captioning sponsored by comedy central >> from comedy central's world news headquarters in new york, this is the daily show with jon stewart! [ applause ] >> stewart: hey, everybody! welcome to the daily show, my name is jon stewart, via a good one for you tonight. mario livio. >> about great scientific errors, like monkey pox. >> like so many nights before with the strong possibility of a nebulously defined targetish

bombing. designed to bring peace and stability to the bomb ees. >> it is not deja vu or groundhog day, it is groundhog deja cluster (bleep). >> obama laid out the goals for bombing syria which ultimately are really quite simple. >> the goal is to negotiate a solution which results in the departure of ba and the free choice of the syrian people for their future. >> stewart: assad leaves willingly, democratic syria is stable and peaceful, thousands of lives are saved and a and they get married and live happily ever after with unicorns and rainbows! >> it sounds simple but i am sure it is an arduous task, complex task the committee members that were listening to

our committee chair there, mr. chair, our secretary of state rightfully agonized over for hours and hours. >> john mccain finding ways to pass the time during that senate foreign relations hearing committee on syria, that is senator mccain on his phone playing poker. [ applause ] >> stewart: hey, man, is this possible global conflagration interrupting your video poker time? well, you have been talking hawkish issue for a year and this is your time to shine and this you can't be bothered because you are about to beat stash man 42? you know what, senator? go. rascal scooter and a bucket of quarters and play all the video owe poker you want, $9.99 prime

rib, go to the, go to an actual casino and pretend like you actually know what the government should. do how about that? [ cheers and applause ] >> stewart: i tell you what it is obama should have done! >> play that poker in my brain. how is mccain going to explain this one? >> you were caught today, you know what i am talking about senator. >> there you are. there is the picture. >> stewart: heave he, he, he. ah. ha, ha! you got me! i'm terrible! ha, ha! that is a great shot of mccain, by the way. can we get a gip of that bad

boy. i'm sorry, senator, i interrupted you. >> the worst thing about it is i lost thousands of dollars in this game. >> you what? >> i lost thousands of dollars. >> stewart: you know, if there is one thing i have learned in my career it is this. the joke always lands better if you repeat it a second time. you know, like a loop. man, it seems like no a matter what we do in the middle east it is like we are not in control of it. it is like we write the script in america and just head to the middle east, spend a good amount of time there and quite a bit of money and come back and finally get a chance to look at what you shot and it turns out it is (bleep) sucks, three months and flies over the middle east and it is all bull (bleep). who how, what are we going to do with this? [ cheers and applause ] we are

going to sit through a three hour moving about three guys sitting in a prison cell, i am not going back there, you hear me! still pulling pieces of that out of my ass. >> anyway, that is syria. just a general analogy. we tried everything. sanctions in the middle east, cruise, explicit and not as explicit. we even tried ignoring the region and pretending the atrocities have nothing to do with us. >> we even attempted dialogue. every eight years or so. >> every eight years or so. ah, there we go. i knew that was coming. it is like even though we are a superpower we haven't figured out yet we actually don't have

superpowers. but we just keep jumping out of the building thinking we are going to fly! you come out of the phone booth and tear your suit off and you know what, you are (bleep) clark kent. there is nothing there after all! any time we just went back to where a lot of these problems started. the original sin, the british man 100 years ago drawing a map of a place he never had been to filled with people he never met, forming new countries with no attention paid to ethnic race or tensions. >> i give you sir maps a, archibald maps a lot iii. >> nice to see you, sir! >> absolute pleasure to be here, jon! now what is all the bother about. >> it is actually amount the middle east, archibald. >> ghastly place, haven't been

there, don't want to. india, that is a playing worth subjugating. >> stewart: the border that you drew back after world war 1. >> yep. >> stewart: well, they have proven to be a little unstable and somewhat controversial. >> really? not a problem. we will just draw them again. in not a problem. yes. that's the problem. >> stewart: that's a problem. you are a little cavalier about this. >> this time i will take care. a quick scribble before you know it, it is gin o'clock, let's take a look. yep, yep, i see your problem right here. the lines are too squiggly. >> as my father once told me when borders get squiggly, people get squiggly, what you want is a nice straight line, jon, straight as you, can like that. lovely. lovely. >> stewart: what you have done though you have taken some land from turkey and now a kurdish population in a disputed zone. >> that is a who living in a where, jon? this is imperialism, boy, first rule is don't over think it, second

