Jim Gates recounts his journey from Newfoundland to MIT, where he studied under Feynman and Witten before debunking warp drives via Einstein's relativity while defending DARPA's integrity. He contrasts SpaceX's reusable rockets with the radiation risks of Mars colonization and explores supersymmetry as a potential path to anti-gravity. Gates also details solving complex permutahedra calculations in dreams like Ramanujan, questions AI consciousness despite its power usage, and discusses microbial life in Jupiter's atmosphere, ultimately arguing that scientific rigor remains our best tool for understanding the universe. [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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Unusual Childhood and Science00:13:50
All right, Jim, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, Danny.
Thank you so much for coming, man.
We've been chatting for a while and trying to make this happen for quite a while.
We have.
And as you know, my life, I have four careers.
And so it makes it really hard to commit to anything.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
For people out there who may not be familiar with you, can you please give us a brief background in your academic career?
And then after that, I kind of want to go back. backwards in time into your childhood and how you got started in all this stuff?
I'm happy to do that.
And thank you for saying that there are people out there who likely don't know about me.
That's actually something I work very hard to make sure is true.
I am not someone who feels a need to be out there like so many.
So academic career.
Let me go back to when I first decided I wanted to become a scientist.
So I was four years old and we were living in St. John's, Newfoundland.
My mother took me to see a science fiction movie.
I think it's the first movie I ever saw in life.
For whatever reason, to my four-year-old mind, I decided science was a doorway to fun and adventure.
What else does a four-year-old boy want in life?
So the next part I don't remember, but my parents often said that evening when dad came home, I told him I want to become a scientist.
So that's the beginning for me of the dream of becoming a scientist.
Remember the movie?
Yes.
A couple of years ago, maybe 10 or so, I started to use the web to see if I could find scenes that had been locked up here since I was four years old.
Maybe it was 15 or 20 years ago I started the search.
Probably 10 years ago I found the movie.
It's a movie called Space Ways.
It stars Howard Duff and Eva Bartok.
Space Ways?
Space Ways.
Oh, wow.
It's a terrible early 1950s science fiction story.
It's science fiction.
It's a love story, science fiction, and a murder mystery all rolled into one.
And so it's that YouTube.
So I watched it when I found it and said, you know, I'm glad I took the science part out of that.
And so you were only four years old, huh?
Yeah, when I first thought that science would be a cool thing.
So my dad was in the U.S. Army, which is why we were living in Canada at the time.
And we moved around quite a bit as a kid.
I was actually born here in Tampa.
But by the time I was one year old, we were living in Cocoa Beach.
By the time I was two years old, we were living in San Antonio, Texas.
Oh, wow.
And then by the time I was three years old, we were living in Canada in St. John's, Newfoundland.
Oh, you were all over the place.
Yeah.
And by the time I finished sixth grade, I had been to six different schools.
So I had a rather unusual childhood.
But one of the concepts do you have any brothers or sisters?
I had two brothers and a sister.
Unfortunately, one of my brothers was deceased as of 2006.
Sorry.
No problem.
It's a part of life.
Death also is a part of my academic trajectory.
It's really, let me just explain it.
I'll try to make it all make sense.
So I started school in El Paso, Texas.
Fort Bliss, there's a big army base there.
Daddy was stationed there.
And when I started school, I already knew how to add and subtract, but I couldn't read.
And that was the greatest challenge I had at the time, was learning to read.
There was a parent-teacher conference, and the teacher told my parent that, you know, he's really good at arithmetic.
She didn't use these words, but the equivalent was he sucks when it comes to reading.
But she suggested that if my father took some books home about things I really loved, I'd probably put that same energy from Arithmetic and the learning to read and write.
Dad remembered his four-year-old son came home and said he wanted to be a scientist.
And so Dad bought two kinds of books, books on horses, because I loved horses, Roy Rogers, and books on space travel and science.
And so very quickly I was reading very well because it was driven by my own internal desire.
We're kind of a strange family in the sense that I am the third generation in my family who sort of makes their living, at least in part, using mathematics.
My grandfather was a sugarcane farmer.
In Alabama.
The family story is he could neither read nor write, but he could do arithmetic.
Why would it?
Yes, exactly.
That's the reaction people are asking.
Why would that be so?
Well, it turns out if you are familiar with people who live on farms, you know that it is often the case that as a farmer, you have to get seeds and implements in order to bring in a crop, and you have to go to stores in order to make that happen.
When you do that, it's typically on a loan basis.
You get basically effectively a loan that has to be paid back.
when the crops come in.
Right.
So those ledgers can be subjects of disagreement, shall we say?
And one way, apparently, like I said from our family stories, that my grandfather learned to do arithmetic was in order to put himself in the position of being fairly treated by store owners.
Wow.
So it was a practical skill.
It wasn't something highfalutin.
It was a practical skill.
Right.
And my dad never finished high school, but he was committed to the idea of education.
And when in the 60s, he was working on his general equivalency exam.
I remember watching him study trigonometry and algebra and having the time of his life.
So our love for mathematics comes sort of back that far.
I have two children who are going to be scientists, and one of them studies black holes.
Studies black holes.
My daughter studies black holes.
I have a twin boy and a girl.
My son studies biology, and he grows human neurons on artificial surfaces.
Oh, wow.
So we are a science family.
My wife is a medical doctor.
But in my trajectory, like I said, we came about it naturally.
And when I was in high school or junior high, as it was called back then, I developed a deep passion for science.
I loved mathematics because that's part of our family tradition.
And I also had a deep passion for Marvel comic books.
And that was a very important thing, although at the time I was just having fun.
But I noticed even at that point that when I was in 10th and 11th grade, perhaps, most of my classmates had lost interest in using their imagination.
Young kids use their imagination all the time.
They play, right?
And everyone's used to that.
But by the time folks get to be teenagers, you can see sort of a diminishment in these.
But because I read comic books, my imagination was sustained all through my high school years.
And that imagination has ultimately blossomed in the fact that I create mathematics at this point in my life.
Well, let me ask you a question.
Next week, will there be more music than this week?
More music?
More music.
Of course.
Next week, will there be more mathematics than this week?
More mathematics?
Ah.
No.
The answer is yes.
There will be.
There will be.
Because you see, mathematics is a human construct.
And the reason I put this question to people is everyone's used to the fact that music comes out of people's creativity and therefore there will always be new songs written.
Mathematics at the level of actually doing mathematics, not what most people learn at school, because what you're learning at school is a tool to basically navigate situations in life, much like my grandfather.
But if you're actually doing mathematics, it more resembles a creation of music.
Interesting.
So that high school fascination with Marvel, the Fantastic Four, which was my favorite group, and the Inhumans, and Bruce Bannard, the Hulk, and Henry Pym, the Giant Man, these were all scientific characters.
And so they fed into my internal sort of desire and dream to become a scientist.
Were you a very social kid when you were in junior high?
Were you.
That's a wonderful question.
And the answer is no.
I was not a social kid when I was in junior high.
I was a nerdy kid.
You know, look, at this point in my life, I have to wear glasses.
But at that point, I buy glasses because I like to look at my face.
You just have glasses on your face.
Oh, really?
You like to look smart?
I like to look smart.
And my friends, you know, it's all that kid's smart.
So yeah, I was doing stuff like that.
And so.
But being a nerdy kid is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in your late teenage years.
Right.
So early, you know, in school in those days, they used to have what we call talent shows where students would get up and sing a dance or perform something in performance art.
I was never on that stage, and I never wanted to be on that stage.
I sat right there and clapped my hands when the things were good.
But around 10th grade or so, I decided to change the way people saw me.
Treated me because, like I said, being a nerd is not necessarily, you know, being athlete in school, but being the kid known as the smartest kid in school is not necessarily so rewarding, right?
So, I consciously made a decision to create a character I called Jim Gates because Sylvester Gates is who I really am, but Jim Gates is the program that runs on that core.
Oh, yeah, yeah, and that's who you're talking to, by the way.
When did you create Jim?
I started at 10th grade or so, 10th grade, yeah, and so I understood that I had to.
Change sort of my psychology in dealing with people.
If you want people to treat you well, then you have to sort of open up.
And you can't be a cipher, this black hole where information doesn't come out and stuff goes in.
So, yeah, it was a conscious effort.
And that also was fed by the fact that ultimately I was the, I had a physics teacher named Mr. Freeman Coney.
And I was in 11th grade.
When I took his class, I realized it was not all of science that I wanted to do, but only physics.
But not just physics of like building stuff because I love math.
I wanted to do physics at the boundary of reality and mathematics.
I call that place mathicality, and I always knew that's what I wanted to do.
I also, because of the use of my imagination, I kind of got a hint that it's a little bit like creating music.
Even at that age, I knew that.
And so that was sort of. an eye-opening moment for me.
The other eye-opening moment was when I was 14.
And I was an avid TV watcher at that age.
And so I watched all kinds of things.
But there was this show called Make Room for Daddy starring Danny Thomas.
And in one episode, a relative of his came to visit the family.
This kid was portrayed as some kind of super genius kid.
And even though I didn't think I was a super genius kid, I thought, well, that's the kind of guy I kind of want to be like.
And he went to college at this place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.
And that was the first time I had heard of such a place.
And what I got from the television story was it was a university or college where the only thing they made you study was math and science.
I called that the good stuff.
And so that was my decision to want to go there at age 14.
Wow.
So that's my early trajectory.
You said you spent a lot of time reading comic books.
Yes.
And you were really inspired at a young age watching a science fiction movie.
Yes.
Were you were you sort of like really interested in things like space travel or like bigger, crazier ideas of like the universe?
Or was it all just, were you just loving the process of doing math and being obsessed with physics?
So you have touched on the guide stars for my life in that period.
Not only was I reading science fiction, but I was also reading about real science.
I was fascinated by the space race.
You know, this is like, It's post-Sputnik 57, the Russians put up a satellite.
And therefore, there was a lot in the popular media discussing science and not just science fiction.
So, for example, there were television shows like there was one show that had a real large impact on me.
The name of the show was Men Into Space.
And it was a drama series of anthologies telling stories about what space travel would be like once humans started to explore space, near space to the earth.
So that was a great inspiration.
And the other inspiration was just learning about science, learning about molecules and atoms and chemistry, which I was obviously doing in school, but also integrating that into sort of a deeper level of my emotional attachment to the universe.
Going back a little bit earlier, when I was about seven or eight years old, we made a car trip.
No, I'm sorry.
In 1956, when our family came back from Canada, we made a car trip from New Jersey.
Hydration as a Treat00:03:18
to El Paso, Texas.
And one night as we were driving along, I remember laying my head back and looking out of the rear window of our car.
And this was the first time I basically saw the stars in the Milky Way that you can see outside of a city because it's an amazing light show up.
And so that was part of who I was.
I was taking in all these things.
It's like a computer, you feed data in it.
