#377 - MIT Physicist: DARPA, Warp Drives, Supergravity & Aliens on Jupiter | Jim Gates

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Jim Gates is a theoretical physicist who works on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. Jim led the creation of a new NASA-funded research center, called the Center for the Study of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Atmospheres (CSTEA) & was it's first director. SPONSORS https://liquid-iv.com - Use code DANNY for 20% off your first order. http://amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off. https://shopify.com/dannyjones - Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial & start selling today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Jim's latest book "Proving Einstein Right" - https://a.co/d/0cg0Dqjz FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Jim's dream to become a scientist at 4 years old 06:25 - The importance of imagination 12:05 - Growing up during the Space Race 17:55 - Jim's journey to MIT 21:41 - Meeting Stephen Hawking at MIT 25:11 - Jim's dinner with Richard Feynman 30:49 - 2 habits that create a genius 36:15 - Meeting Ed Witten 41:12 - When gravity research went dark 45:28 - Why Jim is worried about the future 50:54 - China's rockets are more advanced than SpaceX 53:02 - Why populating Mars is not possible 54:53 - Radiation belts 56:30 - NASA engineers said we can't go back to the moon 59:07 - Technology that could replace rockets for space travel 01:02:07 - The new, larger hadron collider 01:05:28 - Supersymmetry 01:14:05 - Supersymmetry could lead to antigravity "transporter" 01:17:30 - Adinkra symbols 01:21:56 - Evidence the universe is actually evolving 01:29:11 - How data has mass & entropy 01:35:46 - The reality of quantum computing 01:39:53 - How consciousness could be "built" 01:43:56 - Jim downloads physics knowledge in his dreams 01:49:50 - AI will become indistinguishable from consciousness 01:52:52 - Why we will never have time travel 01:58:09 - Why shadow government is interested in physics 02:00:18 - Jim isn't surprised by the Epstein files 02:03:49 - Jim's case for hopeless optimism 02:08:04 - Alien life in Jupiter's atmosphere 02:13:38 - Working on Stephen Hawking's documentary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:44Danny Jones?

  All right, Jim. Nice to meet you.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you, Danny.

• 1:46Danny Jones?

  Thank you so much for coming, man. We've been chatting for a while and trying to make this happen for quite a while, so...

• 1:51Speaker 02

  We have, and as you know, my life, I have four careers, and so it makes it really hard to commit to anything.

• 1:56Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, absolutely. For people out there who may not be familiar with you, can you please give us like a brief background in your academic career? And then after that, I kind of want to go backwards in time into your childhood and how you got started and all this stuff.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I'm happy to do that, and thank you for saying that there are people out there who likely don't know about me. That's actually something I work very hard to make sure is true. I am not someone who feels a need to be out there like so many. So academic career, uh, let me go back to when I first decided I wanted to become a scientist. So I was four years old and we were living in Saint John's Newfoundland. My mother took me to see a science fiction movie. I think it's the first movie I ever saw in life. And for whatever reason, and for my four, for my, to my four year old mind, I decided science was a doorway to fun and adventure. What else does a four year old boy want in life? So, uh, the next part I don't remember, but my parents often said that evening when dad

• 2:57Speaker 02

  came home, I told him I wanted to become a scientist. So that's the beginning for me, uh, of, uh, uh, the dream of becoming a scientist.

• 3:08Danny Jones?

  Remember the movie?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yes. A couple of years ago, maybe 10 or so, I started to use the web to find, to see if I could find scenes that had been locked up here since I was four years old. Uh, maybe it was 15 and 20 years ago, I started the search. Probably 10 years ago, I found the movie. It's a movie called Space Ways. It stars Howard Duff and Eva Bartók.

• 3:32Danny Jones?

  Space Ways?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Ways, Space Ways. It's a terrible 19, early 1950s science fiction story. It's science fiction, it's a love, uh, it's a love story, science fiction and a murder mystery all rolled into one. And so I, it's at YouTube, so I watched it, uh, when I found it and said, you know, I'm glad I took the science part out of that.

• 3:53Danny Jones?

  And, uh, so you were only four years old, huh?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I first thought that science would be a cool thing. So, uh, my dad was in the US Army, which is why we were living in Canada at the time. And we moved around quite a bit as a kid. Uh, I was actually born here in Tampa, uh, but, uh, by the time I was one years old, we were living in Cocoa Beach. By the time I was two years old, we were living in San Antonio, Texas.

• 4:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  And then by the time I was three years old, we were living in Canada in Saint John's Newfoundland.

• 4:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, you were all over the place.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by the time I finished sixth grade, I had been to six different schools. So I had a rather unusual childhood, but the, one of the constants-

• 4:28Danny Jones?

  You have any brothers or sisters?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I had, I had- Two brothers and a sister. Unfortunately, one of my brothers was deceased as of two oh six.

• 4:35Danny Jones?

  Um, sorry, I'm sorry.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  No problem. Um, it's a part of life.

• 4:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Death also is a part of my academic trajectory. It's really, uh, let me just explain it. I'll try to make it all make sense. So, uh, started school in El Paso, Texas, uh, Fort Bliss. There's a big army base there. Daddy was stationed there. And, um, when I started school, I already knew how to add and subtract, but I couldn't read. And that was the greatest challenge I had at the time was learning to read.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  There was a parent teacher conference and the teacher told my parent that, you know, he's really good at arithmetic. She didn't use these words, but the equivalent was he sucks at it because of reading. Um, but, uh, she suggested that if my father took some books home that about things I really loved, I'd probably put that same energy from arithmetic into learning to read and write. Dad remembered his four-year-old son, uh, came home and said he wanted to be a scientist. And so dad bought two kinds of books, books on horses, because I loved horses, Roy Rogers, and books on space travel and science. And so, um, very quickly I was reading very well because it was driven by my own internal desire.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Um, we're kind of a strange family in the sense that I can, I am the third generation in my family who sort of makes their living, at least in part, using mathematics. My grandfather was a sugarcane farmer in Alabama. And he could, the family story is he could neither read nor write, but he could do arithmetic.

• 6:07Danny Jones?

  What?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. That's the reaction people is why, why would that be so? Well, it turns out if you are familiar with, uh, people who live on farms, you know that it is often the case that as a farmer, you have to get seeds and implements in order to, to bring in a crop. And you have to go to stores in order to make that happen. And when, when you do that, it's typically on a loan basis. You get basically effectively a loan that has to be paid back when the crops come in.

• 6:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  So those ledgers can be subjects of disagreement, shall we say? And one way, uh, apparently, uh, like I said, from our family stories that my grandfather, uh, learned to do arithmetic was in order to, uh, put himself in a position of, um, being fairly treated by store owners.

• 6:54Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  So it was a practical skill. It wasn't something highfalutin'. It was a practical skill.

• 6:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  And my dad never finished high school, but he was committed to the idea of education. And when in the sixties, he was working on his general equivalency exam. I remember watching him study trigonometry and algebra and having the time of his life. So it's I I love for mathematics comes sort of back that far. I have two children who are gonna be scientists and one of them studies black holes. So.

• 7:28Danny Jones?

  So he's black holes.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Studies black holes. My daughter studies black holes. I have a twin boy and a girl. My son studies biology and he grows human neurons on artificial surfaces.

• 7:38Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  So we are a science family. My wife is a medical doctor. But in my trajectory, like I said, we we came about it naturally. And when I was in high school or junior high, as it was called back then, I developed a deep passion for science. I loved mathematics because that's part of our family tradition. And I also had a deep passion for Marvel comic books. And that was a very important thing, although at the time I was just having fun. But I noticed even at that point that when I was in tenth and eleventh grade, perhaps, most of my classmates had lost interest in using their imagination. Young kids use their imagination all the time.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  They play, right? And everyone's used to that. But by the time folks get to be teenagers, you can see sort of a diminishment.

• 8:30Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  But because I read comic books, my imagination was sustained all through my high school years. And that imagination has ultimately blossomed into the fact that I create mathematics at this point in my life. Well, let me ask you a question. Next week, will there be more music than this week?

• 8:54Danny Jones?

  More music?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  More music.

• 8:55Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Next week, will there be more mathematics than this week?

• 9:01Danny Jones?

  More mathematics.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 9:04Danny Jones?

  Um, no.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  The answer is yes.

• 9:07Danny Jones?

  There will be.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  There will be. Because you see, mathematics is a human construct. And the reason I put this question to people is everyone's used to the fact that music comes out of people's creativity and therefore there will always be new songs written. Mathematics at the level of actually doing mathematics, not what most people learn at school, because what you're learning at school is a tool to basically navigate, you know, situations in life, much like my grandfather. But if you're actually doing mathematics, it more resembles a creation of music.

• 9:37Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  So that high school fascination with Marvel, the Fantastic Four, which was my favorite group, and the Inhumans, and Bruce Banner, the Hulk, and Henry Pym, the Giant Man, these were all scientific characters. And so they fit into my internal sort of desire and dream to become a scientist.

• 10:00Danny Jones?

  Were you a very social kid when you were in junior high? Were you?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  That's a wonderful question, and the answer is no. I was not a social kid when I was in junior high. I was a nerdy kid, you know. Look, at this point in my life, I have to wear glasses, but at that point, I buy glasses because I like to look at my face. Just have glasses.

• 10:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? You like to look smart?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  I look smart. And my friends, you're like, oh, that kid's smart. So, yeah, I was doing stuff like that. And so, but being a nerdy kid is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in your late teenage years.

• 10:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  So, early, you know, in school in those days, they used to have what were called talent shows, where students would get up and sing and dance or perform something in performance art. I was never on that stage, and I never wanted to be on that stage. I sat right there and clapped my hands when the things were good. But around 10th grade or so, I decided to change the way people saw me and treated me. Because like I said, being a nerd is not necessarily, you know, being an athlete is cool, but being the kid known as the smartest kid in school is not necessarily so rewarding.

• 11:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  So I consciously made a decision to create a character I called Jim Gates. Because Sylvester Gates is who I really am, but Jim Gates is the program that runs on that core.

• 11:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's who you're talking to, by the way.

• 11:25Danny Jones?

  And when did you create Jim?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  I started at tenth grade or so.

• 11:29Danny Jones?

  Tenth grade.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so I understood that I had to change sort of my psychology in dealing with people. If you want people to treat you well, then you have to sort of open up and you can't be a scythe or this black hole where, you know, information doesn't come out and stuff goes in. So, yeah, it was a conscious effort and that also was fed by the fact that ultimately I was the, I had a physics teacher named Mr. Freeman Coney and I was in 11th grade and when I took his class, I realized it was

• 12:10Speaker 02

  not all of science that I wanted to do, but only physics, but not just physics of like building stuff because, because I love math. I wanted to do physics at the boundary of reality and mathematics. I call that place mathematicality and I always knew that's what I wanted to do. I also, because of the use of my imagination, I kind of got a hint that it's a little bit like creating music. Even at that age, I knew that and so that was sort of an eye-opening moment for me. The other eye-opening moment was when I was 14 and I was an avid TV watcher at that

• 12:53Speaker 02

  age and so I watched all kinds of things, but there was this show called Make Room For Daddy starring Danny Thomas. And in one episode, a relative of his came to visit the family. This kid was like portrayed as some kind of super genius kid and even though I didn't think I was a super genius kid, I thought, well, that's the kind of guy I kind of want to be like. And he went to college at this place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. And that was the first time I had heard of such a place. And what I got from the television story was it was a university or college where the only thing they made you study was math and science. I call it that the good stuff. And so that's, that was my, my decision to want to go there at age 14.

• 13:37Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So that's my early, early trajectory.

• 13:42Danny Jones?

  You said you spent a lot of time reading comic books.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:44Danny Jones?

  And you were really inspired at a young age, watching a science fiction movie.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:48Danny Jones?

  Were you, were you sort of like really interested in things like space travel? Or like bigger, crazier ideas of, of like the universe? Or was it all just, were you just loving the process of doing math and being obsessed with physics?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  So you have touched on the guide stars for my life in those, that period. Not only was I reading science fiction, but I was also reading about real science. I was fascinated by the space race, you know? This is like post Sputnik fifty seven, the Russians put up a satellite. And therefore, um, there was a lot in the popular media discussing science, uh, and not just science fiction. So for example, there were television shows, like there was one show that had a real large impact on me. The name of the show was, uh, Men Into Space. And it was a drama series of anthologies, telling stories about what space travel would be like

• 14:49Speaker 02

  once, uh, humans started to explore space, uh, near space to the earth. So that was a great inspiration. And other, other inspiration was just learning about science, learning about molecules and atoms and chemistry, which I was obviously doing at school, but also integrating that into sort of a, a deeper level of my emotional attachment to the universe. I, going back a little bit earlier, when I was about seven or eight years old, we made a car trip. No, I'm, I'm sorry. In nineteen fifty six, when our family came back from Canada, we made a car trip from New Jersey to El Paso, Texas.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  And one night, as we were driving along, I remember laying my head back and looking out of the rear window of our car. And this was the first time I basically saw the stars.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  In the Milky Way that you can see outside of a city because it's an amazing light show.

