Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Felix Flicker: The Magic of Physics on The Into The Impossible Podcast (#318)

Episode Date: May 28, 2023

Watch the video of this episode here: https://youtu.be/AJJGv-5Rk4I #CondensedMatter #superconductors #quantummechanics The tagline for our podcast by Arthur C. Clarke is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker’s imaginative new book The Magick of Physics provides ample service to that notion. In Flicker’s book the magic is in “condensed matter physics”, the quotidian solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us—and the more exotic matter— which form the foundations for our electronic lives, and may hold the keys to a transformed future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks. Flicker finds magic in real physics like creating new particles which never existed before, and making crystals that shoot out light that can cut through metal. Using metaphors of wizards, infinite libraries, staffs and wands, the book has a compelling narrative that circumvents the need for equations and charts, yet conveys real, practical knowledge. Felix Flicker is a lecturer at Cardiff University in the School of Physics and Astronomy. He holds an MPhys in physics from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and received his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Bristol in 2015. He has published in both Nature and Science. Felix has trained in Kung Fu for twenty years and has been an instructor for fifteen years. He is the former British Champion of Shuai Jiao (Chinese wrestling), and a student of Shodo (Japanese calligraphy) and sailing. www.felixflicker.com Buy The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life https://a.co/d/2JtuhM1 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:30 Judging the book by its cover 00:07:10 What is the philosopher's stone? 00:09:20 The announcement by Ranga Diass of the development of a room temperature superconductor at the March 2023 meeting of the American Physical Society of 10,000 scientists. 00:15:45 What qualifies as a legit superconducting material? Why is ultra-high pressure an issue? 00:19:00 What is the significance of condensed matter physics and why should a scientist consider pursuing it? The elevator pitch. 00:25:50 The glory of room temperature superconductors 00:28:25 Felix’s journey through martial arts, calligraphy and tea. 00:33:45 Tea and phase transitions 00:41:54 How does physics go from theory to practice? 00:49:00 Why are knots important in condensed matter physics? Topological quantum computation! 00:56:00 Existential questions - What are your choices for the most magical or impressive scientific fact(s)? Phonons! Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The tagline for selling condensed matter physics is that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I think that would be my tagline for the subject. The clear example of that is a quasi-particle. And I'll be more specific, I'll say the phonon is probably an example of what you've asked for. You'll be described light as being carried by elementary particles. We can describe sound as being carried by particles, but they're not elementary. Phon is like a particle of sound, and it can only exist inside crystals or some other states of condensed matter. And you could say, well, it's just the atoms vibrating as the sound travels through, the thing you learned at school, right?

Sure, they're an effective description, but mathematically it's exactly the same thing you do. And I think if you want to believe that photons are real elements of reality, I think you should admit in the same way that phonons are fundamental real things in reality. And so I suppose the philosophical point I'd want people to have as a take home one for this segment is that emergent stuff, things where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, things like phonons, that's purely emergent phenomenon, right? It's not present in any one of the atoms there that's vibrating. It's some collective behavior of lots of them. But it's no less real. Welcome everyone to this magical episode of Into the Impossible. Our podcast introduction features a quote from announced science fiction writer,

futurist and inventor Arthur C. Clark. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is an apropos aphorism for this episode with Felix Flickr, discussing his new book, The Magic of Physics. Flickr shares his fascination with the reality-bending things that happen at small scales at the extremes of matter when emergent phenomenon are not predicted by initial conditions and seemingly immutable laws. We discover what magical technologies, scientific breakthroughs, past, present, and future, can't unlock, making us all wizards. Dr. Flickr is an award-winning theoretical physicist focusing on the quantum mechanisms of condensed matter.

If you're hungry for more sincere, in-depth open dialogue into cutting-edge science and want to know what great minds are thinking, please keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing and following. And for some extra credit, head to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating and subscribe there too. Remember, click the bell to receive alerts on new episodes as they drop and get in on the live chats. If you feel your personal intellectual universe expanding, please remember to add a five-star asterism to, to ours and pay it forward with a share. We love hearing from you and reading all your reviews, like this one on Audible from Naked Snake. I'd say this podcast is still seriously underrated.

Brian Keating is one of the most genuine and honest scientist and overall thinkers out there. Into the Impossible with Brian Heating does a great job of curating some of the most important voices in the world that people should be listening to. And now, let's discover the wizardry of physics in this magical episode of The Impossible with Brian Keating and Felix Flickr. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, hell. Welcome everyone to a magical, very, very mystical episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with

I, your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, joined by a wizard if ever there was Felix Flickr, Dr. Felix Flickr, who's joining us from Europe. Felix, how are you today? Yeah, I'm very well, thank you. It's great to be with you and to be discussing this magical book, the magic of the K of physics, understanding the fantastical phenomena of everyday life. Felix, you know because you're an avid listener to the podcast,

that I always start each podcast with a discussion of the book cover and its title, but even before that, the actual audio that we start the podcast with is with none other than Sir Arthur C. Clark, who famously said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So we always open the podcast with that. This book has magic in the cover, and I want to take our readers through the thought process that led you to come up with the title, the graphics, and the conspicuous lack of a dust jacket. Now, I've always railed against dust jackets, I think they're useless, and the first thing you do is take them off and they just fall into your lap.

Of course, in my first book, the dust jacket was kind of a sample collector for the villain of the book, which is cosmic dust. But we're not here to talk about my favorite subject, me. We're here to talk about this book. So do us a favor, please, Dr. Flicker, explore and explain the title, design, and subtitle of this book in a segment we call Judging Books by their cover. Okay, well, I should say first of all that most of those things were really the choice of my publisher. And actually all of them are different in the UK version, whereas also the choice of my other publisher. Okay, the dust jacket, that's something I was quite keen on. As you say, I always take the dust jackets off all my books and I just throw them in the bin, actually.

At some point, I had a drawer full of dust jackets because I was like, I might put it back on. And it had been a few years and I was like, you're not, I'm just throwing them all in the bin. So when it came to having my book published, I thought, well, it's going to be a bit silly because I'm going to take the dust jacket off my book and throw it in the bin. So you might as well make sure it doesn't have one. And the title is The Magic or the K. Yeah, what is that meant to represent? Is that a British thing like you guys spell things now I'm blanking on something, but what's something you guys spell with a U that we don't? It's not.

