 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sake, and we are at the fifth annual Raw Science Film Festival. We have been celebrating incredible films in science and technology, inspiring the next generation of builders, and giving them really epic awards for their good work. It's a long time coming that we celebrate scientists with this much health and figure. So, we are now blessed to be talking to Dr. Kip Thorne. Hello. Hi, how are you? Great to see you. Thank you so much for chatting with us. We really appreciate it. For those that don't know, Kip is a Nobel Laureate in 2017 in physics. He has had waves and waves, get it? Gravitational waves of impact on our world in physics and so much more. So, Kip, I usually start off with a big history perspective on civilization. We find ourselves here as stewards of earth after such a long time of evolution, and we're kind of hockey sticking up in population and exponential technologies. What is your current synthesis of humanity? Humanity should take great joy in the world and great joy in each other. We are in this all together, and we need to behave like we're all together, and like we're all friends, and we're all in a quest to enjoy the universe and explore the universe. And what can we best do to increase the awareness of others to the point of that we are all in this quest to enjoy life on earth together and go outward into the cosmos? I think that film plays a big role in inspiring and educating, particularly inspiring, in making people adopt some view of each other and of the world. And so, the film is powerful, and that's why we're here, celebrating the Ross Science Film Festival, celebrating the synthesis between science and film and the effectiveness of film in promoting some understanding of and belief in, faith in, enthusiasm about science. Agreed. This is one of the most powerful mediums, is video, and we can leverage it to disseminate the feelings of unity to more people around the world. Kip, I think it's really important to talk about this. You've been at the edge of knowledge. There's kind of a base camp of knowledge that we learn in school, and then there's an edge of knowledge, which is you get yourself out to where it's the cutting edge of what humans know about a specific field. And you've been there in physics, and you've been there pushing and pushing continuously that edge. What drives you to that edge of knowledge and what sustains you at the edge of knowledge? I think a big part of it is not having lost the curiosity that I was born with. If you take a little child, age three or four or five, the child is just full of questions about the universe, and that gets beat out of them all too often. Fortunately, it didn't get beat out of me, and so here I am, and here's what I have done for my whole career is keeping trying to understand questions through the drive, to understand the drive of curiosity, human curiosity. That curiosity, that's right, that's right. You're retaining it as a lifelong learner throughout our entire life. Okay, and then what would be obviously curiosity, but give us maybe two more principles that we should embody to maximize our ability to get from that base camp out to the edges of knowledge? I think that in the quest to understand the universe, as in so many other human quests, the learning how to concentrate and focus, learning how to select the things you work on, the select the things you pay attention to is tremendously important. It's really in many ways much more important than the actual specific knowledge that you're taught in school, and it is something that I throughout my career I tried to ingrain into my students. That focus and concentration is so crucial, especially in the exponential age of information as well and distraction, susceptibility to distraction, that's a very powerful one, and do we live in a very mathematical universe? At times it seems like we're learning more and more code about how it's run. Well, when you go deep into the nature of the universe, you discover that the laws of nature which control the universe and control how things change in the natural universe, those laws are written in the language of mathematics. So mathematics does not tell us what the laws are, but you have to master mathematics in order to understand the laws, in order to deal with the laws, in order to make predictions, in order to use the laws for technology. So mathematics is a crucial and central tool in technology as well as science. Kip, is our next evolution of humans from single cell, multi cell, human artificial general intelligence? Is that our next evolutionary step? I don't know. I suspect our next evolutionary step in some sense is a synthesis between artificial intelligence and our intelligence and learning to work with machines or they may be some biologically based machines that are smarter than we are in some ways, but they are very, not at all likely to be smarter than we are in some crucial ways. Like from the heart? Well, from the heart, but also it's going to be a long time until I think that artificial intelligence has the levels of creativity that the human mind has, but we'll see. I think the synthesis between human minds and efforts and machine minds is going to be the key, at least over the next 20, 30, 40 years. And what is the next area of math and physics that gives you the most excitement for us to make new discoveries in? For me, the biggest quest is to understand the birth of the universe, to understand the laws that govern the birth of the universe. Those laws we don't know, we don't understand. They're called the laws of quantum gravity, but I hope that by the time I die, and I plan to live to 110, so that that gives me some 40, no 30 years more. We're going to cry genetically freeze you and then we'll keep you on thought. I want to enjoy every step along the way, but I hope that by that time, I think it's likely by that time, we will have these laws of quantum gravity in our hands. We will be beginning to explore the birth of the universe using them and understand how this all came to be. What would you hypothesize is what caused this to come to be? I don't know. As they said, just like a scientist. What do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? Well, to me, people are the most beautiful thing in the world. And what specific aspects for you? I think they are the entity that gives me the greatest joy. Second greatest is making a great scientific discovery. I love it, Kip. I love it. And I'll keep this short. We'll let you get going. We'll hopefully have you on our show for longer format conversation, more deeper depth into things soon. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Thank you, Kip, for coming on. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Give us your thoughts in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you. Support great people like Kip, Raw Science, Film Festival, shows like our simulation. Go and build the future, everyone. Much love, and we'll see you soon. Peace.