Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Science Series 2: Dr Ben McAllister / Dark Matter / Axioms / Theoretical Research vs Experimental

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Science Series 2: Dr Ben McAllister / Dark Matter / Axioms / Theoretical Research vs Experimental · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:15
  Doctor Ben McAllister, Welcome to the show.
• 0:18
  Happy to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me, you
• 0:22
  look. Awfully young for a doctor, got
• 0:24
  to tell you. Oh, I don't know.
• 0:26
  I mean, thank you, but I'm 32 years old and yeah, I don't
• 0:31
  know, did my PhD straight, basically straight, like high
• 0:34
  school, undergrad, grad school, kind of straight through.
• 0:38
  So you can get it done in that time.
• 0:42
  That's a lot of work, I imagine. Right?
• 0:44
  Yeah. Oh.
• 0:45
  Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's a
• 0:48
  life of a a lot of studying. But if you if you love it, then
• 0:51
  it's it's good fun. I don't know if it, if it, if it
• 0:54
  stimulates you and it's enjoyable, then yeah, I always
• 0:56
  say it. I mean, we've, we've jumped
• 0:57
  right into to would you do a PhD?
• 1:00
  But I always say to people, if you like it, it's great.
• 1:03
  But you know, don't do it because you think you should.
• 1:06
  Right. Yeah.
• 1:07
  I kind of feel that way about everything, you know?
• 1:09
  Yeah. I mean, I find out the more that
• 1:11
  I live like that, the happier the happier I am or the more
• 1:14
  productive that I am because it's really hard to play
• 1:16
  something, these things. And if you like it, then it's
• 1:19
  not really a pull. Yeah.
• 1:21
  Yeah, please. I always say to my students that
• 1:25
  if you're not like having fun, I mean, not like literally every
• 1:28
  moment of every day is fun, But if in the kind of macro sense,
• 1:31
  working on the project, like if you're not having fun, you're
• 1:33
  doing something wrong. Like, especially in the kind of
• 1:35
  area that we work in, because it's like fundamental physics,
• 1:38
  like we get to try and like answer the big mysteries and the
• 1:41
  big questions in the universe. And it's like, I think we should
• 1:43
  not lose sight of the fact that that's like an immense
• 1:44
  privilege. And it's really cool to be able
• 1:46
  to work on that stuff and like not get too lost in like the,
• 1:49
  the parts of it that are like annoying or painful and remember
• 1:51
  what they are sort of all point towards.
• 1:54
  And if you're really truly having a miserable timing of PhD
• 1:57
  program or whatever, maybe just do something else.
• 2:00
  Because it should be. It should be fun, you know,
• 2:03
  ultimately in in the big scale. Yeah, yeah, that's actually why
• 2:06
  I never went back to to school because I didn't think that I
• 2:08
  would enjoy getting a master's degree in creative or, you know,
• 2:11
  PhD in any kind of literary aspect, which is my undergrad.
• 2:16
  But but I'm I'm way more interested in what you study,
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  which is physics and specifically the I think, and
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  please correct me if I misunderstood, but the dark
• 2:25
  matter in particular, correct? Yeah, that's that's right.
• 2:27
  I'm a dark matter physicist. It's a relatively obscure niche
• 2:34
  category. Physics, I think based at least
• 2:37
  based on social norms or based on, you know, the zeitgeist.
• 2:40
  Sure. Whether people have heard of it,
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  yes, fair enough. I, I guess you could say that
• 2:43
  it's relatively obscure in terms of who's aware of it.
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  But in some senses I think it's like very not obscure as a
• 2:49
  science problem. It's one of the biggest problems
• 2:52
  in modern science today. The scale of the problem is
• 2:54
  massive. So it's just for anyone who's
• 2:56
  not aware, dark matter is the name we give to what I like to
• 2:59
  call one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.
• 3:01
  It is what is the nature of all of this invisible stuff that is
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  all around us, passing through US, makes up most of the matter
• 3:08
  in the universe, and we just don't know what it is.
• 3:10
  We The name dark matter is actually incredibly descriptive.
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  It's sort of tells you just about everything we know about
• 3:15
  it. It's dark, which means that it
• 3:16
  doesn't interact with light. It doesn't reflect light or give
• 3:19
  off light, so we can't see it using traditional telescopes.
• 3:22
  And it's matter, which just means it has mass, it has some
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  stuff to it. And that is that is kind of the
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  stuff we know for sure. We know it's dark, we know it's
• 3:31
  matter. We know roughly how much of it
• 3:33
  we think we know roughly how much that there is.
• 3:35
  We think we know roughly where it is.
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  We have ideas about what it might be made of, but that's
• 3:39
  sort of it. So I kind of think it's a huge,
• 3:42
  huge mystery for for contact, the scale, it's about 5 sixths
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  of all the matter in the universe is this invisible
• 3:50
  stuff. So if you think about like
• 3:52
  everything that makes people, planets, stars, black holes, all
• 3:54
  of those fun little fundamental particles, all that stuff,
• 3:58
  according to our best models today is about 1/6 of all the
• 4:01
  matter. And then there's about five
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  times as much again, this invisible stuff called dark
• 4:05
  matter that we, yeah, we simply don't know what it's made of.
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  Is that not extremely daunting for not not only for yourself,
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  but also for every other scientist that MO that because I
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  kind of from a science perspective, adds A variable or
• 4:23
  variables that you have no idea how to define, right?
• 4:25
  Yeah. But yeah, Well, yes, it's
• 4:28
  daunting for sure. I had to answer the first
• 4:29
  question. Yes, it's a huge, it's a huge
• 4:31
  problem. But hey, there's a lot of big
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  mysteries in science and there's a lot of history of, of working
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  to answer them. That's sort of what it's what
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  it's what it's all about if you ask me, in terms of like stuff
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  we can't define. I guess that's like that's the
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  idea behind Dark Matters. We do try to kind of fence it
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  in. Like we take the information
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  that we have and we say, OK, it's dark and it's matter.
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  So that's, you know, automatically like it sounds
• 4:56
  like it's a huge fraud category and it is.
• 4:58
  But at the same time, we've run out a lot of stuff that it
• 5:00
  isn't, you know, like we know it can't be any of the stuff we
• 5:02
  already know about. We know it has to have mass that
• 5:05
  kind of already puts some fences around it.
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  And then you can kind of start kind of closing in on it from
• 5:10
  there. And that's that's kind of the
• 5:12
  the aim of the game is we go, OK, so does this stuff does dark
• 5:15
  matter? What might it be made of when
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  people come up with different ideas and then we do either
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  different, like theoretical calculations, which is not my
• 5:23
  area, or different experiments, which is my area, that sort of
• 5:26
  gradually constrain that large parameter space of possibilities
• 5:30
  for what the dark matter can be? Cool.
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  What's the just just to understand for myself and for
• 5:36
  anyone listening, what's the difference as far as the
• 5:41
  theoretical and the experimental goes from the from your end?
• 5:45
  Sure. So, yeah, it's a great question
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  because it is a relatively, I'm not going to say like brand new
• 5:52
  thing, but it is a in the grand history of science, the divide
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  between theory and experiment is relatively new.
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  Time was the sort of like, you know, great since the field,
• 6:02
  your Isaac mutants, your, your Lord Kelvin's, your, your people
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  from, you know, hundreds of years ago, pioneers of science
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  would be theorists and experimentalists.
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  They'd be doing experiments in their lab and then working on
• 6:13
  theory to explain the experiments.
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  Now, in a sense, physics, you know, I don't want to, I don't
• 6:18
  want to denigrate these guys or, or, or people, you know, who,
• 6:22
  who are absolute legends, discovered all kinds of
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  incredible things with the kind of equipment that they had on
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  hand at the time. It's astonishing, some of the
• 6:28
  stuff that was done, but the science was a little bit simpler
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  then. Like we weren't talking about
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  like subatomic particles. We weren't talking about quantum
• 6:37
  physics. You know, we weren't talking
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  about the kind of level of intricate detail that we have
• 6:41
  today, which makes it very just difficult for one person to be
• 6:46
  so highly specialized in. Like as as science has gotten
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  kind of more advanced and physics has gotten into ever
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  smaller scales, there's a lot more like we're kind of like,
• 6:55
  you may think like, oh, as we're narrowing in and getting
• 6:57
  smaller, like it's getting, you know, we're getting closer and
• 6:59
  closer to the bottom, which is true in some sense, but it's
• 7:01
  also opening more and more doors and like more and more rabbit
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  holes. And so there's, there's so much
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  more physics today that we know about than there was like 300
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  years ago, which means it's impossible for anyone physicist
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  to know all of it. It's just not practical to be an
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  expert in literally everything in all of physics.
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  And so one way and that gets divided up in like lots of
• 7:20
  different ways, like within the field, but one like kind of big
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  broad category split would be the split between people who do
• 7:27
  theory and people who do experiments.
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  And, and theorists would be people who do, you know,
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  calculations and simulations and, and, and modeling and, and
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  model building to try and understand the physics in
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  question and then come up with like predictions.
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  And then experimentalists will be people who will build and run
• 7:47
  experiments and devote a lot of their time to think about how to
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  make those experiments better, how to get the data, how to
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  analyze the data and how to either fit it in to confirm or
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  refuse the theory. So this is kind of like into
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  play between the two kind of aspects.
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  And you know, like with everything like this, it's not
• 8:02
  really. Hey everyone real quick if
• 8:04
  you're enjoying the show, click subscribe and rate the show. 5
• 8:07
  stars helps a time. Thanks so much.
• 8:10
  Like a strict binary, it's, it's there are people who exist kind
• 8:13
  of partially in both areas and everyone will sort of sit
• 8:16
  somewhere along the spectrum in this regard.
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  But broadly speaking, physicists will tend to categorize
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  themselves as either a theorist or an experimentalist.
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  I gotcha. That's really cool.
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  Is it? Can you say that it's
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  metaphorically, I guess, similar to the way that that someone it
• 8:31
  could be teaching a, a topic and then, you know, let's say about
• 8:34
  business and then another person is actual business owner.
• 8:36
  A lot of times you'll go back and forth between the two and
• 8:39
  you know, and, and students had to make fun of teachers and say
• 8:41
  those who can't do teach. But but I think that there's
• 8:44
  something to be said about the ability to communicate, which we
• 8:46
  will obviously get back to. Yeah.
• 8:48
  You know, I think it's, it's funny the analogy there because
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  I think if you asked both camps, they'd probably both be like,
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  yeah, and I'm the one who's actually doing it.
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  On the other hand, it's, I don't know, I mean, that would get a
• 9:05
  little bit thorny. I think it's definitely like
• 9:09
  both. I don't know.
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  I think both are really important in doing modern
• 9:12
  physics. And that's why, yeah.
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  I mean, ultimately, ideally in a perfect world, probably there
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  wouldn't be that divide. Everyone would have like such
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  incredible expansive brains that we were able to know all of the
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  deep theory and also all of the technical details for making
• 9:24
  experiment work and how to acquire it.
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  It's not practical. We divide and conquer, you know,
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  both. Both are really, really
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  important things to to have. You need people coming up with
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  brand new ideas and you need people building better and
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  better experiments. Can I ask your thoughts before
• 9:41
  we go on with dark physics? Just on that point, I know that
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  one of the huge values of AI is to sort through an enormous
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  amount of data and be very effective, far more effective
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  than people could be. AI can do.
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  AI companions like the new Clawbot or anything like that
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  play a role as far as sorting data and trying to really like
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  cover more ground and what you know, teams and teams of people
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  could cover. It's not.
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  I mean I do anything AI related. It's a very difficult question
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  to answer in any kind of concrete way.
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  I think to give a very broad question, our physicists using
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  large language models to help them.
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  Yes, unequivocally yes, people, people and more and more as I
• 10:24
  think is common in just about every field at the moment.
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  And in terms of like machine learning more broadly for data
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  science, I would say that's been going on since kind of for the
• 10:37
  current kind of AILOM boom, you know, like, like physicists and,
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  and data scientists have been interested in machine learning
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  is the way to tease things out of data for a very long time.
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  So yes, broadly speaking, I think is the answer,
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  particularly in fields where there's big data.
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  Like, I know there's some people here at the university that I'm
• 10:53
  at, Swinburne University in Melbourne that work specifically
• 10:56
  on like AI and machine learning for radio astronomy data.
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  Because like telescopes pull into an enormous amount of data
• 11:03
  from the sky. And there's a lot of really like
• 11:06
  amazing kind of regular statistical signal techniques
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  for pulling information out there.
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  And then there's kind of increasingly like, oh, I wonder
• 11:14
  if we can do something interesting with this AI stuff.
