Unexplainable - The musical structure of the universe

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

If matter is a result of vibration, what causes the vibration? Our friends at The Gray Area ask, “Is the universe behaving like an instrument?” Guest: Stephon Alexander, theoretical physicist at Brown University For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠ Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, it's Noam. And today on the show, we've got a conversation with a theoretical physicist who's also a world-class jazz saxophonist. But it's not like he's a scientist in his normal life and he's got a jazz side project. The music is part of his research. He thinks really deeply about the connection between music and the biggest questions he's working on, why the universe is the way it is, how it improvises over a kind of rhythmic structure, how playing music can open up new scientific ideas he'd never considered before.

This interview first aired on The Gray Area, another podcast from Vox, and it's a fascinating conversation that's really made me look at the night sky differently. It's honestly made me want to listen to the universe rather than just look at it. Here's The Gray Area with host Sean Allen. Today's guest is Stefan Alexander. He's a professor of physics at Brown University and the author of two terrific books, The Jazz of Physics and Fear of a Black Universe. I have always loved the scientists who go out of their way to engage the public.

People like Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall. They don't just talk to the public. They translate the science into stories. They use colorful analogies. They find the poetry in the data. Alexander is this type of scientist. One big reason for that, I suspect, is that he's a theoretical physicist who's also a world-class jazz musician.

And his musical sensibilities influence both his research and the sort of language he uses to communicate it. But on top of that, for a person whose head lives in a world of abstractions, Alexander is a pragmatist who's up front about how hard it is for physicists like him to really explore their wildest ideas, especially when the research is dependent on grants and the whims of funders. So I was excited to invite him on the show to talk about music and physics and how he's trying to make sense of the universe. Stefan Alexander, welcome to the show. It's a real honor and pleasure to be

Yeah. I appreciate that. I'm really excited to have you. Something I have heard people say, people who are either in physics or adjacent to physics, certainly people who know more about physics than I do, which is anyone who knows anything about physics. But I have heard them say that physics is stuck right now as a science. Is that true? What are those people seeing? And maybe just as importantly, what are they not seeing? I think what people are seeing is that there's been a great tradition and pathway that has been successful. You had quantum mechanics and you had relativity, in this case, special relativity. And there was an attempt to unite them because there were physical regimes where you needed to describe, say, a quantum mechanical particle moving at relative to the six speeds. And so that unification was successful.

That became the bedrock of particle physical. like all the, what we call a standard model, that theory. So that logical progression has been successful. And I think that physicists have been very successful over the last century. And there's no reason to expect that direction to stop. And I think that we must continue moving in that direction. And when I talk about fear in my book, Fear of a Black Universe, We're talking about how do we confront the legacy and the contributions that has been made?

And what's the strategy for getting to new brown or maybe making new breakthroughs? I myself, I'm a researcher in theoretical physics. And honestly, there are days when I'm like, I have no idea what direction to go in. Tell me more. Well, a lot of what we do in physics, especially in the profession itself, we have to go through peer review, we write papers, we submit our results to journals, it gets reviewed anonymously by our colleagues, and we also have to apply for grants. We have to apply for money to support our research, to support our students.

And if you deviate from what's expected, deviate from the judgments that's made about what the right directions are, what the trends are, and what it means to do good physics. So there are judgments about, well, if you work in this field, then you actually know what you're talking about. And if you don't work in, you're working with a different field. You don't really understand what we're doing. Therefore, we should not take you seriously. Maybe if you work in a different field, you try new things out that deviates from the status quo, there might be penalties waiting for you, the same way penalties could await if you deviate from a social order, right?

So part of the fear is that if you're a young person and you're trying to break new ground, there's a warning which is wait until you after you get tenure to work on those kind of problems to think about things in that new way. Part of what makes you unique is your musical background. To an outsider, it might seem like there's some kind of tension between being a scientist and a jazz musician, or at least that these are very unrelated activities. But the point of your book is to say that that's not the case, right? That actually this kind of bounded thinking is part of what's holding science back.

Yeah, I would definitely be of a different physicist without my music and a different musician without my physics. And some examples of that would be when I'm working on any kind of theory, a calculation and an idea, maybe I have an idea and I'm pursuing it, there are times where you might get so enamored about your idea. you might fall in love with the idea, get attached to it. And months would go by, but you just don't want to give up on the idea. It's important to know when to pivot and when to give up.

