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

26:51Well, it was the plane. Exactly. So I'm saying this whole me going around with the little photo book of the airplane and then meeting MIT. You literally brought the photo book of the airplane. Believe me, I had little business cards back in the day. I mean, it's very cringy. That's awesome. I blame my dad. But it was like you had little photo books of the plane, little business cards, and 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 get a little bit less cute once you're in your teenagers, but between like 12 and 14, you're pretty cute.

27:23So like walking around like with that, like trying to introduce myself to like various MIT faculty, say, or like at the air shows, various people in the FAA or like maybe Peter DeMandis or folks who had done cool stuff in either like the private aerospace, like Anusha Ansari had gone up in a Soyuz capsule and then DeMandis had the XPRIZE. So like definitely a lot of like trying to network, but with like little. Man, that is, I'm going to do that with my kids. No, with the kids. I mean, it works. It's like an arbitrage opportunity. It's like there are things that like the kid can get the access and the, yeah.

27:57That's smart. I love it. I love it. So how did you like, how was it getting into MIT? So I mean, it was very, it was a relief because I didn't get into college otherwise. Right. I mean, I was very dumb. I was like very narrow-minded in the sense of like laser-focused on I want this thing or this thing. None else. I have standards. But you can't like 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 wait list. So, yeah. How did you like it?

28:32Oh, I loved MIT. Was it challenging? Yeah, but I love that. You know, and I think that's the thing is like, 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, like you knew where you stood. It wasn't a bunch of kids bullshitting. Like, and like you'd take, you know, you'd take the courses that you're ready for and they'd 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.

29:00And then like, who knows what? It's like babble versus it just felt more like went in, worked hard, you got something out of it. I love structure and something helping push you. Right on. Yeah. What exactly were you studying? So I ended up majoring in physics. So when I went in, there's like a lot of just general institute requirements. The beginning first year or so, I was able to sneak into being like this internship at Kennedy Space Center with a bunch of older aeroastro 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 like narrative of like the airplane build and like flying as a kid like how much that would confine me and I so I guess my rebelling was like going the other option was physics somehow and so I liked I liked my physics courses I did well and I just pivoted into like let me major in physics because you did you did it you did an internship for Boeing yeah Yeah, but it wasn't, I mean, probably it's, lots of kids do internships.

30:01It was probably because of the plane and stuff like that, 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? Oh, between, I hope I'm right, but between freshman and the sophomore year, if I'm not remembering. I mean, as a freshman, you were named the first in MIT history. The little entrepreneur 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.

30:34But when I was at Boeing, I probably, and this is the type of mistake that I would make often, is 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 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 McDonnell Douglas acquired branch of the company.

31:11and that disillusioned me a little bit, not because it should have, but because it's just like, 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 would help you more than studying like coding or something if like the the new tech is uh like either drones or um better engine design or whatever for 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, there's a sense in which you can get lost in the R &D phase.

32:12You just mentioned something. I think you said that the latest technology in a field isn't necessarily what's going to advance you. How do you make that determination? I think what I'm saying is just a lot of times you can see it in... 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 um i think that oftentimes like you can just kind of see that there's like a lot of low-hanging fruit and then it stagnates a bit and like i mean to the extent of like you know the design for like a passenger airplane really hasn't changed so much um 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?

33:04Do 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 for a minute. You had a high school internship at Blue Origin. A little bit, but that was so short. That was, like, I mean, so 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'm glad I can pretend that this is an NDA thing I don't remember exactly all 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 and tell it felt like we were learning operations instead of any particular cool tech but we got to see a lot of fun stuff on the tours What kind of fun stuff?

33:52Like I thought the coolest thing was somehow these tiles where you could heat it up and it would still be really hot on the inside and 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 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'm not going to insult the experts, but something felt off about there being a whole enterprise around like how you organize your enterprise.

34:21It feels like kind of like prompt engineering now. It's surprising how, 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 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 appreciated it more. But I think at the time it was just weird going from like, you know, plane to... What are the other interns? Were there other interns? Yeah, I mean, one of them I think ended up going, they were awesome.

34:57I was probably just a little bit annoying because I was younger and like, and I was like, ITAR, ITAR, ITAR, no. Like, there's a kid of Lars is freaked out over like, ITAR, thanks. But like, like who could see documents? 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 know. I didn't really follow up because I ended up going to a different major later. but uh i think one of them had internet spacex or things like that so it 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 um yeah i probably was just annoying little freshman and that thing how do you think they felt about you how much younger i think we all agree no no i mean no i i think i wasn't that much younger but enough when you skip a year or so like right college is yeah if you're how old i would have been like 17 or something and they're like 21 or two it's still a bit different if you're yeah they're more independent and like and then you had an internship at cern yeah so then i 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 are in aerospace were my heroes and they liked physics so i'm like i'm gonna try to impress them how hard can it be um 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.

36:28And so it was at CERN. So CERN is cool. But I'm sure that 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 interning at or whatnot. I was very lucky that the one year that I do, the first year I go to CERN, they discover the Higgs boson. But like, you know, science is slow, especially in like a big collider. The first year you went to CERN. They're like, they're discovering the Higgs boson. And that's nothing to do with me, but just the right timing of like - Discovered what? The Higgs boson. Oh, sorry.

36:54What is that? It's like, so trying to understand the origin of like masses for like these standard model particles. It's an extra field that was conjectured to be there to describe also like electroweak symmetry breaking, et cetera. It's like the field content of like the things that mediate interactions between particles. um 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 um but again cern 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 um but but again i was just i'm just a kid kind of like having some fun doing like a little bit of uh like uh i think it was some just for my undergrad thesis along the lines of like some data analysis back of the envelope thing for a future detector type of what what is that what there's a lot of conspiracies and all kinds of stuff going on about them.

38:06I wish that stuff was cool. I wish to see this thing is these conspiracies they're never like it's always just not as cool as they make it sound and uh. What are they doing? They're just colliding like particles right? Like you want to you want to send things in at 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 this bag of quarks and you start to see that like the like the kind of component nature of your um like protons and things like that. 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'm so i mean so i mean it should be jets at some point these things hadronized sorry so like basically you're colliding say depending on the collider you're putting like say electron positron and other colliders and this is like say two protons are colliding um 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.

39:05And those interactions will determine, I guess, the rate at which different things are produced. And so there's a theoretical thing. You're modeling like those very short distance scale 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 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?

39:37Yeah, I mean, well, they're near a border, but yeah. But 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. Obviously somehow didn't appreciate it enough. But yeah, it's cool. I don't know. you end up knowing so little compared to all the 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 no 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 fun guy uh for the billionaires you know like he's like because i can understand like i mean you're probably from a defense kind point of view you want to understand the risks or whatnot and i'm like i wish it were that fun i wish it were that risky like nah like if we were i mean i'd love to be like building wormholes but they're not going to be like you're not going to transverse anything no so it's it's so sad this is 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 you're yeah no 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 of graded 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 quantum computing is like way overhyped and then suddenly ai actually is useful you're like holy shit so so i don't know where i should land in the end or what i should learn from the fact that like yeah completely disillusioned to like overly enthusiastic in a couple weeks how long are you at, Sarn?

