Speaker 1: The future may not be clear, but our commitment is
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Speaker 1: I PC. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts
Speaker 1: on Boomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have
Speaker 1: an extra special guest. His name is Professor Brian Green.
Speaker 1: He is a director of theoretical physics at Columbia University
Speaker 1: and is also a super string theorist whose contributions to
Speaker 1: the worlds of physics and cosmology are right up there
Speaker 1: with with some of the greats. If you are at
Speaker 1: all interested in things like how the universe formed, what's
Speaker 1: going to happen to it eventually, what actually makes Earth
Speaker 1: unique and special? How long is a galaxy going to
Speaker 1: be in existence? When is the universe gonna die? Will
Speaker 1: the universe die? This is really a fascinating conversation. I
Speaker 1: love this sort of stuff and it was just an
Speaker 1: absolute pleasure speaking with someone who is such a tremendous
Speaker 1: expert in the field, who can talk with great understanding
Speaker 1: and has the ability to communicate very very complex ideas
Speaker 1: in a way that is readily understandable by just about anybody.
Speaker 1: I found this utterly entrancing. Uh. For those of you
Speaker 1: who are physics wanks or cosmology and space wonks like
Speaker 1: I am, this podcast is for you. I have to
Speaker 1: add that this week is New York City's Festival of Science,
Speaker 1: which Professor Green created and helps co produce each year.
Speaker 1: It's the tenth anniversary of this. So for those of
Speaker 1: you who have kids who are interested in science, or
Speaker 1: kids you wanna make interested in science and so were
Speaker 1: in the New York tri state area, I strongly suggest
Speaker 1: you bring them with no further ado. My conversation with
Speaker 1: Columbia University Professor Brian Green. My special guest today is
Speaker 1: Brian Green. He is professor of physics and mathematics at
Speaker 1: Columbia University, best known for his groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory.
Speaker 1: The public knows him through his books, most notably The
Speaker 1: Elegant Universe, Fabric of the Cosmos, and Hidden Reality. Collectively,
Speaker 1: they have sold over two million copies. He also hosted
Speaker 1: a Nova mini series which won both Peabody and Emmy awards,
Speaker 1: and that mini series was based on his book. He
Speaker 1: is a director of Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Physics.
Speaker 1: Professor Brian Green. Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: So I'm a little bit of a physics nerd, and
Speaker 1: I've been really looking forward to having this conversation. And
Speaker 1: I want to start with a quote of yours, which
Speaker 1: is the universe is rich and exciting, and there's stuff
Speaker 1: that can knock you over every day if you're privy
Speaker 1: to it. Tell us about that. Well, I think that's
Speaker 1: absolutely case. You know, we love going to say the movies, right,
Speaker 1: to see some Hollywood film that usually comes out of
Speaker 1: some screenwriter's imagination. But oftentimes I sit and watch those
Speaker 1: things and I do enjoy them. But when I step
Speaker 1: out of the theater, I recognize that the true way
Speaker 1: the world is put together, quantum mechanics, relativity, all of
Speaker 1: that stuff is so much more creative and so much
Speaker 1: more mind blowing than anything that usually we make up.
Speaker 1: So I always lament the fact that there's so many
Speaker 1: people that just don't realize that. So let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about quantum mechanics and general relativity. For a
Speaker 1: long time, the physics descriptors of the very large and
Speaker 1: the very small seem to be I don't know if
Speaker 1: incompatible is the right word, but but certainly inconsistent with
Speaker 1: one perspective of seeing the universe. What what was the
Speaker 1: cause of that underlying tension? Well, you're absolutely right. So
Speaker 1: there are these two major discoveries that happened in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. One, as you mentioned, is general relativity. It's
Speaker 1: relevant really for the big stuff in the universe, stars, galaxies,
Speaker 1: the whole universe. It's a theory of gravity, and gravity
Speaker 1: matters when things are big. The other main development is
Speaker 1: quantum physics, and that does a fantastic job at describing
Speaker 1: the universe in the other end of the spectrum, the
Speaker 1: small stuff, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and each of these
Speaker 1: two theories they are found in a completely different ideas.
Speaker 1: They approached the universe in completely different ways. And when
Speaker 1: you try to take the equations of these two descriptions
Speaker 1: and meld them together into one unified hole, which is
Speaker 1: what Albert Einstein wanted to do, really you find that
Speaker 1: the equations don't work together. They're these ferocious antagonists every
Speaker 1: time we do a calculation, get a nonsensical result. And
Speaker 1: for decades we've known that that's a real problem, a
Speaker 1: real puzzle. So let's talk a little bit about Albert
Speaker 1: Einstar and he really spent the latter part of his
Speaker 1: professional life trying to find that grand unified theory was
Speaker 1: heat early? Did the technological tools simply not exist to
Speaker 1: give him the building blocks to figure it out? Well.
Speaker 1: Some would even say that we're still too early today.
Speaker 1: You know, we're struggling to do exactly what Einstein was
Speaker 1: trying to do century later, a century later, and I
Speaker 1: I would say we have made great progress, but we
Speaker 1: still don't know if any of the ideas that we
Speaker 1: have come up with are actually correct on paper. They're
Speaker 1: interesting on paper, they seem to work, but we've been
Speaker 1: unable to test any of these theories as yet because
Speaker 1: our technology is so far behind where our theoretical developments
Speaker 1: have taken us. So was Einstein too early? He was
Speaker 1: deaf only earlier than we and we may be too
Speaker 1: early ourselves. So it could still be the case that
Speaker 1: the unified theory maybe a century off. I don't know, so,
Speaker 1: so let's talk a little bit about Newtonian physics. When
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton wrote out his Laws of the Movement of
Speaker 1: the heavenly Bodies, which are still very accurate to this day,
Speaker 1: he envisioned a universe where time and space was rigid.
Speaker 1: And then we look fast forward to Einstein and he
Speaker 1: has a much more flexible and dynamic description of time
Speaker 1: and space. What is the next evolution gonna look like?
Speaker 1: I wish I could tell you. If I knew the answer,
Speaker 1: I'd be in my office right now writing it up
Speaker 1: into some spectacular PAPERM can make some guesses. I think
Speaker 1: the next big discovery is going to change our understanding
Speaker 1: of what space is and what time is again the
Speaker 1: way Einstein changed our understanding from Newton. Well, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: So what Einstein really did exactly as you describe it.
Speaker 1: He added newfound flexibility to space and time. Newton space
Speaker 1: and times just an arena stage. They don't participate in
Speaker 1: the unfolding of the cosmos. They're just there. I says, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: they're not just there. They do something. They warp and
Speaker 1: they curve in the service of communicating the force of gravity, spectacular,
Speaker 1: new idea, radical, But none of those questions, none of
Speaker 1: those developments give us insight into what space is made
Speaker 1: of or what time is made of. Could it be
Speaker 1: the space and time are made of smaller, more fundamental entities,
Speaker 1: just like any piece of matter. We know it's made
Speaker 1: of molecules, made of atoms, made of sub atomic particles.
Speaker 1: That's been the progression over the course of many decades
Speaker 1: to figure that story out. Maybe space and time themselves
Speaker 1: have fundamental constituents, and if we could identify what they
Speaker 1: are and how they behave and find the mathematical equations
Speaker 1: to describe them, that to me would be the next revolution.
Speaker 1: So for a long time, the smallest um article we
Speaker 1: understood was the molecule, and then it became the atom,
Speaker 1: and then protons, neutrons, quarkscluons, etcetera. Is it a never
Speaker 1: ending progression to ever smaller components or can we eventually
Speaker 1: find hey, that's as small as it gets, that's the
Speaker 1: fundamental building block of the entire universe and everything in it.
Speaker 1: So nobody knows. It's a real good question. It's a
Speaker 1: real tough question because it's always difficult to rule out
Speaker 1: the existence of something beyond the reach of your equations
Speaker 1: or beyond the reach of your technology. But personally, my
Speaker 1: own feeling, based on the progression of physics is I
Speaker 1: think that there is gonna come an end. There's gonna
Speaker 1: come a point where we absolutely identify the fundamental ingredients,
Speaker 1: and we absolutely identify the fundamental forces, and we identify
Speaker 1: the equations that describe them. I believe that that chapter
Speaker 1: will come to an end. There was another department, or
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is the same department. The
Speaker 1: Institute for String Cosmology and astro Particle Physics is a
Speaker 1: separate research facility. Yeah, that's a subset of the Center
Speaker 1: of Theoretical Physics that focuses more on the developments of
Speaker 1: string theory and its applications to cosmology. So, so let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that. You're best known for
Speaker 1: your work on string theory. My understanding of string theory, uh,
Speaker 1: lay person as it may be is atoms are made
Speaker 1: up of protons, neutrons, electrons, which are broken down to quarks,
Speaker 1: which are broken down to gluons and muons and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. If you take that down to
Speaker 1: its smallest constituent, you end up at a different level
Speaker 1: where the smallest component are vibrating loops of energy, and
Speaker 1: how they vibrate really determines what their characteristics is. That
Speaker 1: is that a fair description is a fair description. The
Speaker 1: one thing I would immediately underscore is everything that you
Speaker 1: said prior to mentioning strings is physics that we understand
Speaker 1: and has been tested and we're certain about. When you
Speaker 1: then take the next leap to string theory, you're going
Speaker 1: into domain that is not yet tested. So that really
Speaker 1: is speculation that comes out of decades of mathematics that
Speaker 1: has given us some confidence that these ideas may be correct,
Speaker 1: but they have not yet been tested. So so that's
Speaker 1: a fascinating statement. One of the things that I've read
Speaker 1: other physicists say is that, well, we haven't proven string theory,
Speaker 1: but the math is so nearly perfect that there has
Speaker 1: to be something to it. It's not merely a coincidence.
