Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Stephon Alexander: Fear of a Black Universe (#179)

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Stephon Alexander is a Professor of Physics at Brown University and the President of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). Alexander has had previous appointments at Stanford University, Imperial College, Penn State, Dartmouth College, and Haverford College. He is a specialist in the field of string cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-Branes. In such models, the early universe emerged from the destruction of a higher dimensional D-brane which ignites a period of rapid expansion of space often referred to as cosmic inflation. Years ago, cosmologist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. In Fear of a Black Universe, Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream — to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach leads him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Alexander uses them to explore some of physics' greatest mysteries, from what happened before the big bang to how the universe makes consciousness possible. Drawing on his experience as a Black physicist, he makes a powerful case for diversifying our scientific communities. Compelling and empowering, Fear of a Black Universe offers remarkable insight into the art of physics. In his last best selling book, The Jazz of Physics, Alexander revisits the ancient interconnection between music and the evolution of astrophysics and the laws of motion. He explores new ways music, in particular jazz music, mirrors modern physics, such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the physics of the early universe. He also discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from “improvisational logic” exemplified in Jazz performance and practice. Alexander also recently served as a scientific advisor for the Walt Disney film A Wrinkle In Time, directed by Ava DuVernay, and currently serves as President of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSPB). https://nsbp.org/ https://www.stephonalexanderlab.com/ https://www.basicbooks.com/contributor/stephon-alexander/ @stephstem Support our Sponsors! Audible Audible.com/impossible LinkedIn Jobs! Use this link to post your first job ad for FREE LinkedIn.com/impossible 00:00:00 Intro 0002:31 The back story of the book. 00:25:09 Applying the creativity of music to science. 00:29:00 The risks of theorizing in public. 00:32:39 How do you succeed in outsider thinking? The example of Faraday. 00:38:17 Applying outsider thinking: work on condensed matter in cosmology 00:44:16 Why do we need to understand dark energy? 00:54:49 Cosmological Models-String/Gas Theory and Into the Cosmological Matrix 01:16:40 In 50 years, what do you most want the answer to? 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Today we're talking to a preeminent cosmologist, a thinker, a motivator, an inspiration, and also my best man in my wedding. But today we're going to talk about him, and that's Professor Stefan Alexander, my oldest friend pretty much. And really, as I say, at inspiration. you doing today, my brother, Steph? Hey, this was one of the many interviews that I'm looking forward to. I hope not that many, but... Well, no, one of the few, few of many, let's say.

You're going to say like top 20 interviews of the week of the day. Well, you deserve all the rich success that you are engendering, and that is, of course, Stefan Alexander, author of previously the Jazz of Physics, and now Fear of a Black Universe, and that title we're going to get into in the cover of the book. Cover of the book is not as interesting as jazz of physics, at least visually, but the content material is just off the charts. I can't really give you the acclaim that you deserve stuff on because it's such a great book.

It's so well written and it is really going to open up new horizons. But before we do that, before we get into the meat and the guts of it, The title is inescapable. As soon as I heard, I was like, damn, why don't I write that as my book? No, I don't know I love Chuck D. I love Public Enemy, Flava Flav. I've loved them for decades. You know that.

But I could never get the Encomium. I could never get the blurb that you got. I'm going to read it here, none other than Professor Chuck D, rapper and co-founder of Public Enemy, who says about this book, The Rabbit Hole, gets wrestled here, And old school saying applies. The more you know, the more you don't know. That's really old. That's like Aristotle, man.

Dance along this read into the unknown and find out that this book may be the best ever answer to what is soul. And I'm just wondering, man, do you want me to read what Chuck D said, what flavor flabe said, rather? Yeah. He said, yo boy, what time is it? It's time to read Fear of a Black Universe. And he's got the huge cut. about it. He didn't say that. Brother, Stefan, tell me, what does this mean?

What is Fear of a Black Universe? Where'd you get the name? Where'd you get the subtitle? An Outsiders Guide to the Future of Physics? Yes, yes. Well, there's a funny story about that. And like, if you allow me. So you've written a book, you're losing a Nobel Prize, and you know that

finding a good title is like tough business, right? Because, you know, you want to draw the reader in, the books, they're in the books, they see the book, and the title can draw them in. So anyway, make a long story short, my editor, T.J. Kelleher kept bother me. What's the title of the book? I mean, this is in the middle of writing my book. I don't have a title yet. And I was at some point, I kept coming up with titles, and the titles were corny. And, you know, like, I'm not even going to waste time telling you how corny some of these titles were. And he kept coming back, and the marketing team kept come back and saying,

nah, that doesn't really cut it. Nah, that, whatever. So one day, I actually invited T.J. to come to Brown to give some talks to different, you know, colleagues about writing, you know, potentially book deals and things like that. But it was an opportunity for me and him to really hang out and talk more about the book. And one, I took him to this Irish pub in Providence. And it was like two, this is like pre-COVID. This is like a couple of years ago.

And I took him to this pub at late at night. And, you know, we're having a few bruise, you know. And at some point, I decided, and you know, you've known me for a long time. You know, I suck at being sarcastic. It's just not me to do that, right? I was like, I'm going to be sarcastic here. And I said, TJ, I got the title of the book for you. And it was designed to just be a spoof, right?

was a joke. I said, fear of a black universe, man. And anyway, I left that behind. And then a month later, you know, he, I get, I get a text from him. He goes, that's it. I met with the marketing team. They love it. And I was like, really? So anyway, that's kind of, but the truth of the matter is actually, after some reflection, I realized it actually, it was one of these intuitive types of things, right, that deep down, the book is about the, um, the title was, it's a combination of things, right? In one sense, there's ambiguity to it. In one sense, it's like, well, when we think about black and the idea of the category of black, blackness, and, you know, that which, you know, that which is misunderstood, right, ignored sometimes,

invisible. And stigmatize, I mean, so we, you know, when we think about even our laws, like, you know, Black body radiation was misunderstood for why black holes, the singularity, right? The event horizon. What's inside? Dark matter, dark energy. So we tend to in physics, just, you know, not, you know, give names like that to dark this, black this, but things we don't understand that are mysterious. It's a placeholder for those things sometimes. Also, I just think also when we think about like society and sociology and psychology, you know, the dark, we're afraid of the dark, right?

When we think about blackness, like, you know, the American notion of being black. When I lived in Europe, I realized that, you know, white people out there even created their own categories of like, you know, well, you know, they're stigmatized, you know, being stigmatized, right? And having also black ideas, ideas that could actually get you in trouble, right? And so you might want to, you have as a physicist maybe, an idea that is so out there and crazy, it may be. you know, your colleagues may write you off and kick you out of the club. They won't invite you to reindeer games and these kind of things, right? You won't get invited to a conference. So there's a fear in that. So I think like in that sense, but primarily it really was a nod to public enemy because I grew up with, you know, I, you know, I was, I grew up in a Bronx, right? Not too far from where you grew up. And

in the 80s and public enemy, I used to wear, you know, I mean African medallions and things like that, all throughout college, right? You know, one of my favorite lines, I think was from Welcome to the Terodome on the album Fear of a Black Planet was, I got so much trouble on my mind, refused to lose. It was, you know, like, you know,

yeah, I got trouble in my mind, man, but I refuse to lose, you know. So it was a nod to that time of my life. And also an acknowledgement that, you know, despite the fact that some people, People will say, I have the subtitle, the outsiders guy. People say, you're not an outsider. You're a full professor at an Ivy League school.

But there was a part of me that was like, no, I still choose, in a sense, to have, to acknowledge the outsider in me and celebrate it and see it actually as a positive. So the book was also a celebration, not a complaining, okay, and not a, well, was me, I'm an outsider. but actually here the hidden advantages actually to be in an outsider. So the book kind of goes into that as well. That's my long-winded kind of answer. That's your long-winded short story. But you know, my grandfather invented cliff notes, right? And I asked him, how did he do it?

