Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens
物理与宇宙学生物与进化音乐与艺术技术与编程政治与社会
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universephysicsdonmatterequationslawstheorykindsenergyfundamentalhumaninteractionsymmetryquantumspacebeautifulableparticlesquarkshigh
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🎙️ 完整对话（2543 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Frank Wilczek,
以下是与 Frank Wilczek 的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:02.800)
a theoretical physicist at MIT who won the Nobel Prize
麻省理工学院理论物理学家，获得诺贝尔奖
Lex Fridman (00:07.000)
for the co discovery of asymptotic freedom
共同发现渐近自由
Lex Fridman (00:09.620)
in the theory of strong interaction.
在强相互作用理论中。
Lex Fridman (00:12.160)
Quick mention of our sponsors,
快速提及我们的赞助商，
Frank Wilczek (00:14.040)
the Information, NetSuite, ExpressVPN, Blinkist,
信息、NetSuite、ExpressVPN、Blinkist、
Lex Fridman (00:18.700)
and Aidsleep.
和辅助睡眠。
Frank Wilczek (00:20.420)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
在说明中查看它们以支持此播客。
Lex Fridman (00:23.600)
As a side note, let me say a word about asymptotic freedom.
作为旁注，让我谈谈渐近自由。
Frank Wilczek (00:26.900)
Protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of an atom.
质子和中子构成原子核。
Lex Fridman (00:30.000)
Strong interaction is responsible
强互动有责任
Frank Wilczek (00:31.800)
for the strong nuclear force that binds them.
因为强大的核力将它们结合在一起。
Lex Fridman (00:34.160)
But strong interaction also holds together the quarks
但强相互作用也将夸克聚集在一起
Frank Wilczek (00:37.700)
that make up the protons and neutrons.
组成质子和中子。
Lex Fridman (00:40.040)
Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Politzer
弗兰克·威尔切克、大卫·格罗斯和大卫·波利策
Frank Wilczek (00:43.240)
came up with a theory postulating
提出了一个理论假设
Lex Fridman (00:45.280)
that when quarks come really close to one another,
当夸克彼此非常接近时
Frank Wilczek (00:48.040)
the attraction abates and they behave like free particles.
吸引力减弱，它们的行为就像自由粒子一样。
Lex Fridman (00:51.440)
This is called asymptotic freedom.
这称为渐近自由。
Frank Wilczek (00:54.420)
This happens at very, very high energies,
这发生在非常非常高的能量下
Lex Fridman (00:57.860)
which is also where all the fun is.
Frank Wilczek (01:00.640)
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
Lex Fridman (01:02.880)
and here is my conversation with Frank Wilczek.
Lex Fridman (01:07.600)
What is the most beautiful idea in physics?
Lex Fridman (01:10.960)
The most beautiful idea in physics
Frank Wilczek (01:13.520)
is that we can get a compact description of the world
Lex Fridman (01:19.080)
that's very precise and very full
Frank Wilczek (01:22.760)
at the level of the operating system of the world.
Lex Fridman (01:28.520)
That's an extraordinary gift.
Lex Fridman (01:32.100)
And we get worried when we find discrepancies
Lex Fridman (01:38.160)
between our description of the world
Lex Fridman (01:41.080)
and what's actually observed
Lex Fridman (01:43.760)
at the level even of a part in a billion.
Frank Wilczek (01:46.780)
You actually have this quote from Einstein
Lex Fridman (01:49.440)
that the most incomprehensible thing
Frank Wilczek (01:51.880)
about the universe is that it is comprehensible,
Lex Fridman (01:54.920)
something like that.
Frank Wilczek (01:55.760)
Yes, so that's the most beautiful surprise
Lex Fridman (01:58.320)
that I think that really was to me the most profound result
Frank Wilczek (02:05.160)
of the scientific revolution of the 17th century
Lex Fridman (02:08.640)
with the shining example of Newtonian physics
Frank Wilczek (02:13.120)
that you could aspire to completeness, precision,
Lex Fridman (02:17.320)
and a concise description of the world,
Frank Wilczek (02:20.120)
of the operating system.
Lex Fridman (02:21.360)
And it's gotten better and better over the years
Lex Fridman (02:25.280)
and that's the continuing miracle.
Lex Fridman (02:27.920)
Now, there are a lot of beautiful sub miracles too.
Frank Wilczek (02:30.880)
The form of the equations is governed
Lex Fridman (02:33.600)
by high degrees of symmetry
Lex Fridman (02:35.760)
and they have a very surprising kind
Lex Fridman (02:39.000)
of mind expanding structure,
Frank Wilczek (02:40.800)
especially in quantum mechanics.
Lex Fridman (02:42.920)
But if I had to say the single most beautiful revelation
Frank Wilczek (02:47.920)
is that, in fact, the world is comprehensible.
Lex Fridman (02:53.640)
Would you say that's a fact or a hope?
Frank Wilczek (02:56.480)
It's a fact.
Lex Fridman (02:58.160)
We can do, you can point to things like
Frank Wilczek (03:02.360)
the rise of gross national products per capita
Lex Fridman (03:11.400)
around the world as a result of the scientific revolution.
Frank Wilczek (03:14.220)
You can see it all around you.
Lex Fridman (03:15.720)
And recent developments with exponential production
Frank Wilczek (03:21.420)
of wealth, control of nature at a very profound level
Lex Fridman (03:27.480)
where we do things like sense tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny
Frank Wilczek (03:31.800)
vibrations to tell that there are black holes
Lex Fridman (03:35.560)
colliding far away or we test laws as I alluded to
Frank Wilczek (03:40.560)
whether it's part in a billion and do things
Lex Fridman (03:45.400)
in what appear on the surface
Frank Wilczek (03:47.660)
to be entirely different conceptual universes.
Lex Fridman (03:49.820)
I mean, on the one hand, pencil and paper
Frank Wilczek (03:52.040)
are nowadays computers that calculate abstractions
Lex Fridman (03:55.520)
and on the other hand, magnets and accelerators
Lex Fridman (03:58.660)
and detectors that look at the behavior
Lex Fridman (04:00.840)
of fundamental particles and these different universes
Frank Wilczek (04:05.160)
have to agree or else we get very upset
Lex Fridman (04:08.200)
and that's an amazing thing if you think about it.
Lex Fridman (04:12.760)
And it's telling us that we do understand a lot
Lex Fridman (04:18.040)
about nature at a very profound level
Lex Fridman (04:21.400)
and there are still things we don't understand of course
Lex Fridman (04:25.520)
but as we get better and better answers
Lex Fridman (04:28.940)
and better and better ability to address difficult questions
Lex Fridman (04:32.720)
we can ask more and more ambitious questions.
Frank Wilczek (04:35.560)
Well, I guess the hope part of that is because
Lex Fridman (04:38.320)
we are surrounded by mystery.
Lex Fridman (04:40.280)
So one way to say it, if you look at the growth GDP
Lex Fridman (04:45.040)
over time that we figured out quite a lot
Lex Fridman (04:47.200)
and we're able to improve the quality of life
Lex Fridman (04:50.340)
because of that and we've figured out some fundamental things
Frank Wilczek (04:53.160)
about this universe but we still don't know
Lex Fridman (04:55.400)
how much mystery there is and it's also possible
Frank Wilczek (04:58.720)
that there's some things that are in fact incomprehensible
Lex Fridman (05:03.360)
to both our minds and the tools of science.
Frank Wilczek (05:07.400)
Like the sad thing is we may not know it
Lex Fridman (05:11.600)
because in fact they are incomprehensible
Lex Fridman (05:14.320)
and that's the open question is how much
Lex Fridman (05:16.480)
of the universe is comprehensible?
Frank Wilczek (05:18.180)
If we figured out everything what's inside the black hole
Lex Fridman (05:23.480)
and everything that happened at the moment of the Big Bang
Frank Wilczek (05:26.760)
does that still give us the key
Lex Fridman (05:28.880)
to understanding the human mind
Lex Fridman (05:30.740)
and the emergence of all the beautiful complexity
Lex Fridman (05:33.880)
we see around us?
Frank Wilczek (05:35.020)
That's not like when I see these objects
Lex Fridman (05:38.120)
like I don't know if you've seen them like cellular automata
Frank Wilczek (05:41.480)
all these kinds of objects where the from simple rules
Lex Fridman (05:44.920)
emerges complexity, it makes you wonder maybe
Frank Wilczek (05:48.920)
it's not reducible to simple beautiful equations
Lex Fridman (05:52.400)
the whole thing only parts of it.
Frank Wilczek (05:54.900)
That's the tension I was getting at with the hope.
Lex Fridman (05:57.680)
Well, when we say the universe is comprehensible
Frank Wilczek (06:00.240)
we have to kind of draw careful distinctions
Lex Fridman (06:04.980)
about or definitions about what we mean by that.
Frank Wilczek (06:12.640)
Both the universe and the kind of and the comprehensive.
Lex Fridman (06:15.280)
Exactly, right so the so in certain areas
Frank Wilczek (06:22.160)
of understanding reality we've made extraordinary progress
Lex Fridman (06:27.160)
I would say in understanding fundamental physical processes
Lex Fridman (06:32.560)
and getting very precise equations that really work
Lex Fridman (06:35.780)
and allow us to do the profound sculpting of matter
Frank Wilczek (06:40.560)
to make computers and iPhones and everything else
Lex Fridman (06:43.280)
and they really work and they're extraordinary productions
Frank Wilczek (06:48.160)
on the other but and that's all based
Lex Fridman (06:51.720)
on the laws of quantum mechanics
Lex Fridman (06:53.120)
and they really work and they give us tremendous control
Lex Fridman (06:59.760)
of nature on the other hand as we get better answers
Frank Wilczek (07:04.840)
we can also ask more ambitious questions
Lex Fridman (07:07.260)
and there are certainly things that have been observed
Frank Wilczek (07:11.200)
even in what would be usually called the realm of physics
Lex Fridman (07:15.360)
that aren't understood for instance there seems to be
Frank Wilczek (07:19.640)
another source of mass in the universe
Lex Fridman (07:21.840)
the so called dark matter that we don't know what it is
Lex Fridman (07:25.120)
and it's a very interesting question what it is then
Lex Fridman (07:30.420)
but also as you were alluding to there's it's one thing
Frank Wilczek (07:34.040)
to know the basic equations it's another thing
Lex Fridman (07:38.040)
to be able to solve them in important cases
Lex Fridman (07:42.280)
so we run up against the limits of that
Lex Fridman (07:45.520)
in things like chemistry where we'd like to be able
Frank Wilczek (07:48.600)
to design molecules and predict their behavior
Lex Fridman (07:51.280)
from the equations we think the equations could do that
Frank Wilczek (07:54.480)
in principle but in practice it's very challenging
Lex Fridman (07:59.880)
to solve them in all but very simple cases
Lex Fridman (08:04.280)
and then there's the other thing which is that a lot
Lex Fridman (08:07.200)
of what we're interested in is historically conditioned
Frank Wilczek (08:11.520)
it's not a matter of the fundamental equations
Lex Fridman (08:15.460)
but about what has evolved or come out
Frank Wilczek (08:19.960)
of the early universe and formed into people and frogs
Lex Fridman (08:23.640)
and societies and things and the laws of physics
Frank Wilczek (08:27.160)
the basic laws of physics only take you so far
Lex Fridman (08:30.160)
in that it kind of provides a foundation
Lex Fridman (08:32.680)
but doesn't really that you need entirely different concepts
Lex Fridman (08:35.760)
to deal with those kind of systems
Lex Fridman (08:39.780)
and one thing I can say about that is that the laws
Lex Fridman (08:46.360)
themselves point out their limitations
Frank Wilczek (08:48.920)
that they kind of their laws for dynamical evolution
Lex Fridman (08:53.360)
so they tell you what happens if you have
Frank Wilczek (08:55.600)
a certain starting point but they don't tell you
Lex Fridman (08:57.540)
what the starting point should be at least yeah
Lex Fridman (09:01.720)
and the other thing that emerges
Lex Fridman (09:05.000)
from the equations themselves is the phenomena
Frank Wilczek (09:09.600)
of chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions
Lex Fridman (09:14.600)
which tells us that you have that there are intrinsic
Frank Wilczek (09:20.760)
limitations on how well we can spell out the consequences
Lex Fridman (09:24.600)
of the laws if we try to apply them.
Frank Wilczek (09:26.360)
It's the old apple pie if you want to what is it
Lex Fridman (09:28.900)
make an apple pie from scratch you have to build
Frank Wilczek (09:32.520)
the universe or something like that.
Lex Fridman (09:34.280)
Well you're much better off starting with apples
Frank Wilczek (09:37.280)
than starting with quarks let's put it that way.
Lex Fridman (09:39.800)
In your book A Beautiful Question you ask
Lex Fridman (09:42.320)
does the world embody beautiful ideas?
Lex Fridman (09:44.960)
So the book is centered around this very interesting
Frank Wilczek (09:48.080)
question it's like Shakespeare you can like dig in
Lex Fridman (09:50.520)
and read into all the different interpretations
Frank Wilczek (09:52.400)
of this question but at the high level what to use
Lex Fridman (09:56.280)
the connection between beauty of the world
Lex Fridman (09:59.520)
and physics of the world.
Lex Fridman (10:02.240)
In a sense we now have a lot of insight into what
Frank Wilczek (10:05.320)
the laws are the form they take that allow us
Lex Fridman (10:09.260)
to understand matter in great depth and control it
Frank Wilczek (10:13.080)
as we've discussed and it's an extraordinary thing
Lex Fridman (10:19.460)
how mathematically ideal those equations turn out to be.
Frank Wilczek (10:26.620)
In the early days of Greek philosophy Plato had this model
Lex Fridman (10:33.260)
of atoms built out of the five perfectly symmetrical
Frank Wilczek (10:37.020)
platonic solids so there was somehow the idea
Lex Fridman (10:39.480)
that mathematical symmetry should govern the world
Lex Fridman (10:44.000)
and we've out Platoed Plato by far in modern physics
Lex Fridman (10:49.040)
because we have symmetries that are much more extensive
Frank Wilczek (10:52.320)
much more powerful that turn out to be the ingredients
Lex Fridman (10:56.720)
out of which we construct our theory of the world
Lex Fridman (10:59.160)
and it works and so that's certainly beautiful.
Lex Fridman (11:04.160)
So the idea of symmetry which is a driving inspiration
Frank Wilczek (11:13.840)
in much of human art especially decorative art
Lex Fridman (11:18.800)
like the Alhambra or wallpaper designs or things
Frank Wilczek (11:22.420)
you see around you everywhere also turns out to be
Lex Fridman (11:26.680)
the dominant theme in modern fundamental physics
Frank Wilczek (11:30.480)
symmetry and its manifestations the laws turn out
Lex Fridman (11:33.500)
to be very to have these tremendous amounts of symmetry
Frank Wilczek (11:36.600)
you can change the symbols and move them around
Lex Fridman (11:38.920)
in different ways and they still have the same consequences.
Lex Fridman (11:45.180)
So that's beautiful that these concepts that humans
Lex Fridman (11:59.040)
find appealing also turn out to be the concepts
Frank Wilczek (12:03.220)
that govern how the world actually works.
Lex Fridman (12:07.720)
I don't think that's an accident.
Frank Wilczek (12:09.080)
I think humans were evolved to be able to interact
Lex Fridman (12:13.720)
with the world in ways that are advantageous
Lex Fridman (12:17.740)
and to learn from it and so we are naturally evolved
Lex Fridman (12:21.600)
or designed to enjoy beauty and it's a symmetry
Lex Fridman (12:24.880)
and the world has it and that's why we resonate with it.
Lex Fridman (12:29.880)
Well it's interesting that the ideas of symmetry
Frank Wilczek (12:33.180)
emerge at many levels of the hierarchy of the universe.
Lex Fridman (12:40.860)
So you're talking about particles but it also is
Frank Wilczek (12:44.420)
at the level of chemistry and biology
Lex Fridman (12:47.280)
and the fact that our cognitive sort of our perception
Frank Wilczek (12:55.060)
system and whatever our cognition is also finds
Lex Fridman (12:59.060)
it appealing or somehow our sense of what is beautiful
Frank Wilczek (13:02.980)
is grounded in this idea of symmetry
Lex Fridman (13:05.180)
or the breaking of symmetry.
Frank Wilczek (13:06.760)
Symmetry is at the core of our conception of beauty
Lex Fridman (13:09.540)
whether it's the breaking or the non breaking
Frank Wilczek (13:11.620)
of the symmetry.
Lex Fridman (13:12.980)
It makes you wonder why.
Lex Fridman (13:17.740)
Why?
Lex Fridman (13:20.340)
So I come from Russia and the question of Dostoevsky
Frank Wilczek (13:23.780)
he has said that beauty will save the world.
Lex Fridman (13:27.020)
Maybe as a physicist you can tell me
Lex Fridman (13:29.540)
what do you think he meant by that?
Lex Fridman (13:31.380)
I don't know if it saves the world
Lex Fridman (13:32.980)
but it does turn out to be a tremendous source
Lex Fridman (13:35.700)
of insight into the world.
Frank Wilczek (13:37.500)
When we investigate kind of the most fundamental
Lex Fridman (13:42.840)
interactions, things that are hard to access
Frank Wilczek (13:46.100)
because they occur at very short distances
Lex Fridman (13:48.460)
between very special kinds of particles
Frank Wilczek (13:53.460)
whose properties are only revealed at high energies.
Lex Fridman (14:01.280)
We don't have much to go on from everyday life
Lex Fridman (14:04.000)
but so we have when we guess what the,
Lex Fridman (14:06.600)
and the experiments are difficult to do
Lex Fridman (14:08.640)
so you can't really follow a very wholly empirical procedure
Lex Fridman (14:14.760)
to sort of in the Baconian style figure out the laws
Frank Wilczek (14:20.140)
kind of step by step just by accumulating a lot of data
Lex Fridman (14:23.200)
what we actually do is guess.
Lex Fridman (14:25.960)
And the guesses are kind of aesthetic really.
Lex Fridman (14:29.440)
What would be a nice description
Frank Wilczek (14:31.540)
that's consistent with what we know
Lex Fridman (14:34.180)
and then you try it out and see if it works
Lex Fridman (14:36.320)
and by gosh it does in many profound cases.
Lex Fridman (14:42.800)
So there's that but there's another source of symmetry
Frank Wilczek (14:46.080)
which I didn't talk so much about in a beautiful question
Lex Fridman (14:51.080)
but does relate to your comments
Lex Fridman (14:56.880)
and I think very much relates to the source of symmetry
Lex Fridman (15:02.000)
that we find in biology and in our heads, you know,
Frank Wilczek (15:08.440)
in our brain which is that, well it is discussed a bit
Lex Fridman (15:15.860)
in a beautiful question and also in fundamentals
Frank Wilczek (15:20.480)
is that when you have, symmetry is also a very important
Lex Fridman (15:28.240)
means of construction.
Lex Fridman (15:30.340)
So when you have for instance simple viruses
Lex Fridman (15:34.540)
that need to construct their coat, their protein coat,
Frank Wilczek (15:39.380)
the coats often take the form of platonic solids
Lex Fridman (15:43.500)
and the reason is that the viruses are really dumb
Lex Fridman (15:47.100)
and they only know how to do one thing
Lex Fridman (15:49.020)
so they make a pentagon then they make another pentagon
Lex Fridman (15:51.620)
and they make another pentagon
Lex Fridman (15:52.640)
and they all glue together in the same way
Lex Fridman (15:55.420)
and that makes a very symmetrical object sort of.
Lex Fridman (15:58.980)
So the rules of development when you have simple rules
Lex Fridman (16:02.060)
and they work again and again, you get symmetrical patterns.
Lex Fridman (16:07.060)
That's kind of, in fact it's a recipe also
Frank Wilczek (16:09.740)
for generating fractals, like the kind of broccoli
Lex Fridman (16:14.740)
that has all this internal structure
Lex Fridman (16:19.300)
and I wish I had a picture to show
Lex Fridman (16:20.740)
but maybe people remember it from the supermarket
Lex Fridman (16:26.660)
and you say how did a vegetable get so intelligent
Lex Fridman (16:30.020)
to make such a beautiful object
Frank Wilczek (16:31.620)
with all this fractal structure
Lex Fridman (16:33.480)
and the secret is stupidity.
Frank Wilczek (16:35.940)
You just do the same thing over and over again
Lex Fridman (16:38.560)
and in our brains also, you know, we came out,
Frank Wilczek (16:43.100)
we start from single cells and they reproduce
Lex Fridman (16:47.500)
and each one does basically roughly the same thing.
Frank Wilczek (16:54.140)
The program evolves in time, of course,
Lex Fridman (16:56.780)
different modules get turned on and off,
Frank Wilczek (17:01.660)
different regions of the genetic code
Lex Fridman (17:03.460)
get turned on and off but basically,
Frank Wilczek (17:06.700)
a lot of the same things are going on
Lex Fridman (17:08.800)
and they're simple things
Lex Fridman (17:09.740)
and so you produce the same patterns over and over again
Lex Fridman (17:12.460)
and that's a recipe for producing symmetry
Frank Wilczek (17:14.540)
because you're getting the same thing in many, many places
Lex Fridman (17:17.180)
and if you look at, for instance,
Frank Wilczek (17:20.860)
the beautiful drawings of Roman Icahal,
Lex Fridman (17:24.860)
the great neuroanatomist who drew the structure
Frank Wilczek (17:29.220)
of different organs like the hippocampus,
Lex Fridman (17:33.380)
you see it's very regular and very intricate
Lex Fridman (17:37.860)
and it's symmetry in that sense
Lex Fridman (17:43.940)
because it's many repeated units
Frank Wilczek (17:46.860)
that you can take from one place to the other
Lex Fridman (17:49.620)
and see that they look more or less the same.
Lex Fridman (17:51.860)
But what you're describing, this kind of beauty
Lex Fridman (17:54.300)
that we're talking about now is a very small sample
Frank Wilczek (17:58.940)
in terms of space time in a very big world
Lex Fridman (18:01.860)
in a very short, brief moment in this long history.
Frank Wilczek (18:08.260)
In your book, Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality,
Lex Fridman (18:11.420)
I'd really recommend people read it.
Frank Wilczek (18:14.580)
You say that space and time are pretty big or very big.
Lex Fridman (18:20.340)
How big are we talking about?
Lex Fridman (18:21.660)
Can you tell a brief history of space and time?
Lex Fridman (18:26.660)
It's easy to tell a brief history, but the details get very
Frank Wilczek (18:30.660)
involved, of course, but one thing I'd like to say
Lex Fridman (18:33.780)
is that if you take a broad enough view,
Frank Wilczek (18:37.140)
the history of the universe is simpler
Lex Fridman (18:38.820)
than the history of Sweden, say,
Frank Wilczek (18:40.660)
because your standards are lower.
