Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Graham Farmelo: The Universe Speaks In Numbers (#199)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Everybody, I know you're going to love this episode with Dr. Graham Farmello, who is also a phenomenal podcaster, author, and raconteur of past generations of physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, and that gives him a keen eye and an expert awareness into where the future of our field is going, perhaps. I really enjoyed this conversation. He's talked with everybody that I have so much respect for. everyone from Ed Witten to Nima Akhani Ahmed, and today's episode does describe

Starting point is 00:00:37 both of those gentlemen as well as others and going back as far as Newton and beyond. I was thinking of calling this episode from Newton to Nima, but I decided against that. We had just a great deal of fun talking about his perspective on where things like the Cyberg-Witton equations and findings' predictions, and Freeman Dyson figures very prominently in this episode in this book,

Starting point is 00:01:04 The Universe Speaks in Numbers, which is, of course, the title of his most recent book and even his podcast. And we just really enjoyed each other's company, I think, discussing this. This interview is actually recorded earlier in the year, like May, I think it was, but it's taken me a while to kind of get through my back catalog. And only now as the holiday season approaches are we able to really, tackle these great ideas. We talked about amazing and interesting things, comparing them with past guest Sheldon Glashow, including whether or not space time is fundamental. We talked about

Starting point is 00:01:39 supersymmetry in light of recent experimental data. We talked about past guest Juan Naldasana and his duality conjectures. And we also talked about things that are resilient that may not change going forward 100 years, a thousand years from now. So I really enjoy this conversation. I know you will too. And I only ask if you do enjoy it to share it with other people. Let's see the best way to help the show grow. So as we approach the holiday season, and that is the gift you can get for me, along with perhaps you could you could leave a review as I often request. We're up to 311 reviews. I can't believe it. Just tripled or quadrupled even in the last year or so. I wanted to read one of my last recent reviews that I got from J-Mac OS.

Starting point is 00:02:33 It's a new operating system. Title So Knowledgeable, Brian is one of the best read, most knowledgeable communicators of science I have encountered. I really appreciate that. And it's really lovely to talk with great minds like Graham Formello, as you'll hear in today's podcast. So as we approach a holiday season, I express gratitude to you. and want to just commend you to read this wonderful book by Graham Formillo. The Universe Speaks in Numbers. You can find his podcast, which hasn't been so active.

Starting point is 00:03:04 And let me know if you'd like to have him back on the show for his other books about Winston Churchill and Dirac, who makes an appearance in this episode as well. For now, I am now going to sign off and implore you to enjoy this ride into The Impossible with Graham Farmello describing how the universe speaks in numbers. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. The guest is really a wonderful and delightful writer and a fellow podcaster, an author, a wonderful, wonderful author of many books, books about Dirac, books about Churchill, books about

Starting point is 00:03:52 books about the universe. And today we're going to be talking about this book and we're going to schedule five more parts, five more episodes. If Graham will beg me his forbearance or my forbearance, I don't know, which forbearance will do. But Graham, Farmello, thank you so much for joining us. How are you today?

Starting point is 00:04:11 I'm very well. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. You know, my motto of my channel is Always Be Curious ABC. And I think I will title this episode from Newton to Nima, because we're going to go from this little man here. This is supposed to be Isaac Newton, a finger puppet of Isaac Newton. What?

Starting point is 00:04:29 Oh, I see the bottom. I'm sorry, it looks like Einstein, but he's holding Newton. Yeah, yeah, I have an Einstein. Einstein is, he's over there. I'll get Einstein later. But there's, this is Isaac Newton. He's not a good representation. But Nima doesn't, they don't have one for Nima just yet.

Starting point is 00:04:47 These finger puppet manufacturers, they're a little bit behind the time, just a couple hundred years. or so. So I want to talk about the universe speaks in numbers. There's a theme that runs through it, and I've been talking a lot on my podcast into The Impossible, about the difference of opinions as to whether or not, first of all, we need a theory of everything, whether a theory of everything is a proper scientific discipline. And my first question to you is sort of a pun, but it's sort of a truth hidden within the pun. And that's, I wonder, Graham, sometimes are we putting the toe before the gut? In other words, we don't have a grand unified theory as far as I

Starting point is 00:05:29 know that everybody agrees upon. And yet, we're kind of obsessed with a theory of everything that unites all four forces. We don't really have a very strong inkling of how to unify the three strongest forces. What do you think about this notion that we're obsessed with kind of skipping the gut and going straight to the toe? I would say, I think there's a danger here. of over-dramatizing what physicists are seeking to do. I must say, straight away, I mean, like all authors, you know, it's very tempting to go with these brief acronyms and these, you know, these big, big ideas and what have you.

Starting point is 00:06:13 But I'm much more comfortable myself with, if you, like a, if you like a planer statement of what I believe physicists are theoretical physicists are seeking to do with of course experimental physicists what what I think we are seeking to do is find a theory of the most fundamental interactions that we know of in nature what do we mean by that I mean interactions where we don't we are don't know that they are built from something deeper so to speak In other words, things that we find as fundamental and the most fundamental entities that we can identify. Now, you could never put that on a T-shirt, I realize that. But basically, we're talking about the strong, weak, electromagnetic interactions

Starting point is 00:07:09 and the thing that looks very different superficially, which is gravity. Now, physicists of this kind of persuasion are very, very focus on the understanding the smallest possible, the largest possible, I say the cosmos and the very smallest. But following my late friend, Phil Anderson, I think it's, I really do think it's important to bear in mind that, you know, even if you have the standard model in it, all its glory, remember it's how beautifully tested it is, you still can't. predict the shape of a cauliflower, for example. There are things you can't do with those fundamental theories, and no one knows how to do it, because there are other principles that other types of physicists look at. I do believe that there is such a thing as a fundamental branch of physics,

Starting point is 00:08:04 but I do think it's important to have some humility, and bear in mind that we're not talking about the whole of physics here. We're talking about, you know, actually quite a small, but in my opinion, very significant proportion of the whole activity of physics. And I think that it's overplaying it to think that we ever, or rather, certainly in the immediate future, come up with a theory that you can write on a T-shirt or what have you, from which everything else will plainly follow. I think that is overselling it, frankly.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Yeah. I'm speaking, of course, about my past guest, Mitchie O'Caku, who's been on the show and is gracious and kind and as likes to talk and promote the God equation. And we can talk about God, of course, as Isaac Newton was wont to do. And I love the quote that you have in your book, you know, kind of pertinent to... It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees.

Starting point is 00:09:26 Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Sort of this notion that we talk about nowadays is the imposter syndrome. I did a podcast with Barry Barish not too long ago that inspired my next book, which is going to be called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. And Barry told me he had the imposter syndrome once in his life. And I said, you got to be kidding me. You know, that can't be anymore. And he's like, no, I feel it even more than ever.

