Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Nobel Laureate Finds Key Insights About Complex Systems in Bird Flight | Giorgio Parisi (#359)

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

How does a Nobel Prize winner create ideas and bring them to life? What can starlings teach us about physics? And what is a spin glass? Here today, to take us on a fascinating journey from bird flocks to condensed matter physics is none other than Nobel Prize laureate Giorgio Parisi. Giorgio is an Italian theoretical physicist and author of many wonderful works, such as In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems, which we will discuss in detail in this episode. Giorgio is an incredibly inspiring mind who has contributed so much to our understanding of nature and complex systems, and it was an honor to interview him! Tune in.  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Judging a book by its cover: In a Flight of Starlings (00:38) Nicola Cabibbo as an advisor (07:10) Why do starlings form murmurations? (12:12) Giorgio’s work on spin glasses (22:04) How Giorgio lost the Nobel Prize (29:38) Can scientists work in isolation? (35:10) How ideas are born (38:28) Room-temperature superconductivity (43:08) Increasing scientific funding in the European governments (45:18) Science communication (48:59) Outro (54:15) — Additional resources:  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! 📚 In a Flight of Starlings by Giorgio Parisi: https://a.co/d/705ROGE   ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor George Perisi, he's a renowned theoretical physicist, currently a professor of quantum theory at the University of Rome. In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory of complex systems. What secrets lie in the elegant movement of a flock of starlings? What can complex systems tell us about the nature of life, our universe, and ourselves? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, help. Welcome everybody to an exciting episode of the Into the Impossible podcast.

We're joined today by an inspiring physicist, a man who's made many contributions to our understanding of nature and especially the understanding of what are called complex systems. We're going to get into that. But the first thing we love to do on this podcast, Giorgio, is to talk about the title of the book that you have written. It's called In a Flight of Starlings, the Wonders of Complex Systems. Can you explain, Giorgio, what does the title mean? And what does the cover art? What does it illustrate on the cover picture? The point is the following. I've been interested for a long time in the flight of Starling. I mean, Starlin are very interesting bears, and they are doing the flight in a very

use group of thousands of thousand, especially in the evening, just as a moment when they have to go to sleep. And the point was that the image that these people are doing are really amazing, fascinating, but no one knew exactly how they could communicate to do this such moment. And the thing that was most fundamental, no one really knew which was the form of the flock. Because when you see a flock of birds,

you see the image that you have on your retina, but you don't see the three-dimensional shape. And usually, when in order to see the three-dimensional shape, you use two eyes. But with two eyes,

you can see the distance of objects which are nearby. So, which was the solution? The solution was to put two eyes, we decided to do an experiment about that. It took a few years to do, and people are still working on the problem, and to see how really the Stalin flight, and the solution was to put two eyes at a distance of 20 meters. Of course, you cannot put really your eyes at distance at 20 meters, But you can put some camera at the distance of 20 meters, make synchronized pictures,

photographs of the stabling with these two cameras and having a three-dimensional reconstruction. This is not so easy, but at the hand, we succeeded to do. So when I decided, we decided to write a book on complex system, and one of the chapter was certainly dedicated to the Bers. After the book was finished, we decided with the edit of the order, we discussed

the chapters, we discussed to put the chapter on Bavs, on Starlit in the Feves, and also because it's some sense as one that is most fascinating, most easy to be understood, and at the end, we started to discuss the title and we arrived to Z-1.

Yeah, it's a brilliant book. It's very short. It's very readable. And it's endorsed by none other than our friend Carlo Ravelli, who is coming back on the podcast for his 20th book. I think it must be on White Holes. And I take you guys, I don't know if you know this, but Carlo and I recorded the first ever audiobook by Galileo.

So here is Galileo. There's a mini puppet of Galileo. He's holding his telescope. And it reminds me in your book, when you talk about devising not maybe a new way to see things that were never seen before, but a different perspective. And Galileo said the following. When he was inducted into the Lincheon, you say Lincheon society? Lincheon, yes. Of the links of the animals.

