Mark Levinson and host Savas dissect the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, detailing how its trillions of proton collisions confirmed the Higgs boson while exposing gaps in the Standard Model regarding dark matter. They debunk fears of man-made black holes by comparing collider energies to natural cosmic rays and explore how data filtering innovations aided bioinformatics. The discussion extends to Claude Shannon's information theory foundations, quantum computing's superposition challenges requiring near-absolute zero temperatures, and the philosophical parallels between scientific discovery and cinematic storytelling in works like Interstellar. Ultimately, the episode illustrates that humanity's quest to understand fundamental physics drives both technological revolution and global cooperation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Hello, world.
Today, my guest is Mark Levinson.
Mark is a trained particle physicist who got his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, before going to Hollywood as a sound editor on films like The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Movie Seven, and House of Cards.
On this podcast, we talked about his documentary Particle Fever, where Mark tells the story of the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson.
The film covers the scientific process and the scientists behind the research with the Large Hadron Collider, which is the billion dollar piece of machinery.
In Switzerland, that basically collides and smashes atoms together and shit like that.
The film covers the scientific process and the actual scientists behind the research, and it documents the first time they discovered the Higgs boson.
So, without further ado, please welcome the amazing Mark Levinson.
Thanks for coming on here, man.
I really appreciate it.
Good.
Well, I'm looking forward to it.
The very last line of the Particle Fever documentary, where he says, most important things, the things that make us human, are the things that we don't depend on for survival.
The things that humans don't need for survival are the things that are most important.
Yes.
That was a very profound statement he made there.
Yeah, you know, I mean, the thing is, I've always been interested in the overlap between art and science.
Sorry about that.
That's okay.
Let's see if I can just turn this off.
You know, I mean, for me, you know, as somebody who started in the field of science, really, and, you know, getting my doctorate in physics, and then moved into more of the arts with filmmaking, I never really made that distinction.
You know, people always ask about that.
Oh, well, how did you make that transition?
And in fact, it was something that I wasn't even aware of as a big transition.
I mean, obviously, my day to day activities, in some sense, it was.
But it's not as if I felt like I have this part of my brain that is doing science and this part of my brain that's trying to do film.
I mean, they're both creative, and I think they're both important.
And so, what Savas says there, I think it is reflective also of both frontier level scientific research and the arts.
I mean, that these things that really distinguish us as humans, these abstract things that we pursue, I mean, why do we try to understand the universe?
As I think he also says in the film, it's not something that's going to, for the most part, influence our day to day life or have a lot of practical applications, but we need to do this.
And the same thing about art.
You could say that, you know, for a lot of people would question, what is the usefulness of this?
Why do we do this?
And the answer is that it's just, it's something that it's what makes us human.
I mean, Fabiola talks about this too in the film, you know, she has the Dante quote, you know, that this is the thing that distinguishes us from beasts or other animals, that they don't paint and write literature and try to understand where they came from.
So I was very happy that Savas came up with this.
Realistic Science Narratives00:14:57
I mean, it was, it was.
Something I was interested in, but I didn't want to, you know, just feed them the lines.
And, um, Sabas, uh, Fabiola, Nima I mean, all of them, you know, really felt the same akin, the same kinship to artists and what they do.
What was it that brought you to make the decision that you wanted to go dive into this world, into the lives of these people who are creating this billion dollar machine that is its purpose is to.
Just smash atom atomic particles into each other.
And what, what, how did this journey start for you to create this thing?
Well, I mean, the journey actually started in college when I got interested in physics.
And so, my, I, I originally was going to college.
I thought I was going to be an MD.
And so I actually had, was in a program, it was a special program that was a combined MD, PhD program.
And I thought I'd get an MD and I thought I'd study.
And then I, Do research and I'd sort of do a combination.
But it was sort of the quintessential story of an incredible professor at college who was this brilliant physics teacher.
And I decided to take the physics major's physics course because also I just sort of wanted to be away from the pre med rush where most of the pre med people are just taking physics because they have a requirement.
And I was interested in it.
So I thought, okay, I'll take the.
You know, the physics majors one, I was, you know, I was good in math and science.
And, you know, the guy walked in the first day and he picks up this huge book and he says, This is a book, but he tosses it across the room.
He says, But we're not going to care about books.
We're interested in learning how things work and learning how the universe works.
And I thought, Wow, sign me up.
You know, especially in contrast to a lot of the pre med stuff where it was really about memorization and learning things like that.
And, you know, I think it was, I was just really fascinated by.
The search for fundamental truth and understanding.
I mean, that's what I was interested in physics.
And I was, I really got drawn to the most theoretical physics and the most fundamental physics.
And so, particle physics is, in a sense, it's the ultimate physics.
I mean, everything ultimately comes down to what are the fundamental particles of the universe and what are the forces and how do they interact.
And essentially, everything comes from that.
And that was very appealing to me.
I mean, to just try to understand just.
If you want to understand the universe, that's the most fundamental level that you can understand it.
And so that took me through college and through graduate school.
So it was, you know, I was studying this field, but at the university, I did begin to see other, you know, the other things.
I was sort of awakened to film and to literature.
And I think it was, Particularly, actually, a lot of Eastern European cinema that I saw that was very complex, intellectually challenging, and trying to understand the universe also, but you know, from the more humanistic perspective.
And so, that's the other thing I saw, I suddenly saw film as another way of trying to understand the universe.
And you know, physics, you were looking at it from the you know, aspects of the physical.
Components like particles and forces.
But film I saw as a way to also examine how the universe works from a human perspective.
And there's a number of parallels, I think, between the two.
That for me, a script in some sense is like a theory.
A film for me is something that is a representative of something of the world, some truth that is in a compressed form.
I mean, at least for me, the greatest films are.
They're saying something.
They contain some sort of truth in a compressed form, which is like a theory in physics, actually.
You look for a theory that is a simplification of things, but is also representative of much broader things.
And you look for, again, a sort of a simplification, an essence of things that has a broader significance.
And even.
In process, in a certain way.
In science, you look at, you have a theory of something about how the universe works.
And in film, you know, you start out with a script of some idea of something that you're trying to investigate.
And then in physics, you go off and you do an experiment to test it.
And you are, you know, suddenly the experiments are often really huge and expensive, and you hope you get something useful.
And in film, you go off and you make the film.
And again, it's suddenly.
Very different from the more solitary process of writing or coming up with a theory.
But you go out, you have a crew, you do this incredible, crazy thing, and you hope you get something useful.
You hope you get some useful data.
And then in physics, you go back with the results to your theory and you say, oh, okay, what is it really?
What is the real world like?
And in film, you get the footage back into the edit room and you sort of say, oh, that's what my film is about.
You know, it may be very different.
So, there's certain parallels in that regard, actually, too, in terms of the steps.
So, when I finished, when I got my PhD, I really did get interested in exploring this other way of looking at the world from the humanistic perspective.
And I actually went into narrative film.
I mean, what I described is really the path for a narrative feature where you have a script and then you shoot and you go to the edit room.
And I actually had nothing to do with science.
I mean, so my Foray into film for many years was in the narrative world.
I wrote a script about former Russian dissonant artists dealing with all the changes after Glasnost.
Again, I was so fascinated by art and artists and what they were doing.
And so I worked in that field.
I wanted to do more writing and directing.
I began to specialize in post production, working with actors.
To redo lines and to change lines, and you know, something it's called ADR, right?
Looping, and then alternately working on my own things.
But I was always thinking that I wanted to do something that you know, try to perhaps connected the strands of my life.
I was thinking about a script, possibly writing a script that you know, looked at sort of science in a very realistic way.
I mean, I didn't feel And still don't feel that there's a lot of fiction films that deal with science in a very authentic way.
And so I was thinking about that.
And then I heard about this physicist, David Kaplan, who wanted to make a documentary about the startup of the Large Hadron Collider.
And the Large Hadron Collider was the experiment that was designed to test the fundamental theories of particle physics, which is exactly what I had been studying in graduate school.
So, it was something where I could recognize very much the issues, the stakes.
And I knew what was involved, what people were looking for, and how long they'd been looking for it.
And so I could sense that if this thing was really finally about to turn on, it could be a dramatic film.
And so I told David that I was not interested in doing.
A straightforward science documentary where we're just going to try to explain particle physics, but that if I could use my filmmaking tools to make it about characters and make it, you know, try to make it follow a narrative, that would be really interesting and I could see the potential.
And he agreed, and so I jumped in.
And so, you know, it just presented this opportunity to sort of combine in my mind these two strands of my life, two strings in some sense of physics and film, and narrative and story.
And that's how it came about.
And of course, it ended up being much more dramatic than we expected.
I mean, when I started, most of the physicists said they probably wouldn't find the Higgs boson.
While we were filming, and I was trying to think of various dramatic scenarios, thinking in terms of story, what it could be.
I had various ideas of how I could set it up and what we might do in terms of different teams competing or the difference between theorists and experimentalists, which was something that was very interesting to me and something I think was not so well known outside of the field, outside of.
It happens in a lot of science, but it's really accentuated in physics because the experiments like the Large Hadron Collider are so enormous and so time consuming.
So I was thinking about those distinctions.
And we were very lucky that they did end up discovering it while we were still filming.
Why does that thing have to be so enormous?
Well, it is an irony that you're studying the tiniest things in the world.
But in order to study them, you need incredibly high energies.
And we get high energies by accelerating these things around and around.
And you need a certain distance, in a sense, to build up the speed.
Also, to keep particles, to keep charged particles, this is accelerating protons, which have a positive charge, to keep them going around in a circle, you need very, very strong magnetic fields.
