Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek: Beautiful Questions, God, Nobels, Imposters & the Power of Beauty (#101)

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Join me on a cosmic journey with Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. We will embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. This is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.  Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras and the ancient belief in the music of the spheres to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost the same ones that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries.  Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.  Praise for A Beautiful Question: “An expertly curated tour across 2,500 years of philosophy and physics . . . [Frank Wilczek] has accomplished a rare feat: Writing a book of profound humanity based on questions aimed directly at the eternal.” —The Wall Street Journal  “Both a brilliant exploration of largely uncharted territories and a refreshingly idiosyncratic guide to developments in particle physics.” —Nature Get it here: https://amzn.to/3oh48uZ COMING SOON!!! Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek 1/12/21 One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world. In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. With clarity and an infectious sense of joy, he guides us through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how it works. Through these pages, we come to see our reality in a new way–bigger, fuller, and stranger than it looked before. BUY IT HERE: https://amzn.to/37v5jAg Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?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 Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. Welcome, Professor Frank Wilczek, author of A Beautiful Question, and we'll be talking about this book, but also his upcoming book called Fundamentals. How are you today, Frank? I'm great. Doing very well in this kind of self-imposed quarantine in Concord, Massachusetts. Yes, you're my second friend from the eastern. from the outskirts of Boston, shall we say, after Shelley Glashow was on last week.

And I want to then I'm going to be welcoming your colleague, Ray Weiss, next week. So I want to encourage people to subscribe to the channel. We're getting a lot of great interviews. We had Sheldon Glashow. I talked to your rival, Crosstown rival, Kamran Vafa, two weeks ago, and that'll be coming out soon. And then Ray Weiss and Barry Bair. So please stay tuned to The Into the Impossible podcast. But first, we're going to start with this book, A Beautiful Question, which I

found quite beautiful. And we were just remarking before we went live about the choice of covers. I always joke. I always judge books by their covers. But in this case, as in many cases, first of all, this book has two covers. It has a beautiful outer dust jacket, which I'm going to dispense with because how much dust do people really have like flying around their libraries? I've never understood the dust jacket, but I do know that if you don't have a dust jacket, the book is worth a lot less. And here we see in beautiful inner cover depicting constellations. That's my territory. We're going to talk about that.

All sorts of fun stuff today with Frank Wilczek, winner of 2004 co-recipient in 2004 Nobel Prize. And we're going to talk about that event. But first, Frank, I listen to the audiobook. The audiobook has 260 chapters. And I want to point out to you that the New Testament only has 240 chapters. So I don't know if... What?

Is each page a chapter, I guess? Each break is a each kind of paragraph they turn into an audio chapter, but it makes it easy to get to, you know, chapter 200. But I want to ask you. So you know where you are. Yeah. You didn't design the cover, but you came up with the title. Can you explain the title? Because if I'm not mistaken, it's sort of a double entendre, as they might say.

Yes. The beautiful question refers to an actual question, which is, does the world embody beautiful ideas? is. And that was a question that was constantly in my mind as I planned and wrote the book. And was, I thought, a very fertile theme. And then when it came to making a title, I had a different working title, which I don't remember anymore. But then the question grew on me and the possibility of having that little play on words, I thought was too good to pass. spy. A beautiful. And it really is a beautiful question. Yeah. It's a beautiful. So the question of whether or not the universe embodies beautiful ideas, you know, kind of strikes the reader right off the top as

provocative because it's not even clear what a question is, what is beautiful about it, and necessarily why would the universe have some teleological purpose to embody a very human notion, such as the notion of beauty? So the first thing I want to start, with is the role of symmetry plays a huge role in this book. And I want to talk about something that you bring up in the book, which is also adorned with quite lovely, gorgeous illustrations that represent aspects of symmetry throughout the universe, so to speak. And I want to ask you a question about the utility of beauty. Can you use, as some suggest, beauty as a guide in science, to aesthetically, you know, pleasing endeavors like art, but can you use it as a tool in science?

Yes. Well, first of all, let's go back to the most primitive kind of science, which also addresses this teleological issue, which is that when we construct our models of the world, even as children, as babies, we face insolvable problems, the information that we gather, for instance on the backs of our retina is not enough to reconstruct a three-dimensional world. We have to fill in a lot of stuff. And so we rely on patterns. We rely on mathematical regularities, usually subconsciously, of course, but we have to learn these things as children.

And that's why, to me, it's not a matter of the world being designed to be beautiful, but rather it's useful to us in getting into sync with the world in understanding it and harmonizing with it and being able to cope with it, that symmetry is a useful guide and therefore evolution has made us think of it as something that's desirable that we want to have, that we want to interact with, and that's what we feel as beautiful. So that's the aesthetic. version, which I kind of turn on its head. It's not a matter of the world being designed to be

beautiful, but us being designed to be in sync with the world and finding it beautiful. But then a miracle happened, I would say, in the 20th century, which is that as we understood the world, the physical world more deeply, we discovered, well, let me, backtrack a little we got into territory where it was very difficult to do experiments and when you study gravity you can look out at planets when you study electromagnetism you can do experiments with macroscopic objects where you brought with working with magnets or rubbing cats fur and so forth when you but when you want to understand the inner working

of atoms when you want to understand in particular what's going on inside atomic nuclei, which became the big problem of 20th century physics in many ways, it's much, much, much more difficult to do experiments. And so the traditional emphasis of fundamental physics and science of gathering a lot of data, and then from that inferring equations that describe the data in a concise way, was not really available anymore or lost a lot of its power. Instead, what turned out to be very successful is to guess equations based on some kind of aesthetic principle and symmetry was, turns out to be the most important aesthetic principle that's successful here, to guess equations that are highly symmetric,

and then work out their consequences and see if they can explain phenomena. So it was instead of going from the phenomena to finding beautiful equations, we guessed beautiful equations and then figured out if they could possibly describe the world. And it works. Yeah, it's actually. It works amazingly. Quite interesting. I'm getting a question for my friend, Simon Farmer, who's asking, how much of the beauty

narrative comes in hindsight? You know, this notion of beauty is only skin deep. It makes me think you're looking into the past. You're looking into the skin, so to speak. And only later do you find it beautiful? When you were coming up with asymptotic freedom, did you look and say, hmm, let me find a very beautiful, beautiful idea. Was that what happened or no?

It can't be. It must have been that it was retroactively or retrospectively. No, no, it was much more down to Earth, but that was sort of lurking in the background. I mean, first of all, we were looking at beautiful candidate theory, or at least not terribly ugly candidate theories. So we wanted to use quantum field theories, so things which embody general principles of quantum mechanics

and relativity. And then within those theories, we wanted ones that had controllable behavior, so you could actually calculate consequences. And then within that, we focused on theories that, ultimately, we focused on theories that, certainly in retrospect, but I think even beforehand, I would have said this, are the most beautiful quantum field theories. They are quantum field theories that have what's called gauge symmetry. They have enormous amounts of symmetry that random quantum field theories don't have. And so it was very important to investigate the possibility that maybe those theories do describe the world.

if not we would have learned something. It would have been a disappointment, but it turns out that it's certainly not obvious at first, but if you work with the theories and listen to what they're telling you, you learn that indeed they can be used to describe the world very, very accurately and precisely and concisely and beautifully.

And, you know, in listening to the book and reading the book, I found your writing very evocative, and almost poetic in terms. And I'll look up this quote, but there's a famous quote, first of all, from Dirac, that it's more important that your equations be beautiful

than that they be correct. But he also said something to the effect, I'll look up the exact quote. It's saying to the effect that poets, let me see if I can find this, poets, direct, I think you know the quote that I'm saying, poetry.

