Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Stephon Alexander: The Jazz of Physics! (#051)

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

   Physicist, jazz musician, & President of the National Society of Black Physicists, Stephon Alexander is this week’s guest on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He discussed the foundations of the cosmos, his advice for balancing academic and creative pursuits, and his book “The Jazz of Physics.” Support the National Society of Black Physicists: https://nsbp.org/support-nsbp/support-us Show notes and resources for this episode are available: simply join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php and you’ll also get information to enter giveaways to win my guest’s books! Our next giveaway will be Stephon’s phenomenal THE JAZZ OF PHYSICS! 00:14:20 Balancing the creative pursuits of research, jazz, and writing. 00:28:46 Which came first – theoretical or experimental physics? 00:40:30 Creativity and intuition have a role in science. 00:46:48 How legacy and John Coltrane inspired Alexander to write his book. 00:57:18 The power (and limits) of analogies to explain science. 01:07:34 Journal articles and musical films – what’s next from Stephon Alexander. 01:17:08 Questions INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE asks all authors. Stephon Alexander is a physics professor at Brown University, which is where he earned his Ph.D. He is President of the National Society of Black Physicists and a National Geographic Explorer. He served as a scientific consultant on the 2018 movie A Wrinkle in Time. Buy Stephon Alexander’s book “The Jazz of Physics” here: https://amzn.to/3cZekmU Watch Alexander’s Tedx Talk here: https://youtu.be/v9_ZzY99-6U Watch Alexander on NOVA’s documentary series The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/stephon-alexander/ Find Stephon Alexander on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephstem Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes for a chance to win a copy of Alexander’s book:  ‍♂️ Find Brian Keating on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to the Into the Impossible podcast, a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I am your fearful host, Brian Keating, co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Today's a very special episode for me. Not only do I get to interview one of my colleagues in my field of cosmology, but the very person who inspired me to write my own.

book losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science's highest honor. And that's Stefan Alexander. And he, more than any person, really, is credited in some way, or maybe blamed, for encouraging me to write this book. And I want to read from the acknowledgments of my book, where I refer to him and the deep impact he had on my life. I say, this book owes his existence to my brother from another mother, Stefan Alexander. Nothing has changed between us since those late-night intellectual jam sessions spent together as Nobel hopefuls at Brown University 25 years ago. Then, as now, Stefan's encouragement and wisdom kept me going through the darkness. Thank you for believing that mine was a story that needed to be told.

And I've known Stefan since we were both beginning graduate students at Brown University where he now teaches. And Stefan is actually also, in addition to his teaching and theoretical and contributions and research, He is the president of the National Society of Black Physicist, a member for many decades, and now he leads that organization. I'm proud to say that I'm also an honorary member of that August organization. And I hope that my listeners out there will take this opportunity to visit nsbp.org, and perhaps if the spirit moves, you make a donation in honor of the many contributions to our knowledge of the universe that these incredible minds have.

made. Today's episode is very special because, as I said, it's one of my friends and how often you get to interview your friends. We're going to talk a lot about Stefan's book, The Jazz of Physics. Subtitle is the secret link between music and the structure of the universe. This copy, if you're watching the video, is actually the first copy that he ever got. And I was with him in New York in early 2016, right before it came out. It's the fourth anniversary. And the dedication still moves me, it says, he wrote to me to my best friend, Brian, 23 years after that cold night with the sacks at the bridge, we have arrived. Looking forward to your book. And this is before I even thought about writing a book. So Stefan is a tremendous influence on me in my life. And this has

really been just such a pleasure to watch as he's influenced the careers of many generations of physicists, and will continue to do so as the president of the National Society of Black physicist. So I encourage everybody to get this book. You'll stay tuned. You'll hear some callouts to his upcoming work. And I urge you to tune in and see all the great stuff that Stefan is doing. Now, please enjoy this episode featuring Professor Stefan Alexander. Welcome everybody to the latest edition of the Into the Impossible podcast, a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UCSD. I'm your fearful host during these pandemic podcasts. My name is Brian Keating. I'm the associate director of the Clark

Center. And all of the podcasts that I've done, I think I've done about 20 by now since the pandemic started to take over the planet back in March. And of all of those podcasts, I have to say that this is the one perhaps I've been looking forward to the most, simply because the guest today is another than my best buddy, Stefan Alexander, who's really been a fixture in my life for what? I don't want to say. It's probably close to three decades now, but let's not get into how old we each are. He is older than me. He is older than me by a couple of months. He's wiser than me, too. So I want to introduce Stefan Alexander, Professor Stefan Alexander, who is professor of physics at Brown University.

Stefan, a welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. Well, Brian, I remain flattened as flat as flat earth. Flattered than flatter Earth. I would never imagine, like, you know, many decades ago, me going on that dangerous airplane flight with you when you were learning. how to fly. Today would come where you would be interviewing me on a podcast. Yeah, I know. It would be quite crazy to think of either one and for us both to be professors, although I had high helps for you. I wasn't so sure about myself, but it's really a treat to have on such a good friend

on this podcast. And I also want to thank you and express gratitude for connecting me to so many brilliant minds as you have that have been guests on the podcast and looking forward to to many more. And the other thing I want to thank you for is, is inspiring me to write my book, losing the Nobel Prize, which above my different shoulders here are various pictures of the cover, the audiobook and the regular book. And in that, in the acknowledgement section, you were the person that I thank first. So I don't thank my mother for having me until later, but I thank you because you really not only convinced me that I had a story worthy of telling, but you showed the way forward in your book, The Jazz of Physics, which we're going to get into,

on the anniversary of its fourth anniversary of its publication. I cannot believe that time has flown by and it has been four years. How does it feel? Does it feel like it just came out yesterday? It literally does feel like it came out two days ago. But yeah. And then they go, you know, it's funny. You know, when I think about like good friendships throughout my lifetime,

it's those that have organically been that of like, you know, I think this sort of this sort of like, you know, yeah, you have a lot, you have things to be grateful. But I also have things very powerful things to be grateful to you, you know. So it goes both ways. So maybe one day if I chance on a podcast, I'll. I'll also tell out what those things are, right? Yeah, maybe when your next performance at Jazz at Carnegie Lincoln Center.

I definitely am thankful for that Tisset watch I got for the, you know, for being in the wedding, right? That's right, one of my best men at my wedding. That's right, absolutely. I cannot believe that's been almost 12 years ago. While I'm sitting here enjoying and every time I gave you that watch because I wanted you to, every time you look at it, to think of how much you mean to me and how much hopefully I've come to mean to you in the decade and plus.

since I got married and gave you that gift for your service as the honor guard at my wedding. But every time I have a cup of this substance here, which is not vodka for a change, it is simply coffee, I think about you because you were the first person to introduce me to coffee, as we call it, we New Yorkers. You remember our Oceans Coffee Roasters, right? Oh, yeah, man. That was a fixture for us in grad school. You took me there.

You got me hooked on coffee. and I'll never really contemplate seeing you without a cup of coffee not too far away from you. And that's not surprising because as the mathematician, Paral Erdos said, that a mathematician is a machine to convert coffee into equations. And you are a theoretical physicist of the specialization in early universe cosmology, and you and I both studied together on the different poles of experiment and theory, way back beginning in 1993 at Brown University. And I want to take us back to those heady days in the early part of the or the late part of the previous millennium.

It makes us sound really old and we talk like that. But I want to talk about how our careers have kind of been mirror images of one another, you pursuing theoretical pursuits in cosmology and mine and experimental, but kind of loosely coupled like Cooper pairs across the, the Brilawan sphere or something like that, none other than Leon Cooper, your colleague, our former professor at Brown University, is he still, is he emeritus now?

What is Leon's status? His mind is sharp, is still sharp as heck. Does not surprise me. You know, obviously I have Cooper stories for days. There's a Cooper story in Chapter 3 of the book, of course. That's right. He never fails to, you know, to just like, you know, throw me off guard, right?

That's what he's good at. I'll never forget. We were taking as advanced quantum mechanics. I don't know if you remember this, but. I was in that class, of course. Yeah, we were in that class. I barely could handle regular quantum mechanics, and here he was. And I remember him saying, so I asked a question, and he's like,

well, you obviously didn't pay attention in your undergraduate quantum mechanics class. And I was half tempted to say, well, I learned undergraduate quantum mechanics from your book. But I didn't say, I didn't have the, um, the, um, can you imagine that? I don't even think Leon would, he would have smacked me upside the head. Other quantum professors and I won't name names. No, no, no. We're not going to go there. No, no, we're not going to go there.

