Steve Weinberg - Toward the Unification of Physics | Interactive 2013 | SXSW

oh thank you very much and thank you for inviting me I never thought I'd be here at a South by Southwest conference or whatever you call it festival as a speaker you know I I can't play or write music the only computer program I've ever written was a Microsoft DOS batch file some of you remember those and the only movies I've ever made are of close relations but here I am it's wonderful the kind of work I do is pretty far removed from anything that's immediately useful or profitable it is pursuing an ancient goal the goal is to try to understand nature in simple general and unified terms by unified I don't mean that we won't have separate physicists and chemists and biologists will we all have our own techniques for learning things and I think this will go on forever but we have an image of at the deepest level when we keep asking why why why we come to a set of fundamental principles that govern everything one set of laws of nature to rule them all and this is what we're aiming for how do we know that we'll ever get there we don't know but the historical progress of science has been all in that direction I think the first great step toward unification was taken by Isaac Newton in unifying the celestial the celestial and the terrestrial you know it had been thought particularly by Aristotle and his followers that there were entirely separate sets of laws for things in the heavens at the orbit of the moon and beyond and things here on earth in the heavens there is no change except for motion and the motion is natural motion in circles around the center of the earth here below the orbit of the moon are dull sublunary lives motion changes endemic things are always changing and natural motion is toward the center of the earth if you're talking about earth or water or away from the center of the earth directly away if you're talking about air and fire everything else is unnatural it was Isaac Newton who for the first time applied a set of laws that to both the celestial and terrestrial to be specific this is when he was on at home after the plague had reached Cambridge University where he had been working he realized that the moon traveling around the earth is always bending its orbit toward the earth it's not flying off in a straight line so that in effect it's accelerating toward the earth Center likewise a an apple falling to the ground in Lincolnshire where he lived is accelerating toward the Earth's center the moon's acceleration is 3,600 times smaller than the apples acceleration not because they obey different laws of nature but as Newton realized it's simply that the moon is 60 times further from the center of the earth than an apple and hence the acceleration is 60 square I'm smaller and this same analysis he then showed applies to the planets and to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that all had to do with gravity Newton knew very well and he expresses this very forcibly in his book the optics that there are other forces in nature beside gravity they remain rather mysterious electricity was known magnetism was known they were thought to be rather separate phenomena then in the 19th century the work of Earth's Ted in Denmark unpair in Paris and Faraday in London showed that in fact there is a deep relation between electricity and magnetism a relation that was finally spelled out and detailed by James Clerk Maxwell among other things a changing magnetic field produces an electric field that's what allows you to generate electricity by the way and a changing magnetic a changing magnetic field produces an electric field changing electric field produces a magnetic field something Maxwell discovered so that you can have changing electric and magnetic fields supporting each other in space without anything else around and Maxwell calculated the speed at which that would disturbance would travel through space and found low and behold it was the same as the speed of light that had been measured and in fact as Maxwell realized that's what light is it's a self-sustaining oscillation of electric and magnetic fields so that the textbooks had to be re-written electricity and magnetism is not a separate subject from optics they're the same subject well physics and chemistry though were still quite separate and the evidence for that comes from a strange phenomenon at the end of the 19th century and number of physicists declared that physics is just about finished the only thing we have left to do is to push our measurements to the next decimal place get a little bit more accurate in a sense they were right but they were for physics they were thinking of electricity magnetism light heat motion none of them realize that physics could hardly be finished because it had not yet succeeded in explaining the phenomena of chemistry they would not have thought that that was part of their job description you know why does sodium and chlorine form a stable chemical compound salt if you ask a physicist that he would direct you to the next building on the University campus with the chemists it but in fact it was realized through the understanding of what an atom is and through the development of a new kind of physics known as quantum mechanics it was realized in the 1920s that atoms are just a charged and positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons and when different atoms get together at a molecule the molecule is held together by the electric forces already very well understood between the electrons and the nuclei and you could calculate using the principles of physics the energy it takes to rip apart a molecule of salt or to decide whether a different chemical compound is stable or not stable so that chemistry became part of issus physics chemistry today say that but it is true that's all just physical science only a small part of the world we live in what about life what about biology the first great step was taken by Darwin but not so much in realizing that evolution had occurred because fossils were known a lot of many biologists zoologist botanists realized that there had been something like evolution going on even