The following is a conversation with Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT,
who won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong
interaction. Quick mention of our sponsors, the Information, Netsuite, ExpressVPN,
Blinkist, and AIDSSleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say a word about asymptotic freedom. Protons and neutrons
make up the nucleus of an atom. Strong interaction is responsible for the strong nuclear force that
binds them. But strong interaction also holds together the quarks that make up the protons
and neutrons. Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Pulitzer came up with a theory postulating that
when quarks come really close to one another, the attraction abates and they behave like free
particles. This is called asymptotic freedom. This happens at very, very high energies, which is
also where all the fun is. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation
with Frank Wilczek. What is the most beautiful idea in physics?
The most beautiful idea in physics is that we can get a compact description of the world that's
very precise and very full at the level of the operating system of the world. That's
an extraordinary gift, and we get worried when we have fine discrepancies between
our description of the world and what's actually observed at the level even of a part in a billion.
You actually have this quote from Einstein that the most incomprehensible thing
about the universe is that it is comprehensible, something like that.
Yes. That's the most beautiful surprise that really was, to me, the most profound result of
the scientific revolution of the 17th century with the shining example of Newtonian physics that
you could aspire to completeness, precision, and a concise description of the world of the
operating system. It's gotten better and better over the years, and that's the continuing miracle.
There are a lot of beautiful sub-miracles, too. The form of the equations is governed by high
degrees of symmetry, and they have a very surprising kind of mind-expanding structure,
especially in quantum mechanics. But if I had to say that the single most beautiful
revelation is that, in fact, the world is comprehensible.
Would you say that's a fact or a hope?
It's a fact. You can point to things like the rise of gross national products,
growth per capita around the world as a result of the scientific revolution. You can see it all
around you in recent developments with exponential production of wealth, control of nature at a
very profound level where we do things like sense tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny vibrations to tell that
there are black holes colliding far away, or we test laws as I alluded to, as a part in a
billion, and do things in what appear on the surface to be entirely different conceptual
universes. On the one hand, pencil and paper or nowadays computers that calculate abstractions,
and on the other hand, magnets and accelerators and detectors that look at the behavior of
fundamental particles. And these different universes have to agree or else we get very upset.
And that's an amazing thing if you think about it. So it's telling us that we
do understand a lot about nature at a very profound level. And there are still things we
don't understand, of course, but as we get better and better answers and better and better
ability to address difficult questions, we can ask more and more ambitious questions.
Well, I guess the hope part of that is because we are surrounded by mystery.
So we've one way to say it, if you look at the growth GDP, over time that we figured out quite
a lot and weren't able to improve the quality of life because of that. And we've figured out
some fundamental things about this universe, but we still don't know how much mystery there is.
And it's also possible that there's some things that are in fact incomprehensible to both our
minds and the tools of science. The sad thing is we may not know it because in fact they are
incomprehensible. And that's the open question is how much of the universe is comprehensible.
If we figured out everything was inside the black hole and everything that happened
at the moment of the Big Bang, does that still give us the key to understanding the human mind
and the emergence of all the beautiful complexity we see around us? That's not,
like when I see these objects like, I don't know if you've seen them like cellular automata,
all these kinds of objects where the from simple rules emerges complexity, it makes you wonder
maybe it's not reducible to simple beautiful equations, the whole thing, only parts of it. That's
the tension I was getting at with the hope. Well, when we say the universe is comprehensible, we have
to kind of draw careful distinctions about or definitions about what we mean by that.
Both the universe and the comprehensible. Exactly. So in certain areas of understanding
reality, we've made extraordinary progress, I would say, in understanding fundamental
physical processes and getting very precise equations that really work and allow us to do
the profound sculpting of matter, to make computers and iPhones and everything else,
and they really work and they're extraordinary productions.
That's all based on the laws of quantum mechanics and they really work.
And they give us tremendous control of nature. On the other hand, as we get better answers,
we can also ask more ambitious questions. And there are certainly things that have been observed
even in what would be usually called the realm of physics that aren't understood.
For instance, there seems to be another source of mass in the universe, the so-called dark matter,
that we don't know what it is. And it's a very interesting question what it is.
But also, as you were alluding to, it's one thing to know the basic equations.
It's another thing to be able to solve them in important cases. So we run up against the limits
of that in things like chemistry, where we'd like to be able to design molecules and predict
their behavior from the equations. We think the equations could do that in principle, but in practice,
it's very challenging to solve them in all but very simple cases.
And then there's the other thing, which is that a lot of what we're interested in is
historically conditioned. It's not a matter of the fundamental equations, but about what
has evolved or come out of the early universe and formed into people and frogs and societies
and things. And the laws of physics, the basic laws of physics only take you so far,
and that kind of provides a foundation but doesn't really, you need entirely different
concepts to deal with those kind of systems. One thing I can say about that is that the laws
themselves point out their limitations, that they kind of their laws for dynamical evolution.
So they tell you what happens if you have a certain starting point, but they don't tell you
what the starting point should be at least. And the other thing that emerges from the equations
themselves is the phenomena of chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells us that
you have that there are intrinsic limitations on how well we can spell out the consequences
of the laws if we try to apply them. See, old apple pie, if you want to, what does it make an
apple pie from scratch? You have to build the universe or something like that.
Yeah. Well, you're much better off starting with apples than starting with quarks. Let's put it
that way. In your book, A Beautiful Question, you ask, does the world embody beautiful ideas?
So the book is centered around this very interesting question. It's like Shakespeare. You can like
dig in and read into all the different interpretations of this question. But at the high level,
what to use the connection between beauty of the world and physics of the world?
In a sense, we now have a lot of insight into what the laws are, the form they
take that allow us to understand matter in great depth and control it, as we've discussed.
And it's an extraordinary thing how mathematically ideal those equations turn out to be.
In the early days of Greek philosophy, Plato had this model of atoms built out of the five
perfectly symmetrical botanic solids. So there was somehow the idea that mathematical symmetry
should govern the world. And we've outplayed out Plato by far in modern physics because
we have symmetries that are much more extensive, much more powerful,
that turn out to be the ingredients out of which we construct our theory of the world.
And it works. And so that's certainly beautiful. So the idea of symmetry, which is
a driving inspiration in much of human art, especially decorative art, like the Alhambra
or wallpaper designs or things you see around you everywhere, also turns out to be the dominant theme
in modern fundamental physics, symmetry and its manifestations. The laws turn out to be very,
to have these tremendous amounts of symmetry. You can change the symbols and move them around
in different ways and they still have the same consequences. So that's beautiful. These concepts
that humans find appealing also turn out to be the concepts that govern how the world actually
works. I don't think that's an accident. I think humans were evolved to be able to interact with
the world in ways that are advantageous and to learn from it. And so we are naturally evolved
or designed to enjoy beauty and to symmetry and the world has it. And that's why we resonate with it.
What's interesting is that the idea of symmetry emerges at many levels of
the hierarchy of the universe. So you're talking about particles, but it also is
at the level of chemistry and biology and the fact that our cognitive,
sort of our perception system and whatever our cognition is also finds it appealing or
somehow our sense of what is beautiful is grounded in this idea of symmetry or the breaking
of symmetry. Symmetry is at the core of our conception of beauty, whether it's the breaking
or the non-breaking of the symmetry. It makes you wonder why. So I come from Russia and the
question of Dostoevsky, he has said that beauty will save the world. Maybe as a physicist you
can tell me what do you think he meant by that? I don't know if it saves the world, but it does
turn out to be a tremendous source of insight into the world when we investigate kind of the
most fundamental interactions, things that are hard to access because they occur at very short
distances between very special kinds of particles whose properties are only revealed at high energies.
We don't have much to go on from everyday life, and the experiments are difficult to do,
so you can't really follow a very wholly empirical procedure to sort of in the Baconian style,
figure out the laws kind of step by step just by accumulating a lot of data. What we actually do is
guess, and the guesses are kind of aesthetic really, what would be a nice description that's
consistent with what we know, and then you try it out and see if it works, and then by gosh,
it does in many profound cases. There's that, but there's another source of symmetry which I didn't
talk so much about in a beautiful question, but does relate to your comments, and I think very
much relates to the source of symmetry that we find in biology and in our heads, in our brain,
which is that, well, it is discussed a bit in a beautiful question and also in fundamentals,
is that when you have, symmetry is also a very important means of construction,
so when you have, for instance, simple viruses that need to construct their coat,
their protein coat, the coats often take the form of platonic solids, and the reason is that the
deviruses are really dumb, and they only know how to do one thing, so they make a pentagon,
then they make another pentagon, and they make another pentagon, and they all glue together in
the same way, and that makes a very symmetrical object, so the rules of development, when you
have simple rules and they work again and again, you get symmetrical patterns. In fact, it's a
recipe also for generating fractals, like the kind of broccoli that has all this internal
structure, and I wish I had a picture to show, but maybe people remember it from the supermarket,
and you say, how did a vegetable get so intelligent to make such a beautiful object
with all this fractal structure, and the secret is stupidity, you just do the same thing over and
over again, and in our brains also, we came out, we start from single cells, and they reproduce,
and each one does roughly the same thing. The program evolves in time, of course,
different modules get turned on and off, different regions of the genetic code get turned on and
off, but basically a lot of the same things are going on, and they're simple things, and so you
produce the same patterns over and over again, and that's a recipe for producing symmetry,
because you're getting the same thing in many, many places, and if you look at,
for instance, the beautiful drawings of Ramon Icahal, the great neuroanatomist who drew the
structure of different organs like the hippocampus, you see it's very regular and very intricate, and
it's symmetry in that sense, because it's many repeated units that you can take from one place
to the other and see that they look more or less the same. But what you're describing,
this kind of beauty that we're talking about now is a very small sample in terms of spacetime in a
very big world, in a very short, brief moment in this long history, in your book Fundamentals,
10 Keys to Reality, I'd really recommend people read it. You say that space and time are pretty
big or very big. How big are we talking about? Can you tell a brief history of space and time?
