Sheldon Glashow - The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - FULL VIDEO

[Music] hello and welcome to the origins podcast I'm your host Lawrence Krauss in this episode I'll talk to Sheldon Glashow Nobel laureate in physics and a key part of what I called the greatest story ever told so far for his work on unifying the weak and electromagnetic interactions which are two of the four fundamental forces in nature shelley himself has been a leading force in particle physics over the last 50 years making many contributions including the proposal that new quarks existed that were discovered during that time he's often served as a spokesman for the field personally he's been one of my own mentors as well as the collaborator at MIT and Harvard and he first told me how to tell the difference between formalism and physics this conversation at Shelly's home gave me the opportunity to ask about his personal experiences in physics which will be fascinating to anyone who wants a new perspective on how fundamental physics evolved in the last century we talked about what got him into physics as a young man in in New York City and what it was like working with the greatest physicists of the last century we then move on to a discussion of the state of modern physics and the possibilities for the future of science patreon subscribers can find the full video of all of our programs as soon as they're released at patreon.com slash origins podcast I hope you enjoy the show [Music] Shelly it's great to be with you here and it what's really neat for me is I've known you for almost 40 years but now I can ask you questions that I don't think I've ever asked you like first what why did why physics what what got you interested in science in the first place I this is a question that I've thought about many times and it's not clear that the answer I give now is the same as said sure it's what I gave ten or twenty or thirty years ago but as when I was quite young I had a lot of friends but I was on the other hand bit fat and I wore glasses from the time that I was six so I wasn't really good at that playing baseball I was usually the last to be chosen to be on the team and I was spending a lot of time reading and reading science fiction in articulo and getting interested in science partly through my brothers who were studying for medical school in dental school ah making your mother's very happy yeah it didn't spread to me when the time when my time came my father said are you you you're going to be a doctor or dentist and I said no I'm gonna be a college professor I'm going to teach physics and my father said well why if you want to do science why don't you become a doctor into science in your in your spare time yeah when I told him it didn't work that way yeah my mother when I first when I first came to Harvard my mom I remember calling my wife at the time up and saying he can still go to medical school he can still go to med right you took a long time but you knew so you knew you want to be a college professor even in high school well that was in high school but long before high school and and when in junior high I already was very much interested in chemistry through chemistry sets yeah sure I was first interested in biology using my brother's microscope and he was off fighting Germans and Second World War huh so I was stuck home with this microscope and I looked at the water that I collected from the Hudson River and saw all kinds of foul organisms there and cultivated what were they called protozoans yeah for ismo paramecia yeah I remember that things like that and had a lot of fun with biology of course those were the days that one in high school they first taught biology yeah fitted with me then it was chemistry that it was physics yeah when it came to chemistry I had something more than a chemistry set my father built for me a little chem lab in the basement oh wow where I could do all sorts of wonderful things that I should not have done mostly selenium I became a selenium camisole really yeah I had a lot of fun with that element it's the only element that smells like horseradish oh okay you know all his compounds it says is there any selenium in horseradish no okay wow that's great and then I got contacted by the I published an article in a science magazine for teenagers called chemistry magazine put out by the Science Talent Search program okay a science service and they apparently they read it in South Dakota and they told they I got invited to consult on alkali disease which is a disease of cattle no okay cattles that are attracted to plants that concentrate selenium and get some terrible disease but I told them though I'm just a high school kid I don't think I can help you much there's a whole bunch of things I've been that make come to mind based that but first your brother had a microscope so he was already the one who was off going fighting in Germany he wanted to be a doctor he was the doctor the the doctor to be was 14 years older than I was oh and the the dentist to be was already practicing he was 18 years oh okay so high but just did they influence you I mean I had my brother was three years older but I remember I was really influenced by him in a number of things although he didn't he didn't go into science eventually but did did you sort of their interests in science play off on you at all or no a little bit I remember the my brother Sam explaining to me how when an airplane dropped the bomb it had to swerve away because otherwise the bomb would explode just under their plastic physics and exactly now but since you were already an accomplished chemist out selenium chemists and biology no that was my junior year okay then I took a physics course but wait the physics instruction they I even remember the name of the author of the physics textbook it was a mr. dull and the physics book was extraordinarily dull and I got tired trying to memorize the seven basic tools I can much more reasonably remember the Seven Dwarfs every basic rules so I we we learned physics by ourselves me and my friends including Stephen Weinberg and Gary Feinberg both of whom became well-known physicist and and and as is well known what still is remarkable to me is that is that for the audience's that you and Steve were in high school together and not only big both became well-known physicists but went off in separate directions and totally independently developed the basis of what is now the standard model of physics for which you both won the Nobel Prize at the same time I think it's just an amazing it was an amazing story yeah it really is and in fact just to add some things that other people don't really know Steve's father when we applied to schools I had been and Steve were both accepted to City College which was an obligatory application but we were also accepted to Princeton Cornell and MIT ah why I was turned down to Harvard Oh interesting okay we're for which you later became a professor that's very so was always been in graduate school by the way I went to work there but why do you what I was turned down to their graduate Princeton graduate school okay so we both share that I was also turned down to Princeton graduate I share that but but so why did you choose cornet well I'm welding around but why Cornell because well Steve's father was kind enough to drive the two of us to these three schools we all had the same decision to make okay and when when we went to Princeton I think it was before there were girls at Preston okay and the Princeton guys would dress up in these filthy black costumes to dinner you know try to imitate how things were in Cambridge in Oxfordshire sure then we went to Cornell which was so friendly and so wonderful and for the first time in my life I could see things like chickens and cows that were still alive on a plate yeah well and Cornell was originally Agricultural College wasn't it by the way it was and a major part of it was and remains and then we went to MIT and MIT at MIT so we chose Cornell okay that's neat but you so it was your interest it was your friends that got you it shouldn't I mean your mutual friends we the guy versed in physics school didn't it wasn't school that God isn't in spite of school you know it was in spite of school where's the school that brought us together was the school that brought me together with somebody who also became a well-known physicist a name I forget at the moment but he taught me calculus in the lunchroom oh okay so I had a little bit of calculus already also aa big how supplemented by it was hard to find the right books you we would go to there was a wonderful thing in New York in those days as it's called 4th Avenue good sports Avenue had a used book stock shops when there were such things as bookshelves hundreds of them so he would hang out there buying old physics textbooks and mathematics books well you know they that's well yeah it's interesting yeah it's funny because my interests in in science came from in this case a neighbor who was an engineer but and the fact that my mother made the mistake of telling me that doctors were scientists so I got interested in science and by the time discovered in high school that doctors weren't always scientist it was quite the contrary exactly and and my mother was yeah very very disappointed in in in for a long time in in me and that but what you know the fact you said something it that reminds me so in those days and for me too it was sort of biology chemistry than physics which is the exact opposite way in some ways for me should be taught as we know are both our late friend Leon Lederman indeed it worked very hard at least in Chicago a number places saying that you know it should be there are a lot of people never get nowadays a lot of students never even get to physics right they just they start with biology maybe they'll do a chemistry class and they won't they won't even get to physics where is of course physics is the basis of chemistry chemistry is the basis of biology and the problem with learning the opposite order is you tend to learn things by rote rather than trying to figure out why things are the way they are at that basis and and so I don't know how many places have switched well it's interesting you asked because I was at some point