#312 Sabrina Pasterski - Theoretical Physicist on the Hidden Code of the Universe

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a first-generation Cuban-American theoretical physicist from Chicago whose life has been shaped by flight and physics. She began flight lessons at age nine and, between ages 12 and 14, built a single-engine Zenith CH 601 XL aircraft from a kit, making her own engineering modifications after fatal midair breakups involving the model. At 16, before she had a driver’s license, she flew the aircraft solo. The FAA later allowed her demonstration flight to validate her modifications before grounding the fleet. At MIT, Pasterski became the first freshman selected for NASA’s January Operational Internship, received the inaugural MIT Freshman Entrepreneurship Award, interned at NASA Kennedy Space Center and CERN, and graduated first in her MIT Physics class. She earned her PhD from Harvard in 2019 under Andrew Strominger, focusing on quantum gravity, then joined Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at 27 as its youngest faculty member and one of only three women on staff at the time. She now leads the Celestial Holography Initiative, and her honors include Scientific American’s 30 Under 30, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, and the Albert Einstein Foundation’s “100 Greatest Innovators.” Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Live better longer with BUBS Naturals. Get 20% OFF on collagen, MCT creamers, and more with code SHAWN at https://bubsnaturals.com/srs Go to https://calderalab.com/SRS and use code SRS for 20% off your first order. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Sign up and get 10% off at https://betterhelp.com/srs #ad Sabrina Pasterski Links: Perimeter Institute - https://perimeterinstitute.ca/people/sabrina-pasterski Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Sabrina.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Sean.

• 1:06Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:08Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I've been excited about this. So you're labeled, and I know you're probably going to downplay this, the next Einstein.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  You don't like that.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's just not accurate. But I do like this notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit about what that legacy is and like our feel as a whole and how do we kind of leverage that or do good with it.

• 1:31Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think we're going to get into all that. But you know, the stuff you're doing, I don't even know, I don't even know how to say it. But it sounds like, and we're going to get into it in a minute, but it sounds like what you're studying is if everything is a hologram.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Most literally, yeah. Like the thing that I study is that. And I do find it's fun, like to kind of take a step back and talk to people who are not researchers to see how they interpret the words that we attach to things or how like visceral, literal, like the researcher versus like the person you're talking to takes it.

• 2:06Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. Were you ready to get into it?

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:09Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's do it. I'm gonna start you off with an introduction here. Sabrina Gonzalez Pastersky, born in Chicago, Illinois, first generation Cuban American. At age nine, your first flight lesson ignited a lifelong obsession with flight and physics behind it. Between ages 12 and 14, you spent two years building a single-engine Zenith. Rejected by Harvard, waitlisted at MIT, you got off the waitlist because of the airplane you built. Earned your PhD from Harvard in 2019 in high-energy theoretical physics, leading the Celestial Holography Initiative, a project aimed at encoding the entire universe as a hologram to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity.

• 2:54Shawn Ryan?

  Named to Scientific Americans 30 Under 30 in 2012, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Science List in 2015, one of the Albert Einstein Foundation's 100 Greatest Innovators in 2018. First woman to chair the flagship annual Strings Conference for the global string theory community, first female to graduate number one in MIT physics, and like I said before, many consider you to be the next Einstein, which you hate. You, you, you don't like that.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  I think I probably benefit from it too much, but that's, and that's the bad thing. Yeah.

• 3:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's a cool label.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:33Shawn Ryan?

  Be proud of that. But, um,

• 3:37Shawn Ryan?

  so, actually, before we, before we get into it, just can you give me a quick, I think I know what string theory is, at least a little bit. But, is this, is this like, uh, what are they called? Quantum communication, where they?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Oh, so, so basically, they're, so like quantum information are they kind of like, uh, the sense in which you might be thinking of, like, if you were talking to someone who does quantum computing and like, those facets is more like, in holography, there are definitely connections between, foundational aspects of like entanglement and different like protocols you can do in a quantum mechanical system and then mapping it to a gravitational one. So, String theory is not related to that directly, but there's a sense in which the research I do probably is like more closely related, if that's what you're asking. But basically, the whole point is, we want to try to, as a field, not individually, understand like what the basic rules are, what are the laws of nature?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  And if you aren't going out and measuring things, what do you really have at your disposal? You're roughly trying to use mathematical consistency of your frameworks to try to piece together a picture. And so if you have rules for the very short distance physics and very long distance physics that are kind of in their own world, and you want to try to have a framework that connects both of them, you run into various problems. And string theory is one example of a route that people have found to kind of avoid the pitfalls of like understanding how to have a graviton or how to have like a quantum mechanical system with gravity. But in practice, you're roughly setting one little facet of these mathematical frameworks and trying to push it pretty far or generalize it to different situations.

• 5:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. What is the, I read something that China was working on communications where they will vibrate half of an atom, and then no matter what the distance is, the other, the other half of the atom will mimic exactly what?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Talking about some entanglement or what?

• 5:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yes. That's what I was thinking about, quantum entanglement.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Sure. So I think that the, I am less like on top of all of the experiments when it comes to trying to see like, not just entanglement, but maybe like some sort of like position dependence or whatnot, which is like closer to like seeing like how gravity and quantum interface. But, um, so I don't know exactly which experiment, but I know that there's a lot on like kind of the, there's a lot of progress on like the quantum computing side of things, which I guess is like the closest thing to an engineering subfield right now within like high energy theory, but a little bit not high energy.

• 5:59Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:01Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. All right. So a couple of things to crank out here.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:06Shawn Ryan?

  We got a Patreon.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:08Shawn Ryan?

  It's a community.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:10Shawn Ryan?

  They're the reason that I get to sit here with you today.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Super cool, yeah.

• 6:12Shawn Ryan?

  So, they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from JD Pardon.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 6:18Shawn Ryan?

  At 12, you weren't playing video games, you were in a garage building a Zenith CH601 XL. What did that mechanical grease under the fingernails experience teach you about solving abstract physics problems that a textbook never could?

• 6:33Speaker 03

  I think it's not, it maybe didn't teach me like enough for what I have done so far, but it definitely instilled the sense in which like, there's a value to trying to find the things that can be straightforward and systematic and build something cool out of it. And I think that that's one thing that maybe theoretical physics personally felt like it was lacking because I had this bias of growing up around people who like built cool shit or whatnot, is like, is there a sense in which you can try to find the engineering aspects of what you do and the systematic things and like build tools for that? So, that's a thing that that project probably has instilled in me, but I don't think I've like lived that out yet.

• 7:11Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:12Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. And then I got you a gift.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:15Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody gets a gift.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Gummy bears, I heard. Thank you.

• 7:20Shawn Ryan?

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• 7:27Speaker 03

  I hope I know how to open a damn bag, but, sorry.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yummy. Those are good.

• 7:38Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  What made you want to have gummy bears as a product? Cause it's super fun.

• 7:43Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, I was gonna do CBD gummies for sleep and uh...

• 7:47Speaker 03

  You need a melatonin ones or something?

• 7:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, my marketers, I'd all get sued for catering to kids. So I said, fine, we'll just do regular gummy bears, cause I like those too.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  I can eat them in.

• 7:57Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:58Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Involve.

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  But, but um... So I want to do a full life story on you and then get into everything that you're doing right now. So where did you grow up?

• 8:08Speaker 03

  I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and like in the city, but like near the outskirts of the city, part of the city where a lot of like firemen and cops would, I guess, live because they had to live technically in the city. You know, I love like Chicago is a kind of fun, like well-designed city where you have like a lot of like awesome public schools. And I went to a Edison Regional Gifted Center was nearby where I lived at the time. My parents picked that location to be near a nice schools. And it was, you know, fun growing up, awesome having like smart peers and being challenged in school. And then, yeah, I guess I can, I can keep iterating on different parts of it, but I definitely had some enthusiastic parents. And that's where this whole like taking advice

• 8:53Speaker 03

  from mentors and kind of just following different rabbit holes led to where I am now.

• 8:57Shawn Ryan?

  What, what did your parents do?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  So my parents are both lawyers, but they're not lawyers in like the, in the way all of their lawyers fancy sense. So my dad, for most of his career was a public defender. So he worked for like, like Cook County. And then my mom works for the EPA. So more like, I think the regs for like, making sure that companies that accidentally polluted, like various like groundwater or things that like affect people, like they have to pay and fix their problems.

• 9:24Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So nothing to do with physics?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Nothing to do with physics, but my dad did have an electrical engineering like undergrad degree. And so definitely growing up, like we were the ones doing repairs in our house. We didn't really hire contractors, except for maybe some things that had to be welded. So that was interesting, too.

• 9:40Shawn Ryan?

  And you did your first flight lesson?

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:44Shawn Ryan?

  Was it, was it either one of your parents a pilot?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  They weren't at the time. My dad got a license much, I mean, he got a license at some point, pretty soon after. But maybe he had a relative back in the day that had phone or whatnot. And I, like, Harry Potter was cool at the time. And I think I wanted like a flying broomstick. So like, they definitely convinced me like Santa Claus was real. It was really funny. I think they'd use like these extrinsic motivation things to like get me to be a good kid or whatnot. So like, I was convinced Santa Claus was real because the presents were awesome. But like, I guess I got a little greedy and I wanted like a flying broomstick because like Harry Potter was cool. And then they were like, flight lessons. So. Like, I mean,

• 10:20Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  I mean, but it's like, and it's funny because it's a bougie style hobby, but it's very much more like they would just do anything for their one kid, if that makes sense. Like, it's like, yeah.

• 10:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  My, my mom's family, like, so her dad was like a carpenter when, and then he like, they moved from Cuba. And then on my dad's side, his, his father was a bit in trouble with, with things. At some point, that's why he became a public defender. And so to them, they'd made it. And then, you know, they want to invest in their kid.

• 10:47Shawn Ryan?

  Man, so, so in, and you build a plane.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, but the

• 10:51Shawn Ryan?

  A plane.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  But the thing is

• 10:53Shawn Ryan?

  Age 12.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that, and that comes from the fact that like, I mean, like, people do this, right? So, so what's the, the way that this stuff works out? So you're, you're a nine year old flying and then your dad's like, oh, look, my kids are so cool flying. Like, like, who are these people that they can meet, da, da, da, da? You go to a lot of like air shows, um, like because he was a lawyer, so he has some sense of regs. Like, there was this kind of fun thing of looking for like, how can you get around, the fact that you'd have to be like 16 to fly alone in the US? But in Canada, you can only, you can do this at 14. And so I had found out that like Jamal Larkins was this aerobatic pilot who had gone up to Canada to flight train to get through this kind of legal loophole of how old he could be to fly alone. Wrote an essay about it. And then I started getting these like mentors in the FAA.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  And then my dad was super encouraging of like going out and networking. And it's very easy to network when you're a cute little kid. You don't have to be good at public speaking. Like, you're just like, here's a kid with some pictures of you like flying or like, well, like with a big parachute behind you and airplane, like, it's like overpowering. And like, you can walk your way into things. Like you bring like Krispy Kreme donuts to the FAA. It's perishable, you know, and you start making friends and then you see all these people who are, you know, building kit planes. And then you're like, damn, it's hard to get into school these days. Like, can you do some sort of trick to get into either like those like selective high school IMSA where I went or MIT? And, uh, yeah. And then I always just trusted my, like, like, I thought my dad was, knew everything

• 12:20Speaker 03

  because he was really like, kind of a jack of all trades fixing things around the house. So when he is like over my shoulder or like teaching me how to do some things and I'm just going and riveting things together. I'm like, this is great. I know if he says it's fine, it's fine. Like, and it was cool because basically before the, it turned into this set of mentors suggesting, oh, you could do this thing, like whenever, uh, it was just that much effort put into like school projects. So I had like, um, Like, I think whenever like people were like first burning DVDs, we'd have like a room in our house. So one of the bedrooms, they painted chroma key blue that I would go and like reenact little scenes for my history projects and like

• 12:58Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  And put into I had like some like Doctor Who episode or something like that. So it was we'd like, we'd basically were just trying to do like, like say A plus star on every little school project, which is a bit of a waste of time, but just a funny little like effort. And then to translate that into something where then the narrative was like, okay, you're gonna take flight lessons. You're then gonna like, you know, try to build an airplane and then want to work for these aerospace companies, like a linear kind of story arc with a bunch of like fast paced like projects type of thing in between was something I think that came out of this otherwise like intense like

• 13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Do it well attitude.

• 13:30Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what, what age did you start reading?

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I mean, I don't know. I don't think, I don't recall myself as being like a, like a better reader than my classmates. If anything, when I was in kindergarten, like Alison Larrabee could read all of the joke cups. And so like, I mean, I could read, but like, maybe my vocabulary was not as expansive. And so then my parents would like buy all of the Dixie joke cups, like, you know, in bulk to then be able to at least read the words on.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  But like, but then the kids still would just go to Alison, maybe because she was like the first person like that they knew could read the joke cups or because she had more friends. I don't know. But like, um, yeah. So I don't think I was necessarily reading faster, but I probably was talking a lot early on. And they used to do a thing where it's like, I could write it out, then they'd let me like if I asked for a car ride at some at random time of night, if I could write it on the little chalkboard, they'd take me on a car ride. So a lot of extrinsic motivation.

• 14:23Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Right. Do you have any brothers and sisters?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  I don't. And that's, that's probably why all the intense story stuff is because it's like one kid, one shot, you know?

• 14:31Shawn Ryan?

  What else? I mean, what, what else were you designing, inventing, building as a kid?

• 14:35Speaker 03

  I mean, I would say that like the It wasn't anything that like before it would have been just like going all out on every little class project just for this, the heck of it, not, um, nothing that cool. And I think that, but the one thing is, is like, kind of like, it was pretty clear to see how easily, like, the goals were shaped by either like strong reactions to, or like taking on ideas from like the people that you talk to. So like when I was flying, everyone would be like, oh, one day you're gonna be like flying the, our Boeing one day when we're like, we're like taking a vacation. I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to be a, I don't want to do that. And then you see these people building kit planes, super cool at these air shows. Uh, when you're putting it together, they're like, oh, one day you're gonna be

• 15:17Speaker 03

  building the Boeing. I'm like, I don't want to do that. Uh, and so it was just more of like a, someone says you can do it. And then my dad's like, yeah, you can do it. Then let me see how you can do it. Or then someone's saying you will be doing it. You're like, no, I don't want to do it. And so then you pivot. And so that's how I accidentally pivoted into physics later, like we can get to, because I was like, ah, it's not as cool if you're not actually like, you know, there's, the designs aren't really changing and you're not like putting together. I mean, it was somehow more fun to have something where you do straightforward work. Somebody else kind of told you the steps for you modifying it or find like that. But then you have a product that you built versus when you're just engineering something a little, it's like a little too theoretical. I might have out go the whole other extreme of purely theory, which was maybe a bad choice, but, but it kind of.

• 15:57Shawn Ryan?

  What did get you into physics?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So funny story. So basically, I think the first hint at it was the high school I went to, this math and science school, like all of the, like a large fraction of the faculty had PhDs. And so I didn't grow up with people who had PhDs. I mean, my parents both had like, you know, their lawyers. So they went to like, you know, state schools for that. Um, but suddenly now all of your peers think they have to get a PhD to be cool. So that's a weird thing. Like suddenly have this mind shift where, okay, I need a PhD. Probably not true, but like that, that starts, I mean, definitely not true, but that, that starts getting seeping in. The person who founded my high school, uh, was like a former director of Fermilab. And he'd have like these lunches with Nobel laureates with like, they'd come in and give talks. And then he would have lunch with the students if it was just him every Monday or something. I remember.

• 16:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wait, hold on.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:44Shawn Ryan?

  I thought you went to public school.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  I went to, it's a public school. So like,

• 16:48Shawn Ryan?

  This is a public school?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  So this is not Chicago Public School. So I went K through eight, Chicago Public Schools, and they have like these kind of magnet like programs, like give designer type of thing. They have different types of magnet programs. So CPS is like so large that they have fun.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Schools for kids who like school, I guess.