It's easy to tell a brief history, but the details get very involved, of course,
but one thing I'd like to say is that if you take a broad enough view, the history of the
universe is simpler than the history of Sweden, say, because your standards are lower,
but just to make it quantitative, I'll just give a few highlights. It's a little bit easier to
talk about time, so let's start with that. The Big Bang occurred, we think the universe was
much hotter and denser and more uniform about 13.8 billion years ago, and that's what we call the
Big Bang. The matter in it has been expanding and cooling ever since, so in a real sense,
the universe is 13.8 billion years old. That's a big number, kind of hard to think about. A nice
way to think about it, though, is to map it onto one year. Let's say the universe just linearly
mapped the time intervals from 13.8 billion years on to one year, so the Big Bang then is on January
1st at 12 a.m., and you wait for quite a long time before the dinosaurs emerge. The dinosaurs
emerge on Christmas, it turns out. 12 months, almost 12 months later. Getting close to the
end. And the extinction event that let mammals and ultimately humans inherit the earth from
the dinosaurs occurred on December 30th, and all of human history is a small part of the last day.
And so, yes, we're occupying only, and a human lifetime is a very, very infinitesimal part of
this interval, of these gigantic cosmic reaches of time. And in space, we can tell a very similar
story. In fact, it's convenient to think that the size of the universe is the distance that light
can travel in 13.8 billion years. That's 13.8 billion light years. That's how far you can see
out. That's how far signals can reach us. And that is a big distance, because compared to
that, the universe, the earth is a fraction of a light second. So again, it's really, really big.
And so we have, if we want to think about the universe as a whole in space and time,
we really need a different kind of imagination. It's not something you can
grasp in terms of psychological time in a useful way. You have to think, you know,
you have to use exponential notation and abstract concepts to really get any hold on these vast
times and spaces. On the other hand, let me hasten to add that that doesn't make us small,
or make the time that we have to us small. Because again, looking at those pictures of,
you know, what our minds are in some sort of components of our minds, these beautiful drawings
of the cellular patterns inside the brain, you see that there are many, many, many processing units.
And if you analyze how fast they operate, I try to estimate how many thoughts a person can have
in a lifetime. That's kind of a fuzzy question, but I'm very proud that I was able to define it
pretty precisely. And it turns out we can, we have time for billions of meaningful thoughts
in a lifetime. So, so it's a lot. We shouldn't, we shouldn't think of ourselves as terribly small,
either in space or in time, because although we're small in those dimensions compared to
the universe, we're large compared to meaningful units of processing information and being able
to conceptualize and understand things. Yeah, but 99% of those thoughts are probably food,
sex or internet related. Well, that's only like 0.1 is Nobel Prize winning ideas.
But that's true. But you know, there's more to life than winning Nobel prizes.
How did you do that calculate? Can you maybe break that apart a little bit, just kind of
for fun, sort of an intuition of how we calculate the number of thoughts?
The number of thoughts, right. It's necessarily imprecise because a lot of things are going on
in different ways and what is a thought. But there are several things that point to more or less the
same rate of being able to have meaningful thoughts. For instance, the one that I think is
maybe the most penetrating is how fast we can, we can process visual images. How do, how do we
do that? If you've ever watched old movies, you can see that when, well, any movie, in fact,
that in a motion picture is really not a motion picture. It's a series of snapshots that are
playing one after the other. And it's because our brains also work that way. We take snapshots
of the world, integrate over a certain time and then go on to the next one. And then by
post-processing, create the illusion of continuity and flow, we can deal with that. And
the, if the flicker rate is too slow, then you start to see that it's not, it's a series of
snapshots. And you can ask, what is the, what is the crossover? When does it change from being
something that, that is matched to our processing speed versus too fast? And it turns out about
40 per second. And then if you take 40 per second as, as how well we, how fast we can process
visual images, you get to several billions of thoughts. If you similarly, if you ask, what,
what are some of the fastest things that people can do? Well, you can play video games, they can
play the piano very fast if, if they're skilled at it. And again, you get to similar units or
how fast can people talk? You get to similar, you know, within a couple of orders of magnitude,
you get more or less to the same idea. So, so that's how you can say that there's billions of
meaning, there's room for billions of meaningful thoughts. I won't argue for exactly
two billion versus 1.8 billion. It's not that kind of question. But, but I think
any estimate that's reasonable will come out within say 100 billion and 100 million. So,
it's a lot. It would be interesting to map out for an individual human being the landscape of
thoughts that they've sort of traveled. If you think of thoughts as a set of trajectories,
what, what that landscape looks like. I mean, I've been recently really thinking about
this Richard Dawkins idea of memes and just all this ideas and the evolution of ideas inside
of one particular human mind and how there's, there then changed and evolved by interaction
with other human beings. It's interesting to think about. So, if you think the numbers,
billions, you think there's also social interaction. So, these aren't,
like there's interaction in the same way you have interaction with particles. There's
interaction between human thoughts that perhaps that's that interaction in itself is fundamental
to the process of thinking. Like without social interaction, we would be like stuck like walking
in a circle. We need, we need the perturbation of other humans to create change in evolution.
Once you bring in concepts of interactions and correlations and relations, then you have
what's called a combinatorial explosion that the number of possibilities wrap,
expands exponentially technically with the number of, the number of things you're considering.
And it can easily, rapidly outstrip these billions of thoughts that we're talking about.
So, we, we definitely cannot buy brute force master complex situations and or think about,
think of all the possibilities in a complex situations. I mean, even, even something as
relatively simple as chess is still something that human beings can't comprehend completely.
Even the best players lose to, still sometimes lose and they consistently lose to computers
these days. And in computer science, there's a concept of NP complete. So large classes of
problems when you scale them up beyond a few individuals become intractable. And so that in
that sense, the world is inexhaustible. But in that makes it beautiful that we can make any laws
that generalize efficiently and well can compress all of that combinatorial complexity just like
a simple rule that itself is beautiful. It's a happy situation. And I think that, that we can
find general principles of sort of the operating system that are comprehensible, simple, extremely
powerful and let us control things very well and ask profound questions. And on the other hand,
that the world is going to be inexhaustible. That once we start asking about relationships and how
they evolve and social interactions and the the the we'll never have a theory of everything in
any meaningful sense because of everything, everything, truly everything is can ask you
about the Big Bang. So we talked about the space and time are really big. But then
and we humans give a lot of meaning to the word space and time in our in our like daily lives.
But then can we talk about this moment of beginning and how we're supposed to think
about it? That at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was what like infinitely small.
And then it just blew up. We have to be careful here because there's a there's a common misconception
that the Big Bang is like the explosion of a bomb in empty space that that fills up the
surrounding place. It is space. It is. Yeah, as we as we understand it, it's the fact it's the
fact or the hypothesis but well supported up to a point that that everywhere in the whole universe
early in the history, matter came together into a very hot, very dense. If you run it
backwards in time, matter comes together into a very hot, very dense, and yet very homogeneous
plasma of all the different kinds of elementary particles and quarks and anti quarks and
gluons and photons and electrons and anti electrons, everything, you know, all of that stuff,
like really hot, really, really, really hot. We're talking about way, way hotter than the
surface of the sun. In fact, if you take the equations as we as they come, the prediction
is that the temperature just goes to infinity, but then the equations break down. We don't,
you know, we don't really, there are various, the equations become infinity equals infinity.
So they don't feel that it's called a singularity. We don't really know,
this is running the equations backwards. So you can't really get a sensible idea of what happened
before the Big Bang. We don't, you know, so we need different equations to address the very earliest
moments. But so things were hotter and denser. We don't really know why things started out that
way. We do, we have a lot of evidence that they did start out that way. But since most of the,
you know, we don't get to visit there and do controlled experiments, most of the, most of
the record is very, very processed. And we have to, we have to use very subtle techniques and
powerful instruments to get information that has survived. Get closer and closer to the Big
Bang. Get closer and closer to the beginning of things. And what's revealed there is that,
as I said, there undoubtedly was a period when everything in the universe that we
have been able to look at and understand, and that's consistent with everything, is the,
was in a condition where it was much, much hotter and much, much denser,
but still obeying the laws of physics as we know them today. And, and then you start with that.
So all the matter is in equilibrium. And then with small quantum fluctuations and run it forward.
And then it produces in care, at least in broad strokes, the universe we see around us today.
Do you think we'll ever be able to, with the tools of physics, with the way sciences,
with the way the human mind is, we'll ever be able to get to the moment of the Big Bang in our
understanding, or even the moment before the Big Bang? Can we understand what happened before
the Big Bang? I'm, I'm optimistic, both that we'll be able to measure more, so observe more,
and that we'll be able to figure out more. So they're very, very tangible prospects for observing
observing the extremely early universe, so much, even much earlier than we can observe now,
through looking at gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, since they interact so
weakly with ordinary matter, sort of send an, a minimally processed signal from the Big Bang.
It's a very weak signal because it's traveled a long way and diffused over long spaces. But,
but people are gearing up to try to detect gravitational waves that could have come from
the early universe. Yeah, LIGO's incredible engineering project. It's the most sensitive,
precise devices on Earth. The fact that humans can build something like that is truly awe-inspiring
from an engineering perspective. Right. And, but these gravitational waves from the early
universe will probably be of a much longer wavelength than LIGO is capable of sensing.