We don't, we're not that archaic usually. in the UK. Actually, again, the title is different in the UK, although there it's the magic of matter, magic with the K. In the US, it's the magic of physics, magic with the K. I guess in both places, I mean, it wasn't, I didn't exactly choose the title, but, you know, I was involved in the discussion. I think the decision was made in both places because we wanted to emphasize that it's magic in a bit more of a literal sense than you might have got if there weren't a K there. So, If you said something as magic and it didn't have a K on it, I think just from a title alone, you might think someone meant like, oh, it's magic, you know, in a sort of loose sense that we generally mean, oh, that's quite magical. Whereas in this case, I'm really trying to draw a fairly direct comparison to magic in like fantasy fiction or science fiction and just generally trying to get at what's magical about things in the world.

So we wanted people to understand that a glance from the cover that it's meant, slightly more, literally. I really like the American. I think it's very pretty with those patterns on that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a beautifully bound book. I'm a scholar of that. You should know, though, you shouldn't throw out the dust jackets.

Apparently, if you have, say, a rare book, like Darwin's Origin of Species or something like that, if it doesn't have the frontist piece or the cover, it's worth 10% of the price with the cover. But then I also don't want to treasure them as objects. I want to treasure them for the words and sites. And I thought, well, if it's devalued to other people, that's probably good for me because it will encourage me to keep hold of it. That's right. I read the book in multiple copies of it, and I will give away one of the

copies eventually to one of my students, because it's not often I have on a theoretical condensed matter physicist. You may be one of the few if not only Nicole Younger, Halpern, who you reference in the book. Her book was Quantum Steampunk, and it's not exactly about, you know, condensed matter physics, what we're going to discuss today. But it is nevertheless a similar book in that it uses sort of similar literary devices in terms of imaginative open errors and so forth of each chapter and a thread woven through with characters, mystical and otherwise. So, congratulate you on that literary mechanism, because it's very careful. captivating. But we're going to talk about the hard scientific truths of this book. And one of the

things amidst the many references to the Lord of the Rings and other things that my readers, my listeners will be delighted to encounter in this book is a discussion of what you call the Philosopher's Stone. And it's sort of the culmination of the book, not giving a spoiler away, because the descriptions are worth savoring and reading and listening to as I did as well. I heard the audiobook as well, which I highly recommend. So you should buy all copies, digital, hard copy, and audio. But it culminates with the philosopher's stone. Can you explain what is the philosopher's stone to you as a theoretical condensed matter of physicist? Okay. Yeah, we do use this phrase sometimes, and obviously it's in the news a lot at the moment. We tend to use it to refer to

room temperature superconductors. I mean, we use that. We use like the Holy Grail or something. It's like it's the big thing that you always refer to in grants, basically. Maybe that's the accurate way to phrase it. So if you can connect your work to something going on with room temperature superconductors, then that's an easy way to explain to people that it's important. So I try to use this idea of the philosopher's stone because I feel like it connects to this idea that, well, so you know, the idea of the superconductor is that it's something that conducts electricity perfectly without loss, whereas any

typical metal, say, has some resistance. And this means that you can't, you're always losing electricity, you're losing power when you send it down any line over any distance. And this is a huge obstacle to a more widespread adoption of things like renewable energy, say, because, you know, we've probably all wondered about trying to cover the Sahara and solar panels and just send the electricity out all around the world. And of course, that's impossible because you lose so much bit along the way that it wouldn't work. Now, if you could make power lines out of superconductors, that would be possible. You could send it as far as you like

and you'd lose literally none. So I tried to draw the connection to this idea of the philosopher's stone. Historically, alchemists were searching for this magical substance, which would prevent loss in a more general sense, like they could live forever or these sorts of things. And I like the idea that historically,

they were trying to transmute base substances like lead into precious metal, like gold. And you can kind of do that. You can't turn lead into gold, but you could, you cool, lead down, sufficiently cold, and it does change into a new state of matter, this superconductor, and which is arguably much more precious than gold, and much more useful, I'd say. So we had encountered each other. I contacted you a couple weeks ago after the

announcement, the startling announcement, although some say it's a re-announcement, of the discovery of a truly room temperature superconductor by a group at the University of Rochester with published peer-reviewed research nature, presented at the American Physical Society meeting, the March meeting. And I immediately thought of you, and I asked you what's going on. So describe the scene. We're going to probably open the podcast with this description. So describe what it was like in the pandemonium, the chaos surrounding this announcement, and explain why, beyond just the the explanation that you gave of why room temperature superconductivity is so potentially transformative. But why was this particular announcement of this discovery

so chaos-inducing? Right. Well, I can describe the scene at the American Physical Society meeting, if you like. I mean, that was one of the more exciting things that happened at that meeting. Yes. I don't know if it's typically renowned for its excitement. Yes, I mean, it's a very big meeting. 10,000 people go to this meeting every year. It's the biggest meeting of condensed matter physicists in the world. Yeah, so I was there.

I bumped, you tend to sort of walk around, bump into people, you know, other physicists and have a chat about, you know, what are you working on this sort of thing? And I bumped into an old friend from Berkeley and he said, oh, you're going to this meeting in a few minutes. And so we went along to it to the, the, the, the, the, announcement of room temperature superconductivity and it was a bit bizarre because there's some of the rooms are massive. There's rooms that are ballrooms where famous people give talks to thousands of people and set up for that and then there are the rooms that are very small and fit

maybe 100 people comfortably and this was in one of those rooms and we got there and not only was the crowd you know we couldn't get anywhere near the room the crowd was covering the hallway which is itself a huge thing it's in a huge conference center this was in Las Vegas But they're also security lined up on the door. And they tried to claim this was something to do with fire safety regulations or something. But when I gave my talk, it was also, it was in the same size room, actually a very close one, on a different day. And that talk was also very heavily oversubscribed because it was in information theory. So it was about machine learning and people were very interested in that.

And again, the crowd was out the door on that one and there's no security. So it wasn't really, I think, you know, maybe they were more prepared for this one. But yeah, so we were in this bizarre situation with security sort of shouting at us to get back. It felt like a bit of a riot, which you don't normally expect at the March meeting, I have to say. But yeah, so basically, they were making the announcement. It's been republished in nature after having to be retracted after claims of, I mean the claims were about falsified data, I think. So very serious accusations rather than just some accident or something. It's a very heated debate and not one I feel well enough informed about,

but it was retracted from nature. Now it's republished in nature. But it was in a sort of smaller room. So anyone who's a member of the American Physical Society can give a talk. Anyone, you know, you can talk about, you could make a topic up that was definitely, you need to be wrong and you would still be allowed to give a talk about it at this meeting. Now, I'm not saying that's what's happening here. but somehow it'd end up in the small room

and everyone wanted to see the show, but a lot of us didn't get to see it. It's been re-announced. I think, okay, a lot of people are very skeptical about it because of what's been happening over the last year or so. Others aren't, you know, there are some very good conventional matter physicists who I've spoken to personally about it,

who are, you know, they're not taking a side, they're trying to look at the scientific result. And even if it's not a room temperature superconductor, they think there might be something interesting there, there's stuff that can be learned. And I've had some really good conversations with people about other stuff that's going on. I think the thing, you know, the thing that will seal the deal, if it is true, is when another group independently verifies the result. And so there are people thinking about that, obviously, because we are scientists and it's not all just a big fun show at Las Vegas. So some of that works going on now.

