Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio)

an extra special guest. His name is Professor Brian Green. He is a director of theoretical physics at Columbia University and is also a super string theorist whose contributions to the worlds of physics and cosmology are right up there with with some of the greats. If you are at all interested in things like how the universe formed, what's going to happen to it eventually, what actually makes Earth unique and special? How long is a galaxy going to

be in existence? When is the universe gonna die? Will the universe die? This is really a fascinating conversation. I love this sort of stuff and it was just an absolute pleasure speaking with someone who is such a tremendous expert in the field, who can talk with great understanding and has the ability to communicate very very complex ideas in a way that is readily understandable by just about anybody.

I found this utterly entrancing. Uh. For those of you who are physics wanks or cosmology and space wonks like I am, this podcast is for you. I have to add that this week is New York City's Festival of Science, which Professor Green created and helps co produce each year. It's the tenth anniversary of this. So for those of you who have kids who are interested in science, or kids you wanna make interested in science and so were in the New York tri state area, I strongly suggest

you bring them with no further ado. My conversation with Columbia University Professor Brian Green. My special guest today is Brian Green. He is professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, best known for his groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. The public knows him through his books, most notably The Elegant Universe, Fabric of the Cosmos, and Hidden Reality. Collectively,

they have sold over two million copies. He also hosted a Nova mini series which won both Peabody and Emmy awards, and that mini series was based on his book. He is a director of Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Physics. Professor Brian Green. Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you very much. So I'm a little bit of a physics nerd, and

I've been really looking forward to having this conversation. And I want to start with a quote of yours, which is the universe is rich and exciting, and there's stuff that can knock you over every day if you're privy to it. Tell us about that. Well, I think that's absolutely case. You know, we love going to say the movies, right, to see some Hollywood film that usually comes out of some screenwriter's imagination. But oftentimes I sit and watch those

things and I do enjoy them. But when I step out of the theater, I recognize that the true way the world is put together, quantum mechanics, relativity, all of that stuff is so much more creative and so much more mind blowing than anything that usually we make up. So I always lament the fact that there's so many people that just don't realize that. So let's talk a

little bit about quantum mechanics and general relativity. For a long time, the physics descriptors of the very large and the very small seem to be I don't know if incompatible is the right word, but but certainly inconsistent with one perspective of seeing the universe. What what was the cause of that underlying tension? Well, you're absolutely right. So there are these two major discoveries that happened in the

twentieth century. One, as you mentioned, is general relativity. It's relevant really for the big stuff in the universe, stars, galaxies, the whole universe. It's a theory of gravity, and gravity matters when things are big. The other main development is quantum physics, and that does a fantastic job at describing the universe in the other end of the spectrum, the small stuff, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and each of these two theories they are found in a completely different ideas.

They approached the universe in completely different ways. And when you try to take the equations of these two descriptions and meld them together into one unified hole, which is what Albert Einstein wanted to do, really you find that the equations don't work together. They're these ferocious antagonists every time we do a calculation, get a nonsensical result. And for decades we've known that that's a real problem, a

real puzzle. So let's talk a little bit about Albert Einstar and he really spent the latter part of his professional life trying to find that grand unified theory was heat early? Did the technological tools simply not exist to give him the building blocks to figure it out? Well. Some would even say that we're still too early today.

You know, we're struggling to do exactly what Einstein was trying to do century later, a century later, and I I would say we have made great progress, but we still don't know if any of the ideas that we have come up with are actually correct on paper. They're interesting on paper, they seem to work, but we've been unable to test any of these theories as yet because our technology is so far behind where our theoretical developments

have taken us. So was Einstein too early? He was deaf only earlier than we and we may be too early ourselves. So it could still be the case that the unified theory maybe a century off. I don't know, so, so let's talk a little bit about Newtonian physics. When Isaac Newton wrote out his Laws of the Movement of the heavenly Bodies, which are still very accurate to this day, he envisioned a universe where time and space was rigid.

And then we look fast forward to Einstein and he has a much more flexible and dynamic description of time and space. What is the next evolution gonna look like? I wish I could tell you. If I knew the answer, I'd be in my office right now writing it up into some spectacular PAPERM can make some guesses. I think the next big discovery is going to change our understanding of what space is and what time is again the way Einstein changed our understanding from Newton. Well, yeah, that's right.

So what Einstein really did exactly as you describe it. He added newfound flexibility to space and time. Newton space and times just an arena stage. They don't participate in the unfolding of the cosmos. They're just there. I says, no, no, no, they're not just there. They do something. They warp and they curve in the service of communicating the force of gravity, spectacular, new idea, radical, But none of those questions, none of those developments give us insight into what space is made

of or what time is made of. Could it be the space and time are made of smaller, more fundamental entities, just like any piece of matter. We know it's made of molecules, made of atoms, made of sub atomic particles. That's been the progression over the course of many decades

to figure that story out. Maybe space and time themselves have fundamental constituents, and if we could identify what they are and how they behave and find the mathematical equations to describe them, that to me would be the next revolution. So for a long time, the smallest um article we understood was the molecule, and then it became the atom,

and then protons, neutrons, quarkscluons, etcetera. Is it a never ending progression to ever smaller components or can we eventually find hey, that's as small as it gets, that's the fundamental building block of the entire universe and everything in it. So nobody knows. It's a real good question. It's a real tough question because it's always difficult to rule out the existence of something beyond the reach of your equations

or beyond the reach of your technology. But personally, my own feeling, based on the progression of physics is I think that there is gonna come an end. There's gonna come a point where we absolutely identify the fundamental ingredients, and we absolutely identify the fundamental forces, and we identify the equations that describe them. I believe that that chapter will come to an end. There was another department, or

I don't know if this is the same department. The Institute for String Cosmology and astro Particle Physics is a separate research facility. Yeah, that's a subset of the Center of Theoretical Physics that focuses more on the developments of string theory and its applications to cosmology. So, so let's talk a little bit about that. You're best known for

your work on string theory. My understanding of string theory, uh, lay person as it may be is atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, electrons, which are broken down to quarks, which are broken down to gluons and muons and so on and so forth. If you take that down to its smallest constituent, you end up at a different level where the smallest component are vibrating loops of energy, and how they vibrate really determines what their characteristics is. That

is that a fair description is a fair description. The one thing I would immediately underscore is everything that you said prior to mentioning strings is physics that we understand and has been tested and we're certain about. When you then take the next leap to string theory, you're going into domain that is not yet tested. So that really is speculation that comes out of decades of mathematics that has given us some confidence that these ideas may be correct,

but they have not yet been tested. So so that's a fascinating statement. One of the things that I've read other physicists say is that, well, we haven't proven string theory, but the math is so nearly perfect that there has to be something to it. It's not merely a coincidence. Explain that, well, I would say, that's a nutty thing to say, yeah, because there's a lot of beautiful math in the world, and some of it's relevant to reality and some of it's not, And the only way you

figure it out is by having observations and experiments. You need to connect to reality. The flip side, there are other folks who say this theory has been around for thirty years. I mean, I've been working on this since four Okay, so this theory has been around for more than thirty years. You still haven't tested it, and therefore it's time to move on. It's no longer doing science.