Lex Fridman (18:45.900)
But just to make it quantitative,
Frank Wilczek (18:49.620)
I'll just give a few highlights.
Lex Fridman (18:51.500)
And it's a little bit easier to talk about time,
Lex Fridman (18:55.500)
so let's start with that.
Lex Fridman (18:57.420)
The Big Bang occurred, we think.
Frank Wilczek (19:00.100)
The universe was much hotter and denser and more uniform
Lex Fridman (19:03.820)
about 13.8 billion years ago,
Lex Fridman (19:07.060)
and that's what we call the Big Bang.
Lex Fridman (19:10.740)
And it's been expanding and cooling,
Frank Wilczek (19:12.540)
the matter in it has been expanding and cooling ever since.
Lex Fridman (19:16.100)
So in a real sense, the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Frank Wilczek (19:20.660)
That's a big number, kind of hard to think about.
Lex Fridman (19:24.060)
A nice way to think about it, though,
Frank Wilczek (19:26.260)
is to map it onto one year.
Lex Fridman (19:29.260)
So let's say the universe just linearly mapped
Frank Wilczek (19:32.980)
the time intervals from 13.8 billion years onto one year.
Lex Fridman (19:37.620)
So the Big Bang then is on January 1st at 12 a.m.
Lex Fridman (19:43.980)
And you wait for quite a long time
Lex Fridman (19:49.980)
before the dinosaurs emerge.
Frank Wilczek (19:51.660)
The dinosaurs emerge on Christmas, it turns out.
Lex Fridman (19:55.100)
And...
Frank Wilczek (19:55.940)
12 months, almost 12 months later.
Lex Fridman (19:57.900)
Getting close to the end, yes.
Frank Wilczek (19:59.220)
Getting close to the end.
Lex Fridman (1:00:03.760)
is human robot interaction.
Lex Fridman (1:00:05.760)
And it seems that consciousness from the perspective
Lex Fridman (1:00:09.480)
of the robot is very useful to improve
Frank Wilczek (1:00:12.920)
the human robot interaction experience.
Lex Fridman (1:00:16.560)
The first, the display of consciousness,
Lex Fridman (1:00:18.520)
but then to me, there's a gray area
Lex Fridman (1:00:20.200)
between the display of consciousness and consciousness itself.
Frank Wilczek (1:00:23.620)
If you think of consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:00:24.920)
from an evolutionary perspective,
Frank Wilczek (1:00:26.900)
it seems like a useful tool in human communication, so.
Lex Fridman (1:00:29.880)
Yes, it's certainly, well,
Frank Wilczek (1:00:32.040)
whatever consciousness is will turn out to be.
Lex Fridman (1:00:35.240)
I think addressing it through its use
Lex Fridman (1:00:39.680)
and working up from simple cases
Lex Fridman (1:00:42.060)
and also working up from engineering experience
Frank Wilczek (1:00:45.680)
in trying to do efficient computation,
Lex Fridman (1:00:48.760)
including efficient management of social interactions
Frank Wilczek (1:00:53.380)
is going to really shed light on these questions.
Lex Fridman (1:00:56.260)
As I said, in a way that sort of musing abstractly
Frank Wilczek (1:00:59.680)
about consciousness never would.
Lex Fridman (1:01:01.640)
So as I mentioned, I talked to Sarah Walker
Lex Fridman (1:01:04.060)
and first of all, she says, hi, spoke very highly of you.
Lex Fridman (1:01:07.560)
One of her concerns about physics and physicists and humans
Frank Wilczek (1:01:12.400)
is that we may not fully understand the system
Lex Fridman (1:01:16.960)
that we're inside of.
Frank Wilczek (1:01:18.980)
Meaning like, there may be limits
Lex Fridman (1:01:22.880)
to the kind of physics we do
Frank Wilczek (1:01:24.440)
in trying to understand the system of which we're part of.
Lex Fridman (1:01:28.760)
So like, the observer is also the observed.
Frank Wilczek (1:01:33.920)
In that sense, it seems like
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.600)
our tools of understanding the world,
Frank Wilczek (1:01:42.760)
I mean, this is mostly centered around the questions
Lex Fridman (1:01:44.840)
of what is life, trying to understand the patterns
Frank Wilczek (1:01:47.520)
that are characteristic of life and intelligence,
Lex Fridman (1:01:51.320)
all those kinds of things.
Frank Wilczek (1:01:53.280)
We're not using the right tools because we're in the system.
Lex Fridman (1:01:57.320)
Is there something that resonates with you there?
Frank Wilczek (1:02:01.320)
Almost like...
Lex Fridman (1:02:02.160)
Well, yes, we have limitations, of course,
Frank Wilczek (1:02:08.520)
in the amount of information we can process.
Lex Fridman (1:02:12.680)
On the other hand, we can get help from our Silicon friends
Lex Fridman (1:02:16.800)
and we can get help from all kinds of instruments
Lex Fridman (1:02:21.420)
that make up for our perceptual deficits.
Lex Fridman (1:02:25.040)
And we can use, at a conceptual level,
Lex Fridman (1:02:30.520)
we can use different kinds of concepts
Frank Wilczek (1:02:32.760)
to address different kinds of questions.
Lex Fridman (1:02:35.360)
So I'm not sure exactly what problem she's talking about.
Frank Wilczek (1:02:40.280)
It's a problem akin to an organism living in a 2D plane
Lex Fridman (1:02:45.600)
trying to understand a three dimensional world.
Frank Wilczek (1:02:47.800)
Well, we can do that.
Lex Fridman (1:02:48.920)
I mean, in fact, for practical purposes,
Frank Wilczek (1:02:53.360)
most of our experience is two dimensional.
Lex Fridman (1:02:55.840)
It's hard to move vertically.
Lex Fridman (1:02:57.680)
And yet we've produced conceptually
Lex Fridman (1:03:00.400)
a three dimensional symmetry
Lex Fridman (1:03:01.800)
and in fact, four dimensional space time.
Lex Fridman (1:03:05.440)
So by thinking in appropriate ways and using instruments
Lex Fridman (1:03:10.520)
and getting consistent accounts and rich accounts,
Lex Fridman (1:03:14.860)
we find out what concepts are necessary.
Lex Fridman (1:03:22.080)
And I don't see any end in sight of the process
Lex Fridman (1:03:25.960)
or any showstoppers because, let me give you an example.
Frank Wilczek (1:03:32.200)
I mean, for instance, QCD,
Lex Fridman (1:03:35.400)
our theory of the strong interaction,
Frank Wilczek (1:03:37.360)
has nice equations, which I helped to discover.
Lex Fridman (1:03:40.360)
What's QCD?
Frank Wilczek (1:03:41.280)
Quantum chromodynamics.
Lex Fridman (1:03:42.880)
So it's our theory of the strong interaction,
Frank Wilczek (1:03:47.480)
the interaction that is responsible for nuclear physics.
Lex Fridman (1:03:51.400)
So it's the interaction that governs
Lex Fridman (1:03:53.120)
how quarks and gluons interact with each other
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.340)
and make protons and neutrons
Lex Fridman (1:03:59.360)
and all the strong, the related particles
Lex Fridman (1:04:03.120)
and many things in physics.
Frank Wilczek (1:04:05.360)
It's one of the four basic forces of nature
Lex Fridman (1:04:07.960)
as we presently understand it.
Lex Fridman (1:04:09.800)
And so we have beautiful equations,
Lex Fridman (1:04:15.800)
which we can test in very special circumstances
Frank Wilczek (1:04:22.620)
using at high energies, at accelerators.
Lex Fridman (1:04:25.680)
So we're certain that these equations are correct.
Frank Wilczek (1:04:28.700)
Prizes are given for it and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.520)
And people try to knock it down and they can't.
Frank Wilczek (1:04:32.760)
Yeah, but the situations in which we can calculate
Lex Fridman (1:04:43.020)
the consequences of these equations are very limited.
Lex Fridman (1:04:46.280)
So for instance, no one has been able to demonstrate
Lex Fridman (1:04:52.080)
that this theory, which is built on quarks and gluons,
Frank Wilczek (1:04:58.520)
which no one, which you don't observe,
Lex Fridman (1:05:01.080)
actually produces protons and neutrons
Lex Fridman (1:05:03.360)
and the things you do observe.
Lex Fridman (1:05:04.560)
This is called the problem of confinement.
Lex Fridman (1:05:07.640)
So no one's been able to prove that analytically
Lex Fridman (1:05:11.000)
in a way that a human can understand.
Frank Wilczek (1:05:13.520)
On the other hand, we can take these equations
Lex Fridman (1:05:16.640)
to a computer, to gigantic computers and compute.
Lex Fridman (1:05:20.400)
And by God, you get the world from it.
Lex Fridman (1:05:25.440)
So these equations in a way that we don't understand
Frank Wilczek (1:05:32.120)
in terms of human concepts, we can't do the calculations,
Lex Fridman (1:05:36.760)
but our machines can do them.
Lex Fridman (1:05:39.020)
So with the help of what I like to call our silicon friends
Lex Fridman (1:05:43.480)
and their descendants in the future,
Frank Wilczek (1:05:46.600)
we can understand in a different way
Lex Fridman (1:05:50.720)
that allows us to understand more.
Lex Fridman (1:05:53.000)
But I don't think we'll ever, no human is ever going
Lex Fridman (1:05:56.480)
to be able to solve those equations in the same way.
Frank Wilczek (1:06:00.560)
So, but I think that's, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:06:04.760)
when we find limitations to our natural abilities,
Frank Wilczek (1:06:09.560)
we can try to find workarounds.
Lex Fridman (1:06:12.880)
And sometimes that's appropriate concepts.
Frank Wilczek (1:06:15.160)
Sometimes it's appropriate instruments.
Lex Fridman (1:06:17.320)
Sometimes it's a combination of the two.
Lex Fridman (1:06:19.800)
But I think it's premature to get defeatist about it.
Lex Fridman (1:06:26.220)
I don't see any logical contradiction
Frank Wilczek (1:06:32.480)
or paradox or limitation
Lex Fridman (1:06:35.040)
that will bring this process to a halt.
Frank Wilczek (1:06:38.320)
Well, I think the idea is to continue thinking
Lex Fridman (1:06:40.960)
outside the box in different directions,
Frank Wilczek (1:06:42.880)
meaning just like how the math allows us
Lex Fridman (1:06:45.880)
to think in multiple dimensions
Frank Wilczek (1:06:47.280)
outside of our perception system, sort of thinking,
Lex Fridman (1:06:54.240)
you know, coming up with new tools
Frank Wilczek (1:06:55.720)
of mathematics or computation or all those kinds of things
Lex Fridman (1:06:58.320)
to take different perspectives on our universe.
Frank Wilczek (1:07:04.220)
Well, I'm all for that.
Lex Fridman (1:07:05.440)
You know, and I kind of have even elevated into a principle
Frank Wilczek (1:07:08.840)
which is of complementarity following Bohr
Lex Fridman (1:07:11.520)
that you need different ways of thinking
Frank Wilczek (1:07:16.520)
even about the same things
Lex Fridman (1:07:18.600)
in order to do justice to their reality
Lex Fridman (1:07:21.080)
and answer different kinds of questions about them.
Lex Fridman (1:07:23.880)
I mean, we've several times alluded to the fact
Frank Wilczek (1:07:27.480)
that human beings are hard to understand
Lex Fridman (1:07:30.280)
and the concepts that you use to understand human beings
Frank Wilczek (1:07:34.560)
if you wanna prescribe drugs for them
Lex Fridman (1:07:37.640)
or see what's gonna happen if they move very fast
Frank Wilczek (1:07:42.560)
or are exposed to radiation.
Lex Fridman (1:07:45.160)
And so that requires one kind of thinking
Frank Wilczek (1:07:47.200)
that's very physical based on the fact
Lex Fridman (1:07:52.080)
that the materials that were made out of.
Frank Wilczek (1:07:55.480)
On the other hand, if you want to understand
Lex Fridman (1:07:57.680)
how a person's going to behave
Frank Wilczek (1:07:59.440)
in a different kind of situation,
Lex Fridman (1:08:02.960)
you need entirely different concepts from psychology
Lex Fridman (1:08:06.120)
and there's nothing wrong with that.
Lex Fridman (1:08:08.480)
You can have very different ways
Frank Wilczek (1:08:09.760)
of addressing the same material
Lex Fridman (1:08:11.840)
that are useful for different purposes, right?
Lex Fridman (1:08:14.920)
Can you describe this idea
Lex Fridman (1:08:16.120)
which is fascinating of complementarity a little bit?
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.920)
Sort of first of all, what state is the principle?
Lex Fridman (1:08:25.960)
What is it?
Lex Fridman (1:08:26.800)
And second of all, what are good examples
Lex Fridman (1:08:29.160)
starting from quantum mechanics?
Frank Wilczek (1:08:30.960)
You used to mention psychology.
Lex Fridman (1:08:32.720)
Let's talk about this more.
Frank Wilczek (1:08:33.560)
It's like in your new book
Lex Fridman (1:08:34.920)
one of the most fascinating ideas actually.
Frank Wilczek (1:08:38.000)
I think it's a wonderful, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:08:40.280)
To me it's, well, it's the culminating chapter of the book
Lex Fridman (1:08:43.160)
and I think since the whole book is about the big lessons
Lex Fridman (1:08:48.920)
or big takeaways from profound understanding
Frank Wilczek (1:08:52.520)
of the physical world that we've achieved,
Lex Fridman (1:08:56.600)
including that it's mysterious in some ways,
Frank Wilczek (1:09:01.040)
this was the final overarching lesson, complementarity.
Lex Fridman (1:09:06.040)
Lesson, complementarity and it's a approach.
Lex Fridman (1:09:16.960)
So unlike some of these other things
Lex Fridman (1:09:18.520)
which are just facts about the world,
Frank Wilczek (1:09:20.640)
like the world is both big and small
Lex Fridman (1:09:22.480)
and different sizes and is big but we're not small,
Frank Wilczek (1:09:26.320)
things we talked about earlier
Lex Fridman (1:09:28.440)
and the fact that the universe is comprehensible
Lex Fridman (1:09:30.800)
and how complexity could emerge from simplicity
Lex Fridman (1:09:33.600)
and so those things are in the broad sense
Frank Wilczek (1:09:37.880)
facts about the world.
Lex Fridman (1:09:39.760)
Complementarity is more an attitude towards the world
Frank Wilczek (1:09:42.560)
than encouraged by the facts about the world.
Lex Fridman (1:09:46.320)
And it's the concept or the approach
Frank Wilczek (1:09:54.320)
or the realization that it can be appropriate
Lex Fridman (1:09:59.680)
and useful and inevitable and unavoidable
Frank Wilczek (1:10:02.880)
to use very different descriptions of the same object
Lex Fridman (1:10:08.440)
or the same system or the same situation
Frank Wilczek (1:10:12.960)
to answer different kinds of questions
Lex Fridman (1:10:15.520)
that may be very different
Lex Fridman (1:10:17.960)
and even mutually uninterpretable,
Lex Fridman (1:10:22.560)
immutually incomprehensible.
Lex Fridman (1:10:27.720)
But both correct somehow.
Lex Fridman (1:10:28.960)
But both correct and sources of different kinds of insight
Frank Wilczek (1:10:32.720)
which is so weird.
Lex Fridman (1:10:34.800)
But it seems to work in so many cases.
Frank Wilczek (1:10:36.640)
It works in many cases and I think it's a deep fact
Lex Fridman (1:10:41.080)
about the world and how we should approach it.
Frank Wilczek (1:10:44.600)
It's most rigorous form where it's actually a theorem
Lex Fridman (1:10:50.960)
if quantum mechanics is correct,
Frank Wilczek (1:10:53.520)
occurs in quantum mechanics
Lex Fridman (1:10:55.360)
where the primary description of the world
Frank Wilczek (1:11:00.360)
is in terms of wave functions.
Lex Fridman (1:11:03.400)
But let's not talk about the world.
Frank Wilczek (1:11:04.720)
Let's just talk about a particle, an electron.
Lex Fridman (1:11:09.480)
The primary description of that electron
Frank Wilczek (1:11:12.600)
is its wave function.
Lex Fridman (1:11:14.440)
And the wave function can be used to predict
Frank Wilczek (1:11:19.920)
where it's gonna be.
Lex Fridman (1:11:21.840)
If you observe, it'll be in different places
Frank Wilczek (1:11:24.200)
with different probabilities or how fast it's moving.
Lex Fridman (1:11:27.520)
And it'll also be moving in different ways
Frank Wilczek (1:11:31.280)
with different probabilities.
Lex Fridman (1:11:32.760)
That's what quantum mechanics says.
Lex Fridman (1:11:35.240)
And you can predict either set of probabilities
Lex Fridman (1:11:38.920)
if you know what's gonna happen
Frank Wilczek (1:11:40.160)
if I make an observation of the position or the velocity.
Lex Fridman (1:11:48.840)
So the wave function gives you ways of doing both of those.
Lex Fridman (1:11:51.600)
But to do it, to get those predictions,
Lex Fridman (1:11:54.480)
you have to process the wave function in different ways.
Frank Wilczek (1:11:57.320)
You process it one way for position
Lex Fridman (1:11:59.120)
and in a different way for momentum.
Lex Fridman (1:12:01.520)
And those ways are mathematically incompatible.
Lex Fridman (1:12:05.400)
It's like you have a stone
Lex Fridman (1:12:08.480)
and you can sculpt it into a Venus de Milo
Lex Fridman (1:12:11.120)
or you can sculpt it into David, but you can't do both.
Lex Fridman (1:12:18.040)
And that's an example of complementarity.
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.680)
To answer different kinds of questions,
Frank Wilczek (1:12:22.560)
you have to analyze the system in different ways
Lex Fridman (1:12:25.920)
that are mutually incompatible,
Lex Fridman (1:12:29.200)
but both valid to answer different kinds of questions.
Lex Fridman (1:12:32.800)
So in that case, it's a theorem,
Lex Fridman (1:12:34.880)
but I think it's a much more widespread phenomena
Lex Fridman (1:12:38.920)
that applies to many cases
Frank Wilczek (1:12:40.440)
where we can't prove it as a theorem,
Lex Fridman (1:12:42.400)
but it's a piece of wisdom, if you like,
Lex Fridman (1:12:46.520)
and appears to be a very important insight.
Lex Fridman (1:12:53.000)
And if you ignore it,
Frank Wilczek (1:12:53.840)
you can get very confused and misguided.
Lex Fridman (1:13:02.640)
Do you think this is a useful hack
Lex Fridman (1:13:06.960)
for ideas that we don't fully understand?
Lex Fridman (1:13:10.560)
Or is this somehow a fundamental property
Frank Wilczek (1:13:13.720)
of all or many ideas,
Lex Fridman (1:13:16.760)
that you can take multiple perspectives
Lex Fridman (1:13:19.360)
and they're both true?
Lex Fridman (1:13:20.820)
Well, I think it's both.
Lex Fridman (1:13:24.420)
So it's both the answer to all questions.
Lex Fridman (1:13:26.040)
Yes, that's right.
Frank Wilczek (1:13:27.400)
It's not either or, it's both.
Lex Fridman (1:13:28.920)
It's paralyzing to think that we live in a world
Frank Wilczek (1:13:32.760)
that's fundamentally surrounded by complementary ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:13:39.540)
Because we somehow want to attach ourselves
Frank Wilczek (1:13:44.040)
to absolute truths,
Lex Fridman (1:13:45.720)
and absolute truths certainly don't like the idea
Frank Wilczek (1:13:48.440)
of complementarity.
Lex Fridman (1:13:50.080)
Yes, Einstein was very uncomfortable with complementarity.
Lex Fridman (1:13:53.160)
And in a broad sense,
Lex Fridman (1:13:55.280)
the famous Bohr Einstein debates
Frank Wilczek (1:13:59.120)
revolved around this question
Lex Fridman (1:14:00.760)
of whether the complementarity
Frank Wilczek (1:14:03.040)
that is a foundational feature of quantum mechanics,
Lex Fridman (1:14:08.320)
as we have it,
Frank Wilczek (1:14:10.620)
is a permanent feature of the universe
Lex Fridman (1:14:16.680)
and our description of nature.
Lex Fridman (1:14:19.040)
And so far, quantum mechanics wins.
Lex Fridman (1:14:22.960)
And it's gone from triumph to triumph.
Frank Wilczek (1:14:26.480)
Whether complementarity is rock bottom,
Lex Fridman (1:14:28.720)
I guess, you can never be sure.
Frank Wilczek (1:14:31.560)
I mean, but it looks awfully good
Lex Fridman (1:14:34.220)
and it's been very successful.
Lex Fridman (1:14:35.560)
And certainly, complementarity has been extremely useful
Lex Fridman (1:14:40.400)
and fruitful in that domain,
Frank Wilczek (1:14:43.460)
including some of Einstein's attempts to challenge it
Lex Fridman (1:14:50.780)
with the famous Einstein Podolsky Rosen experiment
Frank Wilczek (1:14:55.460)
turned out to be confirmations
Lex Fridman (1:14:57.380)
that have been useful in themselves.
Lex Fridman (1:15:03.300)
But so thinking about these things was fruitful,
Lex Fridman (1:15:05.180)
but not in the way that Einstein hoped.
Frank Wilczek (1:15:07.920)
Yeah, so as I said, in the case of quantum mechanics
Lex Fridman (1:15:19.640)
and this dilemma or dichotomy
Frank Wilczek (1:15:26.200)
between processing the wave function in different ways,
Lex Fridman (1:15:29.280)
it's a theorem.
Frank Wilczek (1:15:30.120)
They're mutually incompatible
Lex Fridman (1:15:31.200)
and the physical correlate of that
Frank Wilczek (1:15:32.880)
is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
Lex Fridman (1:15:35.080)
you can't have position and momentum determined at once.
Lex Fridman (1:15:41.600)
But in other cases, like one that I like to think about
Lex Fridman (1:15:48.120)
or like to point out as an example
Frank Wilczek (1:15:50.120)
is free will and determinism.
Lex Fridman (1:15:52.980)
It's much less of a theorem
Lex Fridman (1:15:57.240)
and more a kind of way of thinking about things
Lex Fridman (1:16:06.240)
that I think is reassuring
Lex Fridman (1:16:10.680)
and avoids a lot of unnecessary quarreling and confusion.
Lex Fridman (1:16:16.040)
The quarreling I'm okay with
Lex Fridman (1:16:17.480)
and the confusion I'm okay with,
Lex Fridman (1:16:18.960)
I mean, people debate about difficult ideas,
Lex Fridman (1:16:21.640)
but the question is whether it could be
Lex Fridman (1:16:24.560)
almost a fundamental truth.
