my great good pleasure and it's your pleasure my pleasure to welcome you to the program and your pleasure had the perception during this next hour conversation or jonathan peel jonathan peel was the former editor of scientific american  major journal as scientific you know reporting in that sort of thing when we talking somebody that and he's also i'm happy to say a producer an independent television producer here at manhattan neighborhood network he joined it's a great did you hear just a little bit of your own back on where you're born and raised in the educated and then we could get into a discussion of the human condition and scientific reporting and other matters that might come up but your own background born and raised with other things your i'm a i'm a native new physics has a as a science writer you it you had written on european history but your writing on science in your life has been involved with you didn't study physics in university of the thing interesting you know in those in those days you could get away with has writing about science is writing about one of the major if not the major force in human history i can understand with dances which is the the impact of technology on the economy on culture on how pe themselves and of course out of out of the technologies of western europe particularly grew of contemporary scientific research yes i think that's probably all true to say that science and so it was seeing how the the structure of alliances that the european powers built with and against each other and led to believe cataclysmic asters and wars in technology and the extent it's science is the grounding kind of things come out of the in the light i guess it's been there for a while but the scientific method is a really important thing and the findings in the methods in the discipline of the scientific approach to life is a very important legacy i guess from the classical but also into the modern experience and that is that you became interested in that like and became interested because i  and in the end in the the cultural consciousness of the great asian societies and it tends to be it tends to be political maybe to some extent economic but what it really by doing by using that framework it really eliminates from consideration the fundamental technological driving that that made the in societies adapted to the different climates and geological situations yeah in which they found them so that and how the technologies that they built through working with with stone and other abusing nature both from the point of view of agriculture of materials of transportation and i think that's where the the study of history really ought to begin of history for a period we want to get into that we're all mean but that's the place of source of information there's been so valuable to me i'd like to think you and all of your colleagues reading me that available to me because there were articles there that were absolutely just so interesting and so informative and educational that they've been very influential my life i think you're right at the outset for that but the questions that come up and i'm not mistaken is scientific american reported on very important things some of the early other kinds of animals who were contemporaneous with our with our ancestor and and how different they are from the animals of the of the rain forest or ryan that set the stage and were that the geological that you were talking about your homosapien is that we are particularly clever at being able to extend our consciousness of that's right or our intellectual cave of really into the environment through the use of the can use the term science and technology but science they often are who have an office of science and technology assessment but is extending it and creating an environment garden child used to write about the man makes the world and that can make the world different then in it even likes the sense seems to be the lot of most of the creatures birds make nests beavers make dance but we really have the ability to make an environment that is different than in and even like that is a given i think that's true and that's true of the  form everything is a seamless web everything it's all one system and then we divided up reductive li into specialisations and so forth but that doesn't take away from the fact that it is one system and that sort of thing and james joyce  literature had daedalus a history of the nightmare from which i am attempting to awaken do you think that a long time on the savannah was a nightmare period that we were running from the great cats that had great advantages over us and he began to get to the needle to think where we had control over the food sources over there is there any way of making a projection of what the lot for that is or that the vast majority of human tenure on the earth was or part of our cultural heritage you know the europeans is it seems to be involved in and try to distinguish ourselves from from animals or from other energies but the but the parts of the machine work together in so many different ways you know there are opportunities and at that emerge from its functioning and i suspect the human brain is probably of the same stripe it has to be experienced at computers and we invented the computers and mr kurtz right i was on c span the other day for three hours on in depth an easy got a book out the singularity is near he said that's when the computers will exceed human mental capability and it's moving like it's going to be emperor made the bet with the fellow that said grain of rice and each thing exponential movement i mean exponential by the time you get the other side of the chessboard that doubling is coming it's coming now with the computing world we've got you tube now where we can put these programs up and make them available and that's coming in x the ability it would seem unless we do some really stupid thing like blow up the whole the whole world which is a capability if we reach such a demented point where we can we've been so clever we've got the weapons systems the news your cock ruins and other people tell us and others tell us that if they were to be unleashed in the guns of august kind