back to indexJim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right | Lex Fridman Podcast #60
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The following is a conversation with S. James Gates, Jr.
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He's a theoretical physicist and professor at Brown University,
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working on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
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He served on former President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology,
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and he's now the coauthor of a new book titled Proving Einstein Right,
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about the scientists who set out to prove Einstein's theory of relativity.
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You may have noticed that I've been speaking with not just computer scientists,
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but philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, economists, and soon, much more.
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To me, AI is much bigger than deep learning, bigger than computing.
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It is our civilization's journey into understanding the human mind
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and creating echoes of it in the machine.
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That journey includes, of course, the world of theoretical physics
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and its practice of first principles mathematical thinking
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and exploring the fundamental nature of our reality.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F.R.I.D.M.A.N.
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consider mentioning ideas, people, topics you find interesting.
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It helps guide the future of this podcast.
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which again is an organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys
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to dream of engineering a better world.
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And now, here's my conversation with S. James Gates Jr.
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You tell a story when you were eight.
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You had a profound realization that the stars in the sky
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are actually places that we could travel to one day.
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Do you think human beings will ever venture outside our solar system?
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Wow, the question of whether humanity gets outside of the solar system.
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It's going to be a challenge,
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and as long as the laws of physics that we have today are accurate and valid,
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it's going to be extraordinarily difficult.
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I'm a science fiction fan, as you probably know,
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so I love to dream of starships and traveling to other solar systems,
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but the barriers are just formidable.
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If we just kind of venture a little bit into science fiction,
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do you think the spaceships, if we are successful,
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that take us outside the solar system,
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will look like the ones we have today,
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or are fundamental breakthroughs necessary?
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In order to have genuine starships,
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probably some really radical views about the way the universe works
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are going to have to take place in our science.
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We could, with our current technology,
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think about constructing multigenerational starships
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where the people who get on them are not the people who get off at the other end.
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But even if we do that, the formidable problem is actually our bodies,
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which doesn't seem to be conscious for a lot of people.
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Even getting to Mars is going to present this challenge,
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because we live in this wonderful home,
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has a protective magnetic magnetosphere around it,
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and so we're shielded from cosmic radiation.
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Once you leave this shield, there are some estimates that,
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for example, if you sent someone to Mars,
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with our technology, probably about two years out there without the shield,
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they're going to be bombarded.
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That means radiation, probably means cancer.
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So that's one of the most formidable challenges,
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even if we could get over the technology.
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Do you think, so Mars is a harsh place.
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Elon Musk, SpaceX and other folks,
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NASA are really pushing to put a human being on Mars.
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Do you think, again, let's forgive me
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for lingering in science fiction land for a little bit.
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Do you think one day we may be able to colonize Mars?
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First, do you think we'll put a human on Mars,
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and then do you think we'll put many humans on Mars?
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So first of all, I am extraordinarily convinced
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we will not put a human on Mars by 2030,
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which is a date that you often hear in the public debate.
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What's the challenge there?
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What do you think?
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So there are a couple of ways that I could slice this,
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but the one that I think is simplest for people to understand involves money.
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So you look at how we got to the moon in the 1960s.
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It was about 10 year duration
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between the challenge that President Kennedy laid out
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and our successfully landing a moon.
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I was actually here at MIT
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when that first moon landing occurred,
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so I remember watching it on TV.
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But how did we get there?
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Well, we had this extraordinarily technical agency
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of the United States government, NASA.
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It consumed about 5% of the country's economic output.
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And so you say 5% of the economic output
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over about a 10 year period gets us 250,000 miles in space.
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Mars is about a hundred times farther.
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So you have at least a hundred times the challenge
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and we're spending about one tenth of the funds
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that we spent then as a government.
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So my claim is that it's at least a thousand times harder
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for me to imagine us getting to Mars by 2030.
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And he had that part that you mentioned in the speech
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that I just have to throw in there of JFK,
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of we do these things not because they're easy,
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but because they're hard.
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That's such a beautiful line
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that I would love to hear a modern president say
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about a scientific endeavor.
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Well, one day we live and hope
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that such a president will arise for our nation.
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But even if, like I said,
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even if you fix the technical problems,
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the biological engineering that I worry most about,
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however, I'm gonna go out on a limb here.
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I think that by 2090 or so,
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or 2100, should I say 120,
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I suspect we're gonna have a human on Mars.
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Wow, so you think that many years out,
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first a few tangents.
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You said bioengineering is a challenge.
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What's the challenge there?
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So as I said, the real problem with interstellar travel,
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aside from the technology challenges,
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the real problem is radiation.
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And how do you engineer either an environment or a body,
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because we see rapid advances going on in bioengineering,
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how do you engineer either a ship or a body
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so that something, some person
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that's recognizably human will survive
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the rigors of interplanetary space travel?
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It's much more difficult than most people
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seem to take into account.
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So if we could linger on the 2090, 2100, 2120,
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sort of thinking of that kind of,
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you know, and let's linger on money.
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So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are pushing the cost,
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trying to push the cost down.
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I mean, this is, so do you have hope
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as this actually sort of a brilliant big picture scientist,
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do you think a business entrepreneur can take science
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and make it cheaper and get it out there faster?
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So bending the cost curve is,
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you'll notice that has been an anchor.
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This is the simplest way for me to discuss this with people
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about what the challenge is.
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So yes, bending the cost curve is certainly critical
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if we're going to be successful.
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Now, you asked about the endeavors that are out there now
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sponsored by two very prominent American citizens,
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Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
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I'm disappointed actually in what I see
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in terms of the routes that are being pursued.
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So let me give you one example there.
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And this one is going to be a little bit more technical.
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So if you look at the kinds of rockets
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that both these organizations are creating,
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yes, it's wonderful, reusable technology
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to see a rocket go up and land on its fins
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just like it did in science fiction movies
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when I was a kid, that's astounding.
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But the real problem is those rockets,
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the technology that we're doing now
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is not really that different
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than what was used to go to the moon.
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And there are alternatives it turns out.
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There's an engine called a flare engine,
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which so a traditional rocket,
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if you look at the engine, it looks like a bell, right?
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And then the flame comes out the bottom.
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But there is a kind of engine called a flare engine,
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which is essentially, when you look at it,
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it looks like an exhaust pipe
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on like a fancy car that's long and elongated.
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And it's a type of rocket engine
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that we know there've been preliminary testing,
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And it also is actually much more economical
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because what it does is allow you
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to vary the amount of thrust as you go up.
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In a way that you cannot do
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with one of these bell shaped engines.
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So you would think that an entrepreneur
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might try to have the breakthrough to use flare nozzles,
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as they're called, as a way to bend the cost curve.
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Because as we keep coming back,
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that's gonna be a big factor.
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But that's not happening.
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In fact, what we see is what I think of as incremental change
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in terms of our technology.
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So I'm not really very encouraged by what I personally see.
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So incremental change won't bend the cost curve.
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Just linger on the sci fi for one more question.
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Do you think we're alone in the universe?
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Are we the only intelligent form of life?
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So there is a quote by Carl Sagan,
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which I really love when I hear this question.
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And I recall the quote,
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and it goes something like,
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if we're the only conscious life in the universe,
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it's in a terrible waste of space
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because the universe is an incredibly big place.
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And when Carl made that statement,
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we didn't know about the profusion of planets
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that are out there.
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In the last decade,
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we've discovered over a thousand planets
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and a substantial number of those planets are Earth like
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in terms of being in the Goldilocks zone as it's called.
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So in my mind, it's practically inconceivable
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that we're the only conscious form of life in the universe.
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But that doesn't mean they've come to visit us.
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Do you think they would look,
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do you think we'll recognize alien life if we saw it?
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Do you think it'd look anything like the carbon base,
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the biological system we have on Earth today?
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It would depend on that life's native environment
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in which it arose.
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If that environment was sufficiently like our environment,
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there's a principle in biology and nature called convergence,
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which is that even if you have two biological systems
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that are totally separated from each other,
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if they face similar conditions,
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nature tends to converge on solutions.
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And so there might be similarities
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if this alien life form was born in a place
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that's kind of like this place.
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Physics appears to be quite similar,
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the laws of physics across the entirety of the universe.
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Do you think weirder things than we see on Earth
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can spring up out of the same kinds of laws of physics?
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From the laws of physics, I would say yes.
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First of all, if you look at carbon based life,
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why are we carbon based?
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Well, it turns out it's because of the way
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that carbon interacts with elements,
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which in fact is also a reflection
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on the electronic structure of the carbon nucleus.
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So you can look down the table of elements and say,
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well, gee, do we see similar elements?
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The answer is yes.
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And one that one often hears about
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in science fiction is silicon.
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So maybe there's a silicon based life form out there
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if the conditions are right.
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But I think it's presumptuous of us
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to think that we are the template
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by which all life has to appear.
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Before we dive into beautiful details,
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let me ask a big question.
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What to you is the most beautiful idea,
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maybe the most surprising, mysterious idea in physics?
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The most surprising idea to me
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is that we can actually do physics.
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The universe did not have to be constructed
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in such a way with our limited intellectual capacity
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that is actually put together in such a way
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and that we are put together in such a way
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that we can, with our mind's eye,
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delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe.
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That to me is pretty close to a miracle.
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So there are simple equations, relatively simple,
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that can describe things, the fundamental functions.
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They can describe everything about our reality.
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That's not, can you imagine universes
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where everything is a lot more complicated?
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Do you think there's something inherent about universes
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that simple laws are...