That's also a nutty perspective because when you're talking about the universe at such a deep level of existence, way smaller than those little particles that you were describing the corks, they're huge compared to the strings, and yet they're tiny by everyday standards. We're talking about hundreds of millions of times smaller than those particles. When you're talking about the universe and such extreme realms, it's gonna take a while to test it. So you don't just give up because

the technology hasn't caught up with you. You keep working and you try to extract some more clever way that you might test these ideas, perhaps using technology we have today or in the next few years. So one of the lines um one of the criticisms I've read about string theory is if we can't test this, is this really a science or is it a philosophy. That's right, So that that's the going line among the detractors of

that sort. And it would be philosophy. If it were fundamentally impossible to ever these ideas, then you're not really doing science. But that's not the case at all, I and are my colleague. We can write down predictions that in principle you could test if you had a big enough accelerator, and and didn't. We see Einstein making certain predictions about things that would happen that only recently were

proven by the gravitational wave detective and things life. A hundred years ago he made a prediction of these ripples in the fabric of space gravitation waves. And you're right, it took a hundred years, almost to the day to to test that prediction. Now what mitigates that somewhat is there's an earlier prediction that was confirmed in just four years.

So in nineteen nine, observations of the distant stars during a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's prediction that light should be bent as it goes by the surface of the Sun. So the detractors will say, come on, Einstein's ideas respectacular and deep, and it only took four years to confirm them. You guys have been going for thirty years and you

haven't got anything yet. And what I'd say is we've jumped so far beyond technology, so far beyond what we can see, and that makes it much more difficult to test these ideas. Well. He also had the advantage of working with gravity, and there's all sorts of things that you can look at to perform mathematical tests and experiment. That's the point when we're talking about sub sub sub atomic particles really where there's only so much we can do these days. That's exactly right. So that my favorite

thing about UM. One of the things that prove Einsteini in um relativity is that when we have various satellites and space that are used for things like GPS, we have to adjust because they're going so much faster than we are and they experienced time relatively compared to us, that there's a small mathematical adjustment that has to be made so your GPS is accurates, right, And if you didn't do that, both for the motion of the satellites

but also for the fact they experienced from gravitational field that we do, they're higher up there, further from the Earth center, at the gravity there is weaker. Those two effects change the rate at which clocks tick off time in that satellite, and that's an objective clock, not not a subjective human thing. If you didn't take into account, GPS would be inaccurate within a day. In fact, this is a piece of physics that you may have seen

in the film Interstellar. I haven't seen it yet, but it's This is not a spoiler, but in that film, the protagonist goes near a black hole and time elapses more slowly near a black hole for exactly because of gravity. And then when they come back away from the black hole, they have an aged much at all, but their colleague on the mothership that was far away has aged decades. So there you see a dramatic version of what the

GPS needs to account for. So when you watch a science fiction film like that, do you walk out shaking your head and saying, oh, they got the science wrong? Or is Hollywood doing a better job being a little more accurate these days? I think they're They're pretty accurate in to some ext end that that film itself has moments where I didn't quite know what science they had

in mind. But my view is if I go to a film and they don't break their own rules, if they're self consistent, even if they differ from the rules of reality as we understand, that's fine with me. I just want a good story and not something where they get lazy. They get lazy at the end and do something. Come on, you know that sort of thing. So let let me get a little technical with you. You are credited with code discovering mirror symmetry and spatial topology change.

What is that, well, spatial topology change is the easier one to describe. One of the lessons from Einstein that you indicated already is that space is flexible. Newton didn't think that, which means not only can space bend and warmp it can stretch. And that's what we mean by

the expanding universe. But in Einstein's meaning that it's not just that the galaxies are separating, it's that the fabric of space and they're on is moving as exactly as if they're kind of stitched into the fabric of space and like expanding, like it's all stretching. Now, in Einstein's theory generalativity, space can stretch, but it cannot rip, the

spandex or the likera can't tear. But we found in string theory, when you go beyond Einstein to include quantum effects, the fabrica space can rip, it can tear, and that way can then repair itself and fundamentally change its shape, which we call a change of topology. That's the technical name, but it's just a change of shape that Einstein would not have thought possible. That string theory, if it's correct,

allows the universe to undergo. He is also the founder of the World Science Festival, which is about to launch its tenth edition in New York City later this year

May thirty, June four. Tell us about the festival. Yeah, so this is an event that I co founded with Tracy Day, journalist broadcast journalists and about you know, eleven twelve years ago, we looked at the state of the world and said, look, we celebrate fashion, books, theater, literature, right, why don't we celebrate big public celebrations of science, which is a vital part of how the world is put together and how we're gonna live going forward into the future.

So back in two thousand and eight, we founded this first edition of the World Science Festival. Here in New York City. Over a hundred and twenty two thousand people came out to the five days of public programming, so it was clear that there was this pent up desire to go someplace and experience cutting out science in a way that you could get it, that you wouldn't find it, uh intimidating, you wouldn't have to study, you would just

be drawn along by these wonderful ideas. And we've been doing it ever since, creating novel experience of a science for the general public. You can be a novice, you can be an expert, you can be young, you can be old. There's something for everybody in the festival. What do you hope the impact is going to be long term? Well, the goal really, as articulated in our mission statement, is we want people to feel that science has to be part of their lives. That it's not something that can

be left to the scientists. It's not something that you can leave to the science classroom. Science is not a subject. It really is a perspective. It's a way of life. It's a way of engaging in the world and being able to figure out what's truth, what's not truth, what's fact, what's not fact and be able to figure out how we should take that information, make policy, and in that

way sculpt the future. What do you make of the rise of anti science, be it the vaxers who believe that basic vaccines cause autism, or the people who, despite overwhelming evidence, either don't believe global warming is real or don't believe mankind has a hand in its creation. What

what's the underlying basis? Well, I think there's a general distrust of so called experts, a general distrust of of the intelligencia, the folks that actually spend their lives thinking about deep problems, how they affect the world and how we're going to solve them. Is a deep distrust there, and it's up to us, and I hope part of the festival will do that, as well as other events around the world, to break down the barrier where everybody

recognizes that they can get the ideas. It's not this opaque collection of weird facts and theories that you'll never be able to understand. You can get it, and when you get it, it's thrilling and allows you to be part of the process. And when you're part of the process, you're less distrustful because you understand what's going on. What we need to do to get kids more interested in math and science. Well, that's a big, big question. And of course the classroom is where most kids encounter these

ideas and looked, are many good teachers. So when I say that somehow we need to improve the classroom out talking about every teacher. But goodness, gracious, I can't tell you the number of kids I've spoken to who think science is simply about memorizing some facts and spitting them

back on an exam. And that's tragic. Science is a journey of discovery that we have been on for thousands of years and the things that we've figured out, from insight into the origin of the universe, to the existence of black holes, to the weirdness of time and relativity, the strange features of quantum mechanics. When you teach this stuff to a kid and they can get the basic ideas, I've seen their eyes wide open, light up and say wow, that science and say, yeah, that's what science is about.

