WEBVTT - Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) 0:00:00.160 --> 0:00:03.279 Brought to you by Bank of America. Merrill Lynch, committed 0:00:03.279 --> 0:00:06.320 to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most 0:00:06.360 --> 0:00:10.280 innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker. 0:00:10.680 --> 0:00:13.960 That's the power of Global Connections. Bank of America North 0:00:14.000 --> 0:00:19.759 America member f d i C. This is Masters in 0:00:19.880 --> 0:00:24.599 Business with Barry Ridholtz on Boomberg Radio. This week on 0:00:24.680 --> 0:00:28.480 the podcast, I have James Glick. He is an author 0:00:28.560 --> 0:00:31.760 and journalist at The New York Times who has covered 0:00:31.800 --> 0:00:35.720 science and technology for a long time. I've been a 0:00:35.720 --> 0:00:39.680 fan of his for many, many years, going back to 0:00:40.040 --> 0:00:43.760 really the first book he ever wrote, called Chaos, Making 0:00:43.800 --> 0:00:48.720 of a New Science. I'm a physics geek, it's sort 0:00:48.760 --> 0:00:53.200 of my background, and at the time this book came out, 0:00:54.720 --> 0:00:59.000 it was really cunning edge stuff. It was absolutely fascinating. 0:00:59.760 --> 0:01:04.800 It's not the most accessible subject, but i'mronically long before 0:01:04.840 --> 0:01:10.720 I joined finance, chaos UH and chaos theory had all 0:01:10.760 --> 0:01:15.200 sorts of applications UH to the world of markets and investing. 0:01:15.240 --> 0:01:20.520 It's not a coincidence that theoretical physicists and mathematicians end 0:01:20.640 --> 0:01:24.560 up working on Wall Street. The ability to deal with 0:01:24.680 --> 0:01:30.280 issues of uncertainty and probability and randomness are really really 0:01:30.319 --> 0:01:33.679 helpful when when thinking about markets. This was a really 0:01:33.800 --> 0:01:38.840 unusual book. It's a very challenging subject and Click makes 0:01:38.880 --> 0:01:44.320 it accessible and really quite quite fascinating and enjoyable. UH. 0:01:44.560 --> 0:01:49.960 From the book comes the term the butterfly effect, which 0:01:50.560 --> 0:01:54.920 Click is credited with popularizing. But that's just one book 0:01:54.920 --> 0:01:57.920 he had written many years ago. He's written dozens of books, 0:01:58.280 --> 0:02:02.400 including biographies on Richard Lineman and Isaac Newton, and What 0:02:02.640 --> 0:02:05.720 Just Happened, which is about technology, and Faster, which is 0:02:05.760 --> 0:02:10.440 about changes in technology. I think his his magnum opus 0:02:10.800 --> 0:02:15.840 is UH The Information, A History A Theory of flood. 0:02:16.320 --> 0:02:21.720 It is just a brilliant exposition about information theory and 0:02:21.760 --> 0:02:29.400 how all technology has tracked various ways of communicating uh 0:02:29.440 --> 0:02:34.840 as people. UM, It's really a brilliant, brilliant book. Who 0:02:34.840 --> 0:02:38.760 was nominated for a Pulitzer Uh. It's totally totally readable. 0:02:38.880 --> 0:02:42.720 I I found it to be delightful to just dive into. 0:02:42.800 --> 0:02:45.639 I think I read it on the beach on vacation 0:02:45.720 --> 0:02:48.639 in in in a day and a half for two days. UH. 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:52.600 And his most recent book is actually a little off 0:02:52.639 --> 0:02:57.959 the beaten path. It's quite charming. It's called Time Travel History, 0:02:58.040 --> 0:03:04.080 and it discusses how time travel as a concept has developed. 0:03:04.160 --> 0:03:08.359 You you may be shocked to learn that before H. G. 0:03:08.600 --> 0:03:11.680 Wells's book The Time Machine, there was no such thing 0:03:11.720 --> 0:03:15.680 as time travel. Nobody had even conceptualized it. It simply 0:03:15.720 --> 0:03:19.040 didn't exist. Anyway, I could babble about the books he's 0:03:19.120 --> 0:03:22.560 written about over and over again. Rather than do that, 0:03:22.760 --> 0:03:27.120 let's just jump right to my interview, my conversation with 0:03:27.200 --> 0:03:33.880 James click Voss Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on 0:03:34.080 --> 0:03:38.560 Boomberg Radio. My special guest today is James Gleek. He 