Frank Wilczek on physics, the Nobel Prize, beauty and knowledge

warmly welcome to tonight's conversation it is part of a new collaboration in science programming between Kutuzov Stas Felton and Stockholm University my name is Johanna Cogan and I have the pleasure to sit here tonight with Professor Frank will check the theoretical physicist nobel laureate connected in different professorial capacities to m.i.c MIT to Shanghai Jiaotong University Arizona State and our Stockholm University thank you Frank for taking the time to speak to us tonight warm welcome thank you so we're surrounded by signs that say Nobel calling would you like to take us back to that time it's yeah 15 years ago now yes when there was a call or was there a call is that how it works there was a call and there's a story in my kid so because of the difference in time zones the formal announcement comes at noon time in Stockholm time which is 6 o'clock in the morning on the east coast which is where I was I had thought it was possible for several years that we would be getting the Nobel Prize and so every day so I knew when it was going to be announced and the night before I couldn't sleep this was a regular thing for four or five years I had a sleepless night and we had at that time we had a little clock with read digital numerals that told what time it was and so I wasn't sleeping and if we once in a while I would look at the clock and it got to be 5 o'clock and I said well look you're not sleeping you might as well take a shower just in case so you would be ready and so I got up out of bed and and went into the shower and I didn't realize two things the first thing I didn't realize was that although the formal announcement comes at 12:00 the phone calls can be earlier and in fact at about 10 after 5:00 my wife came betsy who's here came with our mobile phone and came to the shower and said there's someone calling you from sweden then they have a very charming accent and you should really should probably take this call it i said okay so i stepped out of the shower of have been tingling i was i was soaking wet and i didn't want to keep the other side of the conversation waiting so I just took the phone and betsy withdraw it dried me off as that was more or less I was talking on the phone and they they said congratulations you've won the Nobel Prize so that was the first thing I didn't know was what they called early like that and then the second thing I didn't know that I learned the hard way that that morning was that I had envisaged that it would be a matter of they call and say congratulations you've won the Nobel Prize goodbye but it wasn't that way at all they several Swedish friends wanted to congratulate and the Secretary of the Academy wanted to start explaining the procedures and what you should and shouldn't do and how to respond to the press and the conversation went on for 20 minutes the show and what meanwhile I was still soaking wet and shivering but I enjoyed it it was like another state of consciousness and and then the first thing I did afterwards after getting reasonably dry and putting on a robe was call my parents which was a very very special moment because they they had really lived a hard life struggled through the depression and invested a lot in my education and sort of seeing me through and this for them was very very special fulfillment and however it involved calling my parents at about 5:30 in the morning so what actually happened when I called my was my father it's really super grumpy zi do you know what time it is what do you I don't whatever you're selling I don't want to buy a new dad and explain to him what had happened of course it was a very very emotional for fulfilling moment for us so that was the morning and then somehow a reporter for Time magazine also had advanced information and knocked on our door like I don't know how or maybe maybe it was at exactly 6:00 anyway they they maybe they steaks so this takes out your house and they sort of the lights were on yes something like I don't know it's a mystery but in any case they knocked at our door and right away started to start taking pictures and and as soon as the announcement came the phone it was just you know we'd answer the phone and hang up but it was still that there's you're hanging up it was ringing again you couldn't so we just took it off the hook that was an exciting morning you said that you had a feeling how does that work how is there rumor mill is there dust does the community the wider physics community know that these are the it's about time how does that yes well in my case I had been told by many people that they nominee they had nominated me for the Nobel Prize I don't know how true these things are but so I knew that that was possible I you know in all modesty I thought the work was worthy and the other the the other factor that came in that made it kind of acute is that there's an order in these things so our work relied on experimental work and theoretical work by other people and in previous years first the experimentalists and theorists who were kind of our credit the people we built it on most directly got the prize so it was it sort of like was like a syllogism that we were gonna get you know Socrates is immortal and that we were gonna collage and symmetry but I'm starting to see that there's a fan that emerges we start to feel that it's your time and physics is a small world so theoretically so people have a sense of what's what's you know coming and what's up there I had to look it up on the Internet it was awarded for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interaction yes so I had to learn a little bit about the basic theory of strong force and I felt when I read it but I kind of got it but I couldn't tell you now so would it be possible to explain this to laypeople yeah absolutely it's okay if it's not possible yeah well so there are four basic forces of nature according to our fundamental understanding of physics today there's gravity and electromagnetism which have had beautiful mature theories in the case of gravity since the 17th early 17th century with Newton's synthesis and then Einstein's theory of gravity in in the first part of the 20th century then electromagnetism which had beautiful equations and reached a high level of understanding in the 19th century with Maxwell's equations we still use today and then in the but in the 20th century when people started examining atoms and the interior of atoms they found that those two forces were not enough they needed two other forces in order to account for what goes on deep inside atoms one is called the strong force which is the strongest force in nature as its name suggests and what it does is hold protons and neutrons together inside it and to make atomic nuclei I mean that that was the classic formulation of what the strong force is then kind of its most obvious manifestation in nature because of our work and this is the way the theory developed it turns out that protons and neutrons are not the most basic objects there are things called quarks and gluons that are more fundamental and and and build up protons and neutrons and atomic nuclei and a lot of other particles too that physicists discovered over the course of the 20th century especially the later part of the 20th century or and when we had particle accelerators and then there's the weak force which I won't talk about it's weak and so it was a major item on the agenda of physic I say in terms of person hours PhD hours spent on it was probably the dominant activity of physics starting from the 1930s to figure out what these horses are and and what in particular what the strong force was and a lot of experiments were done there big thick books that that summarize the the measurements and each each measurement represents an enormous effort but the situation was very confused until some decisive