I was taking in this stuff.
And so That experience in particular made me begin to understand how small we are because if those points of light are stars or like our sun, which I had learned about, and they look like just tiny points of light, how far away are they?
Right.
And so I experienced a kind of an internal, emotional, intellectual big bang from that experience.
So all of those are things that went into the mix of who I am today.
And, you know, as I look at it, it's amazing to me that there was this.
Coherent driving force in my life from four years old to 18, and it all pointed to science and math.
And like I said, I don't know why, but that's my story.
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You know, I remember it's really embarrassing to admit, but I was in my 20s when I found out.
That the stars in the sky were actually like suns.
Yes.
I was like, oh God.
When I finally understood it, I was like, oh my, I'm so dumb.
But at least now my six year old understands it.
So I feel like I'm a little bit.
That's a great legacy that you have.
Yeah, exactly.
So, like I said, there were always these coherent drivers in my life all through my, from four years onward, that pointed towards me.
Stars Were Suns00:03:40
Combining my love of mathematics and the study of nature, and in some sense, entering a deep intellectual connection of how I am connected to the universe.
Of how you're connected to the universe?
Yes.
Because all of us, one of the most fundamental questions I think a human can ask is, Who am I?
But another is, Where's this place?
And the third is, How am I situated in this place?
So these are philosophical questions, certainly.
My perception as a child and a young adult into young adulthood, and I guess even now, was that the best way for me to understand the answer to those questions was to pursue a career in science.
You first went to MIT, is that correct?
69.
Well, I told you about Danny Thomas, so let me back up a little bit.
Okay.
So, watching the show back when I was 14, I learned about MIT.
When I was a senior, we took the standard test and I did okay on the SATs, but I did a fantastic job on physics because there's a separate.
Oh.
Naughty, naughty.
Yes.
So when I was around 16, 17, I, you know, my father had always asked us, what college do you want to go to?
I had no answer until I heard about MIT.
By the time I was in high school and applying to college, I took the SAT exam and I took a subject test, particularly in physics, that I did very well because of the excellent physics teacher I had in 11th grade, a guy named Mr. Friedman Coney.
And that caused a number of institutions to send invitations to apply.
One of those invitations was from MIT.
And so a couple of weeks after that invitation arrived, I would always take these things so my father could see them.
But a couple of weeks after the one from MIT arrived, he said, so have you filled out your application for MIT?
And I said, no, Dad.
And then he said, why not?
Isn't that the place you were talking about when you were 14?
I said, yes, that's the same place.
And then he says, so why are you not going to apply?
And my response was, because you know they don't take people like us.
Because I was born in 1950 here in Tampa.
And even from my birth, the impact of segregation was present in my life.
So, for example, there used to be a hospital here in the Tampa area called the Lily White Benevolent Society.
It was a hospital run by them.
Back when African Americans did have a general access to public facilities, those communities banded together and created their own.
So I was born in such a hospital all year in Tampa.
And so I was, and then spending six years in Orlando, again, it was reinforced to me that, well, the way I finally said is I realized that I was living in a society that was betting against me.
And so I was not going to put myself in the position of losing the bet of going to MIT.
My father, who had spent 28 years in the army, said, you're going to apply.
Yes, sir, I'm going to apply because if you have a father like that, you don't have a discussion about these kinds of points.
Nobel Prize Encounter00:06:59
Right.
So I did apply.
And in the spring, one day I came home from school.
He was sitting on the front porch in our rocking couch in Orlando.
And he was rocking very enthusiastically with this enormous smile on his face.
And it was odd because my father was never home.
Before I got home from school, but he was that day.
And when I first saw me, the smile got even larger.
And that's the instant I knew that I had been admitted to MIT.
No way.
Wait.
Wow.
And so I ran over to him.
I tell people it's like watching one of these movies with two lovers and they run up in slow motion and then they hug each other.
I mean, I ran, you know, we sort of ran together in the front yard.
He gave me this big hug and said, You're in, you're in, you're in.
And you, throughout your career there, you rubbed shoulders with lots of.
Prominent members of the physics and science community.
I think you were showing me a photo of you with Stephen Hawking.
Stephen Hawking.
How could I forget?
Yeah.
So, you know, I went off to MIT and I wrote his first thesis on this very peculiar piece of mathematics that is actually the basis for string theory.
I did it before string theory existed.
That's how I, my combination of understanding math.
And so in 1980, Stephen hosted a conference in Cambridge, England, and he invited. a group of us young scientists who were working on this new theory.
Like, that's the question I ask you, is there going to be new mathematics?
We were people actually doing this new mathematics at that point.
And so a group of us were invited to Cambridge, and I first met Stephen there in 1980.
Before that, I guess it was, no, actually it was that same year, I received an appointment at Caltech.
And I was working in a group of two extraordinarily famous scientists.
One of them was Murray Gell-Mann.
Who in the early 60s had gotten a Nobel Prize for understanding what's inside of protons.
And then the other person who was the head of the group I was in was Richard Feynman, who was this utterly fantastic guy, amazing man.
And so those were some of the people who had a major influence on me as I'm making the transition from being a student to being an actual independent researcher, looking at questions about what does the universe look like when you think of things smaller than atoms.
What is space itself, space and time?
What did Einstein do?
So I'm dealing with all these questions in this period.
And these are the most prominent senior people, people that haven't influenced me.
There's one more gentleman of the same category.
All three of the people I'm naming are Nobel laureates.
And that's a Pakistani scientist by the name of Abdus Salam.
Abdus I met in 1981 because, like Stephen, he was interested in this new piece of math that these young kids were developing.
So they had a conference in Trieste, Italy, which is most people have never heard of Trieste, but it's not so far from Venice, and most people know about Venice.
So they had a conference, and Abdus met me.
And so he's the third of the three giants who basically set the course for my research career.
I had other people who were not giants who contributed, like Dr. Shirley Jackson, who, African-American physicist, went on to become the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic.
My PhD thesis advisor, James Young, was African-American.
I think he's a first African-American to get a PhD in physics from MIT.
So they had laid, you know, foundations, but these giants basically gave pushes.
Wow.
And how old were you when you were hanging out with these guys?
So this is 1980, so I'm 30 years old, 30, 31, 32.
And what kind of like, what kind of conversations were you having with these guys?
Like just casually hanging out, having dinner, and what would you guys chat about?
So thank you for asking that question because it gives me a chance to relay several stories that I'm very fond of.
The first story I'm going to relay is my first encounter with Richard Feynman.
So I'm a new postdoc at Caltech and they had a tradition that at the beginning of the academic year, new postdocs and other researchers and graduate students would all go to lunch in this particular research group, would all go to lunch at a place called the Red Dragon.
Red Dragon.
Red Dragon, because Chinese food was the favorite.
So we were all sitting around a big round table, and I found myself sitting a little bit further away from you with Richard Feynman being right there.
All the time I had been a student at MIT and then later at Harvard, he was just well, many of us think he was the smartest scientist after Einstein.
This guy was incredible.
And so suddenly to be confronted by this genius level person that I had been reading about his ideas, I remember in graduate school learning something he, a piece of mathematics he created called, it's got a technical term but it's relativistic perturbative theory.
It's a kind of way of making calculations about atoms and he's the first person to figure out how to do it and that's why he won the Nobel Prize.
And I remember studying that as a graduate student.
When I was in high school, I had learned about Einstein and relativity and all his stuff from Mr. Coney, and I thought, wow.
But when I got to graduate school and saw perturbative relativistic quantum field theory, I was like, I don't understand how human minds can do this.
I mean, Einstein could understand.
I could not understand what Feynman had done.
And so when I met him in person, I was just like, oh my God, there he is, the guy who did this.
It's not something that most people will ever encounter in life.
But it's one of the most startling human achievements in understanding the universe that has ever been made.
It is the thing that quantum field theory.
Quantum field theory.
This is the mathematics that lets us discover things like the Higgs boson, which I know people have heard about the Higgs boson, or finding new forms of nuclear energy.
This is the mathematics that enables that.
And it was invented by him, essentially.
So I'm sitting across the table and people are talking.
And my thought is, if I say anything, he'll figure out I'm an idiot.
So he'll what?
Figure out that I am an idiot.
Oh, okay.
And so under those circumstances, what's the best way to proceed?
Amanita Nervous System Modulator00:02:59
How about say nothing?
So I'm sitting at the table and the conversation is going on.
Feynman was like just an amazing person.
He was fun and a genius.
I mean, just.
Perhaps some of your viewers will use this as an opportunity to go find out on this guy.
So I'm sitting there quietly.
And then finally he turns to me because he noticed I hadn't said a word.
He says, Mr. Gates, that's your name, isn't it?
I said, yes, Professor Feynman.
And then he said, you know, when I was your age, I wanted to wear my hair just like that.
There's a picture of me at those age.
I have a circle, a huge, perfectly circle afro.
And that's what he said he wanted to have as a kid.
And that was my reaction.
Pull up a picture of Richard Feynman in the 80s, see if you can find it.
And I'll send you the picture of me and my afro if you want.
And do you have a picture of you guys together?
No, I was never clever enough to get that picture.
So I only have the story.
But when he said that my reaction was exactly the same as yours, I broke into laughter.
And then suddenly, I was never afraid to speak to Richard Feynman again.
Wow.
Yeah, I can picture it.
Yeah, he was an amazing guy.
I think he could pull it off.
Oh, look, this is what happened.
If you read about him, you'll find out he played bongo drums.
He was at Los Alamos.
In fact, the movie Oppenheimer, there's someone who portrays him in the movie.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So he was quite an amazing character, in addition to being just this amazing genius physicist.
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Emulating Creative Minds00:03:07
What is it about?
Is there, you've spent so much time with these sorts of people and you are one of them yourself.
What sort of common attributes do you think these people have that makes them such abstract thinkers and such geniuses?
Two things I have seen that I have tried to emulate in my career.
One of them is.
is a deep, passionate, emotional attachment to what they're doing.
Most people think of mathematics as being something cold and very separated from one's emotions, but that's not what I ever saw in any of these people.
It was a deep passion.
I would use the word love for what I saw them doing in their work.
And I've tried to, as I said in my own career, I've tried to emulate that.
The other thing is an absolute commitment to being their own person in how they think about problems.
Because if you look at most of the way that we humans behave, We're actually herd animals and so we are influenced by the what I like to call the human ecosystem around us in our discussions.
These people all had an absolute rigid, maybe the obsession is right, rigid to get it to think about the way I think and by I mean the person doing the thinking, either Feynman or Gail Maher.
Interesting.
So it's the kind of iconoclasty where yes, they listen to what's going on around them, but the actual things that they think about Is internally generated.
And that means that they're not following the crowd.
There's a saying about marching to your own band.
Each one of them, in their own way, was marching to their own intellectual and mathematical and physical band.
Interesting.
So they don't let outside influences corrupt their way of thinking or their decision making?