And the tighter you try to bend them, the stronger magnetic field you need.
So, there's a certain size requirement you need to, you know, in a sense, to get them faster.
So, you know, the faster you want to make them curve around, the stronger the magnets you need.
And, you know, there's a trade off.
And the energy you need to basically keep them in track and the energy that is in them to combine and create something.
And the fact is, we're looking for particles that are very massive, that have a lot of mass.
And by Einstein's famous equation, E mc squared, E energy is proportional to the mass.
And so, to get higher mass particles, you need higher energy.
You need higher energies that you're creating, that basically you're putting energy in, this movement energy, and crashing them together.
And you want to transfer that energy of this motion into the mass of these particles.
So, you need this huge thing to build up enough energy to create massive particles.
And the size also is determined by the energy that you need to get and how do you keep these things going.
I mean, it's a phenomenal technological feat when you think about it.
I mean, I remember I think I saw something that said, you know, getting these things because you're accelerating protons, and that it'd be like firing a gun.
From here and from the moon, and you're having the bullets collide.
I mean, that's almost the accuracy that you need.
So it is pretty astonishing that it actually works.
Yeah, it's extremely mind bending how the scale and the enormity of that thing.
So there are four different chambers within that 17 mile loop where the particles actually collide.
Why do those chambers?
Can you explain what the significance of those?
Those giant chambers are and why they have to be five stories to it's basically like a.
I think they described it in the documentary as a five story camera lens, yeah, right, yeah.
So, um, uh, so, yeah, so, so the Large Hunter and Collider, the Large Hunter and Collider itself is this ring of two basically two tunnels of protons that are sent circulating around in opposite directions.
So, they're sent around and they get faster and faster and faster, and then, um, these two beams.
Are crossed.
So the beams are directed towards each other and they cross at four points where you can have the collisions.
And the collisions, again, you're slamming things together, each of them going very fast, you're getting the highest energy.
When these particles collide, lots of things come out.
So it's the combined collision, the mass, the energy is converted into mass.
That flies off into various different particles.
And so, what you want to do is you want to see what they are.
So, they go flying off in all directions.
And the experiments, so what are in these different chambers, are four different experiments.
And they're completely different teams of people.
They work independently.
Detecting Colliding Particles00:04:30
They are designed to detect different things.
You can try to detect different things.
And you can set it up in different ways.
And so, essentially, they're layers.
Because as things come out, you can detect, you can slow things down in some ways, you know, and you can measure the speed and the energy of the things.
You put in your own magnetic fields, and you can see these particles, then charged particles will curve in these things.
And by the angle of the curve, you can determine things about their mass and other internal properties, their magnetic properties, and things like that.
And so you have these layers.
Also, to stop different particles.
Different particles are going to get stopped at different places.
Different layers are going to detect different properties.
And so, again, these things are happening at such enormous energies and it's happening so quick that you need things that can register them successively as they go out and to eventually stop them.
So, you ideally want to find the thing that actually stops it, too, and really.
Really determines its final energy.
So that's what these are for.
I mean, that's why you need them.
And, you know, it's a camera in the sense of more of an electronic camera now where you have things, you know, like in a camera, the photons are coming in and, you know, can activate various pixels or something like that in a digital camera.
And that, in a sense, is what's happening here.
These charged particles come through and you have various wires, you can have various electronics there that pick up these charges.
And send information about where exactly it happened.
And you know, you reconstruct, you see, oh, this thing looks like this particle has gone in this curve, in this direction.
This one looks like it's curved off in this direction.
And this one stopped here.
And this one suddenly looks like it branched out and other things came out of it.
And using our current theories, we can reconstruct what those are and predict where things should go and what should happen.
And so that's sort of the origin of these things and why they're so big.
But as Monica says, it's not like it's just a lot of rebar and space.
It's like a seven story Swiss watch.
This is custom built.
I mean, this is all things that, you know, there's no place that's really using things at this level.
I mean, you know, one of the things is that in getting to this level, they've had to develop technologies that are used in many other fields at a lower level, right?
I mean, so it's taught us a lot about imaging and cryogenics, superconductivity, I mean, magnets.
And it generates so much data that it has also necessitated a better understanding of how we can process so much data and information.
And so, famously, the web language was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee in order initially to just be able to communicate with all the physicists to distribute all the information.
The World Wide Web, right?
The World Wide Web, right.
Yes, exactly.
So that language, that protocol was developed there.
And thankfully, because it was not, they don't charge for it.
So it was made available.
I mean, CERN, which is the overall research facility where the LHC is, is not a nonprofit organization.
It's for the universal pursuit of science.
And so it was sort of made available to everybody.
And it was a private enterprise every time you.
You know, did a search, you'd be paying somebody.
Yeah, it's amazing all the different people from different countries, even countries that are enemies of each other, all these scientists working together on one massive thing.
And I mean, I think that's the biggest man made machine on earth, right?
The Fork in Physics Understanding00:03:30
So, if I understand correctly, there's basically a fork in the road, there's two different general possibilities for our understanding.
Of the universe.
There's either the multiverse, which means everything's chaos and we can't understand.
We're never going to be able to understand everything because we're only like a compartmentalized universe on our own and we'll never be able to get any other particles.
And then the other fork in the road is called supersymmetry, right?
Yeah.
Can you explain that a little bit better?
Yeah.
I mean, I think these are two alternatives that are, I mean, in terms of how we view the universe, we know that.
Our standard model, the theory that we have right now at the most fundamental level of how the universe works, is called the standard model of particle physics.
And it's based on the idea that there's a certain number of the most elementary particles and certain forces that they interact with.
And so there's a finite number of particles, we think.
Basically, there's things called quarks and there's things called leptons.
And so the quarks are quarks and the leptons are things like electrons and muons.
And, you know, the idea is that these are fundamental.
There's nothing smaller, they're not made up of other things.
And there are certain fundamental ways that they can interact.
They can interact with electromagnetic means.
Which is the way we mostly are familiar with, which is when particles have charge, they can form electric currents, they can form magnets.
We know that both electricity and magnetism now are sort of combined or one force, really.
There's something called, well, gravity, we know is another fundamental force, that anything that has mass, there's an attraction to it between them.
We know that there's something called the weak interaction, which is.
Something that is responsible for the fact that particles, some particles decay, and you have radioactivity.
So, radio, the reason we have radioactivity is particles, there is a certain instability, they decay into other things.
So, a neutron, for instance, can decay into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino.
And then we know that there's something called a strong force, which is understood as a necessity because we know protons.
Are not fundamental particles.
Protons are made up of quarks.
And so there's something that's holding these quarks together that is very strong because quarks, you know, they have charge and they would not stay together necessarily.
And they have to be kept very close together.
So there's something that's a very, very strong force as well.
So we have those four forces strong force, the weak force, the radiation force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity.
And this has been incredibly successful as a theory.
Expanding Universe Observations00:03:44
I mean, it explains pretty much every phenomena that we see on Earth.
In terms of its accuracy, it's the most accurate theory of science in terms of the scale that it can get down to and the scale that it can get up to.
But we know that it's not the end story.
We know that there are things it doesn't explain.
In a sense, as soon as you look up into the sky, into the cosmos, There are very big questions we don't understand.
We know that there has to be more mass out there than can be accounted for by the particles that we see.
We can see that things, essentially galaxies rotating and things like that, we can tell there's something that is gravitationally pulling it, but we don't see it.
It's not visible, and so it was given the.
Name dark matter because it's dark, we don't see it.
We also see that the universe is expanding.
It's not only expanding, it's expanding at a faster and faster rate.
It's accelerating, it's expanding at a faster and faster rate.
So there's something we understand that as meaning something in a sense is pushing it.
It's almost like it's pushing it out.
And we don't understand what that is.
And that's called, we call that dark energy.
How can we tell that it's expanding faster?
Well, you can tell by when things move away, there's something called a Doppler shift, there's a red shift.
So it's a phenomenon when, for instance, you hear a siren and a siren approaches, and you hear it as it approaches, the frequency goes up and then comes down.
And that is a shift in frequency, and that happens with light as well.
And so, stars and various other things emit light with certain.
At certain colors, okay.
I mean, light, you know, different frequencies of light correspond to different colors, and any source of light has a very distinctive pattern of the colors that are in it, essentially.
And when things are moving away or moving forward, that pattern shifts, and so we can tell by examining the shift.
How fast something is moving towards you or away from you.
And so, by doing these detailed spectrographic analyses, they can tell the speed at which something is moving.
And they can tell the things that are further away are moving faster than the things that are closer.
Again, looking at, you know, examining the time and studying the movements of these things, studying this redshift, this shift.
They can get an idea of how fast these things are moving away and how far they are as well.
And so, you know, it's incredibly detailed astronomical observations that have really allowed these things.
So, you know, we really, yes, it is.
How do you tell what's happening that far out?
And it's from very detailed spectrographic analysis, really, of the light coming from the light.
Multiverse Configurations Explained00:15:10
I'm saying light, it's really electromagnetic.
Radiation in all its forms.
So that includes x rays and infrared and visible light and ultraviolet and everything like that.
So they have things that are sensitive to all these different frequencies.
So we know that there are these fundamental problems.
And there were also fundamental questions about, well, why is the universe the way it is?
Why there's a different range in strength of the forces.
Gravity is very weak compared to electromagnetic forces, for instance.
And you can see that just by the fact that I can just lift up an object with my glasses.
And the forces that I'm using to lift it are basically electromagnetic forces.
