#909 Paul Halpern: The Allure of the Multiverse

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host as always Ricardo Lops. And today I'm joined by Doctor Paul Halpern. He is Professor of Physics at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He is the author of several books. And today we're focusing on his latest one, the Allure of the Multiverse, extra dimensions, other worlds and parallel universes. So Paul, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to everyone.

00:26 Paul Halpern: My pleasure to thank you for having me on your show, Ricardo.

00:30 Ricardo Lopes: So let's start with this then. Uh I know that in the book, you go through a little bit actually of the history behind the idea of the multiverse and the UX you of of course, focus mostly on physics, but you also talk about the ideas of some philosophers, for example. So do you know how old is the idea of the multiverse actually?

00:56 Paul Halpern: Well, it's interesting because the term multiverse goes back to William James who was a, a writer and uh and also kind of an early psychologist. And uh he talked about the psychological idea of a multiverse back in the 19th century uh as kind of a morally ambiguous universe, that a universe that was neither good nor evil and was pretty much ambivalent to whether someone is good, someone is evil. So he called it kind of a moral multiverse. But that's just a term. I don't think he meant that in the sense of parallel universes and the idea of parallel universes and science really took off in the 19 seventies and 19 eighties and especially in this century, in the 21st century, the idea really became popular but going all the way back to the people like Giordano, Bruno, uh you know, the Italian uh philosopher, that's when people start talking about many worlds out there, worlds that might be similar to earth. And Bruno, of course, famously was burned at the stake for writing that there are an infinite number of worlds out there. And some of those could be, you know, inhabited and like earth. And he speculated about this and that was considered uh heresy blasphemy by the Roman inquisition. And, you know, sadly, he was killed by the Roman inquisition for, for that heresy and other heresies. And then around the same time, Galileo, who was a little bit higher placed, he had more connections. So he wasn't uh luckily he wasn't executed, but he also speculated about, you know, many worlds out there. And then in the 19th century, based upon Newtonian physics, Newtonian determinism, uh people start figuring out that if you have a finite number of elements a finite number of possibilities. But an infinite universe eventually all the combinations would start to repeat themselves. So just like if you're playing uh the game of chess, eventually you run out of moves and would repeat the same moves. They're not an infinite number of moves in chess. Similarly, uh if you had an infinite universe, but a finite number of elements and a finite number of possibilities, eventually, you would have something like Earth recreated and the philosopher, while the the revolutionary uh Luis Blanc Blanche in France, while he was imprisoned in a fortress for revolutionary activity, speculated that there might be um many, many copies of Earth out there that some of them might be exact, some of them might be inexact. And maybe some of the things that play out on Earth would happen in some of the other universes such as, you know, French revolution and so forth. So it's kind of interesting to think about this. But now we know that the universe is expanding and accelerating its expansion. So and it might be that there is a duplicate Earth out there, but it would be so far away from us will be well beyond the possibility of observation, well beyond the observable universe, because the sheer probability of creating uh something that's exactly like the Earth would be so minimal that it would take far longer than the than the time length of the Big Bang and far greater than the size of the observable universe to recreate something like that. So it's, it's pretty much impossible.

04:50 Ricardo Lopes: So one idea that you mentioned there, the fact that people at a certain point notice that if there are a limited number of possible arrangements of matter, then if time is infinite, then eventually the same configurations would repeat themselves over time. That's actually something that comes around also in Nietzsche, right? And the idea of the eternal return because I, I guess that in that aspect, he was influenced by some uh physicists back in the 19th century, right? Yeah.

05:28 Paul Halpern: So Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher um came up with the idea of eternal return. And uh he unlike uh Eastern philosophers, he talked about an exact repetition of history. Um So he imagined that his life and all of its pain and suffering and some joy, mostly a little bit of joy would um repeat itself sometime in the future just based upon the idea of chance reoccurrence. So, you know, for any kind of game with finite elements, I mentioned chess, but also the game of tiktok Toe with Xs and Os. Eventually you just run out of moves. And Tik Tok Toe, if you're familiar with it has a square, has nine uh elements in a square with Xs and Os is the only possibilities. And it's, it could be a boring game if you play it long enough because you repeat the same moves again and again. And similarly, Nietzsche thought that his life will repeat itself. But if we estimate how long it would take for earth to repeat itself, uh It was, you know, far, far, far, you know, almost unimaginably far longer than the history of the universe. So it's, it's incredibly unlikely as people like uh Nietzsche's contemporary Ludwig Boltzmann pointed out Boltzmann talked about the idea of the arrow of time and increasing entropy. People said, hey, wait a minute, things could randomly come together again. But the estimate of that happening, it's just incredibly improbable. So uh normally we don't have to worry about it.

07:21 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm But uh let me just ask you one question since you mentioned Giordano Bruno there earlier and also Galileo and I, we're talking about Nietzsche because if I understand it correctly, uh For example, Giordano Bruno was uh talking back then in the 16 century or so about there being other worlds. But by worlds, I guess he was referring mostly to planets, other planets like earth out there, I mean, but so uh and if those people are mostly talking about uh other worlds in our universe or in the case of Nietzsche inside of our universe, things repeating themselves over time. Uh That isn't exactly the same thing as a multiverse. Yeah,

08:13 Paul Halpern: that is an excellent point. And that's why I say the modern idea of a multiverse, actual multiverse started in really in the 19 seventies when you had Bryce de Witt popularizing the idea of Hugh Everett of um what's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that's a name that Dewitt uh almost coined. He said many universes, but it became many worlds. And then Brandon Carter took that idea and turned it into the, you know, variation of it into the anthropic principle. And then later, other scientists took that idea to try to explain fine tuning and I'm sure we'll talk about that later. But that was an actual idea of something beyond the physical universe. But, you know, our scope has expanded over the centuries. So of course, um in a time of Pythagoras, the time of the ancient Greeks, no one imagined that there was really anything beyond earth. And maybe the, you know, the Pythagorean talked about a central fire, but they talked about 10 objects including the celestial sphere, which was, you know, this the dome of stars and that was kind of considered something fixed out there, not something with, you know, unlimited objects, but something that was just kind of this fixed dome, fixed uh element. And um you know, these planets, but we had no idea what the scope of the the galaxy was, let alone the universe. And then of course, in the time of Galileo and Bruno, we started to think about um other stars, other planets uh but they weren't known yet and it was only in the 19 nineties, believe it or not that um astronomers detected the first exoplanets beyond the solar system. And that was, you know, when we got to confirm that hypothesis, finally, Bruno hypothesis that there are actually other planets around other stars. And now most astronomers think that there are trillions of planets out there. You know, just based upon the ones we've found so far, the thousands of ones we've found so far, if you extrapolate, there are likely planets around most stars. So we can talk about trillions of planets out there. But then within, you know, within the last 100 years, believe it or not. Um That's when we discovered other Galaxies. It was only really in 1926 with the observations of Edwin Hubble that we showed that the Andromeda nebula as it was called, it was thought to be a gas cloud was really an object outside of, of our own own galaxy. And that resolved what was called the great debate over whether or not the milky way was the only object give or take a few things in the periphery or if there are numerous Galaxies out there.