• 17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Then I went to the state school that's three years boarding school paid for like mainly by like state of Illinois. Math and science school, Illinois Math and Science Academy. So I think it's funded under the umbrella of like University of Illinois or whatnot. There's precedents in South Carolina, I believe, and Texas and others where it's just like a STEM boarding school that the state runs that it's it's public.

• 17:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  But it's like, it's like you get this, you have to take the SAT to get in and things like that, but it's kind of actually cool that there are these.

• 17:33Shawn Ryan?

  That is cool.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, public schools.

• 17:34Shawn Ryan?

  You took the SAT to get in?

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, and and the scores for kids getting in like to high school are not that good and I definitely wasn't the type of person who did well on standardized tests. I did well on like the ones in school because I cared about the teacher I'm trying to impress. But, um, yeah, it was neat because it was a public school, but it was very much like a little bit of this vibe of like.

• 17:53Shawn Ryan?

  Gifted.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Private, yeah, type of school experience in the sense of, yeah, you're at a boarding school, but it was nice because then it could get kids from all over, like even our elementary school was like you're bussing kids in from all over the city. And so we have a lot of like just gifted kids from like various socioeconomic backgrounds there. And then similarly with like the boarding school aspect lets you be from anywhere in Illinois.

• 18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  So it was nice.

• 18:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

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• 20:34Speaker 03

  So MIT has been a cost of a lot.

• 20:36Shawn Ryan?

  So all the PhDs got you into physics?

• 20:39Speaker 03

  So it was a PhD plus the fact that the founder was a physicist, like a Nobel laureate in physics, who then somehow, when like, the plane is final assembly like near Aurora Airport nearby this high school. And he thinks it's cool. He's like, oh, you can be a physicist. And then suddenly that gets into our minds. And then all of these aerospace like executives who were running these like private aerospace companies. So I guess not Richard Branson, but Elon Musk and Bezos both like liked physics for whatever reason, like they either like dropped out of some physics-ish like material science degree at Stanford or thought about majoring at Princeton. So my heroes were these guys who like could just do cool shit. Like they had built a company to have the resources to then do something that's valuable, but not necessarily profitable.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Or I'm sure they found ways to make it profitable, but. I thought that was

• 21:26Shawn Ryan?

  I think they're doing alright.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  I think they're doing alright. No, no, but even in the scope of like, can you, like, how do you just build a

• 21:31Shawn Ryan?

  No, I get what you're saying.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  So I thought that was the coolest thing and I wanted to be like that. And I figured, okay, like, if I just work for them, would I ever still be like that? I don't know. And I got a little disillusioned about like, what's the product I'm gonna build? If you build like some suborbital thing, if like you accidentally kill a rich person, is it gonna just be dead? But they did a good job. They didn't do this. I'm surprised. I'm like, damn, like.

• 21:52Shawn Ryan?

  If you accidentally kill a rich person.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  No, you know, so like you're, so that type of thing scared me a little bit. And then I figured they like physicists. So like, how can I be cool to the people I find cool? Let me go into physics, which is like the wrong reason to go into physics. And then, by the way, like, I grew up with a bunch of the kind of like mechanics slash engineers who maybe see like the physics as like this bottleneck that the physicists aren't doing it right. Like, there's gotta be some cool tech that can come out of this. And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go in that field. And it's like, completely not. You gotta hide that at least when you're actually trying to like get by in.

• 22:30Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Very much a wrong reason to go into the field.

• 22:33Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What, I mean, what was, what was the first project that really grabbed your attention? Cause you obviously love it. You're still in it.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I'm still in it. No, but I still think the thing, it's for that bigger picture goal. So I think the thing that grabbed my attention is more, you know, I liked my math and science courses in school. I think that maybe in hindsight, looking back, just the notion of being, computing something draws your attention in, in a way where then once you're in it, you're in it, you're hooked. And that's good for my job mechanically, in the sense that like our job is to compute things. But I do think that I was still more excited by the bigger picture view or this notion of the possibilities of what physicists could do than in practice, what it is in the same sense that like, you know. Someone working at Google like isn't necessarily actually like gets to think about search, they're doing one specific little widget or something, you know, type of thing. But yeah.

• 23:26Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:27Shawn Ryan?

  Where do we go from high school?

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Oh, so from high school, we go to being a little bit too cocky and like being like MIT for aerospace, Harvard for physics, and then not getting in because you wrote too many poems or didn't really like, I think that the one thing about the admissions to these schools, I mean, it's so much luck. So that's a bit sad. I think that grad admissions is fairer because you're already kind of differentiated in your skill set and like the people admitting you are the people who care about the field that you're going into. But I think I thought like, all these other kids are taking the AP courses, they're checking off all these boxes for their extracurriculars. They don't want that, they want something different. It's like, no, maybe it's just like, you know, like they're seeing a large array of applications. You don't want to like be anomalous in a negative way. You just like check the boxes and more or something. I think I didn't, I didn't handle it right.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  But then I knew how to bother people because I'd been networking since I was a kid. So we found like Sheila Woodnell or who else? I think we shouldn't, might not have helped with admissions. It was more like Earl Merman. But basically, I'd be this kid with this little like photos of this airplane belt walking around and like my parents would drop me off at different places. So like wandering MIT hallways to try to like say hi to someone with this book. And I'm just like, okay. And then I just patiently wait. I mean, probably not as cool as like waiting for like a little sniping mission, but like you're just there, you're like, somebody's here, I'm gonna say hi to them. The mission is to get this book in the hands of some MIT professor.

• 24:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  And you meet cool people. And it was like, you give flowers to the secretaries or whatever, things like that. So a lot of networking as a kid and eventually it helped because I had some friends who could be like, hey, admissions office, like maybe she didn't present this clearly enough in her application. This is kind of cool. Let her in and I got in off the waitlist to MIT.

• 25:05Shawn Ryan?

  You got in where?

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Off the waitlist to MIT. Yeah. That way.

• 25:09Shawn Ryan?

  Because you tried to get into Harvard too, right?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I got rejected. But I mean, to be fair, lots of kids get rejected, lots of awesome kids get rejected. It's not something, it's something more about like teaching you not to.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Like rely on other things happening for you that you can't control, right? So like, yeah.

• 25:27Shawn Ryan?

  What was it that got you off the waitlist at MIT?

• 25:29Speaker 03

  It was probably this type of networking thing, like, you know, trying to like, rely on some people who could vouch for me once you're on this waitlist.

• 25:37Shawn Ryan?

  It wasn't the plane?

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Well, it was the plane, exactly. So I'm saying this whole me going around with like the little, like photo book of the airplane and then meeting MIT.

• 25:44Shawn Ryan?

  You literally brought the photo book of the airplane.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Believe me, I would like, I had little business cards back in the day. I mean, I think, I mean, I like, it's very cringey.

• 25:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  I blame my dad. No, but like, it was like, you had little like photo books of the plane, little business cards and like, like thinking of who you want to meet and you're going to meet that person and then you're this cute little kid. I mean, like you think it'll get a little bit less cute once you're in your teenage years, but between like, you know, 12 and 14, you're pretty cute. Um, so like walking around like with that, like trying to introduce myself to like various MIT faculty, say, or like at the air shows, various people in the FAA or like maybe Peter Demandis or, or, or folks who, uh, had done cool stuff in either like the private aerospace, like, um, like Anusha Ansari had gone up, uh, an Asahi's capsule and then Demandis had the X Prize. So like definitely a lot of like trying to network, but with like little.

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that is, uh, I'm gonna do that with my kids now.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  No, with the kids, I mean, it works with, it's like an arbitrage opportunity. It's like there are things that like the kid can get the access and the, yeah.

• 26:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's smart. I love it. I love it. So how did you like, how, how was it getting into MIT?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  So I think it was very, it was a relief because I didn't get into college otherwise, right? I mean, I was very dumb. I was like very narrow minded in the sense of like, or like laser focused on, I want this thing or this thing, none else. I have standards, but you can't like have standards if you're not like what they want. Um, but I guess it helped to be able to have a little bit of that story. And some of that network to like.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Petition or whatever, put a good word in once it was on the waitlist. So, yeah.

• 27:18Shawn Ryan?

  How'd you like it?

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I loved MIT.

• 27:20Shawn Ryan?

  Was it challenging?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I love, you know, and I think that's the thing is like, actually, I loved it way more than my experience at Harvard. But like, not to say that other people don't like each for their own, but it was just, I liked the fact that it was intense. And like, like you knew where you stood. It wasn't a bunch of kids bullshitting like, and like you'd take, you know, you take the courses that you're ready for and they get you up to the next speed and not a bunch of, if everybody gets an A, then you can pretend that you know stuff and you have kids sitting in on courses they shouldn't be in. And then like, who knows what? It's like babble versus it just felt more like went in, worked hard, you got something out of it. I love structure and, and yeah, something helping push you.

• 28:01Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, what exactly were you studying?

• 28:04Speaker 03

  So I ended up majoring in physics. So I think I, when I went in, there's like a lot of just general institute requirements at the beginning, first year. So I was able to sneak into being like this internship at Kennedy Space Center with a bunch of older aerostroke kids. And then I think it was after that first summer, I also interned at Boeing. And I guess at the time I was scared of like this whole like narrative of like the airplane build and like flying as a kid, like how much that would confine me. And I, so I guess my rebelling was like going, the other option was physics somehow. And so I, I liked, I liked my physics courses. I did well and I just pivoted into like, let me major in physics. Cause.

• 28:42Shawn Ryan?

  You, you did it, you did an internship with Boeing?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it wasn't, I mean, probably it's lots of kids do internships. It was probably because of the plane and stuff like that, that, and these, these connections that I was maybe considered as a freshman or like younger than maybe other people would have. But you know, you end up.

• 28:58Shawn Ryan?

  You were, you, you did an internship as a freshman at Boeing?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Uh, between, I think, I hope I'm right, but between freshman and sophomore year. I'm like, if I'm not memory.

• 29:07Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, as a freshman, you were named the first in MIT history.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  The little interpreter.

• 29:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Which, which, but I wasn't very entrepreneurial. I don't have any companies. Lots of MIT kids have companies. But I hope, I hope the, the spirit is there for the, for the wrong application. But when I was at Boeing, I probably, and this is the type of mistake that I would make often is you have, like you make awesome mentors that you want to learn something from, but sometimes you want to not just literally take their advice. And so I think that my family and I, we accidentally would, you know, work for the person that gave you that introduction, rather than thinking about, okay, where else at Boeing would I rather be necessarily? So I ended up in this arm where they were doing some cool, like R and D for a project that didn't feel like it was ever going to be built by Boeing, because it was kind of a McDonald Douglas acquired branch of the company.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  And that disillusioned me a little bit, not because it, it should have, but because it's just like,

• 30:04Speaker 03

  like, engineering isn't always the same thing, or academic engineering isn't always the same thing as like building something. And I think that I thought it would be closer to like move fast, break things, do cool things. And I think if I had seen any military side of Boeing, it would be a very different experience. But I was kind of just like, hmm, you know, sometimes the technology of within a given field isn't the thing that then advances that field.

• 30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  And so, and again, because of these stupid reasons of like a bunch of like, we like not knowing enough about physics to realize that isn't the right route. Like, you know, maybe studying like the fundamental laws of nature would, would help you more than studying like coding or something. If like the, the new tech is like other drones or better engine design or whatever for, for like pushing aerospace forward. So very naive, but kind of disappointed with the fact that you could see that even at a big company that's doing some awesome things. Like there's a sense in which you can get lost in the R and D phase.

• 30:59Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. You, you just mentioned something. I think you said that the, the latest technology in a field isn't necessarily what's going to advance humanity. How do you make that determination?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  So I'm, I think what I'm saying is just like, a lot of times you can see it in like, and I see this in physics with people who complain about physics, who are not necessarily in the, in crowd or whatever. And like, they can say true things and maybe draw the wrong conclusions about intent or about like what to do about it.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  I think that oftentimes like you can just kind of see that there's like a lot of low hanging fruit and then it stagnates a bit. And like, I mean, to the extent of like, you know, the design for like a passenger airplane really hasn't changed so much. And so like, do you just look at like, try to find a definition of progress and see that it's slowing down and not blame yourself for not being smart enough, but try to see like, what do I actually care about? Do I like it because I like doing the thing? Or do I want a product? And once you have the product in mind, probably it's easier to decide like what you need to learn and go do.

• 31:59Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:00Shawn Ryan?

  Let's rewind for a minute. You had a high school internship at Blue Origin.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  A little bit, but that was so short. That was like, I mean, so the internships at Boeing was a real normal internship. And then the one where I was at Blue Origin was, some mentors were nice and like, let me, I forget exactly, I probably, I'm glad I can pretend that this idea, I don't remember exactly all the, the utility of the thing that I was playing with at the time there. And then the one at NASA was also very much more like show and tell. It felt like we were learning like operations instead of any particular cool tech, but we got to see a lot of fun stuff on the tours. Yeah.

• 32:36Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of fun stuff?

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Um, like, I thought the coolest thing was somehow these like, tiles where you could heat it up and it would still be really hot on the inside and you could touch it on the outside. Like, that was, that was fun. But it was just like going around to different parts of like Kennedy Space Center, literally getting a tour with a bunch of aerospace engineer students. And at the time, and this is kind of funny too, because I used to think it felt a little bit bullshitty to, to have these, and again, I don't know, like, not knowing, I'd insult the experts, but something felt off about there being a whole enterprise around like how you organize your enterprise. It feels like, kind of like prompt engineering now. It's surprising how, how much of a discipline do you make the things that feel like soft skills? And so that internship was very much like trying to see how different parts of

• 33:19Speaker 03

  NASA were working together or like, like that. But it's such a high level view that I think I was like, this isn't the tech. And maybe in hindsight, though, I should have like, appreciated it more. But I think at the time, it was just weird going from like, you know, rivet, rivet, rivet, plane to.

• 33:37Shawn Ryan?

  What are your, what are the other interns? Were there other interns?

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, one of them, I think, ended up going, they were awesome. I was probably just a little bit annoying because I was younger and like, and I was like, I turn, I turn, I turn, no, like.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  This is a kid of ours that's freaked out over like, I turn things on. Um, but, um, like, like who could see documents. Um, but, uh, but basically they, like, one of them, I think, was gonna go in the Air Force. Maybe he did. I hope so. I don't, I don't know. I didn't really follow up because I ended up going to a different major later. But, uh, I think one of them had interned at SpaceX or things like that. So it was a, you know, I think I didn't appreciate how valuable your peers are until I started going more towards physics, just because then I got into the whole, like, research community and stuff. But, um, yeah, I probably was just an annoying little freshman in that thing.

• 34:27Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think they felt about you? How much younger were you?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  I think we all agree. No, no. I mean, no, I, I think I wasn't that much younger, but enough when you skip a year or so, like, right? College is, yeah, if you're, how old I would have been, like 17 or something, and they're like 21 or two, it's still a bit different if you're, yeah, they're more independent and like.

• 34:49Shawn Ryan?

  And then you had an internship at CERN?

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So then I went over to physics because I guess, so I made that choice for physics because I liked my physics courses. And again, all of these tech people who are in aerospace were my heroes and they liked physics. So I'm like, I'm gonna try to impress them. How hard can it be? Um, and then, but the mistake I made was, I guess, that I just kind of took the first, um, internship type opportunity from the person who was technically my, my undergrad advisor. And so it was at CERN. So CERN is cool, but I'm sure that, like, like I didn't necessarily make the right choice in the sense that I wasn't like scanning all opportunities of things within the field I could be interning in or whatnot. I was very lucky that the one year that I do, the first year I go to CERN, they discover the Higgs boson. But like, you know, science is slow, especially in like a big collider.

• 35:35Shawn Ryan?

  The first year you went to CERN?

• 35:36Speaker 03

  They're like, they're discovering Higgs boson. That's nothing to do with me, but just the right timing of like.

