Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Putting Einstein to the TEST: Jim Gates (#293)

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

#einstein #relativity #gravity In 1911, a relatively unknown physicist named Albert Einstein published his preliminary theory of gravity. But it hadn't been tested. To do that, he needed a photograph of starlight as it passed the sun during a total solar eclipse. So began a nearly decade-long quest by seven determined astronomers from observatories in four countries, who traveled the world during five eclipses to capture the elusive sight. Over the years, they faced thunderstorms, the ravages of a world war, lost equipment, and local superstitions. Finally, in May of 1919, British expeditions to northern Brazil and the island of Príncipe managed to photograph the stars, confirming Einstein's theory. Sylvester James (Jim) Gates Jr. is an American theoretical physicist. He currently holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science with the physics department at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He is also affiliated with the University Maryland's School of Public Policy. He served on former President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. An excerpt from his book, Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe- At its heart, this is a story of frustration, faith, and ultimate victory--and of the scientists whose efforts helped build the framework for the big bang theory, catapulted Einstein to international fame, and shook the foundation of physics. Get the book here: https://amzn.to/3HDekKS More: https://www.quantamagazine.org/asymmetry-detected-in-the-distribution-of-galaxies-20221205/ Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Physics is not a faith-based organization. And the reason it's not is because we are in conversation with nature, with our observations, and with our experiments. And without that, physics becomes like a religion. Welcome, everyone. To this replay edition of Into the Impossible featuring celebrated Theoretical astrophysicist and Professor extraordinaire, the Ariadite Sylvester James Gates. You're going to discover why Professor Gates has pursued superfluidst. supersymmetry and super string theory for most of his legendary career, being one of the first to recognize its potential. Learn why the solar eclipse of 1919 was pivotal in the history of science and the dramatic story of how it made Albert Einstein an international science celebrity by verifying his general theory of relativity.

Listen along as Brian and James ponder the outsized role of imagination in scientific discovery. Please, let us know you're out there by taking a moment to write a review and give us a five-star rating. We love hearing from you. Now, come along as your host, Brian Keating, and Professor Gates discuss the gripping book, proving Einstein right as we venture into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please, how? Well, welcome, everybody.

there and watching this live or perhaps watching it recorded. I am Brian Keating and I am the associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. And today I'm also a physics professor. And today I'm delighted to be joined with James Gates, who is a professor at Brown University. He is the director. He is a Brown Theoretical Physics Center director in Brown University, which is my alma mater where I got my PhD. oh so many years ago and remember with great fondness, and I only wish that he had been there when I was there. Maybe I would have had a different career

and maybe could have advanced to experimental physics in my absence. But today we're here to talk with Professor Gates about his new book, which is called Proving Einstein Right, and some aspects of the continual quest, that physicists such as Einstein and all the way up through lectures on gravitation by Feynman, and others leading up to Jim and Stephen Hawking have really been compelled to understand what is the nature of gravity and how enticing and how fascinating gravity is. And I wonder, given all the contributions you've made in physics, especially in supersymmetry, which is, you know, in some ways, really sprang from your brain in the 1970s while you were writing the first degree on that PhD thesis on that at MIT and then had so much influence on physics.

And in some sense, even though you're the father, sometimes I joke, you're kind of denying paternity in some sense, you know, that you're maybe not as comfortable with some of the claims made about simper symmetry. So I hope to get into all this. We'll try to keep it general so people will get interested and get to know Jim's work if they don't already know it already. And so first I want to welcome you back to San Diego. Well, thank you, Brian. This is my first time on your campus. I've been here to San Diego before, but never here at UCSD. Yeah.

Let me correct you about one thing I think important for anyone who will be interested in proving Einstein right to know. I have a co-author. Yes. She is a novelist. She has written novels for 30 years, and she is extraordinary as a writer. So the thing that is kind of weird about our book is what happens when a theoretical physicist bumps into novels? Because, you know, as a theoretical physicist, you know, we're not expected to be great writers. And novelists are not expected to know about.