when my grandkids were going to school in one of them in know what's it called a suburb of Boston ah Wellesley yeah I was I gave a talk to the class it might have been junior high school I'm not sure I gave a talk to the class that was high school about how important it was to teach physics then chemistry and and you start with with physics chemistry could be on the story yeah and then learn the chemistry so that biology exactly understood and they looked at me strangely and apparently after my talk it turned out that they were in the process they had just made the decision to switch to the to the rational oh and they but they would hadn't announced it to the set and they they thought it was a put-up job that i was trying to convince the administration to to do this but they had already decided you know i think that by the way I do think I've talked to a lot of people about this I think that's one of the people there are many reasons people often get turned off physics but they get the perception that physics is hard Minh forgetting the mathematical aspect because the the high school the rationale that I always got for teaching biology first is that it's somehow something people can appreciate because it's organisms they can see frogs they can see it's something they can relate to and it's therefore more friendly but they've but the impression that kids get is because it's taught last somehow it's harder than biology and therefore it's you know it's something you should stay away from and I'm glad more and more places are switching but well it's a difficult switch because due to the fact that American math education is so poor yeah it is true that physics is more mathematical than biology and they have to be familiar with algebra not calculus yes certainly algebra yeah the things with X's and A's and B's in them that it baffles so many kids and that's because it baffles their teachers as well yeah that's right so we don't have the right teaching structure yet we don't have the people who can who can teach the physics of course without the wood you know being like gentle with the algebra yeah and it's it's you have to be more comfortable I mean that's another part of the problem and and in in that well the last time I looked was a bunch of years ago at least from middle school well over 90 to 95% of middle school teachers and never really hadn't who taught science had didn't have a science degree that's right and they felt uncomfortable and if they feel uncomfortable that translates to the students in order you have to kind of be all comfortable with a field in order to move beyond the curriculum enough to be able to be gentle or to go outside you know what's in the book and I think that's a and and you know I've gotten in trouble because we talked about how can we change that and and I think what we have to do is ultimately recognize that that in a system while in supply and demand right now if you have a science degree you can generally or suddenly it's always often been the case in the past you can generally go out and get a better job and so in order to convince people a science degree to become teachers it seems to me you have to pay them more than people don't have science degrees you have to pay them more for sure yeah and that's in the modern world a lot of people have problems it's not as if science is more important than English it's just for the same reason frankly why generally scientists universities get paid more than English professors at universities not that one's intrinsically more important it's supply and demand and competition from outside academia I think and the same is true with mathematics and you know it's essential I remember in high school although we I was not terribly impressed by the science teachers although this was Bronx High School of Science yeah which was math teaching and the literature teaching were superb okay literature too at the Bronx High School of Science absolutely yeah yeah my pet my favorite my best teachers were history as it turned out I yeah I had yeah my physics class I got I enjoyed physics in spite of it but but it was it was somewhat similar in fact I think that's a problem with I was gonna ask when you when you made the transition to college at Cornell a lot of kids also get turned off of physics because first year physics is you know inclined planes and sliding things and it just doesn't seem and unfortunately also a lot of colleges and maybe this wasn't the case of Cornell a lot of colleges take sort of instructors and have them teach the first-year course instead of instead of the faculty instead of the people you want your where your mentors the people who have some deep research interest in science and that turns a lot of kids off to oh yeah well in my case things were different for for calculus III I took the first term calculus so did so did Steve and we both discovered that we knew too much to that course so we had to skip along and take the third go from the first semester so the third muster yeah but the physics we had what's the name of that physicist who put the the bound on cosmic ray energies gryson in Bryson Bryson was a very senior guy and he was teaching our basic physics course okay and he didn't hold our hands it was a real tough course even though we were mathematically sophisticated compared to many others knew we had to struggle with that and that was what it was we were thrown into serious science for the people whom so the people who made it through there were the ones who really end up sort of wanting to yeah and well we had such a wonderful group of people in physics majors in my class one was a Tama a young lady who became the wife of another physicist Henry Aaron right and who was a professor at Harvard another person became the head of NASA for a number of years what was his name there are lots of heads of NASA recently died it's very very well known guy yeah it's right I forgot it's not jammed not James Webb who was the head of Linda the telescope no and it was an old Dan Goldin and I'm trying to remember name it yeah Govan we were trying to hire as the president of BU not much later okay well man we like that here too but so the bond oh I guess in your case you it was really your peer group I mean I was gonna ask when you had this fit a lot of people if the physics class was really difficult you might have turned to chemistry or biology so but it was you were driven by well let me ask you instead of putting words in your mouth yes was it was it had you decided you know based on your excitement in high school that you wanted to be a physicist or was it or did that develop or was it always encouraged by your peer group we the peer group was was also interested in science fiction yeah and science fiction the science of science fiction in those days was primarily physics oh yeah the physics of interstellar travel yeah sure as you know physics of Star Trek was good to me yes but it was also other things it was an introduction to philosophy because the non Aristotelian approach of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and refer to some philosopher and we bought that philosophers book oh I said on Aristotelian logic or whatever it was oh so it was a good way it was a good entree but he also got us into Dianetics oh yeah oh great at least you escaped from we cleared Noah for a while we we cleared each other oh really we tried we try to understand each other's sperm dreams oh my god but you over but happily we overcame that's good it's good you overcame that no it's interesting that's another thing because you know people talk about the relationship between science fiction and science and obviously since you know I said they wrote a book related to at least one related to that people ask me all the time what's the connection and I I tend to think I mean it's not a connection that that signs unlike many people I've not I don't think science fiction all always predates the science or in any way understands the science but it's this reinforcement of interest and we actually had a joint caller where you had a joint colleague then I for a little while at Harvard Sidney Coleman it was really really huge a science fiction fan and it's interesting that that so do you do you think your interests in science fiction encouraged started yours in science or were you interest in science fiction because you were interested in science science fiction probably came first okay ah comic books came with a predecessor to science fiction but yeah sure was while I'm browsing in the candy store among the the comic books I found it's an astounding science fiction yeah that was the John W Campbell's or masterpiece book yeah because you also had a section in that book called brass tacks which described basic science okay oh that's great that's well that's interesting so I learned some I saw some real science from from science fiction from that turtle well there you go there okay I'm gonna I'm gonna store that in my file when people asked me about that connection because it's neat to know that it came directly from that and of course then I mean for me I was interested in science fiction but what a lot of people don't appreciate him at least in my opinion is that this it it relatively quickly became clear to me that the science was more interesting than the science fiction yes and and people feel silly to think it's the other way around for a lot of people but it's but scient the universe comes up with things that science fiction writers would never dream of yes yes the the recent discoveries of the nature of the universe are so spectacular who would ever believe that we would know the age of the earth to one percent in the age of the universe better than one per night I would not have I would not have lived in fact even I I will say that when it came to age all the fundamental aspects of cosmology and we'll get back to cosmology but I remember when I was a young assistant professor at Yale a well-known colleague of mine an astronomer who said to me you know I had a positions in both astronomy and physics and he said the universe would conspire so that you'd never be able to measure fundamental constants to within a factor to I mean the age of the universe and the expansion rate and because