Science Friday - SciFri Extra: Remembering Murray Gell-Mann

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann died recently at the age of 89. He received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles, and is credited with giving quarks their name. But he was known for more than just physics—he was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, and a champion of creativity and interdisciplinary research.   One of his biggest interests was exploring the “chain of relationships”  that connects basic physical laws and the subatomic world to the complex systems that we can see, hear, and experience. He joined Ira in 1994 to discuss those chains, the topic of his book “The Quark and the Jaguar.” Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Nobel physicist Merigelman died recently at the age of 89. He was known for his thoughts about quantum mechanics, especially particles like quarks, which he named, and his love of creativity and interdisciplinary thought. We're opening up the sci-fri vault to bring you a conversation I had with him back in August of 1994. It all came together in a rainforest in Belize.

theoretical physicist Murray Galman was strolling through the forest, wondering how quantum mechanics, a fundamental tenet of physics, how quantum mechanics could explain individuality. In other words, if all matter is made up of the same basic stuff, how can the universe be filled with such diversity? Well, in the middle of his musings, Dr. Galman looked up and saw a wild jaguarundi standing on the trail about 100 yards ahead of him. And somehow, the sight of this sleek, black, wild cat triggered something in Gelman's brain. One of those, you know, those eureka moments when the light bulb suddenly lights up and then suddenly he could really see the connections between the simple and the complex.

Well, in this hour, we're going to ask Dr. Gelman to share his insights with us and to explain how quantum physics can form the basis for biological evolution, the development of human society and language, and even creative thought, is the universe essentially comprehensible, and can we ever hope to understand how it all works? Murray Galman is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969. He's the author of the new book, The Quark and the Jaguar, published by Freeman and Company,

and he's one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank for scientists who take a transdisciplinary approach to understanding life, the universe, and everything. Professor Galman joins us from station K-C-F-R in Denver, Colorado. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. It's good to be here, Ira. Did I sum up correctly that moment in the jungle there? Yes, yes, you did a beautiful job. I was okay. Can you tell us what that, describe that little flash of genius, that moment of insight as it occurred to you there, looking at that animal? Well, what I, seeing that very, individual animal somehow made me think since I had just been musing about how individuality fits in with quantum mechanics it made me think that we really

know a little bit about the chain of connections from the simple fundamental underlying laws that govern all matter in the universe to the rich fabric of complex reality that we see around us and of which we are apart And so it was at that moment that I decided to write a book about it. Do we really know the connections or do we think we know the connections? Well, we know something about them. And in particular, we know something about them if we look at the universe from the point of view of information.

And from that point of view, we can see quite a lot. We see that complexity arises from initial order and some sort of the complexity. rules together with the operation over and over and over again of chance. And chance is a key part of it? Yes, it certainly is, what you might call indeterminacy, that is, forks in the road, occasions when things could go different ways, and they go one way out of those, and the different ways have different probabilities. So you can think of the history of universe as kind of a branching tree,

constantly branching with probabilities of the different branches. Albert Einstein, who was not a great believer in chance, although he did agree with you and other scientists of the day in believing that he said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Would you agree with that? Well, I suppose we don't know why the underlying laws are simple, but they are.

They seem to be, at least. And as to chance, it's true that Einstein had difficulty swallowing quantum mechanics, even though he had helped greatly to lay the groundwork for it years before. But even he would have had to admit that from the point of view of any observer, the universe exhibits a phenomenon of chance, because besides quantum mechanical indeterminacy, There's also indeterminacy just from ignorance. You don't know all the details at the beginning of a process.

You know only some of them. And so even if the laws of physics were perfectly deterministic, which they're not, you still couldn't predict the outcome perfectly. And that is made more difficult still by the phenomenon of chaos that occurs sometimes in non-linear systems, in which the outcome is very, very sensitive to tiny details of the input. So even without quantum mechanics, there's a great deal of indeterminacy. But quantum mechanics introduces a fundamental set of indeterminacies, which are much deeper than those that stem merely from ignorance.