0:03:38.720 --> 0:03:43.000 is one of my favorite science writers, perhaps best described 0:03:43.640 --> 0:03:47.880 as a historian of science ideas, looking at the impact 0:03:48.040 --> 0:03:51.360 of technology on our understanding of the world. He is 0:03:51.400 --> 0:03:55.760 the author of Chaos, Making of a New Science, The Information, 0:03:56.040 --> 0:03:59.160 A History, A Theory of Flood, and his latest book 0:03:59.400 --> 0:04:02.640 is Time Travel History. Several of his books have been 0:04:02.680 --> 0:04:07.080 nominated for Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Finalist Awards. The 0:04:07.160 --> 0:04:11.600 Information was awarded the pen Literary Science Award as well 0:04:11.640 --> 0:04:16.559 as the Royal Society Witton Prize for Science Books. James Glick, 0:04:16.680 --> 0:04:19.000 Welcome to Bloomberg. Well, thank you. I'm happy to be here. 0:04:19.160 --> 0:04:21.960 I have to start out asking about your background, because 0:04:22.160 --> 0:04:24.919 you're really the fact that you're a science writer is 0:04:24.960 --> 0:04:30.240 sort of surprising. You majored in English and linguistics. How 0:04:30.240 --> 0:04:33.640 did that morph into science writing? I was a journalist. 0:04:33.760 --> 0:04:36.560 I wasn't. I wasn't any kind of scientist, and I 0:04:36.560 --> 0:04:39.440 I never intended to be a science writer, and I'm 0:04:39.480 --> 0:04:43.240 hardly I don't really think I'm a science writer now. 0:04:43.600 --> 0:04:47.359 And you know, Time Travel isn't really a science book. 0:04:47.480 --> 0:04:49.760 Well not yet, but one day it might be. Well 0:04:50.200 --> 0:04:52.919 we we can dream, but it isn't. But but it 0:04:52.960 --> 0:04:56.080 really isn't. I mean, I have a I have a 0:04:56.120 --> 0:04:58.040 feeling that if you go into the bookstore you can 0:04:58.080 --> 0:04:59.880 probably find it in the science section. But I think 0:05:00.000 --> 0:05:04.760 it's actually it's actually a mistake. So in general, your 0:05:04.800 --> 0:05:09.400 books are these deeply researched, years in the making sort 0:05:09.400 --> 0:05:13.440 of projects. What what made you approach book writing in 0:05:13.480 --> 0:05:18.400 that way? I approached book writing in the first place 0:05:19.279 --> 0:05:23.600 as a journalist and deeply researched. Well, that's you know, 0:05:23.720 --> 0:05:25.360 that's what you do. You go out and you talk 0:05:25.400 --> 0:05:28.040 to people, you do reporting. I thought of it as 0:05:28.120 --> 0:05:30.720 reporting before I thought of it as research. It's changed, 0:05:31.160 --> 0:05:34.159 it's changed a little bit over the years. But my 0:05:34.320 --> 0:05:41.200 first book, Chaos was about something dramatic that was happening 0:05:41.200 --> 0:05:44.280 in the world of science that wasn't getting any attention 0:05:44.400 --> 0:05:46.719 as far as I could see. And I learned about 0:05:46.760 --> 0:05:49.440 it almost by accident when I was writing a profile 0:05:49.520 --> 0:05:52.400 of a of a scientist, and I was only writing 0:05:52.400 --> 0:05:55.400 profiles of scientists because I was interested in science. I 0:05:55.480 --> 0:06:01.520 liked it, so which would that be Mandelbrod or or Um. No. Ways, 0:06:01.600 --> 0:06:03.479 the way it actually came about was I wrote a 0:06:03.520 --> 0:06:07.320 profile early on of Douglas Hofstader. Sure I read go 0:06:07.440 --> 0:06:10.960 to lesch Bach exactly right, and he was, you know, 0:06:11.080 --> 0:06:15.000 he was a computer scientist and was um had a 0:06:15.040 --> 0:06:18.720 lot to say about consciousness. And he was the one 0:06:18.760 --> 0:06:21.560 who told me that he had heard about this thing 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:25.960 called Kass theory that was going on, and that that 0:06:26.120 --> 0:06:32.080 not just mathematicians and physicists but also economists and meteorologists 0:06:32.080 --> 0:06:35.320 and by all everybody was talking about chaos theory, but 0:06:35.400 --> 0:06:39.120 it was very much under the radar. And I thought, well, 0:06:39.160 --> 0:06:42.800 that sounds kind of cool, and it was, and and 0:06:42.839 --> 0:06:45.920 I've been recommending