Well, so in preparation for this call, I talked to you, as I said. But then next week, I'm going to be talking with my UCSD colleague, Professor Jorge Hirsch. I don't know if you know. Oh, yeah. You know, he's famously the counter argument to the authors of this paper. And he got the first one withdrawn, basically, from nature, which, you know, and I think that's, it's important that we have that kind of scrutiny for big. claims. So, yeah, I think it's good that the debate was had, certainly. So, you know, it would be

interesting to hear what he has to say about. Yeah. Now, the claim, the claim by the Rochester team, D.S. at all and their team, I've invited him on the podcast as well, but he hasn't replied to me. So, you know, my grand design is not to have some, you know, drag out debate, fight, you know, where we turn things into a tawdry brawl, but to have some illumination on the subject. Because, as you say, it is so important. One of my past guest, David Friedberg, who's a famous billionaire investor, he actually said on this podcast that he would give his right arm for the discovery of room temperature superconductivity. And then I pointed out, well, it's been discovered, and he started getting nervous. And then he started to say things like, oh, well, that team has been, you know,

controversial before, and maybe it won't hold up. And I said, I'm getting the saw out, David. it. I'm sharpening up the blade. But the one thing that he was hanging his hat on is that it's not at ambient pressure. So can you speak about that? I mean, one thing that is confusing to me is that these strange lutenites and so forth, luteinium or whatever it is, you know, has to be subjected to this tremendous pressure. And that's somehow seen as disqualifying. But if you look at the pressure inside a ceramic, you know, superconductor, just the internal stress and strain inside of it, how is that not the same? You know, it's incredibly high stress strain. Maybe it's not, you know, it's intrinsic. It's not extrinsic. Why should that be disqualifying simply because you need to

construct, you know, this kind of static? I mean, it's one thing if it was dynamic, if you had to supply, you know, continuous fluctuations and pressure to keep it at millions of Pascal, But why do people discount that? Why is that, you know, transformative in the same way that, you know, room temperature or not room temperature, but, you know, liquid nitrogen conduct superconducting objects like Yibico, that those have internal stress strains that are quite high. Why do we care about how much external pressures apply? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Right. Well, I suppose some of that's historical with these things because it's coming from the community where you're talking about really, really high pressures. that so the older claims were that they'd made a room temperature superconductor under like

really phenomenal pressure and it's such high pressures that it's not realistic that you're going to build a power line out of this stuff we're talking about things you can get in like diamond anvil cells so you get like you get diamonds because they're very hard and you can put them under huge pressure and they can maintain the shape roughly and you get them down to a very very sharp tip and then squash like a tiny amount of stuff with that tip under huge pressure because pressure is forced divided by area. So if your area is tiny, then you can get these unbelievable pressures, but only in that tiny little space,

certainly not over power lines that do useful stuff. So maybe it's the historical reason for that. So now I'm slightly unclear about some of the claims here because they certainly use the phrase under ambient conditions or something like that. So I think having talked to other people who know a bit more about it, the claim is that they put it under huge pressure, but nowhere near as huge as it was before. and actually much more achievable under more practical conditions.

So maybe if I answer a slightly different question, when you think about high-temperature superconductors that we already have, like IBCO that you mentioned, it's high temperature when it can exist above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, or the boiling point of nitrogen, and therefore you can call it with liquid nitrogen. Now that's not anywhere near ambient, right? That's very cold, but we call it high temperature. partly because that's so incredibly practical. Like turning, making nitrogen liquid is much, much easier than say making helium liquid. And so you can do it under much easier conditions.

You can carry nice around in, in sort of polystyrene pots basically. It makes it far more achievable. So the pressures we're talking about have gone from, you know, not achievable, achievable by small number of groups on earth to something that can be done much more readily. But then there's a claim beyond this. I think there's a claim beyond this that you make it under these conditions, but then it can actually survive when you take that pressure off. So you have to make it under incredible conditions,

but then you can survive without having those extreme environments. I think that's the claim of the ambience, as in ambient means like sort of normal conditions. And then I think, as you say, it's more like there's an internal pressure, and then you get into questions of, is this material really stable like that, or is it meta-stable? My understanding is that the group that's making the claims is already saying it's not reproducible every time. It's something like a third of the samples can do it or something.

Suggesting that there's more going on, it's maybe not like, you know, you can have like crystals where you have periodic arrangements of atoms. And then those, you know, we know that crystals can be stable. But then you can have things where there's sort of like patch regions that are superconducting and maybe they're not connecting up, something like that. So that would suggest maybe metastable. perhaps it can fall apart after some time. Until people have reproduced this and understood all these different things, it's hard to make a serious comment about it, I think. So you make a strong case in the book that condensed what we call condensed matter physics,

which used to be called solid state physics, which some people call squalid state physics. And the mere fact that you are only the second or third, you know, true theoretical condensed matter physicists, I don't think I've ever had an experimental condensed matter. Although I do a lot of that for the cooling of superconducting transition edge sensor superconductors for astronomical purposes. We basically have a condensed matter physics lab with liquid nitrogen and helium and all sorts of dilution refrigerators and superfluids and so forth. But nevertheless, it's not so well known.

And you make the case that it should be more well known. And I wonder if I could share a vignette. So I went to Brown University for my PhD where Michael Costorlitz is. And of course, he's very famous for, you know, sharing the 2016 Nobel Prize with Duncan Halden who makes an appearance in this book, who is a very strange character. And I did interview him for my second book, which is around here somewhere. Oh, yeah, it's right in front of me. So Into the Impossible has an interview with Duncan Halding, who was a professor here at UC

San Diego before he left for the colder climate of Princeton, New Jersey. Anyway, Leon, who is my quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum mechanics teacher at Brown, he pivoted after he won the Nobel Prize. He'd think he would go into, you know, even deeper into superconductivity, but he turned to neural networks and, you know, kind of early machine learning back in the early 90s. Not, you know, well, it was 20 years after he won the Nobel Prize, but, you know, 50 years, 40 years after he did the work. But nevertheless, why do you think if, why do you think, you know, a beginning student would

be interested and well served by going into condensed matter physics if some of the most prolific practitioners of that immediately abandoned the field? Yeah. As soon as they acquire their, their shiny, gilded object called the Nobel Prize. Give us a little bit of advertisement and promotion, some PR for your field. Okay, well, I would probably, first I point out that I think it's pretty common for someone who wins a Nobel Prize to switch fields dramatically. I think because they're going for another one, right? If you if you won the Nobel Prize in the thing you've been doing, you're not going to win another one in any closely related field.

