Episode 12: The Cosmic Perspective, with Katie Mack

Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest is Katie Mack. She's a cosmologist and science communicator, author, and the Hawking Chair at the Perimeter Institute up in Canada, Theoretical Physics Research Institute. Katie is also a friend of mine and I brought her on because I wanted to have a conversation about the way that thinking about the deep cosmological past and future can change your perspective on things here and now, because that's a big part of how I think about the world. You know, I did my PhD in cosmology and spent my waking hours thinking thinking about the deep past of the universe and to some extent the future. And Katie has spent a lot of time thinking about both of these things. She's written a whole book about the end of the universe as we understand it. And I think that even though the end of the universe can maybe be a depressing subject for First of all, it's billions of years away. And second, I think that it is something that I sort of maybe perversely draw some hope from. And I think that bigger perspective is an important part of... Thinking through how we want to change our relationship to the world around us in order to make it through these problems and crises that we as a species face right now. So here's Katie Mack. Katie Mack, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

We're happy to have you. I feel like most of our listeners probably already know who you are. But for those of you who don't, Katie is a physicist and renowned science communicator and author. And she works at the Perimeter Institute up in Canada, which is a really amazing place that I have been to a couple of times at Katie's invitation. I should have said it's Katie's fault, you know, going. But yeah, and also the author of... the end of everything which is about the end of the universe and is related to what we're going to be talking about today and also has an upcoming book uh the title of which is

how to build a

universe okay

so the first book is the end of everything and then in parentheses astrophysically speaking yeah and the second book is how to build a universe and then in parentheses theoretically speaking So it's about what the universe is made of, how we know about that, how we build theories about what the universe is made of. And as the first one, it's sort of general public level. You know, it's not a technical book, but it does get into some very interesting ideas, I think. Yeah.

I feel like there's kind of a you break it, you bought it kind of thing here. Like, the first book is about how to end a universe, and the second book is how to build one.

It was hard because the first book was about the end of the universe, and I wanted to write more about cosmology, but you can't write more books about the universe when you've already destroyed it, right? And so I thought, like, maybe this one will get more into sort of particle physics and stuff like that. And so it's not about... sort of the history of the universe or even the beginning of the universe is more about, like, how does fundamental physics work? Like, how do particles work? What are they? How