I know it roughly. I'll let you look at it up. Here it is. In science, one tries to tell people in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite. And yet, you quote everybody in the quote from Walt Whitman to IE Cummings,

you have a phenomenal ability to kind of go into the esoterica of poetic. So, Connie, do you find it as distasteful as your fellow laureate, Mr. Dr. Paul Durac? No, no, I kind of like poetry. It's mind expanding. The sentiment that he expressed, and maybe it's a related but different quotation, is that in poetry, I'm sorry,

in physics, you try to express complicated ideas in the simplest possible way. In poetry, it's just the opposite. And of course, there's something to be said about describing things in different ways. This gets, this can be very fruitful to the most concise description may not exhaust the possibilities for relating to or understanding or interacting with some system, especially as the systems go from being atoms to human beings or flowers in between, right? There are different levels of description and poetry is poetry can add. For sure. Yeah. And of course, you know, Feynman said something to the effect that, you know, why is it worse for him to describe Jupiter as a giant ball of methane than a poet to describe it as if it was, you know, using poetic license as if it was a man.

Right. And I kind of... My point is that it's not either or. It can be both. And this is actually very, very closely related to a, deep philosophical principle, which is also a deep principle of physics, which is complementarity, which is that you can have different descriptions of the same object or the same phenomenon that each are valid in their own terms and each answer important questions, but they answer different questions. And if you try to use one description to address inappropriate questions, you know, to address inappropriate questions, it can run out of steam or actually be wrong. So originally this was applied to position versus momentum and quantum mechanics, where it's a

theorem. But I think it's a much, much more general phenomenon. So, for instance, it applies to this question of free will versus determinism. For some purposes, it's good to think that we have free will, but for other purposes, it's better and more realistic to think that we're largely determined. Yeah, and oftentimes we find complementary approaches. You go through a good deal at the beginning of the book, talking about Pythagoras, and it's good to see him getting some citations.

His H index was suffering lately, but it's good to have Wilcheck quoting his work. But you talk about the unification, the complementarity, the unification of physical, tangible mass being unified or coupled to the notion of pitch or harmony. and frequency. You want to talk a little bit more about that. And then we'll get in, so we went from Poetics, which is a form of art. Now we're going to talk about sound, and then we're going to get into light, and then later we'll get into some sort of ideas that I have come across that I would love to run by you in terms of time translation, asymmetry, and so forth. But you don't get into so much in this book, but you do in your next book, Fundamentals are we talking about that. Just a reminder, we're talking to Frank Wilcheck, Professor Frank Wilczek, winner,

our co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. I ask you to leave a comment and subscribe. And Frank, as you know, it's really bad nowadays at home. We're getting a lot of carpal tunnel syndrome. So stretch your thumb and click on the subscribe button and leave a like for the Into the Impossible podcast. That's the only way I get people like Frank to come on the show. Talk to me about the unification of things like mass and frequency.

Those are two very disparate concepts that I don't think, even as a physicist, I'd really grasp that. significance of their interrelationship. Okay, so we have to do that in two steps. So first, there's a relationship between energy and frequency. This is an aspect of particle wave duality, if you like, that in quantum mechanics, we learn that there are complementary description of physical objects, one of which is appropriate to asking questions about position, and the other of which is,

appropriate to answering questions about momentum or roughly speaking velocity. And similarly, we have descriptions in which we talk about the energy of things or we talk about the frequency of things. And to be precise, in the case of photons, there's a relationship between those two concepts, which is that the energy of a photon is related to. to its color, its frequency, by a very simple mathematical formula, E equals H-new, which was discovered really before modern quantum mechanics by Planck and Einstein. So energy is linearly related to frequency in quantum mechanics. And that's a really extraordinary thing, because you think of frequency as a, you know, the sound of a note or the look.

of a color whereas energy seems to be something quite different and yet this profound relationship exists so that that's one relationship so e equals H new that's one equation to keep in mind the other thing to keep in mind is E equals MC squared that energy can also be related to the mass the energy of a particle when it's at rest is proportional to its mass and And then if you put those two together, you learn that mass is related to frequency. So we have this relationship between something you think of as very kind of earthy, ponderous, and something you think of as dynamic and moving and somehow associated with radio waves or music.

Or quantized. But they're mathematically related. Yeah. And then let me introduce yet a third idea, because this is a great theme, which is that in quantum chromodynamics, in our theory of the strong interaction, we really reverse E equals mc squared into M equals E divided by C squared, where we learn that most of the mass of protons, almost all of it, and neutrons and times, nuclear in general and therefore almost all of our mass as human beings is actually not is actually constructed from energy the building blocks out of which we build these things are massless particles gluons and very very nearly massless particles quarks but they're moving around inside protons they're very

dynamical so they carry a lot of energy and if you add up all that energy and divide by c squared you get the mass of the proton so we have this fantastic sort of movement back and forth between energy and mass and frequency and beautiful equations that require particles to be mass equal zero and yet constructing a world where things do have mass so to me that's one of the very high points of 20th century physics well of of human civilization really to understand that that origin of our very tangible mass in terms of really ideally beautiful mathematical concepts. So in terms of beauty and sort of mathematics becoming embodied, you quote a lot as we move from Newton and Pythagoras a little bit more modern into discussing now Hertz and Maxwell.

You talk about how Hertz, the German physicist who proved experimentally the existence of new electromagnetic waves that Maxwell had predicted what we now call radio waves, he said of Maxwell's equations, one cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, even their discoverers that we get more out of them than was originally put into them. You kind of built on this with David Gross back in the 70s. And, of course, Frank Yang, who I'm hoping to get Frank on the podcast. Another Frank, Frank Yang, C.N. Yang on the podcast.

He's getting up there in years. But I'm hoping to get him on the podcast. That would be a real treat. The Yang Mills equations. That would be a remarkable. Yeah. And I'll let you know. Maybe you can do a guest spot when he comes on with Jim Simons,

who's, of course, my friend and benefactor behind that experiment. But at any rate, what you guys did is sort of you and Yang and Mills built upon Maxwell's equations. And actually, you know, now we think about, you know, QCD as sort of having this power. And I wonder, did it, did you unleash too much power? As, as Hurt said, is it, was it wiser than the discovers than you and David and David? Oh, yeah. Oh, much much wiser, much wiser than we, much wiser than us. We certainly didn't anticipate all the consequences that have flowed from our basic discoveries. I mean, I did realize very early that, you know, within a few weeks, that this could be the theory of the strong interaction. And we could

look forward to actually experimentally checking it. And so that, that I already, thought, well, we'll get a Nobel Prize for sure out of that if it works. But there was much more that we didn't understand and much more that we didn't anticipate. So we didn't understand, for sure, a crucial property of the theory with quarks and gluons, which is how quarks and gluons are inevitably confined into more complex objects. So whereas with atoms, you can separate them into nuclei and electrons, with the strong interaction analogs, you can't separate them into their constituent quarks and gluons that the equations tell you were there. And that was a very new and troubling concept to the physics world, that you could have particles within your

equations that you could never observe. And we thought that would be possible because the theory is complicated and it's full of massless particles which have ways of reorganizing themselves and very singular behavior as you try to pull them apart. But we certainly couldn't prove it or calculate it. And that was kind of a leap of faith. We calculated things that we could calculate that we left a lot of things open. It would be wrong to say that we left some details open. We calculated a few details and left almost everything open. And then, but then, uh, the applications to, uh, the, the experiments that we were explaining were kind of, uh, limited. And, uh, at that time, very imprecise and needed a lot

of interpretation. I certainly didn't anticipate that at higher energies, uh, the underlying structure of the theory becomes so much clearer and easier to understand. Then in high, really high energy events, the quarks and the gluons that are emitted at very, very high energies kind of leave trails behind, like jet planes, with a path. And that makes them easy to see. And so, although you can't see the quarks and gluons themselves, you can see those so-called jets and check the theory in very great detail. You can also use. You can also use the quarks and the gluons themselves. You can also use the basic theory to understand the structure of the events. And that's become the dominant method of very high-energy accelerator physics. You have to understand those things, which are

sort of a trillion times more common if you're going to find the Higgs particle, for instance. You have to understand the so-called backgrounds very well. In the early days, it was very exciting, and we talked about checking QCD and seeing if this was the right theory. Nowadays, it's called calculating backgrounds, but it's the same activity. In fact, it's much more rigorous now, but it sounds much less glamorous. And also, I sort of anticipated, but I didn't anticipate how dramatic the consequences would be, that we could start to study the very early universe in a rational way. because we had now the dominant interactions under control, and they got simple at high energies as opposed to complicated.

