Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right | Lex Fridman Podcast #60
the following is a conversation with s James Gates Jr he's a theoretical physicist and professor Brown University working on supersymmetry super gravity a super string theory he served on former President Obama's Council of Advisors on science technology and he's now the co-author of a new book titled proving Einstein right about the scientists who set out to prove in Stein's theory of relativity you may have noticed that I've been speaking with not just computer scientists but philosophers mathematicians physicists economists and soon much more to me AI is much bigger than deep learning bigger than computing it is our civilizations journey into understanding the human mind and creating echoes in the machine that journey includes of course the world of theoretical physics and its practice of first principles mathematical thinking in exploring the fundamental nature of our reality this is the artificial intelligence podcast he enjoyed subscribe I need to give it five stars an Apple 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engineering a better world and now here's my conversation with s James Gates Jr you tell a story when you were 8 he had a profound realization at the stars in the sky are actually places that we could travel to one day do you think human beings will ever venture outside our solar system Wow the question of whether humanity gets outside of the solar system it's going to be a challenge and as long as the laws of physics that we have today are accurate and valid it's gonna be extraordinarily difficult I'm a science-fiction fan as you probably know so I love to dream of starships and traveling to other solar systems but the barriers are just formidable if we just kind of venture a little bit into science fiction do you think the spaceships if we are successful that take us outside the solar system we'll look like the ones we have today or do fundamental breakthrough our fundamental breakthroughs necessary in order to have genuine starships probably some really radical views about the way the universe works is our going to have to take place in our science we could with our current technology think about constructing multi-generational starships where the people who get on them are not that people who get off at the other end but even if we do that there for mental problems actually our bodies which doesn't seem to be conscious for a lot of people even getting to Mars is going to present this challenge because we live in this a wonderful home has a protective magnetic magnetosphere around it and so we're shielded from cosmic radiation once you leave this shield there are some estimates that for example if you send someone to Mars with that technology probably about two years out there without the seal they're gonna be mom bartered that means radiation that probably means cancer so that's one of the most formal challenge even if we could get over the technology if you think so Mars is a harsh place you have musk SpaceX and other folks NASA are really pushing to put a human being on Mars do you think again let's forgive me for lingering in science fiction land for a little bit do you think one day we may be able to colonize Mars first do you think we'll put a human on Mars and then do you think we'll put many humans on Mars so first of all we're not I am extraordinarily convinced we will not put a human on Mars by 2030 which is a date that you often hear in the public debate what's the challenge there well you think so there are a couple of ways that I could slice this but the one that I think is simplest for people and understand involves money so you look at how we got to the moon in the 1960s it was about 10-year duration between the challenge that President Kennedy laid out and our successfully landing a moon I was actually here at MIT when that first moon landing occurred so I remember watching it on TV but how do we get there well we had this extraordinary technical agency of the United States government NASA it consumed about 5% of the countries economic output and so you say 5% of the economic output over about a 10-year period gets us 250,000 miles in space Mars is about a hundred times farther so you have at least a hundred times a challenge and we're spending about one tenth of the funds that we spent then as a government so my claim is is that it's at least a thousand times harder for me to imagine us getting to Mars by 2030 and yet that part that you mentioned in the speech that I just have to throw in there of JFK of we do these things not because they're easy but because they're hard it's such a beautiful line that I would love to hear a modern president say about a scientific endeavor well one day we live in hope that such a precedent will arise for our nation but even if like I said even if you you fix the profit technical problems the biological engineering that I worry most about however I'm gonna go out on a limb here I think that by two thousand ninety or so or two thousand one hundred and so let's say 120 I suspect we're gonna have a human on Mars Wow so you think that many years out first a few tangents he said bioengineering as a as a challenge of what's what's the challenge there so as I said the the real problem with interstellar travel aside from the technology challenges the real problem is radiation and how do you engineer either an environment or a body because we see rapid advances going on in bioengineering how do you engineer either a ship or body so that something is some person that's recognizably Union human will survive the rigors of interplanetary space travel it's much more difficult than most people seem to take into account so if we could linger on the 2092 2121 20 sort of thinking of that kind of you know and we let's linger on money okay so Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are pushing the cost trying to quit push the cost down I mean this is so do you have hope is this actually a sort of a brilliant big-picture scientist do you think a business entrepreneur can take science and make it cheaper and get it out there faster so bending the cost curve is you'll notice that has been an anchor there's the simplest way for me to discuss this with people about what the challenge is so yes bending the cost curve is certainly critical if we're going to be successful now you asked about the endeavors that are out there now sponsored by two very prominent American citizens Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk I'm disappointed actually in what I see in terms of the routes that are being pursued so let me give you one example there and this one is going to be a little bit more technical so if you look at the kinds of rockets that both these organizations are creating yes it's wonderful reusable technology to see a rocket go up and land on its fins just like it did in science fiction movies when I was a kid that's astounding but the real problem is those Rockets the technology that we're doing now is not really that different than what was used to go to the moon and there are alternatives it turns out there's an engine called a flare engine which so a traditional rocket if you look at the engine looks like a bell right and then the flame comes out the bottom but there is a kind of engine called a flare engine which is essentially when you look at it it looks like an exhaust pipe on like a fancy car that's you know long and elongate it and it's a type of rocket engine that we know we know it's there been preliminary testing we know it works and it also is actually much more economical because what it does is allow you to vary the amount of thrust as you go up in a way that you cannot do with one of the bell shaped engines so you would think that an entrepreneur might try to have the breakthrough to use flared nozzles as they're called as a way to bend the cost curve because we keep coming back that's going to be a big factor but that's not happening in fact what we see is what I think of as incremental change in terms of our technology so I'm not really very encouraged by what I personally see so incremental change won't bend the cost curve and I don't see it just linger on the sci-fi for one more question sure do you think we're alone in the universe are we the only intelligent form of life so there is a quote by Carl Sagan which I really love when I hear this question and I'm I recall the quote and it goes something like if we're the only conscious life in the universe it's a terrible waste of space because the universe is an incredibly big place and when Carl made that statement we didn't know about the profusion of planets that are out there in the last decade we've discovered over a thousand planets and a substantial number of those planets are earth-like in terms of being in the Goldilocks zone as it's called so it's on in my mind is practically inconceivable that were the only conscious form of life in the universe but that doesn't mean they've come to visit us do you think they would look do you think will recognize alien life if we saw it do you think you'd look anything like the carbon-based the biological system we have on earth today it would depend on that life's native environment in which it arose if that environment was sufficiently like our environment there's a principle in biology and nature called convergence which is that even if you have two biological systems that are totally separated from each other if they face similar conditions they tend to kin nature tends to converge on solutions and so there might be similarities if this alien life-form almost born in a place that's kind of like this place physics appears to be quite similar the laws of physics across the entirety of the universe do you think weirder things than we see on earth can spring up out of the same kinds of laws of physics from the laws of physics I would say yes first of all if you look at carbon-based life why we carbon base well it turns out it's because of the way that carbon interacts with elements which in fact is also a reflection on the electronic Select structure of the carbon nucleus so you can look down the table developments and say but gee do we see similar elements the answer is yes and one that when it often hears