Nobel Minds 2017

hello I'm Xena but are we welcome to the concert hall here in Stockholm where this year's Nobel laureates receive their awards from His Majesty the King of Sweden for their outstanding contributions to literature economics and science this is the first time that they have been brought together in discussion on television and we're also joined in the audience by some of their family and friends who traveled here to be with them as well as students from Sweden welcome to this year's noble minds [Music] Nobel laureates welcome to you all and congratulations you'll want your Nobel Prizes because you know you are these very rational logical beings or you have great clarity of thought in your novels and in your economic work and so on so do you really act very rationally with great logic in your personal lives generally you're not eating which is Hendersons so yes you obviously do yes I 100 percent rational but very very occasionally we have to step outside that circle so the one little memory I have is a new piece of equipment that was being developed we only had access to it before 8 a.m. come in very early to try and use it I couldn't get it to work I tried everything unplugged this I'm pleased that eventually I said I'll just have to go home but I had one final thing give it a kick sprang into life and there was a loose wire so all right well let's just see you I'm gonna go round the table you know and just get a quick quip from all of you the Iraqi friend I was in an earthquake in Pasadena in 1970 it happened at 6 o'clock I was asleep I went immediately jump out of the bed and went to the to the toilet and flush the toilet immediately as a kind of reflex actually it's a reflex we weren't active O'Shea the third of the chemistry you know the word falsification rationality of a scientific when you have a good idea you have to prove that it is wrong until you have tried everything and then you have proven the idea but I'm very unwell I try to show that my ID is right I push a bit too far okay Kip Thorne one of the physics laureates my greatest insights come in the middle of the night and I'm sound asleep it's not rational I don't know how it happens but my mind somehow irrationally throw those things together I go write down notes in the bathroom wake up the next morning and believe it or not a third of the time it's good it's good I have no idea where I came from that sounds yeah serendipity I guess yeah rave ice you ever done anything completely amazing a lot of irrational things I think the most important one was I fell in love at 19 went chasing a woman the Chicago and it was the end of me I flunked out and then I eventually got back into that mighty yes back there might I flunked out of MIT and back after that I came and I got a job and that job made my career mm-hmm the education wasn't worth a damn oh well we'll come back on to that kind of theme later very parish another of the physics laureates I became a physicist and shuttle the irrational way was to decide not to be a chemist not to be an engineer not to be a writer the last left was my freshman physics class Richard I'm gonna jump leave you out just for a moment so I can come to you because we're gonna talk about your economic theory but the medicine laureates might young well so choosing to be a scientist is I won't say it's irrational but it does come with a lot of risk and I got lots of advice from people that were close to me when am I going to get a job when are you going to choose something that it's understandable to the outside word world that has a simple track forward that you can be sure to support yourself and such in such a way so there is a very there's a very important component there's an emotional component in choosing to take risks and become a scientist mmm Michael Ross fascism so so I would say in in order and having a self-destructive temper as a young person it's not very rational being a sports fan is not very rational and and then the concept of risk-taking is actually has a deep biological basis but of course people like taking risks and and that has an upside of course as Mike mentioned but it's also it also can be destructive you seem very benign now you've lost the term have you the self-destructive tenant I'm most of the time under control we're at progress Jeffrey had work at RIT work in progress but if I handsome fellow to my right and I work together his name escapes me we we came up a number of times with labored pieces of poor aisle public behavior we thought our stunts were hilarious I'm not sure that everybody else and our mitts did do but we couldn't help herself all right okay well Cassie we should grow our literature laureate they've never done anything I'm completely crazy that you not crazy but I guess my wife and I we have a large collection of soft toys which we pretend still belong to our daughter the 25 we have voices for them all and they have whole kind of personal histories and relationships between them have histories I guess that's verging on the irrational perhaps but I think it's perfectly reasonable all right okay well I brought up this Odyssey of irrational versus rational behavior because you rich the sailor won the Nobel Prize for your work in behavioral economics which really says that you know mainstream economics didn't get it right that people individuals households don't act in a rational way when it comes to taking economic decisions or indeed any other kind of decision so just explain to us give us an overview of what behavioral economics actually is well behavioral economics is sort of just doing economics that would accommodate all of the stories that we've just heard it was triggered by a dinner party were and a bowl of cashew nuts wasn't it oh well yes I removed a bowl of cashew nuts that it was a dick ting dinner party and after I came back everyone thanked me for removing these bowl of cashew nuts but