So it's actually in many ways easier to calculate the properties of matter in very close to the Big Bang than it is, say, in the center of the earth. We have much more powerful approximations that apply in the former case, but not the latter. So opening up the early universe to view was something I didn't anticipate right at first, but within a few months, I realized that that would be possible and started working on it. So I want to get into the aspects of testing these beautiful ideas. But before I do, since you brought it up, I wasn't going to go here, but you brought up this little medallion. You mentioned the Nobel Prize. So now it's fair game.

Now I can mention it. And my feelings on the Nobel Prize are well known, as you can tell, by the room I'm in Sky. Well, I could see. It's in your background. You must be aware. As Oscar Wilde said, a boy must hustle his own books. I like to mention my polemic, but I do want to say, I've always been curious since you are a legendary person. I mean, you're extremely modest. You're you're basically free of ego, as I can tell. I mean,

I've talked to Betsy on Twitter. But anyway, but I want to mention, if you say so. I just want to know from a human perspective, you discovered these, you know, asymptotic freedom with David, your advisor, 1973, and it took, you know, 30 years almost, 31 years, before you were rewarded with the Nobel prize that everybody on God's Green Earth knew you guys deserved. What was that period like? And it wasn't like you were waiting for verification. I mean, all these things were verified almost immediately after the Jets, and they became a tool, as you just mentioned, not only for investigating the substructure of Hadrons, but what's for the early universe as well? On a personal level, Frank, How did it feel this waiting 31 years for the inevitable to occur?

Well, it was annoying, you know. And if you think about the half-life, okay, so the clock starts ticking and I'm 21 years old or something. And then if it doesn't happen for 30 years and then it doesn't happen for another 30 years, it's getting a little iffy, right? So that was one way of thinking about it. But on the other hand, I realize, well, really, I think that now I appreciate, that living through it was difficult, frankly, really was difficult.

But in retrospect, I learned some things, and I also realized some things, that make it, that I should have, that would have eased the pain, so to speak, which is, first of all, that the Nobel committee is very, very conservative. They're very protective of the reputation of Alfred Nobel and the prize. So they really want things that have somehow, or at least in most, almost all cases historically have wanted developments that have empirical verification and that won't turn out to be wrong. That would be embarrassing. And in our case, no comment. No comment. In our in our case, since the theory made such precise predictions, that meant it could be wrong.

It could be proved quantitatively wrong or missing something major. I think most theorists, most theorists who are competent to judge, certainly by the late 70s, early 80s or so, had a lot of faith in the theory. But experiments were coming up with LEP, the big electron positive unclayder, which would do much more precise tests. And so that you could wait on that. And they did. And then the other aspect is that our work built on work of others in a major way. So on the experimental work of Friedman, Kendall, and Taylor especially at Slack, where they discovered the so called scaling phenomena, that was really the phenomenon that we aimed at in our initial investigations.

That was the kind of experimental fact about quarks that we wanted to understand. So until they got the Nobel Prize, it would have been very anomalous for us to get a Nobel Prize. And then on the theoretical side, we were also building on especially the work of it Hooft and Veltman, who sort of showed how you could do. some powerful kinds of calculations in the kinds of tricky theories that we wound up using. And so I didn't think we would, so they had to come first also. So there's an ordering. So the reason it took so long for us is that it took so long for them, I think.

Yeah. So let's get back to the impersonal now. You talk in the book a lot about unification, about complementary. And I get a lot of emails, as I'm sure you do. You probably get these on steroids, although I had Adam Reese on the show over the summer, and I said, you know, I get all these emails, you know, basically once a day. And it says, you know, Professor Keating, I've got a new theory of everything. I can't do the math.

But if you help me do the math, I'll share my Nobel Prize with you. And I say, and Adam leaned in and he said, how do you think I got my Nobel Prize? But it's always, you know, people are always saying, you know, Einstein was wrong. And I wonder, I talk to Barry Barish and that interview will air next week or so, I believe. So please everybody subscribe to the Into the Impossible podcast if you want to hear more great interviews. But returning to the Nobel Prize for just one last moment, Barry told me that he always suffered from imposter syndrome, his whole life. And none more so than when he went to collect his Nobel check and sign this logbook, which must have your name. in it and he saw not only your name but he saw this guy's name Albert Einstein and it gave him

tremendous imposter syndrome do you ever feel imposter syndrome especially or the nagging period of three decades between discovery and the award no okay I really don't and and there's a reason for it which is very concrete when I well or said I got over imposter syndrome when I went to college, I guess, or maybe even before, because I went, I was in the New York City school system. And at that time, we had a lot of tests. We had a lot of grading and tracking, they call it. And I got a lot of encouragement from that process. So, you know, I knew I had done very, very well on objective measures of intelligence. And so, you know, I knew I had done very, very well on objective measures of intelligence. forth. So I didn't feel like I'd never felt like an imposter. And then, you know, even when I went to the

University of Chicago, things were very easy for me. I wish I had worked harder. In many ways, I wish things didn't, hadn't come so easily. When I got to Princeton, things didn't start off by coming so easily. It was kind of a rough transition. But, but no, I, fortunately, a consequence of early success is that you get confidence. And that's extremely important to a research scientist. Confidence is pure gold. I mean, because it allows you to think in different ways,

to not worry about what other people think so much. And to think that you could take on big problems because you think that you have a chance of doing better than other people have done on them. Conversely, do you feel like afterwards, after winning it, that you had some superpower? I mean, it's rumored that your fellow laureate, T.S. Eliot, said something to the effect that the Nobel Prize is a ticket to one's own funeral, for no one has done anything after he won it.

But you're a counter example to that. But do you feel the converse effect? The anti-imposter syndrome takes over once you actually do receive the Nobel Prize? in terms of confidence? Well, since I did have so long to think about it, I did think about the afterlife, so to speak. And I looked around, and there are many people I admire that have won Nobel Prizes,

and I looked at their lives after the Nobel Prize. And some had done better than others. And to me, the success stories, like Feynman, like Yang, like T.D. Lee are people who kind of took it in stride and went on writing papers, whereas there are some other people I won't name, but kind of got intimidated by the prize. They thought that nothing they could do afterward would live up to what they had done before or to the prestige of the prize. And I wanted to be like the first group, not the second group. So sort of I planned right away that after getting the prize, I would write some papers that might be mediocre just to have done it, just to break the ice.

And that's what I did. And I kept working. And, well, I've been fortunate in that a lot of the ideas that I had early in my career, I've had a very big afterlife, like aneons and axions. And so, you know, I can build on that. They're still at the frontiers of research. But also, fortunately, my style has always been to do something, try to make a basic contribution, and then to move on and do something else. I'm not someone who sticks in the same place and digs deeper and deeper. I move from one thing to another. And with that style, you're often going to fail, so I got used to failure also. And so I wasn't afraid of failure either before or after the Nobel Prize.

So I didn't get intimidated by it, no. So I want to talk now about some of the work you've done since then, including your recent work on unification of forces. First, I want to take a break to just recognize our guest. We're talking to Professor Frank Wilcheck about his book, A Beautiful Question, which is upside down, which it's too bad it's not perfectly symmetrical, or else I would have been able to pull that up. This is a beautiful book, and I learned a tremendous amount.

I got great insight, as you will, into what it's like to be a physicist and to think about the existential questions, but to do so with an artist's eye and maybe a musician's ear and whatever else. other tact a sculptor's fingers or whatever. Well, I think very important is a historian's appreciation of human endeavor. I really enjoy learning about the history of ideas. Yeah. You go way back, as we said, to Pythagoras, to Aristarchus, you know, boosting their H indices as we go.