experiments were done that first of all indicated that there were these more basic objects inside protons and neutrons called quarks and then that quarks had simple properties when they got when they when when they're studied at high energies or when they're close together and making those facts and reconciling those simple facts about the strong interaction with general principles of relativity and quantum mechanics was very was quite difficult it was and it turned out that we demonstrated is that if you took these very basic clues and demanded that you had a theoretical structure that was fully consistent with relativity and quantum mechanics and and this phenomena that the forces got weaker at short distances you were led to a basically unique theory of how the force worked but that among other things said that there should be gluons with very specific properties and we got precise equations which to this day are believed to be the equations for the strong force and so the work was getting to those equations and then also pointing out consequences that could be tested experimentally because you know new nuclei are very very small it's not easy to it and esta gate their property so it was not a not a trivial thing to draw consequences of these equations that people could actually measure and that that that's that's what we did and since then as I said things get really simple at high energies according to our theory and that proved out but was also very useful because I'm useful to high-energy physicists because had machines now where the energies are much higher than than we had in those days the this predictive behavior is much more evident and guides how you design experiments and how you interpret them it also opened up the early universe where you had very very high energies that instead of being very complicated to study very simple to study how matter behaves in those conditions in in case somebody missed some details we can at least summarize it by saying and I feel this was very clear but I I do feel that the that it's it's obvious that this is completely it's a major step in a completely fundamental understanding of basically everything I think people for for decades or centuries arguably but very practically for decades we're trying to solve this and a lot of people had to be wrong a lot of people had to be incrementally right yes but you're you guys you and your colleague cracked it in the end do you remember what's that a specific moment is there like a Oh moment how does how do you crack something enormous like this well there were there was a very central calculation which was whether the force between quarks gets stronger at short distances or weaker at short distances within different possible consistent theories where I mean consistent with relativity and quantum quantum mechanics which is very restrictive it turns out and as I mentioned there's basically unique theory where the forces become weaker and people had studied a lot of other theories and never found that behavior when we realized that the calculation was indicating that the force was becoming weaker that was certainly a very significant moment you have to leave your chair and run around the room a little bit no no it was it was kind of an exhaustive but the computations were very complex and so you know I filled up notebooks with these computations that checked and every which way because really the foundations for these calculations were not very secure at that time there's a bit of guesswork involved so I needed consistency checks to calculate the same thing in different ways to see let's make sure I got the same answer and you know at first I didn't write that the answers are all different so the the the Matt the real Matt was so the first magic moment was when everything started to be consistent and then it was more a feeling of relief oh my gosh finally I got the damn answer and and I was happy to get an answer and okay the fact that the forces were getting weaker that was really interesting because that was something new how much leverage it would have I did not fully realize at first but you know it was only a matter of a few weeks really from that initial calculation coming together and indicating this this this behavior to having a candidate set of equations for the strong interaction which people had dreamed about for decades but really very few people expected to see ya for instant I mean people had studied the forces between protons and neutrons but instead of finding a simple result things got more and more complicated the the closer you studied so the the fact that you could find really simple behavior inside there was a beautiful surprise the kids earlier I mean then the price of course yes so the question is what happens when when you win the prize does it because you already know what your achievement was and all of your peers know what your achievement was so what does the what does the the Nobel Prize mean in this context well is it like winning the Olympics I mean it's okay to say that it's just very cool it's it's you know it's it's it's the difference between staring meaningfully into your lover's eyes and sort of getting together you know you know you know that that something is happening but but there's there's another dimension when it actually happens by the congregations yeah that's a R it's it's and it's it's a personal satisfaction but it's also a community satisfaction that that you know we recognize that this great problem has really been solved and squirted now it's official and you know it's it's it's and and I was I was really surprised because by that by the reaction of my colleagues some of whom I thought of as rivals and so but but but actually the it was just an outpouring of love I think that that because it was you know I've the work we did was highly leveraged we built on a lot of other people's work so it was really recognition of this whole community effort you said the beautiful equations before they talked about and beautiful theories yes so I need to ask about that but I have to ask two more quick questions before we move on from that one is this all happened in the 70s this breakthrough so obviously you couldn't just go on Twitter and say we have solved it yeah yeah you have to call everyone you know and say I think we've got it no because I wasn't sure we got it that we had it now with the experimental data that we were relying on was pretty flimsy at first and indirect the full simplicity and convincing evidence for the theory only came when the experiments were done at higher energy so when the bigger accelerators that revealed the simple behavior at high energy use was used so in undeniable form I wasn't sure at all that that that this was the final word it was really only in the 1990s I would say when the the large electron positron Collider flip at CERN began to operate that the evidence became clear and undeniable and so I was many of my colleagues were more convinced than I was about the theory I was willing to entertain that it might be correct and build on it but I wasn't fully confident and I thought the the phenomena might might have some alternative explanation so you have to have a favorite for for for the next winner would you care to wager who's winning tomorrow who's well specular several candidates favorite my favorite I don't know that's dangerous territory but ok I would I I think it would be fun to recognize the discovery of exoplanets ok I think there's also profound progress in the use use of quantum mechanics to do computation and treat information and new them powerful ways but it's not clear to me that that's mature it's still very much up in the air so it's not clear which contributions will be the most important in the long run and things so possibly probably exoplanets I don't know I don't know I don't know let me emphasize I don't have any inside