Speaker 1: Explain that, well, I would say, that's a nutty thing
Speaker 1: to say, yeah, because there's a lot of beautiful math
Speaker 1: in the world, and some of it's relevant to reality
Speaker 1: and some of it's not, And the only way you
Speaker 1: figure it out is by having observations and experiments. You
Speaker 1: need to connect to reality. The flip side, there are
Speaker 1: other folks who say this theory has been around for
Speaker 1: thirty years. I mean, I've been working on this since
Speaker 1: four Okay, so this theory has been around for more
Speaker 1: than thirty years. You still haven't tested it, and therefore
Speaker 1: it's time to move on. It's no longer doing science.
Speaker 1: That's also a nutty perspective because when you're talking about
Speaker 1: the universe at such a deep level of existence, way
Speaker 1: smaller than those little particles that you were describing the corks,
Speaker 1: they're huge compared to the strings, and yet they're tiny
Speaker 1: by everyday standards. We're talking about hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: times smaller than those particles. When you're talking about the
Speaker 1: universe and such extreme realms, it's gonna take a while
Speaker 1: to test it. So you don't just give up because
Speaker 1: the technology hasn't caught up with you. You keep working
Speaker 1: and you try to extract some more clever way that
Speaker 1: you might test these ideas, perhaps using technology we have
Speaker 1: today or in the next few years. So one of
Speaker 1: the lines um one of the criticisms I've read about
Speaker 1: string theory is if we can't test this, is this
Speaker 1: really a science or is it a philosophy. That's right,
Speaker 1: So that that's the going line among the detractors of
Speaker 1: that sort. And it would be philosophy. If it were
Speaker 1: fundamentally impossible to ever these ideas, then you're not really
Speaker 1: doing science. But that's not the case at all, I
Speaker 1: and are my colleague. We can write down predictions that
Speaker 1: in principle you could test if you had a big
Speaker 1: enough accelerator, and and didn't. We see Einstein making certain
Speaker 1: predictions about things that would happen that only recently were
Speaker 1: proven by the gravitational wave detective and things life. A
Speaker 1: hundred years ago he made a prediction of these ripples
Speaker 1: in the fabric of space gravitation waves. And you're right,
Speaker 1: it took a hundred years, almost to the day to
Speaker 1: to test that prediction. Now what mitigates that somewhat is
Speaker 1: there's an earlier prediction that was confirmed in just four years.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen nine, observations of the distant stars during
Speaker 1: a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's prediction that light should be
Speaker 1: bent as it goes by the surface of the Sun.
Speaker 1: So the detractors will say, come on, Einstein's ideas respectacular
Speaker 1: and deep, and it only took four years to confirm them.
Speaker 1: You guys have been going for thirty years and you
Speaker 1: haven't got anything yet. And what I'd say is we've
Speaker 1: jumped so far beyond technology, so far beyond what we
Speaker 1: can see, and that makes it much more difficult to
Speaker 1: test these ideas. Well. He also had the advantage of
Speaker 1: working with gravity, and there's all sorts of things that
Speaker 1: you can look at to perform mathematical tests and experiment.
Speaker 1: That's the point when we're talking about sub sub sub
Speaker 1: atomic particles really where there's only so much we can
Speaker 1: do these days. That's exactly right. So that my favorite
Speaker 1: thing about UM. One of the things that prove Einsteini
Speaker 1: in um relativity is that when we have various satellites
Speaker 1: and space that are used for things like GPS, we
Speaker 1: have to adjust because they're going so much faster than
Speaker 1: we are and they experienced time relatively compared to us,
Speaker 1: that there's a small mathematical adjustment that has to be
Speaker 1: made so your GPS is accurates, right, And if you
Speaker 1: didn't do that, both for the motion of the satellites
Speaker 1: but also for the fact they experienced from gravitational field
Speaker 1: that we do, they're higher up there, further from the
Speaker 1: Earth center, at the gravity there is weaker. Those two
Speaker 1: effects change the rate at which clocks tick off time
Speaker 1: in that satellite, and that's an objective clock, not not
Speaker 1: a subjective human thing. If you didn't take into account,
Speaker 1: GPS would be inaccurate within a day. In fact, this
Speaker 1: is a piece of physics that you may have seen
Speaker 1: in the film Interstellar. I haven't seen it yet, but
Speaker 1: it's This is not a spoiler, but in that film,
Speaker 1: the protagonist goes near a black hole and time elapses
Speaker 1: more slowly near a black hole for exactly because of gravity.
Speaker 1: And then when they come back away from the black hole,
Speaker 1: they have an aged much at all, but their colleague
Speaker 1: on the mothership that was far away has aged decades.
Speaker 1: So there you see a dramatic version of what the
Speaker 1: GPS needs to account for. So when you watch a
Speaker 1: science fiction film like that, do you walk out shaking
Speaker 1: your head and saying, oh, they got the science wrong?
Speaker 1: Or is Hollywood doing a better job being a little
Speaker 1: more accurate these days? I think they're They're pretty accurate
Speaker 1: in to some ext end that that film itself has
Speaker 1: moments where I didn't quite know what science they had
Speaker 1: in mind. But my view is if I go to
Speaker 1: a film and they don't break their own rules, if
Speaker 1: they're self consistent, even if they differ from the rules
Speaker 1: of reality as we understand, that's fine with me. I
Speaker 1: just want a good story and not something where they
Speaker 1: get lazy. They get lazy at the end and do something.
Speaker 1: Come on, you know that sort of thing. So let
Speaker 1: let me get a little technical with you. You are
Speaker 1: credited with code discovering mirror symmetry and spatial topology change.
Speaker 1: What is that, well, spatial topology change is the easier
Speaker 1: one to describe. One of the lessons from Einstein that
Speaker 1: you indicated already is that space is flexible. Newton didn't
Speaker 1: think that, which means not only can space bend and
Speaker 1: warmp it can stretch. And that's what we mean by
Speaker 1: the expanding universe. But in Einstein's meaning that it's not
Speaker 1: just that the galaxies are separating, it's that the fabric
Speaker 1: of space and they're on is moving as exactly as
Speaker 1: if they're kind of stitched into the fabric of space
Speaker 1: and like expanding, like it's all stretching. Now, in Einstein's
Speaker 1: theory generalativity, space can stretch, but it cannot rip, the
Speaker 1: spandex or the likera can't tear. But we found in
Speaker 1: string theory, when you go beyond Einstein to include quantum effects,
Speaker 1: the fabrica space can rip, it can tear, and that
Speaker 1: way can then repair itself and fundamentally change its shape,
Speaker 1: which we call a change of topology. That's the technical name,
Speaker 1: but it's just a change of shape that Einstein would
Speaker 1: not have thought possible. That string theory, if it's correct,
Speaker 1: allows the universe to undergo. He is also the founder
Speaker 1: of the World Science Festival, which is about to launch
Speaker 1: its tenth edition in New York City later this year
Speaker 1: May thirty, June four. Tell us about the festival. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is an event that I co founded with
Speaker 1: Tracy Day, journalist broadcast journalists and about you know, eleven
Speaker 1: twelve years ago, we looked at the state of the
Speaker 1: world and said, look, we celebrate fashion, books, theater, literature, right,
Speaker 1: why don't we celebrate big public celebrations of science, which
Speaker 1: is a vital part of how the world is put
Speaker 1: together and how we're gonna live going forward into the future.
Speaker 1: So back in two thousand and eight, we founded this
Speaker 1: first edition of the World Science Festival. Here in New
Speaker 1: York City. Over a hundred and twenty two thousand people
Speaker 1: came out to the five days of public programming, so
Speaker 1: it was clear that there was this pent up desire
Speaker 1: to go someplace and experience cutting out science in a
Speaker 1: way that you could get it, that you wouldn't find it,
Speaker 1: uh intimidating, you wouldn't have to study, you would just
Speaker 1: be drawn along by these wonderful ideas. And we've been
Speaker 1: doing it ever since, creating novel experience of a science
Speaker 1: for the general public. You can be a novice, you
Speaker 1: can be an expert, you can be young, you can
Speaker 1: be old. There's something for everybody in the festival. What
Speaker 1: do you hope the impact is going to be long term? Well,
Speaker 1: the goal really, as articulated in our mission statement, is
Speaker 1: we want people to feel that science has to be
Speaker 1: part of their lives. That it's not something that can
Speaker 1: be left to the scientists. It's not something that you
Speaker 1: can leave to the science classroom. Science is not a subject.
Speaker 1: It really is a perspective. It's a way of life.
Speaker 1: It's a way of engaging in the world and being
Speaker 1: able to figure out what's truth, what's not truth, what's fact,
Speaker 1: what's not fact and be able to figure out how
Speaker 1: we should take that information, make policy, and in that
Speaker 1: way sculpt the future. What do you make of the
Speaker 1: rise of anti science, be it the vaxers who believe
Speaker 1: that basic vaccines cause autism, or the people who, despite
Speaker 1: overwhelming evidence, either don't believe global warming is real or
Speaker 1: don't believe mankind has a hand in its creation. What
Speaker 1: what's the underlying basis? Well, I think there's a general
Speaker 1: distrust of so called experts, a general distrust of of
Speaker 1: the intelligencia, the folks that actually spend their lives thinking
Speaker 1: about deep problems, how they affect the world and how
Speaker 1: we're going to solve them. Is a deep distrust there,
Speaker 1: and it's up to us, and I hope part of
Speaker 1: the festival will do that, as well as other events
Speaker 1: around the world, to break down the barrier where everybody
Speaker 1: recognizes that they can get the ideas. It's not this
Speaker 1: opaque collection of weird facts and theories that you'll never
Speaker 1: be able to understand. You can get it, and when
Speaker 1: you get it, it's thrilling and allows you to be
Speaker 1: part of the process. And when you're part of the process,
Speaker 1: you're less distrustful because you understand what's going on. What
Speaker 1: we need to do to get kids more interested in
Speaker 1: math and science. Well, that's a big, big question. And
Speaker 1: of course the classroom is where most kids encounter these
Speaker 1: ideas and looked, are many good teachers. So when I
Speaker 1: say that somehow we need to improve the classroom out
Speaker 1: talking about every teacher. But goodness, gracious, I can't tell
Speaker 1: you the number of kids I've spoken to who think
Speaker 1: science is simply about memorizing some facts and spitting them
Speaker 1: back on an exam. And that's tragic. Science is a
Speaker 1: journey of discovery that we have been on for thousands
Speaker 1: of years and the things that we've figured out, from
Speaker 1: insight into the origin of the universe, to the existence
Speaker 1: of black holes, to the weirdness of time and relativity,
Speaker 1: the strange features of quantum mechanics. When you teach this
Speaker 1: stuff to a kid and they can get the basic ideas,
Speaker 1: I've seen their eyes wide open, light up and say wow,
Speaker 1: that science and say, yeah, that's what science is about.