about in science fiction is silicon so maybe there's a silicon-based life-form out there if the conditions are right but I think it's presumptuous of us to think that we are the template by which all life has to appear before we dive into beautiful details let me ask a big question what to you is the most beautiful idea maybe the most surprising and mysterious idea in physics the most surprising idea to me is that we can actually do physics the universe did not have to be constructed in such a way that our with our limited intellectual capacity that is actually put together in such a way and that we are put together in such a way that we can with our minds I delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe that to me is pretty close to a miracle so they're simple equations relatively simple that can describe things you know the fundamental functions then describe everything about our reality that's not can you imagine universes where everything is a lot more complicated do you think there's something inherent about universes that well simple laws well first of all let me this is a question that I encounter in a number of guys is a lot of people will raise the question about whether mathematics is the language of the universe and my response is mathematics is the language that we humans are capable of using in describing the universe it may have little to do with the universe but in terms of our capacity it's the microscope it's the telescope through which we it's the lens through which we are able to view the universe with the precision that no other human language allows so could there be other universes well I don't even know if this one looks like I think it does but the beautiful surprising thing is that physics there are laws of physics very few laws of physics they can effectively compress down the functioning of the universe yes that's extraordinarily surprising you know I like to use the analogy with computers and information technology if you worry about transmitting large bundles of data one of the things that computer scientists do for us is they allow for processes that are called compression where you take big packets of data and you press them down into much smaller packets and then you transmit those and then unpack them at the other end and so it looks a little bit to me like the universe is kind of done us a favor it's constructed our minds in such a way that we have this thing called mathematics which then as we look at the universe teaches us how to carry out the compression process a quick question about compression do you think the human mind can be compressed the the biology could be compressed we talked about space travel to be able to compress the information that captures some large percent of what it means to be me or you and then be able to send that at the speed of light wow that's a big question and let me try to take it apart unpack it into several pieces I don't believe that wetware biology such as we are has an exclusive patent on in own intellectual consciousness I suspect that other structures in the universe are perfectly capable of producing the data streams that we use the process first of all our observations of the universe and and an awareness of ourselves I can imagine structures can do that also so that's part of what you were talking about which I would have some disagreement with consciousness yes what's the most interesting part of consciousness of us humans is consciousness is the thing I think that's the most interesting thing about you and then you're saying that there's other entities throughout the universe I could imagine I can well imagine that the architecture that supports our consciousness again has no patent on consciousness it's the in case you have an interesting thought here there's folks perhaps in philosophy called Pan cyclists that believe consciousness underlies everything it is one of the fundamental laws of the universe do you have a sense that that could possibly fit into I don't know the answer that question one part of that belief system is Ghia which is that there's a kind of conscious life force about our planet and you know I encountered these things before I don't quite know what to make of them I my own experience and I'm I'll be 69 in about two months and I have spent all my adulthood thinking about the way that mathematics interacts with nature and with us to try to understand nature and all I can tell you from all of my integrated experience is that there is something extraordinarily mysterious to me about our universe this is something an Einstein said of from his life experience as a scientist and this mysteriousness almost feels like the universe is our parent it's a very strange thing perhaps to hear science say it scientists say but there are just so many strange coincidences that you just get a sense that something is going on while I interrupted you in terms of compressing what we're down to we consented at the speed of light yes so so the first thing is I would argue that it's probably very likely that artificial intelligence ultimately will develop something like consciousness something that for us will probably be indistinguishable from consciousness so that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment that we carry up here probably had does not hold a patent on consciousness because it's really about the data streams I mean that's as far as I can tell that's what we are we are self actuating self learning data streams that to me Lee is most accurate way I can tell you what I have seen in my lifetime about what humans are at the level of consciousness so if that's the case then you just need to have an architecture that supports that information processing so let's assume that that's true that that in fact what we call consciousness is really about a very peculiar kind of data stream if that's the case then if you can export that to a piece of hardware something metal electronic what-have-you then you certainly will ultimately that kind of consciousness could get to Mars very quickly it doesn't have our problems you can engineer the body as I say there's a ship or a body you engineer one or both send it to the speed of light well that one is a more difficult one because that now goes beyond just a matter of having a data stream and so now the preservation of the information in the data stream and so unless you can build something that's like a super super super version of the way the internet works because most people aren't aware that the Internet itself is actually a miracle it's based on a technology called message packaging so if you could expand nc8 message packaging in some way to preserve the information that's in the data stream then maybe your dream becomes true can we you mentioned with artificial intelligence sort of us human beings not having a monopoly on consciousness does the idea of artificial and systems computational systems being able to basically replacing us humans scare you excite you what do you think about so I'm gonna tell you about a conversation I once had with Eric Schmidt I was sitting at a meeting with him and he was a few feet away and he turned to me and he said something like you know Jim and maybe a decade or so we're gonna have computers that do what you do and my response was not unless they can dream because there's something about the human the way that we humans actually generate creativity it's somehow I get this sense of my lived experience and watching creative people that somehow connected to the irrational parts of what goes on in our head yes and dreaming is part of that irrationally so unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence that dreams I have a strong suspicion that you will not get something that it will fully be conscious by a definition that I would accept for example imagine dreaming you've played around with some out-there fascinating ideas how do you think when and we'll start diving into the world of the very small ideas of supersymmetry and all that in terms of visualization in terms of how do you think about it how do you dream of it how do you come up with ideas in that fascinating mysterious space so in my workspace which is basically where I am charged with coming upon on coming up on a mathematical palette with new ideas that will help me understand the structure of nature and hopefully help all of us understand structure of nature I've observed several different ways in which my creativity expresses itself there's one mode which looks pretty normal which I sort of think of as the Chinese water torture mythos drop drop drop you get more and more information and suddenly it all congeals and you get a clearer picture and so that's the kind of a standard way of working and I think that's how most people think about the way technical people solve problems that it's kind of you accumulate this body of information at a certain point you synthesize it and then boom there's something new but I've also observed in my self and other scientists that there are other ways that we are creative creative and these other ways to me are actually far more powerful I first personally experienced this when I was a freshman at MIT live over in Baker house right across the campus and I was in a calculus course 1801 is called at MIT and calculus comes in two different flavors one of them is called differential calculus the other is called integral calculus differential calculus is the calculus that Newton invented to describe motion since our integral calculus was probably invented about seventeen hundred years earlier by Archimedes but we didn't know that when I was a freshman but so that's what you study as a student and the differential calculus part of the course was to me I wouldn't how do I say this it was something that that by the driptip method you could sort of figure it out now the integral part of calculus I could memorize the formula that was not the formula that was not the problem the problem was why in my own mind why do these formulae work and because of that when I was in the part of the calculus course where we had to do multiple substitutions to solve integrals I had a lot of difficulty I was emotionally involved in my education because this is where I think the passion emotion comes to and it caused