that had been history there had been a lot of definitive claims about age and expansion that had been wrong and he was always convinced that observational errors would get in the way but we'll get we'll get to that because we'll come back to observational errors later because it may be one that you and I were just sort of debating earlier that may be relevant to understanding whether we're still totally wrong about the nature of the universe and but well let's get there before get there let's get through your history a little bit more why well there's two questions I want to ask what was was there was it easygoing and what was the greatest challenge and miseries a time when you thought of any time in your undergraduate career or even your graduate career when you thought of doing something else well perhaps there was when certainly not during college at college I was convinced that I was going to be a physics major and do theoretical physics and in particular what we like to call fundamental theoretical physics particle physics that of that I had no doubt one of the things that convinced me incidentally was chance contacts are so important the what is his name you Cowell won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his 1930 for prediction of the existence of Mazon then the residents were seen and he was given the prize he came to New York to give a talk and I noticed that he was giving a talk and I brought my friends and we went to the top now okay of course we couldn't understand a word we were not that well informed about physics but at the end there was a bunch of people talking to you upfront or left it hadn't gone home yet and they were screaming at each other saying it's a scaler it's a scaler no it's event or is it that feel vector its intensive what the hell are they talking about we wondered yeah and of course we wouldn't know for a long long time yeah but that certainly confirmed my interest in in physics going back a few years to junior high school seventh grade because I just I just recalled this incident I was in class no I I've said this many times but out this is out of order yes from graduate school back to says matters you know you know give me I like time-travel yeah yeah that's right exactly so the teacher explained to me the important difference between the words rotation and revolution that the planets rotate about their axis and revolve about the Sun yeah mustn't get it wrong and say that the earth well whatever but it says but the teacher then did precisely explain to us that what these things are doing the moon the earth and the Sun and I said - I raised my hand and I said the it turns out what you're telling me is that the moon rotates about its axis in exactly the same time as the urn or as the moon revolves around the earth and that's because we know that because we always see the same side of the moon yeah and she said that's very interesting and I said why is it true and she said she has no idea that's a good question oh that was very important that you know that's oh that's a great example which I'll use because I've argued and she was a good teacher then because I've argued the best thing a teacher or a parent can say is I don't know it's a good question let's see if we can figure out why that's right because because it's just guy turns learning into discovery instead of memorization absolutely well she didn't proceed we didn't proceed with it at that time but it worried me for some time yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah man prepare I think Bill O'Reilly filled understand that could be he still said no one understands the ties I remember that you know in a show the other day but anywhere ever a year or two ago when when we you talk about teachers and we talk about what knowing you were gonna be you were gonna continue to do that and you cow was talk and indeed it's interesting that that that that going to that and and hearing arguments about was was important to you because I actually again it's funny how in our discussion I'm it's so much resonates with me for me you know it was it wasn't that I I did growing up in Canada I didn't have access so much to well-known scientists who were from the states although eventually I got to hear a few but it was reading Fineman only in the sense that up to a certain point I always thought that sort of physics was done you know already been done in a hundred years earlier and it was only reading I think what I don't was the character of physical when I realized hey it's not all done and that's I think that becomes exciting to a young person too because when you hear people arguing you know hey there maybe there's something I can do me yes well certainly things were at the time I was going to school things there was a great deal of ferment and yeah a discovery going on throughout the 40s and 50s that fishing was discovered that were rolled in eaten in 1938 yeah and the while I was going to school well Fineman was notorious and and he was at Cornell when I was there as though I never met him oh I just had heard about him I had heard about quantum field theory and nobody quite understood it in those days the only way to learn it was through some Dyson's no yeah yeah which I actually took a course in quantum field theory as a senior when I was in college well but I couldn't understand a word of it I at the end Sam Weber who was my teacher in those course well-known brought me asked me to come up and said the only undergraduate in this course and I have a problem he said I give the graduate students a a letter of grade a B or C but you undergraduates and I only have you I have to have a numerical grade so I don't really know what kind of great to give you what would you think an 85 would be okay you've been it's funny but you've been anticipating my questions and what you say but I was gonna ask you knew you want to be a theoretical physicist and a particle physics at the time it might be called the nuclear physicists I don't know what the nomenclature was no it was already part of it was already particle video what what made you a decided you want to be a theoretical physicist and B why fundamental physics well I can't say I was a bad experimenter because I did all kinds of wonderful chemistry when I was a kid did I mean actually didn't you also like become a finalist or win the Intel science I was a finalist Intel Intel came later requesting Westinghouse yeah Wesley the Westinghouse Science Talent Search I was part of yes one of the 40 finalists when I graduated from high school and my project was biological it was growing trying to grow tomato plants and such in in the absence of sulfur and have them replaced the sulfur by selenium your big selenium back right and I also hope to be able to produce well anyway that the experiments failed in tomato plants died because if I had to go away for the weekend with my folks okay anyway but so you're an okay experimentalist I mean what you were driven a theory because you didn't like to tinker or anything I didn't really liked to tinker with telescopes or with experiments I I think I broke a few instruments in the mandatory laboratory wars it was just not something that turned me on I know I wanted to understand I didn't want to do yeah I didn't want to test I wanted to invent and then and was it and particle physics simply because it was most fundamental or certainly was the without in relativity and quantum mechanics or drove me to the field as well I mean it's just the most fundamental stuff but now you also anticipated the next describe I mean the state of when I with hindsight I look back at the state of physics when when I knew you were becoming a physicist it wasn't real turmoil it were so descry mean for some people that will turn them off I mean it was just seemed to be a mess to some extent and so how did how did you relate when you became a graduate student it was a mess it was the fundamental things the things that really turned me on were a total mess of strange particles what nobody knew what strange part well I couldn't even quite understand what made them strange yeah but they were they did have funny properties and people were measuring their lifetimes and nobody knew why they were there we still don't know why they were there but there were all kinds of puzzles then parity was violated in 1955 and which means you know somehow later could distinguish left from right which seems so crazy that was a that was a crazy discovery some discoveries were not crazy and also and I think what was in their 1950s the antiproton was produced and observed and then that was something that was expected it was expected exactly but all kinds of things that were not expected were happening in those days the most well it just went on and on every year of - there was something exciting even in early 1950 the first bayan nucleon resonance - first the beginning of the population explosion of particles exactly I mean you know again when we think about this in retrospect and I've written about this it basically it almost seems like a negative because the more every time people bang particles together they discovered new part that's right it looked like there was no order would look like was just a morass that's too many particles for them all to be elementary exactly and that that was not only confusing but you might think I mean you could have two reactions to that I suppose if you're a student saying this is just crazy I'm gonna go to some field where where this makes sense or I suppose if you're an ambitious young person which I assumed you were look this is crazy that means there must be some something to learn and I is that what motivated you at all yes absolutely and of course that motivates people in many fields today yeah just physics is that medicine biological science has become so much more science than it was sure Batman for me yeah that's why I didn't do it was memorizing a frog if and I yeah yeah yeah and and and and now it's so much different and also not so different than physics in many ways I mean the boundaries between physics and biology are kind of disappearing in many ways well I watched as my dear friend while we Gilbert transition from being a theoretical physicist hands-off theoretical physicist who