The Joe Walker Podcast - The Wisdom Of Frank Wilczek
Episode Date: January 31, 2021Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 and is considered one of the world’s most eminent theoretical physicists.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/frank-wilczekSee omny...studio.com/listener for privacy information.
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You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. I
hope we are all having a happy and productive start to the year so far. Before I introduce our guest for this episode, four quick housekeeping items.
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And now to introduce this episode. I do not know what I may appear to the world,
wrote Isaac Newton, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself
in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. My guest has helped humanity to glimpse a portion
of that great ocean. Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for the discovery of
asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. In this conversation, Frank and I
don't directly discuss the work that won him the Nobel Prize. He has discussed it in a million
other interviews, so allow me to paraphrase it here so that you have some context heading into
the conversation. Physicists
like to systematize. One way they systematize is by trying to discover the basic building blocks
of matter. Another way is to find out the forces that act between those building blocks. In the
case of matter, physicists were able to divide matter up into atoms, and the atoms into nuclei and electrons, and then the nuclei into
protons and neutrons. And by smashing protons, or protons and electrons together, particle
physicists discovered leptons and quarks, with quarks being, as far as we know, the smallest
particle of all. As physicists were busy reducing matter to its tiniest components, they were uncovering the four fundamental forces that acted between those tiny components.
Before the 20th century, we knew about two of these forces, because they were the two that were macroscopically visible, the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force. In the 20th century, when physicists started prying into the interiors of atoms,
they discovered the other two forces, a weak force, which is responsible for the radioactive
decay of atoms, and a strong force that holds the atomic nucleus together. Until Frank Wilczek
entered the scene, physicists had observed something strange about the strong force,
which not only binds together protons and neutrons,
but also the quarks that make them up. The strong force became weaker at high energies or at
shorter distances, meaning that the three quarks within a proton can sometimes appear to dance
around each other freely. This was unexpected because if you looked to the other forces for
reference, the opposite happens. The gravitational
forces get stronger at shorter distances, so do electromagnetic forces. And indeed,
the strong force is so powerful that no free quarks have ever been observed.
So how to resolve this conundrum? Well, as a young graduate student at Princeton,
Frank, working with another physicist, David Gross,
found a theory to reconcile these basic principles and the strange observation. Together, they came
up with a theory postulating that when quarks come really close to one another, the attraction
abates and they behave like free particles. This is called asymptotic freedom. Frank says that he
remembers saying to David,
if the experiments bear this out, we'll get the Nobel Prize.
They did the calculations in the winter of 1972,
and they published in the spring.
That summer, Frank went to his first ever conference,
a small gathering of physicists,
and Richard Feynman was there, the Richard Feynman,
and he talked about Frank's work,
calling it really important. Frank was just 21 years old at the time. The rest, of course,
was scientific history. But it also turns out, for reasons that I have no ability to understand,
that asymptotic freedom is an important foundation stone for our ability to construct a grand unified theory, because it
showed that the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces have much in common and are perhaps
different aspects of a single force. Now, beyond all of this, beyond the work that won Frank the
Nobel Prize, he is responsible for a plethora of other scientific contributions, from hypothetical particles
like axions and anions to time crystals. He is also the author of many brilliant books
including A Beautiful Question and most recently Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality. In this
wide-ranging conversation, Frank and I discuss his childhood and upbringing, how you can
know whether you really know something,
machine learning, the power of words, humility versus self-respect, living in Einstein's house,
which Frank did for almost a decade, and much, much more. Now, I apologize if the audio at times
gets a little bit shitty. What happened was Frank was recording himself on his iPhone, but when in the second half of the interview, he starts gesticulating excitedly as he's explaining
concepts in physics to me, the distance of the phone to his mouth begins to fluctuate.
And that results in some variable audio. Here's what you should do when you get to one of those parts. Firstly, let out a deep sigh.
Second, forgive me.
Third, try not to get distracted because the content is sublime.
And fourthly, please listen through because it passes
and we return to good audio quick smart.
So without much further ado,
please enjoy this conversation with the very smart
and very wise Frank Wilczek.
Frank Wilczek, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here, so to speak.
Frank, your earliest memory involves a coffee percolator. Take me back to that.
Oh, yes. Well, it was when I was a small child,
and I don't know exactly when it was,
but I suspect it was when I was either two or maybe three or maybe one.
It was certainly when it was a pre-verbal memory,
so maybe it was one.
I don't know.
But anyway, it's all in images. And I remember my parents had a coffee percolator,
which was a thing for percolating coffee.
I don't think they still exist.
And it had seven large pieces
that you could take it apart and put it back together.
And I just remember I was on the floor in the kitchen.
I can remember it.
I can call the image to mind still to this day very clearly. And it suddenly occurred to me that this was something in the outside world
that could be manipulated, that wasn't me somehow, but yet somehow not entirely out of my control. And so I started to take it apart and put it back together.
I could see that it had a structure, and you could take it apart.
And I guess fortunately there was more or less only one way you could put it together.
The pieces only fit in one way. So I was able to practice or I felt the need to just take it apart
and put it back together and understand that this thing which you normally saw on the outside also had an inside and that
that different things could fit together and if you took them apart and put them back together
they would still fit things like it was a very uh it was it was a spiritual experience somehow
that i somehow realized things about the real the physical
world that I didn't realize before all at once. Do you have a sense of when as a kid you first
knew you were smart? Well I think the really you know my mother would say all kinds of things, but I didn't really give much weight to that.
But really, when I went to school,
I found that things came very easily to me.
And so that, I sort of took for granted.
I didn't think that, okay, that means you're smart or anything,
but just that's the way it was.
And seeing things that took other kids longer,
I could absorb faster.
But then it really came to a head, so to speak,
when I was in the first grade,
and they started giving us tests,
and they called in my parents and said oh
you you've got to do something or you should know or and i got wind of it and they changed my class
from one class to another you know i was kind of uh young for my grades so that they put me
into the into the class for older kids and that and then
i skipped grades and so so yeah so that that and and you know at that point i knew that was
it was a little bit different i was a little bit different than than most of the kids around. Tell me about your parents.
Well, my parents were second-generation Americans.
Their parents came from Europe.
My father's family came from Poland, different parts of Poland.
My mother's family came from a small region close by in Italy,
although my grandparents didn't know each other in Italy.
They met in the States. But they grew up in the Depression, my parents, and with very limited resources. My father quit high school in order to support the family,
but he worked as a kind of technician, radio and TV repairman
in the very early days of television.
And he was a very bright guy, but not very well educated.
And when I was going to school, so was he.
He was taking night classes and learning calculus
and sort of looked at his books
and I was sort of very interested in that
and also very intrigued because he brought all these broken radios
and little experimental televisions with two-inch diagonal screens home.
And my mother was, I like to think, one of the happiest people I've ever known.
She was very joyful.
She did graduate from high school and did very well but but uh
but you know she was very much embedded in the culture of the time when the expectations are
she would get married and keep a home and have and that's what she did uh they uh but she yeah
as i said she i think she was about the happiest person I've known well.
She would go around the house singing a lot.
Well, all day, really, singing.
