Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Nobel Prize Winner Frank Wilczek: Fundamentals — What Are The 10 Keys To Reality? (#109)

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

Frank Wilczek is a theoretical physicist, author, and intellectual adventurer. He has received many prizes for his work, including a Nobel Prize in Physics. Win a FREE copy of his newest book Fundamentals: enter this giveaway – https://kingsumo.com/g/n7xeaa/win-a-copy-of-frank-wilczeks-fundamentals-10-keys-to-reality Wilczek has made seminal contributions to fundamental particle physics, cosmology, and the physics of materials. His current research focus includes Axions, Anyons, and Time Crystals, concepts in physics which he invented –each of which has become a major focus of worldwide research. In recent years Frank has become fascinated with prospects for expanding perception through technology. He is developing hardware and software tools for this. He has authored several well-known books and writes a monthly “Wilczek’s Universe” feature for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “Fundamentals”, was released in January 2021. Buy it here: https://amzn.to/3q9HNAr Wilczek received a B.S. at the University of Chicago in 1970, and a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1974. Currently he is the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at MIT; Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University; and Professor at Stockholm University. https://www.frankawilczek.com/ 00:04:43 What’s a day in your life like? 00:05:25 Having a grandchild 0 0:08:12 How Frank got interested in machine learning and AI. 00:11:07 What are your current thoughts are AI? 00:21:20 What are the fundamentals? 00:24:05 What motivates to begin a new project? 00:27:25 About axions. 00:30:47 Breaking symmetry or an expanded definition of it? 00:37:54 What’s fundamental about the scales of the universe? 00:40:16 Thoughts about a future envisioned in science fiction. 00:42:58 What do you think is the most beautiful experiment? 00:57;04 What is the case for the existence of God? 00:24:05 Is complexity fundamental? 01:17:09 Will we find that axions explain Dark Matter? 01:20:10 Detecting quantum gravitational waves. 01:31:56 Are there hints about a core theory of everything? Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose https://youtu.be/H8G5onAqlVo?sub_confirmation=1 Juan Maldacena’s First Podcast Interview: https://youtu.be/uIzTliTHn7s?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM ‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everybody. I just finished up a phenomenal interview with my friend Frank Wilczek, who is a really unbelievable, unparalleled intellect in my mind and many physicist's minds, but also in the public's mind, he does a tremendous amount of engagement with the public. And his new book, Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality, is now out. Here's the cover. Here's the actual book he's found here. Don't worry. I read the whole book. And I've done now two podcasts with him about it. But this is my third podcast with him total, if you're keeping score at home. And we got into a great deal of his insights into, really, as he calls the book, the nature of reality and what it's predicated on. The foundations of the universe and its comprehensibility are really keys to

understanding what the limits of human intelligence are, what the potential augmentation of artificial intelligence might mean for humanity. And also, prospecting. for things that transcend the laws of physics, such as religion, alien life, and other things that you'll hear about. You'll also hear about his advice to his former self, his answer to my famous monolith question, and also his ethical will, which you won't want to miss. He promised me that last time we spoke about a beautiful question back in November,

and now he answered it today. But you only hear that if you sign up for my... mailing list at brian keating.com i'm a little concerned about the powers of a big tech and people are getting rightfully concerned about technology perhaps you know controlling our access to to the fans and the audience out there so i do want to encourage you to sign up for my mailing list at bryan keating dot com you'll get advice for life from not only from frank but from folks like jim simons and from even people that you haven't heard podcasts from yet, such as Avi Loeb, who recorded a podcast with me just last week.

I also have Julian Barber coming up on the podcast, so please subscribe, like, and do all those things for this podcast to keep it going. But do subscribe to my newsletter if you want to hear the answers to the thrilling three questions that I ask all of my guests, including Frank Wilcheck, which is delayed back in November, but have no fear. You will get those answers right here. if you subscribe at brian keating.com. Just go there, takes a second. And I won't spam you, send out about one email a week with the advice, tips, tricks, and things that are going about

and percolating in the multiverse of minds that I'm connecting together in the spirit of pandemic podcasts. So for now, sit back and enjoy this wonderful, fun, raucous at times interview with the brilliant, effervescent, and imaginative Frank Wilczek. Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinguishing from magic. Okay, welcome everybody to this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. I am your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, in this time of pandemic podcasting. And we're so fortunate to be joined today by a friend, a real legend, and such a generous person as Frank Wilcheck.

He's given a lot of his time to this podcast, and he's one of the most popular guests that we've had. So it's quite fitting that we kind of return the favor in our small little way and have him back on the occasion of his phenomenal new book called Fundamentals. And we'll be talking a lot about that today. Frank, how are you feeling today? I'm feeling pretty good. You've had a lot of great publicity on this wonderful new book. We'll be talking about fundamentals. It's very gratifying.

It really has been very gratifying. you know, it's, among all my book experiences, this has been unique. It's really been, I think, I think I've been supplying something that people really needed, even if they didn't know it. Well, I see you as a... Wanted, wanted. I should say wanted, not needed, wanted, even if you didn't realize it. Well, in this case, I see you as having tremendous amounts. of courage. You've always been a courageous physicist and a physicist with style and an actual

sort of, I would say, a brand, which is extremely high quality, but somehow with extremely high quantity. And I want to get into that first. What is your, what's a day in the life of Frank Wilczek like? Now, now you talked about, in your previous books, you talked about your devotion to your wife and Betsy, and then you've talked about your kids. And this is the first book you talk about your grandchild, which is so exciting. Congratulations. That's the first opportunity. That's right. How have things changed? I didn't hold that in reserve.

Yeah. The new release came out at a time with the book launch. I actually had that with my twins. They came out a week before my book came out. But Frank, how is your style change since becoming a grandfather or has it changed? Is your workflow? Is your daily routine changed at all? Well, not so much because of having a grandchild. That's been a blessing and has subtly altered my view of the world, I guess, or not so subtle. Viewing him learning and establishing a self and a model of the world was very illuminating and went very much into fundamentals.

But it hasn't affected my day. life in any very direct way. What's really affected my daily life is the pandemic, of course, which has meant that the wandering lifestyle that I had somehow fallen into for the past four or five years suddenly stopped. Whereas I was moving every few years, every few months to different parts of the world. And that was kind of an adventure, and I made a lot of new friends, and it was fun. It was not conducive to a kind of reflective life and sustained creative work. And now I've gone sort of resumed my style, almost like I'm going back to graduate school.

It's been really an extraordinary thing. I completed the book which was kind of you know a struggle a troubled pregnancy

for quite a while and I got to relax and actually give birth to the book and I've gone back to school in some ways I've been reading more both physics

and more broadly and I took up juggling and I started It's been exercising. I lost now almost 20 pounds. Yeah. I feel younger than I felt for a very long time, more energetic. And I've also been learning things. I've decided that I could get serious about a learning machine learning machine learning and really dirty.

my, I've for many years now, enjoyed interacting with computer through Mathematica and it's quite a physics, modeling, and things like that. But it hasn't, I, I've been interested in machine learning from a long time, for a long time. In fact, in the history of machine learning, an important event was a workshop at Santa Barbara in the 80s. And I was there. I was there and participated in it, not as one of the central members, certainly, but kind of as an interested quasi-spectator. And I worked at some of the postdoc.

And now it's some of those same ideas about neural nets have become deep learning and become very, very powerful and impressive. So I decided it's time to get back in touch with that and get up to date. And, you know, when I do something like that, I really mean it. So, you know, I'm learning how to use the tools and doing model problems. I think so. Well, going back to school in that sense.