were hands-on biological son and he did pretty well he wasn't became a billionaire yeah well okay so those are both two not often the only physicists I know who are billionaires are those are failed physicists anyway so the field was created things were crazy and I mean look what the the the that where I'm heading is kind of well-known you wouldn't and and Steve and others created I mean demonstrated and I've written a book about this and so and you've written beautifully about it took this morass and made it and made sense of it and you so you went to Harvard and I always admit interested me I mean I never I never knew swinger I've read it but I've written about Fineman and I've obviously written about swinger but everything I know about swinger seems to me to be to some extent the opposite of what I know about you who I know very well and I'm wondering how how Schuler was a was a very as far as I can tell kind of area feet certainly formal and and none of which I associate with you I'm wondering sir why you chose each other and where he was well first of all I choose him but at the when I went to Harvard I had heard that he was there and that he was somebody important what is brilliant I mean everybody must have known he was brilliant but then when I got to Harvard I realized that he was the only person I could sensibly work with so what happy it's true that his he had a funny style his lecture was precise he had the voice of a radio announcer it was perfect everything was in perfect sentence is grammatically perfect the formulas for all clearly written on the board their talk was so designed that he would be at the blackboard nearest the exit door at the end of the lecture he would end the lecture and he would simply immediately slip out the door and disappear so there his graduate students could not have fight if I come down too easily he was standoffish yes but let me tell you how I became his student 10 or 20 and 12 of us showed up in his office at the same time and said we wanted to be his student rather we wanted to be his students yeah and I looked at us and said well let me give you all a problem so he gave us a problem which was to do some calculation which we all we together and then we came back a week or two later and said we did the problem and he explained that we did we had done it and he still had the problem of what to do with this dozen students yeah he gave up and he started assigning problems our to one after another one to Charley Sommerfeld who would become a Yale professor as a colleague of mine he when I talk that's right another would become another problem and strong interactions Marshall Baker he became a professor at University of Washington the next one was the the Danny kleitman who became a famous mathematician yeah as well as my brother-in-law and and so it went until he got to me which is toward the end of the of a group of people and apparently he had run out of sensible problems and was just good so he said to me shall we we were on a first-name basis at least he to me yeah and I said yes and he said well why don't you there are certain properties that we can electromagnetic interactions have in common and I believe that if you make use of this yang-mills formalism had he hated to refer to other people you know interesting this was the one time that he did in my presence I use that formalism and make a unified theory if we could electromagnetic interactions so that was it he had the idea he was the first person to imagine a possibility yes yeah and he gave it to me and I played with it I had convinced myself that he was right I found other reasons that one could argue that there should be such a unified theory but I certainly couldn't make very much progress toward finding it until they finally threw me out of Harvard and gave me a degree but then a year later or two years later when I was in Copenhagen as a postdoc I did I wrote the one paper which earned my Nobel Prize as I found one of the pieces in the puzzle that would enable the theory to emerge it's uh it yeah the fact that he ended up you know sort of giving you directing you as a student to a problem that eventually win the Nobel Prize ISM it's amazing and I guess it it reflects something and I hadn't appreciated about him until I was writing my last book when I of course I delved more into the history of particle physics and more deeply than I had ever done as you know just teaching it but the notion that he understood that he appreciated what seemed I'm not sure a lot of people there's a there's a formula so you mentioned yang-mills but this idea of this kind of theory which we don't have talked about here the ngage theory this kind of mathematics which has become central to all of our understanding of particle physics at the time there weren't many people who appreciate it I think at least my understanding that that could be so important right it was just an I mean two really important people had done it but or at least one yang and and and but he didn't look like it would be it would be relevant and he said so he had a court did so would you say his physics intuition was good or was it was it the mathematics or what was it that drove him to that he had I had an enormous a brilliant intuition but coupled with this this desire to do everything in a very formal fashion with a peculiar combination which is very effective it sometimes and very bad at other times or what but he was gifted in many ways let me give another example okay that happened at my thesis exam so he had the way he taught physics to me he argued that electrons and muons which are particles that are left charged leptons recall them were known at the time and they he said if we're going to have a quantum numbers that distinguishes electrons from muons then surely we should it should not be the - and and mule - that have different left on number that have lepton number it should be the e - and the MU plus so we were that way this quantum number charge and the new quantum number can distinguish electrons from you wonder her so he said it had to be that way and it followed that there had to be two kinds of neutrinos oh nature so it built into the way he taught physics particle physics was the fact that there are two kinds of neutrinos wish' for anyway this was before before was ever known before it was and it was all acknowledged as a technical possibility by some people but it wasn't known wouldn't be known until 1963 yeah this was that now in the 1950s sure so in 1958 when I went for my thesis exam to Madison Wisconsin because Schwing I had gone off to Madison for other reasons he got interested in condensed matter physics the exam took place there and yang the above-mentioned yang of Yangon Mills was in my committee he was in your committee that's right he and Paul Martin and brilliant winger and wow that's pretty intimidating committee had it was a wonderful committee so I started explaining how the electron neutrino was different from the muon neutrino and Yang said wait a minute I said yes sir and he said that don't you under that there's no way of distinguishing electron neutrinos from yuan neutrinos if they makes no sense to say they are different from one another it's an is meaningless concept and I began to explain and Schwinger seeing my distress and realizing that he was the cause of it said let me explain our situation to mr. yang and he patiently explained how an experiment could be done namely the experiment what was he done it would couple of years how an experiment could be done to distinguish electron neutrinos from yuan neutrinos if indeed they were different from one another and without yang nodded and then the exam continued and I passed the exam that would be the end of the story except six months later Li and yang published a paper explaining how electron neutrinos and yuan neutrinos could be different from one another they simply stole the idea from Julian holy mackerel he it was subject to many such acts of thievery years later by the way I went to it only ten years ago I met yang in China and was speaking with him and I described the incident to him and I asked him if perhaps I had remembered this correctly or not he said it is exactly as you said shall we Oh interesting shellie perhaps we should step back here when we talk about you're working with swinger to give a sense of of of what a swinger was and what the man the man was I remember of course when I was a graduate student one always wanted to work with the sort of most famous scientists you could work with and most accomplished and and Julian Schwinger I guess even I mean in retrospect of course he was seen as a towering figure but even the 1950s he was already recognized as a towering figure for what he'd done maybe you could maybe you could talk about that for a little bit about Julian Schwinger well let me backtrack a little bit to go back all the way to the 1920s when quantum mechanics was created okay and one of the things that the originators of quantum mechanics didn't very unhappy about was that quantum mechanics was not compatible with the special theory of relativity and that was a terrible Bugaboo for a long time it was attempts were made to create a theory of the electron that is consistent with relativity and one person made such a theory but it was inconsistent with the electron spin another person made a theory that was consistent with electron spin but not consistent with relativity until finally a young man young man called Paul Dirac created the theory of an equation that correctly describes the electron and is relativistic and also includes the description of spin and that was the beginning of the marriage that would take place between quantum mechanics and relativity let me let me just jump in for one second and say that that equation also predicted something that he didn't believe and that's why he thought the equation is wrong and later on he said the equation was smarter than he was but yeah it's it's amazing to look over those old papers because he originally noticed that the equation had too many solutions yeah and he thought that it was a unified theory he thought that the negative charge solutions would be electrons and the positive charge solutions were three protons yes and he realized