So there's a beautiful project that's contemplated to put lasers in different part,
different locations in the solar system. We really, really separated by solar system scale
differences like artificial planets or moons in different places and, and see the tiny motions
of those relative to one another as a signal of, of radiation of the Big Bang. We can also
maybe indirectly see the imprint of gravitational waves from the early universe on
the photons, the, the microwave background radiation that, that is our present way of,
of seeing into the earliest universe. But those, those photons interact much more strongly with
matter. They're much more strongly processed. So they don't give us directly such an unprocessed
view of the early universe, of the very early universe. But if gravitational waves leave some
imprint on that as they move through, we could detect that too. And people are trying our,
you know, as we speak, working very hard towards, towards that goal.
It's so exciting to think about a sensor the size of the solar system.
That would be a fantastic, I mean, that would be a pinnacle artifact of human endeavor to me.
It would be such, such an inspiring thing that just we want to know. And we go to these
extraordinary lengths of making gigantic things that are also very sophisticated because what
you're trying to do, you have to understand how they move. You have to understand the,
the properties of light that, that they're being used, the interference between light and,
and you have to be able to make the light with lasers and understand the quantum theory and
get the timing exactly right. And I said, extraordinary endeavor involving all kinds
of knowledge from the very strong, very small to the very large, and all in the service of
curiosity and built on a grand scale. So yeah, it would be proud to be a human if we, if we did
that. I love that you're inspired both by, by the power of theory and the power of experiments.
So this is the both, both I think are exceptionally impressive that the human mind can come up with
theories that give us a peek into how the universe works, but also construct tools that are way
bigger than the, the evolutionary origins we came from.
Right. And by the way, you know, the fact that we can design such things and they work
is an extraordinary demonstration that we really do understand a lot.
And then in some ways, and it's our ability to answer questions that also leads us to be able
to address more ambitious questions. So you mentioned that at the big, at the big bang in
the early days, things are pretty homogeneous. Yes. But here we are sitting on earth to
hairless apes, you could say with microphones in talking about the brief history of things,
you said it's much harder to describe Sweden than it is the universe. So there's a lot of
complexity. There's a lot of interesting details here. So how does this complexity come to be,
do you think? It seems like there's these pockets. We don't know how rare of like
where hairless apes emerge. And then they came from the initial soup that was homogeneous.
Was that an accident? Well, we understand there, we understand in broad
outlines how it could happen. We certainly don't understand why it happened exactly in the way it
did. But there are certainly open questions about the origins of life and how inevitable
emergence of intelligence was and how that happened. But in the very broadest terms,
the universe early on was quite homogeneous, but not completely homogeneous. There were
part in 10,000 fluctuations in density within this primordial plasma. And as time goes on,
there's an instability, which causes those density contrasts to increase. There's a
gravitational instability where it's denser, the gravitational attractions are stronger,
and so that brings in more matter and it gets even denser and so on and so on.
So there's a natural tendency of matter to clump because of gravitational interactions.
And then the equation is complicated, we have lots of things clumping together. Then we know
what the laws are, but we have to, to a certain extent, wave our hands about what happens. But
basic understanding of chemistry says that if things, and the physics of radiation tells us
that as things start to clump together, they can radiate, give off some energy so they don't
they slow down. As a result, they lose energy, they can clumber it together, cool down,
form things like stars, form things like planets. And so in broad terms, there's no mystery.
That's what the equations tell you should happen. But because it's a process involving many,
many individual units, the application of the laws that govern individual units to these things
is very delicate, you know, computationally very difficult. And more profoundly, the equations
have this probability of chaos or sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells you tiny
differences in the initial state can lead to enormous differences in the subsequent behavior.
So physics, fundamental physics at some point says, okay, chemists, biologists, this is your
problem. And then again, in broad terms, we know how it's conceivable that the humans and things
like that can, how complex structure can emerge. It's a matter of having the right kind of temperature
and the right kind of stuff. So you need to be able to make chemical bonds that are reasonably
stable and be able to make complex structures. And we're very fortunate that carbon has this
ability to make backbones and elaborate branching and things. So you can get complex things that
we call biochemistry. And yet the bonds can be broken a little bit with the help of energetic
injections from the sun. So you have to have both the possibility of changing, but also the
useful degree of stability. And we know at that very, very broad level,
physics can tell you that it's conceivable. If you want to know what really happened,
what really can happen, then you have to go to chemistry. If you want to know what actually
happened, then you really have to consult the fossil record and biologists. So these ways of
addressing the issue are complementary in a sense. They use different kinds of concepts,
they use different languages, and they address different kinds of questions, but they're not
inconsistent. They're just complementary. It's kind of interesting to think about
those early fluctuations as our earliest ancestors. Yes, that's right. So it's amazing to think that
this is the modern answer to the, or the modern version of what the Hindu philosophers had that
art thou. Those little quantum fluctuations in the early universe are the seeds out of which
complexity, including plausibly humans really evolve. You don't need anything else.
That brings up the question of asking for a friend here if there's other
pockets of complexity commonly called as alien intelligent civilizations out there.
Well, we don't know for sure, but I have a strong suspicion that the answer is yes,
because the one case we do have at hand to study here on Earth, we sort of know what the
conditions were that were helpful to life, the right kind of temperature, the right kind of star
that keeps, maintains that temperature for a long time, the liquid environment of water.
And once those conditions emerged on Earth, which was roughly four and a half billion years ago,
it wasn't very long before what we call life started to leave relics. So we can find forms of
life, primitive forms of life that are almost as old as the Earth itself in the sense that
once the Earth became recent, it was turned from a very hot boiling thing and cooled off into a solid
mass with water, life emerged very, very quickly. So it seems that these general conditions for life
are enough to make it happen relatively quickly. Now, the other lesson I think that one can draw
from this one example. It's dangerous to draw lessons from one example, but that's all we've
got. And that the emergence of intelligent life is a different issue altogether. That took a long
time and seems to have been pretty contingent for a long time. Well, for most of the history of life,
it was single celled things. Even multicellular life only rose about 600 million years ago,
so much after. And then intelligence is kind of a luxury, if you think.
Many more kinds of creatures have big stomachs than big brains. In fact, most have no brains
at all in any reasonable sense. And the dinosaurs ruled for a long, long time. And some of them
were pretty smart, but they were at best bird brains because birds came from the dinosaurs.
And it could have stayed that way. And the emergence of humans was very contingent and kind
of a very, very recent development on evolutionary time scales. And you can argue about the level
of human intelligence, but I think it's pretty impressive. That's what we're talking about.
It's very impressive and can ask these kinds of questions and discuss them intelligently.
So this is a long-winded justification of my feeling is that the conditions for life
in some form are probably satisfied in many, many places around the universe,
and even within our galaxy. I'm not so sure about the emergence of intelligent life
or the emergence of technological civilizations. That seems much more contingent and special.
It's conceivable to me that we're the only example in the galaxy. Although, yeah, I don't know one
way or the other. I have different opinions on different days of the week. But one of the things
that worries me in the spirit of being humble, that our particular kind of intelligence
is not very special. So there's all kinds of different intelligences. And even more broadly,
there could be many different kinds of life. So the basic definition, and I just had,
I think somebody that you know, Sarah Walker, I just had a very long conversation with her
about even just the very basic question of trying to define what is life from a physics
perspective. Even that question within itself, I think one of the most fundamental questions
in science and physics and everything is just trying to get some universal laws around the
ideas of what is life. Because that kind of unlocks a bunch of things around life,
intelligence, consciousness, all those kinds of things.
I agree with you in a sense, but I think that's a dangerous question because
the answer can't be any more precise than the question. And the question what is life
kind of assumes that we have a definition of life and that it's a natural phenomena that
can be distinguished. But really, there are edge cases like viruses and
some people would like to say that electrons have consciousness. So you can't, if you really have
fuzzy concepts, it's very hard to reach precise kinds of scientific answers. But I think there's
a very fruitful question that's adjacent to it, which has been pursued in different forms for
quite a while and is now becoming very sophisticated in reaching in new directions. And that is,
what are the states of matter that are possible? So in high school or grade school, you learn
about solids, liquids, and gases, but that really just scratches the surface of different ways that
are distinguishable, that matter can form into macroscopically different meaningful patterns
that we call phases of matter. And then there are precise definitions of what we mean by phases of
matter and that have been worked out fruitful over the decades. And we're discovering new
states of matter all the time and kind of having to work at what we mean by matter. We're discovering
the capabilities of matter to organize in interesting ways. And some of them, like liquid crystals,
are important ingredients of life. Our cell membranes are liquid crystals. And that's very
important to the way they work. Recently, there's been a development in where we're talking about
states of matter that are not static, but that have dynamics, that have characteristic patterns
not only in space, but in time. These are called time crystals. And that's been a development
that's just in the last decade or so. It's really flourishing. And so, is there a state of matter
or a group of states of matter that corresponds to life? Maybe, but the answer can't be any
more definite than the question. I mean, I got to push back on the... Those are just words.
I mean, I disagree with you. The question points to a direction. The answer might be able to be
more precise than the question, because just as you're saying, there is... We could be discovering
certain characteristics and patterns that are associated with a certain type of matter,
macroscopically speaking. And that we can then be able to post facto say,
this is... Let's assign the word life to this kind of matter.