Starting point is 00:09:53 Because when I got the Nobel Prize, I had to sign this log book saying I got the actual golden medallion. And I saw Albert Einstein's name. And I said, I'm not worthy. And I said, Barry, come on. You must know that he must have felt that somebody else was, you know, his superior, probably Isaac Newton. And in your book, in chapter two, you point out that Albert Einstein called, you know, Isaac Newton, basically the greatest contributor to Western culture, you know, in history. And then, and then you go one step further and you say, Isaac Newton basically didn't speak about what physicists were, but he spoke about God. And he was sort of, you know, he had imposter syndrome about Jesus Christ Almighty.

Starting point is 00:10:32 And it's just interesting to me because, you know, the universe or God speaks in numbers. and there's a quote by a mathematician, you know, that God created the integers, and all the rest is mentioned Verk. I forget my father was a mathematician. He used to say things like that to me. But my question to you, first of all, is does the universe speak in integers or real numbers, irrational numbers? What do you think? I've got to say here that if you, if I were a more ambitious person in terms of just putting out there exactly what I mean, I would say that I was alluding there to a sentiment of Dirac's, which is that the universe speaks in mathematics.

Starting point is 00:11:14 Now, I mean, I ask for one's indulgence on this. You may not think that there's a big difference. What I'm trying, what I'm alluding to there is the idea that we can learn about the universe, not just through making observations on it, but also there is another way of learning about it, which is through mathematics. Now, it's very, very important to recognize that physics and mathematics are not the same thing, right? That is really, really important, right? The great majority of physicists, right, are not involved in the world of mathematics research, per se and vice versa.

Starting point is 00:12:03 But, and this is the point about Iraq, he argued in his great 1939 lecture, which we could talk about here all down, because it is a phenomenally insightful lecture, that if you look at what he would call the fundamental theories of nature, so he's thinking about quantum mechanics, theory of the very, very small,

Starting point is 00:12:29 he's talking about Einstein's theory of relativity of space and time and gravity, that each time there is an advance, they are framed in terms of what Iraq would say is more and more beautiful mathematics. Now, you don't need to be a genius to say, well, Paul, what do you mean by beautiful mathematics? And that's a fair question. I don't think he gives it a perfect answer, to put it, to be honest. He simply says, well, if you don't know what that means, right, I can't. can't help you because mathematicians know what that means. And I've got to say with the greatest respect to the Iraq, I mean, I don't think that is a water type definition.

Starting point is 00:13:08 But that said, I still think it's a useful idea, right? Whereby you work with ideas of increasing mathematical power. You could say beauty, universality and all the things that beauty entails. And it can be in the right hands, Dirac's and other great physicists, Einstein in particular, had similar views which we could talk about. Mathematics could be a lodestar which guides you in the right direction. Let me be clear that just working on mathematics will not get you to your most ambitious theories, just working on that.

Starting point is 00:13:51 It takes an enormous amount of skill and judgment in order to bring together both of those things. Very, very few people can do that. And the problem is today, it's been the theme of your podcast, but maybe not stated always very explicitly. But we're in a very, very odd time at the moment in the kind of physics we're talking about. Because we found to our, you could say, consternation of physicists that the standard model of the subatomic, forces, but it's much, much better that we ever dreamed it would do, so much better that this incredible machine, our experimentalist friends have brilliantly made, has really only given us so far, it's gifted us a proof, so to speak, of the existence of the Higgs particle, the last

Starting point is 00:14:43 brick in the wall, so to speak, of the standard model. But at the amazement of people, it hasn't shown up these extra, this richer structure of higher energies. So, that is why, very broadly speaking, without those clues which we so yearned for, right, that many leading physicists, including NEMAS, one of them, many others, are working on parts of physics where they're guided as well as what we already know by beautiful mathematics. Now, let me just say, it'd be much better. Let me, let me, I've said in book reviews before, people, you know, if we had a choice, it's a silly thing to say, but you'll know what I'm getting at, you know, if we had a choice

Starting point is 00:15:31 now between another Einstein or, you know, another Rutherford, right, we take the Rutherford because we, we really, really need more experimental clues. And it has been, you know, Nima berates me for saying this. But, you know, I think most of this would say it's been very, very, you know, disappointing, saddening. Nima let him speak for himself, but I think you'd say, no, nature is telling you something. You've got to be smart, right?

Starting point is 00:15:59 But we're in a difficult place. I can't remember a time like this since the beginning of theoretical physics, where, you know, so many elite physicists are struggling to know which way to proceed. And that's why there's been this culture now of mayseers coming out, say, no, you're all the best people, all getting it all wrong, right? That gap has been filled by these outriders. And I wonder, from the experimentalist point of view, first of all, I thank you, and I'll

Starting point is 00:16:30 Venmo you some cash for the plug for experimental physics. First of all, we're looking toward the heavens now, and I wonder, you know, what you would make of it or what theorists would make of it, you know, if for the very first time in history, a cosmologist or an astronomer would tell an elementary particle physicist the mass of a fundamental particle like the neutrino. That seems to be, Katrin just came out with an upper limit of order, the electron volt for the mass sum total of neutrinos. And I'm like, welcome to 2005 in the cosmic microwave background.

Starting point is 00:17:03 Congratulations to them. It's a wonderful laboratory-based result. It is incredibly painstaking. But, you know, we're far ahead of that. We're in the, you know, milly electron volt, you know, hundreds of milli electron volt regime. And we're going to do better with Simon's Observatory and Cosmic Microwe Backer.

Starting point is 00:17:17 experiments to come. But when I hear theorists kind of do things like, well, we need a future experimental collider or something like that to test my theory of everything, be it my friend Eric Weinstein, or loop quantum gravity in the form of Carlo Rovelli, who's been on the show, or Lee Smolin, or, you know, any of these folks, or, you know, Nima when he comes on the show, I often say, well, you know, imagine if I had went back, you know, 20 years ago, Graham, and I, And I said to you, well, how about this? I can't build you a bigger, better large Hadron Collider just yet, but I can smash together two 30 solar mass objects comprised of pure

Starting point is 00:18:00 neutron material at half the speed of light. And I can do that, you know, and I can do that and I can record that many, many times. And I can give you, you know, an atom smasher that smashes together, you know, 10 to the 59th atoms, a pure hydronic material. How about that? You know, can you make some predictions as what your theory would say? And they all say, well, you know, in other words, when Newton was thinking about the unification of color theory, you know, he could go and blank out parts of the spectrum.

Starting point is 00:18:28 And he could look at the low energy limit and he could use that later to think about unification. How come theorists are not thinking about the low energy limit as a clue to what the high energy frontier might yield, could we even approach it? Well, I take your point that Steve Weinberg once commented to me that, you know, the new, you know, the frontiers at the moment look like they're in, in astrophysics and cosmology with all these incredible results like the increasing the acceleration of the universe. What a result that was. Nobody ordered that. I'm afraid I'm old enough to remember when the standard model was being basically formed. with your Weinberg, your wheelchicks, grossies and many, many other people there. And it was an incredible experience.