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Well, first of all, let me,
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this is a question that I encounter in a number of guides.
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A lot of people will raise the question
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about whether mathematics is the language of the universe.
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And my response is mathematics is the language
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that we humans are capable of using in describing the universe.
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It may have little to do with the universe,
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but in terms of our capacity, it's the microscope,
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it's the telescope through which we,
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it's the lens through which we are able to view the universe
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with the precision that no other human language allows.
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So could there be other universes?
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Well, I don't even know if this one looks like I think it does.
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But the beautiful surprising thing is that physics,
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there are laws of physics, very few laws of physics
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that can effectively compress down
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the functioning of the universe.
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Yes, that's extraordinarily surprising.
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I like to use the analogy
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with computers and information technology.
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If you worry about transmitting large bundles of data,
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one of the things that computer scientists do for us
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is they allow for processes that are called compression,
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where you take big packets of data
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and you press them down into much smaller packets,
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and then you transmit those
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and then unpack them at the other end.
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And so it looks a little bit to me
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like the universe has kind of done us a favor.
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It's constructed our minds in such a way
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that we have this thing called mathematics,
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which then as we look at the universe,
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teaches us how to carry out the compression process.
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A quick question about compression.
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Do you think the human mind can be compressed?
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The biology can be compressed?
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We talked about space travel.
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To be able to compress the information
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that captures some large percent of what it means
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and then be able to send that at the speed of light.
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Wow, that's a big question.
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And let me try to take it apart,
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unpack it into several pieces.
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I don't believe that wetware biology such as we are
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has an exclusive patent on intellectual consciousness.
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I suspect that other structures in the universe
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are perfectly capable of producing the data streams
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that we use to process, first of all,
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our observations of the universe
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and an awareness of ourself.
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I can imagine other structures can do that also.
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So that's part of what you were talking about,
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which I would have some disagreement with.
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What's the most interesting part of us humans?
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Is consciousness the thing?
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I think that's the most interesting thing about humans.
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And then you're saying that there's other entities
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throughout the universe.
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I can well imagine that the architecture
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that supports our consciousness, again,
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has no patent on consciousness.
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Just in case you have an interesting thought here,
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there's folks perhaps in philosophy called panpsychists
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that believe consciousness underlies everything.
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It is one of the fundamental laws of the universe.
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Do you have a sense that that could possibly fit into...
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I don't know the answer to that question.
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One part of that belief system is giya,
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which is that there's a kind of conscious life force
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And I've encountered these things before.
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I don't quite know what to make of them.
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My own life experience, and I'll be 69 in about two months,
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and I have spent all my adulthood thinking about
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the way that mathematics interacts with nature
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and with us to try to understand nature.
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And all I can tell you from all of my integrated experience
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is that there is something extraordinarily mysterious
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to me about our universe.
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This is something that Einstein said
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from his life experience as a scientist.
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And this mysteriousness almost feels
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like the universe is our parent.
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It's a very strange thing perhaps to hear scientists say,
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but there are just so many strange coincidences
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that you just get a sense that something is going on.
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Well, I interrupted you.
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In terms of compressing what we're down to,
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we can send it at the speed of light.
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So the first thing is I would argue that it's probably
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very likely that artificial intelligence
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ultimately will develop something like consciousness,
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something that for us will probably be indistinguishable
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from consciousness.
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So that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment
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that we carry up here probably does not hold a patent
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on consciousness, because it's really
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about the data streams.
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As far as I can tell, that's what we are.
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We are self actuating, self learning data streams.
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That to me is most accurate way I can tell you
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what I've seen in my lifetime about what humans are
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at the level of consciousness.
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So if that's the case, then you just need to have
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an architecture that supports that information processing.
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So let's assume that that's true,
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that in fact what we call consciousness is really about
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a very peculiar kind of data stream.
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If that's the case, then if you can export that
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to a piece of hardware, something metal,
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electronic, what have you, then you certainly will,
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ultimately that kind of consciousness could get to Mars
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very quickly, it doesn't have our problems.
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You can engineer the body, as I said,
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it's a ship or a body, you engineer one or both.
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Send it at a speed of light, well,
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that one is a more difficult one because that now
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goes beyond just a matter of having a data stream.
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It's now the preservation of the information
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in the data stream.
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And so unless you can build something that's like
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a super, super, super version of the way the internet works
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because most people aren't aware that the internet itself
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is actually a miracle, it's based on a technology
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called message packaging.
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So if you could exponentiate message packaging
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in some way to preserve the information
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that's in the data stream, then maybe
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your dream becomes true.
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You mentioned with artificial intelligence,
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sort of us human beings not having
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a monopoly on consciousness.
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Does the idea of artificial intelligence systems,
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computational systems, being able to basically
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replacing us humans scare you, excite you?
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What do you think about that?
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So I'm gonna tell you about a conversation
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I once had with Eric Schmidt.
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I was sitting at a meeting with him
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and he was a few feet away and he turned to me
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and he said something like, you know, Jim,
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in maybe a decade or so, we're gonna have computers
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that do what you do.
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And my response was not unless they can dream
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because there's something about,
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the way that we humans actually generate creativity.
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It's somehow, I get this sense of my lived experience
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in watching creative people that it's somehow
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connected to the irrational parts of what goes on
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in our head and dreaming is part of that irrational.
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So unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence
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that dreams, I have a strong suspicion
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that you will not get something that will fully be conscious
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by a definition that I would accept, for example.
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So you mentioned dreaming.
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You've played around with some out there fascinating ideas.
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How do you think, and we'll start diving into
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the world of the very small ideas of super symmetry
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and all that in terms of visualization,
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in terms of how do you think about it?
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How do you dream of it?
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How do you come up with ideas
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in that fascinating, mysterious space?
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So in my workspace, which is basically
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where I am charged with coming up on a mathematical palette
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with new ideas that will help me understand
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the structure of nature and hopefully help all of us
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understand the structure of nature.
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I've observed several different ways
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in which my creativity expresses itself.
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There's one mode which looks pretty normal,
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which I sort of think of as the Chinese water torture method.
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Drop, drop, drop, you get more and more information
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and suddenly it all congeals and you get a clear picture.
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And so that's kind of a standard way of working.
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And I think that's how most people think about
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the way technical people solve problems.
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That is kind of you accumulate this body of information
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and at a certain point you synthesize it
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and then boom, there's something new.
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But I've also observed in myself and other scientists
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that there are other ways that we are creative.
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And these other ways to me are actually far more powerful.
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I first personally experienced this
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when I was a freshman at MIT over in Baker House
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right across the campus.
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And I was in a calculus course, 1801 is called at MIT.
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And calculus comes in two different flavors.
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One of them is called differential calculus.
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The other is called integral calculus.
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Differential calculus is the calculus
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that Newton invented to describe motion.
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It turns out integral calculus was probably invented
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about 1700 years earlier by Archimedes.
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But we didn't know that when I was a freshman.
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But so that's what you study as a student.
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And the differential calculus part of the course was,
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to me, I wouldn't, how do I say this?
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It was something that by the drip, drip, drip method
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you could sort of figure it out.
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Now, the integral part of calculus,
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I could memorize the formula.
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That was not the formulae, that was not the problem.
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The problem was why, in my own mind,
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why do these formulae work?
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And because of that, when I was in the part
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of the calculus course where we had to do
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multiple substitutions to solve integrals,
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I had a lot of difficulty.
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I was emotionally involved in my education
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because this is where I think the passion of motion comes to.
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And it caused an emotional crisis
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that I was having these difficulties
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understanding the integral part of calculus.
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The why, that's right, the why of it.
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Not the rote memorization of fact,
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but the why of it.
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Why does this work?
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And so one night I was over in my dormitory room
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I was trying to do a calculus problem set.
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I was getting nowhere.
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I got a terrific headache.
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I went to sleep and had this very strange dream.
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And when I woke, awakened,
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I could do three and four substitutions
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and integrals with relative ease.
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Now, this to me was an astounding experience
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because I had never before in my life understood
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that one subconscious is actually capable
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of being harnessed to do mathematics.
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I experienced it, this.
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And I've experienced this more than once.
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So this was just the first time why I remember it so.
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So that's why when it comes to like
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really wickedly tough problems,
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I think that the kind of creativity
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that you need to solve them
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is probably this second variety
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which comes somehow from dreaming.
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Do you think, again, I told you I'm Russian.