I agree with that completely. So, it's not a disagreement. It's very frequent in physics that
or in science that words that are in common use get refined and reprocessed
into scientific terms that's happened for things like force and energy. And so, in a way, we find
out what the useful definition is or symmetry, for instance. And the common usage may be quite
different from the scientific usage, but the scientific usage is special and takes on a life
of its own. And we find out what the useful version of it is or the fruitful version of it is.
So, I do think... So, in that spirit, I think if we can identify states of matter or linked
states of matter that can carry on processes of self-reproduction and development and
information processing, we might be tempted to classify those things as life.
What can I ask you about the craziest one, which is the one we know maybe least about,
which is consciousness? Is it possible that there are certain kinds of matter would be able to
classify as conscious meaning... So, there's the panpsychist or the philosophers who kind of
try to imply that all matter has some degree of consciousness and you can almost construct
like a physics of consciousness. Again, we're in such early days of this, but nevertheless,
it seems useful to talk about it. Is there some sense from a physics perspective to make sense
of consciousness? Is there some hope? Well, again, consciousness is imprecise, a very imprecise word
and loaded with connotations that I think we should... We don't want to start a scientific
analysis with that, I don't think. It's often been important in science to start with simple
cases and work up consciousness. I think what most people think of when you talk about consciousness
is, okay, what am I doing in the world? This is my experience. I have a rich inner life and
experience. Where is that in the equations? I think that's a great question, a great,
great question. Actually, I think I'm gearing up to try to address that in coming years.
One version of asking that question, just as you said now, is what is the simplest formulation
of that to study? I think I'm much more comfortable with the idea of studying self-awareness
as opposed to consciousness, because that sort of gets rid of the mystical aura of the thing.
Self-awareness is in simple... I think contiguous, at least with ideas about feedback.
So if you have a system that looks at its own state and responds to it, that's a kind of self-awareness.
More sophisticated versions could be like in information processing things, computers that
look into their own internal state and do something about it. I think that could also be
done in neural nets. This is called recurrent neural nets, which are hard to understand
in kind of a frontier. I think understanding those and gradually building up a kind of
profound ability to conceptualize different levels of self-awareness. What do you have to not know
and what do you have to know? When do you know that you don't know it? What do you think you know
that you don't really know? I think when we clarify those issues and get a rich theory
around self-awareness, I think that will illuminate the questions about consciousness
in a way that scratching your chin and talking about qualia and blah, blah, blah, blah is never
going to do. Well, I also have a different approach to the whole thing. So from a robotics
perspective, you can engineer things that exhibit qualities of consciousness without understanding
how things work. And from that perspective, you, it's like a back door, like enter through the
psychology door. Precisely. The cognitive science door. I think we're on the same wavelength here.
And let me just add one comment, which is I think we should try to understand consciousness
as we experience it in evolutionary terms and ask ourselves, why? Why does it happen?
This thing seems useful. Why is it useful? Why is it useful?
We've got a conscious eye watch here. Interesting question. Thank you, Siri. Okay.
Okay. I'll get back to you later.
And I think what we're gonna, I'm morally certain that what's going to emerge from
analyzing recurrent neural nets and robotic design and advanced computer design is that
having this kind of looking at the internal state in a structured way that, that doesn't look at
everything. It's kind of, it's encapsulated, looks at highly processed information and very
selective and makes choices without knowing how they're made. So there'll also be an unconscious.
I think that that is going to be, turn out to be really essential to doing efficient
efficient information processing. And that's why it evolved because it's helpful in,
because brains come at a high cost. There has to be a good why.
And there's a reason, yeah, they're rare in evolution and big brains are rare in evolution
and they come at a big cost. I mean, if you, they have high metabolic demands.
They require very active lifestyle, warm-bloodedness and take away from the ability to support
metabolism of digestion. And so it's, it comes at a high cost. It has to pay back.
Yeah. I think it has a lot of value in social interaction. So I actually spending the rest
of the day today and with our friends that are, our legged friends in robotic form at Boston
Dynamics. And I think, so my probably biggest passion is human robot interaction. And it seems
that consciousness from the perspective of the robot is very useful to improve the human
robot interaction experience. The first, the display of consciousness, but then to me,
there's a gray area between the display of consciousness and consciousness itself.
If you think of consciousness from an evolutionary perspective,
it seems like a useful tool in human communication. So yes, it's certainly, well,
whatever consciousness is, we'll turn out to be. I think addressing it through its use and working
up from simple cases and also working up from engineering experience in trying to do efficient
computation, including efficient management of social interactions is going to really shed
light on these questions. As I said, in a way that sort of musing abstractly about consciousness
never would. So as I mentioned, I talked to Sarah Walker. And first of all, she says,
hi, spoke very highly of you. One of her concerns about physics and physicists and humans is that
we may not fully understand the system that we're inside of. Meaning, there may be limits to the
kind of physics we do in trying to understand the system of which we're part of. So the observer
is also the observed. In that sense, it seems like our tools of understanding the world,
I mean, this is mostly centered around the questions of what is life, trying to understand
the patterns that are characteristic of life and intelligence, all those kinds of things.
We're not using the right tools because we're in the system. Is there something that resonates
with you there? Well, yes, we do have limitations, of course, in the amount of information we can
process. On the other hand, we can get help from our silicon friends and we can get help from all
kinds of instruments that make up for our perceptual deficits. At a conceptual level,
we can use different kinds of concepts to address different kinds of questions. So I'm not sure
exactly what problem she's talking about. It's the problem akin to an organism living in a 2G
plane trying to understand a three-dimensional world. Well, we can do that. In fact, for practical
purposes, most of our experience is two-dimensional. It's hard to move vertically, and yet we've
produced conceptually a three-dimensional symmetry. And in fact, four-dimensional spacetime.
So by thinking in appropriate ways and using instruments and getting consistent accounts
and rich accounts, we find out what concepts are necessary. And I don't see any end
in sight of the process or any showstoppers because... Let me give you an example. I mean,
for instance, QCD, our theory of the strong interaction, has nice equations, which I helped
to discover. What's QCD? Quantum chromodynamics. So it's our theory of the strong interaction,
the interaction that is responsible for nuclear physics. So it's the interaction that governs
how quarks and gluons interact with each other and make protons and neutrons and all the strong,
the related particles and many things in physics. It's one of the four basic forces of nature,
as we presently understand it. And so we have beautiful equations, which we can test
in very special circumstances using at high energies, at accelerators. So we're
certain that these equations are correct. Prizes are given for it. And so people try to knock it
down and they can't. But the situations in which we can calculate the consequences of
these equations are very limited. So for instance, no one has been able to demonstrate that this
theory, which is built on quarks and gluons, which you don't observe, actually produces protons and
neutrons and the things you do observe. This is called the problem of confinement. So no one's
been able to prove that analytically in a way that a human can understand. On the other hand,
we can take these equations to a computer, to gigantic computers and compute. And by God, you get
the world from it. So these equations in a way that we don't understand in terms of human concepts,
we can't do the calculations, but our machines can do them. So with the help of what I like to
call our silicon friends and their descendants in the future, we can understand in a different way
that allows us to understand more. But I don't think we'll ever, no human is ever going to be
able to solve those equations in the same way. But I think that when we find limitations to
our natural abilities, we can try to find works or workarounds. And sometimes that's appropriate
concepts. Sometimes it's appropriate instruments. Sometimes it's a combination of the two. But I
think it's premature to get defeatist about it. I don't see any logical contradiction or paradox
or limitation that will bring this process to a halt. Well, I think the idea is to continue thinking
outside the box in different directions, meaning just like how the math allows us to think in
multiple dimensions outside of our perception system, sort of thinking, coming up with new tools
of mathematics or computation or all those kinds of things to take different perspectives
on our universe. Well, I'm all for that. And I kind of have even elevated it into a principle,
which is of complementarity, following Bohr that you need different ways of thinking,
even about the same things in order to do justice to their reality and answer different
kinds of questions about them. I mean, we've several times alluded to the fact that human
beings are hard to understand. And the concepts that you use to understand human beings, if you
want to prescribe drugs for them or see what's going to happen if they move very fast or get
exposed to radiation. And so that requires one kind of thinking that's very physical
based on the fact that the materials that we're made out of. On the other hand,
if you want to understand how a person is going to behave in a different kind of situation,
you need entirely different concepts from psychology. And there's nothing wrong with
that. You can have very different ways of addressing the same material that are useful
for different purposes, right? Can you describe this idea which is fascinating of
complementarity a little bit? First of all, what state is the principle? What is it? And second
of all, what are good examples starting from quantum mechanics? You used to mention psychology.
Let's talk about this more. It's like in your new book, one of the most fascinating ideas,
actually. I think it's a wonderful, yeah. To me, it's, well, it's the culminating chapter
of the book. And I think since the whole book is about the big lessons or big takeaways from
profound understanding of the physical world that we've achieved, including that it's mysterious
in some ways, this was the final overarching lesson, complementarity. And it's an approach.
So unlike some of these other things, which are just facts about the world, like the world is
both big and small in different sessions, and as big, but we're not small, things we talked about
earlier, and the fact that the universe is comprehensible and how complexity can emerge
from simplicity. And so those things are, in some, in the broad sense, facts about the world.
Complementarity is more an attitude towards the world that is encouraged by the facts about the
world. And it's the idea, the concept of the approach that or the realization that it can be
appropriate and useful and inevitable and unavoidable to use very different descriptions
of the same object or the same system or the same situation to answer different kinds of questions that
may be very different and even mutually uninterpretable, imutably incomprehensible.
But both correct somehow. But both correct and sources of different kinds of insight.
Which is so weird. Yeah. Well. But it seems to work in so many cases.