Starting point is 00:19:17 It really was an incredible experience to me. You know, I remember, for example, people saying, well, I could give you several examples. One, not in the standard model, but I remember Ron Drever, my first academic job coming and giving a talk, and people laughing at the thought of detecting gravitational waves, right? I can remember very clearly meetings at the Royal Society where people were saying that the third lepton, right? Well, you know, come on, you know, you know, but Martin Paul wants a Nobel Prize and what have you, right?

Starting point is 00:19:54 And we know what happened, right? So, you know, I've seen this where people, and of course I remember when reading about Rudy Piles, where he, one of the great theorists of the war years and soon afterwards, saying that, you know, no one's actually going to detect the neutrino. You know, I mean, that's just not going to be on. And that's why I'm reluctant ever to say that we'll never be able to test this. We'll never be able to do these very high energy experiments.

Starting point is 00:20:25 Because, you know, you never know what is around the corner. Yeah. So one of my heroes and friends that I'm blessed to know is Jim Simons, who plays a very important role in this book. I've tried to get Frank Yang on the podcast as well. He's quite elderly, as you know, and you describe in the book, and the book is so delightful, you describe the role of Frank and Jim Simons as sort of this interesting role that I believe is sort of echoed later, although amplified certainly by Ed Witten,

Starting point is 00:20:57 is sort of a catalyst, you know, bridging together the older generation and the form of the rack and maybe with genetic material in some sense of Maxwell, and then literally in the form of Yang and Mills, you know, basically on steroids, the Maxwell equations. And then later, you know, inculcating it with the churned Simons, can you say something about, you know, where is Witten in all this now? Of course, you know, with large, you know, nowadays I see him on, you know, Twitter and so forth,

Starting point is 00:21:28 and he's talking about Israel, you know, basically all the time. I'm wondering, where is he getting any time to do any string theory or any work? But I haven't seen, and his most recent papers are about maybe Planet Nine is a black hole. Has he given up? I mean, what's going on with Witten these days? And is anyone playing the catalytic role that he once played, or Jim Simons has once played? Well, I think, again, I feel a little bit. I've got to answer your question out of courtesy, but I feel a bit bad speculating on what Edward is doing.

Starting point is 00:22:00 I will say that he is very carefully spoken. He knows that people like me, and I just say your good self, take a lot of notice on my podcast. When I put that one out, he practically broke my server. Everybody listens to exactly. And he is really worth listening. I mean, to quote Weinberg, Edward is deep, deep, deep. Right. Now, no, it's phenomenal.

Starting point is 00:22:24 He is. He is. And he's careful. And he doesn't throw around these words, these big. And I think, I know people we want that from the leaders, the pretty amount of people in the outfield, but he's very, very careful. I certainly have heard him say, right, that, picking up the point we discussed just a few minutes ago, you know, it's difficult to know what to do in the face of what we're seeing at the LHC, right? Now, that's not because people like him are not brilliant, it's because it's not, we really weren't ready for that, for this outcome, I think, of. Outcoming, that's a wrong word, but the findings of the Large Hadron Collider.

Starting point is 00:23:03 Maybe it's all going to end. Maybe somebody's going to show up next week. But at the moment, it really, it's starting to look like we're not going to be finding these wonderful things, phenomena that we were hoping for. I remember, incidentally, it was one little thing before I come back to Edward, that I was one of the people that worked on the draft of the public relations strategy of the large from Collider. And I was, yeah, for the British Research Council. And I was looking at that document the other day, right? It's an internal document and it, but we canvass, the very best physicists

Starting point is 00:23:42 asked what they were expecting for the Large Hadron Collider, right? And I have to say, I think we broke down something like, it was something like a dozen things that we, that might need, you know, large, new, large extra dimensions, symmetry, of course, right? And yeah, what do we, what, we, what, we found, we found the Higgs particle. And that's it. That's it, right? Now, please, I put me in an experiment here. This is absolutely not to put down the fantastic experimental work that has been done to get those things.

Starting point is 00:24:13 But my goodness gracious, we really did. So far, maybe things change next week. But so far, you know, we really have got very little additional value out of it. now I think going back to Edward I said I with apologies to him if you ever hears this people like me shouldn't be summarizing what wicket and says but I suspect he's saying I don't have a useful suggestion about what to do next right he with what he did say to me it in my podcast I treasure the quote because he is so powerful that I asked him right about you know whether he sought string theory had that I mean meant M theory by that but the general

Starting point is 00:24:57 string theory, right, about other options. And he said, right, and I remember very carefully, I'll listen to it so carefully, oh, about that, right, is that string theory is the only interesting generalization of Yang Mills' quantum field theory. Right. Now, if I were working on Luke quantum gravity, which he just says, is just words, right, I'd be very, very worried, right? He's the last person in the world. You would, you regard as a fool. in these things, the last person in the world, right, that you would regard as somebody who's a simplistic thinker. But I think that that to me is quite important. He, because he's saying that something that you hear from many experts, not, not, I don't think he would use these same words,

Starting point is 00:25:45 but many people, when I was writing the universe big to numbers, who were saying to me, the biggest problem we have, right, with string theories, we just don't fully understand it. Right. They certainly don't want to write it off. They know it's got serious problems, of course, but it's the best, the only option, an interesting option that we have. But that said, I do think it fair to say, in all generosity, right, that after the incredible fanfare that string theory had in the 80s,

Starting point is 00:26:20 with the first string revolution, the second one where Edward did that incredible work, and then with the developed in the late 90s, it's very difficult to identify in a clear, communicable way, the progress that we're making with that field. Not to say you throw it away, but it's not easy to happen up on it, to say, well, we solve this problem, this problem,

Starting point is 00:26:49 and basically everything is sorted out. So that's why I think we're in a difficult position on this. Yeah, I agree. And to that extent, I feel there is some glibness on the part of folks like Michi Okaku, who will, you know, rightfully say that he is the father of, you know, string field theory. And he wrote down some of the first, you know, Feynman diagrams in the early 70s. And I reviewed those on the interview I did with him. But then he'll go, you know, turn around and say, if we get this, we'll know the mind of God. And your countryman, Stephen Hawking, also was no stranger to hyperbole about string theory, M theory,

Starting point is 00:27:26 even to the point of conceding bets, willy-nilly, you know, I wish I did meet him once. I heard him speak once, and that was wonderful at a Royal Society meeting in 1995. I'll treasure that. I heard about that in your radio podcast, yeah. Yeah, but the fact is he would always concede these bets long before I think, you know, he should have.

Starting point is 00:27:46 Maybe it was for the publicity of conceding bet, you know, Stevens concedes a bet, because they were conceded on the basis of, you know, calculations in five-dimensional ADS CFT by Juan Maldesana or something, you know, which is, you know, so far removed from any kind of experimental verification. I mean, I think it's, you know, as some have said, it's impossible to, you know, deny that it could be that black holes preserve information, but you can't necessarily confirm it. So fellow guest Leonard Susskin has said, you know, this is my battle to preserve quantum mechanics.