41:18Oh, just like two summers, like whatever the, like less than 90 days or whatever for the work permit, 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 weirder thing about it is the way that it interfaces with, say, the U.S. institutions or things like that. You'll just have a lot of, like, I don't know what year, like 50s or something. they look like dated buildings but with a bunch of people in offices and then all of the cool expensive technology is in the actual like detectors say so it just kind of looks like um i don't know like what you would imagine probably uh some some industrial complex thing is it i mean do you go underground uh i wouldn't for what i'm doing but sure i would for a tour or if someone was actually like putting together detectors absolutely yeah they do tours um yeah Yeah, they do.

42:09Yeah, when it's not running, yeah. I got to check it out. Yeah. They got a hard hat. So how do they get two atoms to collide in a tube? So this is way above my pay grade, but it's a bunch of magnets accelerating these things to like higher speeds. And then I wish I knew. I should probably know what detector is in. But luckily, I'm not technically studying the manufacturing or engineering of the things to test the experiment. I'm 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.

42:43You'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 it's a sound wave where they're seeing the, you know, the mirrors move apart. And that's kind of fun. It's fun when it's the, they're just, they're actually seeing the thing they're saying they're saying instead of indirectly inferring the thing. Interesting. Post-processing is.

43:07What does 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 Hickok's mechanism. Did you say super partner? So like basically I think that at some point a lot of people were looking for like extra particles that would come if there was this like symmetry relating fermions and bosons. So things that want to be apart from one another, like you only want to fill one in each state versus things that like to kind of cohere or have like amplified.

43:47That'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 going to 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 it turns out maybe not. We don't know when the next new discovery is going to 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 how expensive is it to motivate or to build this thing. Wow. But luckily I'm not as involved in that.

44:18I'm purely theory for the sake of that way I can be decoupled from these high cost experimental ventures for a bit and then just tackle that problem of mathematical induction or something on the theoretical physics corpus, I think is one way to say it. I didn't really think much about skincare 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, absorbs 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 caldera lab dot com slash srs and use code srs for 20 off your first order that's caldera lab dot com slash srs where do you go from cern so from cern i use the fact that it's easier to get into grad school the experimental things to get into grad school at like i went harvard at mit 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.

45:52And 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 still 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 dubbed down version of string theory? Maybe. So you're basically, quantum field theory is giving you these fields that explain why particles are identical because they're like, the electron is just an excitation of this field.

46:37So like I have multiple electrons or excitations of the same field. You can think of, say, the mechanical process of how I'd compute some amplitude, like this thing, predictions for CERN, 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 like graph to like a sheet, kind of like a literal, like a pair of pants say, so interacting and like you have this world 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 this sort of points, it's kind of just like this branching of like a tubing thing.

47:13And 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 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 and eat it to like gravity and quantum theory.

47:50Okay. 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 spin memory effects, stuff 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 2000 people in a field that like, you know, are sometimes bombarded by like, what is string theory doing, that type of thing.

48:22So like very much closed ranks type of thing. 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 E &M 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, When you have an antenna, you're seeing 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.

48:53Well, not real experiment, more like a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure angular momentum loss in spiraling binary systems. 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.

49:26So I have, I'm lucky to have some good experiences at 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, because my family thinks it's awesome. You know, like, I mean, yes, when I was a kid, if I was going to be a physicist, wouldn't you want to be like an amazing physicist? Like, of course, that's the goal. You go to Lindau, 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. I think it's better if you earn the money and then you whatever.

49:52But like there is a lifestyle to like just being good at your job would get you. And it's like, I wish it were real, you know, because like hype will just go away at some point. So I 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 a 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 as the physicists publicly are like not the real physicists somehow.

50:31Interesting. And I don't, yeah. And I think it's just funny politics almost or, you know. So you want to be under the radar. No, I don't, no. I mean, I am, I wish I did. 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.

51:07Like, how do you better kind of link 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 is the 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 times have changed with how science is funded that people are more open-minded to you know a little bit of like um 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've all decided this is the way it's done because it's been like that yeah where did the where did the Einstein analogy come from I think it's just some Aussie article trying to be flashy and it was good clickbait.

51:52I 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, 2015, 2016, I guess. So that stuff, I have no clue. I'm pretty sure you don't see the articles before they come out. And like, I didn't want any ridiculous comparisons because mostly airplane build kit stuff probably makes it a cool story. And then you're doing fun stuff with top people in the field. And sure, Hawking starts to work on stuff with Andy. So there's that part of it too.

52:25And Hawking is one of the few examples of somebody who is known for their research and their outreach and actually really good at both. I think it's 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 it's rare. Elon Musk. See, that's the thing. 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. Let me hear. I got to hear this. So when I'm a kid, and this is me being very, very dumb and not realistic. But like I'm in high school and I see like this like Quanta article about Tallulah Riley taking like physics courses at Caltech.

53:02And I'm like, she's not a physicist. She's just taking a few physics courses. I could do better. This guy thinks of it. I'm like, I'm a kid. This is dumb. But I was like, these guys like physics. Damn. 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 iron man in the 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 it's like you know 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 expert to then be able to be more legitimate in a position where you get to do cool stuff.

53:45But I think that's the kind of wrong attitude. So like, so I went through phases where I was like very disillusioned 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 this stuff. Not saying he is or isn't, but I'm saying like, there was definitely this sense in which there's no way he's actually doing all this stuff, because I see how hard it is for people to do all this. 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 towards something that's impossible that's scary and i think that that was something where again before before the ai stuff i was very disillusioned and being like man they're like taking buzzwords and concatenating them with like quantum computing and and what else was i solutioned by like Like, you'd see things that as a physicist, you know, like there's certain no-goes and they're still getting funded.

54:38And you're like, ah. 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, 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, use Mathematica or whatnot.

55:12If 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 their field is 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 when you have tools that open up your ability to basically, instead of hiring a dev team, you don't need the resources for that. You can still just do it yourself. That's really cool. So I'm super grateful that maybe some of that hype led to technology that's actually useful for my job, or at least the things that I wish my job were.

55:46So I think my opinions clearly oscillate a lot about some of these folks. What do you think? Do you think we're going to make it to Mars? So I think he could make it to Mars, depending on his definition, right? So like, when 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 need to like come back. 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 and a little arc and have it like cryogenically frozen out. And I was thinking like, send them one way.

56:16So I think someone can get to Mars. Absolutely. If they change 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 this divide was cooler, but it does make sense sometimes to not risk, you know, life and limb for no reason. I do think that.

56:50Yeah, I don't. I think it depends what the goal is. I think like I'm more reminded 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 second hand sci-fi because I never like read these sci-fi books growing up but all of like the people I admired did I still kind of like the earth like I like I'd rather if I had the same resources it probably would be more like less aerospace now it 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 Terra Firma.

57:30But 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 this AI to be smart enough to help us figure out how to do that. And then we need to like build the AI 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 where you can use the end goal to tell you how to get somewhere. And so maybe he's used that or maybe it's just a good marketing scheme.