information like I want it to be except on this because like that one I understand yeah and it's a it's of course it's not fundamental physics but as an achievement in application of physics you know that the optics and the information processing involved is just extraordinary so it's an extraordinary technical powerful application of physics and I think and it's like a science fiction dream the science she's wonderful yes so you wrote a few years ago a wonderful book called a beautiful question finding nature's tape design and it has a central question and the central question is this is the world an embodiment of beautiful ideas and phrasing it this way suggests that the ideas would be their first and the embodiment comes later and and this is of course an unusual position for to take for for a scientist today and you take us in these books on a tour through the history of philosophy and science that explains why you would put it that way and even so I think it's a little bit surprising in our culture in this age for a physicist to write a wonderful argument that involves art and metaphysics and human anatomy and many other things like could you explain how this book came to be well when I was a it really grows out of my entire life that when I was a child I was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and really took it very very seriously so I well I took it very very seriously and really thought about that there's another world that's hidden that's that that describes what this world is really about that really it's not that it has meaning that it has a story to it and I love that idea and I also loved the idea that you know that that ideas have power but you know when I've studied science well I started magic first of all but I was disappointing but I studied science and I you know found that there really is a kind of magic and when I was growing up there was the time of Sputnik and people people the relative atomic bomb was a relatively fresh memory that Cold War was on so that the the power of scientists to do really surprising magical things was was very tangible the space race was going and so I got deeply involved in studying that and that those ideas were not I wouldn't say we're not how they were they're basically orthogonal to the yeah to the religious texts the traditional religious texts on the face of it so I got very disillusioned and for many years kind of just there was a void where there used to be these cosmic feelings and but as I learned more about science and and really studied its history deeply and in its human context I was able to revisit those questions with a new perspective I mean that's what I was yeah it's a very complex argument but one of the things that you talk about in this book is that human bodies are for instance built built to prefer visual input so that makes us hardwired to care very much about light and also perhaps patterns yes you for instance also write about why harmony in music is pleasurable and if I understand it correctly we don't exactly know but probably it has to do with the brain successfully predicts symmetries in the early stages of perceiving sound for instance so again but there's a there are very obvious physical reasons for us to yes enjoy hard why should have said yeah I mean I left out the very important thing out is that as I've learned more about science I learned that at least as far as I'm concerned there's there is a beauty to the world and that's not an accident because beauty is a human concept and has very much to do with things that you want to revisit things that you find attractive and then keep coming back to those those are the beautiful things and on the other hand we are evolved to try to adapt to our environment successfully and that means we are evolved to enjoy learning yes how things actually work so when we learn how things actually work and succeed at it that's something we find beautiful I find it so compelling and it's very nice on the part of nature that it actually the things that we find beautiful and interesting yes when when you start to look at some scientifically friend says what is musical harmony it turns out that these are mathematical patterns yes and that the world and the the things that we consider beautiful including beautiful equations in understanding the world it are in fact they have predictive yes I was astonished when I think it was when you were writing perhaps about the Maxwell equations or something like that you were talking about how how now the one thing that we learned in the history of science is the beautiful equations equations with beautiful symmetries tend to be correct so now these guys the scientists sometimes they just make like instead of figuring out something and then trying then finding out afterwards yeah see it was right and the equation was beautiful now you just make beautiful equations and then yes and then first you make them beautiful that's very much hell and my theory of the sea lies that's how the world works yes that's very much how our theory of the strong interaction works we constructed a beautiful theory it's very hard to make theories that I said they're consistent with relativity and quantum mechanics they have to have a lot of symmetry because it's almost impossible to put relativity and quantum mechanics together but the fact that it's almost impossible but is possible means that it's very constrained and the kind of equations that enable you to do it are very limited and among those the most symmetric equations turn out to have this behavior that we were looking for in explaining how quarks forces get weaker at short distances that means the human mind which is of yours the human body because that's what it is is a kind of machine built to understand yeah somatic all relationships yes which means that the very thing that makes art powerful and uplifting and enjoyable is also the thing that makes us great scientists or potentially as I think so I think they have the same root that we are we're we're built to enjoy understanding and learning and being challenged and if we don't destroy that feeling that nature doesn't compel us to destroy it and Einstein said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible that's a gift but that's that's that's didn't have to be that way but it but it turns out to be that way and that means the world is beautiful because we can come to comprehend it and that's the kind of thing that we've that defines beauty really and and what is lovely about this or many things a lot of us but one of the lovely things about this obviously is that it it opens again for that idea of purpose or intent in the universe it doesn't the the beauty of this system of which we are part doesn't actually require any kind of God we have all kinds of very scientific explanations for how it worked out like this but but we if we choose to to tell ourselves a story or for those of us who believe in that thing it's it's also not in conflict fundamentally we know well it has some aspects of what people think of as fundamental religious concepts I mean the concept that laws are eternal right that is that there are underlying things that don't change there's a kind of permanence just in Underland and underneath the ephemeral behavior of many things including ourselves the the fact that the same laws work everywhere the scale of things the internal scale that things we're very small compared to the universe but we're very large compared to atoms and we can have a rich structure because of that this it's just so marvelous yeah I realize this is a dangerous threat to follow in a way because it if we argue like if I'm thinking about right now that's very dangerous but I'm gonna think a lot and it's obviously that but if I if I personally for instance were to accept this this modulus as true and then I would say and I also accept all religions that are