Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right | Artificial Intelligence Podcast

The following is a conversation with James Gates Jr., he is a theoretical physicist and professor at Brown University who works on

supersymmetry

, supergravity, a

theory

of super

string

s. He served on former President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and is now co-author of a new book. titled Proving Einstein Was Right about the scientists who set out to prove Stein's

theory

of relativity. He may have noticed that I have been talking not only to computer scientists, but also to philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, economists, and soon much more. To me, AI is much bigger than deep learning. Greater than computing is our civilization's journey toward understanding the human mind and creating echoes in the machine.

That journey includes, of course, the world of theoretical physics and its practice of first principles. Mathematical thinking to explore the fundamental nature of our reality. This is

artificial

intelligence

.

podcast

you enjoyed subscribe I need to give it five stars an Apple

podcast

follow on Spotify support on patreon or just connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled Fri D ma n if you leave a review an Apple podcast for YouTube or Twitter consider measuring ideas people Los Topics you find interesting help guide the future of this podcast, but in general I love commas that are full of kindness and thoughtfulness.

This podcast is a side project for me, but I still put a lot of effort into it, so positive words. The support of an amazing community from you really helped me. I recently started making announcements at the end of the introduction. I'll do it a minute or two after introducing the episode and no ad in between can ever interrupt the flow of the conversation, I hope. That works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. I provide timestamps for the start of conversations that you may have noticed and that you can skip, but it helps if you listen to the ad and support this podcast by trying the product or service advertised on this show is brought to you by Cash App, the financial app number one on the App Store.

I personally use Cash App to send money to friends, but you can also use it to buy, sell, and deposit Bitcoin in just a few seconds. Cash App also has a new investment feature: you can buy fractional shares worth $1, regardless of the share price, brokerage services are provided by Cash Shop, a subsidiary of Square Member at CIBC. I'm excited to work with Cash App to support one of my favorite organizations. First named and best known for their first robotics and Lego competitions, they educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students in over 110 countries and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator, meaning donated money is used most effectively. when you get the Cash app from the App Store.

Google Play and use the Lex podcast code, you'll get $10 and cash. Apple also donated $10 to the first, which again is an organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys to dream of designing a better world and now here's my conversation with Like James Gates Jr., you tell a story about when you were 8 years old. He deeply realized that the stars in the sky are actually places we could travel to one day. Do you think humans will ever venture outside our solar system? Wow, the question of humanity leaving the solar system is going to be a challenge and as long as the laws of physics we have today are accurate and valid, it will be extraordinarily difficult.

I'm a science fiction fan, as you probably know, so I love it. We dream of spaceships and traveling to other solar systems, but the barriers are simply formidable, if we venture a little into science fiction, do you think spaceships If we are successful and they take us outside the solar system, will we look like them? we have today or make fundamental advances our fundamental advances necessary to have genuine spaceships probably some really radical views on the way the universe works will have to take place in our science we could with our current technology think about building multiple generational spaceships where people Those who get on them are not the people who get off at the other end, but even if we do it because of mental problems, our bodies don't actually seem to be conscious to many people even when they get to Mars. is going to present this challenge because we live in this wonderful house that has a protective magnetic magnetosphere around it and therefore we are protected from cosmic radiation.

Once you abandon this shield, there are some estimates that, for example, if you send someone to Mars with that. technology probably about two years out there without the seal, they will be swapped moms, that means radiation, that probably means cancer, so that's one of the more formal challenges, even if we could overcome the technology, if you believe that. Mars is a hard place for you. Do you think we will one day be able to colonize Mars first? Do you think that one day we will be able to colonize Mars? we'll put one human on Mars and then do you think we'll put a lot of humans on Mars?

So, first of all, no. I am extraordinarily convinced that we will not put a human on Mars by 2030, which is a date that is often heard in public debate what the challenge is, well, you think there are a couple of ways you could slice this up, but the In the 1960s, about 10 years passed between the challenge posed by President Kennedy and our successful moon landing. I was actually here at MIT when the first moon landing happened, so I remember seeing it on TV, but how did we get there? Well, we had This extraordinary technical agency of the United States government, NASA, consumed about 5% of the country's economic output, so it is said that 5% of the economic output over approximately a 10-year period gave us leads 250,000 miles into space.

Mars is about a hundred times farther away. so we have a challenge at least a hundred times greater and we are spending about a tenth of the funds that we spent then as a government, so my claim is that it is at least a thousand times more difficult for me to imagine us getting to Mars 2030 and yet , that part that you mentioned in the speech that I have to include there from JFK that we do these things not because they are easy but because they are difficult, is such a beautiful line that I would love to hear it.

The modern president says of a scientific endeavor, well, one day we will live in the hope that such a precedent will emerge for our nation, but even if, as I said, even if you solve the technical problems of profit, biological engineering is what I most like. worries. I'm going to go out on a limb here, I think by two thousand ninety or something like that or two thousand one hundred, so let's say 120. I suspect we're going to have a human on Mars. Wow, so you think many years first, some tangents. I said bioengineering as a challenge of what is the challenge there, like I said, the real problem with interstellar travel, aside from the technological challenges, the real problem is radiation and how you design an environment or a body because we see rapid advances. going on in bioengineering, how do you design a ship or a body so that something is a recognizably human Union person that survives the rigors of interplanetary space travel?

It's a lot harder than most people seem to take into account, so if we could just stop at the 2092 2121 20 kind of thinking like that, you know, and let's focus on the money, okay, then Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are increasing the cost trying to stop reducing the cost. I mean, this is it, do you have hope? Is this really some kind of from a brilliant scientist with great vision, do you think that an entrepreneur can take science, make it cheaper and launch it faster, so that bending the cost curve realizes that it has been an anchor ?

This is the easiest way for me to discuss this. with people about what the challenge is, so yes, bending the cost curve is certainly critical if we want to be successful. Now you asked about efforts that are now sponsored by two very prominent American citizens, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. I'm actually disappointed with what I see in terms of the routes that are being followed, so let me give you an example and this one is going to be a little more technical, so if you look at the types of rockets that both organizations are creating . Yes, it's wonderful reusable technology to watch a rocket rise and land on its fins just like it did in sci-fi movies when I was a kid.