57:55I don't know. Do you think we're going to need to go to Mars? I mean, I think I don't feel that existential need the same way in the sense of the point where you need to get to Mars if you're not already able to go there. Try to avoid that first, maybe. And you actually would have more expertise on that side of things, how scared you are about chaos. I don't know, man. I always think the world's ending. Yeah, but that's a bias that you'd have. I mean, I'm sure they have to get you trained to save it, right? Yeah. Right. I don't know. I don't know. But who else do you look up to, did look up to?

58:37I mean, different parts of lots of people. But at the time when I was a kid, it was because it was Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, 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 the cool stuff um and i again i like this notion of trying to make profitable or build something that wasn't necessarily the like its best uh 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.

59:16You can have a lot of YouTubers go around and debate, like, why is a 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 um 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?

1:00:11I mean, I hope we can do it. No, I don't know. See, the thing is right now, it's this funny, we're at an interesting time where I think like the technologies that like everybody cares about, you know, AI, whatnot, really can help doing the job that I do. There's a thing of 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 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 axiomatize these laws of nature. And maybe there is some uniqueness or rigidity to that structure that it can find.

1:00:47But 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, OK, say you can accelerate science. Did you finish it or did you now open up a new chance to build more infrastructure for how that knowledge is stored and related to one another? Interesting. Because we don't just want to answer about it. I think that if I was an engineer, I want to know the answer to this math equation to predict what I would need for my engineering problem.

1:01:20Versus for physics, it's more like, okay, here's the answers, 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 the number of bill is, 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 better bet.

1:01:49And I think it should be a fun collaboration. And I think that the nice thing now is that there are a lot of some crossovers with people like spending sabbaticals at these big tech companies and they some care about research, which 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 try to get the best product that like can do theoretical physics well. Maybe I'm using other people's products, right?

1:02:23Not 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 laws of 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?

1:02:53And 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 these 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 helped invent the World Wide 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 that, 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.

1:03:24don't just care about papers, care about some of the infrastructure. CERN helped build the World Wide Web. I mean, that's what they say. I hope I don't get all the facts wrong. But yeah, they have a lot of data, and they're wanting to serve it to different places. And I think DARPA gets a lot of credit, too, for actually what you think of as the internet. But, you know, when I used to – and this was the type of thing that bugged me a lot, because I think I had these heroes in tech that thought, like, oh, if the physicists maybe just did things differently, they'd have, like, all these whatever cool things.

1:03:54And 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 quantum mechanics like leads to like the transistor 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 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 it 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 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 if you're a human interacting with it it's an engineering thing.

1:04:50It'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 in 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 U.S. like is basically funding private institutions to do research at scale.

1:05:19And the overhead seemed crazy, but that's just how they funded in Europe. They'd be funding the schools more directly. So 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 completely different value propositions or priorities in the institutions. And so how do you make sure research gets funded and is 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.

1:05:52So it's like the best people in different fields all in one. Or big tech says, ah, it's broken or whatever. Like come into our private lab. I don't know. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. We'll see. Oh. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll 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 pretending to be performance gear. I've worn mine training on the range, traveling, and outdoors for long days, and they stay locked in place the entire time.

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1:07:48Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. Did I do it? Right?

1:07:56What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong because I don't watch any of this. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it.

1:08:14In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're. And now we're bringing them back.

1:08:32It does look pretty cool. I gotta admit that. All right, Sabrina, we're back from the break. We're going to get into your current work. Gravitational memory effect. I need you to slow down just a little bit for me. I'm not on your level quite yet, maybe by the end of the interview. I just talk fast. What is gravitational memory effect? There's different kinds. The easier one is not the one that I came up with. It's much older. It's this notion of you're going to have these big bodies out in somewhere in the galaxy or whatever or far away um coming in and colliding and then when they collide they're going to coalesce maybe into like another black hole or whatever it is but there's some ripples in the space 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 definitely i mean i think actually it's pretty accurate a sense of like i'm looking at like say at a given 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 timescale thing that's imprinted because of this scattering process well can i can i make another yeah would this be like the wake of a boat in some sense almost literally i think that the 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 have a friend who is a family who's like into like um nautical stuff so i think we concluded that like that there's a sense in which sound waves in the water could be approximated as having a memory effect, like if they're deep underwater, but like a surface wave is not going to have a universal relation between the boat passed and then it moved.

1:10:18But 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 moved a certain amount. No, like, you know what I mean? Like some net property of like the thing. So it's not as cool is that because i think that in this in that situation it's not a universal relation between the things that scattered had some kinematics that then set the value of this shift but uh but yes you have these two gravitational like wave detectors some probes sitting very far away just minding their own business they're sitting along geodesics this wave passes and then the distance between them is going to change okay and like depending on where they were relative 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 of energy generalized to this kind of fun asymptotic symmetry version of it turns into deterministic imprints in the night sky of these move detectors and then to see the like the angular momentum analog you have to go a little bit sub leading which is the spin memory oh shit okay i think i'm picking this up so So you're saying, okay, how do I explain this?

1:11:34Okay, so if we have a sheet or a blanket or something and I put, I don't know, a mark on here and a mark over here. And then we put a ball in the middle. Move a little bit. Then they come inward. Is that what you're saying? So that would be kind of an analogy for maybe the gravitational potential kind of curving you in. I think this is closer to the buoy analog. The math is wrong. and so this isn't true for this case, I'm pretty sure, of like imagine that you could have some buoys 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.

1:12:20So that's not going to be true for the the water wave. I'm pretty sure it's not true for the deep water wave case but for the this gravitational system there's a symmetry reason why i can see that type of shift like the buoys move by certain amount that means blah like this amount of energy was deposited like type of thing okay so does the imprint 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 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 that's not the thing you're going to measure so like in my framework i'm doing that single, whatever, ship crossing type of thing as the entire, everything that happened in the whole world, infinite amount of time.

1:13:03But 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 scattering experiment is like a chunk. And so there's a shift from that scattering 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 re-explain 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.

1:13:37Yep, something else moves it. And then there's a very formal version where we say, imagine you wait for infinite amount of time until maybe 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?

1:14:06So 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 the kind of fun thing. So I come into my PhD and you're almost just going to do like classical radiation. So like, you know, you accelerate a charge, it's like emitting radiation. And the fun thing about, you know, gauge theories, 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 a set of equations that are local. so what happens is that when i kind of like when you have a charged 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 um you like static electricity or these things where you see like this balance of charging you probe it far away right so i can with gauge theories or with like uh these like the fun thing is 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 it's like i can see the electric field is like pulling me in like you saying with this blanket and it being deformed.

1:15:12So I can measure some features of this object in the center from the boundary. And that's one of the ingredients to this holographic principle of can I just talk about the things in the boundary in isolation as its own theory. But for the very specific scope here, it's like that Gauss law type of setup of, OK, 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 charges scattering so it's like gauss's law but applied to some scattering process so what makes the particles scatter is it a collision it's their own interactions with each other and that's the funny thing it's these long-range interactions that are bussing in a curse so like the fact that they're charged and then they're gonna like have some photons exchanged between them or other particles is the thing.