You know, you and I are only a year or two a part in age, and we're of the generation where we use technology. But we've had to learn how to use computers, internet software, programming, etcetera. The generation of kids coming up, it's second nature's utensil. You give a six month old an iPad and they've mastered it in a couple of hours. What is that gonna do for

technology and science going forward? Does that give you hope that, oh, these kids really appreciate technology and therefore sciences is right there. I wish I could say yes, not necessarily at all, because so many folks, so many kids are uses technology. They don't care one whit about where it came from or how it works. They just want to get on

to whatever, to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. I see my kids using these devices, and it makes my heart hurt because because they could be using that time to think about deep questions, and yet they're frittering away so much time in these devices. However, we can use these devices as an impetus to show kids, if we do it right, how there is quantum physics inside of yourself on yourself and wouldn't work without being able to direct

the motion of electrons through tiny microscopic integrated circuits. That's interesting and exciting if presented in the right way. GPS, like we were talking about, your phone has a GPS capacity to it. It's got general relativity and something right into it. I see the new Apple tagline now with general built into it, will charge extra for that. Let's talk a little bit about the creation of the universe.

I'm somewhat tickled by of the theory that nothingness is inherently unstable and the universe just vomits into existence because eventually nothingness just can't persist. Is that still the best explanation we have for where the universe came from? It's it's certainly one of the explanations, and it has not really been fully worked out into a form that there's a consensus in the community that we've got it by

any means. But it is fascinating to think, as you're saying, because the deep question is why is there something rather than nothing? That's what liveness asks right centuries ago, and it's this deep question right when we say nothing, we mean the absence of everything, even space and time. And as you're saying, one of the ideas is, well, there may have been an era when there truly was a nothing with a capital end. But it may be that

that nothingness can't persist forever. It may be that Nothingness tends to disintegrate, and when it disintegrates, nothing turns into something and an anti something, and we inhabit to something, and that's where the something of the universe comes from. So when I was younger, the theory was that there was a big bang and that would eventually slow down and reverse and we'd have a big crunch and that

would go on forever. And that seems to have based on a century ago observations of not only galaxies moving away from each other, but doing so at an accelerated pace. They're they're moving away faster and faster um. So that kind of gets rid of the big crunch, and it

leads to the question of entropy and heat death. Are we're looking at a universe that's going to expand forever until it's so far away that there are no stars left in the sky and we're essentially looking at nothingness, which again maybe begets that unstable uh cycle all over again. It certainly looks that way based on the data today. In fact, I'm writing a book on this very subject, analyzing in great detail what the far future of the universe will be like. And the data, if you take

it seriously, does seem to suggest that you're right. The expansion of the units will continue on. In fact, it will expand ever more quickly over time, and the structures in the universe like stars and galaxies will ultimately fall apart, disintegrate, gets sucked up into black holes, which themselves can disintegrate into particles that ultimately a just wafting through and ever colder and ever quieter cosmos. It kind of feels a

little bleak when you describe it that way. But that how many trillions of years in the future we talk well about a trillion years from now. Distant galaxies will rush away so far that we can't see them. Our local galaxies will be able to see, but deep space will go dark. And in terms of the evaporation of black holes, we're talking on the order of ten to

the one hundred years, right, So that's that's long. That's ten followed that that yes, that's a google, that's a google of of years, and um, it's the time Skille. That's so far beyond anything that we've experienced. You know, we're a ten billion, thirteen billions, so you know, ten to the ten years. So we're talking in the exponent going from tent to the tent tent to the hundred.

So these are fantastically large time scales, but amazingly we can use our observations and our equations to make some predictions about what things will be like even on those time skills. So let's talk about something a little less bleak. Let's talk about a multiverse where if our universe might be expanding to cold, dark nothingness, there are an infinite number of other universes ready to either pop into existence or existing in different dimensions. How realistic is that and

what a strength theory tell us about that? Well, again, I would underscore that we're now in the realm of interesting mathematical speculation. But there are many people who take that very idea seriously, because as we've tried to understand the Big Bang with ever greater precision, we found that the fuel, if you will, that drove the Big Bang is so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use all of that fuel up. Some of it drove our Big Bang,

but someone's left over. What does that leftover fuel do? Drives another Big Bang? And even that big bang doesn't exhaust all the fuel some's left over, so you get bang after bang after bang, universe after universe after universe, at least that's what the equation seemed to suggest. So you're right, our universe could be heading toward this bleak future where everything is cold and spread out. But in those other universes there may be life forms and their

future may be different from ours. So let's talk a little bit about what string theory and your work on it says about this in I don't remember which book it was, maybe it was probably Hidden Reality Is, my guests. I wanted to reference strings as they move through space create a membrane in their trail, and there are times where those membranes cross, and there's a significant reaction to that. Yes, so there's a way of thinking about parallel universes which

string theory gives a particular twist to. It's possible within string theory that there are extended objects, not just one dimensional filaments like strings. There could be two dimensional membranes or three dimensional membranes. We could be living on one

of those membranes. So I like to think of it as imagine the totality of reality is like a big cosmic loaf of bread, where every slice of bread is like one universe everything we know is happening on one piece of bread, But there are other pieces of bread, and strength there other membranes which would be other universes. That's another way in which reality could be much bigger than our frail senses would lead us to think. So let's talk a little bit about dark matter and dark energy.

On the one hand, we look at a basic black hole in the center of a galaxy, and the visible mass that we can detect is much much less than what gravity suggests would be sufficient to hold uh, that galaxy together? Am I getting the numbers right? About of

the mass is not visible as dark matter? Yeah. So when you even look at the universe as a whole and you say how much of the stuff that makes up the universe is the stuff that gives off light, the stuff that we know about, the protons and neutrons, the electrons, those things, and it's about four or five that little Yeah, So you've got about twenty five or so percent of the universe in something called dark matter h And then you've got the rest of it SI

sevent whatever in something called dark energy. Again, it's an energy that suffuses space. We believe it's everywhere and every nook and cranny of space. But because it does not give off light, we don't see it doesn't give does it give off some energy? It well, it it contains energy, and because of that, it exerts a gravitational force. In fact,

it exerts an anti gravitational force. Pushes every think apart, and we believe that's why the universe is speeding up in its expansion, that outward push from the dark energy filling space. So let's talk about another question that I'm fascinated by. I'm aware that gravity is the weakest of the major forces, and that the strong nuclear force what holds protons and neutrons together, is the strongest force. I like the way you demonstrate that by leaping off a building.

The center of the Earth pulls you towards it, but just plain old concrete stops you. And therefore concrete is stronger than gravity. But when we look at a black hole, we have a mass the size of a giant sun that's collapsed to a relatively tiny space, and it seems like if you have enough gravity, you can overcome that strong force and crunch all those atoms down to a tiny fraction of their size. Yes, when we say, gravity is much weaker than the other forces, like the nuclear forces.