And I find that being a jazz musician, it's all about embracing, in real time, pivoting. If you might play a wrong note and you have to make something of that, or you might find a phrase that you think sounds very good, middle of an improvisation, but you have to move in a new direction of. And I think that this idea of like that as a jazz musician, the improvisational side teaches you how to just move on to new ideas and not get too attached to ideas, but also how to commit to something. I mean, and my jazz practice, my practice as a musician has been a lifelong process of refining my technique and refining my theory and put myself out there and playing with other people

and learning how to play in a band and all that stuff. And that discipline, that practice, it plays a big role also in my practice as a physicist. So they go back and forth, yeah. Your day job is physics, but, I mean, how serious is your music career? I mean, do you tour? Are you in a band? Do you just sort of play on the side at clubs when you get a chance?

I mean, how big a role does it play in your life? At different times of my life, it's played anywhere from very, you know, like every other night I'm playing out at some club with a quartet to maybe once a semester I'll play. So it depends. But these days, yeah, I do have a band. I'm very fortunate to be playing with Will Calhoun, who's a drummer for the band Live in Color. And Melvin Gibbs, the bassist, played with the Rollins band and others, Harry Tubman. So I've been very fortunate to play with those fellas. We have a band called God Particle.

I love it. I love it. And we'll play a few concerts, a larger-scale concerts a few times a year. So, yeah, it differs in from time to time. I'll jump in a session and sit in for a few songs. And a lot of what I do these days is I'm just happy to go home and work on some new material and shed some new scales. Didn't Einstein say that his best ideas came to him

while playing his violin? Or am I just making that up? I do recall reading Einstein saying something like that, yeah. I mean, one thing for sure that I have confirmed about his relationship with music and his science is that there have been times where I, if I get stuck, something or my brain is just overload and I just pick up my horn and I'll just start playing through some things. And I find it to be very helpful. I find that things are like it or not happening offline in terms of how I'm doing my physics, like the art of physics and exploring those connections.

There is a question you ask in your previous book, The Jazz of Physics, that I want to put to you now. And I'm just going to quote, if the structure of the universe is a result of a pattern of vibration, what causes the vibration? Now, let's give everyone a second to hit their bongs, and then you got to answer that for me. I don't know what it means, but I love the question, and I'm dying to know the answer. I think our most direct experience of this is music and sound. A musical tone is basically a vibrational pattern of airwaves that comes out, airs and, you know, our body responds to that. Obviously, there's a whole mechanism of how that happens. But a sound wave, like, for example, you know, notice that you can hear sound in a swimming pool.

So you can actually hear sound in water, right? You can hear sound obviously in air. And that's because the medium is vibrating, right? the medium can vibrate. Well, what is vibrating? What is vibrating actually is a fact that any type of medium, like water, can actually undergo a change in pressure. If you push against the wall, you're exerting pressure,

which is a force that distributes itself over a region of space. So it turns out that sound is nothing more than a pressure wave. Basically, our direct experience of vibrations and the way that I talk about it is through music. And it turns out that in the early universe, the metaphor here goes pretty close to sound. So we have this picture of a universe that's been expanding for billions of years, which meant that if you ran the clock backwards,

the universe, you can imagine it contracting and being very small, hot and dense. So in the early universe, you have a hot, dense soup of energy. And that past universe is devoid of structures, devoid of galaxies and stars, planets, and people. It's just all energy. So the question that we ask in physics is, how is that past universe, how does that evolve in the universe, come to create the structure that we see today, the stars, the galaxies, the planet, the people? And what we know from observations, from satellites, is that in the early, the early, the stars, the galaxies, the planet, the people. from satellites, is that in the early universe,

we see vibrational patterns of this soup of energy, okay? This soup of energy is basically what we call it's radiation. Okay, the universe is filled in the hot quantum soup of radiation and fundamental particles. And the wave-like motion actually set up sound wave. So the physics of the early universe, those vibrations are actually sound waves

very similar to the sound waves that are passing through in air. And those sound waves that are vibrating in the early universe carry energy. And that is the onset, basically. Those energetic waves are the onset of the formation of the first structures in the universe, such as stars, which eventually all clustered together become galaxies. So it's in that sense that metaphor with sound is, you know, I would say pretty exactly in the early universe. What does it mean to say as you do

that the universe is like an instrument that plays itself? Well, the metaphor is that, you know, if you think about like an instrument, for example, like a drum, the surface of the drum undergoes vibration. And, you know, obviously the vibration and the drum basically sends out, you know, sound waves.

