Transcript for Lawrence Krauss & Marcelo Gleiser on Something

from Nothing
Interview details for Lawrence Krauss & Marcelo Gleiser on
Something from Nothing
Listen
Download
VIEW OTHER INTERVIEWS FROM: Physics & The Big Questions
Fleming: Why is there something rather than nothing? The
philosopher Martin Heidegger called this the fundamental
question in all of metaphysics. For scientists, the question
might be put this way: how can our universe pop out of
nothing, nearly 14 billion years ago? Empty space one moment,
then a second later, an exploding swirl of energy. Believe it or
not, some scientists think we may finally have an answer,
though a new book by Lawrence Krauss has sparked an
intellectual brawl. Steve Paulson talked with Krauss and fellow
physicist Marcelo Gleiser to find out what this modern creation
story means for both science and religion.
Paulson: This is a story about nothing and the beginning of
everything and how nothing can become something. It' s also a
story about why some scientists think philosophers are useless,
while others say certain scientists themselves have become
arrogant and full of hubris. But before we go any further, we
need to consider a basic question, what is nothing?
Lawrence Krauss: To a physicist, the first version of nothing of is
simply empty space with nothing in it. You wouldn' t have any
particles, all the radiation and so, there's literally nothing in it.
But that nothing is actually quite complicated because of
quantum mechanics and relativity. It turns out empty space is a
boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of
existence in a time so short that you can' t even measure them.
Paulson: That' s Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and
director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University. His
idea of nothing is quite different from what you' d hear from a
theologian or philosopher, who is more likely to talk about non-
existence or non-being.
Krauss: That' s true but I don' t exactly know that those words
mean. It seems to me that nothing is a physical quantity just
like something is and we need to look to the universe to ask
what it is. Now, from a physical point of view, one can get a
little closer to that vague and I would say ill-defined notion of
non-being that philosophers and theologians might have
argued about for thousands of years by saying, well, in fact
there are other versions of nothing and in fact, you can imagine
no space and no time, which of course I think is a better version
of non-being and non-existence. But if we apply the laws of
quantum mechanics to gravity, then in that theory, even space
itself can pop into existence, spontaneously - space and time,
where there were no time and space before. And, boy, that' s
pretty close to what I think anyone would argue is nothing but,
you know, if it doesn' t satisfy those who think that that' s non-
being, so be it. But I' m much more interested in the nothing of
the actual universe than some vague, a priori definition of what
non-being is.
Paulson: Lawrence Krauss has written a provocative book called
A Universe from Nothing. It' s an argument for how science
can finally answer the age-old mystery of why there is
something rather than nothing. Now, Krauss is quick to say he
doesn' t have definitive proof; he' s offering a plausible
explanation based on the latest science. Which left me with a
basic question: Can you explain to a non-physicist how the
universe can be created out of nothing?
Krauss: Yeah, given what we understand about quantum
gravity, about quantum mechanics and general relativity
together, it is quite possible that literally a small space could
pop into existence where there was none before. Normally
such spaces will pop in and out of existence in a timescale so
short you can' t measure them and those universes will
disappear quite quickly. But what is also remarkable is we have
great evidence that in our universe, in very early times, and by
very early I mean something like a millionth of a billionth of a
billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, our
universe puffed up by a huge amount, energy got trapped in
space and that energy caused the universe to expand incredibly
rapidly. We call that a period of inflation, and it sounds like a
scam: how can you get something from nothing? How can you
get a free lunch? Well, it turns out, physics allows you to get a
free lunch.
Paulson: I guess, what' s so bizarre, for the outsider, for the
non-physicist is...
Krauss: It' s bizarre for me too.
Paulson: But it sounds like you' re saying, it' s no big deal in the
world of quantum physics for something to come out of
nothing. For some reason, that' s not a problem and for the
outsider it seems like a huge problem.
Krauss: In fact, it' s not only not a big problem, it would be the
much more remarkable if the question would be, why is there
nothing rather than something? Except we wouldn' t be around
to ask the question. Because nothing is essentially unstable,
empty space due to the laws of quantum mechanics of gravity
is unstable, if you leave it long enough it will always create
particles. So the real point is that distinction, that common
sense distinction between something and nothing in common
parlance is not such a distinction in physics. It' s due to the
weird laws of quantum mechanics. And the really interesting
questionsin our universe is how did it evolve and how did we
get here? And this why the question which made everything
seem so profound has been replaced and it often happens in
science, I think, that questions that seem to have a certain type
of significance, the meaning of those words, changes. I mean,
it' s not a scam and it' s not something we do to defeat
philosophers, we do it because we take our definitions from the
universe.
Paulson: I have to follow up on that because there is that
common saying that theology and philosophy deal with the
why questions, while science deals with the how questions
- because the fundamental religious question, of course, is why
are we here? Are you saying those why questions should not
even be asked?
Krauss: Well, I think most of the why questions are really
how questions because if you ask why what you really
mean is you' re presuming purpose. You' re making a
presumption that there' s some meaning, some purpose and I
would argue that if you insist on why, you' re assuming the
answer before you ask the question. You' re assuming there is
purpose to the universe and that there is some reason that we
came to exist. But why should there be a reason and why must
there be purpose to the universe? In science, we just try to
figure out how it happened, there may be purpose to the
universe and science certainly can' t answer that question
ultimately in the negative but what we can say is there's no
evidence of purpose, that everything we see, as far as we can
tell, came into existence by laws of physics that we can
understand without any supernatural shenanigans. There
doesn' t have to be a reason and that may disappoint some
people. But in fact, I find it quite embolding, it energizes me to
think that due to a set of accidents, remarkably in this remote
corner of the universe, in the middle of nowhere of our galaxy,
on a remote planet, that we happen to evolve with a
consciousness that can ask these questions and we should
enjoy our brief moment in the sun and realize the meaning of
our lives is the meanings we make from it.
Paulson: Let me just follow up on that word, meaning.
Basically you' re saying that, you know, we construct our own
meaning and it does raise the question of whether science is in
the business of helping us find meaning, because of course,
again, that' s traditionally the domain of religion and
philosophy.
Krauss: Well, I think that what what the last few thousand years
have shown us is that the domain of religion and philosophy is
shrinking. In fact I would have argued that the domain of
religion shrank to zero a long time ago. So I think what is
amazing is because of the astounding and remarkable
developments that have taken place in science, we are being
pushed to the threshold of asking questions which we may not
have thought were scientific questions and initially were the
domain of science. But the domain of science is to understand
the universe.
Paulson: What' s especially striking about Lawrence Krauss' s
book is how he' s linked his theory about the origins of the
universe to the new atheist movement. In fact, Richard Dawkins
has written the afterword, claiming that Krauss has demolished
the theological arguments in cosmology, just as Charles Darwin
did in biology. And I will say, Krauss does not mince words
when he talks about religious ideas about creation.
Krauss: I don' t write things to attack God because I don' t think
God' s important enough to attack, frankly. I think what is
amazing is understanding reality. Then this need for belief in
myths and superstition will go away. And that' a good thing.
The scriptures, the books of the world' s great religions were
written by people who didn' t even know the Earth goes around
the Sun. How can they know anything about the world that' s
sensible?
Paulson: You are not just hard on religion and theology, your
book has also sparked a very public spat between physicists and
philosophers. And at one point you say some of modern
philosophy is intellectually bankrupt. Why are you so hard on
philosophers of science?
Krauss: Well, I don' t believe we can make great progress
understanding nature or even understanding ourselves by
turning inwards. I would go so far as to say we can only really
claim to know things that we can apparently test but unless we
reflect on reality, then we' re just playing mind games, in my
opinion.
Paulson: Ok. I have to ask you about that scathing review of
your book in the New York Times Book Review by the
philosopher of science, David Albert, who its worth pointing
out has a Ph.D in physics. And it comes back to this...
Krauss: But he' s not a physicist, he' s a philosopher.
Paulson: Right, it kind of comes back to this discussion of what
nothing means and he said, you have not answered the basic
problem of something coming out of nothing because you don'
t explain where the quantum fields came from in the first place
or why the laws of physics are the way they are - for instance,
why we have quantum mechanics.
Krauss: Yeah, I think he should have read the book before
reviewing it, I think it would have helped that review
immensely if he' d actually read more than the preface and the
afterword.
Paulson: His point is that you don' t answer the core
philosophical question, which is first cause.
Krauss: Yeah. Well, in fact I try very carefully to explain what I
do and don' t do. What he said is, Lawrence Krauss didn' t write
the book I would have liked to have written about some other
subject. I actually do describe, exactly, how it's possible that
quantum fields can come into existence and if that' s not the
question he wanted answered, too bad.
Paulson: I guess the question is, don' t there have to be laws of
physics for any of that stuff to happen? And therefore, the
something can come out of nothing.
Krauss: Well, you know, it' s a good question. However people
are driven to the idea now, that in fact, maybe all laws of
physics are possible. Namely, that every different kind of law
you could imagine might arise in some universe, it might arise
and exist for a microscopic instant or an eternity and it's an
interesting question that we may not be able to resolve, as I
say. If our universe is one of potentially an infinite number of
universes, some of which are popping into existence right now,
then we may indeed ask the question, why the multiverse?
Paulson: It seems that we are really talking about a modern
creation story here and the question on the table is whether
science can finally come up with its own version of a creation
story, that once and for all replaces all those religious creation
stories out there. And it would seem that there are ultimately
two options, either the universe appeared at some point in
time, the first of many in the multiverse, let' say, or it has
existed forever. Would you agree that those are the two
choices?
Krauss: Absolutely. But I think the same is true with religion. I
mean, let me point out that science is more than a story and by
the way it has replaced the creation myths of religion long ago.
It has replaced those creation myths. But I would argue that,
you know, the same questions that you can throw at science, is
the multiverse eternal and why is it eternal? - God is just an
intellectual copout for lazy minds. They basically say, look, that
fundamental question of how it came into existence is so
difficult, I' m going to assume some incredible intelligence and
by the way, I won' t even ask the question, how did that
incredible intelligence come into being. I'll just say it had to be
around forever because I can't have any other explanation. It
seems to me that that is just intellectually lazy.
Paulson: So, getting back to these two choices, this gets very
speculative, of course, we don' t really know whether we' re in
the multiverse or not, but would you believe that there was
one original universe, whether it' s ours or another universe or
whether this has just been going on forever?
Krauss: Well, first of all, I don' t like to use the word believe.
It' s an irrelevant word for science but everything I know about
science suggests that, in fact, there probably is an eternal
multiverse which our universe is a part of. So, my best guess is,
in fact, that the multiverse is eternal but certainly our universe
popped into it.
Paulson: Well, there' s another question here as well: is the
universe ultimately knowable? Because, it would seem that one
very legitimate response for both a scientist and an atheist
would be to say, no, there will be some fundamental mysteries
beyond the capacity of science to explain.
Krauss: Well, there may be. I mean, I wrote a book about
Richard Feynman and Feynman would say, you know, maybe
the laws of physics are like an onion, you just keep peeling it
back and there are an infinite numbers of layers and you never
have a theory of everything. That could be the case. But that
makes life even more fascinating, it seems to me, than
presuming that you know everything by simply saying that God
exists. That' s just boring and tedious.
Paulson: As you might imagine, Lawrence Krauss is catching lots
of flak from religious thinkers and philosophers but also from
some fellow scientists. For a different take on cosmology and
spirituality, I turned to Marcelo Gleiser. A physicist at
Dartmouth College who writes for the NPR Science blog, 13.7,
Gleiser recently blogged about the flap over Krauss' s book,
noting what he calls its triumphant tone that science will
conquer all. Gleiser himself is far more cautious.
Marcelo Gleiser: We have no answers to three very
fundamental questions: the origins of the universe, the origins
of life, and the origins of consciousness. Now, it is very possible
that we will understand consciousness and life because these
are things that in a sense would be in our control. I mean, we
can run lab experiments. But the origins of the universe is a
really complicated question. It really kind of defies the very
core of what science is. And I do not know how we could
possibly understand it because even if you made a model and
people have made models of quantum mechanics of portions of
the universe, you still have all these implicit assumptions in
there, which you are using: conservation of energy, you' re
using general relativity, you' re using quantum mechanics, so
you can always ask, ok, but where do these laws come from?
So, you have to go beyond science and create a kind of meta-
science, which is explaining why science works the way it does
and we don' t have that. And I don' t even know how to come
to grips with that. And so maybe, there are questions that are
unknowable. And if that' s true, you have to accept that and be
humbled by it. And say, look there' s all this wonderful stuff we
can explain about the world, but we just don' t need to explain
everything.
Paulson: I went to see Marcelo Gleiser at his Dartmouth office,
where we talked about his book, A Tear at the Edge of
Creation. Gleiser believes his field of physics has been
seduced by the so-called search for everything, a beautiful
theory that would unify all of physics. Elaborate mathematical
models have lead many physicists to embrace String Theory
and the Multiverse, which so far have no empirical proof.
Gleiser: Even though this is a very compelling idea, the notion
that there is this kind of hidden explanation for all that exists in
the world and in fact it is an idea that completely seduced me
in my own career, but you know, I started to realize that it was
becoming extremely convoluted. We' re not getting any closer
to this and in fact all the unified ideas in physics are really more
approximations than really a final pristine unity. Those
unifications we talk about in physics, they are not perfect
unifications. They always have a little flaw. And I started to
realize that maybe we're pursuing the wrong dream.
Paulson: Gleiser says there' s a curious precedent for the
scientists obsession with a single explanation for everything.
As he was studying the history of science, he came to think
that this idea comes straight out of monotheistic religion.
Gleiser: And I think that intellectually, the search for unification
of nature is really our rationalization of the notion of God. It' s
sort of a way of thinking about God through the tools of
science.
Paulson: I' d have to say that highly regarded physicists like
Steven Weinberg or Brian Greene would be horrified that there'
s anything religious about what they' re trying to do, you know,
because they' re big advocates of trying to find a theory of
everything. What makes this religious, this search?
Gleiser: Well, you have to take religion here in a very broad
sense. I' m not saying that superstring theories are religious
theories. I' m an atheist, actually I have to distinguish, I'm an
agnostic. I' m not an atheist, so that is not my point at all. What
I mean is that this notion that nature is one, and all is one , is a
notion that is much older that Galileo and Newton and all these
guys. Now, to talk about Einstein, he used to call science the
most honest of all religions, in the sense that what motivates a
scientist is his cosmic religious theory. What he means is kind of
this aura with the mysterious and a way to peer into the
darkness is through human reasoning and intuition, this
devotion, this sort of idea that you can give your life to
understand this mystery is in essence a very religious choice.
Paulson: Well, that raises the question whether you think that
the universe is ultimately knowable. Is it knowable? Or are you
comfortable saying, it' s not and there will always be mystery
there and that' s OK.
Gleiser: That' s exactly right, we can know about our world
through science and the way we understand reality is through
our measurements and our tools. And even though they are
wonderful and they are advancing, they have limits, so you can
measure things through a certain precision, you can measure
things to a certain distance but beyond that you have darkness,
you do not know.
Paulson: But I think the answer of a lot of scientists would be,
yes, there are many things we don't understand right now. We
don' t understand what matter is, what dark energy is, all kind
of things we don' t understand and how the mind works and
the connection between brain and mind but science is all about
trying to figure out and understand. And to say that we will
never be able to understand it is defeatism . Scientific
defeatism.
Gleiser: Right and I have heard that before and I have corrected
the critics by saying that is not what I mean, what I mean is
precisely the opposite. I think that science is an eternal pursuit
of knowledge, that there is no end to the quest. So what I' m
concerned about is the sort of excess of confidence on the part
of certain scientists to say that, yes, there is a final theory of
nature and that we can get to it. I think that is incredibly
arrogant and it does a disservice to what science really is trying
to do, which is to give meaning to our lives, ultimately.
Paulson: Do you think this is a spiritual position, to say that
ultimately the universe is unknowable in some final sense, that
there will always be a mystery to it?
Gleiser: Yes, I think that is a deeply spiritual position and I think
there is nothing wrong with this sort of reconciliation between
science and spirituality. In fact, I would even propose a
different definition of sacred, because in a sense, what people
at least traditionally think of the sacred is a place you are not
where you were before, a place where you have to pay
attention. So you go to a temple and if you are not a religious
person but you are John Muir, he is going to say, this is my
temple, this is my sacred spot, and within that notion of the
sacred, there' s this very subjective feeling, of awe with the
mystery of what you do not know. And to me the main sort of
engine behind scientific inspiration is precisely this seduction of
the unknown. And so, if we find our sense of what is sacred in
the parts of the universe that I do not understand, then the
pursuit of science becomes the pursuit of the sacred.
Fleming: Marcelo Gleiser is a physicist at Dartmouth College.
Steve Paulson also talked to Arizona State University physicist
Lawrence Krauss.