• 35:39Shawn Ryan?

  Discovered what?

• 35:40Speaker 03

  The Higgs boson. Oh, sorry.

• 35:41Shawn Ryan?

  What is that?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  It's like, so trying to understand the, um, the origin of like masses for like these standard model particles. Um, it's an extra field that was conjectured to be there to describe also like electroweak symmetry breaking, et cetera. Like the, the. The field content of like the, the things that mediate interactions between particles. And so basically, they have a new discovery in a way where that's like really rare, but like, you know, sample bias of like, you're in there, they do cool stuff. So like, okay, that was neat.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  But again, CERN is huge, right? So it's just, it's interesting to also see how hard it is to make some measurement for like some quantities within theories that are also esoteric. And so it's, it's a fun thing to see the engineering side of physics research.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  But, but again, I was just, I'm just a kid, kind of like having some fun doing like a little, little bit of like, I think it was some, just for my undergrad thesis, along lines of like, some data analysis, back of the envelope thing for a feature detector type of.

• 36:47Shawn Ryan?

  What, what is that? What, there's a lot of conspiracies and all kinds of stuff going on.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Stuff was cool. I wish, see, the thing is, is these conspiracies are never like, it's always just not as cool as they make it sound. And.

• 36:59Shawn Ryan?

  What are they doing?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  They're just colliding like particles, right? Like you want to, you want to send things in at higher, higher energy so they get close enough and then you can start to see the structure of the thing. So imagine like you have like this bag of quarks and you start to see that like the, like the kind of component nature of your, your like protons and things like that. And so it's, it's just, you're colliding and then you're trying to measure what's coming out and you want to like try to infer how your theory of the interactions is consistent with that.

• 37:26Shawn Ryan?

  What is coming out?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I'm sorry. I mean, so, I mean, it should be jets at some point, these things hadronized. Sorry. So like, basically you're colliding, say, depending on the collider, you're putting like, say electron, positron and other colliders and this is like, say, two protons are colliding. And you're going to have, the protons are made up of some like quarks and then they're going to have some interactions and then they're shooting out other quarks. But like, there's other particles in your, your standard model field theory and those interactions will determine, I guess, the, the rate at which different things are produced. And so there's a theoretical thing, you're, you're, you're modeling like those very short distance scale interactions and then you're trying to infer from the energy deposited or like different particle tracks that this thing is actually what happened to then say something about your, your theory. And.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  That's fun and that's cool, but the scary thing is just how big, like how hard it is to like probe those high energy scales and you see these huge, I mean, the collider itself is like, you know, these rings are amazingly huge.

• 38:22Shawn Ryan?

  It goes around three countries, right?

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, they're near a border, but yeah, but um, yeah, so very interesting engineering feats for fundamental physics and that's cool and something I probably didn't appreciate as much as I like, because I went into theory, I obviously somehow didn't appreciate it enough. But yeah, it's, it's cool. I don't, I don't know. You end up knowing so little compared to all the things you wish that you knew about, about the stuff.

• 38:49Shawn Ryan?

  Is there any, is there any truth to the fact that you're trying to create some type of a black hole?

• 38:55Speaker 03

  They're not trying to know. I think that there's, so that was a fun thing to see. I think I finally met one person who is kind of this back of the envelope fear monger or fun guy for the billionaires, you know, like, like, because I could understand, like, I mean, if you're probably from a defense kind of point of view, you want to understand the risks or whatnot. And I'm like, I wish it were that fun. I wish it were that risky. Like, nah, like, if we were, I mean, I'd love to be like building wormholes, but they're not going to be like, you're not going to be able to transverse anything. No, so it's, it's so sad. This is the no goes that are the worst thing. Like, I

• 39:27Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just curious because it sounds like now you're into, you're really into black holes and you're

• 39:31Speaker 03

  I'm, yeah, no, but I, like, again, I spent most of like my childhood convinced that, like, there was cool stuff that could be done. And then most of like, the, like, learning grad school or an undergrad at grad school, the hard way is not that cool. And then being upset at the fact that all these people overhyped things and like, it's not as cool. Quantum computing is like way overhyped. And then suddenly AI actually is useful. You're like, holy shit. So, so I don't, I don't know where I should land in the end or what I should learn from the fact that like, yeah, completely disillusioned to like overly enthusiastic in a, in a couple of weeks.

• 40:03Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you at CERN?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Oh, just like two summers, like whatever the, like less than 90 days or whatever for the work permit, I forget now, but just two summers.

• 40:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what's it like there? What's it like when you walk in? What, what's in there?

• 40:15Speaker 03

  It looks like old buildings. Um, like, I think that it's a bunch of, the weirder thing about it is the way that it interfaces with, say, the US institutions or things like that. You'll just have a lot of, like, I don't know what year, like 50s or something. They, they look like dated buildings, but with a bunch of people in offices and then all of the cool expensive technologies and the actual like detectors, say. So it just kind of looks like, um,

• 40:40Speaker 03

  I don't know like what you would imagine probably uh some some industrial complex thing. It's a vibe.

• 40:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is it? I mean, do you go underground?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Uh, I wouldn't for what I'm doing, but sure, for a tour or if someone is actually like putting together detectors, absolutely.

• 40:54Shawn Ryan?

  They do tours?

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, they do. Yeah, when it's not running. Yeah.

• 40:57Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta check it out.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, a hard hat.

• 40:59Shawn Ryan?

  So how how do they get two atoms to collide in a tube?

• 41:03Speaker 03

  This is way above my pay grade, but it's a bunch of magnets accelerating these things to like like higher speeds and then.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  I I wish I do. I I should. I'd literally like I should probably know what detectors are, but luckily I'm not technically studying the manufacturing of uh or like engineering of of the things to test experiment. I'm like purely in the theory side.

• 41:23Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see when the particles hit?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  So they would see the tracks afterwards. So that's a funny thing, too, is like you're not actually seeing like you don't see the Higgs boson. You're seeing like the fact that the things that came afterwards are consistent with it being there. And I think that that was the kind of funny thing, too. Again, very silly, but maybe visceral in the sense of like, you're not actually seeing the thing. You're inferring the thing versus like for gravitational waves, it really is like it's a sound wave where they're seeing the, you know, the mirrors move apart and that's kind of fun. It's fun when it's the they're just they're actually seeing the thing they're saying they're seeing instead of indirectly inferring the thing.

• 41:53Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Post-processing is.

• 41:54Shawn Ryan?

  What what does that all mean?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Uh, to each their own. I think that, sorry, you know, uh, what it means in some sense is like you've tested a particular theory. And so you're kind of ruling out some parameter space of, okay, there's no super partners or things like that, too, or we understand this Higgs mechanism.

• 42:11Shawn Ryan?

  Did you say super partner?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Oh, so like basically, I think that at some point, a lot of people were looking for like extra particles that would come if there was this like symmetry relating um fermions and bosons. So things that want to um like be apart from one another, like you only want to like fill one at each state versus things that like to kind of um.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Cohere or have like amplified or like, sorry, that's a bad analogy. But there's two types of particles that like interged your spin and half interged your spin. And some people were trying to conjecture that when you build these colliders, you're going to see more and more particles and then that'll change the way that we think of these frameworks being organized and things like that. But, you know, turns out maybe, maybe not. Maybe, you know, we don't know when, when the next like new discovery is going to be. And so it's weird because then you're trying to fund an experiment where you don't know what the answer is going to be. And you're like, how expensive is it to, to motivate or to build this thing?

• 43:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. But luckily I'm not as involved in that. I like, I'm like purely theory for the sake of that way I can be decoupled from these like high cost experimental ventures for a bit. And then just tackle that problem of kind of like mathematical, I guess, induction or something on the theoretical physics corpus, I think is, is one way to say it.

• 43:23Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't really think much about skincare before, but after enough long days, travel and stress, you start to see it in your face whether you want to or not. That's what got me into Caldera Lab. It's a straightforward routine built for guys. Nothing complicated, just a few steps that actually work. I use the good in the base layer. Takes less than a minute, absorbs fast and has no greasy feel. But the difference is noticeable. My skin looks healthier, more even, and just more dialed in overall. And it's not loaded with junk either. It's made with clean clinically backed ingredients and does exactly what it says it will. It's one of those small habits that adds up over time and changes how you show up day to day.

• 44:08Shawn Ryan?

  Give it a shot. Go to calderalab.com/srs and use code SRS for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab.com/srs. Where do you go from CERN?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  So from CERN, I use the fact that it's easier to get into grad school, the experimental things, to get into grad school at like at Harvard, at MIT, at School Options. I went to Harvard because it would be more easy to pivot, I thought, because I'd already worked for the people at MIT. And then at Harvard.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  I think I was, it was like quantum computing or string theory. And I thought that quantum computing was overhyped.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  So then I picked the other one. And I don't know how people feel like string theory was so cool back then. And it was like, you know, Brian Greene was very much making it cool when I was a kid.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  And I still think it's super cool, but it's not for the same, like, almost for the same reasons that people sometimes hate on it a little bit.

• 45:08Shawn Ryan?

  So can you, can you give me a dubbed down version of string theory?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Maybe. So you're basically, quantum field theory is giving you these fields that explain why particles are identical. Cause they're like, the electron is just an excitation of this field. So like I have multiple electrons or excitations of the same field.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  You can think of, say, the mechanical process of how I compute some amplitude, like this thing, predictions for certain as a bunch of world lines coming in with some rules for how they interact and split off and create other particles. String theory is kind of chubbing out this like graph to like a sheet, kind of like a literal, like a pair of pants, say, interacting and like you have this world sheet. So what it does for you is it kind of two things, like one thing is it kind of opens up this UV behavior. So this sort of points, it's kind of just like this branching of like a tubing thing. And then the other hand, it also gives you a particle spectrum. So basically it's like, you can imagine, okay, let's try to build some mathematical framework within which I have the spectrum where I have this graviton, I expect this gravitational field.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  And then I avoid some pitfalls of trying to treat gravity as a quantum field theory too. And so, and then people just keep building off of it. And then there's years and years of papers that you're like behind on when you're a new grad student. But the, the main idea is trying to find some underlying mathematical framework that can let you have, you know, your cake and eat it too, like gravity and quantum theory.

• 46:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. All right, all right. So we go to Harvard.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  We go to Harvard.

• 46:42Shawn Ryan?

  Get your PhD.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  I'm working on my PhD and I think the whole airplane story, I have a bunch of friends who are like in aerospace who think, oh, this kid's cool. I'm doing some fun research with like with Andy and friends with like spin memory effects, stuff like that. But then and then you get overhyped really quickly because, you know, any press is good press if you're trying to start a company, but not if you're trying to get along with the 2,000 people in a field that like, you know, are sometimes bombarded by like, what is string theory doing, the type of thing. So like very much closed ranks type of thing. So that happens in the middle of my PhD. So I like, I guess I'm lucky that I didn't take all of these advanced grad courses and just took a lot of E and M for like some of the stuff that my advisor happened to be doing was very like, you know, you have a charge, when it accelerates, it radiates, kind of like, you know, when you have an antenna,

• 47:28Speaker 03

  like you're seeing like the the radio signal from some charges moving up and down antenna. So it was very easy math compared to a lot of stuff that people do in my field that I could latch on to and then think of some sort of fun little experiment. Well, not real experiment, more like a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure angular momentum loss in a inspiring binary system, say. So I have a fun result pretty early on in my career, but it's like, it's a lot of luck that like, you know, if if Andy's on the paper, then people care and people will write about it as spin memory effect or something versus it's like, so you get a little bit of like, that's cool. I'm lucky in hindsight. Very much love the kind of way that sometimes ideas can come together really quickly and then other times you're wasting a lot of time just being stuck.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  So I have, I'm lucky to have some good experience at the beginning of my grad program, but then I get hyped up in a silly way with this Einstein bullshit. And then I'm like, oh, because my family thinks it's awesome, you know, like, I mean, yes, when I was a kid, if I was going to be a physicist, wouldn't you want to be like an amazing physicist? Like, of course, that's the goal. You go to Lindau, you go to these conferences where all these Nobel laureates get to hang out and you're the the students who get to meet them. You're like, this is the life. I mean, maybe not exactly like, I think it's better if you earn the money and then you whatever. But but like, there is a lifestyle to like, just being good at your job. Would get you. And it's like, I wish I wish it were real, you know, uh, cause like hype will just go away at some point. Um, so I've got a taste of the, the dark side with that, but also

• 48:55Speaker 03

  seeing just a little bit more of the sociology of why do people like this like narrative of like a individual doing something cool? And how does that fit into the fact that within our field, the people who write like popular science books are not necessarily ostracized, but it's just like, it's distanced a bit and then it's hard to work with them. So like, it's funny, the people that you see as the physicists publicly are like, not the real physicists somehow.

• 49:18Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  And I don't, yeah, I think it's just funny. Politics almost are, are, you know.

• 49:23Shawn Ryan?

  So you want, you want to be under the radar, you know?

• 49:25Speaker 03

  No, I don't know. I mean, I am, I wish I did. I wish I did. No, I, I want to be for the sake of wanting to do well in my job. I need to be, right? Um, I don't want to be above the radar as a physicist in the sense of like, I don't deserve attention as a physicist, right? I wish that I did something cool enough where I felt like this wasn't complete, like whatever thing. But I do think what I want is that there should be a way for, you know, the fact that, you know, people care about science is good. Like, how do you better kind of link together, like the folks who are good at outreach, or the folks who are lucky enough to have opportunities to have outreach and the research in a way that benefits the research is the best for like the physics. And I, I'm excited for that being something that we can change now.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And I think that maybe, I don't know if it's because I'm faculty now, or because the times have changed with how science is funded, that people are more open minded to, you know, a little bit of like, um, being creative with how you interact with industry, for example. And I, and that's exciting to me because that's like, things can get done a lot faster when you're not just in a group of people who have all decided this is the way it's done. Cause it's been like that. Yeah.

• 50:32Shawn Ryan?

  Where, where did the, where did the Einstein analogy come from?