So I think, you know, John Bardeen, who's the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in physics. And of course, those were both in Kinnets matter. But then my understanding was he was going for a third and he was attempting to get one for understanding high temperature. superconductors, I think. But, you know, that's, that's his say. But he sort of switched topics repeatedly. Every time he gets a Nobel Prize, he changes again because you're not going to get another Nobel Prize in that direction. So maybe if you'd have lived longer, he might have made it to three. That's the, we call that the hedonic treadmill. You know, when you get some level of fame and success, it's never enough. You just keep seeing, wanting the number to go up, whether that's

money or subscribers or what have you. So, yeah, so continue. And I should also point out your countryman Brian Josephson, who trying to get on the podcast, he also made a radical pivot and now works out a theory of consciousness and mind and is involved with some, say, quackery and so forth. But Leon is still an honest to goodness, you know, work-a-day scientist. So anyway, sorry to interrupt. But besides the Nobel Prize winners, what's an advertisement? What's your pitch, your elevator pitch for a young graduate student to pursue? theoretical or experimental condensed matter physics? Well, I'd say the main thing really is that while people tend not to have heard of it, I'm sure people listening to your podcast will have heard of it

because they're perhaps better informed about physics, but someone on the street, if you ask them, if you heard of condensed matter physics, the answer is always known. And you ask them if they've heard of gravitational waves or string theory, and they've always heard of those things. But the first point I would make is that a third of all physicists identify as condensed matter physicists, and that's actually more than any other branch of physics. So it's the biggest field in physics. And so clearly physicists are seeing something in this subject, which is not being communicated to the public. So, you know, I suppose if pitching it to graduate students in particular, one argument is that there's jobs in it.

which is not necessarily true of string theory anymore. So we're getting a lot of string theorists coming over to condensed matter. But not to start that old argument again. I have some work going on on string theory as well. So it's both ways. But there's always going to be jobs in condensed matter. But yeah, I'd say it's there is this disconnect where physicists know about it, find it interesting, lots of them work on it, but people in the public tend not to have heard of it.

heard of it. And I asked people over the years, why is this? You know, I asked other scientists. I asked like science popularizers and journalists. And the answer was always one of two things, basically. They always, and I agree with these two things. One is that it's, you take subjects like astrophysics, gravitational waves, string theory, and there's something like inherently magical about the subjects, which doesn't need explaining. So if you look at the night sky, It's easy to be kind of awe-struck by that. If you said, I find that magical, no one would really say, what do you mean by that? I don't know what you mean.

It's magical, isn't it? You look at the sky. You're trying to imagine the whole universe, it blows your mind. Or you try and imagine like the smallest possible things, like what are the elementary building blocks of the universe? And those things are inherently magical in a way that doesn't need explaining. But condensed matter physics is the study of familiar stuff, the stuff around us. Like, everything we've ever experienced is matter. And the familiar is not obviously magical in the same way.

So you need to explain the magic. So that's one reason. The other reason I think it's less well known is that it's practical. Like this discovery, if they found a root temperature superconductor, that will be put to use within like a year or something. Genuinely, you know, we're already using superconducting power lines. It's just to be a matter of switching them over so they don't use liquid nitrogen anymore. And so you might think that's an easy way to sell the subject, but I think it makes it harder

because if you talk to someone who works on black holes, say, they can write a book about black holes. And in their book, they explain why they're excited to work on black holes. But if a condensed matter physicist tries to sell their subject, there's always this temptation to say, well, I work on it because I think it's great. But the reason you might think it's great is because it's got these practical applications, like all of electronics relies on Conents Matter, your computer, your phone, all this stuff. But that's not why you work on it, right?

I'm not working on Conents Matter physics because I want your phone to work, better, you know, no offense. That's a useful byproduct, but that's not why I'm excited about it. So I think those are the two problems that subject faces. It's practical and it's familiar, and neither of those things seems obviously magical in the way that other subjects in physics are magical. And so that was the central idea of the book. I thought, well, why do I find it magical? And I thought, I think those things can be magical is just a slightly more subtle form of magic. And then that led me to this idea of sort of, it's kind of like what a wizard does, like, you know, a wizard, not attempting to be restrictive on who is a wizard, but you know,

take someone like Harry or Hermione and Hogwarts, and they're not doing magic on the scale of the whole universe and they're not rewriting the fundamental laws of reality. They're doing bits of practical hands-on magic that helps other characters out. And so I thought, okay, so I think it is magical, but we need to explain that a bit more clearly in our subject. So what I love about the book or these illustrations, which, you know, you are a calligraphy, maven, you're quite accomplished at that, as well as, which, you know, I'm grateful to your publicist for letting me know. But in addition to Shodo or Shoto, by Shoto, Japanese calligraphy.

You're also the former British champion of Shui Zhao, which is Chinese wrestling. Tell me about this. Why would a wizard need to wrestle? I mean, there's so many other magical powers that you can take part of it. So what is, tell me about that. You're the first wrestling champion I've had on the podcast. I've had on Prav Maga practitioners, but never a wrestling champion. What led to that?

How does it, how does it jive with you being a theoretical physics? Well, I mean, I've been doing martial arts for many years. It's actually kung fu I do. So I did that for a long time. I went to the, our school went to the national competition and there's various things you can take part in. And I just kind of entered the Shui Shao on the day. I hadn't really heard of it before, but I gave it a go. And yeah, you can just use the same principles.

So it worked out quite well in that case. But yeah, praying mantis Kung Fu is what I have done for many years and I've taught for many years as well. So actually that led to also to the Japanese calligraphy. I guess I also, I'm very into tea, which a lot of English people are, I suppose. And a friend of mine knew, so this is in Bristol where I live now and where I did my PhD years ago. A friend of mine used to work at a place called Hamilton House.