Comments for this interview
So in this nothing there are (pov, 05/20/2013 - 12:48pm)
So in this nothing there are already the laws of QM? Interesting
so again we come to the question of how. A quanta is a unit of
energy so where did that energy stem from?
The only truth here is "we don't know." Any person who can't
bring themselves to accept that isn't IMO really seeking
knowledge.
Ummm . . . (pov, 05/20/2013 - 12:42pm)
"You wouldn' t have any particles, all the radiation and so,
there's literally nothing in it. But that nothing is actually quite
complicated because of quantum mechanics and relativity. It
turns out empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual
particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that
you can' t even measure them."
So nothing = there's literally nothing in it yet nothing = virtual
particles popping into existence. Therefore virtual particles =
literally nothing. Fail.
If he said "prior to the universe we have today there were
virtual particles" that would at least be congruent.
he@re.com (pov, 05/20/2013 - 12:38pm)
If you think that science = truth you're deluded. Thankfully few
of even the most pedestrian science workers think that. Science
is a methodology for seeking to acquire knowledge. Many of us
think it's the best way but that doesn't make it *the truth*.
BTW much of the knowledge you cling to now as science was
discovered because 5 or more decades ago, scientists were able
to work free from the pedantic and dogmatic thinking of much
of the masses.
Majesty of science (John Mix, 04/29/2013 - 12:27pm)
It is useless to try to balance truth (science) with wishful
thinking (spirituality). "Science is a way to keep from fooling
ourselves" - Feynman. Science and mathematics are
mysterious, amazing, beautiful, and effective.
Krause (Henry, 04/28/2013 - 8:37pm)
What struck me most was Krause's arrogance and his
demeaning of any other discipline. Can you imagine how drab
and bleak life would be if his ilk were all we had. I would like to
hear Rabbib Jonathan Sacks debate Krause.
Comments
Krauss' blind spot
Permalink Submitted by Tamara S Morgan (not verified) on
Wed, 06/13/2012 - 3:23pm
It's good to be confident, but when Krauss' confidence spills
over into what sounded like the pure hubris of a 3 yo, I believe
that goes too far. It was amusing to listen to after a while,
because it was clear he was completely blind to his own belief
system: that science can KNOW, and that physics is not 'man-
made' but that 'mathematics were dictated by the universe'
(quoting a friend).
reply
"Out of nothing"
Permalink Submitted by Greg Vitercik (not verified) on Sat,
06/16/2012 - 7:59am
Just listened to the interview with Krauss yesterday. I didn't feel
that his book was as carefully written as it could have been. The
article linked below seems to go a long way to bridging one of
the gaps in his discussion.
http://phys.org/news/2011-11-scientists-vacuum.html
reply
Krause
Permalink Submitted by Henry (not verified) on Sun,
04/28/2013 - 8:37pm
What struck me most was Krause's arrogance and his
demeaning of any other discipline. Can you imagine how drab
and bleak life would be if his ilk were all we had. I would like to
hear Rabbib Jonathan Sacks debate Krause.
reply
Majesty of science
Permalink Submitted by John Mix (not verified) on Mon,
04/29/2013 - 12:27pm
It is useless to try to balance truth (science) with wishful
thinking (spirituality). "Science is a way to keep from fooling
ourselves" - Feynman. Science and mathematics are
mysterious, amazing, beautiful, and effective.
reply
he@re.com
Permalink Submitted by pov (not verified) on Mon, 05/20/2013
- 12:38pm
If you think that science = truth you're deluded. Thankfully few
of even the most pedestrian science workers think that. Science
is a methodology for seeking to acquire knowledge. Many of us
think it's the best way but that doesn't make it *the truth*.
BTW much of the knowledge you cling to now as science was
discovered because 5 or more decades ago, scientists were able
to work free from the pedantic and dogmatic thinking of much
of the masses.
reply
Ummm . . .
Permalink Submitted by pov (not verified) on Mon, 05/20/2013
- 12:42pm
"You wouldn' t have any particles, all the radiation and so,
there's literally nothing in it. But that nothing is actually quite
complicated because of quantum mechanics and relativity. It
turns out empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual
particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that
you can' t even measure them."
So nothing = there's literally nothing in it yet nothing = virtual
particles popping into existence. Therefore virtual particles =
literally nothing. Fail.
If he said "prior to the universe we have today there were
virtual particles" that would at least be congruent.
reply
So in this nothing there are
Permalink Submitted by pov (not verified) on Mon, 05/20/2013
- 12:48pm
So in this nothing there are already the laws of QM? Interesting
so again we come to the question of how. A quanta is a unit of
energy so where did that energy stem from?
The only truth here is "we don't know." Any person who can't
bring themselves to accept that isn't IMO really seeking
knowledge.
reply
Transcript for Lawrence Krauss Our Origins and the Weight
of Space
April 11, 2013
| Download a printable transcript here |
Krista Tippett: The physicist Lawrence Krauss says that one of
the values of science is to make us uncomfortable.
Lawrence Krauss: I don't mean that science isn't spiritually
uplifting. I do think it is, but for the very antithetical reasons to
religion, I guess, is the fact that it causes us to feel less
comfortable should provoke us to try and understand what we
can do and what meaning we can make in the universe. So
learning that the universe isn't made for us, or there's no
evidence that it is, is profoundly inspiring or should be.
Ms. Tippett: Lawrence Krauss helps explain why we should all
care about dark energy and, for that matter, the Higgs boson
particle. He believes that science literacy matters, but more
importantly that we can, should take joy in science just as we
cultivate enjoyment of arts we may not completely
comprehend.
I'm Krista Tippett. This is On Being, from APM, American Public
Media.
I invited Lawrence Krauss's passion for science as our common
human inheritance to the Chautauqua Institution in New York.
We sat together in the outdoor Hall of Philosophy during the
2012 summer season. The theme for the week was inspiration,
action, and commitment.
Ms. Tippett: Public theology has a long history at Chautauqua.
And, in earlier generations, that meant a voice like Reinhold
Niebuhr, an authoritative Christian voice in an overwhelmingly
Christian culture. Today's guest takes us in a completely
different direction, but one which I find equally distinctive and
influential in our time. Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist, a
theoretical physicist, and a public scientist bringing the
learnings of science to the rest of us, to the wider world. So the
science-religion debate is well known, and Lawrence Krauss has
strong views on that. But in my mind I'm just going to lay my
cards on the table.
What science might have to say about God or what religion
might have to say about science is not really what either of
those disciplines are for. I am, however, fascinated by how
scientists in our time neuroscientists, biologists, and
certainly physicists and cosmologists are adding their own
insights and questions to realms of human inquiry that religion
and philosophy long dominated. Where did we come from?
What does it mean to be human? What does the future hold?
What is our place in the universe? Science is as much at the
center of everyday life as it's ever been. I don't think it would
be an exaggeration to say that some kind of science and
technology is woven throughout every moment of every day for
many of us.
Lawrence Krauss is foundation professor in the School of Earth
and Space Exploration and the physics departments at Arizona
State University. He's the associate director of the Beyond
Center there and director of the Origins Initiative. His books
include The Physics of Star Trek and we will talk about that,
don't worry Fear of Physics: A Guide to the Perplexed and, in
2012, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather
Than Nothing. As we start, tell us about the origins of your life
as a scientist.
Dr. Krauss: My mother wanted me to be a doctor and my
brother to be a lawyer. And, unfortunately, my brother became
a lawyer and then, therefore, the pressure was on me to even
more become a doctor. And my mother, unfortunately, since
neither of my parents went to even finished high school
actually, I think helped get me interested in science in the sense
that she mistakenly told me that, you know, doctors were
scientists.
Ms. Tippett: Well, medicine is somewhat related.
Dr. Krauss: Some of medicine is, certainly. Most doctors are not
scientists in the sense that
Ms. Tippett: Right, right.
Dr. Krauss: Therefore, but I got interested in science and I
started reading about it a lot when I was a kid. So reading about
science, particularly about scientists and books by scientists in
particular, had a big impact on me, and I guess it was sometime
in high school when I realized that doctors weren't scientists
and I was kind of hooked on science. Also, I had crummy
biology teachers. And physics was always by far the sexiest of
the disciplines and still is, by the way.
In fact, that's one of the reasons why I guess I write is to return
the favor because I was turned on by books by Isaac Asimov
and George Gamow and people like that. I actually wasn't
convinced I was going to do physics. I didn't know what I was
going to do. I did history for a while because physics seemed
detached from people and I'm very political as well, as we may
get to. Because in fact to amplify what you said, science is not
just a part of everyday lives. It's a part of every important
political decision that has to be made, yet it's never discussed
by politicians, one of the things I've been working hard to
change. I mean, a very long answer to a short question, but
Ms. Tippett: No, no, that's OK.
Dr. Krauss: But the reason people do science is not to save the
world. It's because it's fun. That's the only reason that people
do science. Generally, you're not going to work for 20 years on
a given subject unless you enjoy it, and I think that we don't
explain that enough.
Ms. Tippett: You have said that physics is a human, creative,
intellectual activity like art and music. I mean, you talked a
minute ago about the fun. I mean, you use the word pleasure.
Talk some more about that.
Dr. Krauss: Well, yeah, no, I think it's very important. I just
wrote about this. I think people somehow view science in terms
in a utilitarian way as if the value of science is the technology
it produces, but I think that's completely mistaken. I think,
obviously, science is responsible for the technology that's
allowing us to have this discussion and pretty well everything
that allows most of you to still be alive, which is vitally
important and, therefore, it's changed our lives more than
anything else.
But to me, the most exciting thing about science is the ideas.
Science has produced the most interesting ideas that humans
have ever come up with, certainly among the most interesting.
And somehow, although it wasn't always this way you know,
I was just having the discussion in Aspen last week on this very
subject. It wasn't always this way, but now somehow the ideas
of science are not a part of our culture.
It's perfectly acceptable to consider yourself literate if you
know something about Shakespeare, but not if you know
anything about the Higgs boson. And I think that's a mistake. As
I say, it's relatively recent. You used to be considered illiterate if
you didn't have some ability to discuss at some level natural
philosophy 200 years ago or even at the turn of the last
century. And now it's perfectly acceptable to say, oh, you know,
I don't get science, and scientists are responsible for a lot of
that, I have to say. But it's the ideas of science that make it so
important for humans because it's part of what makes being
human worth being human.
As I often say, we don't remember the Greek plumbing. We
remember their architecture and their ideas. Most people don't
have to know how to build the detailed things of science, but
the ideas change our perspective of our place in the cosmos.
And to me, that's what great art, music, and literature is all
about is when you see a play or see a painting or hear a
wonderful piece of music. In some sense, it changes your
perspective of yourself. And that's what science does in a
profoundly important way and a way with content that
matters.
Ms. Tippett: You're a musical person, or you love music. You're
passionate about music, aren't you?
Dr. Krauss: On paper, I look like a musical person.
Ms. Tippett: OK.
Dr. Krauss: I do like music. I like art, but, yeah, I like music a lot.
I mean, if you've read my biography, you know I have some
apparent credentials, but they're all fake.
[Laughter]
Ms. Tippett: Glad we clarified that.
Dr. Krauss: I was nominated for a Grammy, I will admit that. I
just have no musical ability, but my daughter was very musical
and played the violin in Cleveland, in fact. So I've learned a lot
through her.
Ms. Tippett: So I think I probably first became aware of you
with The Physics of Star Trek because I was a huge well, still
am a huge Star Trek fan. And can I just say I'm so pleased that
you're talking about all the generations, you know, Commander
Data.
Dr. Krauss: Absolutely. It's important.
Ms. Tippett: The voyagers, as well as next generation.
Dr. Krauss: That dates both of us, by the way, but in any case
[Laughter]
Ms. Tippett: OK. You know, I think as I've spoken to lots of
scientists over the years and I think sometimes it's surprising to
non-scientists that scientists love science fiction. I mean, you
wrote somewhere that all physicists you know watched Star
Trek growing up. But then as I was thinking about this and
thinking about the way you put science like in the realm of
being cultured and arts. I mean, science fiction is a narrative,
imaginative rendering of what scientists do and discover.
Dr. Krauss: It's interesting you should put it that way, in fact,
because people imagine science fiction as an imaginative
rendering of science when in fact science is a far more
imaginative rendering of science fiction.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: No, somehow that's the point. Creativity is not
something and imagination are not things that are only
associated with science except Richard Feynman, who I did
write a book about, said, you know, science is imagination in a
straitjacket. And it's far more difficult to conform your
imagination to the evidence of reality than to invent your own
realities. In fact, religion is an example. I'll wait for the
response.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. We'll get to it, but I'm just not going to go
there yet, OK?
Dr. Krauss: But anyway, no. So I did like science fiction until I
discovered that science is much more interesting than science
fiction. The universe continues to surprise us in ways that we
would never imagine, which is why by the way why I'm a
theoretical physicist.
But science and physics are empirical disciplines. And if we just
thought about the universe and, again, to not be completely
facetious, philosophy was an example of that if we just
thought about the universe, we'd come up with the wrong
answers because the universe is far more imaginative. So we
have to keep probing the universe and asking questions and
that means doing experiments and observations because it
constantly surprises us in ways that no one would have
imagined. One of the things that amuses me about science
fiction is how it misses all the really big things.
Ms. Tippett: So do other physicists watch Star Trek growing up
and then they realize that science is more interesting?
Dr. Krauss: It's hard to know. I mean, I've thought about that a
lot. People ask me. It's hard to know if watching Star Trek
influenced them to become scientists or the other way around
or whether their interest in science was promoted. I think
there's no doubt, and Stephen Hawking wrote the foreword for
that particular book and he said, you know, it helped spur the
imagination and it does.
So to the extent that I think it was one of the I used to think
it was a geeky thing to watch Star Trek. It isn't. One of the
things that amazed me when I wrote that particular book, that
shocked me, was how broadly and deeply Star Trek had
permeated not just the culture in the United States, but around
the world. And it wasn't just 16-year-old boys watching it.
Ms. Tippett: No.
Dr. Krauss: And people who became scientists, lawyers and
women. It's kind of interesting. It's not a gender thing either.
The reason that I think that's the case is that it presented two
things: a hopeful view of the future, which science fiction
doesn't often do, and a view of the future where science
actually made the world a better place. The Star Trek future is a
better place because of science and, I can't resist saying it here
now that I think about it, but it was one of the reasons, if you
know in Star Trek, that basically they dispensed with the quaint
notions of myopic views of the 20th century, including most of
the world's religions.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah, OK. We're not going to go there still.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: OK. I keep trying to get you there, but it's not going
to work.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah, they did, but then you had in the next
generation this kind of immortal, semi-divine
Dr. Krauss: More of a Q.
Ms. Tippett: Q. We probably shouldn't do this. It's too inside
baseball.
Dr. Krauss: One of my favorite characters.
Ms. Tippett: I wish we could talk about this for an hour. And as
you've pointed out often, you know, like literature and the arts,
science is getting at origins. Who are we? Where do we come
from? Where are we going? So, but in a very different way than
religion approaches these things or philosophy or the arts. So as
a cosmologist
Dr. Krauss: I'm biting my tongue.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. No, but I just want to hear from you like as a
physicist, how do you approach the question of origins? What
are you looking at? What are you exploring?
Dr. Krauss: Well, I think I'm exploring the same questions that
people have had since people have been people. We all want to
know where we come from, how the universe originated, how
it'll end, what we're made of. And that naturally does lead to
questions of is there a purpose and are we here for a reason, I
think.
Ms. Tippett: But those aren't science questions.
Dr. Krauss: Those aren't scientific questions. And, in fact, that's
what I was just going to get at. They're not scientific questions.
I've gotten in a lot of trouble from some philosophers recently
because I use the word why. Why is there something rather
than nothing? And, in fact, as I say very clearly in the book, why
questions don't mean anything. They're content-free. Any of
you who have children have been asked why, why, why? In the
end, ultimately the only answer to that is because. And that is
also content-free because why presumes purpose. Whenever
we say, we really mean how, at least in science.
Ms. Tippett: In science, yeah.
Dr. Krauss: And it's true and that has content. When we mean
why in religion, we're presuming the answer before we ask the
question. We're presuming there's purpose. There must be a
reason for our existence, otherwise why? And science doesn't
make presumption, and the remarkable thing is science finds
the universe works pretty well without that presumption. So
when we ask, as we used to ask, you know, we could ask the
question why are there nine planets? And there are nine
planets, by the way. Pluto is a planet.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: I don't care what my friend Neil Tyson says. My
daughter studied Pluto in grade four and did a project on Pluto
and I don't plan for her to go back. But when we ask that
question, we don't when Kepler asked the question, say, why
are there five planets, he might have meant there was some
divine purpose. He would talk about the Platonic solids and all
that. But now we've changed the meaning of that because we
realize that not only are there not five planets, but there's
nothing special about nine planets. There are solar systems
around most stars we see. We've discovered 2,000 planets
already.
So the question we really mean is how are there nine planets?
How did our solar system arise? Is it different than other solar
systems? Is it natural to have an Earth-like planet? Could there
be life elsewhere? Those are productive questions. So science
changes the kind of questions we ask by changing the meaning
of words because we learn things. We change the meaning
because we understand the universe and we make progress.
And I would argue that's why science it's nothing wrong
about changing the meaning. It's because there's progress in
science unlike, you know, theology.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: I'm sorry. I keep trying to hope I'll provoke some
people here. But what I mean by that is one of the values of
science is to make us uncomfortable. Somehow that's supposed
to be a bad thing for many people, being uncomfortable. Being
uncomfortable is a good thing because it forces you to reassess
your place in the cosmos. And being too comfortable means
you've become complacent and you stop thinking. So being
uncomfortable should be a spiritually uplifting experience.
I don't mean that science isn't spiritually uplifting. I do think it
is, but for the very reasons the very antithetical reasons to
religion, I guess, is the fact that it causes us to feel less
comfortable should provoke us to try and understand what we
can do and what meaning we can make in the universe. So
learning that we're more insignificant or learning that the
universe isn't made for us, or there's no evidence that it is, is
profoundly inspiring or should be.
Ms. Tippett: But I really want you to tell me, as a cosmologist,
when you think of origins, stars, right? Stars that died
Dr. Krauss: The reason I created the Origins Project or helped
create the Origins Project at Arizona State and the reason I
moved there to lead it is all of the interesting questions that I
can see in science and, to most part, in scholarship beyond
science, have to do with origins. The questions at the forefront
of every field are origins questions. They're really the heart that
you're trying to get at. In the case of the universe, you know,
how did the universe begin? You know, are we the only
universe? What happened before the big bang?
All those origins questions. But we study everything from the
origins of the universe to the origins of life. Origins of life
questions are profoundly interesting from a philosophical, but
more importantly, from a scientific perspective right now. The
origins of consciousness if you think of the frontiers of
human investigation, they inevitably involve origins and we've
been pushing those origins questions back. Origins questions
200 years ago, when Darwin asked them, would have been very
different.
Remember, Darwin in Origin of Species said I think it was in
Origin of Species; it might have been The Descent of Man
said he never talked about the origin of life, by the way,
right? He talked about the origin of the diversity of species. He
never talked about the origin of life itself, and once he just poo-
pooed it. He said origins of life, you might as well talk about the
origins of matter because
Ms. Tippett: OK. So that's what you're talking about now.
Dr. Krauss: Exactly. And that's what's great. We're pushing back
those frontiers. The reason I became a particle physicist is
because it's the fundamental structure of the universe that
ultimately sheds light on all the complexity that we see. The
universe seems to be incredibly complex. And one of the
beauties of science is at some level the diversity of life, the
complexity of the phenomena we see, we can understand in
terms of a few very basic principles and how remarkable that is.
I mean, how amazing that is, and that we should celebrate that.
Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with
physicist and public scientist Lawrence Krauss at the
Chautauqua Institution in New York.
Ms. Tippett: So one thing you're really great at is explaining,
you know, taking concepts of physics. I thought we might do a
little bit of that, but maybe we save that for, you know, we ask
you
Dr. Krauss: If there's any burning question you have, I'm happy
to answer it.
Ms. Tippett: I have lots of burning questions. But I think maybe
what would be fun to talk about now specifically is the Higgs
boson, which is something that's out there that we're talking
about that's not new, but newly, more likely, right? I mean, you
can't say 150 percent proven, but there's new evidence, right?
Dr. Krauss: It certainly captured yeah, not only captured the
imagination of physicists from around the world
Ms. Tippett: And that is one of these fundamental ways of
talking about what it's all made up and how it comes together.
You know, how do you answer what is Higgs boson and why
should I care?
Dr. Krauss: Well, the answer is not so pat as you often hear.
People often say, well, it's responsible for mass, but it's not
that. I was just doing an interview yesterday where someone
said, well, I never asked why there was mass, so why should I
care? And it's true. It's not as if you wake up and say, gee, why
do particles have mass? It could be just a given. But there's a
much more interesting, intellectual reason why we're led there
and it's a reason that we should celebrate. But I bet most of the
people here don't know why we should celebrate. So I'll explain
it.
Ms. Tippett: OK.
Dr. Krauss: We should celebrate revolution in our
understanding that took place about 45 years ago or within the
last 50 years, a totally complete revolution in our
understanding of the universe that's been unheralded. You
don't read about it much.
In the early 1960s, there were four forces in nature,
electromagnetism, which you know of, and gravity, the two
you're mostly familiar with. There are two more, called the
strong force and the weak force. In 1962 or '63, we understand
one, one force in nature. Electromagnetism was the only force
we understood as a quantum theory. Quantum mechanics is
the theory that governs matter on very small scales and forces.
What is remarkable is, within a decade, we understood three of
those four forces of nature.
I mean, it was one of the most amazing periods of scientific
expansion in understanding the universe, and one of the most
beautiful aspects of that is we understood that all of the forces
in nature could be understood in terms of a single
mathematical formulism. They had exactly the same structure
mathematically, which is profoundly interesting, but even more
interesting perhaps, you know you've made a breakthrough in
science when two things that seem very, very different
suddenly are recognized as being different aspects of the same
thing.
The electromagnetic force is long-range. I can experience it
across the room. The weak force operates only on the scale of
nuclei. Those two very different forces could be understood as
different aspects of the same thing. Now how can that be?
Well, they could be same if at a fundamental scale all the
particles are masses. They can be described by exactly the same
mathematics.
And then what happens is, the mass of the particles that
convey the weak force is an accident. It's an accident of our
existence if and this was what seemed too good to be true
if this invisible field permeates all of space, you can't see it, but
if the particles that convey the weak force interact with that
field and get slowed down like swimming through molasses, get
retarded because of that interaction, they act like they're
massive. And it just seemed too good to be true. It seemed to
be too good to be true for me.
Ms. Tippett: OK, so it's like things appear to have mass the way
they do because of the relationship they have to this field as
opposed to something that's intrinsically given.
Dr. Krauss: But we were driven to it not because the particles
that make you and I have that mass, but because of this
beautiful unification. That was what drove us to it. Then people
say, hey, maybe if it's true for these particles called the W and Z
bosons, maybe it's true for all the particles. Maybe all the
particles can be mass less and the Higgs field
Ms. Tippett: Including the atoms that make us?
Dr. Krauss: Well, including many of the particles that make us
up, not all of them, it turns out. But the ones that are heavier
act heavier because they interact more strongly with that field
and the ones that are lighter are lighter because they attract
less strongly and the ones that are mass less don't interact at
all.
Ms. Tippett: And light travels at the speed of light, so it doesn't
slow down and doesn't get all
Dr. Krauss: It doesn't slow down because it doesn't interact at
all. Photons don't interact. That was a proposed property. Now
what's amazing, as I said, seems kind of slimy, doesn't it, to
invent well, I won't make a comment about religion.
Ms. Tippett: No, good.
Dr. Krauss: But inventing invisible forces is not what science is
all about. It's what other things are all about.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: Science should be, if it's there, we should be able to
detect it. But the great thing is, so if it turns out it's a
consequence, that if there is this invisible field that's doing all
this marvelous stuff, then physics says if you hit it hard enough,
if you smack that field hard enough with enough energy in a
small enough region, you'll produce real particles.
That's a prediction and those real particles the field is called
a Higgs field those real particles would be called Higgs
particles. So if that field exists, you should be able to produce
particles and see them, and that's what we've been trying to do
for the last 50 years.
Ms. Tippett: And that's what happened in 2012?
Dr. Krauss: That's what just happened, we think. We built the
machine. We were building the machine in this country 25
years ago, well, 20 years ago, that would have been sure to
detect these particles, we think.
But Congress, in its wisdom and then when it was much wiser
was still pretty stupid, decided that even after building the
biggest tunnel that had ever been built, 60 miles around in
Texas underground, decided they couldn't afford the $5 billion
dollars to finish the project, which is now what the cost of air
conditioning for a day during the Iraq War or something. But
we decided we couldn't built it, so it's been built in Geneva.
Fine, that's life.
Ms. Tippett: So I want to understand this so badly. You know, I
struggle to understand it. So when we talk about the Higgs
boson that is an expression of the field, right?
Dr. Krauss: Well, in quantum physics, fields and particles are
the same thing. All fields exist. The electric field, when you feel
static electricity, classically that's an electric field. Maxwell and
Faraday described it beautifully. In fact, the first major
unification was the unification of electricity and magnetism,
two very different-seeming forces were understood by Maxwell
and Faraday and others to be different manifestations of the
same thing. Beautiful, just beautiful.
But that field that they called a field, we now understand is due
to the exchange of particles, photons. And the weak force due
to the exchange of W and Z bosons. And we understand that
the Higgs field, the reason particles feel mass is by exchanging
particles with that Higgs field, Higgs particles. And if they exist,
as I say, we have to be able to detect them and we even predict
many of their properties. That's why it's not just a crapshoot.
And the particle that's been observed, the bump that's been
observed in Geneva, is Higgs-like. It seems to have all the
properties of the Higgs, and it's where we kind of would have
expected it maybe to be, which is what surprised me because I
was betting against it. I was sure this beautiful
Ms. Tippett: Like Stephen Hawking betted against it too, right?
He lost his 100 dollars.
Dr. Krauss: Yeah. Well, it's one of the few times that Stephen
and I agree, in fact. But it just seemed to good to be true and
it's so rare that nature obeys what we imagine to be true, that I
thought nature would come up with a much more interesting
way around it. In fact, what's really beautiful is every time we
make a discovery in science, we end up having more questions
than answers. Having discovered the Higgs, if that's what we've
done, does not close the book because we still don't
understand why this Higgs field exists in the universe, which is
really and why and by why I mean how
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: Why that Higgs field exists because that's really
what's responsible for our existence. We wouldn't be here if it
weren't for it. And we think that, besides just discovering it's
particle, there are other tantalizing hints, in fact, in the nature
of what's been discovered plus what we expect. It'll say the
Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will point us in the right
direction to answering those questions.
We've been, as I often say, like people locked in a room with
sensory deprivation for 40 years. What happens? You
hallucinate, and that's what most of the business of what I've
been in is hallucinating for the last 40 years.
Most of the hallucinations we've had, namely theoretical
physics, will be wrong. Most ideas are wrong. We don't
celebrate that enough, but it's true. Most ideas are wrong, so
all of the ideas may be wrong. But we won't know until nature
points us in the right direction. And I think, and many other
people think, that if what we really discovered is the Higgs,
there's bound to be new things at the Large Hadron Collider
that will point us in the much more interesting direction.
Ms. Tippett: And you don't even know what that direction is
right now.
Dr. Krauss: No, no. I mean, I have speculations. I have ideas and
so do other theorists. I always hope I'm wrong. I've often said
the two greatest states to be in if you're a scientist is either
wrong or confused, and I'm often both.
[Laughter]
Ms. Tippett: Yes, and in a positive way, you talk about that as
beautiful and mystery is a word that's absolutely part of your
vocabulary.
Dr. Krauss: Mysteries are what it's all about. In fact, not
knowing is much more exciting than knowing, right? Because it
means there's much more to learn. The search is often much
more exciting than the finding. Mysteries are what drive us as
human beings. I think it's really what drives scientists.
And the beautiful mysteries of the universe are what should
keep propelling us because we are fortunate enough for
whatever reason to have an intellect and have evolved and I
can still say that in the United States to have evolved a
consciousness that allows us to ask those questions and to stop
asking them is just a tragedy.
Ms. Tippett: You can listen again and download this
conversation with Lawrence Krauss through our podcast on
iTunes or through our website, onbeing.org. If you're new to
podcasting, find out there how to subscribe. We're also on
Facebook at facebook.com/onbeing. On Twitter we're
@beingtweets. I'm @kristatippett. You'll also find many more
conversations with all kinds of scientists on our site. Again,
that's at onbeing.org.
Coming up, Lawrence Krauss on religion, love, and science as a
social good.
I'm Krista Tippett. This program comes to you from APM,
American Public Media.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, my
conversation with physicist and public scientist Lawrence
Krauss. His books include The Physics of Star Trek and A
Universe from Nothing. I interviewed him before an audience of
1,000 at the outdoor Hall of Philosophy of the Chautauqua
Institution. We've been talking about the nature and meaning
of science in human life. We haven't delved yet into the subject
of religion on which Lawrence Krauss also has famously
impassioned views.
OK, so here is where I want to talk about religion.
Dr. Krauss: Oh, good. Good, because when we talk about stop
asking those questions, it's a natural segue to religion.
[Laughter]
Ms. Tippett: But actually, actually what I was going to say is I
think a reverence for mystery is something that great scientists
and mystics and, in fact, our traditions at their orthodox cores
have in common. There's the shared language of mystery.
Dr. Krauss: Yeah, I'll give you that. No, I mean, the origin
Ms. Tippett: Thank you.
Dr. Krauss: Yeah, except that science has changed the language
because science has meaning. And I don't mean that in a
facetious way. I really don't. I think that science and religion
and mysticism all have their origins in the same in being
human. They all have common origins. The difference is that
science has moved beyond, has taken us beyond our childhood.
Ms. Tippett: So one thing that happens to me because I spend
my life in conversations, so I started to have this cumulative
conversation in my head, and so a couple of people I was
thinking of as I was reading you, a geneticist, Lindon Eaves, do
you know him? He's done a lot of the biggest long-term studies
of twins, and he's also an Anglican priest.
And he said to me that, when he was in his laboratory, religion
most of the time had no place there. So, I keep it I hold it at
bay. At the same time, when he's sitting at the bedside of
somebody who's dying of cancer, science has nothing to say in
that moment. There's meaning
Dr. Krauss: Oh, I disagree about that. You know, I know all
these people say a very famous biologist said, "The minute I
go in the lab, I'm an atheist."
Ms. Tippett: What does science have to say to death, to dying,
not to the biological breakdown of a body, but to the existential
moment of dying?
Dr. Krauss: I think it has a tremendous amount to say. I mean, it
has to say to us that, you know, first of all, it has to say what
dying is. What is dying? What's the process of dying?
Ms. Tippett: OK, there's that, there's that.
Dr. Krauss: No, no. I mean, we're all going to experience it, and
I think a realistic assessment of what the process is helps us
understand what we're going to experience and try and make
sense of it. It seems to me you can't make sense enough to
make even an ethical or moral decision without understanding
the basis in reality.
What seems to me what science could say is what I've sort of
said in the book is that, look, what I'm about to say is going to
sound awful, and I'm not going to go to someone's bedside and
offer this, OK? It's up to them to decide if they want to look at
these things. But we should at least offer the possibility of that
knowledge that there's no evidence in fact every bit of
evidence that there's no afterlife, that you're here, but in fact
the meaning of your life is the meaning that you make.
And in your life, you've made incredible meaning. You created
love for other people. You've brought up children. You've
allowed people to have livelihoods and that meaning has made
your life worthwhile and enjoy every second of being alive. And
death is a sad but necessary part of being alive. That may not
sound like the same comfort of saying that, you know, you're
going to have eternal life and you're going to be with your
family
Ms. Tippett: I don't think Lindon Eaves is talking to people
about eternal life.
Dr. Krauss: No, but I don't see why that's any less comforting
than
Ms. Tippett: But what you just said isn't science.
Dr. Krauss: Yes, it is. It's saying there's no evidence. I mean,
here's what we're saying is that
Ms. Tippett: But you can't put meaning under a microscope.
You can't shoot particles at it in a Large Hadron Collider.
Dr. Krauss: No, but I don't understand what meaning is till I ask
the questions of how the universe behaves. And look, there
could be we can never disprove purpose, you know, so I can
never say there's no purpose to the universe. I could just say
the universe behaves as if there's no purpose, but that may just
mean I'm missing the point, as a lot of people may think. But
there could have been. You can answer it in the positive, but
there's no evidence.
If the stars tonight realign themselves and said I am here in
Greek, presumably [laughter] ancient Greek then, hey, I'd
say, you know, maybe there's something to all this. But in the
absence of that, if Bertrand Russell said, you know, I can't
disprove that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter, and I can't.
There's no evidence of it and it's highly unlikely. And I think
providing that reality check is useful to people, not just when
they're dying, but when they're alive, seems to me.
You know, some people say that religion gives meaning to their
lives, but to me, the knowledge that the meaning we have is
the meaning we make should inspire us to do better. So I think
that I personally think that every single thing that religion
provides, rationality, empiricism and science can provide, and
not only that, it can provide it better.
[Applause]
Dr. Krauss: Well, what do you know?
Ms. Tippett: So the other voice that was in my head was
somebody who I did not interview in person, Rabbi Abraham
Joshua Heschel. He talked a lot he talked a lot like you do
about radical amazement, that the whole point of life is to be
surprised and to be surprised over and over again and that
spiritual life is about learning to be surprised. And here's
something he wrote.
"It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious
philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It
would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.
Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it
became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is
completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by
habit, when the crisis of today is ignored because of the
splendor of the past, when faith becomes an heirloom rather
than a living fountain, when religion speaks only in the name of
authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message
becomes meaningless."
And I just read that because, when I read you talking about
religion and I really don't want to debate it because
Dr. Krauss: There's no debate. I mean, we're having a
discussion.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah, yeah, I do to. I feel like I'm not sure if you've
been exposed to that kind of religious voice, which I think you
would enjoy
Dr. Krauss: I mean, I think it's a brilliant statement. You know,
wisdom is not the province of just of scientists or of anyone.
I mean, you know, and that's a wise statement. Wisdom comes
from experience and knowledge and understanding history and
understanding the universe.
The reason to know things is in some sense to reflect on them
and become wiser and it's not the province of anyone. And
people seem to think I suggest that it's the province of science.
Science is the raw material that provides the basis of wisdom
for some people.
And so I don't want to stereotype religion per se, and there are
brilliant statements. I've often quoted them. I've gone into
many places and fundamentalist colleges and Fox News and,
you know, I quote Moses Maimonides and St. Augustine. I
mean, they're brilliant statements.
My favorite statement of Maimonides, more or less
paraphrased, you know, as he said, the Scriptures are
absolutely true. But if your interpretation of the Scriptures
disagrees with the evidence of science, you should reexamine
your interpretation of the Scriptures. There's a lot of wisdom in
all of that. What I'm amazed about is when someone as wise as
that rabbi
Ms. Tippett: Heschel, mm-hmm.
Dr. Krauss: yeah, says those things, I don't what I don't
understand is why they need religion. I mean, if you're a rabbi,
at some level, you buy into the importance of Judaism. Many of
my friends one of their mothers-in-law is here today who
Ms. Tippett: One of your mothers-in-law?
Dr. Krauss: No, one of their mothers-in-law, not one of mine. I
only have one. They often say, well, you don't have to believe in
God to be Jewish and I say that's absolutely true, but what's the
point?
I mean, there's cultural wisdom. You know, there's beauty in
the masses that have been written for the church. There's
beauty in the paintings that Leonardo da Vinci and others and
Michelangelo and others did in the context of religion, but
that's just the response to the culture of the time and I don't
see why, given what you know now, you can't have that same
wisdom without discarding the provincial basis of it, which was
based, let's face it, on the imaginings of illiterate peasants,
Bronze Age peasants, before we knew the Earth even orbited
the sun.
Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett with On Being, today at the
Chautauqua Institution with physicist and public scientist
Lawrence Krauss. I interviewed him in a week devoted to
themes of inspiration, action, and commitment, including
others like the Buddhist anthropologist Joan Halifax, the
Muslim social activist Rami Nashashibi, and Homeboy Industries
founder Fr. Greg Boyle.
Ms. Tippett: So one of the things that the other people I've
been talking to this week, the other people who've been here
at Chautauqua are all religious people who've been working
and serving others, right, in compassion and
Dr. Krauss: Doing much more useful stuff than I do. I'll buy that.
Ms. Tippett: Well, you know, working with people who need
help. And this concept of the other comes up and the problem
human beings have with the other. And it's a problem not just
for religion, but for our society. You have talked about the
other in these terms: that we are connected organically to
everyone who's ever lived, even our enemies, through the
atoms and the oxygen we breathe. I mean, I think that is an
example of science throwing this fabulous new light on
something that vexes us.
Dr. Krauss: Absolutely, in a much more productive way than
saying we're all brothers under the skin or something.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: Because we really are, but it's really amazing. Every
time you breathe in, you breathe in atoms from virtually
everyone who's ever lived. Every time you take a drink of
water, you're drinking the secretions of every slimy thing that's
ever been around. You know, as I said in the beginning of the
book Atom, my mother used to tell me when I picked up a glass
of water, "Don't touch that. You don't know where it's been."
She had no idea.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: But I think that's exactly to me what science can
provide is a realistic basis of understanding how artificial and
myopic the definitions of us versus our enemies are. Not only
are we made of the same things, we're made of their atoms.
And every atom in our body was once inside a star that
exploded, one of the most poetic things I know about the
universe, that we're all stardust.
These are amazing things and they have content and they're
true. I mean, those three things are great. You can be amazed
without the latter two. But I think when you get all three, it's
really something.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. We have to open this up for questions,
because we are this is so interesting and we're running out
of time. So let's get going.
Audience Participant: How do you define love and from where
does it come?
Dr. Krauss: Well, first of all, I'm not an evolutionary
psychologist or neurologist or neuroscientist. But I think it
comes, from my understanding and my effort to understand
that, suggests it comes from many different areas.
It certainly comes from chemistry, hormones, not just sexual
hormones, but many other aspects of what drives our
perceptions of ourselves and others. It comes from logic as
well. It comes from understanding. It comes from the effort to
understand someone and find that they somehow mirror
everything you like about nature, that everything you admire
and respect.
I'm deeply in love right now, and I think the reasons for that is
that the person I'm deeply in love with reflects all of those
aspects of the universe that I admire. But I also realize that
there's many other aspects, physiological and chemical ones,
that drive that, and I'd be a fool to think that I wasn't driven by
those physical processes.
Do we understand all of it? No, but that's the great thing. Not
understanding it is wonderful because it means there's so much
more to learn about what drives us as human beings to
understand ourselves. And maybe when we do, we'll be better
at love.
Ms. Tippett: Yes?
Audience Participant: Thank you. Can you explain to us what
dark energy and dark matter are and why excuse me, how
it's important to us?
Ms. Tippett: You have about two minutes for that.
Dr. Krauss: Well, they are almost everything in the universe. Let
me make it quite clear that you are indeed far more
insignificant than you ever imagined.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: Not just you, but you, not me, but all of you, but,
uh, no, all of us, because we have learned that, if you'd look at
everything we could see, the beauty of the night sky here and
it's nice and dark at night. I was looking last night at the stars.
The beauty of the night sky and everything we see is just a bit
of cosmic pollution in a universe full of dark matter and dark
energy. Ninety-nine percent of the universe, 30 percent of the
universe roughly is this dark matter, which is made, we're
reasonably convinced, of some new type of elementary particle
that doesn't exist here on earth. Seventy percent is dark
energy, which is the energy of nothing.
One of the reasons I wrote this book that you're all going to
buy, that empty space weighs something. It's amazing. Who
would have thought that? Empty space weighs something. And
most of the energy in the universe resides in empty space.
Ms. Tippett: Space wasn't really the right word, was it?
Dr. Krauss: What?
Ms. Tippett: Space.
Dr. Krauss: No, space is still there.
Ms. Tippett: It's full, right?
Dr. Krauss: And it's even empty. There's not stuff in there.
There's nothing. You can look for it and there's nothing there,
but it weighs something. And what it really means, Krista, is
that it changed what we mean by nothing. But there's nothing
wrong with that.
Science changes what we mean by things all the time as we
learn. That's what learning is all about. We change the meaning
of things that we thought of before in a rough and love. We
may change what we mean by love when we understand it
more, or morality or lots of other ideas that are at the forefront
of our understanding.
But to get back to your question, so that's the dominant stuff in
the universe and everything we see is 1 percent. You get rid of
everything we see, all the stars, planets, people, aliens,
everything, and the universe would be essentially exactly the
same. So much for a universe made for us. We're just a relevant
byproduct and that's wonderful, that's wonderful.
But the other reason you might care is that it's responsible for
our existence. We now understand that without dark matter,
for example, galaxies would never have formed. It was
necessary for that dark matter to exist and be different than
the normal matter in order for galaxies to form and therefore
stars and therefore planets and therefore people and
therefore, theologians or whoever else.
[Laughter]
Dr. Krauss: And therefore it's responsible for our existence.
Now it will never produce a better toaster, I doubt. It won't do
anything useful and therefore you might say why should we
care about it? What amazes me, to get back to the question
you asked at the beginning, is why people ask that question.
Because they never ask that question of why, what use is a
Mozart concerto? What use is a Picasso painting? What use is
James Joyce's Ulysses or whatever?
Ms. Tippett: But, you know, that's why we have to have people
like you because we can't take that in. We don't know how to
enjoy that. You can't turn up like you can for a concert.
Dr. Krauss: You're right. I agree. There's a bigger barrier. But at
the same time, you can enjoy it, I would argue, and most
people just give up and scientists are a large part of it. Most
people, when it says come to science, well, I just don't
understand it. They give up thinking, and that's a really sad part
of our culture.
You know, people don't say, you know what? I can't enjoy
music unless I'm a musician. I can't enjoy art unless I'm an
artist. But you know what? Unless I'm a scientist, I can't enjoy
science. There is a great deal to enjoy and, of course, that's one
of the reasons why I do what I do. But we have to get over this
idea that you don't have to think at all. Well, you have to think
a little bit.
Ms. Tippett: I want to come at this slightly different angle in
just our last couple of minutes.
Dr. Krauss: OK, sure.
Ms. Tippett: One scientist talked to me about the spirituality of
a scientist, and here's how he described it. He said, "The
spirituality of a scientist is like the spirituality of a mystic, which
is that in any given moment you are discerning truth as best
you can and you're also completely aware that you have
everything yet to discover."
An evolutionary biologist who's not religious recently said to
me that he thinks scientists need to recover the word
spirituality. He said we talk about it. We talk about the spirit of
inquiry. So I just want to ask you, you know, very personally.
Like, you know, if you did use that phrase, the spirituality of
scientists, what would that mean for you?
Dr. Krauss: I think you've captured some of it. If I had to use the
term, I'd use awe in the wonder of nature and the realization
that spirituality isn't having the answers before you ask the
questions. And that's the main thing: that real spirituality
comes from asking the questions and opening your mind to
what the answers might be.
Ms. Tippett: Lawrence Krauss, thank you.
[Applause]
Lawrence Krauss is professor of physics, Foundation Professor
in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and Inaugural
Director of the Origins Project, all at Arizona State University.
His books include: The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from
Nothing.
You can listen again and download this show, and you can
watch my unedited public interview with Lawrence Krauss on
our website. That's onbeing.org. Find all our Chautauqua
conversations there as well as on our podcast at iTunes. On
Facebook, we're at facebook.com/onbeing. I'm on Twitter
@kristatippett. Follow our show @beingtweets.
On Being on-air and online is produced by Chris Heagle, Nancy
Rosenbaum, Susan Leem, and Stefni Bell.
Special thanks this week to Maureen Rovegno, Joan Brown
Campbell, and the Chautauqua Institution. Thanks as well for
production support on this show from Lily Percy.
Our senior producer is Dave McGuire. Trent Gilliss is our senior
editor. And I'm Krista Tippett.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: Next time, Alan Rabinowitz. A profound stutter as
a child left him virtually unable to communicate and to prefer
animals to people. He made his name as an explorer in some of
the world's last wild places. He has extraordinary insights into
the animal-human bond, the evolving science of wildlife
conservation, and what it means to be human. Please join us.
This is APM, American Public Media.
Lawrence Krauss Interview - Full Text