The audience knows who Leon Cooper is, right? Yeah, tell us about him. Tell us about him. What does he mean? What does he mean to physics? Um, well, you know, there's a, you know, almost 50-year-old problem called superconductivity that was actually, right, experimentalist in 1911. I can't omnis, I guess I've pronounced the name. Cameron Linne Onus, yeah.

Yeah, discovered experimentally that metals, you know, will conduct with zero resistance. And there was no explanation fit theoretically. And everybody worked on it, including Einstein, Feynman, Landau, you name it. Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and a very young guy named Leon Cooper. And the important thing about Leon was he was an outsider. So he was trained as a particle physicist,

you know, a New Yorker like us. Yeah. And Bardeen took him out to Illinois. And Bardeen actually literally wanted, you know, somebody that was not a condensed matter person to work on a problem because he felt that they would have fresh eyes and an outsider's perspective. And it proved to be correct.

And you know, the important thing about Leon is he is, You mean, you know, he basically took that, what, 17-hour train ride from Illinois, is back to New York and decided to just, he tried all these calculations and said, you know what, I'm just going to like see the problem as a physics problem and just like throw away the math and just like, you know, just do some dirty physics, use my intuition. And he cracked the code, he solved super common, you know, he came up with a key idea, which is that fermions can pair up to act as a quasi-poch, kind of, you know, basically effectively act as a spin zero particle that enabled this collective effect such that that

collective effect of the spin zero particle could conduct without any resistance and it left to some predictions and earned him a Nobel Prize and one of the things Leon always used to tell me whenever I he would make me feel stupid he said I'm you know Einstein once told me I was like okay that um if we knew what we were talking about, we wouldn't call it research. Yep. Yeah, that was one of his chestnuts. Yeah, and like one other interesting, I think, very powerful Leon Cooper story.

I think that really kind of is my lantern, all right, for how I do things and how I do everything in my work, including my mentor and of students. One time after 15 years, I figured that, you know, that I was going to come back in like, impressive, you know, like I'd already been a young professor. I'd just gotten tenure. I got this fancy, you know, APS award and all this, whatever, right? And I drive back and Leon is there. He's just about to retire. I go in his office.

And I start, again, a blackboard. And at this point, I figured I knew all this, like, all this math and all the stuff sitting there. And by the time, I'd written this paper with Michael Peskin that was like a PRL, and it was like a big thing for us. And I write the thing, and he goes, you know, Stefan, you just slow down. I mean, you know, I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but he gets kind of slow down. And I'm like, wow, you know, it's like he's setting me up for the sucker punch.

I'm like, oh, wow. Like, Leon is like, you know, I'm going too fast to the master. So then he goes, and, you know, why don't you find a real problem and, like, work on it? Like, find yourself a real problem, like a hard problem, like a real physics problem, and, like, dedicate yourself and work on it. And I was like, you know, I was, you know, I was, you know, It was like the death blow of this kung fu movies. Like only three days later you start like, you know,

having internal bleeding and like, yeah, like I've been wasting 15 years of my time like, you know, chasing whatever. Like chasing, you know, chasing the company, basically, right?

Yeah. Identify my problem. Like, you know, and actually I thought about you because you had been you as an experimentalist. I call you, you know, a theoretical experimentalist. had been chasing that, right?

You have been doing that for decades. Yeah, I think I was talking about this with Jan 11, who you connected me with on a podcast recently. And I said, you know, physicists sort of have to cultivate a brand, like what their tastes are. And I think you exemplify that as well as, and I hope we can get into this as well, not just within the research domain

where you're, you know, eminently successful in your research program of coming up with the brand, the Alexander brand, which has a characteristic style, which is different, you know, than someone like Jana, who will write, you know, very... On Fordham Road, Alexander's. That's right. And, but on the same token, having, you know, having a very disciplined approach to research, but also being able to communicate ideas to allay audience and, and I think exemplified in

this book, how you really have an ability, which, which I, you know, as I discussed with her. There aren't so many people like her, like you, who can both communicate to the layperson, but also can do cutting-edge research. And there are people like our friend Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an amazing communicator, you know, very polished. He's phenomenal at what he does, but he's not doing cutting-edge scientific research. And he's the first to admit it, which is one of the things that endears me, endears him to me so much because he will be, you know, the first to say, well, there's a big discovery of the black hole event horizon, you know, and the media will want to talk to him and he'll say, no, go talk to the team that did it,

go talk to the real scientist. And I have great respect for that. But how do you straddle and how do you manage that? And is it, you know, what's your workflow like to go, can you slip in and out of these two different very highly creative modalities of thought? One, I think you would agree, right, that theoretical physics is incredibly creative. And so is jazz music. and improvisation and also writing. So take us through those three different, you know,

kind of tripartate aspects of your, of your nature. Well, I'm going to be, I'll probably be the first, there'll probably be the first time I admit this on any podcast. I've done a few since writing my book and- Exclusive, exclusive to the Into the Impossible podcast. Yeah, so I would say like internally, I don't, I don't actually feel that like, you know, when we think about the classic being smart, like, you know, this person can, you know, accumulate information or, you know, can master these technical things. Or is it? I've always felt like, like, I don't feel smart in that way, all right?

And what I've managed to do, I think my hack is I've managed to engage in things that I'm naturally, I would say I'm naturally attuned to, attracted to, and figured out a way to weave them into each other in a way that if you cut one of those links, they all fall apart. So for example, you know, you, you know that I, you know, I used to, I was a serious runner. And I didn't tell you that, until I, you know, 400 meters, right? I turned 49. Now it's 399 meters. That's right, you know, 400 and 800 and cross country. And like, So I was really into that. But a lot of times I found that my runs was exactly that place going on that hour long run

where I can really get deep into a problem and just like be, not have the self-edited that would come out of just if you're sitting at a desk, right? Because you're running. You're not going to be editing yourself too much, right? Because you got to worry about not slipping on ice. And all like, you know, my music, right? And then my physics, they're all, they're kind of like. one activity lends itself to the other, such that if I stop one, I will feel it.

I will see a negative effect with the others. So I've kind of come up with a system for myself where I'm kind of like, you know, a jack of those trades. And really, I don't feel like I'm a master of any of those, right? And those three things, they cycle between each other. There are days where I'll probably play, practice more. These days I'm practicing more. My saxophone and, you know, studying my music.

And some days I'll be thinking more about a physics problem. Other days I might be writing, but they're usually all integrated with each other. And if like you cut one of those things off, the others will suffer. So that's a balance between those two, but it takes, I mean, how I always see it, and I've heard it written that the human brain is actually not as good as we think about multitasking. And, you know, especially when things are very disparate. Like, you know, it's one thing to be writing an email or something and then, you know, turn your attention to writing a latex, you know, code for a paper.

But it's another thing to be, you know, practicing, you know, I don't know what you guys do and jazz musicians, but you must do scales or something like that. And then go and sit down and write down, you know, a two-dimensional Izing model, you know, expansion has applied to some, you know, very intricate calculation and theoretical physics. Can you do that or is it more like, well, one day I'll spend time on writing and the other time I'll, you know, and then a day later or some other half of the day, I'll do, you know, jazz or do hardcore physics. How do you approach it? Is it separated in time or space or both? Yeah, they're separated in time and I don't multitask. I'm unlike our friend Jim Gates, he claims it be a really good multitask. I, you know, I'm horrible at that. I'm very bad at un-tasking. I mean, like, working on one thing. But I guess, let's see. So I think one of the things that I've found happening is that I'll be working,

of thinking about a physics problem. Actually, I'll be thinking about a problem. I'll be thinking about like what kind of problem is worthy pursuing or all their problems to work on, right? So sometimes it'll be as simple as like, what should we be working? should I be working on? You know, what's not already been done? What are the low-hanging fruits, right? Just a strategy of even finding a problem, you know, I actually want to turn that question back to you when I'm done saying what I have to say. And sometimes, you know, like,

I hate to admit this, but I'm an impatient person. And because I'm impatient, what ends up happening is I get very frustrated and then I stifle my own creative and even technical you know abilities so a simple act of going off and doing something else that is that might be apparent appear to be orthogonal to that mode right so if I go play my sax and I just like work on a scale or work on you know cadence or whatever attude or what have you right long blown long tones and facing the wall with saxophone and just blown a long note for like as long as you can and just repeating that over and over again.