And she had quite a good voice, not trained, but quite a good voice.
And it was very, very, very, very supportive.
My father was a little bit distant, but of course also supportive in an abstract way.
We spoke only English at home because their languages were different. What else can I say?
We didn't have a lot of money, but we were certainly not poor, and I never thought of
myself as deprived. We never had to worry about getting fed or anything of that sort.
But we certainly didn't have luxuries. There weren't a lot of books around the house either.
At one point, I wanted to play the piano, but our apartment was too small for that. We couldn't
really do it. Yeah, and we lived in a very vibrant neighborhood.
I guess that was also very important. We lived in a vibrant neighborhood, really full of
people like my parents in a broad sense, children of immigrants, second generations, people
who were aspiring, you know, aspiring that their kids would go to the next level.
So that was the kind of culture I was embedded in in New York City.
Leaping ahead to 2004, can you describe what it was like telling your parents that you'd won the Nobel Prize?
Well, it was a... They must have been so proud.
They were.
But the circumstances were maybe not the happiest.
Well, there's a little glitch on the way.
Let me tell it.
It's a funny story.
So the Nobel Prize was announced at 6 a.m., but they called me earlier, actually.
They called about 5 o'clock in the morning.
And I was in the shower at the time,
so I came out of, I was, and my wife just,
I didn't hear the phone ring,
and my wife brought this, our mobile phone is here.
Someone's calling, sounds like a Swedish accent,
you know, and it's not entirely a surprise
and uh but so of course i took the call i got out of the shower and i was soaking wet and
uh i didn't so i didn't realize that the call would come before the public announcement which
it sometimes does i also didn't realize that it wouldn't be just somebody saying, oh, congratulations,
you won the Nobel Prize, goodbye. So I got out of the
shower, I was dripping wet, and took this call
and got congratulations from several different people
and instructions about how to deal with the press.
Anyway, after all that,
which I was still totally naked, and my wife was
kind of drawing me off as this was going on,
I guess I threw on a bathrobe.
I don't remember the details, but I certainly didn't get fully dressed.
The next thing I did was call my parents.
And my father answered the phone, and I guess by this time it was like 5.30,
and he said, do you know what time it is?
What are you calling me about?
Whatever you're selling, I don't want it.
And if you call again, I'll tell the cops.
Anyway, but I told him, no, it's your son, it's your son. I got the Nobel Prize,
and it was very special. I mean, especially for my father, I think, who was very much himself
into science and a technical person, and very much admired that culture and would have loved to make a contribution,
but felt that because of the circumstances of his life, he wasn't in a position to do it.
So he was very, but it meant a tremendous amount to him to see that his son sort of did what he would have liked to do.
Like me, Frank, you were raised a Catholic.
How did Bertrand Russell cause you to lose your faith in religion?
Well, Bertrand Russell is a beautiful writer.
He writes beautifully.
And I took, my parents weren't really terribly religious, but they did bring me up in the church.
So I went to catechism class and things like that.
And I took it very, very seriously. I was very worried about going to hell.
And I was very inspired by the idea that you could be a saint
and sort of guaranteed of eternal bliss or whatever. And anyway, I was impressed by the ceremonies.
So in a way, I was much more religious than they were.
But I was learning about science as I grew up too,
so there's kind of these parallel things.
And I was very interested in philosophy and logic and mathematics, and wrote on a large number of subjects, ranging from mathematical logic, which is what I first encountered, to religion and ethics and things like that. say it was solely due to his influence, but there was growing tension in my mind between
the things we were getting exposed to in catechism class, and there was an intense period in
preparation for confirmation when I took what I normally would have been taking, I was taking it tremendous tension between what I was being told about
the universe and how things work from these two very different perspectives. Okay, I did confirmation and didn't, but at that point in my life, I was thinking, oh, gee, I should try to be a saint.
Maybe I'll be a priest.
But then it all broke for me. And it was partly the influence of Bertrand Russell's writings that brought me to the view that what the account of things that I was getting from the scriptures and catechism class and so forth really was not so much wrong,
but, I mean, if there were mistakes here and there or simplifications so that people could understand it,
that would be one thing.
But it was just lacking in grandeur,
the grandeur of the universe.
There were many, many secrets that could have been revealed,
and that would have been really impressive.
That's what really struck me, is that there are so many ways
that God could have made it easier to believe in him
that it didn't make use of.
Okay, so he could have said, well, if you grind glass this way and that
and look out, you'll see these fantastic wonders that I've produced.
Or you can see what things are made out of and cure diseases.
But none of that was there.
So it dawned on me that probably these writings are just what they look like.
They're kind of people not very sophisticated, trying to come to grips with the world.
And so that that was
very deflating for me i lost my faith semi-ironically when i was learning about world
religions at school because i realized many of these beliefs are mutually exclusive
and it's probably more likely that none of them is correct than one of them is correct and all
the others are wrong. How do you personally find or create meaning in an apparently godless universe?
Well, I keep looking and there's so much to understand and learn and it's mind expanding to do that. I guess I'm lucky in my choice of mother, as as I told you she was a very happy person and
and that together with my father's kind of curiosity and and I've lived a very
charmed life in the sense that I've been able to do what I love and and and and and be good at it and never really have to feel insecurity.
I have a wonderful wife and family.
So all those things are kind of in the background
as kind of a secure base.
And then find...
So there's joy. There's just joy in life.
And I wish I could live forever.
I wish the various things could be better.
But this... how should I say
I've gotten so many gifts that I didn't really earn
that it seems kind of cranky
to complain
and I feel still so much to look forward to.
So I'm finding meanings.
I'm finding more and more meanings.
And I understand more and more.
And it's wonderful.
It's mind-expanding.
And I try not to be too greedy.
That's a you about it.
And I guess that's my philosophy, such as it is.
You were reading Einstein's books and papers even in high school and you made it one of your goals to not just read
but understand his original paper on general relativity yes and
by the time you entered college at the university of chicago you thought you had achieved that
yes i did right in hindsight do you think you you've genuinely understood it at the time uh
well yes and no. I think I understood it line by line.
Yeah, I did. I definitely did understand it line by line.
I worked through it. Probably there were things here and there that I didn't derive for myself or check the algebra, but it's a very nicely written paper. So it actually
is a very, it has the reputation of being
extremely difficult, but it's actually by the
standards of theoretical physics literature, it's actually a very
easy paper to read. It has a nice section
on tensor calculus, which sort of starts semi from
scratch and derives everything you need. So yes, I could read it and understand the flow of ideas.
I certainly did not at that time have the background to really conceptualize where it fit and why it was a big step past
Newton and how difficult it was and how rare these kinds of insights are. And I certainly didn't,
I didn't understand things well enough to go from that paper to kind of the next steps. I mean,
I didn't see the germs of cosmology or black holes
or anything and in the paper i just i understood what was in the paper no more no less that's
right well i can't say that for general relativity which is way above my pay grade
but at times i've i've felt that or persuaded myself that
i understood special relativity and i recommend to listeners the 1905 paper in which einstein
sets it out the paper called on the electrodynamics of moving bodies it's really worth
reading even just as a piece of scientific history it's pretty short especially and mostly
it's very short and clear
until he starts talking about Maxwell's equations
and their invariance.