Similarly, the universe, in its past, which is very small, as some type of vibrating system, then the question is, what is the hand that hits the universe, if you want to use this analogy? But since our definition of the universe is that there's nothing outside of the universe,

whatever sets off that vibration, it's some entity that's of the universe, that's doing that. And the status quo right now in our field, the field of cosmology, is that there's something called the inflaton field, right? the inflaton is the name of a field. And so for the listeners out there, what is a field?

We need to understand them what a field is. And we are in direct contact with fields anytime you play with a magnet. So if you take two magnets, notice that a magnet can exert a force in another magnet without the magnets actually touching each other. And so the thing that's actually transmitting, the force between two magnets in between at the empty space, is a magnetic field. It seems to be invisible, but it acts over space, right?

And so the idea is in the early universe there's a similar type of feel. It's not a magnetic field, it's an inflaton field. And this field is playing two roles, actually. One role is to make the universe expand very rapidly, which is the thing that's igniting the expansion of the universe. But the inflaton field is actually known as a quantum field. So there's something quantum about this.

quantum about this infotone field. And guess what's quantum about it? The field can vibrate in a discrete fashion. So, you know, when you think about vibrations, right, you think about like a wave that's going up and down, saying an ocean wave going up and down, and you can imagine seeing all different types of wave patterns, right? But these wave patterns are more like notes,

like if I play A, B, C, D, G, these are discrete notes. Right? They only occur in steps. And so the analogy now is that you can think about the quantum fluctuation of the infotone field as basically discrete notes of this infotone field. This is a metaphor, but actually the metaphor goes very, very almost one-to-one correspondence. So that's the idea. I mean, again, that's a paradigm.

Then you can say, well, okay, where does the infotone field come from? What is its nature, right? And these are all good questions that we're asking. but the real answer is that we don't know yet. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in

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Learn more about their customized little plans at squareup.com. Could AI help you do more of what you love? Workday is the AI platform for HR and finance that actually knows your business. We help you handle the have-to-dos so you can't-wait-to-dos so you can't-wait-to-dos. It's a new workday. It's interesting to me to think about this in the context of the so-called fine-tuning argument, this idea that the fundamental laws of our universe are perfectly arranged so as to make life possible. And if they were tuned like a guitar, even slightly differently, life wouldn't exist.

Or to put it differently, the instrument that is the universe wouldn't play. First of all, is that true? And if it is, what does that tell us about the nature of the universe? that it's held together so precariously. Yeah, it might tell us one of a few things. I mean, first of all, when we use the word fine tune, the way I like to think about this is, imagine when you listen to a nice stereo system,

and you have, well, back in the days where we had equalizers that we can manually shift up and down. They say, well, I want a little bit more treble, and I want a little bit more bass. Think about now the universe as an equalizer, meaning that how much trouble, how much base controls now some of the fundamental properties of subatomic particles or the forces, right? That's needed to make a star burn, right?

Which we know to have life, the star has to burn at a given rate. We don't want our sun to burn out too quick, right? If our sun will just burn its fuel in one second, then good luck with any seasons here on Earth, right? So the sun has to burn at the right rate for billions of years to sustain life on Earth. But it turns out that actually the rate in which the sun actually does thermonuclear like conversion depends very sensitively on these equalizers, these parameters that detect how strong the force may be or how weak it may be.

And it does appear that when we look at our theories that describe those forces, that those knobs that dictate how the various forces are control, are very finely tuned to certain values that don't seem to be explained very nicely by the theories themselves. So it seems that the theories themselves cannot explain the determination of those finely tuned parameters. And as a result, we're seeking new ideas out there. And there has been new ideas. One idea is called the anthropic principle, which is basically saying that the universe

actually is finely tuned such that we can be around to observe it. So the Anthropical principle is a statement that the laws of physics are such that if they were any different than the form that they currently have, there would be no life.

And therefore, there would be no universe for life to actually observe. It's almost circular in the sense that the universe exists such that it can create life. And if there were no life, the universe would not exist. Yeah, I recall that Stephen Weinberg, quote, where else could we be except on a planet that can sustain life?

