The Role of Wonder in Science: A Conversation with Prof Brian Greene

[Music] good evening everybody and uh thank you to Graham and to Science Foundation Ireland for for their support of this series and also for supporting the the importance of uh engaging the public with science and technology and uh that's something that the science Gallery is very committed to and it's something that we've had the wonderful opportunity to work uh with the world Science Festival in New York on within for two successive years now and it's really for anybody who hasn't been to it it's a it's a it's an absolutely fantastic uh event um um this evening we're going to be exploring the boundaries uh of science the boundaries of inquiry and we're going to be exploring uh with Brian Green uh the the role of one wonder and mystery in science and uh those are two words that perhaps we don't always associate with science some people think of science is all about certainty and all about uh getting the facts right but we're going to try and open up that question and uh it's going to be a conversation a free flowing conversation there's going to be plenty of opportunity for you and the audience to get involved uh and join the discussion um so please do think of of questions um whether they're about string the Theory or multiverses or some of the other things that we might explore but before we get into that um I wanted to start with this uh quote uh from Einstein which is a quote uh that I think Brian Green uh finds inspiring and interesting and it's something that I find fascinating as almost a confession from a scientist um uh about about wonder and the Mysterious and um uh Einstein said the most most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious it is the source of all true art and all science he to whom this emotion is a stranger who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead his eyes are closed and I would like to ask you Brian you what do what does that mean to you as a scientist well well it's interesting I only actually know the first part of that quote the first sense I'd never heard the the second part which I think really brings it's amazing how people you know in this age of trying to have quick quotes they actually wind up cutting out the part that really matters and and I agree with it fully I mean you know the the the most amazing thing about the scientific journey is that we spend most of our life in the dark we spend most of our life trying to figure things out and most people don't recognize but maybe people here do 99.9% of everything we do is flat out wrong and it's not wrong because we make mistakes it's wrong because the universe is such uh rich source of mystery that our attempts to understand it are usually Off the Mark so you know if in your lifetime you have one or two or a couple great discoveries that's spectacular but the waste basket is full of things that just went no so so it's all about being comfortable searching in the dark I mean the other Einstein quote that I that I know along those lines is when when he spoke about the general theory of relativity years later right he published it 1915 you know late fall 1915 he decades later described the search for general relativity as as years of anxious wanding in the dark for a truth that he could sense but couldn't quite see until finally he emerged into the light and that to me is what it's all about the problem is most of us don't ever emerge into the light uh but but that's what the journey is all about and is Wonder uh something that even on a day-to-day level and your work as a scientist is important to you I mean do you sort of have you know in your calendar your schedule do you have like 10:00 a.m. Wonder for two hours or contemplate the mysterious or you know I wish it was as romantic as that you know that it's not you know and and the problem is many students come into science having read various books and and at least I do try to bring out that that that sense of wonder and mystery but when they have to learn the mathematics and actually get down to brass taxs and really dig fingers into to the details often that's a turning point for some students they like whoa I didn't realize you know behind all of this was very rigorous thought and so the bulk of what we do is not sitting there and and wonder and it's you know doing the calculations it's writing the computer programs it's doing the simulations it's trying to figure stuff out and I do try to pull back on a regular basis and recognize what it is that we're trying to figure out I mean those calculations oh those are really trying to figure out some insight about the origin of the universe those calculations trying to figure out something about the nature of unified theories but when you're deep in the details it's often hard to get that sense of wonder and you do have to in some sense train yourself to pull back and see the bigger picture now and then and I I'd be very interested to know a little bit more about what what it was that really sucked you into science you know was there a moment an inspiration some sort of experience that that triggered that interest what was it I don't know if there was really a specific moment but there were moments that that certainly stand out for me I remember one I grew up across the street from a planetarium in Manhattan in the Hayden Planetarium and um basically whenever it was raining outside that's where my mother would send me to get me out of her hair kind of so I'd wander around this Planetarium and you know when I think by the time I was in six or 7th grade I got a sense at that place of how fantastically minuscule and unimportant we all are I mean when you're comparing Earth to the solar system to the galaxy to the hundred billion or so galaxies that we know are out there it does give you a sense of kind of being puny and um it just began to well up inside of me that you know I people have been asking why we're here for a long time but there clearly wasn't an agreed upon answer that had been sort of set in stone so it struck me that maybe the best way to get a sense of meaning against this backdrop of enormity would be to just figure out not why we're here but how we're here how did the universe come to be how did the stars come to be and as I began to realize that was the domain of physics was that still as a child I mean that you were you know sort of 12 13 or so uh and that really propelled me forward to say try to put the why questions to the side and just try to do the easier how questions and that's really what drove me forward interesting I'm delighted to hear as an Irish man that it was the reain that drove you to science and and uh but but you know how did that Journey progress I mean did you uh so you you then went to to