And every Thursday morning in Hamilton House, there was a Japanese man would come there. And he would do this, thing called Juree Energy Healing, and you would sit there for 10 minutes, and he would hold his hand out, and he would shoot healing energy into your face. So this is how my friend explained it to me. And, you know, I try to be open-minded. I was like, I suspect sitting quietly for 10 minutes with your eyes closed is probably the benefit you're getting from that interaction and maybe having someone pay attention to you like that. But my friend was always adamant about it,

so he said you should go and meet this guy. Anyway, it turned out that the man's wife was as a tea master who can do the Japanese tea ceremony. And you know, this is like similar to martial arts. It takes years of practice to do everything perfectly for this tea ceremony. And he invited me along to have the tea ceremony, three of us to go and have it. And during the discussion around that, it turned out that his wife was also a calligraphy master as well as being a tea master. And I got very excited about this because I'd been doing kung fu for years. Part of that is learning the sword, like a Chinese long sword. And I'd understood it's a similar skill using the long sword

to doing calligraphy. Like it's always portrayed as quite similar art in films and so on. So I got quite excited about that and asked if they wanted to teach me. And actually, by the time we got around to doing it, his wife had moved back to Japan, but he wanted to teach me himself. So I learned that for a few years. And then when I moved to Berkeley in California,

and I found another Japanese calligraphy teacher over there who also wanted to teach it. So I carried on when I was in San Francisco. Francis good. So speaking of tea, well, first I want to relate an anecdote that I can't really remember in its fullness, but there's a story of a Japanese tea master who's traveling with the emperor somewhere in the 1400s or something. And he somehow he besmirches the reputation of a samurai warrior.

And the samurai warrior challenges him to a fight to the death. and he doesn't know, the warrior doesn't know he's actually not, the man that he's encountering is a very high level official in the Japanese, you know, establishment. And he also doesn't know he's this tea master. And so the tea master is terrified. And he says, oh, I'm going to die. And he starts complaining to the emperor. And the emperor says, agree to fight, show up tomorrow. Don't flee. Your life will be over if you flee. But do start your day as you would normally. And we'll see what. happened. And the samurai warrior witnesses him making tea, which, as you know, is a very elaborate process in Japan and elsewhere. And when he does it, the Japanese warrior says, I refuse to fight you. Even if you don't know anything about samurai sword fighting arts and so forth, you are so accomplished in this tea preparation that your mind is far sharper than my sword. And so he surrenders and they become BFFs. The reason I bring this up is I think there is a book written by my namesake,

Brian Keating, and it's called How to Make Tea. And people confuse me with that author. Unfortunately, he's passed away very young, sadly. But I have that book because I always support people named Brian Keating. And I hope everyone will do that as well, except support living Brian Keating, perhaps, by buying my books. And the Brian Keating book is called How to Make Tea. And I was like, well, what's the big deal. I was supporting a friend, you know, or someone with the same name. But I read it, and it's quite intricate. And it goes through the different types of boiling water that are necessary to make different types of tea. And you recount that in your book. And I want to use that as a springboard to talk about phase transition. Because I always heard, you know, phase transitions are

sort of, you know, it's kind of like the Supreme Court in America defined pornography as you'll know it when you see it. I was like, well, how much can there really be, you know, at standard temperature and pressure about different types of water for tea? I just boil it and dump it in a cup. I'm, you know, I'm an American. I drink the most American beverage of all. Tab. I drink Tab. But tell me, Felix, what is a phase transition? Is it, is it, you know it when you see it? Because it seems to me that there's many different definitions and not all scientists seem to agree on it. So how do you think of phase transition? Why are they important? Okay. Can I relate an anecdote quickly before that?

Is that, it's related? Of course, it's your show. Yeah, that's your... You've reminded me that... So when you apply to be an undergraduate in Oxford, you have to go to these interviews, right? And they last for several days. My mom was five days, actually, of being sat in a room and be called up to interview.

Five days. Yeah, it's pretty... I don't know if it's... Yeah, it's still about as thorough these days. It's still about three days. I had a five-day one. But one of the interviews, was with two tutors and they asked what is now a classic interview question, which is you've got some hop tea and you need to go out soon. So you've got to add the milk at some

point to cool it down. Should you add it sooner or later to get the tea to drinking temperature faster? And I didn't know the answer. I was trying to buy time. So I answered that etiquette dictates that you have to put the milk in first regardless. So I wasn't going to. certainly wouldn't put it in second because that wouldn't be allowed. And I kept on that line for about two attempts of them to get me to the answer while I was trying to think. And eventually one of one of the tutors was American and he said, okay, look, I'm an American. Just imagine it's American coffee and nobody cares about etiquette. So that was his way around that.

Sorry. So yes, phase transitions. I mean, they get to the heart of the magic in condensed matter physics, I think. Because I think, like, so when you think about what it is to do physics, the way I think of it, certainly theoretical physics, is kind of spotting hidden connections, I'd say, in the world. Take two phenomena that seem to normal people to be completely unrelated and spot that they're actually connected by kind of hidden secret roots. And isn't that ultimately what you do in magic as well? I think any way you try and think of magic, be it like in fantasy fiction or, you know, if you've got some magician trying to present something, I think they're always trying to find these hidden connections between things. And phase transitions are the epitome of this, right,

because they embody this idea of universality, the totally unrelated physical systems behave identically at phase transitions. So the classic example, and one I mentioned in the book is it's water boiling to steam, but under pressure. So it has to be under a very high pressure, a specific high pressure, for it to go through a phase transition at what's called a critical point. Now, that same behavior you get at that critical point is then the same as when a magnet stopped being magnetic. So you can take a ferromagnet, something that's magnetic by itself.

And if you heat it up beyond a specific temperature, called it's curious. point, then above that, it stops being a ferromagnet, it starts being a paramagnet, which is not magnetic by itself that can become magnetic when you put it in a magnetic field. And the way in which it stops being magnetic is the same as the way that water stopped being a liquid and starts being a gas at its critical point. And that's, you know, if someone told you that water turning into steam and a magnet stop being a magnet, those were like described by identical mathematics. I think you wouldn't naturally have believed them.

We wouldn't have believed them before the working condensed matter of physics on that subject. And so, you know, when I say that they're the same, what you get is you get this kind of universal behavior, like you can measure certain properties of the system. You look at how they change as a function of some parameter. So with water turning into steam, you can look at the density. That's something that, you know, water is denser than steam. You look at how the density changes as a function of temperature, and you'll find that it behaves as a power law. The density goes as the temperature to raise to some power.