Right. There's something circular about it. Then you can say, well, but how does the universe do that? And so ideas out there could be that maybe there are many, many universes. We live in one of such many universes where the universe, as it replicates itself, it gets to try out, like a jazz improvisation, maybe. Think about in a jazz improvisation, you know, you get to try out a new solo

every time the form of the song repeats itself. The idea is that the universe gets to try out new parameters until it hits the jackpot. So is this... Just to jump in there a little bit, is what you're describing there what people call the multiverse theory? Yes, that's what people call the multiverse theory.

Do you buy that? And if you do, you're going to have to explain it terms of lowly country podcaster like me can understand because I don't get it. I mean, I guess I get it conceptually, but it's a little mind-blowing to ponder. Yeah, so 24 years ago, when people in my field were talking about the multiverse, I was a research scientist trying to build my career and they eventually tried to get a job. And when I, one of the leaders in the field, I went to him and said, how do we do physics now? I mean, because the idea of the multiverses that you have to not rely on doing calculations in your theory to make a prediction,

you posit that there are just many universes out there, and there's some random chance. Let me just use that word very loosely, a random chance that the universe replicates itself. So to have a multiverse, you need a mechanism for the universe to basically replicate, to produce. new so-called baby universes. And one picture you might want to have in terms of an analogy is like blown bubbles. So if you have a bubble maker or whatever and you've blown bubbles, you can create many bubbles. And if you think about every universe as some bubble that basically nucleates and gets created,

and inside of every bubble is an environment that you can call a universe. But in different bubbles, bubbling baby universes, the universe actually takes on different values for the forces. And when those values happen to be the right values to produce life, to produce stars, to produce all the things that we see, that's the idea of how the multiverse can actually maybe create our universe. But when I went to this senior person, he said, well, you know, I mean, basically it was like tough luck. You know, this is where the feel is at. And it was very difficult at that time to see how I can make a life for myself as a physicist, as a theorist. And I think that back then I was not a fan of the multiverse because I found it very difficult to do research in that field.

But why weren't you a fan back then? Yeah, but truthfully speaking, because it was aesthetically not pleasing to me. And it just goes to show you how aesthetics, right? affect what types of research in your choose a pursuit. Simply put, it was aesthetically not pleasing to me. Well, what's not aesthetically appealing to? Is it because it's not elegant and simplistic? Is it because it almost seems like it takes a picture of the universe

we don't quite understand and then smuggles in like a new concept to sort of explain it all away? The aesthetic side of this is coming from that when we usually, Usually what we see in physics is some unity, some ways in which one problem you may be trying to solve would be connected to something else. And by not considering that something else or not seeing that other thing, you would not be able to solve the problem.

So the idea here would be like, well, maybe the fact that the laws that we see seem to be fine-tune is telling us something very deep, and it's so deep that it just simply just can't be, you know, this multiverse idea. The same way the advent of quantum mechanics said something profoundly deep about the world. And so it's more about this ambition that we're looking for something profound and so deep that we have not been clever enough to figure it out.

I think part of the reason I was asking it, it sort of surprised me to hear you say it wasn't aesthetically appealing to you. Because I guess my intuition was that, the multiverse would be the kind of theory, a jazz musician in particular. would find appealing. If the universe plays jazz, then it does kind of seem like the multiverse is the kind of world we might get.

It feels very improvisational. You know, jazz, for me, plays a couple of different roles. One of the metaphors that I have developed and has even turned into a little music collaboration with my friend and collaborated, Donald Harrison, who's the NDA Jazz Master, one of the great jazz musicians of our time, is that the metaphor of applying them all.

improvisational logic to interpret in some aspects of quantum mechanics. So the idea that a quantum particle is not doing some probabilistic dance, but it's improvising. See, that's really interesting to me. I mean, I've heard you talk about Donald Harrison before. He's a very well-known jazz musician from New Orleans, actually, really close to my home. And you talk about how he wrote to you about his quantum theory of music. And he said, yeah, I don't play the chord changes. It's like quantum mechanics. I don't play in the changes.

I play through the changes. I don't know what that means, but it sounds extremely cool. So what does that mean? And is it as cool as it sounds? It is cooler than it sounds. In traditional jazz repertoire, we are given a structure of a jazz song, meaning that as a song unfolds in time. There's a structure, there's a form.