So, but you can, but the analysis of space and time
and getting to the physical effects of Lorentz,
of time dilation and all the most,
sort of the most conceptual things,
you can, that's all self-contained.
It's, I think, at the end,
at the end he does the more advanced kind of discussion
of Maxwell's equations,
which was the way he came to it, really.
But, yeah, but he really got to the bottom of things and and and was able to present
it the essence in a much simpler way than the way he found it I think I also love his explanation
in his book relativity the special and general, which was written for a popular audience.
He uses the example of the train, the embankment, and the two bolts of lightning at the either end
of the train to explain the relativity of simultaneity. And I read that and I feel,
yeah, I get this. It's so intuitive, but maybe I don't. I mean, I probably don't. And I'm curious,
Frank, what does it mean to think you understand
something, but to actually not properly understand it? How can you check whether or not you understand
something properly? I'm looking for ways to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Well, there are different levels of understanding. So, you know, there's one word understanding that covers a multitude of levels of ability uh
just as you know for instance right now i'm i'm i'm trying to to learn swedish
and okay i i can read pretty well simple texts and i'm starting to get to the
uh level where i can understand spoken Swedish
with the help of context and things like that.
But my ability to speak it myself is primitive.
But all these things improve and go along.
And if you watch how a baby develops,
there are different levels of skill that you develop with time, with language.
I'll never be as, you know, I'll never have the kind of fluency that I have with English
and ability to write something that approximates literature.
Okay, so it's like that in science too.
There are different levels of understanding things.
There's a very profound statement by Dirac, another great physicist like Einstein,
who said, I feel I understand an equation when I can predict its consequences without actually solving it. So there's this level you get to where you can work in concepts and
develop intuition about how things will behave without actually having to go
step by step through the derivations. But that comes typically only after working a lot of examples,
so you can imagine having done it without actually doing it.
But I don't think it's really different in a way
from things like learning how to play the piano.
There are different levels. So the crudest level
is
you learn there's a thing called
a piano and there are notes
and you can play the notes
and you can play them one at a time
and you can learn the names of the notes
and so forth.
That's sort of the
that's the very cruisest level.
And in principle, that gives you the ability to play anything,
but the ability to do it fluently and integrate a lot of information in real time, that's different.
And, yeah, so it's the same way in physics.
There are different levels.
You can understand basic things
about the physical world.
You can understand them
from different perspectives.
But if you want yourself
to make a contribution
to pushing the frontiers,
that's a different thing. Then you
really have to command the subject and have confidence that you can do calculations and
understand how things will work if you change them and things like that. So I guess the,
the, if I had to try to summarize all that sort of cloud of ideas briefly,
I would say that depth of knowledge is when you can deviate a little from the conditions of what you've actually learned.
So it doesn't have to be literally the same thing that you've just read.
If you change things a little bit, you can still make sense of it.
You can realize its implications and things like that.
Is it true that at one point you owned and lived in Einstein's house in Princeton?
Yes, yes, for about 10 years.
We lived at 112 Mercer Street.
Yes, we are.
Does it still have kind of like artifacts and memorabilia from his time in the place?
It had a little bit.
Well, I should say that the house,
so Einstein died, I believe, in 1955.
And then for quite a few years, the house was lived in by Helen Dukas,
his secretary, and I believe his sister. Could it have been his sister? I think, yeah, maybe his
sister. And the two old ladies lived there,
and the house really kind of was falling down around them.
So, you know, they didn't have the energy after a while
to keep it up.
And I found out that the famous study
where you sometimes see pictures of Einstein working
was actually something that was added to the house and built by a friend of Einstein's and was not built very well.
That was kind of falling down.
So we had to do a lot of renovations before we moved in it, and we did.
And the place was owned by the Institute for Advanced Study, which Einstein worked at, and he left it to them.
And they offered it to me as kind of part of the recruitment process.
But, of course, they took most of the stuff out.
Most of the stuff was gone. A lot of it was just, there's a lot of just residue
of the old ladies living there.
But there were a few gems.
There was a toy that was given to Einstein,
which apparently he was very fond of,
which shows a clown balancing with, I don't know what you call it,
but a long stick like a tightrope walker would have,
and so it was illustrating gravity.
And that little thing was used as a prop in a movie
that was filmed at 112 Mercer Street.
Anyway, we have that.
But mostly it was...
Oh, the other thing.
The most notable...
Oh, no, there are a couple of notable things.
Now more is coming back to me as I think about it.
So probably the two most notable things were
there was a piano.
There was a Beckstein piano.
Very good piano. And I used that for many years.
I used that the whole time I was there.
I played it a lot.
So that was Einstein's piano.
And it was in pretty good shape.
And then there was also the bed that he slept in, I think. And that was not in good shape. And after
trying it out for a few days, we just got rid of it because it was not salvageable.
The novelty wore off yes
very quickly
it was causing me back pain among other things
because it was kind of
mal-shaped
there was a big hole in the middle
and you had to kind of avoid it
and then there were
there was also some nice furniture
but it was so nice that
we didn't feel comfortable using it so so nice that it was we didn't
feel comfortable using it so we had one room where we put that stuff and um yeah that so it was it
was that was kind of the museum section of our house although we never used it as a museum of
course and eventually we did donate it to a museum. Did you draw inspiration from living in his old house?
Well, it was very gratifying and inspiring in a way.
I guess what was, yeah, it was inspiring.
Well, physics can be a struggle.
And most ideas, if you're doing research at the frontiers,
most of your ideas don't work.
And it can be depressing sometimes.
Or ideas don't come, so there are down periods.
Or you're doing things that you're not very enthusiastic about,
at least in my case. So, but after after that i would come home and uh walk to this house which was i lived
in i said wow you live in einstein's house that's pretty good you've come a long way since glen oaks
and and yeah so so that it did buoy my spirits in that way. That was the main thing I would say.
At Chicago University as an undergraduate,
you stumbled onto the quantum theory of angular momentum.
Why do you consider it to be one of the absolute pinnacles of human achievement?
Well, because it's a place where two apparently
entirely different conceptual universes turn out to be the same.
One is the description of symmetry, in this case rotation symmetry of space.
So that has mathematical implications, so-called representations of the rotation group, which are quite profound.
So exploiting how things can possibly transform as you rotate.
That's one domain of ideas which mathematicians studied kind of for its own sake profoundly in the 17th and 18th and 19th and early 20th century.
And then you have this entirely different thing, or superficially entirely different,
which is quantum mechanics, which is a body of lore that comes, of course, from describing the physical world
and it's very surprising in its structure
in fact to this day it's a big problem to
understand how the world we actually experience emerges from this
kind of shadowy world with probabilities and
abstract concepts the but anyway those those two
are like those two come together in a marriage where the sum of the two is much more than either
one separately so you have these mathematical structures of representations and then you have
quantum mechanics which tells you that these things are representations of the world.
They're representations of particles and their properties.
