(gentle upbeat music) - Hey everyone and welcome back to Conversations at the Perimeter. It's Colin and I'm here with Lauren and on this episode we are thrilled to share our fascinating conversation with Lee Smolin. Lee is a founding faculty member here at Perimeter Institute having joined a little over 20 years ago, when the institute was in its very earliest stages.
- I remember when I first came to Perimeter and it really felt like an honor just to be thinking about theoretical physics in the same building as Lee Smolin. He's a co-founder of Loop Quantum Gravity and he's the author of many popular science books, including "The Trouble with Physics" "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" and "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, "The Search For What Lies Beyond The Quantum". - Lee shared with us his philosophical perspectives on quantum mechanics too.
He argues that quantum mechanics isn't actually a final theory, but is pointing in the direction of some new understanding of nature. And I was actually relieved to hear Lee talk about this because if Lee Smolin struggles to make sense of quantum theory, then maybe there's hope for the rest of us. And Lee sees fundamental physics as intertwined with art and with music and philosophy and other ways that we humans try to make sense of our world and our place in it.
- Lee also opened up to us about his challenges with Parkinson's disease and how these struggles have shaped his thinking in recent years. We typically conduct these conversations in person, but for this one, Lee joined us via Zoom. So, you may notice that it sounds a little bit different than other episodes, but no matter the setting, we know that you're gonna be fascinated with Lee's insights and perspectives. So, let's step inside the Perimeter with Lee Smolin.
Hi Lee, and thank you so much for joining us on Conversations at the Perimeter. We're so excited to talk to you today. I know that you're well known as somebody studying the most fundamental questions in the universe, so, we thought we could start off by asking you about some of the questions that you're trying to answer. - I'm a storyteller and I'm interested in telling the biggest story possible, which means that the story that I want to tell, is the story of what we are.
What we human beings are. Who we are. Why we are and how it makes sense that we're in this universe. In other words, the story I want to tell is the opposite of a religious story where the explanation for every question ultimately goes down to some arbitrary act of faith. And I'm also interested in the opposite of that, which is epitomized by Steve Weinberg's Epigram in his first book that says, "The more we understand about the universe, "the more pointless it may be".
And he didn't know that that was pun on we use of points and general relativity, but what he was saying was that, nothing that we know about nature explains what human beings are, why we're here, what consciousness is, or these things that everybody is really interested in. So, I'm interested in understanding the universe so well, that even such obscure questions like, why there is life in the universe? Have an interesting answer.
That includes making sense of quantum mechanics, because look, let's be real here. Quantum mechanics makes no sense. (Colin laughing) - I was hoping you would say that. - No, it really makes no sense. Most of my best friends, many of them like Carlo Rovelli believe that time is not fundamental.
They believe that reality is not what we think it is and we can get into that on his time and they basically, in a certain sense given up, because they don't have the answers to the questions like, why is the universe hospitable to life? That's what I'm interested in. I'm interested in what is the law of physics? Not just what are the laws, but how do they come to be the laws, rather than other laws?
And I'm interested in the old problem of putting together Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics. And I actually think I did that and then I did that again and then somebody else did it a different way again. The problem with that problem is that, it doesn't seem to be very unique. But anyway, that's another one of those things I'm interested in. - Going back to your answer about telling stories, these are the biggest stories that you're tackling.
What inspires you to chase these most fundamental questions? - You know, I think that any line of questioning that you start on leads back to them. Sooner or later if you're honest about your ignorance, you end up thinking about those question. - I think traditionally there are questions that have been thought outside of the realm of science, or physics. These are questions for philosophers and theologians, or is that a mis-categorization? Is that a misunderstanding of them?
- Start with any question and in three moves we'll get to why is the universe here and why are the laws what they seem to be? Let me rephrase what you said. There is a metaphysic that was introduced by Newton and other people of the time and it's an expression of their religious faith, very much when you look into it, because they were deep in religion and even practices of mysticism and so forth. And speaking particularly of Isaac Newton, but there were others like that.
Kepler was a great mystic and they had a metaphysical fantasy and their metaphysical fantasy went like this. And I want you to guess who I'm quoting as I give the quote from memory.