There are certain rules it gives you for playing this game, in other words. For calculating probabilities. So the way my colleagues and I, who are investigating a new modern approach to quantum mechanics, look at it, we say that quantum mechanics gives probabilities for alternative histories of the universe. So in other words, the future need not go along any single path. It might take an infinite number of directions developed by roll of the dice, for example. One role after another. Just constantly branching. The great writer,

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his marvelous imaginative short stories, envisaged someone making a model of the branching histories of the universe in the form of a garden of forking paths. Is it possible to predict the universe quantumly to find out which one of those garden paths we're going to be taking? No, that's the whole idea.

The whole idea is that in quantum mechanics it is fundamentally unpredictable. Which alternative will occur. For example, if a radioactive nucleus decays emitting some particle, say an alpha particle, there is no way whatsoever to predict in what direction that alpha particle will go. It can go in any direction, whatever, and they're all equally probable. And equally so, quantum mechanics predicts that anything is possible. Given that some things are more probable than others, doesn't it say that anything is possible? Well, that's a familiar misconception.

It's true only in a very peculiar sense because some things are so improbable that there's no sense talking about the possibility of their happening. When I studied quantum mechanics first at Yale, almost 50 years ago with Henry Marginau, I remember he gave a problem to the class asking what the probability was that some object, spoon or something, would jump off the table an inch or two and then fall back by a quantum fluctuation. I forget the exact problem, but it was something of that kind. And the probability came out something like one divided by one with 62 zeros. So you can say, well, anything can happen, but anything that's that improbable is effectively impossible. So forget it.

For all practical purposes. But it's a common misconception that in quantum mechanics anything goes and all sorts of things which, if true, would require revolution in the known laws of science, still would require a revolution in the known laws of science if they were to happen, things like psychokinesis and so on. They aren't any more acceptable in quantum mechanics than they are in classical physics. If the future is so dependent on possibilities and probabilities, and how do we use it to predict things? How do we get this idea of complexity of being able to deal with the stock market or to deal with how, how sand piles will fall down from something that is so uncertain? Well, it's uncertain only at the level of very light objects and so on.

When we deal with heavy macroscopic objects, or more accurately, when we deal with degrees of freedom that have a lot of inertia, such as we deal with in everyday life, Then the predictions are much like the predictions of classical physics most of the time, in other words, nearly deterministic, with much less of this freedom. Just as I illustrated by that problem about the spoon jumping off the table, it's pretty certain that it will just stay there unless it's disturbed by some normal influence. So the fact that quantum mechanics is probabilistic at root doesn't mean that it applied to the usual kinds of events that we see that it has such a lot of indeterminacy. It doesn't. But at any time, of course, a macroscopic event involving heavy things can be influenced by a quantum fluctuation if they somehow come into connection with each other.

That was the point, or at least the sensible point, of this story of Schrodinger's cat. Ervin Schrodinger, one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, discussed a hypothetical situation in which a radioactive disintegration or something like that, some quantum process, governs whether a cat will be poisoned or not. And that's just an example of how you can amplify a quantum fluctuation to become a major disturbance in the world around us. Nowadays, we could hook up a quantum fluctuation to set off a hydrogen bomb. I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, but could be done in principle

and could then determine whether a city is blown up or not. Let's go back a second to how the little flash of genius you had there in the jungle and your insight. And let's talk a bit about starting with quarks, which we know are the same. And then you get into complex systems, which are unique. And in your book, you propose that different complex systems can behave similarly like biological evolution and the evolution of an economy or human society. How is that possible? How do we make that jump?

Well, if we look at the world, at the universe from the point of view of information, then we can see some of the links that connect the very simple underlying laws to the complex reality that we see around us. and the operation of chance over and over again is then very important. These accidents, which can turn out one way or another and then turn out in one of those ways, these accidents can often have no very wide-ranging consequences. But sometimes they do have wide-ranging consequences. Large-scale ramifications. For example, long, long time ago, some little fluctuation gave rise to our galaxy. the Milky Way galaxy in which we find ourselves.

