The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Sabine Hossenfelder: Physics, Science Ideology, & More

Episode Date: November 13, 2021

Sabine Hossenfelder joins Lawrence Krauss for an interesting discussion about theoretical physics, academia, and the future of science ideology. You can show your support and access exclusive bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/originspodcast Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krauss and welcome to the Origins Podcast. Sabina Hosenfelder is a theoretical physicist, a science popularizer, and also a sometimes YouTube personality and musician. I've known her for some time and I enjoy the fact that she's also kind of a contrarian. Her last book, Lost in Math, for example, talked about the possibility that physics had lost its way, being more concerned about ideas of beauty in mathematics than perhaps understanding the real world. I decided to have a conversation with her about that and many other things, about what motivated her as a kind of mathematical physicist to get involved in science popularization and how she decided to spend time on her YouTube videos.

All of that and more, as well as a discussion about really the present and future progress of physics. As always, we don't really agree on everything, but it was an interesting discussion, and I particularly enjoy her take, her irreverent take on many aspects of physics, where she kind of inserts herself as a journalist as much as a scientist in trying to interview people about science. I hope you enjoy the interview. Thanks. Again, for those of you who watch this on YouTube, I hope you'll consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

since only a small percentage of the people who watch our videos on YouTube actually subscribe to the channel, and doing so will give you more opportunities to get notice of what's going on as well as other events we may produce with the Origins Project Foundation. And also, if you're interested in supporting the foundation, another way to do it is by subscribing to the podcast through Patreon, which not only supports the nonprofit foundation, but also allows you access to these videos without any advertisements.

In any case, no matter how you watch or listen to this podcast, I hope you enjoy it. Well, Sabina, thanks a lot for joining me for this podcast. I'm really looking forward to talking to you, as I always do. But I want to talk about a variety of things. But since this is the Origins podcast, I want to start with your origins, which I, knowing you at present, I'm fascinated by the origins of how you got to where you are. So what got you interested in science first? Let's start with that, because you have a number of facets that I want to explore, and each of them is interesting.

But let's talk about the physics aspect. I guess it's a fairly boring story. I was always good at math and science things in school, and it was the natural trajectory. I actually originally studied math at the university. And the problem with the math department was that they were pretty much broke. They couldn't offer me a job. They said, go over. Talk to the physicists.

They can need math people. And that's how I became a physicist. Now, you're always good math. Did your parents, what are your parents do? Do they influence you? Did they encourage you? What first, so it was just, you went to math because you were good at it. Was there anything as a young person that,

that attracted you to math or science? My mother is a now retired high school teacher for math and biology. Let's not talk about my father. He ran away early, but he had a PhD in something. In something, okay. It was not math and not physics. Okay, but so the, to some extent, the role model of your mother was a good example. And encourage your math.

What about, did you read much popular science? Because it'll be relevant for later on, given your writing and that. Did that impact on you? Well, actually, no. For a long time, I didn't. I was very interested in science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction. I thought space travel was the coolest thing, and, you know, I got really into this.

But it was always on my mind, like, this is just fiction. You know, it's not real. And that naturally got me interested in, why can't you travel faster than the space? speed of light, what's with warp drives, what's with hyperdrives, what's with all this quantum uncertainty business, and that's how I got sucked into physics. Well, actually, that's good to know. You know, as of course, you know, from my book, The Physics of Star Trek, I get a lot of people

for many years talking to me about science and science fiction. And in my case, I read, you know, science and science fiction, and I was, you know, I watched Star Trek and I watched lots of movies. But it wasn't clear to me, chicken or egg. It wasn't clear to me that whether I was interested in science fiction because my scientists are the other way around. So it's nice to see someone, use you as an example when people, and I say that science fiction sometimes sucks people in the science. Because I'm never certain about that connection between science and science fiction. It's clearly symbiotic, but sometimes I think science fiction gets in the way of people being interested in science, because it's

It's so depressing. And science fiction is so much more exciting to be able to zip through the galaxy in minutes or solve a technical problem on the enterprise in an hour when it may take 20 years in real life. Yeah, I can see that. Though in the end, I always feel like it leaves you feeling a little bit empty, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm disappointed about reality. Well, I do think that's the point that science fiction really misses all the exciting stuff.

The most exciting stuff is the stuff that science fiction misses. I mean, when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, we were supposed to be on flying cars now and doing all this stuff. And, you know, no one mentioned the Internet or any. I mean, for good reason, right? Discoveries are discoveries because we didn't anticipate them. So it's not too surprising that science fiction, while it's sometimes forecast the future,

generally it seems to me it doesn't do a good job that the real universe always surprises us more than science fiction. And as I like to say, the imagination of the universe is better than the imagination of science fiction writers or even scientists, usually, which is something we'll get to, in fact. Now, you also, I want to jump, before I get to writing, I want to jump to music. So you clearly have some background of music, too. Tell me about that. I actually don't. I mean, my mother was insist on that I learned to play the piano. but I was never really good at it. I didn't particularly enjoy it,

which had a lot to do with my teacher, it was really, really boring. Naturally, I've always liked music. I actually, I wanted to play drums, but my mother wasn't very convinced that it would be a good idea. So for a long time, I painted in oil and acrylics, and I made some money with that as a student. And then I had kids and kids and oil colors.

not a good combination. So I thought, you know, I need some other creative outlet. And so I started doing music. And it really started like this. I didn't know anything about nothing. I mean, I had like, I know how to read notes and that kind of thing. Sheep music. But that was pretty much it.

So theoretically, I knew some things, but practically basically nothing. And so you taught yourself. But you clearly must have to be musical. I mean, again, we have a similar background in that regard. I was forced to take piano lessons. And I've actually taken lessons in three different instruments that I can think of. And one was the piano lessons, then the mandolin and then the cello. I took up the cello because my daughter was a very good violinist when she was starting at age three.

And I try, I wanted to surprise her by one Christmas by doing an accompaniment to trinkle, twinkle little star, which I did do. and surprised her, but very quickly she lost interest in me because I couldn't keep up with her. So in each of those lessons that I took, my teacher eventually said, you know what, you probably should stop taking lessons because you're not any good. So clearly, you actually, while you didn't like the lessons, you obviously have Matt Musical aptitude. You were able to pick it up on your own later on.

Well, you know, I'm very much someone who learns by doing things. So I just, I set out and I just wrote some songs and I had fun with it. I mean, for me, this was the important part. And then, of course, you know, you get some feedback. You learn some new things. I learned a lot of things on YouTube. Like, I basically learned to sing on YouTube. I never took any singing lessons.

I tried, but I couldn't find anyone. And then it was difficult to arrange and all that kind of thing. And it was the same with the recording computer software. you need. I taught myself everything myself, basically. No, that's great. I mean, you know, one of the things I have a little small travel guitar. I've been trying to teach myself, so there's hope maybe for me. Because I do love music, I just, I just, but it's, I've been impressed by your songs. So I, my daughter, one, well, we spent a year, I spent a year down in Vanderbilt down at Nashville because my daughter was there at school.

And my daughter is very musical. And I told myself I would write some country music songs while I was there, but I never did one of my great sadnesses. But one day, maybe a country music song too. But it's nice to know that, you know, to see one can do these. And that is the great thing about it, to some extent, while the Internet has many flaws, you can access information that you could never have access before.

You can access a lot of misinformation too, which is a problem both of us deal with. a lot, I think. Anyway, before I get to your writing, I want to, you know, you said, okay, the math department basically told you to go to physics and then you did physics, but you decided to pursue a career in it and it's not an easy thing to do. So walk me through that a little bit. Did you ever consider leaving and doing something else? Many times. So I wasn't at all. convinced about this whole PhD thing and also doing a postdoc and at every step in that series I considered leaving like when I made so I didn't do a master's but at the time it was called a diploma

diploma and I wasn't convinced that doing a PhD would do me any good like why would I want to do it was the point and at this time this was in the late 1990s everyone was doing web design You know, that was the new thing because suddenly everybody wanted to do a website. And I've always been interested in graphics design. I was good with coding things. You know, that was the thing that I taught myself at that time. And I knew a lot of people who went into web design and they made good money because there was a lot of demand at the time. And I thought seriously about doing this.

And then what happened was that, you know, there were all these professors who were like, oh, you're really good. good, you should go on doing this and we'll give you a scholarship. And so they gave me money. And then, you know, it was very encouraging. And it just went on like this, you know, I did my PhD. And then I were like, oh, here you have money to go to the United States. And I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. And it went on like this, right?

And then, of course, you get older and it becomes a little bit more difficult. Did you, yeah, no, by default, you get sort of sucked in as you get stages. The 90s was maybe a better, when I did my PhD, it was a time when there were no jobs. So I kind of did it, recognizing that I probably wouldn't go ahead and do physics or being an academic. I taught myself juggling and I figured I could drive a taxi. I lived in Boston. I did my PhD MIT. And then I figured if I could drive there.

I could drive anywhere. And, but, you know, it was just sort of, oh, yeah, I managed to, then I managed to get a job at Harvard. And you sort of, at a certain time, sort of, you've committed by that point. But it's nice to know there are other options. I was lucky to be able to go directly from Harvard to a professorship. But it's kind of like my wife at the time kind of just said it was like the Army. I mean, this postdoc thing where you basically have to move from one,

place to another and you don't really have control of your life. And if you have a life, if you have a family, that can be pretty discouraging, moving from place to place. Did you already have kids at that point or was it later? No. So after my PhD, I went to the United States and I was there for three years. And then I went to a perimeter institute in Canada. And then I was lucky to get an assistant professorship. So there was a five-year thing, like not 10-year track, but five years in Sweden. And the Swedes are very family-friendly. So I figured going on parental leave wouldn't be an issue. And indeed it wasn't. But the problem was that my husband had, he still has, a permanent position in Germany and couldn't move to Sweden. He would have to give up his permanent position for my

temporary thing, which didn't make any sense. So, and I actually, at the time, I said to the director at the institute, you know, I just, I don't know how to do it? Because I, how is it supposed to work out? I can't leave my husband alone with the kids. So we had twins, which kind of made it even more difficult. Yes. And I can't very well come to Stockholm, take the kids, two of them with me.