Andrew Zimmerman Jones with theoretical physicist Lawrence
Krauss. April 7, 2014, backstage before a showing of Krauss'
documentary film The Unbelievers in Columbus, OH. Andrew
Zimmerman Jones
I had the privilege of meeting with acclaimed cosmologist and
theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss on the evening of
Monday, April 7, 2014. We met at Wexner Auditorium on the
campus of Ohio State University, prior to a showing of his
documentary The Unbelievers (in which he co-stars with famed
atheist and zoologist Richard Dawkins). Our discussion, though
brief - I was the only thing standing between Dr. Krauss and his
dinner - covered a wide range of intriguing topics. A summary
of the interview is also on the website, but here is the full text
(with some edits of my own "ums" and "ahs" and filler
rambling):
Andrew Jones: So, the Origins Project just literally had its fifth
anniversary.
Lawrence Krauss: Yes, on Saturday [April 5, 2014].
AJ: I've seen some of the videos from it. You guys host the
Great Debates.
LK: Yes, we just had a Great Debate with 3,000 people on
Saturday.
AJ: What I really like about the work I see coming out of there is
that it's a very interdisciplinary look at origins.
LK: Everything from the origins of the universe to the origins of
consciousness, so it's about as interdisciplinary as you can get.
We call it transdisciplinary. That's the buzzword at ASU [Arizona
State University]. But we try to bring together people from
vastly different fields to look at forefront questions and look at
them in different ways and see which questions we can make
progress in. And these questions, since they're foundational,
are often of interest to the public, so we often have a public
event associated with them.
AJ: Obviously, you got into that through cosmology and the
origins of the universe, but what made you decide you wanted
to make that the origins of everything?
Ads
We Want Malaysian Authors
partridgepublishing.com/Singapore
Start Publishing Your Book. Get A Free Book Publishing Guide
Now!
Dictionary Free Download
www.dictionaryboss.com
Word Definitions, Translate & More. Download Dictionary Boss
Today!
LK: Well, actually, I began to think about this back when I lived
here in this state of Ohio, but as I was thinking of ways to get
people interested in the subject, I realized that cosmology, as
exciting as it is, alone is just part of the question and that one
could bring together lots of different fields and when I started
to think about it, I realized that origins questions are really at
the heart of the forefront of science. And, as you may or may
not know, I have a broad interest in science, well beyond
physics, and so I just thought: Well, since origins questions are
at the forefront of science, and they are also at the forefront of
the public's interest, it would be a wonderful handle to allow us
to look at really interesting questions anywhere, they all fit in
an origins framework. And it would allow us to do just what
we've done, to bring together people from different fields and
it's been incredibly successful. It was ambitious and I think a lot
of people thought it wouldn't work, but it did.
AJ: Yes, I wish something like that had been in place when I'd
graduated. I have an undergraduate degree in physics. And, in
addition to just being kind of tired of 16 years of college [I
meant school], I also kind of got the sense there wasn't much
left to do, because at the time they were writing books like The
End of Physics and so on.
LK: Yeah, I know, and that's an unfortunate thing.
AJ: So if something like this had been there to make it clear
how many good, rich questions there were still.
LK: Exactly! We tend to treat physics for kids as if it was done
200 years ago by dead, white men, but that's just not it,
though. The questions are vibrant and they're of interest and
they're accessible to people, which is one of the reasons that I
write and speak about them. Yeah, it's unfortunate the way
that we turn people off by doing that. And ASU, when the
President of the university invited me to come, they were
particularly attracted by this idea of interdisciplinary. I am part
of a school of Earth and Space Exploration that has
astronomers, astrophysics, geophysicists, planetary scientists,
engineers, all in one place looking at these things. An example
of the kind of interdisciplinary work we're doing.
AJ: So, to get back to cosmology. Of course, your last book [A
Universe From Nothing] was on the origins of ...
LK: ... the universe.
AJ: ... of everything. And one thing I know you've answered in
previous interviews, and I think in The Atlantic interview you
really clarified this point, but so just since I have you here, I'll
just double check that my understanding is correct. The book,
as I read it, is not saying that this is definitely what happened,
it's saying that we have an explanation of what could have
happened. Is that a fair statement?
LK: We have a plausible explanation of what could have
happened. More importantly, if you asked "What would be the
characteristics of a universe created by nothing ... created from
nothing by known laws of physics?" our universe has precisely
those characteristics. Now does that prove it happened? No,
because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity, but it's
plausible. It's become a lot more plausible in the last few
weeks, with the discoveries from the cosmic microwave
background and the gravitational radiation, which in principle
take us back and directly allow us to measure what happened
in the first 10
-35
seconds of the big bang. But it was just that:
This is plausible. And just having a plausible explanation is
remarkable. Just like when Darwin developed the theory of
evolution, he was plausible. He didn't have all the data. He had
fossil ideas and he had data suggesting this idea worked, and
actually compellingly suggesting that it worked, but he didn't
know about DNA or the genetic basis of life and now we do, but
at the time it was a plausible argument.
AJ: One of the things that I really like about things you've said
repeatedly about science is about being honest about how we
look at questions and not assuming we have the answer before
we start.
LK: No, I think that's ... I mean, we teach kids as if the answers
are important. It's the questions that are important. And I think
that not knowing is a wonderful thing and more parents and
more teachers should be willing to say that. "I don't know the
answer. Let's figure out how we might learn what the answer
is." Because that's what we're trying to teach in schools. It's a
process. Science is a process of trying to take this complicated
world and figure things out and that means not knowing things
and try to figure out how to get the answer. And not knowing is
what I do for a living.
AJ: In research for this, I read your article on the recent
inflation results ... the gravity wave article. And I loved that you
said, "I did this thing a few years ago. Now that didn't turn out
to be right." You would never hear a theologist ...
LK: Yeah, they know they're right, which means they don't
know anything.
AJ: But, I loved the honesty about, "We tried this. It didn't
work." And scientists embrace that, because it leads us
forward.
LK: Yeah, well, absolutely. I think, um ...
AJ: That wasn't really a question.
LK: No, I think honesty is a key part of science. Honesty and full
disclosure. I like to try and think I do that, take that beyond
science. But being wrong is a central part of science and being
willing to say you're wrong. In fact, Woody Allen says in our
movie, too, he talks about it. I think the point is that's how we
make progress. I have had, I think, many beautiful ideas and
unfortunately nature wasn't smart enough to adopt them.
AJ: So, I have a couple of questions that are related to again
kind of the questions of origins. I was wondering of one thing.
In the past, you have expressed ... I'm not sure if skepticism is
quite the right word, but not exactly being "on board" with
string theory as enthusiastically as some people are. Is that still
kind of a fair assessment? Or was that ever really fair? Because
it's hard to get a clear handle on it. Or does that fall in the "we
don't know" category?
LK: I wrote a book, called Hiding in the Mirror, which I called a
"fair and balanced look at string theory," in the non-FOX News
sense. My point was that string theory is based on a lot of
fascinating ideas. However, it has been the least successful
great idea in science in the sense that it hasn't yet made touch
with observation in any way. We still don't know if the ideas of
string theory are right. They're really well motivated; it's not as
if they aren't well motivated. But it was strongly hyped. And I
guess I was against the hype, not the theory. It's not even a
theory. It's unfair to evolution to call string theory a theory. It's
not a theory. A theory is something that has been tested
robustly by experiment and it's unfair to evolution to call it a
theory. I said that many years ago and Brian Greene used to get
mad at me, but now he agrees with me. But I think the point is
that it's fascinating and we're studying it, it just hasn't had any
great successes in terms of demonstrating that it can help us
understand the universe. Maybe it will one day. And, as I say,
some of my best students have become string theorists, I just
wouldn't want my daughter to marry one. No, just kidding.
AJ: One question I had was about the Higgs boson. One thing
that I've heard, and I've gotten mixed results from different
people in the science community, so I'll get your take on it. I've
heard that the Higgs boson that's seen is kind of the garden-
variety Higgs. There's no evidence of supersymmetry ...
LK: No, there's no evidence at all, and it's very disconcerting to
many people, because ... Actually, many of us thought, I
thought - another example of being wrong - I thought
supersymmetry would be seen before the Higgs. It was easier,
in principle, to be seen at the Large Hadron Collider. So the fact
that it hasn't been seen is telling. Now, what happens when the
Large Hadron Collider turns on again next year will be quite
important. Now I'd say that there's more evidence that
supersymmetry might be correct after the discovery of
gravitational waves from the big bang, because the scale that's
picked out is the scale of grand unification which is picked out if
supersymmetry is part of things. So, it gives me maybe a little
more confidence that supersymmetry may be seen, but it's kind
of remarkable that it's all working out at that scale. But if
supersymmetry isn't seen at the Large Hadron Collider, then we
know that we're missing something important. And it's a
nightmare scenario. If only the Higgs is seen, in some sense, it's
a nightmare scenario, because it doesn't tell us what is
happening.
AJ: Well, let's discuss the film for a few minutes. One thing I'm
curious about, and this is probably something you address in
the film, but what motivated you to go from kind of the straight
just "here's the facts" science to really being an advocate for
atheism, if that's not overstating it.
LK: I'm not an advocate for atheism; I'm an advocate for
science, and that I've always been, so there's nothing new
about that. What I am is ... By being an advocate for science I'm
asking people to be willing to accept the reality, the empirically
reality of the universe, the evidence. Having their beliefs
conform to evidence, rather than the other way around. And,
naturally, that implies - since there is no evidence of purpose to
the universe - that implies that the tenets of organized religion
in the world are not consistent with science. And one should be
willing and upfront to say that. I think that by pretending there
are some things which are not subject to questioning, we do
everyone a disservice. And so, I think the point, what really got
me involved in it was, again, in Ohio, right here, in Columbus,
where this movie is. I got involved in the Board of Education
here in Ohio was trying to essentially get rid of the teaching of
evolution in schools and the biologists weren't speaking up and
I had a public pulpit, so I spoke up, and it got me involved and I
came here to a big even with the school board for 1,500
people, me and another scientist debating these two nudnicks
from the Discovery Institute. And that kind of got me, just
protecting science from religious dogmatism, that sort of
established that. And once that happened, I've been fighting
that fight. And I'm against religious dogmatism. It's not as if I'm
out to be an advocate for anything. Except, atheism is just open
questioning. It's not a belief system. It's just saying you don't
accept things without evidence or good reason for accepting
them and that you allow your beliefs to change. As you pointed
out, being wrong is really a central part of science. It's not a
central part of religion, where you assume the answers before
you ask the questions, and that does a disservice to thinking
and action. And if you don't base your public policy on sound
empirical evidence, then the public policy is going to be
irrational. And we can't afford that in the modern world.
AJ: What is your next project after this?
LK: Well, I have a lot of projects. I'm in the middle of scientific
papers. I just wrote, what, 2 last week, because of these new
discoveries. I'm writing a new book, but I won't go into that yet,
except that it will follow up on A Universe from Nothing, in a
different sense, and address more of the question of why we're
here rather than could something come from nothing. Another
fundamental question that in some sense is a religious one. And
what I want to do, what I've done with these books is show that
these fundamental questions that have been the basis of
theology and philosophy, science is addressing in new ways.
And it's changing what we mean, but that's okay. That's okay.
It's called learning.
Transcript
Select language
13:25
Michael Shermer
Why people believe weird things
3.7M views Nov 2006
Funny, Persuasive
0:11 Hey, I am Michael Shermer, the director of the Skeptics
Society, the publisher of "Skeptic" magazine. We investigate
claims of the paranormal, pseudo-science, and fringe groups
and cults and claims of all kinds between -- science and pseudo-
science and non-science and junk science, voodoo science,
pathological science, bad science, non-science and plain old
nonsense. And unless you've been on Mars recently, you know
there's a lot of that out there.
0:33 Some people call us debunkers, which is kind of a negative
term. But let's face it -- there's a lot of bunk, and we are like the
bunko squads of the police departments out there, flushing out.
Well, we're sort of like the Ralph Naders of bad ideas (Laughter)
-- trying to replace bad ideas with good ideas.
0:49 I'll show you an example of a bad idea. I brought this with
me. This was given to us by NBC Dateline to test. It's the -- it's
produced by the Quadro Corporation of West Virginia. It's
called the Quadro 2000 Dowser Rod. (Laughter) This was being
sold to high school administrators for 900 dollars a piece. It's a
piece of plastic with a Radio Shack antenna attached to it. You
could dowse for all sorts of things, but this particular one was
built to dowse for marijuana in students' lockers. (Laughter)
1:22 So the way it works is, you go down the hallway and you
see if it tilts toward a particular locker, and then you open the
locker. So it looks something like this. I'll show you. (Laughter)
No, it -- well, it has kind of a right-leaning bias. So, I'll show --
well, this is science, so we'll do a controlled experiment. It'll go
this way for sure. (Laughter)
1:48 Sir, you want to empty your pockets. Please, sir?
(Laughter)
1:52 So the question was, can it actually find marijuana in
students' lockers? And the answer is, if you open enough of
them, yes. (Laughter) (Applause)
2:01 But in science, we have to keep track of the misses, not
just the hits. And that's probably the key lesson to my short talk
here, is that this is how psychics work, astrologers, and tarot
card readers and so on. People remember the hits; they forget
the misses. In science we have to keep the whole database, and
look to see if the number of hits somehow stands out from the
total number that you would expect by chance.
2:20 In this case, we tested it. We had two opaque boxes: one
with government-approved THC marijuana, and one with
nothing. And it got it 50 percent of the time -- which is exactly
what you'd expect with a coin flip model. So that's just a fun
little example here of the sorts of things we do.
2:36 "Skeptic" is the quarterly publication. Each one has a
particular theme, like this one is on the future of intelligence.
Are people getting smarter or dumber? I have an opinion of this
myself because of the business I'm in, but, in fact, people, it
turns out, are getting smarter. Three IQ points per 10 years,
going up. Sort of an interesting thing.
2:55 With science, don't think of skepticism as a thing or even
science as a thing. Are science and religion compatible? It's like,
are science and plumbing compatible? These -- they're just two
different things. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of
thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural
explanations for all phenomena.
3:10 I mean, what's more likely: that extraterrestrial
intelligences or multi-dimensional beings travel across the vast
distances of interstellar space to leave a crop circle in Farmer
Bob's field in Puckerbrush, Kansas to promote skeptic.com, our
webpage? Or is it more likely that a reader of "Skeptic" did this
with Photoshop? And in all cases we have to ask (Laughter) --
what's the more likely explanation? And before we say
something is out of this world, we should first make sure that
it's not in this world. What's more likely -- that Arnold had a
little extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship? Or
that the "World Weekly News" makes stuff up? (Laughter)
3:46 And part of that -- the same theme is expressed nicely
here in this Sidney Harris cartoon. For those of you in the back,
it says here: "Then a miracle occurs. I think you need to be
more explicit here in step two." This single slide completely
dismantles the intelligent design arguments. There's nothing
more to it than that. (Applause) You can say a miracle occurs.
It's just that it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't offer
anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the
conversation for intelligent design creationists.
4:13 Whereas -- and it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms
out as linguistic place fillers -- dark energy or dark matter or
something like that -- until we figure out what it is, we'll just call
it this -- it's the beginning of the causal chain for science. For
intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chain. So
again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien
spaceships or perceptual cognitive mistakes -- or even fakes?
4:37 This is a UFO shot from my house in Altadena, California,
looking down over Pasadena. And if it looks a lot like a Buick
hubcap, it's because it is. You don't even need Photoshop; you
don't need high-tech equipment; you don't need computers.
This was shot with a throwaway Kodak Instamatic camera. You
just have somebody off on the side with a hubcap ready to go.
Camera's ready -- that's it. (Laughter)
4:59 So, although it's possible that most of these things are fake
or illusions or so on and that some of them are real, it's more
likely that all of them are fake, like the crop circles.
5:09 On a more serious note, in all of science we're looking for
a balance between data and theory. In the case of Galileo, he
had two problems when he turned his telescope to Saturn. First
of all, there was no theory of planetary rings. And second of all,
his data was grainy and fuzzy, and he couldn't quite make out
what it was he was looking at. So he wrote that he had seen --
"I have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies."
And this is what he ended up concluding that he saw. So
without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data,
you can't have a good theory. And it wasn't solved until 1655.
5:45 This is Christiaan Huygens's book in which he cataloged all
the mistakes that people made in trying to figure out what was
going on with Saturn. It wasn't till -- Huygens had two things.
He had a good theory of planetary rings and how the solar
system operated. And then, he had better telescopic, more
fine-grain data in which he could figure out that as the Earth is
going around faster -- according to Kepler's Laws -- than Saturn,
then we catch up with it. And we see the angles of the rings at
different angles, there. And that, in fact, turns out to be true.
6:12 The problems with having a theory is that your theory may
be loaded with cognitive biases. So one of the problems of
explaining why people believe weird things is that we have
things on a simple level. And then I'll go to more serious ones.
Like, we have a tendency to see faces.
6:26 This is the face on Mars, which was -- in 1976, where there
was a whole movement to get NASA to photograph that area
because people thought this was monumental architecture
made by Martians. Well, it turns out -- here's the close-up of it
from 2001. If you squint, you can still see the face. And when
you're squinting, what you're doing is you're turning that from
fine-grain to coarse-grain. And so, you're reducing the quality of
your data. And if I didn't tell you what to look for, you'd still see
the face, because we're programmed by evolution to see faces.
6:54 Faces are important for us socially. And, of course, happy
faces. Faces of all kinds are easy to see. (Laughter) You can see
the happy face on Mars, there. If astronomers were frogs
perhaps they'd see Kermit the Frog. Do you see him there?
Little froggy legs. Or if geologists were elephants?
7:13 Religious iconography. (Laughter) Discovered by a
Tennessee baker in 1996. He charged five bucks a head to come
see the nun bun till he got a cease-and-desist from Mother
Teresa's lawyer. Here's Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of
Watsonville, just down the street, or is it up the street from
here? Tree bark is particularly good because it's nice and grainy,
branchy, black-and-white splotchy and you can get the pattern-
seeking -- humans are pattern-seeking animals.
7:40 Here's the Virgin Mary on the side of a glass window in Sao
Paulo. Now, here's the Virgin Mary made her appearance on a
cheese sandwich -- which I got to actually hold in a Las Vegas
casino, of course, this being America. (Laughter) This casino
paid 28,500 dollars on eBay for the cheese sandwich. (Laughter)
But who does it really look like, the Virgin Mary? (Laughter) It
has that sort of puckered lips, 1940s-era look.
8:07 Virgin Mary in Clearwater, Florida. I actually went to see
this one. There was a lot of people there -- the faithful come to
be in their -- wheelchairs and crutches, and so on. And we went
down, investigated. Just to give you a size -- that's Dawkins, me
and The Amazing Randi, next to this two, two and a half story
size image. All these candles, so many thousands of candles
people had lit in tribute to this. So we walked around the
backside, just to see what was going on here, where -- it turns
out wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree, you get
the effect. Here's the Virgin Mary on the backside, which they
started to wipe off. I guess you can only have one miracle per
building. (Laughter) So is it really a miracle of Mary, or is it a
miracle of Marge? (Laughter)
8:50 And then I'm going to finish up with another example of
this with audio -- auditory illusions. There is this film, "White
Noise," with Michael Keaton about the dead talking back to us.
By the way, this whole business of talking to the dead, it's not
that big a deal. Anybody can do it, turns out. It's getting the
dead to talk back that's the really hard part. (Laughter)
9:10 In this case, supposedly, these messages are hidden in
electronic phenomena. There's a ReverseSpeech.com web page
from which I downloaded this stuff. Here is the forward -- this is
the most famous one of all of these. Here's the forward version
of the very famous song. (Music) Boy, couldn't you just listen to
that all day? (Laughter)
9:52 All right, here it is backwards, and see if you can hear the
hidden messages that are supposedly in there. (Music) What
did you get?
10:29 Audience: "Satan."
10:31 Michael Shermer: "Satan?" OK, well, at least we got
"Satan." Now, I'll prime your auditory part of your brain to tell
you what you're supposed to hear, and then hear it again.
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause)
11:12 You can't miss it when I tell you what's there. (Laughter)
11:18 All right, I'm going to just end with a positive, nice, little
story about -- the Skeptics is a nonprofit educational
organization. We're always looking for little, good things that
people do.
11:28 And in England, there's a pop singer. Very -- one of the
top popular singers in England today, Katie Melua. And she
wrote a beautiful song. It was in the top five in 2005, called,
"Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing." It's a love story -- she's sort of
the Norah Jones of the U.K. -- about how she much loves her
guy, and compared to nine million bicycles, and so forth. And
she has this one passage here.
11:51 We are 12 billion light-years from the edge
11:56 That's a guess
11:59 No one can ever say it's true
12:03 But I know that I will always be with you
12:07 Well, that's nice. At least she got it close. In America it
would be, "We're 6,000 light years from the edge."
12:14 (Laughter)
12:15 But my friend, Simon Singh, the particle physicist now
turned science educator, and he wrote the book "The Big
Bang," and so on. He uses every chance he gets to promote
good science. And so, he wrote an op-ed piece in "The
Guardian" about Katie's song, in which he said, well, we know
exactly how old, how far from the edge. You know, it's 12 -- it's
13.7 billion light years, and it's not a guess. We know within
precise error bars there how close it is. And so, we can say,
although not absolutely true, that it's pretty close to being true.
12:44 And, to his credit, Katie called him up after this op-ed
piece came out. And said, "I'm so embarrassed. I was a member
of the astronomy club, and I should have known better." And
she re-cut the song. So I'll end with the new version. We are
13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable
universe That's a good estimate with well-defined error
bars And with the available information I predict that I
will always be with you (Applause)
13:15 How cool is that? (Applause)
[Transcribed from recording. Some words/sentences may be
wrong. Cleaned up a little, fixed some mistakes and removed
some editing marks - transcriber, 19 March 2013. Main
speakers are (in order of appearance): Yusuf Chambers,
Professor Lawrence M. Krauss, Hamza A. Tzortzis.]

Chambers: A world worth of information pured by the ITH,
however IT and we seem to have failed to adequatedly
answers-answer the most fundamental, of questions about life,
our existence itself which is of course the main core area that
we aim to address you tonight in this, uh, auditorium, in,
London here tonight. I remember, you know, spending a large
part of my life asking myself "Why am I here?" "Who created
me?" "Do I have a purpose?" Um, can we be certain about any
of these uh, you know, these-these questions? And what- you
know I asked a bishop, uh, "Whats the purpose of life?", and he
said to me, go and do a theology degree. Right im not telling to
go do a theology degree im asking you to sit here, in a debate
for two hours with my two honourable guests over here, -

Krauss: (in background) You say its worth asking a bishop (?)

Chambers: Yeah, well, you know..

(audience laughs)

Chambers: Of course- he didn't know the answer, by the way,
right,

(audience laughter)

Chambers: Um, thats another issue um,

(audience murmur)

Chambers: But what of course we can do to inform our
decisions about this debate tonight is to use our reasoning, to
use our mind, to use our intellect, and, really, to cross to have
an open-mindset. Muslim, Non-muslim, christian, whatever you
are, whatever you believe in, you should have an open mindset,
and really go at this, with sincerity. Thats really--Im-Im just
asking the aud- Im asking myself, first and foremost, right, cos
that thats tough, being Irish-ex Irish catholic. Yes, ex, yeah. Uh-

Krauss: I didn't think (?) the Catholic church allows divorce.

Chambers: Oh, well, you know.. thats another story. This
evening, two major belief systems if you like, lay claim to the
truth of going head-to-head. No matter which side of the fence
you tend to reside on, okay, um, at the end of the night tha-you
will be better informed about Atheism, and about Islam.
Hopefully the world perspective, the world view of Islam and
Atheism. Thats what its really all about. Tonight, what-hows it
gonna-hows it gonna happen. Right, well, we're gonna have 25
minutes allotted for both speakers, although Im told thats
gonna change as well-

Krauss: Yeah, (..)

Chambers: Okay, and then followed by a further 10 minutes, of,
you know, sort of, uh coming back, and then another three
minutes of coming back, although that might change, uh,
Professor, right, and, after that, there will be, you know
crossfire, and theres gonna be no heavy arms to be used live in
this section,

(audience chuckle)

Chambers: uh, both of you, okay, that although I understand
the tongue is alot more vicious than nuclear weapons. But,
what we're effectively saying after that is you lovely people will
get the opportunity to ask questions, as, uh uh uh you may
make observations, hopefully ON the topics, right, on the topic
that we're talking about, and then will be two minutes closing
remarks, a little presentation after that and we will go home
and we won't be out of here by 10 o' clock. Okay, right, so
theres a couple of hours to go, and just to let you know, fire-fire
exits, over there right at the back, over there and over here,
and the assemble, the assembly point is in Gordon, uh square.
Gordon, sq. yeah, Gordon square, okay. I would URGE the
audience not to heckle the speakers, to be polite at all times,
okay, and, you know to listen to each other afterwards as well,
don't uh we won't want any blood, or any fights, okay (chuckle),
and im sure that you guys, you understand why im saying that.
So today, our first speaker, okay, this has been agreed upon?

Krauss: No, I was told.

Chambers: Okay, good then. (...)

(Audience laughter)

Krauss: (...) I was (...)

Chambers: Will be, uh, our brother, uh, well it says brother, hes
a brother in humanity, you're my brother in humanity, hes my
brother in humanity, and in the faith of Islam-

Audience member: (loudly) TAKBIR!

Audience: (loudly) Allahu Akbar!

(audience laughter)

Chambers: Okay, (the meen, the meen?) are going great. Okay,
so, Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, of course hes actually Greek, not
Pakistani, hes, you know, he, he-he in fact, is uh, you can see
him a little from Pakistani, but anyway, um, hes a student of
Islamic thought, a lecturer, a researcher for the Islamic
Education Research Academy, and without further ado, I will
call on him to give his piece.

(Clapping)

Tzortzis: Innalhamdillilah, wassalatu waassalamu Alarasulillah,
to proceed, respected Professor Krauss, guests, brothers and
sisters, friends, relatives, I greet you with the warmest Islamic
greetings of peace, Assalamu Alaykum Warahmatullahi
Wabarakatu

Audience: Alaykum salam warahmatullahi wabarakatu (...)

Tzortzis: Which basically means may the peace and blessings of
God be upon you all. Todays question, Islam or Atheism, which
makes more sense. I would argue that if we use our reason, our
rational faculties, we would definetely come to the conclusion
that Islam makes more sense and im gonna use two simple
arguments to verify that claim. Argument number one, Islam
makes sense of the origins of the universe. Argument number
two, Islam makes sense of the nature of the Quranic discourse.
Now let me go straight to the first argument, that Islam makes
sense of the origins of the universe. Now, we all have had the
same type of question - well most of us, anyway, Why does the
universe exist, Why is there something rather, than nothing and
in response to that question the grandfather of Neo-Atheism
Bertrand Russell said, "The universe is just there, and thats all.
Its a brute fact." Even in Islamic history, as early as the 8th
century we had philosophical naturalists known as the
Dah'riyyah, they held similar views. Now the implications of
these historical opinions is that the universe is eternal, and if
the universe is eternal, it implies there is an infinite past. But
the question is, can we have an infinite past- Though the
infinite makes sense in the real world. Now the assertion of the
universe having infinite past is absolutely irrational. This is
because the quantifiable infinite cannot exist in the real world,
something our beloved Professor Krauss has also suggested in
his book, "A Universe From Nothing", on page 71, he says
clearly, the energy of empty space, or anything else for that
matter, cannot physically be infinite. So we have to figure out
how to do the calculation to get a finite answer. To highlight
why the infinity or the infinite doesnt exist, take the following
example into consideration. Imagine you have for example, an
infinite number of Professor Krauss's in this room, and, if I were
to take 5 Professor Krauss's away, how many do we have left?
Well some mathematicians may say, well, we still have an
infinite number of Professor Krauss's. Logicians will say, we
have infinity minus five. But what stops me practically removing
five Professor Krauss's away from this room? Nothing. And if I
do, there should be less than infinite, but there isn't, therefore
leads to absurdities and contradiction. Take this other example
into consideration. My distance between the distance, rather
between myself and Professor Krauss. We can potentially split
this distance into infinite parts, but can actually traverse the
finite distance, which shows Aristotle, the Greek philosopher
said, that the infinite is, potential, never actualised. In light of
this, mathematicians Casman and Newman said, the infinite set
does not exist, in the same sense that we say there are fish, in
the sea. And this leads to our deductive argument, that for
those who don't know deductive argument is a conclusion that
necessarily follows from its premises and to deny a valid and
sound deductive argument is equivalent of denying reality. So
listen to the deductive argument. Number one, an actual
infinite cannot exist. Number two, an infinite history of past
events is an actual infinite, therefore an infinite history of past
events cannot exist, therefore the universe is finite, therefore it
had a beginning. Now this is a deductive argument. But we also
have complementary evidence which I call astrophysical
evidence, and im not claiming to be a physicist, we have an
established acclaimed academic amongst us so he can tell us
the rest of the story, but what have cosmologists said, they
have said for example Alexander Belankin, in his book, "Many
Worlds in One", which I believe is a friend of Professor Krauss,
he says, with the proof now in place, cosmologists can no
longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe.
There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic
beginning, and just to know, even Professor Krauss in his book,
affirms a beginning to the universe. Interestingly in Islamic
thought, this has been discussed at length, and there is a
unananimous conclusion that the universe is eternal, it began in
the finite past, as the polymath theologian Ibn Taymir wrote in
the 14th century his book, "As Safiriyyah", so whatever is
besides God, it is all, Mahluk, all created, originated, coming to
be after non-existing, preceding by its own existence. Now
since we have shown that the universe must have a beginning,
there are four logical explanations for how the universe began
to exist. Number one, it was created via nothing. Number two,
it created itself. Number three, it was created by something
else that was created, and number four, it was created by
something, uncreated, so lets discuss these together, could the
universe be created via nothing? Well first and foremost, what
do we mean by nothing, by nothing we mean the absence of
something, and in this case, the absence of the universe. Now
why doesn't our definition make sense. This is because we have
deductively argued that the universe began, and therefore it
was once not there, there was an absence of the universe. This
is undeniable due to the deductive nature of the argument. So
based on our definition I think we can conclude that the
universe coming into being or existence by nothing is
impossible on logical, rational, and I would even argue
empirical grounds. You could discuss this mathematically for
example, what is zero plus zero plus zero. Its never gonna be
three (chuckle), its zero. Therefore the universe could not have
come into existence via nothing, as PJ's Wartons publication
about time explains, If there is anything we can find
inconceivable, it is that something could arise from nothing.
Lets go to the next option, could the universe create itself? Well
this implies that the universe was in existence, and not in
existence at the same time which is an impossibility, also theres
a crude example for you to picture in your mind. Ask yourself
the question - can your mother give birth to herself? Obviously
not. So we know self-creation is an impossibility. So the next
option is, could the universe be created by something created?
Well I would argue as an ultimate explanation for how the
universe began, this is illogical, and irrational. The universe
could not be as a result of another universe, for example, or
something else that was created because of the absurdity of an
infinite regress. Imagine this universe, Universe 1, being as a
result of another universe, Universe 2, and Universe 2 being as
a result of another universe, Universe 3, and this went on ad
infinitum, we would never have the universe today. Hence the
Islamic philosopher and thinker Dr. Jaafar Idris, summarises this
point, he says there will be no series of actual order (?). Not
only a series of nonexistence, the fact however, is that there
are existence around us, therefore the ultimate form must be
something other than temporal closets. So I would argue that
the final possible explanation which is, the universe, was
created by something uncreated is the most rational
explanation. And philosopher Ibrahim Lahir (?) made an
appendix to Professor Anthony in book, There Is A God,
explains this conclusion in a simple, but faultable (?) way. He
writes, "Now, clearly, theists and atheists can agree on one
thing. If anything exists at all, there must be something
preceeding it, that always existed. How could this eternally
existing reality come to be? The answer is, it never came to be.
It always existed. Think of this. The gods, or the universe.
Something always existed. And we've argued deductively that
the universe began, therefore it couldn't have always existed.
Now this doesn't mean God existed, it doesn't mean Allah,
Buddha, Jesus, Yahweh, existed. Thats a leap of faith. We leave
that to the atheists.

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: The point im trying to make here, is that if we
continue, if we continue with our rtational argumentation,
using our akl, akl meaning intellect in the arabic language as the
Quran, the Quranic discourse says, Afala Ta'kiloon, "Do not use
your brains". If we continue using our brains our mind, we will
conclude something quite profound. Number one, that this
uncreated creator must be eternal, by definition, because hes
uncreated. Number two he must be transcendent as Ibn
Taymir, the 14th century philosopher/theologian said, he must
be distinct and disjoint from the universe, for example if I were
to create this lecturn, Do I become the lecturn? No. Number
three, this uncreated creator must have a will, because if its
eternal, and brought into existence a finite effect that began,
like the universe, he must have CHOSE the universe to come
into existence, and the choice indicates a will, and the will
indicates can have a relationship with sentient beings in the
universe. Number four, he has to be powerful, he created the
atom for example, if you split the atom - ask Professor Krauss
what happens.

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: Fifth point, it must be perpetually KNOWING, because
if its eternal, and it established, laws like the law of gravity, it
implies (something will give her??), so therefore we could make
the inference that its perpetually knowing or perpetaully
intelligent, because its eternal, and created laws, in the
universe. Finally, it must be One. If we use the rational principle
of Occam's Razor, and by the way many people don't
understand Occam's Razor I think Professor Krauss doesn't
understand Occam's Razor either from when I read his book,
but he could debate that with me later. Occam's Razor is not
about physical forces, by the way, which has been
misconstrued as a strawman in the Crowskian (?) fashion.
Basically, Occam's Razor is that you must have a simple
explanation but also you must have the most comprehensive
which means what? It actually means, that it has, has to have
greater explanatory scope, and explanatory power, because it
can be complex, because it may deal with most of the
questions, but considering this reality about the Oneness of the
divine, the argument that the creator must be One is simple
and far more comprehensive. If you say two or three or four,
then, its not simple anymore and it doesn't answer all the
questions, in actual fact it creates far more questions than it
answers, such as, "How do two or three or four causes co-
eternally exist?" It doesn't make any sense. So I think we've
concluded what the Quran concluded 1400 years ago, that
there is a creator, he is one, he is unique and hes transcendent.
As the Quran says in the 112th chapter, "Say. He is God, the
One, the Unique, God the Eternal, Absolute. He begets not, nor
is he begotten, and there is nothing like unto Him." Now before
I move onto my next argument, I really want to have a nuanced
discussion, a very nuanced discussion. Which means if someone
offers to talk to you you have to talk to them back, and if, a
little bit (?) offended but I try and explain a child between a
housewarmer in this room, for us to have a chat and he wants
to have a chat with me which I think is not very nice (??) -

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: But thats uh, thats uh, thats another story. And I want
to do it with some contention so we transcend this kind of,
what I would call, Atheist cliches. So whats the first Atheist
cliche? The first atheist cliche, I call it, the Professor Krauss
"Nothing" cliche.

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: And, if you read his book, you will see, that Professor
Krauss is a highly acclaimed academic, I mean I am nothing
compared to him, (pause) -

Krauss: Thats true.

(audience erupts into laughter)

Tzortzis: He wait, wait, wait, wait your turn (?), by the way him
making a statement is not an argument I don't know why you're
clapping like somebody's obedient slave -

(audience cheering and clapping)

Tzortzis: Please, please, I have a time. To keep.

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: So, in his book - which I really liked his book, I like his
style, I like his rhetoric - he wrote in his book "A Universe From
Nothing", he said that, nothing, is Nothing with italics. And
essentially what he's trying to say, hes trying to change the
label "Nothing" which in the English language, is a universal
negation. But hes saying Nothing is actually Something which is
a quantum reality. And this is quite bizarre, and thats why you
have to study philosophy because you need to make
conceptual distinctions, for example imagine I was in the
hallway and I said "(accent) No I met nobody, (no accent) and
they gave me directions to this room!"

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Or imagine if for example, yesterday, my wife made a
great lunch, and it was nothing!

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: You know, Nothing tastes great with a bit of whipped
cream!

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: I mean does this make any sense?

Krauss: (quietly) It does.

Tzortzis: And, Professor Krauss who showed (?) Nothing is
actually Something he also says in his book, in page 80, "Our
universe would then re-collapse inward to a point, returning to
the Quantum Hades from which our-all existence may have
begun", and his own friend Alexander Belenkin said recently,
"Vacuum is very different from Nothing. Its a physical object."
But this is irrelevant almost because even Krauss admits in his
book, that these are speculative and inconclusive conclusions.
Because he says, I stress the word "could" here, because we
may yet have enough empirical information to resolve this
question unambiguously, so I do respect what hes trying to do,
but you would never take an inductive argument, over
deductive one. Only someone intellectually challenged would
do that in my humble opinion.

