Transcription
I want to try to do a breakdown of super symmetry so people can understand it.
Okay.
Um, can you give me just a high-level view?
I can try.
On on what this is.
Sure. I actually have graphics and talks that I give, and I I'm happy to share them with you afterwards. But, um, maybe you can find some. Are they online at all?
Or they're in some of they're in some of the talks I have given online.
Okay. Yes. So, let me try to start this way. If you walk into a high school high school chemistry chemistry class and you look on the wall, you're likely to see a chart.
Mhm.
In one corner, it has a letter H.
Mhm.
And at the other side, it has a letters H E. It's the table of elements. This is something almost universally known.
Now, that table of elements was created by a Russian scientist named Mendeleev. And when Mendeleev first had the idea of creating the table of elements, he didn't know all the elements we know. And so therefore, if you look at his old chart, which you can, like I said, I have copies of it that I talk to people about. So when you look at his old chart, it actually has holes in it. And he used the presence of these holes to predict elements that no one had ever seen yet. And not only did you find, and we eventually as a species find all those, we found a lot more.
Mhm.
So the modern table of elements has gone through an evolution. Now let's talk about what we know about the universe right now. We know about electrons, and in fact, electrons are a member of a family of things that are called leptons. So there's a whole family of things that are kind of like electrons, but they're slightly different. Um, inside of protons and neutrons, there are these particles called quarks, and they they also come in families. So if you ask me or any scientist, what's the what is the best observational um data we have about the most the smallest things in the universe, we're going to tell you about those objects. And like I said, I have a chart that I'm happy to share with you.
Mhm.
However, um, you're not just a bunch of particles floating around. You're you're an organized structure.
Right?
And that means that these particles have to have things that link them together. And these links are the four fundamental forces because nature actually has four. There's electromagnetism. For example, uh, light charges repel. That's a symbol.
Yeah.
Um, there is um, the strong nuclear force. The strong nuclear force is the form of nuclear energy that powers the sun.
Strong nuclear force.
Then there's a separate nuclear force called the weak nuclear force. And the um simplest way I can give you access to that is to tell you that if you look at old science fiction movies from the 1950s, radioactive things always glowed. That glow is due to the weak nuclear force. So it's a real thing. It's not Hollywood just out there selling the story. So our universe looks like it's made of two things: the things that get hooked together and the things that are doing the hooking.
Yeah.
And that's a chart that I that you can find in many many places. But the particular version of the chart that I use highlights the fact that that it's looks to me and like a lot of us like what we're looking at is the equivalent of Mendeleev's first table of elements. It has holes.
M.
And if that's true, then uh, if we're fortunate, we will one day get the technology to fill in those holes, just like we filled in the holes of the Mendeleev table of elements. This turns out to be part of super string theory, by the way. So I said it's the particle, it's the math that sits under all this stuff. So over here, we can see a demonstration of the table of elements as Mendeleev saw them. And as you can see, if we can scroll down a little bit, you can see there are holes there, those white spaces.
Those correspond to elements that no one had observed at the time that Mendeleev put this table together.
Now, let's go to the next image.
This is the modern table of elements. And you'll notice it has essentially no holes left. And so, and there are lots more boxes here.
That's because we have discovered since Mendeleev many, many more elements. And so that's why this is a thing that you see in high school. Now let's go and look at elementary particles. This table here, that letter E inside of the sphere that you see there, that represents the electron.
Okay?
And you'll notice there's a grouping of things around it. Every single one of those other spheres represents particles that we have observed in the last 100 years. Those particular particles behave a lot like electrons, which is why they're grouped down there in the same color.
Okay. Now next to that, you see there are a group of particles inside of labels inside of red spheres.
Those are the quarks that sit inside of protons and neutrons. And in particular, the U is called the up quark. The D is called the down quark. And that's two up quarks and a down quark is sit inside of every proton.
Okay.
Now up in that upper right-hand corner, you see more spheres. Now, what's sitting the labels in there are not talking about particles uh like the quarks and electrons. These are the particles that carry the forces that cause the uh electrons and quarks to clump together to form atoms. Every force in nature has a carrier particle.
And so this is what we know about the universe right now. This is the extent of our science of asking what's the most fundamental objects you find in the
And these carrier particles are called bosons.
Yes, they're called bosons, and the one with the Greek symbol gamma is the photon. It's in yellow.
Okay.
Uh, remember we talked about nuclear forces. We said there are actually two different forms of nuclear force. There's a strong nuclear force, which is the source of energy for the sun.
And there's a weak nuclear force, which is why radioactive things glow. And so since those are forces, they also have carriers. And those carriers are what you see in up in the upper hand uh quadrant. And the H is the Higgs boson because it's also a force carrier. Now I have a question for you, Danny.
