Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0217_Sabrina Pasterski — Quantum Gravity, Black Holes & The Holographic Universe

Transcript

#0217_Sabrina Pasterski — Quantum Gravity, Black Holes & The Holographic Universe · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Sabrina. Sean. Welcome to the show.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Man, I've been excited about this. So you're labeled, and
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: I know you're probably going to downplay this, the next Einstein.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: You don't like that?
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: No, I mean, it's just not accurate, but I do
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: like this notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: about what that legacy is and like our field as
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: a whole and how do we kind of leverage that or.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Do good with it.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Well, I think we're going to get into all that,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: but you know, the stuff you're doing, I don't even know,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: I don't even know how to say it, but it
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: sounds like, and we're going to get into it in
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a minute, but it sounds like what you're studying is
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: if everything is a hologram.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Most literally, yeah. Like the thing that I study is that,
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: and I do find it's fun, like to kind of
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: take a step back and talk to people who are
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: not researchers to see how they interpret the words that
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: we attach to things or how like visceral, literal, like
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: the researcher versus like the person you're talking to takes it.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Right on, right on. Were you ready to get into it?
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: All right, let's do it. I'm going to start you
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: off with an introduction here. Sabrina Gonzalez-Pasterski, born in Chicago, Illinois,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: first generation Cuban American. At age nine, your first flight
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: lesson ignited a lifelong obsession with flight and physics behind it.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Between ages 12 and 14, you spent two years building
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: a single-engine Zenith. Rejected by Harvard, waitlisted at MIT, you
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: got off the waitlist because of the airplane you built.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Earned your PhD from Harvard in 2019 in high-energy theoretical physics.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: leading the Celestial Holography Initiative, a project aimed at encoding
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: the entire universe as a hologram to unite quantum mechanics
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: and general relativity. Named to Scientific Americans 30 Under 30
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: in 2012 and Forbes 30 Under 30 Science List in 2015,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: one of the Albert Einstein Foundation's 100 Greatest Innovators in 2018.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: First woman to chair the flagship annual strings conference for
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: the global string theory community. First female to graduate number
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: one in MIT physics. And like I said before, many
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: consider you to be the next Einstein, which you hate.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: You don't like that.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: I think I probably benefit from it too much, but
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: that's a bad thing.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: It's a cool label.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Be proud of that. But so... Actually, before we, before
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: we get into it, just, can you give me a quick,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: I think I know what string theory is at least
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: a little bit, but is this, is this like, uh,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: what are they called? Quantum communication?
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Oh, so, so basically they're like quantum information or they
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: kind of like, uh, the sense in which you might
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: be thinking of, like, if you were talking to someone
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: who does quantum computing and like, uh, those facets is
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: more like in holography, there are definitely connections between foundational
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: aspects of entanglement and different protocols you can do in
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: a quantum mechanical system and then mapping it to a
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: gravitational one. So string theory is not related to that directly,
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: but there's a sense in which the research I do
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: probably is more closely related, if that's what you're asking.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: But basically, the whole point is we want to try to,
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: as a field, not individually, understand what the basic rules are,
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: what are the laws of nature. And if you aren't
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: going out and measuring things, what do you really have
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: at your disposal? You're roughly trying to use mathematical consistency
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: of your frameworks to try to piece together a picture.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: And so if you have rules for the very short
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: distance physics and very long distance physics that are kind
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: of in their own world, and you want to try
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: to have a framework that connects both of them, you
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: run into various problems. And string theory is one example
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: of a route that people have found to kind of
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: avoid the pitfalls of understanding how to have a graviton
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: or how to have a quantum mechanical system with gravity.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: In practice, you're roughly setting one little facet of these
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: mathematical frameworks and trying to push it pretty far or
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: generalize it to different situations.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Okay. I read something that China was working on communications
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: where they will vibrate half of an atom, and then
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: no matter what the distance is, the other half of
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the atom will mimic exactly.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: What talking about some entanglement or whatnot.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: I don't know. That's what I was thinking about quantum entanglement. Sure.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: So I think that the, I am less of like
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: on top of all of the experiments when it comes
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: to trying to see like, not just entanglement, but maybe
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: like some sort of like position dependence or whatnot, which
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: is like closer to like seeing like how gravity and
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: quantum interface. But so I don't know exactly which experiment,
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: but I know that there's a lot on like kind
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: of the, there's a lot of progress on like the
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: quantum computing side of things. Which I guess is like
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: the closest thing to an engineering subfield right now within
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: like high energy theory, but a little bit not high energy.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Right on. All right. So a couple of things to
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: crank out here. Yes. We got a Patreon.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: It's a community.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Yes. So we got to make them happy.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: And they're the reason that I get to sit here
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: with you today.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: Super cool. Yeah.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: a question. This is from JD Pardon.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: At 12, you weren't playing video games. You were in
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: a garage building a Zenith CH-601XL. What did that mechanical
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: grease under the fingernails experience teach you about solving abstract
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: physics problems that a textbook never could?
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: I think it maybe didn't teach me enough for what
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: I have done so far, but it definitely instilled a
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: sense in which there's a value to trying to find
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: the things that can be straightforward and systematic and build
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: something cool out of it. And I think that that's
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: one thing that maybe theoretical physics personally felt like it
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: was lacking because I had this bias of growing up
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: around people who like built cool shit or whatnot is like,
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: is there a sense in which you can try to
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: find the engineering aspects of what you do and the
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: systematic things and like build tools for that? So that's
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: the thing that that project probably has instilled in me,
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: but I don't think I've like lived that out yet.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Right on.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Right on. And then I got you a gift. Okay.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: Everybody gets a good gummy bears.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: I heard. Thank you.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Good Jones league gummy bears made the USA up in Michigan. Oh,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: you want to try them? Go ahead. You're going to
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: love them.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: I hope I know how to open a damn bag.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Yummy.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Those are good. Nice. What made you want to have
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: gummy bears as a product? Cause it's super fun.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Actually, I was going to do CBD gummies for sleep. And, uh, yeah,
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: my markers, I'll get sued for catering to kids. So
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: I said, fine, we'll just do regular gummy bears. Cause
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: I like those too.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Right. But, um, so I want to do a full
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: life story on you and then get into everything that
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: you're doing right now. So where did you grow up?
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: I grew up in Chicago, Illinois. And like in the city,
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: but like near the outskirts of the city, part of
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: the city where a lot of like firemen and cops would,
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: I guess, live because they had to live technically in
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: the city. You know, I love like Chicago is a
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: kind of fun, like well-designed city where you have like
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: a lot of like awesome public schools. And I went
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: to a, Edison Regional Gifted Center was nearby where I
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: lived at the time. My parents picked that location to
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: be near a nice schools. And it was, you know,
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: fun growing up. Awesome having like smart peers. and being
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: challenged in school. And then, yeah, I guess I can
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: keep iterating on different parts of it, but I definitely
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: had some enthusiastic parents and that's where this whole like
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: taking advice from mentors and kind of just following different
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: rabbit holes led to where I am now.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: What did your parents do?
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: So my parents are both lawyers, but they're not lawyers
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: in the way all other lawyers fancy sense. So my
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: dad for most of his career was a public defender.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: So he worked for like Cook County. And then my
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: mom works for the EPA. So more like I think
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: the regs for like making sure that companies that accidentally
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: polluted like various like groundwater or things that like affect people,
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: like they have to pay and fix their problems.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Wow. So nothing to do with physics.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: Nothing to do with physics. But my dad did have
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: an electrical engineering like undergrad degree. And so definitely growing up,
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: like we were the ones doing repairs in our house.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: We didn't really hire contractors except for maybe some things
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: that had to be welded. Um, so that was interesting too.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: And you did your first flight lesson. Yeah. Was it,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: was it either one of your parents a pilot?
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: They weren't at the time. My dad got a license much.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, he got a license at some point, um,
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: pretty soon after, but, um, maybe he had a relative
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: back in the day that had phone or whatnot. And I,
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: like Harry Potter was cool at the time. And I
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: think I wanted like a flying broomstick. So like. They
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: definitely convinced me, like, Santa Claus was real. It was
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: really funny. I think they used, like, these extrinsic motivation
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: things to, like, get me to be a good kid
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: or whatnot. So, like, I was convinced Santa Claus was
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: real because the presents were awesome. But, like, I guess
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: I got a little greedy and I wanted, like, a
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: flying broomstick because, like, Harry Potter was cool. And then
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: they were, like, flight lessons. So, like, I mean.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Wow, that's cool.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's like. And it's funny, cause it's a
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: bougie style hobby, but it's very much more like they
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: would just do anything for their one kid. If that
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: makes sense.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Like it's like, yeah, that's awesome.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: My mom's family, like, so her dad was like a
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: carpenter when, and then he like, they moved from Cuba.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: And then on my dad's side, his, his father was
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: a bit in trouble with the things. At some point,
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: that's why he became a public defender. And so to them,
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: they'd made it and then they, you know, they want
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: to invest in their kid.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: So, so in, in you build a plane.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, but the thing is.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Age 12.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it comes from the fact that, like, I mean, it.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: People do this, right? So what's the way that this
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: stuff works out? So you're a nine-year-old flying, and then
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: your dad's like, oh, look, my kid's so cool flying.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Who are these people that they can meet? You go
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: to a lot of air shows. Because he was a lawyer,
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: so he has some sense of regs, there was this
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: kind of fun thing of looking for how can you
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: get around the fact that you'd have to be 16
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: to fly alone in the U.S. But in Canada, you
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: can do this at 14. And so I had found
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: out that, like, Jamal Larkins was this aerobatic pilot who
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: had gone up to Canada to flight train to get
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: through this kind of legal loophole of how old he
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: could be to fly alone, wrote an essay about it.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: And then I started getting these, like, mentors in the FAA.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: And then my dad was super encouraging of, like, going
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: out and networking. And it's very easy to network when
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: you're a cute little kid. You don't have to be
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: good at public speaking. Like, you're just a kid with
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: some pictures of you, like, flying or, like, with a
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: big parachute behind you and an airplane. Like, it's, like, overpowering. And, like,
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: you can walk your way into things. Like, you bring, like,
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Krispy Kreme donuts to the FAA. It's perishable, you know.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: And you start making friends. And then you see all
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: these people who are, you know, building kit planes. And
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: then you're like, damn, it's hard to get into school
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: these days. Like, can you do some sort of trick
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: to get into either, like, there's, like, selective high school, IMSA,
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: where I went, or MIT. And, yeah. And then I
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: always just trusted my, like, I thought my dad knew
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: everything because he was really, like, kind of a jack-of-all-trades
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: fixing things around the house. So when he... is like
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: over my shoulder or like teaching me how to do
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: some things and I'm just going and riveting things together.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: I'm like, this is great. I know if he says
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: it's fine, it's fine. Like, and it was cool because
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: basically before the, it turned into this set of mentors suggesting, oh,
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: you could do this thing, like whenever. It was just
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: that much effort put into like school projects. So I
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: had like, like I think whenever like people were like
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: first burning DVDs, we'd have like, a room in our house,
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: one of the bedrooms, they painted chroma key blue that
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: I would go and, like, reenact little scenes from my
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: history projects and, like, No kidding. We filmed and put inside, like, some, like,
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: Doctor Who episode or something like that. So it was, we'd, like,
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: we'd basically, we're just trying to do, like, say, an
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: A-plus star on every little school project, which is a
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: bit of a waste of time, but just a funny little, like, effort.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: And then to translate that into something where then the
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: narrative was, like, okay, you're going to take flight lessons.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: You're then going to, like, you know, try to build
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: an airplane and then want to work for these aerospace companies. Like,
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: a linear kind of story arc with a bunch of, like, fast-paced, like,
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: projects type of thing in between was something I think
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: that came out of this otherwise, like, intense, like, Wow.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Go do it well attitude.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: What age did you start reading?
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, I don't know. I don't think, I
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: don't recall myself as being like a better reader than
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: my classmates. If anything, when I was in kindergarten, like
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: Allison Larrabee could read all of the joke cups. And
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: so like, I mean, I could read, but like maybe
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: my vocabulary was not as expansive. And so then my
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: parents would like buy all of the Dixie joke cups, like,
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: you know, in bulk to then be able to at
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: least read the words on them. But, like, but then
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: the kids still would just go to Allison maybe because
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: she was, like, the first person, like, that they knew
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: could read the joke cups or because she had more friends.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: I don't know. But, like, yeah, so I don't think
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: I was necessarily reading faster, but I probably was talking
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: a lot earlier. And they used to do a thing
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: where it's like if I could write it out, then
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: they'd let me, like, if I asked for a car
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: ride at some random time of night, if I could
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: write it on the little chalkboard, they'd take me on
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: a car ride. So a lot of extrinsic motivation, though.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Right on. Do you have any brothers and sisters?
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: I don't, and that's probably why all the intense story
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: stuff is because it's, like, one kid, one shot, you know.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: What else, I mean, what else were you designing, inventing,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: building as a kid?
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, I would say that, like, the, it
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: wasn't anything that, like, before it would have been just, like,
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: going all out on every little class project just for
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: the heck of it. Not, nothing that cool, and I
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: think that, but the one thing is, it was, like,
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: kind of, like, it was, pretty clear to see how
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: easily the goals were shaped by either strong reactions to
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: or taking on ideas from the people that you talk to.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: So when I was flying, everyone would be like, oh,
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: one day you're going to be flying our Boeing one
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: day when we're taking a vacation. I'm like, no, I
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: don't want to do that. I don't want to do that.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: And then you see these people building kit planes, super cool.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: These are shows. when you're putting it together, they're like, oh,
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: one day you're going to be building the Boeing. And
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: I'm like, ah, I don't want to do that. And
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: so it was just more of like someone says you
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: can do it. And then my dad's like, yeah, you
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: can do it. And then we see how you can
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: do it. Or then someone's saying you will be doing it.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: You're like, no, I don't want to do it. And
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: so then you pivot. And so that's how I accidentally
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: pivoted into physics later, like we can get to, because
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: I was like, ah, it's not as cool if you're
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: not actually like, you know, the designs aren't really changing
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: and you're not like putting together. I mean, it was
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: somehow more fun to have something where you do straightforward work.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: Somebody else kind of told you the steps before you're
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: modifying it or fine like that. but then you have
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: a product that you built versus when you're just engineering
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: something a little, it's like a little too theoretical. I
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: might've all go the whole other extreme of purely theory,
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: which was maybe a bad choice, but, but it kind of.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: What did get you into physics?
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So funny story. So basically I think the first
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: hint at it was the high school I went to
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: this math and science school, like all of the, like
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: a large fraction of the faculty had PhDs. And so
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: I didn't grow up with people who had PhDs. I mean,
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: my parents both had like, you know, their lawyers. So
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: they went to like, you know, state schools for that.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: But suddenly now all of your peers think they have
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: to get a PhD to be cool. So that's a
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: weird thing. Like you suddenly have this mind shift where, okay,
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: I need a PhD. Probably not true. But like that starts,
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: I mean, definitely not true, but that starts seeping in.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: The person who founded my high school was like a
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: former director of Fermilab. And he'd have like these lunches
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: with Nobel laureates with like, they'd come in and give talks.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: And then he would have, lunch with the students if
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: it was just him every Monday or something, I remember.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Wait, hold on.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: I thought you went to public school.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: I went to, it's a public school. This is a
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: public school? So this is not Chicago Public School. So
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: I went K-8 Chicago Public Schools, and they have like
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: these kind of magnet-like programs, like gifted center type of thing.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: They have different types of magnet programs. So CPS is
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: like so large that they have fun schools for kids
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: who like school, I guess. Then I went to the
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: state school. That's three years boarding school paid for like,
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: mainly by, like, state of Illinois math and science school,
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Illinois Math and Science Academy. So I think it's funded
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: under the umbrella of, like, University of Illinois or whatnot.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: There's precedents in South Carolina, I believe, and Texas and others,
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: where it's just like a STEM boarding school that the
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: state runs. It's public.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: But it's like you get this, you take the SAT
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: to get in and things like that. But it's kind
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: of actually cool that there are these.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: That is cool.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, public schools.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: You took the SAT to get in?
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and the scores for kids getting in, like,
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: to high school are not that good. And I definitely
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: wasn't the type of person who did well on standardized tests.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: I did well on, like, the ones in school because
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: I cared about the teacher. I'm trying to impress. But, yeah,
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: it was neat because it was a public school, but
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: it was very much, like, a little bit of this
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: vibe of, like, a– Gifted. Private, yeah, type of school
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: experience in the sense of, yeah, you're at a boarding school.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: But it was nice because then it could get kids
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: from all over. Like even our elementary school was like,
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: you're busing kids in from all over the city. And
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: so you have a lot of like just gifted kids
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: from like various socioeconomic backgrounds there. And then similarly with
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: like the boarding school aspect lets you be from anywhere
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: in Illinois.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: So it was nice.
• 17:16
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• 19:35
  Speaker 2: So that got you.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: So all the PhDs got you into physics.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: So it was the PhDs plus the fact that the
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: founder was a physicist, like a Nobel laureate in physics,
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: who then somehow when the plane is final assembly near
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: an airport nearby this high school, and he thinks it's cool.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: He's like, oh, you can be a physicist. And then
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: suddenly that gets into our minds. And then all of
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: these aerospace executives who were running these private aerospace companies.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: So I guess not Richard Branson, but Elon Musk and Bezos,
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: both liked physics for whatever reason. They either dropped out
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: of some physics-ish material science degree at Stanford or thought
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: about majoring at Princeton. So my heroes were these guys
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: who could just do cool shit. They had built a
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: company to have the resources to then do something that's valuable,
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: but not necessarily profitable. Or I'm sure they found ways
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: to make it profitable. But I thought that was cool.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: I think they're doing all right.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: I think they're doing all right. No, no. But even
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: in the scope of how do you just build a No,
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: I get what you're saying. So I thought that was
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: the coolest thing. And I wanted to be like that.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: And I figured, okay, if I just work for them,
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: would I ever still be like that? I don't know.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: And I got a little disillusioned about what's the product
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: I'm going to build. If you build some suborbital thing,
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: if you accidentally kill a rich person, is it going
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: to just be dead? But they did a good job.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: They didn't do this. I'm surprised. I'm like, damn.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: If you accidentally kill a rich person.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: So that type of thing scared me a little bit.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: And then I figured they like physicists, so how can
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: I be cool to the people I find cool? Let
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: me go into physics, which is the wrong reason to
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: go into physics. And then, by the way, I grew
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: up with a bunch of mechanics slash engineers who maybe
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: see the physics as this bottleneck that the physicists aren't
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: doing it right. There's got to be some cool tech
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: that can come out of this. And I'm like, yeah,
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: I'm going to go in that field. And it's completely not.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: You've got to hide that, at least, when you're actually
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: trying to get by in that field. So very much
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: a wrong reason to go into the field.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: Wow. What was the first project that really grabbed your attention?
