Hacking The Human Brain, Unlocking Our DNA, Unbreakable Diamonds & The Quantum Magician (EP. 5)

This week we break down four big stories—no PhD required. Reading “inner speech”: Invasive brain–computer interfaces record neurons in motor cortex and decode attempted vs. inner speech into words. Results from Stanford even generalize to simple symbols and numbers. Cool science, huge privacy questions, and a proposed “brain password” to keep users in control. What makes us human: UC San Diego highlights human accelerated regions (HARs)—genomic control switches (promoters/enhancers) that tune when and where genes are used. We revisit classic HAR examples and a new result connecting a specific HAR to brain development. Diamonds get an upgrade: Scientists at HPSTAR (Beijing) grow stronger lab diamonds with clear industrial upside—from cutting tools to power electronics—and potential to reduce harmful mining incentives. International Year of Quantum (2025): A fast retrospective on 100 years of quantum mechanics and how today’s quantum tech is reshaping computing, sensing, and materials. Hosts: Lester Nare & Dr. Krishna Choudhary Show: From First Principles Podcast

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello Internet, this is your captain speaking Lester Nare, joined by my co-host and our resident PhD as always Krishna Choudhary. This is from First Principles, where we talk about breaking science news and headlines, so that you don't need a PhD to understand it. This week, we're covering some fantastic stories, starting with "Thought Crimes Are Now Illegal", as scientists discover how to read our inner thoughts. No, this is not a line from Minority Report. It is a new study out of Stanford, followed up by "Finding Genes That Make Us Human", "Maybe We Actually Are Just Hairless Apes", but with a twist, as new study on genes from UC San Diego

• 0:45Lester Nare?

  is helping us understand what exactly makes us human. Third story, "Diamonds Get An Upgrade", this is the first story my wife has actually cared about, as scientists in China are now able to grow stronger diamonds from the Center for High-Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing. Hopefully, this means we can stop exploiting the continent of Africa, but more at 11. And we will round out with our first retrospective as the UN designates 2025 the International Year of Quantum Mechanics. So we'll take a look back at the last 100 years of quantum and review how it all started. This is from First Principles.

• 1:44Lester Nare?

  My friend.

• 1:46Krishna Choudhary?

  How's it going?

• 1:46Lester Nare?

  How are you?

• 1:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Pretty good.

• 1:48Lester Nare?

  Episode 5.

• 1:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we got some great stories today.

• 1:50Lester Nare?

  We are really excited about this first story. So the headline on this story coming out of Stanford, "Reading People's Inner Thoughts", meaning "Thought Crimes Are Now Officially Illegal", "As Scientists Discover How To Read Our Inner Thoughts", and this one is, we got brain-computer interfaces, brain implants, my deepest, darkest, private secrets are now accessible. Tell me what we got going on here.

• 2:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is a, this is a pretty crazy story. Inner thoughts, not just outer thoughts, not stuff that we're saying out loud. This is stuff that, you know, we think about. And we might not want anyone to know, right? Like, I'm on the freeway, I get cut off by a car. I see who it is, inner thoughts. Alright, inner thoughts that I don't want anyone to know. But, turns out with this new tech, people might have access to it. So, there are some pretty big ethical dilemmas.

• 2:52Lester Nare?

  Obviously.

• 2:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But, before we even get into that, let's talk about like, why anybody would want to do this. Okay? Um, we don't want to be like, uh, Jeff Goldblum, like, you never, you didn't think if you could, should, right?

• 3:05Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 3:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so, um, one of the real problems, um, in neuroscience is trying to understand the brain from a functional sense, from like, a causal sense of like, what brain regions are doing what. And on top of that, trying to get that understanding and try to help people with neurological disorders, with paralysis, with all sorts of like, neural and cognitive impairments, right? So, there are people who have severe paralysis, who develop it later on in life. Things like ALS or brainstem stroke, where they're completely left, um, without control of their body.

• 3:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And they have this kind of locked-in syndrome, you know, where they're like, totally conscious of the world, but they can't interact with it, they can't communicate with anything. And so, for something like that, you would like to have, um, a way for them to communicate. Okay? And that's fundamentally where this study is coming from.

• 4:06Lester Nare?

  That's the entry point for, for this research.

• 4:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, that's the entry point where it's like, okay, can we use all of these technologies that we have with brain-computer interfaces and try to help people that have these kinds of severe debilitating paralysis?

• 4:20Lester Nare?

  And what's interesting about this is, many people might understand or know about BCIs primarily because of...

• 4:28Lester Nare?

  The company started by Elon Musk Neuralink.

• 4:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah Neuralink.

• 4:31Lester Nare?

  Which is arguably, there are other ones out there, but just in the mainstream, probably one of the more well-known.

• 4:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Lester Nare?

  Like use cases.

• 4:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's also probably the most aggressive in terms of its technology.

• 4:42Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 4:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Lester Nare?

  Fair. And so it's a similar space that we're operating in, but the study was primarily starting on focusing on like the medical uh entry point as opposed to the matrix where we download jujitsu.

• 4:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. The point is not to to try and like download your inner thoughts. The point is to try to get these people with severe paralysis and ability to communicate with the world without having to resort to like really tedious avenues. Like before, people used to use eye tracking, cause like sometimes if you're paralyzed from the like spinal cord down, basically, you can still have control over your eyes. So you can use those eyes as a signal for like what this person is trying, like you can train that person to like say that, you know, certain eye movements mean something. Um, there's also this thing called like sip and puff switches, which are like, you, you have like two things, one where you sip, one where you puff.

• 5:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And then those are two different signals from which you can like control, like two different sort of electronic thingies.

• 5:41Lester Nare?

  You're basically communicating binary.

• 5:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then that binary can try and get translated to like higher order communication.

• 5:48Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 5:49Krishna Choudhary?

  But you can imagine it's like super tedious, right? And for somebody who maybe doesn't even have that kind of ability to like control their mouth muscles, then they're just totally out in the dark, right? So, one way, like the holy grail in this sort of thing is to bypass the entire active part of this communication and just go directly into somebody thinking what they're gonna say and then have it be said.

• 6:15Lester Nare?

  Think to action.

• 6:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, think straight to action.

• 6:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 6:18Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what this thing is doing. And it's actually pretty crazy, the amount of tech that's involved here. It involves like um first invasive electrophysiology, meaning like, like in the brain, you're putting in electrodes and you're listening to neurons.

• 6:33Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 6:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Inside the brain, not on the outside with a scalp, okay?

• 6:36Lester Nare?

  So this is not headgear that you can just put on?

• 6:39Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this is invasive.

• 6:40Lester Nare?

  You have to go.

• 6:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you gotta bore a hole and you gotta stick a electrode down there, okay? And then the second is, you've got this input of all of your brain. Signals from all the neurons that are in whatever cortex that you put the electrode in. In this case, it's the motor cortex. And then that input needs to get translated into the output communication.

• 7:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:03Krishna Choudhary?

  And this is where they used our favorite thing, artificial intelligence.

• 7:06Lester Nare?

  Alright, AI is back.

• 7:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. In in this case, it's it's it's a very specific artificial intelligence paradigm. It's really just machine learning where they're learning from the input. How do I map from input to an output kind of vocabulary and communication?

• 7:20Lester Nare?

  You have an input that's in brain language and we need to output it into action language.

• 7:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the study goes as follows. They used four patients that have this kind of debilitating paralysis. And what they did was they targeted the motor cortex and they stuck in these electrodes. Now, these electrodes can be anywhere from like a hundred little tiny electrodes. So electrodes are just like tiny little pieces of silicon that are connected to by wires. And when you stick it inside the brain, neurons are fundamentally electrical units of of like they're like cells that use electricity as their bread and butter. Okay, so whenever they talk to one another, they create these things called spikes, action potentials,

• 8:07Krishna Choudhary?

  which can be registered on your electrode as a tiny little spike. Okay, and then from that spike, these spikes last like, you know, like one millisecond to five millisecond. They're extremely extremely short. But there's like thousands of neurons in your in your brain that are like talking all the time. So you can listen to all of them and you can listen to this like aggregate activity sort of of like all the neurons and where they are like, you know, when you put in the electrode, there's gonna be there's gonna be multiple electrodes along some axis and you know, you know, from your computer when you plug it in, which electrode corresponds to which, and then you have some sort of like map along this axis of like where the activity is in each time bin.

• 8:49Lester Nare?

  In a time series.

• 8:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, in a time series kind of thing, you have like a hundred and let's say you have a hundred and twenty four little silicon dots, right? Then each of those hundred and twenty four silicon dots is gonna register some amount of activity. And then you can chunk it up. In this case, they chunked it up into about like ten millisecond to twenty millisecond time time series. So like that's it's at a hundred hertz, hundred hundred data points a minute, I'm sorry, a second. And then you you get like a hundred, a hundred. Data points a second.

• 9:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And then each data point is an array of like, what is the activity in each of the things?

• 9:24Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 9:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, there's this really high fidelity data.

• 9:26Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 9:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 9:26Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 9:27Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a lot of data.

• 9:28Lester Nare?

  The, the point is, we're getting a very, we're recording a, um, a, a wide spectrum of data points.

• 9:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:35Lester Nare?

  In time, at a very small time interval.

• 9:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:38Lester Nare?

  Which, which means that we're not looking at TV, uh, resolution from nineteen ninety. We have four K ultra HD as the analogy here.

• 9:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Lester Nare?

  In terms of how robust.

• 9:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:51Lester Nare?

  What the input data is that we're getting.

• 9:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, in this, in this sense, like EEG, like the stuff that's on your head, that stuff's like radio.

• 9:58Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Compared to this four K.

• 9:59Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 10:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like here, you're going into the brain. When you, when you work with like EEG and stuff that's on the brain, you've got this really annoying skull.

• 10:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Krishna Choudhary?

  That's in the middle of everything.

• 10:09Lester Nare?

  I was talking to someone about this the other day randomly, skull diffraction.

• 10:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Lester Nare?

  Like, so when you're trying to like read, like the skull is of this layer.

• 10:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the skull is this massive layer of bone and fat and skin. And so, you know, the neurons, they talk at, you know, one millisecond intervals. All of that signal is gonna get completely filtered out by the skull. You're not gonna hear any individual neurons or even chatter at that frequency.

• 10:32Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 10:33Krishna Choudhary?

  The skull basically acts like a, a low pass filter. Okay, all of the high pass signal, I mean, all the higher frequency signal just gets filtered out.

• 10:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 10:41Krishna Choudhary?

  So, you, you really need to go inside the brain to listen to this kind of data.

• 10:47Lester Nare?

  Maybe, uh, maybe, uh, God decided it wouldn't be a great idea for people to be able to read your thoughts.

• 10:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Lester Nare?

  The signals are just accessible outside of your head.

• 10:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Well, I, I don't, I don't even think God like, thought that we would, we would be getting this far, right? If God was behind evolution, he was just like, okay, we, the brain is great.

• 11:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, we need, we need to make the skull real thick. Because because the humans have no other advantage, right? We can't swim fast, we're not the strongest, but we got a good brain. Got a good brain. So then, you know, evolution was just like, I'm gonna encase this thing and we're gonna keep it safe. And then now we're so far advanced, we're like. Yeah, let's get in there. Yeah. Let's mess with the secret formula a little bit. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. But that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, so, so you gotta really get in, and that's actually what Neuralink is doing too, right? The innovation of Neuralink is like, they were just like, no, in order to really get these kinds of brain-computer interfaces, where I can think and then I'll post an Instagram story, right? Yep. I need to get inside the brain.

• 11:49Krishna Choudhary?

  So they also, they bore a hole in the skull, it's about the size of a, like a nickel, and then they have like a chip that gets implanted with a bunch of electrodes that go in, and then we're listening to individual neurons from there, right? So, so, the, the, unfortunately, to really get into the brain, you really just got to. Get a guide into the brain. Yeah, right, yeah. You really gotta get into the brain. Right, you gotta go to the source. Yeah. So, um, the way they trained this thing is kind of interesting, because like at the end of the day, okay, so now you have all this data, right? But it's just gonna be like. Right, it's effectively gibberish. Yeah, it's just effectively just like, like really high-frequency noise. If you plug it into a speaker, it's gonna be like, super high-frequency white noise, effectively.

• 12:33Krishna Choudhary?

  There's gonna be like, like little like, like pops, and that'll be your individual neurons, each electrode is doing this. So you need to, you need to find a way to take all that data and put it into words. Yep. In English. Yes. Okay, in this case, English, but. Could be anything. Could be anything. So, what they did was, um, the, the four participants, they were queued on a screen to attempt speech,

• 12:59Krishna Choudhary?

  and also imagine speech. Okay. So by attempt speech, I mean, you don't wanna say something, but you wanna imagine. Your tongue moving. And like, imagine your, your mouth moving to say something. And then imagine speeches like, like, the kind of imagined speech where I can just like read.

• 13:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:18Krishna Choudhary?

  I just read and I'm like, you know, there's like this inner narrative.

• 13:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Of like what I'm reading.

• 13:23Lester Nare?

  If you're one of those people that doesn't have an inner voice in your head, I'm sorry.

• 13:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess we can't read your inner thoughts.

• 13:29Lester Nare?

  You can't, you're protected from the, the thought police.

• 13:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Lester Nare?

  But it is a fun conversation in there sometimes.

• 13:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, sometimes not what I want people to hear, but you know. Um, so, so they had, so they had the participants like choose a strategy. So either you do, do this motoric inner speech where you like, try to sort of imagine auditory movements. And then there's like pure inner speech, which is just like, just imagine hearing the sound. Like imagine sort of reading the sound in some sense, things like that. And then, so now we've got, you know, in, in machine learning, all the time you want, um, the input and you want to match it to the output. And then the neural network in the middle is just gonna figure it out.

• 14:09Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 14:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the magic of machine learning, right? It's like, you don't actually have to tell the, the neural network how to figure it out because it'll do it by itself. Using the rules of back propagation and this like loss that they come up with.

• 14:21Lester Nare?

  I get what you're saying. We have two sides of the equation where we have known very.

• 14:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we have input and output.

• 14:26Lester Nare?

  Because you've defined what the output is by saying either of these two.

• 14:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're like, okay, imagine cat. They're gonna imagine cat, or they're gonna imagine saying cat.

• 14:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:34Krishna Choudhary?

  There's gonna be some neural thingy.

• 14:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the neural network is gonna be like, okay, that neural thingy maps to cat.

• 14:41Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 14:42Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:42Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, and then, and then it's gonna adjust its weights in the middle.

• 14:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:45Krishna Choudhary?

  To make that thing say cat.

• 14:48Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 14:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That's how, that's how neural networks train.

• 14:50Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 14:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Effectively.

• 14:51Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 14:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, so that's what they did here. And they use like, a bunch of different words. And at the end of the day, so the neural network itself, it's a recurrent neural network. This is like a predecessor of the transformer model, which is now very famous in chat GPT and all these large language models. A recurrent neural network model has this thing called a hidden state.

• 15:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is effectively like a memory, okay? And that's why these these recurrent neural network models are really good at trying to sort of remember and figure out time series data.

• 15:24Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 15:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, you can have these things called feed forward models, where it's just like one layer of neurons talks to the next, talks to the next, talks to the next. This thing has a feedback loop.

• 15:32Lester Nare?

  Instead of being just being a pure linear.

• 15:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Feed forward.

• 15:35Lester Nare?

  Right, feed forward.

• 15:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this thing has this back.

• 15:38Lester Nare?

  Back propagation.

• 15:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, back propagation is the the rule with which we set weights.

• 15:42Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Not to be confused with a backwards connection.

• 15:45Lester Nare?

  Understood.

• 15:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is like where it's going back into its own hidden state and trying to see, okay, did this output sort of make sense with this hidden hidden interstate? And so it's like, it has this like, like, sort of memory, you can say, where now we can keep track of temporal sequences, like time sequences, where it can keep track of the past.

• 16:04Lester Nare?

  What's what's interesting about the transformer model is they had to build memory as a separate component of what we now see in like the latest chat GPT five and the latest thinking models, where if you open the little dropdown, you can actually see that inner dialogue.

• 16:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:19Lester Nare?

  But what you're what you're, I think the point you're identifying is like.

• 16:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That's that chain of thought type thing, yeah.

• 16:24Lester Nare?

  Chain, yeah. Which is, but it's that's a different, it's a different thing. The with recurrent, with the recurrent model, you get that hidden state out of the box, you don't have to sort of build.

• 16:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yeah, it's like, it's like in it, yeah, yeah, there is, there is like a part of the neural network is a hidden state.

• 16:40Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 16:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 16:40Lester Nare?

  Right, yeah, makes sense. That makes sense. This, oh, okay, got it. Okay, so we have our, we we went into the brain, we wired it up with these electrodes. Uh, we have this machine learning model in the middle. And we have the output in the framework of how they define the input and output to train the model so that it could actually learn. What is this high frequency noise that's coming out of the brain actually actually mean?