To think about how these green minds wrestled with difficult problems and the, the paths that they went down that we now know were mistaken, but, but seemed, why did they seem plausible? How did they explore them? I, I learned a lot and been very inspired by studying the history of ideas. Yeah. And I think that comes through in this book. And you talk a lot about Isaac Newton, not only for his role, along with Maxwell himself, James Clerk Maxwell, who, if I'm not mistaken, is your, is your role model as a physicist, is your kind of favorite physicist in history, as you are, to probably millions of people around the world, Frank. But I want to say about Newton, what really is amazing about Newton and certainly, you know,

later people like Faraday, et cetera, was that they had this deep love of solving puzzles. And it's reputed that they would think about these things really without ceasing. Einstein as well, this toy that Anthony Z. talks about is kind of his magical thing, was finding a, getting a compass from his death. that. Talk about experiment, about experiment list, you know, which I always joke. You know, there's a joke, what do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? You call him a drummer.

What do you call someone who hangs out with physicists? You call him an experimentalist. I can say that. You can't say that. But I get emails every day about, you know, Professor Keating, as I said, Einstein was wrong. Not only is going to the Nobel Prize, but going to this notion that we somehow want to to outdo Einstein, that we want to do what Einstein didn't do, maybe as a favor to the old man, or maybe as to vindicate him. You know, he certainly didn't do as much that was really held in high

esteem after he did win the Nobel Prize. But getting to his dream of a so-called theory of everything, I've been talking to Roger Penrose, I talked to Lenny Suskind, I talked to Kamran Vafa and many others, luckily, I'm very blessed to have them as members. Oh, and reminder out there, exercise your fingers. don't get carpal tunnel syndrome. Press the subscribe button, the like button. We can get more time with Frank Wilczek. If he is such a gracious person, he has not only agreed to come on today, but to time translate and use that symmetry to next month in January,

he'll be back on to talk about his new book, Fundamentals. That's a phenomenal book as well. Anyway, getting back to Einstein and unification of forces. There is the common thread that runs through almost all these emails and topics that I've been talking about with people like Penrose, et cetera, this notion that we need a theory of everything because we don't understand how to unify gravity with quantum mechanics. I want to just put a pushback on that notion. As an experimenter, I said this to Roger, to his face, I'm not speaking out of school.

I said, no one's ever going to go into a singularity. I mean, Lenny talks about that in his book. You can't visualize a singularity. And people like Roger, in his book, Cycles of Time, which we talked about last month, right after he won the Nubov, or was an to be the Nobel Prize recipient, co-recipient. We talked about his model for conformal cyclic cosmology, which does away with the initial singularity at which point people were using as motivation for a theory of quantum gravity. I'm going to talk to you later about your paper with Lawrence Krause about inflation and unification of forces. But first, why do we need a theory of quantum gravity when we can't

know for sure if there was an initial singularity? And two, we can't access what occurred at the core of a black hole. And three, we have no example, we have no example in nature of an infinite quantity, smoothly transitioning to a finite quantity. So why do we need to unify gravity with quantum mechanics at all?

Well, at a practical level, we probably don't. I mean, you know, I'm sure, as a practicing astrophysicist, that in astrophysics, people deal with situations where gravity and quantum mechanics are both important at the same time. Every day, that's the world. And it's as common as dust that you have gravity and quantum mechanics working harmoniously.

Frank, dust is a four-letter word. I would have had one of these. You have gravity and quantum mechanics working in harmony to describe the natural. the natural world in great detail with great accuracy. But when you push things really, really hard, when you try to calculate tiny corrections due to quantum fluctuations of gravity, you find that our existing theoretical apparatus

doesn't give any sensible answer, and you would like to understand situations where things do get very extreme, like at the center of black holes, but maybe like the very, very, very, very early universe. And so that's a kind of quasi-practical application. And then there's finally the simplest reason that you want to do it is that gravity is there and quantum mechanics is there. And you want to have a consistent theory that includes both. So it may or may not be important for any practical or even theoretical problem, but it's a challenge. It's an intellectual challenge, if you like, and it might have unexpected consequences.

In fact, I think a quasi-unexpected but potentially important consequence is that we have, a model called inflation that seems to explain a lot about cosmology, as you know. But its foundation in theory is very, very shaky, I would say. And the existing models of inflation are sort of a counter example to beauty and physics, I would say. They really super ugly and don't really fit experiment, very clean. cleanly. So there's something missing in our understanding of early universe cosmology, and it's quite possible in my mind that understanding quantum gravity better will address that cluster of

real questions that are connected to actual observations. So, okay, I think that answers your question. Yes, that that's not we can. Yeah, actually, let's go to what, what, what, kind of as an allied question, a concomitant question. But before we do that, we just received a chat from a very munificent and generous listener who is paying us $10. Not you, Frank, I'm sorry. But it'll also go into my 529 college savings plan for my kids.

And Pete is asking the following question. He is asking, wouldn't a more complete understanding of gravity potentially enable us to de more to manipulate gravity? as provocative. Well, it's conceivable, of course, until we have the understanding, we don't know what we can do with it. But it seems far-fetched to me. Let me tell you why in very concrete terms. So consider the LIGO experiment, which in recent years succeeded in detecting gravitational waves. They had to work very, very hard to be able to observe any effect. They had to develop new methods of keeping things from shaking. They had to make innovations in laser technology. They had to build things on a grand scale. The apparatus are four miles long, and you have to have

several of them all around the world. So it's a very, very challenging enterprise. And, you're looking for effects where the distortions produced in space time by gravitational waves are smaller than the radius of a nucleus by a considerable factor. So it's not so that's so that's manipulating gravity or manipulating space time. And what did it take to do that tiny effect? it takes two gigantic black holes colliding and just in the last moments of the most violent collision they produce this tiny tiny signal so the point is simply that gravity is a very very weak force fundamentally and so I think the prospects of doing engineering with it

by better understanding of the quantum mechanics of gravity is very, very far-fetched. Hey, everybody, I just want to stop in the middle of this podcast as you're super excited and super interested and all the cool stuff we're hearing about from today's guests, and I want to do so to make an advertisement. No, this isn't for manscaping or some other type of product that I've been pitched to pitch to you. I don't think I've found quite the, connection and resonance with manscaping, but maybe other things will fit the bill. But I do want to advertise on behalf of some other podcasts. And why would I do that? Well, it's kind of like when I get asked to blurb a book. After all, books are zero-sum games too. If you're reading somebody else's

book, you're not going to read Losing the Nobel Prize or my upcoming books, which I hope to be announcing shortly on this very podcast. But instead, I do want to recommend to you that you listen to some podcasts by my good friends, some of whom gave me a start on their podcast long before the Into the Impossible podcast. First one is a young man, a graduate student named Brandon Dratchler, Dracler. You can find him on Twitter, a T-S-O-T-U pod. And that stands for the State of the Universe podcast. And just recently in late November, he interviewed Dr. Daniel Whiteson, who's one of the other podcast hosts that I'm going to recommend to you. So Daniel and his, colleague and friend Jorge Cham. They host the Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe podcast. You're going to hear a lot of universes here.