University I suppose and uh how did that progress as a area of curiosity and I I like the how questions rather than the why questions it it it started more in mathematics so sort of learning the the language of the universe in some sense in mathematics and and and when I began to get the facility of how you apply mathematics to solve real problems that to me was also a vital one of those inspirational moments and that one I remember specifically it was high school physics and the teacher set us this problem you had a piece of chewing gum attached to the ceiling and attached to a ball and you swing the ball so as the ball swings the chewing gum stretches figure out the trajectory of the ball and you know it's not a hard problem when you learn the basic math behind this sort of stuff but I remember solving this in my room and running down the hall to my father father to show him the result you know not because I thought he was a fishan a of chewing gum and balls kind of thing but just to this idea that you could do math and figure something real about the world out there was just sort of an amazing idea to me and and that propelled me to study a lot of mathematics but always with the idea that physics would be the place where this mathematics would be applied so I did that in in college and you know graduate school I was I was at Oxford you know here uh and uh when String Theory this approach to unification really bubbled up which was 1984 that was my first year in graduate school at Oxford and and it was like it was really a godsend because here it was the need for heavy mathematics applied to some of the biggest physics questions of the age the ones that Einstein sought but never found this unified theory and and that's where all my effort went yeah so so what what was part of the the joy in that the kind of the joy of solution that mathematics can Prov like the kind of you know getting something out and and so was that you know the sort of the pleasure of the elegant solution was that an important thing for you it was definitely a big part of it the other part of it is it's a it's a it's a great thing that you have these big questions that might be susceptible to a language that has very certain answers so back to your earlier question about sort of the the Wonder and the uncertainty sure we wander in the dark try to figure stuff out but the great thing is if you are on the right track and doing things in a way that's really relevant to reality then whether you approach it this way or this way or that way whichever mathematical techniques whatever approach you use it's all going to converge on the same answer and that's that I mean that's that's wonderful I mean we we see that today right it you know we have this archive where all the new papers that people write are are published immediately so we can see what's going on in various parts of the world everybody contributes to the archive the physics archive and it doesn't matter your approach doesn't matter where you are it doesn't matter your training it doesn't matter your particular style you can have five different papers come out within a short period of time all focused on the same question and if they are doing it correctly they're all revealing the same answer even if it's done in very different ways and that's again one of the beauties of the language of mathematics you know natural language yeah you can go off in any direction there's no constraint ultimately Universe the universe provides the constraint for the language of mathematics and and that's the the one piece that really keeps us Tethered to reality and I I suppose one of the challenges that you were getting to grips with uh in Oxford was this challenge that you mentioned of reconciling Einstein's uh general relativity applying to the world of the very large with the the absolutely minute world of quantum mechanics and you know how how how can those two worlds and those two theories be brought together and how how how did you kind of engage with that and what emerged from it well that's a huge question which has really driven a whole body of research for a long time now but you're right Einstein developed general relativity as we mentioned you know early part of the 20th century it describes stars and galaxies using this notion of curv SpaceTime which is a beautiful Theory quantum mechanics was developed 20s and 30s to describe a completely different realm molecules atoms and subatomic particles and it does a fantastically great job of making predictions down there so two theories each works wonderfully well in its own domain but each in some sense when you try to put them together says the other is wrong so it's this Waring hostility between the two pillars of 20th century physics that we in the 21st century have been trying to put together and the first glimmers of an approach for doing that were developed by a guy named Michael Green no no relation to me uh who's now at Cambridge and John Schwarz in this approach called super string theory and um it posits that our view of what nature is made of little tiny dot particles is the usual picture that we have in mind electrons and quarks neutrinos things of that sort it says that if you probe them even deeper they wouldn't be little dots they'd be little filaments little vibrating strings with the different notes that the vibrating strings being able to play corresponding to different particles of Nature and amazingly this move from a little dot the old picture to a little string the new picture winds up apparently on paper curing the hostilities between gravity and quantum mechanics which is very exciting but again we don't know that it's the Right theory but at least it has a chance of being the Right theory could we not just live with the contradiction like you know like live with the fact that we have general relativity and we have quantum mechanics and just they're both true in different areas some say that and I don't understand how they can say that uh some famous people have said that I won't mention any names but it seems insane Freeman Dyson Freeman Dyson you did it I didn't say it you know I don't know I don't know how he says could have said that uh and and maybe I just don't understand because he's a brilliant physicist of course but there are domains where you need to put general relativity and quantum mechanics together for instance at a black hole center of a black hole what is a black hole say a star implodes in on itself it's so massive that you need a theory of gravity general relativity but when it collapses down to a infinite tesmo spec which is what happens when a black hole forms you also need quantum mechanics since it's so small so here's a domain where you can't separate them out and say ah use general relativity here use