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: The second contention is that things can come into
being without any cause, you have a s- you have a quantum
vacuum, a quantum reality, and there are some subatomic
events that appear, without known (?) causes. I believe we
have a strong defeator to this argument and it concerns
perceptions and it rests on the Kant argument. Now, can alter
my perception in-in this room, I could see this very handsome
young man, I can see the camera man, I can see the wall. I
could also reverse that perception. But if my wife were to start
walking down this auditorium, I couldn't help but see her front
before I see her back, and I couldn't reverse that perception.
Now the very fact that I know when I can alter my perceptions
and when I can't, and when I can reverse my perceptions and
when I can't, is because we have an innate concept of causal
links and causal connections. To reject that base on empiricism
or empirical reality is equivalent and tantamount of actually
rejecting the perception itself, its like shooting yourself, in the
foot. This is why the philosopher John Cottingham in his book
Rationalism said, "But on Kant's argument, who would not be
able to recognise that event in the first place, unless there were
a rule, that makes it necessary that the order of our perception
should be thus, and not otherwise. In short, the very
experience of an external event already pre-supposes an
understanding of causal necessity." So, these are the cliches,
lets go to the next argument which is the nature of the Quran.
Now the Quranic discourse has been described by Eastern and
Western scholars as an intrusive and imposing text, which seeks
to intrude into the inner dimensions of man. Now, this
imposition is positive as the Quran seeks to positively engage
with your intellect, and with your s-psychological disposition.
And the way the Quran achieves this is by asking questions. Wa
Fee Umm Fusi Kum Afa La Tuf Siroon. "And in themselves, do
they not see?" Talks about the physiological reality, the
psychological reality, even referring to things like
consciousness. This is why Professor of Philosophy, Shabbir
Akhtar in his book, The Quran And The Secular Mind: A
Philosophy Of Islam, he describes what the (?) Quran is trying
to say in these verses. He says, "Natures flawless harmonies,
and the delights and liabilities of our human environment, with
its diverse and delicate relationships, are invested with res-
religious significance. Created Nature is a cryptogram of reality
which transcends it, Nature is a text to be deciphered, evidence
is accumulating in the material and social worlds, and in the
horizons, jointly point to a hidden immaterial order." Now you
may think this is quite interesting for a 7th century book, but
the Quran goes even further than this, it produces an
intellectual challenge for the whole of mankind. The Quran
says, Wa In Kuntum Feraybi Min Mannazanna Ala Abdina, Fa'tu
bisooratu mimithlihe, Wada ush'ul hada thummin doonillahi
sadiqeen (?). "And if you are in doubt", talk-talking to Krauss,
talking to me, talking to everybody, "If you doubt this book,
which we have sent down to our servant" referring to the
prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam -

Audience: Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam

Tzortzis: Upon whom be peace, then bring one chapter like it,
and call on your witnesses and supporters besides God, In
Quntum Sadiqeen if you're truthful in this claim. Now this verse
is a basis of an array of arguments in the Quranic discourse and
we dont have time to talk about all the arguments. Historical
arguments, sociological argument, and a whole array of
intellectual responses. But one I want to talk about, is, called
the innamatibility and the uniqueness concerning the Arabic
language in the Quranic discourse. Which Islamic theologians
and thinkers argue that it is a miracle. Now before I get into
that, we have to now discuss what is a miracle? We haven't
defined what a miracle is. Now, the word linguistically comes
from a Latin word miracula meaning something wonderful. And
the traditional Western philosophical definition of a miracle as
summarised by David Hugh in his own enquiry concerning
human understanding, he says its a transgression of natural
law. We don't agree with that definition -

Krauss: Whose we? (?)

Tzortzis: Because what are natural laws? Natural laws are just
inductive generalisations of patterns we perceive in the
universe, if something changes from the pattern or is different,
then maybe its a part of the pattern, its just based on induction.
What they have found, Islamic theologians and thinkers have
done, they've re-defined what a miracle is based on the
Quranic discourse. And they have said, a miracle is an event
that lies outside the productive capacity of Nature which
means, when you go to the nature of the event, you exhaust all
possible naturalistic explanations, and also there is no
naturalistic causal link between the event, and the nature of
the event. And this is a far more coherent definition, let me
give an example from the Quran itself. Now, the Quran talks
about Moses, Musa Alayhi Salam, the prophet upon him be
peace and Pharaoh in the Quran. Moses was told to thrown
down his wooden staff, and it instantaneously turned into a live
snake. Now, this miraculous event, this snake, lies outside the
productive capacity of the nature of the event, the wooden
staff. Because the chemical makeup of the staff is different
from that of the snake. In actual fact, it would add more stuff
than the staff (?), if that makes sense, stuff to the staff, to be
even close of creating a snake, but only the staff was used. So
when we exhaust naturalistic explanations we find there is no
causal link between the staff and the snake itself so this gives
us a definition of what a miracle is. Now this applies to the
Qurans use of the Arabic language, because the Quran cannot
be described as any of the literary forms of the Arabic language,
which include, Saja'ah, rhyme prose, Mur'sal, straightforward
speech, Ma'qaman, a combination of metrical and non-metrical
speech, and the Albihar, the 16 rhythmical patterns of classical
Arabic poetry. Now interestingly, in classical Arabic, every
expression falls within the non-literary forms of the Arabic
language. The Quran however de-scopes the Arabic language,
and the Quran is a miracle in this perspective because even
though its made up of the Arabic language, there is no causal
link between the Arabic language, and the Arabic and the
Quran. This is because when we exhaust the 28 letters, the
finite grammatical rules, and the finite words, we exhaust
them, we cannot produce the unique literary form of the
Quranic discourse. And interestingly from a historical and
literary perspective, when attempts have been made to
produce the like of the literary form of the Quranic discourse,
they have all failed. As the academic Foster Fitzgerald
Arbuthnot, a notable British orientalist states, "And that though
several attempts have been made to produce a work equal to
thus far as elegant writing is concerned, none have y-yet
succeeded". In this light, brothers and sisters and friends, what
we've just discussed can develop into deductive argument, and
listen very carefully. Number one, a miracle is an event that lies
outside the productive capacity of Nature. In other words,
there are no causal links between the event and the nature of
the event. Number two, the Qurans literary form lies outside
the productive capacity of the nature of the Arabic language. Its
literary form cannot be logically explained, using the Arabic
language. Therefore, the Quran is a miracle. As Professor Bruce
Lawrence from Duke University his book, The Quran: A
Biography on page number 8 (?) said, "As tangible science,
Quranic verses are expressive of (??) of a truth, they signify
meaning, laid within meaning, light upon light, miracle after
miracle." So we have two key arguments that are based on
deduction, not just induction, and to challenge an inductive
argument you have to challenge the premises and I hope
Professor Krauss can do that.

(murmur) (Krauss, saying something very quietly?)

Tzortzis: So lets go to some contentions. What about
Shakespeare? Shakespeare is unique? But this is a very shallow
contention, and I even heard this from Dan Barkur in uh,
debate in Minnesota, and he didn't do his reading. Basically
Shakespeare is not unique from the perspective of the
structural features of language, the literary form, rather its
aesthetic reception. The kind of argument we're talking about,
the structural features of the Arabic language, if you look at
Shakespeare, he used the iambic pentameter, the tractate
verse, the blank verse, ... and many English literators used the
same kind of.. structures. And if you go to the book the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography you will see that Shakespeare
has been compared to Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and
other playwrights, so hes not unique or inemitable from the
perspective that we're talking about. Finally, the last contention
is, "But im not an Arab! How would I know?" Well, we could use
another argument called rational deduction. Now rational
deduction is a thinking process where you take a universally
accepted statement and from that draw logical conclusions.
And no one would deny universally accepted statement from
academia or from authorities that are valid AND sound. And
authentic. Because this is the role of epistemology the study of
belief, and a valued source of knowledge is actually, testimony.
If you read the works of Professor Codeine (?), and Professor
Keith Lehrer, and The Epistemology of Testimony published by
Oxford, you will see its a grounded argument which we could
discuss later. So the authentic and valid testimony concerning
the Quran is, noone has been able to challenge the Quran and
produce its literary form. If that is true, then we could - draw a
logical conclusion without even knowing one letter of the
Arabic language. We could say, well could it be from an Arab?
Could it be from an Arab-Non Arab? Could it be from
Muhammad upon him be peace? Or is it from the divine reality.
We know it couldn't be from an Arab because they all failed,
especially the best Arabs at the time, we know it can't be a non-
Arab because you have to know Arabic, we know it can't be
from Muhammad upon him be peace, because all human
expression, if you have the blueprint, you can replicate it, just
look at some replicas of Picasso, and Monet, in art; and
therefore, it must be from the Divine. So from this perspective,
we've dealt with some outdated cliches 'cos I really want a
nuanced and frank discussion, I really do. And I hope I do have
that with Professor Krauss I respect him dearly, and I-like I
respect all of you, obviously we're gonna have a pun here and
there, but, you know, thats the whole point, I couldn't get-
couldn't let Krauss get away what he did in the beginning, heh,

(Audience laughter)

Tzortzis: So from that perspective I really want him to deal with
my premises, and I want him to deal with the deductive
argument, and I wish him, God speed, thank you.

(Audience clapping)

Krauss: Do I have to sit up here? I know its (...)

Unknown: Okay

Krauss: I'll sit up here.

(light audience chuckle)

Unknown: Previously we have (...) our debate (...)

Unknown: Oh god.

(sound of something falling, being knocked over?)

(audience laughter)

Unknown: Yeah I'm (...)

Chambers: Fine, thats fine. Okay, thank you, uh, very much,
Hamza Tzortzis, for that expressive presentation on, the Islamic
world view, uh now I'm going to be calling upon Professor
Lawrence Krauss to come back on that for his presentation
which I know he's going to last more than 25 minutes, I'm sure
of that, but, but just to let you know that some of you, who
perhaps don't know anything about the Professor, uh, hes a
renowned uh, cosmologist, and, science, uh, uh, populariser,
uh, and the foundations of doctrine (?) in the school of Earth
and scien-uh, space exploration, uh, a director of the Origins
project at the Arizona State University, he's hailed by scientific
America as being a rare public intellectual, and hes also the
author of many-mi-more than 300 scientific papers, and 9 uh,
publications, books, including the international bestseller, The
Physics of Star Trek. And his most recent bestseller entitled, A
Universe From Nothing, now, uh being translated into 17
languages or more, uh, Professor Krauss, I call upon you to
respond.

(Audience clapping)

Krauss: No I'm gonna sit here, I like sitting. Is that alright, does
anyone mind?

Unknown: Yeah, thats fine.

Krauss: Okay, uh, first of all, I want to thank, um, Sabiyya, uh,
Obayda, and Essa the people

Unknown person speaking to Krauss: (quietly) I really apologise,
I think we have to close this..

Unknown: You can just sit there, cos they don't have sound at
the mics.

Krauss: You don't have to- Oh, don't have a mic here?

Unknown person speaking to Krauss from before: (quietly) (...)

Unknown: Its not connected to anything.

Krauss: Oh I see, to the, yeah yeah.

Unknown person speaking to Krauss from before: (quietly) Ill
put my chair here. (?)

Krauss: Its okay.

Unknown person speaking to Krauss from before: (quietly)
yeah. (?)

Krauss: No worries. I just don't like them, because they, they
give the illusion of authority -

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Which is what, uh my colleague over here needs.

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Um, uh, the uh, well first I wanna really thank the
organisers, well, f-first I want to thank the people who invited
me, um, you've been very gracious to me, uh, and treated me
with more hospitality than I've gotten in many, many time-talks
like I said Sabiyya webcat (?) and um, Obayda whose been
taking care of me this last day or two, and Essa, who I was just
working with, so I do want to thank them tremendously, ah-
they showed me great respect and hospitality and I-I wanna, I
wanna show them, and you, uh, that kind of respect, and and
um, that doesn't mean I respect ideas. Okay, some ideas are
ridiculous. And thats perfectly reasonable, in fact ridiculing
ideas is what makes progress. So if I offend some of you I don't
mean to offend you personally, I may offend some of your ideas
but I don't- that doesn't bother me at all. Just as if- just, in fact,
if you confront my ideas, um, it will lead to a discussion, um,
what does offend me of course is offending personal freedom
and equal rights and thats one of the reasons why I got upset in
the beginning of this um, um, session, but thats been fixed and I
thank the organisers for that as well, to agreeing to not
segregate this room, in a 21st century, is a great step forward,
and I appreciate it.

(Audience clapping)

Krauss: Y-You know im really shocked, first of all, only thing I've
watched, uh uh um, uh, Mister Tzortz-

Tzortzis: Tzortzis.

Krauss: Right. Tzortzis.

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: My greek is pretty good.

Tzortzis: You mean gorgeous.

Krauss: Yeah, of course.

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Gorgeous George over here.

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Um, uh, this whole-I've watched some of these they're
almost exactly the same, so I thought they'd be different this
time, um, and its always begins with you and I'm supposed to
respond to you, but, -and I will, to some extent, but, its hard to
respond to nonsense. And in fact the point of this is NOT is, is
not a question does God exist, its not thats not the question, its
Atheism, or I-Islam or Atheism, ah, which is more sensible, I
think is what it says, or something like that. Now, I-I was just
shocked, because- because I thought that you wouldn't bother
to try and pretend you use science. Because, you DON'T. And
we're gonna go through that, in real detail. Every-thing you said
is NONsense when it comes to science, and we'll go through
and have a little chat if thats okay.

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: Of course.

Krauss: Okay good. Um, and - and so I found it, uh, remarkable
that you began with that kind of nonsense and will, w-will
continue from that, but let me just first begin with the fact that
the um, that the premise of this debate is in some sense,
inappropriate. Um, because, i-if, s-it suggests two things, first of
all, it suggests that Islam is something special, and it isn't. Its
not special at all.

(audience drawing breath?)

Krauss: Its ONE of a THOUSAND religions that have-or more,
that have existed since the dawn of man, ALL of which claim
divine revelation, ALL of which claim perfection, all of which
contain-con-c-uh, proclaim infinite knowledge, uniqueness,
beauty, et cetera. So Islam is just a religion like any other
religion, and theres no difference, its, s-it proclaims, just as the
Reek Vadah (?) did, and Acamdactum (?) in Ancient Egypt, that
the universe had a beginning, nothing special, okay, it-theres
theres absolutely nothing special and the question is, Islam as
one of a thousand religions, all of which make the same claims,
but mutually cond-inconsistent ones. So one of the things we
know is, of these thousand religions, they all make mutually
inconsistent claims, so they can't all be correct, in fact, at best
one of them can be correct, cos they're not- they're not
consistent with each other, so that means ad priori, just ad
priori, and I really k-know like that, you like that term, instead
of ad fas priori (?), I've heard you say that, ad priori, Islam has a
problem in point 1 percent of being correct. Because just one of
a thousand religions, and one of them i-is-i-ts-i-at most is
correct, but since they all make the same claims, its probable
that none of them are correct. So thats, so treating Islam
specially, is inappropriate. Then, Atheism is somehow- as the d-
described beaker (?) a belief system, its not a belief system,
like, like uh, Islam or Judaism or Christianity or the Norse Myths
or Zeus or Thor or any of the other myths that have been
created throughout human history, its, all its saying is, its not a
belief system its saying, you know what, we don't choose to
believe that stuff because theres-its not sensible. So its not
saying we believe bats (?) its saying, well this-this myth is
inconsistent with this myth, or this myth is inconsistent with
what we know about the universe, and therefore, its unlikely to
be true, so what Atheism is, its just saying this is unlikely to be
true, its not a belief system. So to compare one versus (?) the
other is of course, false. Its a false premise. It-The first part of
the false premise is that Atheism is- uh, is that Islam is special,
not special at all, its been there, it'll be gone, or it'll be there as
long as other religions, its just like all the rest. And Atheism is
not a religion. Its just, in fact, what it is, is, could be described
as common sense.

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Okay, what, what makes sense I will, I will think that
those things that make sense are likely, and those things that
don't make sense are unlikely, in fact thats what science is all
about. Okay, so that, having said that, that theres nothing
special about Islam, and there certainly isn't, lets, lets um, lets
tal-I'm gonna talk a little bit about- my intent by the way is, uh,
the other thing I should say is, debates, I'm an educator. Its, you
know, a flaw, but it is what it is. That means I believe in actually
trying to illuminate ideas and lead to discussion, critical
thinking, and eventually learning things and the increase in
knowledge. Debates aren't meant for that. Debates are
rhetorical devices, for people that want to perform, make,
make statements and then challenge others and try and, uh-uh-
uh convince an audience of something. Thats not education. So
I will talk a little about some of this, and then I just want to
have a chat, I'm gonna use my 25 minutes to have a little chat,
I'll take up my time when I could pontificate, as we've heard,
and just, and just ask some questions cos I'd actually like to
learn, uh, some things. Okay, and hopefully in the process
there'll be some education, for both of us. Um, so, the first
thing ah-I want to say, or, I want to clear up some
misconceptions. This idea of deductive arguments, um, whi-
which sounds good is not the way we learn about reality, okay.
Deductive arguments just don't work. They lead to, irrational
actions. In fact, if we just ask what common sense is, what
common sense is, is taking your beliefs to conform to the
evidence of reality, so that you will make rational actions. If you
force re- if you force your, reality to conform to your beliefs
you'll make irrational actions. So you can deduce things based
on your beliefs, on your a priori beliefs, but you'll have a
problem for example your a priori belief could be, that if you,
pray to Allah, that you could walk, you could jump out, the
fourth story of this, uh, window, uh, of this building, and you'd
land safely. Okay, that could be an a priori belief. And, in fact,
you could deduce, based on all your beliefs, and all of the
evidence that you're a good person and Allah would take care
of you or whatever you want to call it that you would-that
you'd be fine. I would take the elevator down and only one of
us would be walking at the end -

(light audience chuckle)

Krauss: That, is not deductive, its based on empirical evidence.
Okay now.. so, so arguing that something doesn't make sense
to you, is based on the fact that you-it-of the assumption that
you know whats sensible, in advance. But we don't know whats
sensible in advance. Until we explore the world around us. Our
common sense derived from the fact that we evolved on the
Savannah in Africa to avoid lions, NOT to understand quantum
mechanics, for example. As I've often said, common sense, or
deductive, or deductions might suggest that you cannot be in
two places at once. That is crazy. But of course an electron not
only can be, but it is! We-it doesn't make sense, because we
didn't evolve to know about it, we've learned about it, we force
our idea of common sense to change its called learning! Some
people would rather, read an ancient book, then learn. And w-
this has been a very good evidence of that. For example. To say
something is inconceivable, just means you can't conceive it.
But the great thing about the universe and the reason that I do
science, is that the universe has a much greater imagination
than we do. In fact, "There are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And thats whats
wonderful about the universe. Things that are inconceivable
happen, all the time! And what we- what that does is that
expands our mind. And expanding our mind to conform to the
evidence of reality is Common Sense. And thats what, when
you call Atheism, thats what that is, thats just saying I'm going
to accept the evidence of reality and if something seems like it
contradicts the evidence of reality, or, is irrational, I should..
question it. Now. There are alot of, ideas, which, which, uh, er,
Gorgeous George over here (chuckle) -

Tzortzis: No, Mister Tzortz.

Krauss: Shor-Tzorshey. Circus? (?) Um.

Tzortzis: Tz-Tzortzis.

Krauss: Tzorgeous. Zorgeous. I think thats a bit better (?)- I've
been trying to learn Turkish, but I think, Zortzis. His Pitorzis (?)-

(audience chuckling)

Krauss: Um, -

Tzortzis: If you want to learn Turkish, you can speak (?)

Krauss: Okay. Um,

Tzortzis: Greek.

Krauss: Do you speak Ancient Arabic, by the way?

Tzortzis: I fa- (...) to (?)

Krauss: Oh, billogram (?), but you don't speak it, then.

Tzortzis: No, no.

Krauss: So your presumption that its beautiful ancient Arabic, is
just a presumption, you actually don't know what you're talking
about.

Tzortzis: No, its, -

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: I'll respond to it-

Krauss: Okay. I just wanted to ask that question, because I
can't-don't speak Turkish I wanted to see if you spoke Ancient
Arabic-

Tzortzis: Is that a question, or a comment?

Krauss: Well I just wanna ask, do you speak Ancient Arabic?

Tzortzis: Yes I do.

Krauss: Fluently?

Tzortzis: No, but I do speak it.

Krauss: Oh, okay, but not fluently.

Tzortzis: Kayfa Hal.

(Audience clapping and cheering)

Krauss: -The other language that you don't speak is called the
Language of Mathematics. So lets talk about that. Lets stop
with this nonsense about infinity. Lets take something physical.
Lets draw a circle. And draw a diameter. Whats the ratio of the
circumference of the circle to the diameter, do you know?

Tzortzis: You're the teacher.

Krauss: Do you know?

Tzortzis: You're the teacher!

Krauss: I know, I'm asking you a question, I want to have a chat
(?)

Tzortzis: I don't - I don't know anything. Give your speech -

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Well, you've demonstrated that, but lets-let-its oh-
you've heard, of Pi?

Tzortzis: Yes I have, yeah.

Krauss: Oh, do you know what it is?

Tzortzis: Three point one four, the first four decimals (?)

Krauss: How many, how many decimals does it have?

Tzortzis: Uh, I don't remember.

Krauss: An infinite number.

Tzortzis: Yes, yes.

Krauss: Okay, so the Physical distance of the ratio of the ratio of
a-of a diameter of a circle to its circumference is an Infinite
number!

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: What do you know! Now, when we talk about-now I
can-whats amazing to me is you quoted Aristotle as the basis of
science. Of course, Aristotle was the one that told us objects
fall in proportion to their weight. Because, he actually didn't do
the experiment. He deduced it, based on what he wanted.
Galileo of course, did the experiment, right, and we know for-
lets do the experiment here. In front of you. So this, optus (?),
I'm going to take this object and this object-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Aristotle would tell me which would fall first. Will you
tell me which would fall first? Guess, -

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: If you don't know.

Tzortzis: Um, -

Audience member: Book.

Tzortzis: The book.

Krauss: Okay, (sound of an object hitting the floor), book, you
were right, great! Okay, good. Why?

Tzortzis: Because-

Audience member: Friction.

Tzortzis: There's um, resistance. To the..

Krauss: Resistance to what?

Tzortzis: To the paper.

Krauss: Yeah exactly, Aristotle didn't know that.

Tzortzis: Yes, he didn't know that.

Krauss: Okay. Aristotle also claimed that infinity was impossible
because he believed as you pointed out, the distance from you
to me, could be divided, into a half, and then a quarter, and
then an eighth, and then a sixteenth, and thats an infinite thing
that makes it fucking impossible.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Well, the thing that Aristotle didn't know how to do and
you don't know how to do is to sum an infinite series. One plus
a half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth adds up to
two.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay. So that kind of argument that infinity is
impossible, it just doesn't make sense mathematically, infinities
do occur, now it is true in my book that I said, infinite density,
or infinite energy, is a-is a-is a concept that appears to be in-in
contradiction with the evidence of, of physics. But that doesn't
imply all in-infinities are impossible, in fact, space can be
infinitely large. Theres no, theres no presumption that space
isn't infinitely large, it could be. What we now know about
physics suggests it probably isn't, but theres no law of physics
that says space can't be infinitely large. So this notion that you
deduce that infinity is impossible because you don't like it, is
just not the way the world works. Cos infinities happen all the
time, whether you like them or not. Not only that, it doesn't
lead to irrational-uh-to irrational actions, mathematicians have
a way of dealing with infinity. We can add infinities, we can, we
can then take numbers in an-in an infinite series that, for
example, the series one plus two plus three plus four plus five
plus six plus seven, to infinity, actually has, in mathematic-al
terms, can have a finite ans-uh, sum. Its minus one-twelfth, if
you wanted to know. Okay, it may not seem logical to you. It
may seem inconceivable to you, that the sum of the series of
positive terms, each of which is bigger than one-twelfth, could
end up being minus one-twelfth, but the fact its- inconceivable
to you, just means you're ignorant.

Tzortzis: Thank you.

Krauss: Okay.

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Now, this idea, that, that, uh, that, that, uh, Occam's ra-
razor suggests, for-I mean-first of all Occam's razor is not a
principle of science. Okay, its a nice idea that you should try for
the simplest answer to any question, and physicists try and use
that. Sometimes the simplest answer doesn't work. In
Genomics, for example, it'd be nice if every gene, uh-ev-every,
si-in fact we talked about more than one cause for an effect, be
nice if every gene, every disease was caused by a single gene,
one of the reasons that Genomics is so difficult is we discovered
theres a complex interaction of genes so that in fact, in-that
there are many separate causes of many most diseases, there
are very few diseases that have single cause. But in fact, you
know what, is simpler than the number one? The number zero.
Zero is a much simpler ar-reason, there's no cause. Okay, so if
you really wanted to apply, Occam's razor, in fact, you've
applied no causes. Now, you've also used the term... causality.
Which is a term I understand. Uh.. you didn't define it. Do you
wanna define it?

Tzortzis: Uh maybe. (?)

Krauss: Well, why don't you do it now.

Tzortzis: I don't want to give you that favour.

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Well I thought we're gonna have a Chat!

Tzortzis: Yeah but I wanna have a "chat" not a "Chaat" so its,
less rhetoric for me.

(audience laughter and clapping)

Krauss: No no, lets have a chat. We're not talking about
rhetoric, we're talking about the lecture you just gave, now I
want to have a chat, I'm asking you the question.. do you know
what causality means, you used the term.

Tzortzis: Yeah.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Well..

Krauss: I mean I-if you use a term you should know what it
means.

Tzortzis: Yes. I-

Krauss: Okay. Good, YOU used it.

Tzortzis: I have my definition, I have my definition.

Krauss: Okay, okay, well I'll define it, thats, you know, cause,
proceeds, effects. Does that sound good?

Tzortzis: No, thats the wrong definition.

Krauss: Okay, what, what's your definition (?)

(audience clapping and light jeering, "woah, ooh")

Tzortzis: For example, theres an interesting book about
quantum physics and causality, -

Krauss: Mmhm.

Tzortzis: And, the philosophers and philosopher science and
scientists have disagreed on, a specific definition, so they've
reduce back to, a fundamental definition-

Krauss: No..

Tzortzis: And therefore.. (?)

Krauss: Mmhm.

Tzortzis: Do you wanna have a chat, or a Chaat?

(audience laughter and clapping)

Krauss: I thought (...) what it says (?) quantum physics disagree
about the definition of causality?

Tzortzis: Have you presumed, your results here?

Krauss: No-

Tzortzis: Do you definetely wanna connect with me and (...)

Krauss: No. No no. I'll (...)

Tzortzis: You've asked me a question, you're answering before
me?

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Hey.

Tzortzis: I mean come on!

Krauss: You quoted physicists, go on.

Tzortzis: Let me.. as a scientist.

Krauss: Okay.

(audience chuckles lightly)

Tzortzis: Now, which is the same, I agree. Now. So for my
different point, as you believe it is a matter of cause and effect
...

Krauss: Mmhm.

Tzortzis: Is that, the agreement has been, on the something
which produces an effect, which includes therefore, you can
have something called asymmetric spontaneous causality,
where the cause exists prior causily but not prior temporarly
(?). So, there is a whole-

Krauss: Why are you-lets-lets prior causily, not prior
temporarly? (?)

Tzortzis: Prior causily means, that, there is like, there could-I
give you an example, the Kantian example was, you have, an
infinite ball..

Krauss: Mm.

Tzortzis: As well an infinite pillow.

Krauss: Mmhm.

Tzortzis: They both, time doesn't exist here, but you're not
gonna say that indentation is not as a result of the ball, so there
is a cause theres a tendency there, and time is out the window.
So we could discuss causality till the cows come home, but, you
know, its not as simple as what you're trying to say, -

Krauss: Well, so, so-

Tzortzis: It doesn't presume tempor-ah-temporality as you see
it.

Krauss: Well, I-I, I think it does, I think we, again, if you think
carefully what we just did, the ball doesn't, create a, uh, indent
the pillow, but we used infinite, I thought we weren't allowed
infinite, but anyway, um-

Tzortzis: We use an example.

Krauss: Yeah, well, its an example, a physical example which
you said doesn't exist, you said, but it doesn't matter whats
infinite, a pillow here, a finite pillow with a finite ball, -

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay, theres an indent.

Tzortzis: Of course there is.

Krauss: Okay, was the- was the ball there, or not?

Tzortzis: Well my example wasn't based on finitude it was
based on the law of infinite.

Krauss: Well, bu-but, but if, but if the ball isn't on the pillow, it
doesn't create an indent.. right?

Tzortzis: Yeah, of course, yeah.

Krauss: Okay, so it'd have to be, so, was it put on the pillow, or
no?

Tzortzis: Well thats irrelevant. You're damning the example,
thats a -

Krauss: No, no tha-you're taking a legi- (?)

Tzortzis: Thats a, thats a logical travesty. (?)

Krauss: No, no..

Tzortzis: You know, ...

Krauss: No, no, I b-the point is, physical causes have physical
effects, well either the ball is on the pillow or no. Now the point
about casuality is, that, ..

(audience chuckles)

Krauss: That the interesting aspect of it is is its an interesting
physical question. But, what if theres no before?.. Lets take,
you know you talk-you talked about the, cosmology, so lets
take general relativity... whose equations I-I-I'm sure you don't
know.. And.. and.. -

Tzortzis: I said I don't know (...)

Krauss: Take it back to the beginning,

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: We talked-you-you made it very clear that the
beginning of the universe is straightforward, you deduced it.
But in fact.. deduction doesn't matter. The point is, universe-
our visible universe did have a beginning, because, we can
measure. Whether we liked it or not or whether we think its
sensible or not, it actually did have a beginning, a cause, a-a,a
factor not in dispute. Our universe did actually have a
beginning. However, the laws of physics, tell us, right down if
we extrapolate back to the beginning, that.. its quite, that if we
took it at face value, that time didn't exist.. before T equals zero
(?). So, if time doesn't exist, at all.. whats th-what i-the-the
sense of cause doesn't even make sense. And this is the key
point, in science.. we have to realise our common sense notions
sometimes go out the window. When we observe effects they
have causes. But at the beginning of time, when time itself MAY
have come into existence, then that question, becomes a bad
question. Philosophers can debate it, people can write it down
but it doesn't matter. Now ... the other thing I will say, is you've
somehow talked to me about the fact that the Quran as a
literary document is different than other literary documents.
And you've given some arguments I don't understand. Well I
actually did this the other day, because I've seen you give this
talk a gazillion times, um..

(an audience member makes a noise, chuckle?)

Krauss: I actually, inputted, in a, in a computer, ah, ah, ah.. alot
of Arabic words, and asked it to produce them at random, and I
produced, uh, two sentences from the Arabic, at eleven point, -
from the Quran, in eleven point six seconds. My computer
speaks neither Arabic nor is Arab but produced that incredibly
divine-those incredibly divine words. Now, the other question
of course I would have, is, all-and this is a common sense
question, is why did God choose Arabic? Or Aramaic, or Greek, I
mean wh-you know, doesn't he speak English? The Americans
always think he does, which is why they invented the Mormon
religion.

(audience chuckles)

Krauss: Um, but, and so-so, so, the question I want to ask is,
what makes sense is to ask, not the details of the Quran, which
I don't wanna dwell on, because its just one of a thousand
different religions - all of which make the same claims, and all
of which, if you look at them a priori, are equally, ridiculous.
From a priori common sense notion. For example, and I got this
from my friend, m-my late friend Christopher Hitchens. Is it
sensible to assume, that humans, humans evolved in their
present form somewhere between, two hundred fifty thousand
to a million years ago. So you have a God who creates a
universe, uh, and, and, has four and a half billion years of life
evolving, and then, and then, uh, homosapiens evolve, and..
live in incredibly.. awful conditions, and, uh, and, uh, for two
hundred fifty thousand years, and suddenly, in the middle of
the desert, in a cave where no-one can see you.. he takes some,
poor schmal (?), and says, I'm gonna tell you the truth. And not
only that, I'm gonna allow you to save, humanity. And, in fact if
people don't believe you, they're gonna go to hell for eternity
and we can talk, in great length, in great sado-masochistic
length about the torture they're going to have and we can all
enjoy it. Now. What, what about all those poor, two-hundred
fifty thou-year.. two hundred fifty thousand years of people,
real people who were struggling to exist and survive, those
poor people who were existing before that God decided to give
his revelation to Mohammad. Why that? Why would, why
would a sensible God wait that long, and of course, the
interesting question you have to ask is, why are the revelations
always done, when no-one can see them? If you're, if you're
asking a court of law you'd say well you know what, it just
doesn't make sense- why doesn't once, why not once, does it
call down from the sky, so EVERYONE can hear it. Why is it
always given to people in private, who then claim they've had a
revelation? Now why should I believe, Mohammad's
revelations, a-any more than anyone elses? In fact.. there is a
young woman in the United States, in my country, who as you
know, had a revelation, you may know this, she had a
revelation, God told her to drown her four children in a
bathtub, and she did. Cos God told her, she heard it. She heard
it, she had a revelation, it was real, she heard words in
incredible harmony, and beauty that she'd never experienced
before in her life, and she drowned her four children. Okay,
now shes in a mental hospital. For good reason. Cos there's no
evidence, theres no-that a sensible person would believe, to
suggest that God was telling her to drown her four children.
Now, why would, d-d-let me ask you, do you, do you think
Shariah Law should be instituted?

Tzortzis: Well, it depends how you define Shariah Law.

Krauss: O-

Tzortzis: Do you know anything about Shariah Law?

Krauss: Well, I was gonna ask you about it.

Tzortzis: I will teach you in the next round.

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Okay, good. Do you think, for example, that..
blasphemers should be punished?

Tzortzis: Blasphemers meaning?

Krauss: Maybe if I say, lets, lets just say, and forgive me, lets
just say I say that someone who married a 9 year old girl is a, is
a pedophile.

Tzortzis: Yeah.

Krauss: And maybe that person is a prophet. Is that a
blasphemer, should I-is that worth being pun-punished for?

Tzortzis: Well I think you should be educated first.

Krauss: No, no I'm not maybe I'm not saying it happened. But
lets say I said that, I made that claim, should I be punished?

Tzortzis: In a court of law of justice, there would be a form of
punishment.

Krauss: Okay. So if I- oh what about if I questioned, openly
questioned, the existence, of God. In fact, said openly, and
preached, in a room that theres no God. Is that worth
punishment?

Tzortzis: This is fitnah. (...) Intellectual debate (...)

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: In the mention of 8th century Dah'riyyah (?)-

Krauss: So, so if I say, that Allahs not God, but Thor is God, and
people should worship Thor, and I go, and thats not
blaspheming?

Tzortzis: Well its wrong, and its, and its childish, but other than
that discussion (?)