Speaker 1: You know, you and I are only a year or
Speaker 1: two a part in age, and we're of the generation
Speaker 1: where we use technology. But we've had to learn how
Speaker 1: to use computers, internet software, programming, etcetera. The generation of
Speaker 1: kids coming up, it's second nature's utensil. You give a
Speaker 1: six month old an iPad and they've mastered it in
Speaker 1: a couple of hours. What is that gonna do for
Speaker 1: technology and science going forward? Does that give you hope that, oh,
Speaker 1: these kids really appreciate technology and therefore sciences is right there.
Speaker 1: I wish I could say yes, not necessarily at all,
Speaker 1: because so many folks, so many kids are uses technology.
Speaker 1: They don't care one whit about where it came from
Speaker 1: or how it works. They just want to get on
Speaker 1: to whatever, to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. I see
Speaker 1: my kids using these devices, and it makes my heart
Speaker 1: hurt because because they could be using that time to
Speaker 1: think about deep questions, and yet they're frittering away so
Speaker 1: much time in these devices. However, we can use these
Speaker 1: devices as an impetus to show kids, if we do
Speaker 1: it right, how there is quantum physics inside of yourself
Speaker 1: on yourself and wouldn't work without being able to direct
Speaker 1: the motion of electrons through tiny microscopic integrated circuits. That's
Speaker 1: interesting and exciting if presented in the right way. GPS,
Speaker 1: like we were talking about, your phone has a GPS
Speaker 1: capacity to it. It's got general relativity and something right
Speaker 1: into it. I see the new Apple tagline now with
Speaker 1: general built into it, will charge extra for that. Let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the creation of the universe.
Speaker 1: I'm somewhat tickled by of the theory that nothingness is
Speaker 1: inherently unstable and the universe just vomits into existence because
Speaker 1: eventually nothingness just can't persist. Is that still the best
Speaker 1: explanation we have for where the universe came from? It's
Speaker 1: it's certainly one of the explanations, and it has not
Speaker 1: really been fully worked out into a form that there's
Speaker 1: a consensus in the community that we've got it by
Speaker 1: any means. But it is fascinating to think, as you're saying,
Speaker 1: because the deep question is why is there something rather
Speaker 1: than nothing? That's what liveness asks right centuries ago, and
Speaker 1: it's this deep question right when we say nothing, we
Speaker 1: mean the absence of everything, even space and time. And
Speaker 1: as you're saying, one of the ideas is, well, there
Speaker 1: may have been an era when there truly was a
Speaker 1: nothing with a capital end. But it may be that
Speaker 1: that nothingness can't persist forever. It may be that Nothingness
Speaker 1: tends to disintegrate, and when it disintegrates, nothing turns into
Speaker 1: something and an anti something, and we inhabit to something,
Speaker 1: and that's where the something of the universe comes from.
Speaker 1: So when I was younger, the theory was that there
Speaker 1: was a big bang and that would eventually slow down
Speaker 1: and reverse and we'd have a big crunch and that
Speaker 1: would go on forever. And that seems to have based
Speaker 1: on a century ago observations of not only galaxies moving
Speaker 1: away from each other, but doing so at an accelerated pace.
Speaker 1: They're they're moving away faster and faster um. So that
Speaker 1: kind of gets rid of the big crunch, and it
Speaker 1: leads to the question of entropy and heat death. Are
Speaker 1: we're looking at a universe that's going to expand forever
Speaker 1: until it's so far away that there are no stars
Speaker 1: left in the sky and we're essentially looking at nothingness,
Speaker 1: which again maybe begets that unstable uh cycle all over again.
Speaker 1: It certainly looks that way based on the data today.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'm writing a book on this very subject,
Speaker 1: analyzing in great detail what the far future of the
Speaker 1: universe will be like. And the data, if you take
Speaker 1: it seriously, does seem to suggest that you're right. The
Speaker 1: expansion of the units will continue on. In fact, it
Speaker 1: will expand ever more quickly over time, and the structures
Speaker 1: in the universe like stars and galaxies will ultimately fall apart, disintegrate,
Speaker 1: gets sucked up into black holes, which themselves can disintegrate
Speaker 1: into particles that ultimately a just wafting through and ever
Speaker 1: colder and ever quieter cosmos. It kind of feels a
Speaker 1: little bleak when you describe it that way. But that
Speaker 1: how many trillions of years in the future we talk
Speaker 1: well about a trillion years from now. Distant galaxies will
Speaker 1: rush away so far that we can't see them. Our
Speaker 1: local galaxies will be able to see, but deep space
Speaker 1: will go dark. And in terms of the evaporation of
Speaker 1: black holes, we're talking on the order of ten to
Speaker 1: the one hundred years, right, So that's that's long. That's
Speaker 1: ten followed that that yes, that's a google, that's a
Speaker 1: google of of years, and um, it's the time Skille.
Speaker 1: That's so far beyond anything that we've experienced. You know,
Speaker 1: we're a ten billion, thirteen billions, so you know, ten
Speaker 1: to the ten years. So we're talking in the exponent
Speaker 1: going from tent to the tent tent to the hundred.
Speaker 1: So these are fantastically large time scales, but amazingly we
Speaker 1: can use our observations and our equations to make some
Speaker 1: predictions about what things will be like even on those
Speaker 1: time skills. So let's talk about something a little less bleak.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about a multiverse where if our universe might
Speaker 1: be expanding to cold, dark nothingness, there are an infinite
Speaker 1: number of other universes ready to either pop into existence
Speaker 1: or existing in different dimensions. How realistic is that and
Speaker 1: what a strength theory tell us about that? Well, again,
Speaker 1: I would underscore that we're now in the realm of
Speaker 1: interesting mathematical speculation. But there are many people who take
Speaker 1: that very idea seriously, because as we've tried to understand
Speaker 1: the Big Bang with ever greater precision, we found that
Speaker 1: the fuel, if you will, that drove the Big Bang
Speaker 1: is so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use all
Speaker 1: of that fuel up. Some of it drove our Big Bang,
Speaker 1: but someone's left over. What does that leftover fuel do?
Speaker 1: Drives another Big Bang? And even that big bang doesn't
Speaker 1: exhaust all the fuel some's left over, so you get
Speaker 1: bang after bang after bang, universe after universe after universe,
Speaker 1: at least that's what the equation seemed to suggest. So
Speaker 1: you're right, our universe could be heading toward this bleak
Speaker 1: future where everything is cold and spread out. But in
Speaker 1: those other universes there may be life forms and their
Speaker 1: future may be different from ours. So let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about what string theory and your work on
Speaker 1: it says about this in I don't remember which book
Speaker 1: it was, maybe it was probably Hidden Reality Is, my guests.
Speaker 1: I wanted to reference strings as they move through space
Speaker 1: create a membrane in their trail, and there are times
Speaker 1: where those membranes cross, and there's a significant reaction to that. Yes,
Speaker 1: so there's a way of thinking about parallel universes which
Speaker 1: string theory gives a particular twist to. It's possible within
Speaker 1: string theory that there are extended objects, not just one
Speaker 1: dimensional filaments like strings. There could be two dimensional membranes
Speaker 1: or three dimensional membranes. We could be living on one
Speaker 1: of those membranes. So I like to think of it
Speaker 1: as imagine the totality of reality is like a big
Speaker 1: cosmic loaf of bread, where every slice of bread is
Speaker 1: like one universe everything we know is happening on one
Speaker 1: piece of bread, But there are other pieces of bread,
Speaker 1: and strength there other membranes which would be other universes.
Speaker 1: That's another way in which reality could be much bigger
Speaker 1: than our frail senses would lead us to think. So
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about dark matter and dark energy.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, we look at a basic black
Speaker 1: hole in the center of a galaxy, and the visible
Speaker 1: mass that we can detect is much much less than
Speaker 1: what gravity suggests would be sufficient to hold uh, that
Speaker 1: galaxy together? Am I getting the numbers right? About of
Speaker 1: the mass is not visible as dark matter? Yeah. So
Speaker 1: when you even look at the universe as a whole
Speaker 1: and you say how much of the stuff that makes
Speaker 1: up the universe is the stuff that gives off light,
Speaker 1: the stuff that we know about, the protons and neutrons,
Speaker 1: the electrons, those things, and it's about four or five
Speaker 1: that little Yeah, So you've got about twenty five or
Speaker 1: so percent of the universe in something called dark matter
Speaker 1: h And then you've got the rest of it SI
Speaker 1: sevent whatever in something called dark energy. Again, it's an
Speaker 1: energy that suffuses space. We believe it's everywhere and every
Speaker 1: nook and cranny of space. But because it does not
Speaker 1: give off light, we don't see it doesn't give does
Speaker 1: it give off some energy? It well, it it contains energy,
Speaker 1: and because of that, it exerts a gravitational force. In fact,
Speaker 1: it exerts an anti gravitational force. Pushes every think apart,
Speaker 1: and we believe that's why the universe is speeding up
Speaker 1: in its expansion, that outward push from the dark energy
Speaker 1: filling space. So let's talk about another question that I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by. I'm aware that gravity is the weakest of
Speaker 1: the major forces, and that the strong nuclear force what
Speaker 1: holds protons and neutrons together, is the strongest force. I
Speaker 1: like the way you demonstrate that by leaping off a building.