Darwin's grandfather for that matter had known this what dar what it had generally been thought that evolution the gradual improvement in species occurs because of fundamental biological principles different from anything in physics or chemistry that drives life toward betterment what Darwin did was to point out that that assumption is unnecessary that given inheritable variations inevitably evolution will occur toward organisms that are more fit to survive and reproduce one of the great ideas in all of science but the mechanism for in heritable variation was completely unknown Darwin had no idea what it was and didn't try to guess it was discovered in the ninth in the 20th century with the working out of the structure of a chemical molecule DNA and that was in the 1950s increasingly today biology requires for its deepest level of understanding chemistry which in turn requires physics for its deepest level of understanding now there things stayed for a while in the 1930s it became known that atomic nuclei consist of particles called protons and neutrons and there was another step of unification I suppose it was realized that these particles undergo reactions for example their reactions in which pro protons turn into neutrons and these reactions are evidenced in kinds of radioactivity and in the and they produce the heat of the stars the first step in the chain of nuclear reactions in the star in the Sun is just such a reaction where protons are turning into neutrons so again it was another step toward unification of things we know about in our laboratory with the greater world beyond the orbit of the moon but things were very messy I mean this is we're talking about physical principles which is supposed to be at the bottom of everything and yet the principles themselves seem like a mess when I started graduate school so it was in the 20th century the I won't tell you when the there were four kinds of force known electromagnetism well that was well in hand and in the 1940s we learned how to deal with electromagnetism in the context of quantum mechanics there were strong nuclear forces the forces that hold protons and neutrons together inside atomic nuclei that for example hold 92 protons together in the uranium nucleus even though those protons are all repelling each other electrically all having the same charge and we now know that these strong nuclear forces not only keep the protons and neutrons together inside the nucleus they keep the quarks together inside the protons and neutrons more fundamental particles we didn't know that when I started in addition to the strong nuclear forces which are much stronger than electromagnetism there's another class of nuclear forces called weak nuclear forces which are much weaker as you might guess they don't hold anything together but they are what allow neutrons and protons to turn into each other as I mentioned earlier and allow the Sun to shine we had a good theory for we had no theory at all for the strong forces and we just didn't know what they were or how to calculate anything about them we had a good interim theory a practical back-of-the-envelope theory for the weak nuclear forces we could calculate some things like the rate of a certain nuclear decay radioactive decay but there were a lot of other things that when we tried to calculate we got nonsense we got answers like infinity even if we're calculating something perfectly sensible like a probability or an energy and so we knew we didn't have a decent theory of these forces and then there was a fourth force the first one that was known and but in some ways the most mysterious and I'll come back to it the force of gravity how can you bring unity to this kind of mess well one thing we could do was to play with the idea that there was some kind of simplicity in the equations for example we we guessed and this is true a lot of people made this guess in the course of the 50s and the 60s that there was a particle that carried the weak nuclear force in the same way that the particle of light the photon carries the electromagnetic force when two charged particles interact they interact by exchanging a photon similarly the weak nuclear force may occur because when a neutron turns into a proton a char a force carrying particle comes out and produces the particles that are produced in this kind of radioactivity electrons and neutrinos this particle was called the W particle W stands for weak not Weinberg and and people there were obvious problems with this the W and the photon had the same spin that is these particles are actually spinning on their axes around the direction of the emotion and the amount of spin was the same it's a spin equal to one in what physicists like to call natural units so they they look similar and that accounted for some of the properties of the known properties of the weak interactions but there was an obvious discrepancy the W particle was so heavy it hadn't been discovered yet and we all speculated about it but said well it's just too heavy our accelerators aren't good enough we have to go to the public for more money and build bigger accelerators the photon is massless how can you put these entirely different things together how can you unify weak interactions carried by the W particle and electromagnetic interactions carried by the photon an idea was hatched around 1960 originally by a theorist named Yoshi our own ambu working in Chicago inspired by similar problems that occur in the physics of magnets and superconductors and then picked up and made much more general by Jeffrey Goldstone a young theorist I think then at Cambridge and improved on in the 1960 in 1964 by a bunch of theorists their names are routed on glia Peter Higgs and Guralnik Hagen and kibble the idea going back to Goldstone and Nambu is that it is possible for the equations of physics to be very simple and for example to have two particles like the electron and the neutrino that appear different because the electron has a mass and the neutrino doesn't yet appear in the equations in exactly the same way and nevertheless the solutions of the equations which describe the actual phenomena we observe don't have that simplicity