The Known Unknowns: What We Can’t See - Lawrence Kraus

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]um which kind of comes to the book which is this this admission to this phrase of I don't know and how maybe we need to embrace that a little bit more. Um honestly, Lawrence, like the evolution of this show was me saying that same thing. Actually, usually I put myself in this room with people I don't agree with. I've had people I fundamentally disagree with everything they said.

[00:00:23]Sometimes I can barely sit in the seat.

[00:00:25]>> Yeah. But I found sometimes two years later that I agree with them now. And so it was allowing that open mind to say, "I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong." Tell your ego to shut up for a bit. Listen to someone and actually let it soak in as opposed to the headline of what they are. And so this book, The Known Unknowns, Unresolved Mysteries of the Cosmos, you're trying to get people to embrace this concept of not knowing and then opening the mind to discover. Well, that's how we I I mean it it's talked about it uses the title, by the way, the known unknowns in the UK, not in the US.

[00:00:59]>> I know. I heard. Tell us why. I love this that that >> Yeah, because it's, you know, it's it's a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, which one of the it was a really intelligent thing. He said, I'm not a fan of Donald Rumsold. Make it clear, but he talked about, you know, the known unknowns in terms of the Iraq war. There's the things we and then the known knowns are things we know we know. The known unknowns are things we know we don't know. And the unknown unknowns, which things we don't know, we don't know. Now as a scientist by the way the most interesting thing is the unknown unknowns right >> but if I want to write a book on that it'd be a very short book right >> but but but what we can say is we know is we know what we don't know which is fascinating because that's what drives scientists that's what drives scholars that's what drives many people so saying I don't know recognizes what remains to be known and encourages you to learn about it encouraged me as a young man was when I finally realized that not everything was known in science I talk about that when I was when Richard Feman wrote a book, The Character of Physical Law, when I finally realized, gee, it's not all known. It wasn't all done 200 years ago by dead white men. It was, you know, there's a lot left to learn. And um and that should should spur us all on. And and you I try I try to write make my books be different. It's easy to write the same book over and over again.

[00:02:11]And by the way, I wrote 12 of them, not 10, but it's okay. It's okay. But anyway, >> and you open this with a quote by Richard Feman, uh, which starts off with him saying, "I don't feel frightened at not knowing things." He actually taught my dad freshman physics at MI at Caltech in 1961 when he did a guest lecture that's actually being recorded. And so my dad said he used to kind of hang out with all the freshmen and it sounded really epic.

[00:02:33]>> He was Yeah. I I met Fman when I was a student and it was it was epic. Yeah.

[00:02:37]>> Okay.

[00:02:38]>> And and yeah, he's he's a role model in many ways, although I'm no Richard Feman. I can say that. Why why do you look up to Richard Feman?

[00:02:46]>> Well, for many reasons. I mean, he was a brilliant scientist. He liked to play.

[00:02:50]He he he he liked to discover things for himself, but he also was a great educator and a great and his enthusiasm for science, I think, in a way my modeling of the way I I discuss things I like to think well I think has been affected by him. But the unpretentious nature of it, you know, he had a Brooklyn, well, not a Brooklyn, it was Long Island accent. Um, and but you you can't listen to him and not be excited.

[00:03:18]>> And and to have met him, too, was it just Yeah. You you couldn't be but he was he he [snorts] what he was famous for, which I I wrote a book. One of my books is about a scientific biography of Fineman, which is a labor of love that I wrote. And um but he insisted upon rediscovering everything for himself which was a a failing as well as a strength. It meant he had an incredible ability to attack new problems.

[00:03:44]But he also wastes a lot of time as as a as a an a former friend and mentor of mine who's now dead Sydney Coleman at at at at Harvard once said he told Fman not the other guys aren't all bozos you know [snorts] I mean they actually you know you can benefit from having learned what they were talking about but Fman was was was big on that and and and being inventive and um and loving to explain things and loving to learn and the excitement about learning is for me that's what's infectious and hopefully if I you know if I pass other things on that's that's one of the things >> and so you break the book down into five sections where you kind of go into these concepts of time space matter life and consciousness very interesting that's when you could go into AI at the end >> but you know I would love to cover some of those things I mean [clears throat] again what's always amazing to me Lawrence is that the average person finds this stuff fascinating >> well you know but why is that amazing because you know what I realized when I was writing the book I want to talk about the ideas at the forefront of science But they're the same ideas that all of us have, the same questions all of us ask. Are we alone in the universe? You know, what does it mean to think, you know, when I see green is the same green you see? Uh how did life originate? Uh how did the universe begin? How will it end? These are the questions we all have. We give them up. But we all have those questions. So it's not so fascinating. It's not so surprising that questions at the edge of science fascinate people because they are the very they're always the the kind of unknown threshold that provokes us when we're kids when we look up at the sky at night, you know. So Jim Rickards has just recorded a video that's not available to [music] anyone in the public. And he's going to be talking about how this upcoming recession is going to be fast. It's going to be bloody. [music] It's going to be nasty. But at the same time, he's going to show you how you can position yourself to profit from all of this chaos. Now, we've made [music] this video only available to our viewers. Go to londrill.tv/jim.

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