rule, don't think at all! check your brain at the door with your brawley, they will learn to live with it and if not who really cares. see how easy this is, push posh, put in the straight, lovely and take out the jiggles, there you go, there you go and we are done, time for a naughty sherry because if i know arabs, jon, and believe me, i do not -- they like nothing more than alcohol after a good western intervention. >> stewart: what you are doing there, see that is technically iran is not arab. they are persian. >> what? persian? >> stewart: yes. >> you are saying they are cats? >> stewart: no, i am not. >> cats and russian living side by side. oh, it will never work, jon! they are natural enemies. >> stewart: i understand that. i know that cats and russian are natural -- look, that is not what persians -- why didn't you touch saudi arabia, by the way. >> why touch saudi arabia,

jonathan? they are a good decent oil producing people! >> stewart: i don't think this is going to work out. >> look, there is nothing the arabs respect, jon, more than a strong, steady white hand drawing arbitrary lines to their, to, against their ridiculous tribal allegiances. >> stewart: that seems a built racist. >> you are calling me a what? >> stewart: that is a bit racist. >> ba, ba, ba, steady that ship to call me racist would be to imply i cared enough to hate them. oh, or, or with a interesting must have to learn something about them to dislike. that's it. >> stewart: that is exactly the kind of mindless imperialism that got us into this situation. your casual ignorance has doomed the region to exist in a perpetual state, what are you doing? what are you doing right now? >> i am playing poker. >> stewart: wait! why? why? [ cheers and applause ] >> stewart: why?

>> because you are boring me, jon. and this is what real gentlemen do. they play poker on their iphones whenever they become inexplicably bored by something incredibly important. i bid you good day, sir. >> stewart: sir archibald -- >> i bid you good day! >> stewart: sir 

vroom. >> stewart: so we are talking a little bit about the foreign policies and the proxy wars. president obama met with russian's president putin, head of the g-20 this week and after some consideration he decided ah, i am not going to do that, so instead our, we decided to give diplomacy a bit of a try. >> since 1989 the united states and russia have been allies but recently the nations have struggled with one crisis nestled inside ott crisis inside another. to see how to keep these two nations from another cold war i sat down who heads the kremlin approved policy group. let's start with an easy issue. edward snowden. >> you don't want him and we do want him. why can't we figure this (bleep) out like right now? >> this was your fault. why the hell you canceled his passport in moscow airport? you

created all of this mess. >> ah! don't turn this around and blame me for this. >> this is american problem. you created this problem. we are the victims of this situation. >> russia is the victim? >> yes. >> russia is the victim. >> oh, russia is the victim. 158 pounds of pasty nerd walks into your country and you are powerless to do anything about it. >> he is an unwelcomed guest. >> you know what i do with guest whose don't leave i shave my legs while i am watching tv. >> we are unfamiliar with this. >> maybe we should discuss something that never seems to elicit strong opinion, russia's treatment of gays. >> why do you think that gay people are so obsessed with their well-being? like not getting a cab or getting put in jail. >> gay people have the same rights as the other people, just don't manifest this in the

presence of our public with all of this kind of parades, you know, mass demonstration. >> so better to not be gay at all? >> you know, i think that this is a kind of inferiority complex. why the hell you have to have parades? >> yes, these gay pride parades clearly demonstrate an inferiority complex with all of their phallic imagery, we get it guys, you are gay, get your (bleep) out of my face. all they need to do is look to their president to see what is an appropriate public display. >> quite natural picture. >> okay. what about this picture, though come on. >> it is quite normal. when, you know, when man, macho, is, you know, riding the horse -- >> the guy looks like a gay centaur. >> he is one glitter cannon away

from leading a gay parade. >> it is your fantasy. >> okay, we are going to have to agree to disagree on the gay stuff. i just -- i -- i -- ah -- no. no. i -- >> no. i thought it was time to open up the one issue at the geopolitical heart of our differences. >> ever since i got this right here. >> oh. syria. let's talk about disarming assad. >> here is how we see it. russia is propping up assad with money and weapons and we think you should stop. >> no, no. russia is against regime change from outside. this is principal russian position. >> isn't it amazing when innocent civilians get killed sometimes emotions get in the way, but russia seems immune to that. >> listen, look at the mirror, do you know how many people were killed in iraq after american