Is that is that very balanced? Is that a pretty picture?
Yeah. Uh, it's definitely not balanced.
Okay. Can we get switch to the next diagram? If super symmetry is an accurate description of nature, we're going to find all these other particles. And this is almost exactly like looking at Mendeleev's initial table and then looking at today's table. And that's why the issue of super symmetry is um so hotly uh studied and uh, in fact, it was the hope that the LHC would begin to see some of these additional particles. That's one of the primary reasons it was built, but it didn't. So, um, that's what we're aiming for. Uh, and you ask, are we going to have fundamental breakthroughs if we start to see these things? The answer is yes.
Right. Wow.
Now, this particular rendition, can you go back one slide for me? This particular rendition is my creation to try to explain to people what we mean when we talk about symmetry. Because you can see this thing is not balanced. Whereas the second one is, and that's the symmetry is the balance.
Because everything in everything in our in nature is symmetrical.
Symmetry has guided us in understanding nature since Isaac Newton.
And so we don't know. I can't say everything is. I can only say has been a reliable guide for several hundred years.
Right. Extended super symmetry, where does that go?
Oh boy. You've done your homework too. Uh, so if we can switch to the next picture, if extended super symmetry is an accurate description of our nature, what's going to happen is there'll be many more particles added to these blocks.
Outside of it.
Yeah. Outside of the ones I'm showing here. This is just what we call super a simple super symmetry equal one.
Yeah.
So you've had your physics lesson for the day.
Now, what could super symmetry lead to?
This is a good question. And remember, I will appeal again to Arthur C. Clarke's statement about predicting the future is a hassle is is a hazard hazardous business. So what could it lead to? Well,
If I put on my big my far science fiction hat.
Mhm.
Um, part of the interesting hat.
Tinfoil. That's right. Tinfoil hat. Part of the really fascinating things about this table that I'm showing with all the super partners.
Mhm.
Can uh, if we can get the arrow over on the E on the E symbol to the left in the bottom left-hand corner, there's an.
Yeah, that's a a a mathematical representation of the electron. And we know electrons exist because the technology we're using right now is based on manipulating electrons.
Now, if we can scroll to the right a little bit, stop. You'll notice there's an E with a little tilde on it on top of it. A little squiggle.
Yes.
So super symmetry says that to the particles we know, which are on the left-hand side, there are these particles we have never discovered that exist if we get a sufficient, if our universe is super symmetric and we obtain the technology to measure them. Now, what's special here? Well, because these are sort of balanced, you can sort of ask yourself the next question: Is there a way to make a transition between these two sides? Is there an instrumentality or a physical law that lets me switch them? Because if you can, it means that you can replace the E's over here, which are electrons without the funny uh tilde on top of them, with the electrons with them.
The thing electrons with them have different properties.
And the thing that's really interesting is in my, when I wear my science fiction hat,
That could be the scientific basis of a transporter.
A transporter?
As in Star Trek.
Interesting.
Yeah. And this is my science fiction hat. I can't guarantee. But if you ask me what is possible, in the realm of possibility, this is the first piece of mathematics that suggests that you might be able to build a transporter.
And what h how specifically does a a theoretical transporter work?
So you, okay, so the reason you would want to um convert electrons to these things called electrons and you wanted to switch on all the particles is because um these super things are um more malleable. You can actually move them through uh substances that you can't move an ordinary electron through. And so that's why it would be the basis of something like a transporter.
Oh wow. Could this extended super symmetry lead to potential anti-gravity effects?
This is something that re super symmetry research has looked at um since the 1980s, I think it was.
There are versions of super symmetry, not this version, because remember what we're talking about here are mathematical equations.
But there are versions of very similar equations where anti-gravity is definitely present.
Interesting.
Yes. But those mathematical models, we don't know how to extend them to having electrons. But those models do exist. They've been in literature for about 20 years.
Okay. Um, now, how does this connect to the Adinkra symbols?
Oh my goodness. I didn't know you were going to go there.
Yeah.
Uh, can we break?
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
Didn't know you were going to go there.
Sorry. No problem. No problem.
Howdy, folks. 70% of y'all aren't subscribed. Did you know that? So, if you're already watching, I think you rock and I'm really glad you found us. So, hit the subscribe button down below to get more awesome episodes like this, which will also help us get more great guests. Now, back to the show. In in your attempt to understand the fundamental nature of reality. Um, it led you to this set of equations that are, and I might butcher this, there. The set, the set of equations that you were led to are indistinguishable from the types of equations that are used for search engines and web browsers that we use on computers.
That's the next part of the story, and that's exactly right. It turns out that um, so when Michael and I first figured out that you can take data from equations and embed it into images, it was clear to me that we were doing something that no one else in our part of physics had ever thought about. And it was also clear that it was mathematics. So immediately, almost immediately after Michael and I wrote our paper, which I think was in 2004, 2005.