that unification the technical term we use for it is symmetry and we call this a broken symmetry a typical example is what happens in a permanent magnet and this is one of the things that inspired Goldstone and Nambu in a magnet the laws that govern the iron atoms are completely indifferent to the direction of your observation so it doesn't matter whether you're looking at the magnet from the north the southeast the west above below the laws that govern the relation the forces between the iron atoms in the magnet look the same from whatever point of view you observe a bar of iron and indeed when a magnet when you take a hot bar of iron hotter than 770 degrees centigrade the iron does look the same in all directions there's no preferred direction however as the iron cools a magnetic field appears that points in a particular direction it appears spontaneously it breaks the symmetry between different directions and all the iron atoms line up so that they're spinning around the same axis as defined by the magnetic field that's a classic example of a broken symmetry but we in particle physics we weren't looking for symmetries that would break the excuse me we weren't looking for a way of breaking the symmetry between different directions in space we were looking for something that broke the symmetry between say electrons and neutrinos or W particles and photons the first theory that did this and I should say probably the first successful theory that did this was developed in 1967 by me and independently in 1968 by my dear friend the late Abdus Salam with the purpose of unifying the weak and the electromagnetic fields in order to break the symmetry between say the W and the Z we introduced not a magnetic field of course that wasn't what we were trying to accomplish but we introduced a set of fields that don't have any sense of direction in ordinary space so that they're not pointing north or east or anything but they do have a sense of direction in the kind of internal space which distinguishes the different types of particle and would break the symmetry and for example allow the electron to have a mass when the the neutrino wouldn't even though they appear the same way in the equations this kind of field is called a scalar fields the word scalar simply means it doesn't care about direction in space in ordinary space we inch we found we had to introduce in order for mathematical consistency to introduce four scalar fields and three of these serve the purpose of giving mass to the positive W the negative W and a new particle which was required by the theory a neutral particle that carried a new kind of weak new force called the neutral current force and I call this new particle visi and these particles were all subsequently discovered in the 1983 in 1983 experiments at CERN the three scale of the four scalar fields we introduced three of them just serve to give mass to the W plus the W minus and the Z the fourth one is left over as a kind of debris from the symmetry breaking and it is observable in in principle as an actual physical particle one of the characteristics of this particle is because it's Purdue it's a knot of energy and momentum in a scalar field it has no spin it's like you know this year the siyoung award went to a picture of a knuckleball knuckleball is I don't know how he does it but it's a way of pitching the ball so it has no spin and therefore travels an erratic path makes it very hard to hit which is why this guy won the saw Young Award this particle is not known as the knuckleball particle unfortunately it's known as the Higgs boson in my 1967 paper the first reference of these of these earlier papers from 1964 was Higgs and well we needed a short name for it the theory the theory of sallam and me predicted all the properties of this particle except its mass and its name and and we so we didn't know how heavy it would be there were various indirect signs that couldn't be much heavier than than a hundred times the mass of a proton and excuse me a thousand times the mass of a proton and we thought we could build accelerators that could produce this particle such an accelerator was built called the Large Hadron Collider it is at CERN in Europe the accelerator runs under the Jura mountains on the border between France and Switzerland and if it did succeed last July in producing this particle we now know that it exists and it weighs a hundred and thirty three proton masses something we were not able to predict we don't yet know that it is the predicted Higgs particle one of the things that has to be checked is that it is a knuckle bowl that it's not spinning and that hasn't been done yet the accelerator is right now shut down because they're trying to increase the energy and that takes a while I think maybe for two years but I believe that at the end of the two-year period experiments will start up again and will in fact confirm what most people already believe that this is the the last missing particle in the electroweak theory that the theory that unifies the weak and the electromagnetic forces oh I'm not that bad good meanwhile the strong nuclear forces have been understood that's a whole other story which I played a minor role in but other people played a much more important part the theory of the strong nuclear forces looks very much like the theory of electromagnetism in the weak nuclear forces they again are transmitted by particles with a funny name gluons but these are particles quite similar to the photon they have the same spin equal to one in natural units and they have zero mass we don't see them for a complicated reason as you try to pull them apart the force between them increases and you can never get them pulled apart but they are the particles that produce the forces that hold the quarks together inside the protons and the neutrons now this is all very nice but it's certainly not the end of the story I mean there are things that are left out of this picture there astronomers tell us that 5/6 of the mass of the universe is something that has to be attributed to a particle different from any particle allowed by the standard model oh I'm sorry I should explain the standard model is a