The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life by Felix Flicker

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life by Felix Flicker An award-winning Oxford physicist draws on classic sci-fi, fantasy fiction, and everyday phenomena t...o explain and celebrate the magical properties of the world around us. If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic—just familiar magic. The name for this magic is “condensed matter physics.” Most people haven’t heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject—with good reason. Condensed matter is the solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us—and the more exotic matters—which dictate every aspect of our present existence, and hold the keys to a brighter future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks. Flicker teases out the magical threads that run through our daily lives. Condensed matter physics allows you to create anything abiding by the laws of reality—and often, we find that those laws can be bent. Flicker explains how to create new particles which never existed before, how to make crystals shoot out such intense light they can cut through metal, how to separate the poles of a magnet. And more. The book’s endearing conceit is that you, the reader, are an aspiring wizard whose ability to cast spells (i.e. to do science) is dependent on your grasp of the fundamentals of our universe. This book contains no equations or charts—instead, it’s full of owls and mountains and infinite libraries, and staffs and wands, and martial arts and mythical islands ruled by sage knot-makers. Part of the book’s magic is that, for all these fanciful trappings, it still feels practical and applicable. The Magick of Physics will open your eyes to the miracles that surround us.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.
Starting point is 00:00:40 The Chris Voss Show. The giant Barnum & Bailey circus tent in the sky of educational intelligence. I don't know what that means. That means, I don't know, the Lions and Tigers are smarter? Whatever. That's what we do here on the show. We have brilliant discussions with brilliant minds. They come on the show.
Starting point is 00:00:57 They share the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of research, life stories, amazing things that will educate you, that will make you smarter. And when you're smarter, there's this glow you get to your skin and you're more sexually attracted to the other sex. So that's why you listen to the Chris Voss Show. Or, I don't know, maybe you just like being smarter and like being able to be the person who's smart in the room. And everybody knows that the last person who's the smartest person in the room is me. And that's why we bring on these brilliant guests so we have an amazing uh oxford educated and uh professor i think uh is he professor he's a are you professor well if i were in working in the u.s i would be called a professor but uh you call it a lecturer in the uk i don't have the in the u.s you go assistant professor
Starting point is 00:01:43 associate professor then full professor in the uk we go lecturer reader professor yeah in layman terms he's pretty goddamn smart and we got him on the show and he's got his latest book out we're going to be talking to him about uh before we get to that as always we have to do the plugs there's the plugging which is the shameless nature of trying to get people to promote the show for us for free. And that's what we do. That's why we're able to deliver the show for free. It's the advertisements.
Starting point is 00:02:09 You know, when you watch TV, you've got to put up with whatever sort of BS for the Stephen Colbert show for the late night. And so, you know, we do the plugs. As always, refer the show to your family, your friends, and family. We beg of you, as always. Thank you very much for listening to the show. Go to youtube.com for Chess Chris Foss. Goodreads.com for chest christmas and uh what is the linkedin newsletter add all good stuff over there today we have another amazing author i don't know where we come up with it we just put amazing authors brilliant minds into the google machine and
Starting point is 00:02:39 they spit out these names and the hottest books that come off the shelf from all the great universities and minds and publishers as well. He's the author of the latest book to come out, March 21st, 2023, The Magic of Physics, Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomenon in Everyday Life, which is pretty much what I do. You know, when I wake up every morning, I'm like, holy crap, I'm still here. Felix Flicker is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking to us about his amazing book and everything went into it in much of his research. He is a lecturer, what we call in America as professors, we've established that, in physics
Starting point is 00:03:19 at Cardiff University. A theoretical physicist, he works on the quantum underpinnings of matter. He is the author of the newest book that just came out, as we aforementioned before. Welcome to the show, Felix. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. There you go. Is that one of the better lead-ins that you've ever had in life? You can lie to me if you want. I liked it. I have to say, I really enjoyed the intro before we appeared. That was very exciting. Many people, someone in France told me that that's called the ramble.
Starting point is 00:03:49 And we improv the ramble every time. And I just kind of wing it. Oh, really? Yeah. Sometimes. And sometimes it's really dumb and it sucks. And people go, this guy's an idiot. And some people laugh really hard.