Starting point is 00:28:20 Well, who knows? But when Michio says things like this, the mind of God and quotes that at the end of his book, I think it does a disservice because ultimately, beauty, as Ed is saying, implicit, is subjective. And as he's saying, it's interesting. That's a euphemism for beauty or, you know, there's something that piques his fancy. And as my namesake, the poet Keats said, beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye need know on earth and all ye need to know. And actually, Dirac echoed that.

Starting point is 00:28:54 The only time I think that he used the referred to God, he was not a religious man by any means, as you know, he said, God is a mathematician of a very high order. As you've said this, Graham, so you know this. But I'm saying for my listeners who may not know, Graham's wonderful words on Dirac, and I recommend it, God is a mathematician of a very high order. and he used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. So I think it's interesting that we do this, but we also don't necessarily have a rubric or a criteria set for how do we judge these theories. How do we, you know, beauty is one thing. But I don't know if you've ever seen this, Graham,

Starting point is 00:29:35 but they've done studies on who is handsome, who is beautiful. So they take Brad Pitt. So he's reputedly the most handsome man on earth. Okay, President Company excluded, okay, Grant? So they'll take Brad Pitt, but then they'll say, they've done say, they'll take his face and they'll divide it down the middle. They'll take a picture of him. And then they'll mirror image reflect his left side to his right side,

Starting point is 00:29:58 and then that'll be a new face. He looks grotesque. He looks hideous. Nobody wants to look at it. And he'll be the ugliest man on earth. So symmetry is ugly. And actually, it's the broken symmetry that we find beautiful and allows us to live, as you point out in this book, you know, the broken symmetry is what's actually beautiful about the

Starting point is 00:30:16 world. If perfect symmetry would be perfect, you know, entropy, we wouldn't exist. So we would have equilibrium. So why is it that beauty? I don't think beauty should necessarily be a condition of, it might work for Keats and poetry, but not necessarily for physics. So what do you make of this? Should we have a rubric that we apply? At the end of your book, you come up with six ideas that You think we'll stand the test of time from our modern era. But let's start right now. What kind of a rubric could we put forth for grading candidate theories of everything? What would count?

Starting point is 00:30:49 What would you put in such a rubric? Wow. That's a good question. It's a pretty tough. Let me just, I'll come back to it, I promise. Yeah, I don't. Sure, sure. Come and get back to me.

Starting point is 00:31:00 I just want to say that I think the mind of God, when I read that sentence in Hawking's book, I thought, that's an inspired. last line and you're an author I bet as an author you would know what right because somehow it has a kind of it's it's poetic and it's a metaphor right it is absolutely of course it is not a literal statement right correct now I simply say that by overusing it it is it is actually borderline silly frankly, to try to make that more than it is, right? I think most people, even if they're not physicists, if you describe to them basically what physicists are trying to do,

Starting point is 00:31:47 understanding these different interactions in terms of mathematical theories, if you have a theory, you can explain all these things. People know, I get what you mean. And it's somehow, you know, it's a satisfying way of summarizing it. But to try to talk about that as a desideratum, right? To me is, well, you wouldn't get any quick in saying, I'll tell you now, you really wouldn't. Now, in terms of the progress we make, right, the first thing is not to be sniffed at, in my view, you absolutely must, in the standard way in science, you have to generate all the successful predictions, right, that have been made by theories before.

Starting point is 00:32:33 And that is why the essential guide rails of people working in this field are quantum mechanics and relativity. Now, it's something that I try to emphasize in that book. Perhaps I didn't do it enough, right? Because it's still not spoken about enough, in my opinion, is that if I were asked, right, what is the central lesson of the late 20th century theoretical physics? I would say it is the astonishing power, right, of yoking together what looked like the most unlikely of bedfellows, which are relativity and quantum mechanics. They look completely different mathematically.

Starting point is 00:33:21 They are different of nature. We know that. One's a classical theory. One of course is quantum. They're not the same thing. And if you do something, right, as bold, has to be. to try to bring them together, right? And Dirac, I believe, was the first person to start on that road. Many others worked on that, right? Then the key thing is to say that if you want to set out

Starting point is 00:33:43 a quantum field theory of the interaction between charged particles like electrons and photons, for example, it's Steve Weinberg stresses in his quantum field theory book, it's incredibly difficult to do. It really is only just possible. Now, that's a really important thing. to understand. It's not just a question, well, this is easy to bring these two things together, right? It's extremely difficult. It's almost like you're going on a razor's edge, so to speak, and yet that theory, right, you're talking about here, Dirac and Heisenberg and several other authors, then made usable by Dyson, Schwinger, Feynman, Tom andaga, right? That theory is umpteen decimal places, right? Now, that is telling you something, right? It is saying that these two improbable,

Starting point is 00:34:31 formal theories when brought together of putting you in the right direction. And you look at the other great, great successes of those two things. Of course, the direct prediction of the anti-electron of the antimatter came out of quantum mechanics and relativity, right? Hawking's greatest triumph came from taking general relativity and brilliantly working in a way that doesn't actually, isn't actually a unification, but is a, if you're like a jamming together, ingenious jamming together of quantum mechanics and an Einstein theory of gravity. And of course, the modern quantum field theory of all the subatomic forces. They're all based on those things. And that is incredibly difficult to do. It's something that, as I said, I don't think it's expressed nearly enough.

Starting point is 00:35:21 Physicists don't just sit down and write any old theories down. They have to stick to these two giant foundations, though, I'm saying. As Nima says, it's very hard to break the standard model of quantum mechanics. Absolutely right. Actually, I use that gram. That's part of my rubrics. So I look for, you know, I study, you know, the cosmic microwave background. And within that, I used to think the greatest trophy of all would be gravitational waves and detecting B mode polarization

Starting point is 00:35:49 from the putative inflationary origin of the universe. Of course, I wouldn't turn that down. And some say, been there, done that. Of course, we had to retract and recant, as you know, better than anyone probably besides me, this would cause great sensation. But the quest that really motivates me now is the search potentially for small departures from our most sure symmetries, Lorentzen variants, perhaps primordial magnetism, phase transitions. These are ways that we can, in Neiman's words, break the standard model, but they must be subtle. They must be subtle, but maybe as the Lord is not malicious, right?

Starting point is 00:36:26 So those are, you know, it's very hard to do. And that is part of the rubric that I think becomes very hard to. So the low-hanging fruit has been picked. And so we're left with beating our head and grinding our head against granite. But I guess, you know, the question becomes, are there low-energy ways? So the CMB is a low-energy phenomenon. It's, you know, three-keleton photons. But they trace the properties potentially of a very high-energy phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:36:53 And that's what makes it interesting to me. So my hope is that are there other ways that we can look, machine learning, you know, other exoplanet, I don't know, there's some signature using cosmic data perhaps or laboratory data, microgravity scales to test, to test, you know, departures from the standard model, indicative to grade these theories. Because when I talk to Michio or I talk to proponents of string theory, they say things like, well, you know, how is it possible that, you know, like when I complain about the multiverse aspects of string theory. Well, you know, how many solutions are there in Maxwell's equations?

