Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality | A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek

[Music] do [Music] do [Music] welcome everyone i hope everyone's doing well thanks for uh joining us on this friday morning at least here in the east coast of the united states a little bit early for me i i like to sleep a little later but this is the time that it worked out best for all involved as you know today we're having a conversation with nobel laureate frank wilcheck has made tremendously profound contributions to our understanding of physics in a variety of arenas you know some people make a contribution in just one area and they do something that catches the community of physicists catches their attention sets the world on fire in this case wins a nobel prize and then just dig deeper in that area but that's not frank wilczak frank a very broad thinker is willing to take on a whole slew of different problems and has had made because i have made great contributions right across the board we're going to talk about a variety of things particle physics some cosmology but also want to spend some time talking about his new book we can actually bring the cover of that up for a teaser if you will it's new book it's called fundamentals 10 keys to reality just read it it's a beautifully written new book so we'll talk about some of the ideas that frank puts forward in that but before we get to that let's start as we always do with some of your questions a little bit of round up on some of the important ideas that people are discussing debating these days let me just see if there's anything in the chat that catches my attention ah tanzu tanzu asks what do you think about the hierarchy problem the hierarchy problem hierarchy problem is um it's actually relevant to what we'll be talking today in some sense with frank but the hierarchy problem is this fact that when you look at the various mass scales in particle physics the masses of the fundamental constituents and you compare that to the fundamental scale that emerges from the understanding of the strengths of forces the strength of gravity and the various constants of nature there's a a big spread in scales you no doubt have heard of the planck mass planck mass is a is a is a numerical number in the units of mass that naturally emerges by a particular combination of planck's constant the gravitational constant speed of light you put them together in the right configuration and you get something with the units of a mass and the particular amount of mass is about 10 to the 19 times the mass of the proton 10 to the 19. that's huge right so so the fundamental mass scale that seems to emerge from our description of the forces of nature and quantum mechanics speed of light gravity and so forth that number is 10 billion billion times larger than the scale of masses that we actually see in the particles in the world around us so the question is why is there such a broad spread of scales and we've been trying to come to grips with that problem for a very long time the idea of supersymmetry that some of you may have heard of this idea that for every known particle there's a partner particle whose quantum mechanical spin would be different in slightly technical language that idea was partly introduced to deal with this hierarchy problem the quality of those partner particles within the theoretical framework allows for a very natural explanation for why the particles would have such a low mass it all comes down to a symmetry principle whenever a number is really small a natural explanation is well it must be small because some kind of symmetry keeps it small i mean zero is the most symmetric number we know you multiply it by anything you divide it by anything it stays the same symmetry is a quality of a system that is unchanged under a whole variety of transformations right you take a sphere you rotate it if it's a nice silver sphere without anything printed on the surface no matter what angle you look at that sphere no matter how you twist it and turn it the sphere looks the same it is highly symmetric similarly the number zero is highly symmetric as i said you multiply divide doesn't change so if you can find a symmetry that naturally yields zero mass for the particles then you set yourself well maybe that's why they're so small and maybe that symmetry is not exact maybe that symmetry is almost but not quite an exact quality of the world the environment and that would allow the masses to be near zero but not exactly zero and this is this approach that supersymmetry gives us so the problem of course is no one's found the supersymmetric particles large hazron collider the hope was that it would find all sorts of other particles that we hadn't previously seen partners of the electron called the supersymmetric electron or this electron partners of the corks we'll talk about quarks today with frank no doubt that's where a lot of his profound contributions have been made squirks would be the super symmetric partners of the quarks look i don't need i don't name these things sounds a little silly but this is a real mathematical theory and look a 10 billion dollar machine was built in part to try to find the supersymmetric particles and it's been disappointing that we haven't found these particles is it surprising well we never knew the energy scale the size of the machine therefore necessary to conjure these new particles out of the void you know equals m t squared we'll talk about this also a little bit later you can read that as m equals z over c squared right so mass can come from energy so you have highly energetic particles colliding and that energy can be transformed into mass into new particles and the hope was by slamming protons together at the large hadron collider with sufficient energy we'd be able to convert that energy into the mass of these never bore never before seen particles didn't happen or it hasn't happened may still happen maybe you need a more powerful machine maybe their masses are are larger than we can conjure out of the vacuum out of the void so the hierarchy problem and this idea of supersymmetry is a possible solution still up in the air not as not as favored as it once was i mean when i was a graduate student i don't know it was almost a foregone conclusion that the world was going to be super symmetric that we would find these supersymmetric particles almost every paper that i've written that's maybe a little exaggeration but the vast majority of papers that i've written in one way or another have supersymmetry at their core and some of the papers that i've written are using supersymmetry as a mathematical tool and as a mathematical tool it's unassailable right it's a piece of mathematics it doesn't matter whether the world makes use of this quality when you're doing mathematics you don't have the constraints of nature breathing down your neck you can just do mathematics that's one of the beauties but also one of the pitfalls of mathematics i mean the reason why i personally shifted my focus to physics when i was quite young it felt to me that the problems of mathematics were just too artificial in a sense i don't know if that's exactly the right word they were too lenient maybe that's a better way of putting it i liked the idea of doing mathematics with the goal of aligning it with qualities of the physical world but nevertheless math on its own is enriching fun gratifying and supersymmetry has had a powerful impact in our understanding of mathematics but as a tool to understand the physical world yeah that's still that is still somewhat up in the air someone else mentioned something in the questions here which i caught my eye i don't know sorry i can't give your name it's somewhere in the in the chat there but asked about the this thing called the hubble tension you guys heard of this the hubble tension this is this state of affairs right now where our measurements of the expansion rate of space the expansion of the universe have become so precise that when we find discrepancies between distinct ways of measuring the expansion rate of space we have to start to take those discrepancies really seriously and ask yourself whether we are missing something i mean right big bang right space i think we have a little little visual on that it's always nice to start the morning off with a bit of a cosmological explosion so if we can bring up that animation on the screen yeah so you know the big bang things start tightly compressed this rapid swelling yeah it's just a artist rendition but you see that everything expands outward space itself is swelling and the question is how fast is it swelling and there are there are a number of ways that we can get at that answer one way is very direct you look at distant objects like supernova explosions and based upon the redshift of the light that they emit right the light that they emit travels across space as space is swelling it stretches the wavelength of the light that's called red shifting and the degree of redshifting is something that we can measure because we know the processes that are happening in that system we know the light that we would receive from it if it was sitting right next to us and when we look at the light we actually receive it's not that light it's stretched out versions of that light but we can measure the amount of stretching and the amount of stretching gives us insight into the rate at which space is expanding so that's one way of measuring these things another way is you look at the cosmic microwave background radiation this heat left over from the big bang and by carefully measuring it you can build up confidence in an inventory of the things that are filling space the amount of matter the amount of dark matter energy dark energy and using those insights you can then predict from those measurements the rate of spatial expansion it turns out that those two approaches give different answers not hugely different but different enough that they are in tension right edwin hubble is the person who found through observations of distant galaxies that space is expanding so the tension is called the hubble tension it's not like a literal tension sometimes we do talk about tension in physics and we'll talk about tension later on tension between two quarks we'll talk about we'll get to that but this is more a metaphorical tension in that these two measurements don't seem to agree so what's the answer i don't know nobody does really there are interesting proposals that people put forward that maybe there's a kind of ingredient that was present in the early universe that gave the universe a kind of boost in its expansion relative to what we would have thought and this ingredient we don't see it today the theory goes because it may have decayed it may have drifted back to emptiness over time so the fairly significant rewriting of our thinking about the cosmological progression but who knows others you know the more conservative approaches some will say it's going to go away this tension these two measurements you know these measurements are difficult and over time they have certainly bounced around but others say you know we've really gotten to a level of sophistication in our theoretical understanding and our mathematical predictions in our observations from a whole variety of different sources ground-based telescopes space based telescopes right and some would say the level of sophistication and refinement in all of those ingredients are such that when there is a discrepancy in two approaches that are trying to get at the same number the rate of spatial expansion you've got to take it seriously so people are taking it seriously and we'll just have to see where that where that all goes as we head forward all right before i bring frank wilcheck in about 10 minutes i thought it'd be nice to just spend a little bit of time you know five ten minutes talking about what it is that he won the nobel prize for no doubt we'll talk about this again i think it's always kind of nice on these subtle ideas to see it twice leisurely with me maybe more rapidly with our illustrious guest so frank i think he was i have to ask him i think he was in his early 20s when he wrote a paper with david gross another nobel prize winning visit they shared the prize i don't know if we have a copy of that paper we can bring up on the screen it's just short paper you know many nobel