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
Because, you know, it kind of ties to a little bit what you were mentioning earlier in your childhood, how, you know, You said that you kind of were able to be creative longer into your, you know, deeper into your youth compared to the people that you were around because you were exposed to the comic books.
And, you know, that seems to be a common thing with people, you know, because kids seem to be more creative, more playful.
And then as soon as they get, as soon as you start to get indoctrinated into the rigid, Responsibilities of everyday society and having a job and paying bills and all that stuff, that stuff seems to sort of dissolve.
And that's what I was observing when I was reading comic books and science fiction in high school.
I was aware of the fact that my classmates effectively were stopping doing that.
The Manhattan Project Legacy00:11:56
Oh, wow.
You noticed it that early.
Yes.
That's why I actually told that part of my story earlier.
The The involvement with creativity at the level of art, music, and in my case, comic books, is actually the foundation for how you can make singular innovative advances in advanced science.
Okay, so you're in MIT, and how many years total did you spend at MIT?
So I was admitted as a freshman to MIT in 1969.
And then in 1973, I got my two bachelor's degrees, which was an accident, but it's true.
Uh, one bachelor's, and my first bachelor's is in physics and my second bachelor's no, i'm sorry.
My first bachelor's was in mathematics and my second bachelor's was in physics.
And the reason it was an accident was because my grades in mathematics were better.
So I declared myself a math major because I was thinking about grad school but I was studying physics, so that was my love.
And then in my senior year, a friend by the name of Ines Hope said, I bet you they'll let you get both degrees.
And we went to the physics headquarters.
They looked at my transcript, said, you look just like a physics major.
All you got to do is take the lab courses.
So I wound up with two degrees in four years, but that was not a plan.
Oh, wow.
Then, from I applied to graduate school in 1973 and fortunately got admitted, and that's a whole other story you don't have time to hear.
But I got my PhD in '77 from MIT.
So that's my formal academic training before I went to Harvard in '77 after I got my PhD.
And that's when I started meeting these Nobel laureates because although I didn't ever have a close interaction with them, Steven Weinberg was.
also a Nobel laureate, and it was at Harvard when I was beginning my first postdoc.
And in fact, he invited me to give a lecture to his lecture series, seminar series that he was running.
And then from when I finished at Harvard in 80 was when I went to Caltech and began a two-year appointment.
And so that's when now I'm meeting Feynman and Gelman and Salam and just, you know, the big thinkers, so to speak.
Did you ever come in contact with Ed Witten?
Did I come in contact?
Let me tell you some Witten stories.
I would love it.
So in 1975, when I was still a graduate student at MIT, but Edward was at Harvard, one day, I'm sorry, at one point, another Nobel laureate came to give lectures at Harvard.
And so a number of us would get on the bus down at MIT and go up Mass Ave to Harvard and then go to the physics lectures to hear this Nobel laureate.
And At the end of one of those lectures, I was sitting near the back because I'm never a front row guy in some sense.
I was sitting in the back with some of my office mates.
And at the end of the lecture, this person stood up behind us and asked this incredibly deep, intricate question.
And so I didn't turn around to look at him, but I talked, I leaned over to my office mate and said, who is that guy back there?
And my office mate said, oh, that's Ed Witten.
He thinks he's smart.
And to this day, I'm like, he was right.
He was right.
He was smart.
So yeah, that was the first time I saw Edward.
I didn't actually speak to Edward until I was in the period from 77 to 80 when I was a postgraduate researcher at Harvard.
I was a junior fellow, which is a very prestigious organization there where they basically hire you to do what you want.
You don't have to work under any particular senior professor.
You can explore your interests.
And so I was exploring this kind of weird mathematics that underlies string theory at that point.
This is before string theory existed, but it had gotten me there.
And so one day I was walking down the hallway and Edward had the door to his office open.
I had never spoken to Edward.
And he said, Jim, what are you doing?
Come on in.
And I always felt, you know, I was like, you know how in cartoons people turn into water?
That's how I felt.
I'm like, oh my God.
He knows, first of all, he knows my name because I had never spoken to him.
And then he asked me what physics I was doing.
And I explained what I had just been doing recently.
And this is the first time I saw genius up close in my life.
So I was explaining something that no one else in the world had worked out.
And I had just sort of gotten to the beginning of figuring out the answer to this problem.
But I had had some insight.
I explained it to Ed, and very quickly, he had.
It was like watching.
Most of us in reading alphabet would say A, B, C, D, right?
It was like watching someone say A, Z in terms of the intellectual gap that he had filled within seconds on this problem that I was thinking about.
It's the first time I had seen genius.
And so, you know, and Ed is a friend.
I mean, a couple of years later, when I was actually visiting the International Center of Theoretical Physics in Italy, Edward came through, and again, to my great surprise, he sent a message that he'd like to have a conversation about physics.
And so, you know, when you meet these super genius guys and they want to talk to you about physics, it's like maybe I'm not an idiot after all.
What was that problem that you were explaining to him?
It wasn't that I was so much explaining to him, I was reflecting. on something he had done.
Oh, okay.
It had, to my mind, this is the best paper it has ever written.
It had written a paper which explained how certain particles create other particles.
It's something called, it's something called pi zero go to two gamma is the technical language.
But he explained it with a beautiful piece of mathematics that no one had ever in the history of physics come upon.
And so I was talking to him about this particular paper because I wanted to extend that to the kind of mathematics that I was studying.
Remember, I told you I was looking at the mathematics that lies at the foundation of string theory.
And so I wanted to extend Ed's result into that, and that was our conversation.
But I was surprised that he asked me to come and talk.
Wow.
Yeah, I've heard a lot about him and his father.
His father, Lewis Witten, was a legendary.
Guy, too.
Lewis is also someone I knew.
Lewis.
Oh, you.
Oh, yeah.
Look, I know the whole Wikipedia.
She worked for the Martin Corporation, right?
I think that's right.
But Lewis was a cosmology astrophysicist.
Ed is really a mathematical physicist and mostly concentrates on fundamental physics.
So their areas are actually very different.
Lewis is a very nice man.
I remember I was surprised.
I didn't know that Ed's father was a physicist until I met Lewis.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
So I heard a story, and correct me if I'm wrong, was that Lewis.
Witten was working in the Martin Corporation and he was doing, he was studying gravity.
Like he was really big into gravity, right?
And then there was lots of research, like out of nowhere, all this crazy progress started getting made in the realm of gravity in like the 50s.
And there was another gentleman by the name of Bryce DeWitt.
Yes.
You've done your homework.
Yeah.
I've been kind of, I've nerded out on this topic quite a bit in the past.
And then there was some sort of a conference done at, North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Yes.
On gravity.
And it seems like there was so much interest and then like there was progress being made.
And then all of a sudden it went, it disappeared.
Yes and no.
There was a legacy from that conference that maybe most people don't know about, but Kip Thorne, one of the people who measured gravity waves, was present there as a young person.
So it's not like everything just disappeared.
The progress, the rate of progress did stop.
That's certainly true.
But it inspired people like Kip and a whole generation, his whole generation, to get into gravity research.
And that's why we were able to measure gravity waves in 2014.
Yeah, because there's this idea that they could have potentially been trying.
I heard that Lewis had found anti gravity or something like this.
I'm not familiar with that.
I'm afraid I can't make any enlightening statements.
Right.
It's just.
Yeah, that's just kind of like what drew me into it, right?
It seems like the most of the money that goes into science and research and development and this kind of stuff is sort of there's no limiter on the amount of money that can be spent when it's in the context of national security or war and this kind of stuff.
You're right.
You're exactly right.
And Danny, this is something that one should think of as a natural progression of what happened with the Second World War, right?
I mean, as depicted, for example, in the movie Oppenheimer.
Right.
That was the first time that our government in a major way understood the potential for science to contribute to national security.
And that, of course, is the creation of the atomic bomb.
That realization was codified into the behavior of our government at the end of the Second World War by a man named Vannevar Bush, who had been one of the people advising President Franklin Roosevelt during the war and then later President Truman.
There's a document he wrote called Science, the Endless Frontier.
And in that document, he described what the country should do in light of its experience with science and war during the Second World War.
And that's why we have a National Science Foundation.
That's why we have a National Institute of Health.
All of the big science and that the Pentagon has always been an extraordinarily Large player in the development of innovative science.
Yes.
We have the most lethal military in the world, and it gets there because of science.
This is something people don't understand the Department of Energy, I'm sorry, Department of Defense is an enormous funder of science.
In fact, it's much bigger than the National Science Foundation.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think it was the Manhattan Project, which is the name has changed so many times now.
the Department of Energy now.
It's the same thing as the Manhattan Project.
It sort of grew out of it, but it's much, much larger than the Manhattan Project.
But yes, the Manhattan District Project, which is its formal name, by the way, was the project that developed the atomic bomb in World War II.
I actually taught a course about that the last three years, so I dug kind of deeply into the history of that.
And yes, it ultimately does evolve into the Department of Energy.
It's crazy to me that we went from the American Civil War, which I think was like the 1860s.
That's correct, the 60s to 65.
To shooting muskets to less than 100 years later, dropping fusion devices out of jet airplanes.
Yes, that's all true.
In the time spent of a human life?
Lifetime, yes.
Teaching for 53 Years00:04:18
And this is interesting you should bring this point up because I was talking with Steve a little bit earlier today that I'm worried about that as we look forward.
If you look at the period you're talking about also includes the invention of the airplane.
It also includes the invention of the electric light, modern electronic communication, digital communication, computers, all in that same period happened.
And the fact that it all happened speaks to how creative our species was being in that period.
In particular, how our country was extraordinarily creative at the basis of technology, science, engineering, and mathematics.
I worry about that, quite frankly, because As I said, as I was talking with Steve earlier, I'm a college professor.
This is my 53rd consecutive year teaching students.
And what I see in my students now, under the impact, I think, of social media and now artificial intelligence, I fear that we are losing our ability to create at that level.
To create and to innovate.
At that level.
You think with the development of all this technology, it could be sort of sucking the creativity out of us because we don't know.
Kind of like your grandfather that you said was really good at math because he needed that.
It was a necessity for him.
Right.
Now, creativity is not a necessity for us.
We sort of contracted out to LLMs and stuff like that.
And neural networks and what have you.
Right.
Yes.
So, as someone who has been teaching for 53 years, I have lots of conversations with friends.
Who have also are professors, and most of us are physicists, but I talk to people.
I'm also a professor of public policy, for example.
So I talk to people.
And we all these days talk about how different students feel to us in teaching.
And as I said to Steve, in fact, Steve had this wonderful example in the car of what worries me, which is suppose a child, and this guy, I hope he doesn't mind, but suppose your child tells you, Daddy, a young child, I can't find a fork.
And then you sort of wait for the next step, which is maybe the kid's going to go look for it, but they just stand there and say, Daddy, I can't find the fork.