It works in many cases. And I think it's a deep fact about the world and how we should approach it.
It's most rigorous form where it's actually a theorem, if quantum mechanics is correct,
occurs in quantum mechanics, where the primary description of the world
is in terms of wave functions. But let's not talk about the world. Let's talk about a particle,
an electron. It's the primary description of that electron is its wave function. And the wave function
can be used to predict where it's going to be. And if you observe, it'll be in different places
with different probabilities or how fast it's moving. And it'll also be moving in different ways
with different probabilities. That's what quantum mechanics says. And you can predict either set
of probabilities. What's going to happen if I make an observation of the position or the velocity.
So the wave function gives you ways of doing both of those. But to do it, to get those predictions,
you have to process the wave function in different ways. You process it one way for position and
a different way for momentum. And those ways are mathematically incompatible. It's like
you have a stone and you can sculpt it into Venus de Milo or you can sculpt it into David,
but you can't do both. And that's an example of complementarity. But to answer different kinds
of questions, you have to analyze the system in different ways that are mutually incompatible,
but both valid to answer different kinds of questions. So in that case, it's a theorem.
But I think it's a much more widespread phenomenon that applies to many cases where we
can't prove it as a theorem, but it's a piece of wisdom if you like and appears to be a very
important insight. And if you ignore it, you can get very confused and misguided.
Do you think this is a useful hack for ideas that we don't fully understand? Or is this
somehow a fundamental property of all or many ideas that you can take multiple perspectives
and they're both true? Well, I think it's both.
So it's both the answer to all questions. Yes, that's right. It's not either or. It's both.
It's paralyzing to think that we live in a world that's fundamentally surrounded by
complementary ideas. Because we somehow want to attach ourselves to absolute truths,
and absolute truths certainly don't like the idea of complementarity.
Yes, Einstein was very uncomfortable with complementarity. And in a broad sense,
the famous Bohr-Einstein debates revolved around this question of whether the complementarity that
is a foundational feature of quantum mechanics as we have it was, is
a permanent feature of the universe and our description of nature. And so far,
quantum mechanics wins. It's gone from triumph to triumph. Whether complementarity is rock bottom,
I guess, you can never be sure. But it looks awfully good and it's been very successful.
And certainly, complementarity has been extremely useful and fruitful in that domain,
including one of some of Einstein's attempts to challenge it with the famous Einstein-Pedolski
Rosen experiment turned out to be confirmations that have been useful in themselves. But so
thinking about these things was fruitful, but not in the way that Einstein hoped.
Yeah, so as I said, in the case of quantum mechanics and this
dilemma or dichotomy between processing the wave function in different ways,
it's a theorem. They're mutually incompatible and that the physical correlate of that is the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle that you can't have position and momentum determined at once.
But in other cases, like one that I like to think about or like to point out as an example is
free will and determinism. It's much less of a theorem and more a way of thinking about things
that I think is reassuring and avoids a lot of unnecessary quarreling and confusion.
The quarreling I'm okay with and the confusion I'm okay with, I mean,
people debate about difficult ideas. But the question is whether it could be
almost a fundamental truth. I think it is a fundamental truth.
Free will is both an illusion and not. Yes, I think that's correct.
The reason why people say quantum mechanics is weird and complementarity is a big part of that.
You know, to say that our actual whole world is weird, the whole hierarchy of
the universe is weird in this kind of particular way, and it's quite profound,
but it's also humbling because it's like we're never going to be on sturdy ground in the way
that humans like to be. It's like you have to embrace that, well, this whole thing is
on sturdy mess. Well, it's one of many lessons in humility
that we run into in profound understanding of the world. I mean, the Copernican revolution was one
that the earth is not the center of the universe. Darwinian evolution is another that humans are
not the pinnacle of God's creation. The apparent result of deep understanding of physical reality
that mind emerges from matter and there's no call on special life forces or souls.
These are all lessons in humility, and I actually find complementarity a
liberating concept. There's a story about Dr. Johnson and he's talking with Boswell,
and they were discussing a sermon that they'd both heard, and the sort of culmination of the
sermon was the speaker saying, I accept the universe, and Dr. Johnson said, well, he'd damn
well better, and there's a certain joy in accepting the universe because it's mind expanding,
and to me, complementarity also suggests tolerance, suggests opportunities
for understanding things in different ways that add to, rather than detract from understanding.
I think it's an opportunity for mind expansion and demanding that there's only one way to think
about things can be very limiting. On the free will one, that's a trippy one, though, to think
like I am the decider of my own actions, and at the same time, I'm not is tricky to think about,
but it does seem to be some kind of profound truth in that. Well, I think it is tied up.
It will turn out to be tied up when we understand things better with these issues of self-awareness
and where we get what we perceive as making choices, what does that really mean, and what's
going on under the hood, but I'm speculating about a future understanding that's not in place
at present. Your sense there will always be, as you dig into the self-awareness thing,
there'll always be some places where complementarity is going to show up.
Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean, there will be, how should I say, there'll be kind of a God's eye view
which sees everything that's going on in the computer or the brain, and then there's the brain's
own view or the central processor or whatever it is, what we call the self, the consciousness
that's only aware of a very small part of it, and those are very different.
So the God's eye view can be deterministic while the self-view
sees free will. I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to work out, actually.
And as it stands, free will is a concept that we definitely, at least I feel I definitely
experience, I can choose to do one thing than another, and other people I think are sufficiently
similar to me that I trust that they feel the same way. And it's an essential concept in psychology
and law and so forth. But at the same time, I think that mind emerges from matter and that
there's an alternative description of matter that's up to subtleties about quantum mechanics,
which I don't think are relevant here, really is deterministic.
Let me ask you about some particles. Okay.
Okay. First, the absurd question, almost like a question that Plato would ask,
what is the smallest thing in the universe?
As far as we know, the fundamental particles out of which we build our most successful
description of nature are points. They don't have any internal structure.
So, that's as small as can be. So, what does that mean operationally? That means
that they obey equations that describe entities that are singular concentrations of energy,
momentum, angular momentum, the things that particles have, but localized at individual
points. Now, that mathematical structure is only revealed partially in the world because to
process the wave function in a way that accesses information about the precise position of things
you have to apply a lot of energy and that's an idealization that you can apply infinite amount
of energy to determine a precise position. But at the mathematical level, we build the world
out of particles that are points. So, do they actually exist? And what are we talking about?
So, let me ask, do quarks exist? Yes. Do electrons exist? Yes. Do photons exist? Yes.
But what does it mean for them to exist? Okay. So, well, the hard answer to that,
the precise answer is that we construct the world out of equations that contain entities that are
reproducible, that exist in vast numbers throughout the universe that have definite
properties of mass, spin, and a few others that we call electrons. And what an electron is,
is defined by the equations that it satisfies theoretically. And we find that there are many,
many exemplars of that entity in the physical world. So, in the case of electrons, we can
isolate them and study them in individual ones in great detail that we can check that they all
actually are identical. And that's why chemistry works. And yes, so that in that case, it's very
tangible. Similarly with photons, you can study them individually, the units of light.
And nowadays, it's very practical to study individual photons and determine their
spin and their other basic properties and check out the equations in great detail.
For quarks and gluons, which are the other two main ingredients of our model of matter
that's so successful, it's a little more complicated because the quarks and gluons
that appear in our equations don't appear directly as particles you can isolate
and study individually. They always occur within what are called bound states or
structures like protons. A proton, roughly speaking, is composed of three quarks and
a lot of gluons, but we can detect them in a remarkably direct way actually nowadays. Whereas
at relatively low energies, the behavior of quarks is complicated, at high energies,
they can propagate through space relatively freely for a while and we can see their tracks.
So ultimately, they get recaptured into protons and other mesons and funny things,
but for a short time, they propagate freely and while that happens, we can
take snapshots and see their manifestations. Actually, this kind of thing is exactly what
I got the Nobel Prize for, predicting that this would work. And similarly for gluons,
although you can't isolate them as individual particles and study them in the same way we
study electrons say, you can use them theoretically as entities out of which you
build tangible things that we actually do observe, but also you can,
at accelerators, at high energy, you can liberate them for brief periods of time and study how
and get convincing evidence that they leave tracks and you can get convincing evidence
that they were there and have the properties that we wanted them to have.
Can we talk about asymptotic freedom and this very idea that you won the Nobel Prize for?
Yeah. So it describes a very weird effect to me, the weird in the following way. So the way I think
of most forces or interactions, the closer you are, the stronger the effect, the stronger the
force. With quarks, the closer they are, the less the strong interaction. And in fact,
they basically act like free particles when they're very close. But this requires a huge
amount of energy. Can you describe me, how does this even work? How weird it is?
A proper description must bring in quantum mechanics and relativity and
so a proper description and equations. So a proper description really is probably
more than we have time for and we require quite a bit of patience on your part.
How does relativity come into play? Wait.
Oh, relativity is important because when we talk about
trying to think about short distances, we have to think about
very large momenta and very large momenta are connected to very large energy in relativity.
And so the connection between how things behave at short distances and how things behave at high
energy really is connected through relativity in sort of a slightly backhanded way. Quantum
mechanics indicates that short to get to analyze short distances, you need to bring in probes that
carry a lot of momentum. This again is related to uncertainty because it's the fact that you
have to bring in a lot of momentum that interferes with the possibility of determining
position and momentum at the same time. If you want to determine position,
you have to use instruments that bring in a lot of momentum. And because of that,
those same instruments can't also measure momentum because they're disturbing the momentum.