• 15:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  And so that was part of who I was. I was taking in all these things. It was like a computer. You feed data in it. I was taking in this stuff. And so that experience in particular ma- made me begin to understand how small we are because if those points of lights are stars or like our sun, which I had learned about, and they look like just tiny points of light, how far away are they?

• 16:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  And so I got, I ta- I experienced a kind of an internal emotional, intellectual big bang from that experience. So all of those are things that went into the mix of who I am today. And you know, as I look at it, it's, it's amazing to me that there was this coherent driving force in my life from four years old to 18, and it all pointed to science and math. And like I said, I don't know why, but it, but that's my story.

• 16:44Danny Jones?

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• 17:29Danny Jones?

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• 18:11Danny Jones?

  You know, I remember, it's really embarrassing to admit, but I was in my twenties when I found out that the stars in the sky were actually like suns.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:22Danny Jones?

  I was like, oh, God, when I finally understood it, I was like, oh, my, I'm so dumb. But at least now my six year old understands it.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  That's a great legacy.

• 18:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  So, like I said, there were always these coherent drivers in my life, all through my, from four years onward, that pointed towards me combining my love of mathematics and the study of nature and in some sense entering a deep intellectual connection of how I am connected to the universe.

• 18:58Danny Jones?

  Of how you're connected to the universe?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yes, because all of us, one of the most fundamental questions I think a human can ask is who am I? But another is where's this place? And the third is how am I situated in this place? So these are philosophical questions, certainly, but my perception as a child and a young adult into a young adulthood, and I guess even now, was that the best way for me to understand the answer to those questions was to pursue a career in science.

• 19:31Danny Jones?

  You first went to, we first went to MIT, is that correct?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Sixty nine, I, well, I told you about Danny Thomas, so let me back up a little bit.

• 19:39Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  So, watching the show back when I was 14, I learned about MIT.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  When I was a senior, we take the standard test and I did okay on the SATs, but I did a fantastic job on physics because there's a separate.

• 20:06Danny Jones?

  Naughty, naughty.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yes. So when I was around sixteen, seventeen, I, you know, my father had always asked us, what college do you want to go to? I had no answer until I heard about MIT.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  By the time I was in high school and applying to college, I took the SAT exam and I took a subject test, particularly in physics, that I did very well because of the excellent physics teacher I had in eleventh grade, a guy named Mr. Freeman Coney. And that caused a number of institutions to send invitations to apply. One of those invitations was from MIT. And so a couple of weeks after that invitation arrived, I would always take these things so my father could see them. But a couple of weeks after the one from MIT arrived, he, he said, so have you filled out your application for MIT? And I said, no, Dad. And then he said, why not?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Isn't that the place you were talking about when you were fourteen? I said, yes, that's the same place. And then he said, so why are you not going to apply? And my response was, because you know they don't take people like us. Because I was born in nineteen fifty, here in Tampa. And even from my birth, the impact of segregation was present in my life. So for example, there used to be a, a, a hospital here in the Tampa area called the Lily White Benevolent Society. It was a hospital run by them. Back when African Americans did have general access to public facilities, those communities banded together and created their own. So I was born in such a hospital here in Tampa.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And so I was, and then spending six years in Orlando, again, I, it was reinforcing me that, well, the way I finally said is, I realized that I was living in a society that was betting against me. And so I was not going to put myself in the position of losing the bet of going to MIT.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  My father, who had spent twenty-eight years in the army, said, you're going to apply? Yes, sir, I'm going to apply because if you, if you have a father like that, you, you don't have a discussion about these kinds of points.

• 22:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  So I did apply. And in the spring, one day I came home from school. He was sitting on the front porch in our rocking couch in Orlando. And he was rocking very enthusiastically with this enormous smile on his face. And it was odd because my father was never home before I got home from school, but he was that day. And when I first, when he first saw me, the smile got even larger. And that's the instant I knew that I had been admitted to MIT.

• 23:01Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Way.

• 23:03Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  And so I ran over to him. I tell people it's like watching one of these movies with two lovers and they run up in slow motion and then they hug each other. We ran, you know, he was, we sort of ran together front yard and he gave me this big hug and said, you're in, you're in, you're in.

• 23:18Danny Jones?

  And you, throughout your career there, you rubbed shoulders with lots of prominent members of the physics and science community. I think you showed me a photo of you with.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Stephen Hawking.

• 23:33Danny Jones?

  Stephen Hawking. How could I forget?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  So, you know, I went off to MIT and I wrote his first thesis on this very peculiar piece of mathematics. That is actually the basis for string theory. I did it before string theory existed. That's how I, my combination of understanding math. And so in 1980, Stephen hosted a conference in Cambridge, England. And he invited a group of us young scientists who were working on this new theory. Like, that's a question I ask you, is it going to be new mathematics? We were people actually doing this in mathematics at that point. And so a group of us were invited to Cambridge and I first met Stephen there in 1980. Before that, I guess it was, no, actually it was that same year.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  I received an appointment at Caltech. And I was working in a group of two extraordinarily famous scientists. One of them was Murray Gell-Mann, who in the early 60s had gotten a Nobel Prize for understanding what's inside of protons. And then the other person who was the head of the group I was in was Richard Feynman, who was this utterly fantastic guy, amazing man. And so those were some of the people who.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Had a major influence on me as I'm making the transition from being a student to being an actual independent researcher, looking at questions about what does the universe look like when you think of things smaller than atoms and what is space itself, space and time, what did Einstein do? So I'm dealing with all these questions in this period. And these are the most prominent senior people to have an influence me. There's one more gentleman of the same category. All three of the people I'm naming are Nobel laureates, and that's a Pakistani scientist by the name of Abdi Salam. Abdi's I met in 1981, because like Stephen, he was interested in this new piece of math that these young kids were developing.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  So they had a conference in Trieste, Italy, which is, most people have never heard of Trieste, but it's not so far from Venice. Most people know about Venice. So they had a conference and Abdi's met me. And so he's the third of the three giants who basically set the course for my research career. I had other people who were not giants who contributed, like Dr. Shirley Jackson, who African American physicist, went on to become the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic. My PhD thesis advisor, James Young, was African American. I think he's the first African American to get a PhD in physics from MIT. He was my...

• 26:16Speaker 02

  So they had laid, you know, foundations, but these giants basically gave pushes.

• 26:21Danny Jones?

  Wow. And how old were you when you were, when you were hanging out with these guys?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So this is 1980, so I'm 30 years old, 30, 31, 32.

• 26:32Danny Jones?

  And what kind of like, what kind of conversations were you having with these guys? Like, like just casually hanging out, having, having dinner? And what would you guys chat about?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  So, thank you for asking that question, because it gives me a chance to relay several stories that I'm very fond of.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  The first story I'm going to relay is my first encounter with Richard Feynman. So I'm a new postdoc at Caltech. And they had a tradition that the, at the beginning of the academic year, new postdocs and other researchers and graduate students would all go to lunch, in this particular research group, would all go to lunch at a place called the Red Dragon.

• 27:13Danny Jones?

  Red Dragon.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Red Dragon, because Chinese food was the favorite. So we were all sitting around a big round table and I found myself sitting a little bit further away from you with Richard Feynman being right there. All the time I had been a student at MIT and then later at Harvard, he was just, well, many of us think he was the smartest scientist after Einstein. This guy was incredible. And so suddenly to be confronted by this genius level person that I had been reading about his ideas, I remember in graduate school, learning something he, a piece of mathematics

• 27:57Speaker 02

  he created called, it's got a technical term, but it's relativistic perturbative theory. It's the kind of way of making calculations by atoms. And he's the first person to figure out how to do it, and that's why he won the Nobel Prize. And I remember studying that as a graduate student. And when I was in high school, I had learned about Einstein and relativity and all his stuff from Mr. Coney, and I thought, wow. But when I got to graduate school and saw perturbative relativistic quantum field theory, I was like, I don't understand how human minds can do this. I mean Einstein I could understand, I could not understand what Feynman had done.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  And so when I met him in person, I was just like, oh my God, there he is, the guy who did this. It's not something that most people will ever encounter in life, but it's one of the most startling human achievements in understanding the universe that has ever been made.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  It is the thing that

• 28:56Danny Jones?

  Quantum field theory.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Quantum field theory. It's the, this is the mathematics that lets us discover things like the Higgs boson, which I know people have heard about the Higgs boson, or finding new forms of nuclear energy. This is the mathematics that enables that, and it was invented by him, essentially. So I'm sitting across the table, and people are talking, and my thought is, if I say anything, he'll figure out I'm an idiot. So

• 29:20Danny Jones?

  He'll what?

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Figure out that I am an idiot.

• 29:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  And so, under those circumstances, what's the best way to proceed? How about say nothing? So I'm sitting at the table, and conversation's going on. Feynman was like, just an amazing person. He was fun and a genius. I mean, just, um, some, perhaps some of your viewers will use this as an opportunity to go find out on this guy. But, so I'm sitting there quietly. And then finally, he turns to me, because he noticed I hadn't said a word. And he says, Mr. Gates, that's your name, isn't it? I said, yes, Professor Feynman. And then he said, you know, when I was your age, I wanted to wear my hair just like that. There's a picture of me at the, uh, those age. I have a circle, a huge, perfectly circle Afro. And that's what he said he wanted to have as a kid. And that was my reaction.

• 30:08Danny Jones?

  Pull up a picture of Richard Feynman in the eighties, see if you can find it.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  And I'll, I'll send you the picture of me and my Afro a few

• 30:13Danny Jones?

  Do you have a picture of you guys together?

• 30:15Speaker 02

  No, I, I was never clever enough to get that picture. So I only have the story. But when he said that, my reaction was exactly the same as yours. I broke into laughter. And then suddenly, I was never afraid to speak to Richard Feynman again.

• 30:30Danny Jones?

  Wow. Yeah, I can picture it.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was an amazing guy.

• 30:34Danny Jones?

  I think he could pull it off.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Oh, look, when you, if you read about him, you'll find out he played bongo drums. He was at Los Alamos. In fact, the movie Oppenheimer, there's some who portrays him in the movie.

• 30:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So he was, I mean, he was quite an amazing character, in addition to being just this amazing genius physicist.

• 30:52Danny Jones?

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• 31:36Danny Jones?

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• 32:22Danny Jones?

  And don't forget to use the code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. What is it about? Is there, you've spent so much time with these sorts of people and you are one of them yourself. What, what sort of common attributes do you think?

• 32:40Danny Jones?

  These people have that makes them such abstract thinkers and such geniuses?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Two things I have seen that I have tried to emulate in my career. One of them is a deep, passionate, emotional attachment to what they're doing. Most people think of mathematics as being something cold and very separated from one's emotions. But that's not, that's not what I ever saw in any of these people. It was a deep passion. I would use the word love for what I saw them doing in their work. And I've tried to, like I said, in my own career, I've tried to emulate that. The other thing is an absolute commitment to being their own person in how they think about problems. Because with, if you, if you look at most of the way that we humans behave, we're actually

• 33:31Speaker 02

  herd animals. And so we are influenced by the, what I like to call the human ecosystem around us in our discussions. These people all had an absolute rigid, maybe the obsession is right, rigid to get it, to think about the way I think. And by I mean the person doing the thinking, either Feynman or Gail Ma.

• 33:53Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  So it's the kind of iconoclasty where, yes, they listen to what's going around them, but the actual things that they think about is internally generated. And that means that they're not following the crowd. There's a saying about marching to your own band. Each one of them, in their own way, was marching to their own intellectual and mathematical and physical band.

• 34:18Danny Jones?

  Interesting. So they don't let outside influence, outside influences corrupt their, their way of thinking or their decision making?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 34:31Danny Jones?