And he said, well, he said, let me make the long story short. No, I'm just kidding. That's an old joke. One of the other cover Encomia and blurbs that appear on Fear of a Black Universe comes from our mutual friend, the now president of the Simon's Foundation. Professor David Spurgel passed a three-time guest on Into the Impossible. You're a four-time guest on Into the Impossible, so you still beat Brother David. But he said this book is effectively a sequel to a brief history of time.

Now, I remember meeting Professor Stephen Hawking in London in 95, 96, when we were both hot-shot young grad students at Brown. You were hotter than I was. but anyway. And there was a question post- him. You actually, by the way, I got to give you a shout-out. Without you, I wouldn't be drinking the beverage that's in here right now, which is coffee.

You introduced me to coffee at age 21, 22, whenever we met, and we used to go to Ocean's Coffee Roaster. Shout out to No-Long. Pour some coffee out on the sidewalk, right? But Brother David Spurgel says this book compares to a brief history of time. Now, when I heard Stephen Hawking asked, why did you write The Brief History of Time? He said, because I needed to pay for my daughter's college tuition. And I always thought that was kind of silly.

Now, I know you've got a lovely daughter, but that wasn't a reason you wrote this book. But how does it compare to Brief History of Time? Why is it, as I believe the case to be true, a worthy successor to that most famous of all popular science books? Yeah. it's really funny and it was probably the biggest compliment that I think any science writer, physics writer

could ever get. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but let's say David Spurgel you know is one of the most important cosmologists on the planet today and coming from it was a big deal

but also, you know, he was I think it's public knowledge maybe, but he was offered the Lucasian chair. He was offered Hawking's position. So who better to come from than him than David Spurgo? Again, again, that's a conjecture. I'm not certain that that was a case, but in fact check that. But either way, my point here, maybe he was being considered for the location chair. That might be the more correct way of saying it.

But either way, I, the first. science book I ever laid my hands on. And it was given to me, I was, you know, at Deer Clinton High School in the Bronx in the Bronx in Europe, 6,000 students. We had, you know, roughly 60% drop our rate. But this woman, a father, went to my high school. His name is Barney Sharon, S-H-A-R-I-N. And Susan Sharon wanted to kind of reach out to, you know, count promising students and give a scholarship, an academic scholarship in her father's name, Bonnie Sharon. I think, you know, Stanley also went to my high school. Penelift shirts went to my high school, right?

You know, make a long story short, you know. And, but anyway, and she gave me this book as a gift when I was 15 years old, a brief history of time. And it's funny because I actually have my copy of a brief history of the time still here with me. And, of course, I just wanted it. I was actually talking about the other day, so it was writing his hair. But anyway, and it's one of these things where when you're writing, you know, you don't realize the impact, but books, really important books are going to have in your writing.

So I actually deliberately, when I was writing this book, wanted to write a book with a similar type of format as a brief history of time, and another book, which is a character of physical law. And so let me give you an example what I mean by that. And that's by Feynman. That's his messenger. By Feynman. Yeah. Messengers.

Yeah. So in Feynman's book, he wanted to kind of spell out thinking about physics in terms of principles that maybe we can just think about maybe the simplest principles and explain much of physics with these principles. And I wanted to play a similar game here. But I wanted to use these principles. I wanted to do that to liberate the reader from, from jargon and like, you know, the the mess of complicated equations and things like that.

I wanted to say, okay, if we can tie down these three principles and really explicate them in the beginning of the book, then I can use that as a basis or as the ingredient, and the basic ingredients to then talk about, for me, the most pressing and the pressing questions on the horizons of the field, the field of fundamental physics, cosmology, particle physics, and quantum gravity and unification. So I wanted to kind of riff on that in the same manner that Stephen Hawkins did. And remember, one of the things that really fascinated me and really caught me, hooked me on Hawking was, you know, he asked one of the, he did go there.

He said, you know, I want to know, you know, did God have a choice in creating universe, right? And like, so he also discussed matters that maybe we were taught not to discuss in our education as physicists. And so likewise, I did similar things. I talked about, you know, I gave myself deliberately talk about questions about life and consciousness and like, you know, some aspects of spirituality, but not very far away from the basic principles that the book, you know, establishes at the very beginning. So it's in that sense. So I was surprised, not surprised. I didn't tell David when I gave him a book to read, well, when the book company gave him a book read that the book was inspired by Hawkin, he read it and inferred that on his own. So that,

so that me was very pleasing. Yeah, I have to be honest with you, there are a lot of books that have come out lately from colleagues of ours, you know, that talk about experiences of African Americans and other people of color in science, et cetera. And, you know, from the title and maybe even from the outsiders, I thought that's what it was going to be about. I mean, as they say, don't judge a book by its cover. But on the other hand, what else do you have to judge a book by. You know, it's like we have to be Bayesian's and look at analysis with the data that we have. And so even though knowing you, I was, I thought it was incongruous, you know, because I didn't think you were going to take that attack where you would say, you know, this is the experience

of a black, you know, man in America, in the Bronx, you know, coming from Trinidad, immigrant story, all the stuff that you've been through. And it really wasn't about that. I mean, jazz of physics was more kind of autobiographical. This is kind of, I call this, you know, kind of more like a flight plan, you know, as a pilot. You know, I'm a pilot, right? Yes, yeah, no, that's a good analogy, actually. You remember when we flew together, stuff? Well, I have very good memories of that.

Especially when we got serious weather. And I was like, okay, this guy is going to navigate this. Okay. This guy who, you know, I first. This is the way I'm going to choose to die. That's exactly right. This guy who can't clean up a plate after he cooks at the house is going to take me on a flight across the Rhode Island's down there. No, it didn't. It worked out okay. We're both here to talk about it. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $400. $199. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. But, you know, I see it as a flight plan. Where can physics go? Where can things like consciousness go? Where can things like aliens and dark energy in the greatest mysteries? So I want to say, you know, normally you hear questions like this to an eminent scientist like yourself. you know, what got you interested in science? What, what, you know, what inspires you?

I don't want to know that. I don't want to know that. I already know that, by the way. But I want to ask you as a scientist now, not as a kid. What is your curiosity burning brightest about? Yeah, that's a good one. You know, I've always had, you knew that when I was a grad student, we were grad students in the same year, that, like I was always, when Penrose had his theory with Stuart Hammond off, remember, about, you know, his theory about the mitochondria and being the harnessing quantum information to speak about consciousness in the brain, I went to Humphrey Maris, who's an eminent, you know, eminent, um, experimental physicists. And I said, and I went to me, I made a case to Humphrey that we should do an experiment, like a laser experiment with, you know, you know,

know, by studying basically the wave guide properties of mitochondria, like to see whether or not, you know, you can have quantum coherence. So I was already like, you know, I already had this kind of fascination with the connection between physics and biology and life, but at a more deeper level, not at the level of like, you know, atomic bonds and like chemistry, which already is a connection between quantum mechanics already and life because you need quantum chemistry about, right, bond in structures, right, and veiling shells and all that good stuff. That's quantum mechanics, and you need that to talk about proteins. But, you know, the more weird things about quantum tunneling, you know, these other weird

of things, quantum entanglement, right? These other categories of quantum mechanics is even more bizarre, and whether or not these things have something to say about life. I already was exploring that, but, of course, you know, the importance of writing papers and following the herd and getting a good postdoc. And that bug never left me. And I think this book was my way of exploring that. You know, we write books sometimes to kind of explore and better articulate things that we have in our head. And it's an opportunity. It's one format that we can, you know, explore these questions. And so the book was, so that, let me stop talking. My fascination these days is,

okay, given what we know about cosmology, we know about dark energy and dark matter and cosmic inflation, maybe the theory of the early universe, where space time might emerge, a space time in emerging property, is it something else? And whether or not, like, you know, where do we see hints of life and consciousness interpolating those mysteries, right? And the book does explore some of those questions and speculates on that, the same way, in the same spirit of, like, say, how Feynman ends his book in the character of physical law, or Falkinsie Briefest Year's Time as two good examples.