11:26 Ricardo Lopes: And how do physicists themselves uh think about the multiverse? And are there different conceptualizations of what the multiverse might be among

11:39 Paul Halpern: physicists? Yeah. So there are many different multiverses which can be a little bit confusing and none of them are really like the cultural idea of the multiverse, which you can also talk about, which is the multiverse in movies. So everyone imagines in movies, you know, you wake up and you, you go through a portal and you see a near identical version of yourself or you see, you know, a, a superhero that has a different origin story, like a different Spiderman or different, you know, different version of ultra or whatever, like different superheroes. But uh you know, in, in physics, the multiverse ideas are confined to either something having to do with the very small or something having to do with the very large. So either quantum multiverse or a cosmological multiverse. And the quantum multiverse is usually called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that was developed by Hugh Everett the third who was a student of the great American physicist John Wheeler, who I who I had the pleasure of meeting before he passed away, very interesting fellow. And whoever it proposed the idea that when you take a quantum measurement, you the observer do not affect the measurement, uh you do not influence the measurement. So then the question arises, how come you get an exact result? Whereas we know in quantum physics, you have a blending of possibilities before the measurement is taken. How do you get an exact result when the measurement was taken? And the old idea, the orthodox idea is that the measurer collapses the wave function down to one possibility like knocking over a a stack of of cards and collapsing it down to a single pile. Well Everett's idea is that the measurer does not affect anything. Rather the measurer sees all the possibilities, all the the different outcomes at once. Well, how can that happen? Because the measurers conscious uh conscious record says, I see one observation. So that must mean that the measures consciousness branches out into multiple possibilities. And each version of the conscious observer sees a different value or a different outcome of the measurement. So there's a branching of human beings that matches the branching of quantum outcomes and that all matches up with a universal wave function that never collapses. But there's all these possibilities out there in different enclaves of the universe. So that gives you parallel universes. So that's a quantum idea and cosmology. It's the possibility of other bubble universes out there aside from the Big Bang. So aside from uh our own Big Bang, that there are other universes expanding out there just beyond the range of observation. And that for some people is more palatable because that's not something that's happening all the time. This is something that um happens, you know, with a cosmogenesis event, a uni universe creation event. And it almost seems in a way logical if our universe is created in a in a relatively easy way through um you know, the observable universe created in a process called inflation that maybe inflation happens, you know, elsewhere in in reality.

15:34 Ricardo Lopes: And so those are the main reasons uh why the theoretical physicists have theorized about the possible multiverse is I, is it for with, with the idea of explaining those aspects of our reality?

15:56 Paul Halpern: Yes. Well, we want to explain the observable universe and we want to explain the observable results from quantum measurements. So we know that when we take a quantum measurement, we get um if we repeat the measurement, we, we might get different outcomes. But we can, if we repeat the measurement enough times, we can map out the probabilities of those various outcomes. So we know that there's a certain amount of chance, we know that there's a certain range of possibilities. We know that we don't always get the same possibility. And we know that um that the uh results uh can only be precise for certain parameters that we, because of Eise Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that we can't measure position pre precisely and the momentum precisely at the same time. So these are things we know the question is how to explain it. And there are many different ways to explain quantum measurement. Uh Similarly, we know that the universe on the largest scale is very even very regular. If we look in one direction, we see pretty much the same number of Galaxies as in the complete opposite direction. If we look and measure the cosmic radiation background, the temperature of it is very, very close to the same in all directions, there's slight variations. So the question is how do we get such uniformity. Is it just a coincidence or is there some reason that the universe smoothed out in the beginning that led to the idea of inflation? And then it turns out that inflation is pretty easy to produce in Einstein's general theory of relativity by just having the right energy configuration, the right energy set up. So um so Andre Linday, the Russian born um cosmologist who's now at Stanford University, came up with the idea of an eternal inflation, which is that this happens repeatedly. But I should say that the idea of the multiverse really became popular when people started grappling with the idea that the cosmological constant of the universe, which is a anti kind of anti gravity parameter that's causing the universe to slightly accelerate um over time um seems very large by one calculation, calculating the quantum energy background. So if you look at empty space, it's not really empty, it has particles that are popping in and out of emptiness. And if you add up the energy of all those particles, you get something that could be called the cosmological constant. And let me explain what the cosmological constant is. When Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, which is how space and time uh create gravity through their curvature. He realized that he wasn't getting stable results, he was getting results that would either contract or expand. And it was when he developed that was, that was before hubble's um proof as it turns out that the universe is expanding and he thought he made a mistake. So he added the cosmological constant as a stabilizing term, which kind of pushes the universe outward to stabilize it against gravity to make it a steady universe, a static universe. But then uh he dropped that idea. He said it was a big mistake that he shouldn't have even introduced it. But ideas tend to persist. And in 1998 2 teams of cosmologists used um uh observations of the universe to show that not only is the universe expanding, it's accelerating in its expansion. So something is pushing it out faster and faster over time. And that must be something which sometimes is called dark energy. But you could also use a cosmological constant as a way of modeling that dark dark energy that cosmological constant turns out to be very, very small because if it were big, it would have affected uh the development of stars Galaxies and so forth. It would have made it impossible for structure to form. So it's this really, really minute cosmological constant. So you don't feel it until billions of years into the history of the universe. So the 1st 5 billion years of so the history of the universe, you don't feel this anti gravity push and stars can form Galaxies form earth forms, everything forms just nice. But then later in the history of the universe, suddenly you start feeling this outward push and the universe starts to speed up in its expansion because this cosmological constant term is small. But people in quantum field theory calculate the cosmological constant based on the energy of empty space. And they say it must be huge. So the question is why in reality, you have a small cosmological constant. But really based on quantum field theory, you should have a large one. And the answer that some people have is that maybe the universe is really a multiverse and that you have all these expanding universes out there. And each of them has its own cosmological constant and that some of them are enormous and some of them are moderate. And we happen to be in an outlier, we happen to be in the very, very odd strange universe that has a tiny cosmological constant. So, um you know, so we are just in this really bizarre universe that has a small cosmo cosmological constant. But it's lucky that we are because that's the only way stars can form and Galaxies can form and life can form. And that's why we're here because we happen to be in a universe with a tiny cosmological constant and all the other universes with the large cosmological constants never formed structure. So there was no one there to say, hey, we're in a universe with a large cosmological constant.