We want to do an apples to Apple's comparison. So if you say, take just two particles and calculate how this strong force may pull them together versus a gravitational force, big difference. Strong nuclear force wins. But you're right, you put enough stuff together, then cumulatively, the gravity that many, many, many particles exert can be stronger than the other forces acting between particles. So so gravity is able to crush

particles together, causing them to fuse together. For instance, that's what happens in the Sun. You've got nuclear fusion because gravity is squeezing everything together and hydrogen melds into helium, and helium keeps on going. So yeah, up until we get iron, and then that's pretty much right. When you get to iron, it's sort of the end of the line the most tightly abound atomic species, and from then on end the next this next stop is neutron stars

and black holes. Do you pay much attention to things like the rare Earth thesis, which I find, again it's a little off your fields of expertise, but the basic concept is to get a planet that's stable enough in a solar system for not just life, which may be surprisingly common, but advanced technological life not to have been disrupted continually by what a hostile place the galaxy can be. Uh, that's kind of a fascinating idea. Oh totally. You know,

people have asked the question are we alone? Ever since every time we could ask questions, and um, you know, there's some who say, look, life appeared on planet Earth as quickly as it possibly could, which suggests to them that life is just raring to go everywhere in the universe where conditions are ripe. On the other hand, to get intelligent life that can actually build spacecraft and radio telescopes,

you need a lot of coincidences, right. You gotta make sure that your planet is protected from masteroids that are slamming in. You gotta let me take our Planet's a great example. If if this asteroid hadn't slammed in and wiped out the dinosaurs sixty five million years, we wouldn't be the dominant folks walking around. It would still be the dinosaurs. Now, who knows, maybe by now they would have built spacecraft and telescopes and may not have been hard.

That's right. So so there you go, and we're we're even in a part of our own galaxy that doesn't have too much radiation. We're not too close to the middle, we're not too far out. It's really a series of Goldilocks events and then the other, which means it might be very rare. Right, And although rare still can mean there are hundreds of thousands in any game, it depends. It depends how rare. That's the key question, because if the rare, if the probability is sufficiently small, then we

could be the unique one. We have been speaking with Professor Brian Green of Columbia University. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out our podcast extras, where we keep the tape rolling and continue to talk about all things cosmological. Be sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. I'm Barry rid Holts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. What could your

future hold? More than you think? Because at Merrill Lynch, we work with you to create a strategy built around your priorities. Visit mL dot com and learn more about Merrill Lynch, an affiliated bank of America. Mery Lynch makes available products and services offered by Merrill Lynch. Pierce Federan Smith, Incorporated, a registered broker dealer. Remember s I PC. Welcome to

the podcast, Professor Green. Thank you. I don't know what to call you, Professor greene Brian Professor, Professor Green seems more appropriate. Thank you so much for doing this and being so generous with your time. I was saying earlier, I have the hardcover of uh, The Elegant Universe somewhere, but we moved. It's in boxes and I picked up some of the paperbacks to to remind me of what I read a while ago. And really, The Elegant Universe

is so readable. I mean I have I'm a little bit of a physics geek, but I don't have any significant background, and I found it completely accessible and very interesting read for something that is talking about really sophisticated, complex ideas that's not easy to communicate. Yeah, no, thank you.

You know. The the challenge, of course, is in building bridges between things that the typical person who was interested in science but not an expert, is familiar with from everyday life, and building a bridge from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and uh, it's a fascinating journey for me as a writer and a physicist to try to figure out ways of explaining these ideas, and when it works,

you know, it's gratifying. I can imagine them. There are some questions I skipped over that I have to get to before we get to our our standard questions, and one of them has to do with um gravitrons, gravitons, gravitrons. Gravitron I think is the exercise equipment, chin ups, grab patons is the party. So we haven't have we discovered

the particle or is it just theoretical? Just theoretical. It's not surprising that we haven't discovered it because, as we were discussing in the main interview, gravity is the weakest of nature's forces. The graviton is the smallest bundle, the smallest particle of the weakest force, which makes it enormously

challenging to try to detect these particles. But most of us are pretty convinced, based on our understanding of the other particles that communicate the other forces of nature, that gravitons are out there, even if we can't actually capture them like photons, photons is a great example. That's a particle that transmits the electromagnetic force. It's the little pack at the little bundle of that force. And by analogy, the graviton would be the little quanta, the little particle

transmitting the gravitational force. So I love the thought experiment showing the difference between Newtonian physics and nine steining in physics, which is all the planets are are revolving around, rotating, revolving around the Sun. If the Sun were to magically disappear, would it be instantaneous for the planets to be flung out in the straight line that they were previously moving without the Sun holding them in, or would there be a delay in the planet physically recognizing that there's no

more gravity and and moving on. The Einsteinian conclusion is it would take about as long as a beam of light to reach the planet. So you would for what is it eight and a half or nine minutes with eight would continue rotating around, uh, the Sun despite its being there. Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a beautiful idea. Um. You know, Newton's equations that we all learned in high school simply tell us that one object pulls on another, depending on how far apart they are on their masses.

There's no notion of time in that equation, which means if you change the mass of one or other of these bodies, you change the force instantaneously. And that's right. So so the formula, if you don't mind me getting technical here is you know, ethical g M one M

two over our square. That's what we all learned. But if M one, the massive one of those bodies, goes to zero, then F goes to zero immediately, which in the picture you describe, would suggest that if some alien were to come in and somehow grab hold of the Sun and rip it out so it's simply gone, then Earth and all the planet should instantaneously fly out of

their orbits. Einstein looked at that and said, I'll come on, that can't possibly be because in nineteen o five he discovered that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and that would be an instantaneous conveyance of information. Perfect. Yeah, an influence that goes from across the whole Solar system and no time at all. So so what about entangled particles and and spooky action at a distance. Is that still stuck with the speed of light as its limitation.

That's a subtle question, and we believe the answer to that question is yes. It's still stuck with it because when you have two distant particles that are linked through quantum entanglement, it is in fact the case that what you do to one particle seems to instantaneously have some kind of quantum effect on the other. However, no information can ever be transmitted through this effect from the first

particle to the second particle. So it kind of gets by on the small print if you will, that that that there's no information going from one particle together fast in the speed of light, even though there's a quantum correlation. Their behaviors are acting in tandem even though they're far apart. So this goes back to having a better lawyer than God. That's right, And I've always hated the small prints explanation. But let me just say that changes instantly. Yeah, isn't

something happening faster than the speed of line. I completely empathize with the with the perspective, and in fact, in one of my books, I think it's the fabric of the cosmos. I described the party line, which is the one I just told you with the small print no information travels, and then the next page and say, hey, but look something something here that happens, and it's best

than the speech, right. And I think part of the reason why we can't give the full answer today that will make you satisfied is that we don't fully understand quantum mechanics. There is a real puzzle in quantum physics. It's called the quantum measurement problem, which is when we experimenters measure a quantum particle, our measurement seems to affect it, but we can't really articulate or describe how that effect is communicated or what actually happens. Now you might say,

well that's pretty important. I mean, how do you know anything about quantum mechanics if you don't understand how to measure something? Well, amazingly, this whole in our understanding, this gap does not prevent us from making predictions, from being able to harness quantum mechanics to build cell phones and personal computers, But theoretically there is a gap in our understanding.