quantum mechanics here in that extreme domain you need both theories to operate together so you can't Cordon them off you can't sequester them in a way that would allow that dual picture to work as far as I can see and how many dimensions are you currently working in it depends how you count and when you ask but um the the version of string theory that we were developing say when I was a graduate student in the 80s and 90s had nine dimensions of space and one of time and that's again a slightly nutty sounding idea but the mathematics of string theory simply doesn't work if you have three dimensions of space left right back forth and up down it demands that you have other dimensions of space and and again just to avoid confusion I don't sort of mean like a diagonal Dimension you know literally a new direction that in principle you could move in beyond the ones that we know about how can you make sense of that well you imagine that some dimensions are big and that's why we can see them and freely navigate through them them well other dimensions might be crumpled up and very small all around us but so tiny that we don't see them with the naked eye and even with our most advanced accelerator experiments now that was the situation in the 80s and 90s late 90s well mid to late 90s we learned that our mathematical techniques that we've been using to uncover these Dimensions mathematically were sufficiently coarse to have missed one more Dimension and that brought the total number of spatial Dimensions up to 10 with time taking us to 11 space-time Dimensions so that's the Uber version of the theory that we now work with 10 dimensions of space one of time so 11 dimensions and how many universes uh again it depends how you count uh and so so um separate from String Theory there has been a series of developments over decades which which is exactly what this book is really about suggesting that our universe might not be the entirety of reality and look that's a strange idea right most of us were raised to believe that the word Universe means everything right and and I I I do say most of us with a a degree of forethought I don't know if my kids are here but um my my daughter who is now five no she's not here but um when she was three and a half I was holding her I said Sophia I love you more than anything in the universe and she said to me Daddy universe or Multiverse she had heard me talk about this stuff for far too long uh but barring that kind of a weird upbringing you know most of us think universe is everything but what we have found is that from a variety of different angles their suggestion is that reality is so much bigger than the universe that we once thought that we have coined a new term this term Multiverse now String Theory does contrib rute to this idea by suggesting its own version of multi- universes and it comes from the extra Dimensions because a big puzzle for decades has been what's the exact shape I said the extra dimensions are crumpled up but what's the exact shape of the extra Dimensions now I might say well does it does it really matter if they're crumpled up and small we don't see them who really cares what the shape is but you really do need to care about the shape because it turns out that when these little strings are vibrating they're so small that they don't just vibrate in the big Dimensions that you and I can see they also vibrate into these crumpled up dimensions and just like the um the air that's going through a French horn has vibrational patterns dictated by the shape of the instrument the vibrations of the string are dictated by the shape of the extra dimensions and the vibrations are what determine things like particle masses and the strengths of forces and all the details that yield the universe as we know it so you need to know what the shape of the extra Dimensions actually is now when I was a graduate do my thesis my dissertation was analyzing the shape for the extra Dimensions one of the candidate shapes and seeing the physics that comes out and it didn't match reality but at that point there were only five candidate possible shapes so we went back and analyzed the next one again it didn't match Reality by the time we turned back to the list it had grown mathematicians and physicists had found other candidate shapes 100 a thousand 10,000 possible different shapes that number is now grown to 10 to the 500 different possible shapes that have been put forward as candidates for what the extra Dimensions look like the problem is we can't possibly analyze those One By One 10^ The 500 is more than the number of particles in the observable universe so you can't analyze them one by one so the suggestion has come forward that maybe what the reality is there are many universes each with a different shape for the extra dimensions and we live in one universe and not another simply because our universe is the one that has that shape that gives rise to those particle properties that allow us to exist so it's a very different Vision than the one Einstein had which was a single unique universe that we just need to understand the suggestion and it is very controversial is maybe there are many universes each with different properties and you live where you can exist and each with different laws of physics each with different features that would appear as though the laws of physics were different but there is one overarching law of physics that would apply to all but environmental differences can make those laws appear different I mean on the moon gravity appears different than it does on the Earth right because of an environmental difference the Earth isn't as massive as as the the moon isn't as massive as the Earth maybe that's the same thing with universes and do you believe as some people have said that you know everything that can possibly happen does in one of these universes uh well if you do take the mathematics seriously that is the case and that's sort of a funny thing right because because um we're used to reality having features that stamp it with a certain kind of identity And if every possibility happens it seems like we lose our ident I mean that would mean that there's a universe where I'm in that chair and you're in this chair and you know you're the physicist and I'm asking you questions you know it's all I mean when I was first talking about this stuff I remember I gave a a book talk on this in New York and some woman in the front row she says well um if if you know if everything can happen consistent with the laws of physics you know uh in but variations you know uh does does that mean that you know there's a particle arrangement somewhere where where Sarah Palin is President and I know I'm not very political so I didn't really know how to respond but somebody in the back saying