There's something about doing that, about kind of vacillating between those things that kind of, I don't know, like, contributes. I don't know the right word is, but I don't want to claim that there's a flash of genius or insight, but somehow like at least it gives me a little bit more energy or, you know, my patient can't fills up, a little bit more so I'm able to go back to that problem or go back to that confusion and look at it with

fresh eyes. And so for me it's important to have these other hobbies or things that I do that appear to be orthogonal to each other. And I found that to be also the case for some other friends. I mean, you're a pilot. So I was wondering if like a similar thing happens for you. Yeah. I think there's different aspects of it where, you know, can hope to enter into what your colleague at Brown University, Judd Brewer, who's an addiction psychologist and a psychiatrist, MD PhD. And he talks about this flow state and how people have gotten into it. And obviously, it's a state of extreme pleasure once one is inside of such a state. And he talks about how, you know, you can kind of pregame the brain to be receptive to do so

to in order to do practical things. So it's, you know, creativity of a physics equation that describes, you know, 10-dimensional space time might not have very many applications in the real world of any. But if you're struggling with, you know, smoking addiction, he will then recommend to you this exploration of the curious mind, the state of flow that is sort of engaged by the parallel trait of curiosity, which is, you know, as far as we know, the way that we express creative, curiosity is unique among species. And I think it's so too, is it possible to get into a flow state where you are, you know, kind of concentrating and time is slipping by and you're not noticing it. Yeah. So for me, flying a plane, that could do it because you have to concentrate so

strongly and intently on that task. Yeah, except when I flew you over, you know, Rhode Island Sound back way back when. And we had some, we had some interesting, interesting, experiences, didn't we? But I want to, you know, kind of take this the next step, which is, you know, on the Arthur C. Clark Center's, you know, podcast into The Impossible, we like to talk about, how can you actually train the mind, train for curiosity, and stimulate the mind to do these things? And is it possible or is it really fundamentally different? The type of creativity that you have as the saxophonist versus the creativity that you have,

as a jazz musician. Obviously, the jazz of physics makes a case that there are commonalities between the two, but let's take it a step further. Is there a commonality with experimental physics? You know, is it the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, or is there something endemic to the art of experimental science versus theoretical science? It's just different. No, it's not possible to get the same kind of flow state or whatever as an experimentalist as a theorist would explore. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them.

But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Yeah, I disagree with that. I think my experience trying to be an experimentalist and I failed at it. It was more experimental biophysics x-ray crystallography.

You remember when I had that matter of it. And one of the things I saw was sort of like the, there's theoretical work also going on because you have to now cleverly remember there was this one guy in our class. He didn't stay around long, but he once said, a great experimentalist is able to tease out nature's secret. You're able to feel in her secrets, right? Yeah. Like this idea that, like, you know, there are these hidden things,

and how do you design a magic trick, right? Yeah. That's kind of like a really brilliant experiment is that you have to now imagine and theorize before you even get on and build the breadboard, right? there's this kind of like theorizing and figuring out okay how do I fool nature and how do I how do I

rewire nature to reveal the unseen make it manifest so I think that there is a very similar I think it's coming from the same source really really brilliant experiments and I would love to see you write up

your second book should be about that should be about the genius of like you know we often talk about the genius about the genius of how Feynman took the rocks amplitude and turned it into the Feynman path in the group. Like, you know, let's talk about the genius of like the pound replica experiment and like these designs that, that like made theory real, you know? I mean, like, when you, I remember like when we were grad students, you go down in the basement, my coffee, you're working on this very expensive amplifier. And I'm like, you're building an amplifier to look for polarization

in the CMB. Like, that's a pipe dream. Like, 1994, right? 1993. Yeah, that's right. Well, you weren't alone. None other than Paul Steinhart said we'd never detect it. So maybe he's right about B modes. I don't know. I remember he gave a colloquium when we were, you know, first of your student, second. It's like, why are you wasting your time with this? You love for that. Yeah, we do. We do. And I want to get into some of the kind of creative aspects of things that he explores and you explore. Because I think he's wrong. I want to talk about, you know, kind of the difference between our two fields. you know, of experiment in theory, that there isn't necessarily conciliance between them because you couldn't make a good living as a theorist, you know, predicting things. You know, I was talking to Jana again earlier.

And, you know, thank you for stopping by the podcast. We had a crossover episode, which we'll put a link to where, you know, it's like facts of life and different strokes all got together. But remember that back in the day, what's happening? And, you know, we used to watch all those shows together and now we had a crossover. So thank you for joining that. But, you know, we talked about, like, her theories. You don't have a rerun of the episode?

Yeah, you want to be rerun? Oh, no, Roger. That's a Roger. I'll say that. The thing that we talked about was, like, her theories, you know, of black hole battery, black hole flashlights and, you know, topology on the universe, on these massive scales that, you know, really you could never expect to test. In fact, her previous book or her, you know, most recent book,

she's writing another one that'll be out later this year, but about the detection. Yeah, she's writing another book about Black Hole's. And how, but the first book, you know, about the Black Hole Blues book was really brought to fruition as a success only because of the discovery by an experimental team. And one of the things I like to talk about with, mostly I've had on theoretical physicists like Jim Gates and Sean Carroll and Katie Mac and others that were on. But when I talk to a theoretician, I always like to get a sense of what they view as the value of experiment.

In other words, is experiment merely the kind of confirmatory or refuting evidence for a theory? In other words, does experiment serve theory or is there another road? Is there a different ground that is intrinsically valuable? Because obviously, you know, you and I have great regard for the ancients in Galileo. You know, they didn't make a distinction between a theoretical physicist and experimental physicist until, what, the 1920s or something like that? So what do you make of that? Is experiment in the service of theory, not in a negative sense, but is it used only in service

to kind of prove or, you know, kind of validate physical laws of nature that are produced by theorists? Yeah. So my I've had a I've had an evolution with regard so if you were to ask me this question 10 years ago I'd be like well I'm living in 10 dimensions and I'm trying to deal with pure thought and trying to use I'm trying to find a ground state of string theory that will correspond to our universe Which was something that I was working on And that you know well you know that story and I you know I managed to to do something with that and then it turned out that it all went to It all fell into the multiverse So I, there are two things that change my direction.

One was a statement from BJ Bjorkin, the great particle physicist, who at some point, like, you know, he's responsible for the quark model of, you know, and there's some particles named after him, and he is a theorist of the highest order and one of the great theorists of the last century, theoretical particle physicists. And when I was at Slack, as a postdoc, he would always come around and like, you know, know, ask us trivia questions. And one question he would ask us was, because a lot of theorists got attracted to theory

because of Einstein and this idea, and he came up with GR on pure thought. So BJ asked a question was, how long after Einstein discovered GR did he apply his theory to the perihilion of Mercury? All right? Now, my memory may not serve me, but it's an order of a few days. And a lot of us were shocked at that, right? So in other words, Einstein had already known

about certain experimental facts that were problematic that he used to guide him towards this theory. It goes deeper than that. My evolution is actually that, you know, these days, I rely on talking to experimentalists to help my theoretical intuition. So actually, I engage in theoretical talk with experimentalists.

Because I, so, and I think the big, for me, the big story in the history of theoretical physics is something called quantum field theory which is we many people believe to be the mother language of you know the standard model is based on this language on quantum field theory and the idea of the field right now you know in the 1800s a guy named Michael Faraday you know as you know the story he's probably the greatest experimentalist known in in physics and Faraday to explain why it is that change

ancient magnetic fields will induce electric currents far away from the magnet said there's going to be he theorized that there were invisible lines of force you know like woo-woo stuff right and he was the laughingstock of the theorists and it turned out to be actually the paradigm of physics which is the idea that everything basically are made up of fields came from an experimentalist it came from the intuition of an experimentalist so again I think that you know For me, personally, I, you know, I was watching, I give you a good example. There was a conference that I saw that you were a part of at the Permanent Institute.