physics. So the book really is something that could only be done in a team, and we're quite proud of what we were able to accomplish. Yeah, I was delighted to be asked to see and look at some of the early, you know, first, first edition of the book over the summer or last summer, and was really gripped by it, as I said, and discussing it with you and with Kathy, or co-authors, just wonderful writer, and so energetic about the physics topics that are covered for a non-expert. I was blown away. But I said it reads like a novel, and I actually didn't know she was a novelist when I said that. And I said, it's truly a page turner. So congratulations on that. And I'm really excited about that. And why don't we just start right there? So the title. So proving Einstein

right. So normally when I talk to people in the press, especially after different events that have transpired in my career, I've become reluctant when people ask me, what do you hope to discover with your experiment, the Simon's Observatory or BISO or whatever? What do you hope to discover? And usually I say, well, you know, jobs as experimentalists is really to prove people wrong, not to prove them right. And maybe it's different in theoretical physics. But what is the origin of that title? What does it mean to you and to Kathy in writing this? Well, first of all, Kathy Pelletier and I respect highly the work of people who actually go out and look and talk to nature.

theorists don't actually do that to a large degree. We exist in this kind of duality between mathematics and reality. and we're always in tension trying to find a human way to tell a story. And so Kathy and I in writing this book, although we chose the title, proving Einstein right, for the reader who is actually carefully watching what we're doing, we also try to get the reader to understand that science doesn't prove things right. It proves things wrong. And in fact, one of the things that I quote of Einstein, which is a real favorite of mine,

is, I'm going to paraphrase, he basically says that the life of a theorist is not to be envied. And the reason is because nature is a very strict taskmaster. And she never says you're right. The most she will give you is a maybe. Maybe. And even then, he conjecture that at some point maybe all theories will be found to be wrong. So it's a very interesting relation. I know the public thinks that science is about things being right, but you can't prove things right.

Yeah. And in fact, I think a friend of ours mutual friend Alex Filipenko at UC Berkeley said something to the effect, and maybe he's quoting it in somebody else's name, you know, an experimentalist only needs to be wrong once in his or her career to have his or her career terminated that a theorist only has to be right once in his or her life to make a career. And stakes are high, and I think, you know, Einstein had many, you know, blunders and mistakes. And, of course, our other mutual friend, Mary Olivia, wrote a book about not only including limited to Einstein, but many other famous physicist and, and biologists, et cetera, that made, you know, blunders, quote unquote, that sometimes turned out to be, you know, prescient and sometimes turned out to be not so. And I always find it interesting that Einstein's predictions that lead up to this book, and the book spans over a decade of time from 1911 to 1922. And it's a very loving portrait. And you get into the minds, you get into the psychology of these astronomers, these financiers, these travel agents. I mean, it's just unbelievable.

How were you able to, you know, I mean, you're previously known for writing very technical books on super symmetry and things like that or your other passions. How was it to both have to carry the water, so to speak, for the physics meat and potatoes, but also to get into the psychological and character studies that you did? Sure. Let me first of all, again, praise my co-author. It turns out, although Kathy predominantly has worked in fiction and writing novels, she has an amazing ability as a detective or as a researcher. And so she was able to actually, for example, contact descendants of the characters that we were writing about.

And so we had access to writings that the characters were actually telling their families at the time they were doing these things. Right. And even later. So all praise to Kathy. Yeah. I remember getting an email from her and I was sorry to interrupt, but she was asking, well, what's the maximum duration of an eclipse? And I'm like, are you sure Jim's not going to ask that? It was very journalistic almost that she was getting into it.

So in such great deep. That's exactly right. In fact, Kathy paid me a great compliment recently. we were being interviewed, and she said that I have, in some sense, changed her as a writer. And part of that, she, you know, her comment was, as a novelist, she has absolute control when she says a character has a blue shirt on certain day, the character has a blue shirt on a certain day. But she said she found, working in this realm where reality is fixed, she found out that

she had this deep passion for accuracy. And, of course, that's what journalists want, but that's also, of course, how we make our living, it is accuracy that we deliver to the world, because that accuracy is what undergirds our technology, which allows us to provide great apps to humanity and benefits. And when you think about this great character, Einstein, I mean, no single physicist, I remember seeing a picture of Time magazine, I think the week after he passed away in the 55 or so. He died in 1955. Yeah.

Do you remember when he died? Do you remember that thing? I don't. And it's interesting because my interest in science that actually preceded his death Around 1953 or 54, I first got interested in science. But I don't remember hearing about Einstein until like 1957, so after he died. So I was not aware of his death. I remember the cover depicted, you know, planet Earth has seen from space with a giant sign that said Einstein lived here.