But also, I've been carrying through a research program that is, I think, very interesting and promising in many directions. Yeah, I want to... it's that that's that's that's that's more like what i've always done uh that i've just had more time to do it yeah well i i made a vow that anybody who comes out of this pandemic with a six-pack i'm going to be quite upset with and so you might you might add six-pack to Nobel laureate uh but speaking of no of a Nobel laureate your fellow laureate kip thorne uh keeps keeps giving me the cold shoulder to come on the podcast i've had on your colleague ray weiss

I've had on Barry Barish, and he keeps saying, I cannot come on just now. Please contact me in a couple weeks because it's the most productive I've ever been. I'm turning down every opportunity to go on podcasts, and I'm just focusing on work, and it's been one of the best things that ever happened to me. In a work sense, obviously. I wonder what he's up to. Well, the writing book, Barry and Ray and Kipp are writing a book about LIGO, and I think he's also working on other projects related to general relativity and so forth,

But I do want to get into your newfound peregrinations into the world of artificial intelligence. It's funny, this book really goes on a journey from natural intelligence through your contributions all the way up to artificial intelligence. Maybe we'll start there. You talk a lot about things in the book, and it was funny because I was setting up to do this interview, I had to do one of these CAPTCHAs. You know, these CAPTCHAs where you have to prove that you're a human being. but actually you're proving that you're not a robot, which are not artificial intelligence, which is the opposite of the Turing test, right? Turing test is you want to prove that you're a general artificial intelligence can revocate.

So I had on Nome Chomsky this past year or last year now, and he thinks this whole notion of, you know, can machines think is as outlandish as Turing ever did, which is that it's sort of nonsensical, it's almost semantic. You put a lot of faith in it, and you put a lot of emphasis on it, rather, in the book. And I'm wondering, what are your current thoughts? Well, it's not a matter of faith. It's a hypothesis which seems very, very difficult to avoid. Francis Crick, the great molecular biologist, wrote a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis around this very idea.

And his formulation was a little bit different. But basically, it's the idea that, emerges from matter. And that's certainly been the working hypothesis of neurobiology and understanding nervous systems and signaling and so forth in the brain. And so far it hasn't hit any showstoppers. We also, as physicists, know that when we do delicate experiments, as we have to vibrations and shielding from radio waves and shielding

from temperature variations and moisture or stray graduate students wandering through the lab. Or theorists. But one thing we never have to correct for is the possibility that people thinking about it would affect the results. And to me,

anyone who thinks that there are souls or that there are separate entities that are not described by the physical laws we know, show me. You know, here's an open invitation to devise an experiment with very, very delicate instruments and, you know, show the influence of mind on matter. But we would, I mean, we, yeah, when you're, Eric. Or just to show that the actually. accuracy of experiments somehow runs out because there's a lot of cosmic noise from the force

that's carrying all these thought waves. It's just, so it would be pretty astonishing. So, so there doesn't seem to be anything resembling the idea of a thought wave that can, that can affect matter. On the one hand, and on the other hand, as I mentioned, so far, neurobiology has succeeded in understanding more and more about signaling, memory, all the functions that go into human information processing and also just the basic fact that thought seems to be rooted in brains, when you damage brains, you damage thought, and so point. And then on the third hand, we've learned to make minds with computers that do very impressive things all the way from perception now where they can start to identify objects in

images to, of course, playing go and chess better than humans. Those were once thought to be the sort of pinnacles of human intelligence. And in that case, there's no question that the minds have emerged from matter. In fact, we designed them. We designed them based on the principles of quantum mechanics and logic to do these things. And so on all those grounds, I think it's very hard. To me, it would be astonishing if Crix's astonishing hyper, hypothesis were not true.

But one thing that interesting is me is not whether or not, you know, computers, as you point out, like alpha zero and and so forth, can beat humans at the game of chess or at the game of go. Can they ever create the game of chess or create the game of go? And this gets at my pet peeve lately, which is that I'm not so, I don't care about artificial intelligence. I want artificial wisdom. Wisdom is creating chess.

Knowledge is beating the human at chess. So what do you think about the prospects for a computer to create a game that would be pleasurable for human beings, not just beat us at it? Well, that remains to be seen. And I think a great challenge, which is mentioned in the book, and I think is a very important one, is to make machines unhappy. make machines want to explore to be motivated to go out and not just

wait for instructions but to go out and explore, do things to now there are hints of that I mean there's something called reinforcement learning

which is a strategy whereby a computer is encouraged to explore as well as exploit. So to explore and make mistakes so that it learns what works and what doesn't work. At present, that's mostly implemented in very limited domains of learning how to play games well or in robotics, learning how to move around in simple situations. but I don't think there's any barrier of principle to, you know, having computers watch humans and watch what they do and watch what they like

and learn what their motivations are and then to take over some of them. Or not take over is maybe an unfortunate phrase, but to adopt some of them and use them. And derive pleasure from them. And the other thing is when you talk about creativity, it's, again, it's creeping up on us, but you may have seen things like this person does not exist, where you click, you can get photographic, graphic style images of people that don't exist that are very convincing, very

photorealistic. And so these are creations, yeah, and there are also programs now that can take an image and turn it into the style of Van Gogh or turn it into the style of Picasso at different periods. And okay, they're not quite there yet, but they're, they're, they a lot better than I can, that's for sure. And then if you leave them to their own devices, they have their own style, which is kind of phantasmagoric. You can look inside images that deep neural nets are making, and they have a weird charm and certainly creative in the sense

that no human artist does anything like that. Right. When I think about that, I mean, my father used to say, you know, one promising avenue might be to replicate how we learn things, which is by pain avoidance, right? So you could actually damage the transistors, you know, and they make a wrong choice. I wonder if they would actually come about learning. But, but, you know, I always point out, and you talk about this a lot, the book, you know, that what science has taught us is tremendous amount of knowledge. And I see this book as helping us synthesize in the sense that Isaac Newton, as you describe in the book, would do analysis and then synthesis. But I wonder, you know, can you ever broach that, you know, blood-brain barrier between knowledge and wisdom? In other words, I see a lot of issues with the fact that we trust scientists and we say scientists, so-and-so has a Nobel Prize, and therefore we should trust them outside of their domain of expertise.

That's not a good reason to trust anybody. I've had experience with Nobel Prize winners. and they're a very, they're a very odd lot. And some are better than others. But I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, I'm actually working on a book where I'm going to synthesize all the Nobel laureates I've spoken to, including you. So look for that coming out this year. But in reality, I see this conflation of knowledge and wisdom.

And I see your book is giving ammunition. giving a positive way to people to think about the limits of knowledge, but also inspire them. You know, it's your, I would say it's your least technical of all the books you've written. I think you've written, oh, yes, four books. It's the most accessible. It's the most awe-inspiring and wonder-inspiring. It's full of jokes. It's full of little pithy footnotes, which, you know, usually they say, you know,

footnotes are like receiving a phone call as you're kissing your wife or something. But now it's our husband or whatever. I insisted that the footnotes not be numbered. Yes, I love them. They're asynchronous. They're asynchronous. And also that they just appear right there. So you don't have to thumb through the book to get the foot.

And the footnotes are not, you know, not citations. Right. I don't think there's a single citation in the footnotes, but that kind of side remarks, jokes, as you say. Yeah. It's very accessible. It's very readable for the average lay person. But also for the technically minded person, you have some.

you know, red meat or tofu, whatever you want to call it for the vegetarians that may be listening. In the back, you've got your Feynman diagrams. Don't worry. There's plenty of technical goodness there. Let me start with your current thinking about really the fundamental fundamentals. What are the most fundamental fundamentals? You start up with space, with time, with experience, with genes. What is there, you know, as George Orwell said, you know, all animals are equal. some are more equal than others. Is anything as fundamental, everything is as equally fundamental, but is there something more fundamental? Well, in order to have a clear discussion of this question, we have to have a clear discussion of what fundamental means.