Mhm.
Um, he reached out to some mathematicians that he had known, and it turned out I had actually interacted with these mathematicians without knowing it, and we formed a math-physics collaboration. And the purpose of the collaboration was to study the mathematical properties of these images that we that Michael and I had created. And in 2008, the six of us, there are three physicists, three mathematicians, the six of us came to this discovery that the structure of these pictures includes bits, but not just random assortments of bits, but bits in the form of what are known as computer error correction, classical error correcting codes in computer science. They're actually embedded in the structure of these pictures. And this is, thank you for asking the question, because this is the wildest thing I've ever been part of in physics because this will be the first, this, if super symmetry is true, and it's got to be accurate, and if we can observe it, this will be the first instance in science where computer codes will be parts of the fundamental laws of physics. That's the real significance of this.
What does that even mean?
Well, a lot of people like to say something I don't believe. They like to say that means we're that our universe is is as depicted in the Matrix movies.
Mhm.
Because we live in a simulation.
Right?
There are people, lots of people for decades have been saying Jim Gates has proven that we live in the simulation. I don't believe that.
What it sounds like.
Well, well, to to folks that are not scientists, yes, but not to scientists. The problem with that statement is that it's not a scientific statement. Um, because science by definition is about things that you can prove are false.
And that statement can never be proven be false.
Right?
That's why it's not science. And so I actually have a a more complicated um intuition, and I probably will never live long enough to see see it sorted out. My intuition is that error correction not only occurs in computer science, but error correction appears to occur in gen uh, occur in genetics because um, there's been this long-standing argument in genetics that error correction must be present because it suppresses random occurrences of mutations. And if you have a genome that's evolving, you want to do that at some level because if you let random mutations uh, occur, then the offspring are not going to be viable.
Right?
So genetics likely does have some error correction uh in it. Now, that's the only part of nature that we have observed in our several millennia on this species on this planet where error correction is appears to be in a physical system.
Mhm.
So then you can ask a question, how did it get there?
And
How did the error correction get there into these systems?
And the answer is evolution. Systems evolve to have these error corrections. How does how does evolution work? Well, what it says basically is as you look at uh, how species um, survive in time, the ones that have the right um, genetic um, codes have survival advantages. So, um, let's see, the ability, let's see, what's a prime example of this? The ability to walk on two limbs instead of four.
Right.
Right. You have a certain advantage with two over four because that then frees the other two to manipulate. Right. So this is this is a fundamental thing. So the way evolution works is it says that in, if you have a a selection of possibilities of traits of uh, of um, a population,
Then the environment will pick out those traits that are more uh, valuable in terms of survival because others will die.
That's ev that's the essence of evolution. So if I look at this explanation for evolution in genetics and then look at the fact that we have found error correction. Well, first of all, evolution is must is likely to be some kind of error correction, and the fact that we have found error correction in the form of equations suggests to me that there's something like evolution happened.
With math.
Yeah. Yeah. With the math that describes our universe. So that's my explanation. That's not that's not the Matrix. And whether
And so whether this is the case or not, and thank you by the way for giving me the opportunity to explain this to a general public because
I cannot tell you the number of times people have not allowed me to say this part.
It's very, it's very difficult to grasp this concept. You're saying that the fundamental
Laws
Of physics
Likely underwent some sort of evolution process, some sort of evolution process.
And they're probably still evolving.
I'm not, I wouldn't accept that. Uh, because um,
I mean, maybe that's true.
Because we are still evolving.
We are. But that's that's biological. It's not these laws of physics don't necessarily apply to biology.
Okay.
And um, I mean, look, I can't say that I know the laws are not continuing to evolve, but it just seems very unlikely to me.
Mhm.
Oh my god.
So that's the that's the far out weirdness that my scientific journey has taken me to. And um, you know, it's exciting to be able to give, you know, give these sorts of ideas to the scientific community and the public that come from, remember I commented that all of my heroes follow their own. It's exciting to be able to do that and come to these kinds of conclusions.
So there was a scientist in the 40s who came up with the idea of of transmitting data, right, bits.
Yes. Claude Shannon, I believe.
That is exactly who it is.
U, but there's also a contribution from uh, another scientist named Hamming. So Hamming actually is the one who really stood up the. So you're right, Claude uh, Shannon
Is the person who came up with the idea of what we uh, both computer scientists and physicists call um, the uh, entropy content content of information.
Yes.
That that information itself has entropy associated with it, and he wrote an equation for this.
Hamming comes along and shows that if you want to have digital structures that communicate reliably, they have to have error correcting codes built into their structure.
