Thomas Lin Discusses Deep Science (Podcast)

hedge funds in the world. UH. Jim Simons and his wife Marilyn run a philanthropic foundation where they are very interested in math and science education, both at at the most basic level UM educating American UM students to be better at math and science, and as you'll see with Quanta, at the very highest levels. I've been a fan of the site for since it launched. It's really quite fascinating. You don't need a PhD in mathematics or science to be able to keep up with it. It's really intriguing UM.

Thomas has done a wonderful job finding some of the most interesting research and stories UH and breaking news about the latest discoveries in math and science, and making it very readable and very accessible UM. If you're at all interested in science and math, and really all of us should be. Then I think you'll find this conversation to be absolutely fascinating. So, with no further ado, my conversation with Quantum Magazines editor in chief Thomas Lynn. My guest

this week is Thomas Lynn. He is the founding editor of Quantum Magazine. It is an award winning editorially independent science and maths eight published by the Simons Foundation. Uh. That is the philanthropic arm of Jim Simons, who founded Renaissance Technologies. Uh. Thomas Lynne previously was the digital editor for The New York Times. UH. He comes to us by way of Cornell University and the Oregon State University, where he got his masters in teaching and literatures. At right,

that's right, fantastic Thomas Lynn, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. So. So you have a really eclectic background, and I want to spend a little time, um getting into that and find out how you ended up found in Quanta. But let's talk about your background. You're an engineer, you're a former editor at the Times. How do you end up

um creating a magazine like Quanta. Yeah, it's a kind of a crazy story and I think with as with a lot of people who end up in in a place that they ultimately really enjoy and feel very uh satisfied with, and in terms of their careers, I sort

of fell into it. I mean I started out, you know, in college, just not knowing what I wanted to do, and I studied physics and I studied literature, and you know, really was all over the place, and so ended up sort of utilizing a little bit of the physics side of things as an engineer initially, but then I also wanted the human aspects I taught for a few years, and I realized, especially after nine eleven, Uh, I realized that I wanted to be out there in the world

learning more about what's happening and helping up bring news events to the broader public. And so I decided to become a journalist and eventually backed my way into science journalism. So so you end up at the Writer's Institute at the Cuney Graduate Center, ultimately you start teaching journalism there. When you look at the world of science writing, are there many people who have both aspects the hard science of physics and either literature or journalism or does that

make you a relatively rare bird. You know, I think that people, a lot of people are are smarter than I am, and when they're young and they realized what they're good at, and they specialized and they either go sort of the science track, or they've become you know, humanities major, they study literature, they study you know, something else, or they go into law or medicine or something like that. I really just had a broad interest from a very

young age, and I loved writing. It's very interested in literature. But I also had parents who were essentially physicists, and I grew up in this very science culture kind of environment all my family. I have a lot of scientists in my family, and so there's always that part of my brain that that works that way. So both parents were physicists. What what was the dinner table conversation like, Yeah, No, I was definitely pushed to go ahead in things like

math and physics in in school. I ended up studying calculus after my freshman year in high school. And um, and you know, so the conversations were about everything, but there was definitely a scientific bent to a lot of those conversations. And we had my mom loved puzzles and we had puzzles all over the place in our house. That's that's interesting. So you spent a few years doing journalism, you end up as a digital editor at the New

York Times. What would then involve? Yeah, So initially I started on the national desk at the time, so it wasn't about science at all, and I was just a journalist to learn about what's happening in the world and bring that to people. And uh, and that was great.

I mean the Times. When I decided I wanted to go into journalism, you know, like many people, the Times was the dream, right, That's where I wanted to be and I was very lucky to be able to land that that job when I did, And I started on the digital side, which code really interesting opportunity in terms of that interface between the newer technologies that we're starting to change the ways journalism was done and sort of the older traditional legacy print publication and there a lot

of things were just changing. As a very sort of radical time in a way. To be at The Times, and I recall the New York Times being pretty leading edge in terms of interactive graphics. Anytime there's a complex news event, The Times as well as the Wolfs Rejournal and later on the Washington Post would have these giant, intricate um so Katrina and the flooding. I remember you just kind of scroll through that and it was um and now you go back and look at it that

at the time it was so advanced. Today that's kind of rookie stuff. It's really bleeding edge technologies very much. And then they were they were had a great foresight in terms of starting early. They didn't necessarily have it all figured out early on, but they started early. They started getting stuff on the web, They started hiring people like me to think about what we could do did

journalistically online that wasn't just replicating the paper. Remember working on some of the Hurricane Katrina coverage and working all night because it was so important to bring people immediate pictures of what was happening on the ground. And that's not something you can get through a daily newspaper. Right the print, listen, print is really important and and the written word it really matters. But it's true, if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is an interactive

graphic work exactly? So, so how do you get from the Times to Quanta? That's a pretty big um I'll avoid all the cliches. That's a pretty big leap, isn't it. Sure. Yeah, And it's hard because I was at the Times for almost eight years, and about seven a half years after the National Desk, I worked on the Science desk for about three years and learn a lot from the editors there.