That's right. He said a scientist should measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not. not yet so. Was this discovery that you made with your colleagues? Was this hiding in plain sight? Was this something that could have been discovered earlier? Or did it really require the new technology, not maybe of the telescope, but of the camera technology? Could your discoveries have been made 30 years ago, 40 years ago? The things of Stalin, I think, that was just as the first moment it could be done. The reason is the following.

We needed to have a huge number of photographs because it was really a movie. And in order to do this before us, you have to do with the estimated that we need it in anyhow and we use tens of thousands of photographs. Now this has to be used in somewhat in a digital way because they have to be analyzed by computer. Now, the very idea to have a something like an archive

with 10,000, maybe 100,000 photographs, and they look into them, digitize all of them, something that is really a big, big mess. So I think that we started just at a moment with the camera technology, was good for using these things. Because we had the sand at that moment, there were four megapixel camera.

There was an upper professional one of Canon that were able to shot eight photogram per second. So that was just the one that went out. The price was $5,000. We had to buy six of them or eight of them. But, Hermes, it was not a real problem of the price. The point is that they think really did not exist, a digital camera of high precision and high speed. When I look at your history of collaboration, it's impossible for me to not ask you about your advisor, Nicola Kavibo.

Can you talk a little bit about him as an advisor? and maybe explain a little bit for my audience, what was he known for? What was his big contribution to physics that probably warranted a Nobel Prize, in my opinion? But what was Nicola like as an advisor and what did he do for physics? Nicola, it was a wonderful advisor. It was a wonderful advisor because, first of all, he was very friendly with a student. And the thing that he really did, it was transmitting enthusiasm. for the science.

I was making interest in doing science in the good way, in the right way, and without caring too much of the publicity to a result, but the real point was to understand the dictates what you want to do. And also the other things that I remember very well of him, that when we're discussing some possible things to study together, The point was that one should try to pick something which is amusing. I think that it amused for the scientists, and I think that this is important,

because if you start some project, which is very boring, at the middle you are going to stop it. You are not going to finish it. So to have some kind of amusing, I mean, amusement, which is the same kind of amusement that may have people when they solve a puzzle. But it's important to travel. Now, Nicola has been a really great scientist.

In the 60s and the 70s, he made a lot of discoveries about the behavior in which what people call radioactivity. I mean, people nowadays call weak interactions. I mean, some forces which is not strong as a strong. strong forces. And the thing that he really understood the way that these particles interacts, will say at the present moment how quarks doing interact in the week, and introduces what people called after him, the Caboengo, and the Caboengo is at a basis of present theories of week interaction. It could add that the Nobel Prize,

in 2008, I believe, but things happened that the Nobel Committee decided to not give to him doing some argument which I think were factually longer, but sometimes also the Nobel Committee makes some mistakes. When I think of him as an advisor and a contributor, it didn't seemed like he was bitter about not winning. I mean, it seemed like he was committed to his students and to the science with enthusiasm. So is that a trait that you mimic with your students? Did you learn as an advisor to many students and formally and informally as well, to many millions of people probably? What lessons in terms of education or being a mentor did you learn from him? Yes. I mean, I think that I'm trying to transmit.

It's enthusiasm for science. And enthusiasm for science is quite important to do. And, of course, you have to do in the right way. I mean, you have to sit down near your students, to understand what they're doing, help them to do. And also, you have to encourage them. I mean, if they are able to solve things in some way, which is not the best way,

I think that you should let them go on and not explain that it could be done in a much simple way because otherwise you take out from them the joy or even discovered something. And the things that have done things in well because there was nature, The magazine Netscher made a prize for mentoring, and this was, I think, in 2015, there were the price for mentoring in Italy, and I was one of the three guys that won the price for best mentoring in Italy.