And fundamental can mean a lot of different things. It means a very different thing to an evangelical Christian than it means in the context that I'm using it. What I mean by fundamentals for purposes of fundamentals, 10 keys to reality, is basic principles that explain a lot, but that can't be explained in terms of anything else. So, for instance, the second law of thermodynamics is a very insightful, profound principle that tells you a lot about how the world works. but it's not fundamental in my sense because we can understand it on the basis of atomic structure and concepts of probability and the mechanical view of the world, if you like, broadly considered. We can see how it arises. Cosmology also comes into it actually because you have to understand why we happen to find low entropy states all over the place. but that's the side that's another issue anyway but so what I mean by fundamental is basic principles about how the world works that cannot be explained in terms of more basic principles

and the fact that there are such things and that there are just a small number of them that you can survey is a profound profound discovery that in its sense And then, you know, spelling out exactly what they are, that they are is also interesting. But the most profound thing is that there are such a few principles that, that, that you can, that, you know, just like Einstein said, the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it's comprehensible. Or what he actually said is that it was, I think it was in German originally, but a pretty good translation would be the comprehensibility of the world is a miracle. And yet we have plenty of people wanting to make it comprehensible.

I think when I read the book, I come across, first of all, you know, it's not simply touting accomplishments and so forth that you personally made, although you have made contributions to this. When you decide that a problem is worth your attention, I mean, it seems like you've stored in some memory bank in your brain, the fact that machine learning is interesting, and you happen to be at this, you know, apoccal conference in Santa Barbara, et cetera. So what makes you decide that it's time to write a book or it's time to pick up a new project and perhaps leave, you know, particle physics, QCD behind for cosmology and dark matter?

How do you decide that? What is that? Is there a rubric or it's just whatever happens to interest you? well it's somewhere in between I mean there's there's certainly

an element of playfulness I mean I like to say my operating system is think play repeat so so I think about something then I play around

with the ideas and then think about it again and repeat and see if they get better but but I guess there are two basic factors plus a third kind of ingredient that goes into this process.

So the basic factors are the importance of a problem and my perception that I think I can do something about it. So there are some problems that are, but then the third thing I wanted to say is you have to, what is, what is, a lot of weight there is being put on the word important. How do you decide what's important? Okay, so things can be important in different ways. Things can be important if they're fundamental, as we discussed. Things can be important if they have, the possibility of doing useful things in the world, and we can allow a very broad definition of useful, like pushing the frontiers of knowledge in some way or making something observable that was only latent about the world to me is important. And then there's a third thing, which is just making things more beautiful, it's more aesthetic, improving the description of the world. If I perceive flaws here and there, that's something that I've often...

or perceived flaws or gaps in our understanding of the world. So that's the third, so that's kind of the third factor, which you might, you might say jokingly is irritation. If something irritates me, that's important, addressable and irritating. Those are the three axes. All right. Well, we've got a note.

That's a keynote for this talk tag. It has to be important, interesting, and irritating. right at the three eyes was it but I want to ask you something when you came up with axions I mean axions aren't particularly beautiful except in the sense that they might solve a problem so they're not beautiful in the direct sense that you know your equations are it's more important that they're beautiful than that they're right because you're all I don't agree with that the equations are quite beautiful that the yeah they they they turn out to be a when you boil it down and well the original model implementations were not particularly beautiful. And to this day, there's no really beautiful

derivation of the basic principles of axiom physics. They are tied up in questions of unification where we just don't know enough detail to pin it all down. But if you do kind of abstract a way that you can get a very beautiful set of equations, which are kind of a minimal extension of backslows equations to include one extra scalar field and now that I think about it, I never thought about it this way, but it's like, in a way, it's like Brands Dickey theory, which is a famous extension of general relativity to include an extra light scaler. But this is much better motivated and much better. And I think the equations are more beautiful. And it's not just me that thinks that. Nature thinks it. It turns out that these very equations govern the behavior of

certain states of matter in a very profound sense. They are the effective theories of low energy, with different names on the symbols and different values of the parameters, but the same equations, they govern the behavior of low energy excitations and, you know, interactions of certain materials with matter. The so-called topological insulators, in fact, are examples of axion electrodynamics. And I'm very proud that I wrote a paper back in the 80s, I believe, called two applications of axion electrododynamics. And in that paper, you will find the equations that govern topological insulators, even though I didn't know anything about topological wins. No, but, you know, they were still a, still not even a gleam in the eye of anybody,

but the equations have a life of their own. When we look at... They're very beautiful equations. Yeah. When we look at... And also another aspect of it. So I'm sorry, I'm getting exercised because you said that axions aren't beautiful. I just said the problem of spontaneous symmetry. I mean, obviously the most beautiful thing is perfect symmetry, right? So they don't have perfect symmetry. When I was first thinking about these things, I really didn't. anticipate that there would be an important connection to cosmology.

Right. And yet it turns out that the equations are, again, there was more in them than we knew. And it turns out that very plausibly the axions make up the dark matter that cosmologists need. And we'll see. Right, we'll see. The reason I said it's not beautiful,

I just said the underlying symmetry is broken. And in fact, I think most people equate perfect symmetry with perfect beauty. So that's the only reason I'm saying that you were guided by. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yes. Well, but it's broken in a very, very particular way. Right.

So the way that it's broken is, I would say, yes, it's broken. It's a broken symmetry. So it's an imperfect symmetry. but I would say it's an opportunity to expand your concept of symmetry so that that nature gives you an opportunity to expand your mind by expanding your concept of what a symmetry means from the vulgar idea that it has to be perfect to the idea that it can be sort of violated in a very particular way. But let me not let let let me not let me not let me not let me not let that go though because yeah it's actually also true of asymptotic freedom um asymptotic freedom you know scale invariance is a possible uh symmetry of the world that you know that the things the the laws could look the same if you made everything bigger and that's definitely not true of gravity it's definitely not true of other laws but it's almost true of the equations of QCD that their scale invariant and

And that was really one of the important clues that led us to those equations was to try to get as close to that symmetry as we can. And asymptotic freedom shows the asymptotic is that that symmetry appears more and more clearly as you go to higher and higher energy and shorter distances. So it's another kind of symmetry that's never fully realized, but is violated in a very structured way and can be fully revealed. kind of as a limiting perspective, limiting behavior. Right. So symmetry, yeah. So I find it really delightful and even more beautiful when you have an expanded concept of symmetry that can be applied in new ways.

Right. Yeah. And we can go in our other examples. But broken symmetry is both, I say, Broken symmetry is not simply the absence of symmetry. You can have proximate symmetry. You can have spontaneously broken symmetry. You can have anomalous symmetry.

You can have symmetry broken by asymptotic symmetry. So all the, symmetry has been a dominant motif or dominant theme of especially 20th century physics. Not just because it's sometimes completely realized, but because it has all these possibilities for fruitful generalization. And nature likes it. Nature likes them. It would have been very hard for people to dream of them, but nature led us to them. Right. I always point out there's a famous study where they take the most handsome man in the world.