We all remember that cover. He's so much larger than life as, you know, the beer, the mustache rather, and the pipe and the violin and the bicycle. These things that, you know, really fascinated him. And there are similarities, I would say, between the two of you, and that you have many hobbies, you have many interest outside. Do you find that these different interests that you've had throughout your career, whether it be your professional level as a bowler, essentially at MIT and Caltech when you're a postdoc, or, you know, the interest that you had in the space program and actually trying to qualify as an astronaut? not. Do these things give you mere kind of psychological respite from the rigors of being a theoretical physicist, or do they feed a different part of your spirit? They feed a different part of my spirit, quite frankly. And the things that you're very kind

and your praise, most of the things you're talking about are deep in my past. They're not things that are potentially going to return to the realm of reality. But I have all, although I have a deep, passionate love for science, which started when I was four years old, I also, understood about the personality that I am, that I wanted to do lots of things. In fact, for me, the idea would have been to create maybe 10 clones and that each one of them do a different thing because I had that many things I wanted to do. So what I've been able to do in my career is build multiple careers on the basis of this first one, which is a deep, passionate love for physics and trying to get it right at that mathematical physics interface. You don't

want me in your lab, because I will destroy your equipment. We went in before, and of course, it's smoldering right now. That's right. So I've always told people that that's somehow, that is a skill set that I do not possess, and I know that. I learned that when I was a student in MIT. And so I have very great admiration and appreciation for what it is that people who go and observe nature do in our discipline. I often tell people, physics is not a faith-based organization. And the reason it's not is because we are in conversation with nature, with our observations, and with our experiments. And without that, physics becomes like a religion.

I want to come back to that in a little bit, and hopefully I won't forget. But I do want to touch upon one last kind of commonality and difference between you and many physicists that you do share in common. And you mentioned it during an informal talk you gave so kindly to my group earlier today. And that was the aspect of physics as culture. Yes. The physics should not be divorced from culture thought as a separate entity from culture. And yet, you know, most people would say there's no way some STEM geek or nerd that he or she is part of like a culture. That's art.

That's, you know, paint. That's music. What are you, how do you feel about, about the interface between physics as a, as a branch of culture within our society? Sure. Well, as I read, well, I read, first of all, I refer to Albert Einstein as my hero Maximus. He is my maximum scientific hero in my life. life. And it is clear if you look at his life

that he understood that although he had made these enormous contributions to our understanding the structure of nature, it was within the context of a cultural matrix. And he was pretty clear about that. And so, if you, for example, one of the quotes that

of his, which is a favorite of mine is, he says, and I'm paraphrased I'll never get it exactly right. But he essentially says that at their highest levels, art and science coalesce, and plasticity, aesthetics, and form. And so he understands that physics, as the kind of physics that he was engaged in,

is in fact a product of culture. And the same way that I, and by the way, do you know what he would have done if he wasn't a physicist? I think I had known. I know it wasn't, you know, Tour de France competitor, but... No. He said he'd be a violinist. And so he understood this,

to me, it's more than an ephemeral connection as I've experienced creativity in my current life, I've concluded that there's a single source of creativity in human consciousness and that this single source can be manifest in different ways, whether it be arts, whether it be science, whether it be mathematics, but that this essential thing that allows us to be creative, it looks like it's pretty much the same from all the things that I have read about. And so it is not perhaps surprising that when you look at our greatest scientists, they all seem to have this message about science is actually part of culture. And one way, by the way that I think that that's true is because of the way science has created. I like lots of music. And among my musical likes is classical music.

So, you know, I like Debussy. I like Rimsky-Corsico. I like Grieg. You like Little Lane, I found out today. Yes. Well, that's a whole different axis. But the point of bringing this up is if you look at classical music and if you're aficionado of classical music, you can ask yourself, well, I like all these things,

why were the people who created them, how did they create these different forms? And part of that, we know the answer to it because often, parts of classical music are drawn from folk music, which means that it's arising from the cultural matrix in which the individuals themselves exist. So if that's going on with music, I have a very strong suspicion that it goes on actually with all of STEM that at the boundary,

where we're trying to create new knowledge, it is that irrational creativity, the same thing that powers the creation of music and art and literature, it's that irrationality, the illogical nature, that drives how you make advance. Einstein made one quote that puzzled me for decades, which was, imagination is more important than knowledge.