22:41 Ricardo Lopes: So you mentioned Einstein there and of course, if theorize about the space time continuum and about 1/4 dimension of reality. Does this idea of going above the three dimensions also connect in any way to the idea of the multiverse or not?

23:03 Paul Halpern: Well, the idea of dimensions is very interesting. Uh DIMENSIONS is a little bit of a strange concept because we know that there are three tangible physical dimensions. You know, if we, we can, you know, walk north and south, we can walk east and west or we can jump up and down. Those are the three ways we can move. Uh So those are the physical dimensions. But then at some point, people started saying, even in the late 19th century, that time has a quality that resembles a dimension. Uh BECAUSE uh you can imagine things changing over time just like they might be different in different directions in space. And that was idea was solidified. Uh When Herman Mankowski in 1907 said that Einstein's special theory of relativity was best developed in 44 dimensions. And finally, after a few years of saying, oh dimensions, four dimension is kind of an abstract concept and not really liking it. Einstein adopted the fourth dimension and used it in his general theory of relativity. So that's pretty well accepted. But around the time that Einstein proposed General Relativity, a phys, a mathematician uh Theodore Kaluza who was in uh East Prussia and part of then part of Germany, a German empire um wrote to Einstein and said, hey, wait a minute, maybe you can add another force to your theory, electricity and magnetism, which we call electromagnetism by adding an extra dimension to your theory and having 1/5 dimension that uh we don't detect but still comes into the theory. So that's the Kusa idea of the fifth dimension. And later someone named Oscar Klein connected with qua quantum physics. So now we call that Kusa Klein um higher dimensional theory. And Klein proposed the idea that the higher dimension was kind of curled up into a very tight circle, kind of like if you look at a piece of spaghetti or a piece of pasta, and you look at not the long part of it, but we look at the radius of it. It's very, very tiny. So if you were observing a piece of spaghetti from a great distance, it would just look like a one dimensional object, it would look like a straight line. You wouldn't be able to tell that it has a thickness. And similarly in the uh Calusa Klein picture, um the higher dimension, the fifth dimension is curled up so tightly into such a tight little circle that we never really detect it, that's impossible to detect. Well, um if you look later in the history of physics, string theory was developed starting in the 19 eighties as this idea that particles are not really particles, but they're energetic strands that are vibrating and their vibrations create the particle categories. But mathematicians discovered that string theory does not mathematically make sense. It's mathematically inconsistent unless you put it into a 10 dimensional theory at least. And so you need to add not just 1/5 dimension, but you need to add six more dimensions beyond space and time. So, uh so you have 10 dimensions. And um in a related topic called Super Gravity, um people like Eugene Kremer and Bernard Julia in France developed the idea of spontaneous compact application. Um And I think that was developed in the late 19 seventies, this idea that um all the other dimensions would collapse and you would only see four of the dimensions, but the other dimensions would just, you know, become crushed into something that's undetectable. And um other physicists found that there are many, many, many different ways that this collapse of the higher dimensions can occur and many different possible geometries for the higher dimension. Once it's collapsed, it turns out to be 10 to the 500 power possibilities for this kind of collapse into 10 to the 500 power types of geometries. And you could think of those geometries kind of like pretzels, not just rings but or doughnuts, but all these different twisty pretzels, you know, and imagine 10 with a 500 zeros possibilities. And each of these can lead to its own universe model its own physics. And um some physicists talk about, you know, 10 to the 500 possible universes out there, each with its own um type of what we call internal geometry. Um INTERNAL meaning that you don't really see it as opposed to external geometry. So that's another yet another idea of the multiverse is that to try to explain why we're in one particular type of universe. But there's all these other possibilities out there, 10 to the 500 other possibilities out there, which is very, very perplexing. And that's how dimensions comes into the picture of the multiverse models.

29:12 Ricardo Lopes: And so these universes with different configurations. WW should we expect them to also have different laws of physics?

29:23 Paul Halpern: Yes. So they would have uh not necessarily uh super different laws like you might like, you might think if you know naively physics, you say, OK, force equals mass times acceleration, something you learn in basic physics. And then, you know, you wouldn't have like force is mass to the third power at times acceleration hub, but you might have uh different constants strength constants for the forces. So we have all these parameters in physics which tell you how strong, how strongly particles can interact with each other. So for example, uh if you have, you know, two magnets like two refrigerator magnets or bar magnets, and you hold them 1 m away from each other, you know how strong the attraction will be. Well, maybe in another universe, they would have a much stronger attraction to each other. Maybe in a third universe, they have a much weaker attraction to each other. So, in one universe, like, you might have a refrigerator and you wanna put a magnet on the refrigerator, you know, with your favorite football team or something like that, you put it on the refrigerator and it just never sticks because the magnets are never strong enough. And then another universe, you get, um, a magnet for your favorite football team. You put on a refrigerator and then that football team does terribly like they keep, you know, uh losing like, oh, I, I'm gonna support another football team. You try to take the first magnet off, but it's impossible because it's stuck on there forever because the magnetism is so strong. So, you know, we're lucky, we're in a universe where you can take refrigerator magnets on and off and they'll stick as long as you want to. But then if you wanna take them off, you can take them off.

31:23 Ricardo Lopes: But let me just ask you 11 more question about uh dimension. So, is it possible in any way to, I mean, to test that out empirically, to detect them empirically or, or is this something that we just are able to figure out mathematically

31:47 Paul Halpern: well with these unseen dimensions? Um The whole theory is designed so that these dimensions would be undetectable. But then of course, people will say, well, then how do you prove it? Well, then you try to look for what's called, what are called low energy ramifications So string theory operates, it lives on a very, very high energy scale. So um if you um if, if you want to see string theory, you know, don't know, don't really uh have the possibility of creating uh colliders on earth or even in the solar system that would be strong enough to produce those ultra high energies. But then people say, well, maybe you can see a slight change in the results due to the higher dimensions. So there are theories that predict you would see a slight difference in the outcome of a collision experiment due to the fact that there are more dimensions in space. So those are the things people are trying to test for these subtle differences. And so far, these haven't been found. Um THAT would be Nobel Prize winning material. If you could show that a collision experiment, you get a difference that's significant enough to show that some of the energy, for example, escaped into a higher dimension.