By the way, very tough acts of follow, and I, you know, the jury is out. I don't think I owned up to it, but it was an attempt. So we see where it goes. But I'm wrong by saying some crazy stuff. And the last of course was my fear. My fear of coming out and just saying that. And I think that, you know, going back to the idea of like, I think one, the idea of like, okay, I'm a black man or a black person doing prison, right?

I just have a what better way, right? What better way to express that than to then to really go there in terms of in terms of theorizing, right? So I don't know my point was sort of like yeah Let me tackle some really really hard questions in this book Let me speculate And let me not be afraid of being wrong or even chastised because of it Because guess what? That's sometimes what it means to be

To live in a world where you're already stigmatized And so what fear do I have? It already happens to me you know So that's rough And I wonder you know if you could comment on because you must have this happen a lot too, where, you know, I note on my videos, whenever I post a video that's about cosmology or about string theory and things like that, I get comments such as, you know, the following, that big bangs in an oscillator flow or spiral cosmological model, my friend Roger Perlman, et cetera, et cetera. So I get all these comments and, you know, they're completely unorthodox, you know, space. is finite, the Big Bang never happened, time is infinite, everything emerges from, you know,

a quadrupolar pair. I get a lot of, you know, refreshingly candid new theories, shall we say. I never see, by the way, I never see experimentalists, you know, I never see like, oh, here's an experiment, you know, except nowadays I start to get people wanting to investigate UFOs and things like that. And so they are proposing observations and I'm involved with some of these But anyway, the point is, how do you... I got a lot of aliens so I can point them out to you. Yeah, so how do you draw the line? Because there's only so much time in the day.

You need to apply a low-pass filter and block off your time. How do you know, like, when someone's an outsider, like a Nikola Tesla or somebody like that, you know, destined to change the world or an Elon Musk or even an Einstein, you know, before he was Einstein. He was an Einstein as our mutual friend, Jim Gates, always says. How do you know someone's an outsider versus being totally out to lunch? That's a good. That's a good. Let me see if I can address that with the following notion. And one of my heroes, you know, part of my biggest hero in physics, in terms of personally, is Leon Cooper, Nobel Prize winner for superconductivity. And, of course, and I discuss as a chapter where I talk about,

his description of his discovery to me when I was a graduate student. When I was a postdoc came back to visit him. And I think this captures it. But one of the things that, you know, it occurred to me with Leon in the many years that I've known him, almost 30 years, as long as I've known you, since we both knew Leon when we were first year of graduate. That's right. In fact, both took advanced quantum mechanics with him. Remember that class? Oh, I remember it.

Yeah. He told me I didn't learn my undergraduate quantum mechanics well enough to ask him about negative energy states and the Dirac equation. Anyway, he did so very gentlemanly. And I teased him. I said, well, I learned quantum mechanics from your textbook, Professor Cooper. No, I didn't. Well, the thing about Leon, that's weird. That was crazy was that I was in that class.

I was sitting in the back of the room. And one time I said that what I thought to be the most idiotic thing. And he was like, what is a really good question? So he was kind of one of these rascals. Yeah. Right. So he'd get you. So anyway, one thing I learned about Leon, right, was like Leon is so, no so much, right?

But the thing that was interesting about Leon was that Leon was not interested in talking to other people that knew what he knew. Because he was so smart. He just knew so much science. Forget about this physics. And so his interest was also talking to people that knew things he didn't know. And so this balance, I think you need both. I think it's not, you've got to be grounded. I think one of the things I try to do in the book was to ground the book.

Like it really have, you know, I thought I did a really good job in really describing quantum field theory. Yeah. In terms of mode oscillators and as a combination of special relativity. And the illustrations are killer. I mean, I'll see here. principal yeah yeah i mean the the field ones i got my one of my daughters was she went crazy with the highlighter and one of these oh my god could you send me a picture of that yeah yeah well that's the review on amazon leaving on amazon wow wow wow i'm that's like i i met her when she was a little baby

so that's amazing i got to get i got to get a picture of that anyway yeah yeah they're the analogies the visual analogies are so on point that it really you know it does you never dumb things down i mean you go into some serious stuff with string gas cosmology. We're going to get into that later because that's one of my favorite chapters. But you never dumb it down. And I think that's a sign of respect for your audience. And the courage is you have to do that, I think, yeah, comes from this upbringing. Plus you have a natural gift, I would say.

I think you wouldn't dispute that, right? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I don't. It's hard for me to accept what you call compliments, but I'll thank you. I'm learning to accept compliments from time of time. because, but, you know, it's interesting.

Let me say another thing. It just occurred to me. I grew up growing up in the Bronx, I think, you know, one of the things that it just, let me say it another way. I grew up in an error. This is the first time I'm saying this publicly, actually. I don't know if you knew this, but I was part when I was 17 years old, I was approached by some friends of mine to join a hip-hop group called Timbuck 3.

and that was part of Native Tongue. And that group, we used to go to Strong City Studios up in Alton Avenue that was run by Africa Bambata, Jazz E.J. and Rocco Bucano. And I used to be in that studio with Jazz E.J. and my friends who were part of this group, I was not a rapper. I was a beatmaker. I used to sample my saxophone. But I was very much, and here's the thing that's really interesting. like the when we were sampling and we were taken like when we had taken elements to make beats and make music we would just draw from anything so the most obscure records you know like Walt Disney records and like all kinds of obscure things we would basically take these elements and bring them together and the art was actually making it sound good making it you know making it funky and I think that I was you know so So when I look at some of the papers that I wrote when I was a postdoc and I was maybe made fun of,

the string theorists would say, don't, the loop quantum gravity people are loopy, don't even pay attention to their theory. And vice versa with other things. And when I look at some of my papers, it didn't matter to me. Like, what if I found useful, just like a mixologist or, you know, doing a remix or, you know, as a beatmaker, a hip-hop beat maker, The point was, like, you want to, whatever work, whatever tools would work to make something coherent and do something that scientifically sound, even if it meant making a, of course, making a prediction or connecting to experiment, I didn't limit myself. There's another word. I didn't self-edit in that way, right? So I think that going back to your question about, you know, where do you see the, where's the dividing line?

And I think you need, you know, I look at it more like you need to be grounded and know and have your skill set. And it's a lifelong process as a scientist, okay? Just like as a saxophone is, it's learning to play the sax is a lifelong thing. I can always get better at that. But I'm not going to wait until I become John Coltrane. train to try to do something creative. And so to answer that question, I think it's important to put ideas out there, populate the landscape of ideas, right?

I think this is also inspired by our friend Eric Weinstein. And then, you know, let people then shoot it down. Let experiment shoot it down. Let's not self-edit these ideas. And let's keep an open mind. And then use our methods and our techniques and, you know, mathematics and experiments to then say, okay, this is right, this is wrong. No one has ever died from theorizing.

Maybe they have like, you know, didn't get a grant proposal, like, funded, but. You end the book on that note. You know, nobody died from theorizing, and that must be from Alba Ashdakar, you know, wonderful, your former fellow colleague at Penn State. But the, you know, the concept of theorizing in public has changed since the time of, you know, the masters that we look up to, even hawking, even. even Feynman, et cetera. And I like to use a thought example. Imagine you go back to 1864. In the UK, in Scotland, there's a guy by the name of James Clerk Maxwell, and he's got all these ideas.

He's got ideas about the electromagnetic field and equations that will bear his name and later be made into a version that Frank Wilcheck, our mutual friend, calls the Maxwell equation on steroids in the Yang Mills version that you talk about in this book. But he's working on And he's like, oh, yeah, well, how do these field theories work? How do these waves oscillate? What do they oscillated? Oh, well, there are these gears and world pools in space and there are these vortices. He would have been laughed out of his mind, right?