Frank Wilczek (1:16:26.880)
I think it is a fundamental truth.
Lex Fridman (1:16:28.280)
That free will is both an illusion and not.
Frank Wilczek (1:16:32.640)
Yes, I think that's correct.
Lex Fridman (1:16:35.960)
There's a reason why people say quantum mechanics is weird
Lex Fridman (1:16:39.280)
and complementarity is a big part of that.
Lex Fridman (1:16:45.320)
To say that our actual whole world is weird,
Frank Wilczek (1:16:48.760)
the whole hierarchy of the universe is weird
Lex Fridman (1:16:52.140)
in this kind of particular way,
Lex Fridman (1:16:54.440)
and it's quite profound, but it's also humbling
Lex Fridman (1:17:03.240)
because it's like we're never going to be on sturdy ground
Frank Wilczek (1:17:06.720)
in the way that humans like to be.
Lex Fridman (1:17:09.280)
It's like you have to embrace that this whole thing
Frank Wilczek (1:17:13.760)
is like unsteady mess.
Lex Fridman (1:17:18.080)
It's one of many lessons in humility
Frank Wilczek (1:17:21.560)
that we run into in profound understanding of the world.
Lex Fridman (1:17:28.600)
The Copernican revolution was one,
Frank Wilczek (1:17:30.720)
that the earth is not the center of the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:17:35.200)
Darwinian evolution is another,
Frank Wilczek (1:17:36.960)
that humans are not the pinnacle of God's creation and the apparent result
Lex Fridman (1:17:53.960)
of deep understanding of physical reality,
Frank Wilczek (1:17:57.640)
that mind emerges from matter and there's no call
Lex Fridman (1:18:05.520)
on special life forces or souls.
Frank Wilczek (1:18:09.360)
These are all lessons in humility,
Lex Fridman (1:18:11.440)
and I actually find complementarity a liberating concept.
Frank Wilczek (1:18:19.120)
It's, okay, you know, we...
Lex Fridman (1:18:21.560)
Yeah, it is in a way.
Frank Wilczek (1:18:22.640)
That is what I remember.
Lex Fridman (1:18:28.080)
There's a story about Dr. Johnson,
Lex Fridman (1:18:30.880)
and he's talking with Boswell,
Lex Fridman (1:18:32.640)
and Boswell was, they were discussing a sermon
Frank Wilczek (1:18:36.400)
that they'd both heard,
Lex Fridman (1:18:37.800)
and the sort of culmination of the sermon was the speaker saying,
Frank Wilczek (1:18:43.600)
I accept the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:18:45.440)
And Dr. Johnson said, well, damn well better.
Lex Fridman (1:18:50.720)
And there's a certain joy in accepting the universe
Lex Fridman (1:18:55.720)
because it's mind expanding.
Lex Fridman (1:18:57.760)
And to me, complementarity also suggests tolerance,
Lex Fridman (1:19:10.160)
suggests opportunities for understanding things
Frank Wilczek (1:19:15.880)
in different ways that add to rather than detract
Lex Fridman (1:19:22.760)
from understanding.
Lex Fridman (1:19:25.120)
So I think it's an opportunity for mind expansion
Lex Fridman (1:19:29.960)
and demanding that there's only one way
Frank Wilczek (1:19:33.160)
to think about things can be very limiting.
Lex Fridman (1:19:36.720)
On the free will one, that's a trippy one, though.
Frank Wilczek (1:19:38.840)
To think like I am the decider of my own actions
Lex Fridman (1:19:43.520)
and at the same time I'm not is tricky to think about,
Lex Fridman (1:19:49.760)
but there does seem to be some kind of profound truth in that.
Lex Fridman (1:19:53.840)
I get, well, I think it is tied up.
Frank Wilczek (1:19:56.880)
It will turn out to be tied up when we understand things better
Lex Fridman (1:20:00.320)
with these issues of self awareness and where we get,
Lex Fridman (1:20:04.640)
what we perceive as making choices,
Lex Fridman (1:20:06.960)
what does that really mean and what's going on under the hood.
Lex Fridman (1:20:12.120)
But I'm speculating about a future understanding
Lex Fridman (1:20:15.000)
that's not in place at present.
Frank Wilczek (1:20:17.000)
Your sense there will always be,
Lex Fridman (1:20:19.960)
like as you dig into the self awareness thing,
Frank Wilczek (1:20:22.880)
there'll always be some places
Lex Fridman (1:20:24.600)
where complementarity is gonna show up.
Frank Wilczek (1:20:26.640)
Oh, definitely, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:20:28.040)
I mean, there will be, how should I say?
Frank Wilczek (1:20:31.560)
There'll be kind of a God's eye view
Lex Fridman (1:20:33.720)
which sees everything that's going on
Frank Wilczek (1:20:37.400)
in the computer or the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:20:40.120)
And then there's the brain's own view
Frank Wilczek (1:20:42.280)
or the central processor or whatever it is,
Lex Fridman (1:20:46.240)
what we call the self, the consciousness,
Frank Wilczek (1:20:50.760)
that's only aware of a very small part of it.
Lex Fridman (1:20:53.480)
And those are very different.
Frank Wilczek (1:20:54.800)
Those are, so the God's eye view can be deterministic
Lex Fridman (1:20:59.720)
while the self view sees free will.
Frank Wilczek (1:21:07.880)
I'm pretty sure that's how it's gonna work out actually.
Lex Fridman (1:21:11.440)
But as it stands, free will is a concept
Frank Wilczek (1:21:15.160)
that we definitely, at least I feel I definitely experience,
Lex Fridman (1:21:19.280)
I can choose to do one thing then another.
Lex Fridman (1:21:21.600)
And other people I think are sufficiently similar to me
Lex Fridman (1:21:24.920)
that I trust that they feel the same way.
Lex Fridman (1:21:30.640)
And it's an essential concept in psychology
Lex Fridman (1:21:33.600)
and law and so forth.
Lex Fridman (1:21:35.680)
But at the same time, I think that mind emerges from matter
Lex Fridman (1:21:42.520)
and that there's an alternative description of matter
Frank Wilczek (1:21:47.360)
that's up to subtleties about quantum mechanics,
Lex Fridman (1:21:51.160)
which I don't think are relevant here,
Frank Wilczek (1:21:53.960)
really is deterministic.
Lex Fridman (1:21:56.180)
Let me ask you about some particles.
Frank Wilczek (1:21:57.960)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:21:59.200)
First the absurd question,
Frank Wilczek (1:22:00.880)
almost like a question that like Plato would ask.
Lex Fridman (1:22:04.980)
What is the smallest thing in the universe?
Frank Wilczek (1:22:08.840)
As far as we know, the fundamental particles
Lex Fridman (1:22:13.520)
out of which we build our most successful description
Frank Wilczek (1:22:17.480)
of nature are points.
Lex Fridman (1:22:20.040)
They don't have any internal structure.
Lex Fridman (1:22:27.000)
So that's as small as can be.
Lex Fridman (1:22:31.960)
So what does that mean operationally?
Frank Wilczek (1:22:34.000)
That means that they obey equations that describe entities
Lex Fridman (1:22:39.000)
that are singular concentrations of energy,
Frank Wilczek (1:22:46.240)
momentum, angular momentum,
Lex Fridman (1:22:47.720)
the things that particles have,
Lex Fridman (1:22:50.080)
but localized at individual points.
Lex Fridman (1:22:53.460)
Now that mathematical structure
Frank Wilczek (1:22:57.960)
is only revealed partially in the world
Lex Fridman (1:23:01.420)
because to process the wave function
Frank Wilczek (1:23:04.600)
in a way that accesses information about the precise
Lex Fridman (1:23:09.360)
position of things, you have to apply a lot of energy
Lex Fridman (1:23:12.080)
and that's an idealization
Lex Fridman (1:23:14.960)
and you can apply infinite amount of energy
Frank Wilczek (1:23:16.720)
to determine a precise position.
Lex Fridman (1:23:19.880)
But at the mathematical level,
Frank Wilczek (1:23:23.560)
we build the world out of particles that are points.
Lex Fridman (1:23:26.560)
So do they actually exist and what are we talking about?
Frank Wilczek (1:23:29.280)
Oh, they exist.
Lex Fridman (1:23:30.120)
So let me ask sort of do quarks exist?
Lex Fridman (1:23:33.000)
Yes, do electrons exist?
Lex Fridman (1:23:36.200)
Yes, do photons exist?
Frank Wilczek (1:23:37.720)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:23:38.540)
But what does it mean for them to exist?
Frank Wilczek (1:23:39.720)
Okay, so well, the hard answer to that,
Lex Fridman (1:23:43.520)
the precise answer is that we construct the world
Frank Wilczek (1:23:49.000)
out of equations that contain entities
Lex Fridman (1:23:51.880)
that are reproducible,
Frank Wilczek (1:23:56.720)
that exist in vast numbers throughout the universe,
Lex Fridman (1:24:00.860)
that have definite properties of mass,
Frank Wilczek (1:24:05.900)
spin and a few others that we call electrons
Lex Fridman (1:24:13.420)
and what an electron is is defined by the equations
Frank Wilczek (1:24:17.220)
that it satisfies theoretically
Lex Fridman (1:24:19.920)
and we find that there are many, many exemplars
Frank Wilczek (1:24:24.160)
of that entity in the physical world.
Lex Fridman (1:24:28.860)
So in the case of electrons,
Frank Wilczek (1:24:31.300)
we can isolate them and study them
Lex Fridman (1:24:34.260)
and individual ones in great detail
Lex Fridman (1:24:36.740)
and we can check that they all actually are identical
Lex Fridman (1:24:42.100)
and that's why chemistry works and yes.
Lex Fridman (1:24:45.420)
So in that case, it's very tangible.
Lex Fridman (1:24:49.820)
Similarly with photons,
Frank Wilczek (1:24:51.020)
you can study them individually, the units of light
Lex Fridman (1:24:55.180)
and nowadays, it's very practical
Frank Wilczek (1:24:59.900)
to study individual photons
Lex Fridman (1:25:01.560)
and determine their spin and their other basic properties
Lex Fridman (1:25:05.660)
and check out the equations in great detail.
Lex Fridman (1:25:11.100)
For quarks and gluons,
Frank Wilczek (1:25:13.480)
which are the other two main ingredients
Lex Fridman (1:25:16.780)
of our model of matter that's so successful,
Frank Wilczek (1:25:22.300)
it's a little more complicated
Lex Fridman (1:25:23.580)
because the quarks and gluons that appear in our equations
Frank Wilczek (1:25:29.300)
don't appear directly as particles you can isolate
Lex Fridman (1:25:33.340)
and study individually.
Frank Wilczek (1:25:35.720)
They always occur within what are called bound states
Lex Fridman (1:25:41.820)
or structures like protons.
Frank Wilczek (1:25:43.980)
A proton, roughly speaking, is composed of three quarks
Lex Fridman (1:25:48.060)
and a lot of gluons but we can detect them
Frank Wilczek (1:25:50.620)
in a remarkably direct way actually nowadays,
Lex Fridman (1:25:54.420)
whereas at relatively low energies,
Frank Wilczek (1:25:58.200)
the behavior of quarks is complicated.
Lex Fridman (1:26:00.820)
At high energies, they can propagate through space
Frank Wilczek (1:26:05.500)
relatively freely for a while and we can see their tracks.
Lex Fridman (1:26:11.740)
So ultimately, they get recaptured into protons
Lex Fridman (1:26:14.820)
and other mesons and funny things
Lex Fridman (1:26:17.940)
but for a short time, they propagate freely
Lex Fridman (1:26:21.020)
and while that happens, we can take snapshots
Lex Fridman (1:26:25.260)
and see their manifestations.
Frank Wilczek (1:26:29.620)
Actually, this kind of thing is exactly
Lex Fridman (1:26:31.700)
what I got the Nobel Prize for,
Frank Wilczek (1:26:33.140)
predicting that this would work.
Lex Fridman (1:26:35.060)
And similarly for gluons,
Frank Wilczek (1:26:36.540)
although you can't isolate them as individual particles
Lex Fridman (1:26:41.660)
and study them in the same way that we study electrons,
Frank Wilczek (1:26:43.900)
say, you can use them theoretically as entities
Lex Fridman (1:26:51.820)
out of which you build tangible things
Frank Wilczek (1:26:57.060)
that we actually do observe
Lex Fridman (1:26:59.560)
but also you can, at accelerators at high energy,
Frank Wilczek (1:27:03.820)
you can liberate them for brief periods of time
Lex Fridman (1:27:06.340)
and study and get convincing evidence
Frank Wilczek (1:27:10.860)
that they leave tracks and you can get convincing evidence
Lex Fridman (1:27:15.460)
that they were there and have the properties
Frank Wilczek (1:27:17.900)
that we wanted them to have.
Lex Fridman (1:27:19.580)
Can we talk about asymptotic freedom,
Lex Fridman (1:27:21.260)
this very idea that you won the Nobel Prize for?
Lex Fridman (1:27:24.020)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:27:25.300)
So it describes a very weird effect to me,
Lex Fridman (1:27:30.820)
the weird in the following way.
Lex Fridman (1:27:33.220)
So the way I think of most forces or interactions,
Lex Fridman (1:27:38.220)
the closer you are, the stronger the effect,
Lex Fridman (1:27:43.820)
the stronger the force, right?
Lex Fridman (1:27:46.300)
With quarks, the close they are,
Frank Wilczek (1:27:50.540)
the less so the strong interaction.
Lex Fridman (1:27:53.900)
And in fact, they're basically act like free particles
Frank Wilczek (1:27:58.600)
when they're very close.
Lex Fridman (1:28:00.700)
That's right, yes.
Lex Fridman (1:28:01.900)
But this requires a huge amount of energy.
Lex Fridman (1:28:04.540)
Like can you describe me why, how does this even work?
Lex Fridman (1:28:11.740)
How weird it is?
Lex Fridman (1:28:12.580)
A proper description must bring in quantum mechanics
Lex Fridman (1:28:18.220)
and relativity and it's,
Lex Fridman (1:28:21.660)
so a proper description and equations,
Lex Fridman (1:28:25.460)
so a proper description really is probably more
Lex Fridman (1:28:29.860)
than we have time for and require quite a bit of patience
Frank Wilczek (1:28:34.140)
on your part, but.
Lex Fridman (1:28:35.980)
How does relativity come into play?
Frank Wilczek (1:28:37.700)
Wait, wait a minute.
Lex Fridman (1:28:39.220)
Relativity is important because when we talk about
Frank Wilczek (1:28:48.980)
trying to think about short distances,
Lex Fridman (1:28:51.580)
we have to think about very large momenta
Lex Fridman (1:28:55.060)
and very large momenta are connected
Lex Fridman (1:28:56.580)
to very large energy in relativity.
Lex Fridman (1:28:59.180)
And so the connection between how things behave
Lex Fridman (1:29:02.460)
at short distances and how things behave at high energy
Frank Wilczek (1:29:06.180)
really is connected through relativity
Lex Fridman (1:29:09.340)
in sort of a slightly backhanded way.
Frank Wilczek (1:29:13.000)
Quantum mechanics indicates that short,
Lex Fridman (1:29:16.180)
to get to analyze short distances,
Frank Wilczek (1:29:20.120)
you need to bring in probes that carry a lot of momentum.
Lex Fridman (1:29:26.460)
This again is related to uncertainty
Frank Wilczek (1:29:29.140)
because it's the fact that you have to bring in
Lex Fridman (1:29:31.980)
a lot of momentum that interferes with the possibility
Frank Wilczek (1:29:36.060)
of determining position and momentum at the same time.
Lex Fridman (1:29:40.220)
If you want to determine position,
Frank Wilczek (1:29:41.980)
you have to use instruments that bring in a lot of momentum.
Lex Fridman (1:29:45.140)
And because of that, those same instruments
Frank Wilczek (1:29:48.580)
can't also measure momentum
Lex Fridman (1:29:50.060)
because they're disturbing the momentum that,
Lex Fridman (1:29:53.620)
and then the momentum brings in energy and yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:29:56.220)
So that there's also the effect that asymptotic freedom
Frank Wilczek (1:29:59.540)
comes from the possibility of spontaneously making
Lex Fridman (1:30:08.460)
quarks and gluons for short amounts of time
Frank Wilczek (1:30:12.140)
that fluctuate into existence and out of existence.
Lex Fridman (1:30:16.600)
And the fact that that can be done
Frank Wilczek (1:30:21.860)
with a very little amount of energy
Lex Fridman (1:30:23.800)
and uncertainty and energy translates
Frank Wilczek (1:30:26.660)
into uncertainty and time.
Lex Fridman (1:30:27.620)
So if you do that for a short time, you can do that.
Frank Wilczek (1:30:31.460)
Well, it's all comes in a package.
Lex Fridman (1:30:35.340)
So I told you it would take a while to really explain,
Lex Fridman (1:30:39.500)
but the results can be understood.
Lex Fridman (1:30:44.100)
I mean, we can state the results pretty simply, I think.
Lex Fridman (1:30:48.100)
So in everyday life, we do encounter some forces
Lex Fridman (1:30:53.100)
that increase with distance
Lex Fridman (1:30:56.380)
and kind of turn off at short distances.
Lex Fridman (1:30:59.320)
That's the way rubber bands work, if you think about it,
Frank Wilczek (1:31:02.140)
or if you pull them hard, they resist,
Lex Fridman (1:31:06.980)
but they get flabby if the rubber band is not pulled.
Lex Fridman (1:31:12.940)
And so there are, that can happen in the physical world,
Lex Fridman (1:31:17.660)
but what's really difficult is to see
Lex Fridman (1:31:19.860)
how that could be a fundamental force
Lex Fridman (1:31:21.820)
that's consistent with everything else we know.
Lex Fridman (1:31:24.400)
And that's what asymptotic freedom is.
Lex Fridman (1:31:28.500)
It says that there's a very particular kind
Frank Wilczek (1:31:33.620)
of fundamental force that involves special particles
Lex Fridman (1:31:37.480)
called gluons with very special properties
Frank Wilczek (1:31:40.340)
that enables that kind of behavior.
Lex Fridman (1:31:43.080)
So there were experiment, at the time we did our work,
Frank Wilczek (1:31:47.380)
there were experimental indications
Lex Fridman (1:31:49.300)
that quarks and gluons did have this kind of property,
Lex Fridman (1:31:54.180)
but there were no equations
Lex Fridman (1:31:56.780)
that were capable of capturing it.
Lex Fridman (1:31:59.600)
And we found the equations and showed how they work
Lex Fridman (1:32:02.580)
and showed how they, that they were basically unique.
Lex Fridman (1:32:06.240)
And this led to a complete theory
Lex Fridman (1:32:08.300)
of how the strong interaction works,
Frank Wilczek (1:32:09.980)
which is the quantum chromodynamics we mentioned earlier.
Lex Fridman (1:32:14.220)
And so that's the phenomenon that quarks and gluons
Frank Wilczek (1:32:23.140)
interact very, very weakly when they're close together.
Lex Fridman (1:32:26.500)
That's connected through relativity
Frank Wilczek (1:32:29.100)
with the fact that they also interact very, very weakly
Lex Fridman (1:32:32.520)
at high energies.
Lex Fridman (1:32:34.000)
So if you have, so at high energies,
Lex Fridman (1:32:37.740)
the simplicity of the fundamental interaction gets revealed.
Frank Wilczek (1:32:42.220)
At the time we did our work,
Lex Fridman (1:32:43.820)
the clues were very subtle,
Lex Fridman (1:32:46.580)
but nowadays at what are now high energy accelerators,
Lex Fridman (1:32:50.140)
it's all obvious.
Lex Fridman (1:32:51.100)
So we would have had a much,
Lex Fridman (1:32:52.900)
well, somebody would have had a much easier time
Frank Wilczek (1:32:55.540)
20 years later, looking at the data,
Lex Fridman (1:32:57.700)
you can sort of see the quarks and gluons.
Frank Wilczek (1:32:59.940)
As I mentioned, they leave these short tracks
Lex Fridman (1:33:02.140)
that would have been much, much easier,
Lex Fridman (1:33:04.380)
but from fundamental, from indirect clues,
Lex Fridman (1:33:08.700)
we were able to piece together enough
Frank Wilczek (1:33:10.260)
to make that behavior a prediction
Lex Fridman (1:33:13.240)
rather than a post diction, right?
Lex Fridman (1:33:15.900)
So it becomes obvious at high energies.
Lex Fridman (1:33:17.960)
It becomes very obvious.
Frank Wilczek (1:33:19.240)
When we first did this work,
Lex Fridman (1:33:21.560)
it was frontiers of high energy physics
Lex Fridman (1:33:24.820)
and at big international conferences,
Lex Fridman (1:33:27.780)
there would always be sessions on testing QCD
Lex Fridman (1:33:30.900)
and whether this proposed description
Lex Fridman (1:33:34.380)
of the strong interaction was in fact correct and so forth.
Lex Fridman (1:33:37.660)
And it was very exciting.
Lex Fridman (1:33:39.740)
But nowadays the same kind of work,
Lex Fridman (1:33:44.740)
but much more precise with calculations
Lex Fridman (1:33:48.920)
to more accuracy and experiments
Frank Wilczek (1:33:50.700)
that are much more precise
Lex Fridman (1:33:54.380)
and comparisons that are very precise.
Frank Wilczek (1:33:57.160)
Now it's called calculating backgrounds
Lex Fridman (1:33:59.100)
because people take this for granted
Lex Fridman (1:34:03.040)
and wanna see deviations from the theory,
Lex Fridman (1:34:06.660)
which would be the new discoveries.
Frank Wilczek (1:34:09.740)
Yeah, the cutting edge becomes a foundation
Lex Fridman (1:34:11.700)
and the foundation becomes boring.
Frank Wilczek (1:34:13.100)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:34:15.340)
Is there some, for basic explanation purposes,
Frank Wilczek (1:34:19.100)
is there something to be said about strong interactions
Lex Fridman (1:34:23.300)
in the context of the strong nuclear force
Frank Wilczek (1:34:26.260)
for the attraction between protons and neutrons
Lex Fridman (1:34:30.800)
versus the interaction between quarks within protons?
Frank Wilczek (1:34:35.340)
Well, quarks and gluons have the same relation
Lex Fridman (1:34:40.620)
basically to nuclear physics
Frank Wilczek (1:34:43.700)
as electrons and photons have
Lex Fridman (1:34:46.700)
to atomic and molecular physics.
Lex Fridman (1:34:49.780)
So atoms and photons are the dynamic entities
Lex Fridman (1:34:56.780)
that really come into play in chemistry and atomic physics.
Frank Wilczek (1:35:01.580)
Of course, you have to have the atomic nuclei,
Lex Fridman (1:35:03.220)
but those are small and relatively inert,
Frank Wilczek (1:35:07.060)
really the dynamical part.