Krauss: But, but its blasphemous to suggest, is it blasphemous
to suggest, that Mohammad isn't a prophet?

Tzortzis: Well, from an Islamic perspective, you understand
theres a difference between public intellectual discourse-

Krauss: Okay, so, great. Okay. Okay, well thats, thats great.

Tzortzis: (...) A form of intellectual discourse, as per, this big
debate!

Krauss: Oh but you say I should be punished if I suggest
Mohammad was a child molestor, thats (...)

Tzortzis: No no no no, I wasn't saying that, I was-

Krauss: Didn't you say that?

Tzortzis: What I'm saying is, in an Islamic law, for instance, if
you were to speak about something like (?) this, and you would
be taken to a court, under certain conditions, -

Krauss: Then I would be punished.

Tzortzis: There may be a punishment, but generally speaking it
would be more, edifying and education rather-

Krauss: But should there be punishment, thats what I'm asking
you. Should there be.

Tzortzis: Oh you're asking me-you're asking me-

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: If there should be punishment, I think we should
follow both lower courts (?)

Krauss: So there should be punishment.

Tzortzis: I there there should be a punishment for deliberately
harming someone else.

Krauss: For, for.. openly questioning.

Tzortzis: But jokes do NO damage (...)

Krauss: For openly questioning or openly ridiculing on it. So, so,
so..

Tzortzis: Nah nah nah nah nah, theres a difference, most strong
man (?) (...)

Krauss: In the-let-okay, let me take a more clear example.

Tzortzis: If you're a strong man (?) (...)

Krauss: Say you're a homosexual man.

Tzortzis: (quietly) Yes.

Krauss: And you have sex, with another homosexual man, does
that, should that be subject to punishment?

Tzortzis: If the private of home (?) is outside the Shariah law. If
they did it in public, which doesn't even have the law you're
from,-

Krauss: Mmhm.

Tzortzis: Then its a different story.

(audience laughter and clapping, a cheer)

Krauss: Where am I from?

Tzortzis: Well, you're from the United States of America.

Krauss: Oh I see, um, and thats uh, and so it doesn't even
happen in where I'm from. Now thats, thats rude.

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: But any case, um, uh, but it does happen in, n-one the
thing about it is,-

Tzortzis: Thats called a conspiracy!

Krauss: It DOES happen where I'm from..

Tzortzis: Well thats, thats.. (...)

Krauss: So two people in Arizona are around in the desert,
having sex,-

(audience chuckling)

Krauss: Because they really, get turned on.. and they're both
men, and they have sex together..

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay. Is that punishable?

Tzortzis: If theres no-one in the desert, no its not.

Krauss: Is homos-okay let me ask you another question, is
homosexuality wrong?

Tzortzis: In their country, traditional said (?)

Krauss: Okay. Now heres-, heres my idea, of why common
sense should tell you that Islam, like many other religions, is
not, common sense. Because first and foremost actually, its
perfectly natural, in all, in all animal species almost its natural,

(audience chuckling)

Krauss: It occurs with a 10 percent frequency. Okay, in fact,
there are good evolutionary reasons for homosexuality. So in
that sense, theres no reason that a fundamental- why would a
God, who thought it was a sin, make it natural among all
species, I don't think the sheep, by the way which 10 percent of
the sheep are, long term homosexual relationship.

(audience chuckling)

Krauss: Why would a God, who thought it was a sin, create
sheep, who don't have a soul, who can-who can't-who aren't,
able to think, about it, be homosexual? Thats the kind of
nonsense that we have to ask, and the only way we can
determine if its nonsense is by looking at the world around us,
not by deducing it, not by listening to the words, of ignorant
individuals and irinate (?), i-irinate peasants who didn't even
know, the Earth orbited the Sun. Wisdom and learning comes
from observing the world around us, and we shouldn't take our
wisdom, from people, who didn't even understand the way the
world worked. Thank you.

(audience clapping)

Chambers: Professor Krauss.. thank you very much, for your,
presentation.. uh, oh the.. atheist world view..

Krauss: Its not a world (...)

Chambers: Uh, I think it was-I think it was actually more, like a
dialogue, nice to chat between you two guys actually-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Chambers: I was, I was wondering, whet-whether I should jump
in and stop you guys, you know. Its uh, uh, anyway, I'm sure-cos
I'm sure, Aristotle and Galileo did the same thing. But.

(audience light chuckle)

Chambers: Now, we've got something uh, to sort of, come back
on, uh, from uh Professor he's given alot of food for thought,
and no doubt Hamza, in uhh about 10 minutes?

Tzortzis: Yes. Thank you.. (?)

Chambers: He could uh, possibly come back and answer some
of those contentions brought up by Professor Krauss.

Tzortzis: Thank you very much Professor Krauss, audience.. first
and foremost, I think most of what he said was, a red herring. A
red herring, is this very smidge fish,-

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: That you put across the path of running dogs..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: And uh, you know-the reason for the red herring
because, he said that I spoke about science. I SPECIFICALLY said,
he knows better than I do, I specifically didn't use it as my key
argument for the finitude of the universe. And he wanted to
correct me on something that I didn't even mention myself?
This is what you call, not rhetoric, not intellectual arguments,
its what you call sophistry. Its rhetoric, with crap, frankly.

(audience chuckle and clapping)

Tzortzis: And .. I'm not saying it to be, I'm not saying it to be
rude, because its a typical Kraussian fashion, a Kraussian
fashion trying to win over the whole audience, make a hoo-ha
in the beginning, and you know, imagine I did that when I
walked into, one day I-I had interfaith dialogue. And.. imagine I
walked into a Jewish mosque or hall that was public, and I
basically said I don't wanna do things your way, but I wanna
discuss with you, but I'm not gonna do things your way. Is that
tolerance? Is that how you connect with other people? Humans
are not but our tradition,-

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: But he won't even ask them why do you have this and
he, another strawman. Justice and Equal Rights. You think
they're saying that because they don't have any justice or equal
rights? My own wife is out there, ask my wife! Whats the
matter with you? See these pre-sumptions from Fox News;
you're an academic, but..but when you talk about Islam, its
based on the Fox News narrative and I'm gonna expose this in a
minute.

Audience member: Hear, hear.

(Audience clapping, cheering and whistling)

Audience member: Takbir!

Tzortzis: Now if he uses the word a priori more than three times
but you rejected deductive thinking.. I mean, isn't a priori
deductive?

Krauss: (...)

Tzortzis: I mean you can't have your cake and eat it, sir!

Krauss: And I trust.. (?)

(light audience clapping)

Tzortzis: Example (?)... and th-thats the first quote, the second
point I'd like to make.. actually, calm down..

(audience laughter, single clap)

Tzortzis: The second point I would like to make..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Is.. that.. see, we're not rej-we're not rejecting
inductive arguments, of course we're not. You're forgetting the
inductive method, scientific method, you know where it came
from, sir? Do you know where it came from?

Krauss: I kn-ah-in fact theres an or,remarkable scientific
mathematical tradition in the Arab world, if thats what you're
gonna talk about.

Tzortzis: I'm gonna talk about Ibn Al Haitham and his book of
Optics..

Krauss: Yeah!

Tzortzis: Read the works of David Linberg and others, historians
of philosophy and science.. And this it came from Islam you
know why cos Islam doesn't reject - th-

Krauss: No they came from the Arab world, th-they didn't come
from Islam.

Tzortzis: Well let me give you the link, let me give you the link..
okay. Afala yun thuroona ilal ibilikay fahooliqat. Had, had you
not seen.. empiricism.. the created thing like a camel, and how
it was formed and how it was created. This was the basis and
this was the poetic justification for the en-TIRE scientific
method. As muslims, we go where the science takes us. But..
we're not stupid. Deductive arguments, they are necessarily
true-necessarily true, if you wanted to discuss my argument
you have to break down the premises which you didn't! You
just talks-talking about the Infinite, and the circle and the
circumference- I knew you were gonna do this..

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: Because its all mathematics. Remember what I said..

Krauss: Well its a physical circle.

Tzortzis: Yeah, but let me make a point. A big point. I said the
quantifiable infinite. The quantifiable infinite cannot be
actualised in the physical realm, something that you-you agreed
with, one second.. And I said theres nothing with the qualitative
infinite, and qualitative infinites can exist infinitely for example
mathematicians discuss, yes, so wheres the infinite there?

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Now I gave you (?) the length-whats-immunes(?)-in-you
think this is a length, a length is a physical quantity? That is,
length is the physical quantit-that is, okay. The length of this,
and the length of that, okay? The ratio of those two lengths is
an infinite number.

Tzortzis: Yes, of course it is..

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: But what is that length?

Audience member: No it isn't. (?)

Another audience member: Any right (?)(...)

Tzortzis: What is that length?

Krauss: One, this is a length, one, theres one Krauss.

Tzortzis: Okay, can you-

Krauss: (...)

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: One second. Can you measure, wait, can you measure
the straight line? And can you measure the circumference? Yes
or no.

Krauss: I can measure it.

Tzortzis: Well thats a quan-thats quantifiable.

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: What you're talking about is in the realm of
mathematical realm of discourse, which has axioms and
conventions which doesn't make sense (?), I'm not disagreeing
with that, I'm agreeing wi-you already agreed with in your own
book, which from a quantifiable discrete perspective, you can't
have an infinite. Thats the point I'm trying to make.

Krauss: Oh, discrete?

Tzortzis: Discrete parts.

Krauss: But, but who says it has to be discrete?

Tzortzis: Ah, but thats your presupposition. Thats your
presupposition-

Krauss: No, I said..

Tzortzis: You brought your assumptions,

Unknown: There you go.. (?)

Tzortzis: Fox News by the way..

Krauss: No no, no, no..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: And ultimately(?)-ah, and you think you've got an
answer.

Krauss: No..

Tzortzis: I-I have time, let me finish this please.

Krauss: Okay cos, well I gotta teach you different, calculus,
Newton events that go on (?)(...)

Tzortzis: Yeah, I know, but calculus is based on axioms,
conventions, and mathematical realm of discourse.

Krauss: It describes how things work.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Now, I'll give you a point (?). So, thats the first point.
Oh, dear.

(audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: Okay, then we spoke about.. for example, zero is
simple as in-a-as-as-Occam's razor again, you've-you've
misconstrued what Occam's razor is. Occam's razor is not only
the simplest explanation, it has-has, has to have greater
explanatory scope -

Krauss: (quietly) Okay.

Tzortis: And explanatory power. Zero has no explanatory scope
of-or power concerning the origins of the universe -

Krauss: (quietly) Okay, I'll explain it after. (?)

(light audience chuckle)

Tzortzis: From that perspective. The other point I like t-I like to
make. Is.. you spoke about, for example, Hell, and justice, look
at all these people that're going to Hell, again another huge
straw-man, you misrepresented Islamic theology. We have a
very nuanced theology sir.. I think the best thing to do if you
WERE sincere you woulda said, You know Hamza.. I don't get
this, I haven't read this before I'm just making my own up- mind
up because I watched videos of Christopher Hitchens and he's
an authority to me..

(light audience laughter)

Tzortzis: I don't know much.. Ah-can you tell me what Islam
says about this issue? That would've been better, wouldn't it?
But, again, its a strawman, when it comes to things that count,
we believe God is All Just and All Merciful, okay. No-one
disagrees with the concept of punishment, okay. You're not
gonna disagree with the concept of punishment, are you.. so
when it comes to people who haven't- heard about Islam,
theres a whole array, of theologians like Ibn Tamir and Ali
Gazali who said, that theres gonna be another form of justice
for them, they may be tested on the Day of Judgement, based
on other prophetic traditions, its not as simple as that. Okay.
Homosexuality is the same, again. You try to put words in my
mouth a-a, and thats not nice. Thats not nice.

Krauss: I asked you questions, I didn't -

Tzortzis: You did,

Krauss: Put words in your mouth.

Tzortzis: But then after you tried to answer them for me, which
is quite interesting.

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Now.. See, we don't-

Krauss: You're answering.. (?)

Tzortzis: Believe.. homosexual tendencies, tendencies, per se..
are.. sinful. Its the manifestation of the homosexual Act, in
public, is sinful. Because we believe, in-in our theology, let me
make-let me just make the point. That we're given a package.
We all have tendencies- some are-people have tendencies, you
know.. th-they're polygamous, for example.. or.. other people
have tendencies.. that, may be s-be seen negative -

(light audience murmur)

Tzortzis: Or taboo, other people have tendencies, concerning
various different things and we're-we believe this is a Package
that God has given us. Well we have an empowering
philosopher which says, that God, okay, when he gives you
these tendencies- whatever they are, whatever kind of
inclinations we are-we have, we use our A'kala intellect, but
understanding the divine reality, and what he wants from us
because God would know me better than I know myself, and he
would say fine you have these tendencies.. this is how you
shape them, this is how you control them- th-we don't believe
in like, we should be, agitate(?), purely based on the beastal..
aspects of man, whether its.. heterosexual or homosexual. And
by the way.. you know, saying "Ouff" to your mother, is
equivalent, major sin, as being a homosexual. So, the point I'm
trying to say is we don't condemn people per se, we don't say
(high-pitched voice) you know-you know aah im gonna kill you,
(normal voice) we appreciate every human being, they have
spiritual needs.. but, we're not gonna, we're not gonna make
up our own religion, we're not gonna follow the Kraussian
religion whatever he says, we're gonna follow the divine reality
if it says homosexuality is a sin, its sin- Just like drinking alcohol
is a sin, for the Muslim, or for example, b-being harmful to
human beings is a sin, alright just because I have a tendency
and, and I'm a martial artist and im gonna harm people.. does
that mean now, you know, God is wrong just because I have
that tendency? I mean thats-thats not right. Anyway I'm still
looking for some count-some strong counter arguments you
made to my points..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Um..

Krauss: Where do (?) points actually make it into counter
arguments..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Well the points that make-because you didn't-you-
okay. This is what it is-infinity doesn't exist..

Krauss: Yes it does.. Okay.

Tzortzis: You didn't, you didn't, no I said the quantifiable infinite
doesn't exist, I agree the infinite exists, don't-again, another
strawman. The point I'm trying to say is this: We have a
deductive argument, that the universe is finite.. If its finite, it
began to exist. If it began to exist there are some logical
possibilities. Please entertain those logical possibilities, if not,
its equivalent you coming to my house having a coffee, I'm
talking to you but you're talking to the window..

(Audience laughter)

Tzortzis: And I know you have, you-you have better morals and
manners than that, cos I.. I-I know you're-you're highly
respected, and we do all respect you.. in some paradoxical way
but the point is..

(Audience laughter)

Tzortzis: The point I'm trying to say dear (?) Professor Krauss, is
that, I think.. its only fair.. if you.. want to pick and choose from
the Fox News narrative.. that, you actually.. trying to change
that stance and say right, what does Shariah law say? Do you
have a book of Shariah Law?

Krauss: I asked you, so I could learn.

Tzortzis: No, you were telling me.-

Krauss: No I was asking. (?)

Tzortzis: You have a book-okay, do you have a book of Shariah
law?

Krauss: No!

Tzortzis: And you-

Krauss: Cos its based on nonsense!

Tzortzis: Think judgements, and you th-okay. I have a book on
Atheism, I think its based on nonsense-

Krauss: Great!

Tzortzis: But I give you the intellectual epistemic respect, to
read your world view. But you've come here-

Krauss: Oh I won't-Its not a book on Atheism, its a book on
science. (?)

Tzortzis: Blas!.. Sorry, you've come here blas. Almost
arrogant, I don't wanna judge you, and say you know its alright
but actually I'm not gonna entertain any of his arguments, I
know better than you which you said that and I do agree, in
physics you do. And you've come here, making judgements on
Shariah law, you don't even have a book! On Shariah law.

Krauss: Thats why I asked questions.

(Audience clapping, cheering, whistling)

Krauss: (...) Thats why, I ask questions. I asked you questions so
I could learn and I asked what YOU thought,-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: As someone whose- opinions I'm supposed to respect.
And I wanted to know,-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: If you think-what is wrong (?) and I wanted to know
why, theres no sense, why homosexuality is wrong. I wanted to
know, what common sense tells you that homosexual is wrong,
except some self-proclaimed, prophet telling you-

Tzortzis: No.

Krauss: That with no evidence!

Tzortzis: Theres a different way-

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: Okay.

Audience member: Hear, hear! (?)

Tzortzis: L-let me-let me-let me ask, let me ask Professor Krauss
a question. Why is.. why is incest wrong.

Krauss: Its-uh-Its not clear to me that its wrong.

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: Its clear it-it- theres a, theres something..- (?)

(Audience laughing and murmuring loudly, there is loud
speaking and some jeering)(?)

Krauss: (Trying to speak)(...) Theres-theres-theres-th-th-theres,
theres.. (?)

Tzortzis: W-w-wait, l-lets give him, lets give him the respect,
please, hes got a-

Krauss: You asked me a question, and if you want me to answer
it.. (...)

Tzortzis: Justification. (...) Go ahead. (?)

Krauss: The point is, most societies had the-have a taboo on
incest, and i-and its an empirical one. Generally, incest
produces genetic defects.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay, uh, -and so th-so in, in, in general, theres a
physiological reason and a-and a societal one, why incest is
wrong.

Tzortzis: (Quietly) Yes.

Krauss: Okay. But, if you ask me the question.. is it, and, this is
an interesting question. We are in-by the way, its an ingrained-
theres an inc-ingrained incest taboo in almost all societies for
that reason.

Tzortzis: Sure.

Krauss: Because societies want to persist, so it-it works. But if
you ask me a priori, for example,.. the question.. i-if, a-a
brother and a sister loved each other, and used..
contraception..

(audience laughing and murmuring)

Krauss: Is, is there something absolutely morally wrong about
that?

(several audience members say yes, one says mmhm)
(audience murmurs)

Krauss: I'm-I.. A-and then, by the way, once, and then went off
and it didn't affect anything else, I'm gonna have to think about
it because I don't think theres any, absolute.. condemnation of
that- in fact, if they love each other and care for each, and they
go off and it doesn't affect anything else-

Tzortzis: Okay. (?)

Krauss: I, I-would I recommend it? No.. would I be critically
happy about it(?)-would I be willing to listen to those
arguments? If they were rational, maybe.

Tzortzis: Okay, good. So, see this is precisely the point I'm trying
to make Professor Krauss, is that, I find it quite interesting,
someone who adopts an Atheist position, would have strong
moral judgements about religious tradition.. whereas your
moral judgements, at best.. are relative and subjective. Now,
when you look about moral theory, from an Islamic perspective
and a religious perspective you see, that, objective morals,
that-you're pointing the finger and saying, "You know you're
wrong! You're nonsense! Shariah Law is backward!" These kind
of strong emotive things, I think we can only, be that emotive
and strong in an objective sense, if you have God as a
grounding for your objective moral values. Because, if you take
God out of the picture, hes the only constant that transcends
human subjectivity. Social pressure, you know that doesn't
work, look what happened in Nazi Germany. You know for
example evolution, it.. makes it end up being ephemeral(?) and
empty if you look at the, philosopher of science, Michael Ruse..
He said, you think loving thy neighbour as thy self is like you're
referring above and beyond the self, but essentially it has no
true meaning its just, a product of survival and reproduction. So
from this perspective, you don't have an on-tological,
grounding for objective moral truths. The best you could do,
what alot of atheists have done, is, well, we believe in moral
rea-realism, which is, moral truths are just moral truths
because they are. Well, Islam just is, and the prophet
Muhammad upon him be peace just is and the Quran just is,
thats not an argument. So the reason I asked you that question,
sir.. was to say, how on earth from an intellectual perspective
can we point the finger at religions, from a moral perspective
and especially today's been- the irony is, most of your
articulation against Islam, has had a Moral, lie to it. Not a
rational one, because you didn't deal with the premises of my
argument-

Krauss: I did!

Tzortzis: You-no you didn't, you talked about infinity, and-

Krauss: I talked cau-causality, infinity, the con-the words that
you employ now.

Tzortzis: Yes, and what'd you say about causality?

Krauss: I said, in fact thats its quite, likely that the beginning of
the universe, causality isn't a good question (?). That if you
learn some of the physics-

Tzortzis: Your dream here,-

Krauss: You'd understand it.

Tzortzis: No, your presupposition on causality.

Krauss: No, its not my presupposition-

Tzortzis: It is!

Krauss: Its, time doesn't exist.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Space doesn't exist.

Tzortzis: Okay, think about the-the statement, Something
produces an effect. Where is time as a definition, there?

Krauss: Produces.

Tzortzis: No, it could be equal(?), it could be-it could be a, it
could be a temporal.

(light clapping from the audience)

Krauss: What is an a temporal?

Tzortzis: Well-

Krauss: You explain to me, clearly what you mean in a physical
way, and..

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: And, don't just give me the-

Tzortzis: Ok-

Krauss: English language, give me, give me a physical example.
(...)

(light audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Okay. Let me give you-like, like your 'Nothing' is a
physical example yeah?

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Well, you haven't explained it like-like it is, yet. Y-you-
you, you read the preface, like a number of people did, but I
don't know if you go-got very far in the (...)

Tzortzis: Actually, I read the whole book! I-I liked it!

Krauss: Great. Whats my Nothing?

Tzortzis: Your Nothing is-

Krauss: What is my Nothing?

Tzortzis: Your Nothing is quantum.

Krauss: No.

Tzortzis: It is!

Krauss: No! No space, no time, no laws, no nothing!

Tzortzis: But thats still the quantum haze.

(audience clapping)

Krauss: No!

Tzortzis: (...)

Krauss: (...) There's, there's nothing. There's no universe!
There's no, universe! Nothing! Zero, Zip, Nada!

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: So, why do you say in your own book, then, that, we
will reduce to one quantum haze?

Chambers: Hamza, can I..

Tzortzis: Yep.

Chambers: Can I..-

Tzortzis: Well, he took alot of my time. He took alot of my time.

Chambers: Interrupt..

Chambers: Yeah.

Krauss: Well, -

Chambers: But.

Krauss: Did you- I can't- (?)

Chambers: Res-

Krauss: Go over my time to answer my question! (?)

Chambers: Resolve it into a discussion.

Krauss: So-

Chambers: I- (?)

Krauss: We'll continue the discussion, -

Chambers: Oh, okay. (?)

Krauss: Because I'm planning to pontificate.. (?)

Tzortzis: No, of course, yes.

Chambers: Okay.

Krauss: Okay.

Chambers: Thanks very much, Hamza... please thank this man
(?)

(audience clapping loudly)

Chambers: I don't mean to stop you in.. mid-flow there, but..
over to, uh..

Tzortzis: There must be some,

Chambers: Professor.

Tzortzis: There must be some agreement with Professor Krauss.

Chambers (?): (jokingly) Yeah.

(light audience murmur)

Krauss: Ok-okay, well, we can continue the discussion, because,
it should be a discussion. Um.. my point is that, the question, I
repeat again, is whats more sensible. And whats more sensible,
ultimately, is what produces more rational action. And I'm
sorry, if you talk about tolerance, I get so tired, of hearing
people talk about tolerance, but then I hear people talking
about blasphemers. I should be allowed to bl-blaspheme all I
want. Because ridicule, is an important part, of-of, of enquiry
and discussion, sometimes ridicule some- ridiculing something,
illuminates it. And I hear, about blasphemers, I hear- y-yeah-I
hate to say it, and this may be, a complete, mis-application of
Islam, it could be, that Islam as its practiced in many countries
in the world, is a misapplication of Islam, but all I can see, is, in-
tolerance when I see those principles applied, intolerance to
blasphemers, intolerance to homosexuals.. intolerance in
general. Now the other question, the other thing I wanna say is,
this, Go- if we ask whats sensible, why would we think, that this
unproven God, that is supposed to be the basis of not just..
Islam, but.. all religions, different gods, different characteristics.
But the Islamic God, m-much like the.. Judeo-Christian God, is a
real creep. This is a God, worse than Saddam Hussein.. Instead
of tor-torturing you just for your life, tortures you for- infinity!
Forgive me the word, but eternity, let me use that word.
Eternity, for not believing. For not believing, you're tortured
for.. infinity- The tortures are actually described in the Quran
and you know it as well as I do.. And, the point is, if you just ask
yourself common sense, if you were a divine being, say you had
an ant colony, that you made in your house. Would you be
offended if those ants didn't pay homage to you five- Well, lets
start with fifty times a day before Mohammad cut it down to
thirty, and then five.. Would you be offended if those ants
didn't pay homage to you five times a day? And if they didn't, if
they didn't look up to you or didn't, recognise your existence,
would you destroy them? No-I mean it just seems so petty. So
why should we believe in a hateful, unmerciful, petty,
sadomasochistic, homophobic, sexist, God? Its just irrational. Its
not, sensible. Theres nothing, if- and there, and the point is, if-
and-and, and I don't wanna, I don't wanna single out Islam
here, and I know I'm offending some people.. but the same is
true for the God Moses, okay.. If-the-If you read-If you really
believe that the scriptures were- were literally true, the morals
in that book are reprehensible! Its okay, when- you know- a-
when an angel- and angels appear to do alot of things, including
coming down an, an-an-and-i-and-and, uh, re-making
revelations, to Mohammad, which Mohammad didn't write
down- as far as I know the first example of the Quran was
twenty years after, he died so there was alot of, talk.. And some
of that talk got turned into perfect writing well after
Mohammad was dead, but, those angels come down.. but in
this case and the case of of course Lot (?) as you know, the
angels came down, and uh.. and the-and they were men, they
came in the form of men, which I don't think- um, is allowed, in,
in, in certain versions of the Quran, at least, but anyway, they
did, and, then, they were gonna be raped, so what did Lot do,
of course he said don't rape them, take my daughters. Cause
daughters are expensive.

(Audience murmurs)

Krauss: What kind of- what kind of moral lesson is that, that
you wanna learn?

Audience member: (...) Get your facts right!

Unknown: Sshh..

Krauss: Okay, now I'm-I'm sorry thats m-my-my idea(?),-

Chambers: Plea-please..

Krauss: Thats from my religion, okay or my an, ancestors
religion. I have none. Okay so those are the kind of moral
lessons that I find, not sensible. And so lets-so other than that
how about we take the Old Testament and not the Quran we
talked about, uh um, im-immoral intolerance. The idea of
punishing people for eternity, for choosing to find something
unlikely, is not tolerant. The idea of.. punishing them in vicious,
evil, ugly ways for all eternity, is not merciful, it is the opposite
of rational, common sense. Now in terms of explanatory things,
let me just spend a few minutes, teaching a little bit of science.
So.. if... you have an infinite, temporal.. but-i-lets say time
exists.. beyond our universe.. lets just allow for that, cause its
easier to describe. And lets say our universe spont-a-a universe
can.. given the laws of nature, spontaneously come into
existence. Okay?

Then.. it will come into existence! It will come into existence at
some time. And the fact that it came into existence at that
time, need not have any reason. Theres not- it need not have
any reason why it was that time, relevant to some other time,
whatever time it happens it will come into existence, and..
people could say, theres some significance to that, but it must
happen some-where, at some time, and there need not be ANY
significance, ANY purpose, ANY intelligence, for why it
happened now, instead of then. Its guaranteed to happen at
some point. Now if you say, during that creation, there are
laws, one of which is quantum-cause of Quantum Mechanics,
which can create a universe with zero total energy - by the way
if im creating a universe I mean, a universe that didn't exist,
there was no space, there were no times, and no laws, in fact.
And then you come and you say, okay, if that universe is
created spontaneously it must be created at some time, so the
universe MUST come into existence. In fact.. an infinite n-
number of universes come-come into existence if time was
infinite. Okay? Its simply possible. Then, A universe will come
into existence and you can say, let me predict the properties of
that universe. Well, lo and behold, the properties of that
universe have to be exactly the properties of the universe we
live in, including, the structure of the fluctuations of cosmic b-
background, the collapse that produce all the galaxies and all
the stars and the planets and you and me. Thats explanatory.
Theres no explanation, at that level in any way, in your book.
So, the explanation of the universe, that could come into
existence from nothing, without any purpose, without any
planning, without any reason, is explanatory. Now.. lest, I be
misconstrued.. that is just plausible. Because we do not have..a
full, scientific theory. But.. to make the claim- as I know you've
often made, that because, that there are certain things we will
never understand, is to-is-is to misunderstand, science! There
are lots of things we don't understand today, and there-and-
thats the reason to go out and do science! Its just like Darwin
said, you know, he said..

(audience murmurs)

Krauss: "Evolution species, I'm describing the evolution species,
I'm not describing the origin of life, we'll never understand the
origin of life, we'll no sooner understand the origin of life than
we understand the origin of matter." Well of course, he didn't
realise that there-a-one-one day (?) understand the origin of
matter! Just as I expect, in your lifetime, in my lifetime, we'll
understand the origin of life. We'll understand how chemistry,
turns into biology.. By doing experiments, testing, and not
forcing our predilection that its impossible!

Krauss: I had a debate recently with someone who said, its
impossible, for non-life to turn into life, well thats a nice
statement, its a nice belief, and its a belief you can have but, its
a belief that could be wrong, and thats the great thing about
science, which you can call atheism if you wish, is you're willing
to change your beliefs! You're not assuming the answers before
you ask the question, you're not assuming you know whats
divinely right, just as you interpret a certain book to mean a
certain thing - and someone else may interpret it to mean
something else - you will agree there are different
interpretations of every book including, the Bible and the
Quran. And so, you- to presume, that you, know Divine Truth
before you've asked the Universe.. is not sensible. And I don't
think I'll take any more time.

Chambers: Okay.

(Audience clapping)

Chambers: Thank you, Professor Krauss, uh.. Now over-back
over to Hamza, three minutes it will be, thereabouts..

Tzortzis: Thank you Professor, thank you very much for your
presentation.. Now... I really want you to.. try and address..
some of my arguments, you produced something about the
Quran, but if you had tended to my argument, the Quran says
bring a chapter like it not two verses from different chapters..
So, again it was a straw-man, or the articulation of what the
Quranic miracle was. And I could spend more time maybe
during the Q & A to explain what that is but I specifically said
bring one chapter like it.. your, computer models I like to see
evidence of, by the way..

Krauss: But.. but who d-decides whats like it? I mean, who is-
do you decide, or do I?

Tzortzis: Okay, is that a different to-

Krauss: Reading Shakespeare is more beautiful than the Quran.

Tzortzis: Me (?)(...). Thats fine.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: But, I-I-

Krauss: Or, James Joyce..

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: He doesn't use iambic..

Tzortzis: I understand.

Krauss: Pentameter.

Tzortzis: I understand, sir.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: But what you have to understand, sir, is this.. is that I
repeated maybe more than once its not based on aesthetic
reception, your opinions or beauty-

Krauss: Whose, whose, who determined it?

Tzortzis: Well, its the reality, empirical reality-

Krauss: No, wh-who,

Tzortzis: I-I'm gonna explain-

Krauss: Whats empirical reality?

Tzortzis: L-Let me explain what the argument is, again, because,
from your answer, you misunderstood it, you think it was
mutating (?)-

Krauss: You quote people, who said it couldn't have been
created, but those are just, literary scholars, what-I mean, what
if I say, "Yeah, it could be created."

Tzortzis: Yeah. Let me just explain that, -

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Because your first presupposition was based on a
falsehood, wasn't it, yeah. If you thought it was aesthetic
reception. Its based upon the structural features of the Arabic
language, and because I only have 2 minutes, I'll continue that
in the Q & A.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Okay. So. Also you're saying about, that.. the- the
universe began, and we could show that maybe empirically or
deductively, ah-my focus is on the deduction here, and, I don't
think you really address on the infinite perspective, when we
said that this is based on axioms and c-conventions of the
mathematical realm of discouse but, in discrete physical parts
as you've-you've admitted in your book that can't happen, so
we have a deductive argument that the universe began which
means it wasn't once there. Ontologically, if there wasn't a
cause of that you wouldn't have the universe in the first place.
The second point, I'd like to make..

Krauss: No, theres a pho- see the photon thats lighting you up,
from that thing?

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: It didn't exist, oh-before it was invented by the
electron.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay? It didn't exist.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: It wasn't there.

Tzortzis: Y-and you're saying there's no cause?

Krauss: It-there-it wasn't-you know-

(audience laughs and claps)

Krauss: (...) What I'm saying is, what I'm saying is.. there could
be physical causes for physical effects,

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay, but they don't have to be-but God, doesn't have
to pull the-the photon, just cause the, the photon pulls from
nothing, doesn't require something supernatural.

Tzortzis: I agree. But.. (...)-

Krauss: Okay. So the universe suddenly-

Tzortzis: Why would it come into existence? (?)

Krauss: Come into an existence where it wasn't before. It
doesn't require something supernatural.

Tzortzis: I already-I already gave you a defeator to the
argument that you assume that when things begin to exist, they
may not require any causes, and that defeator was-

Krauss: Not a purpose, I didn't say cause-I-look I just said, if a
universe CAN come into existence.. by physical causes..

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Where theres no universe to begin with, it will happen
at some time and your point was,..-

Tzortzis: I agree.

Krauss: It happened, and, and therefore, it, there's a reason-

Tzortzis: No, nonono.

Krauss: Why it happened, because it happened when it
happened it was-if it didn't happen then, it would've happened
some other time,-

Tzortzis: You-

Krauss: And we would've had this conversation some other
time.