People would have tormented him. They would have, like, said he's ridiculous. And guess what? They would have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. And we wouldn't know about Maxwell to this day. So is there a hindrance now with like theorizing in public as Eric has done, you know, and as, you know, as other people might as Carlo Revelli, who's been against guest on the show many times, even Lee Smollin, your colleague and friend,

endorser of the book. The situation has changed. Our mutual friend, Paul Steinhardt, never, he refuses to go on Twitter. He refuses to go on social media. And he's got his own, you know, kind of bold outsider-like prediction. So I guess the thing I came away with is, yeah, you can be an outsider, even if you're an insider. Because there are enough people out there that are trying to gun for it, you know, take you down, do whatever. But, you know, speak about that, the courage of a theorist. Because I think, you know, in a certain sense, theorists are more courageous because they can put their ideas out, but experimentalists are more bold because they actually have to test it. And, you know, there's an old saying,

a theorist only has to be right once in his or her life, but an experimentalist has to only be wrong once in his life or her life. Of course, I proved that wrong, right? I was wrong and I still live to tell a tale. But anyway, what do you make of this? Does it take courage to do what you do? Or is it like, I'll throw it out there. It'll probably never get tested. So what difference does it make? Yeah. I think that if you want to play safe as a theorist,

you know, you know, I don't want to use the word. The best description I have is follow the herd. There's a shepherd and there's a herd. And if like, you know, there's certain influential people. Or, by the way,

nowhere am I saying that there's anything wrong with this. I'm saying that one game you can play is to just follow the herd and they follow what's fashionable and what other people are writing about. And guess what? I did that too. You know, when- Who is the herd? Who is the who is the shepherd? Well, I remember it was, you know, it's still, I mean, when I was a postdoc, string theory was very fashionable. People were writing papers on brain worlds and, you know, high-dimensional realizations of cosmology. And I wrote papers on that too.

Yeah. Those highest-sized papers are horrible. Those papers got recited and crazy, you know? Yeah. I got, I mean, hundreds of citations from two such papers that I wrote. And I learned a lot, by the way. I learned a lot, learned, you know, how to calculate in higher dimensions. And so I picked up skills and skill sets and intuitions and all that kind of stuff.

It was all worth it. One of my great mentors, the late Joe Polchinski, said, you know, string theory is going to be useful for something. And I agree with that. I mean, it's technology. And it might still end up being correct at the end of day. Okay? So the jury is still out, actually.

I wrote these papers and it got me, it got me a great postdoc. I got me two great postdocs because I was writing papers on that and not in loop quantum revenue where there were a few jobs and available at the time. Right. So, so again, that's one, that's one model, right? And of course, I'm obviously simplifying this. So I'm open to scrutiny when I'm saying this. I'm definitely deliberately simplifying things here.

But then, you know, if you're really going to aim for something maybe big or bold, I think I guess the thing here is that if you have an intuition or a hunch and it stands outside of what's fashionable, I say, you know, the whole point is let me, yeah, I think one way of doing this is say that when I was my, under my second postdoc, my postdoc advisor, Michael Peskin, used to just say, just basically shut up and calculate, not directly, but it's like, go away, just calculate this thing and come back to me in a few weeks, okay? And I remember at some point, I was very frustrated. I was like, man, why is this guy put me through this? Like, you know, go do these, these loop diagrams and come back, you know, I was like this guy put me through this? And one day he said something

to me that blew me away. He goes, he just, out of the blue, he goes, you're doing this so that, so that you can master the stuff and then do what, use this to do what you want to do with it. Right. So it's just like, it sounds to me like, you know, like learn how to play the saxophone really well. Learn the techniques. Go through all the etudes and the scales and the theory and all this stuff, right? Get it under your finger. Not so that you can play the, you know, memorize the solo of John Coltrane, giant steps. But so you can make your own stuff. And so it isn't just to say, like, I'm going to go and, like, you know,

have some deliberately have some audacious, crazy idea that's woo-woo. But it's more like you do the hard work, you do this stuff, you engage in conversation, you have sound boards, right? And if you get lucky to have an intuition that is on the outside or is that, you know, you're like, oh, my goodness, like, if I say this, my colleague's going to laugh at me, What I'm saying is go for it and then use the techniques and the math and all the stuff, the tools that you've developed to help, you know, refine it into something that is communicable and might even connect hopefully with experiment.

So that's kind of where I was trying to go with it. It's a dance. And I don't claim that I know the complete answer. But right in the book, I was exploring that. Let me also say one last thing about this, too. I mean, I think one of the best example is Michael Faraday, right? Because Faraday, you know, first of all,

was an experimentalist. I guess he was not supposed to be theorizing, but he had his own theory about invisible lines of force. Well, how woo-woo and witchcraft do you want to get there, right? During that time, the 1800s, I mean, like, if there was a

stake to be burnt at, to say there's an invisible lines of force. And he was a laughingstock. I mean, This idea is called idiotic, and the fundamental paradigm of our physics is quantum field theory, our fields. Everything is made up of fields. So that's, I think, one of the great ironies of, I think, what I'm talking about. But it's really hard to say, how do you actually do it? I mean, and what I do in the book is tell stories.

I try to communicate that instead of explain it away, but like by telling stories. So the book will have, we'll see a lot of stories of different surprising things. Schernerger's reading of the Vedic philosophy and Niels Bo and, you know, Pauli doing dream analysis with Carl Young, you know, Mr. Mr. Ultimate Insider is saying your theory is not even wrong. Right. It's like engaging in dream analysis, you know? Yeah. Yeah, and those guys were, we're buddies, right? So, Paulie and his friend Carl Young, yeah, had Paul Stein, Halpern on last year to talk about their unlike relationship synchronous. Yeah, I remember you talking about all that stuff the first year. You know, and there's always a danger because, like, you're telling me their woo-woo stuff.

And I'm kind of like, in my mind shooting the message. I'm like, why is this guy into like the Orgon and the like Vedic stuff? And then like all of a sudden it comes, well, not the Argon. But anyway, everything comes from a circle. I remember I had that thick book on the desk? The Orgo-Engo, my God. That's crazy. I came in there. I was like, are you reading like Gratstein and Rijic? You know? like no no no it's like the Vedic contra raidic I don't know I never I never got too deeply involved with that but but I always thought you know this is kind of out there but you need that because it is the outsiders and it's not just like diversity for let's say it real I mean it's not like

diversity as your your friend of mine Jim Gates always talks about it's like if you're not diverse it hurts you the the non-diverse one you know who's just like keeping things and like it's going to hurt physics if we don't have a certain perspective that's different from our traditions because, you know, yeah, we're still all kind of living off the fumes of Isaac Newton and and Albert Einstein, et cetera. And some argue like Sabina Hossenfeld, our mutual friend, you know, that physics, fundamental physics is kind of stagnant in some sense, although many people find that controversial. But, you know, in this book, you get into something that actually Sabina is now working on, which is like super fluid dark matter. And that to me is like the ultimate, like totally out of left field. That combines your early work with Leon Cooper and his obvious Titanic contributions with a new method of applying condensed matter physics to cosmology. So that's kind of that only could come from an outsider. Talk about that theory, your theory and the work that you and your colleagues are working on about superfluid dark matter. Yeah. And in fact, that was a good example. That actually started with Leon.

One time I was in his office, I went to visit him. At the time I was at Penn State. and so I was driving up to Boston for some reason maybe give a talk and I popped into Providence to see him and then he sits me, I'm wearing this, you know, remember his huge office, and then he tells me so I was telling him what I was working on

thinking that I was telling something clever and he goes, you know what, you need to find a real problem and do some real physics, okay? And he goes, you know, a lot of people in your field you know, they stop working on the hard problem because they say that like physics is stagnant and all the stuff. You know what?

They're just scared. You know, they're scared to solve a poem. You know, when people thought superconductivity was impossible to solve, it was solvable. We solved it, okay? So you know what? Find a real problem and go solve it. And I was like, you mean like the really hard one?