Starting point is 00:37:29 There's an infinite number. You have to tell us the, you know, the boundary conditions, the initial condition. Okay, well, I can tell you boundary conditions from physical observation. But you can't returrect and use that as a prediction. For example, G-minus two results came out, LHCB results. Mitya. Yeah, he was claiming those are, those are, come as results of string theory. I said, come on. How can that be? How can that be? You can't claim everything, right? And you can't simultaneously say, you have to tell me the vacuum state. Why is that my job as the experimentalist? Shouldn't that be the outcome of the theory?

Starting point is 00:38:02 No. Well, to me, the more I look at the history of this subject, I really commend the position of the conservative revolutionary. And we start off with the first theoretical physicist. I mean, I know that's a subjective matter, but a very good choice for that is Max Planck. right and i i admit i mean this is being fanciful i accept that except that but i will always be fascinated with this extremely conservative physicist right who was we know told by his supervisor i believe was that you know there's nothing to be uh uh learned now in physics basically we've got the basic rules and he took what is a good a good um you is a very good example of the most dramatic step, right, in proposing that radiation comes in quantum, right? And to quote,

Starting point is 00:39:00 Bram pays, right, the mathematics of doing that was mad, right? I mean, even if you're a, you know, a parable college student, right, a physics could see that basically it pretty much made no sense, right? But it was right. And it took Einstein then to take it on another. step forward and beautifully clarify what he meant by that. This is the point where I'm going to speculate. And like most speculation, it's probably wrong, but I'll be using your views on it. I just wonder whether we're missing something, some insight, right, that is as radical as revolutionary, right, as that contribution of Planck's was.

Starting point is 00:39:48 It is all this confusion. Could it be a result? I'm not saying in a trice, but are we missing something really big? Now, obviously, it may be nonsense. But I just wonder, you know, the state we're in, whether we are just missing. I was thinking about that as I was reading it. And just I couldn't help. But, you know, just imagine the amount of, you know, obviously progress is usually,

Starting point is 00:40:11 there's a paper called Progress by Compression. It's a wonderful paper. And one of the culminations of it is, you know, think about how much. compression is involved in Einstein's E equals MC squared, like how much information, how much notions about reality are compressed into that. And I think that's true. And then, of course, think of how many books are needed to explain what is the meaning of that. And then it's like expansion. But now think the opposite way, Graham, think like 1901, Plank, you know, 1900, 1901, Plank Nobel Prize for, you know, a three symbol equation, you know, E equals H new or equals

Starting point is 00:40:43 HF or, you know, and then Einstein later, you know, his, not, I even win the Nobel Prize for it, but E equals MC squared, four symbols, you know. And now it's like Nima and his colleague, it's like 100 pages of mathematical formulae. And I'm wondering, like, is this going in the right direction or is that just a symbol that the low-hanging fruit have been picked? And it is curious to me, you know, I can't tell. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:41:09 When I look at things, so I do like to ask the people that like the Kakus, because I do think that he has interesting insight. So I said to him, here's, here are some interesting arguments from critics of string theory, Lee Smollin, Carlo Rovelli. And by the way, these are people that you don't necessarily agree with. You believe that the tradition of, you like the agreement in physics. Yeah. But you, but you're, you know, you're obviously, you get along and you don't, you don't necessarily,

Starting point is 00:41:40 there's no hard feelings. You're just criticizing. No, no, no. Yeah. But, but Michio is much more aggressive. I think he's saying, well, look, there's nothing in their theory. They don't even have fermions. They're doing something. Maybe it's gravity, but it's not a theory of everything the way string theory. String theory can give you,

Starting point is 00:41:55 you know, the elephant and it can wiggle its tail. A string theory can give you the one inch equation. It can give you even mathematics. And my thing to him was, well, can it, can it, can it, can, can it, can, because of this vacuum problem, is there not a danger that, that, that, you know, the laws of physics might be different in each one of these landscape universes, maybe the laws of logic, maybe the laws of mathematics. In other words, how is it that you're guaranteed to have a self-consistent form, you know, modus tollens? Is it going to agree in a universe, a landscape where even, you know, even these dimensions, we don't necessarily have evidence that they agree? And he couldn't really answer that except to say that in string theory,

Starting point is 00:42:38 you know, you get gravity out naturally. But again, I said, we don't have evidence for these large dimensions. And so my question is, is it not already falsified? And his basically responses, it's too early to say that and all the other candidate theories, as Witten would say, are uninteresting and if not, if not already wrong. Well, I do think personally, I respect his point of view and his heart's in the right place, but I do think that it's almost like he's in the 80s where that sense of almost triumphalism in string theory. But to say that now, when there are so many challenges besetting the theory, you can't really blame people for being skeptical, right?

Starting point is 00:43:28 Because, you know, I mean, I know this might sound naive, but in the end, you know, the plain person is going to want to know, right? Why should I believe in this, right? Yes, yes. Now, I do think we owe people who are not physicists at least. indications of why we take string theory seriously. And as I said, that quote of Edwards, it's the most interesting generalisation of an obviously successful

Starting point is 00:43:57 Yangmills field theory. At least that is at least clear about what it is. But there are so many things that string theory hasn't done. For example, it hasn't retro-explained things. I think I think I'm right in saying that you can't take problems in terms, in the physics of fundamental particles that were explained by string theory backwards, so to speak, right?

Starting point is 00:44:21 See, Weinberg, Richard, and that's my understanding of it when I spoke to him about this. So, you know, I think, you know, I think there's a cultural thing here, Brian, because, you know, we're in an age where everyone can be an expert for a thought. Everyone can have a view on anything, right? And as I mentioned at the end of my book, I don't wish to be mean-spirited, but, you know, I think that, you know, that we've lost this deference for authority. And I don't just mean that we should worship the top, you know, the most famous Harvard professor or what have you.

Starting point is 00:44:58 No, we shouldn't. But I think we should have at least a respect for why parts of the community are spending so much time on that. And I think there is another point to way, if I could just be critical for a second. I think personally it's regrettable that a sober, thoughtful response from string theorists to these critics isn't more forthcoming. I think that's a real shame. I think I know why they do it, incidentally, although I'm not going to name any names.

Starting point is 00:45:25 It's like Richard Dawkins when he stopped talking to creationists. Right. And that was because he said, you simply can't win. You simply can't win. Now, I still think, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think that there is, that there is plenty of room for a small number of forums where the people who, you know, the people who are very doubtful about the way that string theory is going, could talk to their critics in a way.

Starting point is 00:46:01 Now, it's not easy to do. Let me say, this is not a trivial thing. But at the moment, I see very few examples of where very articulate people on the public say, like Sabina, for example, like Lee and what have you actually talk in a respectful, straightforward way, right? Instead, it's done through intermediaries, you know. Or on Twitter. Or on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:46:23 And I don't think that's how far. I tell you, I honestly can't think, it may be my ignorance, but I thought a fair bit about this. I can't think of another stage in physics where it's been like that. I really can't, right? And nor can I think of a time that makes related where people who the community of theoreticians would say, are the world's leading people are just routinely dissed, right? As in, well, they just don't know what they're talking about.

