Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 1]

good luck okay hi everyone so I am in these pandemic times one of the things I'm doing which I'm finding a lot of fun is doing general q and A's for kids and others but primarily kids about science and technology so I'll try and answer whatever questions you might have let's see I think we already have some here okay there's a first question here actually what physical experiments do I recommend for kids that is an interesting question hmm interesting question you know I have to say my own efforts at those when I was a kid were pretty lame I'm thinking about that you know getting intuition about how things work in physics is something I think one does from just paying attention to things going on around one I mean I think that the question is you know why did that happen it's more I think the the art is more and the question one asks that are necessarily doing the thing that has an unexpected result I mean it's like you see something happen and you say why well you see some strange technological object then you say what is that and why was it built that way I mean that's that's been my probably my best comment on that now they're also a computer experiments there are lots of those that are fun for kids to do Lots involving simple programs like cellular automata one of the things that's neat about those is it's it's really easy to discover stuff that basically nobody ever discovered before because it's sort of a wide open area that hasn't been much explored but I don't have a maybe I if I think about it some more I'll have a better answer to two actual physical sort of hands-on experiments people people can do but I think the most most important thing is to actually ask why did things and see whether you can explain that or why is a piece of technology built the way it's built why does you know why does that um that you know phone have this thing set up that way and I suppose that that extends beyond the pure science of it to things like the user experience of it why did they make why is it the case that you know the the buttons on a phone the the soft buttons on a phone work the way they do why is it you know try to understand why these things happen and that's that's a sort of very educational thing to do um okay so question from pH something asking about the physics project which we just launched last week and the possible connection of the project to making space travel more possible you know that's far away I mean back in you know when Isaac Newton was inventing his universal law of gravity the the the law that says that the gravitational force between two things as the inverse square of the distance between them that's something that Isaac Newton first came up with probably in about 1665 when he was when he was hanging out sort of locked out of his university by plague actually um but he came up with this law of gravitation and in principle that law of gravitation should have explained that it's possible to have artificial satellites to to launch things that can be in orbit around the earth but it took until well it took until the 1950s the late 1950s before which was a full 300 years basically almost 300 years between the time when the theory for how one might launch something in orbit around the earth to the actually launching something in order around the word earth happened now in terms of in terms of this physics theory that we've been working on so one of the questions is what does it say about things like faster than light space travel the answer is at least in first blush it seems to say that's hard there's no there's no sort of magic way to do that but it also says that's not completely impossible if one makes use of quantum mechanics in the right way and so on not completely impossible we certainly don't know we don't know how to do it I mean a lot of the more exotic effects are ones that have to do with black holes and you know the the we don't have any sort of black holes available in the lab on earth the nearest black hole actually I don't know how far away it is maybe a thousand light years away maybe a little less than that um there's a big black hole at the center of our galaxy the sort of giant garbage can of our galaxy that's that's ingesting stars and all sorts of other things we are we are far away from it we will not be ingested by the giant black hole center of our galaxy but the so you know some of the effects that um this physics theory predicts or talks about are things that happen in connection with black holes but those are not sort of readily at hand um okay it's a question here from Lexington you have suggestion of someone who finds math fascinating wants to learn more but is not a math whiz and has difficulty with homework and tests well I don't know what a math whiz is necessarily it'd be a sort of a school level I know I'm not sure that I for example was a math whiz in the sense that when it come for example okay this is one of these stories one shouldn't tell for the young but I'm gonna tell him anyway you know I didn't learn my multiplication tables until I was a full adult and I I perhaps had the misfortune of being in a an elementary school I was supposed to learn multiplication tables the sort of there were things like they had some game where all the kids would line up and they would go down the line of kids asking randomly chosen multiplication facts and if people couldn't answer the multiplication fight it would go to the next kid next kid next kid in the first kid who could answer the multiplication fact would go to the front of the line so to speak and I learned that the one fact that people didn't know was what seven times eight so that was the one thing when I was seven years old or something that I definitively learned seven times eight is fifty-six but that was the only one all the other ones because they were randomly chosen multiplication facts most of the other ones like five times three in these that's easy I can work that out but you know six times nine things like that I have tried to keep track of when that I need to know that and some of those facts I think I learnt finally in my 40s or even older than that eventually I did learn them I know that um one of my kids who was not into doing any kind of math at all but was very interested in in business I was like oh you know he was like why should I learn to do any mental math and it's like well let's say you're trying to do some kind of business negotiation in real time and somebody says I'll give you ten percent more for this it's like it's good to be able to actually work out what that means and I think that convinced him and he got to be actually pretty good at doing those kinds of things um but you know in terms of I think there's a difference there's different kinds of reasons that people are good at or like math some people like kind of the the abstract elegance of math some people like the kind of the problem-solving I can get it faster than anybody else side of it some people like the you know what you can do and figure out with math I'm kind of suspecting from your question that you're more in the kind of the elegant abstraction of being able to work out something really really nice and perfect with math I would say that you know you know become friends with computers and start doing math with a computer and start seeing what you can discover about math with a computer I think I tried to do a couple of sessions ago here and there's a certainly a recording of it I tried to do some go through some sort of pretty kind of from the school perspective sort of elementary math questions and was sort of remarkable how quickly we could go sort of with a computer particularly from the questions that you might be reasonably expected to answer in sort of elementary school math to questions where well people have been thinking about them for 2,000 years but nobody knows the answer yet um so I think being able to sort of explore math experimentally with a computer go to our cloud you can start plot start playing with things there that's a that's a good place to start you know I actually myself have had a project started about three years ago to try and write a kind of introduction to the abstract ideas of math sort of for everybody but I haven't I haven't gone out and I got about four or five chapters in and maybe I should post what I have I'd be interested in feedback from people who are who might find that interesting um all right next it's a question here from Hameed how far are we from building von Neumann machines I'm not quite sure what you mean by that but kind of guessing what you mean is self-replicating computers or self-replicating systems so so one of the questions is you know when we see biology one of the one of the sort of notable features of biology as biological organisms manage to make copies of themselves well at least approximate copies you know given given to parents you can make a child and the child isn't the same as their parents as as as many people as many children are will point out to their parents I certainly did to my parents my children have pointed out to me the children out the same as parents but they are they're made from the same kind of they're they're similar so to speak and in some organisms there's there's sort of directly direct replication of of a parent to to child organisms so one of the features of biology is this this amazing capability to make a copy of an organism and you know it wasn't known back in in the 1950s in 1940s and early 1950s it wasn't known how that could possibly be how did what was the what was the mechanism by which an organism could make a copy of itself and doesn't got john von neumann tried to come up with sort of a an elaborate kind of theory for how life might work and how things might make copies of themselves and he came up with a very elaborate theory most of which isn't really so relevant although he did sort of invent the idea that maybe it was like a program maybe it was like a computer program and then in 1953 the DNA the structure of DNA was was was decoded and it was realized that the DNA molecules that essentially all life on Earth except for RNA some some things only have a sort of half of DNA RNA like the virus we're all fighting right now is an RNA virus but um but basically DNA is a molecule that stores the programs for all organisms like for example our DNA for humans is six billion base pairs long so it's about um let's see that means it's about three it's about three gigabytes of data going at the right place no it'll be half that 1.5 gigabytes of data to represent one of our one of us humans and and what happens when sort of when a human is built so to speak what's happening is inside each of our cells there are there's a whole molecular mechanism that's looking at that program on our DNA and actually building molecules that implement that that are specified by that program and and some of those some of the pieces of that program will specify you know skin cells hair cells heart cells muscle muscle cells those are just different parts of the program that is specified on every cell all the hundred trillion cells and our bodies have a copy of that piece of DNA so it's kind of it's this scheme for being able to replicate it the way it works is DNA is a molecule which has two strands and in order to replicate what happens is one strand comes off and then basically another strand is formed from the from the scaffold and that's created that because these strands each each strand has it has some toad that's made from these little little collections of atoms base pairs ATG and C and they're set up so that whenever there's a G on one strand there has to be a C on the corresponding strand so if you only have one strand and you start trying to rebuild another strand if there was Gyan the first stand you'll get to see on the second strand and eventually you have essentially a copy of the copies of these essentially a just a essentially a copy of one strand on the other strand and that's that's how you managed to replicate the molecule so so we've got in all of us in all life on earth there's this idea of self-replicating molecules we have not yet managed to make with technology anything that works as a self-replicating molecule and the way that DNA works we're getting closer to that but we haven't managed to do it yet um and and when people think about doing technology that involves self-replication they usually actually think about leveraging without using what biology is already constructed using DNA and RNA and all those kinds of things so one question is so one thing is can you make a self-replicating thing that isn't based on biology and isn't based on something that has come out of the history of life on earth over the last two billion years and so on and the answer is we're not quite there yet although it's clear we could do that with a molecular it's kind of a molecular scale computer but we don't yet know quite how to do it actually let me say something about molecular scale computers so I mean computers as they exist right now you know computers store information bit by bit so they're they're storing you know any any data and a computer is ultimately stored in terms of ones and zeros on or off etc and there's just a huge array of those and so you know I think my computer has 96 gigabytes of of random access memory which means it has about a hundred billion times eight so see this is where multiplication facts come in useful so that's eight hundred billion nearly a trillion bits of memory each is just specifying sort of on or off and and ultimately that's representing all of the programs and images and everything that I'm that are in my computer but the but the way the each one of those bits in my computer is represented by the presence or absence of maybe 10,000 electrons so that's like you know in inside atoms their electrons and electricity is made up of electrons and each bit in a modern computer is represented by maybe 10,000 electrons so if there's a one there's 10,000 electrons there if there's a zero they're not there okay so we can ask the question could we make a computer in which bits of information are represented one electron at a time where we only use one electron we only use one atom to represent each bit of information in our computer well the one problem with that which is that there tends to be when you get down to those small scales there's there's always the kind of well as for example always heat there's always some things are the molecules the atoms are not completely stationary they're always they're always sort of bouncing around and as a result of that there'll be it's like that one electron that was supposed to be there well actually maybe something will kind of just knock into it and the electron won't be there when it was supposed to be there or there will be an electron there when there wasn't supposed to be there but with little errors that creep in when you're using just a really tiny number of electrons to storage bit well actually there's a trick