And then the momentum brings in energy. So that there's also the effect that asymptotic
freedom comes from the possibility of spontaneously making quarks and gluons for short amounts of
time that fluctuate into existence and out of existence. And the fact that that can be done
with a very little amount of energy and uncertainty and energy translates into uncertainty and time.
So if you do that for a short time, you can do that. Well, it all comes in a package.
So I told you it would take a while to really explain. But the results can be understood.
I mean, we can state the results pretty simply, I think. So in everyday life, we do encounter some
forces that increase with distance and kind of turn off at short distances. That's the way
rubber bands work, if you think about it. If you pull them hard, they resist. But they could
flabby if the rubber band is not pulled. And so there are that can happen in the physical world.
But what's really difficult is to see how that could be a fundamental force that's
consistent with everything else we know. And that's what asymptotic freedom is. It says that
there's a very particular kind of fundamental force that involves special particles called gluons
with very special properties that enables that kind of behavior. So at the time we did our work,
there were experimental indications that quarks and gluons did have this kind of property. But
there were no equations that were capable of capturing it. And we found the equations and
showed how they work and showed how they that they were basically unique. And this led to a
complete theory of how the strong interaction works, which is the quantum chromodynamics we
mentioned earlier. So that's the phenomenon that quarks and gluons interact very, very
weakly when they're close together. That's connected through relativity with the fact that
they also interact very, very weakly at high energies. So at high energies, the simplicity
of the fundamental interaction gets revealed. At the time we did our work, the clues were very
subtle. But nowadays at what are now high energy accelerators, it's all obvious. So we would have
had a much, well, somebody would have had a much easier time. 20 years later, looking at the data,
you can sort of see the quarks and gluons. As I mentioned, they leave these short tracks that
it would have been much, much easier. But from fundamental, from indirect clues, we were able
to piece together enough to make that behavior a prediction rather than a post-diction, right?
So it becomes obvious at high energies. It becomes very obvious. When we first did this work,
it was frontiers of high energy physics. And at big international conferences,
there would always be sessions on testing QCD and whether this proposed description of the
strong interaction was in fact correct and so forth. And it was very exciting. But nowadays,
the same kind of work, but much more precise with calculations to more accuracy and experiments that
are much more precise in comparisons that are very precise. Now it's called calculating backgrounds
because people take this for granted and want to see deviations from the theory,
which would be the new discoveries. Yeah, the cutting edge becomes a foundation,
the foundation becomes boring. Is there some, for basic explanation purposes,
is there something to be said about strong interactions in the context of the strong
nuclear force for the attraction between protons and neutrons versus the interaction
between quarks within protons? Well, quarks and gluons have the same relation
basically to nuclear physics as electrons and photons have to atomic and molecular physics.
So atoms and photons are the dynamic entities that really come into play in chemistry and
atomic physics. Of course, you have to add the atomic nuclei, but those are small and
relatively inert, really the dynamical part. And for most purposes of chemistry, you just say
that you have this tiny little nucleus, which QCD gives you. Don't worry about it. It's there.
The real action is the electrons moving around and exchanging and things like that.
But okay, but we want it to understand the nucleus too. And so atoms are sort of
quantum mechanical clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces, which is photons,
and then this radiation, which is another aspect of photons.
That's where all the fun happens is the electrons and photons and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, that's right. And the nucleus are kind of the, well, they give the positive charge
and most of the mass of matter, but they don't, since they're so heavy, they don't move very
much in chemistry. And I'm oversimplifying drastically.
They're not contributing much to the interaction in chemistry.
For most purposes in chemistry, you can just idealize them as concentrations of positive mass
and charge that are, you don't have to look inside, but people are curious what's inside.
And that was a big thing on the agenda of 20th century physics starting in the 19,
well, starting with the 20th century and unfolding throughout of trying to understand
what forces held the atomic nucleus together, what it was. And so anyway, the story that emerges
from QCD is that very similar to the way that, well, broadly similar to the way that
clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces give you atoms and ultimately molecules.
Protons and neutrons are like atoms made now out of quarks, quark clouds held together by
gluons, which are like the photons that give the electric forces, but this is giving a different
force, the strong force. And the residual forces between protons and neutrons that
are left over from the basic binding are like the residual forces between atoms that give molecules,
but in the case of protons and neutrons, it gives you atomic nuclei.
So again, for definitional purposes, QCD quantum chromodynamics is basically the physics of
strong interaction. Yeah, we understand. I think most physicists would say it's the theory of
quarks and gluons and how they interact, but it's a very precise, and I think it's fair to say,
very beautiful theory based on mathematical symmetry of a high order. And another thing
that's beautiful about it is that it's kind of in the same family as electrodynamics,
the conceptual structure of the equations are very similar. They're based on having
particles that respond to charge in a very symmetric way. In the case of
electrodynamics, it's photons that respond to electric charge. In the case of quantum
chromodynamics, there are three kinds of charge that we call colors, but they're nothing like
colors. They really are like different kinds of charge.
But they rhyme with the same kind of, like it's similar kind of dynamics.
Similar kind of dynamics. I'd like to say that QCD is like QED on steroids. And instead of one
photon, you have eight gluons. Instead of one charge, you have three color charges. But there's
a strong family resemblance. But the context in which QCD does this thing is it's much higher
energies. Like that's where it comes from. Well, it's a stronger force so that to access how it's
works and kind of pry things apart, you have to inject more energy.
And so that gives us, in some sense, a hint of how things were in the earlier universe.
Yeah. Well, in that regard, asymptotic freedom is a tremendous blessing because it means
things get simpler at high energy.
The universe was born free.
Born free. That's very good. So in atomic physics, I mean, a similar thing happens
in the theory of stars. Stars are hot enough that the interactions between electrons and photons
are, they're liberated. They don't form atoms anymore. They make a plasma, which in some ways
is simpler to understand. You don't have complicated chemistry. And in the early universe,
according to QCD, similarly, atomic nuclei dissolved into the constituent quarks and
gluons, which are moving around very fast and interacting in relatively simple ways.
And so this opened up the early universe to scientific calculation.
Can I ask you about some other weird particles that make up our universe?
What are axions? And what is the strong CP problem?
Okay. So let me start with what the strong CP problem is.
First of all, well, C is charge conjugation, which is the transformation, the notional
transformation, if you like, that changes all particles into their antiparticles.
And the concept of C symmetry, charge conjugation symmetry, is that if you do that,
you find the same laws would work. So the laws are symmetric. If the behavior that
particles exhibit is the same as the behavior you get with all their antiparticles,
then P is parity, which is also called spatial inversion. It's basically looking
at a mirror universe and saying that the laws that are obeyed in a mirror universe,
when you look at the mirror images obey the same laws as the sources of their images.
There's no way of telling left from right, for instance, that the laws don't distinguish
between left and right. Now, in the mid 20th century, people discovered that both of those
are not quite true. Really, the equation that the mirror universe, the universe
that you see in a mirror is not going to obey the same laws as the universe that we actually
exhibit and interpret. You would be able to tell if you did the right kind of experiments,
which was the mirror and which was the real thing. Anyway, that-
So that's the parity and they show that the parity doesn't necessarily hold?
It doesn't quite hold. And examining what the exceptions are turned out to lead to
all kinds of insight about the nature of fundamental interactions, especially the
properties of neutrinos and the weak interaction. It's a long story, but it's a very-
So you just define the C and the P, the conjugation, the charge conjugation-
Not that I've done that, I want to-
What's the problem?
... shove them off.
Okay, great.
Because it's easier to talk about T, which is time reversal symmetry. We have very good
reasons to think CPT is an accurate symmetry of nature. It's on the same level as relativity
and quantum mechanics basically, so that better be true.
So it's symmetric when you do conjugation parity in time?
And time and space reversal. If you do all three, then you get the same physical consequences.
But that means that CP is equivalent to T. But what's observed in the world is that T is not
quite an accurate symmetry of nature either. So most phenomena of at the fundamental level,
so interactions among elementary particles and the basic gravitational interaction,
if you ran them backwards in time, you'd get the same laws. So if again going back, unless
this time we don't talk about a mirror, but we talk about a movie. If you take a movie and
then run it backwards, that's the time reversal.
It's good to think about a mirror in time.
Yeah, it's like a mirror in time. If you run the movie backwards, it would look very strange
if you were looking at complicated objects and a Charlie Chaplin movie or whatever.
It would look very strange if you ran it backwards in time. But at the level of
basic interactions, if you were able to look at the atoms and the quarks involved,
they would obey the same laws to a very good approximation, but not exactly.
So not exactly. That means you could tell.
You could tell, but you'd have to do very, very subtle experiments with at high energy
accelerators to take a movie that looked different when you ran it backwards.
This was a discovery by two great physicists named Jim Cronin and Val Fitch in the mid-1960s.
Previous to that, over all the centuries of development of physics with all its precise laws,
they did seem to have this gratuitous property that they looked the same if you run the equations
backwards. It's kind of an embarrassing property, actually, because life isn't like that.
So empirical reality does not have this imagery in any obvious way, and yet the laws did.
It's almost like the laws of physics are missing something fundamental about life
if it holds that property, right? That's the embarrassing nature of it.