It's amazing, but the real problem is those rockets, the technology we are making now is not really that. different than what was used to go to the moon and there are alternatives, it turns out there is an engine called a flare engine, so a traditional rocket, if you look at the engine, it looks like a bell and then the flame comes out the bottom, but there is a type of engine called a flare engine that essentially when you look at it, it looks like an exhaust pipe like a fancy car, you know, it's long and elongated and it's a type of rocket engine that we know has been there.

In preliminary testing we know that it works and it's also much more economical because what it does is allow you to vary the amount of thrust as you climb in a way that you can't do with one of the bell-shaped engines, so you would think that An entrepreneur could try to achieve the breakthrough of using flared nozzles, as they are called, as a way to bend the cost curve because we keep coming back, that will be a major factor, but that is not happening, in fact, what we see is what what i think It's considered an incremental change in terms of our technology, so I'm not very encouraged by what I see personally, so incremental change won't bend the cost curve and I don't see it, just stay in science fiction for a question further.

Do you think we are alone in the universe? Are we the only intelligent form of life? So there's a quote from Carl Sagan that I really love when I hear this question and I remember the quote and it says something like if we are the only conscious life in the universe, it's a terrible waste of space because the universe is an incredibly big place and when Carl made that statement we didn't know about the profusion of planets that exist in the last decade. I have discovered over a thousand planets and a substantial number of those planets are similar to Earth in terms of being in the Goldilocks zone, as it is called, so in my mind it is practically inconceivable that they were the only conscious form of life in the universe, but that does not mean that they have come to visit us.

Do you think they would see each other? Do you think they would recognize extraterrestrial life if we saw it? Do you think you would be anything like the carbon-based biological system we have on Earth today? It would depend on life's native environment in which it arose if that environment was similar enough to our environment, there is a principle in biology and nature called convergence which is that even if you have two biological systems that are totally separate from each other, if they face conditions Similar tend to be relatives, nature tends to converge on solutions, so there could be similarities if this alien life form was almost born in a place similar to this place, the physics seems to be quite similar to the laws of physics throughout the universe.

You believe that stranger things than what we see on Earth can arise from the same kinds of laws of physics. I would say yes, first of all, if you look at carbon-based life, why do we have a carbon base? Well, it turns out that it is because of the way carbon interacts with elements, which is in fact also a reflection of the electronic structure. Select the carbon core structure so you can look at the chart developments and say, but wow, do we see similar elements? The answer is yes and one that when What you often hear in science fiction is silicon, so perhaps a silicon based life form exists if the conditions are

right

, but I think that is presumptuous of us. to think that we are the model by which all life has to appear before we submerge. in beautiful details let me ask you a big question what is for you the most beautiful idea, perhaps the most surprising and mysterious idea in physics, the most surprising idea for me is that we can really do physics, the universe did not have to be built in such a way manner. in such a way that, with our limited intellectual capacity, it is actually put together in such a way and that we are put together in such a way that we can with our minds, delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe which to me is pretty close to a miracle, so They are simple, relatively simple equations that can describe things, you know, the fundamental functions, then they describe everything about our reality, not that.

Can you imagine universes where everything is much more complicated? Do you think there is somethinginherent in universes that are such simple laws? Well, first of all, let me know that this is a question that I find in several guys: many people will raise the question whether mathematics is the language of the universe and my answer is that mathematics is the language that humans are capable of doing. using to describe the universe may have little to do with the universe but in terms of our ability it is the microscope is the telescope through which we are is the lens through which we can see the universe with the precision that no other language human allows then could there be other universes?

Well, I don't even know if this one is similar, I think so, but the beautiful and surprising thing is that in physics there are laws of physics, very few laws of physics that can effectively compress the functioning of the universe. Yes, that is extraordinarily surprising. If you're concerned, I like to use the analogy with computers and information technology. Regarding the transmission of large data packets, one of the things that computer scientists do for us is enable processes called compression, in which They take large packets of data and are pressed into much smaller packets, then transmitted, and then unpacked. at the other extreme and it seems to me a bit as if the universe has done us a favor: it has constructed our minds in such a way that we have this thing called mathematics which then, when we look at the universe, teaches us how to carry out the process of compression a quick question about compression do you think the human mind can be compressed? biology could be compressed we talked about space travel to be able to compress the information that captures a large percentage of what it means to be me or you and then be able to send it at the speed of light.

Wow, that's a great question and let me try to take it apart, unzip it into several pieces. I don't think wetware biology like ours has an exclusive patent. intellectual consciousness I suspect that other structures in the universe are perfectly capable of producing the data streams that we use in the process, first of all, our observations of the universe and an awareness of ourselves. I can imagine that structures can do that too, so that's part of what you were talking about that I would have some disagreement with consciousness, yeah, which is the most interesting part of consciousness for us humans, consciousness is the which I think is the most interesting thing about you and then you say that there are other entities throughout the universe.

I imagine, I imagine well that the architecture that supports our consciousness again has no patent on consciousness. In case you have an interesting idea, there are people maybe in philosophy called Pancyclists who believe that consciousness underlies everything, it's one of the fundamental laws. of the universe, do you have a feeling that that might fit? I don't know the answer to that question, part of that belief system is Ghia, which is that there is some kind of conscious life force on our planet and you know I found these things before I don't really know what to do with them.

My own experience. I'll be 69 in about two months, and I've spent my entire adulthood thinking about the way mathematics interacts with nature and with us. Try to understand nature and all I can tell you from all my integrated experience is that there is something extraordinarily mysterious to me about our universe. This is something Einstein said from his life experience as a scientist and this mystery almost feels like the universe. is our father, maybe it's a very strange thing to hear science say it, scientists say, but there are so many strange coincidences that you just have the feeling that something is happening while I interrupt you in terms of compressing what we are. consented to the speed of light, yes, so the first thing I would say is that it is probably very likely that

artificial

intelligence

will ultimately develop something like consciousness, something that for us will probably be indistinguishable from consciousness, so that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment.