And I think it was because I was on the Science desk somebody from the Science Foundation reached out asking did I know any good science editors who could help them produce high quality science articles? And I sort of scratched my head and I wanted to find out more about who I should recommend. So I asked them about

this job, just to find out who. Yeah, no, but and and you know, and and the thing is that, you know, I was a journalist, so I was not interested in going to do communications or PR that sort of thing. And so but in talking to the Foundation, I started to learn that they actually had this other publication already that was editorially independent, and there was a possibility that whoever came into this role could do some

editorially independent science journalism. And so I got a little bit interested in thought, well, what if we actually could start a magazine and do something a little bit bigger and really changed the way hopefully that people see how science coverage is done. And and Quanta Online I linked to it pretty regularly. I I love some of the graphics that you guys do. It's pretty clear that this

is a well thought out, big budget specialty site. UM, so it's not it's not that big budget actually, so we have a really small team who that was very very hard because well, let me then rephrase that it looks like it has a pretty big budget because it's there. There are a lot of you know, ge whiz uh special effects, but it's pretty in depth UM coverage and and a lot of the breaking news in math and science.

And I know that's almost a counterintuitive statement. It doesn't just get you know, a rip and read off a PR release. It's a deep explanation about here's what just was discovered through this research, and here's why it's significant, and here's how this fits into the long history of

this aspect of math or science exactly. And that's exactly why I wanted to start this publication as I looked out there at the offerings that most mainstream publications had in terms of their science coverage, and it was a little disheartening. I have to say, I mean not not only the level of the lack of depth of the coverage,

but also to some extent, the choice. I mean, so much of what you see is health and technology coverage, but so little of it is fundamental basic science, which is really where all of our knowledge comes from about

the world and by the universe around us. And so I wanted to cover not only these subjects, which are inherently the most fundamental, deepest, biggest questions we have about everything and what's you know, what's in the universe, how things work, but also covered in a way with a little bit of depth, still tell engaging stories about it, but actually get things right, do the careful fact checking, do the careful reporting and research, take the time to

get the story right, and to tell the more nuanced story of what's happening in science. Quite fascinating. So let's talk a little bit about that. I had a conversation recently with someone, and part of our discussion was having to acknowledge that we are living in a golden age of physics, of new mathematical breakthroughs of astrophysics. We have never known more about the universe either on an astronomical level or at the quantum level than ever before. Am

I overselling that or is that a fair statement? I think it's it's it's I think that's fair. On one hand, so we are learning more than ever. At the same time, we're also learning how much we don't know, and I think that's also where we are. So it's a golden era in terms of being in this I think it's very exciting the things that we can do now, whether it's experimentally in terms of the theories and the math

that's being developed. At the same time, we're also hitting the limits of what we can test experimentally in terms of the largest structures and and thinking about the cosmos, but also the smallest um you know, quantum level interactions. We're sort of coming to a point where the theories can no longer be fully tested primarily, and that is leading to a little bit of an internal uh, sort of soul searching, and and you know, there's there's work to be done to figure out what the next revolution

will be in physics. So so the Dunning Krueger curve applies to everything. You could say that so um, and for those of you who are not familiar with that, just google Dunning Krueger and you'll you'll spend hours reading fascinating things about the things we think we know but don't.

But but that's really kind of a fascinating area. As we approach the limits of what we can test in the laboratory, does that mean theoretical physics or or moving away from applied mathematics, the theoretical math becomes an increasingly

important aspect of our research. Well, I think that's where the debates are happening right around this is you know both things, whether it's in the laboratory in terms of looking at things that are really small, or also even looking out what we can actually uh in terms of the visible universe, what we can see, and of course there's a lot that we can't see in terms of dark matter and dark energy, things that we most of the universe is universe is made up of stuff that

we don't even know what it is, or we're just not seeing what's there. And there's an interest. I'm trying to remember. So I have two of your books, which we'll talk about later, But there was just a debate about dark matter, and part of the question becomes is there is dark matter really the universe or dark matter and dark energy together, or are our technologies and ability to perceive the rest of the universe not picking up what what may or may not be there, and so

the assumption is it's dark matter or something else. How much of this is a measurement issue and how much of this is g We really have no idea what x out there. Well, there there is a lot of indirect evidence that this stuff is out there. I mean, everything that we're observing indicates that dark matter and dark energy does exist. There are some theories out there that have I think slowly been they're they're sort of not they're they're losing faver because the evidence is not supporting it.

There's some ideas of modified gravity and and other ways that you could explain away things like dark matter. But I think most physicists agree that dark matter and dark energy exists, but we just don't know what it is, and we don't have the ability to detect it, and we can't see it because um, whatever it is, it's not in it. Well it's it's dark, but it's not

interacting with things that we can detect. But we we continue to see that the universe continues to expand faster than it would if if visible matter and energy was all there was. So there has to be something driving galaxies apart no matter what direction in space, right, the movements of galaxies. Uh, you know, there's got to be something that that's affecting that movement, and that's the dark matter. And then the acceleration in the universe. Uh is the

dark energy causing that? So so let's talk a little bit about Quanta. You're a foundation based publication as opposed to a subscription slash advertising UM format. How does that make UM what you do a little different and does that afford you freedoms to go places that perhaps the