And then, of course, what makes it magic is not that you can bring together different branches of mathematics, but that is a description of reality. would never imagine doing from kind of if you just were dealing with everyday interactions
with the world and trying to learn from that experience kind of empirically.
The deep understanding and manipulating the mathematical concepts leads you to predictions about how things behave that are really surprising,
really detailed, and that work. So, yeah, it's an extraordinary thing. You have beautiful
ideas that were studied for their own sake. You have surprising surprising surprising revelations about how the world uh works in in as a in kind
of a general framework and then you have the two coming together to give you a really rich detailed
description of the mapping between a calculated world and our world and they match you know it's
really amazing yeah it's it's even just talking about it i
get kind of into a rapture of it's so it's so amazing yeah so from chicago you get to princeton
as we've already sort of indicated take me back frank to those months in 1972 at Princeton, you're just 21 years old and you're working on the physics, which will eventually lead to you being awarded the Nobel Prize.
What were your days like?
What did they look like?
Well, that was a off a kind of uninterrupted run of fully expecting that it would continue to be easy and life would be good.
But I was in for a shock when I got to Princeton.
Well, first of all, I didn't realize, I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I thought I wanted to use mathematics for something,
like Einstein had done, or like my other heroes,
Feynman and Hermann Weyl,
or in biology, or in computer science.
I wanted to do something great, but I didn't know what,
using the mathematical skills.
And I thought, well, I'd go to Princeton,
that's the place where you get revelations like that, and it would be obvious what to do. But
I quickly found out by experience that it's a very different thing
to learn
than to create
it's really
creation
is slower
it's much less foolproof
and
it's harder work in many ways and requires a different kind of focus.
At least for me, learning things is very, especially in those days, was very, very early, very, very easy.
But to make the transition to doing something new when I didn't know what it is I wanted to do and I didn't have the kind of
experience or command of any particular subject that it would take to really push the frontiers,
I really, it's hard for me even now to realize how unhappy I was then and how kind of lost.
But then after a couple of years, two miracles happened.
One is that I met Betsy, who was still my wife.
And she kind of brought me out of that funk because it was clear there was something great to live for.
And she, yeah, she's very special.
So I didn't feel alone anymore.
And then I found something in physics that I could really, and someone in physics that I could really glom onto.
There were things...
The physics department in Princeton
is right next to the math department,
and the math department is kind of this forbidding tower.
But the math building is this kind of friendly place.
I was at the physics building.
It was a kind of friendly place where you meet people.
So I wandered over there
and went to seminars.
I was going to seminars in biology,
everything, computers, everything.
But physics was really exciting.
It was clearly in a period
of extraordinary excitement
and advancement,
and I could see that.
This was the time when what's now called the standard
model or the core theory was being invented. There were great new ideas about renormalization group,
about gauge theories, that used the kind of mathematics that I really liked, the mathematics
of symmetry and analysis and calculation.
So I went to some lectures by Ken Wilson,
which I didn't understand at all,
but gave a sense of excitement.
And so I went to a class on quantum field theory by David Gross, and we really hit it off.
He was this kind of charismatic, very, very brilliant
guy, very driven and clearly someone I could learn from and relate to. I was 21, so he
was 31, which at that time seemed to me ancient, but clearly he was young and dynamic.
In retrospect, he was very young and very dynamic and very driven and very much on the make in the sense that he wanted to do great things.
And he was very ambitious. And so I started talking to him, and out of those conversations, we discussed a lot of things and hit on this project of putting together the gauge theories and the renormalization group to see how they work together, because these were two kind of different powerful strands that nobody had put together.
I was just looking for a thesis project, really, to do something.
As I said, I wanted to get out of this crisis by doing something.
And that suggested itself.
David was very interested in finding a theory of the strong interaction or proving that quantum field theory couldn't work
to describe the strong interaction he wanted to have.
But anyway, this all came together.
It was very, we were in the right place at the right time
with the right kind of drive and talent to solve it.
What do you think David saw in a young kid from Queens?
I don't know.
He saw us, but, you know, we talked.
And I guess the short answer is we talked.
Well, that was one thing.
And the other thing is, you know, I had at least enough on the ball to become a graduate student at Princeton.
So that's something.
There's a funnel you have to go through to get there.
And also, you know, the course had some homework.
And I worked to really do elegant solutions to the problems.
So he saw that.
So all those things, I think.
The same year, 1972, a book is published called Gravitation and Cosmology by Steven Weinberg, who's another nobel laureate and towards the end of the book weinberg's talking
about how the strong interaction makes our understanding of the very early universe
difficult and i'll quote him from page 597 he writes it is therefore not out of the question
that someday we may detect remnants of previous cycles of the history of the universe. For the present, however,
such matters remain at the furthest bounds of cosmological speculation.
Frank, do you remember when you found this book and why did it make such an impression on you?
I found it, well, not long after. I mean, it was part of my graduate.
I mean, I should say that I came to physics never with a very little conventional training in physics.
I had taken a few courses here and there,
but there are vast gaps in my knowledge.
That's another reason I went to quantum field theory
because I felt you didn't have to know much.
If you had the mathematics at your command, you didn't have to know a lot of facts,
because this was about elementary particles, and so it's sort of the simplest possible situations,
and was relatively clean. You didn't have to worry about experiments or anything.
You could have a lot of knowledge. But anyway, it was a very naive view, but that was my view.
But anyway, shortly afterwards, I wanted to exploit the insights we had gotten and also I just wanted to fill
in the gaps in what I felt.
I found myself becoming a professional physicist.
I thought you'd better be prepared to answer questions that a professional physicist is
expected to know the answers to. So I, and the very early universe, of course, is fascinating
in itself. As we mentioned before, I had been very interested in learning all about Einstein
and his work, because he was a personal hero. And it happened that the book that I bought
that had Einstein's original paper in it
also on general relativity and special relativity
also had his original paper on cosmology.
And so I was aware of that.
And Weinberg's book was a sort of modern version
of physical cosmology at the time.
And so it was very natural for me to read it
and it's very you know it's very well written it does it's very sort of step-by-step systematic
orderly exposition of what was known so it was reasonably easy to read.
But then what struck me was at the end,
he talks about what's unknown.
And one of the striking things there
was that the limitation
in understanding the strong interaction
was the barrier to making further progress.
Because if you go back to the Big Bang, things get very dense, very hot,
and you have lots of protons and neutrons and strongly interacting particles.
Interacting strongly, people thought, and it was just utterly impenetrable.
Nobody knew how to proceed. But our work on asymptotic freedoms made it simple.
Instead of things getting more complicated, they get simpler at high energy, according to the theory.
And so I remember that those last sections of Weinberg's book, because I was always looking for opportunities.
And it sort of was very clear to me that now we could go back to those questions and address them in a much more intelligent, confident way, because the strong interaction was coming under control.
The standard model is often thought of as a zoo of particles but you've said that it's better understood as a realization of principles. What do you mean by that?
Yeah, well this uh uh yeah there are two very different things.
There's kind of the core of the standard model,
which is based on a few interactions,
strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions,
and gravity also fits in nicely in general relativity.
So these four all kind of work harmoniously together and give us a profound understanding of the world.