• 17:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then the hidden, so, so this, this neural network model here, which is the recurrent neural network. It puts out like representations, okay? And then from that, then they have a language model that takes that and then puts it into language. And that language model, you know, they've, they've used a transformer on one of them. They've also used another type of language model. I forget the name. I think it's in here somewhere. Yeah, they've used the N-gram language model.

• 17:30Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 17:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they've also used a transformer language model. Um, and the loss function that they've used is pretty interesting because it's the CTC loss function. Where, um, you know, usually when, when it comes to losses. So the way the loss function works is it takes its guess. And then it takes what the ground truth is. And then it computes the difference between the two. And then it's like, oh, I was really wrong here. So I really need to start changing the weights. Because I'm, I'm going in the wrong direction. Or it's like, oh, I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer. I'm going to keep going in this direction. That's what the loss function and back propagation does.

• 18:03Lester Nare?

  Is it kind of like a scoring system?

• 18:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Effectively. It's a scoring system. That's why we call it a loss function. It's like, what is the loss between your target and your prediction, right? And then, um, they use this thing called CTC loss, which it's kind of a, a loose loss function, okay? What it does is give a little bit of freedom in terms of like what the, what the input was and what you're, what you're trying to predict. Because, um, with, with, with the kind of data that we're working with, it's at a hundred hertz, right? So it's like one every, um, ten to twenty milliseconds. But like, the words that are going to come out are not going to be at that speed. So you need some bit of looseness to try to match the input to the output.

• 18:44Lester Nare?

  It, it needs room to explore a little bit.

• 18:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. In time.

• 18:47Lester Nare?

  In time.

• 18:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And so, and so it was, it was like a really cool way of using like. Loss, but like not in this rigid format, which, which I thought was interesting.

• 18:56Lester Nare?

  That is interesting because it's maybe a little counterintuitive.

• 18:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Lester Nare?

  You want, the idea is. You want rigid control over the outputs of these systems.

• 19:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, usually if you're like, if if there's like a photo of a cat and you want it to be a cat, it's like, okay, no, cat is just map to cat, right? But this is like a sequence of stuff that we don't even know how it works, just like neurons talking.

• 19:16Lester Nare?

  And we need a little bit of discovery to allow it to have a little bit of discovery space.

• 19:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yeah, in in time, and that's exactly what this is, this thing is doing, and the results are are pretty interesting. So once they did this, they trained all this, and now now comes the time to test.

• 19:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so um first, it's like, let's just be, let's just, let's just do seven words, okay? Like, let's not do like thoughts. Like, why don't you think cat? And then we're gonna try to predict cat. Alright, they did that, um, attempted speech was at ninety-eight percent correct classification.

• 19:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 19:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so um, that's attempted speech, meaning like they thought, okay, I'm gonna say the word cat.

• 19:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And then and then the the the neural network was like, oh, I see cat being represented in the neurons.

• 20:00Lester Nare?

  Even with grade deflation, uh.

• 20:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Bro, that's an A plus.

• 20:03Lester Nare?

  That's still an A.

• 20:04Krishna Choudhary?

  That's an A plus. You know they don't have get grade deflation anymore?

• 20:06Lester Nare?

  We're not gonna have this conversation.

• 20:07Krishna Choudhary?

  No, that's for later.

• 20:08Lester Nare?

  Because it is, it is very, it is very upsetting.

• 20:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause I I was, I I got, I got wrecked.

• 20:13Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Anyways, um, inner speech was at seventy-two percent. So you can see that like if if they think, so if they think the word cat and we want to predict the word cat, that's at ninety-eight. But if they just think about the word cat, but they're not trying to like say it.

• 20:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 20:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Then it's at seventy-two.

• 20:31Lester Nare?

  They're not trying to try, when you're not trying to trigger the motor function of speaking the word.

• 20:35Krishna Choudhary?

  You got it.

• 20:36Lester Nare?

  It it is, it is worse, but when you add the element of the the thought plus trying to trigger the motor action of moving your mouth, moving your tongue, that almost, the fidelity for us to make the matches better.

• 20:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep, yep, now that, yeah, and that fidelity decreased when you start, when you went to a higher vocabulary, so like at fifty percent. Um, sorry, at like a fifty word vocabulary, that fidelity decreased from ninety-eight percent to like now we're getting down to like thirty-five percent. But it's still better than chance.

• 21:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's still way faster than some of the older stuff that we were doing, like eye tracking and all of these other like.

• 21:13Lester Nare?

  The pull, push.

• 21:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, all of that stuff. I mean, yeah, this is starting out. So you can imagine like, you know, maybe more electrodes, maybe a bigger neural network.

• 21:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:23Krishna Choudhary?

  With a larger hidden state.

• 21:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:24Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, uh, more time for training, more data for training.

• 21:27Lester Nare?

  More individual subjects that have these in them to have a wider spectrum of different.

• 21:33Krishna Choudhary?

  The, the, there's a variety of very straightforward, uh, implementations. Yeah, to like make this better.

• 21:39Lester Nare?

  To make it better. The fundamental point is that it's possible to get to a high level of efficacy in translating the input of an inner thought to the output and, and, and knowing with a level of certainty that that's the correct translation.

• 21:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 21:55Lester Nare?

  And so we're just, we have a dictionary with seven words in it and now.

• 21:59Krishna Choudhary?

  They're at ninety-eight and now we got a dictionary of fifty and then they upgraded to a dictionary of a hundred and twenty-five thousand.

• 22:05Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 22:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And it was still like, you know, way better than chance.

• 22:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:09Krishna Choudhary?

  It was out like, uh, twenty-six percent for inner speech, which.

• 22:12Lester Nare?

  Which means they're extrapolating from the, the map that was built with the seven.

• 22:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Lester Nare?

  To try to arbitrarily map to this whole.

• 22:19Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, no, no. They're not trying to, they, they built the map for each successive one.

• 22:23Lester Nare?

  Okay, got it.

• 22:24Krishna Choudhary?

  They did build the map for each successive one.

• 22:26Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 22:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but it's still.

• 22:27Lester Nare?

  It's still, no, no.

• 22:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Still.

• 22:29Lester Nare?

  First time.

• 22:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, first time, first time's pretty damn good, dude.

• 22:33Lester Nare?

  Pretty good.

• 22:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and actually I think the, um, the, they only built the map with the fifty word vocabulary and then they tried it on this bigger one.

• 22:40Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:40Krishna Choudhary?

  And because the things sound, the sound kind of similar, like it was able to guess new novel words.

• 22:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Pretty, pretty crazy.

• 22:47Lester Nare?

  Which is, that's very.

• 22:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Lester Nare?

  Very interesting.

• 22:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but I think the coolest test.

• 22:51Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 22:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Is the following, okay? So then they did something called the arrow recall test, okay? This is a pretty familiar test for like, um, psychological experiments where like you see arrows that are up, down, left, right, and things like that. Um, and all you're doing is seeing them and then thinking about the arrow and then the, this thing could say up, down. So even when they're not actively thinking, but they're like seeing stuff. This thing could pick up what they're like.

• 23:20Lester Nare?

  What the brain, yeah, right, right, right. Like, almost in this like sub, sub Rosa brain process that's happening when you're seeing something. It is even.

• 23:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And you're thinking about it, right? Oh, I see an up arrow and then this like thing is gonna up, up. I, I. And then, and then, and then, uh, the other thing they did was with numbers. They had like counting objects. And then the thing would put out one, five.

• 23:41Lester Nare?

  So it extrapolates beyond language.

• 23:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 23:43Lester Nare?

  Sort of like not like to like imagery.

• 23:45Krishna Choudhary?

  And crucially, these two tasks are not something that the neural network was trained on.

• 23:51Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 23:51Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what's insane. Okay. These two tasks, the, the neural network was trained on, these are the neurons.

• 23:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That are being activated.

• 23:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:00Krishna Choudhary?

  When this person thinks about certain words.

• 24:02Lester Nare?

  Words.

• 24:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, from that mapping, it could then take, oh, up, like it's seeing, the, the guy is seeing an up arrow. The guy is counting three objects.

• 24:11Lester Nare?

  That's scary.

• 24:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So like, because the neural representations.

• 24:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Are gonna be like, they've abstracted.

• 24:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:18Krishna Choudhary?

  To like, what is the brain look like?

• 24:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:22Krishna Choudhary?

  When it's in the space of thinking about three.

• 24:25Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 24:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Not even about trying to say three.

• 24:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:28Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, the, the idea of this thing.

• 24:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:31Krishna Choudhary?

  What does it look like in the brain? Right? So now you can see the ethical concerns.

• 24:36Lester Nare?

  No, no, no, this is, because very quickly, I mean, the only bottleneck to this right now is that you need brain surgery. Right? Which is, uh, uh, which is a, a high barrier.

• 24:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, which is its own like ethical thing, right? Because like, the only reason that these, um, that neurosurgeons were like, okay, I'm gonna do this brain surgeries. Because these four patients were like severely paralytic, right? And they volunteered to do this, but like.

• 25:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's gonna take a while for just like normal people to get.

• 25:08Lester Nare?

  Casual brain surgery.

• 25:12Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 25:12Lester Nare?

  This is very, I, I think what's so, what's so fascinating about this story is.

• 25:19Lester Nare?

  We all see these headlines, particularly with Neuralink being in the news where it's like, ah! But, but actually understanding what's happening.

• 25:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Lester Nare?

  And why it works.

• 25:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a mechanistic like thing, right? It's like you're, you, you get into the brain, you start listening to neurons, and then you start trying to decipher what those neurons are saying. How do we do that? It's by sort of training this input-output response.

• 25:45Lester Nare?

  And there's these underlying patterns.

• 25:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And then it starts making sense. It's like, oh, that's why it works. It's not like some, we can just read brains.

• 25:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:52Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, we have to learn how to read that brain.

• 25:54Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 25:54Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 25:55Lester Nare?

  And that's, I think, an important detail.

• 25:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Lester Nare?

  Um, because it's, it's not like, um, I, I think there's two things that are interesting. One, there's a process by which we learn how to translate. And then also, partial translation, which is like that word, the word input-output mapping they had.

• 26:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Lester Nare?

  Can also be used to, with some level of better-than-chance odds, make novel connections about what the brain may or may not be saying or thinking, even when you haven't mapped for those things explicitly.

• 26:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Lester Nare?

  Um, which means like, just increasing the amount of work being done on mapping the inputs.

• 26:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Bro.

• 26:32Lester Nare?

  Can have really crazy implications downstream, even if we don't map everything exactly. Which, again, it's, it's, for people who work with LLMs, it's, it's kind of very similar.

• 26:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it is, it is.

• 26:44Lester Nare?

  Like, in that, you know, it takes the whole corpus of the internet as text, as training data, but it can still put words together in strings that are not exactly mimicking what's from the training data.

• 26:56Krishna Choudhary?

  No, yeah, it's, it's novelty now. Because it's learned a pattern.

• 27:00Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 27:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Internalized, right? Within its, you know, billions and billions of parameters, right? It's learned something about it. And, um, yeah, the next question that's obvious to ask is like, this is a slippery slope.

• 27:14Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:14Krishna Choudhary?

  All right? What are we doing to like, control this, right? Because, I mean, even if you're like, even if you're that paralyzed individual, maybe you don't want all your inner thought, like you're talking to someone using this interface, right? Maybe you don't want all your inner thoughts to go out, okay? All humans are kinda... You know, fallible. No one's perfect. So, so, so how do we, how do we figure this out? And so they, they came up with a strategy. I don't know if it's a good one, but at least it's a strategy. It's, it's an interesting data analysis tool. It's something called principal component analysis, PCA. It's used a lot in these kinds of like high dimensional data sets. Whenever you're trying to analyze them. What you're trying to do is like, you have this really high dimensional data set. But frequently, if we're trying to like study like two different things.

• 27:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Then that data is going to fall on two different directions in this high dimensional space. Okay? And that's what PCA is. It's basically trying to reduce like, what, what's the direction with the most information? And then what's the direction with the next most information? So they did this PCA analysis for this inner speech and attempted speech. And what they found was that when you have attempted speech and inner speech, they all, they both fall on the same axis. Okay? It's just that the inner speech is like a little bit, like sort of the amplitude along that direction is less. But if you have intent, motor intent. Speech. Yes. Which is like, I intended to say that. Yes. That's on a different axis.

• 28:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So now they can, they can have this kind of password protection. Ah, interesting. Like in their brain. Where it's like, it's like, like the, the guy, the, the, the person can have some like passwords set that thinks along this direction. Yeah. And then that opens up the BCI. Yeah. To be like, oh, okay, now I can like. Say what he's trying to think. Right, right. But, and then he can go the pass, the, the other password and then the BCI will shut off. So shut off. So you can have like this learned dimensionality. Yeah. In someone's brain. And then the person can like have this password in his head that he thinks about. Yes. And then it's like, okay, now I'm going to speak. That turns off the access to the translation. Yeah, yeah.

• 29:28Lester Nare?

  We're talking-

• 29:28Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a cool like way of, I don't know.

• 29:30Lester Nare?

  We're talking about multi-factor authentication.

• 29:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, bro.

• 29:34Lester Nare?

  For your inner thoughts.

• 29:36Krishna Choudhary?

  For your inner thoughts, yeah. It's like a face ID.

• 29:39Lester Nare?

  Face ID in your brain.

• 29:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:41Lester Nare?

  Brain ID.

• 29:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude.

• 29:43Lester Nare?

  Hashtag TM, trademark, brain ID.

• 29:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:46Lester Nare?

  Heard here first.

• 29:48Lester Nare?

  That's actually a very clever, that's a clever-

• 29:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Lester Nare?

  Sort of solution to the problem that actually like lives within the control of the patient.

• 29:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the person, yeah.

• 29:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because, because at the end of the day, you're like, like, they need to be in charge.

• 30:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 30:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:02Krishna Choudhary?

  For this thing to be, make any ethical sense whatsoever.

• 30:05Lester Nare?

  I can't believe we're talking about role-based access controls for your brain.

• 30:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Bro, it's nuts.

• 30:11Lester Nare?

  Yeah. This is 2025.

• 30:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, there's risks, obviously, right? Like, you can, you can, you can hack it.

• 30:17Lester Nare?

  Yes, of course.

• 30:18Krishna Choudhary?

  You could just, I mean, all of this is gonna be in code.

• 30:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:21Krishna Choudhary?

  At the end of the day, right? Where the BCI is gonna choose to turn off because there's a bit of code that's like, oh, he went this way, so I'm gonna turn off. You just hack it and then it's like neurohacking, now you get like into the inner thoughts.

• 30:32Lester Nare?

  I mean, this is literally the, the, the three-letter agencies are gonna have, you know, neural hackers.

• 30:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Lester Nare?

  To, to-

• 30:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Easy.

• 30:39Lester Nare?

  To bypass your, your inner thought.

• 30:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then what started off as a medical tool.

• 30:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Is gonna turn into something totally different, like you could have like espionage.

• 30:48Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 30:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Surveillance.

• 30:49Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent, counter intel.

• 30:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, counter intel, oof.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah, no, it's-

• 30:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Interrogation.

• 30:54Lester Nare?

  Interrogation, yeah.

• 30:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 30:55Lester Nare?

  I mean-

• 30:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Like-

• 30:56Lester Nare?

  And, what do they call it?

• 30:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Do I have a plead the fifth?

• 30:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Inside my head?

• 31:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah, is that the Fourth Amendment, right?

• 31:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I plead the fifth.

• 31:03Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:03Krishna Choudhary?

  No, it's like, it's, it's, it's my right to not incriminate myself.

• 31:06Lester Nare?

  Self-incriminate, right.

• 31:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, right?

• 31:08Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 31:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Although, I don't know, the Constitution is kinda loose today, so.

• 31:11Lester Nare?

  I, this almost, it's, it's, it's very true, it's, and it's all-

• 31:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Lester Nare?

  I think the Fourth is the, the right to not having a legal search and seizure, but they can just search your brain.

• 31:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Lester Nare?

  And it's, like, there are so many implications.

• 31:22Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, there's so many implications, right? The founding fathers didn't know we'd be doing this bullshit?

• 31:28Lester Nare?

  The fact that we're talking about the constitutional implications of brain computer interfaces uh is uh crazy that we're talking about this in twenty twenty five.

• 31:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And I think I think like papers like this really start putting an impetus on us as a society.

• 31:43Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 31:43Krishna Choudhary?

  To start talking about this in a much more serious way.

• 31:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 31:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, we've had, we've had social media.

• 31:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And our data online.

• 31:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:52Krishna Choudhary?

  For, you know, twenty plus years now.

• 31:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And there's barely any legislation in Congress trying to deal with like data privacy rights.

• 32:00Lester Nare?

  Which I've actually worked on like public advocacy work to to push for data privacy laws.

• 32:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It it's nuts dude.

• 32:09Lester Nare?