And these podcasts are really interesting and valuable contributions to the scientific podcast world. And I really enjoy listening to them. And they've had me on their podcast. Both of these podcasts have hosted me as well. And the last podcast that I want to write, recommend is a podcast by two up and coming podcasters who started a podcast over the summer. And they are named Daniel Hooper, another Daniel. And Shama, his co-host, Shama, is a graduate student. I believe she's at Columbia, is Shama. And Dan is a physicist at Fermilab. And so what makes them so interesting is that they go deep into the podcast world. old. And this is Shaamba Weggsman. I'm sorry, I forgot to mention her last name, but she's soon to be a PhD,

or maybe she already is a PhD at NYU. And she is a co-host of the Why This Universe podcast with Dan Hooper. They do tremendous work. Also, there is a podcast Twitter account called Why This Universe, and they claim to discuss the biggest ideas in physics broken down. And they come out with episodes every other Monday. So please tune into these podcasts, and I hope you'll stay subscribe to the Into the Impossible podcast where we do cover things in the universe and beyond into the multamers. But we also do other things that I hope you'll find fascinating as well. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with many more Nobel Prize winners, as well as with

maybe even a solo episode or two about my ideas as to where I think experimental physics should be going. I've had a lot of guests on the podcast, and I will continue to do so. folks like Eric Weinstein, folks like Garrett Leasy, Stephen Wolfram, and Julian Barber is coming on the show. But I want to think maybe a little bit less in 2021 about theories of everything and more about experiments of everything. So stay tuned for that, as well as guests totally outside the realm of the physical sciences. Look for an interview with psychologists and with lifestyle optimizers and maybe some brand name podcasters that you know and love.

So with that, I'll end this quick quote unquote advertising break, return you to the action on today's podcast episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you so much for being a friend of the show. Please do help me out. The biggest help you can do, cost you nothing, is to rate the podcast and share it with other people. So I hope you'll rate it highly. I read each and every comment.

So if you want me to check out your theory of everything, leave me a comment and I'll at least read it. And that will be one way that we can continue to grow and share the love of this wonderful, magical, mysterious multiverse, perhaps, that we inhabit. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Now, please enjoy the rest of this podcast of Into the Impossible. I just want to give a little tease.

I can't resist it. So people in the 1700s looked at lightning and they would have said, oh, we can never approach the power, the fearsome power of the electron or whatever they would have called it. But then allegedly, none other than my hero, Michael Farrer, Faraday said, when allegedly, I guess, when asked by William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, a British Minister of Finance back then, about the practical value of electricity, Faraday said, one day, sir, you may tax it. That's right. Yeah.

And that's, that's, that's, that's, or that's a warning. Yeah, that's a warning. But on the other hand, now we understand things much better and much more completely. So the idea that we're missing something enormous that could be used in engineering is a lot more challenging. And what's with the other thing I was going to say? Never mind. That's enough. Yeah.

So I want to get to this and I have a lot of comments from people in the audience. Sometimes I do a poll and I say, you know, leave a comment if you have a theory of everything. And then give a thumbs up if you've heard about a theory of everything. recently. So let's do that. But I want to talk about your paper, this is from 2014, soon after my team and I released the B-7-2 results, you and Lawrence

Krause wrote a paper from B-Modes to quantum gravity and unification of forces. The reason I want to go here is that I feel it's very important for scientists, if they have a theory of everything, to pursue all existing avenues of data. And you just

gave an example, which was meant to be kind of illustrative of how hard it is to do experiments in gravity. But what if I told you, you know, most of the time I get these theories of everything, someone like Garrett Lise or my friend Eric Weinstein, who may join us at the end of the show, the question of, well, I want to test this theory, but it relies on such high energy phenomena that we need a bigger particle accelerator. And I always say, like imagine if you wanted to test gravity and you said,

I want a bigger particle accelerator. I'd say, well, how about this? I have a neutron star collider. Will that do? I'll take two neutron stars at 99.9% the speed of light. I'll crash them together. Would that do? In other words, why aren't people as willing as you were to look at the low energy limits of different phenomena?

As you said, you know, asymptotic freedom was sort of confirmed not through direct observation of quarks, but through the jet processes. I mean, that was very, very hard to do, but it wasn't as hard as finding the Higgs, right? Oh, well, it made finding the Higgs conceivable, actually. But the, well, that's an example where, you know, I think we would have been justified in saying that we need higher energy accelerators to really test the theory in that work. In the case of quantum gravity, though, we can estimate what the required energies are and they're just not going to be available any time soon. And maybe never. You know, you would need accelerators the size of the solar system and an energy budget, which is way beyond human energy consumption.

So don't hold your breath on that one. Now, but on the other hand, if you have a bright idea, you might be able to see consequences of quantum gravity at low energies. And this work I did with Lawrence was an example of that where, well, it's not, it's using the early universe as an accelerator. So you could find relics left over from the early universe. You get to also look at signals from colliding black holes, as I mentioned, or black holes in neutron stars. So there is data out there. And in general, I have very little sympathy for theoretical physicists who say, oh, my theory is great, but you can't test it. That's a failure. That's not an excuse.

That's just a failure. And, okay, in a more constructive vein, I've been thinking recently about the quantum nature of gravitational radiation. It's usually, it has been treated as a classical field that rattles around the things in LIGO in a certain way based on classical mechanics, basically. But in reality, the black holes produce a quantum field. Everything is quantum. And the black holes create a quantum field of radiation. And they're very different, I'm discovering. And I hope there'll be observable consequences from that

that won't require gigantic new accelerators other than the black holes. Yeah, we experimentalists are a greedy bunch. We want future circular colliders. We want international linear colliders. We want LIGOs in space. But I wanted, yeah, to get back to that paper that you wrote after Bicep 2 results came out, as you just mentioned, you know, the phenomena of gravitational waves leaving a B-mode imprint in the polarization of the micro-rate background is that based on classical perturbations,

not quantum mechanics. So what would be a definitive early universe test of the quantum nature of gravity, that is the graviton, so-called graviton? Well, in that paper we argued that observation of gravitation waves from the early universe that had basically a thermal character was a strong indication of the quantum nature of gravity in the same way that observations about the black body radiation led Plank and Einstein to propose quantum mechanics in the first place. There's an H-bar that appears in the equations, and that's pretty sure a sign of quantum mechanics. But I'm still hopeful that there would be more encompassing implications, maybe new models for how to produce the phenomena that we currently ascribe to inflation, maybe some heterodox version of inflation that's driven by gravity itself rather than some ad hoc inflaton field. made, I guess, what was the question again? Yeah, just, just, I carried away.

What is a fundamental, when I think of quantum mechanics, I think of, you know, spooky action at a distance, number one. I think about, you know, electron double-slid experiments. What is the analogous? Because I agree with you, I don't think we could do an experiment on gravitons the way we do with photons, but what conceivable test of early universe, quantum gravity? Again, my theory, not my theory, my contention is, we don't know if my friend Paul Steinhart is right or if Sir Roger Penrose is right, there is no initial

singularity. And even Stephen Hawking, you know, had the no boundary proposals, et cetera. So what, and it's usually touted that we need a theory of quantum gravity because we know the universe had a singularity. Actually, we don't. And so I would like to know if there was any way to show that the universe had a singularity. I think what we know, we need a theory of the early universe that's sufficiently concrete that you can calculate observable consequences of it. And we know what we have to calculate. We or certainly some things that should be calculated that presently are not. Those include the amplitude of the fluctuations, the nature of the spectrum.

Are they non-Gausian? It would be nice to make some predictions for a change instead. Right? Are there a significant gravitational wave background? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? There are many, many things that observers like you are gathering information about.

And wouldn't it be nice if the theory predicted some of those things? Yeah. Or even post-dicted some of those things. It's not that there's no material. It's that the theorists have failed to produce a theory so far. That's So you don't You can't blame the universe

You you you face it guys You failed I failed Well hope abounds You know because Einstein provides a lovely target And a lovely Kind of story

And I think as you know Stories are very important To tell a good story Even in physics But getting to this point You make the case in the book In the book And of course we're talking

With Frank Wilcheck Winner of the Co-Recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, along with Pulitzer and Gross. And this question, we talked a little bit about the Nobel Prize and what it felt to wait for 30 years, what it felt like on a personal level. But during that time, you were making tremendous contributions. And some of those contributions rely on things that may best be seen in the universe. I'm speaking about the CP problem.