Speaker 1: The center of the Earth pulls you towards it, but
Speaker 1: just plain old concrete stops you. And therefore concrete is
Speaker 1: stronger than gravity. But when we look at a black hole,
Speaker 1: we have a mass the size of a giant sun
Speaker 1: that's collapsed to a relatively tiny space, and it seems
Speaker 1: like if you have enough gravity, you can overcome that
Speaker 1: strong force and crunch all those atoms down to a
Speaker 1: tiny fraction of their size. Yes, when we say, gravity
Speaker 1: is much weaker than the other forces, like the nuclear forces.
Speaker 1: We want to do an apples to Apple's comparison. So
Speaker 1: if you say, take just two particles and calculate how
Speaker 1: this strong force may pull them together versus a gravitational force,
Speaker 1: big difference. Strong nuclear force wins. But you're right, you
Speaker 1: put enough stuff together, then cumulatively, the gravity that many, many,
Speaker 1: many particles exert can be stronger than the other forces
Speaker 1: acting between particles. So so gravity is able to crush
Speaker 1: particles together, causing them to fuse together. For instance, that's
Speaker 1: what happens in the Sun. You've got nuclear fusion because
Speaker 1: gravity is squeezing everything together and hydrogen melds into helium,
Speaker 1: and helium keeps on going. So yeah, up until we
Speaker 1: get iron, and then that's pretty much right. When you
Speaker 1: get to iron, it's sort of the end of the
Speaker 1: line the most tightly abound atomic species, and from then
Speaker 1: on end the next this next stop is neutron stars
Speaker 1: and black holes. Do you pay much attention to things
Speaker 1: like the rare Earth thesis, which I find, again it's
Speaker 1: a little off your fields of expertise, but the basic
Speaker 1: concept is to get a planet that's stable enough in
Speaker 1: a solar system for not just life, which may be
Speaker 1: surprisingly common, but advanced technological life not to have been
Speaker 1: disrupted continually by what a hostile place the galaxy can be. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a fascinating idea. Oh totally. You know,
Speaker 1: people have asked the question are we alone? Ever since
Speaker 1: every time we could ask questions, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's some who say, look, life appeared on planet Earth
Speaker 1: as quickly as it possibly could, which suggests to them
Speaker 1: that life is just raring to go everywhere in the
Speaker 1: universe where conditions are ripe. On the other hand, to
Speaker 1: get intelligent life that can actually build spacecraft and radio telescopes,
Speaker 1: you need a lot of coincidences, right. You gotta make
Speaker 1: sure that your planet is protected from masteroids that are
Speaker 1: slamming in. You gotta let me take our Planet's a
Speaker 1: great example. If if this asteroid hadn't slammed in and
Speaker 1: wiped out the dinosaurs sixty five million years, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: be the dominant folks walking around. It would still be
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs. Now, who knows, maybe by now they would
Speaker 1: have built spacecraft and telescopes and may not have been hard.
Speaker 1: That's right. So so there you go, and we're we're
Speaker 1: even in a part of our own galaxy that doesn't
Speaker 1: have too much radiation. We're not too close to the middle,
Speaker 1: we're not too far out. It's really a series of
Speaker 1: Goldilocks events and then the other, which means it might
Speaker 1: be very rare. Right, And although rare still can mean
Speaker 1: there are hundreds of thousands in any game, it depends.
Speaker 1: It depends how rare. That's the key question, because if
Speaker 1: the rare, if the probability is sufficiently small, then we
Speaker 1: could be the unique one. We have been speaking with
Speaker 1: Professor Brian Green of Columbia University. If you enjoy this conversation,
Speaker 1: be sure and check out our podcast extras, where we
Speaker 1: keep the tape rolling and continue to talk about all
Speaker 1: things cosmological. Be sure and check out my daily column
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at rid Halts. I'm Barry rid Holts. You've been listening
Speaker 1: to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. What could your
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Speaker 1: available products and services offered by Merrill Lynch. Pierce Federan Smith, Incorporated,
Speaker 1: a registered broker dealer. Remember s I PC. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast, Professor Green. Thank you. I don't know what
Speaker 1: to call you, Professor greene Brian Professor, Professor Green seems
Speaker 1: more appropriate. Thank you so much for doing this and
Speaker 1: being so generous with your time. I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: I have the hardcover of uh, The Elegant Universe somewhere,
Speaker 1: but we moved. It's in boxes and I picked up
Speaker 1: some of the paperbacks to to remind me of what
Speaker 1: I read a while ago. And really, The Elegant Universe
Speaker 1: is so readable. I mean I have I'm a little
Speaker 1: bit of a physics geek, but I don't have any
Speaker 1: significant background, and I found it completely accessible and very
Speaker 1: interesting read for something that is talking about really sophisticated,
Speaker 1: complex ideas that's not easy to communicate. Yeah, no, thank you.
Speaker 1: You know. The the challenge, of course, is in building
Speaker 1: bridges between things that the typical person who was interested
Speaker 1: in science but not an expert, is familiar with from
Speaker 1: everyday life, and building a bridge from the familiar to
Speaker 1: the unfamiliar, and uh, it's a fascinating journey for me
Speaker 1: as a writer and a physicist to try to figure
Speaker 1: out ways of explaining these ideas, and when it works,
Speaker 1: you know, it's gratifying. I can imagine them. There are
Speaker 1: some questions I skipped over that I have to get
Speaker 1: to before we get to our our standard questions, and
Speaker 1: one of them has to do with um gravitrons, gravitons, gravitrons.
Speaker 1: Gravitron I think is the exercise equipment, chin ups, grab
Speaker 1: patons is the party. So we haven't have we discovered
Speaker 1: the particle or is it just theoretical? Just theoretical. It's
Speaker 1: not surprising that we haven't discovered it because, as we
Speaker 1: were discussing in the main interview, gravity is the weakest
Speaker 1: of nature's forces. The graviton is the smallest bundle, the
Speaker 1: smallest particle of the weakest force, which makes it enormously
Speaker 1: challenging to try to detect these particles. But most of
Speaker 1: us are pretty convinced, based on our understanding of the
Speaker 1: other particles that communicate the other forces of nature, that
Speaker 1: gravitons are out there, even if we can't actually capture
Speaker 1: them like photons, photons is a great example. That's a
Speaker 1: particle that transmits the electromagnetic force. It's the little pack
Speaker 1: at the little bundle of that force. And by analogy,
Speaker 1: the graviton would be the little quanta, the little particle
Speaker 1: transmitting the gravitational force. So I love the thought experiment
Speaker 1: showing the difference between Newtonian physics and nine steining in physics,
Speaker 1: which is all the planets are are revolving around, rotating,
Speaker 1: revolving around the Sun. If the Sun were to magically disappear,
Speaker 1: would it be instantaneous for the planets to be flung
Speaker 1: out in the straight line that they were previously moving
Speaker 1: without the Sun holding them in, or would there be
Speaker 1: a delay in the planet physically recognizing that there's no
Speaker 1: more gravity and and moving on. The Einsteinian conclusion is
Speaker 1: it would take about as long as a beam of
Speaker 1: light to reach the planet. So you would for what
Speaker 1: is it eight and a half or nine minutes with
Speaker 1: eight would continue rotating around, uh, the Sun despite its
Speaker 1: being there. Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a beautiful idea. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, Newton's equations that we all learned in high
Speaker 1: school simply tell us that one object pulls on another,
Speaker 1: depending on how far apart they are on their masses.
Speaker 1: There's no notion of time in that equation, which means
Speaker 1: if you change the mass of one or other of
Speaker 1: these bodies, you change the force instantaneously. And that's right.
Speaker 1: So so the formula, if you don't mind me getting
Speaker 1: technical here is you know, ethical g M one M
Speaker 1: two over our square. That's what we all learned. But
Speaker 1: if M one, the massive one of those bodies, goes
Speaker 1: to zero, then F goes to zero immediately, which in
Speaker 1: the picture you describe, would suggest that if some alien
Speaker 1: were to come in and somehow grab hold of the
Speaker 1: Sun and rip it out so it's simply gone, then
Speaker 1: Earth and all the planet should instantaneously fly out of
Speaker 1: their orbits. Einstein looked at that and said, I'll come on,
Speaker 1: that can't possibly be because in nineteen o five he
Speaker 1: discovered that nothing can go faster than the speed of light,
Speaker 1: and that would be an instantaneous conveyance of information. Perfect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: an influence that goes from across the whole Solar system
Speaker 1: and no time at all. So so what about entangled
Speaker 1: particles and and spooky action at a distance. Is that
Speaker 1: still stuck with the speed of light as its limitation.
Speaker 1: That's a subtle question, and we believe the answer to
Speaker 1: that question is yes. It's still stuck with it because
Speaker 1: when you have two distant particles that are linked through
Speaker 1: quantum entanglement, it is in fact the case that what
Speaker 1: you do to one particle seems to instantaneously have some
Speaker 1: kind of quantum effect on the other. However, no information
Speaker 1: can ever be transmitted through this effect from the first
Speaker 1: particle to the second particle. So it kind of gets
Speaker 1: by on the small print if you will, that that
Speaker 1: that there's no information going from one particle together fast
Speaker 1: in the speed of light, even though there's a quantum correlation.
Speaker 1: Their behaviors are acting in tandem even though they're far apart.
Speaker 1: So this goes back to having a better lawyer than God.
Speaker 1: That's right, And I've always hated the small prints explanation.