Like, you know, these problems like the singular, all this thing. He goes, yeah, find a real. And he goes to the black boy and he goes, I'll give you an example. He goes, you know, people say that the big banks, the singularities are, you know, it's impossible to get around. But let me show you something. And then he literally does a geometric series, like a resumination, and shows that what you thought

was a singularity and a function, right, could be resummed and it's not singularity. And I was like, wait a minute, that's actually really interesting. And that got me thinking about some, you know, taking some of the ideas that he had in superconductivity. which has a semblance, like the same type of quantum mechanics, many body quantum mechanics, in superfluidity, like, for example, superfluid helium, where the helium atoms, in a sense, cooper pair, right, to form, to go into the superfluid state. And the idea was our idea was basically to think of, the modern version of the idea, which is work that I did with my former post like Evan McDonough, and,

David Spurgel was that we said the idea was that in the early universe, you have, the thing that's Cooper Parenth to form like a superfluid, a dark quarks. So you have quarks that are produced during inflation by a mechanism that we spelled out, you know, usual particle production mechanism of cosmic inflation. But what happens is that this is a strongly couple of phenomenon and akin to some, you know, color superconductivity ideas that, you know, Krishna Rajagapal and Alfred and Frank Wilczek and others developed, that you can basically, you know, it's very preferred, very much preferred. The cosmological dynamics at very low temperatures.

Instead of these quarks form in a thermal state, they actually, there's an attractive channel and they coop up to form a superfluid. And so the idea is that the dark matter, in this case, is a superfluid made up of these dark quarks. That is different than the superfluid that we find in in bosonic particles, like an axionic, like an ultralight axions, can also do a similar thing. And they're distinguishing observables for these two different types of superfluids. Yeah, but the basic idea is just like, you know, think of a superfluid in a bucket and fill out the universe with this superfluid. And it has properties very similar to that of what a dark halo could have. And in a recent paper, we actually showed that you get very naturally stable dark halos

made up of this superfluid. And it has certain predictions having to do with excitations. You know, like in a superfluid, if you rotate it, you can get excitations, core rotons and cortices. Well, you get these types of objects in halos. You can have substructure that will look like line-like defects. And one of the things we're working on right now is actually to look at basically what kind of observables you'll see through things like gravitational lens. One final thing, there is some connection to chiral gravitational waves in this.

I know that's something that you have as director of the Simon's Observatory you guys are thinking about. But we can talk about that offline. Yeah, yeah. This is about your book and your idea. And one of the ideas you talk a lot about is a very provocative idea, I would say, and that is, you know, the origin of dark energy might be kind of the waste byproduct of advance. That was woo-woo. And that's with your buddy, Geron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality,

a brother that you introduced me to up in Northern California one day in his treehouse, wandered through there. I'd love to get the two of you guys to chat about your recent paper together. We'd love to do that. Yeah, I had Leon over the summer, and he mentioned that. You guys were leading that effort. But anyway, you guys had this, I have to say, it is literally far out. So talk about this idea.

What is the dark energy? I mean, first of all, why is this a problem? Like, you know, in nature, we're always trying to, like, explain things. But as Feynman says in character of physical laws, you noted, you know, at the end he's just like, well, it might be that nature has an infinite layer of onion skins. And the pleasure of finding things out is just peeling away a couple layers, not like getting to the center of the onion. What do you have then? You don't even have an onion ring.

I mean, that's like nothing, right? So talk about that. Why is it like, why do we need to figure out what dark energy is? What's the big deal? That's a very good question. So let me say that what I'm about to say here is coming from a place of ignorance ultimately. because if I was able to articulate what the problem really is, that I'd probably be close to solving it, right?

And, you know, a big part of this, part of writing this book, too, is as a practicing theorist and physicists, right? And there are always the reason I love talking to bright experimenters like you. We're in the process of trying to understand what the problem is. Because once you understand the problem, like, you know, more clearly, then you might have a go with tackling it, you know, or going beyond it. or to even realize there was no problem to begin with. So the way I would like my in-with dark energy is to think,

oftentimes it's usually formulated as, or the universe is accelerated, the expansion rate, the universe is accelerating. And, you know, that is one aspect to dark energy, because the way that feeds in to Einstein's theory of general relativity is that if you have a form of energy, That has negative pressure equation of state, you know, like a bariatric tropic equation of state that's negative. Then, you know, you get this repulsive effect, this accelerate expansion. But there's another side of the cosmic dark energy problem.

And that is that what's doing this is something, a form of energy momentum or energy, let's say, that's feed an end to general and into space time, that's source in this. And that thing actually is indistinguishable from something called a cosmological constant or vacuum energy. These words are interchangeable. And so what does that mean? It means actually we don't have to go all the way to outer space to talk about dark energy. Take a tiny bit of empty space right in front of you, the same space, in front of us.

There's the same space way out there. And this space in front of us, there's energy associated with empty space. So this vacuum energy is actually, if I take a cubic centimeter, right, there is a tiny bit of this vacuum energy in this piece of empty space. And people like Richard Feynman and his predecessors and contemporaries taught us how quantum field theories,

how interacting quantum fields, can generate particles coming into a virtual particle, an electron, positive, ampere coming in, and then annihilate very quickly, that process will generate some of this energy in empty space. And we have many of these processes that we can calculate in our standard model

with the same precision that we go to calculate the G2 of muon, for example, right? All these precision things that we calculate in the standard model and we go measure, the same precision predicts actually that empty space should have way too much vacuum energy than what is actually observed. So the question is, where is it hiding? What do we need to do to our standard model, our precision standard model, to get rid of this vacuum energy?

So the part of this cosmological constant dark energy problem, if I can summarize it, is that we know that this vacuum energy that's making this universe accelerate, but there's way too, little of it per cubic centimeter than what we should expect by our very precision, the most precision theories that we have, quantum electrodynamics, for example, the standard model, right? So the question is, you know, what's going on between how the standard model speaks to general relativity that's causing this huge discrepancy between what we observe and what the theory is actually predicting? There should be way too much vacuum energy in a piece of empty space. in front of our faces.

Where is it? And that's one way of maybe characterizing the dark energy slash cosmological constant problem. Does that help? Yeah, absolutely. Now, if I told you stuff on that, you know, the cosmological constant, we just got an update from past guest

on the show, Adam Reese. He said, actually, no, you know what? It's more consistent with a, you know, a cosmological constant with a positive equation of state. And, you know, it's not really a cosmological constant. constant at all. It's more like, you know, matter, radiation, something like it. Wouldn't you throw out your theory? I mean, the thing I'm getting at is that, you know, we talk about string

theory, and it's been around for a long time, and you and I were there during some of the big revolutions. You talk about it in the book on Maldesana, you know, that was happening right as we were graduating around that in 2000-ish, and ADS-CFT. And, you know, lately I've been doing a lot of videos. I'll actually have, I had a video out last week by the time this comes out. And it was about, you know, what is the minimum that string theory has to do? And contrary to distinction to Lenny Suskin, who was a guest on the show, he has these books, Theoretical Minimum. Great books, yeah.

Yeah, but what's the experimental minimum? In other words, if I tell you, you know, this only works in, you know, in a positive, you know, anti-de-sitter space, not the sitter space like we live in, shouldn't you just stop working right now? I mean, like, why do they keep going with it? You talk a little bit about ADS-CFT. Why do people even talk about string theory if it predicts the exact opposite behavior in a negative cosmological constant?

And we know the universe has a positive, you know, dark energy, if not a cosmological constant. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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Yeah, I mean, so that's right. So I think one of the things that theorists do is that we work with things called toy models, right? Remember Brandenberg recently, we have a toy model. We have a pencil to talk about something standing on an idealized surface and, you know, it falls. So we tend to have toy models.

So I would think of like, you know, these solutions that are given to us in string theory where a negative cosmological constant is preferred as solutions of a theory. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, by studying those solutions, those toy models, they hope to gain more insight into the real deal, where, you know, where we get a positive of cosmological constant. And I think I like the work that string theorists, some of them are doing where they literally break the theory. They literally, you know, they introduce a cosmological constant in some really,

you know, not contrived, but very elegant ways. And I'm a big believe in, like, it's important to break your theory, meaning that whatever your theory is and if they're underlying principles that govern the theory, in this case, in string theory, there are certain symmetries that work that you try to preserve in looking for solutions. And if you break that, then usually you break some principles in a theory. Like, oh, the bad one, of course, is if you break unitarity of the theory, right? So anyway, the point here is that you reintroduce anomalies into the theory, things like that.