that this made no sense that the two things had to have the same mass and finally he realized that he was in fact predicting the positron just shortly before the positron was quite independently and serendipitously discovered yeah it was a recharged electron and that was I mean I think that in retrospect that was a the reason he was so timid about is that that was the first time in the history of physics that a theoretical work had predicted the existence of a new of a new fundamental particle in nature and and one should say by the way that the proton is is you know two thousand times more massive than the electron so it's hard to imagine the meaning of the neutron might have been predicted by Rutherford maybe a I'm a fundamental theory where it sort of had to be there anyway it was Sir I guess it it's kind of amazing because the people who went out and discovered the paused run weren't motivated by it they were not looking for Mars it was just happened to be within two years of the theory that they discovered it was kind of Stoli serendipity it was told absolutely serendipitous they've been so many such serendipitous discoveries that's been a theme of discovery sure sure in all of the science they're not just physics but then Schwinger the marriage was not yet created because it was the theory described how photons how particles of light could be created and destroyed but it didn't describe how you let electrons and positrons could be created and destroyed how a photon could create an electron and positron pair or how an electron and positron could annihilate one another to become photons this was not part of the theory to get that kind of theory that that that that was quote that would emerge as something called quantum field theory and it emerged through the work of many people but particularly three of them which was she winger on the one hand Fineman indi independently on the other hand and in Japan meanwhile just after the Second World War Tom Anagha in Japan and they these three were eventually recognized as the creators of quantum electrodynamics and there was a fourth person who played an integral role as well and that was a man named Dyson who is some argue should have shared in the Nobel Prize but the Nobel Prize is famous for being able to only honor three people at a time yeah in any case though that that enhanced the fame of Schwinger and finder of course and certainly to Monica but swindler had before been working on radar radar cell some radar related problems electromagnetic problems classical electromagnetic theory problems that nobody else could could approach and he had been as a calculator he was amazing phenomenal as a calculator nominal I think he liked being you know I think there's a famous statement about it about his distaste of fineman's work because everyone could understand fine man he said now now this goes to the masses or say that's right because the Fineman had his Fineman diagrams which winGuard would not accept such diagrams because anyone could calculate then instead of just him actually do you know why I don't know if you know why I was always amazing in the history phiman and and and at least many of the community went to Los Alamos working on the bomb Schwinger worked on radar in state in in Harvard at the in Boston right in Boston and it I guess because it was a war effort it was a reasonable place for him to stay or did he choose not to go to Los Alamos do you know or I don't know if he what I think he felt that and then he was doing something useful and quite happy to be doing it there there was no reason to get involved in anything else and after all you can well argue that radar played and as well as as new developments in in bomb technology in infuses yeah were more played a more important role than in any more weapons yeah okay no I just wondered what if you knew that I never did okay so that's that's good to know but about so that issue yeah and so there was a good reason to wanna don't want to work with swinger when you went to Harvard he in spite of the fact also I guess as you say he was perhaps the only person that was he the only person at the Harvard at the time sort of thinking about particle physics is that I I know there were experimenters there theorists but among theorists there was no there there was Roy Glauber who had just gotten his degree and he was certainly doing things related to neutrons and such but more in the way of nuclear physics than particle physics okay and there was a poor Martin and and they were doing elect problems in electrode and in studying the nature of positronium positronium which is a combination of an electron and a positron going forming there little Adam that was a big issue going on at those times but they were not really taking students the Swingle was taking students by the Dozen affected students by the Dozen Marlo Dawson as someone I'm sure you're the same as someone who's had students I I've always said there's once or twice in my life I've had more than one student at a time and I found that very difficult yeah I had to - it was difficult yeah yeah yeah twelve I can't imagine one of them was the Chinese a young man named Andy Yale who got his PhD with me I took him to France when in one year and we were working together with Eliopoulos and we had a lot of fun he met and married a girl who was into computer science and she got him seduced into not just sexually but also into computer science he went off and got a degree in computer science a PhD a second PhD he then won the Turing prize the highest level prize in computer science now and went off to China to become an extremely famous scientists and and well recognized scientists in in China I've recently met him fair and he's among those who have renounced their American citizenship he said he has not done this for any political reason whatever in fact he has citizenship on Hong Kong so he can travel freely to the United States but the reason he gave up his citizenship is that as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he is not required he's ineligible to pay Chinese income taxes oh but he would have to continue paying 40% of his salary in two nights a mother so he decided that it was just not worth it and less noble political especially money yeah okay well you know that that's from a perspective he's a mathematician so yeah so he knows about money yes or at least he knows about numbers the the let's speaking of the so he moving to China I you mentioned that that China is throwing money is wrong funny science but you mentioned that that yang who's really what a revered scientist and certainly should be and it's gone back to China one of the scientists who's gone back to China after many years in the United States surprisingly was opposed to China building a new accelerator I guess he is come to the conclusion that building new accelerators has not really taught us very much he's watched the left a large electron positron accelerators spend most of its time simply confirming the theory said that seemed to be correct in the first place and providing endless confirmations Sisyphean confirmations of the theory he's seen the Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab neither of them making that many substantial discoveries of anything new they're the last great discoveries of unanticipated things were decades ago now I know it's important you know that and and perhaps he realized though or he concluded that there were no more great discoveries to be made and but why should we be spending so much money in this particular direction when there are so many other things that could be done with the money let me you just said something that maybe allows us to segue a little to the modern times because we're not going to explain the standard model here we're no no no but but but I would say for the listeners that the unification of these two these two forces the weak and electronica isn't is anything but obvious they behave very differently the weak force operates on a nuclear scale the electromagnetic force across the whole universe if you were thinking of two things that could somehow be different manifestations are the same thing in some ways you couldn't imagine two things that look more different at this in Inanna in a superficial way you need someone like swinger and eventually you guys to be able to realize that that there was something fundamental about well actually you kaua in the 1930s was trying to unify the strong and weak nuclear yeah yeah for a long time that was a red herring in many ways that's right and yeah well we could go into that but we may or may not but in fact it it's probably relevant to something I want do want to get to because I want to talk about string theory a little bit at some point and and and the precursors of string theory was was a theory in the 1960s that was trying to try to overcome the the morass of misunderstanding about nature at that point but before we get there you talked about how swinger liked what attracted to him this idea was probably mathematical as much as physical the formalism that called the yang-mills formalism beautiful mathematical formalism and he could appreciate I have to tell you I think I've told you this but maybe not you changed my my own career in physics in many ways but when I was it positively I positively I hope so I I was in graduate school I was very mathematical I was doing mathematical physics and I remember well we first met at a at a at a summer school in Scotland and I think you well anyway I you I would talk to you after that and and and you told me something that I always still remember and tell students you said there's physics and there's formalism and you have to know the difference and many people get enamored with the formalism and and don't realize it's not the same thing as physics III thought I'd give you a chance to elaborate on that a little bit because there was maybe obviously you don't remember telling me that but it for me was profoundly important because suddenly I realized that if I was gonna be doing something and it wasn't it wasn't motivated by some experimental phenomena in some ways I wasn't doing physics and and and I and from then on while there have been a few times when I've dabbled