And this was based also on the reports of my students who wrote a very enthusiastic report. Well, certainly so. I think it's Latin, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but the word educate in Latin is educare, and it means not to pour into, but to bring out of. And so I think you've brought out a lot in your students and your colleagues, and it seems to me you're, you have quite a good deal of humility, as well as sort of the confidence to pursue these incredible questions. And when I was reading the book, I started to wonder about these murmurations. So a murmuration is a collective noun for starlings when they flock together. And it almost as if they become a different entity, like a different organism. Can you describe what they're actually

doing? Why do they do this? Is it to scare off predators? Is it to migrate? Is it to attract mates. What is the evolutionary purpose of a murmuration? Well, that was well understood by biologists much before we entered in the game. The things is clear. These bears do not like cold weather. Therefore, in summer time, they stays in North Europe. I mean, during the winter, they are more or less in November to room, and they spent the winter up to March. In that period, things, they have to find a place which are relatively warm, because they do not have enough many things to eat. They have some fat, but the amount of fat that they are able to burn is not so high.

So the point is to find a place which is good, which is warm, that you must have some trees which have leaves, and there should be not too many cats that go on on the trees, because that would be better for other reasons. So what happens is that when they come, they go in the countryside during the day. So they're commuting. They're going to the countryside in the day,

and they come in the evening into sleep and inside the city. But anyhow, they commute, and when they come back, have to find out a good place. Some of them will find out the good place, or the same, maybe the same as the previous day, so they start to make some kind of numeration movement on the top of the place. And the other bird that arrives, they see this kind of memorization, and after they're becoming bigger, bigger, and when it's the moment to go to sleep, which is usually half an hour after the dawn, they go to sleep, and this memorandation can be seen from a very

a large distance. I mean, but that I was able to see memorization on the sky room and more less at 10 kilometers of distances. So they are something that you can easily see in the sky, because you don't see usually the sky objects that moves and make change and so on. Yeah, they're quite mesmerizing. Are they describing them with the tools of condensed matter physics? Do they exhibit phase transitions? Do they exhibit, you know, first order or free energy? Are there things that we can connect to our, you know, introductory thermodynamics classes that a student can understand about their behavior? Or is it really unique to these birds and the fact that they're birds? Are there commonalities, critical points? phase transitions. How do they behave in a physics from a physicist perspective? Well, from the point of view of your physical perspective, one has to take care that these bells are out to equilibrium, because usually when the city and one is doing the standard textbook for thermodynamics or on, one is looking to a system which are at equilibrium.

And now I take what people call terminal equilibrium, and now these bears are not a Terminal equilibrium, but however, the thermodynamics, the physics of these last years had done a lot of progress to discuss a system which are not at what people call Termal Equilibrium. And therefore, one can you describe in this up, this by physical law. One can write something like the Equestion, collective equation motion, one can speak of normalization group, first transition, and the techniques that happens that the way that this birds move is a sensor that they stay essentially at the critical point. The reason for which they choose the type of parameter which they use in doing in flight

to say near the critical point is that when near a critical point near a first transition, the speed is going to read the speed of information inside the system is going to move very, very fast. Indeed, this is what happens in this case, because in half a second, all the flops decides to turn in one direction and another direction. We know that when they turn, there are a few birds that start to turn, other, which is typical in the center of the flock, other birds are following, but the signal that someone is starting to move, propagate very, very fast. And when I thought about the murmurations, it crossed my mind that maybe human beings

can exhibit these same kinds of behaviors, but not know about it. Are there phenomena, maybe not physical phenomena, because we, you know, except when we go to a a football game, we don't really behave as huge flocks, but are there sort of social behaviors, maybe obsessions or so forth, that human beings also can act as murmurations? Or am I wrong? The point about the reason of a relation is that each bird is going to irritate the other the births and nearby because they have to avoid condition and so on. And therefore, there is a many, many things in a society where people try to imitate other human beings, try to imitate other human beings.