• 50:35Speaker 03

  I think it's just some Aussie article trying to be flashy and it was good cook bay. I don't know. Like, I mean, to be fair, like we wouldn't use those words. I mean, you are studying gravitational waves and then people just try to be nice. And I don't know if it was a girl boss time of, of, decade or whatever, twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, I guess. Um, so that stuff, I have no clue. I'm pretty sure, like, you don't see the articles before they come out. Like, I didn't want any ridiculous comparisons because mostly, you know, airplane build kit stuff probably makes it a cool story. And then you're doing fun stuff with, you know, top people in the field. And sure, Hawking starts like to work on stuff with Andy. So there's that part of it, too. And he, Hawking is one of the few examples of somebody who is like known for their research and their outreach and like actually really good at both.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  I think it's rare to have somebody where they're popular and they did really cool stuff. Penrose is another example, I'd say. And I'm sure that there's more that I could start listening, but, but it's, it's rare. Elon Musk. See, that's the thing. He was my hero as a kid. And then I went through different phases of how I feel about the guy. What? No, I know. Let me hear. I gotta hear this. So, so when I'm a kid, and this is me being very, very, and not realistic, but like, I'm in high school and I see like this like Quanta article about Tallulah Riley taking like physics courses at Caltech. And I'm like, she's not a physicist. She's just taking a few physics courses. I could do better. This guy thinks, I mean, I'm like, I'm a kid. This is dumb. But I was like, these guys like physics, them.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Um, but, no, but I didn't understand to what extent they did. So like, I saw him as somebody like posts things to Iron Man in a sense of build cool shit and get people to build cool shit. And like, I thought if I were in his shoes, I'd do the same thing, right? And then you see like, you start getting a little shaky of like, how much does he actually know how to do? It's like, you know, how, what, how much is the team behind him that's really, um, holding it up? And then how much, like, like, I thought, okay, if I like get the PhD or something, I'll be the actual expert to then be able to be more legitimate in a position where you get to do cool stuff. But I think that's the kind of wrong attitude. So like, so I went through phases where I was like very disillusioned with the fact that he kind of represented science or tech, like people believed whatever he said was like, right? And that he also was the engineer and he also was all this stuff.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Not saying he is or isn't, but I'm saying like, there was definitely this sense in which there's no way he's actually doing all this stuff. Cause I see how hard it is for people to do all these things, right? Um, and then you, you know, you get over it or whatever, and you realize how, you know, there's a lot of value to being able to get other people on board with the same vision, because then you can really push for it. And as long as that push is to something that's possible, then you're good. If it's a push or it's something that's impossible, that's scary. And I think that that was something where, again, before. Before the AI stuff, I was very disillusioned in being like, man, they're like taking buzzwords and concatenating them with like quantum computing and, and what else was I solutioned by? Like, you'd see things that as a physicist, you know, like there's certain no goes and they're still getting funded. And you're like, ah, like, you know, like, we don't have like

• 53:28Speaker 03

  this lack of vision. We wish we were doing cool stuff, but like somehow we can't, you know? Now I think that's changing. And at the same time, these people are just overselling things kind of adjacent to what we do and acting like they're going to be better because they're entrepreneurs and like, and we don't know what we're doing. And I was very, I was almost resentful of that at some time. But I think the coolest thing now is like, damn, like the products they're building with like Claude Code or whatnot are super useful in the sense of, you know, as a physicist, not many people in theory know how to do much more than like pen and paper, use mathematics or whatnot. If I wanted to like, think about questions that are more like systematic, like you just want to like compute all of these different things numerically or whatnot. Those are not valued because their field is so small that one person doing it would be considered a

• 54:11Speaker 03

  waste of time because they're not gonna have a chance of getting a breakthrough. But, you know, when you have tools that open up your ability to basically like, instead of hiring a dev team, like you don't need the resources for that. You can still like, just do it yourself. That's really cool. So I'm like, super grateful that maybe some of that hype led to technology that's actually useful for, for my, my job, or at least the things that I wish my job were. So I think my, my opinion is clearly oscillate a lot about, about some of these, these folks.

• 54:38Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think? Do you think we're gonna make it to Mars?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Oh, so I think, I mean, I think he could make it to Mars, depending on his definition, right? So like, when I was a kid, it was really almost grim or like very pragmatic. I was like, you just want to get to Mars. You don't necessarily need to like come back. So like, can you do like a, you know, the first person to go to Mars one way could bring a bunch of like genetic material and a long arc and have it like cryogenically frozen out. And I was thinking like, send it one way. So I think someone can get to Mars, absolutely, if they change the definition or the scope of what their goal is. But, but yeah.

• 55:11Shawn Ryan?

  How fast do you think we can get there?

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I don't, I don't, I'm not gonna be the expert on that. I think that I definitely would be parroting things when I was a kid, like off of what other people were saying. And I do think it depends what you want for it. Like, I always thought, you know, manned missions were cooler than automated missions, like the vibe was cooler. But it does make sense sometimes to not risk, you know, life and limb for no reason. I do think that

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I think it depends what the goal is. I think like I'm open did for getting around red tape to do something cool. And again, I kind of also, I really liked, like, it's weird because I think that I had like secondhand sci fi because I never like read these sci fi books growing up, but all of like the people I admire did. I still kind of like the earth like I like, like I'd rather if I if I had the same resources, it probably would be more like less aerospace now would be more like infrastructure, like trains and things like that. Just like a lot of things you can do that people would care about. Terra firma, but

• 56:18Speaker 03

  but yeah, so, but it's funny because it can align like your vision a certain way. Like if you want to get to Mars and you think, oh, I need some sort of like invention to do that, then we gotta like build this AI to be smart enough to help us figure out how to do that. And then we need to like you build the AI to also figure out the health of the energy problems so that we can scale it up the right amount to be smart enough to do that. I don't know. So like it's a kind of funny thing where you can use N goal to tell you how to to get somewhere. And so maybe he's used that, or maybe it's just a good marketing thing. I don't, I don't know, but yeah.

• 56:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think we're gonna need to go to Mars?

• 56:46Speaker 03

  I mean, need, I think I don't feel that existential like need the same way in the sense of like the point where you need to get to Mars if you're not already able to go

• 56:59Speaker 03

  like try and avoid that first, maybe. And you have, you actually would have more expertise on that side of things. How scared you are about like chaos and

• 57:06Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. I always think the world's ending.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they but like that's a bias that you'd have. I mean, I'm sure that's why they have to, they have to get you like a train to

• 57:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  to save it, right?

• 57:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:18Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I don't know. But who else do you look up to, did look up to?

• 57:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I looked up, I mean, different parts of lots of people, but like at the time when I was a kid, it was because, you know, it was Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX were the ones who were kind of these big players in this private aerospace industry. And they were like, whenever any parts of their companies were at these airshows, like, that was the cool stuff. And I, again, I like this notion of trying to make profitable or build something that wasn't necessarily the, like, its best, uh, value proposition wasn't so much the capital that it could get, even though you try to make it self-funding or something like that. Like, I like that, that kind of encapsulation of doing things. Because I think, like, for example, theoretical physics research, you can have a lot of YouTubers go around and debate, like, why is a taxpayer funding this? Or is it stagnating? Da, da, da, da, da.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  And it's kind of missing the point that, like, okay, so say you defunded, like, this subfield. Who's going to actually know quantum field theory amongst the people who are doing data-driven stuff that doesn't, like, you know, that's making progress now? So it's like, how do you take advantage of the fact that, like, there are things that are worth funding that are not necessarily, like, worth funding because they make money or because they have a product? And then try to align it in, like, a kind of, maybe not corporate structure or something where you make it so that it doesn't need to rely on things, like, always having been that way, you know? Can you innovate in that space of trying to fund or have self-fund valuable enterprises that are not driven by profit but driven by the thing that they're after? So whether it's space exploration or, like, solving physics or something like that.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  I'm inspired by that a lot.

• 58:57Shawn Ryan?

  Who's doing that?

• 58:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I hope we can do it. No, I don't know. I, I, see, the thing is, right now, it's this funny, weird, interesting time where I think, like, the technologies that, like, everybody cares about, you know, AI, whatnot, really can help doing the job that I do. There's a thing of, like, I don't know how to make the right pitch for somebody who believes it's going to do everything, you know? And also conveying what exactly it means to solve physics or not. So, like, in practice, like, I do think there's a sense in which, like, we're trying to axiomatize these laws of nature, and maybe there is some uniqueness or rigidity to that structure that it can find. But I think that a lot of people think, oh, there's a particular open problem, and it's going to write a paper that the researchers are going to be like, whoa, this is better. And that's what physics research is. So I'm scared of, like,

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Not having a good collaboration, say, with the industry folks and the academic folks to really kind of pin down, okay, say you can accelerate science, did you finish it? Or did you now open up a new chance to build more infrastructure for how that knowledge is stored and related to one another?

• 59:58Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Because we don't just want to answer, but like, I think that if I was an engineer, I want to know the answer to this math equation to predict what I would need for my engineering problem versus for physics, it's more like, okay, here's the answers, but why? And really just distilling that, kind of compressing that basic set of rules that lead to that why. And so I'm scared slightly that if this field is stagnating because we're only individuals doing something and we can't make our field very modular as it is, because it's just like historical precedent or whatever the number is. That when somebody comes along and actually does have a result that's better than these things, is it like, oh, let's just put all our eggs in one basket now, like this is the better bet? And I think it should be a fun collaboration. And I think that the night thing now is that there are a lot of, some crossovers with

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  people spending sabbaticals at these big tech companies and they some care about researchers is great, but how do you make it so it's not just like, I think I like academia in a way, I don't know, it's institutions, right? But can you try to use the fact that there is some value proposition or exchange there to try to drive innovation for like, let's try to get the best product that can do theoretical physics well? Maybe I'm using other people's products or not, fine. If there's any IP or value in that, use that to help fund a field going forward instead of it being relying on taxpayers, whatever, for a very specific, small, highly purely theory thing, because there's value that can come from the engineering side of it.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  So for example, when you build CERN or you build these other big detectors, a lot of the time, the value proposition isn't, okay, we're learning something about the laws of nature, which is cool, but it's also that all of the engineering that's going to go into that is going to be super valuable. Can you do that with theory? And I think that now the answer is yes, and maybe it's already being done in some sense, like when they're selling intelligence and they're getting fundraising for these companies, maybe that is the pitch and that's what they're doing. But I find it fascinating to be kind of, I feel like we're back at this moment when CERN helped invent the world wide web. Like, can you, instead of whining and begging, like, oh, we should have had better structures that endowed a field or something like that, maybe it's not even the right thing to do. Can you do that now without begging for things to have been different in the past and just like, you know, there's opportunity and now go for it and do it right? Don't just.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Care about papers, care about some of the infrastructure.

• 1:02:16Shawn Ryan?

  CERN helped build the World Wide Web.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  I mean, that's what they say. I hope I don't get all the facts wrong, but yeah, like they were, they're trying to, they have a lot of data and they're wanting to like serve it to different places. And I think DARPA gets a lot of credit too, therefore like what you think of as the internet. But you know, like when I, I used to, and this was the type of thing that bugged me a lot because I think I had these heroes in, in, in tech that thought like, oh, if the physicists maybe just did things differently, they'd have like all these, whatever, cool thing. And then you walk into the door of where I worked and there'd be a thing on the side because it was funded by a tech person of like saying how, um, you know, quantum mechanics like leads to like the transistor technology. And like understanding general relativity helps with like timing of satellites and GPS. Like imagine if you had quantum gravity or like the, the blue sky research you do now might lead to something cool in the future.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  And I believe in blue sky research and it's great, but I think the thing is like normally it's still, there's a reason for it, you know? And like, how do you, like, it's a weird pitch to try to say, oh, it's worked before, so keep giving me money now. I don't, it doesn't feel honest. I mean, it's in some sense, yes, but like, I didn't like that. I think the cooler thing would be again, to try to see like, how do you align things that are valuable with the thing that you want to do as a physicist? And like go from there because there's anything that you want to be able to do if you can't do it already, there's something missing. And it probably if you're a human interacting with it, it's an engineering thing. It's a product you can build and not like an equation you're trying to solve.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  So I think that's a fun thing that's kind of opening up, probably because of the way that like funding is weird in academia right now. Like, you know, can you decouple this? Like we basically view universities as just educational institutions until you go to grad school and you realize it's a research institution. And like all of the great grades you get in undergrad, you realize like, they don't care. They just care about their research. This is like, this is not that. This is like some way the US like is basically funding private institutions to do research at scale. And, uh, and overhead seem crazy, but that's, this is how they funded in Europe. They'd be funding the schools more directly. So like, like there's such a dichotomy between I think how I used to see MIT or Harvard before I went to grad school and how I see it now of like completely different value propositions or priorities in the institutions.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  And so like, you know, how do you make sure research gets funded and is super cool? And it's maybe like that the experts in the field are the ones deciding like how the resources for that field are allocated, uh, rather than it being kind of. Okay, you know, these institutions get money from revenue streams from teaching students. So it's like the best people in different fields all in one. Or Big Tech says, ah, it's broken or whatever. Like come into our private lab, you know?

• 1:04:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:04:53Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll start getting into space.

• 1:04:59Shawn Ryan?

  Most gear looks good until you actually start using it. Then you find out pretty quickly what holds up and what doesn't. That's why I keep coming back to Roka. These aren't just lifestyle sunglasses pretending to be performance gear. I've worn mine training on the range, traveling and outdoors for long days. And they stay locked in place the entire time. They're incredibly lightweight. The optics are razor sharp with zero glare. And you honestly forget you're even wearing them. But they still look clean enough to wear anywhere.

• 1:05:39Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:06:18Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:06:36Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. They do it, right?

• 1:06:44Shawn Ryan?

  What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong, because I don't watch any of this [BLEEP]. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty [BLEEP] cool.

• 1:06:55Shawn Ryan?

  Gotta silence it.

• 1:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary [BLEEP] magazine, supposedly the best engineering in the [BLEEP] world. When that breaks, you're [BLEEP].

• 1:07:13Shawn Ryan?

  And now we're bringing him back.

• 1:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  It does look pretty [BLEEP] cool. I gotta, I gotta admit that.

• 1:07:26Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Sabrina, we're back from the break. We're gonna get into your current work. Gravitational memory effect. I need you to slow down just a little bit for me. I'm not, I'm not on your level quite yet. Maybe by the end of the interview.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  I just talked fast.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, okay, so...

• 1:07:45Shawn Ryan?

  What is gravitational memory effect?

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  So there's different kinds. The easier one is not the one that I came up with. It's much older. And it's this notion of you're gonna have these big bodies out in, somewhere in the galaxy, whatever, or far away, um, coming in and colliding. And then when they collide, they're gonna coalesce maybe into like another black hole or whatever it is, but there's some ripples in the space-time that come out too. So these gravitational waves are propagating away from this collision event.

• 1:08:12Shawn Ryan?

  So this is like indentations in the weave of space?

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, actually, it's pretty accurate. A sense of like, I'm looking at like, say, at a given time, the positions of some mirrors that have been moving back and forth. So the thing about the memory effect is basically that there is like a very, like, long time scale thing that's imprinted because of this scattering process.

• 1:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  With, well, can I, can I make another? Would this be like the wake of a boat?

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  In some sense, almost literally. I think that the, the thing about the wake of the boat is there's different approximations for like a deep water wave and like, it's not as universal. I think, like, I have a friend who is a family who's like into like nautical stuff. So I think we concluded that like... That there's a sense to which sound waves in the water could be approximated as having a memory effect, like if they're deep underwater, but like a surface wave is not going to have a universal relation between the boat passed and then it moved. But, okay, so imagine, let's do the buoy analogy. So I don't think the math works out the same, but imagine you have like some boat passing and you knew that like you could infer like the amount of like munitions on this boat because like the buoys moved a certain amount. No, like you know what I mean? Like some, some net property of like the, of the thing. So it's not as cool as that because

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  I think that in this, in that situation, it's not a universal relation between the things that scattered, had some kinematics that then set the value of this shift. But, but yes, you have these two gravitational like wave detectors, some probes sitting very far away, just minding their own business. They're sitting along geodesics. This wave passes and then the distance between them is going to change.

• 1:09:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  And like depending on where they were relative to this thing, there's a certain like pattern in the sky that it would. And you're seeing that there's a relationship between this distance changing and like the kind of net kinematics of the amount of like energy in the things that were scattering and the waves coming out. And so there's this relationship, it's like conservation of energy generalized to this kind of fun asymptotic symmetry version of it, turns into deterministic imprints in the night sky of these move detectors. And then to see the, like the angular momentum analog, you have to go a little bit subleading, which is the spin memory.

• 1:10:14Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit. Okay. I think I'm picking this up. So, so you're saying, okay, how do I just, how do I explain this? Okay. So if we have a sheet or a blanket or something and I put, I don't know, a mark on the here and a mark over here. And then we put a ball in the middle.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  And move a little bit.

• 1:10:35Shawn Ryan?

  They come inward. Is that what you're saying?

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  It's like, so that would be kind of an analogy for like, maybe like the just gravitational, like potential kind of curving you in. I think this is closer to the buoy analog. So the math is wrong. It's what, this isn't true for this case. I'm pretty sure of like, imagine that you could have some buoys pretty far away and you knew that there was always a shipping route where they go like from here to there. And like the only options are like the direction in which they came and like maybe the, like the momentum of that boat. And you could infer from the buoy shift, those types of quantities, regardless of whatever they did in the middle. So that's not going to be true for the, the water wave. I'm pretty sure it's not true for the deep water wave case, but for the, this gravitational system, there's a symmetry reason why. I can see that type of shift, like the buoys move by certain amount, that means blah,

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  like this amount of energy was deposited, like type of thing.

• 1:11:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so does the imprint stay like that in space?