You are one of two experimentalists at this conference who was like all about like, you know, you know, the past hypothesis and the empty, you know, the smallest of entropy in the universe and the hour of time and, you know, and everyone was saying all this stuff, all this fancy ADS, CFT and C and all this stuff. And you actually, I was watching this, you rose your hand. You said, you know, we're looking for a new form of CP violation. And I was like, wow, the only person that made sense in terms of what informed my theoretical musings later on was what you said. Because the connection, it got me thinking about the connection between CP violation, right, CPP symmetry, and the violation of T.

But you were the one that came up with that, an experimentalist. So I have very strong feelings about like, you know, how important it is for at least my students. I'm like, whatever opportunity you get, you must be talking to experimentalists about your theory and getting their feedback. Yeah. Because they have a kind of intuition that can be very useful for you. Yeah, my father, who was in terms of giving you orientation and giving you direction, otherwise you're going to be lost in like this jungle. Yeah. Yeah. My father, you know, was a great mathematician, and he always used to say that actually,

you, me, I should know, understand theoretical physics at the level comparable to a theoretician, not necessarily at the level that I have to create new theories, although I've tried to do that unsuccessfully so far, but I'll let you know if that pans out. Yeah, exactly. Mark Kaminkowski at Johns Hopkins, you know, used to call me a deeply closeted theorist. But anyway, the thing that I always took away from my father's statement, and this coming from mathematician, was that to really, to be a good experimentalist, you have to understand why you're doing it. You can't just be a plumber, you know, electrician, and, you know, those are great things to be. But in the context of truly understanding why you're doing it, and it's an obligation that I think an experimentalist has to understand the theory.

Otherwise, they are just merely, you know, kind of turning screws and so forth. They're not to, again, to denigrate that at all. But on the same token, a theorist doesn't necessarily have to understand the ins and outs of the experiment. But if he or she does, it's a superpower. And I think that level, you know, when you see people like that that are intimately embedded in experimental science, something like our friend David Spurgel. Yes. He know, I mean, he could have been a great experimentalist. I mean, he understands the DEI, and he does numerical experiments, but he's one of the foremost theorists of,

of his generation. And I think, you know, people like him or Robert Dickey, you know, also an eminent theorist, Brands Dickey theory, you know, the, you know, anthropic principle, he had precursor notion of inflation, flatness problems and so forth. And then he was, you know,

deeply involved with experimental searches for, you know, gravity and obviously the cosmic background that, you know, he's indelibly associated with. So I always say, and I like to bring this up, I had this conversation with Stephen Wolfram and Jan 11 and Eric Weinstein, and it really revolves around what I think is physicists in general. So here we can agree that we're both physicists, but that we kind of envy in a certain sense the fact that mathematics, it can be proven that mathematics is either incomplete or incoherent in a sense. Gertil's theorem basically shows that.

And the closest I argue that we have to such a dictum in physics is Carl Popper's falsifiability criterion that's really called the demarcation that something which cannot be proven wrong is does not constitute science. And that's, you know, no one made Popper God. I mean, just because he, and he had, you know, he had his predilections. He was a big believer in the steady state theory for a long time. and because he thought that was sort of Occam's Razor, in a sense, explanation. So I wonder, you know, do you think the physicist will ever have something that really is

elevated to the level of a girdle incompleteness theorem? Or is it just destined to really be some combination of Occam's Razor and Carl Popper's demarcation hypothesis? Yeah, I think it was, I mean, I think you're asking the question of the ages. I mean, that's a, I don't have, I would say. that the closest I've come to, so I've asked similar questions and I ask it these days because some of the things that I'm working on or even the new research, research directions that I might be taken, you know, is really, I think is inspired by that challenge actually

that you just raised. I want to read you a quote that I think that helps couch that those questions actually. Yeah. And gives me some kind of direction or inspiration or solace to kind of maybe humble me. And it's from Albert Einstein. So like in, I think it was the 30s. He was at Oxford University. And people were still trying to figure out how did you crack the code? How did you figure it out? How did you come from general relativity? Like, you know, like how did you get that insight, that space is more. Tensorial field equations, right? And this was his response. You know, and his obviously speaking a little bit of parables, right? So he goes, I'm quoting here. A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. That means it is not reached by conscious logical conclusions. But thinking it through afterwards, you can always discover the reasons which have led you unconsciously to your guess and you will find a logical way to justify it. Aberde Einstein. Very interesting. Oh, it's like, you know, you have this, you know, whatever, he had this,

I'm just curious how you think that that that you know by me um sidestep into alban Einstein has yeah well yeah that's the last refuge of the scoundrel is to invoke Albert Einstein but um you know yeah i've had that exact same kind of thought that you know and don't forget Einstein you know worked in a patent office it's no secret right he was deeply influenced by you know Swiss kind of uh you know his Swiss heritage or or you know at least formative years there and at ETH and in Switzerland and seeing their culture of timekeeping and precision that was really manifest at that time. And also, you know, never forget the kind of deep realizations he had. What did he call his deepest tool, his most important tool? He called them thought experiments,

good-dankan experiments, right? So he was an experimentalist. It was just a thought experiment. And I wonder if nowadays you feel like we're kind of lost in math as our mutual friend, Sabine Hossensfelder, who'll be a guest on the show, not too long from now, how she, you know, really makes this claim that theoretical physics has been, you know, basically stagnated for the last, what does she call it, basically our whole lifetime since the 70s. And she claims that, you know, really the stagnation is the result of really a fascination with the, with an obsession with beauty and with finding mathematics, you know, to be elegant and beautiful and and there have been books, you know, Brian Green, the actually name the elegant

universe. Your book makes a lot of parallels between not visual arts, but, but, you know, the musical arts, jazz, obviously, it's a huge part of it. And she claims that this, you know, is kind of treading over ground that hasn't borne fruit in 40 years. So let me, let me get your take on this. And Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend also has had made significant claims of that nature on this very podcast and elsewhere, that we're either very bad salesmen and sales women and that we're

not really promoting how awesome theoretical physics has been, or there really hasn't been the greatest turnover and new ideas since the November 1975 kind of particle revolution. Where do you stand in that? In that kind of... No, it's a very, you're asking all these hard questions. Yeah, well, what do you expect? On this podcast. That's why I'm paying you so much. That's your honorarium, brother. That's right.

Book me up. So I think it's a very interesting intention. I mean, because at one level, so far, like, you know, when we look at our standard model of particle physics, right? We have this Lagrangian, and then you specify, like, you know, so my, one of my great mentors, John Collins, particle physicists, John Collins, he said he had a final exam question for his part of this quantum field theory, advanced quantum field theory class. And the question was, if I give you Lorentzian variance, SU2, SC3, and U1, and Gajun variance, and four dimensions, there's only one unique Lagrangean to write down,

write the Lagrangian down, right? And it's a standard model, you know, without the Higgs term and that kind of stuff, right? you can uniquely specify a theory that like, you know, that we've just, you know, tested, you know, to, you know, great, great lengths, right? I mean, so, so at one level, you know, we see apasiora, at least, you know, the incredible, what's that Vignor quote? The, the official. Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and physics. So I think that, that statement kind of codifies it. However, it reminds me of a great jazz edition Ornett Coleman, who was also a mentor and a friend of mine,

and I once bought a great, you know, a great musical researcher in cognitive science, Ani Patel, to come down to meet Ornick Coleman. And he had all these questions for Ornette, you know, all these technical questions about music theory and homilotics and all this stuff. And he goes on that with these questions. And Ornett goes,

I'll answer if you can tell me where an idea comes from. Right? And it was like, okay, maybe it was a conversation. pop-out, but, you know, well taken. I think this points back to the Albert Einstein thing. Yeah, you know, we have this beautiful math that we can then use as a tool, and it can be very efficiently used to make predictions and calculate outcomes that another language may not be able to do.

But, you know, can you write down an equation for the intuition that got you that, that insight, that got you that math, you know, and the source of the creativity or, you know, just basically physical. What about physical intuition? What about the fact that, you know, you and I know we have, I mean, like David, like, David Spirgel is like that, right? You know, like David would have like a crazy intuition. He once sold me something, you know, three years prior was like an intuitive thing. I went back and I did the calculation for like two years and he was bang on for it.

How do you explain that? Right. Right. So that is his dance. There's this interesting thing there, right? And it goes back to this other thing about what Einstein said, you know, which is like the most incomprehensible thing by the universe is that it's at all comprehensible. You know, what is it about the human mind and us that's able to come up with this stuff?