that book for for many years. Well, 0:06:45.960 --> 0:06:51.440 will come back to that, um so somewhat unusual career path. 0:06:51.520 --> 0:06:55.800 Then if you started out as a journalist, how do 0:06:55.839 --> 0:07:00.080 you veer from someone doing broad interviews to somebody doing 0:07:00.120 --> 0:07:05.560 these really deep dives into very very comprehensive and complicated 0:07:05.760 --> 0:07:10.720 subjects like information theory or chaos theory. Well, chaos theory 0:07:10.840 --> 0:07:13.880 just you know, as I said, started out as a 0:07:13.960 --> 0:07:16.360 kind of journalism I was. I felt I was reporting 0:07:16.680 --> 0:07:18.920 on something that was very real, that was happening in 0:07:18.960 --> 0:07:23.600 the world, and it just happened to be science, and 0:07:23.640 --> 0:07:26.840 I approached it. I intended to approach it the way 0:07:26.840 --> 0:07:32.520 a political reporter would approach politics, or a reporter specializing 0:07:32.440 --> 0:07:35.640 in art would approach art. You know, it just happened 0:07:35.640 --> 0:07:37.520 to be science, and a line a bunch of experts 0:07:37.560 --> 0:07:41.080 asked them questions, some dumb questions, and figure out what 0:07:41.160 --> 0:07:44.840 was going on, and I wanted to My goal in 0:07:44.880 --> 0:07:49.520 that book wasn't so much explained the ideas of chaos 0:07:49.760 --> 0:07:54.480 as tell the story of how this new science was 0:07:54.560 --> 0:07:57.840 being born, and tell the stories of the individual scientists 0:07:57.840 --> 0:08:00.280 and find out what they were thinking and how they 0:08:00.320 --> 0:08:03.920 communicated with one another. And that was just I mean, 0:08:03.960 --> 0:08:06.320 that's the kind of book I like to read, So 0:08:06.440 --> 0:08:08.679 that's the kind of book I wrote. But it's true. 0:08:09.520 --> 0:08:13.600 Um not the usual approach to writing a book on 0:08:13.680 --> 0:08:16.080 science then, or do you think of the Worst Day 0:08:16.120 --> 0:08:18.440 of Dagon? Similar? But I'm not sure there is one 0:08:18.560 --> 0:08:23.640 usual approach. You know, science writing covers a lot of territory, 0:08:23.720 --> 0:08:26.080 a lot of there's a kind of science writing that's 0:08:26.120 --> 0:08:29.400 written by scientists, and they write about their own work, 0:08:29.680 --> 0:08:33.079 or they write about other things in the field. I mean, 0:08:33.120 --> 0:08:36.720 I was a huge admirer of Stephen Jay Gould, who 0:08:36.720 --> 0:08:40.880 wrote um the most beautiful essays, and they often turned 0:08:40.880 --> 0:08:44.560 into books about his own work and work that was 0:08:44.679 --> 0:08:47.520 connected to his work. And he had a very broad 0:08:47.640 --> 0:08:50.680 view of the world, and you could learn a lot 0:08:50.760 --> 0:08:53.320 from reading his stuff. And there are many there are 0:08:53.320 --> 0:08:57.000 people today who write about physics, who are physicists, and 0:08:57.040 --> 0:09:01.240 they're just trying to explain, maybe in a popular way, 0:09:01.559 --> 0:09:06.079 the things they know. I don't like the word popularization, 0:09:08.720 --> 0:09:12.120 maybe because I'm not an expert myself. You know, I'm 0:09:12.160 --> 0:09:16.199 not trying to popularize things. I'm trying to write about 0:09:16.200 --> 0:09:18.640 things that I care about and in some cases barely 0:09:18.760 --> 0:09:22.920 understand when I get started. The word popularize often implies 0:09:23.040 --> 0:09:26.840 a dumbing down from mass audience. Exactly, you're you have 0:09:27.240 --> 0:09:30.480 never been accused of of doing and I don't know 0:09:30.480 --> 0:09:33.040 how you dumb care. I don't know. I've been accused 0:09:33.040 --> 0:09:36.160 of just about everything. Barry, thank you, but um, but 0:09:36.240 --> 0:09:38.640 not that. No, but I'm not. I don't need to 0:09:38.720 --> 0:09:42.440 dumb anything down. I need to raise my own understanding 0:09:42.440 --> 0:09:45.080 to the level of grasping the stuff I'm writing about. 