Supposing that there were laws which could tell exactly where every particle would be any time in the future, if you knew where it was now and how it was traveling and suppose you were really, really, really good at algebra and you could compute all those laws and figure out where everything, every particle who would be in the future, then we would have no agency, no will, our existence, our decisions, our ethical quandaries would be inconsequential, because everything would be predicted
from the motions of particles, which has no meaning on those levels. The amazing thing about this argument is that even if you aren't so smart, just being able to say that there are laws of that kind makes those dreadful consequences apparent. Now who did I quote? - I'll go with René Descartes. - No. - No? - I know I saw it quoted in one of the articles I was reading about you before we began the recording, but I now can't remember who it was by. - Let's save this for the end
of the podcast. - Oh suspense, okay. - Oh, okay. You know, I wanna ask how you can measure when you're making progress on these kinds of questions, because these are such fundamental questions. What are the laws and how did they come to be laws? Have you been able to measure progress in answering these questions throughout your career? - All good questions have contradictory paradoxical answers, so I'm gonna answer it like that.
One is the answer that has always been, which is that we can test our ideas, because we use mathematics to formulate our ideas. We can compute exactly as the quote would tell us to do the future and test that. And we can do that in very restricted cases like walls rolling down in (indistinct) planes, or the motion of a planet like Mars. But when we can do it, we really do it and it really works.
So, that's the most impressive thing because you can have an argument like Newton says, here's my calculation of how the comets move. And Leibniz is very philosophical, says blah blah philosophy blah, philosophy blah philosophy, blah, blah, philosophy. And Newton says, "No, it really works.
"Here's where you'll see the comet if you look in the sky" and some other philosophers go, blah, blah, blah, well the audience prefers Newton, because it really works, even if Newton's metaphysics is religious nonsense and philosophical nonsense. So, that's roughly what happened and that's still the case. If I come along as I do and am doing and claim that I have a deeper theory of microscopic physics that explains quantum mechanics.
You don't have to take all these crazy things and just ignore that they don't make any sense. Ultimately the question is, can you make a prediction that shows where your theory would differ from ordinary quantum mechanics and can we run that test? That's actually always been the answer and that's the real answer. But we in the 21st century are sociologically sophisticated. So, we tell that story a little bit different.
We say there are communities that validates science and how do you become a member of that community? You become a member of that community by learning the technical side, by learning the techniques that those in the community have discovered are very good for finding errors in your work.
Because what a scientific community is, is a group of people who are pledged to each other to be honest and to in good faith and by the way, I didn't realize that when I used that expression, but it comes from Jean Paul Sartre in The Existentialist and so forth apparently. But we know what it means, good faith means you're not trying to play any tricks, or cheat anybody. You report honestly the result of your observations and your calculations and your experiments.
And then the community agrees to be bound by those displays of likelihood. I become a member of the community of theoretical physicists, when I write a PhD thesis, which impresses my community enough that they can trust me, because nobody's gonna go check everybody else's errors. So, I think that this is really how science works. There at these communities, membership in the communities that's highly controlled as as you might say it should be.
And I know that this will make some people unhappy, but I think this is the way it works and the only way it can work and something is judged to be part of the current understanding, or the canon, when it's past many tests of this kind.
It gives a fantastic surprising predictions, but the whole social structure explains to me what I see happening all the time in seminars and.. - Well, I was gonna ask, you mentioned that a lot of your efforts and your work have been trying to make sense of quantum mechanics, trying to figure out what's missing, or what's incomplete. Can you just take us back a little bit for listeners who may not be familiar with the challenge that you're up against.
Why is figuring out quantum mechanics such a a challenge and and unifying with general relativity? Why is this such a focal point for physics? - Because it's embarrassing. It's really embarrassing that the best explanation that we have has so much that's contradictory and against realism. So, let me give some definitions here. I am a realist, I hope you are realist.
If you believe that there is a reality independent of our experience and our knowledge, or belief and that it is possible to gain knowledge about that reality by some methodology like the one that I was describing, that as it's stable enough and concrete enough that you can gain knowledge of it, then we're realist and we sometimes say we're realist about different things. I'm a realist about atoms. That means I don't think that atoms are just a contrivance to do a calculation.