And I think that when we fill that gap. You have me on the show and you ask me that question again about entanglement, and I'm going to be able to give you a full answer. So growing up to me, that was always we can measure the location or the spin or the location of the speed, but not both at once. Is that essentially that's still part of our understanding for sure, that there are complementary qualities of a

particle that cannot simultaneously be ascertained. So you can't know where the particle is and what its speed is simultaneously. You can know one the other, not both. Now, how does the idea of the process of measuring it changes it? And therefore even if you could, you've affected it? Or

am I misream? You're right on target. You know, there's this picture that came to us from Newton, which is, you know, there are physical systems and you glance at them and you measure them, but your measurement doesn't change them, doesn't affect them. You're simply extracting a feature of that system. The distance between the Sun and the Earth, just measure it. The speed of that baseball I guess that you have baseball of Newton's times, or the speed of that rock.

You just measure it. It doesn't affect it. But when you're talking about particles, you're active measurement on a tiny electron can wreck havoc, and that makes it a much more subtle procedure to understand what a measurement is. And that's the thing that we've not yet fully resolved. Let me issue this question, how confident are you that in

our lifetimes, uh, there will be a grand unification theory solved. Well, if no one cracks the issue of immortality, then I suspect that I'm not particularly optimistic that will have a complete unified theory that's been tested to the degree that we're ready to lift. I wish I could even say for that really, Yeah, you know, we're we're talking a

century or so off. You see. I think there's something interesting that's about to happen, which is if the large had drown collider in Geneva, Switzer just turned back on actually this week they now it was taken off when Certain came online because it was so much bigger and theoretically eat their lunch. But what what changes they due to the hadron? So the lawn hutter is part of Certain and and so what they've done is periodically they upgrade it. Yeah, Fermi Lab is the other one here

in the United States, but you know you're right. They take it offline, they upgrade it, they make it stronger, and it's going to be the most powerful incarnation of that machine, the highest so called luminosity, the greatest number of particles slamming together. That's what it's all about. And the thing is, if they don't find something new, startlingly new, we may find ourselves in a situation where funding agencies

are not so excited in these difficult financials. But they've made a series of I mean, if I agree with if you look at physics the past twenty years, it's it's almost, I don't want to say a daily newspaper headline, but there has just been a series of spectacular from the gravitational waves go light on and go down the list of here's the problem, here's the problem. None of those were unexpected. That doesn't take away from the achieved

of the discovery. But everybody knew that gravitational waves are. There is a question of will we have the technological wherewithal to detect them. The Higgs particle, everybody believed it was there, The question was will we actually find it. We did spectacular, So there have been great breakthroughs, but what we need is something that rocks our world, where we can go back to funding agencies and say, we've got to understand this. This is an anomaly, this doesn't

make sense. This is the gateway to a deep new understanding of the world. If we can't do that, it maybe decades or maybe even centuries before we have the next big machine. China may step in the rumors that China may build the next big machine, but that's twenty thirty years off maybe, so when you talk about time scales, and even that big machine may not be powerful enough

to test grand unified theory or string theory. So so that's why I'm not particularly optimistic that we're going to have the unified theory in hand in the next generation or time. I would love China to build a huge machine because if you look at how much of modern technology traces its lineage back to spot Nick, which caused a giant arms race. Unfortunately we managed not to blow ourselves up, but it's still lead to hey, these guys

are ahead of us in space. We have to get there. Also, maybe China would stimulate some competitive juices and and get governments behind these big physics. Certainly more exciting than building a border wall. So I would, uh, well, we could test if galileis theories. See if things drop, you're gonna see science in the border, right, Can you could do that? Now? Granted it's not a vacuum. Which side of the wall you're gonna drop things on that? It depends on the

nationality of the scientists, I guess. Um, all right, so I wanted I didn't get to uh Icarus before. And I have to ask you a couple of questions which come from it's me moving my papers around. These come from Maddock, age ten, and Ellis, age seven, who are big fans of Icarus at the Edge of Time, which is the kid's book you wrote about black holes. I'm not going to give you all the questions they asked, but I'm just gonna give you the top fifty or so. Um,

when did you first become interested in astrophysics? When I was quite young, five or six years old. I grew up across from the planetarium, which I think is certainly part of it. But I always had this urge to look out and think about stars and the galaxies. And my dad was a big mentor of mine and those things. He wasn't trained in any of the stuff. But he was just fascinated by who's a composer, a singer performer, But he would tell me all about this stuff, so

quite young. So what can we learn from black holes and how relevant are they to our daily lives? Well, black holes are the primary theoretical laboratory that people like me play with because they're so extreme, so much mass crushed to such a fantastically small size. And when you have such extreme domains, that's when you can break existing ideas, where existing ideas can fail, and where they fail as an opportunity to step in with new understanding. But that

again is in the theoretical realm. Black holes are becoming more and more part of the observational realm. There's this new telescope have you heard about. It's called the event horizon telescope, where they're actually looking right at the edge of so called event horizons of black holes to perhaps really see what's happening there, take a photograph of a

black hole itself, so they're becoming launched into that's right. Well, actually it's a it's a series of radio telescopes around the Earth that are working together to combine their imagery to create a very high resolution picture of a black hole. So more and more black holes are becoming part of the the everyday side of observational science. So they're not as esoteric as they once were. And the current theory is that black holes exist in the center of each galaxy.

Is that that seems to be the case? Yeah, So this went from a crazy idea to an abstract thesis to every galaxy has one. Yeah. When this idea first came online, this is back in about nineteen seventeen or nineteen sixteen, Karl Schwarzschild was playing with Einstein's mathematics and came upon this idea. Einstein resisted the idea of black holes throughout his life, even even he was writing paper

showing here's why black holes can't be real. So he was a revolutionary thinker, but also conservative in some ways too. But yes, now there's virtually no denying that black holes are actually out there. Mean, we're gonna take a photograph of the edge of a black hole. There may be uncertainties about what happens inside a black hole in the detailed mathematics that really describes them, but these entities do appear to be part of the universe. What about wormholes.