Lex Fridman (1:35:09.440)
And for most purposes of chemistry,
Frank Wilczek (1:35:12.100)
you just say that you have this tiny little nucleus,
Lex Fridman (1:35:14.200)
which QCD gives you.
Frank Wilczek (1:35:17.120)
Don't worry about it.
Lex Fridman (1:35:17.960)
It just, it's there.
Frank Wilczek (1:35:19.700)
The real action is the electrons moving around
Lex Fridman (1:35:22.660)
and exchanging and things like that.
Frank Wilczek (1:35:26.900)
Okay, but we want it to understand the nucleus too.
Lex Fridman (1:35:29.340)
And so atoms are sort of quantum mechanical clouds
Frank Wilczek (1:35:36.000)
of electrons held together by electrical forces,
Lex Fridman (1:35:38.880)
which is photons.
Lex Fridman (1:35:39.780)
And then this radiation,
Lex Fridman (1:35:40.820)
which is another aspect of photons.
Frank Wilczek (1:35:43.300)
That's where all the fun happens
Lex Fridman (1:35:44.560)
is the electrons and the photons.
Frank Wilczek (1:35:45.900)
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman (1:35:47.000)
And the nucleus are kind of the,
Frank Wilczek (1:35:51.180)
well, they give the positive charge
Lex Fridman (1:35:53.920)
and most of the mass of matter,
Lex Fridman (1:35:55.760)
but they don't, since they're so heavy,
Lex Fridman (1:36:01.180)
they don't move very much in chemistry.
Lex Fridman (1:36:03.800)
And I'm oversimplifying drastically.
Lex Fridman (1:36:07.920)
They're not contributing much to the interaction in chemistry.
Frank Wilczek (1:36:12.240)
For most purposes in chemistry,
Lex Fridman (1:36:13.680)
you can just idealize them as concentrations
Frank Wilczek (1:36:16.120)
of positive mass and charge that are,
Lex Fridman (1:36:20.720)
you don't have to look inside,
Lex Fridman (1:36:22.120)
but people are curious what's inside.
Lex Fridman (1:36:24.260)
And that was a big thing on the agenda
Frank Wilczek (1:36:29.280)
of 20th century physics starting in the 19,
Lex Fridman (1:36:32.520)
well, starting with the 20th century
Lex Fridman (1:36:34.520)
and unfolding throughout of trying to understand
Lex Fridman (1:36:38.240)
what forces held the atomic nucleus together,
Lex Fridman (1:36:41.600)
what it was and so.
Lex Fridman (1:36:44.640)
Anyway, the story that emerges from QCD
Frank Wilczek (1:36:49.640)
is that very similar to the way that,
Lex Fridman (1:36:55.560)
well, broadly similar to the way
Frank Wilczek (1:36:57.120)
that clouds of electrons held together
Lex Fridman (1:37:01.080)
by electrical forces give you atoms
Lex Fridman (1:37:04.480)
and ultimately molecules.
Lex Fridman (1:37:08.960)
Protons and neutrons are like atoms
Frank Wilczek (1:37:13.740)
made now out of quarks, quark clouds held together
Lex Fridman (1:37:17.820)
by gluons, which are like the photons
Frank Wilczek (1:37:20.960)
that give the electric forces,
Lex Fridman (1:37:23.580)
but this is giving a different force, the strong force.
Lex Fridman (1:37:26.480)
And the residual forces between protons and neutrons
Lex Fridman (1:37:31.800)
that are leftover from the basic binding
Frank Wilczek (1:37:37.600)
are like the residual forces between atoms
Lex Fridman (1:37:40.120)
that give molecules, but in the case of protons and neutrons,
Frank Wilczek (1:37:43.560)
it gives you atomic nuclei.
Lex Fridman (1:37:45.400)
So again, for definitional purposes,
Frank Wilczek (1:37:48.400)
QCD, quantum chromodynamics,
Lex Fridman (1:37:51.000)
is basically the physics of strong interaction.
Frank Wilczek (1:37:54.040)
Yeah, we understand, we now would understand,
Lex Fridman (1:37:56.580)
I think most physicists would say
Frank Wilczek (1:37:58.680)
it's the theory of quarks and gluons
Lex Fridman (1:38:02.000)
and how they interact.
Lex Fridman (1:38:04.280)
But it's a very precise, and I think it's fair to say,
Lex Fridman (1:38:07.840)
very beautiful theory based on mathematical symmetry
Frank Wilczek (1:38:11.920)
of a high order, and another thing that's beautiful
Lex Fridman (1:38:16.600)
about it is that it's kind of
Frank Wilczek (1:38:22.160)
in the same family as electrodynamics.
Lex Fridman (1:38:26.280)
The conceptual structure of the equations are very similar.
Frank Wilczek (1:38:31.200)
They're based on having particles that respond to charge
Lex Fridman (1:38:34.880)
in a very symmetric way.
Frank Wilczek (1:38:37.160)
In the case of electrodynamics,
Lex Fridman (1:38:39.660)
it's photons that respond to electric charge.
Frank Wilczek (1:38:42.040)
In the case of quantum chromodynamics,
Lex Fridman (1:38:44.520)
there are three kinds of charge that we call colors,
Lex Fridman (1:38:47.520)
but they're nothing like colors.
Lex Fridman (1:38:49.320)
They really are like different kinds of charge.
Lex Fridman (1:38:51.900)
But they rhyme with the same kind of,
Lex Fridman (1:38:54.560)
like it's similar kind of dynamics.
Frank Wilczek (1:38:56.600)
Similar kind of dynamics.
Lex Fridman (1:38:57.920)
I'd like to say that QCD is like QED on steroids.
Lex Fridman (1:39:02.920)
And instead of one photon, you have eight gluons.
Lex Fridman (1:39:05.920)
Instead of one charge, you have three color charges.
Lex Fridman (1:39:09.200)
But there's a strong family resemblance between them.
Lex Fridman (1:39:13.120)
But the context in which QCD does this thing
Frank Wilczek (1:39:16.880)
is it's much higher energies.
Lex Fridman (1:39:19.360)
Like that's where it comes to life.
Frank Wilczek (1:39:20.480)
Well, it's a stronger force,
Lex Fridman (1:39:22.320)
so that to access how it works and kind of pry things apart,
Frank Wilczek (1:39:28.160)
you have to inject more energy.
Lex Fridman (1:39:30.360)
And so that gives us, in some sense,
Frank Wilczek (1:39:35.320)
a hint of how things were in the earlier universe.
Lex Fridman (1:39:39.440)
Yeah, well, in that regard,
Frank Wilczek (1:39:41.120)
asymptotic freedom is a tremendous blessing
Lex Fridman (1:39:43.760)
because it means things get simpler at high energy.
Frank Wilczek (1:39:48.280)
The universe was born free.
Lex Fridman (1:39:50.040)
Born free.
Frank Wilczek (1:39:50.880)
That's very good, yes.
Lex Fridman (1:39:52.640)
Universe was born.
Lex Fridman (1:39:53.560)
So in atomic physics,
Lex Fridman (1:39:56.560)
a similar thing happens in the theory of stars.
Frank Wilczek (1:39:59.360)
Stars are hot enough that the interactions
Lex Fridman (1:40:03.380)
between electrons and photons, they're liberated.
Frank Wilczek (1:40:07.520)
They don't form atoms anymore.
Lex Fridman (1:40:08.680)
They make a plasma,
Frank Wilczek (1:40:09.640)
which in some ways is simpler to understand.
Lex Fridman (1:40:12.320)
You don't have complicated chemistry.
Lex Fridman (1:40:14.640)
And in the early universe, according to QCD,
Lex Fridman (1:40:18.120)
similarly atomic nuclei dissolved
Lex Fridman (1:40:20.480)
and take the constituent quarks and gluons,
Lex Fridman (1:40:22.880)
which are moving around very fast
Lex Fridman (1:40:24.480)
and interacting in relatively simple ways.
Lex Fridman (1:40:27.020)
And so this opened up the early universe
Frank Wilczek (1:40:30.560)
to scientific calculation.
Lex Fridman (1:40:33.560)
Can I ask you about some other weird particles
Lex Fridman (1:40:35.840)
that make up our universe?
Lex Fridman (1:40:37.920)
What are axions?
Lex Fridman (1:40:39.740)
And what is the strong CP problem?
Lex Fridman (1:40:42.640)
Okay, so let me start with what the strong CP problem is.
Frank Wilczek (1:40:49.040)
First of all, well, C is charge conjugation,
Lex Fridman (1:40:53.720)
which is the transformation,
Frank Wilczek (1:40:57.600)
the notional transformation, if you like,
Lex Fridman (1:40:59.940)
that changes all particles into their antiparticles.
Lex Fridman (1:41:03.360)
And the concept of C symmetry,
Lex Fridman (1:41:09.140)
charge conjugation symmetry, is that if you do that,
Frank Wilczek (1:41:13.280)
you find the same laws that would work.
Lex Fridman (1:41:16.760)
So the laws are symmetric if the behavior
Frank Wilczek (1:41:20.720)
that particles exhibit is the same
Lex Fridman (1:41:22.800)
as the behavior you get with all their antiparticles.
Lex Fridman (1:41:27.160)
And then P is parity,
Lex Fridman (1:41:31.360)
which is also called spatial inversion.
Frank Wilczek (1:41:35.260)
It's basically looking at a mirror universe
Lex Fridman (1:41:39.040)
and saying that the laws that are obeyed
Frank Wilczek (1:41:41.960)
in a mirror universe, when you look,
Lex Fridman (1:41:44.160)
that the mirror images obey the same laws
Frank Wilczek (1:41:46.780)
as the sources of their images.
Lex Fridman (1:41:50.480)
There's no way of telling left from right, for instance,
Frank Wilczek (1:41:52.840)
that the laws don't distinguish between left and right.
Lex Fridman (1:41:55.640)
Now, in the mid 20th century,
Frank Wilczek (1:42:00.380)
people discovered that both of those are not quite true.
Lex Fridman (1:42:05.160)
Really, the equation that the mirror universe,
Frank Wilczek (1:42:08.960)
the universe that you see in a mirror
Lex Fridman (1:42:15.360)
is not gonna obey the same laws
Frank Wilczek (1:42:18.480)
as the universe that we actually interpret.
Lex Fridman (1:42:23.480)
You would be able to tell
Frank Wilczek (1:42:26.880)
if you did the right kind of experiments,
Lex Fridman (1:42:28.980)
which was the mirror and which was the real thing.
Frank Wilczek (1:42:33.700)
Anyway, that.
Lex Fridman (1:42:34.840)
That's the parity and they show
Frank Wilczek (1:42:36.080)
that the parity doesn't necessarily hold.
Lex Fridman (1:42:37.920)
It doesn't quite hold.
Frank Wilczek (1:42:41.200)
Examining what the exceptions are turned out to be,
Lex Fridman (1:42:45.680)
to lead to all kinds of insight
Frank Wilczek (1:42:47.400)
about the nature of fundamental interactions,
Lex Fridman (1:42:49.840)
especially properties of neutrinos
Lex Fridman (1:42:51.640)
and the weak interaction, it's a long story.
Lex Fridman (1:42:53.840)
But it's a very, it's a.
Lex Fridman (1:42:55.480)
So you just define the C and the P,
Lex Fridman (1:42:57.680)
the conjugation, the charge conjugation.
Frank Wilczek (1:42:59.480)
Now that I've done that, I wanna.
Lex Fridman (1:43:00.880)
What's the problem?
Frank Wilczek (1:43:01.720)
Shove them off.
Lex Fridman (1:43:02.560)
Okay, great.
Frank Wilczek (1:43:04.040)
Because it's easier to talk about T,
Lex Fridman (1:43:06.520)
which is time reversal symmetry.
Frank Wilczek (1:43:08.920)
We have very good reasons to think CPT
Lex Fridman (1:43:13.200)
is an accurate symmetry of nature.
Frank Wilczek (1:43:17.180)
It's on the same level as relativity
Lex Fridman (1:43:19.400)
and quantum mechanics, basically.
Lex Fridman (1:43:20.960)
So that better be true.
Lex Fridman (1:43:23.960)
Or else we.
Lex Fridman (1:43:24.800)
So it's symmetric when you.
Lex Fridman (1:43:26.000)
When you do.
Frank Wilczek (1:43:26.840)
When you do conjugation parity and time.
Lex Fridman (1:43:28.000)
And time and space reversal.
Frank Wilczek (1:43:30.960)
If you do all three,
Lex Fridman (1:43:32.320)
then you get the same physical consequences.
Frank Wilczek (1:43:35.320)
Now, so, but that means that CP is equivalent to T.
Lex Fridman (1:43:39.700)
But what's observed in the world
Frank Wilczek (1:43:41.640)
is that T is not quite an accurate symmetry of nature,
Lex Fridman (1:43:45.640)
either.
Lex Fridman (1:43:46.720)
So most phenomena of, at the fundamental level.
Lex Fridman (1:43:52.320)
So interactions among elementary particles
Lex Fridman (1:43:54.700)
and the basic gravitational interaction.
Lex Fridman (1:43:59.240)
If you ran them backwards in time,
Frank Wilczek (1:44:03.520)
you'd get the same laws.
Lex Fridman (1:44:05.400)
So if, again, going back.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:08.920)
This time we don't talk about a mirror,
Lex Fridman (1:44:11.500)
but we talk about a movie.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:13.220)
If you take a movie and then run it backwards,
Lex Fridman (1:44:18.820)
that's the time reversal.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:21.360)
It's good to think about a mirror in time.
Lex Fridman (1:44:23.400)
Yeah, it's like a mirror in time.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:25.220)
If you run the movie backwards,
Lex Fridman (1:44:29.120)
it would look very strange
Frank Wilczek (1:44:30.680)
if you were looking at complicated objects
Lex Fridman (1:44:32.800)
and a Charlie Chaplin movie or whatever.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:37.360)
It would look very strange if you ran it backwards in time.
Lex Fridman (1:44:40.240)
But at the level of basic interactions,
Frank Wilczek (1:44:43.800)
if you were able to look at the atoms
Lex Fridman (1:44:46.000)
and the quarks involved, they would obey the same laws.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:49.960)
They do a very good approximation, but not exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:44:53.360)
So this is not exactly, that means you could tell.
Frank Wilczek (1:44:55.960)
You could tell, but you'd have to do very, very
Lex Fridman (1:44:59.800)
subtle experiments with at high energy accelerators
Frank Wilczek (1:45:04.680)
to take a movie that looked different
Lex Fridman (1:45:06.760)
when you ran it backwards.
Frank Wilczek (1:45:08.760)
This was a discovery by two great physicists
Lex Fridman (1:45:13.800)
named Jim Cronin and Val Fitch in the mid 1960s.
Frank Wilczek (1:45:20.600)
Previous to that, over all the centuries
Lex Fridman (1:45:22.520)
of development of physics with all its precise laws,
Frank Wilczek (1:45:25.260)
they did seem to have this gratuitous property
Lex Fridman (1:45:30.120)
that they look the same if you run the equations backwards.
Frank Wilczek (1:45:33.040)
It's kind of an embarrassing property actually
Lex Fridman (1:45:35.320)
because life isn't like that.
Lex Fridman (1:45:38.560)
So empirical reality does not have this imagery
Lex Fridman (1:45:41.880)
in any obvious way.
Lex Fridman (1:45:42.900)
And yet the laws did.
Lex Fridman (1:45:44.960)
It's almost like the laws of physics
Frank Wilczek (1:45:46.320)
are missing something fundamental about life
Lex Fridman (1:45:48.740)
if it holds that property, right?
Frank Wilczek (1:45:51.400)
Well, that's the embarrassing nature of it.
Lex Fridman (1:45:54.360)
Yeah, it's embarrassing.
Frank Wilczek (1:45:55.240)
Well, people worked hard at what's,
Lex Fridman (1:46:01.080)
this is a problem that's thought to belong
Frank Wilczek (1:46:04.840)
to the foundations of statistical mechanics
Lex Fridman (1:46:07.160)
or the foundations of thermodynamics
Frank Wilczek (1:46:10.560)
to understand how behavior,
Lex Fridman (1:46:14.960)
which is grossly not symmetric
Frank Wilczek (1:46:18.780)
with respect to reversing the direction of time
Lex Fridman (1:46:21.280)
in large objects, how that can emerge from equations
Frank Wilczek (1:46:24.360)
which are symmetric with respect to changing
Lex Fridman (1:46:28.120)
the direction of time to a very good approximation.
Lex Fridman (1:46:31.080)
And that's still an interesting endeavor.
Lex Fridman (1:46:33.200)
That's interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:46:35.200)
And actually it's an exciting frontier of physics now
Lex Fridman (1:46:38.640)
to sort of explore the boundary
Frank Wilczek (1:46:40.200)
between when that's true and when it's not true.
Lex Fridman (1:46:42.360)
When you get to smaller objects
Lex Fridman (1:46:44.520)
and exceptions like time crystals.
Lex Fridman (1:46:47.600)
I definitely have to ask you about time crystals
Frank Wilczek (1:46:49.480)
in a second here.
Lex Fridman (1:46:50.320)
But so the CP problem and T,
Lex Fridman (1:46:53.680)
so there's all of these.
Lex Fridman (1:46:55.680)
We're in danger of infinite regress,
Lex Fridman (1:46:57.580)
but we have to convert soon.
Lex Fridman (1:46:59.240)
So.
Frank Wilczek (1:47:00.080)
Can't possibly be turtles all the way down.
Lex Fridman (1:47:02.160)
We're gonna get to the bottom turtle.
Lex Fridman (1:47:03.440)
So it became,
Lex Fridman (1:47:06.280)
so it got to be a real,
Frank Wilczek (1:47:08.880)
I mean, it's a really puzzling thing
Lex Fridman (1:47:11.200)
why the laws should have this very odd property
Frank Wilczek (1:47:15.340)
that we don't need.
Lex Fridman (1:47:16.840)
And in fact, it's kind of an embarrassment
Frank Wilczek (1:47:20.000)
in addressing empirical reality.
Lex Fridman (1:47:22.180)
But it seemed to be almost,
Frank Wilczek (1:47:24.680)
it seemed to be exactly true for a long time.
Lex Fridman (1:47:26.960)
And then almost true.
Lex Fridman (1:47:29.280)
And in way, almost true is even,
Lex Fridman (1:47:33.760)
is more disturbing than exactly true
Frank Wilczek (1:47:35.600)
because exactly true,
Lex Fridman (1:47:37.400)
it could have been just a fundamental feature of the world.
Lex Fridman (1:47:39.800)
And at some level you just have to take it as it is.
Lex Fridman (1:47:42.300)
And if it's a beautiful, easily articulatable regularity,
Frank Wilczek (1:47:47.720)
you could say that, okay,
Lex Fridman (1:47:48.700)
that's fine as a fundamental law of nature.
Lex Fridman (1:47:51.760)
But to say that it's approximately true,
Lex Fridman (1:47:53.440)
but not exactly, that's weird.
Frank Wilczek (1:47:56.400)
So, and then, so there was great progress
Lex Fridman (1:48:00.920)
in the late part of the 20th century
Frank Wilczek (1:48:06.860)
in getting to an understanding
Lex Fridman (1:48:09.260)
of fundamental interactions in general
Frank Wilczek (1:48:11.680)
that shed light on this issue.
Lex Fridman (1:48:14.800)
It turns out that the basic principles of relativity
Lex Fridman (1:48:20.900)
and quantum mechanics,
Lex Fridman (1:48:22.240)
plus the kind of high degree of symmetry that we found,
Frank Wilczek (1:48:27.520)
the so called gauge symmetry
Lex Fridman (1:48:28.960)
that characterizes the fundamental interactions,
Frank Wilczek (1:48:31.980)
when you put all that together,
Lex Fridman (1:48:33.800)
it's a very, very constraining framework.
Lex Fridman (1:48:37.620)
And it has some indirect consequences
Lex Fridman (1:48:42.500)
because the possible interactions are so constrained.
Lex Fridman (1:48:45.960)
And one of the indirect consequences
Lex Fridman (1:48:48.640)
is that the possibilities for violating the symmetry
Frank Wilczek (1:48:54.360)
between forwards and backwards in time are very limited.
Lex Fridman (1:48:57.920)
They're basically only two.
Lex Fridman (1:49:01.040)
And one of them occurs and leads to a very rich theory
Lex Fridman (1:49:05.120)
that explains the Cronin Fish experiment
Lex Fridman (1:49:07.600)
and a lot of things that have been done subsequently
Lex Fridman (1:49:09.700)
has been used to make all kinds of successful predictions.
Lex Fridman (1:49:13.680)
So that's turned out to be a very rich interaction.
Lex Fridman (1:49:19.000)
It's esoteric and the effects only show up at accelerators
Lex Fridman (1:49:23.160)
and are small and so on,
Lex Fridman (1:49:24.360)
but they might've been very important in the early universe
Lex Fridman (1:49:26.480)
and lead to them be connected to the asymmetry
Lex Fridman (1:49:29.760)
between matter and antimatter in the present universe.
Lex Fridman (1:49:32.560)
And so, but that's another digression.
Lex Fridman (1:49:36.380)
The point is that that was fine.
Frank Wilczek (1:49:40.080)
That was a triumph to say
Lex Fridman (1:49:41.620)
that there was one possible kind of interaction
Frank Wilczek (1:49:44.920)
that would violate time reversal symmetry.
Lex Fridman (1:49:47.320)
And sure enough, there it is.
Lex Fridman (1:49:49.500)
But the other kind doesn't occur.
Lex Fridman (1:49:54.760)
So we still got a problem.
Lex Fridman (1:49:55.920)
Why doesn't it occur?
Lex Fridman (1:49:59.800)
So we're close to really finally understanding
Frank Wilczek (1:50:01.800)
this profound gratuitous feature of the world
Lex Fridman (1:50:04.760)
that is almost but not quite symmetric
Frank Wilczek (1:50:08.380)
under reversing the direction of time, but not quite there.
Lex Fridman (1:50:12.240)
And to understand that last bit
Frank Wilczek (1:50:18.520)
is a challenging frontier of physics today.
Lex Fridman (1:50:22.880)
And we have a promising proposal for how it works,
Frank Wilczek (1:50:27.520)
which is a kind of theory of evolution.
Lex Fridman (1:50:31.360)
So there's this possible interaction,
Frank Wilczek (1:50:35.600)
which we call a coupling,
Lex Fridman (1:50:37.320)
and there's a numerical quantity
Frank Wilczek (1:50:39.120)
that tells us how strong that is.
Lex Fridman (1:50:41.480)
And traditionally in physics,
Frank Wilczek (1:50:43.640)
we think of these kinds of numerical quantities
Lex Fridman (1:50:46.400)
as constants of nature that you just have to put them in.