But I think it's useful to have toy models. And then once you gain enough experience, like actually jump in it and try to make contact with the real world. our job, I think, as theorists, is to, you know, our tradition has always been. You know, when Einstein found, discovered general relativity, you know, the boom, the periheal and the mercury. And, you know, and then, you know, people are looking at cosmological solution, La Maitre, right?

Found the first, I think he was one of the first to find the, to talk about the conic cup, you know, the day, you know, yesterday, whatever. The day before there was yesterday, whatever, the saying was. You know what's saying? But anyway, my point is that there's always been a tradition where no matter what kind of theorizing you're doing, behind it, there's always a standard and an ethic to try to connect as best as you can to observations and especially to those that cannot be

explained by current theory. Yeah, and that's certainly true. And in fact, in the video that I made, I'll link to it in this video. I say just that. I say, oh, it's important and it's fine to be guided by what Einstein did. That was a retradiction. And in other words, he's just explaining, which is huge, you know, what that which Newton lacked. But he also had all these predictions.

By the way, he thought most of his predictions were either unobservable in practice or, you know, were irrelevant from gravitational lensing to gravitational waves. So, you know, it's too bad because he could have had a good career. I want to talk now about Robert Brandenberger, about mentors, because it seems like, you know, again, yes, you're an outsider, but you're an insider. I mean, your mentor was one of the most preeminent theorists in our generation, right? Robert Brandenberger sat on my committee, found some errors in the wiring diagram of a five-dimensional, of a five-layer-deep circuit schematic and a high-electron mobility transistor. I don't know how he did that. you know, hopefully.

Yeah, I'm kidding. He did find some errors, you know, which my advisor. In your wires or something. Exactly, yeah. I got some, I got some strings up in there. But speaking of strings, you give a much better description than almost any other description, maybe with the exception of him, of string gas cosmology. And it's hard to make me think that I need to cover this in my chapter and my book,

because I've been talking about Sir Rogers, conformal cyclic cosmology. We talked about that. We talked about Paul Steinhart. We talked about the burbages in the past, you know, the steady state, basically. But it seems like string gas cosmology, which he did, you know, kind of the week before Bicep results came out in 2014. He was like, I think the results are consistent with string gas cosmology. It turned out it was consistent with dust, not string gas cosmology or any kind of inflationary cosmology. So dust gas cosmology is the new cause the Keaton mechanism.

Well, I am pretty dirty is. as you know, a young, dirty, you know, who would say. But thinking about these cosmological models, I want to turn now to cosmology from particle physics now that we've been talking about. And you are an expert in this and you have many, many ideas about the future and the past of the universe. And I want to ask, you know, in that concept, in that landscape, where does string gas cosmology fit in?

Because I don't know that you're still working on it or even if you've ever really worked on it. It seemed like always kind of like a skunk works project that Robert was working on. But talk a little bit about this model and what makes it so appealing to you. And then I'll share some of my feelings about maybe testing it. But what do you think is so appealing about string gas cosmology that it warrants a whole chapter, a wonderful chapter in the book? Yeah, yeah, into the cosmic matrix. That's the type of that chapter. Yeah, so I did work. part of my PhD dissertation was to extend string, because remember, in the early days of string theory, the fundamental degrees of freedom were just thought to be fundamental strings. And then when

Pulchinsky came out with the D-Brain's and Lee as well, they realized that there were non-perturbitative degrees of freedom in the theory, which are hyperservices that strings can end on, called D-Brain's. And so the question is, if you look at this, I. of string gas cosmology, you have to also consider de-brains. And let me just say a basic idea of string gas cosmology. It's very kind of simple. So in the standard big bank cosmology, before we talk about, so there's no inflation in the standard big bank, hot big bank cosmology of oil and others,

which is that the universe starts off very much radiation dominated, and it's hot and dense, and then you extrapolate that back to early, times and then you find you have a curvature and a density singularity at t is equal to zero. But then the solution basically smoothly expands, right, and cools. So if you think about the initial state of the universe, it's really just a hot, dense gas of radiation. So the idea of string gas is to just simply replace those particle degrees of freedom, which is a hot, dense gas of particles, okay, and quantum, you know, the particle excitation is

quantum fields, replace the early universe by a hot, dense gas of strings. And when you do string theory now in that context, what you find is that when you look at the density and singularity, actually, if you, for example, look at the density and the temperature, it no longer now goes to an infinity, but it reaches a bounded value called a haggardon temperature. And the density goes finite on you. So actually, you realize that the singularities that you would get in a hot, big bang radiation-dominated particle-like scenario gets replaced now. Those singularities get replaced. They get regulated now because the stringer degrees of freedom basically soak in all of those, you know, it basically, well, I don't want to get into the physics of why that's happening,

but basically the string degrees of freedom basically regulate that, and it has to simply do with the notion that strings are extended objects. And so if you try to zoom in, there are symmetries in string theory that basically tell you that when you zoom in, you end up with, it's as if you're moving in a big string again. So this is called target space duality. You know, physics are very small and not becomes physics that are very big. There's a symmetry there that strings enjoy that particles don't. So when I make a long story short, that theory in its early stages was that basic idea that you can, him and Vafa, you know, came up with this theory, said that there's a sense like a universe,

a big universe and a small universe, and they're kind of dueled each other. They related this, you know, interchangeable when you get to the Big Bang Singler. Now, the reason why I revisited this is that the story gets really interesting because if you start saying, well, what kind of cosmology is this? Is this a bounce that you come out of? so there's some pre-existent larger universe. And I was kind of using string gas cosmology to say that, okay, if you, one of the things we might want to do, and I think Robert and Kamran Vafa did this, was to say, let's try to build up a cosmology that is intrinsic to the theory itself.

So let's not try to do inflation with string theory. Let's see what string theory says. That's natural to it in terms of a cosmology. and it seems that this is the more natural thing, that if you start off with a hot, stringy early universe, it will naturally want to, you know, do what String Gas Cosmology says it does. The other thing that was interesting was I used that, though,

to motivate the question of, well, what really does happen at the earliest time in String Gas Cosmology? And this is where I brought in some ideas that actually, you know, Banks, Fishler, Suskin, and Shanker, BFSS, had a way of reformulating string theory into something that Ed Witten called M theory. Now M will be matrix theory, that basically you give up smooth the description of space time, so space becomes very discrete. So you give that up, you give up the continuum as a principle.

And I wanted to do this as a nod to Richard Feynman. Because Feynman ends the character of physical law by saying, you know, he talks about these principles, you know, symmetry, you know, symmetry invariants and all these principles. And he says, maybe we have to give up one of these principles. And he did talk about giving up the continuum, but then he got stuck about, you know, if you do this, you're screwed. But that's exactly what matrix theory did. It gives up the continuum in this interesting way. So it was a nod to Feynman and then to say, okay, listen, if we, if we, if we, if we. we now say string gas cosmology now goes into a matrix description, what would that look like?

And I kind of end with that question. And then coincidentally, Robert Brandenberger and his students put a paper out, literally saying that string gas cosmology is, before there was that, the universe is basically a non-community of a discrete space time. And then the smooth space time emerged. So it's like an emergent cosmology, right? which is very interesting, right? It lends itself more to ideas of condensed matter physics, right, where things are no longer fundamental, right, but things can emerge, right, from fundamental degrees of freedom. One most appealing thing to me is that it makes a concrete prediction in wild contrast to inflation, which is that it predicts a background of primordial tensor modes, but they are predominating at the smallest scales rather than the biggest scales. And, you know, I wonder because a theory like inflation, like string theory, has a certain, as you called it, herd mentality, you know, it's not for me to call it that, but you're in the field and that's you're right.

And, you know, I can say I agree with that in a lot of sense, but I'm not practicing theorist. Some of my best friends are theorists. But the point of my curiosity is that it's falsifiable in that it could be. ruled out and rather than ruled in. But again, in the back of my mind, I'm always wondering, are we too beholden to Carl Popper? Are we, as Lenny Suskin called him on this

podcast, he called the, you know, the paparazzi. It's not like Girdle, right? Girdle said, Oh, great, pretty good. Yeah, Gertl said, you know, certain things are fundamentally not provable within a formal axiomatic set.