33:17 Ricardo Lopes: And when it comes to the origins of our own universe and the Big Bang, which is something you referred to earlier. I mean, what is the most accepted uh explanation for the origins of our universe or the way that the Big Bang occurred or played

33:39 Paul Halpern: out? So, um physicists, most physicists don't talk about what happens before the Big Bang because um as people like Stephen Hawking proved in the 19 sixties, the actual Big Bang event would be a singularity So nothing would be detective before then. Now that said there are other theories about cosmic cycles that there were other cycles of creation. But the standard Big Bang theory is that it's a singularity that time began essentially at that point. So we can't really talk about before the Big Bang. And then space came into existence during the time of the Big Bang time came to existence and then the universe immediately began expanding. But then um at this point, there was a certain amount of energy in the universe, a certain amount of energy background. And one thing um that was found in the early universe is something with a technical name. It's called a scalar field. And a scalar field sounds like, you know, something very mathematical. But in reality, it just means that you have a map of energy that's different from point to point. Kind of like if you were going mountain climbing and you wanted to find out which were the highest peaks which were the lowest peaks. And what would be the best way to climb up a mountain? You might have a topographical map and that topographical map would tell you the elevation at every point. So it might say, OK, this point is 500 m high. This point is 1000 m high. This point is more, this point is less and then you can plan your walk and your hike um up the mountain based on the topographical map. Well, if you look at the early universe right after the Big Bang, you could map out its energy and that would give you what we call a scalar field. And if that energy has a certain profile, meaning it has a certain level, um and that level persists for a while and slowly changes over time, then that, that bump in energy um causes expansion super rapid expansion at that particular point in space. So if you have a certain energy profile, that's, that's flat for a certain period of time, meaning it would be kind of like you have, you know, uh you climb up a mountain and then you have this flat plateau where things are pretty much level that triggers the universe space in the universe to start expanding really rapidly. It's just a result of Einstein's general theory of relativity which says that space expands depending upon what's in it, what mass is in it, what energy is in it. So space starts to expand rapidly that stretches out that part of the universe and that's called inflation and that happens super rapidly. And suddenly when um when things uh expand enough, um the universe no longer um sits in that energy zone that, that it it it's no longer subject to that scalar energy field um which, which has evolved slowly over time. Um And that you no longer have inflationary period, that enormous amount of energy created by that super rapid expansion turns into all these particles. So all the particles that we see today, you know, light particles called photons, the particles we know as electrons the quarks. And this whole zoo of particles is created at the exact moment that inflation stops. And all this energy turns into matter. Uh FOLLOWING E equals MC squared energy is matter times the speed of light squared as Einstein said, so then that's when the the physical universe with all of the particles is created. But as Andre Linde said, um this might happen in other parts of the early cosmos creating other inflationary events and other universes. And that's where you get the multiverse picture. Mhm

38:39 Ricardo Lopes: So I I mean, is that idea that we sometimes see or read about in popular science publications uh where I mean, if a uni if a multiverse is real, it is usually depicted visually as different uh bubbles or different spheres. And then uh we read that uh basically what could have happened is that two of them or perhaps even more collide with and when they collide they create a new universe or they provoke what would be a big bang? And the a new universe uh is created from that, I mean, does that have uh any support in actual physics or not?

39:33 Paul Halpern: Well, there are ideas of higher dimensional planes called membranes or brains for short colliding along a higher dimension. That's a different idea that was proposed by Neil Turret Paul Steinhardt and others uh around uh 2000. And uh that's called a cyclic cosmology. And that's an alternative to inflation and inflation, the bubbles expand and they could collide. But when they collide, they don't really create a new universe, they create, maybe create a little scar. So when two universes collide, they might create some disruption in matter and energy and that theoretically could be seen in a uh kind of rings scar like rings in the cosmic microwave background. And scientists are trying to look for these rings that are relics of early collisions between us and another universe. So that is one way of trying to uh physically prove the existence of a multiverse. So um in, in my book, I talked interviewed Jana P Pols who's uh who's a researcher at the University of London, who uh her team is trying to look for uh evidence of of bubble collisions in the early universe. And also their latest project is to try to simulate this computationally and do

41:14 Ricardo Lopes: black holes connect in any way to the multiverse or not?

41:20 Paul Halpern: Well, there is a theory um by Lise Mullen, uh a physicist that um black holes uh they, they, they are known to be extreme events in the universe. And um I if you look at um uh standard general relativity, we say that the more mass you have concentrated in a point, the more space time warps. Well, for black holes, you have an infinite warping. So it creates what can look like a tear or a hole in the fabric of space time. And um there are ways to mathematically connect the black hole with another part of space and create a kind of a um you know, what could be a connection with another part of our universe. And some speculate that it could create a new universe uh like uh as Lise Mullen called it a baby universe and that this baby universe could grow up into a big universe and then create more black holes. And he has this idea of survival of the fittest where the universe that creates the most black holes is evolutionary fitter than other universes because uh it also creates um more stars and more planets and more, more likelihood for life. So that's a really interesting idea, but that's not really the thrust of uh most researchers who do, who study the multiverse as more of an idea of, of one researcher

43:06 Ricardo Lopes: and does the science and philosophy of counter factuals uh have anything to do with the idea of a multiverse.

43:17 Paul Halpern: Well, yes. Uh So in philosophy, we can speculate upon all the possibilities that are out there. And uh that was, you know, done all the way back to people like philosophers like Leibnitz. So Leibnitz talked about all the possible universes out there that he, he talked about the divine or God thinking about all these other possibilities. But of course, God is uh as, as he would say, perfect in his wisdom and chose from all these among these other possibilities, the best possibility for us, the best of all possible worlds. But he imagined all these other worlds out there, you know, where earth was brutally hot and unpleasant and you know, food was unappetizing and people were, you know, uh you know, these unthinking beings. But in his wisdom, he said, OK, we want a world which is pleasant, as nice climate, as nice oceans. And as people who are kind of a little bit like, you know, a little bit like the divine because they can make choices and so forth. So Leibniz kind of talked about this idea of the best of all possible worlds. And the writer, uh Voltaire famously satirized this idea with his character Candide. Uh So as this novel Candide, where he had a character named Pangloss who was a philosopher who would no matter what happened, there could be an earthquake. Um In fact, I think he talked about the, the great earthquake in Lisbon and uh you know, it's horrible earthquake. And he said, well, you know, it must be the best possibility because God meant us to be in the best of all possible worlds. So even if, even if you know where there's all this suffering, it still works out for the best. And uh Voltaire thought that was very amusing that a philosopher would say anything is, is always the best outcome. Mhm

45:39 Ricardo Lopes: So one of the questions that you also explore in the book is how explaining why the universe is habitable uh uh as something to do with the idea of the multiverse. So what's the connection there or the possible connection?