Tzortzis: Lets calm down. You're putting words in my mouth,
okay.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: What I'm saying-

Krauss: What did you say, then?-

Tzortzis: I'm not saying-

Krauss: Maybe, maybe.. (?)

Tzortzis: Things like, eh-im not talking about, teleolo-teleology,
I'm not talking about there is-

Krauss: Don't use..

Tzortzis: A purpose behind..-

Krauss: Don't use definition. Did you not say, our universe came
into existence for a cause and there had to be a reason for it.

Tzortzis: No, I didn't say reason. I-well-uh-

Krauss: There had to be a purpose?

Tzortzis: No I didn't say that, I said there is a quibble- (?)

Krauss: Oh I thought you said there was an intelligence, you
gave a whole long argument-

Tzortzis: Oh, thats after using conceptual analysis that you
agree that there is a.. uncreated creator or a "cause" that was
"uncaused". Now..

Krauss: Wha-hold on, but-

Tzortzis: Yep.

Krauss: What-it-forget, a-all that, I just talked about our
universe..

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: You-you- are you agreeing with me, that our universe
doesn't have to have a-a-ah any purpose or reason to create it?

Tzortzis: No, of course n-not. Of course I agree with you. Well-
but thats not my argument, my argument is.. deductively, was
the universe once, absent?

Krauss: Yes!

Tzortzis: Yes. If thats the case, then ontologically, which means,
th-the nature or source of reality, is that it couldn't have come
into being without a cause.

Krauss: Well, well, okay. First of all.. The sim-I wish, I hope its
that way, because that means you'd understand.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay. It-Its possible that its not that way. Okay, so if it
has, and we-we can this off my time, you know I don't care,

(audience chuckle)

Krauss: Um, the-the, the.. th-the point is, maybe, maybe time e-
exists outside of our universe, maybe it does. Lets just pretend
it does, and that our unvierse came into our existence and
theres a physical cause for that. Thats fine, I'm-im fine with
that, im fine with our universe coming into existence with a
physical cause just like that photon being created. But, as I
pointed out to you, its equally possible that these notions that
we have in our brains, because we're humans living in a
classical level, that time.. that someth-that time exists, and is a
continuous flow, may break down. And if they break down, and
T equals zero, then.. any sense of the word cause, becomes,
non-sensical-

Tzortzis: That does. (?)

Krauss: And os (?), the word, cause, i-i-is a red herring, in your
terms. Its not worth discussing, it may not be relevant to, the
creation of our universe, because there may not have been any
time before it, and therefore there may - this notion that every,
every cause, e-every effect has a cause, may be irrelevant, if
theres no time. Now, I don't know if thats the case but I'm
willing-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: So I'm willing to ask the question and I'm willing to do
studies to see if its reasonable-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: I'm not willing to presume the answer before I ask the
question.

Tzortzis: Oh-oh-I agree.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: But the point is, the presumption here is, is that you
requre time, and theres a specific physical definition for time.
Now what-

Krauss: Presumption is, after T equals zero you recl-require
time, that-thats what you're-the presumption that you require
time, at T equals zero, if you took the equations as they're
written, then you'd, time would go out the window.-

Tzortzis: I-I'm not, um-I don't have a contention with the
physics, thats your job-

Krauss: No, no, but theres no-

Tzortzis: Yep.

Krauss: But, if the days are written, theres no time. Th-Time,
has no meaning at T equals zero.

Tzortzis: Okay, I agree.

Krauss: Great.

Tzortzis: The quality-

Krauss: So there's no cause.

Tzortzis: The quality of the physics, I-I don't disagree with you,
I-I, I highly, I highly respect that, but all of that is inductive in
nature.

Krauss: No its not..

Tzortzis: Of cou-well what is it based on, is it deductive?

Krauss: Its based on observation!

Tzortzis: Which is inductive!

(Audience laughter and clapping)

Krauss: Thats, terribly wrong, you-you know, the problem is, its
empirical, its based on-

Tzortzis: Okay, what is empirical?

Krauss: Okay-Ok-Okay. Look, I don't car- look, the point is..

Tzortzis: Do you-do you have an infinite set, of observations?

Krauss: Mmhm.

Tzortzis: Have you had an infinite.. set of observations?

Krauss: Ah-now-i-if you're gonna tell me, I read your, I read
your, uh-something you wrote which really, misrepresents
science, you're absolutely right if you're gonna tell me, science
can never tell anything with absolute certainty.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Thats-thats right (?)

Krauss: Except- Things that are wrong.

Tzortzis: Yes.

(audience chuckles)

Krauss: Thats what science can tell.

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: I agree.

Krauss: Science can tell us- (...) Science can tell us, that-that,
science can tell us many things and so..-

Tzortzis: I don't disagree with you.

Krauss: Okay, so the fact that science, can lead us closer to the-
to, what is the underlying reality..

Tzortzis: Mm.

Krauss: Is absolutely true. And the fact that, that science can't
say with anything with absolute certainty is absolutely true,
Except whats wrong.

Tzortzis: Yes, I agree.

Krauss: Okay. And, it can say, certain claims, for example that
the moon split in two, when he was area(?)-th-thats wrong.
Now-

Tzortzis: Another red herring,

Krauss: I'm going to say, its a misinterpretation..

Tzortzis: Another red herring.

Krauss: I know another red herring, but certain-

Tzortzis: Loads of fish in this room today.

Krauss: No no no, some people as you will know, some people
as you know, some interpreters in fact, thought that was the
case, but they're wrong. Do you agree with me?

Tzortzis: Th-thats it-th-thats it-

Krauss: Do you agree that those interpreters-

Tzortzis: I'm making a different point here, Professor..

Krauss: That claim. Okay, all I'm saying is, this is a book of
words, and you can interpret it many different ways, and some
interpretation of those words,-

Tzortzis: I'm gonna, I'm gonna address that-

Krauss: Are wrong.

Tzortzis: I'm gonna address that as well.

Krauss: Mhm, okay.

Tzortzis: But as(?), look, we've been from so many different
issues that could, its a typical strategy of not knowing how to
respond to a particular point. Look. (pause) The point of
interpretation for example.. The Quran for example.. We read
the holy Quran holistically, we understand that its probably the
only religious book, that gives you tools of interpretations. For
example the Quran says there are some.. open-ended verses,
ambiguous verses and they're specified. So, in linguistics its
called intra- and inter-textuality. Now, therefore it creates a
scope of interpretation. Yes, I agree there is interpretation. But
there are some things that are lie out-side of the scope.
Because you don't know the language, you don't know the
interpretive tools, you don't know the scholarian tradition.. et
cetera, so there is-y-yes I agree, a-a scope of interpretation, but
its-its fixed. So, that is, in-in, in essence, a red herring. The point
I'm gonna get to..-

Krauss: What, whats different about that, than say, biblic-uh,
Christian, uh, uh, um.. uh, theology, theologicals, different
interpretations of the bible-

Tzortzis: Thats very interesting,-

Krauss: Okay, yeah, go ahead. (?)

Tzortzis: But for example, i-in the Protestant tradition.. the
reason they moved away from the Catholic church is because
they said look, this is me and my book. And I can interpret it the
way I want. But now, alot of Protestants are-are coming back to
the Catholic tradition because they're saying, how do I
understand those words? And thats why they see the church
entity as an interpretive authority, you see. So, obviously they
have their own confusions but the book doesn't tell it, how to
interpret it. Thats, thats why you have the German school of
systematic theology.

Krauss: Now, but the Catholic church-

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: Accepts evolution, for example, and say you're right.
Book doesn't tell us how to interpret-

Tzortzis: Yeah.

Krauss: This um, ridiculous, verse. Genesis.

Tzortzis: But let me get back to my original point.

Krauss: (quietly) Okay.

Tzortzis: Which is, if ded- (...)

Krauss: This has nothing unique about it, you keep pretending
you're-Islam is unique, and I don't see it.

Tzortzis: Can we deal with it a point at a time?

Krauss: Okay. Yeah,-

Tzortzis: Okay, okay-

Krauss: Its not always nice, that you throw these things out..

Tzortzis: We believe Islam -

Krauss: And-I-If I don't,

Tzortzis: Isn't unique.

Krauss: If I don't, -

Tzortzis: Professor!

Krauss: Challenge them,-

Tzortzis: Professor!

Krauss: Then, you know, seven from seven. (?)

Tzortzis: We don't believe Islam is unique. We believe-

Krauss: Oh, okay. (?)

Tzortzis: Its a universal message of religion, and one true God,
dont histake (?) the self to your ego and your, and your desires
and the beastal aspects of man which is the social pressure,
L'oreal "Because I'm worth it"-

Krauss: So is L'oreal.. (?)

(audience laughing)

Tzortzis: Free yourself, free yourself from these, free yourself
from these shackles.. and, worship the Divine which gives you
true freedom. Cos you've want real libertry-liberty, interesting
the word Ruh in the Arabic language means soul, or self. And it
comes from the tribe Chustel (?)-

Krauss: Soul or self, which one?

Tzortzis: Both.

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: In different contexts. Okay-

Krauss: I don't know what a soul is.

Tzortzis: Lets be nuanced, okay-

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: Not reductionist. So..

Krauss: Whats a soul? You wanna tell me what a soul is?

Tzortzis: Well when you die, you'll find out. Let me just give my
quest..

(audience erupts into laughter, cheering and clapping)

Tzortzis: You think that-that, that..

Krauss: (...) Is that explanation..

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: Well, queue it (?)-

Krauss: B-because, cos it gives me stuff I can't test.

Tzortzis: Listen, I-I'm the Greek, I'm supposed to be full of
sophistry and rhetoric here.

Krauss: Well you are!

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: What is-im trying to say, is that the word Ruh, it
malogically shares the same.. meaning with the word, Raha,
which means liberty and serenity, and interestingly.. you know,
we all wanna see this type of liberty but the irony is, from an
existential perspective.. y-you know, what does it mean to
exist, Who Am I.. we're all in a state of slavery, because your
birth, sir.. your birth, madam.. is, just like the American writer
once wrote, we're be-we're born.. and then we're sold into
slavery, you never chose your birth!

Krauss: No, it was Rousseau who said that, it-we're, man is born
free, and-

Tzortzis: Yeaf-

Krauss: But forever he is in chains, (?)(...)-

Tzortzis: Yeah, exactly, well done,-

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: Good.

Krauss: It wasn't American, it was-it was.. (...)

Tzortzis: N-let me get poetic here.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: So the point is.. we don't choose our birth, I didn't
choose I was gonna be Greek looking like a Pakistani..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: You never-you never chose that shape (?) you're in..

Krauss: What looks so that, so Pakistani? (?)

Tzortzis: Well, you know, I'm wearing my head just like yours...

Krauss: Okay.

(audience laughter and a little clapping)

Tzortzis: So lets.. So, the thing is, the thing I'm trying to say-

Krauss: I like your hair, by the way..

Tzortzis: Thank you.

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: I-We're becoming friends now..

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: So.. the point I'm trying to say is, look, you know, lets-
lets be nuanced about some of the narratives from religion, like
you know, in essence, we as ham(?)-see you have to emphasise
and see the filters of the Muslim youths.. and like thats why, a
Muslim woman who may cover her hair.. a Muslim man who
may grow a beard.. these are not reasons because, its like, this
kind of, ridiculous, type of, blind slavery.. we really understand..
that the only way to free yourself, from the shackles of the
ephemeral nature, of social pressure, cos we're social animals..
of.. the very fact that you didn't choose your birth you-and-this
is-to, even your own gender.. You free yourselves from these
shackles by.. what we call O'bodiyyah, a servanthood to the
Divine Reality. So, uh..-

Krauss: So, but-but, the question I wanna ask is,

(aside)(audience member, quietly: O'bodiyyah means slavery...
actually, actually..)

Krauss: Is-is, -

Tzortzis: Yeah.

Krauss: Is it sensible. So, why is it sensible for a woman to be
covered up, and not a man?

Tzortzis: Well, I am covered..

Krauss: No, no you're not covered up..

Female audience member: Hes a man.

Krauss: You're not covered up, -

Tzortzis: You were the s-

Krauss: You can't look good in a bag,-

Tzortzis: (...)

Krauss: Like the-some of the people back there..

(audience member gasps, audience murmus)
(light clapping in audience)

Tzortzis: But its not really a bag, you know..

Krauss: But it is! As far as I'm concerned, it is.

Tzortzis: Okay, look. Thats a different question, I'm gonna get
into the.. the moral, uh-the moral judgements of certain
traditions, because at the end of the day, -

Krauss: And-and,

Tzortzis: You're..-

Krauss: And-and by the way, they aren't only Islamic, I mean-I,
you know-I-I, if you want me to offend other religions, I'm
happy to.. (...)

Tzortzis: No, I'm not saying that -

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Mister (?) Krauss, but someone who is rationalising
incest.. can't-doesn't-have no moral high ground to point the
finger (...)

(audience erupts into cheering and clapping)

Audience member: Takbir!

Audience: Allahu Akbar! (?)

Krauss: You ask-asked, something, (?)

Tzortzis: No, no, but let me finish..

Krauss: I'm not rationalising it.. (?)

Tzortzis: Let me finish, let me finish..

Krauss: I mentioned-no I didn't, I-I, I brou-I explained why in -

Tzortzis: Let me,

Krauss: General, incest isn't a bad thing.

Tzortzis: Complete the sentence.. I'm sure you wanna go ad
infinitum.

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Very different point.

Krauss: Well we could go on ad infini (?), because it could last
an infinite amount of time it took less than- (...)

Tzortzis: Potentially. So. Not actually.

Krauss: But you agree?

Tzortzis: Potentially, yeah. But not actually.

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: That was my point, which you misunderstood. So the
point im trying to say, Pro-ah, Professor Krauss.. is this. Is that..
you know, these m-, pointing the finger at other tradition-

Krauss: But how.. okay.

Tzortzis: Where is your ontological basis, for an objective moral
value like this?

Krauss: What-, you know, in fact..- (...)

Tzortzis: Is it objectively wrong that shes wearing a bag?

Krauss: What-n-no- (?)

Tzortzis: Is it objectively, morall-y, wrong, I-how is it
objectively,-

Krauss: I did never say it was wrong.

Tzortzis: Morally, wrong.

Female audience member: (quietly) Its not Morally wrong..

Krauss: I asked if its sensible.

Tzortzis: Okay, is it sensible?

Krauss: Okay, and I-, and-and, so- my question to you is, it
seems to me.. that given the fact, that I happen to view women
and men, as, uh-you know, we have, we have differences,
inherent gendic-

Tzortzis: Of course, yes.

Krauss: Differences. A, but it-i-in, in, in, but i-, in every other
sense we're equal human beings.. and in fact, in many senses as
you know there are advantages and disadvantages of-

Tzortzis: We don't disagree with that.

Krauss: So I do not see.. any reason.. to treat women differently
than men. I don't-, doesn't make sense to me. Thats all I'm
saying.

Tzortzis: Okay, fair enough. Good.

Krauss: (...) Okay.

Tzortzis: So, the point is, when we make moral judgement, I
know you-we use the word sensible but other times when we-

Krauss: No, no,

Tzortzis: Were (...)

Krauss: I wouldn't-I don't, I don't talk, I'm like you.. I don't talk
about morals, because I try, i-in in this sense, the question
before us was not, is-i, Atheism moral, or is Islam, moral, its is it
sensible, and when people act,..i-

Tzortzis: So,-

Krauss: In nonsensical..

Tzortzis: Why have you spent, twenty-five minutes, pointing the
finger and making moral judgements? While I'm-

(audience clapping)

Krauss: I didn't-

Tzortzis: While I'm trying to do my argument!

Krauss: I'm not saying that-

Tzortzis: You're thoughtful, you're thoughful.. (?)

Krauss: I'm not saying a moral judgement-I'm not saying theres
a moral judgement about your, in-, mis-interpretation.. of
whether infinity is allowed in physics.. I didn't make a moral-

Tzortzis: I never said that!

Krauss: Judgement, I made a factual judgement.

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: I never said that, I said i-, it makes sense in physics..
because you need the mathematics to correspond to physical
reality. I don't disagree with that! I am saying..-

Krauss: So its important- you need the mathematics to
correspond to physical reality, is that what you just said?

Tzortzis: Yeah, of course you do. Yeah, cause -

Krauss: So physical -

Tzortzis: Its physics.

Krauss: Reality.. can allow-

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: For infinity?

Tzortzis: I put it towards- (?) I learned alot from your book,
actually, it was quite interesting, you said.. even in your book, I
think it was page 81, you said that essentially.. you know,
theres the maths... and I need to be,.. improve my physics, to
ensure its in line with the math. And interestingly-

Krauss: No, no. I need to.. improve my... MATH to ensure its-,..
in line with reality.

Tzortzis: Okay, good. So,-

Krauss; Okay.

Tzortzis: If-, what is th-

Krauss: What is the evidence of experiment?

Tzortzis: Yes, good. Exper-

Krauss: So, my math doesn't agree with the evidence of
experiment.. then I change my math.

Tzortzis: And thats why I think, and I don't wanna, build a straw
man, you made a conclusion in your book, you said.. This is
why, you can't have.. an infinite anything.

Krauss: No!

Tzortzis: You said that.

Krauss: You show me where I can't have an infinite anything.

Tzortzis: Yeah, (...) infinite.

Krauss: Are you talking about infinite energy density?

(audience laughter)

Tzortzis: th-there is, there is, (...)

Krauss: Doesn't the universe have anything? (?)

Tzortzis: Let me find it for you.

Krauss: And by the way, if I did I was wrong.

(audience cheers, whistles, and claps loudly)

Krauss: That, that to me is the, that to me,

Tzortzis: Th-th-that-that's honourable, thats honourable.

Krauss: That, to me is the worst kind of- thats-thats (...)

Tzortzis: Thats honourable, no that is honourable, I admit.

Krauss: Personally offensive about these arguments, is you
quote people, as if what they say matters, but the great thing
about science, is there are no authorities!

Tzortzis: I agree.

Krauss: There are no scientific authorities, everyone can be
wrong.. and we all are! That including,-

Tzortzis: That is honourable, that is honourable.-

Krauss: That including-

Tzortzis: I-I, I have to..-

Krauss: The people who claim to be.. including Benedict, before
he stopped being Pope!

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: Yeah, one second while I-ah.. screw it, one second..
just, just bear with me.. he-he wanted it, yes, yes (...)

Krauss: No no, I'm exploring (?) that..

(audience laughs)

Tzortzis: S-So this is your skill. Okay so...-

Krauss: (...)

Tzortzis: Infinity is not a pleasant quantity, however at least as
far as physics are concerned, and we try to avoid it wherever its
possible. -

Krauss: Whenever its possible.

Audience member: Ooh..

Tzortzis: Clearly.. clearly, the energy of empty space, or
anything else for that matter.. cannot be physically infinite!

Krauss: Yet alone.. (?)

(audience cheers and claps)

Krauss: You said, -

Tzortzis: I'm sorry.

Krauss: That, (...) is the spa-..

Tzortzis: Or anything else for that matter!

Krauss: The energy of anything, cannot be (...) infinite.

Tzortzis: Wheres that then?

Krauss: The energy of empty space, or the energy of anything
else! (?)

Tzortzis: You're reading another book, now.

(audience laughs and some clap)

Krauss: I'm-I'm not being here to talk about the Quran but I'm
here to talk about my book.

Tzortzis: Yeah, you don't even know your book!

(audience laughs and some clap, some cheer)

Krauss: The book says.. May I borrow it (?), from you?

Tzortzis: Yes, please..

Krauss: Maybe I should change it in Arabic so you understand it,
but the point is,-

Audience: Woah..

Krauss: The energy of empty space, or the energy of anything
else, cannot be infinite. So, o-okay?

Tzortzis: Yeah, right. Okay.

Krauss: Okay. Thats what I said.

Tzortzis: Okay, good. So, really... i-i-its suggestive of my point..

Krauss: No!-

Tzortzis: So it, it-

Krauss: It didn't say space cannot be infinite,-

Tzortzis: Did you-you, you respect, by the way..? (?)

Krauss: It didn't nay-say space, cannot-, it didn't say space
cannot be infinite, or time cannot be infinite,

Tzortzis: Good.

Krauss: Cos they perfectly well can!

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: Okay, good. But, theres another point you make-

Krauss: Wait, wait, wait, no..

Tzortzis: Yep (?).

Krauss: No, don't..

Tzortzis: The other point is..

Krauss: Don't.. I mean, you're making a big mistake, to try and
talk, to me (?)-

Tzortzis: Noo, I'm not!

Krauss: About this stuff (?)..

(audience laughter)

Krauss: I mean you're, -not (?) after you show me what you
said, if I mis-quote you..

Tzortzis: Listen, listen..

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Professor Krauss, I can only read your words-

Krauss: Don't say.. (?)

Tzortzis: "Or, anything else for that matter".. means, or
anything else. But I know I should've-

Krauss: Was-, was that,

Tzortzis: I know,

Krauss: Was that.. was that paragraph (?) about energy?

Tzortzis: Yeah, but, but..

Krauss: Okay. Just ask me the question.

Tzortzis: Oh, so theres a context now!

Krauss: But- (?)

Tzortzis: When it comes to religion, there is no context..

Krauss: No, there is!

Tzortzis: When it comes to physics, theres a context!

Krauss: No I talked to you about the fact, th-the-a-Arab
interpretation..

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Means.. their (...), (?)-

Tzortzis: I-

Krauss: Over time!

Tzortzis: I agree. I agree.

Krauss: They've you know, have interpreted the Quran
incorrectly..

Tzortzis: I agree, Professor Krauss. But, listen to this, what you
have to understand is this-... You, don't you agree the universe,
s-started, a-at a finite time ago..

Krauss: Do I agree?

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: The universe-

Tzortzis: You made that point.

Krauss: has a (?) fourteen point seven two billion years ago?

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: As-as as far back as we could go, to -what, the first, u-
um, millionth of a millionth-

Tzortzis: Ten to the minus,

Krauss: Of a second.

Tzortzis: Fourty three, or something..

Krauss: Well, no..

Tzortzis: It changed on me? (?)

Krauss: E-em, empirically we know, we talk about the millionth
of a millionth of a second.

Tzortzis: Yeah, e-ex,

Krauss: Of course it started,

Tzortzis: Good.

Krauss: Point a hundred. (?)

Tzortzis: G-Good. Exactly, so...

Krauss: Good.

Tzortzis: That, I said was suggestive-, suggestive evidence.. for,
my deductive reasoning. Okay?

Krauss: Well it was suggestive evidence for the Rid Vada, akh
Nammon (?), ah-the-the-

Tzortzis: Yeah, I know! Good good good!

Krauss: the-the.., th-the wonderful read -

Tzortzis: Lets carry on now!

Krauss: the Norse (...) myth.. its JUST as beautiful, it was
created!

Tzortzis: I agree, I agree.

Krauss: Yeah. (?)

Tzortzis: But then I said, but since we- now we, the best
possible explanation is th-there's an uncreated creator, or there
is a-

Krauss: Why is it-

Tzortzis: Cause that was not caused by..

Krauss: The best, possible explanation?

Tzortzis: Because, I-I gave you all the logical explanation, this is
the point, it should be a dialogue..

Krauss: No I have the best explanation..

(audience chuckles)

Krauss: It came from Nothing, by physics.

Tzortzis: Yes. But -

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Your Nothing, isn't really that- no nothing?

Krauss: No space, no time. Our universe didn't exist.

Tzortzis: So theres no, n-

Krauss: There was no quantum phone, there was nothing
where our universe existed, there was no space, and no time,
everything we see, this room that we're in-

Tzortzis: So when w-

Krauss: Did not exist.

Tzortzis: When your friend Vilenkin comments on that..

Chambers: Can we have a Q & A please..

Tzortzis: One second.. (?)

Unknown: Quite a few.

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: So when-so when your friend, Alexander Vilenkin,
whose a regarded cosmologist,

Krauss: Yeah, and good friend.

Tzortzis: -A good friend, I mean, I've read some of his works
psychology, create your own meat, yeah.. (?)

Krauss: Ah. And in fact, you know what?

Tzortzis: Yeah.

Krauss: You know what? In fact, Alex Vilenkin is the reason my
book, as I did, in fact he spooked me because he wrote -

Tzortzis: Yes, he did-

Krauss: This thing about life,

Tzortzis: I read that and it was very interesting.

Krauss: Talked about, a creation.. of space, from no space.

Tzortzis: Yes, I agree.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: Recently he has mentioned.. that, there is a spatial
temporal boundary. Right?

Krauss: ..No.

Tzortzis: He doesn't say that.

Krauss: Well, I'm- possibly..(?), he is, I mean, y-you know, you-
you can talk about the echoes of the instanton that he
described at that,-

Tzortzis: Yes, yes,-

Krauss: At that instant.

Tzortzis: Yes.

Krauss: But in fact, there is no space, at th- at the central point
of their mass.

Tzortzis: Okay, agree. So th-, see-, my main point is that this
evidence is suggestive of an evidence that is- what I would call
far more stronger and has greater epistemic value - and I'm
gonna end on this.. - because, it has greater pistica, -e, pistemic
value because as you admitted, the inductive method, doesn't
lead to.. certain conclusions. Whereas the deductive method,
leads to certainty. Now, you can't get it all the time (?)-

Krauss: You've got-

Tzortzis: A time..

Krauss: it wrong!

(light chuckle from one member of the audience)

Tzortzis: But, no! If the premises-

Krauss: I can c-I can be certain about something to be wrong,
can you?

Tzortzis: Yep. I agree.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: But Krauss, if the premises are sound.. and the logic is
valid, its still certain. You still-

Krauss: What happens if-

Tzortzis: Have to prove to me..

Krauss: The universe doesn't respect your logic?

Tzortzis: Yea-but. Krauss. You s-, Professor Krauss,-

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: You still have to prove to me.. that the deductive logic
I used, is unsound, or, or not valid, and you haven't done that.
Okay? (?)

Krauss: Well you don't think I have, I do! Let me just-,

Chambers: Ah-okay, uhh,

Krauss: W-

Chambers: I'm really sorry to interrupt you, Professor Krauss,
Hamza, you're going at it hammer and tongs, but,

(audience chuckle)

Chambers: There's a whole bunch of guys out there who
wanna, sort of,-

Audience member: Just me.

Chambers: Have a say. Okay? And what we've got, effectively, is
a- a microphone over here, okay, so you need to give your
question from here-I don't think you're gonna do that, you're
gonna have to jump, from here. You're gonna have to jump
over here..

Audience member: Can I talk?

Chambers: Jump onto-

Audience member: Can I speak? Can I speak?

Another audience member: (...)

Chambers: Okay. Can you do that?

Audience member: No.. Yes.

(light murmuring)

Chambers: So if you're, like, if you are- behind that microphone,
and uh.. don't you screw with the UCL property..

(audience laughing)

Chambers: But, both (?), yes?

Unknown: Attendees, if you (...), if I can have your attention..
we will ask you do not have any statements, any retorts, any
phrases that you can come back.. please keep your heckles and-
and.. (...) to yourself.

(hubbub)

Chambers: Okay, okay guys settle down.. we're gonna get the
first question, right now.

Questioner: Okay, my first question is to Professor Krauss, and
this is just to sort out, the sort of- the whole thing, we're talking
about.. I-, just opened up your page and it said, "Nothing is
something." There you go.

(audience laughter)

Krauss: What they (...)-,

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Thats the-, thats the type of a chat for you..(...)

Tzortzis: We are, not here now to give a chat.

Questioner: The other thing is, um,-

Krauss: Okay.

Questioner: Right.

Krauss: And if-and i- and y- (...), -

Questioner: I will,-

Krauss: And, and ..-

Questioner: No, no I am back to my, I'll ask my second-

Krauss: Okay.

Questioner: Question now..

Krauss: Okay.

Questioner: The whole book, is based on mathematics, and
mathematics, as you know.. is based on deduction..

Krauss: No, here, its based on evidence,

Questioner: Okay.

Krauss: Observational evidence.

Questioner: And you used mathematics throughout your book.
And you say, deductive..

Krauss: Show me the equations, in my book. Show me the
equations.

Questioner: Okay.

Krauss: Are there equations?

Questioner: I just did.

Krauss: Oh, there are one or two.. The books aren't full of
them(?)..

(audience laughter)

Questioner: Okay. L-l, let me ask about my-.. f-f, -

Krauss: I may say.. Go ahead..

Questioner: About my, my, my.. my first question was,-

Krauss: Alright.

Questioner: You said, Nothing is something.. its written here, in
your book.. secondly, you said deductive method.. deduction,
deduction doesn't work. Maths is based on deduction.

Krauss: No, I said it may not work..

Questioner: No, no, you said it in the opening.. deduction -

Krauss: Okay.

Questioner: Doesn't work.. and your- book, is full of
mathematics, and deduction.. mathematics is based on
deduction.. so how do you.. its actually a good introduction to
logical fallacies..

(audience laughter, cheering and clapping)

Chambers: Professor, you wanna say.. something?

Krauss: Yer-okay, I mean th-, th-these rhetorical things are so
ridiculous, but okay.. Um.. I liked uh, Patu (?) for instance...
And.. when I said nothing is something..

Tzortzis (?): ..In this, incident..

Krauss: Patu way(?). My.. My point, was many philosophers
over-extend.. and I-I, I guess they're, anyway.. Um, is that.. um..
Nothing is a physical quantity. Its not a philosophical quantity,
its not.. an imaginary quantity. Nothing... In physics, is the
absence of Something. So, therefore, to understand.. what
Nothing is, you first have to ask the question.. what is
Something? And to do that, requires alot of work! Its required..
All the work of the 20th century, of alot of great people,
experimentalists and physicists. So what I'm trying to do.. is
explain.. what we mean by Something.. so that,.. people.. can
actually learn, what you mean by the absence of Something,
I've tried to be very clear.., and accurate. So who is just.. in fact,
in some ways, trying to convince people.. of anything, I was just
trying to explain it.. The point is, in physics.. Nothing is the
absence of Something, so to understand what the absence of
Something is.. you have to, describe.. Um, you have to.. you'd
have to know what Something is, to know what the absence of
that thing is. First. Secondly, mathematics is mathematics.
You're absolutely right. But physics isn't mathematics. I did a
degree in mathematics, and I -

Questioner: I know.

Krauss: Did a degree in physics. I learned I wasn't a
mathematician... And more importantly I learned many of my,
the best mathematician colleagues of mine, weren't phyisicists.
Because, the universe.. the way physics works, is that we make
mathematical model-ehs, models of reality, but we don't
decide that they're right! We say.. in fact, I prove it all the time,
that most of them are wrong! I sit (?), at, at, on a Good day..
trying to make a mathematical model that explains reality..
they go out and test it, and ninety nine point nine nine percent
of the time, its wrong! In fact, its the way science works, if it
didn't work that way, anyone could do it. So, its not inductive in
the sense th-.. that mathematics is a useful language, in fact its
the ONLY useful language, to describe nature, as far as we can
tell. But it doesn't- we don't decide, mathematics can describe
an infinite number of universes. But.. you know, you can write
mathematically, theres a-, an infinite number of universes.
Most of them aren't our universe. The way we determine if
they're our universe, if we go out and experiment. Science is
experimental. Without experiment, pure thought, leads
nowhere, if you locked a particle physicist in a room, and asked
her, to come up with a theory of reality without any
experimental observation she'd come up with the wrong
answer.

Questioner: Um.. you didn't actually answer the question
there.. Just, .. just to reiterate and you can actually answer it, if
you like..

(light audience murmuring)

Questioner: You said deduction doesn't work..

Krauss: No, I didn't!

Questioner: Wait, no no no.. yes you said you don't need to..
for.. (...)

Krauss: I said, it doesn't have to work!

Questioner: Okay, let me just repeat the question-

Krauss: Not..

Questioner: You don't understand the question. You said,
deduction doesn't work.. and your book, has mathematics.. to
what I'm gonna ask you this..-

Krauss: Okay. Oh, and I agree with you. Next topic.

Questioner: Okay.

(audience laughter)

Questioner: What is deduction? Thats my question, what is
deduction. Do you even know what deduction is, cause I
studied mathematics at university.. -

Krauss: You know what,

Questioner: I mean to take your word (?)

Krauss: I don't care..

Questioner: For this..

Krauss: You know what.

Questioner: What is deduction?

Krauss: You kno-, you know what.

Audience member: Next question..

Another audience member: Come on!

Questioner: Th-..th..

Unknown: Thank you, thank you..

Questioner: Okay, what is deduction? (...)

Krauss: Let me just say,

Questioner: (...)

Krauss: I know-, c-let me just say..

Questioner: (...) To go on.

Krauss: Let me just say this.

Questioner: Okay.

Krauss: Okay.. You can make definitions of things.. I can try and
figure out how the universe works.. I'll make progress, and
you'll sit here.

Chambers: Okay, thanks very much..

(audience clapping)

Chambers: And.. next question, please.

Questioner: Is.. that mic on? Uh, hi, my question is to Hamza..
and uh.. s-its about, um s-.. things he said about science and
Islam.. he said, he's done a r-, um, research paper, on
embryology in-in the Quran. And, the idea that that I'm getting
is, that, you know, its-its sort of better, to actually understand
Arabic more to get more scientific ideas out of the Quran. Um..
but where is, the.. LHC equivalent.. um, in terms of Islam?