didn't you hear the professor the arrangement of particles must be consistent with the laws of physics yeah um so but but it is a there is a serious issue here um because on that basis uh What uh system of morality can we have how can we make decisions if effectively the world everything that can possibly happen does so that is that a new form of determinism that well it's an interesting question where Free Will comes into this at all because if you're going to talk about morality and and my personal view is that free will and many physicists feel the same way but not all free will is a complete illusion right so we tell ourselves this story we have free will and you need to buy into that story to live to exist within a society but do we really have any free will no I don't think so at all when I look at the laws of physics at least as we currently understand them and I admit at some point maybe we'll have new laws of physics and like oh there's free will damn it you know we missed it all these years but now when we look at the laws of physics there is no place for free will in those you know and and you know you know I do think that we are just collections of particles a bag of particles I mean Steven colar I don't know if you guys watch him at all here but uh so I did an interview with him and and you know was got kind of contentious you know and uh and at the end I said to him look you are just a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics and he looked at me and I was like oh God I hope he can pull this one out because it's like there's silence here and he looked at me and he said that's a great pickup line you know uh but I do believe that and I think that's all that it is well I've been predetermined to ask this question um there Nobel Lau at Philip Anderson he he um is quite an outspoken critic of string theory and he he once actually described it as a futile exercise in physics um why why are people so critical some people very critical of string theory what what do they think is wrong with it oh well one overarching response I G is whenever someone's hypercritical about a subject you should always look a little bit deeper because there's usually some ancel reason that that's driving it um but I'm not going to analyze that at all I just put that out there uh but but um not naming names but but um but but there is absolutely valid reasons to be very critical about strength Theory and I should say that I am very critical about String Theory it has made no experimentally uh testable predictions that would allow us to determine whether it's right or wrong and science ultimately is about that process so I am hypercritical of the subject and I don't believe that string theory is is correct what I do believe is that it's our best approach for putting together quantum mechanics and general relativity something that has to be done but until the theory is able to make contact with observation and experiment nobody should believe it that doesn't mean that nobody should work on it or should think about it or try to push the Frontiers forward or that kids can't get excited about it and want to go into physics because of the opportunities with this Theory but it does mean that you have to put it in the right context and if we fail to do that or if we have yet to make the balance story out in the general public then then then that's that's not a good thing so when I do talk about the subject I try to emphasize this side of it I'm still enthusiastic about the subject and somehow maybe that is out outweighing or out shading you know the the overall picture but I'm as critical as they are and speaking of experimental physics and and experimental discovery uh the last 8 days have obviously been an extraordinary time since the announcement of the observation of aan which may or may not be the higs BOS on which is the amazing degree of caution with which the announcement was made but uh uh it's an fascinating time because this week we have also the director general of CERN in Dublin for Dublin City of Science and the eself conference um from your point of view from the point of view of your of string theory what what does that actually mean uh this Discovery Well it it doesn't affect day-to-day String Theory just yet because frankly we've been operating under the assumption that the higs particle the higs bosen was the right idea and would be found in fact I was thinking I don't know that I've written a single paper over the last 25 years which in one way or another did not implicitly make the assumption that the higs idea that this kind of Bose on this kind of so-called scalar field idea was real and would one day be confirmed so if they hadn't found it in a way it would have shaken up our work um more vigorously than the discovery itself but what the discovery does show is it shows again like we were talking about before that mathematics again appears to be the Gateway toward understanding features of reality that we haven't yet been able to test the idea was put forward in 1964 based upon mathematical calculations trying to answer a very basic question where does math come from where do the mass of electrons and quirks the fundamental particles where does their heft come from so higs put forward this crazy idea that there's this invisible substance filling space this invisible molasses likee substance now called the higs field and when particles try to burrow through the higs field the higs Molasses it's sticky and that's where their mass comes from he put forward this idea the paper was initially rejected from the journal nobody believed it but as people began to study the equations they realized ah this idea has legs and it began to be accepted by the physics community so much so I have to tell you that when I started graduate school at Oxford 1984 people spoke about the Hicks field with such nonchalant such confidence that for many months I had no idea that this idea that I was learning about was speculative I thought it was real and then then I sub learned no no we don't really know that this is true and I was like really and and and that's the state of the field and then you know as you say a few days ago there's finally announcement that this idea seems to be supported by experimental observation so it shows us that mathematical ideas can be trust you can't trust them all but the techniques do take us to the truth and that's an exciting thing for someone like me whose work is purely mathematical and do you think there are still big unanswered questions in physics yeah we pretty much have it all no it's huge know we scratched we you know the proverbial Iceberg just a tip I mean I mean even in in our own lifetime we've observed this strange thing called dark energy that nobody expected which is driving