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So we romanticize suffering.
link |
But do you think part of that equation
link |
is the suffering leading up to that dreaming?
link |
So the suffering is,
link |
I am convinced that this kind of creative,
link |
this second mode of creativity as I like to call it,
link |
I'm convinced that this second mode of creativity
link |
is in fact that suffering is a kind of crucible
link |
Because the mind I think is struggling to get out of this.
link |
And the only way to actually solve the problem.
link |
And even though you're not consciously solving problems,
link |
something is going on.
link |
And I've talked about to a few other people
link |
and I've heard other similar stories.
link |
And so I guess what I think about it is
link |
it's a little bit by like the way
link |
that thermonuclear weapons work.
link |
I don't know if you know how they work.
link |
But a thermonuclear weapon is actually two bombs.
link |
It's an atomic bomb which sort of does a compression.
link |
And then you have a fusion bomb that goes off.
link |
And somehow that emotional pressure
link |
I think acts like the first stage of a thermonuclear weapon.
link |
That's when we get really big thoughts.
link |
The analogy between thermonuclear weapons
link |
and the subconscious, the connection there is,
link |
at least visually, is kind of interesting.
link |
There may be, Freud would have a few things to say.
link |
Well, part of it is probably based
link |
on my own trajectory through life.
link |
My father was in the US Army for 27 years.
link |
And so I started my life out on a military basis.
link |
And so a lot of probably the things that wander around
link |
in my subconscious are connected to that experience.
link |
I apologize for all the tangents, but.
link |
Well, you're doing it.
link |
But you're encouraging by answering the stupid questions.
link |
No, they're not stupid.
link |
You know, your father was in the Army.
link |
What do you think about, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently wrote
link |
a book on interlinking the progress of science
link |
to sort of the aspirations of our military endeavors
link |
and DARPA funding and so on.
link |
What do you think about war in general?
link |
Do you think we'll always have war?
link |
Do you think we'll always have conflict in the world?
link |
I'm not sure that we're going to be able
link |
to afford to have war always, because if.
link |
Strictly financially speaking?
link |
No, not in terms of finance, but in terms of consequences.
link |
So if you look at technology today,
link |
you can have non state actors acquire technology,
link |
for example, bioterrorism, whose impact is roughly speaking
link |
equivalent to what it used to take nations
link |
to impart on a population.
link |
I think the cost of war is ultimately,
link |
it's going to be a little, I think
link |
it's going to work a little bit like the Cold War.
link |
You know, we survived 50, 60 years as a species
link |
with these weapons that are so terrible that they could have
link |
actually ended our form of life on this planet, but it didn't.
link |
Well, it's a very bizarre and interesting thing,
link |
but it was called mutually assured destruction.
link |
And so the cost was so great that people eventually
link |
figured out that you can't really
link |
use these things, which is kind of interesting,
link |
because if you read the history about the development
link |
of nuclear weapons, physicists actually
link |
realized this pretty quickly.
link |
I think it was maybe Schrodinger who
link |
said that these things are not really weapons.
link |
They're political implements.
link |
They're not weapons, because the cost is so high.
link |
And if you take that example and spread it out
link |
to the kind of technological development
link |
we're seeing now outside of nuclear physics,
link |
but I picked the example of biology,
link |
I could well imagine that there would be material science
link |
sorts of equivalents across a broad front of technology.
link |
You take that experience from nuclear weapons,
link |
and the picture that I see is that it would be possible
link |
to develop technologies that are so terrible that you couldn't
link |
use them, because the costs are too high.
link |
And that might cure us.
link |
And many people have argued that actually it prevented,
link |
nuclear weapons have prevented more military conflict than.
link |
It certainly froze the conflict domain.
link |
It's interesting that nowadays it
link |
was with the removal of the threat of mutually assured
link |
destruction that other forces took over in our geopolitics.
link |
Do you have worries of existential threats
link |
of nuclear weapons or other technologies
link |
like artificial intelligence?
link |
Do you think we humans will tend to figure out
link |
how to not blow ourselves up?
link |
I don't know, quite frankly.
link |
This is something I've thought about.
link |
And I'm not, I mean, so I'm a spectator in the sense
link |
that as a scientist, I collect and collate data.
link |
So I've been doing that all my life
link |
and looking at my species.
link |
And it's not clear to me that we are
link |
going to avoid a catastrophic, self induced ending.
link |
Are you optimistic?
link |
Not as a scientist, but as a single element speaker?
link |
I would say I wouldn't bet against us.
link |
Let's dive into the world of the very small,
link |
if we could for a bit.
link |
What are the basic particles, either experimentally observed
link |
or hypothesized by physicists?
link |
So as we physicists look at the universe,
link |
you can, first of all, there are two big buckets of particles.
link |
That is the smallest objects that we
link |
are able to currently mathematically conceive
link |
and then experimentally verify that these ideas have
link |
a sense of accuracy to them.
link |
So one of those buckets we call matter.
link |
These are things like electrons, things
link |
that are like quarks, which are particles that
link |
exist inside of protons.
link |
And there's a whole family of these things.
link |
There are, in fact, 18 quarks and apparently six
link |
electron like objects that we call leptons.
link |
So that's one bucket.
link |
The other bucket that we see both in our mathematics
link |
as well as in our experimental equipment
link |
are a set of particles that you can call force carriers.
link |
The most familiar force carrier is the photon, the particle
link |
of light that allows you to see me.
link |
In fact, it's the same object that
link |
carries electric repulsion between like charges.
link |
From science fiction, we have the object
link |
called the graviton, which is talked about a lot in science
link |
fiction and Star Trek.
link |
But the graviton is also a mathematical object
link |
that we physicists have known about essentially
link |
since Einstein wrote his theory of general relativity.
link |
There are four forces in nature, the fundamental forces.
link |
There is the gravitational force.
link |
Its carrier is the graviton.
link |
There are three other forces in nature,
link |
the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force,
link |
and the weak nuclear force.
link |
And each one of these forces has one or more carriers.
link |
The photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force.
link |
The strong nuclear force actually has eight carriers.
link |
They're called gluons.
link |
And then the weak nuclear force has three carriers.
link |
They're called the W plus, W minus, and Z bosons.
link |
So those are the things that both in mathematics
link |
and in experiments, by the way, the most precise experiments
link |
we're ever as a species able to conduct
link |
is about measuring the accuracy of these ideas.
link |
And we know that at least to one part in a billion,
link |
these ideas are right.
link |
So first of all, you've made it sound both elegant and simple.
link |
But is it crazy to you that there is force carriers?
link |
Like, is that supposed to be a trivial idea to think about?
link |
If we think about photons, gluons,
link |
that there's four fundamental forces of physics,
link |
and then those forces are expressed.
link |
There's carriers of those forces.
link |
Like, is that a kind of trivial thing?
link |
It's not a trivial thing at all.
link |
In fact, it was a puzzle for Sir Isaac Newton,
link |
because he's the first person to give us basically physics.
link |
Before Isaac Newton, physics didn't exist.
link |
What did exist was called natural philosophy,
link |
so discussions about using the methods of classical philosophy
link |
to understand nature, natural philosophy.
link |
So the Greeks, we call them scientists,
link |
but they were natural philosophers.
link |
Physics doesn't get born until Newton writes the Principia.
link |
One of the things that puzzled him was how gravity works,
link |
because if you read very carefully what he writes,
link |
he basically says, and I'm paraphrasing badly,
link |
but he basically says that someone who thinks deeply
link |
about this subject would find it inconceivable
link |
that an object in one place or location
link |
can magically reach out and affect another object
link |
with nothing intervening.
link |
And so it puzzled him.
link |
There's a puzzle of you, action at a distance.
link |
I mean, not as a physicist.
link |
It would, it would, except that I am a physicist,
link |
and we have long ago resolved this issue,
link |
and the resolution came about
link |
through a second great physicist.
link |
Most people have heard of Newton.
link |
Most people have heard of Einstein.
link |
But between the two of them,
link |
there was another extraordinarily great physicist,
link |
a man named James Clark Maxwell.
link |
And Maxwell, between these two other giants,
link |
taught us about electric and magnetic forces,
link |
and it's from his equations that one can figure out
link |
that there's a carrier called the photon.
link |
So this was resolved for physicists around 1860 or so.
link |
So what are bosons and fermions and hadrons,
link |
elementary and composites?
link |
Sure, so earlier I said.
link |
You have got two buckets
link |
if you wanna try to build the universe.
link |
You gotta start off with things on these two buckets.
link |
So you gotta have things, that's a matter,
link |
and then you have to have other objects that act on them
link |
to cause those things to cohere to fixed finite patterns,
link |
because you need those fixed finite patterns
link |
as building blocks.
link |
So that's the way our universe looks to people like me.
link |
Now, the building blocks do different things.
link |
So let's go back to these two buckets again.
link |
Let me start with a bucket containing the particle of light.
link |
Let me imagine I'm in a dusty room with two flashlights,
link |
and I have one flashlight, which I direct directly
link |
in front of me, and then I have you stand over to say my left
link |
and then we both take our flashlights and turn them on
link |
and make sure the beams go right through each other.
link |
And the beams do just that.
link |
They go right through each other.
link |
They don't bounce off of each other.
link |
The reason the room has to be dusty
link |
is because we wanna see the light.
link |
The room dust wasn't there.
link |
We wouldn't actually see the light
link |
until it got to the other wall, right?
link |
So you see the beam because it's the dust in the air.
link |
But the two beams actually pass right through each other.
link |
They literally pass right through.
link |
They don't affect each other at all.
link |
One acts like the other's not there.
link |
The particle of light is the simplest example
link |
that shows that behavior.
link |
Now let's imagine that we're in the same dusty room
link |
and this time you have a bucket of balls
link |
and I have a bucket of balls.
link |
And we try to throw them so that we get something
link |
like a beam, throwing them fast, right?
link |
If they collide, they don't just pass through each other.
link |
They bounce off of each other.
link |
Now that's mostly because they have electric charge
link |
and electric charges, light charges repel.
link |
But mathematically, I know how to turn off
link |
the electric charge.
link |
And if you do that, you'll find these still repel.
link |
And it's because they are these things we call fermions.
link |
So this is how you distinguish the things
link |
that are in the two buckets.
link |
They are either bosons or fermions.
link |
Which of them, and maybe you can mention
link |
the most popular of the bosons.
link |
The most recently discovered.
link |
It's like when I was in high school
link |
and there was a really popular majorette.
link |
Her name is the Higgs particle these days.
link |
Can you describe which of the bosons
link |
and the fermions have been discovered,
link |
hypothesized, which have been experimentally validated,
link |
what's still out there?