I'm speaking about axions. And these are probably the hottest topic. I've been, I did a plot recently of axions as a, as a topic in, in Cosmo. And it's, you got the hockey stick going, you know, Al Gore, Al Gore, fellow Nobel Prize winner is going to do a video with him on an elevator with Axion citations going up to the moon. But the, but the point I'm trying to make is that that's another example of low energy limit of a potentially high energy phenomena. So do you want to say, of all these things that you've created, first of all, I can't resist because how often do I get to chat with you? of all these kinds of things, which would you most like to see confirmed or if you're, I think, as you are intellectually honest, maybe disproven in the remaining 80 years of your life, hopefully?

Well, I think clearly axions are the biggest deal because they are, as you know, they're a leading and perhaps, as you were hinting, now. the leading candidate to provide the dark matter of the universe. They have all the right properties. And I've been cheerleading, but also participating in the attempt to design antennas, you know, modified antennas suited to axions that will definitively observe that background. So it's not dark anymore, right? So we can see not only that it gravitates, but also does the other things that particles ought to do, although very feebly. So, so that's, yeah, that's, that's great. And by the way, you, you quoted Hertz recently. I feel very much that way about axions. It's, it's a beautiful extension of this, the standard model. I think it's fair to say that the

people who invented the theory in some sense, Pache and Quinn didn't realize it's, didn't realize this potential. They didn't realize it had axions, for heaven, and much less that axions play such an important role in cosmology, but it's there. I mean, you know, it comes right out of the equations when you think about them carefully. And then there's going to be, there has been a wonderful creative activity in trying to design the antennas,

and we'll see if they're out there. it's just now in recent years getting to the point where the antennas are getting sufficiently sensitive that they have a chance to actually observe it. It's very exciting, but nerve-wracking. So before we turn, if you've got a few more minutes, before we turn to a couple more questions from the audience, I wanted to just see if you'll indulge me. In your book, you talk a lot about religion. I joked at the very beginning, we spoke how your book in Auditius.

audio form, which I listen to in addition to reading it. I have the audiobook version of it. And it has 220 chapters in the audiobook versus the video or versus the New Testament, which has 260 chapters. And you talk a lot about this character in the New Testament called Doubting Thomas. And I want to ask you, and maybe just to recap that and maybe even your connection to, to, I understand you're a Catholic but not in good standing perhaps or not practicing Catholic. You call yourself an A very, very lapsed Catholic. You call yourself an agnostic. And I wonder, you know, do you see similarities between sort of the faith that it takes to pursue a scientific idea that you believe is beautiful, ecumenical or simple, economical? And to keep that sort of faith

in the face of perhaps overwhelming odds, is there anything about religious? Is there anything about religion or, you know, not in practicing theological sense, but are there any kind of fruitful interchanges that can be had from questions of faith as a physicist? At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement,

loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. I'm not sure I would call it faith, but one thing that got deeply imprinted on me as a result of my religious training as a, you know, as a young adult, really I turned away from it as in my, early teenage years. So we're talking about very early, but very formative influences. And the thing I took away from it permanently, I think, is really deeply embedded, is the idea that the world embodies secret meanings, that, you know, the surface appearance of things is not the real story. That there's something else going on that's in the case of religion is mostly symbolic or sort of a working out of a moral scheme.

But in science, you take it as it comes. You go out and learn about what God is by studying his works. So that's the attitude I have. And I don't think faith is, no, I mean, it's not a matter of faith, I would say. It's a matter of what I call radical conservatism, which is, You have an idea. You work out its consequences as hard as you can. Because you want to know if it's correct or not.

And if it's, it is correct, you've learned something very exciting. If it's not correct, you've also learned something useful that you should do. But vague thinking never gets you anywhere. So, so that,

so it's, so that's a kind of attitude. That. has something in common with religion where you try to understand everything in terms of God, but I'd say it's a tenuous relationship. So it's not faith. I wouldn't call it faith. I'd call it kind of a working principle of pushing, pushing.

And but also of, it's not a matter of appreciating to take to, to, to, To me, okay, when I was a very young adult, as I mentioned, until I got disillusioned, I got enormous satisfaction about thinking that the world had deeper meanings, that there was part of a big picture, that you could be a saint, and so that and merge with God or something. But, and unfortunately, you know, I can't believe in that stuff anymore. It just doesn't hold together as I've learned more about how the world actually works. But the way the world actually works is incredibly beautiful in its own way, incredibly beautiful.

And I'm happy to be a part of it, you know, and happy to be able to appreciate so much and learn more and more. It's fitting for an author of a book about so-called beautiful questions that you'd answer that in that way. Okay, we're going to come to the end soon, but not before. we take one more super chat. I can't resist. The super chats, they put bread on the table. No, they don't do that. But they're very much appreciated.

This one's from Jody Geiger. I wonder if he's related to the famous Geiger, Geiger Martston, and the man. The only man, I think, who is a physicist, Nobel Prize winner, on a piece of legal tender. Do you know who that is, by the way, Frank? Nobel laureate, who's on a piece of legal currency. Not in America.

Hint. I don't know for sure. I thought maybe Rutherford was in the news. That's right. Okay. Yes, Rutherford. Absolutely. Very good. That was trivia that you got. Anyway, going back to Geiger, maybe he's related to Jody, let me know if you're related to Geiger, Geiger Martson. Anyway, he asked, I have a peer-reviewed, published theory of everything with 20 plus measured and verified predictions in the laboratory such as quantum gravity. Hmm, but this work went unnoticed for years. So he's asking you for suggestions. How should he proceed? He says it's reviewed, peer-reviewed and published. I don't know where. I don't know what experiments that verify quantum gravity he's talking about. But I get this a lot. How do we proceed with a novel theory of everything?

What would you recommend to somebody, Frank? I would recommend that you take a small part of the theory that people can understand independently, if that's possible. and if you have a clear prediction, write that up and write it so that it follows from the minimal hypotheses so that people don't have to work very hard to understand a complicated theory in order to understand anything at all, and then submit it to regular journals or post it on the archive where it can get the attention of people who were in a position to judge. Great.

And the last question from the audience that I'll take in the interest of time comes from someone named Zolo. Does Gerdell's incompleteness theorem have any implications for physics? And I'll do another separate question in his second topic. But I always find that physicists have a sense of math envy in that, at least in math, we know the limits of what can or can't be proven self-consistently. But no such thing exists in physics. And people usually say, Carl Popper said falsification. Is there an analog to Girdle's incompleteness theorem, in your opinion, for physics? Not really.

Gertil's theorem has very much to do with, well, in a limited sense, which I'll come to. Gertil's theorem has very much to do with the properties of formal axiomatic systems, and physics is not that. Now, maybe there are long-term aspirations to turn physics into that, and we're nowhere close to doing it at present, But if we got there, then ideas around Gertroth's theorem would become relevant. Very good. Okay, so I'm going to ask you my own questions that I ask all my listeners, all my guests on the Into the Impossible podcast.

Hopefully you'll enjoy these. So normally when I have on, say, like a child psychologist, I say, now's time for the final three questions. First, can you provide a quantum theory of gravity that's self-consistent? and the child psychologist, give me five minutes. But now I'm going to ask you, because you've already worked on that, I want to ask you, there's a concept in my religion, which is Judaism, of what's called an ethical will. And it's what you want to leave to the future to benefit humanity.

And actually, Alfred Nobel, who you're well acquainted with, had an ethical component in his material will, which was to make humanity for the betterment of all mankind. I want to ask you, what aspect or wisdom would you most want to leave for future generations as a so-called inheritance, an ethical will of wisdom, perhaps, for the future? Well, I think that's what we'll discuss in our next podcast. Because this is very much the kind of question that I take up in the new book. Oh, awesome. I cannot wait.

We're talking about Frank's next book as is coming out in January, on January 12th. He'll be on the show January 11th. Let me know if you want me to have him back alive like this, or we could do a recorded one. But this is called Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality. I'm going to put a link to purchase the book in the show notes. So Frank can, you can get a head start in advance of our podcast on January 11th. Okay, let's get back to my other question that I ask people. Maybe this, too, will be covered in fundamentals.