• 11:16
  I mean, the, yeah, it's, it's, it's certainly a useful tool.
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  And then on the other aspect of it, like data analytics aside,
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  like more and more physicists they know are reporting that
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  they find that the tools like the, the more commercial tools
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  like useful for like a sort of research assistant kind of
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  thing. You know, you still have to be
• 11:40
  quite careful about hallucinations.
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  You have to really, you know, check, check the sources for
• 11:45
  sure. If it's going to be anything
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  that you're going to like rely on firmly.
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  But it can definitely help as like a jumping off point for,
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  for things. It's, you know, more and more
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  often I'll find myself like, oh, OK, this is an area I don't know
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  anything about. First thing I'll do is go get an
• 11:58
  LM and be like, well, one of the, you know, or even just to
• 12:01
  be like one of the 10 papers I should read.
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  And then it'll like get out of this, you know, and that's, that
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  saves a lot of time in, in terms of good searching and stuff.
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  So yeah. And it's getting used in
• 12:08
  different ways in physics at the moment.
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  So actually something quite interesting happened maybe like,
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  and, and, and well, I guess like with everything of AI, it's like
• 12:15
  it's changing so rapidly. It's like, you know, the the.
• 12:19
  Tomorrow will be it'll be something new already.
• 12:22
  Exactly, Like if we had this conversation two months ago, I'd
• 12:24
  probably have given you a different answer.
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  But, and yeah, I mean, like, especially like recently, as of
• 12:29
  March 2026, I don't know, it feels like the, like, it feels
• 12:34
  to me personally, like, I mean, I'm unqualified opinion on this.
• 12:37
  I'm really not like an AI expert at all, but like just just just
• 12:41
  personal experience. It feels to me like the model
• 12:43
  had gotten quite a bit better quite quickly in the last little
• 12:46
  while. But anyway, that aside, like 2
• 12:51
  years ago, I think like, well, maybe a year and a bit ago, like
• 12:53
  early in like the kind of people were starting to adopt these
• 12:55
  things. There was a seminar here at at
• 12:58
  the university that was like, oh, like, you know, AI and
• 13:03
  physics seminar. And I like went along and it was
• 13:05
  a room full of like physicists and astronomers and the first
• 13:08
  thing, and I wasn't using like AILLMS that much at that point.
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  And the first thing the guy running the seminar said was
• 13:15
  like, OK, like, put your hand up if you're using an LLM every
• 13:17
  day. And probably like 75% of the
• 13:20
  room put their hands up. And I was like, oh, OK, there's
• 13:23
  something about this I'm not understanding because up until
• 13:25
  that point I'd been like, Oh yeah, this is kind of a kind of
• 13:28
  a useful tool. I guess I can like help me like
• 13:31
  edit down documents or whatever. Like it's not, you know, I'm not
• 13:33
  really. And I like tried to use it for
• 13:35
  research questions. And then like, oh, it's not that
• 13:36
  good. You know, it's not very useful.
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  And then like all of these physicists, all of the peers
• 13:41
  were like, oh, yeah. And then I was like, OK.
• 13:42
  And I was like, really, you know, then then focused on, on
• 13:45
  the preceding hour of people describing different use cases
• 13:48
  and some other things. Anyway, I don't want to get into
• 13:51
  a whole chat about AI, to be honest, because I honestly don't
• 13:53
  know how I feel about it more broadly speaking as a as a
• 13:56
  thing. But to answer the question as
• 13:58
  asked, are people using it? Yes.
• 14:02
  Is it helpful in some ways? Yes.
• 14:04
  Do I use it? Yes, for some things.
• 14:06
  I gotcha. Yeah.
• 14:07
  I don't know how I feel about it either, man.
• 14:09
  That's how. Yeah.
• 14:11
  And you know what? I don't think that we should
• 14:14
  know how we feel about it because like you said, the, the,
• 14:16
  the, its existence is changing so rapidly, so frequently that
• 14:22
  it's very hard to wrap your head around what it really is.
• 14:25
  Because what it was six months ago, it's not the same thing as
• 14:28
  it is now. And having anyone who has a set
• 14:31
  opinion on it is might be might be ignoring the, you know, the
• 14:34
  present, the present circumstance.
• 14:37
  Yeah, I, I agree with you that it's, it's like, yeah, it's hard
• 14:41
  to have a fixed opinion about it.
• 14:42
  I, I, I do, I do kind of like, I do think that that in itself is
• 14:48
  also kind of a problem. Like I think like, you know,
• 14:49
  that like stuff is changing too quickly for people to really
• 14:53
  have fixed opinions about it and that it it's changing too
• 14:58
  quickly to almost like know what the sensible thing to do is
• 15:02
  about it. And I think that that, you know,
• 15:04
  we should look at and be like, OK, maybe we need to slow down a
• 15:06
  little bit on this kind of, you know, like this kind of this
• 15:08
  arms race between these like this driving this thing.
• 15:11
  And it's just like that is actually that doesn't need to be
• 15:14
  happening. Like we just, we could, we could
• 15:16
  stop and pause and be like, OK, like what's a sensible way
• 15:19
  forward here? But anyway, like I said, not not
• 15:22
  an expert on this topic, just. For sure.
• 15:25
  And I think that it's important for you.
• 15:27
  What I think is interesting and particularly important is the
• 15:29
  fact that, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, well, AI is
• 15:32
  the next breakthrough, AI is the next development.
• 15:33
  But there's so much science that has to be done, including the
• 15:36
  work that you're doing that, you know that we can turn to as
• 15:39
  well. And so I think that for people
• 15:40
  that think that, hey, you know, the next, you know, the future
• 15:44
  is just AII mean. There is that you're ignoring a
• 15:47
  whole lot of you're doing a whole lot of universe out there
• 15:49
  and there's a whole lot of science and there's a whole lot
• 15:51
  of other things going on that, you know, I'm sure could, could,
• 15:55
  could be looked into as well. And yeah, we need to catch up as
• 15:58
  a society. We still need to catch up years
• 16:00
  ago from what we still need to catch.
• 16:03
  Up from 20 years ago. I mean, like, you know, I mean,
• 16:05
  like I think people are still, I think I think that society's
• 16:08
  kind of going, you know, we're still trying to figure out how
• 16:10
  to navigate the world now. And I don't think it's really
• 16:13
  been consistent in one place that we've really figured out to
• 16:16
  get a handle on it for since really probably the early 2000,
• 16:20
  you know, the mid 2000s. Yeah, I have this theory that
• 16:23
  like, like technological development is like, it's
• 16:26
  exponential, obviously, and against time.
• 16:29
  And like The funny thing about an exponential is like if you
• 16:31
  zoom in and you don't like you zoom in at any point, it still
• 16:34
  looks like an exponential, like the the Y axis and the X axis
• 16:37
  change. So like you're here and you're
• 16:38
  like, wow, things are changing so quickly.
• 16:40
  And like, so it always feels like it's going way faster than
• 16:44
  you can possibly deal with it. And then at the same time, it's
• 16:47
  also getting faster and faster. So like in a, in a, in a sense,
• 16:51
  it's like, it's easy to be like, oh wow, things are like things
• 16:53
  are so crazy right now and things are changing so fast.
• 16:55
  And it's easy to forget that they also were, you know, 20-30
• 16:59
  years ago. I think like, you know, like
• 17:01
  we're about the same age. I think like probably grew up, I
• 17:06
  wouldn't say like the kind of like younger generation, maybe
• 17:08
  like, you know, complete digital natives because like, you know,
• 17:10
  and I don't know that you like my early childhood, I wasn't on
• 17:13
  the Internet all the time, but by the time I was like, I don't
• 17:15
  know, seven, I was. And then so I think that
• 17:20
  transition is like pretty crazy in terms of the like, I don't
• 17:25
  know, networking and connection information and and then like
• 17:29
  watching the kind of like smart smartphone thing happen.
• 17:31
  I think those were like massive messengers, idolships that
• 17:33
  you're right, I don't think we have really fully come to grips
• 17:36
  with as a as a culture. And yeah, so in some sense, I
• 17:40
  guess there's nothing that new about the fact that things
• 17:42
  changing so rapidly and crazy and we're not prepared to deal
• 17:46
  with it. But in other ways, yeah.
• 17:48
  I mean, it's, it is. It is.
• 17:49
  Different We're still trying to convince you whether social
• 17:51
  media hasn't been a great idea. You are like not to let kids
• 17:53
  use. And we're like, I just can't
• 17:55
  believe like it's 2026. We still have to have this
• 17:57
  conversation. We're talking about AI now.
• 17:58
  You know we're talking. About, you know, talking about.
• 18:00
  We're talking about quantum physics, we're talking about
• 18:02
  UFOs, we're talking about like all this stuff.
• 18:04
  And you're talking about like, you know, whether or not a kid
• 18:06
  spending too much time on Twitter or X or Instagram or
• 18:09
  whatever it is. And on one hand, it is a super
• 18:12
  important right now problem that like has to be, you know,
• 18:17
  responded to or acknowledged at least, you know, And on the
• 18:19
  other hand, it's like, but things are also going on over
• 18:22
  here, you know, it's really, it's really.
• 18:24
  Yeah, too much stuff going on, fire hose and information, too
• 18:27
  many, too many different areas that need a lot of immediate
• 18:30
  attention is broadly speaking the case.
• 18:35
  But hey, I mean, we're not talking about physics right now,
• 18:38
  so let's get. Back to it.
• 18:40
  So can you take me through, please, the life of her?
• 18:43
  So how'd you get, how'd you get started in this?
• 18:47
  Were you always a science enthusiast or curious about?
• 18:53
  I know that people I talked to are either very analytical or
• 18:57
  very imaginative when it comes to becoming scientists, I feel
• 19:00
  like. And what was your kind of
• 19:03
  experience and what what drew to it and what does it experiments
• 19:06
  look like? You know, as far as throughout
• 19:09
  your education, was most your time spent in labs or how'd that
• 19:12
  work? Yeah, it's a good question.
• 19:14
  I I guess in a sense I kind of in school I didn't really know
• 19:19
  what I wanted to do. Like in primary school that is
• 19:22
  like I was just like I was good at science and maths so that,
• 19:25
  you know, I was just good at them.
• 19:26
  I guess just happened to have that kind of brain and that was,
• 19:30
  you know, something that I just did and always kind of enjoyed.
• 19:33
  I enjoyed the problem solving aspects of it, but I wasn't
• 19:35
  thinking at that time like, oh, I'm going to be a scientist.
• 19:37
  You know, like I always, I always say these days, like, you
• 19:40
  know, I was in high school, I wasn't thinking about becoming a
• 19:43
  scientist because I guess I just wasn't kind of aware that that
• 19:46
  was something you could do. Like it, it didn't, it didn't
• 19:48
  even occur to me that that was a thing you could do.
• 19:50
  And I was like good at physics and maths and good at chemistry
• 19:53
  and stuff. And like all of my like peers
• 19:57
  who were also good at those things, the vast majority of
• 19:59
  them will be like, oh, we're going to go into Med school,
• 20:01
  we're going to come doctors or whatever.
• 20:03
  And I knew I didn't want to do that.
• 20:05
  I, I don't know, I just kind of like didn't, didn't appeal to me
• 20:08
  very much. And so I was like, OK, I guess
• 20:11
  I'll be an engineer because that's the thing you do if
• 20:13
  you're good at physics and, and maths and stuff.
• 20:15
  So I like, I went to, to university to study engineering
• 20:19
  and I was taking a second major and I just picked physics
• 20:24
  basically because I kind of found it interesting.
• 20:27
  And I was studying engineering all through undergrad And I was
• 20:29
  like, OK, cool, I'm going to be an engineer.
• 20:30
  And the physics stuff is just kind of cool and interesting and
• 20:33
  it helps the engineering, you know, you understand the
• 20:34
  physics, you understand the engineering, blah, blah, blah,
• 20:36
  blah. And then it wasn't until like
• 20:37
  the end of undergrad that I was doing like an astronomy class
• 20:40
  and I learned about the dark matter problem, like, and the
• 20:43
  scale of this problem and like how we know about it and all
• 20:45
  this extra matter and blah, blah, blah.
• 20:47
  And I was like, oh, wow, that's incredibly fascinating.
• 20:52
  And I don't know how you could like have a bigger problem and
• 20:55
  how more people not aware of it. And how was I not aware of it?
• 20:57
  And like, what, what, what you know, and, and, and I was sort
• 21:00
  of like, how could I, it just kind of grabbed me, just kind of
• 21:03
  grabbed my brain as like a problem.
• 21:04
  And I was like, oh, OK, how can I do anything else in a sense?
• 21:07
  So you kind of became very quickly the feeling.