Yeah, I've always said, I don't want my surgeon to say that. I'm really going to be imaginative today. Exactly. And so that puzzled me for decades. I first learned about Albert Einstein when I was 16 years old. That's when I was first introduced

of special relativity. I thought it was one of the most amazing things that human mind could recreate. And then I came across the statement, imagination is more important than knowledge. And I was like, how can that possibly be? Because for me, at that age, imagination was about Marvel comic books, superheroes. It was about science fiction.

It was about the imagination, just being a space where I could creatively engineer worlds within my ears. That's the way I thought about imagination. But for him to then say that that is more important than knowledge, like special relatives, like Newton's Law, which are things that ultimately provide enormous benefit for our species, how could he say that was my question? And so decades later, I think I concluded he was right, and I think it works like this. Knowledge is like a ball, a ball of finite size. At any given point in time, we humans have a finite amount of knowledge, and if you

go, if you wait a decade or so, we have more. So the question is, how does this ball grow? And the answer, as far as I can tell and have experience and watch other scientists work, is that we actually make up the new answers. And where does that come from? It comes from our imagination. And if that's the case, then I believe that one can understand how the irrational and the logical parts of us that are embedded in our cultural matrix

are contributing to the achievement and growth of science. It's so interesting you mentioned that because, you know, the center that I'm the associate director of is called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And the title of this podcast that we call, that is the podcast of the center, is called Into the Impossible. And it's based on a quote by Sir Arthur C. Clark, which said the only way to determine what's possible is to go beyond into the impossible. And that's kind of this expanding sphere of knowledge. And what is it expanding into, not the void, but really into ignorance or perhaps into the impossible, which we don't understand. Yeah. I like to think of it as expanding into darkness because it's shedding light for the human mind in such a way that we as a species, at least in principle, have a shot of living more bountiful lives. So to me, that's what the expansion is about. So getting back to the book, Proving Einstein Right, that you wrote with Kathy Pelletier, this story is really a human drama. And it's spanning continents and it's spanning, you know, World War II and pre-World War I rather. Sorry, I meant pre-World War I mean pre-World War I and across the globe. And it was a dangerous time and it was a time of ideologies and passions and stereotypes and prejudices against this type of physics.

I always think, you know, Einstein had one thing going for him in this quest to, you know, maybe prove his theory of general relativity right, which is that he had the work of Newton that he was standing on whose shoulders he was standing. And they knew, he knew that there were something odd about Mercury. And that's a little bit different than, say, the state of affairs when we find ourselves today as physicists. We can make a theory, but oftentimes we can't, I shouldn't say we, I should say you theorist and your fellow theorist, you guys can predict a theory. But you don't often have a retradiction against which to compare. In other words, he had this advance of the perihelion of Mercury,

so they knew something was deeply wrong with Newtonian theory alone for hundreds of years, perhaps. Absolutely. And so how is it to work on this expansion into the impossible as we were thinking, what would it have been like for him, you know, as compared to someone like you in the modern era, where we don't really have testable, you know, kind of returictions against which we can compare super symmetric predictions. Well, first of all, we do actually have some very mild retradictions. Oh, really? In the sense that you can't, as a theorist, you can't write something that would be in conflict with the standard model because your friends would laugh at you immediately, right?

So in that sense, we'd like I say, but you're right, the retradictions are less sharply defined now than perhaps at any point in the history of the field. And that leaves, that leaves room for lots of people to exercise their imagination and their creativity to try to imagine the way the world works. I, on the other hand, although you mentioned I was one of the early adopters, first adopters of the idea of supersymmetry, I'm actually an extraordinarily conservative physicist. And so although I think it's valuable to explore an idea like supersymmetry, and I think I even know why it's valuable, which is not what most of my colleagues believe, I think that we run a danger of trying to create scenarios where there are almost no retradictions that confine our imagination.

As I said, it's that conversation that stops us from being a faith-based operation. Right, yeah. So maybe let's get back to that. So you and I've talked actually about this notion of what constitutes good physics. And this is a matter of philosophy and taste. But it comes down to, oftentimes comes down to Carl Popper, who was a logician, a philosopher, who came up with this famous demarcation kind of hypothesis, which said, you can tell if something is scientific if it can be falsified. And in many cases, you know, so Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is a large portion of the subject of your book, proving Einstein right, was known, at least could explain it, although there were some errors of factors of two.

in the mercury calculate. That's a factor of two between physicists. And it could have easily been proven wrong. And in fact, many people had deep suspicions, even decades. And you mentioned this in the book. You guys point this. There were deep suspicions, if it were correct, really, even until after the 1922, or 1919, sorry, 1919, solar eclipse.