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  That's the whole point. So this is supposedly like the, at the very end, it stayed. Now, in practice, that's not super useful because like, we do these things where we have a theoretical framework where the math is rigorous, and then it's completely BS in the sense of that's not the thing you're going to measure. So like, in my framework, I'm doing that single, whatever, ship crossing type of thing, as the entire, everything that happened in the whole world, infinite amount of time. But what you do then is you say, okay, there's this effect that this framework studies, but it really is only accurate for like, each individual scattering experiment is like, a chunk. And so there, there's a shift from that scattering experiment. And sure, something else is going to move it around later, but if they're spaced out enough in time, can I approximate this thing as like, the memory effect?

• 1:12:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so let me, let me re-explain this to you, to see if I'm getting it. So basically, what you're saying is that it will leave an indention, an imprint in the fabric of space.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  Yep, exactly.

• 1:12:19Shawn Ryan?

  Until, and it will stay there forever until something else moves it.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Yep, something else moves it. And then there's a very formal version where we say, imagine you wait for infinite amount of time, tell me the beginning and the end, and that's technically, the memory effect. But in practice, it's closer to like, let's pretend there was just one thing that happened, one thing you're detecting, so one event. And as far as those time cells are concerned, it's a lot longer than any other thing later moving it.

• 1:12:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  And so then, then that's a memory.

• 1:12:48Shawn Ryan?

  And you discovered this?

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  I discovered a variant of this, based on the connection to the symmetries.

• 1:12:53Shawn Ryan?

  What is the variant?

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  So this variant is like, angular momentum loss, instead of energy loss in the gravitational waves and the spinning particles, kind of. So, so basically, it's like, and this was the kind of fun thing. So I come into my PhD, and you're almost just going to do like, classical radiation. So like, you know, you accelerate a charge, it's like emitting radiation. And the fun thing about, you know, gauge theories, or sorry, so, gravity and electromagnetism kind of fit into this framework of the, there's an extra symmetry when you try to write down a field, like a set of equations that are local. So what happens is that, when I have a fact, like, when you have a charged object, so say you take some cat, and you're like,

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  I don't know, like, some bioelectric effect thing to get some charge on, like a fur, you like static electricity, or these things where you see like, this balance of charging, you probe it far away, right? So I can, with gauge theories, or with like, these, like, The fun thing is I can be away from the charge and see it, so I don't need to come up and pick up, oh, look, I have like an electron charge. It's like I can see the electric field is like pulling me in, like you were saying with this blanket and like the, um, it being deformed. So like I can measure the, some features of the, this object in the center from the boundary. And that's kind of one of the ingredients to this kind of holographic principle of like, can I just talk about the things in the boundary in isolation as its own theory? But for the very specific scope here,

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  it's like that Gauss law type of setup of, okay, if I am very far away and I measure the like the electric field everywhere in some sphere, I can determine the total charge inside. The analog of that, when I then have an accelerating, like scattering experiment is kind of like the, this imprint of this universal, like I know from this low energy part of the radiation, something about the kinematics of the charge scattering. So it's like Gauss's law, but applied to some scattering process. So like.

• 1:14:43Shawn Ryan?

  What makes the particles scatter? Is it a collision?

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  It's their own interactions with each other. And that's the funny thing. It's these long range interactions that are busting in a curse. So like the fact that they're charged and then they're gonna like have some photons exchange between them or other particles is, it's the, is the thing. But we basically like, there's something about the very low energy that is, is universal almost because of this kind of classical equations of motion. So I guess, long story short, when I do this idealization where I pretend I'm, I'm in flat space, that's my world. And I want all of these solution sciences equations that obey these boundary conditions. Then I see that, you know, things at the boundary are gonna move. So like, what you're saying is I have like these two detectors are sitting there. They're not just gonna stay there. They're gonna move, but they're gonna move by a certain amount.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  That's maybe a certain like controlled parameter as compared to where they are. If I just push them out to infinity. And so you like, because you have this kind of whole symmetry framework that you're importing from other.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Instances where it's been useful in physics, you can apply it here and you realize, oh, look, that tells me something about soft limits and scattering, tells me something I can observe. Yeah. So early in my PhD, they had this connection between like soft physics and a asymptotic symmetry word identity. And then my first paper was on like the subleading soft version of that, which was new. And some people had speculated that there might be a enhancement of the angular momentum, like the rotation symmetry of the of the world in some sense. And then when you keep pushing that further, then you can tie it to this experimental version because someone else understood that there is a physical, like the spacetime physical thing you're measuring is related to the waveform

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  that otherwise computing with this quantum field theory computation. And yeah. So anyway, basically, long story short is you were just taking some mathematical framework and then trying to copy paste it to a new application. Once you have like one iteration, you're trying to see what's modular or something about like some computation. And then you get to import that and find something new because you pulled it out.

• 1:16:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Shawn Ryan?

  Stephen Hawking cited your solo and joint papers in 2016. Your dissertation is the only is only the second Harvard physics PhD published in Physics Reports. The other author won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, these things are fun, but it's always fun that you can you probably find a way to find a cool little way to frame what happens or not. But the Hawking thing was cool because again, he, you know, he visited at the end of, like near the end of his life, he was, he came to Harvard, which was neat to see just the entourage. We were like, we were on a Congo line in this boat, like, kind of like those like little river cruise type of thing, but in the Boston Harbor, that was like hawking his whole entourage. And I was like, I'm literally doing like a little Congo line behind him. And like, I mean, you can't, you can't. I can't make that up, you know, it's a fun, it's a fun experience, you know.

• 1:17:40Shawn Ryan?

  So what is, what does this discovery mean?

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  I don't think it means that, I mean, it means I'm lucky that something experimental is gonna come out of like, something I did maybe. I do, I don't think the things that I've done have like that deep of a meaning or something where like everyone should know these types of things necessarily. It's more like the fact that, you know, there is some value of trying to take these frameworks that are very abstract and try to distill parts of it that then you can try to then push for the more realistic versions of it. I think that's a fun, fun kind of paradigm and it's, and it's like fortunate that there was some observable something. But at the same time,

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  like I'm using Einstein's equations to get it. It's more of a test of like the boundary conditions being a good physical assumption than a test of the theory itself. Right? So, so I think that it's not like super, super exciting, it's exciting to me, but like it's not, like, you know, I wouldn't say, tell your audience it's important or anything.

• 1:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's pretty cool.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  Lots of things are cool though. Lots of things in this building are pretty cool, so.

• 1:18:40Shawn Ryan?

  Is the, is the universe expanding?

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  So again, I think that that's a funny thing. I, I do think if you talk to a cosmologist, they believe in like the cosmological constant, like, isn't necessarily being actually like, sorry, there's this experiment right now that's like trying to promote that maybe the cosmological constant is like changing over time. And a lot of string theorists love that. A fellow, like a faculty member when I was in grad school at Harvard, like Rafa is kind of colleagues with, with Andy. He is very into the SMPL program and trying to test things. I think that I am not too into the experiment to know, like, why a lot of cosmologists don't trust the results yet or whatever. But I think that a lot of things are up in the air in the sense of, you know, like, there's always qualifications to things. So like, it's good to at face value,

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  trust the actual results of an experiment, but you want to understand what are the extra, like,

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  What is it actually seeing versus what you're actually over interpreting it as seeing? And so one option that a lot of people like is, okay, maybe the cosmological constant is changing over time and then it'll be asymptotically flat or the wrong sign, opposite sign to be where a string theory likes to live. So I just, I guess I end up being very agnostic in a weird way, which is not good because somebody should just answer and say, yeah, blah, this is our model, I'm a CDM.

• 1:19:57Shawn Ryan?

  But it is true that stars, galaxies-

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, sure. No, no, sorry. So there's a sense in which, yes, like, so I think what I'm saying is I'm taking it to be like, okay, you're looking at these various stars far away and you know, like, okay, so the fun thing about physics is you're often saying, the laws that I have here are the same everywhere. So if that's true, I know like some features of my star or solar formation. So I know like the spectrum of the lines that are supposed to be there. So if it's moving further away, I'm going to see like different frequency shifts and things like that. So there's a lot of cool stuff that you can see where like, yes, that's not in doubt. I think the thing that I latch on to, because again, it's too, it's close to this, like, is your framework even physical? Is like the statement about like some parameter, like the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations and whether everything I do, I'm like a flat earther as far as like cosmology is concerned, because I just set it to zero. And like, now there's some experiment

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  saying, maybe that's okay. No, but like, what things are constant versus functions of other things that can change over time roughly?

• 1:20:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean-

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Shawn Ryan?

  We gotta-

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  But the expansion thing, sure.

• 1:20:56Shawn Ryan?

  You're not a flat earther.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Um, no, no, I'm joking. So I don't want to encourage a flat earther. Sorry. So like, you know, like, sorry. So the sense in which you're on the earth and you see like the curvature scale of the horizon or whatever, or you're not seeing, and you're saying, the world is flat. Um, there is a, I'm just trying to make a joke and probably it's dangerous to do it at the actual platform of the fact that like, you know, do we see the curvature scales of like the universe, the cosmological constant at the scales where I care about it for particle detectors or for these gravitational waves from Lego? And I, I'm always setting this constant to zero instead of like, whatever, it's ten to the negative, like, large power thing.

• 1:21:30Shawn Ryan?

  So if the universe is expanding-

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:21:33Shawn Ryan?

  Or, or-

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Shawn Ryan?

  Or if we want to, the galaxies and stars are getting farther apart?

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I feel like that means the universe is expanding.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I'm sorry. I think I'm saying, I'm not saying no, I think you're right. But I'm saying that the physicists are worried more about like, why is it, right? Like, is there a reason that there is some like, like various like cosmological constant there? Or like, is it all just like the different like matter distributions and things like that that try to govern the reason why? So the, I should have just said, yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  But instead, I was like, oh, by the way, there are experiments that are like maybe like changing our opinions a little bit or calling the question some notions of those like parameters that describe this thing.

• 1:22:14Shawn Ryan?

  So if it's expanding, wouldn't that mean there's a wall?

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  So that's the thing. So the fun thing about cosmology, if you're doing like a holography for like the sitter space times is there is like a literal horizon where you can like as one observer, you're not seeing the whole thing. And so the the world that I live in is like kind of understanding the mathematical structure you can attach to the kind of the boundaries of the spacetime. And in most situations, like in the ADS context, which is this like wrong sign cosmological constant version toy model, or in the case where I do, like it's really the spacetime boundary and not the boundary of some observer. And then you have to deal with observers and the sitter is hard for lots of reasons. So, so I just go, ah.

• 1:22:53Shawn Ryan?

  So if it's expanding, wouldn't that the fabric?

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Shawn Ryan?

  The indentions, what do we call it?

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  Ripples.

• 1:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  Gravitational memory effect. Wouldn't that change?

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  No, it does. So you're absolutely right. And in the sitter, like the types of like I you're you're basically propagating a wave on a curved background versus a flat background, and it changes the the form of it further away. And people have papers trying to talk about it, like memory on like the observer horizon in the sitter, which is the closest thing. But the thing that's relevant is like, you want to think about like, what scale is that important as compared to what scale I'm like seeing the wave coming from this inspiraling binary system. And so, like, at least, for example, a lot of things I do are also relevant to, not the memory effect so much, but like, these asymptotic symmetry stories can be applied to amplitudes. And there, what you're doing, you have you have CERN, you have this collider, and like, it's such a small scale where these things are interacting, and that the detector itself is considered to be at infinity. But it's

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  not infinite. I mean, it's huge, but it's like, like, that's hardly infinity. And so, like, can I pretend or ignore that expansion for some things? Sometimes, yes. And then sometimes, no.

• 1:23:58Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. Gotcha. Wow. We actually have a I have a hot question here. It has to go with Flatter.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  Uh oh. Okay, I'm ready. I think I'm accidentally eating this.

• 1:24:08Shawn Ryan?

  Here we go.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Shawn Ryan?

  Surveys have found that up to around one in 10 Americans say they agree with statements that the earth is flat. From a scientific standpoint, what actually proves whether the earth is flat or round, and not just in theory? What real world evidence or systems make that determination undeniable?

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Okay, I should have prepared more because I got the best, I know the best answers, but I would just say like, look at the pictures from them like satellites or like people up in space, you can see the horizon. I mean, like, like what, I guess, I don't know what, why those don't work. For example, you know, when, like, if I talk to someone who was a flat earth, or what would they try to say if I said, you know, look at the horizon, see it's curved, like, or go up on like a...

• 1:24:48Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not a flat-erther.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:24:50Shawn Ryan?

  But I've talked to a handful of them, and they always, they always have...

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  What's the excuse that they use?

• 1:24:55Shawn Ryan?

  I can't remember what their excuse is. They think satellites are balloons. They're not in space. I do know that. I don't know what the argument is. It goes on here a little bit more. Because technologies like GPS, satellite communications, and global navigation all operate as if earth is curved. So what are, what are the strongest proofs? And could any version of a flat earth realistically reproduce those same results?

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm trying to, like, I would say no, but like, I think what I'm saying, I'm trying to think of like, how would I be the defense attorney for a flat earth? You know what I mean? Like, like, what would I try to do to make them feel as right as possible by copying the hell out of everything they want to? I mean, like, I think that you can't, once you're trying to say, like, I mean, that you're trying to apply a framework beyond its scope of applicability, and that's what these types of technology, or like, the something far away above the earth is seeing, that it's, it's wrong, but like, you know, to their credit or not, like, when you're on a map, like, you know, you print out your little chart, like, you're not gonna go that far off, like, when you're driving around town, pretending that, you know, the, the earth around you is flat, unless you try to park your car in a hill and you forgot to put your parking brake on. I don't know.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  Like, like, basically, no, and that's not for the coverage, but just, but it's, but I think that... I don't know. I think that it's emblematic of the fact that it's hard to believe the things you don't have input for. You know, like you build your intuition. We build our intuition, you know, walking around in a way where like you might not notice these things. Like, do you notice the like phases of the moon? I don't know like how much people pay attention to those things or how much it affects their their lives. And then doubling down on that worldview is sometimes funny, sometimes scary. I don't know what the right the take on it is. But like, you know, there's value to questioning, I guess, like how much your assumptions are like the visceral world that you live in and the intuition you get from that actually extends beyond the

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  things that you're able to probe yourself. Like, you can't go and just jump up into space and look down and go, oh, never mind.

• 1:26:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, maybe soon, though.

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  Maybe so. Maybe you guys send them up like, hey, they go free, like, is a they'll say it to get on the free like subway or little flight or something.

• 1:27:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Follow up.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Shawn Ryan?

  What's the biggest misconception people have about black holes? And is there anything about them that still completely breaks our current understanding of physics?

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Uh, I think that if anything, okay, so breaking your current understanding, I think that sometimes the it is the the paradoxes that that show that there are problems in our understanding. So I think that maybe breaking isn't as as active word. I don't think I want to use. I think that, like, again, I always feel like I don't even understand these stuff well enough. And I think that's one problem when you're gonna feel that everybody's confused. It's like, how confused are you? Like, when I say I'm confused, does that mean I'm actually confused? Are you like, less confused? Who's really more confused? So there's these paradoxes that come from, like, basically trying to say, okay, I think I know, like, it shouldn't be that ridiculous if it's a big black hole, like, the horizon isn't that special. I only kind of know it, like, kind of, like, theologically, or like, away from, like, I don't know at the

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  moment that I passed the horizon. So then why can't I put some quantum fields on it? And then, like, I have pair production, one of them will go out to infinity, the other one's gonna go inside. And suddenly, you run into these, like, like, issues of, uh-oh, like, did I evaporate into a thermal system now? Is it not unitary? And all this fun hawking stuff. So I think the the thing that's one should take away is that there are still, I think, situations where people don't understand all the assumptions they make, where they can just, you know, follow one step after the other, think that they're doing something that seems logical or not, and then they realize, oops, together, something was wrong. And so it's not breaking physics, it's showing that there is something broken in our assumptions. Like, it's not like the physics is always has to be right. I think we believe that. It's just we don't quite know, again, like, the regimes in which our assumptions are valid, or which one is the the wrong one. So

• 1:28:43Speaker 03

  So yes, there's a lot of active things like some people I think I still have colleagues who believe that as soon as you cross the horizon, there's like some like firewall or fuzzballs like there's like different models for what happens behind it. But we're all basically just playing with some frameworks, like mathematical frameworks that give us intuition for what we might guess. And then we're not precise enough with what we're assuming when we compute something and then oh, this don't fit together. Like, that's the vibe. But I think I wouldn't try to scare like a random person with it. I would just point out that somehow the bread and butter of like a physical theory where you don't make a measurement is seeing that like these assumptions don't tie together. So if something has to be wrong, then popping in it back and trying to fix it.