Now, from the point of view of the whole cosmos, that may not have been very important, but to anything in our galaxy, it's pretty important that it came into existence. Right. And similarly, some little accident, amplified, produced the solar system, and sequence of accidents produced the various planets,

including the Earth. And a whole bunch of other accidents led to the particular way, in which life originated on Earth and the early stages of biological evolution on Earth and then to the different kinds of plants and animals that evolved, the details of those. What's fascinating about complexity, though,

is that if we would turn the clock back on all these events and get to those initial conditions and start it again, we're not guaranteed of getting to the same place that we are today, are we? No, absolutely not. No, not at all. because of all these chance processes that occur one after another. The accidents that give rise to large-scale correlations that have ramifications that are widespread, some of us like to call frozen accidents, like the formation of our galaxy, like the initial form of life that was ancestral to all the other surviving forms of life on Earth,

had certain characteristics, and to some extent every living thing on Earth still has some of those characteristics. For example, in living things all over the Earth, certain right-handed molecules play very important roles, while the corresponding left-handed molecules don't. Now, at one point, certain physicists tried to. to explain that in terms of the asymmetry between left and right for matter as opposed to antimatter. But it didn't work. And as far as anyone knows, it's purely an accident. It's just that the

ancestral life form happened to have these right-handed molecules playing important roles, and it's been true ever since. So it's a beautiful example of a frozen accident. Beautiful example of how life is unfair, right? Now, complexity means many different things. But in in the book, the Quark and the Jaguar, having examined many different possible definitions of complexity, I conclude that the one that comes closest to what we usually mean by complexity in everyday speech and even in a great deal of scientific discourse is the length of a very concise description of the regularities of a system, not including fluctuations judged to be random, but regularities.

Now, where do regularities come from? They can come either from the simple underlying fundamental laws that govern all matter in the universe, or they can come from one of these frozen accidents, or many of these frozen accidents. So as time goes on, as the universe gets older, there's more and more opportunity for accidents and for some of those to be frozen accidents, and therefore more and more opportunity for irregularities to arise and consequently more and more opportunities for greater complexity to arise. So I guess this would be like mutations in biology then. You might look at them in the same way. A mutation that survives. Yes. And that has profound consequences later on for many things

would be an example of a frozen accident. All right. Let's go to the phones because lots of people would like to ask you nice questions. I hope. Bob Bog in Ames, Iowa. Hi. Hello, my question was, I took this quantum physics several years ago, and, you know, for example, for finding the position of, let's say, an electron inside the potential barrier, what we do, we solve the equation and solve the Scherzeresinger's equation, and we get to find the eigen functions. I had two, three years' time to think about it. It seems to me that we are missing an equation, If we had the extra equation that is needed, we can precisely locate, for example, where the, how do you call it, electron is inside that potential well or something like that. Another thing that I taught about this is, you know, maybe we are, you know, like if we saw the world with the sound wave, in a instead of, let's say, light wave, our uncertainty would be totally calculated different. because it's, as you know, H-bar over than five. Babak, you've got to have to be a little less technical for us on this. Have you got a general question?

I'm a little less technical, but your guest would know it's really hard to talk about it's less technical. I know. I would hope that you're... Well, let me... I don't know exactly what you mean. I'm sorry to say, but I can try to guess a little bit about what you mean. Okay. Many people, when they study quantum mechanics, are disappointed that it doesn't turn out to be fully deterministic, like the old-fashioned classical physics, which is now known to be only an approximation to quantum mechanics.

And the great Albert Einstein in his old age also found it difficult to accept. Nevertheless, it's true. It works. Quantum mechanics works, it's right. But Einstein thought that quantum mechanic was okay for now, but it's not the ultimate solution. Is there something beyond quantum mechanics that is great? Well, many people have hoped that many people who are dissatisfied with a fundamentally probabilistic character of quantum mechanics have hoped that somehow what would turn out to be right instead was some kind of deterministic theory underneath, plus a lot of little sources. of uncertainty, little bees buzzing around that you have to average over. And when you average

over those, you would get back the results that are confirmed for quantum mechanics, but the underlying theory would be really deterministic. And I think that's what our caller was hoping also. Now, it turned to some years ago, it was noticed that there's certain experiments that can distinguish between the two situations, between quantum mechanics and an alternative rival hypothetical theory in which that would be deterministic but with some kind of random processes obscuring the determinism