So we're celebrating the centennial of the famous eclipse that sort of solidified Einstein's reputation for all time. But even up until that time, it wasn't clear that there was any room necessarily for falsifiable of that. And I think people could say, well, there could have been some other theory that could have shamed in the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. And so you couldn't really prove it wrong. So is it the case that you see that Einstein was kind of in a no-win situation? Like he famously said, well, what if the expedition had been, you know, I've proven you wrong. And he said, I would have felt sorry for the good Lord because the equations are correct. I don't believe that he was really that confident.

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we have to reflect a little bit on his trajectory. So starting at 15, he, in his mind, begins to construct the philosophical basis for special relativity. And with a very simple question.

What would the universe look like if I was riding on a beam of light, right? So he starts from this philosophical basis with his earliest work, and it turns out to be an enormous triumph. It runs the table in the language of some poker games, right? And so given that he had had such success, and then the next problem comes along, how does he make his 1905 success consistent with the law of gravity, which is what leads to his 1915 work.

But as you mentioned, he gets it wrong in 1911. I mean, he just totally blows it in 1911. But when he finally gets to the right answer and is able to show the procession of the percellion of Mercury comes from his mathematics, the thing that he also said, there were three tests, that if any one of them failed, the theory failed. field. One of them was

procession of Piedelian Mercury, but he knew that beforehand. He just had to get to it. The second one, the whole. The ace in the hole, sort of. The second one, of course, being the deflection of starlight by stars, like the sun. And the third one, which you well know, because you are an accomplished astralvisis,

the third one was gravitational Doppler, which didn't get settled for decades after his even after his death. And so if you actually look at what happened in terms of the history, he says all three have to be passed. One of them passes immediately. One of them provisionally gets a fast in 1990,

and then in 1920 gets a more rousing path. And the third one doesn't get a pass until the 60s or 70s. And so what happened? Well, we clearly did not follow his standard on proving him right. And that's another reason why we like to use that title, Because as you said, in the book, we actually discuss that his statement of three tests is not satisfied until over 20 years after his death. Yes. Right.

And so that was, the title is not to be taken literally. It's sort of a metaphorical title that we want the reader to come back to as they have read the text. Because when most readers speak, they say, oh, of course I know what that means. But after they've read the text, we want them to reflect, do you really know what he meant? Right. And what does history say about what happened? Exactly. So getting to the faith-based arguments that we started to touch on a few minutes back, you know, there's sort of a culture war going on in physics today, and it revolves around the question of the reality of multiple universes. And maybe you can say a little bit about the origin of such things within the context of string theory and supersymmetry. I'll just say in the context of the experimental astrophysics realm that I study, the context supposes that.

if in a period of exponential inflation occurred at the earliest moments in the universe, perhaps a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth after a second after the Big Bang, that the universe would unavoidably be accompanied by a concomitant host of many other universes. And this, when it was discovered that there are certain predictions of string theory, which in some sense could be interpreted as also providing motivation for multiverses, which maybe you can expound a little bit upon, that you now have people speaking about their belief in the multiverse. And, you know, you've spoken about this in the past,

but I wonder if you could first recapitulate. What is the motivation from just a purely physics, not a philosophy or theology standpoint for the multiverse? Sure. So many years ago, I was a participant in the television production of the Elegant Universe, where Brian Green was the principal host. But Stephen Weinberg is in it, and so is Shelley Glass Show. And Shelley points out something very interesting in that presentation.

And it's a problem, in fact, that Bedog's string theory to this day. Essentially, I'm going to change the language of Shelley's work. But essentially, what Shelley points out, not with such fidelity, is that The mathematics of string theory that has been broadly accepted by many, many theorists has this philosophical hold in it. And the philosophical hold is, if you take string theory in a simple mathematical formulation, it describes a universe that has nine spatial directions, not R3. And so you have to add this extra mathematical widget in order to get from the nine dimensions of the math to the three dimensions of our observation. This widget is called compactification.

And when string theory was first studied in the middle 80s, people were pretty sure there were some small number of such mathematical widgets that you could use. But what Shelley was sensitive to, although he didn't state it in this terms, was that no one has actually figured out how many widgets there are. And as long as you don't know how many widgets there are to achieve this result that brings the mathematics, of string theory down to be consistent with our observations of dimensionality,

then you have no way to falsify it. So he nails the point precisely in a way that most people who are aficionados or string theory have yet to address. It took me a decade to conclude that he was right. That it's the counting of the number, the way I'd like to say it, until you can tell me mathematically how to count the number, of widgets, you do not have a theory that's falsifiable. Now, on the other hand, string theory does have incredibly large numbers of these widgets.