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: Because you obviously love it. You're still in it.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: I'm still in it. No, but I still think the thing,
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: it's for that bigger picture goal. So I think the
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: thing that grabbed my attention is more, you know, I
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: liked my math and science courses in school. I think
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: that maybe in hindsight, looking back, just the notion of being,
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: computing something draws your attention in in a way where
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: then once you're in it, you're in it, you're hooked.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: And that's good for my job mechanically in the sense
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: that like our job is to compute things. But I
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: do think that I was still more excited by the
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: bigger picture view or this notion of the possibilities of
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: what physicists could do than in practice what it is
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: in the same sense that like, you know, someone working
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: at Google like isn't necessarily actually like gets to think
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: about search. They're doing one specific little widget or something,
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: you know, type of thing. But yeah.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: Right on.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Where do we go from high school?
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, so from high school, we go to being a
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: little bit too cocky and like being like MIT for aerospace,
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: Harvard for physics, and then not getting in because you
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: wrote too many poems or didn't really like, I think
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: that the one thing about the admissions to these schools,
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's so much luck. So that's a bit sad.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: I think that grad admissions is fairer because you're already
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: kind of differentiated in your skillset and like the people
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: admitting you are the people who care about the field
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: that you're going into. But I think I thought like,
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: All these other kids are taking the AP courses. They're
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: checking off all these boxes for their extracurriculars. They don't
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: want that. They want something different. It's like, no, maybe
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: it's just like, you know, like they're seeing a large
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: array of applications. You don't want to like be anomalous
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: in a negative way. You just like check the boxes
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: and more or something. I think I didn't, I didn't
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: handle it right. But then I knew how to bother
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: people because I'd been networking since I was a kid.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: So we found like Sheila Woodenall or who else? I
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: think we shouldn't, might not have helped with admissions. It
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: was more like Earl Mormon. But basically I'd be this
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: kid with this little like photos of this airplane build.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: walking around, and my parents would drop me off at
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: different places. So wandering MIT hallways to try to say
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: hi to someone with this book. And I'm just like, OK.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: And then I just patiently wait. I mean, probably not
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: as cool as waiting for a little sniping mission. But
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: you're just there. You're like, somebody's here. I'm going to
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: say hi to them. The mission is to get this
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: book in the hands of some MIT professor.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Meet cool people. And it was like, you give flowers
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: to the secretaries or whatever, things like that. Um, so
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: a lot of networking as a kid and eventually it
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: helped because I had some friends who could be like, Hey,
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: admissions office, like maybe she didn't present this clearly enough
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: in her application. This is kind of cool letter. And
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: then I got into off the waitlist at MIT.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: You got in where?
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Off the waitlist at MIT.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: That way.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Cause you tried to get into Harvard too, right?
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And I got rejected, but I mean, to be fair,
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: lots of kids get rejected. Lots of awesome kids get rejected.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: It's not something, it's something more about like, uh, teaching
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: you not to like rely on other things happening for
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: you that you can't control, right? So like, yeah.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: What was it that got you off the wait list
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: at MIT?
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: It was probably this type of networking thing, like, you know,
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: trying to like rely on some people who could vouch
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: for me once you're on this wait list.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: It wasn't the plane?
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Well, it was the plane, exactly. So I'm saying this
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: whole me going around with like the little like photo
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: book of the airplane and then meeting MIT.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: You literally brought the photo book of the airplane.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: Believe me, I would like... I had little business cards
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: back in the day. I mean, I think, I mean,
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: I like, it's very cringy.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: That's awesome.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: I blame my dad. No, but like, it was like,
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: you had little like photo books on the plane, little
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: business cards and like, like thinking of who you want
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: to meet and you're going to meet that person. And
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: then you're this cute little kid. I mean, like you
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: get a little bit less cute once you're in your teenagers,
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: but between like, you know, 12 and 14, you're pretty cute.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: So like walking around like with that, Like, trying to
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: introduce myself to, like, various MIT faculty, say, or, like,
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: at the air shows, various people in the FAA, or, like,
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: maybe Peter DeMandis, or folks who had done cool stuff
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: in either, like, the private aerospace, like, Anushan Sari had
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: gone up in a Soyuz capsule, and then DeMandis had
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: the X Prize. So, like, definitely a lot of, like,
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: trying to network, but with, like, little.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Man, that is... Yeah. I'm going to do that with
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: my kids.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: No, with the kids. I mean, it's like an arbitrage opportunity.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: It's like there are things that the kid can get
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: the access and the, yeah.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: That's smart.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: I love it. So how did you like, how was
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: it getting into MIT?
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: So it was very, it was a relief because I
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: didn't get into college otherwise, right? I mean, I was
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: very dumb. I was like very narrow-minded in the sense
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: of like, or like laser focused on, I want this
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: thing or this thing. None else. I have standards, but
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: you can't like have standards if you're not like, what
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: they want. But I guess it helped to be able
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: to have a little bit of that story and some
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: of that network to like petition or whatever, put a
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: good word in once it was on the wait list. So, yeah.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: How did you like it?
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, I loved MIT.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Was it challenging?
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I love that. You know, and I think
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: that's the thing is like, actually, I loved it way
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: more than my experience at Harvard, but like, not to
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: say that other people don't like each for their own,
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: but it was just, I liked the fact that it
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: was intense and like, like, you knew where you stood.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a bunch of kids bullshitting, like, and, like,
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: you'd take, you know, you'd take the courses that you're
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: ready for, and they'd get you up to the next speed,
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: and not a bunch of, if everybody gets an A,
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: then you can pretend that you know stuff, and you
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: have kids sitting in on courses they shouldn't be in,
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: and then, like, who knows what, it's, like, babble, versus
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: it just felt more, like, you went in, worked hard,
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: you got something out of it. I love structure and
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: And yeah, something helping push you. Yeah.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. What exactly were you studying?
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: So I ended up majoring in physics. So when I
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: went in, there's like a lot of just general institute
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: requirements at the beginning, first year or so. I was
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: able to sneak into being like this internship at Kennedy
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: Space Center with a bunch of older aero-astro kids. And
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: then I think it was after that first summer, I
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: also interned at Boeing. And I guess... At the time,
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: I was scared of this whole narrative of the airplane
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: build and flying as a kid, how much that would
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: confine me. And so I guess my rebelling was going,
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: the other option was physics somehow. And so I liked
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: my physics courses. I did well. And I just pivoted into,
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: let me major in physics. Because.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: You did an internship at Boeing?
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but it wasn't– I mean, probably it's– lots of
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: kids do internships. It was probably because of the plane
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: and stuff like that and these connections that I was
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: maybe considered as a freshman or, like, younger than maybe
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: other people would have.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: But, you know, you end up– You did an internship
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: as a freshman at Boeing?
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Between– I hope I'm right, but between freshman and the
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: sophomore year, if I'm not remembering.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, as a freshman, you were named the first
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: in MIT history.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: The little interpreter thing? But I wasn't very entrepreneurial. I
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: don't have any companies. Lots of MIT kids have companies.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: But I hope the spirit is there for the wrong application.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: But when I was at Boeing, I probably, and this
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: is the type of mistake that I would make often,
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: is you make awesome mentors that you want to learn
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: something from, but sometimes you want to not just literally
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: take their advice. And so I think that my family
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: and I, we accidentally would you know, work for the
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: person that gave you that introduction rather than thinking about, okay,
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: where else at Boeing would I rather be necessarily? So
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: I ended up in this arm where they were doing
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: some cool like R & D for a project that
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: didn't feel like it was ever going to be built
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: by Boeing because it was kind of a McDonnell Douglas
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: acquired branch of the company. And that disillusioned me a
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: little bit, not because it should have, but because it's
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: just like, like, engineering isn't always the same thing or
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: academic engineering isn't always the same thing as like building something.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: And I think that I thought it would be closer
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: to like move fast, break things, do cool things. And
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: I think if I had seen any military side of Boeing,
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: it would be a very different experience, but I was
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: kind of just like, you know, sometimes the technology of
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: within a given field, isn't the thing that then advances
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: that field. And so, and again, because of these stupid
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: reasons of like a bunch of like, we like, not
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: knowing enough about physics to realize that isn't the right route. Like,
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: you know, maybe studying like the fundamental laws of nature
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: would help you more than studying like coding or something
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: if like the new tech is like other drones or
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: better engine design or whatever for like pushing aerospace forward.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: So very naive, but kind of disappointed with the fact
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: that you could see that even at a big company
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: that's doing some awesome things, like there's a sense in
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: which you can get lost in the R & D phase.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: You just mentioned something. I think you said that the
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: latest technology in a field isn't necessarily what's going to
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: advance humanity. How do you make that determination?
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: So I think what I'm saying is just like a
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: lot of times you can see it in like, and
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: I see this in physics with people who complain about
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: physics who are not necessarily in the in crowd or whatever.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: And like they can say true things and maybe draw
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: the wrong conclusions about intent or about like what to
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: do about it. I think that oftentimes like you can
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: just kind of see that there's like a lot of
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: low hanging fruit and then it stagnates a bit. And like,
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, to the extent that like, you know, the
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: design for like a passenger airplane really hasn't changed so much.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: And so like, do you just look at like, try
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: to find a definition of progress and see that it's
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: slowing down and not blame yourself for not being smart enough,
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: but try to see like, what do I actually care about?
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Do I like it because I like doing the thing
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: or do I want a product? And once you have
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: the product in mind, probably it's, easier to decide like
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: what you need to learn and go do.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Let's rewind for a minute. You had a high school
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: internship at Blue Origin.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: A little bit, but that was so short. That was like,
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, so the internships at Boeing was a real
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: normal internship. And then the one where I was at
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: Blue Origin was, some mentors were nice and like, let me,
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: I forget exactly. I probably can't even, I'm glad I
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: can pretend that this is anything. I don't remember exactly
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: all the utility of the thing that I was playing
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: with at the time there. And then the one at
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: NASA was also very much more like show and tell.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: It felt like we were learning operations instead of any
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: particular cool tech, but we got to see a lot
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: of fun stuff on the tours.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: What kind of fun stuff?
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: I thought the coolest thing was somehow these tiles where
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: you could heat it up and it would still be
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: really hot on the inside and you could touch it
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: on the outside. That was fun. But it was just
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: like going around to different parts of like Kennedy Space Center,
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: literally getting a tour with a bunch of aerospace engineer students.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: And at the time, and this is kind of funny too,
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: because I used to think it felt a little bit
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: bullshitty to have these, and again, I don't know, like
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to insult the experts, but something felt
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: off about there being a whole enterprise around like how
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: you organize your enterprise. It feels like kind of like
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: prompt engineering now. It's surprising how much of a discipline
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: do you make the things that feel like soft skills?
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: And so that internship was very much, like, trying to
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: see how different parts of NASA were working together or, like, that.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: But it's such a high-level view that I think I
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: was like, hmm, this isn't the tech. And maybe in hindsight, though,
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: I should have, like, appreciated it more. But I think
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: at the time it was just weird going from, like,
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: you know, rivet, rivet, rivet plane to ….
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: What are your … What are the other interns? Were
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: there other interns?
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, one of them, I think, ended up going.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: They were awesome. I was probably just a little bit
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: annoying because I was younger and, like, and I was like, ITAR, ITAR, ITAR, no. Like,
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: there's a kid at Lars that's freaked out over, like,
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: I turn things on. But, like, who could see documents?
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: But basically, they, like, one of them, I think, was
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: going to go in the Air Force. Maybe he did.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: I hope so. I don't know. I didn't really follow
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: up because I ended up going to a different major later.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: But I think one of them had interned at SpaceX
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: or things like that. So it was, you know, I
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: think I didn't appreciate how valuable your peers are until
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: I started going more towards physics just because then I
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: got into the whole, like, research community and stuff. But... Yeah,
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: I probably was just annoying little freshman.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: How do you think they felt about you? How much
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: younger were you than everybody?
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: I think we all agreed. No, no. I mean, no,
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: I think I wasn't that much younger, but enough when
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: you skip a year or so. Like, right, college is,
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: you know, if you're, how old I would have been,
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: like 17 or something, and they're like 21 or two,
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: it's still a bit different if you're, yeah. They're more
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: independent and like, you know, like kind of.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: And then you had an internship at CERN?
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so then I went over to physics because I guess,
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: So I made that choice for physics because I liked
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: my physics courses. And again, all of these tech people
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: who were in aerospace were my heroes and they liked physics.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: So I'm like, I'm going to try to impress them.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: How hard can it be? And then, but the mistake
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: I made was, I guess, that I just kind of
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: took the first internship type opportunity from the person who
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: was technically my undergrad advisor. And so it was at CERN.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: So CERN is cool, but I'm sure that like, Like
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: I didn't necessarily make the right choice in the sense
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: that I wasn't like scanning all opportunities of things within
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: the field I could be interning at or whatnot. I
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: was very lucky that the one year that I do,
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: the first year I go to CERN, they discovered the
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: Higgs boson. But like, you know, science is slow, especially
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: in like a big collider.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: Wait, the first year you went to CERN?
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: They're like, they're discovering the Higgs boson. That's nothing to
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: do with me, but just the right timing.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: Of like, oh. Discovered what?
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: The Higgs boson? Oh, sorry.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: What is that?
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: It's like, so trying to understand the origin of like
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: masses for like these standard model particles. It's an extra
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: field that was conjectured to be there to describe also
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: like electroweak symmetry breaking, et cetera. It's like the field
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: content of like the things that mediate interactions between particles.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: And so basically they have a new discovery in a
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: way where that's like really rare, but like, you know,
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: sample bias of like, you're in there, they do cool stuff.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: So like, okay, that was neat. But yeah, again, CERN
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: is huge, right? So it's just, it's interesting to also
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: see how hard it is to make some measurement for
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: like some quantities within theories that are also esoteric. And
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: so it's a fun thing to see the engineering side
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: of physics research. But again, I was just, I'm just
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: a kid of like having some fun doing like a
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: little bit of like, I think it was some just
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: from my undergrad thesis along the lines of like some
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: data analysis, back of the envelope thing for a future
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: detector type of thing.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: What is that? There's a lot of conspiracies and all
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: kinds of stuff.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: Going on about them. I wish that stuff was cool. See,
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: this thing is these conspiracies, they're never like, it's always
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: just not as cool as they make it sound.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: What are they doing?
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: They're just colliding like particles, right? Like you want to
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: send things in at higher energy so they get close
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: enough and then you can start to see the structure
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: of the thing. So imagine like you have like This
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: bag of quarks, and you start to see the component
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: nature of your protons and things like that. It's just
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: you're colliding, and then you're trying to measure what's coming out,
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: and you want to try to infer how your theory
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: of the interactions is consistent with that.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: What is coming out?
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry. I mean, it should be jets at some point.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: These things hadronize. I'm sorry. Basically, you're colliding- say, depending
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: on the collider, you're putting, say, electron, positron, and other colliders,
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: and this is, say, two protons are colliding, and you're
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: going to have the protons are made up of some quarks,
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: and then they're going to have some interactions, and then
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: they're shooting out other quarks, but there's other particles in
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: your standard model field theory, and those interactions will determine,
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: I guess, the rate at which different things are produced.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: And so there's a theoretical thing. You're modeling those very
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: short-distance scale interactions, And then you're trying to infer from
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: the energy deposited or like different particle tracks that this
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: thing is actually what happened to then say something about
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: your theory. And that's fun. And that's cool. But the
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: scary thing is just how big, like how hard it
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: is to like probe those high energy scales. And you
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: see these huge, I mean, the collider itself is like,
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: these rings are amazingly huge.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: It goes around three countries, right?
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, well, they're near a border, but yeah.
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: But yeah, so very interesting engineering feats. for fundamental physics.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: And that's cool and something I probably didn't appreciate as
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: much as I, because I went into theory. I obviously
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: somehow didn't appreciate it enough. But yeah, it's cool. I
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: don't know. You end up knowing so little compared to
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: all the things you wish that you knew.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: About the stuff. Is there any truth to the fact
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: that you're trying to create some type of a black hole?
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: They're not trying to. No, I think that there's... That
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: was a fun thing to see. I think I finally
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: met one person who is kind of this back-of-the-envelope, fear-monger,
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: fun guy for the billionaires. You know, like, because I
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: could understand, like, I mean, you're probably from a defense
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: kind of point of view. You want to understand the
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: risks or whatnot. And I'm like, I wish it were
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: that fun. I wish it were that risky. Like, nah. Like,
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: if we were, I mean, I'd love to be, like,
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: building wormholes, but they're not going to be, like, you're
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: not going to be able to transverse anything. No, so
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: it's so sad. It's the no-goes that are the worst thing.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: Like, I mean, I'm just curious because it sounds like
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: now you're really into black holes.
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: Again, I spent most of my childhood convinced that there
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: was cool stuff that could be done. And then most
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: of learning grad school or an event of grad school
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: the hard way is not that cool. And then being
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: upset at the fact that all these people overhype things.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: It's not as cool. Quantum computing is way overhyped. And
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: then suddenly AI actually is useful and you're like, holy shit.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: So I don't know where I should land in the
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: end or what I should learn from the fact that like, yeah,
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: completely disillusioned to like overly enthusiastic in a couple of weeks.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: How long were you at CERN?
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: Oh, just like two summers, like whatever the, like less
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: than 90 days or whatever for the work permit, I
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: forget now, but just two summers.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, what's it like there? What's it like when
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: you walk in? What's in there?
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: It looks like old buildings. Like, I think that it's
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: a bunch of, The weirder thing about it is the
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: way that it interfaces with, say, the U.S. institutions or
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: things like that. You'll just have a lot of, I
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: don't know what year, like 50s or something. They look
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: like dated buildings, but with a bunch of people in offices.
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: And then all of the cool expensive technology is in
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: the actual detectors, say. So it just kind of looks like,
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: I don't know, like what you would imagine probably some
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: industrial complex thing. That's the vibe.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: Is it, I mean, do you go underground?