of apparently i don't know for sure is something that basic data apparently we now can know that we can in religion a with our weapons systems entire species i don't know if you think that is true or not or what do you think a lot of that the active idea of what i buy more mind does arguably much better than the human mind but it's fundamentally stupid because all it can do is what the program tells it to do maybe you could maybe you could build all this artificial intelligence and  spiritual machine he had written a book called the age of intelligent machines and he had done a lot of inventing and so forth very successfully and from ten years out jonathan he projected me reading the odd rhythms or something he projected  right it's like the the test for whether or not there are flying saucers i'd have to have one lad in my backyard or a believe that but more power to occur as well it's really interesting with the extension of the technology what a place to have seems to be that there are other universes parallel universes to this and he said they've got a telescope now wham or something and the telescope was unable to take pictures of the shock waves of the big bang thirteen billion seven hundred million years ago within only three hundred and seventy thousand years after the big bang and the he tells me lies the system is in place the the financing is there international is over there going to have a telescope by about two thousand and eleven that's going to take the measure of the shock wave one second of the big bang thirteen million seven hundred thousand years ago the consciousness capable of taking the measure of that like that coming out of evolutionary processes in this planet is seeing is indicating maybe period a singularity or i mean that that's that's all of them pretty sophisticated capability that we've developed don't you think it's wonderful that over the last twenty last one hundred years or so and it's all going exponentially increasing and in every field it's like the pregnancy of a birth or the quickening of a pregnant there's a thing and we're coming to a point where we can just perhaps destroy the british east and perhaps to some other things going on on the other side that we're losing co of because we're looking at all the trees rather than looking at the forest of the situation that accidentally the human society is technological extension is in scientific american is happening to bridge a lot of gaps between that or your inabilities and take a measure universe can we see it it's pretty clear that we might be able to see back to within a few fractions of a nd but we can't see beyond that yeah that's a big idea that it was before that the laws of physics as we were understanding them so that in some sense the the universe is a is one of these membranes or branes has the string theorists call them for short and there's no reason why you can't have a large number of them like the the opera it's really something to see but i understand yeah so yes there's that this is it's entirely possible that there are that there are many many universes and quantum quantum theory also has has that provides indications that the that there are other other universes that being as it may you know this is the only one only one we haven't and the only thing on planet that we have and we should we should be taking better care of it probably than that than we are and voted agree with you more in spades in that particular some of the political leadership is very worrying and lack of vision for the worry the worry that you're that the word that you raised earlier about the about a nuclear conflagration is probably a worry that belongs somewhat more to the cold war path and it does to the present and the future but i think that we should not be complacent about that because it is entirely possible that that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of of that they might be able to even extinguish life on the planet at the hands of our and we couldn't do that as recently if i may our jonathan we couldn't do that as a reason with the nd world war  i don't think that but you know with with the collapse of the of the soviet union the danger of a of a of a major dr strangelove crisis recede noticeably but it's north korea i don't know to what extent the government looked at the possibility of a preemptive strike but even relatively small country like that one which is presumably quite well watched from orbit the high flying out aircraft and other means of surveillance we don't have enough confidence or enough information to even consider but cover the palling preemptive act it is in and painter doesn't necessarily know how to take the next step in string theory you know a string theorist is might be a pretty bad musician now or both or maybe god and science and mathematics and music are seem quite they do dealin things we can do ways in which we can act in ways in which we perceive reality and perceive each other so yes in that sense it's very seamless i wonder if i could ask another matthew wade is he right through your i have to depend upon people that write in these things to get certain layman's ideas of things in their image certain things to hang things on ideas and he's even did to me this is the biological level that in the human organism there's something on the order of one hundred trillion cells hundred trillion cells in the human organism and they all matter don't you get one out of whack and it's called cancer and they all matter and they all have oxygen and they all have the ability to do it it's a metaphor we've got happy population of the world now lives on less than a dollar a day or some damn thing we got with a movie have a cape and the other side of that equation about the structures that are we have an incredible capability technologically augment it providing what bucky fuller or mcluhan might a call in life support everybody and within an ecological context in a manner that is been equally not available to us coming out of history this may be a time of qualitative transformation in the evolution of affairs and maybe consciousness in this part of the universe and probably cr coming x when then children but i but i'm