the universe to expand at an ever increasing rate I mean the expectation was that just as you throw a ball up it goes up slower and slower because gravity pulls it back everybody believe that the universe is expanding but the pull of one Galaxy on every other would slow the expansion over time the observations have shown that's not the case it's speeding up it's like throwing a ball upward and it goes up faster and faster so the big mystery is what's pushing ing the universe apart our best explanation is that again there's a substance filling space invisible like the higs field called dark energy which basically means we don't know what it is fancy word for that and it's pushing everything outward that's a big mystery to really figure out what the dark energy is will it change over time will it decay how will affect the far future of the cosmos and that's one of you know a hundred questions that we could list from where does time come from where does space come from where do the fundamental part articles come from what are the forces of nature we know four are there others on and on a list of questions that will keep us busy for eons fantastic well I'm going to open it up soon to the the audience for questions but before I do that I just wanted to touch on one area that we haven't really talked about which is that uh uh you said uh once and I was very taken by this um statement that science need not be experienced only in the head but it can also be experienced fully and viscerally uh what did you mean by that well what I meant by that is that well maybe just give you an example you know my my mother has no idea why I do what I do right so so I wrote you know the elegant universe and um I gave it to her that was my first book that I I wrote back in 1999 and a few weeks later I asked her if she enjoyed it and she said well she enjoyed the dedication which was was to her and my dad I said you know what about the rest she said well I tried to really get me a headache you know um and um and I appreciate that idea that you know for for some people science is just something up here it stresses the mind and and it can be overwhelming and not be something that you want to engage with but the but the act of doing science I mean when you find a discovery when you when you find something that no one has ever known about before you know it makes it's thrilling I mean Einstein himself when he wrote down the general theory of relativity the first calculation he did did was to apply it to the motion of the planet Mercury there was this mystery about Mercury that its orbit was not fitting in the way Newtonian Dynamics would suggest Mercury should move so he does the calculation and it matches the anomaly it explains this feature of Mercury's orbit and Einstein described that it gave him heart palpitation for hours after that Discovery that's not just in your head that's in your body and that's what real science is about and and I think the more people recog recognize that the more people will see that science needs to be put alongside literature and music and theater and dance and art as a vital part of what it means to be human it's interesting earlier we were talking um somebody was saying that the fact that mathematics applies so well to the world is the best evidence that we're actually living inside a simulation would you would you agree with that you know it one of the chapters in my book deals with with that idea because one of the ways that you could have other universes is by creating them simulating them on a computer and again I you may know Nick Bostrom over at Oxford he put forward a wonderfully interesting calculation sort of thought experiment where if you think about it if you try to create another Universe a real physical other universe that's pretty hard to do right there actually are theories about how you might generate other universes in the laboratory but none of them really seem to hold water but if you were able to create universes on a computer which would have simulated beings like in The Matrix that really think that they're in a universe even though they're just bits and bites wafting through a computer well if you got good at that you could just create Universe after Universe by just changing this or that element in a computer program which would mean that the number of simulated universes if you can simulate them with such Fidel that the beings inside of them think they're real like this one then the number of simulated universe will far outstrip the number of real universes once you can do this which means that if there are many many more simulated universes than real universes and the ODS are just by sheer statistics that if you are a sensient being it's likely that you're a sensient being inside a simulation um which is a kind of disturbing I idea at some level but then you think about it and you say well so what if it's real enough who cares if it's simulated but nevertheless it's a striking idea that that could well be the dominant form of universe in the Multiverse um you mentioned dance and music and and I suppose one of the things that you've been very committed to is this interplay between science and the Arts and you've worked with Alan Alda you've uh you're doing this amazing uh work that you've done with uh in collaboration with Philip Glass uh Icarus at the edge of time uh which is on Saturday I believe the national Concert Hall um uh can you say a little bit about that experience what you think the Arts can bring to science well I think it sort of fits into what we were just saying a moment ago the Arts everybody knows that you take them in in a in a very emotional visceral way great music great art it just immediately has a direct connection to you and science doesn't naturally have that direct connection but if you meld science and the Arts in an organic Quake because I got to tell you I've seen some versions of science and art where it brings out the worst in both it is just awful okay but but if you're able to bring science and art and like you do here in in a wondrous way then it allows the science to penetrate I think much more deeply than it otherwise would and we've found certainly at the world Science Festival that art provides new avenues of entry into science so there are people who wouldn't go near science but they would go to music or dance or theater and if that peace has a direct link to science then you've brought them into science in a different way so they sort of come in for the art and they leave with the science which is wonderous when it happens but you know my experience you know with Philip Glass I think is is a good one I mean philli is a composer deeply interested in ideas and when I presented him this idea of taking this kid story about a boy going to a black