Yes. And so, uh, as I said, these are my guide stones in trying to understand this very strange result that we have found classical error correcting codes in the in the context of equations that might describe our physical universe.
Because when you transmit a data packet from one computer here to another computer in Beijing,
The fluctuations in the transmission medium will flip bits unless you put in a mechanism for unflipping the bits, and those are the error correcting codes. That's was that was basically Hamming's observation.
Right. Okay. So, if a, well, a computer that transmits data and bits is bound by the laws of entropy, right? So if you have a blank hard drive with no data on it at all, that hard drive would be very low entropy, right? From a purely physical standpoint, it would be either all ones or all zeros.
That's correct.
When you encode data on it, say we store this podcast on that hard drive, it becomes a chaotic mess of ones and zeros.
It could.
Right?
It could.
So that would make it high entropy. Chaos is typically associated with high. Yes.
So it'd be more chaotic from a purely physical perspective, but when you plug a TV monitor or a computer monitor into that hard drive, it becomes, it gives us, it gives it meaning. You have the video files or the documents or whatever it is on there.
That's a very interesting point that I hadn't thought about.
I'm not sure I'm willing to comment. That's that's simply a point. I mean, the fact that you actually need to have an actor, namely the video, that's actually very. What is that's ringing a bell with me. Oh, yes. It's ringing a bell with me because a scientist named John Wheeler effectively said the same thing about information in the universe. He said that it's actually a statement called "it from bit."
Yes, I've heard of that. And it's the statement you just made.
Okay. Yeah. Because the computer monitor kind of acts like a consciousness.
Yes.
To transcribing the the physical raw data into meaning.
Yes. Into knowledge, I would say.
So what happens when you erase that hard drive? If it's bound by the laws of thermodynamics and entropy can all always goes up and and and uh energy can, there's all, there's net energy can only be transferred. Right.
You have exceeded my comfort zone.
That's okay. You've been exceeding my comfort zone this whole podcast. So that's fair. Um, the something has to leave that hard drive, right?
You have exceeded my comfort zone. I am not, uh, when people ask me questions that I haven't thought about, I don't answer them with whatever comes up. I I need time to think about it.
It's just interesting. Hear me out. Um, and you know, comment or not, but it's just interesting to me. This idea has been proposed to me that if you crack open a hard drive, well, first of all, if the information on the hard drive could, and there, there's a gentleman who um, actually published this theory, his name was Ralph Landauer.
Not familiar with the work. Uh, he said he did an equation that all the mass on all the data's on all the hard drives and server farms throughout the world right now is like, if you had the tools to accurately measure and weigh the mass, it would equal like a kilogram of mass, but it would, he said it would equal mass. So if that theory, that information on a hard drive could equal mass, since mass and energy are interconvertible, then mass, energy, and information could be also interconvertible.
So he says if you crack open a hard drive, you, it's invisible. You can't see that mass. It's electromagnetically undetectable. And he made that connection to when we look at universes, the spin of the universes, the center of a of a universe spins at the same speed as the outer rim. And and the dark matter is mass that's flattening the spin rate. So he made the the connection to say if dark matter equals mass that's electromagnetically undetectable because we can't see it, then maybe what's in that hard drive could be the same thing as dark matter.
Uh, again, these are not ideas that I have thought about, and so I uh, have no comments to make.
Yeah. Well, it's just interesting because it it connects to the bits and the like the whole "it from bit" thing, right? And like, could, you know, tinfoil hat, could dark matter be uh, some sort of a computational cloud?
Yeah. This is a very interesting uh premise, and it's also something that Feynman himself kind of contributed to at one point. Feynman made this very interesting statement at a conference that there's a whole lot of computation going on in order to make physics work. And he found that mysterious.
A whole lot of computation going on.
Yeah. That the that the magnitude of computation that the universe has to do in order to get our physics is staggering, or something like that. You should look this comment up if you're interested in this sort of thing.
Yeah. And that leads to, you know, like the idea of consciousness.
It does indeed lead to the idea of consciousness.
Like, you know, the idea of how like, can you build up to consciousness from from protons and neutrons and electrons? And does it, we haven't found a way to reconcile consciousness from matter. So if you include in the word "build," build the actions of humans in this process, then I think the answer is yes, you can. Because having watched the progress of computer technology in my lifetime and interacting, as I, as I said to Steve, I've been interacting a lot recently with uh, some AIs, ChatGPT and
Why can I never remember the other one? Google has a has Gemini.
Gemini. So these are my two friends. I interact with them almost every day. And so having that experience of watching a world go from uh, essentially computers are these big boxes that someone has in an air-conditioned room.
The ENIAC. And when I started, the first time I was exposed to computers, it was with punch cards. That's how old I am. They used to have these cards you punch the holes in.
