James Simons and C.N. Yang: Stony Brook Masters Series

dr. Chen Ning yang a Nobel laureate in physics is the Albert Einstein professor emeritus in physics at Stony Brook University and the founding director of the Seon yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook his good friend dr. James Aris simons is a renowned mathematician investment advisor and philanthropist the former chair of the math department at Stony Brook he heads Renaissance Technologies an investment fund that trades billions of dollars in markets around the world he and his wife Marilyn recently donated 60 million dollars to Stony Brook to create the Simon Center for geometry and physics and gentlemen it's a great pleasure to be able to speak to both of you I was quite comforted yesterday to learn that each of you at certain points in your relationship were unable to understand what the other one was talking about I found a very comforting situation now that physics and math are back together again is everybody caught up with each other dr. Simon's well I still generally speaking don't understand a heck of a lot of physics so I don't know I think a lot of mathematicians have certainly caught up to some extent people who are interested in these particular areas which do center around geometry to a large extent have gotten more familiar with what the physics lingo at least and what they're after in many respects and I expect the same is true on the physics side about dr. young do you now understand what the mathematicians are talking about mostly not but let me explain math and physics and in fact every discipline has now become very big subjects of the investigation in contrast to a hundred years ago each covers now much broader territory than before so when a mathematician talks to me most of the time I cannot understand but amazing things that between what they talk about and what we talk about there's a reading of overlap what is amazing is this reading of overlap is a very very fundamental and it's mostly related to the geometry part of mathematics so although it is only a small fraction of both mathematics and physics it occupies a central position in both sort of at the source of the lifeblood of each and everybody expects both mathematicians and the physicists expect that this will continue that future developments of both the disciplines are likely to be deeply entangled in this central region that is the reason why everybody's very happy that with Jim and the Marilyn's generosity stone the book will be able to launch into this central area of research for decision for both disciplines I want to follow up on that but I also want to mention that it I heard you say at one point you wrote that there were two types of mathematics books tell me about that yes that was when in 1969 or thereabouts I found some similarity between some mathematicians formula and some formula that we physicists were talking about so I went to German who was department chairman of math at that time and he instantly said these are the same thing in fiber ponders I said was fiber ponders so he gave me a book there a famous book written by a Princeton mathematician named Tim Roth and I took the book back and got very frustrated after studying it for a couple hours so later i joked there are only two types of modern mathematics book while you cannot read beyond the first page when you cannot read the other first sentence and the steam was was the latter kind and the mathematicians agree that they they think that this is a profit joke to waste to certain extent but that does not mean that they would abandon that style but there is a certain rigidity but there is certain advantage in this way of writing so some of the mathematicians persistent write in that way is that the way you would write dr. Simon you are you okay Regine rods book was always not an easy read some people are better writers another and as time goes on certain fields become clarified and then as a result easier to explain so I never got very far enstein rods book either and learned that material that's in that book in other ways but Steen rods book was written sometime earlier well before I gave it to Frank so it's like a lot of subjects at first they're very difficult to understand and therefore difficult to explain to other people because you don't perhaps fully understand all the ramifications yourself gradually things become clearer and things are easy I'm easy to explain so you know that's Stephen Raj book I think will always be a particular example of something that's pretty hard to read his fiber bundle something you could explain fairly easily at this point I could if I had ten minutes you want to give me ten minutes I'll give you ten minutes after this energy you funding the Simon Center for geometry and physics what do you hope and expect will happen there and that's it to get back to something that dr. Young said what is the connection between geometry and physics that doesn't connect the rest of math man well obviously most of mathematics is involved in physics calculus is involved in physics and you have to know how to solve the linear equations or whatever so invert a matrix all that stuff most basic mathematics are a great deal of it finds its way into physics and is necessary the the modern thrusts of mathematics into geometry which has occurred over the last say seventy-five to a hundred years by now has very much deepened a certain area of mathematics which is generally called geometry and those areas have become particularly relevant in in physics so and physics has always had quite a bent towards the geometric side of mathematics for example if you look at the work of Archimedes who was a great great scientist the more I learned about him that the greater he seems he did both mathematics and physics I don't think completely separated the two in his mind for example he quickly learned how to count the importance of the center of mass now he was only looking at least initially at the center of mass of a two dimensional object of a flat object which you might have what doesn't even have any mass but of course if it's a little thin plate of metal or something so geometrically you find a nice