name I gave to this combination of the strong nuclear force theory and the electroweak theory put together that's what's called the standard model the standard model doesn't account for dark matter and there's an even more mysterious dark energy an energy inherent in space itself which can only be detected because it appears that it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up to accelerate and it makes up about 3/4 of the total energy of the universe in other words much more than all the matter including the dark matter well three times in fact even apart from the things which are not described by the standard model evidently it's far from unified for one thing we have strong forces which are much stronger than the electroweak forces and that's not explained yet by any kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking there is a strong hint that we're getting from a number of different sources that a unification also including gravitation may be possible but that the simplicity which unites the strong weak electromagnetic and gravitational forces will only be seen in the phenomena when we go to much higher energy well that's always the excuse I mean you know wait until we go to higher energy unfortunately in this case when I say higher energy I mean ten thousand trillion times higher than any energy that can be reached in the laboratory and that's not just a lot of zeroes strung together I really mean ten thousand trillion there set there are at least three reasons for this one is the problem I already mentioned about the unification of the strong and the electroweak forces those forces depend slightly very slowly on energy the strong nuclear for the strength of the strong nuclear force decreases with as the logarithm of the energy increases it's inversely proportional to the logarithm of the energy and logarithms as you undoubtedly know change very slowly as you change what they're the logarithms of and apparently and this is a calculation that was first done with two co-workers Howard George II and Helen Quinn and me back in 1974 I think if you plot the strength of the strong nuclear force as it depends on energy and also the weak and the electromagnetic which also depends somewhat on energy they all seem to come together and although two curves typically will come together unless well unless they don't but but for three curves to come together at the same point tells you something is going on and they all seem to come together at this energy ten thousand trillion what is it ten thousand trillion times the energies that we can study in the laboratory now another hint is the fact that although I said earlier neutrinos have zero mass they don't really have zero mass they have a very tiny mass about a millionth of the mass of an electron this is just it was first discovered as in effect when we observe neutrinos coming from the Sun they didn't seem to come in the right way that we expected and this is just the mass level that we would expect from some fundamental symmetry breaking occurring at an energy of ten thousand trillion times what we observe the final clue is gravity gravity is incredibly weak on the scale of laboratory physics even in a molecule no one has ever detected the a tional force between two nuclei in the same molecule it's so weak it's many many trillion times weaker than the electric forces but gravity is produced by energy whether it's energy in a mass or any other kind of energy and if you go up to sufficiently high energy the force of gravity becomes as strong as any of the other forces what energy do you have - for example if you have two particles with the same electric charge as an electron how heavy do they have to be for the gravitational attraction to be just as strong as the electrical repulsion well the answer is ten thousand trillion times heavier than the particles we know about I'm being careless with a power of 10 but not that much not more than one now that's that's an intriguing picture although very in a way very discouraging one thing it presents us with a puzzle I mentioned that everything about the Higgs boson Higgs particle was predicted by the electroweak theory except its mass its mass in fact that's because it's mass in fact sets the scale of all the other masses of the quarks and the electron and so on so it's in a sense the fundamental unit of mass for the elementary particles well as a fundamental unit of mass shouldn't it be up there 10,000 trillion times higher than the energies were used to but it's down at a level of 133 proton masses where we can actually observe the thing why it's true they had to build an accelerator that costs 10 billion dollars before they could produce the Higgs boson because it weighs 133 proton masses but from a different point of view from maybe a more fundamental if less fiscal point of view why is the Higgs boson so light 10,000 trillion times later than all the other fundamental mass units that we know about I don't know it's a it's a mystery we what we need evidently is more data because we Ferris have been looking at these problems I'm sure we didn't know the mass of the Higgs boson but we certainly knew it was less than a thousand proton masses which by these standards is also incredibly light so we've been looking at these problems for a long time not not just since last July and we haven't made progress some theorists have tried developing entirely new approaches called string theory I think that they're probably doing the best that can be done but they're not getting anywhere they're not producing any predictions that can be compared with observation and they haven't really come up with any one theory that shows how the four forces are unified what we need to give us a kick in the pants and inspire us to theoretical ideas that will get us to the next step of unification is more data Newton benefited from centuries of observations of the planets people looking up in the sky in those days the sky was darker than it is now and seeing five things that look like stars but moving in an irregular way across the zodiac Darwin benefited from the fact that England was filled with clergymen who in their spare time were