45:57 Paul Halpern: Well, this was an idea called the Anthropic Principle developed by Brandon Carter who was someone who was at Cambridge. He, he was a friend of Stephen Hawking. And uh you know, Cambridge was this really hot area for cosmology. It still is. But in the 19 seventies, uh Cambridge and Princeton were two of the best places to go in Princeton. You had uh John Wheeler in Cambridge, you had people like Hawking and Penrose and Brandon Carter was also there. And Carter also spent some time at Princeton. So we got to know John Wheeler and he found out about Hugh Everett's uh idea of the many worlds interpretation. So that got Brandon Carter thinking about the multiverse, although it wasn't called as such. And he thought, well, there's all these questions, cosmology about uh parameters like why certain physical parameters should have certain values. And that's called the fine tuning problem. Because if the strength of electromagnetism was different, you wouldn't have uh you know, for example, atoms, you know, being stable. If you had, for example, the charge of a proton being slightly different than a charge of electron, then you know, the atoms would collapse. So there are all these coincidences in the universe, things that um if you change slightly, the universe would not be suitable for life. And Brendan Carter said, hey, wait a minute, what if there's all these other units versus out there where things are different? But the fact that our universe eventually leads to stable planets, um thriving stars and um life and, and particularly intelligent life that can talk about the universe. Uh Maybe that restricts this range of possibilities down to one universe. And they call that the anthropic principle for the Latin anthroposophy and some others said, well, maybe that term is a little bit misleading because you don't just need people, you just need stability, stable, stable planets and life. Um You could have other beings um observe it. But um but anyway, that's uh one idea of the multiverse is uh this idea of the anthropic principle and it explains why um you have a universe that supports habitable worlds

48:53 Ricardo Lopes: and does the idea of the multiverse connect in any way to a potential theory of everything or a simple unified explanation of the natural forces.

49:07 Paul Halpern: Well, um this is what we call the holy grail of physics or the ultimate goal of physics is to create a theory that unites all of the natural forces into a single simple set of equations. And uh it's an elusive goal because um we made great progress in uh the 19 sixties and 19 seventies with developing the Standard Model and the standard model includes the electro weak unification, which very, very nicely unites electromagnetism with the weak force. The weak force is the force that explains radioactivity. And of course, electromagnetism explains why charges uh attract to repel and why magnets attract to repel. All of those can be explained with a single theory that is also uh consistent with quantum physics and it's very, very accurate. So electro weak uh predictions are as accurate as any experiment that's been ever been done. So it's extremely successful. Now, we also have the strong nuclear force which explains why atomic nuclei are stable. And there's a theory for that called quantum chromodynamics, which is a very, very successful theory. Um And um it's not as well tested, I should say as electro weak, but it also has very similar properties to electro week and involves this idea of uh two types of, of entities. One is the matter particles quarks, electrons and so forth. And then you have force carrying particles which are particles that are um conveyed from one particle ma matter particle to another. So they're exchanged just like throwing a ball to matter particles, throw in a sense, a force uh carrier back and forth and that creates a force. So you have uh a, a bunch of force carriers, you have photons which carry electromagnetic force, you have the WW particle and Z particles which carry the weak force and you have gluons which carry the strong force. Now, in principle, we should have gravity should be described using a force carrying particle which some people have called graviton. But no one has successfully developed a quantum theory of gravitation that is uh testable and describes, you know what we measure in the universe. There are a lot of ideas out there for quantum gravitation and then the theory of everything would describe quantum gravity in a way that's consistent with all the other forces and unify all those into a quantum theory of all particles and all forces. And the leading candidate for that is string theory. But as I mentioned, uh string theory has all these possibilities, 10 to the 500 string uh geometries. And each of those creates its own uh theory of physics of and leads to a diff different parameters for the Standard model. So those need to be significantly narrowed down to create a theory of everything where the multiverse comes into play is you can say, OK, there's all these possibilities out there, there's all these theories out there. But the theory of everything that happens to correspond to our universe was narrowed down by the fact that we are here using the anthropic principle, we can say, well, there are many, many, many, many different theories of everything, but there's one that matches a universe that creates planets that creates stars, creates intelligent life. And that's our particular theory of everything. And that's you know why we have these particular parameters, different strengths of different constants. And that in, in, in theory, narrows everything down to one universe and explains why we are living in this one universe and explains, you know, all the constants for our universe. Well, we're very, very far from that. That's kind of an idealization. That's the goal, but no one has ever come up with a way to narrow everything down to one possibility. But

53:59 Ricardo Lopes: what are perhaps the main difficulties with integrating gravity with quantum physics? What are the bigger obstacles there?