But this is related to the namesake of this show, is Sir Arthur C. Clark. and I am the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. I think I've mentioned that to you once or twice. I've invited you to come when the pandemic is over. He'll come and we'll do an event around you and your wonderful books. But there's a scene in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, based on Arthur's books and a series of books. And it shows these primates on the plains of Africa. And they're playing around with this monolith that they discover.

And later they discover it on the surface of the moon. And yesterday I talked to astronaut Jessica Meir about this, about her experiences, and she said she gets like PTSD thinking about the hal spacecraft when she was on the ISS. But anyway, I want to ask you, Frank, the monolith in 2001 is like a time capsule. What would you put on a time capsule if you knew it would last for perhaps millions of years into the future? What summary of nature would you perhaps put in there? Well, we have the equations of the standard model that are really, that are perfect for that purpose because they can be stated very precisely and concisely in a computer program. So we could certainly write such a program and it would be much shorter than the operating system of your computer.

Certainly much shorter than Word. and I put in axions as a plausible extension of the standard line and I put in my new book. Which form would you put it on? CD-ROM? What's going to last? Well, you know, it's very, I mean, technology and science have changed so much in the last hundred years. it's really nuts in my opinion to think about what would be interesting to the humans or cyborgs or inheritors of human intelligence that would be looking at these things even thousands of years into the future. So I guess I'll leave it at that.

That's the best answer. I'm just afraid I'll put it on a USB stick and we only have USB C. We don't have USBA. Okay, lastly... Of course, I would also, I should say, I don't want to, you know, don't want to belittle the achievements of observational astronomers.

Of course, independent of how the world works, we also have a lot of information about what the world is and was, and we'd want to have a nice summary of that as well. That's right, yes, and that will hopefully be contained it in our next podcast. We do that in a couple weeks. The last question I have for Frank is also kind of related to Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said,

as you quote in the book, I'm talking about your previous book, A Beautiful Question, which I devoured over the last 187 hours of listening to it on audio. But the quote comes from Sir Arthur C. Clark. One of them relates to his three laws. And his first law is that for any, any, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You quote that in your book. The second law, which is a little bit less well known, is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I find that to be true. And then the third law is where we get the name of this

podcast. He said, the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the name of this podcast. I want to ask you, what mysterious aspect of life perplexed you as a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old when you were coming up with these soon-to-be or not soon to be, but future Nobel-worthy things perhaps, was perplexing, mysterious, maybe fear-inducing, but now makes sense through the lens of looking backwards in time. So essentially, advice to your former self, what would you tell a 20-year-old Frank Wilchick? I'd tell him to focus more on the basis. aspects of quantum theory. When I early in my career I had a kind of snobbish

attitude about people who worried about the foundations of quantum mechanics. I said I mean come on we use the theory all the time very successfully and there's not that the interesting thing is to apply it in complicated circumstances not not to understand the basics but but in recent years it's really become clear that the theory is so deep and has so much potential that's been untapped for information processing and new kinds of sensitive detectors and new ways of understanding the world that it would have been better to get earlier into the issues of understanding really very, very basic questions and not to turn

up my nose at it and sort of brush it off. Very good. We have one more guest question that's going to come in from actually live by Skype. We'll see if we can get him on. This is Eric Weinstein, who's a friend of the show who runs his own podcast called The Portal podcast. Let's see if Eric can be patched in somehow. Eric, do you hear us? I see his name. Yeah, I see his name, but I don't see him. Let's see. If he is available, I will check to see. Technical difficulties.

Let's see if this will come up. This is always challenging. Oh, I think he might be popping in. There he is. Let's see. I hear Eric. Eric, how do you read us? I can see you.

Okay, we cannot see you. I can hear you now, but not see you. It's been years. Good to see you. It's very nice to not see you, but to hear you anyway. This is a great thrill, And there are issues that I've wanted to talk to you about for some time, particularly with... Sorry, Eric, you dropped out.

You left an extremely provocative comment in the book, which you... Pardon me? It's a little hard to hear you. You're breaking up a little bit, Eric. What was it great stuff? What's your question? There we go. Oh, there we go. Now I see you at least.

Okay. Very good. So, can you hear me now? Yes. Yes. So I wanted to ask you about a question from your last book, which you tantalizingly drop in a provocative fashion and then deliberately don't follow up, which I thought was a great literary move, which is that you talk about the S-O-10 theory of grand unification, so three out of four forces. And then you say, I note that this is the same representation of spin 10, that is the spinner representation, as the portion that connects to the spacetime, which is the spacetime spinner

representation. Yes. And then you say, whether this is a coincidence or an indication of something deeper is not known, or something like this. And then you run away. Well, in my private notebook. I've tried to follow up on that. And not only in my private notebooks,

I mean, I've thought about models where you extend the spinner symmetry to explain why there are families. And I wrote, but that doesn't bring in space time, but there are also attempts to bring space-time spinners and internal space spinners together. I never published, any of that because it didn't work to my satisfaction. But it's still, it's still an interesting

program and maybe somebody would have better ideas about it. I mean, it's a remarkable mathematical coincidence that these same structures emerge in such different contexts. And I don't know, I have this sneaking suspicion that it's like the equivalence principle. It's something that everybody knows that points to something very deep, but I haven't been able to get that deep and get it out. Well, you should know that I spend my every waking moment trying to make that cryptic comment go down in history is one of the most important. But you also probably know that the number 10 doesn't get a lot attention when you talk about the S-O-10 Grand Unified model because what that 10, that group of symmetries of 10-dimensional space is doing for the model is not happening

in the 10-dimensional incarnation of the group. It's happening in this 16-dimensional vial spinner representation. The representation. Right. And so my question to you would be, what concern have you given to the 10 in spin or S-O-10 as the physicists call it, which is well the S-O-10, the group, as you know, governs the not the quarks and the leptons, but the gluons and the and the weak bosons and the photons, so the force mediating particles. And there are new ones that arise in the bigger theory in the SO-10 that mediate things like proton decay and generate masses for neutrinos. And so I've very much been following.

I'm very much followed that. That evades the question again, sir, because that is the 45-dimensional representation of spin 10. It's 16. And we have the 45. I'm still trying to get you to answer the question about that. The only place, okay, well, I don't. You have to appreciate that because I'm a non-physicist,

I get to ask these things, whereas if I was a professional physicist, I'd have to worry about their consequence. Yeah. Well, it's an artificial separation because to me the dimension of the space, so that there's a 10-dimensional representation, there's a 45-dimensional representation,

there's a 16-dimensional representation that all play important roles in the theory. The 10-dimensional representation actually does play a role in the theory. That's where the Higgs particle lives. Well, so this is an interesting question. But the fact that the whole S-10 is really just a label. You could call it G for group. It would still be the same group,

and it would be represented in different ways, some of which are 10-dimensional, some of which are 45-dimensional, some of which are 16-dimensional. The underlying symmetry is what... That's actually not really the case, because spin-10 and spin-nine are a very important transitional period where the first, let's say, one through nine dimensions gets you through what would be called the exceptional isomorphisms in bot periodicity. But above that level, the group has different properties because it stops acting transatlanticism, on its the orbits of its spin representation.

But let me ask you another couple of questions. You're aware that you have 14-dimensional. I think we're going to lose the audience very, very rapidly at this level. I'll allow one more question. And then I do want to remind people that number 10 is very important because Frank's next book is fundamental. Ten keys to reality, not spin-10. I promise Frank would be off at the hour. Eric, we'll take one more question from the audience from you.

Let's make it a little brisk. All right. So the one question I also would have asked is, I have a feeling that you think that it might be that some of the spinless fields that we use, whether the inflaton, whether we're talking about quintessence, whether we're talking about the Higgs field, might be related to each other in a way that has not been fully understood. Is it possible that any of these fields that we invoke to sort of get out of jail for various problems elsewhere could be the same? Like you never see Clark, Ken, and Superman in the same place. We think that these are distinct fields, but maybe they're different. Maybe they're the same. They certainly could be the same.