They're really, really are atoms and I'm also a realist about life, about consciousness, about colors and I'm also a realist about electrons and protons and atoms and molecules and quarks and so forth, which means I want a version of the theory that explains and describes all those things, which doesn't depend on my observation, or my belief, or my existence.
Finally, mechanics come as in many formulations, which is interesting enough and many of those formulations not only violate that principle of realism, but they have all sorts of rhetoric about how it's dead and it was killed off by Nietzsche, or the Nazis, or whoever. That now we live in a relational world where, your belief is as good as mine, or anybody else's because we're all just relative man and I'm against that.
But that is a very, that relativistic point of view is very common in the 20th and the 21st century. And many of the people who developed quantum mechanics were anti-realist. They didn't believe that there were any facts about the world which were true, except when they were created by intervention, by human beings doing experiments. - Just to ask one question there, would those people have described themselves as anti-realists at the time? - Oh for sure. - Really?
- Sure, read Niels Bohr. I mean these people had agendas and you have to think this was after the first world war, there was a lot of people who were anti-realist and all kinds of things, because they were so dismayed and disappointed by what had just happened. Niels Bohr was a close student of Schopenhauer and other anti-realist philosophers. - When I hear the term anti-realist, I read it in your book many times, realist versus anti-realist.
The anti-realist strikes me as a shorthand for saying, well it must be wrong. If it's not real then it must be unreal, incorrect. But that's not the exact distinction we're making is it? - My distinction since I'm a realist. But I have, as I said, genuinely many very good friends who are not realists. - So how do they like being called anti-realists? - They love it. It puts them right there where they wanna be.
See, a lot of this is about people positioning themselves in a bigger context than theoretical physics. They wanted to see themselves in the big philosophical fights of the late 20th century, which have to do with modernism and postmodernism, and so there is a consistent story about quantum physics as a great advance of non-realism, or anti-realism.
- You know, I think about the Copenhagen interpretation and the idea of many worlds, some of the things that people, that their minds tend to rebel against, because these things are so strange. But you make it clear in in your books that quantum mechanics is you said it to us earlier, it's strange, it's bizarre. It if it's inherently unusual, or counter intuitive to us, that doesn't make it anti realistic theory? - Yes I think it does.
But there are versions of quantum mechanics that are completely realists, like pilot wave theory of de Broglie which was actually the first version of quantum mechanics that was developed because de Broglie developed his version of quantum mechanics which was completely realist about a year before, if I remember the history right, Heisenberg and Schrödinger developed their versions, which was 1927.
Schrödinger also was a realist and he thought he was developing a realist formulation of quantum mechanic but he turned out he was wrong about his own formulation. Truly his great regret. - Some theories like Heisenberg's and others, seem to rise the top of the pile so to speak. They seem to be more popular, or more widely taught than others. Is that a fluke of history, or is that why is de Broglie pilot wave theory not the theory that everybody's most familiar with?
- First of all, let me say at the start, I think it's changing, thankfully. This is the part of the story I want to tell. There was a generation that invented quantum mechanics and that included Einstein, who started the whole thing off, even though he repudiated the direction it took. Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Max Born and a bunch of other people, who were all about as old as the century. Einstein was older and Bohr was older and Schrödinger it was a bit older.
But typically we're talking sort of 1925, 1926 and Heisenberg was 22, 23 and they were all foundationally oriented. And what I mean by that, is that they thought in terms of these fundamental questions and they had a good education in the history of attempts to answer these questions, which means that they could read philosophy and they had school read philosophy and they were philosophically sophisticated.
And that is a style of physics to reference the great philosophers, or philosophical physicists in your arguments to make the slow, careful, deep, reflective arguments in thought that is the best of that kind of science. And they dominated science in the period that we're talking about, which is sort of 1900 to early 1930s 'cause that you had to think about those questions to push science forward.
Things were so unexpected and surprising that if you didn't have a philosophical orientation you might give up. So, that community was also centered in Europe, it's important to say. It was centered in Paris and Berlin and a little bit in London, not Cambridge, Oxford, a little bit in the northern countries like Copenhagen and the one place that didn't take on that philosophical orientation was really and always was in the United States.