What I mean by that is, that there's some type of rhythmic structure, and that rhythmic structure repeats itself, and then there's a harmonic structure as well. So there's melody, there's harmony, and there's rhythm. And the improviser should improvise some line, musical line, musically meaningful line, as that structure unfolds.

And so one thing that we're challenged to do is what we call play within the chord changes, as the chords change, we're supposed to weave like a melody through those chord changes and that's the name of the game how one does that and the practice of doing that and there are all these different strategies maybe of how to do that

and what Donald Harrison, who is a master and like, you know, he knows all the traditional ways of playing through those changes but the beautiful thing about a person like Donald is that that's not enough he is engaged in his own research just like a scientist

is to figure out new ways, new strategies of playing a jazz solo over those changes. And he, in his own self-study of quantum mechanics, and then, of course, in our follow-up conversations, he found a lot of interesting ideas in terms of how quantum mechanical things, like a quantum particle, may actually occupy a certain energy level over time and how a jazz pattern. you know, could be improvised. Yeah. And so this idea of getting from point A to point B in a musical improvisation, Donald Harrison intuited that the way a quantum particle actually moves through space

to get from point A to point B, according to, say, Richard Feynman, which is that the particle must consider all possible paths as it goes from point A to point B. That an improvised line, I'm now quoting Donald. There's just infinite possibilities presented, and that, An improvised line, basically, is a consideration of all those, you know, it's closer to quantum physics than the way jazz may be traditionally taught, and these strategies are traditionally taught. Another interesting insight into that is Sonny Rollins.

When I interviewed Sonny Rollins in my first book, you know, the legendary sax player, he said to me, you know, I practice, I practice a lot. I've practiced a lot through my life. but it's very important that when I'm playing that I'm not thinking at all. Yeah, look, it's worth saying. The universe isn't exactly a jazz composition, but the idea that it has some kind of functionally musical quality, that's a pretty old idea.

I mean, the Pythagoras thought the universe was fundamentally musical, right? I mean, even Kepler borrowed this idea from that. And I wish that when I was a younger person growing up, that was something I was taught at the outset, like when we think about our science in art curriculum and, say, high school or even before that, I wish that my science teachers or my music teachers were aware. I'm sure about whether they were aware of it or not. That's why I wrote this book to make people aware of it that the birth of Western science started simultaneously with music and physical. in this case. When I say physics, I mean astronomy. But when the Pythagoras, as the legend has, came up with this idea that the cosmos, and I believe that that word was created to actually deal with that which has order in the universe, which in this case had to do with the planetary motions, that the reason why the planets were moving in the way they were had to do with music of the spheres. and moving 2,000 years or so into the future,

that Kepler relied on this Pythagorean idea of music of the spheres to actually figure out the elliptical orbits of the planets. And in fact, he wrote down musical notes first for these planets before writing those equations down, that those equations came, right, in part from a musical analogy. So that there's always been historically, this intimate connection between music and the universe, music and astrophysics and physics. This episode is brought to you by Defender.

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hers. Give more than a gift for less. Give AncestryDNA. Visit Ancestry.ca today. Offer ends May 10th. Terms apply. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. I'm curious if you have a favorite philosopher.

It seems to me that if you're doing theoretical physics and you're trying to, understand the origins of the universe, you reach a certain point at the frontier where it almost just out of necessity collapses into poetry and metaphor because we just don't know and we can't empirically wrap our arms around it. So I guess what I'm really asking is, where's the boundary here, when you're doing big, grand theoretical physics between science and philosophy? Well, I think the connecting link to that is mathematics. And, like, you know, because, as you know, there's a very deep connection between mathematics and philosophy. Yeah.

Like mathematical logic and, you know, very abstract things, category theory, and, you know, there's a set theory. There's all this, you know, way in which math and philosophy get in the physics. The language you speak and the tool we use, a big part of our toolkit, is mathematics. But of course, physics is not just mathematics. Physics is physics, is physics, and it deals with the physical world. So physics is also the ideas. And physics is created by humans. And we'd love to think that maybe the creations and physical laws are independent of

the human, of us creating them. But that's another philosophical discussion. But one philosopher, it's really funny. I did a lot. I almost majored in philosophy, and I did over the years. I tried to do a lot of reading in philosophy. And one philosopher that I was influenced by, I was Schopenhauer.