• 21:10
  And so I kind of shelved the engineering at the end of that,
• 21:14
  like undergrad, it was like, oh, do you want to go to your
• 21:15
  masters in engineering? I'm a professionally qualified
• 21:17
  engineer or start grad school in physics.
• 21:19
  I kind of told myself like, oh, I'll like start grad school and
• 21:22
  see how I go and maybe I'll go back and do the engineering
• 21:25
  eventually. Engineering, right.
• 21:26
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 21:27
  I just never looked back. Went straight through to the PhD
• 21:29
  and then started working as a physicist on this dark meta
• 21:32
  problem. Yeah.
• 21:33
  Just just found the big, the big mystery aspect of it.
• 21:36
  And the fact that there was like something that I could actually
• 21:39
  do to contribute to it, you know, it was, was fascinating.
• 21:43
  And like, I don't like, you know, I don't, I, I always say
• 21:46
  like people sort of like, oh, like this is an area like, you
• 21:48
  know, a Nobel Prize, blah, blah, blah.
• 21:50
  I don't like, I mean, obviously, like no one's going to be like,
• 21:52
  no, I don't want to win a Nobel Prize.
• 21:53
  But I was like, that's not, that's not the motivation for
• 21:55
  me. Like, I don't really like, I
• 21:56
  don't need to be the person who makes the big discovery.
• 22:00
  I'm really be working on the big problem.
• 22:04
  And I'm like, I'm, I'm, it would be awesome, obviously, like if
• 22:06
  our experiments worked and we detected dark matter and we
• 22:10
  made, you know, this massive discovery.
• 22:12
  Like obviously that's like kind of what I, what I want to
• 22:14
  happen. But at the same time, I like see
• 22:18
  the value in contributing to solving the problem because it
• 22:22
  is kind of this process of elimination like with with dark
• 22:25
  matter, like with testing different models and like ruling
• 22:28
  things out. So did I lose you?
• 22:32
  Sorry, did I? Did I disconnect for a second
• 22:34
  now? Yeah.
• 22:37
  You're good. OK, Yeah.
• 22:39
  It's like we're we're we're testing different problems and
• 22:41
  kind of testing different ideas and kind of ruling things out.
• 22:44
  And like if you do your experiment well and you rule out
• 22:47
  a certain concept of dark matter, it means that someone
• 22:50
  else doesn't have to do that later.
• 22:51
  And so you've kind of narrowed down the space.
• 22:54
  You know, it's like famous, like Isaac Newton quote, we've seen
• 22:57
  further than others. It's because I'm stood on the
• 22:59
  shoulders of giants is an appreciation of the fact that
• 23:01
  that's how science works. You know, like the the number
• 23:04
  that there are, there are many, many, many more unsuccessful
• 23:07
  experiments and ideas than there are successful ones.
• 23:09
  And you have to have all of the unsuccessful ones to have the
• 23:12
  successful 1. So, you know, someone
• 23:15
  ultimately, maybe me, maybe someone 10 years from now, maybe
• 23:18
  you know, will will be the one that stumbles upon the answer.
• 23:21
  And that will be because of all of the work you did before of
• 23:24
  narrowing down possibilities. I love that there's a great,
• 23:26
  there's a great quote. It's not up to you to finish the
• 23:29
  job, but that doesn't mean you're not doesn't it doesn't
• 23:32
  deprive you from the responsibility of contributing.
• 23:35
  Yeah. You got to be the one to crack
• 23:38
  it. But if everyone ignores it and
• 23:39
  everyone has that attitude of it, I'm not going to crack it.
• 23:41
  I'm not going to do it, then then it's never going to get
• 23:43
  done, you know? And so that's that general
• 23:46
  attitude. I think that leads to progress.
• 23:47
  Yeah, absolutely. And it's especially true in
• 23:49
  science. I think it's, it's, yeah, it's
• 23:52
  people like often say we're talking about like the dark
• 23:54
  matter thing. They're like, oh, like how do
• 23:55
  you feel? Like, you know, you might spend
• 23:57
  your entire year working on this problem and never discovered the
• 23:59
  thing. And I'm kind of like, well,
• 24:00
  yeah, maybe. But it's exactly like you just
• 24:03
  said, like that's, that's, that's more often the case than
• 24:06
  not. And if we all feel that way,
• 24:08
  then no big problems would ever get solved.
• 24:10
  You know you need to to be to be willing to to do the best you
• 24:12
  can, chipping away at it and contributing to the eventual
• 24:16
  discoveries. So can you walk me through the
• 24:19
  research process? Do you find fear?
• 24:22
  You know, I guess you do find papers or theoretical works and
• 24:26
  then try to bring them to life in your in a, in a lab.
• 24:29
  Is is that the way that you go about it?
• 24:30
  And yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:33
  So, so broadly speaking, there's different like like like I
• 24:36
  mentioned, like there's different ideas about like what
• 24:37
  the dark matter might be made of.
• 24:38
  So we can talk a bit more about the the the ideas there.
• 24:41
  So like historically speaking, so OK, maybe I'll create history
• 24:45
  a little bit. So dark matter as a problem has
• 24:48
  been, I'm going to say it's roughly 100 years old.
• 24:52
  The the origins of it, specifically in terms of who the
• 24:55
  first person was who proposed it.
• 24:58
  People come up in different answers to that question because
• 25:01
  it depends whether you're like including someone who made like
• 25:04
  the vague idea that all maybe there's some invisible stuff as
• 25:06
  opposed to someone making a concrete idea that's like, oh,
• 25:08
  the extra matter is needed to create this effect in space,
• 25:11
  blah, blah blah. About 100 years ago, different
• 25:14
  astronomers were looking at different stuff in space and
• 25:18
  they were looking at the way that it moved around and there
• 25:20
  started to be evidence for the presence of extra stuff that we
• 25:26
  can't see. So you would look at like the
• 25:29
  way a Galaxy was moving and in space, the, the main force that
• 25:35
  that pulls things around is gravity.
• 25:37
  And you can look at something and kind of by looking at like
• 25:40
  the number of stars and, you know, gas and dust and all the
• 25:43
  stuff you can see, you can like estimate roughly how much mass
• 25:47
  there is, which means you should be able to estimate how much
• 25:50
  gravity there is. And so you should be able to
• 25:52
  estimate how stuff should move. And like what people started to
• 25:56
  see is like, oh, when we look at these like galaxies and we count
• 25:59
  up all the bits of matter we can see, the way stuff is moving
• 26:03
  cannot be accounted for if all the gravity is only coming from
• 26:06
  the stuff we can see. There has to be some extra
• 26:08
  stuff, some extra invisible stuff that isn't giving off
• 26:11
  light so telescopes can't see it.
• 26:12
  That's providing extra mass, that provides extra gravity that
• 26:15
  holds stuff together. And this idea was kind of like
• 26:18
  floating around for a while and then it started to gain like
• 26:22
  really good scientific traction in the 1960s, Nineteen 70s.
• 26:25
  Particular work of these astronomers, Vera Rubin and Ken
• 26:29
  Ford and others, measuring what were called the rotation curves
• 26:34
  of galaxies. So you look at like a spiral
• 26:37
  Galaxy, like the Milky Way, like our own Galaxy, and it's like
• 26:40
  kind of a spinning disk. So there's like a big, heavy
• 26:43
  thing in the center. And then there's these spiral
• 26:45
  arms of matter that are just kind of like rotating around
• 26:47
  them. And if you use a telescope, you
• 26:49
  can look at a Galaxy like that and you can measure how fast all
• 26:52
  the different parts of the Galaxy are rotating.
• 26:55
  So you can say, like, OK, how fast is the part near the center
• 26:57
  spinning as opposed to the part in the middle, as opposed to the
• 26:59
  part on the edge? Then if you just looked at a
• 27:02
  Galaxy with the telescope and counted all the stuff you could
• 27:04
  see, you would say, OK, most of the stuff I can see is near the
• 27:07
  middle of the Galaxy, there's a big bulge of matter, and then it
• 27:10
  gets wispier and wispier to the outside, which means that in
• 27:13
  near the middle there, gravity should be really strong.
• 27:15
  And then as you get to the outside gravity, the pull
• 27:18
  towards the center should be weaker because you're further
• 27:20
  away. There's less matter.
• 27:21
  And so. Sorry, was that a question?
• 27:24
  Yeah. Question I wanted to ask on
• 27:25
  that. So that means that that that
• 27:27
  means that there's something very heavy typically in the
• 27:30
  center of these galaxies, that is, yeah, putting everything
• 27:34
  towards it, right. Yeah, so that's right at the
• 27:37
  center of galaxies, there's what's called a supermassive
• 27:39
  black hole usually, which is a giant, giant dense core of the
• 27:43
  Galaxy. And then also there's just
• 27:45
  because of, I mean, it's the nature of a spiral.
• 27:47
  Like the arms get closer together near the center.
• 27:49
  There's just more stuff there, like more of the the stars and
• 27:51
  the gas and the dust. Like if you just look at a
• 27:53
  Galaxy, most of the stuff is near the middle and it gets more
• 27:56
  and more sparse as as the arms go further out.
• 27:59
  So the gravity should be strong near the middle and it should be
• 28:02
  weak on the outside, which means that the stuff should be
• 28:05
  spinning around really fast near the middle.
• 28:06
  And it should be spinning around a lot more slowly around the
• 28:09
  outside. Because it's like if you've ever
• 28:11
  had a ball on a string and like you spin it around, you know,
• 28:13
  like you can only spin it so fast before the string breaks
• 28:16
  and the ball flies away. In this context, like gravity is
• 28:19
  the string. So like the stronger gravity
• 28:21
  near the middle means that the ball should be able to spin
• 28:23
  around really quickly. And the weaker gravity near the
• 28:25
  outside of the Galaxy means that it should only be able to go
• 28:28
  like much more slowly without being like flung off into space,
• 28:32
  right? And so that's, that's like,
• 28:33
  that's what we expect galaxies to behave like just by looking
• 28:36
  at them. But then it turns out that when
• 28:38
  you actually measure the velocities of the stuff in the
• 28:41
  Galaxy, the parts near the outside are not spinning really
• 28:46
  slowly compared to the parts in the middle.
• 28:47
  In fact, they're spinning just about as fast or faster than the
• 28:50
  stuff near the middle. So they're moving like really
• 28:52
  quickly around the outside of the Galaxy, even though we can't
• 28:55
  see like what it is those speeds.
• 28:58
  Well, but those speeds, like if all the gravity was coming from
• 29:01
  just the stuff we can see in the middle, the Galaxy should be
• 29:03
  like flying off into space. There shouldn't be enough
• 29:05
  gravity to keep it bound to the to the center of the Galaxy.
• 29:08
  So there has to be some extra stuff, some invisible matter in
• 29:11
  the Galaxy that is holding it together, providing extra
• 29:14
  gravity and like pulling in on the outer parts of the galaxies
• 29:17
  to allow them to like spin that quickly without like completely
• 29:20
  breaking apart. So that's essentially like the
• 29:23
  first good bit of evidence for the problem.
• 29:24
  There's all this dark matter. It's providing extra gravity.
• 29:27
  It's holding galaxies together. And then people go, OK, So what
• 29:29
  is it? OK, what's it, What's it made
• 29:31
  of? And there were historically a
• 29:34
  very popular hypothesis was this particle called a weakly
• 29:37
  interacting massive particle or a WIMP.
• 29:40
  Because, yeah, silly acronyms are very important in physics.
• 29:44
  People like to come up with, with fun, fun names for things.
• 29:48
  And these particles are essentially like they do what
• 29:50
  they say on the tin. They are massive, which is to
• 29:53
  say they have mass and they interact very weakly with the
• 29:55
  regular matter. And they are just all around us.
• 29:58
  And they're, they're passing through us because we're sitting
• 30:00
  in a big soup of dark matter. And occasionally one of them
• 30:03
  might like bump into one of the atoms in our body or one of the
• 30:06
  atoms in an experiment we make and give it a little bit of
• 30:09
  energy. And this was like the favored
• 30:12
  hypothesis for dark matter for probably, I don't know, 40 years
• 30:15
  or so that it was made of these things, these, these weakly
• 30:19
  interacting massive particles. And there were reasons for that
• 30:22
  that I could go into or probably what in terms of why that was
• 30:25
  the most popular model, it was to do with some deep theory
• 30:28
  stuff. So I guess this comes back to
• 30:29
  your question, like how do people decide on how to do
• 30:31
  experiments? Maybe it is actually instructive
• 30:33
  to talk about the the. I would love, I would love to
• 30:37
  hear. I'm fascinated doing a great job
• 30:38
  explaining this. Sure, thank you.