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't for what I'm doing, but sure, for a
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: tour or if someone was actually like putting together detectors, absolutely, yeah.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: They do tours?
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they do. When it's not running, yeah.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: I've got to check it out.
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: They've got a hard hat.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: So how do they get two atoms to collide.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: In a tube? So this is way above my pay grade,
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: but it's a bunch of magnets accelerating these things to
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: like higher speeds and then. I wish I knew. I
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: should literally, like, I should probably know what detector is.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: But luckily, I'm not technically studying the manufacturing of, or, like,
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: engineering of the things to test the experiment. I'm, like,
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: purely in the theory side.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Do you see when the particles hit?
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: So they would see the tracks afterwards. So that's a
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: funny thing, too, is, like, you're not actually seeing, like,
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: you don't see the Higgs boson. You're seeing, like, the
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: fact that the things that came afterwards are consistent with
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: it being there. And I think that that was a
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: kind of funny thing, too. Again, very silly, but maybe
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: visceral in the sense of, like, you're not actually seeing
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: the thing, you're inferring the thing. Versus like for gravitational waves,
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: it really is like it's a sound wave where they're
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: seeing the mirrors move apart. And that's kind of fun.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: It's fun when they're actually seeing the thing they're saying
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: they're seeing instead of indirectly inferring the thing.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: Post-processing is.
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: What does that all mean?
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: To each their own. I think that, sorry, what it
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: means in some sense is like you've tested a particular theory.
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: And so you're kind of ruling out some parameter space of, okay,
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: there's no super partners or things like that too. Or
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: we understand this Higgins.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Mechanism Did you say superpartner?
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: Basically, I think at some point, a lot of people
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: were looking for extra particles that would come if there
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: was this symmetry-relating fermions and bosons, so things that want
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: to be apart from one another. You only want to
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: fill one in each state versus things that like to
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: cohere or amplify each other. Sorry, that's a bad analogy.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: But there's two types of particles, integer spin and half-integer spin.
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: Some people were trying to conjecture that when you build
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: these colliders, you're going to see more and more particles,
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: and then that'll change the way that we think of
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: these frameworks being organized and things like that. But it
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: turns out maybe not. We don't know when the next
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: new discovery is going to be. And so it's weird
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: because then you're trying to fund an experiment where you
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: don't know what the answer is going to be, and
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: you're like, how expensive is it to motivate or to
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: build this thing? Wow. Yeah. But luckily, I'm not as
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: involved in that. I'm purely theory for the sake of
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: that way I can be decoupled from these high-cost things
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: experimental ventures for a bit and then just tackle that
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: problem of kind of like mathematical, I guess, induction or
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: something on the theoretical physics corpus, I think is one
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: way to say it.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: I didn't really think much about skincare before, but after
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: enough long days travel and stress, you start to see
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: it in your face whether you want to or not.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: That's what got me into Caldera Lab. It's a straightforward
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: routine built for guys. Nothing complicated, just a few steps
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: that actually work. I use the good in the base layer.
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: Takes less than a minute, absorbs fast, and has no
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: greasy feel. But the difference is noticeable. My skin looks healthier,
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: more even, and just more dialed in overall. And it's
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: not loaded with junk either. It's made with clean, clinically
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: backed ingredients and does exactly what it says it will.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: It's one of those small habits that adds up over
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: time and changes how you show up day to day.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: Give it a shot. Go to calderalab.com slash SRS and
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: use code SRS for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab.com
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: slash SRS. Where do you go from CERN?
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: So from CERN, I use the fact that it's easier
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: to get into grad school via experimental things to get
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: into grad school at Like, I went to Harvard at MIT,
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: I had school options. I went to Harvard because it
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: would be more easy to pivot, I thought, because I'd
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: already worked for the people at MIT. And then at Harvard,
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: I think I was, it was like quantum computing or
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: string theory. And I thought that quantum computing was overhyped.
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: So I picked the other one. And I don't know
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: how people feel. Like, string theory was still cool back then.
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: And it was like, you know, Brian Greene was very
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: much making it cool when I was a kid. Um,
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: and I still think it's super cool, but it's not
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: for the same, like almost for the same reasons that
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: people sometimes hate on it a little bit.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So can you, can you give me a. Dubbed
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: down version of string theory.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: Maybe. So you're basically quantum field theory is giving you
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: these fields that explain why particles are identical. Cause they're
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: like the electron is just an excitation of this field.
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: So like I have multiple electrons or excitations of the
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: same field. Um. You can think of, say, the mechanical
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: process of how I'd compute some amplitude, like these predictions
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: for CERN, as a bunch of world lines coming in
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: with some rules for how they interact and split off
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: and create other particles. String theory is kind of chubbying
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: out this graph to a sheet, kind of like a
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: literal pair of pants, say, interacting, and you have this
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: world sheet. So what it does for you is it
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: kind of two things. One thing is it kind of
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: opens up this UV behavior. So instead of points, it's
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: kind of just like this branching of like a tube thing.
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: And then the other hand, it also gives you a
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: particle spectrum. So basically, it's like, you can imagine, okay,
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: let's try to build some mathematical framework within which I
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: have the spectrum where I have this graviton, I expect
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: this gravitational field. And then I avoid some pitfalls of
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: trying to treat gravity as a quantum field theory too.
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: And so, and then people just keep building off of it.
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: And then there's years and years of papers that you're
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: like behind on when you're a new grad student. But
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: the main idea is trying to find some underlying mathematical
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: framework that can let you have, you know, your cake
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: and eat it too, like gravity and quantum theory.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. All right.
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: So we go to Harvard.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: We go to Harvard.
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: Get your PhD.
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: I'm working on my PhD. And I think the whole
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: airplane story, I have a bunch of friends who are
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: like in aerospace who think, oh, this kid's cool. I'm
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: doing some fun research with like with Andy and friends
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: with like spin memory effects, stuff like that. But then,
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: and then you get overhyped really quickly because, you know,
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: any press is good press if you're trying to start
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: a company, but not if you're trying to get along
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: with the 2000 people in a field that like, you know,
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: are sometimes bombarded by like, what is string theory doing?
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: That type of thing. So like very much closed ranks
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: type of thing. So yeah, That happens in the middle
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: of my PhD. So I, like, I guess I'm lucky
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: that I didn't take all of these advanced grad courses
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: and just took a lot of E & M for, like,
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: some of the stuff that my advisor happened to be
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: doing was very, like, you know, you have a charge.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: When it accelerates, it radiates. Kind of like, you know,
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: when you have an antenna, like, you're seeing, like, the
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: radio signal from some charges moving up and down antenna.
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: So it was very easy math compared to a lot
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: of stuff that people do in my field that I
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: could latch on to and then think of some sort
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: of fun little experiment bulk. Not real experiment, more like
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: angular momentum loss in spiraling binary systems. So I have
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: a fun result pretty early on in my career, but
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: it's a lot of luck that if Andy's on the paper,
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: then people care and people will write about it as
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: spin memory effect or something. So you get a little
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: bit of like, that's cool. I'm lucky in hindsight. Very
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: much love the kind of way that sometimes ideas can
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: come together really quickly. And then other times you're wasting
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: a lot of time just being stuck. So I'm lucky
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: to have some good experience at the beginning of my
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: grad program, but then I get hyped up in a
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: silly way with this Einstein bullshit. And then I'm like, uh-oh,
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: because my family thinks it's awesome, you know, like, I mean, Yes,
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: when I was a kid, if I was going to
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: be a physicist, wouldn't you want to be like an
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: amazing physicist? Like, of course, that's the goal. You go
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: to Lindau, you go to these conferences where all these
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: Nobel laureates get to hang out and you're the students
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: who get to meet them. And you're like, this is
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: the life. I mean, maybe not exactly. I think it's
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: better if you earn the money and then you whatever.
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: But like there is a lifestyle to like just being
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: good at your job. would get you. And it's like,
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: I wish it were real, you know? Because hype will
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: just go away at some point. So I got a
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: taste of the dark side with that, but also seeing
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: just a little bit more of the sociology of why
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: do people like this narrative of an individual doing something cool?
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: And how does that fit into the fact that within
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: our field, the people who write popular science books are
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: not necessarily ostracized, but it's just like, it's distanced a bit.
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: and then it's hard to work with them. So it's funny,
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: the people that you see as the physicists publicly are
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: not the real physicists somehow.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's just funny politics almost.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: So you want to be under the radar.
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: No, I don't. No, I mean, I wish I did.
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: I wish I did. No, I want to be for
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: the sake of wanting to do well in my job.
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: I need to be, right? I don't want to be
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: above the radar as a physicist in the sense of
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: I don't deserve attention as a physicist, right? I wish
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: that I did something cool enough where I felt like
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: this wasn't complete, like whatever thing. But I do think
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: what I want is that there should be a way for,
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: you know, the fact that, you know, people care about science.
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: It's good. Like, how do you better kind of link together,
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: like the folks who are good at outreach or the
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: folks who are lucky enough to have opportunities to have
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: outreach and the research in a way that benefits the
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: researchers best for like the physics. And I'm excited for
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: that being something that we can change now. And I
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: think that Maybe, I don't know if it's because I'm
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: faculty now or because the times have changed with how
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: science is funded, that people are more open-minded to you know,
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: a little bit of like being creative with how you
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: interact with industry, for example. And that's exciting to me
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: because that's like, things can get done a lot faster
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: when you're not just in a group of people who
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: have all decided this is the way it's done because
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: it's been like that. Yeah.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: Where did the Einstein analogy come from?
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: I think it's just some Aussie article trying to be flashy,
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: and it was good clickbait. I don't know. I mean,
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: to be fair, you wouldn't use those words. I mean,
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: you are studying gravitational waves, and then people just try
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: to be nice. I don't know if it was a
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: girl boss time of decade or whatever, 2016, 2015, 2016,
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: I guess. So that stuff, I have no clue. I'm
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: pretty sure you don't see the articles before they come out. Like,
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: I didn't want any ridiculous comparisons because mostly, you know,
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: airplane build kit stuff probably makes it a cool story.
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: And then you're doing fun stuff with, you know, top
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: people in the field. And sure, Hawking starts, like, to
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: work on stuff with Andy. So there's that part of it, too.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: And Hawking is one of the few examples of somebody
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: who is, like, known for their research and their outreach and, like,
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: actually really good at both. I think it's rare to
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: have somebody where they're popular and they did really cool stuff.
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: Penrose is another example, I'd say. And I'm sure that
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: there's more that I could start listening. But it's rare.
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: Elon Musk. See, that's the thing. He was my hero
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: as a kid. And then I went through different phases
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: of how I feel about the guy.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: What?
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: No, I know.
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: Let me hear. I got to hear this.
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: So when I'm a kid, and this is me being very,
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: very dumb and not realistic, but like I'm in high
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: school and I see like this like Kwanzaa article about
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: Tallulah Riley taking... like physics courses at Caltech. And I'm like,
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: she's not a physicist. She's just taking a few physics courses.
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: I could do better. This guy thinks I'm like, I'm
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: a kid. This is dumb. But I was like, these
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: guys like physics.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: Damn.
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: But no, but I didn't understand to what extent they did.
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: So like I saw him as somebody like post this
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: thing to Ironman in the sense of build cool shit
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: and get people to build cool shit. And like, I
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: thought if I were in his shoes, I'd do the
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: same thing. Right. And then you see like, you start
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: getting a little shaky of like, how much does he
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: actually know how to do? It's like, you know, how
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: much is the team behind him that's really holding it up?
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: And then how much, like, I thought, okay, if I, like,
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: get the PhD or something, I'll be the actual expert
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: to then be able to be more legitimate in a
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: position where you get to do cool stuff. But I
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: think that's the kind of wrong attitude. So, like, so
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: I went through phases where I was, like, very disillusioned
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: with the fact that he kind of represented science or tech. Like,
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: people believed whatever he said was, like, right and that
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: he also was the engineer and he also was all
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: this stuff. Not saying he is or isn't, but I'm saying, like,
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: There was definitely this sense in which there's no way
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: he's actually doing all this stuff because I see how
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: hard it is for people to do all this, right?
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: And then you, you know, you get over it or
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: whatever and you realize how, you know, there's a lot
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: of value to being able to get other people on
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: board with the same vision because then you can really
• 52:02
  Speaker 2: push for it. And as long as that push is
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: to something that's possible, then you're good. If it's a
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: push towards something that's impossible, that's scary. And I think
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: that that was something where, again, before the AI stuff,
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: I was very disillusioned in being like, man, they're like,
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: taking buzzwords and concatenating them with quantum computing and what
• 52:19
  Speaker 2: else was I solutioned by? You'd see things that, as
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: a physicist, you know there's certain no-goes and they're still
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: getting funded, and you're like, ah. We don't have this
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: lack of vision. We wish we were doing cool stuff,
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: but somehow we can't. Now I think that's changing. And
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: at the same time, these people are just overselling things
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: kind of adjacent to what we do and acting like
• 52:39
  Speaker 2: they're going to be better because they're entrepreneurs and we
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: don't know what we're doing. I was very, almost resentful
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: of that at some time. But I think the coolest
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: thing now is like, damn, like the products they're building
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: with like cloud code or whatnot are super useful in
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: the sense of, you know, as a physicist, not many
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: people in theory know how to do much more than
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: like pen and paper or use Mathematica or whatnot. If
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: I wanted to like think about questions that are more
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: like systematic, like you just want to like compute all
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: of these different things numerically or whatnot, those are not
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: valued because their field is so small that one person
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: doing it would be considered a waste of time because
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: they're not going to have a chance of getting a breakthrough.
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: But when you have tools that open up your ability
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: to basically, instead of hiring a dev team, you don't
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: need the resources for that. You can still just do
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: it yourself. That's really cool. So I'm super grateful that
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: maybe some of that hype led to technology that's actually
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: useful for my job, or at least the things that
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: I wish my job were. Um, so I think my, my,
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: my opinions clearly oscillate a lot about, about some of these,
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: these folks.
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: What do you think? Do you think we're going to
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: make it to Mars?
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: Oh, so I think, I mean, I think he could
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: make it to Mars depending on his definition. Right. So like, I,
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: when I was a kid, it was really almost grim
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: or like very pragmatic. I was like, you just want
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: to get to Mars. You don't necessarily need to like
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: come back. So like, can you do like a, you know,
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: the first person to go to Mars one way could
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: bring a bunch of like genetic material in a little
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: arc and have it like cryogenically frozen out. I was
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: thinking like, send him one way. So I think someone
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: can get to Mars absolutely if they change the definition
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: or the scope of what their goal is. But, yeah.
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: How fast do you think we can get there?
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: Oh, I don't. I'm not going to be the expert
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: on that. I think that I definitely would be parroting
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: things when I was a kid, like, off of what
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: other people were saying. And I do think it depends
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: what you want for it. Like, I always thought, you know,
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: manned missions were cooler than automated missions. Like, the vibe
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: was cooler. But it does make sense sometimes to not risk,
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: you know, Life and limb for no reason. I do
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: think that, yeah, I don't, I think it depends what
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: the goal is. I think, like, I'm open-minded for getting
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: around red tape to do something cool. And again, I
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: kind of also, I really liked, like, it's weird because
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: I think that I had, like, secondhand sci-fi because I never, like,
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: read these sci-fi books growing up, but all of, like,
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: the people I admired did. I still kind of like
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: the Earth. If I had the same resources, it probably
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: would be less aerospace now. It would be more infrastructure,
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: like trains and things like that. A lot of things
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: you can do that people would care about terra firma.
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: But it's funny because it can align your vision a
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: certain way. If you want to get to Mars and
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: you think, oh, I need some sort of invention to
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: do that, then We got to like build this AI
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: to be smart enough to help us figure out how
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: to do that. And then we need to like build
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: the AI to also figure out the energy problems so
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: that we can scale it up the right amount to
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: be smart enough to do that. I don't know. So
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: like it's a kind of funny thing where you can
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: use end goal to tell you how to get somewhere.
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: And so maybe he's used that or maybe it's just
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: a good marketing scheme. I don't know.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: Do you think we're going to need to go to Mars?
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think I don't feel that existential like
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: need the same way in the sense of like the
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: point where you need to get to Mars.
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: If you're not already able to go there, like try
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: to avoid that first maybe. And you actually would have
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: more expertise on that side of things, how scared you
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: are about like chaos.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: I don't know, man. I always think the world's ending.
• 56:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but like that's a bias that you'd have. I mean,
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: I'm sure that's why they have to get you like
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: trained to save it, right? Yeah. Great. I don't know.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know. But who else do you? Look up to,
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: did look up to?
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: I mean, I looked up to, I mean, different parts
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: of lots of people. But, like, at the time when
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: I was a kid, it was because, you know, it
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: was Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX were the ones who
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: were kind of these big players in this private aerospace industry.
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: And they were, like, whenever any parts of their companies
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: were at these air shows, like, that was the cool stuff.
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: And I, again, I like this notion of trying to
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: make profitable or build something that wasn't necessarily profitable. its
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: best value proposition wasn't so much the capital that it
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: could get, even though you try to make it self-funding
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: or something like that. I like that kind of encapsulation
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: of doing things. Because I think, for example, theoretical physics research.
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: You can have a lot of YouTubers go around and debate,
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: why is a taxpayer funding this? Or is it stagnating?
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: And it's kind of missing the point that, OK, so
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: say you defunded this subfield. Who's going to actually know
• 57:15
  Speaker 2: quantum field theory amongst the people who are doing data-driven
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: stuff that's making progress now? So it's like, how do
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: you take advantage of the fact that there are things
• 57:26
  Speaker 2: that are worth funding that are not necessarily worth funding
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: because they make money or because they have a product,
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: and then try to align it in a kind of
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: maybe not corporate structure or something where you make it
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: so that it doesn't need to rely on things always
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: having been that way? Can you innovate in that space
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: of trying to fund or have self-fund valuable enterprises that
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: are not driven by profit, but driven by the thing
• 57:51
  Speaker 2: that they're after. So whether it's space exploration or like
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: solving physics or something like that, I'm inspired by that
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: a lot.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Who's doing that?