And they work on, in everyday life, just a few ingredients.
There are quarks, gluons, photons, and electrons, and that's really it.
Gravitons are lurking in the background as kind of holding things together on cosmological scales
but basically in everyday life that's it and if if it stopped there uh people would have
you know still been looking for a unified theory but there wouldn't be all this grousing about how
ugly the standard model is blah blah blah but at accelerators people found a lot of unstable particles,
so more kinds of quarks, basically,
whose mutual interactions are very complicated.
There's their pattern of masses, their pattern of who decays into who,
how they couple to W and Z bosons.
The details of that are not beautiful.
But, so there's a large domain of interactions
and phenomena that are described very compactly
with beautiful mathematics,
sort of comparable to the mathematics of quantum theory of angular momentum that I mentioned. In fact, very much related to that to do justice to these odd transient phenomena that that's not the whole story.
The beautiful part is what describes ordinary matter, very precise, the kind of matter that we have in everyday life.
And it gives a beautifully compact, and even in astrophysics, all kinds of engineering, everything, biology is compact.
I think it's very well tested and based on profoundly beautiful ideas. and you can describe them in a rather thin book
as I did in Fundamentals
and do some kind of justice to it
but then if you want to bring in
all the stuff that people have found at accelerators
all these very unstable particles
that don't seem to have any important role in the universe
but there they are, Why are they there?
What can we make?
Can we make this bigger structure
into something unified and beautiful?
That's where it gets hairy, right?
So we hope someday that those things get brought in,
but that shouldn't blind us
to the beauty of what we already have.
To what extent do you think the work you did
during the 1970s
has contributed to our ability to produce a grand unified theory?
Oh, well, it's absolutely central.
You couldn't even begin to think about a grand unified theory
without, first of all, understanding the strong interaction,
which is, you know, there are only four interactions,
and that's one of them. So you have to understand, you're going there are only four interactions, and that's one of them.
So you have to understand,
you're going to make a unified theory,
you have to know what to unify and what it is.
So we found the equations, and so you know what it is,
and it turns out that those equations
are very profoundly similar to the...
They're richer, in a way, more complicated.
They have more bells and whistles, if you like,
but their central idea is very similar to the idea of...
the guiding idea, the high symmetry,
or the so-called gauge symmetry of electrodynamics and also of the weak
interaction. So all three interactions of those three interactions have a very, very similar
mathematical structure of symmetry and exchange of spin one particles. Gravity is a little bit
different, but still sort of has a family resemblance it is based on also symmetry
it's slightly different it's uh it's called uh general covariance if you like and it's
associated with the spin two particle instead of a spin one particle but it's the kind of the same
family so having these four theories with uh conceptual structure is begging you to try to unify them.
But the other aspect of our contribution
is not only revealing what the equations are,
but also revealing this principle
that the effective strength of interactions
changes with distance or with energy, and opening up the possibility
that if you calculate what happens at very short distances or at very high energies,
the interactions come together in a quantitative way. So you can discuss unification
not only as kind of a dream,
but also you can draw out
quantitative implications
of this possibility that they unify.
And it almost works.
It more or less works.
Of course, you know,
it involves a huge extrapolation,
so a lot of things could go
wrong it's amazing it works as well as it does yeah yeah murray gelman famously lifted the word
quark from james joyce's finnegan's wake and co-opted it as you know frank as the name for
the particle that he helped to discover you. You've also named some particles or hypothetical particles,
including the slightly less poetic axion,
which you named after the laundry detergent,
which is still a better name than a jelly swagger.
Well, taste may differ, right?
But names and words in physics can have a deeper impact than that when they affect how we frame things.
Talk about how you think about all subjects, really.
I think that having names for concepts really conditions the discourse. Because when you have a name for something,
ideas accrete around it,
a domain of discourse,
a literature accretes around it,
and if there's no such nucleus around to accrete,
then the ideas just float
and don't necessarily come together in the same way so
it's like uh it's like when you have uh a super cooled liquid or or if you have in the weather
if you want to if you want to have raindrops or snowdrops you have to have nuclei around
the chris around which they crystallize and then and have nuclei around which they crystallize and then around which they condense.
Anyway, I'm not sure I wanted to use that metaphor.
But having centers around which things can organize
and attract each other and kind of have a locus is really important.
And computer scientists are learning this also in machine learning.
The so-called unsupervised learning is largely a matter of finding resemblances among things
and putting them into categories.
And that, if you think about it it that's giving them a name.
So you have things which resemble each other somehow and they cluster and then that tells
you that there is something and you can give it a name.
On the computer they don't necessarily give it a name but they give it a memory location
and links but it's the same idea. So having names really is a great aid to thinking,
and it's also a great aid not only to individual thinking,
but to how communities think,
because people recognize a subject around the word.
So I could give many examples in physics but let's see what's a good
nice example
I know Feynman hated color change
Clark is a good example
color
color as a name for charge
yeah
it's pretty stupid
actually
because it's pretty stupid, actually.
Because, you know, it's sort of purposely confusing because the color charge has nothing to do with color in the ordinary sense.
I mean, literally nothing.
In fact, any metaphor you kind of try to draw doesn't work. I don't know any way to, well, actually, I mean,
you can stretch it. If you think about not physical color, but the perception of color,
we have three receptors, oh yeah, and you can blend different things. But color charge is a very very different thing than color in uh in the in
the usual way it's applied to to light so that's not that's not a good one so you can make bad
choices as well as good ones no question in in what sense is in what sense is the name
the big bang potentially misleading well it's potentially misleading because people usually associate explosions
with some bomb
or some location where a lot of energy
concentrates and then it expands out. But
the Big Bang, as currently understood, is quite different.
It occurred everywhere at once.
So that's potentially misleading.
But otherwise, it's a pretty good name.
And, you know, it's short and gave people a convenient handle
to associate things which would otherwise be quite a mouthful.
You know, The hypothesis that early
in its history the universe was much
hotter and denser and then it expanded
out. Just saying
there was a Big Bang
is much more convenient
and people can
gather their thoughts around
that body of lore.
So
it's a nice it's good
the only as i said the only thing that the only bad thing about it i would say is that uh
it uh it's a little undignified but that's okay and uh and that it does suggest that there was a
place a sort of center from which things expanded,
then that's not true.
It was uniform.
Everywhere.
It occurred everywhere at the same time.
Am I correct in thinking that you may be the youngest person
who's contributed to the standard model?
Well, it depends what you mean by contributed.
I mean, people are still contributing,
but I think there was a, you know, the foundation of the standard late 60s, the very late 60s and early 70s, which is still to this day thought to be entirely valid and is the basis of our profound understanding of the physical world. And yeah, I think QCD and asymptotic freedom
was kind of the last major link in the chain.
And I was the youngest person involved.
That's right.
And am I correct in thinking
that there haven't been any industrial applications
of the ideas for which you won the Nobel Prize,
at least not yet? Any practical implications? No. Oh, industrial? No, I don't think so.
You would really have to stretch it. No. There have been applications to cosmology, as I mentioned.
There's been tremendous application to understanding the interpretation and designing
experiments at accelerators. So if you count that as industrial activity, I guess. But no.