• 1:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  What I mean, what is, what is a black hole?

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  So I mean, I think some of it sounds like there's literally just a sense in which like I have so much matter in some region that now even light can't escape. And the way that I see it is like from a Penrose diagram, there's straight up is just some reason that I cannot, region that I cannot access from infinity. So it's very much like, like a feature of the geometry. But then there's other fun things about like the fact that if you put enough energy in some region that you're going to end up creating a black hole. And that often is tied into this question of like quantum gravity has to be weird and different, you know? And so like, it's just, and it's neat though, because you see how much people like when they see, even though it's not actually the horizon, when they see like these images of a black hole and like the creation just around it or whatever, like generating the light, like engineering is cool.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  The fact that they can like reproduce that image or stare at a black hole. But like it literally is like a black hole, the picture, which is kind of funny, right? Like, you know, like the way the light is vending around it. But I think that the fun thing is really just more like, like the way a physicist would at first encounter it is like, there's a very specific solution to Einstein's equations. So this differential equation with a specific collision that then has some weird ass properties of like the causal structure of like where like particles are going to end up. So.

• 1:30:40Shawn Ryan?

  What happens if something goes on it?

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  That's so that's the type of question. So basically, I think a lot of people would believe, okay, when you first go through, you don't really know that you went through because like it's the black holes can be different sizes, right? And so like if it were large enough, the curvature scale when you're crossing the horizon isn't so extreme. But eventually, like if you just did like, you know, little probes on this this background, I think people talk about like spagification or like you're going to be stretched out eventually when you get closer to where the the curvature is larger and blowing up at the singularity. But I think that's a funny thing is people like you understand this classical geometry. And then you start having problems putting quantum fields on it and answering some fun like paradoxical type of questions that then people aren't sure like they think that the the singularity is something so highly curved that the approximation of just treating it

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  classically is bad now. So then they don't know what happens if everything, but it's not like, I think it's easy enough to try to say, okay, if I like have some nice numerical simulation and I can just write down this differential equation like for how something would propagate on a classical like black hole background, that you could have something just like going through the horizon for a little bit and probably like in that model, it looks fine. But it's just like, how valid are those? How hard is numerics, first of all, to do near near return regions and the way you set up for a scattering process probably is also hard. But it depends on like, basically, the problem is that sometimes it's a question you're asking ends up being not the right question or things like that type of problems.

• 1:32:07Shawn Ryan?

  I just I still I don't understand how it can swallow light.

• 1:32:11Speaker 03

  No, I mean, so but it's basically like you're writing like, how do I say?

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  So like you have this metric is telling you like the if I have a coordinate system for my space time, and I have then a notion of like the distance between points on it. And like a nice coordinate system is often some notion of like a spherical coordinate system where okay, like very far away, I have this like, you know, directions in the night sky and it's like a time direction in this case. And then in the coordinate system, like the there's a solution to this differential equation that Einstein gives you where you don't have any matter sourcing outside. And it ends up being a black hole solution where there ends up being a horizon. And you can just kind of play around with like, how does like the energy like redshift or whatever, things like that. It's a fun, it's very much just a math problem. You know what I mean? Like you're playing with a given solution. So it's like, kind of.

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  Like it's harder because it's nonlinear, but like when you're doing like multiple moment expansions in E and M or like just like literally like if you give me some charged object, put it here, what's the electric field far away?

• 1:33:12Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Or I don't know if they have any fun. I think if I try to make an analogy that you could probably help figure out one with a some telecom like reverse engineering from all these different radio signals, what's happening? I don't know, but yeah.

• 1:33:24Shawn Ryan?

  What, what, what do they look like from, I mean, how do I say this?

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:30Shawn Ryan?

  If we were to do, if we were to do like a 360 model of a black hole.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  I mean, I think the best thing is like, I forget which, I'm going to get the name of the movie wrong, but like Kip Thorne was a scientific advisor to this whatever. Oh, man, I wish I had a better recall of like names of cool movies. Interstellar, maybe? I hope I'm not wrong on that. Where they actually ran a like, you know, simulation for what it looks like. I think that you have pretty good like images from either like that movie or.

• 1:33:56Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen the images.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  You've seen the light coming out of it, right? So that's why it's like.

• 1:34:00Shawn Ryan?

  They look like, they look like, so you know, if, if my fist here is, or my hand is the black hole, what does it look like from this angle?

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you.

• 1:34:09Shawn Ryan?

  Is it flat or does it look the same?

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Oh, no, it should be round. It should be, I mean, there's.

• 1:34:13Shawn Ryan?

  So it's actually a hole that's, you can access from any direction.

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  And so ironically, I definitely have like colleagues who play with these type of like race simulations more than me. So the way, when I see black hole, I see like a metric, I see an equation written down and I like, oh, this blows up here. That's not, but, um, but the point is that when you're seeing the simulations, I think a lot of it is you're seeing like, imagine you had some stars behind it and then how that light from the star is coming to you. And so like, maybe it looks funny because literally like you're not necessarily seeing the fact that nothing, you're also seeing nothing came from it kind of, but you're also seeing some like funny lensing of like the stars behind like their light kind of going on geodesics around and coming to you. So, so some of the artifacts are that, which I guess is what it looks like. But the thing, this, I think there's, you literally know what it looks like. And I don't think it would be that hard to like, do some sort of simulation of like

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  you're, you're following a geodesic down and then there's a bunch of.

• 1:35:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I want to look at it from.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  Particles with you with some light. You know, it's just a question of like, how do you want to set up?

• 1:35:10Shawn Ryan?

  From the back?

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it should, so roughly has the normal like non-rotating buckle would have like spherical symmetry. A lot of buckles are actually kind of rapidly spinning. So there is some like asymmetry you can see like it'll depend on like where you are compared to this axis of rotation, but um, that's not like a front and back thing. It's more like a, like axis of rotation difference.

• 1:35:31Shawn Ryan?

  So what is the shape?

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  It looks like those like

• 1:35:34Shawn Ryan?

  Is it a ball?

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  It's like, I mean, sorry, it looks like when those images of the like the black hole have this kind of funny like distorted ball looking thing. But again,

• 1:35:43Shawn Ryan?

  Three dimensional though, what is it? What does it look?

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  No, that's yeah. So you're seeing it. It's like if you have a surface of revolution around it, I think is rough, the rough picture, like the things are symmetric roughly around that. But again, assuming that like, and I think there's no reason to some other ways of like the light sources around it are kind of evenly spaced because this thing is rotating. So there's a rotational symmetry and you should do it that way.

• 1:36:00Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think it could swallow a planet? Are there?

• 1:36:03Speaker 03

  I mean, I have no reason to think not. I guess the question is like, what is I'm like, sorry. So like, if the take us back and make sure I'm not like saying something that was for the experts are going to be concerned. But like, to the extent of what do you want to consider a planet? Like, I think that like, just because something is like gravitating and it was always there, like, you know, our planet, we're orbiting something that if I just wasn't moving like this way, I'd be falling in. So like, you know, um, so like, it's not just because it's there, it doesn't mean it's like swallowing a planet. But sure, something could fall into it. And I guess if you wanted to say like, the only thing I'm worried about is to whatever extent the thing was the original like,

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  thing, the planet was rotating around that you called it a planet for that reason, you know?

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's, it's like, it's a hole where you don't see the light coming out, but I don't think there's anything stopping it. I don't know if I've ever like looked or tried to find a nice numerical simulation of just imagine that I have a bunch, me and a bunch of other

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  particles with some light sources are together falling across the horizon, what it looks like. I think it doesn't look that special. You know, and the thing that looks special is you're outside and you're seeing all the light around it.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Kind of being warped by the

• 1:37:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm sure it would look kind of fun. Like, I don't know why they don't like, you could do it. I mean, there's nothing like, that's just a differential equation you're trying to solve. It's like, no. Yeah.

• 1:37:17Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  I'm retracing.

• 1:37:18Shawn Ryan?

  All right. Let's move into celestial holographs.

• 1:37:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:24Shawn Ryan?

  What is?

• 1:37:26Shawn Ryan?

  What is that?

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  So it's a

• 1:37:28Shawn Ryan?

  This is what you're doing right now, right?

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Um, so, yeah, a lot of, I think some British twister people have some fun, like, sense of humor of how they name things as far as like celestial sphere and heavenly equations. I think there's fun things. But, um, so celestial sphere literally is, you know, night sky, stars. If you're like, you're like Millennium Falcon or whatever, and you're accelerating, you might imagine that like, you'll see the, the distribution of the stars in the night sky move around a bit. So like, they're gonna dilate. And so that's somehow seeing that there is like, the boost symmetry of the space-time is a dilatation of this sphere.

• 1:38:05Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  So what we're doing is trying to do, is like map all of the observables that we want to have to this night sky times a null direction that's complicated, so we just project it back down to the night sky. And the reason why we do it is again, because we're just copying and pasting and then generalizing things that have worked before. So both, someone like Hawking, thinking about putting quantum field theory on a black hole, or someone who's like a string theorist who's saying, there's like 10 dimensions or 11 dimensions, and I'm gonna like have all these, all this extra field content that I then have to like have this extra dimension like wrapped up and be tiny, I never see it, fine. But both of those types of frameworks end up leading to this cute notion that somehow the easiest way to get around describing a quantum gravity system

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  is to find an equivalent non-gravitational system that it's dual to. And so from the Hawking point of view, it's like, there's a sense in which this black hole behaves like a thermal system where the entropy is this area law. And so, okay, there's this fun kind of almost information theoretic vibe to like how like gravitational solutions. Then from the string theory side, there's this kind of more complicated, like some theory on brains backreacting, da-da-da, where you have a more precise actual equivalence between, I know some very esoteric like bulk strings on like some gravitational spacetime, that's the wrong cosmological constant, wrong number of dimensions, yada, yada, but it's equivalent to another gauge theory that I know. And so, a lot of people in my field love like those precise dualities, because then they have power on both sides.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  Maybe some things are easy to compute as a geometric object, and other things are easier to compute on the other side. And so you can study like different like strongly coupled limits by having this other approximation, or other approximation, let's spell it. But both of these things, to me, are just saying, okay, you have, again, this effort, so like there's a reason to think that maybe one tenet of quantum gravity is this holographic nature. And then we're trying to apply it to these asymptotically flat spacetimes, which are again, the kind of the flat Earth analog of cosmology. But like, don't, maybe I shouldn't say, I should stop saying.

• 1:41:44Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like the, I have the core question here. Is everything we see in 3D space, 4D spacetime actually projected from a 2D surface like a hologram?

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  See, that's the thing is, I would say in some sense, yeah, by definition, but like, how physical is it? Like, I think what I'm saying is that, and maybe this is a problem with someone who ends up spending too much time just in equations and not in like, real world. Like, if we can describe things the same way, you might as well use whatever definition is useful for some things, right? So I think, I don't always take it too literally in the sense of, like, we are in this celestial sphere. It's more like, can I convert everything to variables on that celestial sphere? And does that help me organize some scattering computations in a way that like, would just get computationally complicated to compute all these Fiman diagrams? Or something like that? That's the kind of goal. Like, I think I view it as like, it's another math framework that ideally, if we do it right, is equivalent. And then don't overinterpret like, the physicality of that per se.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  But it probably is my own problem for not trying to take things more literally because we are studying physics after all.

• 1:42:45Shawn Ryan?

  So I, I don't under, I'm trying to understand this. So are you, are you trying to prove that everything we see is a hologram?

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  I think that I'm trying to build a version of a holographic framework that works for spacetimes that are not anti-disider. So like spacetimes that are more relevant for like scattering. How does gravity want to be, quantum gravity want to be described by a boundary system? So we're trying to build that out. And that's significant, if it were true, then the two things are equivalent, not that like, so like,

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  if A equals B, I'm not saying everything is B, I'm saying everything that is A is B, right? So I'm, I'm more like, uh, saying there's equivalent set of things. Like, you could imagine a world where maybe I, I don't know, try to project everything down to the earth and then talk about some rules for how those things interact. And it was more convenient to talk about the extra dimension, I don't know, like, um, but like, you're not trying to lose content that way. Certainly, it's not supposed to lose anything.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  But it is neat to think, okay, like if everything is described in terms of boundary observables, then it does kind of call into question which questions are well-defined in the bulk, for example.

• 1:43:56Shawn Ryan?

  So celestial holography is your way to prove this and use it to unite Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics. The two foundational theories currently contradict each other.

• 1:44:08Speaker 03

  So, but again, there's a lot of people where you could probably motivate their research as inspired by it. And the question is like, I'll go and, so it's funny, these, these things go in and out of fashion. Like, I think I've heard from some, like, postdocs now that it's not cool anymore on their grant applications to be talking about, like, quantum gravity. But I still think that's why we go into, like, we don't go into the field because, there's two maybe reasons why people go into the field. I think some people genuinely like paradoxes, and it always bothered me because it's just like, any paradox where someone actually had the answer in the end, like, you just defined it wrong. So I went into physics because I liked that I didn't have to learn as much, I mean, in the sense of I don't have to have, have a, like, an excellent working memory nominally, if the laws of physics are simpler, to then figure out what the rule, like, the rules are simpler than the solutions.

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  So I like physics for that. That doesn't necessarily bode well when you have a very complicated corpus of things and so on. I think the reason why we study something like quantum gravity is, again, because we have this bias, or we think that, you know, whatever the laws of nature are, there, there, there's a fundamental set that then leads to all these different regimes that you're studying. And if you didn't have that bias, maybe you shouldn't, you know, be, be doing that, that job. But if you have that bias, then the thing that you should be doing is trying to, again, merge various rules into a single set of rules. And so I guess the big outstanding one is this, like, short-distance physics and long-distance physics, because at some point, then, you, like, we know there's quantum mechanics, and we know that the GR is important.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  So, like, there's some sense in which the actual observations guide you to this still-open kind of problem of how, what theoretical frameworks can consistently limit to both. I think, I mean, to the extent that, like, why should the rules of, like, tennis versus hockey have to be united, right? Like, like, so, like, I think that, like, it's kind of cool that we think that the laws of nature are, like, there's something fundamental about it, that there's something highly compressible, like, about that description. And I think that's a fun hypothesis even, rather than just a belief to try to test it, and you can kind of automate what you do as researchers in the future, but, yeah.

• 1:46:09Shawn Ryan?

  So are you, yeah, are you saying that everything in space is potentially?

• 1:46:15Shawn Ryan?

  Projected from a 2D surface?

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  That would be, sorry, I think what I'm saying is if, so like spacetime, so for me, it's like, uh, it depends on, so sometimes you use the word space to mean spacetime, but it's three plus one dimensions is our, our world. And then the boundary is one dimension lower typically, and the celestial sphere is two dimensions lower because the boundary for these flat spacetimes is, is null in a way where like, basically no other direction can talk to each other. Um, so again, the point would be, can we find an equivalent description or almost like, uh, we've seen it work in the past, how do we apply it to this regime? And then how do we learn something by seeing how we can't import it? So again, physicists are constantly using mathematical frameworks that they already

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  have, and then trying to tweak, like, like, take, apply them to something different, and then realize something goes wrong, and then try to like, learn about that framework by seeing how to modify it to make it work. And so like, in some sense, answer is yes, but at the same time, you know, you want to try to see if, if I build a framework like that, would it tell me anything different about the structure at scales I can't see? But like ideally, like, it's a, it's a bad framework if it can't like, in principle, encompass the things that we do have the intuition for in the book, in our world.