That's the theory that we haven't really seen a whole lot of evidence for, but there's a lot of theoretic excitement around it, certainly much more speculative than than black holes. I mean, wormholes are allowed by Einstein's mathematics, but there's zero evidence that they're actually real, and therefore there's sort of zero reason to think that they're out there today. But look, you could have said that about a lot

of stuff in the world before we encountered it. So I'm I would be remiss or would be a little bit naive for me to suggest that they're absolutely not real, but there's just no evidence yet. And one more question from Maddi and ellis what do you want the young

reader to learn from your book? The point of Vicorus at the Edge of Time was to give the reader a sense of what happens at a black hole without it being an instruction manual, without it being pedagogical, without it being a teacher or a professor telling you what's going on, merely by virtue of going for the ride. In this story, so boy build a spaceship, goes to the edge of a black Hole's dad says not to

do it. It's like the original myth of Icarus, but instead of the sun with wax wings, you know, it's a boy building his spaceship. And then when he comes back from this journey, he doesn't die, but because time slows down near the edge of a black hole, when he comes back and wants to show his dad what he's done, he quickly realizes that he comes back to world ten thousand years into the future. And this is

what really could happen. This is not science fiction, even though the story, of course is fictional, and I want people to get a feel for what it is that happens at a black hole, and also to recognize if if I'm just going to finish up my answer maybe a little too long winded, but I hated I hated the original myth of Acres. It kind of said if you don't do what your dad says, you die, right. I mean, dad says Kris don't fly near the sun.

Acres does because he's courageous, maybe a little reckless, and he dies side. But you know, if you're going to have a breakthrough in science, you've got to be somewhat reckless. You have to go against what people tell you cannot do what your forefathers or four mothers tell you to do. You may return to a strange reality if you discover

something spectacular, but that's the nature of the beast. I recall when when one of the colliders was coming online, we got warnings of they're going to create a black hole here on Earth. I thought that was kind of yeah, that was a vigorous like fear. Well, yeah, this is two thousand and eight. They're turning on the machine. And I got a call from so many news outlets to be on television to talk about the starting of the large hatch on collider, and I was like, wow, science

is mainstream. We've really got there. They didn't want to talk about the collider. They want to talk about this little black hole that might be created that might suck up Geneva. Nobody really worried about that here, but then it might suck up the rest of the planet Earth. People start to worry a lot about that, and that's what it was about. The good news is you wouldn't

even feel it, that's right. So there are two other string theory related questions I have to ask before I moved to my standard questions one is all right, our everyday common experience, we have the three spatial dimensions X, y, and z plus time is for how do we get from that to eleven? Because eleven seems like a lot of dimensions. It is a lot of dimensions. And it's a strange idea because you look around the world and there's, as you say, left, right, back forth, up down, the

three spatial dimensions of common experience. Where in the world could there be more than that? There's just no room for it. And yet the mathematics of string theory suggests that there are additional dimensions of space. So it's been up to us to figure out where they are, and that's really been the focus of my work for many decades.

Others as well have worked on this enormously, and the ideas that maybe these other dimensions are all around us, they're just crumpled to such a fantastically small size that we can't see them with the naked eye or even with our most powerful equipment. But that's the idea if these if these theories are correct, we're looking at a world that has more dimensions than the three that we know about. The explanation that I've found interesting is it's

a function of perspective. If if you're um an ant on a line, well you only see folding back. And if that line turns out to be a garden hose, well, oh guess what. Now there's another dimension you can travel. We're stuck in three dimensions, and therefore we we lack the ability to see your experience the other seven. But it seems like a lot now. At one point in time there were a variety of different numbers of dimensions.

How did we settle on eleven? Well, and there were originally five different theories and Witten, Professor Whitten took a took a paddle to them and basically came up on them altogether. Yeah. Edward Whitten, who's sort of the grand master of string theory at the Institute for a Vance Study, had a great breakthrough in the mides. There were five competing versions of string theory. All of them had nine dimensions of space, had six additional ones, not the seven

that we're referring to. And um, he realized that if you looked at it the right way, all these five theories are actually different windows onto the same theory number one. Moreover, when you did the more precise analysis that this combined perspective gave you. You found one additional dimension of space that we had long missed, and that's what took us from nine dimensions of space to ten, which, as you say, with time takes us to eleven space time dimensions. So

that number is pretty stable now right now. But yeah, that's the historical progression. And Witten was, Um, there's the old I think it's Kipling the parable of the six blind men describing the elephant, and they're all on a different body part the trunk, the ear of the tail, and you have they're describing the same thing, just from a different person exactly. And then the last question I have before I get to my favorites. When we look at the remnants of the big Big Bang, there are

lots of clues. So we have the cosmic background radiation, we have the cold spots and parts of the universe. There are all sorts of evidence that, hey, this seems to have really happened. We may not understand precisely how, but we have a pretty substantial body of of um observations that that support it. In any of these observations,

do we find support for superstring theory. No, Now that is not a black mark against the theory, because the theory really comes into its own in domains that have much higher energy, much smaller distances than the things that we can see, even with the most powerful telescopes or even with hit the Large Hadron collider. So the theory can agree with everything that we found, but where it differs from the things that we know about those are

domains that we can't yet access. So we're in this kind of curious slimbo land that we have this beautiful mathematical theory that seems to unify things gravity and quantum mechanics does it with some strange and wonderful ideas, extra dimensions of space being one of them, fundamental filaments at the heart of matter being another. But we've yet to be able to deter aman if these ideas are actually

describing our universe. That that's quite fascinating. So so now let me jump to my favorite UH pod question podcast questions UH that I asked all of my guests, so I know a decent amount about your background. Did you ever think about doing anything other than going into physics? Oh gosh, Well, when I was really a little up to sort of ten or eleven, years old, I was intent on being a professional bowlers bowler, not even a

baseball player. Definitely bowler. I used to spend my summer's bowling over on the east side of the eight Street in New York Avenue. Used to be a bowling I don't that's the thing of my past. I gave that up. Okay eight years UM, I have to send you a YouTube video of a bowler who in I think forty three seconds bowls of perfect game. I'll send this to you. He goes, you know, bowling alleys here in lanes and bull How do you even reset the pens because it

because by the content one. Then he goes back to the first one and does the last three things. That's amazing. If you're a bowler at all, I will appreciate you will find that quite like, Oh my goodness. UM. So aside from being a professional bowler, what else was well? You know? Um, if I was to go back in retrospect, I would say neuroscience is one of the most amazing fast fields that that are being developed today. So I

could certainly imagine loving being a researcher in that field. Uh. Certainly, writing is something that I take very seriously, and and that is I do consider myself that's part of what I do. Well, you've got four going on five books. I think it's the fifth book. You're allowing that you can call yourself that. Yeah, exactly. Um, so those are sort of the main things. I never really imagine doing anything radically different from It was always going to be

science and communicating. So tell us about some of your early mentors. You you have some fast in schooling, and you've worked with some amazing people. Yeah, well, you know, I I went to New York City public schools, you know, through through eighth grade. Then I went to Stuyveson High School, which is still a public school, and I was fortunate in the seventh grade. It must have been that my math teacher at i S forty four, the intermediate school in seventy Street, gave me a note that I took

up to Columbia University. In the note basically said, hey, this kid's smart in math, we can't teach him anything else and can you help us out? And I just handed this to person after person on the Columbia campus. Sort of a weird thing to knocking on doors, and amazingly I knocked on a door in the math department and a fellow named Neil Bellensen, one of the most generous smart spect you're something like that, Yeah, I must be and um and and he said he looked at

the note and he said, sure, I'll teach you. And it was, you know, for free. We didn't have money, couldn't pay him, and just out of the goodness of his heart, he met with me three four times a week over the summers, taught me math that I'd never learned any other way. During the year, I'd meet with him on Saturdays. He picked me up at the bus stop near his house in the cold of winter and taking we'd learn that. I mean, who does this? What

an amazing thing. And it allowed me just to sail off into mathematical domains that kept my interest going and really just kept the juices flowing in my brain, which is very important. Wow, that's fascinating. And his name was Neil Bellensen. And if he's listening, I don't know where he is, you know, I haven't a contact with him in like decades. Maybe he'll hear this. That's that's that's amazing.