That's what allows the arm, it's biological.
Movement is contractions of muscles, which are ions moving in the arm.
So it's electromagnetic.
It's fundamentally electromagnetic.
But just little me with my arm lifting this can overcome the entire gravitational attraction of the Earth.
So that just gives you an idea of how much weaker gravity is than electromagnetic forces.
And similarly, there's a real hierarchy in the strength of the weak and the weak.
Strong force.
And so this is another thing that really was very, very difficult to understand.
And there's things in the theory that really don't predict this at all.
And there's, in terms of the acceleration of the universe as well, we don't understand this.
And if you try to do a calculation based on our best understanding, it's humongously off.
The calculation is humongously off.
It's really one of the worst predictions in science.
And so, again, this is a question well, what.
Are we missing?
And what's really interesting is it seems to have a very specific and sensitive value, this value at which the universe is accelerating, what this force is that's pushing it out.
Because if it was a little bit more, if the force was a little bit more, or the gravitational force was a little bit less, then things would never have actually formed.
We never would have, after the initial Big Bang, They never would have come back together again.
You know, I mean, gravity would not have been strong enough to pull it back together.
But if it was too much, then, I mean, if it was too much, then things would not have expanded at all, or it would not be accelerating.
So there seems to be this, you know, we don't understand that there seems to be a sensitivity and sort of a very specific number that accounts for this balance between a universe that would never form.
And you never, because it just flew apart and it would never form because it would just never expand.
So there are these various issues, and traditionally in physics, we've tried to understand things in terms of the fewest number of particles and certain, you know, there's certain patterns, certain patterns and symmetry.
And that has been the approach that has worked up to now.
We've seen certain parallels in particles that they have counterparts to things.
You know, it's sort of like a right hand has a left hand, and a positive charge has a negative charge, and a spin up has a spin down, and various things like this that have a certain symmetry.
And so the hope has been to try to understand any new particles that might be necessary to understand these odd phenomena in terms of the things that we have, that they're related somehow, that they sort of fall into the same theory.
And that we just haven't seen them, but there's something that they're going to fall into the same pattern.
And again, behind me, I have this illustration of the standard model of particle physics.
It has this very nice, symmetrical, round structure.
And the hope was that maybe this could be expanded in terms of other symmetries, other parallel things, That would follow the same pattern.
And these theories are called supersymmetry, the idea that there are additional symmetries that we are beyond what we know now, but we could mathematically see that they could work.
And mathematically, they're allowed, and maybe there's particles that would correspond to that.
And so that has been one of the big hopes at the LHC that we'd see new particles that would fall into these new patterns, and that could be part of our theory.
Our standard theory, but we haven't seen them.
And so, you know, this alternative idea has arisen is that maybe we're asking the wrong question in a sense.
And we shouldn't be asking why these numbers have very specific values.
The number that determines the expansion of the universe is something that's called the cosmological constant.
And maybe we shouldn't be asking, you know, For a theory that's going to predict that number.
Because maybe it's not a special number in general, it's a number that happens to be special in our universe.
And so the parallel that's often made is if you look at the distance the Earth is to the Sun, or any of the planets to the Sun, you could say, well, Why is it that distance?
I mean, with the Earth in particular, you say, why we have this very particular distance?
It's just right.
You know, that it's not too close where it would be too hot to allow life, and it's not too far where it would be too cold to allow life as we know it.
But what we know is that there's not a theory that says the Earth has to be here.
You know, in the aftermath of the Big Bang, I mean, things fell into various distances.
Just because of the way things were exploding and the gravity, and they fell into them.
And this one at this distance is the one that allowed life to arise.
It just got lucky.
It just got lucky.
But, you know, Mars was not so lucky.
You know, Saturn was not so lucky.
As far as we know, any of these other ones are not as lucky.
And so, this has been this wild idea that maybe there are other universes.
And ours is the lucky one that has this expansion that allowed a universe to form.
But there could be other universes where things are not expanding the way they are, where they didn't, or where, you know, maybe it's another universe, you know, it's of course, it's hard to even say, well, what's another universe even look like?
Big Bang or something, and that the acceleration is different than ours, or that it never expanded the way we're expanding.
And so, this idea, which is a theory called that there are multiverses, is a competing scheme, and it's a very different way of looking at the problem.
And it's controversial within the physics community because, in some sense, physics has always Worked on the precept that we could find an ultimate theory that would explain everything.
But this is an alternative that's gained more ground in the last 15, 20 years, especially the last 10 or 15 years, which is basically saying it's the wrong question to say, how do we predict that number?
You'll never predict the number.
Because it's a matter of chance that it came out in this universe that way.
And, you know, there's some support for this idea from other theories.
There are theories like string theory that seem to indicate the possibility and maybe necessity of different universe configurations.
String theory?
String theory, yes.
So, a string theory is a theory that basically one of the other biggest outstanding problems in physics is that the Weak, the electromagnetic, the strong interactions are all in some sense fundamentally built the same way.
There are quantum field theories, they're quantum, really.
And gravity is not.
Gravity, our best theory of gravity is still Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is a theory of gravity.
And it's really Just a complete outlier in terms of how it's set up.
That it, you know, Einstein gave a theory that basically said gravity is because of curvature in our space and time.
That it's a very hard thing to picture, but, you know, we come up with three dimensional images of surfaces that are curving.
And mathematically, Einstein showed that, you know, if you think of four dimensions of, you know, the three dimensions of space and time, We can study those things geometrically, mathematically, and the mathematics shows that if you think about curves in space time, that is completely equivalent to the force of gravity.
Because gravity, we know gravity affects anything with mass.
And so anything in the universe that has mass is occupying some space and time.
And we can say that if you bend space and time, things are going to move in a certain way that's gravity.
But this is a very You know, it's completely separate from quantum mechanics.
And so, you know, the holy grail of physics in many ways has been to figure out a way to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.
And one of the candidates that has been, you know, being worked on now for also quite a number of years is something called string theory, which, you know, in a very simple manner imagines that the little fundamental particles are not.
Like little points, balls, but they're little vibrating strings.
And that it's the different frequency vibrations that might correspond to different types of particles, and interactions are the interactions of these things.
And there's hope that this might be a way to unify gravity and quantum mechanics.
And there are also indications in string theory that you may need other.
Dimensions and uh, you know, it gives some credence to the idea of a multiverse again.
I mean, these are uh, none of this is completely proved, but there are you know, there are overlaps that support it.
So, um, I think that has given more weight to the arguments of a multiverse, you know, in in in the later years, in the last years, um.
But it's still unclear, you know, which way it's going to be.
And so, experiments like the Large Hadron Collider, you know, so the big thing with the Large Hadron Collider is that in the standard model of physics, there was, you know, even though the theory worked incredibly well, at the center of it was this thing called the Higgs boson, which was necessary for the theory to work, but had not been seen.
And in a sense, the LHC was designed to really determine yes or no if the Higgs existed.
It did.
And so, in some sense, it was an incredible success.
I mean, it was just the ultimate confirmation of a theory when you think about it, just this incredibly abstract theory that is incredibly elaborate and accurate and ultimately explains all of the everyday phenomena we see on Earth.
And they found it with this enormous machine that is mind boggling, and the evidence really.
Was convincing that yes, there is this Higgs particle.
But, you know, so that sort of capped off this nice picture.
But then, of course, it's like, you know, you look outside and there's everything else that's going on and it didn't.
So, you know, I think what physicists, you know, in some sense, you wanted to find the Higgs, but the real hope is they find something else to sort of start to indicate what is the bigger theory.
What exactly is the purpose of the Higgs?
What other particles have they found since they discovered the Higgs?
Well, the Higgs is a very unique particle.
It's the only one of its kind that has certain properties of what are called spin and its mass.
The Higgs Field Medium00:02:40
And it is, you know, in a simple way, we understand that it's necessary for particles having mass, for them actually having mass.
That the theory itself, And quantum field theory is a great theory for particles that are without any mass, the way they interact.
But in order to essentially explain certain mathematical aspects of it, you need something like a Higgs particle.
You need a particle that has the properties of a Higgs mathematically to have the theory work out, to have the theory work out and have masses and things like that.
You know, there's a lot of analogies people make.
You know, some of them are better than others, but you know, the one that's most often used is the idea that, you know, the Higgs is this field.
It's a field that permeates everything, and particles moving through the field get mass.
I mean, the simple analogy being, you know, throwing a ball through the air versus throwing it, you know, trying to push it through water or molasses, you know, that the different.
The medium that things move through determines its mass.
So the Higgs is like the medium?
The Higgs is a medium.
So the Higgs is, you know, fundamentally the Higgs is something we call a field.
And, you know, what we believe is that in the very, very early universe, you know, right after the Big Bang, in some sense, this field turned on, you know, that suddenly this field turned on or it was created at this early stage.
Particles obtained mass and began to have the interactions that we know.
So, the Higgs is a field.
What we know is that in a field, when you combine these particles, you can excite the field and it manifests itself as a particle coming off.
And so, that's what the Higgs boson is.
When they see the Higgs particle, it's a perturbation in the Higgs field that when we combine these things at such incredibly high energies and it creates a disturbance in the Higgs field that we see as the Higgs.
Particle as the Higgs boson.
Crunched Dimensions Theory00:03:08
So, are there any theories that suggest that there could be like dimensions that we can't even perceive with our senses?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we can't perceive with our senses more than, you know, four.
I mean, you know, the three physical, I mean, the three space dimensions and one time dimension.
So, yes.
So, yes.
So, that is the question.