Frank Wilczek (1:50:54.220)
From experiment, they have a certain value and that's it.
Lex Fridman (1:50:57.040)
And who am I to question what God doing?
Frank Wilczek (1:51:01.760)
They're just constant.
Lex Fridman (1:51:02.720)
Well, they seem to be just constants.
Frank Wilczek (1:51:04.620)
I'm just wondering.
Lex Fridman (1:51:06.060)
But in this case,
Frank Wilczek (1:51:10.340)
it's been fruitful to think and work out a theory
Lex Fridman (1:51:15.140)
where that strength of interaction
Frank Wilczek (1:51:22.260)
is actually not a constant.
Lex Fridman (1:51:23.900)
It's a fun, it's a field.
Frank Wilczek (1:51:27.220)
It's a, fields are the fundamental ingredients
Lex Fridman (1:51:31.560)
of modern physics.
Frank Wilczek (1:51:32.420)
Like there's an electron field,
Lex Fridman (1:51:34.060)
there's a photon field,
Frank Wilczek (1:51:35.180)
which is also called the electromagnetic field.
Lex Fridman (1:51:37.180)
And so all of these particles
Frank Wilczek (1:51:39.240)
are manifestations of different fields.
Lex Fridman (1:51:41.700)
And there could be a field,
Frank Wilczek (1:51:45.300)
something that depends on space and time.
Lex Fridman (1:51:47.740)
So a dynamical entity instead of just a constant here.
Lex Fridman (1:51:53.100)
And if you do things in a nice way,
Lex Fridman (1:51:57.660)
that's very symmetric,
Frank Wilczek (1:51:58.720)
very much suggested aesthetically by the theory.
Lex Fridman (1:52:02.200)
But the theory we do have,
Frank Wilczek (1:52:05.160)
then you find that you get a field
Lex Fridman (1:52:11.160)
which as it evolves from the early universe,
Frank Wilczek (1:52:17.240)
settles down to a value
Lex Fridman (1:52:22.160)
that's just right to make the laws
Frank Wilczek (1:52:27.160)
very nearly exact, invariant or symmetric
Lex Fridman (1:52:32.240)
with respect to reversal of time.
Frank Wilczek (1:52:33.640)
It might appear as a constant,
Lex Fridman (1:52:34.760)
but it's actually a field that evolved over time.
Frank Wilczek (1:52:36.640)
It evolved over time, okay.
Lex Fridman (1:52:38.500)
But when you examine this proposal in detail,
Frank Wilczek (1:52:42.160)
you find that it hasn't quite settled down to exactly zero.
Lex Fridman (1:52:47.240)
There it's still,
Frank Wilczek (1:52:48.720)
the field is still moving around a little bit.
Lex Fridman (1:52:52.040)
And because the motion is so,
Frank Wilczek (1:52:55.660)
the motion is so difficult.
Lex Fridman (1:52:59.460)
The material is so rigid.
Lex Fridman (1:53:00.820)
And this material,
Lex Fridman (1:53:01.660)
the field that fills all space is so rigid.
Frank Wilczek (1:53:03.980)
Even small amounts of motion can involve lots of energy.
Lex Fridman (1:53:08.200)
And that energy takes the form of particles,
Frank Wilczek (1:53:14.740)
fields that are in motion
Lex Fridman (1:53:16.740)
are always associated with particles.
Lex Fridman (1:53:18.500)
And those are the axioms.
Lex Fridman (1:53:20.500)
And if you calculate how much energy
Frank Wilczek (1:53:23.380)
is in these residual oscillations,
Lex Fridman (1:53:26.620)
this axiom gas that fills all the universe,
Frank Wilczek (1:53:30.260)
if this fundamental theory is correct,
Lex Fridman (1:53:32.300)
you get just the right amount
Frank Wilczek (1:53:36.460)
to make the dark matter that astronomers want.
Lex Fridman (1:53:39.300)
And it has just the right properties.
Lex Fridman (1:53:41.780)
So I'd love to believe that.
Lex Fridman (1:53:44.260)
So that might be a thing that unlocks,
Frank Wilczek (1:53:47.680)
might be the key to understanding dark matter.
Lex Fridman (1:53:50.180)
Yeah, I'd like to think so.
Lex Fridman (1:53:51.540)
And many, many physicists are coming around
Lex Fridman (1:53:53.380)
to this point of view,
Frank Wilczek (1:53:54.220)
which I've been a voice in the wilderness.
Lex Fridman (1:53:58.100)
I was a voice in the wilderness for a long time,
Lex Fridman (1:54:00.620)
but now it's become very popular, maybe even dominant.
Lex Fridman (1:54:04.620)
So almost like,
Lex Fridman (1:54:05.460)
so this axion particle slash field
Lex Fridman (1:54:10.660)
would be the thing that explains dark matter.
Frank Wilczek (1:54:13.980)
It explains, yeah,
Lex Fridman (1:54:14.820)
would solve this fundamental question of finally,
Frank Wilczek (1:54:17.940)
of why the laws are almost, but not quite exactly the same
Lex Fridman (1:54:24.620)
if you run them backwards in time.
Lex Fridman (1:54:26.540)
And then seemingly in a totally different
Lex Fridman (1:54:30.380)
conceptual universe,
Frank Wilczek (1:54:32.740)
it would also provide,
Lex Fridman (1:54:35.300)
give us an understanding of the dark matter.
Frank Wilczek (1:54:38.020)
That's not what it was designed for.
Lex Fridman (1:54:41.580)
And the theory wasn't proposed with that in mind,
Lex Fridman (1:54:45.060)
but when you work out the equations, that's what you get.
Lex Fridman (1:54:47.940)
That's always a good sign.
Frank Wilczek (1:54:49.060)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:54:51.020)
I think I vaguely read somewhere
Frank Wilczek (1:54:53.840)
that there may be early experimental validation of axion.
Lex Fridman (1:54:59.600)
Is that, am I reading the wrong?
Frank Wilczek (1:55:03.120)
Well, there've been quite a few false alarms
Lex Fridman (1:55:05.580)
and I think there are some of them still,
Frank Wilczek (1:55:08.100)
people desperately wanna find this thing.
Lex Fridman (1:55:10.100)
And, but I don't think any of them are convincing
Frank Wilczek (1:55:15.300)
at this point,
Lex Fridman (1:55:16.140)
but there are very ambitious experiments
Lex Fridman (1:55:20.460)
and kind of new,
Lex Fridman (1:55:23.000)
you have to design new kinds of antennas
Frank Wilczek (1:55:24.940)
that are capable of detecting these predicted particles.
Lex Fridman (1:55:28.340)
And it's very difficult.
Frank Wilczek (1:55:29.900)
They interact very, very weakly.
Lex Fridman (1:55:31.380)
If it were easy, it would have been done already.
Lex Fridman (1:55:33.740)
But I think there's good hope
Lex Fridman (1:55:37.060)
that we can get down to the required sensitivity
Lex Fridman (1:55:40.980)
and actually test whether these ideas are right
Lex Fridman (1:55:44.740)
in coming years or maybe decades.
Lex Fridman (1:55:47.420)
And then understand one of the big mysteries,
Lex Fridman (1:55:50.460)
like literally big in terms of its fraction
Frank Wilczek (1:55:53.940)
of the universe is dark matter.
Lex Fridman (1:55:55.460)
Yes.
Frank Wilczek (1:55:56.620)
Let me ask you about, you mentioned a few times,
Lex Fridman (1:55:59.020)
time crystals.
Lex Fridman (1:56:01.920)
What are they?
Lex Fridman (1:56:02.860)
These things are, it's a very beautiful idea
Frank Wilczek (1:56:05.340)
when we start to treat space and time
Lex Fridman (1:56:10.100)
as similar frameworks.
Frank Wilczek (1:56:13.740)
Yes, right.
Lex Fridman (1:56:14.580)
Physical phenomena.
Frank Wilczek (1:56:15.420)
Right, that's what motivated it.
Lex Fridman (1:56:17.500)
First of all, what are crystals?
Frank Wilczek (1:56:19.220)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:56:20.060)
And what are time crystals?
Frank Wilczek (1:56:20.900)
Okay, so crystals are orderly arrangements
Lex Fridman (1:56:24.540)
of atoms in space.
Lex Fridman (1:56:27.340)
And many materials,
Lex Fridman (1:56:30.740)
if you cool them down gently, will form crystals.
Lex Fridman (1:56:38.580)
And so we say that that's a state of matter
Lex Fridman (1:56:43.900)
that forms spontaneously.
Lex Fridman (1:56:45.940)
And an important feature of that state of matter
Lex Fridman (1:56:50.220)
is that the end result, the crystal,
Frank Wilczek (1:56:53.900)
has less symmetry than the equations
Lex Fridman (1:57:01.460)
that give rise to the crystal.
Lex Fridman (1:57:03.100)
So the equations, the basic equations of physics
Lex Fridman (1:57:09.260)
are the same if you move a little bit.
Lex Fridman (1:57:12.740)
So you can move, they're homogeneous,
Lex Fridman (1:57:15.620)
but crystals aren't.
Frank Wilczek (1:57:16.820)
The atoms are in particular place,
Lex Fridman (1:57:18.540)
so they have less symmetry.
Lex Fridman (1:57:20.260)
And time crystals are the same thing in time, basically.
Lex Fridman (1:57:27.060)
But of course, so it's not positions of atoms,
Lex Fridman (1:57:30.220)
but it's orderly behavior that certain states of matter
Lex Fridman (1:57:38.220)
will arrange themselves into spontaneously
Frank Wilczek (1:57:41.020)
if you treat them gently
Lex Fridman (1:57:44.780)
and let them do what they want to do.
Lex Fridman (1:57:46.780)
But repeat in that same way indefinitely.
Lex Fridman (1:57:50.040)
That's the crystalline form.
Frank Wilczek (1:57:51.460)
You can also have time liquids,
Lex Fridman (1:57:54.940)
or you can have all kinds of other states of matter.
Frank Wilczek (1:57:57.420)
You can also have space time crystals
Lex Fridman (1:57:58.960)
where the pattern only repeats if with each step of time,
Frank Wilczek (1:58:03.740)
you also move at a certain direction in space.
Lex Fridman (1:58:07.300)
So yeah, basically it's states of matter
Frank Wilczek (1:58:12.680)
that displace structure in time spontaneously.
Lex Fridman (1:58:17.680)
So here's the difference.
Frank Wilczek (1:58:21.120)
When it happens in time,
Lex Fridman (1:58:24.900)
it sure looks a lot like it's motion,
Lex Fridman (1:58:27.800)
and if it repeats indefinitely,
Lex Fridman (1:58:29.480)
it sure looks a lot like perpetual motion.
Frank Wilczek (1:58:32.040)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:58:32.880)
Like looks like free lunch.
Lex Fridman (1:58:35.080)
And I was told that there's no such thing as free lunch.
Lex Fridman (1:58:39.280)
Does this violate laws of thermodynamics?
Frank Wilczek (1:58:42.480)
No, but it requires a critical examination
Lex Fridman (1:58:45.640)
of the laws of thermodynamics.
Frank Wilczek (1:58:47.920)
I mean, let me say on background
Lex Fridman (1:58:49.840)
that the laws of thermodynamics
Frank Wilczek (1:58:51.560)
are not fundamental laws of physics.
Lex Fridman (1:58:55.420)
There are things we prove
Frank Wilczek (1:58:58.920)
under certain circumstances emerge
Lex Fridman (1:59:01.160)
from the fundamental laws of physics.
Frank Wilczek (1:59:03.400)
They're not, we don't posit them separately.
Lex Fridman (1:59:06.680)
They're meant to be deduced,
Lex Fridman (1:59:08.300)
and they can be deduced under limited circumstances,
Lex Fridman (1:59:10.600)
but not necessarily universally.
Lex Fridman (1:59:12.820)
And we're finding some of the subtleties
Lex Fridman (1:59:15.560)
and sort of accept edge cases
Frank Wilczek (1:59:18.360)
where they don't apply in a straightforward way.
Lex Fridman (1:59:22.600)
And this is one.
Lex Fridman (1:59:25.200)
So time crystals do obey,
Lex Fridman (1:59:27.680)
do have this structure in time,
Lex Fridman (1:59:30.400)
but it's not a free lunch
Lex Fridman (1:59:31.980)
because although in a sense, things are moving,
Frank Wilczek (1:59:36.680)
they're already doing what they want to do.
Lex Fridman (1:59:39.100)
They're in the,
Lex Fridman (1:59:40.400)
so if you want to extract energy from it,
Lex Fridman (1:59:44.080)
you're gonna be foiled
Frank Wilczek (1:59:44.920)
because there's no spare energy there.
Lex Fridman (1:59:50.360)
So you can add energy to it and kind of disturb it,
Lex Fridman (1:59:53.900)
but you can't extract energy from this motion
Lex Fridman (1:59:58.380)
because it's gonna, it wants to do,
Lex Fridman (20:01.060)
And the extinction event that let the mammals
Lex Fridman (20:05.580)
and ultimately humans inherit the Earth
Frank Wilczek (20:08.900)
from the dinosaurs occurred on December 30th.
Lex Fridman (20:13.540)
And all of human history is a small part of the last day.
Lex Fridman (20:18.380)
And so, yes, so we're occupying only,
Lex Fridman (20:23.380)
and a human lifetime is a very, very infinitesimal part
Frank Wilczek (20:26.860)
of this interval of these gigantic cosmic reaches of time.
Lex Fridman (20:35.300)
And in space, we can tell a very similar story.
Frank Wilczek (20:39.300)
In fact, it's convenient to think that the size
Lex Fridman (20:44.300)
of the universe is the distance that light can travel
Frank Wilczek (20:48.820)
in 13.8 billion years.
Lex Fridman (20:50.700)
So it's 13.8 billion light years.
Frank Wilczek (20:54.420)
That's how far you can see out.
Lex Fridman (20:56.940)
That's how far signals can reach us.
Lex Fridman (21:01.380)
And that is a big distance.
Lex Fridman (21:06.380)
That is a big distance because compared to that, the Earth
Frank Wilczek (21:14.780)
is a fraction of a light second.
Lex Fridman (21:18.180)
So again, it's really, really big.
Lex Fridman (21:21.580)
And so if we wanna think about the universe
Lex Fridman (21:27.020)
as a whole in space and time,
Frank Wilczek (21:30.420)
we really need a different kind of imagination.
Lex Fridman (21:35.060)
It's not something you can grasp
Frank Wilczek (21:41.900)
in terms of psychological time in a useful way.
Lex Fridman (21:44.380)
You have to think, you have to use exponential notation
Lex Fridman (21:47.460)
and abstract concepts to really get any hold
Lex Fridman (21:51.820)
on these vast times and spaces.
Frank Wilczek (21:56.340)
On the other hand, let me hasten to add
Lex Fridman (21:58.140)
that that doesn't make us small
Frank Wilczek (22:00.460)
or make the time that we have to us small.
Lex Fridman (22:06.900)
Because again, looking at those pictures
Frank Wilczek (22:10.660)
of what our minds are and some of the components
Lex Fridman (22:15.500)
of our minds, these beautiful drawings
Frank Wilczek (22:18.620)
of the cellular patterns inside the brain,
Lex Fridman (22:21.180)
you see that there are many, many, many processing units.
Lex Fridman (22:24.820)
And if you analyze how fast they operate,
Lex Fridman (22:29.740)
I tried to estimate how many thoughts
Frank Wilczek (22:31.660)
a person can have in a lifetime.
Lex Fridman (22:33.340)
That's kind of a fuzzy question,
Lex Fridman (22:34.740)
but I'm very proud that I was able
Lex Fridman (22:36.740)
to define it pretty precisely.
Lex Fridman (22:39.460)
And it turns out we have time for billions
Lex Fridman (22:43.620)
of meaningful thoughts in a lifetime.
Lex Fridman (22:46.940)
So it's a lot.
Lex Fridman (22:48.540)
We shouldn't think of ourselves as terribly small
Frank Wilczek (22:51.820)
either in space or in time,
Lex Fridman (22:53.300)
because although we're small in those dimensions
Frank Wilczek (22:57.460)
compared to the universe, we're large compared
Lex Fridman (23:01.380)
to meaningful units of processing information
Lex Fridman (23:05.980)
and being able to conceptualize and understand things.
Lex Fridman (23:11.620)
Yeah, but 99% of those thoughts are probably food,
Frank Wilczek (23:15.100)
sex, or internet related.
Lex Fridman (23:16.820)
Well, yeah, well, they're not necessarily, that's right.
Frank Wilczek (23:20.540)
Only like point one is Nobel Prize winning ideas.
Lex Fridman (23:24.100)
That's true, but there's more to life
Frank Wilczek (23:26.340)
than winning Nobel Prizes.
Lex Fridman (23:27.740)
How did you do that calculate?
Lex Fridman (23:29.860)
Can you maybe break that apart a little bit,
Lex Fridman (23:31.380)
just kind of for fun, sort of an intuition
Lex Fridman (23:34.020)
of how we calculate the number of thoughts?
Lex Fridman (23:35.940)
The number of thoughts, right.
Frank Wilczek (23:37.900)
It's necessarily imprecise because a lot of things
Lex Fridman (23:40.940)
are going on in different ways and what is a thought.
Lex Fridman (23:43.260)
But there are several things that point
Lex Fridman (23:45.900)
to more or less the same rate of being able
Frank Wilczek (23:50.900)
to have meaningful thoughts.
Lex Fridman (23:52.700)
For instance, the one that I think is maybe
Frank Wilczek (23:57.700)
the most penetrating is how fast
Lex Fridman (24:01.420)
we can process visual images.
Lex Fridman (24:04.420)
How do we do that?
Lex Fridman (24:07.820)
If you've ever watched old movies,
Frank Wilczek (24:11.380)
you can see that, well, any movie, in fact,
Lex Fridman (24:15.700)
a motion picture is really not a motion picture.
Frank Wilczek (24:18.080)
It's a series of snapshots that are playing
Lex Fridman (24:20.540)
one after the other and it's because our brains
Frank Wilczek (24:25.120)
also work that way.
Lex Fridman (24:26.540)
We take snapshots of the world, integrate over a certain time
Lex Fridman (24:29.940)
and then go on to the next one and then by post processing,
Lex Fridman (24:33.500)
create the illusion of continuity and flow,
Frank Wilczek (24:37.020)
we can deal with that.
Lex Fridman (24:38.380)
And if the flicker rate is too slow,
Frank Wilczek (24:44.540)
then you start to see that it's a series of snapshots
Lex Fridman (24:48.640)
and you can ask, what is the crossover?
Frank Wilczek (24:51.060)
When does it change from being something
Lex Fridman (24:53.100)
that is matched to our processing speed versus too fast?
Lex Fridman (24:57.440)
And it turns out about 40 per second.
Lex Fridman (25:00.460)
And then if you take 40 per second as how well,
Lex Fridman (25:04.820)
how fast we can process visual images,
Lex Fridman (25:06.900)
you get to several billions of thoughts.
Frank Wilczek (25:10.820)
If you, similarly, if you ask what are some
Lex Fridman (25:14.700)
of the fastest things that people can do?
Frank Wilczek (25:16.980)
Well, they can play video games,
Lex Fridman (25:18.700)
they can play the piano very fast if they're skilled at it.
Lex Fridman (25:22.500)
And again, you get to similar units
Lex Fridman (25:25.320)
or how fast can people talk?
Frank Wilczek (25:27.260)
You get to similar, you know,
Lex Fridman (25:28.420)
within a couple of orders of magnitude,
Frank Wilczek (25:30.140)
you get more or less to the same idea.
Lex Fridman (25:33.020)
So that's how you can say that there's billions
Frank Wilczek (25:38.660)
of meaningful, there's room for billions
Lex Fridman (25:40.780)
of meaningful thoughts.
Frank Wilczek (25:42.140)
I won't argue for exactly two billion versus 1.8 billion.
Lex Fridman (25:47.620)
It's not that kind of question,
Lex Fridman (25:49.100)
but I think any estimate that's reasonable
Lex Fridman (25:52.820)
will come out within, say, 100 billion and 100 million.
Lex Fridman (25:58.180)
So it's a lot.
Lex Fridman (26:01.700)
It would be interesting to map out
Frank Wilczek (26:04.140)
for an individual human being the landscape of thoughts
Lex Fridman (26:07.300)
that they've sort of traveled.
Frank Wilczek (26:09.320)
If you think of thoughts as a set of trajectories,
Lex Fridman (26:14.340)
what that landscape looks like.
Frank Wilczek (26:16.400)
I mean, I've been recently really thinking
Lex Fridman (26:19.620)
about this Richard Dawkins idea of memes
Lex Fridman (26:24.780)
and just all this ideas and the evolution of ideas
Lex Fridman (26:27.840)
inside of one particular human mind
Lex Fridman (26:30.780)
and how they're then changed and evolved
Lex Fridman (26:33.740)
by interaction with other human beings.
Frank Wilczek (26:36.520)
It's interesting to think about.
Lex Fridman (26:38.100)
So if you think the number is billions,
Frank Wilczek (26:41.500)
you think there's also social interaction.
Lex Fridman (26:44.340)
So these aren't like there's interaction
Frank Wilczek (26:48.660)
in the same way you have interaction with particles.
Lex Fridman (26:50.740)
There's interaction between human thoughts
Frank Wilczek (26:53.500)
that perhaps that interaction in itself
Lex Fridman (26:56.380)
is fundamental to the process of thinking.
Frank Wilczek (26:59.140)
Like without social interaction,
Lex Fridman (27:01.380)
we would be like stuck, like walking in a circle.
Frank Wilczek (27:04.100)
We need the perturbation of other humans
Lex Fridman (27:07.380)
to create change and evolution.
Frank Wilczek (27:09.620)
Once you bring in concepts of interactions
Lex Fridman (27:13.300)
and correlations and relations,
Frank Wilczek (27:15.880)
then you have what's called a combinatorial explosion
Lex Fridman (27:20.260)
that the number of possibilities expands exponentially
Frank Wilczek (27:24.300)
technically with the number of things you're considering.
Lex Fridman (27:28.900)
And it can easily rapidly outstrip these billions
Frank Wilczek (27:34.700)
of thoughts that we're talking about.
Lex Fridman (27:36.740)
So we definitely cannot by brute force
Frank Wilczek (27:41.700)
master complex situations
Lex Fridman (27:45.500)
or think of all the possibilities in a complex situations.
Frank Wilczek (27:48.920)
I mean, even something as relatively simple as chess
Lex Fridman (27:53.500)
is still something that human beings
Frank Wilczek (27:56.300)
can't comprehend completely.
Lex Fridman (27:57.860)
Even the best players lose, still sometimes lose
Lex Fridman (28:00.940)
and they consistently lose to computers these days.