What we've been up to here probably doesn't have a patent on consciousness because it's actually about data flows. I mean, that's what I can say, that's what we are, we are self-learning, self-acting data streams, which to me Lee is the most accurate way. I can tell you what I've seen in my life about what humans are like at the level of consciousness, so if that's the case, then you just need to have an architecture that supports that information processing, so let's assume that's true, that in fact that is what calling consciousness is actually a very peculiar type of data flow, if that is the case, then if you can export it to a piece of hardware, something metallic, electronic, whatever, then certainly Ultimately, that kind of consciousness could reach Mars very quickly.

It doesn't have our problems, you can design the body, like I say, there is a ship or a body, you design one or both, send it at the speed of light, well, that one is more difficult because that now goes beyond a simple matter of having a data stream and therefore the preservation of information in the data stream, unless you can build something that's like a super super super version of the way the Internet works, because most people They are not aware that the internet itself is actually a miracle, it is based on a technology called message packing, so if you could expand nc8 message packing in some way to preserve the information that is in the data stream, then maybe your dream will come true.

Can we mention that artificial intelligence is something like we humans don't have a monopoly on consciousness, the idea of ​​artificial systems and computer systems that can basically replace us humans, scares you, excites you, does it scare you? what do you think? So I'll tell you about a conversation I once had with Eric Schmidt. He was sitting in a meeting. with him and he was a few feet away and he turned to me and said something like you know Jim and maybe in a decade we will have computers that will do what you do and my answer was no unless they can dream because There's something about the human, the way that humans really generate creativity, it's somehow that I have this sense from my lived experience and from observing creative people who somehow connect with the irrational parts of what happens in our lives. head, yes, and dreaming is part of that irrationally, unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence that dreams.

I have a strong suspicion that you won't get something that will be fully conscious according to a definition I would accept - for example, imagine dreaming that you've played with some fascinating ideas. how you think when and we will begin to dive into the world of very small ideas of

supersymmetry

and all that in terms of visualization in terms of how you think about it how you dream about it how you come up with ideas in that fascinating and mysterious space, in my space of work, which is basically where I'm tasked with finding a mathematical palette of new ideas that will help me understand the structure of nature and, hopefully, help us all understand the structure of nature.

I have observed several different ways in which my creativity is expressed. There is a way that seems quite normal and that in a way I consider as the Chinese myth of water torture. Drop, drop, drop, you get more and more information and suddenly everything freezes and you get a clearer picture. And that's the kind of standard way of working and I think that's how most people think about the way that technicians solve problems, which is, you accumulate this set of information, at a certain point, you synthesize it and then boom, there's something new, but I've also observed in myself and other scientists that there are other ways in which we are creative and these other ways to me are actually much more powerful.

I first experienced this personally when I was a freshman at MIT living in Baker House. across campus and I was in a course called calculus 1801 at MIT and calculus comes in two different versions, one of them is called differential calculus and the other is called integral calculus. Differential calculus is the calculus that Newton invented to describe motion from our integral calculus. It was probably invented about seventeen hundred years earlier by Archimedes, but we didn't know it when I was a freshman, but that's what you study as a student and the differential calculus portion of the course was for me.

I wouldn't, how do I put it? this was something that with the drip tip method you could solve it now the integral part of the calculation I could memorize the formula that was not the formula that was not the problem the problem was why in my own mind why do these formulas work and why That's when I was in the part of the calculus course where we had to make multiple substitutions to solve integrals, I had a lot of difficulties. I was emotionally invested in my education because this is where I believe passion and emotion comes from.

It caused an emotional breakdown because I was having difficulty understanding the integral part of the calculation, so why another one? In my bedroom at the Baker house I was trying to solve a series of calculus problems. I wasn't getting anywhere. My head hurt a lot. I went to sleep and had a very strange dream and when I woke up, I woke up, I could do substitutions and integrals of 3 and 4. with relative ease now, this for me was not a surprising experience because I had never before in my life understood that a subconscious is actually capable of being harnessed to do mathematics.

I experienced this and I've experienced it more than once, so this was just the first time why I remember it like that, so when it comes to really difficult problems I think the kind of creativity you need to solve them is probably this second variety that arises somehow from dreams, if you think about it again, I told you. I'm Russian, so we romanticize suffering, but do you think part of that equation is the suffering that leads to that dream? So, suffering is. I am convinced that this type of creativity sickens the second mode of creativity, as I like to call it.

I'm convinced that this second mode of creativity is, in fact, that suffering is a kind of crucible that triggers it because mine, I think, is fighting its way out of this and the only way the heaters really solved the problem and although you are not consciously solving problems. Something is happening and I've talked to a few other people. There are similar stories. I guess the way I think about it is a little similar to the way thermonuclear weapons. They work and yes you know how they work, but a thermonuclear weapon is actually two bombs, there is an atomic bomb that has a kind of Delta compression and then you have a fusion bomb that explodes and in some way that emotional pressure I think acts like the first stage of a thermonuclear weapon. weapon that's when we have really important thoughts the analogy between thermonuclear weapons and the subconscious the connection there is uh at least visually that's kind of interesting well I might be fried I would have a few things to say well some of this is probably based on my own path through life, my father was in the military for us for 27 years, so I started my life on military bases and a lot of the things that wander through my subconscious are probably connected to the experience.

I apologize for all the tangents, but while you're at it, you're encouraging me to answer the stupid questions. No, they are not stupid. You know your father was in the army. What do you think of any other herbs? Tyson recently wrote a book about the interconnection of the progress of science with the aspirations of our military efforts and DARPA funding, etc. What do you think about war in general? Do you think we will always have war? Do you think we will always be in conflict? In the world, I'm not sure we're going to be able to afford to always have wars because, strictly speaking, not in financial terms but in terms of consequences.

If we look at current technology, we can have non-state situations. Actors acquired technology, for example bioterrorism, whose impact is, broadly speaking, equivalent to what nations used to impart to a population. I think the cost of war is ultimately going to be a little bit. I think it will work a little like the Cold. War, you know, we survived 50 or 60 years as a species with these weapons that are so terrible that they could have ended our way of life on this planet, but it didn't, why didn't it? It's a very strange and interesting thing, but it was called mutual assured destruction and the cost was so great that people finally realized that you can't really use these things, which is quite interesting because if you read the history about the development of nuclear weapons, companies realize this quite quickly.