For example, you can think of fashion, but also there's one particular case that we have studied and is the distribution of baby names in the United States. Now, you see that you have in a certain moment, you have a certain. in fashion, for example, in the 60s, Jennifer, was a very common name. Nowadays, I don't know what may be a very common name, maybe Isabella or something like that. And now, if we look to the distribution names, the United States, you see there are some states which have nearly the same distribution name of other states, and other states

that have different things. And now what we did, we analyzed numerically these distribution names because we have the recording of the names that were given to Babi in the last century and something. And for example, the things that discovered

that, for example, in that one century ago, the great division was the northern country and the South one that were quite a different way. And now what happens essentially after the thing change in the 70s, and now the East Coast and the West Coast go very well together, and the center part of the United States goes in another direction.

Something like, I would say, that the democratic state, use different names and the Republican one, roughly speaking. And now this is clearly that this in effect, it's clearly an effect that people here are probably different television channels. I read different newspaper, read different things, have different friends from the United States. And also, that is something that we published. And also we started to study.

if one can understand this type of waves, which are the state, which the first start, and we found, but we had not finished or started, that there are some state which start two years before the other, some kind of fashion, and after the other state is systematically imitated. So this is something that can be done in many, many different subject. The only point is to have the data, because if we would have the data of sold in each state of the United States by Amazon,

one could do this kind of study, but a fear that it would be very hard to have from Amazon this kind of data. 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. Yes, yeah, I agree.

That's fascinating. Let's turn towards now the research that you did kind of buried the lead, as they say. I didn't mention that you won the Nobel Prize. Normally I do that in the intro, but I'll clean that up when I actually edit the video. But I want you to now drop in and start talking about your work on spin glasses. They're so fascinating. And the curiosity I think my audience would have is what inspired you to do that and invent this concept and collaborate to make this occur and then possibly talk about some technological implications of them.

So let's start with what is glass, first of all? What is glass and why, how does it have an applicability to spin? I mean, if you have, you know, my glass starts to spin, I've got problems over here. So tell me, what is glass, first of all? And then what is a spin glass? Because I think the public understanding won't be as clear until you explain it rather than me. Let's say to the following. It's supposed to take water.

You cool water and it becomes ice. and we know that this happens a very precise temperature, 32 Fahrenheit. And so there is what happens here in that case, a well-defined transition, something that you call liquid, to something that you call solid. Now, suppose that you look to the watts of a candle. I mean, when you see that it goes down, you see that it's liquid, and after going out from the fire, it becomes more and more solid, but it's not really solid. It's something that you can push your finger in and deformate, and becoming cool and cooler, become more and more rigid. Now, in this case, you don't have a real first transition.

You have a situation in which you have a liquid that a certain moment becomes so rigid that you cannot really push it. And you have many, many other type of liquid or this type. Like think of honey. Honey is liquid, but you usually don't do, but if you put in a frequent, become really solid. So you have a lot of things and real glasses, the window glass, belong to this category. And in Venice you can see how people work with glasses when they are very hot. Now spin glasses is some kind of material which have some glass properties,

they have some respect to glasses, but they are done with spins. But, But if you ask me why I was interested, I became interested at the moment which I did not know anything about spring glass. The only thing that I know that it was a mathematical difficult problem, in the sense that somebody tried to give a solution, but the solution was factually wrong, was inconsistent. And now, so I started to study how to solve the mathematical problem, And at the end of one here, I found the solution of computing the quantities that were needed to computed. And for all that period, I was not at all interested to what pink glass were, which was the possible experimental realization.