But what happened in World War II, is first of all the countries and the cultures that supported that kind of science where desolated and the center of physics moved very quickly to the United States and there it encountered a very pragmatic scientific and otherwise culture. So, here's an example. Freeman Dyson who was the more I reflect on him, he died a few years ago and he was a little bit a friend and I wish I had been a better friend.
But anyway, Freeman Dyson liked to put it this way, he said "In most generations the old people "of the conservatives and the young people are the rebels".
But in physics in his generation, the old people were a bunch of rebels who were (indistinct) and they were always arguing about philosophy and meaning and meanwhile there were all these great physics problems to solve by taking the theory, however badly understood and just applying it to atoms and molecules and solids and gases and nuclear gravity and particles and so forth. And they were making tremendous progress without worrying about the foundations.
- Is that the met up and calculate generation? Yes, that's the allegedly the set and calculating generation. - For more practical matters, were pressing rather than the philosophical ones? - Yes and Richard Feynman is the great hero of that period. - Do you think it's possible to say, is there an ideal balance between addressing these more philosophical questions, versus more pragmatic ones?
- I think it depends on what has to be done, for what was happening in science in that period, which is sort of 1930 to 1973 or so, 19 and I'll tell you in a minute how I'm dating them. It was what was needed. The people who were arguing about philosophy, were not getting anywhere. What they were doing was not appealing to the younger people. But let me introduce a contrast and raise some questions that I've recently been thinking a lot about.
I've been reading Menards in New York, he's a New Yorker editor and writer and a professor of English at Harvard. He's a very great sort of intellectual historian and he has a book about the history of art and thought during the Cold War and of course the same thing happened in art.
That is the center of art, which in Europe in old Europe was of course Paris and Paris is where you had to go, moved to New York in the 1930s and 1940s, because people were fleeing Nazism and it's, he documents that and it's extraordinary, 500 of the best painters in the world moved from Paris to New York. The Americans took over and learned a great deal from the Europeans and then the Europeans, many of them went back to Europe but the center of art stayed in New York.
Something like that happens in physics too, I think there's a great book to be written. I couldn't write, of those artists and those physicists encountering each other. For example, the great anthropologist Levy Strauss lived in the same building as Claude Shannon and they never met, but I think there were some meets. I think Feynman hung out. Feynman was also a jazz musician, he was also an abstract expressionist painter. I think Einstein hung out in the so-called black side of Princeton.
Freeman certainly did, David Bone did and I think there's a lot of history about how science was taken over by the Americans and the American pragmatic philosophy. Now, I said that you asked me, is that the right thing? Well, it's the right thing in the context in which you have a lot of discoveries experimentally, which fit in to the existing paradigm. What happens is that that paradigm runs out in the middle late 1970s it's in a very interesting question why it runs out.
But basically, it's largest triumph was the standard model of particle physics. It's stopped producing new discoveries, communicating to our friends here at Perimeter, who do particle physics. Excuse me, your theory has been dead since before you were born. Seriously, I mean do they react to it? Well maybe now in 2022, the bravest of them write papers about the crisis in particle physics.
But anybody with eyes to see, understood there was a crisis in the methodology of elementary particle physics already in 1975, 1976. For example, Abraham Price who somewhat later became a friend of mine, we used to have lunch off in the Rockefeller University. And he was a great physicist who was in New York and was a great appreciator of art. For example, he had a Picasso that he had bought in Paris in 1945 with all his family's like savings, which survived the war one Picasso.
Ron was of that earlier culture and we often talked about the transition and of course he wrote some great books about himself and about Einstein and Bohn and so forth. My view has been since I entered physics in the middle 70s, that the current dominant methodology was failing. I don't understand why everybody else doesn't see it. (Indistinct) and he pointed out clearly. - So, how do you think we need to shift our focus, or perspective moving forward from today?
- We all need to take a deep breath and say, we theorists of all kinds, everything we've been working has yet to lead to substantial progress since the 1970s. Can we say it again? We need to get normalized to that, the situation. Therefore what do we need? We need people who are rebels, who are not concerned with their social status within the field of science, or otherwise.