synchronous incra knowest with this or that match this is true it means that then I have said that some religions are obviously completely wrong on account on this my own my scientific basis and that usually doesn't make people who belong to those religions very happy yes well that's one thing that there's not you know I have to say there's there's no hint in scientific knowledge of a personal god of you know a person something that has the characteristics of a person with with the person that the laws seem to be very abstract and mathematical but they do have the the carrots some of the characteristics of universality of timelessness and of beauty that that people associate with central concepts of religion let's have some of it but not all of it right so you have a Roman Catholic background now I am its Rockville I am vaguely aware that for instance many Jesuits do have advanced degrees in science yes oh yes so would you say that it's possible to be for instance fully a scientist and fully a Christian even if that's not where you ended up yes it is possible there's a although it's a balancing act and I think it's possible only if you accept the concept of complementarity which is another profound lesson that I take from science so complementarity is an idea that was formulated popularized by by Niels Bohr the great quantum physicist and it's the idea which is within quantum mechanics is a theorem it's not it's not optional it's a feature of quantum mechanics that there are different ways of describing the same object both of which are valid and even complete in their own terms but which are mutually incompatible so in the case of quantum mechanics you can describe where an electron is likely to be or you can describe how fast it's likely to move and you can make full descriptions of either of those but you can't do both at the same time that's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle so there are different viewpoints so generalizing that vastly I think is a really liberating concept of complementarity that there may be different kinds of questions you can ask about the same thing about the same phenomena that require different concepts to answer and those concepts may not be mutually compatible so I think it's the right answer yeah so I mean a classic case is freewill versus determinism so although there are some arguments about this I think it's to me it's clear that the basic laws of physics are deterministic if you know if you had perfect knowledge of the state at one time you would be able to evolve it forwards and the equations have unique solutions so that it's deterministic in that sense on the other hand we experience that we make choices and if we want to have systems of laws if we want to punish criminals if we want to understand other human beings we need this concept that they actually make choices and have free will so that's a valid concept to address certain kinds of questions how people will behave how they should behave or how they should be punished but if you ask about the physical aspect of you of people and how they're going to respond to medicine how they're going to respond to being shot then free will doesn't come into it so much right and I mean even more and this is a point where I could very mind blown by the book it was an observation and of course now I forgot to note down who made the observation originally but it's very beautiful to quote this phrase that objective reality exists it some change and no if ya did that that's Herman while but it actually goes back to st. Augustine I've been reading st. Augustine recently and he had this concept that from from the God's eye point of view not the world doesn't change it's it's all of it space-time is all laid out that the space and time shouldn't be thought of as separate entities but as a complete complete entity of space-time and the space-time is just it's and it's only to us that crawling along our world lines this is what Herman while said that it appears to be events unfolding in time yes because time to act is the dimension and that we're like moving along yes but of course from the perspective of physics or st. and it's slightly alarming but very wise of him as usual from the point of view of physics everything has already happened and then we're back and then this is the same point where my brain melts I don't I cannot how do you even think in these concepts well you don't have to use complementarity you think to address different kinds of questions and different kinds of issues you have to use different concepts okay so I understand the were not meant to understand the sort of fullness of space-time as as deterministic in on the individual everyday life yes that would be a very dangerous attitude right I mean you know who cares it's on a very large scale everything is done yeah this is why sometimes ordinary folks find it surprising that scientists are also ordinary folks because how can you just continue living with this knowledge of how everything works isn't it also a first of all there plenty of holes in our novel it's very tough we're not done yet and conceivably we may have to rethink things we think we know I'm in at a very basic level that's happened in the past but let's suppose it does hold up this view well I mean if I want to answer questions about cosmology the large-scale structure of things then it's very very natural to think about space and time as one entity a space-time it's very unnatural to separate them actually especially in in Einstein's general theory of relativity it's it would be impossible most impossible to separate space and time and it would be might very ugly and unnatural but ok that's but but for everyday life we have we don't get to see the whole thing where you get to experience of a bit at a time unfolding and you can enjoy that to you right I think in the context of discussing Newton you're right is it not unnatural to separate our understanding of the world into parts that we do not seek to reconcile it is that query to which this book your book for me responds and and I think it's interesting it really it just really struck me because I have been training that University and by living in a secular society to think that that for that the sort of metaphysical and certainly this or spiritual or religious approaches to these things are they don't have much relevance however since I come from the humanities I am also trained by my education to feel that the arts have profound relevance in answering the big questions of life and existence and helping us understand helping us grapple with these enormous concepts that we also engage with as humans especially with humans with this level of scientific knowledge that we have now as a species so so there is something interesting in how how arbitrarily these different fields are prioritized or respected and there is and it feels like it leads me to think two different thoughts one is I suspect that there's something about how we do science education that is perhaps completely ass-backwards because I may not have ended up in the humanities if somebody had said to me instead of saying this is hard about physics or if this is exciting they would have said this is beautiful mm-hmm and then my other big question is I wonder if we are at a sort of tipping point that your that your book is also one example of where we're saying okay the religious explanation models weren't great but sometimes some as some ways that we have been engaging with the scientific explanation points there perhaps too limited so so what is the worldview in which we can you know confront these new challenges that we have said ourselves as a species is there some new kind of way of thinking about science and all these things and these are two different big questions you can start with either you are like well I keep coming back to this concept of complementarity which