29 Mar 2019 · 4 min
Emmy-winning Sports Science creator John Brenkus discusses the odds of life arising by chance, the nature of time, and why climate change matters less as settled science than as a practical argument for clean air and water.
This is five minute Friday. We've got John Brinkus in the house. He has spent the last decade studying and popularizing the unique characteristics of the world's greatest athletes. He co-created the groundbreaking series fight science for the National Geographic Channel. Brinkus is best known as the on-air host, co-creator and executive producer of ESPN's Emmy award show Sports Science, appearing in and producing over 1500 segments that have been featured on ABC and ESPN's enormous sports platforms. He has been featured in coverage of the Super Bowl, Monday Night Football, the NBA Finals, Sunday Night Baseball, the Masters, just to name a few. And through Sports Science, Brinkus has appeared before 80 million people annually for the last decade. He's won six Emmys and he's written a New York Times bestseller, the perfection point. Now, how often would you say that you are still studying science today? Are you like obsessed with it? Do you constantly like curious about science and testing things just outside of sports? All the time. Really?
I mean, I would say especially outside of sports.
So I watched the whole Bill Nye series on Netflix. Did you watch that money chance?
I have seen a lot.
Yeah, most of them or a few of them. And I think there was one, I can't remember, I think there was one about an energy. And you were talking about before we got on here about God energy. As a scientist, what is this place? What is this world, universe? Are we even here? Is there an energy force bigger than us that has created us, or was it a explosion of particles that came together and light and molecules?
I love the theory. of probability of life existing. If you were to just say, okay, the universe exploded and then somehow it magically all came together and therefore life existed. When you do the odds on hydrogen and oxygen and creating water and all those things having to come together, the margin of error of it actually happening is so far off the meter. that it couldn't, in my opinion, there's no way it could just happen by chance. There's some sort of order to the chaos. And this is what I think a lot of people can't wrap their brains around. And I'm a very spiritual guy, born and raised Catholic, and accepting of all religions, all lenses. I believe that we're all looking at the universe through a different lens, but essentially we want to get We want to live the same way and get to the same place. We want to be good people. That's what I believe. But when you think about this, and people say, well, at the beginning of time, there's a great philosopher named Paul Davies that wrote a book called Time. And he posed the question, Is there.
A beginning of time?
Is there? Do we have to have a beginning of time? I mean, that's the time infinite? Right. If it's infinite, if we say something is infinite, it has to be infinite in every direction.
Exactly.
Right.
There was no beginning then.
There was no beginning and there's no end. It's just infinite. So it always was. And that idea blows our minds.
It's crazy.
You just can't even comprehend it, right? That's crazy. Like you were never born, you always were, right? The universe always, it just, it's just a crazy idea. So the idea that the universe has always existed and there's always been something to it, and it clearly has evolved, but the time idea is one that I think we can point to and say, there is order in this chaos, and we, through scientific terms, have put labels on what we believe we understand. But think of the number of things that we have had to change and revise because our understanding is now different.
Every week, every day, every year, right?
Every, if you think about it.
What we prove to be true is always not true.
Right.
You do this all the time with the body or I mean, the four-minute mile to all these other things of people breaking PRs every day in every category of sport, right?
Yeah, and science, I think, best reflects that the only way that we can move forward is by agreeing on a set of signs and symbols that we refer to as language so that we can communicate and evolve from there.
Right?
It's just like saying the earth is flat. We then say, it is flat, period, it's flat. Then we say, oh, it's round, but it's the center in the earth. Oh, wait, but now that it's a globe, maybe it's not the center, maybe it's going around something else. Like we keep evolving, and that's why it's almost like the argument of global warming as an example. From a purely scientific standpoint, I feel like we're arguing something that you can't win. You can't win this argument one way or the other, because you don't have your planet that has no people, no cars, no nothing that has existed the exact same way that Earth has. You don't have this constant other planet that would be something you could compare it to. So you can't prove it one way or the other. But what we can prove is that, well, the air is worse, the water is dirtier. We can prove that. And to me, it's like an anti-pollution argument is something far easier for everyone to get on that train than to say, well, the whole world is changing because I just don't think we have enough of a snapshot. I'm not one of these, oh, global warming is not real. I'm just saying it's really hard to definitively prove it, and I'm not sure that that's even the point. The point is I don't want my kids breathing crappy air. I don't want to drink dirty water. Like, that's an easy thing for us all to agree on.