Starting point is 00:04:00 Sometimes you, in comedy as they call it, sometimes you kill and you're funny and sometimes you die. And then hopefully if I die, it's funny as well, or I don't know, people throw things. So welcome the show. Give us your.com. So if we were to find you on the interwebs,
Starting point is 00:04:15 give it to you. Well, you can find me at Felix flicker.com. If you want to go on my personal website, I suppose. There you go. Mostly research based, but you can read my papers there. If you fancy it, there you go on my personal website, I suppose. There you go. It's mostly research-based, but you can read my papers there if you fancy it.
Starting point is 00:04:27 There you go. So is this your first book? Yes, it is, yeah. There you go. Congratulations. What motivates you to want to write this book? Well, the subject I study is called Condensed Matter Physics, and it's the study of the stuff around us, like matter.
Starting point is 00:04:45 And there are no books on it there really weren't and it's a bit strange because obviously there are lots of books on physics and they're on things like gravitational waves black holes strings theory these kinds of things uh but my subject condensed matter physics is actually the biggest field in physics so about a third of all physicists work on it and it was very strange that there was no book on it and so i thought i wanted to address this fact you know explain so why i just find exciting my apologies uh for an opportunity uh so basically it's a book on why matter matters yeah that would have been a good title yes see see see what i do this is why they pay me five dollars a show um i make all the big bucks, baby.
Starting point is 00:05:26 So this is really interesting. And to me, physics is important. Matter is important. All these different sort of things that make up our universe. Give us like a 30,000 sort of foot analogy of the book or an idea of concept of it. Just an overview of it. Yeah, I mean, it's about why physicists get excited about this subject when people typically haven't heard of that subset of physics, condensed matter physics. And I suppose the broad overview of it is I've spent a long time, many years really, thinking why is it
Starting point is 00:05:57 that people haven't heard of it? Why aren't books written about this? Why don't you hear about it on the radio? And the answers I came up with, and when I spoke to other physicists, and I spoke to like journalists and so on, and the answers always fell into two categories, basically. It was, if you think about the stuff you have heard of, things like black holes, or maybe like string theory, like there is the description of like the, some of the biggest stuff in the universe, some of the smallest stuff in the universe some of the smallest stuff in the universe and these topics are kind of inherently like magical in a way that doesn't need explaining you know you look at the night sky and you can understand if someone said that i find that magical you know what they meant roughly um whereas my subject the study of matter well
Starting point is 00:06:37 matter is very familiar it's everything that's around us so that's not obviously magical in any in an intuitive way it's just it's just familiar stuff. And the other reason I think people haven't heard of it is that you take those other subjects again and they're not obviously practical. Like that's not to dismiss them at all. But if you read a book on black holes, the person who wrote the book has written why they are personally excited to work on black holes. Right. This is fantastic. I love all this stuff. whereas condensed matter physics is practical in quite a short time scale so there's other subjects that are practical but it's like you know more like a 50 year time scale for the technology to like filter down into applications whereas the study of matter that underlies everything like all electronic technology is based on our understanding of of the matter it's built from and so you have this practical
Starting point is 00:07:24 side to it. And that also, I think, actually, ironically, makes it kind of harder to sell. Because when you write a book on condensed matter physics, it's always gonna be tempting to say, not why you're excited about it, but why you think other people should be excited, because it makes their phone work better, and so on. And so the point of the book is that I tried to think, okay, so these other topics in physics, people have written books, I think, about them because they're magical in this way that doesn't need explaining. And and this subject doesn't seem to have that magic. But I thought it clearly does have that magic. That's why so many of us work on it. So I wanted to get to explaining why that was. And to get to answer your question, the reason I think it's magical, I think there is a magic to
Starting point is 00:08:06 the familiar and the practical. And I think specifically, it's the kind of magic that you'd read about a wizard doing, like, to interpret it. So you think of someone like Harry or Hermione in Hogwarts, or like Merlin or Morgan Le Fay in Arthurian legend, any of these people, they don't do magic that changes the entire universe, and they don't rewrite the fundamental laws of reality. They do bits of hands-on practical magic that helps the other characters. I think it can be magical, the familiar and the practical, but it's just a kind of more subtle magic.