I think maybe it was Schrodinger who said that these things are not really weapons, their political instruments and not weapons because the cost is very high and if you take that example andYou extend to the kind of technological development we're seeing now outside of nuclear physics, but I chose the example of biology. I could well imagine that there would be equivalents in material science on a broad front of technology, you take that experience of nuclear weapons and the image I see is that this is how it would be there. It would be possible to develop technologies that are so terrible that they couldn't be used because the costs are too high and that could cure us and many people have argued that it actually prevented nuclear weapons, prevented further military conflict and then certainly froze the conflict.

It is interesting that today it was with the elimination of the threat of mutual assured destruction that other forces took control of our geopolitics. Are you worried about existential threats from nuclear weapons or other technologies like artificial intelligence? Do you think humans will tend to tend? figure out how to not blow ourselves up I don't know, frankly, this is something I thought about and I don't, I mean, I'm a bystander in the sense that as a scientist I collect and collate data, so I've been doing that all my life and observing my species and it is not clear to me if we are going to avoid it.

It could have a self-induced catastrophic end. Are you an optimist as a scientist, but like me? Well, I would say I would say I wouldn't bet against us beautifully placed, let's immerse ourselves in the world, we are very small. If we could hear it for the first time, what are the basic particles, whether observed experimentally or hypothesized by physicists? So when we physicists look at the universe, we can first see two large cubes of particles, which are the smallest objects we currently can mathematically. conceive and then verify experimentally that these ideas have an accent of precision, so one of those cubes that we call matter are things like electrons, things that are like quarks, which are particles that exist inside protons and there is a whole family of these things. in fact, 18 corks and apparently six electron-like objects that we call leptons, so that's one cube and the other cube that we see both in our mathematics and in our experiment with the team, are our set of particles that can be called carriers of strength. familiar carrier of force is the photon the particle of light that allows you to see me in fact it is the same object that carries electrical repulsion between similar charges in science fiction we have the object called graviton that is talked about a lot in science fiction and star Trek, but the Graviton is also a mathematical object that we physicists have known essentially since Einstein wrote his theory of general relativity.

There are four forces in nature. The fundamental forces. There is the gravitational force. Its carrier is the graviton. There are three other forces in nature. the electromagnetic force the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force and each of these forces has one or more carriers the photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force the strong nuclear force actually has eight carriers they are called gluons and then the weak force Nuclear has three carriers, they are called W plus W minus and Z bosons, so those are the things that are most used both in mathematics and in experiments.

By the way, the most precise experiments were ever performed as a species capable of performing. the accuracy of these ideas and we know that at least one part in a billion these ideas are correct, so first of all, you've made it sound elegant and simple, but does it seem crazy to you that there are force bearers like they're supposed to? ? It's a trivial idea to think about, if we think about photons, gluons, that there are four fundamental forces of physics and then those forces are expressed, there are carriers of those forces, it's kind of a trivial thing, it's not a trivial thing in Absolute, in fact.

It was a puzzle for Sir Isaac Newton because he was the first person who basically gave us physics before Isaac Newton physics didn't exist. What did exist was called Nath philosophy, so the discussions about using the methods of classical philosophy to understand nature, natural philosophy, then the Greeks. We call them scientists but they were natural philosophers. Physics is not born until Newton writes the Principia. One of the things that puzzled him was how gravity works because if you read very carefully what he writes he basically says and I'm paraphrasing badly but he basically says that someone who think deeply about this issue you would find it inconceivable that an object in one place, our place, could magically reach and affect another object without anything intervening, so it baffled you.

There is a puzzle about what not. a distance, I mean, not as it would be, I would accept that I am a physicist and we solved this problem a long time ago and the resolution came through a second great physicist, most people have heard of Newton, most people You have heard of Einstein, but between the two of them there was another extraordinarily great physicist, a man called James Clark Maxwell and between these two other giants Maxwell taught us about electric and magnetic forces and it is from his equations that one can deduce that there's a carrier called a photon, so this was solved for physicists around 1860 or so, what are bosons and fermions and, hey, elementals and John's compounds, sure?

I said before that you don't know, you have two cubes, if you want to try to build a universe, you have to start without things. in these two cubes, then you have to have things, that's the problem and then you have to have other objects acting on them to make those things cohere with fixed finite patterns because you need those fixed finite patterns as building blocks, so That's the way. our universe looks like to people like me now building blocks do different things so let's go back to these two cubes again let me start with a cube that contains the light particle let me imagine that I am in a dusty room with two flashlights and I have one flashlight that I shine directly in front of me and then I have you stop to say my left and then we both take our flashlights and turn them on, make sure that the rays go through each other and that the rays do exactly that, they go to the

right

. through each other they don't bounce off each other the reason the room has to be dusty is because we want to see the light because I'll let the rule the dust not be there we wouldn't actually see the light until we got to the other wall , so you can see the beam because it's dust in the air, but the things actually pass through each other, they literally pass through each other, they don't affect each other at all when it acts like that, one isn't there, the things there are the flight of particles is the simplest example that shows that behavior that is a boson now let's imagine that I have to get dressed in the same dusty room and this time you have a bucket of balls and I have a bucket of balls and we try to throw them to pass through, so we get something like lightning that shoots them fast, if they collide, they don't just pass through each other, they bounce off each other, that's mainly because they have an electric charge, an electric charge is like the charges repel each other, but Mathematically I know how to turn off the electrical charge.

If you do that, eventually you'll still repel each other and that's because they're things we call fermions, that's how you tell the things that are in the two buckets apart: they're bosons or fermions. which one of them and maybe you can mention the most popular boson the most recently discovered she's like yeah it's like when she was in high school and there was a major crack very popular her name is her name is the Higgs particle these days can you describe which of the bosons and fermions have been discovered as hypotheses, which have been tested experimentally, she was still out there, so the two cubes that I actually described to you were first hypothesized and then verified by observation with the Higgs.

The boson being the most recent of these things, we haven't actually verified the graviton, interestingly, mathematically we have the expectation that gravitation is like this, but we haven't done an experiment to show that this is an accurate idea that nature uses something like that. It has to be a carrier of the force of gravity exactly because maybe something much more mysterious than us, so when you say that it would be like the other force-carrying particles in some ways yes, but in others no, it turned out that the graviton is also , if you look at Stein's theory, he taught us about this thing that he calls space-time, which is, if you try to imagine it, you can think of it as a kind of rubber surface that is a popular representation of space.