link |
Right, so the two buckets that I've actually described
link |
to you have all been first hypothesized
link |
and then verified by observation.
link |
With the Higgs boson being the most recent
link |
one of these things.
link |
We haven't actually verified the graviton
link |
interestingly enough.
link |
Mathematically, we have an expectation
link |
that gravitons exist.
link |
But we've not performed an experiment
link |
to show that this is an accurate idea that nature uses.
link |
So something has to be a carrier.
link |
For the force of gravity, exactly.
link |
Can it be something way more mysterious than we,
link |
so when you say the graviton, is it,
link |
would it be like the other particles, force carriers,
link |
or can it be something much more mysterious?
link |
In some ways, yes, but in other ways, no.
link |
It turns out that the graviton is also,
link |
if you look at Einstein's theory,
link |
he taught us about this thing he calls space time,
link |
which is, if you try to imagine it,
link |
you can sort of think of it as kind of a rubber surface.
link |
That's one popular depiction of space time.
link |
It's not an accurate depiction
link |
because the only accuracy is actually in the calculus
link |
that he uses, but that's close enough.
link |
So if you have a sheet of rubber, you can wave it.
link |
You can actually form a wave on it.
link |
Space time is enough like that
link |
so that when space time oscillates, you create these waves.
link |
These waves carry energy.
link |
We expect them to carry energy in quanta.
link |
That's what a graviton is.
link |
It's a wave in space time.
link |
And so the fact that we have seen the waves
link |
with LIGO over the course of the last three years,
link |
and we've recently used gravitational wave observatories
link |
to watch colliding black holes and neutron stars
link |
and all sorts of really cool stuff out there.
link |
So we know the waves exist,
link |
but in order to know that gravitons exist,
link |
you have to prove that these waves carry energy
link |
in energy packets.
link |
And that's what we don't have the technology to do yet.
link |
And perhaps briefly jumping to a philosophical question,
link |
does it make sense to you that gravity
link |
is so much weaker than the other forces?
link |
You see, now you've touched on a very deep mystery
link |
There are a lot of such questions in physics
link |
about why things are as they are.
link |
And as someone who believes that there are some things
link |
that certainly are coincidences,
link |
like you could ask the same question about,
link |
well, why are the planets at the orbits
link |
that they are around the sun?
link |
The answer turns out there is no good reason.
link |
It's just an accident.
link |
So there are things in nature that have that character.
link |
And perhaps the strength of the various forces is like that.
link |
On the other hand, we don't know that that's the case.
link |
And there may be some deep reasons
link |
about why the forces are ordered as they are,
link |
where the weakest force is gravity,
link |
the next weakest force is the weak interaction,
link |
the weak nuclear force, then there's electromagnetism,
link |
there's a strong force.
link |
We don't really have a good understanding
link |
of why this is the ordering of the forces.
link |
So some of the fascinating work you've done
link |
is in the space of supersymmetry, symmetry in general.
link |
Can you describe, first of all, what is supersymmetry?
link |
Yes, so you remember the two buckets
link |
I told you about perhaps earlier?
link |
So there are two buckets in our universe.
link |
So now I want you to think about drawing a pie
link |
that has four quadrants.
link |
So I want you to cut the piece of pie in fourths.
link |
So in one quadrant, I'm gonna put all the buckets
link |
that we talked about that are like the electron and quarks.
link |
In a different quadrant,
link |
I'm going to put all the force carriers.
link |
The other two quadrants are empty.
link |
Now, I showed you a picture of that.
link |
You'd see a circle.
link |
There would be a bunch of stuff in one upper quadrant
link |
and stuff in others.
link |
And then I would ask you a question.
link |
Does that look symmetrical to you?
link |
And that's exactly right
link |
because we humans actually have a very deeply programmed
link |
sense of symmetry.
link |
It's something that is part of that mystery of the universe.
link |
So how would you make it symmetrical?
link |
Or one way you could is by saying
link |
those two empty quadrants had things in them also.
link |
And if you do that, that's supersymmetry.
link |
So that's what I understood
link |
when I was a graduate student here at MIT in 1975
link |
when the mathematics of this was first being born.
link |
Supersymmetry was actually born in the Ukraine
link |
in the late 60s, but we had this thing
link |
called the Iron Curtain.
link |
So we Westerners didn't know about it.
link |
But by the early 70s, independently,
link |
there were scientists in the West
link |
who had rediscovered supersymmetry.
link |
Bruno Zemeno and Julius Wess were their names.
link |
So this was around 71 or 72 when this happened.
link |
I started graduate school in 73.
link |
So around 74, 75, I was trying to figure out
link |
how to write a thesis so that I could become a physicist
link |
the rest of my life.
link |
I did a, I had a great advisor, Professor James Young
link |
who had taught me a number of things about electrons
link |
and weak forces and those sorts of things.
link |
But I decided that if I was going to have a really
link |
an opportunity to maximize my chances of being successful,
link |
I should strike it out in a direction
link |
that other people were not studying.
link |
And so as a consequence, I surveyed ideas
link |
that were going, that were being developed.
link |
And I came across the idea of supersymmetry.
link |
And it was so, the mathematics was so remarkable
link |
that I just, it bowled me over.
link |
I actually have two undergraduate degrees.
link |
My first undergraduate degree is actually mathematics.
link |
And my second is physics,
link |
even though I always wanted to be a physicist.
link |
Plan A, which involved getting good grades was mathematics.
link |
I was a mathematics major thinking about graduate school,
link |
but my heart was in physics.
link |
If we could take a small digression,
link |
what's to you the most beautiful idea in mathematics
link |
that you've encountered in this interplay
link |
between math and physics?
link |
It's the idea of symmetry.
link |
The fact that our innate sense of symmetry
link |
winds up aligning with just incredible mathematics,
link |
to me is the most beautiful thing.
link |
It's very strange, but true
link |
that if symmetries were perfect, we would not exist.
link |
And so even though we have these very powerful ideas
link |
about balance in the universe in some sense,
link |
it's only when you break those balances
link |
that you get creatures like humans
link |
and objects like planets and stars.
link |
So although they are a scaffold for reality,
link |
they cannot be the entirety of reality.
link |
So I'm kind of naturally attracted
link |
to parts of science and technology
link |
where symmetry plays a dominant role.
link |
And not just, I guess, symmetry as you said,
link |
but the magic happens when you break the symmetry.
link |
The magic happens when you break the symmetry.
link |
Okay, so diving right back in,
link |
you mentioned four quadrants.
link |
Two are filled with stuff we can, two buckets.
link |
And then there's crazy mathematical thing,
link |
ideas fulfilling the other two.
link |
What are those things?
link |
So earlier, the way I described these two buckets
link |
is I gave you a story that started out
link |
by putting us in a dusty room with two flashlights.
link |
And I said, turn on your flashlight, I'll turn on mine,
link |
the beams will go through each other.
link |
And the beams are composed of force carriers called photons.
link |
They carry the electromagnetic force
link |
and they pass right through each other.
link |
So imagine looking at the mathematics of such an object,
link |
which you don't have to imagine people like me do that.
link |
So you take that mathematics
link |
and then you ask yourself a question.
link |
You see, mathematics is a palette.
link |
It's just like a musical composer
link |
is able to construct variations on a theme.
link |
Well, a piece of mathematics in the hand of a physicist
link |
is something that we can construct variations on.
link |
So even though the mathematics that Maxwell gave us
link |
about light, we know how to construct variations on that.
link |
And one of the variations you can construct is to say,
link |
suppose you have a force carrier for electromagnetism
link |
that behaves like an electron
link |
in that it would bounce off of another one.
link |
That's changing a mathematical term in an equation.
link |
So if you did that, you would have a force carrier.
link |
So you would say first it belongs
link |
in this force carrying bucket,
link |
but it's got this property of bouncing off like electrons.
link |
So you say, well, gee, wait, no,
link |
that's not the right bucket.
link |
So you're forced to actually put it
link |
in one of these empty quadrants.
link |
So those sorts of things, basically we give them...
link |
So the photon mathematically
link |
can be accompanied by a photino.
link |
It's the thing that carries a force
link |
but has the rule of bouncing off.
link |
In a similar manner, you could start with an electron
link |
and you say, okay, so write down the mathematical electron.
link |
I know how to do that.
link |
A physicist named Dirac first told us how to do that
link |
back in the late 20s, early 30s.
link |
So take that mathematics.
link |
And then you say, let me look at that mathematics
link |
and find out what in the mathematics
link |
causes two electrons to bounce off of each other,
link |
even if I turn off the electrical charge.
link |
So I could do that.
link |
And now let me change that mathematical term.
link |
So now I have something that carries electrical charge,
link |
but if you take two of them,
link |
I'm sorry, if you turn their charges off,
link |
they'll pass through each other.
link |
So that puts things in the other quadrant.
link |
And those things we tend to call,
link |
we put the S in front of their name.
link |
So in the lower quadrant here, we have electrons
link |
and this now newly filled quadrant, we have selectors.
link |
And the quadrant over here, we had quarks.
link |
Over here, we have squarks.
link |
So now we've got this balanced pie.
link |
And that's basically what I understood
link |
as a graduate student in 1975
link |
about this idea of supersymmetry,
link |
that it was going to fill up these two quadrants
link |
of the pie in a way that no one
link |
had ever thought about before.
link |
So I was amazed that no one else at MIT
link |
found this an interesting idea.
link |
So it led to my becoming the first person in MIT
link |
to really study supersymmetry.
link |
This is 1975, 76, 77.