in different areas but I've always tied my own work to something that was related to something you can measure or or or an experiment that may have unexpected results etc so that that really changed my life I I experienced many fads yeah in in physics during my years first it was there were dispersion relations and they were not so disconnected from experiment as all that but yeah but people became fascinated by dispersion relations as dispersion relations and that led to more and more elaborate constructions such as wretched poles and the Mandelstam parametrizations of scattering and scattering as a discipline in and of itself and I may say that not only will the public members of public who hear this now in other words many physicists won't because of course in some ways they they went by the way side of the dustbin of history and somehow while they're fundamentally true anyway sir but there are new nudists new dust bins have arisen yeah and at first that you were leading us to string theory which is 40 years old as well yeah it's amazing it's amazing and two things like supersymmetry yes are 40 years old or so so okay so what did in that context and I want to get there again physics and formalism how do you find it how do you distinguish between those two things physics and formalism well one thing that disturbs me it's not so much a question of formalism it's a question of one's approach to physics and some people like Geoffrey Chu who was the leader of a program that has not gone anywhere the 1960s in 1960s he he was preoccupied with the concept of a program that one must have a generalized program that would deal with all of all of basic fundamental physics and so it was with Einstein when he tried to spent all these years trying to unify our electricity and electromagnetism and gravity where he regarded as the only exciting fundamental things in physics falsely yeah and the well I'm not quite sure where I was headed with Geoffrey whew sure having a big program I was problem at the programmatic nature and it's spread to Schwinger who also developed the programmatic got my attitude toward physics toward quantum to his his child quantum field theory which he and Fineman into monograph shared the nobel prize for but he had his way of doing things basically the difference being that Fineman used the integral calculus and and and schwinkle uses two differential calculus to formulate the theory yeah and then he was led to formulating and reformulating and reformulating again a quantum field theory he had his first series of papers which we'll call quantum electrodynamics his second series of papers which were called the theory of quantized fields and then his discovery of source theory yeah it was his way of doing quantum field theory which he could practice but nobody else could succeed in practicing and which led him astray it led him to California with the first and they're nuts yeah anyway that was so I never had a general approach and I would just my attitude was to look for the low-hanging fruit look for puzzles that I could that I could answer one very quickly in my career was the SCI hyper on had been discovered and the question is what was its parity could we design and experiment to measure its based on property called parity and marche now I long ago what wrote a paper even before my my Nobel winning paper which suggested a plausible experiment and so it went with little things here and there how there could be mixing between particles apparently different from one another that sort of stuff well and and and solving interesting puzzle but they were all but is it true I mean you know as far as I know when I think of the the work that I do and that I know of your work which is pretty extensive that were they're all motivated by physical by puzzles in experiments more was it anything purely for let me give you an example of one of course one of them other than the work unifying we can elect romantic interactions you and and and James York and you know proposed in extra quark we heard up to be there and then something that really did affect and maybe for better or worse the the future of physics leading to supersymmetry and string theory is the idea of what's called grand unification the idea that maybe not just two of the forces in nature might be unified but but three of them and you you created the paradigm theory for that all right was of all the ones the idea there may be a unification of forces the quark one I can kind of understand being motivated by puzzles and experiment but what's grand unification motivated by experiment or just something that you thought was neat but in both cases it's a question of beauty and let me this is it's much described concept the beauty and physics was that there something good is it good to be led by a desire for beauty or is it dangerous yeah and it could be argued both ways let me come back to the fourth quark I was on sabbatical in Copenhagen with with Bjork n James Buhl Kane and we noticed that if you would have a fourth quark then there would be four different kinds of quarks and four different kinds of leptons their lands are being like well you can sit there that's right the electrons and such and yet he knows there would be the electron and it's neutrino and the muon and it's neutrino both forming pairs whose natural doublets yeah and they're in quark why's there was the up quark in the down quark and and there was the strange quark all alone if you put in a term quark there would be two doublets we have quarks just like there were two doublets of leptons and that would make things a LeBron more elegant and neat and it was really that was the real motivation for us introducing the fourth quark interesting so you're guilty of searching for beauty yourself I'm certainly guilty for searching for beauty myself and then bladers what the amazing part of this story to me and we did this in 1964 and nothing much came with it for another six years yeah until I got together with Eliopoulos and my Ani at Harvard and we used that fourth quark idea to do something very neat create this the it's described as the one great success of the search for naturalness yeah in quantum field theory yes this wonderful meccans called the jim mechanism where the fourth quark and allowed you to solve a problem we won't go into that's right which is by the way near and dear to my heart because I was doing my PhD exam oral exam which was a general exam a week after you won the Nobel Prize and and there were parties and or three days after you won the Nobel Prize I remember that and there were parties and I was doing very mathematical physics I mean really mathematical physics and the first question in my oral exam was described a genetic mechanism and I looked like a deer in the headlights and I failed that so I very quickly learned by the mechanism after that so that's the importance of that is is ingrained in my mind ever since then but it was important because in fact it was a it was a good reason for in retrospect because I really wasn't keeping in touch with what was driving the physics I was doing something called fiber bundles and yeah that's it and and and when I realized that I wasn't in touch with something as significant as that that was a real wake-up call for me so as for it was probably useful but anyway there are still mathematicians out there mathematical physicists who tell me that I simply don't understand quantum field theory if I don't express it in terms of fiber bundles yeah exactly yeah I did pretty well as far as I'm concerned but but grand unification was so it's a it's a grand name but it was all not our name and you know yeah you won't take you approve it sounds like a church but but it also basically is a beautiful I mean it is really a mode it's motivated in retrospect by a number of physical ideas as well but initially it was a again a mathematical properties most motivated purely from the search for simplicity and beauty yeah what by that time physicists had learned a little bit about regroups and we knew with the difference between simple groups and and non simple groups and the group responsible for the standard model which is often called as u3 cross su 2 cross u 1 is evidently tripartite yeah it's not a simple group that has reported yeah and there were such things as simple groups and there were this but what howard georgia and i did is to search for the simplest simple groups that contain the tripartite group of the standard model and and we found two i found one and he found another which other two simple examples of grand unified theories which voted yes which i remember when i was again when i which were this sent became the search for what to see whether that idea was true became the central direction of particle physics and in the in the late that mid to late 70s and and it's still there it's still lingering it's it it well let me ask you before i get to something else I read once that you said about the about and you mentioned here that you were convinced that the weak in electric Matic magnetic interactions of a unified you were convinced in 1958 you said that there must be a unifying thing therein and that for one reason or other you continue to think about it are you convinced that now that equally can I mean it's a beautiful idea and it seems to smell right to me and many others but are you convinced that unification exists out there or not I think there's a chance but the the current view of of the universe of the string theoretical universe is one that makes it impossible to to make such arguments because they as as you well know questions of that kind are now accidents of birth of our particular universe and there's no way we can tell whether yeah what the future will bring yeah it doesn't look like I mean the search for something fundamental namely when I was growing up and maybe when one hopes was still this way but when I was growing up we wonder way explain why the universe had to be the way it is that was what I thought that's physics and now the ideas that maybe that's a bad question that maybe it's just all a big accident there's no real reason why anything is anything that's right oh so it all follows from Steve Weinberg's question that he asked many years ago he said is