1:16:10But we basically, like, there's something about the very low energy that is universal almost because of these 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 sciences 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.

1:16:46And 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 apply it here and you realize, oh, look, that tells me something about soft limits and scattering tells me something I can observe. So early in my PhD, they had this connection between soft physics and a synthetic symmetry, word identity. And then my first paper was on the subleting 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 world in some sense.

1:17:24And then when you keep pushing that further, then you can tie it to this experimental version because someone else understood that there is 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 anyway, basically, long story short, is you are just taking some mathematical framework and then trying to copy-paste it to a new application once you have one iteration. You're trying to see what's modular about some computation. And then you get to import that and find something new because you pulled it out.

1:18:00Wow. Yeah. Wow. I mean, Stephen Hawking cited your solo and joint papers in 2016. Your dissertation is only the second Harvard physics PhD published in physics reports. The other author won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah. 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 Hawking's thing was cool because, again, he visited at the end of – like near the end of his life. He came to Harvard, which was neat to see. Just the entourage. We were on a Congo line in this boat – kind of like this little river cruise type of thing, but in the Boston Harbor that was like Hawking, his whole entourage.

1:18:44And I was literally doing like a little Congo line behind him. And like, I mean, you can't make that up. You know, it's a fun experience. So, yeah. So what does this discovery mean? I don't think it means that. I mean, it means I'm lucky that something experimental is going to come out of something I did maybe. I don't think the things that I've done have that deep of a meaning or something where everyone should know these types of things necessarily. It's more like the fact that 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.

1:19:21I think that's a fun kind of paradigm, and it's fortunate that there was some observables of this. But at the same time, I'm using Einstein's equations to get it. It's more of a test of the boundary conditions being a good physical assumption than a test of the theory itself. So I think that it's not super, super exciting to me, but it's not... I wouldn't say tell your audience it's important. I think it's pretty cool. Lots of things are cool, though. lots of things in this building pretty cool so is the is the universe expanding um so again i think that that's a funny thing i i do think if you talk to a cosmologist they believe in like the cosmological constant um 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 um a fellow um like a faculty member when i was in grad school at Harvard, like Rafa is kind of colleagues with Andy.

1:20:22He is very into the Swamp One program and trying to test 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 at face value trust the actual results 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 seeing. 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 would be where a string theory likes to live.

1:21:00So 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, blah, this is our model of MDCDM. But it is true that stars, galaxies, Oh, 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 far away, 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 if that's true, I know, like, some features of my star or cellar formation.

1:21:30So I know, like, the spectrum of the lines that are supposed to be there. So if it's moving further away, I'm going to 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 onto, because again, it's close to this, like, is your framework even physical? Is the statement about some parameter, like the cosmos are constant in Einstein's equations, and whether everything I do, I'm a flat earther as far as cosmology is concerned, because I just set it to zero. And now there's some experiments saying maybe that's okay.

1:22:00But what things are constant versus functions of other things that can change over time, roughly? I mean, we got to get the - But the expansion thing, sure. You're not a flat earther. No, no, I'm joking. So I don't want to encourage a flat earther. Sorry. So like, you know, like, sorry. So the extent to which you're on the earth and you see like the curvature scale of the horizon or whatever, or you're not seeing and you're saying the world is flat. There is a, I'm just trying to make a joke and probably it's dangerous to do it at the actual platform of the fact that like, you know, do we see the curvature scales of like the universe, the cosmological constant at the scales where I care about it for particle detectors or for these gravitational waves from Lego.

1:22:37and I'm always setting this constant to zero instead of like whatever, 10 to the negative, like large power. So if the universe is expanding or if we want to say the galaxies and stars are getting farther apart, I mean, I feel like that means the universe is expanding. No, no, no. I'm 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 various cosmological constant there? Or is it all just the different matter distributions and things like that that try to govern the reason we're doing?

1:23:12So I should have just said, yeah. But instead, I was like, oh, by the way, there are experiments that are maybe changing our opinions a little bit or calling the question some notions of those parameters that describe this thing. So if it's expanding, what does that mean? There's a wall? So that's the thing. So the fun thing about cosmology, if you're doing 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 the world that i live in is like kind of understanding the mathematical structure you can attach to the 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 so if it's expanding wouldn't that the fabric yeah the indentions what do we call it the gravitational memory effect wouldn't that change no it doesn't so you're absolutely right and in the sitter like the types of like i you're you're basically propagating a wave on a curved background versus a flat background and it changes the the form of it further away and people have papers trying to talk about it like memory on like the observer horizon in the center, which is the closest thing.

1:24:32But the thing that's relevant is like, you want to 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 synthetic symmetry stories can be applied to amplitudes. And there what you're doing, you have CERN, you have this collider, and like, it's such a small scale where these things are interacting, 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.

1:25:04And 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 hot question here. It has to do with flat Earth. Uh-oh. You ready? Okay, yeah. I'm ready. I think I'm accidentally reading this. Here we go. Yeah. 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 got the best i don't 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 could see the horizon i mean like like what i guess i don't know what why those don't work for example you know when like if i talked to someone who was a flat earther what would they try to say if i said you know look at the ride and see it's curved like or go up on like a i'm not a flat earther 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.

1:26:18Because 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, what would I try to do to make them feel as right as possible by caveating 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.

1:26:57And 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 know, you print out your little chart, like, you're not going to go that far off like when you're driving around town pretending that you know the the earth around you is flat unless you try to park your car on a hill and you forgot to put your parking brake on i don't know like like basically no and that's not for the curvature but just for ships and guns 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 uh 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?

1:27:39I don't know like how much people pay attention to those things or how much it affects their, their lives. Um, and then doubling down on that worldview 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 or like 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 and be like oh never mind yeah well maybe soon though maybe so maybe you guys send them up like hey they go free like is a they'll say it to get on the free like suburbital 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 okay so breaking your current understanding i think that sometimes the, it is the, the paradoxes that, that show that there are problems in our understanding.

1:28:38So 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 this stuff well enough. And I think that's one problem when you're going to feel that everybody's confused. It's 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 relatively more confused? So there's these 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.

1:29:05I only kind of know it like, kind of like teleologically or like away from, like, I don't know at the moment that I pass the horizon. So then why can't I put some quantum fields on it? And then like, I have pair production, one of them will go out to infinity, the other one's going to go inside. And suddenly you run into these like, like issues of, uh-oh, like, did I evaporate into a thermal system now? Is it not Unitarian, all this fun hawking stuff. So I think the thing that 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.

1:29:40And so it's not breaking physics, it's showing that there is something broken in our assumptions. Like, it's not like, 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 still have colleagues who believe that as soon as you cross the 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.

1:30:13And then we're not precise enough with what we're assuming when we compute something and then, oh, this don't fit together. Like that's the vibe. But I think I wouldn't try to scare a a random person with it, I would just point out that somehow the bread and butter of a physical theory where you don't make a measurement is seeing that these assumptions don't tie together. So something has to be wrong, then popping it back and trying to fix it. I mean, what is a black hole? So I mean, I think some of the sense there's literally just a sense in which I have so much matter in some region that now even light can't escape.