Tzortzis: Wheres the ..?

Questioner: What is the LHC equivalent?

Tzortzis: Ask-, uh..

Questioner: Large hadron collider equivalent.

Krauss: Large hadron collider.

Tzortzis: Okay. In Islam?

Questioner: Yes. Or genomics, I mean wouldn't it be a better
idea just to study the Quran, and.. and come up with these
results. And why t-can't we see those r-results?

Tzortzis: Good question. Uh, first point, the first point is.. Um,
that essay that was written wasn't to show that the Quran gives
science.. If you read the essay, it basically says, the Quran.. is
Very general, and.. a-ah, most places concerning science quite
ambiguous. Ah- Islamic theology.. leaves verses what we call
teleological they don't have (?) a specific answer to make you
think.. Like, only s-, frankly only someone really silly- is gonna
think that you're gonna find, quantum physics.. and
embryology, in a holy book. Thats-thats not the.. thats not the,
divine- thats not the- will, of the Creator.

Krauss: And Satan obviously sent (?) the Bible, too.. the Bible
was Messiah.. (...)

Tzortzis: Yeah, but its not a scientific book!

Krauss: Yeah, if anyone said that.. (?) (...)

Tzortzis: Like, Ashan-libilly (?), he was a, theologian, and he
said, look, this book the Quran, is there to make you think
about the most important questions about life.. Non-life (?) in
the universe.. Who am I.. Whose am I.. Why am I, for Whom am
I, these existential questions. And may I(?)-

Krauss: I answered that, by the way, I think there probably is,
that.

Tzortzis: Thank you, sir.

Krauss: Okay.

Tzortzis: So..

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: Th-th-the point- the point I'm trying to make is, from
an embryology perspective is to show.. not that the Quran is
scientific, per se.. but that its language was not representative
of a 7th century times. That was my major point. So, its got
nothing to do with the fact..

Questioner: Your point is, flawed. (?)

Tzortzis: Sorry?

Questioner: Why don't you have any more science..

Tzortzis: No, w-why should there be? Oh-oh-

Questioner: Well,

Tzortzis: My main..

Questioner: (...) isn't a book..

Tzortzis: The book, by God, as b-but ex-i-b-but, but i-but in
some cases there is.. but not in terms of the, year (?) of the
detail, theres more like.. you don't think you need to think
about the Quranic discourse, for example.. when it talks about..
natural prosalmine (?). It will give present a word, for example..
And that word would have the scope of the meaning.. And you
can take this little example for yourself, and interestingly.. its in
ali- its aligned with.. past errors.. and future accuracies as well,
which is very interesting..

Questioner: But who could -

Tzortzis: So..

Questioner: See now, future accuracies..

Tzortzis: Yeah-, but.. I would argue.. that in some cases.. that
you do see future accuracies but-

Questioner: How (...)

Tzortzis: However, I don't believe..

Questioner: Have you made, any-

Tzortzis: L-let me..

Questioner: (...) accuracies (...) (?)

Tzortzis: L-l-l-, l-let me move my point.. my argument for the
Quran is not a scientific one.. because they believe science.. as,
Professor Krauss admitted.. really didn't answer somehow, was
that inductive.. the inductive word specifically be (?)
certainties.. So... we believe the Quran you can prove
deductively.. and, which tells us to do the science, to see how
things work.. We may be wrong, we may be right. So it would
be only erroneous to say, that something, that is deductive can
be proven by something speculative or inconclusive.. And this is
why, a-a-and I empathise with you, the current trend in our
modern.. what we call Da'wah.. propagation of Islam.. is heavily
reli- resu- uh, rely on science.. But we have to understand what
science is, thats why I wrote the essay.. On.. how we
misunderstood, evolution- I don't deny the signs of evolution.. I
can spoke to alot of academics.. on the philosophy of science..
and there are, issues! Like the problem of.. hard, or weak
empiricism! The problem of induction! Falsification! And so, uh-
so.. from that perspective, I think you misunderstood the..,
point of the paper.. Uh-

Krauss: But I-

Tzortzis: But I-

Krauss: I, I understood-

Tzortzis: I-I'm also-I'm also elaborating..

Krauss: From that paper that, s-s-, s-suggests that evolution..
was not a, a-as well as, uh, and tested-uh, and I think, uh.. uh-
uh scientific ideas.. gravity, or pharmacan (?). We've made new
drugs based on it.. i-in fact, the evidence of evolution, is,
evolution a fact.

Tzortzis: Okay. Uh.. I-I even addressed that..

Krauss: Yeah, I know, I-I tried to read it and it seemed to me
that you were suggesting..-what, but anyway, that, I may have
misunderstood.. so, I'm willing to, I'm willing to agree that I
may have misunderstood..

Tzortzis: Thats the Professor I'm (...). Okay. Maybe we can sit,
have a coffee after..

Chambers: Okay, we're gonna go to the-, jazakallah khair, go to
the next question, please.

Questioner: Er-thank you for the very emotive debate.. My
question is for Professor Krauss..

Krauss: Why did I guess that..

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Go ahead.. anyway. (?)

Questioner: First its (...) l-, lets, lets not compare to science for
Atheism, as we would all agree.. that science doesn't logically
entail Atheism.. it is a theologically neutral.. uhm, therefore my
questions is, something a, a empirical method based on
observations, experimentation, can never answer questions,
questions suggesting there isn't a God.. so.. then.. the, you
improvise.. how do you (...) Atheism and take a position, if you
said, for example.. And purely speaking we can't, say, God
existed- doesn't (...) this, rationally that to be really, ruled out..
therefore, how can you rationally justify your belief? How can
you say its common sense.. and (...) please, -

Krauss: W-well,

Questioner: Thank you very much..

Krauss: Its a good question. Uh-uh, okay I should clarify.. its a
(?) very good question.. um... Okay, thats a great..

(soft clapping in audience)

Krauss: Yeah. That is (...), go ahead..

(audience clapping increases)

Krauss: Okay. I mean, let me.. let me try and clarify this.. I-I, I
wondered what, what.. wha-.. again, emphasise that.. Atheism
is not a religion. Okay. Its not a religion. As a scientist.. I don't
believe anything. As a scientist.. I don't believe anything. I-, if
you, you used the word believe, scientists shouldn't use the
word believe. There are things that are more likely, and less
likely, in fact it would spare.. Hamza, its-i-, uh-, science can say
nothing with absolutely certainty. It can say something is very,
very likely, or something is very, very unlikely. Based on the
evidence of experience and ex-, and testing.

Questioner: I'm not saying you can (?) argue with that.

Krauss: Okay. And so.. um, eh-I find it easier to talk to a person..
Okay,

Questioner: Oh, sorry I'll-

Krauss: And..

Questioner: Come down..

Krauss: No no no, sit there, sit there.. I can see you now. Um,
so... So, th-the question is.. what is more likely? Thats all
Atheists are saying. And they-Atheists are saying.. look.. the
first thing they're saying, I mean people who claim they're
Atheists- and by the way, you know most scientists don't think
enough about God to know that they're Atheists, because God's
irrelevant. God never comes up. It any scientific conference, in
any discussion, anywhere, it doesn't. Because in fact, we're just
trying to figure out how the universe works. You're ab-solutely
right, also, the fact that I wanna stress one more time, that
science.. and I may.. slightly have to differ (...) depending on
whether you're talking about Islam, or God (?). Science does
not require Atheism. And the proof of that, is empirical. Which I
believe in empirical proof. I have several colleagues of mine,
who are very good scientists, who aren't atheists. Therefore,
since they're very good scientists, and they're also, not atheists,
science doesn't require Atheism. Now, people can hold
contradictory ideas at the same time, (...), but.. science can
never disprove, purpose in the universe. All we can ask is, given
the evidence of our observation, if I think, it is more likely, that
theres a personal God, that cares, about, this random... uh,
planet.. around a random galaxy in the middle of four hundred
million galaxies, and the universe in which, everything we see,
could be one percent of the whole universe, you can get rid of
us and all the galaxies and e-everything, universe would be
likely to say, we're gonna coffee (?) pollution.. It seems
ridiculous to imagine, for me.. based on everything I see, and
my common sense, to imagine, the universe was created for
me. Thats all.

Questioner: Okay, thank you.

(audience clapping)

Chambers: Go to (?) next question.

Questioner: Hello, Mister, Krauss, and, salam to you from uh..
mister,-

Tzortzis: Yeah-I can't see-

Questioner: Uh..

Tzortzis: Whoever you're talking (...)

Questioner: Tzortzis. I'm very sorry (?), I just have a question for
Hamza. Uhh.. so you started off, uh, talking about uh.. you
know, infinity and uh... uh. I mean, a-alot of these arguments
were absurd. William Lane Craig-type arguments, and by the
way, Fox News lies. Uh, now, my question is, we've got a guy
here, whose, whose written 300 books in astronomy,
cosmology, whatever.. And.. we-we, I mean, there is a lot of..
talk about.. Islam, about the Quran having scientific evidence
behind it, uhm.. cosmologically, as well. Why didn't you ask him
these questions? Why did you say, "Oh, I don't know." You said
that. You don't know? Why not ask him, he's there!... I mean,
why-why not? This is.. this is a, forum for conversation, why
don't you have, but-I didn't hear it one. time.. except for when
you mentioned quantum vacuum, where.. he, explained to you
what quantum vacuum is.

Tzortzis: Yes, yes.

Questioner: Other than that I didn't hear anything.. so I'm-, I'm
really interested as to why that conversation didn't happen.. i-i-
in, yeah.

Tzortzis: Because, my argument wasn't a scientific one.

(audience laughs)

Tzortzis: Right, Professor Krauss? (?)

Krauss: Yes, yes.

Questioner: Of course. But uh..

Tzortzis: I could-I could do that in Starbucks or..

Krauss: I'm hold on.. I'm hold on-

Tzortzis: On the left theres a non Stewiyearly (?),-

Krauss: I-.. You tried to preface (?) (...)..

Tzortzis: Another coffee shop..

Krauss: Just like you weren't going to worry about, the price of
(?)(...),-

Tzortzis: No, no no no. Yous-

Krauss: The evidence was a big bag, and, then..

Tzortzis: Now, l-let me, reattend, to my argument. It wasn't a
key premise.

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: It was, I even revised-

Krauss: I came in-

Tzortzis: I..

Krauss: I guarantee you, -I agree with you, it was not, scientific
evidence..

Questioner: Yeah.

Tzortzis: Yeah, exactly, well, well done.

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: So, o-or,

(audience claps lightly)

Tzortzis: My point was.. it was, that, suggestive.. you-

Krauss: You suggested that (...)..

Tzortzis: To..-, use that argument.. you still have my deductive
argument that hasn't been addressed.

Questioner: No, I-I, I know.

Tzortzis: Yeah.

Questioner: What I'm saying is, then why did you use.. the
linguistic argument, why not this-the-the, the..

Tzortzis: Because I,-

Questioner: But theres -

Tzortzis: I don't-

Questioner: So many

Tzortzis: I don't-

Questioner: Arguments, yeah.

Tzortzis: I don't, hold the view.. I don't hold the view.. that the
scientific argument, per se.. is, s-strong to become a..

Questioner: Right,

Tzortzis: (...)

Questioner: So is this, purely (?)linguistic?

Krauss: So you- you-, so, lets make it clear-

Tzortzis: No,

Krauss: That..

Tzortzis: There are many others! Historical, em-empirical..

Krauss: Th-this is how..

Tzortzis: I could give them to you, now..

Questioner: Okay.

Krauss: Now historical is not pervasive evidence, let me make it
clear, cause it could be a real difference.. and it should just
represent our, fundamental differences..

Tzortzis: Yeah, of course.

Krauss: You don't believe, that your beliefs.. should conform to
the evidence of reality.

Tzortzis: No, of course not.

Krauss: Alright. Okay.

Tzortzis: I don't-

Krauss: Good.

Tzortzis: I don't- yeah, but you're..

Krauss: Th-th-thats what.. (...)

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: But-but Krauss! You just even agreed.. That.. science
itself.. which, we love, and we think its a mercy from the Divine
Reality to use..

Krauss: Mhm.

Tzortzis: That has, that has... correlated verses, indicating we
must use reality, and-and be empirical.. You've assumed that-
that, that empiricism itself, wouldn't lead to.. an understanding
of reality, absolutely! But you've-

Krauss: No, no, no-

Tzortzis: You've agreed..

Krauss: No no..

Tzortzis: Let me finish!

Krauss: I never say any absolutes! I've always said, plausible..
likely.. unlikely, thats the way science is(?)-

Tzortzis: But thats what I'm saying-

Krauss: A-And, the whole question here is.. Whats more
sensible? And the point is, once again, I've said empirically, a
thousand religions, you're Athei-all Atheists for nine hundred
and ninety-nine of them.. I'm just an Atheist for one of them.

Tzortzis: Yeah, but this is besides my point,

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: Why would I, therefore.. Use.. an empirical, inductive
method.. to form.. beliefs that I believe are certain. That would
be apernukcious (?) of me. So what I do.. is, if I believe
something is so certain.. As the existence of the Divine.. And
the miraculisation of the Quran.. I'm not gonna use an inductive
method which-

Krauss: But, if you're- you.. (?)

Tzortzis: Speculative.. and, or realistic, which you-.. wouldn't
even agree, rate-is(?) from zero to ninety-nine percent. I would
have to rely heavily, on what you would call, O-ther methods,
epistemic roots to knowledge, such as deduction.

Krauss: And, are they -

Tzortzis: And du-..

Krauss: Sensible?

Tzortzis: But-but and they are sensible.

Krauss: And-a-heres the quote- that Scross Doppelman (?) said..
Extraordinary.. (...) reward, the hereafter. And they've claimed
it here, after you (...) the truth, its huge!.. That you, personally..
are absolutely certain of the truth.. is a remarkable claim!

Tzortzis: No.

Krauss: And the evidence you've presented is-

Tzortzis: Strawman.

Krauss: -Is, does not, does not (...).

Tzortzis: Straw-man. I've actually said I was gonna, engage (...)
views, and this is called, epistemic foundationalism..

Krauss: No, I don't have that presumption.

Tzortzis: You-

Krauss: Anoth(?)-fat presumption.

Tzortzis: Well.. you obviously have a presumption that
induction works.. thats a truth in-

Krauss: No,

Tzortzis: Itself..

Krauss: I don't have the presumption that I know the truth.

Chambers: Lets-,

Tzortzis: Okay.

Chambers: Lets deal with a-some more questions, as well..

(audience laughter)

Chambers: Okay, so lets go.

Questioner: Alright. My, my question is for.. Hamza.

Tzortzis: Oh, yes.

Questioner: And uh.. my question is, now let try to clear
something up, before I go on.. Do you think, that logic and
science are two separate paths to each other. Because,
Professor Krauss, who was taking the scientific (...) logic, point.
Do you believe they're, -too specific? (?)

Tzortzis: No.. no, no no.. of course not, because you have the
deductive argument.. that its premise-i is rests on induction..
so.. thats fine. And, in-inductive argument, by definition, is
empirical, by nature. But, the point I'm trying to say is.. there is
a difference between in-duction, and deduction. That is, a clear
distinction..

Krauss: Oh, sure it is,

Tzortzis: Whi-

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: Wh- Exactly. So, the point is, if we do have a valid and
sound deductive argument.. then, for God's sake..

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: Lets address it!

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: Not just say, oh.. you guys.. we-wearing bags, or..

(audience chuckles)

Tzortzis: Do you, do you scratch your ear on a Sunday.. Or,

(audience laughs)

Tzortzis: You don't speak in earwax (?).. All these kind of,
random red herrings that were coming along..

Krauss: I cannot, I-uh, No..

Tzortzis: So-the-the, the-

Krauss: So I-

Tzortzis: Point is..

Krauss: Tried to ask, empirically, what.. to me, yea-maybe this is
a different-

Questioner: (very quietly)(...)

Krauss: word, maybe you should've applied the word sensible..

Questioner: Um, please.

Krauss: Yeah,

Questioner: Sorry..

Krauss: Because sensible,

Questioner: Um,

Krauss: To me is,

Questioner: I don't mean to make trouble..

Krauss: Is that-is, is something-

Questioner: Sorry, yeah.

Krauss: Thats consistently..

Questioner: Sorry, yeah.

Krauss: Yep,

Questioner: Th-that

Krauss: Yeah..

Questioner: Wasn't a question..

Krauss: Go ahead.

Questioner: My question was, that.. uh... uh, do you-do you
think logically, this is-, uh-you said you didn't (...) offended(?),
do you think that your, your.. premises, cos thats what your
arguments rest on, are informed.. by empirical evidence?

Tzortzis: Uh.. Th-th.. some of them are supported, but, but the
majority of them are deductive themselves.

Chambers: Okay, next question?

Tzortzis: And thats what deductive very strong, if you have
premises that are deductive.. and y-, the conclusion is sound
and valid, therefore its a deductive.. argument, so that makes it
a very strong argument- and thats why its said.. it would be,
irrational to take.. induction, over deduction if you have a
deductive argument.

Krauss: How do you know that they're valid, if you don't test
them?

Tzortzis: Because you know them conceptually, and
metaphysically, and all other sorts of ways(?).

(audience laughs)

Krauss: Just like that woman who d-.. drowned her four kids.

Tzortzis: Yeah, but.. Okay.

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: No, no no, thats great (?). No no no, l-let me (...)
question, sorry.. The-the interesting thing is.. Your very
statement, is a metaphysical statement. It could be translated,
metaphysically.. For example, induction is the only way.. the
only method to use, to.. try and establish a normal reality. That
statement is self-, self-defeating, it can't even be proven.. by its,
b-b-b-b-by empiricism, its an inductive statement!

(audience clapping)

Krauss: Okay, (...)

Tzortzis: (...)

Krauss: (...)

Tzortzis: Its like you have this, almost crude..

Krauss: I don't claim to know whats valid, just by.. knowing.

Tzortzis: No.. but.. but-no, but you have to, in that very
statement, in itself, because.. you're-, its almost like you're
proclaiming this crude scientism, or logical positivism..

Krauss: Of cour-

Tzortzis: Thats..

Krauss: Stop using words!

Tzortzis: Okay.. W-w..

Krauss: (...), serious question (?).

(audience laughs)

Tzortzis: Wait, wait, wait.. Oh, oh when you use words, its
great, when I use words, I-I can't do that,

Krauss: No, I don't-

Tzortzis: Yeah?

Krauss: I don't think I've used very much jargon at all, I-, if I did I
apologise..

Tzortzis: Okay, scientism is-, yeah let me define, before we go.
I-is the assertion, that science is the only way to form
conclusions about reality. Okay? That statement itself, is, one,
its self-defeating.. because, science can't prove that statement.
Secondly.. science itself, that statement itself, is.. i-is flawed..
because science can't prove mathematical truths. Also, it can't
prove ontological truths. It can't prove moral truths. H-
historical truths. But, if you study-

Krauss: But, no.. How do you know that it can't prove.. -

Tzortzis: Epistemology.. Sorry,

Krauss: Hang on, how do you know-

Tzortzis: Excuse me, sir.

Krauss: It can't prove the historical truths?

Tzortzis: L-l-let me, let me make a point, sir..

Krauss: How do you know it can't prove moral truths? You're
breaking the (...)

Tzortzis: Okay, okay. Let me make a point. How do we know
Aristotle existed?

Krauss: Theres physical evidence..

(audience laughing)

Tzortzis: Okay, let me-

Krauss: (...)

Tzortzis: Let me give you a piece of evidence that I know. We
know him through Plato. Okay?.. That...

Krauss: Its highly likely, that it was-

Tzortzis: Yep.

Krauss: Distribution(?),

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: But I'm sorry.. (?)

Tzortzis: Yeah, but let me make my point. Even, anyone
studying epistemology which is, the study of knowledge and
belief.

Krauss: Yeah.

Tzortzis: You know that-, the majority of Europeanism in the
swimmers hole..(?), is based on, non-empirical evidence. Its
based on..-

Krauss: You're right, but-but..

Tzortzis: Let me finish..

Krauss: In fact, I understand.. that to be wrong.

Tzortzis: Yeah, but.

Krauss: Aristotle may not have existed..

Tzortzis: Yeah, but you're missing the point, I'm trying to show
you theres other roots to knowledge, sir.. Which is..

Krauss: Thats not knowledge!

Tzortzis: Such as.. sworn testimony, for example..

Krauss: Oh, testimony?

Tzortzis: Authentic, and valid testimony.

Krauss: Oh my goodness. You really believe in testimony, as
proof.. of-, ah..

(audience chuckles, few audience members laugh)

Krauss: You really believe that?

Tzortzis: But.. but Professor Krauss.. The whole..

Krauss: Do you really just re-, do you really believe.. that.. (...)

Tzortzis: Lets..

Krauss: If I say..

Tzortzis: Lets not dig a hole for ourselves..

Krauss: (...) hundred something, in the after? (?)

Tzortzis: Go to the Berkeley website, on the scientific method, it
says.. One of the majority.. aspects..

Krauss: I don't go to websites, I just do science!

Tzortzis: Yeah, okay, well thats very, thats very great.

(audience clapping)

Tzortzis: Well do this science, then, listen to this science. The
Berkeley website says.. The key part of scientific method.. is, is
also, the.. workings of other scientists.. That yield(?)-

Krauss: We should(?) test, and we don't trust!

Tzortzis: Yeah-

Krauss: And you repeat their experiments, because you don't
trust, their result..

Tzortzis: Yes, I agree.

Krauss: Thats the way-

Tzortzis: Wait, wait..

Krauss: Science works.

Tzortzis: Wait, wait.. but theres alot of science..

Krauss: You don't.. trust(?).. other people's results.

Tzortzis: Excuse me, sir.. theres alot of science that would
require, testimony, yeah?

Krauss: Why?

Tzortzis: Loads of science.

Krauss: What?!

Tzortzis: Ok-okay, I give you an example, -have you done, every
single experiment concerning evolution?

Krauss: No!

Tzortzis: So, you believe its true. Thank you, very much..

Krauss: No, no, I don't.. The wor(?) (...)-

(audience laughter, erupts into cheering and clapping)

Chambers (?): (...)

Krauss: (...) You, s-, you, get an answer before I've even
answered it! Come on!

Chambers: Um.. o-kay.

Unknown (?): (...)

Tzortzis: Yeah nah.. um, I think..

Krauss: I don't believe in anything..

Tzortzis: I believe (?) you're the best..

(audience laughter)

Krauss: I don't bel-.. I don't believe in anything. I face-.. based,
on the evidence of my experience..

Tzortzis: (quietly) Yes.

Krauss: And, e-everything I see in the world around me.. that
evolution.. is.. Highly, Likely..

Tzortzis: Okay.

Krauss: And thats what I recall a fallacy ..(?) (...)

Tzortzis: So, so, so, so.. when you had the.. you-you..

Krauss: Un-un, unbelievably highly likely.

Chambers (?): Oh, okay. (?)

Krauss: As, as, highly likely as the, a- even though I haven't, I
haven't ever been in space..

Chambers: I remind you..

Krauss: A-And you know, I.. (...)

(...) generous quality ..

Krauss: The earth is round.

Chambers: The-the one, and only more than one (?)(...)
answered (?) question in the room, right now, -

Krauss: Oh.

Chambers: Is whose standing there, thank you!

(audience laughs, claps and cheers)

Krauss: (...)

Unknown: Ladies and gentlemen.. I'm afraid this will be the last,
question, of the evening.. thank you very much, Professor
Krauss (?)..

(few audience members chuckle, many of the audience sigh in
disappointment)

Krauss: Well, I think-

Unknown: Thank you very much Hamza.. and thanks to every..
(?)

Krauss: Its appropriate, that she has the last question.

Unknown: And jazakallah (?) to everybody else.. sit down, and
uh... a.. (...)

Krauss: Sorry, um, um.. I'm happy to stay late.. uh,-

Unknown: Well, well thats your well deserved intention.. (...) (?)

Chambers: O-, okay.. um, please..

Tzortzis: (...)

Questioner: I just wanted to make a comment.. about, um.. the
incident that happened.. before this event began. Um, I abolish
that brother who took, my seat, that he was coming from..
um..., but.., ah-and, I believe that he has the right to sit where
he wanted to, but there has been some, misunderstanding.
Um.. that Islam makes it very clear, uh-and.. equality, is..
emphatically important.. and, that no one black man, for
example is superior to a white man, and vice versa.. But the
issue here, is not one of superiority.. and, no one imposed
segregation upon him. He was allowed to sit with the ladies, at
the back.. and, he was also.. allowed, to sit at the front.. where
(...) was. (?)

Audience member (?): Thats not true.

Unknown: Shh...

Questioner: But..,

Chambers: (...)

Questioner: Theres some of us..

Chambers: (...), okay.

Questioner: Theres some, of the ladies..

Krauss: I appreciate that..

Questioner: Chosen to sit, at a distance.. from the men.. why
must he, impose himself upon us..

(audience begins to chuckle)

Questioner: And if I sat in a nice shop, with my friends,

Unknown: Shh.. (to the audience)

Questioner: Away from men.. Would it be appropriate, for him
to join me at my table too.. and, I'm basically offended by his
disrespect for my values.

(Audience erupts into cheers and clapping)

Krauss: (...)

Unknown: (...)

Krauss: Let me respond, look... The point is.. a-as I said, I don't
think s-, people should be uncomfortable, okay.. and, I-, and
they should move if they're uncomfortable. However...,
however.. you chose,

Unknown: Shh, shh (to audience)

Krauss: To come to an event.., that wasn't segregated. If you
felt uncomfortable by that.., I think you have the right not to be
here, and watch it on video.., but, you chose to do that.. and
therefore.. if, you know, un-, -uh-uh-uh, and I realise that you
may be uncomfortable sitting with men, and I respect that. You
shouldn't be forced to do that, but, if you choose to go to a
hockey game.. or a, or a, .. what do they call it, football game..
(really soccer).. Um..

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Uh.. uh.., then, y-you, you-, you know you subject your-
self, to the social conventions of, uh-of the time. So, I'm.. I-I-I
respect your desires.. and I don't want you to be forced to do
that, when in fact.. you should've moved away, if it-, was,
offensive,

Female audience member: Um..

Krauss: Or.. and..

Female audience member: Why should she-

Krauss: But, but,

Female audience member: Have to give up her (...)

Another audience member (?): Valid question.

Krauss: The point is.. that.. this, was a non segregated event,
and you knew that, coming in.. and you, therefore were subject
to the possibility.. that you might be near someone and I.., and-
and.. that was your choice.

(Audience clapping)

Unknown: (...)

Chambers: Okay.. thank you very much, thank you very much..
You guys.. Masha Allah. Oh, sorry Professor Krauss (?).

(audience laughter)

Krauss: Its alright.

Chambers: Oh oh.

Krauss: Don't be sorry! (...)

Chambers: I was sitting on the bench the whole night, you see.

(audience laughter)

Chambers: Um..

Krauss: Thats (...)

Chambers: Okay. Thank you, for your presence(?). Um..

Krauss (?): I can an- (...)

Chambers: Hamza.. and.., Professor Krauss.. you know, I-I think
you guys have been, amazing tonight. Don't you think?

(Audience clapping and cheering)

Chambers: Theres, still couple of members (?) of the audience
up there, so you got two minutes each.

Krauss: Oh.. Well-, no I mean, I-I, I'm glad we had more
dialogue, than..

Unknown (?): Mmm.

Krauss: I mean, as I once said.. because.. I-I, I just think the
debate, format, is a stupid format, I-, for-forgive me. Uh.. it-it-it,
it just doesn't to the kind of interaction.. actually there have
been some positives, thats come out of the fact,

Unknown: Really. (?)

Krauss: That Hamza and I have talked. That have been much
more positive, than-, when people make these rhetorical,
wrong statements, and try and define things, and.. try and,
sneak the other person in some logical contradiction.. Its just, it
just.., not good for, for education. My attempt, and I'm sure I
have offended people here, my intent was not to offend.. I
always offend. And I offend some of my scientific colleagues,
too. My intent was just to raise questions.. and encourage
people to think about issues. And, for that.. I hope I, I hope..
that s-, that some of the statements I've made.., will cause
people to think, and yours, and..

Unknown: Indeed.

Krauss: My whole point is, that.. G-.. given, access to
information.. and I believe you should get access to information
on how the world really works, which is why.., I write scientific
books, and I speak, because I think these are some of.. beautiful
ideas, that people have ever come up with. And we shouldn't
be afraid of them, we shouldn't fear them, we shouldn't view
them, as, if.., in fact, if they.. offend our beliefs... thats a good
thing. Because it means our beliefs are wrong. And THAT, as I
say to students all the time.. is the greatest, gift we can have.
Changing our minds, and learning.. is whats produced the
progress, that allows this room to happen, that allows these
video cameras, to be recording things. So I just hope, that, as I..
hope I am.. willing to... change my beliefs, or change my mind,
in the e-presence of evid-evidence, and, get information.. that I
hope, that some of the things I've said have spurred your
thinking.. and I certainly don't.. want to convert you, into
anything. And, so.. thank you for listening.

(Audience clapping)

Unknown: (...)

Tzortzis: You have some-, something inside of you, Professor
Krauss, (...), Professor Krauss, although I disagree with him... I,
love his style. And, my dad loved your style, as well, its like.. I
don't care, I'm gonna be media-ogre(?),

(Audience laughing)

Tzortzis: (...) so.. I do respect that, I do respect that..

Krauss: Good.

Tzortzis: And the other thing I agree with is-

Krauss: No, you're that with me too, don't you think?

Tzortzis: Yes! We're the same!

Krauss: Well, thanks for calling me (?).

Tzortzis: You agree with (?)-

(audience laughing)

Krauss: Thats why-

Tzortzis: Thats why-thats why it was like, almost an explosion
here, on an atomic level..

Krauss: Exactly.

Tzortzis: I mean, interestingly.. We have alot in common. We
both like Star Trek..

(Audience laughs)

Tzortzis: So.. I-, you know..

Krauss: I don't wanna start agreeing with him.

Hamza: (Laughing)

(Audience erupts into laughter, cheers and clapping)

Krauss: (...) But he gave me, h-, he gave me to the (...)

Tzortzis: I give you my word,

Krauss: (...)

Tzortzis: I give you my word,

Krauss: (...)

Tzortzis: I give you my word, okay good. Right, so.. first and
foremost, I think.. there was a (...) introduction, on.. the
definition of a miracle that I-I presented, I think, th-that people
should have more a useful discussion on, .. things, that, the-,
the coherent definition that I presented..

Krauss: I agree.

Tzortzis: Uh, concerning the literary form.. is unique.. Again, I
think there was a, misunderstanding with (?) aesthetic
reception and unique literary form.. and the conclusive analysis
that.., was, brought as an example.., was based on a whole
chapter which is based on.. the, inimitability of the Quranic
discourse.. Also, I think we, we-we brought forth a deductive
argument to show that the, finitude of the universe.. and
therefore, it couldn't have come via nothing.. once it was, in a
state of non existence and it, and it was brought into being.. it
couldn't self-create, it couldn't be.. created by something else,
(...), of the infinite regress.. therefore, it-it-it, it makes sense..
that it was, created by something uncreated or caused, by
something thats uncaused.. and survived the (...) definition of
causality, which is something that produces an effect, which
allows asymmetric causality. Also, when we talked about the,
infinite.. we talked about the... quantitative infinite, the-, not
the qualitative infinite.. uh, I think the example the Professor
gave.. were based on axioms and conventions of the
mathematical realm of discourse.. was, that.. in reality.. So..
thats what I have to say, I don't think the key premises of, my
argument were addressed.. and, I think it shows the veracity of
Islam.. from that perspective, because if it was SO wrong and
SO rubbish and so nonsensical.. we would've had a strong
counter-argument from that perspective. But this, is gonna be..
unaddressed until the day of Judgement, right, we believe.. but
I think, what we all have to learn is.. that you know what, we
can sit on the table.. we can speak together.. we may be..
angry, and rhetorical- by the way, I SO.. apologise, if I've
offended anyone, especially Professor Krauss.. I did say things
that I shouldn't have said for a highly respected..

Krauss: You called (...). You (...).

Tzortzis: Yeah. For a highly respected academic, like himself.. so
we have to humble ourselves for his, achievements.. and some
of the words that I used, were not appropriate.. even though,
they may have sounded nice rhetorically, but..

(Audience laughter)

Tzortzis: Thats a different issue. Uhh.. The point is.. you know,
at the end of the day, lets be human, lets connect with one-
each other without presuppositions, and thats very hard to do.
But the only way to do that, is really, divorcing our drama.. and
our presuppositions when we try and engage with someone,
and thats what we teach in our courses, all the time.. Engage
with the human being, not with h-, not with his beliefs or your
perception of who he is.. we didn't quite get there today.., but
you know what, its a beginning, for the rest of the world.

(Audience clapping)

Krauss (?): (...)

Chambers: Okay.. so, uh.. the last, few, words, and uh..
something needs to be presented over there, so don't go
anywhere! Professor..

Krauss: Oh, thank you, very much. Thats very kind of you.

(audience chuckles)

Krauss: Thank-thank you, very much.. Oh-, wow.. thats, thats,
what I thought it was.. (...)