is that there are different perspectives on the same phenomenon the same object the same universe that have validity and answer different kinds of questions or respond the different kinds of needs and you can use both and the and how should I say knowing that the laws of physics are what they are and the part of the basic constituents of matter are what they are doesn't get you very far in understanding human beings in everyday life so you need to you need to be open to both now okay for most purposes of everyday life you don't really need to know about quarks and gluons and the equations on the other hand it's mind expanding and it's beautiful if you if you do all right so just as you know you can get by without knowing anything about art or literature but it would be terrible it's it's impoverished yeah so science I think has can be of course can be pursued as a as a vocation that important parts of a life but it can also be you know you can enjoy art without being an artist you can enjoy music without being a professional musician and so forth and you can you can and should enjoy science without necessarily science yeah I mean that's a bit of a problem it's a massive problem in fact right now because of the climate crisis most people don't think age with science even a little to the point where they don't even understand why you have to listen when scientists say this is an emergency well on the other hand they they enjoy their iPhones and enjoy the productivity that science has made possible as so so maybe they should be reminded that paying attention to reality is a good idea if you were allowed to dictate something about how science education would happen in the world if you if we gave you a magic wand or some kind of science wand and said let you are now the decider how would you how would you change science education I would teach more of the history of science and how the concepts we really instead of just saying this is the way it works say well it might have worked this other way and people thought that for a while but then they had we had had to give that up because this phenomena and that phenomena that that it couldn't explain I think it makes it a much richer kind of experience like a sort of a dialogue between historical and people love narratives and in dialogues and so I think there should be more of that I also I mean I also love that I don't there's another okay so that that's kind of conceptual soft there's another part of science though which is quantitative and form in logical and but that can also be fun people really enjoy doing logic puzzles and things like this and I think that should be encouraged also like the kind of puzzles that you buy in a supermarket yeah yeah so people do buy them right because they're so they they obviously they didn't happen there no no one holds a gun to their head and say you have to solve logic puzzles they go out and buy by the magazines and the and and I think that shouldn't for children I think that that's really should be encouraged to solving solving puzzles active puzzles active kind of reasoning yeah I actually fully agree with this the history of Sciences is a big part of the answer but it also strikes me that the the both thinking about the history of science and this development and and thinking about the Nobel Prize which tends to be retroactive for obvious reasons it just makes us look a little bit backward chess or maybe at the end we would look a little bit forwards before we open up what is the exciting edge of physics right now what is the things that you are thrilled to think about in your field right now well let me not give to parochial an answer because I'm I'm thrilled about things that I've been involved in so there are some specific problems that are enormous and ripe I think physics has has achieved a remarkably detailed and complete and powerful theory of ordinary matter the kind of matter we've built out of that that people study in chemistry and engineering and so forth of the matter that's based on protons and neutrons and electrons and photons but somewhat embarrassingly astronomers in recent years have discovered that most of the mass in the universe is not any of that it's something else and we don't know what it is so close are we to solving this problem well you never know how close you are until you've actually solved it but I have an idea about what it is called accion's that their success their predicted to be there they're introduced to solve a fundamental aspect of physical law that that appears to be very coincidental in our current formulation of the laws so not I don't like Queens garbage no we don't we like symmetry no yeah that's what we like symmetry and we like things to make sense no as oh so for instance you know glorious example of this is in in Newton's theory of gravity you always had the force proportional to the mass and the acceleration inversely proportional to the mass so that the acceleration was independent of the mass so why should the why should it be independent why should everything move the same way in a gravitational field and in Newton's theory that was just a coincidence those two masses could not Oh didn't have to have a universal ratio but that was what led Einstein that coincidence was what led Einstein to formulate a new theory of gravity and there were things like that in the weak interaction there were a variety of inter of different reactions that seemed to have the same intrinsic strength why should they have the same intrinsic strength so you had to formulate there was a clue that you needed a theory that had extra symmetry accion's are a way of addressing a another aspect of physical law which is which appears otherwise to be coincidental which is that the laws run forwards in time look very accurately the same as the laws run backwards in time so although everyday life if you in everyday life if you took a movie and ran it backwards you could tell that it was running backwards if you look really small it was happening Adam at the basic level you find you can't tell the difference if the movies been run running forwards or backwards the laws are the same and that's a coincidence with with all the other things we've understood that's still that's still something that needs explanation weird because like isn't it if time only has a direction for us it would that still be weird if we didn't have a direction in time no well okay maybe the supernal questions are no no this is this is an aspect of fundamental laws that not only appears gratuitous but makes problems because now you have to understand how from laws that are reversible in time you've derived behavior that's not reversible in time and there's a whole story about that which involves concepts of entropy and second law of thermodynamics and also the fact that the universe began in a Big Bang so so the this the actual world the solution of the equations that we find ourselves embedded in certainly is not symmetric between past and future but the equations themselves that's a really embarrassing coincidence and accion's explain it and it's no it's excess would be like a mathematical solutions can be experimentally could they know they're they they are actual particles with very concrete properties and they are predicted to be very difficult to observe so you have not forget yet that prediction is successful [Laughter] but also if you run their run them through the Big Bang using our understanding of the laws and the properties that they need to have if they're gonna do their job you find that they are a very plausible explanation of the astronomers Dark Matter they they just right so now now the game is afoot so does being the challenge is okay they're difficult to observe but maybe not impossible and as many of my colleagues have been trying to design experiments and persuade experimentalists to do these experiments that would