then since it was a group of economists we began to wonder how it was that we could be happy since an axiom of economics is more choices are always better than less so yeah that was my Apple thank you for removing the bowl of cashew because they didn't want to eat anymore and they had plenty more colored if the ball were there they would have continued and Richard I mean a lot of people have focused on just one component of your work which is this concept of lunch and you wrote a book of course with Cass Sunstein coordinate and it's about how people can be nudged into making better decisions and David Cameron former British prime minister set up a nudge unit and indeed many many other countries followed suit so just give us an idea how does not actually work what does it try to set out to do well nudge takes into consideration what our biases are and then tries to introduce small features of the environment that will adjust them so for example suppose we're worried that this show might run over then fortunately I set my phone for the amount of time we're supposed to do so when it starts beeping we'll note and and we won't worry about the risk of running over so that's the I mean there's some people thank you I get the message you've advised governments on nudging you know trying to get policies that for instance will get young people like the students we've got here in the audience just save up for their old-age pensions and to try to get people to take decisions which are in their self-interest based on the fact that people don't always do so but can we really leave it to politicians and policy makers and their advisors such as yourself to really nudge a person into into doing something like that mean isn't it manipulation in some ways well the the real point is that we have no choice so there's no alternative to nudging the only alternative is bad magic gentlemen I mean what do you think about behavioral economics and in particular this aspect of it which is you know the concept of nudge would some of you like to be nudged or have been nudged into doing something that avoided reckless behavior yeah I want to know if the society and there's something different I wonder how you think about this I mean we teach the wrong kind of math to our kids yeah oh you agree with that I mean for example I mean if you want to nudge me or into a certain thing I'd like to know the odds right and we don't know how to make art in high school or grade school I would teach it by having them gamble Yeah right so that what people know deadly serious what you want a nation of gamblers nuts not no no you see yeah there are you jump too fast yeah I don't do that okay no no the idea was used as a mechanism to learn the mathematics and the thinking that goes with probabilistic reasoning right Jeff Hall you are one of the three laureates for the prize in medicine or physiology and talking about as I say you know the psychological aspects of economics and in behavioral economics and how the mind works and the impact it might have on economics but you you won your prize for what makes the body tick our body clock Jeff why don't you just perhaps spell out for us what we mean by our body clock there are many kinds of revealed daily rhythms that can be observed and measured rhythms but there's long-standing information from studying a whole variety of different kinds of organisms that these revealed rhythms are underpinned by biological clocks Michael Ross fashion and Mike Young through your research on on fruit flies we discovered that we have these body clocks you know we humors as well as all other animals and you've you discover that by our isolating genes in in fruit flies in fact I think the fruit fly is featured in so many Nobel Prize experiments it deserves its own little little Nobel Prize wouldn't you say a little prize see the little thing yes Mike Young once you discover the components of these clocks you can look for them all over the organism and as Jeff and his colleagues showed in Drosophila you find different parts of the earth the fruit fly the fruit fly you've got you've got many different body parts that display these rhythms using these clocks so it's not just behavior it's many aspects of physiology the the other thing that became clear was that you could start with the genes that we found in the fruit fly and lo and behold you have relatives in all the other members of the animal kingdom including us so can we ask questions that would help shiftwork because you know people who work in the emergency services deal better with the kind of work that they have to do at night can it help us understand why babies don't sleep during the night I mean I always find that expression oh I sleep so well just like a baby must have been said by somebody who's never looked after a baby because we know they don't sleep at night right so I mean you know does your work help us understand these common experiences well in many cases what it reveals is there's much more complexity to what's wrong or what we think we're observing when a baby's not sleeping for example or take jetlag when we go from New York or Boston to at the Stockholm what's really going on most of us think well in a few days my one body clock will get to Stockholm and until then I'm going to be in a state of malaise in fact what happens is that since you have clocks all over your body there is disagreement that starts occurring between the cells in different parts of your body about what time of day it is and so in fact at the end of a flight from New York to Stockholm for the next few days you really occupy it your body is occupying multiple time zones simultaneously depending on which clock you look at you think that there's good and bad times during the day where are we right now [Laughter] so it depends it depends what that there's there's times in which which are more favourable for some things than others