Lex Fridman (28:05.140)
And in computer science, there's a concept of NP complete.
Lex Fridman (28:08.860)
So large classes of problems when you scale them up
Lex Fridman (28:12.260)
beyond a few individuals become intractable.
Lex Fridman (28:16.100)
And so that in that sense, the world is inexhaustible.
Lex Fridman (28:21.020)
And that makes it beautiful that we can make any laws
Frank Wilczek (28:25.920)
that generalize efficiently and well
Lex Fridman (28:29.660)
can compress all of that combinatorial complexity
Frank Wilczek (28:32.780)
just like a simple rule.
Lex Fridman (28:33.980)
That in itself is beautiful.
Frank Wilczek (28:35.380)
It's a happy situation.
Lex Fridman (28:36.660)
And I think that we can find general principles
Frank Wilczek (28:43.300)
of sort of of the operating system
Lex Fridman (28:45.780)
that are comprehensible, simple, extremely powerful
Lex Fridman (28:49.940)
and let us control things very well
Lex Fridman (28:52.740)
and ask profound questions.
Lex Fridman (28:55.460)
And on the other hand,
Lex Fridman (28:56.380)
that the world is going to be inexhaustible.
Frank Wilczek (28:59.100)
That once we start asking about relationships
Lex Fridman (29:03.300)
and how they evolve and social interactions
Lex Fridman (29:06.940)
and we'll never have a theory of everything
Lex Fridman (29:10.620)
in any meaningful sense because that.
Frank Wilczek (29:13.580)
Of everything, everything, truly everything is.
Lex Fridman (29:17.860)
Can I ask you about the Big Bang?
Lex Fridman (29:19.940)
So we talked about the space and time are really big.
Lex Fridman (29:24.380)
But then, and we humans give a lot of meaning
Frank Wilczek (29:27.780)
to the word space and time in our like daily lives.
Lex Fridman (29:33.660)
But then can we talk about this moment of beginning
Lex Fridman (29:37.300)
and how we're supposed to think about it?
Lex Fridman (29:40.480)
That at the moment of the Big Bang,
Frank Wilczek (29:42.460)
everything was what, like infinitely small
Lex Fridman (29:46.660)
and then it just blew up?
Frank Wilczek (29:48.740)
We have to be careful here
Lex Fridman (29:49.820)
because there's a common misconception
Frank Wilczek (29:53.480)
that the Big Bang is like the explosion of a bomb
Lex Fridman (29:58.580)
in empty space that fills up the surrounding place.
Frank Wilczek (2:00:00.400)
that's the lowest energy configuration that there is,
Lex Fridman (2:00:03.420)
so you can't get further energy out of it.
Lex Fridman (2:00:06.120)
So in theory, I guess perpetual motion,
Lex Fridman (2:00:10.200)
you would be able to extract energy from it
Frank Wilczek (2:00:13.080)
if such a thing was to be created,
Lex Fridman (2:00:15.080)
you can then milk it for energy.
Frank Wilczek (2:00:17.080)
Well, what's usually meant
Lex Fridman (2:00:20.320)
in the literature of perpetual motion
Frank Wilczek (2:00:23.040)
is a kind of macroscopic motion
Lex Fridman (2:00:27.560)
that you could extract energy from
Lex Fridman (2:00:29.400)
and somehow it would crank back up.
Lex Fridman (2:00:33.540)
That's not the case here.
Frank Wilczek (2:00:35.160)
If you want to extract energy,
Lex Fridman (2:00:38.400)
this motion is not something you can extract energy from.
Frank Wilczek (2:00:42.160)
If you intervene in the behavior,
Lex Fridman (2:00:45.400)
you can change it, but only by injecting energy,
Frank Wilczek (2:00:48.960)
not by taking away energy.
Lex Fridman (2:00:51.120)
You mentioned that a theory of everything
Frank Wilczek (2:00:54.160)
may be quite difficult to come by.
Lex Fridman (2:00:56.480)
A theory of everything broadly defined
Frank Wilczek (2:00:58.520)
meaning like truly a theory of everything,
Lex Fridman (2:01:00.760)
but let's look at a more narrow theory of everything,
Frank Wilczek (2:01:03.120)
which is the way it's used often in physics
Lex Fridman (2:01:07.160)
is a theory that unifies our current laws of physics,
Frank Wilczek (2:01:16.400)
general relativity, quantum field theory.
Lex Fridman (2:01:19.480)
Do you have thoughts on this dream
Lex Fridman (2:01:22.680)
of a theory of everything in physics?
Lex Fridman (2:01:25.380)
How close are we?
Lex Fridman (2:01:26.640)
Is there any promising ideas out there in your view?
Lex Fridman (2:01:29.480)
Well, it would be nice to have.
Frank Wilczek (2:01:32.380)
It would be aesthetically pleasing.
Lex Fridman (2:01:35.480)
Will it be useful?
Frank Wilczek (2:01:36.780)
No, probably not.
Lex Fridman (2:01:38.520)
Well, I shouldn't, it's dangerous to say that,
Lex Fridman (2:01:43.220)
but probably not.
Lex Fridman (2:01:45.040)
I think we, certainly not in the foreseeable future.
Frank Wilczek (2:01:52.160)
Maybe to understand black holes.
Lex Fridman (2:01:54.240)
Yeah, but that's, yes, maybe to understand black holes,
Lex Fridman (2:01:57.520)
but that's not useful.
Lex Fridman (2:02:00.400)
That's my book.
Lex Fridman (2:02:02.700)
And well, not only, I mean,
Lex Fridman (2:02:04.960)
to understand it's worse,
Frank Wilczek (2:02:08.320)
it's not useful in the sense
Lex Fridman (2:02:09.520)
that we're not gonna be basing any technology anytime soon
Frank Wilczek (2:02:12.880)
on black holes, but it's more severe than that,
Lex Fridman (2:02:16.020)
I would say it's that the kinds of questions
Frank Wilczek (2:02:19.840)
about black holes that we can't answer
Lex Fridman (2:02:24.200)
within the framework of existing theory
Frank Wilczek (2:02:28.720)
are ones that are not going to be susceptible
Lex Fridman (2:02:33.480)
to astronomical observation in the foreseeable future.
Frank Wilczek (2:02:37.620)
They're questions about very, very small black holes
Lex Fridman (2:02:41.480)
when quantum effects come into play
Lex Fridman (2:02:46.720)
so that black holes are,
Lex Fridman (2:02:50.280)
not black holes, they're emitting this discovery
Frank Wilczek (2:02:54.900)
of Hawking called Hawking radiation,
Lex Fridman (2:02:57.100)
which for astronomical black holes is a tiny, tiny effect
Frank Wilczek (2:03:01.040)
that no one has ever observed, it's a prediction
Lex Fridman (2:03:03.600)
that's never been checked.
Lex Fridman (2:03:04.440)
So like supermassive black holes, that doesn't apply?
Lex Fridman (2:03:06.720)
No, no, the predicted rate of radiation
Frank Wilczek (2:03:11.240)
from those black holes is so tiny
Lex Fridman (2:03:13.600)
that it's absolutely unobservable
Lex Fridman (2:03:15.480)
and is overwhelmed by all kinds of other effects.
Lex Fridman (2:03:21.480)
So it's not practical in the sense of technology,
Frank Wilczek (2:03:24.420)
it's not even practical in the sense
Lex Fridman (2:03:26.400)
of application to astronomy, our existing theory
Frank Wilczek (2:03:33.080)
of general relativity and quantum theory
Lex Fridman (2:03:37.800)
and our theory of the different fundamental forces
Frank Wilczek (2:03:41.680)
is perfectly adequate to all problems of technology,
Lex Fridman (2:03:46.680)
of technology, for sure, and almost all problems
Frank Wilczek (2:03:58.080)
of astrophysics and cosmology that appear
Lex Fridman (2:04:03.080)
except with the notable exception
Frank Wilczek (2:04:06.560)
of the extremely early universe, if you want to ask,
Lex Fridman (2:04:09.480)
what happened before the Big Bang
Frank Wilczek (2:04:11.120)
or what happened right at the Big Bang,
Lex Fridman (2:04:13.020)
which would be a great thing to understand, of course.
Frank Wilczek (2:04:17.300)
Yes. We don't, but.
Lex Fridman (2:04:19.140)
But what about the engineering question?
Lex Fridman (2:04:21.100)
So if we look at space travel,
Lex Fridman (2:04:23.900)
so I think you've spoken with him, Eric Weinstein.
Frank Wilczek (2:04:28.420)
Oh, yeah. Really, you know,
Lex Fridman (2:04:31.900)
he says things like we want to get off this planet.
Frank Wilczek (2:04:36.020)
His intuition is almost motivated
Lex Fridman (2:04:39.140)
for the engineering project of space exploration
Frank Wilczek (2:04:42.300)
in order for us to crack this problem
Lex Fridman (2:04:44.700)
of becoming a multi planetary species,
Frank Wilczek (2:04:47.460)
we have to solve the physics problem.
Lex Fridman (2:04:49.320)
His intuition is like, if we figure out this,
Lex Fridman (2:04:51.460)
what he calls the source code, which is like,
Lex Fridman (2:04:55.980)
like a theory of everything might give us clues
Frank Wilczek (2:05:00.660)
on how to start hacking the fabric of reality,
Lex Fridman (2:05:04.260)
like getting shortcuts, right?
Frank Wilczek (2:05:06.460)
It might. I can't say that, you know,
Lex Fridman (2:05:08.820)
I can't say that it won't,
Lex Fridman (2:05:10.100)
but I can say that in the 1970s and early 1980s,
Lex Fridman (2:05:16.380)
we achieved huge steps in understanding matter.
Frank Wilczek (2:05:23.860)
QCD, much better understanding of the weak interaction,
Lex Fridman (2:05:28.780)
much better understanding of quantum mechanics in general.
Lex Fridman (2:05:32.460)
And it's had minimal impact on technology.
Lex Fridman (2:05:36.460)
On rocket design, on propulsion.
Frank Wilczek (2:05:38.180)
On rocket design, on anything, any technology whatsoever.
Lex Fridman (2:05:42.620)
And now we're talking about much more esoteric things.
Lex Fridman (2:05:46.360)
And since I don't know what they are,
Lex Fridman (2:05:48.800)
I can't say for sure that they won't affect technology,
Lex Fridman (2:05:51.180)
but I'm very, very skeptical
Lex Fridman (2:05:52.700)
that they would affect technology.
Frank Wilczek (2:05:57.780)
Because, you know, to access them,
Lex Fridman (2:05:59.680)
you need very exotic circumstances
Frank Wilczek (2:06:02.460)
to make new kinds of particles with high energy.
Lex Fridman (2:06:04.620)
You need accelerators that are very expensive
Lex Fridman (2:06:07.860)
and you don't produce many of them, and so forth.
Lex Fridman (2:06:09.780)
You know, it's just, it's a pipe dream, I think.
Frank Wilczek (2:06:13.060)
Yeah, about space exploration.
Lex Fridman (2:06:15.380)
I'm not sure exactly what he has in mind,
Lex Fridman (2:06:18.140)
but to me, it's more a problem of,
Lex Fridman (2:06:26.700)
I don't know, something between biology and...
Lex Fridman (2:06:29.380)
And information processing.
Lex Fridman (2:06:34.380)
Processing, what you mean, how should I...
Frank Wilczek (2:06:37.980)
I think human bodies are not well adapted to space.
Lex Fridman (2:06:43.700)
Even Mars, which is the closest thing
Frank Wilczek (2:06:46.380)
to a kind of human environment
Lex Fridman (2:06:49.140)
that we're gonna find anywhere close by.
Frank Wilczek (2:06:52.340)
Very, very difficult to maintain humans on Mars.
Lex Fridman (2:06:57.300)
And it's gonna be very expensive and very unstable.
Lex Fridman (2:07:02.300)
But I think, however, if we take a broader view
Lex Fridman (2:07:09.520)
of what it means to bring human civilization
Frank Wilczek (2:07:17.460)
outside of the Earth, if we're satisfied
Lex Fridman (2:07:20.660)
with sending mines out there that we can converse with
Lex Fridman (2:07:25.380)
and actuators that we can manipulate
Lex Fridman (2:07:29.180)
and sensors that we can get feedback from,
Frank Wilczek (2:07:33.780)
I think that's where it's at.
Lex Fridman (2:07:37.180)
And I think that's so much more realistic.
Lex Fridman (2:07:41.580)
And I think that's the long term future
Lex Fridman (2:07:45.820)
of space exploration.
Frank Wilczek (2:07:48.180)
It's not hauling human bodies all over the place.
Lex Fridman (2:07:50.660)
That's just silly.
Frank Wilczek (2:07:54.100)
It's possible that human bodies...
Lex Fridman (2:07:56.780)
So like you said, it's a biology problem.
Frank Wilczek (2:07:59.100)
What's possible is that we extend human life span
Lex Fridman (2:08:03.540)
in some way, we have to look at a bigger picture.
Frank Wilczek (2:08:07.540)
It could be just like you're saying,
Lex Fridman (2:08:09.420)
by sending robots with actuators
Lex Fridman (2:08:12.420)
and kind of extending our limbs.
Lex Fridman (2:08:16.540)
But it could also be extending some aspect of our minds,
Frank Wilczek (2:08:19.180)
some information, all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (2:08:20.380)
And it could be cyborgs, it could be, it could be...
Frank Wilczek (2:08:23.820)
No, we're talking, not getting the fun.
Lex Fridman (2:08:26.620)
It could be, you know, it could be human brains
Frank Wilczek (2:08:32.140)
or cells that realize something
Lex Fridman (2:08:34.340)
like human brain architecture
Frank Wilczek (2:08:36.860)
within artificial environments,
Lex Fridman (2:08:42.580)
you know, shells, if you like,
Frank Wilczek (2:08:44.860)
that are more adapted to the conditions of space.
Lex Fridman (2:08:47.780)
And that, yeah, so that's entirely man machine hybrids,
Frank Wilczek (2:08:52.780)
as well as sort of remote outposts
Lex Fridman (2:08:57.940)
that we can communicate with.
Frank Wilczek (2:08:59.220)
I think those will happen.
Lex Fridman (2:09:02.500)
Yeah, to me, there's some sense in which,
Frank Wilczek (2:09:05.300)
as opposed to understanding the physics
Lex Fridman (2:09:07.340)
of the fundamental fabric of the universe,
Frank Wilczek (2:09:15.100)
I think getting to the physics of life,
Lex Fridman (2:09:17.380)
the physics of intelligence,
Frank Wilczek (2:09:18.740)
the physics of consciousness will,
Lex Fridman (2:09:20.860)
the physics of information that brings,
Frank Wilczek (2:09:27.900)
from which life emerges,
Lex Fridman (2:09:29.380)
that will allow us to do space exploration.
Frank Wilczek (2:09:32.140)
Yeah, well, I think physics in the larger sense
Lex Fridman (2:09:34.700)
has a lot to contribute here.
Frank Wilczek (2:09:36.860)
Not the physics of finding fundamental new laws
Lex Fridman (2:09:39.980)
in the sense of another quark or axions even.
Lex Fridman (2:09:44.820)
But physics in the sense of,
Lex Fridman (2:09:51.460)
physics has a lot of experience
Frank Wilczek (2:09:53.500)
in analyzing complex situations
Lex Fridman (2:09:56.660)
and analyzing new states of matter
Lex Fridman (2:09:58.260)
and devising new kinds of instruments
Lex Fridman (2:10:00.180)
that do clever things.
Frank Wilczek (2:10:01.580)
Physics in that sense has enormous amounts
Lex Fridman (2:10:05.940)
to contribute to this kind of endeavor.
Lex Fridman (2:10:09.980)
But I don't think that looking
Lex Fridman (2:10:13.180)
for a so called theory of everything
Frank Wilczek (2:10:16.620)
has much to do with it at all.
Lex Fridman (2:10:19.020)
What advice would you give to a young person today
Frank Wilczek (2:10:24.820)
with a bit of fire in their eyes,
Lex Fridman (2:10:26.380)
high school student, college student,
Frank Wilczek (2:10:28.100)
thinking about what to do with their life,
Lex Fridman (2:10:30.460)
maybe advice about career or bigger advice
Lex Fridman (2:10:35.060)
about life in general?
Lex Fridman (2:10:37.460)
Well, first read fundamentals
Frank Wilczek (2:10:38.900)
because there I've tried to give some coherent deep advice.
Lex Fridman (2:10:45.780)
That's fundamentals, 10 keys to reality by Frank Kulczyk.
Lex Fridman (2:10:50.140)
So that's a good place to start.
Lex Fridman (2:10:50.980)
Available everywhere.
Frank Wilczek (2:10:52.260)
If you wanna learn what I can tell you.
Lex Fridman (2:10:56.820)
Is there an audio book?
Frank Wilczek (2:10:57.740)
I read that ebook.
Lex Fridman (2:10:58.580)
Yes, there is an audio book.
Frank Wilczek (2:10:59.420)
There's an audio book, that's awesome.
Lex Fridman (2:11:00.860)
I think it's, I can give three pieces of wise advice
Frank Wilczek (2:11:05.220)
that I think are generally applicable.
Lex Fridman (2:11:08.340)
One is to cast a wide net,
Frank Wilczek (2:11:13.580)
to really look around and see what looks promising,
Lex Fridman (2:11:19.460)
what catches your imagination and promising.
Frank Wilczek (2:11:25.860)
Yeah, and those, you have to balance those two things.
Lex Fridman (2:11:28.380)
You could have things that catch your imagination,
Lex Fridman (2:11:30.060)
but don't look promising in the sense
Lex Fridman (2:11:32.420)
that the questions aren't ripe or,
Lex Fridman (2:11:34.580)
and things that you,
Lex Fridman (2:11:37.900)
and part of what makes things attractive is that,
Frank Wilczek (2:11:42.340)
whether you thought you liked them or not,
Lex Fridman (2:11:43.940)
is if you can see that there's ferment
Lex Fridman (2:11:45.980)
and new ideas coming up that become,
Lex Fridman (2:11:47.660)
that's attractive in itself.
Lex Fridman (2:11:49.420)
So when I started out, I thought I was,
Lex Fridman (2:11:52.340)
and when I was an undergraduate,
Frank Wilczek (2:11:53.580)
I intended to study philosophy
Lex Fridman (2:11:55.420)
or questions of how mind emerges from matter.
Lex Fridman (2:11:57.660)
But I thought that that wasn't really right.
Lex Fridman (2:12:00.300)
Timing isn't right yet.
Frank Wilczek (2:12:01.260)
The right, the timing wasn't right
Lex Fridman (2:12:03.020)
for the kind of mathematical thinking
Lex Fridman (2:12:05.220)
and conceptualization that I really enjoy and am good at.
Lex Fridman (2:12:12.340)
But, so that's one thing, cast a wide net, look around.
Lex Fridman (2:12:18.780)
And that's a pretty easy thing to do today
Lex Fridman (2:12:25.260)
because of the internet.
Frank Wilczek (2:12:27.060)
You can look at all kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (2:12:30.060)
You have to be careful though
Frank Wilczek (2:12:30.940)
because there's a lot of crap also.
Lex Fridman (2:12:33.460)
But you can sort of tell the difference
Frank Wilczek (2:12:36.620)
if you do a little digging.
Lex Fridman (2:12:42.460)
So don't settle on just,
Lex Fridman (2:12:44.940)
what your thesis advisor tells you to do
Lex Fridman (2:12:46.780)
or what your teacher tells you to do.
Frank Wilczek (2:12:49.100)
Look for yourself and get a sense of what seems promising,
Lex Fridman (2:12:54.100)
not what seemed promising 10 years ago or, so that's one.
Frank Wilczek (2:13:03.620)
Another thing is to, is kind of complimentary to that.
Lex Fridman (2:13:09.980)
Well, they're all complimentary.
Frank Wilczek (2:13:12.860)
Complimentary to that is to read history
Lex Fridman (2:13:18.260)
and read the masters,
Frank Wilczek (2:13:19.860)
the history of ideas and masters of ideas.
Lex Fridman (2:13:22.300)
I'd benefited enormously from, as early in my career,
Frank Wilczek (2:13:28.420)
from reading in physics, Einstein in the original
Lex Fridman (2:13:34.420)
and Feynman's lectures as they were coming out and Darwin.
Frank Wilczek (2:13:39.620)
You know, these, you can learn what it, and Galileo,
Lex Fridman (2:13:43.540)
you can learn what it is to wrestle with difficult ideas
Lex Fridman (2:13:46.700)
and how great minds did that.
Lex Fridman (2:13:48.180)
You can learn a lot about style,
Lex Fridman (2:13:51.220)
how to write your ideas up and express them in clear ways.
Lex Fridman (2:13:57.740)
And also just a couple of that with,
Frank Wilczek (2:14:00.180)
I also enjoy reading biographies.
Lex Fridman (2:14:02.300)
And biographies, yes, similarly, right, yeah.
Lex Fridman (2:14:04.660)
So it gives you the context of the human being
Lex Fridman (2:14:08.100)
that created those ideas.
Frank Wilczek (2:14:08.940)
Right, and brings it down to earth in the sense that,
Lex Fridman (2:14:11.860)
you know, it was really human beings who did this.
Frank Wilczek (2:14:14.100)
It's not, and they made mistakes.
Lex Fridman (2:14:17.180)
And yeah, I also got inspiration from Bertrand Russell
Frank Wilczek (2:14:22.980)
who was a big hero and H.G. Wells and yeah.
Lex Fridman (2:14:25.460)
So read the masters, make contact with great minds.
Lex Fridman (2:14:31.420)
And when you are sort of narrowing down on a subject,
Lex Fridman (2:14:33.900)
learn about the history of the subject
Frank Wilczek (2:14:35.460)
because that really puts in context
Lex Fridman (2:14:38.380)
what you're trying to do and also gives a sense of community
Lex Fridman (2:14:43.980)
and grandeur to the whole enterprise.
Lex Fridman (2:14:46.020)
And then the third piece of advice
Frank Wilczek (2:14:48.900)
is complimentary to both those,
Lex Fridman (2:14:51.860)
which is sort of to get the basics under control
Frank Wilczek (2:14:58.860)
as soon as possible.
Lex Fridman (2:15:00.420)
So if you wanna do theoretical work in science,
Frank Wilczek (2:15:04.220)
you know, you have to learn calculus,
Lex Fridman (2:15:08.420)
multivariable calculus, complex variables, group theory.
Frank Wilczek (2:15:11.600)
Nowadays, you have to be highly computer literate
Lex Fridman (2:15:15.300)
if you want to do experimental work.
Frank Wilczek (2:15:16.540)
You also have to be computer literate
Lex Fridman (2:15:17.980)
and you have to learn about electronics
Lex Fridman (2:15:19.660)
and optics and instruments.
