#312 Sabrina Pasterski - Theoretical Physicist on the Hidden Code of the Universe

Perustin pyöräilyvää teitä valmistavan ornotin vuonna 2013. Mielestäni parasta Shopify saan se, että voimme harjoittaa liiketoimintaa ilman teknistä osaamista, voimme hallinoida yrityksen taustajaristeelle mien ja front-endia sekä myydä verkossa, vaivatta, jos Shopify olisi pyöräilyvaruste, se olisi mielestäni itse polkupyörä. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meidän liiketoiminta me hoituu Shopify'sssä. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu, Shopify piste.com sivustolla. - Sivustolla. - Sabrina! - John! - Welcome to the show. - Thank you for having me. - Man, I've been excited about this. So, you're labeled, and I know you're probably going to downplay this, the next Einstein. - You don't like that. - No, I mean, it's just not accurate, but I do like this notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit about what that legacy is, our field as a whole, and how do we kind of leverage that, or do good with it. - Well, I think we're going to get into all that. But, you know, this stuff you're doing, I don't even know how to say it, but it sounds like, and we're going to get into it in a minute, but it sounds like what you're studying is, if everything is a hologram. - Most literally, yeah, like the thing that I study is that, and I do find it's fun, like, to kind of take a step back, and talk to people who are not researchers to see how they interpret the words that we attached to things, or how, like, visceral, literal, like, the researcher versus, like, the person you're talking to takes it. - Right on, right on. You ready to get into it? - Absolutely. - All right, let's do it. I'm going to start you up with an introduction here. Sabrina Gonzalez-Pasterski. Born in Chicago, Illinois, first generation Cuban-American. It aged nine, your first flight lesson ignited a lifelong obsession with flight and physics behind it. Between ages 12 and 14, you spent two years building a single engine zenith. Rejected by Harvard, waitlisted at MIT, you got off the wait list because of the airplane you built. Earned your PhD from Harvard in 2019 in high-energy theoretical physics, leading the celestial holography initiative. A project aimed at encoding the entire universe as a hologram to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. Named to Scientific Americans 30 under 30 in 2012, in Forbes 30 under 30, Science List in 2015, one of the Albert Einstein Foundations 100 Greatest Innovators in 2018. First woman to chair the Flagship Annual Strings Conference for the Global String Theory Community. First female to graduate number one in MIT Physics. Like I said before, many consider you to be the next Einstein, which you hate. I think I probably benefit from it too much, but that's a bad thing. It's a cool label. Be proud of that. Actually, before we get into it, can you give me a quick, I think I know what string theory is, at least a little bit. But is this quantum communication? So quantum information or the sense in which you might be thinking of, if you were talking to someone who does quantum computing and those facets, is more in holography. There are definitely connections between foundational aspects of entanglement and different protocols you can do in a quantum mechanical system and then mapping it to a gravitational one. So string theory is not related to that directly, but there's a sense in which the research I do probably is more closely related if that's what you're asking. But basically, the whole point is we want to try to, as a field, not individually, understand what the basic rules are, what are the laws of nature. And if you aren't going out and measuring things, what do you really have at your disposal? You're roughly trying to use mathematical consistency of your frameworks to try to piece together a picture. And so if you have rules for the very short distance physics and very long distance physics that are kind of in their own world, and you want to try to have a framework that connects both of them, you run into various problems and string theory is one example of a route that people have found to kind of avoid the pitfalls of like understanding how to have a graviton or how to have like a quantum mechanical system with gravity. But in practice, you're roughly studying one little facet of these mathematical frameworks and trying to push it pretty far or generalize it to different situations. Okay. What is the, or it's something that China's was working on communications, where they will vibrate half of an atom, and then no matter what the distance is, the other half of the atom will mimic exactly what. Yes, that's what I was thinking about quantum entanglement. Sure, so I think that the, I am less like on top of all of the experiments when it comes to trying to see like not just entanglement, but maybe like some sort of like position dependence or whatnot, which is like closer to like seeing like how gravity and quantum interface. But so I don't know exactly which experiment, but I know that there's a lot on like kind of the, there's a lot of progress on like the quantum computing side of things, which I guess is like the closest thing to an engineering, within like the energy theory, but a little bit not energy. All right. Yeah. Right on. All right, so a couple things to crank out here. Yes. You got a Patreon. Okay. You got communication. Yes. And um, they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. It's frugal, yeah. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from JD Parton. All right. At 12, you weren't playing video games. You were in a garage building a Zenith CH601 XL. What did that mechanical grease under the, under the fingernails experience teach you about solving abstract physics problems that a textbook never could? I think it's not, it maybe didn't teach me like enough for what I've done so far, but it definitely instilled a sense in which like, there's a value just trying to find the things that can be straightforward and systematic and build something cool out of it. And I think that's one thing that maybe theoretical physics personally felt like it was lacking because I had this bias of growing up around people who like built cool shit or whatnot is like, is there a sense in which you can try to find the engineering aspects of what you do and the systematic things and like build tools for that. So that's the thing that that project probably hasn't still been me, but I don't think I've like lived that out yet. Right on. Yeah. Right on. And then I got you a gift. Okay. Everybody gets a gift. Okay, gummy bears. I heard. Thank you. -Huosia, Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. Lepuosia, Lepuosia, Lepuosia, Lepuosia, Lepuosia, Lepuosia, Lepuosia, Lepu -Hei, luului. -Kiitos Lepuosia, Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Hei, luului. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. -Kiitos Lepuosia. broomstick so like they definitely convinced me like Santa Claus was real it was really funny I think they'd use like these extrinsic motivation things to like get me to be a good kid or whatnot So like I was convinced Santa Claus is real because the presents were awesome But like I guess I got a little greedy and I wanted like a flying broomstick because like Harry Potter was cool And then they're like flight lessons So Like I mean that's cool. I mean it but it's like and it's funny because it's a bougie style hobby But it's very much more like they would just do anything for their one kid If that makes sense like it's like yeah That's awesome. My mom's family like so her dad was like a carpenter When and then he like they move from Cuba and then my dad's side his his father was a bit in trouble with with things At some point that's why he became a public defender And so to them they made it and then they you know they want to Invest in their kid fan so that so and and you build a plane Yeah, I mean but the plane but the thing is age 12 Yeah, and that and that comes from the fact that like I mean it Like people do this right? So so what's the the way that this stuff works out? So you're you're nine year old flying and then your dad's like oh look my kids. I so cool fine Like like who are these people that they can meet that at that You go to a lot of like air shows Like because he was a lawyer so he has some sense of regs Like there was this kind of fun thing of looking for like how can you get around The fact that you'd have to be like 16 to fly alone in the US But in Canada you can only you can do this at 14 And so I had found out that like Jamal Larkins was this aromatic pilot who had gone up to Canada to flight train to get through this kind of legal loophole of how old he could be to fly alone Wrote assay about it And then I started getting these like mentors in the FAA and then my dad was super encouraging of like going out and networking And it's very easy to network when you're a cute little kid. You don't have to be good at public speaking You're just like you're just a kid with some pictures of you like flying or like the like with a big parachute behind you and hopefully like it's like over Sorry And like you can walk your way that things like you bring like a christmas cream donuts to the FAA It's perishable, you know, and you start making friends and then you see all these people who are you know Building kit planes and then you're like damn it's hard to get into school these days like can you do some sort of trick to get into Either like there's like selective high school in sewer. I went or MIT and Yeah, and then I always just trusted my like like I thought my dad was new to everything because he was really like Kind of a jack of all trades fixing things around the house. So when he is like over my shoulder or like teaching me how to do some things And I'm just going and riveting things together. I'm like this is great I know if he says it's fine. It's fine Like and it was cool because basically before the it turned into this set of mentors suggesting oh you can do this thing like whenever It was just that much effort put into like school projects. So I had like um Like I think whenever like people were like first burning DVDs. We'd have um like A room in our house of one of the bedrooms a painted chroma key blue That I would go and like re-enact little teams for my history projects and like No good and put into I had like some like doctor who episode or something like that So it was we'd like we'd basically we're just trying to do like say a plus star on every little school project Which is a bit of a waste of time, but just a funny little like effort and then to translate that into something where then the narrative was like Okay, you're gonna take flight lessons. You're then gonna like you know try to build an airplane and then want to work for these airspace companies Like a linear kind of story arc with a bunch of like fast-paced like projects type of thing in between was something I think that Came out of this otherwise like intense like wow do it well attitude. Well, what what age did you start reading? Oh, I mean, I don't know I don't think I don't recall myself as being like a like a Better reader than my classmates if anything when I was in kindergarten like Alison Larby could read all of the joke cups And so like I mean I could read but like maybe my vocabulary was not as expansive and so Then my parents would like buy all of the Dixie joke cups like you know in bulk to then be able to at least read the words on But like but then the kids still would just go to Alison Maybe because she was like the first person like that they knew could read the joke cups or because she had more friends. I don't know what like Yeah, so I don't think I was Necessarily reading faster, but I probably was talking a lot And they used to do a thing where so if I could write it out then they'd let me like if I asked for a car ride At some random time and I'd if I could write it on the little chalkboard. They'd take me in a car ride So a lot of extrinsic motivation little right on right. Do you have any brothers and sisters? I don't and that's that's probably why I'll be intense story So if it's because it's like one kid one shot, you know What else I mean what what else were you designing inventing building as I mean, I would say that like the It wasn't anything that like before it would have been just like going all out on every little class project just for this the heck of it not Nothing that cool and I think that but the one thing is it was like kind of Like it was pretty clear to see how easily like the goals were shaped by either like strong reactions to or like taking on Ideas from like the people that you talked to so like when I was flying everyone would be like oh one day You're gonna be like flying the are Boeing one day when we're like we're like taking a vacation I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to be a I don't want to do that And then you see these people building kit planes super cool at these airshows When you're putting together. They're like well one day you're gonna be building the Boeing. I'm like, I don't want to do that And so it's just more of like a someone says you can do it and then my dad's like yeah, you can do it Then then we see how you can do it Or then someone saying you will be doing it. You're like no, I don't want to do it And so that's how I accidentally pivoted into physics later like we can get to because I was like It's not as cool if you're not actually like, you know There's the designs aren't really changing and you're not like Putting to get I mean it was somehow more fun to have something where you do straightforward work Somebody else kind of told you the steps for you modifying it or find like that But then you have a product that you built versus when you're just engineering something a little It's like a little too theoretical. I might have I'll go the whole It's other extreme of purely theory, which is maybe about choice, but But it kind of what did get you into physics? Yeah, so funny story so basically I think the first Hinted it was the high school. I went to this math and science school Like all of the like a large fraction of the faculty had PhDs And so I didn't grow up with people who had PhDs I mean my parents both had like, you know, their lawyers so they went to like, you know, state schools for that Um, but suddenly now all of your peers think they have to get a PhD to be cool So that's a weird thing like suddenly have this mind shift where okay, I need a PhD probably not true But like that that starts I mean definitely not true, but that that starts getting it seeping in the person who founded my high school Was like a former director of Fermi lab and he'd have like these lunches with noble laureates with like they come in and give talks And then he would have lunch with the students if it was just him every Monday or something I remember wait hold on. Yeah, I thought you went to public school I went to it's a public school So like so not for so this is not Chicago public school So I went K through eight Chicago public schools and they have like these kind of magnet like programs like give to center type of thing They've different types of magnet programs. So CPS is like so large that they have fun Schools for kids who like school. I guess. Okay, then I went to the state school. That's three years boarding school paid for like mainly by like state of Illinois Um, math and science school and a math and science academy. So I think it's funded under the umbrella of like university of Illinois or whatnot There's precedents in South Carolina. I believe in Texas and others where it's just like a STEM boarding school that the state runs that it's it's public Wow, but it's like it's like you get this if take the SAT to get in and things like that But it's kind of actually cool that there are these like that is cool. Yeah, public schools. You took the SAT to get in Uh, yeah, I mean and this scores for kids getting in like to high school or not that good or not I definitely wasn't the type of person who did well on standardized tests I did well and like the ones in school because I cared about the teacher. I'm trying to impress but um Yeah, it was neat because it was a public school But it was very much like a little bit of this vibe of like a gifted private. Yeah Like a school experience in the sense of yeah, you're at a boarding school But it was nice because then it could get kids from all over like even our elementary school was like you're busing kids in from all over the city And so we have a lot of like just gifted kids from like various socioeconomic backgrounds there And then similarly with like the boarding school aspect. Let's you be from anywhere in Illinois. Wow So it was nice. Wow If you're like me health and wellness is extremely important to you But how do you know who to trust when it comes to the supplement industry? We have all these companies They pop up every other day. They're all selling snake oil. How do you know who to trust? Well, here's the most important question Who wants to take the biggest most massive shit of your entire life Bubs is a company I've used and trusted for a long time. They make great products have rigorous quality standards and They are a long-time supporter of this show and they have the recipe for the biggest shit of your entire life I love their collagen peptides. This isn't just any collagen. It is a benchmark of trust and performance It's crafted with integrity and backed by NSF for sports certification giving you their assurance of its purity and potency Bubs collagen peptides help support your joints help enhance recovery and help revitalize your hair and skin and yes It will help you stay regular Bubs was founded in honor of Navy Seal Glenn Bubb Dirty in every product supports veterans with 10% of all profits going to help military men and women transition back into civilian life and now for the Recipe for the biggest and best shit of your entire life. Bubs college in peptides mixed with Bubs, apple cider vinegar gummies, and you have a recipe for success every day. Bubs college in peptides, Bubs apple cider vinegar gummies. Ready to upgrade your life? Visit BubsNaturals.com today and use promo code Sean for 20% off your order. BubsNaturals.com/Sean. - So that gets you. - MIT is physically cost a lot. - So all the PhDs got you into physics. - So it was the PhDs, plus the fact that the founder was a physicist, like a Nobel Laureate in physics, who then somehow, when the plane is final assembly, like near a port near by this high school, and he thinks it's cool. He's like, "Oh, you can be a physicist "and then suddenly that gets into our minds." And then all of these aerospace executives who were running these private aerospace companies. So I guess not Richard Branson, but Elon Musk and Bezos both, like physics, for whatever reason, like they either dropped out of some physics-ish material science degree, Stanford or thought about majoring in Princeton. So my heroes were these guys who could just do cool shit. Like they had built a company to have the resources to then do something that's valuable, but not necessarily profitable, or I'm sure they found ways to make it profitable, but I thought that was-- - I think they're doing all right. - I think they're doing all right. - No, no, but even in the scope of like, how do you just build a-- - No, I get what you're saying. - So I thought that was the coolest thing, and I wanted to be like that, and I figured, okay, like if I just work for them, would I ever still be like that? I don't know, maybe. And I got a little disillusion about like, what's the product I'm gonna build? If you build like some suborbital thing, if like you accidentally kill a rich person, it's like gonna just be dead, you know? But they did a good job, they didn't do this. I'm surprised I'm like, damn, like-- - If you accidentally kill a rich person, would you be-- - No, you know, so like, so that type of thing scared me a little bit, and then I figured they like physicists. So like, how can I be cool to the people I find cool? Let me go into physics, which is like the wrong reason to go into physics. And then by the way, like I grew up with a bunch of the kind of like mechanic/engineers who maybe see like the physics as like this, bottleneck that the physicists aren't doing it right. Like, there's gotta be some cool tech that can come out of