1:30:47And the way that I see it is like from a Penrose diagram, there straight up is just some 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 going to 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 um 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 the accretion disk around it or whatever like generating the light.

1:31:21Engineering is cool, the fact that they can reproduce it and just stare at a black hole. But it literally is a black hole in that picture, which is kind of funny, right? Like the way the light is bending around it. But I think that the fun thing is really just more like the way a physicist would first enter is there's a very specific solution to Einstein's equations. So there's a differential equation with a specific solution that then has some weird ass properties of the causal structure of where particles are going to end up. So, yeah. What happens if something goes on it? So that's the type of question.

1:31:56So 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 – 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 background, I think people will talk about, like, spaghettification or, like, you're going to be stretched out eventually when you get closer to where the curvature is larger and blowing up at the singularity. But 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 aren't sure, like, they think that the singularity is something so highly curved that the approximation of just treating it classically is bad now.

1:32:40So then they don't know what happens if they have a thing. But it's not, like, I think that's easy enough to try to say, OK, if I have some nice numerical simulation and I can just write down this differential equation for how something would propagate on a classical black hole background, that you could have something just going through the horizon for a little bit and probably in that model it looks fine. But it's just like, how valid are those? How hard is the numerics, first of all, to do near certain regions? And the way you set up for a scattering process probably is also hard. But it depends on, like basically the problem is that sometimes it's the question you're asking ends up being not the right question or things like that type of problems.

1:33:20I just, I still, I don't understand how it can swallow light. No, I mean, so, but it's basically like you're writing, like, how do I say 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 it's like 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 um like it's harder because it's non-linear but like when you're doing like multiple moment expansions and enm or like just like literally 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 help figure out one with uh some telecom like reverse engineering from all these different radio signals what what's happening i don't know but yeah 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 i mean i think the best thing is like uh i forget which i'm gonna get the name of the movie wrong but like kip thorne was a scientific advisor to this whatever oh man i wish i had better recall of like names of cool movies interstellar maybe i hope i'm not wrong on that um where they actually ran a like you know simulation for what it looks like i think that you have pretty good like images from either like that movie or um i've seen the images you've seen the light coming out of it right so that's why it's like they look like so you know if if my fist here is or my hand is the black hole what does it look like from this angle yeah but is it flat or does it look the same oh no it should be round this should basically i mean there's so it's actually a hole that's you can access from any direction.

1:35:30And so ironically, I definitely have colleagues who play with these type of ray simulations more than me. So the way when I see Black Hole, I see an equation written down, and I'm like, uh-oh, this blows up here. But the point is that when you're seeing those simulations, I think a lot of it is you're seeing, imagine you had some stars behind it, and then how that light from the star is coming to you. And so maybe it looks funny, because literally 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 funny lensing of the stars behind their light kind of going on geodesics around and coming to you.

1:36:03So some of the artifacts are that, which I guess is what it looks like. But the funny thing, I think you literally know what it looks like. And I don't think it would be that hard to do some sort of simulation of you're following a geodesic down and then there's a bunch of particles with you with some light. It's just a question of how do you want to set up? From the back? Yeah. So roughly has the normal like non-rotating black hole would have like spherical symmetry. A lot of black holes 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 axis of rotation.

1:36:36But there's not like a front and back thing. It's more like a axis of rotation difference. So what is the shape? It looks like those... Is it a ball? It's like, I mean, sorry, 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 yeah so you're seeing it it's like if you have a surface of revolution around it i think is 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 of 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 are there i mean i have no reason to think not i guess the question is like what is i'm like sorry so like have to take a step back and make sure I'm not like saying something that was for the experts are going to 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 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 the only thing I'm worried about is to whatever extent the thing was the original thing.

1:37:51The planet was rotating around that you called it a planet for that reason. But yeah, 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 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. So, you know, and the thing that looks special is you're outside and you're seeing all the light around it kind of being warped by it. Okay.

1:38:22Yeah. 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. It's like not, yeah. All right. Retracing. All right. Let's move into celestial holographs. Yeah. Celestial holographs. What is that? So it's a good burning exercise. This is what you're doing right now, right? Yeah, I know. So, yeah, a lot of, I think some British twister people have some fun, like, sense of humor of how they name things as far as, like, celestial sphere and the heavenly equations. I think there's fun things.

1:38:54But, so, celestial sphere literally is, you know, night sky, stars. If you're, like, you're, like, Millennium Falcon or whatever and you're accelerating, you might imagine that, like, you'll see the distribution of the stars and the night sky move around a bit. So, like, they're going to dilate. And so that's somehow seeing that there's like the boost symmetry of the space-time is a dilatation of this sphere.

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1:40:56So what we're doing is trying to do, just like map all of the observables that we want to have to this night sky times a null direction that's complicated to do with, so we just projected 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 in a black hole or someone who's like a string theorist who's saying there's like 10 dimensions or 11 dimensions and I'm gonna like have all these, all this extra field content that I then have to like have this extra dimension like wrapped up and be tiny and never see it.

1:41:31But 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 brains backreacting, da-da-da, where you have a more precise actual equivalence between.

1:42:06I know some very esoteric, like, bulk strings on, like, some gravitational space-time. That's the wrong possible constant, wrong number of dimensions, yada-yada. 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, um, yeah, approximation that's valid. But both of these things to me are just saying, okay, you have, again, this effort to like, there's a reason to think that maybe one tenant of quantum gravity is this holographic nature.

1:42:46And then we're trying to apply it to these asymptotically flat space times, which are again, the kind of the flat earth or analog of cosmology, but like don't maybe i shouldn't say i should stop saying yeah sounds like the i have the core question here is everything we see in 3d space 4d 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 ends up spending too much time just in equations and not in like real world like if you can describe things the same way, you might as well use whatever definition is useful for some things, right?

1:43:24So 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, like, 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 over-interpret the physicality of that per se, but it probably is my own problem for not trying to take things more literally because we are studying physics after all.

1:43:58So 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-de-sitter. 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 at the same time, 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 that is A is B, right?

1:44:39So 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. But like you're not trying to lose content that way. Certainly. 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 into question which questions are well defined in the book, for example. So celestial holography is your way to prove this and use it to unite Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

1:45:18The two foundational theories currently contradict each other. But again, there's a lot of people where you could probably motivate their research as inspired by it. And the question is like, 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.

1:45:53So 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 like an excellent working memory nominally if the laws of physics are simpler to then figure out what the rules are simpler than the solutions. So I like physics for that. that doesn't necessarily bode 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, because 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.

1:46:22And if you didn't have that bias, maybe you shouldn't 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 short distance physics and long distance physics, because at some point then we know that there's quantum mechanics and we know that the GR is important. So there's some sense in which the actual observations guide you to this still open kind of problem of what theoretical frameworks can consistently limit to both. I think, I mean, And to the extent that like why should the rules of like tennis versus hockey have to be united, right?

1:47:02Like 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. 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 saying that everything in space is potentially projected from a 2D surface? That would be, sorry, I think what I'm saying is if, so like space time, so for me it's like, it depends on, so sometimes you use the word space to mean space time, but it's three plus one dimensions is our world.