  And it's it's it.

• 32:10Krishna Choudhary?

  It's been twenty years since everyone's been on Facebook talking about random nonsense.

• 32:14Lester Nare?

  And it's not that controversial of an issue and it's weirdly caught up in political dynamics of who's being censored more, which is like irrelevant to the point of data privacy, but that's.

• 32:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Lester Nare?

  The discussion has become now we're being more censored than you in online speech.

• 32:28Krishna Choudhary?

  It it. Yeah, and then and so now imagine like now we get into like just neural data being everywhere, right? This stuff is gonna get uploaded.

• 32:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, whose right is it? Like, we need, we need legislation, but like.

• 32:39Lester Nare?

  And now you can't sue people if they lose your data currently, and so you're just kind of SOL uh in terms of even getting any kind of remuneration or like financial compensation.

• 32:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Lester Nare?

  I mean, these are like really deep, complex issues.

• 32:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then we need to start having that conversation.

• 32:53Lester Nare?

  It's the same, this is the same issue that the AI space is having generally where like AI safety, people or people who advocate that we need to be like thinking about AI safety. I've been sidelined because we're in a global arms race to reach superintelligence.

• 33:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Lester Nare?

  And stuff like this on the neural side is gonna have the same game theoretic dynamics around nation states. Viewing the upside being more important than any of the safety allocation. So it's this, this is like really, really important.

• 33:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude.

• 33:24Lester Nare?

  And it might not feel like it impacts you every day, but people were talking about the social media implications. Twenty years ago.

• 33:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Lester Nare?

  We didn't listen to them.

• 33:31Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 33:31Lester Nare?

  And now everyone's upset about the way it works.

• 33:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Lester Nare?

  And that's because we didn't listen to the people talking about this and saying that this was gonna happen.

• 33:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, like twenty years ago on social media, I was just talking about like, oh, I'm going to my friend's house. And then now today, we're like declaring war and like fixing elections. Like, what's gonna happen here?

• 33:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, this, the, the implications are crazy and this is definitely gonna be an arena. We've touched on a couple of these uh, like neuroscience stories and they all kind of intersect at the same nexus, which is that the research progress is moving apace. The public understanding is not keeping up with where it is.

• 34:06Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 34:07Lester Nare?

  And the political will to even learn about it such that you could legislate for it.

• 34:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Lester Nare?

  Is, is.

• 34:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's just, it's not there, yeah.

• 34:17Lester Nare?

  It's zero.

• 34:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Everyone's thinking about the next election in two years, right? Uh, yeah, it's, it's super annoying, but like, but science is just moving forward and technology is moving forward because like these players, they're, they're just trying to push.

• 34:30Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 34:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And then.

• 34:31Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 34:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, you know, maybe, maybe Jeff Goldblum was right, like, maybe we do need to stop and think like, okay, should we be doing this and maybe if we should, like, what are the safeguards?

• 34:40Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? How are we, how can we make sure that this isn't gonna be like getting nasty?

• 34:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Quickly.

• 34:46Lester Nare?

  Cause it can get nasty very quickly.

• 34:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Lester Nare?

  Um, an incredible story out of Stanford, dark crimes are definitely illegal now.

• 34:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:55Lester Nare?

  Uh, we're already seeing.

• 34:56Krishna Choudhary?

  About to be.

• 34:57Lester Nare?

  We're already seeing that with ICE, so we're on the road.

• 35:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude.

• 35:00Lester Nare?

  Um, on that depressing note, we'll do a hard pivot.

• 35:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's not totally depressing, I will say, right? Like, I mean, the prospect of like giving, um,

• 35:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Paralyzed individuals the ability to, to communicate like is, is pretty awesome, but at the same time, yeah.

• 35:18Lester Nare?

  Especially for folks who either have someone in their family or in their network or their friends that are impacted by something like that, or your parents.

• 35:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Lester Nare?

  Right? As you get older, parents, you know, naturally we all have these neurodegenerative diseases.

• 35:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, like, if, if we get a, if we get someone like Stephen Hawking around today.

• 35:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:34Krishna Choudhary?

  They could be using something like this instead of like the computer interface, right?

• 35:37Lester Nare?

  Right, and, and, uh.

• 35:39Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, so, yeah, but again, we need to, we need to start having the conversation, come on.

• 35:44Lester Nare?

  And the scientists who did the study were.

• 35:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:46Lester Nare?

  And that's, and that's the point.

• 35:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they, they, they, they went into this like password.

• 35:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Type thing and they were like, and they, they also called for it.

• 35:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:53Krishna Choudhary?

  In their paper, they're like.

• 35:56Krishna Choudhary?

  This is clearly gonna be an issue. Right, like, we're thinking about the clinical aspects of it, but clearly this is gonna be an issue, so.

• 36:03Lester Nare?

  Especially geopolitically with, you know, the great war, power war with China. But we'll come to China in our third story. Uh, our second story is about finding genes that make us human. This is where I said, maybe we actually are just hairless apes. But this new study brings a little twist from UC San Diego. That's helping us understand what exactly makes us human. So the byline is, uh, uh, this UCSD team discover, uh, discovery comes from their investigation of human accelerated regions, H A Rs, sections of the human genome that have accumulated an unusually high level of mutations as humans have evolved.

• 36:45Lester Nare?

  And so, how is this new H A Rs, H A Rs? Why is this like, help me understand what it is and why it's giving us a better understanding of our evolutionary background?

• 36:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, um, I mean, it's, it's a fascinating question, right? Like, what is, what is it that makes us human? It's something that I think we've, it's probably one of the oldest questions ever, right? Like, we have, um, in, in Greek mythology, we have Pandora's box. Like this, this thing that gave us reason and whatever. And then, um, in all sorts of mythological traditions, we have that. In the 2001 Space Odyssey.

• 37:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:23Krishna Choudhary?

  You've got like the, the monolith that the apes touch and then all of a sudden they get reason and they get tools and things like that. So it's a fascinating question, what makes us human? Um, when the genetic revolution came along in the 1940s and 50s, when we figured out, okay, DNA is the blueprint for all of life and that's sort of telling mechanistically, the DNA sequence is telling an organism what proteins to create. That became the central focus, right? And there was this thing called the central dogma, which sounds just as bad as it is, okay? These biologists, they literally, they called it themselves. I don't understand them, okay? Like a dogma, okay, anyways, like, uh, the central dogma was you go from DNA. Yes.

• 38:08Krishna Choudhary?

  To mRNA and RNA. Mm-hmm. Which is this intermediary and from RNA you get to proteins, okay? And so, the thing that really matters is the DNA that makes proteins, okay? Then we got into big sequencing projects, okay? The Human Genome Project started. After the Human Genome Project was finished in like early 2000s. Then we had something called the Thousand Genomes Project. Because the Human Genome is like, they were just sequencing one, one dude's DNA. And it's like, probably a white dude, you know? And so, and then with the Thousand Genomes Project, now you get this diversity of human genomes. Yep. To see like, okay, how are the different human genomes different? Um, turns out not a lot, very few, very few differences.

• 38:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And then we started also sequencing, um, our closest living ancestor, uh, living relative. I shouldn't say ancestor because we had a common ancestor. Mm-hmm. Um, but our closest living relative, um, the chimpanzee. Um, so. So we 23 and made the chimpanzee. Yes, we 23 and made the chimpanzee and we also 23 made ourselves. And then now we compare the two. Mm-hmm. And surprise, surprise.

• 39:14Krishna Choudhary?

  There's very, very few differences. Hmm. Okay? So when people call me a chimpanzee, I can't really complain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're actually being unreasonable.

• 39:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but, but actually, they, they should be calling each other chimpanzee. Like, we, we're all part of the same, like, sort of ape family. Yep. And there's something like 98% similarities. Yes. Between the chimpanzee genome and the human genome. Um, so now we, we reached this kind of like conundrum. Where, where it's like, like, there's not that many differences and clearly we are like way different. Yeah, at the, at the genetic level. At the geni-, at the base pair level. There's not that many. Not that many differences, like 2%. But then when we get to this. When we, when we get to this, we're like, holy shit. Once we go through the mRNA that translates. Yeah. And proteins get created. Now I can read inner thoughts. Right. Right? Right, right, right, right. Okay, so how are we, what's the, what's the gap here? Right. So, there was a paradigm shift in sort of the mid 2000s.

• 40:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Where we started going away from the central dogma, okay? Because we started realizing that a tiny major, tiny minority of the human genome is actually coding for protein.

• 40:26Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 40:27Lester Nare?

  So we have these long set of base pairs.

• 40:29Krishna Choudhary?

  We have like billions of base pairs.

• 40:31Lester Nare?

  And only like some.

• 40:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And only a small, less than ten percent.

• 40:34Lester Nare?

  Is.

• 40:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Less than ten percent are coding for actual proteins.

• 40:37Lester Nare?

  Which was the whole po- point.

• 40:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Point of the central dogma, it's like, oh, DNA makes proteins, like, different DNA, different proteins. But here, we're like, different DNA, same protein.

• 40:45Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 40:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like, the changes are no longer in the protein coding part of the DNA. We're actually seeing that a lot of the changes are happening outside. In a part of the DNA that used to be called junk DNA, because we didn't know any better.

• 40:58Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Then we started thinking about genetics.

• 41:02Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:02Krishna Choudhary?

  How does it work? Okay? We started discovering things called promoters. Okay? So.

• 41:08Lester Nare?

  Not for the club, alright?

• 41:10Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 41:10Lester Nare?

  We're not shaking ass.

• 41:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Kind of, though.

• 41:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 41:13Krishna Choudhary?

  You know how a promoter?

• 41:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, finds hot girls?

• 41:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And then brings them to the club?

• 41:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:18Krishna Choudhary?

  A promoter on DNA finds the transcription machinery, like RNA polymerase, and brings it to transcribe a segment of DNA into RNA.

• 41:29Lester Nare?

  I can't believe we're talking about janky promoters and DNA.

• 41:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, they're, they're, they're just as, they're, they're probably as smelly and as shady, you know? They, they sit right next to the, the bit of the DNA, right? The club is right here, and then they're sitting right next to it, and they're like, come on. And then the guy comes, and then, and then RNA polymerase goes and like, and, and transcribes the bit of DNA. So that's what a promoter does. That thing is outside of the part that's making a protein. But it's extremely important in terms of getting that protein to be made.

• 41:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Because if you got a club without a promoter?

• 42:02Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 42:02Krishna Choudhary?

  No hot girls.

• 42:03Lester Nare?

  No, it's a bad club.

• 42:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Nobody wants to go.

• 42:04Lester Nare?

  No one wants to go.

• 42:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Alright, and then the dudes don't wanna spend two hundred dollars on a fucking, you know, Smirnoff vodka. You know?

• 42:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 42:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so, so you need the promoter to start bringing in the transcription machinery?

• 42:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Krishna Choudhary?

  To actually translate this thing.

• 42:18Lester Nare?

  So, so the DNA defined, some, ten percent defines what proteins need to be created.

• 42:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, less than ten.

• 42:23Lester Nare?

  Less than ten.

• 42:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Even, yeah.

• 42:25Lester Nare?

  But there's this intermediary function, which is these promoters, that are actually who brings all of the stuff together to

• 42:33Krishna Choudhary?

  To actually make the transcription happen. On top of that, that's not it. The promoter is not it. There's also something called an enhancer.

• 42:40Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 42:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Which can be very far away. The promoter usually sits right next to the, the thing that you wanna transcribe, right? Cause the, the Lego block comes, the RNA polymerase comes, binds to the promoter, the promoter is like this way. And then it goes ta ta ta ta ta, and then it like makes the mRNA, the mRNA then goes outside and becomes a protein. Right? You've got an enhancer, which is kinda like a volume control on the promoter.

• 43:02Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Which, now this enhancer can be very far away on the, on the, on the bit of DNA.

• 43:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 43:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, the DNA can like fold such that an enhancer that was really far away is gonna come closer and then like start promoting the, the, the transcription of this thing. So the enhancer acts kinda like a volume control.

• 43:20Lester Nare?

  Got it, got it.

• 43:20Krishna Choudhary?

  On, on this gene.

• 43:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 43:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And it has, eh eh, and, and so you've got all of these sort of different machinery.

• 43:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 43:27Krishna Choudhary?

  That was, that's found in the junk part of the DNA, the part that doesn't do any protein synthesis.

• 43:33Lester Nare?

  Which previously was thought to be not relevant.

• 43:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It was just like a relic.

• 43:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, people thought, oh, it's just like there, cause like, you know, may- maybe the, the, the genetic machinery is like lazy and didn't get rid of it.

• 43:46Lester Nare?

  It was the appendix.

• 43:47Krishna Choudhary?

  It just wants to like, it, we're just hoarders. We're like DNA hoarders.

• 43:49Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 43:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and we're not getting rid of the junk DNA. But it turns out all of this stuff is important and, and might be the most important for trying to figure out why we are human.

• 43:59Lester Nare?

  In, in, in retrospect, it was probably naive to think that way.

• 44:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Yes. But I can't fault them because like, you don't know what the hell, like, you know? At the time, even getting that far was like, dude, we're like, like, I can make, eh, like insulin.

• 44:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:14Krishna Choudhary?

  This is insane.

• 44:15Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 44:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, I, I can make human insulin in a bacteria. This is, whoa, whoa, whoa, holy, like, you know?

• 44:20Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 44:21Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so I, yeah, eh, they're, they're doing the best they can. Um, but the, the question now shifts.

• 44:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:27Krishna Choudhary?

  About like, what makes us human? What is, there's no longer this like mon- like black monolith, one gene.

• 44:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 44:34Krishna Choudhary?

  To rule them all.

• 44:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, the question shifts from what are the genes that make us human to what is the machinery and the control mechanism?

• 44:43Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:43Krishna Choudhary?

  That affects? The already existing genes. That make us human.

• 44:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's where these human accelerated regions come in.

• 44:52Lester Nare?

  Uh, okay, because the idea here, I I think I see where this is going, is that the machinery.

• 44:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the thing that's changing.

• 44:59Lester Nare?

  That's the thing that's changing that has created the diversion between us and our nearest. You know, cousins, the chimpanzees.

• 45:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. The nearest existing cousins. The, for human accelerated regions, now that we have like this template of chimpanzee DNA, we've got a, we've got the human DNA. Okay, now we can compare and contrast, right? So, human accelerated regions are regions that have two characteristics. Okay, the first characteristic is, this region is conserved across vertebrates. So it's found in chickens, it's found in like all sorts of stuff, not just like humans and chimpanzees, but like all over the place. Meaning, this part is just like super important. For all like mammals and like vertebrates and like, like life, big formed life in general, okay? The second characteristic is, between chimpanzees and humans, there's been hella way more mutations than there should have been.

• 45:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Over the past like six million years or ten million years that we've had, since evolving. Whatever snippet of DNA there is, there's way more changes than there should be by chance.

• 46:02Lester Nare?

  So, as an analogy, I'm gonna make a video game analogy.

• 46:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Lester Nare?

  The first set you talked about is like buying the game, and then the second set's like the expansion pack.

• 46:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Lester Nare?

  And like we have the expansion pack that has like extra levels.

• 46:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, all the, yeah, yeah, but the game is like, has to be really good that everybody has it.

• 46:18Lester Nare?

  Has it, right, yeah, everyone has the game.

• 46:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Lester Nare?

  But only we have the super cool expansion pack.

• 46:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like we bought all the skins, you know?

• 46:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so this particular, so human accelerated regions, they sort of started becoming a thing in the two thousands.

• 46:34Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 46:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the first one, H A R one, um, was a gene that was identified and it was like, there was this correlation between the, the gene. The presence of that gene and its expression in brains. So we're like, oh, okay, like this human accelerator region is like affecting. Brain development, nice. There was another one, H R two. That one became correlated with the opposable thumb. We're like, ooh. Notice, there's no protein. The opposable thumb. But there's a switch. That's telling whatever protein is doing this to be like, eh, make it a little bit longer and make it like a little bit over there, you know? Like this, like chimpanzees have thumbs. But they're not like so nice.

• 47:16Lester Nare?

  They're like, make ours pretty.

• 47:19Krishna Choudhary?

  And then that same gene is also doing like foot evolution, like ankle, so that we can be bipedal. So, so now you start getting this like, you know, correlation between human accelerated regions and human characteristics.

• 47:31Lester Nare?

  So, just to make sure I'm tracking on this, because this is so fascinating, the machinery that you're talking about. Right, so like the insight, one of the key insights here among many is that. The machinery that's dictating the protein synthesis. Has different instruction manuals. In these, particularly in these H A Rs.

• 47:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, these H A Rs are the sort of instruction. On how to use that protein, how much to use.

• 47:57Lester Nare?

  Got it. Got it, right.

• 47:59Krishna Choudhary?

  When to use.

• 48:00Lester Nare?