We always need people who are great technically, but we need them to be imaginative, to be independent thinkers, to have their own compass and to have deep curiosity and abundant current. - Lee, throughout your career you've been seen as a rebel yourself, someone who's a little outside of the norms and likes to challenge conventions. Did that come naturally? Do you consider that a professional hallmark of yours? Where does that rebelliousness come from? - But it's not true.
I mean I'm not that kind of person. My stick, or my gain, which is very clear if you look at all my papers, is stealing a really good idea from one domain in theoretical physics and applying it to another, or sometimes another domain of science outside of physics. That's when I'm good at sniffing out congruences and similes and metaphors in the mathematics spheres. Which means that I know the present stuff pretty well.
If you want rebels, real rebels, you want people who are taking much more outlandish risks than I do. I take a very controlled risk. I take the most important idea in particle physics for the last 100 years, which is the close connection between quantum gauge fields and dynamics having of strings and membranes and so forth.
That idea was invented by Russian high energy physicists, Sasha Parley (indistinct) and his friends and I just took that idea and applied it to Quantum Gravity with a few more necessary inputs from friends, like (indistinct) and Carlo Rovelli I don't understand. To me that was a deeply conservative move to me. Now, of course it may not be right, 'cause we don't have experiments, but it's doing pretty well. - On the topic of some of these maybe rebel ideas.
I wanted to go to a question that was sent in from one of our listeners. So, this question comes from Kenneth. - Hello everyone, my name is Kenneth and I am a student of the Perimeter Institute's PSI Start summer program and currently a software engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
My question for Dr. Lee Smolin is, what new potential theories of quantum gravity have not been investigated to their furthest extents yet and you believe are worth the efforts of future mathematicians and physicists hoping to break new grounds in the space? - Mine. No, it's, (people laughing) I need help. I have a great theory about quantum gravity and quantum quantum mechanics and how they fit together and start to advertise it if you let me.
No, the whole point of being a scientist as opposed to an engineer is that you choose your research problems. And the thing that most characterizes a scientist and is most correlated with their success, or not, is their choice of research problems. So, I'm not gonna tell him my choice of research problems. If he wants to offer his services as an engineer to a research program, which would be very welcome, then find somebody doing something you're interested in.
But I'm not gonna tell you what's interesting. - I actually have a follow up question from another listener. This is from Sandeep in India. - Hi Dr. Smolin. My name is Sandeep and I am from India. What charm does physics have in the era of high paying tech and finance jobs, if you think completely in terms of employability? - I don't wanna be one of these old guys who says what is the current generation coming to?
They've got no values and no passion and they don't care about anything except job security. I mean, who are these people? It's a privilege to be paid to work on understanding nature. It's a privilege to be able to paint and further the understanding that art has of the world in the future. It's a privilege to be able to play musical instruments for other people's enjoyment and pleasure and that's it. If you wanna be more highly paid than your neighbor, then do something else.
Please don't get in our way. - You've mentioned several times when referring to Feynman and other scientists that an important factor is the company they keep. Who they're hanging out with, where and when. Can you speak to that in your own life and your own work, how the company you've kept has helped you in your life and work? - Yes. First of all, I've been very, very fortunate in friends in science.
And that's something I didn't know when I went into science inspired by this fairytale about Einstein and transcending blah blah, blah, blah, is that you can make great friends, wonderful friends in science and I have done so and Carlo Rovelli for example, we did great work together. Our best work Carlo likes to say, is the work we did together and we disagree about a lot of things, but we're deeply friends and support each other.
And I feel that way about (indistinct) who with Carlo, we made the quantum gravity more, or less and other people (indistinct) Jacobson, I now am working with some amazing people. In addition to that, I was very fortunate in meeting artists, good artists (indistinct). And this is a strange story, but it really was very influential on me. I now look back and I've written six books and I'm working on the next two.
And let me first say that it's been a great privilege to write those books, because each one offered an opportunity to think carefully through some problems that was bugging me in science. That's what they really, each of them should be understood as. They're not journalistic, they're not popularization, they are meant for curious non-scientists, who have the same questions, but they're not, both science outreach is going for, which I'm frankly very puzzled by.