What's the math? What's the physics of that, you know? Yeah. And like, so anyway, I think that it's a dance. It's sort of like, yes, nobody takes away from the math. But, you know, you and I, your dad was a great mathematician. And he once told me a story that he used to tell you when, which was if anybody, you know, like, you know, math is people will try to impress you with math and but what's a number? This question, right?

What's a number? Right. One time I was in, I was in some space with these, I was at the Institute of Advanced Study on sabbatical and there are all these brilliant mathematicians and they'll give me a hard time making fun of me like this, you know, you've been this, you stumble on something and we come to clean it up. And then I said to one of them, what's a number? And then he completely got like, he did not know how to respond to that. So like, anyway, so I can go on for days about that. I don't have an answer to your question. But I do believe that it's sort of like, you know, the whole elephant thing, that one party elephant, yes, seems like mathematics is a good tool. But not all mathematics. It seems like a subset of the math.

can be useful and a subset, you know, of the math is just useful to mathematicians. And some of it is useful to economics and some of it is useful to machine learning. But to say that math is going to be the thing, the guideposts, and the Holy Grail that will give us, give us the breakthroughs in physics, that I disagree with. Right. Especially when you look explicitly at it for guidance via L. against beauty. You know, obviously there are people in one extreme like, like Paul Dirac and maybe Eric Weinstein, cleaves to that mold that is, you know, Dirac used to say, it's more important

that your equations be beautiful, that your math is beautiful, than it be right. Obviously, he was right and he actually made predictions about the physical world more often than he was wrong. But I wonder, was there attention, you know, as you're writing this book, the fourth anniversary of which is now upon us, the jazz of physics. And you're talking about the secret link between the structure of the universe. And I wonder if you could take us through, what was the inspiration? When did you realize,

first of all, that you had to write a book, because you used to say to me, like, don't write a book unless you cannot not write a book. Like basically, you got to have, and you encourage me. You said, you have the story. You connected me and the right people and the right times.

And I couldn't have done it without you. But really, I was always nervous. Like, do I have enough of an idea? And when did you know unequivocally that you had a, you had this idea for this brilliant book that would go on to be a bestseller and influence both, you know, it's like sometimes people that do to try to do too much. You said multitasking is not your strong suit. But you try to do something for the jazz community and then they're going to say,

well, you're not a real jazz musician. And they try to do something in physics. Well, you dabble in jazz. Was that a fearful process for you? I mean, you already had tenure, right? But how did you, how was it for you? When you knew you had to write this book and what fears did you have to overcome and limitations, self-limitation, did you have to overcome in order to bring it to life?

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6 p.m. Pacific time. Again, another card question. Yeah, well, the Ivy League professor, man. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, like, you know, looking back at it, because sometimes you do things, you're not even aware of what the impulse was.

So, but looking back, I realized I did, I wrote the book, I had to write the book for mainly two reasons. The first reason was I wanted to write the book for a younger version of myself. In other words, when I was like some young lost soul that may have like had my fantasies, you know, my naive fantasies about about being a scientist and especially physics and, you know, being a musician and not wanting to really give up on either and not knowing how to reconcile. not known how to reconcile those inner conflicts of identity actually, it's also about that that nerd

from the Bronx that really didn't fit in and like, you know, have these two passions and couldn't find that outlet anywhere. Either you're the cool musician or you're the nerdy scientist. And I was sort of like in the closet about both of those things. And I felt like, you know, I had reached a certain level of like, you know, I kind of knew how to play my horn. I knew something about music and I knew something about physics and I was like start to see ways in which those two worlds were linked and I just said I'm you know I'm going to write this book I have to write this book but I have to write the book to clarify some of those things so it was actually a process of like you have this this sort of inner intuition and the process of writing the book and telling those

stories helped me clarify and also reconcile some of those conflicts that I actually had and And it was the process of coming out of the closet as well. And making it known to people who I was afraid of and I was afraid would judge me to say, you know what? This is who I am. And this is what, this is the story. And, you know, you saw some of the book reviews I got. Some of them were not.

Some of them were people who were threatened by that. And they were like, no, you know, you're just a physicist trying to be a musician. And you're, or you're just a fake physicist, view of music. I was like, maybe I'm neither of those things. How about that? You know, like, you know, I am. like writing the story, this is my, this is this narrative. And so, um, so for me it was kind of both of those things. The process of trying to clarify something by, by, by writing and telling those

stories. And then, and also, you know, kind of like, write in that book for, for a kid, for a young person or a person, you know, that, you write in a book for somebody that, that would find such a book very useful or inspirational. Yeah. And I think it has. I mean, you were able to communicate to people. I remember you telling me, you know, wait till you start getting, you know, emails from people around the world. And, you know, and I've gotten that. I've gotten people, you know, some guy in Pakistan, you know,

who's just like, I'm your biggest fan. And, you know, he's probably Muslim. And here I am his New York Jew, you know, and like we couldn't be farther apart. And, you know, I'll get emails about that. And it's, I think, in large part, because you encourage me that the story has to come out. If you don't let it out, you know,

I'm glad he did it. Why? It's funny, you're going to now see the blessings actually coming out soon because you have, you're also a pioneer because the very thing that you were, that you were, there's fear in this, as you know. I knew that when you were right, you want of, there was this fear. Let's face it. Like, all right, I have to, I have to come out and say, you know, speak about my spirituality and and the veracity of my science and the same breath in the same book. And I remember that there was,

there was, you know, you know, what happens when you write books like this. And it turns out, a book, it will soon be coming out that I'm actually, I'm read, I have to read

by a very, very accomplished young physicist. I can't mention his name. I can't. And it touches on the similar topics. It touches on, like, you know, this guy,

is actually a rabbi as well as like a top notch theoretical biophysicists. Wow. Like he's talking about it. So it's like, aren't you glad that you were the first to write such a book? Well, you know. I'm writing the first book of this nature where I'm making this link in a way that's like, you cannot answer the question about this unless you look at this, which we're told to not look at, right?

Right. You did it already. Yeah. Well, you know, I think, again, you know, I don't want to turn this into too much of a mutual admiration society, but it's impossible. How happens when you bring your friends on your podcast? I know, I know. That's right. The university will forbid me from bringing on buddies again. But the, but the basic truth. You know, for me, thinking about what a book is, and at the end of the podcast, we'll ask you guys, we'll ask you the same questions I ask everybody that comes on, which is, you know, the meaning of books and how they affect you.

and it's exactly like you're saying how it can be this letter, almost as I call it in the book, like an ethical will, where you have a book and it's not really for you. I mean, we'll talk about that later, what your legacy, what you hope your legacy will really amount to and in terms of your book. And maybe we could talk a little bit about your next project. We'll talk about that at the very end.

But one of the things that really spoke to me in this book is a notion of gratitude. and the gratitude that you have for teachers. And as I, you know, I hope that there's nobody who speaks Russian out there in the wilderness listening. But the word, as I was taught by my teacher, Alexander Polnerev, who you knew very well. Alexander Polnerov, yes. That's right.

That's right. He is. Yeah. And having him as a mentor, you know, he used to say, scientist in Russian translates into a person who was taught. And, you know, in your book, you're talking about these things and you're talking about At one point, you referenced Bruce Partridge, one of your teachers, and David Wilkinson, who is my grand advisor.

So he's my Ph.D. advisor, Peter Timby's Ph.D. advisor. And in my book, I also show my academic genealogy stretching back to the 1500s. And now one of my students, Darcy Barron, is now she's a professor. And now she has a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. So it's like 20 generations. And how do you see yourself in this book, you know, kind of in the, in that along that chain that's unfurled since you know in here and the ancients going back to Pythagoras etc that you talk about all the way through the future the resonances of the universe

how did that thesis play out did it come to you how did it be this inspiration we talked about how the story emerged from you the fears you overcame but where did this idea come from or is it like you know Einstein you just can't you can't really pin it down yeah I mean a lot of it came from actually listening, you know, I, as you know, I'm a big, I'm an avid fan of John Coltrane and, you know, and listened to his, the evolution of his sound, his music. He kind of like, you know, went from sort of like the more traditional bebop, hardbop tradition. And then he kind of went into this other realm where it was more an exploration of sound. So just not necessarily structured notes and chord changes and the way in which we, you know, might traditionally think about music,

but, and, you know, culture is also like, you know, even in a Love Supreme, or even like the more like, you know, his album expression or, you know, cosmic sound, like interstellar space. That's a great album, by the way. Every, every song is named after a planet in our solar system. And it's fantastic. And it's just a different axis that, you know, that you have. have to listen, but it's beautiful and it's capturing, but it's an exploration of sound. So then when I realized that actually, you know, music, what we call music, and also some of it also have to do with the inspiration I had from Brian Eno, who was a friend and a mentor that I knew, and I don't mean to name drop, but I, you know, I can't help myself.