it that the questions we ask today about elementary particles are like the questions that people asked in the past about the radii of planetary orbits Kepler found some Amy explanation but it was nonsense this is not a real question yeah knowing what's fundamental is easy after the fact it's really easy after the fact but not when you're in the middle of confusion let let let let's talk a little about string theory because there's a quote from yours I was reading I really read it just in anticipation of this an old paper you wrote a little little I guess it's a paper that paper desperately seeping super strings nice that was co-authored with Paul Ginsburg yes who's now Cornell who created a something and who was a string theorist who was time yes and yeah there was a number of criticizing discussions it was actually when I read it at the time I remember it caused a stir because everyone thought it was so heretical but it's actually kind of kind in many ways but it does say in you of the traditional confrontation between theory and experiment super string theorists pursue an inner harmony where elegance uniqueness and beauty define truth and that was and you were criticizing things because you said that the the the instead of the confrontation between theory and experiment and it's rather interesting for me and you I know that for us for for me still I'm an old-fashioned physicist in the sense that whether something you have an idea what really matters is does nature it you know you know obey that idea that is that this doesn't explain anything does it explain experiments where's there's a whole generation that's grown up that says is it a beautiful elegant idea that's more important than whether it actually explains anything and that's a problem don't you agree I think it's very much a problem and and it's it well you know let's be careful they're super strict people are very smart yeah absolutely and it's one more in many ways it's well motivated it's motivated by gauge theories and the kind of things at the standard model built up and the putt and some puzzles in the standard model after all like why yes there are puzzles remaining but the the real why questions that that I'd like answers to is you know why are there six kinds of quarks why are there three families of quarks and leptons why is there this particular tripartite group yeah things like that well why quite well not exactly why questions but how did it come out come about that there are all I've said it before and my books all why questions and science are really how questions yes don't assume there's purpose but we won't know how the universe came to make and you're right in the standard model which is beautiful and by the way I've argued as one ism is the most amazing of triumph of the human intellect that I know of that the whole journey to the standard model that describes nature in ways that I again I must say even when I was a graduate student I never thought we'd wait for a point we knew such a point but that beautiful model has 17 or so it's not very beautiful when you look at it with the microscope yeah quite ugly it's like impressionist paintings I've always said so from a distance they look great we walk up close they look pretty bad and and so that certainly is a cause at least for some of us have concern right but but another cause for concern is that there is no experiment that contradicts this exactly and it's exactly that I think that I mean certainly again if I when I look at history and when I look at my even things that have happened since I since I've been a physicist that it's those contradictions it's those puzzling things that come up that drive theoretical physicists I mean we can see radical physicists can come up with a lot of stuff if you locked them in a room for a long time they come up with beautiful things that nothing to do with the world be the imagination in nature my experience is a lot better than the imagination human beings and it's the experiments that drive us and tell us what's the right direction to and the tragedy of the moment is that the Large Hadron Collider which is the most powerful accelerator working today is has not found any surprises whatever just merely finding merely yes perhaps the wrong word discovering the Higgs boson yeah exactly I mean it was a huge triumph both its the intellectually and experimentally to be able to discover this absolutely and some people may think that that's an it but but but what from a physicists point of view what you like to be at some level is wrong with something about the standard model we hope is wrong namely disagrees with experiment so that we can tell us where how did where to go agon delayed and that's what's missing at the moment yeah maybe tomorrow they'll find doubly charged leptons or who knows well let's let's go to the future now I think it's a perfect segue to that to think about well the puzzles that exist now and we can talk about some of them and as we talked about for some of their main cosmology would you concede when I you when I when I was a doing my PhD I actually started as a particle physicist and I have been a particle visits but I started to think about cosmology at the time that was not that was sort of new but now in a way what's happened in the last 30 or 40 years is because accelerators have been limited in in the new things they've been able to tell us we look at the universe which was a particle physicist experiment after all and the early universe had energies that we can't access with our current accelerators many of us have looked at the universe to try and find clues that might take us beyond the standard model and and the question is when the Large Hadron Collider came on great suddenly particle physics could access something new and we all thought many people thought not just the Higgs but many people thought that would discover this thing called supersymmetry it hasn't do you have any sense from your gut intuition where you whether a what the likelihood is that the Large Hadron Collider might discover something new and where it might come from you have a pretty good track record yes but not recently yeah the Large Hadron Collider has not found anything unexpected and it's unlikely that it will because its energy is compromised compared to the what we all knew was the right energy that was needed with the superconducting supercollider in which which I should preface it was a tragedy in many ways for science and for this country there was a there was an accelerator being built in the United States which which was designed based on the on the physics problems it designed from scratch based on trying to solve the physics problems and the United States decided in its the government of the United States decide in its wisdom that we couldn't afford to build this thing which may have cost 10 billion dollars which is like thee as often say like the the air conditioning cost for the Iraq war or something like that but but and whereas in CERN they had a machine already and they designed a Collider that could fit within the existing tunnel that was done after the abortion no after the abortion but they did within the constraints of what they had rather than designing a machine from scratch and I think many of us did the best I could and I think it was still a gamble that they could have just got I was surprised that they actually discovered were able to discover the Higgs I don't know if you yeah I was also surprised and it was a display of the new enormous skill and competence by the year unbelievable as a theorist I was just ya talking 3,000 PhD physicists working together and together and it worked I mean it's just amazing so so that's right that machine has been has been hindered but people are talking about building a new machine the problem is because we haven't seen anything the problem is it seems to me one of the problems its sociological how do you go to Congress or your government and say guess what we didn't see anything it was it was more money I I don't know if that's exactly the best approach well the Europeans are not using quite that approach CERN is anticipating a more or less constant budget on which it will continue to develop new tools and more powerful accelerators and the it is the intent of CERN to build a hundred kilometer long circular accelerator which will far exceed the power of the superconducting supercollider that this country did not build what's the best argument oh well look if the money's flowing that's okay but if you wanted to talk to the public and one of the things I want to say is that you've like me of both of us I think understand or appreciate the importance of talking to the public about science for a lot of reasons particularly because science is misunderstood in our society in so many ways but why if what argument can we give for why we should be spending money on such an esoteric machine that may or may not give us something new yeah well of course there's no indication that this country intends to do anything of the kind yeah and that cut back that took place in 1993 was not just the cut back of the of the superconducting supercollider it was general reduction of funding throughout science yeah and we're still well behind where we were at that time in terms of funding I mean yeah a decision in some ways to abdicate leadership if you if you want it's true and so it's not a question that I would choose to and to address here it's one that I have addressed in Japan where the Japanese are trying to build a modestly more powerful device the the called the international linear collider yeah ultimately to receive some contributions from America and from Europe and perhaps from China but they're trying to make that same argument today about the importance of the device and there are several different parts of that argument one is the the our obligation to understand the universe as best we can yeah which is which is not sufficient another is that the spin-off technologies could be and have traditionally been very important in such things look just that CERN that so many things that have been spun off from CERN not least of which is the world wide web yeah but also various the new developments in refrigeration technology that have commercial