Right now it's not an accurate representation because the only precision is in the calculation it uses, but that's close enough that if you have a sheet of rubber, you can shake it and you can actually form a wave on it. Space-time is enough like this. that when spacetime oscillates you create these waves, these shapes carry energy, we expect them to carry energy in quanta, that's what a graviton is, it's a wave in spacetime and therefore the fact that We've looked at the waves with LIGO over the course of the last three years and we've recently used the Gravitational Wave Observatory to look at the collision of black holes and neutron stars and all kinds of really interesting things out there, so we know that the waves They exist, but to know that the graviton exists you have to show that these waves carry energy in energy packets and that's what we don't have the technology to do yet and maybe jumping briefly to a philosophical question: does it make sense to you? that gravity is much weaker than the other forces?

No, it's now, you see. You've touched on a very deep mystery about physics, there are many physics questions about why things are the way they are, and as someone who believes that there are some things that are certainly coincidences, you could ask the same question. Why are the planets in the orbits they are in around the Sun? The answer turns out that there is no good reason, it is just an accident, so there are things in nature that have that character and maybe the strength of the weak of the various forces is like that. Well, the other thing we don't know is that that's the case and there may be some deep reasons as to why the forces are arranged the way they are where the weakest forces, gravity, next week are the forces, the weak interaction, the weak nuclear force, then there is electromagnetism.

We don't really understand why this is the order of forces. Some of the fascinating work you've done is in the supersymmetry space. Symmetry in general. Can you first describe what supersymmetry is? Oh yeah, then you delete. The two cubes that I told you about maybe earlier I said there are two cubes in our universe, so now I want you to think about drawing a cake that has four quadrants, so I want you to cut the piece of cake into quarters so that one quadrant . I'm going to put all the cubes that we talked about so they're like electronic quarks in a different quadrant.

I'm going to put all the force carriers. The other two quadrants are empty now. If I showed you a photo of that, if you see a circle, there will be a lot of things in one upper quadrant and things in others and then I would ask you a question: does it look symmetrical to you? No, no, and that's exactly right because humans actually have a very deeply programmed sense of symmetry. It's something that's part of that mystery of the universe, so how would you make it symmetrical? One way to do it is to say that those two empty quadrants had things in them, they don't and if you do that, that's supersymmetry, so that's what I understood when I was. a graduate student here at MIT in 1975 dismissing the idea of ​​when mathematics was born out of this, supersymmetry was actually born in Ukraine in the late 60s, but we have something called the iron curtain, so Westerners don't do it. we knew but in the early '70s, independently, there were scientists in the West who had rediscovered supersymmetry, symmetry, bruno Cimino and julius vests were their names, so this was around '71 or '72 when this happened.

I started grad school in '73, so around '74 75 I was trying to figure it out. I figured out how to write a thesis so I could become a physicist for the rest of my life. I did a lot of things with the great consulting professor James Young, who had taught me various things about electrons and weak forces and that sort of thing, but I decided that if I was really going to have a chance of maximizing my chances of being successful, I should do it in a direction that other people were not studying and, as a result, I studied the ideas that were being developed and I found the idea of ​​supersymmetry and so the mathematics was so remarkable that it blew me away.

I actually have two college degrees, my first college degree is actually math and my second is physics, although I always wanted to be a physicist plan. It meant getting good grades it was math I was studying math thinking about grad school but my heart was in physics if we could do aTo do this, you have a black ball and a white ball, so the simplest of these objects looks like two little balls, one black and one white connected by a single line and if it comes to that it's like me. said a deep mathematical property related to symmetry, you mentioned air correction codes, but are there any particularly beautiful properties that stand out to you about these objects that they just find?

Yes, they are very, yes, very early in development. Yeah, there's the crazy thing about this to me is that when you look at physics and try to write equations where information is transmitted reliably, if you're in one of these super symmetric systems with this extra symmetry, that doesn't happen unless that an error correction code is present. like the universe is saying that you don't really transmit information unless there's something about an error-correcting code. This to me is the craziest thing I have personally come across in my research and it really made me wonder how this could happen. because the only place in nature that we know about error correction codes is genetics and in genetics we believe that it was evolution that causes the air correction codes to be in the genomes and that means that there was some kind of evolution acting on the mathematical laws of the physics of our universe, this is a very strange and strange idea and something I have wondered about from time to time since I made these discoveries, do you think such an idea could be fundamental or is it emerging in all the different types of systems I don't know if it's fundamental and I probably won't live to find out.

This will be the job of probably future mathematicians or physicists to figure out what these things really mean. We have to talk a little about the magical, the mysterious.

string

theory bag string theory sure maybe there is still this aspect that is still there for me from the outside perspective of this fascinating and heated debate about the state of string theory can you clarify this debate, perhaps by articulating the various points of view and saying where do you land? First of all, I doubt I can say anything to clarify the string theory debate for the general audience.

Part of the reason is that string theory is something I've never seen in the erect. Physics is introduced into the consciousness of the general public before we finish, you will see that string theory does not actually exist because when we use the word theory we mean its particular set of attributes, it means that it has a general paradigm. that explains what you are doing, there is no such general paradigm or string theory, what string theory is currently is a huge collection of mathematical facts that reinforce each other and in which we cannot find contradictions, we do not know why is there, but we can certainly say that now without question, just because you find a piece of mathematics doesn't mean it applies to nature and, in fact, there has been a very heated debate about whether string theory is some kind of hysteria among the community of theoretical physicists or if you have something fundamental to say about our universe, we still don't know the answer to that question, but those of us who study string theory will tell you things like String theory has been extraordinarily productive in making us think. even more deeply in mathematics that is not string theory but the type of mathematics that we have used to describe elementary particles.

They have been derived from string theory and this has been happening now. For almost two decades I have allowed us, for example, to more accurately calculate the force between electrons with the presence of quantum mechanics. This is not something that is heard in the public. There are other similar things like that type of property that I just told. What you are interested in is what is called weak strong duality and it comes directly from string theory. There are other things, like a property called holography, which allows you to take equations and observe them at the edge of a space and then learn information about its interior. space without doing calculations, this comes directly from string theory, so there are a number of direct mathematical effects that we learn from this string theory, but we take these ideas and look at the mathematics that we already know and we find that suddenly we are more powerful, this is a pretty good indication that something interesting is happening with string theory itself, so it's the early days of a powerful mathematical framework, that's what we have now.