54:12 Paul Halpern: Well, the biggest obstacle is mathematical um so back in the 19 forties, um physicists such as Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Si Tiro Tomonaga in Japan developed what are called uh renormalization methods in quantum electrodynamics. Now that is a very technical term, but basically what that means is that you can take two electrons which are char basic charge particles. And you say, OK, let's develop a quantum theory of how these electrons interact with each other. And the way they interact with each other is by exchanging a light particle called a photon. And then you say, OK, you have an electron gives off a photon, that photon is absorbed by another electron. And then that electron acquires a certain amount of energy acquires a certain amount of momentum. And then you could predict the ways where the electron will end up. And that's called scattering scattering is when you have two particles, you predict, you know where they end up what angles, what's the probability they'll end up at certain angles. And that's something you can physically measure the scattering, you physically measure where these particles end up. You test test it according to theory. And in the 19 forties, quantum electrodynamics showed how you can add up all the possible ways electrons interact and using something called Feynman diagrams, which is a neat way of adding up all the possibilities. And then using mathematical methods, get rid of infinite terms that pop up. So if you do these calculations with particles, because particles are infinitesimal, they really elementary particles are not only tiny, but they're believed in this theory to be, you know, mathematically have zero size. So if you put that into the theory, you get infinite terms because one divided by zero is infinity um or unlimited. So what during these calculations before a five inch ring or Toman NAA, they found these infinite terms, but they were able to use a method called renormalization which basically matches terms, subtracts them so that you get rid of all the infinite terms. And that's renormalization. And when electro the weak theory was developed in 19 sixties and 19 seventies, it was shown that you could also match up terms, subtract them out and then get um get uh a a finite amount. And I use a nice analogy in my book about um how renormalization works? I imagine a couple two people and they're living together and one of them earns money and every week gets a paycheck and she adds up all the money she earns o throughout a lifetime. And she imagines that she, she lives indefinitely. Um It's just a hypothetical. So would make an infinite amount of money. And the other person is spending each, each month and the spending would be infinite. And if you say, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't add up in the bookkeeping infinite income, but an infinite amount of spending, that doesn't make any sense. But if you say, OK, every month, one person brings in the paycheck, the other person spends it and that creates a finite amount each month. So that so therefore everything matches up in the in the bookkeeping. So the accounting works out similarly, you can do in a kind of accounting in particle physics with electromagnetism and the weak force in which everything gives you a finite result. Well, it turns out with gravity, you try to do this and you don't get, you can't match up the terms you keep getting infinite answers. And the only way around it as far as physicists can tell is to say, there's no such thing as infinite decimal that every particle must have a finite size. And that leads to the idea of finite strands which are known as strings at that vibrate instead of particles. So that leads to string theory. And string theory is finite So you don't get infinite number of uh you know, get infinite terms. But then um you have all these possibilities for string theory. So you have to narrow things down. So that's the problem with string theory of so many options.

59:35 Ricardo Lopes: So earlier, I've asked you about the Big Bang and the origins of our universe. But how about the future of our universe? What are perhaps the main hypothesis that physicists have proposed for the future of our universe? And is it that one of them has more support than the others? I mean, basically, what do we know at this point about the possible future of our

1:00:04 Paul Halpern: universe? Well, until the 19 nineties, um you know, I should say between the 19, late, late 19 twenties or 19 thirties and 19 nineties, the basic idea was that the universe had three options. One of them is that expands and then um eventually collapses. And then the second possibility is that expands and the expansion slows down but slows down very gradually. And the expansion keeps going. And the third option was kind of in between the two that the universe al almost collapses, not quite collapses and keeps slowing down and slowing down, but never quite collapses. But then in 1998 these two teams of astronomers discovered using measurements of exploding stars or supernova that the universe is speeding up in its expansion. And that's called cosmic acceleration. And that means that you have 1/4 option, which is that the universe will keep expanding forever, but not only that, but will speed up in its expansion. And eventually just everything will just keep getting more and more dilute and that Galaxies will get further and further apart. And then finally, our set of Galaxies will be a hermit, meaning like a loner in, in the universe and we won't even see any other Galaxies, we'll only see our galaxy and maybe a few others in the vicinity. And uh that is called the sometimes called a big whimper scenario uh from the Ts Elliot Poe poem. Um THAT you know how's the world ends? Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Um IT'S a line from Matthias Elliott poem. But um there's an even scarier uh possibility called The Big Rip. And that is that um whatever is, is causing acceleration keeps getting stronger and stronger. And then eventually everything is ripped apart, including planets are torn apart, stars are torn apart and even the atoms in people's bodies are torn apart. So everything is torn to shreds and that will be the end of the universe. Now, those are some possibilities in the standard model of, of cosmology. But then if you believe in cyclic universes, I believe in, um for example, the idea of Steinhardt and Turek that the universe is um uh cyclical because you have uh two membranes also known as brains colliding with each other periodically and clashing with each other. Um There would be a periodic phase in which these two like, it's like hyper planes or planes in a higher dimension, collide with each other, wipe everything out and reset the universe. And that would be um the end of everything, but that would start a new phase of the universe. And then finally, there's Roger Penrose idea, a different kind of cycle where at the end of the universe, there's emptiness, everything becomes more and more dilute all the particles uh evaporate. And then eventually you have sheer emptiness, but that emptiness um has a kind of identity crisis and it mathematically and instead of thinking of itself is very large, it thinks of itself as very small and there's just mathematical transition and then creates a new phase of the universe. So you have a new cycle. So those are some of the ideas about the end of time and you know, either destruction and recreation of the universe or just the destruction of the universe.

1:04:22 Ricardo Lopes: And is there or I I mean, what is the likelihood that whatever kind of scenario will occur and the universe will still be able to sustain life and perhaps even worse uh being able to sustain intelligent life like us?

1:04:46 Paul Halpern: Well, so, so we, we believe in, in, you know, the current standard cosmology that the universe is expanding faster and faster. And that um but also that something called entropy, which is a measure of disorderly energy is increasing. And that means that stars will eventually burn out and the sun will eventually die if the sun dies. We imagine that maybe we have spaceships that take us to another star, but then that star might die. So then we go to a third star and we keep going and uh maybe all the stars in our galaxy die. And maybe we have, you know, uh not only interstellar travel but intergalactic travel, we try another galaxy, but eventually all of these Galaxies stars will either um you know, become uh so cold, they, they can't support life or turn into black holes and so forth. So then the question is, can intelligent life survive? And that was answered um at one point by Roger Penrose who speculated that maybe we will develop ways to transform our uh intelligence, our consciousness into maybe, um you know, artificial intelligence or robots and that could live in under very, very cold circumstances. But I'm not sure if that would be quite as satisfying to say that life would be in these robots that, you know, exist in, in, in ultra cold temperatures. It's not the kind of life that we, that most people would want to live.

1:06:43 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, for sure. And uh if a multiverse is real, would it have any bearing on the future of our own universe?

1:06:54 Paul Halpern: Uh Well, we, if the multiverse, the cosmological multiverse is real, um unless uh there's some collision with another universe that happens to hit our part of the observable universe, probably it wouldn't affect us very much. We would just know that there are other universes out there that might have different fates than our universe. Uh So, uh might not, might not affect us very much. Um IN terms of the quantum multiverse of the many worlds possibility, um It's possible that we would have other versions of ourselves that might have slightly different um fates in life. Um You know, if let's say during a quantum event uh that somehow affected um the rest of our lives, it's unlikely that um an obs a single quantum observation will make a big difference in our lives. But it's hypothetically possible that by making a different observation that that could affect our lives and steer our lives on a different course.