Any other mentors you wanna want to mention? Well, I had some great teachers in the New York City public schools, a guy named Danny Kotalk. I don't know if he's still alive any longer. He he, he was the guy that wrote that note. And he again was just a spectacular teacher that just made mathematics so fascinating and just kept kept the interest going there. Um. And then you know when we when we go to high school and college. Know there's a professor at Harvard, Howard George I one

of the great particle physicists of our era. And uh he again just I would go talk to him when as a freshman, I just knock on his door, is bold, and he would open the door and I'd walk in. For hours, we talk about stuff, and he teach me stuff on the blackboard. So again, you know, the one lesson is if you're willing to go forward people are. They're willing to help you. They're not necessarily going to come to you, but if you go to them, the

opportunities are there. I'm intrigued by the story that you're on campus and you see a flyer uh lecture this evening the theory of everything. Yeah, that sounds interesting. Let's go look at that is that what led you into

deeper into the world of physically totally. I was a graduate tude at Oxford, you know, in England, and uh I was, as you're saying, walking across the campus one day and saw that sign and I went and checked it out and it was a talk about gang named Michael Green, not related to me, and he was one of the founders of strength here and he was talking about the breakthrough that he and a guy named On

Schwartz who's at Caltech, that they had found. And that's what turned me onto string theory as a graduate student, and I shifted my work, and just about everybody else in the world shifted their work to focus on this new idea that they had come up with. Intriguing Who else influenced your approach to thinking about science, physics, math or communication. Well, I'd like to think that that Einstein

is always with me and my colleagues too. Of course, every step of the way, Almost everything that I do has in some sense intellectual roots that go back to Einstein's ideas. He's pervasive in the field. But the other person is the Einstein of our age, which is Edward Whitten at the Institute for Advanced Study again. You know, so many of the papers that I've done ultimately go back to ideas that he had that we were able

to develop in one way or another. I spent a wonderful year at the Institute for Advanced Study, you know, decades ago, where talking to Ed Witten every day. We actually got into a little friendly competition where this idea that space could rip the topology change. He had a way of doing it, we had a way of doing it. And during those three months we were all racing to the finish line, and we we finished at the same time, different approaches, published our papers on the same day. Really, yeah,

so it was a wonderfully exciting time. He has yeah to to come up with these strange ideas. He has some um lectures and interviews online, and he is just such a soft spoken, gentle individual. It's hard to imagine him in like bloodthirsty academic debate because he just seems to, well, here's the thing, but he doesn't he doesn't need to ever get angry because he's so much smarter than everybody else.

He can crush just you know a few words. Everybody I've seen or reads have said, Hey, we're all really smart. And then there's Ed Witten. It's just a different now and working with him is quite a trip. You know. There'd be five of us in his office and we're talking about stuff, and all of a sudden, he stops talking. He looks up. Everybody gets quiet because Ed is thinking, and you don't disturb Ed's thinking. And you know, sometimes he really is coming up with something new. Sometimes maybe

he's just thinking about lunch, you know. So there are times when I was a little bit bold and I'd say so, at any anything else that we should have to like fifteen minutes of silence, you know, at anything else, you should talk about it. No, No, we're good. Well we'll meet again later and we'd all leap the office. And that's amazing. Let's talk about books. This is the most popular question I get from from readers and listeners.

What are some of your favorite books? Well, God, fiction, nonfiction, physics, what hell? Yeah, and the fiction domain. I'm a great fan of Camu, you know. Uh, The Stranger is one of my favorite books. Wait, I always thought that was fit nonfiction existentialism and yeah, no, but he he wrote stories, uh, and um, the stories are tell the storytell the story and and they're just amazing works of literature. Um, so

that's Kafka. You know. The Trial I think is one of the one of the great stories quite relevant in our aids. Uh certainly Orwell is one of my favorite authors. Four Animal Farm. You know, in the nonfiction domain, there's a book I don't know if you know of it. It's called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, one the seventy four Pulterer Project. I think that was a year one of the most influential books I've ever read. Really, yeah. Yeah.

It really describes human motivation and why we do what we do from sort of a post Freudian perspective where we really are the only species that knows that we're going to die, and that drives us to try to do things that will give us a sense of permanence. And if you take that perspective, I can't do it justice in thirty seconds, but you recognize so much of what we do is driven by this fear of the

impending doom that faces us all. And I have to tell you this is a book that's really even influencing the book I'm writing right now. The book I'm writing now is about the whole history of the universe from the beginning to the end, and as you describe it, the future does look like a death to the universe,

the heat death. We even use that language. And the book kind of shows an interplay between our recognition as a species that we will die with this recognition that the universe as a whole is going to die, and how do those notions play off of each other, has that effect how we live? That's sort of what this book is about. Fascinating, and any of the books you want to mention, give us a give us a physics book that's not your own, that that you think is

worth pursuing. Wow, or cosmology or astrophysics or uh, well, you know Richard Dawkins, if we're gonna outside of itself, you know what a beautiful writer, you know, and what a capacity he has for taking ideas in the biological realm and just writing in a way that can make you weep. I mean, it's such such a beautiful writing. So I'd say he certainly is. Anything that he's written

is well worth one's time to read, really quite quite fascinating. Also, I would say Stephen Pinker, he was a previous guest, I love the concept. So I a little self interested digression. So I do a lot of work with behavioral economics and why investors are so bad at what they do because of the cognitive wet wear was not designed you know, if it was a pharmaceutical, we would call it off

label usage. We weren't designed for there, and and Pinker's book The Better UM Better Angels of Our Nature UM basically shows how things can be getting better and better and better, and yet you're unaware of it. The phrase I use as denominator blindness. But if you see, you know, something on the news, there was this crime, this murder, this robbery, Well, what does that tell you about the overall trend? Is this more than average? Is this less

than average? We've been hearing about all these terrible crimes, and yet by every data point we look at, most serious crimes are at thirty, forty, even forty five year lows. You look around the world's poverty, uh slavery, nutritional short for they're all there has never been a better time to be a human being on this planet. And yet you read the headlines and it doesn't quite give you that same perspective. Yeah, absolutely, And and that's Uh, that's