Wasn't that, was von Neumann the one, von Neumann machine? Yeah. The von Neumann machine. And so having watched this evolution of computers from those days to now, I've I my belief, let me say it this way, is that at some point, something indistinguishable from consciousness is likely to arise in computers. Now, this is beyond the Turing test. I don't know if you know what the Turing test is.
Okay.
What I'm talking about is actually beyond the Turing test because to me,
That's kind of a mechanistic, first level of consciousness, namely to be able to respond to uh, inputs with reasonable outputs. In fact, the current, in my from my experience with uh, the recent AIs, they are inference machines. And what I mean by that is they don't do calculations, but they infer from the data that you give them a result. So they're inference engines. Inference to me is not consciousness. Consciousness, at least from all of my life experience, consciousness has this element about it where the outputs exceed what the inputs are.
Right?
And that pluses the role of consciousness. And until I see that, I claims of consciousness are not consistent with
We've all had "aha" moments where like, it seems like something just comes to us, right?
Yes.
Where there's like the the sum of whatever that is is not is way greater than all the inputs.
Yes. And you know, neuro psychologists have some have made statements that have uh, imprinted themselves on my thinking about that. And one of them is to understand that each of us is, there's each of us is actually kind of two computing systems. There is the conscious, and that's who's talking to you right now. But there's also the uh, subconscious, which decides that I prefer green to red. Right? There's no rational reason why this. And there are some writings in the neuro uh, psychological literature that to the effect that the amount of data processed by our subconscious is orders and orders of magnitude greater than what goes on in our conscious mind.
Right?
And therefore, if this is right, there's a part of all of us that is doing even more thinking than we sort of remember and can recall.
And it's that part, I believe, that generates these "aha" moments.
Yeah. And then you have dreams where you're processing all of the inputs from the previous day to help you.
Yeah. And in my case, some of those dreams are mathematical. No, literally. It's literally true.
Oh.
It's not a joke. It's literally true.
Your dreams are literally mathematical.
Yeah. I have it happened. I have people who can testify to having seen that in some of my interactions.
How, what do you mean?
Well, um, so the most recent example was partly connected to my work at Brown University.
And I had a graduate student who, um, urged me to go and watch a video of a French mathematician giving a lecture on a subject I had never heard of before. The lecture uh, online uh, at an event hosted by an Indian research institution. That night, I had a dream, and the next day, I knew the answer to uh, a set of 300 calculations. And it just came from the dream. And I took it to my graduate student and said, "Write some code and see if this is right," and it was.
You had looked at this the day before?
No, I I saw a lecture the day before.
Okay. And for whatever reasons, my subconscious used it to figure out something. I know it sounds like magic. And this is the first time sort of I've talked about this experience, but I have a couple of other similar experiences and a few of them have witnesses.
Whoa. Whoa. And you were able to do this in your mind and you corroborated it with a computer?
Well, my student did.
Your student did. And what, what, what types of equations were these?
So, they weren't equations. They were graphical images that gave rise to equations. And somehow I made a a connection.
Graphical images.
Yeah. Yeah. Like Adinkras. These all the things in question were not Adinkras. They're actually a piece of mathematics called permutohedra.
Um, but the point was that these are actually relevant for Adinkras. And so
We were able to u
Write a paper called "The 300 Correlators" as a joke on "The 300 Spartans."
The 300 Correlators.
I like to have fun when I do physics.
Wow. And there's been many times where you've where you've done something similar by going to sleep and dreaming.
Have been other times. Yes. But most of them don't have uh, witnesses.
Right?
I just come in and say, "Try this, and it works."
Yeah. Yeah. That's the crazy thing about about the human mind and consciousness is it's that we haven't figured it out. And it's it does seem like magic in many cases.
Yes, it does.
Yeah. And
There's a mathematician that's uh, I hold up as the greatest example of this. There's an Indian mathematician named uh, Ramanujan, and he literally, if you read about him, you'll find out that he did this regularly.
Yeah. Who was the guy who would say he would sleep on sleep on his books and then wake up and then
That sounds like something similar to something Ramanujan said. He would he would wake up.
The sleeping prophet. That was his name. What was his actual name?
That was
Oh, you're talking about Edward Casey.
Edward Casey.
So, you should wonder why I know about such things.
Yes. Yes. Yes. He would go to sleep on his school books and wake up and know all the content of the book.
That's what he said. At the time, I read those things, I thought, "Oh, that's impossible." I'm not sure. I'm not so sure anymore.
Well, it sounds like science fiction.
It sounds like science fiction. But you know what's crazy is uh, I had this woman in here who writes on national security, and she did this whole book about the Pentagon.
Yes.
It was called "The Pentagon's Brain."
Oh.
And the people that are in the Pentagon who work for an organization um, going back through the Cold War called DARPA, was what it was called. Now it's called ARPA. They would invite routine, every year they would invite the world's top science fiction writers.