1:08:18 Ricardo Lopes: And so, of course, in science fiction, many times, people use the idea of time traveling and depict it in different ways in movies, books, et cetera. But is there, is it theoretically possible according to physics for time traveling to exist or occur? And if so, would it connect in any way to the idea of the multiverse or

1:08:48 Paul Halpern: not? Well, when we talk about time travel, we need to distinguish between time travel into the future and time travel into the past. Well as Einstein uh showed in his, in his special theory of relativity, if you take an astronaut launch the astronaut to space and that astronaut somehow can travel very, very close to the speed of light. And that astronaut returns to earth, that astronaut's clock would tick more slowly than earth clocks. And that astronaut could theoretically travel into the future of earth. Um So, for example, uh if that astronaut was traveling 99.99% the speed of light, they might come back and see that all of their relatives are either, you know, 100 years old or, or likely deceased. Um, YOU know, and uh Earth is, you know, instead of being the 21st century and the 22nd century, um because time is relative. So that is a relatively simple way to time travel. And that create doesn't create any contradictions because you would just go into the future, you would arrive in the future and you would maybe have different customs and, you know, you would say, where, where are the smartphones and say, no, we use brain chips now or we use something else. So you would say, ok, technology has advanced. So that would be one way of time travel. But what about traveling to the past? We imagine going back in time and trying to prevent the Second World War or something like that, you know, you know, all these tr tragedies. Um Well, physics does have the possibility of that by creating something called a wormhole. Now, a wormhole traversable wormhole is a little bit like a black hole only it's stabilized. So instead of having this um very narrow uh tunnel that possibly connects to another region of space that would not be uh you cannot travel into which will be deadly. Um We imagine being able to stabilize this tunnel and make it so that you can travel through it and end up in a different part of space. Well as uh Kip Thorne and some of his students showed, uh there's a way that you can uh manipulate the wormhole so that they can act as a time machine and you could travel backward in time. And um and then uh you wouldn't be able to travel before the creation of the wormhole, but you could travel back to at least the time when the wormhole was created. And uh so if there are wormholes that were created naturally in space that were useful as time machines, you could use one of those. And then the question is, could you affect history? And the way it connects with the multiverse is in science fiction, particularly, there's this idea that maybe if you go backward in time and you try to change history that maybe you start a new branch of reality. So for example, let's say you go back in time to the age of Hitler and you assassinate Hitler and there's no Hitler, there's no Nazi Germany and World War Two doesn't happen, but maybe something else happens, maybe Stalin becomes all powerful and takes over Europe. And then, um so now we have, instead of, you know, Nazis trying to take over Europe that's run by Stalin and the Soviets. OK. So that's a different branch of reality, maybe that would represent, you know, a type of multiverse where you have all these other alternative histories. But that is very science fiction, a very speculative. It's not something that physics can prove.

1:13:13 Ricardo Lopes: So another thing that perhaps is also speculative you, you tell me is the simulation hypothesis. So what is it? And does it also, does it have any relationship to the multiverse?

1:13:32 Paul Halpern: Well, um the simulation hypothesis is the idea that could it be possible that everything we see, everything we observe is a computer simulation that was designed by some other intelligent being. And the argument for that is imagine our civilization, um our own civilization evolves naturally. And currently we have some forms of artificial intelligence like we could create, you know, at this point in time, you can create an essay that looks like it was written by a human being. It might have some mistakes, you know, using chat G BT or some other mechanism. Well, imagine um that you could uh create a simulated human being, you know, something that would be indistinguishable by from a human being. And then you go on to create a simulated city where you have human beings interact and it seems like human beings and then you create a simulated planet and then maybe a simulated, you know, solar system simulated galaxy. Well, if intelligence intelligent beings uh last long enough, the chances according to some thinkers that they could create a simulation is 100% that eventually they would develop the technology for this. So then imagine you have all these uh natural worlds out there that create simulation. So you would have all these simulated worlds out there. Eventually, the simulated worlds would greatly outnumber the natural worlds because you could have one natural world creating all these simulated worlds. So then you estimate the chances that we're in a simulated world or a natural world and that becomes almost 100% according to these thinkers that were in a simulated world, not a natural world. So I don't quite buy that idea personally. Um BECAUSE, you know, there's, there's all these other arguments about design that were designed and uh the simplest one that, you know, people who are religious believe or may some people religious believe? Well, we were designed by a divine being. Ok. Well, some people don't believe that some people do believe that, but it's a simpler belief to say that there's a divine being out there than to say, oh, well, there's another, you know, set of beings that created us well, who created them, you know, were they as simulation? And it gets into this whole uh philosophical uh tangled argument about, you know, why are there real beings? Why are they simulated beings? And what's the connection?

1:16:44 Ricardo Lopes: And if we actually were living in a simulation, would there be any way at all of verifying that of empirically? I mean, being sure of that.

1:16:58 Paul Halpern: Well, I can only turn to science fiction and say, well, maybe someone would hand us a red pill and you take it and all of a sudden you see, you see everything like in the matrix. Um BECAUSE um you know, if it was, it was a really smart intelligent being, they would create a perfect simulation. So um but uh you could speculate about intelligent being that's very, very, very smart but makes mistakes and creates a flawed simulation. So all of a sudden you wake up and you look up at the sky and instead of seeing, seeing the moon or whatever, you know, wake up at night and instead of seeing the moon, you see something that looks like pixels and you're like, wait a minute, what are those pixels doing there? But you know, if, if an intelligent race was smart enough to develop a simulation, it would, it would conceivably be a perfect simulation, then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So this becomes almost like, you know, in a way, I think it gets a little silly uh a little comical like, OK, you know, if it's a perfect simulation, could there be flaws? OK, that's gets a little bit silly to think about things like that.

1:18:23 Ricardo Lopes: So we've been touching on science fiction here and there during our conversation. But what are probably some of the most common ways that in popular culture, people portray the multiverse and as a physicist, I mean, is it that you just take it lightly? I mean, it's just fiction, whatever or, uh is it that some of those ways that the multiverse is portrayed actually bother you?