for food but so so right now so that's one of the problems is that when we get down to trying to store you know one electron per bit will be subject to all of these errors that come about through just the the things that happen down at the scale of atoms the sort of random motion and random processes that happen down at the scale of atoms okay let me mention one trick for um it's called error correcting codes and it's a way of it's a way of being able to be sure about data that you have so let me give you an example the so let's say that you wanted to store you wanted to store a sequence of ones and zeros and you had let's say you were storing five ones and zeros and so you might have one zero zero one one that might be what you're trying to store one zero zero one okay but now let's say we want to check whether one of those bits was wrong let's say the first one might be flipped to be a zero and we're not sure and we say that there might be an error of that kind well here's the trick so what you do is you you just say you look at the one zero one one what did I say what ones did I say five bits yeah yeah one zero one one so then then what you say is do you have an even number of ones or an odd number of ones if you have an odd number of ones add an extra one at the end if you have an even number of ones put a zero at the end so we have one zero zero one one and that has an odd number of ones so that we have one at the end okay so now if we're looking at that group of six bits six digits and we see that we can then ask the question did that bit at the end agree with that did it correctly represent whether there were an even an odd number of ones if it did correctly represent it we can have some confidence that there wasn't what we know that there couldn't have been one of those one of those bits that was flipped because if it had been flipped then that last check digit should be different okay so so that term so and if it if it if it's wrong if that last bit doesn't correctly confirm the number of ones and the in the previous part then then we know that then we know that something went wrong and so we can for example say well we have to reread it or we have to generate some error or something like that so that's a that's sort of the basic idea of an error correcting code actually one can do a little bit better than that and one can by adding a little bit of extra data but you have a bunch of data you add a little bit of extra data you can actually correct errors you can for example if you say there's only one error there's at most one error you can say well I know what that from just the check digits at the end you can say I know what that error is and I can correct it if there were two errors you might be out of luck but if there's only one error you you can correct it so error correcting codes are really really widely used and sure as the data from my webcam through the internet to you guys is being transmitted it's full of error correcting codes that are trying to deal with things that might be bits that might be being lost in different places um and the if you look at um I don't know what if you look at a book do I have a book readily at hand mm-hmm no I don't think I can no reach reach and find it but let's see if I can reach and find the book here we go okay here's a book it's out is through a book I wrote but um that's some so if we look back here if we look there that is the ISBN number the international standard book number that's every every book that's published gets one of those numbers that specifies it so it's a way of identifying which book it is well when is PN's were invented one of the things that was done was to add a check digit at the end so if somebody were to were to type in this ISBN number and they would get one of those numbers wrong then that nine at the end that's the check digit that nine at the end wouldn't agree correctly and so they'd know they typed in something wrong um so that's an example of one of these error correcting codes so that's a way that one can go if one's trying to build like a computer out of out of atoms that's one of the important tricks one can use to try and get rid of the effects of kind of sort of small small perturbations small errors that happen at level of atoms one of the things that's been a kind of a long-running question is okay how would we build something that where we have like let's say we wanted to build a little machine a little a little thing with gears or something and we want to make it actually out of atoms and we want to make it so that the gear teeth so that each gear tooth is just a small number of atoms is that a possible thing we can do well actually if you want to know about like rotors like something like a gear turns out there are bacteria that actually have little flagella that are used to little propellers that they use to swim along that actually have essentially molecular sized gearing in them where the where the individual the individual pieces of the kind of the gear are at the scale of a fairly small number of atoms that's something that was created using the machinery of life but the question is can we make so that was something that was created from their DNA program the molecules were created that followed that DNA program that made this kind of gear structure so the question is can we can we do something like that not through DNA not by using biological evolution to have created the apparatus to do it but could we make as a piece of technology something that will make a molecular scale machine so the answer is not yet but one day that will be possible and you know somebody is going to figure out how to do this see the thing that is right right now when we want to build things out of molecules the main way we do that there are really two ways to do it one is to use living systems and to use the fact that DNA can encode a program that can specify how certain kinds of molecules proteins can be built up that's way number one way number two is use chemistry because a lot of chemistry is about synthesizing molecules going from one set of molecules and saying you know mix these two chemicals together heat them up stir them stir them together all those kinds of things and what's happening when you do that is molecules are combining breaking apart all those kinds of things and what you want to do in chemistry chemistry is kind of the story a synthetic chemistry at least is the story of how do you go from let's say perhaps quite small molecules to bigger molecules that do something useful so like molecules that can be used to make materials ones interested in molecules that can be made to use to make drugs one once those kinds of things and that that story of kind of how do you how do you synthesize molecules is is a story of how do you find this procedure and these days you know there may be a 20 step procedure maybe the biggest ones are maybe 30 steps or something maybe 35 steps let's say do this do that mix these chemicals together do this do this do this and you're gradually building up this bigger and bigger molecule it's kind of the the story of can you can you figure out how to sort of make changes to the molecule you're building up so that you get the molecule we want that's kind of been the story of chemistry but that doesn't really make molecular scale machines that usually makes molecules that just sort of sit there and for example there are a particular shape and so they'll fit in to some some gap in some other molecule to prevent the molecule from doing something you don't want it to do or there'll be molecules that line themselves up in a certain way but those molecules aren't like machines they're not they're not like actually sort of doing something at a molecular scale they're not making something with a bunch of cogs and gears and things at a molecular scale and we don't know how to do that yet um I think I personally think that's one of these kinds of things which somebody some clever inventor out there is going to figure out how to start building things at a molecular scale I think it's going to be something where you effectively you build yourself molecules that can act as tools and then you build yourself ways to sort of program those little tools and the tools will be operating at the scale of individual molecules and there'll be sort of constructing other molecules and gradually you'll start off with pretty simple tools but gradually you'll end up building up more and more complicated molecules and eventually you'll be able to build these sort of molecular scale machines okay so this was a sort of long answer to so I think that's one of the really exciting things that I think is part of the future of technology is molecular scale molecular scale machines molecular scale computers those kinds of things not there yet that but perhaps we will be and one of the features of those molecular scale machines is well we can expect that we'll be able to do things like what life does of being able to take a blueprint for this as a collection of molecules we want to build okay now I've got a universal replicator a machine that can be given a program okay let me back up for a second you know DNA as I mentioned lets us build certain kinds of molecules lets us build proteins proteins are made of amino acids there are maybe 20 amino acids that are commonly used by by the organisms on earth and a protein a sequence of amino acids so it might be and the what that sequence is is specified by the program on the DNA by the sequence of base pairs on the DNA and the the neat thing about proteins as proteins make up everything they make up you know muscle active active as a is something in muscles or they make up rhodopsin for you know in our retinas or they make up oh gosh I could start naming you know there's there's about in us humans there's about thirty thousand proteins I think that uh that are commonly that that sort of a commonly used by us us humans hemoglobin for our blood or all these different kinds of things these are all proteins and they all are built from these same elements these same twenty amino acids and different orders and the one of the neat things that proteins do is depending on the order of those amino acids the proteins some amino acids tend to attract each other sometime to repel each other the proteins will fold themselves up into really complicated patterns and the shape of the final protein is critical to how it works like for example you know actin is a this long filament or a protein that's used for muscles completely different from hemoglobin for example which is a protein that has a sort of a little cage in the middle of it that that likes to have iron atoms in that cage and that it kind of it floats around that sort of collects iron atoms because only an iron atom fits in that particular shape and structure of cage in the protein and those iron atoms are used to kentukcy gene in our blood so proteins just by having the these different tongue sequences of amino acids they end up being different shapes and they end up having different functions and they end up interacting differently with other proteins and that's kind of the story of how how we get how we actually operate as living systems is we're full of proteins that do things now a question that you can ask is let's say proteins are very specific kinds of molecules made from amino acids but let's say we wanted to make more orbit kinds of kinds of things out of atoms so for example one one pretty versatile kind of thing is carbon so carbon is an element and you know one thing carbon makes is the graphite that you find in pencils and things another thing carbon makes his diamund those are really different I mean graphite is black looking thing that's quite soft diamund is this transparent thing that looks that's really hard and those are both made for just arrangements of carbon atoms in in graphite the carbon atoms are arranged in kind of sheets each one will hexagonal a sheet of hexagonal arrangement of atoms in diamund there's a particular way of in which the atoms of carbon are packed together that makes them more closely packed and have the very have the strength of diamond has but both of those materials are just made from carbon atoms and not so long ago about 30 30 to 40 years ago another form of carbon was found called bucky balls which are kind of like like like a soccer ball and they every sort of the joins on a soccer ball imagine you put carbon atoms at every join our soccer ball that's an example of a Bucky ball made from its it's kind of this cluster of carbon atoms and that's something where there are all kinds of weird applications in nonstick frying pans and all sorts of other places for Bucky balls and there and there are other forms of carbon things called carbon nanotubes that might be really useful to make really good wires for conducting electricity and things like that but all of these things are just carbon atoms just arranged in different in different ways and so one of the questions is if you just say I want to make you know some weird shape out of carbon atoms how do I do that right now nobody knows how to do it you know when bucky balls were discovered they were discovered almost by accident in insert actually where we're just you know carbon have been sort of arranged randomly and some of the things happen to arranged in those kind of clusters but it is almost certainly the case that there is a tet well I'm sure it's the case they is a way of constructing it at an atomic scale sort of an almost arbitrary shape out of carbon and so you know you can imagine that as sort of a future for technology is these these atomic scale things that have been constructed even just out of carbon but if we say well let's allow other materials into the into the picture we can say well how will we construct an arbitrary object how will we just make a thing that from a program can just sort of knit together this thing made out of atoms that contains you know silicon aluminum I don't know copper carbon whatever and just sort of knit it together an arbitrary shape we don't know how to do that yet one day we will um and and one day we'll be able to make it so that all these different kinds of objects that we're constructing are well we specify how to make them but not only that instead of them just being there as sort of materials that just sit there and and do nothing there'll be things which can actively respond to their environment I mean so for example you know plastic big invention of the nineteen only 1900s I mean plastic is these molecules that are these long polymer molecules where there's it's mostly carbon hydrogen oxygen um where am you've just arranged them in in mostly carbon and hydrogen actually where you've just arranged a long sequence of atoms that all fit together to make these very very very long molecules but the wrong molecules don't really do anything they just make a material that has certain properties one can imagine a time when one could make something where there's actually a little computer operating sort of at the level