I was busy that day, so they took Brad Pitt. They took Brad Pitt and they take his face and they cut it down the middle and then they reflect the right side onto the left side and he's grotesque, you know, even more than he normally is. And so perfect symmetry. Yeah, perfect symmetry is not beautiful, at least a human conception. And I want to talk about, you know, how the human beings come in, come into play in this book. Because we live. I guess that's another. Sorry, that's another theme in music.

You don't play this. You do theme with variations. and that enriches the thing, right? Yeah, and counterpoint and so forth. Yes, I'd say the only instrument I play is the iPhone. That's the only one I'm competent. Hi, everybody. Just a quick break to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter at briankeating.com

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So Brian Keating.com, there it is right there. And do me that wonderful favor. I appreciate it very much. And now back to the remainder of our conversation with the noblest mind of the Nobel Minds universe. No, there are many, many Nobel laureates that have come on and many that aren't. So it's quite a treat.

But today, special treat because it's the book launch for Frank Wilczek's Fundamentals. Pick up a copy of a link in the show notes, and you can get one yourself, and you will enjoy it. And it's a rather quick read, which I appreciate having so many books to read, so many awesome guests coming up. And really, just so blessed to run this podcast. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the show. I think another aspect of this book, we talked a little bit about that with Deepak Chopra and Leonard Milan now, is kind of cosmic humility that we're,

sort of in this, you know, we're sort of at this geometric mean between the largest scales in the universe or, I don't know, exponential, logarithmic geometric mean maybe between the largest scales in the universe and the smallest scales. In some ways. Is that, you know, sort of, as Galileo pointed out, you know, animals can only be so large. You can't have an elephant the size of, you know, the leaning tower of Pisa. Is that just an accident? Is there some anthropic, you know, kind of correlation?

You talk about the, you know, the variety of scales as, as another. type of fundamental property of our universe. Can you talk more about that? Well, it's complicated and I think it's time dependent. But yes, the size that we are is, we're in a very sweet spot, actually. We are large enough to comprehend a very large number in the objective sense much, much larger than one of independent processing units, neurons that are themselves complicated and stable, so they're composed of zillions of, to speak scientifically, zillions of atoms and molecules. You heard you.

Nobel laureate uses zillion. And they support complex patterns and information processing that we call mind. And yet we don't exhaust no one of us or even humanity as a whole does not come close to exhausting the resources of the physical universe. We're here on this little planet inside a modest solar system, inside an average galaxy inside a huge universe and maybe a multiverse on top of that. So we're both large in the sense of having enough independent complexity, programmable complexity, if you're dynamic complexity, to support very rich experience and information processing and all the wonderful things that come with being human. and yet there's a lot left over so that in the future, the vanguard of intelligence can keep expanding. And now we get into the dreams of science fiction like Olaf Stapleton of galactic brains and things, which of course are still the future and may take a long time to be realized if ever,

But in a sense, we're starting to get there. We're standing out, we're establishing the whole world as a communications network. You know, I can talk to you across the continent. I don't give it a second thought anymore. I'm old enough to remember when that was not remotely a possibility when it was near. Now you have a studio. Now you've got your own home studio. Right.

That's right. And, you know, we can send out robots that are complex and actuators to different planets and explore them. And we can, so we have intimate, and it's going to get better and better. They sort of out of, I've had some out-of-body experiences controlling robots in other places and being embodied and having conversations with people. And it's a very, it's a transporting experience, literally, you can feel. And I think the idea of distributed intelligence both as a continuation of sort of individual human identity, but also kind of a group consciousness, is on us. And it's only going to flourish. And so we're not limited by the size of a human body.

So that, okay, so that, I guess that's what I, that's what I, that's, that's what I'm, that's, that's, all I wanted to touch on. We are very big. We are also very small, and we're growing. Those are the three points, I think. And the universe is growing, too. Although, given your diet and your loss of weight, you're shrinking, and I'm growing. But we're conserved. I'm conserving the amount of mass between you and me. My shell is getting smaller, but my brain is getting bigger. That's the most efficient packing mechanism. I actually talked to astronaut Jessica Meere not too long ago, and she said not only are, you know, women, you know, kind of better suited to go into space because they have a higher strength to weight ratio, especially in space, but they actually have

slower metabolisms so that makes them more efficient consumers of energy. And I'm thinking, yeah, but their brains might work a lot faster than our brains as men. And so, yes, there might be a triple threat for women to. So hopefully she'll be the first woman to set foot on the moon. She's an amazing, amazing person. I want to ask you a question that I've always wanted to ask you, you're a theorist, you delve into, you know, the observational consequences of your theories. What is the most beautiful experiment, or maybe one or two experiments that you've ever seen in the history of, let's say modern physics. Let's not go back to, you know, Cavendish or whatever. Let's stay with modern physics last 100 years or so. Oh, I thought you were

going to ask about the things that came out of my theories. Well, let me start with those anyway. Yeah, yeah, I will. Okay, go ahead. Start with that. Because it is a personal element to it. And I don't want to give up on that right away. Yeah, okay. And then I'll come back to the most beautiful period. So to me, the two most beautiful experiments that kind of spoke to me on a personal level because they came out of my work in some sense are seeing jets in QCD, where you almost literally see the Feynman diagrams that we calculated with quarks

and gluons and anti-quarks, not as individual particles, but you see their tracks as, where you see several actual particles moving fast in the same direction. And so it plots out a flow of energy and momentum that tracks the properties of the underlying quarks and gluons. And it is incredible, I mean, you know, I remember distinctly as a graduate student's playing with these Fein diagrams and doing the algebra and, the idea that this would actually be a tangible, almost like a map of the physical world, is just mind-boggling. But there it is.

And so that's one beautiful kind of experiment. And the other was much more recent, kind of a bookend to the beginning and so far the latest chapter. my career is was the anion discovery where the anion observation where we predicted that in a certain state of matter the emergent particles would have some peculiar kind of memory that if you have one and what the other one another one winds around it that affects its behavior and this this summer June or July an experiment was done that actually saw this behavior and and it would take a bit of patience on my part and also more important on your audience's part to fully to fully explain it but you see certain curves that

have discontinuities when one or two or three you know it's an integer number of these funny particles that fall into your trap and each time they do you see a change in the behavior that's discontinuous and it's extraordinarily beautiful and the experimentalist did a good job of false coloring and sort of presentation of their data so it just leaps to the eye and it's just an extraordinary correspondence between reality and theoretical understanding that was very beautiful. So now going back to your, so those are the two for me in my personal experience that have just, you know,

sent me into a different state of consciousness. I was walking on air for several days when I saw these things. I never fully came down. Then, but if I think about the most beautiful kind of phenomenon that sort of is I don't want to go back to ancient history or so

and it's it's hard to not take that for granted these things for granted like Newton's laws of gravity or even general relativity so novelty is also an element of beauty. And to me, the most beautiful kind of experiment that emerged from 20th century physics is the Josephson effect, the Josephson effects that are these extraordinary manifestations of behavior of matter in a superconducting state when you have little insulating layers between two insular and two superconductors. So something you would never, ever stumble onto without

profound understanding and intuitions about the behavior of matter when quantum mechanics dominates its behavior and really stunningly surprising behavior that a constant voltage gives rise to a non-constant current and then as the icing on the cake so it's rooted mathematically in deep principles of gauge symmetry and sort of quantum mechanics that it's most raw basic, fundamental level. And it's led to

an important technology, a very important technology that I don't think is exhausted yet. No, we use it in all of our detectors in cosmology. Yes. Right. Right. So that to me may be the most beautiful.