Something like that is what I fear because I see in the classroom when students get to a point where they can't do something, they freeze.
They don't try to figure out what we could try to do.
To figure out the thing I don't know right, and that's the essence of innovation.
That is the essence of innovation, and I think you're right.
I've been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot and um, I I think you're right about that man, I don't know where it goes and I don't like the fact that it's all becoming distilled and centralized and controlled by very few people.
Yes uh, what you just spoke about is called diversity, And I tell people, you know, so if you have a financial planner or someone that works on your finances and you walk through their office and they say, we don't believe in diversifying our stockholdings, you would run out of that office because you know that doesn't work.
And so it's something like that has long, I've written essays on this for at least since the 90s about how if you want to have a robust, Entity that creates innovation.
What you really want is to have as many people who possibly can make a contribution in that conversation.
And that's diversity.
SpaceX Versus Apollo Program00:02:50
Well, an interesting connection we could make here is the comparison between how we are sending rockets into space now versus how we did it with the Apollo program.
Yes.
Now we have multiple different.
Companies that are doing it and competing to do it the best way.
And there's rockets getting launched every day over there in Cape Canaveral, except for the Artemis one.
The Artemis one, they keep.
I've been following Artemis.
My interest as a kid started with space.
So it has never diminished in 70 years.
Yes, yes.
Elon's SpaceX is sending satellites into space every single day.
But the Artemis one has just been sitting there forever, keep going for sure.
Yeah, we know, like I said.
But the other thing, you mentioned SpaceX and its accomplishments, but there are other countries doing this too.
China has actually landed, you know how.
One of the SpaceX systems comes down and it gets caught.
It doesn't actually land, it gets caught by a bunch of clamps.
Right.
I can't believe it.
Oh, yeah.
It catches the rocket.
It catches the rocket.
Yeah.
China has done that at sea.
They've done that what?
At sea.
Oh, really?
Yes.
On a ship?
Yes.
On a platform.
So this is the kind of thing, like I said, about thinking about different ways to do things.
Well, here's an example that, from your surprise, you haven't heard it.
I don't think most Americans know this is going on.
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That's what we use for our merch store.
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Building the Mars Mission00:15:41
I saw the other day that, you know, Elon Musk has been historically obsessed and has made it clear that his mission is to populate Mars, get human beings to Mars.
Yes.
And I think just a couple weeks ago, he posted something saying, no longer is this my goal.
Yes.
Now we have to focus on the moon.
Yes.
Are you surprised at this?
No.
Several years ago, I was on a panel. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
And the question before the panel was, are we going to Mars?
And the other panelists included Dr. Shirley Jackson, who was the president of RPI at the time.
There's an organization called Space.org, and the CEO of that organization, a retired admiral, as I recall, was on the panel.
And then Ellen Ochoa, who is a retired astronaut, was on the panel.
And so there was this hour-long discussion about going to Mars and everyone else, you know, were basically supporting Elon's claim.
And I was the only one saying, no, we're not going to do that.
And there are lots of really good reasons to understand why that was never going to be possible.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, by never, I mean, I would not be surprised if we get there by, say, But we're not going to get there in the short term.
And the reasons are a couple.
One of the reasons that it was always impossible to adhere to the timescale that was being hyped is because if you look at the exposure so we live here in the Earth, and the Earth is a I like to say it is a hospitable home.
It creates the conditions for us to live.
It has an atmosphere.
We need to breathe, obviously.
But it also has a magnetic atmosphere around it.
And this magnetic atmosphere shields us from radiation.
When you get in a rocket ship and plan to go to Mars, you go outside of that shield.
And therefore, the amount of radiation that humans will be exposed in any reasonable length of technology to get to Mars likely suggests that without special shielding, horrible mutations are going to occur.
And that's likely to be diseases.
Van Allen talked about this.
Yes.
And so that was a reason number one to know that Elon was talking out of his hat.
Reason number two was.
There are lots of technical issues.
Well, so if you look deeply into my biography, you'll find out I applied to be an astronaut around 1980 or so.
Wow.
Because I had a friend who was an astronaut, the black astronaut Ronald McNair, who died in the Challenger explosion.
No way.
He was a physicist.
He and I had been friends since from 69 to 85 when he died.
When I was going to Caltech to work with Feynman and Gilman, he had convinced me to apply to NASA because they were accepting new applications for astronauts.
And I applied.
And I got pretty far along in the process.
And so I got a chance to talk to some of the engineers who had actually built the Apollo Saturn V that got us to the moon.
And they made this statement which utterly astounded me at the time.
So this is like 1980.
The moon landings were, the first one was in 69.
They said, we can't do that now, that we cannot produce a rocket that would get us to the moon right now.
This and this is like.
This is what year again?
1980 80 yeah, and the question about why was rather interesting.
11 years later yeah right, 11 years later, and so they had done it.
What in 73 too, so it went from from?
69 was the first moon landing, and this last one was from like 73 75, something like that.
Yeah so, so in 15 years, what happened?
Well, what happened is something that people often don't understand about complex systems and complex engineering.
When you build a complex engineering system, it is almost always the case that it does not work the way you thought it would when you designed it on paper.
And the way that you get it to work is by having engineers of extraordinarily deep understanding of the mechanisms involved, and they figure out how to make it work.
That generation had retired.
And that's why we couldn't do it.
What was so special about that generation?
That they did it.
Yeah.
The point was, it's a usual thing.
You know, I don't know if you work out, but you know, one of the things that we know about the human body is if you don't exercise, you lose muscle.
Right.
It's the same kind of a process.
Sure.
One of the things that was described to me is one of the reasons that we haven't gone back is because the Saturn V was an expendable rocket, and now we're spending all of our money on reusable rockets.
Right.
So to get a reusable rocket, That far is exponentially more difficult.
It is far more difficult.
And that's one of the things that has been a real triumph of SpaceX as we've watched them have rockets that you send up and then they come back down.
When I was a kid in El Paso, there was a science fiction show called Rocky Jones, and they used to do that then rockets would go up and they would come back down.
So, you know, I've lived long enough to see this go from a television science fiction show to reality.
Do you think, I mean, I'm sure you've had to think about this, but.
I'm curious to hear your answer.
Will we ever have a more advanced way of traveling through space other than rockets?
Because rockets are essentially guns, right?
You're shooting.
They're basically guns.
That's correct.
That's correct.
What would it take?
So Arthur C. Clarke, who was a very famous science fiction writer in the 50s and 60s, In fact, he's the author of the book 2001 that became a movie and what have you.
Yeah.
Stanley Kubrick.
Right.
Kubrick made the movie.
Arthur C. Clarke said that something along the lines of predicting the future is a very hazardous undertaking.
So when you ask me ever, right, I don't know what time constant you're attaching to ever.
My suspicion is that, yes, we will get something other than.
Now, when I say something other, I mean, even, you know, you can build rockets that are basically, they are powered by nuclear explosions.
This is something that's been under discussion since the 50s.
So we know that in the realm of possibility, but again, that's shooting the gun, as you described.
Still, yeah.
So what do you get to?
What can I imagine would be technology beyond that?
And the only thing that I can think about is two things something that's electromagnetic, where instead of shooting the guns, you, you know, magnets repel each other.
So, you could imagine that if we had a deeper understanding of how magnets work, we might be able to take advantage of the fact that the sun produces a magnetic field.
And then you would have a rocket that would interact with that magnetic field to be propelled.
Interesting.
So, if you ask a crazy person like me about what comes next, this is what comes out.
And that is using, obviously, the model of physics as we understand it now.
We have to know that the sun produces a magnetic field so that we can.
They sort of become surfers on it.
Right.
Do you think it's possible that there's any sort of fundamental science that could be being held by private aerospace organizations that has been held from the academic public academics?
I find that extraordinarily unlikely because one thing about scientists is Collectively, we like to brag when we do stuff.
And I think if someone stumbled on something like that, there'd be no way in the world any organization could stop them from talking about it.
Yeah, it's been one of the puzzling questions for me over the last 10 years, just seeing.
Yeah, well, maybe part of this thing that I'm talking about, this slowdown in innovation.
The slowdown, yeah.
Yeah, and then you have things like the Large Hadron Collider, and now they're building a bigger one now, right?
Well, they're considering building it.
Oh, they haven't.
So, this is some, you know, this is part of the science that I watch very closely.
closely.
So the Large Hadron Collider did what it was predicted to do because it allowed us to find the Higgs boson, but it also did not do something that a lot of other physicists thought it should be able to do, and that is to find the particles that correspond to the mathematics I've been studying since I was in graduate school.
It's called supersymmetry.
It didn't do that.
And so the Large Hadron Collider has had one upgrade in its life, and it still was not able to show us this other result.
There's talk of building, there's actually talk of building two next generation machines.
One of them is what's called a linear collider.
A linear collider is based on the device that's at Stanford, the so-called Slack device stack.
Pull that up, Steve.
There's illustrations of it.
It looks pretty cool.
Yes, it is.
So one, ah, in fact you have it.
So one possible next gen is that you kind of build two of these Slack type.
Okay, you see this.
figure that you have here, it has two arms.
And where it says main LINAC electron, that actually already exists.
That is the current SLAC accelerator.
And so the idea is that you build another one of those type devices that it's like taking two guns and aiming their barrels at each other.
But in this second device, you don't accelerate electrons.
You accelerate the particles that are the antiparticle to the electron.
Particles and antiparticles, if they get too close, always destroy each other.
And so you increase the efficiency of the energy conversion, and that would then allow you to probe even higher energies to look for the kinds of things that I would love to see tomorrow, these things called super partners.
So, this is one possibility.
Super partners.
Yeah.
Now, the other possibility is an upgrade.
Now, the thing to notice about this machine, by the way, is that the particles that are being accelerated are the electron and its antiparticle, the positron.
The LHC accelerates protons.
And so when you accelerate protons, you're looking at a different force in nature.
The only forces we have to worry about here are the electrical forces and the weak nuclear force.
At the Large Hadron Collider, you have to worry about the strong nuclear force, and it's much messier.
And so there is discussion of building a next-gen version.
Some people call it the Super LHC in CERN, but these are all just discussions as of now.
Right.
Do you think it's possible that we could get some sort of like major breakthrough discovery with these colliders in like the next 100 years?
Yes.
I don't, I'm not a betting man, but I'd be willing to bet positive on that one.
Okay.
So let's go to, I want to try to do a breakdown of supersymmetry so people can understand it.
Okay.
Can you give me just a high level view?
I can try.
On what this is?
Sure.
I actually have graphics and talks that I give, and I'm happy to share them with you afterwards.
Maybe you can find some.
Are they online at all?
They're in some of the talks I have given online.
Okay.
Yes.
So let me try to start this way.
If you walk into a high school chemistry class and you look on the wall, you're likely to see a chart.