• 1:47:30Shawn Ryan?

  This is way over my head.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  But it's way over everybody's, I mean, that's the thing, is it's like, you know, like, I think that I, especially when this hype happened when I was younger, I was very much like, I'm gonna go and read a bunch of textbooks, because I want to be able to like, answer good questions, or like, you know, know how to tell the flat Earthers why they're young, or like, you're, you're representing science somehow in a funny way. And it's just like, ah, like, you need a much better working memory for that, or, or, I don't know, I think the thing is that, you know, you don't need it, like, in our job, you can do this kind of like, you're diving in, you're doing a computation, and then sometimes you lose sight of the, the breadth of it, but I also think that now it's a fun time where you can kind of take a step back and see if there are things where, you know, the resource limitations are just the way that physics is done, doesn't need to be that way, because like, now, you know, one researcher doesn't need to hire a whole

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  team of like, data scientists to treat the corpus as a data set and do something with it. Like, there's a lot of, uh, power to having like, funny eye tools, and like, you get to just basically play around with doing things that you never would want to do normally as a, as a good researcher, because that wouldn't help you with your career.

• 1:48:34Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I'm gonna ask you some very, very, very basic questions, try to understand this.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 1:48:40Shawn Ryan?

  Are you saying that a planet could be a hologram?

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but in weird lawyer sense, not like in the way, you know.

• 1:48:47Shawn Ryan?

  A star.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  No, I think what we're saying is like all these objects that you're thinking in the bulk. And like, there would be some state on the boundary theory that's equivalent to it in these types of holographic setups. I don't want to say that I understand flat space holography to the level where like, I'm confident in that. But in ADS CFT context, their dictionaries are like, yep, like this mass of state is this other operator in the CFT type of.

• 1:49:06Shawn Ryan?

  Potentially, everything we see in space could be a hologram. Or are you saying the fabric of space?

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  I think everything, I'm sorry, like basically, the whole point is that there's two equivalent theories. So the thing that you have in the bulk, you want to have in the boundary theory. Can you formulate a theory that lives one dimension lower that isn't just so like, is there a natural sense in which you want to live one dimensional lower? And for example, one, maybe one kind of intuitive thing of why it might be nice is that if I have a global symmetry. So I have something that's not related to the like, these long distance interactions. Then typically I need to go and like, kind of measure the, the charges of the objects throughout the like, constant time slice that I'm in. Like we're saying, this is Gauss law story, that I can measure the electric charge in a configuration by just having some probe of the electric field like at infinity. And so in ADS CFT, there's a sense in which this boundary theory is evolving in time. And you want to find the dynamics of the boundary theory.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  So like, there's a dynamics of the boundary conditions of the bulk theory that end up like, I guess, telling you, it's an equivalent presentation of the bulk theory. So the fact, I think the fact that it is holographic is deeper and probably had, if it were true, has deeper implications for like, the right physical quantities to be talking about in the bulk. But again, and so I think that's a sense in which, sure, if I felt more confident that the state of the dictionary were, where I really had a good intuition for that thing. Then I could try to pull back and say, let me, like, the fact that it's described as this boundary theory, what does that mean for what's a good thing to talk about in the bulk? But I don't think it's formed enough for me to have that type of assertion or make that type of enthusiastic claim, given the danger of like, how it's interpreted.

• 1:50:41Shawn Ryan?

  What are you visualizing in your head as you describe this?

• 1:50:43Speaker 03

  I am visualizing as a Penner diagram with a spirit and just some like, like light sheets, I guess. Um, probably that and or, yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Some equations. So I'm basically just a bunch of pen diagrams, right, the slides and the talks I would give.

• 1:50:59Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you're visual, I can see it. I think you're visualizing.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. I know, but that's not necessarily very helpful, right? So like, that's a problem with like, when you're a grad student, they often say like, shut up and compute. And I used to take it as like a personal, I'm like, I can think too. But the point is, you're trying to be trained out of using your physical intuition, you know, for the things that you're doing. Because again, like, you know, you can't see 10 dimensions. You can not even barely see like, you know, four if it weren't three plus one. So like, how do you, what can you physically do in this world where we clearly are interacting with certain energy scales, three plus one dimensions at a time? How do you get out of that? And then you build this intuition by computing things, I guess. So then your intuitions are roughly a bunch of computations or a bunch of lower

• 1:51:45Speaker 03

  dimensional projections of things. If you happen to have someone who can make nice figures.

• 1:51:51Shawn Ryan?

  What do you believe happens when we die?

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  Oh, God, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, my mom's very Catholic. I don't know. I think the thing, it's like, that's a funny thing. Physics probably tells you like, gives you some sense of which questions you want to ask or not. And I guess that the right answer from a physics point of view is, I don't know.

• 1:52:10Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think about it?

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  Um, I luckily, like, I'm happier, so I guess I don't. But no, I, I think that the, that is, the weirdest thing is often, I can fight with people I think are friends in a fun way of like, how to interpret the observer. So like, yeah, like, I definitely think that if you, and I mean, to the extent where we don't agree, like, and I don't know actually who's right on it, of like, how much is the fact that like, I am a me, like, somehow, I feel like physics can still describe or doesn't, doesn't obviously like, tell me I couldn't have, you know, some objects that end up having these complicated, like neural nets in them that interact with the environment and it changes the set of it. And so it feels like they're making decisions based on that, but that's a different question than like,

• 1:52:56Speaker 03

  I feel I'm me and I interact with the world. So I, I think if I want to say that physics like covers everything, then I probably do want to have the observer be part of the system. But I definitely have friends who are definitely not religious or anything like that and still kind of call that observer thing into question. I just don't know, because again. I guess I don't like open systems. I don't know, like, from the, the point of view of what are we doing as a theory? But yeah, there is fun questions about that are related to this in the sense of like, uh, who would, who am I versus like, and is it the same thing, um, as?

• 1:53:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I think how active the observer is or something like that. I still probably am biased to not including that, but maybe that's dumb. That could easily be dumb.

• 1:53:40Shawn Ryan?

  Do you and your mom talk about this?

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  No, cause like, oh, she, sorry. I'm not good at, neither of us are good at debating. No, um, she definitely sees what I do as a variant of religion and I'm like, ah, but, but I also, it's very easy because I think we're so close to like, end up going too far with questioning this stuff. She, she came from like, she came from Cuba when she was a kid and they weren't allowed to be religious there. And so I think that, you know, it, uh, it means a lot more to her personally because of that, but also I mean, it gives her like a very sense of like guidance in the family life and things like that. She, I mean, it means so much to her, right?

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  But you don't, you don't.

• 1:54:17Speaker 03

  No, I, and the, that's the thing is I personally view like attention with the like dogmatic aspects of like, that you know, the answer. Like, I mean, what I love about physics is that, you know, there is a sense in which like the, even though, first of all, like the level at which I actually understand these things is so, so silly and whatever, but there's this about science that if it's done right and honestly, like you can have these revelations, like you can learn something about nature. And I think that whether you're religious or not, everybody appreciates like nature. And so we're trying to find the rules.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  And if anything, that seems pretty close to the spirit of like the part of religion that gives you the, like, the, like, answers or some like sense of like, this is the way things are, right? Um, it mean that you're trying to find an origin story, right? So like that kind of origin story aspect of it, I think that science is after, but I think that I like the fact that we are supposed to admit when we don't know things. Sometimes that doesn't always, it definitely plays out in a way, weird way, because a lot of people think they're experts and then like talk down to people who don't. And so it's very dogmatic in practice, but it's not supposed to be that. And I love that about it. And that's the thing that turns me a little bit off of religion. Sometimes it's just like, you know, like. Like can you question things or whatnot? But I think this notion of not knowing is clearly fits into this notion like if you thought there is something creating everything, maybe that's more of a reason that we're special

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  or more of a reason that the rules have to be simpler because but but like I tried to be more agnostic and I also am against the kind of dogmatization side of it a little bit, but I'm happy to try to debate or change my mind a little. I seriously, my mom and it's just like, yeah, why aren't there women priests, you know?

• 1:55:55Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. So what do you, what does it mean if, what does, what does it mean with the hologram stuff if it's projected from a 2D?

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  So again, I think the thing that it will mean is once I understand it better, that there's some types of things you do or don't want to talk about within the bulk space time.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  But I do think like I care about physics, not because, I mean, you land on this one little corner of it that you get to play with and it's somehow the best bet for you because it uses the things that you know. But like it always frustrated me like how hard it would be to jump between different fields because you like, imagine if you have no experiment calling different parts of the research canon, it's just going to get harder and harder when there's more alternate attempts to something and I don't know enough about loop product gravity to tell them why they're wrong. And I'm just basically vouching because I like, I trust like one other person's opinion who might've looked at it. And so this is funny thing where like, like this is the kind of the output of other people that are also really smart is hard to internalize and compress. So I like this notion of thinking, be able to think about taking a step back and saying

• 1:56:54Speaker 03

  like, we value physics for this type of reason of like finding these deep questions, trying to like see that nature seems to be like, have this highly compressed description. How would you go about finding it? Like, can we view ourselves as instead of like individual people who maybe do a great thing and they could call themselves an Einstein or whatever that instead of it like we're responsible for this legacy, we're custodians of this canon. Are there tools now that we have that we can be like help curate and like condense it more systematically? And I think that that's an exciting time for me because I love that notion of, you know, don't just stay in my little corner. Like, how would I get out of that corner? First of all, personally, but then how is it also you like, you view that venture as something super valuable, I think, and closer to these kinds of like deeper questions. But, but I don't think I think about the deep questions enough because I'm in the competitions because that's the thing where the intuition comes from and then you just

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  get stuck philosophizing if you're not, if you're in the, you're too far away from it.

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• 1:58:47Shawn Ryan?

  How would this change the Big Bang?

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  Oh, I think that it's-

• 1:58:51Shawn Ryan?

  Bang theory.

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  I think the Big Bang Theory thing would probably tell me that something about my framework has to be tweaked or something like that. I do it more, because again, like, you know, like, the cosmological origin side of thing is very much like not part of the thing I'm setting up. So the first side of it, if I need to include the sitter, the stuff that I'm studying is more of like a stepping stone to understanding how to generalize lography.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  And then the second part of it is, again, like, initial conditions or things like that. We're not necessarily always... Sometimes we're thinking about the equations and not like the, like, the solutions of the equations or the particular ones that are relevant to the real world. So I would say that the, it's not going to do for the Big Bangs more, but will the Big Bang tell me I need to, like, specify? Once I understand better if my framework encompasses that or not.

• 1:59:34Shawn Ryan?

  Do you believe we can time travel?

• 1:59:37Speaker 03

  Forward at different rates.

• 1:59:39Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, sorry, I think what I'm saying is, like, I'm just making the joke that we're all going forward in time. But to the extent that even they have this in this Interstellar movie, if I got the name right, like, like, this kind of twin paradox of, like, your clock is affected by gravity, and so you can, you know, go around and come back and have aged differently than your twin, but you're only still going forward. No, it's funny, because we don't, like, and that's a kind of fun thing, too, is like, it's, there's still cool stuff, like, but the no-gos are there, and we never, you never really get to play with all the fun things, I think. Like, I-

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  Like, it's always this funny thing of like, sure, you can do this thing, but the caveat is it's not physical or whatever, like, right, so this thing about like, you can age differently, but you can't like, go back in time, everything. And it's also because it would be pretty, sometimes things are built into assumptions, like, it would cause a lot of other problems if you can go back and, like, close time, like, curve, you're influencing your own future. But, like, yeah, I just wish that, I think the thing is, is that, like, in order to make progress in the field, you have to be so in the nitty gritty, that you don't get to, like, have fun, like, bullshitting around with, like, the, the things that people think physicists do. But, Permittor's pretty close. We have, we have a pretty fun, um, we have people who do, like, quantum foundations, and like, a wide variety of just theoretical physics, where sometimes that it feels a little bit more like, uh, maybe what

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  the stereotype of a physicist, or the chalkboard debating, like, existential things is.

• 2:01:03Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about quantum mechanics versus Einstein, the fight at the edge of reality.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:01:08Shawn Ryan?

  Where do we start?

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  We're framing it as a fight, man. Um, no, I got, I see, I see, like, um, more like, again, this is the type of thing of, uh, why do we believe that the laws have to be coming from the same thing? Right? Um, I think that that's a pretty bold and fun assumption. And if you, you can imagine that if somebody thought, but like, at every different energy scale, just there's some new things, because that's the way it is, that you couldn't predict, that's a very different vibe than thinking that, like, there's a mathematical consistency, or some kind of underlying principles that will carve out a space of theories that still can be consistent with, with observations. So, what I view it as, is again, as a hep theorist, we're making this bet about the structure of these, like, laws of nature, that probably has some consequences

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  that you wouldn't be able to see when you're just in the, the nitty gritty of it. Um, and that excites me a lot, thinking of, like, okay, if I could zoom out and see the structure of the corpus, and like, like, how, which theories are actually consistent with each other, wouldn't that be fun?

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  And so I think I like that because that feels closer to the kinds of things that excited me about physics as a kid. Now, it's still further away from a lot of like, there's some companies now that are trying to do like AI for physics with a thing of like, we're gonna like, you know, like, robots are gonna come out of the physics thing. It's like, I don't, I, it's probably not physics the way I define it when that's the case. But there is cool, like, you can unlock cool things when, like, you're changing the way you're doing things. And I think that I, sorry, forget for this quantum gravity thing. It's again, it's about trying to condense this corpus. You're trying to like, find a single description that can limit to two different things. And right now, we really have only a limited number of suggestions, like roughly string theory is a framework. Can you try to find other ones? You probably never would if you're just sociologically

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  in a field where everything you're learning is in the context of like, within string theory, it probably be some variant of it at any point, just almost by accident. So I think it's kind of fun to do a little bit of a meta layer and think about, like, what are we actually after as a field? And be clear about those goals.

• 2:03:12Shawn Ryan?

  What is the Perimeter Institute?

• 2:03:14Speaker 03

  Oh, I love it. So Perimeter is founded by Michael Zeridis. He's one of the co-founders of BlackBerry. And he's one of these, like, you know, tech entrepreneur physics fans. So like, I mean, obviously, like, he kind of the head of his time with the smartphone type of thing, was an engineer, awesome engineer, and then like, liked physics, then put a lot of money into physics. I'm not sure, like, I mean, like, you have to be a fun kind of, I don't know, it's a brilliant idea or a silly idea, but it's definitely good for the physicists. So what I love about it is that it's like a research institution that's like a private-public partnership. So like, his money is highly leveraged and like, the Canadian government supports it of, just for theoretical physics. And so it's neat because you can imagine, you know, if you cared about the product, you care

• 2:03:57Speaker 03

  about research, having something where the whole institution is dedicated to that is a very different vibe than again, like a university where you are like, You're pooling like your eight auditoriums or your dorms or things like that. And it's all these different research directions that are together, sharing some resources. And you're kind of like, like cross-sectioning the field. And then it's a reputation of that place that draws some talent in or not. I think there is value to this kind of cross-sectioning research by the product or by the discipline. And Perimeter is an instantiation of that, but like with the downside of it being in just one place in Waterloo, Ontario, you know, where, where his company was and things like that. So I understand he's.

• 2:04:32Shawn Ryan?

  You went there instead of.

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  At Brown.

• 2:04:34Shawn Ryan?

  Taking a $1.1 million.