0:09:45.320 --> 0:09:48.560 You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My 0:09:48.640 --> 0:09:51.440 guest this week is James Glicky is the author of 0:09:51.520 --> 0:09:57.080 numerous books, most recently time Travel History, and let's jump 0:09:57.200 --> 0:10:00.560 right into this. I was astonished to learned from your 0:10:00.559 --> 0:10:04.200 book that prior to H. G. Wells, there really wasn't 0:10:04.240 --> 0:10:07.319 a whole lot of discussion of time travel. How is 0:10:07.360 --> 0:10:10.120 that possible? Not just not a lot of discussion? Time 0:10:10.160 --> 0:10:14.160 travel didn't exist. The words the words literally were not 0:10:14.320 --> 0:10:17.160 used in English. If you had said to somebody, are 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:19.680 you interested in time travel? They would have just looked 0:10:19.679 --> 0:10:21.800 at you as if you were crazy. And yes, I 0:10:21.880 --> 0:10:24.520 was astonished too. If there was one thing that got 0:10:24.559 --> 0:10:27.600 me going on this as a book subject, it was 0:10:27.679 --> 0:10:31.880 that discovery that that the idea of time travel has 0:10:31.960 --> 0:10:36.920 had a relatively short lifetime, barely essential. And the reason 0:10:37.000 --> 0:10:40.160 it's hard to believe. I mean, I I assume that 0:10:40.160 --> 0:10:42.600 that some of the people listening to us are thinking, well, 0:10:42.640 --> 0:10:47.480 that's not true, that's ridiculous. What about X and X 0:10:47.559 --> 0:10:50.640 might be I'm going to guess now people might be thinking, 0:10:50.679 --> 0:10:54.840 weren't there Greek myths that involved traveling through time? Or 0:10:54.880 --> 0:10:58.120 what about a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was 0:10:58.160 --> 0:11:01.600 a little before H. G. Wells that clearly didn't involve 0:11:01.800 --> 0:11:04.680 time travel, then involved We're going to show you a 0:11:04.720 --> 0:11:07.839 potential future. That is the difference, and then rip Van 0:11:07.880 --> 0:11:11.520 Winkle sleeps into the future. And you could say, you 0:11:11.559 --> 0:11:14.120 could argue, with the advantage of hindsight, that that's a 0:11:14.200 --> 0:11:17.760 kind of time travel if you want to explore the literature, 0:11:17.800 --> 0:11:21.520 which I did have to do extensively there. Um, there 0:11:21.520 --> 0:11:25.240 were sort of precursors to the idea, but until H. G. Wells, 0:11:25.760 --> 0:11:30.600 nobody imagined a machine or any other method where you 0:11:30.679 --> 0:11:35.600 could choose to transport yourself to another place in time, 0:11:35.880 --> 0:11:38.240 in the past or in the future. There was no 0:11:38.440 --> 0:11:41.840 possibility of volition, and of course Wells jumped right into it. 0:11:41.840 --> 0:11:45.679 He invented a machine with a lever, and his time 0:11:45.720 --> 0:11:49.440 traveler as he called him, hops on the machine and 0:11:49.800 --> 0:11:53.640 sends himself hurtling into the future. So what was it 0:11:53.679 --> 0:11:57.319 that led you to an interest in time travel? It's 0:11:57.400 --> 0:12:00.960 so different than most of your other world, where there's 0:12:01.000 --> 0:12:06.200 an underlying theme of some specific branch of science and 0:12:06.240 --> 0:12:10.320 the impact that it in technology has on society and culture. 0:12:10.320 --> 0:12:15.400 And it's a more philosophical approach to a harder science 0:12:15.480 --> 0:12:19.480 e sort of discussion. This is very science fiction, fun 0:12:19.600 --> 0:12:22.360 sort of thing. What made you say let's try this? 0:12:23.080 --> 0:12:27.400 I would say it's you're right, it's not a science book. 0:12:27.800 --> 0:12:31.240 I don't know if it's a philosophical book. At least 0:12:31.240 --> 0:12:34.240 there's some certainly some philosophy in it. It couldn't be avoided. 