prize winning papers are are quite short you don't have to write a big dissertation a big tone to make an impact so this is the first page just a few pages i don't know how many is maybe three or four pages in total yeah they're coming up on the screen here it's a handful of pages and what they did in this paper was to give a mathematical derivation that aligned with puzzling observations what did the puzzling observation had to do with quarks and the observations seem to suggest that when quarks are in the vicinity of one another when they're very close the strong nuclear force that's what holds protons together the strong nuclear force gets very weak when the particles are very near each other and it goes stronger and stronger as you move them apart like that's unusual right i mean if you talk about the gravitational force gravitational force though very very strong when things are close and it gets weak as you move them apart quite the the opposite and what they showed was that when you take certain quantum mechanical effects into account it's as if the roiling bubbly vacuum of space has the property that it kind of anti-screens the force right normally if you have bubbly things happening they can intervene in the force between two objects and make the force between them weaker but the bubbly stuff it turns out makes the force stronger and there's some the the little formula i think we do have the formula they derive i don't know if they have an exactly the form that's in their paper it's the so-called beta function of the strong interactions yeah we won't get into the gory details here but that number alpha in there that is a measure of the strength of the strong interaction and and the beautiful thing in this formula what really what wins the nobel prize it turns out as we'll talk with frank that minus sign in that formula in there is the size of the color group you know it's all technical stuff nf is the number of flavors the number of cork species basically but that minus sign is what establishes that as you move quarks closer and closer together the force gets weak and weaker as you move them apart it gets stronger and stronger and this also gives an explanation of why one would never see a quark on its own why would you never see a quark on its own i'll show you an animation in a minute but the basic idea relies on einstein's equals mc squared right remember einstein wrote his famous paper and special relativity in june of 1905 but then in september of 1905 you had an afterthought and an additional little paper that he knocks off i think we have the uh september paper yeah here it is again just a just a few pages and it's in this paper if we go i think to the very last page that we have the formula equals mc squared now einstein didn't write it in the form e equals m c squared in effect he wrote it in the way that i mentioned before he divided both sides by c squared and had m equals e over c squared now he didn't even use c for the speed of light to use capital v a different notation it all means the same stuff he didn't use e for the energy it uses l that we have over here you see it if a body releases the energy l and there must be a reason for l i don't know maybe in german i i don't know i don't know why i used l but l over v squared is the same thing as e over c squared so as you see in that line mass is related to e over c squared but the point is forgetting about notation that's sort of fun to see ein there's the genesis of the most famous equation in the world right that's kind of fun but the point is energy and mass are interchangeable so i'll show you an animation just a second but let me explain it in words first if you have two quarks and you try to pull them apart the energy of the strong connection between them from the strong nuclear force it gets stronger and stronger more and more attention more and more energy in there at some point the energy in the strong connection between them can be transmuted into the production of mass namely two other quarks a quark and an antiquark so the connection between them can snap but when it snaps you'll find two more quarks you won't have pulled that cork into isolation let's show a little animation on that i think we have a little visual here so we have two quarks that's a strong force holding them together more and more tension between them at some point the energy of the tension is so strong that it will snap creating a cork anti-corp pair so you can't get the cork in isolation again those can snap again right every time you try to pull a cork by itself you wind up failing because as you try to pull them apart the energy ultimately gets transmuted into the production of a new partner a new partner cork this also explains another issue that no doubt i think we'll talk about when frank is here and i think he'll be in just a moment which is you know when you talk about a proton and people have asked this and various other other chats that we've had in the past if you go to a book and you look up the mass of the quarks that make up a proton right the up the down quark you look up their masses you add them together basically three quarks inside of a proton the answer you get is a tiny fraction of the mass of a proton itself so what gives right we normally think of a proton made of three quarks add up the masses of the quarks to get the mass of the proton but no you get a tiny fraction of the mass of the proton and again the ideas that we're talking about give an explanation for that because again these the glue the gluons of the strong interaction that hold the quarks together they have energy and indeed if we show up let me show an atom do we have one atom show up yeah right so here's an atom right you got the electron cloud around the nucleus there's a proton inside the proton there goes the quarks but the quarks are held together by these energetic tubes of glue the gluons and they're in a sea of roiling production of corks antiquarks and gluons all over the place and it's the energy and all the other stuff that via einstein's m equals e over c squared contributes the m the mass of the proton so most of the mass of the proton is not the intrinsic mass of the corks most of the mass this is other stuff so these are the ideas that frank has been so instrumental in in developing and transforming or understanding the world i mean look they're only there aren't there aren't that many physicists who actually transform our understanding of the world you know einstein was one of them of course frank wilceck is on that level so with that it's my great honor to bring frank wilcheck into our conversation i think he is here i'm told he is here as we bring him in let me just note that frank wilcheck is the hermann feshbach professor of physics at mit in 2004 he won the nobel prize for the discussions and discoveries that we will be talking about i just made a reference to and as i mentioned he has a new book fundamentals 10 keys to reality and we're gonna get into that in our conversation today and as you may no doubt know i'm now riffing because i have no idea why frank isn't up on the screen here i don't see him there he is i enjoyed watching you for a few minutes there great to see you frank how's everything good very good uh you know in so much as insofar as it can be good with the world falling apart around us i'm actually optimistic about the future yeah where are you now are you concord massachusetts hungary massachusetts and have you been there for most of the pandemic i've been here since mid-march right yeah right only small excursions to take walks in the forest and historic fights around here yeah for sure and i mean what do you what what is your feeling about what's happening in i'm not this is not a political talk show what's what's your take on what's happening right now i guess my feeling is this too shall pass and if you go if you think cosmically in terms of scales of space and time and and even of human history i i think there's every reason to be optimistic about the future yeah there are dangers looming uh of course there's the specter of climate change and nuclear war and of course the one could have even worse pandemics uh but the ability of our uh understanding of nature to give us control and the the in principle the resources that are available to us and the rise of our understanding of mind i would say both our own and the minds we create all all those things point to fantastic possibilities for a bright future yeah no i'm i'm deeply optimistic too i would say though and i wonder if you feel the same or not i i like many i guess never thought that our democracy was as fragile as it is i mean somehow you know in school you're brought up to learn about the three branches and the checks and the balances but in the end it ultimately comes down to the integrity of the individual at some level at some deep level yes there are complex systems have unexpected instabilities i guess is the general lesson that people learn in dealing with plasmas and uh you can see it happening in history and systems failing in unexpected ways yeah we can try to learn from it and i think we hope i hope we can learn from this experience but there are some people of bad bad character and bad will unfortunately that yeah have gotten gotten influential and somehow we have to work past that yeah you've certainly done you know a great job a heroic job obviously we'll talk about your science in just a moment but you spent a lot of effort on reaching out to more general members of the public you've written a number of books and we're going to talk about this book here today you know which is uh which is a beautiful contribution you've also written columns that i've enjoyed looking at over the years and many people have and so do you feel that books that like you write i mean i write books too do they preach to the converted or or do you think that there's a real chance to uh reach out beyond i think there's a chance to reach out beyond uh it's not it's a challenge uh and frankly i think my previous books have sort of been getting uh more and more sophisticated in the way they reach out as and and presenting the science in ways that are more digestible uh i've gotten a lot of feedback from friends i've gotten questions and uh found out what people have trouble with also what people are really interested in which is not necessarily the specific facts it's you know they they're not interested in physics 101 or they could they've taken courses and they they've managed to forget it and or sometimes with uh with prejudice so to speak but what they're interested in is understanding the world and enriching their experience of the world and they're very curious about what we've achieved and what we know not so much for the detailed facts or the equations but for the view of the world that it leads and why we believe in it and how it empowers us yeah well well absolutely you know and one of the wonderful things about about your new book is if i can just sort of show it's not a thick book no it's not fake to go through i have to tell you every time i write a book i say to myself this one's going to be a thin book yes and this this is for me a new departure too and it was necessary to censor myself and a couple of times i started all over again i had a very good editor christopher richards who kept me in line so to speak and uh and and i kept i really this time i kept thinking of specific individuals i was writing for which were the friends i mentioned whose questions sort of stimulated this uh effort and then also uh um as as i was writing this book my grandson was born and that made me think but what would what what what could i write for him that he would really benefit from as he was growing up and that made me think about myself as a as a teenager when i was thinking about what i wanted to do and what what kind of questions i was asking so that so uh you know i wouldn't have wanted to read or i wouldn't have benefited very uh i mean i might put it differently there are plenty of places especially nowadays and wikipedia and and and and the web and of course books where you can get technical information if you want it yeah but what people need is an orientation or i think what people can benefit from is an orientation clarity about the absolutely basic fundamentals and and it's a wonderful story that we can i think we should be able to present