this, and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go into the field. And it's like completely not. (laughs) You gotta hide that at least when you're actually trying to like, goodbye. (laughs) - Right on. - It's a very much a wrong reason to go into the field. - Wow. What was the first project that really grabbed your attention? - Oh, I mean-- - 'Cause you obviously love it, you're still in it. - I'm still in it, no, but I still think the thing, it's for that bigger picture goal. So I think the thing that grabbed my attention is more, you know, I liked my math and science courses in school. I think that maybe in hindsight looking back, just the notion of being computing something, draws your attention in and away where then once you're in it, you're in it, you're hooked. And that's good for my job mechanically, in the sense that like our job is to compute things. But I do think that I was still more excited by the bigger picture view or this notion of the possibilities of what physicists could do, than in practice what it is in the same sense that like, you know, someone working at Google, like isn't necessarily actually like, it's a thing about search, they're doing one specific, little widget or something, you know, type of thing. But, yeah. - Right on, where do we go from high school? - Oh, so from high school, we go to being a little bit too cocky and like being like MIT for aerospace, Harvard for physics, and then not getting in because you wrote too many poems or didn't really like, I think that one thing about the admissions of these schools, I mean, it's so much luck. So that's a bit sad. I think that grad admissions is fair because you're already kind of differentiated in your skill set and like the people admitting you are the people who care about the field that you're going into. But I think I thought like, all these other kids are taking the AP courses, they're checking off all these boxes for their extracurriculars. They don't want that, they want something different. It's like, no, maybe it's just like, you know, like they're seeing a large array of applications. You don't want to like, be anomalous in a negative way. You just like, check the boxes and more or something. I think I didn't handle it right. But then I knew how to bother people because I'd been networking since I was a kid. So we found like, Sheila Woodenall or who else? I think we shouldn't mind out enough help with admissions. It was more like Earl Merman. But basically, I'd be this kid with this little photos of his airplane build walking around. And like my parents would drop me off at different places. So like, wandering at MIT hallways to try to like, say hi to someone with this book. And I was like, OK, and then I just patiently wait. I mean, probably not as cool as like waiting for a like a sniping mission. But like, you're just there. If you're like, somebody's here, I'm going to say hi to them. The mission is to get this book in the hands of some MIT person. Wow. I need to meet cool people. And it was like, you give flowers to the secretaries or whatever, things like that. So a lot of networking is a kid and eventually it helped because I had some friends who could be like, hey, admissions office. Like, maybe she didn't present this clearly enough in her application. This is kind of cool. Later, and then I got in off the wait list at MIT. You got in more? Off the wait list at MIT, yeah, that way. Because you try to get into Harvard too, right? Yeah, and I got rejected. But I mean, to be fair, lots of kids get rejected. Lots of awesome kids get rejected. It's not something more about teaching you not to rely on other things happening for you that you can't control, right? So thank you. What was it that got you off the wait list at MIT? It was probably the step of networking thing, trying to rely on some people who could vouch for me once you're on this wait list. It wasn't the plane. Well, that was the plane, exactly. So I'm saying this whole meeting going with the little photo book of the airplane, and then meet you at MIT. You literally brought the photo book of the airplane. Believe me, I had little business cards back in the day. I mean, I think it's very cringy. That's awesome. I blame my dad. No. But it was like, you have little photo books of the plane, little business cards. And like, thinking of who you want to meet, and you're going to meet that person, and then you're this cute little kid. I mean, you think you'll get a little bit less cute once you're in your teenager. But between 12 and 14, you're pretty cute. So like, walking around with that train introduced myself to various MIT faculty say, or at the air shows, various people in the FAA, or maybe Peter Demandis, or folks who had done cool stuff in either the private aerospace, like a New Shenzari had gone up an Soyuz capsule, and then Demandis had the ex-price. So definitely a lot of trying to network with little. Man, that is, I'm going to do that with my kids now. No, it's like an arbitrage opportunity. It's like there are things that, like, the kid can get the access and, yeah. That's smart. I love it, I love it. So how was it getting into MIT? So I was very-- it was a relief because I didn't get into college otherwise, right? I mean, I was very dumb. I was very narrow-minded in the sense of laser-focused on, I want this thing, or this thing. No, no. I have standards, but you can't have standards if you're not, like, what they want. But I guess it helped to be able to have a little bit of that story and some of that network to, like, petition or whatever, put a good word in once it was on the way to the show, yeah. How'd you like it? Oh, I loved MIT. Was it challenging? Yeah, but I love that. And I think that's the thing is, actually, I loved it way more than my experience at Harvard, but, like, not to say that other people don't like each for their own, but it was just-- I like the fact that it was intense. And, like, you knew where you stood. It wasn't a bunch of kids bullshitting. And, like, you'd take the courses that you're ready for, and then get you up to the next speed, and not a bunch of-- if everybody gets an A, then you can pretend that you know stuff, and you have kids sitting in on courses. They shouldn't be in. And then, like, who knows what? It's, like, babble versus-- it just felt more like-- went in, worked hard. It got something out of it. I love structure in. And, yeah, something helping push you, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What exactly were you studying? So I ended up majoring in physics. So when I went in, there's a lot of just general institute requirements at the beginning first year. So I was able to sneak into being like this internship at Kennedy Space Center with a bunch of older Aero Astro kids. And then, I think it was after that first summer, I also interned at Boeing. And I guess, at the time, I was scared of, like, this whole narrative of, like, the airplane build, and, like, flying as a kid, like, how much that would confine me. And so I guess my rebelling was, like, going the other option was physics somehow. And so I liked my physics, of course, as I did well. And I just pivoted into, like, learning major in physics. Because-- You did an internship at Boeing? Yeah, but it wasn't, I mean, probably, it's lots of kids do internships. It was probably because of the airplane and stuff like that, and these connections that I was maybe considered as a freshman or, like, younger than maybe other people would have. But, you know, you end up-- You were-- you did an internship as a freshman at Boeing? Between-- I think I hope I'm right, between freshman and sophomore year. Oh, like, if I'm not right. I mean, as a freshman, you were named the first in MIT history. There's a little interpreter thing. Yeah. But I wasn't very entrepreneurial. I don't have any companies, lots of MIT kids have companies. But I hope the spirit is there for the wrong application. But when I was at Boeing, I probably-- and this is the type of mistake that I would make often, is you have, like, you make awesome mentors that you want to learn something from, but sometimes you want to not just literally take their advice. And so I think that my family and I, we accidentally would, you know, work for the person that gave you that introduction rather than thinking about, OK, where else at Boeing would I rather be necessarily? So I ended up in this arm where they were doing some cool, like, R&D for a project that didn't feel like it was ever going to be built by Boeing because it was kind of a McDonald Douglas acquired branch of the company. and I'm going to be back. And that disillusioned me a little bit, not because it should have, but because it's just like engineering isn't always the same thing or academic engineering isn't always the same thing as like building something and I think that I thought it would be closer to like move fast, break things, do cool things. And I think if I had seen any military side of Boeing, it would be a very different experience. But I was kind of just like, you know, sometimes the technology of within a given field isn't the thing that then advances that field. And so, and again, because of these stupid reasons of like a bunch of like we like not knowing enough about physics to realize that isn't the right route. Like, you know, maybe studying like the fundamental laws of nature would help you more than studying like coding or something if like the new tech is like other drones or better engine designer, whatever for like pushing aerospace forward. So very naive, but kind of disappointed with the fact that you could see that even at a big company that's doing some awesome things like there's a sense in which you can get lost in the R&D phase. You just mentioned something. I think you said that the the latest technology in a field isn't necessarily what's going to advance you. Yeah. How do you make that determination? So I think what I'm saying is just like a lot of times you can see it in like and I see this in physics with people who complain about physics who are not necessarily in the in crowd or whatever. And like they can say true things and maybe draw the wrong conclusions about intent or about like what to do about it. I think that oftentimes like you can just kind of see that there's like a lot of little hanging fruit and then it stagnates a bit. And like I mean to the extent that like you know the design for like a passenger airplane really hasn't changed so much. And so like do you just look at like try to find a definition of progress and see that it's slowing down and not blame yourself for not being smart enough but try to see like what do I actually care about? Do I like it because I like doing the thing or do I want a product? And once you have the product in mind probably it's easier to decide like what you need to learn and go do. Okay. Yeah. Let's rewind. You at a high school internship at Blue Origin. A little bit but that was so short. That was like I mean so the the internships at Boeing was a real normal internship. And then the one where I was at Blue Origin was some mentors were nice and like let me I forget exactly I probably kind of I'm glad I can pretend that this is I don't remember exactly all the the utility of the thing that I was playing with at the time there. And then the one at NASA was also very much more like show intel. I felt like we were learning like operations instead of any particular cool tech but we got to see a lot of fun stuff on the tours. Yeah. We're kind of fun stuff. Like I thought the coolest thing was somehow these like tiles where you could heat it up and it would still be really hot on the inside. You could touch it on the outside like that was that was fun. But it was just like going around to different parts of like Kennedy Space Center. Literally getting a tour with a bunch of aerospace engineer students. And at the time and then this is kind of funny too because I used to think it felt a little bit bullshitty to to have these and I'm again I don't know like I not know how to insult the experts but something felt off about there being a whole enterprise around like how you organize your enterprise. It feels like kind of like prompt engineering now. It's surprising how much of a discipline do you make the things that feel like soft skills. And so that internship was very much like trying to see how different parts of NASA were working together or like like that. But it's such a high level view that I think I was like this isn't the tech. And maybe in hindsight though I should have like appreciated it more but I think at the time it was just weird going from like you know playing to what are your what are the other interns or are there other interns. Yeah I mean one of them I think they were awesome. I was probably just a little bit annoying because I was younger and like and I was like I turn I turn I turn no like as a kid a Lars is freaked out over like I turn things out. But like who could see documents but but basically they like one of them I think was going to go in the Air Force maybe he did I hope so I don't I don't know I didn't really follow up because I ended up going to a different major later but I think one of them in internet space X or things like that. So it was a you know I think I didn't appreciate how valuable your peers are until I started going more towards physics just because then I got into the whole like research community and stuff but yeah I probably was just annoying little freshmen. How do you think they felt about you? How much younger? I think we all agree no no I mean no I think I wasn't that much younger but enough when you skip a year or so like rate college is yeah if you're how old I would have been like 17 or something in there like 21 or two it's still a bit different if you're yeah they're more independent and life. And then you had an internship at Sarn? Yeah so then it's went over to physics because I guess so I made that choice for physics because I liked my physics courses and again all of these tech people who were in aerospace were my heroes and they liked physics so I'm like I'm going to try and impress them how hard and then but the mistake I made was I guess that I just kind of took the first internship type opportunity from the person who was technically my undergrad advisor and so was at Sarn. So I started as cool but I'm sure that like like I didn't necessarily make the right choice in the sense that I wasn't like scanning all opportunities of things within the field I could be in turning it or whatnot. I was very lucky that the one year that I do the first year I go to Sarn they discover the Higgs boson but like you know science is slow especially like a bit collider. The first year you went to Sarn? They're like they're discovering Higgs boson that's nothing to do with me but just the right timing of like the Higgs boson. What is that? It's like so train to understand the the origin of like masses for like the standard model particles. It's an extra field that was conducted to be there to describe also like electro-week symmetry breaking etc like the field content of like the things that mediate interactions between particles and so basically they have a new discovery in a way where that's like really rare but like you know sample bias of like you're in there they do cool stuff so like okay that was neat but again Sarn is huge right so it's just it's interesting to also see how hard it is to make some measurement for like some quantities within theories that are also esoteric and so it's a fun thing to see the engineering side of physics research but but again I was just I'm just a kid I don't like like having some fun doing like a little bit of like I think it was some just for my undergrad thesis along lines of like some data analysis back of the envelope thing for a future detector I mean what is that what there's a lot of conspiracies that all kinds of stuff going on about I wish I see this thing as these conspiracies they're never like it's always just not as cool as they make it sound and what are they doing? They're just colliding like particles right like you want to you want to send things in at higher higher energy so they get close enough and then you can start to see the structure of the thing so imagine like you have like as bag of quarks and you start to see that like the like the kind of component nature of your like protons and things like that and so it's it's just you're colliding and then you're trying to measure what's coming out and you want to like try to infer how your theory of the interactions is consistent with that. What is coming out? I mean so I mean I mean it should be jets at some point these things happen I'm sorry so like basically you're colliding say depending on the collider you're putting like let's say electron positron and other colliders in this is like say two protons are colliding and you're going to have the protons are made up of some like quarks and then they're going to have some interactions and then they're shooting out other quarks but like there's other particles in your standard model field theory and those interactions will determine I guess the rate at which different things are produced and so there's the theoretical thing you're you're you're modeling like those very short distance skill interactions and then you're trying to infer from the energy deposited or like different particle tracks that this thing is actually what happened to then say something about your your theory and that's fun and that's cool but the scary thing is just how big like how hard it is to like probe those high energy scales and you see these huge I mean the collider itself is like these rings are amazingly huge it goes around three countries right yeah I mean well they're near a border but yeah but um yeah so very interesting engineering feats for fundamental physics and that's cool and something I probably didn't appreciate as much as I like because I went into theory I obviously somehow didn't appreciate it enough but yeah it's it's cool I don't I don't know it he ended up knowing so little compared to all the other things you wish that you knew about about the stuff is there any is there any truth to the fact that you're trying to create some type of a black hole they're not trying to know I think that there's so that was a fun thing to see I think I finally met one person who is kind of this back of the envelope fear monger or fun guy for the millionaires you know like he's like because like I could understand like if you're probably from a defense kind of point of view I want to understand the risks or whatnot and I'm like I wish it were that fun I wish it were that risky like not like if we were if I mean I'd love to be like building wormholes but they're not gonna be like you're not gonna go to turns or anything though so it's it's so sad this the no-goes that are the worst thing like I I'm just curious because it sounds like now you're into you're really into black holes and there's yeah I know but I like again I spent most of like my childhood convinced that like there was cool stuff that could be done and then most of like the like learning grad school or an event a grad grad school the hard way it's not that cool and then being upset at the fact that all these people overhyped things like it's not as cool kind of computing is like way overhyped and then suddenly I actually as useful you're like holy shit so so I don't I don't know where I should land in in the end or what is your name? to learn from the fact that like, yeah, completely dissolution to like, overly enthusiastic in a couple weeks. - How long are you at, sir? - Oh, just like two summers, like whatever the, like less than 90 days or whatever for the work for when I forget now, but just two summers. - I mean, what's it like there? What's it like when you walk in? What's in there? - It looks like old buildings. Like I think that it's a bunch of, the weird thing about it is the way that interfaces with say the US institutions are things like that. You'll just have a lot of like, I mean, what year, like 50s or something. They look like they did buildings, but with a bunch of people in offices, and then all of the cool expensive technologies and the actual like detectors say. So it just kind of looks like, I don't know like what you would imagine, probably some industrial complex thing. - Is it, I mean, do you go underground? - I wouldn't for what I'm doing, but sure I would have for a