  When to use. And, and so the, one of the, what, what the, what's interesting is then like, that totally changes the picture of trying to then now map. How, even though ninety-eight percent, ninety-nine percent of the base pairs are similar. The differences in this machinery are not only great in that first set, which all vertebrates have, et cetera, but also in the second set where there's a difference between. Us and chimps have this special set of stuff. But ours is even more.

• 48:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Even more extra special, yeah, yeah, it's, there's, there's a bunch of mutations in these H A Rs. We've got three thousand H A Rs. Okay, but the problem until now, and this is where the study is like, I think, I think it's a beautiful, um, exercise in science. Um, the reason for that is, so before like H A Rs were pretty hard to nail down what is actually happening. Because frequently they affect brain development. Brain development and like just, just brain in general, it's like really hard to study. Okay, without the current tools that we have now, this kind of study would only be possible in like today's world.

• 49:01Lester Nare?

  Because of the other tools.

• 49:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because what, what, because all of the stuff that they did to go from correlation, which is what I told you about, oh. H A R two opposable thumbs, it's kind of related to now they've got like, they've done this, a suite. Of experimental protocols that can cause it, like give causation links.

• 49:23Krishna Choudhary?

  H A R one twenty-three, which is what they're studying here, all the way to what is happening in the brain. Okay, and that's what we're gonna go through.

• 49:32Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 49:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so first. You've got to identify H A R one twenty-three, right? How do you do that? Well, um, so it's a four hundred and forty-two base pair segment. And there were nine um differences. Might not sound like a lot, but it's actually pretty significant, okay? So the the ma- the mammalian mutation rate is about like ten to the n- one part in ten to the nine per year. So one part, like one in a billion base pairs per year. Gets mutates, right? So we've we've the divergence is maybe, let's say, six million years. So um six million times divided by one billion, that's gonna give you um six divided by a thousand.

• 50:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so for every thousand um base pairs, we should have about six changes.

• 50:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Now, which means for four hundred and forty-two nucleotides, we should have about two or three. We've got nine.

• 50:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like statistically, now you can start doing this math.

• 50:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, where it's like, hmm, we're expecting two or three. This isn't four or five, this is nine.

• 50:37Lester Nare?

  It's a three.

• 50:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Just three times, right? Which means like, and because this is a nice binomial distribution, we can like calculate the probability for that. And it's like, no, this is not by chance. Like, this is sort of like evolution kind of directed. H A R one twenty-three to change in this direction.

• 50:54Lester Nare?

  You know who's gonna perk up when you hear that?

• 50:57Krishna Choudhary?

  What?

• 50:57Lester Nare?

  All the people, all the alien people.

• 50:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, really?

• 51:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah, cuz they're because because the key, the core story is we were genetically engineered by the aliens, and that explains.

• 51:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, right.

• 51:09Lester Nare?

  In our divergence in our evolution.

• 51:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, well, if aliens are natural selection in in some abstract way, I don't even know, then then I guess it makes sense. Because we are genetically sort of engineered, but through a process of natural selection, right? It's just like those who got this were like way smarter, I guess. And so they were like, and then back then, there's no like society or ethics. From the other, the other people just like die.

• 51:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then, you know, like now, it's like, okay, but like, back then, so th- th- this is how you would have some kind of genetic drift like that, right? Like those who are smarter, procreate more, and then you get genetic drift in this direction. So then, this is how H A R one twenty-three starts sort of.

• 51:49Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 51:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Coming in, okay? So, first thing they gotta do is establish what is HR123. Okay, so they um, the, what they did was they, they do this thing called a luciferase assay. Where they attach it to um, they, they basically attach it to a plasmid that has this luciferase protein. And then the HR123, when it gets, when it gets activated, it's gonna activate the luciferase and then it's gonna glow. And then, so now you've established it as an enhancer, okay? Okay, so now it's like, okay, HR123 is an enhancer.

• 52:24Lester Nare?

  Not a promoter.

• 52:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Not a promoter, it's an enhancer.

• 52:26Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 52:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, um, so we've, we've proven that it's enhancer activity.

• 52:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna say, okay, what does, where does this enhancer express itself? Okay, this one's interesting, so um, they use something called mouse trans- transgenic enhancer assay.

• 52:46Lester Nare?

  Oh my god, did you see this story?

• 52:49Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 52:49Lester Nare?

  About transgenic mice?

• 52:51Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 52:51Lester Nare?

  In the news? If you can imagine.

• 52:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 52:55Lester Nare?

  Uh, there's been a lot of defunding of government programs.

• 52:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, no way.

• 53:00Lester Nare?

  And one of the programs that got all these headlines was, uh, the, the woke left is trying to make mice trans. Because they didn't know what the words trans-

• 53:11Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, no.

• 53:12Lester Nare?

  I swear to god.

• 53:13Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 53:13Lester Nare?

  We'll put, we'll put it up in the, we'll put it up in the video, yeah. This was a whole thing, like, maybe two months ago, three months ago. So, this does not mean that you're making mice trans.

• 53:23Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, transgenic meaning like they're genetically altered. They're, they're, they're like lab-specific mice that are not found in the wild.

• 53:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And um, they couldn't care less about their-

• 53:37Lester Nare?

  I didn't mean to get you off your- But, I mean, the, the government is now literally not allowing funding for studies that involve doing stuff with transgenic mice, which means-

• 53:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, that's gonna cripple-

• 53:46Lester Nare?

  I know, like, I know.

• 53:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, genetic studies, though.

• 53:50Lester Nare?

  I know.

• 53:50Krishna Choudhary?

  That's gonna like-

• 53:51Lester Nare?

  I know.

• 53:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, this is like a bread and butter for a lot of these labs.

• 53:53Lester Nare?

  I know. Please continue.

• 53:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Alright anyways, back when we had the ability to do this. Think about this, this is actually like insane how, how, how we can do this. So we take, um, we take a, a mouse like, um, embryo.

• 54:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and then we're gonna stick in this H A R one twenty-three with the, with the, with an assay. That, that's gonna make it like whenever this thing gets expressed, this stuff is gonna glow.

• 54:17Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, now, that embryo has, um, your promote, your enhancer, sorry, H A R one twenty-three. Um, you're gonna stick that into a mom, and then they're gonna make babies. Then you can DNA, um, sequence the babies to make sure that they have that.

• 54:34Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 54:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And then whatever babies that have that, then you create more of those. And then now, what you can do is, when the, the, the young mice, the prenatal mice are developing, you can, you can halt their development, and then you can look for where in their brain, this particular enhancer is being expressed.

• 54:57Lester Nare?

  Oh my, that's, that's, okay, yep.

• 54:59Krishna Choudhary?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 55:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can only do this with like, with like now modern day like technology.

• 55:04Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 55:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's insane.

• 55:06Lester Nare?

  Because now what you're saying is, where it's being expressed in the brain is allowing us to create that, that, that through line you talked about earlier, from the beginning of just the identification of this area, to how is it actually, uh, acting in the development process of its end destination?

• 55:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 55:25Lester Nare?

  Which is the brain in this case.

• 55:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and, and what they found was, they could, so, here's what we can do. We can put in the human version, and we can also put in the chimp version, and see what is the difference.

• 55:37Lester Nare?

  Uh, so now we can actually, at the end of the, of the road.

• 55:40Krishna Choudhary?

  We can see where, where is the, the chimp version of H A R one twenty-three going? And where is the human version going? And the human version is going in the forebrain, and the midbrain?

• 55:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 55:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And the chimp version is going in the hide brain, from just nine base pair differences.

• 55:54Lester Nare?

  And so the the the point here being from just this nine base pair difference between us and chimpanzees.

• 56:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It's targeting different regions in the brain.

• 56:03Lester Nare?

  And how it develops such that like thi- this gets back to the whole point of how is it that a small difference can have such an outsized impact. It's because it's fundamentally changing over evolutionary time. What at like what it actually is developing.

• 56:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Lester Nare?

  Particularly like if we talk about the brain use case.

• 56:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in this case, it's like the forebrain and that's like sort of where like higher mental capacities. So you know, now we're on to something.

• 56:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And and that's what I meant by like this, the study is really cool in in terms of all the techniques that they used.

• 56:34Lester Nare?

  And compounded on top.

• 56:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And compounded on top and they weren't done. Okay, so after that, then they get um embryonic stem cells.

• 56:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 56:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, human embryonic stem cells, which is basically like a model for um embryonic development in a Petri dish. You can you can now sort of like get and embryonic stem cells are basically cells who don't know who they are. Okay, they haven't had their um you know, identity um you know, teenage years where they're like, I'm gonna be Goth. You know, or like, I'm gonna be a skin cell, I'm gonna be an I'm gonna be, you know, a bone.

• 57:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, these are all cells that that are still trying to figure out.

• 57:11Lester Nare?

  You're right.

• 57:12Krishna Choudhary?

  What they're gonna be. So now, this is where we can put in um HR123 and see what's gonna happen. Okay, so here what they did was, you know, these human stem cells already have HR123, right? So you can go in with CRISPR Cas9.

• 57:28Lester Nare?

  Ah, CRISPR strikes again.

• 57:30Krishna Choudhary?

  CRISPR strikes again, this is something that we can do now. We can take CRISPR Cas9 and we can cut out.

• 57:36Lester Nare?

  The the nine base pairs.

• 57:37Krishna Choudhary?

  The the the not the the entire gene.

• 57:39Lester Nare?

  The entire.

• 57:40Krishna Choudhary?

  The the 442, right?

• 57:41Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 57:42Krishna Choudhary?

  We can cut that out and say, okay, what's gonna happen? And we can, instead of cutting it out, we can also put in the chip version. Be like, what's gonna happen? And what you see is that, um, so th- these, these, these cells, you can induce them to become sort of brain cells. But those that don't have the human version of that HR123, they don't make, um, the precursors to neurons as well as the ones that do. These are called like neural, um, neural progenitor cells, I believe. NPCs.

• 58:21Lester Nare?

  Not, not, not that, not, not those.

• 58:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Right when I say that, yeah, but like in this case, these, these are like the baby neurons.

• 58:28Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 58:28Krishna Choudhary?

  That become our brain.

• 58:30Lester Nare?

  It's the prerequisite.

• 58:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and so what they, what they found was in these stem cells, you took out the HR123, you could no longer get, um, you can, you can no longer generate neural neurons and glia with as much fidelity as you could before.

• 58:44Lester Nare?

  Which is like.

• 58:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Now it's making sense.

• 58:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 58:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's like not all, like in, in the mouse brain, it was like different regions. Now it's like, this thing also is promoting, um, neurons and glia in a specific way.

• 58:56Lester Nare?

  Because this goes back to the enhancer can go, like can sort of.

• 58:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 58:59Lester Nare?

  Impact what the promoter does.

• 59:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Is still there. All of the proteins are still there. That's what's key here.

• 59:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:04Krishna Choudhary?

  All of the proteins are still there. All we've done is like, take out the volume control and put in a new one. And the new one's just like shitty.

• 59:11Lester Nare?

  Right. And if it's, if it's, if it's dialed to 11, it works.

• 59:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Lester Nare?

  But if it's dialed to four, it doesn't work as well.

• 59:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then you can take these cells and then you can do something called, um, RNA sequencing, where you try to figure out what are the, um, what are the RNA that's being expressed?

• 59:27Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 59:27Krishna Choudhary?

  What are the RNA that's being transcribed from the genes?

• 59:29Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 59:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can see that these cells are sort of getting halted at some like intermediate state. They're not going all the way fully to become these like NPCs that are then gonna become neurons.

• 59:39Lester Nare?

  On the chimpanzee side, when we, when we, yeah, yes, yes.

• 59:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And then, um, so then now it's like, now the next thing they did, um, this is all in vitro in a petri dish. So they've done in vivo studies with the mouse.

• 59:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Now in vitro, the other thing they do is this thing called Hi-C chromatin capture, which is sort of a way of mapping out, um, how the bulk DNA is working. Right? Cause like I told you, this enhancer is like, kinda like. A little bit far away from where the protein is.

• 1:00:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:08Krishna Choudhary?

  But you can now see and visualize like

• 1:00:10Lester Nare?

  How it folds.

• 1:00:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, like the proximity of like this thing to that. And, and, and see that, oh, this thing really is regulating this particular gene called H I C one. Um, which is called, um, hypermethylated in cancer one. Um, it doesn't have to do specifically with cancer. It actually has to do a lot with brain development. But because of historical reasons, it was first found in the nineteen nineties. As having to do something with cancers. And then they're like, we're gonna name it hypermethylated in cancer one. Um, so now that's, that's just like what we're stuck with. Um, but like, but this, this, this brain, this, this, um. H I C one is like involved in um, brain development.

• 1:00:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you can see that this enhancer is going and like affecting that guy.

• 1:00:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:52Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:00:53Lester Nare?

  What, what, what's interesting about kind of how you're talking through this is at each stage of the process, from the DNA all the way through the like protein synthesis. When you're talking about the promoter, the enhancer. Uh, and then like the actual process of the proteins getting generated and how they form. They basically put systems or tools or machinery at each of those stages. To be able to monitor and actually track what's happening with different switching out.

• 1:01:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's decades and decades of research of like other people creating these tools. So now that they have this suite, they're just like throwing the whole.

• 1:01:35Lester Nare?

  Right, right. They took the whole toolbox out and said, we're gonna look at everything.

• 1:01:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're gonna do the whole thing. And then finally.

• 1:01:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, this is when it gets crazy. Finally, they're like, okay, so we've established all of these causation links between like development and, and the thing. Does it actually impact cognitive ability? You can only test that with behavior. So they literally raised knockout mouse that don't have this.

• 1:02:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:02:06Krishna Choudhary?

  This, this, um, this gene.

• 1:02:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, or this enhancer.

• 1:02:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they compared it with, um, the ones that do.

• 1:02:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And. This is what's crazy. So the mice, so they both, they're fine. They grow up. Yes. They're fertile, they can have babies, right? So which means that like, it's not, again, this is not a protein. If you took out the protein, this thing would be. Right. But this is a volume control on. Right. On some, it's an enhancer, it's regulating the proteins, right? So the mice are fine, whether it's wild type or whether it's knockout. But

• 1:02:45Krishna Choudhary?

  the um, the knockout mouse could also learn just fine. Like um, there's this thing called the barnes maze, which is a, a standard test. Um, where, where you stick a mouse in the middle and then there's a bunch of tunnels that go out, okay? And then there's like one tunnel that leads to the cheese. Right. Okay, so it learns like this is the tunnel that leads to the cheese and he goes down this tunnel, several tries, he's like, okay, this is the tunnel. And then they know and remember. And then they know and remember. Everyone could do that, just fine. There's also this thing called the Morse water maze, which is um, where like you put them in water, that's like opaque, so it's like kinda milky, so they can't see anything. But there's like a platform that's hidden just underneath the water, so they don't know where the water is. But looking at the visual cues, they can be like, oh, the platform is over there, they go over there, they get a little bit of cheese. Okay?

• 1:03:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, they can do those fine. But now, what if we do a reversal test where we change where the platform is? Or we change which tunnel has the cheese? Wild type might, might, they're gonna go down, they're gonna be like, the fuck, where's the cheese? Yeah. And then come back, they're gonna try everything else, find the one and then relearn, immediately be like, okay, this is the new one. Yep. Um, same with the Morse water maze, you take out the platform, they go swim over there, they're like, where's the platform? It's not here. They keep swimming, they find the new platform. They're still able to figure it out. They learn pretty quickly that this is the new platform, they go there, they get the reward. The ones without HR, HR one twenty-three could not do that. Once they learned it, they were just stuck in that behavior. This sort of relearning paradigm. Now, it's kinda dangerous to like take this. Sure.

• 1:04:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And extrapolate to like what humans are doing for learning, right? Because the mouse brain is different, but what, the point of this thing is that like, it's not impairing the brain even. Right. But it's impairing like specific qualities when it comes to learning. Right.

• 1:04:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:04:24Lester Nare?

  And learning behavior.

• 1:04:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's like very specific.

• 1:04:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:27Krishna Choudhary?

  So imagine what it's doing in the brain of of a human being, right, compared to a chimpanzee.

• 1:04:32Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's it's it's an incredible paper because it's like going all the way from the bioinformatics of, okay, we've identified using mathematics and using like this kind of matching. That maybe this is something we can target. Now, all the way to, we've got all of these like cell and developmental techniques that we can. Like, put it through.

• 1:04:54Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And then also now this in vivo study of like behavior.

• 1:04:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like the full vertical integration.

• 1:05:00Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Of of this.

• 1:05:02Lester Nare?

  And you can see where the diversions happen at each of those specific steps.

• 1:05:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Lester Nare?

  In that process.

• 1:05:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's it's pretty crazy.

• 1:05:09Lester Nare?

  Uh, which is like, it's more than pretty crazy.

• 1:05:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um. It's it's just such a cool, like, yeah, story. It's like, they they really like closed the book. They wrote every chapter.

• 1:05:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Lester Nare?