naturalist sand dug up fossils we need data and unfortunately it's it's very expensive as I said the Large Hadron Collider problem although I don't know an exact figure probably cost something in the neighborhood of 10 billion dollars which is a lot of money on the other hand it's not a lot of money when compared with something else that we've been doing that is related to science supposedly and that is manned space flight it's an interesting comparison between the the International Space Station and the Large Hadron Collider the International Space Station has so far cost about a hundred billion dollars ten times what the Large Hadron Collider cost and has produced nothing of scientific interest the I'll be glad to defend that if anyone was to argue the I say this in fact I don't know why I'm dragging yes I do know why I'm dragging this in I'm dragging this in because of something that happened here in Texas in 1993 we were at that time working on a large accelerator of our own called the superconducting supercollider which would have been placed in Ellis County well it was very big Ellis County would have been in it and it would have accelerated particles to three times the maximum energy that will eventually be reached at the Large Hadron Collider it would have discovered the Higgs particle 15 years ago and would be now doing a much much better job than the LHC can do in probing its properties they're looking for new things like maybe it the particle that makes up dark matter and these two projects were both seen as Texas projects the SSC obviously would have been in Texas and the International Space Station although it's up there would be monitored from the Johnson manned spaceflight Center in Houston and they came into competition in Congress the Clinton administration said well we're in favor of both but we're really in favor of the National Space Station and Congress just barely passed the International Space Station and voted down the superconducting supercollider something which has left me permanently scarred funds now are drying up even more than back in the early 90s we all read the newspapers about this what can we do about this well this is a democracy and it seems to me we don't have the right to expect the public to support this search for a unified view of nature unless we can get them interested in it and that's why I'm here thank you thank you well I you know I think I finished on time i we have time for 10 or 15 minutes of questions yes I said yeah go ahead I recently in the news there was a discovery of black hole which spins near the speed of light I'm just wondering does that evaporate faster ah I think the answer is yes it probably does but I'm not an have not an expert on black holes and I remember a time in my life when although I knew the theory of black holes I didn't believe they actually existed and and well now it's clear they do and but I have never so I think you're right but I don't know for sure oh well yeah that is a good question thank you for asking it I think there are a number of things that can be done on a fairly small scale for example as an experiment that would produce neutrinos at Fermilab near Chicago they would travel under the earth to a mine in Minnesota where they could then be detected that way we would learn about the properties of the neutrinos this tiny mass that I mentioned and the way that mass correlates with the way they interact I mean we describe neutrinos in two different ways there are electron neutrinos for example which produce electrons when they hit something but they don't have a definite mass the neutrinos that have definite mass they're mixtures of the neutrinos that interact in definite ways we need to sort that out because as I mentioned neutrino masses are one of our few tangible clues to something that's going on this incredible energy of 10,000 trillion times the energies we can study there are other things like looking for the decay of the proton the proton is usually thought to be absolutely stable experiments so far show that protons live longer than a million million million million million million years that's much longer than the age of the universe but so you're not going to observe a proton decay by just having one proton and waiting for it to decay but that's an average lifetime if you have a million million million million million million protons which isn't that hard you know a thousand tons of water then maybe you'll see one decay a year that is very difficult because there are cosmic rays that can imitate proton decays but these experiments have pretty well dried up also I should say the experiment to look at neutrinos traveling hundreds of miles under the earth and then being detected in a mine in Minnesota that also hasn't been funded so there are lots of things these are not at the multi billion dollar level they're sort of at the hundred million dollar level not I mean it's not money you can come by easily but it's it's not in the same categories of big accelerator I think after the LHC is finished we will need another accelerator very likely a Collider which collides electrons and anti electrons because that produces something very clean that we understand the theory very well in the Large Hadron Collider you have two protons colliding with each other protons are bags of quarks and gluons it's like two garbage trucks colliding and all sorts of garbage comes out and you have to be very clever and looking for the thing you're interested in the Higgs boson of it or the Dark Matter particle or whatever it is you can do things much more precisely with electro positron Collider x' but that's very expensive that's also at the multi billion dollar level most people think it would have to be an international collaboration in fact there's even a name for this the international linear collider and they have workshops on it and so on but one of the things I went through with the super collider was trying to get international collaboration and building it and that isn't easy because it's only going to be in one country and other countries don't want to put money into any country but their own so this is going to be very very difficult