0:12:34.800 --> 0:12:37.480 Once again, I I wanted to tell a story, and 0:12:37.520 --> 0:12:40.920 the story was It started with a question. The question 0:12:41.040 --> 0:12:46.960 was why did this powerful and exciting, kind of exhilarating 0:12:47.000 --> 0:12:50.200 idea of time travel arise in the first place? Why 0:12:50.240 --> 0:12:52.559 did it arise at this particular time in the mind 0:12:52.600 --> 0:12:56.120 of H. G. Wells, a young writer he had never 0:12:56.120 --> 0:12:59.400 written a book before, trying to make a living in 0:12:59.720 --> 0:13:04.880 eighteen England. And then what happened to turn this primitive 0:13:05.000 --> 0:13:08.840 version of time travel, born out of the blue, into 0:13:08.880 --> 0:13:13.600 the very complicated and various cornucopia of things that were 0:13:13.640 --> 0:13:17.040 so familiar with today. I mean, we've got time travel cartoons, 0:13:17.559 --> 0:13:19.800 you know, I know, eight year old to get up 0:13:19.800 --> 0:13:22.320 in the morning and start arguing about the paradoxus of 0:13:22.360 --> 0:13:26.480 time travel. We are very sophisticated about time travel, and 0:13:26.880 --> 0:13:29.920 so I wanted to chart that as a story, to 0:13:30.080 --> 0:13:34.080 watch the ideas get handed from one person to another, 0:13:34.200 --> 0:13:38.839 and watch new writers. And we're talking about people who 0:13:38.960 --> 0:13:43.720 range from pulp science writers in New York in the 0:13:43.840 --> 0:13:49.160 nine twenties to literary writers like James Joyce and Virginia 0:13:49.200 --> 0:13:54.360 Wolf also in the early twentieth century, and scientists beginning 0:13:54.360 --> 0:13:59.440 with Einstein, all toying with ideas of time in very 0:13:59.520 --> 0:14:03.320 imagine native new ways. We have a tendency to you know, 0:14:03.360 --> 0:14:06.000 we live in the world and we know how things are, 0:14:06.440 --> 0:14:08.319 and we have a tendency to think it's always been 0:14:08.360 --> 0:14:11.360 like that, but it hasn't. And I just think it's 0:14:11.400 --> 0:14:16.360 it's really fun to watch the ideas transform. That's classic 0:14:16.440 --> 0:14:19.680 hindsight biases that well, of course it worked out this way. 0:14:19.720 --> 0:14:22.360 How else could it have worked out. It's very difficult 0:14:22.400 --> 0:14:25.840 to go back and unimagined an idea after you're familiar 0:14:25.880 --> 0:14:29.640 with it. So what was it about the Industrial Age 0:14:29.880 --> 0:14:33.080 and whatever, all of the new technologies that came about 0:14:33.080 --> 0:14:35.640 at the turn of the prior century, in the ninet 0:14:36.040 --> 0:14:38.600 whatever that put this out in the air and allowed 0:14:38.680 --> 0:14:41.480 so many people to conceptualize it when it had never 0:14:41.520 --> 0:14:43.640 really been thought about previous. There were a lot of 0:14:43.680 --> 0:14:46.120 things happening all at once. One thing that was happening 0:14:46.160 --> 0:14:50.080 was that there was a new idea of futurity. There 0:14:50.160 --> 0:14:53.360 was a new ability to imagine the future and a 0:14:53.400 --> 0:14:57.479 new interest in the future that depended on the Industrial 0:14:57.520 --> 0:15:00.600 Revolution and then the acceleration of technology. G When you 0:15:00.640 --> 0:15:03.160 think about it, if you took your time machine back 0:15:03.560 --> 0:15:07.800 and arrived on a farm in the fifteenth century and 0:15:07.920 --> 0:15:09.880 asked the first person you met, what is what do 0:15:09.920 --> 0:15:11.560 you think the world is going to be like for 0:15:11.680 --> 0:15:15.080 your grandchildren? They would say, what are you talking about? 0:15:15.080 --> 0:15:17.480 The world is going to be the same for my grandchildren. 0:15:18.160 --> 0:15:19.960 You know they're going to be using the same plows 0:15:20.040 --> 0:15:22.880 that I'm using because my grandparents used those plows, and 0:15:23.440 --> 0:15:25.440 there was nothing like the conception that we have of 0:15:25.480 --> 0:15:29.560 the progress of technology, which starts to seem inevitable to us. 0:15:30.040 --> 0:15:31.960 But by the end of the nineteenth century, there were 0:15:32.040 --> 0:15:36.360 railroads steaming across the landscape. There was the electric telegraph 0:15:36.760 --> 0:15:41.280 sending instant messages at the speed of electricity, and people 0:15:41.320 --> 0:15:45.480 were very conscious of how life was changing. They could 0:15:45.560 --> 0:15:47.960 see their lives changing right in front of them, and 0:15:48.000 --> 0:15:51.760 then they could start to wonder and get excited about 0:15:52.080 --> 0:15:54.360 how life was going to be in a hundred years. 