  That's actually fascinating. I mean, that's so, I mean, I imagine, just just like, we talk a lot about about experimental design.

• 1:05:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I love experimental design.

• 1:05:29Lester Nare?

  And it's, I think.

• 1:05:30Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, how do we know what we know? Well, this is how we know.

• 1:05:32Lester Nare?

  This is how we know what we know. And I think it's so important to talk about the experimental design because, again, people they, people don't have context or understanding. For like, how deeply complex the process is to get to this headline, which is.

• 1:05:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Lester Nare?

  You know, humans are ninety nine percent genetically identical chimpanzees. How does the other one percent make us different? It's not intuitive when you think of that one percent in the headline.

• 1:05:56Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:05:57Lester Nare?

  That there's all this sort of first principle of background.

• 1:06:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Lester Nare?

  That like helps me now really contextual. I was like, oh.

• 1:06:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That's how we know.

• 1:06:04Lester Nare?

  That makes sense. That's how we got to this understanding of what the processes are and seeing where these differences in ours versus chimpanzees happen. And understanding that it's not enough to just look at the base and say it's ninety nine and one.

• 1:06:18Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:06:19Lester Nare?

  It's all of these other sub. Processes that are impacted even by a very small amount of changes.

• 1:06:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, we're not, we're not making it up.

• 1:06:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:06:29Krishna Choudhary?

  We did the experiments and then like, this is what, and somebody else can go and do these experiments.

• 1:06:33Lester Nare?

  And someone else can go and do it too.

• 1:06:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Lester Nare?

  Um, maybe not the transgenic mice thing though, unfortunately.

• 1:06:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, unfortunately, yeah, these guys, these guys got it.

• 1:06:40Lester Nare?

  More funding, um, which is, I know, that's so crazy. What a great story. Look, California, by the way, was our first two stories. Stanford.

• 1:06:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:50Lester Nare?

  UC San Diego.

• 1:06:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Easy.

• 1:06:51Lester Nare?

  The Republic of California continues.

• 1:06:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Easy.

• 1:06:54Lester Nare?

  To be the light, shining light on a hill.

• 1:06:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Lester Nare?

  Um.

• 1:06:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, maybe Gavin Newsom's gonna be like, you know what, we are gonna keep transgenic mice.

• 1:07:02Lester Nare?

  That's true, he's the guy who can do what he wants.

• 1:07:04Krishna Choudhary?

  He can do what he wants.

• 1:07:04Lester Nare?

  We do have an eighty billion dollar surplus that we give back to federal government.

• 1:07:08Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:07:08Lester Nare?

  Take a billion or two off the top.

• 1:07:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, easy.

• 1:07:10Lester Nare?

  Um, so we're now gonna go across the pond, but in the opposite direction of the pond that people normally associate with that phrase. Uh, from California, all the way to Beijing, where we have learned that diamonds have gotten an upgrade. Uh, my wife immediately texted me when she saw the stories for today.

• 1:07:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:07:32Lester Nare?

  And was like, can you, I want you to tell me about this one after you're done.

• 1:07:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Nice.

• 1:07:35Lester Nare?

  Um, this is out of the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing, where apparently, uh, scientists are able to create extra hard hexagonal diamonds in the lab that are up to sixty percent stronger than normal diamonds and can be used to create super tough drilling and cutting tools for industrial applications. Sorry, honey, this is not Tiffany's.

• 1:08:04Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:08:04Lester Nare?

  But, uh, interesting nonetheless, so help me understand, uh, what exactly is going on with this new lab-grown diamond stuff?

• 1:08:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so diamonds. Girls best friend. Yes. Usually when we think about diamonds, we're thinking about the thing that um you're gonna buy for your girl when you got wanna. Get the government involved.

• 1:08:26Krishna Choudhary?

  The the diamond is a pure form of carbon. Okay, something called an allotrope. There's nothing other than carbon in diamond. Okay. Okay, which is pretty cool. That's pretty cool. There's very few elements that actually do this kind of thing. Um where they form like a solid that is only that. And it's like a compound, like metals, I guess, do this, but they're not like. Bonded in the sense that like diamonds are bonded, like these, these are covalent bonds between carbon atoms. That make it so strong. There's other allotrope of dr- of carbon and every time there's an allotrope of carbon, it's like. It does amazing things. We've got carbon nano tubes, which are like these like tubes made out of entirely of carbon.

• 1:09:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the carbon fiber that you're like that we see in Formula One and things like that. Um there's bucky balls, the buckminster full rain. The soccer ball, right, that made out of carbon. There's obviously also graphite, which is the thing in your pencil lead. And graphene, which is a single layer of graphite. Um that one won the Nobel Prize many years ago because that has like extraordinary electrical and um conducting properties. I think Batman suit is based on graphene. Graphene, yeah, I could imagine it's a. It it's it's like one of those things that you can use in movies. Because there's so many unexplored things, like, oh, quantum this, like.

• 1:09:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Like graphene is one of those. Where it's like, there's so many unexplored areas for graphene that you could just be like, yeah, maybe it's made out of graphene. So diamond is one of those things. It's called an allotrope. Um where you have this like pure elemental covalently bond bonded form. And it is the hardest thing that we know on earth. Okay, on the most hardness scale, it is like by definition ten. Because it's the hardest thing and it's used in industrial applications. If you wanna like cut stuff. Like you use a diamond, right? If you wanna cut like really, really hard things.

• 1:10:23Krishna Choudhary?

  We used to think that diamond was the most, the hardest thing and like we had sort of exhausted the possibilities on all the things that carbon could be. Okay, and then um people started looking at this thing called the Canyon Diablo meteorite. Which is the meteorite that fell on um Arizona fifty thousand years ago. Have you been to meteor crater?

• 1:10:44Lester Nare?

  I know of it, I've never been.

• 1:10:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's right off the um, I think it's off the forty freeway.

• 1:10:50Lester Nare?

  Forty, yep.

• 1:10:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, um on your way from like Grand Canyon to Albuquerque. Um, it's a, it's, it's a wonderful place. It's the best preserved meteor crater on the planet because in these arid conditions. You see this beautiful, it was also only fifty thousand years ago.

• 1:11:06Lester Nare?

  America always has the best.

• 1:11:08Krishna Choudhary?

  We've always got the best, yeah. Um, and so um it was also like one of the first places that my dad visited when he came to America from India. Um, so I remember when I was like in India, I was like seeing like photos of the meteor crater going like that's crazy, you know? Um, so people found the meteorite for this thing. It's a massive meteorite called the Canyon Diablo meteorite, six hundred and forty kilograms. Um, and in this people started doing like chemical analyses and they thought they saw another form of a diamond.

• 1:11:37Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:11:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, um it was called Lon's delight, okay? And it was this elusive hexagonal thing that people had theorized existed, but maybe it was in there. Very trace amounts and there was controversy like are you really seeing what you're seeing like is this real? Um, and uh people started doing theoretical modeling of it and were like this thing would be even harder than diamond. If, if it was true. Um, the hypothesis is that whatever carbon was in the meteorite, it slammed like this meteorite was so big that it didn't just like burn up in the earth's atmosphere actually slammed into the ground, right? And when it slammed into into the ground, that carbon in all that high temperature and pressure fused into this new form.

• 1:12:20Lester Nare?

  Which makes sense.

• 1:12:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Of Leon's, yeah, and it makes sense. So um and you see these like trace amounts, but ever since then people have been on the hunt to try to make this thing, okay? Because it's gonna be kind of like a holy grail for material science, right? You're gonna get even harder than diamond, you're gonna get novel electrical properties. Perhaps you can start using it in like quantum computers and like, like all sorts of stuff, right? So you wanna, you wanna try and make it first. Um, but it ended up being extremely hard to make.

• 1:12:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:12:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, um.

• 1:12:51Krishna Choudhary?

  The reason for that is people were, people were basically trying to put carbon under a lot of stress.

• 1:13:00Krishna Choudhary?

  To hope for making this, making this like. Structure.

• 1:13:05Lester Nare?

  They should just put them in Princeton during grade deflation. That'll be plenty of stress.

• 1:13:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, during finals week, easy. That's where diamonds are made. So, so they're trying to make this hexagonal diamond.

• 1:13:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:13:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? The, the, the, the normal diamonds that we have, those are called cubic diamonds.

• 1:13:22Lester Nare?

  Cubic diamonds.

• 1:13:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And that's because like, the, the way that the bonds all work, it looks like, it, it's, it's got this like cubic form that repeats over and over. In the hexagonal diamond, you're gonna get hexagonal close packing, where like, the bonds are now slightly different. But in this like weird hexagonal heterostructure that like, with like two different bond lengths.

• 1:13:42Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:13:42Krishna Choudhary?

  That becomes extremely.

• 1:13:44Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Nice and tight. Um, so you're trying to make this thing, everyone's, everyone's, um. Process is basically the same, high stress, high temperature, high pressure. Um, what these guys did was, they were like, we need to control this thing. Really, really well, in order to actually make it.

• 1:14:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:14:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So their setup is actually kinda crazy. Um, their, their setup is, they've got, um, a diamond anvil press.

• 1:14:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:14:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? You, you, they're, they're trying to reach pressures that are insane. Two hundred thousand times the atmospheric pressure.

• 1:14:25Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:14:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So Marianas Trench is like a thousand atmospheres. This is two hundred times the pressure that you see in Marianas Trench.

• 1:14:33Lester Nare?

  The, the highest pressure in the natural environment.

• 1:14:35Krishna Choudhary?

  So how do we achieve that pressure without blowing everything up?

• 1:14:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:14:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, you use the best thing there is, which is a diamond. You make a press.

• 1:14:44Lester Nare?

  Out of.

• 1:14:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Out of diamonds.

• 1:14:45Lester Nare?

  Oh my god.

• 1:14:46Krishna Choudhary?

  It's called a diamond anvil press.

• 1:14:48Lester Nare?

  Diamonds on diamonds.

• 1:14:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, they're using the old diamond.

• 1:14:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Krishna Choudhary?

  To make the new diamond.

• 1:14:54Lester Nare?

  That's so funny.

• 1:14:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's it's kind of cool. So they've got this diamond anvil cell that like that goes in like this, okay? Um, and in that you can now start squishing everything. So it goes to extremely high pressure. Inside that thing, they put in a single crystal of graphite. Okay, this is like, you're you're the lead in your pencil is graphite. But it's not a single crystal. It's it's usually like sheared layers, which is why I like. You know, you can like write with it like shears off. This is a single crystal. So you've got these hexagonal lattices. That are on top of each other that are connected by Vanderwall's forces. Um, which are like just loose forces. They're not covalently bonded.

• 1:15:31Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 1:15:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, like the the layer within the layer itself, these hexagons are a bunch of carbons that are covalently bonded, but the two layers. Are not covalently bonded. What we want to get is hexagonal layers that are now covalently bonded. In like this like crazy hexagonal sort of um crystal.

• 1:15:47Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:48Krishna Choudhary?

  So they start with a single crystal like that. They pump it with all this pressure. They have lasers. That are heating it through the diamond.

• 1:15:56Lester Nare?

  Always have lasers.

• 1:15:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Always have laser. When when all has failed, just shine some lasers on it, heat it up. So they're they're they're heating up this thing to like a thousand to like fifteen hundred degrees Celsius. So like, you know, two thousand, three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Um, and then they create this this structure that they think is um the hexagonal diamond. And not only that, the they haven't created like trace amounts. They've created something like that's as big as a millimeter. Which sounds like a sounds like small, but like dude, that's, you know, that's what ten to the twenty atoms?

• 1:16:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a lot.

• 1:16:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:29Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a lot.

• 1:16:30Lester Nare?

  And and and also it's a novel technique.

• 1:16:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Lester Nare?

  Right? So they have to like first create.

• 1:16:35Krishna Choudhary?

  First create even a milli- even a millimeter's worth, right? Like, uh, people had done way, way less. Where like you gotta go into with the electron microscope and be like, ah, right there, see? Like that little part. That little part there is got hexagonal diamond.

• 1:16:48Lester Nare?

  That's a diamond.

• 1:16:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, but here it's like a millimeter. I can like see that with my naked eye.

• 1:16:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, so so they finally did this. And the first thing everyone's gonna do is say nah.

• 1:16:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:16:59Krishna Choudhary?

  You didn't do it.

• 1:16:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:17:01Krishna Choudhary?

  So they, again, just like those previous stories that we've had, we're gonna run through a suite of tests.

• 1:17:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:17:07Krishna Choudhary?

  To make sure that we're talking about what we're talking about. Um, so they did X-ray diffraction, which is the idea of shooting X-rays out of crystal. The X-rays are gonna diffract in a certain way, and depending on the crystal structure of the atoms, they're gonna just diffract and create an image of where the X-rays bounced off. And that'll tell you sort of the bond spacing and like the bond angles and things like that.

• 1:17:29Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:17:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Things match.

• 1:17:30Lester Nare?

  Yep, so you can know if those hexagonal layers actually like ended up covalently bonding.

• 1:17:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and like the, like the spacing of it. Like, is it 1.5 angstroms, is it 1 angstrom? Like, down to like, you know, hydrogen, um, hydrogen, like, atom.

• 1:17:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:17:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Length.

• 1:17:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:17:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Type stuff. Um, they also do, um, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. That's just the standard thing, you gotta put it in there. You gotta see, oh, you got like the little, uh, hexagonal structures. So that's nice. Um, they also did something called Ramen spectroscopy, after, named after C. V. Ramen, my guy from India. Um, the first Nobel Prize winner in physics from India. Um, Ramen spectroscopy is the idea that, um, molecules vibrate, right? And so, uh, in normal spectroscopy, you wanna see, you, you shoot in some light, and then, like, the, you're gonna go to a high quantum state, lower quantum state, and then that's gonna release some energy, right? Here, some of the light that goes in is gonna get like lost into the vibrational modes of the molecule,

• 1:18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  and then you're gonna get a different color of light that sometimes might be even higher.

• 1:18:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like the vibration is gonna like dump like some energy and stuff like that. So you get this inelastic, like, sort of scat- scattering where the, you know, some, the weird energy happens in, when, when you start doing this kinda stuff. So, they, they did that, and they found three vibrational modes. So like, you know, one this way, one like this longer, which confirms that there are two different bond lengths, which is what the theory suggests. Like, when you, when you go and you do the crystalline structure, you're like, there should be one bond length that's at 1.58, which is the, the intra-layer one, that's like within the buckled honeycomb layer, and then there's 1.50, which is linking one layer to the other. And these two should be different lengths.

• 1:19:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And, that, the Ramen spectroscopy, you do this, the simulation, and you find out that it is in, in fact, there. Right? So they're doing all of these, all of these things, and it's, it's kind of a crazy story, because actually, earlier this year... Another Chinese group came out saying that they had a plan, concept of a plan.

• 1:19:34Lester Nare?

  A concept of a plan.

• 1:19:35Krishna Choudhary?

  To like, to like, they had this like promising um procedure.

• 1:19:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Krishna Choudhary?

  To make the sixagonal diamond.

• 1:19:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:19:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and they were like, you know, we're gonna have like, y'all wait.

• 1:19:47Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And then I think these guys scooped them.

• 1:19:50Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 1:19:50Krishna Choudhary?

  That other group was from University of Shanghai and these guys from Beijing, like so, I mean, it also shows just how far China has come.

• 1:19:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:19:58Krishna Choudhary?

  As a scientific powerhouse.

• 1:19:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:20:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Where like, they're scooping within their country now.

• 1:20:03Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:20:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:20:03Lester Nare?

  Not even in the global competition space.

• 1:20:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, now it's like they're competing amongst themselves. It's actually like, like they, they've advanced so much that now they've got competing institutions that are like.

• 1:20:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, you know, they're like having beef with each other.

• 1:20:16Lester Nare?

  And pushing the boundaries of, of, of the frontier of science research, which is like, that's actually very interesting.

• 1:20:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Lester Nare?

  And, and for, and it, cause I know there's a lot of, in the popular discourse, there can tend to be this knee jerk reaction when referring to Chinese studies. Because there is the geopolitical nexus here, which creates an incentive for there to be cutting corners to be able to show advancements happening.

• 1:20:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Lester Nare?

  And so, a lot of times, again, the, in the zeitgeist conversation, it's like, well, the Chinese study comes out, they, the, the data may be fake and take it with a grain of salt.

• 1:20:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Lester Nare?

  It's kind of like the, the response.

• 1:20:53Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, but this is published in Nature, they did all of these.

• 1:20:56Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 1:20:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Tests.

• 1:20:57Lester Nare?

  And I, I think that perception, it's the same thing with like, the same idea with looking at China from the uh trade secrets perspective. Where maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, it was true that, and there still is obviously.

• 1:21:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and there's, there probably still is, yeah.

• 1:21:12Lester Nare?

  However, that is an independent point to the fact that they've now established their own flywheel of educating a large amount of their populace.