• 30:41
  So we had this big problem with the dark matter and people were
• 30:45
  like, oh, what's it made of? And then at the same time, like
• 30:47
  a different group of physicists. And so I guess this is sort of
• 30:50
  similar to what we're talking about before with this kind of
• 30:51
  like so many different streams of stuff we need to know about.
• 30:54
  Like you have the astronomers who were going like, whoa,
• 30:57
  there's all this extra matter or there has to be all this extra
• 30:59
  matter to account for the way the galaxies move.
• 31:01
  And at the same time, like particle physicists and, and,
• 31:04
  and quantum theorists and people were starting to try and build
• 31:07
  different like models that explain the whole universe, like
• 31:10
  the grand unified theories and stuff.
• 31:11
  So sort of like unrelated physics.
• 31:13
  And there was this really, really popular kind of family of
• 31:17
  new models to explain the universe that was called super
• 31:20
  symmetry, which is the name for just like a class of, of, of
• 31:24
  models and physics that that try to account for all of the like,
• 31:28
  essentially trying to come up with like one big grand unified
• 31:31
  equation or theory that explains the whole universe.
• 31:33
  And like one of the popular candidates for this was called
• 31:35
  super symmetry. And one of the consequences of
• 31:39
  supersymmetry, like if it was real, was it predicted all of
• 31:42
  these new particles. And one of the particles that it
• 31:44
  predicted was this thing called a called a neutral, you know,
• 31:49
  don't worry about it. But when people looked at like
• 31:51
  the properties that they expected that new particle to
• 31:53
  have, they like matched exactly with the properties of dark
• 31:56
  matter, which is to say they had mass.
• 31:58
  They would be wary with the interacting.
• 31:59
  And they would be expected to be produced in the like, early
• 32:03
  universe in about the right amount to account for all the
• 32:05
  dark matter. And so everyone was like, OK,
• 32:07
  great, we've solved it. Like this is it, the neutralino
• 32:10
  is going to be the dark matter. It's also going to prove
• 32:12
  supersymmetry is real. And we're going to solve all of
• 32:15
  this in like 1-1 fell swoop. You know, we're gonna we're
• 32:17
  gonna find this particle that's going to prove our ground
• 32:20
  unified theories, right? It's also going to explain the
• 32:22
  dark matter. It was just too beautiful.
• 32:24
  Like what was it too? Sorry.
• 32:26
  When was that? When did it?
• 32:28
  Was that discovered? Mid 20th century this this would
• 32:31
  have been so like, yeah, sixties, 70s, around that time,
• 32:35
  probably maybe a little earlier, mid 20th century would have been
• 32:39
  the prediction of this particle. And everyone was like, so
• 32:41
  convinced that this was like going to be it and build a bunch
• 32:46
  of experiments to try and detect this particle and prove that it
• 32:48
  was real. And yeah, it just kind of didn't
• 32:52
  find it. So sorry.
• 32:56
  In what sense? Well, we, we build different
• 32:58
  experiments to try and and find these particles passing through
• 33:01
  US. And like generation after
• 33:04
  generation of these experiments has not seen this particle,
• 33:07
  they've not detected it. And it's starting to call into
• 33:10
  question the idea of whether this theory is right, just
• 33:13
  because this theory is so beautiful that it predicts the
• 33:16
  existence of this particle that explains all these problems.
• 33:19
  And you know, that doesn't mean it's a bad theory.
• 33:21
  I guess this kind of gets back to like what we were talking
• 33:23
  about before. Well, like, say that it's a it's
• 33:26
  a good, it's a good idea. It like it all, you know,
• 33:29
  there's no, it's very self consistent.
• 33:31
  It solves a lot of problems. It all hangs together nicely on
• 33:33
  paper. It just sort of starts to look
• 33:36
  like that's maybe not the way the universe works.
• 33:38
  Like the universe doesn't have to work a certain way just
• 33:41
  because it looks nice on paper. Like just because you can write
• 33:43
  down these really gorgeous theories of super symmetry that
• 33:46
  you know, are mathematically beautiful and perfect and
• 33:48
  elegant and solve all that problem.
• 33:50
  The universe doesn't have to care about that.
• 33:51
  Like it can just work a different way.
• 33:53
  You can just think. It is not that particle can just
• 33:54
  turn out to not exist. And I don't, I want to be clear
• 33:57
  in case there are any other particles.
• 33:58
  This is listening to this. I'm, I'm not saying that that
• 34:02
  winds are completely dead. I'm not saying that sort of
• 34:04
  symmetry is dead or anything. I'm talking in very broad terms.
• 34:07
  I think it would be fair to say about very broad shifts.
• 34:11
  There are people, very serious people who are still, you know,
• 34:13
  believe that we're going to find these particles, that these
• 34:15
  experiments are still ongoing. They're certainly not ruled out
• 34:17
  by any, by any nature that it's still possible that these
• 34:20
  particles exist. I'm simply saying this was the
• 34:22
  historically most popular candidate because it accounted
• 34:25
  for these beautiful theoretical models.
• 34:27
  And it also was going to explain the dark matter.
• 34:28
  And I built all these experiments.
• 34:29
  And over time, as the evidence for that particle has started to
• 34:32
  look a little bit shakier, other kind of ultimate dark battle
• 34:37
  models and hypotheses have started to become more more
• 34:41
  prevalent in the field. And that is kind of where my
• 34:44
  work comes in because whilst winds have sort of been like,
• 34:47
  yeah, the historic juggernaut in the the search for dark matter
• 34:51
  around, I'm going to say, I guess it's really like the ideas
• 34:55
  about these particles began in like the late 20th century, like
• 34:58
  70s, eighties, 90s. They really started to become
• 35:02
  like a big force in definitely the 21st century.
• 35:05
  And it's it's searches for this different particle called the
• 35:08
  axion, which is a different kind of dark Meadow.
• 35:11
  Great. Real quickly before we dive into
• 35:13
  that, I just want to confirm that I understand correctly.
• 35:16
  Is the is the issue with the WIMP particle and the
• 35:20
  neutralino? Yeah.
• 35:24
  Is the issue that we can't measure it and so we're saying
• 35:29
  it can't be it because we haven't measured, because you
• 35:31
  haven't found an accurate way to measure it.
• 35:33
  Is that? Is that what the problem
• 35:34
  ultimately is? It's some two things.
• 35:36
  So I mentioned before that like the WIMP particle was motivated
• 35:40
  by these like grand unified theories called supersymmetry.
• 35:43
  And for a long time, particle physicists were very excited
• 35:45
  about supersymmetry and, and many still are.
• 35:47
  And you've probably heard of the Large Hadron Collider, like the
• 35:50
  big particle accelerator that is the like, maybe, maybe not.
• 35:53
  OK, maybe this is one of my OK, I need to, I need to get out of
• 35:56
  my head problems. Yeah, sorry.
• 35:59
  I said I'm a real novice, but yeah.
• 36:01
  Yeah, sure, sure. Well, yeah, the the Large Hadron
• 36:04
  Collider is this giant particle accelerator that is underneath
• 36:08
  like several countries in Europe.
• 36:09
  It's like the biggest physics experiment that's ever been
• 36:11
  built. It's like many, many kilometers
• 36:15
  of, of particle acceleration with like super strong magnets
• 36:18
  that drive the particles around and smash them together.
• 36:21
  And like, look at what comes out.
• 36:22
  And it's, it's, it's part of a like grand tradition of what's
• 36:25
  called like Collider physics, which is how we like discover
• 36:28
  stuff about like the very, very small particles in the universe.
• 36:32
  Like we smash atoms together, we see what falls out and we go,
• 36:35
  OK, the atoms made-up of protons and neutrons and most protons
• 36:37
  and neutrons are made-up of quarks and blah, blah, blah.
• 36:39
  And that's, that's like the history of particle physics.
• 36:42
  And the, the Large Hadron Collider is this massive,
• 36:46
  massive thing that was built, you know, to, to do lots of new
• 36:51
  physics. But one of the things that
• 36:52
  people were really excited about was it was going to find all of
• 36:55
  this evidence of supersymmetry, not just the neutralino, the web
• 36:58
  stuff matter, but like all of these other predictions of
• 37:00
  supersymmetry. And so we built this big
• 37:02
  Collider and we did all of these like precise experiments and we
• 37:04
  discovered all kinds of like incredible things, like new
• 37:06
  particles, figured out all this other amazing stuff about
• 37:09
  particle physics and no evidence of supersymmetry.
• 37:12
  And so it was kind of like, so the, the theoretical grounding
• 37:16
  for the existence of this particle, whilst it's not dead,
• 37:19
  it's fair to say it's looking a little shakier.
• 37:21
  And you know, many physicists will tell you, oh, we just like
• 37:24
  if we have a, a more powerful Collider, if we can access
• 37:26
  higher energy scales, then we'll eventually find the
• 37:28
  supersymmetry. So yeah, like I said, by no
• 37:31
  means dead, certainly shakier as a, as a theoretical motivation
• 37:36
  for the existence of a particle. And then at the same time, all
• 37:39
  of the dark matter experiments that have been looking for the
• 37:41
  web dark matter for decades have not seen it.
• 37:44
  So like whilst when you're looking for like an unknown
• 37:46
  unknown, you can't ever say it's like completely ruled out,
• 37:49
  right? Because you can always just say,
• 37:50
  oh, it exists in a different vast range or a different energy
• 37:52
  scale, or it's more weakly coupled is I think personally,
• 37:56
  I'm willing to stand on this fair to say that it is at least
• 38:01
  worth considering the fact that these particles may not exist
• 38:05
  and that there are other candidates that we should be
• 38:06
  looking for. You know that's that's not to
• 38:09
  say sorry. It's a very polite way.
• 38:12
  Of saying it too, you know, because it's just an idea, you
• 38:15
  know, You're not insisting on anything.
• 38:17
  Yeah, that, that's right. Like I certainly and like, yeah,
• 38:19
  to be clear, like there's, there's generations of these web
• 38:22
  experiments that are still being built that I think should be
• 38:24
  built because the hypothesis is by no means completely ruled
• 38:27
  out. And we have a lot of a lot of
• 38:29
  expertise at building these things now and a lot of very
• 38:31
  capable scientists who can, you know, it's kind of like a
• 38:34
  marginal, like it's like the the field is already built.
• 38:37
  So building the next generation detector is like a marginal cost
• 38:39
  compared to spinning up an entire new field.
• 38:41
  So I think that is very much worth continuing to pursue as an
• 38:45
  area, at least for the moment. But I also think it is fair to
• 38:47
  say that both the theoretical groundings of the things and the
• 38:50
  experimental searches have meant that it makes sense to consider
• 38:53
  alternate candidates more seriously.
• 38:55
  And that is, that is kind of where my work comes in, which
• 38:58
  is, yeah, like I said, this, this newer kid on the block as
• 39:01
  it comes to, you know, dark matter, it's called the Axion,
• 39:04
  which is it's sort of a similar story.
• 39:05
  It, it falls out of a different area of particle physics,
• 39:09
  There's this other problem. So I mentioned like, oh, super
• 39:11
  symmetry is the motivation for this particle slightly different
• 39:13
  thing. There's this big problem in
• 39:14
  particle physics that I honestly will not go into because it's,
• 39:17
  it's very, you know, people can Google if they're interested.
• 39:20
  It's called the strong CP problem.
• 39:22
  Suffice to say, it is a very glaring hole in an otherwise
• 39:28
  incredibly precise theory. So like we have this really,
• 39:30
  really nice mathematical theory called quantum chromo dynamics
• 39:33
  that explains things about the way particles behave on very
• 39:35
  small scales. And it's really precise.
• 39:37
  Like it's able to predict things, interactions and
• 39:39
  particle gliders really, really, really well, except for the fact
• 39:41
  that it has this one gaping hole in it.
• 39:43
  And whenever you've got something like that, it's like,
• 39:44
  oh, that's really interesting because this theory is clearly
• 39:47
  not completely bad. It's really good.
• 39:50
  It's just predicting like one thing that we just equivocate
• 39:53
  like unequivocally do not see. And so like, what, what's what's
• 39:56
  going on there? Like what's wrong with this
• 39:58
  theory? You know, what's the patch we
• 39:59
  need to put on it? What's the change we need to
• 40:01
  make? And in the 1970s, these
• 40:04
  physicists proposed that you can solve this problem by
• 40:07
  introducing this new particle called the axion.
• 40:09
  And it's introduced and it has these certain properties that
• 40:11
  interact with that physics in such a way that it removes that
• 40:14
  problem. And then shortly thereafter.