What is the big first of all? Most people would probably do what, like you said, The general public would actually know what string theory is, which is at the highest level, which is a fascinating fact. Well, string theory is what they do in the Big Bang theory. One, can you describe what string theory is and two, what are the open challenges? So what is string theory? Well, the simplest explanation I can give is to go back and ask the water particles, which is the question I'm first asked, what is the smallest? Yes, what is the smallest?

So, in a way, I try to describe particles to people. star, I want you to imagine a little ball and I want you to let the size of that ball shrink, it doesn't have any extension, but it still has the mass of the ball, which is actually what Newton was working with when he first invented physics. time. true inventor of the massive particle, which is this idea that underlies all of physics, so that's where we start, it's a mathematical construct that you get by taking a limit of things that you know, so what is a string?

Well, in the same analogy, I would say now. I want you to start with a piece of spaghetti so we all know what it looks like and now I want you to let the thickness of the spaghetti reduce until it's mathematically thin. I mean, this doesn't make sense mathematically, this actually works and you get. This mathematical object has properties that are like spaghetti, it can move and move but it can also move collectively like a piece of spaghetti, so it is the mathematics of that type of object that constitutes string theory and makes the 11 multidimensional dimensions, however many they are. . dimensional rather than four dimensions, it's a crazy idea to you that the strangest aspect of force is not really and also partly due to my own research, so earlier we talked about these strange symbols that we have discovered within the equations.

It turns out that, to a large extent, tinkers don't really care about the number of dimensions, they have an internal mathematical consistency that allows them to manifest in many different dimensions, since supersymmetry is part of string theory, so this same property is I would expect it to be inherited by string theory, however another little known fact that is not in the public debate is that there are actually strings that only have four dimensions. This is something that was discovered in the late '80s by three different groups of physicists working independently, my friend Warren Siegel and I, who were at the University of Maryland at the time, were able to show that there is mathematics that looks totally four-dimensional and yet it is a rope.

There was a group in Germany that used slightly different mathematics, but I found the same rizzo and then there was a group at Cornell that using a third piece of mathematics found the same thing yourself, so the fact that the extra dimensions are the reason why that they spoke in public is partly a function of how the public has reached them. to understand string theory and how the story has been told to them, but there are alternatives that you don't know, yes we could talk about validation experiments and you are co-author of a recently published book that proves that Einstein is right. human history - the daring expeditions that changed the way we see the universe - are there echoes of the early days of general relativity in the 1910s - the most widespread - string theory?

I just nodded, yes, and that's one of the reasons I was happy to focus on the story of how Einstein became a global superstar. Earlier in our discussion we went over the story of him where in 1915 he came up with this piece of mathematics, he used it to do some calculations and then made a prediction. Yes. but making a prediction is not enough, someone has to go out and measure, so string theory is in that middle zone now for Einstein it was from 1915 to 1919 1950 he makes the correct prediction because of the way he made a prediction incorrect about the same in 1911, but it was corrected in 1915 and in 1919 the first experimental observation data were available to say that yes, he was not wrong and in 1922, the argument that, based on observation, was overwhelming, that wasn't wrong, she described what special relativity and general relativity are briefly sure since then and what prediction Einstein made and maybe some memorable moment in the human journey trying to prove this was right, she was incredibly right, so I'm very fortunate to have worked with a talented novelist who wanted to write a book to match a book.

I wanted to write about what science feels like if you're a person, I guess it's actually people who do science, although that may not be obvious to everyone, so for me I wanted to write this. book for a couple of reasons I wanted young people to understand that the seemingly alien Giants who lived before them were just as human as them you get married you get divorced remarried they get worse they do terrible things they do great things they are They are people like you, and that Part of telling the story allowed me to spread it to both young people interested in science and the public, but the other part of the story is that I wanted to open up. of what it was like, now I am a scientist and that is why I will not pretend to be a great writer.

I understand a lot about mathematics and I've even created my own mathematics, you know, it's a strange thing to be able to do, but to tell the story you really have to have an incredible master of narrative and that was my co-author Kathy Pelletier, who is a novelist, so we formed This joint brain that used to call us, she is the one who calls us. Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, my expression to us was that we were a united brain to tell this story and that allowed us, what are some magical moments for me? The first magical moment in telling the story was looking at Albert Einstein in his struggle because, although I consider him a genius, as I said in 1911, he actually made an incorrect prediction about the expenditure of starlight and that was what in actually made the astronomers leave.

In 1914 there was an eclipse and due to various accidents of war, weather and all kinds of things we talked about. in the book no one could make the measurement, if they had made it, it would not have agreed with their 1911 prediction because nature only has one answer and then you will see how lucky it was that wars, bad weather, accidents and transport. The equipment prevented measurements from being made, so it was corrected in 1915, but astronomers were already trying to make the measurement, so now it gives them a different number and it turns out that's the number that nature agrees with, so it gives you a sense of this is a person who struggles with something deeply and although his deep insight led him to this, it is the circumstance of time and place an accident but through which we see it and the story could have very different result than where he does it for the first time.

The prediction measurements were made in 1914, they do not agree with your prediction and then what would the world see? He's this professor who made this prediction that he didn't get right, yeah, so the fragility of human history is illustrated by that story and This is one of my favorite things. You also learn things like in our book how eclipses and watching eclipses was a driver of the development of science in our nation when I was very young; in fact, even before we were a nation, it turns out that they were citizens or The citizens of this would be a country that they would go out trying to measure eclipses, so some fortunes, some misfortunes affect the progress of science, especially with ideas in As for me, at least if I go back to those days as radicals, general relativity comes first, can you describe if? okay, briefly, what is general relativity and yes, if you could, take a moment if you put yourself in those shoes in the eka and the academic researchers, scientists of that time and what is this theory, what is it trying to describe about our world. to answer what left Isaac Newton baffled Isaac Newton says that gravity magically goes from one place to another he doesn't believe it by the way he knows that's not right but mathematics is so good that you have to say well, shot My scruples went away because I will use it.