and those experiments have been done and quantum mechanics came out right it's been called one of the most successful theories but there's still people because there are so many probabilities involved because physicists especially theoretical physicists look like they're getting away with murder sometimes because they can

they can make these incredible projections without having to test them, that people think that, you know, what a great job this is to be a theoretical physicist because no one can prove you wrong. Well, that's completely incorrect. The whole idea of science is to make predictions that can ultimately be tested in some way. Ultimately, but maybe not in our lifetime. Well, in my experience, fortunately, I've been very, very fortunate in that my predictions in elementary particle physics have been verifiable not only in the lifetime,

but within a few years of when they were made. And most of them, I'm particularly fortunate and that most of them turned out to be right. It's very satisfying. But science does not consist of, I mean, not just physics, no kind of science consists of speculation that can never be verified. That's contrary to the whole idea of science,

which is to check with nature, constantly, repeatedly check with nature as to whether what you're saying has any validity. When the Royal Society of London was founded in 1660, the motto was Nullius in Werba, or in English Latin, Nullius in Verba. And I interpret that to mean not through anyone's words. In other words, don't trust Aristotle. Check with nature. I once interviewed a physicist who has pointed out the great difference,

between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. And I had to get to this guy by going down into a mine that was 2,000 feet below the surface. I took down a taconite mine in Minnesota. This gentleman had set up a large concrete cube down there, and he was looking, and this is many years ago, you'll remember when decaying protons were very vogue, and people were trying to figure out whether the proton has a real lifetime and you can detect its decay and what that lifetime was,

10 to the 28th or something like that. And he was down there with his little, device that had flashing lights, hoping that the light would flash when, you know, proton decay would happen. And I remember remarking to him saying, you know, aren't you afraid that when we open the door and go inside and look at this, just at that point, the light's going to flash and you're going to miss it? He said, that's the least of my worries.

He said, I'm really worried about the theoretical physicists because they can be up there on their blackboards at Cambridge. And they can say, oh, well, maybe the proton isn't 10 to the 28th or maybe it's 10 to the 26, or maybe it's 10 to the 30th. And they just smudge out to 28 and put a 30 or put a 26 in there. And there they go off to have lunch. Here, I've got to stay down there another 10 years because they've changed that number one digit. So it was driven home to me that the difference between theoretical physicists and guys who actually have to make the experiments.

And sometimes it appears, for example, with super string theory, which we've talked about on this program before, there may be no way to actually test this theory using atom smashers or particle accelerators that are. Well, that's another misconception, which unfortunately some of my colleagues have helped to propagate. I don't know why. It's a conspiracy against you, probably. No, not against me, but not at all. But let's explain for the benefit of the listeners about super string theory. For the first time in the history of science, we have in the last few years been presented with a plausible candidate

for the role of unified quantum field theory of all of the elementary particles and all of their interactions. In other words, the ultimate microscopic physical theory. Superstring theory passes the various tests that people have been able to devise for it so far as a theory. And it's then very exciting to see, as you say,

to what extent it can be tested against observation. Now, the first prediction is of Einstein's gravitational theory, general relativity, and that seems to be right. It's been checked the number of times. By experiment? It's passed, yes, by observation. So it's passed a beautiful test in that it predicts it. Second, it's the only theory that anyone has ever seen

that gives Einstein's gravitational theory, in quantum mechanics, together with other quantum mechanical forces, and without leading to crazy infinities in the perturbation expansion. Those infinities have made other attempts to describe gravitation quantum mechanically fail. But here, it's not true. The theory seems to make perfect sense, even in a perturbation expansion, and allows the description not only of gravitation, but of other forces as well. The next test should be whether it can lead to the so-called standard model, which describes physics up to the energies,

describes quite well, physics up to the energies at which the experiments have been done. I'm one of the people that have worked all these years on constructing the standard model, and we're naturally terribly proud of it because it's very successful. But it clearly is not the ultimate theory of the elementary particles in their interest. reactions. There are many reasons why, but it just contains a large number of undetermined, other quantities that have to be determined by observation. It contains a large number of particles without explaining why. So there'd be another theory after that super string. So there must be another. And super string theory, no, after the standard model.