an emotional crisis that I was having these difficulties understanding the integral part of calculus so why other why that's right the why of it not the remember rote memorization of fact but the why of it why does this work and so one night I was over in my dormitory room in Baker house I was trying to do a calculus problem set I was getting nowhere I got a terrific headache I went to sleep and had this very strange dream and when I woke walk awakened I could do 3 & 4 substitutions and integrals with relative ease now this to me wasn't an astounding experience because I had never before my life understood that one subconscious is actually capable of being harnessed to do mathematics I experienced it this and I've experienced this more than once so this was just the first time why I remember it so so that's why when it comes to like really wickedly tough problems I think that the kind of creativity that you need to solve them is probably this second variety which comes somehow from dreaming if you think again I told you I'm Russian so we romanticize suffering but do you think part of that equation is the suffering leading up to that dreaming so the suffering is I am convinced that this kind of creative sick the second mode of creativity as I like to call it I'm convinced that this second mode of creativity is in fact that suffering is a kind of crucible that triggers it because the mine I think is struggling to get out of this and the only the only way the heaters actually solved the problem and even though you're not consciously solving problems something is going on and I've talked about to a few other people in there are there similar stories and so I the way I guess so I think about it is it's a little bit by like the way that thermonuclear weapons work and if you know how they work but a thermonuclear weapon is actually two bombs there's an atomic bomb which sort of Delta compression and then you have a fusion bomb that goes off and somehow that emotional pressure I think acts like the first stage of a thermonuclear weapon that's when we get really big thoughts the analogy between thermonuclear weapons and the subconscious the the connection there is uh at least visually that's kind of interesting well I there may be fried it would have a few things to say well part of it is probably based on my own trajectory through life my father was in the Army for us for the US Army for 27 years and so I started my life out on military bases and so a lot of probably the things that wander around in my subconscious are connected to the experience I apologize for all the tangents but while you're doing it but you're encouraging by me answering the stupid questions no they're not stupid you know your father was in the army what do you think about any other grass Tyson recently wrote a book on interlinking the the progress of science to sort of the aspirations of our military endeavors and DARPA funding and so on what do you think about war in general do you think we'll always have war do you think we'll always I am conflict in the world I'm not sure that we're going to be able to afford to have war always because if strictly financially speaking no not in terms of Finance but in terms of consequences so if you look at technology today you can have non state actors acquired technology for example bioterrorism which whose impact is roughly speaking equivalent to what it used to take nations to an impart on a population I think the cost of war is ultimately it's gonna be a little I think it's gonna work a little bit like the Cold War you know we survived 50 60 years as a species with these weapons that are so terrible that they could have actually ended our form of life on this planet but it didn't why didn't it well it's a very bizarre and interesting thing but it was called mutually assured destruction and so the cost was so great that people eventually figured out that you can't really use these things which is kind of interesting because if you read the history about the development of nuclear weapons businesses actually realized this pretty quickly I think it was maybe Schrodinger who said that these things are not really weapons their political and implements and not weapons because the cost is so high and if you take that example and spread it out to the kind of technological development we're seeing now outside of nuclear physics but I picked the example of biology I could well imagine that there would be material science sorts of equivalents that across a broad front of Technology you take that experience from nuclear weapons and the picture that I see is that it would be so there would be possible to develop technologies that are so terrible that you couldn't use them because the costs are too high and that might cure us and many people have argued that actually it prevented nuclear weapons have prevented more military conflict then it certainly froze the conflict domain it's an interesting that nowadays it was with the removal of the threat of mutually assured destruction that other forces took over in our geopolitics do you have worries that of existential threats of nuclear weapons or other technologies like artificial intelligence do you think we humans will tend to figure out how to not blow ourselves up I don't know quite frankly this is something I thought about and I'm not I mean so I'm a spectator in the sense that as a scientist I collect and collate data so I've been doing that all my life and looking at my species and it's not clear to me that we are going to avoid I could a catastrophic self-induced ending are you optimistic as a not as a scientist but as a I well I would say I would say I wouldn't bet against us beautifully put let's dive into the the world are very small if we could first heard it what are the basic particles either experimentally observed or hypothesized by physicists so as we physicists look at the universe you can first of all there are two big buckets of particles that is the smallest objects that we are able to currently mathematically conceive and then experimentally verify that these ideas have an accent of accuracies them so one of those buckets we call matter these are things like electrons things that are like quarks which are particles that exist inside of protons and there's a whole family of these things there are in fact 18 corks and apparently six electron like objects that we call leptons so that's one bucket the other bucket that we see both in our mathematics as well as in our experiment to equipment are what our set of particles that you can call force carriers the most familiar force carrier is the photon the particle of light that allows you to see me in fact it's the same object that carries electric repulsion between like charges from science fiction we have the object called the graviton which is talked about a lot in science fiction and Star Trek but the graviton is also a mathematical object that we physicists have known about essentially since Einstein wrote his theory of general relativity there are four forces in nature the fundamental forces there is the gravitational force its carrier is the graviton there are three other forces in nature the electromagnetic force the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force and each one of these forces has at one or more carriers the photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force the strong nuclear force actually has eight carriers they're called gluons and then the weak nuclear force has three carriers they're called the W plus W minus and Z bosons so those are the things that both in mathematics and in experiments the most by the way the most precise experiments were a ever as a species able to conduct is about measuring the accuracy of these ideas and we know that at least to one part in a billion these ideas are right so first of all you've made it sound both elegant and simple but is it crazy to you that there is force carriers like is that supposed to be a trivial idea to think about if we think about photons gluons that there's four fundamental forces of physics and then those forces are expressed there's carriers of those forces like is that a kind of trivial thing it's not a trivial thing at all in fact it was a puzzle for Sir Isaac Newton because he's the first person to give us basically physics before Isaac Newton physics didn't exist what did exist was called Nath philosophy so discussions about using the methods of classical philosophy to the understand nature natural philosophy so the Greeks we call them scientists but they were natural philosophers physics doesn't get born until Newton writes the Principia one of the things that puzzled him was how gravity works because if you read very carefully what he writes he basically says and I'm paraphrasing badly but he basically says that someone who thinks deeply about this subject would find it inconceivable that what an object in one place place our location can magically reach out and affect another object with nothing intervening and so it puzzled him there's a puzzle you what doesn't in a distance I mean not as it would it would it would accept that I am a physicist and we have long ago resolved this issue and the resolution came about through a second great physicist most people heard of a Newton most people have heard of Einstein but between the two of them there was another extraordinarily great physicist a man named James Clark Maxwell and Maxwell between these two other giants taught us about electric and magnetic forces and it's from his equations that one can figure out that there's a carrier called the photon so this was resolved for physicists around 1860 or so so what are bosons and fermions and hey John's elementary and composites sure so earlier I said you've UNK it's you have got two buckets if you want to try to build a universe you have to start off without things on these two buckets so you got to have things that's the matter and then you have to either have other objects that act on them to cause those things to cohere to fixed finite patterns because you need those fixed finite patterns as building blocks so that's the way our universe looks to people like me now the building blocks do different things so let's go back to these two buckets again let me start with a bucket