But Popper is just like, yeah, it's good if you can falsify things. But, you know, as my friend Stephen C. Meyer pointed out, you know, you can, you know, astrology, astrology makes falsifiable predictions, right? You know, I'm going to win the lottery tomorrow or, you know, tomorrow I'm going to find, you know, true love if I'm single. Yeah, those are falsifiable. So now astrology is science, that's ridiculous. And harkening back to what I said earlier about Maxwell and, you know, if Twitter existed back then,

and, you know, he tweets out about the wheels and the vortexes and the Faraday did it. and he was right, but, you know, his successor in some ways, Maxwell did, and he was wrong. So I guess the question, you know, that I want to kind of wrap things up on is, you know, is there room, again, for non, you know, for mainstream outsiders? Let me just make up a term on oxymoron. You know, can you have something, take the energy, the wind that's in the sales of string theory and inflation, the two dominant theories of particle genesis and cosmogenesis, respectively.

And talk about, you know, can you divert some of that energy intellectually to other pursuits? And even, you know, if you could, how would that look? I mean, are you going to hire somebody, you know, if a young Stefan Alexander came to your department right now, Brown University, one of the top departments in the world, two Nobel laureates on the faculty, including, you know, and then plus you and Jim Gates. I mean, it's just like, so it's only grown since I've left, right? I think it was correlated by my leaving that you guys grew so much. But, you know, if a young Stefan Alexander, forget about the name, forget about all the cool

stuff that you've done, recording jazz albums, Ryu, you know, getting a leading the Harlem Gallery of Science, being president, NSBP, take away all that. take your name off the CV, take away all the, you know, all the struggles that you went through. Guy comes to you, gal comes to you, he or she says, here's my ideas, you know, cosmic Vedic energy, you know, alien dark energy. What do you say? What would you honestly do in that situation? Good.

I would not crush that spirit, but I'll do what I'm doing now, which is that I, you know, I give them, I give a project that really, you know, lets them sharpen and develop a skill, a solid skill set. So they, you know, so they're versed in the, in the tradition. And then, and I create, I create a forum. I create an environment where my students and postdocs and those around, like there really is, you know, you are encouraged to just say, just, just, say things and just use each other as soundboards. So it's sort of like, right, you know, it's not a... But it also means that if you throw something at me,

I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna like, you should expect in a very playful way and in a way that is, that's embracing. In jazz music, you know, this is Albert Murray, the great theorist who mentored Whitman O'Sulles and, you know, the brain behind jazz at Lincoln Center called it antagonistic cooperation. You know, you go to the cutting session,

and it's your turn of solo now. But the rest of the band, you know, they're going to throw stuff at you. They're going to take you on a wild twist and turn. But it's coming from a place of because I expect you, I expect you to generate great ideas, wild ideas, and we're going to take it seriously. But, you know, we're going to tear it apart.

And I, and they're encouraged to do the same with me. I think really creating that where people are not shamed or stigmatized to say, to have ideas or be wrong. Okay. The idea of being afraid of being wrong. No, be wrong. It's okay. We can't, we can't make progress if you're not, if you're not wrong.

Otherwise, or stare at a wrong thing into something that's right. right and and you know there's a thing of like who gets to be wrong who's allowed to be wrong who is not right so kind of like democratizing that who gets to be right and who gets to be wrong who gets to speculate um who gets to theorize um you know i'll give you an example peter warry wrote a um he you know he has a great blog i um you know and but anyway just to give you a story about that like he wrote a the other day about a version of basically Gravy Week unification, the idea that, you're told to not embed an internal symmetry like the Lawrence group. Sorry, a space-time symmetry with an internal symmetry like those of the standard model. But he wrote a beautiful paper the other day.

Why is that? Why are you told? What does that mean you're told not to do that? Is that just like, no, not to work? Like, is there some forbidden, you know? Yeah, there's a no-go theorem by Coleman and Weinberg. The Coleman Weinberg theory. I believe this is Eric Weinberg.

If I'm not, we can fact-checked out. The Coleman Weinberg theory has certain axioms, as you know, or a loophole. There are loopholes, of course, behind this. That says that if you take a space-time submission, like the Lawrence group, which is the rotation group plus, you know, boosts, so the group S-O-3-1, you can't take a subgroup of that, for example, right? identify it with an internal symmetry like SU2. So SO3 is locally isomorphic to SU2.

And so you can imagine thinking, maybe I can take this SO3 of the Lawrence group and figure out a clever way of saying that that is the SU2 of the weak group. Well, I also played some of this game as well many years ago. It's like, let's break the rules. Let's break this no-go theorem and see, you know, what the loophole is.

And so anyway, he recently wrote a paper that was really, you know, also technically very strong. And so, you know what I did? I mean, I invited him to give a seminar at Brown in a theory seminar. Yeah. Because I sort of feel like, you know, like we need to hear from him, right? And this idea of like democratizing, who gets to be heard, who gets to, you know, to speculate, who gets to break the rules is to me something.

that I'm having a lot of fun with these days. Yeah, right. If you look at, you know, Wolfgang Powley and you say, sorry, you can't speculate, you know, on the conservation of energy as sank or sanker sacked and you can't order another particle, you know, if you'd said after him, you know, I don't know if he would let you do that. But anyway, the point is, yeah, we don't know where the right answer is going to come from. And, you know, I think it's like walking that dichotomy of being.

enough of an insider that you know what happened in the past so you can respect the great because the one thing that shines through in this book is that you are a scholar in other words you study not only the subject matter of the equation the history the the milieu the cultural milieu in which these things were developed and that's part of being a master that's part of being an expert in my opinion at least own it all pay off your home travel for life drive a Ferrari in celebration of the world premiere of the monopoly big board buck slot machine by aristocrat gaming yamava resort and casino at san manuel is giving one person a 1.6 million dream package the biggest prize in yamava's history club sorano members can earn daily instant prizes

and secure a spot in the finale may 29 don't pass go and own it all only at yamava celebrating its 40th anniversary you win details at yamava dot com must be 21st winter please gamble responsibly monopoly is a trademark of hasbro hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion trait that I've spoken about many times. In my book, even, the word scientist in Russian, you know that I learned from Alexander Polnerev, your friend, Alexander and Alexander, those great papers. But the notion of the word scientist in Russian means someone who is taught. And to me, to be a good teacher, you had to have been a good student. And to be a good teacher, you also have to teach people in the future. And so, you know, I really, I do, you know, I give you

incredible accolades and really much respect because you're not just content at doing their calculations. You're bringing people up. You're inspiring the youth. You're the president of National Society of Black Physicist, leader of the Harlem Gallery of Science, the Hip Hop Museum. Let's talk a little bit about those organizations for a little bit. Why is that important? I mean, I've talked to you about this. You and I are brothers, right? I say, why are you continuing to pay the black tax. In other words, you are working your ass off harder than I am. I don't have to like opine on, you know, how do we bring up the next generation of underrepresented men and women, the next generation of leaders. You know, I don't get asked to do that because I'm white.

You know, you have to pay this tax. And my, our, you know, female, you know, sisters in science, they have to do it, you know, because they're women. I don't want to get too, you know, woke about it. But that's true, right? I mean, you have an excess burden that I don't have to do. And you go above and beyond it. Why do that? I mean, don't you want to get to the heart of the matters of the universe and get back to your research? Yeah, so it's a dance. And I think after my tenure of NSBP president, I will, yeah, I have to get back and devote time because, you know, time is limited. Time is finite. And so, yeah, you know, it's kind of selfish because actually I get really a lot of

I gain a lot of pleasure from watching and, you know, especially students, like yeah, one of the things I really do enjoy still doing is that like, you know, with NSBP or the Hong Gower Science, just talking to students and talking science with them and getting, you know, sort of watching them develop their superpowers, you know,

like watching that, oh, you come back, you learn how to do a Jacobian transformation, and they get a kick. There's something really cool about engaging in that process. The other thing, too, is that they, it's selfish because sometimes I rely on them to throw things at me that I would never think about because they're coming at things from a, you know, from a beginner's mind perspective, right? John Coltrane would say he wish he had the ears of a baby.