No, I was actually just going to read his blur. This book could have just been called The Joy of Physics because what leaps out is Stefan Alexander's delight and curiosity about the cosmos and how he finds pleasure in exploring it. Brian Eno, artist, composer, and producer. That's right. And so Brian was also that kind of musician, which was that he played with sound. He, you know, he basically was basically engineer. I guess he referred to himself. You do treatments when he was at rock to music, right? And sound synthesis and, you know, just the science of sound. And I was like,

oh, that's my hook. I mean, here we have, you know, sound and acoustics, which is a branch of physics already. So that's already a link. And then, then there's this remarkable crazy thing, which is, you know, when we look at the expanding universe, Jim Peoples who won a Nobel Prize this year, right? Wait, wait, was it last year this year? Yeah, no, 2019. Right, Jim Peoples, there's a whole chapter in a book about Jim Peoples discovery, before he got the Nobel Prize, by the way.

Yeah, that's right. You predicted it. And, you know, that prediction was that if the universe is expanding, this is what's crazy, right? If the universe is expanding. and only of the universe is expanded, the equation, the equation for the plasma. So you have the expanding universe, right, and it's filled with a plasma of hot energetic electrons and photons, and it's all, you know, there's no structure there, but it's basically

a medium that can carry sound. And what people's basically showed is that that system, literally, is an acoustic system, and that the expansion rate itself set, the scale for the resonance. So just like you know how we have an instrument and the geometric size of an instrument, right, the size, if I have a flute, the fundamental, the largest, the longest, the longest frequency that can fit, right, is basically the length divided by fourth of that flute, right? And a similar calculation, what people showed is that you're going to get these sound waves, and these sound waves are responsible for seed and structure, stars and galaxies and us, and it started with sound and of course there's a beautiful resonance with the book of Genesis as well.

Instead of in the begin was a word and begin was sound, right? The begin of our structure and so like that to me was just so compelling that's like you know that the modern jazz musicians and modern composers like Brian you know like their their direction and their music was more about sound and then you had like this fundamental thing happening in cosmology that the big question that we asked and the thing I was researching, which is structure formation in the universe, and that also had to do with sound, and that to me was my link. And then once I have that link, then it became now, how far can I push these analogies? And the book was also a book about analogies, was a book about the importance

when we do scientific research and scientific inquiry, the importance of not getting an exact and not having an exact mathematical equation, but having a good analogy between two systems that actually are just analogous to each other. And then where they don't completely overlap, it might give you a new direction for your investigation to discover something new. So, yeah. Yeah, so when I was talking with Eric Weinstein a couple weeks ago,

one of my listeners asked me to ask him a question about, you know, he said, basically, I've heard Eric describe geometric unity, which is his new theory, or not new, but his proposal for at least one venue to pursue that may ultimately lead to some greater unification of the laws of physics and gravity as well with the three other four of the four forces of nature. And this gentleman friend of mine said, I've listened to him on Joe Rogan's show a couple times. I've listened to him on

Lex Friedman's show. And I just don't get it. The way he explains these, I do not get it. So please ask him to describe it in terms of analogies. And I think that's quite, and I don't know if I succeeded did so much in my interview with him, but the listeners can be the judge of that. But that's one of the most beautiful aspects of your book is that you are thinking in analogies. And like, again, I'm not, you know, you know me. When I give you a compliment, you got to look out. But, you know, I'm your friendly neighborhood grouchy cosmologist, right? As you put it at my wedding and your wedding speech at my wedding.

But the top heads off, yes. But the truth is, you know, having this ability to analogize, I hate it when people say, can you dumb it down? No. You can't dumb it down. And if you do, and you told me this, again, another piece of sage advice at the book, don't dumb it down. Don't dumb down your research.

Don't dumb down your physics. Because what's important is that the reader feels like you respect him or her. And if you respect him or her, then she's likely to feel trusted and trust you and that you're taking him or her seriously. So I thank you for that. And the analogies play really well. And the criticism, you know, I always say, I think it'll be a fun podcast. Tell me what you think about this. You know, like I think it'll be fun to have a podcast where you have people who are, um, who are verified purchasers and they read your book, my book, you know, whoever's book. And they gave it a one star review. And they're, but they're not like just trolls or being nasty, you know, but like when people

criticize your book, they say things like, well, you know, it's not really, you know, how does the universe improvise? And that's not really the point that you're trying to make. You're making an analogy. And it's not like you're saying, let's revive Pythagoras. Go on, yeah. That's right. I'm not saying a lot of people mistook,

they were like when they bought the book, they had these high hopes of thinking, oh, the universe revealed that the universe is a jazz. There's a jazz musician playing the universe. Yeah. Versus improvising, that kind of stuff. That's not, yeah, I wasn't trying to say. very clear. That subtitle is the secret link. Okay, so I can see people getting a little woo-woo about the

secret link, but between the music and the structure of the universe, you're talking about the structure. That means the large-scale structure, the organization of the structure, which on large-scale, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the large-scale properties of the universe may in turn be determined by its microstructure. Can you talk a little bit about that and how the very tiny can affect the very large. Yeah, I mean, if what if you allow me to me to talk about inflation and yeah yeah yeah so that's right. I mean you know one of the things that um you know again in like if you look at people like Brian Eno and you know people that work in electronic synthesis where you you you you play with

sound you know you manipulate sound waves electronically right. to create new sounds and actually, you know, create entire compositions, for example. Generative music is an example of this. And actually, if you look at as an analogy, so you want to explain cosmic inflation and the quantum feel theoretic fluctuations of inflation, good luck to a lay reader, right?

But here I have, you know, I can talk about a synthesizer and I can talk about, you know, that, you know, every note is like basically a sine wave. And I, and it turns out that when I use, use that analogy it comes really really close the universe is not a synthesizer but you can really understand a lot of cosmic of like of the fact that what that June inflation the early stages of the universe right you know you know 10 to the minus 30 something seconds right after the Big Bang you have basically a period

of rapid expansion in the universe and that rapid expansion of the space space time of a basically sets the stage such that it amplifies these quantum undulations it amplifies them and stretches them and those are the things and it does it in a way where it's very democratic and how it does it so it creates basically something that we call white noise and everybody hears white nose or white noise sound like it's basically the hiss that you hear if you had old school TV sets. But the basic point there is that, you know, that's initial sound, that initial sound spectrum,

it's not literally sound, it's the sound of the vacuum, if you want to call it, is the thing that we, you know, I think the current paradigm is, and it's consistent with the experiments, is the thing that source the large-scale structure in our universe today. But, you know, going back that I can explain a lot of that, not by saying that the universe is, you know, playing a jazz chord. It isn't.

But it's a really impressive analogy. And, you know, I, you know who I learned this from actually? I think who did it the best was Richard Feynman. And it's because, you know, I felt like to really make these analogies and do it well, you actually really had to understand the, you know, the subject matter deeply. it's really hard to find a good analogy for something unless you have a well you could get lucky and you could have a good intuition i'm not saying it's the only way but i found it was the exercise of finding these analogies really required me to like to understand the you know quantum fluctuations a lot deeper than i thought i'd understood it just by writing down the you know the creation and annihilation operators you know right yeah right yeah and alienating your author's

I mean, I think Stephen Hawking said every equation cuts your body. Let me ask you that's one thing. I also believe that mathematics is also an analogy. Yeah. You know, if you have like a, you know, like if I look at a pendulum and it's going up and down, I write down, you know, a simple harmonic, you know, I write down the oscillator equation for that. That's just an analogy. Yeah.