link |
And in 77, I wrote the first PhD thesis
link |
in the physics department on this idea
link |
because I was drawn to the balance.
link |
Drawn to the symmetry.
link |
So what does that, first of all,
link |
is this fundamentally a mathematical idea?
link |
So how much experimental, and we'll have this theme.
link |
It's a really interesting one.
link |
When you explore the world of the small
link |
and in your new book talking about
link |
Approving Einstein, right, that we'll also talk about,
link |
there's this theme of kind of starting it,
link |
exploring crazy ideas first in the mathematics
link |
and then seeking for ways to experimentally validate them.
link |
Where do you put supersymmetry in that?
link |
It's closer than string theory.
link |
It has not yet been validated.
link |
In some sense, you mentioned Einstein,
link |
so let's go there for a moment.
link |
In our book, Approving Einstein Right,
link |
we actually do talk about the fact
link |
that Albert Einstein in 1915 wrote a set of equations
link |
which were very different from Newton's equations
link |
in describing gravity.
link |
These equations made some predictions
link |
that were different from Newton's predictions.
link |
It actually made three different predictions.
link |
One of them was not actually a prediction,
link |
but a postdiction, because it was known
link |
that Mercury was not orbiting the sun
link |
in the way that Newton would have told you.
link |
And so Einstein's theory actually describes Mercury
link |
orbiting in a way that was observed
link |
as opposed to what Newton would have told you.
link |
So that was one prediction.
link |
The second prediction that came out of
link |
the theory of general relativity,
link |
which Einstein wrote in 1915,
link |
so let me describe an experiment and come back to it.
link |
Suppose I had a glass of water,
link |
and I filled the glass up,
link |
and then I moved the glass slowly back and forth
link |
between our two faces.
link |
It would appear to me like your face was moving,
link |
even though you weren't moving.
link |
I mean, it's actually, and what's causing it
link |
is because the light gets bent through the glass
link |
as it passes from your face to my eye.
link |
So Einstein in his 1915 theory of general relativity
link |
found out that gravity has the same effect on light
link |
as that glass of water.
link |
It would cause beams of light to bend.
link |
Now, Newton also knew this,
link |
but Einstein's prediction was that light
link |
would bend twice as much.
link |
And so here's a mathematical idea.
link |
Now, how do you actually prove it?
link |
Well, you've got to watch.
link |
Just a quick pause on that, just the language you're using.
link |
I can say he did a calculation.
link |
It's a really interesting notion
link |
that one of the beautiful things about this universe
link |
is you can do a calculation
link |
and combine with some of that magical intuition
link |
that physicists have, actually predict what would be,
link |
what's possible to experimentally validate.
link |
So he found out in the sense
link |
that there seems to be something here
link |
and mathematically it should bend,
link |
gravity should bend light this amount.
link |
And so therefore that's something that could be potentially,
link |
and then come up with an experiment that could be validated.
link |
And that's the way that actually modern physics,
link |
deeply fundamental modern physics, this is how it works.
link |
Earlier we spoke about the Higgs boson.
link |
So why did we go looking for it?
link |
The answer is that back in the late 60s and early 70s,
link |
some people wrote some equations
link |
and the equations predicted this.
link |
So then we went looking for it.
link |
So on supersymmetry for a second,
link |
there's these things called idynchrous symbols,
link |
these strange little graphs.
link |
You refer to them as revealing something
link |
like binary code underlying reality.
link |
First of all, can you describe these graphs?
link |
Describe these graphs, what are they?
link |
What are these beautiful little strange graphs?
link |
Well, first of all, idynchrous are an invention of mine,
link |
together with a colleague named Michael Fox.
link |
In 2005, we were looking at equations.
link |
Well, the story's a little bit more complicated
link |
and it'll take too long to explain all the details,
link |
but the Reader's Digest version
link |
is that we were looking at these equations
link |
and we figured out that all the data
link |
in a certain class of equations could be put in pictures.
link |
And the pictures, what do they look like?
link |
Well, they're just little balls.
link |
You have black balls and white balls.
link |
Those stand for those two buckets, by the way,
link |
that we talked about in reality.
link |
The white balls are things that are like particles of light.
link |
The black balls are like electrons.
link |
And then you can draw lines connecting these balls.
link |
And these lines are deeply mathematical objects
link |
and there's no way for me to,
link |
I have no physical model for telling you what the lines are.
link |
But if you were a mathematician,
link |
I would do a technical phrase saying,
link |
this is the orbit of the representation
link |
and the action of the symmetry generators.
link |
Mathematicians wouldn't understand that.
link |
Nobody else in their right mind would,
link |
so let's not go there.
link |
So, but we figured out that the data
link |
that was in the equations was in these funny pictures
link |
that we could draw.
link |
And so that was stunning,
link |
but it also was encouraging
link |
because there are problems with the equations,
link |
which I had first learned about in 1979
link |
when I was down at Harvard
link |
and I went out to Caltech for the first time
link |
and working with a great scientist
link |
by the name of John Schwartz.
link |
There are problems in the equations we don't know how to solve.
link |
And so one of the things about solving problems
link |
that you don't know how to solve
link |
is that beating your head against a brick wall
link |
is probably not a good philosophy about how to solve it.
link |
So what do you need to do?
link |
You need to change your sense of reference,
link |
your frame of reference, your perspective.
link |
So when I saw these funny pictures,
link |
I thought, gee, that might be a way
link |
to solve these problems with equations
link |
that we don't know how to do.
link |
So that was for me one of the first attractions
link |
is that I now had an alternative language
link |
to try to attack a set of mathematical problems.
link |
But I quickly realized that A,
link |
this mathematical language was not known by mathematicians,
link |
which makes it pretty interesting
link |
because now you have to actually teach mathematicians
link |
about a piece of mathematics
link |
because that's how they make their living.
link |
And the great thing about working with mathematicians,
link |
of course, is the rigor with which they examine ideas.
link |
So they make your ideas better than they start out.
link |
So I start working with a group of mathematicians
link |
and it was in that collaboration that we figured out
link |
that these funny pictures had error correcting codes
link |
Can you talk about what are error correcting codes?
link |
So the simplest way to talk about error correcting codes
link |
is first of all, to talk about digital information.
link |
Digital information is basically strings of ones and zeros.
link |
They're called bits.
link |
So now let's imagine that I want to send you some bits.
link |
Well, maybe I could show you pictures,
link |
but maybe it's a rainy day
link |
or maybe the windows in your house are foggy.
link |
So sometimes when I show you a zero,
link |
you might interpret it as a one.
link |
Or other times when I show you a one,
link |
you might interpret it as a zero.
link |
So if that's the case,
link |
that means when I try to send you this data,
link |
it comes to you in corrupted form.
link |
And so the challenge is how do you get it to be uncorrupted?
link |
In the 1940s, a computer scientist named Hamming
link |
addressed the problem of how do you reliably transmit
link |
digital information?
link |
And what he came up with was a brilliant idea.
link |
Now, the way that you solve it
link |
is that you take the data that you want to send,
link |
the ones in your strings of ones and zeros,
link |
your favorite string,
link |
and then you dump more ones and zeros in,
link |
but you dump them in in a particular pattern.
link |
And this particular pattern
link |
is what a Hamming code is all about.
link |
So it's an error correcting code
link |
because if the person at the other end
link |
knows what the pattern's supposed to be,
link |
they can figure out when one's got changed to zeros,
link |
zero's got changed to one.
link |
So it turned out that our strange little objects
link |
that came from looking at the equations
link |
that we couldn't solve,
link |
it turns out that when you look at them deeply enough,
link |
you find out that they have ones and zeros
link |
But even more astoundingly,
link |
the ones and zeros are not there randomly.
link |
They are in the pattern of error correcting codes.
link |
So this was an astounding thing
link |
that when we first got this result
link |
and tried to publish it,
link |
it took us three years to convince other physicists
link |
that we weren't crazy.
link |
Eventually we were able to publish it,
link |
I and this collaboration of mathematicians
link |
and other physicists.
link |
And so ever since then,
link |
I have actually been looking at the mathematics
link |
trying to still understand properties of the equations.
link |
And I want to understand the properties of equations
link |
because I want to be able to try things like electrons.
link |
So as you can see,
link |
it's just like a two step removed process
link |
of trying to get back to reality.
link |
So what would you say is the most beautiful property
link |
of these Adinkra graphs, objects?
link |
What do you think, by the way, the word symbols,
link |
what do you think of them, these simple graphs?
link |
Are they objects or?
link |
How should we think about that?
link |
For people who work with mathematics like me,
link |
our mathematical concepts are,
link |
we often refer to them as objects
link |
because they feel like real things.
link |
Even though you can't see them or touch them,
link |
they're so much part of your interior life
link |
that it is as if you could.
link |
So we often refer to these things as objects,
link |
even though there's nothing objective about them.
link |
And what does a single graph represent in space?
link |
Okay, so the simplest of these graphs
link |
has to have one white ball and one black ball.
link |
That's that balance that we talked about earlier.
link |
Remember, we want to balance out the quadrants?
link |
Well, you can't do it unless you have
link |
a black ball and white ball.
link |
So the simplest of these objects looks like two little balls,
link |
one black, one white, connected by a single line.
link |
And what it's talking about is, as I said,
link |
a deep mathematical property related to symmetry.
link |
You've mentioned the error correcting codes,
link |
but is there a particular beautiful property
link |
that stands out to you about these objects
link |
that you just find?
link |
Yes, yes, there is.
link |
Early on in the development of it.