In one corner, it has the letter H, and at the other side, it has the letters HE.
It's the table of elements.
This is something almost universally known.
Now, that table of elements was created by a Russian scientist named Mendeleev.
And when Mendeleev first had the idea of creating the table of elements, he didn't know all the elements we know.
And so therefore, if you look at his old chart, which you can, like I said, I have copies of it that I talk to people about.
So when you look at his old chart, it actually has holes in it.
And he used the presence of those holes to predict elements that no one had ever seen yet.
And not only did you find, we eventually as a species find all those, we found a lot more.
So the modern table of elements has gone through an evolution.
Now, let's talk about what we know about the universe right now.
We know about electrons.
And in fact, electrons are a member of a family of things that are called leptons.
So there's a whole family of things that are kind of like electrons, but they're slightly different.
Inside of protons and neutrons, there are these particles called quarks.
And they also come in families.
So if you ask me or any scientist what is the best observational data we have about the smallest things in the universe, we're going to tell you about those objects.
And like I said, I have a chart that I'm happy to share with you.
However, you're not just a bunch of particles floating around.
You're an organized structure.
And that means that these particles have to have things that link them together.
And these links are the four fundamental forces because nature actually has four.
There's electromagnetism, for example, light charges repel.
That's a simple one.
There is the strong nuclear force.
The strong nuclear force is the form of nuclear energy that powers the sun.
Strong nuclear force.
Then there's a separate nuclear force called the weak nuclear force.
And the simplest way I can give you access to that is to tell you that if you look at old science fiction movies, From the 1950s, radioactive things always glowed.
That glow is due to the weak nuclear force.
So it's a real thing.
It's not Hollywood just out there selling the story.
So our universe looks like it's made of two things the things that get hooked together and the things that are doing the hooking.
Yeah.
Electrons and Mathematics00:15:34
And that's a chart that you can find in many, many places.
But the particular version of the chart that I use highlights the fact that it looks to me and like a lot of us like what we're looking at is the equivalent.
Of Mendeleev's first table of elements, it has holes.
And if that's true, then if we're fortunate, we will one day get the technology to fill in those holes just like we filled in the holes of the Mendeleev table of elements.
This turns out to be part of super string theory, by the way.
So I say it's the math that sits under all this stuff.
So over here, we can see a demonstration of the table of elements as Mendeleev saw them.
And as you can see, if we can scroll down a little bit, you can see there are holes there, those white spaces.
Those correspond to elements that no one had observed at the time that Mendeleev put this table together.
Now let's go to the next image.
This is the modern table of elements, and you'll notice it has essentially no holes left.
And there are lots more boxes here.
That's because we have discovered since Mendeleev many, many more elements.
And so that's why this is the thing that you see in high school.
Now, Let's go and look at elementary particles.
This table here, that letter E inside of the sphere that you see there, represents the electron.
Okay.
And you'll notice there's a grouping of things around it.
Every single one of those other spheres represents particles that we have observed in the last 100 years.
Those particular particles behave a lot like electrons, which is why they're grouped down there in the same color.
Okay.
Now, next to that, you see there are a group of particles inside of labels inside of red spheres.
Those are the quarks that sit inside of protons and neutrons.
And in particular, the U is called the up quark, the D is called the down quark, and that's two up quarks and a down quark sit inside of every proton.
Okay.
Now, up in that upper right hand corner, you see more spheres.
Now, what's sitting, the labels in there are not talking about particles like the quarks and electrons.
These are the particles that carry the forces that cause the electrons and quarks to clump together to form atoms.
Every force in nature has a carrier particle.
And so, this is what we know about the universe right now.
This is the extent of our science of asking what's the most fundamental objects you find in the universe.
And these carrier particles are called bosons?
Yes, they're called bosons.
And the one with the Greek symbol gamma is the photon.
It's in yellow.
Okay.
Remember, we talked about nuclear forces.
We said there are actually two different forms of nuclear forces there's a strong nuclear force, which is the source of energy for the sun, and there's a weak nuclear force, which is why radioactive things glow.
And so, since those are forces, they also have carriers, and those carriers are what you see in up in the upper hand uh quadrant, and the h is the Higgs boson, because it's also a force carrier.
Now I have a question for you, Danny, is that, is that very balanced?
Is that a pretty picture?
Yeah uh, it's definitely not balanced.
Okay, can we get switch to the next diagram?
If supersymmetry is an accurate description of nature, we're going to find all these other particles, And this is almost exactly like looking at Mendeleev's initial table and then looking at today's table.
And that's why the issue of supersymmetry is so hotly studied.
And in fact, it was the hope that the LAC would begin to see some of these additional particles.
That's one of the primary reasons it was built, but it didn't.
So that's what we're aiming for.
And you ask, are we going to have fundamental breakthroughs?
If we start to see these things, the answer is yes.
Right.
Wow.
Now this particular rendition, can you go back one slide for me?
This particular rendition is my creation to try to explain to people what we mean when we talk about symmetry.
Because you can see this thing is not balanced.
Whereas the second one is.
And that's the symmetry is the balance.
Because everything in nature is symmetrical.
Symmetry has guided us in understanding nature since Isaac Newton.
And so we don't know, I can't say everything is.
I can only say it has been a reliable guide for several hundred years.
Right.
Extended supersymmetry, where does that go?
Oh, boy.
You've done your homework too well.
So if we can switch to the next picture, if extended supersymmetry is an accurate description of our nature, what's going to happen is there'll be many more particles added to these blocks.
Outside of it.
Yeah, outside of the ones I'm showing here.
This is just what we call simple supersymmetry.
Okay.
Number one.
Yeah.
So you've had your physics lesson for the day.
Now, what could supersymmetry lead to?
This is a good question.
And remember, I will appeal again to Arthur C. Clarke's statement about predicting the future is a hazardous business.
So, what could it lead to?
Well, if I put on my big, my far science fiction hat, part of the interesting.
Tinfoil hat.
That's right, tinfoil hat.
Part of the really fascinating things about this table that I'm showing with all the super partners, if we can get the arrow over on the E symbol to the left and the bottom left hand corner, there's an E.
Yeah, that's a mathematical representation of the electron.
And we know electrons exist because the technology we're using right now is based on manipulating electrons.
Now, if we can scroll to the right a little bit, stop, you'll notice there's an E with a little tilde on it, on top of it, a little twiggle.
Yes.
So supersymmetry says that to the particles we know, which are on the left-hand side, they're these particles we have never discovered that exist if we get a sufficient, if our universe is supersymmetric. and we obtain the technology to measure them.
Now, what's special here?
Well, because these are sort of balanced, you can sort of ask yourself, the next question is, is there a way to make a transition between these two sides?
Is there an instrumentality or a physical law that lets me switch them?
Because if you can, it means that you can replace the E's over here, which are electrons without the funny tilde on top of them, with the electrons with them.
The thing, electrons with them have different properties.
And the thing that's really interesting is when I wear my science fiction hat, that could be the scientific basis of a transporter.
A transporter?
As in Star Trek.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And this is my science fiction hat, actually.
Sure.
But if you ask me what is possible in the realm of possibility, this is the first piece of mathematics that suggests that you might be able to build a transporter.
And how specifically does a theoretical transporter work?
So the reason you would want to. convert electrons to these things called electrons and you wanted to switch on all the particles is because these super things are more malleable.
You can actually move them through substances that you can't move an ordinary electron through.
And so that's why it would be the basis of something like a transporter.
Oh, wow.
Could this extended supersymmetry lead to potential anti-gravity effects?
This is something that supersymmetry research has looked at since the 1980s, I think it was.
There are versions of supersymmetry, not this version, because remember, what we're talking about here are mathematical equations.
But there are versions of very similar equations where anti-gravity is definitely present.
Interesting.
Yes.
But those mathematical models, we don't know how to extend them to having electrons.
But those models do exist.
They've been in literature for about 20 years.
Okay.
Now, how does this connect to the Adinkra symbols?
Oh, my goodness.
I didn't know you were going to go there.
Yeah.
Can we break?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Okay, so there.
Yep.
On the left-hand side of this image, you see some equal signs.
Yes.
And therefore, that informs us that's some kind of mathematics.
Mm-hmm.
On the right hand side of this, there are no equal signs.
They're just pictures.
And so in 2005 and 2006, working with a physicist named Michael Fox, we realized that there's mathematical data in the equations to the left that is also contained in the images to the right.
And that when you do math on the equations to the left, it corresponds to manipulating the images on the right.
So, adinkras are a graphical way to represent mathematical data in the equations that possess supersymmetry.
Oh, that's incredible.
It's crazy.
And I have to admit, maybe it was subconscious, but this is what Richard Feynman did in producing the theory of perturbative relativistic quantum field theory.
He also has a set of pictures, they're called Feynman graphs.
And so, maybe my coming to this is partly a legacy of having been around him a little bit.
Oh, interesting.
Now, what are they good for?
Yeah, what are they good for?
That's always a good question.
There are some problems involving equations that are much more complicated than this that arose from some work that Edward did.
And the particular class of problems I'm talking about is.
called M theory in the literature.
And there are aspects of M theory that were totally unknown to us.
And so in 2020, working with the two graduate students at Brown, we were able to solve some of these problems that Ed had given us and no one knew how to solve.
And it involves extensions of these pictures, more complicated versions of these pictures I showed you.
Okay.
And it involved, so I'm going to give you a little, I'm a professor, I'm going to give you a pop quiz.
I'm going to give you a warning first.
Word problem.
Anisha and Tom together have $10.
Item number one.
Anisha has two more dollars than Tom.
Item number two.
How much money does Anisha have and how much money does Tom have?
This is what's called two unknowns in algebra.
And the answer is that Anisha has $6 and Tom has four.
Because 6 and 4 equals 10.
So that's a problem where you have two unknowns.
With these young ladies, we figured out how to look at some of these equations that Ed and actually two other physicists had presented that have over 4.2 billion unknowns in them.
And we solved that using these pictures.
Whoa.
So this is all the.
I mean, what I'm showing you, this is mathematics, it's basically impenetrable.
But the point is.
This mathematics let us write computer codes which then solve the problem.
These are the inputs that the computer codes gave out as answers.
So that's what I actually do as a scientist.
And earlier you were kind enough to say that, you know, that it's proper to consider me in the company of people like Feynman and those guys.
I would hope.
I can't say that I believe that, but we're certainly doing the best science that I'm capable of doing.
Yeah.
Well, so, and also in your attempt to understand the fundamental nature of reality, it led you to this set of equations that are, and I might butcher this, the set of equations that you were led to are indistinguishable from the types of equations that are used for search engines and web browsers that we use on computers.
That's the next part of the story.
That's exactly right.
It turns out that, so.
When Michael and I first figured out that you can take data from equations and embed it into images, it was clear to me that we were doing something that no one else in our part of physics had ever thought about.
And it was also clear that it was mathematics.