  Because, you know, it kind of ties to a little bit what you were mentioning earlier in your childhood, how, you know, you said that you kind of were able to be creative longer into your, you know, deeper into your youth compared to the people that you were around because you were exposed to the comic books. And, you know, that seems to be a common thing with people, you know, because kids seem to be more creative, more playful. And then as soon as they get, as soon as you start to get indoctrinated into the rigid responsibilities of everyday society and having a job and paying bills and all that

• 35:15Danny Jones?

  stuff, that stuff seems to sort of, the creativity seems to dissolve.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  And that's what I was observing when I was reading comic books and science fiction in high school. I was aware of the fact that my classmates effectively were stopping doing that.

• 35:33Danny Jones?

  Oh wow, you noticed it that early?

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yes, that's, that's why I actually told that part of my story earlier. The, the involvement with creativity at the level of art, music, and in my case, comic books, is actually the foundation for how you can make singular innovative advances in advanced science.

• 35:58Danny Jones?

  Okay, so you're in MIT and, and how many years, how many years total did you spend at MIT?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  So I was admitted as a freshman to MIT in 1969. And then in 1973, I got my two bachelor's degrees, which was an accident, but it's true. One bachelor's, and my first bachelor's is in physics and my second bach, no, I'm sorry, my first bachelor's was in mathematics and my second bachelor's was in physics. And the reason it was an accident is because my grades in mathematics were better, so I declared myself a math major, because I was thinking about grad school. But I was studying physics, because it was my love. And then in my senior year, a friend by the name of Inez Hope said, I bet you they'll let you get both degrees. And we went to the physics headquarters, they looked at my transcript, said, you look just like a physics major. All you gotta do is take the lab courses.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  So I wound up with two degrees in four years, but that was not a plan. Then from, I applied to graduate school in 1973 and fortunately got admitted, and that's a whole nother story you don't have time to hear. But I got my PhD in 77 from MIT. So that's my, that's my formal academic training before I went to Harvard in 77, after I got my PhD. And that's when I started meeting these Nobel laureates, because although I didn't ever have a close interaction with them, Steven Weinberg was also Nobel laureate and was at Harvard when I, when I was beginning my first postdoc. And in fact, he invited me to give a lecture to his lecture series, seminar series that

• 37:32Speaker 02

  he was running. And then from Uh, when I finished at Harvard in eighty was when I went to Haltech and began a two year appointment. And so that's when now I'm meeting Feynman and Galman and

• 37:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  And, uh, Salam and just, you know, the big thinkers, so to speak.

• 37:52Danny Jones?

  Did you ever come in contact with Ed Witten?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Did I come get contact with Ed Witten? Let me tell you some Witten stories.

• 38:01Danny Jones?

  I would love it.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  So in nineteen seventy-five, when I was still a graduate student at MIT, but Edward was at Harvard. One, uh, day, I'm sorry, uh, at one point, uh, another Nobel laureate came to give lectures at Harvard. And so a number of us, uh, would get on the bus down at MIT and to go up Mass Ave to Harvard and then go to the physics lectures to hear this Nobel laureate. And at the end of one of those lectures, uh, I was sitting near the back, cause I'm never a front row guy in some sense. I was sitting in the back with some of my office mates. And at the end of the lecture, this person stood up behind us and asked this incredibly

• 38:46Speaker 02

  deep, intricate question. And so I didn't turn around to look at him, but I, I talked, I leaned over to my office mate and said, who is that guy back there? And my office mate said, oh, that's Ed Witten. He thinks he's smart. And to this day, I'm like, he was right, he was right, he was smart. So yeah, that was the first time I saw Edward. Uh, I didn't actually speak to Edward until I was, uh, uh, in the period from seventy-seven to eighty, when I was a postgraduate researcher at Harvard. I was a junior fellow.

• 39:19Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Which is a very prestigious organization there where they basically hire you to do what you want. Uh, you, you don't have to work under any particular senior professor. You can explore your interests. And so I was exploring this kind of weird mathematics that, um, underlies string theory at that point. This is before string theory existed, but it, it had gotten me there. And so one day I was walking down the hallway and Edward, um, had the door to his office open. I had never spoken to Edward and he said, Jim, what are you doing? Come on in. And I almost felt, you know, I was like, you know how in cartoons, people turn into water? That's how I felt. I'm like, oh, my God. He knows. First of all, he knows my name because I had never spoken to him.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  And then he asked me what physics I was doing. And I explained what I had just been doing recently. And this was the first time I saw genius up close in my life. So obviously explaining something that no one else in the world had worked out. And I had just sort of gotten to the beginning of figuring out the answer to this problem, but I had had some insight. I explained it to Ed and very quickly he had, it was like watching. Most of us in reading alphabet would say A, B, C, D, right? It was like watching someone say A, Z. In terms of the intellectual gap that he had filled within seconds on this problem that I was thinking about. It's the first time I had seen genius.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  And so, um, you know, and Ed is a friend. I mean, I, um, I, I, a couple of years later, when I was actually visiting the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy. Edward came through and again, to my great surprise, he sent a message. He'd like to have a conversation about physics. And so, you know, when you meet these like super genius guys and they want to talk to you about physics, it's like, maybe I'm not an idiot after all.

• 41:14Danny Jones?

  What was that problem that you were explaining to him?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Uh, it wasn't that I was so much explaining to him. I was reflecting on something he had done.

• 41:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Ed had, to my mind, this is the best paper Ed has ever written. Ed had written a paper which explained, um, how certain particles, uh, create other particles. It's something called, um, it's something called, um, Pi zero go to two gamma is the technical language, but he, but he explained it with a beautiful, beautiful piece of mathematics that no one had ever in the history of physics, um, come upon. And so I was talking to him about this particular paper because I wanted to extend that to the kind of mathematics that I was studying. Remember, I told you, I was looking at the mathematics that lies at the foundation of string theory.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  And so I want to extend Ed's result into that. And that was our conversation. But I was surprised that he asked me to come and talk.

• 42:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I've, uh, I've, I've heard a lot about him and his father. His father Louis Whitten was a legendary guy too.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Louis is also someone I knew. Louis.

• 42:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, you.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, look, I know the whole Whitten family.

• 42:28Danny Jones?

  He worked for the Martin Corporation, right?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I think that's right. But Louis was a cosmology astrophysicist. It's a, it is really a mathematical physicist and mostly concentrates on fundamental physics. So their areas are actually very different. Louis was a very nice man. I, I remember, I was surprised. I didn't know that Ed's father was a physicist until I met Louis.

• 42:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, so I heard a story, and correct me if I'm wrong, was that Louis Whitten was working in the Martin Corporation and he was doing, he was studying gravity, like he was really big into gravity, right? And then there was lots of research, like, out of nowhere, all this crazy progress started getting made in the, in the realm of gravity in like the 50s. And there was another gentleman by the name of Bryce DeWitt.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yes, you've done your homework.

• 43:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I've, I've been kind of, I've nerded out on this topic quite a bit in the past. And then there was some sort of a conference done at, um, North Carolina Chapel Hill.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:27Danny Jones?

  On gravity. And, um, it seems like there was so much interest and then like there was progress being made. And then all of a sudden it went, it disappeared.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yes and no. There was a legacy from that conference that, uh, maybe most people don't know about. But Kip Thorne, one of the people who measured gravity waves, was present there as a young person. So it's not like everything just disappeared. The progress, the rate of progress did stop. That's certainly true. But it inspired people like Kip and a whole generation, uh, his whole generation to get into gravity research. And that's why we were able to measure gravity waves in 2014.

• 44:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, because there's this idea that they could have potentially like been trying. I heard that Lewis like had found anti-gravity or something like this.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  I'm not familiar with that, so I'm afraid I can't, you can't make any enlightening statements.

• 44:28Danny Jones?

  Right. It's just, yeah, that's just kind of like what drew me into it, right? It seems like the most of the money with, that goes into science and research and development and this kind of stuff is sort of, there's, there's no limiter on the amount of money that can be spent when it's in the context of national security or war and this kind of stuff, you know?

• 44:51Speaker 02

  You're right. You're exactly right. And Danny, this is something that one should think of as a natural progression of what happened with the Second World War, right? I mean, as depicted, for example, in the movie Oppenheimer.

• 45:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  That was the first time that our government, in a major way, understood the potential for science to contribute to national security. And that, of course, is the creation of the atomic bomb.

• 45:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  That realization was codified into the behavior of our government at the end of the Second World War by a man named Vannevar Bush, who had been one of the people advising President Franklin Roosevelt during the war, and then later President Truman. There's a document he wrote called "Science, the Endless Frontier." And in that document, he described what the country should do in light of its experience with science and war during the Second World War. And that's why we have a National Science Foundation. That's why we have a National Institutes of Health.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  All the big science, and that the Pentagon has always been extraordinarily large player in the development of innovative science.

• 46:13Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  We have the most lethal military in the world, and it gets there because of science. This is something people don't understand is that the Department of Energy, I'm sorry, Department of Defense is an enormous funder of science.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  It's in fact, it's much bigger than the National Science Foundation.

• 46:33Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. And the, I think it was the Manhattan Project, which is the name has changed so many times now. That is the Department of Energy now is the same thing as Manhattan Project.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  It sort of grew out of it, but it's much, much larger than the Manhattan Project. But yes, the Manhattan District Project, which is its formal name, by the way, was the project that developed the atomic bomb in World War II. I actually taught a course about that the last three years. I dug kind of deeply into the history of that. And yes, it ultimately does evolve into Department of Energy.

• 47:05Danny Jones?

  It's crazy to me that we went from the American Civil War, which I think was like the 1860s.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  That's correct. 60, 65.

• 47:14Danny Jones?

  Shooting muskets to less than a hundred years later, dropping fusion devices out of jet airplanes.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Yes, that's all true.

• 47:24Danny Jones?

  In the, in the, in the width of a, in the time span of a human life.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Lifetime, yes. And this is, it's interesting you should bring this point up because I was talking with Steve a little bit earlier today that I'm worried about that as we look forward.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  If you look at the, you know, in that period you're talking about, it also includes the invention of the airplane. It also includes the invention of the electric light, modern, modern electronic communication, digital communication, computers, all in that same period happened. And the fact that it all happened speaks to how creative our species was being in that period. In particular, how our country was extraordinary, was extraordinarily creative at the basis of technology, science, engineering, mathematics.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  I worry about that, quite frankly, because as I said, as I was talking with Steve earlier, I, I'm a college professor. This is my 53rd consecutive year teaching students. And what I see in my students now, under the impact, I think of social, of social media and now artificial intelligence, I fear that we are losing our ability to create at that level.

• 48:48Danny Jones?

  To create and to innovate.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  At that level.

• 48:51Danny Jones?

  You think with the development of all this technology, it could be sort of sucking the creativity out of us because we don't know, or kind of like your, was it your grandfather that you said was really good at math because he needed that, it was necessity for him?

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:07Danny Jones?

  Now creativity is not a necessity for us. We, we sort of contracted out to L L Ms and stuff like that.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  And, and, and neural networks and what have you.

• 49:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yes, that and that, so as someone who has been teaching for 53 years, I have lots of conversations with friends who have also are professors and most of us are physicists, but I, you know, I talk to people. I'm also a professor of public policy, for example. So, um, you know, I talk to people and we all these days talk about how different students feel to us in teaching. And as I said to Steve, in fact, Steve had this wonderful example in the car of what worries me, um, which is, um, suppose a child in this, I hope he doesn't

• 50:00Speaker 02

  mind, but suppose your child tells you, um, daddy, a young child, I can't find a fork.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  And then you sort of wait for the next step, which is maybe the kid's going to go look for it, but they just stand there and say, daddy, I can't find the fork. Something like that is what I fear because I see in the classroom, when students get to a point where they can't do something, they're, they, they freeze. They don't try to figure out what we could try to do to figure out the thing I don't know.

• 50:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  And that's the essence of innovation.

• 50:40Danny Jones?

  That is the essence of innovation. And I think you're right. I've been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot. And I think you're right about that, man. I don't know where it goes. And I don't like the fact that it's all becoming distilled and centralized and controlled by very few people.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Yes. What you just spoke about is called diversity. And I tell people, you know, so if you have a financial planner or someone that works on your finances and you walk through their office, and they say, we don't, we don't believe in diversifying our stock holdings, you would run out of that office, because you know that doesn't work.

• 51:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  And so it's something like that has long, I've written essays on this for at least since the 90s, about how if you want to have a robust entity that creates innovation, what you really want is to have as many people who possibly can make a contribution in that conversation. And that's diversity.

• 51:47Danny Jones?

  Well, interesting, an interesting connection we could make here is the comparison between how we are sending rockets into space now versus how we did it with the Apollo program.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:06Danny Jones?

  Now we have multiple different companies that are doing it.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:10Danny Jones?

  Competing to do it the best way.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:14Danny Jones?

  And there's rockets getting launched every day over there in Cape Canaveral, except for the Artemis one, the Artemis one.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  I've been following Artemis. My interest as a kid started with space. So it has never diminished in 70 years.

• 52:30Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes. Elon's SpaceX is sending satellites into space every single day. And but the Artemis one has just been sitting there forever.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we know. We know. Like I said, but the other thing, you know, you mentioned SpaceX and its accomplishments. But there are other countries doing this, too. China has actually landed, you know how one of the SpaceX systems comes down and it gets, it doesn't actually land, it gets caught by a bunch of clamps.

• 53:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  I can't.

• 53:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. It catches the rocket.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  It catches the rocket.

• 53:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  China has done that at sea.

• 53:08Danny Jones?

  They've done that what?

• 53:08Speaker 02

  At sea.

• 53:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:10Danny Jones?

  On a ship?

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yes, on a platform. So this is the kind of thing, like I said, about thinking about different ways to do things. Well, here's an example that, from your surprise, you haven't heard it. I don't think most Americans know this is going on.

• 53:26Danny Jones?

  If you've ever shopped online, chances are you've purchased from a store powered by Shopify. It's easy to spot that purple Shop Pay button. That's what we use for our merch store. The purple button has all your payments and shipping info, so you don't have to track down your card or hope your browser remembered your payment info. That's the reason why so many businesses use Shopify. It's because they make it incredibly easy to run and start your own business online. It's the business behind the business that really counts, and that's where Shopify excels with convenient tools and workflows. Shop Pay has the best converting checkout on the planet, meaning fewer abandoned carts and way more sales. It's a game changer. You can spread your brand's word with the built-in marketing and email tools. Don't want to build your own page? Shopify has hundreds of beautiful, ready-to-go templates to express your brand and forget the code, like Daylight Computer, whose website is gorgeous.

• 54:11Danny Jones?

  So if you've got a product, a dream, and the drive to make it happen, Shopify is the platform to help you do it with ease, because businesses that sell, sell more with Shopify. See less carts abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial and go to Shopify.com/DannyJones, all lowercase. Again, that's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com/DannyJones. Shopify.com/DannyJones. I saw the other day that Elon Musk has been historically obsessed and has made it clear that his mission is to populate Mars, get human beings to Mars.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:51Danny Jones?

  And I think just a couple of weeks ago, he posted something saying, "No longer is this my goal."

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:56Danny Jones?

  "Now we have to focus on the moon."

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:59Danny Jones?

  Are you surprised at this?

• 55:00Speaker 02

  No. Several years ago, I was on a panel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the question before the panel was, "Are we going to Mars?" And the other panelists included Dr. Shirley Jackson, who was the president of RPI at the time.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  There's an organization called space.org and the CEO of that organization, a retired admiral, as I recall, was on the panel. And then Elon Ochoa, who is a retired astronaut, was on the panel. And so there was this hour-long discussion about going to Mars. And everyone else, you know, were basically supporting Elon's claim. And I was the only one saying, no, we're not going to do that. And there are lots of really good reasons to understand why that was, that was never going to be possible.

• 56:06Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, by never, I mean, I would not be surprised if we get there by, say, 2090. But we're not going to get there in the short term. And the reasons are a couple. One of the reasons that it was always impossible to adhere to the time scale that was being hiked is because if you look at the exposure. So we live here in the Earth and the Earth is a, is a, is a, I like to say, it is a hospitable home. It creates the conditions for us to live. And one of the, it has an atmosphere that we need to breathe, obviously. But it also has a magnetic atmosphere around it. And this magnetic atmosphere shields us

• 56:49Speaker 02

  from radiation. When you get in a rocket ship and plan to go to Mars, you go outside of that shield. And therefore, the amount of radiation that humans will be exposed in any reasonable length of technology to get to Mars likely suggests that without special shielding, horrible mutations are going to occur. And that's likely to be diseases.

• 57:11Danny Jones?

  Van Allen talked about this.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Yes. And so that was reason number one, to know that Elon was talking out of his hat. Reason number two was

• 57:21Speaker 02

  There are lots of technical issues. Well, so if you look deeply into my biography, you'll find out I applied to be an astronaut around nineteen eighty or so.

• 57:33Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Because I had a friend who was an astronaut, the black astronaut Ronald McNair, who died in the Challenger explosion.

• 57:41Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  He was a physicist. He and I had been friends since, from sixty-nine to eighty-five when he died. So when I was going to Caltech to work with Feynman and Yaman, he had convinced me to apply to NASA because they were accepting new applications for astronauts. And I applied. And I got pretty far along in the process. And so I got a chance to talk to some of the engineers who had actually built the Apollo, the Apollo Saturn V that got us to the moon. And they made this statement which utterly astounded me at the time. So this is like nineteen eighty. The moon landings were, the first one was in sixty-nine.

• 58:23Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  They said, "We can't do that now. That we cannot produce a rocket that would get us to the moon right now." And this is like-

• 58:31Danny Jones?

  This is what year again?

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Nineteen eighty.

• 58:33Danny Jones?

  Eighty.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the question about why was rather interesting.

• 58:38Danny Jones?

  Eleven years later.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Eleven years later. And so-

• 58:41Danny Jones?

  Well, they had done it, what, in seventy-three, too?

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Well, it went from sixty-nine was the first moon landing, and this last one was from like seventy-three, seventy-five, something like that.

• 58:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, so-

• 58:51Speaker 02

  So in fifteen years, what happened? Well, what happened is something that people often don't understand about complex systems in complex engineering. When you build a complex engineering system, it is almost always the case that it does not work the way you thought it would when you designed it on paper. And the way that you get it to work is by having engineers of extraordinary, of extraordinarily deep understanding of the mechanisms involved, and they figure out how to make it work. That generation had retired.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  And that's why we couldn't do it.

• 59:30Danny Jones?

  What was so special about that generation?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  That they did it?

• 59:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  The point was, it's a usual thing, you know? I don't know if you work out, but you know, one of the things that we know about human bodies, if you don't exercise, you lose muscle.

• 59:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  It's the same kind of a process.

• 59:45Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 59:47Danny Jones?

  One of the things that was described to me is one of the reasons that we haven't gone back is because the Saturn V was an expendable rocket and now we're spending all of our money on reusable rockets.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:00Danny Jones?

  So to get a reusable rocket that far is exponentially more difficult.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  It is far more difficult. And that's one of the things that has been a real triumph of SpaceX as we've watched them have rockets that you send up and then they come back down.

• 1:00:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  When I was a kid in El Paso, there was a science fiction show called Rocky Jones and they used to do that then. Rockets would go up and they would come back.

• 1:00:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  So, you know, so, you know, I've lived long enough to see this go from a television science fiction show to reality.

• 1:00:35Danny Jones?

  Do you think?

• 1:00:39Danny Jones?

  I mean, I'm sure you've had to think about this, but I'm curious to hear your answer. Will we ever have a more advanced way of traveling through space other than rockets? Because rockets are essentially guns, right?

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:00:56Danny Jones?

  You're shooting guns.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Basically guns. That's correct. That's correct.

• 1:01:00Danny Jones?

  And what would it take?

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  So Arthur C. Clarke, who was a very famous science fiction writer in the 50s and 60s, in fact, he's the author of the book 2001 that became a movie and what have you.

• 1:01:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Stanley Kubrick.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Right. Kubrick made the movie. Arthur C. Clarke said that. Something along the lines of predicting the future is a very hazardous undertaking. So when you ask me ever, right? I don't know what time constant you're attaching to ever. My suspicion is that yes, we will get something other than rockets. Now, when I say something other, I mean even, you know, you can build rockets that are basically, they are powered by nuclear explosions. This is something that's been in discussion since the 50s. So we know that in a realm of possibility, but again, that's shooting the gun as you described.

• 1:01:59Danny Jones?

  Still, yeah.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  So what do you get to? What can I imagine would be technology beyond that? And the only thing that I can think about is two things. Something that's electromagnetic where instead of shooting the guns, you, you know, magnets repel each other. So you could imagine that if we had a deeper understanding of how magnets work, we might be able to take advantage of the fact that the sun produces a magnetic field. And then you would have a rocket that would interact with that magnetic field to be propelled.

• 1:02:33Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  So if you ask a crazy person like me about what comes next, this is what comes out.

• 1:02:39Danny Jones?

  And that is using obviously the model of the unit of physics.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:45Danny Jones?

  As we understand it now.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  We have to know that the, that the sun produces a magnetic field.

• 1:02:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  That we can, they sort of become surfers on it.

• 1:02:52Danny Jones?

  Right. Do you, do you think it's possible that there's any sort of fundamental science that could be being held by private aerospace organizations that has been held from the academic, public academics?

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  I find that extraordinarily unlikely because one thing about scientists is collectively, we like to brag when we do stuff. And I think if someone stumbled on something like that, there'd be no way in the world that any organization could stop them from talking about it.

• 1:03:32Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's been one of the puzzling questions for me over the last 10 years, just seeing.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, maybe part of this thing that I'm talking about, this slowdown in innovation.

• 1:03:43Danny Jones?

  Slow down, yeah. Yeah, and then you have things like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider, and now they're building a bigger one now, right?

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Well, they're considering building it. They haven't quite.

• 1:03:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, they?

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  They haven't. So, this is some, you know, this is part of the science that I watch very closely. So, um, so the Large Hadron Collider, uh, did what it was predicted to do because it allowed us to find the Higgs boson, but it also did not do something that a lot of other physicists thought it, uh, should be able to do, and that is to find the particles that correspond to the mathematics that I've been studying since I was in graduate school. It's called supersymmetry. It didn't do that. And so, the Large Hadron Collider has had one upgrade in its life, and it still was not able to show us this, um, other result. There's talk of building, uh, there's actually, there's talk of building two, uh, next-generation

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  machines. One of them is what's called a linear collider. A linear collider is, uh, based on the, uh, on the device that's at Stanford, the so-called SLAC device stack.

• 1:04:49Danny Jones?

  Pull that up, Steve. There's, there's, there's illustrations of it. Looks pretty cool.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Yes, it is. Uh, so, uh, one, uh, one, ah, in fact, you have it. So, one possible next-gen is that you kind of build, uh, two of these SLAC-type, uh, okay, you see this figure that you have here? It has two arms.

• 1:05:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  And where it says, uh, "main, uh, main linac electron," that actually already exists. That is the current, uh, SLAC, uh, accelerator. And so, the idea is that you build another one of those type devices that, um, it's like taking two guns and aiming their, uh, barrels at each other, but in this second device, you don't accelerate electrons, you accelerate the particles that are the antiparticle to the electron. Part- particles and antiparticles, if they get too close, always destroy each other. And so, you increase the efficiency of the energy conversion, and that would then allow you to probe even higher energies to look for the kinds of things that I would love to see tomorrow, these things called superpartners.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  So, this is one possibility.

• 1:05:55Danny Jones?

  Superpartners.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now, the other possibility is an upgrade. Now, the thing to notice about this machine, by the way, is that the particles that are being accelerated are the electron, and its antiparticle, the procytron.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  The LHC accelerates protons.

• 1:06:12Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  And so when you accelerate protons, you're looking at a different force in nature. The only forces we have to worry about here are the electrical forces and the weak nuclear force. At the Large Hadron Collider, you have to worry about the strong nuclear force, and it's much messier. And so there is discussion of building a next-gen version. Some people call it the Super LHC in Sarn, but these are all just discussions as of now.

• 1:06:41Danny Jones?

  Right. Do you think it's possible that

• 1:06:49Danny Jones?

  we could get some sort of like major breakthrough discovery with these colliders in like the next 100 years?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:06:55Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Yes. I don't, I'm not a betting man, but I'd be willing to bet positive on that one.

• 1:07:03Danny Jones?

  Okay, so let's go to, I wanna try to do a breakdown of supersymmetry so people can understand it.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:13Danny Jones?

  Can you give me just a high-level view?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  I can try.

• 1:07:16Danny Jones?

  On what this is?

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Sure. I actually have graphics in talks that I give, and I'm happy to share them with you afterwards, but...

• 1:07:23Danny Jones?

  Maybe you can find some. Are they online at all, or?

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  They're in some of, they're in some of the talks I have given online.

• 1:07:31Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Yes. So let me try to start this way. If you walk into a high school chemistry class, and you look on the wall, you're likely to see a chart. In one corner, it has the letter H, and at the other side, it has the letters HE. It's the Table of Elements. This is something almost universally known. Now, that Table of Elements was created by a Russian scientist named Mendeleyev. And when Mendeleyev first had the idea of creating the Table of Elements...

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  He didn't know all the elements we know. And so therefore, if you look at his old chart, which you can, like I said, I have copies of it that I talk to people about. So when you look at his old chart, it actually has holes in it. And he used the presence of those holes to predict elements that no one had ever seen yet. And not only did you find, we eventually as a species find all those, we found a lot more. So the modern table of elements has gone through an evolution. Now, let's talk about what we know about the universe right now. We know about electrons, and in fact, electrons are a member of a family of things that are called leptons. So there's a whole family of things that are kind of like electrons, but they're slightly different.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Inside of protons and neutrons, there are these particles called quarks. And they also come in families. So if you ask me or any scientist, what's the, what is the best observational data we have about the most, the smallest things in the universe? We're gonna tell you about those objects. And like I said, I have a chart that I'm happy to share with you. However, you're not just a bunch of particles floating around, you're an organized structure.

• 1:09:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  And that means that these particles have to have things that link them together. And these links are the four fundamental forces, because nature actually has four. There's electromagnetism, for example, is like chart history. That's a simple. There is the strong nuclear force. The strong nuclear force is the form of nuclear energy that powers the sun.

• 1:09:49Danny Jones?

  Strong nuclear force.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Then there's a separate nuclear force called the weak nuclear force. And the simplest way I can give you access to that is to tell you that if you look at old science fiction movies from the 1950s, radioactive things always glowed.

• 1:10:05Speaker 02

  That glow is due to the weak nuclear force.

• 1:10:07Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  So it's a real thing. It's not Hollywood just out there selling the story. So our universe looks like it's made of two things, the things that get hooked together and the things that are doing the hooking.

• 1:10:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  And that's a chart that I, that you can find in many, many places, but the particular version of the chart that I use highlights the fact that, that it's, looks to me, and like a lot of us, like what we're looking at is the equivalent of Mendeleev's first table of elements. It has holes.

• 1:10:38Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  And if that's true, then if we're fortunate, we will one day get the technology to fill in those holes, just like we filled in the holes of the Mendeleev table of elements. This turns out to be part of superstring theory, by the way. So I say, it's the part, it's the math that sits under all this stuff. So over here, we can see a demonstration of the table of elements.

• 1:11:03Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  As Mendeleev saw them. And as you can see, if we can scroll down a little bit, you can see there are holes there, those white spaces. Those correspond to elements that no one had observed at the time that Mendeleev put this table together. Now let's go to the next image. This is the modern table of elements, and you'll notice it has essentially no holes left. And so, and there are lots more boxes here. That's because we have discovered since Mendeleev, many, many more elements. And so that's why, this is the thing that you see in high school. Now, let's go and look at elementary particles. This table here, that letter E inside of the sphere that you see there, that represents the electron.

• 1:11:47Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  And you'll notice there's a grouping of things around it. Every single one of those other spheres represent particles that we have observed in the last 100 years. Those particular particles behave a lot like electrons, which is why they're grouped down there in the same color.

• 1:12:02Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Now next to that, you see there are a group of particles inside, labels inside of red spheres. Those are the quarks that sit inside of protons and neutrons. And in particular, the U is called the up quark, the D is called the down quark, and that's two up quarks and a down quark is, sit inside of every proton.

• 1:12:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Now, up in that upper right-hand corner, you see more spheres. Now, what's sitting, the labels in there are not talking about particles like the quarks and electrons. These are the particles that carry the forces that cause the electrons and quarks to clump together to form atoms. Every force in nature has a carrier particle. And so this is what we know about the universe right now.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  This is the extent of our science of asking, what's the most fundamental objects you find in the universe?

• 1:13:00Danny Jones?

  And these carrier particles are called bosons?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Yes, they're called bosons, and the one with the Greek symbol gamma is the photon. It's in yellow.

• 1:13:09Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Uh, remember we talked about nuclear forces? We said there are actually two different forms of nuclear forces. There's a strong nuclear force, which is the source of energy for the sun. And there's the weak nuclear force, which is why radioactive things glow. And so, since those are forces, they also have carriers. And those carriers are what you see in up in the upper hand quadrant.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  And the H is the Higgs boson, because it's also a force carrier. Now, I have a question for you, Danny. Is that very balanced? Is that a pretty picture?

• 1:13:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, uh, it's definitely not balanced.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Okay, can we get, switch to the next diagram?

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  If supersymmetry is an accurate description of nature, we're gonna find all these other particles. And this is almost exactly like looking at Mendeleev's initial table, and then looking at today's table. And that's why the issue of supersymmetry is so hotly studied. And in fact, it was the hope that the LHC would begin to see some of these additional particles. That's one of the primary reasons it was built, but it didn't. So, uh, that's what we're aiming for. Uh, and you ask, are we gonna have fundamental breakthroughs? If we start to see these things, the answer is yes.

• 1:14:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:31Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Now, this particular rendition, can you go back one slide for me? This particular rendition is my creation to try to explain to people what we mean. We talk about symmetry because you can see this thing is not balanced. Whereas the second one is, and that's the symmetry is the balance.

• 1:14:52Danny Jones?

  Because everything, everything in our, in nature is symmetrical.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Symmetry has guided us in understanding nature since Isaac Newton. And so we don't know, I can't say everything is, I can only say it has been a reliable guide for several hundred years.

• 1:15:11Danny Jones?

  Right. Extended supersymmetry, where does that go?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. You've done your homework too well. So if we can switch to the next picture, if extended supersymmetry is an accurate description of our nature, what's going to happen is there'll be many more particles added to these blocks.

• 1:15:30Danny Jones?

  Outside of it?

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, outside of the ones I'm showing here. This is just what we call super, a simple supersymmetry.

• 1:15:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  So you've had your physics lesson for the day.

• 1:15:42Danny Jones?

  Now, what could supersymmetry lead to?

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  This is a good question, and remember, I will appeal again to author C. Clark's statement about predicting the future is a hazard, hazardous business. So what could it lead to? Well, if I put on my big, my far science fiction hat.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Part of the interesting.

• 1:16:01Danny Jones?

  Tinfoil hat.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Tinfoil, that's right, tinfoil hat. Part of the really fascinating things about this table that I'm showing with all the super partners. Can, if we can get the arrow over on the Es, on the E symbol to the left in the bottom left hand corner, is a, yeah, that's a mathematical representation of the electron.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  And we know electrons exist because the technology we're using right now is based on manipulating electrons. Now, if we can scroll to the right a little bit, stop, you'll notice there's an E with a little tilde on it, on top of it, a little twiggled.

• 1:16:41Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  So supersymmetry says that to the particles we know, which are on the left-hand side, there are these particles we have never discovered that exist if we get a sufficient, if our universe is supersymmetric and we obtain the technology to measure them. Now, what's special here? Well, because these are sort of balanced, you can sort of ask yourself, and the next question is, is there a way to make a transition between these two sides? Is there an instrumentality or a physical law that lets me switch them? Because if you can, it means that you can replace the E's over here, which are electrons, without the funny tilde on top of them, with the electrons with them. The thing, electrons with them have different properties.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  And the thing that's really interesting is, in my, when I wear my science fiction hat, that could be the scientific basis of a transporter.

• 1:17:34Danny Jones?

  A transporter.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  As in Star Trek.

• 1:17:37Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is my science fiction hat.

• 1:17:42Danny Jones?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  But if you ask me what is possible, in the realm of possibility, this is the first piece of mathematics that suggests that you might be able to build a transporter.

• 1:17:53Danny Jones?

  And what, how specifically does a theoretical transporter work?

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  So you, okay, so the reason you would want to convert electrons to these things called electrons, and you wanted to switch on all the particles, is because these super things are more malleable, you can actually move them through substances that you can't move an ordinary electron through. And so that's why it would be the basis of something like a transporter.

• 1:18:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Could this extended supersymmetry lead to potential anti-gravity effects?

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  This is something that supersymmetry research has looked at since the 1980s, I think it was. There are versions of supersymmetry, not this version, because remember, what we're talking about here are mathematical equations. But there are versions of very similar equations where anti-gravity is definitely present.

• 1:18:53Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Yes, but those mathematical models, we don't know how to extend them to having electrons. But those models do exist. They've been in literature for about 20 years.

• 1:19:06Danny Jones?

  Okay, um, now, how does this connect to the Adinkra symbols?

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. I didn't know you were gonna go there.

• 1:19:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  Uh, can we break?

• 1:19:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  Okay, so, uh, there.

• 1:19:24Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  On the left-hand side of this image, you see some equal signs.

• 1:19:31Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  And therefore, that informs us that's some kind of mathematics.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  On the right-hand side of this, there are no equal signs. They're just pictures. And so, in 2005 and 6, working with a physicist named Michael Fox, we realized that, that there's mathematical data in the equations to the left that is also contained in the images to the right.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  And that when you do math on the equations to the left, it corresponds to manipulating the images on the right. So Adinkras are a graphical way to represent mathematical data in the equations that possess supersymmetry.

• 1:20:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's incredible.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  It's crazy, and I have to admit, uh, it was, maybe it was subconscious, but this is what Richard Feynman did in producing the theory of relativistic, perturbative relativistic quantum field theory. He also has a picture, a set of pictures that are called Feynman graphs. And so, maybe my coming to this is partly a legacy of having been around him a little bit.

• 1:20:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:54Danny Jones?

  Now, um.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  What are they good for?

• 1:20:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what are they good for?

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  That's always a good question. There are some problems involving equations that are much more complicated than this that arose from some work that Edward did. And these, the particular class of problems I'm talking about is called M-theory in the literature. And there are aspects of M-theory that were totally unknown to us. And so, in 2020, working with the two graduate students at Brown, we were able to solve some of these problems that Ed had given us and no one knew how to solve.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  And it involves extensions of these pictures, more complicated versions of these pictures I showed you.

• 1:21:48Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  And it involved, so I'm gonna give you a little, I'm a professor, I'm gonna give you a pop quiz, I'm gonna give you a warning first.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  Word problem.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  Anisha and Tom together have $10. Item number one. Anisha has two more dollars than Tom. Item number two. How much money does Anisha have and how much money does Tom have? This is what's called two unknowns in algebra. And the answer is that Anisha has $6 and Tom has 4, because 6 and 4 equals 10. So, that's a problem where you have two unknowns. With these young ladies, we figured out how to look at some of these equations that Ed had, Ed and actually two other physicists had presented, that have over 4.2 billion unknowns in them. And we solve that using these pictures.

• 1:22:42Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  So, this is, uh, this is all the, I mean, what I'm showing you, this is mathematics is basically impenetrable. But the point is, this mathematics let us write computer codes which then solve the problem. These are the inputs that the computer codes gave out as answers. So, that's what I actually do as a scientist.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  And earlier, you were kind enough to say that, you know, I, um,

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  that I, um...

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  That is proper to consider me in the company of people like Feynman and those guys. I would hope. I can't say that I believe that, but we're certainly doing the best science that I'm capable of doing.

• 1:23:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, so, and also, in your attempt to understand the fundamental nature of reality, it led you to this set of equations that are, and I might butcher this, they're, the set of equations that you were led to are indistinguishable from the types of equations that are used for search engines and web browsers that we use on computers.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  That's the next part of the story. That's exactly right. It turns out that, so, when Michael and I first figured out that you can take data from equations and embed it into images, it was clear to me that we were doing something that no one else in our part of physics had ever thought about. And it was also clear that it was mathematics. So, immediately, almost immediately after Michael and I wrote our paper, which I think was in 204, 205, he reached out to some mathematicians that he had known. And it turned out I had actually interacted with these mathematicians without knowing it, and we formed a math/physics collaboration.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  And the purpose of the collaboration was to study the mathematical properties of these images that we, that Michael and I had created. And in 2008, the six of us, there are three physicists, three mathematicians, the six of us came to this discovery that the structure of these pictures includes bits, but not just random assortments of bits, but bits in the form of what are known as computer error correction, classical error correcting codes in computer science. They're actually embedded in the structure of these pictures.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  And this is, thank you for asking the question, because this is the wildest thing I've ever been part of in physics, because this will be the first, this, if supersymmetry is true, and it's gotta be accurate, and if we can observe it. This will be the first existence, uh, first instance in science where computer codes will be parts of the fundamental laws of physics. That's the real significance of this.

• 1:25:52Danny Jones?

  What does that even mean?

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of people like to say something I don't believe. They like to say that means where that our universe is, uh, is as depicted in the Matrix movies.

• 1:26:06Danny Jones?

  We live in a simulation.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  Right. There are people, lots of people that for decades have been saying Jim Gates has proven that we live in the simulation. I don't believe that for a moment.

• 1:26:15Danny Jones?

  Certainly what it sounds like.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  Well, uh, well, to, to folks that are not scientists, yes, but not to scientists. The problem with that statement is that it's not a scientific statement. Um, because s- science by definition is about things that you can prove are false. And that statement can never be proven to be false.

• 1:26:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  That's why it's not science. And so I actually have a, a more complicated, um, intuition, and I probably will never live long enough to see, see it sorted out. My intuition is that error correction not only occurs in computer science, but error correction appears to occur in gen- uh, occur in genetics because, um, there's been this longstanding argument in genetics that error correction must be present because it suppresses random occurrences of mutations. And if you have a genome that's evolving, you want to do that at some level because if you let random mutations occur, then the offspring are not going to be viable.

• 1:27:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  So genetics likely does have some error correction, uh, in it. Now, that's the only part of nature that we have observed in our several millennia on this species, on this planet, where error correction is, appears to be in a physical system. So then you can ask the question, how did it get there?

• 1:27:41Danny Jones?

  How did the error correction get there?

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Into these systems. And answer is evolution.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Systems evolve to have these error corrections. How does, how does evolution work? Well, what it says basically is, as you look at how species survive in time, the ones that have the right genetic codes have survival advantages. So, um, let's see, the ability, let's see, what's a prime example of this? The ability to walk on two limbs instead of four.

• 1:28:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  Right? You have a certain advantage with two or four because that then frees the other two to manipulate. Right? So this is, this is a fundamental thing. So the way evolution works is it says that in, if you have a selection of possibilities of traits of, of a population, then the environment will pick out those traits that are more valuable in terms of survival because others will die. That's, that's the essence of evolution. So if I look at this explanation for evolution in genetics and then look at the fact that we have found error correction, well, first of all, evolution is most, is likely to be some kind of error correction.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  And the fact that we have found error correction in the form of the equation suggests to me that there's something like evolution happened.

• 1:29:13Danny Jones?

  With math?

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. With the math that describes our universe. So that's my explanation. That's not, that's not the matrix.

• 1:29:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  And so whether this is the case or not, and thank you, by the way, for giving me the opportunity to explain this to a general public because I cannot tell you the number of times people have not allowed me to say this part.

• 1:29:39Danny Jones?

  You're saying that the, the fundamental

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  Laws.

• 1:29:45Danny Jones?

  Laws of physics.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Likely underwent some sort

• 1:29:50Danny Jones?

  Evolution.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  Evolution process. Some sort of evolution process.

• 1:29:54Danny Jones?

  And they're probably currently still evolving.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  I'm not, I wouldn't accept that.

• 1:29:59Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  Because, um, I mean, maybe that's true.

• 1:30:03Danny Jones?

  Because we are still evolving.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  We are, but that's, that's biological. That's not, these laws of physics don't necessarily apply to biology.

• 1:30:11Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  And, um,

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I can't say that I know the laws are not continuing to evolve, but it just seems very unlikely to me.

• 1:30:23Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  So that's the, that's the far out weirdness that my scientific journey has taken, taken me to. And, um, you know, it's exciting to be able to, you know, give these sorts of ideas to the scientific community and the public that come from, remember I commented that all of my heroes follow their own.

• 1:30:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  It's exciting to be able to do that and come to these kinds of conclusions.

• 1:30:48Danny Jones?

  So there was a scientist in the 40s who came up with the idea of transmitting data, right, ones at bits?

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:57Danny Jones?

  Claude Shannon, I believe.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  That is exactly who it is. There's also a contribution from, uh, another scientist named Hemming. So Hemming actually is the one who really stood up the, so you're right. Claude Shannon is a person that came up with the idea of what we've, uh, both computer scientists and physicists call, um, the entropy content, uh, content of information.

• 1:31:23Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  That, that information itself has entropy associated with it.

• 1:31:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  He wrote an equation for this. Hemming comes along and shows that if you want to have digital structures that communicate reliably, reliably, they have to have error correcting codes built into their structure.

• 1:31:42Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  And so, uh, as I said, these are my guide stones in trying to understand this very strange result that we have found classical error correcting codes in the, in the context of equations that might describe our physical universe.

• 1:31:57Danny Jones?

  Because when you transmit a data packet from one computer here to another computer in Beijing.

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

  The fluctuations in the transmission medium will flip bits.

• 1:32:08Danny Jones?

  Flip bits.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Unless you put in a mechanism for unflipping in the bits and those are the error correcting codes. That's what was, that was basically Hemming's observation.

• 1:32:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

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• 1:33:19Danny Jones?

  A well computer that transmits data and bits is bound by the laws of entropy. Right? So if you have a blank hard drive with no data on it at all, that hard drive would be very low entropy. Right? From a purely physical standpoint, it would be either all ones or all zeros.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 1:33:41Danny Jones?

  When you encode data on it, say we store this podcast on that hard drive. It becomes a chaotic mess of ones and zeros.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  It could.

• 1:33:51Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  It could.

• 1:33:52Danny Jones?

  So that would make it high entropy.

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  Chaos is typically associated with high, yes?

• 1:33:56Danny Jones?

  So it'd be more chaotic from a purely physical perspective. But when you plug a TV monitor or a computer monitor into that hard drive, it becomes, it gives us, it gives it meaning. You have the, the video files or the documents, whatever it is on there.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  That's a very interesting point that I hadn't thought about. I'm not sure I'm willing to comment. That's simply a point. I mean, the fact that you actually need to have an actor name of the video. That's actually very, that's ringing a bell with me. Oh, yes. It's ringing a bell with me because a scientist named John Wheeler effectively said the same thing about information in the universe. He said that it's actually a statement called it from bit.

• 1:34:42Danny Jones?

  Yes, I've heard of that.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  And it's the statement you just made.

• 1:34:47Danny Jones?

  Okay. Yeah, cuz the computer monitor kind of acts like a consciousness.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:34:54Danny Jones?

  To transcribing the the physical raw data into meaning, meaning.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Yes, into knowledge, I would say.

• 1:35:01Danny Jones?

  So what happens when you erase that hard drive? If it's bound by the laws of thermodynamics, and entropy can always goes up. And and and uh, energy can, there's all, there's net energy can only be transferred, right?

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  You have exceeded my comfort zone.

• 1:35:21Danny Jones?

  The, something has to leave that hard drive, right?

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  You have exceeded my comfort zone. I am not, uh, when people ask me questions that I haven't thought about, I don't answer them with whatever comes up. I I need time to think about.

• 1:35:37Danny Jones?

  It's just interesting, hear me out, um, and you know, comment or not, but it's just interesting to me. This idea has been proposed to me that if you crack open a hard drive, well, first of all. If

• 1:35:51Danny Jones?

  the information on the hard drive could, and there's a gentleman who um, actually published this theory.

• 1:36:00Danny Jones?

  His name was Rolf Landauer.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Not familiar with work.

• 1:36:03Danny Jones?

  Uh, he said, he did an equation that all the mass on all the datas on all the hard drives and server farms throughout the world right now is like, if you, if we had them, the tools to accurately measure and weigh the mass, it would equal like a kilogram of mass. But it would, he said it would equal mass. So if that theory that information on a hard drive could equal mass. Since mass and energy are interconvertible, then mass, energy and information could be also interconvertible. So he says, if you crack open a hard drive, you, it's invisible, you can't see that mass, it's electromagnetically.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  And coded, right.

• 1:36:44Danny Jones?

  And he made that connection to. When we look at universes, the spin of the universes, the center of a universe spins at the same speed as the outer rim. And the dark matter is mass that's flattening the spin rate. So he made the connection to say if dark matter equals mass, that's electromagnetically indetectable because we can't see it, then maybe what's in that hard drive could be the same thing as dark matter.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  Again, these are not ideas that I have thought about, and so I have no comments to make.

• 1:37:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, it's just interesting because it connects to the bits and like the whole it from bit thing.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:37:37Danny Jones?

  And like, could, you know, tinfoil hat, could dark matter be some sort of a computational cloud?

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is a very interesting premise, and it's also something that Feynman himself kind of contributed to at one point. Feynman made this very interesting statement at a conference that there's a whole lot of computation going on in order to make physics work, and he found that mysterious.

• 1:37:58Danny Jones?

  A whole lot of computation.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that the magnitude of computation that the universe has to do in order to get our physics is staggering or something like that. You should look this comment up if you're interested in this sort of thing. That's why, one reason why Feynman is often cited as the father of quantum computing, because he thought it had something to do with quantum mechanics.

• 1:38:21Danny Jones?

  What do you make of the evolution of quantum computers and AI and then combined? And then how that could?

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  Wow. Well, I can give you a perspective of someone who started in physics with a degree in '77 and has been thinking about it since then. When I learned physics, there were many things that in quantum mechanics disturbed a lot of other people, and they never disturbed me. I'll never forget, I was in my second year at MIT and I took a course in quantum mechanics. And a lot of my classmates were disturbed by...

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  Trying to tie the physics that they learned from Newton to the physics of quantum mechanics. I was never so perturbed because I understood that neither of these things is actually reality. What they are is our best descriptions of reality. They're somehow embedded in what we are. And so the, the, but also there was an aspect of quantum mechanics that was mysterious. And it's still mysterious. It's what we sort of now call entanglement. We knew mathematically that these things were possible. They're also connected to another idea called the collapse of the wave function.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  And so we learned that these things were possible, but generally the attitude was, well, that's philosophy. We're never going to have to worry about that in our world. Well, that's not turned out to be true. We have to worry about it in this age of quantum computing. Because essentially, quantum computing works by a mechanism which is entanglement. And there's something called the Bell inequality. There are all kinds of results on this that prove that entanglement is a real thing. In fact, there's an experiment that was done by a Chinese researcher, Madame Wu, C.S. Wu,

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  and one of her postdocs, where it looks like they were the first to actually experimentally show that this idea of entanglement shows up in physical systems. So I've watched this trajectory from saying, ah, that's not something we have to worry about, to now people saying, well, we have quantum computers, which although they're not perfect replicators of quantum entanglement, because there's this thing, I can't remember the detailed name, but this is one aspect of quantum computers that we don't really have matching with the math, but they seem to be good enough. So my comment is that ideas that, in fact, let me say it this way.

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  I remember reading as a graduate student about Wheeler's idea, it from bit. And I thought it was the craziest thing in the world. And I'm like, you know, he's a respected scientist, but that's a bridge too far for me. So then 40 years later,

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  Through my own personal efforts, I find out in collaboration with my colleagues that error correction is in the equations. And so, one of the things I've told people is that for me, this trajectory has been so amazing. I thought that Wheeler was crazy when I first read about this idea. But I've also now realized that if you study physics long enough, you too can become crazy.

• 1:41:57Danny Jones?

  The deeper you get, the crazier you seem.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  That's happened to me. That's the problem. I've gone from this idea that I totally reject it to now I can't reject it because I can see it in the math that I worked out.

• 1:42:12Danny Jones?

  Right. And that's undeniable.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  For people like me.

• 1:42:17Danny Jones?

  Well, right, a mathematician, when you do the math and you crunch the numbers, there's no way of getting around that. You can't misinterpret, right?

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  We can't get around that stuff.

• 1:42:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and that leads to, you know, like, the idea of consciousness.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  It does indeed lead to the idea of consciousness.

• 1:42:38Danny Jones?

  Like, can you build up to consciousness from protons and neutrons and electrons? We haven't found a way to reconcile consciousness from matter.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  So, if you include in the word build, the actions of humans in this process, then I think the answer is yes, you can. Because having watched the progress of computer technology in my lifetime, and interacting, as I said to Steve, I've been interacting a lot recently with some AIs, ChatGPT, and...

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Why can I never remember the other one? Google has a

• 1:43:30Danny Jones?

  Gemini.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  Gemini. So these are my two friends. I interact with them almost every day. And so having that experience of watching the world go from essentially computers are these big boxes that someone has in an air-conditioned room.

• 1:43:47Danny Jones?

  The ENIAC.

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  And when I started, the first time I was exposed to a computer, it was with punch cards. That's how old I am. They sell these cards, you punch the holes in it.

• 1:43:56Danny Jones?

  Was Von Neumann, the one Von Neumann?

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  The Von Neumann machine, yeah. The Von Neumann machine. And so having watched this evolution of computers from those days to now, I've, my belief, let me say it this way, is that at some point, something indistinguishable from consciousness is likely to arise in computers. Now, this is beyond the Turing test. I don't know if you know what the Turing test is.

• 1:44:20Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  What I'm talking about is actually beyond the Turing test. Because to me, that's kind of a mechanistic first level of consciousness, namely, to be able to respond to inputs with reasonable outputs. In fact, the current, from my experience with the recent AIs, they are inference machines. And what I mean that is, they don't do calculations, but they infer from the data that you give them a result. So they're inference engines. Inference, to me, is not consciousness. Consciousness, at least from all of my life experience, consciousness has this element about it where

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  the outputs exceed what the inputs are. And that pluses the role of consciousness. And until I see that, I, claims of consciousness are not consistent with what I think.

• 1:45:16Danny Jones?

  Because we've all had aha moments, where like, seems like something just comes to us, right?

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:21Danny Jones?

  Where there's like, the, the sum of whatever that is, is not, is way greater than than the piece of the all the inputs.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Yes. And, you know, neuropsychologists have some, have made statements that have imprinted themselves on my thinking about that. And one of them is to understand that each of us, there's, each of us is actually kind of two computing systems. There is the conscious and that's who's talking to you right now. But there's also the subconscious, which decides that I prefer green to red, right? There's no rational reason why.

• 1:45:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  And there are some writings in the neural psychological literature that to the effect that the amount of data processed by our subconscious is orders and orders of magnitude greater than what goes on in our conscious mind.

• 1:46:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  And therefore, if this is right, there's a part of all of us that is doing even more thinking than we sort of remember and can recall. And it's that part, I believe, that generates these aha moments.

• 1:46:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and then you have dreams where you're processing all of the inputs from the previous day to help you.

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and in my case, some of those dreams are mathematical. No, literally, it's literally true.

• 1:46:47Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  It's not a joke, it's literally true.

• 1:46:49Danny Jones?

  Your dreams are literally mathematical?

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have, it happened, I have people who can testify to have seen that in some of my interactions.

• 1:47:00Danny Jones?

  How, what do you mean?

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  Well, so the most recent example was partly connected to my work at Brown University. And I had a graduate student who urged me to go and watch a video of a French mathematician giving a lecture on a subject I had never heard of before the lecture online at an event hosted by an Indian research institution. That night, I had a dream. And the next day, I knew the answer to a sort of 300 calculations. And it just came from the dream. And I took it to my graduate student and said, write some code and see if this is right. And it was.

• 1:47:49Danny Jones?

  You had looked at this the day before?

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  No, I saw a lecture the day before.

• 1:47:55Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:47:55Speaker 02

  And for whatever reasons, my subconscious used it to figure out something.

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  I know it sounds like magic.

• 1:48:04Danny Jones?

  It does sound.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  This is the first time sort of I've talked about this experience. But I have a couple of other similar experiences and a few of them have witnesses.

• 1:48:15Danny Jones?

  And you were able to do this in your mind and you corroborated it with a computer?

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  Well, my student did.

• 1:48:22Danny Jones?

  Your student did.

• 1:48:24Danny Jones?

  And what, what, what types of equations were these?

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  So they weren't equations. They were graphical images that gave rise to equations. And somehow I made a connection about.

• 1:48:40Danny Jones?

  Graphical images?

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Adinkras. These, all the things in question were not Adinkras. They're actually a piece of mathematics called promethehedra. But the point was that these are actually relevant for Adinkras. And so we were able to write a paper called The Three Hundred Correlators. That's a joke of the three hundred Spartans.

• 1:48:59Danny Jones?

  The three hundred correlators?

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  I like to have fun when I do physics.

• 1:49:06Danny Jones?

  Wow. And there's been many times where you've, where you've done something similar by going to sleep and dreaming about it.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  There have been other times, yes. But most of them don't have witnesses.

• 1:49:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  I just come in and say, try this and it works.

• 1:49:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's the crazy thing about, about the human mind and consciousness is it's

• 1:49:30Danny Jones?

  that we haven't figured it out. And it's, it does seem like magic in many cases.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  Yes, it does.

• 1:49:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  There's a mathematician that's, I hold up as the greatest example of this. There's an Indian mathematician named Ramanujan. And he literally, if you read about him, you'll find out that's, he did this regularly.

• 1:49:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, who is the guy who would say he would sleep on, sleep on his books and then wake up and then?

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  That sounds like something similar to something Ramana Ujan said.

• 1:50:02Danny Jones?

  He would, he would wake up, um, The Sleeping Prophet, that was his name. What was his actual name?

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Oh, you're talking about Edward Casey.

• 1:50:09Danny Jones?

  Edward Casey.

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  So you should wonder why I know about such things.

• 1:50:13Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, yes. He would go to sleep on his school books and wake up and know all the content of the book.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  That's what he said. At the time I read those things, I thought, oh, that's impossible. I'm not sure. I'm not so sure anymore.

• 1:50:25Danny Jones?

  Well, it sounds like science fiction.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  It sounds like science fiction.

• 1:50:27Danny Jones?

  But you know what's crazy is, uh, I had this woman in here who writes on national security and she did this whole book about the Pentagon.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:50:35Danny Jones?

  It was called The Pentagon's Brain.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:50:37Danny Jones?

  And the people that are in the Pentagon who work for an organization, um, going back through the Cold War called DARPA, was what it was called. Now it's called ARPA. They would invite routine, every year, they would invite the world's top science fiction writers.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  To have some sort of like an intellectual brainstorm.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:00Danny Jones?

  On weapons of the future.

• 1:51:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. One of the things that's really amazing about our Pentagon, I've, uh, in my career, I can't claim I had deep connections, but I've had some connections.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  Um, is that the part of the reason that our Pentagon is so efficient at what it does is that it has this deeply intellectual part of it that does things like, uh, what you just described with DARPA, where people think very deeply and some people would say far outside of the box about possibilities. And that's an example.

• 1:51:39Danny Jones?

  Well, they have to.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 1:51:41Danny Jones?

  They can't think inside the box because all the other countries are probably.

• 1:51:44Speaker 02

  Also inside the box, exactly. So the idea is if you want to get ahead, you have to actually go outside the box.

• 1:51:50Danny Jones?

  And they have, uh, they have this blue sky research.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  That's exactly the word, yes.

• 1:51:56Danny Jones?

  Where there's like, let's throw money at this insane idea and who cares if it doesn't pay us off or get some sort of a return, you know?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  There is a, at least when I was a child, there was a aphorism about Edison, which went along the lines that he had to, he had to find a thousand substances that did not allow him to form an incandescent bulb before he found the one that did.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 1:52:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Going back to the, the consciousness stuff and AI, I don't know if I'm convinced. Like, I agree with you that it will become so advanced that it will be indistinguishable from consciousness, but I don't know if it will actually become consciousness.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know how to parse that statement because if it's indistinguishable, which means some kind of observations are being done, I don't know how to ask a deeper level of questions that are not connected to observations. That's sort of what scientists do.

• 1:53:04Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  And you can certainly, you can certainly ask those questions, but I don't know how to...

• 1:53:14Danny Jones?

  Well, think about all the power it takes to power those AIs. And how many, how many watts does the human brain run on again? It's like five watts?

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Something like that. Something like that.

• 1:53:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's nothing.

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, compared to what they do. Well, you know, but part of the problem that you're talking about is this set of circumstances is tied up to the current evolution of AI. Namely, it's deep neural nets and large language models. There are other things that one could probably do. And who knows, since no one's actually figured out how to do the things, who knows how much more efficient they might be?

• 1:53:52Danny Jones?

  Right, that we may, that the public might not be aware of.

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  Not just the public, any man might not be aware. This might be around a set of ideas that no one has conceived.

• 1:54:02Speaker 02

  And to tell you the truth, I'm not very, well, how could I, I am, I am not, in quantum mechanics, the answer to a question, a question have two answers. And so I'm in that quantum mechanical state and thinking about, about consciousness and AI.

• 1:54:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  At the one hand, our current evolution of AI does not impress me.

• 1:54:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  Except that it does. And I don't know how to explain those two statements. I have, in my interactions with AIs, I've seen, I've done some things, and again, Steve and I had talked about in the ride over, he and I both have done things where you, in fact, I recommend this to your audience, go play with AI, go get an account or get a free account and learn what these things are. That would probably be the best offense we'll have against them.

• 1:54:55Danny Jones?

  Against them?

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, there's.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's actually, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say against them, against our making stupid mistakes with them, let me put it that way.

• 1:55:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, it seems like they're very good at helping people cheat on their homework and creating pictures that look real and, you know, crazy videos that look real and, you know, deep fakes.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  They could do a lot.

• 1:55:16Danny Jones?

  And that kind of stuff.

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  But they don't have any sense in my interaction.

• 1:55:20Danny Jones?

  Right, right. It doesn't seem like super intelligence by any stretch of the imagination.

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  Not from my interaction.

• 1:55:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Um, time travel.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  Not unless Einstein's wrong.

• 1:55:37Danny Jones?

  Not unless Einstein's.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  Until someone can find an error in his logic and equations, there's not going to be any time travel. You also won't have warp drives for the same reason.

• 1:55:46Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Can you expand that for?

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  So the point is that the best piece of science that our species has ever produced is something called the G minus two experiments, where you try to measure the properties of, the magnetic properties of electrons, because electrons also act like little magnets. This is a set of experiments that's been going on for over 50 years, and the, the answers that we get from calculation versus observation match to one part in a billion.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  There's nothing else in science that where you have this kind of measurement prediction. Agreement. In order to do this calculation, you have to use relativity. And so this suggests that at least a one part in a billion relativity is actually right. And if relativity is right, its mathematical structure rules out time travel and warp and warp drives. And that's why I say that.

• 1:56:50Danny Jones?

  What are the chances Einstein gets proved wrong?

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  What was it that Arthur C. Clarke said about predictions? That it's a activity that that is extraordinarily difficult to prove successful.

• 1:57:03Danny Jones?

  Well, your book is titled Proving Einstein Right, your most recent book, right?

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  So you pinned me on that. That title is indeed the title of a book. And let me, let me talk, since you bring that subject, let me talk about that because that was an amazing experience.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Many years ago, there was a book called Latitude by an author named Sobel. And it's a story basically about how a clockmaker, and I can't remember the gentleman's name, beat Sir Isaac Newton to constructing an accurate clock that the British Navy could use as it navigated the planet. It's a very interesting story. And so one of the things I got, I said, one day I'd like to love to write a book like that about something of science. And this is something, like I said, I, you can go back and Dava, Dava Sobel is her name. That's her first name, D A V A, Dava Sobel's book. And so for decades, I was like, gee, I really wish I could do something like that.

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  And so in, so I'm the author of five books, the one you mentioned is the last of the five. And it started while I was at Brown University.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  And I got this email message out of the blue from someone who had published novels successfully for decades. A lady named Kathy Pelletier. And Kathy introduced herself in the email message because she had seen me in a TurboTax commercial and thought I looked like a kindly gentleman. Now, she, her, her expertise was in fiction novels. She wanted to write a nonfiction novel. And so she approached me because since she was not a specialist in science and since I seemed like someone who was open to having such discussions,

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  she sent this email message. And I looked at her past writings, her past fiction writings, which I found impressive. And then we had some discussions about doing a book on something related to Albert Einstein. Now, her initial idea was not something I found attractive. But the final idea that came out of these discussions was to write a book about a band of astronomers. I like to say it's a scientific band of brothers who, over the course of a decade, struggled to make a measurement to show whether Einstein's description of gravity was better than Newton's description of gravity.

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  And that's what the book is actually about. It's about these eight astronomers as they go into war zones. I mean, they have adventures, basically. It's basically an adventure book about these scientists. And so the proving Einstein right part,

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  our publisher wanted that title because science can actually never be proved right. What you can say about science is that it has not been proven wrong. Science is about things that can't be. Science is about things that can be proven wrong. And the science we have is only about the things that have not yet been proven wrong.

• 2:00:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:25Speaker 02

  And so that title is not, not my favorite.

• 2:00:31Danny Jones?

  So when it comes to the use of physics for things like governments, the Pentagon, these type of things that get enormous unlimited funding, what sort of interest do you suspect, maybe you don't know, that like the Pentagon, for example, would have in basic physics, or breakthrough physics, or funding physicists at universities?

• 2:01:02Speaker 02

  Well, it always has the same interest. First of all, the Pentagon is not, is not the evil empire, which is something that many people in this society seem to think. I'm the son of a gentleman who serves 28 years in the US Army, part of my childhood, who took place on US Army bases. So you can say that, well gee, I was somehow programmed to have the thoughts that I have. But military culture in this country, up until recent times, is a very distinct culture that is deeply deliberative in a way that the general

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  society is not. It is also tightly focused on one mission, which in ordinary times is protect this country. The people that I have met who are leaders of the Pentagon are people I have enormous respect for, for their intellectual ability, not for rah rah rah and we build nuclear, but for the intellectual ability. And so, given what I have observed, I, you know, I'm sure that you can get people, maybe we're seeing examples now, who are not

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  Not the ones who who take this commitment to protecting the nation consistent with the Constitution of the United States seriously. Time will tell whether our country has entered such a phase. That's all I know.

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• 2:03:53Danny Jones?

  Well, it's certainly unsettling, given these Epstein files that have come out, where you have a window now into this invisible world that most people did not know existed, where you have power brokers running around the world, pulling the strings of governments and funding and profiting from wars. And at the same time, you have this guy who's wildly interested in physics, in parapsychology, all of this wacky stuff.

• 2:04:36Danny Jones?

  He's funding, funding science, funding the top scientists around the world. And none of us knew this existed.

• 2:04:47Speaker 02

  None of you knew this existed. None of you knew this didn't exist. So the point is, science.

• 2:05:01Speaker 02

  Is a two-edged sword. It can be used for good or can be used for evil. And if you actually look at the history of science, particularly in the Western tradition, and let's restrict ourselves there because that's where I'm most knowledgeable. Uh, Western science for, um, well, let me say it the way Einstein said. Einstein said that Galileo is the father of all science because he drummed it into our heads that, um, you don't get accurate descriptions of nature. I'm paraphrasing. You don't have an accurate understanding of nature unless you actually are in conversation with nature. This means that you can't go off and dream up the right answers.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  That's the short way to interpret what we're saying. So in the Western tradition, as I look from Galileo to Newton, science, uh, for a very long time, if you look at the scientists, they're wealthy people because ordinary people are busy trying to live.

• 2:06:01Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  And so this secret society sort of mentality is far deeper than just looking at the current. It is in fact, uh, the standard way that science evolved up until fairly recently.

• 2:06:16Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, yes, yes. I mean, you have, if you look at the, the creation of NASA, it was a, a group of Nazis, occultists and, you know, a Scientologist and, and Jack Parsons, all the stuff he was into. It's like, wow.

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  Yes, but this is, but my point is that this has always been the case. This is not something new.

• 2:06:39Danny Jones?

  Right. I, I just, I just, I, I can understand your deep knowledge of this. You, you may have, you obviously do have far more, um, a far greater grasp of the history of this stuff than, than 99% of people on the planet. So it's, it's kind of astonishing for people like me.

• 2:06:56Speaker 02

  It is scary.

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  It is scary, and the only thing that I can think that will allow us to avoid the doing of evil is that more people like you and more people in the general public become aware of the subtleties that are involved in maintaining a consistent application of the principles in the US, in the establishment of this country. If we don't do that, things can be lost.

• 2:07:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Are you optimistic?

• 2:07:34Speaker 02

  I was in England about a, in fact, it was a year ago, I was in England, I was in London, I gave a series of talks. And a journalist from a journal named Physics World came to talk to me, and part of our discussion was actually on this subject, am I optimistic? And what I, I told her two things. One, that many times in my life, I have been described as a hopeless optimist, and what that means is that if you ask me, is there hope, I will say, no, but then I will say, but if we don't have hope, there is no hope.

• 2:08:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  And the other thing is, as I look at the, look at my country, where, where it's not clear that people like me can exist in its future, if certain forces take control. So I'm very mindful of that, and if the country survives, as I have come to note over the course of my lifetime, it's going to take at least half a century to get back to this.

• 2:08:44Speaker 02

  But that's a big if.

• 2:08:47Danny Jones?

  Half a century to get back.

• 2:08:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there there certainly needs to be, you know how you when they do to the houses to get rid of the termites where they put the big tent over it?

• 2:09:01Speaker 02

  Yes, I've seen that many occasions.

• 2:09:03Danny Jones?

  Something like that where where it doesn't take out, it doesn't destroy the foundation, but it's like a very hyper focused rate like rate the raid spray that gets all the cockroaches out.

• 2:09:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, if we look back on just a little bit of history, the process that we're talking about.

• 2:09:21Danny Jones?

  Fumigation, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:09:22Speaker 02

  Fumigation is word indeed, but this process is something that we have seen in our world in the course of the last 100 years. The Second World War was an existential battle for the existence of traditional values that the West at least says that it has. And both the Nazis in Germany and the imperialists in China, I'm sorry, Japan, were clearly a challenge to these principles.

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  When they were defeated, however, and this is certainly well documented in both those societies, the West engaged what they call in Nazi was called denazification, and it was the fumigation that you're talking about. And so, yes, these things have happened before, and it will likely take something rather similar.

• 2:10:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, hopefully it doesn't take another country doing it to us. Hopefully we can do it to ourselves.

• 2:10:19Speaker 02

  That's exactly right, because I wouldn't trust anybody else.

• 2:10:22Danny Jones?

  You don't want to do that to bear at the end of a gun.

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  No, and I don't want anybody else to do it either.

• 2:10:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:28Danny Jones?

  It is pretty crazy to think how, I don't know if you've ever been to Japan?

• 2:10:33Speaker 02

  I have.

• 2:10:33Danny Jones?

  I've never been, but I've heard stories recently of people saying how insanely safe and clean the place is and like how your four year, a four year old could take a ride on the subway or on the train and you don't even have to think twice about it and not have to worry about any sort of crime. And it seems like our civilization is the opposite of that, and we're the ones that dropped two nukes on them.

• 2:11:00Speaker 02

  Yes. To answer your question about fifteen, no, even longer, twenty years ago, I took my family to Tokyo. It's their only visit. I've been to Japan, I think at least one other time. But my wife and our children, I was at a conference, and I would go to conference the day, and my wife and the kids say, oh, we're gonna go explore Tokyo in the subway. I'm like, go right ahead. Yes, it's insanely safe.

• 2:11:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  And that's certainly not who we are.

• 2:11:30Danny Jones?

  No. Another thing I wanted to ask you was, when it comes to, I was totally jumping from topic to topic here, but that's okay. When it comes to the search for life outside of our solar system, what, first of all, do you think there is consciousness, similar to ours, outside of our solar system? And two, do you think if there was, because there, obviously, there is a whole bunch of different planets that we've found that are Goldilocks planets that could inhabit intelligent life. Do you think it would resemble anything similar to us?

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, on the question of the possibility that it exists, I refer to what I regard as a wonderful statement by Carl Sagan. He said, if we're the only intelligent universe in the life, there certainly was a lot of wastings, wasted, wasted space, right? So, most scientists that I know believe that intelligent life likely exists outside of our solar system. In fact, it's very rare that I find a scientist who doesn't think that's a reasonable statement.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Do they have to be like us is a different question because when you talk about the Goldilocks planets, that assumes that carbon-based life forms similar to us. And I'm sure that the conditions that support carbon-based life are the only ones that can give rise to conscious beings.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  One of the chemical arguments about why that might not be true is to look at the table of elements. And the table, in the table elements, you'll find out that silicon is actually rather similar to carbon in its behavior. You just need to have higher temperatures. So one could perhaps think about silicon-based life. And there are other holes in the argument about whether it has to be carbon-based. There is a scientist at MIT, a female scientist, I can't think of her name. I heard her give a talks, maybe three or four years ago, about the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere.

• 2:13:56Speaker 02

  This is the idea that actually Carl Sagan talked about in his, in his.

• 2:14:01Danny Jones?

  In Jupiter's atmosphere?

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, in Jupiter's atmosphere. This is the idea that Carl Sagan talked about in his, what was this great, Cosmos? If you look very carefully, you'll find it. But this particular scientist and some collaborators were putting together observational and chemical data that where, it was the first time in my life, I heard someone give a rational explanation about why you should not rule out the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere.

• 2:14:34Speaker 02

  So, you know, the universe, uh-oh. Ah, Sarah, yes, this is the lady, thank you, Sarah Seeger, that's the lady. So you might want to have some of your audience spend some time looking at her work.

• 2:14:48Danny Jones?

  Okay, so this could be like microbial life?

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  Uh, yes.

• 2:14:54Danny Jones?

  Life has not been observed in any habitat other than Earth, which has an oxygen-rich environment, while Earth's atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen gas. Oxygen is essential for advanced living organisms. Some species of microorganisms do not require oxygen for metabolism, called anaerobic organisms, such as methanogens, which rely on carbon dioxide while releasing methane.

• 2:15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me stop you here and remind you that methanogens have been observed here on Earth in terms of volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.

• 2:15:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes. Interesting.

• 2:15:35Speaker 02

  So, given that our universe and Mother Nature are incredibly ingenious, I think it's kind of a short-sighted to think that only carbon-based life forms exist.

• 2:15:48Danny Jones?

  And what would evolution look like on these other Goldilocks? So if one of these Goldilocks planets was able to have similar conditions to Earth, it would not necessarily have the same gravity?

• 2:16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you're, again, pushing me to an area where I don't feel confident giving answers. I can, you know, can talk about my suspicions, my intuitions, but they're no more valuable than yours.

• 2:16:17Danny Jones?

  Sure. Well, thank you for doing this. This has been-

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  Thank you for the opportunity. Like I say, I don't do many of these things because a lot of people who do podcasts in particular have their own agenda and their own sort of spin, because they're trying to satisfy what they think their audience wants. And I perceived you as the exception that would allow me to speak about what I think, as opposed to imposing any pre-existing kind of matrix that those thoughts had to adhere to.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  Well, I greatly enjoyed this and I learned a lot. So I appreciate you making the trip and doing it.

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:17:00Danny Jones?

  Um, where can folks find out more about your stuff and the books you've written?

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. Just put in Jim, just put in, uh,

• 2:17:06Danny Jones?

  Just Google it.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, just do James Gates and then put, put James Gates in quotes and then put some word after what you're interested in finding.

• 2:17:13Danny Jones?

  And you'll find it.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  You'll find this lot. Although I don't do a lot of stuff like this, there's a lot of stuff online about me.

• 2:17:19Danny Jones?

  Yes, and you've been doing it for a long time. Lots of great documentaries, all kinds of good stuff.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  About thirty, about thirty science documentaries.

• 2:17:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the last one, uh, I, if you ask me anything about, let me talk about the last one.

• 2:17:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:31Speaker 02

  The last one is, um, is a documentary that was authorized by Stephen Hawking's family. And it's called Hawking, Can You Hear Me?

• 2:17:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:17:40Speaker 02

  You know this?

• 2:17:41Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, yes. You showed it to me before.

• 2:17:44Speaker 02

  Okay, and so I was very, very pleased to be asked to be part of that by the family because I actually met Stephen's daughter on more than one occasion. She's the person who reached out. And, um, the thing to me that was so interesting about that particular one was, uh, it sort of lifted this, uh, lifted this, um, this veil of, of, um,

• 2:18:15Speaker 02

  false worship of Stephen. I guess it was very much the person as opposed to the image that's out there. And I thought that was very important, that all of us are just people. And this is something that

• 2:18:30Danny Jones?

  Just human beings.

• 2:18:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And one of the things that mystifies me about this is that so many wish to worship other members of our species. And this was kind of undoing that.

• 2:18:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's interesting. Um, well, we have some Patreon questions for you.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  Go right ahead.

• 2:18:49Danny Jones?

  From our beautiful Patreon supporters that will go and do that. This will be the end of the podcast. So thank you again, Jim.

• 2:18:55Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. It's been very interesting, Danny.

• 2:18:57Danny Jones?

  Good night, everybody.

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