link |
The craziest thing about these to me
link |
is that when you look at physics
link |
and try to write equations where information
link |
gets transmitted reliably,
link |
if you're in one of these super symmetrical systems
link |
with this extra symmetry,
link |
that doesn't happen unless there's
link |
an error correcting code present.
link |
So it's as if the universe says,
link |
you don't retransmit information
link |
unless there's something about an error correcting code.
link |
This to me is the craziest thing
link |
that I've ever personally encountered in my research.
link |
And it's actually got me to wondering
link |
how this could come about,
link |
because the only place in nature
link |
that we know about error correcting codes is genetics.
link |
And in genetics, we think it was evolution
link |
that causes error correcting codes to be in genomes.
link |
And so does that mean that there was
link |
some kind of form of evolution
link |
acting on the mathematical laws of the physics
link |
This is a very bizarre and strange idea.
link |
And it's something I've wondered about
link |
from time to time since making these discoveries.
link |
Do you think such an idea could be fundamental,
link |
or is it emergent throughout
link |
all the different kinds of systems?
link |
I don't know whether it's fundamental.
link |
I probably will not live to find out.
link |
This is gonna be the work of probably some future
link |
either mathematician or physicist
link |
to figure out what these things actually mean.
link |
We have to talk a bit about the magical,
link |
the mysterious string theory, super string theory.
link |
There's still maybe this aspect of it,
link |
which is there's still for me
link |
from an outsider's perspective,
link |
this fascinating heated debate.
link |
On the status of string theory.
link |
Can you clarify this debate,
link |
perhaps articulating the various views
link |
and say where you land on it?
link |
So first of all, I doubt that I will be able
link |
to say anything to clarify the debate
link |
around string theory for a general audience.
link |
Part of the reason is because string theory
link |
has done something I've never seen the erectal physics do.
link |
It has broken out into consciousness
link |
of the general public before we're finished.
link |
You see, string theory doesn't actually exist
link |
because when we use the word theory,
link |
we mean a particular set of attributes.
link |
In particular, it means that you have
link |
an overarching paradigm that explains
link |
what it is that you're doing.
link |
No such overarching paradigm exists for string theory.
link |
What string theory is currently
link |
is an enormously large mutually reinforcing collection
link |
of mathematical facts in which we can find no contradictions.
link |
We don't know why it's there,
link |
but we can certainly say that without challenge.
link |
Now, just because you find a piece of mathematics
link |
doesn't mean that this applies to nature.
link |
And in fact, there has been a very heated debate
link |
about whether string theory is some sort of hysteria
link |
among the community of theoretical physicists,
link |
or whether it has something fundamental
link |
to say about our universe.
link |
We don't yet know the answer to that question.
link |
What those of us who study string theory
link |
will tell you are things like,
link |
string theory has been extraordinarily productive
link |
in getting us to think more deeply,
link |
even about mathematics that's not string theory,
link |
but the kind of mathematics
link |
that we've used to describe elementary particles.
link |
There have been spin offs from string theory,
link |
and this has been going on now for two decades almost,
link |
that have allowed us, for example,
link |
to more accurately calculate the force between electrons
link |
with the presence of quantum mechanics.
link |
This is not something you hear about in the public.
link |
There are other similar things.
link |
That kind of property I just told you about
link |
is what's called weak strong duality,
link |
and it comes directly from string theory.
link |
There are other things such as
link |
a property called holography,
link |
which allows one to take equations
link |
and look at them on the boundary of a space,
link |
and then to know information about inside a space
link |
without actually doing calculations there.
link |
This has come directly from string theory.
link |
So there are a number of direct mathematical effects
link |
that we learn as string theory,
link |
but we take these ideas and look at math
link |
that we already know and we find suddenly
link |
we're more powerful.
link |
This is a pretty good indication
link |
there's something interesting going on
link |
with string theory itself.
link |
So it's the early days
link |
of a powerful mathematical framework.
link |
That's what we have right now.
link |
What are the big, first of all,
link |
most people will probably, which as you said,
link |
most general public would know actually
link |
what string theory is, which is at the highest level,
link |
which is a fascinating fact.
link |
Well, string theory is what they do
link |
on the Big Bang Theory, right?
link |
One, can you maybe describe what is string theory,
link |
and two, what are the open challenges?
link |
So what is string theory?
link |
Well, the simplest explanation I can provide
link |
is to go back and ask what are particles,
link |
which is the question you first asked me.
link |
What's the smallest thing?
link |
Yeah, what's the smallest thing?
link |
So particles, one way I try to describe particles
link |
to people is start,
link |
I want you to imagine a little ball
link |
and I want you to let the size of that ball shrink
link |
until it has no extent whatsoever,
link |
but it still has the mass of the ball.
link |
That's actually what Newton was working with
link |
when he first invented physics.
link |
He's the real inventor of the massive particle,
link |
which is this idea that underlies all of physics.
link |
So that's where we start.
link |
It's a mathematical construct
link |
that you get by taking a limit of things that you know.
link |
So what's a string?
link |
Well, in the same analogy, I would say,
link |
now I want you to start with a piece of spaghetti.
link |
So we all know what that looks like.
link |
And now I want you to let the thickness of the spaghetti
link |
shrink until it has no thickness.
link |
Mathematically, I mean, in words, this makes no sense,
link |
but mathematically, this actually works
link |
and you get this mathematical object out.
link |
It has properties that are like spaghetti.
link |
It can wiggle and jiggle,
link |
but it can also move collectively
link |
like a piece of spaghetti.
link |
It's the mathematics of those sorts of objects
link |
that constitute string theory.
link |
And does the multidimensional, 11 dimensional,
link |
however many dimensional, more than four dimension,
link |
is that a crazy idea to you?
link |
Is that the stranger aspect of string theory to you?
link |
Not really, and also partly because of my own research.
link |
So earlier we talked about these strange symbols
link |
that we've discovered inside the equations.
link |
It turns out that to a very large extent,
link |
a Dinkers don't really care about the number of dimensions.
link |
They kind of have an internal mathematical consistency
link |
that allows them to be manifested
link |
in many different dimensions.
link |
Since supersymmetry is a part of string theory,
link |
then the same property you would expect
link |
to be inherited by string theory.
link |
However, another little known fact,
link |
which is not in the public debate,
link |
is that there are actually strings
link |
that are only four dimensional.
link |
This is something that was discovered
link |
at the end of the 80s by a scientist,
link |
by three different groups of physicists
link |
working independently.
link |
I and my friend Warren Siegel,
link |
who were at the University of Maryland at the time,
link |
were able to prove that there's mathematics
link |
that looks totally four dimensional,
link |
and yet it's a string.
link |
There was a group in Germany
link |
that used slightly different mathematics,
link |
but they found the same result.
link |
And then there was a group at Cornell
link |
who using yet a third piece of mathematics
link |
found the same result.
link |
So the fact that extra dimensions
link |
is so widely talked about in the public
link |
is partly a function of how the public
link |
has come to understand string theory
link |
and how the story has been told to them.
link |
But there are alternatives you don't know about.
link |
If we could talk about maybe experimental validation,
link |
and you're the coauthor of a recently published book,
link |
Proving Einstein Right,
link |
the human story of it too,
link |
the daring expeditions that change
link |
how we look at the universe.
link |
Do you see echoes of the early days
link |
of general relativity in the 1910s
link |
to the more stretched out to string theory?
link |
And that's one reason why I was happy to focus
link |
on the story of how Einstein became a global superstar.
link |
Earlier in our discussion,
link |
we went over his history where in 1915,
link |
he came up with this piece of mathematics,
link |
used it to do some calculations
link |
and then made a prediction.
link |
But making a prediction is not enough.
link |
Someone's got to go out and measure.
link |
And so string theory is in that in between zone.
link |
Now for Einstein, it was from 1915 to 1919.
link |
1915 he makes the correct prediction.
link |
By the way, he made an incorrect prediction
link |
about the same thing in 1911,
link |
but he corrected himself in 1915.
link |
And by 1919, the first pieces
link |
of experimental observational data became available
link |
to say, yes, he's not wrong.
link |
And by 1922, the argument that based on observation
link |
was overwhelming that he was not wrong.
link |
Can you describe what special general relativity are
link |
And what prediction Einstein made
link |
and maybe some or a memorable moment
link |
from the human journey of trying to prove this thing right,
link |
which is incredible.
link |
So I'm very fortunate to have worked
link |
with a talented novelist who wanted to write a book
link |
that coincided with a book I wanted to write
link |
about how science kind of feels if you're a person,
link |
because it's actually people who do science,
link |
even though that may not be obvious to everyone.
link |
So for me, I wanted to write this book
link |
for a couple of reasons.
link |
I wanted young people to understand
link |
that the seeming alien giants that live before them
link |
were just as human as they are.
link |
They get married, they get divorced.
link |
They get married, they get divorced.
link |
They do terrible things.
link |
They do great things.
link |
They're just people like you.
link |
And so that part of telling the story allowed me
link |
to get that out there for both young people interested
link |
in the sciences as well as the public.
link |
But the other part of the story is I wanted to open up
link |
sort of what it was like.
link |
Now I'm a scientist.
link |
And so I will not pretend to be a great writer.
link |
I understand a lot about mathematics
link |
and I've even created my own mathematics
link |
that is kind of a weird thing to be able to do.
link |
But in order to tell the story,
link |
you really have to have an incredible master
link |
And that was my coauthor, Kathy Pelletier,
link |
who is a novelist.