formula for the center of mass when you can't you couldn't do physics without the notion of the center of mass elementary physics that's the way you look at forces a reply to the center of mass and then the whole thing becomes simple so in the very beginning at least back to Archimedes geometry the geometric side of mathematics and physics were quite intertwined Newton himself did a lot of his work with geometric say stimulation and inspiration and and his writings involved a lot of a lot of geometry and depended on that quite a lot for the physical intuition so there's nothing really new about a geometry and physics interaction except how he's very advanced areas of both subjects have become so intertwined in the past say 40 years let me supplement what the Tim just said she said traditionally physics and mathematics had deep relations and especially physics with geometry in 19th century Maxwell wrote down axis equations that's the greatest piece of physics in the 19th century and we'll read what he wrote he was thinking deeply geometrically however the person who explicitly stated that the physics helps to be geometrist was Einstein Einstein first did this in the beginning of the 20th century by geometries in the concept of gravity gravity used to be thought of as something two bodies would attract each other at a distance and that's started from Newton's times Einstein converted that into a geometrical theory a completely geometrical theory and that's called the general relativity that's one of his great achievements more than that after that he then said that not only should gravity be traumatized as I did but other forces in nature should also be dramatized what is meant by the other forces of nature at that time it means the electromagnetism electric and magnetic forces electric magnetic forces you sube used to be thought of you have a charge here in the charge here they repair each other if they have the same science like Newton's gravity action at a distance and the Arnage they insisted that this kind of the electromagnetic forces should also become geometrical and that was the beginning of the idea of gauge Theory taken up by one of the great mathematicians of the ninth of the 20th century Hermann Maier and he introduced the idea of gauge theory which developed through all these ages to today and it has a profound influence on the reemergence of a common interest between the geometers and the physicists in many ways you two gentlemen represent this coming together we contribute it to the beginning of it yeah I mean we contributed to the beginning of the desert that well from my point of view when I came to Stony Brook Frank was good enough to tell me some of the things that he was doing and since I knew so little physics they went right over my head but at a certain point I realized that what he was doing involved mathematics very similar to what I was doing and or at least where I come from he was depending or groping in some cases for mathematics which had been done 30 or 40 years earlier and that was at that point I realized hey you know we're using different words to say some of the same things and so on and so forth so I got interested in to some extent and sort of interpreting some of these things too Frank and his and his colleagues and he also told me about an extraordinary experiment called a ball merinov experiment which that would only take me three minutes to describe well it's it's basically an experiment where you expect nothing to happen intuitively you would expect nothing to happen and in fact something happens a coherent beam of electrons you know all what the frequencies lined up you know coherent light like lasers is man is meant to is sent around a circle by reflecting it and comes back and meets itself in the presence of a magnetic field you would expect that there'd be a twist but the coherence would be shifted as a result of this magnetic field let's say that they're going through but it turns out that these fellows Baum and I are not did an experiment where there was no magnetic field present that the electrons could detect it was confined let's say to to a region way away from where the electrons were so but the electrons if they had a brain would not feel anything they would just march around very happily and come back and and find themselves upside down relative to their their friends who were just coming you know whom they were meeting and that was quite extraordinary on the other hand the geometric description of that kind of phenomena that kind of a twist is well described it's called a flat bundle or a connect a flat connection on a bundle one of these fiber bundles that would take me too long to describe so that made me realize hey here's this remarkable phenomenon in physics which mathematically is trivially described by using modern mathematics and I told this to a few of my other mathematical friends for example a singer from MIT who communicated and he got excited and he communicated this to a tear and some other very prominent mathematicians with whom he was working and so they at least began looking at some of the issues and in in physics that their approach to geometry and topology could be applied to I think at the same time that Frank and I was taught we're talking I expect there were others who were having the same kinds of discussions I don't think we were unique in getting this going it was the time the time was ripe and and so I'm sure there were others who were getting involved within a few years I decided to try to make some money and stopped and that worked out for you by the way what his ability to make money this really hit the geometry producing things in the market place to get back to the center which you are funding what do you what do you expect out of that I expect good science I think because of the focus we have a chance to see some very interesting developments there I think that I did it for one thing because we did it because we wanted to make a gift to Stoneybrook I feel Stoneybrook gave us a lot and we were we were going to make a gift to Stoneybrook up some sort of or another in connection with their capital campaign but this subject began to I began to realize