and expand people's minds with yeah absolutely so i'm gonna we'll get into that in just a moment but you you mentioned you know thinking of yourself as a as a teenager and yes we can we go back there just just for a moment it's always nice for the audience here to get uh some something for me too you grew up in new york right am i yes yeah in uh in queens way in the northeast corner of uh yes northeast corner of queens almost i could walk uh two or three minutes and i would have been in nassau county so wayne in the corner over there right so i guess that may explain because one of my questions was you know many i grew up in new york and and many people who grew up and went to school there went to bronx science went to high school but you you went more local presumably it was just too far it was basically too far it would it would have been more than an hour commute each way to bronze high school of science for instance right so that i talked about that with my parents but it really wasn't a sensible thing to do clearly uh and uh and the other side of the coin is that uh the school that i actually went to martin van buren high school uh at that time was quite a good school and uh and also was a very large school so there were classes at all different levels and it suited me very well yeah presumably you you you stood out there i would do this i mean you would have stood out anywhere but uh you know were you an anomaly did the teachers not know what to do with this kid who kind of presumably well a little bit but but you know that they threw me ahead a couple of grades so uh so at that point it uh it was i i i i had there was a cohort of us who who were who could meaningfully communicate and change and trade ideas and they were definitely subjects in which i wasn't the best student i imagined so like what like what uh languages i'm not particularly good at languages i terrible truly terrible or awful at uh at a drawing for some reason yeah i want to come back to that someday and learn to do it properly but it's not natural right no i i you know the pandemic is of course this is time as many people start to think well this is the time i'm going to take up drawing and during this uh yeah i think i'm picking up juggling i did and yeah and i have gone back and i have gone back to languages i've always been ashamed that i don't know a foreign language so since i now spend time in sweden i've decided to learn swedish and i've made some progress there yeah i used to spend tweeting i didn't i didn't pick up pick up the language at all so but with the juggling uh how's that going it's uh well i i found a marvelous video by uh someone named taylor glenn which is an introduction to juggling and i thought the beginning of that it's very charming uh that but the beginning was truly profound she said that people think that juggling is a process of throwing things and catching things but actually juggling is a process of dropping things so yes you have to when you see someone doing it fluently uh you're seeing the tip of a very large iceberg of practice it kind of reminds me of uh of calutsa do you know kalutsa learned to swim just by reading a book on swimming and then drove in you know so uh well i did that too as an adult i actually you know growing up in queens i had very few opportunities to meet the water and really got kind of a phobia about swimming but then as an adult when we uh we bought a place by the lake in new hampshire as a summer place it seemed a pity not to be able to swim in the lakes so i read about it and took it up and and and learned that i guess i was 30 at the time that is a true theoretical physicist right you can do anything by just figuring it out and then just doing it well there was definitely an element of experimental trial and error in it but i love the love the expression that i got from a uh fortune cookie that i kind of made one of my mottos which is the work will teach you how to do it the work will yeah yeah right through practice you get it yeah right yeah we we do so many things subconsciously i mean consciousness is is just a gloss on what's going on in our brain really and we do many many things that we don't know how we do them starting with well organizing our visual perception talking understanding standing up straight walking all these things we don't know how we do them and that's been proved by the halting progress of artificial intelligence on all those fronts that's right you know we don't know how you know we have an amazing storehouse of information that's buried in there somehow and it comes from interacting with the world exactly that's it's a in a really profound way we are not just individuals we're also we have agglomerated a lot of the world into into ourselves we're the beneficiary of a hundred thousand generations of forebears who built up right and a lot of and also a lot of feedback as we grow up yeah absolutely i've watched you watch babies doing experiments they drop things and pick them up or have someone else pick them up over and over yeah you know i you know when i when my kids were young i i wanted to see i like i wanted to see that motion that moment where language took hold and and yes i remember the first words but somehow it just happens yeah and it well it doesn't it's not it doesn't happen in a micro second but it but it happens uh in steps that are and usually surprisingly fast yeah yeah no and my daughter i mean her first words were in response to my son a little bit older and her first words alec hit me [Laughter] you know so it was a it was it was out of need you know to communicate that's really the work teaching you how to do it yeah totally um so you you graduated high school young if i right like 15 when i well i was just around my 15th my 16th birthday and you went from there to university of chicago yes right right so i want to ask you a question about that you know i had a graduate student who was 15. you know cal take a 12. right and and it was really tough for him because yeah he had the intellectual firepower but he didn't have the emotional maturity right to do that did you i mean what's your view of rushing ahead so so quickly as you did well i didn't do it as fast as he did i think i was basically pushing the envelope of what i would be comfortable recommending because i did have i've had plenty of friends and uh maybe not quite a normal social life i was clearly less mature than my many of my classmates and along various axes uh but close enough that i did get socialized and learned how to deal with people in in reasonable ways and of course i picked up more at college uh but i never felt disconnected from my peers right right i mean i think that's if you can feel part of the social environment then it can as you say through the work you can you know an accelerated rate and from there you went i should say also my parents and particularly my mother was you know kind of a very social person and also kind of a saint in terms of how supportive she was and how caring she was she pushed did she push you or was she hands off my father pushed my mother my mother just uh support well she pushed in in a very gentle way she she didn't push but if in some way i was failing or doing the wrong thing she would just be less happy than usual and i i was very sensitive to that because yeah i was okay so yeah i mean the whole question of how hard to push your kids is such a subtle one you know and so depending on who the kid is you know their dna and yes right their experiences so and that that that worked very well with my mother's technique i i don't think it was something she was calculating about was that she was just so supportive in general that and when something was wrong in her mind she just became a little less supportive and and i felt that very acutely yeah yeah well look i mean there is nothing like a mother man i'm like a mother um so you went from chicago to princeton did you go directly to uh and and david uh was here david gross was your advisor uh well it's a little richer story than that so i i graduated in three years from chicago so i was even you know more more advanced yeah and more out of shape out of and uh i was i was i went to graduate school in mathematics at princeton because i still didn't really know what i wanted to do i wanted to keep my my options open i was pretty sure i didn't want to do pure mathematics actually so i got there under somewhat false pretenses and uh i had up to then i had been learning what other people did and i had become pretty good at that you know internal and uh uh but it's a big i found it a big step to go from learning what other people did to doing something different it's an it's a big intimidating step also the pace is much slower you have to understand that not everything you try is going to work and so my first two years at princeton is combination of that kind of change and also not knowing exactly what i wanted to do it was kind of a crisis i was a lost soul and but but and i tried different things i went to colloquia and all in biology chemistry and different as well as there was nascent computer science growing up there but uh but i lucked into uh i was very fortunate because the math building and and physics are connected at princeton it was it was and the math building is actually a big tower so it's kind of like i wander around so i wandered into the physics room place often and i got the sense that very exciting things were happening in physics that used some of the kinds of mathematics that i really liked used analysis and group theory and symmetry and i came upon this very charismatic young professor david gross who was teaching quantum field theory and we just hit it off very very rapidly and you know within a few months after our first encounter we wrote those papers did you have physics back in other words were you a math major at chicago yeah i was a math major at chicago so i did not have a convention i did not have a conventional physics education at all i picked up some i picked up you know i was interested in physics and took quite a few courses but it wasn't my major uh i had read the feynman lectures as they came out originally and and i thought i understood them but you know in retrospect i clearly did not understand them in in in a in a a an operational profound way uh but so i was vaguely aware of of physics but i did not have a proper education here i mean i mean did you take a course in quantum field theory well that's how i met david i took i said in on his class in quantum field theory okay i thought i should learn because i i there were lectures by ken wilson and about renormalization group he was visiting princeton and uh uh i knew sydney coleman was going to be around anyway there's a sense of excitement so i i uh and i was always interested in quantum field i i i had treasured as uh as before that as a student uh books by hermann weil uh and uh einstein was a great hero of mine even when i was a teenager a younger teenager and uh so i and and as i mentioned the feynman books so so i i and i and as an undergraduate i also read dirac's quantum mechanics book and i really liked that because it was kind of a different approach to linear algebra right and very clean very clean very thin and was it less than 100 pages or something i think it's the whole thing right uh well this it depends where you decide to stop but yeah the basic the basic framework of quantum mechanics is spelled out and very succinctly for sure yeah and uh you know if you want to look at his views on quantum electrodynamics and so forth and then then it's it's it's more but uh the uh uh so all so i was interested in physics but i as i i didn't have a proper education anyway i was so i went i decided this this quantum field theory course was was being offered and that was a nice clean subject that uh you didn't have to have a lot of background for so i did that and david was the teacher so there was the professor and that was really inspiring and and so i i did did i guess in your interaction with him did this idea naturally bubble up to calculate as we call the beta function well it wasn't the first idea we discussed we discussed many ideas yeah uh for possible things i remember at one point i was proposing to calculate neutrino neutrino scattering because this is this this is the kind of thing that i was thinking but but uh i wanted to i i i understood