1:18:55 Paul Halpern: Well, I think of it from the point of view of somebody who's a researcher and they apply to the government for a grant or they applied to a corporation for a grant. So let's say they have this idea for testing, you know, using observations of the cosmic micro background to test for other universes and the word multiverse comes up and they send it to, um, somebody to review their grants and that person has just seen a marvel movie they see, just saw Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and they come back and say this is not real science. This is science fiction. You don't get any money from me or it's another possibility. You could have someone who says, wow, I love that movie. I love science fiction. You know, that's really cool that you can test these things in real life. You get, you know, here's $100,000 you know, for your grant, €100,000. So then, um then you could be lucky. So it's, it's a little bit of a mixed thing. Some scientists are like, well, science fiction talks about multiverse ideas, those are really not real science. So let's not even talk about a multiverse and others uh appreciate the popular interest as a way of supporting science. Like, OK, you've learned, you've seen the Multiverse in movies, let me show you the real multiverse ideas. Forget about the movies. Here's the real science of it. So in the movies, the main attraction is the idea of, of what if you know, what if you know Spiderman came from a different background? What if you know in Star Trek instead of Spock being logical and emotionless? What if Spock were evil and very emotional? So we see, you know, an alternate universe where Spock as a beard and is sinister and so forth. So these are all talked about in, um, you know, in science fiction. And then there's even the simple question, what if I missed a train instead of making a train? And that's the movie sliding doors where a woman just misses a subway train versus just makes a subway train? And the movie shows what happens to her life in the, the world where she just makes the train and now their possibility where she just misses the train. And in one of them, she discovers that her boyfriend is having an affair with another woman and she breaks up with the boyfriend, she finds another boyfriend who's much nicer and her life continues and then in the other scenario, she doesn't discover that her boyfriend is cheating on her, she continues with the same boyfriend and then we see what happens at the end and I'm not gonna give too much away, but the branch of reality, which looks like a good one might not be so good after all in the movie. So, these are intriguing ways to think about the multiverse in science fiction.

1:22:19 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I mean, it's as if, uh, every time in movies, every time people think about different possibilities, they're dealing with counterfactual in their mind. What if this happened? What if that happened? Reality branched and then a new universe popped up where the, what if really happened?

1:22:42 Paul Halpern: Right. Yes, that's right. So we, we often imagine, uh, what happened, what would happen if we made different decisions in our lives? Like what if we decided to move to a different city? So, um, you know, what if we decided a different job? So, so imagine we grew up and as a teenager, we were in a rock band and, you know, we played it at our high school and everybody applauded and then our parents say, wait a minute, you can't make any money from a rock rock music. You should go into a serious job and we become an accountant instead. But then, um, we imagine what would be a scenario where we say to our parents. No, no, no. We wanted to stay in music and then we become The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or, you know, they're very successful rock band. We say, ah, it's very good that we didn't listen to our parents. And we, we pursued our musical dream because we became one of the most successful bands of all time. So we don't know until, unless there were, uh, you know, the possibility of viewing other universes, other branches of reality, we wouldn't know if our decisions were good decisions or bad decisions.

1:24:03 Ricardo Lopes: So one last question and then sort of related to this previous one. Do you see, I, I mean, how do you look at the popular ideas that people have about the universe? Do you think that they attribute specific meanings to the universe to the multiverse that the it might be meaningful in some way for people to consider the possibility of a multiverse existing?

1:24:32 Paul Halpern: Well, I think it's, it's fun to imagine about different things. And I like science fiction personally and I like dreaming about other worlds and thinking about different scenarios and I think that's, that's perfectly healthy. Uh The only time I have a bit of an objection is when people exploit quantum physics or exploit the idea of a multiverse and try to convince people that um they can control their own reality by using quantum physics. So they say they'll say something like, like all you have to do is want to be rich and you know, um you know, buy my book or listen to my audio. I'll show you how, so it's only $100 for this audio. And you'll learn how that using quantum physics, you'll uh use your mind and make the right choice and that will you into a universe where you're very wealthy using, you know, the idea of a multiverse. Well, somebody is making money from a false premise there but it's very easy to try to exploit physics and to try to convince people uh that they can use it to become rich or become, you know, immortal, become, you know, super healthy and so forth. So I would steer personally, I would steer away from those ideas because it's, it's not really a proper use of a physics to say if you think you're rich, you're gonna be rich.

1:26:13 Ricardo Lopes: It's like that very popular book from a few years ago. The Secret, right? And other similar ideas popularized by some self help gurus, right?

1:26:27 Paul Halpern: Yes. Although there are people who, who find quantum books in the self help section of a bookstore and then become seriously interested in real scientific ideas. Like for example, um uh I, I know a rock musician who in the 19 nineties looked at a lot of self help books and that led him to write songs about quantum physics. So it can be a good thing. Well,

1:26:59 Ricardo Lopes: let's send on that note then and the book is again the lure of the multiverse extra dimensions, other worlds and parallel universes. I'm leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And uh Paul just before we go apart from the book, would you like, would you like to let people know where they can find you when your work on the internet?

1:27:22 Paul Halpern: Well, I'm active on what used to be known as Twitter, also known as X. I'm also on uh Blue Sky Mastodon. I have my own uh blog. Uh Yeah, it's active sometimes I post things and I post articles. Uh So if you Google my name, uh some of these things should come up, you know, social media, there's a Facebook writing page for me, but I'm not uh involved in that, but there are a lot of social media that you can reach out to me and especially on um X Twitter. I'm, I'm very active on that under the hand of P Halpern.

1:28:04 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So I'm also leaving that in the description of the interview and thank you so much again for taking the time to come on the show. It's been fun to talk with you.

1:28:13 Paul Halpern: Thank you, Ricardo. Those are wonderful questions and I really enjoyed the interview.

1:28:18 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by the N Lights learning and development. Then differently check the website at N lights.com. And also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perera Larson Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno, Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam, Castle Matthew Whitten Bear. No wolf, Tim Ho Erica LJ Condors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mark Nevs called in Holbrook Field, Governor Mikel Stormer Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferus and H Her Me and Lain Jung Y and the K Hes Mark Smith J Tom Hummel S Friends, David Sloan Wilson. Ya dear, Ro Ro Die Jan Punter Romani Charlotte, Bli Nicole Barba, Adam Hunt, Pavlo Stassi na me, Gary G Alman Sam of Zed YPJ Barboa, Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broner Douglas Fry Franca Beto Lati Cortez or Solis Scott Zachary FTD and W Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul. Giorgio, Luke Loki, Georgio Theophano, Chris Williams and Peter Wo David Williams Di Costa Anton Erickson Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore Larry Dey Junior, Old Ebon, Starry Michael Bailey. Then spur by Robert Grassy Zorn, Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberley Johnson, Benjamin Gilbert Jessica. No Week, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensley Man, George Katis Valentine Steinman, Perras, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Abert Liam Dan Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi Perpendicular Jer Urla. Good enough Gregory Hastings David Pins of Sean Nelson, Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks to my producers is our web, Jim Frank Luca Stein, Tom Veg and Bernard N Cortes Dixon, Bendik Muller Thomas Trumble, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carl, Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick Golden. And to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Si Adrian Bogdan Knits and Rosie. Thank you for all.