containing the particle of light let me imagine I'm in a dusty room with two flashlights and I have one flashlight which I direct directly in front of me and then I have you stand over to say my left and then we both take our flashlights and turn them on make sure the beams go right through each other and the beams do just that they go right through each other they don't bounce off of each other the reason the room has to be dusty is because we want to see the light because I'll let the rule dust wasn't there we wouldn't actually see the light until it got to the other wall right so you see the beam because it's dust in the air but the do things actually pass right through each other they literally pass right through they don't affect each other at all when acts like that one's not there things there are the particle flight is the simplest example that shows that behavior that's a boson now let's imagine that I have to wear in the same dusty room and this time you have a bucket of balls and I have a bucket of balls and we try to throw them so that they pass so that we get something like a beam throwing them fast right if they collide they don't just pass through each other they bounce off of each other now that's mostly because they have electric charge an electric charge is like charges repel but mathematically I know how to turn off the electric charge if you do that you'll finally still repel and it's because they are these things we call fermions so this is how you distinguish the things that are in the two buckets they are either bosons or fermions which of them and maybe you can mention the most popular of the boson the most recently discovered she's it's like yeah it's like when I was in high school and there was a really popular major rift her name is her name is the Higgs particle these days can you describe which which which of the bosons and fermions have been discovered hypothesized which have been experimentally value she was still out there right so the two buckets that I've actually described to you have all been first hypothesized and then verified by observation with the Higgs boson being the most recent one of these things we haven't actually verified the graviton interestingly enough we mathematically we have an expectation that gravitas like this but we've not performed an experiment to show that this is an accurate idea that nature uses so something has to be a carrier for the force of gravity exactly because maybe something way more mysterious than we so when you say is that would it be like the other particles force carriers in some ways yes but in other ways no it turned out that the graviton is also if you look at I in Stein's theory he taught us about this thing he calls space-time which is you know if you try to imagine it you can sort of think of it as kind of a rubber surface that's one popular depiction of space-time it's not an accurate depiction because the only accuracy is actually in the calculus that he uses but that's close enough so if you have a sheet of rubber you can wave it you can actually form a wave on it space-time is enough like that so that when space-time oscillates you create these waves these ways carry energy we expect them to carry energy in quanta that's what a graviton is it's a wave in space-time and so the fact that we have seen the waves with LIGO over the course of the last three years and we've recently use gravitational wave Observatory to watch colliding black holes and neutron stars and all sorts of really cool stuff out there so we know the waves exist but in order to know that graviton exists you have to prove that these waves carry energy in energy packets and that's what we don't have the technology to do yet and uh perhaps briefly jumping to a philosophical question does it make sense to you that gravity is so much weaker than the other forces no it's now you see now you've touched on a very deep mystery about physics there are a lot of such questions of physics about why things are as they are and as someone who believes that there are some things that certainly are coincidences like you could ask the same question about well why are the planets at the orbits that they are around the Sun the answer turns out there is no good reason it's just an accident so there are things in nature that have that character and perhaps the strength of the weak of the various forces it's like that well the other thing we don't know that that's the case and there may be some deep reasons about why the forces are ordered as they are where the weakest forces gravity the next week is forces the weak interaction the weak nuclear force then there's electromagnetism this we don't really have a good understanding of why this is the ordering of the forces some of the fascinating work you've done is in the space of supersymmetry symmetry in general can you describe first of all what is supersymmetry ah yes so you remove the two buckets I told you about perhaps earlier I said there are two buckets in our universe so now I want you to think about drawing a a pie that has four quadrants so I want you to cut the piece of pie in fourths so one quadrant I'm going to put all the buckets that we talked about like that are like the electronic quarks in a different quadrant I am going to put all the force carriers the other two quadrants are empty now if you I showed you a picture of that you'd see a circle there would be a bunch of stuff in one upper quadrant and stuff in others and then I would ask you a question does that look symmetrical to you no no and that's exactly right because we humans actually have a very deeply programmed sense of symmetry it's something that is part of that mystery of the universe so how would you make it symmetrical one way you could is by saying those two empty quadrants had things in them not so and if you do that that's supersymmetry so that's what I understood when I was a graduate student here in at MIT in 1975 weeding the idea when the mathematics of this was first being born supersymmetry was actually born in the Ukraine in the late 60s but we have this thing called the iron curtain so we Westerners didn't know about it but by the early 70s independently there were scientists in the West who had rediscovered supersymmetry symmetry bruno Cimino and julius vests were their names so this was around 71 or 72 when this happened I started graduate school in 73 so around 74 75 I was trying to figure out how to write a thesis so that I could have become a physicist the rest of my life I did a lot of great advisor professor James Young who had taught me a number of things about electrons and weak forces and those sorts of things but I decided that if I was going to have a really opportunity to maximize my chances of being successful I should strike it out in a direction that other people were not studying and so as a consequence I surveyed ideas that were going that were being developed and I came across the idea of supersymmetry and it was so the mathematics was so remarkable that I just it bowled me over I actually have two undergraduate degrees my first undergraduate degree is actually mathematics and my second is physics even though I always wanted to be a physicist plan a which involved getting good grades was mathematics I was a mathematics major thinking about graduate school but my heart was in physics if we could take a small digression what's to you the most beautiful idea in mathematics that you've encountered in this interplay between math and physics it's the idea of symmetry the fact that our innate sense of symmetry want wines of aligning with just incredible mathematics to me is the most beautiful thing it's very strange but true that if symmetries were perfect we would not exist and so even though we have these very powerful ideas about balance in the universe in some sense it's only when you break those balances that you get creatures like humans and objects like planets and stars so although they are a scaffold for reality they cannot be the entirety of reality so I I'm kind of naturally attracted to parts of Science and Technology where symmetry plays note a dominant role and not just I guess symmetry as you said but the the magic happens when you break the symmetry the magic happens when you break the symmetry okay so diving right back in you mentioned four quadrants yes - - or filled with stuff what can we do buckets yeah and then there's crazy mathematical thing ideas for filling the other two what are those things so earlier the way I described these two buckets as I gave you a story that started out by putting us in a dusty room with two flashlights and I said turn on your flashlight I'll turn on mine the beans will go through each other and the beams are composed of force carriers called photons they carry the electromagnetic force and they pass right through each other so imagine looking at the mathematics of such an object which you don't imagine people like me do that so you take that mathematics and then you ask yourself a question you see mathematics is a palette it's just like a a musical composer is able to construct to construct variations on a theme well a piece of mathematics in the hand of a physicist something that we can construct variations on so even though the mathematics that Maxwell gave us about light we know how to construct very issues on that and one of the very issues you can construct is to say suppose you have a force carrier for electromagnetism that behaves like an electron that in that it would bounce off of another one it's so that's changing a mathematical term in an equation so if you did that you would have a force carrier so you would say first it belongs in this force carrying bucket but it's got this property of bouncing off like electrons and so you say well gee wait no that's not the right bucket so you're forced to actually put it in one of these empty quadrants so those sorts of things we basically we give them so the photon mathematically can be accompanied by a photino it's the thing that carries a force but has the rule of bouncing off in a similar manner you could start with an electron and you say okay so write down the mathematical is electron I know I want to do that physicists name Dirac first told us how to do that back in the nineteen late 20s early 