that the the theory of the weak interactions was kind of breaking open that the gates theories were really promising in different ways and uh the the model wasn't clear that what the correct model was or what whether the possibilities along these lines had been exhausted so i wanted to do that and then uh david was very interested in renormalization group as you and and and wilson of course had given these lectures about renormalization groups so then uh in our conversations eventually we wandered over to the question of calculating the how the short distance properties of the the renormalization group would apply to the gauge theories and uh that's that's that's and they were interesting formal questions because scaling is not manifestly gauging variant and that i thought that was a nice clean problem and then it was just calculating david had a much longer standing of uh trying to show that quantum field theory could not describe the strong interaction is trying to show that no way no how uh but uh but when we calculated in the non-abelian theories we found that there was a way and not only was there a way but was sufficiently unique as a guiding principle that it led to are you like a unique candidate theory for the strong interaction which is called qcd and we've got we we got it and we were able to figure out ways of testing it and you know we it was way ahead of the experiments at the time but eventually they caught up yeah so we showed actually before you came on we showed your paper with dave we can probably bring it up again you know it's it's it's it's beautifully succinct short and and the key equation of course um maybe not exactly in the form that you wrote it down i think we can bring up uh that's a letter yeah the letter is here right that's right so can you bring can we bring up the the the the beta function equation i just want to ask frank one one question about that so so here's one version of that and and the insight that the interaction between the quarks you know gets weaker and weaker as you get closer together it's all in that minus sign in there that's right well well that minus sign when we calculated it it was just it was literally that we did a calculation uh it was at the time it was a technically challenging calculation and uh sort of broke new ground and technique but it was not how should i say it was not a very conceptual calculation we followed the rules that feynman and fideo and popoff and some pioneers had had laid down for how to do gage theories and uh and the you know this this this answer emerged and you know to our credit we knew what to do with it but uh the conceptual like understanding emerged in the over the next two or three years of why this happens and kind of more picturesque terms but at at first it was just a calculation that gave a minus sign did it if it was very important it was going to not be a minus sign i was at least not just ignorant enough not to not have a prejudice but did that make you nervous that so much hinged i mean minus signs are things that we often get right you know yeah i don't think i've uh oh well no i wasn't i mean we there were many ways of checking the calculation i calculated all kinds of gauges i compared known results in qed and so there were many men there was no question about the song once everything settled down the the hard part of the calculation sort of at the level of uh nitty gritty was just making all these cross checks agree with each other and once they did the overall answer was clear so i wasn't worried about that but what i was worried about was you know is is this a meaningful result and despite the questions about gauge and variance is uh and of course does it apply to the world when we when we wanted to have it the strong in a way that didn't bother me so much at that point i was interested in getting a thesis and doing something that would kind of establish me as a as a uh as a person that would would have a job and the the uh but uh so i was i i wasn't worried about the the question of whether so much i mean it would of course i would be great if it would if it described the world no question and i was already immediately thinking about getting a nobel prize for it because if it was correct it was the theory of the strong interaction yeah but i i was less worried about the upside i was less worried about i was less worried about that was that was sort of gravy okay that was fun fun to fantasize about but clearly there were there were uh issue nature would have something to say about it and experimental physics would have something to say about it it wasn't clear at all at first that testing the theory would be easy we had logarithmic corrections to this or that which were you know notoriously difficult to sort out the experiments that we sort of used as our lever were very very crude uh we were you know just the phenomena of scaling which was the thing we were trying to explain was kind of yeah pretty semi-quantitative but we wanted to say that oh yes so this it's actually scaling but also slight deviations from scaling and this was way beyond way beyond the evidence at the time and what was the reaction i mean with this uh result yeah reaction was mixed i would say uh there were a few people who immediately took it up and became very enthusiastic uh the people at harvard who were doing gage theories for other reasons i saw so ways of uh they were that was very welcome to them to to have a theory of the strong interaction that that could could be used ken wilson i think was a very enthusiastic from the very beginning he had ideas about confinement which we really didn't we only had we only saw that the problem was difficult we didn't really have a concrete picture of how confinement would emerge uh that but but uh people i thought of as as sort of older and wiser like td lee for instance said well you know people see approximate scaling in different circumstances in nuclear physics they could me it could mean this it could mean that and they're also more or less plausible alternative explanations of the things that we were explaining uh so it was mixed uh and but the most common reaction was no reaction at all because people didn't understand what we were doing right right you knew at the time yeah for sure and and so you know it's a funny thing in physics when results are sufficiently novel they can generate the response that you're noting but over time they become the ones that are right become absorbed in such a deep way that it's almost like nature it becomes it's like oh yeah well i actually talk about this in the book i uh as as a young faculty member val fitch was the chairman at princeton and well for and he was he became quite a good friend uh and he was of course the experimentalist who discovered uh time reversal symmetry violation yep or cp violation but it's really related uh and i was talking with him and i was telling him my bright ideas about matter antimatter asymmetry and how that might be developed cosmologically and i think even about axions at that time which was inspired by this t-violation phenomena and i was talking about t violation like it was history you know not not not as not real not thinking that he he was uh he was the guy who discovered he remembered very well when it wasn't a part of reality and the startling new revelation and he said uh he he looked kind of wistful i don't think he was hurt he was amused he was very very nice sweet fellow and very uh serene he said uh well i guess yesterday's sensation is today's calibration right i've seen that i've seen that with qcd originally when we you know for many years maybe for 10 or 15 years after our breakthroughs uh when they were you know after a couple of years it became credible that this was maybe the theory of the strong interaction uh got a lot of theoretical support but uh at international conferences there would also always be major plenary talks about status of qcd the status of the strong interaction uh where people would talk about the evidence was it convincing was it and it was slowly building and getting better and better uh and that was that was a that was one of the big highlights maybe the highlight of this kind of international conference for for quite a few years uh but now uh the same activity in fact much more sophisticated the same kind of activity measurements and uh calculations of strong interaction processes at high energies uh have become a very highly developed art and now it's called calculating backgrounds because people want to want to take take it for granted and the the whole idea that this theory might be falsified in a big way is no longer really credible so the focus of interest is using it as a way of uh uh establishing a baseline for looking for deviations and those those would be the interesting things right yeah right yeah it is funny how that works i had a similar experience when i was a graduate student i learned about the higgs mechanism and it was taught in such a way that i had no idea things had never been found wrong perspective that you know this was a done deal because everyone was treating it as if it was a done deal and then of course it just becomes as you say ultimately uh the background within a more novel phenomenon you try to you mentioned axions in what we were just discussing i wonder if we could turn to that for a moment that's another i mean you you named axion you discovered this idea yeah um i i saw in your book you even give uh genesis of the name which was uh you may want to mention i had no idea that it's a laundry detergent right that i uh once when i was shopping with my mother i think i think it was probably must have been when i was in college and home home for a holiday or the summer uh went shopping and saw this detergent on on the shelf called axion and i said to myself gosh that really sounds like it ought to be a particle that you know it it fits with pion or meson or baryon or ion or anion cation and you know all these so uh so it really and it's also you know it's a greek root clearly and it's nice and short so really catchy so uh so i said to you know i said i really did say to myself i say a lot of nonsense to myself but i remember this that that if i had a chance to name a particle i would try to name an accident see if i could there's a way i could bring in axion and uh and years later uh not actually not that many years later a little bit later uh the the uh the opportunity arose because there was this remarkable sort of qualitatively new kind of particle that clearly deserved its name and its motivation its deserved a name and its motivation was a problem that has to do with the axial baryon number current it's a little bit of a stretch but close enough and that that was close enough to sell to a physical review letters which is very conservative about this if i you know if i told them i was naming it after a laundry detergent there's no way that the name would have been accepted but i didn't tell anybody until afterwards try to submit a paper to physical review with the name of a particle called a spermion spermion right that's what we now call tadpoles yeah right and that did that they rejected it did not fly they they rejected that right and i think also this was way before my time but but uh i think murray gelman originally talked about curious particles not strange particles but that was not allowed right right yeah good thank goodness yeah right yeah we have enough uh already but the action now is um still hypothetical article that has not been detected but you have put forward the case and many people thousands of people have written papers on the possibility that this puzzle of the dark matter yeah might be resolved with the axion now there was a time when it was a footnote in thinking about dark matter i mean it was kind of there i mean hopefully i i don't mean not anything like me but yeah you're right you're absolutely right footnote is being kind it was kind of regarded as a nut cult of but things have changed now right i mean change no now it's uh well at least it's uh if it's in that cult it's kind of it's kind of grown into an uh a respectable religion or it has lots of adherence and is uh supported by uh you know supported by funding agencies and and serious experimental efforts all around the world to to detect the thing so it has a very well developed theory it was and to me one of the most impressive