Chambers: Well, we need to say bye to you (?)..

Krauss: (...)

(Audience laughter and clapping)

Krauss: On-once again, I want to thank.. the organisers, and-
and I repeat, I would spend-I, s-, I though I felt, uh coming in
that I've been treated with great respect and.. and I mean,
hospitality, which is.. which is.. uhh.. wonderful. And I
appreciate that, tremendously.

Chambers: Thank you.

(Audience clapping)

Chambers: Okay, thank you, very very, v-very much..

Steve Riedel
@RiedelSteven
Tweets 496
Photos/Videos 7
Following 27
Followers 3,101
Steve Riedel
@RiedelSteven
Raised in Alaska. Blessed to experience; skiing, hunting, flying
mountain climbing, hockey, bears and moose - and now Gold
Dredging!
Nome Alaska
Joined January 2012
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Sep 19
Hi winds been whipping up waves recently - but hopin to get in
some good #diving in today
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Sep 18
My diver did find some gold under a big rock after all...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Sep 16
My ladder dredge is good - been huntin gold, huntin, huntin -
think some is coming my way...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Sep 12
My #diver OK - pickup damaged badly...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Sep 12
Rolled over 3 times - almost into #SnakeRiver!!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Sep 12
Out of Nome for a few weeks & my diver ROLLS my pickup!!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Aug 21
Had weeks of bad weather - bad visibility - waiting is tiresome!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jul 17
Working every day - either filming or #dredge-building. Have
some good #help with my dredge
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jul 13
A #dredge can be a lot of work - AND money! They're draining
me....
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jul 12
Building my 3rd dredge for this season - lost two...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jul 10
#Dad told @EmilyRiedel23 not to chase too many #Bears
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jul 10
Maybe she wants to shoot a bear . . . .
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jul 10
Got @EmilyRiedel23 a 44 Magnum for BD - she's very happy
with it!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Jun 9
Had a super first dive a few days ago. Looking good. ..
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 30
dredges come and dredges go ... eenie, meenie, minie, mo..
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 28
I like to start with a #positiveattitude - the work comes after
that
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 28
Maybe this season #gold will find me. Putting that thought
#UnderMyPillow tonight...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 26
#Nome is calling - have to return... won't be long before I'll be
#UnderWater again, literally
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed Doug G, Original Productions and Parker
Schnabel
Doug G
@saywhatDoug
Invented craigslist
Original Productions
@OriginalProds
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 16
This #TravelingMan is ready for a new start - new dredge, new
season - change is coming..
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 13
I'm a traveling man - looking for my dredge.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven May 3
Spring has sprung leaks in the ice - or made it thin. Time to go
before we all fall in.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 24
We need a webcam on #Vern's #IceDredge - it MIGHT go thru
the ice!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 23
Everyone is on #ThinIce except me - ooooh!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 16
dredge repossession drama becomes a nefarious story.....
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 14
#BradKellythief took the heating stove from my yurt!!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 13
Brad Kelly #snowmachine thief - had to go get it back
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 13
Someone asks to borrow - you say no - you're not there - they
take it anyway - #thief
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 13
Brad Kelly #truckthief - took my truck - had to take it back
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel retweeted
William Rutter @WilliamRutter1 Apr 9
@RiedelSteven they don't see a kind hearted guy that has some
quirks. I wish you the best, hope you get lots of gold!
#heartofgold
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 11
Kris Kelly - another #goldthief
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 9
Brad - he's a #GOLD thief!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Apr 9
That guy Brad Kelly - he's a thief!!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Mar 3
mattzagha call me
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 16
New sluice for 14'' 100 hp is 70% complete. Nozzle and
sluice/excavator mount still daunting projects
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 16
I am in computer hell as my brand new Dell VENUE 8 pro is
snarling and spitting at me. Dell can't be reached.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 12
I twink I haven't been tweeting my friends well lately.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed MARK STAMPER, Kevin Jupina, Matthew
Zagha and Gold Rush
MARK STAMPER
@Stampfooko
Restauranter Dredge owner Diver Bering Sea! mechanic welder
master of all trades Fireman,Boy Scout,tire changer
NASCAR,Proven leader! a creator!
Kevin Jupna
Verified account
@KevinJupina
Navy Diver HOO-YAH!!DEEP SEA Diver on @Discovery Channel's
@BeringSeaGold-It makes no difference if I burn bridges behind
me - I never
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 10
I hate moguls, hate the 'dog' skis(unable to carve turn) the
mogul skiers ski on. The magic of skiing for me is the sine wave
the ski makes
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 9
The Ice offshore Nome has a torrid reputation. It is good in
some places, and dangerous for dredgers, in others.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 9
sure a traffic ap. Radar plug into phone. look at phone cross
street
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 9
Living in the heartland of America. Dreaming and building a
super-dredge.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 9
the day breaks, my mind aches.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 6
The whole buying big pieces of equipment is strange for the
bank
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Feb 6
building a dredge is a lot harder than it appears.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel retweeted
C Christie @AlaskanAtHeart Nov 23
Hey, fans of @RiedelSteven - you can get images of Steve on
shirts, mugs, etc at http://www.zazzle.com/spiritofalaska *
pic.twitter.com/hvCiYTJiQc
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel retweeted
C Christie @AlaskanAtHeart Nov 24
@BeringSeaGold, @RiedelSteven, @EmilyRiedel23 That's right -
only a FEW people get that privilege - the Tough Ones!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Nov 4
And now I'll be taking a break and won't be around for awhile , ,
, thanks for all your support and interest in the show
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Nov 4
And I've even worked hard at getting the ice sled ready now -
so will be prepared when ice filming starts in spring. .
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Nov 4
So guess what, I fired them! I need reliable divers that can be
trusted. Getting lined out better for next year. . .
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Nov 4
Andy and Chris wanted their share before it was even counted.
. . .
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Nov 4
I was a little short on gold because two of my divers just
couldn't keep their fingers out of it.. . you know what I mean?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven Nov 4
So here's a wrap-up..ONLY 10 ounces of gold for the season,
but more to tell. .
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 18 Jul 2013
Having another run of bad weather days - looks like several
more days of it. But that's Nome!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 16 Jul 2013
We also repaired main suction hose connection at the jet
before heavy diving. If we can just stay under water now & find
the right places
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 16 Jul 2013
Was a brand new pop-off valve that regulates pressure on air
pump. Went bad after only 10 minutes of diving so had to come
back in.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 16 Jul 2013
Have had some good weather so we're diving. But the first one
was short-a brand new valve went bad so came in after 10
minutes diving.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Jul 2013
A few are out dredging but most miners think water is still too
murky. Will be checking soon...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Jul 2013
Am re-working the sluice box on the Minnow as it wasn't
working efficiently. Getting this done now before weather
clears.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 3 Jul 2013
Emily refurbished the Edge and launched last week. But like the
rest of us, no dredging going on right now.
pic.twitter.com/6WBwAyoe1f
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jul 2013
Weather looks beautiful doesn't it? But water currents kept it
muddy so we did maintenance on the minnow instead
pic.twitter.com/st3vCxUHUT
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Jun 2013
Just had another week of bad dredging weather - wind & poor
visibility. Had moved to mouth of Nome River but now back to
Snake River.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 25 Jun 2013
Started out the other day but barge was coming in - had a few
mishaps but we're ready to go out again-waiting on the
weather.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 25 Jun 2013
Have had some beautiful days in Nome recently but not for
dredging. Did find some gold but haven't checked amount yet.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed Tyndrum Gold HQ and David Pritikin

Tyndrum Gold HQ
@GoldTyndrum
Talking place for UK gold prospectors, panners & metal
detectors #Prospecting #Panning #GoldRush #GoldFever
GoldPanner@outlook.com

David Pritikin
@dpritikin
Emmy Award winning Sr. Executive Producer @Discovery:
Current Shows #DeadliestCatch #TheBait #BeringSeaGold
#Tethered -Past
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Jun 2013
Filming has been in progress this week. Had a strange day
yesterday when Brad had accidental fall from dredge - unusual
for him
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Jun 2013
Want to give credit to my diver, Brad - the one I'm learning
from. And his two sons, Chris & Andrew working with me too.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 12 Jun 2013
Haven't mentioned it before, but my diving skills are improving.
Hope you can see it in the show. Learning from my experienced
diver..
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 11 Jun 2013
Had meeting with some new friends (experienced miners) at
my yurt. Guys that know their business- I now have better plans
for future mining.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Jun 2013
Main seal on pump has been leaking. Trying to dredge despite
problems. Haven't been able to replace it but ordered new one
to arrive Fri
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jun 2013
We did run into trouble with the #Minnow this afternoon but
no one got hurt.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jun 2013
Huge ice chunks kept drifting into my working dredge, causing
danger for diver...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jun 2013
Today, we ran into some danger. Easterly winds caused huge
icebergs to break off the sea ice - many larger than a car.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jun 2013
Here's pix of launching the #Minnow.
pic.twitter.com/D55jKaFWXP
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jun 2013
Successful launch of the #Minnow happened yesterday at
Noon. Both Minnow & Ladder Dredge - #Tadpole are working -
mining is happening!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Jun 2013
Renamed the "Mystic" - name was a bit overdone. Now calling
it the "Minnow" - it's small & grey. Ladder dredge is "Tadpole"
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 30 May 2013
Getting started again. Lots of work to do. Hope to be on the
water quickly.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 26 May 2013
When they finally pulled it off the ice, it was missing a few
things - like main engine, water pump, generator - and I wasn't
anywhere near
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 26 May 2013
Just have to mention this. When Mister Big M (Scott) left he left
his dredge on the ice, then.....
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 26 May 2013
I'm in-transit back to the frigid north. Soon be working on The
Mystic to prepare for summer dredging
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 20 May 2013
Hope I don't disappoint any of you folks - but the name of the
Summer #Dredge will be #Mystic . Maybe it will bring me luck!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 17 May 2013
Only have a short time now to get all the warmth I can get, then
back to the frigid north! But looking forward to the challenge
this summer
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 May 2013
It's still freezing in Nome, but I'm soaking up sun in a southern
clime. Have to get ready for the next round this summer.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 May 2013
My last location had too much overburden & needed a lot of
work to get to the gold layer-then two guys quit and we
couldn't get to it.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 May 2013
Police stopped us, then let us go. Didn't give us too much of a
hard time. We successfully ended the season by not losing any
equipment
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 May 2013
Had a difficult time getting off the ice with only 1 helper. Had to
tow the Diving Sled, Motor Sled & Mothership right past police
station.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 May 2013
Winter dredging was not successful. With 50 hours of diving,
we had 2 1/2 oz gold. The key is finding the gold bearing ground
in summer.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 May 2013
Sorry, I've been away. Wanted to get out of Nome as soon as
we closed down the ice dredging about a week ago, but here's
an update.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Apr 2013
Zeke and I are the last ones on the ice - I'm hoping to catch up -
Zeke is trying to stay ahead (of everyone) - he'll probably do it!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 25 Apr 2013
Haven't cleaned out the sluice box but the tailings are mounting
up - going to keep working this hole until we've cleaned it out.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 25 Apr 2013
Made some modifications to the dredge while it was down.
May be easier to see now. Working a new offshore hole - looks
promising.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 19 Apr 2013
Will be starting up again in a few days. Dredge is down right
now and crew resting.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 18 Apr 2013
Now the filming is over - crew is exhausted and rather cranky -
will have to give them a break before going at it again.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 18 Apr 2013
Photo of the whole camera crew pic.twitter.com/6fbDjXZG7l
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 18 Apr 2013
The last few days have been hectic-filming crews wrapping up
the ice dredging. A photo of my camera men.
pic.twitter.com/mM7suSBkxT
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Apr 2013
Here's a photo of our power sleds
pic.twitter.com/VhoUoYOmLk
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Apr 2013
Well we are on the #gold but having to work at it - not sure
how it's going to turn out yet - but I'm in the running...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 13 Apr 2013
Drilled a new dive hole - "Steve's World on Ice" has hit a jackpot
it seems But not counting the gold til it's in the vial, OK? -
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 10 Apr 2013
It's almost mid-April and 7 degrees in Nome - definitely
springtime in Alaska - almost ready to melt - well, maybe in a
month..
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 9 Apr 2013
Cleaned out every speck of gold from our first site. Moving our
#dredge to new ground - on the river. Got to find another
#hotspot.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 9 Apr 2013
Lucky for me - Emily's friend, a SUPER chef is now our crew
cook. I look forward to every meal!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 7 Apr 2013
Been working steady, so burnt out. Taking a rest and enjoying a
meal prepared by a real Chef!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 4 Apr 2013
Here's a view of our location off the shore of Nome. Sled in on
right, tent on left-viewed from "Mother Ship"
pic.twitter.com/jnULZaHroz
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed GoldFeverProspecting, Cody Moen and
William Brandt

GoldFeverProspecting
@goldfevermining
Owner of Gold Fever Prospecting / Defender of gold
prospecting, placer mining rights. / Mining Equipment design. /
Freedom & civil liberty gadfly &
Cody Moen
@CodyMoenBSG
I am a Bering Sea gold miner/dredger on the Christine Rose.
Also a ice diver,featured on Bering Sea Gold. I prefer my
nuggets dipped in salt
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 4 Apr 2013
We're following a #paystreak - gold is flowing in. Diving is
continuing despite some problems.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 4 Apr 2013
Made a 2 hour dive before air compressor stopped working.
Getting the kinks out of the equipment-getting all working
right. Found gold.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 4 Apr 2013
Diving is happening - in between equipment problems, but
we're on the #gold!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Mar 2013
Next we had a day with the filming crew keeping us out of the
water - now we SHOULD get some diving done today.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Mar 2013
Some delays here - trouble with frozen hoses. Didn't know the
problem for awhile but finally got things working. Too late for
diving.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Mar 2013
I mean, when we're done sucking up all that gold we're going to
find, the hole had better be where we knew it was when we
went down.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Mar 2013
Well - today's the BIG day. Our first dives - we just have to find
the hole in the ice when we're done - not a a big deal, right?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 23 Mar 2013
First things first - had to drill a hole in the ice - but now it's done
- a little resting time
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 22 Mar 2013
So we've managed to complete the dredge set-up, despite all.
We're on the ice - on the claim site and ready to go.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 22 Mar 2013
Been working hard - long haul to our claim site from the
building site, but we made it after a some struggles.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 20 Mar 2013
With snow machines and truck we've made progress getting
operational. Dive shed is ready. "Steve's World on Ice" will soon
be dredging.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 20 Mar 2013
We miss you greatly John Patrick Bunce. May your future be
brighter.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 20 Mar 2013
John Bunce was a very fine young man whose untimely death
from an unfortunate alcoholic binge was very hard on all of us.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 17 Mar 2013
Listening to "Emily Zeke of Bering Sea Gold Show" by Chattin In
Manhattan on #BlogTalkRadio
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/chattininmanhattan/2013/03/1
6/emily-zeke-of-bering-sea-gold-show
BlogTalkRadio
View more photos and videos
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 11 Mar 2013
I've noticed that people who are critical aren't the ones up here
doing it. A few of you should try this "under the ice" thing.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 10 Mar 2013
Weather's been rough, I'm a bit under the weather myself, but
coming back up. If anyone thinks this is easy, try it yourself!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Mar 2013
Summer and winter #GoldDreges are going. Just don't know
how many are actually getting anything out of it.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Mar 2013
The #Gold Rush of this century is happening off the coast of
#Nome with everybody and his brother building a dredge.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 4 Mar 2013
Thanks everyone - lot's of good names on here - will be mulling
'em over and let you know soon.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Mar 2013
I'm particularly looking for names for the summer dredge at the
moment -
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 2 Mar 2013
So I'm looking at names suggested - some are pretty interesting
- could I get more suggestions - and a vote on them?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel retweeted
larry larrington @No1Lazza 28 Feb 2013
@RiedelSteven call it chilled ice! Fits right in with ur chilled out
laid back style of dredging! Lol
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel retweeted
Chris Tranter @TranterC 1 Mar 2013
@RiedelSteven Lean mean gold dredging machine!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
The fourth guy on the team, a newbie, is a mystery guy. Oh boy
is he going to give Zeke a run for his diving money.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
God help us
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
I have got three rad divers working for me. Two are pretty good
fabricators and engineers. All are easy to get along with.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
I am looking for a name for my Water Dredge for the Summer
season
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
Is "Steve's World On Ice" a good name for an ice dredge?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
I am 50% done with my Ice Dredge
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Feb 2013
Oh man, I am back to Nome Friday
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 15 Dec 2012
I am wearing a hand made wool felted jacket whoa it is
awesome from Spokane it will be in Nome with me.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 15 Dec 2012
Oh boy I will trade a loud bar in Spokane for a quiet dive getting
the gold in Nome Alaska.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed ELISA BETH FLYNN, Capt Keith Colburn,
Marketing Support and Social Media Club

ELISA BETH FLYNN
Protected Tweets
@mama2yo
~DRY HUMOR IS HUMOR TOO~ ~DRESS INDESTRUCTIBLE ~

Capt Keith Colburn
Verified account
@crabwizard
Deadliest Catch Captain Keith Colburn of The Wizard. Chef,
Entrepreneur, Speaker on leadership & team building. Strong
safety & sustainable fisherie
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 1 Dec 2012
Nurvosesos to get back to work on Ice dredging in Nome
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 1 Dec 2012
Eating, I can't see the food anymore, I ate it?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 1 Dec 2012
I looked it up. Nome Alaska has 7 hours of daylight Feb. 1
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Nov 2012
What happens in Nome does not stay in Nome, no, I tweet it
right a way.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 27 Nov 2012
Nome gold is waiting, under a fresh layer of November ice, for
our return, no, just waiting.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Oct 2012
The wind wips the yurt gently tonight, it's 28 degrees f. On
many nights this Summer the yurt was so loud as to wake me in
the night
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 13 Oct 2012
Gold is not too easy to find
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 13 Oct 2012
I am going to get a easy job, like, like, what?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 13 Oct 2012
The mining in Nome has been horrible. Of the 120 days in the
season we have been able to mine only 20 days
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 19 May 2012
Vacation in Homer, who would have thought?
Replied to 0 times



Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 17 May 2012
It was quite dark under the ice. For about two weeks, we had
some underwater lights near the dive hole
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 17 May 2012
I was scared a lot
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 17 May 2012
I learned a lot about how to ice dive
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 17 May 2012
Ice diving was a great adventure
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 3 May 2012
I am sitting a breakfast with four very tired miners. They are full
of great humor. We move the operation to a new hole.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 3 May 2012
Nome has has a cold trend now. Snow and winter have
returned
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 3 May 2012
We have been diving under the ice for two and a half weeks. It
is still scary when I go down
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Apr 2012
The ice is three feet thick, the water 28degrees. It is ice diving
for gold on the Bering Sea
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 16 Mar 2012
Arrrg, the video of Vern and Kaptain Kangaroo fighting won't
load on #Discovery.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 16 Mar 2012
I might not be in the finale of #BeringSeaGold. I left in middle-
last Sepember.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Mar 2012
At the #Bering Sea Gold aftershow, Scott blamed everything but
himself for the Wild Ranger's lousy season.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Mar 2012
#Discovery reminded me of hours and hours waiting for the
weather to clear, waiting to go mining.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 14 Mar 2012
At the post-season filming of #Discovery Bering Sea Gold we
had a great time remembering how Emily became a gold miner
Replied to 0 times
teve Riedel @RiedelSteven 13 Mar 2012
#Discovery brought #Bering Sea Gold's cast together in CA.
What a hoot. We are a wild bunch.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 13 Mar 2012
The #Bering Sea cast is in Santa Barbara for the Post Season
show. Shawn and I are getting to know one another, A heck of a
guy
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 12 Mar 2012
In California, going to Alaska soon, by car!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 12 Mar 2012
We are with #Discovery. We are working harder than we were
in Nome, on the Bering Sea
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 9 Mar 2012
Dredgeing in the Bering Sea is in and out, hot and cold, yes and
no, in and out, wrong when its right
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 9 Mar 2012
Gold is fun, cause it makes dredge work happen. Bering sea
knows this
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 9 Mar 2012
Lets have the Post Season Show LIVE, eh Discovery?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 9 Mar 2012
Tues. March 13, and Wed. the 14, Bering Sea Cast will create
wild in Santa Barbara. Be there!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed Ian Foster, Sean Martin, Discovery and
EditrixFussylush

Ian Foster
@Sluiceyfoster
I am a full-time caretaker for a beard. The rest is details.

Sean Martin
@SeanMartin
Ninth Ave vagabond. TV Nerd. Margarita Connoisseur.
Bootcamp Fiend. Proud Jorts/Tank Aficionado. PR Director
@Discovery. Hi.
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 Mar 2012
This might have no bering, gold or not, but I have got to get this
out
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 Mar 2012
I just saw the documentary on Harry Nilsson. Sad all the
creative people that fell hard
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 Mar 2012
@DitaVonTeese Back in the day, people used to spray Bear
spray on there bodies. Not as fun as discovery of gold in the
bering sea
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 Mar 2012
@EmilyRiedel23 Just write in little bites, that is the secret to
gold mining in Nome, discovery of gold in the bering sea
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 8 Mar 2012
@EmilyRiedel23All bow to the godz of Discovery
Replied to 0 times
teve Riedel @RiedelSteven 7 Mar 2012
It is OK to think Discovery is rude when it takes our gold away
from us in Nome on the Bering Sea.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 7 Mar 2012
I think I would like to dive for gold underneath the ice during
the winter. Discovery?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 7 Mar 2012
In Nome, diving for gold is the funnest thing to do in town.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 7 Mar 2012
Discovery can't capture a tenth of what goes on reality gold
dredging
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 7 Mar 2012
@EmilyRiedel23 @pinterest I don't get this tweet suff very
much
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Mar 2012
Did not happen. Emily Has Major STEEL!!!!!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Mar 2012
How come a woman who can come up to Nome, do everything
to learn how to dive and mine for Gold, cry and instantly
become a wimp?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Mar 2012
Bering sea Gold, Emily Riedel brushes with danger, on her way
from hot tubbing near Nome Alaska
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 6 Mar 2012
bering sea gold. Jason the man moves his way up the gold
seeking ladder with talk to Zeke Tenhoff, expert gold dude
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@GratefuIly_Dead Which boat would you be on? With what
crew?
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@shawnbloom @GaryTosco It is exciting. I love to do it. I like
Brooklyn too.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@ATLtvguy It is worth the lack of sleep to stay up that late?
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@ExcelerateHD This is a great experience yes?
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@TeamMOODUS Which is best episode?
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@cbrown21390 @DaRealOtisMoss INTENSE?? try it in real life.
With a bozo screaming at you.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Galactic1950 What mistakes, I wasn't on that epesode.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@AdamLav2 What in particular did you like?
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@taylorgriggs8 Mining for gold is an affermation of life.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Mike_Brassell @ty_zagame Bering sea gold diver here. May
get up there to dive under the ice.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@baltimorepacman I need 777 to watch TV
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Raya_sunshiine Even birds lilke gold!!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@DominiquedenH What you think? Next year, better stuff,
more real.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@seanambler @Discovery I would love to know that. And if you
watch, tweet me to tell me what you think about Seagull
attacks.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Kevcorp23 @shalomshuli AND, as a bonus, we make
ourselves look like morons>
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@kjhass I am German, not Viking. I don't BBQ
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@TheMightEQuinn I am down, send me a ticket, and some cash
please
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Nathanplz Mee too!!!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@SincererlyAlexB #peep it once for me!!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@DSauce79 @ltrainstein Can I come?
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Minorcan1970 Better think about it and research, it is much
harder than it looks
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
The Clark, on Bering Sea Gold, was blessed to have Emily Riedel.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
Emily Riedel is one of the most steely, brave, naturaly gifted
athletes I have ever skied, swam. ran, climbed, raced, mined for
gold with.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
Nome Alaska is being bombarded with depression creating
waves from space.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
Everyone wants gold from Nome, it is the best.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
The Bearing Sea is no place for hotheads.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
Discovery should know the difference between good drama
and first season hype. Gold is the means...
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 5 Mar 2012
@Scubababe007 Kick me off the boat for what? I am the best
crew on that boat!!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 1 Mar 2012
As "Bering Sea" develops, you will find the Characters (me),
developing their lessor talents.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 1 Mar 2012
@katherinen The more one develops their genius, the better
the world is. That applies to every human on the planet.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel followed Frozenplanet, Maia KG, Katherine Nelson
and Gretchen Palek

Frozenplanet
@frozenplanetski
Ski and snowboard holidays, news and sweet stuff!

Maia KG
@MaiaKG
Snr digi manager & influencer relations @webershandwick,
former social manager @Discovery, @umich alum, southpaw,
always on the hunt for a
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Feb 2012
@katherinen @alecbaldwin @discovery If I say so myself.
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
teve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Feb 2012
@katherinen @alecbaldwin @discovery Hey, how does
somebody with a great radio voice get some of that narration
stuff?
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Feb 2012
@Scubababe007 Yea, there was way too much of it. Crazy!!
View conversation
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel retweeted
Rhonda Evans @Scubababe007 27 Feb 2012
#THINKGOLDITSFRIDAY, love the drama on Bering Sea Gold.
Kick Steve off the boat!!!!!!! Then Emily, they are
father/daughter...so crazy!
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Feb 2012
I really am looking forward to seeing winter again. I have been
in America for the winter, and it has been warm here.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 29 Feb 2012
@Randall_L I agree that I am disfunctional in Nome. Nome is a
disfunctional place. I am there for the gold, not the social life.
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 28 Feb 2012
bering sea gold
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 28 Feb 2012
Mutiny On The Wild Ranger Doesn't Go As Planned On 'Bering
Sea Gold' (VIDEO) http://huff.to/yG0a81 via @HuffingtonPost
Replied to 0 times
Steve Riedel @RiedelSteven 30 Jan 2012
Reality TV is not for wimps
Replied to 0 times



Andy Kelly
Diver, Reaper
Comments

Meet Andy Kelly from the Reaper, featured on Discovery's
BERING SEA GOLD.
DCL
Andys story is similar to that of his older brother, Kris: he is
also a painter in Hawaii during the off-season, and was
introduced to mining early by his father, Brad.
A hard worker, Andy hopes to make enough money to travel
and live with his girlfriend in San Diego.
He could be successful this season -- if he can keep his temper
under control.

Meet Kris Kelly from the Reaper, featured on Discovery's
BERING SEA GOLD.
DCL
Brad Kelly's eldest son, Kris, began mining in California with his
dad and younger brother Andy. When mining was outlawed in
that state, the family moved to Hawaii.
Kris spends the off-season in Hawaii, where he is a house
painter and loves to surf.
After a failed season with Steve Riedel, Kris is now working with
his dad and brother on their own operation.
So far, Kris seems like the only one to take the dredge seriously.
Can he get the rest of his family on board?
Top of Form

Bottom of Form
Camden 15 days ago
I really like the Kelly brothers, they have loyalty to each other
and I love that Andrew says his mom is his best friend. I am
starting to get really irritated at the shady dad, seriously earn
your keep or don't take a share at all! And Kris cracks me up,
he has a real child like way about him. I really want to see
these two brothers succeed, they really are good guys, and
they deserve some success.
John Bono 19 days ago
Why is dad getting more than 1/3 rd of the money for doing
nothing but slow you down? I would send my pops packing if
he treated me & my bros like that.
Renee Aldrete 21 days ago
Been watching all of you guys, great show, hope all continues
to go well,
Andrew Kelly a month ago
Who the hell writes this crap I dont have a girlfriend and I sure
as hell dont live in san diego
Dawson Hayes 2 months ago
Lol, this man has talent as a diver, I mean he's chasing his
dreams at the bottom of the ocean but let's be honest, he's
facing his reality on the surface. He could put his scuba diving
to a much greater purpose.
mickey esham 7 months ago
if you jumped my claim you wouldn't have to worry about
building onto your hawaiian shack!!
Camden 15 days ago
I really like the Kelly brothers, they have loyalty to each other
and I love that Andrew says his mom is his best friend. I am
starting to get really irritated at the shady dad, seriously earn
your keep or don't take a share at all! And Kris cracks me up,
he has a real child like way about him. I really want to see
these two brothers succeed, they really are good guys, and
they deserve some success.
John Bono 19 days ago
Why is dad getting more than 1/3 rd of the money for doing
nothing but slow you down? I would send my pops packing if
he treated me & my bros like that.

Renee Aldrete 21 days ago
Been watching all of you guys, great show, hope all continues
to go well,
Andrew Kelly a month ago
Who the hell writes this crap I dont have a girlfriend and I sure
as hell dont live in san diego
Dawson Hayes 2 months ago
Lol, this man has talent as a diver, I mean he's chasing his
dreams at the bottom of the ocean but let's be honest, he's
facing his reality on the surface. He could put his scuba diving
to a much greater purpose.
mickey esham 7 months ago
if you jumped my claim you wouldn't have to worry about
building onto your hawaiian shack!!
Michelle Parker a day ago
Love this guy. Feel like he carries the weight of his family on
his shoulders. I commend him for having the strength to do
so. Kudos to you Kris! Xoxo
rudimentalist 10 days ago
The Kelly brothers need to ditch their dad. I understand there
is some bond with blood and all, but he is doing nothing to
make the venture succeed. He steals from his own sons, and
they allow him to do it. They would do better working for
someone else, saving enough for their own startup, and get
moving toward success.
mike 14 days ago
The Kelly brothers as a team is unbeatable. Hope they get a
backer to branch out together
ted morrison 14 days ago
already talked on your dads site but I hope you and your
bother get things together and work hard and keep your nose
to the grind stone and you will make some good money. you
are going to either have to fix your dads greed or break out on
your own with your brother for you can do it bud just work
hard theres no magic to making money just keep that suction
hose sucking dirt and at the end of the day there will be gold
in the box some days better then others but keep your chin
up and keep it going and it will work but if you don't watch
your diver when hes in the water and keep the suction going
then you might was well go to bingo and you will probley have
better luck on making some money so keep your head on
straight and keep the dredge going strong and you wont be
sorry its that easy so good luck ill be watching and hoping that
you will make it with your brother .
John Bono 19 days ago
Why is dad getting more than 1/3 rd of the money for doing
nothing but slow you down? I would send my pops packing if
he pulled that crap.
iamoppo a month ago
wtf they were my neighbors in Hawaii
William a month ago
You people have no clue what your talking about. The Kelly
brothers are a couple of honest hard working guys trying to
make a living like everyone eles out there. They are not theifs.
I hope they find more gold than anyone eles on the ice this
season.
mickey esham 7 months ago
You don't even watch over you diver! you are too busy
feeding your stupid face!!
Stacey Adkins 7 months ago
Awesome dude! Love the Kelly Brothers!
mickey esham Stacey Adkins 7 months ago
you must be another half-assed crook!!
DirtyHouseGuy 7 months ago
Love to watch the brothers work togther!
couchtripper 7 months ago
watching the latest episode, this guy and his brother are just
crooks. I hope they both get the response they deserve.
Meet Steve Riedel
Captain & Diver, Steve's World
Comments
Meet Steve Reidel, featured on Discovery's BERING SEA GOLD.
Discovery Communications
First, Steve Riedel was fired off the Wild Ranger (three times
over). Then, he tried his hand at an ice mining operation (but
failed). Next, he captained a summer dredge (until it was
repossessed).
Still, Steves hoping for a change with his sixinch winter
dredge. Hes scaling down, only working with young veteran
miner, Dale.
Steve and Dale are planning on pulling out all the stops this
summer when they bring up an underwater tractor.
Steve is highly intelligent, charming, and obviously -- a
uniquely Alaskan character.

Kensington Lane 3 days ago
When you gettin yer own show dude? You seem better with
less responsibilities. Have you been taking something for your
mental health? I like this Steve much better than "minnow
steve"
Jim Watson 14 days ago
Steve is a living example of how LSD damages a brain beyond
repair.
His daughter is "emilating" (see what i did there?) his actions
and lack of wisdom.
But hey, reality tv needs losers to be real.
Kensington Lane Jim Watson 3 days ago
Steve has a hard time with delegating his authoritEye. He is
more normal when he is at the bottom. That's all it is. Steve is
really misunderstood because he doesn't know who he is
himself in the authority position. This is why he comes off as
an asshole.

Kyle Pratt a month ago
Show me an example of his high intelligence. He can't get
along with his crew, daughter or fellow miners. He has a
horrible work ethic, He stays in bed when he should be
working. He is full of excuses . Please stop paying this guy to
be on the show. I don't want to see him fail again.
Joe Branham 6 months ago
he is not intelligent at all or charming
brm373 7 months ago
What a goof!
Marko Kraljevic brm373 7 months ago
It gets even worse in season 3, which is on Discovery ATM. It's
unbelievable how much of a nut case he is and how he's still
managing to operate there; probably gonna end up in jail for a
while, or homeless, unless it's not his credit and cash that he's
throwing away. xD
Matthew Miller 7 months ago
What a f*^&wit.. I've never seen anyone so stupid in my life.
What a loser.
BRM-373 Matthew Miller 6 months ago
Steve would have to progress three levels up the food chain
to be called stupid
johnboss 7 months ago
can you say psycho? this guy is def in need of medication..
mickey esham 7 months ago
are you for real or a figment of my imagination? hopefully the
latter!