• 1:21:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:22Lester Nare?

  In the fundamental areas of science, mathematics, et cetera, necessary to then populate these institutions with people to do these studies.

• 1:21:33Lester Nare?

  And then actually funding those institutions.

• 1:21:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Lester Nare?

  To be able to get results.

• 1:21:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37Lester Nare?

  And like that is infrastructure exists. Independent if some of the, there's some funny business going on in some cases, there's like a blanket, I think, shutting off. Of like really taking in earnest, things that are coming out of here, which I think is um. Not a great thing for us to do from just a strategic surprise perspective.

• 1:21:58Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:21:58Lester Nare?

  Because what we don't want to do is underestimate.

• 1:22:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:22:01Lester Nare?

  And then there's now this runaway, cause like progress compounds, right? And we don't want to have this runaway train where with what we're seeing with manufacturing in the US. Where we didn't care about it and then now we're like, oh, we need to re-onshore and it's like.

• 1:22:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's like now it's impossible.

• 1:22:14Lester Nare?

  It's too late.

• 1:22:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like the global economy is already gone thirty paces ahead and this is what it is, right? Yeah, and if you don't like it, just like fun science.

• 1:22:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah, or the correct.

• 1:22:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:22:24Lester Nare?

  Correct. If if we're in this great power war with China, one of the like battlefields.

• 1:22:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Lester Nare?

  Frontier research.

• 1:22:29Krishna Choudhary?

  It always is.

• 1:22:30Lester Nare?

  It always is.

• 1:22:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, anywhere, yeah.

• 1:22:32Lester Nare?

  It's how we won World War Two.

• 1:22:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Lester Nare?

  And how we lost. The idea that it's important when it was literally the reason we became. The global world power that we are still baffles me.

• 1:22:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Lester Nare?

  That's a digression, but it point in context because a lot of people show China study shut down.

• 1:22:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:48Lester Nare?

  Right? And this is why we talk about it from first principles because you can just.

• 1:22:51Krishna Choudhary?

  They did it. They did the work.

• 1:22:52Lester Nare?

  They did it.

• 1:22:53Krishna Choudhary?

  They did the work, like they they got hexagonal diamonds. This has been, this has been something that people have been after for fifty years and they got it. You're right, like in material science, this was kind of like that. That thing on the hill that you want to get to. And they got it, yeah.

• 1:23:08Lester Nare?

  And not only did they get it, they were protect, they're pace potentially on pace to get it twice before anyone else at that other university.

• 1:23:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Lester Nare?

  Wasn't beaten up by uh the Beijing.

• 1:23:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:16Lester Nare?

  Also did it, right?

• 1:23:17Krishna Choudhary?

  They probably shouldn't have published like that early. Like I wonder if like that gave, oh, that's what we were missing.

• 1:23:23Lester Nare?

  Like they were already almost there.

• 1:23:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:23:28Lester Nare?

  So unfortunately for this use case, uh, we're not gonna get cheaper diamonds to put on ring.

• 1:23:36Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, cheaper diamonds, cheaper diamonds are actually already here. We have lab grown diamonds. Um, the lab grown diamonds actually, one, one of the processes that they use for lab grown diamonds is this high temperature, high pressure. But then there's a much more, um, effective and cheaper way to do it, which is chemical vapor deposition.

• 1:23:53Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:23:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is interesting where you have like a diamond sort of, um, seed. And then you fill the chamber with like, usually it's like methane, which is CH4, so carbon and hydrogen. And then you start heating up the methane with lasers to take out the hydrogen. And then the carbon just like finds its way on the diamond and then you grow it layer by layer to make a lab grown diamond, right? Like, the only reason diamonds are expensive is because the De Beers Corporation has monopoly on it. And, um, and now they're like putting out these, this like propaganda saying like, you know, oh yeah, but you want one from the earth. You know, that's actually caused human suffering.

• 1:24:35Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Otherwise your wife is not gonna know that you love her.

• 1:24:38Lester Nare?

  Right. True love comes from the human suffering of minds all over Africa that are getting you these earth grown diamonds.

• 1:24:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Otherwise, what is this all about? You know?

• 1:24:46Lester Nare?

  Uh, no, that's, that's, that is what they say.

• 1:24:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Lester Nare?

  That, that is what they say. Um, great story, diamonds getting an upgrade, crazy.

• 1:24:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:55Lester Nare?

  Industrial use cases.

• 1:24:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's gonna be cool.

• 1:24:58Lester Nare?

  Implementation to get to the answer to what has been a 50 yearish, uh, quest.

• 1:25:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:04Lester Nare?

  Uh, to be able to actually experimentally.

• 1:25:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Realize it.

• 1:25:08Lester Nare?

  Realize that this hexagonal diamond.

• 1:25:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Lester Nare?

  Was possible. Um, and he did bring up as an analogy or as a reference point that things like, you know, if you can do the hexagonal diamond, maybe there are use cases in other technologies, maybe like in quantum computers.

• 1:25:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Lester Nare?

  Which may, whether.

• 1:25:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Like in industry, like you always want harder things.

• 1:25:28Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:25:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:25:29Lester Nare?

  Drilling is obviously gonna be a use case.

• 1:25:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Easy.

• 1:25:31Lester Nare?

  But with quantum, that is a segue into our last story of the day, which is our retrospective on the UN designating.

• 1:25:42Lester Nare?

  This current year, twenty twenty five.

• 1:25:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:44Lester Nare?

  As the international year of quantum mechanics. A subject we talk about on almost every episode, one way or another.

• 1:25:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Lester Nare?

  Um, so as we take a look back at the last hundred years. Uh, we wanna review a little bit on how it all started for us to get to this point of the UN designating.

• 1:26:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Lester Nare?

  Twenty twenty five.

• 1:26:04Krishna Choudhary?

  It's been a hundred years.

• 1:26:06Lester Nare?

  As the year of quantum mechanics.

• 1:26:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's been one hundred years.

• 1:26:09Lester Nare?

  One hundred years.

• 1:26:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Nineteen twenty five. Um, it was a seminal year in physics. Um, there were four big papers. There was one paper by Wolfgang Pauli. There's one paper by Paul Dirac. And then there's two papers, one by Heisenberg, which is the big one. And then there's, there's a follow up paper that he wrote with um, his PhD advisor and another colleague. Uh, not PhD advisor, postdoc advisor and a colleague of his. That um, was sort of a follow up to his big paper, the Um Doytung paper. And it's like legendary, okay? This paper is something that um, Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner. Um, he once said that, you know, there's, there's two types of great physicists.

• 1:26:55Krishna Choudhary?

  There's the sage physicists and then there's the magician physicists. And with sage physicists, one can read their papers and understand where they're coming from. And it's like obvious. And you're almost asking yourself, God, why didn't I think of that, you know? And once you see it, you have the same epiphany.

• 1:27:14Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:14Krishna Choudhary?

  That the sage did.

• 1:27:16Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And you realize that the, and, and the universe starts making sense and it's just like, oh, this is beautiful.

• 1:27:21Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Newton is a sage physicist.

• 1:27:24Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:27:24Krishna Choudhary?

  I would say, um, Einstein, uh, uh, also a sage physicist, like his relativity paper, it's like. Oh, that, that's so nice.

• 1:27:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:32Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:27:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Um.

• 1:27:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Heisenberg is a magician physicist.

• 1:27:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Krishna Choudhary?

  People read his paper and still to the, to this day, nobody reads his paper in nineteen twenty five. And even though that's the paper that's why this year is called the year of quantum mechanics. Nobody in their right mind reads his paper to understand quantum mechanics. Because it's a magician paper. It's, it's like, where did you pull that out of?

• 1:27:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:57Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? It's like, you just like did a card trick. And then now there's like this random equation that explains everything. And there's no, you didn't say anything about like what your thought, what are your thoughts? You know?

• 1:28:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:28:11Krishna Choudhary?

  What the hell are you talking about?

• 1:28:12Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:28:13Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? So, so that's, that's the paper that I want to cover.

• 1:28:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:28:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, you know, usually in this podcast, we cover papers that happened over the past week or like very recently. This is a hundred year old paper that was published almost exactly a hundred years ago. It was in July. But some of the other papers like the, the, the Bourne, uh, Jordan Heisenberg paper was published in September and then Dirac was published a little bit later. So it's really a whole year worth of stuff. And to really understand that whole year, I'm going to take you on a journey.

• 1:28:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:28:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Back to nineteen hundred.

• 1:28:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah, the nineteen hundreds.

• 1:28:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Back to the nineteen hundreds, okay? Physics is doing really good.

• 1:28:47Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:28:47Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, we've understood temperature. We, we got, we were pretty sure there's atoms. Electromagnetism, you know, Edwin Hubble's got lights. Like, it's crazy, okay? We got the phonograph, like now I can listen to music. And, um, like there's all this like, everyone's like, this is dope. There's, there's two or three big conundrums, but everyone's kind of like, not a big deal.

• 1:29:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:13Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? Uh, we'll figure it out.

• 1:29:15Lester Nare?

  We'll get there.

• 1:29:16Krishna Choudhary?

  We'll figure it out. Lord Kelvin said they're like these little like clouds on the horizon, but they're, they're soon going to part.

• 1:29:23Krishna Choudhary?

  One of them is how hot things glow. So-called black body radiation, you know? If you heat up like, if you've seen hot glass, it glows, right?

• 1:29:34Lester Nare?

  Stove top.

• 1:29:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Stove top, yeah. The old G stove, stove tops with the coils.

• 1:29:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the coils glow.

• 1:29:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:29:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and so the question is how, like, when, when you heat something up, why does it glow the way it does? Specifically, why does it not like run away and glow infinitely bright? Okay, because that's what the theory was suggesting. The Boltzmann theory, which was the statistical, um, stat mech theory of like, how we figured out like PV equals NRT, right? Like our sense of temperature and pressure and volume. Has immense success. But at the same time, it's like totally failing when it comes to electromagnetic radiation, when it comes to light. The other thing is, when we look at the sun and when we glow, like when we look at, you know,

• 1:30:19Krishna Choudhary?

  lamps of gas, when we put a gas and then we electrically spark it and we look at the light that comes out, it's discrete. It's not a continuous. The sun is continuous, but then if you look really closely at the sun, there's these dark lines. And then those dark lines end up corresponding to the lines that we see in the laboratory, which is how we actually discovered helium. Right? Like, somebody, somebody noticed that there's like lines on the sun, actually like right outside, not dark lines, but like, right outside the sun, you're getting these like emission, like these bright lines, and these two spots, and those two spots are exactly the same as the helium line that I discovered in the laboratory. So they're like, that must be up there. I'm gonna call this helium. Right? Um, for Helios, the sun. So, so those lines are like, okay, what's going on?

• 1:31:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Why are there lines? And then, the other thing was, um, light needs an ether, or something. Sound moves through, through air. Water waves move through water. Light needs something to move through.

• 1:31:20Krishna Choudhary?

  It's the ether. So, but what is the ether? Can, can somebody find it? Are we moving through the ether? Does the ether itself have a velocity? Right? So all of these things are happening and everyone's like, we're gonna figure it out, it's fine. Then comes the revolution from Einstein. First of all, we can't find the ether. Michelson and Morley do these amazing experiments at Case Western University, where they're trying to measure the ether. So they try to measure the speed of the ether when the earth, like, at one time, let's say at 6:00 PM, and then they try to measure it at 6:00 AM. Because then, the earth is gonna be on the other, their, their lab is gonna be on the other side of the earth, right? So if the earth is moving like this, or like if the earth is stationary like this and the ether is coming this way,

• 1:32:06Krishna Choudhary?

  then, at one point, their lab is going against the ether, and the other time their lab is going towards the ether, so they're trying to find a difference here and they can't. So they're like, the speed of light is the same. There's no wind. There's no wind, and like, it should, like, our airbar is now like, like we grinded so hard, and our airbar is so small that it doesn't make sense anymore. So we're pretty sure there's no ether, and I don't know what's going on. Einstein. Has a big epiphany with this, with the theory of relativity and he says, let's just say that light is constant speed and let's say that all laws of physics are the same when, when I'm doing stuff.

• 1:32:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? If I do an experiment here and then I get on a train and the train is moving at constant speed and I do the experiment there, they should be the same. He's actually influenced by um, a philosopher, a philosopher and a physicist Ernst Mach. You know the Mach number?

• 1:32:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the speed of, like Mach five, Mach six. That's named after Ernst Mach, who's the first guy who sort of described what happens when stuff moves faster than the speed of sound. He has this very famous photograph, um, black and white back in those days, like with the, the, like, this is like civil war camera. You know, like the Ken Burns documentary shit.

• 1:33:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, he took a photo of a speeding bullet and showed the shockwave.

• 1:33:23Lester Nare?

  Oh, that's sick.

• 1:33:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Using like those cameras.

• 1:33:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is an insane feat. I actually still don't understand how he got that photo.

• 1:33:30Lester Nare?

  I was gonna say, like, that would, yeah.

• 1:33:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, that's an insane photo to get, right? Even now, I don't know how to, like, with a digital camera, how to get that. So, but, but, so he does all, all this physics stuff, but he's also really into philosophy and he, he champions this thing called positivism.

• 1:33:45Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:33:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is the idea that we should be concerned about describing stuff that we can see with our immediate experience. Okay?

• 1:33:53Lester Nare?

  So this is not woke ideology?

• 1:33:55Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this is not woke ideology at all. This is like, what is, what is in front of me? And what can I, like, see and be sure exists? Okay, be very, very sure exists. Einstein takes this to heart and he starts asking crazy questions, okay? He's like, what is time? And everyone's like, what are you talking, like, what, time is time? And he's like, no, no, no, what is, what is time? And he figures the time is like the, me seeing change. Right? The, in the simplest sense, there's a clock on the wall, the second hand is moving. Time for me is the rate at which I see the second hand move.

• 1:34:35Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:34:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? The second hand makes one round every sixty seconds and every one second it's going this.

• 1:34:41Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:34:42Krishna Choudhary?

  It's doing this. That for me is time. That's how I experience time and according to Mach's positivism, that is literally time.

• 1:34:50Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:34:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Is the rate at which I'm seeing this for me.

• 1:34:53Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:34:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And then he makes a simple argument, like if I'm moving away at the speed of light. Then the image of that second hand changing is never gonna reach me. Because I'm always gonna be running away from that image of the second hand moving. Which means I'm never gonna see the second hand move.

• 1:35:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:35:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means if I'm going at the speed of light, time is like slowing down to zero.

• 1:35:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:35:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Do you see what I'm saying?

• 1:35:16Lester Nare?

  Right, right, because what you're saying is if, if, if the clock is here and you're moving away at the speed of light, the actual imagery of the clock.

• 1:35:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the clock move, like changing its second hand.

• 1:35:25Lester Nare?

  Which has to be like, it's like, you know, has to travel.

• 1:35:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Lester Nare?

  Like you're, you're always gonna be.

• 1:35:31Krishna Choudhary?

  You're running away from it.

• 1:35:32Lester Nare?

  Like it's, it's like Wile E. Coyote and uh, whatever the other thing. It never catch, so meaning you don't actually see the, the, the, the change in which define, like in the analogy he brings up, it's like, well, if I'm not seeing. It change, then.

• 1:35:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Then the time in that outside, like if I'm in a train and I'm like watching this, then the time on the outside is like, according to me, there's, there's, there's just like, there's.

• 1:35:54Lester Nare?

  No time.

• 1:35:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there's no time has gone by, right? And so he's taking this like positivism like so seriously.

• 1:36:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:36:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and he's like, the only thing that matters to me is my experience.

• 1:36:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:36:04Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and it's this nice marriage of physics, mathematics and philosophy in, at the end of the day, like it took this philosophical leap.

• 1:36:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:36:13Krishna Choudhary?

  To actually get there, right? And that's actually one of the geniuses of Einstein.

• 1:36:16Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Is like, he literally took this thing seriously, right? Newton is another one of these sort of philosophers who literally took it seriously.

• 1:36:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Like everybody back in the day was talking about how the heavens should have the same rules as on earth.

• 1:36:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Krishna Choudhary?

  There's no difference.

• 1:36:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Everyone's saying it.

• 1:36:31Lester Nare?

  But they weren't really about that life.

• 1:36:32Krishna Choudhary?

  They weren't really about that life. Newton was like, no, no, if I take it seriously, then the apple falling on my head is also the thing that's making the moon.

• 1:36:40Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Fall into earth.

• 1:36:41Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:36:42Krishna Choudhary?

  He's the, he, he took it like so seriously.

• 1:36:44Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:36:45Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then he did the math, he's like, actually, no, this is like, it's literally what's happening.

• 1:36:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that, it's a philosophical leap that he had to do.