How's that supposed to work? And I said, you know, let's just forget about it. it. You know, I'll thank you for the job, but I can't sort it out. And the guy who was the director at the time said, well, I know the problem perfectly well, because he had three kids himself, and his family actually lived in a different country, and so he was commuting back and forth. And he said, you know, you just try to be here when you can, but as long as you work, will not look at it too closely. And that's what I did. So, for four years, I commuted back and forth to Stockholm, and it was terribly stressful,

but he kind of just about worked out. Well, I hope it worked out. Stockholm to Germany is not, I commuted for five years between the U.S. and Australia. That's a little longer commute, but so, but, well, it's fortunate. Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right. In Stockholm, you had that building. Nowadays, maybe even, it'll be interesting to see where the pandemic makes that easier or harder, the fact that you don't have to necessarily be present.

Although, you know, it is one of the many misconceptions about science is, and I think Einstein is the cause of them to say the truth, is that the sort of, it's done by the, well, by these people in the old cases, you know, old white men, but people who are in the middle of the night alone with revelations. But it's really a kind of a community endeavor, at least least, and most people don't recognize that. And therefore, being around colleagues and bouncing ideas is incredibly important, and people don't realize that. Did that, was that a problem then commuting in that regard? I mean, I don't know what your working style is. I thought, for the most part, many of my, most of my papers have been collaborative efforts, and that has been an important part

of my life, especially then later on with students. What about you? Well, so, you know, if you look at my CV, you'll see that most of my papers are single-authored. That's partly, I guess, just the way that I work. When I come to some conclusion, I just write it up and then there's the paper. And it works for me for some things. But of course, I suffered from this lack of interaction. I wasn't very well integrated at the Institute. You know, I didn't have really anybody to work with.

And of course, partly for this reason, I had also trouble getting funding for postdocs and so on. So I actually didn't have any postdocs and no students at the time when I was there. And then it haunts you later because you can't show up with the experience in your CV. And then, you know, people come, oh, you're not supposed to have a student because you've never had a student, basically. So it becomes this chicken and egg problem. Yeah, well, it, you know, it's interesting that you say that. I'm not surprised. In some sense, if you read your book Lost in Math, it's written almost from the point of view of an outsider, even though you're an insider. It's an insider looking from the outside looking in. And so I get the sense in some sense that that's kind of been the way you proceed as a scientist. In a sense, there's some kind of a level of detachment from, from the community or the socialization or whatever you want to call it. Is that realistic or fair to say?

Yeah, I think that that's fair to say. Though I also have to add that the book is about particle physics in particular, and I kind of left this field. So I would say at this time, I was already an outsider to that particular field. But of course, since then I've been doing other things. I've been doing dark matter stuff, quantum foundations. So I'm more integrated into a new community, you could say, at this point.

It's also true that, I mean, you probably know that I've been writing a blog for, oh God, since 2006. Yeah. A long time. Yeah, for longer than I've had kids. And so I've had for a long time kind of had this option to go to science writing. And I've worked as a freelance writer for a long time. And so I've always kind of had one leg on the writing side and one leg on the research side.

Well, actually, that's a nice segue because I've been putting off talking about the other problem, there's science, the music, and writing. And, you know, it is interesting to me that you've had a blog since 2006. I have to say, I mean, obviously, as a scientist, I've been involved in writing and public's popularization of science for many years. But maybe since before, not quite since before you're born. But anyway, for a long time. But when young people come to me, I often tell them to avoid, if they're interested in that.

And yet at the same time they're only good in science, they should stick for the science because they should take advantage of every opportunity to write if they're interested. But if they're good at science, the more they can do in science, the more avenues will be open to them to write. And I would have recommended to any young person not to do a blog for their careers, goodness the careers, but you chose to do a blog in 2006. So maybe you could explain that. Well, so for one thing, I kind of stumbled into this accidentally,

because what happened was that I moved to the United States and I had all these friends and relatives in Germany who would always ask me, like, how is it over there? How's it going? And I would have to repeat the same thing, like 20 times to different people. And I was like, you know what? I'll write a blog and then I just sent the link to everybody. Of course, that didn't work because they were just insulted.

You know, I wouldn't write to them personally. But I figured out that there were a lot of people who were really interested in my research. You know, they would ask me a question about I was working at the time, Black holes at the LHC, you know, what's going on with the LHC, particular physics, quantum stealth black holes and extra dimensions. So I got a lot of questions about this. So I started writing more about it. And I guess what factors into this is that the way that I learn is that I have to explain it to someone else.

And I wasn't teaching. I was a postdoc. And later I'm at Pyrameter Institute. I didn't have teaching duties and neither in Stockholm. So I kind of this explaining part of science, which I was missing, filled this in with my writing. And I just learned a lot from it. I read papers and I summarized them and I explained to other people what I thought

the paper said. I think it worked really well for me. Well, you know, okay, that's nice. It is true. I mean, again, I'm playing devil's advocate for some extent because I, there are two things are true. First of all, you don't understand a subject until you've taught it and anyone who's taught at least for me, you know, you learn so much more when you're trying to explain it.

You realize all the things you thought you understood that you don't understand. And then almost more so in writing, I mean, one of the reasons I've chosen different topics for my books is to learn as well as to expound. You really, there are things that I really thought I understood well in particle physics, Mountfield, which I discovered on writing books. I didn't. Because somehow when you know, it's all right to say something, to give a lecture and just offhand say that. But somehow when it's in print, it has a certain kind of finality that, at least for me,

give me the responsibility that I have to really be trying to be accurate and right. And it's a whole different level of understanding, writing something down for the world. And yeah, so it's a wonderful way to learn writing. But it does take time away from, you know, from, well, there's two things. It takes time away from research. And, you know, I've, I'm, People asking why I did it and done it all along, and I say I don't have much choice. It's just the way I am. If I'm not doing science, I kind of feel like I'm a fraud. If I'm not writing about it, I kind of, often I write when I'm angry anyway.

So for me, it wasn't much of a choice. So I didn't have a plan. It just evolved and it worked out. I was influenced by writing when I was a kid, and so it was nice to be able to turn that favor. But people often say, hey, it takes time out. but also from a professional perspective, and maybe because you're in Europe, this isn't such a big deal.

But it would be seen, writing a blog as a young person might be seen as a black mark if you were trying to get a tenure track faculty position in the United States. And there are people I know who haven't gotten tenure track faculty positions because I have written blogs

and they spent more time doing that. But maybe it wasn't such a deal in Europe. Well, for one thing, I wasn't in Europe at the time. But when you started, were you planned to stay in the States? Did you think you might have a trajectory to stay in the States and go to do a backly job? I assumed you always planned to come back to Europe. Well, I'm not sure. I was at the time.

I was fairly open. In the end, you know, I lived in California. I was in Santa Barbara. First, I was in Arizona, then I was in Santa Barbara. And I have to admit that I've always found California. kind of creepy, you know, they basically sit on this huge volcano and they have an earthquake every other day and I was like, yeah, so I don't think I want to live in California. But at the time, I really liked it in the United States.

And so, I don't know, if something had popped up, maybe I would have taken the opportunity, but it's just not the way that it panned out. but of course, I mean, I know the warnings that you mention, you know, you shouldn't, never leave anybody with the impression that you're doing anything besides research, right? But I guess I'm just not good to listen to warnings. Well, it's clear that you like to not listen, and that's a good thing. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, and even when, I mean, even if you're successful, when I was a professor, already in writing books, but there's somehow, you know, Carl Sagan would say that,

and those people wrote about that, that somehow people don't take you seriously if you're, if you're spending time popularizing. It was more so, much more so, I would say, in the 80s when I started writing. Now I think it's a different story. But then there was a, there was a sense that you weren't a serious scientist if you deign somehow to talk to the unwashed masses. But that's definitely changed. In fact, I think that some people feel like, unless you write something popular now, it's a problem if you're not a scientist. I don't know. How do you feel about that?

Well, you seem to think it's better in Europe, but actually I think that at least in Germany, it's somewhat worse. Because here it's more like you're not supposed to write a popular science book until you're kind of close to retirement. So if you do it when you're young, they think you're kind of out of research. And I've certainly gotten this, you know, people asking me, oh, so you're now doing science writing, right, assuming that I'm done with research. And yeah, I mean, what can I say? Basically, I don't care. I mean, I just think I do my thing and that's it.

Well, it was certainly that way. I was an assistant professor at Yale. I wrote my first book. And, you know, it got attention. And you never also, it's hard to know. I mean, I think there definitely was a sense that maybe, you know, among some, I was working a lot and my science was going well. But still you get the sense that you're not maybe taking this seriously.

And then to some extent, there was also concern that your colleagues, if you get more attention than they do for your popularizations, there's some kind of, I don't know what I want to use the word jealousy, but there's some kind of back reaction to that regard that people who aren't who are just doing research, somehow kind of present that in that sense. Do you ever, do you sense that as well? Oh, yeah, certainly. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who hate it that I'm quite popular and take great pleasure in that.

Well, you know, that's okay. and you should enjoy that in that sense. But I think it's evolved. Now it almost seems like people, everyone seems to, I'm surprised at how many people, how many scientists now want to try and write books. I used to tell people if you're in it for the money, don't do it because the dollar per hour rate is you can get back unless you're very fortunate. And, you know, I've been, and some people are, but it's not, but it's really amazing how many

people seem to be feeling the need to write now. And I don't know what the motivation for that is. Yes, like everyone I know is writing a book or has written a book and it's crazy, it's crazy. Yeah, well, I suppose, you know, maybe it's a good thing in the end. Now, look, let's, okay, so you and you, had you written before your blog? I mean, again, I'm only asking because if I think of myself, I always wrote, I used to do history before I do physics. And I generally usually wrote when I was angry, whether it got published or not,

just I'd write and then whether I just put it aside in a drawer or tried to send it somewhere to publish something, at least my mind was clear and I can then focus on other things. So I'd written from the time I was a student. But what about you? Yeah, I've always written, you know, even when I was in primary school, you know, I used to write stories. I tried to write novels like at least two or three times, which didn't really go anywhere. They were really terrible. So yeah, I had some practice, I guess. I suppose it just

comes naturally to me. Good, good. And then did the, but in your blog, you know, I want to get to the science in a minute, but I'm fascinated by this sort of progress. And I put it in perspective when I read your book and have known you. But am I correct that at one point, maybe this was just a way of supporting yourself, you offered to consult for $50 at a time, and then you ended up having so many people asked, you had a staff of four or five or something. Did that turn out to be lucrative?