It's embarrassing. Well, people worked hard at what this was a problem that's thought to
belong to the foundations of statistical mechanics or the foundations of thermodynamics
to understand how behavior, which is grossly not symmetric with respect to reversing the
direction of time in large objects, how that can emerge from equations which are symmetric with
respect to changing the direction of time to a very good approximation. That's still an interesting
endeavor. Actually, it's an exciting frontier of physics now to sort of explore the boundary between
when that's true and when it's not true, when you get to smaller objects and exceptions like
time crystals. I definitely have to ask about time crystals in a second here. So the CP problem
and T, so there's lost all of these. We're in danger of infinite regress, but we'll have to
convert soon. Can't possibly beat turtles all the way down. We're going to get to the bottom
turtle. So it got to be a really puzzling thing why the laws should have this very odd property
that we don't need. And in fact, it's kind of an embarrassment in addressing empirical reality,
but it seemed to be almost, it seemed to be exactly true for a long time and then almost true.
And in way almost true is even more disturbing than exactly true because
exactly true. It could have been just a fundamental feature of the world. And at some level,
you just have to take it as it is. And if it's a beautiful, easily articulatable
regularity, you could say that, okay, that's fine as a fundamental law of nature. But to say
that is approximately true, but not exactly, that's very weird. That's weird. So there was
great progress in the late part of the 20th century in getting to an understanding of
fundamental interactions in general, that shed light on this issue. It turns out that the
basic principles of relativity and quantum mechanics plus the kind of high degree of
symmetry that we found, the so-called gauge symmetry that characterizes the fundamental
interactions, when you put all that together, it's a very, very constraining framework.
And it has some indirect consequences because the possible interactions are so constrained.
And one of the indirect consequences is that the possibilities for violating the symmetry
between forwards and backwards in time are very limited. They're basically only two.
Okay. And one of them occurs and leads to a very rich theory that explains the Cronin-Fisch
experiment. And a lot of things that have been done subsequently has been used to make all kinds
of successful predictions. So that's turned out to be a very rich interaction. It's esoteric,
and the effects only show up at accelerators and are small and so on. But they might have
been very important in the early universe and lead to them be connected to the asymmetry between
matter and antimatter in the present universe. And so, but that's another digression. The point is
that that was fine. That was a triumph to say that there was one possible kind of interaction
that would violate time reversal symmetry. And sure enough, there it is. But the other kind
doesn't occur. So we still got a problem. Why doesn't it occur? So we're close to
really finally understanding this profound gratuitous feature of the world that is almost,
but not quite symmetric under reversing the direction of time, but not quite there.
And to get to understand that last bit is a challenging frontier of physics today.
And we have a promising proposal for how it works, which is a kind of theory of evolution.
So there's this possible interaction, which we call a coupling, and there's a numerical quantity
that tells us how strong that is. And traditionally in physics, we think of these kinds of numerical
quantities as constants of nature that you just have to put them in from experiment.
They have a certain value, and that's it. And who am I to question? They seem to be just constants.
But in this case, it's been fruitful to think and work out a theory where that
strength of interaction is actually not a constant. It's a field. It's a
field or the fundamental ingredients of modern physics. Like there's an electron field, there's
a photon field, which is also called the electromagnetic field. And so all of these
particles are manifestations of different fields. And there could be a field,
something that depends on space and time, so a dynamical entity instead of just a constant here.
And if you do things in a nice way, that's very symmetric, very much suggested aesthetically
by the theory, but the theory we do have, then you find that you get a field which,
as it evolves from the early universe, settles down to a value that's just right
to make the laws very nearly exact, invariant or symmetric with respect to reversal of time.
It might appear as a constant, but it's actually a field that evolved over time.
It evolved over time. But when you examine this proposal in detail, you find that it hasn't quite
settled down to exactly zero. The field is still moving around a little bit,
and because the motion is so difficult, the material is so rigid, and this
mistero, the field that fills all spaces so rigid, even small amounts of motion can involve lots of
energy. And that energy takes the form of particles, fields that are in motion are
always associated with particles, and those are the axions. And if you calculate how much
energy is in these residual oscillations, this axion gas that fills all the universe,
if this fundamental theory is correct, you get just the right amount to make the dark matter
that astronomers want, and it has just the right properties. So I'd love to believe that.
So that might be a thing that might be the key to understanding dark matter.
Yeah, I'd like to think so. And many physicists are coming around to this point of view, which
I've been a voice in the wilderness. I was a voice in the wilderness for a long time, but now
it's become very popular, maybe even dominant. So this axion particle slash field would be the
thing that explains dark matter? Yeah, it would solve this fundamental question of, finally,
of why the laws are almost but not quite exactly the same if you run them backwards in time. And
then seemingly in a totally different conceptual universe, it would also provide, give us an
understanding of the dark matter. That's not what it was designed for. And the theory wasn't
proposed with that in mind. But when you work out the equations, that's what you get. That's
always a good sign, actually. I think I vaguely read somewhere that there may be early experimental
validation of axion. Is that, am I reading the wrong? Well, there have been quite a few false
alarms. And I think there are some of them still, people desperately want to find this thing.
But I don't think any of them are convincing at this point. But there are very ambitious
experiments and kind of new, you have to design new kinds of antennas that are capable of detecting
these predicted particles. And it's very difficult. They interact very, very weekly. If
it were easy, it would have been done already. But I think there's good hope that we can get
down to the required sensitivity and actually test whether these ideas are right
in coming years or maybe decades. And then understand one of the big mysteries,
like literally big in terms of its fraction of the universe is dark matter.
Let me ask you about, you mentioned a few times, time crystals. What are they? These things are,
it's a very beautiful idea when we started to treat space and time as
similar frameworks, physical phenomena. Right. That's what motivated it.
First of all, what are crystals and what are time crystals?
Okay. So crystals are orderly arrangements of atoms in space. And many materials, if you cool them
down gently, will form crystals. And so we say that that's a state of matter that forms spontaneously.
And an important feature of that state of matter is that the end result, the crystal,
has less symmetry than the equations that give rise to the crystal. So the equations,
the basic equations of physics, are the same if you move a little bit. So you can move,
they're homogeneous, but crystals aren't. The atoms are in particular places,
though they have less symmetry. And time crystals are the same thing in time.
But of course, it's not, so it's not positions of atoms, but it's ordering, orderly behavior
that certain states of matter will arrange themselves into spontaneously if you treat them
gently and let them do what they want to do. But repeat in that same way indefinitely.
That's the crystal in form. You can also have time liquids, or you can have all kinds of other
states of matter. You don't have space time crystals where the pattern only repeats if,
with each step of time, you also move at a certain direction in space. So, yeah.
So basically, it's states of matter that displace structure in time spontaneously.
So here's the difference. When it happens in time, it sure looks a lot like it's motion,
and if it repeats indefinitely, it sure looks a lot like perpetual motion,
like it looks like free lunch. I was told that there's no such thing as free lunch.
Does this violate laws of thermodynamics?
No, but it requires a critical examination of the laws of thermodynamics. Let me say on
background that the laws of thermodynamics are not fundamental laws of physics. There are things
we prove under certain circumstances emerge from the fundamental laws of physics. We don't
posit them separately. They're meant to be deduced, and they can be deduced under limited
circumstances, but not necessarily universally. And we found finding some of the subtleties and
sort of edge cases where they don't apply in a straightforward way. And this is one.
So time crystals do obey, do have this structure in time, but it's not a free lunch,
because although, in a sense, things are moving, they're already doing what they want to do.
So if you want to extract energy from it, you're going to be foiled because there's no spare energy
there. So you can add energy to it and kind of disturb it, but you can't extract energy
from this motion because it wants to do, that's the lowest energy configuration that there is,
so you can't get further energy out of it. So in theory, I guess perpetual motion,
you would be able to extract energy from it. If such a thing was to be created,
you can milk it for energy. But what's usually meant in the literature of perpetual motion
is a kind of macroscopic motion that you could extract energy from, and somehow
it would crank back up. That's not the case here. If you want to extract energy,
this motion is not something you can extract energy from. If you intervene in the behavior,
you can change it, but only by injecting energy, not by taking away energy.
You mentioned that a theory of everything may be quite difficult to come by. A theory of everything
broadly defined meaning like truly a theory of everything. But let's look at a more narrow
theory of everything, which is that the way it's used often in physics is a theory that unifies
our current laws of physics, general relativity, quantum field theory. Do you have thoughts on
this dream of a theory of everything in physics? How close are we? Is there any promising ideas
out there in your view? Well, it would be nice to have. It would be aesthetically pleasing.
Will it be useful? No, probably not. Well, I shouldn't. It's dangerous to say that, but
probably not. I think certainly not in the foreseeable future. Maybe try to understand
black holes. Yeah, but that's, yes, maybe you'd understand black holes, but that's not useful.
And well, not only, I mean, to understand, it's worse. Of course, it's not useful in the sense
that we're not going to be basing any technology anytime soon on black holes, but it's more severe
than that, I would say. It's that the kinds of questions about black holes that we can't answer
within the framework of existing theory are ones that are not going to be susceptible to
astronomical observation in the foreseeable future. They're questions about very, very small
black holes when quantum effects come into play or so that black holes are,
you know, not black holes. They're emitting this discovery of Hawking called Hawking
Radiation, which for astronomical black holes is a tiny, tiny effect that no one has ever
observed. It's a prediction that's never been checked. I feel like supermassive black holes
that doesn't apply. No, no. The predicted rate of radiation from those black holes is so tiny
that it's absolutely unobservable and is overwhelmed by all kinds of other effects.