Yeah. It's hard to believe. It's coming up on about 60 years of Josasin effect. For me, it's the Aharaunov-Bohmob effect because it's so strange, you know, that this thing that we ascribe almost no reality to in classical physics, then not only seems to have a reality in physics as a whole, but also in quantum physics. And they're not unrelated, I suppose, to the justice and effect where it's a phase dependent effect. But it's also not unrelated to any, it's very related to any ions.

Yes, yeah. So actually, can we take a little break? Because it's not so often I get a chance to to ask someone of your stature the most basic questions of life. So when you think of these things, is it is it that you are, you know, kind of, is it, is it that fortune favors a prepared mind? Is it that you've, you work so hard as a young person and you paid your dues and you put in your 100,000 hours and then all of a sudden these ideas just flow to you? Are you an idea machine. What is your kind of a secret? Is there anything that we can learn from you? Let me just put it that way. Is there any habitual? I think I love to learn things. So it's not work for me. And I've always been kind of a sponge of absorbing. I'm not so good as systematically saying,

oh, I'm going to study this and then, you know, without without, uh, without, uh, how should I say, without loving it already. But fortunately, for me, for my career, I love a lot of ideas and then just dig deeper. And I've been very fortunate in going to the right schools and meeting some very great thinkers that I was in resonance with, you know, all the way from Bertrand Russell to Herman Wilde to David Gross and each time learning. something new in a different, and Einstein and Feynman, you know, the old, and, uh, Darwin, you know, the, you didn't meet Darwin though, right. No, I didn't meet Darwin.

You're like the youngest Nobel Prize winner that I thought. Nor did I meet, I didn't meet Einstein either, although, you know, he died when I was four years old or something. Right. So I could have met him. But I'm a colleague here who did meet him, Lyman Spitzer's son is a professor here, Nick Spitzer at UC San Diego, and he remembers seeing him, you know, rowing in a rowboat and Einstein, you know, at the Institute for Advanced Study.

I see you also working well. You do work with... But I mentioned that I'm learning artificial intelligence, machine learning now, in a serious way. And over the years, I've maintained an amateur interest in that. I had an amateur interest in cosmology, which I was, able to heighten when it became clear that the emerging ideas in high-energy physics could be used for cosmology. I had kind of an amateur interest in the rest of physics. That was not

fundamental particles. But then when I realized that the insights that we were developing in particle physics could be applied and describe interesting new phenomena in math. matter. I took, I educated myself more systematically in that. And so, so, so it's a combination of sort of general awareness of what's out there, uh, and occasional obsessions or sensed opportunities that I seize on. But so I think the thing, I mean, okay, I can't speak for everybody or even for anybody really, except myself. But, but the, the, the, I think, the thing, I mean, okay, I can't speak for everybody or even for anybody really except myself but but to me it seems to me looking at other people what's one thing that separates my style from others is that uh i'm kind of an omnivore of

ideas i just i uh i graze in all kinds of different directions but you're not a dilettante i mean there's a danger you could be a oh no no no it's serious i have a serial attention on that goes you know when I when I well I don't think I'm a dilettant I that's just what a dilettant would say I I put honest work and into every single paper that I've written and I've written a lot so I go very deeply at least for the time I'm writing the paper but I do have as you say, for instance, in QCD, I have delved from time to time back in particular things like color superconductivity or notably color superconductivity, but also the phase structure of QCD and sort of cosmological implications of QCD. But basically I abandoned the subject.

as a subject in itself. And that's been my style. I do something, you might say, skim the cream or do make a contribution that I'm happy with and then move on to something else. And you work with small groups, I would say. You don't tend to work in huge collaborations. Would you say that part of your success is your ability to focus, you know, relatively, you know, I always say laser focus is not actually correct.

It's laser collimation. When people say laser focus, they mean laser collimation. But when you collimate your mind, is it best done by yourself or with a student or two? Seemingly, it's not with large groups. I've worked in both ways. So I often when I have a new idea, I should. share it with friends and things and sometimes it resonates and results in a collaboration. There have been several occasions on which, where it's worked the other way, where some people

have brought me into their investigations and, you know, if I feel like have, and if it sparks my imagination, I participate. If it doesn't, then I don't. So usually, it only, it really only usually sparks my imagination if it's something I've been at least close to thinking about or related to things that I have been thinking about. So, but yeah, I'm always looking for new adventures. But I also see you as community. Some of them are self-generated, but self-generated means based on reading that I've done or annoyances that I felt about the way things should be and aren't,

but also sparked by conversations with colleagues, sometimes by colloquia or seminars and things. My mind is open, as Erdos used to say. Erdos said that, except he also said when they took away his amphetamins for a month, He said that you set back the progress of mathematics by one month, but I know that's not a problem for you. I do want to close out by talking a little bit in the book. One of the things that really resonates with me in your writing and in your speaking is that you have a courage. And I think for scientists nowadays to even mention something from the gospel of Mark, I mean,

it shouldn't take courage to do that, but you do it. And I wonder, when you write things in the book, you quote from Matthew and Mark, and you quote, you know, these other kind of astonishing things, you know, from, from theistically inclined individuals, shall we say. But my, and I am, as you know, I called my son, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church, but I'm born as a Jew and I practice as a Jew. I'm not afraid. I have a bit of that, too, actually. Of Jewishness? Yes. I didn't know that. I think you were a Polish Catholic.

No, well, I was, but, you know, a lot of Polish Catholics weren't entirely Catholic by choice. It was complicated. Yeah. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather was Jewish. Oh, why? And he wasn't, he didn't practice in any way either Catholicism or Judaism, but that's another story. That's not uncommon. And that's probably more common with Jews and then it's anyway.

But my question is, you know, can religion, does religion inform you in any way? I read the Bible every day. I read a section of it of the Old Testament only, you know, because it's part of the Jewish tradition. We read the whole Torah, the Old Testament once per year. And every day, there's one seventh of a weekly portion that we read. And so for me, it's always, I always look to it and I say, you know, is this scientific? I wrestle with it. Is this not scientific?

And I remember this conversation I had with Milad now not too long ago. And we were talking about Stephen Hawking's famous book, a brief history of time, which when I read it, I didn't understand. I was only 17 or something when I came out, 18, 16. But now I understand it really well. And I understand what he was trying to do in that book, which was really to make the case for God's existence not necessary, not to invalidate God's existence. But he talked about the two reasons for God would be to establish the laws of nature, you know, basically establish the laws of nature as well and the laws of physics by which he meant that. But really also to establish the universe as a whole.

And what he said was, you know, God could be avoided the necessity of starting the universe if the Hawking Hardle conjecture is true than no boundary conjecture. And that was really the basis of the book, Frank. I urge you to read that book again because he's really saying that that is not controversial. And it still is controversial. But the second thing he says is. Of course. Well, yeah, okay.

I would say it's not even controversial, but that's another picture. That's right. That's what Pauli used to say, what, not even wrong. Right. But then he said that M theory in the grand design with Leonard, Milad now, he says that M theory provides the conditions for the laws of nature. And so in both instantiations of God's necessity, it's not all. Now, again, I am a practicing development.

agnostic. I'm agnostic as they come, but I think it's important to wrestle with these. What does the what does your study, your knowledge of religion? What does it do something? Does it satisfy something in you that your equations cannot? Is it just philosophy? What is religion to you? Let me let me first say that I do not adhere to any any established religion. Right. I was brought I when I was growing up in into my early teen years, I was absolutely fascinated and deeply steeped in Roman Catholicism, which I was exposed. So a lot of my cultural heritage is from that.