I mean, if you wanted, all physics connected to. to spring glass was not interested to me. It was just a problem that I want to solve it because also because maybe I want to show that I am good in solving problems, but not particularly interested to eat. And however, at that moment I left the problem. And after a few years, three, four years, we started by speaking with people to understand better the meaning of the solution. We started to have a new interest in the problem, we started to looking better, and realized

that the problem was connected to complex systems. But it was discovered that was done by analyzing the problem a few years after that was done. And that was due also to the fact that other people were looking to the problem. And therefore, I also found there were interesting things to be understood, and they started to look again. And after looking again in details, once after that wasn't connected to complex system. And a spin glass itself is embedding magnetic or metallic particles inside of a glass, as I understand it. Are there any technological applications, resistors, you know, transistors, quantum computers. Are there any

technological spinoffs from these magical devices? No. At first, no spin glass have no, no one has found a real application of spin glass. Someone was thinking maybe to have an application as memory, but it was too complex to be done. No, what was at the long. of technological spin-off was a theory that was behind the spring glasses because the theories that was behind the screen glass was not not so different from the theory that off-field wrote down for the first modern type of neural network and the spin-glass and the theory of spring glasses was fundamental in the words that was done by other people by the Israeli group led by Armit to have a deep understanding of the

often model of neural network. And this made a strong push towards understanding of neural network. Many people started to study analytically neural network because using the theory of verification the theory, you know, the type, for example, people were able to compute using the this kind of theory, which was the maximum amount of things that a often network will be able to memorize. And in this kind of wave of interest for neural network, in the 90s, people started to propose the deep network, which now are the deep networks, the deep networks, the deep news, network are now at the basis of modern artificial intelligence.

Let's summarize that the interest in being class since the 80s have also a deep influence of the beginning of neural network, and this neural network are now artificial intelligence of these days. So my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, and it's about the story of how I came to invent an experiment that was looking for cosmic. Inflation, trying to understand the origin of the Big Bang via the imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation and how if we had been proven correct, then if the experiment had been confirmed, then somebody would have won the Nobel Prize. Maybe not me. But everybody agreed that this was the case. And in fact, we got a lot of attention. And then spoiler alert, we did not win the Nobel Prize. And that's the name of the title. But a lot of people criticize me in the they said, well, you can't lose the Nobel Prize because you don't really have it until you lose it. And I said, that doesn't make any sense. You can't lose a football game because you didn't

win the football game. But it actually occurs to me that you did lose a Nobel Prize in certain sense back in and you described this in the book to Kenneth Wilson. Can you talk a little bit about what Kenneth Wilson did, what you almost did as well? Can you talk about your actual losing the Nobel Prize before you actually won it. There were two moments when I was very, very young. I was 25 that I lost in some sense at the number of prize. The first one was that I was interested in the same problem that Ken Wilson was interested to understand the renormalization, not a renormalization group, because the organization group

who was a dear Wilson mat to understand Second or the First Transition. But in this case, there was no match because Ken had so many ideas, and he was working on the problem in the last 10 years. And so it's clear that I could not really match him starting in one or two years' time. And so just at the moment where I arrived to start to think about the problem, it came out with a solution. So this was really no match. The things on which we were quite near was the point of view of synthetic freedom.

A synthetic freedom, which was a wonderful idea that got the Nobel Prize by gross Wiltschette Politzer in 2000. 2004, I never remember. Yeah, 2004. Yeah, Frank, Frank Krochek has been on the podcast. Well, Gross, Weichek, and Politz got the Nobel Prize in 2004 for Sintrity Freedom.

But at that moment, I was really interested to this type of problems, and I knew that the same computation of Policer, Gross Wechek, was done by Toft that was left

unpublished, but Tovst and not try to apply this type of computation to a physical to real physics, which was opposite of gross world check that discussed the quantum chromodynamics. So the things

I remember that I was in CERN with Toft and we started to discuss how can one construct a model of physics in order to use this discovery. Now, we have only discussed half an hour because I was interested mainly to add a problem

in connect or first transition, who also was interested in quantized their gravity, and just the right solution that was a model that was proposed by a man two years ago that I knew very well. I did not like the model in reality, but I knew the model very well. it came not to my mind the idea of applying to that model.