things about it is that it was introduced to solve a theoretical problem in fundamental physics having to do with the fact this time reversal property that the laws of physics look very very nearly the same if you run them backwards in time uh the fundamental laws that is that uh but when we worked out what the consequences of this new particle would be when you ran it through big bang cosmology we found that it gets produced in great abundance and has just the right properties to make the dark matter and that case has become stronger and stronger over time both in the fact in the way that uh um the theoretical concepts around the axion have been battle tested for for 40 plus years and and survived every challenge uh with flying colors uh it even emerges from string theory for instance there's their ax the uh um then uh the uh experimental limits on the axiom the axion has the theory has an undetermined parameter so axions could could have different properties depending on one parameter it's very much like the higgs particle which we didn't know the mass but once you knew the mass you knew everything else and the range of axion masses that where it would not be dark matter have pretty much been excluded so if you have axions at all so if you're going to solve this problem at all you need axions and then if you have axions at all you're going to get dark matter and and that's so that's one thing that's happened one big cluster of things that happen has happened the other big cluster of thing that has happened is uh that kind of the competition has uh has not fared well yeah that people originally thought maybe neutrinos some kind of neutrinos would be the dark matter but that's that's pretty well ruled out by now there were ideas that uh so-called wimps associated with super symmetry uh would be uh the dark matter and that uh you know that that's been the subject of very heavy experimental observe uh efforts but so far both low energy super symmetry and directly searching for the wimps have come up empty let me ask you a question about that though because it's do you find it is it just curious just a coincidence i could and people have say many of the same words about super symmetry and super symmetric dark matter i mean in super symmetry you're trying to solve a completely separate problem not the dark matter problem solve the hierarchy problem and then within supersymmetry these wimp particles they naturally are produced in the right abundance to be the dark matter you don't have to fight more or less more or less yeah i wouldn't open it order magnitude or so yeah so is it is it why i i i i have been an advocate for low energy certification as you know it's also the the the way the couplings unify is improved yeah you have low energy super symmetry that to me is really powerful quantitative evidence in that direction uh but uh low energy supersymmetry is not really a theory in quite the same way as the axion theory is it has many more than one parameter yeah and there are certainly regions of parameter space where you can retain the good features and yet the contribution to dark matter would be subdominant or super really subdominant not uh so so it's a little bit so it's it has i you know i still i wouldn't be shocked or appalled if some version of super symmetry and wimps turns out to be an important part of the picture uh it really should be but uh right but but uh i at this point i'd be disappointed if axions weren't the dominant uh contributor to the dark matter any sense of time frame when there'll be some experiments well [Music] i i've been saying five or ten years for quite a long time but i i do think we're getting more realistic about uh and and and as you as you alluded to the world is getting more serious about it many many more experimental efforts are being mounted i think really for the first time recently one one experiment the admx experiment has actually developed sufficient sensitivity that they would have detected the cosmological background of axions if they had masses within a certain narrow range so it's only now that we are developing the technology that clearly is going to put the theory to the test yeah and you know it's difficult to say how long it's going to take i would be well it could happen any day but that would require a lot of luck at least no existing experiment except for admx can do anything and and and they only their their progress is uh slow and uh they have to look at one mass at a time and it's a slow process uh so but i i'm working on some antenna designs with collaborators that i really think will might improve things and are there lots of ideas so uh it's i can't say for sure but i i wouldn't be i wouldn't bet against the possibility of uh discovery on a time scale of say five or ten years right all right so are you a tinkerer i mean do you build stuff when you talk about you do yeah well i don't build serious how should i say i don't build serious stuff but i build uh models i like to build models i like i like toys i always have like toys games of all kinds yeah so i do so um what do you think about these ideas that people put forward that maybe the whole dark matter paradigm might be wrong and we just need to really rethink our understanding of gravity itself uh not much i mean you know it's one of these situations where it walks like a duck and waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck it's probably a dog yeah the dark the dark mat there are many many ways of accessing this phenomenon and they all fit quite snugly into the so-called dark matter paradigm so you know it's on the scale of galaxies on clusters of galaxies going back to the micro background radiation perturbations uh in the early universe it's all makes it consistent the way they cost the way they're distributed around galaxies night and they're clumped but not as clumped as the regular matter it all fits together and people who've done numerical simulations like carlos frank have done had spectacular success uh based on starting with uh standard big bang parameters many of which are pinned down experimentally and running it forward and getting something that is at least a good caricature of our universe right so people who have want to develop alternatives have a lot to answer for and the existing attempts are not impressive at all yeah right general relativity is hard to change yeah it is you can add to it but it's hard to change for sure it's a profound theory yeah and the amazing thing is you know even the parts of general relativity that you can say einstein himself was less than convinced about you know gravitational waves he was sort of on the fence right yeah oh my goals totally on the fence it was paper i think in 1938 where he tried to prove that black was couldn't form that's right exactly he thought he he really did he was confused about the the horizon being a singularity and yep yep yeah um so yeah he really put forward something that you know and of course he struggled with the cosmological terms as another big one he introduced it but uh rejected it ultimately on a combination of empirical and aesthetic grounds yeah i don't think he would have been terribly upset well actually that's not zero you may be aware of this but you know the famous story of course is the one that gamma tells where einstein says you know it was the greatest blunder of my life you know uh but there is a talk of his that i saw a transcript where einstein says it will be in the future yeah measurements will determine whether there is a cosmological concept he didn't just sort of wipe it away the way the story seems to suggest so i think he would be totally on board yeah i'm sure of it yeah yeah without a doubt um so let's turn to um you know this book uh i never get my left to right correct with these cameras there all right there it is exactly yeah um this came out i think just a couple days ago or two days ago yeah two days ago now three days ago the 12th right so you know this is we began to speak about it a little bit but i want to go a little bit further now i mean your your motivation here is clearly to give insight into a scientific mindset as opposed to the the detailed forefront this newfangled discovery that you know it's really about how do you see the world through the eyes of a scientist and the beauty of that and the way that that viewpoint naturally engages with the very human yes so exactly but i also i also in each chapter i let myself speculate a little bit at the end because again when i wrote this for my friends as i say i'm curious i have some very specific people in mind i don't want to embarrass them but but but uh but they they all asked the same kind of questions about you know what does it all mean can what do you actually do and what's coming next so uh so i i talk about i try to be clear about what we do understand and that's a lot uh but also convey the and and why we believe what we believe and uh i think we can i can speak for we in this in this context uh that we have a lot of overlap but the uh um and that's a process and it's historical and i try to talk about how it might have been different so these things shouldn't seem too obvious to you and uh and put it in the context of experiencing the world and anticipating what might happen in the future but i i'm very careful to speculate to i'm sorry too uh to speculate i do speculate but to separate the speculations from from the facts from the facts and and things that and when in the kind of facts to give at least some indication of why they're facts why we call them facts right yeah and so what is your i mean my writing process is i don't i don't have long outlines i just sort of dive in but then i'm a revision i re revive right a similar thing for you my wife tells me that all good writing is rewriting and i do rewrite a lot and it's particularly this book the reason it became short was that i did a lot of surgery and amputation of a much much more extended detailed kind of wandering text in in retrospect uh and so it's all high points and uh that but i do i do out i do outline a lot and uh and you can see that this book is very structured it's in 10 parts and each part has some parts some of the scaffolding is still visible more or less look like the proposal yes and broadly broadly however i would say as it developed it became more uh culturally and philosophically connected yeah and less less purely technical yeah right you know you make a i brought in a history of ideas yeah some poetry some history in the in the sense of history especially but especially history of ideas and science going also going back to the ancient greeks and and other philosophical traditions to talk about how people it could have been different right these guys weren't dopes these guys and uh so tech coming putting yourself in the mindset of powerful minds who thought differently is really mind is really an expansion of mine this and closely related to uh a great theme to me of of modern science which is complementarity right there should be there are valid different ways of looking at things that you should to to to do justice to reality you should be ready to take them all in yeah we're totally on the same perspective there my own recent book i had a similar idea expressed differently that that they're just many levels at which you can analyze reality and the question is part of it what level is the right one and that level has its own language its own vocabulary or its own yeah that's right and and knowing knowing what's going on two or three levels below might not be terribly relevant to uh right right if you're if you're in a jury on a legal case it doesn't really help very much to know that the the uh the victim and the perpetrator are made out of quarks and gluons right i love you very much funny thing though a jury i was in a jury in a criminal case and in the closing remarks that the defense attorney looks to me and says and you don't have to be a quantum physicist right and in the hallway i read your books you know yeah but uh and he was right the defendant was uh not guilty in terms of the evidence to put forward but anyway um but i want to ask you a question uh about that so so we're totally uh on the same page regarding that perspective but there was a moment in in reading your book where i wasn't sure we were completely on the same page and i wonder if you wouldn't want to spend a