traditional media just simply doesn't have the time or patients. Yeah. No, I think it is liberating in the sense that we are both editorially independent and yet we are funded to do this very mission oriented, very important kind of journalism making fundamental science accessible to all. Uh. There are other publications like this that are nonprofit, that are funded by foundations like Pro Publica for example, that are very important

investigative journalism. And these are the areas of journalism that have a hard time attracting advertisers. They're very expensive because it takes a lot of time to do it well, but they don't pay for themselves, and so they've been slowly receding from the commercial publications that that we have none of None of your headlines would would make it onto BuzzFeed just to say the least um. How neanderthal DNA helps humanity. The neuroscience behind bad decisions uh in

newly created life form a major mystery. I mean, these aren't the sort of things that are especially clicky, but there are important parts of new research, and disseminating them out from behind a payball is important, very much. It's very important that's freely accessible. And you know, we try to make our our headlines inviting, but at the same time we try to capture a little bit of what the story is really about, and so we don't do the click bait, we don't do things that are overly

sensational or misleading. So so really that raises the key question, how do you decide, hey, this is a good topic, this is a good subject, or this piece of research is accessible enough to those people who aren't experts in this. You know, it used to be you're a generalist a mile wide and not too deep. Now it's the opposite. Everyone is such a specialist. It's a quarter inch wide and a mile deep. How do you decide who to

appeal to? Yeah, first of all, I would say that there's nothing that I consider something that we wouldn't cover in terms of how difficult it is. That that's something that we that's sort sort of our calling card as a publication. We we will cover the hardest, most abstract, difficult subjects out there, but we uh, you know really so.

The one thing is that as journalists and as people who have been covering this, uh these areas for quite a while, we do get a sense and we get get a sense of developed hopefully a good taste in terms of what are important and interesting stories. At the same time, we're not experts in these subjects, so we can't just say, oh, well, I think this is important, therefore we're just going to cover this. We actually talked to a lot of the true experts out in the field.

We talk to many people, and not just people with their own pet theories, but to enough people where we can get a sense of okay, there there is this uh groundswelling of of of interest and level of excitement about this new idea and it's worth talking about. At the same time, it's worth talking about the caveats to and the limitations, and so we try to do that as well. So who are the journalists you have writing about these very hard subjects. Are they science people first

who can write? Or are the writers who have an interest in science? It's really both. Yeah, so we have both. We have people who we have a former math professor who who is now a fantastic probably one of the best math writers journalists out there today. We have our our staff of the writer uh studied at least part

way through a physics graduate program. But we also have our our staff math writer is someone who was humanities major and and did not have a math background, but now has been covering up for enough long enough and who has been talking to enough of the top experts that he has this just crystal clear ability to explains some of the most difficult, profound, pure mathematics that you wouldn't believe. And so it's something. And you know other

writers like Carl Zimmer, very well known biology writer. He's written for us a couple of times. He was also a humanities major as well. He's one of the foremost biology writers of our time, and and has has even written textbooks on evolution and things like that. So really it can come from both sides as long as you end up in a place where you can do both understand enough of the of the deep science and write

well about it quite quite fascinating. So no less an expert than Sean Carroll writes for a number of fine publications, including The New York Times, Cold Quanta A revelation and what makes Quanta different than your typical math or science publication, assuming that there are still math publications, I don't know if there are. Well, that's one of the things that there really aren't any popular math publications, and that's partly why I wanted to start Quanta as well. That was

very kind of Shawn to say. Then he also wrote the forward to our new science book as well, Some Bob Meet the Wall of Fire, and he said some really kind things in there. But he also talked about something that is is very true about sort of where we are in terms of media coverage of science and and there are scientists who are the ones who are the experts who are doing this work often look at even though they do take the interviews and they talk

to reporters. Uh, they often are quite skeptical of the way that the media treats that their work because unfortunately, UM, some publications don't take the time to carefully vet the work, and they cover things that either aren't necessarily good studies, or they don't talk to enough people to get a sense of what's really going on, or they just throughout these headlines that make it seem like, you know, we've cured cancer, when really we haven't. We've learned maybe a

little bit more about one specific aspect of sure. Look at look at how the entire anti vax are craziness just ran away from any rational thought and it was just a combination of people not doing their homework and of course a giant fraud in the land set to start out. So the whole thinking behind this is, we want to do this right, we want to do it carefully. How long do you typically take to create, um, a

full story. Some of these are pretty in depth, and it looks like they're not like I can crank something out in twenty minutes. These are not short pieces, right, No, not at all. And and you know, it really does does depend something. Sometimes there is news that we have to respond to quickly, and we have to turn something around in a few days. That's that's not that common though, in the areas that we're covering, right, So most of the time we do have at least a few weeks

to work on these stories. Uh, some stories, some features you know that are a couple of thousand words, could take three weeks to do. Some pieces take a few months, just partly because we're still developed, the ideas are still developing. We need to talk to people, the work isn't quite

completed yet. And often we're actually covering papers that are coming coming out on the archive what's known as the archive, which is a repository of scientific preprint papers, which means that they haven't yet been accepted to a journal and

they haven't been peer reviewed. And yet this is the place now where you have open access to all sorts of important papers that then other scientists can just chime in and they can get feedback on it, and we can also talk to other experts to make sure that a paper is worthwhile, that it's been carefully vetted before we cover it. So so let me throw a curve bowl at you, because I think the average person is

unaware of what's going on in academia and publications. UM, even though most of this research is funded by the government, is taxpayer funded? A handful began as a handful of research journals started to get brought up by one or two organizations, and they just kept getting brought up, and eventually it reached the point where the vast majority of academic publications are are behind a paywall. And it's not a cheap paywall. These are thousands and thousands of dollars.