link |
So we formed this conjoined brain, I used to call us.
link |
She used to call us Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.
link |
My expression for us is that we were a conjoined brain
link |
to tell this story.
link |
And it allowed, so what are some magical moments?
link |
To me, the first magical moment in telling the story
link |
was looking at Albert Einstein and his struggle
link |
because although we regard him as a genius,
link |
as I said, in 1911, he actually made an incorrect prediction
link |
about bending starlight.
link |
And that's actually what set the astronomers off.
link |
In 1914, there was an eclipse.
link |
And by various accidents of war and weather
link |
and all sorts of things that we talk about in the book,
link |
no one was able to make the measurement.
link |
If they had made the measurement,
link |
it would have disagreed with his 1911 prediction
link |
because nature only has one answer.
link |
And so then you see how fortunate he was
link |
that wars and bad weather and accidents and transporting
link |
equipment stopped any measurements from being made.
link |
So he corrects himself in 1915,
link |
but the astronomers are already out there
link |
trying to make the measurement.
link |
So now he gives them a different number.
link |
And it turns out that's the number that nature agrees with.
link |
So it gives you a sense of this is a person struggling
link |
with something deeply.
link |
And although his deep insight led him to this,
link |
it is the circumstance of time, place and accident
link |
but through which we view him.
link |
And the story could have turned out very differently
link |
where first he makes a prediction,
link |
the measurements are made in 1914,
link |
they disagree with his prediction.
link |
And so what would the world view him as?
link |
Well, he's this professor who made this prediction
link |
that didn't get it right, yes?
link |
So the fragility of human history
link |
is illustrated by that story.
link |
And it's one of my favorite things.
link |
You also learn things like in our book,
link |
how eclipses and watching eclipses was a driver
link |
of the development of science in our nation
link |
when it was very young.
link |
In fact, even before we were a nation,
link |
it turns out there were citizens of this would be country
link |
that were going out trying to measure eclipses.
link |
So some fortune, some misfortune affects
link |
the progress of science.
link |
Especially with ideas as, to me at least,
link |
if I put myself back in those days,
link |
as radical as general relativity is.
link |
First, can you describe, if it's OK briefly,
link |
what general relativity is?
link |
And yeah, could you just take a moment of, yeah,
link |
put yourself in those shoes in the academic researchers,
link |
scientists of that time, and what is this theory?
link |
What is it trying to describe about our world?
link |
It's trying to answer the thing that left Isaac Newton puzzled.
link |
Isaac Newton says gravity magically
link |
goes from one place to another.
link |
He doesn't believe it, by the way.
link |
He knows that's not right.
link |
But the mathematics is so good that you have to say,
link |
well, I'll throw my qualms away because I'll use it.
link |
That's all we used to get a man from the Earth to the moon
link |
was that mathematics.
link |
So I'm one of those scientists, and I've seen this.
link |
And if I thought deeply about it,
link |
maybe I know that Newton himself wasn't comfortable.
link |
And so the first thing I would hope that I would feel
link |
is, gee, there's this young kid out there who
link |
has an idea to fill in this hole that was left with us
link |
by Sir Isaac Newton.
link |
That, I hope, would be my reaction.
link |
I have a suspicion.
link |
I'm kind of a mathematical creature.
link |
I was four years old when I first
link |
decided that science was what I wanted to do with my life.
link |
And so if my personality back then was like it is now,
link |
I think it's probably likely I would
link |
want to have studied his mathematics.
link |
What was a piece of mathematics that he was
link |
using to make this prediction?
link |
Because he didn't actually create that mathematics.
link |
That mathematics was created roughly 50 years
link |
He's the person who harnessed it in order
link |
to make a prediction.
link |
In fact, he had to be taught this mathematics by a friend.
link |
So this is in our book.
link |
So putting myself in that time, I would want to, like I said,
link |
I think I would feel excitement.
link |
I would want to know what the mathematics is.
link |
And then I would want to do the calculations myself.
link |
Because one thing that physics is all about
link |
is that you don't have to take anybody's word for anything.
link |
You can do it yourself.
link |
It does seem that mathematics is a little bit more
link |
tolerant of radical ideas, or mathematicians,
link |
or people who find beauty in mathematics.
link |
All the white questions have no good answer.
link |
But let me ask, why do you think Einstein never
link |
got the Nobel Prize for general relativity?
link |
He got it for the photoelectric effect.
link |
Well, first of all, that's something
link |
that is misunderstood about the Nobel Prize in physics.
link |
The Nobel Prize in physics is never
link |
given for purely proposing an idea.
link |
It is always given for proposing an idea that
link |
has observational support.
link |
So he could not get the Nobel Prize
link |
for either special relativity nor general relativity,
link |
because the provisions that Alfred Nobel left for the award
link |
But after it's been validated, can he not get it then, or no?
link |
Yes, but remember the validation doesn't really
link |
come until the 1920s.
link |
But that's why they invented the second Nobel Prize.
link |
I mean, Marie Curie, you can get a second Nobel Prize
link |
for one of the greatest theories in physics.
link |
So let's be clear on this.
link |
The theory of general relativity had its critics
link |
even up until the 50s.
link |
So if the committee had wanted to give
link |
the prize for general relativity,
link |
there were vociferous critics of general relativity
link |
Einstein died in 1955.
link |
What lessons do you draw from the story you tell in the book,
link |
from general relativity, from the radical nature
link |
of the theory, to looking at the future of string theory?
link |
Well, I think that the string theorists are probably
link |
going to retrace this path.
link |
But it's going to be far longer and more torturous,
link |
String theory is such a broad and deep development
link |
that, in my opinion, when it becomes acceptable,
link |
it's going to be because of a confluence of observations.
link |
It's not going to be a single observation.
link |
And I have to tell you that, so I gave a seminar here
link |
And it's on an idea I have about how string theory can
link |
leave signatures in the cosmic microwave background, which
link |
is an astrophysical structure.
link |
And so if those kinds of observations are borne out,
link |
if perhaps other things related to the idea of supersymmetry
link |
are borne out, those are going to be the first powerful
link |
observationally based pieces of evidence that
link |
will begin to do what the Eddington expedition did
link |
But that may take several decades.
link |
Do you think there will be Nobel prizes given
link |
for string theory?
link |
No, because I think it will exceed normal human lifetimes.
link |
But there are other prizes that are given.
link |
I mean, there is something called the Breakthrough Prize.
link |
There's a Russian immigrant, a Russian American immigrant
link |
named Yuri Milner, I believe his name,
link |
started this wonderful prize called the Breakthrough Prize.
link |
It's three times as much money as the Nobel Prize.
link |
And it gets awarded every year.
link |
And so something like one of those prizes
link |
is likely to be garnered at some point far earlier
link |
than a Nobel award.
link |
Jumping around a few topics.
link |
While you were at Caltech, you've
link |
gotten to interact, I believe, with Richard Feynman,
link |
Yes, Richard Feynman, indeed.
link |
Do you have any stories that stand out
link |
in your memory of that time?
link |
I have a fair number of stories, but I'm not
link |
prepared to tell them.
link |
They're not all politically correct.
link |
Let me just say, I'll say the following.
link |
Richard Feynman, if you've ever read
link |
some of the books about him, in particular,
link |
there's a book called Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
link |
There's a series of books that starts with Surely You're
link |
Joking, Mr. Feynman.
link |
And I think the second one may be something like What Do You
link |
Care What They Say or something.
link |
I mean, the titles are all, there are three of them.
link |
When I read those books, I was amazed at how accurately
link |
those books portrayed the man that I interacted with.
link |
He was irreverent, he was fun, he was deeply intelligent,
link |
he was deeply human.
link |
And those books tell that story very effectively.
link |
Even just those moments, how did they
link |
affect you as a physicist?
link |
Well, one of the, well, it's funny because one
link |
of the things that, I didn't hear Feynman say this,
link |
but one of the things that is reported that he said
link |
is if you're in a bar stool as a physicist,
link |
and you can't explain to the guy on the bar stool
link |
next to you what you're doing, you
link |
don't understand what you're doing.
link |
And there's a lot of that that I think is correct,
link |
that when you truly understand something as complicated
link |
as string theory, when it's in its fully formed final
link |
development, it should be something
link |
you could tell to the person on the bar stool next to you.
link |
And that's something that affects the way I do science,
link |
It also affects the way I talk to the public about science.
link |
It's one of my mantras that I keep deeply,
link |
and try to keep deeply before me when I appear in public fora
link |
speaking about physics in particular and science
link |
It's also something that Einstein
link |
said in a different way.
link |
He said he had these two different formulations.
link |
One of them is when the answer is simple, it's God speaking.
link |
And the other thing that he said was
link |
that what he did in his work was simply
link |
the distillation of common sense,
link |
that you distill down to something.
link |
And he also said you make things as simple as possible
link |
So all of those things, and certainly this attitude for me
link |
first seeing this was exemplified
link |
by being around Richard Feynman.
link |
So in all your work, you're always
link |
searching for the simplicity, for the simple, clear.
link |
You served President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors
link |
in Science and Technology.
link |
For seven years, yes.
link |
For seven years with Eric Schmidt
link |
and several other brilliant people?
link |
Met Eric for the first time in 2009
link |
when the council was called together.
link |
Yeah, I've seen pictures of you in that room.
link |
I mean, there's a bunch of brilliant people.
link |
It kind of looks amazing.
link |
What was that experience like, being called
link |
upon that kind of service?
link |
So let me go back to my father, first of all.
link |
I earlier mentioned that my father served 27 years
link |
in the US Army, starting in World War II.