tour, or if someone was actually like, putting together detectors absolutely. - They do tours? - Yeah, when it's not running, yeah. - I gotta check it out. - Yeah, they got a hard hit. - So how do they get two atoms to collide? - So this is a way above my bakery, but it's a bunch of magnets accelerating these things to like higher speeds. And then I wish I knew, I should literally like, I should probably know what detectors are saying, but luckily I'm not technically studying the manufacturing of like engineering of the things to test the experiment. I'm like purely in the theory side. - Do you see when the particles hit? - So they would see the tracks afterwards. So that's a funny thing too, is like you're not actually seeing like, you don't see the Higgs boson. You're seeing like the fact that the things that came afterwards are consistent with it being there. And I think that that was a kind of funny thing too. Again, very silly, but maybe visceral in the sense of like, you're not actually seeing the thing, you're inferring the thing, versus like for gravitational waves, it really is like a sound wave, where they're seeing the mirrors move apart, and that's kind of fun. It's fun when they're just, they're actually seeing the thing, they're saying they're seeing in sort of, indirectly inferring the thing. - Interesting. - Post-processing. - That all mean to each their own. I think that, sorry, you know, what it means in some sense is like, you've tested a particular theory, and so you're kind of ruling out some parameter space of, okay, there's no super partners or things like that too, or we understand this Higgs mechanism. - Do you say super partner? - Oh, so like basically I think that some point, a lot of people were looking for like extra particles that would come if there was this like symmetry relating for meons and bosons. So things that want to like be apart from one another, like you only wanna like fill one at each state versus things that like to kind of cohere or have like, amplify each other, like I'm sorry, that's a bad analogy, but there's two types of particles, like integer spin and half integer spin, and some people were trying to conjecture that when you build these colliders, you're gonna see more and more particles and then that'll change the way that we think of these frameworks being organized and things like that. But, you know, turns out maybe, maybe not, maybe we don't know when the next like new discovery is gonna be. And so it's weird because then you're trying to fund an experiment where you don't know what the answer is going to be and you're like how expensive is it to motivate or to build this thing? - Wow. - Yeah, but luckily I'm not as involved in that. I like, I'm like purely theory for the sake of that way, I can be decoupled from these like high cost experimental ventures for a bit, and then just tackle that problem of kind of, like mathematical, I guess induction or something, on the theoretical physics corpus, I think is nice one, maybe. Say it. (whooshing) - I didn't really think much about skin care before, but after enough long days, travel and stress, you start to see it in your face, whether you want to or not. That's what got me into Caldera lab. It's a straightforward routine built for guys. Nothing complicated, just a few steps that actually work. I use the good in the base layer. Takes less than a minute, absorbers fast, and has no greasy feel. But the difference is noticeable. My skin looks healthier, more even, and just more dialed in overall. And it's not loaded with junk either. It's made with clean, clinically backed ingredients, and does exactly what it says it will. It's one of those small habits that adds up over time and changes how you show up day to day. Give it a shot. Go to calderalab.com/srs and use code srs for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab.com/srs. (whooshing) Where do you go from, Surn? - So from Surn, I use the fact that it's easier to get into grad school, the experimental things, to get into grad school at Harvard at MIT grad school options. I went to Harvard because it would be more easy to pivot. I thought because I'd already worked for the people at MIT. And then at Harvard, I think I was, it was like quantum computing or string theory. And I thought that quantum computing was overhyped. So I picked the other one. And I don't know how people feel. Like string theory was so cool back then. And it was like, you know, Brian Green was very much making it cool when I was a kid. And I still think it's super cool, but it's not for the same, like, almost for the same reasons that people sometimes hate on it a little bit. So can you give me a dumb down version of string theory? - Maybe, so you basically, quantum field theory is giving you these fields that explain why particles are identical, 'cause they're like, the electron is just an excitation of this field. So like I have multiple electrons or excitations of the same field. You can think of, say, the mechanical process of how I compute some amplitude, like these things predictions for Surn, as a bunch of world lines coming in with some rules for how they interact and split off and create other particles. String theory is kind of chubbing out this graph to like a sheet, kind of like a literal pair of pants that you're interacting and like you have this rule sheet. So what it does for you is it kind of two things. Like one thing is it kind of opens up this UV behavior. So these sort of points, it's kind of just like this branching of like a tubing thing. And then the other hand, it also gives you a particle spectrum. So basically, it's like, you can imagine, okay, let's try to build some mathematical framework within which I have the spectrum where I have this graviton, they expect this gravitational field. And then I avoid some pitfalls of trying to treat gravity as a quantum field theory too. And so, and then people just keep building off of it and then there's years and years of papers that you're like behind on when you're a new grad student. But the main idea is trying to find some underlying mathematical framework that can let you have, you know, your cake, you need it to like gravity and that quantum theory. - Okay, okay. All right, all right. So we go to Harvard. - We go to Harvard. - Get your PhD. - I'm working on my PhD. And I think the whole airplane story, I have a bunch of friends who are like in aerospace. Who think, oh, this kid's cool. I'm doing some fun research with like, with Andy and friends with like a spin memory, effects of like that. But then, and then you get overhyped really quickly because you know, any press is good press if you're trying to start a company, but not if you're trying to get along with the 2,000 people in a field that like, you know, are sometimes bombarded by like, what a street they're eating with and it's everything. So like very much closed ranks type of things. So that happens in the middle of my PhD. So I like, I guess I'm lucky that I didn't take all of these advanced grad courses and just took a lot of EMM for like some of the stuff that my advisor happened to be doing was very like, you know, you have a charge. When it accelerates, it radiates kind of like, you know, when you have an antenna, like you're seeing like the radio signal from some charges moving up and down antenna. So it was very easy math compared to a lot of stuff that people do in my field that I could latch on to and then think of some sort of fun little experiment, well, not real experiment, more like a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure your momentum loss and a inspiring binary system say. So I have a fun result pretty early on in my career, but it's like, it's a lot of luck that like, you know, if Andy's on the paper, then people care and people will write about it as spin memory effect or something versus it's like, so you get a little bit of like, that's cool, I'm lucky in hindsight. Very much love the kind of way that sometimes ideas can come together really quickly and then other times you're wasting a lot of time just being stuck. So I have, I'm lucky to have some good experiences, the beginning of my grad program, but then I get hyped up in a silly way with this Einstein bullshit and then I'm like, oh, 'cause my family thinks it's awesome, you know? Like, I mean, yes, when I was a kid, if I was gonna be a physicist, why not, you want you wanna be like an amazing physicist? Like, of course, that's a goal. You go to a lendout, you go to these conferences, where all these Nobel laureates get to hang out and you're the students who get to meet them. And you're like, this is the life. I mean, maybe not exactly like, I think it's better if you earn the money and then you whatever, but like, there is a lifestyle to like, just being good at your job would get you. And it's like, I wish I, it wish it were real, you know? 'Cause like, hype will just go away at some point. So I've got a taste of the dark side with that, but also seeing just a little bit more of the sociology of why do people like this like narrative of like an individual doing something cool? And how does that fit into the fact that within our field, the people who write like popular science books are not necessarily ostracized, but it's just like, it's distance a bit. And then it's hard to work with them. So like, it's funny. The people that you see is the physicists publicly and like, not the real physicists somehow. Interesting. And I don't, yeah, and I think it's just funny. Politics almost, you know? So you want, you want to be under the radar, you know? No, I don't. No, I mean, I am, you know, I wish I did. (laughs) And I'm like, I wish I did. No, I want to be for the sake of wanting to do well in my job, I need to be, right? I don't want to be above the radar as a physicist in the sense of like, I don't deserve attention as a physicist. Right, I wish that I did something cool enough where I felt like this wasn't complete, like, whatever thing. But I do think what I want is that there should be a way for, you know, the fact that, you know, people care about science is good. Like, how do you, better, you know? linked together, like the folks who are good at outreach or the folks who are lucky enough to have opportunities to have outreach and the research in a way that benefits the research as best for like the physics. And I'm excited for that being something that we can change now. And I think that maybe, I don't know if it's because I'm faculty now or because the time to change with how science is funded, that people are more open-minded to, you know, a little bit of like being creative with how you interact with industry, for example. And that's exciting to me because that's like things can get done a lot faster when you're not just in a group of people who have all decided. This is the way it's done. Gotcha. 'Cause it's been like that. Yeah. Where did the Einstein analogy come from? I think it's just some Aussie article trying to be flashy and it was good clickbait. I don't know. Like, I mean, to be fair, like you wouldn't use those words. I mean, you are studying gravitational waves and then people just try to be nice. I don't know if it was a girl boss time of decade or whatever, 2016, right, 15 minutes, right, six minutes. Um, so that stuff, I have no clue. I'm pretty sure, like, you don't see the articles before they come out, like, I didn't want any ridiculous comparisons because mostly, you know, airplane build kit stuff probably makes it a cool story. And then you're doing fun stuff with, you know, top people in the field and sure Hawking starts like to work on stuff with Andy. So there's that part of it, too. And he, Hawking is one of the few examples of somebody who is like known for their research and their outreach and like actually really good at both. I think it's a rare to have somebody where they're popular and they did really cool stuff. Penrose is another example. I'd say, and I'm sure that there's more that I could start listening. But, but it's, it's rare. Um, almost. See, no, so I think he was my hero as a kid and then I went through different phases of how I feel about the guy. What? No, I don't. Well, I'm here. I gotta hear this. Okay. So, so when I'm a kid, and this is me being very, very, very, and not realistic, but like, I'm in high school and I see like there's like, quanta article about Tallula Riley taking, like, physics courses at Caltech, and I'm like, she's not a physicist. She's just taking a few physics courses. I can do better. This guy thinks of, I mean, I'm like, I'm a kid, so this is dumb. But I was like, these guys like physics, them, um, but, no, but I didn't understand to what extent they did. So like, I saw him as somebody like post this thing to an Iron Man in a sense of build cool shit and get people to build cool shit. And like, I thought if I were to choose, I'd do the same thing, right? And then you see like, you start getting a little shaky of like, how much does he actually know how to do? You know, what, what, how much is the team behind him that's really, um, holding it up and then how much like, like, I thought, okay, if I like get the PhD or something, I'll be the actual experts to then be able to be more legitimate in a position where you get to do cool stuff. But I think that's the kind of wrong attitude. So like, so I went through phases where I was like, very dissolution with the fact that he kind of represented science or tech, like, people believed whatever he said was like, right, and that he also was the engineer and he also was all the stuff. Not saying he isn't, but I'm saying like, there was definitely this sense in which there's no way he's actually doing all the stuff because I see how hard it is for people to do all these things, right? And then you, you know, you get over it or whatever and you realize how, you know, there's a lot of value to being able to get other people on board with the same vision because then you can really push for it. And as long as that push is to something that's possible, then you're good. If it's a push toward something that's impossible, that's scary. And I think that that was something where again, before, before the AI stuff, I was very dissolution and being like, man, they're like, taking buzzwords and concatenating them with quantum computing and what else was I solutioned by. Like, you'd see things that, as a physicist, you know, like, there's certain no-gos and they're still getting funded, you know, like, you know, like, we don't have like this lack of vision. We wish we were doing cool stuff, but like, somehow we can't, you know, now I think that's changing. And the same time, these people are just overselling things kind of adjacent to what we do and acting like they're going to be better because they're entrepreneurs and like, we don't know what we're doing. And I was very, I almost resentful of that at some time. But I think the coolest thing now is like, damn, like, the products they're building with like, cloud code or whatnot are super useful in the sense of, you know, as a physicist, not many people in theory know how to do much more than like, pen and paper, or use mathematics or whatnot. If I wanted to like, think about questions that are more like, systematic, like, you just want to like, compute all of these different things numerically or whatnot, those are not valued because they feel so small that one person doing it would be considered a waste of time because they're not going to have a chance of getting a breakthrough. But you know, when you have tools that open up the ability to basically like, instead of hiring a dev team, like, you don't need the resources for that, you can still like, just do it yourself. It's really cool. So I'm like, super grateful that maybe some of that hype led to technology that's actually useful for for my job, or at least the things that I wish my job were. So I think my, my opinions clearly oscillate a lot about about some of these, these folks. What do you think do you think we're going to make it to Mars? So I think, I mean, I think he could make it to Mars, depending on his definition, right? So like, I, but I was a kid, it was really almost grim or like, very pragmatic. I was like, you just want to get to Mars. You don't necessarily come back, right? So like, can you do like a, you know, the first person to go to Mars one way could bring a bunch of like genetic material in a long arc and have it like, cryogenically frozen. I don't know. I was thinking like, send him one way. So I think someone could get to Mars. Absolutely, if they changed the definition or the scope of what their goal is, but, but yeah. How fast do you think we can get there? Oh, I, I don't, I don't, I'm not going to be the expert on that. I think that I definitely would be parroting things when I was a kid, like off of what other people were saying. And I do think it depends what you want for it. Like, I always thought, you know, man missions were cooler than automated missions. Like the vibe was cooler, but it does make sense sometimes in our risk, you know, life a limb for no reason. I do think that, yeah, I don't, I think it depends what the goal is. I think, like, I'm open minded for getting around red tape to do something cool. And again, I kind of also, I really liked, like, it's weird because I think that I had like secondhand sci-fi because I never like read these sci-fi books growing up, but all of the people I admired did. I still kind of like the earth, like, like, I'd rather, if I had the same resources, it probably would be more, like, less aerospace now would be more, like, infrastructure, like trains and things like that. Just like, a lot of things you can do that people would care about terraform, but, um, but yeah. So, but it's funny because it can align, like, your vision a certain way. Like, if you want to get to Mars and you think, oh, I need some sort of, like, invention to do that, then we got to, like, build the say eye to be smart enough to help us figure out how to do that. And then we need to, like, you build the eye to also figure out the health of the energy problems so that we can scale it up the right amount to be smart enough to do that. I don't know. So, like, it's a kind of funny thing when you can use end goal to tell you how to get somewhere. And so maybe he's used that, or maybe it's just a good marketing thing. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Do you think we're going to need to go to Mars? I mean, need, I think I don't feel that existential, like, need the same way in the sense of, like, the point where you need to get to Mars, if you're not already able to go there, like, try to avoid that first, maybe. And you have, you actually would have more expertise on that side of things. How scared you are about, like, chaos and I don't know, man, I always think the world's ending. Yeah. But like, this is a bit of a seed. I mean, I'm sure that they have to, they have to get you like, you know, train to, yeah, to save it, right? Yeah. Right. I don't know. I don't know. Who else do you look up to? Did look up to? I mean, I looked up, I mean, different parts of lots of people, but like, at the time when I was a kid, it was because, you know, it was Virgin Galactic, Bloorige and SpaceX were the ones who were kind of these big players in this private aerospace industry. And they were like, whenever any parts of their companies were at these air shows, like, that was a cool stuff. And I, again, I like this notion of trying to make profitable or build something that wasn't necessarily the best value proposition wasn't so much the capital that it could get even though you try to make it self-funding or something like that. Like, I like that, that kind of encapsulation of doing things because I think like, for example, theoretical physics research, you can have a lot of YouTubers go around and debate, like, why is it taxpayer funding this or is it stagnating? And it's kind of missing the point that like, okay, so say you defunded like this subfield, who's going to actually know quantum field theory amongst the people who are doing data driven stuff that doesn't like, you know, that's making progress now. So it's like, how do you take advantage of the fact that like, there are things that are worth funding that are not necessarily like worth funding because they make money or because they have a product and then try to align it in like a kind of maybe not corporate structure or something where you make it so that it doesn't need to rely on things like always having been that way, you know, can you innovate in that space of trying to fund or have self-fund valuable enterprises that are not driven by profit, but driven by the thing that they're after. So whether it's space exploration or like solving physics or something like that, I'm inspired by that a lot. Who's doing that? I mean, I hope we can do it. No, I don't know. I see the thing is right now. It's as funny, we're at an interesting time where I think like the technology that like everybody cares about, you know, AI whatnot, really can help doing the job that I do. There's a thing I'm like, I don't know how to make the right pitch for somebody who believes it's going to do everything, you know. And also just conveying what exactly it means to solve physics or not. So like in practice, like I do think there's a sense in which like we're trying to axiomitize these laws of nature. And maybe there is some uniqueness or rigidity to that structure that it can find. But I think that a lot of people think, oh, there's a particular open problem and it's going to write a paper that the researchers are going to be like, whoa, this is better. And that's what physics research is. So I'm scared of like not having a good like collaboration, say with the industry folks and the academic folks to really kind of pin down, okay, say you can accelerate science. Did you, do you finish it or did you now open up a new chance to build more infrastructure for how like that knowledge is stored and related to one another. Because we don't just want to answer but like I think that if I was an engineer like I want to know the answer to like this math Like the equation to like predict what I would need for my engineering problem versus for physics It's more like okay, here's the answer is but why and really just distilling that kind of compressing that basic set of rules that lead to that Why and so I'm scared slightly that like you know if this field is stagnating because we're only Individuals doing something and we can't make our field very modular as it is because it's just like Historical precedent or whatever that the number goes That when somebody comes along and actually does have a result that's better than these things is it like oh Let's just put all our eggs in one basket now like this is the the better bet And I think it should be a fun collaboration and I think that the night thing now is that there are a lot of Some crossover is with people like spending sabbaticals at these big tech companies and they some care about researchers is great But how do you make it so it's not just like I think I like academia in a way I don't know it's institutions right but Can you try to use the fact that there is some value proposition or exchange there to like try to drive like innovation for like let's have Try to get the best product that like conduit theoretical physics well Maybe I'm using other people's products were it not fine if there's any IP or value in that use that to help fund a field going forward instead of it being relying on taxpayers whatever for a very specific small like highly purely theory thing because There's value that can come from the engineering side of it so for example when you build cern or you build these other like big detectors a lot of the time The value proposition isn't okay. We're learning something about the Lawson nature, which is cool But it's also that all of the engineering that's going to go into that is going to be super valuable Can you do that with theory and I think that now the answer is yes And maybe it's already being done in some sense like when they're selling intelligence and they're getting like fundraising for those companies Maybe that is the pitch and that's what they're doing but I Find it fascinating to be kind of I feel like we're back at this like moment when Cern helps invent the worldwide web Like can you instead of like whining and begging like oh, we should have like had better structures that like endowed like a field or something like it Maybe it's not even the right thing to do Can you do that now without like begging for things to have been different in the past and just like you know There's opportunity to now go for it and do it right. Don't just Care about papers care about some of the infrastructure, you know, Cern helped build the worldwide web I mean I that's that's what they say. I hope I don't get all the facts wrong But yeah, like they were they're trying to they have a lot of data and I wanted to like serve it to different places and I think DARPA It's a lot of credit to there for like so like what you think of as the internet but you know like When I used to and this was the type of thing that bugged me a lot because I think I had these heroes and in In tech that thought like oh if the physicist maybe just did things differently They'd have like all these whatever cool thing And then you walk into the door of where I worked and there'd be a thing on the side because it was funded by a tech person of like saying how You know quantum mechanics like leads to like the transistor or technology and like understanding general relativity helps with like Timing of satellites and GPS like imagine if you had quantum gravity or like the blue sky research You do now might lead to something cool in the future and I believe in blue sky research and it's great But I think the thing is like normally it's still there's a reason for it, you know and Like how do you like it's a weird pitch to try to say oh it's worked before so keep giving me money now I don't I doesn't feel honest. I mean it's In some sense, yes, but like I didn't like that. I think the cooler thing would be again to try to see like how do you align things that are A valuable with the thing that you want to do as a physicist and Like go from there because there's anything that you want to be able to do if you can't do it already There's something missing and it probably for your human interacting with it It's an engineering thing. It's a product you could build and not like an equation. You're trying to solve so I think that's a fun Thing that's kind of opening up probably because of the way that like funding is weird in academia right now like you know Can you decouple this like we basically view universities as just educational institutions until you go to grad school and you realize It's a research institution and like all of the great grades you get and undergrad you realize like they don't care They just care about their research. This is like this is not that. This is like some way the US like is basically funding private institutions to do research at scale and And overhead seemed crazy, but that's this how they funded in Europe. They'd be funding the schools more directly so like Like there's such a dichotomy between I think how I used to see MIT or Harvard before I went to grad school and how I see it now of like Completely different value propositions or priorities in the institutions and so like, you know How do you make sure research gets funded and it's super cool? And it's maybe like that the experts in the field are the ones deciding like how the resources for that field are allocated rather than it being kind of Okay, you know these institutions get money from revenue streams from teaching students So it's like the best people in different fields. All in one or Big tech says it's broken or whatever Like come into our private lab. I know. Yeah. Wow. Wow Let's take a quick break when we come back and start getting into space Most gear looks good until you actually start using it then you find out pretty quickly What holds up and what doesn't that's why I keep coming back To roka. These aren't just lifestyle sunglasses pretended to be performance gear I've warned mine training on the rains traveling and outdoors for long days and They stay locked in place the entire time. They're incredibly lightweight the optics are razor sharp with zero glare And you honestly forget you're even wearing them But they still look clean enough to wear anywhere not overly tactical just modern Functional design that works every day Roca was born in Austin, Texas in everything about them reflects that performance first mindset and if you need Prescription lenses they offer both sunglasses and eyeglasses options built to the same standard and Whether you're outfitting a law enforcement unit a military team or looking for corporate gifts that don't suck Roca offers wholesale partnerships to make it happen Roca isn't just I wear it's confidence you can wear every single day They're the real deal ready to upgrade your I wear check them out for yourself at roka.com in use code SRS for 20% off site wide at checkout. That's A dot com in use code SRS Welcome to Hollywood versus reality they do it right What does he do in the movies to tell me if I'm doing this rock because I don't watch it Little flick like that right seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool Got a silence it And another lifetime I did gun reviews for a living the proprietary magazines supposedly the best engineering in the world when that breaks your And now we're bringing them back It does look pretty cool. I got I got it met that All right Sabrina. We're back from the break We're gonna get into Your current work. Okay. Gravitational memory effect. I need you to slow down just a little bit for me I'm not I'm not on your level quite yet. Maybe by the end of the interview. I just talk fast Yeah, so okay, so what is gravitational memory effect? So there's different kinds the easier one is not the one that I Came up with it's much older, and it's this notion of you're gonna have these big bodies out in somewhere in the galaxy whatever or per way coming in and colliding And then when they collide they're gonna coalesce maybe into like another black hole or whatever it is But there's some Ripples in this face time that come out to you. So these gravitational waves are propagating away from this collision X-Men so this is like indentations in the weave of space. Yeah, I mean, I think actually it's pretty accurate A sense of like I'm looking at like say to give in time the positions of some mirrors that have been moving back and forth So the thing about the memory effect is basically that there is like a very Like long time scale thing that's imprinted because of this scattering process Would or can I can I make another? Yeah, would this be like the wake of a boat? I mean in some sense as almost I think that the thing about the wake of the boat is there's different approximations for like a deep water wave And like it's not as universal. I think like I'm a friend who is a family who's Like into like a nautical stuff So I think we concluded that like that there's a sense of which sound waves and the water could be approximated as having a memory effect Like if they're deep underwater, but like a surface waves is not gonna have a universal relation between the The boat past and then it moved but okay, so imagine let's do the buoy analogy So I don't think the math works out the same But imagine you have like some boat passing and you knew that like you could infer Like the amount of like munitions on this boat because like the buoys move to turn them out No, like I mean like some some net property of like the of the thing So it's not as cool as that because I think that in this in that situation It's not a universe relation between the things that scattered had some kinematics that then set the value of this shift but But yes, you have these two gravitational like Wait, detector some probes sitting very far away just mining their own business They're sitting along geodesics this wave passes and then the distance between them's gonna change Okay, and like depending on where they were well to this thing There's a certain like pattern in the sky that it would and you're seeing that there's a relationship between this distance changing and Like the kind of net kinematics of the amount of like energy in the things that we're scattering and the waves coming out And so there's this relationship. It's like conservation advantage generalize to this kind of fun asymptotic symmetry version of it, turns into deterministic inference in the night sky of these move detectors. And then to see the, like the angular momentum at a log, you have to go a little bit subleting, which is the spin memory. Oh, shit. Okay. I think I'm picking this up. So you're saying, okay, how do I just, I don't explain this. Okay. So if we have a sheet or a blanket or something, and I put, I don't know. Uh, a mark on here and a mark over here. And then we put a ball in the middle and then they come inward. But is that what you're saying? It's like, so that would be kind of an analogy for, like, maybe like the, it's just gravitational, like, potential kind of curving you in. I think this is closer to the buoy and a log, I mean, so the math is wrong. It's what, this isn't true for this case. I'm pretty sure of, like, imagine that you could have some booze pretty far away. And you knew that there was always a shipping route where they go, like, from here to there. And like, the only options are like the direction in which they came and like, maybe the, like, the momentum of that boat. And you could infer from the buoy shift those types of quantities, regardless of whatever they did in the middle. So that's not going to be true for the, the water wave, this, I'm pretty sure it's not true for the deep water wave case. But for the, uh, this gravitational system, there's a symmetry reason why I can see that type of shift. Like, the buoy is moved by some amount, that means blah, like, this amount of energy was deposited. Like, type of thing. Okay. So does the inference stay like that in space? That's the whole point. So this is supposedly like the, at the very end, it stayed. Now in practice, that's not super useful because we're like, we do these things where we have a theoretical framework where the math is rigorous. And then it's completely BS in the sense of that's not the thing you're going to measure. So like in my framework, I'm viewing that single, whatever, ship crossing type of thing as the entire, everything that happened in the whole world, if in an amount of time. But what you do, then, is you say, okay, there's this effect that this framework studies, but it really is only accurate for like each individual scatter and experiment is like a chunk. And so there, there's a shift from that scatter experiment. And sure, something else is going to move it around later. But if they're spaced off enough in time, can I approximate this thing as like the memory effect? Okay. So let me, let me re-expline this to you to see if I'm getting it. So basically what you're saying is it will leave an indention, an imprint in the fabric of space. Yeah, exactly. And it will stay there forever until something else moves it. Yeah, something else moves it. And then there's a very formal version where we say, "Imagine wait for infinite amount of time. Tell me the beginning and the end." And that's technically the memory effect. But in practice, it's closer to like, let's pretend there was just one thing that happened, one thing you're detecting. So one event. And as far as those time cells are concerned, it's a lot longer than any other thing later moving it. Okay. And so then that's a memory. And you discovered this? I discovered a variant of this based on the connection to these symmetries. What is the variant? So this variant is like angular momentum loss instead of energy loss in the gravitational waves and the spinning particles kind of. So basically it's like, and this was a kind of fun thing. So I come into my PhD and you're almost like just going to do like classical radiation. So like, you know, you celebrate a charge, it's like emitting radiation. And the fun thing about, you know, gauge theories or something. So gravity and electromagnetism kind of fit into this framework of the, there's an extra symmetry when you try to write down a field, like it's set of equations that are local. So what happens is that, when you have a charge object, so say you take some cat and you're like, I don't know, like some riboelectric effect thing to get some charge on like the fur, you know, like static electricity or these things where you see like this balance of charge, you probe it far away, right? So I can, with gauge theories or with like these fun things, I can be away from the charge and see it. So I don't need to come up and pick up, oh, look, I have like an electron charge is like, I can see the electric field is like pulling me and like you're saying with this blanket and like the, it being deformed. So like I can measure the, some features of this object in the center from the boundary. And that's kind of one of the ingredients to this kind of holographic principle of like, and I just talk about the things in the boundary and isolation as its own theory. But for the very specific scope here, it's like that Gauss law type of set up of, okay, if I am very far away and I measure the electric field everywhere in some sphere, I can determine the total charge inside the analog of that when I then have an accelerating, like scattering experiment is kind of like the, this imprint of this universal, like I know from this low energy part of the radiation, something about the kinematics of the charge of scattering. So it's like Gauss's law, but applied to some scattering process. So what makes the particle scatter? Is it a collision? It's their own interactions with each other, and that's the funny thing. It's these long range directions that are busing in a curse. So like the fact that they're charged and then they're going to like have some photons exchanged between them or other particles. It's the, it's the thing, but we basically, like, there's something about the very low energy that is, is universal almost because of this classical equations of motion. So I guess long story short, when I do this idealization where I pretend I'm in flat space, that's my world, and I want all of these solution science equations that obey these boundary conditions, then I see that, you know, things at the boundary are going to move. So like what you're saying is I have like these two detectors are sitting there, they're not just going to stay there, they're going to move, but they're going to move by a certain amount that's maybe a certain like controlled parameter as compared to where they are if I just push them out to infinity. And so like because you have this kind of whole symmetry framework that you're importing from other instances where it's been useful in physics, you can die a plate here and you realize, Oh, look, that tells me something about soft limits in scattering, tells me something I can observe. Yeah. So early in my PhD, they had this connection between like soft physics and a asymptotic symmetry word identity. And then my first paper was on like the subletting soft version of that, which was new and some people had speculated that there might be an enhancement of the angular momentum, like the rotation symmetry of the of the world in some sense. And then when you keep pushing that further, then you can tie it to this experimental version because someone else understood that there's a physical like the space time physical thing you're measuring is related to the waveform that otherwise computing with this quantum field theory computation. And yeah, so basically long story short is you were just taking some mathematical framework and then trying to copy paste it to a new application. Once you have like one iteration, you're trying to see what's modular or sound about like some computation. And then you get to import that and find something new because you pulled it out. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I mean, Stephen Hawking cited your solo in joint papers in 2016. Your dissertation is the only is only the second Harvard physics PhD published in physics reports. The other author won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, these things are fun, but it's always fun that you can you probably find a way to find a cool little way to frame what happens or not. But the Hawking thing was cool because again, he, you know, he visited at the end of like near the end of his life. He was, he came to Harvard, which was neat to see. It's the entourage like we were, like we were on a Congo line in this boat, like kind of like this like little river cruise type of thing, but in the Boston Harbor that was like Hawking his whole entourage and us like literally doing a little Congo line behind him. And like, you can't, you can't make that up, you know, it's a fun, it's a fun experience. Yeah. So what is, what does this discovery mean? I don't think it means that, I mean, it means I'm lucky that some of the experimental things come out of like something I did maybe. I do, I don't think the things that I've done have like that deep of a meaning or something where like I want to know these types of things. And so it's more like the fact that, you know, there is some value of trying to take these frameworks that are very abstract and try to distill parts of it that then you can try to then push for the more realistic versions of it. I think that's a fun, fun kind of paradigm and it's, and it's like fortunate that there was some observables of this. But at the same time, like I'm using Einstein's equations to get it, it's more of a test of like the boundary conditions being a good physical assumption than a test of the theory itself. Right. So I think that it's not like super, super exciting to me, but like it's not like, yeah, I wouldn't say tell your audience is important in my mind. I think it's pretty cool. Lots of things are cool though. Lots of things in this building. Pretty cool. Is the, is the universe expanding? So again, I think that that's a funny thing. I do think if you talk to a cosmologist, they believe in like the cosmological constant, like isn't necessarily being actually like, sorry, there's this experiment right now that's like trying to promote that maybe the cosmological constant is like changing over time. And a lot of string theorists love that, a fellow, like a faculty member when I was in grad school at Harvard, like Vaffa's kind of colleagues with Andy. He is very into Swampland program and to try and adjust things. I think that I am not too into the experiment to know like why a lot of cosmologists don't trust the results yet or whatever, but I think that a lot of things are up in the air in the sense of, you know, like there's always qualifications to things. So like it's good to face value, trust the actual result of an experiment, but you want to understand what are the extra like, what is it actually seeing versus what you're actually overinterpreting it as a thing? And so one option that a lot of people like is, okay, maybe the cosmological constant is changing over time and then it'll be asymptotically flat or the wrong sign, opposite signs to be where a string theory likes to live. So I just, I guess I end up being very agnostic in a weird way, which is not good because somebody should just answer and say, yeah, this is our model of an endocardium. But it is true. - Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, sorry. So there's a sense in which, yes. Like, so I think what I'm saying is I'm taking it to be, like, okay, you're looking at these various stars for a way and you know, like, okay, so the fun thing about physics is you're often saying the laws that I have here are the same everywhere. So that's true. I know like some features of my star or cell information. So I know like the spectrum of the lines that are supposed to be there. So if it's moving further away, I'm gonna see like different frequency shifts and things like that. So there's a lot of cool stuff that you can see where like, yes, that's not in doubt. I think the thing that I latch on to because again, it's too, it's close to this. Like, is your framework even physical? Is like the statement about like some parameter like the Cosmos or Constantine Einstein's equations and whether everything I do, I'm like a flat Earth Earth as far as like cosmology's concerned 'cause I just set it to zero. And like, now there's some experiments saying, maybe that's okay, no, but not as, but like, what's things are constant versus functions of other things that contain it for a time roughly. Yeah. - I mean, yeah, we gotta get this. - But the expansion, think sure. - You're not a flat Earth Earth. - No, no, I'm joking. So I don't wanna encourage a flat Earth Earth, sorry. So like, you know, like, sorry, so like the essentially what you're on the Earth and you see like the curvature scale of the horizon or whatever, you're not seeing what you're saying. I, the world is flat. There is a, I'm just trying to make a joke and probably it's dangerous to do it. I have the actual platform of the fact that like, you know, do we see the curvature scales of like the universe, the Cosmos or Constantine at the scales where I care about it for particle detectors or for these gravitational waves from what I go. And I, I'm always setting this constant to zero instead of like, whatever, it tends to the negative, like, large power thing. - So if the universe is expanding or, yeah. Or if we wanna say the galaxies in stars or getting farther or, I mean, I feel like that means the universe is expanding. - No, no, no, sorry. I think I'm saying, I'm not saying no, I think you're right. But I'm saying that the physicists are worried more about like, why is it, right? Like, is there a reason that there is some like, like, various like Cosmological or Constant there or like, is it all just like the different matter distributions and things like that that try to govern the reason where you're like, so the, I should have just said, yeah. But it's that I was like, oh, by the way, there are experiments that are like, we'd be like, changing our opinions a little bit or calling the question some notions of those like parameters that describe this thing. - So if it's expanding, what do that mean? There's a wall. - So that's the thing, so the fun thing about Cosmology, if you're doing like a holography for like, the sitter space times is there is like a literal horizon where you can like, as one observer, you're not seeing the whole thing. And so the world that I live in is like, kind of, understanding the mathematical structure you can attach to kind of the boundaries of the space time. And in most situations like in the ADS context, which is this like wrong sign, Cosmological Constant version toy model, or in the case where I do, like, it's really the space time boundary and not the boundary of some observer. And then you have to deal with observers and the sitter is hard for lots of reasons. So, so I just go, ah. - So if it's expanding, wouldn't that the fabric, the indentions, what do we call it, the gravitational memory effect, wouldn't that change? - No, it does, so you're absolutely right. And in the sitter, like the types of, like, I, you're basically propagating a wave on a curved background versus a flat background and it changes the form of it further away. And people have papers trying to talk about it, like memory on like the observer horizon and the sitter, which is the closest thing. But the thing that's relevant is like, you wanna think about, like, what scale is that important as compared to what scale I'm like seeing the wave coming from this inspiring binary system. And so, like, at least for example, a lot of things I do are also relevant to, not the memory effects so much, but like these asymptotic symmetry stories can be applied to amplitudes. And there what you're doing, you have, you have certain, you have this collider. And like, it's such a small scale where these things are interacting and that the detector itself is considered to be at infinity. But it's not infinite, I mean, it's huge, but it's like, that's hardly infinity. And so, like, can I pretend or ignore that expansion for some things? Sometimes yes. And then, sometimes no. - Gotcha, gotcha, wow. We actually have a, have a hot question here. It has to do with flatter. - Uh-oh, okay, yeah. I'm ready, I think I'm accidentally eating this. - Here we go. Surveys have found that up to around one in 10 Americans say they agree with statements that the earth is flat. From a scientific standpoint, what actually proves whether the earth is flat or round and not just in theory? What real-world evidence or systems make that determination undeniable? - Okay, I should have prepared more because I know the best answers, but I would just say, like look at the pictures from them, like satellites or like people up in space, you can see the horizon. I mean, like, like what, I guess, I don't know why those don't work. For example, you know, when, like if I talk to someone with a flat earth or what would they try to say if I said, you know, look at the right and see it's curved. And you're like, or go up on like a. - I'm not a flat earth. - Yeah, yeah, I don't know. - But I've talked to a handful of them. And they always, they always have. - What's the excuse of these? - I can't remember what their excuse is. They think satellites are balloons. They're not in space. I do know that. I don't know what the argument is. It goes on here a little bit more. Because technologies like GPS, satellite communications and global navigation all operate as if Earth is curved. So what are the strongest proofs and could any version of a flat earth realistically reproduce those same results? - Okay, I'm trying to, like, I would say, no. But like, I think what I'm saying, I'm trying to think of like, how would I be the defense attorney for a flat earth? You know what I mean? Like, like, like, what would I try to do to make them feel as right as possible by coming in the hell out of everything they want to? I mean, like, I think that you can't, once you're trying to say, like, I mean, you're trying to apply a framework beyond its scope of applicability. And that's what these types of technology or like the something far away above the earth is seeing that it's wrong. But like, you know, to their credit or not, like, when you're on a map, like, you print out your little chart. Like, you're not gonna go that far off, like, when you're driving around town pretending that, you know, the earth around you is flat, unless you try to park your car in a hill and you try to put your parking brake on. I don't know. Like, like basically, like, no, and that's not for the curvature, but just for this version again. But I think that, I don't know. I think that it's emblematic of the fact that it's hard to believe the things you don't have input for. You know, like, you build your intuition, we build our intuition, you know, walking around in a way where, like, you might not notice these things. Like, do you notice the, like, phases of the moon? I don't know, like, how much people pay attention to those things or how much it affects their lives. And then doubling down on that world view is sometimes funny, sometimes scary. I don't know what the right, the take on it is. But like, you know, there's value to questioning, I guess, like, how much your assumptions are like the, the visceral world that you live in and the intuition you get from that actually extends beyond the things that you're able to probe yourself. Like, you can't go and just jump up into space and look down, go, oh, nevermind. - Yeah, well, maybe soon though. - Maybe soon, maybe you guys send them up, like, they go free, like as they'll say it to get on the free, like, several little flight or something. - Yeah, follow up. - Yeah. - What's the biggest misconception people have about black holes? And is there anything about them that still completely breaks our current understanding of physics? - Uh, I think that if anything, so breaking your current understanding, I think that sometimes the, it is the paradoxes that show that there are problems in our understanding. So I think that maybe breaking isn't as active word I don't think I want to use. I think that, like, again, I always feel like I don't even understand these stuff well enough. And I think that's one problem when you're going to feel that everybody's confused is like, how confused are you? Like, when I say I'm confused, does that mean I'm actually confused? Are you, like, less confused? Who's really more confused? So there's, like, paradoxes that come from, like, basically trying to say, okay, I think I know, like, it shouldn't be that ridiculous. If it's a big black hole, like, the horizon isn't that special. I only kind of know it, like, kind of, like, twoologically or like, away from, like, I don't know at the moment that I pass the horizon. So then why can I put some quantum fields on it? And then, like, I have paraproduction. One of them will go out to find the other one's going to go inside. And suddenly you run into these, like, like, issues of, uh-oh, like, that I evaporate into a thermal system now. Is it not unitary and all this fun-hocking stuff? So I think the thing that's, one should take away is that there are still, I think, situations where people don't understand all the assumptions they make, where they can just, you know, follow one step after the other, think that they're doing something that seems logical or not. And then they realize, oops, together, something was wrong. And so it's not breaking physics is showing that there is something broken in our assumptions. Like, the physics always has to be right. I think we believe that. It's just we don't quite know, again, like, the regimes in which our assumptions are valid or which one is the wrong one. So, yes, there's a lot of active things. Like, some people, I think I saw colleagues who believe that as soon as you cross our horizon, there's, like, some, like, firewall or fuzzballs. Like, there's, like, different models for what happens behind it. But we're all basically just playing with some frameworks, like, mathematical frameworks that give us intuition for what we might guess. And then we're not precise enough with what we're assuming we compete something and then, oh, there's don't fit together. Like, that's the vibe. But I think I wouldn't try to scare a random person with it. I would just point out that somehow the, the bread and butter of, like, a physical theory where you don't make a measurement is seeing that, like, these assumptions don't tie together. So something has to be wrong. They're popping in it back and trying to fix it. - What, I mean, what is a black hole? - So, I mean, to, I think, sometimes, like, there's literally just a sense in which, like, I have so much matter in some region that now even light can't escape. And the way that I see it is, like, from a penorose diagram, their straight up is just some reason that I cannot, region that I cannot access from infinity. So it's very much, like, like, a feature of the geometry. But then there's other fun things about, like, the fact that, if you put enough energy in some region that you're gonna end up creating a black hole, and that often is tied into this question of, like, "Quantum gravity has to be weird and different," you know? And so, like, It's just and it's neat though because you see how much people like when they see even though it's not actually the horizon when they see like these images of a black hole and like they Christianess around it or whatever like generating the light like engineering is cool the fact that they can like reproduce that image or stare at a black hole um but like it literally is like a black hole in the picture which is definitely right like yeah like the way the light is is running around it um but I think that the fun thing is really just more like um like the way a physicist would at first encounter is like there's a very specific solution to Einstein's equations so this is a differential equation with a specific solution that then has some weird ass properties of like the causal structure of like where like particles are gonna end up so what happens if something goes on that's so that's the type of question so basically I think a lot of people would believe okay when you first go through you don't really know that you went through because like it's the black holes can be different sizes right and so like if it were large enough the curvature scale when you're crossing the horizon isn't so extreme but eventually like if you just did like you know little probes on this this background I think people will talk about like specification or like you're gonna be stretched out eventually when you get closer to where the curvature is larger than going up at the singularity but um I think that's a funny thing is people like you understand this classical geometry and then you start having problems putting quantum fields on it and answering some fun like paradoxical type of questions that then people are unsure like they think that the the singularity is something so highly curved that the approximation of just treating it classically is bad now so then they don't know what happens if everything but it's not like I think that's easy enough to try to say okay if I like have some nice numerical simulation and I can just write down this differential equation like for how something would propagate on a classical like black hole background that you could have something just like going through the horizon for a little bit and probably like in that model it looks fine but it's just like how valid are those how hard is a numeric principle to do near near the certain regions and the way you set up for a scanning process probably is also hard but it depends on like it basically the problem is that sometimes it's like question you're asking ends up being not the right question or things like that type of problems yeah I just I still I don't understand how it can swallow light no I mean so it's basically like you're writing like how does it so like you have this metric is telling you like the if I have a coordinate system for my space time and I have then a notion of like the distance between points on it and like a nice coordinate system is often subduction of like a spherical coordinate system where okay like very far away I have this like you know directions in the night sky and I say a time direction in this case and then in that coordinate system like the there's a solution to this differential equation that Einstein gives you where you don't have any matter sourcing outside and it ends up being a black hole solution where there ends up being a horizon and you can just kind of play around with like how does like the energy like redshift or whatever things like that it's it's a fun it's very much just a math problem you know what I mean like you're playing with a given solution so it's like kind of like it's harder because it's not linear but like when you're doing like multiple moment expansions and in em or like just like literally like if you give me some charge object put it here what's the electric field far away or I don't know if they've any fun I think if I try to make an analogy that you could probably have figure out one with a some telecom like reverse engineering from all these different radio signals what's happening I don't but yeah what what what what do they look like from I mean how do I say this yeah if we were to do if we were to do like a 360 model of a black hole I mean I think the best thing is like I forget which I'm gonna get the name of the movie wrong but like Hipthorne was a scientific advisor to this whatever oh man I wish I had better recall of like I was a cool movie's interstellar maybe I hope not wrong on that where they actually ran up like you know simulation for what it looks like I think that you have pretty good like images from either like that movie or I've seen the images you're seeing the like coming out of it so that's why it's like they look like so you know if my fist here or my hand is the black hole what does it look like from this angle yeah but you see this flat or does it look the same you know it should be around this should be see I mean there's there's actually a hole that's you can access from any direction and so I run it but I definitely have like colleagues who play with these type of like race and relations more than me so wait when I see black hole I see like a metric I see an equation written down and I like uh-oh this blows up here but um but the point is that when you're seeing those simulations I think a lot of it is you're seeing like imagine you had some stars behind it and then how that light from the stars coming to you and so like maybe it looks funny because literally like you're not necessarily seeing the fact that nothing you're also seeing nothing came from it kind of but you're also seeing some like funny lensing of like the stars behind like they're like kind of going on