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, I hope we can do it. No, I
• 58:01
  Speaker 2: don't know. See, the thing is right now, it's this funny,
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: we're at an interesting time where I think like the
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: technologies that like everybody cares about, you know, AI, whatnot,
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: really can help doing the job that I do. There's
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: a thing of like, I don't know how to make
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: the right pitch. for somebody who believes it's going to
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: do everything, you know? And also conveying what exactly it
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: means to solve physics or not. So like in practice,
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: like I do think there's a sense in which like
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: we're trying to axiomatize these laws of nature and maybe
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: there is some uniqueness or rigidity to that structure that
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: it can find. But I think that a lot of
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: people think, oh, there's a particular open problem and it's
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: going to write a paper that the researcher is going
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: to be like, whoa, this is better. And that's what
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: physics research is. So I'm scared of like not having
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: a good like Collaboration say with the industry folks and
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: the academic folks to really kind of pin down Okay,
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: say you can accelerate science Did you do you finish
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: it or did you now open up a new chance
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: to build more infrastructure for how like that knowledge is?
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: Stored and related to one another because we don't just
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: want to answer about like I think that if I
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: was an engineer Like I want to know the answer
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: to like this math equation to like predict what I
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: would need for my engineering problem versus for physics it's
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: more like okay, here's the answers, but why? Really just
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: distilling that, compressing that basic set of rules that lead
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: to that why. I'm scared slightly that.
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: If this field is stagnating because we're only individuals doing
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: something and we can't make our field very modular as
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: it is because it's just like historical precedent or whatever
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: the number of bill is, that when somebody comes along
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: and actually does have a result that's better than these things,
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: is it like, oh, let's just put all our eggs
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: in one basket now. Like, this is the better bet.
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: And I think it should be a fun collaboration. And
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: I think that the nice thing now is that there
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: are a lot of some crossovers with people like spending
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: sabbaticals at these big tech companies. And some care about researchers,
• 59:49
  Speaker 2: which is great. But how do you make it so
• 59:52
  Speaker 2: it's not just like, I think I like academia in
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: a way, I don't know, it's institutions, right? But can
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: you try to use the fact that there is some
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: value proposition or exchange there to try to drive innovation for,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: let's try to get the best product that can do
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: theoretical physics well. Maybe I'm using other people's products for it, not, fine.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: If there's any IP or value in that, use that
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: to help fund a field going forward instead of it
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 2: being relying on taxpayers, whatever, for a very specific, small,
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: highly purely theory thing. Because there's value that can come
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: from the engineering side of it. So for example, when
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: you build CERN or you build these other big detectors,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: a lot of the time the value proposition isn't, okay,
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 2: we're learning something about the laws of nature, which is cool.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: But it's also that all of the engineering that's going
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: to go into that is going to be super valuable.
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: Can you do that with theory? And I think that
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: now the answer is yes. And maybe it's already being
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: done in some sense, like when they're selling intelligence and
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 2: they're getting like fundraising for those companies, maybe that is
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: the pitch and that's what they're doing. But I find
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: it fascinating to be kind of, I feel like we're
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: back at this like moment when CERN helps invent the
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: worldwide web. Like, can you, instead of like whining and begging, like, oh,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: we should have like had better structures that like endowed
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: like a field or something like that. Maybe it's not
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: even the right thing to do. Can you do that now?
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: without like begging for things to have been different in
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 2: the past and just like, you know, there's opportunity to
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: now go for it and do it right. Don't just
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: care about papers, care about some of the infrastructure, you know.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: CERN helped build the World Wide Web.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's what they say. I hope I don't
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: get all the facts wrong. But yeah, like they were,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: they're trying to, they have a lot of data and
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: they're wanting to like serve it to different places. And
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: I think DARPA gets a lot of credit too there
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: for actually like what you think of as the internet. But,
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: you know, like when I used to, and this was
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: the type of thing that bugged me a lot because
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: I think I had these heroes in, in, in tech
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: that thought like, oh, if the physicists maybe just did
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: things differently, they'd have like all these whatever cool thing.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: And then you walk into the door of where I
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: worked and there'd be a thing on the side because
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: it was funded by a tech person of like saying
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: how quantum mechanics like leads to like the transistor technology
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: and like understanding general relativity helps with like timing of
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: satellites and GPS. like imagine if you had quantum gravity
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: or like the blue sky research you do now might
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: lead to something cool in the future. And I believe
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: in blue sky research and it's great. But I think
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: the thing is like, normally it's still, there's a reason
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: for it, you know? And like, how do you, like,
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: it's a weird pitch to try to say, oh, it's
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: worked before. So keep giving me money now. I don't,
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: it doesn't feel honest. I mean, it's in some sense, yes.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: But like, I didn't like that. I think the cooler
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: thing would be again, to try to see like, how
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: do you align things that are valuable with the thing
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: that you want to do as a physicist? and like
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: go from there. Cause there's anything that you want to
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: be able to do. If you can't do it already,
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: there's something missing. And it probably, if you're a human
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: interacting with it, it's an engineering thing. It's a product
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: you could build and not like an equation you're trying
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: to solve. So I think that's a fun thing. That's
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 2: kind of opening up probably because of the way that
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: like funding is weird in academia right now. Like, you know,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: can you decouple this? Like we basically view universities as
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: just educational institutions until you go to grad school and
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: you realize it's a research institution. And like, all of
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: the great grades you get in undergrad, you realize, like,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: they don't care. They just care about their research. This is, like,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: this is not that. This is, like, some way the U.S., like,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 2: is basically funding private institutions to do research at scale.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: And overhead seemed crazy, but that's just how they fund
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: it in Europe. They'd be funding the schools more directly. So, like,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: there's such a dichotomy between, I think, how I used
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: to see MIT or Harvard before I went to grad
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: school and how I see it now of, like, completely
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: different value propositions or priorities in the institutions. And so, like,
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: you know... how do you make sure research gets funded
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: and is super cool? And it's maybe like that the
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: experts in the field are the ones deciding like how
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: the resources for that field are allocated rather than it
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: being kind of, okay, you know, these institutions get money
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: from revenue streams from teaching students. So it's like the
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: best people in different fields all in one or big
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: tech says, ah, it's broken or whatever, like come into
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: our private lab, you know?
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. Let's take a quick break. When we come back,
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: we'll start getting into space. Most gear looks good until
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: you actually start using it. Then you find out pretty
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: quickly what holds up and what doesn't. That's why I
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: keep coming back to Roka. These aren't just lifestyle sunglasses
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• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: That's R-O-K-A dot com and use code SRS. Welcome to
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: Hollywood versus reality. Did I do it right? What does
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: this wrong, because I don't watch any of this. A
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: pretty cool. Gotta silence it. In another lifetime, I did
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: gun reviews for a living. Proprietary... It's supposedly the best
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're. And now
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: we're bringing them back. It does look pretty cool. I
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: gotta admit that. All right, Sabrina, we're back from the break.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: We're gonna get into your current work. Gravitational memory effect.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: I need you to slow down just a little bit
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: for me. I'm not on your level quite yet. Maybe
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: by the end of the interview.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: I just talk fast.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: So, okay. So.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: What is gravitational memory effect?
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: So there's different kinds. The easier one is not the
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: one that I came up with. It's much older. And
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: it's this notion of you're going to have these big
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: bodies out in somewhere in the galaxy or whatever, or
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: far away, coming in and colliding. And then when they collide,
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: they're going to coalesce maybe into like another black hole
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: or whatever it is. But there's some ripples in the
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: space-time that come out to you. So these gravitational waves
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: are propagating away from this collision exhibit.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: So this is like indentations in the weave of space.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think actually it's pretty accurate in
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: the sense of like I'm looking at like, say, at
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: a given time, the positions of some mirrors that have
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: been moving back and forth. So the thing about the
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: memory effect is basically that there is like a very–
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: like long timescale thing that's imprinted because of this scattering process.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: Hold on. Can I, can I make another, would this
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: be like the wake of a boat?
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 2: In some sense, almost literally. I think that the thing
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: about the wake of the boat is there's different approximations
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 2: for like a deep water wave. And like, it's not
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: as universal. I think like I have a friend who
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: is a family who's like into like nautical stuff. So
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: I think we concluded that like, There's a sense to
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: which sound waves in the water could be approximated as
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 2: having a memory effect, like if they're deep underwater, but
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: like a surface wave is not going to have a
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: universal relation between the boat past and then it moved.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: But okay, so imagine, let's do the buoy analogy. So
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: I don't think the math works out the same, but
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: imagine you have like some boat passing and you knew
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: that like you could infer like the amount of like
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 2: munitions on this boat because like the buoys moved a
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: certain amount. No, like, you know what I mean? Like
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: some net property of like the thing. So it's not
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: as cool as that because I think that in that situation,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 2: it's not a universal relation between the things that scattered
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: had some kinematics that then set the value of this shift.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: But yes, you have these two gravitational like, wave detectors,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: some probes sitting very far away, just minding their own business.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: They're sitting along geodesics. This wave passes, and then the
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: distance between them is going to change. And depending on
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: where they were relative to this thing, there's a certain
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 2: pattern in the sky that it would. And you're seeing
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: that there's a relationship between this distance changing and the
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: net kinematics of the amount of energy in the things
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: that we're scattering and the waves coming out. And so
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: there's this relationship. that's like conservation of energy generalized to
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: this kind of fun asymptotic symmetry version of it turns
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: into deterministic imprints in the night sky of these move detectors.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: And then to see the angular momentum analog, you have
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: to go a little bit sub leading, which is the
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: spin memory.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: Oh shit. Okay. I think I'm picking this up. So
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: you're saying... Okay, how do I explain this? Okay, so
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: if we have a sheet or a blanket or something,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: and I put, I don't know, a mark on here
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: and a mark over here, and then we put a
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: ball in the middle. Move a little bit. They come inward.
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: Is that what you're saying?
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: So that would be kind of an analogy for maybe
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: the gravitational potential kind of curving you in. I think
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: this is closer to the buoy analog. The math is wrong.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: This isn't true for this case, I'm pretty sure. Imagine
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: that you could have some buoys pretty far away and
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: you knew that there was always a shipping route where
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: they go from here to there. And the only options
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: are the direction in which they came and maybe the
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: momentum of that boat. And you could infer from the
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: buoy shift those types of quantities, regardless of whatever they
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: did in the middle. So that's not going to be
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: true for the water wave. I'm pretty sure it's not
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: true for the deep water wave case. But for this
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: gravitational system, there's a symmetry reason why I can see
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: that type of shift. Like the buoys move by a
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: certain amount, that means blah, like this amount of energy
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: was deposited, like type of thing.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: Okay. So does the imprint stay like that in space?
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: That's the whole point. So this is supposedly like the,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: at the very end it stayed. Now in practice, that's
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: not super useful because we're like, we do these things
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 2: where we have a theoretical framework where the math is
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: rigorous and then it's completely BS in the sense of
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: that's not the thing you're going to measure. So like
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: in my framework, I'm doing that single, whatever, ship crossing
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: type of thing. as the entire, everything that happened in
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: the whole world, infinite amount of time. But what you
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 2: do then is you say, okay, there's this effect that
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 2: this framework studies, but it really is only accurate for
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: like each individual scattering experiment is like a chunk. And
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: so there's a shift from that scattering experiment. And sure,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: something else is going to move it around later. But
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 2: if they're spaced off enough in time, can I approximate
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: this thing as like the memory effect?
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: Okay. So let me re-explain this to you to see
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: if I'm getting it. So basically what you're saying is
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: it will leave an indention, an imprint in the fabric
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: of space.
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: And it will stay there forever until something else moves it.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, something else moves it. And then there's a very
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: formal version where we say, imagine you wait for an
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: infinite amount of time, tell me the beginning and the end,
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: and that's technically the memory effect. But in practice, it's
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: closer to, like, let's pretend there was just one thing
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 2: that happened, one thing you're detecting, so one event.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 2: As far as those time cells are concerned, it's a
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: lot longer than any other thing later moving it.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: And so then that's a memory.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: And you discovered this?
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: I discovered a variant of this based on the connection
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 2: to these symmetries.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: What is the variant?
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: So this variant is like angular momentum loss instead of
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: energy loss in the gravitational waves and the spinning particles
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: kind of. So basically it's like, and this was the
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: kind of fun thing. So I come into my PhD
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: and you're almost just going to do like classical radiation.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: So like, you know, You accelerate a charge, it's like
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 2: emitting radiation. And the fun thing about gauge theories, so
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 2: gravity and electromagnetism kind of fit into this framework of the,
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: there's an extra symmetry when you try to write down
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: a field, like a set of equations that are local.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 2: So what happens is that when you have a charged object,
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: so say you take some cat and you're like, I
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 2: don't know, like some riboelectric effect thing to get some
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: charge on like the fur. like static electricity or these
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: things where you see like this balance of charge, you
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 2: probe it far away, right? So I can, with gauge
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: theories or with like these, like the fun thing is
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: I can be away from the charge and see it.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: So I don't need to come up and pick up, oh, look,
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: I have like an electron charge. It's like, I can
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: see the electric field is like pulling me in, like
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 2: you were saying with this blanket and like the, it
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 2: being deformed. So like I can measure the, some features
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: of this object in the center from the boundary. And
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: that's kind of one of the ingredients to this kind
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: of holographic principle of like, Can I just talk about
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: the things in the boundary in isolation as its own theory?
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: But for the very specific scope here, it's like that
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 2: Gauss law type of setup of, okay, if I am
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: very far away and I measure the electric field everywhere
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: in some sphere, I can determine the total charge inside.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: The analog of that when I then have an accelerating
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: scattering experiment is kind of like this imprint of this universal,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 2: like I know from this low energy part of the
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: radiation something about the kinematics of the charges scattering. So
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: it's like Gauss's law, but applied to some scattering process.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: What makes the particles scatter? Is it a collision?
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 2: It's their own interactions with each other. And that's the
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: funny thing. It's these long-range interactions that are busting in
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: a curse. So the fact that they're charged and then
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: they're going to have some photons exchange between them or
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: other particles is the thing. But we basically, there's something
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: about the very low energy that is universal almost because
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 2: of these classical equations of motion. So I guess, long
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: story short, when I do this idealization where I pretend
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 2: I'm in flat space, that's my world, and I want
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: all of these solution sciences equations that obey these boundary conditions,
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: then I see that, you know, things at the boundary
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 2: are going to move. So, like, what you're saying is
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: I have, like, these two detectors are sitting there. They're
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 2: not just going to stay there. They're going to move,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: but they're going to move by a certain amount that's
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 2: maybe a certain, like, controlled parameter as compared to where
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: they are if I just push them out to infinity.
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: And so, like.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 2: Because you have this kind of whole symmetry framework that
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: you're importing from other instances where it's been useful in physics,
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 2: you can now apply it here and you realize, oh, look,
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: that tells me something about soft limits and scattering, tells
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: me something I can observe.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: So early in my PhD, they had this connection between
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: like soft physics and a synthetic symmetry word identity. And
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 2: then my first paper was on like the subleading soft
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 2: version of that, which was and some people had speculated
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 2: that there might be an enhancement of the angular momentum,
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: like the rotation symmetry of the world in some sense.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: And then when you keep pushing that further, then you
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: can tie it to this experimental version because someone else
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: understood that there is a physical, like the space-time physical
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: thing you're measuring is related to the waveform that otherwise
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: computing with this quantum field theory computation. And yeah. So anyway, basically,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 2: long story short, is you were just taking some mathematical
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 2: framework and then trying to copy paste it to a
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: new application. Once you have like one iteration, you're trying
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: to see what's modular about like some computation. And then
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: you get to import that and find something new because
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: you pulled it out. Wow. Yeah.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: Wow. I mean, Stephen Hawking cited your solo in joint
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: papers in 2016. Your dissertation is the only, it's only
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: the second Harvard physics Ph.D. published in Physics Reports. The
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: other author won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. That's incredible.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, these things are fun, but it's always fun.
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 2: You probably find a way to find a cool little
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: way to frame what happens or not. But the Hawking
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 2: thing was cool because, again, he visited at the end of, like,
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: near the end of his life. He came to Harvard,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: which was neat to see, just the entourage. We were
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: on a Congo line in this boat caravan. kind of
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 2: like those little river cruise type of thing, but in
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: the Boston Harbor, that was hawking his whole entourage, and
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: I was literally doing a little conga line behind him.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, you can't make that up. It's a fun experience.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: So what does this discovery mean?
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 2: I don't think it means that. I mean, it means
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 2: I'm lucky that something experimental is going to come out
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: of something I did maybe. I don't think the things
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: that I've done have like that deep of a meaning
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: or something where like everyone should know these types of
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: things necessarily. It's more like the fact that, you know,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: there is some value of trying to take these frameworks
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 2: that are very abstract and try to distill parts of
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: it that then you can try to then push for
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 2: the more realistic versions of it. I think that's a fun,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: fun kind of paradigm. And it's, and it's like fortunate
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: that there was some observables of this. But at the
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 2: same time, like I'm using Einstein's equations to get it.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: it's more of a test of like the boundary conditions
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: being a good physical assumption than a test of the
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 2: theory itself.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: So, so I think that it's not like super, super exciting.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: It's exciting to me, but like, it's not like, you know,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't say tell your audience is important.
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: I think it's pretty cool.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 2: Lots of things are cool though. Lots of things in
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 2: this building. Pretty cool.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: Is the, is the universe expanding?
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: So again, I think that that's a funny thing. I
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 2: do think if you talk to a cosmologist, they believe
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 2: in like the, the cosmological constant like isn't necessarily being
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: actually like, sorry, there's this experiment right now that's like
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 2: trying to promote that maybe the cosmological constant is like
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: changing over time. And a lot of string theorists love that.
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 2: A fellow, like a faculty member when I was in
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 2: grad school at Harvard, like Rafa is kind of colleagues
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: with Andy. He is very into the Swamp One program
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: and trying to test things. I think that I am
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: not too into the experiment to know like why a
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: lot of cosmologists don't trust the results yet or whatever.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: But I think that a lot of things are up
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 2: in the air in the sense of, you know, like
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 2: there's always qualifications to things. So like, it's good to
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 2: at face value, trust the actual result of an experiment,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: but you want to understand what are the extra, like,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: what is it actually seeing versus what you're actually over-interpreting
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 2: it as seeing. And so one option that a lot
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 2: of people like is, okay, maybe the cosmological constant is
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: changing over time and then it'll be asymptotically flat or
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 2: the wrong sign, opposite signs would be where a string
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 2: theory likes to live. So I just, I guess I
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 2: end up being very agnostic in a weird way, which
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 2: is not good because somebody should just answer and say, yeah, blah,
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 2: this is our model of MDCDM.