1:47:40And then the boundary is one dimension 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 a, we've seen it work in the past. How do we apply it to this regime? And then how do we learn something by seeing how we can't import it? So again, physicists are constantly using mathematical frameworks that they already have and trying to tweak, like apply them to something different and then realize something goes wrong and then try to like learn about that framework by seeing how to modify it to make it work.

1:48:22And 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. This is way over my head. But it's way over everybody's. I mean, that's the 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 and read a bunch of textbooks because I want to be able to like answer good questions or like, you know, know how to tell the flat earthers why they're wrong or like, you're representing science somehow in a funny way.

1:49:00And it's just like, ah, like you need a much better working memory for that. Or, 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 in, 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 a step back and see if there are things where, you know, the resource limitations or just the way that physics is done doesn't need to be that way. Because like now, you know, one researcher doesn't need to hire a whole team of like, data scientists to treat the corpus as a data set and do something with it.

1:49:34Like there's a lot of power to having like funny eye tools. And 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 going to ask you some very, very, very basic questions to try to understand this. We'll see. Are you saying that a planet could be a hologram? Yeah, but in a weird lawyer sense, not like in the way, you know. A star. No, I think what we're saying is like all these objects that you're thinking in the bulk and like there would be some state on the boundary theory that's equivalent to it in these types of holographic setups.

1:50:09I don't want to say that I understand flat space holography to the level where like I'm confident in that, but in ADS-CFT context, their dictionaries are like, yep, like this massive state is this other operator in the CFD type of thing. Potentially everything we see in space could be a hologram. Or are you saying the fabric of space? I think everything, I mean, sort of like basically the whole point is that there's two equivalent theories. So the thing that you have in the bulk, you want to 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 we want to live one-dimensional lower.

1:50:39And for example, maybe one kind of intuitive thing of why it might be nice is that if I have a global symmetry, so I have something that's not related to these long-distance interactions, then typically I need to go and kind of measure the charges of the objects throughout the constant time slice that I'm in. We were 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 at infinity. And so in ADS-CFT, there's a sense in which this boundary theory is evolving in time and you want to find the dynamics of the boundary theory.

1:51:11So there's a dynamics of the boundary conditions of the bulk theory that end up, I guess, telling you it's an equivalent presentation of the bulk theory. So I think the fact that it is holographic is deeper and probably, if it were true, has deeper implications for the right physical quantities to be talking about in the book. But again, I think that's a sense in which, sure, if I felt more confident that the state of the dictionary 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 described as a boundary theory, what does that mean for what's a good thing to talk about in the book?

1:51:44But 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 a Penrose diagram with a sphere and just some light shades, I guess. Probably that and or, yeah, some equations. So I'm basically just a bunch of Penrose diagrams, probably the slides and the talks I would give. I mean, you're visual. I can see it. I think you're visualizing. Yeah, I do. I know. But that's not necessarily very helpful, right? So that's a problem with when you're a grad student, they often say, shut up and compute.

1:52:22And I used to take it as a personal offense. 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 10 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.

1:52:59If you happen to have someone who can make nice figures. Yeah. What do you believe happens when we die? Oh God, I don't know. Um, but yeah, I mean, my mom's very Catholic. I don't know. I think the thing that's like, that's a funny thing. Physics probably tells you like, gives you some sense of which questions you want to ask or not. Um, and I guess the, the right answer from a physical point of view is I don't know. Right. Do you think about it? Luckily, I'm happier, so I guess I don't. But no, I think that the weirdest thing is often I can fight with people I think are friends in a fun way of how to interpret the observer.

1:53:39So yeah, I definitely think that if you – and I mean, to the extent where we don't agree, and I don't know actually who's right on it. of like how much is the fact that like I am a me like somehow I feel like physics can still describe or at least it 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 interact with the world so I I think if I want to say that physics covers everything, that I probably do want to have the observer be part of the system.

1:54:18But I definitely have friends who are definitely not religious or anything like that and still kind of call that observer thing into question. I just don't know because, again, I guess I don't like open systems. I don't know. From the point of view of what are we doing as a theory. But yeah, there's fun questions that are related to this in the sense of who am I versus like and is it the same thing um as yeah 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 dumb that could easily be dumb you know yeah do you and your mom talk about this you said no no because like oh she sorry i'm not good at when either of us are good at debating no um she definitely sees what i do as a variant of religion and i'm like nah but but i also it's very easy because i think we're so close to like end up going too far with questioning the 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 partially because of that but also i mean it gives her like a very sense of like guidance in the family life and things like that she i mean it means so much to her right and so but you don't you don't no i and that's the thing is i personally view like attention with with the dogmatic aspects of that you know the answer.

1:55:37I mean, what I love about physics is that there is a sense in which the, even though, first of all, the level at which I actually understand these things is so silly and whatever, but there's a sense about science that if it's done right and honestly, you can have these revelations. You can learn something about nature. And I think that whether you're religious or not, everybody appreciates 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 the like answers or 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 like 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 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 very dogmatic in practice but it's not supposed to be that and i love that about it and that's the thing that turns me a little bit off of religion sometimes it's just like you know like like can you question things or whatnot but i think this notion of not knowing it 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 of a reason that uh the rules have to be simpler because but but like uh 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 like i seriously my mom and it's just like yeah why aren't there women priests you know

1:57:08right on right on so what do you what does it mean if what 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 bulk space time um but i do think like i care about physics not because i mean you land 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 but like it always frustrated me like how hard it would be to jump between different fields because you like imagine if you have no experiment culling different parts of the research canon it's just going to get harder and harder when there's more alternate attempts to something and i don't know enough about looped point of gravity to tell them why they're wrong.

1:57:49And I'm just basically vouching because I trust one other person's opinion who might have looked at it. And so this is funny thing where the output of other people that are also really smart is hard to internalize and compress. So I like this notion of being able to think about taking a step back and saying, we value physics for this type of reason of finding these deep questions, trying to see that nature seems to 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 this 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 you like you view that venture as 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 computations because that's the thing where the intuition comes from and then just get stuck philosophizing if you're not um if you're in the you're too far away from it man you have one new message

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1:59:50Love can be hard to find. So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go. A second chance at first love. Every Year After, now streaming only on Prime. How would this change the Big Bang? Oh, I think that it's... Bang theory. I think the big bang theory thing would probably tell me that something about my framework has to be tweaked or something like that. I view it more because, again, like, you know, like a cosmological origin side 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 lography.

2:00:25and then the second part of it is again like initial conditions or things like that we're not necessarily always sometimes we're thinking about the equations and not like the like the solutions for the equations of the particular ones that are relevant to the real world so i would say that the it's not going to do for the big bang's more but with the big bang tell me i need to like specify once i understand better if my framework encompasses that or not yeah do you believe we can time travel uh forward at different rates how so oh i mean sorry i think of what I'm saying is like I'm just making the joke that we're all going forward in time but to the extent that even they have this in this interstellar movie if I got the name right um like uh like this kind of twin paradox of like 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 and whatnot um no it's fun because we don't like and that's the kind of fun thing too is like it's there's still cool stuff like but the no-goes are are there and we never you never really get to play with all the fun things I think like I um like it's always this funny thing of like sure you can do this thing but the caveat is it's not physical or whatever like right so this thing about like you can age differently but you can't like go back in time to anything um and it's also because it would be pretty sometimes things are built into assumptions like it would cause a lot of other problems if you can go back and like a closed time like curve you're influencing your own future um but um like yeah I just wish that I think the thing is that But 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.