And what was your experience with that? Well, it wasn't really something that I ever intended to live, It was more like I was temporarily unemployed because, you know, there was one grant which had run out. And I was waiting to hear about some other grant. And meanwhile, you know, I was just sitting there having no income, which is kind of bad if you have rent to pay. And I was trying to figure out, you know, what can I do with a PhD in theoretical physics? Put your shingle out. Yeah.

Yeah, so, and I mean, as you certainly know, there are lots of people who are like really, really interested in physics, but they don't have the background. And they're looking for someone to explain to them how to do physics, basically. And I thought, well, that's something I can do. I wouldn't do it voluntarily without being paid. But if you give me the money, well, fine, you know, ask me some physics questions and I'll do my best to answer it. And that's something that a PhD is good for. And yeah, so I announced this on my blog. And I got quite a lot of requests and I talked to them for some while.

But then eventually, another grant came through. And so I just didn't have the time anymore. And what I did at this point was I asked around. You know, I was like, you know, your postdoc, you want to make a little bit money on the side. Would you be interested to talking to people for certain payment? And so I wouldn't say that I really recruited people, but I made a list to whom I would pass on inquiries. And at this point, it's actually being handled by someone else entirely. It's still continuing?

People continue. It still goes on. So the requests no longer go to me, but go to, I would say, the most reliable person that I've been working with. And he recruits people and he, you know, ask. like what do you want to talk about and then tries to decide who's the best person to forward the request to? No. You know, you're absolutely right, though. There is a real craving to people to be able to hear from, as one of my first editors said from the horse's mouth.

They really want to be able to talk to people and hear from people. And that's one of the reasons I got involved in doing a lot of TV early on is because people like it. And, you know, it's funny because the people who get in the way of often of, of some, scientists communicate to the public are editors, whether it's written editors or media people, TV people, who somehow don't realize that people are actually fascinated by science. It amazes me how little TV media people realize what a craving there is. Now, they try and satisfy it by producing a lot of science fiction nonsense, but they don't seem to realize that it's actually marketable and that people really want.

There's certainly not everybody, but there's a subset of people who are really craving And you read so much about it in the newspaper and you really don't know what to believe, just really craving hearing from someone they might think as sort of an authoritative source. It's fascinating to me. There really is an interest. And I'm glad that people are still, that your little enterprise is continuing. At various times when I, in my professional life, we've created programs where people could ask a physicist or whatever, didn't often monetize it then because it was an academic thing.

But one of the reasons I did started doing public events and organizing programs, I mean, and one of the things I did decides developing a research program was develop institutes that had public events was precisely because people would, you know, and, and you've probably seen some of them. I mean, we would get 3,000 people coming to an auditorium to your scientists and paying to her scientists. It's kind of an amazing thing. And again, I don't know whether there's a difference culturally between Europe and the United States in that regard. Just because I get the sense, I've always gotten the sense that in Europe, there seem to be less of a disconnect between scientists and the public in the sense that it was a career like any other

career or it didn't seem to be so different. And there was a better demographic in terms of the different types of people who were doing it and their integration in the community. you, but maybe, maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Is that, what do you think? It's really difficult to say. So, the Germans are kind of, they're very formal with professors and titles and all that kind of thing. And I've always found that in Germany in particular, there's a big disconnect between the normal person on the street and then the people in the universities with all their titles. And this is definitely something that in the United States is just much, much better. You know, you kind of feel like they're real people, like the professors of the universities. You can, you feel like you can

actually talk to them. Yeah. But when it more generally comes to science communication, I don't have a good, I don't have a good overview. Generally, my feeling is that the Germans are really, really behind with social media. Most of the outreach, public outreach, science communication things that I see being done here are local things. And I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. I mean, it's always nice. You have a public lecture, you know, you have an open day or something, that kind of thing. That's cool, especially to get kids interested.

You know, they need to see something real, right? Something to touch and so on. But, I mean, there's a whole world out there. people who you can reach through the internet, through social media. And I just think that the Germans haven't fully understood this. Yeah, I mean, certainly maybe Germany's a unique case because you're right, the hair doctor professor thing is a real, there's a big hierarchy. But, you know, I guess maybe work in CERN as I've done,

and it just seemed to me there are lots of, they may not be the exalted professor level, but there are lots of people doing technical work. And I always noticed it just seemed to me that if I just didn't, looked around me that people you know just seemed like they were more integrated the community and they were more there certainly at the time when I used to do it there were more women for example involved in Europe than that were in the United States in in science as far as I could see at the conferences and it just technical engineers etc and so I always got the sense that it was a profession

like any other as opposed to something otherworldly just just doing science or doing technical professions not so much at the economic level but just doing science seemed less, had less stigma attached to it than it did in the United States, less nerd quality, if you want to call it that. Did you, was that no, you don't agree or what? Well, I always hesitate to make general statements about something that you would have to find out with a poll. Yeah, yeah, it's not for me to.

Yeah. Right, exactly. Like, what do I know if I've talked to a representative sample? right? I mean, there are many things that could be said about it. One thing is that I think that that's a difference between Germany and also the UK and the United States is that the Germans and also the British, they're kind of proud of the intellectual heritage, right? So that they like to show off with all their, you know, old really super important people and so on. Whereas my impression is always that in the United States,

States, they're trying not to appear to intellectual, as if that was kind of a bad thing. And so that's definitely a cultural difference there. But, you know, what's the impact on science? That's really, really difficult to say. Yeah. No, that's a really interesting observation. I guess I was one point offered to be considered doing a position at Oxford to represent. place Richard Dawkins. And I wanted to keep a foot in the United States and spend half time.

At that time, I just started in student in Arizona and spent half time at Oxford. And at Oxford, they said, why would you want to be, why would you want to be in Arizona when you could be at Oxford? And it was that sense. And I realized that we weren't talking the same, because as far as I was concerned, the public understanding of science, if you didn't have a foot in the United States in some sense, you were missing out because there was a place with the biggest misunderstanding of science of any place was the United States. But it was that sense of the, yeah, of the featness or the intellectual quality or lack thereof, the sense of UK versus the U.S.

Okay, well, look, I want to move to both your book and science now. Look, I want to start. I've enjoyed talking to you. And, you know, when I first saw the book, I thought, okay, I'm sympathetic to beauty and getting lost in math. Because for some reason, for a long time, I was listed publicly as a critic of string theory, for example. When all I was a critic of was a hype associated with string theory. It was very well-founded, and I wrote a book in some sense about the interest in extra dimensions

and the long history of it in physics. But it was the hype. But it was certainly clear to me, and a general, almost, well, maybe when you were doing your PhD, there was a time when it was quite clear that there was a newer emerging class of young string theorists who viewed anything below the plank scale is not really interesting.

I mean, just stuff related to the phenomena and experiment is just being irrelevant. And I remember I would give colloquia at Caltech, for example. My friend Ed Witton was there visiting at the time they were trying to recruit him. And before my colloquial, I had lunch with him and his string theory, young acolytes, and then right before the cloak,

and they all sort of left the building and asked a friend of mine, a well-known particle physicist, you know, if it were me. And he said, no, they're not interested in anything having to do with mere phenomena. So that was, they had become mathematicians in that sense. But then I kind of sense that was waning as the, as the, as the, sort of the stock in string theory, if you want to call it, sort of began to go down and not as severe now. But nevertheless, you know, you focused on beauty.

And I'm wondering what was the real motivator for doing that. You can comment what I just said because I saw you nodding. But but why beauty? What was the thing that really irked you? I'm assuming you wrote this because something bothered you. Yes. That's true. So first of all, to give people some sense what we're talking about, I think what you say is true.

You know, there was in the late 90s, so around the time when I finished my diploma, this was when all this string phenomenology stuff came up. And it wasn't only strings, but there are some related disciplines where they also did. This whole story was the larger dimensions and all that kind of stuff. I think it was born out of the realization that they would have to make contact to experiment at some point. And that brings me directly to my book, basically, because you have this idea that you can see string phenomenology at the Large Hadron Collider. How the heck is this supposed to work when all this phenomenology is supposed to be at the Planck Skare, which is like 15 orders of magnitude beyond what the LHC can possibly probe?

And that was an argument from naturalness, right? So the six dimensions had to have a particular size. And if they have this particular size, they would show up at the Large Hadgeon Collider. And it had to be about in the same energy range as the Higgs. And the argument was this naturalness thing. And you ask why they choose to write about beauty? Because I just felt there were several different arguments that people were making that could all fit under this header, basically.

You know how it goes with books. You need a running thing. You need a hook. Yeah. Now, but let's unpack this a little bit, because for the non-experts, there's a number of terms here that we talked about that a lot of people might not know.

Phenomenology is a word I never even heard of until I was a physicist. And it's really, it's basically, more or less one can think of it as trying to, not only make contact with phenomenon, but basically to explain specific, experimental results with theory. I don't know if I'd have a better explanation for phenomenology than that.

But somehow, and often that means, it used to mean, again, and it's changed to some extent, but maybe not that much, but it had the flavor of, well, you weren't looking necessarily for a fundamental theory. You were looking for a theoretical explanation. It may not be part of a grand scheme, but you wanted to have a way to, to calculate and predict and compare with the experiment, even if it was at-home. Fair to say? Yeah, more or less ad hoc.