So, immediately, almost immediately after Michael and I wrote our paper, which I think was in 204, 205, he reached out to some mathematicians that he had known.
And it turned out I had it.
Actually, we interacted with these mathematicians without knowing it, and we formed a math physics collaboration.
The purpose of the collaboration was to study the mathematical properties of these images that Michael and I had created.
In 2008, the six of us there are three physicists, three mathematicians came to this discovery that the structure of these pictures includes. bits, but not just random assortments of bits, but bits in the form of what are known as computer error correction, classical error correcting codes in computer science.
They're actually embedded in the structure of these pictures.
And this is – thank you for asking the question because this is the wildest thing I've ever been part of in physics because this will be the first – if supersymmetry is true, and it's got to be accurate, and if we can observe it, This will be the first instance in science where computer codes will be parts of the fundamental laws of physics.
That's the real significance of this.
Entropy in Hard Drives00:15:03
What does that even mean?
Well, a lot of people like to say something I don't believe.
They like to say that means that our universe is as depicted in the Matrix movies.
We live in a simulation.
Right.
There are people, lots of people, for decades have been saying, Jim Gates has proven that.
we live in the simulation.
I don't believe in what it sounds like.
Well, to folks that are not scientists, yes, but not to scientists.
The problem with that statement is that it's not a scientific statement because science, by definition, is about things that you can prove are false.
And that statement can never be proven to be false.
Right.
That's why it's not science.
And so I actually have a more complicated intuition, and I probably will never live long enough to see it sorted out.
My intuition is that Error correction not only occurs in computer science, but error correction appears to occur in genetics because there's been this longstanding argument in genetics that error correction must be present because it suppresses random occurrences of mutations.
And if you have a genome that's evolving, you want to do that at some level because if you let random mutations occur, then the offspring are not going to be viable.
Right.
So genetics likely does have some error correction in it.
Now, that's the only part of nature that we have observed in our several millennia on this planet where error correction appears to be in a physical system.
So then you can ask the question how did it get there?
How did the error correction get there?
Into these systems.
And the answer is evolution.
Systems evolve to have these error corrections.
How does evolution work?
Well, what it says basically is as you look at how species evolve, survive in time.
The ones that have the right genetic codes have survival advantages.
So let's see, the ability, let's see, what's a prime example of this?
The ability to walk on two limbs instead of four.
Right.
Right?
You have a certain advantage with two or four because that then frees the other two to manipulate, right?
So this is a fundamental thing.
The way evolution works is it says that if you have a selection of possibilities of traits of a population, then the environment will pick out those traits that are more valuable in terms of survival because others will die.
That's the essence of evolution.
So if I look at this explanation for evolution in genetics, and then look at the fact that we have found error correction.
Well, first of all, evolution is likely to be some kind of error correction.
And the fact that we have found error correction in the form of the equation suggests to me that there's something like evolution happened.
With math?
Yeah.
With the math that describes our universe.
So that's my explanation.
That's not the matrix.
Fine.
And so, whether this is the case or not, and thank you, by the way, for giving me the opportunity to explain this to a general public, because I cannot tell you the number of times people have not allowed me to say this part.
You're saying that the fundamental laws of physics likely underwent some sort of evolution through evolution, some sort of evolution process.
And they're probably currently still evolving.
I wouldn't accept that.
No.
Because, I mean, maybe that's true.
Because we are still evolving.
We are, but that's biological.
These laws of physics don't necessarily apply to biology.
Okay.
And I mean, look, I can't say that I know the laws are not continuing to evolve, but it just seems very unlikely to me.
So that's the far out weirdness that my scientific journey has taken me to.
And, you know, it's exciting to be able to give these sorts of ideas to the scientific community and the public that come from.
Remember, I commented that all of my heroes.
Follow their own.
It's exciting to be able to do that and come to these kinds of conclusions.
So, there was a scientist in the 40s who came up with the idea of transmitting data, right?
Ones and bits.
Yes.
Claude Shannon, I believe.
That is exactly who it is.
There's also a contribution from another scientist named Hamming.
So, Hamming actually is the one who really stood up there.
So, you're right.
Claude Shannon is a person that came up with the idea of what we've.
Both computer scientists and physicists call the entropy content of information.
Yes.
That information itself has entropy associated with it.
He wrote an equation for this.
Hamming comes along and shows that if you want to have digital structures that communicate reliably, they have to have error correcting codes built into their structure.
Yes.
And so, as I said, these are my guide stones in trying to understand this very strange result that we have found classical error correcting codes in the context of equations.
That might describe our physical universe, because when you transmit a data packet from one computer here to another computer in Beijing, the fluctuations in the transmission medium will flip bits, unless you put in a mechanism for unflipping in the bits, and those are the error correcting codes.
That's what that was basically Hamming's observation, right okay?
Well, a computer that transmits data and bits is bound by the laws of entropy, right?
So If you have a blank hard drive with no data on it at all, that hard drive would be very low entropy, right?
From a purely physical standpoint, it would be either all ones or all zeros.
That's correct.
When you encode data on it, say we store this podcast on that hard drive, it becomes a chaotic mess of ones and zeros.
It could, right?
It could.
So that would make it high entropy.
Chaos is typically associated with high, yes.
So it'd be more chaotic from a purely physical standpoint.
Perspective, but when you plug a TV monitor or a computer monitor into that hard drive, it becomes, it gives us, it gives it meaning.
You have the video files or the documents or whatever it is on there.
That's a very interesting point that I hadn't thought about.
I'm not sure I'm willing to comment.
That's simply a point.
I mean, the fact that you actually need to have an actor, namely the video, that's actually very, what is it?
That's ringing a bell with me.
Oh, yes.
It's ringing a bell with me because a scientist named John Wheeler.
Effectively said the same thing about information in the universe.
He said that it's actually a statement called it from bit.
Yes, I've heard of that.
And it's the statement you just made.
Okay.
Yeah, because the computer monitor kind of acts like a consciousness.
Yes.
To transcribing the physical raw data into meaning.
Yes, into knowledge, I would say.
So, what happens when you erase that hard drive?
If it's bound by the laws of thermodynamics and entropy can always go up and energy can, there's net energy can only be transferred, right?
You have exceeded my comfort zone.
Something has to leave that hard drive, right?
You have exceeded my comfort zone.
I am not, when people ask me questions that I haven't thought about, I don't answer them with whatever comes up.
I need time to think about it.
It's just interesting.
Hear me out and comment or not, but it's just interesting to me that this idea has been proposed to me that if you crack open a hard drive, well, first of all, if the information on the hard drive could, and there's a gentleman who actually published this theory.
His name was Rolf Landauer.
Not familiar with the work.
He said he did an equation that all the mass on all the data's.
On all the hard drives and server farms throughout the world right now, is like if you, if we had the tools to accurately measure and weigh the mass, it would equal like a kilogram of mass.
But he said it would equal mass.
So, if that theory that information on a hard drive could equal mass, since mass and energy are interconvertible, then mass and energy and information could be also interconvertible.
So, he says if you crack open a hard drive, it's invisible.
You can't see that mass, it's electromagnetically undetectable.
And he made that connection to when we look at universes, the spin of the universes.
The center of a universe spins at the same speed as the outer rim.
And the dark matter is mass that's flattening the spin rate.
So he made the connection to say if dark matter equals mass that's electromagnetically indetectable because we can't see it, then maybe what's in that hard drive could be the same thing as dark matter.
Again, these are not ideas that I have thought about, and so I have no comments to make.
Yeah.
Well, it's just interesting because it connects to the bits and the whole it from bit thing.
Right.
And could, you know, tinfoil hat, could dark matter be some sort of a computational cloud?
Yeah.
This is a very interesting premise, and it's also something that Feynman himself kind of contributed to at one point.
Feynman made this very interesting statement at a conference that.
There's a whole lot of computation going on in order to make physics work, and he found that mysterious.
A whole lot of computation going on.
Yeah, the magnitude of computation that the universe has to do in order to get our physics is staggering or something like that.
You should look this comment up if you're interested in this sort of thing.
That's one reason why Feynman is often cited as the father of quantum computing, because he thought it had something to do with quantum mechanics.
Evolution of quantum computers and an Ai and then combined and then how that could wow.
Well really, I can give you a perspective of someone who started in physics with a degree in 77 and has been thinking about it since then.
When I learned physics there were many things that in quantum mechanics disturbed a lot of other people.
They never disturbed me.
I'll never forget the.
I was in my second year at MIT and I took a course in quantum mechanics And a lot of my classmates were disturbed by trying to tie the physics that they learned from Newton to the physics of quantum mechanics.
I was never so perturbed because I understood that neither of these things is actually reality.
What they are is our best descriptions of reality.
They're somehow embedded in what we are.
But also there was an aspect of quantum mechanics that was mysterious and it's still mysterious.
It's what we sort of now call entanglement.
We knew mathematically that these things were possible.
They also connected another idea called the collapse of the wave function.
And so we learned that these things were possible, but generally the attitude was, well, that's philosophy.
We're never going to have to worry about that in our world.
Well, that's not turned out to be true.
We have to worry about it in this age of quantum computing, because essentially quantum computing works by a mechanism which is entanglement.
And there's something called the Bell Inequality.
There are all kinds of results on this that prove that entanglement is a real thing.
In fact, there's an experiment that was done by a Chinese researcher, Madam Wu, C.S. Wu, and one of her postdocs, where it looks like they were the first to actually experimentally show that this idea of entanglement shows up in physical systems.
So I've watched this trajectory from saying, ah, that's not something we have to worry about, to now people saying, well, we have quantum computers which Although they're not perfect replicators of quantum entanglement because there's this thing, I can't remember the detail name, but there's this one aspect of quantum computers that we don't really have matching with the math, but they seem to be good enough.
So my comment is that ideas that, in fact, let me say it this way.
I remember reading as a graduate student about Wheeler's idea, it from bit.
And I thought it was the craziest thing in the world.
And I'm like, you know, he's a respected scientist, but that's a bridge too far for me.
So then, 40 years later, through my own personal efforts, I find out in collaboration with my colleagues that error correction is in the equations.
And so, one of the things I've told people is that for me, this trajectory has been so amazing.
I thought that Wheeler was crazy when I first read about this idea.
But I've also now realized that if you study physics long enough, you too can become crazy.
AI and Consciousness Debate00:13:27
Because I'm wondering.
The deeper you get, the crazier you seem.
That's happened to me.
That's the problem.
I've gone from this idea that I totally reject it to now I can't reject it because I can see it in the math that I worked out.
Right.
And that's undeniable.
For people like me.
Well, right.
A mathematician.
Mathematician, physicist.
You do the math and you crunch the numbers.
There's no way of.
Getting around this stuff.
We can't get around this stuff.
Yeah, and that leads to, you know, like the idea of consciousness.
It does indeed lead to the idea of consciousness.