of individual molecules so your material instead of just being a material that sits there and has mechanical properties that has a certain strength and things like that is a material that can do all kinds of things it could respond to you know could respond to its environments and it could start changing color like a chameleon or something or it could do all kinds of all kinds of strange things where it's where it's operating like a computer but at the scale of atoms so that's one of the one of the things in the next part I know 50 years or something I think you can you can readily expect that that will be possible I mean I think it's the the there was a time when all the materials we had were natural materials we had things like wood we had things like copper we had things where you could go into the natural world and you could just mine that material or go collect it by by you know chopping down a tree or something um in what happened in the late 1800s Early 1900s was the first kind of synthetically created materials which plastics with a big example and today you know we're very used to synthetically made materials materials that have been made you know artificially but we're not yet used to materials that actually compute at the level of individual atoms and I think in in in the future it will seem like oh you know really there were materials that were just static materials that didn't have computation built into the material that will be surprising to people okay looping back to the original question about von Neumann machines so kind of the thing that came out of von neumann's really fairly incorrect actually ideas about sort of how life might work was the idea that you could make a machine that would make a copy of itself and you could imagine something as Roman did that was at the level of you know giant pieces of you know gears and things you could see and the machine would have you know arms that would reach in and do this in that and the other on the we can also imagine as I was sort of talking about at some length there machines at the level of molecules and atoms and so on that could make copies of themselves but the the question really is could we imagine something where a machine makes a copy of itself and and the answer is absolutely now you know what could we do with that well actually we are in the middle of an ugly situation where a thing is making a copy of itself right the the the coronavirus is it isn't quite able to on its own make a copy of itself like a bacterium is able to on its own make a copy of itself a virus cannot a virus needs to kind of hijack our cells to make copies of itself and so for example I think let's see we probably have this point about so how many copies of the coronavirus the coronavirus is basically a bunch of RNA it's pretty small piece of RNA it's about 29,000 base pairs all curled up inside a coat that is that sort of keeps the DNA it keeps the RNA sort of stable inside because RNA unlike DNA is quite an unstable molecule and it has some some extra little spikes on the outside but that that little tiny thing it's it's what it's maybe a hundred nanometers are a hundred billions of a meter across that little tiny thing um when when it uses our cellular apparatus can can make copies of itself and I think last I worked out let's see I haven't worked this out in a while I think it has maybe maybe there are a hundred billion trillion copies of that virus that have now been made in the world um so it's kind of a hundred right about our a billion trillion copies of it versus our temple and humans and so on and you know we're in the process of winning so to speak but that's a case where there's been a copy of that term of that object that virus that's been made so you know what people started talking about in the 1950s when when von Neumann machines were the rage was maybe we can make spacecraft that will be self-replicating spacecraft and so one of the ideas was let's go put something on the moon that is a factory that can basically make copies of let's say the factory well let's send something into space it's a spacecraft that's out you know out in the universe and it's going to make copies of itself well it's kind of tough because you have to have material to make a copy from and if you're in interstellar space for example you might have one atom every every cubic meter so that's hardly a lot of stuff to make copies from but let's say that you you arrive on your your favorite planet your favorite exoplanet and you successfully land there and you say I'm gonna make copies of myself here well we're certainly not there yet but we can certainly imagine a time when it's possible I don't know whether it'll be more like you know making copies of virus or more like making copies of a little sort of molecular scale object or more like copies of making a big spacecraft I think it's gonna be actually easier to make copies of things that are little tiny molecular scale things now you know is it exciting to populate the galaxy with all viruses not so clear it might be more exciting to do it with machines that we feel a little bit closer to I'm not sure but but that's some that's kind of so that's a that's a long answer that interesting question um there's a question here how can you connect to the internet if your mom turns off the Wi-Fi that is a challenging ah gosh well I mean you have a cell phone that's um I'll tell you how I first started using so the the predecessor of the Internet was a thing called the ARPANET and I started using that in 1976 when I was 16 years old um and it was kind of a funky thing because in those days every computer there weren't very many computers on this network and every computer had a number and I think there were 512 computers on the network and you could just you could go type into a terminal kind of like a a computer that doesn't compute anything that's just so you connect to the ARPANET and I'll explain how you connect it in a minute and then you would simply type at oh and then the number of the computer he wanted to connect to so my favorite computer was 236 which was a computer at MIT I lived in England in those days so it had two that was a network that went through a satellite connection and all kinds of elaborate things but but back in those days you would connect to these computers around the ARPANET and there were just 512 and that was and they were all specified by numbers okay back in those days how did you connect to the ARPANET well you actually connected through phone lines and those were that was when there were only landline phones cellular phones didn't exist yet and the the way it worked is you have a phone line and you have a phone with a physical you know receiver that you like hold up to your ear and things and there were these things called acoustic couplers which were these things with kind of rubber kind of cups and you literally you put the the phone receiver into an acoustic coupler and if you listened and then you dial the number and I'll explain what happen when you dial the number you dialed this number to connect to the ARPANET and when when the when the number picked up this thing called a modem modem still exists today although they're deeply built into the the technology stack we have a modem would pick up and it would start making all these weird whistling noises and pretty soon it would be starting it would go to I can't imitate it I I don't think I could ever have imitated it but I it some would make all kinds of weird noises and those sounds were converted by the acoustic coupler into computer data and so it was it was basically sending all its data just through the sound of what was on the on the phone I don't know whether you can you can you might be able to buy from eBay an acoustic coupler and you might be able to that that would be a very exotic of course you have to have a old landline phone hmm this is a this is getting to be an archeological technology stack but what what happened when you would dial into the ARPANET there was this it's called tips terminal interface processors and there were a limited number of those that um I just had phone numbers and you would dial up one of these things and it would it would answer with it's funny whistles and things wasn't for a human to call into it it was for a computer and it would start then communicating back in those days the most common speed to communicate 300 board which means 300 bits per second so that means so that's let's see you know I was talking about arithmetic and now divided by eight so that's about 40 bytes per second so that's 40 characters per second so that means if you were using the web through a 300 board connection you'd be getting about 40 characters per second being being typed out so a typical line might be 80 characters long so that means a line of text would take about two seconds to come out really slow um actually it was interesting because back in those days people used to say um it'll never be possible to send data they used to say faster than 1200 board over to 1200 bits per second over telephone lines I said just the telephone lines aren't set up to do better than that well then people succeeded in making it go faster they then 9600 board was the next the next real threshold ah I'll tell you one funny thing I mean I remember once ordering some phone connection from the phone company which was a higher speed connection or something and the person came out was kind of rural place that I was in in those days and the you know the phone connection when it comes to a house in the days before modern fiber optics and things when it came to your house there's a big bundle of wires and they usually but I think 96 pairs of wires and any given telephone would just connect to one of those pairs and so the question of how do you get a higher speed pair well the person came out and he just tested these different pairs and out of the 96 pairs he found a few that could run data at a higher speed so who knows what had happens at the other ones you know some they were you know there was a little nick in the wire or something but it was kind of a funny process that to find a faster connection it was just like out of the 96 wires a few of them will be able to go faster but anyway so then people used to say oh 9600 baud that's the fastest you'll ever be able to transmit data over the copper wires that were the backbone of the phone network turns out that was that was that was that was beaten and in fact nowadays people people send data routinely at two million bits per second over essentially those kinds of connections how did that happen well the answer is it happened using error correcting codes the things I was mentioning earlier and happened by being able to essentially predict what kinds of ways the data would be messed up by being transmitted down these wires so effectively what's happening is the the thing that is sending the data is sending various check information along with the data and it is whenever something goes wrong it will resend the data for example but it knows that certain kinds of errors will be typical to occur on those wires and it knows kind of how to optimally how best to to package up the data and resend it to avoid those kinds of errors I mean this is happening in 5g telephony there's a yet another round of this let me expire we're talking technology here for a minute so let's just people might be curious cell phones people curious how does ok so somebody's asking what's my take on 5g technology alright oh let's talk about this okay so first of all how does a cell phone work ok what so cell phone is using radio and what's happening is when you're talking on the cell phone or data or you're looking at the browsing the web on a on a cell phone or something it's sending data by radio to a cell phone tower well you see these cell phone towers in different places sometimes they're disguised as trees sometimes they're on the sides of buildings and things you'll typically see them they'll typically have these kind of rectangular things which are their antennas sometimes they're just vertical that's cylindrical vertical things sometimes they're a sort of flatter rectangular things those are the antennas and whenever you're using a cell phone what it's doing is its sending radio signals back and forth to the to a cell tower so one of the big tricks of cellular telephony is which cell tower are you talking to because there are so fat towers dotted all over the place and the question is your cell phone wants to be talking to the one that is that it's typically nearest to and for example if you're driving down a highway or something your cell phone will be the the cell tower that your nearest to will change as you drive down the highway and so the it's some it's there's a question of how does the cell phone know that it should now connect to a different cell tower and then when you have many cell phones connecting to one cell tower how do they not all get mixed up okay so first of all the question of how does it know which cell tower to connect to roughly what's happening is your cell phone it used to be the case in early cell phones you could actually see the list of cell towers that it was trying to connect to but roughly what happens is at any moment it's it's sending it well not quite at any moment every so often it will send a little ping to cellphone towers and it will try and figure out what is the strength of the signal from different cell phone towers and that tells it roughly how close it is how much how easily it's going to be to communicate to with a particular cell phone tower so as you drive down the highway it'll handoff from one cell phone tower to another so it'll be for a while you'll be talking to this cell phone tower your phone will be talking to this cell phone tower then then it'll get closer to another cell phone tower it will see that the strength of the signal from the new cell phone tower is larger than the strength of the signal from the old cell phone tower and so it'll do a handoff to the new cell phone tower it's a little tricky because you can get into a situation where you keep on you know the signal gets stronger weaker stronger weaker and then you'd be handing you know you'd be saying okay I'm handing it off the cell phone tower too and then it'll be back to one back to two back to one and that's very inefficient and causes all kinds of problems so you have to do some some sort of clever engineering to prevent that happening so the other question is how does it know your cell phone is so so you know when you teen a radio people still do you'll hear you know there's some radio station that'll advertise itself as you know win ninety nine point seven megahertz where w whatever it is at ninety nine point seven megahertz so what's happening there is you're the the radio waves that are generated by that radio station are they are mostly sort of operating at that frequency and the the the the the the data the voice whatever it is associated with that radio station it's kind of just a little wiggle on top of