So as you said earlier, I mean, what happened was that you had these people who were looking for the grant theory of everything, the grant unified, whatever, and they drifted over to mathematics. And at some point, they were so far away that they didn't care about what you could actually measure. And then the phenomenologist said, well, we don't really know what's with. these people, let's just ignore them, we'll try to make up a simplified model that we can actually connect to experiment. And the way that I like to explain is that the phenomenology

kind of sits between the experiment and the theory and tries to bridge that gap. And how do phenomenological models work? It's exactly what you say. You're not looking for this big overarching, perfect thing, but you're focusing on some particular thing. You know, you're taking a particular property that the theory might have and you ask if I add this property to the theories that we already know, what would change? And could I measure it and how could I measure it? And what's the experiment that we would have to do? And there are just a lot of questions that become much more tangible once you leave behind this idea that everything needs to be perfect. Yeah, in fact, as a friend of both ours, one of the quotes from my friend Frank Wilczek

that I do like is what is that and he was not in the string theory backguard and probably maybe partly resentful of it but but said I don't want a theory of everything I just want a theory of something and and and and I think that the phenomenology is trying to be a theory of something in some sense of motivated by that and and you know it's interesting for me you you you started in math I did a degree in mathematics and physics and it was kind of an epiphany I did very mathematical physics and then at some point actually was my PhD exam the first first thing version of at MIT, they have not on your thesis, but before you can do a thesis, they have an oral exam. And I started getting asked all these questions about phenomena, about which I knew nothing

because I was working on what are called fiber bundles and gauges. And it was a shock. And it was actually then a sort of mentor later on became a colleague of mine, Shelley Glashow, who said to me, there's physics and there's formalism, and you have to know the difference. And that really resonated with me. So when I moved to Harvard, I really, for most of my career, although I've done some pretty abstract stuff, it's, I kind of feel if I'm not in contact with the phenomena, then there's some problem. And for me, that sort of kept me honest, at least in my own mind.

But interesting to me that you, well, we'll get to naturalness. But I do want to jump back to something you said. Having said all this, you talked about the fact that in order to, at the large, Hadron Collider to make contact, there was this idea of large extra dimensions, which maybe we'll talk about. I have a certain, how can I say affinity? I thought the idea was ugly as sin. Let me just say, I still do. But I was very happy because my student, one of my PhD students, a guy named Roman Sundrum, proposed large extra dimensions. And what made me happy is a god of tenure. I still think the idea is ugly but the the the having said that you'd said that in your early work

that's what you're working on so in spite of the fact you seem to have the skeptical attitude about it that's what you chose to work on so I want to I want to ask about that well I didn't at the time I was not that skeptical so I'd written my diploma thesis on black holes so I knew everything about black holes and Hawking radiation and that kind of thing and I was very interested in Kaluza Klein theory. So I had this extra dimensional part. And then these people came and said, you know, we can do black holes in extra dimensions. And, you know, my PhD supervisor was just, you're the person to do it. Right. So we work out exactly what the signature is at the

LHC and here's the code and you put it in the math and that's how it works. And that's what I wrote my PhD thesis on. And what happened was that I wasn't even thinking very much about the question. like exactly why should these dimensions have this particular size? It was just something that people did. Like, I read it and I put it into my papers. And then I went to a conference, and I think it was actually the first international conference that was it. And someone asked me this question.

Like, why do the dimensions have exactly this size? Like, okay, we understand why they can't be any larger because we would already have seen them. But why aren't they tiny? Like, why should they show up at the Dutch Haddon Collide? And I said exactly what I'd read in the papers. I said, well, because that wouldn't be natural. And, you know, the guy was like, oh, yes, like this explains everything.

And that was fine for what the talk is concerned. But I went away feeling like really, really stupid because I realized I didn't understand why it should be the case. And then I fell down into a rabbit hole where I was trying to figure out exactly why is this a good assumption, why is it justified, where does it come from? And I asked people about it, you know, how do you justify this? And I figured they couldn't answer my question. So, and I became increasingly uneasy with this whole thing going on. Because at this point, I had already finished my PhD. And in 2004, 2005, so this was after I moved to the United States,

I just decided I want nothing to do with it anymore. And I actually, I was offered at the time, I almost forgotten about this, but I was offered a very prestigious scholarship to come back to Germany, which would have been a five-year thing. It's kind of the closest that the Germans get to tenure track, and it has funding for a whole group and so on. But it would have required me to continue working on this, because that's what I brought in the proposal at the time.

And to make a long story short, I turned it down because I didn't want to spend five more years of my life working on it. But I, you know, and I was just, and you see this, if you look in the archives of my blog, that I was just fascinated, you know, that people believe this. Why do they believe it? You know, if there's no reason for it. And, you know, sometimes I was a little bit nasty and would poke them. Can you explain this to me and just to figure out, no, they couldn't? But there's two things there I want to hit, which are fascinating. One is this is the reason why it's important that people ask questions, even if they're uncomfortable questions.

And it's unfortunately in academia now becoming less and less acceptable to somehow offend someone by saying, you know, what, well, why are you, you know, what's the point of this? Or is it really have a sound basis? But it causes, it can cause someone. And in fact, it was, I was just reading Christopher Hitchens who basically said that that's a big problem by cutting off that kind of dialogue. you actually don't just hurt the rights of people who are asking the questions, but the rights of people who might otherwise have heard the question and redo their thinking, which is a right, you know, they have a right to be able to sort of be provoked into thinking correctly and they lose that right. So it was interesting that that question hit you.

And it's a wonderful example. I think it's important. I mean, Richard Dawkins gave me a similar example, he was very religious at some point and bought the religious arguments until someone basically said, why are you buying that? And then it caused him to rethink his own basis. And there's a long, I guess, on a more basic level, and I've talked about this often in our podcast, but pedagogically, and I'm sure you'll have seen this if you have students at any level, pedagogically, there's a lot of evidence that the only way to really understand something is to confront your own misconceptions of it. And there's some people have so many misconceptions about physics as an undergraduates that you can do that. But it continues on, even at a professional level clearly as well.

And it's interesting to me that that had an effect on you. Is that the only time that's happened to you? That someone asks a question that made me rethink something. No, it happens quite frequently, you know, on social media. You know, someone will ask a question. You're like, do I actually know this? And why do I know this? and stuff like this.

So, for example, one thing, which I'm still a little bit embarrassed about, was the measles vaccination. You know, kind of arrogant German that I am, I always thought that Germans are pretty good with vaccinating kids against measles. But when I looked at the numbers, turns out that the, at least at the time, which was like five years ago, actually, the United States are better vaccinating kids against measles than the Germans. I was like, okay, so I was wrong, you were right.

It's nice to be. It's nice. It's wonderful to be discovered. I think if you have the right attitude, it's wonderful to discover you're wrong. It's a good thing. It's unfortunate that we don't train people to so much enjoy being wrong. I mean, if you're a scientist in some sense, that's what it's all about, right? Yeah, basically, you have to get used to being wrong. Otherwise, you can't do science, right? Yeah, learning is a process of constantly being wrong until you might be right. And I don't think, again, that's not something people understand about science.

Somehow is it, you know, science is more like Sherlock Holmes, which is sort of getting rid of all the stuff that's wrong and eventually hoping that that leads you in the right direction. But, okay, a little less philosophical. I want to go back. I'm kind of amazed, you know, when someone said the question of naturalness and extra dimensions, because in some sense, nothing seemed,

even when I first heard it, nothing seemed more unnatural to me than large extra dimensions. The only reason they were considered, there was no fundamental reason why there should be some extra large invisible dimensions, except that it might give you something you can measure an experiment. It might be related somehow to constraints to experiment. But that seemed not, I mean,

Nothing seemed more unnatural to me, and I assume you agree with me in that regard. Well, it all depends on what you mean by the word natural, which particle physicists have given a very technical meaning to, and there's this whole story that the mass of the Higgs boson is supposedly technically unnatural. And to explain why the Higgs mass is so small, you need to bring in a new scale. and that scale was assumed to be

the same scale as that of the extra dimension. This is a little bit way, but this is basically what you're imposing. Yeah, it was imposing, you know, you had to make the extra dimensions that scale in order to make the theory, quote, of a natural, but there was nothing about the theory that. In fact, Feynman, you're probably aware of this quote about from Feynman, which I think I probably put in my book in Extra Dimensions.

He was a critic of Spring Theory before he died in 88. And he said that it doesn't explain. anything, it has to be excused all the time. Namely, it always basically doesn't, the quote-to-quote, the directions the math drive you in is not the direction the physics would drive you. And so it has to be excused. Oh, sorry, it's these, the fundamental scales much less than you'd see. And all these things. And so it always had to, you always had to put in by hand something that would somehow connect it to the real world. And he found it very, very artificial. And I guess I felt that was in good company with that agreement with Biman.

It's interesting how physicists get used to this. I think if you come as an outside, and I see this constantly, if I give public lectures and I talk to people who know very little about it, from the outside, it just looks completely crazy. You know, you write down the string theory thing, and I know the world has 11 dimensions. Okay, so that doesn't describe what we see. So what do we do?

Oh, we call them up, so then they're gone. Oh, it predict super symmetry. or we don't see this. So what do we do? Well, we add some things here and some things there. And that still doesn't work. And then you add our parity. And then you have all these moduli, which should have screwed up cosmology.

And what do we do about this? Well, we fudge something together, right? And it becomes more and more difficult. And I think the people who work on it at some point just become so used to it that they can't see how artificial the whole thing is and how much it was futched to at least not disagree with if we see. Okay, you know, I think you're absolutely right. But I want to come, you know, I do want to come back because I don't want to, I don't want necessarily bury naturalness. I want to praise it, as Caesar might have said, but, or as Brutus might have said, namely, there were, you know,

again, from the era, and I'm older than you, but from the era that I come in in particle physics, naturalness, I want to unpack it a little differently than you did. Naturalness pointed to a real problem. It wasn't as if what it pointed was there's something you're missing in the theory, and therefore it was very an important phenomenon. And that is, and so I'll try and explain my version of naturalists, which is that there, as I've often described, the quantum mechanics and relatively tell you there are virtual particles popping in and out of existence in timescales so short you can't measure them. And on smaller and smaller timescales, and smaller and smaller distance scales, which means higher and higher energies, more exotic particles can appear for shorter

times that can have much higher masses and much higher energies. And most, and we know that's true. We can measure the phenomena of virtual particles, so it's not some hypothetical thing. It's an essential part of our theory. But most of physics works because it turns out the effect of these high-energy processes happening on very small scales is irrelevant. But it turns out that there was one area, which is the Higgs particle, where the effects of those extra and the scale of the weak interaction, which is set by the scale of this final call the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs particle, that was somehow sensitive to these very high-energy phenomena, and therefore they should be producing effects that we're not seeing. And therefore, it is very unnatural to have a scale of the weak

interaction in energy, which is very different than, say, the scale of quantum gravity. There's separated by 17 or as a magnitude. That's very unnatural. And so naturalness basically said, was pointing out a problem that somehow, clearly there must be something you're missing for that huge hierarchy of scales to exist. And if your theory didn't somehow address that problem, it was kind of unnatural. And so it pointed for me, it was a very important phenomenon. I was Gerard de Tuft, I think, who I most clearly learned that from. And it really points out that there's something fundamental we're missing.