gsx around and coming to you so so some of the artifacts are that which I guess is what it looks like but I think this I think there's just you literally know what it looks like and I don't think it would be that hard to like do some sort of simulation of like you're you're following a geodesic down and then there's a bunch of um yeah I want to look at it for particles with you some light you know I just like question about how do you want to set up like from the back yeah so it roughly has so a normal like non-retake buckle would have like spherical symmetry a lot of buckles are actually kind of rapidly spinning so there is some like asymmetry you can see like it'll depend on like where you are compared to this access to rotation but um there's not like a front and back thing it's more like a like access to rotation difference so what is the shape it looks like those like it looks like it looks like when those images of the like the black hole have this kind of funny like distorted ball looking thing but again three-dimensional though what is it what does it look like? No this yeah so you're seeing it it's like if you surface of our illusion around it I think it's rough the right picture like the things are symmetric roughly around that but again assuming that like and I think there's no reason to some other rise it's like the light sources around it are kind of evenly spaced because this thing is rotating so there's a rotational symmetry and you should do it that way do you think it could swallow a planet other I mean I've no reason to think not I guess the question is like what is I'm like sorry so like that to take us back and make sure I'm not like seeing something there was for the experts would be concerned but like to the extent of what do you want to consider a planet um like I think that like just because something is like gravitating and it was always there like you know our planet we're orbiting something that if I just wasn't moving like this way I'd be falling in so like you know um so like it's not just because it's there it doesn't mean it's like swallowing a planet but sure something could fall into it and I guess if you wanted to say like don't think I'm worried about us to whatever extent the thing was the original like thing the planet was rotating around that you called it a planet for that reason you know um but yeah it's it's like it's a hole where you don't see the light coming out but I don't think there's anything stopping it I don't know if I've ever like looked or tried to find a nice numerical simulation of just imagine that I have a bunch me and a bunch of other particles with some light sources are together falling across the horizon what it looks like I think it doesn't look that special you know and the thing that looks special is you're outside and you're seeing all the light around it um it's kind of being warped by the okay yeah I'm sure it would look kind of fun like I don't know why they don't like you could do it I mean there's nothing like that's just a differential equation you're trying to solve this thing yeah all right all right all right let's move into celestial holographs yeah what does that so it's a good burning exercise yeah um so yeah a lot of I think some British twist your people have some fun like sensitive humor how they name things as far as like celestial spirit and heavenly equations that I think they're some things but um so celestial spirit literally is you know night sky stars um if you're like you're like millennium Falcon or whatever you're accelerating you might imagine but like you'll see the distribution of the stars and the night sky move around a bit so like they're gonna dilate and so that's somehow seeing that there's like the boost symmetry of the space time is a dilutation of this sphere this episode is sponsored by better help summer can be a great season but it can also get overwhelming fast travel picks up schedules change weekends fill up and before you know it you're trying to keep everybody else happy while you're running on empty sound familiar and I think a lot of people feel that pressure you're supposed to be enjoying the season but sometimes you're just trying to get through it therapy can help you understand what you actually need where your boundaries need to be and how to build a summer that feels better instead of just busier better help is the world's largest online therapy platform with over 30,000 therapists and they've served over six million people globally their therapist are fully licensed in the US and better help starts with a short questionnaire to help match you with someone based on your needs and preferences and if you're not happy with your match you can switch to a different therapist at any time you don't have to say yes to everything this summer find support and therapy sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/srs That's better H-E-L-P.com/S-R-S so what we're doing is trying to do um it's like map all of the observables that we want to have to this night sky times a no-direction that's complicated to us so we just project it back down to the night sky and the reason why we do it is again because we're just copying and pasting and then generalizing things that have worked before. So, both someone like Hawking thinking about putting quantum field theory on a black hole, or someone who's like a strength theorist who's saying there's like 10 dimensions or 11 dimensions, and I'm gonna like have all these things. All this extra field content that I then have to like have this extra dimension like wrapped up and be tiny and ever see it might. But both of those types of frameworks end up leading to this cute notion that somehow the easiest way to get around describing a quantum gravity system is to find an equivalent non-gravitational system that it's dual to. And so, from the Hawking point of view, it's like there's a sense in which this black hole behaves like a thermal system where the entropy is this area law. And so, okay, there's this fun kind of almost information theoretic vibe to like how like gravitational solutions. Then from the string theory side, there's this kind of more complicated like some theory of the brains, back reacting, not a data, where you have a more precise actual equivalence between. I know some very esoteric like bulk strings on like some gravitational space time. That's the wrong customer consent, wrong in dimensions, you get a data. But it's equivalent to another gauge theory that I know. And so, a lot of people in my field love like those precise dualities because then they have power on both sides. Maybe some things are easy to compute as a geometric object and other things are easier to compute on the other side. And so, you can study like different like strongly couple limits by having this other approximation or other, yeah, approximation that's valid. But both of these things to me are just saying, okay, you have, again, this effort, so like there's a reason to think that maybe one tenant of quantum gravity is this holographic nature. And then we're trying to apply it to these asymptotically flat space times, which are again the kind of the flat earth or the analog of cosmology. But like, don't maybe I shouldn't say I shouldn't say that. - Sounds like the, I have the core question here. Is everything we see in 3D space, 40 space time actually projected from a 2D surface like a hologram? - See, that's the thing is I would say, in some sense, yeah, by definition, but like how physical is it? Like I think what I'm saying is that, and maybe this is a problem with someone who is sending too much time just in equations and not in like real world. Like if we can describe things the same way, you might as well use whatever definition is useful for some things, right? So I think I don't always take it too literally in the sense of like we are in this celestial sphere. It's more like, can I convert everything to variables on that celestial sphere and does that help me organize some scattering computations in a way that would just get computationally complicated to compute all these Feynman diagrams or something like that. That's the kind of goal. Like I think I view it as like, it's another math framework that ideally, if we do it right, is equivalent. And then don't overinterpret like the physicality of that per se, but it probably is my own problem for not trying to take things more literally because we are sending physics after all. - So I don't understand, I'm trying to understand this. So are you trying to prove that everything we see is a hologram? - I think that I'm trying to build a version of a holographic framework that works for space times that are not anti-dissider. So like space times that are more relevant for like scattering. How does gravity want to be described, quantum gravity want to be described by a boundary system? So we're trying to build that out. And that's even if it were true, then the two things are equivalent not that like, so like if A equals B, I'm not saying everything is B, I'm saying everything is A is B, right? So I'm more like saying there's equivalent set of things. Like you can imagine a world where maybe I, I don't know, try to project everything down to the earth and then talk about some rules for how those things interact and it was more convenient to talk about the extra dimension, I don't know, like, but like you're not trying to lose content that way. It's not supposed to lose anything, but it is neat to think okay, like if everything is described in terms of boundary observables then it does kind of call the question, which questions are well defined in the bulk, for example. So celestial holography is your way to prove this and use it to unite Einstein's theory of general relatively relativity with quantum mechanics. The two foundational theories currently contradict each other. So again, there's a lot of people worry, you could probably motivate their research as inspired by. And the question is like, I'll go and, so it's funny, these things go in and out of fashion. Like I think I've heard from some postdocs now that it's not cool anymore on your grant applications to be talking about like quantum gravity, but I still think that's why we go into, like we don't go into the field because, there's two maybe reasons why people go into the field. I think some people genuinely like paradoxes and it always bothered me because it's just like, any paradox where someone actually had the answer in the end, like you just defined it wrong. So I went into physics because I like that I didn't have to learn as much. I mean, the sense of, I don't have to have, we have like an excellent working memory, nominally, if the laws of physics are simpler to then figure out what the rules, the rules are simpler than the solutions. So I like physics for that. That doesn't necessarily vote well when you have a very complicated corpus of things and so on. I think the reason why we study something like quantum gravity is again, 'cause we have this bias or we think that, you know, whatever the laws of nature are, there's a fundamental set that then leads to all these different regimes that you're studying. And if you didn't have that bias, maybe you shouldn't, you know, be doing that job. But if you have that bias, then the thing that you should be doing is trying to again merge various rules into a single set of rules. And so I guess the big outstanding one is this like short distance physics and long distance physics because at some point then you, like we know there's quantum mechanics and we know that the GR is important. So like there's some sense in which the actual observations guide you to this still open kind of problem of how what theoretical frameworks can consistently limit to both. I think, I mean, to the extent that like why should the rules of like tennis versus hockey have to be united, right? Like like some, like I think that like it's kind of cool that we think that the laws of nature are like there's something fundamental about it and there's something highly compressible like about that description. And I think that's a fun hypothesis even rather than just a belief to try to test it and you can kind of automate what you do as researchers in the future. But yeah. So are you, are you saying that everything in space is potentially projected from a 2D surface? That would be, sorry, I think what I'm saying is if two. So like the space time. So for me, it's like defensive. So sometimes you use the word space to mean space time. But it's three plus one dimensions is our world. And then the boundary is one to mention lower typically and the celestial sphere is two dimensions lower because the boundary for these flat space times is null in a way where like basically no other direction can talk to each other. So again, the point would be can we find an equivalent description or almost like we've seen it work in the past. How do we apply it to this regime? And then how do we learn something by saying how we can't import it? So again, physicists are constantly using methodical frameworks that they already have been trying to tweak like just like apply them to something different and then realize something goes wrong and then try to like learn about that framework by saying how to modify it to make it work. And so like in some sense, answer is yes. But at the same time, you know, you want to try to see if I built a framework like that, would it tell me anything different about the structure at scales I can't see? But like ideally like, it's a bad framework if it can't like in principle encompass the things that we do have the intuition for in the book. Or in our role. - This is way over my head. - But it's way over everybody's. I mean, the type of thing is it's like, you know, like I think that I, especially when the type happened when I was younger, I was very much like, I'm going to go read a bunch of textbooks because I want to be able to like answer good questions or like, you know how to tell the fodder, there's why they're wrong or like you're representing science somehow in a funny way. And it's just like, ah, like you need a much better working memory for that or I don't know. I think the thing is that, you know, you don't need it like in our job, you can do this kind of like you're diving and you're doing a computation. And then sometimes you lose sight of the breadth of it. But I also think that now it's a fun time where you can kind of take us up back and see if there are things where, you know, the resource limitations are just the way the physics is done. Doesn't need to be that way because like, no, you know, one researcher doesn't need a higher whole team of like data scientists to treat the corpus as a data set and do something with it. Like there's a lot of power to having like funny eye tools. Like you get to just basically play around with doing things that you never would want to do normally as a good researcher because that wouldn't help you with your career. - Okay, I'm gonna ask you some very, very, very basic questions try to understand this. - Oh, we'll see. - Are you saying that a planet could be a hologram? - Yeah, but in weird lawyer sense, not like in the way, you know. - The star. - No, I think what we're saying is like, all these objects that you're saying in the book and like there would be some state in the boundary theory that's equivalent to it in these types of holographic setups. I don't wanna say that I understand flat-space holography to the level where like I'm confident in that, but in ADSCFT context their dictionaries are like, yep, like this massive state is this other operator in the CFD type of. - Potentially, everything we see in space could be a hologram. Or are you saying the fabric of space, the-- - The everything in it, I mean, so basically the whole point is that there's two equivalent theories. So the thing that you have in the book, you wanna have in the boundary theory. Can you formulate a theory that lives one dimension lower that isn't just so like, is there a natural sense in which you wanna live one dimensional lower? And for example, one maybe one kind of intuitive thing of why it might be nice is that I have a global symmetry. So I have something that's not related to the like these long distance interactions. Then typically I need to go and like kind of measure the charges of the objects throughout the like constant time slice that I'm in. We're saying this is Gauss law story that I can measure the electric charge in a configuration by just having some probe of the electric field like at infinity. And so in ADSCFT, there's a sense in which This boundary theory is evolving in time and you want to find the dynamics of the boundary theory. So there's an dynamics of the boundary conditions of the bulk theory that end up like I guess telling you, there's an equivalent presentation of the bulk theory. So the fact, I think that the fact that it is holographic is deeper and probably had, if it were true, has deeper implications for like the right physical quantities to be talking about in the bulk. But again, and so I think that's the sense in which sure, if I felt more confident that the state of the dictionary were where I really had a good intuition for that thing, then I could try to pull back and say, "Let me, like, the fact that it's a scribe is a boundary theory. What does that mean for what's a good thing to talk about in the bulk?" But I don't think it's formed enough for me to have that type of assertion or make that type of enthusiastic claim given the danger of like how it's interpreted, yeah. What are you visualizing in your head as you describe this? I am visualizing as a pen or a diagram with a sphere and just I'm like, like, like, like, I guess probably that and/or, yeah. Some equations. So I'm basically just a bunch of pen or diagrams, probably the slides and the talks I would give. I mean, your vision, I can see it. I think your visualizing. Yeah, I do. I know. But that's obviously very helpful, right? So, like, that's a problem with, like, when you're a grad student, they often say, like, shut up and compute. And I used to take it. It was like a personal effect. Like, I can think too. But the point is, you're trying to be trained out of using your physical intuition, you know, for the things that you're doing. Because again, like, you know, you can't see ten dimensions. You can not even barely see like, you know, four if it weren't three plus one. So like, how do you, what can you physically do in this world where we clearly are interacting with certain energy scales, three plus one dimensions at a time? How do you get out of that? And then you build this intuition by computing things, I guess. So then your intuitions are roughly a bunch of computations or a bunch of lower dimensional projections of things if you happen to have someone who can make my figures. Yeah. What do you believe happens when we die? Oh, God. I don't know. But, yeah. I mean, my mom is very Catholic. I don't know. I think the thing is, like, that's a funny thing. Physics probably tells you, like, gives you some sense of which questions you want to ask or know it. And I guess the right answer from a physicist maybe is, I don't know. Right. Do you think about it? Hey, luckily, I'm happy with it, so I guess I don't, but, um, no. I think that the weirdest thing is often I can fight with people. I think you're friends in a fun way of, like, how to interpret the observer. So like, yeah, like, I definitely think that if you, and I mean, two things, I mean, we don't agree. Like, I don't know who's right on it. If, like, how much is the fact that, like, I am a me, like, somehow, I feel like physics can still describe or doesn't, doesn't, obviously, like, tell me I couldn't. Have, um, you know, some objects that end up having these complicated, like, neural nets in them that interact with the environment and it changes the set of it. And so it feels like they're making decisions based on that, but it's a different question than, like, I feel I'm me and I feel interact with the world. So I, I think if I wanted to say that physics, like, covers everything that I probably do want to have the observer be part of the system, but I definitely have friends who are definitely not really just writing like that and still kind of call that observer thinking the question that I just don't know because again, I guess I don't, like, open systems. I don't know, like, from, like, from the, the point of view of what are