Now, if you forget the idea or if someone would be present in the discussion and would just say, but what about the model? It's clearly that all this, we could write a very similar paper to those people who caught the Nobel Prize in two days because all the complications were done and it was easy for me to spell all possible application. But the idea did not

came to our mind. I was the expert on a physical application. Toast was more interested to quote theory. So the thought was mine certainly not the other Gerard. But anyhow,

we did get something that in this case, I was quite near a few centimeters away and the things escape. Also maybe it could be a mess because as far as

probably also the other people in the United States would arrive at the same moment would have five people with the same discovery and which would make a cost mar for the Nobel Prize Committee but

I really do not know what would happen. Well, own it on. 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. The biggest prize in Yamava's 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.

You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. My second book, thankfully, is not as obsessed with the Nobel Prize being lost, but it's about how to win one, potentially. So this is my second book. It's called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner.

And it's all about how you can collaborate and work with people to make the world more understandable. So I wanted to ask you about collaboration and how you view collaboration. Is it possible for scientists to work in isolation and not be involved with, say, experimental results, if you're a theoretical physicist or if you're a experimental physicist to not understand the theory? Is it possible to do things by yourself nowadays? Or is it only possible with the help of collaborators? Well, I think that it's very, very difficult to do things to have one-man work. sometimes we do have, but this is just an isolated spot, I would say,

because after, in order to show the importance of this isolated work, you need the work of many other people. So the type of collaboration is very important. I mean, certainly, I am very fun of collaborating with people. When I was 70 years old, people had just done a poster with all the names of people I've collaborated with, and there were 317 people. Two years ago, one year ago, maybe people did an update version of the poster with 360. So I am pretty sure that I am supposed to go more than 400 of different collaborators. Sometimes that collaborators are only in one work.

Sometimes our collaborator, which I have written 50 work together. But I think that collaboration is very important in these days, also because... And what is something important to change your ideas with people. Because sometimes you have some idea, but you are very often the idea that people had half-baked ideas. And in order to transform in really final things, you have to explain to other people, discuss with them and so on, at least from a point to me. Of course, there may be other people that works in a different way. Einstein, thanks many discussions, at least in the first paper.

Relativity was best and other friends and so on. The influence of Grossman was very important because for the general relativity, because for general relativity, it was needed in mathematics that Einstein did not know. Very few people knew at that time at Roseman, I really explained to him. On the other hand, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric. effect what really something that we did by himself, as far as I understand. Yes, I think you're right.

And what was so fascinating about this book, or many, many fascinating aspects of In a Flight of Starlings by today's guest, Nobel laureate, Georgio Parisi, is that you kind of go through a checklist of what it's like to have an idea. And it's in a chapter called How Ideas Are Born. And I wonder if you could comment on it. You talk about these four steps, and we'll put them on the screen. there's a first preparatory step where the problem is studied existing literature read and first

unsuccessful attempts are made it's a period that can last between a week and a month because it ends when no progress occurs then there's a period of incubation step two in which the problem is abandoned at least consciously three the incubation ends suddenly with a moment of illumination which often occurs unrelated in an unrelated situation and then four after the illumination provides the general way to tackle the problem, the solution must be formulated. Can you talk about your process, your work process? Do you follow this rigorously or sometimes do you have ideas that can be made to fruition relatively quickly? Or do you really have to wait for these moments of inspiration followed by maybe a fallow period when you're waiting? Nothing much is happening

and you abandon it. How does that interplay work, especially when you have collaborator? It's hard enough to have one idea of your own, but you have a collaborator. How do you get him or her to abandon it and work on it, etc.? So can you talk about your idea generation process? How are ideas born? Well, the point is the following that is not that I'm really following this program. I mean, it's not something that I do programmatically. Just thinking on a few cases in which I have some particular good ideas and also looking

to something that written the literature because other people describe the way that they got a idea. The framework case in which they do, they tell, I mean, usually scientists do not tell people how the dot idea. They only present a final result, but not the way they get. There are people that discuss, they'll discuss from the case of people. or the something that has seen in the book of David Well after that he wrote my one. So many people describe the way that they get a year and this is something that is quite common.