And therefore, I think of it as a very valuable aspect of physics. So, but I guess, I guess you view it as something that's now been perverted into something less useful. Well, so you said that these high energy contributions would lead to effects that we don't see. But that's not true. They actually don't lead to any effects that we see. That's the entire issue, which I have. So what you say is technically it's perfectly correct. Like you have this theory and you have the Higgs bos and it's a scale.

therefore it has the sensitivity to a scale in the outer violet, which is a very high. And that's just a statement about the property of this theory. But now the question is like, is this a problem that you must fix? And I would say there's no good reason to think that you must fix this problem. That's just an argument from beauty, the way that I put it in my book. It's something that people don't like because they, you know, they haven't seen it before. Why haven't they seen it before? Well, because the Higgs is the only scalar.

Right? So I see. So let me interrupt for one second. That's fascinating. I don't want to interrupt you too much because I know I interrupt too much. But for me, what it, don't you think it tells you that the theory, if it's true, and they don't have any observed effect, doesn't it tell you that the theory is somehow wrong in some way and that's a very important quantity? Are you saying it's something deeper?

the theory can be right, but for reasons we don't know. I mean, for me, what was exciting is it pointed that it's highly suggested there's something important we're missing, and I love that, but you're suggesting we may not be missing anything. It just may be a fixation on a non-problem. Is that a better way of paraphrasing what you think? Exactly. That's what I would say. It might very well be a non-problem.

There's nothing wrong with the theory that has this property. Except you could say it's somewhat unusual, because the rest of the standard model does not have this property, which is correct, of course, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong, that the standard model with the Higgs sector is different. And so I think it's a prejudice. I guess so. And this may be a little technical for the popular audience, but I want to get to it anyway, I guess. but these virtual particles and there could be many more for all we know where it may be new theories with heavy particles they don't have an effect and if they and and why don't they have an effect because the theory because everything we know about

particle physics at least in the current framework suggests that they should have a visible impact so if the if the if If there's anything beyond what's called the standard model in physics, you would expect them to have an effect. And if they don't, there must be something we're missing that's stopping them from having effect. But maybe I'm too ingrained in the notion that there's some physics beyond the standard model. And you're telling me, well, that just it is a property of the standard model that there are no such particles. Well, the nationalist argument actually doesn't really say anything about particles. It has this contribution that comes from the high energy modes,

but you never actually observed this. Supposedly, it makes a contribution to the mass. And then that's where the naturalness argument comes in, is that it would be highly unlikely if this large contribution from the plank scale was exactly cancelled by some other thing. And that's where the argument from natural comes in. But mathematically, you can very well just subtract one constant from another constant. And the important point is that they are separately, completely unobservable.

The only thing that you eventually measure is the actual mass of the Higgs boson. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And I think this is where physicists get confused about like what does the math, what does the math mean? What does it mean that you have these unobservable contributions from something that you can interpret as this kind of thing? And I'm very much the person who looks at what comes out in the end.

What comes out in the end is that we have a constant, which we cannot calculate. That's the mass of the Higgs boson, and then we go and measure it, and that's the end of the story. Who cares what these intermediate steps were? Well, you know, but I think it's, I'm going to push this further. This unlikely, in any sensible kind of framework that we understand right now, in the framework of four-dimensional physics,

for that mass and for that constant to be, that mass to be the constant that's measured, there has to be a cancellation of numbers to many decimal places. And at least there's no, and I think the argument is that there's no other area of science, there's no other area of science where such a cancellation is observed. And also, the other thing is it's stable, namely if you make a small change in anything, that cancellation will go, well, you have to fine-tune things. so that the cancellation occurs to 17 decimal places,

and it's very hard to make that mathematically stable, that cancellation. And so that at least to me is suggestive that there's something missing. You can say, well, it happens, and if it happens, it happens. And the virtue of this theory, when we may talk about supersymmetry,

was that it appeared to allow such a cancellation in principle to happen in a way that was, least stable, mathematically consistent, that you wouldn't have small corrections that would destabilize that cancellation. And then again, I'm not sure if anything I've said is understandable than anyone who's watching, but at least it's a question I have for you. So that to me, that that cancellation that's required to make it just to make you accept it and move on to something else is strongly suspicious because you don't observe it anywhere else in science. Thoughts? Well, You're making an argument from intuition, which is exactly the same argument that particle physicists have also made, and it turned out to be wrong.

Right? I mean, they didn't actually see the six dimensions. They didn't see anything in the required energy range to make the theory natural. So just looking at the evidence, it's just wrong. Well, step back. Do you think the fact that the LHC has not discovered, say, supersymmetric particles at the scale it has, implies that the whole, that that, that, that, that, that, you know, that, you think the fact that. this notion that super symmetry must be broken, namely the difference between particles and their super-semitic partners in the mass difference must not be too large. You think that is now proven

to be wrong? My sense is that there's still, that we're a ways away from knowing that that idea is wrong. But anyway. Yeah, well, you know how it goes with supersymmetry. Like, there are very many models and you can always make up something more complicated. It's like the story with string theory, right? You can always fudge something. You can always add something and so on. But it's certainly the case that all the simple models that people looked at that they said should be easily discovery at the LHC because naturalness have just been ruled out. And yes, you can always make up more complicated models. You can make up more complicated criteria of naturalness. And, you know, theorists are really, really inventive if they want to make a point, if they want to make an argument,

if they want to come to a particular conclusion, they will find a way to get there somehow. And I'm super not impressed by all of this. But it's certainly true, and I have all the quotes in my book and on my blog and everything, that for decades, they said, we'll see it immediately. It will be right in your face and so on.

And it just hasn't happened. And so the arguments from naturalness that people have made for a long time are just definitely wrong. And at the very least, you'll have to come up with a more complicated notion of naturalists. But maybe if I can bring this in, the issue with your argument about the unlikely cancellation is in the probability. You know, you have to quantify this probability.

You have to ask, how do I know that this was actually unlikely? To which the answer is, you don't know, because these are constants of nature. What does it even mean to talk about the probability of getting a different constant of nature? Like it's just, you know, it's not something that science can say anything about. Well, it's true, and I've written about this, it's very hard to do probabilities if you don't know what's called the phase space. If you don't know the set of possibilities, then you can't accurately determine probabilities. One of the problems of any time you hear someone estimate the probability there's life on other planets, you can generally assume they don't know what they're just pulling the number out of their hat or

some other place. Because we don't know the different possibilities for life. And so it's very hard. But on the other hand, to continue to be the devil's advocate, and I will do that for the moment, if you assume any kind of normal phase, space arguments, if there is a possibility, a range of probabilities, this seems very unlikely. But you're absolutely right. it's a guess and the guess can be wrong because we don't know we don't you can't do you can't

know the probabilities unless you have an underlying theory so to guess that the underlying theory must have a property based on probabilities you don't know is suspicious but it's one way of proceeding at least yeah I mean you you just tweaked in the word reasonable reasonable probability distribution you know where I would ask well where do you take reasonable from this is just another word to say natural. And Reggie. Yeah, yeah, no, you're right. It doesn't even have to be continuous. But what happens always

is that you put in a number somewhere and you have a width that's kind of similar to the plank energy or something like this. And now you've put in a number. And if you put in that number, that's what you get out and then it comes out to be unlikely and it comes out to be

unnatural. And that's what people have been doing. But of course, you can put a different number and then that other number will come out. So it's just, it's a circular argument. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess when you're looking for, when you're thinking about new physics, you're guided by something. And I'm not, and I want to get back to whether you're guided by beauty or not, because I found that choice of words interesting. But let me ask, before I get there, because people have asked me this question about God, what would it, what would it take for you to believe in God? And I say, well, if I looked up and I saw the stars realigned and in, in

Sanskrit or whatever, or Aramaic, they said, I am here, I might, begin to suspect there's something to the whole thing. But let me ask you this. If at the Large Tadron Collider, or a next-generation Collider, if there's ever one built, particles are discovered and maybe even super-symmetric particles, then will you come back and say, oh, yeah, the idea was right? Well, the idea of supersymmetry, I would of course say was right, you know, if they've discovered it.

But the argument from naturalness would still be unscientific. You know, that's, it's just, I mean, it's a property of the argument. Now, you can say it may be that the argument for why they should found it was wrong, but they found it nevertheless. I mean, this can always happen. You know, there's this. No, no, but let me be more clear. Instead of the argument or people saying or what's social fads,

mathematically, if super-symmetric, let's just say super-symetic particles are discovered for, again, for the listeners or viewers, this is one way of, if this new symmetry of nature exists at some fundamental scale, but we don't observe it, and the amount by which we don't observe it is comparable to the energies of the weak scale, then you can show mathematically that the effects of what these dangerous virtual particles will go away. And so what I'm asking you is, if we saw supersymmetry at this scale, then it would tell us, at least in conveysmal. elemental quantum field theory, it would tell us that the mathematical problem that was a problem that for naturalness would mathematically go away and therefore be solved. I mean, that is true

mathematically, right? No, it's not. Mathematically, mathematically, there is no problem. You can always, you know, subtract this constant be done with it. I mean, this is how people, make predictions for the LHC, right? So, I mean, the theory works perfectly fine. What's the problem supposed to be? Well, okay, but if we discover supersymmetry, then there are particles beyond the standard model, and it would tell you that worries about, that it would tell you that if you calculate the effects of the, of heavier particles, those effects will go away. I mean, that's a property of supersymmetry is a theory, that the effects of higher energy modes, if supersymmetry is a fundamental symmetry of nature will go away.

I was going to say, we'll naturally go away, but I didn't want to provoke you. But it will go away. So that would be mathematically true, correct? Well, I don't think that what you mean by effect is what most people mean by effect. Usually you would think it's something observable. But the whole point about these things is that you don't observe them. So what you're trying to say is that if you calculate these corrections with super-summel. you get this cancellation automatically.