30s so take that mathematics and then you say let's let me look at that mathematics and find out what in the mathematics caused us two electrons to bounce off of each other even if I turn off the electrical charge so I could do that and now let me change that mathematical term so now I have something that carries electrical charge but if you take two of them I'm sorry if you turn their charges off they'll pass through each other so that puts things in the other quadrant and those things we till we tend to call we put the Essen in front of their name so in the lower quadrant here we have electrons and this now newly filled quadrant we have select rods and the quadrant over here we had corks over here we have squirts so now we've got this balance pie and that's basically what I understood as a graduate student in 1975 about this idea of supersymmetry that it was going to fill up these two quadrants of the pie in a way that no one had ever thought about before so I was amazed that no one else at MIT found this an interesting idea so that's it led to my becoming the first person in MIT to really study supersymmetry this is 1975 76 77 and in 77 I wrote the first PhD thesis in the physics department on this idea because I just I must draw to the balance drawn to the symmetry so what boundary what does that first of all is this fundamentally a mathematical idea so how much experimental and we'll have this theme it's an really interesting one when you explore the worlds of the small and in your new book talking about approving is that right right that will also talk about there's this theme of kind of starting and exploring crazy ideas first in the mathematics and then seeking for ways to experiment to validate them where do you put some supersymmetry and that's it's closer than string theory it is not yet been validated in some sense you mentioned Einstein so let's go there for a moment in our book proofing Einstein right we actually do talk about the fact that Albert Einstein in 1915 wrote a set of equations which were very different from Newton's equations and describing gravity these equations made some predictions that were different from Newton's predictions and it actually made three different predictions one of them was not actually a prediction but a post diction because it was known that mercury was not orbiting the Sun in the way that Newton would have told you and so I science Theory actually makes describes mercury orbiting in the way that it was observed as opposed to what Newton would have told you that was one prediction the second prediction that came out of the theory of general relativity which Einstein wrote in 1915 was that if you if so let me describe an experiment and come back to it suppose like a glass of water and I filled it up fill the glass up and then I moved the glass slowly back and forth between our two faces it would appear to me like your face was moving even though you weren't moving I mean it's actually and what's causing it is because the light gets bent through the glass has it passes from your face to my eye so Einstein in his 1915 theory of general relativity found out that gravity has the same effect on light as that glass of water it would cause beams of light tube in now Newton also knew this but Einstein's prediction was that light would Bend twice as much and so here's a mathematical idea now how do you actually prove it well you've got to watch yes just a quick pause on that just the language you're using he found out I can say he did a calculation it's a really interesting notion that the one of the most and one of the beautiful things about this universe is you can do a calculation and and combined with some of that magical intuition that physicists have actually predict what would be was possible to experiment to validate that's correct so he found out in the sense that there seems to be something here and mathematically should bend gravity should bend like this amount and so therefore that's something that could be potentially and then come up with an experiment that can be validated right and that's the way that actually modern physics deeply fundamental modern physics is how it works you earlier we spoke about the Higgs boson so why did we go looking for the answer is they had back in the late 60s and early 70s some people wrote some equations and the equations predicted this so then we went looking for it so uh none supersymmetry for a second there's these things called Adinkra symbols strange little grass yes you referred to them as revealing something like binary code yes underlying reality yes or so can you describe these grout what are they what what what are these beautiful little strange graphs well first of all the Dinkas are an invention of mine and together with a colleague named Michael Fox in 2005 we were looking at equations well so the story's a little bit more complicated and it'll take too long it's explained all the details but the Reader's Digest version is that we were looking at these equations and we figured out that all the data in a certain class of equations could be put in pictures and the pictures what do they look like whether just they're just little balls you have black balls and white balls those stands for those two buckets by the way that we talked about in reality the white balls or things that are like particles of light the black balls are like electrons and then they you can draw lines connecting these balls and these lines are deeply mathematical objects and there's no way for me to I have no physical model for telling you what the lines are but as a math if you were a mathematician and with your technical phrase saying this is the orbit of the representation and the action of the symmetry generators mathematicians would understand that nobody in there else in their right mind was so let's not go there so we but we figured out that the data that was in the equation suddenly it was in these funny pictures that we could draw and so that was stunning but it also was encouraging because there aren't problems with the equations which I had first learned about in 1979 when I was down at Harvard and I went out to Caltech for the first time and working with a great scientist by the name of John Schwarz there are problems in the equations we don't notice all and so one of the things about solving problems that you don't know how to solve is that beating your head against the brick wall is probably not a good philosophy about how to solve it so what do you need to do you need to change your sense of of reference your frame of reference your perspective so when I saw these funny pictures I thought gee that might be a way to solve these problems with equations that we don't know how to do so that was for me when the first attractions is that I now had an alternative language to try to attack a set of mathematical problems but I quickly realized that a this mathematical language was not known by mathematicians which makes it pretty interesting because now you have to actually teach mathematicians about a piece of mathematics because that's how they make their living and the great thing about working mathematicians of course is the rigor with which they examine ideas so they make your ideas better then they start out so I start working with a group of mathematicians and there's in that collaboration that we figured out that these funny pictures had error correcting codes buried in them so can you can talk about what our error correcting codes are sure so the simplest way to talk about error correcting codes is first of all to talk about digital information digital information is basically strings of ones and zeros they're called bits so now let's imagine that I want to send you some bits well maybe I can show you pictures but maybe it's a rainy day or maybe the windows in your house are foggy so sometimes when I show you a zero you might interpret it as a one or other times when I show you one you might interpret it as a zero so if that's the case that means when I try to send you this data it comes to you in corrupted form and so the challenge is how do you get it to be uncorrupted in the 1940s a computer scientist named hemming address the problem how do you reliably transmit digital information and what he came up with with was a brilliant idea the way to solve it is that you take the data that you want to send and then once in your strings of 1 0 is your favorite string and then you've dumped more ones and zeros then but you dump them in in a particular pattern and this particular pattern is what a Hamming code is all about so it's an error correcting code because if you the person at the other end knows what the pattern is supposed to be they can figure out when once got changed the zeros so it turned out that our strange little objects that came from looking at the equations that we couldn't solve it turns out that when you look at them deeply enough you find out they're strictly that they have ones and zeros back buried in them but even more astoundingly that ones and zeroes are not there randomly they are in the pattern of error correcting codes so this was an astounding thing that when we first got this result and tried to publish it it took us three years to convince other physicists that we weren't crazy mm-hmm eventually we were able to publish it I in this collaboration of mathematicians and other physicists and so every since then I have actually been looking at the mathematics of these objects trying to still understand properties of the equations and I want to understand the properties equations because I want to be able to try things like electrons so it's just like a two step remove process of trying to get back to reality so what would you say is the most beautiful property of these dinkar graphs objects what do you think what by the way the word symbols what do you think of them these simple graphs are they objects or their haha work with mathematics like me our mathematical concepts are we often refer to them as objects because they feel like real things even though you can't see them or touch them there's so much part of your interior life that it is as if you could so we often refer to these things as objects even though there's nothing objective about them and what is this a single graph