Pinker's book. I'm gonna have you started asking me questions if I can keep going off on this, let me get back to my uh my list. So let's talk about what's changed since you've joined the realm of physics. What do you think are the most interesting changes that have taken place? Yeah, well, they're better or worse. Yeah, well, I'd say the big developments in physics, the thrilling ones are the discoveries of ideas that were put forward a

hundred years ago or fifty years ago. The issues of the microwave, background, radiation heat left up from the Big Bang that now we can measure with such spectacular person decision, and what we see matches what the math says. That gives us confidence that we truly understand what was happening thirteen point eight billion years ago. That's utterly thrilling, you know. Discovery of the Higgs boson, that we now understand that there can be this feel permeating space and that's why

other things have mass. We found the particle, these ideas, the god particle. I'm sort of not a great fan of that word, but yeah, that's what it's called. When I learned about this in graduate school in the nineteen eighties. It was taught to me in a way where I didn't even know that it hadn't yet been confirmed. It was spoken of as if this is how the world works. It was decades before I knew. Wait, we don't have that particle in our hands. Well, decades is an exaggeration.

A few years and then twelve we find the particle, and then gravitational waves is the other big one. Right, None of us who are in the theoretical end of things really thought that they were going to detect these gravitational way ever, or just in a life I mean, look, you're looking at a wave that can strutch device by a fraction of an atomic diameter. How can you measure

stretching by the fraction of an atomic diameter? And yet these guys pulled it all set up at tube and you have a mirror that refracts it in the other and you just measure the two waves theoretically, theoretically, that's come on, they could have figured that out years ago. You're absolutely right, But no, it is. It is stunning achievement.

But but that we mentioned this earlier, we are living in a golden age of physics where things that theoretically have been described when you see hard proof like that. And and by the way, oh, we could trace this to two black holes that collided one three billion years. Okay, hey, we there's proof of that. And here it is in the shift in this in this measurement. That's an astonishing accomplishment. I don't know if people, people who aren't physics nerds appreciate,

and there seems to be so. I subscribe to a bunch of different email lists because I I do a morning set of reads for everybody. Here are the ten most interesting things from markets, to psychology to whatever. And I'm on all these different lists, and the sort of stuff that comes from the physics side, it's it's not like every six months I get, uh, hey, here's this big announcement. It's every day there's two or three different things. And every week there's some hey, this is a pretty

big deal. And it seems at least once or twice a month it's hey, this is groundbreaking stuff. It's a are you do You stop and say, I'm really glad that my lifespan incorporates this era of spectacular discovery. Absolutely absolutely, But you can't help us say to yourself, Wow, if only I've been born, like a few hundred years from now, I could read about all this exciting stuff and now it's gonna happen. Then no, then it's boring. It's done, I think, so stop and think about this is a

fun little experiment. Think about the people who lived in the thirties, forties, fifties didn't make it to the eighties and nineties, and computers were these things that were the size of a room, and there was no concept of an internet other than, hey, we have a system set up that in case we are attacked with nukes, we could launch a response and and wipe out most of the planet. That was the concept of an internet. And we had phones with phone operators and the plugs and everything.

Think about, and maybe this is me showing my age, but I've gotten to see some astonishing things just in the past fifty years. I think it might be boring to be born after everything is figured out. Yeah, I don't think so. I think it's only you to get more exciting and and the possibilities of of artificial intelligence, the possibilities of maybe simulated world, simulated realities, the possibilities to be go a little nutt a year of down

learning your consciousness and too you know. Yeah, so who knows if any of that stuff holds any water. But I would love to be around to see. Huh sounds sounds intriguing. Um so those are the next major shifts. We don't know what's gonna gonna come out of them. This is another question that came from listeners. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. Oh gosh, the old failure question. That's a tough one always. But um I'll give you one example,

you know, sort of a personal side of things. You know, my dad was a musician, composer, and because that life is so hard, he kind of pushed us kids away from music. He didn't want us to go in that direction. So when I was in college, finally I said, I want to play an instrument, you know, I want to play piano. So I started to do that. But what I've learned is that unless you are fully least me personally,

fully focused on something, you don't get it done. So here I am thirty years later, and I'm still thinking to myself, I really want to play piano, and by hell or high water. I want before I leave this planet to have some level of proficiency. I've not gotten it yet. But the lesson I would say is for me personally, if I'm gonna do something, it has to

be one commitment or it just doesn't happen. I have a friend who started taking Italian lessons and he said he thought it would take five years to really be proficient. And I said, gee, that's a long time, and he said the five years ago, and by whether I'm studying Italian or not, so maybe exactly right. Something to it? All right, my I know we only have the room for two couple more minutes. Let me get to my last two and most favorite questions. You work with a

lot of millennials, young students. Someone comes to you and says, I'm interested in a career in theoretical physics. What sort of advice would you give them? Well, I tell them, number one, can you imagine doing anything else? Because I think to really succeed in this field, you've got to be one of the people saying no, no, My heart and soul is in physics, and that's what I've got to do. Because it's a hard field. Very few jobs you work like crazy you don't make a lot of money.

You have to be doing it because it's got you by the d n A. And if that's the case, then I tell them, look, the next thing is, you've got to learn the basics inside out. Don't try to jump ahead and do string theory or general relativity because it's cool ideas that you maybe saw some television show mine or somebody else's. You've got to learn Newton Maxwell everybody inside out. And if at the end of that

you still love the field, keep on going. And my final question that I ask all my guests, what is it that you know today about physics, string theory? What have you that you wish you knew when you were starting out five or so years ago. You can I give a real nuts and bolts to that question, not sort of from high end saying, well, you know, twenty five years ago numerical methods using computers was not really the centerpiece of doing physics, but so many issues today.

If you're doing general relativity, if you're doing these really hard problems, you've got to be a cracker jack computer person to be able to push certain of these calculations forward. And I always left that to others I would do the equations and I'd leave it, say the students to program it to take it forward. I wish I was a cracker Jack programmer, because there's a certain kind of insight that I found myself, even on the rudimentary stuff

that I've done. In the numerical world, you learn things better if you can take an idea, turn into a program and actually calculate something with it. In that way, you understand it better. So I'd tell all students get proficiency in numerical methods, even if you're going to be doing high end theory. It will serve you well. Quite fascinating. We have been speaking with Professor Brian Green, director of

the Center for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University. Be sure and check out any of the other hundred and fifty or so such conversations we've had. You can find them on Bloomberg dot com, Apple iTunes, SoundCloud, or any of the other places where fine podcasts or hosted. I would be remiss if I did not thank my producer, Taylor Riggs or my director of research, Michael Batnick. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m

IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry Ridholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Our world is always moving, so with Mery Lynch you can get access to financial guidance online, in person or through the app. Visit mL dot com and learn more about Meryll Lynch. An affiliated Bank of America, Mary Lynch makes available products and services offered by Merrill Lynch, Pierce feder and Smith Incorporated or Registered Broker Dealer remember s I PC