Starting point is 00:08:37 So that's the pitch for the book, basically. There you go. And this is kind of an interesting intersection. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm throwing this out there as a thing. This is an interesting intersection between what we establish as science and the factual nature of science, although science is always a theory in evolving and development, really an assessment of what we think we know at the time. But then there's also what we don't know we don't know, and that seems to evolve as we get better at understanding this stuff.
Starting point is 00:09:11 Is that a good analogy that it's, well, it's kind of a midsection between physics and reality and math and where we go, this is fact as we know it, and then, you know, like something like religion or magic, as it were, where is this something we've imagined? Is it real? Is that what it is? Is a good mid-lane between those two?
Starting point is 00:09:37 Or do I have that analogy right? Yeah, okay. I definitely agree with the statement that our kind of understanding of reality is always evolving. I'm very, I was keen from the start to make it clear that, to kind of dispel this myth that science is like a big book of facts that you can read from. Because I think, you know, often it's portrayed that way. And that's very damaging to science, but also to society a bit more generally. I think, you know, this idea that there are experts and they have access to this big book that you don't know about it's it's wrong
Starting point is 00:10:07 and really the essence of science is what you say it's this constant going over of the things you think you know and questioning them again and again and trying to tease them apart and finding that you didn't really know the thing you thought you knew you constantly you're testing things going back over and checking stuff um so yeah uh it it's, you know, the magic is kind of woven through the book. I used kind of fictional bits of magic. The point really was making the point I made to you in words a few minutes ago about, you know, trying to get to, you look at the sky and think people can sort of agree that's magic in some sense without being too specific about what they mean. I wanted to try and convey that same sense of magic about the world around us,
Starting point is 00:10:46 so, you know, in a sort of more intuitive way. So I used fictional bits in the book to do that, because I thought you can write something in a fictional context and everyone can agree it's magic, because, you know, it is magic. So I started off with... Oh, sorry, yes. There's kind of a feel to that. I mean, especially if we don't fully understand it, or if we're not at the level of education that folks like you are, you know, that's kind of how we approached it when we were cavemen, right?
Starting point is 00:11:11 We would look out from the cave and, you know, see thunder and lightning and the stars and, you know, noises that scared us and different things. And we consider a lot of things magic. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we still do, really. I mean, I think people do think quite things magic. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we still do really. I mean, I think people do think quite magically still. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:28 And then there's this element of thinking you've understood something. There's this theme I keep coming back to in the book, which was, actually I'll tell you, I'll tell you the whole story, you know, if that's all right. Yes,
Starting point is 00:11:38 please. So I met, it's a true story. In fact, I met a magician when I was walking through the desert. I won't give any more context than that, but he was a real magician. And it was in America. And I asked this magician if he'd heard of the magician Derren Brown.
Starting point is 00:11:54 Have you heard of Derren Brown? No. Okay, he's very well known in England, but I didn't know how well known he was over there. And actually the magician I met had heard of Derren Brown. He knew of him very well and i said that i to me darren brown was the best stage magician because um it's not just that he does magic but he does it in such a way that he makes you believe he's done something with science so it's all about kind of um like mentalism what you'd call that so he the way it works is he kind of convinces you that there's so much we don't know about the brain
Starting point is 00:12:25 that he's kind of done these tricks, you know, manipulating people's brains. And it's caused you to these strange things to happen. So he can, like, you know, make people survive things that should be too painful or they can lift things they shouldn't be able to lift, this kind of stuff. And you believe it because he presents it in this kind of scientific way. But then I realized after rewatching these shows many times and thinking it through I started to think oh some of that stuff could be done with like fairly simple magic tricks and then I said to the magician so this is like the real trick I've seen these times two stages like there's the stage where you just watch the show and you
Starting point is 00:12:57 you find it fascinating and like you say maybe that's like cavemen looking at the stars and being like that's magic and then there's a stage two where you start to work it out and you're like oh it was actually a trick all along and i and then you start to think okay i've i'm working it out i know how the world works you see there's a magic in the analogy and then the what the magician said to me was yeah but there's a third stage that you aren't appreciating which is like the professional magician watching those tricks so a magician knows exactly what he was doing all along so stage stage two isn't that exciting to them, but they still enjoy the show because they love the kind of technical skill with which he does it. So he said he watches these shows and he's this guy, Darren Brown is a really technically able magician and it's a joy to watch him as a
Starting point is 00:13:37 professional. And so I thought that's kind of what we need to aspire to as people more generally, I think. Stage one, when we're young, we look at the world and it is just magic. Children are looking at it and everything is new and exciting to them. And as we get older, we start to think, oh, I kind of understand the world pretty much. And it starts to become kind of boring to you and mundane. But I think the real skill is in returning to it with the insight of the professional. And that's kind of what scientists should aim to do. We should look at it again and say, you know, it is magic after all.