That's all we used to get a man from the Earth to the Moon. It was math, so I'm one of those scientists and I've seen this. If I thought deeply about it, maybe I would understand. I know Newton himself wasn't comfortable, so the first thing I hope to feel is: wow,This is a young boy who has an idea to fill this void that Sir Isaac Newton left us. Hope would be my reaction. I have a suspicion. I'm kind of a mathematical creature. I was four years old when I first decided that size was what I wanted to do and if my personality back then was what it is now.

I think I probably would have liked to have studied his mathematics, what was one part of the mathematics that he was using to make this prediction, because he didn't actually create the mathematics that math.max was created in about fifty years before he lived. , he is the person who took advantage of it to make a prediction, in fact, a friend had to teach him this mathematics, so this is in our book, so putting myself in that moment I would like to like it. I said I think I would feel emotion. I would like to know what mathematics is and then I wouldn't like to do the calculations myself because one of the things that physics is about is that you don't trust anyone's word for anything, you can do it yourself, it seems that mathematics are a little more tolerant of radical ideas or mathematicians some people who find beauty in mathematics why all the white questions don't have a good answer let me ask you why you think Einstein never got the Nobel Prize for general relativity, he obtained by the photoelectric effect, that is correct, well, first of all, that is something that is misunderstood about the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Nobel Prize in Physics is never awarded for simply proposing an idea, it is always awarded for proposing an idea that has observational support, which is why I couldn't get the Nobel Prize for either special relativity or generic relativity because the provisions that Alfred Nobel left for the prize prevent it, but after it's been validated I can't get it then or not, yes, but remember that validation doesn't really come until the 1920s, but that's why they invented the second Nobel Prize, I mean, very Curie, you can get a second Nobel Prize for one of the greatest linear facilities in physics, so let me make this clear: the theory of general relativity had its critics even up to the 1950s so if would have done if the committee had wanted to award the prize to general relativity.

There were vociferous critics of general relativity until the 1950s. Einstein died in 1955. What lessons do you draw from the book's account of the general activity of the radical nature of the theory for look at future string theory. Well, I think string theorists will probably retrace this path, but in my opinion it will be much longer and more tortuous. String theory is such a broad and deep development that, in my opinion, when it becomes acceptable it will be due to a confluence of observations, it will not be a single observation and I have to tell you that, so yesterday I gave a seminar here to my The theory can leave signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is an astrophysical structure, so if those types of observations are confirmed, if perhaps other things related to the idea of ​​supersymmetry, those will be the first powerful pieces of observational II based on evidence that will begin to do what the Eddington expedition did in 1919, but that may take several decades.

Do you think Nobel Prizes will be awarded for string theory? Not because I think the arrays will beI think it will exceed the normal human lifespan, but there are other prizes that are awarded. I mean, there's something called an innovative award. There is a Russian emigrant, a Russian-American immigrant named Yuri Milner. I think they started this wonderful award called The Innovative Award is three times as much money since Novell French Fries and they give it out every year, so you're probably going to get something like one of those awards at some point long before an award.

Nobel jumping on some topics while he was at Cal Tech. You were able to interact I think with Richard Fineman. I have to ask you: Yes, do you have any stories that you can remember? I have a good number of stories, but I am not prepared to tell them, not all of them are political. correct copy, but well, let me tell you this: Richard Fineman, if you've ever read any of the books about him in particular, there's a book called, you're probably kidding me, sir. Feinman, there's a series of books that starts with "You're probably kidding, Mr.

Fireman," and I think the segment might be something like, "What do you care about what they say or something?" I mean, their titles are all in there. Three of them .When I read those books, I was amazed at how accurately those books betrayed the man I interacted with. He was irreverent, he was funny, he was deeply intelligent, he was deeply human, and those books told that story very effectively, even those moments. , how did they affect you as a physicist? Well, it's funny because one of the things I did, I didn't hear the firefighters say this, but one of the things they are reported to have said is that if you're on a stool as a physicist and you can't explain to the guy on the stool next to you what you're doing, you don't understand what you're doing and there are a lot of things that I think are right: when you really understand something as complicated as string theory, when it's at its best. fully formed final development, it should be something you can tell him. the person on the stool next to you and me that's something that affects the way I do science, frankly, it also affects the way I talk to the public about science.

It is one of those mantras that I hold dearly and try to maintain. deeply before me when I appear in public forums talking about physics in particular and about science in general, it is also something that Einstein said in a different way, he said that he had these two different formulations, one of them is when the simple answer is God speaking and The Another thing he said was that what he did in his work was simply the distillation of common sense that boils down to something and he also said that you have to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler, so that all those things and certainly For me, this attitude, first of all, was exemplified by being close to Richard Fineman, so in all your work you are always looking for simplicity for all the first times, ultimately you were part of the Council of Advisors in science and science from President Barack Obama. technology for seven years, yes, for seven years with Eric Schmidt and several other billions of people.

I first met Eric in nineteen in 2009, when he was called to the council. Yes, I saw photos of you in that room. I mean, there are a lot of brilliant people. It seems incredible, what was that experience of being called to that type of service like? So let me go back to my father. First, I mentioned earlier that my father served 27 years in the US Army starting in World War II and left in 1942. 43 to fight the fascists, he was part of the supply corps that supplied the General Patton as the tanks rolled through Western Europe pushing back the forces of Nazism to meet up with our Russian comrades who were pushing the Russians, you know, pushing the Nazis starting at Stalingrad.

And you know, thinking about a war is actually a very interesting part of history too and I know that from both sides and here in America we don't normally do it, but I actually studied history as an adult, so she knows that. from all of history and on the Russian side we don't know the Americans, they didn't teach us, I know, I know I have a lot of Russian friends and we've had this conversation occasionally, but you know, like General Zhukov, for example. it was something that you would know, but maybe you don't know about a patent, but he's right, you know that too or you get a cough or a shrill noise.