And so that's why I can, you know, I refer to it because it's part of my intellectual furniture, so to speak. and I still have a lot of respect and admiration for that tradition. It's quite flawed. It's quite complicated and human, but that contains some very beautiful things and broadly considered the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is part of who we are. If we grow up as you and I did in the 20th century and 21st century United States, It's just, it is, it is, it's everywhere around us. And so, so it's, it's part, you know, it's, to, to, to, uh, uh, ignore it or minimize it or, uh, attempt to, uh, how should I say, stigmatize it or is, it was, it was, it's like cutting off your arm or, or,

doing a lobotomy of part of the you do you lose a lot if you lose that cultural reference and and there are things about getting around in the world and making sense of it that science doesn't answer I very much agree with David Yume's analysis that no no amount of thinking about what is can lead to a logical inference about what ought to be, you know, or how we ought to behave or what's white, right? So it can give you insight about the consequences of different choices and, you know, lead to a kind of wisdom at that level, but it can't ultimately decide what you want to do or what's right or what's good or what's bad. Those are different categories. And people have thought about those things for a lot.

of long time, gathered a lot of experience, and a lot of that is in traditions, including religious ones. So, I mean, this is a rambling answer, but that should be the, so I think it's, it's, it's, uh, not a good idea to, to just, uh, ignore or dump on or trivialize those traditions. I think in the spirit of complementarity, you can learn from them and also relate better to people who come from different perspectives if you take it seriously and try to understand what they're thinking about. But to me, the approach to those questions that's proved most sympathetic and fulfilling in the long.

long run to me is to understand God through God's works, to understand, you know, what it's all about, what it all means by first understanding what it is. And then that teaches you a lot. Those other questions, certainly is background knowledge you should have to approach them with seriousness they deserve. And so that's what I've been trying to do. And that's what I've been trying to do. That's certainly what I try to convey in fundamentals. Yeah. Yeah, towards the end of the book, we're coming to the end of the conversation. I know you've got a lot of media appearances from your home studio, the reporters outside.

But I do want to cover a couple things. Then you promised me an answer last time to a question I asked all my guests when we spoke in November. And so I want to get to that question in just a second. But before we go there, the book kind of, I don't, I hate it when authors are asked to, you know, summarize your entire book. So the audience doesn't have to buy the book. or the audio book. So I will listen to this book.

I have a copy of the book, obviously, and maybe we'll give a copy away to one of my listeners, depending on how you feel. I'd love to get a signed copy someday. But I do want to ask you, at the end of the book, you talk about complementarity, and right before that you talk about complexity

and emerging complexity. I spoke to your crosstown rival, Avi Loeb last week, about his new book called Extraterrestrial. And he talks a lot in that book, about this technology that he believes visited our solar system back in 2017. But a good portion of the book, you find that astonishing? What's that?

Are you there? I said, oh, my gosh. Yes. Yeah, I'm there. That's what he says. He says, yes. Maybe it was the extraterrestrial. Well, the first thing I want to ask you,

still their beams or something. Yeah, the first thing I want to do is ask you about that, not that hypothesis. you'll have to read the book as I did. But if complexity is an emergent property of the universe, first of all, do you believe there is that there will be found evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence? Is there a preponderance of evidence?

Is that unanswerable? And second of all, would they have structures like religion and extraterrestrial civilizations if they do exist, if complexity is a fundamental feature of the universe? Yes. Well, okay, to the first question, of course, well, unless there's something I don't know about.

There doesn't seem that I'd say the situation is we don't have direct evidence for any kind of extraterrestrial intelligence. However, to me, the probabilities are overwhelming. There's a kind of lot of circumstantial reasons to suspect that it should be abundant. And it's not a paradox that we haven't seen it because it's far away and difficult to communicate. And also, when I say it's abundant, I should say what it is. Okay, so here on Earth, we know that as soon as the conditions became not crazy, so to speak, as soon as the Earth began to solidify and cool down and have a reasonable degree of stability and form of liquid oceans and so forth, it didn't take very long for a life to emerge.

And also, you know, the chemistry is complicated, but not crazily complicated to get life started. So I believe it's very likely that life would start on a variety, a large number of the kinds of planets that people are discovering now, extra solar planets, and great abundance. So they're not a rare thing. They're, again, zillions of them in the galaxy. have many billions probably of potential. I believe the precise term is cajillion, gagillion, Frank. In our galaxy,

and then, of course, there are lots and lots of galaxies. So I do think that life is abundant in the universe. However, again, consulting the history of life on Earth, which it took a long time for multicellular life to emerge and it took you know kind of special conditions of stability and kind of having a nice star that that's that has a leisurely evolution and a plant of an orbit that's precisely circular and a moon to kind of stir things up and plate like there seem to although you know we can't say what it would have happened if any of these things hadn't been in place. It does seem that the step, it seems to me that the step from a simple life, which is sort of at the level of glorified chemistry to multicellular forms is a much as a difficult step. Then on Earth that took a long, long time.

That took billions of years. then on top of that, then to get from there to something we called intelligence, that's that we would recognize as human-level intelligence, it's only been realized in humans, basically, with use of language and abstract concepts. And of course, the growth of technology is only about 200 years old, and embodied a lot of contingencies such as wiping out the dinosaurs yeah I call that the the hard problem of the whale I think I think the extraterrestrial intelligence and extraterrestrial technology might be rare even though extraterrestrial life is

common yeah but I don't know this is this is very difficult speculative stuff I do right no I agree and That's why it's so surprising that Avi is so convinced with high certainty that this was alien technology. And I didn't ask him this question, but I was... Alien technology in the sense of physical objects that they throw into our vicinity seems to be extraordinarily far-fetched. It's a very inefficient way. It's a very inefficient way to explore the universe to act to throw physical objects around. It takes a very long time and why do it, you know, and you have to know where to throw it.

And so, you know, it just, it just, it seems a priority so far-fetched. Well, that's what he said you would say. I find it hard to get excited about UFOs or whatever. The, on the other hand, you know, there's Arthur C. Clark's third law that says that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic. So who am I to say what some advanced civilization might be doing? But, okay, but I need to see pretty good evidence to start thinking on those lines. You'll see that in his book.

You'll see that in the podcast about his book, which will come out confusingly after this podcast comes out. But yes, the saying about Arthur C. Clark is how we open this podcast with his actual voice. You'll hear it when you listen to the podcast tomorrow. But I do want to say, yeah, in that context, first. of all, he doesn't believe that it was necessarily targeting Earth. He thinks it's sort of space, either space junk, space debris, but it was a solar sale. I don't want to get into that too much, but just to say that Elon Musk, Elon Musk right now is preparing. That makes, okay, but yeah, all right. Well, yeah, this is definitely a diversion from our main themes. Yeah, I mean,

the question, remarkable, if just say, let's just say remarkable, if true. That's right. It's astonishing, even if false. But yes, I talked about this in the context. I brought it up in the context of, you know, is complexity fundamental? If complexity is fundamental, as you assert, you know, and kind of religion is sort of a, you know, a superstructure built upon, you know, the culture of the evolved citizens. I think, yeah, I think complexity is a, I mean, we proved, we know, we are, we proved it. we are the proof really that complexity is a complexity that can support mind is an emergent property of matter under the right conditions so to me that's not not a hypothesis that's just a fact and we prove it in ourselves we also prove it with our constructions