And as a result of writing these books, I was in a position to meet and again, genuine friends, a number of people who are at the edge of their field in some of the key fundamental fields. You see, I think that everything human beings do is about the future. We've always been developing, we've always been changing and learning. And I think that there are a small number of domains in which we human beings have since the very beginning, been driving into the future.
There have been people who've been trying to understand about nature that we find ourselves in. And there are people who have tried to push our understanding of the spiritual world that we find ourself in and there are people who have been trying to understand our political world, the world of other human beings, and that's it, that's sort of it.
All the creative arts and so forth to me go back to those small numbers and then you'll imagine the early artists, the early scientists, the early mystics sitting around their campfire, whatever they did and talking because it's all about talk. And so, through some almost purely accidental meetings, most of which had to do with that I was writing these books. I met some extraordinary artists.
And they've become very good friends and that greatly, greatly, greatly, enriched my understanding of my life and the world. St. Chris and (indistinct) Beth Turr and many, many others. - Is there a direct relationship there in that your scientific ideas sometimes get a spark from their creative ideas , or is it less tangible than that and more just about speaking to creative people about the world? - It's less tangible than that.
One of the things that I would never do is, do a art and science and how are they related talk. When St Claire and I get together, which isn't as often as I'd like it to be, we still talk about techniques and we talk about ideas. We talk about it as two people who are very curious. - Do you have an artistic side as well? Are you a creator of art, or music?
- No, I mean, I can play around, but I used to play jazz, but I got good enough to play with people who were really, really good and then I understood then I would never, there was no point. - I wanna go back to the topic of your books. As you mentioned, you've written six books. This is a really huge endeavor and I wanna ask if you can say a little bit more on why you decided to start writing these books and what you hope readers will take away from them?
- There was an opportunity to think through what I was very puzzled about, which are the questions of what determines what the laws and physics are. How are the laws of physics chosen? The theory, or the speculation about string theory had expressed the view that there might be one theory that was somehow perfect and was picked out by its mathematical beauty, or something like that. And we had then discovered through the 1980s that that wasn't true.
That there were vast numbers of string theorists. So, I went looking for a way you could understand how the laws were chosen by some process analogous to natural selection and I had found an answer to that. That is several scenarios that worked exactly and did make predictions.
And I was confused about how that could be, how could a theory like natural selection, which is statistical and probabilistic, let's just say is probabilistic can produce a deeper understanding than a more traditional theory, which just has one version of the laws. So, that's why I took on writing that book. I was given the opportunity, never look back. I mean each time I've said that's it. I'm never writing another book again. It is not easy to write, it's not easy to write a good book.
I think I have written six good books. Oh, but some of it is also that I like to express myself, I like to write, because it allowed me to think through the questions that I was struggling with. It wasn't a waste of time for me. - I was gonna ask that, if writing the books for a non-specialist, a curious, non-scientific audience, if that forces you to get a sense of your own work in a different way. If it forces you to look through a different lens? Perhaps not the mathematical lens.
- Yeah, the mathematics is often a scaffold to hold you in a position where you're not actually very stable. So making, explaining why something is a good idea without mathematics is harder than explaining it with mathematics. I mean, everything you do influences everything else. I mean, when you're writing a book that you want to capture people's attention for two or 300 pages, style is very, very important. And we don't teach style in physics class at school.
- How did you develop your own sense of voice, or style? Was it trial and error over time? - It was good teachers including some very good editors. It's a very different than an academic style. In an academic style, you tell them what you're gonna tell it to them, you tell them what you just told them. It's very linear, it's very structured. And we can argue about that whether to what extent that's a good, or a bad thing. But you can't do that in a book for general readers.
That kills a book if you use that structure from your academic mind. - And you've written six books now, each is on a different topic, but are there any common themes that kind of go through all of your books? - Yes, they're all interested in time. They're all interested in the consequences for the future of how we understand the world now.
And I mean in some sense there, the one research program laid out over many pages, but in the last book "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" I explicitly lay out that research program and that is my research program and it has always been, but somehow it stayed in the background. The other thing is the more personal feelings about nature and society and how the future is going.