Speaker 1: But let me just say that changes instantly. Yeah, isn't
Speaker 1: something happening faster than the speed of line. I completely
Speaker 1: empathize with the with the perspective, and in fact, in
Speaker 1: one of my books, I think it's the fabric of
Speaker 1: the cosmos. I described the party line, which is the
Speaker 1: one I just told you with the small print no
Speaker 1: information travels, and then the next page and say, hey,
Speaker 1: but look something something here that happens, and it's best
Speaker 1: than the speech, right. And I think part of the
Speaker 1: reason why we can't give the full answer today that
Speaker 1: will make you satisfied is that we don't fully understand
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics. There is a real puzzle in quantum physics.
Speaker 1: It's called the quantum measurement problem, which is when we
Speaker 1: experimenters measure a quantum particle, our measurement seems to affect it,
Speaker 1: but we can't really articulate or describe how that effect
Speaker 1: is communicated or what actually happens. Now you might say,
Speaker 1: well that's pretty important. I mean, how do you know
Speaker 1: anything about quantum mechanics if you don't understand how to
Speaker 1: measure something? Well, amazingly, this whole in our understanding, this
Speaker 1: gap does not prevent us from making predictions, from being
Speaker 1: able to harness quantum mechanics to build cell phones and
Speaker 1: personal computers, But theoretically there is a gap in our understanding.
Speaker 1: And I think that when we fill that gap. You
Speaker 1: have me on the show and you ask me that
Speaker 1: question again about entanglement, and I'm going to be able
Speaker 1: to give you a full answer. So growing up to me,
Speaker 1: that was always we can measure the location or the
Speaker 1: spin or the location of the speed, but not both
Speaker 1: at once. Is that essentially that's still part of our
Speaker 1: understanding for sure, that there are complementary qualities of a
Speaker 1: particle that cannot simultaneously be ascertained. So you can't know
Speaker 1: where the particle is and what its speed is simultaneously.
Speaker 1: You can know one the other, not both. Now, how
Speaker 1: does the idea of the process of measuring it changes it?
Speaker 1: And therefore even if you could, you've affected it? Or
Speaker 1: am I misream? You're right on target. You know, there's
Speaker 1: this picture that came to us from Newton, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, there are physical systems and you glance at
Speaker 1: them and you measure them, but your measurement doesn't change them,
Speaker 1: doesn't affect them. You're simply extracting a feature of that system.
Speaker 1: The distance between the Sun and the Earth, just measure it.
Speaker 1: The speed of that baseball I guess that you have
Speaker 1: baseball of Newton's times, or the speed of that rock.
Speaker 1: You just measure it. It doesn't affect it. But when
Speaker 1: you're talking about particles, you're active measurement on a tiny
Speaker 1: electron can wreck havoc, and that makes it a much
Speaker 1: more subtle procedure to understand what a measurement is. And
Speaker 1: that's the thing that we've not yet fully resolved. Let
Speaker 1: me issue this question, how confident are you that in
Speaker 1: our lifetimes, uh, there will be a grand unification theory solved. Well,
Speaker 1: if no one cracks the issue of immortality, then I
Speaker 1: suspect that I'm not particularly optimistic that will have a
Speaker 1: complete unified theory that's been tested to the degree that
Speaker 1: we're ready to lift. I wish I could even say
Speaker 1: for that really, Yeah, you know, we're we're talking a
Speaker 1: century or so off. You see. I think there's something
Speaker 1: interesting that's about to happen, which is if the large
Speaker 1: had drown collider in Geneva, Switzer just turned back on
Speaker 1: actually this week they now it was taken off when
Speaker 1: Certain came online because it was so much bigger and
Speaker 1: theoretically eat their lunch. But what what changes they due
Speaker 1: to the hadron? So the lawn hutter is part of
Speaker 1: Certain and and so what they've done is periodically they
Speaker 1: upgrade it. Yeah, Fermi Lab is the other one here
Speaker 1: in the United States, but you know you're right. They
Speaker 1: take it offline, they upgrade it, they make it stronger,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be the most powerful incarnation of
Speaker 1: that machine, the highest so called luminosity, the greatest number
Speaker 1: of particles slamming together. That's what it's all about. And
Speaker 1: the thing is, if they don't find something new, startlingly new,
Speaker 1: we may find ourselves in a situation where funding agencies
Speaker 1: are not so excited in these difficult financials. But they've
Speaker 1: made a series of I mean, if I agree with
Speaker 1: if you look at physics the past twenty years, it's
Speaker 1: it's almost, I don't want to say a daily newspaper headline,
Speaker 1: but there has just been a series of spectacular from
Speaker 1: the gravitational waves go light on and go down the
Speaker 1: list of here's the problem, here's the problem. None of
Speaker 1: those were unexpected. That doesn't take away from the achieved
Speaker 1: of the discovery. But everybody knew that gravitational waves are.
Speaker 1: There is a question of will we have the technological
Speaker 1: wherewithal to detect them. The Higgs particle, everybody believed it
Speaker 1: was there, The question was will we actually find it.
Speaker 1: We did spectacular, So there have been great breakthroughs, but
Speaker 1: what we need is something that rocks our world, where
Speaker 1: we can go back to funding agencies and say, we've
Speaker 1: got to understand this. This is an anomaly, this doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense. This is the gateway to a deep new
Speaker 1: understanding of the world. If we can't do that, it
Speaker 1: maybe decades or maybe even centuries before we have the
Speaker 1: next big machine. China may step in the rumors that
Speaker 1: China may build the next big machine, but that's twenty
Speaker 1: thirty years off maybe, so when you talk about time scales,
Speaker 1: and even that big machine may not be powerful enough
Speaker 1: to test grand unified theory or string theory. So so
Speaker 1: that's why I'm not particularly optimistic that we're going to
Speaker 1: have the unified theory in hand in the next generation
Speaker 1: or time. I would love China to build a huge
Speaker 1: machine because if you look at how much of modern
Speaker 1: technology traces its lineage back to spot Nick, which caused
Speaker 1: a giant arms race. Unfortunately we managed not to blow
Speaker 1: ourselves up, but it's still lead to hey, these guys
Speaker 1: are ahead of us in space. We have to get there. Also,
Speaker 1: maybe China would stimulate some competitive juices and and get
Speaker 1: governments behind these big physics. Certainly more exciting than building
Speaker 1: a border wall. So I would, uh, well, we could
Speaker 1: test if galileis theories. See if things drop, you're gonna
Speaker 1: see science in the border, right, Can you could do that? Now?
Speaker 1: Granted it's not a vacuum. Which side of the wall
Speaker 1: you're gonna drop things on that? It depends on the
Speaker 1: nationality of the scientists, I guess. Um, all right, so
Speaker 1: I wanted I didn't get to uh Icarus before. And
Speaker 1: I have to ask you a couple of questions which
Speaker 1: come from it's me moving my papers around. These come
Speaker 1: from Maddock, age ten, and Ellis, age seven, who are
Speaker 1: big fans of Icarus at the Edge of Time, which
Speaker 1: is the kid's book you wrote about black holes. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to give you all the questions they asked,
Speaker 1: but I'm just gonna give you the top fifty or so. Um,
Speaker 1: when did you first become interested in astrophysics? When I
Speaker 1: was quite young, five or six years old. I grew
Speaker 1: up across from the planetarium, which I think is certainly
Speaker 1: part of it. But I always had this urge to
Speaker 1: look out and think about stars and the galaxies. And
Speaker 1: my dad was a big mentor of mine and those things.
Speaker 1: He wasn't trained in any of the stuff. But he
Speaker 1: was just fascinated by who's a composer, a singer performer,
Speaker 1: But he would tell me all about this stuff, so
Speaker 1: quite young. So what can we learn from black holes
Speaker 1: and how relevant are they to our daily lives? Well,
Speaker 1: black holes are the primary theoretical laboratory that people like
Speaker 1: me play with because they're so extreme, so much mass
Speaker 1: crushed to such a fantastically small size. And when you
Speaker 1: have such extreme domains, that's when you can break existing ideas,
Speaker 1: where existing ideas can fail, and where they fail as
Speaker 1: an opportunity to step in with new understanding. But that
Speaker 1: again is in the theoretical realm. Black holes are becoming
Speaker 1: more and more part of the observational realm. There's this
Speaker 1: new telescope have you heard about. It's called the event
Speaker 1: horizon telescope, where they're actually looking right at the edge
Speaker 1: of so called event horizons of black holes to perhaps
Speaker 1: really see what's happening there, take a photograph of a
Speaker 1: black hole itself, so they're becoming launched into that's right. Well,
Speaker 1: actually it's a it's a series of radio telescopes around
Speaker 1: the Earth that are working together to combine their imagery
Speaker 1: to create a very high resolution picture of a black hole.
Speaker 1: So more and more black holes are becoming part of
Speaker 1: the the everyday side of observational science. So they're not
Speaker 1: as esoteric as they once were. And the current theory
Speaker 1: is that black holes exist in the center of each galaxy.
Speaker 1: Is that that seems to be the case? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: this went from a crazy idea to an abstract thesis
Speaker 1: to every galaxy has one. Yeah. When this idea first
Speaker 1: came online, this is back in about nineteen seventeen or
Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, Karl Schwarzschild was playing with Einstein's mathematics and
Speaker 1: came upon this idea. Einstein resisted the idea of black
Speaker 1: holes throughout his life, even even he was writing paper
Speaker 1: showing here's why black holes can't be real. So he
Speaker 1: was a revolutionary thinker, but also conservative in some ways too.
Speaker 1: But yes, now there's virtually no denying that black holes
Speaker 1: are actually out there. Mean, we're gonna take a photograph
Speaker 1: of the edge of a black hole. There may be
Speaker 1: uncertainties about what happens inside a black hole in the
Speaker 1: detailed mathematics that really describes them, but these entities do
Speaker 1: appear to be part of the universe. What about wormholes.
Speaker 1: That's the theory that we haven't really seen a whole
Speaker 1: lot of evidence for, but there's a lot of theoretic
Speaker 1: excitement around it, certainly much more speculative than than black holes.