Of course, the fact that you need some months is something that especially for very important and difficult ideas. But in certain case, Also for simple or for much simple things is something that you need to, you work in a similar way. The only thing that the time scales in much shorter. For example, I remember sometimes that I started the morning to look to a new program. I realized that it's a buck that does not work. The problem code is wrong.

and spend the whole morning and try to understand what is wrong. I am not able to find but after that I started to drive in for going to home at the last time. During driving, I understand what is wrong. I go home and check

that that was exactly the same thing. So the fact that sometimes looking back, I mean, looking for a little far away, is something that helps. Of course, when you have a collaborator, the things are somewhat easier if you are at this stage with collaborators

because you start to tell your collaborator your ideas. At the first time, they do not understand, but which are your ideas. So you have a tool to be formulated to formulate in a clear way that are understandable by them. I remember that for my 60 years,

one student of mine gave me a present cactus, I mean, had a small cactus and saying, this is the way that the deer come out from the mind of Georgia. Wow, that's very prickly. Well, I have to ask you about something controversial in your field of condensed matter physics, although you've done so many things from high energy particle physics to studying starlings, but recently there was a claim of the very first room temperature, ambient pressure, high temperature superconductor.

What did you make of the excitement? And what do you think is going to happen with high temperature superconductivity? Do you think we'll have one in the next few decades? think it's almost impossible to imagine. Well first all the only temperature superconductor will be very useful first all for doing toys for children and also because there will be a lot of or gadgets which will consume much less electricity so certain will be very very useful and I feel that I mean I do not see any particular reasons for which we should not have high-temperature superconductors.

Of course, it's clear that this is very difficult, also because we really do not fully understand why the actual superconductors that have reason that they are superconductor at the liquid oxygen liquid air temperature. The reason for which they are superconductor. The reason for which they are superconductors. There are some recent paper that claims they do understand. But I think that the space, the amount of different materials that can be constructed is so huge that especially the moment in which when we have a good theory of high-temperature superconductors, I do not see any reason for which we could not have a wrong temperature of superconductivity. Of course, may be wrong, but I am quite confident that we can arrive to hit.

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Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Ask about your work that you've been leading to really bring scientific funding in European governments to the high level. One of the topics in the book is how much value that science provides to a thriving society. And you talk about in the book, this famous joke by Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who said that, you know, science is like sex. Sometimes it produces useful results, but that's not why we do it. Can you talk about your movement that you've been heading called, and I'm going to butcher this,

Salvi Mano La Ritercha Italian. I hope I didn't butcher that. Can you talk about that? What drove you start this for society? The point was the following. In Italy, the research is not enough funded. I mean, the total amount of money that Italy is spending on research, private and state, all together, is a little more than 1% of the total gross income

and total gross product. And this is something that opposite to as a country, like Germany, we stay near 2%. France is already half percent more than Italy. Korea is 4% so one and something is really bad for Italy. And this is really a problem because with this amount of spending, many brilliant Italian go abroad.

They do not remain in Italy because there's not enough for money to do reasonable research. They go in other countries, and this is something that makes Italy much poor. So what I've been started to push in the last 10 years, in the last 15 years, let's say, and more money, maybe 20, more money for research, this is something which many Italian government did not give more money. The rich only said, although research is useful for increasing the national gross problems, in the long run, it does not, it's not in the time interval between one election and the other elections.