Yeah.
To have some sort of like an intellectual brainstorm.
Yeah.
On weapons of the future.
Yeah.
One of the things that's really amazing about our Pentagon, I've uh, in my career, I can't claim I had deep connections, but I've had some connections.
Microphone. Um, is that the part of the reason that our Pentagon is so efficient at what it does is that it has this deeply intellectual part of it that does things like uh, what you just described with DARPA, where people think very deeply and some people would say far outside of the box about possibilities. And that's an example.
Well, they have to. They can't think inside the box because all the other countries are
Also inside the box. Exactly. So the idea is, if you want to get ahead, you have to actually go outside the box.
And they have, they have this blue sky research.
That's exactly the word. Yes.
Where there's like, let's throw money at this insane idea, and who cares if it doesn't pay us off or get some sort of a return. You know.
There is uh, there at least when I was a child, there was a aphorism about um, Edison, which went along the lines that he had to, he had to uh, find a thousand substances that did not allow him to form an incandescent bulb before he found the one that did.
Or something like that.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's um, it's really, it's really wild. And um, going back to the uh, the consciousness stuff and AI, I don't know if I'm convinced like I agree with you that it will become so advanced that it will be indistinguishable from consciousness, but I don't know if it will actually become consciousness.
Well, I don't know how to parse that statement because if it's indistinguishable, which means some kind of observations are being done, I don't know how to ask a deeper level of questions that are not connected to observations.
That's sort of what scientists do.
Sure. And you can certainly, you can certainly ask those questions, but I don't know how to.
Well, think about all the power it takes to power those AIs.
And and how many, how many watts does the human brain run on again? It's like five watts.
Something like that. Something like that.
Yeah. It's nothing.
Yeah. Compared to what they're doing. Well, you know, but part of the problem that you're talking about is this um, set of circumstances is tied up to the current evolution of AI.
Namely, it's deep neural nets and large language models.
Mhm.
There are other things that one could probably do. And who knows, since no one's actually figured out how to do those things, who knows how much more efficient they might be. I saw the other day that, you know, Elon Musk has been historically obsessed and has made it clear that his mission is to populate Mars and get human beings to Mars.
Yes.
And I think just a couple weeks ago, he posted something saying, "No longer is this my goal."
Yes.
"Now we have to focus on the moon."
Yes.
Are you surprised at this?
No. Several years ago, I was on a panel at Rensselaer Polytechnic uh Institute. And you can, and the question before the panel was, "Are we going to Mars?" And the other panelists included Dr. Shirley Jackson, who was the president of RPI at the time. There's an organization called space.org or and the CEO of that organization, who a retired uh admiral, as I recall, was on the panel. And then Ellen Ochoa, who is a retired astronaut, was on the panel. And so there was this hour-long discussion about going to Mars. And uh, everyone else, you know, were were basically uh, supporting Elon's uh, claim.
And I was the only one saying, "No, we're not going to do it." And there's are lots of really good reasons to understand why that was that was never going to be possible.
Really.
Yeah. Well, by "never," I mean I would not be surprised if we get there by say, 2090, but we're not going to get there in the short term. And the reasons are a couple. One of the reasons that it was always impossible to adhere to the time scale that was being hyped
Is because if you look at the exposure, so we live here on Earth, and the Earth is a is a I I like to say it is a uh, hospitable home. It creates the conditions for us to live. And one of the, it has an atmosphere. We need to breathe, obviously, right?
But it also has a a magnetic atmosphere around it. And this magnetic atmosphere uh, shields us from radiation.
When you get in a rocket ship and plan to go to Mars, you go outside of that shield. And therefore, the amount of radiation that humans will be exposed to in any reasonable length of uh, technology to get to Mars likely suggests that without special shielding, horrible mutations are going to occur, and that's likely to be diseases.
Van Allen talked about this.
Yes.
And so that was a reason number one to know that Elon was talking out of his hat.
Reason number two was there are lots of technical issues. Well, so if you look deeply into my biography, you'll find out I I applied to be an astronaut around um, 1980 or so.
Wow.
Uh, because I had a friend who was an astronaut, uh, the black astronaut, uh, Ronald McNair, who died in the uh, Challenger explosion.
No way.
He was a physicist. He, he and I had been friends uh, since um, from uh, '69 to '85 when he died. So, when I was going to Caltech to work with Feynman and Gilman, he had convinced me to apply to NASA because they were accepting new applications for astronauts. And I applied, and I got pretty far along in the process. And so I got a chance to talk to some of the engineers who had actually built the Apollo uh, the Apollo Saturn 5 that got us to the moon. And they made this statement, which utterly astounded me at the time. So this is like 1980. The moon landings, the first one was in '69.