• 40:16
  A bunch of other physicists, sort of similar story to the
• 40:19
  WIMP, looked at this prediction of this new particle, the axion,
• 40:22
  and said, oh, it also has the exact properties we need of dark
• 40:24
  matter. And it can also be produced in
• 40:26
  the early universe in such a way that it can account for all of
• 40:29
  the dark matter that's all around us.
• 40:30
  So that makes it a compelling dark matter candidate.
• 40:34
  This it's, it's, it's, it's very plausible that the dark matter
• 40:37
  could be made of these particles.
• 40:39
  They're motivated by this other problem.
• 40:41
  They can account for the dark matter.
• 40:42
  So we should look for them. And so that is the kinds of
• 40:45
  experiments that I do is searching for this particular
• 40:48
  type of dark matter called the axion.
• 40:51
  Now, when you're searching for dark matter, it doesn't matter
• 40:53
  what model it is. And also to be clear, there's
• 40:54
  like dozens of other candidates as well.
• 40:56
  These are, I think it's probably fair to say, just kind of the
• 40:59
  two biggest ones, the Wimp and the Axion.
• 41:02
  The, the, when you're searching for them, regardless of what
• 41:06
  you're searching for, you've still got a like, it's not like,
• 41:08
  oh, I'll build an experiment for this particle.
• 41:10
  I'll build an experiment for this particle.
• 41:11
  There's one type of experiment to search for that particle
• 41:14
  because the properties of these things exist in what are called
• 41:17
  parameter spaces. So like part of the issue is we
• 41:19
  don't know the mass of either of these particles.
• 41:21
  So like we don't know if say dark matter is axions, whether
• 41:25
  it's made of a smaller number of very heavy axions or a much
• 41:28
  larger number of very light axions.
• 41:30
  We know roughly how many total mass there is like in a given
• 41:33
  volume. We just don't know what's making
• 41:35
  that up. And then we also don't know how
• 41:37
  strongly interacting they are. So if you imagine like a 2 axis
• 41:40
  parameter space, like on the X axis you would have the mass of
• 41:43
  the particle and on the Y axis you would have like how strongly
• 41:46
  it interacts with the regular matter.
• 41:48
  And the particle can be like anywhere in that space.
• 41:52
  And so when you when you do an experiment, you are only
• 41:55
  sensitive to like a small subset of that space at any given time.
• 41:59
  You can only make your experiment to search for axions
• 42:01
  in a given mass range in a given sensitivity range.
• 42:04
  And so that's essentially the name of the game.
• 42:06
  It's building different experiments that probe different
• 42:08
  regions of the parameter space and either say, OK, upgrade,
• 42:12
  we've detected dark out of here. Or as has been the case with
• 42:14
  every experiment to date, no, we didn't.
• 42:16
  And we can rule out a chunk of this parameter space and we can
• 42:19
  say like, OK, cool, we searched here, we didn't see it, so that
• 42:22
  bit's ruled out and now we can move on to the next bit.
• 42:24
  Or we can try and make the thing more sensitive to try and push
• 42:26
  lower and lower on the Y axis. I see.
• 42:29
  OK, think I think I got that all.
• 42:32
  I think, I think I got that all hang on.
• 42:37
  I'm trying to think of that the best way to process and to to
• 42:43
  respond. So how do you, So what are you
• 42:45
  observing? What are you taking, and how are
• 42:47
  you observing it, and how? And what's the process like for
• 42:50
  actually filtering out whether or not you're finding this dark
• 42:52
  matter or not? Good, good question.
• 42:54
  So it depends on on what you believe it is.
• 42:57
  But going forward, I'm just going to talk about axioms,
• 42:59
  because that's the kind of thing I do.
• 43:00
  Sure, with Axion, dark matter searches, one of the things
• 43:04
  that's nice about axions as a candidate is they are predicted
• 43:07
  to have an interaction with photons, which are particles of
• 43:11
  light. And the thing that as a species
• 43:14
  we are the best at detecting. We're really good at observing
• 43:16
  photons. Our eyes do it really well.
• 43:18
  We build telescopes, we build other kinds of sensors that are
• 43:20
  really, really good at detecting small amounts of light, which
• 43:23
  makes them experimentally attractive as a candidate
• 43:26
  because you have a mechanism by which you can take this
• 43:28
  invisible stuff, dark matter, and convert it into a little
• 43:31
  flash of light, something we can see a really, really good at
• 43:33
  observing. And we do that with experiments
• 43:36
  that are called Axion haloscopes, which actually were
• 43:40
  proposed by a guy who was at the University of Florida.
• 43:43
  His name is PS Akivi. He's a great physicist.
• 43:46
  And yeah, sorry, Pierre Sikivi PIERESIKIV i.e.
• 43:53
  Yeah. Anyway, very, very good, good
• 43:56
  physicist there at UF. Anyway, he proposed this type of
• 44:00
  experiment where you can convert axons into photons in inside a
• 44:05
  special kind of chamber. And so the way you do that is
• 44:08
  you apply a strong magnetic field.
• 44:10
  So like a really, really strong magnet, like stronger than the
• 44:13
  kind of magnet that you might use in a scrap yard to pick up a
• 44:15
  car, kind of stronger than an MRI magnet.
• 44:19
  And if there are axions inside passing through some amount of
• 44:22
  them will interact with that magnet and convert into one of
• 44:25
  these little photons, these little flashes of light.
• 44:27
  And then the game, the game becomes detecting those photons.
• 44:29
  And then it's about how you do it.
• 44:31
  And the thing that makes it hard is what lots of things make it
• 44:34
  hard. The two things that make it
• 44:35
  hardest are because the so the the frequency of that photon or
• 44:40
  like the color of the light if you will, depends on the axion
• 44:43
  mass which is not a quantity that we know.
• 44:45
  So we don't know what frequency that light is going to be and
• 44:50
  the size of the signal like whilst we don't know how
• 44:53
  strongly it couples. So like how many of those
• 44:55
  photons are going to convert per second.
• 44:56
  What we do know is that it is a very small number.
• 44:59
  So like even in the kind of best case scenarios, it's going to be
• 45:03
  a very, very small signal of light.
• 45:06
  So we're looking for tiny little flashes of light of an unknown
• 45:09
  frequency, which is a really difficult experimental challenge
• 45:12
  because you can only build a light detector to be sensitive
• 45:15
  to some bandwidth of frequencies at any given time.
• 45:18
  But you are getting maybe? Am I understanding this
• 45:22
  correctly? So you're basically causing a
• 45:24
  reaction that is measurable, right?
• 45:27
  Meaning that the, the, the magnetic force allows the axiom
• 45:31
  to I guess collides or whatever it is interacts with axiom in
• 45:36
  the sense that causes it to turn to light.
• 45:39
  And you could capture that, right?
• 45:41
  And you could actually. That's exactly right.
• 45:43
  That's the that's the goal of these experiments.
• 45:45
  And the challenge is that you don't know how much light it's
• 45:48
  giving off, or what the percentage of light to its mass
• 45:52
  it creates in the process. Yeah, we don't know how much of
• 45:56
  it it's producing that. That would be like the
• 45:58
  probability of interaction. The other thing we don't know is
• 46:01
  the the like, if you've like, if you use a radio, right and like
• 46:05
  you tune the radio through different frequencies, like it's
• 46:08
  like looking for like a radio station.
• 46:09
  We don't know the radio station. Like we have to tune our
• 46:11
  detector because we don't know the frequency of the light
• 46:14
  that's coming out. So it's actually very similar to
• 46:16
  to a radio station because a radio station is a thing that is
• 46:19
  picking up radio frequency light, a radio tune.
• 46:22
  It's so it's actually quite similar, like we're tuning,
• 46:24
  we're tuning a radio detector to look for light of an unknown
• 46:28
  frequency and an unknown signal strength as well, which makes it
• 46:31
  challenging because, yeah, like much like your car's radio
• 46:34
  receiver, it needs to be tuned because it is only sensitive to
• 46:37
  some small bandwidth, the frequencies at any given time.
• 46:39
  The same is true for our receivers that we use in the
• 46:42
  Axion experiments. We can only be sensitive to some
• 46:44
  bandwidth of frequency. So we have to tune the thing
• 46:46
  around and that's just experimentally quite
• 46:48
  challenging. It turns out tuning the location
• 46:51
  in frequency space the key detector is sensitive to.
• 46:53
  And then of course there's just the fact that the signals are
• 46:55
  incredibly weak, which means that you are always looking for
• 46:59
  something small buried in a huge amount of noise.
• 47:01
  So that's that's the experimental challenge is to
• 47:03
  bring the noise level down and to increase your ability to do
• 47:06
  like statistical data processing to pull small signals out of
• 47:09
  noise. I gotcha.
• 47:13
  I can't believe I got, but I got you.
• 47:15
  Great, glad to hear it. Hey, that's a real that's a real
• 47:18
  testament to your ability to explain this stuff because you
• 47:21
  did it. That was that was that was a
• 47:23
  trip. And I'm happy I was able to hang
• 47:24
  on for the ride. I'm.
• 47:26
  Glad. So, but it's got to be
• 47:29
  incredibly encouraging to know that you are getting like you're
• 47:33
  getting a reaction, you're getting something tangible that
• 47:35
  you can that you can measure. When was the first time that
• 47:40
  this was measured, and how long has it been since we're trying
• 47:43
  to accurately measure it? So this, this is the thing so
• 47:46
  much like with like with the with the Wimps, what I'm
• 47:49
  describing is the mechanism by which this interaction is
• 47:52
  proposed to occur. We have not actually yet
• 47:54
  detected this particle. That's the thing we're doing
• 47:57
  searches for this. So when we run an experiment,
• 47:59
  because light is everywhere, you detect stuff all the time.
• 48:03
  And then the question becomes like, is that an axion?
• 48:06
  Have we definitively proven that this thing exists, right.
• 48:08
  So this, this is this is the the great mystery of dark matter.
• 48:11
  We've known about this stuff for about 100 years.
• 48:14
  We've done a lot of very precise experiments and we have never
• 48:17
  like categorically detected it directly here on Earth.
• 48:21
  It may be that we just can't, It may be that we are wrong about
• 48:25
  what it's made of. It's not made of limbs, it's not
• 48:28
  made of axions, and it just doesn't interact with the type
• 48:31
  of stuff we can make detectors out of.
• 48:32
  There's no reason that can't be the case.
• 48:34
  All we can do. I was going to say the
• 48:37
  beginning. I was going to say the
• 48:38
  beginning. Well, you just think that our
• 48:39
  method of measuring things, you know, could capture, you know?
• 48:43
  Yeah, there's there's no reason to to well, OK, I'm not going to
• 48:47
  say there's no reason to believe that, but it's not, it's not
• 48:50
  impossible that. Yeah, we just can't, right.
• 48:53
  Like so. So when we talk about physics,
• 48:56
  we talk about the particles in the universe interacting through
• 48:59
  what we call the four fundamental interactions.
• 49:04
  And this, this is just a list of stuff that particles in the
• 49:07
  universe are allowed to do. It's really, it's quite, it's
• 49:10
  quite descriptive. We don't in some ways have like
• 49:14
  a deep, deep why knowledge of why these things exist.
• 49:18
  We just kind of have observed and we can very precisely
• 49:21
  mathematically describe these four different kinds of
• 49:24
  interactions. So the four things that as far
• 49:26
  as we know, it's possible there are more.
• 49:28
  The four things we know about now, that stuff is allowed to do
• 49:30
  in the universe, gravity, that's one of them.
• 49:33
  So that is stuff that has mass, attracts other stuff that has
• 49:36
  mass. Anything that has mass, even
• 49:38
  something very light, something very heavy, they pull on each
• 49:40
  other gravitationally. Another one, electromagnetism.
• 49:44
  This is the main force that you actually feel in your day-to-day
• 49:46
  life. If you push down on the table in
• 49:47
  front of you or sit on the chair you're sitting on, the reason
• 49:50
  your hand doesn't go through the table and the reason you don't
• 49:52
  fall through the chair is because the particles in you and
• 49:54
  the particles in the surface are repelling each other using
• 49:57
  electromagnetism. It's also the force that makes,
• 50:00
  you know, magnets stick to fridges and like static
• 50:02
  electricity, that interaction is, is is a really dominant and
• 50:05
  important one. Then there's these two other
• 50:07
  ones that are called the strong and weak nuclear interactions,
• 50:10
  which only occur on very, very small scales inside atoms and
• 50:14
  inside subatomic particles that are to do with the way that
• 50:16
  those but are bound together and the way that they decay apart.