moment talking about it it wasn't the issue is the issue of free will i think we do agree but i think we probably say it slightly differently so so you come to the argument that asking whether we are free in the context of a reductionist perspective it's kind of the wrong question to ask you know free will this human conception it's up here at this level the human level yeah other level of reality down there the quarks the gluons the electrons and so forth and it's that other so when it comes to certain things that bifurcation makes a lot of sense to me we talk about love and and guilty or not in a trial or hate or grief or anxiety you know those qualities those sensations of human experience it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to talk about them in their in the reductionist language they're just you know different and free will is a very very useful concept very useful but here's what i would say tell me if you agree with this so so when we talk about the sensation say of love or hate or grief that human sensation i agree needs to be thought of distinctly from the reductionist account if we talk about the sensation of free will then i would also agree needs to be separated out but i do find that there is value in thinking about at least a certain kind of freedom it may be a matter of definition you know when we think of free will as having control over the physical unfolding then we start to use a language that's so similar to the physical and funding down the reductions account that i do find it useful to ask the question that you say that we shouldn't ask now is it because your definition of is more the sensation the human sensation of free will is is that where we use slightly different language well i think there is a phenomenon of free will i mean here it is i can put raise my hand or not and i'm gonna decide do you tell me what to do and i'll do the opposite right and free will is an essential concept in law you know we give an insanity defense if we say that someone is not in control of their decisions and yep and so forth uh now so it's a very useful concept and in many kinds and this is necessary to address certain kinds of questions uh the great problem i think that a better way to state the problem that is usually discussed in terms of free will versus determinism to me a much better way a phrasing of the problem is uh does mind emerge from matter and how yeah that and i absolutely do believe that mind emerges from matter right uh and i you know we've we've seen how uh metabolism emerges from matter how heredity emerges from matter at a molecular level and you can even go down further if you wanted to uh we understand uh we don't yet have that account for mind uh clearly but but so far there are no show stoppers the neurobiologists have not come into any phenomenon where they have had to invoke souls or something other than the same sort of thing that we discuss in our core theories or standard model and it seems that it doesn't seem to be anything missing and even more than that you know we do very very we meaning the scientific community uh do very very delicate sensitive experiments where we have to make sure we control all kinds of things stray magnetic fields straight radio waves people walking by tremors of the earth and so forth but we've never had to make corrections for what the guy next door is thinking right be careful not to think certain thoughts or you'll mess up the experiment so uh so so i think maybe that's what you're getting at that that definitely big part of it there's no uh so i i'm very sympathetic to the idea that that we can get to a deep understanding of mind and lay a foundation for the phenomena we observe in terms of molecules and ultimately quarks and so forth uh however having done that i still think we'll talk about free will and that's and that's an example of the nested layers you know the different languages that women use it would be virtually impossible to excise the language and concepts surrounding free will from everyday human discourse but in my mind i always say okay but i really mean it's the sensation of that free will but because mind emerges from men matter is fully governed by these physical laws my ability to intercede in those physical laws is that's a loser it's really not that straightforward i don't think because the the uh there are phenomena of quantum uncertainty and chaos and sheer numbers that make the uh idealization that we can just compute what's going to happen and not to mention a human being is or brain is not a closed system so the whole universe gets involved the uh and that's not just a that's not the metaphor i mean you see things and that changes what you think the uh uh so i think there are questions about what the way you know in in quantum mechanics the if you know the wave function then the evolution is deterministic but you don't know the wave function even in principle you don't know so it's not clear i mean so i mean it is what it is we'll discover as as we work out what the dis what what the the facts are and presuming it's true how mind emerges from matter it'll be much clearer how to talk about it yeah uh but i don't think the kind of laplacian crude determinism that it's just a matter of solving the equations and if we were we were cleverer we would be able to do that uh i i think that that doesn't do justice to the situation the the the calculations are so impractical yeah and but even more it's not even clear that they make sense in principle because uh they're so uh it's just not an appropriate way to describe this yeah i mean i would agree at the level of predictive capacity i totally agree with the perspective that you lay out for me though it's a question of what are the governing principles and is there the ability of the human mind to intercede in the physical unfolding in a manner that somehow is distinct from yeah or theory we touched on exactly those two points and i i think we do agree on those i don't i don't think there's any evidence yeah it's certainly worth investigating and my god it would be the greatest discovery of all it would be uh greatest discovery of all time in my opinion if you could show that there's influence of my matter that's separate from uh influence of matter on matter exactly uh and we have very sensitive instruments now yeah that then uh and and that uh we will understand how mind emerges from matter in the same at the same level as we understand how metabolism emerges from matter how heredity emerges from matter or for that matter we've we're constructing minds we're constructing uh new kinds of minds that are getting very powerful and getting you know up to human and in some cases superhuman levels on some fronts and uh yeah so that'll that'll give us examples of minds that emerge from matter exactly we'll also i think in you know over the course of the next few centuries maybe the next that will make progress on the next few decades but certainly in the next few centuries we'll have a very rich understanding of how human minds emerge from matter and uh well if it works out the way i think it'll work out that you know minds do emerge matter and and there are no such effects then then i think we agree on those those it's kind of the observable correlates of this discussion now what do you want to say that's the absence of free will i'm not sure i'm willing to go with you there because free will is a very useful concept and i experience it so there's something that we have to do justice to as part of understanding how mind emerges from matter yeah i mean there's two points that i would make on that so yeah i think we we do pretty much fully agree but the one point is make is i think there is an implication of these ideas for some of the concepts that you mentioned for even for the judicial system right because when i think in the manner of the absence of traditional free will not sort of the everyday useful concept of it it eliminates the knee-jerk reaction for retribution in certain circumstances it adds a certain kind of empathy to circumstances so so punishment now becomes more just a teaching tool behavior stimulus of punishment as opposed to punishing for the sake of revenge and i think that change of attitude at least it helped me get to that change of attitude through thinking in this way well that's i think well i think that's wonderful even if it's not quite right i think it's a wonderful byproduct and uh i think i would i would reach similar conclusions by related but but just a little bit different routes yeah that but i do agree that you know think internalizing this concept of complementarity that different descriptions are uh appropriate and by internalizing i think one of the great lessons of our fundamental understanding is that the distinction between self and not self is somewhat superficial and that we're all in this universe together we're made out of the same sort of stuff and expanding your circle of empathy very very wide and you know sort of internalizing the idea that there's also other forms of wisdom that say uh put yourself in the other guy's shoes or we're all god's children i i think that that those lessons are not contradicted by fundamental understanding in the way you come to them uh by different paths yeah totally agree now you mentioned the possibility of creating mind in a in a machine in a computer and yeah it doesn't i agree i don't think there's any fundamental obstacle to that i don't know how long it will take and we begin to see already with systems like you know alphago and yeah gene folding or a deep mind you know these systems that they can learn on their own they just study the data they study the patterns yeah yeah so so it does suggest you mention this in your book it does suggest that at some point we may have these devices that can you know in an hour or 15 minutes rederive all of of human understanding you know and and so what what do you think about that is that the future that we're headed toward and does it have an impact on when you think about the work you're doing you know it changes our understanding it changes the world but when you say oh and a machine will be able to do that in 30 seconds you know in the 25th century you know does that does that color anything that you do it is a lesson in humility isn't it i i do i well let me let me get a prop here [Music] we're waiting for frank to come back for a show-and-tell anybody just joined us this is uh this is archaeopteryx [Music] i keep arcticus on my desk as a constant reminder of this that uh i read a book by uh olaf stapleton one of the visionary geniuses of science uh well i've read several of his books made a big impression on me but one i think maybe the first one that i read was called odd john it's about a superhuman intelligence in this case it was a mutant but a similar idea that was just able to function at a different level and the the biography of john is written by a normal human and at one stage uh i john is talking to this uh the biographer and says you are the optic archaeopteryx of the spirit and i think we have to realize that we we we can do we can we are able to comprehend the world remarkably well astonishingly well uh but we can certainly gra see that there there are uh more powerful ways of more uh powerful internet in information processing uh uh and uh uh absorbing and abstract whatever more powerful thinkers on the horizon more powerful mines on the horizon and uh that's okay i mean we it doesn't uh you know we humans are already not the best at not we still have uh uh athletic competitions even though cars can move much faster and so for we still love birds even though airplanes can move faster and higher and so forth and carry things uh and even at a more practical level today i wouldn't be able to work at the same level without my silicon friend here that that helps me do calculations and and picture things and and just gather information uh that's stored on the internet and so uh so i think we'll have a co-evolution uh the human mind will have a co-evolution and the maybe the vanguard of thought will no longer be things uh encased in human skulls but that's okay they'll be better they'll be better than us if if we do it right you know of course there are many ways things could go wrong but i i hope that there'll be a co-evolution a period of transition and and and uh humans will continue to to