Depending on what variety that you want to use, there's collabial compactification, and there's non-geometric structures, and there's asymmetrical orbitals. The list goes on and on. And one of the amazing things for me is that every few years someone figures out another one of these widgets. Taxonomy, right? Yeah, so we found another widget here, right? And so that in and of itself is saying that there's an incompleteness.

And so until you satisfy that condition, you can't falsify it. And that's really the essence of Shelley's message. So I think it was right. On the other hand, about several months ago, I brought this issue up with a physicist at Harvard, Kummer Vafa, who is one of the folks who are working on a part. of string theory. There's a part of string theory called F theory. And in that, there is a fair body of mathematical evidence that you can count the widgets. If you can extend that to all possible string theories, then Shelley's objection goes away, and it becomes falsifiable. But even Vafa, who's the

proponent of something called the Swamp Land, which you've probably heard about, in the context of F theory, which is really the initial, well, one of the place he spends a lot of his intellectual energy, even there, there is no absolute proof of the counting. And so until that happens, I'm going to be highly skeptical. So before we wrap up, I do want to think, you know, years in the future, hopefully not decades and decades as it took Einstein to get verified. But if you could imagine future physicist and novelists collaborating together

to write a book called Proving Gates Right, what would it be? what would the contributions be? What would you most like to see, you know, if you could have one divine being answer, any one question about the nature and origin of the universe or the properties of its entities therein, what would it be?

What it fascinates you the most that you'd most like to know the answer to? So, as you know, Brian, I have been pursuing some, well, some mathematical approaches that have been described as avant-garde or eclectic, they involve taking differential equations and then recasting them in the language of networks

and then studying the properties of these networks. So we call these networks a dinkras. And this is something that I've received a fair amount of criticism. Like, what in the world? Why are you doing this? And the answer turns out to be because there are problems

at the basis of string theory that I am aware of from, when I was a postdoc at Harvard that no one has ever solved. And so that suggests that if you have a problem where, you know, my, the community to which I belong contains many individuals of which I am in total awe and admiration of their intellect. Just absolutely the case. And yet none of these people have been able to solve this particular problem I'm describing. That suggests that you need a new tool to attack the problem.

And this network approach was my effort to start to develop a new kind of tool to attack this problem. So I've referred to this problem as the white whale in my life. I'm like Ahab chasing this white whale through the darkness that the knowledge expands into, right? And so if the good Lord would suddenly appear before me and say, Jim, you're going to die, but in order to do that, I'll give you an answer. Do you still want to ask the question? I would ask the question. And the question would be,

how do I find the irreducible representations of super symmetry? Very good. Well, I want to finish this interview with the question I like to ask people. And it involves a general nature of imagination and curiosity. And I do that with all the guests that I'm so privileged to interview, such as yourself. And it really involves your first career in some sense going. back to 1972 as a student at MIT, where you began your career as an educator. And my question to you is, and there's no right or wrong answer as far as I can tell, is can you teach, you know, the kind

of creativity that physicists such as yourself need to employ in their craft, or is it sort of a divine gift that is, you know, visited upon some people by fortunes, goodliness and providence in some sense, or is it just random luck? Let me respond by slightly changing your question, Brian, by changing to the issue of genius. Because I no longer think about genius the way I did when I was a young physicist because I've been around very bright people

and I've watched what's happened. And I don't, well, first of all, I don't think you can teach it. But what you can do is, is to support the idiosyncratic thinking patterns that exist in every single individual. That's what makes us different. That you can add an increased possibility or probability

that the idiosyncratic nature of an individual's thinking will lead to a unique, innovative answer. That's what I think you can do as a teacher. Very good. Well, Dr. Jim Gates, Ford Foundation professor. sir, and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you and your audience. Yes, thank you so much for being here with us. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Thanks for listening to this replay episode of Into the Impossible with your always inquisitive host, Brian Keating. Please leave us a review. Professor Keating loves hearing from you. For a chance to win your very own piece of space dust in the form of a meteorite fragment, subscribe to Brian's mailing list at Briankeetting.com. And remember, always be curious. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars.

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