Right. So, but I wouldn't say it's a, a fundamental feature of matter, though. It's, it's in the sense, in the sense of fundamental we discussed, that that can't be understood in terms of more basic principles. The more basic principles of quantum field theory and things like that don't themselves refer to complexity, but they turn out to empower complexity. We talked about with Leonard Milad now and Deepak Chopra in our chat called Fundamentally Closer to Truth, which is on my podcast channel and on Deepak Chopra's Chopra well. We got into this kind of meandering conversation about free will and so forth. And I don't really want to revisit that. But I do want to say that, you know, at some point we were debating, you know, if you could know the wave function, you know, for a given, for a human being,

then you could know predict basically with absolute certainty how he or she would interact with the world and I found it very frustrating because that presupposes a bunch of things such as you know we understand the wave function of the person we understand the wave function of the universe and we understand the apparatus as you make a point in this book you know precision and um what is it precision is sort of complementary Precision and human comprehensibility. Yeah. So you have to like alter the system to make a precise, the more you want precision in your measurements,

the more you have to interact with it. So how could you possibly, anyway, I was on your side in that, but I want to ask you a question. I've had debates with people like Sean Carroll and so forth about religion, about the multiverse, et cetera, wherein you'll hear things like,

well, you know, before the universe existed, even your co-author, you know, Lawrence Krauss and you have done, you know, written papers together, he'll say, well, the laws of physics, you know, allow for a multiverse, therefore the multiverse can occur. But I want to ask you, where does the, do you, can we ever know things like where the wave function of the universe came from? Or Sean Carroll says, you know, well, there's a Hilbert space and that's all you need. Okay, that's great. But where did the Hilbert space come from? Are these like the same kind of frustrating, stupid questions that I asked you about free

will or are these fruitful avenues for discussion? Because sometimes, you know, you know, the best part is knowing when to say no. Well, so, yes, yes. You kind of know when to say. Yeah. This really goes back to the discussion we had earlier about how I decide what to work on. And some questions are more fruitful than others. You know, any bum on the street can say, what's it all about?

and what's the meaning of it all. And, okay, yeah, and, you know, I wouldn't call the bums, but we've had a long history of philosophers who, even, you know, some that are highly regarded and still studied, that to me have had discussions that are kind of so vague and so meandering that they don't lead anywhere, so pseudo-profound, I would say. But that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate. question that are of great interest around those issues. It's just a matter of separating the

weed from the chaff. Yeah. When you look at a, when you think about things like the, the sort of impossible to answer questions that we should have just said, you know, citation, Descartes, you know, 1687, you know, he needs to boost his H index a little bit. But, but I, but I guess, you know, it fascinates me about your work is that you don't shy away from the big questions. but you're actually really keen on answering, you know, particular questions. And in fact, you say in the book, you say, you know, if there's justice in the universe, we will find, you know, axions. Can you tell me what?

What do you mean? Are you serious? Do you feel like that's, you know, kind of like Einstein said, you know, if, what's that? I'm not, obviously, I'm not serious that it's justice. I mean, no, no, we'll be guilty of any crime in axions. or not the dark matter. But I just mean it would be a pity if so much circumstantial evidence from nature, you know, were misleading. So it's sort of a vast cosmic joke.

I think, you know, I'd like to think that God has better taste than that to mislead us that way. but you know some ideas I mean this is something I've felt several times in my career

that that's such and such an equation such and such an idea is too beautiful not to be true and mostly that's been correct

but we're still waiting for proton decay we're still waiting for low energy supersymmetry so sometimes things that

I thought if there's any justice in the world, they should be happened. They should happen. At least they haven't happened yet. I wanted to, because in your previous book, in a beautiful question, you say, you know, I think supersymmetry will be found within the next five years. I think we're about year four and a half. So I want to make a bet. I want to make some bets with you, Frank, maybe offline.

I'm afraid that's when it seems. how should I say no more bets are being taken on that one. All right. What about Axioms? Would you like to make a bet? The LHC has, unfortunately the LHC has more or less exhausted, not quite, but close to, I would say, having exhausted its potential for discovering low energy supersymmetry and there's nothing on the horizon in the near future that's going to be able to address that question

more closely. Right. Well, I want to... Axions, on the other hand, we're just now getting into the sophistication and

power of technology to make a serious try at detecting them. Yeah. Yeah, so I wanted to offer a bet with you, Frank. I want to offer a bet that we buy each other the most, the largest

stuffed mascot of each other's university in five years I will give it to you if axions are not discovered and you will give it to me if axions are discovered so no matter what we both win okay do you all right do you accept that bet all right we have it on tape so I don't know I need to know what university is oh oh you see San Diego oh that's fine yeah I didn't say tuition I didn't have to pay tuition for my kids but all right you You get me a giant stuffed beaver if it's not detected, if it is detected, and I get you a giant stuff, Triton. Okay, I'm going to finish up. So that's where you got your degree?

Oh, no, no, no. I meant our current university. Oh, our current university. Oh, okay. That's fine. Either way, it's fine. So you'll get me a giant stuff. Beaver, yes, if I'm, if, if, and I'll get you a stuffed triton, which I don't even know what that is.

But, but anyway, I'll get it for you. Okay. So the last thing I want to talk about just before we wrap up is your work with one of your students, or post-dog, I can't pronounce his name, he's of European extraction. And it's about detecting the quantum nature of gravitational waves using. Well, okay, that's with Malik Parik, who was a student of mine, and George Zaharid, who's a student of his, or postdoc with him. Great.

Yes. What is the status of that? And why is it important to establish the quantized nature of gravity for us to understand the nature of the fundamentals of reality? Well, I would have said before we got involved in this that it's important to show because people, various people have doubted it. And, well, it's always important to... to do things for spite. That things you think are true actually are true in the world. I mean, you can be surprised, obviously, and people.

But in the course of this investigation, I think I came to realize, and we came to realize that the classical treatment of gravitational radiation, really not just in principle, but in reality, is fundamentally flawed. I mean, there's fundamentally, flawed is too strong, fundamentally limited. We know quantum mechanics governs the world, I think most people, well, most people who are qualified to pronounce on the question think so. And we know that there is such a thing as gravity, and we know that there is such a thing as gravitational waves. And so it behooves us to put that phenomenon in the framework of quantum mechanics and the framework of our understanding of the rest of the world. And that's been done in the literature, of course.

You have to do that in order to design LIGO and detectors and think about them. But it's basically been making assumptions about the nature of gravitational waves, which we do. them to a classical phenomenon. We could discuss the technicalities, but basically that's the message. And I now think that that is severely limited, that that's very misleading as regards the last moments of black hole mergers, where the equations become nonlinear. And I think the gravitational waves during that period will not be well described as classical. And so a really Originally, the motivation was kind of dotting the eyes and crossing the T's and just showing that it could be done consistently. Now I think there's actually new ground to be broken.

Yeah, I was very curious about that because I think there's this notion that gravity has to be quantized and even part of this theory of everything, which is what I want to close up talking about. Why are there so many theories of everything? I mean, I get two emails a week about a theory of everything. That's because there isn't a theory of everything. Yeah, so I always point out, I never get, I never get emails. I should be very, I should be more careful. I was going to say, fools, Russian, we're angels feared of travel. Okay, yeah, that's less, yeah, good job, Frank.

That's less controversial than. even by yeah the um um but uh well first of all let me let me clarify this whole i i really dislike this phrase theory of everything because what people are really talking about is i think it's better much better to a much better uh version of that is what was what was what was what was what was what calls it a final theory but first of all so a final theory would be a an account of the fundamental laws of nature which we could argue about exactly what that encompasses does it encompass the big bang does it encompass initial conditions or just the just the laws of how things evolve in time but okay let's that question vague for the moment.

But a description that's so, that's everywhere we check it in experiments is correct. And it describes, and there's no phenomenon that we have observed that's left out of it.