we doing as a theory. But yeah, there's fun questions about that are related to this in the sense of, like, uh, who, who am I versus, like, and is it the same thing as, yeah, I don't, I don't, I think how active the observer is or something like that. I still probably am biased to not including that, but maybe that's them that could easily do. Yeah. Yeah. Doing your mom talk about this? No, no, cause like, oh, she, sorry, I'm not good at, when I, there was a good at debating, no, um, she definitely sees what I do as a variant of religion and I'm like, ah, but, but I also, it's very easy because I think we're so close to, like, end up going too far with questioning this stuff. She came from, like, she came from Cuba when she was a kid and they weren't allowed to be religious there. And so I think that, you know, it, uh, it means a lot more to her purposely because of that, but also I mean, it gives her, it's like a very sense of, like, guidance in the family life and things like that. She, I mean, I'm, it means so much to her, right? So, yeah. But you don't, you don't, no, I, and the, that's the things I personally view, like, attention with the, like, dogmatic aspects of, like, that you know the answer, like, I mean, what I love about physics is that, you know, there is a sense in which, like, the, even though, first of all, like, the level, which I actually understand these things is so, so silly and whatever, but there's sense about science that if it's done, right, and honestly, like, you can have these revelations, like, you can learn something about nature. And I think that whether or not everybody appreciates, like, nature, and so we're trying to find the rules. And if anything, that seems pretty close to the spirit of, like, the part of religion that gives you the, like, the, like, answers are some, like, sense of, like, this is the way things are. Right? Um, it means that you're trying to find an origin story, right? So, like, that kind of origin story aspect of it, I think, that science is after, but I think that I liked the fact that we are supposed to admit when we don't know things, sometimes that doesn't always, it definitely plays out in a way, a weird way because a lot of people think they're experts and then, like, talk down to people who don't, and so it's a very dogmatic in practice, but it's not supposed to be done. And I love that about it. And that's the thing that turns me a little bit off of religion sometimes is just, like, you know, like, the can-you-question things or whatnot. But I think this notion of not knowing is clearly fits into this notion, like, if you thought there is something creating everything, maybe that's more of a reason that we're special or more reason that the rules have to be simpler because, but, like, I tried to be more agnostic and I also am against the kind of dogmatization side of it a little bit, but I'm happy to try to debate or change my mind a little. Right. I see my mom and it's just like, yeah, why aren't there women priests, you know, right? So, what does it mean if, what does it mean with the hologram stuff if it's projected from a 2D? So, again, I think the thing that it will mean is once I understand it better that there's some types of things you do or don't want to talk about within the book space time. But I do think, like, I care about physics not because, I mean, you learn on this one little corner of it that you get to play with. And it's somehow the best bet for you because it uses the things that you know. Like, it always frustrating me like how hard it would be to jump between different fields because you, like, imagine that if you have no experiment, calling different parts of the research, and it's just going to get harder and harder when there's more alternate attempts to something. And I don't know enough about Luke probably to tell them why they're wrong. And I'm just basically vouching because I, like, I trust like one other person's opinion who might have looked at it. And so this is funny thing where, like, like, there's just the kind of output of other people that are also really smart is hard to internalize and compress. So I like this notion of, like, being able to think about taking a step back and saying, like, we value physics for the type of reason of, like, finding these deep questions, trying to, like, see that nature seems to be, like, have this highly compressed description. How would you go about finding it? Like, can we view ourselves as, instead of, like, individual people who maybe do a great thing and they could call themselves an Einstein or whatever that? Instead of it, like, we're responsible for this legacy, we're custodians of this canon. Are there tools now that we have that we can be, like, help curate and, like, condense it more systematically? And I think that that's an exciting time for me because I love that notion of, you know, don't just stay in my little corner, like, how would I get out of that corner? First of all, personally, but then how is it also, like, you view that venture something super valuable, I think, and closer to these kinds of, like, deeper questions, but, but I don't think I think about the deep questions enough because I'm in the confrontations because that's the thing where the intuition comes from and then you just get stuck, philosophizing if you're not, if you're too far away from it. The question of the question is, how do you think about the world in the past two to three years? How do you deal with Shopify? Because it's possible to have a lot of technology in the future. It's possible to have a lot of experience in the future and in the front end, and in the future, in the future. If Shopify had a lot of questions, it would have been possible for the world to have a lot of questions. That's how you can help and we can also deal with the question of the question of the question. Let's start with the questions of the question of the question of the question of the question of the question of the question. How would this change a bit, Bang? Oh, I think that I'd say-- Bang Theory. I think the big, big theory, I think I'm probably telling me that something about my framework has to be changed or something like that. I do it more because, again, like, you know, like a cosmological origin type of thing is very much, like, not part of the thing I'm setting up. So the first side of it, if I need to include the sitter, the stuff that I'm studying is more of like a stepping stone to understanding how to generalize geography. And then the second part of it is, again, like, initial conditions are things like that. We're not necessarily always-- some of us were thinking about the equations and not, like, the solutions of the equations in the particular ones that are relevant to the world. So I would say that the-- it's not going to do for the big bang. But with the big bang, tell me, I need to, like, specify once I understand better if my framework encompasses that or not. You know? Do you believe we can time travel? Forward, at different rates? How so? Oh, I mean, sorry, I think what I was saying is, like, I'm just making the joke of we're all going forward in time. But to the extent that even they have this in their center cell and movie, if I got the name right, like this kind of twin paradox of, like, the-- your clock is-- is affected by gravity. And so you can, you know, go around and come back and have age differently than your twin, but you're only still going forward. Now, it's funny because we don't-- and that's a kind of fun thing, too, is there's still cool stuff. But the no-gos are there. And we never really get to play with all the fun things, I think. It's always this funny thing of, sure, you can do this thing, but the caveat is it's not physical or whatever, right, so this thing about you can age differently, but you can't go back in time thing. And it's also because it would be pretty-- sometimes things are built into assumptions. It would cause a lot of other problems. If you can go back and close time curve, you're influencing your own future. But yeah, I just wish that I think the thing is that in order to make progress in the field, you have to be so in the nitty gritty that you don't get to have fun bullshitting around with the things that people think physicists do. But promoters are pretty close. We have a pretty fun-- we have people who do like quantum foundations and a wide variety of just theoretical physics, where sometimes that it feels a little bit more like maybe what the stereotype of a physicist or the chalkboard debating like existential things is. Let's talk about quantum to mechanics versus Einstein, the fight at the edge of reality. Yes. What do we start? Well, for me, it's a fight, and I'm not if I can see, I see. More like, again, this is the type of thing of why do we believe the laws have to be coming from the same thing, right? I think that that's a pretty bold and fun assumption. And if you can imagine that if somebody thought, but like at every different energy scale, just there's some new things, because that's the way it is that you couldn't predict. That's a very different vibe than thinking that there's a mathematical consistency, or some kind of underlying principles that will carve out a space of theories that still can be consistent with without observations. So what I view it as is, again, as a hypthyrus, we're making this bet about the structure of these laws of nature that probably has some consequences that you wouldn't be able to see when you're just in the nitty-gritty of it. And that excites me a lot, thinking of like, OK, if I could zoom out and see the structure of the corpus, and like, which theories are actually consistent with each other, wouldn't that be fun? And so I think I like that, because that feels closer to the kinds of things that are exciting me about physics as a kid. Now, it's still further away from a lot of-- there's some companies now that are trying to do AI for physics with a thing of, like, we're going to, like-- robots are going to come out of the physics thing. It's like, it's probably not physics the way I define it, when that's the case. But there is cool-- you can unlock cool things when you're changing the way you're doing things. And I think that I-- sorry, forget about this quantum gravity thing-- it's, again, it's about trying to condense this corpus, trying to find a single description that can limit to two different things. And right now, we really have only a limited number of suggestions, like roughly string theory as a framework. Can you try to find other ones? You probably never would if you're just sociologically in a field where everything you're learning is in the context of within string theory. It probably would be some variant of it at any point, just almost by accident. So I think it's kind of fun to do a little bit of a medallayer and think about, like, what are we actually after as a field and be clear about those goals? What is the perimeter institute? Oh, I love it. So a perimeter is founded by-- like Las Ritas, he's one of the co-founders of Buckberry. And he's one of these tech entrepreneur physics fans. So obviously, the head of his time with the smartphone type of thing was an engineer, awesome engineer, and then liked physics that put a lot of money into a physics institute. I'm not sure. I mean, you have to be a fun kind of-- I don't know if it's a really an idea or a silly idea, but it's definitely good for the physicists. So what I love about it is that it's like a research institution that's like a private public partnership. So his money is highly leveraged and the Canadian government supports it just for theoretical physics. And so this need, because you can imagine-- if you cared about the product, you cared about research, having something where the whole institution is dedicated to that is a very different vibe than again, like a university where you are-- you're pooling your eight auditoriums or your dorms or things like that, and it's all these different research directions that are together sharing some resources and you're kind of like cross-sectioning the field, and then it's a reputation of that place that draws some talent in or not. I think there is value to this kind of cross-sectioning research by the product or by the discipline. And perimeter is an instantiation of that, but with the downside of it being in just one place in Waterloo, Ontario, where he's company was and things like that. So we went there instead of taking a $1.1 million-- But these packages are for research funding and things like that. And research is, I guess, I don't know, people are expensive. So that's where these things scale and sound like fancy numbers. But I mean, yeah. But at Brown, it would be very much like a-- Ivy League professor sounds cool. You're teaching a lot. But again, you're just kind of at a university that has one reputation for the other reputation. I don't know the type of vibe of within the US system. Harvard will get more money than Brownwood. And then, versus at least at perimeter, it's kind of a startup vibe. But really, in principle, it could be. And then you try to make it that, which is fun. But we'll see if it will. So what are you doing at the perimeter? Yeah, so I do my research there. So I do my Celestial Agriculture Research. And it's basically like your faculty. You don't have to teach. You mentor mostly master students up. And then you're-- but they're more forgiving or like the kind of institutional things that you're helping with. It's normally-- it's like, instead of being on committees that are just in a big department at a university, we don't care. You're closer to being able to help guide the institute sometimes. And so it's kind of fun because you're going to think, OK, we're at this institute that has outreach teams. It has teaching teams that really value each of those facets of physics. How can you help with that as the researcher? And I love that type of question. I love thinking about how we can position ourselves to collaborate more with tech companies for AI for physics or things like that. And I don't think that question is as meaningful if you're at another university. Because that university doesn't care about theoretical physics. They can change their mind at who they hire later in the community over time. And sure, there's probably awesome CS departments at places. But you can really focus on a thing when it's your whole mission. And I love that about Priya. Do you think AI's going to allow-- What do you think about it? I'm excited. I'm sorry. I used to be more-- so again, I think my opinion-- at least I'm happy that my opinion can change. I feel like that's a positive thing. But I was definitely more like jaded by people over-salt things. And what if they over-salt things too much, the extent more than it hurts the-- like, there is value to expertise that I think that sometimes people over-or-correct things and they don't trust science and stuff like that, right? So how do you engage with hard conversations of where is this field going or things like that without throwing maybe out with the bath water or making it hard to collaborate? So I used to be more like, oh, no, they're going to say. They're going to do all these things. I know that my hero's kind of like physics, so is it going to be like the guys of the funding get access to all the data, start making some claims of theories, and then we don't know enough to be able to tell them why they're wrong, yadda, yadda. The route that ended up happening instead is more like, oh, we're going to take the top people in the field, not like the Harvard professor's not me, and just work with them and collaborate with them first to then-- it's a fun-- it's a reputation thing. But it's fine. It makes sense, it's a business move. It makes sense, but it's a funny thing where we're more a part of it than I might have thought. I thought it would be like we're going to get overwhelmed with a bunch of crock pot papers by physics enthusiasts. And it's less that and more-- more of this funny thing where it says we're all in the labs for a little bit or not. But how do we really do this right? Instead of it being like, OK, so say one company wants to show that they're doing some research. They can work with a few top researchers, and then the top researchers can say it's interesting. But we want to do cooler shit than we couldn't have done before. I think it's funny. It's like, you think it wouldn't be that hard to try to just get all bunch of strings. It's just like, let's do what they do for math. Write down a bunch of well-enough defined questions, and dare someone to try to automate it. And even we could have more fun. We could say, OK, Sam Altman, you're saying ChatGee PT8 is going to solve quantum gravity. Let's put some parameters on that and make a bet. And if you do it by that time frame, whoever did it, gets that prize pool. If not, give that money to fund the researchers. I don't know. I think there's a fun way to do an x-prize with these deadlines. Because the thing that scares me the most is there's a lot of confidence. And once you start playing with the coding side of the product, I can see the confidence in that. But to what extent, a company can always pivot, and you can be like, that claim is bullshit, but they still will find something else that works, and that's great for them. So you don't want to short the company or anything of that. How do you call them out a little bit when they're over-resolussed that over-resolusseness can hurt you? On the flip side, though, I found that the agentic coding vibe coding capabilities are just amazing, because you can have all these little daydreams of how you want to interact with the physics paper. And before, when I was a perimeter, there were supportive of me trying to use some of my grant money or start up money to hire some interns from local universities to code something up. But I was a shitty coder, so I'm not good at managing people at tasks that I don't know what I'm actually going to do. And then I was so bad, I couldn't even basically host this thing locally to show people what it was. And with it a few weeks, I could basically redev the same thing with Cloud Code, which is amazing. So I kind of see that sometimes that hype or that push can drive a product to a level where, now, I don't need a higher adept team. As a physicist, I can start to play around with things that I couldn't have done if I didn't know how to code myself for their skillsets that are open to me, because it has been kind of democratized. So I'm grateful to that. And that's a bit in tension with my kind of Ir, about like, we're going to solve physics. And then it might, like, take the funny way around. So I could be like, well, at least I think-- - Thank you. - You gotta do if they solve physics. - No, but this thing is, that's the question. It's like, what does it mean to solve physics? I wanna make sure we have the same definition of that. Because I do think that it would be hard to imagine actually solving physics to the extent where, like, until you build an experiment, you can't, we're all at the face of theories. I think the coolest thing is to try to think, okay, there's a lot of things in our field that you would never do because, again, resource limitations. So, when you have a couple of thousand people who, awesome smart people, like, definitely, like, I feel dumb all the time, they're awesome people. And they do their thing. And, you know, like, you self-select accidentally for the type of people who just love mathematics, to the extent where then, like, you can accidentally be ostracized if you are too ambitious with them that framework, because, again, who are you, right? And then also, just, it doesn't help you get a job. So, like, there's some things where it's like, I'm almost like an emergent phenomena of things that people create to say are institutional problems. It's like, it's really not anybody being a bad actor. It's just like, you get kind of stuck in the way that things are done, because people like, obviously, like, what they do and the people who like it stay in it and the people who don't are expelled, right? So, imagine, like, you have something where it's like, if you feel comfortable with things operating this way, then you stay, and otherwise, you leave, and you resent the feels. Then, like, that's a bad thing sometimes. But now, I think, you know, there's enough, like, so you have this thing we're basically before, a