live and thrive and and be enriched by by this but they won't be the vanguard of mind anymore and of course it could be that we do evolve to a form where the flesh and blood version of ourselves is something part of the distant past right it could be that well yeah that right we could i mean my actually ray kurzweil who's here yeah one of the visionaries of this kind of thing was came from that same high school as me oh is that true yeah just a couple of years before i think well i did i didn't know him and i still don't know him very well but uh but yeah he there's something in the air 2020 if i remember to be the singularity yeah i don't i don't believe in the singularity i think not i think you know in the and in the parlance of physics it's going to be a crossover it'll be a gradual sure which is fortunate because it's going to be very complicated to adjust to and i think it's another case where the work will teach us how to do it we'll interact with these things and and have a chance to give them feedback on uh on how they're doing and and and uh to build up relationships and and you know maybe i think an important part of the future will be cyborgs so human human brains and even closer partnership with our computers than now uh and yeah so it i don't think anyone is smart enough to predict how this is going to work out in detail yeah uh but experience will will i i do have a lot well not faith but a hope hope that uh and and and expectation i guess guarded expectation that uh increased intelligence will also be associated with increased empathy and increased experience of the world yep so it'll all be good it's not and we shouldn't be jealous that that that you know our ancestors will be longer lived and wiser and kinder than we are we should right i mean so a lot of this conversation is predicated not completely but partly under the assumption that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is one that isn't actually a problem right this an inner world can emerge so do you see an inner world merely as the byproduct of certain complex processes is that enough of an answer to you or do you does it puzzle you at all it certainly needs to be worked out in much more detail and i'm sure the details might turn out to be very surprising but i think you know with if your standards of explanation are low enough i think you can already see the outlines of how it might work and some experimental support for the ideas that most of what's going on in our brains is subconscious we already mentioned how we don't really know how we walk or how we set but we certainly don't even people have tried to study it very carefully haven't gotten very far and uh and visual processing you know we know a lot of bits and pieces but it's like the theory of the strong interaction before qcd it's not really a functional theory uh the uh but uh where was i going with this i'm sorry you know whether we can come up with that right but but i think there is uh there is there are experimental indications that that most of what we do is subconscious however that there is a kind of necessity to organize it all there's an executive function that needs to be uh needs to be in place for very plausible evolutionary reasons just to make sense of it all right and make sure all these units are working together and that if you think about it that would have to be something like consciousness that says it's a and and there are famous experiments which i uh mentioned in the book actually where you can see that there's a separate process of a unit making decisions and then reporting it to consciousness right and that's a separate process separated in time and place from where where it's actually done and where it's reported so when you think you're willing something you're actually uh just uh accepting the report of what your unconscious actually did now there are a lot of uh you know the global workspace theory michael graziano the attention scheme of theory i think these are and they're but they're ideas they're not just theories they're there were experiments by benjamin leiber especially with the pioneer but they're not by now there are hundreds of experiments yeah along these lines of separating the decision-making process from conscious experience they are not the same thing and so a couple more things if you have a couple minutes i just wanted to get your your feeling on you know physics science more generally makes progress usually because there's some kind of tension some kind of the parts don't fit together and and we have a bunch of those on the table at the moment and i'm wondering what your thoughts are and one is and you and i once spoke about this a long time ago and you didn't seem very interested to talk about it so you may dismiss me again right here but the quantum measurement problem um you know that you know we have schrodinger's equation it allows us to calculate how the wave function the probability wave evolves in time yeah to go from that to the definite world of actual outcomes is still problematic as far as the detailed mathematical description goes i think of that as part but not necessarily the most salient part of this question of seeing myself in the equations you know to see how within the equations of quantum mechanics you can construct sort of step by step well not just quantum mechanics but but the world as we actually know so qcd and quantum load uh at least in broad you you of course you'll have to make simplified models along the way and idealizations but just the broad in broad strokes how you can construct something that we would recognize as uh our experience of the world yeah saying so not we wouldn't be talking about doing experiments we'd be talking about you know doing experiencing the world and and then to show that uh this description [Music] has the properties that that we actually experience that's somewhat of a scandal is that to me is that we uh we have this marvelous very successful description of the micro world and there's no reason to think that we can't step by step ascend a different levels of description and reach [Music] the macro world and we do that very effectively at the level of designing engineering structures and semi computers and so forth but to get all the way from there to see how mind emerges from matter and then to see how the world as we experience it emerges from that description of mind that loop has definitely not been closed yeah but i i'm not sure that separately thinking about the so-called measurement problem is going to help very much right i mean does that suggest that you are more in a many worlds like camp that it will just be schrodinger's equation and nothing else will be needed once this other level of analysis can be undertaken yeah i hope so i hope so uh although there just seemed to be a big gap somewhere in in the axiomatic structure of quantum mechanics at least as far as i've been able to see uh somewhere you have to introduce uh concepts of probability and yeah and and interpretation i really like i was i have been very influenced by a book called the consistent quantum theory by robert griffiths yeah i know the book yeah that that uh i mean not only is it very clarifying but i think it's actually useful in in making little models of quantum mechanical phenomena i've been using it in my work and there'll be some papers soon that this the uh um but so he so those models are sufficient the models that are described in that book he are fully consistent with the principles of quantum mechanics and sort of recognizable descriptions of actual experimental situations and i think really as stripped down as they could possibly be given those constraints and you can't get away from this damn assumption of a probability interpretation i don't see how so i think that might have to be added to the schrodinger equation right right um so going from the small to the big you know there is some some people claim there's tension not everyone does between you know the inflationary cosmological perspective and some of the other ideas that even you know paul steinhardt one of the architects of the inflationary paradigm has sort of shifted his view to a you know a cyclic cosmology one that repeats in time what's your view well okay i i uh uh i mean paul's objections as far as i understand them are basically phenomenological he thinks the theory doesn't doesn't really uh fit quite but also the uh you know the multiverse as a natural outcome i think is a thing that really turned away from inflation yeah uh yeah i it doesn't bother me uh they uh it could be it's it's kind of uh it's another lesson in humility perhaps for fundamental physics we might not be able to predict as much as we had hoped uh about the basic laws we might have to leave some parameters uh as historical accidents or something but but i that i try to resist because that's the easy way out you know you you know that's that's just a convenient excuse if you're saying oh i i failed therefore it's a failure principle so but but it could be that way it's certainly logically possible that some of the things we think of as fundamental constants are historically conditioned and are different elsewhere yeah it's certainly very logical possibility uh so we'll just have to see how well what if it's the king of players develop uh one point let me ask one question though if it's the case that the um the breadth of the multiverse is so broad that any measurement would find a home in some multiverse i mean this is the issue that paul said and he says you know then then we're in a room that's just not the cmb you know that's that's not true i mean you know we have we have our core theory we have our standard model and uh you know and it's not a random it makes many predictions so it's it's highly over determined it's not so our description of the world is definitely not underdetermined we have plenty we have lots and lots of data so uh and and whether you whether it takes we ideally we'd like to have a one parameter theory or zero parameter theory of everything of the fundamental or at least the fundamental laws and excuses for why the complex world we see around us uh is is complex uh but and then we shouldn't aspire to incorporate it in the fundamental laws in detail uh but uh you know whether in in a way whether we need to use one parameter two parameters or five parameters or 20 parameters yeah look that that that's that's to me is a higher order question but i i think to say that that we can't predict anything is ridiculous i mean right we do a lot so advocate there is an assumption of simplicity in that because you take the core theory the standard model there are a lot of zeros in there that we are assuming from simplicity we don't even pay attention to those zeros other fields other couplings you know so if you allow yeah but but yeah but but uh their principles we're trying to we're trying to me the goal the goal of science is to describe the world uh and we're describing the world very very well and it's not underdetermined i i i make the same argument too of course you know what we do is you know we make our best understanding of the phenomena that we see and then we modify it in the smallest possible way when some anomaly comes along we have to describe it as well and yeah and we use it i mean this this is the basic procedure that uh was articulated by by newton and brilliantly exemplified by him and that we've been following ever since which is analysis and synthesis you try to understand very basic principles by boiling seeing them in the simplest possible way they operate and then build back up by deduction yeah that's been spectacularly successful for sure uh and i don't see any reason to uh pooh-pooh it would say that and and uh yeah how should i say it it's not our job to describe all possible worlds whatever that means is our primary job is to describe our world and the the the the the logical possibilities that aren't realized in our world well that's curious but it's not really the job or what's to me at least it's not really the job of fundamental science to uh to explain that black hole information problem another one of those arenas of tension yeah do you think it's where do you think we are on that i it's complicated i guess the uh i think you know one of the i was alluding previously to making to using these griffiths type models i've recently made progress not on