yeah so I think what you're alluding to perhaps is that this is a very successful nap time for example for example for example especially for a gentleman or ladies are aged around around this table where in fact who were up late last night were up very late that was when you received your period all the festivities and so on construe an astronaut that has no resetting mechanism also dude aren't the cabins my impression was that the the cabins have very intense like artificial like dark cycles to mimic to mimic the external pretty primitive suicide if they didn't yeah even if they didn't if they were in constant darkness they would show these rhythms and and that's and in fact that's how they were originally revealed in these models people often have a reality is that if you put an organism into cycles that are different from a day like 7 hours 7 hours that certain organisms depending on the organism can synchronize yeah that's the occult cycles but at some point you're so far away from 24 when you do these tests they snap we know here in Sweden actually lot of people do say they have these lights that lamps that mimic daylight don't they because I have such a dark days but this time of year but some of your colleagues working on the body clock have benefited from the work of our chemistry laureates because of course gentlemen you won your award for developing a technique called cryo e/m which for the first time captured images of molecules that were not visible using standard techniques and of course we know that the world of molecules is is the core of what we call life so Richard Anderson in a nutshell what is cryo a.m. I think our our area of interest and expertise is the easiest to explain in this group we basically freeze a thin film of the molecules of life take a picture of it and then you look at the picture with your eyes it's magnified and you can see all the molecules the computer helps you to interpret what they are but the methodologies are the tools that were invented by the others particularly Jacques Du Bois she mm-hmm alright well we'll go to shank to Basho then so this tool that enables you to look at these molecules I mean its potential its possibilities of how it can help human endeavor cure illnesses we are physicists we worked in biology and we get the Nobel Prize in Chemistry don't confuse people please because because we see atoms with the help of those people and when we see atoms with do chemistry and chemistry is a very powerful science because if you have a biological object you see how the atoms are interacting one with the other you see how alzheimer filaments are attached to each other perhaps you see a drug which will separate them or will prevent them to associate use anything with with with chemistry it's an extraordinary powerful method but I mean in the case of you know what you want your prize for for instance in the case of the Zika virus cryo PM was used to generate 3d images of the virus which meant researchers could try to work out you know what kind of drugs would help to resist the virus for instance I don't know if you want to pick that up you are in fact the Zika virus is a perfect illustration for the dis combined technology that is now available so when we do know the structure of it now it doesn't mean that we immediately find a way of combating it seized but but it makes it possible you know so they potentially Richard Saylor yeah I was just gonna say that this links up to the conversation we were having a bit earlier which is whether choice architecture or nudging is good or bad it just depends on who's using it so all the scientists here have created knowledge that can be used for good or evil this the same is true for behavioral science or behavioral economics and many companies nudge for evil the last last night my toast was to nudge for good and but that's a hope Richard Henderson I mean all of you have worked you know for many many years on your endeavors and I think it was one chemist who said you know miracles sometimes occur but you have to work terribly hard I mean it's part and parcel of everything you do isn't it failure is part and parcel of that that you'll carry out lots and lots of experiments and expect many of them not to succeed yeah I think we are aiming to find out completely new things so if when you're thinking of an experiment in any area if the the choice that you make is close to the knowledge that you have already then you're likely to have a successful experiment but you won't have learned very much so if you make a bigger jump take a bigger risk and then most of the time the experiments would have failed but when it succeeds you make a bigger jump forward so I learned from Fred Sanger who had was had two Nobel Prizes for his work in sequencing protein and DNA he used to say that you should aim for a very high failure rate my interpretation was ninety-nine percent failure rate but the one percent that succeed takes you with a very big step forward which is worth all the effort you've spent on the other night I would say that leaves out one one important component especially for young people who who like science and that is the discussion of high risk high failure or very lofty goals leaves out an element of craftsmanship to our profession in other words I think I think that the thing with you the chance of of having tremendous success is is very small for any one individuals we are the we are the progeny we are the beneficiaries of also a lot of luck as well as hard work and perhaps a tiny little bit of talent but the the fact is that most of us here love what we did hmm and so that carries you through failures sure and you have to really like to do experiment interesting micro smash because when you were young you were marked out as a potential failure at school you were very unruly by your own admission and you've known each other I know for many many years for 30 