invasion? >> oh, here we go. >> 200,000 -- >> how many millions were displaced? >> we have to have this conversation. >> no, no, no. but you are endlessly trying to blame russia for doing some bad thing. >> okay, you want to have a -- >> yes, we need to have a -- >> okay. afghanistan. go. >> yes. afghanistan. it was a tragic event in soviet history, and now you are repeating soviet experience. >> ah! i don't want to hear this! rrrr. >> and suddenly it hit me. maybe we weren't so different after all. >> i have got an idea. you propped up dictators and we have propped up dictators, why can't we prop up the same ruthless dictators? >> oh, we can do that. >> at least we agree on

something. [ applause ] >> stewart: we will be right

[ applause ] >> stewart: we are back, our guest tonight is an as spree physicist at the space telescope institute. >> it is called brilliant wonders. >> colossal miss mistakes that changed our concept of life. please welcome mario livio! >> how are you, my friend? >> great. let me tell you something, there is nothing i like better than a brilliant physicist. this is what i love about the book f expectation about the scientific blunder is always that story of the french guy who discovered, you know, radioactivity through like uranium of his desk and pens

sill lynn but that is not really what this book is about. no that is serendipity. >> but this is not that. this is big scientists making big mistakes. >> stewart: exactly. and it makes them seem. einstein and darwin, these are the greats, the idea along with their brilliant theories they held stubbornly wrong beliefs. >> comforting, isn't it, to all of us. >> stewart: what are the things about the world that bothers me so much is how much i don't know about it. and how wrong i am every day. and from now on, i am just going to go, yeah, i am just like darwin. >> but you should say, you know, i don't know much about it and, therefore, i should know more. and that is the real thing. >> stewart: you say these blunders drove scientific discovery,.

>> #02: breakthroughs, right, eventually, because you see there is this miss con sense that scientific progress is some sort of a direct march to the truth. nothing really can be further from the truth. scientific progress goes in a zigzag path, a lots of blind alleys and false starts and that's the main point i wanted to make here that is how it goes. >> stewart: it is very interesting and evens sition back zigs back. >> he added to his equation, he thought the universe was stable but his equations made it seem that would be impossible so he just added something in. >> right. just -- you see, he thought -- that's right, with a pencil. you see, he thought -- probably in his case it was a pencil. >> so, you see, he thought that the universe was static, but then he realized, wait a second,

but there is gravity. everything pulls on everything else, so it should collapse, right? it couldn't stay static, so it ended like a fudge factor, he entered another term that would produce a repulsive force that precisely balanced gravity. it was not a good idea. it was a big like balancing a pencil on its tip, but, you know, we thought this was it. then after hubble telescope, he discovered the universe is expanding when he discovered the universe is expanding, wait a second if the universe is expanding i don't need to balance everything like this. gravity will just slow down the expansion, you know, like i take my keys out of my pocket, i throw them up, gravity of the earth slows them down, right? >> stewart: that works. >> so for the keys, it does. so he took that term out of his equation. now guess what? 15 years ago we discovered that, in fact, our

universe expansion is not slowing down, it is speeding up. it is accelerating. and you know what is propelling this acceleration? >> stewart: your keys? >> good try. that term that einstein took out of his equation. >> stewart: you got to be kidding me so it has come back around, his original blunder was correct? >> was a huge insight. some people are just so smart that their blunders -- you know, i wish i could make a blunder like that. >> stewart: he is like a brilliant mr. magoo, like he wondered into it and it is brilliant and he didn't know but linus, he clung to this unusual structure of dna that was incorrect. >> right. >> stewart: but without that we don't get crick ken rosen. >> you know, they adopted his way of thinking, and his method of thinking, but his model was really wrong, it was built inside out, it has three strands

instead of two, i mean he had all kind of things wrong with it and this was the world's greatest chemist at the time doing a mistake like this. but what he. >> stewart: but he truly believed in it as well? >> yes. you see, so, he had so much success before sometimes we are victim of our own previous success. >> stewart: exactly. you think you can go off and do something else and then -- >> >> stewart: what is beautiful about this book is, first of all, it is very nicely written, just fun to read, but it gives you insight into the methodology of brilliance and science and it is a wonderful thing to read. you have to get this, "brilliant blunders" on the bookshelves right now, mario livio, thank

captioning sponsored by comedy central captioned by media access group at wgbh access >> stewart: that's our show. here it is. your moment of zen. >> putting young americans in harm's way, that is not what the president is asking for