Lex Fridman (2:15:22.260)
So get that under control as soon as possible
Frank Wilczek (2:15:26.860)
because it's like learning a language to produce great works
Lex Fridman (2:15:32.640)
and express yourself fluently and with confidence.
Frank Wilczek (2:15:37.980)
It should be your native language.
Lex Fridman (2:15:39.460)
These things should be like your native language.
Lex Fridman (2:15:41.420)
So you're not wondering what is the derivative?
Lex Fridman (2:15:44.660)
This is just part of your, it's in your bones,
Lex Fridman (2:15:50.300)
so to speak, and the sooner that you can do that,
Lex Fridman (2:15:53.380)
then the better.
Lex Fridman (2:15:55.060)
So all those things can be done in parallel and should be.
Lex Fridman (2:16:01.760)
You've accomplished some incredible things in your life,
Lex Fridman (2:16:04.520)
but the sad thing about this thing we have is it ends.
Lex Fridman (2:16:09.520)
Do you think about your mortality?
Lex Fridman (2:16:15.240)
Are you afraid of death?
Lex Fridman (2:16:19.000)
Well, afraid is the wrong word.
Frank Wilczek (2:16:20.440)
I mean, I wish it weren't going to happen
Lex Fridman (2:16:23.960)
and I'd like to, but.
Lex Fridman (2:16:27.000)
Do you think about it?
Lex Fridman (2:16:28.040)
I, you know, occasionally I think about,
Frank Wilczek (2:16:30.460)
well, I think about it very operationally
Lex Fridman (2:16:32.400)
in the sense that there's always a trade off
Frank Wilczek (2:16:35.480)
between exploration and exploitation.
Lex Fridman (2:16:39.480)
This is a classic subject in computer science,
Frank Wilczek (2:16:42.580)
actually in machine learning that when you're
Lex Fridman (2:16:46.280)
in an unusual circumstance, you want to explore
Frank Wilczek (2:16:50.600)
to see what the landscape is and what, and gather data.
Lex Fridman (2:16:54.700)
But then at some point you want to use that,
Frank Wilczek (2:16:57.680)
make, decide, make choices and say,
Lex Fridman (2:17:00.000)
this is what I'm going to do and exploit the knowledge
Frank Wilczek (2:17:02.040)
you've accumulated.
Lex Fridman (2:17:03.360)
And the longer the period of exploitation you anticipate,
Frank Wilczek (2:17:10.480)
the more exploration you should do in new directions.
Lex Fridman (2:17:14.600)
And so for me, I've had to sort of adjust the balance
Frank Wilczek (2:17:18.760)
of exploration and exploitation and.
Lex Fridman (2:17:25.880)
That's it, you've explored quite a lot.
Frank Wilczek (2:17:28.180)
Yeah, well, I haven't shut off the exploitation at all.
Lex Fridman (2:17:31.960)
I'm still hoping for. The exploration.
Frank Wilczek (2:17:34.000)
The exploration, right.
Lex Fridman (2:17:35.200)
I'm still hoping for 10 or 15 years
Frank Wilczek (2:17:38.280)
of top flight performance.
Lex Fridman (2:17:39.560)
But the, several years ago now when I was 50 years old,
Frank Wilczek (2:17:47.480)
I was at the Institute for Advanced Study
Lex Fridman (2:17:49.540)
and my office was right under Freeman Dyson's office
Lex Fridman (2:17:52.500)
and we were kind of friendly.
Lex Fridman (2:17:53.920)
And, you know, he found out it was my 50th birthday
Lex Fridman (2:17:58.760)
and said, congratulations.
Lex Fridman (2:18:00.960)
And you should feel liberated because no one expects much
Frank Wilczek (2:18:05.040)
of a 50 year old theoretical physicist.
Lex Fridman (2:18:07.480)
And he, and he obviously had felt liberated
Frank Wilczek (2:18:10.120)
by reaching a certain age.
Lex Fridman (2:18:13.160)
And yeah, there is something to that.
Frank Wilczek (2:18:15.680)
I feel, you know, I feel I don't have to catch,
Lex Fridman (2:18:19.280)
I don't have to keep in touch
Frank Wilczek (2:18:21.640)
with the latest hypertechnical developments
Lex Fridman (2:18:25.000)
in particle physics or string theory or something.
Frank Wilczek (2:18:27.600)
I, because I'm not gonna, I'm really not gonna
Lex Fridman (2:18:31.560)
be exploiting that.
Lex Fridman (2:18:33.280)
But I, but where I am exploring in these directions
Lex Fridman (2:18:37.640)
of machine learning and things like that.
Frank Wilczek (2:18:40.120)
And, but then, but I'm also concentrating
Lex Fridman (2:18:43.040)
within physics on exploiting directions
Frank Wilczek (2:18:46.480)
that I've already established
Lex Fridman (2:18:48.000)
and the laws that we already have
Lex Fridman (2:18:50.040)
and doing things like,
Lex Fridman (2:18:52.260)
I'm very actively involved in trying to design,
Frank Wilczek (2:18:58.300)
helping people, experimentalists and engineers even
Lex Fridman (2:19:02.620)
to design antennas that are capable of detecting axions.
Lex Fridman (2:19:08.300)
So there, and that's, there we're deep
Lex Fridman (2:19:10.980)
in the exploitation stage.
Frank Wilczek (2:19:13.140)
It's not a matter of finding the new laws,
Lex Fridman (2:19:14.940)
but of really, you know, using the laws we have
Frank Wilczek (2:19:17.860)
to kind of finish the story off.
Lex Fridman (2:19:20.860)
So it's complicated, but I'm, you know,
Frank Wilczek (2:19:25.500)
I'm very happy with my life right now
Lex Fridman (2:19:27.900)
and I'm enjoying it and I don't wanna cloud that
Frank Wilczek (2:19:31.700)
by thinking too much that it's gonna come to an end.
Lex Fridman (2:19:39.780)
You know, it's a gift I didn't earn.
Frank Wilczek (2:19:42.060)
Is there a good thing to say about
Lex Fridman (2:19:45.100)
why this gift that you've gotten
Lex Fridman (2:19:50.280)
and didn't deserve is so damn enjoyable?
Lex Fridman (2:19:53.120)
So like, what's the meaning of this thing, of life?
Frank Wilczek (2:19:57.240)
To me, interacting with people I love, my family,
Lex Fridman (2:20:01.600)
and I have a very wide circle of friends now
Lex Fridman (2:20:04.920)
and I'm trying to produce some institutions
Lex Fridman (2:20:08.960)
that will survive me as well as my work
Lex Fridman (2:20:12.000)
and it's just, it's, how should I say?
Lex Fridman (2:20:18.760)
It's a positive feedback loop when you do something
Lex Fridman (2:20:24.720)
and people appreciate it and then you wanna do more
Lex Fridman (2:20:28.360)
and you get rewarded and it's just, how should I say?
Frank Wilczek (2:20:32.220)
This is another gift that I didn't earn
Lex Fridman (2:20:34.040)
and don't understand, but I have a dopamine system
Lex Fridman (2:20:37.520)
and yeah, I'm happy to use it.
Lex Fridman (2:20:42.280)
It seems to get energized by the creative process,
Frank Wilczek (2:20:47.360)
by the process of exploration.
Lex Fridman (2:20:48.920)
Very much so.
Lex Fridman (2:20:49.760)
And all of that started from the little fluctuations
Lex Fridman (2:20:56.160)
shortly after the Big Bang.
Frank Wilczek (2:20:58.640)
Frank, well, whatever those initial conditions
Lex Fridman (2:21:01.640)
and fluctuations did that created you, I'm glad they did.
Frank Wilczek (2:21:04.600)
This is, thank you for all the work you've done,
Lex Fridman (2:21:07.640)
for the many people you've inspired,
Frank Wilczek (2:21:09.280)
for the many, of the billion, most of your ideas
Lex Fridman (2:21:12.740)
were pretty useless of the several billions,
Frank Wilczek (2:21:16.480)
as it is for all humans, but you had quite a few
Lex Fridman (2:21:20.040)
truly special ideas and thank you for bringing those
Frank Wilczek (2:21:23.140)
to the world and thank you for wasting your valuable time
Lex Fridman (2:21:25.680)
with me today, it's truly an honor.
Frank Wilczek (2:21:27.760)
It's been a joy and I hope people enjoy it
Lex Fridman (2:21:31.840)
and I think the kind of mind expansion that I've enjoyed
Frank Wilczek (2:21:37.120)
by interacting with physical reality at this deep level,
Lex Fridman (2:21:41.240)
I think can be conveyed to and enjoyed by many, many people
Lex Fridman (2:21:45.540)
and that's one of my missions in life, to share it.
Lex Fridman (2:21:48.040)
Beautiful.
Frank Wilczek (2:21:49.360)
Thanks for listening to this conversation
Lex Fridman (2:21:50.880)
with Frank Wilczek and thank you to The Information,
Frank Wilczek (2:21:54.040)
NatSuite, ExpressVPN, Blinkist and 8sleep.
Lex Fridman (2:21:58.500)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast
Lex Fridman (2:22:01.720)
and now let me leave you with some words
Lex Fridman (2:22:03.320)
from Albert Einstein, nothing happens until something moves.
Frank Wilczek (2:22:08.100)
Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (30:02.980)
It is space.
Frank Wilczek (30:03.940)
It is, yeah.
Lex Fridman (30:05.300)
As we understand it, it's the fact,
Frank Wilczek (30:08.960)
it's the fact or the hypothesis,
Lex Fridman (30:12.260)
but well supported up to a point
Frank Wilczek (30:14.820)
that everywhere in the whole universe,
Lex Fridman (30:19.820)
early in the history,
Frank Wilczek (30:24.180)
matter came together into a very hot, very dense,
Lex Fridman (30:28.140)
if you run it backwards in time,
Frank Wilczek (30:29.940)
matter comes together into a very hot, very dense
Lex Fridman (30:32.740)
and yet very homogeneous plasma
Frank Wilczek (30:36.260)
of all the different kinds of elementary particles
Lex Fridman (30:39.500)
and quarks and anti quarks and gluons
Lex Fridman (30:41.260)
and photons and electrons and anti electrons,
Lex Fridman (30:43.340)
everything, all of that stuff.
Frank Wilczek (30:45.160)
Like really hot.
Lex Fridman (30:46.940)
Really, really, really hot.
Frank Wilczek (30:49.140)
We're talking about way, way hotter
Lex Fridman (30:52.100)
than the surface of the sun.
Frank Wilczek (30:56.140)
Well, in fact, if you take the equations as they come,
Lex Fridman (31:00.660)
the prediction is that the temperature
Frank Wilczek (31:02.940)
just goes to infinity,
Lex Fridman (31:04.020)
but then the equations break down.
Frank Wilczek (31:06.920)
We don't really, there are various,
Lex Fridman (31:10.620)
the equations become infinity equals infinity,
Lex Fridman (31:12.980)
so they don't feel that it's called a singularity.
Lex Fridman (31:15.120)
We don't really know.
Frank Wilczek (31:16.240)
This is running the equations backwards,
Lex Fridman (31:19.660)
so you can't really get a sensible idea
Frank Wilczek (31:21.780)
of what happened before the Big Bang.
Lex Fridman (31:23.940)
So we need different equations
Frank Wilczek (31:25.660)
to address the very earliest moments.
Lex Fridman (31:31.580)
But so things were hotter and denser.
Frank Wilczek (31:35.660)
We don't really know why things started out that way.
Lex Fridman (31:40.140)
We have a lot of evidence that they did start out that way.
Lex Fridman (31:43.980)
But since most of the,
Lex Fridman (31:51.180)
we don't get to visit there and do controlled experiments.
Frank Wilczek (31:55.420)
Most of the record is very, very processed
Lex Fridman (31:59.580)
and we have to use very subtle techniques
Lex Fridman (32:05.560)
and powerful instruments to get information
Lex Fridman (32:09.500)
that has survived.
Frank Wilczek (32:11.140)
Get closer and closer to the Big Bang.
Lex Fridman (32:14.220)
Get closer and closer to the beginning of things.
Lex Fridman (32:16.460)
And what's revealed there is that, as I said,
Lex Fridman (32:22.900)
there undoubtedly was a period
Frank Wilczek (32:25.180)
when everything in the universe
Lex Fridman (32:26.940)
that we have been able to look at and understand,
Lex Fridman (32:30.900)
and that's consistent with everything,
Lex Fridman (32:33.420)
is in a condition where it was much, much hotter
Lex Fridman (32:41.420)
and much, much denser,
Lex Fridman (32:44.220)
but still obeying the laws of physics
Frank Wilczek (32:46.340)
as we know them today.
Lex Fridman (32:48.180)
And then you start with that.
Lex Fridman (32:51.100)
So all the matter is in equilibrium.
Lex Fridman (32:54.300)
And then with small quantum fluctuations
Lex Fridman (32:57.960)
and run it forward,
Lex Fridman (32:59.460)
and then it produces, at least in broad strokes,
Frank Wilczek (33:04.020)
the universe we see around us today.
Lex Fridman (33:06.620)
Do you think we'll ever be able to,
Frank Wilczek (33:09.180)
with the tools of physics, with the way science is,
Lex Fridman (33:12.640)
with the way the human mind is,
Frank Wilczek (33:14.020)
we'll ever be able to get to the moment of the Big Bang
Lex Fridman (33:17.700)
in our understanding or even the moment before the Big Bang?
Lex Fridman (33:21.700)
Can we understand what happened before the Big Bang?
Lex Fridman (33:24.700)
I'm optimistic both that we'll be able to measure more,
Lex Fridman (33:31.620)
so observe more,
Lex Fridman (33:33.460)
and that we'll be able to figure out more.
Lex Fridman (33:36.640)
So they're very, very tangible prospects
Lex Fridman (33:40.660)
for observing the extremely early universe,
Lex Fridman (33:45.660)
so even much earlier than we can observe now
Lex Fridman (33:49.420)
through looking at gravitational waves.
Frank Wilczek (33:52.220)
Gravitational waves, since they interact so weakly
Lex Fridman (33:55.700)
with ordinary matter,
Frank Wilczek (33:58.820)
sort of send a minimally processed signal from the Big Bang.
Lex Fridman (34:03.660)
It's a very weak signal
Frank Wilczek (34:05.860)
because it's traveled a long way
Lex Fridman (34:07.380)
and diffused over long spaces,
Lex Fridman (34:09.460)
but people are gearing up to try to detect
Lex Fridman (34:13.360)
gravitational waves that could have come
Frank Wilczek (34:15.220)
from the early universe.
Lex Fridman (34:16.340)
Yeah, LIGO's an incredible engineering project.
Frank Wilczek (34:19.140)
It's the most sensitive, precise devices on Earth.
Lex Fridman (34:24.660)
The fact that humans can build something like that
Frank Wilczek (34:27.500)
is truly awe inspiring from an engineering perspective.
Lex Fridman (34:31.340)
Right, but these gravitational waves from the early universe
Frank Wilczek (34:34.820)
will probably be of a much longer wavelength
Lex Fridman (34:38.420)
than LIGO is capable of sensing,
Lex Fridman (34:41.500)
so there's a beautiful project
Lex Fridman (34:44.620)
that's contemplated to put lasers
Frank Wilczek (34:51.120)
in different locations in the solar system.
Lex Fridman (34:54.980)
We really, really separate it
Frank Wilczek (34:56.420)
by solar system scale differences,
Lex Fridman (34:59.900)
like artificial planets or moons in different places
Lex Fridman (35:03.400)
and see the tiny motions of those
Lex Fridman (35:06.060)
relative to one another
Frank Wilczek (35:07.220)
as a signal of radiation from the Big Bang.
Lex Fridman (35:10.100)
We can also maybe indirectly see the imprint
Frank Wilczek (35:15.300)
of gravitational waves from the early universe
Lex Fridman (35:18.340)
on the photons, the microwave background radiation.
Frank Wilczek (35:23.040)
That is our present way of seeing into the earliest universe,
Lex Fridman (35:27.240)
but those photons interact much more strongly with matter.
Frank Wilczek (35:31.180)
They're much more strongly processed,
Lex Fridman (35:32.980)
so they don't give us directly such an unprocessed view
Frank Wilczek (35:37.980)
of the early universe, of the very early universe,
Lex Fridman (35:41.100)
but if gravitational waves leave some imprint on that
Frank Wilczek (35:45.700)
as they move through, we could detect that too,
Lex Fridman (35:49.380)
and people are trying, as we speak,
Frank Wilczek (35:53.180)
working very hard towards that goal.
Lex Fridman (35:56.860)
It's so exciting to think about a sensor
Frank Wilczek (35:58.980)
the size of the solar system.
Lex Fridman (36:01.180)
That would be a fantastic,
Frank Wilczek (36:03.180)
I mean, that would be a pinnacle artifact
Lex Fridman (36:06.100)
of human endeavor to me.
Frank Wilczek (36:08.100)
It would be such an inspiring thing
Lex Fridman (36:11.900)
that just we want to know,
Lex Fridman (36:15.140)
and we go to these extraordinary lengths
Lex Fridman (36:17.460)
of making gigantic things that are also very sophisticated
Frank Wilczek (36:20.860)
because what you're trying to do,
Lex Fridman (36:22.260)
you have to understand how they move.
Frank Wilczek (36:24.960)
You have to understand the properties of light
Lex Fridman (36:28.020)
that are being used, the interference between light,
Lex Fridman (36:30.900)
and you have to be able to make the light with lasers
Lex Fridman (36:34.180)
and understand the quantum theory
Lex Fridman (36:35.740)
and get the timing exactly right.
Lex Fridman (36:38.300)
It's an extraordinary endeavor
Frank Wilczek (36:40.100)
involving all kinds of knowledge
Lex Fridman (36:42.100)
from the very small to the very large,
Lex Fridman (36:45.100)
and all in the service of curiosity
Lex Fridman (36:49.060)
and built on a grand scale, so.
Frank Wilczek (36:52.540)
Yeah, it would make me proud to be a human if we did that.
Lex Fridman (36:58.340)
I love that you're inspired both by the power of theory
Lex Fridman (37:01.340)
and the power of experiment.
Lex Fridman (37:02.580)
So both, I think, are exceptionally impressive
Frank Wilczek (37:07.860)
that the human mind can come up with theories
Lex Fridman (37:10.500)
that give us a peek into how the universe works,
Lex Fridman (37:13.200)
but also construct tools that are way bigger
Lex Fridman (37:16.900)
than the evolutionary origins we came from.
Frank Wilczek (37:20.720)
Right, and by the way,
Lex Fridman (37:22.060)
the fact that we can design such things and they work
Frank Wilczek (37:25.740)
is an extraordinary demonstration
Lex Fridman (37:28.200)
that we really do understand a lot.
Lex Fridman (37:30.620)
And then in some ways.
Lex Fridman (37:33.260)
And it's our ability to answer questions
Frank Wilczek (37:36.220)
that also leads us to be able
Lex Fridman (37:37.820)
to address more ambitious questions.
Lex Fridman (37:39.820)
So you mentioned at the Big Bang in the early days,
Lex Fridman (37:45.140)
things are pretty homogeneous.
Frank Wilczek (37:46.860)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (37:47.820)
But here we are, sitting on Earth,
Frank Wilczek (37:51.660)
two hairless apes, you could say, with microphones.
Lex Fridman (37:57.040)
In talking about the brief history of things,
Frank Wilczek (37:58.820)
you said it's much harder to describe Sweden
Lex Fridman (38:00.780)
than it is the universe.
Lex Fridman (38:03.780)
So there's a lot of complexity.
Lex Fridman (38:05.340)
There was a lot of interesting details here.
Lex Fridman (38:07.420)
So how does this complexity come to be, do you think?
Lex Fridman (38:11.260)
It seems like there's these pockets.
Frank Wilczek (38:13.500)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (38:14.340)
We don't know how rare of like where hairless apes emerge.
Frank Wilczek (38:18.840)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (38:19.680)
And then that came from the initial soup
Frank Wilczek (38:22.100)
that was homogeneous.
Lex Fridman (38:23.500)
Was that an accident?
Frank Wilczek (38:26.460)
Well, we understand in broad outlines
Lex Fridman (38:31.620)
how it could happen.
Frank Wilczek (38:33.660)
We certainly don't understand why it happened exactly
Lex Fridman (38:36.380)
in the way it did.
Frank Wilczek (38:40.180)
Or there are certainly open questions
Lex Fridman (38:42.620)
about the origins of life
Lex Fridman (38:44.120)
and how inevitable the emergence of intelligence was
Lex Fridman (38:47.940)
and how that happened.
Lex Fridman (38:48.940)
But in the very broadest terms,
Lex Fridman (38:52.180)
the universe early on was quite homogeneous,
Lex Fridman (38:58.020)
but not completely homogeneous.
Lex Fridman (39:01.020)
There were part in 10,000 fluctuations in density
Frank Wilczek (39:07.060)
within this primordial plasma.
Lex Fridman (39:10.580)
And as time goes on, there's an instability
Frank Wilczek (39:16.860)
which causes those density contrasts to increase.
Lex Fridman (39:20.140)
There's a gravitational instability
Frank Wilczek (39:21.700)
where it's denser, the gravitational attractions
Lex Fridman (39:24.620)
are stronger.
Lex Fridman (39:25.580)
And so that brings in more matter
Lex Fridman (39:27.300)
and it gets even denser and so on and so on.
Lex Fridman (39:29.780)
So there's a natural tendency of matter to clump
Lex Fridman (39:34.380)
because of gravitational interactions.
Lex Fridman (39:37.180)
And then the equation is complicated.
Lex Fridman (39:39.860)
We have lots of things clumping together.
Frank Wilczek (39:43.980)
Then we know what the laws are,
Lex Fridman (39:47.060)
but we have to a certain extent wave our hands
Frank Wilczek (39:50.020)
about what happens.
Lex Fridman (39:51.900)
But basic understanding of chemistry
Frank Wilczek (39:56.220)
says that if things and the physics of radiation
Lex Fridman (40:00.140)
tells us that as things start to clump together,
Frank Wilczek (40:02.840)
they can radiate, give off some energy.
Lex Fridman (40:05.540)
So they don't just, they slow down.
Frank Wilczek (40:07.900)
As a result, they lose energy.
Lex Fridman (40:09.300)
They can collaborate together, cool down,
Frank Wilczek (40:12.340)
form things like stars, form things like planets.
Lex Fridman (40:16.220)
And so in broad terms, there's no mystery.
Frank Wilczek (40:19.260)
There's, that's what the scenario,
Lex Fridman (40:22.300)
that's what the equations tell you should happen.