this would be an excellent thing to use that money for so we focused we focused on this and I'm hoping great results come and a lot of people get trained and it becomes a fount of knowledge in this area and you must be very interested in please allow me to supplement what Jim said from the physics side in the 20th century starting with the time Heisenberg bore through several revolutions there was great progress however there is one lagging difficult problem and that is how to put gravity and the quantum mechanics together gravity and quantum mechanics are both essential theoretical and experimentally important ideas and the concepts and the theory behind them must be put together otherwise the whole of the physics is sort of not exactly matched up but we met with great difficulties in putting the two together this is the main subject in fundamental theoretical physics in the last thirty years and in the last thirty years one bright idea took place it's called super strings or string theory so string theory now attracts I would say at least one third of all the brightest young PhDs in theoretical physics it is the hottest field in the last 30 years and the string theory is deeply entangled with deep mathematics especially with the deep geometric and topological mathematics and that must be one of the reasons in the back of Jim's mind him funded this Center because the center would concentrate deep geometrical topological problems which are many of which came from the string theorists so I would presume that when they make appointments in the center there would be people who would be working in geometry hope you working in string theory and who would be working in between the two those the appointment you'll be make primarily primarily they'll be you know there'll be a faculty of seven a director and six faculty members permanent members and then about thirty visitors every year and many of the visitors and perhaps most or even all the faculty might be as Frank described but they'll there'll be other and always have been strong interactions between even the geometric side of mathematics and physics so I think we don't want to be known as a string theory Institute per se a string theory has come there may be other theories that that develop along the line and we want to stick to I think the geometrical side of things which is a very very broad statement but string theory and that and those problems in physics that relate to that which are going to be many right now string theory is as frank says the the hot thing but it but it's morphing to I mean you know what was string theory twenty years ago might not be reckon it's it's it's developing and there are experiments now being done and the new Collider at CERN when it opens I don't know if you know about this huge accelerator that will go online next year maybe I'm not sure perhaps if they do not get more funding problems okay well I ran to the rescue of Rick but I don't think I'm gonna run to the rescue of CERN's are they're gonna have to figure that one out them so you ran to the rescue and he wanted Brookhaven National yeah I did but but CERN is a behind of energy and franken obviously say much more about that than I but that at the edge of those energy levels certain conjectures I think supersymmetry is as one might be verified so certain things in modern physics in particular in string theory might have some experimental justification as a result of experiments there Frank you must be able to say more than yeah we are all looking forward to what will come out of what is called the LHC at CERN which probably would come working if not this year next year the crucial questions is whether they will find the particle called Higgs particle the good thing the good thing about it is education Englishman if they find the Higgs particle it will be very good if they do not find the kiks kiks particle in my opinion will be even better why because all the theories have converged to the Higgs particle and if he exists everything is everything smoothed out everything's very good if it doesn't it means that we are going the wrong channel we have to completely rethink that is that means there may be a revolution coming so in many senses that is even better anyway Frank's a revolutionary revolution for its own sake no reason Einstein so famous is because he personally created two and a half revolutions so if you talk to a bright young physicist he would like to have more revolutions rather than that but anyway the cern event is a very important one so we are all looking forward to that no matter which way it turns out it means that we will have more material to think about and it's clear that those material would be imputing mathematic would be in between geometry and physics and it will prove it one way or the other one it was yeah that should that should and there are other things to I think that our other results that could I think there's a lot that could come out of a for they have they're already asked you to rescue them I want to say something about what Frank said about geometry yeah dictating things as Frank said the general relativity said look the universe four-dimensional universe including time has a shape to it it's not flat it has it has a shape and that the more bending in the presence of more mass and less bending in the presence of West Mass and that bending is what causes things to to come together like rolling down a channel or something like that so the geometry forces the physics or in a sense determines of physics and and that's Frank said you know it was a fabulous development now those are very macro things you're looking across billions and billions of miles and so on so now if you go to the opposite time-space scale look very very very very small look at distances of you know one over ten with with thirty zeros really small there may be geometry going on at that scale there may be some interesting geometry at that scale in fact that seems very likely to be and a scale that is undetectable obviously as we're sitting here by us but nonetheless there may be something going on way way way way down there so that I think it was wheeler who first sort of hypothesized maybe