Starting point is 00:14:05 But we need this kind of deeper level to return to that thing that we had when we were younger. Definitely. And kind of returning to a wonderment. And, you know, once you kind of know, what's an analogy for this? Once you kind of know how the machine operates, you can more appreciate its beauty, maybe? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Definitely. Yeah. kind of know how the machine operates you can more appreciate its beauty maybe yeah yeah i think so definitely yeah yeah and it kind of puts it kind of moves away from that science thing because some people get bored with science because it's it does seem kind of factual even though it's not
Starting point is 00:14:35 um and uh you know they see it as a very black and white sometimes sort of thing and it's a little bit sleepy and a little bit too factual for people, you know, people, people like, you know, the story of something. And like you,
Starting point is 00:14:48 like you mentioned that third phase, that, that presentation where, you know, the game, you know, like you watch a movie, you know,
Starting point is 00:14:55 what's going to go on. I mean, nine times out of 10 within five minutes, you know, you know how the whole plot is going to play out, but we love the journey of that, of that moment. We love the experience of being taken on that journey.
Starting point is 00:15:07 And, and, you know, I mean, we do that, you know, like we'll have romance novels, novels that will come on the show.
Starting point is 00:15:14 And a lot of it's very blueprint. They'll even admit to themselves, uh, and, and us that, you know, the, the formula is the same in a lot of,
Starting point is 00:15:21 you know, stories are formulated the same, but it's a repetition of how we enjoy them and, and consume them. And, uh, you know, you, you know, that most movies or most stories are, you know, good triumphs over evil. Sometimes the movie is the opposite of that and people get very upset, uh, you know, and, and think, well, that's not fair. Well, the world isn't fair. And so you spin this through. What are some examples of some of the matter that you talk about in the book of how, you know, there's this nuance behind it of magical properties?
Starting point is 00:15:55 Okay. Well, so I'd say the way I came to writing the book over the years, I tried to write it a few times and it was coming out very inconsistent. inconsistent i wasn't quite getting it and the thing that really let me write the book was i opened with a fictional passage instead of fact um and so in this fictional passage i had some uh wizard who i called varian and she's off um she's clambering through a cave and to light her way in this cave she pulls a crystal from her pocket and she does some kind of spell that causes this crystal to light up the the rocks around her and and i so i switched then to non-fiction and said well you know clearly that was fiction and and what that was that person was a wizard and she was doing magic clearly because if you could take a crystal and cause it to light up then that would be magic right um that was the the point i wanted to make but then i explained
Starting point is 00:16:44 that actually we do that magic trick all the time because most light these days probably i know the lights here and probably the lights uh where you are will be leds light emitting diodes and those are nothing but crystals they're just crystals and we cause them to light up by passing electric current through them so then you could say well okay so maybe it wasn't magical when she lit up a crystal in the fictional setting because she could have just been turning on a torch that works with an led or a flashlight but i would say that the point of the book is to look at it the other way around and say no you were right that it was magical in that fictional setting but then you should also admit that it's
Starting point is 00:17:19 magic whenever you turn on a light because you know you are causing a crystal to light up at the flick of a switch and that is really a magical thing it's just a very familiar practical thing yeah we kind of take it for granted and so it sounds like what you've tried to do or you've done in your book is you've tried to put the imagination fun and and um the embracing of that newness that we usually experience as young people and we go hey this is still really cool still really cool. Because, you know, it gets kind of boring. You're like, just flick on the lights and whatever. I tell Google to turn on the lights. But there is, you know, a combination of formula of both science