understanding black holes but on understand understanding uh uh lumps of coal so how a pure quantum system can radiate can in that case a burn you put in a highly excited state it burns the radiation looks thermal and so but we of course we know and it goes down to a ground state the the radiation despite looking thermal perhaps for a very long time is actually not thermal how can that be why and i i think i have a very clear understanding of that the case of standard quantum mechanical systems now black holes have additional constraints about how things are arranged in space time and how you transmit information causally that you know it's hard to resolve and we don't have a lot of experimental data to go on we it's not clear that if we had a correct theory we'd even know that it was very happy you know i mean but uh i i guess uh it's a fun problem it's not clear to me that it's a really central problem in describing the world right and i the way the inspiration i took from it was to try to understand uh not black holes but things that have the sort of most basic things in common that they we uh that they they radiate in ways that can look thermal for a long time and yet have to be pure states how does that happen right right as far as i'm i don't think there's any really deep mystery there but to see it concretely is was a challenge and continues to be yeah all right so um that was sort of the bulk of things that i wanted to talk about though you know a lot of students watch these conversations that we've been having some young you know some graduate students some younger you know and we've even had people write that their their child five six years old sort of watches these conversations just to let the ideas wash over them so do we yeah i recommend that actually i mean it meant a lot to me well i don't think well even at five or six i was a big admirer of einstein and you know it was immersed in the cold war and people were talking about advanced weapons and you know it was pretty scary of course but but the fact that that people were controlling nature and could produce these spectacular effects i was immersed in that of course i didn't understand it but but just knowing that it's out there in this sense of excitement and possibility and base rate you know people going into space and yeah just to be exposed to it is great and then you can fill in the details later but an important part of filling in the details is you need patience because it's unusual material it's difficult [Music] and to to have that patience it really helps to have the motivation and to see the goal yeah i was i was going to ask you if you had any words of wisdom for those students but you basically answered my question before i i even asked it so yeah that is an inspiring outlook that there is so much more to learn and it's a yeah definitely uh cast a wide net uh don't insist on it understanding ever don't insist on understanding everything before you understand anything uh and uh but at the same time the complementary advice i would give is pay attention to the foundations do do learn your calculus and so forth as soon as possible and you know learn how to converse with a computer now and just be curious and have fun find out what you love yeah and go there absolutely so everybody you know this is uh frank's new book let me try to center it in the frame there fundamentals 10 keys to reality just came out three days ago there's an even better image that you see on your screen right there so you know you should go get it it's a beautifully written account that really allows you to see the world through the eyes of one of the great physicists of our age and gives a different perspective on on how we can engage with reality so you should get it read it enjoy it re-read it and frank wilcheck saying thank you so much for joining us okay all right everybody that was our conversation with frank wilczyk nobel laureate for his work in quantum chromo dynamics and as you've seen you know he's a very broad thinker who is concerned much more than the details much more with how we human beings can relate to the world in a way that's exciting creative can even involve contradictory perspectives but that's the beauty of having a human brain the ability to engage with the world in a fundamentally human manner so before we wrap up let me um see if there are any particular questions that you guys have in the chat i'm looking over at it here and uh let's see uh yeah so elsa notes never forget when you're looking in the sky you're looking in the past elsa that's true both scientifically and it's a very poetic idea i like to think that everything that happens on planet earth right the reflected light rays from planet earth they race across the universe and carry our present out to the cosmos it's a kind of immortality in a way the fact that something happens in the universe gives off light and the light from that event has an imprint of that event and that imprint just travels until obviously it reaches some destination if not it just can travel through the cosmos indefinitely which is a kind of an exciting way of thinking about how the world is susan roy asks when you use the word information what precisely do you mean it's not an easy question to answer susan it's a vital question to ask to some extent when we talk about information we're talking about the data necessary to specify a physical system that would be the most straightforward definition i could give so for instance when we're talking about air in this room where i am right now there is a certain amount of information required to nail down the precise positions and velocities in the classical language of the particles or the precise quantum state of the particles using the quantum mechanical language and that would be the information content of the air inside this room and when we talk about entropy entropy arises when we don't look at the detailed microstate of say the particles of air in this room but rather we summarize their state with more coarse macroscopic features like the temperature of the molecules and the pressure and the volume of space that the molecules fill and the number of molecules those more macroscopic qualities don't give us the detailed microscopic information so we often think about entropy as the amount of hidden information where the hidden information is the information necessary to specify the detailed microstate of say the particles of gas in this room so that's one answer but in different contexts the notion of information can take on somewhat different form so the answer to the question susan is somewhat context dependent but that would be an answer that is quite relevant when we're thinking about the world in the language of statistical mechanics thermodynamics and using the concept of entropy rob b asks can the universe be cyclic just by the direction of time not exactly what you mean by just by the direction of time but when people talk about a cyclic universe it's usually one that in one form or another goes through some sort of origin event origin like event a big bang like event develops evolves for some period of time and then somehow finds its back finds itself back in a configuration that yields an event analogous to the original creation event some new kind of big bang event so there was this expirotic scenario that was developed in the context of string theory where these large membranes three-dimensional membranes could float through a higher dimensional space slam into each other every trillion years or so and that slamming together would be the big bang-like conflagration that would start the cycle anew there's an older idea going way back to the early days of general relativity as richard thoman was developing these ideas where the universe would have a big bang it would expand for a while reach a maximum size and then come back in on itself collapse back down and then the cycle would happen repeatedly that particular model had problems in dealing with the second law of thermodynamics because in that case the buildup of entropy would strongly suggest that the sequence of big bangs and big crunches couldn't go on forever so there'd have to be some initial event and therefore the cycles couldn't go on forever but others in the more modern incarnation of these ideas like paul steinhardt working with people like neil turock and and others early days uh bert overt also postdoc of mine at columbia justin curry had early models of this they've developed versions of the cyclic scenario that seemingly can go on forever and still not have an issue with the second law of thermodynamics not everybody agrees with that those models actually make sense you may recall in our conversation with lenny suskind lenny was definitely no it doesn't work you know that's like a perpetual motion machine so i i'm not going to get into the fray on those particular arguments i understand the arguments from both sides but that is what we would mean by a cyclic universe all right we're heading on now to uh two hours now i'm a little exhausted you probably are as well um some interesting questions here liam what is the relation between symmetry breaking in the standard model where does it break so symmetry breaking really should be thought of as symmetry hiding i'll end on this i think so the idea is that if you have certain mathematical equations that enjoy a certain kind of symmetry when you change around the symbols according to some rule of transformation the resulting equations are unchanged that's what we mean by the standard model have certain symmetries it has a symmetry that has a name su 3 costs su 2 cross u 1. these are not a billion and a billion gauge symmetries that the equations of the standard model enjoy when we say that this image is broken we don't mean that the equations somehow are changed rather we envision applying those equations in an environment in a world and that world environment has qualities that do not respect the symmetry transformation and that's where the symmetry is broken it's an environmental fact an environmental quality that doesn't respect the symmetry that the fundamental equations do so the equations have the symmetry but the symmetry becomes hidden by the qualities of the environment for instance the environment may be threaded by a higgs field and that higgs field may have the property that it doesn't respect certain symmetry transformations and that's why the symmetry becomes hidden or in the language of the field it becomes broken and that's vital to the standard model of particle physics the core theory that frank was talking about and it's one of the the vital ideas in our understanding of the physical universe all right i think that's it for us here today thanks for tuning in we will probably have another one of these sessions we seem to be doing them on a rhythm of every two weeks we do look at your suggestions keep them coming for people that you would like to hear from frank was one of the suggestions and you see that we now had a conversation with him uh there are other interesting folks out there in the world some nobel prize winners some not noble prize winners just interest thinkers across the board send in your thoughts of who you'd like us to have that conversation about and we will join again in roughly two weeks again you should sign up for the world science festival newsletter so you can be alerted when these sessions happen you can follow the world science festival on the usual social channels twitter and facebook and you can follow me on twitter as well i'm at begreen on twitter you join in i announce these sessions there as other tidbits of science and i also i'm starting to use facebook a little bit more i kind of let it go for a while we'll see but i also am b green or brian green at facebook okay look forward to seeing you next time bye [Music] you

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Keywords: Frank Wilczek, asymptotic freedom, Nobel laureate, MIT, Brian Greene, Wilczek Quantum Center, Nobel Prize, gravitational waves, black holes, quantum mechanics, singularity, event horizon, theory of the strong interaction, radio telescopes, astronomy, general relativity, gravity, New York City, Live stream, world science festival, World, Science, Festival, world science u

Id: v6YEKYIkrzI

Length: 123min 40sec (7420 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021