space is sort of a foam like thing and at the very smallest space scales there may be little bubbles or this data the other and to the extent that something like that is true then you might end up with a situation where the micro geometry of space drives quantum mechanics or some of the other some of the other physics so it's it's possible that Einsteins dream or Einsteins approach to geometry explaining the physics could even end up at the at the micro scale and again I emphasize I really mean a micro scale that the geometry there could also perhaps simplify or drive the physics you have a thought on that there's some speculation as I said there's the question of how to marry gravity with quantum mechanics and when you talk about that these have extremely small regions immediately come into play how that is going to play out is everybody's speculation and that is deeply entangled with this string theory also for sure I wanted to mention one one thing about your background that came to mind when we were describing dr. Jung is revolutionary here but which was you're getting fired from the government which was pretty much the reason you came to Stoneybrook to begin with tell me about that well it was simple enough I was at a I'd spent four years in Princeton and something called the Institute for Defense analyses which was a place that specialized was a government agency or contracted to a government agency the NSA in fact and they hired mathematicians there to work on very high-level secret obviously codes try to help the United States make more secure codes and try to crack Russian codes for example and so on they hired mathematicians but deal was you could and half your time doing research on your own and half your time working on the government problems it was nice and I took that job for a variety of reasons went to Princeton and I was an okay code cracker and I also did a fair amount of mathematics while I was there in fact the work that I did there justified Stony Brook give me that opera because I had solved a well-known an old well-known problem but in the meantime I was you know being a cold cracker and but the Vietnam War was heating up and I didn't like it and I was outspoken about it we weren't doing any work that impinge on the war we were working on very high-level Russian cypher systems and I think there was no application at all to Vietnam my view was it was a dumb place for us to be and we ought to get out of there the head of the Institute for Defense analysis was Maxwell Taylor a man you may have good old General Max and he published an article there was cover story in The New York Times Magazine Sunday magazine saying how wonderfully we're doing in Vietnam and we just stay the course why we'll defeat the enemy and I wrote a letter to The Times which they published saying not everyone who works with general Taylor subscribes to his view and then I went on and gave my own view so that sort of sat there like a lump nobody said anything for six months and then I was a really a wise guy in those days and a reporter or a guy who was purported to be a reporter he was a stringer in fact for Newsday Newsweek the magazine said he's doing a story on people who work for the Defense Department who were opposed to the war can I interview you what are you doing about this I said well I said with that as a policy at eye-dea you can spend fifty percent of your time on your own mathematics and 50% of your time cracking codes or whatever they do there I'm not even sure I said that and my algorithm lately has been I'm spending all of my time in mathematics and when the war is over I'll spend an equal amount of time on their work so but I'll have matched it all up see so I gave I said that to him then I went back to the office and it occurred to me maybe I better tell my boss that I gave this interview there's the only brilliant only intelligent thought I'd had all day but it came a little late so I said you know I gave us interview he said gee I better tell Taylor he calls Taylor Taylor said fired him and I was fired so that was that happened it happened it would seem to me to be a microsecond and the biting is that three days later Lyndon Johnson announced he was not going to run for a second term he was going to stop the bombing and I figured the war was over so I went back to my local boss a very nice fella I said you know when we just forget about all this I mean this whole damn thing is over he said I don't think so so and I wasn't very worried about finding a job because you know I was obviously competent as a research mathematician so something would come up but the Stonybrook was very appealing to me to be a chairman I thought that would be a lot of fun and it was that was a it was a in retrospect all that was a good thing that happened to you I think it was a very good thing yeah it was I met Frank I met my wife all kinds of good things what was it about that war that you didn't like any war or just that one no it's not any war I think I would have been in favor of fighting in the Second World War on it's usually the example that everyone agrees is a justified war it's I didn't think that there was such a big threat from the Communists over there I thought we were losing an awful lot of people I thought we were taking our eyes off the ball that in America it just seemed like a like a waste and very destructive and you could feel the fabric of society tearing apart as the kids were marching and bodies were coming home and we weren't getting anywhere it just seems stupid to me so some year 68 was it was a heck of a year yeah and after Jim came after I got acquainted with him one day he came to and said let's organize an anti-war fund and so we did and I talked about that last night and also or in-crowd talked about that we raised a lot of money I forgot how much to contribute to the anti-war effort and in fact at that time we raised more money on this campus than any other campus in the United States all these anti-war fence drives was springing up on all campuses and what much larger campuses like Berkeley and Michigan did not raise as much money as we did here well I mean it and I think that I was saying with something out