• 50:21
  So those are the four things that we know stuff is allowed to
• 50:24
  do. As far as dark matter is
• 50:26
  concerned, we know it must experience gravity because
• 50:29
  that's the only way we see it. We see it pulling on stuff in
• 50:32
  space, right? We see the presence of extra
• 50:33
  mass, so it must have gravity. We know it must not experience
• 50:37
  electromagnetism because it's passing right through us all the
• 50:39
  time. It passes through itself.
• 50:41
  We can observe like large clusters that contain both
• 50:44
  regular and dark matter hitting each other.
• 50:46
  The regular matter like collides and sprays off.
• 50:48
  The dark matter just goes straight through.
• 50:50
  So we know it doesn't experience electromagnetism, we know it
• 50:54
  doesn't experience the strong nuclear interaction, because if
• 50:56
  it did, it would like mess up the way atoms form and would be
• 50:59
  able to detect it. And we're not sure about the
• 51:01
  other one, so it's entire, but it is entirely possible that
• 51:05
  dark matter is some new kind of exotic material that only
• 51:08
  experiences gravitation. It just only has gravity.
• 51:11
  And so the only way we're ever going to see it is by looking in
• 51:14
  space with telescopes at the way stuff moves around and seeing
• 51:16
  the presence of this matter. And all these experiments that
• 51:19
  we're doing on Earth to try and detect it by these other
• 51:21
  mechanisms will just never work because the dark matter just
• 51:25
  doesn't interact that way. It's possible, but in terms of
• 51:29
  like, why are we doing those experiments then?
• 51:32
  It's because it's the only thing we can do.
• 51:35
  Like we, we, we, you know, we can only use the, the tools that
• 51:38
  we have. And like you would say, it's
• 51:40
  like it's, you know, we, we're, we're trying to answer a big
• 51:44
  mystery. Anyone being intellectually
• 51:46
  honest is going to tell you, we may never answer it, but like,
• 51:49
  does that mean we shouldn't try? You know, we, we, we try with
• 51:53
  the best tools we have available and we'd be honest about the
• 51:55
  fact that it may not work. But if we want to try and solve
• 51:58
  the mystery, this is the only way we're going to.
• 52:01
  And even if the stuff that we're doing now isn't the right stuff,
• 52:05
  it's still like the steps on the road, you know, like if we rule
• 52:07
  out the fact that it is either of these particles, well, OK,
• 52:11
  now we need to do the next thing and maybe eventually we'll get
• 52:13
  there. Like this is the like science is
• 52:16
  it? It's, it's not like it's not, I
• 52:19
  guess I would say it's, it's like this.
• 52:20
  I heard this said somewhere sometime.
• 52:22
  I can't remember who said it. But science is not a guaranteed
• 52:26
  path to knowledge. It is not guaranteed that by
• 52:29
  doing the science you will get the answer.
• 52:31
  But it is a reliable path to knowledge and it is kind of the
• 52:35
  only one that we have so. Really like.
• 52:38
  We go, here's the problem. We throw our best hypothesis at
• 52:41
  it in terms of stuff we can actually do, and we do the best
• 52:44
  we can to try and answer the question.
• 52:47
  I gotcha. I gotcha.
• 52:48
  What do do people hypothesize about the potential uses of
• 52:52
  understanding or applying, you know, our knowledge and trying
• 52:55
  to, I guess, control or manipulate?
• 52:57
  It yeah, it's a great question. It's all my favorite ones about
• 53:00
  dark matter like, OK, cool. So it's an interesting problem.
• 53:02
  I agree. Get into it.
• 53:03
  I'm sorry about that. Sorry.
• 53:05
  Oh, no, no, no, no. That's great.
• 53:07
  It's the right time. Yeah.
• 53:08
  It's one of these good questions.
• 53:08
  It's like, OK, cool. You've convinced me.
• 53:10
  It's an interesting problem. But like, ultimately, why do we
• 53:12
  care about this? I think there's a lot of
• 53:14
  different. I imagine that if something that
• 53:17
  comprises so much of the galaxy's mass, it's got to be
• 53:20
  enormously, enormously valuable, no?
• 53:23
  Well. I mean, hey, so that's that's
• 53:26
  one of the things is because we don't know what it is.
• 53:29
  It's kind of you can't, you know, we can't say one way or
• 53:31
  another. But I think the fact that we
• 53:33
  don't know what it is and we know there's so much of it to me
• 53:36
  is like reason enough that we need to know what it is.
• 53:38
  Because like, you look around and you think about like, OK,
• 53:40
  think about everything humans have accomplished, computers,
• 53:43
  modern medicines, space travel, all of art and literature,
• 53:45
  everything that's ever moved you in this life, all of that has
• 53:48
  been achieved using 1/6 of the matter in the universe.
• 53:52
  And there was five times as much again of this invisible stuff
• 53:55
  called dark matter. We just don't know what it is
• 53:57
  like. So, like, to me, the idea that
• 53:59
  it's not worth trying to figure out what it is is kind of
• 54:01
  ridiculous. Like, we, we need to know what
• 54:03
  it is first. And if it turns out that it's
• 54:05
  useless, well, OK. But we had to, we had to find
• 54:08
  that out because it could be, you know, like this whole new
• 54:11
  world of, of incredible stuff. And, and so that's like the very
• 54:14
  kind of high level, kind of, you know, optimist answer on the
• 54:17
  other side, like the slightly more practical answers, like
• 54:19
  there's a few of those as well. If it is axions for, for one,
• 54:24
  that's really particularly appealing because we can convert
• 54:27
  them into light, which is, you know, a form of energy that we
• 54:29
  can potentially harness and, and use for things.
• 54:33
  I mean, we'd, we'd need a few things to go our way for that to
• 54:35
  be the case. Like we'd need the coupling to
• 54:37
  be quite strong. We'd need the local density of
• 54:39
  axions to be strong. But anyway, it's, it's, it's
• 54:42
  certainly interesting. You know, you can also imagine
• 54:44
  that people have proposed using them for like communication
• 54:46
  technology, like if we can figure out how to reliably
• 54:49
  convert, because the conversion works both ways.
• 54:51
  If axions exist and they couple to photons the way we think they
• 54:53
  do, you can also turn photons into axions.
• 54:56
  And so you can imagine like taking some signal of
• 54:59
  information that's encoded in in photons, which is a common way
• 55:01
  we send information, converting it into a stream of axions and
• 55:04
  then reconverting it on the other side.
• 55:05
  And having like unhackable, undetectable communication
• 55:08
  transmitted by dark matter that you can shoot right from the
• 55:10
  center of the planet. You don't need satellites or
• 55:11
  whatever. So, you know, you can get all
• 55:13
  kinds of interesting sci-fi ideas out of axions because you
• 55:16
  can couple them to photons. And I do think it's worth
• 55:19
  thinking about those things. But ultimately I think the first
• 55:21
  thing we need to do is figure out what this stuff is and then
• 55:23
  we can start looking at like what it's useful for.
• 55:26
  And then of course, there's the other side of it, which is that
• 55:28
  like we, we know doing this kind of fundamental research in
• 55:32
  inevitably leads to new technologies and, and, and new
• 55:34
  kinds of like spin out. So there's, there's two aspects
• 55:37
  of it, right? There's like, as we build better
• 55:39
  and better experiments, we're building better detectors, we're
• 55:42
  developing quantum technologies, we're developing things that are
• 55:44
  going to be useful in other areas.
• 55:46
  That's certainly the case, and that has always been the case.
• 55:48
  There is also the fact that like doing fundamental physics is the
• 55:52
  only thing historically that has led to massive technological
• 55:56
  breakthroughs. There's and like usually they
• 55:59
  don't come from people doing research with like well defined
• 56:03
  outputs and answers. And this is like a key point
• 56:05
  that I like to that I like to hit like so for example, like
• 56:08
  all modern computing technology, communication technology is
• 56:12
  based on this thing called a semiconductor transistor.
• 56:15
  And our ability to engineer those semiconductor transistors
• 56:18
  relies heavily on our understanding of quantum
• 56:21
  physics. And if you ask the people who
• 56:23
  discovered quantum physics in like the early 20th century,
• 56:26
  what is this for, they wouldn't have said 01 day.
• 56:30
  It will allow us to build something called a semiconductor
• 56:32
  transistor that will eventually go inside something called an
• 56:35
  iPhone. They would have said, I'm just
• 56:36
  trying to understand the way the universe works on a fundamental
• 56:38
  level. And that is the thing that
• 56:40
  inevitably leads to making the new stuff.
• 56:44
  Another great example is radio waves in like the 1880s when
• 56:48
  radio waves were discovered by the scientist Heinrich Kurz is
• 56:51
  recent enough that you can actually go read newspaper
• 56:53
  articles from the time. There's a journalist who
• 56:55
  interviews Heinrich Kurtz and says Professor Hertz, you know,
• 56:58
  I'm paraphrasing, great job that you've discovered these radio
• 57:00
  waves. But essentially like of what
• 57:02
  possible use are these radio waves?
• 57:04
  And Heinrich Hertz goes, I don't know, probably nothing.
• 57:07
  I just wanted to prove that Maxwell, who's the physicist who
• 57:10
  proposed them, was correct. And now, of course, the entire
• 57:14
  modern communication network is based on radio wave
• 57:16
  communication. So like, you don't always know
• 57:18
  what the downs to impacts of these things are, but doing that
• 57:20
  research is the only way we ever make truly groundbreaking
• 57:23
  discoveries. And if we, if we require that
• 57:25
  the people doing that research can tell you from day one what
• 57:28
  technological, scientific or like, you know, commercial
• 57:31
  output is going to come, then we are doing something wrong.
• 57:35
  Right, can not a completely fun, speculative, you know, sci-fi
• 57:41
  fun level. Can you potentially understand
• 57:47
  the UAP phenomenon that's been going on through the through,
• 57:52
  especially the way the way you describe the relationship
• 57:54
  between axioms and photons and the way that they kind of could
• 57:57
  convert over And it almost, And I mean, you know, the, I guess
• 58:01
  the common thing that people seem to be saying about the UAP
• 58:04
  UFOs is just the sheer speed and velocity doesn't seem to, it
• 58:07
  seems to break our understanding of physics at the moment.
• 58:10
  And I'm not sure if you're and I don't, and I'm actually, I'm
• 58:13
  curious what you would think, if you are familiar with Eric
• 58:16
  Weinstein, who goes on long podcasts and talks about how he
• 58:21
  thinks that there's basically blacklisted physics or
• 58:24
  classified physics that we just have not, you know, that like
• 58:27
  we've basically been at a dead end for a while and it's been
• 58:30
  going on in a classified, compartmentalized, you know,
• 58:34
  capacity. And this is kind of what we've
• 58:36
  been seeing. I don't know if he goes as far
• 58:39
  as it is what we've been seeing, but he says it's curious about
• 58:43
  the relationship between the. 2 Sure.
• 58:46
  Want to talk about your PS. The first thing I will say is
• 58:48
  that I am by no means an expert in this area and I you know this
• 58:55
  is fun. This is just fun Yeah, just for
• 58:57
  fun. The next thing I would say is
• 59:00
  without looking like, because I'm probably not like, as I know
• 59:03
  there's like interesting stuff going on in that area in terms
• 59:05
  of like new releases of information and stuff and like,
• 59:07
  you know, declassified videos and whatever.
• 59:09
  I know that that stuff has been confirmed by like military
• 59:12
  officials saying like, yeah, these are real videos or
• 59:13
  whatever. The last time I honestly checked
• 59:17
  in on that stuff in any kind of serious way, like looking into
• 59:19
  it was like a couple of years ago, to be honest.
• 59:21
  But sort of I imagine things may have changed.
• 59:23
  But just to like one thing that I think is quite interesting and
• 59:26
  important to, to acknowledge about some of that stuff at the
• 59:29
  time, at least the stuff that I was referring to from a couple
• 59:32
  of years ago, like the stuff that gets referred to as like
• 59:34
  physics defying or physics breaking.
• 59:37
  I, I think it's care. Like it's important to be
• 59:40
  careful about that language because like a lot of the stuff
• 59:43
  people like, oh, it's like moving so fast, it's
• 59:45
  accelerating so fast or whatever, based on like
• 59:49
  statements made by like the like people on the planes who are
• 59:53
  like filming the thing. And it's like, it's not like,
• 59:56
  yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
• 59:59
  But it's like, you know, the the people who are measuring a
• 1:00:01
  thing, moving really fast or whatever.
• 1:00:04
  They're not like, they're very smart people who know how to fly
• 1:00:07
  these planes, but they're not necessarily like.
• 1:00:11
  They're not just the ones saying it.
• 1:00:12
  It's the people it's captured on.
• 1:00:14
  I mean, you, we have military footage of it.
• 1:00:16
  A lot of this, because a lot of this stuff revolves around
• 1:00:18
  military. I don't.