He wish he didn't know too much music theory because, because then you can listen to music in the purest, most pristine way, you know? So, like, there's something, so, yeah, there is a part where I really do enjoy, get a lot of joy out of that. In terms of the Harlem Gallery of Science and the Hip Hop Museum, the Universal Hip Hop Museum, where I'll be leading the STEM initiatives in the hip-hop. Well, you know, I was one of those kids and, you know, growing up with, when hip-hop music was being developed in the 80s and the Bronx, you know, doing that. part of the hip-hop evolution coming in from the 70s. And, you know, we were behaving like scientists.

We were taking a sampler, a digital sampler, and, you know, modifying it, right, to sample in ways and sample things that was never really designed to do. You know, Grand Master Flash was basically studying the moment of inertia, like, you know, of different types of turntables to, and, you know, designing new types of cross-faders and the electronics for that. So, like, just the idea that the content and the, what's the word, like, you know, the experimental tools that we, that are the objects, okay, of scientific inquiry, the palate is much larger than just like being at a blackboard with chalk or being in a lab,

you know, with some, with an amplifier. It, you know, it can look like, you know, it can look like, you know, you know, electronic music. It can look like, you know, breakdance and it can look like, you know, the, you know, the rhyme patterns of a flow of, you know, so I think that, you know, the patterns, the patterns of different polyrhythms and what that has to say about geometry. So I think that we use these, the idea that we can use these ways of engaging really bright and promising young people and show them that there's science there too, there's amazing physics and chemistry and biology and electronics in those things that they're still interested in and use that as a rabbit

hole so that, you know, they can express whatever it is, whatever song they're going to play in their scientific career. I think it's what's actually exciting about that, those engagements. Well, Professor Stefan Alexander, president of the National Society of Black physicist. Servant, servant, humble servant. I heard it said by the past, one of the past presidents that you're one of the best presidents they've ever had. I'm not going to get into details because I don't want to get you in trouble. But anyway, one of my favorite hip-hop group was a group called Dad Perez. I want to ask you one final question because we played into the impossible in the past where I ask you these existential questions. I just want to ask one this time.

You get you get one bite at the apple this time. You and I are both 50 now. by the time this comes out. Not about it to dust, not another one bites the dust. No, no, we're not going to do that. We're not going to talk about my sequel, my next book, a farewell to arms, another one bites the dust. I want to ask you, 50 years from now, 10 to the 50th years from now,

let's just say 50 years from it. What one chapter would you most like to have the answer to? In other words, this book is full of puzzles and mysteries, of conundrums of questions. There's nothing solved in the sense that like, you know, you're just describing the double-slid experiment for the 50,000 times. No, no, no. That's not what this is about.

This book is about a manifesto, a challenge to future physicists, the same way that Hawking ends with, you know, if we can get a theory of everything, we'll know the mind of God. I happen to dispute that. But anyway, of these, you know, 9, 10, 11 chapters in this wonderful book, now from basic books. Shout out to T.J. Kelleher, who is, uh, uh, I've known him for a long time. The greatest editor in the history of the universe, of universes. Yeah. I mean, I've had on so many basic book authors. He owes me, uh, he owes me a bottle of, uh, of a blue bottle of coffee

or whatever you guys drink over there in these costs. Um, I want to ask you, of all the chapters in this book, what would you most be curious about? Come on. You can, you know, it's like my mom, You met my mom, and I'd always ask her, mom, you know, who's your favorite kid? I've got three brothers. And she'd say, oh, that's like asking me to choose my left hand or my right hand. I said, mom, you're left-handed. Come on. Of course, you're going to choose your left hand.

Of course, I'm your favorite. But I want to ask you, there's got to be one thing in here that, you know, that's equal but above equal. What question do you most want to know the answer to, if you'll permit me? Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you say that I'm looking at a chapter. And this chapter was related to actually a crazy woo book I was reading as a grad student about, and it was a book called Zen Mind Beginners Mind by Suzuki. Yeah. So I have this chapter called the Zen of Quantum Fields.

And maybe can I read just one section of this? Yeah, yeah, of course. So let me see if I can if I could, yeah. So it goes, my first introduction to Eastern philosophy was a book entitled Zen Mind Beginer Mind. by Zen Master Shanruh Suzuki. And Suzuki had a most interesting metaphor for existence. Imagine a stream flown towards a waterfall. When the water leaves a cliff, a droplet of water leaves a stream

and at some point rejoins the stream. Life is like that droplet of water, and the stream is like the universe. During the time between when we are born, quote, and when we pass away, quote, unquote, we are like the water droplet, feeling like we are separate from the universe as a whole. But before we are born and after we die, we are part of the stream, the universe. I remember wanting there to be some truth to Suzuki's metaphor. So in what way could we be connected to the universe in the poetic manner described by Suzuki? And so I use that metaphor, and I end this chapter before when I go into it.

talking about quantum field and why quantum field theory is kind of saying something like this, right? Again, metaphorically. And I say, I end with the last paragraph of that chapter after going through quantum field theory in that sense. And I say, consider electrons in a star, millions of light years away from Earth. While there are many electron particles, there's only one electron field that they are born from. Those electrons and the electrons that are in you and me were created as quantum excitations from the same universal electron field in the early universe. In fact, every other particle including quarks and neutrinos in the universe, a quantum that emerged from their corresponding field vibrations. It's in this Suzuki sense that we are

feathered to the fundamental fabric of the universe. Anyway, so again, it's a, it's a, it's, as you said, It's one of these dream ideas. But are we actually connected to the universe in this poetic manner, right? And it seems that the lessons that we're learning of this oneness and this wholeness is not just maybe woo-hoo, but actually closer to the picture of, say, quantum field theory and the early universe that we're trying to discover, trying to learn, and you are trying to experimentally probe. How's that? That's great.

That is great. Well, Stefan, my oldest dearest friends, one of them, top two or three that I've known longer than anybody, even than my wife. I want to thank you for this book because it is a gift. It's mesmerizing. It's inspiring. It's thoughtful. It's soulful. And, of course, it has a hell of a beat.

It has a hell of a rhyme to it. And I just want to thank you for kind of rekindling this love in me of the big question. That's why I got into being a physicist. I may be a different reflection of it in that I'm an experimentalist, but you and I going back to 1993, we first met each other. You know, I just can't believe that you have, that you remember these things that we've gone through and that have really steeped in you, this unique approach to science. I want to thank you, and I want you to give my regards, Professor Griff, Flavor Flav, no, Chuck D.

I'd love to meet that man, and, you know, maybe. Maybe we could all do something with Chuck. Maybe we can do something with Chuck in the future. That would be fun. I'd love to get him on the podcast with you. Can I say one last thing? Yeah, go for it. I also, you know, again, this book,

the thing about fear of black universe, as well as like a, you know, think about quantum superposition. It had many different superposition, different types of meanings, One of it actually was my fear, my fear of kind of coming out clean and say, look, I've, I, you know, I got into physics because I had these bigger questions about my existence. And I think, you know, some of it is your fault because when you wrote your book, you all, I think writing a book and you kind of coming out and talking about God and talking about these matters, okay, as well as your physics. And so in connection to your physics. I also, I think it was a thing. It gave me the hall pass to write my book. So I want to thank you.

All right. I will take your encomia, your blurb, which you were kind enough to put on the last book that I wrote. And you feature also in my upcoming book as well, but we'll save that for another time. Professor Stefan Alexander, Professor Brown University, theoretical physics, cosmologist, saxophonists. You want to take us out with that little riff or are you the read?

No, no one. I mean, no, no, no, no, no, all right. I'll put in some public enemy. I'll try and get some rights-free, you know, fight for your right to party, a party for your right to fight. I want to thank you, Stefan, for sharing it. Welcome to Perraudome on Sachs, yeah. Okay.

All right, my friend. Thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating, and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating.

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