• 1:36:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Everybody else knew what gravity was, people had measured things going, like Galileo had dropped. Stuff. Stuff, right, and like measure the measure G, but he's the first one who's like, guys, you guys keep talking. Yeah. Like, let's do the walk. Right. Right, so Einstein does this as well. And so he comes up with with relativity, it's amazing. Yes. Um, everyone's like dope, this is dope. Um, at the same time, we start getting into really cool experiments. So the electron is discovered by J.J. Thompson. Rutherford discovers the nucleus of the atom, and now we're running into some serious problems. Okay, once the nucleus is discovered, now we know that the nucleus is this tiny thing of positive charge with electrons moving around it. We already know the electron is there.

• 1:37:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And now, according to classical electromagnetism, if a charged particle moves, remember from last week, we talked about the synchrotron. Yes. Where the electron is moving around in a circle. Yes. And it's like putting out X-rays, and then that's how we Yes. Did the dinosaur autopsy. Yes. Um, okay, if it's a smaller little synchrotron inside of an atom where the electron is moving like this, it should also be releasing light. And if it releases light, it should, it should decrease in energy. Yes. And then it should fall into the atom. Yes. To the nucleus, and so there should be no atoms. Right. Okay. But, but obviously, clearly that Clearly that's There are atoms. There are atoms. So. So what do we do? That doesn't work. Yeah, um, at this point, um, Rutherford is like, Rutherford's an experimentalist.

• 1:38:20Krishna Choudhary?

  He's like, look, I gave you the nucleus. Yeah. I don't know. You go theorize. Yeah, so, and at that point, like theoretical physics is still at its nascent day. People aren't really respecting it. The real guys are the experimentalists, right? Because they're like dealing with truth. The theorists are basically fancy mathematicians. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Um, and so along comes Niels Bohr. Niels Bohr joins as a postdoc in Rutherford's lab. And Rutherford's like, alright, I'm gonna hire you, you're gonna tell me what the hell is going on. Yeah. Right, this is your job now. Yeah. Okay, and Bohr's like, bro, I got this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you how every single atom works. Tries, it spectacularly fails. Okay, he has no idea what he's doing. And then he's like, okay, I'm just gonna focus on the hydrogen atom.

• 1:39:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Alright, single proton, single electron, because the other ones, there's a bunch of electrons, the electrons are pushing against each other, they're also like getting the nucleus, so he's like, alright, single proton, single, um, and, and, single proton, single electron, hydrogen atom, can I solve the hydrogen atom? Okay, and at that point, it was known that the hydrogen spectra had this thing called the Balmer series. It always came in this really peculiar pattern, okay? Where it's like, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a line here, and then there's another line, and then another line, sort of shorter away, shorter away, shorter away. And then there'd be another set of these up here, then there'd be another set of those up there. And, somebody worked out, that the frequencies of all of these lines was proportional

• 1:39:49Krishna Choudhary?

  to the difference in one over squares of numbers.

• 1:39:54Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:39:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Just pure numerology, okay? He was just like, "Look, if I do one minus one-fourth, I get this line."

• 1:40:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Krishna Choudhary?

  If I do one minus one-ninth, I get this line.

• 1:40:03Lester Nare?

  I get this one.

• 1:40:04Krishna Choudhary?

  If I do, you know, he's just pure numerology.

• 1:40:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And he's like, he's like, "Guys..."

• 1:40:10Lester Nare?

  As the kids say, the math was mathing.

• 1:40:12Krishna Choudhary?

  The math was mathing, no idea what's going on. But he's like, "If I do one over a square, minus one over another square, that always gives me a line."

• 1:40:20Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So everyone's like, "Okay, this is like, just like now woo-woo."

• 1:40:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you're just like seeing, I mean, clearly it's working, so there's something there.

• 1:40:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:40:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Bohr sees this, and, um, he has an idea. Okay? So before this, Max Planck had already found out that if I quantize the electromagnetic field, which means that I say, "Okay, the elektro-" like, I can't have, um, light that's arbitrarily small at a given frequency.

• 1:40:50Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:40:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, if I have light at, let's say, like, really high frequency, like, uh, gamma radiation, I can't have like, an arbitrarily small amount of gamma radiation.

• 1:40:59Lester Nare?

  Mm, mm.

• 1:41:00Krishna Choudhary?

  There's like, a minimum amount of gamma radiation.

• 1:41:04Lester Nare?

  There's a floor.

• 1:41:04Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a floor, and that floor is proportional to the frequency.

• 1:41:07Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 1:41:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And-

• 1:41:08Lester Nare?

  So the floor moves based on the frequency?

• 1:41:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Based on the frequency, and the rate at which this floor moves, I'm gonna name a constant.

• 1:41:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:41:14Krishna Choudhary?

  That's where we get Planck's constant.

• 1:41:16Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 1:41:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? He's like, he's like, "If I have frequency this much, the minimum amount of energy is this much."

• 1:41:21Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Krishna Choudhary?

  "If I have frequency this much, the minimum amount of energy is this much." The slope of this guy, I'm gonna, it's a constant.

• 1:41:27Lester Nare?

  It's a constant.

• 1:41:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and people started calling it Planck's constant, okay? So, um, Bohr is like, "Okay, he did that, and it worked."

• 1:41:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Why don't I do that? Why don't I do that here? Why don't I say that the angular momentum of the electron around my hydrogen atom comes in chunks of Planck's constant? Yeah. Divided by two pi because there's like a, you know, two pi in a circle. Yes. There's like angular versus rate, like anyways, but he's like, let's say? Yes. That it comes as one times h over two pi or two times h over two pi, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Um, and he, he basically noticed the like Planck's constant kinda looks like angular momentum. The units are the same. Mm hmm. So maybe, you know? Yep. When he does this? Yep. He, he gets these like orbits. There's like a smaller orbit where it's, where it's one h bar over two pi, then there's two h bar over two. And he gets these orbits.

• 1:42:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And when he says, okay, if I take differences between the energies at these orbits, I can calculate the kinetic energy, right? And the total energy of the system, I can like take the difference. Yes. Um, that is exactly this numerology. Thing. Nonsense that people have been doing. Yeah. That is the same numerology as this stuff. Mm hmm. On top of that, I can now justify like how big these orbits are. Yes. And that corresponds to one angstrom. Mm hmm. The, the number 10 to the minus 10 meters, which is the size of the hydrogen atom. Right. It pops out. So he's like, bro, I'm on to something. Yes. He almost didn't publish this thing because he's like, I, you know, I only figured it out for hydrogen. Right. Like I, I was supposed to do it for everything. And Rutherford's like, bro, you're never gonna publish the whole thing. Yeah.

• 1:43:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like this is already good enough. Like, and Rutherford despised theorists. Hmm. But he's like, this is pretty good. Mm hmm. The fact that it's working so well. Mm hmm. And, and, and clearly there's issues like where does the electron go? When it transitions from one to the other? Yeah. Okay? Yeah. How does the electron know to put out exactly the right amount to go down? Yes. Right? Like, there's all these. Yeah. There's all these little questions. But the math is math. But the math is mathing. It seems he's pulled it completely out of his ass, right? But it's, it's, but at, at that point, everyone's doing this. Right, right, right. Like Max Planck also did this thing. Out of. And was like, oh, it works.

• 1:43:48Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, but but he thought of it as like, this might just be an emission and absorption type thing.

• 1:43:54Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 1:43:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Bohr is now taking that concept and being like, okay, I'm gonna put it into the atom.

• 1:43:59Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:44:00Krishna Choudhary?

  So that goes really well.

• 1:44:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:44:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Then there's a guy Sommerfeld in Munich, and this is where Heisenberg comes in.

• 1:44:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:44:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Heisenberg is now a PhD student with Sommerfeld. Um, at the University of Munich. Um, and at the University of Munich, Sommerfeld and some of his other students start looking at Bohr's atom. And they're like, well, this kind of looks like planets, right?

• 1:44:21Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Basically, he's just saying that the planet, the orbits are no longer like, can be anywhere. They're only in these discrete spots.

• 1:44:27Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 1:44:28Krishna Choudhary?

  But like planets.

• 1:44:29Lester Nare?

  They're racetracks that are predefined.

• 1:44:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, they're racetracks that are predefined, and Bohr is like, they're all circles.

• 1:44:34Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:44:35Krishna Choudhary?

  But, um, the planets are held together by a central force due to gravity.

• 1:44:41Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Which has the same exact form as the central force due to electromagnetism. Just the constant is different. Electromagnetism is a little bit strong, not a little bit, actually, a whole lot stronger. But the one over R squared thing, where it's like, if I double the distance, I decrease the force by one fourth.

• 1:44:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:44:57Krishna Choudhary?

  That thing is the same.

• 1:44:57Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 1:44:58Krishna Choudhary?

  So the mathematical structure is the same.

• 1:44:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:45:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means that the kinds of orbits that planets do, these electrons should do around it, right? And planets don't do circular orbits. From the time of Newton, and actually from the time of Kepler, we know that they use elliptical orbits, right? So Sommerfeld's like, let's generalize this thing, okay? So we've got one number that tells you the orbit that it's in.

• 1:45:17Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:18Krishna Choudhary?

  What if we have another number that tells you sort of like the elasticity?

• 1:45:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:45:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Of this thing?

• 1:45:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:45:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Like how skewed this orbit is.

• 1:45:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, is it, is it like, uh, a wider elliptical orbit?

• 1:45:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, or is it real super, super circular?

• 1:45:30Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:45:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then, so that's, that, that becomes this guy.

• 1:45:33Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:45:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and so he's like, let's, let's, let's start including that. Okay, what's the advantage of this? There's always, in physics, whenever you try to come up with a new idea in terms of a theory, you want to try to see if it can explain some kind of experimental fact, right? Um, Einstein did this when it comes to, he, he explained the not presence of an ether and like this whole stuff. And why light can go at the same speed everywhere.

• 1:45:57Lester Nare?

  It's constant.

• 1:45:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, Planck's constant, um, explained black body radiation really well. It fit, it fit the data amazingly well.

• 1:46:07Krishna Choudhary?

  So Bohr, obviously, with the spectral lines. So now, this guy is like, okay, what are we trying to explain here? There's something called the Zeeman effect. Okay, basically, when you put the, you know, you get these emission lines. But if you put the gas in a magnetic field, and then you do this experiment, instead of one line, you're gonna get three. Okay. You're gonna get the original line, then you're gonna get one that's slightly higher frequency, and one that's slightly lower frequency. Okay? So this Zeeman effect is now explained because if I've got an elliptical orbit. Yeah. That, and I put a magnetic field. Yes. That elliptical orbit can be, he said, can be oriented towards.

• 1:46:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, perpendicular, or antiparalllel. Right. Right? Like, kinda like a magnet. Yes. Um, a compass, how does a compass work? It finds the true north based on the Earth's big magnetic field, right? It aligns with it. Yes. Well, now, we've got like this electron orbit. Yes. That'll either align with the magnetic field for a lower energy. Right. Or. Yes. Not align for a higher energy, or an intermediate value, so now you get your three. That's why there's the three bars. Alright? Yes. So he's like, okay, cool, dope. Yes. This is working. Yes. Um, and, you know, he gets some points there. Yes. Sommerfeld, at this point, is this established guy at University of Munich. Heisenberg is his student. Yes. Okay? Um, Heisenberg does his PhD defense under Sommerfeld.

• 1:47:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, he nearly fails his PhD defense, because it was too theoretical. And like, um, Wien, who was the other big physics guy at University of Munich, nearly failed him. Hmm. Because, first of all, Wien was like, what physics did you do? Right, right, right, right. Right? You're just doing like math. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and then Wien asked him to like, just do like, simple, like, just ask him simple, like, honestly, really simple experimental questions. Right? Like, it's like, if I'm measuring these two quantities, and they're related in this way, where's the most error coming from? Something that every experimental physicist should know, right? They're concerned with errors. Yes. Heisenberg is just like, falter.

• 1:48:11Krishna Choudhary?

  He starts writing random shit on the blackboard, and then, and then Sommerfeld just stops him, and then the two of them start having an argument. Mm-hmm. Sommerfeld, and, and they start having an argument about what is physics. Right. And Sommerfeld is like, like, dude, this guy, no, you know, and they start, and so finally, he gets the degree, but he's super like, he's super down on himself. And he actually, his next job was supposed to be with, um... With Max Born at the University of Gottingen, which is another powerhouse. Back then, dude, Germany had these amazing, amazing research institutions in Berlin, in Munich, in Gottingen. All of that just got trashed by the Nazis over the course of like five years. But like before the Nazis, they were, they, they were like the epitome of, it was them and then Cambridge.

• 1:48:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And that was the, that was the whole thing.

• 1:48:58Lester Nare?

  History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

• 1:49:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but it does rhyme and, and, and so uh one of the things is like, it's so, it's so hard to build up these institutions. And so easy to just like break it down in like a couple of years. We gotta be very careful as a society that we're not doing that right now. So he goes, he goes to Born and he like, he's like, dude, I don't know if you still want me. Like I just nearly failed. And then Born was like, was it ween?

• 1:49:25Lester Nare?

  He's like, I know that.

• 1:49:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, and then he's like, wait, what happened? And then like Heisenberg like tells him and Born's like, okay. Arguably, you should have known how to do that one.

• 1:49:36Lester Nare?

  He was gonna write.

• 1:49:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but okay, fine, whatever. Let's just, let's, I'll, you're, you're still my postdoc, like, come on. So all of this stuff is what's called old quantum theory.

• 1:49:47Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:49:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Because the whole point is what they're trying to do is they're trying to like get like some kind of visual mechanistic understanding of what's happening inside of the atom. Okay? They're like, they're like, how does the electron go around the atom? And it, this starts frustrating a lot of people.

• 1:50:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Specifically the young people. Cause the old guys are really into this, right? They're, they're in this old phase from the 1905, 1910s, 1920s where it's worked.

• 1:50:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:50:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Bohr did this and it worked. Sommerfeld did this and now he's explaining this stuff. So it's working.

• 1:50:25Krishna Choudhary?

  But the new guys aren't, aren't really sold on it. They're not rocking with it. Right? So Heisenberg specifically is not rocking with it. He's also really into mock and positivism, okay? So he has this like crazy um case of hay fever. He had allergies all his life. Um, he actually went to Copenhagen for a bit to, to see Niels Bohr, got the hay fever. And so he went to this um, this island off the North Sea in Germany. Um, and he just like stayed there for like two weeks, all on his own. And that's where he comes up with this magician shit. Oh my god. Okay, on his own, on an island, trying to recover from allergies. On, on his bout of hay fever, just sweating in a bed. Sweating in the bed and he has this epiphany.

• 1:51:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And his epiphany has to do with the same, one of his big, he was a huge fan of Einstein, okay? And he loved the fact that Einstein used this like mocks positivism to say, what is the stuff? That I can measure, what is my experience? And he asked the same thing about this. And his, dude, his paper, the Umdeutung paper in nineteen twenty-five, it's written, his first page is like a manifesto about philosophy and how physics needs a new direction. And like, it's this, this pretentious like, it's, it's like this tirade on why everyone else is wrong, okay? Yeah. But hi, the, the central tenet is, can you see an electron going around an atom? Okay. That's what he asks. The answer is no.

• 1:51:54Krishna Choudhary?

  We cannot observe an electron going around an atom, we can't see it. What can we see? What we can see are spectral lines, their frequencies and their brightness. That's what we should be concerned about. Those are in principle observable, that's what he uses. He says, in principle, those are observable. The atom, there's no way we can see an electron, like, we can see planets move around, but we can't do that with this stuff. Right. What we can see is their transitions from different energy levels. And we can see how bright those transitions are. That's what we should be concerned with.

• 1:52:33Krishna Choudhary?

  So he develops a new quantum description for the kinematics and the mechanics of atoms. That's what he called it.

• 1:52:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And when he's doing this, this is where the magician stuff comes in, okay? He's like, okay, you know how I have like a, I can go from like, let's say n equals 6, the higher orbital to n equals 1, okay? I can go all the way down like that. I can do that in one jump, or I can do that in several jumps. I can go from 6 to 3, 3 to 1, or 6 to 2, 2 to 1. And each of those transitions corresponds to a frequency. And if I add those frequencies, then they equal the big frequency. Okay. Because of the way that the energy works, right? With like, the energy is proportional to the frequency. So if I want to add the energy from here to here, all I'm doing is I'm adding the frequencies from here to here, right? So, so the frequencies add. Okay, so he's like, what does that remind me of?

• 1:53:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, the way we describe waves in mathematics is with an exponential. E to the power of i times some omega t. Basically, I'm saying e to the power of some imaginary times like the angular component, which is my, the speed at which my angle is moving, the frequency, times some time. That's gonna give me a sine wave and a cosine wave. And with exponentials, just like, like, you know, e to the power of a, if I want to add, like, the frequencies are in the exponentials, right? So if I want to add the exponential stuff, Yeah, yeah. I gotta multiply these two. Yes. Make sense? Yes. So e to the power of a times e to the power of b is gonna give me a plus b on the top. Mm-hmm. Right?