already that's that's that's exciting but isn't but it's more it's more of a greater foundation for optimism is the the so called demographic transition and the fact that we have china and societies will vote for and ways to make sure that the wealth reaches large numbers of people we have been very good at that in terms of the human condition we have become very good at getting the wealth down to all the people  i think the the facts the facts are as you say the facts are also as i'm saying which you know which is that which is that these that the that the western countries and china and india are increasingly moving into industrial one and in the european american case post industrial thought id in which the level of the standard of living is is very very comfortable certainly compared to those those pro single written word in the whole presentation a narrative they could translate that into swahili put it in front of kids in africa they would be educated at the highest level of understanding of a certain process of the heart without going through you know intelligent design based the i think the mistake of presuming that complexity has to be the result of an end of invention and that rather than things that are in fact everything everything in the universe indicates that that  miserable lot for our species if we if we don't handle our environment our natural resources the planet on which we live better than we are starting to handle it  england you got certain people whose pair of clean grease is based upon slavery and there is that it would always be necessary for there to be slavery so that you can lead the life of the mind in the spirit and that it will ever be so unless the loom learned to we will he was wrong you think maybe that maybe the loom the loom through the computer learn to weave but we certainly do not live and in a live wave societies you do not think we live in slaves as i don't know i don't think we have a t visually reinforced the order of society that church and state felt should apply to the running of of human affairs  make knowledge in the human intellect the major sources of capital and progress do you see that in the social organization i see people working three jobs in order to keep their nose above water i see tendencies in the world i see eighty thousand demonstrations in china where you've got a capitalist led communist party living in gated communities and going to conditional way of the aristocracy that owns everything i saw an article by paul krugman in the new york times the other day when he talked about wealth accumulation over the last three or five years and he said the wealth the real wealth above inflation he didn't go into the upper five percent it didn't go to the upper one percent it didn't even go to the upper th the one percent it went the upper why should every cell be able to have a vote have a have access to oxygen within a system without having to do whatever somebody owns the capitol asses to do it employed in order to eat i mean liberation may creativity and energy as a business person yeah i've had the thrill of know starting a business enterprise you know with a small group of people working  became separated from the intellectual freedom that's protected in the st amendment it's not entirely i think it's entirely a good thing the private enterprise takes quite a licking and our popular culture although a lot of people want to get rich certainly are dark sides of it in abuses and problems with research touched on the environment has an issue yeah that would come in with global warming but when it but but that to in many people's minds sort of right the situation where there had been a group of people who had a certain kind of view that maybe they're going to be able to be jacked by a politically astute group of people formed as nation two hundred and thirty month years ago which forms a model for would come to an end of any kind of a question is just a matter of just fine tuning it and the systems in place led by the united states of america hyperball it's in place and if we can just let that go stay the course that it will braise all ships it'll raise all both and there's no question qualitatively challenging the vision thing that we need a vision that would allow for there to be some sort of an alteration in the way we form capital distributing income and the capital is becoming more responsible for production through time as far as the ratio with labor would distribute all income by labor criteria the vast majority of the people the capitals all owned by a small group of people but what was what is the economic theory didn't form the operation of the operation of the planet earth now the spaceship earth if it isn't keynesian what is what are we all now in terms of economic theory that informs the political process  capital available instantaneously on for any good idea that cowboy a lot of bad ones but then you have the market to do was sort of sort those out i mentioned galbraith because in the affluent society  a book that i think a lot of the people who go back and read again he talks about the risk that corporations take when they make major investments in a product such as a new airline or or a or a new pharmaceutical agent and how the size of that capital allocation carries with it the risk of the corporation tries to minimize by by marketing advertising to some extent interacting with governments all of which is a to stabilize and create a market to make much more certain a positive outcome sure live in a room for the investment s diffusion of of american culture grew to be through radio television and high speed presses the communications infrastructure of modern society you know the one thing the one thing the overlooked  which i think is is quite fascinating room is the the the central role that the computer plays in this whole and that whole process and that whole technology in understanding media he says that the computer hours and hours and hours and i thank you very much for all of your for participating in three very well led life up to now that continues in a very gracious in manner for the humans will thank you were all the really great george being on your show m