You don't, to a certain degree, because it depends on the mass, right? This is why it's important that the masses of these products are actually in the range of the Archeron Collider. And the heavier they are, the less well this automatic cancellation works. So you're left with another term that would make a contribution, which is why this whole nationalist problem has now come back, because we've already ruled out. out the range where it would have worked comfortably. But if it, but we, okay, at least we agree that if they, if it were discovered,

then there would be an automatic cancellation, whether you call that naturalness or or not. Of course, I mean, there would be an on. Yeah. That's math. Yeah. That's a technical thing. And you and I agree, the math, the math works at least.

But let's, but is it beautiful. So, and I want to come back to beauty because I was flabbergasted in a sense. My dog doesn't like it either. He's barking. But, um, I, I was. I was flabbergasted in some sense by the use of beauty because I would say, I understand in having read your book and have talked to you as well, where you're coming from here, that people are using some vague notion, which is not well defined, to describe something and maybe lead us down a rabbit hole. and I'm quite sympathetic to that. But I will say in my 40-odd years of being a physicist,

I don't know if I've ever heard the term beauty mentioned directly in a scientific conference. I suspect that everyone who's, there's no doubt that everyone who's working on physics models at some time convinces themselves that that model is beautiful, even if all their colleagues think it's ugly. Because otherwise it's hard to motivate spending hours, days, years, working on a mathematical idea, unless you somehow commits yourself there's something attractive about it. So that's not necessarily a bad thing because everyone, you know, needs to have some

motivation to what they do. But I haven't heard, I mean, but precisely because beauty isn't really well defined. I haven't really heard it mentioned in physics meetings per se. So I'm wondering why, I want to ask you, it's a provocative way of asking you why you focus on sort of beauty in your book? Because I think that's where it comes from. You're perfectly right. What happened is physicists use these criteria of naturalness and also simplicity. If you think of grant unification, you know, wouldn't it be so much simpler if it was one big group and it would be broken down, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. Similar thing for theories of everything. And they will not, of course, in their papers say, and now I assume the theory has to be.

beautiful and therefore this is not how it happens. Instead, they will talk about technical naturalness or they will just start with assuming it has come out of some grand unified group that was broken and there had some consequences and so on and so forth. But if you look at the popular science books or if they talk to a general audience, that's how they will explain it. Like, why do we believe in string theory? Oh, because it's so elegant. And, yeah, but I mean, there are lots and lots of quotes, lots of books. Well, even his title of books. And I think, and I actually think that this is how they really feel.

You know, this is where it comes from. And, you know, at least this is my interpretation. And, you know, I have all these interviews in the book. I think there's some truth to it. But, I mean, there's certainly people who have told me, you know, I shouldn't talk about aesthetics and beauty, but those are just generally metaphysical criteria. You know, they're not based on evidence. It's just an assumption that we make about how the theories are supposed to work that are not based on observations.

So, yeah, I mean, you could argue that maybe talking about beauty isn't the best thing to do, but they're more general metaphysical criteria. Well, I mean, I guess you were tracking something you saw as an explanation to the public that you didn't think was a valid one. And I applaud that. And you're actually right. I mean, the elegance is, you know, I come from a time where it didn't matter whether the theory was elegant or not.

Did it explain the universe? And that matters a lot more. And unfortunately, we came to a time when there's largely sensory deprivation because there's no data. And suddenly a new criteria comes about, which is called elegance or mathematical beauty. And it's a new time in physics. That was a new time in particle physics, because it, Because what really determines whether a theory is wonderful is not how beautiful it is mathematically or in any other aesthetic way, but does it explain the universe we see and the phenomena we see?

And that should always be the governing criteria. And in that sense, it's very important to realize that elegance or beauty is completely irrelevant. But it is also important to realize that people, in order to be motivated to work on what they're working on, right there or wrong, they have to find something attractive to it. otherwise they tend to, you know, it takes a, it's a thankless, long job. And, you know, I'm trying to be generous here. I mean, people are working on, say, even string theory for 20 years, doing very difficult and well-motivated calculations, let me say for this, in some cases, in order to be motivated by that, they have to, maybe they convince themselves it's beautiful. And after the fact that's inappropriate to say it, but scientists need something, especially

theorists to continue to move along. But while I haven't heard beauty discussed as, I've heard it once or twice in scientific meetings, and I discount it when I hear it. There was a model that was people developed back in the days of grand unification, which was designed specifically because, you know, to allow you to observe things instead of for any other reason. And somehow that was the criteria, which just seemed crazy. But I was intrigued maybe because you were trying to understand why physicists were to explain things,

you chose in this book to basically interview lots of physicists. And I've always thought it's a weird way of thinking of trying to understand the world. And it's a very eclectic group, I must admit. I found your choice interesting because there are people of significant accomplishment and there are people of significant non-accomplishment that you interview. And I'm wondering what caused you to want to do it that way, to decide to sort of do that journalistic,

sort of, if you wish, interview approach to understanding the way physicists think about the world. Well, I was actually, when I started writing the book, I was not sure what conclusions I would come to. I just wanted to you. why would people make this argument? Like, where were they coming from? Like, why was it important for them

and also trying to understand, like, the sociological dynamics that got them thinking this way? And there were certainly many who said things that I hadn't thought about. For example, the point which you just raised. You know, beauty is just something that's important for people to be motivated, to work on something. And I understand this. But I have to ask you, what if the fundamental theory of nature is just ugly?

Should we just say, okay, we'll give up on it because no one's interested thinking about it? Right? So to me, this seems even more depressing than... I guess I'm confident enough that people will find in life. People love something. It inevitably becomes beautiful. And I suspect it's not too different in science. that even if it, I mean, the standard model is not pretty in many ways,

but because it's so remarkable in its comprehensiveness, physicists have come to think of it as beautiful or, so I guess I suspect that if there is an ultimate theory, and I'm not convinced there is, in fact, I kind of hope there isn't, that whatever comes along, people will eventually, if you look at enough, And once you love it, things become beautiful. It's true for human relationships. And I think it's true for science as well.

Would you agree? Yeah, exactly. That's what the infamous final sentence in my book is supposed to say. You know, it ends with it. It'll be beautiful. Why? Because when we find it, we will come to find it beautiful. And this has happened repeatedly in the history of science,

which the philosopher, and now I keep forgetting his name, He made this point prior to me. And so I wanted to give him credit. And he has several examples, you know, where a paradigm change happened. And along with it, scientists changed their conception of beauty. And so my whole issue with all this talk about naturalness and simplicity and elegance and strength theory and so on is that it's backwards. You know, you start with a very specific notion of beauty that you

want the underlying theory to have instead of saying, let's just get surprised by what we find, and then we will find beauty in it. Well, except is that really, does that really allow you to do something? I mean, you have to have something guiding you. I mean, if you just say, let me be surprised, then it's hard to know what's going to, if you're actually involved in the search for new theories, saying, I want to be surprised. Well, we do want to be surprised, but there has to be something that's guiding your work. And hopefully it's based on something that is based on the real work of physics before you.

We all build on the shoulders of giants and other people. And so just being surprised isn't a guide for what to do next, right? Right, exactly, which is why towards the end of my book, I put forward alternatives, you know, instead of thinking about beauty, what would be better to do? And I mean, there's the obvious thing to say, you should be guided by data, right? But also we have mathematical consistency. And those are the two things that I think,

if you look at the history of physics, have actually been successful. Like, if you look at where has there been a breakthrough, it was either we observed something, and then we were looking for an explanation. and that's become more and more difficult because you don't just stumble over things if an experiment takes two decades to build

and several billion dollars. But there were also very good predictions based on mathematical consistency. For example, the predictions of the Higgs itself. We need the Higgs for consistency. It could have been something else, you know, besides the Higgs,

but the standard model without the Higgs just isn't consistent. So that doesn't work. And there are other examples in the history of physics. For example, the old original formulation of quantum mechanics wasn't compatible with special relativity, which led Dirac to develop the DRock equation and so on and so forth. And it's interesting, if you look at those breakthroughs that were guided by theoretical predictions, I think they were all based on arguments from consistency. And sometimes, of course, you know, the people who were working on it,

Deraq, Einstein and so on, they called it beauty. But what they were really going on about was consistency. And so this is why I say we should focus on consistency, not on beauty. Okay, and at the risk of going in a circle, again, putting on the hat, contrarian hat, some people would say that naturalness is equivalent to mathematical consistency, namely the ability to cancel infinite possible contributions effectively is mathematical consistency, and that's why they're guided by it. No, it's just not.

I know, you would disagree. Well, but it's factually wrong, because you can perfectly well do mathematically consistent calculations with the standard model the way that it is. never mind that some physicists don't like it because it's not no no no yeah that's right with the theory that is but i i guess what i'm saying is when people try and look for new theories they use what may be called naturalness because they say my new theory is the quantum corrections the virtual corrections produce bad effects and i don't get mathematical consistency in my new theory unless i impose this this criteria so i guess that what i'm trying to say is there

they're trying to create new theories that they view as mathematically consistent using this criteria as a way of automatically canceling bad effects. So I mean, you know, I'm just trying to give the other side, the rationale for why it doesn't, you're right. The standard model doesn't need it. But if you if you are looking for new physics and you think there's a reason there might be new physics, maybe that itself is misguided. But I suspect even I suspect, I suspect when, again, maybe extrapolating from the past is not a good idea, but every time we've opened a new window on the universe, we've generally been surprised, and I like to think that that's going to continue. And therefore, if I look, if I'm trying to develop a new theory

and it produces unexervable effects that are not observed, unless I impose this criteria, I might consider that as sort of mathematical consistency. That's the last time I'm going to try and provoke you with this. If it actually produces effects that are not observed, then that's an inconsistency with observation. That's a different thing. But also, I mean, people have used the argument from Natchelists to say that we need a new theory to begin with,

whereas you are saying something completely different. You're saying, if I am already convinced that there is a new theory, then I can use the argument from Natchelous. But that's not what I'm talking about, because from starting from, the assumption that there has to be a new theory doesn't give you an argument for why there has to be a new theory that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't absolutely.