And people have explored, I'd say, with mixed success at best, the idea that the Higgs, particle and the Higgs field and the infloton are the same thing. I think more likely is that we'll find a more encompassing theory that has all these different particles as consequences so that we'll see that they're not really independent ideas, but they'll be unified at the level of concepts, not at the level of identity. Very good.

Thank you guys. Thank you especially to my guest today, Frank Wilczek, who is the author of this book, A Beautiful Question, which is a beautiful book, Inside and Out, beautifully bound, actually, and lavishly illustrated with colorful representations of different objects, including some spin groups that we just heard about. But I want to also notify people that we are going to be live with, with Frank Wilcheck in a month to talk about his new book, upcoming book, Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality.

Frank, I want to thank you so much for going into The Impossible. I want to ask the audience to tune in and subscribe to hear interviews with Barry Barish, Ray Weiss, fellow laureates of Frank Wilchek, and also hopefully we're going to get Sien Yang, Frank Yang, another Frank Nobel laureate, and I'll bring on Frank. Frank, I hope I can bring you on if I do manage to pull that off you and maybe Shelley Glashow and also Jim Simons. But I'll keep you posted.

Frank, get back to... That would be extraordinary. And, you know, I promise not to be the flying the ointment. If that comes to be, I'll move heaven and earth to participate. I will do my best. Thank you so much. We love having you on. Everybody out there, thank you for going into the impossible with Brian Keating.

I'm your fearful host. Looking forward to our next episode together. And now, intro, outro music for my friend McGee. Yeti Tears online. Thank you, Frank. Thanks, Eric. I'll see you. Hopefully, maybe later tonight.

We've got to sign off now, so bye-bye. Bye, guys. Eric, how are you, my friend? Look at you, Mr. Big Shot podcast. I know. I know. I know. All the smart people.

Well, you missed the beginning. I asked him about imposter syndrome when it came to to the Nobel Prize. As I asked Barry Barish last week when he was on the show, that interview will come out soon. I asked Barry,

did you ever have imposter syndrome? and he said all the time, especially when he went to go collect this little medallion, and he sat assigned the same book that this guy's name was signed in just above. And he said, I never felt more of an imposter in my whole life. I asked Frank Wilczek, what do you think he said? Imposter syndrome? Not since breakfast. No, not since he was 12 years old.

He took an IQ test as a high schooler in Queens, New York, and it came out phenomenally for him. And it's been all the way for him. But he did say that he wished he had maybe spent a little bit more time learning quantum field theory, which I found kind of a kick in the tail because if he's got problems with quantum field theory, what hope do I have? I think that that's a really interesting answer because in large measure, quantum field theory is the only thing that really underwent a major intellectual

revolution after Frank. So Frank is the last person, literally the last person to contribute to the standard model. He's now 69 in terms of youth. The thing that happened after him was the geometrization of quantum field theory. And in some weird way, if you preceded a paper called a Gucci-Gilke and Hansen, you think about the world one way. And if you followed that paper, you think about it a different way. That was the paper that introduced geometric language to the physicists. And then, you know, so many of like Witten's insights. Frank belongs to an earlier world.

Ed is born later the same year. Yeah. He's on the other side of that divide. So we'll check to Witten is the divide, in my opinion, as to where he becomes smarter and dumber at the same time. But I also mentioned the quote from T.S. Eliot, where he said, the Nobel Prize. It's like a ticket to their funeral. And it couldn't be farther from the truth in the

case of Frank Wilczek, who was 22 years old when he came up with asymptotic freedom with David Politzer and David Gross, had it endured. He didn't win the prize for a long time. 34 years. I mean, can you imagine that? Or 31 years? I couldn't imagine. I said, how was that feeling? And it basically sounded like he was excruciating. By the way, I think we're inventing a new genre right now, Eric, podcast debriefing in the middle of an active live podcast stream on YouTube. But I love it. I'm here to break barriers and go into the impossible. Well, there you go. I mean, I also thought that his responses, this throwaway comment that he made about Spin 10 and the regular spinners on Space Time, you know, we hit pay dirt because

what you're hearing about is that this is a private research program and that people are embarrassed to air their sort of private thoughts. This was a daring thing to do in the culture, but it shouldn't be daring at all. I mean, how important. That idea, I believe, is going to turn out to be one of the most important ideas ever. Yeah. So I want people to tune in tomorrow. Hopefully in person, we'll have Eric Weinstein with a better audio quality. Not better video quality. You've got remarkable video and the audio just needs a little bit of tweaking. you a present. I got you a present here. Well, it's over there. It's a microphone, Eric. I hate to spoil the Hanukkah surprise, but I got you a microphone. A real live microphone. There's only two things

that people say about you when you come on my show, how handsome you look, how much weight you've lost, maybe three things, how you need a better microphone. So we're going to do that. And maybe something about publication, but we're not going to go there. That's a sour spot. We're going to talk about that in person tomorrow. What did you think of your interaction? With Frank? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I thought it was marvelous. He actually echoed some things that I've been thinking about for a long time, and that, I'm going to run by you in person tomorrow. And that has to do with, why don't people test the low energy consequences of their models using existing data sets? So imagine if I said to you, you know, I've got this great theory, but it requires an atom Smasher that's twice as big as LHC. Well, I could say to, well, I've got this thing. It collides two 30 mass solar mass neutron stars at 99.999% the speed of light. Would that interest you? You know,

does that have any relevance to your theory? And he basically said, yeah, those are the kinds of tests that you want to look at for consequences, low energy. And he gave the example that he published with Lawrence Krause called from B modes to quantum gravity. This one's some prize in gravity research in 2014 after Bicep 2, but before it was retracted. And that was anticipating whether or not you could actually say that gravity is quantized from low energy phenomena, such as B mode polarization, the kind of which I study. You know, one thing I thought was really cool is looking at his book is a lot about color and light, and he goes through these beautiful examples of beautiful things in nature.

there's a beautiful squid. We'll be having that for lunch when he come tomorrow. But the beautiful things in nature that Isaac Newton discovered. You remember, he unified spectral theory. Color theory was not thought to be part of physics. It was like mysticism. Maybe it happens in the eye. Maybe it happened.

But he showed you have a prism and you take a spectrum of the sun. And then you block out the color green, let's just say. And then you put it together with another prism. So you do a summing operation. and out doesn't come white light. And that was a demonstration that it's not a physiological property. So he unified within the laws of physics, so to speak,

empirical evidence at low energies, which we'd later discover, as Frank talks about in the book, at high energies has a consequence in Maxwell's theories, which he basically views Maxwell as his superhero as his avatar in physics. And I can't fault him for that. But I kind of view Faraday myself, because Faraday would do the experiments without any mathematical knowledge.

And I think the experiment is the key. I've told people in the chat room right now, leave a thumbs up if you have heard a theory of everything lately. And then leave a comment in the comment section if you have a theory of everything. Because it's... Rough comment section, man. That's right. I know. It's going to be brutal.

That's a high bar, right? All right, well, I'll let you go. Thanks for coming on. Tomorrow, let's do a live stream. I want to talk about this new idea, a project that I have. to act as a Weinstein-Keating sieve to get to the root of what it means to have a working theory of everything. Until then. Well, such an exciting invitation.

I'll even come down to San Diego. All right. I've got room on the couch here. We'll both be in the doghouse when my wife figures out how much time I've been spending podcasting. Everybody out there, I love you guys. We're criss-crossing. It's like strangers on a train. We'll both sleep on each other's couch.

Everybody, thank you. so much. Please subscribe to the podcast so we can get more great guests like Eric and Frank Wilcheck. And next week we're going to have Come Run Vafa. We're going to have Barry Barish. We're going to have Carlo Rovelli has agreed to come on. And Oprah. And well, Oprah is coming on to give me a new couch. Everybody will get a couch. So for now, signing off your fearful host, Brian Keating. Have a great day, everybody. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with 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

Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.