Starting point is 00:46:48 Right. I mean, it's an incredible situation, right? Again, I'm reading your book, and I just love this book so much, Graham. I want to just reset the conversation for a second. This is the universe speaks in numbers. Graham Formello, who's just a delight to speak to the author of several books, Strangest Man, at Paul Dirac, who will have back on again. That won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Starting point is 00:47:10 He's a fellow at the Churchill College at the University of Cambridge's a book about Churchill, a bomb. Churchill's a fascinating character. I love Winston Churchill. My nine-year-old, 10-year-old was reading his thousand-page autobiography recently. Tell your nine-year-old to read Hawking. Sorry, that's my present project. I'm sorry about that.

Starting point is 00:47:30 But, but you're pardon. Churchill's best book, which was actually alluded to in his Nobel citation, was a book your nine-year-old could read called My Early Life. Okay. A nine-year-old could read. It's a charming book, and it's about his youth. I can't wait. It's a lovely read.

Starting point is 00:47:50 And I say again, the Nobel people had that in mind when they gave him his prize. I will certainly refer that to him. And then, of course, he is a regular visitor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in non-pandemic times, I assume. And he will get back there, and I will hopefully have him someday, Graham, you'll come and visit me in San Diego, where this office used to be occupied by Jeff Burbage and Margaret Burbage. We'll talk a little bit about that. That segues nicely maybe perhaps into the conversation we're just talking about these weird times that we live in. And I was thinking, you know, you talk in the book about these, about Maxwell and how, you know, he came up with

Starting point is 00:48:29 this mechanical model of how light would propagate and he used these gears and wheels and boardacies and stuff. And can you imagine what would have happened if Twitter were around back then? And he would have had this, you know, hashtag trending, you know, this fool, you know, these gears, you know, this idiot thinks, the Scottish Scotsman. No, actually, that's a really good point, actually. Because if you look at the classic article that Maxwell wrote, which I spent a few pages in the university because I was talking about, about the relationship between physics and mathematics, he talks about a theory. of Electro Magnes.

Starting point is 00:49:05 He doesn't say, I'm the only one who's right. No, everybody else is wrong. All those German guys don't know what they're talking about. He simply says. And he turned out to be right. The poor guy was dead before we knew that. Right. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new,

Starting point is 00:49:22 while the rest of it looks, well, not so new? It's time for a carpet upgrade. At the Home Depot, we have stylish choices at simple prices from all the top brands. Best of all, we can install it for you. starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor. Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Exclusions apply for licenses. See Home Depot.com slash license numbers. I know you raise a good point there. But if Twitter had been around there, I know that this is a,

Starting point is 00:49:53 you know, what I call it, bending reality. But, you know, people simply said, all right, it's a, it's a theory that Maxwell has got here. He is a brilliant theoretician. Remember, he wasn't a physicist that never came a physicist. He called himself a natural philosopher or a mathematical philosopher. But it was not this, you know, this bum fight, so to speak, about that. And that's an example of even what Carl Popper, you know, who's, I always say that physicists, you know, just as a biologist have physics envy and it has said, I believe that physicists have, you know, girdle envy or mathematician envy because we can't, you know, really bound what we can't prove.

Starting point is 00:50:32 So, you know, Popper kind of substitutes falsification, demarcation, hypothesis, substitutes for for girdle's incompleteness theorem. But even Popper himself said there is a place for the, for the, you know, unfalsifiable, because there is, there is room for the development of a known wrong theory to kind of blossom and bloom because if nothing else, it sharpens the correct eventual emergent theory. And that took place in this very room with Jeff. Burbage in the quasi-steady stake theory, which prevailed, as you probably know, the companion paper that Dickie People's Role in Wilkinson put out to the Penzies and Wilson paper doesn't mention the Big Bang at all.

Starting point is 00:51:14 It mentions a cyclic, you know, collapsing universe basically as the origin of the thermal relic, you know, background. It doesn't mention the Big Bang. And obviously, we don't believe that to be the case. And so, too, with Maxwell, if people had, you know, this is ridiculous, vortices. So maybe right now, we're, you know, some of my colleagues and even, obviously, I on occasion will be too quick to sacrifice string theory on the altar of a falsifiability currently. But I think, you know, the challenge that I have as an experimentalist is there's only so many resources. And again, you know, Michio is not here to defend himself.

Starting point is 00:51:46 But I said, if you're the head of the NSF, there's only so many dollars to go around, there's only so many postdocs to go around. And it's not fair to a young person, you know, when they might get their first research grant, you know, at age 41 or 42 here in the U.S. I don't know how it works in the UK. But it's very challenging, very competitive. It's a bloodthirsty race here. But to get it, very few positions, 400 applicants for one job maybe at a place like UC San Diego.

Starting point is 00:52:09 And you get, you know, it's a very long delayed gratification. So what are you going to tell them, Mitchio? Should we let loop quantum gravity and string theory? Should we give equal amounts of money? What about to experiment? And he's like, yeah, just give equal amounts of money. And I don't know. I mean, if where, you know, how do you divide up finite resources?

Starting point is 00:52:28 How do you engage, you know, the community so that young people, have something productive to do. Do we have too many people doing string theory? And Eric Weinstein has said that explicitly, and you should know, he's a big fan of yours. But, you know, he's said explicitly, there's too many people, it's sucking the life out of it. And you probably heard the interview, and Lee Small and sort of agree. I must say on that one, that I'm not involved in these hiring committee things, but I've heard enough people from Freeman Dyson to Martin Rees and other people. it's a widespread view that it's a very, very tough field, string theory. And I think there is a case that you can never be sure.

Starting point is 00:53:15 You're never sure when you fund research. But if you ask a proportion of people working on that field, right, is it too high? Then I suspect it might be, right? Because, you know, you really have to be, you know, a very advanced mathematics. as well as have physical, and you are working with these constant prompts of observation and experiment. So I don't want to be disloyal to my string theory friends, but I do, and I think you have a point too. You know, you never know. It's very, very difficult to know what to invest money into in physics. I've certainly persuaded that we need another accelerator, study the Higgs

Starting point is 00:53:54 much more carefully. But that said, you know, I appreciate the difficulty because governments, funding agencies, they want to see, you know, bang for their bucks. And, you know, out of the large Adderon Collider, they've had one bang, you know, to put it very crudely, right? Now, that is really, let me be very clear. I definitely invest in an accelerator. But, you know, we have to be real. Even Feynman, I know, you see my research, the university speaks at, universities, speaks in numbers. even he said, which I think is right, it's a depressing thought, but we have to face it. It may be that one day we run out of money to do these high energy experiments. I'm sorry if that depresses people, but he's in the climate of great, great businesses.