It's just a hypothesis. It's a guess. And it's a guess in my case based on history and my experience of physics. And we all, we guess wrong sometimes. So I don't think there's any more rationale for that than that, except there's one thing that, you talk about mathematical consistency, but to me, and I don't use the term beauty, but what to me, one of the most important,

and I've written about this a lot in my books and other places, one of the biggest developments in physics, which has profoundly changed the way we think of the world, is symmetries. And the fact that essentially all of physics has come down to symmetries, that the, as I like to say it, that the playing field, the Dermens of Dynamics, that a baseball field, if the baseball, if there were five bases instead of four and the symmetry

of the field were different, it would be a very different game. If the distance between home played and first base, again, assuming Americans here, was one mile long, it would be a very different game. And in some sense, what we've discovered is that the symmetries determine the underlying dynamics, in the case of the most profound symmetry of physics, or at least the most useful one, something called gauge symmetry, all of the known forces in nature have this mathematical property called gauge symmetry. So what's come down, what's in my mind guided physicists as they're looking to understand fundamental physics is this symmetry. Now, you might call that beauty or not, but I guess I would say that as a guiding principle that certainly

has become important. And I suspect I would be very surprised if it wasn't simpity. symmetries that guided us to new physics. What do you think of that statement? Well, particle physicists have certainly tried it already, right? I mean, this is where supersymmetry comes from. This is where all the grand unified theory things come from. And, you know, I can only say, well, it didn't work. Right.

Well, it hasn't worked. No, no, that's a different statement. It hasn't worked yet. You're too young. It hasn't worked yet. But it's sometimes the fact that it didn't come out either. And look, I'll agree with you. I thought for sure, I didn't think the Higgs, I didn't think the LHC would ever measure the eggs because frankly, I was suspicious of the Higgs.

I thought supersymmetry might be the first thing it would see, and that was wrong. But the fact that it hasn't been seen, maybe because I've lived and worked in a field war for 40 years, there weren't really results. And maybe we should just be a little more patient, instead of saying it hasn't worked and just say it hasn't worked yet. That's right. So it hasn't worked yet. I certainly think that we should at least learn from this that the type of theory development that particle physicists have done was not particularly successful.

And they should be rethinking their methods, which is basically the conclusion of my book. So, I mean, I'm not opposed to symmetry arguments, certainly not. I mean, as you say, they have been dramatically successful because they're basically great ways to simplify a theory, just as I think this is what Frank Wurcheck said, you get a lot out of little, right? So this is the great thing about gauge poverty. They do a lot of work for you.

It's the same with general relativity. But, yeah, I mean, people have tried in the 70s and 80s to move forward, to move beyond the standard model, using these symmetry arguments, and nothing's come out of it, I mean, other than a lot of papers, which is maybe not nothing. A lot of papers and PhDs in the tenure, jobs. Yeah, right, but I mean, no deeper understanding of the laws of nature. And I think, I mean, this is evidence that we should pay attention to.

I think it's trying to tell us something. Or may just say that the problem has gotten harder, that the low-hanging fruit was easily done. I mean, these are hard questions. And we become much more ambitious with the kind of questions we're asking, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised with ambitious questions that it may take a lot longer to solve it. Anyway, that's my point. That's, of course, right. But I think you can't move forward if you don't study your mistakes and learn from them.

Absolutely. I agree. And I'm trying to provoke you. There's much I'm sympathetic with, but I think it's important to look at this argument from both sides. But, okay, look, I think we've beaten that dead horse enough. enough. I'm a big fan of symmetry, and I think it's an important, when I try to explain to the public, I think it's really important. It's very hard to explain symmetries, as you know, as someone who's communicated to the public, because symmetry in popular parlance is something very different than symmetry in physics, and it's a very important and interesting concept, so I spend more

and more time. I've spent a lot of time trying to explain it. But now let's talk about, I do want to go back, I think, you know, I'm sensitive to your time because I know it's going to be time for you to feed your children soon. And I want to come back to a few things about your own thoughts and activities beyond the book. Because I think it was a fun discussion, actually, of illuminating these ideas. I hope you found it fun. You say you've moved out of the field of particle physics to dark matter, and it's interesting for me to hear those words. because for me, dark matter is part of particle physics. But in particular, I think you're strongly,

well, I know from having read what you've written, that you're strongly suspicious of the arguments that dark matter is a new type of elementary particle. And so let's, because I completely disagree with you in that regard. So I thought we have a little discussion in that area. So what's your thinking about dark matter? Well, I'm not sure I've ever said that I think dark matter is not a new type of elementary particle. It's a little bit more subtle than that.

I think that the distinction between particle dark matter and modified gravity is not remotely as clear as some people have tried to argue it is. So basically, I think what we need is a combination of both. But, you know, I guess I ended up working on dark matter because that's kind of the next closest thing. can do when you come from particle physics. I actually know a lot of particle physicists who did exactly the same thing. You know, after the LHC didn't find supersymmetry, they were like, oh, we'll do dark matter because it's kind of like next door, astroparticle physics. And the good thing about dark matter is that at least we do have data, right? And for me, this is kind of a new thing. It's like really, really exciting. Oh my God, they have observations. You know, they're stated to be

analyzed. That's why I started working in dark matter in 1982. for that reason because there was data and it was an area where you might probe fundamental physics so I guess I'm quite sympathetic it's been 40 years for me to be working on it

but yeah no I think that that's I think that's what's driven a lot of and even it's not only some string theorists and not even Sheldon even Sheldon on Big Bang theory for a while to dark matter is because it's in astrophysics that because accelerators

weren't providing us with data the one place that seemed to be providing us with experimental or at least maybe not experimental, observational constraints that might probe fundamental physics was the cosmos. So for me, as someone who sort of focused on particle astrophysics since the early 80s, for me that was the idea is that the universe was an experiment done once, but at least the rest is just data analysis. So that's what motivated you to get into dark matter is an area with data. But then for reasons that still surprised me, you somehow found modified gravity to be sufficiently attracted to begin to think about it. So I want to understand why. Yeah, so I kind of stumbled into this by accident.

And it actually came out of, unlikely as this may sound, out of this book because I wanted to write a little bit about dark matter and modified gravity. but it wasn't something that I was very familiar with. So I talked to Stacey McGorke, who's been going on about modified gravity for a long time, tried to understand this better. And I ended up, you know, thinking that this cold dark meta-hypothel doesn't work remotely as well as I thought it did. And, you know, I've heard all these stories from astrophysicist. about how there are just some shortcomings and numerical calculations,

and sooner or later they'll figure it out and it will all work fine. But time passed, and it's still a problem. There's still things that are problems. And if you look at modified gravity, like the baryonic tally fissure relation, the radial acceleration relation, all that kind of thing, it just falls out so easily, like it's a three-line derivation. it's really hard to ignore that it just explains a lot from very little. And so I think from...

Yeah, well, let's get back. I mean, I know, Stacey, as you know, I was the chairman of the physics department where he now in astronomy, the university where now is working and was familiar with some of the ideas. I think it's really important to have straw men, but I'm not convinced. I mean, for me, the one area where the need, the evidence for dark matter, which came, of course, from observational evidence, which and Vera Rubin and Ford and colleagues, which is now overwhelming. But the real importance is, it's not just that, you know, it comes from that area, is this understanding that we can't seem to get the structure in the universe that we need if Berion's are all there. is. And I find that the most compelling argument for non-varionic dark matter.

Protones and neutrons are all there is. The quick way of thinking about it is there just simply hasn't been enough time for the Big Bang for galaxies to form. And if I look around me, I notice the galaxies have formed. I'm living in one. And that's a really fundamental problem. And I, and correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm certainly willing to be wrong here, you have to stand on your head. I'm not convinced that that problem can be adequately answered in a modified gravity in any way that isn't in every sense of the word that I would think ugly. So maybe you can prove me right. Well, so this is why I went on about this in my book, you know, because there are a lot of theorists who discard modified gravity because it's ugly, which I think is not a good argument.

But I mean, you know, I actually agree with you. You know, it's really hard to modify general relativity and to get the large-scale structure work out and also with the cosmic microwave background. So, and this is exactly why for a long time, I was absolutely not convinced by all this modified gravity stuff. You know, I mean, this is all well and fine. You know, you can do these kindergarten math derivations.

And, yeah, you get out flage rotation, curves and baryonic tully-fishers, so what? Right? Yeah, exactly. So what? Yeah, right. But another thing is that it's just, I mean, this is just the fact. Like, computationally, it's much, much easier to get these observed correlations

to come out from this model, for gravity, for galaxies. The problem is, how do you combine it also with the large-scale structure and the cosmic microwave background. And this is why I got so excited when I came across Justin Curie's paper about superfluid dark matter, where they said, well, you can have it both. You can have particle dark matter in the early universe on large scales. And then it can condense in galaxies and that gives you a force which looks like modified gravity. And at this point, it can And it kind of becomes very philosophical. You know, if I just give you the Lagrosian,

is it modified gravity or is it particle dark matter? It's very difficult to tell one from the other because in both cases, you add fields to the theory. It's kind of mathematically the same thing. And you have to find some criterion to tell one from the other. And the criterion that I've been using is to say, well, if the force that acts on the barion is just the normal gravitational force created by this other matter, then I call it dark matter.

If there's an additional force or if the gravitational force is actually modified so that it's no longer general relativity, I call it modified gravity. So if you look at it from this perspective, then the superfluid dark matter is actually modified gravity because you have a new force that's medial, by the phonons in the superfluid. And so in this kind of scenario, you get the best of both worlds together. Maybe.

Okay, I guess we could argue that as physicists, but I think I won't in this context. I'm not convinced, but I do think probably another term that Wilczek used once is radical conservatism. And it seemed to me, you will at least, one of the things that that seems attractive, besides as far as I can see, the absolute need for non-barient dark matter to explain the large-gal structure of the universe, is the fact, and again,

it's based on the presumption that there's physics beyond the standard model, which I agree with you is a presumption for which there may be, there's certainly not yet any evidence, well, except maybe neutrino masses, give some evidence that there's physics beyond the standard model, of which, in fact, they do, in my mind, give strong, compelling evidence that there's probably physics beyond the standard model. But every theory when able to invent that goes beyond the standard model, dark matter, some dark matter naturally falls out.