this wave that's coming into your radio that's coming in at a certain frequency and so your radio is tuned to that frequency and then you can detect the little wiggle that is the actual data the song whatever else that's coming from that from that radio station so each radio station has a certain frequency and the each radio station is allocated that frequency and it's told you have to operate on that particular frequency and nothing but that frequency okay when you have cellphones you might have hundreds of cellphones that are all trying to talk to the same cell phone tower and in order for them to have their signals not get mixed up each one has to be allocated a certain frequency or at least that was the original way it was done that was the way it was done in 1g and 2g um telephony um so the idea was I think back in those days and it may still be true there used to be six hundred and sixty six channels per cell phone tower per cell generated by a cell phone tower so a cell will be the region that sort of serviced by particular antennas on a cell phone tower and then what happens is there will be let's say 600 different frequencies that that cell phone tower can use to communicate with with the with them with different cell phones and so it has to happen is when my cell phone says I'm going to connect to this particular cell phone tower the cell phone tower has to tell it or back in those days it had to tell it you are allocated channel number 253 out of 600 and that will be the frequency that channel that frequency will be the one that you use to communicate with this cell phone tower if you handed off to another cellphone tower you'll get allocated another channel for that other cellphone tower and that'll be the one you'll use for that and so there used to be this kind of transaction where there be sort of this this this thing where they where the sort of this cell phone would sort of hail the cell phone tower and the cell phone tower would respond and say okay you're allocated this frequency go communicate with me on this frequency that was what happened in so-called 1g and 2g first generation and second generation telephony then um when 3G came in there was a new idea that's called well okay actually I'm skipping I'm sorry I'm actually cheating here there's there was another idea in between okay so there was a thing let's see there was a thing called TDMA time division multiplexing um boy you're using my technology memory here okay so first idea was allocate a different frequency for every cell phone second idea is a weirder idea is every second each second is broken into let's say a hundred different or a thousand different different term different different slices so the first thousandth of the second the second thousandth of the second the third thousandth of the second and so on each one of those a different little time division and the idea was that a cell phone will be allocated not just a frequency but also a time division or actually it might operate on a single frequency but a different time division and it would be saying the cell phone will be told you are operating at the thirty seventh thousandth of every second so in other words the cell phone your cell phone is allowed to communicate at the thirty seven thousandth of a second and not at any other time okay so how could that possibly work because after all you're having a conversation with somebody and you know you're hearing their voice continuously but maybe your cell phone is only sending its data in this little bin of time there's a little tiny piece of time well the way it works says that your your voice is compressed so that your voice corresponds to you know you you look at the waveform from your voice the the you know the pressure wave from the sound that coat the microphone turns that into an electrical signal and then it's wiggling up and down and you know for my voice right now oh I don't know it'll probably be it would be maybe 200 times as you know most of the most of the speaking that I'm doing is maybe around 200 times a second it'll be it'll be kind of going up and down in an intensity as recorded by the microphone but then what you can do is to take that waveform that that signal you get from the voice and you can actually you can essentially take all the data associated with that signal and compress it and send it as a piece of data much more quickly so that you're not spending the actual time it took to say the word hello or something you're compressing that and sending the data associated with hello but in a much shorter period of time so that was another scheme for having many cellphones talk to one cell phone tower so another scheme called CDMA code division multiplexing was a cleverer mathematical scheme in which basically what you do is every cell phone is allocated a certain pattern of bits that says when you have an you're kind of kind of taking this pattern of bits and you're superimposing it on the actual the actual signal that the person is generating and the way it's arranged is these different patterns are bits um they oh gosh how to explain the these patterns of bits are such that if you try and use kind of the the sort of cookie cutter of one pattern of bits you will get the signal associated with that pattern of bits and you use a different cookie cutter you'll get the signal associated with another pattern of bits and you can just put all these patterns of bits on top of each other and the ones that aren't meant for you will just seem like white noise will just seem like a background sort of a background of nothing um and only the one that's intended for you will be the one you pick out so that's CD and that's that was sort of the 3g that was the one of the big ideas of 3g cell phones okay um sorry this is a very um the is a very long long story but okay what is special about 5g so then we got to 4G and that's so what's special about 5g is it's got a different idea gosh okay I can explain this technology okay so so one question is in order for you to be communicating with a cellphone tower how do you have to be able to see the cell phone tower in other words if you have a radio signal is it like a light signal like the the only you know light will basically just go in a straight line from one place to another so you know let's say and and radio waves if they are sufficiently high frequency work that way as well they only go they just go in a straight line from from the source to the receiver so essentially it's like it'll only work for your cellphone will only work if you can actually see physically you know you look out out of the car window or something can you see a cell phone tower if yes then your cell phone will work if no it won't pick up a signal oh I might mention by the way a little piece of cell phone trivia um one of the things if you you know there is a switch off your cell phones on on planes at least commercial planes and the and you know there are arguments people are not quite sure whether it really makes a difference to the navigation of planes but but anyway it seems like a safe thing to do but particularly if you use private planes and things that isn't usually a thing but one thing that happens in a plane it's kind of a cruelty to cell phone situation because the cell phone is expecting to hand off from from from cell tower to cell tower like if you were going at 50 miles an hour in a highway so there's a certain speed of handoff and so on but if you're on a plane going at 500 miles an hour the handoff is very different and in fact the cell phone will like increase its power as it tries to communicate the cellphone signals are not directed upwards because nobody expects to be using cellphones from from the sky so to speak but plus also the poor cellphone will be desperately trying to hand off signals between cell towers and everything will get very confused I mean when you you know when you have a internet on a plane the way that works is well some of that is ground-based and some of it is satellite based there's this thing usually in the tail of the plane that's a pretty big antenna maybe that big I don't know something something that big perhaps and the antenna often if it's if it's a satellite antenna it will actually move too as the plane you know moves the the antenna will be locked in placed with gyroscopes and things to try and keep it so that it's actually pointing correctly at the satellite um ok anyway but back to 5g so ok so first first thing about um about cell phones is does it have to be line-of-sight does it have to be the case that you that your cell phone can directly and be in a straight line seeing the the cell phone tower there no trees in the way there's nothing else in the way okay so it turns out on the frequencies that cell phones usually operate around 2 gigahertz things like that they don't have to be perfectly line-of-sight and there are the there are things where the the signal well you get you get all these effects where the signal is being as being diffracted by things and so on and it's being it's being turned in various ways and you get um the signal can have them can have different it has a so called multipath effect where instead of going straight from point to point there are multiple paths between you and the cell phone tower that a radio signal can travel on so one of the mysteries of cell phones is you can be standing in exactly one place and your cell phone signal can go up and down and that has to do typically with with changes in something to do with the multipath transmission and those changes can be things like humidity in the air can be changing somewhere or some tree can be moving or some very detailed thing can change the way that that um that those signals work and can lead to the thing fading out or fading in and so on there's also another effect oh yeah there's all kinds of interesting physics effects actually from cellphones of the nulls from standing waves or all kinds of funny things but anyway 5g okay so 5g operates at a higher frequency typically and it is intended to be more of a line-of-sight thing but the idea is to have a larger number of kind of micro cells rather than a smaller number of big cells and the and so the sort of the 5g idea is just put these sort of little micro cells for cell phones all over the place and even have it be the case that one cell phone can be using another cell phone to relay its signal so right now you're always going straight from your cell phone to a cell phone tower but in 5g you can have these multiple steps and even potentially be using other other cell phones to relay things it's kind of like the way the internet works the internet often you're using sort of other computers other people's computers to relay information through the internet but um so the way 5g works in a little bit more detail it's kind of a complicated thing so so one of the things that 5g really tries to do is to have it be the case so so normally when you have a radio transmitter it sends radio signals in all directions in the simplest simplest kind of radio transmitter is a dipole antenna where the electrons are just being bouncing up and down inside a wire and that has a certain pattern of radio signals that come out of it that is not quite the same in all directions but it's not too different in different directions and then people make all kinds of elaborate antennas you know you'll see antennas with a one main sort of spine and lots of little pieces sticking out of them you'll find on talents with all kinds of shapes and sizes sometimes you'll find antennas for a while there was a big thing in cellphones actually to have fractal antennas that will have these nested patterns and so on lots of complicated patterns of antennas and all those different patterns have different ways of of sending radio energy in different directions and so for example when you see a parabolic dish that's intended to be something which which specifically sends its signal just in one direction okay so so one of the things is if you're sending a signal in all directions you know let's say you just you have a cell phone tower and you have a cell phone and the cell phone tower is trying to communicate with the cell phone the cell phone tower is sending its its cell phone its radio signals in all directions most of those directions won't be relevant to communicate it into your cell phone so what if it could just send it signals specifically to your cell phone and not send signals in all directions if it could do that it would need to send a lot less energy to your cell phone it would need to use a lot less energy because it's not wasting all that cell phone signal going all that signal going in other directions so okay so there's a is this explainable maybe um so the question is if you have so let's say you have an antenna like a parabolic dish you see these dish antennas in different places you can steer that dish like if you have a satellite term a dish that is getting satellite TV it will be pointed in a very particular direction it will be looking at a geostationary satellite okay there's another tricky thing so most satellites just go around the earth and a low-earth orbit satellite goes around every 90 minutes but satellites there are about 24,000 miles out from the from the earth and orbiting over the equator they their speed of orbiting exactly matches the speed of rotation of the earth and so that means that those satellites sit over one spot on the earth so that means if you're getting your television or your radio from that satellite you just have to have an antenna that points in this one direction so if you go and look at your satellite TV dish if you have one you will find it is pointing up to a point somewhat above the equator just just outside about 24,000 miles up it'll be pointing sort of if you're in the US for example will be pointing down so to the south - towards the equator and up to look at the satellite and that dish able to be in a fixed it's just getting signals from that one satellite in that one direction okay so and if you wanted to get signals from another satellite you would have to you know use a motor turn the satellite dish um so the question is is there a way to get signals from like a different satellite from a different direction without turning any dishes and turns out there is a way to do that and it's a thing called a phased array and it's kind of a clever technique that is used a little bit of math maybe if I pulled up a notebook here I could I could show you but um let me see if I can explain it in a simple way hmm well not so simple it's just suffice it to say that by by detecting well it's easier when you think about sending radio waves usually when you send radio waves you'll make this sort of circle you have a particular place like if you have if you have something of water making water waves you just you have a surface of water you're going you're sort of going poke poke poke at the center of the pond and you'll make this set of ripples that just go out in a circle okay okay so let's imagine you're doing that in