years but you also attractive I'll show you know you say that you would just select sick at school and rich sailor you were mildly dyslexic I mean I think it's interesting that your path to this success is now worrying about the wrong thing it has been you know but it's just inspiring to people isn't it listen listen to Michael he said something very profound and that is people like to work on things that are fun that are a pleasure to work on that's absolutely fundamental none of us at least I certainly in my life didn't think I'm gonna win the Nobel Prize it was never in my mind it was not my life was not dedicated to winning a prize my life was dedicated I enjoyed this thing I was working on it was fun I have my buddies with me we had a great time the whole project the LIGO project isn't based on the fact that the oh god we fail we just listen to me yeah I gotta listen to me this is important because that destruction that ye said it right and asking Oh Oh God failure failure failure that's not the way you think ya know the consequence is that you do things which you get a kick out of and luckily sometimes they turn out to be important sure but just going back [Applause] that brings me to UM Kazu issue guru universally known as ish who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I know that in your writing career you've had some four starts and works that you've discarded and started all over again but you know you are now amongst the the Giants of the world of literature you've written eight novels and so a lot of your your novels seem on the surface to be quite different you know set in different countries and so on but there does seem to be a common theme the relationship between the present and the past would you say yes I mean the surface of my novels are kind of deceptive people think I keep moving on truth is I keep writing the same thing over and over again obsessively and people don't realize it because they have very different settings but I think I perhaps there is a parallel but see what the kind of way I make progress in the kind of way that the guys around this table have done I around some sort of piece of ground sometimes if somebody comes up with an idea or a topic that's somewhere out there and I think would that be great for somebody else but it's not on this little thing I'm I'm closing in on I'm digging away in the dead of night you know looking expecting to sort of uncover something strange down there you mentioned the scientists around the table but you are interested in a discussion about science and one of your most famous books never let me go looks at scientific advances in a world that's kind of gone mad perhaps setting in in the future where society expects that all illnesses can be fixed and they don't want to turn the clock back to you know people dying of cancer and so on is that something that really concerns you the misuse of science these are very important things I think for books films plays to address but that isn't essentially what literature is for you know it doesn't have to directly address these questions I think what literature does is allow us to understand each other across cultural barriers linguistic barriers so that when we come to have the debate about how we order our society what is important we understand how other people not obviously like us feel most discoveries I think are two edged blades and this is at the heart of the Nobel metaphor if you like a man who invents dynamite which can do great things and very destructive things we have to have a debate in society we have to think about what we do with the great breakthroughs massage surrounds ability the other way to make sure that what we do is understood enough by the public it doesn't have to be exactly what we measure you know this famous problem was the CP snow made such a fuss over and I think he had did a lot of damage with that is there this cross-fertilization of people who do science people who do music people who do arts that's got to go and it isn't that I mean I'd like to have for example if in our country right now I'd like to have the arts be able to know a little more science very bearish I know you're a great fan of Kazuo Ishiguro's work what do you think about this conversation between science and art you wanted to be a novelist didn't you yeah I'm and I think what I'm as I said I eliminated several professions and ended up in physics the earliest one was being a writer because I read all the time when I was a kid if you write a novel on a threat by a hundred thousand readers you're really writing a hundred thousand novels that's why there's book clubs because it's not that anybody the guy next to you doesn't read well it's that how that novel that's interpreted by them is different than how you interpret the novel so it's a fantastic thing that you can write something that actually is a hundred thousand stories I think and why the movies never as good as the book because the movie does too much it doesn't really have the same partnership that's my view did you like the movie of your book never let me go yes and I loved the movie of the remains of the day I don't myself make a huge I don't disagree with you but you know I I think all the art forms have their special powers you know sure there are things that I can't do that the filmmakers can do very very well and vice versa I just go to you I can Frank because I know that you are a writer you've written short stories which have been published and you have a novel which has been unpublished about an astrophysicist at a university that it might get published now that you are a Nobel laureate listening let him know thanks for the plug well for me the English language became a medium of reinventing myself really I mean it was a very challenging thing and and when I discovered it I could write dialogue and got something across there was an incredible experience to me