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: But it is true that stars, galaxies are.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: Moving further apart. So there's a sense in which, yes, like,
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: so I think what I'm saying is I'm taking it
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 2: to be Like, okay, you're looking at these various stars
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 2: far away and you know, like, okay. So the fun
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: thing about physics is you're often saying the laws that
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 2: I have here are the same everywhere. So if that's true,
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: I know like some features of my star or stellar formation.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: So I know like the spectrum of the lines that
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 2: are supposed to be there. So if it's moving further away,
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 2: I'm going to see like different frequency shifts and things
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 2: like that. So there's a lot of cool stuff that
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 2: you can see where like, yes, that's not in doubt.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 2: I think the thing that I latch onto, because again,
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: it's too, it's close to this like, is your framework
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 2: even physical? Is like the statement about like some parameter,
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: like the cosmos are constant in Einstein's equations and whether
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: everything I do, I'm like a flat earther as far
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: as like cosmology is concerned, because I just set it
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: to zero. And like, now there's some experiments saying maybe
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 2: that's okay. No, but not, but like what things are
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: constant versus functions of other things that can change over
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: time roughly. Yeah.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but the expansion thing, sure.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: You're not a flat earther.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 2: No, no, I'm joking. So I don't want to encourage
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: a flat earther, sorry. So like, you know, like, sorry,
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: so the extent to which you're on the Earth and
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: you see like the curvature scale of the horizon or whatever,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: or you're not seeing and you're saying, the world is flat.
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 2: There is a, I'm just trying to make a joke
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: and probably it's dangerous to do it at the actual
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 2: platform of the fact that like, you know, do we
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: see the curvature scales of like the universe, the cosmological
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: constant at the scales where I care about it for
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 2: particle detectors or for these gravitational waves from LIGO? And I...
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 2: I'm always setting this constant to zero instead of like, whatever,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: 10 to the negative, like large power.
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: So if the universe is expanding or, or, or if
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: we want to say the galaxies and stars are getting
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: farther apart.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like that means the universe is expanding.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: No, no, no. I'm sorry. I think I'm saying, I'm
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: not saying no, I think you're right. But I'm saying
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: that the physicists are worried more about like, why is
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 2: it right? Like, is there a reason that there is
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 2: some like, like, various like cosmological constant there, or like,
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: is it all just like the different like matter distributions
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: and things like that, that try to govern the reason worrying.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: So I should have just said, yeah.
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 3: But instead I was like, oh, by the way, there
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 3: are experiments that are like maybe like changing our opinions
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 3: a little bit or calling the question, some notions of
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 3: those like parameters that describe this thing.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: So if it's expanding, what does that mean? There's a wall.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: So that's the thing. So the fun thing about cosmology,
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 2: if you're doing like a holography for like the sitter
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: space times is there is like a literal horizon where
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 2: you can, like as one observer, you're not seeing the
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 2: whole thing. And so the world that I live in
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: is like kind of understanding the mathematical structure you can
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 2: attach to the kind of the boundaries of the space time.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: And in most situations, like in the ADS context, which
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: is this like wrong sign, cosmological constant version toy model,
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 2: or in the case where I do, like, It's really
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: the space-time boundary and not the boundary of some observer.
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 2: And then you have to deal with observers, and the
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 2: sitter is hard for lots of reasons. So I just go, ah.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: So if it's expanding, wouldn't that, the fabric, the indentions,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: what do we call it? The gravitational memory effect. Wouldn't
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: that change?
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: No, it doesn't. So you're absolutely right. And in the sitter,
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: like the types of, like, you're basically propagating a wave
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 2: on a curved background versus a flat background, and it
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 2: changes the form of it further away. And people have
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 2: papers trying to talk about it, like memory on the
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: observer horizon and the center, which is the closest thing.
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: But the thing that's relevant is you want to think
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: about what scale is that important as compared to what
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 2: scale I'm seeing the wave coming from this inspiring binary system.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: And so at least, for example, a lot of things
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 2: I do are also relevant to... not the memory effects
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 2: so much, but these asymptotic symmetry stories can be applied
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 2: to amplitudes. And there, what you're doing, you have CERN,
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 2: you have this collider, and it's such a small scale
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 2: where these things are interacting that the detector itself is
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 2: considered to be at infinity. But it's not infinite. I mean,
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 2: it's huge, but that's hardly infinity. And so can I
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: pretend or ignore that expansion for some things? Sometimes yes,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: and then sometimes no.
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: Gotcha. Gotcha. Wow. We actually have a hot question here.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: It has to do with flat Earth.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 2: Uh-oh.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: You ready?
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm ready. I think I'm accidentally reading this.
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: Here we go.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: Surveys have found that up to around one in ten
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: Americans say they agree with statements that the Earth is flat.
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: From a scientific standpoint, what actually proves whether the Earth
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: is flat or round, and not just in theory? What
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: real-world evidence or systems make that determination undeniable?
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 2: I should have prepared more because I got the best,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: I don't know the best answers, but I would just say, like,
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 2: look at the pictures from them, like, satellites or like
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: people up in space, you can see the horizon. I mean, like,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: like what, I guess, I don't know what, why those
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 2: don't work. For example, you know, when, like, if I
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 2: talked to someone who was a flat earther, what would
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 2: they try to say if I said, you know, look
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 2: at the right and see it's curved or go up
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 2: on like a.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: I'm not a flat earther. Yeah.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: But I've talked to a handful of them and they always,
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: they always have.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: What's the excuse of these?
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: I can't remember what their excuse is. They think satellites
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: are balloons. they're not in space. I do know that.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: I don't know what the argument is. It goes on
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: here a little bit more. Because technologies like GPS, satellite communications,
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: and global navigation all operate as if Earth is curved.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: So what are the strongest proofs, and could any version
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: of a flat Earth realistically reproduce those same results?
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm trying to, like, I would say no, but like,
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 2: I think what I'm saying, I'm trying to think of like,
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: how would I be the defense attorney for a flat Earth?
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean? Like, what would I try
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 2: to do to make them feel as right as possible
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: by caveating the hell out of everything they want to?
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, like, I think that you can't, once you're
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 2: trying to say, like, I mean, you're trying to apply
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 2: a framework beyond its scope of applicability. And that's what
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 2: these types of technology or like the something far away
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 2: above the earth is seeing that it's wrong. But like,
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: you know, to their credit or not, like when you're
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: on a map, like, you know, you print out your
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: little chart, like, You're not going to go that far
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 2: off like when you're driving around town pretending that, you know,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 2: the earth around you is flat unless you try to
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 2: park your car in a hill and you forgot to
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 2: put your parking brake on. I don't know. Like basically– no,
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 2: and that's not for the curvature. But I think that–
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I think that it's emblematic of the
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 2: fact that it's hard to believe the things you don't
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 2: have input for. You know, like you build your intuition.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: We build our intuition, you know, walking around in a
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 2: way where– Like, you might not notice these things. Like,
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: do you notice the phases of the moon? I don't know, like,
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 2: how much people pay attention to those things or how
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 2: much it affects their lives. And then doubling down on
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: that worldview is sometimes funny, sometimes scary. I don't know
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 2: what the right take on it is. But, like, you know,
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 2: there's value to questioning, I guess, like, how much your
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: assumptions or, like, the visceral world that you live in
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 2: and the intuition you get from that actually extends beyond
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 2: the things that you're able to probe yourself. Like, you
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: can't go. And just jump up into space and look
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: down and go, oh, never mind.
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, maybe soon, though.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 2: Maybe soon. Maybe send them up. Like, hey, they go free. Like,
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: they'll say it to get on the free, like, several-bottle
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 2: flight or something.
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Follow-up.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: What's the biggest misconception people have about black holes? And
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: is there anything about them that still completely breaks our
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: current understanding of physics?
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 2: I think that, if anything, okay, so breaking your current understanding,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: I think that sometimes it is the paradoxes that that
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: show that there are problems in our understanding. So I
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 2: think that maybe breaking isn't as active word I don't
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 2: think I want to use. I think that like, again,
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 2: I always feel like I don't even understand these stuff
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: well enough. And I think that's one problem when you're
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 2: in a field that everybody's confused is like, how confused
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: are you? Like when I say I'm confused, does that
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: mean I'm actually confused? Or are you like less confused?
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 2: Like who's really more confused? So there's these paradoxes that
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 2: come from like basically trying to say, okay, I think
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: I know, like it shouldn't be that ridiculous if it's
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 2: a big black hole, like the horizon isn't that special.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 2: I only kind of know it like, kind of like
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: teleologically or like away from, like, I don't know at
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: the moment that I passed the horizon. So then why
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: can't I put some quantum fields on it? And then
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 2: like I have pair production, one of them will go
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: out to infinity, the other one's going to go inside.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 2: And suddenly you run into these like issues of, uh-oh,
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: like did I evaporate into a thermal system now? Is
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 2: it not unitary? And all this fun hawking stuff. So
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 2: I think the thing that one should take away is
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 2: that there are Still, I think situations where people don't
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: understand all the assumptions they make, where they can just
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 2: follow one step after the other, think that they're doing
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 2: something that seems logical or not, and then they realize, oops,
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 2: together something was wrong. It's not breaking physics. It's showing
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 2: that there is something broken in our assumptions. The physics
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 2: always has to be right. I think we believe that.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 2: It's just we don't quite know, again, the regimes in
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: which our assumptions are valid or which one is the
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: wrong one. So yes, there's a lot of active things.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 2: Like some people, I think I still have colleagues who
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: believe that as soon as you cross a horizon, there's
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: like some like firewall or fuzz balls. Like there's like
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: different models for what happens behind it. But we're all
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 2: basically just playing with some frameworks, like mathematical frameworks that
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: give us intuition for what we might guess. And then
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: we're not precise enough with what we're assuming when we
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 2: compute something. And then, oh, this don't fit together. Like
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 2: that's the vibe. But I think I wouldn't try to
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 2: scare like a random person with it. I would just
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: point out that Somehow the bread and butter of like
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 2: a physical theory where you don't make a measurement is
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: seeing that like these assumptions don't tie together. So something
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: has to be wrong and then propagating it back and
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: trying to fix it.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, what is a black hole?
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 2: So I mean, I think some of it sounds like
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 2: there's literally just a sense in which like I have
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 2: so much matter in some region that now even light
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 2: can't escape. The way that I see it is from
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 2: a Penrose diagram there straight up is just some region
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 2: that I cannot access from infinity. It's very much like
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 2: a feature of the geometry. But then there's other fun
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 2: things about the fact that if you put enough energy
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 2: in some region that you're going to end up creating
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: a black hole. That often is tied into this question
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: of quantum gravity has to be weird and different. It's neat, though,
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 2: because you see how much people, when they see, even
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 2: though it's not actually the horizon, when they see these
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 2: images of a black hole and the accretion disk around
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 2: it or whatever, generating the light. Engineering is cool, the
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 2: fact that they can reproduce that image or stare at
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: a black hole. But it literally is a black hole,
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: the picture, which is kind of funny, right? The way
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: the light is bending around it. But I think the
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 2: fun thing is really just more like.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: Like the way a physicist would at first in her
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: counter is like, there's a very specific solution to Einstein's equations.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 2: So there's a differential equation with a specific solution that
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 2: then has some weird ass properties of like the causal
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 2: structure of like where like particles are going to end up.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: So. What happens if something goes on it?
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: That's, so that's the type of question. So basically I
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: think a lot of people would believe, okay, when you
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 2: first go through, you don't really know that you went
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: through because like it's, Black holes can be different sizes, right?
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: And so if it were large enough, the curvature scale
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 2: when you're crossing the horizon isn't so extreme. But eventually,
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: if you just did little probes on this background, I
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: think people talk about spaghettification or you're going to be
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 2: stretched out eventually when you get closer to where the
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 2: curvature is larger and blowing up at the singularity. But
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 2: I think that's a funny thing is people, you understand
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 2: this classical geometry, and then you start having problems putting
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: quantum fields on it and answering some fun paradoxical type
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: of questions. that then people aren't sure, like, they think
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 2: that the singularity is something so highly curved that the
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 2: approximation of just treating it classically is bad now, so
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 2: then they don't know what happens if type of thing.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: But it's not, like, I think it's easy enough to
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 2: try to say, okay, if I, like, have some nice
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 2: numerical simulation and I can just write down this differential equation, like,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: for how something would propagate on a classical, like, black
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 2: hole background, that you could have something just, like, going
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 2: through the horizon for a little bit and probably... like
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 2: in that model it looks fine, but it's just like
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 2: how valid are those, how hard is the numerics first
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: of all to do near certain regions and the way
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 2: you set up for a scattering process probably is also hard.
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 2: But it depends on, like basically the problem is that
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 2: sometimes it's the question you're asking ends up being not
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 2: the right question or things like that type of problems.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: I just, I still, I don't understand how it can
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: swallow light.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: No, I mean, so, but it's basically like you're writing, like,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 2: how do I say it? So like you have this
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: metric is telling you like the, if I have a
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 2: coordinate system for my space time and I have then
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 2: a notion of like the distance between points on it
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 2: and like a nice coordinate system is often some notion
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: of like a spherical coordinate system where, okay, like very
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: far away, I have this like, you know, directions in
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 2: the night sky and let's say a time direction in
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: this case. And then in that coordinate system, there's a
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: solution to this differential equation that Einstein gives you where
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 2: you don't have any matter sourcing outside, And it ends
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 2: up being a black hole solution where there ends up
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 2: being a horizon. And you can just kind of play
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 2: around with how does the energy redshift or whatever, things
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 2: like that. It's very much just a math problem. You
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: know what I mean? You're playing with a given solution.
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 2: So it's harder because it's nonlinear. But when you're doing
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 2: multiple moment expansions in E & M or just literally,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: if you give me some charged object, put it here,
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 2: what's the electric field far away? I don't know if
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 2: they have any fun... I think if I try to
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 2: make an analogy, you could probably figure out one with
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: some telecom, like reverse engineering from all these different radio signals,
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 2: what's happening. I don't know.
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: What do they look like from, I mean, how do
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: I say this? If we were to do like a
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: 360 model of a black one.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think the best thing is like, I
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 2: forget which, I'm going to get the name of the
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 2: movie wrong, but like Kip Thorne was a scientific advisor
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 2: to this whatever oh man i wish i had a
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 2: better recall of like names of cool movies interstellar maybe
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 2: i hope i'm not wrong on that um where they
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 2: actually ran a like you know simulation for what it
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: looks like i think that you have pretty good like
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 2: images from either like that movie or um i've seen
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: the images you're seeing the light coming out of it
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: right so that's why it's like.
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: They look like so you know if if my fist
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: here is or my hand is the black hole what
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: does it look like from this angle Is it flat
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: or does it look the same?
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: Oh, no, it should be round.
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: So it's actually a hole that you can access from
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: any direction.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: And so ironically, I definitely have colleagues who play with
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 2: these type of ray simulations more than me. So when
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: I see a black hole, I see an equation written
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: down and I'm like, uh-oh, this blows up here. But
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: the point is that when you're seeing those simulations, I
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: think a lot of it is you're seeing, like, imagine
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: you had some stars behind it and then how that
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: light from the star is coming to you. And so, like,
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 2: Maybe it looks funny because literally like you're not necessarily
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: seeing the fact that nothing, you're also seeing nothing came
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: from it kind of, but you're also seeing some like
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 2: funny lensing of like the stars behind like their light
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: kind of going on geodesics around and coming to you.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: So some of the artifacts are that, which I guess
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 2: is what it looks like. But the funny thing, I
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 2: think there's, you literally know what it looks like. And
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 2: I don't think it would be that hard to like
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: do some sort of simulation of like you're following a
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 2: geodesic down and then there's a bunch of them. Yeah,
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: I want to look at it from the bottom, from
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 2: the top, from the side. It's just a question of
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: how do you want to set up.
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: From the back?
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 2: So it roughly has a normal non-rotating buckle would have
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 2: spherical symmetry. A lot of buckles are actually kind of
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: rapidly spinning, so there is some asymmetry. You can see
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 2: it'll depend on where you are compared to this axis
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 2: of rotation. But there's not a front and back thing.
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 2: It's more like an axis of rotation difference.
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: So what is the shape?
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 2: It looks like those. Is it a ball?
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: It's like a ball.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 2: I mean, sorry, it looks like when those images of the,
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 2: like the black hole have this kind of funny, like
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: distorted ball looking thing. But again.
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: Three dimensional though. What is it? What does it look like?
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So you're seeing it. It's like if you, there's
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 2: a surface of evolution around it, I think is the rough,
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: the rough picture. Like the things are symmetric roughly around that.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 2: But again, assuming that like, and I think there's no
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: reason to assume otherwise that like the light sources around
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 2: it are kind of evenly spaced because this thing is rotating.
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 2: So there's a rotational symmetry and you should do it
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 2: that way.
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: Do you think it could swallow a planet?
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, I have no reason to think not. I
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 2: guess the question is like, what is, I'm like, sorry.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 2: So like, I have to take a step back and
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: make sure I'm not like saying something that was for
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 2: the experts are going to be concerned, but like to
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 2: the extent of what do you want to consider a planet? Um,
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 2: like I think that like, just because something is like
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 2: gravitating And it was always there, like, you know, our planet,
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: we're orbiting something that if I just wasn't moving like
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 2: this way, I'd be falling in. So like, you know,
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 2: so like, it's not just because it's there doesn't mean
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: it's like swallowing a planet, but sure, something could fall
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 2: into it. And I guess if you wanted to say, like,
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 2: the only thing I'm worried about is to whatever extent,
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 2: the thing was the original, like, thing, the planet was
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: rotating around that you called it a planet for that reason,
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 2: you know, but yeah. Yeah, it's a hole where you
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 2: don't see the light coming out, but I don't think
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 2: there's anything stopping it. I don't know if I've ever
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 2: looked or tried to find a nice numerical simulation of
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: just imagine that I have a bunch, me and a
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 2: bunch of other particles with some light sources are together
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 2: falling across the horizon, what it looks like. I think
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: it doesn't look that special. And the thing that looks
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 2: special is you're outside and you're seeing all the light
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 2: around it kind of being warped by it.
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 2: I'm sure it would look kind of fun. I don't
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 2: know why they don't. Like, you could do it. I mean,
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 2: there's nothing. Like, that's just a differential equation you're trying
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: to solve.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: It's like, no. Yeah. All right.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: Let's move into celestial holographs.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Celestial holograms.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: What is that?
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: So it's a good branding exercise. This is what you're
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 2: doing right now, right?