two places you're making poke poke poke in one place in making a bunch of ripples going out poke poke poke in another place you're making another set of ripples going out those ripples and the middle with interval interfere with each other and you'll see this pattern of interference and actually if you have two circular collections of ripples they'll actually see two lines where those were those some circles interfere with each other if I'm right I think so yeah um well by deciding exactly what order the the you what the timing is for poking poking poking to start those ripples you can determine what the angle that those lines where the where the ripples will line up to make those those lines of interference and that as more or less a phased array works except that the instead of poking water you've got some electrical signals producing radio waves and so on and that allows you to basically steer a radio signal by without moving anything just by changing the electrical signals you can this radio this beam of radio energy to go in a particular direction and that's more us how phased arrays work so so then the idea is for for 5g is that you're trying to essentially steer signals so that you're using so that you're making communication from like the the the the base station the thing that's like the cell phone tower and your cell phone and you're only having the signal go in that particular in that particular direction so you don't need to have nearly as much signal but in order to find out how you make the signal go in the right direction you have to kind of know everything about the room so for example the signal might bounce off the walls of the room and it might it might go through a window in some weird way and somehow you have to discover the the the system has to discover sort of how to best set the radio waves up so that they will communicate correctly and so I think what happens in the in the current 5g setup these things I think they're called pilot waves I think that's right there are that it basically it's sort of a two-phase thing you're first of all you're sending out a bunch of radio signals and they're trying to figure out what is the environment like around you okay I know what the environment is like now I can figure out how to set up this thing that will direct the radio energy in a very particular way so that's kind of that's roughly the the idea of 5g and it's more about point-to-point communication rather than you know self you know one little one little radio and you know transmitter to another little one and then going you know before you get all the way to to sort of the central backbone of the of the network I can talk about I mean I maybe I should talk a little bit about how the internet works and things but but Tim let's see I've probably I've been yakking on about this for a while let me go back and look at Tim so I was trying to answer the question I think I was trying to answer the question what do you how do you connect to the internet if your mom turns off the Wi-Fi and somehow I got into talking about 5g here but but um I think um I see if you can buy the stuff to make an acoustic coupler that would be an interesting exercise um okay ah talking about deep learning here I think that's a little sophisticated let me maybe come back to that um want to know but the correspondence between intelligence and comprehension for example dogs can't recognize themselves in the mirror but chimps can in humans people used to study cranial circumference as an indication of intelligence the question is can intelligence be quantified and how does that all work you know here's the thing the you know people have these intelligence tests IQ tests and they you know they are seeing basically the main thing you learn from an IQ test is how well you do on IQ tests and it's just like if you have if you're you know running in a race or you're you know trying to run 100 meters in a certain period of time the main thing you learn by how fast you run 100 meters is how fast you run 100 meters how much you can generalize you know maybe you can say if you can run 100 meters quickly then that must mean you're fit or that must mean you have long legs so that must mean you're who knows what and similarly from you know from any particular thing that you test there's a certain amount of generalization you can do you can say well if you can do that IQ test then you can do something that is very very similar to an IQ test and so on and so there's there's always the question of you know if you want to figure out you know who will be able to you know I I for a living I run a company and we have a lot of very talented people and I'm always trying to figure out you know we have some particular project we have some particular problem who's gonna be able to solve this problem the best and you know so usually the good guide to that as well if somebody solved a similar problem before and they've done a good job then they'll be able to solve this new problem as well and you know if you had sort of the the ratings for who'd solved every problem in the best possible way then maybe you could use that as a more sort of scientific way to guess who'd solve a particular problem in a particular way and it's it's a it's something where I don't think you know is there people okay so back in the 1930s particularly there was this whole question is there a notion of a general intelligence so in other words people were was it was used for for example recruiting for the military and other other kinds of places where ones just dealing with a large number of people and it's like okay can you sort of sort out who should do what and what's the most efficient way to sort out who should do what and so there was this idea that one would you know test the IQ the intelligence quotient and the quotient was you know the average would be a hundred and some people who were more intelligent would get higher intelligence quotients more than a hundred and and other people who weren't as intelligent would get lower intelligence quotients and so there was this idea was there a notion of general intelligence I think it was called G oftenly the general intelligence quotient that would be sort of a an overall scaling of who's able to be more intelligent than who I think what's become clear I mean as a practical matter for me as somebody who watches people do you know achieve things and so on I think the notion that there's sort of a a a general a single number that characterizes this is complete nonsense and but I think there's a good way to think about it actually which is OK and it has to do with actually thinking about computers and it's something we should understand from computers so one feature of computers is in the end it doesn't so much matter what computer hardware you have what matters is how you can program that hardware so you know I'm running right now on a Mac computer you know but I might have a PC somewhere or I might have you know a cell phone that has a different a different CPU or different it's a different computer and it has different hardware but nevertheless when it comes to running programs I can run the same programs on these different computers it's just a question of how those programs are encoded for those different computers and so if you think about that for brains and for people you know we all have different brains you know our the the in fact you know one knows ones fingerprints are somewhat unique the the shape and structure of brains is much more variable than fingerprints you know the ways that there are folds and so on inside brains are very variable so we all have different brains um and in terms of our hardware but nevertheless the the the sort of the programming the software that can exist on top of that hardware can achieve the same things even though the hardware may be different even though you know one brain may have this feature that you know they may have a you know this particular piece of the brain may be larger than some other piece of the brain and so on turns out it's likely with the case that just like for computers it just doesn't matter because you know with with appropriate programming you just do the same things so then you know one of the questions is so you know people then start thinking about sort of a you know how can you parameterize different sort of people's different performance on different kinds of things and sort of multiple intelligences of parameters of you know how good are you were telling what other people think how good are you at solving analytical problems how good are you I don't know whether they have this how good are you like creating new ideas I don't know um anyway so I think that there's some there's this whole question about um so I'm I just I wanted to you know this all feeds into the whole question of like standardized testing and you know you go through school and you do all these tests and you know how does that'll work and you know the main reason that you know there are it doesn't make any sense for you to be doing a class but you're not going to understand other thing in the class so there's some sense of sort of testing are you do you know that stuff and or do you know enough stuff that you'll be able to do well in this class but then there's the kind of you know does the testing really mean something fundamental about you know you and the answer is not really I mean I think you know when it comes to things like I don't know the SAT or something for colleges it's like what does that actually mean you know what is the what is correlated with the you know performance in something like an SAT and I think the only thing that can be said and I think people have tried to measure and people create those tests have tried to measure is you know how well correlated is it with your success in the first year of college well that's what they're trying to get is something which is well correlated with your success whatever that means in the first year of college and I'm not sure and but you know it is it is absolutely not something generalized beyond that I mean it's worth saying that you know I've had the good fortune to both know and in many cases in some cases mentor people who've ended up being you know very very successful in the world or doing very interesting things being able to and it's it's really a strange thing that there's just a great diversity in the in the actual skills that people have and you know you can get to a really good point with a very diverse range of different kinds of skills that one of the things is always to figure out well what point are you trying to get to you know what is the thing that is a match with your kind of skills and interests and also happens to be a thing that one can do in the world today I mean it's it's you know this is one of these challenges of of do you want to do something that the world today either as has a job to do or even better actually values like for example I've been you know involved recently and trying to find the fundamental theory of physics does the world value that well people seem to be pretty interested you know could I make a living doing that I'm not sure I'm not sure whether anybody would you know if it's if it's like will you pay me to find a fundamental theory of physics I'm not completely sure that the world is set up so that that's possible I mean fortunately I make my living in some other way and so I can have that as a hobby and have fun doing it and it turns out people seem to find it interesting and seem to value it and that's great but it's it's you know it's a it's a slightly tricky thing so um let's see the um well though I wanted to talk about animal intelligence in a minute but let's some there's a point from Diana here so how intelligent when it comes down to how well one can understand and use one's intelligence you know I have to say okay I'm gonna give a little speech right here um about applying things one learns I mean one of the things that just drives me crazy is you'll talk to people and I'll say you say do you know about this say well yes I did this course about this okay so here's a question that's come up in real life that one's trying to answer that can make use of the things one learns in that course can the person actually you know take the thing they learnt in that class and apply them to solve the problem the answer is so much of the time the answer is no and it just drives me crazy because somebody spent all that time doing this class and yet they didn't learn something they didn't take away from it something they can then apply and you know I've noticed this with with kids for example you know they'll do math classes and they'll learn all kinds of things and then when it comes to okay let's apply what you learnt about you know the volume of a sphere is both 4/3 PI R cubed let's apply that to work out I don't know the density of the earth given that we know certain other information and the concept that you could actually take the formula for the volume of a sphere which has been learnt as a matter of you know learning math and apply it to something like the earth it's like that doesn't connect or like for example if we were talking about some you know let's say I told you that the the the the intensity of a signal from a cell phone tower falls off like 1 over R squared 1 over the distance squared you know can you apply that to figure out you know given certain level of noise can you apply that to figure out how far away the cell phone can be these are things which actually the math isn't difficult and it's something that somebody kind of learnt in you know middle school to high school level math but can they actually apply it in a real situation there's often this this terrible sort of fear of you know can I really apply the thing learnt or is there something that was just a thing I learnt in school as opposed to something that I can actually apply in the real world and I think it's a great exercise for people you know as you kind of experience things in the world like can I understand that can I use something I learned in school to understand that can I make this connection between things I learnt in school and things that really happen in the world and I think this ability to like take stuff you know and actually apply it to things you want to solve that's a that's a really important skill and I don't think that skill it's not an intelligence skill in any definition of intelligence it's really more just a yes it's possible you can do that it isn't the case that there's this box of stuff you learn in school and then there's all the other stuff and the box of stuff you learn in school is only used in school so to speak and I think that say I'm you know I'm I'm um I'm a big big believer in the sort of taking things you've learnt and just applying them in in the things you run into in life and I you know I suppose insofar as I've been able to do a certain amount of Science and Technology a large part of my okay I probably have two maybe three sort of tricks sort of up my sleeve okay one of them