He was also obsessed with music. Oh, that I didn't even know. I didn't know that. At terms of Schopenhauer was influential on one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger. But, you know, it's funny, as I was thinking about this, I read a lot of philosophers,

and I can't remember anything that I read. But I just remember that those things were influential. I've also read a lot of, I mean, definitely a lot of Vedic philosophy and, you know, Eastern philosophy as well. I found that, and again, that's nothing new. I mean, you know, Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg. I mean, a lot of the founders of Albert Einstein were, you know, very much influenced by both.

both Western and Eastern philosophy. It's just so interesting to me, this semi-permeable border between philosophy and science. I mean, I have your book in front of me right now. I was reading some of it this morning. And, you know, in the 14th chapter, I mean, you ask a question like, now I'm quoting, for many years I tried to get my mind around the question.

What can exist if time ceases to exist? That feels like a philosophy question, as much or even more than a science. scientific question. But maybe I'm just seeing that as a philosopher and not as a scientist. It is a philosophy question, and I think that it's useful for physicists to see what philosophers have come up with in terms of that question, because I do find it. But at the end of the day, a good physicist for me is you have your skill set, you have your chops, whatever they may be. I mean, obviously, the more than merry. And then, of course, you're trying to come up with ideas for yourself. And part of why you have students or younger people to talk to you is that you hope in those conversations that something may come out where it might lead to a new idea.

So we're kind of always, I think a good physicist should fish for ideas and that you should like cast a wide net and then consider ideas. And then obviously you get to try it like a landscape of different ideas and hopefully something works. That's one strategy. I mean, you know, some people are good enough where they can just hit the jackpot. find the idea and it works. Or some people may just maybe find the answer by calculating their way to the answer. These are all different strategies. And I don't want to leave too many stones on turn in terms of finding new sources of ideas.

And I think like philosophy, music, you know, I love, I mean, I love talking to lay people about my physics and my research because I sometimes find that they might say something that may knock me out of the way my pattern of thought. and that could be useful. I will say this, just talking about ideas on the frontiers, you know, the physics of consciousness is a fascinating one for me. I mean, we seem to have no idea how this immaterial thing we call consciousness emerges from physical matter from our brain.

Hell, we still don't even have a good definition of consciousness. I mean, is this even a fruitful space for, physics at the moment, or is this just forever the domain of metaphysicians and theologians and philosophers? I think it definitely is a deep, okay, thinking about that you have different fields, you have different categories of fields, and with those things, come academic and intellectual silos, that you have to figure out how to, if you're serious about working and something like that, you know, how to collaborate with people and how to break through, given those silos.

I mean, those things, those realities are there. So for me, writing a book where I did talk a little bit about consciousness and fear of a black universe at the end, I gave myself permission, and I was honest about that this is pure speculation. But I would say yes, I mean, I think at the heart of it, for me, since our experience of consciousness is that we are housed in a physical body and we have a brain and somehow we know that different states of consciousness seems to be influenced by this piece of matter between our head and our nervous system,

that clearly there is some link between this internal experience we call consciousness and the matter. But the question, of course, is what is the interplay between matter and the organization of, say, and maybe the complexity of neurons and the emergence of consciousness, I think for me, where the rubber hits the road is that one way into this is,

well, the mystery of consciousness, right, could be also connected to the mystery of matter. So, in other words, at the level where we understand how neurons fire and neural networks and all that stuff, it could be that where consciousness has happened is not only, it's not to say it's either or, in the epiphenomenon of the complexity of neurons, right?

Consciousness seems to be running on a hardware. And the hardware is not just neurons, but matter. But there are things about matter that we still don't understand. And so the question of, I think, where physics could come in and may be useful is to maybe find that way of connecting the mystery of consciousness to actually the mystery of matter itself. I mean, the stuff about, you know, applying quantum physics to the world at our scale, you know, the world beyond just, you know, subatomic particles, that's where you get a lot of woo-woo. And the impression I've always received from serious scientists is that there's a down that road is a lot of bullshit.

You know, you have a lot of new agey type people. We'll look at some of the spookiness of quantum physics, you know, something like, you know, you. you know, superposition that particles can be in different positions in space and time simultaneously. And somehow if that were true, then, then I guess human beings could also be in multiple places at multiple times simultaneously, which seems to cut against our experience of reality. But I don't know. I mean, is, am I being too dismissive by calling all of that woo-woo?