2:02:00But we're pretty close. We have a pretty fun – we have people who do quantum foundations and a wide variety of just theoretical physics, where sometimes it feels a little bit more like maybe what the stereotype of a physicist or the chalkboard debating existential things is. Let's talk about quantum mechanics versus Einstein, the fight at the edge of reality. Yes. Where do we start? We're framing it as a fight, man. Oh, no, I see. More like, again, this is the type of thing of why do we believe that the laws have to be coming from the same thing, right? I think that that's a pretty bold and fun assumption.

2:02:39And if you can imagine that if somebody thought that 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 like 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 observations. So what I view it as is again as a hep theorist we're making this bet about the structure of these like laws of nature that probably has some consequences that you wouldn't be able to see when you're just in the nitty-grit of it.

2:03:11And that excites me a lot thinking of like okay if I could zoom out and see the structure of the corpus and like like how which theories are actually consistent with each other wouldn't that be fun um and so I think I like that because that feels closer to the kinds of things that excited me about physics as a kid now it's still further away from a lot of like there's some companies now that are trying to do like AI for physics with a thing of like we're gonna like you know like robots are gonna come out of the physics things like I don't I it's probably not physics the way I define it when that's the case but there is cool like you can unlock cool things when like you're changing the way you're doing things and I think that I sorry for getting from this quantum gravity thing it's again it's about trying to condense this corpus you're trying to like 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 is 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 like within string theory it probably will 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 meta layer and think about like what are we actually after as a field and be clear about those goals yeah What is the Perimeter Institute?

2:04:28Oh, I love it. So Perimeter is founded by Michael Lazaridis. He's one of the co-founders of BlackBerry. And he's one of these, like, you know, tech entrepreneur physics fans. So, like, I mean, obviously, like, he kind of ahead of his time with the smartphone type of thing, was an engineer, awesome engineer, and then, like, liked physics, then put a lot of money into a physics institute. I'm not sure. like I mean like you have to be a fun kind of I don't know if it's a brilliant 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 like his money is highly leveraged and like the Canadian government supports it of just for theoretical physics and so it's neat because you can imagine you know if you cared about the product you care 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 like you're pooling like your eight like 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 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 um research by the product or by the discipline and perimeter is an instantiation of that but like with the downside of it being in just one place in waterloo ontario you know where where his company was and things like that so i you you went there instead of around taking a 1.1 million dollar yeah but these these packages are for like research funding and things like that so 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 i'm yeah um but at brown it would be very much like an ivy league professor sounds cool you're teaching a lot but um but again you're just kind of at a university that has one reputation for other repetitions i don't know like that type of vibe of like within the u.s system harvard will get more money than brown would um and then versus at least at perimeter it's kind of a startup vibe but or at least in principle could be and then you try to make it that which is fun but we'll see if they let yeah so what are you doing at the perimeter yeah so i i do my research there so i do my celestial geography research and it's basically like your faculty you don't have to teach you mentor mostly like master students up and then you're but they're more forgiving or like like the the kind of institutional things that you're helping with it so normally it's like instead of being on committees that are just like 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 get to think okay like we're this institute that has like outreach teams that has like uh teaching teams separate like that really value each of those facets of physics um how can you help with that as the researcher and i love that type of question.

2:07:05I 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 on who they hire later and they can meander 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 AI. Do you think AI is going to... What do you think about AI? I'm excited. I'm sorry. Like I used to be more so like, again, I think my opinion, at least I'm happy that my opinion can change.

2:07:38I feel like that's a positive. But like, I was definitely more like jaded by, oh, people oversell things. And like, what if they oversell things too much to the extent where then it hurts the like, it's not like there is value to expertise that I think that sometimes people over correct on things and they don't trust like science and stuff like that. Right. So like, how do you engage with like like hard conversations of like where is this field going or things like that without throwing the baby out with the bath water or like making it hard to to like collaborate so i used to be more like oh no they're gonna say they're gonna do all these things i know that my heroes kind of liked physics so is it gonna be like that like the guys with the funding get access to all the data start making some claims of theories and then like like we don't know enough to be able to tell them why they're wrong, yada, yada.

2:08:29The 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 Press, it's not that I mean, and just work with them and collaborate with them first. It's a funny 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 crockpot papers by physics enthusiasts, And it's less that and more, yeah, more of this funny thing where it's just we're all in the labs for a little bit or not.

2:09:00But, like, how do we really do this right? Instead of it being like, okay, so say one company wants to show that they're doing some research. They can, like, work with a few top researchers. And then the top researchers can say it's interesting. But, like, we want to do cooler shit than we could have done before. And how do you, like, I think that it's funny. It's like you think it wouldn't be that hard to try to just get a bunch of strings first. Just like, let's do what they do for math, write down a bunch of like well enough defined questions and dare someone to like try to automate it. And even we could do, we could have more fun.

2:09:28We could say like, okay, Sam Altman, you're saying ChatGPT8 is going to solve quantum gravity. Let's put some parameters on that and make a bet. And if you like 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. Like I think there's a fun way to do like XPRIZE 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 products, I can see the confidence in it. 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 like that.

2:10:03How do you call them out a little bit when they're overzealous, if that overzealousness 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 like before when I was a perimeter they were supportive of me like trying to use some of my like grant money or startup money to like hire some interns from like local universities to code something up but like I was a shitty coder so I'm not good at managing people at tasks that I don't know what I'm asking them to do and then like I was so bad I couldn't even like basically host this thing locally to show people what it was and like within a few weeks like I could basically redev the same thing with cloud code which is like amazing so like I kind of see that sometimes that hype or that push can drive a product to a level where like now I don't need to hire a dev team.

2:10:52As a physicist, I can start to do, play around with things that I couldn't have done if I didn't know how to code myself. So there's skill sets that are open to me because it has been kind of democratized. So I'm grateful to that. And that's a bit intention with my kind of err about like, we're going to solve physics and then it might like take the funny way. So, well, at least like, thank you. What are you going to do if they solve physics? No, but the thing is, that's the question is like, what does it mean to solve physics? I want to 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 rule out spaces of theories.

2:11:25I 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, 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 within 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 almost like an emergent phenomena of things that people kind of 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 people who don't are expelled, right?

2:12:12So 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 field. Then like, that's a bad thing sometimes. But now I think, you know, there's enough, like, so you have this thing where 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, 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.

2:12:42So 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 in even math, there's more like, I guess, like tests 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 at this thing? In our field, I think that we kind of don't like often to say whose research is more valuable than others. We There's totally a vibe of like judging things. But like that kind of ethos 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.