They said, "We can't do that now."
That we cannot produce a rocket that would get us to the moon right now. This, and this is like
This is what year again?
1980.
'80.
Yeah. And the question about why was rather interesting.
11 years later.
Yeah. Right. 11 years later. And so
They had done it what in '73 too? So it went from from '69 was the first moon landing, and the last one was like '73, '75, something like that.
So
So in 15 years, what happened? Well, what happened is something that people often don't understand about complex systems in complex engineering.
When you build a complex engineer uh, system, it is almost always the case that it does not work the way you you thought it would when you designed it on paper. And the way that you get it to work is by having engineers of extraordinary uh, of extraordinarily deep understanding of the mechanisms involved, and they figure out how to make it work. That generation had retired.
And that's why we couldn't do it.
What was so special about that generation?
That they did it.
Yeah.
The point was, it's it's a usual thing, you know. Um, I don't know if you work out, but you know, one of the things that we know about the human body is if you don't exercise, you lose muscle.
Right.
It's the same kind of a process.
Sure.
Is is it one of the things that was described to me is um, one of the reasons that we haven't gone back is because the Saturn 5 was an expendable rocket, and now we're spending all of our money on reusable rockets.
Right. So to get a reusable rocket that far is exponentially more difficult.
It is far more difficult. And that's one of the things that has been a real triumph of for of SpaceX, as we've watched them uh, have rockets that you send up, and then they come back down and land. When I was a kid in El Paso, there was a science fiction show called Rocky Jones, and they used to do that then. Rockets would go up, and they would come back down. So, you know, so to, you know, I've lived long enough to see this go from a television science fiction show to reality.
Do you think, I mean, I'm sure you've had to think about this, but I'm curious to hear your answer. Will we ever have a more advanced way of traveling through space other than rockets? Because rockets are essentially guns, right? You're shooting.
Basically guns.
That's correct. That's correct.
What would it take?
Um, so Arthur C. Clarke, who was a very famous science fiction writer in the 50s and 60s. In fact, he's the author of uh, the book 2001 that became a a movie and what have you.
Yeah. Stanley Kubrick.
Right. Kubrick made made the movie. Arthur C. Clarke said that something along the lines of predicting the future is a very hazardous undertaking. So when you ask me "ever," right? Um, I don't know what time constant you're attaching to "ever." My suspicion is that yes, we will get something other than um, uh, rockets. Now, when I say "something other," I mean even, you know, you can build rockets that are basically uh, uh, they are powered by nuclear explosions. This is something that's been discussed since the 50s. So we know that in the realm of possibility, but again, that's shooting the gun, as you described.
Still. Yeah.
So what do you get to, what can I imagine would would be uh, technology beyond that? And the only thing that I can think about is two things. Something that's electromagnetic, where instead of shooting the guns, you, you know, magnets repel each other.
Mhm.
So you could imagine that if we had a deeper understanding of how magnets work, we might be able to take advantage of the fact that the sun produces a magnetic field.
Mhm.
And then you would have a rocket that would interact with that magnetic field to be propelled.
Interesting.
So if you ask a crazy person like me about what comes next, this is what comes out.
H. That's really interesting. Using magnets to propel, and that is using obviously the model of the un of physics and the universe as we understand it now.
We have to know that the that the sun produces a magnetic field so that we can sort of become surfers on it, right? Do you do you think it's possible that there's any sort of fundamental science that could be being held by private aerospace organizations that has been held from the academic public academics?
Uh, I find that extraordinarily uh, unlikely because um, one thing about scientists is collectively, we like to brag when we do stuff.
And I think if someone stumbled on something like that, there'd be no way in the world any organization could stop them from talking about it.
Yeah. It's been one of the puzzling questions uh, for me over the last 10 years, just seeing um.
Yeah. Well, maybe part of this thing that I'm talking about, this slowdown in invention.
The slowdown. Yeah. When it comes to the search for life outside of our solar system, what, first of all, do you think there is consciousness similar to ours outside of our solar system? And two, do you think if there was, because there obviously there is a a whole bunch of different planets that we found that are Goldilocks planets that could inhabit intelligent life. Do you think it would resemble anything similar to us?
Well, first of all, um, on the question of the possibility that it exists, I refer to what I regard as a wonderful statement by Carl Sagan. He said, "If we're the only intelligent universe in the life, there certainly was a lot of wastage of space, right?"
So uh, most scientists that I know believe that uh, intelligent life likely exists outside of our solar system.
In fact, it's very rare that I find a scientist who doesn't think that's a reasonable statement.
Um, do they have to be like us is a different question because when you talk about the Goldilocks planets, that assumes that carbon-based uh, life forms similar to us. I'm sorry, that that the conditions that support uh, carbon-based life are the only ones that uh, can give rise to conscious beings.