Oh, the standard model. And super string theory could be that theory. But we have to check that it really leads to the standard model. Once it does, once it's seen that it can lead to the standard model, then there's the possibility that it can predict some of the quantities which otherwise have to be determined purely by observation in the standard model. So there's another way to test it. Beyond that, there will be some corrections to the standard model from super string theory, and it will be possible to test those. The most exciting test is that super string theory predicts that for every known elementary

particle, there is a new particle, a partner. super partner at a higher mass with somewhat different properties, but properties that can be predicted. And one of the most exciting possibilities for new accelerators is that they may be able to surmount this super gap in energy and produce the super partners of the known particles, or at least some of them. It's not known for sure how big that super gap is, and it might be very large and inaccessible to new accelerators,

but there is some evidence, some evidence today from the analysis of observations, that that super gap may not be very large, that it may be such that these super particles will be accessible to experiments in a new accelerator. We're talking this hour about simplicity, complexity, everything in between. My guest is Murray Gilman, who is co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and author of the new book, The Quark and the Jaguar, published by Freeman. Dr. Galman, let me finish that thought about super string theory.

Are you saying that if we do get a powerful accelerator that can jump this gap and find that next plateau particle that will really cement the super string theory because nothing else predicts it? Well, finding some of these super partners of the known particles would certainly be a powerful argument in favor of the correctness of superstring theory. the standard model would then be enlarged at least to a superstandard model containing these super partners. But that wouldn't prove completely the correctness of super string theory. In fact, such a thing can never be done. You can never prove once and for all the validity of an underlying fundamental theory. What you can do, though, is to subject it to as many tests as possible. But the statement that it can't be tested by observation is not correct.

Let's talk about speculation because that seems to be one of the key reasons for having the Santa Fe Institute is that people get together and try different approaches of collaboration. Tell us a little bit about what happens there. We've had people talk about it before, but never someone who can really give us an insider's look about what your goal in creating it was and why. I guess you believe that strict scientific approaches to ideas can be more fruitful if you bring other people. people into the process? In many cases, yes. That is, we believe very much in specialization. We think specialization is necessary, inevitable, and good.

As we know more and more, learn more and more about the world around us. But we believe that specialization needs to be supplemented by integrative thinking, and that right now there's this kind of imbalance, that there's a great need for competent integrative thinking, bringing together specialists in a great many fields from mathematics and physics and chemistry through several kinds of biology to psychology, economics, political science, history, and so on. And to have them share their insights,

but not in general, but in pursuing certain kinds of issues and the grand synthesis that we are hoping to pursue concerns looking at the world in terms of information and trying to understand simplicity and complexity, and especially complex adaptive systems, which are systems that can learn or adapt or evolve the way living things evolve. A lot of people would, there's that the Gaia principle or the theory that I'm sure you're familiar with.

Is that an adaptive sort of system where people think that the earth is changing to meet some of the insults and challenges that are put on it? As I understand it, it's a proposal that not only the living things on the earth are adaptive, but that the whole system of Earth plus living things is in some sense adaptive, but it's not generally accepted. A lot of scientists

look at outsiders, like philosophers or people who are not involved in the scientific community as just kibitzers along the way. It's nice to have them around, talk to them at cocktail parties. You'd have them, maybe you'd have your daughter marry one, but they don't really add anything

to fostering advances and knowledge. I imagine that that's not true in your philosophy at the Santa Fe Institute. Or is it? Well, I don't know that we've had a significant number of philosophers. Well, I'm not speaking specifically just about philosophers. I just use them as an example, but other people who are not involved in science. My wife is a poet. My wife, Marcia Southwick is a poet. And she and I are trying to put together. It's been postponed several times through. nobody's false, but we're trying to put together some seminars on simplicity and complexity in the arts,

for example. And we certainly have had a number of people from the arts visiting, and we even had one preliminary discussion of simplicity and complexity in the arts in which we brought together a few kinds of creative artists and some of the Santa Fe Institute's scientific researchers. It was actually very good. We have someone who would like to ask you about the poetry. Stephen from Lorraine, Ohio. Hi, Stephen. Hello. The reason why I called is, actually, I've been thinking about the same thing he's been thinking about for probably five or ten years. And as I look at entropy and enthalpy and the things that could happen, you know, just as I fried up a pan of bacon, you know,

for bacon is like some snowflakes, you know. It's not an endorsement for eating bacon. But I wrote a poem about it, being his wife is a poet. Maybe you might want to hear it. A short poem? Long poem. It's four words. Oh, well. Go ahead. It's called the divergence coefficient.