represent and so ok so the simplest of these graphs has to have one white ball in one black ball that's that balance that we talked about earlier we want to balance out the quadrants well you can't do this you have a black ball and white ball so the simplest of these objects looks like two little balls one black one white connected by a single line and whether it's talking about is as I said a deep mathematical property related to symmetry you've mentioned the air correcting codes but is there a particular beautiful property that stands out to you about these objects they just find yeah they're very yes very early on in the development yes there is the craziest thing about these to me is that when you look at physics and try to write equations where information gets transmitted reliably if you're in one of these super symmetrical systems with this extra symmetry that doesn't happen unless there's an error correcting code present so as as if the universe says you don't really transmit information unless there's something about an error correcting code this to me is the craziest thing that I've ever personally encountered in my research and it actually got me to wondering how this could come about because the only place in nature that we know about error correcting codes is genetics and in genetics we think it was evolution that causes air correcting codes to be in genomes and so does that mean that there was some kind of form of evolution acting on the mathematical laws of the physics of our universe this is a very bizarre and strange idea and something I've wondered about from time to time since making these discoveries do you think such an idea could be fundamental or is it emergent throughout all the different kinds of systems I don't know whether it's fundamental and I probably will not live to find out this is gonna be the work of probably some future either mathematicians physicists to figure out what these things actually mean we have to talk a bit about the magical the mysterious string theory the purse string theory sure there's still maybe this aspect of it which is there still for me from an outsider's perspective of this fascinating heated debate on the status of string theory can you clarify this debate perhaps articulating the various views and say where you land on it so first of all I mean I doubt that I will be able to say anything to clarify clarify the debate around string theory for for general audience part of the reason is because string theory is a has been something I've never seen the erecto physics do it is broken out into consciousness of the general public before we're finished you see string theory doesn't actually exist because when we use the word theory we mean a their set of attributes in particular it means that you have an overarching paradigm that explains what it is that you're doing no such overarching paradigm exists or string theory what string theory is currently is an enormous lean large mutually reinforcing collection of mathematical facts in which we can find no contradictions we don't know why it's there but we can certainly say that without challenge now just because you find a piece of mathematics doesn't mean that it's applies to nature and in fact there has been a very heated debate about whether string theory is some sort of hysteria among the community of theoretical physicists or whether it has something fundamental to say about our universe we don't yet know the answer to that question but those of us who study string theory will tell you are things like string theory has been extraordinarily productive in getting us to think more deeply even about mathematics that's not string theory but the kind of mathematics that we've used to describe elementary particles they have been spin-offs from string theory and this has been going on now for two decades almost that I have allowed us for example to more accurately calculate the force between electrons with the presence of quantum mechanics this is not something you hear about in the public there are other similar things the kind of that kind of property I just told you about is what to call weak strong duality and it comes directly from string theory there are other things such as a property called holography which allows one to to take equations and look at them on the boundary of a space and then to know information about inside space without actually doing calculations there this has come directly from string theory so there are there are a number of direct mathematical effects that we learn this string theory but we take these ideas and look at math that we already know and we find sudden we're more powerful this is pretty good indication there's something interesting going on with string theory itself so it's the early days of a powerful mathematical framework that's what we have right now what are the big first of all those most people will probably that which as you said most general public would know actually what string theory is which is a at the highest level which is a fascinating fact well string theory is what they do on the Big Bang Theory right one can you maybe describe what is string theory and two what are the open challenges so what is string theory well let the simplest explanation I can provide is to go back and ask water particles which is the question you first ask me what's the smallest thing yeah what's the smallest thing so particles one way I try to describe particles to people a star I want you to imagine a little ball and I want you to let this size of that ball shrink into it has no extent whatsoever but it still has the mass of the ball that's actually what Newton was working with when he first invented physics he's the real inventor of the massive particle which is this idea that underlies all of physics so that's where we start it's a mathematical construct that you get by taking a limit of things that you know so what's a string well in the same analogy I would say now I want you to start with a piece of spaghetti so we all know what that looks like and now I want you to let the thickness of the spaghetti shrink until it has no thickness mathematically I mean words this makes no sense mathematically this actually works and you get this mathematical object out it has properties that are like spaghetti it can wiggle and jiggle but it can also move collectively like a piece of spaghetti then it's the mathematics of those sorts of objects that constitutes string theory and does the multi-dimensional 11 dimensional however many dimensional more than four dimension is that a crazy idea to you is that is that the stranger aspect of strength not really and also partly because of my own research so earlier we talked about a dink these strange symbols that we've discovered inside the equations it turns out that to a very large extent a tinker's don't really care about the number of dimensions they kind of have an internal mathematical consistency that allows them to be manifest in many different dimensions since supersymmetry is a part of string theory then this same property you would expect to be inherited by string theory however another little-known fact which is not in the public debate is that there are actually strings that are only four dimensional this is something that was discovered at the end of the 80s by three different groups of physicists working independently I and my friend Warren Siegel who were at the University of Maryland at the time were able to prove that there's mathematics it looks totally four-dimensional and yet it's a string there was a group in Germany that used slightly different mathematics but they found the same rizzo and then there was a group at Cornell who using yet a third piece of mathematics found the same yourself so the the fact that extra dimensions is so why they talked about in the public is partly a function of how the public has come to understand string theory and how it's the story has been told to them but there are alternatives you don't know about if we could talk about maybe experiments of validation and you you're the co-author of a recently published book proving Einstein right the the human story of it - the daring expeditions that changed how we look at the universe do you see echoes of the early days of general relativity in the 1910s - the more stretched out - string theory I just nodded I do and that's one reason why I was happy to focus on on the story of how Einstein became a global superstar earlier in our discussion we went over the the his history where in 1915 he he came up this piece of mathematics used it to do some calculations and then made a prediction yes but making a prediction is not enough someone's got to go out and measure and so string theory is in that in-between zone now for Einstein it was from 1915 to 1919 1950 he makes the makes the correct prediction by the way he made an incorrect prediction about the same thing in 1911 but he corrected himself in 1915 and by 1919 the first pieces of experimental observational data became available to say yes he's not wrong and by 1922 the the argument that based on observation was overwhelming that he was not wrong he described what special and general relativity are just briefly sure since and what prediction Einstein made and maybe maybe some or memorable moment from the human journey of trying to prove this thing right she was incredible right so I'm very fortunate to have worked with a talented novelist who wanted to write a book that coincided with a book I wanted to write about how science kind of feels if you're a person guess it's actually people who do science even though that may not be obvious to everyone so for me I wanted to write this book for a couple of reasons I wanted young people to understand that the seeming alien Giants that lived before them were just as human as they are you get married you get divorced again married they get worse they do terrible things they do great things they're people they're just people like you and so that part of telling the story allowed me to get that out there for both young people interest in the sciences as well as the public but the other part of the story is I wanted to open up sort of what what it was like now I'm a scientist and so I will not pretend to be a great writer I understand a lot