Um, one of the chemical arguments about why that might not be true is to look at the table of elements, and the table in the table of elements, you'll find out that silicon is actually rather similar to carbon in its behavior. You just need to have higher temperatures. So, one could perhaps think about silicon-based life.
And there are other holes in the argument about whether it has
To be carbon based. Um, there is a scientist, uh, at MIT, uh, a female scientist. I can't think of her name. I heard her give a talk, um, maybe three or four years ago, about the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere. This is an idea that actually Carl Sagan talked about in his, um, in his, um, >> in Jupiter's atmosphere. >> Yeah, in Jupiter's atmosphere. This is an idea Carl Sagan talked about in his, um, what was his great, um, Cosmos. There's a, if you look very carefully, you'll find it. But this particular scientist and some collaborators were putting together, um, observational and, uh, chemical data that, where it was the first time in my life I heard someone give a rational explanation about why you should not rule out the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere.
M. >> So, um, you know, the universe, uh, oh, ah, Sarah, yes, this is a lady. Thank you. Sarah Seager. That's a lady. >> So you might want to have some of your artists spend some time looking at her work. >> Okay. So this could be like microbial life? >> Uh, yes. Life has not been observed in any habitat other than Earth, which has an oxygen-rich environment. While Earth's atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen gas, oxygen is essential, uh, for advanced living organisms. Some species of microorganisms do not require oxygen for metabolism, called, uh, anor-, anaerobic organisms, such as, um, meth-, methanogens. >> Yep. >> Which rely on carbon dioxide while releasing methane. >> Now, let me stop you here and remind you that methanogens have been observed here on Earth in terms of the volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, yes, interesting. >> So, given that our universe and mother nature are incredibly ingenious, I think it's kind of shortsighted to think that only carbon-based life forms exist. >> Yeah. And would, and what would evolution look like on these other Goldilocks? So, so if a, if one of these Goldilocks planets was able to have similar conditions to Earth, it would not necessarily have the same gravity. >> It does. Yeah. But you're again pushing me to an area where I don't feel confident giving answers. I, I can, >> you know, I can talk about >> my suspicions, my intuitions, but they're, but they're no more valuable than yours. >> Sure. Um, >> Is there anything we haven't covered that you think we should cover? That would be valuable. >> You have made this a deeply invasive investigation of who I am. Uh, I'm not complaining because obviously I gave answers and so, uh, there's nothing else right offhand I can think of. >> Um, well, thank you for doing this. This has been >> No, thank you for the opportunity. Like I say, I don't do many of these things, um, because, um, a lot of people who do podcasts, in particular, have their own agenda and their own sort of, um, spin. >> Because they're, they're trying to satisfy what they think their audience wants. And I perceived you as, uh, uh, the exception that would allow me to speak about what I think as opposed to imposing any pre-existing kind of matrix that those thoughts had to adhere to. >> Well, um, I greatly enjoyed this and I learned a lot. So, I appreciate you making the trip and doing it. >> Thank you. >> Um, where can folks find out more about your stuff and the books you've written? >> Oh boy. Just put in Jim. Just put in, uh, just Google James. Yeah, just do James Gates and then put, put James Gates in quotes and then put some word after what you're interested in finding, >> and you'll find it. >> You'll find there's a lot. Although I don't do a lot of stuff like this, there's a lot of stuff online about me. >> Yes. And you've been doing it for a long time. Lots of great documentaries. All kinds of stuff. >> About 30. About 30 science documentaries. Yeah. Yeah. And the last one I, uh, I, if you ask me if there's anything I want, let me talk about the last one. Yeah. >> The last one is, um, is a documentary that was authorized by Stephen Hawking's family and it's called Hawking. Can you hear me? >> Oh, yes. >> You know this? >> Yes. Yes. Yes. You, you showed it to me before and I >> And so I was very, very pleased to be asked to be part of that by the family because I actually met, uh, Stephen's daughter on more than one occasion. And she's a person who reached out. And, um, the thing to me that was so interesting about that particular one was, uh, it sort of lifted this, uh, uh, lifted this, um, this, uh, veil of, of, um, false worship of Stephen because it was very much the person as opposed to the image that's out there. And I thought that was very important that >> all of us are just people and this is something that >> just human beings. >> Yeah. And one of the things that mystifies me about us is that so many wish to worship other members of our species, >> and this was kind of undoing that. >> Yeah, that's interesting. Um, well, we have some Patreon questions for you. >> Go right ahead. >> From our beautiful Patreon supporters that we'll go and do that. This will be the end of the podcast. Thank you again, Jim. >> It's been fun. >> Thank you. I think it's been very interesting, Danny. >> All right. Good night, everybody. 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