And again, I would have argued, in the very first book I wrote when you were a baby on dark matter, the argument is, is it just some parochial, does dark matter seem strange because of some parochial argument? After all, most of the universe is already invisible. There are a billion photons for every proton in the universe,

and most of them were invisible. They were all invisible until 1965, until the cosmic microwave background discovery. They were in our TV sets. 1% of the static in our TV is photons of the Big Bang, but we didn't see them, and there's nothing more visible than photons. So if there's a billion photons for every proton,

well, maybe there's some other particles that were also creating the Big Bang that aren't as observable as photons. and are more numerous than protons. It seems to be the most reason. I was going to say the most natural thing, but it drops out immediately. And the minute you have any physics beyond the standard model in the early universe,

you find, if anything, an embarrassment of riches, a profusion of dark matter candidates, you have to work hard to get rid of most of them. So I guess, you know, I think that when you say that certain relations, the flat rotation curve and tully fish relation dropped naturally out of this, I would say, ad hoc model. It seems to me that you can also say that dark matter drops naturally out of particle physics

and almost any model you go beyond the standard model. I would totally agree with this. Indeed, that's what I thought for a long time. Being a particle physicist, I thought the obvious explanation for dark matter. So it's some kind of particle. And yes, most of the standard model extensions have dark matter. candidates. And so I actually start this way in my talk. I used to be a particle for this. And of course, I thought, well, it's some kind of particle and then find it. And there'll be the end of the story.

There'll be a Nobel Prize for it. But this hasn't happened. Right. They haven't found the damn particle. I mean, this is the one problem. But the other problem is that it's really hard to get these correlations out of dark matter models. You have to put in a lot of work with your numerical the calculation, all your subgrid parameters, and so on and so forth. Whereas modified gravity, it just falls out so easily. Well, I guess again, I keep thinking it captures some truth that we don't have in the particle dark matter. Okay, well, look, and it's interesting.

We'll see. To me, I don't see it myself, but I guess, and also, I hate to use this argument that I'm older in here again, but I used to argue that was one of the reasons. that dark matter was I was so found it so compelling cold dark matter it's because it had been killed so many times by observation and then it turned out the observations or the numerical simulations were wrong and I saw two or three times it rise from from the ashes of and it was resurrected and so so it I found that I find that more compelling and I suspect there have been many times when it said when people say well dark cold dark matter

doesn't give you observations for many classes or what you've got to give whatever it is. And I've been, I've been, I found it quite remarkable that each time more sophisticated simulations were done, in general, those problems are in a way. We'll see. But we'll see. It's like what you like about dark matters exactly what you don't like about string theory, right?

And every time it's been ruled out, they've found a way to make it work after all. Well, it's never been ruled out because it never makes any predictions. So, yeah, I mean, but no, so I think it's different. I think string theory has kept redefining itself. Well, look, to be honest, it's gone in the direction of the mathematics and it's become clear that it's a much more complicated theory than anyone thought of before. And so, you know, people move in different directions. I'm going to be generous to string theorists. You know, the realization that strings themselves may be not a particularly relevant, important part of string theory.

That calling it string theory is probably misnomer. But it seems to me that at least this one model, cold dark matter model, which at least is testable and makes predictions, when the predictions have disagreed with observations or numerical simulations, on the whole, the observations and the numerical simulations have changed. And I find that interesting. But you're right that, first of all, we haven't seen it, and that there remain problems and puzzles,

and I think there always are at the forefront of physics. So I'm a little less, I'm a little more generous to, I've seen to happen in particle physics, where, again, even in the standard model, it disagreed with experiment for a while, and having it with something called neutral currents, until the experiments turned out to be wrong. So I take a wait and see attitude a little more, maybe.

And I think it'll, and I'm as impatient as anyway. I first proposed dark matter experiments again in 1982, both what are called lymph experiments and axiom ones. And I thought they'd be done in 10 years and the whole thing would be over. And it's 40 years later and we haven't seen anything. But that's why I'm happy the experiment, less or more patient than I am. So we'll see.

So about dark matter supposedly making predictions, well, one thing to say is that modified gravity also made predictions that were confirmed by observations. And I would recommend that you have a look at the book from the philosopher David Merritt, I think first name, something with D. I'm pretty sure about the merit, which is called a philosophical approach to Mont,

which sounds really off-putting, I know. Yeah, it's off-putting to me. Basically, what he does. I think he would appreciate the book because it's very to the point. You know, he doesn't waste a lot of time. he goes through the predictions that cold dark matter has supposedly made and that munt has made and he just rates them you know how good were they um did they actually agree

with the observations um and i might take a look for you write that the title of the book is one such that i would never have picked up in my life this is all those words anyway okay um but look let's let's let me just some quick last questions and the last five minutes or so What do you think the future particle physics is? Dark, very dark. Well, so particle physicists are really in a difficult position right now. I mean, they do have the LHC upgrade, which is running now, and that will run for, I don't know, 10 years or more,

so they will collect a lot of statistics. And, I mean, if they're lucky, they find some. something. And then I think the future will be bright. I mean, there's no question about it. But I think the much more likely things to happen is that they do not find anything new. They will have some anomalies, you know, that they don't really get sorted out, that will have some low statistical significance. And they would try to make a claim that they need a bigger collider. But if you look at the status of the world today, you know, with all this pandemic going on and with climate change,

it will be really, really hard to get the money together to build this larger collider. Because we're talking about $2040 billion dollars or something, and they would have to start planning pretty soon. And digging the time on time. Yeah, I mean, it's always a daunting task. Yeah, but if it would, so you would say that if no, nothing other than anomalies are seen, then the field will end?

Oh, no, it will certainly not end. But what's going to happen is that it'll shrink. And I think it's actually healthy because it will give people time to focus, try to figure out what's the really important thing to do, trying to figure out what went wrong. And I mean, there's also, and this is something which I personally don't believe, but I think it's a fair question to ask, like, is this something that we should spend a lot of time and money on at this point in time?

Like, is it the right thing to do? If we're fairly certain that there isn't actually anything to find for 15 orders of magnitude or something like that. Well, let me, I used to, again, I've been simply thinking. I've always argued that it's probably not clear, you know, that physicists could go and say, guess what? We found nothing. That's really exciting. Bill, that's another accelerator.

On the other hand, so let me take again, the contrary point of view, that $10 billion used to be a lot of money. But in the pandemic world, we've seen, you know, trillions. No, I never thought I'd hear the word trillions being bandied about so easily. So $10 billion over 20 years, by comparison to even small NASA projects or minimal NASA projects, is not a lot of money. I mean, this space shuttle cost a billion dollars each time it went up,

and I don't know why it was ever sent up in the first place. So it's not, I mean, we talk as if it's a lot of money, but it isn't, to be fair, if $10 billion is the quanta of large accelerators, which it apparently seems to be, $10 billion with a lot of countries over 10 or 20 years is not in the grand scheme of things a lot of money. And I think we have to remind ourselves of that. Well, you know, everything is relative. I guess that's a lot of things that you can do with $10 billion. Oh, yeah.

If we spend it on one thing, it won't be there for another thing. Well, yeah, but that was a dangerous, that's, again, you're young. That's what killed the superconducting super collided in the United States, the claim that, hey, we can't. But the point is, it's not a zero-sum game. It wasn't as if the money from the Large Hadron Collider was then used for other areas of science. That's just not the way, at least in the end. United States, that's not the way funding went.

There wasn't suddenly a big pot of money available for the things. It was just that the pot of money for the superconducting superclider disappeared. So I think we have to be very wary for scientists to start saying, well, if you don't spend it here, it'll be spent there because I don't think that's the way government funding of science has spent. So I caution you from thinking about that. I do agree we have to think is it worth of $10 billion. And I strongly believe that we have to make the case.

as physicists for why it's worth it. And if we don't make the case convincingly, then the public shouldn't spend the money. And that I agree with 100% on. Last question, maybe. What about the future of science? What do you think about ideology and science now? Do you want to talk about that?

We don't have to. But do you see a bright future for science in the West? Well, I flip back and forth between being very optimistic and being very pessimistic. The reason I'm optimistic is that I personally think we have a lot of exciting things to discover and we're kind of almost there. On the other hand, it's been really difficult for me, you know, to see how so many particle physicists went down collectively. this dead end and ended up believing in these weird things.

And I kind of feel like this is like a group of the most intelligent people on the planet. Like if they can't understand that their interests and their convictions are influenced by people they are constantly in contact with, that they're constantly talking to, that they have this social reinforcement, then I don't think that the rest of mankind will. see that this is actually a problem that we need to work on. And of course, this is something which is affecting all of science, you know, these problems with academia, where does the funding go? I just think it's extremely inefficient.

You know, we're throwing a lot of money at things uselessly that we kind of know it won't go anywhere. And at this point, it's not so much particle physics, but, you know, it's all this quantum everything and artificial intelligence, machine learning, and all that kind of thing. And there are some good things in there, but I think the vast majority of this stuff is just, you know, it's pretty much a waste of money. And it's a problem. And I think it's something that scientists need to sort out, but I see no indication that it's going to happen. Okay.

Well, you're even more pessimistic in that regard. I was thinking not so much of, but that's an interesting question. But I was also thinking about the question of I, you hit one kind of ideology, namely the beauty. ideology or whatever you want to call it. I'm thinking of the other. I think of the fact that increasingly scientists are not able to ask questions because of sociological issues and that the ability to openly question, at least in the West, seems to be, as far as I can see, under attack in many places. And I'm deeply concerned about that for the future of science. Do you think I'm just overly concerned, or do you see that as a problem? Well, it's not only a problem. It

It seems to me there are just certain questions you can't really talk about because people will immediately start shouting at you that you're a bad person for even asking the question. And it's a big, big problem. And it concerns me a lot that most scientists seem to just look away from what's happening. That it's not my problem, somebody else's problem. And that worries me a lot, yeah. Well, I mean, to be fair, I think it's natural. Most people, scientists like to keep their heads down and just keep working on what they're working on. And if you put your head up into the fray, you risk a great deal.

So I can understand it, although I don't necessarily condone it. Well, look, thanks for letting me be provocative and contrary. And I really, you know, as I think you're sensitive, I think we agree on a lot. And I think it's important to have these discussions so people see where we're coming from. and I really appreciate you allowing me to provoke. And I always do enjoy talking to you, Sabina. So I hope you had a good time. Yeah, thanks for the question,

which really got me to think about all of this again. Good. Okay. You take care, and we'll see you again. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through Patreon. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people

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