Starting point is 00:17:54 and as you call it magic or some sort of, you know, thing that it is kind of cool when it really comes down to it. And the chain reaction or whatever that takes place to make that happen or what we've created. And maybe humanity when we create, you know, light diodes from minerals of the ground and everything. So do you, my understanding is in the book, this isn't like your typical physics books where, you know, we're going to be reading equations and charts. Instead, you've built it with different things. your typical physics books where you know we're going to be reading equations and charts instead you've you've built it with different different things talk to us a little bit about more of that and how you present the data in the story okay yeah so it doesn't have charts and it doesn't
Starting point is 00:18:34 have any equations in it um people like that too they like not having the equations or they like the equation and math is hard yeah um i you know i considered the equation. And math is hard. Yeah. I considered the equation. Some of the equations seem beautiful to physicists, but I think I was convinced that they're not as beautiful when it's just a load of scary-looking symbols. Actually, there's one that makes it in, but it's the physicist Erwin Schrödinger who invented quantum mechanics,
Starting point is 00:19:04 or one of the people who invented it, his grave has his equation written on it. Oh, really? Yeah. And weirdly, I stumbled across his grave totally coincidentally. I was in Altbach in Austria, just on a skiing holiday with my dad when I was a teenager. And there's a little graveyard there. I went walking around it, and there was one grave that had, well, basically, I just saw this grave. It had a couple of candles on it, but it wasn't fancy. And I was like, that's the Schrodinger equation written on that grave. And it turned out it was Schrodinger's grave happened to be where it was at the time. I don't assign any magical significance to this, but it
Starting point is 00:19:37 was quite a coincidence. Sorry. Yeah. So no, it doesn't have equations in it. And I do, I try to use fictional bits throughout the book so i try to um you know continue this story of varian and and she goes through seeing different uh different things and and you know i portray the the fictional setting with in a magical world and then try to say well again you know that's not actually that magical we do think basically do some of that magic all the time and usually explain different things so the first half of the book is kind of um like essential spells things you'd need to be a modern wizard and therefore a condensed matter physicist people who can take our world understand how it works and therefore you know take it apart and uh and create new things um with it and then the
Starting point is 00:20:21 second half of the book is kind of um uh of cutting edge stuff, like spells we're still learning to cast. So things that we don't understand fully yet, like new states of matter, these sorts of things. And some of the biggest open questions in modern theoretical physics, in particular studying matter. There you go. So is there real power to crystals and some metaphysics, I guess? I see a lot of people that do this thing called manifesting, where they feel that with their mind they can do stuff. I don't know if that's involved in any.
Starting point is 00:20:55 But these folks that delve in magical properties, I think I'm trying to say. And, you know, I have some friends that are crystal coaches that are in my circles that, you know, they believe in actual crystals and healing powers of different things and, you know, universal energies and stuff like that. Is some of this entwined in that? Is there some relation to some sort of intellect to that, I guess? The short answer is no. But, you know, I don't want to be dismissive of these ideas, but I'd say, you know, a scientist should remain open-minded of things, but they should
Starting point is 00:21:40 see if the thing really is an effect. And I'm not familiar with any effect along these lines. I think it's noteworthy, although I don't emphasize the point in the book, but in a strict sense, crystals have less energy than other forms of matter. Really? Yeah. I mean, because they're the most ordered things
Starting point is 00:21:56 on the atomic scales. Like what defines a crystal? Yeah, lots of things are crystals that you wouldn't think of. So, I mean, there's obvious crystals like quartz, say, or salt, maybe you may notice a crystal. I love that you wouldn't think of. So, I mean, there's obvious crystals like quartz, say, or salt, maybe. You may know a crystal. I love that.