• 1:00:19
  Know that's that's what I'm talking about like the military
• 1:00:21
  guys right like so like the guys like on the video will be like
• 1:00:22
  whoa that thing's crazy I've never seen it like they don't
• 1:00:25
  like that doesn't mean that it's like in physics it means it's a
• 1:00:28
  possible plane right like they don't necessarily have the like
• 1:00:32
  so I I don't know I've seen I've seen things but someone's like
• 1:00:34
  oh this crypt defies physics and then like people look at it and
• 1:00:36
  they're like well clearly that's like that speed is a radar error
• 1:00:39
  this frame shows the right speed and that's actually.
• 1:00:42
  Just I'm not referring to the, I'm not talking about like
• 1:00:44
  Twitter videos. I'm talking about, you know, if
• 1:00:47
  something's giving, you know, if you could detect something with
• 1:00:49
  the radar, that means that there's tangible data that's
• 1:00:52
  being collected about it, isn't it?
• 1:00:53
  Doesn't. It totally.
• 1:00:54
  I'm not saying these things don't I'm not saying these
• 1:00:56
  things don't exist to to be clear, sure.
• 1:00:58
  I'm, I'm just saying that like, I think like I haven't seen any
• 1:01:03
  like confirmed official footage that could like, and I'm not
• 1:01:07
  saying it doesn't exist that that like you could look at it
• 1:01:09
  and be like, oh wow, that truly breaks physics.
• 1:01:11
  There's no way that a craft could do that, you know.
• 1:01:14
  And, and like the this, I think the stuff that has been like
• 1:01:16
  officially like military footage risers just like, yeah, that's a
• 1:01:18
  really interesting weird thing that's going on.
• 1:01:21
  It doesn't look like a it doesn't look like a plane that
• 1:01:23
  we're familiar with today. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not
• 1:01:26
  convinced that that stuff is necessarily physics breaking.
• 1:01:30
  Yeah. But anyway, to to talk about in
• 1:01:32
  a more big picture sense, do I believe that there are aliens in
• 1:01:35
  the universe? My answer is almost certainly
• 1:01:37
  yes. I mean, the universe is very,
• 1:01:39
  very large. It would be crazy to think that
• 1:01:41
  there aren't aliens somewhere in terms of whether they've ever
• 1:01:44
  been to Earth. I don't know.
• 1:01:47
  I, I personally, I think like it's totally unlikely.
• 1:01:50
  Like as much as I want to believe in like the, you know,
• 1:01:52
  like the, and I, I wouldn't say that it's, it's like impossible.
• 1:01:56
  I just think it's like kind of unlikely given the distances
• 1:01:59
  involved and, and the fact that like, yeah, obviously.
• 1:02:02
  And, and this is where it gets in the realm of like, oh, OK.
• 1:02:04
  But you can imagine some like massively, massively advanced
• 1:02:06
  thing. And it's just like, but at that
• 1:02:08
  point it's like, it's, it's purely like it's, it's literally
• 1:02:10
  purely speculation. Like, is it, is it possible?
• 1:02:12
  Yeah. Is it possible that there is
• 1:02:14
  some like massively, massively advanced civilization and it's
• 1:02:17
  able of doing like wormhole travel across space?
• 1:02:18
  I'm sure. Yeah, that of course that's
• 1:02:20
  possible. But I don't believe that those
• 1:02:22
  people are like like if if the station was not advanced and
• 1:02:26
  they didn't want us to know about them, like we wouldn't.
• 1:02:29
  And if they did want us to know about them, we would like the
• 1:02:32
  Earth based governments wouldn't be able to stop them.
• 1:02:34
  So I don't know that's that's like those are the things that
• 1:02:37
  my brain always gets hitched on when I think about this stuff is
• 1:02:39
  that I'm just like as much as I look at like interesting UAP
• 1:02:42
  phenomena and I'm like, wow, that's really interesting.
• 1:02:44
  I really like and I do believe there are probably aliens in the
• 1:02:48
  universe. I just like I can't get over
• 1:02:50
  these mental hurdles of like the why of it I find so challenging.
• 1:02:54
  It's just like, well, why would they be here and not telling us?
• 1:02:57
  Or if they didn't want us to know, why would we then be able
• 1:02:59
  to film it like that? That seems, that seems weird to
• 1:03:02
  me. But you know, in terms of like,
• 1:03:04
  is it possible like, yeah, I guess it's possible that there's
• 1:03:07
  some like massively advanced technology in terms of relation
• 1:03:10
  to dark matter. I don't know.
• 1:03:11
  I mean, it'd be throwing out sci-fi buzzwords like, oh, OK.
• 1:03:14
  Well, like manipulating gravity by course in the dark matter and
• 1:03:17
  that lets us travel super falls like, yeah, I don't know, maybe,
• 1:03:19
  but it's that stuff's way out there.
• 1:03:22
  Although stuff that is way out there, sometimes real, but it's
• 1:03:25
  it's it's, yeah, more. Often than I'm than I'm
• 1:03:28
  comfortable with actually is what I said a lot more often
• 1:03:31
  than I'm comfortable with. I found recently, you know,
• 1:03:34
  every everything that I thought was wild is is just having it,
• 1:03:39
  You know, it's just being confirmed.
• 1:03:40
  I'm like this. Yeah, but I, I tend to, you
• 1:03:42
  know, I, I think, I think I have a really strong argument with
• 1:03:45
  the why and the Y factor, particularly with, coupled with
• 1:03:49
  the fact that this activity does happen on military bases, does
• 1:03:53
  lead me to think that. Especially because now we're
• 1:03:55
  having, you know, conversations at least from the Americans.
• 1:03:58
  And I actually was going to ask you this from the Australian
• 1:04:00
  perspective, because my understanding is that other
• 1:04:02
  countries are not as skeptical about alien life in general as
• 1:04:05
  Americans are. And I think Americans have an
• 1:04:07
  enormous, enormous stigma. It's even the possibility that
• 1:04:11
  humans aren't alone, you know? Right.
• 1:04:13
  OK, Well, yeah, I mean, that's interesting.
• 1:04:16
  I think. I don't know, I, I, I wouldn't
• 1:04:19
  want to speak to like the Australian general public
• 1:04:22
  perspective. I would say most of the
• 1:04:23
  scientists I know, I imagine believe that aliens probably
• 1:04:27
  exist somewhere, you know, like the, the, that, that it's, it's
• 1:04:30
  most of the businesses probably believe that.
• 1:04:33
  I, I think from at least the one that I've spoken to, tend to
• 1:04:36
  tend to think that the universe is so vast.
• 1:04:38
  If the universe's purpose was to create humans, Gee, there's a
• 1:04:41
  lot of waste in that simulation. You know that there are easier
• 1:04:44
  ways to do that than to make. So anyway, yeah, in, in a broad
• 1:04:51
  sense, I, I tend to to think that that's probably the case.
• 1:04:54
  But yeah, the UAP services find hard to connect.
• 1:04:56
  I think it's just more likely like the more, the more likely
• 1:04:59
  explanation is that they're just like highly advanced military
• 1:05:01
  craft that we just have the disclosure about or some other
• 1:05:05
  kind of thing. I, I don't know, I mean, like,
• 1:05:07
  don't get me wrong, like I find this substitute super
• 1:05:09
  interesting and I like to talk about it and I like to think
• 1:05:11
  about it. I just, I think, yeah, it's,
• 1:05:15
  it's easy to jump to the alien explanation and I would love if
• 1:05:19
  that were true. I just, I think that would be
• 1:05:23
  really cool. I just I'm yet to see anything
• 1:05:27
  that couldn't reasonably be explained by something else.
• 1:05:30
  When I was about, I don't know, maybe 9 or 10, I grew up in New
• 1:05:35
  York and during the change of seasons, I don't know, there's a
• 1:05:38
  phenomenon in Australia. But when there's a pretty
• 1:05:41
  drastic, dramatic, dramatic change in temperature, it looks
• 1:05:45
  sometimes like the stars are shimmering and changing color.
• 1:05:47
  Sometimes, I don't know, probably a regular phenomenon.
• 1:05:51
  You know, I mean, there's a million different reasons why
• 1:05:53
  that would be. I was 11 years old.
• 1:05:54
  I'm looking at my window and I'm going to bed and I see these
• 1:05:57
  shimmering stars. I'm like, they're coming.
• 1:06:00
  And let me call my friend Jason, who's like the smartest friend I
• 1:06:05
  know. And he's a, he's a mechanical
• 1:06:07
  engineer. He was 11 year old at the time.
• 1:06:09
  And I'm like, dude, look outside.
• 1:06:11
  He's like, what? I was like, what is that?
• 1:06:12
  And he's like, I don't know, you guys like pull out this like,
• 1:06:15
  you know, one of his books. And he was like, oh, that's just
• 1:06:17
  like the gas. And like, you know, like right
• 1:06:18
  now it's like, you know, it's small and the air is changing
• 1:06:21
  and the airs get heavier or whatever it is.
• 1:06:23
  And so it just looks like that. We're totally finding.
• 1:06:26
  And ever since then I've wanted it to be true, but I still alas
• 1:06:29
  and disappointed on a regular basis.
• 1:06:32
  Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I yeah, I think it would be
• 1:06:35
  cool, but I, yeah, I just, yeah, I look, I'm not totally close to
• 1:06:39
  it as a concept. There's definitely weird stuff.
• 1:06:41
  I just don't think that it's, yeah, I haven't seen anything
• 1:06:45
  like, Oh yeah, that's definitely aliens as opposed to like, oh,
• 1:06:47
  that's some kind of crazy aircraft that, you know, or like
• 1:06:51
  some kind of drone or something. Sure, sure, sure.
• 1:06:53
  I want to. I want to actually talk the last
• 1:06:56
  little bit with you, if you don't mind, about probably an
• 1:06:59
  equally valuable contribution you're making, which is
• 1:07:02
  communication and teaching. I personally am a huge advocate
• 1:07:05
  of education. I think that in general, it's
• 1:07:08
  enormously underappreciated. And the way that you were
• 1:07:12
  describing the type of science for the sake of science are
• 1:07:15
  almost like playing like a just like, you know, I mean, some of
• 1:07:17
  the best scientists that I know are guys that just have always
• 1:07:20
  loved to play and like take things apart and put things back
• 1:07:22
  together just for the fun of it. And like, like they're just fun
• 1:07:24
  people that like fun things. And so science is appealing to
• 1:07:27
  them for that reason. Tell me about teaching and you
• 1:07:31
  know, 32 year college professor. It's, it's probably, it's
• 1:07:35
  probably fun. I imagine.
• 1:07:37
  I've always wanted to teach college.
• 1:07:38
  I teach high school. Tell me about what that's like
• 1:07:42
  teaching introductory classes and how you know what what you
• 1:07:46
  feel about it and what you're hopeful about.
• 1:07:48
  Sure. So to be clear, I'm not a
• 1:07:50
  professor. I'm a I'm a research fellow.
• 1:07:52
  I have a few runs on the on the totem below professor, but you
• 1:07:55
  know, I'm hoping to hoping to get there one day.
• 1:07:58
  I do some teaching at the moment.
• 1:07:59
  I'm actually like right now one of research fellowships.
• 1:08:02
  I'm actually 100% research allocated time.
• 1:08:04
  I have taught in the past and I do I do I really enjoy it.
• 1:08:09
  I really, I really enjoy it. I like in my last Gen.
• 1:08:12
  I was teaching intro quantum and introparticle physics at the
• 1:08:16
  University of WA and that was really cool.
• 1:08:20
  And I'm a good question. It was like FIS 102, which is
• 1:08:29
  the smaller of the two, because everyone takes FIS 101, which is
• 1:08:32
  like engineers and stuff, like all take FIS 101.
• 1:08:34
  And then FIS 102 is like just the people going into physics.
• 1:08:35
  I don't know, there were maybe like 40 or 50 students in the
• 1:08:37
  class, not that big. And yeah, in some ways that's
• 1:08:43
  really nice because you can like kind of get to know the students
• 1:08:45
  quite well and you like know the students who show up every week
• 1:08:47
  and the ones who don't and you know, what to expect out of
• 1:08:50
  them. Honestly, more of the like,
• 1:08:51
  teaching stuff I do at the moment is more like, it's more
• 1:08:56
  like like all primary school and high school, like school
• 1:08:59
  engagement stuff. So like one of the things that
• 1:09:00
  I'm involved in is this thing here called the National Quantum
• 1:09:03
  and Dark Matter Road trip. Every August in Australia, it's
• 1:09:06
  National Science Week. And a bunch of other physicists
• 1:09:09
  and I get into cars and they like drive around like regional
• 1:09:12
  and remote schools around Australia and like visit
• 1:09:15
  classrooms and science teachers and, and talk about the science
• 1:09:17
  that's going on like around the country and try and like promote
• 1:09:20
  people to get interested in, in STEM and, and to go into physics
• 1:09:23
  at uni. Because I don't know what it's
• 1:09:24
  like in the US, but the rates of like enrollment in like STEM
• 1:09:28
  degrees at universities are like not going in the direction that
• 1:09:31
  they should be. So, so always trying to trying
• 1:09:36
  to bump those numbers up as best we can.