And it's all lowercase. It's called the odds are... That's it. The odds are God. That's it. Are you looking for a critique? Well, when people... No, not at all.

I just thought it might add to the... That would certainly fit in with quantum mechanics, would it not? Well, it's curious that when scientists use that word God or gods, some kind of metaphor for things in science, they sometimes mean the underlying laws, the fundamental laws, for example, super string theory, if it's correct, and sometimes they mean the chance processes

that are completely unpredictable. And you can never tell when somebody uses that, it's going to use that word about science, which metaphor will be chosen. In this case, it's the the chance processes that are selected to be labeled that way. Albert Einstein used to talk about the fundamental laws as the secrets of the old one.

Just the opposite metaphor. It's quite amusing. All right, Stephen? That's a nice little poem. The odds are gods. I like that. Thanks a lot for calling. Oh, you're welcome. Enjoy the show. Have a good weekend. Let me ask you about creative thinking. You talk about thinking, creative thought in your book. As someone who was obviously a well-known creative thinker, Are creative thinkers born, or do you learn how to think creatively? Well, I don't address that issue so much.

I mean, not the part about being born, as I do the question of how it happens and whether it can be taught, which is the second part of your question. I'm sure that people who make huge strides in art, in science, in many other fields, often have some unusual endowment, genetic endowment, the people at the very top of a profession, just the way we believe that a very great ballplayer or a very great musician probably has some unusual endowment. But at the next level, most people, or great many people at least,

can attain the next to highest level in a great many fields. And so it's probably not so much a matter of genetic equipment as it is accident and learning. But with creative ideas, the getting of a creative idea, as I discuss in the book, involves jumping over some kind of barrier from the existing patterns of thought

to some other pattern of thought, which is more successful. And usually we have to wait for that to happen spontaneously, sort of leakage through the barrier. We fill ourselves with some problem. And then this comes a point when further conscious effort doesn't do any more good. And the whole system is not obviously, not on the surface at least, doing any work. But then all of a sudden, in an odd moment, while cooking or shaving or running or something like that,

or in one of my cases, by a slip of the tongue, an idea suddenly appears. And it looks subjectively as if the mind has been working on this problem out of awareness. But we don't know if that's really true, but it certainly looks that way. In any case, is there some way of learning to do that quicker so that you don't have to wait for the spontaneous process, which may take a very long time? And some people who claim to teach thinking skills, including creative thinking skills, say that maybe you can hasten the process.

For example, by introducing a random element into the situation. One such teacher suggests using the last noun on the front page of today's newspaper to solve your problem. Whatever that noun is and whatever your problem is. It's just a way of introducing a random perturbation, a little bit of noise. Either be Simpson or health care will be the last word. Yeah, something like that. A little bit of noise that might just jump you over the barrier between the pattern of thought that was conventional

and the new one that will help to make progress. All right, let's go to the phones and have some people who want to ask you some concrete questions. Is Darren from San Francisco? Hi, Darren. Yeah, good afternoon. I was calling, first of all, I remember that story from Borges. It's a great one. And there's also an interesting bit.

in Nabokov's book, Ada, discussing time and probability and things. Vladimir, Vladimir, Nabokov. He was a great collector of butterflies. Yes, he was. He was. And flowers and such

as well. I don't have in front of me, and the names are evading me at the moment, and wired about three months ago. In your neck of the woods, actually in Santa Fe, I believe, massively parallel processing, and and utilizing quantum mechanics to do predictions and such for the stock market. And they were getting massive amounts of funding from major corporations

that were contractually wanted to remain anonymous. And also the results, of course, were remaining anonymous. But I was wondering if you could give me your kind of insight on that. Our caller is partially correct. In the world, and in this country in particular, there are a number of people who are trying to use quantitative methods, to look at fluctuations in financial markets and see if they can predict something about the future behavior of the financial markets from that. Some economists have labeled that a hopeless undertaking, saying that the departures from fundamentals are just a random walk.