link |
He went off in 1942, 43 to fight against the fascists.
link |
He was part of the supply corps that
link |
supplied General Patton as the tanks rolled
link |
across Western Europe, pushing back the forces of Nazism
link |
to meet up with our Russian comrades
link |
who were pushing the Nazis starting in Stalingrad.
link |
And the Second World War is actually
link |
a very interesting piece of history
link |
to know from both sides.
link |
Here in America, we typically don't.
link |
But I've actually studied history as an adult.
link |
So I actually know sort of the whole story.
link |
And on the Russian side, we don't know the Americans.
link |
We weren't taught the American side of the story.
link |
I have many Russian friends, and we've
link |
had this conversation on many occasions.
link |
But you know, like General Zhukov, for example,
link |
was something that you wouldn't know about,
link |
but you might not know about a Patton.
link |
So Georgy Zhukov or Rokossovsky, I mean,
link |
there's a whole list of names that I've
link |
learned in the last 15 or 20 years looking
link |
at the Second World War.
link |
So your father was in the midst of that,
link |
probably one of the greatest wars in history.
link |
In the history of our species.
link |
And so the idea of service comes to me essentially
link |
from that example.
link |
So in 2009, when I first got a call from a Nobel laureate
link |
actually in biology, Harold Varmus,
link |
I was on my way to India, and I got this email message,
link |
and he said he needed to talk to me.
link |
And I said, OK, fine, we can talk.
link |
Got back to States I didn't hear from him.
link |
We went through several cycles of this, sending me a message,
link |
I want to talk to you, and then him never contacting us.
link |
Finally, I was on my way to give a physics presentation
link |
at the University of Florida in Gainesville,
link |
and Jess had stepped off a plane,
link |
and my mobile phone went off, and it was Harold.
link |
And so I said, Harold, why do you keep sending me messages
link |
that you want to talk but you never call?
link |
And he said, well, I'm sorry, things have been hectic
link |
and da, da, da, da, da.
link |
And then he said, if you were offered the opportunity
link |
to serve on the US President's Council of Advisors
link |
on Science and Technology, what would be your answer?
link |
I was amused at the formulation of the question,
link |
because it's clear there's a purpose of why the question is
link |
But then he made it clear to me he wasn't joking.
link |
And literally, one of the few times in my life,
link |
my knees went weak and I had to hold myself up
link |
against a wall so that I didn't fall over.
link |
I doubt if most of us who have been the beneficiaries
link |
of the benefits of this country,
link |
when given that kind of opportunity, could say no.
link |
And I know I certainly couldn't say no.
link |
I was frightened out of my wits because I had never,
link |
although I have, my career in terms of policy recommendations
link |
is actually quite long, it goes back to the 80s,
link |
but I had never been called upon to serve as an advisor
link |
to a president of the United States.
link |
And it was very scary, but I did not feel that I could say no
link |
because I wouldn't be able to sleep with myself at night
link |
saying that I chickened out or whatever.
link |
And so I took the plunge and we had a pretty good run.
link |
There are things that I did in those seven years
link |
of which I'm extraordinarily proud.
link |
One of the ways I tell people is if you've ever seen
link |
that television cartoon called Schoolhouse Rock,
link |
there's this one story about how a bill becomes a law.
link |
And I've kind of lived that.
link |
There are things that I did
link |
that have now been codified in US law.
link |
Not everybody gets a chance to do things like that in life.
link |
What do you think is the, science and technology,
link |
especially in American politics,
link |
we haven't had a president who's an engineer or a scientist.
link |
What do you think is the role of a president like President Obama
link |
in understanding the latest ideas in science and tech?
link |
What was that experience like?
link |
Well, first of all, I've met other presidents
link |
beside President Obama.
link |
He is the most extraordinary president
link |
that I've ever encountered.
link |
Despite the fact that he went to Harvard.
link |
When I think about President Obama,
link |
he is a deep mystery to me.
link |
In the same way perhaps that the universe is a mystery.
link |
I don't really understand how that constellation
link |
of personality traits could come to fit
link |
within a single individual.
link |
But I saw them for seven years.
link |
So I'm convinced that I wasn't seeing fake news.
link |
I was seeing real data.
link |
He was just an extraordinary man.
link |
And one of the things that was completely clear
link |
was that he was not afraid and not intimidated
link |
to be in a room of really smart people.
link |
I mean, really smart people.
link |
That he was completely comfortable in asking
link |
some of the world's greatest experts,
link |
what do I do about this problem?
link |
And it wasn't that he was going to just take the problem
link |
and it wasn't that he was going to just take their answer,
link |
but he would listen to the advice.
link |
And that to me was extraordinary.
link |
As I said, I've been around other executives
link |
and I've never seen one quite like him.
link |
He's an extraordinary learner, is what I observed.
link |
And not just about science.
link |
He has a way of internalizing information in real time
link |
that I've never seen in a politician before.
link |
Even in extraordinarily complicated situations.
link |
Even scientific ideas.
link |
Scientific or non scientific.
link |
Complicated ideas don't have to be scientific ideas.
link |
But I have, like I said, seen him in real time
link |
process complicated ideas with a speed that was stunning.
link |
In fact, he shocked the entire council.
link |
I mean, we were all stunned at his capacity
link |
to be presented with complicated ideas
link |
and then to wrestle with them and internalize them.
link |
And then come back, more interestingly enough,
link |
come back with really good questions to ask.
link |
I've noticed this in an area that I understand more
link |
of artificial intelligence.
link |
I've seen him integrate information
link |
about artificial intelligence and then come out
link |
with these kind of Richard Feynman like insights.
link |
That's exactly right.
link |
And as I said, those of us who have been in that position,
link |
it is stunning to see it happen because you don't expect it.
link |
Yeah, he takes what, for a lot of sort of graduate students,
link |
takes like four years in a particular topic
link |
and he just does it in a few minutes.
link |
He sees it very naturally.
link |
You've mentioned that you would love
link |
to see experimental validation of super strength theory
link |
Before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
link |
Which the poetry of that reference
link |
made me smile when I saw it.
link |
You know, people actually misunderstand it
link |
because it's not what, it doesn't mean
link |
what we generally take it to mean colloquially.
link |
But it's such a beautiful expression.
link |
It's from the Hamlet, to be or not to be speech.
link |
Which I still don't understand what that's about.
link |
But so many interpretations.
link |
Anyway, what are the most exciting problems in physics
link |
that are just within our reach of understanding
link |
and maybe solve the next few decades
link |
that you may be able to see?
link |
So in physics, you limited it to physics.
link |
Physics, mathematics, this kind of space of problems
link |
that fascinate you.
link |
Well, the one that looks on the immediate horizon
link |
like we're gonna get to is quantum computing.
link |
And that's gonna, if we actually get there,
link |
that's gonna be extraordinarily interesting.
link |
Do you think that's a fundamentally problem of theory
link |
or is it now in the space of engineering?
link |
It's in the space of engineering.
link |
I was out at a Q station, as you may know,
link |
Microsoft has this research facility in Santa Barbara.
link |
I was out there a couple of months in my capacity
link |
as a vice president of American Physical Society.
link |
And I had some things that were like lectures
link |
and they were telling me what they were doing.
link |
And it sure sounded like they knew what they were doing
link |
and that they were close to major breakthroughs.
link |
Yeah, that's a really exciting possibility there.
link |
But back to Hamlet, do you ponder mortality,
link |
your own mortality?
link |
Nope, my mother died when I was 11 years old.
link |
And so I immediately knew what the end of the story was
link |
As a consequence, I've never spent a lot of time
link |
thinking about death.
link |
It'll come in its own good time.
link |
And sort of to me, the job of every human
link |
is to make the best and the most of the time
link |
that's given to us in order not for our own selfish gain,
link |
but to try to make this place a better place
link |
And on the why of life, why do you think we are?
link |
I have no idea and I never even worried about it.
link |
For me, I have an answer, a local answer.
link |
The apparent why for me was
link |
because I'm supposed to do physics.
link |
But it's funny because there's so many other
link |
quantum mechanically speaking possibilities in your life,
link |
such as being an astronaut, for example.
link |
So you know about that, I see.
link |
Well, like Einstein and the vicissitudes
link |
that prevented the 1914 measurement of starlight vending,
link |
the universe is constructed in such a way
link |
that I didn't become an astronaut, which would have,
link |
for me, I would have faced the worst choice in my life,
link |
whether I would try to become an astronaut
link |
or whether I would try to do theoretical physics.
link |
Both of these dreams were born
link |
when I was four years old simultaneously.
link |
And so I can't imagine how difficult
link |
that decision would have been.
link |
The universe helped you out on that one.
link |
Not only in that one, but in many ones.
link |
It helped me out by allowing me to pick the right dad.
link |
Is there a day in your life you could relive
link |
because it made you truly happy?
link |
What day would that be if you could just look back?
link |
Being a theoretical physicist
link |
is like having Christmas every day.
link |
I have lots of joy in my life.
link |
The moments of invention, the moments of ideas, revelation.
link |
Yes, the only thing that exceed them are
link |
some family experiences like when my kids were born
link |
and that kind of stuff, but they're pretty high up there.
link |
Well, I don't see a better way to end it, Jim.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
It was a huge honor talking to you today.
link |
This worked out better than I thought.
link |
I'm glad to hear it.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words of wisdom
link |
from the great Albert Einstein for the rebels among us.
link |
Unthinking respect for authority
link |
is the greatest enemy of truth.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.