that Frank's agreeing to co-head that made a huge difference because first of all he had such respect in the university and second of all I think he was taking some risk because you know he was a Chinese guy and maybe had relative I mean I don't know but I think he was taking some it's true because the US has always been some people in the US government it's a little bit always suspicious of me because my field is physics deeply related to nuclear physics Edward Teller was my thesis adviser and I and I was close to over hammer the CIA has my fire the stick and then in 1971 mr. China for the first time the reason that I involved there China and the US for at war in first - first in Korea then young Vietnam and in 71 I was able to visit because with the team came home diplomacy I can tell that the Nixon and the Mao wanted to talk to each other because both of them were afraid of the Soviet Union and so I decided to visit and after I decided that I decided it's not good if I did not tell the White House so I wrote to the science advisor David mr. David Edie David you know him yeah but anyway I wrote to him and to my surprise he answered saying that we are delighted that you're going to visit China but we cannot help you to get a visa now I didn't need already written to my father and my father applied to the Chinese government and then said fine ask your son to get the visa the Chinese busy in the Chinese embassy in Paris there was only two Chinese and business in Western countries in Ottawa and M Harris so I got the embarrassin and after I came back immediately the CIA visited me several times I told them I pay US taxes I'm a US citizen I do not do anything that's unlawful but I was very careful yeah so what happened is the phone in the CIA mang him they all rather he called and he insisted on visiting me in my house which is on Daniel Webster I didn't know why I said why don't we just go to my office no no he wanted to be my house so the more he insisted the more I declined that so finally he came to my office and after a few minutes of conversation two of them came and they as soon as we sat down my officer on a table they immediately opened their fire and took out some documents I become alerted because I already know that this is the way they trap people if if you they can eventually say that the you had seen some secret documents so I said hold on hold on I got my secretary to come in to sit there and just later she sign an affidavit saying that she was there when throughout the conversation I had with the CIA men because I told the CIA mmm my parents are in China and I still want to visit them I do not want to be entangled with any secret stuff in the United States which may prevent going to China and that was a very clever move and the next day I called an NSF we had a contract there was a man named I forgot who was in charge of the Stony Brook grant so I called him and he said great investigate then after couple of hours he called me and he said you did a very intelligent thing by telling me about us because in Washington there are many branches and they are not informing each other and if the heirs of didn't know that they are CIA man had visited me there may be some confusion which put to the intercept sort of you know bad light by my lieutenant then immediately about us they were in a stronger position well I understand that the CIA has its job because clearly China also has agents here and just like the US has agents this the world is very complicated what one has to be careful about is not to get that anchored not to get suckered into a very famous Watergate story like that where one of the Watergate guys went to judge Sirica in his chambers and and said I've got this document I want to give you and the judge no no no no and called in a court reporter a stenographer to record everything that took place with the passing of that document anyway there was a great success raising that money and I think Frank was quite courageous to take on the the publicly visible post of you know co-head of this it I did it naturally raises the next question which is how you feel either of you if you feel strongly at all about what's going on now with the so-called war on terror does that disturb you as much as Vietnam did dr. Simon's well I think the Iraq war was a terrible mistake you know we're not bringing back as many dead people from it so in that sense and it hasn't caused the the furor or the dislocations that Vietnam did on the other hand I think it's it's definitely one of the worst pieces of public policy I ever saw I think we were suckered into it I think we were misled by the administration if there really were a bunch of atomic bombs over there okay but there weren't and they knew there weren't so I feel misled and now we have to figure out a way to wine that down and get the heck out of there but it isn't simple and we can't I don't think we can just say goodbye suddenly we've created such a mess we have to clean it up somehow but it was a bad business anyway that's what I think prank maybe you have a different view I think it's clear that with the coming election the new president or try to extract the u.s. from the mess in Iraq whatever the original reason whatever the original strategy it is clear that what has happened created tension in the United States and weakened the u.s. internationally so something has to be done of course how to do it is a complicated it's a little bit like the Vietnam War how to solve this problem would be I think the chief responsibility of the next president you spent a lot of time in China now how is the relationship between China and the US developing in your opinion I think it's going very well I think in the first place I moved back to China actually I've been going back to China back and forth so repeatedly but in nineteen into 0:03 after my first wife died I moved back completely so now I spend almost 10 months 11 months in China and Shanghai and Hong Kong and the only visit the u.s. occasionally and I see within the last five years there has been enormous change in any China's position in the world and be the relationship between the Chinese government and Washington and all of this in my