0:15:54.800 --> 0:15:59.120 How significant were railroads along with the telegraph and in 0:15:59.320 --> 0:16:05.200 having people recognize that time wasn't necessarily a constant that 0:16:05.240 --> 0:16:07.760 they had to think about time zones in different places 0:16:07.800 --> 0:16:12.000 across the country. How important was that development to Ah, Well, 0:16:12.040 --> 0:16:14.800 that's a really good question, Barry, because you're right it was. 0:16:15.080 --> 0:16:19.240 It's exactly because of railroads and the telegraph, both of 0:16:19.280 --> 0:16:24.120 those technologies that clocks were changing. The telegraph made it 0:16:24.160 --> 0:16:28.920 possible to synchronize clocks electrically across great distances, which had 0:16:28.960 --> 0:16:31.800 never been possible before. When you think about it, if 0:16:31.800 --> 0:16:33.760 you had a clock in New York and you had 0:16:33.760 --> 0:16:38.040 a clock in Chicago, who would care what those you know, 0:16:39.240 --> 0:16:41.680 because because it would take days to get from New 0:16:41.760 --> 0:16:45.280 York to Chicago. So first the railroad made it kind 0:16:45.280 --> 0:16:49.080 of necessary to have accurate clocks in different places and 0:16:49.480 --> 0:16:51.840 help people notice that the sun was in a different 0:16:51.840 --> 0:16:54.960 place in the sky in New York and Chicago. And 0:16:55.000 --> 0:16:57.800 then the telegraph made it possible to synchronize the clocks. 0:16:58.120 --> 0:17:00.640 And it wasn't just Eighth d Well, it was also 0:17:00.720 --> 0:17:04.480 Einstein who was living in a world with these new technologies, 0:17:04.480 --> 0:17:08.480 and as a patent clerk, he was reading patents that 0:17:08.520 --> 0:17:11.119 had to do with synchronizing clocks, and he was starting 0:17:11.160 --> 0:17:13.440 to think about what what if you take a clock 0:17:13.480 --> 0:17:16.080 and you put it in motion at high speed? Does 0:17:16.119 --> 0:17:19.639 anything change? You know, all of these things were happening 0:17:19.640 --> 0:17:23.320 at once. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Master's in 0:17:23.359 --> 0:17:27.560 Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is James Glick. 0:17:27.720 --> 0:17:31.760 He is the author of numerous books, most recently time 0:17:31.800 --> 0:17:37.000 travel History. His first book was Chaos, Making of a 0:17:37.000 --> 0:17:40.280 New Science. And I have to ask you, this is 0:17:40.520 --> 0:17:45.720 an extremely complex subject in physics. What on Earth made 0:17:45.760 --> 0:17:48.840 you for your first book say, I know, I'll tackle 0:17:49.119 --> 0:17:54.080 chaos theory? Well, it wasn't, I know it was it 0:17:54.200 --> 0:17:58.000 was Woa, there's a thing called chaos theory. Okay, I mean, right, 0:17:58.200 --> 0:18:02.640 we we've it's it's kind of familiar now. People now, 0:18:02.800 --> 0:18:05.480 for example, have seen Jurassic Park and they watched Jeff 0:18:05.520 --> 0:18:12.160 Goldblum explain chaos mansplain chaos theory in fact, but it 0:18:12.240 --> 0:18:15.200 was brand new. And I was interested in science and 0:18:15.920 --> 0:18:18.320 writing about some scientists, and I heard about this thing, 0:18:18.359 --> 0:18:19.960 and I thought, I want to know what that is. 0:18:20.280 --> 0:18:24.040 And then as I learned what it was, I realized 0:18:24.520 --> 0:18:29.480 that it was a kind of science that really mattered 0:18:29.760 --> 0:18:34.800 to people who might not otherwise care about the esoterica 0:18:34.800 --> 0:18:37.399 of theoretical physics. It was a very, I felt, a 0:18:37.520 --> 0:18:41.200 very human kind of science. And one thing, one thing 0:18:41.240 --> 0:18:44.560 that was unusual about it was that it was cross disciplinary. 0:18:44.560 --> 0:18:48.639 That it involved people studying the weather, people studying the 0:18:49.280 --> 0:18:53.840 physiology of the human heart. It involved economics as well 0:18:53.880 --> 0:19:02.200 as theoretical physics. And that was because irregularity and disorder 0:19:02.280 --> 0:19:06.760 and complexity arise in all of these different areas, and 0:19:07.320 --> 0:19:10.960 as humans, we're interested in that, right. I mean, I'm 0:19:11.000 --> 0:19:13.920 not a scientist myself, so I have the kind of 0:19:14.640 --> 0:19:17.159 I have the prejudice that if I'm interested in it, 0:19:17.280 --> 0:19:19.400 other people are going to be interested in it too. 0:19:19.520 --> 0:19:23.000 It can't be that esoteric, and that was true of chaos. 