How problematic is that for the progress of science? That's a great question. This is something I covered for the New York Times back in two thousand twelve, had a story that was on the cover of Science Times. And you know, this is UH, this really goes to the fundamental question of what is science for? Who is it for?

Who has the right to access and see the results of the work that are tax money is going you know, is paying for essentially, And so you're you're right that there have been companies that have been extremely profitable in taking the work of scientists, UH, taxpayer funded science and the scientists who actually the journals and edit the journals often for free, UH and turning around and packaging and bundling these into journals, and and that they sell for

very high price back to universities and normal academic libraries, and exactly they have to buy these they make millions. And actually so there was a big piece of news recently when the the entire University of California UH system decided yes, we're no longer to to one particular publishers of here, which is really has drawn a lot of the ire of of scientists and and people who want access to these the science that they're paying for. So

I'm glad you see did that. Wouldn't it be just as easy to have Congress to say, And and by the way, if you're going to take our millions of dollars of research, you must publish in a no paywall, peer review site. And this is this is for everybody, not just for a few mercenary publishers. And and that

puts the onus on the scientists. And I think that's really where the the you know, Rubbert meets the road in terms of there now people are the scientists act the people UH doing the research are put in a tough spot in terms of do they continue to submit their papers to these very reputable journals where you have, you know, these reputation points that affects your ability to get tenure and to to sort of move forward in your academic career to be published in these, uh, the

most well known journals. Or do you then say, well, we're gonna start going to the Public Library of Science or to the new bio Archive, or we're gonna you know, sort of skip that step. And is there enough of an set of structure built around those newer forms of open access science publications that can then feedback and make

it worthwhile for for researchers to go that route. Quite quite intriguing, you know, given that peer reviews are so important to scientific papers, and given how successfully the Internet seems to do that, one would think that there would be some sort of a venue for people to bypass these I know, it's a resume builder. I know, it's very prestigious, and anybody who hopes to win subsequent um research grants and or rewards wants to be published in

these places. But there's sort of a vicious cycle. How do you break that if you want to disseminate this wildly widely um and yet still allow taxpayer research to find its way into the hands of public of the public, right.

I think that's being worked on now. There are some groups and people who are leading the charge, who are starting things like to buy archive, and who have been working on the archive for many years and and trying to develop a better model for how to UM publish science, how to vet it carefully, and how to ultimately make it accessible to anyone who wants to read it. So, so you said, the harder subject is to understand, the more likely we are to cover it. Can you give

me an example of that. Okay, that's sort of an inside joke. That's that we don't we don't just look at that. We don't decide what to cover based on how difficult it is. But at the same time, we

don't shy away from that either. And so I think the example that I like to give for that is that one of our early viral stories, actually in fact, it's still the most popular story that we've ever published, is about this very very uh deep physics idea that is um both a way it's a geometric way to simplify calculations of particle interactions, a way in a sense, to simplify what Fynman diagrams tried to simplify back when

Richard Fineman created them decades ago. Uh and and at the same time, this geometric approach could also lead eventually hasn't yet, it hasn't improven yet, could lead to a way to get things like gravity and space time to emerge from from a more fundamental reality. And so this was a mind blowing concept. The math itself and the physics itself is very complicated, but this story was read and shared so broadly, was viewed more than a million times.

It even made an appearance on um Conan O'Brien show. He mentioned it in his in his opening monologue. And

so this has shared so broadly and widely. But it was a mind blowing idea because people, I think a lot of people hadn't necessarily grasped the possibility that spacetime and gravity aren't necessarily the most fundamental aspects of our universe and that could be emergent, and that there could be things that could lead to a new math, that we could figure out a new simple, well somewhat simple looking geometries that could be underlying all of reality. Quite

quite fascinating. Let's talk a little bit about science getting a little bit political lately. Isn't politics the antithesis of science? So I think yes, Collectively, as a collective enterprise, science is all about UH having ideas, UH, carefully examining them, finding evidence to support it, and then if it's a bad idea, throwing it out right, and if it's a good idea, you keep working on you keep refining it further.