opinion are for the good for international relations the most obvious thing is about North Vietnam and North Korea you know this six sided talk was initiated by the Chinese side and it's clear it has not yet been successful but it has already accomplished a lot and I think it's everybody believes I think everybody included the North Koreans that this is the way to go despite all the difficulties it's making steady although slow progress and without this it could be very disruptive kirdamon led to a disastrous war so I'm sure President Bush is very appreciative of this they are of course a lot of frictions a country as large as China which is trying to pull itself out of poverty is means with tremendous problems I have said publicly but what China is trying to do is to compress him 40 years the progress made by the West named 400 years when you do it with such a great aunt to create problems by the way I should say here and I told the story last night I asked Jim to visit me in China in nineteen into zero zero one and Jim and Marilyn came and afterwards I saw him in Setauket and I was very impressed with the short conversation I had with him I said Jim how's your impression of China is his first visit and he sort of paused for a few seconds I realized that he had been this has been long his mind and he said well I think the problem face in the world today the most important problem facing the world today is poverty and he said here in my visit I found the 1.3 billion people pulling themselves up out of poverty by their own bootstraps and that is a contribution not only to a day themselves but also to the world I think it's very clear that that reflects the thinking of a thoughtful person who upon reaching the stage in his life when he can try to do something good for mankind not just for himself would perhaps think about so I was deeply impressed by that dr. Simon you've been involved on a number as well philanthropic efforts including healthcare in Nepal including of course all of all the help you've given here to stone broke into the Brookhaven National Lab tell us a little bit about philanthropy and how you go about making the decisions that you do well the biggest single focus we have right now we have a number of folks died but the first of all our Foundation and our philanthropy is primarily based on scientific research that is supporting mathematics and science basic research that's what we spend 80 percent of our funds on that one thing we didn't mention is the autism autism initiative that we have and that's probably the biggest single project we have in that there were quite quite focused and we put up a team under the leadership of Jerry Fishbach who was a well known neuroscientist and to run that and we're trying to make some progress with that with that condition which really goes to the heart of many respects of how the brain works understanding that condition there's going to end up giving us a lot of understanding about how a normal brain an unaffected brain works and so it's quite scientifically very challenging but basically our approach is to support basic scientific and mathematical research for two reasons one because we think there's a lot of leverage in that that that one can do a lot of good by making progress in these basic kinds of areas and two it's interesting to both Marilyn and me we both like research I get into it a little bit I've learned some some neuroscience obviously I'm a mathematician so maybe I can get into a little bit about what we're doing here but so it appeals to us aesthetically as something very interesting and something we both like and from the first point of view autism is a very important subject now there's very little known about it isn't that well of course if everything was known about it then it wouldn't be very effective it's its genetic that's that's for sure two identical twins of one has it the other is 90% going to have it so at least beyond the spectrum it's it's a it's a broad range of conditions that are that are have a number of things at common so the first fact is its genetic the second thing now we've been looking for genes there's going to be a large set of genes that impinge on there's probably at least 50 from different places in the genome that are going to create what's called autism presumably many of these affecting the same pathway or the same subsystem in other words there are a lot of things that can make a car go wrong you know not drive maybe the spark plugs and they'll go to the carburetors no but others about any of them relates in a poor performance of the car but they may be different things so and most of these genes the genetic condition is probably going to be what's called turn out to be what's called sporadic in other words you don't inherit it from your mother let's say it's not found in her genome but it might be a damage in her egg or perhaps more likely in your father's sperm so there could be at the germ cell level some damage at the time of inception some genetic damage which then becomes in the infant's genome and so it's not classically Mendelian we inherited you don't say oh yes well all uncle Ned had it and he pad was passed down and so on and so forth that'll happen but more most of it is probably going to end up being this so there's a big hunt on for genes we're doing a big data collection at 11 sites around the world collecting uniformly characterized genetic information Bloods and so on and a lot of questionnaire type stuff phenotype information so that's a project that we're doing and I'm very optimistic that within three years I would say most of the prime most of the Jean candidates will have been identified and some discovery will have been made already as to how a few of these major ones work there are already some mouse models being made of a couple of the most flagrant suspects and so I think that the next three years is going to see a lot of progress I think the next five years I think within five or six years there may be some interventions based on what we've learned here something to stimulate or slow down some particular process that's inhibited or accelerated or whatever it might be so and it will break down into