And the power is some totally random number, it was something like 0.326 or something. And we can measure what this number is. And you might say, okay, maybe, and then sorry, if you measure the magnetization of a magnet as it stops being magnetic, similarly, it's governed by the same power. And you say, okay,

there's some magical like constant of reality there. It's like the speed of light or something. But it's not really, that's the thing. It's just some number. It's not some combination of pies or ease or anything like that. And it's really just the fact that it's this kind of random number is the really interesting thing. Because there's nothing that said, all right, it's not some combination of known fundamental constants that gives you that thing. They're just coming out exactly the same.

And that's the really mysterious thing. When you measure these two unrelated things carefully, you find that they're really, they're really ultimately like we think of them in the same way now and that's that's uh the magic of phase transitions i say own it all pay off your home travel for life drive a Ferrari in celebration of the world premiere of the monopoly big board bucks slot machine by aristocrat gaming yamava resort and casino at san manuel is giving one person a 1.6 million dollar dream package the biggest prize in yama vaas history club serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary.

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So the other thing I often kind of get into arguments about with my condensed matter, friends, or others, is the degree to which theory, experiment, and technology become sort of conflated with one another. I mean, we often hear things like, well, if, you know, if it wasn't for quantum mechanics, we wouldn't be able to talk on an iPhone because, you know, an iPhone has 14, you know, trillion transistors in it. And because of that, that's the transistors quantum mechanical. But, A, if you look at the very first transistor, you know, and you talk about it in the book, but you look at it, it looks like, it doesn't look like something a wizard would make.

It looks like something, you know, my four-year-old would make, you know, after I've deprived her of sleep for a couple. You know, it's got coat hanger and chicken, you know, chicken wire. It's got some chewing gum. And it's got this, you know, ginormous crystal, you know, which you're, you know, philosopher's stone maybe you might think of it as. It doesn't look anything like an iPhone. Moreover, I claim.

And you have, by the way, you have one of the best descriptions of how a transistor works. I think it should be, you know, included for all beginning undergraduates. You should be very much congratulated, Felix. It's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard. And it's poetic as the book is. And it's accurate scientifically. And it's just, it's just dead on. And I give it the highest commendation, Felix.

I wish I could have done it. So that's the highest incommium. You'll ever receive, my friend. Thank you. But the transistor, they didn't look at, oh, here's the Shrardinger equation. And let's apply it. And boom, here's a, you know, we can use, you know, we can take Instagram selfies.

What do you make of this? Like, in other words, how does the basic physics, the path from basic physics to, you know, or fundamental physics, condensed matter, quantum mechanics to technology is completely, it's almost incalculable how it comes about. But people simplify it and they say, well, if you don't believe, you know, in general relativity, if you think the earth is flat, you know, don't use your GPS. You know, so anyway, to what extent do we really ever look at the fundamental laws to make technology? I claim it's almost never, but I might be wrong.

I wouldn't say never. No, I think we do quite a lot in Conantamatter, if I'm honest. So maybe that's a controversial opinion. When I had Duncan on trying to interrupt. When I had Duncan Haldane on, he was like, you know, you should do things that are useless. He said, like, my discovery of topological matter with costrolitz and thallus, it'll never result in a better iPhone. But that's not why we did it. So anyway, go on.

So give me some examples of where we look into a fundamental law, like here's QCD or here's a Feynman diagram and out pops technology. As I said, I'm taking the counter example of I don't think it ever happens. But tell me, what are your thoughts? Okay. Well, I wouldn't say it works like that. that you look at the theory and the result pops out. But, you know, the first, I think one of the examples I give in the book of an early electronic device was this point contact rectifier.

I mean, it's maybe the kind of thing you were referring to a second ago, where I think like American GIs in Second World War managed to improvise an electronic device without realizing it by kind of creating a semiconductor, again, without knowing it, by, which created a sort of what's called a foxhole radio, I think. And the thing is, you know, they did this with remarkably little stuff. They basically just had some headphones, a safety pin. And they could make, or what turned out to be an electronic device. Now, the problem is, okay, you have got the basis of a working electronic device there,

But they didn't know that at the time. And I think before it started being kind of commercially useful, this became the transistor later on, you had to understand what was going on and why that thing worked, because it only worked a tiny percentage of the time. And part of that was we had no idea why it was working. So to get you from the stage where you've got, you're pushing two things together

and sometimes you're getting a radio signal in your headphones to having a functioning radio that works very well, we really did have to understand many body physics to understand that, you know, the quantum mechanics of many particles at once. And I don't think that's an overstatement. You know, it's not a coincidence that we started developing that many body theory in the 1950s

and then the transistor comes about also in the 1950s. It's not like random. If we take an example that's maybe a bit more timely now, if you look at the development of, or attempts to develop quantum computers, I think that's a really good place look. I mean, looking at all this in a bit of a more meta way, I think Connected Matter Physics more than other subjects has this, like, because it's practical on a sort of shorter

time scale, it tends to get a lot of like industry funding. Again, something that makes it look very unmagical, I think. But if you look at a lot of the brilliant discoveries in the 20th century in condensed matter physics, lots of them came out of places like Bell Labs. Bell Labs. Yeah. So, you know, and again, the important thing with Bell Labs is first, it's got loads of money. But the second, they allowed Blue Sky research, much like how they were saying, you know, they just let people spend, they got clever people, gave them the money to be able to do work they wanted to and let them work on stuff that seemingly had no point whatsoever. And then it led to many Nobel Prizes, lots of these cheering awards and so on, all sorts of stuff.

Now, somewhere where that's happening today, you know, Bell Labs was was ultimately funded out of money from the telecommunications industry. You know, it came from Alexander Graham Bell ultimately. I mean, I think it was more Bell's emphasis on the fact that he did kind of stuff that he said he felt was pointless and it led to one of the most important inventions in the modern world. But to take a kind of current example, there's loads of money now going into quantum computing, that's, you know, huge investment. And it's this really nice marriage of theory and experiment. You know, there's, they're taking on theorists. There's, but there's also like a kind of engineering side to it.