Politics generally doesn't work that way, right, and you sort of it's it's much more of a hodgepodge of of ideas and people throwing and there's not a lot of evidence sometimes supporting that, and so on a collective level, I think that's true. Individually, scientists are human also and have opinions and have political views, and so I don't know that it's as as a human activity that it's

completely divorced from politics, and certainly not from society. UM. But I think that in the sense that science is striving for truth and and and and finding facts, and politics often does not do that. So I would say that they can be quite different at times. So, so briefly, why do you find that science literacy is so important for people in society who eventually will be casting votes

that help determine our future. Right, Yeah, I know, I think. Um. I think one thing is that uh, science is the best way for understanding reality, right, And it's it's the way that we've developed all the technologies, all of the modern medicine, everything that that we enjoy now in terms of the quality of life comes from that. And some of the decisions that we have to make as citizens, as a country, as a government have a scientific element to them, and if we can examine those uh scientific

facts carefully, we can make better decisions. And the other way I think about it is, would you rather live in a society where where people just sort of believe whether they want to believe? Would you rather be part of a community where everyone, even if you have disagreements in terms of your ideologies, your politics or philosophy, you at least agree that facts are facts. And I think that's you know, one of the keys I think to

me is why I want people to be more scientifically literate. See, I would like to live in a society where facts are important and and reality matters. But for now I'm staying in America so until we resolve that. Um. But the funny thing is and I only say that half jokingly. On the finance side, you have people like Ray Dalio of Bridgewater and and other people who have made that exact argument, with the caveat that if you put capital at risk based on something that is not reality based,

well you're gonna lose money. And so what we see in politics is there, at least so far, there's not a penalty for believing things that are untrue. The beauty of the markets are that feedback loop is very immediate. Politics, you can go decades. Look at the people who claimed smoking didn't close cancer. It took decades before that came home to roost right. And I'll just add I think

this works on a personal level too. I think that people who are uh scientifically literate or at least can think in a more scientific way, can make better decisions for themselves so they don't get into trouble, they don't either fall for scams, or they can make better career choice and necessartainly it can lead to to better options for themselves. That's a fair, fair statement. Here's the credible pushback we were going to get about this. And I don't mean the flat earth people or the you know,

anti vaxers or global warming denialists. Very recently something came out and now eggs are bad for us again. If you remember, eggs were bad for us a long time ago, and then eggs were good for us. And I mentioned to somebody I was going to be speaking to you, and their question was, Margarine, can we eat it? Can we throw it away? It was good, it was bad,

It was good, it was bad. I understand the scientific process is provisional, dependent upon whatever the next best piece of information that comes along, But how do you deal with the public that I just can't keep up with all this? How how do you manage that sort of expectation that people want black and white answers in the world that's really very nuanced. And this is sort of what I was alluding to. But for in terms of the responsibility, I think that, uh, journalists and the media

have to cover science accurately and carefully. And uh so the one thing is that, yes, there are many studies out there. Uh there's there are stronger studies and they're weaker studies, and there are there are studies that have mistakes in them as well, and so uh, the journalists who are covering and writing about science to a broader public.

Have to be able to differentiate between what are studies that are have been done with the right um procedures that have the large sample sizes that um, you know, have been carefully vetted by others as well, and then also even in talking about and writing about it um accurately and uh, carefully conveying what the study really says, right, because again that's where you get the headlines that say we've done this or margin is bad for your assault is bad for you, r whatever it is, uh, and

it really they they ignore too often, uh, the nuances of it. What does that study really say? What do we not know? And what are we still trying to learn? So what do you do with something like quantum physics does when we're talking about sub sub atomic particles at a certain point, does that just far beyond the grasp of a lay person to understand? And how do you cover something like that um? Or do you just shrug your shoulders and say, no, one's going to ever understand

what a muan or gluon is amongst the lay population. Well, so I would start by saying that even the foremost experts physicists don't really understand everything about quantum physics, right, So, I mean this is it's very difficult. It's a very difficult.

It's uh subject to wrap your head around. And yet for us, that's the challenge we enjoy, right, We actually liken the And I would go a step further to say that not only are these subjects uh difficult, but at the same time, they're actually some of the most fascinating things that we can think about, because this is the ultimate sort of the most fundamental aspect or layer

of reality that we can try to understand. And so I would hope that everyone would be interested in want to pursue some understanding of this, just for your own to satisfy your own intellectual curiosity. And so I think the interest is there. But you're right, it is a challenge, and we love the challenge and we take it on every day. So along those lines, how do you measure the success of planta? I don't get the sense that you're counting page views and clicks, given that it's not

just a simple um traffic issue. How do you figure out, hey, are we succeeding, are we building a loyal audience, and are we making a difference in people's understanding of science. It sounds like it's really difficult to come up with a measure of that right now, that's a good question, and so we uh never use traffic as a justification for doing a story. We don't chase after clicks or views. However, what we're really looking at is impact, right broader impact.

Are we both covering the science that is important, Are we choosing the right stories that ever, and are we doing it in a way that it's accessible and it's interesting and gets at the key insights in a way that enough people will want to read it and learn about it. And so there is a measure of of reach as well. We do want the audience to grow right now. We have see last year, I think we're

at over seven million people visit our site. Uh, and it's it's growing year year to year very nicely, because again, people are interested in these subjects and we're trying our best to make it accessible for them. Um. So it's both. Uh,

the numbers are important. At the same time, we want to make sure that the people who are reading it, especially the people who are experts who actually know these subjects really well, also find it valuable and they they find that that this is actually a resource that not only they can use, but that we are actually accurately covering the subjects for anyone who wants to learn more.