into into subgroups even though there's 50 or maybe even a hundred genes there's probably a half a dozen subtypes that come out I mean there's a there's a lot to be learned it's a lot to be learned you sound very helpful though I mean I'm very optimistic assessment of autism I've ever heard well I'm very very hopeful I mean I think it's there's a clear path its genetic let's find the genes find the genes let's see what they do there's a clear path there will be progress on this path will it be wiped out or a hundred percent treatable I doubt it very much well a reasonable amount of it be treatable I'm optimistic you you reject the fairly widespread notion that it's somehow connected with vaccinations well there's no there's not a shred of evidence if there was some evidence I might all the experiments that have been done in large samples have shown absolutely no difference between wide groups that have been vaccinated and similar groups that have not been vaccinated with this mercury or the Marisol whatever so if there were evidence sure but there isn't it the reason I think that people are suspicious of this one thing there's a tremendous desire to people really want an answer because it's a terrible thing to have a child whose have been particularly severely autistic it's a terrible thing and secondly about 15% of autism's our regressive means this that in about 15 percent of the cases a child was seemed to be developing normally through roughly the age of two and then go backwards lose language maybe lose some coordination that he or she had and so on it's a regressive type that happens to be roughly the time at which people kids get one of these multi shots so a lot of things you know oh well she was fine until she got that run shot well maybe it was a month before or a month after or something like that but that there's there's no positive connection that's been anyone has determined between those shots and that behavior but that would be a I mean look at all the people who still think living by a high power high tension line that electromagnet is we're going to give you cancer no there's not a shred of evidence of that but there are still people who say yeah you know I don't I don't believe it they're out to get it so I'm sorry I talk too long perfectly fine well where do we go from hearing and you in your in your field your respective fields just as a way of sort of wrapping this up dr. yang where do you where are we going where we headed in physics for example this is a question which is oftentimes raised by my students when they talk to me because that affects their future very much of course I always say that if you look at the history of physics in different periods they are completed different types of problems completely different the flavor of development and for a young person looking forward to a future in physics he or she must understand something about the changing environment and I emphasize what was the situation one century ago is no longer the situation today as a century ago there were fundamental problems in which need to be solved and Einstein was and Heisenberg born a day at that time so they created the great revolutions today we don't have that opportunity does that mean it's a bad for you compared with my generation especially compared with Heisenberg's generation yes or no if you want to make revolutions I think you are less fortunate but on the other hand usually people do not make up revolutions people make us more progress very useful progress very rewarding progress and there you have an advantage because today fear of physics is very wide many many doors are open and if you will go into the right door you might make some very important progress in the field of lasers in the pace of superconductivity you know what I call this morning about the cold atoms the technology advanced makes possible for human beings to explore matter in many more ways than it was possible for Einsteins time of Heisenberg's time so you should think of this as a challenge and as a opportunity it's a different type of challenge but if you ask me is physics full of important future prospects I said of course and furthermore in fact if you do the right thing your mind become my bill billionaire because all these the new channels how is the modern computer compute created the modern computer depends on the chip the chip depends on the semiconductor and semiconductor is a field of physics and if you do the right thing today in the semiconductor field for example if you can make a semiconductor like device which solves the heat transport problem it would become immediately the head of a you could become immediately the head of a company also a billion dollars so there are many more opportunities today for you to make achievements of various kinds compared with Heisenberg and and Bohr's time I think so if you ask me is physics a good field answer it's unambiguous Lee yes is it a good field for revolutions like Einsteins no dr. Simon's what advice would you give young mathematicians or young investment advisers and take your pick I think one can summarize some of what Frank is saying is that he said physics is broader and so is mathematics in particular in the application side so I think there'll be a lot of progress in mathematics under theoretical sizes or always has been but mathematics and quantitative methods in general are more and more ubiquitous in applying to a whole range of areas finance today is riddled with quants obviously Google didn't even exist twenty years ago and so on and so forth so there are many many opportunities for people in mathematics or with mathematical training yes to do great research but also to do a variety of things in another interview perhaps we could get on to our failures to educate the young people in the country but it can't be now because I'm going to go to the two o'clock I look forward to the next and thank you very much dr. Slamon okay who got the yard you you

Channel: Stony Brook University

Views: 72,648

Rating: 4.9452057 out of 5

Keywords: C.N. Yang, James Simons, Nobel, Stony Brook

Id: zVWlapujbfo

Length: 59min 53sec (3593 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2009