importance all sorts of interesting things furthermore they have a particular goal in Japan which is to build the thing in an area which has been devastated by the the okishima Fukushima event last what was a disaster thirty thousand people died that is a disaster yeah and there's a huge area which is now relatively desolate that can be repopulated and reformed by the creation of this device at that location so there are many arguments that can be used and brought to the fore there's one that I've used which an addition and I know I I don't know how how it plays in Japan I would have thought it would play well in China which is that by being a leader in what is the sort of fundamental physics or fundamental science is it's sexy it attracts the most the brightest young people in many ways when you bring them your country not all them are gonna continue but some of them are gonna stay there and do wonderful things whether it's you know creating new companies Google or something else so that by when you are a leader in in in in fundamental science you never bleeeh tracked the best young people and and and it's good for the science but inevitably some of them are also gonna go off and do other things that are gonna dramatically potentially help your your economy as well and I Japan for a long time has been trying to make sure it's it maintains our bills leadership China right now is doing just that that's why I'm kind of surprised that yang or I would have thought China would be pushing to be the leader in the next new accelerator yes and perhaps they will be yang has not won that argument now China is right now throwing money at at basic science yeah and throwing it in often in very good directions they have done some really successful work and looking for dark matter and studying neutrino properties at the daya Bay reactors they are working at using their scientists to develop new types of modular reactors that can be sold by China throughout the world so they have many plans and I was just told by Arthur Jaffe that there is in Shanghai a new fundamentally mathematics Institute where 12 billion dollars is promised over the last or next five years yeah.well billion dollars it's amazing if you're if you're a theorists the United States and and not just in China in Korea you see you see not just one new Institute but 50 new Institute's there because I think I think this country realized that that that that promoting fundamental science has many many side benefits not least because after all it's III never like the argument I don't like to pretend that particle physics is gonna produce some new necessarily some new technology I never think you always lead with the side benefits but it is true that and it's been known in this country that the current gross national product the current standard of living was based on curiosity driven research a generational not applied research if you'd asked them to build better computers in the nineteen forties they would have built cogs and wheels instead we have the transistor and so that you know fundamental curiosity driven research is important in the long run for the health right now in the 21st and 22nd centuries of any technological country and I'm worried a little bit in this country that that that argument has sort of totally disappeared you're right and it's so much something let's say 35 percent of our economy is based on quantum mechanics yeah and quantum mechanics was invented by a bunch of Young Turks in Copenhagen in Germany who got together and built the the theories that that we now depend upon of course that didn't cost very much money yeah yeah exactly we do now costs great deal of it cost money that were less low-hanging fruit but wrong you know it's one one one battleship worth of money will support a lot of things well you know I I just tried to make this argument the other day and and and I couldn't have tried to get it published but the purported wall that then from the money what was being asked for the wall eight point six billion dollars is bigger than the entire budget of the National Science Foundation no yes and I think it's important when we ask ourselves which is gonna contribute more to the health welfare and security of our children in the long run and it's a question that I think needs to be brought up but I don't hear it discussed very much well look let's talk about the remaining that we talked about where you know we're building machines and you know I again I don't know if you want to venture where in particle physics you think the next breakthrough will happen but cosmology is an exciting area and we were just talking about about a puzzle and we need puzzles yeah we have a puzzle in hand yeah why do you explain for a second well there is this thing called the the Hubble constant which was introduced by mr. Hubble back in 1929 and it says that the more distant a galaxy is from us the faster it will be moving and that that relationship is a linear relationship whose constant is the Hubble constant yeah and people have been trying to measure that for many many years and some years ago there was a well-known discrepancy there some people got 50 and other people got a hundred in some units we don't have to just with very small air force that relatively and now things are reaching the point where there there is a whole series of experiments that have converged on a number which is about 72 yeah and plus or minus 1 or so and it's it's it's precisely determined and then there's just one outlier which lies at 68 or 67 years I remember which is quite a distance away from the other ones and that's the one that comes from studies of the cosmic background radiation that's the only measure of the cosmological constant that measures the value of well of the Hubble constant yes it's also measure of the Hubble constant at very early times and the that one measurement is in serious discrepancy with the that's the problem that's been around for a couple years yeah and what's just happened recently is a couple of new experiments one given these absurd name holy cow are you familiar I didn't realize it had the acronym now yeah that's the but what it has nothing to do with holiness or cows but it has to do with quasars and it has to do with the fact that quasars make multiple that in galaxies make multiple images of quasars and then you instead of seeing the quasar as a point you see it as five or six different points yes and since quasar light fluctuates in time the fluctuations are seen in these different images at different times yes actually what's wrote a paper about that and yes but that is what they've been doing and they've been using that information to measure the Hubble constant at the time of this earlier laser yeah which is and I should say quasars are objects that are incredibly distant and therefore the light from those things has been traveling through most of the history of the universe so when you measure this you're are measuring back into the history of the universe that's right and they're getting different dad said they're confirming the cosmic background radiation and and the puzzle there is that apparently for some people it means that the expansion rate of the universe was different at early times than it is now in a way that completely if we're true would completely confront what is currently the standard model of cosmology which itself is kind of crazy yeah that's all well in the olden days that we were told that the universe will either expand forever getting more and more boring or it will contract and implode upon itself in the future and now what these experiments are indicating and there's another experiment as well yeah based on quasars as standard candles yes it's also points in this direction by some a couple of Italian physical scientists that they're telling us that the future of the universe will be neither of the above it will be the great riff yeah where everything including Gallic these and stars and planets and people and atoms will be ripped apart yeah well and but in a finite time but don't worry not in not a long time long for now III remain highly skeptical of course I will say it's always amusing to me maybe because I grew up in the era of that Hubble constant uncertainty that was when I started you know when it was out there 100 or 50 either both groups saying with high precision that it was a hundred or fifty and at the time a number of us bet said if a lot of people think it's a hundred a lot of people think it's fifty it's probably around 75 and that's it remarkably turned out to be true neither group was right it was right in the middle between the two I I have to say faced with the fact from a fundamental physics perspective it seems to me crazy to think of this big rip there's no good physical picture I can of theory that I can think of that will make it I'm betting on the side of observational uncertainties you're hoping maybe that that the craziness and I'm gonna right now bet you a bottle of fine wine that fine in the eyes of the gifter yeah okay that they will turn out that the cosmological constant is changing is the Hubble constant you know that the Cosmo consequently but the cosmological constant is it's increasing I will take that bet here recorded and I look forward to time when we can talk again drinking that bottle of wine that you will have bought for me thanks again chalice was great thank you very much thank you lord the origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss Nancy Dahl Amelia Huggins John and Don Edwards Gus and Lou coordi and Rob's EPS audio by Thomas a misen edited by Evan diamond web design by Redman Media Lab animation by tomahawk visual effects and music by Rick Ellis to see the full video of this podcast as well as other bonus content visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast you

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 19,199

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics, Sheldon Glashow, Nobel Laureate, Nobel Prize, Asking questions, Cosmology, Cosmological Constant, Hubble Constant, Schwinger, Unified Theory, Weak Interactions, weak and electromagnetic interactions

Id: XkYefDscNfM

Length: 90min 13sec (5413 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020