Or do you think there's some there, there? Look, there's definitely. woo-woo out there, and I usually when I hear, that term means usually the same way, like, you know, some people say, you're not playing jazz the right way, you're not playing within our tradition.

You haven't done the work, or you have an idea, but you didn't even realize that this has been considered before and it's wrong for these other reasons. So maybe it speaks to a certain naivety.

And all of that is fine to criticize. Our job is to poke holes and things. So that's part of it. And I tell my students and myself that we have to embrace that. Now, having said that, I think that when I say the way function in the universe and quantum mechanics, I'm talking about new things. I'm not talking about quantum mechanics as we know it now. But again, quantum mechanics itself and research at the foundations of quantum mechanics will require us to understand something new about quantum mechanics. And it's in that place that trying to ask whether or not there's something quantum mechanical about our entire universe is a research question.

So I like to summarize it with a quote from Albert Einstein, which is, if we knew what we were talking about, we wouldn't call it research. But again, just like we talk about jazz and physics, like the name of the game is, you know, is that we try to get our chops together. We're always in a continual path to refining our skill set and mastering what's currently understood. And we try our best to keep an open mind to break new ground. So would you say you feel good about the future of physics

and where the science is going? Well, you know, I do feel good about it because there's some, I think, extraordinary young people that are coming on the scene that I have gotten, to work with and know. And I think that they're able to do things and see, you know, their minds are much faster and sharpened in mind now. And I think that I'm, you know,

I feel optimistic about their ability to take the baton and move forward. There is just so much that we don't understand. And I think that with all, the thing that's all surprised me is that just when we think something is impossible to solve, for some weird reason, we've been able to make advances in physics. So I expect that to happen, even though, as I'm saying all this, and I look at, you know, when I'm done talking with you,

I'm going to go back to my work with my resource group. I have no clue how to move forward on some days. I am definitely at a stage right now where I'm finding that I myself feel very stuff, at my physics and in terms of breaking new ground in my own research. Boy, that's a... Do you have a few more minutes? Because I would really love to know what... Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have time.

I would just love to know why you feel stuck and what that means. I mean, I know, I mean, you do theoretical physics, obviously, cosmology. I mean, these are big, big, big questions you're wrestling with. But why do you feel stuck? What does that even mean? You know, when I first started from physics, I think I had this idea that maybe I will, you know, find some breakthrough in the field or something like that. And now I'm like, I'm just happy to publish a paper and make a tiny little contribution to a tiny little problem. But, you know, one of my mentors, Leon Cooper always encouraged me.

I mean, Leon won a Nobel Prize. He always encouraged me to think big and to never be afraid of asking the biggest questions. And, you know, I have tried to do that. So there's a, you know, I think that ambition of trying to ask the biggest question, sometimes I don't even know what question to ask. Yeah. But that's part of the process. And that's where I'm at now.

And also, I think part of it is to find jobs for your students and find ways where they themselves can have careers. And there's sometimes I put a lot of pressure in myself of, like, I need to find things that they can work on or where they can actually have a career or get a job or get a postdoc, right? So those things come into play as well. And also, if I actually shake things up too much, I do things that go too much against the grain,

then that could actually jeopardize my students from actually getting a job because they'll say, oh, he's a student of this guy who is doing all these things that we don't think should be done. So there's some of that going on as well, too. Well, whatever you do, don't stop playing jazz. Keep doing that. Keep making music.

Well, of course, you know, the big fantasy is in the middle of a jazz solo. The idea comes to me. But that's more of a pipe dream, you know, because I'll get to write a third book. I love it. You know what? I'm going to moonwalk out of here on that note. There's just so much here. And I could barely scratch the surface.

So I will say, once again, the title of the book, his fear of a black universe, an outsider's guide to the future of physics. Stefan, Alexander, this was a genuine pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right, that was fun. A little jazz. A little physics. What else could you ask for? We don't usually use so much music in our episodes, but it felt right this time. Every song, but one came from Stefan's most recent album, Spontaneous Fruit. There's also one track from his EP, True to Self. We'll put those links in our show notes.

As always, we want to know what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at the gray area at box.com. I read those emails, keep them coming. And if you can't do that, rate, review, subscribe. All that stuff really helps. This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.

And a special thanks to Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers.