Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right
物理与宇宙学音乐与艺术数学生物与进化政治与社会
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theorymathematicsphysicsstringuniversecalleddongoingsaidscienceforceeinsteinideasmathematicalgeneralequationsstorytechnologyhumannature
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🎙️ 完整对话（2029 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with S. James Gates, Jr.
以下是与小詹姆斯·盖茨的对话。
Lex Fridman (00:03.800)
He's a theoretical physicist and professor at Brown University,
他是布朗大学的理论物理学家和教授
Lex Fridman (00:07.300)
working on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
研究超对称、超引力和超弦理论。
Lex Fridman (00:11.460)
He served on former President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology,
他曾在前总统奥巴马的科学技术顾问委员会任职，
Lex Fridman (00:16.500)
and he's now the coauthor of a new book titled Proving Einstein Right,
他现在是一本名为《证明爱因斯坦是对的》新书的合著者，
Jim Gates (00:21.600)
about the scientists who set out to prove Einstein's theory of relativity.
关于致力于证明爱因斯坦相对论的科学家们。
Lex Fridman (00:26.500)
You may have noticed that I've been speaking with not just computer scientists,
你可能已经注意到，我不仅与计算机科学家交谈，
Lex Fridman (00:30.200)
but philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, economists, and soon, much more.
但哲学家、数学家、物理学家、经济学家等等。
Lex Fridman (00:35.200)
To me, AI is much bigger than deep learning, bigger than computing.
对我来说，人工智能比深度学习、计算更重要。
Jim Gates (00:39.300)
It is our civilization's journey into understanding the human mind
这是我们的文明理解人类心灵的旅程
Lex Fridman (00:43.000)
and creating echoes of it in the machine.
并在机器中产生它的回声。
Jim Gates (00:45.700)
That journey includes, of course, the world of theoretical physics
当然，这个旅程包括理论物理的世界
Lex Fridman (00:50.300)
and its practice of first principles mathematical thinking
及其数学思维第一原理的实践
Lex Fridman (00:53.300)
and exploring the fundamental nature of our reality.
并探索我们现实的基本本质。
Lex Fridman (00:57.500)
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
这是人工智能播客。
Jim Gates (01:00.500)
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
如果您喜欢它，请在 YouTube 上订阅，在 Apple Podcast 上给它五颗星，
Lex Fridman (01:04.600)
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
关注 Spotify，支持 Patreon，
Jim Gates (01:07.300)
or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F.R.I.D.M.A.N.
或者直接在 Twitter 上与我联系：Lex Friedman，拼写为 F.R.I.D.M.A.N。
Lex Fridman (01:13.400)
If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube or Twitter,
如果您在 Apple 播客、YouTube 或 Twitter 上留下评论，
Jim Gates (01:17.100)
consider mentioning ideas, people, topics you find interesting.
考虑提及你感兴趣的想法、人物和话题。
Lex Fridman (01:20.500)
It helps guide the future of this podcast.
Lex Fridman (01:23.100)
But in general, I just love comments that are full of kindness and thoughtfulness in them.
Lex Fridman (01:28.600)
This podcast is a side project for me, but I still put a lot of effort into it.
Lex Fridman (01:32.800)
So the positive words of support from an amazing community, from you, really help.
Lex Fridman (01:39.600)
I recently started doing ads at the end of the introduction.
Jim Gates (01:42.500)
I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode
Lex Fridman (01:45.100)
and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation.
Jim Gates (01:48.900)
I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
Lex Fridman (01:52.600)
I provide timestamps for the start of the conversations you may have noticed
Jim Gates (01:56.400)
that you can skip to, but it helps if you listen to the ad
Lex Fridman (02:00.100)
and support this podcast by trying out the product or service being advertised.
Jim Gates (02:05.300)
This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store.
Lex Fridman (02:10.100)
I personally use Cash App to send money to friends,
Lex Fridman (02:12.500)
but you can also use it to buy, sell, and deposit Bitcoin in just seconds.
Lex Fridman (02:16.800)
Cash App also has a new investing feature.
Jim Gates (02:19.700)
You can buy fractions of a stock, say $1 worth, no matter what the stock price is.
Lex Fridman (02:25.200)
Broker services are provided by Cash App Investing,
Jim Gates (02:28.100)
a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC.
Lex Fridman (02:31.100)
I'm excited to be working with Cash App
Jim Gates (02:33.100)
to support one of my favorite organizations called First,
Lex Fridman (02:36.200)
best known for their first robotics and Lego competitions.
Jim Gates (02:39.600)
They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students
Lex Fridman (02:43.100)
in over 110 countries and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator,
Jim Gates (02:47.300)
which means the donated money is used to maximum effectiveness.
Lex Fridman (02:51.200)
When you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play
Lex Fridman (02:54.000)
and use code LEXPODCAST, you'll get $10,
Lex Fridman (02:57.700)
and Cash App will also donate $10 to First,
Jim Gates (03:00.600)
which again is an organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys
Lex Fridman (03:05.400)
to dream of engineering a better world.
Lex Fridman (03:08.400)
And now, here's my conversation with S. James Gates Jr.
Lex Fridman (03:13.600)
You tell a story when you were eight.
Jim Gates (03:15.500)
You had a profound realization that the stars in the sky
Lex Fridman (03:18.200)
are actually places that we could travel to one day.
Lex Fridman (03:22.500)
Do you think human beings will ever venture outside our solar system?
Lex Fridman (03:27.200)
Wow, the question of whether humanity gets outside of the solar system.
Jim Gates (03:30.500)
It's going to be a challenge,
Lex Fridman (03:31.800)
and as long as the laws of physics that we have today are accurate and valid,
Jim Gates (03:38.300)
it's going to be extraordinarily difficult.
Lex Fridman (03:40.800)
I'm a science fiction fan, as you probably know,
Lex Fridman (03:43.400)
so I love to dream of starships and traveling to other solar systems,
Lex Fridman (03:48.100)
but the barriers are just formidable.
Jim Gates (03:52.500)
If we just kind of venture a little bit into science fiction,
Lex Fridman (03:55.300)
do you think the spaceships, if we are successful,
Jim Gates (03:58.100)
that take us outside the solar system,
Lex Fridman (04:00.400)
will look like the ones we have today,
Lex Fridman (04:03.000)
or are fundamental breakthroughs necessary?
Lex Fridman (04:07.500)
In order to have genuine starships,
Jim Gates (04:10.100)
probably some really radical views about the way the universe works
Lex Fridman (04:14.900)
are going to have to take place in our science.
Jim Gates (04:17.900)
We could, with our current technology,
Lex Fridman (04:22.200)
think about constructing multigenerational starships
Jim Gates (04:25.500)
where the people who get on them are not the people who get off at the other end.
Lex Fridman (04:31.200)
But even if we do that, the formidable problem is actually our bodies,
Jim Gates (04:36.500)
which doesn't seem to be conscious for a lot of people.
Lex Fridman (04:41.100)
Even getting to Mars is going to present this challenge,
Jim Gates (04:44.000)
because we live in this wonderful home,
Lex Fridman (04:47.300)
has a protective magnetic magnetosphere around it,
Lex Fridman (04:50.700)
and so we're shielded from cosmic radiation.
Lex Fridman (04:54.100)
Once you leave this shield, there are some estimates that,
Jim Gates (04:58.800)
for example, if you sent someone to Mars,
Lex Fridman (05:02.100)
with our technology, probably about two years out there without the shield,
Jim Gates (05:05.700)
they're going to be bombarded.
Lex Fridman (05:07.000)
That means radiation, probably means cancer.
Lex Fridman (05:10.200)
So that's one of the most formidable challenges,
Lex Fridman (05:12.900)
even if we could get over the technology.
Lex Fridman (05:16.300)
Do you think, so Mars is a harsh place.
Lex Fridman (05:19.300)
Elon Musk, SpaceX and other folks,
Jim Gates (05:22.800)
NASA are really pushing to put a human being on Mars.
Lex Fridman (05:25.900)
Do you think, again, let's forgive me
Jim Gates (05:28.500)
for lingering in science fiction land for a little bit.
Lex Fridman (05:31.300)
Do you think one day we may be able to colonize Mars?
Jim Gates (05:34.400)
First, do you think we'll put a human on Mars,
Lex Fridman (05:37.800)
and then do you think we'll put many humans on Mars?
Lex Fridman (05:40.700)
So first of all, I am extraordinarily convinced
Lex Fridman (05:45.500)
we will not put a human on Mars by 2030,
Jim Gates (05:48.100)
which is a date that you often hear in the public debate.
Lex Fridman (05:52.100)
What's the challenge there?
Lex Fridman (05:53.500)
What do you think?
Lex Fridman (05:54.300)
So there are a couple of ways that I could slice this,
Lex Fridman (05:56.600)
but the one that I think is simplest for people to understand involves money.
Lex Fridman (06:01.000)
So you look at how we got to the moon in the 1960s.
Jim Gates (06:05.500)
It was about 10 year duration
Lex Fridman (06:07.100)
between the challenge that President Kennedy laid out
Lex Fridman (06:10.300)
and our successfully landing a moon.
Lex Fridman (06:12.700)
I was actually here at MIT
Jim Gates (06:14.400)
when that first moon landing occurred,
Lex Fridman (06:16.600)
so I remember watching it on TV.
Lex Fridman (06:18.300)
But how did we get there?
Lex Fridman (06:19.200)
Well, we had this extraordinarily technical agency
Jim Gates (06:24.700)
of the United States government, NASA.
Lex Fridman (06:26.900)
It consumed about 5% of the country's economic output.
Lex Fridman (06:32.700)
And so you say 5% of the economic output
Lex Fridman (06:35.800)
over about a 10 year period gets us 250,000 miles in space.
Jim Gates (06:40.400)
Mars is about a hundred times farther.
Lex Fridman (06:43.500)
So you have at least a hundred times the challenge
Lex Fridman (06:45.500)
and we're spending about one tenth of the funds
Lex Fridman (06:48.600)
that we spent then as a government.
Lex Fridman (06:50.800)
So my claim is that it's at least a thousand times harder
Lex Fridman (06:54.400)
for me to imagine us getting to Mars by 2030.
Lex Fridman (06:58.000)
And he had that part that you mentioned in the speech
Lex Fridman (07:00.400)
that I just have to throw in there of JFK,
Jim Gates (07:03.900)
of we do these things not because they're easy,
Lex Fridman (07:06.100)
but because they're hard.
Jim Gates (07:07.800)
That's such a beautiful line
Lex Fridman (07:09.100)
that I would love to hear a modern president say
Jim Gates (07:11.900)
about a scientific endeavor.
Lex Fridman (07:13.700)
Well, one day we live and hope
Jim Gates (07:16.300)
that such a president will arise for our nation.
Lex Fridman (07:19.700)
But even if, like I said,
Jim Gates (07:21.100)
even if you fix the technical problems,
Lex Fridman (07:24.900)
the biological engineering that I worry most about,
Jim Gates (07:28.900)
however, I'm gonna go out on a limb here.
Lex Fridman (07:31.900)
I think that by 2090 or so,
Jim Gates (07:35.800)
or 2100, should I say 120,
Lex Fridman (07:41.300)
I suspect we're gonna have a human on Mars.
Jim Gates (07:44.000)
Wow, so you think that many years out,
Lex Fridman (07:46.400)
first a few tangents.
Jim Gates (07:48.000)
You said bioengineering is a challenge.
Lex Fridman (07:50.500)
What's the challenge there?
Lex Fridman (07:52.400)
So as I said, the real problem with interstellar travel,
Lex Fridman (07:57.800)
aside from the technology challenges,
Jim Gates (08:00.800)
the real problem is radiation.
Lex Fridman (08:03.200)
And how do you engineer either an environment or a body,
Jim Gates (08:08.700)
because we see rapid advances going on in bioengineering,
Lex Fridman (08:12.900)
how do you engineer either a ship or a body
Lex Fridman (08:16.400)
so that something, some person
Lex Fridman (08:18.900)
that's recognizably human will survive
Lex Fridman (08:22.200)
the rigors of interplanetary space travel?
Lex Fridman (08:24.600)
It's much more difficult than most people
Jim Gates (08:26.500)
seem to take into account.
Lex Fridman (08:29.500)
So if we could linger on the 2090, 2100, 2120,
Jim Gates (08:36.200)
sort of thinking of that kind of,
Lex Fridman (08:40.100)
you know, and let's linger on money.
Jim Gates (08:42.900)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (08:43.740)
So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are pushing the cost,
Jim Gates (08:48.900)
trying to push the cost down.
Lex Fridman (08:50.600)
I mean, this is, so do you have hope
Jim Gates (08:52.900)
as this actually sort of a brilliant big picture scientist,
Lex Fridman (08:56.600)
do you think a business entrepreneur can take science
Lex Fridman (09:02.040)
and make it cheaper and get it out there faster?
Lex Fridman (09:04.900)
So bending the cost curve is,
Jim Gates (09:06.800)
you'll notice that has been an anchor.
Lex Fridman (09:08.500)
This is the simplest way for me to discuss this with people
Jim Gates (09:10.600)
about what the challenge is.
Lex Fridman (09:12.100)
So yes, bending the cost curve is certainly critical
Jim Gates (09:16.200)
if we're going to be successful.
Lex Fridman (09:18.200)
Now, you asked about the endeavors that are out there now
Jim Gates (09:22.900)
sponsored by two very prominent American citizens,
Lex Fridman (09:25.300)
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Jim Gates (09:28.000)
I'm disappointed actually in what I see
Lex Fridman (09:31.600)
in terms of the routes that are being pursued.
Lex Fridman (09:35.200)
So let me give you one example there.
Lex Fridman (09:36.700)
And this one is going to be a little bit more technical.
Lex Fridman (09:39.600)
So if you look at the kinds of rockets
Lex Fridman (09:41.400)
that both these organizations are creating,
Jim Gates (09:45.100)
yes, it's wonderful, reusable technology
Lex Fridman (09:47.300)
to see a rocket go up and land on its fins
Jim Gates (09:50.000)
just like it did in science fiction movies
Lex Fridman (09:51.800)
when I was a kid, that's astounding.
Lex Fridman (09:54.500)
But the real problem is those rockets,
Lex Fridman (09:58.900)
the technology that we're doing now
Jim Gates (10:00.300)
is not really that different
Lex Fridman (10:02.100)
than what was used to go to the moon.
Lex Fridman (10:04.400)
And there are alternatives it turns out.
Lex Fridman (10:06.600)
There's an engine called a flare engine,
Jim Gates (10:09.000)
which so a traditional rocket,
Lex Fridman (10:11.000)
if you look at the engine, it looks like a bell, right?
Lex Fridman (10:13.200)
And then the flame comes out the bottom.
Lex Fridman (10:14.900)
But there is a kind of engine called a flare engine,
Jim Gates (10:17.300)
which is essentially, when you look at it,
Lex Fridman (10:20.200)
it looks like an exhaust pipe
Jim Gates (10:23.800)
on like a fancy car that's long and elongated.
Lex Fridman (10:27.600)
And it's a type of rocket engine
Jim Gates (10:29.000)
that we know there've been preliminary testing,
Lex Fridman (10:32.800)
we know it works.
Lex Fridman (10:34.100)
And it also is actually much more economical
Lex Fridman (10:36.700)
because what it does is allow you
Jim Gates (10:38.700)
to vary the amount of thrust as you go up.
Lex Fridman (10:40.900)
In a way that you cannot do
Jim Gates (10:42.200)
with one of these bell shaped engines.
Lex Fridman (10:44.300)
So you would think that an entrepreneur
Jim Gates (10:48.800)
might try to have the breakthrough to use flare nozzles,
Lex Fridman (10:53.500)
as they're called, as a way to bend the cost curve.
Jim Gates (10:56.600)
Because as we keep coming back,
Lex Fridman (10:57.600)
that's gonna be a big factor.
Lex Fridman (10:59.200)
But that's not happening.
Lex Fridman (11:00.600)
In fact, what we see is what I think of as incremental change
Jim Gates (11:04.600)
in terms of our technology.
Lex Fridman (11:06.200)
So I'm not really very encouraged by what I personally see.
Lex Fridman (11:10.200)
So incremental change won't bend the cost curve.
Lex Fridman (11:12.500)
I don't see it.
Jim Gates (11:14.200)
Just linger on the sci fi for one more question.
Lex Fridman (11:17.400)
Sure.
Lex Fridman (11:18.900)
Do you think we're alone in the universe?
Lex Fridman (11:20.900)
Are we the only intelligent form of life?
Lex Fridman (11:23.800)
So there is a quote by Carl Sagan,
Lex Fridman (11:27.000)
which I really love when I hear this question.
Lex Fridman (11:30.300)
And I recall the quote,
Lex Fridman (11:32.400)
and it goes something like,
Jim Gates (11:34.000)
if we're the only conscious life in the universe,
Lex Fridman (11:38.500)
it's in a terrible waste of space
Jim Gates (11:40.800)
because the universe is an incredibly big place.
Lex Fridman (11:45.000)
And when Carl made that statement,
Jim Gates (11:47.200)
we didn't know about the profusion of planets
Lex Fridman (11:50.400)
that are out there.
Jim Gates (11:51.600)
In the last decade,
Lex Fridman (11:53.200)
we've discovered over a thousand planets
Lex Fridman (11:56.100)
and a substantial number of those planets are Earth like
Lex Fridman (11:59.600)
in terms of being in the Goldilocks zone as it's called.
Lex Fridman (12:04.100)
So in my mind, it's practically inconceivable
Lex Fridman (12:09.100)
that we're the only conscious form of life in the universe.
Lex Fridman (12:13.400)
But that doesn't mean they've come to visit us.
Lex Fridman (12:15.800)
Do you think they would look,
Lex Fridman (12:17.000)
do you think we'll recognize alien life if we saw it?
Lex Fridman (12:21.200)
Do you think it'd look anything like the carbon base,
Lex Fridman (12:24.100)
the biological system we have on Earth today?
Lex Fridman (12:27.100)
It would depend on that life's native environment
Jim Gates (12:31.100)
in which it arose.
Lex Fridman (12:32.600)
If that environment was sufficiently like our environment,
Jim Gates (12:36.300)
there's a principle in biology and nature called convergence,
Lex Fridman (12:39.200)
which is that even if you have two biological systems
Jim Gates (12:42.300)
that are totally separated from each other,
Lex Fridman (12:44.600)
if they face similar conditions,
Jim Gates (12:46.900)
nature tends to converge on solutions.
Lex Fridman (12:49.400)
And so there might be similarities
Jim Gates (12:52.000)
if this alien life form was born in a place
Lex Fridman (12:55.600)
that's kind of like this place.
Jim Gates (12:57.800)
Physics appears to be quite similar,
Lex Fridman (13:00.600)
the laws of physics across the entirety of the universe.
Lex Fridman (13:03.900)
Do you think weirder things than we see on Earth
Lex Fridman (13:06.900)
can spring up out of the same kinds of laws of physics?
Jim Gates (13:10.300)
From the laws of physics, I would say yes.
Lex Fridman (13:12.800)
First of all, if you look at carbon based life,
Lex Fridman (13:14.500)
why are we carbon based?
Lex Fridman (13:15.600)
Well, it turns out it's because of the way
Jim Gates (13:18.200)
that carbon interacts with elements,
Lex Fridman (13:20.100)
which in fact is also a reflection
Jim Gates (13:22.200)
on the electronic structure of the carbon nucleus.
Lex Fridman (13:26.600)
So you can look down the table of elements and say,
Lex Fridman (13:28.200)
well, gee, do we see similar elements?
Lex Fridman (13:30.400)
The answer is yes.
Lex Fridman (13:31.400)
And one that one often hears about
Lex Fridman (13:34.100)
in science fiction is silicon.
Lex Fridman (13:36.200)
So maybe there's a silicon based life form out there
Lex Fridman (13:38.500)
if the conditions are right.
Lex Fridman (13:40.200)
But I think it's presumptuous of us
Lex Fridman (13:41.700)
to think that we are the template
Jim Gates (13:44.300)
by which all life has to appear.
Lex Fridman (13:50.000)
Before we dive into beautiful details,
Jim Gates (13:52.900)
let me ask a big question.
Lex Fridman (13:55.200)
What to you is the most beautiful idea,
Lex Fridman (13:58.200)
maybe the most surprising, mysterious idea in physics?
Lex Fridman (14:02.000)
The most surprising idea to me
Jim Gates (14:03.400)
is that we can actually do physics.
Lex Fridman (14:05.700)
The universe did not have to be constructed
Jim Gates (14:08.800)
in such a way with our limited intellectual capacity
Lex Fridman (14:13.600)
that is actually put together in such a way
Lex Fridman (14:17.600)
and that we are put together in such a way
Lex Fridman (14:20.200)
that we can, with our mind's eye,
Jim Gates (14:24.200)
delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe.
Lex Fridman (14:27.500)
That to me is pretty close to a miracle.
Lex Fridman (14:30.800)
So there are simple equations, relatively simple,
Lex Fridman (14:34.400)
that can describe things, the fundamental functions.
Jim Gates (14:40.000)
They can describe everything about our reality.
Lex Fridman (14:42.600)
That's not, can you imagine universes
Lex Fridman (14:46.000)
where everything is a lot more complicated?
Lex Fridman (14:50.500)
Do you think there's something inherent about universes
Jim Gates (14:54.800)
that simple laws are...
Lex Fridman (14:57.600)
Well, first of all, let me,
Jim Gates (14:58.900)
this is a question that I encounter in a number of guides.
Lex Fridman (15:02.200)
A lot of people will raise the question
Jim Gates (15:04.200)
about whether mathematics is the language of the universe.
Lex Fridman (15:08.000)
And my response is mathematics is the language
Jim Gates (15:11.200)
that we humans are capable of using in describing the universe.
Lex Fridman (15:14.700)
It may have little to do with the universe,
Lex Fridman (15:17.300)
but in terms of our capacity, it's the microscope,
Lex Fridman (15:20.700)
it's the telescope through which we,
Jim Gates (15:22.800)
it's the lens through which we are able to view the universe
Lex Fridman (15:26.400)
with the precision that no other human language allows.
Lex Fridman (15:31.400)
So could there be other universes?
Lex Fridman (15:32.900)
Well, I don't even know if this one looks like I think it does.
Lex Fridman (15:36.800)
But the beautiful surprising thing is that physics,
Lex Fridman (15:43.000)
there are laws of physics, very few laws of physics
Jim Gates (15:46.800)
that can effectively compress down
Lex Fridman (15:48.900)
the functioning of the universe.
Jim Gates (15:50.200)
Yes, that's extraordinarily surprising.
Lex Fridman (15:52.700)
I like to use the analogy
Jim Gates (15:54.000)
with computers and information technology.
Lex Fridman (15:56.800)
If you worry about transmitting large bundles of data,
Jim Gates (16:01.000)
one of the things that computer scientists do for us
Lex Fridman (16:03.200)
is they allow for processes that are called compression,
Jim Gates (16:06.400)
where you take big packets of data
Lex Fridman (16:07.900)
and you press them down into much smaller packets,
Lex Fridman (16:10.300)
and then you transmit those
Lex Fridman (16:11.400)
and then unpack them at the other end.
Lex Fridman (16:13.400)
And so it looks a little bit to me
Lex Fridman (16:16.000)
like the universe has kind of done us a favor.
Jim Gates (16:18.500)
It's constructed our minds in such a way
Lex Fridman (16:20.600)
that we have this thing called mathematics,
Jim Gates (16:23.100)
which then as we look at the universe,
Lex Fridman (16:24.700)
teaches us how to carry out the compression process.
Jim Gates (16:29.600)
A quick question about compression.
Lex Fridman (16:31.600)
Do you think the human mind can be compressed?
Lex Fridman (16:35.100)
The biology can be compressed?
Lex Fridman (16:38.000)
We talked about space travel.
Jim Gates (16:40.000)
To be able to compress the information
Lex Fridman (16:42.400)
that captures some large percent of what it means
Jim Gates (16:46.000)
to be me or you,
Lex Fridman (16:48.700)
and then be able to send that at the speed of light.
Jim Gates (16:52.600)
Wow, that's a big question.
Lex Fridman (16:54.300)
And let me try to take it apart,
Jim Gates (16:56.900)
unpack it into several pieces.
Lex Fridman (16:58.900)
I don't believe that wetware biology such as we are
Jim Gates (17:02.700)
has an exclusive patent on intellectual consciousness.
Lex Fridman (17:08.000)
I suspect that other structures in the universe
Jim Gates (17:11.500)
are perfectly capable of producing the data streams
Lex Fridman (17:14.700)
that we use to process, first of all,
Jim Gates (17:17.300)
our observations of the universe
Lex Fridman (17:18.700)
and an awareness of ourself.
Jim Gates (17:20.700)
I can imagine other structures can do that also.
Lex Fridman (17:23.300)
So that's part of what you were talking about,
Jim Gates (17:26.600)
which I would have some disagreement with.
Lex Fridman (17:30.500)
Consciousness.
Lex Fridman (17:31.600)
What's the most interesting part of us humans?
Lex Fridman (17:36.200)
Is consciousness the thing?
Jim Gates (17:38.000)
I think that's the most interesting thing about humans.
Lex Fridman (17:39.900)
And then you're saying that there's other entities
Jim Gates (17:43.700)
throughout the universe.
Lex Fridman (17:45.100)
I can well imagine that the architecture
Jim Gates (17:48.200)
that supports our consciousness, again,
Lex Fridman (17:50.800)
has no patent on consciousness.
Jim Gates (17:53.800)
Just in case you have an interesting thought here,
Lex Fridman (17:57.700)
there's folks perhaps in philosophy called panpsychists
Jim Gates (18:01.500)
that believe consciousness underlies everything.
Lex Fridman (18:04.100)
It is one of the fundamental laws of the universe.
Lex Fridman (18:07.000)
Do you have a sense that that could possibly fit into...
Lex Fridman (18:09.700)
I don't know the answer to that question.
Jim Gates (18:12.100)
One part of that belief system is giya,
Lex Fridman (18:15.800)
which is that there's a kind of conscious life force
Jim Gates (18:18.500)
about our planet.
Lex Fridman (18:20.300)
And I've encountered these things before.
Jim Gates (18:22.800)
I don't quite know what to make of them.
Lex Fridman (18:25.200)
My own life experience, and I'll be 69 in about two months,
Lex Fridman (18:30.300)
and I have spent all my adulthood thinking about
Lex Fridman (18:33.000)
the way that mathematics interacts with nature
Lex Fridman (18:37.400)
and with us to try to understand nature.
Lex Fridman (18:39.800)
And all I can tell you from all of my integrated experience
Jim Gates (18:43.800)
is that there is something extraordinarily mysterious
Lex Fridman (18:47.300)
to me about our universe.
Jim Gates (18:48.500)
This is something that Einstein said
Lex Fridman (18:51.100)
from his life experience as a scientist.
Lex Fridman (18:53.300)
And this mysteriousness almost feels
Lex Fridman (18:59.800)
like the universe is our parent.
Jim Gates (19:03.300)
It's a very strange thing perhaps to hear scientists say,
Lex Fridman (19:07.300)
but there are just so many strange coincidences
Jim Gates (19:10.100)
that you just get a sense that something is going on.
Lex Fridman (19:14.900)
Well, I interrupted you.
Jim Gates (19:16.300)
In terms of compressing what we're down to,
Lex Fridman (19:19.900)
we can send it at the speed of light.
Jim Gates (19:21.800)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (19:23.300)
So the first thing is I would argue that it's probably
Jim Gates (19:26.800)
very likely that artificial intelligence
Lex Fridman (19:30.100)
ultimately will develop something like consciousness,
Jim Gates (19:32.600)
something that for us will probably be indistinguishable
Lex Fridman (19:35.200)
from consciousness.
Lex Fridman (19:36.500)
So that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment
Lex Fridman (19:41.600)
that we carry up here probably does not hold a patent
Jim Gates (19:44.100)
on consciousness, because it's really
Lex Fridman (19:46.200)
about the data streams.
Jim Gates (19:48.100)
As far as I can tell, that's what we are.
Lex Fridman (19:49.500)
We are self actuating, self learning data streams.
Jim Gates (19:53.700)
That to me is most accurate way I can tell you
Lex Fridman (19:56.300)
what I've seen in my lifetime about what humans are
Jim Gates (19:59.700)
at the level of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:00:01.500)
And it's something I've wondered about
Jim Gates (1:00:02.500)
from time to time since making these discoveries.
Lex Fridman (1:00:05.300)
Do you think such an idea could be fundamental,
Jim Gates (1:00:08.100)
or is it emergent throughout
Lex Fridman (1:00:09.700)
all the different kinds of systems?
Jim Gates (1:00:12.200)
I don't know whether it's fundamental.
Lex Fridman (1:00:15.900)
I probably will not live to find out.
Jim Gates (1:00:18.100)
This is gonna be the work of probably some future
Lex Fridman (1:00:20.700)
either mathematician or physicist
Jim Gates (1:00:22.100)
to figure out what these things actually mean.
Lex Fridman (1:00:24.700)
We have to talk a bit about the magical,
Jim Gates (1:00:27.900)
the mysterious string theory, super string theory.
Lex Fridman (1:00:31.300)
Sure.
Jim Gates (1:00:32.100)
There's still maybe this aspect of it,
Lex Fridman (1:00:35.300)
which is there's still for me
Jim Gates (1:00:37.900)
from an outsider's perspective,
Lex Fridman (1:00:39.500)
this fascinating heated debate.
Jim Gates (1:00:42.000)
On the status of string theory.
Lex Fridman (1:00:44.600)
Can you clarify this debate,
Jim Gates (1:00:46.600)
perhaps articulating the various views
Lex Fridman (1:00:48.700)
and say where you land on it?
Lex Fridman (1:00:50.700)
So first of all, I doubt that I will be able
Lex Fridman (1:00:53.200)
to say anything to clarify the debate
Jim Gates (1:00:55.700)
around string theory for a general audience.
Lex Fridman (1:01:01.400)
Part of the reason is because string theory
Jim Gates (1:01:05.100)
has done something I've never seen the erectal physics do.
Lex Fridman (1:01:08.600)
It has broken out into consciousness
Jim Gates (1:01:10.800)
of the general public before we're finished.
Lex Fridman (1:01:13.400)
You see, string theory doesn't actually exist
Jim Gates (1:01:15.800)
because when we use the word theory,
Lex Fridman (1:01:17.100)
we mean a particular set of attributes.
Jim Gates (1:01:20.100)
In particular, it means that you have
Lex Fridman (1:01:21.500)
an overarching paradigm that explains
Lex Fridman (1:01:23.900)
what it is that you're doing.
Lex Fridman (1:01:25.900)
No such overarching paradigm exists for string theory.
Lex Fridman (1:01:29.900)
What string theory is currently
Lex Fridman (1:01:31.800)
is an enormously large mutually reinforcing collection
Jim Gates (1:01:35.200)
of mathematical facts in which we can find no contradictions.
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.500)
We don't know why it's there,
Lex Fridman (1:01:41.600)
but we can certainly say that without challenge.
Lex Fridman (1:01:44.700)
Now, just because you find a piece of mathematics
Jim Gates (1:01:46.500)
doesn't mean that this applies to nature.
Lex Fridman (1:01:49.200)
And in fact, there has been a very heated debate
Jim Gates (1:01:53.200)
about whether string theory is some sort of hysteria
Lex Fridman (1:01:57.200)
among the community of theoretical physicists,
Jim Gates (1:02:00.000)
or whether it has something fundamental
Lex Fridman (1:02:01.400)
to say about our universe.
Jim Gates (1:02:04.400)
We don't yet know the answer to that question.
Lex Fridman (1:02:07.900)
What those of us who study string theory
Jim Gates (1:02:09.800)
will tell you are things like,
Lex Fridman (1:02:12.300)
string theory has been extraordinarily productive
Jim Gates (1:02:14.700)
in getting us to think more deeply,
Lex Fridman (1:02:16.600)
even about mathematics that's not string theory,
Lex Fridman (1:02:19.500)
but the kind of mathematics
Lex Fridman (1:02:20.900)
that we've used to describe elementary particles.
Jim Gates (1:02:23.800)
There have been spin offs from string theory,
Lex Fridman (1:02:25.600)
and this has been going on now for two decades almost,
Jim Gates (1:02:28.500)
that have allowed us, for example,
Lex Fridman (1:02:31.000)
to more accurately calculate the force between electrons
Jim Gates (1:02:34.300)
with the presence of quantum mechanics.
Lex Fridman (1:02:36.600)
This is not something you hear about in the public.
Jim Gates (1:02:39.100)
There are other similar things.
Lex Fridman (1:02:42.600)
That kind of property I just told you about
Jim Gates (1:02:44.700)
is what's called weak strong duality,
Lex Fridman (1:02:46.700)
and it comes directly from string theory.
Jim Gates (1:02:48.900)
There are other things such as
Lex Fridman (1:02:53.600)
a property called holography,
Jim Gates (1:02:55.500)
which allows one to take equations
Lex Fridman (1:02:59.600)
and look at them on the boundary of a space,
Lex Fridman (1:03:01.800)
and then to know information about inside a space
Lex Fridman (1:03:04.000)
without actually doing calculations there.
Jim Gates (1:03:06.400)
This has come directly from string theory.
Lex Fridman (1:03:08.000)
So there are a number of direct mathematical effects
Jim Gates (1:03:12.500)
that we learn as string theory,
Lex Fridman (1:03:14.100)
but we take these ideas and look at math
Jim Gates (1:03:16.500)
that we already know and we find suddenly
Lex Fridman (1:03:18.100)
we're more powerful.
Jim Gates (1:03:19.400)
This is a pretty good indication
Lex Fridman (1:03:20.700)
there's something interesting going on
Jim Gates (1:03:22.100)
with string theory itself.
Lex Fridman (1:03:23.100)
So it's the early days
Jim Gates (1:03:24.300)
of a powerful mathematical framework.
Lex Fridman (1:03:25.900)
That's what we have right now.
Lex Fridman (1:03:27.200)
What are the big, first of all,
Lex Fridman (1:03:30.300)
most people will probably, which as you said,
Jim Gates (1:03:33.400)
most general public would know actually
Lex Fridman (1:03:35.300)
what string theory is, which is at the highest level,
Jim Gates (1:03:38.800)
which is a fascinating fact.
Lex Fridman (1:03:41.400)
Well, string theory is what they do
Lex Fridman (1:03:43.000)
on the Big Bang Theory, right?
Lex Fridman (1:03:44.600)
One, can you maybe describe what is string theory,
Lex Fridman (1:03:51.100)
and two, what are the open challenges?
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.000)
So what is string theory?
Jim Gates (1:03:57.300)
Well, the simplest explanation I can provide
Lex Fridman (1:04:01.800)
is to go back and ask what are particles,
Jim Gates (1:04:05.900)
which is the question you first asked me.
Lex Fridman (1:04:10.200)
What's the smallest thing?
Lex Fridman (1:04:11.500)
Yeah, what's the smallest thing?
Lex Fridman (1:04:13.800)
So particles, one way I try to describe particles
Jim Gates (1:04:20.400)
to people is start,
Lex Fridman (1:04:21.500)
I want you to imagine a little ball
Lex Fridman (1:04:24.800)
and I want you to let the size of that ball shrink
Lex Fridman (1:04:26.700)
until it has no extent whatsoever,
Lex Fridman (1:04:28.800)
but it still has the mass of the ball.
Lex Fridman (1:04:32.300)
That's actually what Newton was working with
Jim Gates (1:04:34.900)
when he first invented physics.
Lex Fridman (1:04:36.300)
He's the real inventor of the massive particle,
Jim Gates (1:04:39.100)
which is this idea that underlies all of physics.
Lex Fridman (1:04:43.600)
So that's where we start.
Jim Gates (1:04:44.500)
It's a mathematical construct
Lex Fridman (1:04:46.700)
that you get by taking a limit of things that you know.
Lex Fridman (1:04:51.000)
So what's a string?
Lex Fridman (1:04:51.900)
Well, in the same analogy, I would say,
Jim Gates (1:04:54.300)
now I want you to start with a piece of spaghetti.
Lex Fridman (1:04:57.300)
So we all know what that looks like.
Lex Fridman (1:04:59.300)
And now I want you to let the thickness of the spaghetti
Lex Fridman (1:05:03.100)
shrink until it has no thickness.
Jim Gates (1:05:05.700)
Mathematically, I mean, in words, this makes no sense,
Lex Fridman (1:05:08.300)
but mathematically, this actually works
Lex Fridman (1:05:11.300)
and you get this mathematical object out.
Lex Fridman (1:05:13.700)
It has properties that are like spaghetti.
Jim Gates (1:05:15.700)
It can wiggle and jiggle,
Lex Fridman (1:05:17.400)
but it can also move collectively
Jim Gates (1:05:19.900)
like a piece of spaghetti.
Lex Fridman (1:05:21.500)
It's the mathematics of those sorts of objects
Jim Gates (1:05:24.300)
that constitute string theory.
Lex Fridman (1:05:25.900)
And does the multidimensional, 11 dimensional,
Jim Gates (1:05:30.900)
however many dimensional, more than four dimension,
Lex Fridman (1:05:34.900)
is that a crazy idea to you?
Lex Fridman (1:05:36.900)
Is that the stranger aspect of string theory to you?
Lex Fridman (1:05:40.900)
Not really, and also partly because of my own research.
Lex Fridman (1:05:45.900)
So earlier we talked about these strange symbols
Lex Fridman (1:05:49.500)
that we've discovered inside the equations.
Jim Gates (1:05:51.900)
It turns out that to a very large extent,
Lex Fridman (1:05:54.100)
a Dinkers don't really care about the number of dimensions.
Jim Gates (1:05:56.500)
They kind of have an internal mathematical consistency
Lex Fridman (1:05:59.300)
that allows them to be manifested
Jim Gates (1:06:00.900)
in many different dimensions.
Lex Fridman (1:06:02.900)
Since supersymmetry is a part of string theory,
Jim Gates (1:06:05.300)
then the same property you would expect
Lex Fridman (1:06:07.300)
to be inherited by string theory.
Jim Gates (1:06:09.300)
However, another little known fact,
Lex Fridman (1:06:12.300)
which is not in the public debate,
Jim Gates (1:06:14.100)
is that there are actually strings
Lex Fridman (1:06:15.700)
that are only four dimensional.
Jim Gates (1:06:17.700)
This is something that was discovered
Lex Fridman (1:06:19.300)
at the end of the 80s by a scientist,
Jim Gates (1:06:23.300)
by three different groups of physicists
Lex Fridman (1:06:25.300)
working independently.
Jim Gates (1:06:27.300)
I and my friend Warren Siegel,
Lex Fridman (1:06:29.100)
who were at the University of Maryland at the time,
Jim Gates (1:06:31.100)
were able to prove that there's mathematics
Lex Fridman (1:06:33.300)
that looks totally four dimensional,
Lex Fridman (1:06:34.500)
and yet it's a string.
Lex Fridman (1:06:36.100)
There was a group in Germany
Jim Gates (1:06:37.700)
that used slightly different mathematics,
Lex Fridman (1:06:40.300)
but they found the same result.
Lex Fridman (1:06:42.100)
And then there was a group at Cornell
Lex Fridman (1:06:43.900)
who using yet a third piece of mathematics
Jim Gates (1:06:46.100)
found the same result.
Lex Fridman (1:06:46.900)
So the fact that extra dimensions
Jim Gates (1:06:49.900)
is so widely talked about in the public
Lex Fridman (1:06:53.700)
is partly a function of how the public
Jim Gates (1:06:55.700)
has come to understand string theory
Lex Fridman (1:06:57.300)
and how the story has been told to them.
Lex Fridman (1:06:59.500)
But there are alternatives you don't know about.
Lex Fridman (1:07:02.500)
If we could talk about maybe experimental validation,
Lex Fridman (1:07:06.300)
and you're the coauthor of a recently published book,
Lex Fridman (1:07:11.300)
Proving Einstein Right,
Jim Gates (1:07:14.500)
the human story of it too,
Lex Fridman (1:07:16.300)
the daring expeditions that change
Lex Fridman (1:07:18.100)
how we look at the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:07:19.900)
Do you see echoes of the early days
Jim Gates (1:07:22.100)
of general relativity in the 1910s
Lex Fridman (1:07:25.700)
to the more stretched out to string theory?
Jim Gates (1:07:29.900)
I do, I do.
Lex Fridman (1:07:31.100)
And that's one reason why I was happy to focus
Jim Gates (1:07:33.500)
on the story of how Einstein became a global superstar.
Lex Fridman (1:07:43.700)
Earlier in our discussion,
Jim Gates (1:07:45.500)
we went over his history where in 1915,
Lex Fridman (1:07:51.100)
he came up with this piece of mathematics,
Jim Gates (1:07:53.900)
used it to do some calculations
Lex Fridman (1:07:55.700)
and then made a prediction.
Jim Gates (1:07:57.060)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:07:58.020)
But making a prediction is not enough.
Jim Gates (1:08:00.180)
Someone's got to go out and measure.
Lex Fridman (1:08:02.940)
And so string theory is in that in between zone.
Jim Gates (1:08:07.020)
Now for Einstein, it was from 1915 to 1919.
Lex Fridman (1:08:09.940)
1915 he makes the correct prediction.
Jim Gates (1:08:14.380)
By the way, he made an incorrect prediction
Lex Fridman (1:08:16.420)
about the same thing in 1911,
Lex Fridman (1:08:17.780)
but he corrected himself in 1915.
Lex Fridman (1:08:20.340)
And by 1919, the first pieces
Jim Gates (1:08:22.420)
of experimental observational data became available
Lex Fridman (1:08:27.620)
to say, yes, he's not wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:08:31.020)
And by 1922, the argument that based on observation
Lex Fridman (1:08:35.940)
was overwhelming that he was not wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:08:38.500)
Can you describe what special general relativity are
Lex Fridman (1:08:41.860)
just briefly?
Jim Gates (1:08:42.700)
Sure.
Lex Fridman (1:08:43.540)
And what prediction Einstein made
Lex Fridman (1:08:45.580)
and maybe some or a memorable moment
Lex Fridman (1:08:52.580)
from the human journey of trying to prove this thing right,
Jim Gates (1:08:56.980)
which is incredible.
Lex Fridman (1:08:58.060)
Right.
Lex Fridman (1:08:58.900)
So I'm very fortunate to have worked
Lex Fridman (1:09:02.580)
with a talented novelist who wanted to write a book
Jim Gates (1:09:07.820)
that coincided with a book I wanted to write
Lex Fridman (1:09:09.740)
about how science kind of feels if you're a person,
Jim Gates (1:09:14.900)
because it's actually people who do science,
Lex Fridman (1:09:17.140)
even though that may not be obvious to everyone.
Lex Fridman (1:09:20.780)
So for me, I wanted to write this book
Lex Fridman (1:09:22.660)
for a couple of reasons.
Jim Gates (1:09:23.660)
I wanted young people to understand
Lex Fridman (1:09:26.460)
that the seeming alien giants that live before them
Jim Gates (1:09:32.180)
were just as human as they are.
Lex Fridman (1:09:34.060)
They get married, they get divorced.
Jim Gates (1:09:35.780)
They get married, they get divorced.
Lex Fridman (1:09:37.100)
They do terrible things.
Jim Gates (1:09:38.500)
They do great things.
Lex Fridman (1:09:39.580)
They're people.
Jim Gates (1:09:40.420)
They're just people like you.
Lex Fridman (1:09:42.180)
And so that part of telling the story allowed me
Jim Gates (1:09:44.420)
to get that out there for both young people interested
Lex Fridman (1:09:47.020)
in the sciences as well as the public.
Lex Fridman (1:09:49.540)
But the other part of the story is I wanted to open up
Lex Fridman (1:09:54.180)
sort of what it was like.
Jim Gates (1:09:58.580)
Now I'm a scientist.
Lex Fridman (1:10:00.460)
And so I will not pretend to be a great writer.
Jim Gates (1:10:02.660)
I understand a lot about mathematics
Lex Fridman (1:10:04.700)
and I've even created my own mathematics
Jim Gates (1:10:07.100)
that is kind of a weird thing to be able to do.
Lex Fridman (1:10:11.980)
But in order to tell the story,
Jim Gates (1:10:13.980)
you really have to have an incredible master
Lex Fridman (1:10:18.100)
of the narrative.
Lex Fridman (1:10:19.900)
And that was my coauthor, Kathy Pelletier,
Lex Fridman (1:10:22.540)
who is a novelist.
Lex Fridman (1:10:24.060)
So we formed this conjoined brain, I used to call us.
Lex Fridman (1:10:27.620)
She used to call us Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.
Jim Gates (1:10:30.100)
My expression for us is that we were a conjoined brain
Lex Fridman (1:10:33.220)
to tell this story.
Lex Fridman (1:10:34.980)
And it allowed, so what are some magical moments?
Lex Fridman (1:10:39.740)
To me, the first magical moment in telling the story
Jim Gates (1:10:43.900)
was looking at Albert Einstein and his struggle
Lex Fridman (1:10:48.460)
because although we regard him as a genius,
Jim Gates (1:10:51.700)
as I said, in 1911, he actually made an incorrect prediction
Lex Fridman (1:10:54.460)
about bending starlight.
Lex Fridman (1:10:55.660)
And that's actually what set the astronomers off.
Lex Fridman (1:10:59.780)
In 1914, there was an eclipse.
Lex Fridman (1:11:02.220)
And by various accidents of war and weather
Lex Fridman (1:11:06.220)
and all sorts of things that we talk about in the book,
Jim Gates (1:11:08.860)
no one was able to make the measurement.
Lex Fridman (1:11:11.100)
If they had made the measurement,
Jim Gates (1:11:13.580)
it would have disagreed with his 1911 prediction
Lex Fridman (1:11:19.460)
because nature only has one answer.
Lex Fridman (1:11:22.020)
And so then you see how fortunate he was
Lex Fridman (1:11:26.020)
that wars and bad weather and accidents and transporting
Jim Gates (1:11:32.740)
equipment stopped any measurements from being made.
Lex Fridman (1:11:35.860)
So he corrects himself in 1915,
Lex Fridman (1:11:38.780)
but the astronomers are already out there
Lex Fridman (1:11:40.180)
trying to make the measurement.
Lex Fridman (1:11:41.700)
So now he gives them a different number.
Lex Fridman (1:11:43.460)
And it turns out that's the number that nature agrees with.
Lex Fridman (1:11:46.620)
So it gives you a sense of this is a person struggling
Lex Fridman (1:11:50.540)
with something deeply.
Lex Fridman (1:11:52.180)
And although his deep insight led him to this,
Lex Fridman (1:11:56.860)
it is the circumstance of time, place and accident
Lex Fridman (1:12:01.260)
but through which we view him.
Lex Fridman (1:12:03.740)
And the story could have turned out very differently
Jim Gates (1:12:06.980)
where first he makes a prediction,
Lex Fridman (1:12:09.620)
the measurements are made in 1914,
Jim Gates (1:12:11.900)
they disagree with his prediction.
Lex Fridman (1:12:13.580)
And so what would the world view him as?
Jim Gates (1:12:15.620)
Well, he's this professor who made this prediction
Lex Fridman (1:12:17.540)
that didn't get it right, yes?
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.540)
So the fragility of human history
Lex Fridman (1:12:26.220)
is illustrated by that story.
Lex Fridman (1:12:27.620)
And it's one of my favorite things.
Lex Fridman (1:12:29.540)
You also learn things like in our book,
Lex Fridman (1:12:32.460)
how eclipses and watching eclipses was a driver
Lex Fridman (1:12:36.180)
of the development of science in our nation
Jim Gates (1:12:37.940)
when it was very young.
Lex Fridman (1:12:38.780)
In fact, even before we were a nation,
Jim Gates (1:12:40.620)
it turns out there were citizens of this would be country
Lex Fridman (1:12:47.180)
that were going out trying to measure eclipses.
Lex Fridman (1:12:50.580)
So some fortune, some misfortune affects
Lex Fridman (1:12:54.820)
the progress of science.
Jim Gates (1:12:56.740)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (1:12:57.660)
Especially with ideas as, to me at least,
Jim Gates (1:13:01.740)
if I put myself back in those days,
Lex Fridman (1:13:03.620)
as radical as general relativity is.
Jim Gates (1:13:08.380)
First, can you describe, if it's OK briefly,
Lex Fridman (1:13:12.100)
what general relativity is?
Lex Fridman (1:13:14.180)
And yeah, could you just take a moment of, yeah,
Lex Fridman (1:13:18.500)
put yourself in those shoes in the academic researchers,
Lex Fridman (1:13:22.460)
scientists of that time, and what is this theory?
Lex Fridman (1:13:25.180)
What is it trying to describe about our world?
Jim Gates (1:13:28.660)
It's trying to answer the thing that left Isaac Newton puzzled.
Lex Fridman (1:13:37.620)
Isaac Newton says gravity magically
Jim Gates (1:13:39.740)
goes from one place to another.
Lex Fridman (1:13:41.700)
He doesn't believe it, by the way.
Jim Gates (1:13:43.300)
He knows that's not right.
Lex Fridman (1:13:45.340)
But the mathematics is so good that you have to say,
Jim Gates (1:13:48.220)
well, I'll throw my qualms away because I'll use it.
Lex Fridman (1:13:52.020)
That's all we used to get a man from the Earth to the moon
Jim Gates (1:13:55.020)
was that mathematics.
Lex Fridman (1:13:58.420)
So I'm one of those scientists, and I've seen this.
Lex Fridman (1:14:03.460)
And if I thought deeply about it,
Lex Fridman (1:14:04.860)
maybe I know that Newton himself wasn't comfortable.
Lex Fridman (1:14:08.700)
And so the first thing I would hope that I would feel
Lex Fridman (1:14:11.100)
is, gee, there's this young kid out there who
Jim Gates (1:14:13.300)
has an idea to fill in this hole that was left with us
Lex Fridman (1:14:17.820)
by Sir Isaac Newton.
Jim Gates (1:14:19.780)
That, I hope, would be my reaction.
Lex Fridman (1:14:23.100)
I have a suspicion.
Jim Gates (1:14:24.820)
I'm kind of a mathematical creature.
Lex Fridman (1:14:29.020)
I was four years old when I first
Jim Gates (1:14:30.300)
decided that science was what I wanted to do with my life.
Lex Fridman (1:14:33.700)
And so if my personality back then was like it is now,
Jim Gates (1:14:38.820)
I think it's probably likely I would
Lex Fridman (1:14:41.180)
want to have studied his mathematics.
Lex Fridman (1:14:43.620)
What was a piece of mathematics that he was
Lex Fridman (1:14:45.380)
using to make this prediction?
Jim Gates (1:14:47.660)
Because he didn't actually create that mathematics.
Lex Fridman (1:14:50.060)
That mathematics was created roughly 50 years
Jim Gates (1:14:52.180)
before he lived.
Lex Fridman (1:14:53.300)
He's the person who harnessed it in order
Jim Gates (1:14:56.420)
to make a prediction.
Lex Fridman (1:14:57.260)
In fact, he had to be taught this mathematics by a friend.
Lex Fridman (1:15:00.780)
So this is in our book.
Lex Fridman (1:15:03.700)
So putting myself in that time, I would want to, like I said,
Jim Gates (1:15:08.140)
I think I would feel excitement.
Lex Fridman (1:15:09.340)
I would want to know what the mathematics is.
Lex Fridman (1:15:10.900)
And then I would want to do the calculations myself.
Lex Fridman (1:15:13.580)
Because one thing that physics is all about
Jim Gates (1:15:16.660)
is that you don't have to take anybody's word for anything.
Lex Fridman (1:15:19.420)
You can do it yourself.
Jim Gates (1:15:20.980)
It does seem that mathematics is a little bit more
Lex Fridman (1:15:23.060)
tolerant of radical ideas, or mathematicians,
Jim Gates (1:15:25.540)
or people who find beauty in mathematics.
Lex Fridman (1:15:31.780)
All the white questions have no good answer.
Lex Fridman (1:15:33.620)
But let me ask, why do you think Einstein never
Lex Fridman (1:15:35.860)
got the Nobel Prize for general relativity?
Jim Gates (1:15:38.540)
He got it for the photoelectric effect.
Lex Fridman (1:15:40.260)
That is correct.
Jim Gates (1:15:41.020)
Well, first of all, that's something
Lex Fridman (1:15:42.860)
that is misunderstood about the Nobel Prize in physics.
Jim Gates (1:15:46.060)
The Nobel Prize in physics is never
Lex Fridman (1:15:48.620)
given for purely proposing an idea.
Jim Gates (1:15:54.060)
It is always given for proposing an idea that
Lex Fridman (1:15:57.420)
has observational support.
Lex Fridman (1:15:59.700)
So he could not get the Nobel Prize
Lex Fridman (1:16:02.340)
for either special relativity nor general relativity,
Jim Gates (1:16:05.300)
because the provisions that Alfred Nobel left for the award
Lex Fridman (1:16:08.700)
prevent that.
Lex Fridman (1:16:11.060)
But after it's been validated, can he not get it then, or no?
Lex Fridman (1:16:16.100)
Yes, but remember the validation doesn't really
Jim Gates (1:16:19.540)
come until the 1920s.
Lex Fridman (1:16:21.820)
But that's why they invented the second Nobel Prize.
Jim Gates (1:16:24.500)
I mean, Marie Curie, you can get a second Nobel Prize
Lex Fridman (1:16:28.140)
for one of the greatest theories in physics.
Lex Fridman (1:16:31.540)
So let's be clear on this.
Lex Fridman (1:16:33.740)
The theory of general relativity had its critics
Jim Gates (1:16:39.780)
even up until the 50s.
Lex Fridman (1:16:43.020)
So if the committee had wanted to give
Jim Gates (1:16:47.820)
the prize for general relativity,
Lex Fridman (1:16:50.300)
there were vociferous critics of general relativity
Jim Gates (1:16:54.180)
up until the 50s.
Lex Fridman (1:16:56.740)
Einstein died in 1955.
Lex Fridman (1:16:59.740)
What lessons do you draw from the story you tell in the book,
Lex Fridman (1:17:04.300)
from general relativity, from the radical nature
Lex Fridman (1:17:07.060)
of the theory, to looking at the future of string theory?
Lex Fridman (1:17:12.900)
Well, I think that the string theorists are probably
Jim Gates (1:17:14.980)
going to retrace this path.
Lex Fridman (1:17:17.900)
But it's going to be far longer and more torturous,
Jim Gates (1:17:20.020)
in my opinion.
Lex Fridman (1:17:22.140)
String theory is such a broad and deep development
Jim Gates (1:17:29.140)
that, in my opinion, when it becomes acceptable,
Lex Fridman (1:17:34.180)
it's going to be because of a confluence of observations.
Jim Gates (1:17:38.060)
It's not going to be a single observation.
Lex Fridman (1:17:40.620)
And I have to tell you that, so I gave a seminar here
Jim Gates (1:17:44.620)
yesterday at MIT.
Lex Fridman (1:17:46.500)
And it's on an idea I have about how string theory can
Jim Gates (1:17:50.860)
leave signatures in the cosmic microwave background, which
Lex Fridman (1:17:53.980)
is an astrophysical structure.
Lex Fridman (1:17:56.860)
And so if those kinds of observations are borne out,
Lex Fridman (1:18:01.580)
if perhaps other things related to the idea of supersymmetry
Jim Gates (1:18:05.580)
are borne out, those are going to be the first powerful
Lex Fridman (1:18:08.900)
observationally based pieces of evidence that
Jim Gates (1:18:12.340)
will begin to do what the Eddington expedition did
Lex Fridman (1:18:18.060)
in 1919.
Lex Fridman (1:18:19.620)
But that may take several decades.
Lex Fridman (1:18:22.900)
Do you think there will be Nobel prizes given
Lex Fridman (1:18:25.060)
for string theory?
Lex Fridman (1:18:26.220)
No, because I think it will exceed normal human lifetimes.
Lex Fridman (1:18:34.980)
But there are other prizes that are given.
Lex Fridman (1:18:38.140)
I mean, there is something called the Breakthrough Prize.
Jim Gates (1:18:42.220)
There's a Russian immigrant, a Russian American immigrant
Lex Fridman (1:18:45.020)
named Yuri Milner, I believe his name,
Jim Gates (1:18:48.420)
started this wonderful prize called the Breakthrough Prize.
Lex Fridman (1:18:53.020)
It's three times as much money as the Nobel Prize.
Lex Fridman (1:18:56.100)
And it gets awarded every year.
Lex Fridman (1:18:58.100)
And so something like one of those prizes
Jim Gates (1:19:00.300)
is likely to be garnered at some point far earlier
Lex Fridman (1:19:04.020)
than a Nobel award.
Jim Gates (1:19:07.660)
Jumping around a few topics.
Lex Fridman (1:19:09.780)
While you were at Caltech, you've
Jim Gates (1:19:11.900)
gotten to interact, I believe, with Richard Feynman,
Lex Fridman (1:19:15.340)
I have to ask.
Jim Gates (1:19:16.300)
Yes, Richard Feynman, indeed.
Lex Fridman (1:19:19.100)
Do you have any stories that stand out
Lex Fridman (1:19:20.540)
in your memory of that time?
Lex Fridman (1:19:21.660)
I have a fair number of stories, but I'm not
Jim Gates (1:19:23.660)
prepared to tell them.
Lex Fridman (1:19:24.980)
They're not all politically correct.
Jim Gates (1:19:26.820)
Let me see.
Lex Fridman (1:19:28.620)
Let me just say, I'll say the following.
Jim Gates (1:19:31.060)
Richard Feynman, if you've ever read
Lex Fridman (1:19:33.980)
some of the books about him, in particular,
Jim Gates (1:19:36.420)
there's a book called Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
Lex Fridman (1:19:38.980)
There's a series of books that starts with Surely You're
Jim Gates (1:19:42.140)
Joking, Mr. Feynman.
Lex Fridman (1:19:43.180)
And I think the second one may be something like What Do You
Jim Gates (1:19:45.760)
Care What They Say or something.
Lex Fridman (1:19:47.260)
I mean, the titles are all, there are three of them.
Jim Gates (1:19:49.620)
When I read those books, I was amazed at how accurately
Lex Fridman (1:19:53.820)
those books portrayed the man that I interacted with.
Jim Gates (1:19:57.180)
He was irreverent, he was fun, he was deeply intelligent,
Lex Fridman (1:20:01.620)
he was deeply human.
Lex Fridman (1:20:03.620)
And those books tell that story very effectively.
Lex Fridman (1:20:07.300)
Even just those moments, how did they
Lex Fridman (1:20:09.540)
affect you as a physicist?
Lex Fridman (1:20:12.100)
Well, one of the, well, it's funny because one
Jim Gates (1:20:15.380)
of the things that, I didn't hear Feynman say this,
Lex Fridman (1:20:20.460)
but one of the things that is reported that he said
Jim Gates (1:20:25.580)
is if you're in a bar stool as a physicist,
Lex Fridman (1:20:29.600)
and you can't explain to the guy on the bar stool
Jim Gates (1:20:31.740)
next to you what you're doing, you
Lex Fridman (1:20:33.060)
don't understand what you're doing.
Lex Fridman (1:20:35.660)
And there's a lot of that that I think is correct,
Lex Fridman (1:20:40.580)
that when you truly understand something as complicated
Jim Gates (1:20:47.580)
as string theory, when it's in its fully formed final
Lex Fridman (1:20:53.700)
development, it should be something
Jim Gates (1:20:55.620)
you could tell to the person on the bar stool next to you.
Lex Fridman (1:20:58.980)
And that's something that affects the way I do science,
Jim Gates (1:21:03.300)
quite frankly.
Lex Fridman (1:21:04.900)
It also affects the way I talk to the public about science.
Jim Gates (1:21:08.180)
It's one of my mantras that I keep deeply,
Lex Fridman (1:21:11.460)
and try to keep deeply before me when I appear in public fora
Jim Gates (1:21:15.980)
speaking about physics in particular and science
Lex Fridman (1:21:20.020)
in general.
Jim Gates (1:21:21.060)
It's also something that Einstein
Lex Fridman (1:21:22.460)
said in a different way.
Jim Gates (1:21:23.580)
He said he had these two different formulations.
Lex Fridman (1:21:27.200)
One of them is when the answer is simple, it's God speaking.
Lex Fridman (1:21:31.820)
And the other thing that he said was
Lex Fridman (1:21:33.700)
that what he did in his work was simply
Jim Gates (1:21:37.580)
the distillation of common sense,
Lex Fridman (1:21:40.620)
that you distill down to something.
Lex Fridman (1:21:43.620)
And he also said you make things as simple as possible
Lex Fridman (1:21:45.940)
but no simpler.
Lex Fridman (1:21:47.860)
So all of those things, and certainly this attitude for me
Lex Fridman (1:21:50.820)
first seeing this was exemplified
Jim Gates (1:21:53.380)
by being around Richard Feynman.
Lex Fridman (1:21:55.260)
So in all your work, you're always
Jim Gates (1:21:56.900)
searching for the simplicity, for the simple, clear.
Lex Fridman (1:21:59.220)
I am, ultimately.
Jim Gates (1:22:00.140)
Ultimately, I am.
Lex Fridman (1:22:01.980)
You served President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors
Jim Gates (1:22:05.660)
in Science and Technology.
Lex Fridman (1:22:07.660)
For seven years, yes.
Jim Gates (1:22:08.700)
For seven years with Eric Schmidt
Lex Fridman (1:22:11.260)
and several other brilliant people?
Jim Gates (1:22:13.380)
Met Eric for the first time in 2009
Lex Fridman (1:22:17.580)
when the council was called together.
Jim Gates (1:22:19.820)
Yeah, I've seen pictures of you in that room.
Lex Fridman (1:22:21.420)
I mean, there's a bunch of brilliant people.
Jim Gates (1:22:23.020)
It kind of looks amazing.
Lex Fridman (1:22:24.420)
What was that experience like, being called
Lex Fridman (1:22:27.340)
upon that kind of service?
Lex Fridman (1:22:29.300)
So let me go back to my father, first of all.
Jim Gates (1:22:31.580)
I earlier mentioned that my father served 27 years
Lex Fridman (1:22:34.020)
in the US Army, starting in World War II.
Jim Gates (1:22:37.020)
He went off in 1942, 43 to fight against the fascists.
Lex Fridman (1:22:42.820)
He was part of the supply corps that
Jim Gates (1:22:45.380)
supplied General Patton as the tanks rolled
Lex Fridman (1:22:47.580)
across Western Europe, pushing back the forces of Nazism
Jim Gates (1:22:51.860)
to meet up with our Russian comrades
Lex Fridman (1:22:54.980)
who were pushing the Nazis starting in Stalingrad.
Lex Fridman (1:22:59.620)
And the Second World War is actually
Lex Fridman (1:23:02.420)
a very interesting piece of history
Jim Gates (1:23:06.060)
to know from both sides.
Lex Fridman (1:23:08.460)
Here in America, we typically don't.
Lex Fridman (1:23:09.980)
But I've actually studied history as an adult.
Lex Fridman (1:23:12.500)
So I actually know sort of the whole story.
Lex Fridman (1:23:14.500)
And on the Russian side, we don't know the Americans.
Lex Fridman (1:23:16.860)
We weren't taught the American side of the story.
Jim Gates (1:23:19.260)
I know.
Lex Fridman (1:23:20.020)
I have many Russian friends, and we've
Jim Gates (1:23:22.820)
had this conversation on many occasions.
Lex Fridman (1:23:24.420)
It's fascinating.
Lex Fridman (1:23:25.140)
But you know, like General Zhukov, for example,
Lex Fridman (1:23:27.260)
was something that you wouldn't know about,
Lex Fridman (1:23:28.620)
but you might not know about a Patton.
Lex Fridman (1:23:30.100)
But you're right.
Lex Fridman (1:23:30.860)
So Georgy Zhukov or Rokossovsky, I mean,
Lex Fridman (1:23:34.980)
there's a whole list of names that I've
Jim Gates (1:23:36.820)
learned in the last 15 or 20 years looking
Lex Fridman (1:23:39.180)
at the Second World War.
Lex Fridman (1:23:41.020)
So your father was in the midst of that,
Lex Fridman (1:23:44.340)
probably one of the greatest wars in history.
Jim Gates (1:23:46.500)
In the history of our species.
Lex Fridman (1:23:49.860)
And so the idea of service comes to me essentially
Jim Gates (1:23:54.540)
from that example.
Lex Fridman (1:23:57.660)
So in 2009, when I first got a call from a Nobel laureate
Jim Gates (1:24:06.020)
actually in biology, Harold Varmus,
Lex Fridman (1:24:09.940)
I was on my way to India, and I got this email message,
Lex Fridman (1:24:13.660)
and he said he needed to talk to me.
Lex Fridman (1:24:15.580)
And I said, OK, fine, we can talk.
Jim Gates (1:24:18.140)
Got back to States I didn't hear from him.
Lex Fridman (1:24:20.180)
We went through several cycles of this, sending me a message,
Jim Gates (1:24:22.300)
I want to talk to you, and then him never contacting us.
Lex Fridman (1:24:24.860)
Finally, I was on my way to give a physics presentation
Jim Gates (1:24:28.180)
at the University of Florida in Gainesville,
Lex Fridman (1:24:29.860)
and Jess had stepped off a plane,
Lex Fridman (1:24:34.700)
and my mobile phone went off, and it was Harold.
Lex Fridman (1:24:37.180)
And so I said, Harold, why do you keep sending me messages
Lex Fridman (1:24:40.460)
that you want to talk but you never call?
Lex Fridman (1:24:43.180)
And he said, well, I'm sorry, things have been hectic
Lex Fridman (1:24:45.380)
and da, da, da, da, da.
Lex Fridman (1:24:47.340)
And then he said, if you were offered the opportunity
Jim Gates (1:24:51.020)
to serve on the US President's Council of Advisors
Lex Fridman (1:24:55.180)
on Science and Technology, what would be your answer?
Jim Gates (1:24:59.420)
I was amused at the formulation of the question,
Lex Fridman (1:25:02.500)
because it's clear there's a purpose of why the question is
Jim Gates (1:25:06.060)
asked that way.
Lex Fridman (1:25:07.540)
But then he made it clear to me he wasn't joking.
Lex Fridman (1:25:12.500)
And literally, one of the few times in my life,
Lex Fridman (1:25:15.220)
my knees went weak and I had to hold myself up
Jim Gates (1:25:19.020)
against a wall so that I didn't fall over.
Lex Fridman (1:25:23.100)
I doubt if most of us who have been the beneficiaries
Jim Gates (1:25:28.300)
of the benefits of this country,
Lex Fridman (1:25:31.220)
when given that kind of opportunity, could say no.
Lex Fridman (1:25:34.900)
And I know I certainly couldn't say no.
Lex Fridman (1:25:37.820)
I was frightened out of my wits because I had never,
Jim Gates (1:25:43.700)
although I have, my career in terms of policy recommendations
Lex Fridman (1:25:50.820)
is actually quite long, it goes back to the 80s,
Lex Fridman (1:25:52.620)
but I had never been called upon to serve as an advisor
Lex Fridman (1:25:57.620)
to a president of the United States.
Lex Fridman (1:26:00.780)
And it was very scary, but I did not feel that I could say no
Lex Fridman (1:26:06.780)
because I wouldn't be able to sleep with myself at night
Jim Gates (1:26:10.420)
saying that I chickened out or whatever.
Lex Fridman (1:26:14.740)
And so I took the plunge and we had a pretty good run.
Jim Gates (1:26:19.180)
There are things that I did in those seven years
Lex Fridman (1:26:23.180)
of which I'm extraordinarily proud.
Jim Gates (1:26:28.380)
One of the ways I tell people is if you've ever seen
Lex Fridman (1:26:30.660)
that television cartoon called Schoolhouse Rock,
Jim Gates (1:26:34.100)
there's this one story about how a bill becomes a law.
Lex Fridman (1:26:37.140)
And I've kind of lived that.
Jim Gates (1:26:38.540)
There are things that I did
Lex Fridman (1:26:41.060)
that have now been codified in US law.
Jim Gates (1:26:44.620)
Not everybody gets a chance to do things like that in life.
Lex Fridman (1:26:47.820)
What do you think is the, science and technology,
Jim Gates (1:26:50.660)
especially in American politics,
Lex Fridman (1:26:53.780)
we haven't had a president who's an engineer or a scientist.
Lex Fridman (1:26:58.300)
What do you think is the role of a president like President Obama
Lex Fridman (1:27:01.660)
in understanding the latest ideas in science and tech?
Lex Fridman (1:27:05.500)
What was that experience like?
Lex Fridman (1:27:06.820)
Well, first of all, I've met other presidents
Jim Gates (1:27:09.660)
beside President Obama.
Lex Fridman (1:27:10.820)
He is the most extraordinary president
Jim Gates (1:27:12.740)
that I've ever encountered.
Lex Fridman (1:27:15.220)
Despite the fact that he went to Harvard.
Jim Gates (1:27:18.180)
When I think about President Obama,
Lex Fridman (1:27:21.300)
he is a deep mystery to me.
Jim Gates (1:27:23.540)
In the same way perhaps that the universe is a mystery.
Lex Fridman (1:27:27.180)
I don't really understand how that constellation
Jim Gates (1:27:29.780)
of personality traits could come to fit
Lex Fridman (1:27:34.020)
within a single individual.
Lex Fridman (1:27:35.700)
But I saw them for seven years.
Lex Fridman (1:27:38.060)
So I'm convinced that I wasn't seeing fake news.
Jim Gates (1:27:41.140)
I was seeing real data.
Lex Fridman (1:27:42.620)
He was just an extraordinary man.
Lex Fridman (1:27:44.780)
And one of the things that was completely clear
Lex Fridman (1:27:48.620)
was that he was not afraid and not intimidated
Jim Gates (1:27:55.620)
to be in a room of really smart people.
Lex Fridman (1:27:58.260)
I mean, really smart people.
Jim Gates (1:28:00.900)
That he was completely comfortable in asking
Lex Fridman (1:28:06.380)
some of the world's greatest experts,
Lex Fridman (1:28:07.940)
what do I do about this problem?
Lex Fridman (1:28:09.860)
And it wasn't that he was going to just take the problem
Lex Fridman (1:28:12.500)
and it wasn't that he was going to just take their answer,
Lex Fridman (1:28:15.460)
but he would listen to the advice.
Lex Fridman (1:28:18.340)
And that to me was extraordinary.
Lex Fridman (1:28:21.060)
As I said, I've been around other executives
Lex Fridman (1:28:23.020)
and I've never seen one quite like him.
Lex Fridman (1:28:27.020)
He's an extraordinary learner, is what I observed.
Lex Fridman (1:28:30.260)
And not just about science.
Lex Fridman (1:28:32.940)
He has a way of internalizing information in real time
Jim Gates (1:28:36.700)
that I've never seen in a politician before.
Lex Fridman (1:28:39.100)
Even in extraordinarily complicated situations.
Jim Gates (1:28:42.460)
Even scientific ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:28:43.700)
Scientific or non scientific.
Jim Gates (1:28:45.060)
Complicated ideas don't have to be scientific ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:28:47.900)
But I have, like I said, seen him in real time
Jim Gates (1:28:50.100)
process complicated ideas with a speed that was stunning.
Lex Fridman (1:28:54.060)
In fact, he shocked the entire council.
Jim Gates (1:28:56.340)
I mean, we were all stunned at his capacity
Lex Fridman (1:29:01.260)
to be presented with complicated ideas
Lex Fridman (1:29:06.180)
and then to wrestle with them and internalize them.
Lex Fridman (1:29:08.580)
And then come back, more interestingly enough,
Jim Gates (1:29:11.380)
come back with really good questions to ask.
Lex Fridman (1:29:14.020)
I've noticed this in an area that I understand more
Jim Gates (1:29:17.140)
of artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman (1:29:19.220)
I've seen him integrate information
Jim Gates (1:29:21.740)
about artificial intelligence and then come out
Lex Fridman (1:29:24.100)
with these kind of Richard Feynman like insights.
Jim Gates (1:29:27.340)
That's exactly right.
Lex Fridman (1:29:28.260)
And as I said, those of us who have been in that position,
Jim Gates (1:29:32.380)
it is stunning to see it happen because you don't expect it.
Lex Fridman (1:29:35.940)
Yeah, he takes what, for a lot of sort of graduate students,
Jim Gates (1:29:40.180)
takes like four years in a particular topic
Lex Fridman (1:29:42.220)
and he just does it in a few minutes.
Jim Gates (1:29:43.900)
He sees it very naturally.
Lex Fridman (1:29:46.380)
You've mentioned that you would love
Jim Gates (1:29:47.780)
to see experimental validation of super strength theory
Lex Fridman (1:29:51.820)
before you shove.
Jim Gates (1:29:53.060)
Before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
Lex Fridman (1:29:56.260)
Which the poetry of that reference
Jim Gates (1:29:58.180)
made me smile when I saw it.
Lex Fridman (1:30:00.380)
You know, people actually misunderstand it
Jim Gates (1:30:02.180)
because it's not what, it doesn't mean
Lex Fridman (1:30:03.940)
what we generally take it to mean colloquially.
Lex Fridman (1:30:06.620)
But it's such a beautiful expression.
Lex Fridman (1:30:08.300)
Yeah, it is.
Jim Gates (1:30:09.140)
It's from the Hamlet, to be or not to be speech.
Lex Fridman (1:30:13.780)
Which I still don't understand what that's about.
Lex Fridman (1:30:15.460)
But so many interpretations.
Lex Fridman (1:30:18.620)
Anyway, what are the most exciting problems in physics
Jim Gates (1:30:22.700)
that are just within our reach of understanding
Lex Fridman (1:30:25.260)
and maybe solve the next few decades
Lex Fridman (1:30:27.340)
that you may be able to see?
Lex Fridman (1:30:29.140)
So in physics, you limited it to physics.
Jim Gates (1:30:32.780)
Physics, mathematics, this kind of space of problems
Lex Fridman (1:30:36.380)
that fascinate you.
Jim Gates (1:30:39.140)
Well, the one that looks on the immediate horizon
Lex Fridman (1:30:41.660)
like we're gonna get to is quantum computing.
Lex Fridman (1:30:45.340)
And that's gonna, if we actually get there,
Lex Fridman (1:30:47.540)
that's gonna be extraordinarily interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:30:50.540)
Do you think that's a fundamentally problem of theory
Lex Fridman (1:30:53.980)
or is it now in the space of engineering?
Jim Gates (1:30:55.860)
It's in the space of engineering.
Lex Fridman (1:30:57.020)
I was out at a Q station, as you may know,
Jim Gates (1:31:01.340)
Microsoft has this research facility in Santa Barbara.
Lex Fridman (1:31:06.780)
I was out there a couple of months in my capacity
Jim Gates (1:31:09.740)
as a vice president of American Physical Society.
Lex Fridman (1:31:12.500)
And I had some things that were like lectures
Lex Fridman (1:31:15.660)
and they were telling me what they were doing.
Lex Fridman (1:31:18.260)
And it sure sounded like they knew what they were doing
Lex Fridman (1:31:20.380)
and that they were close to major breakthroughs.
Lex Fridman (1:31:24.140)
Yeah, that's a really exciting possibility there.
Lex Fridman (1:31:26.420)
But back to Hamlet, do you ponder mortality,
Lex Fridman (1:31:31.460)
your own mortality?
Jim Gates (1:31:32.660)
Nope, my mother died when I was 11 years old.
Lex Fridman (1:31:35.940)
And so I immediately knew what the end of the story was
Jim Gates (1:31:41.220)
for all of us.
Lex Fridman (1:31:42.580)
As a consequence, I've never spent a lot of time
Jim Gates (1:31:45.660)
thinking about death.
Lex Fridman (1:31:47.700)
It'll come in its own good time.
Lex Fridman (1:31:49.940)
And sort of to me, the job of every human
Lex Fridman (1:31:54.220)
is to make the best and the most of the time
Jim Gates (1:31:56.460)
that's given to us in order not for our own selfish gain,
Lex Fridman (1:32:02.340)
but to try to make this place a better place
Jim Gates (1:32:04.780)
for someone else.
Lex Fridman (1:32:08.740)
And on the why of life, why do you think we are?
Jim Gates (1:32:13.460)
I have no idea and I never even worried about it.
Lex Fridman (1:32:17.460)
For me, I have an answer, a local answer.
Jim Gates (1:32:20.900)
The apparent why for me was
Lex Fridman (1:32:22.460)
because I'm supposed to do physics.
Lex Fridman (1:32:25.020)
But it's funny because there's so many other
Lex Fridman (1:32:29.460)
quantum mechanically speaking possibilities in your life,
Jim Gates (1:32:33.220)
such as being an astronaut, for example.
Lex Fridman (1:32:35.500)
So you know about that, I see.
Jim Gates (1:32:36.980)
Well, like Einstein and the vicissitudes
Lex Fridman (1:32:45.740)
that prevented the 1914 measurement of starlight vending,
Jim Gates (1:32:50.740)
the universe is constructed in such a way
Lex Fridman (1:32:53.740)
that I didn't become an astronaut, which would have,
Jim Gates (1:32:56.020)
for me, I would have faced the worst choice in my life,
Lex Fridman (1:33:00.020)
whether I would try to become an astronaut
Jim Gates (1:33:04.540)
or whether I would try to do theoretical physics.
Lex Fridman (1:33:07.420)
Both of these dreams were born
Jim Gates (1:33:09.140)
when I was four years old simultaneously.
Lex Fridman (1:33:11.660)
And so I can't imagine how difficult
Jim Gates (1:33:14.700)
that decision would have been.
Lex Fridman (1:33:16.980)
The universe helped you out on that one.
Jim Gates (1:33:19.540)
Not only in that one, but in many ones.
Lex Fridman (1:33:21.780)
It helped me out by allowing me to pick the right dad.
Jim Gates (1:33:25.380)
Is there a day in your life you could relive
Lex Fridman (1:33:27.900)
because it made you truly happy?
Lex Fridman (1:33:29.740)
What day would that be if you could just look back?
Lex Fridman (1:33:32.700)
Being a theoretical physicist
Jim Gates (1:33:35.460)
is like having Christmas every day.
Lex Fridman (1:33:39.020)
I have lots of joy in my life.
Jim Gates (1:33:43.180)
The moments of invention, the moments of ideas, revelation.
Lex Fridman (1:33:46.940)
Yes, the only thing that exceed them are
Jim Gates (1:33:49.900)
some family experiences like when my kids were born
Lex Fridman (1:33:53.060)
and that kind of stuff, but they're pretty high up there.
Jim Gates (1:33:57.900)
Well, I don't see a better way to end it, Jim.
Lex Fridman (1:34:00.540)
Thank you so much.
Jim Gates (1:34:01.380)
It was a huge honor talking to you today.
Lex Fridman (1:34:03.300)
This worked out better than I thought.
Jim Gates (1:34:05.340)
I'm glad to hear it.
Lex Fridman (1:34:35.540)
And now, let me leave you with some words of wisdom
Jim Gates (1:34:38.300)
from the great Albert Einstein for the rebels among us.
Lex Fridman (1:34:42.780)
Unthinking respect for authority
Jim Gates (1:34:45.020)
is the greatest enemy of truth.
Lex Fridman (1:34:48.140)
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (20:01.200)
So if that's the case, then you just need to have
Lex Fridman (20:03.600)
an architecture that supports that information processing.
Lex Fridman (20:06.600)
So let's assume that that's true,
Lex Fridman (20:09.000)
that in fact what we call consciousness is really about
Jim Gates (20:13.800)
a very peculiar kind of data stream.
Lex Fridman (20:17.200)
If that's the case, then if you can export that
Jim Gates (20:21.400)
to a piece of hardware, something metal,
Lex Fridman (20:25.500)
electronic, what have you, then you certainly will,
Jim Gates (20:29.500)
ultimately that kind of consciousness could get to Mars
Lex Fridman (20:32.400)
very quickly, it doesn't have our problems.
Jim Gates (20:35.000)
You can engineer the body, as I said,
Lex Fridman (20:36.800)
it's a ship or a body, you engineer one or both.
Jim Gates (20:41.300)
Send it at a speed of light, well,
Lex Fridman (20:44.100)
that one is a more difficult one because that now
Jim Gates (20:47.400)
goes beyond just a matter of having a data stream.
Lex Fridman (20:49.700)
It's now the preservation of the information
Jim Gates (20:51.800)
in the data stream.
Lex Fridman (20:53.100)
And so unless you can build something that's like
Jim Gates (20:56.200)
a super, super, super version of the way the internet works
Lex Fridman (20:59.800)
because most people aren't aware that the internet itself
Jim Gates (21:02.100)
is actually a miracle, it's based on a technology
Lex Fridman (21:04.700)
called message packaging.
Lex Fridman (21:06.300)
So if you could exponentiate message packaging
Lex Fridman (21:10.300)
in some way to preserve the information
Jim Gates (21:11.900)
that's in the data stream, then maybe
Lex Fridman (21:13.500)
your dream becomes true.
Jim Gates (21:16.200)
You mentioned with artificial intelligence,
Lex Fridman (21:18.900)
sort of us human beings not having
Jim Gates (21:21.900)
a monopoly on consciousness.
Lex Fridman (21:24.400)
Does the idea of artificial intelligence systems,
Jim Gates (21:29.400)
computational systems, being able to basically
Lex Fridman (21:33.300)
replacing us humans scare you, excite you?
Lex Fridman (21:37.800)
What do you think about that?
Lex Fridman (21:38.800)
So I'm gonna tell you about a conversation
Jim Gates (21:40.100)
I once had with Eric Schmidt.
Lex Fridman (21:41.900)
I was sitting at a meeting with him
Lex Fridman (21:43.300)
and he was a few feet away and he turned to me
Lex Fridman (21:46.700)
and he said something like, you know, Jim,
Jim Gates (21:49.300)
in maybe a decade or so, we're gonna have computers
Lex Fridman (21:51.600)
that do what you do.
Lex Fridman (21:53.200)
And my response was not unless they can dream
Lex Fridman (21:55.800)
because there's something about,
Jim Gates (21:57.700)
the way that we humans actually generate creativity.
Lex Fridman (22:01.200)
It's somehow, I get this sense of my lived experience
Jim Gates (22:04.700)
in watching creative people that it's somehow
Lex Fridman (22:07.100)
connected to the irrational parts of what goes on
Jim Gates (22:09.700)
in our head and dreaming is part of that irrational.
Lex Fridman (22:12.500)
So unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence
Jim Gates (22:15.200)
that dreams, I have a strong suspicion
Lex Fridman (22:17.200)
that you will not get something that will fully be conscious
Jim Gates (22:21.100)
by a definition that I would accept, for example.
Lex Fridman (22:24.300)
So you mentioned dreaming.
Jim Gates (22:25.900)
You've played around with some out there fascinating ideas.
Lex Fridman (22:31.700)
How do you think, and we'll start diving into
Jim Gates (22:35.300)
the world of the very small ideas of super symmetry
Lex Fridman (22:38.200)
and all that in terms of visualization,
Lex Fridman (22:41.700)
in terms of how do you think about it?
Lex Fridman (22:43.900)
How do you dream of it?
Lex Fridman (22:44.900)
How do you come up with ideas
Lex Fridman (22:46.700)
in that fascinating, mysterious space?
Lex Fridman (22:49.300)
So in my workspace, which is basically
Lex Fridman (22:52.900)
where I am charged with coming up on a mathematical palette
Jim Gates (22:59.900)
with new ideas that will help me understand
Lex Fridman (23:02.100)
the structure of nature and hopefully help all of us
Jim Gates (23:04.500)
understand the structure of nature.
Lex Fridman (23:06.300)
I've observed several different ways
Jim Gates (23:08.100)
in which my creativity expresses itself.
Lex Fridman (23:10.500)
There's one mode which looks pretty normal,
Jim Gates (23:12.900)
which I sort of think of as the Chinese water torture method.
Lex Fridman (23:16.700)
Drop, drop, drop, you get more and more information
Lex Fridman (23:19.500)
and suddenly it all congeals and you get a clear picture.
Lex Fridman (23:23.100)
And so that's kind of a standard way of working.
Lex Fridman (23:25.100)
And I think that's how most people think about
Lex Fridman (23:28.700)
the way technical people solve problems.
Jim Gates (23:30.700)
That is kind of you accumulate this body of information
Lex Fridman (23:34.700)
and at a certain point you synthesize it
Lex Fridman (23:37.300)
and then boom, there's something new.
Lex Fridman (23:39.100)
But I've also observed in myself and other scientists
Jim Gates (23:41.900)
that there are other ways that we are creative.
Lex Fridman (23:44.500)
And these other ways to me are actually far more powerful.
Jim Gates (23:48.900)
I first personally experienced this
Lex Fridman (23:50.500)
when I was a freshman at MIT over in Baker House
Jim Gates (23:53.500)
right across the campus.
Lex Fridman (23:55.500)
And I was in a calculus course, 1801 is called at MIT.
Lex Fridman (24:00.500)
And calculus comes in two different flavors.
Lex Fridman (24:03.700)
One of them is called differential calculus.
Jim Gates (24:05.900)
The other is called integral calculus.
Lex Fridman (24:07.500)
Differential calculus is the calculus
Jim Gates (24:09.700)
that Newton invented to describe motion.
Lex Fridman (24:13.300)
It turns out integral calculus was probably invented
Jim Gates (24:15.300)
about 1700 years earlier by Archimedes.
Lex Fridman (24:18.100)
But we didn't know that when I was a freshman.
Lex Fridman (24:20.900)
But so that's what you study as a student.
Lex Fridman (24:24.100)
And the differential calculus part of the course was,
Lex Fridman (24:26.900)
to me, I wouldn't, how do I say this?
Lex Fridman (24:30.300)
It was something that by the drip, drip, drip method
Jim Gates (24:32.900)
you could sort of figure it out.
Lex Fridman (24:35.300)
Now, the integral part of calculus,
Jim Gates (24:37.500)
I could memorize the formula.
Lex Fridman (24:38.900)
That was not the formulae, that was not the problem.
Jim Gates (24:42.100)
The problem was why, in my own mind,
Lex Fridman (24:44.700)
why do these formulae work?
Lex Fridman (24:47.300)
And because of that, when I was in the part
Lex Fridman (24:52.300)
of the calculus course where we had to do
Jim Gates (24:53.900)
multiple substitutions to solve integrals,
Lex Fridman (24:56.500)
I had a lot of difficulty.
Jim Gates (24:59.300)
I was emotionally involved in my education
Lex Fridman (25:01.300)
because this is where I think the passion of motion comes to.
Lex Fridman (25:05.500)
And it caused an emotional crisis
Lex Fridman (25:07.700)
that I was having these difficulties
Jim Gates (25:09.100)
understanding the integral part of calculus.
Lex Fridman (25:10.700)
The why.
Jim Gates (25:11.700)
The why, that's right, the why of it.
Lex Fridman (25:12.900)
Not the rote memorization of fact,
Lex Fridman (25:15.100)
but the why of it.
Lex Fridman (25:16.300)
Why does this work?
Lex Fridman (25:18.300)
And so one night I was over in my dormitory room
Lex Fridman (25:21.700)
in Baker House.
Jim Gates (25:23.100)
I was trying to do a calculus problem set.
Lex Fridman (25:25.900)
I was getting nowhere.
Jim Gates (25:28.500)
I got a terrific headache.
Lex Fridman (25:30.900)
I went to sleep and had this very strange dream.
Lex Fridman (25:33.700)
And when I woke, awakened,
Lex Fridman (25:36.700)
I could do three and four substitutions
Lex Fridman (25:38.500)
and integrals with relative ease.
Lex Fridman (25:41.300)
Now, this to me was an astounding experience
Jim Gates (25:44.300)
because I had never before in my life understood
Lex Fridman (25:48.700)
that one subconscious is actually capable
Jim Gates (25:51.100)
of being harnessed to do mathematics.
Lex Fridman (25:54.100)
I experienced it, this.
Lex Fridman (25:55.100)
And I've experienced this more than once.
Lex Fridman (25:56.700)
So this was just the first time why I remember it so.
Lex Fridman (25:59.900)
So that's why when it comes to like
Lex Fridman (26:02.100)
really wickedly tough problems,
Jim Gates (26:04.300)
I think that the kind of creativity
Lex Fridman (26:06.100)
that you need to solve them
Jim Gates (26:08.700)
is probably this second variety
Lex Fridman (26:10.900)
which comes somehow from dreaming.
Lex Fridman (26:15.900)
Do you think, again, I told you I'm Russian.
Lex Fridman (26:18.700)
So we romanticize suffering.
Lex Fridman (26:20.500)
But do you think part of that equation
Lex Fridman (26:22.300)
is the suffering leading up to that dreaming?
Lex Fridman (26:25.900)
So the suffering is,
Lex Fridman (26:28.500)
I am convinced that this kind of creative,
Jim Gates (26:31.900)
this second mode of creativity as I like to call it,
Lex Fridman (26:34.700)
I'm convinced that this second mode of creativity
Jim Gates (26:37.700)
is in fact that suffering is a kind of crucible
Lex Fridman (26:43.300)
that triggers it.
Jim Gates (26:44.700)
Because the mind I think is struggling to get out of this.
Lex Fridman (26:47.700)
And the only way to actually solve the problem.
Lex Fridman (26:51.300)
And even though you're not consciously solving problems,
Lex Fridman (26:54.100)
something is going on.
Lex Fridman (26:55.500)
And I've talked about to a few other people
Lex Fridman (26:57.300)
and I've heard other similar stories.
Lex Fridman (27:00.100)
And so I guess what I think about it is
Lex Fridman (27:03.300)
it's a little bit by like the way
Jim Gates (27:04.900)
that thermonuclear weapons work.
Lex Fridman (27:07.900)
I don't know if you know how they work.
Lex Fridman (27:09.300)
But a thermonuclear weapon is actually two bombs.
Lex Fridman (27:11.700)
It's an atomic bomb which sort of does a compression.
Lex Fridman (27:14.300)
And then you have a fusion bomb that goes off.
Lex Fridman (27:16.100)
And somehow that emotional pressure
Jim Gates (27:18.900)
I think acts like the first stage of a thermonuclear weapon.
Lex Fridman (27:22.100)
That's when we get really big thoughts.
Jim Gates (27:25.100)
The analogy between thermonuclear weapons
Lex Fridman (27:27.500)
and the subconscious, the connection there is,
Jim Gates (27:30.900)
at least visually, is kind of interesting.
Lex Fridman (27:34.700)
There may be, Freud would have a few things to say.
Jim Gates (27:39.700)
Well, part of it is probably based
Lex Fridman (27:41.300)
on my own trajectory through life.
Jim Gates (27:43.100)
My father was in the US Army for 27 years.
Lex Fridman (27:46.700)
And so I started my life out on a military basis.
Lex Fridman (27:50.300)
And so a lot of probably the things that wander around
Lex Fridman (27:53.700)
in my subconscious are connected to that experience.
Jim Gates (27:56.300)
I apologize for all the tangents, but.
Lex Fridman (27:58.700)
Well, you're doing it.
Jim Gates (27:59.900)
You're doing it.
Lex Fridman (28:01.100)
But you're encouraging by answering the stupid questions.
Jim Gates (28:07.100)
No, they're not stupid.
Lex Fridman (28:08.100)
You know, your father was in the Army.
Lex Fridman (28:14.100)
What do you think about, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently wrote
Lex Fridman (28:20.100)
a book on interlinking the progress of science
Jim Gates (28:25.500)
to sort of the aspirations of our military endeavors
Lex Fridman (28:31.700)
and DARPA funding and so on.
Lex Fridman (28:33.900)
What do you think about war in general?
Lex Fridman (28:35.900)
Do you think we'll always have war?
Lex Fridman (28:37.900)
Do you think we'll always have conflict in the world?
Lex Fridman (28:42.100)
I'm not sure that we're going to be able
Jim Gates (28:43.700)
to afford to have war always, because if.
Lex Fridman (28:47.500)
Strictly financially speaking?
Jim Gates (28:49.100)
No, not in terms of finance, but in terms of consequences.
Lex Fridman (28:53.300)
So if you look at technology today,
Jim Gates (28:56.900)
you can have non state actors acquire technology,
Lex Fridman (29:00.500)
for example, bioterrorism, whose impact is roughly speaking
Jim Gates (29:05.100)
equivalent to what it used to take nations
Lex Fridman (29:07.700)
to impart on a population.
Jim Gates (29:10.700)
I think the cost of war is ultimately,
Lex Fridman (29:13.300)
it's going to be a little, I think
Jim Gates (29:14.500)
it's going to work a little bit like the Cold War.
Lex Fridman (29:16.700)
You know, we survived 50, 60 years as a species
Jim Gates (29:21.700)
with these weapons that are so terrible that they could have
Lex Fridman (29:25.500)
actually ended our form of life on this planet, but it didn't.
Lex Fridman (29:29.000)
Why didn't it?
Lex Fridman (29:30.100)
Well, it's a very bizarre and interesting thing,
Lex Fridman (29:32.100)
but it was called mutually assured destruction.
Lex Fridman (29:34.500)
And so the cost was so great that people eventually
Jim Gates (29:37.500)
figured out that you can't really
Lex Fridman (29:39.100)
use these things, which is kind of interesting,
Jim Gates (29:41.100)
because if you read the history about the development
Lex Fridman (29:43.300)
of nuclear weapons, physicists actually
Jim Gates (29:45.300)
realized this pretty quickly.
Lex Fridman (29:46.900)
I think it was maybe Schrodinger who
Jim Gates (29:49.000)
said that these things are not really weapons.
Lex Fridman (29:51.300)
They're political implements.
Jim Gates (29:52.900)
They're not weapons, because the cost is so high.
Lex Fridman (29:55.900)
And if you take that example and spread it out
Jim Gates (30:00.200)
to the kind of technological development
Lex Fridman (30:01.900)
we're seeing now outside of nuclear physics,
Lex Fridman (30:04.200)
but I picked the example of biology,
Lex Fridman (30:06.900)
I could well imagine that there would be material science
Jim Gates (30:10.500)
sorts of equivalents across a broad front of technology.
Lex Fridman (30:14.500)
You take that experience from nuclear weapons,
Lex Fridman (30:17.300)
and the picture that I see is that it would be possible
Lex Fridman (30:20.800)
to develop technologies that are so terrible that you couldn't
Jim Gates (30:24.300)
use them, because the costs are too high.
Lex Fridman (30:27.600)
And that might cure us.
Lex Fridman (30:29.100)
And many people have argued that actually it prevented,
Lex Fridman (30:33.100)
nuclear weapons have prevented more military conflict than.
Jim Gates (30:36.700)
It certainly froze the conflict domain.
Lex Fridman (30:41.100)
It's interesting that nowadays it
Jim Gates (30:44.000)
was with the removal of the threat of mutually assured
Lex Fridman (30:46.900)
destruction that other forces took over in our geopolitics.
Lex Fridman (30:52.300)
Do you have worries of existential threats
Lex Fridman (30:57.700)
of nuclear weapons or other technologies
Lex Fridman (31:00.200)
like artificial intelligence?
Lex Fridman (31:01.700)
Do you think we humans will tend to figure out
Lex Fridman (31:05.100)
how to not blow ourselves up?
Lex Fridman (31:06.900)
I don't know, quite frankly.
Jim Gates (31:10.000)
This is something I've thought about.
Lex Fridman (31:11.700)
And I'm not, I mean, so I'm a spectator in the sense
Jim Gates (31:16.900)
that as a scientist, I collect and collate data.
Lex Fridman (31:21.700)
So I've been doing that all my life
Lex Fridman (31:23.300)
and looking at my species.
Lex Fridman (31:25.300)
And it's not clear to me that we are
Jim Gates (31:27.500)
going to avoid a catastrophic, self induced ending.
Lex Fridman (31:34.500)
Are you optimistic?
Lex Fridman (31:37.300)
Not as a scientist, but as a single element speaker?
Lex Fridman (31:40.700)
I would say I wouldn't bet against us.
Jim Gates (31:45.400)
Beautifully put.
Lex Fridman (31:47.100)
Let's dive into the world of the very small,
Jim Gates (31:50.700)
if we could for a bit.
Lex Fridman (31:52.900)
What are the basic particles, either experimentally observed
Lex Fridman (31:56.900)
or hypothesized by physicists?
Lex Fridman (31:59.300)
So as we physicists look at the universe,
Jim Gates (32:02.500)
you can, first of all, there are two big buckets of particles.
Lex Fridman (32:05.300)
That is the smallest objects that we
Jim Gates (32:07.200)
are able to currently mathematically conceive
Lex Fridman (32:11.300)
and then experimentally verify that these ideas have
Jim Gates (32:15.700)
a sense of accuracy to them.
Lex Fridman (32:17.700)
So one of those buckets we call matter.
Jim Gates (32:20.900)
These are things like electrons, things
Lex Fridman (32:23.300)
that are like quarks, which are particles that
Jim Gates (32:25.900)
exist inside of protons.
Lex Fridman (32:27.900)
And there's a whole family of these things.
Jim Gates (32:30.700)
There are, in fact, 18 quarks and apparently six
Lex Fridman (32:34.300)
electron like objects that we call leptons.
Lex Fridman (32:37.500)
So that's one bucket.
Lex Fridman (32:39.100)
The other bucket that we see both in our mathematics
Jim Gates (32:41.700)
as well as in our experimental equipment
Lex Fridman (32:43.700)
are a set of particles that you can call force carriers.
Jim Gates (32:47.900)
The most familiar force carrier is the photon, the particle
Lex Fridman (32:50.700)
of light that allows you to see me.
Jim Gates (32:52.200)
In fact, it's the same object that
Lex Fridman (32:54.300)
carries electric repulsion between like charges.
Jim Gates (32:58.300)
From science fiction, we have the object
Lex Fridman (33:00.900)
called the graviton, which is talked about a lot in science
Jim Gates (33:03.600)
fiction and Star Trek.
Lex Fridman (33:05.300)
But the graviton is also a mathematical object
Jim Gates (33:07.500)
that we physicists have known about essentially
Lex Fridman (33:09.400)
since Einstein wrote his theory of general relativity.
Jim Gates (33:13.400)
There are four forces in nature, the fundamental forces.
Lex Fridman (33:17.700)
There is the gravitational force.
Jim Gates (33:19.600)
Its carrier is the graviton.
Lex Fridman (33:21.400)
There are three other forces in nature,
Jim Gates (33:23.100)
the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force,
Lex Fridman (33:25.800)
and the weak nuclear force.
Lex Fridman (33:27.000)
And each one of these forces has one or more carriers.
Lex Fridman (33:30.200)
The photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force.
Jim Gates (33:33.200)
The strong nuclear force actually has eight carriers.
Lex Fridman (33:35.900)
They're called gluons.
Lex Fridman (33:37.300)
And then the weak nuclear force has three carriers.
Lex Fridman (33:39.500)
They're called the W plus, W minus, and Z bosons.
Lex Fridman (33:44.000)
So those are the things that both in mathematics
Lex Fridman (33:46.500)
and in experiments, by the way, the most precise experiments
Jim Gates (33:49.900)
we're ever as a species able to conduct
Lex Fridman (33:53.100)
is about measuring the accuracy of these ideas.
Lex Fridman (33:55.500)
And we know that at least to one part in a billion,
Lex Fridman (33:57.600)
these ideas are right.
Lex Fridman (33:59.600)
So first of all, you've made it sound both elegant and simple.
Lex Fridman (34:05.400)
But is it crazy to you that there is force carriers?
Lex Fridman (34:11.300)
Like, is that supposed to be a trivial idea to think about?
Lex Fridman (34:14.500)
If we think about photons, gluons,
Jim Gates (34:17.300)
that there's four fundamental forces of physics,
Lex Fridman (34:21.300)
and then those forces are expressed.
Jim Gates (34:24.200)
There's carriers of those forces.
Lex Fridman (34:26.600)
Like, is that a kind of trivial thing?
Jim Gates (34:29.600)
It's not a trivial thing at all.
Lex Fridman (34:31.000)
In fact, it was a puzzle for Sir Isaac Newton,
Jim Gates (34:33.100)
because he's the first person to give us basically physics.
Lex Fridman (34:37.200)
Before Isaac Newton, physics didn't exist.
Lex Fridman (34:39.800)
What did exist was called natural philosophy,
Lex Fridman (34:41.700)
so discussions about using the methods of classical philosophy
Jim Gates (34:45.100)
to understand nature, natural philosophy.
Lex Fridman (34:48.400)
So the Greeks, we call them scientists,
Lex Fridman (34:50.700)
but they were natural philosophers.
Lex Fridman (34:52.800)
Physics doesn't get born until Newton writes the Principia.
Jim Gates (34:56.600)
One of the things that puzzled him was how gravity works,
Lex Fridman (35:00.500)
because if you read very carefully what he writes,
Jim Gates (35:04.800)
he basically says, and I'm paraphrasing badly,
Lex Fridman (35:07.300)
but he basically says that someone who thinks deeply
Jim Gates (35:10.000)
about this subject would find it inconceivable
Lex Fridman (35:13.200)
that an object in one place or location
Jim Gates (35:17.000)
can magically reach out and affect another object
Lex Fridman (35:19.500)
with nothing intervening.
Lex Fridman (35:21.600)
And so it puzzled him.
Lex Fridman (35:23.100)
There's a puzzle of you, action at a distance.
Jim Gates (35:25.700)
I mean, not as a physicist.
Lex Fridman (35:27.000)
It would, it would, except that I am a physicist,
Lex Fridman (35:29.900)
and we have long ago resolved this issue,
Lex Fridman (35:32.400)
and the resolution came about
Jim Gates (35:33.500)
through a second great physicist.
Lex Fridman (35:36.800)
Most people have heard of Newton.
Jim Gates (35:38.400)
Most people have heard of Einstein.
Lex Fridman (35:40.100)
But between the two of them,
Jim Gates (35:41.100)
there was another extraordinarily great physicist,
Lex Fridman (35:43.600)
a man named James Clark Maxwell.
Lex Fridman (35:45.900)
And Maxwell, between these two other giants,
Lex Fridman (35:49.500)
taught us about electric and magnetic forces,
Lex Fridman (35:52.900)
and it's from his equations that one can figure out
Lex Fridman (35:55.900)
that there's a carrier called the photon.
Lex Fridman (35:58.200)
So this was resolved for physicists around 1860 or so.
Lex Fridman (36:04.000)
So what are bosons and fermions and hadrons,
Lex Fridman (36:08.400)
elementary and composites?
Lex Fridman (36:09.700)
Sure, so earlier I said.
Jim Gates (36:12.900)
Two buckets.
Lex Fridman (36:13.740)
You have got two buckets
Jim Gates (36:14.600)
if you wanna try to build the universe.
Lex Fridman (36:15.800)
You gotta start off with things on these two buckets.
Lex Fridman (36:18.700)
So you gotta have things, that's a matter,
Lex Fridman (36:21.300)
and then you have to have other objects that act on them
Jim Gates (36:23.800)
to cause those things to cohere to fixed finite patterns,
Lex Fridman (36:28.400)
because you need those fixed finite patterns
Jim Gates (36:30.000)
as building blocks.
Lex Fridman (36:31.100)
So that's the way our universe looks to people like me.
Jim Gates (36:34.000)
Now, the building blocks do different things.
Lex Fridman (36:37.100)
So let's go back to these two buckets again.
Jim Gates (36:39.800)
Let me start with a bucket containing the particle of light.
Lex Fridman (36:42.800)
Let me imagine I'm in a dusty room with two flashlights,
Lex Fridman (36:46.400)
and I have one flashlight, which I direct directly
Lex Fridman (36:49.300)
in front of me, and then I have you stand over to say my left
Lex Fridman (36:52.800)
and then we both take our flashlights and turn them on
Lex Fridman (36:54.800)
and make sure the beams go right through each other.
Lex Fridman (36:56.800)
And the beams do just that.
Lex Fridman (36:57.900)
They go right through each other.
Jim Gates (36:58.800)
They don't bounce off of each other.
Lex Fridman (37:00.300)
The reason the room has to be dusty
Jim Gates (37:01.500)
is because we wanna see the light.
Lex Fridman (37:03.500)
The room dust wasn't there.
Jim Gates (37:04.500)
We wouldn't actually see the light
Lex Fridman (37:05.500)
until it got to the other wall, right?
Lex Fridman (37:07.000)
So you see the beam because it's the dust in the air.
Lex Fridman (37:09.900)
But the two beams actually pass right through each other.
Jim Gates (37:12.600)
They literally pass right through.
Lex Fridman (37:13.900)
They don't affect each other at all.
Jim Gates (37:15.900)
One acts like the other's not there.
Lex Fridman (37:20.200)
The particle of light is the simplest example
Jim Gates (37:23.000)
that shows that behavior.
Lex Fridman (37:24.600)
That's a boson.
Jim Gates (37:26.200)
Now let's imagine that we're in the same dusty room
Lex Fridman (37:30.100)
and this time you have a bucket of balls
Lex Fridman (37:31.900)
and I have a bucket of balls.
Lex Fridman (37:33.100)
And we try to throw them so that we get something
Lex Fridman (37:36.200)
like a beam, throwing them fast, right?
Lex Fridman (37:39.200)
If they collide, they don't just pass through each other.
Jim Gates (37:41.500)
They bounce off of each other.
Lex Fridman (37:43.400)
Now that's mostly because they have electric charge
Lex Fridman (37:45.900)
and electric charges, light charges repel.
Lex Fridman (37:48.500)
But mathematically, I know how to turn off
Jim Gates (37:50.300)
the electric charge.
Lex Fridman (37:51.500)
And if you do that, you'll find these still repel.
Lex Fridman (37:53.800)
And it's because they are these things we call fermions.
Lex Fridman (37:57.100)
So this is how you distinguish the things
Jim Gates (37:59.000)
that are in the two buckets.
Lex Fridman (38:00.200)
They are either bosons or fermions.
Jim Gates (38:04.000)
Which of them, and maybe you can mention
Lex Fridman (38:06.900)
the most popular of the bosons.
Jim Gates (38:09.900)
The most recently discovered.
Lex Fridman (38:12.000)
It's like when I was in high school
Lex Fridman (38:15.200)
and there was a really popular majorette.
Lex Fridman (38:18.300)
Her name is the Higgs particle these days.
Lex Fridman (38:21.500)
Can you describe which of the bosons
Lex Fridman (38:26.700)
and the fermions have been discovered,
Jim Gates (38:28.500)
hypothesized, which have been experimentally validated,
Lex Fridman (38:31.300)
what's still out there?
Jim Gates (38:32.200)
Right, so the two buckets that I've actually described
Lex Fridman (38:37.100)
to you have all been first hypothesized
Lex Fridman (38:40.200)
and then verified by observation.
Lex Fridman (38:43.100)
With the Higgs boson being the most recent
Jim Gates (38:45.200)
one of these things.
Lex Fridman (38:47.200)
We haven't actually verified the graviton
Jim Gates (38:49.800)
interestingly enough.
Lex Fridman (38:51.200)
Mathematically, we have an expectation
Jim Gates (38:54.100)
that gravitons exist.
Lex Fridman (38:55.400)
But we've not performed an experiment
Jim Gates (38:56.900)
to show that this is an accurate idea that nature uses.
Lex Fridman (38:59.900)
So something has to be a carrier.
Jim Gates (39:02.200)
For the force of gravity, exactly.
Lex Fridman (39:04.500)
Can it be something way more mysterious than we,
Lex Fridman (39:08.000)
so when you say the graviton, is it,
Lex Fridman (39:11.500)
would it be like the other particles, force carriers,
Lex Fridman (39:15.000)
or can it be something much more mysterious?
Lex Fridman (39:16.300)
In some ways, yes, but in other ways, no.
Jim Gates (39:18.700)
It turns out that the graviton is also,
Lex Fridman (39:21.900)
if you look at Einstein's theory,
Jim Gates (39:24.200)
he taught us about this thing he calls space time,
Lex Fridman (39:26.600)
which is, if you try to imagine it,
Jim Gates (39:29.300)
you can sort of think of it as kind of a rubber surface.
Lex Fridman (39:32.400)
That's one popular depiction of space time.
Jim Gates (39:34.900)
It's not an accurate depiction
Lex Fridman (39:36.200)
because the only accuracy is actually in the calculus
Jim Gates (39:38.600)
that he uses, but that's close enough.
Lex Fridman (39:41.100)
So if you have a sheet of rubber, you can wave it.
Jim Gates (39:43.700)
You can actually form a wave on it.
Lex Fridman (39:46.000)
Space time is enough like that
Lex Fridman (39:47.800)
so that when space time oscillates, you create these waves.
Lex Fridman (39:51.000)
These waves carry energy.
Jim Gates (39:53.100)
We expect them to carry energy in quanta.
Lex Fridman (39:55.000)
That's what a graviton is.
Jim Gates (39:56.100)
It's a wave in space time.
Lex Fridman (39:57.700)
And so the fact that we have seen the waves
Jim Gates (40:00.700)
with LIGO over the course of the last three years,
Lex Fridman (40:03.700)
and we've recently used gravitational wave observatories
Jim Gates (40:07.200)
to watch colliding black holes and neutron stars
Lex Fridman (40:09.800)
and all sorts of really cool stuff out there.
Lex Fridman (40:12.500)
So we know the waves exist,
Lex Fridman (40:14.600)
but in order to know that gravitons exist,
Jim Gates (40:16.700)
you have to prove that these waves carry energy
Lex Fridman (40:18.800)
in energy packets.
Lex Fridman (40:20.400)
And that's what we don't have the technology to do yet.
Lex Fridman (40:25.100)
And perhaps briefly jumping to a philosophical question,
Jim Gates (40:28.300)
does it make sense to you that gravity
Lex Fridman (40:30.600)
is so much weaker than the other forces?
Jim Gates (40:32.900)
No.
Lex Fridman (40:34.300)
You see, now you've touched on a very deep mystery
Jim Gates (40:40.500)
about physics.
Lex Fridman (40:42.600)
There are a lot of such questions in physics
Jim Gates (40:44.300)
about why things are as they are.
Lex Fridman (40:47.200)
And as someone who believes that there are some things
Jim Gates (40:50.900)
that certainly are coincidences,
Lex Fridman (40:53.400)
like you could ask the same question about,
Jim Gates (40:54.800)
well, why are the planets at the orbits
Lex Fridman (40:57.100)
that they are around the sun?
Jim Gates (40:58.900)
The answer turns out there is no good reason.
Lex Fridman (41:00.300)
It's just an accident.
Lex Fridman (41:01.400)
So there are things in nature that have that character.
Lex Fridman (41:03.500)
And perhaps the strength of the various forces is like that.
Jim Gates (41:08.600)
On the other hand, we don't know that that's the case.
Lex Fridman (41:10.900)
And there may be some deep reasons
Jim Gates (41:12.500)
about why the forces are ordered as they are,
Lex Fridman (41:15.900)
where the weakest force is gravity,
Jim Gates (41:17.600)
the next weakest force is the weak interaction,
Lex Fridman (41:19.700)
the weak nuclear force, then there's electromagnetism,
Jim Gates (41:22.000)
there's a strong force.
Lex Fridman (41:23.100)
We don't really have a good understanding
Jim Gates (41:24.700)
of why this is the ordering of the forces.
Lex Fridman (41:27.000)
So some of the fascinating work you've done
Jim Gates (41:30.900)
is in the space of supersymmetry, symmetry in general.
Lex Fridman (41:36.300)
Can you describe, first of all, what is supersymmetry?
Jim Gates (41:39.500)
Yes, so you remember the two buckets
Lex Fridman (41:41.400)
I told you about perhaps earlier?
Lex Fridman (41:43.500)
So there are two buckets in our universe.
Lex Fridman (41:46.100)
So now I want you to think about drawing a pie
Jim Gates (41:51.800)
that has four quadrants.
Lex Fridman (41:53.000)
So I want you to cut the piece of pie in fourths.
Lex Fridman (41:56.200)
So in one quadrant, I'm gonna put all the buckets
Lex Fridman (41:58.300)
that we talked about that are like the electron and quarks.
Jim Gates (42:01.400)
In a different quadrant,
Lex Fridman (42:02.400)
I'm going to put all the force carriers.
Jim Gates (42:04.500)
The other two quadrants are empty.
Lex Fridman (42:06.600)
Now, I showed you a picture of that.
Jim Gates (42:08.500)
You'd see a circle.
Lex Fridman (42:10.100)
There would be a bunch of stuff in one upper quadrant
Lex Fridman (42:12.600)
and stuff in others.
Lex Fridman (42:13.900)
And then I would ask you a question.
Lex Fridman (42:15.900)
Does that look symmetrical to you?
Lex Fridman (42:19.100)
No. No.
Lex Fridman (42:20.700)
And that's exactly right
Lex Fridman (42:22.100)
because we humans actually have a very deeply programmed
Jim Gates (42:26.700)
sense of symmetry.
Lex Fridman (42:28.000)
It's something that is part of that mystery of the universe.
Lex Fridman (42:32.900)
So how would you make it symmetrical?
Lex Fridman (42:34.300)
Or one way you could is by saying
Jim Gates (42:35.800)
those two empty quadrants had things in them also.
Lex Fridman (42:38.900)
And if you do that, that's supersymmetry.
Lex Fridman (42:42.500)
So that's what I understood
Lex Fridman (42:43.500)
when I was a graduate student here at MIT in 1975
Jim Gates (42:47.900)
when the mathematics of this was first being born.
Lex Fridman (42:52.300)
Supersymmetry was actually born in the Ukraine
Jim Gates (42:55.000)
in the late 60s, but we had this thing
Lex Fridman (42:56.700)
called the Iron Curtain.
Lex Fridman (42:57.600)
So we Westerners didn't know about it.
Lex Fridman (43:00.500)
But by the early 70s, independently,
Jim Gates (43:02.900)
there were scientists in the West
Lex Fridman (43:04.300)
who had rediscovered supersymmetry.
Jim Gates (43:07.500)
Bruno Zemeno and Julius Wess were their names.
Lex Fridman (43:10.400)
So this was around 71 or 72 when this happened.
Jim Gates (43:14.100)
I started graduate school in 73.
Lex Fridman (43:16.200)
So around 74, 75, I was trying to figure out
Lex Fridman (43:19.200)
how to write a thesis so that I could become a physicist
Lex Fridman (43:21.500)
the rest of my life.
Jim Gates (43:23.600)
I did a, I had a great advisor, Professor James Young
Lex Fridman (43:27.700)
who had taught me a number of things about electrons
Lex Fridman (43:31.100)
and weak forces and those sorts of things.
Lex Fridman (43:33.900)
But I decided that if I was going to have a really
Jim Gates (43:40.900)
an opportunity to maximize my chances of being successful,
Lex Fridman (43:45.500)
I should strike it out in a direction
Jim Gates (43:46.900)
that other people were not studying.
Lex Fridman (43:48.800)
And so as a consequence, I surveyed ideas
Jim Gates (43:52.200)
that were going, that were being developed.
Lex Fridman (43:54.300)
And I came across the idea of supersymmetry.
Lex Fridman (43:57.100)
And it was so, the mathematics was so remarkable
Lex Fridman (44:00.700)
that I just, it bowled me over.
Jim Gates (44:03.100)
I actually have two undergraduate degrees.
Lex Fridman (44:05.500)
My first undergraduate degree is actually mathematics.
Lex Fridman (44:07.600)
And my second is physics,
Lex Fridman (44:09.400)
even though I always wanted to be a physicist.
Jim Gates (44:12.000)
Plan A, which involved getting good grades was mathematics.
Lex Fridman (44:17.500)
I was a mathematics major thinking about graduate school,
Lex Fridman (44:20.500)
but my heart was in physics.
Lex Fridman (44:22.800)
If we could take a small digression,
Jim Gates (44:26.200)
what's to you the most beautiful idea in mathematics
Lex Fridman (44:29.100)
that you've encountered in this interplay
Lex Fridman (44:31.600)
between math and physics?
Lex Fridman (44:33.400)
It's the idea of symmetry.
Jim Gates (44:35.500)
The fact that our innate sense of symmetry
Lex Fridman (44:39.900)
winds up aligning with just incredible mathematics,
Jim Gates (44:44.500)
to me is the most beautiful thing.
Lex Fridman (44:47.400)
It's very strange, but true
Jim Gates (44:50.100)
that if symmetries were perfect, we would not exist.
Lex Fridman (44:53.100)
And so even though we have these very powerful ideas
Jim Gates (44:55.200)
about balance in the universe in some sense,
Lex Fridman (44:57.700)
it's only when you break those balances
Jim Gates (44:59.200)
that you get creatures like humans
Lex Fridman (45:01.000)
and objects like planets and stars.
Lex Fridman (45:03.600)
So although they are a scaffold for reality,
Lex Fridman (45:07.100)
they cannot be the entirety of reality.
Lex Fridman (45:09.500)
So I'm kind of naturally attracted
Lex Fridman (45:15.500)
to parts of science and technology
Jim Gates (45:18.900)
where symmetry plays a dominant role.
Lex Fridman (45:21.400)
And not just, I guess, symmetry as you said,
Lex Fridman (45:23.500)
but the magic happens when you break the symmetry.
Lex Fridman (45:26.800)
The magic happens when you break the symmetry.
Jim Gates (45:29.600)
Okay, so diving right back in,
Lex Fridman (45:31.300)
you mentioned four quadrants.
Jim Gates (45:33.100)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (45:34.100)
Two are filled with stuff we can, two buckets.
Lex Fridman (45:37.100)
And then there's crazy mathematical thing,
Lex Fridman (45:39.500)
ideas fulfilling the other two.
Lex Fridman (45:41.600)
What are those things?
Lex Fridman (45:43.300)
So earlier, the way I described these two buckets
Jim Gates (45:46.200)
is I gave you a story that started out
Lex Fridman (45:48.900)
by putting us in a dusty room with two flashlights.
Lex Fridman (45:52.700)
And I said, turn on your flashlight, I'll turn on mine,
Lex Fridman (45:55.300)
the beams will go through each other.
Lex Fridman (45:56.700)
And the beams are composed of force carriers called photons.
Lex Fridman (46:00.900)
They carry the electromagnetic force
Lex Fridman (46:03.200)
and they pass right through each other.
Lex Fridman (46:04.300)
So imagine looking at the mathematics of such an object,
Jim Gates (46:07.600)
which you don't have to imagine people like me do that.
Lex Fridman (46:11.400)
So you take that mathematics
Lex Fridman (46:12.800)
and then you ask yourself a question.
Lex Fridman (46:15.200)
You see, mathematics is a palette.
Jim Gates (46:16.700)
It's just like a musical composer
Lex Fridman (46:20.700)
is able to construct variations on a theme.
Jim Gates (46:24.400)
Well, a piece of mathematics in the hand of a physicist
Lex Fridman (46:26.800)
is something that we can construct variations on.
Lex Fridman (46:29.000)
So even though the mathematics that Maxwell gave us
Lex Fridman (46:33.300)
about light, we know how to construct variations on that.
Lex Fridman (46:38.200)
And one of the variations you can construct is to say,
Lex Fridman (46:41.100)
suppose you have a force carrier for electromagnetism
Jim Gates (46:45.400)
that behaves like an electron
Lex Fridman (46:47.200)
in that it would bounce off of another one.
Jim Gates (46:49.500)
That's changing a mathematical term in an equation.
Lex Fridman (46:53.200)
So if you did that, you would have a force carrier.
Lex Fridman (46:56.600)
So you would say first it belongs
Lex Fridman (46:58.200)
in this force carrying bucket,
Lex Fridman (46:59.600)
but it's got this property of bouncing off like electrons.
Lex Fridman (47:01.700)
So you say, well, gee, wait, no,
Jim Gates (47:03.400)
that's not the right bucket.
Lex Fridman (47:04.600)
So you're forced to actually put it
Jim Gates (47:05.800)
in one of these empty quadrants.
Lex Fridman (47:07.800)
So those sorts of things, basically we give them...
Lex Fridman (47:12.100)
So the photon mathematically
Lex Fridman (47:14.400)
can be accompanied by a photino.
Jim Gates (47:15.900)
It's the thing that carries a force
Lex Fridman (47:18.200)
but has the rule of bouncing off.
Jim Gates (47:20.700)
In a similar manner, you could start with an electron
Lex Fridman (47:24.200)
and you say, okay, so write down the mathematical electron.
Jim Gates (47:27.000)
I know how to do that.
Lex Fridman (47:28.200)
A physicist named Dirac first told us how to do that
Jim Gates (47:30.200)
back in the late 20s, early 30s.
Lex Fridman (47:33.500)
So take that mathematics.
Lex Fridman (47:34.600)
And then you say, let me look at that mathematics
Lex Fridman (47:37.700)
and find out what in the mathematics
Jim Gates (47:39.600)
causes two electrons to bounce off of each other,
Lex Fridman (47:42.300)
even if I turn off the electrical charge.
Lex Fridman (47:44.500)
So I could do that.
Lex Fridman (47:45.600)
And now let me change that mathematical term.
Lex Fridman (47:48.200)
So now I have something that carries electrical charge,
Lex Fridman (47:50.700)
but if you take two of them,
Jim Gates (47:52.300)
I'm sorry, if you turn their charges off,
Lex Fridman (47:53.700)
they'll pass through each other.
Lex Fridman (47:55.300)
So that puts things in the other quadrant.
Lex Fridman (47:57.600)
And those things we tend to call,
Jim Gates (48:00.600)
we put the S in front of their name.
Lex Fridman (48:02.500)
So in the lower quadrant here, we have electrons
Lex Fridman (48:04.800)
and this now newly filled quadrant, we have selectors.
Lex Fridman (48:08.100)
And the quadrant over here, we had quarks.
Jim Gates (48:12.300)
Over here, we have squarks.
Lex Fridman (48:13.700)
So now we've got this balanced pie.
Lex Fridman (48:15.600)
And that's basically what I understood
Lex Fridman (48:17.600)
as a graduate student in 1975
Jim Gates (48:20.500)
about this idea of supersymmetry,
Lex Fridman (48:22.400)
that it was going to fill up these two quadrants
Jim Gates (48:24.300)
of the pie in a way that no one
Lex Fridman (48:25.900)
had ever thought about before.
Lex Fridman (48:27.700)
So I was amazed that no one else at MIT
Lex Fridman (48:30.200)
found this an interesting idea.
Lex Fridman (48:32.300)
So it led to my becoming the first person in MIT
Lex Fridman (48:37.300)
to really study supersymmetry.
Jim Gates (48:39.500)
This is 1975, 76, 77.
Lex Fridman (48:42.600)
And in 77, I wrote the first PhD thesis
Jim Gates (48:44.900)
in the physics department on this idea
Lex Fridman (48:47.100)
because I was drawn to the balance.
Jim Gates (48:50.500)
Drawn to the symmetry.
Lex Fridman (48:51.700)
So what does that, first of all,
Lex Fridman (48:56.800)
is this fundamentally a mathematical idea?
Lex Fridman (49:01.200)
So how much experimental, and we'll have this theme.
Jim Gates (49:04.400)
It's a really interesting one.
Lex Fridman (49:05.600)
When you explore the world of the small
Lex Fridman (49:08.200)
and in your new book talking about
Lex Fridman (49:11.200)
Approving Einstein, right, that we'll also talk about,
Jim Gates (49:14.100)
there's this theme of kind of starting it,
Lex Fridman (49:16.700)
exploring crazy ideas first in the mathematics
Lex Fridman (49:19.600)
and then seeking for ways to experimentally validate them.
Lex Fridman (49:23.000)
Where do you put supersymmetry in that?
Jim Gates (49:25.600)
It's closer than string theory.
Lex Fridman (49:28.200)
It has not yet been validated.
Jim Gates (49:30.700)
In some sense, you mentioned Einstein,
Lex Fridman (49:33.200)
so let's go there for a moment.
Jim Gates (49:35.400)
In our book, Approving Einstein Right,
Lex Fridman (49:37.000)
we actually do talk about the fact
Jim Gates (49:38.800)
that Albert Einstein in 1915 wrote a set of equations
Lex Fridman (49:42.900)
which were very different from Newton's equations
Jim Gates (49:45.100)
in describing gravity.
Lex Fridman (49:46.800)
These equations made some predictions
Jim Gates (49:48.900)
that were different from Newton's predictions.
Lex Fridman (49:51.200)
It actually made three different predictions.
Jim Gates (49:53.100)
One of them was not actually a prediction,
Lex Fridman (49:55.000)
but a postdiction, because it was known
Jim Gates (49:57.000)
that Mercury was not orbiting the sun
Lex Fridman (49:59.500)
in the way that Newton would have told you.
Lex Fridman (50:01.600)
And so Einstein's theory actually describes Mercury
Lex Fridman (50:05.400)
orbiting in a way that was observed
Jim Gates (50:08.200)
as opposed to what Newton would have told you.
Lex Fridman (50:09.800)
So that was one prediction.
Jim Gates (50:11.600)
The second prediction that came out of
Lex Fridman (50:13.400)
the theory of general relativity,
Jim Gates (50:14.700)
which Einstein wrote in 1915,
Lex Fridman (50:17.400)
was that if you,
Lex Fridman (50:21.000)
so let me describe an experiment and come back to it.
Lex Fridman (50:23.400)
Suppose I had a glass of water,
Lex Fridman (50:25.400)
and I filled the glass up,
Lex Fridman (50:28.800)
and then I moved the glass slowly back and forth
Jim Gates (50:31.000)
between our two faces.
Lex Fridman (50:33.800)
It would appear to me like your face was moving,
Jim Gates (50:36.600)
even though you weren't moving.
Lex Fridman (50:38.000)
I mean, it's actually, and what's causing it
Jim Gates (50:40.000)
is because the light gets bent through the glass
Lex Fridman (50:42.200)
as it passes from your face to my eye.
Lex Fridman (50:45.000)
So Einstein in his 1915 theory of general relativity
Lex Fridman (50:50.800)
found out that gravity has the same effect on light
Jim Gates (50:54.400)
as that glass of water.
Lex Fridman (50:55.400)
It would cause beams of light to bend.
Jim Gates (50:58.200)
Now, Newton also knew this,
Lex Fridman (51:01.000)
but Einstein's prediction was that light
Jim Gates (51:02.600)
would bend twice as much.
Lex Fridman (51:04.800)
And so here's a mathematical idea.
Lex Fridman (51:07.200)
Now, how do you actually prove it?
Lex Fridman (51:09.000)
Well, you've got to watch.
Jim Gates (51:11.400)
Just a quick pause on that, just the language you're using.
Lex Fridman (51:15.800)
He found out.
Jim Gates (51:17.800)
I can say he did a calculation.
Lex Fridman (51:19.600)
It's a really interesting notion
Jim Gates (51:21.200)
that one of the beautiful things about this universe
Lex Fridman (51:25.200)
is you can do a calculation
Lex Fridman (51:28.000)
and combine with some of that magical intuition
Lex Fridman (51:30.900)
that physicists have, actually predict what would be,
Jim Gates (51:35.200)
what's possible to experimentally validate.
Lex Fridman (51:37.600)
That's correct.
Lex Fridman (51:38.440)
So he found out in the sense
Lex Fridman (51:40.000)
that there seems to be something here
Lex Fridman (51:43.300)
and mathematically it should bend,
Lex Fridman (51:46.000)
gravity should bend light this amount.
Lex Fridman (51:48.500)
And so therefore that's something that could be potentially,
Lex Fridman (51:51.400)
and then come up with an experiment that could be validated.
Jim Gates (51:53.300)
Right.
Lex Fridman (51:54.400)
And that's the way that actually modern physics,
Jim Gates (51:57.300)
deeply fundamental modern physics, this is how it works.
Lex Fridman (52:02.400)
Earlier we spoke about the Higgs boson.
Lex Fridman (52:04.400)
So why did we go looking for it?
Lex Fridman (52:06.000)
The answer is that back in the late 60s and early 70s,
Jim Gates (52:10.900)
some people wrote some equations
Lex Fridman (52:12.700)
and the equations predicted this.
Lex Fridman (52:15.500)
So then we went looking for it.
Lex Fridman (52:18.500)
So on supersymmetry for a second,
Jim Gates (52:21.300)
there's these things called idynchrous symbols,
Lex Fridman (52:25.100)
these strange little graphs.
Jim Gates (52:26.700)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (52:27.700)
You refer to them as revealing something
Jim Gates (52:29.500)
like binary code underlying reality.
Lex Fridman (52:32.700)
First of all, can you describe these graphs?
Lex Fridman (52:34.900)
Describe these graphs, what are they?
Lex Fridman (52:38.100)
What are these beautiful little strange graphs?
Jim Gates (52:40.700)
Well, first of all, idynchrous are an invention of mine,
Lex Fridman (52:44.800)
together with a colleague named Michael Fox.
Jim Gates (52:46.900)
In 2005, we were looking at equations.
Lex Fridman (52:50.000)
Well, the story's a little bit more complicated
Lex Fridman (52:51.800)
and it'll take too long to explain all the details,
Lex Fridman (52:54.000)
but the Reader's Digest version
Jim Gates (52:55.600)
is that we were looking at these equations
Lex Fridman (52:58.000)
and we figured out that all the data
Jim Gates (53:01.100)
in a certain class of equations could be put in pictures.
Lex Fridman (53:04.600)
And the pictures, what do they look like?
Jim Gates (53:06.400)
Well, they're just little balls.
Lex Fridman (53:09.400)
You have black balls and white balls.
Jim Gates (53:12.100)
Those stand for those two buckets, by the way,
Lex Fridman (53:14.100)
that we talked about in reality.
Jim Gates (53:15.700)
The white balls are things that are like particles of light.
Lex Fridman (53:18.600)
The black balls are like electrons.
Lex Fridman (53:20.800)
And then you can draw lines connecting these balls.
Lex Fridman (53:24.400)
And these lines are deeply mathematical objects
Lex Fridman (53:27.400)
and there's no way for me to,
Lex Fridman (53:29.100)
I have no physical model for telling you what the lines are.
Lex Fridman (53:33.900)
But if you were a mathematician,
Lex Fridman (53:36.200)
I would do a technical phrase saying,
Jim Gates (53:37.900)
this is the orbit of the representation
Lex Fridman (53:39.600)
and the action of the symmetry generators.
Jim Gates (53:41.900)
Mathematicians wouldn't understand that.
Lex Fridman (53:43.600)
Nobody else in their right mind would,
Lex Fridman (53:45.100)
so let's not go there.
Lex Fridman (53:47.000)
So, but we figured out that the data
Jim Gates (53:49.700)
that was in the equations was in these funny pictures
Lex Fridman (53:52.000)
that we could draw.
Lex Fridman (53:53.800)
And so that was stunning,
Lex Fridman (53:56.900)
but it also was encouraging
Jim Gates (53:59.700)
because there are problems with the equations,
Lex Fridman (54:02.400)
which I had first learned about in 1979
Jim Gates (54:06.700)
when I was down at Harvard
Lex Fridman (54:07.900)
and I went out to Caltech for the first time
Lex Fridman (54:09.900)
and working with a great scientist
Lex Fridman (54:11.700)
by the name of John Schwartz.
Jim Gates (54:12.700)
There are problems in the equations we don't know how to solve.
Lex Fridman (54:16.000)
And so one of the things about solving problems
Jim Gates (54:18.300)
that you don't know how to solve
Lex Fridman (54:20.100)
is that beating your head against a brick wall
Jim Gates (54:22.800)
is probably not a good philosophy about how to solve it.
Lex Fridman (54:25.900)
So what do you need to do?
Jim Gates (54:26.800)
You need to change your sense of reference,
Lex Fridman (54:29.300)
your frame of reference, your perspective.
Lex Fridman (54:31.300)
So when I saw these funny pictures,
Lex Fridman (54:35.100)
I thought, gee, that might be a way
Jim Gates (54:37.500)
to solve these problems with equations
Lex Fridman (54:39.000)
that we don't know how to do.
Lex Fridman (54:41.800)
So that was for me one of the first attractions
Lex Fridman (54:44.400)
is that I now had an alternative language
Jim Gates (54:46.900)
to try to attack a set of mathematical problems.
Lex Fridman (54:50.700)
But I quickly realized that A,
Jim Gates (54:54.600)
this mathematical language was not known by mathematicians,
Lex Fridman (54:58.100)
which makes it pretty interesting
Jim Gates (54:59.900)
because now you have to actually teach mathematicians
Lex Fridman (55:02.700)
about a piece of mathematics
Jim Gates (55:04.100)
because that's how they make their living.
Lex Fridman (55:05.900)
And the great thing about working with mathematicians,
Jim Gates (55:08.000)
of course, is the rigor with which they examine ideas.
Lex Fridman (55:11.100)
So they make your ideas better than they start out.
Lex Fridman (55:14.400)
So I start working with a group of mathematicians
Lex Fridman (55:16.600)
and it was in that collaboration that we figured out
Jim Gates (55:18.500)
that these funny pictures had error correcting codes
Lex Fridman (55:20.740)
buried in them.
Lex Fridman (55:23.500)
Can you talk about what are error correcting codes?
Lex Fridman (55:25.700)
Ah, sure.
Lex Fridman (55:26.700)
So the simplest way to talk about error correcting codes
Lex Fridman (55:32.100)
is first of all, to talk about digital information.
Jim Gates (55:36.800)
Digital information is basically strings of ones and zeros.
Lex Fridman (55:39.600)
They're called bits.
Lex Fridman (55:41.100)
So now let's imagine that I want to send you some bits.
Lex Fridman (55:46.700)
Well, maybe I could show you pictures,
Lex Fridman (55:50.300)
but maybe it's a rainy day
Lex Fridman (55:52.200)
or maybe the windows in your house are foggy.
Lex Fridman (55:56.300)
So sometimes when I show you a zero,
Lex Fridman (55:59.300)
you might interpret it as a one.
Jim Gates (56:01.600)
Or other times when I show you a one,
Lex Fridman (56:03.300)
you might interpret it as a zero.
Lex Fridman (56:05.800)
So if that's the case,
Lex Fridman (56:07.100)
that means when I try to send you this data,
Jim Gates (56:08.800)
it comes to you in corrupted form.
Lex Fridman (56:11.000)
And so the challenge is how do you get it to be uncorrupted?
Jim Gates (56:15.500)
In the 1940s, a computer scientist named Hamming
Lex Fridman (56:21.700)
addressed the problem of how do you reliably transmit
Lex Fridman (56:24.700)
digital information?
Lex Fridman (56:26.200)
And what he came up with was a brilliant idea.
Jim Gates (56:29.400)
Now, the way that you solve it
Lex Fridman (56:31.300)
is that you take the data that you want to send,
Jim Gates (56:33.200)
the ones in your strings of ones and zeros,
Lex Fridman (56:34.900)
your favorite string,
Lex Fridman (56:36.100)
and then you dump more ones and zeros in,
Lex Fridman (56:38.000)
but you dump them in in a particular pattern.
Lex Fridman (56:41.200)
And this particular pattern
Lex Fridman (56:42.900)
is what a Hamming code is all about.
Lex Fridman (56:45.300)
So it's an error correcting code
Lex Fridman (56:46.600)
because if the person at the other end
Jim Gates (56:48.400)
knows what the pattern's supposed to be,
Lex Fridman (56:49.800)
they can figure out when one's got changed to zeros,
Jim Gates (56:52.200)
zero's got changed to one.
Lex Fridman (56:53.700)
So it turned out that our strange little objects
Jim Gates (56:57.500)
that came from looking at the equations
Lex Fridman (56:59.300)
that we couldn't solve,
Jim Gates (57:00.800)
it turns out that when you look at them deeply enough,
Lex Fridman (57:02.700)
you find out that they have ones and zeros
Jim Gates (57:06.200)
buried in them.
Lex Fridman (57:07.500)
But even more astoundingly,
Jim Gates (57:08.800)
the ones and zeros are not there randomly.
Lex Fridman (57:10.800)
They are in the pattern of error correcting codes.
Lex Fridman (57:14.200)
So this was an astounding thing
Lex Fridman (57:16.000)
that when we first got this result
Lex Fridman (57:19.000)
and tried to publish it,
Lex Fridman (57:20.000)
it took us three years to convince other physicists
Jim Gates (57:22.000)
that we weren't crazy.
Lex Fridman (57:23.800)
Eventually we were able to publish it,
Jim Gates (57:25.200)
I and this collaboration of mathematicians
Lex Fridman (57:27.400)
and other physicists.
Lex Fridman (57:29.300)
And so ever since then,
Lex Fridman (57:31.400)
I have actually been looking at the mathematics
Jim Gates (57:34.400)
of these objects,
Lex Fridman (57:35.900)
trying to still understand properties of the equations.
Lex Fridman (57:39.200)
And I want to understand the properties of equations
Lex Fridman (57:40.800)
because I want to be able to try things like electrons.
Lex Fridman (57:43.300)
So as you can see,
Lex Fridman (57:44.300)
it's just like a two step removed process
Jim Gates (57:46.200)
of trying to get back to reality.
Lex Fridman (57:48.400)
So what would you say is the most beautiful property
Lex Fridman (57:50.900)
of these Adinkra graphs, objects?
Lex Fridman (57:56.000)
What do you think, by the way, the word symbols,
Lex Fridman (57:58.100)
what do you think of them, these simple graphs?
Lex Fridman (58:01.600)
Are they objects or?
Lex Fridman (58:04.200)
How should we think about that?
Lex Fridman (58:06.000)
For people who work with mathematics like me,
Jim Gates (58:08.300)
our mathematical concepts are,
Lex Fridman (58:11.500)
we often refer to them as objects
Jim Gates (58:13.000)
because they feel like real things.
Lex Fridman (58:15.200)
Even though you can't see them or touch them,
Jim Gates (58:17.800)
they're so much part of your interior life
Lex Fridman (58:21.000)
that it is as if you could.
Lex Fridman (58:23.700)
So we often refer to these things as objects,
Lex Fridman (58:26.000)
even though there's nothing objective about them.
Lex Fridman (58:28.400)
And what does a single graph represent in space?
Lex Fridman (58:31.600)
Okay, so the simplest of these graphs
Jim Gates (58:34.000)
has to have one white ball and one black ball.
Lex Fridman (58:36.600)
That's that balance that we talked about earlier.
Lex Fridman (58:38.400)
Remember, we want to balance out the quadrants?
Lex Fridman (58:40.200)
Well, you can't do it unless you have
Jim Gates (58:42.200)
a black ball and white ball.
Lex Fridman (58:43.800)
So the simplest of these objects looks like two little balls,
Jim Gates (58:46.800)
one black, one white, connected by a single line.
Lex Fridman (58:49.400)
And what it's talking about is, as I said,
Jim Gates (58:51.800)
a deep mathematical property related to symmetry.
Lex Fridman (58:54.700)
You've mentioned the error correcting codes,
Lex Fridman (58:56.300)
but is there a particular beautiful property
Lex Fridman (58:58.500)
that stands out to you about these objects
Lex Fridman (59:00.400)
that you just find?
Lex Fridman (59:01.500)
Yes, yes, there is.
Jim Gates (59:03.100)
Early on in the development of it.
Lex Fridman (59:04.400)
Yes, there is.
Jim Gates (59:05.500)
The craziest thing about these to me
Lex Fridman (59:10.600)
is that when you look at physics
Lex Fridman (59:14.200)
and try to write equations where information
Lex Fridman (59:17.000)
gets transmitted reliably,
Jim Gates (59:20.000)
if you're in one of these super symmetrical systems
Lex Fridman (59:22.200)
with this extra symmetry,
Jim Gates (59:23.800)
that doesn't happen unless there's
Lex Fridman (59:24.900)
an error correcting code present.
Lex Fridman (59:26.800)
So it's as if the universe says,
Lex Fridman (59:29.100)
you don't retransmit information
Jim Gates (59:31.000)
unless there's something about an error correcting code.
Lex Fridman (59:33.200)
This to me is the craziest thing
Jim Gates (59:35.200)
that I've ever personally encountered in my research.
Lex Fridman (59:38.300)
And it's actually got me to wondering
Lex Fridman (59:41.000)
how this could come about,
Lex Fridman (59:42.400)
because the only place in nature
Jim Gates (59:44.500)
that we know about error correcting codes is genetics.
Lex Fridman (59:47.500)
And in genetics, we think it was evolution
Jim Gates (59:50.100)
that causes error correcting codes to be in genomes.
Lex Fridman (59:53.100)
And so does that mean that there was
Jim Gates (59:54.200)
some kind of form of evolution
Lex Fridman (59:55.600)
acting on the mathematical laws of the physics
Lex Fridman (59:58.100)
of our universe?
Lex Fridman (59:59.400)
This is a very bizarre and strange idea.
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