But there's a lot of evidence now that that's not true, that the fluctuations are in part deterministic, chaotic or near-cautic. chaotic but deterministic, and that therefore it is possible to profit by studying fluctuations and trying to predict the future. It doesn't mean that everybody who claims to do it can do it, but it seems to be in principle possible. And indeed, a couple of researchers from New Mexico, colleagues of ours, quit their scientific jobs to form an investment firm. They didn't use quantum mechanics.

They just used the theory of deterministic near chaos and chaos, things of that kind, to study fluctuations in certain markets and try to predict something about future fluctuations around fundamentals. They, of course, can't predict the changes in fundamentals, but they can predict the fluctuation, something about, some information about the fluctuations. And they did get some funding indirectly from a Swiss bank. First, they played with play money for a few months and made money in pretend money. And after that, the Swiss bank through an intermediary sent them some funds, and if they do well, they'll get more investment from that bank. So far, they are doing pretty well, I understand. And giving further evidence, therefore, that it's not totally insane

to draw conclusions from fluctuations about future fluctuations. That shows you that using chaos theory can produce money. Exactly. From fees. Thanks for calling, Darren. Thank you very much. Let's go to Jerry in Kirkland, Washington. Hi, Jerry. I hope you'll indulge me. I'm a kibitzer. Not too long ago in a popular magazine someplace, I was reading about Stephen Hawking's radiation, which, if real, is a disconnection of radiation from a black hole that spawns it. And that was said to be horrifying to scientists because it signified the loss forever of information that could never be obtained. and I'm mystified by how radiation or those physical properties can be seen as information. Oh, well, let me, if we have a few minutes, I can try to explain that.

You have two. Two minutes, okay. Stephen Hawking proposed, and everybody agrees with it, that the black holes gradually will lose energy through emitting two or three or four elementary particles at once, some of which go out and others go in. That's the hawking radiation. There's no controversy about that. It was a very clever thing to point out, and people agree on it.

But he then has the idea that a black hole will then ultimately disappear, leaving nothing as a result of this radiation, and that's not a conclusion that's shared by everybody. If it happens, then the quantum mechanical phase information that was contained in the black hole might be lost forever. That's a possible interpretation. And scientists or theorists have been arguing about that ever since. It's not a clearly settled or clearly understood point at this time. Nor is it known for sure if Stephen's idea is correct that the black hole disappears leaving nothing.

But it's a very interesting subject of controversy. But if no one sees that radiation and influences it, does it exist? Oh, the radiation, some of the radiation comes out. But the stuff that is not seen or goes in. No, no, some of the radiation comes out. For example, an electron positron pair might be produced outside the black hole. The electron might come out. The positron might go in.

It's not that this radiation doesn't come from the interior of the black hole. It comes from out at the edge of where things can still get away. Let me ask you, before we leave, I know you're on the new White House Science Advisory Committee. Yes. Do you have any idea? Give us some secrets about what to expect in science policy coming up? Well, I don't know about secrets. I certainly haven't been told any secrets so far.

Well, what would you, I know? If I had been, I wouldn't tell them to you, especially not on the radio. But it's easy to see that there are a number of questions of policy in various domains, where some scientific and technical advice would be useful, and particularly questions that transcend various government departments. I was on such a committee 25 years ago. The analogous committee at that time was called the President's Science Advisory Committee, and I served on it 25 years ago, and we studied all kinds of things,

and we had wonderful briefings on the situation in great many different areas. And how did it's a computer? We tried to give some useful advice. And how does that experience compare with this one? Well, we haven't met yet. The new one hasn't met yet. So they're trying to arrange for some compromise between the scientist schedules and the president's schedule and so on, and we'll see how it works out. But the first meeting is yet to be held.

All right. Thank you very much for taking time to talk with us today. It was a pleasure, Ira. Thank you. You're welcome. Dr. Murray Gilman, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and author of the book, The Quark and the Jaguar from W.H. Freeman and Congress. That interview was from 1994. Dr. Murray-Gell-Man, who died recently at the age of 89, our condolences to friends and family.

We'll see you next Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.