So we don't have a kind of scalable quantum computer that can, okay, we're doing some practical stuff, but, you know, it's not certainly not something people are using day to day for a useful purpose. But the approach is to try and make it practical. technology, there's the engineering side where you just, you just try and do better and better. And then there's the theory side which says, okay, maybe a totally different approach could lead to something which is much simpler to create through engineering. And the way I've interacted with this subject is through attempts to make a topological quantum computer, which is unarguably a very theoretical approach. Maybe it's not even the most practical one anymore. It's a very fast developing

field, but it's not implausible that that could be a good approach to it. And so my former colleague, Steve Simon, is a well-known expert on things related to this. And the way he phrased it is that if you want to harness quantum mechanics to build something practical like a quantum computer, well, quantum mechanics only really works in, you know, you can only maintain quantum coherence in like very cold, very clean systems. It's very easy to lose this magical property of quantum mechanics that makes it useful. And so he said, there's two approaches to this. One is the engineering approach where you try to minimize the noise, the noise being the messiness,

the temperature, so you try to make things very cold, you make them very clean. That's the engineering approach. The other approach is to make the system somehow deaf to the noise. So rather than just minimize the noise, you just make it so that the noise is there. You don't care about it at all because you've made something that doesn't care about the noise. And that one of the approaches to that then is is topological quantum computers. And I think maybe Haldane was underselling himself if he said that his stuff is never going to be useful. I think there's always an eye with the Nobel Prize being awarded to actually having some practical uses.

It tends not to go to something that's totally, you know, totally theoretical. And I think like the 2016, sorry, 2016 Nobel Prize that you've mentioned a couple of times. now that that was for topological matter. And I think it is going to have practical effects. You know, I might be dreaming there, but I think things, the fact that has been taken seriously by people putting money into quantum computing, whether or not it ends up being the practical technology that leads to it, I think it shows that there is this connection. And that's really fundamental theory playing into practical technology, I would say. So I think they're not totally disconnected. But I agree, it probably is oversold in a lot of places as well. And I want to ask you,

we're going to get to, you know, questions because it's getting late that over there in Europe where you are and you're so gracious to stay up late on a Thursday. But I do want to ask you, you know, my existential questions, which will have some tie into your work and especially the application of Arthur C. Clark's quote on technology and magic. But before we do that, I guess the last thing that kind of resonates throughout the book is sort of this discussion of knots and and knots as this device. So what is it about knots that is so perhaps applicable in terms of things like quasi-particles? Is it merely a device? Is it merely a mathematical analog?

You know, as Hilbert wonder, you know, and others about fundamental laws, Vigner's famous statement that mathematics is unreasonably effective in physics. So what is this device of nuts? Why are they so important to you? And do they play a role in your research as a theoretical condensumatic physicist? Well, they're certainly very inspirational things. I think they were quite an easy way to explain the idea of topology.

When that Nobel Prize was awarded, you saw all these journalists attempting to explain what topological matter is. And it was a very hard task. Some achieved it, you know, some maybe less so. California bagel or something. Yeah, a lot of discussion of bagels and oranges and so on. Nots, I think, make it make it quite intuitive what's meant by topology, right? Because so a mathematical knot is just like one you tie in your shoelaces, but you take the two friends and you stick them together. And so if you imagine like a little string like a shoelace and you can take it, you can,

you can just stick the two ends together like that. That's what gets called an unknot, because it's the simplest knot. It's like unknotted. You can think of it like sort of like zero of knots, if you imagine. And it actually looks like a zero as well, which is helpful. Then you can take it and you can kind of tie the simplest knot you can imagine and put the two ends together. And the simple, so the next simplest one after that is the trefoil knot. And you can just see that like this without cutting the string, you can move it around as you like.

But as long as you don't cut it and rejoin it, that thing. is going to be fundamentally different to the case of the unknots, one looking like this, the other one weaving around and then rejoining. And there are many different ways you can do this. So I think one of the main reasons I emphasize them heavily in the book is there's a very natural connection to this idea of magic. I think I find them quite inspirational. These knots, they're present throughout various cultures. You know, we all use them. I'm getting married next week and the wedding ring is like an example of a closed loop trying to symbolize infinity and connection between two people and so on. You know, people then take padlock.

Wedding ring, yeah, there you go, perfect. And a knot on your hand. Although, you know what I call, you know what I call the wedding ring, Felix? I did not. It might be too late, but it's also known as the world's smallest handcuff. I see, yeah. Well, I mean, historically... It's kidding, honey. My wife won't like it. My wife won't like it. that. My wife does not like that, but luckily she doesn't listen very often. Just kidding, honey. Go on Felix. So congratulations before I forget. That's an amazing. That's an amazing and that'll truly be a transformative moment for your life, a phase transition for you and your bride to be, but none as radical as when you guys hopefully have kids. But anyway, please continue.

Well, yeah, so there are sort of handbinding ceremonies and stuff for weddings, so it's not it's not unrelated, this idea of nodding. So it's something that I think people can appreciate more generally. And yeah, they do play an important role in Kinnett's Matter Physics. Classifying the different types of knot, if you just imagine, okay, I can take the thing and stick it together, or I can take it and I can do this thing and stick it together, or I can do something more complicated. Which of those ones can I transform into which other ones?

That's a fun mathematical problem and quite a deep one. Yes. They do play a role in condensed matter physics. I mean, essentially, the topological quantum computation I mentioned is entirely, we think of it in terms of knots. Now, the way to make these knots is, I guess your readers are familiar with things like creating particle, antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, right? Is that a totally crazy thing to start? My audience is the most brilliant in the non-multiverse. Yes, that's right.

Okay. So if you have time going up this way, and there's a space down here in a plane, then we can create a particle antiparticle pair, pull it apart, and rea-line it. it, right? And you can think of that as the unknot then in space time. Okay, and there's famous, well, no, I'm not going to say that. I want to start talking about things going back in time. You create the pair, pull it apart, you stick it together again, unknot. Now, the things we would try and make a topological quantum computer out of are bizarre particles that can only exist in matter, as far as we know, where you can create them and you can create another pair, and you can take these two and you can

switch them around, switch their places. I think in some cases you can even switch them back again. Now you try and take these two. It was created as a particle antiparticle pair. You take this one, you pass around something else over here. And now you try and push them back together again, they won't go together. And the reason they won't go together is because they're no longer

particle antiparticle pair. So this one, by virtue of having gone around something else over here, has ceased to be the antiparticle of the thing that it used to be. And so in a very simple way, then you can see that, okay, if I'm looking at following the braids that I'm making in this time direction, I've made something more complicated. Actually tends to be called like a link is when you have two different knots linked together,

something like this. And by doing that, you can make it so that things can't annihilate. And so one way to look at it is you've kind of encoded a history in the movement of these particles. And the nice thing is that these particles can now, there's noise in the system, there's finite temperature making them shake around, or there's disorder in the medium that they're being created in. But it doesn't care. As long as the topology of the knot stays the same, then the quantum information can be encoded in the same way, in this way that is robust to that noise.