hole and making it into a performance piece he got real excited about it and really wanted to find ways to take the science and make music that was not just random but relevant to the science so I mean one night at 11:00 I got a call from him and he says Brian you know I'm I'm writing the P part of the piece right now where the boy is circling the black hole and the time is slowing down and generalistic effects I think I've got the music for that you know but can you come down and listen to it you know see so you know I went downtown to a studio and he played the stuff and he was so struggling and and and so wanting to grasp the science and find a musical rendition of it that it was that it was great and and I think he did a great job with the score and it really gives you a sense of how time itself has this warped quality near the edge of a black hole which is what this particular piece is all about so strings doing String Theory well that's actually there's actually a different piece I did with the Amerson quartet called strings and strings I won't bore you with that one but that's actually where my first association with art came from thank you well if your heads haven't exploded by this point uh we uh I think this would be a good time to open it up to questions and Thoughts From the audience so and we have two mediators uh with microphones who be happy to pass them to you yes up here yeah um thank you that was very interesting um as a scientists at least by education um part of The Wonder of science I think is the the math content so when we popularize science sometimes we need to strip it from a lot of the maths so what are we missing when we try to use analogy and explain things to people who may not have the the math depth that you do have you know I think you're always going to lose something with an analogy but I think really good analogies can at least get at the heart of the physical idea allowing someone that doesn't have the Technical Training to at least get a feel for what it is that we're talking about what you're of course missing is the ability to talk about it with any precision and what sort of pains me the most I have to say is every so often and I suspect you do too I get a manuscript from somebody um and then perhaps the difference is if you've not written a popular book I don't know if you've had but I get a manuscript from somebody who says look I read your book and uh for the last six years I've been in my basement figuring out how to go the next step and I just want to say to them it's just a translation of the math there's no way you can go the next step based upon anything that's in these books because the math isn't there and ultimately that's the language for going the next step and I think most people recognize that most people realize that that you're only getting a part of the story um you know the other side of your question though is you're also leaving out the beauty of the mathematics which for many of us is is is the source of some of the inspiration and the Wonder and there's no way around that and you know I've always had a mind to write a book about math that try to do just that I've not done it it's a challenge because the language is so foreign to many people but um I think you can still get pretty far without the math in terms of getting the essential ideas thank you do you have other questions yeah sort of related one yeah is that mik on yes yeah um have you had any real Quantum leaps of no pun intended of uh inspiration and jumping forward in ideas uh and working on string theory or has it all been just by pushing away at the equations well it's the funny thing um the Quantum Leap description because as you know the Quantum Leap is actually the smallest possible leap that an electron can take uh now it is discreet and maybe that's uh the the part that distinguishes it but in the you know popular parament quantumly of course I think that's probably what you have in mind and and and I've had a couple of moments like that not not many I wish I had more work I did on trying to understand whether or not space could rip apart in string theory something that can't happen in Einstein's theory that so-called topology change processes I think that in came from one of those kind of quantum leaps another thing that we discovered called mirror symmetry where you can have two different shapes for the extra Dimensions that yield identical physical systems different shapes but identical universes that also came from one of those moments of inspiration that you know I clearly remember but most of the time it is just pushing pushing along pushing the boundary along and look there there there are other people who are are smarter and better I mean a friend of mine was a a postto at The Institute for advanced study where Edward Whitten who's sort of probably the smartest person maybe that's ever lived uh works and his office shared a wall with Ed wht's wall and it was the summertime and they were like the only two people left at The Institute and my friend described to me how distressing it was to listen to Ed Whitten type and type and type eight hours a day cranking out paper after paper after paper these are sort of revolutionary papers you know from brain to computer and and but most of us can't can't do that most of us it is just pushing the boundaries in an incremental way making use of what other people have done pushing it a little step forward thank you we had a question over here yeah um sorry um I was reading a book recently by Marcus dooy about uh finding moonshine and he's talking you mentioned a briefly there about symmetries and how life's mimic symmetry how a b sees flower and it's a specific symmetry how they pollinate and stuff and you're were talking there about numbers and it just it's sprung to mind and I don't know does that have any sorry any relationship with string thees just in the fact that for like the no hugely hugely so I understand understand the question you know Richard I think it was Richard fman said that if he was going to summarize all of Science in one sentence where we've gotten he says that you know basically matter is made up of atoms the atomic hypothesis soort of the most important breakthrough in modern physics I would say the second sentence would be that symmetry underlies the laws of nature that really has been what's Driven 20th and 21st century ideas we found that the electrom magnetic force the weak Force the nuclear force can all be bound together into a symmetric pattern much like the points on a snowflake or the structure of a flower and literally we can embody that symmetry in a technical manner using something called group Theory there is a certain group of symmetries in a technical mathematical sense but you can sort of get the idea