Starting point is 00:54:38 And I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to worry about, right? But nonetheless, it's too early to think like that in my opinion. Yeah, I've often thought about that as my role as an experimentalist is kind of be like Galileo's assayer, you know, to kind of, to look through and to see what low-hanging fruit might remain. And it might be our, as you talk about at the end of the book, our Silicon friends are the artificial physicists. I've started a project very slowly going called Galaiio, where I'm trying to program the works of Galileo,

Starting point is 00:55:13 the text of his books. He wrote millions of words and dumped them into a general AI program and try to teach it very slowly, quantum mechanics and so forth over the years and see what pops out of the great mind because he was certainly a unique intellect and i want to close out with two unique intellects uh one of whom i had on the podcast uh before he passed away and that was my friend freeman dyson oh oh you had freeman oh great yes many times he was my first guest on the pot the impossible podcast we talk about freeman uh what did he mean to you you talk about him so uh he was sort of this voice of reason

Starting point is 00:55:52 I want to relay a quote to you what he and I talked about in, and it's kind of an animating quote in my life inside and outside of physics. And it was about God. We were talking about God and religion, and he called himself an agnostic. And I used to chide him about that. You know, he's such a lovable person. And one of my favorite memories is to, is to, we'd have him over for Shabbat dinner, you know, we're Jewish. And he'd come over. And then my now eight-year-old, you know, is basically 90 years younger than Freeman.

Starting point is 00:56:22 and I mean and they would talk and it was just funny seeing like nine decades difference and they would just like have these really interesting conversations and uh and at one point i said to him you know well you know freeman why do you why do you have this interest in religion why don't you just either not go or not say you're an atheist because you don't go to church like you don't go to the same church that richard dawkins doesn't go to so like why don't you just call yourself an atheist and he's like well you know there are things in life that are mysteries and there are things in life that are puzzles and you know to me puzzles can be solved you know, you might not be able to solve them, but there are solutions.

Starting point is 00:56:55 And somebody smarter than me or smarter than you can solve them. But then there are mysteries. And mysteries may not have a solution, but that doesn't stop me from wrestling with them. And so my goal in life, I've started to think about, like, my goal is to turn as many mysteries into puzzles as possible. Like, that's kind of my mission statement. And I want to ask you, like, what, like, mysteries are you most engaged with now? You talk about working on a book about Stephen Hawking. I'm really curious, and of course, I'll invite you back in a heartbeat to talk about that.

Starting point is 00:57:26 But what mysteries? And what did Freeman mean to you personally? And then we'll close out by talking about Nima. I can't resist. Well, Freeman, when you say get to know, I've got to know him well, I'm not sure anyone really understood Freeman, but he was an incredible character. And I spent dozens and dozens of hours talking to him. I do I well but first thing to say right is to actually let him describe himself right I said I've written a remembering Freeman Dyson article on my website I wrote just a few days

Starting point is 00:58:05 after he died and I'm sure I began with this but he he said to me and he said he said it elsewhere that he was only good at two things which is solving problems and writing essence essays. Now, I, you know, I scoffed, right? I think forgivably, right? And he said, and I said, something like that, that's, that's ridiculous or something like that. He said, it may sound ridiculous, but it's true. I remember him actually used saying that, right? And he, he, he was a quite a superb mathematical physicist, make, make no mistake. And a brilliant, probably my favorite writer, right, in physics. I mean, the most silken style, right?

Starting point is 00:58:54 So he meant a lot to me. I do admit I found it frustrating sometimes with his contrarianism, right? He definitely had that, right? I had a kind of amateur theory here that I think he was so smart, Freeman, that he it would be because most people he met including all these other luminaries in physics

Starting point is 00:59:20 he could find a way round what they were saying right so he it was almost a game to him to say for example that Churchill was the second best leader Britain had in the war time who's the best freeman oh neville chamberly oh there are dozens of others like that right and he would then hit you with the thing that you hadn't thought of a new perspective right um with string, what was particularly interesting, I thought, was in his approach to the physics.

Starting point is 00:59:50 He thought the large natural colliding was not a good use of money. He thought there were far too many people working in string theory, which we've covered. He was always looking to provoke, right? He loved that, right? And in Princeton, there's a statement you often hear are in the Princeton community, is namely that Freeman would rather be interesting than right. That I think is very perceptive, right?

Starting point is 01:00:17 He liked the, you know, the game of conversation. I really believe that's a profound thing to say about him. You know, he wants it to be interesting, right? Ever being right, you know, that's a difficult thing for him. What was your other question about, you asked about it? Oh, yeah, it'll be about Nima. But before we move on to that, I do want to say, so when I was writing my book, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:42 I didn't know if I was going to write any more books and I wanted to get some star power blurbs on the back of the book. And so I asked Freeman, and it was right after my third child was born, my daughter, my first daughter. And I wrote Freeman, I said, Dear Freeman, can you please do me the honor of writing a blurb for this book? It's about losing the Nobel Prize, you know, a subject that, yeah, I thought he'd have some strong opinions about. I said, Dear Brian, congratulations are getting the book done. I love to your daughter, Orly. My problem with blurbs is that I have a strict rule not to write blurbs unless I've actually read the book.

Starting point is 01:01:13 Yeah, that's right. He told me that. And I already have a big pile of unread books. The idea is that a blurb is supposed to be an honest expression of information for the reader, not just a favor for the writer. Perhaps it's a silly, old-fashioned idea. Anyway, I hope the book does well without my help. Yours forever.

Starting point is 01:01:30 That's absolutely classic Freeman. And you know what? I've used that. And so now, as you have done and I have done, after you write a book, you get asked to write blurbs for people's books. So I got asked to write blurbs for books after my book. And I got a book in the mail just about back in early December. And it was a book, it was about this thick, about 590 pages long.

Starting point is 01:01:52 And it was about intelligent design. But it was by a Cambridge man by the name of Stephen Meyer. And he's a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge. And he writes about intelligent design. And I have heard of him before. And he written me, would you do me the honor of writing a blurb about this book called the Return of the God Hypothesis. And it's about entropy and so forth.

Starting point is 01:02:11 then I'll put links to that in the show notes and whatever. And he said, and could you do the blur by next week? What? Kidding me. So I said to him, look, Stephen, I like the idea, but I have this rule that I inherited from my friend, the late great Freeman Dyson. So Freeman has gotten me out of a lot of sticky pilavers, as you might say, over there across the pond.

Starting point is 01:02:35 The last question I have is about Nima. And he figures very prominently in the book and does provide a so-called blurb on the back of the book. And he is the, you know, after you is the most requested guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. He calls this book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers, a riveting account of one of the greatest stories of our time. Graham Formello has delved in deep into this fascinating subject, combining original scholarship and lively interviews with contemporary theorists at its forefront of the field. The result is a masterful book, which gives us for the first time a behind-the-scenes look at out physicists and mathematicians, driven by their pursuit of the ultimate truth, capital T, have been drawn into the common territory by their mysterious intellectual forces seemingly

Starting point is 01:03:15 beyond their control. His blurb kind of, I'm going to encourage him to write a book. He assisted on that capital T when my publisher say, no, it's got to be. He said, no, I want capital T. I want to tie, you know, him and this capital T because it kind of brought up something, a beautiful sentence that you kind of maybe put off. Maybe it was a throwaway line, but it stuck out to me like a phone call during a glass of wine. And it was, you say, even in mathematics, ignorance can be a virtue.