So they are not really interested in doing that. So it's something that is really bad for Italy, and we'll, for example, the movement Salviamo-Lavichie, Italian, Lessev Italian research, was a movement in which we start on a petition on change.org, and we got 200,000 senior show asking to get

more money to Italian research. And this took a certain amount of time to organize and to get this number

of seniors. But this I think was helpful because he showed to the politicians

that research was important. At that time I think that this did not have

any song effect on the total amount of money that politicians were to go in on. The only difference that made that before people or the politicians were not speaking about research, after the movement, they were saying that we give a research a lot of money, but we thought it's the amount of money. So they understood that it was important to say that they give money to the research. Very good. And then the last thing that I wanted to bring up before I asked my final question, which is kind of a philosophical question, has to do with a quote that you have in the beginning of the book, which was really, it inspired me to write a tweet, which is, you know, online. I said that why do we need to have science communicators, people whose job it is professionally to communicate science? We don't have that with movie stars. We don't have that with football players. We don't have that with football players. So why is it that science needs someone to make science more popular? And I got a lot of hatred online.

You know, people said, oh, that's stupid. You know, movie stars do get paid to go out and do it. And I said, well, yeah, that's proving my point. But scientists should be communicating more to the public, is my philosophy. And it's not a surprise that we don't get much funding because a lot of times we do things to say that we can't really explain it to you as a layperson because you're not smart enough. Or we say that it's too hard for us as scientists to learn how to communicate properly. And I say that's nonsense.

It's hard to learn the renormalization group. So stopping, saying something is hard is not an excuse. So you said at the end of the preface, you say the following. I wanted to start to emphasize how difficult it is to understand the many phenomena that we observe almost daily and convey that complexity is not about what happens in laboratories. It is what happens all around us. Our job as scientists is to illuminate for everyone the truths we discover. Can you say, if you agree with this, I believe scientists have a moral obligation to communicate what they do in terms that people that fund us can understand.

Do you agree with that or do you disagree? And if so, how? No, I fully agree with that. And I think the scientists have to understand that if they do not communicate with people what they are doing, the funds will stop eventually. So I think it is a certain moral obligation, but also a long period of need to communicate with people. Because science in these days, it costs to a lot of money. and we can think of some kind of, there may be not very efficient,

a word in which technologies go on without science. And this is something that may be difficult, but may be possible. And or you may have a situation which boost technology and science escape from small countries like Italy. This is also another purpose. So I think that it's extremely important, it's a moral, I agree, fully agree, it's a moral obligation and also convenience for them to communicate. It's not easy.

I mean, I want to study because also communication with people should be done also in a fast way because you have to get the attention of people. And therefore it's not easy to get the attention of people. And also because a scientist, you normally accustomed to use written words. And this is not the way. And also to speak with people that are interested like scientists. Now, the real problem for scientists to communicate is to get attention to other people. At the moment they start to communicate.

And that is the thing that makes things different, because other people get immediate way just looking to them in the face, you're interested to what they're doing, but not scientists. Georgia, that was beautiful. I really appreciate your time. And there's one last question before I'll let you return to have a bono ser. And that's the question I like to ask my guests and ask them to give themselves advice when they were 20 years old to 25 years old.

And it's based on the name of this podcast. So this podcast is based on Sir Arthur C. Clark's third law, which states, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. So I want to ask you a question, Georgio, for your former self at age 25. What advice would you give him to have the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? What piece of advice if you have 30 seconds with 25-year-old Giorgio? What do you say to him? This question was already asked to me. And after some truth, I say that I will not give any advice.

Because I've been very lucky in the choice of things to study in my trajectory. And to hear some say, I mean, I think that there's a lot of luck. And I think that any disturbance of the trajectory, would be very like to have a quite negative aspect. Well, that's very smart because here we have the Simpsons, a very famous cartoon where Homer Simpson goes back in time and he steps on a bug and he goes, stupid bug, you go squish now.

And then like fast forward 60 million years later and humanity is a servant of all these bugs. So, so Giorgio, I want to thank you so much for this wonderful book for the inspiration to millions of people around the world. You made so many people happy when you won the Nobel Prize, but really for the work that you've done and this fabulous book. And I hope we can meet someday in person and have a cappuccino together. You are welcome if you come to Rome to have a cappuccino here.

Thank you. Millie grazie. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you are building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.