about mathematics and I've even created my own mathematic that you know it's kind of a weird thing to be able to do but in order to tell the story you really have to have an incredible master of the narrative and my that was my co-author Kathy Pelletier who is a novelist we so we formed this conjoined brain I used to call us she's the call us professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle my expression for us was that we were a conjoined brain to tell this story and it allowed so what are some magical moments to me the first magical moment in telling the story was looking at Albert Einstein in his struggle because although we regard him as a genius as I said in 1911 he actually made an incorrect prediction about spending starlight and that's actually what set the astronomers off in 1914 there was an eclipse and by various accidents of war and weather and all sorts of things that we talked about in the book no one was able to make the measurement if they had made the measurement it would have disagreed with his 1911 prediction because nature only has one answer and so you then you see how fortunate he was that Wars and bad weather and accidents and transporting equipment stopped any measurements from being made so he corrects himself in 1915 and but the astronomers are already out there trying to make the measurement so now he gives them a different number and it turns out that's the number that nature agrees with so it gives you a sense of this is a person struggling with something deeply and it although his deep insight led him to this it is the circumstance of time place an accident but through which we view him and it could the story could have turned out very differently where first he makes the prediction the measurements are made in 1914 they disagree with his prediction and so what would the world view him as well he's this professor who made this prediction that didn't get it right yes so the fragility of human history is illustrated by that story and this is one of my favorite things you also learn things like in our book how eclipses and watching eclipses was a driver of the development of science in our nation when it was very young in fact even before we were a nation turns out they were citizens or citizens of this would be country they were going out trying to measure eclipses so some fortunes some misfortune affects the progress of science especially with ideas as to me at least if I put myself back in those days as radicals general relativity is first can you describe if it's okay briefly what general relativity is and yeah if you could you just take a moment if ya put yourself in those shoes in the eka and academic researchers scientists of that time and what is this theory what is it trying to describe about our world it's trying to answer the thing that left Isaac Newton puzzled Isaac Newton says gravity magically goes from one place to another he doesn't believe it by the way he knows that's not right but the mathematics is so good that you have to say well I'll throw my qualms away because I'll use it that's all we use to get for a man from the earth to the moon was that mathematics so I'm one of those scientists and I've seen this and if I thought deeply about it maybe I know that Newton himself wasn't comfortable and so the first thing I would hope that I would feel is gee this is young kid out there who has an idea to fill in this hole that was lay left with us by Sir Isaac Newton that would I hope would be my reaction I have a suspicion I'm I'm kind of a mathematical creature I was four years old when I first decided that size was what I wanted to do my and so if my personality back then was like it is now I think it's probably likely I would want to want to have studied his mathematics what was a piece of mathematics that he was using to make this prediction because he didn't actually create that mathematics that math.max was created of roughly fifty years before he lived he's the person who harnessed it in order to make a prediction in fact he had to be taught this mathematics by a friend so this is in our book so putting myself in that time I would want to like I said I think I would feel excitement I would want to know what the mathematics is and then I wouldn't want to do the calculations myself because one thing that physics is all about is that you don't take anybody's word for anything it's you can do it yourself it does seem that mathematics is a little bit more tolerant of radical ideas or mathematicians some people who find beauty in mathematics why all the white questions have no good answer let me ask why do you think Einstein never got the Nobel Prize for general relativity he got it for the photoelectric effect that is correct well there first of all that's something that is misunderstood about the Nobel Prize in Physics the Nobel Prize in Physics is never given for purely giving for purely proposing an idea it is always given for proposing an idea that has observational support so he could not get the Nobel Prize for either special relativity nor gen relativity because the provisions that Alfred Nobel left for the award prevent that but after it's been validated cannot get it then or no yes but remember the validation doesn't really come until the 1920s but that's why they invented the second Nobel Prize I mean very Curie you can get in second Nobel Prize for one of the greatest so so linear ease in physics so let me let's be clear on this the theory of general relativity had its critics even up until the 50s so if you had if had if the committee had wanted to give the prize for general relativity there were vociferous critics of general relativity up until the 50s Einstein died in 1955 what lessons do you draw from from the storytelling the book from general activity from the radical nature of the theory to looking at the future string theory well I think that the string theorists are probably going to retrace this path but it's gonna be far longer and more torturous in my opinion string theory is such a broad and deep development that in my opinion when it becomes acceptable it's going to be because of a confluence of observation it's not gonna be a single observation and I have to tell you that so I give a seminar here yesterday to my team and it's it's on an idea I have about how string theory can leave signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background which is a Astro physical structure and so if those kinds of observations are borne out if perhaps other things related to the idea of supersymmetry borne out those are going to be the first powerful observational II based pieces of evidence that will begin to do what the Eddington expedition did in 1919 but who that may take several decades do you think there will be Nobel Prizes given for string theory no because because I think the arrays it'll be you'll be I think it will exceed normal human lifetimes but there are other prizes that are given I mean there is something called the breakthrough prize there's a Russian emigre a Russian American immigrant named Yuri Milner I believe is they started this wonderful prize called the breakthrough prize it's three times as much money since Novell fries and he gets awarded every year and so something like one of those prizes is likely to be garnered at some point far earlier than a Nobel award jumping around a few topics while you were at Cal Tech you've gotten to interact I believe with Richard Fineman I have to ask yes do you have any stories to stand on your memory of that I have a fair number of stories but I'm not prepared to tell them they're not all politically correct copy but well let me just say I'll say the following Richard Fineman if you've ever read some of the books about him in particular there's a book called surely you're joking mr. Feinman there's a series of books that starts with surely you're joking mr. fireman and I think the segment may be something like what do you care what they say or something I mean their titles are all in there three of them when I read those books I was amazed at how accurately those books betray the man that I interacted with he was irreverent he was fun he was deeply intelligent he was deeply human and those books tell that story very effectively even just those moments how did they affect you as a physicist well one of the well it's funny because one of the things that I didn't hear firemen say this but one of the things that is reputed we've reported that he said is if you're on a barstool as a physicist and you can't explain to the guy on the barstool next to you what you're doing you don't understand what you're doing and there's a lot of that that I think is correct that that when you truly understand something as complicated as string theory when it's in its fully formed final development it should be something you could tell to the person on the barstool next to you and I that's something that affects the way I do science quite frankly it also affects the way I talked to the public about science I it's one of them sort of my mantras that I keep deeply in tried to keep deeply before me when I appear in public fora speaking about physics in particular in science in general it's also something that Einstein said in a different way he he said he had these two different formulations one of them is when the answer simple is God speaking and the other thing that he said was that what he did what he did in his work was simply the distillation of common sense that you distill down to something and he also said you make things as simple as possible but no simpler so all of those things and certainly this attitude for me first sort of seeing this was exemplified by being around Richard Fineman so in all your work you're always kind of searching for the simplicity for all the early ultimately I am you served on President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors in science and technology for seven years yes for seven years with Eric Schmidt and several other billion people met Eric for the first time in nineteen in 2009 when the council was called together yeah seen pictures of you in that room I mean there's a bunch of brilliant people it kind of looks amazing what was that experience like being called upon that kind of service so let me go back to my