I mean, all these ideas, I mean, many of these ideas, well, certainly in string theory.
Posits more dimensions.
You know, this is the question of multiverses do multiverses correspond to more dimensions?
And, you know, there are various theories about why don't we see them?
You know, is it possible that there are these dimensions, but somehow they're all crunched up?
So beyond our dimensions, they're crunched up and they're so tiny that we can't see them, they're folded on into each other.
But yes, I mean, we don't see these dimensions.
Clearly, in our normal activity, but there are theories about how, if they exist, they might be manifested.
Okay, and I mean, again, just to give you an example of what this could mean, you know, it would mean essentially it would be a bizarre phenomena where something might just appear.
So, one of the classical examples is if you think of If you think of the fact that suppose you lived on a piece of paper, suppose we lived in two dimensions.
So a piece of paper is just two dimensions.
And you walk around, you're just on the paper.
You can't see above or you can't see below.
So all you can see is what's in the paper, in the plane of the paper.
And now suppose there is another dimension.
You're not aware of it, but there is another dimension, and some ball comes in and Enters your universe.
Well, what would you see?
You would see, you know, when it first touches, you'd suddenly see a spot.
And then if it's a sphere, you know, you'd see it expand.
And as it goes through it, you know, and passes through, the spot would get bigger and bigger, and then it would get smaller and smaller, and then it would disappear.
Right.
And so it would be this phenomena that you would not be able to explain with your normal theories of, you know, you've never seen anything like this.
Suddenly something appeared.
And disappeared.
And that would be evidence of something, you know, possible evidence of something from another dimension.
So, you know, that's in a sort of one simple way to imagine what does this mean?
What, you know, what would it be if there's another dimension and how could we detect it?
And so we look for strange phenomena like that that we couldn't, that doesn't fit into our theory, but might fit into how it would work if it was, you know, if it was coming from another dimension.
Massive Scientific Undertakings00:15:31
Right.
It's not something that you could explain with just shapes.
That's right.
You couldn't, or, you know, just like, you know, forces that we know and things like that.
So, you know, evidence of other dimensions would be really weird phenomena.
Is there any weird phenomena that sticks out that people have found in the past decade or so that hints to anything like this?
Not that I know of.
No.
I mean, no sudden appearances of a UFO or things like that.
So, no.
I mean, that's what they're looking for, they're looking for things that don't follow the normal rules of physics, but might.
Follow, you know, might be explainable in terms of some of these other theories.
And there are other theories that do explain these.
And, you know, using other ideas and multi dimensions and things, they can try to explain some of the, you know, missing understanding in cosmology.
But, you know, there's not enough, there's nothing that's definitive for sure at this point.
Have you heard of this element called 115?
I think it's 115.
I believe a new element that was recently discovered in the past, I believe, in less than 10 years, where I think I've heard Bob Lazar talk about it, the guy who was working, he was working near in Roswell at Area 50, or near Area 51.
And I believe it was an element that was used to basically fold gravity.
The story of him is he worked at a secret base near Area 51 where they found these outerworldly crafts.
That the way they moved was instead of using a combustion engine to pull air in and shoot air out the back, what it did was it bended gravity around it to accelerate in any direction.
Like there was no acceleration.
You don't start off slow, get faster, and then slow down.
It's just.
Instant up, down, left, right.
And apparently, from what he was explaining, was that it's this special element called 115 that enables these crafts to basically fold through gravity and use gravity to propel itself in any direction.
I don't know anything about this, I have to say.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
So, yeah, what particles have been found besides the Higgs boson?
Well, your documentary.
Well, there have been no new particles.
I mean, there's no fundamental new particles.
I mean, there are certain variations of things, certain things that have certain properties that we didn't expect.
But in terms of anything beyond the standard model, which is the quarks that we know, the electrons, the muons, the neutrinos, they have not found a new particle that doesn't fit into this paradigm.
So, you know, that begs the question is it, is the theory wrong?
Or is it just that we don't have enough energy?
Because, you know, the problem is these theories, they don't really predict definitively what the masses of these particles are.
We had a certain idea of what the mass of the Higgs should be, around what it should be.
But, you know, it's always a question are we at the highest?
Because we know that you need higher energies to find these particles.
I mean, that's one of the reasons we don't see them, they don't exist normally.
They're not stable.
I mean, even the Higgs boson doesn't last.
Last.
We don't really even see the Higgs.
The Higgs almost immediately decays into other things.
But our theory predicts what it should do, and that's what they find.
So, the idea still is that for many people, they think that we should make even more powerful accelerators.
We need to get to higher energies.
But of course, the question is well, how high?
You know, it's very expensive and technologically difficult, but there are efforts now to build a successor to the LHC.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, there's a there's what would something like that look like?
Well, again, you could do it, could either be a big ring, another ring, even bigger, or the other alternative is a linear collider where you basically have things that you know are originated at two ends.
And you just accelerate them right to each other and bang them together.
And so there are proposals in Asia and there's a proposal at CERN, but these are, you know, 20, 30 year plans.
So the LHC itself is still, you know, very active.
They actually have just upgraded, they're in the middle of a big upgrade.
So they already have the capability to go to higher energies and they keep improving their optics in a sense, you know.
So they've also upgraded, they've upgraded both.
The ring to get higher energies and more accuracy and more what's called luminosity.
So, you know, these are bunches of things that come together.
And, you know, the more you can focus them, the more collisions you're going to get.
And that's not just one proton, one proton.
These are packets, you know, millions and billions of protons.
And, you know, they sort of fly through each other and you get a certain number of collisions.
And so, of course, if you can focus it more, You'll get more collisions.
So they're improving that, they're improving their detectors, their ability to detect things, and then they're also starting to lay the groundwork for what could be the next generation of things.
As well as, there's also a lot of efforts to see can we learn anything about this from alternative experiments?
And there are alternative experiments that are looking at other phenomena that are looking at the way these things called neutrinos behave.
Are these light particles, very, very light particles that are involved in weak interactions and they pass through almost everything, but they have very unusual properties and they might be able to shed light on some fundamental problems.
And so people are looking for them often in deep caverns in the earth where they build them really, really deep and in mines and things, hoping that they can stop them and analyze them.
And then more and more astronomical.
Studies where people are hoping as our sensitivities are getting better and better and they're coming up with new techniques, maybe they'll find something that sheds light on issues like dark matter and dark energy.
So, you know, the problem is I mean, the scale of these things now are huge, and so of course, they're very expensive.
And this gets back to, you know, the issue we talked about right at the beginning of this.
What is the value?
What value does society place on these things that are, as Sama said, not necessary for survival, but they are intrinsic to our need to understand and our curiosity?
And that's something we as a society have to evaluate.
Well, that's an interesting question.
How much money, do you know how much money has been dumped into the Large Hadron Collider to date or into CERN?
And who pays for all that?
So, I mean, I think the construction of the Large Hadron Collider was, I think they say, about $10 billion to get it to the point of finding the Higgs boson.
It's a consortium.
So, CERN, which is the consortium of countries, was actually an outgrowth of UNESCO.
So, it was created shortly after the end of World War II.
And it was a consortium of European countries that the idea was.
To unite these countries who often had been very recently enemies into the peaceful pursuit of science.
The idea is that science could be this unifying endeavor, that there's a truth to science that would transcend political differences and opinions and things like that.
And so there are these founding members.
Of CERN, and they each contribute money based on their size, and so that's where a lot of the money comes from.
And then there are other affiliate countries and institutions that contribute money for the privilege to be able to work on these experiments.
Because you know, essentially, if you want to be at the forefront of understanding particle physics, you need to be you know participating at CERN, and so other countries like the US, the US is a huge.
Contributor.
Are they really?
Yeah.
I was going to ask you how much of this money does the U.S. have financially into this?
You know, I'm not sure how much, but it's probably at least, I don't know.
I mean, again, I'm not sure.
I'd say an order of magnitude of 200 million or something like that.
So it's not inconsiderable.
And so what happens is it usually can come from, it can come from, The US government, but often also from universities.
So, universities that want to participate, they want to send their students there, then they contribute and they get affiliated with one of the experiments.
So, whether it's ATLAS or CMS or LACB, they contribute a certain amount of money for their students to go and to work there.
So, that's what you saw in the film.
Is that Monica, the graduate student Monica?
She was formerly, I think at that point, she changed.
She was at the University of Pennsylvania, then she was at the University of Chicago.
She was formerly a University of Chicago student.
She was living at CERN, working at CERN full time.
But it was the University of Chicago collaboration that was working on Atlas.
And they contribute a certain amount of money to do that.
And they build things, they work on it, so they work on the detectors.
So CERN itself, Is really, I think, I believe, really supported by the members.
So that's the ring.
That's permanent staff.
I think there are 1,500 or so people that are permanent there that are part of CERN.
The experiments are really independent things.
They are supported by the institutions that participate in it.
So, all the universities that work on ATLAS or ALICE or LACB or CMS, they are independent organizations, groups of universities that come together.
Yeah, we want to work on this together.
And we're going to have, we're going to put this much money into the experiments.
So the funding for the experiments is a little different from the funding of the ring that they maintain the ring.
The interesting thing to me about all of this, I think the most interesting thing to me is that, you know, there's so much that goes into this massive, massive undertaking of the LHC and all the experiments that go on.
And it's a very difficult thing for.
A normal everyday civilian to wrap their mind around, right?
You know, normally if someone explains this to somebody who's never heard about it, you say, Well, what's the point?
What's the goal?
What's the goal of all this?