detect but do we think that it would be possible well it wouldn't be possible in like our currently existing detectors no we need new detectors it's like bigger but also more clever in some ways that it's like the the challenge that faced early pioneers of radio how do you design antennas to pick up electromagnetic waves and so this is like that so this is not electromagnetic waves anymore but we're trying to detect a new kind of matter and unit you need suitable antennas that can pick up this dark matter that that interacts with the dark matter and turns it into a signal that we can work with I was speaking recently with a scientist from the team that observed the Higgs boson and and he said that they're pretty excited about perhaps building a detector it's basically I think it was like the circumference of sweets or something like that but really what he was very disappointed in I guess mostly the material scientists never you know people who build things he was disappointed that we couldn't build one that's the size of the solar system because that would be best for you know to solve the problem that we need now is would it be enough to have one this is basically the size of Switzerland or it's difficult to tell it's difficult to tell i there are ideas that I find very plausible that indicate there should be a whole new world of particles and symmetry equals supersymmetry that would be revealed that's somewhat higher energies then are currently accessible because the it takes a lot of energy to produce heavy particles and most of many of us were hopeful at the LHC would do that but it hasn't and then you know you have to persuade society and yourself that it's it's justified to spend another 10 billion euros emergency with other with many other competing projects okay so so that you you were asking very exciting yeah that's what that's exciting but it's and it's exciting to me personally because I have been involved in that story from the very beginning and continuing but I would say a sort of broader frontier that's very exciting that I'm really working on very actively now is a new concept of information this so information in modern computers and standard computers is based on binary digits or bits that these are things that can take values 0 and 1 and you have a lot of them and they frost you process it to to do all the things that computers do now but in quantum mechanics the analog of this is it is a quantum state with two states a quantum object with two states that's a very different beast it turns out this is instead of and so and we call it a qubit instead of a bit because it's a quantum bit both joke and the properties of quantum bits when you put them put a lot of them together are quite different it's a richer world with a lot more structure and there are possibilities for channeling that richer structure to do more powerful calculations because one or zero or is it like in-between yeah I do a lot of in between so it's a it's a different beast and it's harder to deal with in many ways it's more delicate but potentially more powerful so coming to terms with how you use that poses many many interesting challenges and questions and that's that's I think that's a growth area for the future so quantum computing probably is to put the buzzword that most people have heard but it's a much broader subject of coming to terms with the quantum world because now our technologies are becoming so powerful that we can really do that so basically the technologies kind of catching up with the theory yes and now both can need to be pushing ahead together yes which means that if somebody here is a student this is a terribly exciting field yes so get into those because the next couple decades are going to be insane yes I think that's right I mean I realize we have to open for questions but I I may perhaps we can summarize what we said so far but by thinking there I it made me think I was thinking about Large Hadron Collider which if you ever have the opportunity to go to certain they they're tours you can go and see you know and the Atlas detector is like a five-story building and it's one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen and that and everything is silly it's like a Cathedral but so is science this idea that that's that's scientific knowledge is a is a kind of Cathedral that that is built by a craftsman who over time tend to become anonymous you know over the centuries we don't remember everybody's names anymore but creating this beautiful monument of understanding and it somehow connects these things and now these are the new spy yes and the new spires are kind of phantasmagorical they well thought to mechanics is a beautiful thing that's a little hard to convey without a long story but it's really mind expanding and I highly recommend it yes also it's it's opposed to many other things that are mind expanding it's called legal which is also I think we are ready for some audience questions don't be shy there are no stupid there's somebody who isn't shy at all you're going to have a microphone that comes right there and let's try and keep the questions a little bit concise so that we can have more of them yes okay hello my name is Gustav and I'm a physicist so I love understanding things but I have to admit that the statement that you had that a life without understanding or appreciating art was impoverished rubbed me the wrong way I have to ask you if you see it as a necessity to be able to appreciate beauty to have understanding of art how the world works no what me know that I mean there are I I know physicists for it's very good physicists who for instance hate music if there's they run the other way if there's music and many scientists aren't interested in art in my experience the best scientists tend to do have do have an appreciation of many different things the most creative I shouldn't say this I mean but but it's it's not necessary no it's not you can I guess maybe what I should say okay an appropriate thing to say is that certainly and modern theory physics it's kind of it's very separated from everyday life and when you're trying to make progress if you're trying to find new equations or design new objects materials we don't have much to go on except a kind of aesthetic feeling okay we're not we're not making analogies from everyday life so much we're trying to think how could things be more beautiful how a good thing well and when you have a good idea you sort of recognize that it's that it's on the right track because things make sense and then click together and I'm weird beautiful so with this it doesn't have to be art in the sense of painting or or sculpture or you know Campbell's soup cans or whatever that but but this kind of I think this kind of aesthetic feeling within science is really essential to you also say in the book that that or you remind us in the book that sort of kind of obvious it should be obvious that of course it's also many of these of the arts are languages or are skill sets in a way that does the the brain can you know like simple harmonies before it likes complex harmonies yeah so if you're confronted with art that you're not enjoying at all it might be because there are some previous stages that you haven't enacted very much it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have that your brain wouldn't enjoy that sort of thing but then would you would you would you would you go so far as to argue that that exposing yourself to the Arts in different ways it's a good kind of training for at least in having some kind of plasticity in your approach to scientific projects problems well I don't think it hurts whether it's the most efficient way I don't know but it's it's an enriching aspect of human life and I think it can help yeah and I think but I'm not but it's more I don't I don't not sure it's causing effect but I think the desire to kind of