I mean, there's a whole list of names that I've learned over the last 15 or 20 years looking up World War II, so if my dad was in the middle of that, probably one of the biggest war wars in the history of our species, the idea of ​​service comes to me essentially from that example, in 2009, when I first received a call from a Nobel laureate actually in my biology Harold Varmus the only way to India and I received this email message and He said he needed to talk to me and I said, okay, we can talk, I have my castes, I didn't hear from him, we went through several cycles of this kind of inverted I want to talk to you and then I never contacted him and he was finally on his way to giving a physics presentation at the University of Florida in Gainesville and just then I got off a plane and my cell phone went off and it was Harold and then I said Harold why do you keep texting me that you want to talk but you never call and he said well, Sorry, things have been hectic and that a fact and then said if you were offered the opportunity to Serve on the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology what would be your response?

He made me laugh at the phrasing of the question, yes, yes, because clearly there is a purpose for why the question is asked that way, but then he made it clear. To me he wasn't kidding and it was literally one of the few times in my life that my knees went weak and I had to hold myself against the wall to keep from falling. I doubt most of us have been the beneficiaries. of the benefits of this country when I was given that kind of opportunity I could say no and I know I certainly couldn't say no.

I was very scared because I had never done it, although my career in terms of policy recommendations actually goes back quite a bit to the '80s, but I have never been called upon to serve as an advisor to a president of the United States and it was very scary. , but I didn't feel like I could say no because I couldn't sleep with myself at night I say, you know, I chickened out or whatever, so I took the plunge and we had a good run. There are things I did in those seven years that I am extraordinarily proud of.

One of the ways I tell people. If you've ever seen that TV cartoon called Schoolhouse Rock, it's this story about how a bill becomes a law and I've experienced that there are things that I did that have now been codified into US law, no. everyone gets a chance to do things like that in life what do you think science and technology is? Especially in American politics. You know we haven't had a president who is an engineer or a scientist. What do you think is the role of a president like the president? Obama in understanding the latest ideas in science and weather, what was that experience like?

Well, first of all, I have met other presidents besides President Obama, he is the most extraordinary president I have ever met even though he went to Harvard when I believe. about President Obama I I he is a deep mystery to me in the same way maybe these new mystery verses I don't really understand how that constellation of personalities could fit within a single individual, but I saw them for seven years, so I'm convinced that I wasn't seeing fake news, I was seeing real data, he was just an extraordinary man and one of the things that was completely clear was that he was not afraid or intimidated by being in a room of really smart people. people, I mean really smart people, felt completely comfortable asking some of the world's greatest experts what do I do about this problem and it's not like I was just going to accept their answers, I was going to listen to their advice and that to me was extraordinary.

As I said, I've been with other executives and I've never seen someone like him. He's an extraordinary learner, that's what I observed and not just about science, but he has a way of internalizing information in real time than I do. I have never seen a politician before, even in extraordinarily complicated situations, even scientific ideas, complicated scientific or non-scientific ideas do not have to be scientific ideas, but, as I said, I have seen him in real time process complicated ideas with a speed that It was surprising, in fact, it surprised the entire council. I mean, we were all amazed by his ability to have complicated ideas presented to him and then wrestle with them and internalize them and then come back in a pretty interesting way, come back with really good questions to ask.

I have noticed that this is in an area where I understand more about artificial intelligence. I've seen him integrate information about artificial intelligence and then come up with these kinds of ideas like Richard Fineman's that are exactly right and that's it, like I said, we. who have been in that position it's surprising to see this happen because you don't expect it, yes, it takes what takes many graduate students like four years on a particular topic, he just does it in a few minutes. like learning naturally, you've mentioned that you'd love to see experimental validation of superstring theory before it doubles down on this death spiral, which the poacher to that reference made me smile, well, if you know people who don't really understand that because It is not like this. which doesn't mean what we generally take it to mean colloquially, but it's such a beautiful expression, yes, it is, it's from thevillage to be or not to be a speech I still don't understand what is above interpretation anyway, what are they?

The most interesting problems in physics are within our grasp and may be solved within the next two decades. You might be able to see them, so in physics you limited it to physics, physics, mathematics, this kind of problem space that fascinates you. one that seems on the immediate horizon that we're going to get to is quantum computing, and if we actually get there, it's going to be extraordinarily interesting. Do you think it's primarily a theoretical problem or is it now in the engineering space? In the engineering space, it wasn't a reference station, as you know, Microsoft has this research facility in Santa Barbara.

I was there for a couple of months in my capacity as vice president of the American Physical Society and I got a, you know, I had a few. things that were like lectures and they told me what they were doing and it sure sounded like they knew what they were doing and were close to breakthroughs, yeah, that's a really exciting possibility, but going back to Hamlet, do you consider mortality? Mortality itself, no, my mother died when I was 11, so I immediately knew what the end of the story was for all of us, as a consequence, I have never spent much time thinking about death, it will come in its time. own good time and, to me, the job of every human being is to make the most of the time we are given, not for our own selfish benefit, but to try to make this place a better place for someone else and in the Y of life, why do you think we are?

I have no idea and never worried about it. I haven't responded to a local answer. The apparent reason for me was because I'm supposed to do physics, but it's funny because there are so many other possibilities in terms of quantum mechanics in your life, like being an astronaut, for example, so you know how well I see Einstein and the vicissitudes that They prevented the 1914 starlight measurement from discovering that the universe is constructed in such a way that I did not become an astronaut, which would have faced the worst choice of my life: whether to try to become an astronaut or whether to try theoretical physics. .

Both dreams were born when I was four years old. years simultaneously, so I can't imagine how difficult that decision would have been. The universe helped you with that, not just that but the minis, and it helped me by allowing me to choose the right evil. day of your life you could relive because it made you really happy. What day would that be if you could see that being a theoretical physicist is like having Christmas every day? I have a lot of joy in my life, the moments of invention, the moments of revelation of ideas, yes, the only thing that surpasses them are some family experiences like when my children were born and that kind of thing, but they are quite high, well, I don't see a better way to finish it, Jim, thank you very much.

It's a great honor to speak today, this worked better than I thought. I'm glad to hear it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Gates Jr. and thanks to our presenting sponsor. Cash app, download it and use the code. Let's podcast. You will get ten dollars and ten. The dollars will go first to a critical education nonprofit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to learn and dream about designing our future. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars. An Apple Podcast supported on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter.

And now let me leave you with some wise words from the great Albert Einstein for the rebels among us. Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Thanks for listening and I hope to see you next time.