from the vernacular the group has a name it's su3 CR su2 CR U1 it just as a glorified version of the rotations that this cup respects so this cup is symmetric under these kinds of rotation it looks the same as I rotate it similarly the forces of nature when you rotate them in this abstract way also look the same and it's that structure which allowed us to work out the fundamental equations that underly the standard model of particle physics which is what's tested at the Large Hadron Collider so it's all based upon symmetry that's the key idea that has allowed us to go forward E yeah thanks so much for the talk it's really interesting to to have someone who's so articulate and communicated it with such passion I mred Matt's education and we were discussing in our Leonardo meeting earlier on how best can we bring maths to the public so everybody here is obviously interested in theoretical physics and maths but how can we extend that to just the general public without making it too technical without going on about the Beauty and the Elegance to people who aren't used to it how best can we put a poster up outside the science Gallery where everyone want to come in because it's maths do you have any ideas about that I have no no idea uh no it's a it's a tough question it's why I've not written a popular book on mathematics like we're talking about before I've had various ideas about how to do that I've never felt like any of them really did the job and I hope that one day maybe soon I'll have a clearer sense and and maybe be able to move forward in that kind of a project but I think it is the right question to be asking but I don't know what the answer is or is it someone else that at the meeting actually should we not be focusing on it and actually just lend our attentions to the people who do are who are interested in it should we not be kind of wasting energy on people that might I don't believe that but I'm just asking I don't I don't think that either and you know there have been various attempts I mean some attempts are obviously to show people where there's hidden mathematics in everyday things that they deeply care about I mean one good example which not enough emphasis was placed on but you remember back in the uh election the United States I guess it was 2000 when it was um who are the people involved so it was Al Gore and it was George Bush right and they were battling it out for who actually won the election and there was all this counting that you may have followed the hanging Chads trying to figure out 500 votes here 200 votes here if the United States was a mathematically literate populace people would have simply said this is a situation where the tools for the measurement are not sufficiently precise for the attempt to do the actual measurement you know if you say to someone measure the weight of an apple to 10 the minus5 kilos people know that the typical scale that we have is not adequate to the task that's exactly the situation we were in it's not that bush won or Gore nobody won because we simply didn't have adequate tools to measure who won and that should have been the conversation we should have figured out okay what do we do in a situation do you have a runoff do you have don't go back and count it's too close there's no way to determine based upon all the eror the errors are larger than the difference period and that would have been a great teaching moment for a mathematical idea that's pretty vital but it didn't happen maybe we should do a show about error that that might be yeah yeah absolutely thanks uh other questions yeah just kind of thought that occurred to me it's Bas partly on my own experience with Matts um it we we think of mats is this monolith uh and that you like matths or you don't like Matts but in some respects my my personal experience doing computer science and of things in college was that matths is more like music you can like jazz not like pop you can like hip-hop but not like rock or or something else and that there's almost a monolithic way that we introduce kids to matths uh that I think colors the experience and and some people and you can like it certain pits of certain points but that if we opened up the idea that there's different Avenues and multiple different paths and multiple different ways into it again I find as as as an undergraduate the first two years of mats loed it and the third year of mats loved it and and it was because I was doing different areas of mats and it was you know different things of interest no I think you're absolutely right I mean there some people love geometry because they're very visual some are like algebra since it's you know uh you know very concrete and and calculational so I mean I feel the same way they areas of mathematics that I don't have any interest in um usually because they're just too hard for me uh but you know there's certain kind of math that I gravitate more toward than others I think that's true for most people I think you're right sorry just hello yeah just a question that we meant to ask our professors when we were studying theoretical physics and we're always too nervous to ask uh which is basically do you really think that the universe is genuinely an n-dimensional pseudo Romanian manifold or whatever the current mathematical model using was or is there like a slight nagging doubt that this is just a really beautiful approximation and we're just getting more and more really beautiful approximations all the time uh so I would go even further that I have great confidence that that is an approximation after all it emerges from Einstein's view of gravity which we then have generalized so Einstein's view that you had a 3+1 dimensional you know pseudo Romanian manifold with various topological hous D and things of that sort but that was a completely classical Theory had nothing to do with quantum mechanics and as we've tried to mail quantum mechanics into the story various features of that picture have changed the number of Dimensions has changed as we discussed before but more than that when you get to very very small scales there's a lot of evidence in the theory like string theory but even in quantum mechanics more generally that the whole idea of distance which is what the metric does for you that ranian structure the whole idea of distance seems to be an approximate notion that only comes into play on sufficiently large scales there's not even apparently a notion of how far apart things are if you go sufficiently small and that's even in oxymoron I'm talking about small as distance but I'm saying at sufficiently small scales conventional ideas of space and time seem to go away which mean the conventional picture that you describe would go away too but the the sorry the extrapolation of that therefore now is with