Like, can you build up to consciousness from protons and neutrons and electrons?
And we haven't found a way to reconcile consciousness from matter.
So, If you include in the word build the actions of humans in this process, then I think the answer is yes, you can.
Because having watched the progress of computer technology in my lifetime and interacting, as I said to Steve, I've been interacting a lot recently with some AIs, ChatGPT, and Why can I never remember the other one?
Google has a Gemini.
So these are my two friends, right?
I interact with them almost every day.
And so having that experience of watching a world go from essentially computers are these big boxes that someone has in an air conditioned room.
The ENIAC.
And when I started, the first time I was exposed to a computer, it was with punch cards.
That's how old I am.
These are these cards you punch the holes in.
Wasn't that, was von Neumann, the one von Neumann created?
The von Neumann machine.
Yes, the unknowing machine.
And so having watched this evolution of computers from those days to now, my belief, let me say it this way, is that at some point something indistinguishable from consciousness is likely to arise in computers.
Now, this is beyond the Turing test.
I don't know if you know what the Turing test is.
What I'm talking about is actually beyond the Turing test because to me, that's kind of a mechanistic first level of consciousness, namely to be able to respond to inputs. with reasonable outputs.
In fact, the current, from my experience with the recent AIs, they are inference machines.
And what I mean that is they don't do calculations, but they infer from the data that you give them a result.
So they're inference engines.
Inference to me is not consciousness.
Consciousness, at least from all of my life experience, consciousness has this element about it where the outputs exceed what the inputs are.
And that pluses the role of consciousness.
And until I see that, claims of consciousness are not consistent with what I've seen.
We've all had aha moments where it seems like something just comes to us, right?
Yes.
Where there's like the sum of whatever that is is way greater than all the inputs.
Yes.
And neuropsychologists have made statements that have imprinted themselves on my thinking about that.
And one of them is to understand that.
Each of us is actually kind of two computing systems.
There is the conscious, and that's who's talking to you right now.
But there's also the subconscious, which decides that I prefer green to red, right?
There's no rational reason why this is.
And there are some writings in the neuropsychological literature to the effect that the amount of data processed by our subconscious Is orders and orders of magnitude greater than what goes on in our conscious mind.
Right.
And therefore, if this is right, there's a part of all of us that is doing even more thinking than we sort of remember and can recall.
And it's that part, I believe, that generates these aha moments.
Yeah.
And then you have dreams where you're processing all of the inputs from the previous day to help you.
Yeah.
And in my case, some of those dreams are mathematical.
No, literally.
It's literally true.
Oh.
It's literally true.
Your dreams are literally mathematical.
Yeah, I have.
It happened.
I have people who can testify to having seen that in some of my interactions.
What do you mean?
Well, so the most recent example was partly connected to my work at Brown University.
And I had a graduate student who urged me to go and watch a video of a French mathematician giving a lecture on a subject I had never heard of before the lecture online at an event hosted by an Indian research institution.
That night, I had a dream.
And the next day, I knew the answer to a set of 300 calculations.
And it just came from the dream.
And I took it to my graduate student and said, write some code and see if this is right.
And it was.
You had looked at this the day before?
No, I saw a lecture the day before.
Okay.
And for whatever reasons, my subconscious used it to figure out something.
I know it sounds like magic.
It does sound.
This is the first time, sort of, I've talked about this experience, but I have a couple of other similar experiences, and a few of them have witnesses.
And you were able to do this in your mind, and you corroborated it with a computer?
Well, my student did.
Your student did.
And what types of equations were these?
So.
They weren't equations.
They were graphical images that gave rise to equations.
And somehow I made a connection about graphical images.
Yeah, like Odinkras.
All the things in question were not Odinkras.
They're actually a piece of mathematics called permutahedra.
But the point was that these are actually relevant for Odinkras.
And so we were able to write a paper called The 300 Correlators.
That's a joke on the 300 Spartans.
300 correlators.
I like to have fun when I do physics.
Wow.
And there's been many times where you've done something similar by going to sleep and dreaming about it.
There have been other times, yes.
But most of them don't have witnesses.
Right.
I just come in and say, try this, and it works.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the crazy thing about the human mind and consciousness is that we haven't figured it out.
And it does seem like magic in many cases.
Yes, it does.
Yeah.
And there's a mathematician that I hold up as the greatest example of this.
It's an Indian mathematician named Ramanujan.
And he literally, if you read about him, you'll find out that he did this regularly.
Yeah.
Who was the guy who would say he would sleep on his books and then wake up and then.
That sounds like something similar to something Ramanujan said.
He would wake up.
Um, the sleeping prophet that was his name.
What was his actual name?
Oh, you're talking about Edward Casey, Edward Casey.
So, you should wonder why I know about such things.
Yes, yes, yes.
He would go to sleep on his school books and wake up and know all the content of the book.
That's what he said.
At the time I read those things, I thought, Oh, that's impossible.
I'm not sure.
I'm not so sure.
Well, it sounds like science fiction, it sounds like science fiction.
But you know what's crazy is uh, I had this woman in here who writes on national security, and she did this whole book about the Pentagon.
Yes, it was called The Pentagon's Brain.
Ah.
And the people that are in the Pentagon who work for an organization going back through the Cold War called DARPA was what it was called.
Now it's called ARPA.
They would invite, every year, they would invite the world's top science fiction writers to have some sort of like an intellectual brainstorm on weapons of the future.
Yeah.
One of the things that's really amazing about our Pentagon, in my career, I can't claim, I. had deep connections, but I've had some connections.
I'll have the microphone down.
Is that the part of the reason that our Pentagon is so efficient at what it does is that it has this deeply intellectual part of it that does things like what you just described with DARPA, where people think very deeply and some people would say far outside of the box about possibilities.
And that's an example.
Well, they have to.
Yeah, well, they can't think inside the box because all the other countries are also inside the box, exactly.
So, the idea is if you want to get ahead, you have to actually go outside the box.
And they have this blue sky research.
That's exactly the word.
Yes.
Where there's like, let's throw money at this insane idea, and who cares if it doesn't pay us off or get some sort of a return, you know?
There is, at least when I was a child, there was an aphorism about Edison, which went along the lines that he had to find a thousand substances that did not allow him to form an incandescent bulb before he found the one that did.
Hmm.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Going back to the consciousness stuff and AI, I don't know if I'm convinced, like I agree with you that it will become so advanced that it will be indistinguishable from consciousness, but I don't know if it will actually become consciousness.
Well, I don't know how to parse that statement because if it's indistinguishable, which means some kind of observations are being done, I don't know how to ask a deeper level of questions that are not connected to observations.
That's sort of what scientists do.
Sure.
And you can certainly ask those questions, but I don't know how to.
Well, think about all the power it takes to power those AIs.
And how many watts does the human brain run on again?
It's like five watts.
Something like that.
Something like that.
Yeah, it's nothing.
Yeah, compared to what they're doing.
Well, you know, but part of the problem that you're talking about is this set of circumstances is tied up to the current evolution of.
Of AI.
Namely, it's deep neural nets and large language models.
There are other things that one could probably do.
And who knows, since no one's actually figured out how to do the things, who knows how much more efficient they might be.
Right.
That the public might not be aware of.
Not just the public, that anyone might not be aware of.
This might be around a set of ideas that no one has conceived.
And to tell you the truth, I'm not very.
Well, how can I.
I am not.
Quantum mechanics, the answer to a question, a question has two answers.
And so I'm in that quantum mechanical state and thinking about consciousness in AI.
At the one hand, our current evolution of AI does not impress me, except that it does.
And I don't know how to explain those two statements.
In my interactions with AIs, I've done some things.
And again, Steve and I have talked about in the ride over, he and I both have done things where you.
In fact, I recommend this to your audience.
Go play with AI.
Go get an account or get a free account and learn what these things are.
That would probably be the best defense we'll have against them.
Against them?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's actually, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say against them, against our making stupid mistakes with them.
Let me put it that way.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like they're very good at helping people cheat on their homework and creating pictures that look real.
And crazy videos that look real and deep fakes.
They could do a lot and that kind of stuff.
But they don't have any sense in my interaction.
Right.
Right.
It doesn't seem like super intelligence by any stretch of the artistic.
Not from my interaction.
Proving Einstein Wrong00:04:44
Right.
Time travel.
Not unless Einstein's wrong.
Not unless Einstein's wrong.
Until someone can find an error in his logic and equations, there's not going to be any time travel.
You also won't have warp drives for the same reason.
Can you expand that for so the point is that the best piece of science that our species has ever produced is something called the G-2 experiments, where you try to measure the properties of the magnetic properties of electrons, because electrons also act like little magnets.
This is a set of experiments that's been going on for over 50 years, and the answers that we get from calculation versus observation match to one part in a billion.
There's nothing else in science where you have this kind of measurement prediction agreement.
In order to do this calculation, you have to use relativity.
And so this suggests that at least to one part in a billion, relativity is actually right.
And if relativity is right, its mathematical structure rules out time travel and warp drives.
And that's why I say that.
What are the chances Einstein gets proved wrong?
What was it that Arthur C. Clarke said about predictions?
That it's an activity that is extraordinarily difficult to prove successful.
Well, your book is titled Proving Einstein Right, your most recent book, right?
So you pin me on that.
That title is indeed the title of the book.
And let me talk, since you bring that subject, let me talk about that because that was an amazing experience.
Many years ago there was a book called Latitude by an author named Sobel.
And it's a story basically about how a clockmaker, and I can't remember the gentleman's name, beat Sir Isaac Newton to constructing an accurate clock that the British Navy could use as it navigated the planet.
It's a very interesting story.
And so one of the things I got, I said, one day I'd like to love to write a book like that about something of science.
And this is something, like I said, you can go back and Davis Obel is her name.
That's her first name, D-A-V-A.
Davis Obel's book.
And so for decades, I was like, gee, I really wish I could do something like that.
And so I'm the author of five books.
The one you mentioned is the last of the five.
And it started while I was at Brown University.
And I got this email message out of the blue from someone who had published novels successfully for decades.
A lady named Kathy Pelletier.
And Kathy introduced herself in an email message because she had seen me in a TurboTax commercial and thought I looked like a kindly gentleman.
Now, her expertise was in fiction, novels.
She wanted to write a nonfiction novel.
And so she approached me because since she was not a specialist in science and since I seemed like someone who was open to having such discussions, she sent this email message.
And I looked at her past writings, her past fiction writings, which I found impressive.
And then we had some discussions about doing a book on something related to Albert Einstein.
Now, her initial idea was not something I found attractive.
But the final idea that came out of these discussions was to write a book about a band of astronomers.
I like to say it's a scientific band of brothers who over the course of a decade struggled to make a measurement to show whether Einstein's description of gravity was better than Newton's description of gravity.
And that's what the book is actually about.
It's about these eight astronomers as they go into war zones.