So what's it like working with the Simons Foundation? I know that he has a deep and abiding interest in mathematics and has set up a number of philanthropic UM goals so try and not only focus on some of the really sophisticated, deep progress in math, but also make Americans a better UM mathematical society, early learning in math and some advanced mathematical UM programs. How do you interact

with the with the foundation? Yeah? So, and I should add that really the one of the founders and the president of the Foundation is Maryland Simon's Jim Simon's wife, and she leads a lot of the efforts that are geared more towards education and outreach and making sure people understand and know more about science and Quanta falls under that umbrella within the foundation, and so we I speak with both Jim and Maryland, and probably a little more

of Maryland because that's that's uh the area that she um leads UM. And you know, really the Foundation is a fantastic place to work it's it's a place where you have good ideas are supported, and I hope you

know people think that Quanta was a good idea. At the same time, the freedom is uh, whether it's academic freedom for researchers to study and pursue what they're interested in and to learn whatever they can about the universe, or our journalistic freedom to do real independent journalism UM while trying to to benefit society and make the impact that we can. So so let's talk about the two collections that you put out UM. One is on math, one is on science. The first one the Prime Number

of Conspiracy. You have a lovely forward from James Glick, who has written a number of books, perhaps most famously Chaos. I think right, the master of science writing Chaos. It's

just a fastening. And his most recent book was on time Travel, although I will describe it as somewhat skeptical UM and and kind of a survey of all the various thoughts on but but in this book you really go into a lot of details about various UM new discoveries in there are these mathematical problems that have been around for decade, in some cases centuries, and whether it's computing power or something else. Prime numbers a perfect example,

the prime number conspiracy. Suddenly we're able to reach conclusions that we couldn't have done a century ago or even a few decades ago. Right, math is just I mean pure math especially right, I mean this is this is one of those areas where and then one of the deep questions that you know, people have asked over the years is, you know, why does math even work in describing the real world? Right? Is math invented or discovered?

That's just one of those questions. It's a great diconomy, right, right, and and so but the pure math that we cover, um, you know, it is done again to build out this logical universe, right, to sort of see where where people can explore. It's almost like it's it's not necessarily a

map to our actual reality. And yet, strangely, some of the math that's being developed just again extending our our logical universe does come up back to be being very useful in terms of the physics and other science is that we're studying. So this is just one of the philosophically, I feel like that's one of the most interesting questions out there. Why does it work? And and let's talk about Alison Bob Meet the Wool of Fire. You have to explain that title for people who may not be

familiar with the subject. Sure, sure, I picked the title. It's it's one of the stories that's in the book, um, because it's sounds kind of dramatic, right you have. And the cover has shows two astronauts standing in front of this hole in the ground which is supposed to have metaphorically represent a black hole, and there's a ring of fire around this, uh deep dark pit. Um. And and this is actually one of the interesting theoretical questions and

physics that has come about in recent years. It was put forward by a few researchers, including Joe Polcensky uh who unfortunately passed away um recently. Um. But the question is this, and it's also made that Stephen Hawking put forth initially, which is black holes we know, okay, have our have intense gravity and they suck things in and the things from at a at a quantum level, contain quantum information, and if something falls into a black hole,

you know what happens to that information. Especially after Stephen Hawking uh discovered that black holes radiate and if they're radiating what's now known as as Hawking radiation. Then eventually, over a very very long time period, the black hole will evaporate and disappear. And so what happened a lot of information that fell into the black hole in the first place. You can't physics says, you can't lose information,

and you've got to conserve information. And so what happens to and so this is a paradox which was highlighted by this idea that that these researchers, including Jobisky, had of a black hole firewall. And so the idea was, well, if information that drops in, we can't lose it, maybe there's a firewall that just incinerates everything before it gets

and so it never goes inside. And this also gets at again one of the most fundamental questions right now in physics, which is how do we reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, Because general relativity says, if we follow Einstein's um laws of gravity, which you know essentially is described as as uh curvature and spacetime, if you fall into a black hole as you pass the event horizon, nothing should happen according to general relativity, should you shouldn't

feel anything at all, but quantum mechanics says everything has to be quantized, everything has to be done in discrete bits and is particle interactions. And so that's where you have the problem of the information coming falling in and possibly disappearing when the black hole evaporates, and that's where you get this firewall. And so quantum mechanics makes you think maybe there has to be something like a firewall or something that that's preventing the information from getting in

and getting lost. And so there's this big conflict between the two most fundamental theories that we have in physics, and we don't yet know how to connect those two things. It's quite fascinating. We have been speaking with Thomas Lynn. He is the founding editor and editor in chief of Quanta, as well as two collections of articles Alice and Bob Meat, The Wall of Fire, The Biggest Ideas in Science and

The Prime Number Conspiracy, The Biggest Ideas in Math. If you enjoy this conversation, come back for the podcast extras. Will we keep the tape rolling and continue discussing all things quantum mechanics. You can find that at iTunes, overcast, uh Stitcher, Bloomberg dot com wherever your finer podcasts are sold. We love your comments, feedback, end suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion.

Follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. I'm Barry Rid Halts. You're listening to Masters and Business Fun Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Thomas. Thank you so much for for doing this. Um. I've been reading Quanta pretty much since it first came out and kind of felt like it was you and me and not a lot of people

um knew about it. I'm a little bit of a science geek, um, but every now and then there's something kind of intriguing and accessible, and so I would work some of your your stories into my my list of go read these ten things each morning than you reading that, and uh, well, it was just really interesting stuff. And I love being the person who gets to expose other people to something new and interesting, and the work you

guys do is quite fascinating. I actually have lots and lots of Jim Simon's stories, most of which I won't share on the air, but I could share one, which is I went to Stony Brook and undergraduate. I started out anyway as applied mathematics and physics. And when I was getting a tour of the university when I was still in high school, I want to say, this was

like seventy seven or seventy eight. You get a tour of the math department, or at least in the tour, there's the math department, and there's this guy standing outside chain smoking a cigarette with this sort of scraggly beard, and I just remember thinking, who the hell is that, um? And then you know, and there's the head of our

mathematics department, Jim Simons. I recall looking at him and thinking, this guy is lucky he's an academic because if he ever went into finance, no one would give this guy a dime, which is which is pretty hilarious considering how spectacular the track record of renaissance technolo pologies Um has been. I have other stories, but he definitely has an adventurous spirit and he's such a code breaker. Just an amazing background, right, so smart and and so many interests. Really, you know,

is modern day um, you know, um renaissance man. He really is. And and the fact that he said says to himself. I'm gonna put together a hedge fund, but I'm not gonna do it in New York and I'm not gonna do in Granwich, Connecticut. I'm gonna do it out in he's there and needs to talk it. Um, I've never been out there. I mean, I know the area, it's past Stony Brook. And I'm not gonna do it with traditional Wall Street people. I'm just gonna hire mathematicians

and physicists and computer programmers. I think that's the most fascinating story in um in finance, just yeah, yeah, what Wall Street is doing is interesting, but I'm going to do it this way and and has been tremendously successful. So it's it's so able to do the work that we do because of it. It's in credibly inspiring that someone could say the mainstream approach is not where my strength lay and I'm going to do it this way and it ends up being wildly successful. It's it's you

gotta love a story like that. It's fascinating, So I know I only have you for for a short period of time. There were one or two questions we missed that I wanna get to before I get to my my favorite um questions. I know we we talked about how long it could take to write a story, But when you're trying to figure out, hey, will this make for a good piece, what what goes into that calculus? Yeah,

I know, it's a combination of things. One is that we want to make sure that what we're covering is uh some of the most important and and perceived that way by the research community. Itself important ideas that well then lead to new other ideas and it's really pushing things forward. So one thing is that. Another is that you know, we do want to cover again attempts to answer some of the big fundamental questions that really is

ultimately what we're about at Quanta. I think that's what I feel is a draw to anybody out there, whether you have a science or math background or not, is that you want to know where we came from, where the universe came from, what is in this universe that that we're a part of, and you know, what is reality made of? Really? And so if if you want to know these things, you have to get at some of these basic questions that the research that we cover

try to answer. I don't remember if this was Quanta I read pretty broadly, but I think it was Quanta that the discussion. So we have the general theory of Big Bang, and there's a few holes in that theory. How did that giant inflationary expansion happened? Blah blah blah. But but some people have looked at we'll go back before the Big Bang, and I recall reading I hope

I'm not getting this wrong. Someone had written a theoretical physics piece that said that the idea of nothingness is inherently unstable, and so you can't have nothingness forever because eventually nothingness will just vomit out a universe. Because on a human level, we understand what nothing this is, but on a I can't even say galactic within the broad universe, having absolutely nothing is just unbalanced and unstable and can't be sustained for trillions of years. What was that a

quantity piece? So there there we did do a story

that looked at some new ideas. Um. You know that in cosmology where you know, there's a lot of evidence that something like cosmic inflation happened, right, Um, Although there are questions as to whether there was really just one Big Bang or whether there's more of a cyclic kind of thing going on, or more of a big bounce, right where things are expanding and then they end up contracting and then they bounce and you had another inflationary period, and you know, things kind of go in that way

because because there was a you know, just one and if there was nothing before that, then we'll eventually the universe will eventually do. And what even entropy? What even that the the initial ingredients to to to lead to the inflation of the universe. Right, So there's a lot of questions that are hard to answer um with with the existing knowledge. Just wait a few trillion years and we'll have all the answers. Yes, we either that or

we love nothing. That's exactly right. So let me get to some of my favorite questions that I asked all my guests. Um, let's jump right into it. Tell us the most important thing that we don't know about Thomas Lynn. Wow. Uh, let's see, you do probably do not know that. In when I was twenty, I wrote a bicycle across the United States of America. Really, I have a friend who did that. What was that? Like? That was amazing? We were young, We did not know what we were doing.

It was a group. No, it's just a friend and I so college buddy, and either was between my junior and senior years in college. That we took those those months to ride from Oregon to New York? And how long did the most amazing thing? Uh? It took about two months? Mm hmm? And where are you sleeping? How how you eating? Was? We? We went a whole hog in terms of just putting everything that we needed to

live on the bicycles themselves. We had about fifty sixty pounds of gear in our panniers in the front and the back, over the front and back wheels and everything we needed from the tent sleeping bags to a cook stove that we went to the gas station to pay five cents to get a little bit of gas to to cook our meals. Everything we needed and clothing and food and everything was in those bags and we had quite an adventure. How long did this take? This took

about two months? And uh and and even counting for the extra day we spent in Yellowstone National Park and places where we wanted to sort of enjoy ourselves a little bit. Um, did you did you map it out in advance or was it just on the kind of wing on the road. Yeah. So back then, I mean back before we had I know, GB, I right, No,

GB has no phones, smartphones, any of that sort of thing. Um. There was an organization called Bike Centennial that used to sell these different routes that you could take, and I think the one we took. The route we took was one of the longer ones. It was called I think the trans America Route is about four thousand miles where you went up from Oregon up to Idaho and Montana to the Rockies and then you ended up winding and going down the Rockies all the way down to Colorado.