Several of the books have epilogues and what I was going to do, at some time, I'd like to just do something where I read all the epilogues in order. I won't read the epilogue of the first one, but there's a quote from St Chris (indistinct) which opens it and I can do that from memory. And this is in response to a question of what is postmodernism?
And he said, "If the purpose of modernism "was to burn down the old classic house, "which we've gotten quite bored with, "then the achievement of postmodernism "has been just to play around with "the little char pieces that are left". Which is a pretty pure thing to be doing given that winter is coming. And that's typical. That's not me. That's typical St Clair, but we're after the same thing. - What would you say you're after?
- I'm after having a scientific understanding of nature, which gives us human beings a place in nature where we can feel at home. - Is there a a sense of consolation that you are looking for where perhaps religions, or moralities or all short, are you looking for a sense of meaning behind the science? - Maybe. I want better than consolation. Look, what's tragic about life, which is of course death and pain and illness is where it's really not consolable, it's inconsolable.
But living a happy life, a good life, in my very minor view because I'm not very wise, is that there's no answer to that. The only good thing about them is that more for most of us, the price we pay for a wonderful life comes at the end. I don't think there's a consolation. There I'm very influenced by Roberto Mangabeira Unger who I wrote the fourth book with. - You mentioned earlier that you're working on one, or two more books and you said you wouldn't talk about them unless we asked you to.
So, can I ask you to tell us what you're working on? - Sure. One is about what we've learned, or what I've learned and it will be a short book and it might even be a part of the other book. When you ask me what I'm interested in, it's not a very interesting story. But I dropped out of high school and I was working in the San Fernando Valley in LA and as an apprentice sheet metal guy. And I used to take my lunches and rather than hang out with the other guys who I didn't really understand.
And it was all guys by the way. I would take a notebook and write thoughts about physics and science. And one day I wrote down in that notebook what I'm interested in, is first of all what the universe is and second, what life is in the context of the first answer. And third, what a human being is, in the context of the first two answer. And so I thought it would be nice to write it at least a section of the book that sums up what I've learned during my life in science.
The other book is about Parkinson's disease, which I happen to have. And I've been reflecting on the implications of a new treatment, which involves putting a chip basically in your head and becoming what the feminist science fiction writers call a Cyborg. That is somebody whose brain is half, or in any right part machine and part human. - Can you tell us a bit about that experience so far with Parkinson's? Has this affected how you go about your life?
- I don't recommend it, if you wanna recreational disease. - Stay away? - It's like you have a high school friend who has become an alcoholic and he shows up every few months, thrown out by his girlfriend and stays on your couch a few nights and pulls himself together. And then time goes on and you wake up one morning and you are on the couch. At first it's relatively minor, it progresses if you're lucky. And I am in that case slowly. I'm still more inconvenienced than anything else by it.
But it grows in your life. That's not the story I want to tell because, many, many people suffer of course. Everybody, at least in their family and I have nothing to say about that. But I do have maybe some reflections that I think we ought to think about, becoming cyborgs, because I suspect it's gonna become more common. - Are you feeling trepidation about this, or are you optimistic? Do you know what to think?
- Well, I don't know what to think of the experience, but it's not a difficult decision to make. I mean all you have to do is meet somebody who's had the implants, hang out with them for a while and they'll show you what they're like with them turned off. 'Cause everybody has an off button. They hold it over their chip that controls the networks in the brain and they click off and then you see what they would be like without the implant and it's not a difficult (indistinct).
- And this book that you're thinking of writing about your experience with Parkinson's, do you think it would tie in with some of the themes that came up in other books you have written? Would there be still some connective tissue there? - Maybe. Let's see. Certainly it convinces me happiness in life is more about character than anything else and success.
And so, the most important scientist who make the most important influences and changes and progress in science are not doing that because they're smarter than other people, or better situated, or anything like that. They're more curious and they're more honest. - Well, thank you so much Lee. This has been really a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you. - Thank you. Thank you very much. This is fun. - Thanks so much Lee. (upbeat music) - Thanks for stepping inside The Perimeter.
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