string theory for example do you for example believe that we live in an 11 dimensional or is it a beautiful mathematical model which is even closer approximation I I believe that there are certain domains of the universe where a description of reality in terms of a 10 plus 1dimensional pseudo ranium manifold is approximately valid there are other domains of the universe and we can quantify that based upon the corrections that come from the quantum processes at very small scales so we again we don't know that string theory is Right which is what prevents me from saying absolute certainty but based upon an idea like string theory we absolutely learn that there are domains where that whole story of having a geometrical space for the hypersurfaces and a Time Dimension that folds into it into some larger n plus one dimensional manifold just isn't right it just doesn't work it's not the correct description of reality on those distance scales so so absolutely an approximation is the way we look at it today there's a a question down here at the front who's been waiting for for well and uh then we're we're going to have to uh I think that is going to have to be the last one unfortunately I'm getting a signal unfortunately I think we've run out of time uh so yeah okay yeah can you hear me yeah um basically you seem to be very much interested in getting to the to the bottom of things in the whole universe I I but for me I would say the biggest question I never hear this talked about in science I mean maybe I'm just not listening enough but basically I'm I'm wondering you don't seem to ask where did life actually come from where did Consciousness actually come from and I would say that like earlier he was saying do you have any questions left I would say that is the biggest question and I haven't seen people asking it or so I'd like to know is it been asked by any branch of science uh sure I mean if you were to ask me what the three big questions that are on the landscape I would say the three biggest questions are where did the universe or Multiverse come from where did life come from where did Consciousness come from those are the B big three now the reason why we physicists don't talk about the Life part of the Consciousness part is we don't talk about it because we got nothing to say those are very complicated questions when we talk about having the standard model of particle physics that can predict the results of experiments to 10 decimal places we're talking about applying those equations to a single particle or a handful of particles when you talk about trillions of particles that are in some real complex interrelated relationship that somehow yields this thing called life and Consciousness that is so far beyond anything that we can speak of with any degree of certainty that we just don't have much to say but of course there are branches of biology and psychology Neuroscience that do investigate you know through fmri scans trying to get an understanding of is consciousness merely physical processes in the brain if it is we should be able to line up love and joy and hate and wonder with various parts of the brain lighting up and people are trying to M that kind of thing out so people are trying to study the emergence of life in other environments other planetary systems could they support life so yes people think about those questions all the time but people like me if if we if we're have our head on our shoulders we don't talk about it okay and can I just okay can I just as a that was the last question I'm really sorry second part just second part yeah yeah yeah really it was I You' the first part was the archin of life the universe and Consciousness what can the second part be can I just yeah well my my question was just that I've heard that at some levels of physics that the things only happen when people are conscious of them I mean could you explain that yeah that's a that's a Mis yeah I believe that's a complete misguided idea that came from the way quantum mechanics unfolded from the 1930s there is a real question in quantum mechanics which is this quantum theory describes a reality that's a fuzzy Haze of possibilities each with different probabilities which only becomes definite upon measurement so the electron could be here here and there you measure it you find it here the other possibilities go away and there's one definite outcome the puzzle is we don't really understand how the active measurement caused only one definite reality to snap to the four we don't know what happens to the other possibilities do they exist in some parallel reality we don't understand that process it's called the quantum measurement problem some have suggested that since Consciousness is typically involved in a measurement maybe it's the act of Consciousness that brings out a def reality I think it's total nonsense what really happens is there's environmental influence that affects a system and it's the impact of the environment whether it's a conscious being a computer a photon from the cosmic microwave background radiation banging into it and it's that interaction process that we believe is part of bringing a definite reality to the Flor it doesn't need a conscious being to be behind it now you could say how do you know that it's always a conscious being you always are conscious so whenever you see a definite reality Consciousness is brought to bear and that's one of the burdens of being a conscious being you can't ever get outside your own head so can we establish this absolutely no because of that issue but it nothing in the laws of physics suggest there's anything special about Consciousness and bringing that definite reality to the FL well that's that sorted thing uh so I'm afraid we're going to have to end it there um and uh before we we close I would like to mention that we are very fortunate to have a few copies of of Brian Green's book The Hidden reality uh which he has kindly agreed to sign if people are interested uh and um uh then I also wanted to remind you that Icarus at the Edge of Time is on on Saturday uh there are two performances one at 3:00 and one at 7:00 and I would really strongly recommend it if there are any tickets left I don't actually know that but uh if there are I would certainly recommend you get along there um and finally it just remains uh to ask you to join me in thanking science Foundation Ireland for the support of tonight's event and Professor Brian Green for this amazingly inspiring evening thank you

Channel: Science Gallery Dublin

Views: 49,148

Keywords: Science gallery, dublin, ireland, esof, trinity, michael john gorman, string theory, Brian Greene, professor, sfi, speaker series

Id: KzWeTpT43-U

Length: 54min 44sec (3284 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 24 2012