Lex Fridman (40:25.580)
But because it's a process involving
Lex Fridman (40:30.580)
many, many fundamental individual units,
Frank Wilczek (40:37.100)
the application of the laws that govern individual units
Lex Fridman (40:40.620)
to these things is very delicate,
Frank Wilczek (40:46.100)
computationally very difficult.
Lex Fridman (40:48.220)
And more profoundly, the equations have
Frank Wilczek (40:52.020)
this probability of chaos or sensitivity
Lex Fridman (40:54.260)
to initial conditions, which tells you tiny differences
Frank Wilczek (40:57.380)
in the initial state can lead to enormous differences
Lex Fridman (41:00.700)
in the subsequent behavior.
Lex Fridman (41:02.440)
So physics, fundamental physics at some point says,
Lex Fridman (41:08.340)
okay, chemists, biologists, this is your problem.
Lex Fridman (41:11.760)
And then again, in broad terms,
Lex Fridman (41:16.680)
we know how it's conceivable that the humans
Lex Fridman (41:23.100)
and things like that, how complex structure can emerge.
Lex Fridman (41:28.140)
It's a matter of having the right kind of temperature
Lex Fridman (41:34.040)
and the right kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman (41:36.300)
So you need to be able to make chemical bonds
Frank Wilczek (41:41.300)
that are reasonably stable
Lex Fridman (41:42.860)
and be able to make complex structures.
Lex Fridman (41:45.380)
And we're very fortunate that carbon has this ability
Lex Fridman (41:48.700)
to make backbones and elaborate branchings and things.
Lex Fridman (41:54.220)
So you can get complex things that we call biochemistry.
Lex Fridman (41:57.580)
And yet the bonds can be broken a little bit
Frank Wilczek (42:01.140)
with the help of energetic injections from the sun.
Lex Fridman (42:04.760)
So you have to have both the possibility of changing,
Lex Fridman (42:07.440)
but also the useful degree of stability.
Lex Fridman (42:10.580)
And we know at that very, very broad level, physics
Frank Wilczek (42:15.820)
can tell you that it's conceivable.
Lex Fridman (42:17.780)
If you want to know what really happened,
Lex Fridman (42:23.140)
what really can happen, then you have to work a bit,
Lex Fridman (42:26.260)
go to chemistry.
Frank Wilczek (42:27.100)
If you want to know what actually happened,
Lex Fridman (42:29.820)
then you really have to consult the fossil record
Lex Fridman (42:32.260)
and biologists.
Lex Fridman (42:33.220)
And so these ways of addressing the issue
Frank Wilczek (42:41.220)
are complimentary in a sense.
Lex Fridman (42:43.400)
They use different kinds of concepts,
Frank Wilczek (42:49.660)
they use different languages
Lex Fridman (42:52.480)
and they address different kinds of questions,
Lex Fridman (42:54.340)
but they're not inconsistent, they're just complimentary.
Lex Fridman (42:59.340)
It's kind of interesting to think about those early fluctuations
Frank Wilczek (43:03.740)
as our earliest ancestors.
Lex Fridman (43:07.140)
Yes, that's right.
Lex Fridman (43:08.180)
So it's amazing to think that this is the modern answer
Lex Fridman (43:15.900)
to the, or the modern version of what the Hindu philosophers
Frank Wilczek (43:24.100)
had, that art thou.
Lex Fridman (43:25.740)
If you ask what, okay, those little quantum fluctuations
Frank Wilczek (43:30.480)
in the early universe are the seeds out of which complexity,
Lex Fridman (43:36.380)
including plausibly humans, really evolve.
Frank Wilczek (43:40.900)
You don't need anything else.
Lex Fridman (43:42.260)
That brings up the question of asking for a friend here
Frank Wilczek (43:47.260)
if there's other pockets of complexity,
Lex Fridman (43:52.140)
commonly called as alien intelligent civilizations out there.
Frank Wilczek (43:59.420)
Well, we don't know for sure,
Lex Fridman (44:00.900)
but I have a strong suspicion that the answer is yes
Frank Wilczek (44:05.740)
because the one case we do have at hand to study
Lex Fridman (44:13.500)
here on Earth, we sort of know what the conditions were
Frank Wilczek (44:17.720)
that were helpful to life,
Lex Fridman (44:18.880)
the right kind of temperature, the right kind of star
Frank Wilczek (44:21.700)
that keeps, maintains that temperature for a long time,
Lex Fridman (44:24.260)
the liquid environment of water.
Lex Fridman (44:28.420)
And once those conditions emerged on Earth,
Lex Fridman (44:33.800)
which was roughly four and a half billion years ago,
Frank Wilczek (44:36.060)
it wasn't very long before what we call life
Lex Fridman (44:39.700)
started to leave relics.
Lex Fridman (44:41.580)
So we can find forms of life, primitive forms of life
Lex Fridman (44:47.060)
that are almost as old as the Earth itself
Frank Wilczek (44:49.980)
in the sense that once the Earth was turned
Lex Fridman (44:55.180)
from a very hot boiling thing
Lex Fridman (44:58.660)
and cooled off into a solid mass with water,
Lex Fridman (45:02.340)
life emerged very, very quickly.
Lex Fridman (45:03.940)
So it seems that these general conditions for life
Lex Fridman (45:09.180)
are enough to make it happen relatively quickly.
Frank Wilczek (45:13.860)
Now, the other lesson I think that one can draw
Lex Fridman (45:21.500)
from this one example, it's dangerous to draw lessons
Frank Wilczek (45:24.580)
from one example, but that's all we've got,
Lex Fridman (45:27.620)
and that the emergence of intelligent life
Frank Wilczek (45:32.020)
is a different issue altogether.
Lex Fridman (45:35.340)
That took a long time and seems to have been
Frank Wilczek (45:40.340)
pretty contingent for a long time.
Lex Fridman (45:47.300)
Well, for most of the history of life,
Frank Wilczek (45:50.580)
it was single celled things.
Lex Fridman (45:55.060)
Even multicellular life only rose
Frank Wilczek (45:58.020)
about 600 million years ago, so much after.
Lex Fridman (46:01.620)
And then intelligence is kind of a luxury.
Frank Wilczek (46:12.540)
Many more kinds of creatures have big stomachs
Lex Fridman (46:18.100)
than big brains.
Frank Wilczek (46:20.220)
In fact, most have no brains at all in any reasonable sense.
Lex Fridman (46:25.180)
And the dinosaurs ruled for a long, long time
Lex Fridman (46:30.140)
and some of them were pretty smart,
Lex Fridman (46:31.500)
but they were at best bird brains
Frank Wilczek (46:35.300)
because birds came from the dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman (46:37.700)
And it could have stayed that way.
Lex Fridman (46:41.540)
And then the emergence of humans was very contingent
Lex Fridman (46:46.260)
and kind of a very, very recent development
Frank Wilczek (46:49.620)
on evolutionary timescales.
Lex Fridman (46:51.900)
And you can argue about the level of human intelligence,
Lex Fridman (46:55.100)
but I think that's what we're talking about.
Lex Fridman (46:58.460)
It's very impressive and can ask these kinds of questions
Lex Fridman (47:02.260)
and discuss them intelligently.
Lex Fridman (47:07.020)
So I guess my, so this is a long winded answer
Frank Wilczek (47:13.380)
or justification of my feeling
Lex Fridman (47:16.940)
is that the conditions for life in some form
Frank Wilczek (47:21.940)
are probably satisfied many, many places
Lex Fridman (47:28.700)
around the universe and even within our galaxy.
Frank Wilczek (47:33.260)
I'm not so sure about the emergence of intelligent life
Lex Fridman (47:36.980)
or the emergence of technological civilizations.
Frank Wilczek (47:41.500)
That seems much more contingent and special.
Lex Fridman (47:47.420)
And we might, it's conceivable to me
Frank Wilczek (47:50.380)
that we're the only example in the galaxy.
Lex Fridman (47:54.460)
Although, yeah, I don't know one way or the other.
Frank Wilczek (47:56.660)
I have different opinions on different days of the week.
Lex Fridman (47:59.660)
But one of the things that worries me
Frank Wilczek (48:01.420)
in the spirit of being humble,
Lex Fridman (48:04.700)
that our particular kind of intelligence
Frank Wilczek (48:09.060)
is not very special.
Lex Fridman (48:10.700)
So there's all kinds of different intelligences.
Lex Fridman (48:13.700)
And even more broadly,
Lex Fridman (48:15.020)
there could be many different kinds of life.
Lex Fridman (48:19.060)
So the basic definition, and I just had,
Lex Fridman (48:22.420)
I think somebody that you know, Sarah Walker,
Frank Wilczek (48:24.860)
I just had a very long conversation with her
Lex Fridman (48:27.260)
about even just the very basic question
Frank Wilczek (48:29.380)
of trying to define what is life from a physics perspective.
Lex Fridman (48:34.580)
Even that question within itself,
Frank Wilczek (48:36.060)
I think one of the most fundamental questions
Lex Fridman (48:38.180)
in science and physics and everything
Frank Wilczek (48:41.100)
is just trying to get a hold,
Lex Fridman (48:43.860)
trying to get some universal laws
Frank Wilczek (48:45.500)
around the ideas of what is life
Lex Fridman (48:47.420)
because that kind of unlocks a bunch of things
Frank Wilczek (48:49.660)
around life, intelligence, consciousness,
Lex Fridman (48:52.460)
all those kinds of things.
Frank Wilczek (48:53.420)
I agree with you in a sense,
Lex Fridman (48:55.060)
but I think that's a dangerous question
Frank Wilczek (48:56.580)
because the answer can't be any more precise
Lex Fridman (49:01.740)
than the question.
Lex Fridman (49:02.940)
And the question, what is life,
Lex Fridman (49:07.980)
kind of assumes that we have a definition of life
Lex Fridman (49:11.340)
and that it's a natural phenomena
Lex Fridman (49:12.900)
that can be distinguished.
Lex Fridman (49:14.660)
But really there are edge cases like viruses
Lex Fridman (49:17.580)
and some people would like to say
Frank Wilczek (49:20.740)
that electrons have consciousness.
Lex Fridman (49:25.020)
So you can't, if you really have fuzzy concepts,
Frank Wilczek (49:28.700)
it's very hard to reach precise kinds of scientific answers.
Lex Fridman (49:34.060)
But I think there's a very fruitful question
Frank Wilczek (49:37.020)
that's adjacent to it,
Lex Fridman (49:39.020)
which has been pursued in different forms
Frank Wilczek (49:42.060)
for quite a while
Lex Fridman (49:44.980)
and is now becoming very sophisticated
Frank Wilczek (49:47.820)
in reaching in new directions.
Lex Fridman (49:50.020)
And that is, what are the states of matter
Lex Fridman (49:53.900)
that are possible?
Lex Fridman (49:55.100)
So in high school or grade school,
Frank Wilczek (49:58.460)
you learn about solids, liquids and gases,
Lex Fridman (50:01.740)
but that really just scratches the surface
Frank Wilczek (50:04.700)
of different ways that are distinguishable,
Lex Fridman (50:07.820)
that matter can form into macroscopically different,
Frank Wilczek (50:15.060)
meaningful patterns that we call phases.
Lex Fridman (50:17.420)
And then there are precise definitions
Frank Wilczek (50:19.460)
of what we mean by phases of matter
Lex Fridman (50:21.660)
and that have been worked out fruitful over the decades.
Lex Fridman (50:26.100)
And we're discovering new states of matter all the time
Lex Fridman (50:29.820)
and kind of having to work at what we mean by matter.
Frank Wilczek (50:33.260)
We're discovering the capabilities of matter
Lex Fridman (50:35.980)
to organize in interesting ways.
Lex Fridman (50:39.580)
And some of them, like liquid crystals,
Lex Fridman (50:46.020)
are important ingredients of life.
Frank Wilczek (50:49.060)
Our cell membranes are liquid crystals,
Lex Fridman (50:51.740)
and that's very important to the way they work.
Frank Wilczek (50:55.500)
Recently, there's been a development
Lex Fridman (50:57.340)
in where we're talking about states of matter
Frank Wilczek (51:01.500)
that are not static, but that have dynamics,
Lex Fridman (51:06.580)
that have characteristic patterns,
Frank Wilczek (51:09.620)
not only in space, but in time.
Lex Fridman (51:11.540)
These are called time crystals,
Lex Fridman (51:12.860)
and that's been a development
Lex Fridman (51:14.460)
that's just in the last decade or so.
Frank Wilczek (51:17.580)
It's just really, really flourishing.
Lex Fridman (51:20.820)
And so is there a state of matter
Lex Fridman (51:25.820)
or a group of states of matter that corresponds to life?
Lex Fridman (51:31.580)
Maybe, but the answer can't be any more definite
Frank Wilczek (51:34.460)
than the question.
Lex Fridman (51:35.900)
I mean, I gotta push back on the,
Frank Wilczek (51:38.620)
those are just words.
Lex Fridman (51:39.940)
I mean, I disagree with you.
Frank Wilczek (51:41.980)
The question points to a direction.
Lex Fridman (51:45.940)
The answer might be able to be more precise
Frank Wilczek (51:49.180)
than the question, because just as you're saying,
Lex Fridman (51:53.300)
there is a, we could be discovering
Frank Wilczek (51:56.660)
certain characteristics and patterns
Lex Fridman (51:59.740)
that are associated with a certain type of matter,
Frank Wilczek (52:02.860)
macroscopically speaking,
Lex Fridman (52:04.420)
and that we can then be able to post facto say,
Frank Wilczek (52:10.620)
this is, let's assign the word life to this kind of matter.
Lex Fridman (52:14.420)
I agree with that completely, that's what that's,
Lex Fridman (52:17.580)
but that's, so it's not a disagreement.
Lex Fridman (52:19.780)
It's very frequent in physics that, or in science,
Frank Wilczek (52:23.380)
that words that are in common use
Lex Fridman (52:26.820)
get refined and reprocessed into scientific terms
Frank Wilczek (52:31.380)
that's happened for things like force and energy.
Lex Fridman (52:35.800)
And so we, in a way, we find out
Lex Fridman (52:38.780)
what the useful definition is, or symmetry, for instance.
Lex Fridman (52:43.900)
And the common usage may be quite different
Frank Wilczek (52:47.260)
from the scientific usage,
Lex Fridman (52:48.460)
but the scientific usage is special
Lex Fridman (52:52.020)
and takes on a life of its own,
Lex Fridman (52:53.340)
and we find out what the useful version of it is,
Frank Wilczek (52:59.820)
the fruitful version of it is.
Lex Fridman (53:02.060)
So I do think, so in that spirit,
Frank Wilczek (53:05.340)
I think if we can identify states of matter
Lex Fridman (53:10.340)
or linked states of matter that can carry on processes
Frank Wilczek (53:18.540)
of self reproduction and development
Lex Fridman (53:23.940)
and information processing,
Frank Wilczek (53:28.260)
we might be tempted to classify those things as life.
Lex Fridman (53:34.260)
Well, can I ask you about the craziest one,
Frank Wilczek (53:36.860)
which is the one we know maybe least about,
Lex Fridman (53:41.540)
which is consciousness.
Frank Wilczek (53:42.700)
Is it possible that there are certain kinds of matter
Lex Fridman (53:44.940)
would be able to classify as conscious,
Frank Wilczek (53:50.340)
meaning like, so there's the panpsychists, right,
Lex Fridman (53:54.380)
who are the philosophers who kind of try to imply
Frank Wilczek (53:57.900)
that all matter has some degree of consciousness,
Lex Fridman (54:01.220)
and you can almost construct like a physics of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (54:04.220)
Do you, again, we're in such early days of this,
Lex Fridman (54:09.260)
but nevertheless, it seems useful to talk about it.
Frank Wilczek (54:13.100)
Is there some sense from a physics perspective
Lex Fridman (54:15.860)
to make sense of consciousness?
Lex Fridman (54:18.860)
Is there some hope?
Lex Fridman (54:19.700)
Well, again, consciousness is a very imprecise word
Lex Fridman (54:24.820)
and loaded with connotations that I think we should,
Lex Fridman (54:28.620)
we don't wanna start a scientific analysis with that,
Frank Wilczek (54:31.900)
I don't think.
Lex Fridman (54:34.260)
It's often been important in science
Frank Wilczek (54:38.340)
to start with simple cases and work up.
Lex Fridman (54:43.020)
Consciousness, I think what most people think of
Frank Wilczek (54:45.860)
when you talk about consciousness is,
Lex Fridman (54:47.740)
okay, what am I doing in the world?
Frank Wilczek (54:52.980)
This is my experience.
Lex Fridman (54:53.900)
I have a rich inner life and experience,
Lex Fridman (54:57.180)
and where is that in the equations?
Lex Fridman (54:59.900)
And I think that's a great question,
Frank Wilczek (55:02.220)
a great, great question,
Lex Fridman (55:03.420)
and actually, I think I'm gearing up to spend part of,
Frank Wilczek (55:07.740)
I mean, to try to address that in coming years.
Lex Fridman (55:10.980)
One version of asking that question,
Frank Wilczek (55:12.660)
just as you said now,
Lex Fridman (55:14.420)
is what is the simplest formulation of that to study?
Frank Wilczek (55:19.060)
I think I'm much more comfortable
Lex Fridman (55:20.740)
with the idea of studying self awareness
Frank Wilczek (55:23.780)
as opposed to consciousness,
Lex Fridman (55:25.420)
because that sort of gets rid of the mystical aura of the thing.
Lex Fridman (55:30.260)
And self awareness is in simple,
Lex Fridman (55:33.780)
you know, I think contiguous at least
Frank Wilczek (55:38.980)
with ideas about feedback.
Lex Fridman (55:41.580)
So if you have a system that looks at its own state
Lex Fridman (55:45.380)
and responds to it, that's a kind of self awareness.
Lex Fridman (55:50.820)
And more sophisticated versions
Frank Wilczek (55:54.460)
could be like in information processing things,
Lex Fridman (55:57.380)
computers that look into their own internal state
Lex Fridman (56:00.540)
and do something about it.
Lex Fridman (56:03.220)
And I think that could also be done in neural nets.
Frank Wilczek (56:08.300)
This is called recurrent neural nets,
Lex Fridman (56:10.260)
which are hard to understand and kind of a frontier.
Lex Fridman (56:15.340)
So I think understanding those
Lex Fridman (56:18.340)
and gradually building up a kind of profound ability
Frank Wilczek (56:26.500)
to conceptualize different levels of self awareness.
Lex Fridman (56:32.220)
What do you have to not know?
Lex Fridman (56:33.540)
And what do you have to know?
Lex Fridman (56:34.620)
And when do you know that you don't know it?
Frank Wilczek (56:36.740)
Or when do you, what do you think you know
Lex Fridman (56:38.180)
that you don't really know?
Lex Fridman (56:39.220)
And these, I think clarifying those issues,
Lex Fridman (56:44.220)
when we clarify those issues
Lex Fridman (56:47.300)
and get a rich theory around self awareness,
Lex Fridman (56:51.420)
I think that will illuminate the questions
Frank Wilczek (56:55.780)
about consciousness in a way that, you know,
Lex Fridman (56:58.180)
scratching your chin and talking about qualia
Lex Fridman (57:00.860)
and blah, blah, blah, blah is never gonna do.
Lex Fridman (57:04.260)
Well, I also have a different approach to the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (57:06.860)
So there's, from a robotics perspective,
Lex Fridman (57:09.060)
you can engineer things that exhibit qualities
Frank Wilczek (57:13.260)
of consciousness without understanding how things work.
Lex Fridman (57:19.780)
And from that perspective, you, it's like a back door,
Frank Wilczek (57:25.620)
like enter through the psychology door.
Lex Fridman (57:28.020)
Precisely, I think we're on the same wavelength here.
Frank Wilczek (57:32.180)
I think that, and let me just add one comment,
Lex Fridman (57:35.300)
which is I think we should try to understand consciousness
Frank Wilczek (57:40.300)
as we experience it as, in evolutionary terms,
Lex Fridman (57:48.940)
and ask ourselves, why, why does it happen?
Frank Wilczek (57:53.020)
This thing seems useful.
Lex Fridman (57:54.380)
Why is it useful?
Lex Fridman (57:55.220)
Why is it useful?
Lex Fridman (57:56.340)
Interesting question.
Frank Wilczek (57:57.180)
I think we've got a conscious eyewatch here.
Lex Fridman (58:01.540)
Interesting question.
Frank Wilczek (58:02.380)
Thank you, Siri.
Lex Fridman (58:03.500)
Okay.
Frank Wilczek (58:08.100)
I'll get back to you later.
Lex Fridman (58:09.660)
The, and I think what we're gonna,
Frank Wilczek (58:14.820)
I'm morally certain that what's gonna emerge
Lex Fridman (58:18.500)
from analyzing recurrent neural nets
Lex Fridman (58:21.500)
and robotic design and advanced computer design
Lex Fridman (58:26.380)
is that having this kind of looking at the internal state
Frank Wilczek (58:33.940)
in a structured way that doesn't look at everything,
Lex Fridman (58:38.420)
this guy's has, it's encapsulated,
Frank Wilczek (58:40.580)
looks at highly processed information,
Lex Fridman (58:42.260)
is very selective and makes choices
Frank Wilczek (58:44.380)
without knowing how they're made.
Lex Fridman (58:45.620)
There's, there'll also be an unconscious.
Frank Wilczek (58:47.360)
I think that that is gonna be,
Lex Fridman (58:49.460)
turn out to be really essential
Frank Wilczek (58:51.940)
to doing efficient information processing.
Lex Fridman (58:55.460)
And that's why it evolved,
Frank Wilczek (58:59.340)
because it's, it's, it's, it's helpful in,
Lex Fridman (59:03.420)
because brains come at a high cost.
Lex Fridman (59:06.240)
So there has to be, there has to be a good why.
Lex Fridman (59:09.480)
And there's a reason, yeah.
Frank Wilczek (59:10.960)
They're rare in evolution and big brains
Lex Fridman (59:16.640)
are rare in evolution and they, they come at a big cost.
Frank Wilczek (59:19.920)
You mean, if you, you, they, they,
Lex Fridman (59:22.480)
they have high metabolic demands.
Frank Wilczek (59:27.160)
They require, you know, very active lifestyle,
Lex Fridman (59:30.640)
warm bloodedness and take, take away from the ability
Frank Wilczek (59:36.880)
to support metabolism of digestion.
Lex Fridman (59:39.160)
And so, so it's, it's, it comes at a high cost.
Frank Wilczek (59:42.280)
It has to, it has to pay back.
Lex Fridman (59:44.320)
Yeah, I think it has a lot of value in social interaction.
Lex Fridman (59:47.160)
So I actually am spending the rest of the day today
Lex Fridman (59:49.600)
and with our friends that are,
Frank Wilczek (59:54.960)
our legged friends in robotic form at Boston Dynamics.
Lex Fridman (59:58.280)
And I think, so my probably biggest passion
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