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, a lot of, I think, some British twister
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: people have some fun, like, sense of humor of how
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 2: they name things as far as, like, celestial sphere and
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 2: heavenly equations. I think there's fun things. So a celestial
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 2: sphere literally is night sky stars. If you're like Millennium
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 2: Falcon or whatever and you're accelerating, you might imagine that
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 2: you'll see the distribution of the stars in the night
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 2: sky move around a bit. So they're going to dilate.
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 2: And so that's somehow seeing that there's like the boost
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 2: symmetry of the space-time is a dilatation of this sphere.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Summer can be a
• 1:37:10
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• 1:38:44
  Speaker 2: So what we're doing is trying to map all of
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 2: the observables that we want to have to this night
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 2: sky times a null direction that's complicated to do. So
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 2: we just project it back down to the night sky.
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 2: And the reason why we do it is, again, because
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: we're just copying and pasting and then generalizing things that
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 2: have worked before. So both someone like Hawking thinking about
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 2: putting quantum field theory in a black hole or someone
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 2: who's a string theorist who's saying there's 10 dimensions or
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: 11 dimensions, and I'm going to have all these things.
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 2: all this extra field content that I then have to
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 2: like have this extra dimension like wrapped up and be
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 2: tiny and never see it. But both of those types
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 2: of frameworks end up leading to this cute notion that
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 2: somehow the easiest way to get around describing a quantum
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 2: gravity system is to find an equivalent non-gravitational system that
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 2: it's dual to. And so from the Hawking point of view,
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 2: it's like there's a sense in which this black hole
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 2: behaves like a thermal system where the entropy is this
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: area law. And so, okay, there's this fun kind of
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 2: almost information theoretic vibe to like how like gravitational solutions.
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 2: Then from the string theory side, there's this kind of
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 2: more complicated, like some theory on brains backreacting, where you
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 2: have a more precise actual equivalence between, I know some
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 2: very esoteric, like bulk strings on like some gravitational space time.
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: That's the wrong cosmological constant, wrong number of dimensions, yada, yada.
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: But it's equivalent to another gauge theory that I know.
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 2: And so a lot of people in my field love
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 2: like those precise dualities and because then they have power
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 2: on both sides. Maybe some things are easy to compute
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: as a geometric object and other things are easier to
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 2: compute on the other side. And so you can study
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 2: like different, like strongly coupled limits by having this other
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 2: approximation or other approximation that's valid. But both of these
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: things to me are just saying, okay, you have, again,
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: this effort to like, there's a reason to think that
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 2: maybe one tenant of quantum gravity is this holographic nature.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 2: And then we're trying to apply it to these asymptotically
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: flat spacetimes, which are again, the kind of the flat
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: earth or analog of cosmology. But like, don't, maybe I
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 2: shouldn't say, I should just say that.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: Sounds like the, I have the core question here. Is
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: everything we see in 3D space, 4D spacetime actually projected
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: from a 2D surface, like a hologram?
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: See, that's the thing is I would say in some sense, yeah,
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: by definition, but like how physical is it? Like I
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 2: think what I'm saying is that, and maybe this is
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 2: a problem with someone who ends up spending too much
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: time just in equations and not in like real world.
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: Like if you can describe things the same way, you
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 2: might as well use whatever definition is useful for some things, right?
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: So I think I don't always take it too literally
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 2: in the sense of like we are in this celestial sphere.
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 2: It's more like, can I convert everything to variables on
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 2: that celestial sphere? And does that help me organize something
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 2: scattering computations in a way that would just get computationally
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 2: complicated to compute all these five-minute diagrams or something like that.
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 2: That's the kind of goal. I think I view it
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 2: as it's another math framework that ideally, if we do
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: it right, is equivalent. And then don't over-interpret the physicality
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 2: of that per se, but it probably is my own
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 2: problem for not trying to take things more literally because
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 2: we are studying physics after all.
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: So I don't understand. I'm trying to understand this. So
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: are you trying to prove that everything we see is
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: a hologram?
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 2: I think that I'm trying to build a version of
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: a holographic framework that works for space times that are
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: not anti-de Sitter. So like space times that are more
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: relevant for like scattering. How does gravity want to be described?
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: Quantum gravity want to be described by a boundary system.
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 2: So we're trying to build that out. And at the
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 2: same time, if it were true, then the two things
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: are equivalent. Not that like, so like if A equals B,
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: I'm not saying everything is B. I'm saying everything that
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 2: is A is B, right? So I'm more like saying
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: there's equivalent set of things. Like you can imagine a
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 2: world where maybe I, I don't know, try to project
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: everything down to the earth and then talk about some
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 2: rules for how those things interact. And it was more
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 2: convenient to talk about the extra dimension. I don't know.
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 2: But like you're not trying to lose content that way.
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 2: Certainly it's not supposed to lose anything. But it is
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 2: neat to think, okay, like if everything is described in
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: terms of boundary observables, then it does kind of, which
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 2: questions are well-defined in the book, for example.
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: So celestial holography is your way to prove this and
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: use it to unite Einstein's theory of general relativity with
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanics. The two foundational theories currently contradict each other.
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 2: But again, there's a lot of people where you could
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 2: probably motivate their research as inspired by it. And the
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: question is, I'll go in So it's funny, these things
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 2: go in and out of fashion. I think I've heard
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 2: from some postdocs now that it's not cool anymore on
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 2: your grant applications to be talking about quantum gravity. But
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 2: I still think that's why we go into it. We
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 2: don't go into the field because there's two maybe reasons
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 2: why people go into the field. I think some people
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 2: genuinely like paradoxes. And it always bothered me because it's
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 2: just like any paradox where someone actually had the answer
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: in the end, you just defined it wrong. So I
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 2: went into physics because I liked that I didn't have
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 2: to learn as much. I mean, the sense of I
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: don't have to have an excellent working memory nominally. if
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: the laws of physics are simpler, to then figure out
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 2: what the rules are simpler than the solutions. So I
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 2: like physics for that. That doesn't necessarily bode well when
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 2: you have a very complicated corpus of things and so on.
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: I think the reason that we study something like quantum
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 2: gravity is, again, because we have this bias or we
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 2: think that whatever the laws of nature are, there's a
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 2: fundamental set that then leads to all these different regimes
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 2: that you're studying. And if you didn't have that bias,
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 2: maybe you shouldn't be doing that job. But if you
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 2: have that bias, then the thing that you should be
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 2: doing is trying to, again, merge various rules into a
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 2: single set of rules. And so I guess the big
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 2: outstanding one is this, like, short-distance physics and long-distance physics
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 2: because at some point then, like, we know there's quantum
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 2: mechanics and we know that, like, GR is important. So, like,
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 2: there's some sense in which the actual observations guide you
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 2: to this still open kind of problem of how, what
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: theoretical frameworks can consistently limit to both. I think, I mean,
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: to the extent that, like, why should the rules of, like,
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 2: tennis versus hockey have to be united, right? Like, I
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: think that, like, it's kind of cool that we think
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 2: that the laws of nature are, like, there's something fundamental
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 2: about it. There's something highly compressible, like, about that description.
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 2: And I think that's a fun hypothesis even rather than
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: just a belief to try to test it. And you
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: can kind of automate what you do as researchers in
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 2: the future.
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: But, yeah. So are you saying that everything in space
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: is potentially– projected from a 2D surface?
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 2: That would be, sorry, I think what I'm saying is if,
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 2: so like space-time, so for me, it's like, it depends on,
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 2: so sometimes you use the word space to mean space-time,
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 2: but it's three plus one dimensions is our world. And
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 2: then the boundary is one dimension lower typically, and the
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 2: celestial sphere is two dimensions lower because the boundary for
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 2: these flat space-times is null in a way where like
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 2: basically no other direction can talk to each other. So again,
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 2: the point would be, can we, find an equivalent description
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 2: or almost like a, we've seen it work in the past.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 2: How do we apply it to this regime? And then
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 2: how do we learn something by seeing how we can't
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 2: import it? So again, physicists are constantly using mathematical frameworks
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 2: that they already have and trying to tweak, like apply
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 2: them to something different and then realize something goes wrong
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 2: and then try to like learn about that framework by
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: seeing how to modify it to make it work. And
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 2: so like in some sense, answer is yes, but at
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 2: the same time, You want to try to see if
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 2: I build a framework like that, would it tell me
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 2: anything different about the structure at scales I can't see?
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 2: But ideally, it's a bad framework if it can't, in principle,
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 2: encompass the things that we do have the intuition for.
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: In the book. This is way over my head.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: But it's way over everybody's. I mean, that's the thing.
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 2: It's just like, you know, like I think that I,
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 2: especially when the type happened when I was younger, I
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 2: was very much like, I'm going to go and read
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 2: a bunch of textbooks because I want to be able
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 2: to like answer good questions or like, you know, know
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 2: how to tell the flat earthers why they're wrong or
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 2: like you're representing science somehow in a funny way. And
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 2: it's just like, ah, like you need a much better
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 2: working memory for that. Or I don't know. I think
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 2: the thing is that, you know, you don't need it.
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 2: Like in our job, you can do this kind of
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 2: like you're diving in and you're doing a computation. And
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 2: then sometimes you lose sight of the breadth of it.
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 2: But I also think that now it's a fun time
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: where you can kind of take a step back and
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 2: see if there are things where the resource limitations or
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 2: just the way that physics is done doesn't need to
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 2: be that way because now one researcher doesn't need to
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 2: hire a whole team of data scientists to treat the
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 2: corpus as a data set and do something with it.
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of.
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 2: Power to having like funny eye tools. And like, you
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 2: get to just basically play around with doing things that
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 2: you never would want to do normally as a, as
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 2: a good researcher, because that wouldn't help you with your career.
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: Okay. I'm going to ask you some very, very, very
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: basic questions to try to understand this. Are you saying
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: that a planet could be a hologram?
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but in weird lawyer sense, not like in the way,
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 2: you know, a star. No, I think what we're saying
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 2: is like all these objects that you're thinking you're in
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 2: the bulk. And there would be some state on the
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 2: boundary theory that's equivalent to it in these types of
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 2: holographic setups. I don't want to say that I understand
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: flat space holography to the level where I'm confident in that.
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 2: But in ADS-CFT context, their dictionaries are like, yep, this
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 2: massive state is this other operator in the CFT type
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 2: of thing.
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: Potentially, everything we see in space could be a hologram.
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: Or are you saying the fabric of space?
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 2: Basically, the whole point is that there's two equivalent theories.
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 2: So the thing that you have in the bulk, you
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 2: want to add in the boundary theory. Can you formulate
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 2: a theory that lives one dimension lower that isn't just so, like,
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 2: is there a natural sense in which you want to
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 2: live one dimensional lower? And for example, maybe one kind
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 2: of intuitive thing of why it might be nice is
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 2: that if I have a global symmetry, so I have
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 2: something that's not related to these long distance interactions, then
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 2: typically I need to go and like kind of measure
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 2: the charges of the objects throughout the constant time slice
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 2: that I'm in. We were saying, this is Gauss' law story,
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 2: that I can measure the electric charge in a configuration
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 2: by just having some probe of the electric field at infinity.
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 2: And so in ADS-CFT, there's a sense in which this
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 2: boundary theory is evolving in time, and you want to
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 2: find the dynamics of the boundary theory. So there's a
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 2: dynamics of the boundary conditions of the bulk theory that
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 2: end up, I guess, telling you as an equivalent presentation
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 2: of the bulk theory. I think the fact that it
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: is holographic is deeper and probably, if it were true,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 2: has deeper implications for the right physical quantities to be
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 2: talking about in the book. But again, I think that's
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 2: the sense in which, sure, if I felt more confident
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 2: that the state of the dictionary where I really had
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 2: a good intuition for that thing, then I could try
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 2: to pull back and say, the fact that it's described
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 2: as this boundary theory, what does that mean for what's
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 2: a good thing to talk about in the book? But
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 2: I don't think it's formed enough for me to have
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: that type of assertion or make that type of enthusiastic
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 2: claim given the danger of how it's interpreted.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: What are you visualizing in your head as you describe this?
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 2: I am visualizing a Penrose diagram with a sphere and
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: just some light shades, I guess. Probably that and or, yeah,
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 2: some equations. So I'm basically just a bunch of Penrose diagrams,
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 2: probably the slides and the talks I would give.
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, I can see it. I think you're visualizing. Yeah,
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: I do.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: I know, but that's not necessarily very helpful, right? So
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 2: that's a problem. With like, when you're a grad student,
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 2: they often say like, shut up and compute. And I
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 2: used to take it as like a personal offense. Like,
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 2: I can think too. But the point is you're trying
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: to be trained out of using your physical intuition, you know,
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 2: for the things that you're doing. Because again, like, you know,
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 2: you can't see 10 dimensions. You can not even barely
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 2: see like, you know, four if it weren't three plus one.
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 2: So like, how do you, what can you physically do
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 2: in this world where we clearly are interacting with certain
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 2: energy scales? three plus one dimensions at a time. How
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 2: do you get out of that? And then you build
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 2: this intuition by computing things, I guess. So then your
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 2: intuitions are roughly a bunch of computations or a bunch
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 2: of lower dimensional projections of things if you happen to
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 2: have someone who can make nice figures. Yeah.
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: What do you believe happens when we die?
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, God, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, my
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 2: mom's very Catholic. I don't know. I think the thing
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 2: that's like, that's a funny thing. Physics probably tells you like,
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 2: Gives you some sense of which questions you want to
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 2: ask or not. And I guess the right answer from
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 2: a physical point of view is I don't know.
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: Do you think about it?
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 2: Luckily, I'm happier, so I guess I don't. But no,
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 2: I think that the weirdest thing is often I can
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 2: fight with people I think are friends in a fun
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 2: way of like how to interpret the observer. So like, yeah,
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 2: like I definitely think that if you And I mean,
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: to the extent where we don't agree, like, I don't
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 2: know actually who's right on it. If like, how much
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 2: is the fact that like, I am a me, like
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 2: somehow I feel like physics can still describe, or it
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 2: doesn't obviously like tell me I couldn't have, you know,
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 2: some objects that end up having these complicated, like neural
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 2: nets in them that interact with the environment and it
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 2: changes the set of it. And so it feels like
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 2: they're making decisions based on that. But it's a different
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 2: question than like, I feel I'm me and I interact
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 2: with the world. So I got, I think if I
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 2: want to say that physics covers everything, then I probably
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 2: do want to have the observer be part of the system.
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: But I definitely have friends who are definitely not religious
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 2: or anything like that and still kind of call that
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: observer thing into question. I just don't know because, again,
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: I guess I don't like open systems. I don't know
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 2: from the point of view of what are we doing
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 2: as a theory. But, yeah, there's fun questions that are
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 2: related to this in the sense of, like, who am
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 2: I versus, like, and is it the same thing as.
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 2: I think how active the observer is or something like that.
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 2: I still probably am biased to not including that, but
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 2: maybe that's dumb. That could easily be dumb.
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: Do you and your mom talk about this?
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 2: No, no.
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 3: Sorry.
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: I'm not good at... Neither of us are good at debating.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 2: She definitely sees what I do as a variant of
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 2: religion and I'm like, nah. But I also, it's very
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 2: easy because I think we're so close to like end
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 2: up going too far with questioning this stuff. She came
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 2: from Cuba when she was a kid and they weren't
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 2: allowed to be religious there. And so I think that,
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 2: you know, it means a lot more to her partially
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: because of that. But also, I mean, it gives her
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 2: like a very sense of like guidance in the family
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 2: life and things like that. I mean, it means so
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 2: much to her, right?
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But you don't, you don't.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 2: No, and that's the thing is I personally view like
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 2: attention with the like dogmatic aspects of like that you
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 2: know the answer. Like, I mean, what I love about
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 2: physics is that, you know, there is a sense in
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 2: which like the, even though, first of all, like the
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 2: level at which I actually understand these things is so,
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 2: so silly and whatever. But there's a sense about science
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 2: that if it's done right and honestly. Like, you can
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 2: have these revelations. Like, you can learn something about nature.
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 2: And I think that whether you're religious or not, everybody appreciates, like, nature.
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 2: And so we're trying to find the rules. And if anything,
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 2: that seems pretty close to the spirit of, like, the
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 2: part of religion that gives you the, like, the, like,
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 2: answers or some, like, sense of, like, this is the
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 2: way things are, right? I mean, like, you're trying to
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 2: find an origin story, right? So, like, that kind of
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 2: origin story aspect of it, I think that science is after.
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 2: But I think that I like the fact that we—
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 2: are supposed to admit when we don't know things. Sometimes
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 2: that doesn't always, it definitely plays out in a way,
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 2: weird way, because a lot of people think they're experts
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: and then like talk down to people who don't. And
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 2: so it's very dogmatic in practice, but it's not supposed
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 2: to be that. And I love that about it. And
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: that's the thing that turns me a little bit off
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 2: of religion. Sometimes it's just like, you know, like, like,
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 2: can you question things or whatnot? But I think this
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 2: notion of not knowing is clearly fits into this notion.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 2: Like if you thought there is something creating everything, maybe
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 2: that's more of a reason that we're special or more
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 2: of a reason that the rules have to be simpler
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 2: because yeah. But like I tried to be more agnostic
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 2: and I also am against the kind of dogmatization side
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: of it a little bit. But I'm happy to try
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 2: to debate or change my mind a little. I seriously
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 2: see my mom and it's just like, yeah, why aren't
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 2: there women priests, you know?
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: Right on, right on. So what does it mean if,
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: what does it mean? with the hologram stuff, if it's
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: projected from a 2D.
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 2: So, again, I think the thing that it will mean is,
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 2: once I understand it better, that there's some types of
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 2: things you do or don't want to talk about within
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 2: the bulk space-time. But I do think, like, I care
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 2: about physics not because, I mean, you land on this
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 2: one little corner of it that you get to play with,
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 2: and it's somehow the best bet for you because it
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 2: uses the things that you know. But, like, it always
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 2: frustrated me, like, how hard it would be to jump
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: between different fields. Because you, like, imagine if you have
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: no experiment culling different parts of the research canons. it's
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 2: just going to get harder and harder when there's more
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 2: alternate attempts to something. And I don't know enough about
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 2: loop point of gravity to tell them why they're wrong.
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 2: And I'm just basically vouching because I like, I trust
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 2: like one other person's opinion who might've looked at it.