Starting point is 00:22:08 I love those crystals. I love salt crystals in my food. Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, exactly. Well, in that sense, yeah, crystals can be, you know, they can help with your health because salt is good for you sometimes. Well, I don't know that. Don't quote me on that.
Starting point is 00:22:24 I mean, sometimes, a certain amount of it, from my understanding. I don't know. It could be wrong. You probably want some, but don't ask me. Don't have too much. But, so metals are crystals as well. All metals, basically. Really?
Starting point is 00:22:36 Yeah. It's very rare for a metal to not be a crystal. It's very hard to make a non-crystal metal. This is why I worship gold. Yeah. There you go. I try and manifest it into my life. Wow. This is why I worship gold. Yeah, there you go. I try and manifest it into my life.
Starting point is 00:22:54 But yeah, so the defining feature of crystals, you might ask, well, how is gold a crystal? I mean, it doesn't look like what you imagine a crystal should look like, right? It's not like a ruby. But the way a crystal is defined is that on the atomic scale, the atoms appear in a regular periodic structure. So they're kind of evenly spaced in three dimensions. They form this very regular structure. And because of that, they end up having kind of less energy associated with them than something like a glass where things are randomly distributed. There's energy associated. Well, there's an equation for it, which I won't go into the details of,
Starting point is 00:23:26 but in a strict sense, crystals are kind of less energetic than other things. Huh. And so what you've tried to do is kind of portray this in more of a, maybe would an accurate statement be more of like a fun way, and more something that stimulates maybe our imagination, and we don't gloss over like we do in science in science class where like, Oh God, facts and math. Right. We, it brings back the fun and imagination back to, you know, looking at life through that sort of lens as opposed to.
Starting point is 00:23:59 I try to, yeah. And I think it says, I had to think a bit about what you want to do with a popular science book because when i was writing it you know i hadn't thought as much about that before i came to writing it and i think there's a sense in which when you first start writing you want to just you know get as many facts across as possible and of course that's that's not interesting and no one's going to remember the facts because they haven't been studying the subject for years and so on it's not going to fit in into things they've already heard so i think the thing you can the best you can hope for with a popular science book is to inspire people to
Starting point is 00:24:29 want to go off and and learn more about the subject so i hope it's fun in that sense and people are like oh that is fun i i get the the bits that are being explained there i'd like to know more about that that's the real hope there you go and so it's full of owls, mountains, infinite libraries, staffs and wands, martial arts, mythical islands, ruled by sage knot makers. You know, something that's kind of more fun. So it's like a mixture between, I don't know, Harry Potter and your physics science books. I did think, you know, Harry Potter is a very popular thing. And some of the large number of people that like Harry Potter might be convinced to put some of that to use.
Starting point is 00:25:08 I mean, essentially, I was thinking, you know, there's a lot of, in Oxford where I was, I'm not based there anymore, but there's like 10 Harry Potter shops that just sell Harry Potter stuff. Really? They didn't use to be when I was there before. But yeah, they've sprung up since Harry Potter
Starting point is 00:25:22 because, you know, it's a very, you know, a lot of it's based in Oxford. um not you know it's not um set there but they used uh you know some of the colleges they they used for designs and harry potter and this kind of thing um so people come there wanting to buy like the fake wand and the gown and stuff and i thought well you know that's i'm not going to criticize that but if you want to be a real wizard you can you but you know you should become a physicist basically because they're the people who really you know take the world understand it and then you know do bits of practical magic that that change the world for practical effect for yeah and i think that's where we really
Starting point is 00:26:01 kind of embrace concepts better is when we can put into like an everyday format or a format that kind of, uh, jives or, or kind of tickles our imagination in ways that make us embrace it. Maybe a lot easier putting in concepts that are, are more adaptable. You know,
Starting point is 00:26:20 that's why that's really what the Harry Potter movies I think are about and other books and things like that. I don't get a check for that, do I? I'm plugging Harry Potter books. But, but that's kind of our fascination with it, right? Our, you know, the magic of, of what really we don't sometimes think about ours. There's actual matter and physics and kind of the basics of it. You give me a lot to think about.