But what I've realized is that no matter what the goal is, the coolest thing is that all the things that you can discover on the way to that goal, like for example, the World Wide Web, like all the different innovations that come along in the process of trying to reach some.
Peak, you know what I mean, or some summit of some like some big discovery, some aha discovery.
Is that the interesting things that are innovated or discovered or learned about on the you know during the process?
Yeah, I well, I think that is exactly the point, you know, and again, it relates to this question you brought up right at the head that that Savas encapsulates in other people is that, um, um.
You know, the people that do this for the most part don't do it because they want to make a better mousetrap.
You know, they're doing it because we want to understand, but the offshoot of that is unpredictable and immeasurable, and it has resulted in so many other things.
As I say already, I mean, from the LHC, I mean, the advances that we've gotten in understanding, you know, how to work with super cool temperature things, materials sciences.
Optics things, magnetic phenomena, information processing, the web.
Yeah, I mean, even just at the simplest level of information, I remember a number of years ago, we obviously are having an information explosion.
We're living in an age of information explosion.
And a cousin of mine was working in.
The field of bioinformation and, in particular, dealing with all the genetic sequencing and our understanding of genes.
And, you know, this used to be very hard and expensive, but it was changing where now the cost of, you know, sequencing DNA was getting, you know, less and less and easier and easier.
And suddenly people in biology were being, you know, faced with an enormous amount of data.
Information Explosion Era00:08:53
And they didn't know, you know, how do you deal with this?
And so they decided they need to seek out the advice of the people that deal with the most data of all, and it's the people at CERN.
And so they went to them and talked to them.
And so, one of the things that was interesting, he said at that time, is that at CERN, the amount of data created at the LHC, the trillions and trillions of collisions every second, it's impossible for us to imagine.
We can't deal with it.
It's happening too quick for our computers.
We can't possibly store it all.
And so, the first stage after the collision is that it goes through an analysis.
It's called the trigger, and it immediately Throws away a huge amount of data, which is things that they already know about and are not interesting.
And so it filters out at the very first stage a lot of uninteresting things that were not needed.
There's a lot of junk, a lot of things that aren't interesting.
And because they just can't even deal with anything else.
So this is a very, you know, and of course it's a very tricky thing because you're throwing away data.
But there's no alternative.
We just couldn't deal with it.
And what my cousin had said is at that point, he said biology wasn't at that.
Point where they could imagine throwing away data, but they were going to have to get to that point, you know, because there was.
And so, how to do that intelligently is something, again, it's not something you would even expect necessarily would be a result of the, you know, physics, but it's part of it.
And it's one of the things that has been an outgrowth of this, you know, you're pushing the frontiers of understanding in science and technology.
And that does eventually have, you know, it can have a certain.
Unexpected benefit.
So, but you're saying these when they when they collide all these particles, when they when they use this thing to collide the particles and these atoms together, whenever there are events that we've seen before during those collisions, we're able to just filter those out and only take the new things that we've never seen.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, not so simply new and old, but yes.
Yes, basically, exactly.
That there are a lot of things that are happening that we know are not interesting.
You know, there are a dime a dozen, and, you know, or, you know, just seen, you know, relics of something and, you know, just see the, you know, just focus on the new ones.
Yes, because we can't possibly keep all the information.
They can't possibly keep it.
So, you know, talking to people that are on the trigger division at the various experiments, they become, Very popular with their collaborators because certain theories predict certain things could happen.
And so it's a very tricky, you have to make some tricky decisions about what things you're going to eliminate because everybody may not agree on what are the interesting things, but they have to make certain decisions or they couldn't possibly deal with any of it.
Sort of like clickbaity headlines where they talk about making little black holes at the LHC or purposely creating black holes?
So the theory does predict that it's possible that it could create really many black holes, but the idea that it would create a black hole that would destroy the universe is just complete fiction.
You know, it was astonishingly, it was mostly promoted by this, you know, ridiculous high school science teacher in Hawaii.
And, you know, but because it had such, you know, sensationalistic aspects, it was picked up by the press everywhere.
And this guy really knew nothing.
I mean, in fact, as they, you know, they said if he read the next lines in a paper, you know, in any of the technical papers, that the same theory that predicted that you could possibly create a mini black hole also predicted it would evaporate almost immediately.
So, and, you know, but unfortunately, it did get the attention of the Press and I remember I was over there at CERN right before the first big turn on, and you know, there were big headlines, and so it did force the administration to basically take a couple of physicists and say, Okay, we really need to do another study, just definitively show that this is not a problem, which they did.
But, and you know, the other argument is that in the cosmos, there are collisions happening at far, far greater energies than we can ever create here, and The universe is here.
So, you know, if this was really a problem, if, you know, these high energy collisions could create these things that would destroy our universe, they, you know, most likely would have already happened and we wouldn't be here to worry about it.
How are we ever going to figure out what dark matter is?
Well, I mean, it's basically just blackness, nothingness, right?
That's how we can perceive it.
Yes, yes.
Well, but we do, it does have effects on mass and things like that.
So, you know, we do, dark means that it's not visible electromagnetically.
It doesn't mean that it's not all that it doesn't interact in other ways.
We know it interacts gravitationally.
So we can detect things that don't emit light because of the other properties.
I mean, there are other particles that, you know, don't emit light, that don't have a charge or something like that.
So we can detect them because of their interactions through these other forces.
Okay, does that make sense?
So, you know, you're saying how do we detect something because we can't see it, but seeing is only one way of detecting things.
We can detect things, which is how we know that it exists, which is how we know that dark matter exists because of gravity.
So it affects other things, right?
So, you know, if you saw something rotating, you know, you saw something that you can see and it's going around in a circle.
You know, we to keep something going in a circle, we know is gravity needs to keep something going in a circle.
There needs to be a force, okay.
I mean, even at the simplest level of Newton's laws, we know that things, you know, if they don't go in a straight line, there's got to be a force that's holding it in.
So, the reason things, you know, any object, any object with mass moves around something is because something is holding it in.
Now, that something could be.
Electricity and magnetism.
So, if you have a positive thing at the center and an electron around it, like this primitive idea of an atom, it's the electromagnetic force that's holding it together, the attraction between positive and negative charges.
You have the Earth going around the Sun.
It's because the Sun has a huge mass and the Earth also has mass and it moves around it.
But you know, suppose you know, it's possible that you don't see something.
So, suppose there's something out there and it doesn't emit light like the sun, but we see an object, we see a planet moving around something.
Okay, or even what we see is sometimes whole, you know, whole galaxies moving around something.
We know something is there.
Something is there.
We can't see it because it's not emitting light like the sun, but we know something is there.
And so that's how, you know, if you study the motion of these things, you know, what the speed is, what the distance is, what the curvature is.
Again, the curvature is really important.
How we can tell what the strength of this thing is and we can tell properties about it, even though we can't see it conventionally with light.
Have you ever seen the movie Interstellar?
Yes.
What did you think about it?
Do you like it?
Visualizing Time Curvature00:03:13
Personally, I liked the human story the most, but I think.
Kip Thorne was involved in it.
In fact, I think what I read is actually one of the originators of it.
Kip is a very, very respected physicist.
They made it as realistic as possible in a speculative way.
It was very legitimately done.
I know that the graphics people actually.
Really worked with, I think, with scientists, and even I think may have even written a couple of scientific papers on how do you visualize certain of those aspects of it and things like that.
So, it really dealt with that as well.
Again, you know, I mean, it is for me an interesting thing is I primarily consider myself a filmmaker at this point.
And so, when I look at a film, I'm looking at how they are dealing with that aspect of it.
And I thought there were some very interesting things there.
I thought, you know, with the You know, I actually thought the way that they handled some of the things nearer the end with the different dimensions with the daughter and the father was very, very interesting.
Actually, the hardest part for me to conceptualize was the way that time changed how he got farther away from the earth and time went slower for him than it went on earth because when he came back at the end, his daughter was like a hundred years old and he was still like the same age.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's a function of relativity.
You know, it's part of Einstein's theory in terms of how the time and space dimensions get altered.
And again, in a similar way to, I mean, you know, somewhat parallel to what I was talking about the way, you know, things shift when they're moving in color.
Right, that you shift frequencies.
There's a certain sense to what you can imagine that time also can be changing.
You know, that when you're moving, when you're under the effect of a field, of a strong gravitational field, or something like that.
So I don't know if that helps at all, but thinking in terms of the way we know that sound or colors can shift when you're moving, well, time can as well, actually.
I think the next thing that we're going to discover at CERN is time machines.
I think that would be pretty cool.
That would be cool.
What else are you working on now?
It's been a while since you released that movie.
Right.
So, in 2014, you released that?
Yeah, it actually premiered at festivals in 2013, and we sort of did the festival run for 2013, and then it actually came out in theaters in 2014.
And so it was nice.
Shannon and Information Theory00:15:10
I mean, I think that, you know, we had the benefit of a discovery that was on the front page of essentially every newspaper in the world, and people were interested in it.
I mean, they are, you know, people.
We were surprised.
I mean, look, when I started, I had no idea if anybody would be interested in this sort of film.
And it turns out that there's a lot of people that are interested in these questions and these fundamental pursuits.
So that went through 2014.
And then I actually got involved in, I made a new film about a man named Claude Shannon.
And Claude Shannon is this unbelievably unknown genius.
Who essentially laid the foundation for the information age?
And he is somebody who he really is the person that first realized what the significance of bits and that everything could be converted to zeros and ones.
I mean, he was somebody who was looking for a universal theory of communication.
So this was in the 40s, late 30s, 40s.
And, you know, we had all these different things like.