Speaker 1: I mean, wormholes are allowed by Einstein's mathematics, but there's
Speaker 1: zero evidence that they're actually real, and therefore there's sort
Speaker 1: of zero reason to think that they're out there today.
Speaker 1: But look, you could have said that about a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff in the world before we encountered it. So
Speaker 1: I'm I would be remiss or would be a little
Speaker 1: bit naive for me to suggest that they're absolutely not real,
Speaker 1: but there's just no evidence yet. And one more question
Speaker 1: from Maddi and ellis what do you want the young
Speaker 1: reader to learn from your book? The point of Vicorus
Speaker 1: at the Edge of Time was to give the reader
Speaker 1: a sense of what happens at a black hole without
Speaker 1: it being an instruction manual, without it being pedagogical, without
Speaker 1: it being a teacher or a professor telling you what's
Speaker 1: going on, merely by virtue of going for the ride.
Speaker 1: In this story, so boy build a spaceship, goes to
Speaker 1: the edge of a black Hole's dad says not to
Speaker 1: do it. It's like the original myth of Icarus, but
Speaker 1: instead of the sun with wax wings, you know, it's
Speaker 1: a boy building his spaceship. And then when he comes
Speaker 1: back from this journey, he doesn't die, but because time
Speaker 1: slows down near the edge of a black hole, when
Speaker 1: he comes back and wants to show his dad what
Speaker 1: he's done, he quickly realizes that he comes back to
Speaker 1: world ten thousand years into the future. And this is
Speaker 1: what really could happen. This is not science fiction, even
Speaker 1: though the story, of course is fictional, and I want
Speaker 1: people to get a feel for what it is that
Speaker 1: happens at a black hole, and also to recognize if
Speaker 1: if I'm just going to finish up my answer maybe
Speaker 1: a little too long winded, but I hated I hated
Speaker 1: the original myth of Acres. It kind of said if
Speaker 1: you don't do what your dad says, you die, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, dad says Kris don't fly near the sun.
Speaker 1: Acres does because he's courageous, maybe a little reckless, and
Speaker 1: he dies side. But you know, if you're going to
Speaker 1: have a breakthrough in science, you've got to be somewhat reckless.
Speaker 1: You have to go against what people tell you cannot
Speaker 1: do what your forefathers or four mothers tell you to do.
Speaker 1: You may return to a strange reality if you discover
Speaker 1: something spectacular, but that's the nature of the beast. I
Speaker 1: recall when when one of the colliders was coming online,
Speaker 1: we got warnings of they're going to create a black
Speaker 1: hole here on Earth. I thought that was kind of yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a vigorous like fear. Well, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. They're turning on the machine. And
Speaker 1: I got a call from so many news outlets to
Speaker 1: be on television to talk about the starting of the
Speaker 1: large hatch on collider, and I was like, wow, science
Speaker 1: is mainstream. We've really got there. They didn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about the collider. They want to talk about this
Speaker 1: little black hole that might be created that might suck
Speaker 1: up Geneva. Nobody really worried about that here, but then
Speaker 1: it might suck up the rest of the planet Earth.
Speaker 1: People start to worry a lot about that, and that's
Speaker 1: what it was about. The good news is you wouldn't
Speaker 1: even feel it, that's right. So there are two other
Speaker 1: string theory related questions I have to ask before I
Speaker 1: moved to my standard questions one is all right, our
Speaker 1: everyday common experience, we have the three spatial dimensions X, y,
Speaker 1: and z plus time is for how do we get
Speaker 1: from that to eleven? Because eleven seems like a lot
Speaker 1: of dimensions. It is a lot of dimensions. And it's
Speaker 1: a strange idea because you look around the world and there's,
Speaker 1: as you say, left, right, back forth, up down, the
Speaker 1: three spatial dimensions of common experience. Where in the world
Speaker 1: could there be more than that? There's just no room
Speaker 1: for it. And yet the mathematics of string theory suggests
Speaker 1: that there are additional dimensions of space. So it's been
Speaker 1: up to us to figure out where they are, and
Speaker 1: that's really been the focus of my work for many decades.
Speaker 1: Others as well have worked on this enormously, and the
Speaker 1: ideas that maybe these other dimensions are all around us,
Speaker 1: they're just crumpled to such a fantastically small size that
Speaker 1: we can't see them with the naked eye or even
Speaker 1: with our most powerful equipment. But that's the idea if
Speaker 1: these if these theories are correct, we're looking at a
Speaker 1: world that has more dimensions than the three that we
Speaker 1: know about. The explanation that I've found interesting is it's
Speaker 1: a function of perspective. If if you're um an ant
Speaker 1: on a line, well you only see folding back. And
Speaker 1: if that line turns out to be a garden hose, well,
Speaker 1: oh guess what. Now there's another dimension you can travel.
Speaker 1: We're stuck in three dimensions, and therefore we we lack
Speaker 1: the ability to see your experience the other seven. But
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot now. At one point in
Speaker 1: time there were a variety of different numbers of dimensions.
Speaker 1: How did we settle on eleven? Well, and there were
Speaker 1: originally five different theories and Witten, Professor Whitten took a
Speaker 1: took a paddle to them and basically came up on
Speaker 1: them altogether. Yeah. Edward Whitten, who's sort of the grand
Speaker 1: master of string theory at the Institute for a Vance Study,
Speaker 1: had a great breakthrough in the mides. There were five
Speaker 1: competing versions of string theory. All of them had nine
Speaker 1: dimensions of space, had six additional ones, not the seven
Speaker 1: that we're referring to. And um, he realized that if
Speaker 1: you looked at it the right way, all these five
Speaker 1: theories are actually different windows onto the same theory number one. Moreover,
Speaker 1: when you did the more precise analysis that this combined
Speaker 1: perspective gave you. You found one additional dimension of space
Speaker 1: that we had long missed, and that's what took us
Speaker 1: from nine dimensions of space to ten, which, as you say,
Speaker 1: with time takes us to eleven space time dimensions. So
Speaker 1: that number is pretty stable now right now. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the historical progression. And Witten was, Um, there's the
Speaker 1: old I think it's Kipling the parable of the six
Speaker 1: blind men describing the elephant, and they're all on a
Speaker 1: different body part the trunk, the ear of the tail,
Speaker 1: and you have they're describing the same thing, just from
Speaker 1: a different person exactly. And then the last question I
Speaker 1: have before I get to my favorites. When we look
Speaker 1: at the remnants of the big Big Bang, there are
Speaker 1: lots of clues. So we have the cosmic background radiation,
Speaker 1: we have the cold spots and parts of the universe.
Speaker 1: There are all sorts of evidence that, hey, this seems
Speaker 1: to have really happened. We may not understand precisely how,
Speaker 1: but we have a pretty substantial body of of um
Speaker 1: observations that that support it. In any of these observations,
Speaker 1: do we find support for superstring theory. No, Now that
Speaker 1: is not a black mark against the theory, because the
Speaker 1: theory really comes into its own in domains that have
Speaker 1: much higher energy, much smaller distances than the things that
Speaker 1: we can see, even with the most powerful telescopes or
Speaker 1: even with hit the Large Hadron collider. So the theory
Speaker 1: can agree with everything that we found, but where it
Speaker 1: differs from the things that we know about those are
Speaker 1: domains that we can't yet access. So we're in this
Speaker 1: kind of curious slimbo land that we have this beautiful
Speaker 1: mathematical theory that seems to unify things gravity and quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics does it with some strange and wonderful ideas, extra
Speaker 1: dimensions of space being one of them, fundamental filaments at
Speaker 1: the heart of matter being another. But we've yet to
Speaker 1: be able to deter aman if these ideas are actually
Speaker 1: describing our universe. That that's quite fascinating. So so now
Speaker 1: let me jump to my favorite UH pod question podcast
Speaker 1: questions UH that I asked all of my guests, so
Speaker 1: I know a decent amount about your background. Did you
Speaker 1: ever think about doing anything other than going into physics?
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, Well, when I was really a little up
Speaker 1: to sort of ten or eleven, years old, I was
Speaker 1: intent on being a professional bowlers bowler, not even a
Speaker 1: baseball player. Definitely bowler. I used to spend my summer's
Speaker 1: bowling over on the east side of the eight Street
Speaker 1: in New York Avenue. Used to be a bowling I
Speaker 1: don't that's the thing of my past. I gave that up.
Speaker 1: Okay eight years UM, I have to send you a
Speaker 1: YouTube video of a bowler who in I think forty
Speaker 1: three seconds bowls of perfect game. I'll send this to you.
Speaker 1: He goes, you know, bowling alleys here in lanes and
Speaker 1: bull How do you even reset the pens because it
Speaker 1: because by the content one. Then he goes back to
Speaker 1: the first one and does the last three things. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: If you're a bowler at all, I will appreciate you
Speaker 1: will find that quite like, Oh my goodness. UM. So
Speaker 1: aside from being a professional bowler, what else was well?
Speaker 1: You know? Um, if I was to go back in retrospect,
Speaker 1: I would say neuroscience is one of the most amazing
Speaker 1: fast fields that that are being developed today. So I
Speaker 1: could certainly imagine loving being a researcher in that field. Uh. Certainly,
Speaker 1: writing is something that I take very seriously, and and
Speaker 1: that is I do consider myself that's part of what
Speaker 1: I do. Well, you've got four going on five books.
Speaker 1: I think it's the fifth book. You're allowing that you
Speaker 1: can call yourself that. Yeah, exactly. Um, so those are
Speaker 1: sort of the main things. I never really imagine doing
Speaker 1: anything radically different from It was always going to be
Speaker 1: science and communicating. So tell us about some of your
Speaker 1: early mentors. You you have some fast in schooling, and
Speaker 1: you've worked with some amazing people. Yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I I went to New York City public schools, you know,
Speaker 1: through through eighth grade. Then I went to Stuyveson High School,
Speaker 1: which is still a public school, and I was fortunate
Speaker 1: in the seventh grade. It must have been that my
Speaker 1: math teacher at i S forty four, the intermediate school
Speaker 1: in seventy Street, gave me a note that I took
Speaker 1: up to Columbia University. In the note basically said, hey,
Speaker 1: this kid's smart in math, we can't teach him anything
Speaker 1: else and can you help us out? And I just
Speaker 1: handed this to person after person on the Columbia campus.