father first of all i earlier mentioned that my father served 27 years in the US Army starting in World War two he went off in 1942-43 to fight against the fascist he was part of the supply corps that supplied General Patton as the tanks rolled across Western Europe pushing back the forces of Nazism to meet up with our Russian comrades who were pushing the Russian you know pushing the Nazis starting in Stalingrad and you know this you know think of a war is actually a very interesting upset a piece of history too and know from both sides and here in America we typically don't but I've actually study history as an adult so I she know sort of the whole story and on the Russian side we don't know the Americans we weren't taught the I know I know I have many many Russian friends and we've had this conversation in the occasional but you know like general Zhukov for example was something that you would know but you might not know about a patent but you're right so do you or gives you cough or raucous offski I mean there's a whole list of names that I've learned in the last 15 or 20 years looking at the Second World War so if father was in the midst of that probably one of the greatest warrior wars in the history of our species and so the idea of service comes to me essentially from that example so in 2009 when I first got a call from from a Nobel laureate actually in my biology Harold Varmus the only way to India and I got this email message and he said it needed to talk to me and I said okay fine we can talk got my castes I didn't hear from him we went through several cycles of this something invested I want to talk to you and then never contacted and finally I was on my way to give a physics presentation the University of Florida in Gainesville and just just that stepped off a plane and my mobile phone off and it was Harold and so I said Harold why do you keep sending me messages that you want to talk but you never call and he said well I'm sorry things have been hectic and that a data and then he said if you were offered the opportunity to serve on the US President's Council of Advisors on science and technology what would be your answer I was amused that the formulation of the question yeah yeah because it's clear that there's a purpose of why the question is asked that way but then he made it clear to me he wasn't joking and literally my one of the few times in my life my knees went weak and I had to hold myself up against the wall so that I didn't fall over I doubt if most of us who have been the beneficiaries of the benefits of this country when given that kind of opportunity could say no and I know I certainly couldn't say no I was frightened out of my wits because I had never although I have my my career in terms of policy recommendations is actually quite long goes back to the 80s but I have never been called upon to serve as an advisor to a President of the United States and it was very scary but I did not feel that I could say no because I wouldn't be able to sleep with myself at nights saying you know that I chickened out or whatever and so I took the plunge and we had a pretty good run there are things that I did in those seven years that of which I'm extraordinarily proud one of the ways I tell people is if you've ever seen that television cartoon called Schoolhouse Rock is this one story about how a bill becomes a law and I've kind of lived that there are things that I did that have now been codified in US law not everybody gets a chance to do things like that in life what do you think is the you know Science and Technology especially in American politics you know we haven't had a president who's an engineer or a scientist what do you think is the role of a president like President Obama in understanding the latest ideas in science and time what was that experience like well first of all I've met other presidents beside President Obama he is the most extraordinary president I've ever encountered despite the fact that he went to Harvard when I think about President Obama I I he is a deep mystery to me in the same way perhaps that these new verses of mystery I don't really understand how that constellation of personalities could personality traits could come to fit within a per single individual but I saw them for seven years so I'm convinced that I wasn't seeing fake news seeing real data he was just an extraordinary man and one of the things that was completely clear was that he was not afraid and not intimidated to be in a room of really smart people I mean really smart people that he was completely comfortable in asking some of the world's greatest experts what do I do about this problem and it wasn't that he was going to just take their answer but he would listen to the advice and that to me was extraordinary as I said I've been around other executives and I've never seen qua one quite like him he's an extraordinary learner that's what I observed and not just about science but he has a way of internalizing information in real time that I've never seen in a politician before even in extraordinarily complicated situations even scientific ideas scientific or non-scientific complicated ideas don't have to be scientific ideas but I have like I said I've seen him in real time process complicated ideas with a speed that was stunning in fact he's shocked the entire council I mean we were all stunned at his capacity to be presented with complicated ideas and then to wrestle with him and internalize them and then come back more interestingly enough come back with really good questions to ask I've noticed this is in an area that I understand more of artificial intelligence I've seen him integrate information about artificial intelligence and then come out with these kind of richard fineman like insights that's exactly right and that's that as I said those of us who have been in that position it is stunning to see it happen because you don't expect it yeah it takes what for a lot of sort of graduate students takes like four years in a particular topic he just does it in a few minutes I have like learn naturally you've mentioned that you would love to see experimental validation of superstring theory before you before I'll double off this mortal coil which the poacher that reference made me smile oh well si you know people who actually misunderstand that because it's not what it doesn't mean what we generally take it to mean colloquially but it's such a beautiful expression yeah it is it's from the hamlet to be or not to be a speech which I still don't understand what that's above interpretation anyway the what are the most exciting problems in physics they're just within our reach of understanding and maybe solve the next two decades they you may be able to see so in physics you limited it to physics physics mathematics this kind of space of problems that fascinate you well the one that looks on the immediate horizon like we're gonna get to is quantum computing and that's gonna if we actually get there that's gonna be extraordinarily interesting do you think that's a fundamentally problem of theory or is it now in the space of engineering it's in the space of engineering I was not a cue station as you may know Microsoft has this research facility in Santa Barbara I was out there a couple of months in my capacity as a vice president of American Physical Society and I got a you know I had some things that were like lectures and they were telling me what they were doing and it sure sounded like they knew what they were doing and the thing were close to major breakthroughs yeah that's a really exciting possibility there but the back to Hamlet do you ponder mortality your own mortality nope my mother died when I was 11 years old and so I immediately knew what the end of the story was for all of us as a consequence I've never never spent a lot of time thinking about death it'll come in its own good time and sort of to me the job of every human is to make the best and the most of the time that's given to us in order not for our own selfish gain but to try to make this place a better place for someone else and on the Y of life why do you think we are I have no idea and I never even worried about it for me I haven't answered a local answer the apparent why for me was because I'm supposed to do physics but it's funny because there's so many other quantum mechanically speaking possibilities in your life such as being an astronaut for example so you know what that I see well like like Einstein and the vicissitudes that prevented the 1914 measurement in the starlight finding the universe is constructed in such a way that I didn't become an astronaut which would have for me I would have faced the worst choice in my life whether whether I would try to become an astronaut or whether I would try to do theoretical physics both of these dreams were born when I was four years old simultaneously and so I can't imagine how difficult that decision would have been the universe helped you out on that one not only in that one but in mini ones and it helped me out by allowing me to pick the right bad is there a day in your life you could relive because it made you truly happy what day would that be if you could just look that being a theoretical physicist is like having Christmas every day I have lots of joy in my life the the moments of invention the moments of ideas revelation yes the only thing I exceed them are some family experiences like when my kids were born and that kind of stuff but they're pretty high up there well I don't see a better way to end it Jim thank you so much as a huge honor talking today this worked out better than I thought glad to hear thanks for listening to this conversation with s James Gates Jr and thank you to our presenting sponsor cash app download it and use code let's podcast you'll get ten dollars and ten dollars will go to first a stem education nonprofit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to learn and to dream of engineering our future if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on YouTube give it five stars an apple podcast supported on patreon or connect with me on Twitter and now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from the great Albert Einstein for the rebels among us unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you