expand your mind and look at things in different ways that leads you to science and creative work in science also leads you to be interested in other things I mean humanists I would say it's also about being interested in the impossible yeah being interested in the things that are not yet there you know that's what that's what the arts are about for me and I suppose that's also about the science would be about thank you so much for this question do we have another one yes hello another question on aesthetics and elementary particles uh-huh but first of how many pens do you have in your breast pocket how many pens fantastic I don't know exactly ice probably about ten I'm sure there's a good reason yeah there's a very good reason been a lay man myself what I know about quarks is that they have a number of different properties and they are small yeah but it's very hard for me to get my head around the concept and you've been mentioning here today that yes human or visual beings would like to see things in patterns so I was wondering do you have when you study quirks with your profound knowledge of their concepts do you have a mental image of quirks you see them in your studies well I use many different kinds of images in different contexts but the properties of quarks are so different from the kinds of things we deal with in everyday life that the mental images have are dangerous they have limited validity on the one hand but okay but but I should make a general comment which is that human beings are highly visual information processors that's what we're really good at is and it's an amazing thing we can take images that arise through these tiny holes and are projected on the retina in two-dimensional patterns and construct the world of objects in three dimensions that we can move around and with colors that we know something about the chemistry and objects and it's and we do that really fast and effortlessly computers are better than humans that many many things like chess and go and arithmetic but but humans are much much better at visual processing and a lot of our brain is devoted to that so if we can bring in those modules that visual processing it's very very powerful so it's all I always try to make visual models in the case of quarks it's not I don't visualize them well in any one way but different different different ways in different contexts but really in that case more what I visualize is the equations and how the equations might be rearranged or not the quarks as objects but the underlying fields and the fluctuations and those fields so the deep the construction of visual models is a creative process that has to be conditioned by the strange properties of the things you're trying to deal with and hang on there was a movie isn't that called a beautiful mind I think there was and he literally he was playing pool and you could see the equations in there do sometimes see equations in there that's a physicist thing I can't say that I literally hallucinate but well well I do visual but but I still find it helpful to actually write them down but but not necessarily for this is really you know everyday kind of experience is okay I've I work with equations during the day and write them down but then I'm so then I put them away and my mind keeps working and it's not and it's working I think using the same kind of hardware that's used for visual information so the things get rearranged reprocess tree and so I don't literally see anything but he's doing the feeling that's that that's that's what's going on just like you know Beethoven was deaf when he was composing in his later career so he didn't literally hear the music yeah but he did in a real sense he was able to deal with the information as if it were sound because he had a different representation that was so powerful that it didn't need to be air vibrating in the West Wing where Toby Ziegler who's the speech writer is writing he's playing pool as well in fact and then somebody says aren't you supposed to be writing your speech and he says paper is for wussies and then he says the sentence that he's thinking exactly maybe this is a universal phenomena yes but a question in the back just yes well good evening and thank you so much for this interesting talk both of you I've been thinking about what you've been saying about beauty and about it being symmetrical and how it being symmetrical means it makes sense and therefore it's beautiful so sort of the definition of beauty is a sort of contingent or dependent on this symmetry and me coming from the arts I'm wondering if we look at the theories of beauty that exists within for example painting dating back to the Renaissance time we have something called the golden ratio where we have the 70/30 percent which is perceived as beautiful and it means that for example for those that don't know the golden ratio that if you were to paint a landscape you would have 30% sky and 70% earth and that would be you know the the perfect work yes that would be beautiful in that sense but it's not symmetrical no you think about it so I'm wondering if the theory of what's beautiful within science and the theory if what's beautiful within art are in some way conflicting yeah I wouldn't say they're conflicting on the contrary but I think they have commonalities but I don't think the only form of beauty is symmetry nor is every aspect of science and physical law beautiful I mean so symmetry is is certainly part of science and it's especially central in our deepest understanding of the fundamental laws and it's certainly also an important aspect of art the whole concept of perspective for instance is based on symmetric and geometric constructions and people find it in when they for inst a convincing example I think is in decorative art if you look at catalogs of what people have used in across many civilizations to decorate walls of the Vaz azure so there's they these symmetrical patterns enormous Li much and especially actually when they're trying to depict the sacred inside mosques or inside cathedrals you find symmetric arrangements of things but it doesn't exhaust art there's many other things that people find beautiful for other reasons then understanding how the world works at a physical level I mean of course people also relate to other people and so a lot of art has to do with the human form which is not particularly symmetric or landscapes which are not particularly symmetric so symmetry doesn't exhaust art by any means and orders that exhaust science but but it is a common theme that is really deep in both and and there's a it's common for profound reasons that whether we discussed and I mean I think also we need the golden ratio could also be expressed as as a recurring I mean sometimes you see draw this sort of spiral as a shell of Shaffers yeah it's also like recurring proportions the golden ratio occurs in many many different contexts yeah and and that would that wouldn't make it related in the same way as harmony can also harmonious can be expressed I learned yesterday from Frank's book that if you look at it mathematically the musical harmony of course is also about like recurring proportions and between these frequencies which is obvious when you think about it but I've never thought about that was kind of mind blown that was in a way I would say the very first scientific discovery this was by Pythagoras that the notes that sound well together are thing the notes associated with strings plucking strings whose lengths have simple ratios so there's these kinds of regular correspondences between the physical world and our perception of beauty go way back they're still not very well understood that one in particular is still kind of mysterious why we find it pleasing to have notes that whose frequencies are in simple whole-number ratios that's that's I don't think well understood at a physiological level but it's a fact