And you see, it's the same as taking a shoestring, tying it in some knot and sticking the ends together. I can move around as much as I like as long as I don't actually break it and rejoin it. And it's still the same knot. And so essentially, that is the key. Massively simplified, but the basis of how to approach topological quantum computation, which could be a very practical technology. Okay, so we are back. All right, Felix, we've come to the Danumont, where the wizards have to make their journey back to the coven. I guess you taught me that a collective noun for wizards is an argument.

Is that right? That's what Terry Pratchett said, yes. It sounds about right for academics, doesn't it? Okay. Yeah. And it sounds better than a plural of... turkeys, which is the rafter. I don't know how that came to be. And lawyers, I've heard maybe incorrectly, lawyers are a coven, a coven of lawyers. Anyway, at the end of each interview,

I love to ask my guest some questions, and these are existential questions. These are meant to evoke in the listener something provocative, perhaps. And I want to ask you this question that I really started off the interview with, which is Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sometimes it can be inverted that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. But at any case, I want to ask you, and this is kind of in the lines of Richard Feynman's famous cataclysm question, which was, he was asked, well, what statement contains the most? information in the fewest words about the physical world. And he said that everything's made of

tiny whirling atoms that are little miniature systems of subatomic particles for acting in concert. I want to ask you kind of a similar type of question. In all the exploration in your field, what have you come upon? That's sort of the most magical. If there is a, you know, sui generis, there is a particular fact that you think is deserved of a Feynman-type cataclysm question, you know, in other words, something that would endure and maybe give reason for humans to have swagger. So the meandering question is, what is the most impressive form of magic that wizards like yourself have come up with in your estimation? Okay, there's a few I'd like to say.

Yeah, as many as you're like. I suppose, okay, so if I boiled the subject down to its essence, I would say that the tagline for selling condensed matter physics is that it's cases where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I think that would be my tagline for the subject. And all the fundamentally exciting phenomena you're asking me about, I think they all embody that very clearly. Let's see. I think personally, probably the thing I'm really excited about is when we think about what is condensed matter physics, again, it's not really material science, right? It's fundamentally different to that. It's not chemistry, although it has some overlap.

It's not engineering, but there's overlap with that. At the theoretical end, there's philosophy. It's not that. But it has bits of all these things. I had to think about what's a thing that is just pure condensed matter physics and doesn't appear in any other branch of physics. And I think that's the clear example of that is a quasi-particle. And I'll be more specific, I'll say the phonon is probably an example of what you've asked for. So the way I try to explain these in simple terms, a photon is a particle of light.

When we just give light, it's quantum description. We can say a beam of light is made up of individual particles called photons. Now, sound doesn't have that property. You can have sound waves, but sound is not described typically by elementary, well, it's not described by elementary particles, right? One way to say this is what do we mean by an elementary particle, where you could say it's something that can exist by itself in the vacuum of space and can't be reduced to other things with that property. So light is an example of that, a photon. An atom can exist in space, but it can be reduced to electrons, protons, protons, neutrons, so that wouldn't be an elementary particle in that sense. Now, you can see that rules out sound because sound can't travel through space.

you're done. So there can be, you know, elementary sound particle, but actually sound can travel through any matter, right? And when it travels through a crystal, say, we can describe it in exactly the same way we describe light as being carried by elementary particles. We can describe sound as being carried by particles, but they're not elementary. And these are what we call phonons rather than photons. So a phonon is like a particle of sound and it can only exist inside crystals or some other states of condensed matter. And you could say, well, it's just the atoms vibrating as the sound travels through the thing you learned at school, right? But the thing I think the subject is really so magical is that actually if you look at the description of these things using

quantum field theory, it's exactly the same emergent description that you use for describing particles like light, you know, the standard model of particle physics, it's still effective field theory, right? You'll know a lot more about this than I will from the cosmology side, astroparticle physics. The standard model is an effective field theory. It's a description of these particles. Phonons, sure, they're an effective description, but mathematically it's exactly the same thing you do. And I think if you want to believe that photons are real elements of reality, I think you should admit in the same way that phonons are fundamental real things in reality.

I suppose the philosophical point I'd want people to have as a take home one for this segment is that emergent stuff, things where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, things like phonons, that's purely emergent phenomenon, right? It's not present in any one of the atoms there that's vibrating. It's some collective behavior of lots of them, but it's no less real, because all of your, everything you've ever experienced, that is emergent. And so I think it's sort of backwards to say, oh, the real things are like the elementary particles. the emergent stuff is just something that comes out of that. I'd say it's the other way around.

I'd say your reality you experience all the time is real. It's certainly real to you. And I think that should be taken more seriously. Does that sound like a good answer for this section? Yeah, that's very good. And I like that you brought in the concept of diversity, which is overused, in my opinion. We hear so much about it in the States.

I'm sure it's the same in Europe. But it's obviously important. But, you know, diversity for its own sake is not necessarily, you know, a pure unalloyed, you know, benefit. I mean, you know, one of my friends likes to say, you know, if you have diversity in the UK, you know, you think driving on the left is really great, but you think it should be diverse. We have people driving on the right at the same time. You know, that's not going to be so great. But when it's done in service of something greater, such as, you know, elevation of a community by having multiple. viewpoints from practitioners with different backgrounds. And I really appreciate that you brought that in.

And it really did make me think about how in the mission of this book is in concert with Philip Anderson's kind of observation that more is different. It's not better. It's not necessarily worse. It might not be fundamental, but it's composite. And to me, it seems like you could apply that as sort of a theme of the book, that more people from diverse backgrounds is going to be different. And hopefully that'll add to the collective endeavor of the magic that we call physics. And this is such a delightful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. As I said, I give it the highest encomium possible, which is I wish I wrote several of its segments.

So Felix Flicker will have links to your wonderful Royal Institution Talks. I'm going to be there in June to give a talk there by own. I'm going to have to hit you up for some tips on how to give a, conversation like that at the site of my hero, Michael Faraday, and the experiments and magnetism and fields that you describe in this wonderful book. I'll need your help because I'm talking about cosmic polarization and its rotation through things like magnetic fields in the primordial universe. So look forward to that. I look forward to meeting you in person someday. And I wish you most of all great luck and success in your upcoming nuptials. That kind of bonding of two quasi-particles

is the most elemental, and it is the most beneficial to the furthering of humanity. So I can't congratulate you highly enough. It's great. You came out with this wonderful book before the wedding, otherwise you'd be working on it on your honeymoon. So my friend Felix Flickr, I'd like to know you, and I hope we get to meet in person something. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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