which might be a built in thing is I have a pretty good memory and so like the stuff I learnt you know in school fifty years ago I still think I remember like I could probably conjugate Latin and Greek of regular verbs and I probably would still remember how they went even though I haven't thought about that in probably close to 50 years so you know I and whether whether I have a decent memory just because I was lucky in getting a decent memory whether I have a decent memory because I've used my memory a lot and so I you know remember how to remember better I don't really know but so that's one thing um another thing is just this you know apply knowledge from different places learn a bunch of stuff and be able to apply knowledge from one place to other places that's that's something you know just having the sort of confidence that that will work is really an important thing and I suppose the third third thing is it's kind of like they choose what to do I mean there's one thing which is being able to do what you do and the other thing is choosing what what you decide to do like you know when you have that project to pick what project do you pick do you project you pick a project you know how do you decide that this is a project you should do that this is a project that's interesting that you're going to be able to do that you have a path to be able to do how do you how do you pick that and you know in my own case okay so that one of the sort of weird tricks of my life I suppose is is the following thing and this is not necessarily not necessarily kid applicable although it might be which is there are these things that I'm interested in like let's say physics and there are these problems in these areas and there are problems that are kind of like the core problem of that area like the thing that is kind of the big the big kahuna problem of that area the thing that that sort of people have been saying that's the thing we really want to solve and they might have been saying it for 50 years or a hundred years or whatever that's the that's the core problem of this field okay so my trick is just try and solve the core problem don't most people who are working one of those fields will say oh my gosh the core problem it's much too difficult to ever possibly solve so let's work on these things that are on the outer edges that are much easier and you know we'll make a little bit of progress on the outer edge and maybe they're a long long time we'll be able to drill into the center but kind of my strategy tends to be just head for the center of difficulty just try and do the thing that is the central problem and so what happens when you try and do that well sometimes so one thing that happens is you will be asking questions where the answers if you can answer that question even if it's not quite the central problem but it's something that's sort of a a one of the bricks that builds up the central problem you buy by being able to answer anything right around there you are achieving much more than by answering something out on the periphery also another thing is there as many people looking at the central problem because people gave up usually people said it's too difficult we're not gonna look at this sometimes and the big surprise of this physics project recently is it turns out that the central problem may not be as difficult as you thought it was and as everybody else thought it was and then that's tremendously satisfying because you find out has happened with this physics project it's like I thought these problems which I've known about for 50 years would be much harder and they just or not and you know that's that's really wonderful when that happens although you can't count on that happening but what what you can't count on is that if you make any progress on that central problem it'll be important relative to progress that's being made on these more peripheral things and so you know I think to me when I when I think about different fields are different questions it's always like what's the main question what's the core question you know if you're if you're doing a science project you know science fair project whatever else you know it's like what is the core question in this area you're trying to deal with you know you're trying to work out I don't know what some oh I don't know how long does some kind of I'm picking one where it's pretty obvious what to do but you know how long does some kind of germ lost on some surface or something that's a bad example because it's pretty obvious what to do but um some other case where where it's less obvious and where there's kind of the where the sort of a choice between the core problem and a peripheral problem it's like try and solve the core problem and maybe you won't be able to do exactly the core problem it'll be a little bit to the side of the core problem but by just thinking about the core problem you're already way ahead and you know I think that the thing to remember is you know when you look at people who have been very successful in in well particularly in more intellectual fields I think it's particularly true but it's true in a lot of fields the the question of knowing kind of sort of what to try to do understanding what the goal is is often vastly more important than the mechanical ability to solve it I mean like for example and this in this project to find fundamental theory of physics um you know some of what's come up there I you know I'm not I'm not total totally terrible at math kinds of things and so on but I will tell you that the that the math that's come up in in trying to figure out fundamental theory of physics is above my level of math capability now some of it is above the level of math capability of anybody right now but there are there is some of the math that is definitely you know above what I can easily do in math um but nevertheless you know I'm deciding I'm sort of bashing through trying to get to the answer and I can do that math well enough to be able to get through the answer it won't be as elegant as somebody who was is more still that doing that kind of math might be able to do but but because I know what where I'm trying to get to I'm you know I and I sort of know enough to be able to bash through it even though I didn't do it in the most beautiful possible way um and I think that's a you know it's it's important to realize the the goal is often more important than more difficult to you know more people that the set of people who sort of picking the right goals is is a much is a is an ability in much shorter supply than mechanically being able to solve things to get to those goals and I don't you know I don't think it needs to be in shorter supply it's just a question of of learning to make decisions about picking out goals and figuring out you know I think think one of the things that term like in my particular line of work of designing computational languages and things like this a lot of what's involved and running companies and so on a lot of what's involved is just making decisions about things um and I think you know it's a sometimes in school it's not really a making decision about things kind of kind of thing that you learn and that's a it's a it's a really you know being able to just sort of make decisions not freak out about the fact oh my gosh I don't know how to make this decision just uni make the decision maybe you'll be wrong some fraction of the time hopefully it won't be disastrous you keep on doing the next thing anyway I think come yeah more to say about that I'm happy to talk more about that okay let's see um the yeah so there's a comment here from Slayer darf saying that one of the underlying issues is that kids are taught to pass exams rather than necessarily to to learn things yeah I mean I I can't emphasize enough the the value of like learning stuff you're interested in that you're going to remember you know passing the exams well there are structural things than the education system where it's like you can get to the next rung of some ladder better by passing this exam and so on I you know it's a really unfortunate that some aspects of the education system is set up that way and it's a-you know sometimes I think with people who are like trying really really hard to go to the right college alright whatever it's like you know be careful what you wish for because it may be that the selection process is actually selecting for the kinds of people for whom that will make sense and you're not one of them like if you're a really creative thinker who is really good at figuring stuff out or you're really a great entrepreneur who's good at sort of you know doing business and so on then going to you know then then going to the most sort of elite school or whatever that has the most intellectual stuff going on it may not be relevant um and or has the most kind of sort of perform perform perform kind of attitude if you're into that kind of thing different story but there's a sometimes people are like I really really really want to go to this place it's all about performance but actually the thing that person is best at and values most isn't that kind of performance and so you know it's it's just the wrong wrong match I mean I think you know the thing to say okay this is again an off-topic thing but I'll say it anyway because it's some you know the thing people don't understand like about colleges for example people say oh there's this you know US News and World Report ranking of the top hundred colleges whatever it is or its some this is like assuming that that colleges are completely plug compatible that is that you know they're a college like a really college it's just not true you know they have different personalities and different kinds of students who go there different different kinds of you know styles of operation and so on and I think people you know it's sort of the this concept of let me go to the better one because it's higher up on that ranking um is is kind of not you know it's the better one for you so to speak which may not be the better one according to the slightly dubious statistical analysis that's done to make these kind of you know one-shot rankings and it's kind of like it's almost like the intelligence story it's like you know reducing the college to one number is kind of unfortunate for the college because it's kind of like um you know there's this whole college with hundreds of years of history and all these different professors and all these different facilities and so on and now you're going to reduce it to this one number of what its ranking is and that's kind of not not the right way to think about it I think um let's see um the yeah I mean you know another thing that happens okay I'm getting on too many soap boxes here but another thing that happens is you know when you're in many lines of work not all in many lines of work in careers what matters is to do things absolutely as well as possible it's not that there are lines of work where it's more important to just in the in a fixed amount of time get as far as you can but there are plenty of lines of work where the real goal is you know do it as well as you can doesn't matter whether it's some you know and and sort of partial credit isn't really a thing it's like if you're writing a piece of software and it's like well I get partial credit the things full of bugs and it crashes for everybody you know twenty five percent of the time but I should get 75% partial credit that isn't really doesn't make any sense and I think one of the things that can happen in you know in school is that people will end up doing things where they're running very fast they're doing all these classes and they're getting sort of partial credit from everything and that's a bad model for for a lot of kinds of professions and so on where but it's not what it's about it's about you know can I really do a good job can I do that project and really make it great um rather than you know can I do it fast enough that you know I get sort of almost there and I kind of get partial credit for it right you know I think the thing that well you know different people learn in different ways but but I always find a lot of for example we have a summer camp for high school students which we'll be doing online this year um and you know it's a very project-based camp where kind of the idea is do an original project and I think that sort of the process of well first of all the process of do something that nobody's ever done before and the process of do it as well as you can admittedly we have time constraints there which is unfortunate um but you know these are these are really worthwhile things to and and I wouldn't say specifically about a camp but I mean in general just do projects you like I mean like I kind of a funny thing for me I I did a lot of physics projects when I was a early teenager and you know you can find the results of my projects on the web now it's kind of I'm kind of I was actually quite proud of myself I was reading stuff I wrote when I was like 12 13 years old recently in the context of this fundamental physics project it's quite decent actually um it's it's some but you know I I did that just because I was interested in it I didn't do that in any way for school I didn't do that I don't think anybody in any school I was I'd ever even saw it um and you know it's something in fact anything was seen by anybody until I put it on the web a few years ago um but it's something that I found really interesting and I was probably kind of educational for me and it was something that you know I took sort of pride in doing as well as I could okay somebody asks the question do I know Brian Greene yes I I know him I I enjoy him um okay question is from AAS my kids are currently reading your book a new kind of science is your new physics book within reach of kids um high school yes below that probably no I would say pieces of there are parts of the book that talk about kind of how these simple models work the intrinsic character of these models that should be accessible the parts that are sort of some parts are more kind of dealing with the existing sort of corpus of knowledge in physics and those I'm afraid are probably a bit advanced I would suggest if you look at the announcement blog post that I wrote that's kind of a a a good introduction to the project that I I think should be accessible and you know accessible maybe with a little bit of looking on the web to to learn what some terms mean and so on um okay there's a question from an IDI here asking about um can I explain how particles acquire mass I can talk about what mass is but I don't think for here because it's a little bit complicated um I think one of the things that's really exciting about this physics project is we actually sort of know I think structurally and abstractly what mass is actually we were just asking as it related to spin the answer is we were just talking about that even on a live stream yesterday about kind of what the origin of particle spin is so if you're interested in that I you might you might want to check out