You know, I mean, we're developing radio and TV and text and all sorts of things that you wanted to communicate.
And what Shannon realized is fundamentally, what is it?
It's about communicating information.
You're transmitting information.
And nobody had really, there was no real theory of information.
I mean, I think information was considered to be this sort of abstract thing.
Probably people thought, well, information is about data and, you know, Amount of information, you know, how would you measure information?
Well, it's like the amount of text on a page or something like that.
And what Shannon realizes is that information is fundamentally about the resolution of uncertainty.
So it's something you didn't know and now you know.
That's the basic unit of information you find out something that you didn't know and now you know.
And that he realized that it basically could all be reduced to this simple binary thing.
Of, you know, not know or no, or true or false, yes, no, zero or one, a bit.
And so he realized that, you know, you could, if you changed all information, if you reduced it, if you changed it all into, you know, basically this question of a zero or a one, you could have a universal theory.
I mean, this would apply to any information, whether it's, you know, Text or pictures or sound or things like that.
It's all the same, then.
It's all zeros and ones.
And you could come up with a mathematical theory.
And he showed how you could measure it.
You could measure information mathematically.
And then you could optimize it.
You could talk about compressing it because he realized that a lot of things are redundant.
And so he looked initially at that, like the English language, where we know that if you have a Q, the U is going to generally follow.
And there's a lot of other things that we have incorporated in our grammar and patterns.
And he looked at it in a more general sense, realized that there's a lot of redundancy you don't need, so you could compress information, and that you could transmit it, and that you could actually come up with a theory of how to overcome errors in transmission of information.
And that if you had a good theory and an understanding of what you have, you could essentially code it in certain ways that could compensate for errors.
And the earliest, most popular manifestation of this was when we suddenly had CDs that could compensate for scratches because they could overcome scratches as opposed to an analog LP record.
But digital media could often be encoded in a way that it could compensate for scratches and things like that.
And so it was this comprehensive theory of communication that allowed you essentially to, if you were clever enough, To code things in a way that you could have efficient and perfect communication.
And it seems like such a distant memory of playing a CD in a CD player and having it skip.
Remember when you'd bounce it or you'd vibrate too much, the music would skip?
Yeah.
What was this guy's name again?
Claude Shannon.
Claude Shannon.
What led you to discover this guy?
Well, it was actually a friend who is an information theorist who told me about it.
He was a friend and he.
Said he has an idea for me for another film, and he said it's about Claude Shannon.
I admit I didn't know who Claude Shannon was myself, and then started reading about it.
You start thinking, How could we not know about this person?
He is so fundamental to everything in our modern world.
In a sense, he did three major things as a grad student.
As for his master's degree, he actually was the first person in 1938 to realize that you could meld something called Boolean algebra.
So, Boolean algebra was a mathematics of thought.
I mean, it's basically you know, you see these sort of logical arguments that you know, so and so does this, so and so does this, then this does this.
And it's sort of the logical statements that can lead to a conclusion that children don't like alligators, alligators eat children.
You could do this sort of series of things, and they were all just basically logical statements, and he showed how you could make those mathematical.
And they were all just being about true or false, that statements were either true or false, and you could make logical arguments.
And it was the basis of how we think that this is a logical argument.
And what Shannon realized is that.
Basic, you know, true false aspect could be mapped to electric circuits, which are either on or off.
And so, the on, you know, a circuit is either on or off, and then that could correspond to true or false.
And he showed that basically any logical argument, you could have an electric circuit to mimic it.
So, you could basically make circuits that could.
Do logic.
And so, in a sense, it's the basis of the idea of a modern computer that does something more than just, you know, adds numbers or things like that, or, you know, makes steam.
Like something that's true or false?
Yeah.
So, true or false could be correspond to just, you know, whether a circuit is on or off, whether a switch is, you know, connected or not.
And so, you know, the whole basis of this idea of a computer that, you know, really could.
Do logical operations comes from this.
And this was his master's thesis.
Then during the war, he was working, he was at Bell Labs, and he was working on cryptography.
And he wasn't that interested in specifics of code breaking.
So a lot of the effort during the war was how do we break a code?
This was like the Enigma with Alan Turing and things like that.
But Shannon was really interested in a much more theoretical, fundamental question is what is a code?
How much information do you need to break a code?
Can you make a code that's completely unbreakable?
And so he wrote a paper that basically people consider as the foundation of theoretical cryptography.
And then he really worked on it, he came up with this theory of information theory.
And it was really, he was working on it on and off for 10 years and didn't really talk to anybody about it.
It was just something nobody else even was thinking that there was a theory of information, a mathematical theory of information.
Communication like this.
And he sort of wrote a paper in 1948, two big papers that just sort of created this field and threw down a challenge basically because he predicted that if you could find the right way to code things into zeros and ones, if you could find the right way to code things in zeros and ones, and then to compensate for errors, that you could have perfect communication.
And he, you know, threw this down in his paper in 1948, and it took until the 90s to basically be able to prove everything.
And people began to use it right away.
And it was very important for even the Voyager, for our satellites, the way the reason we can actually communicate over these huge distances because they were using, applying principles that Shannon had laid down in terms of how you could compress the signals, how you could compensate for the noise of millions of miles of travel.
And it was used in, obviously, compression is something that is critical to our way of life.
I mean, the whole idea, the way we compress images, the ability to be able to.
For us to talk on Zoom and see images, then it all comes down to basic principles still of what Shannon laid down of how to encode information, how to transmit it.
So, you know, it seemed like a worthy subject, but even more is that when I began to read about him, I found out that he was a really unique individual in terms of he was very playful.
There was a series of, there was very little footage of him at all.
And he was very shy.
He didn't write a book, you know, I think in terms of why don't we know about him compared to other people.
But the IEEE, which is an electronic, the Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers, a professional society, they did an interview with him in the 80s.
And there were a couple of other interviews with him in the 80s too.
And It was at his house, and he was an inveterate inventor.
He not only had the mathematical skills, but he was also, he loved to build things and he had the ability to do that.
And so he built all sorts of things.
And so this interviewer came to interview him, and the interviewer wanted to talk about how he came up with certain theories and things.
And he just wanted to show various things he had built, which included, you know, a juggling W.C. Fields and a flaming trumpet and a chess playing machine.
And so he, you know, he built all these things.
That, you know, just showed a sort of playfulness that he had this curiosity of a child that he never lost.
And sometimes it revolutionized the world and sometimes it made a flaming trumpet.
And so to me, this, and again, this sort of, you know, it's somewhat related to the bigger issues we had, we've talked about of, you know, pursuing pure science and the reasons for doing it.
And Shannon epitomized for me somebody who.
Just, you know, he did, he pursued things out of just curiosity, this childlike curiosity, and it had tremendous results.
So he also, and I think that's another reason he's not so well known, is that after his paper in 48, he sort of threw this down as a challenge to people to try to prove it, to try to work out certain things.
And he did some work on it as well, but then he sort of got interested in other things and didn't really.
Pursue it as much.
And so he got interested in chess.
And so, in fact, Alan Turing came to visit when he was at Bell Labs.
And they were both working on top secret things in dealing with cryptography.
So they didn't talk about cryptography, but they both began to talk about chess and about the fact that, so again, this is in the 50s, early 50s.
Could a computer ever be able to play chess?
And so Shannon actually wrote the first paper about how a computer could play chess and built a primitive machine.
It could only play six moves because the computers didn't have that much capability at the time.
But he built the first, you know, at least one of the first computers that could play chess and wrote the first paper that I actually met some of the people at IBM that made Deep Blue.
So Deep Blue was the computer that IBM made.
That was the first computer to beat a world champion, a grand champion.
So it famously won the grand championship of chess.
And he said that basically everything still in terms of computer chess goes back to Shannon's paper, basically, that he laid the way for that.
So he built that.
He built one of the first, probably one of the first.
Artificial development, artificial intelligence devices of a little mouse that could find its way through a computer.
Then he got very interested in juggling and unicycles.
And he came up with a mathematical theory of juggling.
He built unicycles.
So he just was sort of extraordinary and he was very playful.
Mathematical Juggling Genius00:02:40
So to me, again, I got interested in the idea of this film.
First of all, I mean, to let people know what this man did, but also as a model of how.
And so the film actually is a.
I ended up doing a real hybrid film.
And so, where I was able to sort of recreate the interview, I mean, there was no footage, but I had this text and I sort of wrote a script based on that, you know, as if we were doing it and found somebody, had an actor, and we were able to film actually in Shannon's house.
And we were able to get a lot of these devices.
Some of the things he built were at MIT Museum and in various homes, and the family had them.
And so we recreated the house in the house and used this interview, you know, as a sort of core of the film, which was to really get the sense of Shannon as a person and then have other people talk about him and illustrate some of the things he did.
So that film, which is called The Bit Player, was something that I was working on, you know, for a couple years after that now.
And premiered last year at the World Science Festival, and it's actually now out on Amazon Prime and on Curiosity Stream.
So that was my last big effort.
What was the scientific theory for juggling?
I'm curious.
Well, yeah, he looked at it from a mathematical perspective of how long the ball is in your hand, how long the ball is in the air, gravity, the size of the ball.
As he said, even how many hands, the speed at which you throw it.
So, those are the different parameters that you can play with.
The theory of how high do you have to throw it, the speed, the number of balls.
And so, the idea of how could you come up with a theory of was there a prediction for how many balls you could juggle or what speed you would need with how many balls and things like that, what height you should do it at, what speed you should do it at.
You know, those are all the parameters that he was playing with.