lot of people would go and, like, you wouldn't value doing brute force, straightforward things that are just, like, scanning over spaces of stuff, because that won't lead to a breakthrough, or, like, is it one individual, you can't do it. But, if you can automate that, like, sure, like, there's a lot of value to types of questions that nobody would have cared about, but that then makes it a problem with benchmarking. So, like, for example, in other fields where there's more of an engineering challenge, or, like, a very specific goal in mind, you can say, this goal is valuable, and then, you know, protein folding or whatnot, they can do it. Or, even math, there's more, like, I guess, like, test for kids, you know, like, the community seems a bit more organized, a lot more, like, IMO problems, like, different benchmarks of, like, how good is it as thing? In our field, I think that we kind of don't, like, often to say, who's research is more valuable than others. We definitely feel like there's totally a vibe of, like, judging things. But, like, the kind of ethos turns that lends itself to not wanting to just straight up say, this is a valuable thing that you should do, because if it was so straightforward to do it, it wouldn't be an interesting question. And it's, like, that's dumb. Because, like, anything that's worth doing, like, you'd think it'd be worth telling someone else to do, right? And so, I think that we just got to get over that in our heads a bit, and realize, like, that, just because in the past, you could only give faculty lines to people who, like, happen to have a great idea that there isn't value, because the whole enterprise isn't-- it's physics. It's not math. It's like, there's some cohesive structure to this thing. Like, how do we optimize for that? And I think it's fun, because I think tech can disrupt that a little bit in a way that isn't going to necessarily, you know, hopefully, not-- hopefully, not in a way where it's, like, completely just erasing. And I think that there's a lot of values that expertise. And, like, how do we harness that to do something really cool with it instead of it being this thing where someone who's not an expert just thinks it looks like it's doing the right thing, you know. What is something that you want to dive into that you haven't yet? Yeah. So I mean, it's always grass is always here on the other side in the sense of, like, you get-- you feel siloed. And it's not, like, no one's siloing you but yourself in some sense. But because, like, I guess, for me, the one thing that I wish I'd-- it would be easier for me if it wasn't is, like, I really like extrinsic motivation sometimes too much. So, like, when I'm computing, I can be happy. But I like, if other people care about what I'm computing. And sometimes, they don't because they care about their own thing. And, like, I don't think you're a better person or not for having, like, less extrinsic motivation. But it's hard to navigate, like, you know, if every person just cares about their own thing, and you're, like, how do I do something this person cares about? I want to jump into their thing. But then, like, they see it as a waste of their time to necessarily, like, you know, transfer that knowledge or something because they have their own grass since they have to do the research. It's hard to move around in a funny way just because everybody's doing their own little math. But, so, I just wish that I could better parse other people's papers and understand, like, how their notation, their ideas fit into the things that I've already built in my mind. And so, like, the type of thing that I'm excited about more so is just, you know, can I take and inspire up this database of all the different papers in the field and try to, like, use large language models or whatnot, just for fun to see, like, how much I can try to parse, like, the different concepts that are appearing in these papers. And I think it's a fun game to be, like, OK, when I'm, when I'm asked to explain something publicly, why am I so shit? I think I spent a lot of years instead of getting better at public speaking, thinking, like, why the hell am I so bad at it? And I think there's these trade-offs between, you know, we are selected for, or at least in our job, it's better if you are not sacrificing accuracy. And so, anytime you're making an analogy, there's so many caveats that caveats get in the way of the intuition going through. And then, sometimes, you don't even think that way. So, it's just, like, can I try to, like, see the structure of the thing I'm studying a little bit better by, like, playing around with it within the scope of things that I know. So, I'm, like, so I'm super excited just for the fact that, like, I can experiment with that all I want to, because before I might need to, like, be better at coding in Python, or, like, understand the inspired baby I keys. And that's API calls. And then, that's, like, automatic now. So, you get to basically just have fun. And I like that a lot. And so, for me, I just want to, basically, understand better, like, like, what is the information content of what I work, right? And, like, in the, in the human sense, not in the, in the 80s, 80s sense, yeah. Let's talk about the physics race between the U.S. and China. Yeah. Who's winning? I mean, I think the U.S. is still, like, I mean, it's already, but, uh, no, I'm just, I'm sorry. I think this is, like, and I think this is something where I'm happy to hear your side of it too a bit more, because I know, like, everybody I, who has any sort of military background, has a different view or conception of China than, like, probably because physics is so useless, the type of physics that I do as seen as that, that it's nice because everybody can be a part of it. So, we love this notion that, like, it doesn't matter what country you're from, you're contributing to, like, this corpus. And it should be for everything that we're doing, or publishing on archive, so it's not, like, there's IP involved and, like, various IP policies can affect things. So, like, I like the fact that there's some little slice of research that's so far away from replication, but, like, everybody can be a part of it, and it's not, like, what country you're in. And so, when I see things like about, like, like, China funding experiment, it's like, you know, someone top down could just say, we're gonna fund it. Hey, it's an experiment, and honestly, maybe it's a good thing if they're spending money on, I'm trying to be better at, like, research for just the, like, the type of research that's just for the cloud, and not for, like, the military technology, like that, like, make them, what the build requires, right? But, I do think that the pipeline of transferable technology is much slower than it's actually building a technology, right? So, I mean, my attitude is, I could see that there is, and this is type of thing too, I think that, you know, very strong, like, top-down governance can do, or, and also, different relaxations of, like, IP laws. Like, there's a power to that, that you can see, kind of, you're up, maybe, over-regulating things, like, USAI, right? So, I like to think that, as we are right now, and I still think it's more feasible to say, that, like, the research that I do, is so much less about the practical applications, and the technology for, like, these space specs, like, detectors, I still think that the European Space Agency, one, Lisa, or whatever the name is going to be, that the US is a part of, will perform this particular one, I think, that you're referring to, TN China or something. But, I think it's great that, like, if they cared about it, they would fund it, versus, like, if a hard time sometimes, going to see the American taxpayer, that this is worth funding, you know, so. - So, you think we're ahead? - We are ahead, yeah, and I, but I think that, like, again, this, what do you want to be ahead on, like, like, isn't it great that, like, they spend their money on the things that we don't really be doing, if it actually, you know, type of thing? If there's a reason why we don't value doing it, maybe it's great that they're doing it. - What are they doing that we're not doing? - Oh, I just think that they have, like, sorry, for example, there's a lot of, I'm not sure if it's a concern. So, again, these could be, like, you know, different people have, or they're different, I mean, I don't know what level you want to consider it, as a regime versus a person, or, like, what, but, like, there's a, like, faculty member at Harvard, like, it was there who has a lot of influence in China, which is great because then he can just have research centers, and he can hire people who win good jobs in America. So, I think what I'm saying is that, you know, in America, it's like, oh, we only want, like, the top person to, like, get a job, or, like, these, like, elite things, and we can get them all over the world, and that's what we typically do. And then their route is, like, there's a lot of awesome people that are never going to get a job in the US system. We can hire them there, and it sometimes works, but also right now, it's still very isolating. So, like, the US would choose not to do that. Like, we don't want to just hire a bunch of more faculty, 'cause, like, you know, but then we once we've made that choice, they're optimizing, given that constraint. What can they do that's valuable? And I think that then, like, there's a reason why we made our choice, right? And that still has an effect of, like, everybody that I know, like, it's really hard, I mean, it's really hard in, like, Indian China, I think, to, like, break out of those systems, unless you happen to have an advisor, or someone you know, who was in the US system, which is insane. Like, I mean, I feel bad for, like, the researchers, it's just like, it's so sociological in some sense. Like, you can't just have a brilliant idea, and, like, get to be a part of this, like, club in some sense, because, again, it's not just a, it's almost more, like, you can't, if you don't speak the language or the right way, people don't think you know what you're talking about, or they, like, they don't understand you. And so, like, there's, like, pipelines that are very limited, and very much go through the US and out. Almost, like, go through, like, Princeton Stanford, like, Harvard, MIT, you know, and that sucks. But that definitely just says that it's not, like, word behind in that sense, right? Are there any projects going on in China that you're excited about? I mean, I'm less of an experimental, less type of person. I think a lot of, I mean, I'm excited for my phenomenological buddies if they think that they can get somebody to fund an experiment that the US wouldn't prioritize. I'm happy for them. I still think the things that I'm more excited about are still in Silicon Valley, as far as I'm concerned. but um. but that's my own bias as my own thinking. - What about the US, are there any projects here that you're excited about? - I mean, it's not involved in. - I probably don't know all the cool projects that people are doing. I think that just the way that we, I mean, the US, there's a lot more money that can go into innovation in a way that, when the time skills for research in a company are so comparable to the ones in academia, sometimes that rubbed me the wrong way. I think that we're good at, there's a problem of putting money into innovation. So the question of who's hands is to go in or how's to control? But it's definitely the exciting things in the States. So you can move fast and break things in a way that I don't think you can in many other places. But probably in China, IP laws would be such that, unless like, I mean, however we followed the law with like copyrighted material for training things, I imagine that they could have had a lot of, they could have done that better, right? 'Cause they can, they don't care. If they don't, maybe, I don't know the actual setup. But a system who doesn't care about IP can definitely, do cool things and something. - What do you think about all these UFOs and UAP signings and stuff? - I don't know, I wish, I wish they were real, be cooler. But no, I don't think, I believe in aliens, but I don't believe in like aliens that have contacted us. But. - You believe in aliens? - Oh, in general, I mean, this is basically, I mean, so like, I think there's a fun thing. So like, either we're super, super special or like sure, there probably are, why wouldn't there be life somewhere else? Where are the initial conditions for where we are so special? I think that, you know, people who study, like, I don't do this myself, but like there's some, the fact that you haven't interacted with them, gives you some bounds on how common it can be or like whether they need to be like, in some environment where you can have water or all those types of fun things. But sure, I think that like, I mean, in less, and I mean, if anything, it's called tension with religion and stuff too. Like, I think there's no reason to think you're special unless there is a reason they are special. And so, modding out by maybe the prior being, like, we're probably not special, would tell you, sure, there's something like an alien somewhere. Will you ever interact with it? You don't know. But I don't believe in like, necessarily like, I definitely, like, I wish that we had talked to and it would be pretty cool. Like, there we go. - So you think all these sightings are bullshit? - Oh, that's hard. I mean, I want to, yeah, but I don't want to say it. Like, that's mean to say, like, that people don't believe what you see type of thing. But I'm saying, like, I wish, if it weren't bullshit, wouldn't that be more fun? I think what I'm saying is like, I wish things were as cool. All these conspiracy theories make it seem like there's much more structure in organization than there is. Like, I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm with you. - I'm with you. - So is it, you've seen the military when it works, fucking well, and like, that there is some cool shit that I wish I knew about. 'Cause like, I just, I see like, the kind of like, - I've never seen any cool UNPs in the military that go into the water and have riveted propulsion systems or whatever, I don't know, yeah, I've never seen anything. - I don't know, I think. - I've only seen stuff on the news. - Yeah, but like, I think what I'm saying is like-- - But I don't believe the dose. - I know, oh, that's, yeah, it's funny. I don't know how many people are actively, I think that we don't always give credit to the fact that people cannot realize their biases or that they are self-serving sometimes. Like, I mean, like, I don't know how much of it's like, like, knock-a-value, or like, emergent knock-a-value, or whatever it would be. Like, 'cause the-- - One that really gets me as the Nimitz. - Oh, he was like more, but I don't know this. - You don't know about the Nimitz? - I don't know, I guess not. - Multiple people saw it. It was some kind of a, what was it? It was like an egg-shaped, whatever projectile. And it went in the water. I don't believe it lost any speed. It amounted the water. Pilots saw it, people on the ship saw it. - All right. - A lot of, it was a collective. - That's super cool. I wish, I mean, I always thought these things are-- - Has it hurt about this? - I'm, I'm, you're, I mean, you're definitely different, like, a set of, like, internet feeds. - We definitely live in different worlds. - Yeah, which is, no, but that's, and that's fine in the sense of, like, I know that I have biases coming from, like, the experience of, like, who I would have, like, kind of, spend a lot of time around. But, no, I mean, I, I mean, I think I always thought, maybe it's cool military projects, I don't know, like, and then, like, sometimes, like, optical illusions for, like, it being, if it was physically impossible. But-- - That's what I wanted to ask you about. - Why, how could it be an optical illusion? - I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen the thing to, to know that answer, but I mean, like, first of all, it's gonna be more fun now that you can AI generate stuff. Like, we're gonna have, like, a real, like, fake news on scale, accidentally, or I'm delicious. I don't know, like, that's, that's scary. Um, and then the other side, I don't understand the extent to which things are physically impossible for it to be a, just some, like, whatever, drone or something you don't know. I know, in this case, I'm not talking about this example of going into water, it sounds good. But I think what I'm saying is that, yeah, I guess the word, which is, like, when someone does believe it is that thing, they're so confident it's an alien and not, like, whatever, why did they think the alien can do something that we can't do? 'Cause if it's all the laws of physics, then probably it's the same capability. So then it's just a question of, like, how advanced is the US military, or other, whatever? Right, or what are you actually seeing or so what you think you're seeing because you're, again, extrapolating based on, like, other things that you're used to looking at. - Could it be a hologram? - Ah, no, no, I'm not gonna go there. I don't get a little quote for that. But, no, I think, again, I'm saying, more in the literal sense of, like, you're probably misunderstanding what it's being seen if, like, there's a reason why it physically couldn't be some military tech. It's my prior. I'd love to be wrong, right? - Could we project a hologram? - I mean, I'm saying, I'm like, I mean, sorry, to the extent, I don't see any reason why you couldn't do a little, like, a little, like, come, some say me, what's the quote from the, like, a press layer? I don't know, like, that type of thing, which is a more literal version of the hologram not the one that I would study. I don't know where laser shows are at nowadays or exactly what, but, see, things, I always, I think I always take the more pragmatic attitude of, like, like, build cool shit. Like, don't ask what is actually true, like, try to engineer a thing so that it is as if it's possible. But, yeah, maybe it's less cool for the UFO type of thing, but, like, you know, imagine the thing that would have to be true for that to be real. Do you believe it's true or do you want it to be true? Do you not want it to be true? Like, what's the conclusion that you draw if there's, like, really some, like, deep state type of thing that's hiding all these alien cool stuff, like, - I think it's all bullshit. - Exactly, I do too. But, - All of it. - Yeah, but, like, the person who then doesn't think it's bullshit, has this, probably in their mind, like, a more, like, powerful versions of the US government having, like, some really cool, like, men in black tech, right? I don't know, that's kind of a feeling or fun. Like, I, yeah, I just, I think that we need to-- - I mean, it's a fun thing to think about. - Yeah, to lay off the conspiracy and make the cool stuff, like, that you can do. - I like that. - You know what I mean? There's a lot of stuff that's, like, same as the morphism class of, like, that's fucking cool, like, this, like, whatever, like, autonomous F-35 thing, you're talking about. Like, there's some cool shit that we can do. - What did you say? - Oh, like, no, like, I was through, Tim and I was going around and showing me the different things that you had in my fridge. Well, any of your teammates was showing there? - Is that, like, a scaled down model of a military type of thing that a private company was doing? I don't know it, but, but, no, this, I don't know. I had, yeah, I think, I wish that, yeah. It'd be fun if, like, people, like, if it wasn't just defense spending, that got to do the cool shit. You're like, (laughs) I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you. - Well, Sabrina, we'll wrap it up the interview. What, what are you getting into next? - I think I'm getting into being a shitty vibe coder and just seeing, like, getting to have fun, like, do my physics and then on the side, kind of try to look at this, like, bigger scale picture of the corpus and see how far I can go with the little, like, do it yourself type of attitude until I need help and then ask for help. - Love it, love it. Well, Sabrina, this is fascinating. Thank you. - Thank you so much. (dramatic music) - No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And, if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.