the recording of that um okay let's see I think we had a question back here which I'll try to address about yeah this this question that caused me to go into this long speech about intelligence and measurement of intelligence and so on had to do with animals and animal intelligence and so on you know one of the things people find fun that sort of a science fiction thing is you know will we be able to communicate with extraterrestrials I think that question is ultimately a badly formed question but let's even imagine that's a question the first sort of test case for that is how about all the animals on the earth can we communicate with them you know if we've got you know if you've got a cat or a dog or something you probably have some at least emotional level communication with with with the animal um and there used to be a for a while there was a product that was a dog human translator that would would sort of listen to the listen to the box of different kinds of dogs and it would kind of say translate that into one of you know I don't know five or ten phrases but really those related to more or less emotional states for the dog and that's some so that's sort of one level of of communication but but so one question would be what um how would one you know if one was trying to sort of figure out the intelligence of animals you know well how about we have a discussion with the animal we we ask it things you know we see is it capable and when we talk about intelligence of computers and artificial intelligence a pretty common thing as this thing called the Turing test which is a question of if if you had if you were typing in a you know text messages to something okay you type your text messages and you know the question is do you know if it's a human at the other end of the text message stream or a bot in other words by asking it questions you can say you know you say things like what's your favorite color or something let's say some answer you say what's 2+2 it'll say some answer the question is can you tell by just sort of that channel of text messaging can you tell whether the at the other end is a human or a computer and it's it's pretty hard that there aren't really well it's there's been very slow progress in making it hard to tell I mean people actually sometimes people use our wolf alpha knowledge engine as something to kind of give general knowledge to a eyes that um can be used for Turing test where you're trying to figure out is it a human or a computer at the other end and I've tried a few of these things it's kind of funny because you ask you a bunch of questions and you know welcome alpha can answer those questions but you know that no human would be able to answer that set of rather obscure questions so there you nailed it it's a computer um but you know this question about can we make an AI that we can have a conversation with and not be able to tell it isn't a human it's an interesting thing we talked about that separately but now you know we're asking the question you know how do we communicate so we're trying to communicate with some animals some I don't know a dolphin a something like that what you know what's our medium of communication what um and you know for example for for primates other than us there's you know chimpanzees and things people have used sign language they've used you know things on an iPad where you're pointing at different pictures of things and so on to try and sort of form a channel of communication and they're sort of interesting questions about how far can that get how sophisticated can the language get and how sophisticated and the concepts get one of the challenges is you know as a famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was like if you could talk to lions what would you talk to them about in other words the life of a lion is different from the life of a person they have different kinds of experiences they're different kinds of things they care about what will be the common themes that you could actually talk about what would be the what would be kind of the the the medium of discussion you know would the language would would the lion be able to form linguistic structures like we do you know all human languages have nouns and verbs and adjectives all of them now we don't know whether that's because that's how our brains are built whether that's because they all sort of evolved in some some correlated way it's not completely clear we don't know whether that's because of something to do with the way that we think about the structure of knowledge in the world I talk about this at considerable length because I've thought about it a lot but but you know the question of for your average animal would its language have the same structure or not I'm kind of led to and this question of sort of what's the internal state of the animal does it have a sort of a a model of the world that's like ours does it figure things out the way we figure things out about the world hard to know it's you know it's hard to know whether another person figures things out the same way you figure things out but the best you've got in figured in in learning that is talking to them and being able to ask them questions and sort of being able to sort of probe the shape of their kind of of their way of thinking about things you know I have to tell you excuse me um many years ago I was involved in a very silly project so actually many many years ago I was for some reason was trying to come up with silly inventions that you might file patents for and things like this and I had two silly inventions at that time one of them was an alarm clock that would decide when to wake you up based on looking at your brainwaves and the other was video games for pets so amusingly the the the brainwave alarm clock thing it hasn't been it's not with brainwaves but there are now alarm clocks that you know sense your motion and things when you're asleep to decide what what cycle of sleep you're in and whether that's a good one to wake you up and so so that pseudo invention eventually happened but the other one video games for pets maybe five or six years ago we were working with some company that was interested in kind of innovation and so on and I I was actually all frustrated and I I eventually said look you know let me feed you and innovation videogames for pets so there was a branding company so they were very very interested in that and so we started seriously looking at um how would you make really good video games for pets and actually I had a I guess was was longer ago than that because it was right around the time the iPad came out so was early 2010 or so um and the so one of my challenges was could you invent a game for the iPad that a cat could win against its owner so you know cats are quick you know cats are you know have various characteristics humans have various characteristics - can you make a game on an iPad that a cat can win against its owner so we got an animal behavior expert involved in this and started looking at it he said problem is cats aren't gonna be interested I said what about dogs problem is dogs aren't going to be interested there they're um you know that they're more um no the problem is dogs don't have good enough eyesight and things and they you know they're more smell related and so on and so it's not gonna work with dogs but he was really pushing the idea of cockatoos which are social Birds and which are often kept one at a time and so what this really turned into was essentially a Twitter for cockatoos project of a you know make the social network for the cockatoos and um you know there were always questions like what we discovered that the that cause of a cat couldn't scratch the screen of an iPad and I think the beak of a cockatoo could activate the screen and so on unfortunately there's no project never happened somebody should really do this project um but one of the things that I was particularly interested in with that project is if you give let's say cockatoos a means of constructing things you know a a Minecraft for cockatoos or something what would they construct and would they construct something that you know might look completely random to us but it might be deeply meaningful to themselves or another cockatoo for that matter and you know what would what would the animal build you gave the animal a means to build things and unfortunately never did that project I I'm hoping somebody will eventually do that and we'll be able to see what is the what is the great literature of you know of the lions or the cockatoos or whatever else because we don't know now we may be in a situation where we look at it and it's like this was just a bunch of random bits you know this was is this really a Minecraft you know what did they make its just something totally random we as humans just don't understand the significance of it at all we might be in that situation I think another thing that I've also been waiting for is you know when do we get to talk to the animals you know when I was a kid there with these dr. Doolittle books about this veterinarian who talked to animals that were kind of cool and it's a question is okay why can't we talk to animals well one question is do we actually have a common set of things to talk to them about but imagine we could make sort of the Universal Translator where we say you know tell me what kind of what your favorite kind of cat food is or more tell me why you like a red ball of wool more than you like a black ball of wool okay and let's say we could communicate that and it would turn into a you know meow purr whatever thing for a cat or whatever it is um and and then the cat would respond with uh you know whatever the cat responds with or maybe the cat would respond with some gesture with it's poor or something or maybe the cat would respond on an iPad by you know moving things around the question is can we you know what can we detect about you know could we could we learn that language you know it's like like we've tried to learn you know people will go into you know the the middle of the Amazon jungle where there may be still some tribes that haven't had contact with the outside world and you know it's like can you learn the language of this tribe well you know it's kind of like well you learn it because they pointer you know they're these things actually as a as a when you when you do linguistics there are maybe 7,000 languages that are still extant around the world maybe maybe 10,000 and there's there's often there's things Swadesh lists which are kind of lists of very basic words like person fish you know this tree this kind of thing that are a limited set of words that one knows and lots of languages and where imagine you were sort of plopped down and you're sort of trying to find a way to communicate you can point it the thing and it's like you say tree that's a tree okay so you know how do you how do you make the same kind of you know you you you can do this with with humans people have done this many times of sort of learning being plopped down in some place and learning the local language so to speak you know could we learn the local language of the animals you know I I have to say I've sort of thought that with modern machine learning and so on it might be possible and you know you basically sort of record the environment of the animal you record how it responds different kinds of things and you you kind of then detect what is it's sort of vocalization of things based on what it's seen I mean I think one of the cases of this is whale songs you know whales have these long elaborate sort of sounds that they make that get transmitted through the deep ocean and in the deep ocean sort of it's a paradoxical thing but sound travels a long way and deep ocean so you can have one whale as kind of having a conversation with a whale a thousand miles away or is it having a conversation we don't know for sure we don't know whether you know the kind of whale songs that are made are actually transmitting information you know being you know maybe they're telling the the epic of the I was going to say the the I I wouldn't be a good thing to say the epic of Moby Dick or something you know maybe they're saying some you know maybe they're reciting a whale epic to some other whale that's then going to reira cite that whale epic to other whales and that that's been going on you know across you know halfway across the Pacific Ocean for a long time we don't know that might well have been happening just like songbirds are continually making songs which other birds respond to you know are those songs meaningful and conveying information in this way that we think about information or are they just purely you know like like I will admit that I sometimes whistle when I work and I'm quite sure that my whistling conveys no useful information and is quite horribly tuneless - and you know maybe that's what the birds are doing they're just hanging out whistling as they as they hang out so to speak or maybe that's sort of actually meaningful information how do you tell you know how do you tell like come you know and maybe the way you tell is you try and correlate something that happened to one bird or some environment that one bird is in you try and say is that environment affecting the the bird song is it affecting the whales song can we determine that effect can we maybe use machine learning to learn the effect of something and how that is vocalized by that by that critter and if we could do that maybe we could learn something where where we could be able to either decode what the creature saw or is talking about or even be able to tell it like another one of its species would tell it something so it's kind of a you know could we imagine making sort of the universal translator for for creatures I think it's an interesting question and I don't think it's hopeless and it's again it's actually in the in the spectrum of things people have tried to do or not tried to do I don't think anybody's tried to do that for a very very long time if ever and probably not with modern techniques and so on it might not be that hard or it might be might be the other possibilities you might find out that it's essentially impossible because those critters kind of world views and models of the world are just so completely different from ours that meaningful sort of serious communication isn't actually possible okay we should wrap up soon here but let me just look at um um okay JJ is asking what all that I play in my own kids education some of my kids don't like me talking about them but I'll tell you a little bit okay so I have four kids the oldest is well they range from their early 20s down to the mid teens I'm so my my my top three oldest three children did a whole bunch of home schooling and that mostly consisted of particularly for my oldest son of kind of he decided stuff he wanted to learn about and then he would he actually got into doing kind of the whole cycle of you know right ad and Craigslist for teacher about such and such read resumes you know talk to teachers pick one you know then