Why else would Wigner say it's unreasonable? To the real thing. Right. Why else would Wigner say it's unreasonable for math to be effective unless it is only an analogy, right? It's a model for, it's not the thing. If we can't understand what a number is or, you know, it takes two books of proofs to show that one plus one equals two, so two is it only at best imperfect approach asymptotically to the notion of what meaning is in terms of a mathematical description of physics.

And Galileo, you know, is one of the first, you know, to really invoke that. And I think, you know, this book pays homage to that. Yeah. So he was the first, you know, he was a mathematician. His father thought he should be a doctor. You know, his father was a musician and wanted his son to not, you know, squander his talents and become a physician. And so he didn't, he became a doctor, but, you know, not the kind that helps people like us. He became like us instead.

Well, I want to ask you, I know you don't have too much more time, but I want to start, you know, kind of winding down this particular episode. So we're going to do many more parts, I hope. Can you say anything about projects that you're working on in the future before we get to the segment that I call the final five, which I ask all my guests? But in particular, in research, in jazz, in writing, can you take us on those three, you know, kind of trimesters or tri-segments of your brain? And where are you, what are your plans at each one of those three different areas? Well, you know, actually before I left, Leon was, Leon Cooper was my first thesis advisor, and then I'm moving to cosmology. And what happened, it's in my book, but it started off with, back then Leon was doing machine

learning, like, but basically modeling real, he became a biophysicist soon after his Nobel Prize. And I was working on in the early days of machine learning with Leon. And the project back then that I was working on was to look at the large-scale structure the universe using unsupervised neural networks. Oh, yeah. I remember that. And I wrote that.

I still have that paper. I wrote in 1997. It was like a preprint that I never put out. Right. It's really funny to see that. That's what people are working on today. But I've returned back to some of that, but more of the theoretical level trying to understand, you know, what is it about the, these, the architectures and what is this?

You know, it turns out there are certain physical systems like, I don't want to want to give too much rid of the way that has a really close semblance to the way the machine learning architecture is a model mathematically and looking at these physical models and that and trying to understand what what can be gain on both sides of that analogy. Another thing I'm working on is I've been Leon after Leon told me to find a real project to work on. I decided to dedicate a lot of my after tenure so the last like I don't know 12 years I've been working on the cosmological constant problem. Yep.

And I'm starting to make some, some progress on that. You know, that's led to this whole thing about the multiverse and that, you know, if the cosmological constant, the vacuum energy is exactly not this value. You can't have life in the universe. Right. That's not actually exactly true. Oh, wow. Yeah.

There's a paper I wrote with Fred Adams and Groh and Mercini Houghten. we show that if you let other coupling constants float as well, you can you can change the vacuum energy by eight orders of magnitude, six orders of magnitude, I forget, and you still get habitable zones. So it's not as finely tuned as we're led to believe. Yeah, and that then gave me the confidence to them really start, Leon gave me an idea. He said, there is a hidden symmetry at work And it's not super symmetry that is dealing with the cosmological constant. And I think I found what that is. And I've been working on that.

And it's related to our good friend, you know, our friend and your benefactor and Jim Simons. It's related to Chern Simons, actually. So I put a preprint out recently. It's up for review. It looks like it's going to get published. And it's a way of dealing with the vacuum energy, sequestering it into a topological sector having to do with deterrent simon's number and what we're looking at now if we have we have this theory it's a modified theory of gravity and we're looking right now to look to see if there's solar

system tests that can constrain this theory so again experiment you know whether or not there this thing makes a prediction that deviates from Einstein's relativity and you know either it makes a prediction and if it whatever that is can we rule the theory out you know that so that's kind of what I'm doing physics-wise these days. Other than that, I'm pretty confused and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, I'm still, also trying to find what directions to go into. So maybe you can, offline, you and I can talk about some of the secret experiments you're doing.

Yeah, well, we, we, it's funny because, you know, well, Max Planck said that physics advances one funeral at a time, but it was funny because I sort of mean, I mean it in a non-morbid sense by, you know, kind of one paper at a time, every generation, you have to reinvent all the literature. So one of my students is working on looking at axions and time-bearing signals, how they could be produced in the CMB polarization or discovered through a CNB polarization. And then our mutual collaborator in Tel Aviv University, Mayor Shimon, brought up that you had worked on a similar effect, you know, but with circular polarization. And so my graduate student, you know, now we're in like the second, almost third generation

between all three of us and we're looking at, you know, how can we constrain, you know, circular biorringence and circular dichroism and things like exotic effects, all in an effort to really understand how did, you know, how do these, how can we constrain such exotic phenomena that may lead to violation of the most sacrosanct laws of physics, Lorentz invariants, time reversal, CPT violation, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, so even though we, we don't get that, you know, hang out under the Waterman Street Bridge and drink Ocean's Coffee very often. We're going to do that, too. Any, what about, like, obviously, COVID has put a crimp on a lot of your performances,

but you were very active in the Providence in Boston, New York Jazz scene. Any long-range plans or things on the horizon once things return to normal or not yet? Yeah, so there's a film, so there's this project. So I've been working with this great basis, you know, was considered to be jazz times basis of the year, Melvin Gibbs. Played jazz, played it was the basis of the Rollins band. I mean, so Melvin, J.T. Lewis, the great drummer J.T. Lewis and DJ Logic. We recently did a live street of like a block like performance, a social distance and what music looks like when you're social.

distance and that will be released very soon this um great filmmaker cam christen that i'm mispronouncing his name so he's putting out a series um soon and we'll appear in that but no i have not been playing out a lot and i've mainly been just trying to get you know practice when i can um hopefully i'll emerge you know like like you know sunny ronons in the bridge right you know i emerge from the bridge you know being able to play twinkle twinkle little star a little bit better a little bit better yeah a little bit better yeah My kids will appreciate Uncle Stefan performing even more frequently than... That's right, great pumpkin. Last thing is you're in the visual arts before we turn to the final segment here.

So you played a role in the film, Rinkle and Time. Can you talk a little bit about that and what the... If there's anything coming up in that, in that aspect of Stefan's great. No, no. So that was great fun. I look a lot from that. Actually, the thing that was interesting there was that, you know, like I work with their creative team and like, you know, they're all about like, you know, you need to, you need to take psychedelics to really be, you know, to see like quantum bursts and I'm like, I'm okay, you know. I don't need that. I actually in working on that film and like, you know, a wrinkle in time and trying to figure out how to build a test rack and how to do it in a way that's not a corny wormhole anymore. And, you know, all the stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. That's hard of wormholes. Wormholes peak. We're at peak wormhole. Exactly. Like, you know, enough wormholes.

And one of the things I learned, I actually, you know, was interesting. I learned things about my physics, trying to explain physics to them, right? Yeah. And so, no, so the answer is no. However, as you know, I am the president of, you know, an organization of black scientists, the National Society of Black Physicists. And one of the things that I dream of doing, you know, and we're trying to to do is to create new platforms for our young emergent scientists.

And so I think like some of those platforms may start looking like, you know, having people kind of like in a very exciting and natural and, you know, organically talk about their science, talk about their lives and have interesting conversations, right? And I think that working with, you know, the great Ava Duvenet, right, and her creative team for Wringle and time gave me some idea. of how to do that. And actually, you know, I'll say my last compliment to you, you know, listening to preacher Brian, like, you know, give his sermons, you know, definitely, you know, you've given me some other tips as well.

All right. Good enough. Well, I will say, though, that there was, there was an idea that I felt I got ripped off on and I can't. Yeah. For reasons I can't. Come on. You can't, you can't, come on. You can't tease like that. No, because I don't know, man, you know, you know, you might have to like snip it out later on. Uh-oh, all right, all right. We'll talk offline. There was a famous movie where they use a concept of time travel, and that was my idea. Okay.

Oh, wow. Okay. All right. We'll talk offline about that. We'll get our, I have a phalanx of lawyers in the next room. I can call it, you know. Well, thank you for calling me a preacher. I haven't, you know, been associated with the Catholic Christian church in a long time,

but it's nice to always go back to my roots there. So the end of the talk, I usually, like to bring up, I call it the final five. And I like to bring together some themes across all the great intellects that I am privileged and blessed to interview such as yourself. And it's been, you know, it's been, it's been kind of a wonderful time in the last few months being with my children, with my wife, et cetera. But it's been challenging. And part of the way to get out of the depression that's natural to feel on occasion is to engage with great minds and great books. And I thought back as I was interviewing Sasha Sagan, who is the daughter of Carl Sagan, and And Drurian, who's an amazing, kind of more artistic and not as obviously scientifically astute as Carl Sagan, but nevertheless has made so many contributions to culture and popularization of science.