We crossed the Continental Divide like nine times, I believe, and then we started heading across the planes Kansas and back up through Missouri back to New York. That four thousand miles, That's that's impressive. Um. Tell us about your early mentors who impacted the way you looked the world of of both writing and and science. Yeah, so many mentors.

I mean, you know, I have to really thank everybody that almost all the editors that I've worked for and with over the years, especially some of the editors at the Science Desk, former editors. Now some of them like Laura Chang was that was the desk editor at the New York the science desk editor at the New York Times when I was there. Jim Gorman was Science Times

editor at the time. David Corkrane. So many of these editors helped shape me as a writer and editor and also thinking about the best ways to communicate science to the public. So let's talk about your favorite books, be they fiction, non fiction, science or not. What do you like? I read a lot of different things, more recent books would see. Right now, I'm reading viet Ton When's book The Sympathizer, which I think a couple of years ago when the Pulitzer to be as a fictional novel about

the Vietnam War. I also recently read TV Stroke Guests just published a new book called Infinite Powers. It's about calculus. It's amazing. Whether you like calculus or whether you hate it, you will love the book and you will learn things that you never knew you uh could, or or that you wanted to. But you will be uh uh so uh happy that you did. Wow, that's fascinat. Give us, give us one more book. Okay, wow, so uh you know what those are more recent books going all the

way back. I was maybe two quick books that in terms of my all time favorites. One is The Kingdom and the Power by Gate to least, it's about the New York Times during that era decades ago, about how it served as both the fourth Estate as a publication, but also the internal machinations and the politics and the

the internal sort of struggles within the newsroom itself. And it gives you a really really good insight into how a major newspaper like The Times came to be and operate the other and you were there, so did ring read very very much fundings that decades later, I was there and still many of the same general themes existed, and it was really fascinating to read be reading the book while also living it. Uh there And the other book I would say that's one of my all time

favorites is The Peloponnesian War by Thucydities. It's about um, the conflict between UH, the Greeks, UM and UH and and the Spartan Um back you know many centuries UH and and UH and it you know to me that that gets at some of the universal aspects of human nature, of societies, of why we get into conflicts and why we fight these wars. So, if a millennial or recent college grad came up to you and said they were thinking about a career in either science or math journalism,

what sort of advice might you give them? You know, I would say, Um, find a place and people uh to work for and with that represent your values, that are the kind of work that you want that you see yourself doing, and at the same time be open to learning. Right. I think this is not about millennials

or any particular generation. I think all young people starting out, UM, come in you know, sometimes thinking that that they have a lot of things figured out, and yet the people around you off and have a lot of experience, and especially the ones who are looking out for you and have your back. Um, you know, it's good to work with them and listen to them and try to pick up a few things, because ultimately you will be that person down the road who will hopefully be giving a

lending hand to the next generation. And our final question, what is it that you know about the world of physics and science and mathematics and journalism today that you wish you knew twenty years or so ago. When you're really exploring this this area. Wow. You know what, I think I would say that I was just so new to it back you know, twenty years ago, I wasn't even thinking about journalism yet as a career, right. I

think it was probably teaching at the time. Um. But I think that having gone through what I have and and having started this magazine and published these two books, I think that it feels very liberating in terms of knowing what you can build and the impact that you can create even when something doesn't currently exist that you uh want to exist, right, and so sort of thinking big and thinking, well, maybe we don't have this thing yet that in society or this publication doesn't yet exist,

or at this company that you might want to start, and just having a little bit of that confidence and and putting in the elbow grease and and learning as much as you can, but having the willingness to go out and make the things that you think the world deserves. Quite fascinating. We have been speaking with Thomas Lynn. He is the editor in chief and founder of Quantum Magazine

as well was the editor of two recent publications. The first is The Prime Number of Conspiracy and the second is Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire, both of which are discussing the biggest ideas in science and mathematics. If you've enjoyed this conversation, well be sure and looks up an Inch or down an Inch on Apple iTunes and you can see any of the other two hundred and fifty or so such conversations we've had with people

over the past five years. UH. You can also find the rest of our UM archives at Stitcher, Overcast, SoundCloud, Bloomberg dot com, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. If you've enjoyed this conversation, go to Apple iTunes, give us a five star review and tell us why you like this. If you don't like this, we'll send me an email and

I'll i'll respond personally. I would be remiss if I did not mention the crack staff that helps put together this conversation each week. Medina Parwana is my engineer slash producer, as well as a conscience of Generation UM. Taylor Riggs is our booker. Attika val Brunn is our project manager. My Kilbatnick is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Master's in Business on Bloomberg Radio