learn about some subject so he had the sort of good fortune I suppose to to just learn about stuff he wanted to learn about and I was like I wondered whether it would sort of gradually fill in and he would learn about so everything that was that was sort of in the point out to him look his the encyclopedia you know let's pick a random volume you know is there something interesting in this volume and actually the interesting thing was he recently was that oh that's kind of interesting oh that's kind of interesting about sort of everything in all these different volumes and so that's um and my gosh I would say my older daughter is a math graduate student student so I suppose that's a that's a math II thing although she used to say that her her her act of teenage rebellion was to know nothing about computers um although I later learnt that she knew a lot more than she she'd let on and part of the explanation she was did online high school and she was keen to travel and so would um I hadn't been traveling for a long time and she sort of said you get all these invitations to all over the world let me pick the ones that are worth going to and and then she'll come along and so she did that and her eventual explanation for how she knows more than one would think she would know is do you know how many incredibly boring lectures that you've given in weird countries around the world I've been sitting at the back at doing something else you know I did absorb a certain amount of stuff there and then I have a son who has a little bit more public profile Christopher who has is a very capable computational person who I reckon is about twice as fast at programming and more from language as I am right now and kind of uses it sort of it he's an interesting you can go look at his website I think it's just Christopher Wolfram calm and he just does projects with computation all the time and you know the thing that is interesting to see is I know right now he's doing something about Babylonian history actually um and was doing some other stuff to do with the pandemic and modeling that but for him it's just like he knows this computational stuff well enough that he can just you know open up a notebook and he is typing code and doing things and doing things that are like well nobody in these fields was able to do that before because they didn't have that fluency with computational tools so um he's some an example where I was sort of interesting in his case I think um I think I'm allowed to tell this story um where you know he became a very capable computational person long before he would learn math and things like that and he he would say for a long time I'm not gonna learn this math stuff now why do I need to know how to do all this math stuff look I could just type it into a computer and we'll do it and then I remember when he was quite young I remember remember it was like I'm trying to persuade him to to learn how to do multiplication maybe an edition of love not long numbers and things he's like why do I need to know how to do this you know I just type it into the computer it'll do it eventually I was saying to him you know well aren't you at least curious how the computer does it so yes he was curious about that he says but I bet it's not going to do it the same way I'm gonna do it as a person and so then you know I suppose this is a specific to me kind of thing what he was like let's go look at the source code of you know let's go look at the code zero it actually works and of course it's incredibly complicated and it doesn't do it and anything like the way that that humans do it and so it was like well look I'm you know that's very unconvincing you know but look I think I think I'm yeah anyway so Christopher was for a while a a pure play example of a kid who knew computation well but didn't know things like math and you know there was a particularly amusing case where he invented an algorithm which actually is used in Wolfram language now for doing nearest neighbor finding which is a pretty mathy algorithm and you know so it was like he was explaining this thing to people and people would say oh that's interesting use of this math thing that thing he's like that's not math that's just obvious and you know and in the end sort of you know he had learnt computation but had looked not learnt traditional math and you know he could sort of write down the differential equations for some physical system but hadn't the slightest idea how to solve even the simplest differential equation himself as a human and that was but unfortunately he's no longer so pure-play because he did learn sort of human human based math which is sort of sort of spoils the effect but you know look I would say another thing about my kids is that um one thing that's probably matter useful perhaps is that perhaps one of the more educational things they've seen is you know they know about projects I've done and they'll know about you know they'll hear about these projects I'm doing and they'll you know know about them I'll have opinions about them etc etcetera etcetera and often it'll go from a project where they're saying well like the physics projects a good example my kids were very unconvinced about that project for for quite a while and and then ah you know it's sort of interesting for for anyone and one's kids in particular to see these things that go from it's just an idea - oh it's a real thing that actually exists in the world and so on and I think that that going you know being able to see that one could have an idea and it would turn into something real is a really important sort of thing to know and I know well I suppose I mean I I don't know what's the nature-nurture etc etcetera etcetera but all of my kids are very much in the I'll have an idea and I'll turn it into something real um so it's some in very different domains but but um the I think that's it I mean one of the things that I find I find sort of really odd sometimes with kids is that you say oh what are your parents do I say oh I don't know they're kind of like my um youngest child was just relating some story about some somebody that time I said person was saying oh they're their dad is a CEO so my my kid had asked him you know what is the company that the CEO what does it do and it was like well I don't really know okay but the the thing is you know knowing what one's parents do is it's a great data point it's like you know your parents probably fairly well and you can see what they do and you can see what works what doesn't work you know how maybe the mistakes they make the things you think a totally goofy the the things that look kind of interesting etc etc etc and it's it's it's really good data of course you might ask you might be asking what did my parents do and okay so the so my father was ran a business which in its day was well he started it kind of got into it um right after World War two and it was an import-export business in England dealing with textiles well at that time being an import-export business dealing with textiles was kind of like a high-tech leading-edge kind of thing roll the clock forward 50 years and it's not quite so high tech or what kite so leading-edge and so I would always be quite dismissive of the kind of um you know oh it's it's kind of an old old old boring kind of business but that he he ran it for about 50 years actually um and and then on the side he wrote novels and which I am embarrassed to say I didn't read until quite recently and it's one of my poor poor child behavior type type of poor child performance some things is that but I you know to be fair I'm not sure that my kids have written read books that I've written so so maybe that's just the way of the way of the world um but there my mother I was a philosophy professor in Oxford and she um I actually have read at least one book she wrote about philosophical logic and you know one of the things about having a philosophy professor as a parent is well one of the things I always used to say when I was a kid is if there's one thing I'll never do when I'm grown up its do philosophy and yet I've ended up doing a lot of things that sort of amount to philosophy I think one story I kind of like to tell I remember I was at some some party that I was sort of I think that was the you know the child childminding of the five or six year old me was bring them along to some some random philosopher party or something and I was some you know of course the only kid there and there was some white haired old philosopher who came over to me and started this long conversation with me and you know I have to say it reminds me because I've been at parties where I'm like these adults they're there so so but there's some kid over in the corner let me go talk to the kid because that'll be more interesting um and I suspect that's what kind of happened in this case but anyway I have this long conversation with this chap and afterwards it's um you know he's walking away and he's kind of mumbling and he's saying one day that child will be a philosopher but it may take a while and you know yes it probably took him many many decades after that time before I I got involved in those kinds of things but I thought that was kind of amusing I mean I think that the the thing that Tim it's some I anyway that's so that's and yes I did know what my parents did and I would sort of I would hear the philosophy I think my mother actually used to try out sort of when I was you know six seven years old and things would try out these questions that were for philosophy under graduates would try them out on me although that wasn't I didn't know that was what was going on but I think that was so that was some if I'd known that I probably would have been more amused by the whole thing then it's like me just saying it's obvious that whatever whatever whatever whatever whatever um and um because I would always be like look it's obvious you can just work this out and this and listen this way I didn't really realize until long afterwards that probably those things which I was saying it's obvious that whatever not everybody might have you know untangled them in those ways and so on and I think that Tim yeah I mean you know if you're curious in the the thing that Tim yeah I mean you know people are saying wish their parents had told them more about their jobs just ask just show interest your parents will appreciate it well speaking as a parent of you know when my kids decide that something I'm doing is actually interesting it's like that's really cool and of course they often have they often have opinions about you know that's a waste of time that's a good idea whatever that quite often right actually um the I think um you know it's a for some reason people I think people get into the point of view where it's like well I've been a kid for 15 years and you know I didn't find out about what my parents do why I'm asking them today well find an excuse because just because when you were five years old it didn't make sense to find out what your you know parent who's a you know financial engineer does or something like this it doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense you know when you're 15 years old and you might actually find that your parents know things that are sort of worth knowing so to speak and I think that Tim I mean I think one of the things with with my kids is they know a lot of stuff that I think is interesting and so I'm always asking them things about stuff that they know about an occasionally they'll ask me things about stuff I know about and I think it's kind of the the very fact that I'm asking them about things that they know about is probably why you know otherwise they'd never think to ask me about what I know about probably um and I also look I think that um you know one thing probably with my kids is it's like I'm probably about as like just um go try and do that sure why not maybe people would say it's you know it's it's it's crazy but sure why don't you try and do it it's some and usually it works out and that my my oldest son who got into business very very young did that a bunch with him and it worked out really well and actually you'll probably find if you go look on the web my son Christopher I don't think he's completely disowned this when he was probably oh I don't know what eleven maybe the we were going to I was going to make a fair event and I was supposed to be giving some talk there and he says what are you gonna talk about I tell him he says that's totally boring you know people are just gonna fall asleep that's just a total lose so it was like okay well maybe you should give the talk instead so he said well maybe maybe and then so eventually he was like sure you know I'll do it and he was it was a time when the first drones first quadruped two drones and things were available and he decided he would do something because it was a maker type event do something where it's like programming a you know doing real-time programming of of one of these drones and so I'm like okay you know do make sure you've tested it you know anything that can go wrong with an audience will go wrong and so it's like I don't know for 500 people there or something and so he's like it tries it out and of course something goes wrong and so he's doing kind of real-time debugging and and there there are videos of this and watch one but but um and it was it was I was the thing I was most impressed by was how how calm he managed to be just like okay I'm gonna do bug this you know etc etc etc and I I thought it was I thought it was gonna be hopeless and wasn't gonna work and it was it was all but eventually it worked drone took off flew around and I was quite quite a quite a cool event um and you know exactly where the the look I admit that the doing real-time demos in front of audiences which is something I've done for a long time is one of those Apple of the next generation doesn't fall far away from the tree type of thing although maybe it's also because like he'd see me do that a bunch instead he figured look if the if that if that slow old old fogey can do it then the bright young ones should be able to do it too um okay let's see I think we should probably um try to wrap up there um well it's some sorry you got me off talking on about some all sorts of weird topics fun for me I've this is some I can see that during the time I was talking to you guy you guys hundreds of emails came in many of them about my day job many of them also about physics project so I've got I've got my work cut out here there anyway it's it's been fun to talk to you guys and look forward to doing this again and thanks for being here and good bye have good weekends

Channel: Wolfram

Views: 5,248

Rating: 4.9626169 out of 5

Keywords: Wolfram, Physics, Wolfram Physics, Wolfram Physics Project, Stephen Wolfram, Science, Technology, Wolfram Language, Mathematica, Programming, Engineering, Math, Mathematics, Nature, A New Kind of Science, NKS, Computer Science, Philosophy

Id: _tXW-NFvnlU

Length: 134min 8sec (8048 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020