Starting point is 01:03:48 And I think about someone like Nima is just like this mathematical god. You know, he thinks of himself as a mathematician, trained in Toronto, you know, etc. What did you mean by that? And can somebody like Nima be considered to be ignorant of mathematics? It seems like we have to be like a... You say that, I think Nima, I've had loads of conversation with him, an amazing physicist, wonderful person. The key thing about him is he's a physicist down to his toes and his fingers, right?

Starting point is 01:04:21 That's what he is. He's absolutely driven to understand the underlying order of the universe, basically, right? and there is absolutely, you know, his passion, he wears his passion on his sleeve, so to speak. Now, he, it's very important to, when, when, when, when, um, thinking about NEMA, he doesn't do mathematics for the sake of it, right? No. I literally watch, I got to know him just after, I mean, just after he started at the Institute for Abarth study, when he basically, he went in, and I quote him now, like a graduate student, into amplitudes, right? Scaltering amplitudes, which is about, you know, looking mathematically at the very deepest, you know, scattering between quarks and, you know, fundamental particles and looking at that lowest level

Starting point is 01:05:19 of interaction describing them, using quantum mechanics and relativity, as he's always banging on about, quite rightly. Now, he, the, the, the, Stuff that he's been driven into, it's been a glorious thing for me as a friend of his, to see, he's amazed and he's had to work incredibly hard to get into that mathematics. But he's not doing it to show off, right? He's doing it because he's being led there. He's been pulled by the nose, so to speak, right, into it. And you ask him why he would say, I'm pretty sure ask him, when you speak to him,

Starting point is 01:05:52 I would be a great podcast, right? He will say he's being driven there by the fundamental principles at the heart of quantum field theory. and in particular quantum mechanics and special relativity. They have together, right? And I remember asking him once, right? Are you really saying that you occasionally find yourself veering off quantum mechanics all? And he said, yes, that is true. Okay.

Starting point is 01:06:17 He said once he said to me, I even did that this morning. You can check it line by line, right? And that's where, incidentally, the miracle that we see. in this amplitude stuff that Nima has done so brilliantly. And of course he has many brilliant collaborators who work with him in a very creative way, right? That it's that forcing together of quantum mechanics, that has given rise to these mathematical directions, right?

Starting point is 01:06:47 It's not done because he just wants to show off, right? It's because he feels it really is relevant to nature, right? And he's going to be a great guest on your podcast. But again, he wants to understand nature. I'll tell you, a story about amplitude. Somebody told me this, and Nima didn't deny it. When he got into it, and of course he became a senior member of the field, very, very fast. Somebody wanted to make a collaboration with him.

Starting point is 01:07:14 And Nema said, I'll do that. But if something comes up at the LHC, I'm dropping everything and going into that. Oh, yeah. Now, you see what I'm saying there? Yeah. It wasn't the case of him leaving that discipline. You see what I mean? Right.

Starting point is 01:07:28 No, he has been very, very gracious, very generous with his time and corresponding with me, but he's clearly deep involved in some very significant work. And he begs, you know, kind of to just, you know, forestall the conversation with me. And I've, of course, I'm going to give him, you know, whatever time he needs. And it might actually work out that I get to see him in person because I have a meeting out there in a month or so. I might actually get to do the interview in person, which would be really spectacular. He's a great in my podcast. It's the only one we split up because it was just uneditable.

Starting point is 01:08:04 It was just so great. The level of the depth of it, the enthusiasm was so great. Oh, it's wonderful. He's a, you know, he's a wonderful ambassador for the excitement, the continued excitement of physics. Yeah. When some people are struggling to maintain that. Yeah, the last person I want to speak about before I have to run and teach myself

Starting point is 01:08:24 is just kind of in contrast to him is, Gerard at Hooft, I think, is how you pronounce his name. I'm hoping to get him on the podcast as well. But he seems to be kind of the Freeman Dyson-like character, the old guard in some sense. And maybe I'll send him this episode to convince him to come on. But what are your impressions of him and where he is? He's still quite active.

Starting point is 01:08:44 He has a paper. Absolutely. I really do believe he's one of the great physicists. I mean, he really is. I mean, and you have to take everything he says seriously. He certainly seems to be quite skeptical of modern developments, I think it's fair to say now. And, you know, he's looking at new ways of formulating quantum mechanics, which, which he, I've noticed how carefully he is to say to young people, go and learn it from the standard books.

Starting point is 01:09:11 I'm, you know, but he's obviously unhappy with the formulation of it. But no, no, to Hufft is absolutely, and no one incident is he's, basically they're like a duo in my time in particle physics. And that's Sasha Polyakov at Princeton, Princeton University. those two were basically neck and neck in many ways. I mean, they are both absolutely brilliant physicists. And it's a shame now that, I mean, I must have patronised them, but they were our heroes in the 70s. You know, they were just absolutely teeming.

Starting point is 01:09:43 And of course, the thing, what I say to Nima so often, he really doesn't like this internet. He said, is don't you sometimes miss that these Tehuts and Pogneukovs and Weinbergs had actual data. Right? No, no, this is what people will say is we're getting data

Starting point is 01:10:02 from the Large Tropocleidate and it's telling us something and it's our job, right? So we interpret that null result just like, in a sense, Einstein did with Michaelson Morley, right? No result. That is telling you something, right?

Starting point is 01:10:17 Exactly, right. The most famous failed experiment in history done at my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University. Well, it's again, if that history of that is endlessly fascinating. How can a null result be so powerful, but we know it was? Yep, absolutely.

Starting point is 01:10:34 And again, if we had looked at falsification as our only criterion, how backwards things would have been. Pampharmelo, I want to thank you so much. Tell me, are you going to resume your podcast? It doesn't. Well, I may do. At the moment I'm deep in, there's about 25 interviews there. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:51 But at the moment I'm deep in writing the life of Stephen Hawkins. So we will see. But for the moment, congratulations is on the job you're doing. You produce a wonderful corpus of interview. So I'm very great, but there's a lot for us to work through. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on the show, for being a guest, and for inspiring us with your podcast and for this wonderful book

Starting point is 01:11:13 and for the book on Churchill, Dirac, we'll have you back. And please do let me know as soon as you're done with the book on Hawking. I'd love to have you on. I had Charles Seifon for his book. You may have read it. You may have seen the interview. That's quite critical. I'd love to have a discussion with you.

Starting point is 01:11:28 And maybe we could have a friendly debate with Charles. That'll be an interesting kind of a pairing to do if you're up for it. But for now, Graham, thank you so much for spending so much to be a valuable time. It's been a delight and a pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating.

Starting point is 01:12:02 That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center

Starting point is 01:12:23 for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Graham Farmelo: The Universe Speaks In Numbers ​(#199)

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Graham Farmelo: The Universe Speaks In Numbers (#199)