And then he built this mechanical W.C. Fields figure that actually juggled.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
That's amazing how you can take things like juggling or chess and solve them with basic math equations.
Separating Meaning from Data00:03:13
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
I mean, that's the real genius how do you translate something like that into.
Into mathematics that can be useful.
And that's what, you know, that's what Shannon did.
Is he, in some sense, one of the genius things of information theory is that he was able to abstract from the complexities of the content of information.
And so the content doesn't matter.
That was, you know, we're never going to come up with a theory of information that could account for all the meaning because, you know, you can have, you know, every book has different sentences and you can't.
You can't measure the meaning, but what you can measure is the uncertainty, the intrinsic, you know,
how much of something is new, how much makes a difference, you know, and that you can measure, and, you know, it allows you to do so many things, like compress it or like.
Compensate for errors.
So it was this abstraction of information separating meaning from an intrinsic thing that you could actually deal with.
And, you know, it actually has had so many, has so many consequences now in unexpected fields.
I mean, when it first came out, there was a big move, you know, people, you know, just were like jumping on this idea of, you know, using it for everything, you know, gardening and this and that and landscape design and architecture and, you know, everybody, you know, in the social sciences and we're all excited about this idea and using it.
And Shannon sort of pulled back and he, Famously, wrote a very short paper, you know, where he said people should get off the bandwagon that this is, you know, we're this is a very specific theory and we're still working out the details and, you know, we need to focus on that first.
The irony is now it's continuing to have an incredible amount of applications unexpectedly.
And so, as you know, as varied as in genetics, where when we, you know, it's interestingly, I mean, relating to something I was telling something about before is.
You know, when you do it, when you try to sequence genes, we can't technically still, you can't basically do the whole thing in one strip.
We can't technically get a whole strand of DNA.
So, what they do is they do it in segments.
They have to break it up and do it in segments.
And then the question is, how do you put these segments back together again so that you're in the right order?
And it turns out that they're doing it using Shannon information theory.
It becomes an integral point, an integral tool for how to see how these things go back together again.
He's actually having a role.
Black Hole Information Loss00:04:47
I mean, information theory is important there.
It's turning out to be information in physics has turned out to be a very, very important concept.
And for a long time, physicists didn't care about it at all.
But it sort of changed with the idea when Stephen Hawking started talking about black holes, and black holes started becoming more.
Seriously considered.
And what, you know, a black hole is something where basically, you know, everything, it's so strong, the gravitational force is so strong that everything that comes, you know, too close to it basically gets sucked in.
Nothing can get out, not even light can get out.
That's why it's called black.
Okay, so there's another example of something you can't really see, but we can see the effects of it.
And we now know that there's black holes possibly at the center of every galaxy.
Anyways, the paradox.
Of the black hole, were that it seems that anything you threw in would be lost in terms of the information.
Hawking famously showed that, in fact, black holes can leak, that, you know, because of quantum mechanics at the edge, things can leak out, but it's just a very diffuse radiation.
So it doesn't reflect anything that went in there.
So, no matter what goes in there, you know, whether you throw an elephant in there or a book or anything like that, what comes out is all the same.
And so, information has been lost.
We've lost the information about what went in there.
What do you mean what comes out is all the same?
Think of it as radiation.
So, you know, okay, whatever, you know, more concretely, you know, if a star, a certain star goes in, certain stars fall into a black hole.
Other planets, things fall into it.
What comes out is just a certain radiation.
There's nothing that tells you what went into forming the black hole.
Okay.
Does that make sense?
Kind of losing me.
Okay.
Well, there's nothing, you know, it's just like, you know, different things can fall in, different planets, but what comes out is just light, you know, or heat.
Okay.
So it doesn't, there's nothing, we can't get, we can't learn anything about what went into the black hole by what comes out.
So, There's information lost.
The information about what the thing was that went in is not what comes out.
So, do things are you saying things actually are ejected out of black holes at a different position, like it's somewhere else?
No, not in somewhere else.
It comes out, you know, it radiates.
So, we know black holes, we can see that there's radiation coming out, very, very low level radiation.
Okay.
Okay, which was initially thought not to be possible.
It didn't seem like radiation is light.
It didn't seem like anything could come out.
We know things do come out, but what comes out isn't related to what went in.
And it seems like so.
The idea was it seemed like information was lost, that things fall into the black hole.
It seemed like that we lose information.
And now, and it's still a very hot topic, but it seems, and one of the things physicists have had to do is really go back to information theory and think about information carefully to try and understand it.
And so, It has, you know, information theory has become very important in cosmology in terms of its understanding.
So, again, you know, there are people that have claimed that information is actually more fundamental than a lot of other concepts in physics.
So, famously, there's a physicist named John Wheeler who basically Kip Thorne, I think, was Wheeler's student.
And so, Kip Thorne from, you know, Interstellar, right?
So, he Worked with Wheeler.
They wrote a famous book on gravitation.
And Wheeler very much believed that in the end, information was everything.
He famously coined the phrase it's from bits, that he felt that everything was ultimately going to have to be looked at from the terms of information.
Quantum Computer States00:14:22
So, you know, that's still, I don't think that's been borne out, but it's still something that people talk about is information.
Is that the fundamental way we should look at the world in terms of information?
Not just information and communication, but just is that the way we need to come up with a theory of the universe based on just information?
So it's had a lot of applications.
Well, it's interesting.
They do go hand in hand with the information that you get from combining particles with the LHC.
I mean, nothing means anything unless you have those ones and zeros that are transmitted to those hundreds of thousands of computers, right?
Right.
Yes.
Well, that is the way we analyze it for sure.
And that's, you know, I mean, again, CERN.
You know, um, uh, you know, is at the forefront of how do we handle so much information?
How can we compress it?
You know, one of the interesting things is right now is, you know, even with everything that CERN has done, the amount of information that we're having to deal with, not only at CERN, which is also expanding, but everywhere else, is, you know,
a lot of people believe really going to exceed our capability of advancing in terms of the classical way we construct computers, in terms of, you know, our chips, our semiconductor chips, and things like that.
And so, You know, one of the what chips, semiconductors, you know, the silicon chips, the things that are in our computers now, right?
So, so we've gotten used to these things getting faster and more powerful, right?
That every couple of years, there's new generations.
This was famously canonized in something called Moore's Law, and Moore's Law was this observation that Moore observed that.
It seemed like our abilities to make smaller and smaller and denser chips of semiconductors, you know, every year and a half would double our capacity.
And that has been true for many, many years.
And we had taken, you know, we have, you know, benefited from it as our devices get smaller and faster and things like that.
But we are approaching physical limits, you know, we're at the atomic level almost.
And so, And we're generating more and more data, especially like in artificial intelligence and things like that, with these so called machine learning devices that are becoming more and more evident.
It requires huge amounts of data.
And so, one of the things people are investigating is the idea of can we make a quantum computer, a computer that operates at the quantum level.
And so, IBM has now formed a consortium with a number of people, including CERN.
And so, I talked to some of my friends at CERN, and they're They're very concerned about the fact, no pun intended, about the ability to deal with all this.
And that, you know, are they going to need, you know, what is the future of computing that's going to allow them to deal with all of this?
So, again, information, it's information, information, information.
That's our.
Can you explain in dummy terms for me exactly what.
The most fundamental basis of what a quantum computer is?
Yeah, so I mean, you know, classical computers are based on, I mean, you know, essentially a computer is based on something that has two states, a binary state, right?
I'm going back to Shannon actually, really.
So, you know, whether it's on or off, that you can store information.
You can, if you change everything to zeros and ones, yeah, and you can have an array.
Of circuits that are on or off, you know, and you could have an on, open correspond to, you know, a zero, a closed correspond to a one.
So you could, you know, think about that.
You can arrange circuits that would, you know, basically be in a state of the zeros and ones, right?
Right.
That would encode information.
But what we know is that at the quantum level, quantum mechanical objects can exist in different states at the same time.
So basically, this is the strange thing about quantum mechanics.
That the quantum mechanics, and it's something where, yes, you know, you just raised your eyebrows and it's just, yes.
Starting to melt that brain here.
Okay, what does that mean?
And it's, you know, it's hard to comprehend because our brain, it is hard to think about what does that mean.
But I'll give you an example, the simplest example, or one of the best I've seen is if you think about a coin.
So, okay, so a coin can be, you know, up or down.
Okay, so a coin is heads or tails.
A coin is heads or tails.
And that sort of, you know, corresponds to a classical.
You know, chip basically a bit, okay, that it can be one or the other, just like an electronic switch could be on or off.
But what if I spin the coin and I say, well, what is it a heads or a tail when it's spinning?
Well, yeah, I mean, it technically has the little tiny edge around it.
It has the edge, but exactly, but it's, you know, it is in, it is, it's really in both states at that point, right?
Until it falls, until it.
And that is essentially a parallel to the way we think nature works, that nature is not in fixed states at the quantum level.
When we observe them, we see one state or the other.
But in the interim period, it is in both.
And so if you think of a classical computer, everything is fixed.
Everything is either on switch or off switch.
And so that is, you know, so any single switch can have two possibilities.
It could be open or closed.
Yeah, I can open a window or a program on my laptop, turn it, use it, edit a video on it, or shut it down.
And it's right.
Yeah, but this is even more basic than that is just, you know, what do you do when you open a program?
You know, it's going in there, and you know, there are physical, you know, there are physical, you know, electronics that are, you know, Either the current is going through here where there's a one, or it's not going through here or a zero.
And just think of everything as a sequence of zeros and ones, right?