0:19:23.080 --> 0:19:27.800 So you're credited with making the expression the butterfly affect 0:19:28.000 --> 0:19:32.040 a household word. Um explained what the butterfly Well, I 0:19:32.040 --> 0:19:36.000 didn't invent the butterfly effect. It was invented by a meteorologist, 0:19:36.080 --> 0:19:40.000 Edward Lorenz, who was one of the pioneers of chaos theory, 0:19:40.119 --> 0:19:46.199 and he discovered and proved that the Earth's weather is 0:19:46.240 --> 0:19:50.600 a chaotic system in this in this definite technical sense, 0:19:50.880 --> 0:19:56.600 that it's so unstable and so subject to small perturbations 0:19:57.200 --> 0:20:01.880 that the flapping of a butterfly's wing in one part 0:20:01.920 --> 0:20:06.640 of the globe at one instant can actually affect the 0:20:06.640 --> 0:20:09.720 the path of a hurricane a month later on the 0:20:09.760 --> 0:20:14.560 far side of the globe. That is not obviously true. 0:20:14.960 --> 0:20:18.119 I mean it could be the Earth's weather could be 0:20:18.160 --> 0:20:20.520 designed in a different way such that the flapping of 0:20:20.560 --> 0:20:23.720 the butterfly's wings would just dissipate and it wouldn't be important, 0:20:23.960 --> 0:20:27.480 and it would take a giant perturbation to actually have 0:20:27.560 --> 0:20:30.399 an effect on something as large as the course of 0:20:30.440 --> 0:20:33.440 a hurricane. So that's a surprise, and it had to 0:20:33.480 --> 0:20:36.040 be proved mathematically and it does turn out to be true. 0:20:36.520 --> 0:20:40.640 And it's why to this day, weather forecasting, no matter 0:20:40.680 --> 0:20:44.280 how powerful our computers get, is such an imperfect science. 0:20:44.359 --> 0:20:47.920 So so let's talk about something else that involves imperfect 0:20:48.000 --> 0:20:53.159 forecasts where small perturbations have outside effects, and that's the 0:20:53.200 --> 0:20:57.240 stock market. I'm gonna pull a line from Chaos the book. 0:20:57.720 --> 0:21:06.040 Markets exhibit unstable, a periodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamism 0:21:06.080 --> 0:21:10.760 sensitive to initial conditions. Now you were writing in general 0:21:10.920 --> 0:21:15.520 about theory of chaos, but that is very applicable to 0:21:15.880 --> 0:21:19.840 stock markets. That they're nonlinear, meaning a small change can 0:21:19.880 --> 0:21:24.399 have an outsize effect. That they're not they're a periodic 0:21:24.520 --> 0:21:27.440 in that there's sort of a cycle. You know, it's 0:21:27.480 --> 0:21:29.960 colder in the winter and warmer in the summer, but 0:21:30.119 --> 0:21:34.160 the day to day changes appear to be fairly random. 0:21:34.200 --> 0:21:38.040 There are all sorts of interesting parallels between chaos theory 0:21:38.080 --> 0:21:40.840 and the markets. Have you ever heard much back from 0:21:40.880 --> 0:21:45.240 people who work in finance or or work investing as 0:21:45.280 --> 0:21:48.760 to how chaos theory is applicable to investing. I have 0:21:48.920 --> 0:21:52.000 heard from people, and people have tried to explore it, 0:21:52.080 --> 0:21:55.199 and in fact, some of the chaos scientists who I 0:21:55.240 --> 0:21:59.160 wrote about in that book all those years ago, try 0:21:59.240 --> 0:22:02.400 to apply k Us theory to the markets, and I 0:22:02.440 --> 0:22:06.760 can't say whether they had any particular success. Personally, I'm 0:22:06.800 --> 0:22:10.120 a little bit skeptical. I think if anybody had had 0:22:10.160 --> 0:22:14.399 a magic trick for applying the science of chaos to 0:22:14.480 --> 0:22:17.159 making money in the market, well, I don't know if 0:22:17.200 --> 0:22:20.200 we'd know about it. Coming up, we continue our conversation 0:22:20.280 --> 0:22:24.680 with James Glick discussing information theory and human history. I'm 0:22:24.680 --> 0:22:27.879 Barry rid Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on 0:22:27.960 --> 0:22:32.080 Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is author James Glick, 0:22:32.240 --> 0:22:36.240 whose most recent book is called Time Travel History. He's 0:22:36.320 --> 0:22:42.359 previously written biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, as 0:22:42.440 --> 0:22:45.560 well as a couple of other books, Chaos, The Making 0:22:45.560 --> 0:22:48.600 of a New Science, and what I think is a 0:22:48.640 --> 0:22:53.120 tour to force book. The information a flood, a history, 0:22:53.520 --> 0:22:56.359 a theory. I got that backwards somewhat. Let's talk a 0:22:56.400 --> 0:22:59.360 little bit about this, because this is really a fascinating, 0:22:59.400 --> 0:23:06.719 fascinating book. Human beings are information seeking creatures? Discuss Well, 0:23:07.200 --> 0:23:11.000 it's like an essay question. Yes, first of all, that's 0:23:11.040 --> 0:23:14.600 obviously true, right, Information is is what we live on. Well, 0:23:14.920 --> 0:23:17.959 is it obviously true? Because when you were referring previously 0:23:18.119 --> 0:23:20.800 to the farmer who lived the same life as his 0:23:20.920 --> 0:23:24.520 grandparents and expected his children and grandchildren to live the 0:23:24.520 --> 0:23:27.840 same life, and there was no growth from learning and 0:23:27.880 --> 0:23:32.800 applying new information, maybe we haven't always been information seeking creatures. Well, exactly, 0:23:32.840 --> 0:23:35.760 you're making my point for me, Barry. We have always 0:23:35.800 --> 0:23:39.359 been information seeking creatures. We didn't always know it. We 0:23:39.359 --> 0:23:43.680 didn't we didn't use the word information. The word information 0:23:43.880 --> 0:23:47.679 now has a scientific meaning, and we're comfortable with that. 0:23:47.760 --> 0:23:50.600 Even if we aren't scientists. We know what the unit 0:23:50.640 --> 0:23:54.640 of measure of information is. It's the bit, right, That's 0:23:54.640 --> 0:23:58.720 a fundamental particle, on or off, yes or no. It's 0:23:58.760 --> 0:24:01.040 at the root of all of our computers and our 0:24:01.080 --> 0:24:05.640 communication devices. Information is being transmitted in bits, but that's 0:24:05.680 --> 0:24:09.520 the language of how it's communicated. It's it's on or off. 0:24:09.600 --> 0:24:13.480 And with that binary system you can create a universe 0:24:13.520 --> 0:24:17.320 of things. Is but is that really the bottom building 0:24:17.359 --> 0:24:22.080 block of of information there is? Because there's nothing smaller 0:24:22.760 --> 0:24:25.480 than yes or no, than yes or no. It's if 0:24:25.520 --> 0:24:27.399 you want to if you want to measure how much 0:24:27.480 --> 0:24:30.360 information there is in something, how much information is there 0:24:30.400 --> 0:24:33.440 in a book? How much information is there in three 0:24:33.480 --> 0:24:37.160 minutes of audio of a certain quality? How much information 0:24:37.240 --> 0:24:40.680 is there in a photograph or a video. We're fairly comfortable, 0:24:40.720 --> 0:24:45.920 I think, asking that question how much information? It implies 0:24:46.000 --> 0:24:48.399 that information is a thing you can measure, and if 0:24:48.440 --> 0:24:50.840 you're measuring it, there has to be a unit of measure, 0:24:50.880 --> 0:24:52.879 and there has to be well, there wouldn't have to 0:24:52.920 --> 0:24:56.280 be a smallest amount. You could imagine an infinitesimal amount 0:24:56.320 --> 0:24:59.399 of information, But in fact there is a smallest amount. 0:25:00.080 --> 0:25:02.880 It's one bit. There can't be any less than that. 0:25:03.080 --> 0:25:05.159 So let's talk a little bit about some of the 0:25:05.200 --> 0:25:08.640 concepts that come up in the book, starting with drums 0:25:08.840 --> 0:25:13.000 and going to alphabets. How does that then move on 0:25:13.080 --> 0:25:18.040 to computing and more complex technologies. Because we now have 0:25:18.240 --> 0:25:21.200 this expansive view of information as a kind of general 0:25:21.280 --> 0:25:24.479 category of things, we can think about all the different 0:25:24.480 --> 0:25:27.560 information technologies. Well, we know there are a lot of 0:25:27.560 --> 0:25:30.159