So when I interviewed Sasha, I brought up the fact that her father said in an episode of the original Cosmos series in 1980s, there was an episode called The Persistence of Memory, so I'm going to read it like him. What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny, dark squiggles and equations and graphs and all sorts of cool goodness in this book. but one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person. Maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. You never thought about this way. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside of your head directly to you. And I think it's, he says, a book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

What I want to ask you is he talked about, you know, millennia ago, a book could have been written that influenced you. Obviously, you're studied in the, arts of of you know Pythagoras etc and look at the ancient scrolls and and it's original parchment and papyrus but I want to talk about that magical aspect of books and whether or not you Stefan Alexander high professor of High Solomon professor of of physics at Brown University if you had your choice you can only choose one don't say both I'll get you if you do but would you rather have a hundred readers of your book the jazz of physics next year or one reader a hundred years from now.

One reader 100 years now. Okay. Okay. Anyone want to elaborate on that? No, because I think this idea of it, I mean, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about like a book I read recently that, you know, I think the book was written maybe in the 40s. So it's not quite 100 years ago.

But just, again, like this, it was that much more special that it was written at that time. It was a different time, you know, a different time in our century. And it was Schrodinger's, what is life? Yeah. I remember you gave that to me in second year grad school. Oh, wow. Well, I never returned it. I never returned it. So that's where you're copy. You know what's just worth now? Signed by Schrodinger. Exactly. One million dollars. Wow. But yeah, so I think like, you know, you know, reading that book and just knowing, actually just knowing that Schrodinger wrote that book back then, has, you know, it does have this impact. Yeah.

Awesome. Okay. Next question that I ask, again, about readers of your book, the Jazz of Physics now in its fifth year. It's finished four years of four orbits around the sun with this wonderful, wonderful book on it. What do you have as a preference for readers? Now, this, again, is not a hater, troll, you know, someone who's flaky, who just doesn't like stuff on. This is somebody who's engaged with the book, read it cover to cover, maybe twice. Would you rather have someone who's skeptical of the notions that there is a secret link between physics and the structure of the cosmos?

Or would you rather have it be a fanboy, a fan girl that just loves the idea, I was just like really into it. Who would you rather have really deeply, thoroughly, meaningfully engaged with your book? someone who's skeptical okay yeah good good because i'm skeptical about that too yeah i think that's the most honest way that a scientist can be about certainly about his or her work in in science remember findman said you know the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool so we sort of should be adversarial with each other's scientific ideas but a book like ours that you know might be a polemic um yeah so it's great to hear your uh your feelings there Okay, I've always seen you as a Boolean optimist.

What are you pessimistic about? Anything to do with the future of education post-COVID? Anything that you're pessimistic about. Okay, so I'm a contrarian, as you know. So what are you pessimistic about as an optimist? Good. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. I am, I don't know if the word, I don't know how to word it,

but like, you know, but it's sort of like, I know there's a fate, there's another Einstein quote, and he goes, you know, there... We have a one Einstein quote per episode minimum maximum. Sorry, no, I'm just kidding. Weinstein didn't say it. His brother said it. Weinstein, Weinstein said this, yeah.

Actually, I think Weinstein actually did say this quote. I'm sure he did. There are two things that are infinite. The universe and human stupidity. And then I think Einstein goes on to say, I'm not certain about the universe, though. But it's, again, like, you know, when I say that, I'm also including myself in this. I'm also including my stupidity as well.

I am part of that human family. And I think this uncanny ability for us to just, you know, sometimes, you know, make stupid choices and do stupid things when they are clear, the clear, smart thing to do. And it's in front of us. And we choose to make a stupid choice. And I think that there are certain things. I'm being now very general. but now let me make it specific. I think that, you know, I hope that in this next,

the next hour, this sort of new generation of thinkers and scientists and people who are going to do competent things and brave things, that they are truly rewarded for their innovations and not held back because they may be different, and they may think different or look different or talk different, right? And they don't fit into the social structures or what have you, that they're going to be rewarded for their innovations because we have, I'm seeing,

especially here at Brown, I'm seeing a new generation of truly brilliant young people, they're just different. And we have to be ready for them. We have to be ready to elevate them and give platforms to them and protect them and at the same time, and teach them at the same time, but definitely acknowledge them and reward them, even if they're different. And, you know, and I'm also referring to like things like, you know, when people from underrepresented groups and women in the science, who are thinking, might be thinking differently and coming up with innovations that we should, as a community, really make the smart choices by celebrating their innovations. Yeah.

Well, that really pains me to admit how beautifully eloquent that was said about it. I learned it all from you, bro. Yeah, I don't know about that. All right, last question revolves around the telescope. So, Sir on Kierkegaard, as you know, once said that that. But life can only be understood backwards, but you must live it forwards. And we astronomers look through telescopes and we see things at great distances that were only produced very long ago. And so we might have clarity about what that system used to look like.

We have no idea what it looked like now. But what I'm asking you now really refers to the name of this podcast, which is one of Sir Arthur C. Clark's three laws. So one of his laws was the only, I'll say the first one is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That was his first law. His second law, I'll just quote the third one second, but his second law was for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. But the third law is where we get the name of this podcast from. He said, the only way to find out what is possible is to venture beyond a little bit into the impossible. So as the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, I want to ask you, looking back through Kierkegaard's telescope, what things seemed impossible to you as a 20-year-old, as a 30-year-old, that now seem possible because you have that courage to venture into the impossible.

Oh, wow. You know, I thought the thing that was impossible, that, I mean, I never, I was so. I was so convinced that I wasn't going to make it as a scientist as a physicist in terms of being able to have a career and a profession, let alone tenure and what have you, that I just went along with for the ride just expecting, you know, well, this year I'm not going to make it. And this year I'm not going to make it. And this year I'm not going to make it. And I have to make it and get tenure and do this and do that. Right. It was more like, you know, I'm going to continue doing this as long as I'm allowed to. And then when I fall off the cliff, I'll just, you know, do something else. Right. So at that 20-year-old person, I thought it was impossible that I was going to make it to where I'm at right now professionally. And another thing was as a theorist, and this still lives with me. I think the dream of a theorist for me, of this theorist, is to actually have a, be part of a theory, or be part of an idea that actually finds, it finds a home in an experiment that actually matters itself to be correct. It says something about the real world, our world, right? Because all of us, all theorists were wrong, okay?

Everything we publish, unless it's experimentally confirmed. Okay, it meets a certain theoretical standard. But it's tentative. Old standard of actually it being, you know, the detection of, well, you know, all the things that were experimented to confirm that had been predicted. Higgs boson, that Jerry Groundlick played a big role in, right? When we were grad students. That's right.

Professor, yeah. So, yeah. So the point is that, like, that to me is still, still feels impossible. Mm-hmm. But it feels possible so long as I'm not, so long as I continue kind of keeping it humble and talking and actually, you know, and, and continuing to talk to experimentalists. Because I think that you guys kind of whole, give us the orientation and the direction and the intuition sometimes to not get lost in that jungle.

Well, that's really phenomenal. Well, Stefan, I want to thank you again. I owe you at another coffee someday. I'll buy it from Oceans, coffee roasters. You can just buy my own coffee estate. Okay, yeah. Well, I'll put in a requisition for that. I want to thank you.

We'll put in your website, your Twitter handle. We'll add all that in. I just want to thank you for your generosity of spirit, your honesty, vulnerability, and also your insights. And I want to also recognize you as the leader, as the president of the National Society for Black Physicist, which I am honored to be an honorary member of, to be redundant. And I'm looking forward to many big things that we can do together to advance the story tradition of this wonderful entity that you're charged with being intrepid leader of. So I want to thank you for your service to physics, to the community, to all of. us really and we have a great debt to you and i cannot wait to see what you come up with next in your

indomitable improvisational um epicureate i'll stop with the superlatives here because uh you know otherwise you'll get a big head thank you so much stephan alexander uh thank you again for sharing your time thank you mr brian keene dr brian keaton and um i look forward to see you soon sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD. Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences

at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.