• 1:54:10Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the standard thing that we do with exponentials. Yep. Okay, so that's the frequency part. Yes. The amplitude part is the stuff that's in front, right? There's gonna be some number multiplied by e to the sine that's gonna tell me how big my sine and cosine is, right? So if I'm adding the exponential part, I'm gonna have to multiply the amplitude part. Okay, so he's like, that's what I should be worried about, is how do I multiply these amplitudes? He tries doing it the normal way, it doesn't work. Okay. Okay, it doesn't like, just mesh with the way that like these transitions work and things like that. And he comes up with this really weird multiplication rule. That says that if I multiply two like A times B, that's different from if I multiply B times A.

• 1:54:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:54:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's called non-commutativity.

• 1:54:58Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:54:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Non-commutation, okay?

• 1:55:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:55:00Krishna Choudhary?

  The commutative, like, commutation is central to the multiplication of normal numbers, right? Five times four equals four times five equals twenty.

• 1:55:07Lester Nare?

  Right, right, that's why I'm furrowing my brow.

• 1:55:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but now you're like, and even Heisenberg's like, ah, so even he didn't know the magic trick that he was pulling.

• 1:55:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:55:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, but he wrote this up and he sends it, he's like, this is, it works. It tells you the brightness of the spectral lines, which is a new um, experimental thing that you've like, sort of explained. He's like, I don't, I don't know, right? He sends it to, he sends it to his postdoc advisor, Max Born. Um, and Max Born's like, oh dude, these are matrices.

• 1:55:42Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:55:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause Max Born has had the experience of being a mathematical physicist for twenty years above. Like Heisenberg might be a new guy who's got ideas.

• 1:55:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Krishna Choudhary?

  But Max Born immediately recognizes this mathematics as matrices.

• 1:55:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and in matrices, matrices are, are ways in which, like, you can manipulate vectors.

• 1:56:00Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:56:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Such that they point in different directions, you stretch them out and things like that. That's like standard linear algebra. Linear algebra back then was not something that every physicist took. Which is why Heisenberg had no idea what the hell he was doing. Right, but Max Born had done mathematics and so he knew some basic linear algebra. And um, and he recognizes this immediately. So Heisenberg publishes his Um Doytung paper. Max Born and Jordan then published their version of the paper. Reformulating it in terms of matrices.

• 1:56:27Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:56:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and to give you a sense of why this commutation thing works, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a little demonstration, okay?

• 1:56:34Lester Nare?

  We got the gold eagle.

• 1:56:35Krishna Choudhary?

  This is where, this is where, this is why I wanted the gold eagle in the beginning.

• 1:56:38Lester Nare?

  From the White House.

• 1:56:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so here we've got a um, a thing.

• 1:56:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:56:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, let's say, let's, let's, it's, it's an abstract. Like object. Yes. Okay, and one of the ways to visualize what matrices do, one of the common techniques that you use in matrices is you can have a three by three matrix. Which is nine different numbers in three rows, three columns. Yes. All with a bunch of signs and cosines. Mm-hmm. And there's signs and cosines of the angle of rotation that you rotate an object. Okay. Frequently in video games also, like when you're, when you, when you like rotate stuff. Or when like things are happening, you're using matrices to actually render. It's like this three axis. Mm-hmm, yeah, it's like, there's like X, Y, Z. Yeah. And so, and so, when you like rotate along some axis, there's some signs and some cosines somewhere and things like that, okay? That makes sense. So, so what we're gonna do right now. Is we're gonna apply two different matrices to this thing. Okay. Two different rotation matrices. Okay.

• 1:57:26Krishna Choudhary?

  But in different orders. Okay. Okay? Oh. Let's gonna start off with, we're gonna start off with the eagle facing away from me. Yes. The first rotation we're gonna do is along the Z axis, so from the top down. Yeah. We're gonna rotate ninety degrees towards you, to the left. Okay. Okay, and the second one we're gonna do. Yeah. Is along this axis, which is perpendicular to me like, and it's gonna rotate away from me downward. It's gonna be facing the. So, so we're gonna see what, what happens, okay? So the first thing, we're gonna rotate ninety degrees along Z. Yes. And then ninety degrees along this. Yes. Okay, so the first thing ninety degrees along you, now it's facing you. Yes. Now we rotate along this axis, so it's facing downward. Yeah. And it's looking like that. Yes. Okay? Okay.

• 1:58:08Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's an eagle that's like, kind of like lying down on the table. Now facing. Facing you. My direction. Lying down, facing you. Yes. Okay, now let's start again. Having started, having started facing vertically. Having started facing upright that way, okay, now I'm gonna do it the opposite direction. I'm gonna first rotate along this axis. Yeah, yeah. Now it's facing down, and then now I'm gonna rotate along this axis. Yeah. Now it's facing downward. Yeah. With its stomach on the table. Yes. See? And this is why the order of those. The order matters. Matters because of the rotational dynamics that happen. Because this is a matrix. Right. What I just applied is not, I didn't multiply this by a simple number. Right. I multiplied it by a matrix, the orientation of this thing, I applied a matrix to it. Right.

• 1:58:52Krishna Choudhary?

  That gave me a new orientation. Right, right. Versus.

• 1:58:57Lester Nare?

  Yes, that's actually no, that's a great visual explainer for why the order matters.

• 1:59:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the order in linear algebra, the order matters. The order of operations matters. The operation that we're doing is not multiplying by a number.

• 1:59:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:59:12Krishna Choudhary?

  We're acting with a matrix.

• 1:59:14Lester Nare?

  One of the things I really am upset about my early math education is that I'm a visual learner and I just did not get. And it, no one ever translated the visual of what's actually happening.

• 1:59:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Lester Nare?

  Uh, as we were discussing the concepts, I only learned that later in life. I'm like, this would have been way easier for me.

• 1:59:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:31Lester Nare?

  Because it.

• 1:59:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It dude, because mathematics is a language about. It's, it's a beautiful, it's, it's the only language that works when we're trying to describe like. Like, you know, processes in a very precise way.

• 1:59:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:59:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:59:45Lester Nare?

  Yes, that's brilliant. I totally get it.

• 1:59:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, yeah, it makes sense, right? And, and another, like, just a side bit. These rotations do not commute in three dimensions. But if I were to do a two dimensional rotation, meaning I can only do this way.

• 1:59:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Three dimensions means I can rotate this way and like all these ways.

• 2:00:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:00:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Two dimensional means I'm like, I'm stuck on the plane.

• 2:00:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Krishna Choudhary?

  If I rotate this way 90 degrees and then this way 30. Whereas if I rotate this way 30 and then this way 90.

• 2:00:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Krishna Choudhary?

  I get the same.

• 2:00:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So in two dimensions, rotations commute.

• 2:00:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:00:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And the order doesn't matter, but in three dimensions, they do.

• 2:00:21Lester Nare?

  That.

• 2:00:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's actually gonna be like, you know, if you, if we get into quantum mechanics later, like, that's actually like. A huge, huge thing in, in quantum mechanics. This is called SO3.

• 2:00:33Krishna Choudhary?

  The, the group of rotations in 3D and it's the underpinning for like spin.

• 2:00:37Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 2:00:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And like all the, yeah, all of the, all of the crazy stuff. Yeah, like, like, um. And, and all of that just comes from like.

• 2:00:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:00:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Basic mathematics of us living in three dimensions.

• 2:00:49Lester Nare?

  It's a, and it's an, it's an interesting application of like fundamental math concepts. And what, and what the implications of them are when you apply it into like this functional context or whatever.

• 2:01:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but this is, and it's, it's, it's crazy that like Heisenberg like. Came up with this multiplication rule, not knowing what the hell he was doing. Right? Like, he must, he must have thought he was going fully crazy. He's like, I got, I got A times B does not equal B times A. And then Born was like, no, this is fine. Actually, I'll do you one better. They, they wrote, and then Max Born, Heisenberg and Jordan.

• 2:01:27Lester Nare?

  Did the follow up.

• 2:01:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Did the follow up after that, all in 1925. And it started just, because now you got this language. Right? Where now you don't have to care about what the electron is doing.

• 2:01:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:01:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 2:01:40Lester Nare?

  Right. You, you, it's that positivism concept. You focus on what is actually, which has, it's interesting because the theory created experimental outcome. Like it changed the experimental framework of how you think about it.

• 2:01:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, how you even think about it. Now you got these quantum states.

• 2:01:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:01:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And oh, what are the quantum states? It's like now we start getting in the whole Copenhagen interpretation. It's like, duh. And now, now we're just starting to piss off Einstein. Actually, a funny story. So Heisenberg told Einstein.

• 2:02:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:02:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That like, I'm a huge fan of yours and like the whole Mach and positivism, like your philosophy is amazing. Um, so I actually used it to do this. This is when Einstein and Heisenberg were in a debate. And then it's like, dude, I, I used your, and then Heisenberg, Einstein apparently said, you know, um, a good joke is only funny the first time. What a dick.

• 2:02:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah. It's kind of a dick move.

• 2:02:31Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like Heisenberg is like, like, like way younger than you. And it's like thinks, thinks of you as his idol. Like, he was born when you wrote the 1905 papers. And then now it's like you're, ah, it's so funny, dude.

• 2:02:44Lester Nare?

  My mind is just sort of, because, you know, as we continue to have these conversations, everything gets more and more crystallized for me. Uh, so I can begin to intuit as you're going through, because we've talked about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle multiple times, uh, on the show. We've talked about quantum mechanics in general ways all the time. But now having walked through this story arc. The historical context is like also like super important and I don't want to lose sight of because. It's this idea like these ideas are compounding.

• 2:03:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they're built up. They're built up one at a time.

• 2:03:18Lester Nare?

  It's not just like thin air.

• 2:03:19Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 2:03:20Lester Nare?

  Each time, fresh from zero baseline.

• 2:03:22Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 2:03:24Lester Nare?

  Because a lot of people spend a lot of time doing stuff and being wrong. By the way.

• 2:03:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like Sommerfeld, his PhD advisor was wrong about, there's no elliptical orbits.

• 2:03:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:03:34Krishna Choudhary?

  That was just something, that was something you made up.

• 2:03:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:03:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 2:03:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:03:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And like even Bohr, Bohr's like circular orbits, again, something you made up. That's not how it works. Right? But it's like, but these incremental advances start, sort of gave way to the, to the ideas that we have today. And even the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? That didn't exist in nineteen twenty-five. That came about after.

• 2:03:55Lester Nare?

  This.

• 2:03:55Krishna Choudhary?

  This stuff, because it turns out that if you have these non-commutations.

• 2:03:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:03:59Krishna Choudhary?

  These variables like A times B.

• 2:04:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02Krishna Choudhary?

  There's some things like A times C where A times C equals C times A.

• 2:04:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Krishna Choudhary?

  For those two, there's no Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle only goes for variables that do not commute. Right? So when you have momentum times position, that's different times with position times momentum.

• 2:04:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18Krishna Choudhary?

  If you measure one and then the other, that's different from measuring B and then, and then the.

• 2:04:23Lester Nare?

  And this is part of the reason why you can only know one and not the other.

• 2:04:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, and then, and it becomes a super general thing. Because like, look, these rotations don't commute either, right?

• 2:04:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:04:32Krishna Choudhary?

  So now you have something like the total angular momentum and the angular momentum in a particular direction.

• 2:04:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:04:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is like, you know, the J total and then JZ is what we say in quantum mechanics. The angular momentum in this direction and the angular momentum total in any given direction. Those two don't commute because of these rules. And so that means you can't, those have a Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

• 2:04:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:04:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Energy and time also have an Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? All because of this, this mathematical structure that Heisenberg found in this nineteen twenty-five. Um, Doiting paper.

• 2:05:01Lester Nare?

  I got ninety-nine problems, but certainty, uh, ain't one.

• 2:05:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, and that's not a problem for him apparently. It is for Einstein.

• 2:05:12Lester Nare?

  This is, and, and, I mean, this really

• 2:05:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and that was a hundred years ago.

• 2:05:16Lester Nare?

  Right, and, and this is kind of like, that, at a hundred years, where now, the UN is now proclaiming 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, which, it's crazy to understand how it all started.

• 2:05:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, from a random hay fever guy.

• 2:05:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:05:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, dude was 23.

• 2:05:35Lester Nare?

  Right, like, and

• 2:05:37Krishna Choudhary?

  He was young, and that's why he came up with this stuff.

• 2:05:39Lester Nare?

  There is, there is something about the youthful naivete.

• 2:05:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:43Lester Nare?

  Uh, that you're not encum, you're not blocked by your prior biases that have been built up from years of life experience. Which may be good in some avenues, but when you're trying to do novel ideation, having a wider search space? Because you don't already have things blocked off.

• 2:06:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Lester Nare?

  Allows for serendipitous discovery.

• 2:06:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:04Lester Nare?

  Which is what we're seeing with Heisenberg in the story, which is so crazy. Because it, we also are in a situation, someone would have come up, up with it eventually, likely, but if Heisenberg didn't get that PhD, which was on the table.

• 2:06:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that was on the table.

• 2:06:19Lester Nare?

  It was very much on the table. You know, what, what, it

• 2:06:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, what is the trajectory, like, I, I mean, we would have been a few years late, I think.

• 2:06:26Lester Nare?

  Right, which like, okay.

• 2:06:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Somebody, and I think we would have come about it in a different, in a different way.

• 2:06:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:06:31Krishna Choudhary?

  There wouldn't have been a magician paper.

• 2:06:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:06:33Krishna Choudhary?

  It would have required like, a bit more, and a bit more, and a bit more. Schrodinger actually independently came up with his wave equation.

• 2:06:39Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:06:39Krishna Choudhary?

  That was separate from Heisenberg's. And then it turns out that those two were equivalent.

• 2:06:43Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 2:06:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but, Schrodinger's was much more still in the vein of old, old quantum, of like, I want to see what the electron is doing.

• 2:06:51Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:06:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And so he came up with these orbitals and things like that, and that's predominantly what physicists use today, because still to this day, we like having a mental picture of what is going down.

• 2:07:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:07:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And, and Schrodinger's, I mean, Schrodinger's mechanics is like, the, the wave, wave mechanics is, is an awesome thing. But, the, this commutation stuff.

• 2:07:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:07:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And this algebra.

• 2:07:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:07:12Krishna Choudhary?

  That, that, this non-commutative algebra is actually much more deep.

• 2:07:15Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, because this is something that underpins, like, this idea of symmetry and using algebra with symmetry and, and all of these principles is something that now underpins like, everything, like, from quantum field theory, standard model.

• 2:07:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 2:07:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, all sorts of stuff, right? Yeah.

• 2:07:29Lester Nare?

  Speaking of standard model, we have our lovely drink that our pro-host has been drinking all episode, which is the inaugural standard model agave soda.

• 2:07:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Named after the standard model of particle physics.

• 2:07:43Lester Nare?

  Which we love to talk about on the show.

• 2:07:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and we'll always talk about it.

• 2:07:46Lester Nare?

  Uh, great plug for standard model.

• 2:07:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:49Lester Nare?

  Um, we've covered four incredible topics, concept stories today. We started off way different with reading.

• 2:07:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, re- reading, reading inner thoughts, yeah.

• 2:08:01Lester Nare?

  Minority Report is here, uh, study out of Stanford. We then moved on to finding genes that make us human. We- that was all, all the stories as we were super interesting.

• 2:08:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:12Lester Nare?

  But that one was really fascinating to me because it, it, it gave me a framework into understanding evolution in a way that I didn't understand before.

• 2:08:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:19Lester Nare?

  Um, that totally changes my concept of how to think about that.

• 2:08:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:25Lester Nare?

  Um, and shout out to UCSD, two California stories today.

• 2:08:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:30Lester Nare?

  Shout out to California Republic. We then went across the pond, we saw and talked about how diamonds have gotten an upgrade. We have hisaginal, one mil- one millimeter large hisaginal diamonds have been created.

• 2:08:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:42Lester Nare?

  Uh, from scratch in the bakery at the High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing. And we ended with a great, really, really illuminating retrospective on the history of quantum mechanics.

• 2:08:56Krishna Choudhary?

  The hundredth anniversary.

• 2:08:57Lester Nare?

  The hundredth anniversary of the.

• 2:08:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the magician paper.

• 2:08:59Lester Nare?

  Of the magician paper, which, oh, God, I think that's what Eric Weinstein thinks his, uh, uh, unified theory is.

• 2:09:05Krishna Choudhary?

  He probably does think that, you know? And I don't know, who knows? Maybe in 400 years, we'll look back and think that. I, I, I have my doubts, but.

• 2:09:14Lester Nare?

  We will soon know in 400 years from now.

• 2:09:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:16Lester Nare?

  Um, thank you all of those who've stayed to watch with us for this whole episode. As always, we cover the week's breaking science headlines, research papers, and an occasional mis- mystery box or retrospective. I am your host, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Dr. Krishna Choudhary. This is From First Principles. We'll see you guys next week.