The short answer is, the honest and short answer is no. So it's been applied
within physics very profoundly to sort of push the frontiers of
knowledge of the early universe, of what happens at accelerators,
unification, but not
what any sane person would call a practical application, I don't think.
According to the economist Robert Gordon, US economic growth slowed by more than half
from 3.2% per year during the period from 1970 to 2006, to only 1.4% during the period from 2006 to 2016. And recently on this podcast, Frank,
I've been asking guests whether the slower economic growth since the 1970s has been causing
an increase in rent seeking or vice versa, or maybe I guess something else has been driving both the slow
growth and the rent seeking. And I'd like to ask you the physics version of this question,
because I'm interested in the sociology. Okay, good, because I'm not prepared to answer the
economics. No, no, fair enough. I wouldn't put you on the spot like that, but I am interested in the sociology of string theory. And so, my question is, has the intense politics, for want of a better word,
in the physics community distorted the community's the frequency of new major discoveries
led to this kind of bitter infighting in politics
in the physics community?
Well, first of all, I'm not prepared to accept the premise
that there's been bitter infighting in politics.
Fair enough.
There has been some inevitable, I mean inevitable friction between different communities that want to represent, want to get faculty positions and support and so forth.
And that's quite normal.
And maybe it's been a little more intense in recent years because of the frustration.
So I guess I'm groping towards an answer.
I'll try to be honest about this, although it might get me in trouble.
I think the main reason that things have slowed down
in terms of progress in fundamental physics
is simply that we were so successful in bringing things together
in the 70s and 80s in fundamental interactions and fundamental cosmology. And it's really been hard to get beyond that. We kind of swept the field as far as experimental data.
We explained it all.
If your standards are low enough, I should say, in a broad-grained way.
We certainly can't calculate the details of every reaction any more than you can in chemistry,
but we understand the principles, I think securely and uh uh and it's been
very difficult to do any better that's what people have found that's so uh
in a sense that's a that's glorious that's not a failure i mean that means we
but it's it's unfortunate if if what you want to do is to keep improving or expanding our fundamental principles.
And that was once the central activity of physics. I mean, all through the 20th century, I would say, until maybe the very last parts,
the description, the search for new fundamental principles and the search for improving our
understanding of the physical world was the same search. So when people discovered the principles of quantum mechanics,
it opened up the description of materials, chemistry, all the innovations of lasers and
microelectronics and all that stuff came. Semiconductors, technology, all that stuff came in a very, very tangible way that you can trace
through profound curiosity and understanding about how atoms work and how matter works and
the breakthroughs in the quantum theory. And then there were still questions about how atomic nuclei work,
about how the stars get lit up and things like this,
where the energy comes from,
and then where the universe came from, the Big Bang.
And those questions were,
and that kind of information about the world
that experimenters and observers had gathered
got used and put together into a nice package
that's been hard to improve.
It doesn't mean it can't improve.
There are certainly loose ends.
There's a so-called dark matter problem.
There's tension between certain aspects of our understanding of gravity and our understanding
of quantum mechanics. But to a first approximation, the empirical drive, let alone the technological
drive that powered fundamental physics
through the 20th century
has kind of dissipated
because we've understood the data.
So we're left with aesthetic desires
and that's very debatable
and people try different things.
None of them has really worked
in anything like the kind of depth and power
that what we did in the 70s and 80s.
I'm sounding like an old man, and I guess I'm getting there.
But in those days, we were giants, and we solved all that.
And it's much harder.
And the...
So, let's see. Oh, but OK. But but, you know, no.
But I think physics in many ways is more exciting than ever, because it's like.
Let's go back to that piano analogy, which is one I really like. So learning the fundamental principles is like learning a piano has notes
and you you can play them and there are a certain number of notes and eventually you played all the
notes so you know you know how it works uh that's but that's not the end of the story that's when it
gets really interesting okay now you now you can put the notes together and play chords and
and make patterns and do fantastic things and And that's an ongoing creative activity.
Knowing the fundamentals, you can build beautiful objects
and quantum computers and instruments of different kinds
and expand our perception and maybe get at questions
like how mind emerges from matter and make useful devices. Yeah, it's just...
So I don't...
What am I trying to say here?
I'm not...
Well, I'm trying to...
It's still exciting.
The nature of the fruitful questions changes
because of what you've learned.
And I don't...
So I think
insisting that the only interesting
or the most interesting or the
most profound part
of physics is improving
the most basic
laws was an easier
case to make when there were
more loose ends and when that enterprise was thriving.
Now I think there's competition from other fields,
but there's also, within physics,
there's a thriving enterprise of using the theory in creative ways.
We know that its potential is nowhere near being exhausted
in terms of, okay,
now we understand how matter works,
so we have no excuse
for not replacing chemists
with computers
and taking design of materials
to new levels
and new forms of engineering,
all kinds of things
you can imagine doing
that are really exciting. new levels and new forms of engineering, all kinds of things you can imagine doing that
are really exciting.
And the quest for improving the fundamentals kind of has to compete with those other possibilities
for the minds of young people and for resources.
I wonder how that's flowed through to technological progress over the last few decades recently nicholas bloom
and some other economists wrote a paper called our ideas getting harder to find and it's a pretty
disturbing paper but they present a stylized equation which is economic growth equals research productivity multiplied by the number of
researchers and they present you know a swathe of evidence showing that research effort is rising
at the same time as research productivity is falling and one one of the main examples they
pick comes from moore's law and they show that the number of researchers
required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times
larger than the number required in the early 1970s. So we're kind of like on this treadmill
running faster and faster and faster and faster, but we're not necessarily covering the same ground. Moore's Law is an extraordinarily high standard.
It's a miracle, really, that that has been maintained for so long.
I mean, exponential growth usually doesn't go on for very long for very good reasons.
It's hard to keep going.
It's the famous story of the person,
the one grain of rice and then two grains of rice
and the king is eventually bankrupt
and kills the guy who got this prize.
And it's not unrelated to the phenomenon that we've just been discussing that, how should I say?
There's a period, a sort of heroic period, when you discover vast new territories, and it only takes a few people to do that in a sense uh but then if you want to
exploit it uh the low-hanging fruit gets picked right away and then you have then there's higher
higher fruit and you it takes more effort and sort of maybe in absolute terms it doesn't seem
as impressive but it's more systematic and takes more people but yeah but but uh how should i say nobody promised you a rose garden
you you gotta you gotta take it as it comes and uh you know uh um yeah columbus or whatever
discovered a new world uh and that was vast but you could only do it one. That was one guy.
So, yes, he was enormously productive, but you can't keep doing that.
Yeah. And so, yeah, so I don't find that counterintuitive or disturbing at all.
It gets harder because it was easy at first. Well, it's disturbing in terms of its social ramifications, I guess.
Well, it can be, yeah.
Well, that's a different issue, which I don't want to abuse my authority
such as it is by pronouncing on,
but I do think you're onto something
if this is where you're going,
which I sense is where it is,
is that already in the...
Let me put it my way, so to speak.