So it's not practical in the sense of technology. It's not even practical in the sense of
application to astronomy. We are existing theory of general relativity and quantum theory and our
theory of the different fundamental forces is perfectly adequate to all problems of
technology for sure. And almost all problems of astrophysics and cosmology that appear except
with the notable exception of the extremely early universe, if you want to ask what happened
before the Big Bang or what happened right at the Big Bang, which would be a great thing to
understand, of course, we don't. But what about the engineering question? So if we look at space
travels, I think you've spoken with him, Eric Weinstein, really, he says things like we want
to get off this planet. His intuition is almost a motivator for the engineering project of space
exploration. In order for us to crack this problem of becoming a multiplanetary species,
we have to solve the physics problem. His intuition is like if we figure out what he calls the source
code, which is like a theory of everything might give us clues on how to start hacking the fabric
of reality, like getting shortcuts. It might. I can't say that it won't, but I can say that in
the 1970s and early 1980s, we achieved huge steps in understanding matter, QCD, much better
understanding of the weak interaction, much better understanding of quantum mechanics in general.
And it's had minimal impact on technology. On rocket design, on proportion.
Certainly on rocket design, on anything, any technology whatsoever. And now we're talking
about much more esoteric things. And since I don't know what they are, I can't say for sure
that they won't affect technology, but I'm very, very skeptical that they would affect technology.
Because to access them, you need very exotic circumstances to make new kinds of particles
with high energy. You need accelerators that are very expensive, and you don't produce many,
many of them, and so forth. It's just a pipe dream, I think. About space exploration.
Yes. I'm not sure exactly what he has in mind, but to me, it's more a problem of
something between biology and information processing. What you mean, how should I?
I think human bodies are not well adapted to space. Even Mars, which is the closest thing to a kind of
human environment that we're going to find anywhere close by, very, very difficult to maintain humans
on Mars, and very expensive and very unstable. However, if we take a broader view of what it means
to bring human civilization outside of the Earth, if we're satisfied with sending minds out there
that we can converse with, and actuators, and manipulate, and sensors that we can get feedback
from, I think that's where it's at. I think that's so much more realistic. I think that's
the long-term future of space exploration. It's not hauling human bodies all over the place,
and that's just silly. It's possible that human bodies, like you said, it's a biology problem.
What's possible is that we extend human lab span in some way. We have to look at a bigger picture.
It could be just like you're saying, by sending robots with actuators and extending our limbs,
but it could also be extending some aspect of our minds and information on those things.
It could be cyborgs. It could be human brains or cells that realize something like human brain
architecture within artificial environments, you know, shells, if you like, that are more adapted
to the conditions of space. Man-machine hybrids, as well as remote outposts that we can communicate
with. I think those will happen. Yeah, to me, there's some sense in which, as opposed to understanding
the physics of the fundamental fabric of the universe, I think getting to the physics of life,
the physics of intelligence, the physics of consciousness, the physics of information
that brings from which life emerges, that will allow us to do space exploration.
Yeah. Well, I think physics in the larger sense has a lot to contribute here,
not the physics of finding fundamental new laws in the sense of, you know, another quark or
axions even, but physics in the sense of, you know, physics has a lot of experience in
analyzing complex situations and analyzing new states of matter and devising new kinds of
instruments that do clever things. You know, physics in that sense has enormous amounts to
contribute to this kind of endeavor. But I don't think that looking for a so-called theory of
everything has much to do with it at all. What advice would you give to a young person today
with a bit of fire in their eyes, high school student, college student, thinking about what
to do with their life, maybe advice about career or bigger advice about life in general?
Well, first read fundamentals because there I've tried to give some coherent
deep advice. That's fundamentals, 10 keys to reality by Frank Wilczak.
So that's a good place to start.
Available everywhere.
If you want to learn what I can tell you.
Is there an audiobook? I read that.
Yes, yes, there is an audiobook. That's awesome.
Yeah, I think it's, I can give three pieces of wise advice that I think are generally applicable.
One is to cast a wide net, to really look around and see what looks promising, what catches your
imagination. You have to balance those two things. You can have things that catch your imagination,
but don't look promising in the sense that the questions aren't ripe or, and things that you,
in part of what makes things attractive is that, whether you thought you liked them or not,
is if you can see that there's ferment and new ideas coming out, that's attractive in itself.
So, when I started out, I thought I was, and when I was an undergraduate,
I intended to study philosophy or questions of how mind emerges from matter, but I thought that
that wasn't really right.
Timing isn't right yet.
The right, the timing wasn't right for the kind of mathematical thinking and
conceptualization that I really enjoy and am good at.
But, so that's one thing, cast a wide net, look around, and that's
a pretty easy thing to do today because of the internet. You can look at all kinds of things.
You have to be careful though, because there's a lot of crap also, but you can sort of tell
the difference if you do a little digging. So, don't settle on just what your thesis
advisor tells you to do or what your teacher tells you to do. Look for yourself and get
a sense of what seems promising, not what seemed promising 10 years ago.
So, that's one. Another thing is kind of complementary to that. Well, they're all
complementary. The complementary to that is to read history and read the masters of the
history of ideas and masters of ideas. I benefited enormously early in my career from reading
in physics, Einstein in the original, and Feynman's lectures as they were coming out,
and Darwin. You can learn what it is, and Galileo, you can learn what it is to wrestle
with difficult ideas and how great minds did that. You can learn a lot about style, how to
write your ideas up and express them in clear ways. And also, just a couple of that with,
I also enjoy reading biographies. And biographies, yes, similarly.
So, it gives you the context of the human being that created those ideas.
Right. And brings it down to earth in the sense that it was really human beings who did this. And
they made mistakes. I also got inspiration from Bertrand Russell, who was a big hero,
and H.G. Wells. So, read the masters, make contact with great minds. And when you are
sort of narrowing down on a subject, learn about the history of the subject, because
that really puts in context what you are trying to do, and also gives a sense of community and
grandeur to the whole enterprise. And then the third piece of advice is complementary to both
those, which is sort of to get the basics under control as soon as possible. So, if you want to
do theoretical work in science, you have to learn calculus, multivariable calculus, complex
variables, group theory. Nowadays, you have to be highly computer literate. If you want to
do experimental work, you also have to be computer literate, then you have to learn
about electronics and optics and instruments. So, get that under control as soon as possible.
Because it's like learning a language, to produce great works and express yourself fluently and
with confidence. It should be your native language. These things should be like your
native language. So, you're not wondering, what is a derivative? This is just part of your,
it's in your bones, so to speak. And the sooner that you can do that, then the better. So,
those, all those things can be done in parallel and should be.
You've accomplished some incredible things in your life. But the sad thing about this
thing we have is it ends. Do you think about your mortality? Are you afraid of death?
Well, afraid is the wrong word. I mean, I wish it weren't going to happen and I'd like
to, but... Do you think about it? Occasionally, I think about, well, I think about it very
operationally in the sense that there's always a trade-off between exploration and exploitation.
This is a classic subject in computer science, actually, in machine learning,
that when you're in an unusual circumstance that you want to explore to see what the
landscape is and gather data, but then at some point you want to use that, make choices and say,
this is what I'm going to do and exploit the knowledge you've accumulated. And
the longer the period of exploitation you anticipate, the more exploration you should do
in new directions. And so for me, I've had to adjust the balance of exploration and exploitation.
That said, you've explored quite a lot. Yeah. Well, I haven't shut off the
exploitation at all. I'm still hoping for the exploration. Right. I'm still hoping for
10 or 15 years of top flight performance, but several years ago now when I was 50 years old,
I was at the Institute for Advanced Study and my office was right under Freeman Dyson's office
and we were kind of friendly. And he found out it was my 50th birthday and said,
congratulations and you should feel liberated because no one expects much of a 50-year-old
theoretical physicist. And he obviously had felt liberated by reaching a certain age.
And yeah, there is something to that. I feel I don't have to keep in touch with the latest
hyper-technical developments in particle physics or string theory because I'm really
not going to be exploiting that. But I am exploring in these directions of machine
learning and things like that. But I'm also concentrating within physics on exploiting
directions that I've already established and the laws that we already have and doing things like
I'm very actively involved in helping people, experimentalists and engineers even to design
antennas that are capable of detecting axions. So there and that's, there we're deep in the
exploitation stage. It's not a matter of finding the new laws, but of really using the laws we
have to kind of finish the story off. So it's complicated. But I'm very happy with my life
right now and I'm enjoying it and I don't want to cloud that by thinking too much that it's
gonna come to an end. It's a gift I didn't earn. Is there a good thing to say about
why this gift that you've gotten and didn't deserve is so damn enjoyable? So what's the
meaning of this thing? Of life? To me interacting with people I love, my family and I have a very
wide circle of friends now and I'm trying to produce some institutions that will survive me
as well as my work. And it's just, it's, how should I say, it's a positive feedback work
loop when you do something and your people appreciate it and then you want to do more
and they get rewarded. And it's just, how should I say, this is another gift that I didn't earn
and don't understand, but I have a dopamine system and yeah, I'm happy to use it.
It seems to get energized by the creative process, by the process of exploration.
Very much so. And all of that started from the little fluctuations
shortly after the Big Bang. Frank, well, whatever those initial conditions and
fluctuation did that created you, I'm glad they did. This was, thank you for all the work you've
done, for the many people you've inspired, for the many of the billion, most of your
ideas were pretty useless of the several billions, but as it is for all humans, but you had
quite a few truly special ideas and thank you for bringing those to the world and
thank you for wasting your valuable time with me today. It's truly an honor.
It's been a joy and I hope people enjoy it. And I think the kind of mind expansion that I've
enjoyed by interacting with physical reality at this deep level, I think, can be conveyed to
and enjoyed by many, many people. And that's one of my missions in life this year.
Beautiful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Frank Wilczak.
And thank you to the information, Natsuit, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Aidsleep. Check them out in
the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert
Einstein. Nothing happens until something moves. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.