there are lots of things that we need to do in space the you have this James Webb Space Telescope that appears to be going ahead you have this exhibition here and that will as was mentioned earlier that will supplant the Hubble Space Telescope and get us much closer to the origin of stars for instance but there are other things that need to be done for instance the universe is filled with microwave radiation left over from the time when the universe was well when the current Big Bang was 380,000 years old I say the universe was that over the universe may be eternal but the Big Bang in its present version was 380,000 years old at that point the universe became transparent to microwave radiation and the microwave radiation that was filling the universe well then it wasn't microwave radiation then it was visible now it's been red shifted to microwave frequencies it's filling the universe we've been studying it and it's taught us a tremendous amount about what was going on in the early universe but there are other studies that need to be made which we haven't yet seen how to do how to get the money for in particular looking for traces of gravitational waves they leave an imprint on this microwave background so that's another thing that needs to be done and I suppose you know people in biology have things they'd like to do I'm not against that loop quantum gravity oh that's what you're referring to well you use the word emergence right was that the word emergence yeah okay this came up a lot in arguments about the supercollider some people who work on the physics of ordinary matter so-called condensed matter liquids solids pointed out that in their work they don't really use much for elementary particle physics they use principles that emerge when you have very large numbers of particles like a million million million million particles in a gram of water you have concepts like temperature and entropy which make no sense on the level of a single molecule of water but which do make sense when you have a million million million particles all together and they said therefore there's no sense in which what you're trying to do for much more money than we spend is more fundamental than what we do my answer is there's no question that whether it's condensed matter physicists or biologists or philosophers use concepts that are not directly related to elementary particles and don't get much help from elementary particle physics yet the principles on which they base their work do emerge they emerge in the sense that they are logical consequences of the physics that we study the the elementary particle physicists study the fact that then the details of elementary particles aren't important to some of who studies superconductivity or tidal waves or whatever is beside the point the point is not to try to reorganize the way science is done I explicitly in fact said I don't want to do that and couldn't if I wanted to the point is to understand why things are the way they are and if you want to understand why water boils at a certain temperature you have to trace a chain of reasoning back to something very fundamental and that very fundamental level is the level of the elementary particles I'm scared I'm scared that the tools may be too expensive we'll see what comes out of the Large Hadron Collider and out of the planck satellite which I believe on March 21st will have a news conference where they a lot and they're studying the microwave radiation and they may have some exciting news about the microwave radiation we'll see I mean certainly too early to despair but I think you know despair is a distinct possibility the idea of atoms goes back to about 400 BC to loose if us and Democritus and they speculated that all matter is composed of atoms traveling and avoid and it took a long time to verify that it took until about 1900 before chemists and physicists were convinced that atoms were real there were physicists in fact even in 1900 to still didn't believe in the existence of atoms and we may be in for another 2,500 year hiatus I certainly hope not but that's more of a problem for you than it is for me well that's a question much closer to the interactive s south-by-southwest the concerns I have mixed feelings you know we have an open access system at least in my kind of physics when you write a physics article so often before you send it to a journal you post it to a website called archive and every physicist in the world can read it and in fact it works very well based they can often then tell you what's wrong with it and you can correct it before it gets published the I do think that the journals play an important part not in editing articles I have never seen an article in physics exposed to serious editing the kind you get when you submit an article say to the New York Review of Books where they actually make it better what they do is they they make sure that you're using their style for footnotes that's the kind of editing that goes so I don't put any value on the editing that the journals do but they do do a very good job of sending out the articles to experts and they know who the experts are and getting rational assessments of the articles and and then judging what they should do should they accept it should they turn it down and so on I would hate to give that up now I know that some open access journals do that but I don't know how well they do it and you know I have a kind of edmund burke's as feeling that when you have existing institutions that working pretty well you don't scrap them for something else which sounds like it'd be a little better and so we have these journals like the Physical Review in my field that I think work very well they're so expensive these days only libraries buy them but they represent a permanent form of publication which on paper with ink that I find very reassuring that an article of mine will still be there gathering dust on the shelves a century from now I think yeah I'm overstating my welcome and thank you very much you've been a wonderful audience

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Length: 53min 43sec (3223 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2013