I'm I'm saying it's sort of daunted by the idea I'm sitting next to him laureate in literature and talking about my little little production well a small point about that in sort of in the interest of young scientists and which is I think a lot of young scientists don't pay any attention to the writing I don't mean writing a novel well when you do research the end product is something written and until you've written it down you haven't done anything that concerns me as well you know very much but you just say as somebody from the world of the Arts there seems to be some sort of disconnect with with your great discoveries and your breakthroughs and and then what the rest of society gets preoccupied about and in popular culture and popular debate it seems to me we the world the Western world anyway is very well prepared for a zombie attack on our major cities but we don't seem to be addressing you know how we reorganize our societies as a result of some of the staggering breakthroughs that are being made in science and technology one particular aspect of science which really has captured the public imagination popular imagination of course is the world of science fiction I come to the physics laureates because you won your prize for the observation of gravitational waves it was the first time that a passing gravitational wave has been observed directly on earth that you know huge scientific sensations so Kip Thorne why don't you just encapsulate for us what this was all about so a black hole is something that every child knows from comic books but a black hole is a spherical hole in space that has such intense gravity that nothing can get out not even light and what we discovered was that 1.3 billion years ago in a galaxy far far away two black holes circled around and around each other spiraling together as they emitted these gravitational waves losing energy to the gravitational waves the holes came crashing together at half the speed of light and they created a veritable storm in the shape of space and time time slowed down then sped up ocellated while if you can imagine time they're speeding up and slowing down relative to how time flows here and that process produced these waves in which space is stretched and squeezed stretched and squeezed that travelled across interstellar space intergalactic space to the earth and were captured by the or monitored by the instruments were built by the experimental team that I am associated with this is a whole new way to study the universe to study aspects of the universe that we've never seen before it's a way by which we will in due course watch the birth of the universe and for the first time really come to understand through a combination of this with a theory the birth of the universe ray and Barry I mean what kind of it's a window on the world or on our universe what kind of things might we discover about our universe that we don't know now Barry we've worked for decades developing an instrument much like we heard the chemists talk about this just astounding I mean I can't imagine that we could do what we could do except that we learned very early that you couldn't prove that we couldn't do it so we kept making steps and as I think Ray said earlier people keep asking us how could we stay at this so long persistence no it was really a lot of fun because we've broken new ground all the time much as you have without maybe making a discovery but just experimentally go further than people have before black holes of course really are very much the stuff of science fiction films Kip Thorne you a scientific adviser and executive producer of one such film interstellar how important is it for you do you think that science fiction should actually pays based on fact there's no necessity there are different genres of science fiction and my partner in Hollywood Linda opes who together with me wrote the treatment from which interstellar spraying she calls this science faction by contrast with science fantasy Harry Potter is science fantasy interstellar science faction but the beauty of this for me is that a film like this where the science is embedded in right from the beginning it's capable of inspiring people about science how else could I as a professor succeed in providing some inspiration for 100 million people except you feel like this one one particular thing that you know a lot of people sort of like to know about in science fiction stories are there other universes out there parallel universes I mean could your work in any way help us discover whether there are indeed other universes Barry well it might there's different we don't if we had an easy and straightforward test to see there was this idea was right we'd probably be going after it there's various ways that we might get clues whether it's right and some of them are through the kind of work we're doing it's not very direct it's one of the ideas that kind of Springs from what we don't know about the early universe so discussing here you know the success of films like interstellar and science-fiction - contradictions there you might say I mean how importance of just thinking about this issue you know in general terms do you think that evidence based discourse is in our societies today let me get a view from all of you on this particular issue perhaps you first Jeff or people don't know much about science and technology they you know electricity a miracle for example day to day things that never existed centuries ago and now we're taking for granted the proper American in the United States is not only ignorant but is actively belligerently pugnaciously ignorance are you sick I refuse go away or I'm secular humanists I say who thinks that there are these irrational influences and that you will seek the triumph of Reason in the face of all this Michael Ross passion a lot of this has to do with with educational landscape we've seen circumstances most starkly