Already in the 1930s,
Lord Keynes, the great economist, wrote a paper called The Economic Prospects of Our Grandchildren, something like that, where he talked about the level of productivity that was in sight that could be achieved in the near future.
And they said, our grandchildren will have the capability of working much fewer hours and living well.
Everybody could be in the Bloomsbury group, so to speak.
I guess what was in the back of his mind, everyone could live comfortably, wouldn't have to worry about,
and could devote themselves to art or whatever. And I do think, well, I think that's a bit much of nature, our industrial processes and so forth
could support a very comfortable life for a lot of people as opposed to a kind of grotesquely
rich life for a few people and hard work and impoverishment for many others to support that.
You know, so, yeah, I, but that's not a problem of physics. That's a problem of
morality and politics and things like that. Yeah, I think you're right, Frank. The
big thing Keynes missed in the economic possibilities for our grandchildren was the huge rise in inequality, which of course is something that he couldn't or could not easily have predicted.
So if many of the low-hanging fruits have been picked, I'd like to ask you about how we can find new orchards.
And I guess there are like a couple of ways of approaching that question.
One is to talk about broad approaches
and the other is to talk about like particular areas or fields of physics.
And to begin with the broad approaches,
three people who authored the major equations of the last century,
Einstein, Dirac, and Yang,
all used beauty as their compass.
And I'm curious to hear from you, Frank,
as to whether you think that's just random
or if there's something to it.
Like, why should the laws of nature care about
what we think is beautiful?
And what does beauty mean?
And why can't the fundamentals be ugly well there yeah i think the the fundamentals as far as we understand them are very beautiful
uh and but they have a very particular kind of beauty uh
that overlaps but is not the same thing as our concept of beauty more generally.
So, for instance, one of the major themes of art history is the beauty of landscapes,
the beauty of sexual attraction, very attractive bodies of different human bodies.
Those things aren't really represented in the fundamental laws.
But the beauty, one powerful theme of a lot of art,
especially decorative art,
when you look at the things people use to decorate their houses,
is symmetry, that you have patterns that are very regular.
And people like that.
And it goes across many cultures, across many times.
You see that maybe in the highest form in things like cathedrals or mosques
where you have these fantastic decorations of high symmetry.
And it turns out that the fundamental laws of nature are characterized by
tremendous amounts of symmetry. They're not symmetries of objects but symmetries of
concepts and equations. That is, you can change the equations in many many ways and yet they have the same content so it's the same thing as a
symmetric object you can change its position and it still remains the same object you rotate a
circle it's still a circle even though every point moves that kind of thing so the laws have that character
and i think people find that i kind of have a theory of evolution about that which i think
explains why i mean okay i mean the laws are what they are so it's not so that that's kind of not
negotiable the question is why we find them beautiful and And I think it's because
when we learn about the world
and kind of have to interpret
our sensory experiences,
it's a big challenge
to take our raw experience
and turn it into a model of the world.
We have to use
the way the world works
as part of it, as part of the rules of thumb.
It's how you go from these impressions on our retinas, which are two-dimensional and all mixed up,
to a three-dimensional world that we walk around in.
You have to use properties of the world, which you learn partly because they're in our hardware,
but also partly because as a baby you experience these things
and have to organize it.
And organizing it, in organizing it,
it's very, very useful to use this property of symmetry
because the laws are symmetric, you know,
and patterns do tend to continue in the natural world uh and you if you
have a blind spot you fill it in by saying it's more or less the same as what there was elsewhere
and so it's very very useful and i think uh in in doing this learning task of coming to terms with how the world actually works to it's been useful for evolution
I realize I'm speaking in a way that biologists
wouldn't approve of but let me
it's trivial to translate
evolution encourages us
to like
symmetry because it's a useful thing to learn.
So the idea that we would love to come back
to symmetric objects and interact with them,
which is, in a way, an operational definition
of what beautiful is for human experience,
is something that evolution encourages.
So I don't think it's entirely a miracle.
I think you can have the beginning of an explanation.
Now, of course, the depth of symmetry in physical law
and its particular aspects that are kind of abstract
and require a lot of imagination to even get to is way beyond the decorative art.
But I think that's the way it works.
I think, I mean, to me, at least, that's a nice story of how it works.
I mean, the laws are what they are. And one more aspect to this is that if
they weren't simple and regular and beautiful, we would never have found them. And that in particular
applies to quantum chromodynamics, our theory of the strong force, which we never would have found those equations,
except that they're very special equations
that have enormous amounts of symmetry.
Yeah, I guess evolution might have prepared us to save the symmetry,
but we're also lucky that symmetry runs deep down into the microcosmos yes
yes we're lucky that's right it's a wonderful world and we didn't deserve it but there it is
well we're part of it you know we're part of it and i guess that's that's the that's the thing
we we learn to love it because we're part of it and have to learn how to get around in it.
So thinking about different fields or subject matter areas in physics, if we do reach a cul-de-sac at the Large Hadron Collider and don't find any new particles,
what's the next most promising thing we should be doing?
Axions. next most promising thing we should be doing axions well there's a great problem of dark
matter what the dark matter is that's a very concrete challenge okay we've understood ordinary
matter uh profoundly and yet then now the cosmologists have found that that is only a small contribution to the universe by mass.
It's only about 5%.
And then there's dark matter and then there's a weight of empty space itself, so-called dark energy.
So, and it looks, the dark matter looks very much like it should be some kind of new particle.
And we have ideas about what that particle might be. synthesis of in a fantastic culmination of of or of a profound understanding leading to a very
surprising and dramatic consequence that that there's this new kind of matter that's that's
so much of the universe and it's so important and how it evolved. And so one challenge is that, identifying it.
And their idea, you know, we can use our laws to make guesses about what that stuff might be.
I'm very fond of this particular guess called axions, which I've been involved in developing for many years uh and
because these guesses come with equations and come with strat and the equations allow you to
have strategies for how you can test whether these hypotheses about the world are in fact correct so
i think that's clearly to me that's that's the part of fundamental
physics that seems by far the most likely to break through on a big in a big way in uh in a reasonable
human time scale uh accelerators well you know the lhC seemed to be a great opportunity to find new particles, new phenomena.
And we did get the Higgs particle out of it, but not the more ambitious ideas about supersymmetry that I certainly was hoping for.
Maybe the energy is just not high enough.
But in any case, the LHAT was a big, expensive project.
And as a practical matter, I think it's difficult to motivate potential investors,
both of time and money, to build a successor without a clear indication
that something good would come out of it.
Then, well, does that answer your question?
Yeah, yeah, it does.
I'm sure, it's a very broad question.
I don't think I've answered all aspects.
No, no no of course
meanwhile as i don't as i said there are great things that don't involve fundamentals in the
same sense don't that is don't involve maybe finding new laws uh that you couldn't or phenomena
that you couldn't derive from our present knowledge, but our present knowledge is also a secure base for addressing questions like how mind emerges from matter.
Can we build new kinds of minds, quantum computers that have powerful new capabilities?
Can we make new kind of instruments? Can we move to a sustainable industrial process or a sustainable supply of energy that's large and doesn't poison the earth?