I mean, they have adventures, basically.
It's basically an adventure book about these scientists.
And so, the Proving Einstein Right part, our publisher wanted that title because science can actually never be proved right.
Science Cannot Be Proven Right00:05:24
What you can say about science is that it has not been proven wrong.
Science is about things that can be proven wrong.
And the science we have is only about the things that have not yet been proven wrong.
Right.
And so, that title is a.
Not my favorite.
So when it comes to the use of physics for things like governments, the Pentagon, these type of things that get enormous, unlimited funding, what sort of interest do you suspect, maybe you don't know, that like the Pentagon, for example, would have in basic physics or breakthrough physics or funding physicists?
It always has the same interest.
First of all, the Pentagon is not the evil empire, which is something that many people in this society seem to think.
I'm the son of a gentleman who serves 28 years in the U.S. Army.
Part of my childhood took place on U.S. Army basis.
So you can say that, well, gee, I was somehow programmed to have the thoughts that I have.
Military culture in this country up until recent times is a very distinct culture that is deeply deliberative in a way that the general society is not.
It is also tightly focused on one mission, which in ordinary times is protect this country.
The people that I have met who are leaders of the Pentagon are people I have enormous respect for.
for their intellectual ability, not for rah, rah, rah and we build nuclear, but for their intellectual ability.
And so given what I have observed, I'm sure that you can get people – maybe we're seeing examples now – who are not the ones who take this Commitment to protecting the nation consistent with the Constitution of the United States seriously.
Time will tell whether our country has entered such a phase.
That's all I know.
Well, it's certainly unsettling given these Epstein files that have come out, where you have a window now into this invisible world.
World that most people did not know existed, where you have power brokers running around the world pulling the strings of governments and funding and profiting from wars.
And at the same time, you have this guy who's wildly interested in physics, in parapsychology, all of this wacky stuff.
He's funding science.
Funding the top scientists around the world, and none of us knew this existed.
None of you knew this existed.
None of you knew this didn't exist.
Right.
Well, I'm saying that.
The point is science is a two edged sword.
It can be used for good or it can be used for evil.
If you actually look at the history of science, particularly in the Western tradition, and let's restrict ourselves there because that's where I'm most knowledgeable.
Western science for well, let me just say it the way Einstein said.
Einstein said that Galileo is the father of all science because he drummed it into our heads that you don't get accurate description of nature.
I'm paraphrasing.
You don't have an accurate understanding of nature unless you actually are in conversation with nature.
This means that you can't go off and dream up the right answers.
That's the short way to interpret what I was saying.
So in the Western tradition, as I look from Galileo to Newton, science for a very long time, if you look at the scientists, they're wealthy people because ordinary people are busy trying to live.
Yes.
And so this secret society sort of mentality is far deeper than just looking at the current.
It is, in fact, the standard way that science evolved up until fairly recently.
Well, I mean, yes.
Yes.
I mean, you have, if you look at the creation of NASA, it was a group of Nazis, occultists, and, you know, a Scientologist and Jack Parsons, all the stuff he was into.
It's like, wow.
Yes, but this is, but my point is that this has always been the case.
This is not something new.
The Secret Society of Scientists00:04:16
Right.
I just, I just, I can understand your deep knowledge of this.
You may have, you obviously do have far more, a far greater grasp of the history of this stuff than.
than 99% of people on the planet.
So it's kind of astonishing for people like me.
It is scary.
It is scary.
And the only thing that I can think that will allow us to avoid the doing of evil is that more people like you and more people in the general public become aware of the subtleties that are involved in maintaining a consistent application of the principles in the U.S. in the establishment of this country.
If we don't do that, things can be lost.
Yeah.
Are you optimistic?
I was in England about a year ago.
In fact, it was a year ago.
I was in England, I was in London, I gave a series of talks.
And a journalist from a journal named Physics World came to talk to me.
And part of our discussion was actually on this subject.
Am I optimistic?
And what I told her two things.
I told her two things.
One, that many times in my life I have been described as a hopeless optimist.
And what that means is that if you ask me, is there hope, I will say no.
But then I will say, but if we don't have hope, there is no hope.
Right.
And the other thing is, as I look at my country, where it's not clear that people like me can exist in its future if certain forces take control.
So I'm very mindful of that.
And if the country survives, as I have come to know over the course of my lifetime, it's going to take at least half a century to get back to this.
But that's a big if.
Half a century to get back.
Yeah, there certainly needs to be, you know how when they do to the houses to get rid of the termites where they put the big tent in the roof?
Yes, I've seen that many occasions.
Something like that where it doesn't take out, it doesn't destroy the foundation, but it's like a very hyper-focused rate, like the raid spray that gets all the cockroaches out.
Yeah, well, you know, if we look back at just a little bit of history, the process that we're talking about fumigation, that's what I'll say.
Fumigation is a word indeed.
But this process is something that we have seen in our world in the course of the last 100 years.
The Second World War was an existential battle for the existence of traditional values that the West at least says that it has.
Both the Nazis in Germany and the imperialists in China I'm sorry, Japan were clearly a challenge to these principles.
When they were defeated, however, and this is certainly well documented in both those societies, the West engaged what they call – in Nazi, was called denazification, and it was the fumigation that you're talking about.
And so, yes, these things have happened before and it will likely take something rather similar.
Yeah, well, hopefully it doesn't take another country doing it to us.
Hopefully we can do it to ourselves.
That's exactly right.
Because I wouldn't trust anybody else.
You don't want to do that at the barrel at the end of a gun.
No, and I don't want anybody else to do it either.
Right.
It is pretty crazy to think how, I don't know if you've ever been to Japan.
I have.
I've never been, but I've heard stories recently of people saying how, Insanely safe and clean the place is, and like how your four year old could take a ride on the subway or on the train, and you don't even have to think twice about it, not have to worry about any sort of crime.
Life on Goldilocks Planets00:08:05
And it seems like our civilization is the opposite of that, and we're the ones that drop two nukes on them.
Yes.
To answer your question about 15, no, even longer, 20 years ago, I took my family to Tokyo.
It's their only visit.
I've been to Japan.
I think at least one other time.
But my wife and our children, I was at a conference and I would go to a conference in the day and my wife and the kids say, oh, we're going to go explore Tokyo in the subway.
I'm like, go right ahead.
Yes, it's insanely safe.
Yeah.
And that's certainly not who we are.
No.
Are no.
Another thing I wanted to ask you was, uh, when it comes to it's totally jumping from topic to topic here, but that's okay um, when it comes to the search for life outside of our solar system what, first of all, do you think there is consciousness similar to ours outside of our solar system?
And Two, do you think, if there was, because obviously there is a whole bunch of different planets that we found, that are Goldilocks planets, that could inhabit intelligent life.
Do you think it would resemble anything similar to us?
Well, first of all, on the question of the possibility that it exists, I refer to what I regard as a wonderful statement by Carl Sagan.
It said, if we're the only intelligent universe in the life, there certainly was a lot of wastage of space, right?
So most scientists that I know believe that intelligent life likely exists outside of our solar system.
In fact, it's very rare that I find a scientist who doesn't think that's a reasonable statement.
Do they have to be like us is a different question because when you talk about the Goldilocks planets, that assumes that carbon-based life forms similar to us, I'm sorry, that the conditions that support carbon-based life Are the only ones that can give rise to conscious beings.
One of the chemical arguments about why that might not be true is to look at the table of elements.
In the table of elements, you'll find out that silicon is actually rather similar to carbon in its behavior.
You just need to have higher temperatures.
So one could perhaps think about silicon based light.
And there are other holes in the argument about whether it has to be carbon based.
There is a scientist at MIT.
A female scientist, I can't think of her name.
I heard her give a talk maybe three or four years ago about the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere.
This is an idea that actually Carl Sagan talked about in his.
In Jupiter's atmosphere?
Yeah, in Jupiter's atmosphere.
This is an idea Carl Sagan talked about in his.
What was this great series?
Cosmos.
If you look very carefully, you'll find it.
But this.
particular scientists and some collaborators were putting together observational and chemical data that where it was the first time in my life I heard someone give a rational explanation about why you should not rule out the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere.
So, you know, the universe, uh-oh.
Ah, Sarah.
Yes, this is a lady.
Thank you.
Sarah Seeger, that's a lady.
So you might want to have some of your audience spend some time looking at her work?
Okay, so this could be like microbial life.
Yes.
Life has not been observed in any habitat other than Earth, which has an oxygen rich environment, while Earth's atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen gas.
Oxygen is essential for advanced living organisms.
Some species of microorganisms do not require oxygen for metabolism, called anaerobic organisms, such as methanogens.
Yep.
Which rely on carbon dioxide while releasing methane.
Yeah, let me stop you here and remind you that methanogens have been observed here on Earth in terms of the volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Oh, yes.
Interesting.
So, given that our universe and Mother Nature are incredibly ingenious, I think it's kind of short sighted to think that only carbon based life forms exist.
And what would evolution look like on these other Goldilocks?
So, if one of these Goldilocks planets was able to.
Have similar conditions to Earth, it would not necessarily have the same gravity.
Yeah, but you're again pushing me to an area where I don't feel confident giving answers.
I can talk about my suspicions, my intuitions, but they're no more valuable than yours.
Sure.
Well, thank you for doing this.
This has been.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Like I say, I don't do many of these things because.
A lot of people who do podcasts in particular have their own agenda and their own sort of spin because they're trying to satisfy what they think their audience wants.
And I perceived you as the exception that would allow me to speak about what I think as opposed to imposing any pre-existing kind of matrix that those thoughts had to adhere to.
Well, I greatly enjoyed this and I learned a lot.
So I appreciate you making the trip and doing it.
Thank you.
Where can folks find out more about your stuff and the books you've written?
Oh, boy.
Just put in James Gates and then put James Gates in quotes and then put some word after what you're interested in finding.
And you'll find it.
You'll find this a lot.
Although I don't do a lot of stuff like this, there's a lot of stuff online about me.
Yes.
And you've been doing it for a long time.
Lots of great documentaries, all kinds of good stuff.
About 30 science documentaries.
Yeah.
And the last one, if you ask me anything, let me talk about the last one.
The last one is.
Is a documentary that was authorized by Stephen Hawking's family, and it's called Hawking Can You Hear Me?
Oh, yes.
You know this?
Yes, yes, yes.
You showed it to me before, and I'll show it to you.
And so I was very, very pleased to be asked to be part of that by the family because I actually met Stephen's daughter on more than one occasion.
She's a person who reached out.
And the thing to me that was so interesting about that particular one was it sort of lifted this.
Lifted this veil of false worship of Stephen because it was very much the person as opposed to the image that's out there.
And I thought that was very important that all of us are just people.
And this is something that.
Just human beings.
Yeah.
And one of the things that mystifies me about us is that so many wish to worship.
Other members of our species.
And this was kind of undoing that.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
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