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 2: And so this is funny thing where like, like this
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 2: is the kind of the output of other people that
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 2: are also really smart. It's hard to internalize and compress.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 2: So I like this notion of being able to think
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 2: about taking a step back and saying like, we value
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 2: physics for this type of reason of like, finding these
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 2: deep questions, trying to see that nature seems to have
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 2: this highly compressed description. How would you go about finding it?
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 2: Can we view ourselves as instead of individual people who
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 2: maybe do a great thing and they could call themselves
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 2: an Einstein or whatever, that instead of it, we're responsible
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 2: for this legacy, we're custodians of this canon. Are there
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 2: tools now that we have that we can help curate
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 2: and condense it more systematically? And I think that that's
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 2: an exciting time for me because I love that notion
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 2: of don't just stay in my little corner. Like, how
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 2: would I get out of that corner, first of all, personally,
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 2: but then how is it also, like, you view that
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 2: venture as something super valuable, I think, and closer to
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 2: these kinds of, like, deeper questions. But I don't think
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 2: I think about the deep questions enough because I'm in
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 2: the computations, because that's the thing where the intuition comes from,
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 2: and then you just get stuck philosophizing if you're not,
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 2: if you're in the, you're too far away from it. Man.
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: How would this change the Big Bang?
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: Oh, I think that it's... I think the big bang
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 2: theory thing would probably tell me that something about my
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 2: framework has to be tweaked or something like that. I
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 2: view it more because again, like, you know, like a
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 2: cosmological origin side of thing is very much like not
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 2: part of the thing I'm setting up. So the first
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: side of it, if I need to include the sitter,
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 2: the stuff that I'm studying is more of like a
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 2: stepping stone to understanding how to generalize holography. And then
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 2: the second part of it is again, like initial conditions
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 2: or things like that. We're not necessarily always, sometimes we're
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 2: thinking about the equations and not like the like the
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 2: solutions for the equations and the particular ones that are
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 2: relevant to the real world. So I would say that the,
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 2: it's not going to do for the big banks more,
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 2: but with a big bank, tell me I need to
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 2: like specify once I understand better if my framework encompasses
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 2: that or not. Yeah.
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: Do you believe we can time travel?
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 2: Uh, forward at different rates.
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: How so? Oh, I mean, sorry.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 2: I think what I'm saying is like, I'm just making
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 2: the joke that we're all going forward in time, but
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 2: to the extent that even they have this in this
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 2: interstellar movie, if I got the name right, um, like, uh,
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: like this kind of twin paradox of like your clock
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 2: is affected by gravity. And so you can, you know,
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 2: go around and come back and have age differently than
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 2: your twin, but you're only still going forward and whatnot. No,
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 2: it's funny because we don't, like, and that's the kind
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 2: of fun thing too, is like, it's, there's still cool stuff, like,
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: but the no-goes are, are there. And we never, you
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 2: never really get to play with all the fun things,
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 2: I think. Like, I, like, it's always this funny thing of, like, sure,
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 2: you can do this thing, but the caveat is it's
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 2: not physical or whatever. Like, right, so this thing about, like,
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 2: you can age differently, but you can't, like, go back
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 2: in time to anything. And it's also because it would
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 2: be pretty, sometimes things are built into assumptions. Like, it
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 2: would cause a lot of other problems if you can
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 2: go back and, like, close time, like, curve your, influencing
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 2: your own future. But, like, yeah, I just wish that,
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 2: I think the thing is that, like, in order to
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 2: make progress in the field, you have to be so
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 2: in the nitty gritty that you don't get to, like,
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 2: have fun, like, bullshitting around with, like, the, the things
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 2: that people think physicists do. But Prometheus is pretty close.
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 2: We have a pretty fun, we have people who do
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 2: like quantum foundations and like a wide variety of just
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 2: theoretical physics, where sometimes it feels a little bit more
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 2: like maybe the stereotype of a physicist or the chalkboard
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 2: debating like existential things.
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about quantum mechanics versus Einstein, the fight at
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: the edge of reality.
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: Where do we start?
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 2: We're framing it as a fight, man. Oh, no, I see.
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 2: More like, again, this is the type of thing of
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 2: why do we believe that the laws have to be
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 2: coming from the same thing, right? I think that that's
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 2: a pretty bold and fun assumption. And you can imagine
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 2: that if somebody thought that, like, at every different energy scale,
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 2: just there's some new things, because that's the way it is,
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 2: that you couldn't predict, that's a very different vibe than
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 2: thinking that, like, There's a mathematical consistency or some kind
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 2: of underlying principles that will carve out a space of
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 2: theories that still can be consistent with observations. So what
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: I view it as is, again, as a hep theorist,
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 2: we're making this bet about the structure of these laws
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 2: of nature that probably has some consequences that you wouldn't
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 2: be able to see when you're just in the nitty-gritty
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: of it. And that excites me a lot, thinking of, like, okay,
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 2: if I could zoom out and see the structure of
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: the corpus and, like, Like, which theories are actually consistent
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 2: with each other? Wouldn't that be fun? And so I
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: think I like that because that feels closer to the
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 2: kinds of things that excited me about physics as a kid. Now,
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 2: it's still further away from a lot of, like, there's
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 2: some companies now that are trying to do, like, AI
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 2: for physics with a thing of, like, we're going to, like,
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 2: you know, like, robots are going to come out of
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 2: the physics thing. It's like, I don't, I, it's probably
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 2: not physics the way I define it when that's the case.
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 2: But there is cool, like, you can unlock cool things
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 2: when you're, like you're changing the way you're doing things.
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: And I think that I, sorry, forget this quantum gravity thing.
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: It's again, it's about trying to condense this corpus. You're
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 2: trying to like find a single description that can limit
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 2: to two different things. And right now we really have
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 2: only a limited number of suggestions, like roughly string theory
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 2: is a framework. Can you try to find other ones?
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 2: You probably never would if you're just sociologically in a
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 2: field where everything you're learning is in the context of
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 2: like within string theory, it probably be some variant of
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: it at any point, just almost by accident. So I
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 2: think it's kind of fun to do a little bit
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 2: of a meta layer and think about like what are
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 2: we actually after as a field and be clear about
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 2: those goals.
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: What is the Perimeter Institute?
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, I love it. So Perimeter is founded by Michael Zeridis.
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 2: He's one of the co-founders of Blackberry and he's one
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 2: of these like, you know, tech entrepreneur physics fans. So like,
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 2: I mean, obviously like he kind of ahead of his
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 2: time with the smartphone type of thing, was an engineer,
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 2: awesome engineer, and then like liked physics. that put a
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 2: lot of money into a physics institute. I'm not sure, like,
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, like you have to be a fun kind of,
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it's a brilliant idea or a
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 2: silly idea, but it's definitely good for the physicists. So
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 2: what I love about it is that it's like a
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 2: research institution that's like a private public partnership. So like
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: his money is highly leveraged and like the Canadian government
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 2: supports it of just for theoretical physics. And so it's
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 2: neat because you can imagine, you know, if you cared
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 2: about the product, you care about research, Having something where
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 2: the whole institution is dedicated to that is a very
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 2: different vibe than, again, like a university where you are, like,
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 2: you're pooling, like, your eight, like, auditoriums or your dorms
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 2: or things like that. And it's all these different research
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 2: directions that are together sharing some resources and you're kind of, like,
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: cross-sectioning the field. And then it's the reputation of that
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 2: place that draws some talent in or not. I think
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 2: there is value to this kind of cross-sectioning research by
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: the product or by the discipline. And Perimeter is an
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 2: instantiation of that, but, like, with the downside of it
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 2: being in just one place in Waterloo, Ontario, you know,
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 2: where his company was and things like that.
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: You went there instead of taking a $ 1. 1 million.
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but these packages are for, like, research funding and
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 2: things like that. And research is, I guess, I don't know,
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 2: people are expensive. So that's where these things scale and
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 2: sound like fancy numbers. But, I mean, yeah. But at Brown,
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 2: it would be very much like an Ivy League professor
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 2: sounds cool. You're teaching a lot. But, again, you're just
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 2: kind of at a university that has one reputation compared
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 2: to other reputations. I don't know, like, that type of
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: vibe of, like, within the U.S. system, Harvard will get
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 2: more money than Brown would. And then versus at least
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 2: at Perimeter, it's kind of a startup vibe. Or at
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 2: least in principle it could be. And then you try
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 2: to make it that, which is fun. But we'll see
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 2: if they let me.
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: So what are you doing at the Perimeter?
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I do my research there. So I do
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 2: my celestial geography research. And it's basically like your faculty.
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 2: You don't have to teach. You mentor mostly, like, master
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 2: students up. And then you're, but they're more forgiving or
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 2: like the kind of institutional things that you're helping with.
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 2: And so normally it's like, instead of being on committees
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 2: that are just like in a big department at a university,
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 2: we don't care, you're closer to being able to help
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 2: guide the institute sometimes. And so it's kind of fun
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 2: because you get to think, okay, like we're this institute
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 2: that has like outreach teams, that has like teaching teams separate,
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 2: like that really value each of those facets of physics.
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 2: How can you help with that as a researcher? And
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 2: I love that type of question. I love thinking about, like,
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 2: how we can position ourselves to collaborate more with, like,
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 2: tech companies for, like, AI for physics or things like that.
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 2: And I don't think that question is as meaningful if
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 2: you're at another university because, you know, that university doesn't
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 2: care about theoretical physics. They can change their mind on
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 2: who they hire later in the commuter over time. And sure,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 2: there's probably awesome, like, CS departments at places. But, like,
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 2: you know, like, you can really focus on a thing
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 2: when it's your whole mission. And I love that about AI.
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: Do you think AI is going to... What do you
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: think about it?
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 2: I'm excited.
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 2: Like, I used to be more... So, like, again, I
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 2: think my opinion... At least I'm happy that my opinion
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: can change. I feel like that's a positive thing. But, like,
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 2: I was definitely more, like, jaded by, oh, people oversell things. And, like,
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: what if they oversell things too much to the extent
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 2: where then it hurts the.
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 2: Like, it's not... Like, there is value to expertise that
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 2: I think that sometimes people overcorrect things and they don't trust, like,
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 2: science and stuff like that, right? So, like, how do you.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 2: Engage with like hard conversations of like where is this
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 2: field going or things like that without throwing the baby
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: out with the bathwater or like making it hard to
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 2: like collaborate. So I used to be more like, oh, no,
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 2: they're going to say they're going to do all these things.
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 2: I know that my heroes kind of like physics. So
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: is it going to be like. The guys with the
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 2: funding get access to all the data, start making some
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 2: claims of theories, and then we don't know enough to
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: be able to tell them why they're wrong, yada, yada.
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 2: The route that ended up happening instead is more like, oh,
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 2: we're going to take the top people in the field,
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: not like the Harvard professors, not them, and just work
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 2: with them and collaborate with them first. It's a funny
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 2: reputation thing. But it's fine. It makes sense. It's a
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 2: business move. It makes sense. But it's a funny thing
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 2: where we're more a part of it than I might
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 2: have thought. I thought it would be like we're going
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 2: to get overwhelmed with a bunch of crockpot papers by
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 2: physics enthusiasts. And it's less that and more this funny
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 2: thing where it's just we're all in the labs for
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 2: a little bit or not. But how do we really
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 2: do this right? Instead of it being like, okay, so
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 2: say one company wants to show that they're doing some research.
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 2: They can work with a few top researchers. And then
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 2: the top researchers can say it's interesting. But like, we
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 2: want to do cooler shit than we could have done before.
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 2: And how do you like, like, I think that it's funny.
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 2: It's like, you think it wouldn't be that hard to
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 2: try to just get all bunch of strings first. It's like,
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 2: let's do what they do for math. Write down a
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 2: bunch of like well enough defined questions and dare someone
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 2: to like try to automate it. And even we could do,
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 2: we could have more fun. We could say like, okay,
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 2: Sam Altman, you're saying ChatGPT-8 is going to solve quantum gravity.
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 2: Let's put some parameters on that and make a bet.
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 2: And if you like do it by that timeframe, whoever
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 2: did it gets that prize pool. If not, give that
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 2: money to fund the researchers. I don't know. I think
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 2: there's a fun way to do like XPRIZE with these
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 2: deadlines because the thing that scares me the most is
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of confidence. And once you start playing
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 2: with the coding side of the products, I can see
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 2: the confidence in it. But like to what extent, like
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 2: a company can always pivot and you can be like,
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 2: that claim is bullshit. But they still will find something
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 2: else that works and that's great for them. So you
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 2: don't want to short the company or anything like that.
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 2: Like how do you call them out a little bit
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 2: when they're overzealous if that overzealousness can hurt you? On
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: the flip side, though, I found that the agentic coding,
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 2: vibe coding capabilities are just amazing because you can have
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 2: all these little daydreams of how you want to interact
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 2: with the physics paper. And before, when I was a perimeter,
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 2: they were supportive of me trying to use some of
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 2: my grant money or startup money to hire some interns
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 2: from local universities to code something up. But I was
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 2: a shitty coder, so I'm not good at managing people
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 2: at tasks that I don't know whether I'm asking them
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 2: to do. And then I was so bad, I couldn't
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 2: even basically host this thing locally to show people what
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: it was. And within a few weeks, I could basically
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 2: redev the same thing with Cloud Code, which is amazing.
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 2: So I kind of see that sometimes that hype or
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 2: that push can drive a product to a level where
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: now I don't need to hire a dev team. As
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: a physicist, I can start to play around with things
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: that I couldn't have done if I didn't know how
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 2: to code myself. So there's skill sets that are open
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 2: to me because it's been kind of democratized. So I'm
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 2: grateful to that. And that's a bit in tension with
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 2: my kind of err about we're going to solve physics,
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 2: and then it might like, take the funny way, ah. So, well,
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 2: at least, like, thank you.
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 1: What are you going to do if they solve physics?
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: No, but this thing is, that's the question, is, like,
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 2: what does it mean to solve physics? I want to
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: make sure we have the same definition of that, because
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 2: I do think that it would be hard to imagine
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: actually solving physics to the extent where, like, until you
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 2: build an experiment, you can't rule out spaces of theories.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 2: I think the coolest thing is to try to think, okay,
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of things in our field that you
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 2: would never do because, again, resource limitations. So, When you
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 2: have a couple thousand people who, awesome smart people, definitely,
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: I feel dumb all the time, they're awesome people, and
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: they do their thing, and you self-select accidentally for the
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: type of people who just love mathematics to the extent
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: where then you can accidentally be ostracized if you are
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 2: too ambitious within that framework because, again, who are you, right?
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 2: And then also just... it doesn't help you get a job.
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: So like there's some things where it's like almost like
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: an emergent phenomena of things that people try to say
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 2: are institutional problems. It's like, it's really not anybody being
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 2: a bad actor. It's just like, you get kind of
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 2: stuck in the way that things are done because people like,
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 2: obviously like what they do and the people who like
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: it stay in it and the people who don't are expelled, right?
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 2: So imagine like you have something where it's like, if
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: you feel comfortable with things operating this way, then you
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 2: stay and otherwise you leave and you resent the field.
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 2: Then like, that's a bad thing sometimes. But now I think,
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 2: you know, there's enough, like, so you have this thing
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 2: where basically before a lot of people would go and like,
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 2: you wouldn't value doing brute force, straightforward things that are
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 2: just like scanning over spaces of stuff because that won't
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 2: lead to a breakthrough or like, is it one individual?
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 2: You can't do it. But if you can automate that, like, sure,
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 2: like there's a lot of value to types of questions
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 2: that nobody would have cared about, but that then makes
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 2: it a problem with benchmarking. So like, for example, in
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 2: other fields where there's more of an engineering challenge or, like,
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 2: a very specific goal in mind, you can say, this
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 2: goal is valuable, and then, you know, protein folding or whatnot,
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 2: they can do it. Or in even math, there's more, like,
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 2: I guess, like, tests for kids, you know, like, the
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: community seems a bit more organized, a lot more, like,
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 2: IMO problems, like, different benchmarks of, like, how good is
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 2: it at this thing. In our field, I think that
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 2: we kind of don't, like, often to say whose research
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 2: is more valuable than others. We definitely feel, like, there's
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 2: totally a vibe of, like, judging things. But, like, that
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 2: kind of ethos lends itself to not wanting to just
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 2: straight up say, this is a valuable thing that you
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 2: should do because if it was so straightforward to do it,
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 2: it wouldn't be an interesting question. And it's like, that's
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 2: dumb because like anything that's worth doing, like you'd think
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 2: it'd be worth telling someone else to do, right? And
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 2: so I think that we just got to get over
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 2: that in our heads a bit and realize like that
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: just because in the past you could only give faculty
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 2: lines to people who like happen to have a great
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 2: idea that there isn't value because the whole enterprise isn't,
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 2: it's physics, it's not math. It's like, There's some cohesive
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: structure to this thing. How do we optimize for that?
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 2: And I think it's fun because I think tech can
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 2: disrupt that a little bit in a way that isn't
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 2: going to necessarily, hopefully not in a way where it's
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 2: completely just erasing it. I think that there's a lot
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 2: of value to that expertise and how do we harness
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 2: that to do something really cool with it instead of
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 2: it being this thing where someone who's not an expert
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 2: just thinks it looks like it's doing the right thing.
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: What is something that you want to dive into that
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: you haven't yet? Yeah.
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 2: So, I mean, for me, it's always grass is always
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 2: greener on the other side in the sense of, like,
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 2: you get, you feel siloed and like, it's not like,
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: like no one's siloing you but yourself in some sense.
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 2: Because like, I guess for me, my, my, the one
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 2: thing that I wish I'd, it was like, it would
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 2: be easier for me if it wasn't is like, I
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 2: really like extrinsic motivation sometimes too much. So like when
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 2: I'm computing, I can be happy, but I like if
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 2: other people care about what I'm computing, you know, and
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 2: sometimes they don't because they each care about their own thing.