Can we design new drugs from first principle and new catalysts and things
from our knowledge of quantum mechanics
rather than having to do experiments
in smelly laboratories?
These are, you know,
can we build self-reproducing machines?
There's kind of new kinds of engineering
that biology uses,
but human engineering hasn't been able to really duplicate.
There's no excuse.
We know how matter works.
We should be able to do all these things.
Yeah.
And I guess that connects to yet another way
we could think about this question of finding new orchards and
that is that we need new technologies to be the enabling factor for new discoveries in in much
the same way that for example computers enabled our understanding of confinement in quantum
chromodynamics yes that's right i mean there's new ways of understanding the world with the help of our silicon friends and maybe other kinds of friends in the future. like to say great answers lead to great questions, lead to even greater questions.
So, you know, we've answered some questions and now we can really
pose with it. I mean you can always pose these questions, how does mind emerge
from matter, what was the early universe like, but to really pose them sharply in meaningful ways,
you have to know what you're talking about
and have the appropriate tools to address them.
And I think it's only now that we really do have that.
Frank, I've got some final questions about, I guess,
how you think and how you work, because I
like trying in my own modest way to try and learn from really impressive people.
And the first question is, I understand that you've been teaching yourself machine learning
recently, and I'd love to know... Yes, well, I've been interested in it for a long time
at kind of a, you know, how should I say,
an interested amateur level
or maybe a beginning graduate student in the subject.
But now I'm getting much more serious
in acquiring the tools.
And I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them,
if anything,
but it's actually quite charming
that in that community,
the tools are so widely available.
It's very well documented.
You can get these tools online. Things like TensorFlow and PyTorch, they're
out there. And they're very well documented. The barriers to entry are much lower than
people might think. It's very interesting. And it's a new style. It's very interesting,
and it's a new style of interacting with computers and programming
that in many ways is more human and more user-friendly
than traditional instructional programming
where you write, do this, do that in a simplified language.
This is a little, it's different. where you write, do this, do that in a simplified language.
It's different.
It's more giving examples and more like how you would teach a child.
It's fun.
Yeah.
And it's a place, going back to our earlier metaphors, it's a place where i'm convinced that not all the low
hanging fruit has been identified much less plucked right that that's there you go that
wow so so how does frank wilczek teach himself machine learning do you have like a systematic
approach to self-directed learning and what what sort of like well so sources are you consulting it's system
well i could tell you the particular books i have a pile but uh but it's it's the same way as i
learned physics or anything else i i talk to people who uh have more knowledge. In this case, I've listened to a couple of online courses
and I look at books and I see which books are good
and in those books I go into deeper.
It's not arcane.
It's a very straightforward process of just latching on to things.
I guess what's helpful to me, though, is that having done this kind of thing before,
I feel I have a good instinct for things were that are not properly understood i have a lot of confidence and experience that i can find weak points and go go for those and
that's what can can you share the the titles i mean i this this may be
uh well if i want to get them right i I'll have to go over here. Okay.
So.
Frank is walking to his office.
Well, I'm walking to actually my bathroom where I have this pile of stuff.
Best place to learn machine learning.
So this, well, one thing I've really enjoyed, this is from the sort of previous adventures in machine learning, is this book by David McKay called Information Theory Inference and Learning Algorithms.
Okay.
So that's sort of something that I've read several years ago.
I'm now rereading it to make sure I understand all the details.
That's a good book.
But it doesn't go to the latest developments.
And there's this thing, Deep Learning, by Goodfellow, Bengio, and Corville.
And then there's this kind of notes called Reinforcement Learning and Introduction.
This must be the world's longest introduction by Sutton and Bartow. So those are the books I've been looking at.
But then there are also lots of online resources.
Great.
Thanks, Frank. With pop. Yeah, okay.
You've said that your operating function is think, play, repeat.
Can you describe what that looks like in practice?
Well, it doesn't look like anything dramatic.
I mean, it looks like me typing at my computer and surfing the Internet in some way or calculating.
I do a lot of work with Mathematica, this computer program that I've learned to be pretty fluent with.
I'm not so fluent yet with Python and all its tools, but I'm getting there.
And so that's part of it.
The other part of it is talking to people.
You know, I do Skype calls with former students,
with collaborators, and occasionally a lot of conferences are archived now
so I can look at those
but the thing is
nowadays
there's so much information, it's kind of overwhelming.
So I consult people who I trust to sort of maintain quality control.
That's actually the hardest part.
You can easily waste a lot of time by not doing that.
What sort of books do you read that aren't about physics?
Oh, I read all kinds of things.
I've even been trying to read more fiction recently.
I read things that people, that I stumble into, really.
So I look at a lot of books and read a few pages,
and then if I find myself resonating with them, then I go further.
I've also tried to... There are some books I keep coming back to.
Bertrand Russell, I keep coming back to.
History of Western Philosophy and some of his other writings.
I'm a great admirer of Olaf Stapledon, the pioneering science fiction writer, H.G. Wells.
But I also, you know, classics, Shakespeare, Melville.
I like Mokey Dick.
I just read Crime and Punishment.
Again, I guess I had maybe seen it in high school or something.
But I've actually made a big discovery there, which is kind of a discovery of necessity,
but turned out to be really important in enjoying these things,
is that I should only try to read maybe a chapter a day of something like that,
because then I enjoy it if i if i try to do a lot then i then i think well you know
i really should be doing something else and that's one thing and the other thing is the these rich
texts they take a while to absorb to really you know to come to terms with the characters and the situations and imagine it. So trying to read too fast, I think, at least for me,
I lose it if I don't have time to interact.
How do you think about balancing humility and self-respect?
Well,
I don't think much about it except that it's something that happens.
There are plenty of occasions for humility
as you think about the universe
and also at a less exalted level if if you try to do hard
problems as I often do I fail a lot you know so so humility or you know if I wanted a lesson if
I want a lesson in humility I can I can go back and and look the Principia, Newton's work.
There are levels of human achievement that are just awesome.
It's a lesson in humility that I haven't done that.
But self-respect, well, i get a lot of positive feedback so that's and
uh also i think it goes back to my early school years and ever since i've gotten a lot of
feedback positive feedback so self-respect comes comes naturally uh And, you know, my ego is very secure.
But also, you know, but also learning,
and this really came especially most out of writing fundamentals
and thinking about it,
is just what an extraordinary thing it is to be a thinking
human being with just what an extraordinary thing it it is that that such a thing can emerge from
matter and how much has to go into it and how billions of years to evolve and this organized
complexity and uh it's just awesome and to think that that's me or that's, you know, that's us.
It's not all humility.
We should have self-respect too because we're remarkable creations.
Frank Wilczek, I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah. Well, thanks. for joining me. Yeah.
Well, thanks.
It was fun.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
You can find episodes, transcripts, and show notes at thejsp.com.
If you enjoyed this episode with Frank Wilczek,
you might also enjoy episode number 48 with physicist Leonard Susskind
or episode number 98 with cosmologist Avi Loeb.
The audio editor for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield.
Our incredibly thirsty video editor is Alfetti.
I'm Joe Walker.
Until next time, thank you for listening.
Ciao.