Speaker 1: Sort of a weird thing to knocking on doors, and
Speaker 1: amazingly I knocked on a door in the math department
Speaker 1: and a fellow named Neil Bellensen, one of the most
Speaker 1: generous smart spect you're something like that, Yeah, I must
Speaker 1: be and um and and he said he looked at
Speaker 1: the note and he said, sure, I'll teach you. And
Speaker 1: it was, you know, for free. We didn't have money,
Speaker 1: couldn't pay him, and just out of the goodness of
Speaker 1: his heart, he met with me three four times a
Speaker 1: week over the summers, taught me math that I'd never
Speaker 1: learned any other way. During the year, I'd meet with
Speaker 1: him on Saturdays. He picked me up at the bus
Speaker 1: stop near his house in the cold of winter and
Speaker 1: taking we'd learn that. I mean, who does this? What
Speaker 1: an amazing thing. And it allowed me just to sail
Speaker 1: off into mathematical domains that kept my interest going and
Speaker 1: really just kept the juices flowing in my brain, which
Speaker 1: is very important. Wow, that's fascinating. And his name was
Speaker 1: Neil Bellensen. And if he's listening, I don't know where
Speaker 1: he is, you know, I haven't a contact with him
Speaker 1: in like decades. Maybe he'll hear this. That's that's that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Any other mentors you wanna want to mention? Well, I
Speaker 1: had some great teachers in the New York City public schools,
Speaker 1: a guy named Danny Kotalk. I don't know if he's
Speaker 1: still alive any longer. He he, he was the guy
Speaker 1: that wrote that note. And he again was just a
Speaker 1: spectacular teacher that just made mathematics so fascinating and just
Speaker 1: kept kept the interest going there. Um. And then you
Speaker 1: know when we when we go to high school and college.
Speaker 1: Know there's a professor at Harvard, Howard George I one
Speaker 1: of the great particle physicists of our era. And uh
Speaker 1: he again just I would go talk to him when
Speaker 1: as a freshman, I just knock on his door, is bold,
Speaker 1: and he would open the door and I'd walk in.
Speaker 1: For hours, we talk about stuff, and he teach me
Speaker 1: stuff on the blackboard. So again, you know, the one
Speaker 1: lesson is if you're willing to go forward people are.
Speaker 1: They're willing to help you. They're not necessarily going to
Speaker 1: come to you, but if you go to them, the
Speaker 1: opportunities are there. I'm intrigued by the story that you're
Speaker 1: on campus and you see a flyer uh lecture this
Speaker 1: evening the theory of everything. Yeah, that sounds interesting. Let's
Speaker 1: go look at that is that what led you into
Speaker 1: deeper into the world of physically totally. I was a
Speaker 1: graduate tude at Oxford, you know, in England, and uh
Speaker 1: I was, as you're saying, walking across the campus one
Speaker 1: day and saw that sign and I went and checked
Speaker 1: it out and it was a talk about gang named
Speaker 1: Michael Green, not related to me, and he was one
Speaker 1: of the founders of strength here and he was talking
Speaker 1: about the breakthrough that he and a guy named On
Speaker 1: Schwartz who's at Caltech, that they had found. And that's
Speaker 1: what turned me onto string theory as a graduate student,
Speaker 1: and I shifted my work, and just about everybody else
Speaker 1: in the world shifted their work to focus on this
Speaker 1: new idea that they had come up with. Intriguing Who
Speaker 1: else influenced your approach to thinking about science, physics, math
Speaker 1: or communication. Well, I'd like to think that that Einstein
Speaker 1: is always with me and my colleagues too. Of course,
Speaker 1: every step of the way, Almost everything that I do
Speaker 1: has in some sense intellectual roots that go back to
Speaker 1: Einstein's ideas. He's pervasive in the field. But the other
Speaker 1: person is the Einstein of our age, which is Edward
Speaker 1: Whitten at the Institute for Advanced Study again. You know,
Speaker 1: so many of the papers that I've done ultimately go
Speaker 1: back to ideas that he had that we were able
Speaker 1: to develop in one way or another. I spent a
Speaker 1: wonderful year at the Institute for Advanced Study, you know,
Speaker 1: decades ago, where talking to Ed Witten every day. We
Speaker 1: actually got into a little friendly competition where this idea
Speaker 1: that space could rip the topology change. He had a
Speaker 1: way of doing it, we had a way of doing it.
Speaker 1: And during those three months we were all racing to
Speaker 1: the finish line, and we we finished at the same time,
Speaker 1: different approaches, published our papers on the same day. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it was a wonderfully exciting time. He has yeah
Speaker 1: to to come up with these strange ideas. He has
Speaker 1: some um lectures and interviews online, and he is just
Speaker 1: such a soft spoken, gentle individual. It's hard to imagine
Speaker 1: him in like bloodthirsty academic debate because he just seems to, well,
Speaker 1: here's the thing, but he doesn't he doesn't need to
Speaker 1: ever get angry because he's so much smarter than everybody else.
Speaker 1: He can crush just you know a few words. Everybody
Speaker 1: I've seen or reads have said, Hey, we're all really smart.
Speaker 1: And then there's Ed Witten. It's just a different now
Speaker 1: and working with him is quite a trip. You know.
Speaker 1: There'd be five of us in his office and we're
Speaker 1: talking about stuff, and all of a sudden, he stops talking.
Speaker 1: He looks up. Everybody gets quiet because Ed is thinking,
Speaker 1: and you don't disturb Ed's thinking. And you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: he really is coming up with something new. Sometimes maybe
Speaker 1: he's just thinking about lunch, you know. So there are
Speaker 1: times when I was a little bit bold and I'd
Speaker 1: say so, at any anything else that we should have
Speaker 1: to like fifteen minutes of silence, you know, at anything else,
Speaker 1: you should talk about it. No, No, we're good. Well
Speaker 1: we'll meet again later and we'd all leap the office.
Speaker 1: And that's amazing. Let's talk about books. This is the
Speaker 1: most popular question I get from from readers and listeners.
Speaker 1: What are some of your favorite books? Well, God, fiction, nonfiction, physics,
Speaker 1: what hell? Yeah, and the fiction domain. I'm a great
Speaker 1: fan of Camu, you know. Uh, The Stranger is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite books. Wait, I always thought that was
Speaker 1: fit nonfiction existentialism and yeah, no, but he he wrote stories, uh,
Speaker 1: and um, the stories are tell the storytell the story
Speaker 1: and and they're just amazing works of literature. Um, so
Speaker 1: that's Kafka. You know. The Trial I think is one
Speaker 1: of the one of the great stories quite relevant in
Speaker 1: our aids. Uh certainly Orwell is one of my favorite authors.
Speaker 1: Four Animal Farm. You know, in the nonfiction domain, there's
Speaker 1: a book I don't know if you know of it.
Speaker 1: It's called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, one
Speaker 1: the seventy four Pulterer Project. I think that was a
Speaker 1: year one of the most influential books I've ever read. Really, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It really describes human motivation and why we do what
Speaker 1: we do from sort of a post Freudian perspective where
Speaker 1: we really are the only species that knows that we're
Speaker 1: going to die, and that drives us to try to
Speaker 1: do things that will give us a sense of permanence.
Speaker 1: And if you take that perspective, I can't do it
Speaker 1: justice in thirty seconds, but you recognize so much of
Speaker 1: what we do is driven by this fear of the
Speaker 1: impending doom that faces us all. And I have to
Speaker 1: tell you this is a book that's really even influencing
Speaker 1: the book I'm writing right now. The book I'm writing
Speaker 1: now is about the whole history of the universe from
Speaker 1: the beginning to the end, and as you describe it,
Speaker 1: the future does look like a death to the universe,
Speaker 1: the heat death. We even use that language. And the
Speaker 1: book kind of shows an interplay between our recognition as
Speaker 1: a species that we will die with this recognition that
Speaker 1: the universe as a whole is going to die, and
Speaker 1: how do those notions play off of each other, has
Speaker 1: that effect how we live? That's sort of what this
Speaker 1: book is about. Fascinating, and any of the books you
Speaker 1: want to mention, give us a give us a physics
Speaker 1: book that's not your own, that that you think is
Speaker 1: worth pursuing. Wow, or cosmology or astrophysics or uh, well,
Speaker 1: you know Richard Dawkins, if we're gonna outside of itself,
Speaker 1: you know what a beautiful writer, you know, and what
Speaker 1: a capacity he has for taking ideas in the biological
Speaker 1: realm and just writing in a way that can make
Speaker 1: you weep. I mean, it's such such a beautiful writing.
Speaker 1: So I'd say he certainly is. Anything that he's written
Speaker 1: is well worth one's time to read, really quite quite fascinating. Also,
Speaker 1: I would say Stephen Pinker, he was a previous guest,
Speaker 1: I love the concept. So I a little self interested digression.
Speaker 1: So I do a lot of work with behavioral economics
Speaker 1: and why investors are so bad at what they do
Speaker 1: because of the cognitive wet wear was not designed you know,
Speaker 1: if it was a pharmaceutical, we would call it off
Speaker 1: label usage. We weren't designed for there, and and Pinker's
Speaker 1: book The Better UM Better Angels of Our Nature UM
Speaker 1: basically shows how things can be getting better and better
Speaker 1: and better, and yet you're unaware of it. The phrase
Speaker 1: I use as denominator blindness. But if you see, you know,
Speaker 1: something on the news, there was this crime, this murder,
Speaker 1: this robbery, Well, what does that tell you about the
Speaker 1: overall trend? Is this more than average? Is this less
Speaker 1: than average? We've been hearing about all these terrible crimes,
Speaker 1: and yet by every data point we look at, most
Speaker 1: serious crimes are at thirty, forty, even forty five year lows.