2:13:19And 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 it i think that there's a lot of value to 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 what is something that you want to dive into that you haven't yet yeah so i mean for me it's always grass is always going around the other side in the sense of like you get you feel siloed and like it's not like like no one's siloing you but yourself in some sense because like i guess for me my my the one thing that i wish i'd it was like well 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 you know And sometimes they don't because they each care about their own thing.

2:14:35And, 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 grad students. They have to do their research. So 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 I understand like how their notation their ideas fit into the things that I've already built in my mind um and so like the type of thing that I'm excited about more so is just you know can I take 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 okay when I'm when I'm asked to explain something publicly, why am I so shit?

2:15:31I 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, the 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?

2:15:58So I'm So I'm super excited just for the fact that I can experiment with that all I want to because before I might need to be better at coding in Python or understand the Inspire API keys. And that's API calls. And then that's 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 what is the information content of what I work on in the human sense, not in the ADS safety sense. Right on. 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 – sorry, but – no, obviously – I'm sorry.

2:16:38I 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 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 is 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 to be fair, everything that we're doing, we're publishing on archive. So it's not like there's IP involved and like various IP policies can affect things.

2:17:06So 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 China funding an experiment, it's like, you know, someone top down could just say we're going to fund it. Hey, it's an experiment. And honestly, maybe it's a good thing if they're spending money on trying to be better at like research for just the like the type of research that's just for the clout and not for like the military tech or something like that. Like make them, let them build cliters.

2:17:40But I do think that the pipeline of transferable technology is much slower than it's actually building a technology. So, I mean, my attitude is I could see that there is – and this is the type of thing, too. I think that, you know, very strong, like, top-down governance can do – and also different relaxations of, like, IP laws. Like, there's a power to that that you can see kind of Europe maybe over-regulating things compared to, 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.

2:18:22I still think that the European Space Agency, one, LISA, or whatever the name is going to be, that the U.S. is a part of will outperform this particular one I think that you're referring to, Tianjin or something. But I think it's great that, like, if they cared about it, they would fund it versus, like, you have a hard time sometimes convincing the American taxpayer that this is worth funding, you know, so. So you think we're ahead? We are ahead, yeah. But I think that, like, again, it's like, what do you want to be ahead on? Like, isn't it great that, like, they spend their money on the things that we don't value doing eventually, you know, type of thing?

2:18:56If 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 good thing. So, again, these could be, like, different people have different, they're different. I mean, I don't know what level you want to consider it as a regime versus a person or like whatnot. But like, there's a faculty member at Harvard or 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 wouldn't get jobs in America.

2:19:24So 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 from 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 U.S. system. We can hire them there. And it sometimes works, but also right now it's still very isolating. So like the U.S. would choose not to do that. Like we don't want to just hire a bunch of more faculty because, you know, but then once we've made that choice, they're optimizing, given that constraint, what can they do?

2:19:54that'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 to, I mean, it's really hard in, like, India and China, I think, to, like, break out of those systems unless you happen to have an advisor or someone you knew who was in the U.S. 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 don't understand you.

2:20:29And so there's pipelines that are very limited and very much go through the U.S. and out. Almost like go through Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and out. And that sucks. But that definitely just says that it's not like we're behind in that sense. Are there any projects going on in China that you're excited about? I mean, I'm less of an experimental 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 U.S. 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.

2:21:10But that's my own bias. It's my own. What about the U.S.? Are there any projects here that you're excited about? I mean, so. That you're 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, in the U.S., there's a lot more money that can go into innovation in a way that when the time scales for research in a company are so comparable to the ones in academia, sometimes that rubs me the wrong way. Like, I think that we're good at – there isn't a problem of putting money into innovation. So the question of, like, whose hands does it go in or how is it control?

2:21:45But it's definitely the exciting things in the States. the states you can move fast and break things in a way that i don't think you can many other places but probably in china ip laws would be such that unless like i mean however we follow 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 because 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 you know do cool things and stuff what do you think about all these ufos and uap sightings and stuff i don't know i wish i wish they were real be cooler but no i don't think i 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 there's been statistically 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 unless and i mean if anything is called tension with religion stuff too like i think there's no reason to think you're special unless there is a reason that you're special um and so modding out by or maybe the prior being like we're probably not special would tell you sure there's some something like an alien somewhere will you ever interact with it you don't know um but i don't believe in like necessarily like i definitely like i wish that we had talked to it would be cool like all right 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 because 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.

2:23:44Like, I mean, just like, I mean, maybe - I'm with you. Maybe your bias, though, is that you've seen the military when it works fucking well, and like that there is some cool shit that I wish I knew about. I've never seen any cool UAPs 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 I think what I'm saying is like - But I don't believe the news. I know. So 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.

2:24:24Like, I mean, like, I don't know how much of it's, like, just Machiavellian or, like, emergent Machiavellian or whatever it would be. The one that really gets me is the Nimitz. Oh, wait, was I saying more? I don't know. 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. Came out of the water. Pilots saw it. People on the ship saw it. Okay. It was a collective. That's super cool. I wish, I mean, I always thought these things are.

2:25:01You haven't heard about this? You're in a different set of internet feeds. We definitely live in different worlds. 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, like who I would have like kind of spent 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 want to ask you about. Yeah. Why, how could it be an optical illusion?

2:25:33I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen the thing to know that answer. But I mean, like, first of all, it's going to be more fun now that you can AI generate stuff, like we're going to have like a real like, fake news at scale accidentally or maliciously. I don't know, like that, that's scary. 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 the water. It sounds weird. But I think what I'm saying is that yeah i guess the one question is like when someone does believe it is that thing they're so confident it's an alien and not like whatever why do they think the alien can do something that we can't do because 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 advances the u.s military or other whatever um right or what are you actually seeing versus what you think you're seeing because you're again extrapolating based on like other things that you're you're used to looking at could it be a hologram?

2:26:30No, no, I'm not going to go there. That'd be fun. 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. Could we project a hologram? I mean, I think what I'm saying, like, I mean, sorry, to the extent, I don't see any reason why couldn't do a little like a little like come some save me what's the what's the quote from the like a princess leia 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 um i don't know where laser shows are at nowadays or exactly what but see the thing is 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 if it's possible um 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 u.s government having like some really cool like men in black tech right i don't know that's kind of appealing or fun like i yeah i just i think that we need to it's a fun thing to think about yeah to lay off the conspiracies and make the the cool stuff like that you can do you know what i mean there's not there's a lot of stuff that's like say my somorphism 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 just say oh like no that you like i was through someone was going around and showing me the different things that you had i forget one of your teammates was showing the um some like a scaled down model of a military type of thing that a private company was doing i don't know what but um but no this i don't know i yeah i think

2:28:41i wish that yeah it'd be fun if like people like if it wasn't just defense funding that got to do the cool shit. I'm with you. I'm with you on that. Well, Sabrina, we're wrapping up the interview. What are you getting into next? I think I'm getting into being a shitty vibe coder and just seeing, 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 a little like do it yourself type of attitude until I need help and then ask for help. Love it. Love it. Well, Sabrina, this was fascinating. Thank you.

2:29:17Thank you so much.

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