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 2: And like, I don't think you're a better person or
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: not for having like less extrinsic motivation. But it's hard
• 2:11:29
  Speaker 2: to navigate, like, you know, if every person just cares
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 2: about their own thing and you're like, how do I
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 2: do something this person cares about? I want to jump
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 2: into their thing. But then, like, they see it as
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 2: a waste of their time to necessarily, like, you know,
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 2: transfer that knowledge or something because they have their own
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 2: grad students. They have to do the research. So it's
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 2: hard to move around in a funny way just because
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 2: everybody's doing their own little math. But so I just
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 2: wish that I could better parse other people's papers and understand, like,
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: how their notation, their ideas fit into the things that
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: I've already built in my mind. Um, and so like
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 2: the type of thing that I'm excited about more so
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 2: is just, you know, can I take inspire up this
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 2: database of all the different papers in the field and
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 2: try to like use large language models or whatnot, just
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 2: for fun to see like how much I can try
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 2: to parse like the different concepts that are appearing in
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 2: these papers. And I think it's a fun game to
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 2: be like, okay, when I'm, when I'm asked to explain
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 2: something publicly, why am I so shit? I think I've
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 2: spent a lot of years instead of getting better at
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 2: public speaking, thinking like, why the hell am I so
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: bad at it? And I think there's these trade-offs between,
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 2: you know, we are selected for, or at least in
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 2: our job, it's better if you are not sacrificing accuracy.
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 2: And so anytime you're making an analogy, there's so many caveats,
• 2:12:34
  Speaker 2: the caveats get in the way of the intuition going through.
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: And then sometimes you don't even think that way. So
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: it's just like, can I try to like see the
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 2: structure of the thing I'm studying a little bit better
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 2: by like playing around with it within the scope of
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 2: things that I know? So I'm like that. So I'm
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 2: super excited just for the fact that like, I can
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 2: experiment with that all I want to, because Before, I
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 2: might need to, like, be better at coding in Python or, like,
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 2: understand the Inspire Hub API keys, and that's API calls.
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 2: And then that's, like, automatic now. So you get to
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 2: basically just have fun, and I like that a lot.
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 2: And so for me, I just want to basically understand better, like,
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: what is the information content of what I work on, right? Like,
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 2: in the human sense, not in the ADS safety sense.
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: Right on.
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the physics race between the U.S. and China.
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: Who's winning?
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think the US is still... I mean, sorry,
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 2: but obviously... I'm sorry. I think this is like... And
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 2: I think this is something where I'm happy to hear
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 2: your side of it too a bit more because I
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 2: know everybody who has any sort of military background has
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 2: a different view or conception of China than like... Probably
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 2: because physics is so useless. This type of physics that
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 2: I do is seen as that. That it's nice because
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: everybody can be a part of it. So we love
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 2: this notion that it doesn't matter what country you're from,
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 2: you're contributing to like this corpus. And to be fair,
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 2: everything that we're doing, we're publishing on archive for this.
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 2: So it's not like there's IP involved and like various
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 2: IP policies can affect things. So like, I like the
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 2: fact that there's some little slice of research that's so
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 2: far away from replication, but like everybody can be a
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 2: part of it. And it's not like what country you're in.
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 2: And so when I see things like about like, like
• 2:14:06
  Speaker 2: China funding an experiment, it's like, you know, someone top
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 2: down could just say, we're going to fund it. Hey,
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 2: it's an experiment. And honestly, it's, maybe it's a good
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 2: thing if they're spending money on trying to be better
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 2: at like research for just the, like the type of
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 2: research that's just for the clout and not for like
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 2: the military tech or something like that. Like make them,
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 2: let them build clouters, right? But I do think that
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 2: the pipeline of transferable technology is much slower than it
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 2: is actually building a technology, right? So, I mean, my
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: attitude is I could see that there is, and this
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 2: is the type of thing too, I think that, you know,
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 2: very strong top-down governance can do, and also different relaxations
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 2: of IP laws. There's a power to that that you
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 2: can see Europe maybe over-regulating things compared to USAI. So
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 2: I like to think that as we are right now,
• 2:14:59
  Speaker 2: and I still think it's more feasible to say that
• 2:15:01
  Speaker 2: the research that I do is so much less about
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 2: the practical applications and the technology for these space specs detectors.
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 2: I still think that the European Space Agency, one, LISA,
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 2: or whatever the name is going to be, that the U.S.
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 2: is a part of will outperform this particular one I
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 2: think that you were referring to, Tianjin or something. But
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 2: I think it's great that if they cared about it,
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 2: they would fund it, versus you have a hard time
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 2: sometimes convincing the American taxpayer that this is worth funding.
• 2:15:28
  Speaker 1: So you think we're ahead?
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 2: We are ahead, yeah. But I think that, again, it's
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 2: what do you want to be ahead on? Isn't it
• 2:15:36
  Speaker 2: great that They spend their money on the things that
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 2: we don't value doing eventually. You know, type of thing.
• 2:15:44
  Speaker 2: If there's a reason why we don't value doing it,
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 2: maybe it's great that they're doing it.
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 1: What are they doing that we're not doing?
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, I just think that they have, like, sorry, for example,
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of, I'm not sure if it's a
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 2: good thing. So, again, these could be, like, you know,
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 2: different people have different, I mean, I don't know what
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 2: level you want to consider it as a regime versus
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 2: a person or, like, whatnot. But, like, there's a, like,
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 2: faculty member at Harvard or, like, was there who has
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 2: a lot of influence there. in China, which is great
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 2: because then he can just have research centers and he
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 2: can hire people who wouldn't get jobs in America. So
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 2: I think what I'm saying is that, you know, in America,
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 2: it's like, oh, we only want like the top person
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 2: to like get a job or like these like elite
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 2: things and we can get them from all over the world.
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 2: And that's what we typically do. And then their route
• 2:16:22
  Speaker 2: is like, there's a lot of awesome people that are
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 2: never going to get a job in the US system.
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 2: We can hire them there. And it sometimes works, but
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 2: also right now it's still very isolating. So like the
• 2:16:32
  Speaker 2: US would choose not to do that. Like we don't
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 2: want to just have, hire a bunch of more faculty
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 2: because like, But then once we've made that choice, they're optimizing,
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 2: given that constraint, what can they do that's valuable? And
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 2: I think that then there's a reason why we made
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 2: our choice, right? And that still has an effect of
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 2: everybody that I know, it's really hard in India and China,
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 2: I think, to break out of those systems unless you
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 2: happen to have an advisor or someone you knew who
• 2:16:58
  Speaker 2: was in the US system, which is insane. I mean,
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 2: I feel bad for the researchers. It's just like, it's
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 2: so sociological in some sense. You can't just have a
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 2: brilliant idea And like get to be a part of
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 2: this like club in some sense because, again, it's not
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 2: just a– it's almost more like you can't– if you
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 2: don't speak the language or the right way, people don't
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 2: think you know what you're talking about or they don't
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 2: understand you. And so like there's like pipelines that are
• 2:17:19
  Speaker 2: very limited and very much go through the U.S. and out.
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 2: Almost like go through like Princeton, Stanford, like Harvard, MIT
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 2: and out, you know. And that sucks. But that definitely
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 2: just says that it's not like we're behind in that sense, right?
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 1: Are there any projects going on in China that you're
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: excited about?
• 2:17:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, I'm less of an experimental type of person.
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of, I mean, I'm excited for
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: my phenomenological buddies if they think that they can get
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 2: somebody to fund an experiment that the U.S. wouldn't prioritize.
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 2: I'm happy for them. I still think the things that
• 2:17:53
  Speaker 2: I'm more excited about are still in Silicon Valley as
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 2: far as I'm concerned. But that's my own bias. It's
• 2:18:00
  Speaker 2: my own.
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: What about the U.S.? Are there any projects here that
• 2:18:03
  Speaker 1: you're excited.
• 2:18:03
  Speaker 2: About that you're not involved in? I probably don't know
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 2: all the cool projects that people are doing. I think
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 2: that I mean, in the US, there's a lot more
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 2: money that can go into innovation in a way that
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 2: when the time scales for research in a company are
• 2:18:23
  Speaker 2: so comparable to the ones in academia, sometimes that rubs
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 2: me the wrong way. I think that we're good at.
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 2: There isn't a problem of putting money into innovation, so
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 2: the question of whose hands to go in or how
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 2: to control, but it's definitely the exciting things in the States.
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 2: The States, you can move fast and break things in
• 2:18:36
  Speaker 2: a way that I don't think you can in many
• 2:18:38
  Speaker 2: other places. But probably in China, IP laws would be
• 2:18:41
  Speaker 2: such that unless like, I mean, however we follow the
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 2: law with like copyrighted material for training things, I imagine
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 2: that they could have had a lot of, they could
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 2: have done that better, right? Because they can, they don't
• 2:18:51
  Speaker 2: care if they don't, maybe, I don't know the actual setup,
• 2:18:53
  Speaker 2: but a system who doesn't care about IP can definitely,
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 2: you know, do cool things and stuff.
• 2:19:01
  Speaker 1: What do you think about all these UFOs and UAP
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 1: sightings and stuff?
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I wish, I wish they were real.
• 2:19:06
  Speaker 2: It'd be cooler. But no, I don't think, I believe
• 2:19:09
  Speaker 2: in aliens, but I don't believe in, like, aliens that
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 2: have contacted us.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: You believe in aliens?
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, in general. I mean, statistically. I mean, so, like,
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 2: I think there's a fun thing. So, like, either we're super,
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 2: super special or, like, sure, there probably are, why wouldn't
• 2:19:21
  Speaker 2: there be life somewhere else? Where are the initial conditions
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 2: for where we are so special? I think that, you know,
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 2: people who study, like, I don't do this myself, but, like,
• 2:19:30
  Speaker 2: there's some, the fact that you haven't interacted with them
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 2: gives you some bounds on how common it can be or, like,
• 2:19:35
  Speaker 2: whether they need to be, like, in some environment where
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 2: you can have water or all those types of fun things.
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 2: But sure. I think that like, I mean, unless, and
• 2:19:46
  Speaker 2: I mean, the funny thing is called tension with religion
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: stuff too. Like, I think there's no reason to think
• 2:19:49
  Speaker 2: you're special unless there is a reason that you're special.
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 2: And so modding out by, or maybe the prior being like,
• 2:19:56
  Speaker 2: we're probably not special. It would tell you, sure. There's some,
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 2: something like an alien somewhere. Will you ever interact with it?
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 2: You don't know. But I don't believe in like, necessarily, like,
• 2:20:07
  Speaker 2: I definitely, like, I wish that we had talked about it.
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 2: It would have been cool.
• 2:20:12
  Speaker 1: So you think all these sightings are bullshit?
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's hard. I mean, I want to, yeah, but
• 2:20:16
  Speaker 2: I don't want to say it. Like, that's mean to say, like,
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 2: that people don't believe what you see type of thing.
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 2: But because I'm saying, like, I wish, if it weren't bullshit,
• 2:20:24
  Speaker 2: wouldn't that be more fun? I think what I'm saying is, like,
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 2: I wish things were as cool. All these conspiracy theories
• 2:20:29
  Speaker 2: make it seem like there's much more structure in organization
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 2: than there is. Like, I mean, just, like, I'm with you.
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 2: Maybe your bias, though, is that you've seen the military
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 2: when it works fucking well and that there is some
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 2: cool shit that I wish I knew about.
• 2:20:41
  Speaker 1: I've never seen any cool UAPs in the military that
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 1: go into the water and have rivetic propulsion systems or
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: whatever the fuck. I don't know. Yeah, I've never seen anything.
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I think.
• 2:20:53
  Speaker 1: I've only seen stuff on the news.
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think what I'm saying is like.
• 2:20:56
  Speaker 1: But I don't believe the news.
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 2: I know. That's... Yeah, it's funny. I don't know how
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 2: many people are actively... I think that we don't always
• 2:21:06
  Speaker 2: give credit to the fact that people cannot realize their
• 2:21:09
  Speaker 2: biases or that they are self-serving sometimes. Like, I mean, like,
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 2: I don't know how much of it's, like, Machiavellian or, like,
• 2:21:15
  Speaker 2: emergent Machiavellianism or whatever it would be.
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 1: The one that really gets me is The Nimitz.
• 2:21:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, wait, was I saying more? I don't know.
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 1: You don't know about The Nimitz?
• 2:21:24
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I guess not.
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: Multiple people saw it. It was some kind of a,
• 2:21:29
  Speaker 1: what was it? It was like an egg-shaped whatever projectile.
• 2:21:35
  Speaker 1: And it went in the water.
• 2:21:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:21:37
  Speaker 1: I don't believe it lost any speed. Came out of
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 1: the water. Pilots saw it. People on the ship saw it.
• 2:21:43
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 1: A lot of, it was a collective.
• 2:21:46
  Speaker 2: That's super cool. I wish, I mean, I always thought
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: these things are.
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 1: You haven't heard about this?
• 2:21:50
  Speaker 2: I'm, you're in a different, like, set of, like, internet feeds.
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: We definitely live in different worlds.
• 2:21:57
  Speaker 2: Which is, no, but that's, and that's fine in the
• 2:21:59
  Speaker 2: sense of, like, I know that I have biases coming from, like,
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 2: the experience of, like, who I would have, like, kind of,
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 2: Spent a lot of time around. But, no, I mean,
• 2:22:09
  Speaker 2: I think I always thought maybe it's cool military projects.
• 2:22:11
  Speaker 2: I don't know. And then, like, sometimes, like, optical illusions for, like,
• 2:22:14
  Speaker 2: if it was physically impossible.
• 2:22:17
  Speaker 1: That's what I want to ask you about.
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 1: How could it be an optical illusion?
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen the thing
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 2: to know that answer. But, I mean, like, first of all,
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 2: it's going to be more fun now that you can
• 2:22:29
  Speaker 2: AI generate stuff. Like, we're going to have, like, a real, like.
• 2:22:31
  Speaker 2: fake news at scale accidentally or maliciously i don't know
• 2:22:34
  Speaker 2: like that that's scary um and then the other side
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 2: i don't understand the extent to which things are physically
• 2:22:38
  Speaker 2: impossible for it to be a just some like whatever
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 2: drone or something you don't know i know in this
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 2: case i'm not talking about this example of going into
• 2:22:45
  Speaker 2: the water it sounds good but but i think what
• 2:22:47
  Speaker 2: i'm saying is that yeah i guess one question is
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 2: like when someone does believe it is that thing they're
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 2: so confident it's an alien and not like whatever why
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 2: do they think the alien can do something that we
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 2: can't do Because if it's all the laws of physics,
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 2: then probably it's the same capability. So then it's just
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 2: a question of, like, how advanced is the U.S. military
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 2: or other whatever, right? Or what are you actually seeing
• 2:23:11
  Speaker 2: versus what you think you're seeing? Because you're, again, extrapolating
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 2: based on, like, other things that you're used to looking at.
• 2:23:16
  Speaker 1: Could it be a hologram?
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 2: No, no, I'm not going to go there. That'd be fun.
• 2:23:19
  Speaker 2: I don't get a little quote for that. But, no, again,
• 2:23:24
  Speaker 2: I'm saying more in the literal sense of, like, you're
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 2: probably– misunderstanding what it's being seen if there's a reason
• 2:23:31
  Speaker 2: why it physically couldn't be some military tech. It's my prior.
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 2: I'd love to be wrong.
• 2:23:37
  Speaker 1: Could we project a hologram?
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 2: I think what I'm saying, sorry, to the extent I
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 2: don't see any reason why you couldn't do a little, like,
• 2:23:46
  Speaker 2: come save me. What's the quote from Princess Leia? I
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 2: don't know. That type of thing, which is a more
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 2: literal version of the hologram, not the one that I
• 2:23:53
  Speaker 2: would study. I don't know where laser shows are at
• 2:23:57
  Speaker 2: nowadays or exactly what, but see the thing is I always,
• 2:24:00
  Speaker 2: I think I always take the more pragmatic attitude of like,
• 2:24:06
  Speaker 2: like build cool shit. Like don't ask what is actually true.
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 2: Like try to engineer a thing so that it is,
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 2: if it's possible. Um, but yeah, maybe it's less cool
• 2:24:16
  Speaker 2: for the UFO type of thing, but like, you know,
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 2: imagine the thing that would have to be true for
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 2: that to be real. Do you believe it's true or
• 2:24:23
  Speaker 2: do you want it to be true or do you
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 2: not want it to be true? What's the conclusion that
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 2: you draw if there's really some deep state type of
• 2:24:28
  Speaker 2: thing that's hiding all these alien cool stuff?
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 1: I think it's all bullshit.
• 2:24:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly. I do too.
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 1: All of it.
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but the person who then doesn't think it's bullshit
• 2:24:37
  Speaker 2: has this probably in their mind like a more powerful
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 2: version of the U.S. government having some really cool– Like
• 2:24:45
  Speaker 2: men in black tech, right?
• 2:24:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 2:24:47
  Speaker 2: That's kind of appealing or fun. Yeah. I just, I
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 2: think that we need to.
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's a fun thing to think about.
• 2:24:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, to lay off the conspiracies and make the cool
• 2:24:54
  Speaker 2: stuff like that you can do.
• 2:24:55
  Speaker 1: I like that.
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean? There's a lot of stuff
• 2:24:57
  Speaker 2: that's like same isomorphism class of like, that's fucking cool.
• 2:25:01
  Speaker 2: Like this, like whatever, like autonomous F-35 thing you're talking about.
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 2: Like there's some cool shit that we can do. What
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 2: did you just say? Like I was through, someone was
• 2:25:10
  Speaker 2: going around and showing me the different things that you had.
• 2:25:12
  Speaker 2: I forget, one of your teammates was showing the. is
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 2: that like a scaled down model of a military type
• 2:25:18
  Speaker 2: of thing that a private company was doing?
• 2:25:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 2: But, but no, there's, I don't know. I, yeah, I think,
• 2:25:29
  Speaker 2: I wish that, yeah, it'd be fun if like people,
• 2:25:32
  Speaker 2: like if it wasn't just defense funding that got to
• 2:25:34
  Speaker 2: do the cool shit.
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: I'm with you. I'm with you on that. Well, Sabrina,
• 2:25:39
  Speaker 1: we're wrapping up the interview. What, What are you getting
• 2:25:42
  Speaker 1: into next?
• 2:25:44
  Speaker 2: I think I'm getting into being a shitty vibe coder
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 2: and just getting to have fun, like do my physics.
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 2: And then on the side, kind of try to look
• 2:25:53
  Speaker 2: at this bigger scale picture of the corpus and see
• 2:25:55
  Speaker 2: how far I can go with a little do-it-yourself type
• 2:25:58
  Speaker 2: of attitude until I need help and then ask for help.
• 2:26:01
  Speaker 1: Love it.
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 2: Love it.
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 1: Well, Sabrina, this was fascinating. Thank you.
• 2:26:05
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 2:26:18
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• 2:26:22
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• 2:26:25
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