• 1:09:39
  I think part of the compete problem, I completely agree.
• 1:09:41
  Like education is like so, so important.
• 1:09:43
  And a big part of the problem is just that, like, there aren't
• 1:09:46
  enough teachers in high school with a science background.
• 1:09:51
  Yeah. And so like, you'll have, like,
• 1:09:53
  really, like, awesome teachers who are really passionate about
• 1:09:56
  education, and they just, like, struggle with the STEM stuff.
• 1:10:00
  And so then that just gets passed on to the kids.
• 1:10:03
  And then the students like who may have otherwise gone into
• 1:10:05
  STEM because like they like just like find it kind of like
• 1:10:08
  difficult or intimidating or scary because their teacher did.
• 1:10:11
  And so then they, they don't like consider that a path they
• 1:10:14
  can go down. I know like, I think some
• 1:10:16
  countries, I think Canada has a thing where like to be a science
• 1:10:18
  teacher in school, you have to have like at least a few years
• 1:10:21
  of university science. I think that's awesome.
• 1:10:24
  I think that would be great everywhere.
• 1:10:26
  But part of the problem, I guess, is just like Australia's
• 1:10:30
  like so big and so remote. So much of it is so remote that
• 1:10:35
  like, it's, it's not really. And to have like a physics
• 1:10:39
  teacher in every school who actually has a physics degree,
• 1:10:41
  you know, and like, we definitely see that out in the
• 1:10:44
  countryside, there are like so, so rarely like really STEM
• 1:10:49
  teachers with, with those qualifications like in, in the
• 1:10:52
  schools. Yeah.
• 1:10:54
  I don't know what to do about that other than try and
• 1:10:56
  encourage people to go into teaching.
• 1:10:57
  I mean, I think it's, yeah, an incredibly important and
• 1:11:01
  valuable thing to do. And yeah, I think more people
• 1:11:06
  like with stand backgrounds need to need to go do it personally.
• 1:11:12
  Well, the problem is that you are asking people essentially to
• 1:11:16
  be a martyr. But it's hard.
• 1:11:20
  And I think a lot of people that, you know, especially if
• 1:11:23
  you can make bigger money, whether that be via grant or,
• 1:11:26
  you know, a job at A, at a private company or a government
• 1:11:29
  contracting company or whatever it is, you're basically asking
• 1:11:32
  someone to take in a very intense and refined and
• 1:11:36
  particular niche skill and accept essentially minimum wage
• 1:11:40
  for it, you know, and deal with a bunch of snotty kids and their
• 1:11:43
  parents. And, you know, and I, and so I,
• 1:11:49
  I can't imagine if I was a scientist, you know, of that
• 1:11:52
  caliber that I don't want to be a high school teacher either
• 1:11:55
  necessarily, you know. I I agree with you.
• 1:11:59
  I mean, I guess I'm like, not so much talking about people with
• 1:12:01
  PhDs necessarily, although that's certainly good too, you
• 1:12:03
  know, And I, I mean, like, people do that.
• 1:12:05
  Like they're like, I'm sick of this.
• 1:12:07
  I'm going to go teach high school.
• 1:12:09
  That happens, you know, because academia is a pretty brutal game
• 1:12:12
  as well. But yeah, I mean, it seems hard
• 1:12:15
  for sure. Like, I definitely think
• 1:12:16
  teachers need more support and more incentive to do it.
• 1:12:20
  I think also like it's, it's a bigger problem outside of the
• 1:12:22
  cities, right? Like if you go around Melbourne
• 1:12:24
  or Sydney, you're probably going to find like pretty good science
• 1:12:28
  teachers in most of the schools. If you go out, you know, a
• 1:12:31
  couple hours out of one of the cities, then like it becomes
• 1:12:34
  harder. And that's also, I think part of
• 1:12:35
  the challenge is because you're not just asking someone to, to,
• 1:12:37
  you know, take these skills and, and go teach high school.
• 1:12:40
  You're also asking them to like move several 100 kilometers
• 1:12:44
  from, you know, everyone they know to go to teach kids.
• 1:12:48
  So I don't know what the solution is there.
• 1:12:50
  And I, yeah, like I said, we just try and we try and go visit
• 1:12:55
  the schools and try and provide a bit of like motivation,
• 1:12:57
  inspiration, someone to, we try and leave results behind to help
• 1:13:02
  the teachers. We try and provide like a
• 1:13:05
  communication and just like, oh, if you know your students ever
• 1:13:07
  have questions, like here's a kind of catch all e-mail that
• 1:13:10
  they can send information, send a question to and we'll try and
• 1:13:13
  answer it. But yeah, it's a hard problem.
• 1:13:16
  I guess, like so many things, it's a hard problem and there's
• 1:13:18
  not an obvious solution. Yeah.
• 1:13:20
  I think I, I mean, I personally think that we are a little
• 1:13:24
  overdue for an education reform, just the structure of the way
• 1:13:27
  that we do it. And I think that we are in a
• 1:13:30
  world at the moment where people could be a lot more the way that
• 1:13:34
  their education could be a lot more customized and personalized
• 1:13:36
  to their needs and allow them and really, you know, while
• 1:13:40
  providing a lot of the basic foundations, also allow their
• 1:13:44
  individual niches to be expanded on and developed and matured.
• 1:13:49
  And I think that integration at the moment is probably just the
• 1:13:53
  hardest, the hardest issue, which just trying to shake up a
• 1:13:56
  system exists to support to save itself.
• 1:13:58
  You know, that's, that's always the way it is.
• 1:14:00
  And this this system is not letting go very anytime soon it
• 1:14:03
  seems like. Yeah, I get.
• 1:14:05
  Yeah, it's, it's an interesting thought, the idea of like a
• 1:14:08
  really big like revolution in the way we do education because
• 1:14:10
  I suppose that's happened before, you know, and I guess
• 1:14:14
  like, yeah, it's, yeah. Not being an expert on, on
• 1:14:17
  pedagogy or anything, I wouldn't want to want to comment too much
• 1:14:21
  other than to say I do see the value in like a journalist
• 1:14:24
  education. I do think it's important as a
• 1:14:27
  kind of foundation file learning to have a journalist education.
• 1:14:30
  And I'd be worried about a system that encourage people to
• 1:14:32
  specialize to, you know, but at the same time that is like
• 1:14:35
  increasingly that like that's just the way because of the same
• 1:14:39
  stuff I mentioned before about like in physics, like there's
• 1:14:40
  too much physics. You can't, you know, know all of
• 1:14:42
  it. So you kind of end up
• 1:14:43
  specializing. I guess that's probably just
• 1:14:45
  true in general. It's hard to know everything,
• 1:14:48
  but you have to know some subset of the things.
• 1:14:52
  I guess it's just about where along the way you do that
• 1:14:55
  specialization because, you know, kids brains haven't always
• 1:14:59
  necessarily fully formed by the time we'd be asking them to make
• 1:15:02
  those kinds of decisions. No, yeah, I, I don't know, man.
• 1:15:06
  It's a hard problem. Like I said, I, I don't, I don't
• 1:15:14
  see like a direction that anyone's moving in that is like
• 1:15:17
  this is the answer. But at the same time, I do
• 1:15:19
  believe that like there are people who care about this
• 1:15:20
  problem. Yeah.
• 1:15:22
  Like, and, and it's, it's like everything, it's like the
• 1:15:25
  tendency to think like when something is so like heavily
• 1:15:27
  involved in like bureaucracy and like the government stuff that
• 1:15:30
  you're like, oh, like, yeah, that's decay because nobody
• 1:15:33
  cares about it. And then you go meet the people
• 1:15:34
  whose job it is. And it's like, Oh no, these
• 1:15:35
  people actually do care about this.
• 1:15:37
  We actually do want this to be better.
• 1:15:39
  You know, It's just that they're, they're dealing.
• 1:15:41
  It's a really difficult problem as well because there's aspects
• 1:15:44
  of it that you haven't considered yet because you don't
• 1:15:46
  know about the, you know, the realities of how the system
• 1:15:48
  works and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, everything is
• 1:15:50
  always more complicated than you think it is.
• 1:15:52
  Like, do you think that something is like, oh, yeah,
• 1:15:55
  this, like, this is a problem because of these people doing
• 1:15:58
  this thing who are like, you know, just don't care?
• 1:16:00
  Like I find that is almost never the case.
• 1:16:02
  I was talking to a friend of mine.
• 1:16:04
  I did, I mentioned that I did this podcast to the nuclear
• 1:16:06
  physicist and he was telling me about the potential of, of
• 1:16:09
  efficiency and, and literally like limitless energy with, with
• 1:16:13
  nuclear and I was talking to other friends about it.
• 1:16:15
  I'm like, it's so weird. How come it's not integrated?
• 1:16:17
  He's like, dude, because do you know what the would happen to
• 1:16:20
  the world if tomorrow oil was worthless?
• 1:16:22
  So like, do you know, like, you know, like what would happen to
• 1:16:25
  like every institution and like the global economy, like you
• 1:16:29
  can't just like pull it out from underneath it and just like have
• 1:16:32
  the whole thing claps on itself is like, I mean, you could if
• 1:16:35
  you want to, but does it, you know, it doesn't seem to be
• 1:16:38
  practical make any sense. Last question and then I'll let
• 1:16:41
  you go. I really appreciate your time
• 1:16:42
  and this is tons of fun. That your favorite, most and
• 1:16:47
  least and least favorite. I'm sorry your favorite but
• 1:16:50
  least accurate science movies or shows?
• 1:16:53
  Man, that's so good. All right, I'll preface all of
• 1:16:55
  this by saying I am not the kind of scientist who needs my
• 1:16:58
  science fiction to be believable.
• 1:16:59
  Like I really don't care. Like I I'm not, I'm not going
• 1:17:02
  there for that. I don't want it to be real
• 1:17:06
  science. You know, I appreciate like some
• 1:17:08
  of it when it is because it's just like that's an extra flavor
• 1:17:10
  of sci-fi. Like they've made an effort to
• 1:17:12
  make the science kind of more believable.
• 1:17:13
  That's cool, but I don't get mad if it's bad.
• 1:17:16
  My, one of my favorite movies just in general of all time is
• 1:17:19
  Back to the Future. Fantastic film, great sci-fi
• 1:17:24
  Lots, lots to to be excited about.
• 1:17:27
  And yeah, the fact that the science is bad, I don't know, I
• 1:17:29
  found kind of charming. And in terms of stuff that's
• 1:17:32
  like pretty good, I mean, like in terms of like believability,
• 1:17:36
  I really like, I mean, I think like Andy Weir stuff, which is
• 1:17:39
  like the Martian and the forthcoming like project Hail
• 1:17:42
  Mary, I think is the movie that's coming out soon.
• 1:17:44
  I, you know, I think that's cool and I think that he deserves
• 1:17:47
  props for, for making it efforts to like put a bit more of the
• 1:17:50
  hard science in. Like it's not 100% right, but
• 1:17:52
  like, like I said, who cares? It's like, it's, it's cool that
• 1:17:54
  he like bothers. And then I don't know what was
• 1:17:58
  my least favorite. Huh, I don't know, least least
• 1:18:01
  favorite. I mean, the the stuff that is my
• 1:18:03
  least favorite would have nothing to do with whether the
• 1:18:05
  science is good or not, and everything's true whether the
• 1:18:09
  narrative is good. OK, I got you, I got you, I got
• 1:18:13
  you. OK, I'm not going to ask you to
• 1:18:14
  crap on any narratives on here, but but Doctor Ben, I really
• 1:18:19
  appreciate the time. This was really tons of fun and
• 1:18:21
  I hope maybe to do this again because I think that I learned a
• 1:18:24
  lot and I would love to kind of process this and maybe dive more
• 1:18:27
  into some more stuff that you're you've been researching and
• 1:18:30
  looking into in some time from now.
• 1:18:31
  But this is great meeting you and thanks again for taking the
• 1:18:35
  time and a short notice to hop on with me.
• 1:18:37
  Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having.
• 1:18:38
  Me. Cheers.
• 1:18:39
  Thanks so much. Take care.
• 1:18:40
  Bye.