in the US but but in Western Europe as well where politicians ambitious people take advantage of the situation to exploit for their own benefit for power gain of power it's not something that's unprecedented happened in the 20th century to disastrous to disastrous ends and so it's it's it's a very worrisome it's very worrisome concept Mike young you can have an attitude that you're not interested in science and you don't can't benefit from science these wouldn't exist if there hadn't been discovered 50 years ago that invented the technologies if you get just about every minute of the day everyone depends on some form of technology so that the notion that it's over or we have enough or it never happened or it never happened that this is brand-new and created from whole cloth is is such an incredible mistake richard thaler we have a fact free Administration in the United States worrying about science it would be nice if there was there were scientists in the administration I would settle for some people who are collecting facts right but Barry it's interesting we you know talk about we've heard and science bias from from Jeff Hall for instance but you're like oh project for the observation of these gravitational waves do you think that kind of support would happen today for something like we did yeah well I'm worried not not you can't do science and move forward without taking risks yet we have a system that's become more and more conservative I personally knowing the funding situation pretty well in the u.s. through the National Science Foundation don't believe that right now you could fund something that was equivalent we as scientists have a job it's not just that we we have a job to make what we do more intelligible to people I think that that's why I mean Kip's movie is an important thing I think you also have to go and talk to people who are not at college levels you have to talk to high school kids and grade school kids yeah I agree completely with with Ray on this and I think the one key aspect I'd like to emphasize is the importance that the general public that the majority of the populace in a democracy particularly understands how science works understands its powers its limitations jacques de poche the remark by mister ichigo ho that it would be easy to develop and make great a story about zombies coming on us and destroy everything easy but why is it so difficult why does it work to make a terrible story about our climate going astray going about as bad as the zombie on earth why can't we make a story of that well you're working Frank we talked before about the the difficulty of getting science even across to the public and that there are no existing forums and you know the problem is we have all these forums the media in the media you know chop everything into pieces and and people are completely incapable of getting some kind of a coherent story out of this Richard Henderson do you think that the role of the scientists is to explain their science to society but also beyond that to actually say we want to raise the level of knowledge based comments and debates I'm completely with with you on that actually I think scientists are I am an optimist about this whole discussion I think scientists particularly have to be optimists you couldn't have worked for 50 years to to look for gravitational waves without being an optimist to differentiate between rational irrational fact and fiction better education I think is the answer actually and lots of people want better education for their children some of them take their children out of school to give them a better education of home some people take them out of school to avoid it exactly so we need to improve the general to indoctrinate yeah something better education is the bottom line but what it's ish you have in the past 30 s I mean you're sitting with scientists people deal with facts but you're going to make a plea for also fiction has a place in in society obviously we like reading works of fiction fiction culture I mean I think one of the issues is that the business model behind the media and journalism and reporting is currently broken the traditional ways in which newspapers and periodicals used to spread knowledge and debate and they were rewarded for by-and-large for accuracy is gone what is important at the moment is that it is eyeballs you know on websites clips you know that there isn't a good economic economically viable business model by which we can have these debates because people are driven by by the fact that you have to get maximize the number of clicks on the website right well I hope you have found well I hope you'll make an honorable exception of this program at least and that you have had the chance to interact with these great minds as well as adding your great mind to our our debate here our discussion I think everybody has found in the audience and beyond everything that you've said really absolutely and fascinating I've certainly enjoyed talking to all of you thank you to all our Nobel laureates to our audience here in Stockholm at the concert hall from me Zainab Badawi and all of this on the noble minds team thank you very much indeed for watching goodbye [Music] you you

Channel: Nobel Prize

Views: 994,354

Rating: 4.9036183 out of 5

Keywords: nobel minds, nobel prize 2017, kazuo ishiguro, kip thorne

Id: jIkk4nCmLNY

Length: 43min 34sec (2614 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Chiefmeez]

God that feels way worse to me than it should

[u/[deleted]]

At about 9:00, a little after, Thaler basically says no one wants to be there

[u/ParkerWarby]

What is the cringe here? Thaler's work on nudging behavior and irrationality was what he won the Nobel prize for and they were just going around reflecting on that too kick off the discussion. I found the whole video great so thanks for linking OP lol

[u/ScoopDat]

3:30 lol this man just got real.