Everything, every instruction, every piece of information, the color red is this, this is this, the letter A. Just think about how we code a letter and come up with it.
There's a certain accepted string of zeros and ones that corresponds to A.
A different one that corresponds to B. Everything.
So everything has a certain code to it.
Okay, but in a computer, those zeros and ones, each one of them is a circuit, a switch that's on or off.
Okay.
Okay, and so each one of those switches is either just one or two things.
But a quantum object, something that is actually behaving at a quantum mechanical level, a switch is much too big for quantum mechanics to be an effect.
It's a big thing, it's not just an atom.
But an atom itself, or an electron, or something like that, It's in a quantum mechanical state.
It's like the spinning coin.
And so it can be both at the same time.
So, you know, unlike in a classical computer where a switch is, it's either open or closed.
Okay.
An atom or an electron is spinning and it could be either up or down or in between.
And so intrinsically, it can hold more information.
Than this thing that's just up or down.
The spinning coin can intrinsically be including both information at the same time.
Just depending on how you're looking at it?
Yeah.
It depends on how you will look.
It depends on what you do to actually look at it at the end.
So if you can put in, you can basically, whereas in the switch, you can only either say it's either zero or one.
In that atom, you can say it's both at the same time.
And then the trick is how do you get the, you know, how do you observe it and see what is the thing that you want?
So the idea with the quantum computer is that if we can make components that actually operate quantum mechanically, there's a potential for storing a huge amount of information.
Much greater amount of information at the same time than you could in the, you know, with just a classical computer with chips.
Okay.
So the main advantage to a quantum computer is just storing way more information.
Way more information and being able to do calculations that are much, much more complex than you could ever do with a classical one because it would just take forever.
To do the classical ones.
So, things that would basically take forever, literally for as long as the universe has existed, there might be a possibility to do it with a quantum because it can just operate with so much more capacity and simultaneously.
So, for example, if we're talking about something like virtual reality or augmented reality, this is done with a traditional computer with the same type of information ones and zeros.
So, if you could imagine.
Something like augmented reality on steroids, like times a million.
More than a million, even, yeah.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, things that we think would take, you know, yeah, it's a completely different level of magnitude.
But the problem is, they're very hard to do.
So, there are quantum computers now, but they are very limited in what they can do because one of the problems is how do you manipulate things?
At that scale, and they're very unstable.
You know, when you're dealing with atoms, you know, as soon as you perturb them, they fall apart or they lose their orientation.
So, generally, you know, they have to be done at super, super cool temperatures so that there's no heat impacting it and things like that.
And so, you know, it's still, you know, it's another controversial thing.
It's again one of these things at this point.
It's incredibly fascinating and theoretically intriguing.
But there is debate in the field.
Is this, you know, like the LHC?
And in a sense, is quantum computing going to be practical?
Well, I mean, isn't a huge question also how are biological organisms like us going to be able to interact with it?
If it can store and quantify this massive amount of data, how can monkeys like us interact with it in a meaningful way, just like an iPhone?
These amazing devices, we only have our two thumbs.
We can only do so much with an iPhone.
So, like the input output with a human being, like we can type with our fingers on a keyboard.
There's only so much that we can do to interact with these computers.
So, isn't one of the big questions how are we going to be able to integrate with them to be able to do or learn anything meaningful?
Well, yes, but we do that through a regular computer.
So, as I say, there are.
You know, there are quantum computers that exist.
In fact, IBM has made one available to anybody.
They've put it, you basically can access it.
You know, if you go on the web and you look up IBM Q System, they have set it up and you interact with it like a regular computer.
So, the point of quantum computers is that the input and the output are regular computers.
So, we will interact with them.
So, you know, your point is a very good point.
Is that the way we interact with them is classically because that's the way we interact with things.
So the input is classical information.
So you're on a regular computer and you're writing a program.
Now, what those programs look like, that's one of the big challenges is what is the language to use for quantum computing.
Interacting with Quantum Machines00:08:30
But there are people that are working on that.
And as I say, there's online now, you can go online and there's a whole thing about play with a quantum computer.
The idea of IBM is they want to try to get people engaged and start to explore what they can do.
But you go on and you write, you know, you can program something and it sends bits, it sends zeros and ones to the quantum computer down to, you know, down to these, whatever the system is.
There's many, many quantum systems you can use.
And it sends it down there and it encodes the information in a quantum system.
And then you have to get that out of the quantum system.
And then translate it back into your classical computer.
Does that take the fun away from it, though?
What fun?
I mean, doesn't that take like interacting with a quantum computer?
I mean, you have, there's a 2D or a regular binary buffer between you and the quantum computer.
Like, wouldn't it be cool if you could just somehow directly interface with the quantum computer and eliminate all of the barriers that are.
Our biological bodies inhibit us from?
Well, it's not so much the biological bodies.
Well, except that, you know, look, we are entities that interact with our world through our senses.
So at some level, you have to interact with physical things.
You know, the fact is, quantum, you know, we can't possibly imagine, you know, we don't have the ability to pick up an atom, right?
Right.
So, at some level, you need something that actually interacts with the atom, and it's certainly nothing that we ever could do.
We can't pick an atom up and move it.
We can do it with a lot of devices, and they do.
In fact, we can move atoms now, actually.
I mean, we can actually move them around, but not with our hands.
We have these huge electron microscopes and scanning tunneling microscopes that can actually, they're enormous machines to interact with something at a quantum level.
So, at some level, you have to have.
Machines that are doing it.
And, you know, we just have to have, because of our physical limitations, we have to interact with a machine that can do it.
We can't, you know, I don't think there's ever any hope that we're going to actually be able to, you know, what's going to change?
You can't move an atom with your fingers, no matter how good a surgeon you are.
Right.
So you need equipment to do it.
We are dependent on tools at a certain level.
You know, I mean, that's an interesting philosophical question, is in a sense, you know, at the quantum level, we know it through the tools.
We know the world at the fundamental level.
At CERN, too, it's not like anybody ever really sees, in a classical sense, you know, with light, a Higgs boson.
It's all many steps.
It's measured, right?
It's all measured from these devices that we've, you know, We've come up with our tools.
Our tools, you know, the way we understand the universe is basically through whatever tools we use to observe it.
And so, you know, at the macroscopic level, we have our eyes, and, you know, there's some perception of it, but our picture of the universe is based on, you know, our biology of how we see things.
But as soon as we get beyond things that we can see, then it's based on.
The data and tools that we have, and the picture that we draw from that.
Right.
I mean, we will never, you know, what does an atom look like?
It's based on something that these machines give us an answer to, a picture of.
So there's that abstraction of, you know, the way the universe looks is based on.
The way we look at it, whatever tools we have, a tool looks at it this way and it can detect this part of it, then we construct an image of it from that.
Didn't we recently actually get an image from a telescope of a black hole?
Yeah, multiple telescopes.
Yeah, I mean.
So we have an idea of what it could look like.
Yeah, it looks like a black hole.
It's black.
With a ring around it.
No, it does.
It was very exciting.
I mean, it was, you know, and again, it was.
But again, there, you know, telescope, it's an abstraction.
It's looking at electromagnetic radiation and these big radio telescopes that are looking, and it was basically done by using multiple ones all around the Earth.
Right.
So, yes, but it is true.
And again, it's another example where we've created this image, but it's based on, you know, I mean, these things that, you know, look like radar dishes and, you know, telescopes.
I mean, they're gaining all this data.
And then they combined it all in very sophisticated ways to make a composite image of a black hole, which was, yeah, it's very exciting to actually see what this looks like.
And the hope is that we can study it and study what happens around the perimeter and things like that.
So, look, I mean, the idea of a black hole was initially just an anomaly.
I mean, it was in Einstein's theory of general relativity that there was this problem.
That it predicted these things where everything blew up basically.
And for a long time, it just was regarded as a mathematical anomaly.
And then, you know, people began to think, well, actually, maybe can we study these things?
Maybe it's not just something where the math falls apart.
Maybe we can actually learn something about these mathematically.
And eventually, people did begin to figure things out about it.
And now we think we've, you know, we predicted that they were existing and now we've.
Seen one, you know, and you know, so first it was just we could see that there was evidence of one, as I talked about before.
You could see things rotating around something that was black, and it was so heavy that you had to think it made up in black home.
Now, with this new thing that you the image that you've seen, they're actually see it, you know.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Well, look, man, I really appreciate you giving me your time.
We just did two hours of fascinating, a fascinating conversation, and I hope it can do.
I could sit here for 10 hours and talk to you about this stuff.
I just.
It blows my mind, some of these concepts and ideas.
Tell people who are listening where they can find out more about what you're doing with your filmmaking and the other stuff that you're creating.
Yes.
So, Particle Fever, which is the film about the discovery of the Higgs boson, that's pretty widely available now.
It's on Amazon, iTunes, Curiosity Stream, many, many places.
And the bit player about Claude Shannon and information theory is now on Amazon Prime and on Curiosity Stream.
And I'm, you know, my next project I'm working on now is an adaptation of Richard Power's book, The Gold Bug Variations.
And so that'll be a fiction film, and it's looking at overlaps in music and biology and molecular biology, and again, exploring this idea of what is the best way to look at the world and to live in it.
Upcoming Fiction Film Adaptation00:00:22
So, when do you plan on releasing that one?
Well, I've got to shoot it first.
It's a script right now.
Well, awesome, man.
Good.
I really appreciate your time, and it was great meeting you, Mark.
Great.
Well, it was a pleasure.
And I hope that answered some of your questions and that some of your listeners will be intrigued as well.