And that it has a kind of logical closure. It's so beautiful and so difficult to imagine changing in a consistent way that it becomes a final theory. People lose motivation to try to do better. This is it as far as fundamental laws of nature are concerned because it's battle tested. It doesn't seem to be ready, doesn't seem to be open to change and it seems to be complete.

So that would be a final theory of fundamental physical law. it would not be a theory of everything. It would not be a theory of much of anything, really. It wouldn't be a theory of the history of Sweden or the history or the description of human beings or their behavior or, you know, lots of things that we think of as part of everything. Most people would say everything about everything. Okay, but a final theory. And we have a fairly close approximation to that, I would say, in our core theory or standard model of how the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions work and then how it fits together with gravity and works with quantum mechanics. And for purposes of engineering, for biology, for chemistry, for physics, for most of physics, and most of astrophysics, everything except a few corners of cosmology, those laws have that character.

They are complete. They are battle tested. They are very difficult to change. And okay, so we have a model, and we have also ideas about unification, vague or ideas about string theory that might take it further and get an even better approximation to a final theory. So that's what it means. I think somehow that rambling discussion included the answer to your question, but if not maybe you can sign it. Yes, yeah.

I only like to. So I think we might achieve a theory, a final theory, it would not deserve the name of a theory of everything, and we're not, and in my opinion, we're not all that close. We have achieved it in a certain practical sense. I don't think we're very close to it in a philosophical sense. I think there are too many open issues and loose ends to say that we certainly, I mean, you know, Hawking's claim that M theory is a final theory, which is essentially what he's claiming is just silly. Yeah.

It's not battle tested. It has not made concrete predictions about physical phenomena, let alone a complete set of predictions. Right. So calling, so that's just silly. But yes, but one could imagine improving what we have now, so it deserves the name of a final theory. As I said, we do have a final theory for many practical purposes, but that does not mean it's a theory of everything. It's a theory of, it's a foundation maybe for understanding the physical world, but it does not treat questions of emergence or creativity or the actual objects that exist around us. Yeah.

No, I think that's beautiful way to phrase it in a way. is actually radically not controversial because I think you're right. Yeah. But it raises a lot of people's tackles because they're invested in glamorizing their work. Which, you know, that's... Well, I always say, you know, I get a lot more emails. I've never gotten an email that says, you know, Boltzman was wrong. Let me show you how it's always Einstein was wrong or Wilcheck is wrong.

Yes. Not... not, but let me just close out that last section before I get to the final questions by saying, I never get emails about an experiment of everything. And one of the most beautiful things in a beautiful question to me was that you talk about ways that scientists in the early, you know, 18th century, like Isaac Newton, were testing things that would eventually become part of the core theory, namely, you know, the wave-like and particle-like nature, different manifestations of matter and light. You know, for example, the continuity of the rainbow of the spectrum.

And it reminded me of Richard Feynman said, you know, if an alien civilization exists and they're intelligent, they should be able to predict that sometimes we see rainbows in our atmosphere. Yes. Because it's based on physical laws. It wouldn't necessarily really reveal how we feel when we see a rainbow or what that rainbow has been interpreted by religions around the world. But it made me think that, you know, we are.

We are. The hard part is we, not the rainbow. Yes, right. And since, you know, as you pointed out, there's literally thought to be trillions of exoplanets. It always, it always galls me a little bit when people say, you know, there's probably a trillion planets just like the Earth in the history of the observable universe. And I'm like, don't we want to focus on our own galaxy first before we go back 13 billion years to some galaxy that's that distance away in light. Anyway, I want to ask you, are there kind of learning? HINTS at a final theory, at the final evolution of the core theory, you know, perhaps in

data that people haven't fully mined. When we look at, you know, exoplanet data, there's tons of it out there and we don't have enough time to analyze it. When we look at, you know, Avilob claims that when the Vera Rubin Observatory comes online, we'll find many of these Omura-Mura-like objects. But that suggests to me that maybe there's data in the LHC or in Fermilab data or in some very, very, you know, in laboratory physics data, like you have shown with anions, with quasi-particles, with topological insulators, these are things that could have

implications on a cosmological scale that nobody pays attention to and nobody writes me about Professor Keating, I need $10,000 to do an experiment, or to look and mine the data. Instead, it's let me come up with this theory of time like Julian Barber's doing now, who's going to come on the show. But why is it that we are not putting as much attention and looking at archival data for clues to even some of these grand concepts and issues that people are caring about. Well, it's, you have to make a concrete proposal, I guess. But I do have some sympathy for the idea that there may be ways of analyzing either existing data or practical laboratory experiments as opposed to thought experiments that would require thought accelerators that are not likely to appear or

or thought black holes that we don't actually have access to. But there is a thought black hole, Frank, Frank, there is a thought black hole where ideas go to die. It's called Twitter. It's called Twitter. Avoid it at all costs. Right. So, but, yeah, so I do have sympathy for the idea and that there may be new ways of analyzing low-energy phenomena that will reveal absolutely fundamental new insights.

Well, concretely, I think the search for electric dipole moments of elementary particles is one. Of course, the search for axions is carried on through new kinds of antipsy, antennas that ultimately are low energy observations. The quantum nature of gravitational waves, I think, is a matter of doing delicate processing of information and maybe setting up slightly different kinds of, well, maybe not so slightly, but different antennas that are sensitive to entanglement and sort of more subtle aspects of radiation fields. So, yeah, I do think there's a lot of room for creativity.

On the other hand, just because the core theory does have the property of kind of closure, it's very difficult to change its basic principles without ruining it. And the ways you can change it tend to be things that are very challenging to probe experimentally. sort of in a way that's we're the victims of our own success in a way we've understood so many kinds of experiments and we managed to construct this theory that describes them so well that's it's very hard to improve but maybe there'll be some some marvelous surprise yeah that that that I haven't envisaged now yeah as uh upcoming guest Nima Arkani Ahmed says he, it's very difficult to break, you know, the standard model, the core theory.

It's very hard to, to disturb it in such a way that you, that you, you know, can make fruitful predictions that are novel and in a way that the core theory almost has an, as an intelligence, a resilience that makes it very hard to break. Okay. I want to wrap up because I know you've got a million things to do today. Because it's based, it's based on profound principles. So unless you want to define, somehow renounce one of the profound principles, it seems to be very difficult to change. But you can augment it.

You can add things to it that also embrace the profound principles. And that, I mean, axions are an example of that. And certainly you can derive new phenomena from it. It's a very, you know, people haven't exhausted its content. I mean, for heaven's sake, people haven't exhausted the content. of the integers, people just proved from Oslaas theorem. So there's a lot more to be

drawn out of it, but as to changing it in really basic ways that change its profound principles, that's that seems to be really tough because it works. Yeah, you break it, you bought it, right? I want to thank you for many things for being

an inspiration to many of us in the world, both in the sciences and outside of the sciences. This book is a gateway drug into the mind of Frank Wilczek. It is a book full of meaning. And actually, you know, the laws of physics describe what the world is. But I think the way that you look at it gives a sort of prose but infused with the way a scientist should look at the world. And I found it very beautiful, very moving, almost emotional at some point. And I want to thank you for being vulnerable and also courageous, as I know you always are.

So thank you for sharing so much of your time. Good luck with the book. Thank you. And we'll talk to you again soon when your murder mystery comes out. Until next time. Until next time. I hope isn't it. I'm sure there'll be many next times.

Okay. It's a joy. Thank you, Frank. Bye-bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode into The Impossible with Professor, Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Heating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, director, Brian Keating, co-director. Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Balco.