Speaker 1: You look around the world's poverty, uh slavery, nutritional short
Speaker 1: for they're all there has never been a better time
Speaker 1: to be a human being on this planet. And yet
Speaker 1: you read the headlines and it doesn't quite give you
Speaker 1: that same perspective. Yeah, absolutely, And and that's Uh, that's
Speaker 1: Pinker's book. I'm gonna have you started asking me questions
Speaker 1: if I can keep going off on this, let me
Speaker 1: get back to my uh my list. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about what's changed since you've joined the realm of physics.
Speaker 1: What do you think are the most interesting changes that
Speaker 1: have taken place? Yeah, well, they're better or worse. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I'd say the big developments in physics, the thrilling ones
Speaker 1: are the discoveries of ideas that were put forward a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago or fifty years ago. The issues of
Speaker 1: the microwave, background, radiation heat left up from the Big
Speaker 1: Bang that now we can measure with such spectacular person decision,
Speaker 1: and what we see matches what the math says. That
Speaker 1: gives us confidence that we truly understand what was happening
Speaker 1: thirteen point eight billion years ago. That's utterly thrilling, you know.
Speaker 1: Discovery of the Higgs boson, that we now understand that
Speaker 1: there can be this feel permeating space and that's why
Speaker 1: other things have mass. We found the particle, these ideas,
Speaker 1: the god particle. I'm sort of not a great fan
Speaker 1: of that word, but yeah, that's what it's called. When
Speaker 1: I learned about this in graduate school in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: It was taught to me in a way where I
Speaker 1: didn't even know that it hadn't yet been confirmed. It
Speaker 1: was spoken of as if this is how the world works.
Speaker 1: It was decades before I knew. Wait, we don't have
Speaker 1: that particle in our hands. Well, decades is an exaggeration.
Speaker 1: A few years and then twelve we find the particle,
Speaker 1: and then gravitational waves is the other big one. Right,
Speaker 1: None of us who are in the theoretical end of
Speaker 1: things really thought that they were going to detect these
Speaker 1: gravitational way ever, or just in a life I mean, look,
Speaker 1: you're looking at a wave that can strutch device by
Speaker 1: a fraction of an atomic diameter. How can you measure
Speaker 1: stretching by the fraction of an atomic diameter? And yet
Speaker 1: these guys pulled it all set up at tube and
Speaker 1: you have a mirror that refracts it in the other
Speaker 1: and you just measure the two waves theoretically, theoretically, that's
Speaker 1: come on, they could have figured that out years ago.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right, But no, it is. It is stunning achievement.
Speaker 1: But but that we mentioned this earlier, we are living
Speaker 1: in a golden age of physics where things that theoretically
Speaker 1: have been described when you see hard proof like that.
Speaker 1: And and by the way, oh, we could trace this
Speaker 1: to two black holes that collided one three billion years. Okay, hey,
Speaker 1: we there's proof of that. And here it is in
Speaker 1: the shift in this in this measurement. That's an astonishing accomplishment.
Speaker 1: I don't know if people, people who aren't physics nerds appreciate,
Speaker 1: and there seems to be so. I subscribe to a
Speaker 1: bunch of different email lists because I I do a
Speaker 1: morning set of reads for everybody. Here are the ten
Speaker 1: most interesting things from markets, to psychology to whatever. And
Speaker 1: I'm on all these different lists, and the sort of
Speaker 1: stuff that comes from the physics side, it's it's not
Speaker 1: like every six months I get, uh, hey, here's this
Speaker 1: big announcement. It's every day there's two or three different things.
Speaker 1: And every week there's some hey, this is a pretty
Speaker 1: big deal. And it seems at least once or twice
Speaker 1: a month it's hey, this is groundbreaking stuff. It's a
Speaker 1: are you do You stop and say, I'm really glad
Speaker 1: that my lifespan incorporates this era of spectacular discovery. Absolutely absolutely,
Speaker 1: But you can't help us say to yourself, Wow, if
Speaker 1: only I've been born, like a few hundred years from now,
Speaker 1: I could read about all this exciting stuff and now
Speaker 1: it's gonna happen. Then no, then it's boring. It's done,
Speaker 1: I think, so stop and think about this is a
Speaker 1: fun little experiment. Think about the people who lived in
Speaker 1: the thirties, forties, fifties didn't make it to the eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties, and computers were these things that were the
Speaker 1: size of a room, and there was no concept of
Speaker 1: an internet other than, hey, we have a system set
Speaker 1: up that in case we are attacked with nukes, we
Speaker 1: could launch a response and and wipe out most of
Speaker 1: the planet. That was the concept of an internet. And
Speaker 1: we had phones with phone operators and the plugs and everything.
Speaker 1: Think about, and maybe this is me showing my age,
Speaker 1: but I've gotten to see some astonishing things just in
Speaker 1: the past fifty years. I think it might be boring
Speaker 1: to be born after everything is figured out. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't think so. I think it's only you to get
Speaker 1: more exciting and and the possibilities of of artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: the possibilities of maybe simulated world, simulated realities, the possibilities
Speaker 1: to be go a little nutt a year of down
Speaker 1: learning your consciousness and too you know. Yeah, so who
Speaker 1: knows if any of that stuff holds any water. But
Speaker 1: I would love to be around to see. Huh sounds
Speaker 1: sounds intriguing. Um so those are the next major shifts.
Speaker 1: We don't know what's gonna gonna come out of them.
Speaker 1: This is another question that came from listeners. Tell us
Speaker 1: about a time you failed and what you learned from
Speaker 1: the experience. Oh gosh, the old failure question. That's a
Speaker 1: tough one always. But um I'll give you one example,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of a personal side of things. You know,
Speaker 1: my dad was a musician, composer, and because that life
Speaker 1: is so hard, he kind of pushed us kids away
Speaker 1: from music. He didn't want us to go in that direction.
Speaker 1: So when I was in college, finally I said, I
Speaker 1: want to play an instrument, you know, I want to
Speaker 1: play piano. So I started to do that. But what
Speaker 1: I've learned is that unless you are fully least me personally,
Speaker 1: fully focused on something, you don't get it done. So
Speaker 1: here I am thirty years later, and I'm still thinking
Speaker 1: to myself, I really want to play piano, and by
Speaker 1: hell or high water. I want before I leave this
Speaker 1: planet to have some level of proficiency. I've not gotten
Speaker 1: it yet. But the lesson I would say is for
Speaker 1: me personally, if I'm gonna do something, it has to
Speaker 1: be one commitment or it just doesn't happen. I have
Speaker 1: a friend who started taking Italian lessons and he said
Speaker 1: he thought it would take five years to really be proficient.
Speaker 1: And I said, gee, that's a long time, and he
Speaker 1: said the five years ago, and by whether I'm studying
Speaker 1: Italian or not, so maybe exactly right. Something to it?
Speaker 1: All right, my I know we only have the room
Speaker 1: for two couple more minutes. Let me get to my
Speaker 1: last two and most favorite questions. You work with a
Speaker 1: lot of millennials, young students. Someone comes to you and says,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in a career in theoretical physics. What sort
Speaker 1: of advice would you give them? Well, I tell them,
Speaker 1: number one, can you imagine doing anything else? Because I
Speaker 1: think to really succeed in this field, you've got to
Speaker 1: be one of the people saying no, no, My heart
Speaker 1: and soul is in physics, and that's what I've got
Speaker 1: to do. Because it's a hard field. Very few jobs
Speaker 1: you work like crazy you don't make a lot of money.
Speaker 1: You have to be doing it because it's got you
Speaker 1: by the d n A. And if that's the case,
Speaker 1: then I tell them, look, the next thing is, you've
Speaker 1: got to learn the basics inside out. Don't try to
Speaker 1: jump ahead and do string theory or general relativity because
Speaker 1: it's cool ideas that you maybe saw some television show
Speaker 1: mine or somebody else's. You've got to learn Newton Maxwell
Speaker 1: everybody inside out. And if at the end of that
Speaker 1: you still love the field, keep on going. And my
Speaker 1: final question that I ask all my guests, what is
Speaker 1: it that you know today about physics, string theory? What
Speaker 1: have you that you wish you knew when you were
Speaker 1: starting out five or so years ago. You can I
Speaker 1: give a real nuts and bolts to that question, not
Speaker 1: sort of from high end saying, well, you know, twenty
Speaker 1: five years ago numerical methods using computers was not really
Speaker 1: the centerpiece of doing physics, but so many issues today.
Speaker 1: If you're doing general relativity, if you're doing these really
Speaker 1: hard problems, you've got to be a cracker jack computer
Speaker 1: person to be able to push certain of these calculations forward.
Speaker 1: And I always left that to others I would do
Speaker 1: the equations and I'd leave it, say the students to
Speaker 1: program it to take it forward. I wish I was
Speaker 1: a cracker Jack programmer, because there's a certain kind of
Speaker 1: insight that I found myself, even on the rudimentary stuff
Speaker 1: that I've done. In the numerical world, you learn things
Speaker 1: better if you can take an idea, turn into a
Speaker 1: program and actually calculate something with it. In that way,
Speaker 1: you understand it better. So I'd tell all students get
Speaker 1: proficiency in numerical methods, even if you're going to be
Speaker 1: doing high end theory. It will serve you well. Quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Professor Brian Green, director of
Speaker 1: the Center for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University. Be sure
Speaker 1: and check out any of the other hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: or so such conversations we've had. You can find them
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg dot com, Apple iTunes, SoundCloud, or any of
Speaker 1: the other places where fine podcasts or hosted. I would
Speaker 1: be remiss if I did not thank my producer, Taylor
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