Starting point is 00:26:44 Like I didn't, I didn't know that metals were in in fact a form of crystal but i guess from a molecular aspect or a matter aspect it makes sense yeah exactly yeah there you go looking at stuff in the world that seems familiar like metal and then realizing that there's actually you know that's kind of stage two of appreciation you used to like it when you're a kid that was magical now you're older you think i understand metals they're familiar but actually there's more to it you can go back to it and enjoy the uh the art of the performance as well yeah i mean every day i come on the show i turn on my computer and like it magically still comes up after all these years and then we come on the show and i'm just like wow magic uh this shit still works today again and then just sometimes
Starting point is 00:27:29 sometimes microsoft downloads a update in the background and they throw all the com ports off and we turn on the computers and nothing works and the magic is gone and then we have to restart and find the magic once again and then somehow we press all the right buttons and the magic appears and that's the magic of the ch buttons and the magic appears and that's the magic of the chris fosh show gentlemen ladies and gentlemen uh anything more you want to tease out of the book we of course want people to order it up wherever fine books are sold uh anything more we should tease out that you want to give a plug into um i don't know i think i've uh you've asked some nice uh probing questions that have got to to the basics of what I wanted to do in the book.
Starting point is 00:28:06 Yeah. I hope people find it interesting and want to take a further look. Is this something that could be turned into a movie someday? It kind of sounds like maybe it could be a nice movie to help explain some of this. Well, who knows? I mean,
Starting point is 00:28:19 actually I've been doing a bit of promotion in the UK as well. So I've been on the radio a couple of times and I've, I got speaking to one of the producers. So he and I have put a pitch in to, to have it sort of turned into a radio show. So fingers crossed for that. That would be interesting. And of course,
Starting point is 00:28:36 a lot of great movies came from radio shows or the worlds and other things. And radio shows are really cool. I'm, I guess I'm doing a self-plugging promotion thing. Because, you know, when you listen to a radio show, you have to use your own imagination. When you go to film, it defines that imagination for you. And so I think it's funnier sometimes with radio.
Starting point is 00:28:56 And that's probably why people listen to the podcast. Plus, they don't ever want to really see my face in person. So that's why most people consume the podcast on an audio basis, because they don't want to be scared of the bejesus out of themselves. really see my face in person so that's why most people consume the podcast on audio basis because they don't want to be scared the bejesus out of themselves like holy shit chris voss is a fat old ugly guy anyway um that's also on my tinder profile as well folks uh so it's been wonderful to have you on felix i love this sort of insightfulness and you you kind of activated my my love of science and everything, because,
Starting point is 00:29:25 you know, sometimes it can, the theory of science can be a little dry. You know, the math, you start saying math and science and people's eyes glaze over. But when you put features behind it that are fun and imaginative and, and kind of give us a more basic understanding of the interpretation of science,
Starting point is 00:29:42 I think that's where it becomes, uh, much more lively, if you will, and engaging for people. I don't know. What do I know? I'm just a man with a microphone on the show. But there's magic every day when I show up.
Starting point is 00:29:57 Felix, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's been great. There you go. Give us your.com so people can find you on the internet, which is please. Oh, yeah. So felixflicker.com. Yeah. so people can find you on the internet, which is please. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:06 So felixflicker.com. Yeah. And there's the magic of the internet, too, as well. You just type in a few letters and magically stuff appears on the screen. It's kind of cool. Yeah. There you go. Now just googleonlyfans.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, and see what sort of magic appears.
Starting point is 00:30:21 I'm kidding. There's nothing there. There better not be anything there, damn it. Anyway, thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortune.chrisvoss, youtube.com, fortune.chrisvoss,
Starting point is 00:30:30 linkedin.com, fortune.chrisvoss, where you'll find all the smart stuff. The magic of physics, uncovering the fantastical phenomenon in everyday life, available wherever fine books are sold, March 21st, 2023.
Starting point is 00:30:46 Thanks for tuning in, everyone. We certainly appreciate you and our audience. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.

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