about the world and and as I said it was probably among the very first non-trivial laws that people discovered so it wasn't not a law that relates it to motion or time but really to the relationship between perception of beauty and physical fun because it's a we think of this as a mathematician it's the first and foremost right but here we are again with the science scientists doing you know if he was doing but let's assume that he wasn't doing doing these kinds of practical things and theoretical things oh and also placing at the very edge where it becomes weird still incomprehensible and sort of gets to that metaphysical level yeah that he was also a cult leader he was very much like an actual religious leader you know but it was a unique cult it was a cult of numbers it's some kind of new but they world view maybe that's what it was a Korean Brotherhood and they also had lots of women actually for that time very new that believed that all things are numbers that was kind of the the leading principle of this cult and they tried to explain the structure of the universe based on numerical proportions so in some ways it has the same spirit as modern physics although the mathematics was relatively primitive but and I think modern physics with a lot more wine scientific basis all right let's do one more perhaps two if there's somewhere this Michael hey I'm here firstly thank you so much for an incredibly interesting talk it is really writing up an otherwise dull Monday and I'd like to ask I feel that many fields in this day and age are undergoing a change and growing more diverse but the scientific community is not really giving off that impression so I'm asking you who is on the inside do you have another view on that do you feel that it is more diverse than we give it credit for when it comes to things like gender and ethnicity ring yeah yeah exactly yeah no it's not more diversity we're working on it I mean I think there's a there's a there's an active will to try to rectify that situation I think I would be happier and I think most of my colleagues would be happier to have a more representative balance of and you know I would just like to tell women not to be afraid and that there's a one you know they're wonderful things that you can enjoy and contribute to the work environments are changing the work environments are definitely changing yeah yeah so so no please please join in join the party we want to and and I I would hope for the the some of the ideas we talked about that that science is not separate or shouldn't be separate from art and music or other human endeavors and that it should also be regarded as or should be should be regarded as or can be profitably thought of as among other things a historical process a kind of dialogue and narrative I think these things make it could make it more universally appealing yeah I think we have time for one more hello and thank you for the discussion mr. will check I would like to ask about the problem of consciousness human or not and widely in scientific fields and and otherwise it's it's often treated as a problem of second priority even though science in my opinion is essentially a part of consciousness we're thinking about it right why do you think it's justified that we do not have it as the largest priority what do you think that's justified in and what do you think we do that okay so let me so let me first I'll take out I'll answer this in the style of complementarity okay so the first thing I would claim is that there's no evidence at all that there's such a thing as mind distinct from matter just dissing so when physicists or scientists in general do experiments in modern technology very delicate experiments measurements of great sensitivity they have to make all kinds of Corrections they have to make sure that the temperature is under control and the pressure is under control that you shield from electromagnetic signals that things don't shake all kinds of things but one thing that they've never had to take into account is what people were thinking so there's I think overwhelming evidence or a overwhelming circumstantial evidence that matter sort of can be understood in its own terms without referring to a conscious thought waves or conscious interventions of things that are affecting matter there's also I think based on modern experience with computing machines that more and more do things that we once that people once thought would require mind as a separate entity that web computers we definitely know how they're made and they made of physical designed on physical principles and operate by known physical laws and yet they'll beat you a chest they'll be to it go and so they they they do things that were once thought to be the province of mind and unique and uniquely of mind and intelligence so I think this is based on things like that there's a very strong case that mind emerges from matter so that's one side of the complementarity on the other hand consciousness is something I mean my the way we experience the world and the way we construct our models of the world is based on mind is based on conscious perception and and that although it may emerge from matter looks back on matter and make sense of it so these are complementary aspects you can you can't you can't I think there's every reason to think that mind emerges from matter and doesn't need a separate explanation but on the other hand it's mind that experiences matter and without mind who cares no what no one would care the question with questions wouldn't arise I'm not sure where I'm going with this but they're complimentary yeah so well I guess what I what I really want to emphasize is that the statement that mind emerges from matter in no way diminishes what mind is it enhances it because it means you can relate it to other phenomena and experiences and you can enhance your understanding of it so it doesn't the idea that mind should be free of matter could have been true doesn't seem to be true but in retrospect knowing that it may not be true is a real challenge okay so okay so now now mister physicist mix mister neurobiologist or miss new missus how do you okay now you have the challenge okay so matter doesn't seem I mean it's a it's it's not obvious how consciousness has experience emerges from our equations that describe matter I don't think there are any showstoppers and people are gradually understanding more and more about neurobiology and so far they haven't had to introduce new physical entities or new physical laws that's just you know it's just molecules all the way down but but we learned that matter has potentials and abilities that weren't obvious at all and so that very much is that fact that that matter can think and talk and perform on stage that that's a very remarkable thing that's a challenge to explain how do you get from the laws to these you know abstract strange laws of quantum mechanics to that everything we've talked about tonight right yeah yeah that's what I said yeah that's what I should have said in answer to your question about the future of physics oh so there are concrete problems I should have said this yeah so there are concrete problems like the dark matter and accion's there is this frontier of quantum information and to me the kind of the third great problem for the future is understanding how mind emerges from matter that's wonderful No here we have you know laws of nature create these meet states in our mind that canvas that can reflect on the laws of the cosmos it's fantastic yes we have we're going to have to end here I don't see any nobler point that I should end on in fact your friends Frank will check alright thank you

Channel: Stockholm University

Views: 26,003

Rating: 4.8811879 out of 5

Keywords: Frank Wilczek, physics, Nobel Prize, beauty

Id: btKFVApwh_4

Length: 90min 22sec (5422 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019