• 2:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, but these, these packages are for like research funding and things like that. So and research is, I guess, I know people are expensive. So that's where these things scale and sound like fancy numbers. But I mean, I, yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 03

  But at Brown, it would be very much like Ivy League professor sounds cool. You're teaching a lot, but, but again, you're just kind of at a university that has one reputation for the other reputations. I don't know, like that type of vibe of like within the US system, Harvard will get more money than Brown would. And then versus at least at Perimeter, it's kind of a startup vibe, but or at least in principle could be. And then you try to make it that, which is fun, but we'll see if they will. Yeah.

• 2:05:12Shawn Ryan?

  So what are you doing at the perimeter?

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I do my research there. So I do my celestial geography research and it's basically like your faculty. You don't have to teach, you mentor mostly like master students up. And then you're, but they're more forgiving or like, like the, the kind of institutional things that you're helping with. It's normally it's like, instead of being on committees that are just like in a big department, any university, we don't care. You're closer to being able to help guide the institute sometimes. And so it's kind of fun because you get to think, okay, like we're this institute that has like outreach teams. It has like teaching teams separate, like that really value each of those facets of physics.

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  How can you help with that as a researcher? And I love that type of question. I love thinking about like how we can position ourselves to collaborate more with like tech companies for like AI for physics or things like that. And I don't think that question is as meaningful if you're at another university. Cause you know, that university doesn't care about theoretical physics. They can change their mind on who they hire later in the communitar over time. And sure, there's probably awesome like CS departments at places, but like, you know, like you can really focus on a thing when it's your whole mission. And I love that about P I.

• 2:06:16Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think AI is gonna, uh, what do you think about AI?

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  I'm excited. I'm sorry. Like, I used to be more, so like, again, I think my opinion, at least I'm happy that my opinion can change. I feel like that's a positive. But, um, like, I was definitely more, like, jaded by, oh, people oversell things and, like, what if they oversell things too much, the extent where then it hurts the, um, like, it's not, like, there is value to expertise that I think that sometimes people overcorrect on things and they don't trust, like, science, stuff like that, right? So, like, how do you engage with, like, like, hard conversations of, like, where is this field going or things like that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater or, like, making it hard to, like, collaborate?

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  So I used to be more like, oh, no, they're gonna say they're gonna do all these things. I know that my heroes kind of like physics, so is it gonna be like, that, like, the guys with the funding get access to all the data, start making some claims of theories, and then, like, like, we don't know enough to be able to tell them why they're wrong, yada, yada. The route that ended up happening instead is more like, oh, we're gonna, like, take the top people in the field, like, not like the Harvard professors, not that many, um, and, uh, just work with them and collaborate with them first, and then, it's a funny, it's a reputation thing, uh, but it's fine. It makes sense. It's a business move. It makes sense. But it's a funny thing where we're more a part of it than I might have thought. I thought it would be like, we're gonna get overwhelmed with a bunch of crock pot papers by physics enthusiasts, and it's

• 2:07:39Speaker 03

  less that and more, um, yeah, more this funny thing where it's, we're all in the labs for a little bit or not, but like, how do we really do this right? Instead of it being like, okay, so say one company wants to show that they're doing some research, they can, like, work with a few top researchers, and then the top researchers can say it's interesting. But, like, we wanna do cooler shit than we could've done before. And how do you, like, like, I think that's, it's funny. It's like, you think it wouldn't be that hard to try to just get all a bunch of strings through, just like, let's do, what they do for math, write down a bunch of, like, well enough defined questions, and there's someone to, like, try to automate it. And even, we could do, we could have more fun. We could say, like, okay, Sam Altman, you're saying ChatGPT-8 is gonna solve quantum gravity? Let's put some parameters on that and make a bet, and if you, like, do it by that timeframe, whoever did it gets that prize pool.

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  If not, give that money to fund the researchers. I don't know. Like, I think there's a fun way to do, like, X Prize with these deadlines, because the thing that scares me the most is There's a lot of confidence. And once you start playing with the coding side of the products, I can see the confidence in it. But like, to what extent, like, a company can always pivot and you can be like, that claim is bullshit. But, but they still will find something else that works and that's great for them. So you don't want to short the company or anything like that. Like, how do you call them out a little bit when they're overzealous? If that overzealousness can hurt you. On the flip side, though, I found that like, you know, the agentic coding, vibe coding capabilities are just amazing. Because you can have all these little daydreams of how you want to interact with the physics paper. And like before, when I was a perimeter, they were supportive of me like trying to use some of my like grant money

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  or startup money to like hire some interns from like local universities to code something up. But like, I was a shitty coder, so I'm not good at managing people at tasks that I don't know what I'm asking them to do. And then like, I was so bad, I couldn't even like basically host this thing locally to show people what it was. And like within a few weeks, like I could basically re dev the same thing with Claude Code, which is like amazing. So like, I kind of see that sometimes that hype or that push can drive a product to a level where like now, I don't need to hire a dev team. As a physicist, I can start to do, play around with things that I couldn't have done if I didn't know how to code myself. But there's skill sets that are open to me because it's been kind of democratized. So I'm grateful to that. And that's a bit intention with my kind of err about like, we're going to solve physics and then it might like, you know, take the funny way, ah.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  So, so, well, at least like, thank you.

• 2:09:57Shawn Ryan?

  What are you going to do if they solve physics?

• 2:09:58Speaker 03

  No, but this thing is, I, that's the question is like, what does it mean to solve physics? I want to make sure we have the same definition of that. Because I do think that it would be hard to imagine actually solving physics to the extent where like, until you build an experiment, you can't rule out basic theories. I think the coolest thing is to try to think, okay, there's a lot of things in our field that you would never do because again, resource limitations. So when you have a couple of thousand people who, awesome, smart people, like, like definitely, like, I feel dumb all the time. They're awesome people and they do their thing. And, you know, like, you self-select accidentally for the type of people who just love mathematics to the extent where then, like, you can accidentally be ostracized if you are too ambitious within that framework. Because again, who are you, right? And then also, just, it doesn't help you get a job.

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  So like, there's some things where it's like, almost like an emergent phenomena of things that people kind of say are institutional problems. It's like, it's really not anybody being a bad actor. It's just like, You get kind of stuck in the way that things are done because people like, obviously like what they do and the people who like it stay in it and people who don't are expelled, right? So imagine like you have something where it's like, if you feel comfortable with things operating this way, then you stay and otherwise you leave and you resent the field, then like that's a bad thing sometimes. But now I think, you know, there's enough, like, so you have this thing where basically before, a lot of people would go and like, you wouldn't value doing brute force, straightforward things that are just like scanning over spaces of stuff because that won't lead to a breakthrough or like, is it one individual, you can't do it. But if you can automate that, like, sure, like, there's a lot of value to types of questions that nobody

• 2:11:25Speaker 03

  would have cared about, but that then makes it a problem with benchmarking. So like, for example, in other fields where there's more of an engineering challenge or like a very specific goal in mind, you can say, this goal is valuable and then, you know, protein folding or whatnot, they can do it. Or in even math, there's more like, I guess, like tests for kids, you know, like, um, the community seems a bit more organized, a lot more like IMO problems, like different benchmarks of like, how good is it, this thing. In our field, I think that we, we kind of don't like often to say whose research is more valuable than others. We definitely feel like there's totally a vibe of like judging things. But like, that kind of ethos lends itself to not wanting to just straight up say, this is a valuable thing that you should do, because if it was so straightforward to do it, it wouldn't be an interesting question. And it's like, that's dumb. Because like, anything that's worth doing,

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  like, you'd think it'd be worth telling someone else to do, right? Um, and so I think that we just got to get over that in our heads a bit and realize like, that just because in the past, you could only give faculty lines to people who, like, happen to have a great idea, that there isn't value, because the whole enterprise isn't, it's physics, it's not math. It's like, there is some cohesive structure to this thing. Like, how do we optimize for that? And I think it's fun, because I think tech can disrupt that a little bit in a way that isn't going to necessarily, you know, hopefully not, hopefully not in a way where it's like completely just erasing it. I think that there's a lot of value to that expertise and like, how do we harness that to do something really cool with it, instead of it being this thing where someone who's not an expert just thinks it looks like it's doing the right thing, you know?

• 2:12:51Shawn Ryan?

  What is something that you? Want to dive into that you haven't yet?

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, for me, it's always, grass is always growing on the other side in the sense of, like, you get, you feel siloed and like, it's not like, like, no one's siloing you but yourself in some sense. Because like, I guess for me, my, my, the one thing that I wish I'd, that was like, well, it would be easier for me if it wasn't is like, I really like extrinsic motivation sometimes too much. So like, when I'm computing, I can be happy, but I like if other people care about what I'm computing. You know, and sometimes they don't because they each care about their own thing. And like, I don't think you're a better person or not for having like, less extrinsic motivation. But it's hard to navigate like, you know, if every person just cares about their own thing and you're like, how do I do something this person cares about, I want to jump into their thing? But then like, they see it as a waste of their time to necessarily like, you know, transfer that knowledge or something because they have their own grass and they have to do the research.

• 2:13:41Speaker 03

  So it's hard to, hard to move around in a funny way, just because everybody's doing their own little math. But, so I just wish that I could better parse other people's papers and understand, like, how their notation, their ideas fit into the things that I've already built in my mind. Um, and so, like, the type of thing that I'm excited about more so is just, you know, can I take InspireF this database of all the different papers in the field and try to, like, use large language models or whatnot, just for fun, to see like, how much I can try to parse like, the different concepts that are appearing in these papers. And I think it's a fun game to be like, okay, when I'm, when I'm asked to explain something publicly, why am I so shit? I think I've spent a lot of years, instead of getting better at public speaking, thinking like, why the hell am I so bad at it?

• 2:14:22Speaker 03

  And I think there's these trade-offs between, you know, we are selected for, or at least in our job, it's better if you are not sacrificing accuracy. And so anytime you're making an analogy, there's so many caveats, the caveats get in the way of the intuition going through. And then sometimes you don't even think that way. So it's just like, can I try to like, see the structure of the thing I'm studying a little bit better? By like, playing around with it within the scope of things that I know, so I'm like, but, so I'm super excited just for the fact that like, I can experiment with that all I want to, because before I might need to like, be better at coding in Python or like, understand the InspireF API keys and that's API calls and then that's like, automatic now. So you get to basically just have fun and I like that a lot. Um, and so for me, I just want to basically understand better, like,

• 2:15:06Speaker 03

  like, what is the information content of what I work, right? Like, in the, in the, in the human sense, not in the, in the ADS safety sense.

• 2:15:13Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about the physics race between the US and China.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  Who's winning?

• 2:15:20Speaker 03

  I mean, I think the US is still like, I mean, it's already but uh, no, obviously, I'm sorry, I think this is like, and I think this is something where I'm happy to hear your side of it too a bit more because I know like everybody who has any sort of military background has a different view or conception of China than like, probably because physics is so useless, so the type of physics that I do is seen as that, that it's nice because everybody can be a part of it. So we love this notion that like, doesn't matter what country you're from, you're contributing to like this corpus. And to be fair, everything that we're doing, we're publishing on archive for this. So it's not like there's IP involved and like various IP policies can affect things. So like, I like the fact that there's some little slice of research that's so far away from application, but like, everybody can be a part of it. And it's not like what country you're in.

• 2:16:01Speaker 03

  And so when I see things like about like, like China funding an experiment, it's like, you know, someone top down could just say, we're gonna fund it. Hey, it's it's an experiment. And honestly, maybe it's a good thing if they're spending money on on trying to be better at like, research for just the, like the the type of research that's just for the clout and not for like the military tech or something like that. And I could like, like make them, let them build platters, right? But um, because I do think that the the pipeline of transferable technology is much slower than it's actually building a technology. Right? So so I mean, my attitude is, I could see that there is, and this is the type of thing too. I think that, you know,

• 2:16:42Speaker 03

  very strong like top down governance can do, or and also different relaxations of like IP laws. Like there's a power to that, that you can see kind of Europe maybe over regulating things compared to like USAI, right? So I like to think that as we are right now, and I still think it's more feasible to say that like the research that I do is so much less about the practical applications and the technology for like the space specs like detectors. I still think that the European Space Agency One, LISA, that or whatever the name is going to be, that the US is a part of will outperform this particular one, I think that you were referring to, Tianjin or something. But I think it's great that like, if they cared about it, they would fund it. Versus like, you have a hard time sometimes convincing the American taxpayer that this is worth funding. Yeah, so.

• 2:17:27Shawn Ryan?

  So you think we're ahead?

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  We are ahead. Yeah. And I, but I think that, like, again, it's what do you want to be ahead on like, like? Isn't it great that like they spend their money on the things that we don't value doing eventually, you know, type of thing? If there's a reason why we don't value doing it, maybe it's great that they're doing it.

• 2:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  What are they doing that we're not doing?

• 2:17:46Speaker 03

  Oh, I just think that they have like, sorry, for example, there's a lot of, I'm not sure if it's a good thing. So again, these could be like, you know, different people have different, I mean, I don't know what level you want to consider it as a regime versus a person or like, but like, there's a like faculty member at Harvard or like was there who has a lot of influence in China, which is great because then he can just have research centers and he can hire people who wouldn't get jobs in America. So I think what I'm saying is that, you know, in America, it's like, oh, we only want like the top person to like get a job or like these like elite things and we can get them all over the world and that's what we typically do. And then their route is like, there's a lot of awesome people that are never going to get a job in the US system. We can hire them there and it sometimes works, but also right now it's still very isolating. So like, um, the US would choose not to do that.

• 2:18:31Speaker 03

  Like, we don't want to just have hire a bunch of more faculty because like, you know, but then once we've made that choice, they're optimizing, given that constraint, what can they do that's valuable? And I think that then like, there's a reason why we made our choice, right? And that still has an effect of like, everybody that I know that like, it's really hard to, it's really hard in like India and China, I think, to like break out of those systems unless you happen to have an advisor or somebody you knew who was in the US system, which is insane. Like, I mean, I feel bad for like the researchers. This is like, it's so sociological in some sense. Like you can't just have a brilliant idea and like get to be a part of this like club in some sense because again, it's not just a, it's almost more like you can't, if you don't speak the language or the right way, people don't think you know what you're talking about or they like, they don't understand you.

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  And so like, there's like pipelines that are very limited and very much go through the US and out, almost like go through like Princeton, Stanford, like Harvard, MIT and out, you know? And that sucks, but. But that definitely just says that it's not like we're behind in that sense, right?

• 2:19:31Shawn Ryan?

  Are there any projects going on in China that you're excited about?

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm less of an experimental, less type of person. I think a lot of, um, I mean, I'm excited for my phenomenological buddies if they think that they can get somebody to fund an experiment that the US wouldn't prioritize. I'm happy for them. I still think the things that I'm more excited about are still in Silicon Valley as far as I'm concerned, but, um, but that's my own biases, my own.

• 2:19:59Shawn Ryan?

  What about the US? Are there any projects here that you're excited about?

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  I mean, so.

• 2:20:02Shawn Ryan?

  That you're not involved in?

• 2:20:04Speaker 03

  I probably don't know all the cool projects that people are doing. I think that, um, just the way that we,

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  I mean, in the US, there's a lot more money that can go into innovation in a way that when the time scales for research in a company are so comparable to the ones in academia, sometimes that rubs me the wrong way. Like, I think that we're good at, um, we're not, there isn't a problem of putting money into innovation. So the question of like, whose hands does it go in or how is it controlled? Like, but it's definitely the exciting things in the States. The States, you can move fast and break things in a way that I don't think you can in many other places. But probably in China, IP laws would be such that unless, like, I mean, however, we follow the law with, like, copyrighted material for training things, I imagine that they could have had a lot of, they could have done that better, right? Because they can, they don't care if they don't, maybe, I don't know the actual setup, but a system who doesn't care about IP can definitely, you know, do cool things and stuff.

• 2:20:59Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about all these UFOs and UAP sightings and stuff?

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  I don't know. I wish, I wish they were real, it'd be cooler. But no, I don't think, I, I believe in aliens, but I don't believe in, like, aliens that have contacted us, but.

• 2:21:11Shawn Ryan?

  You believe in aliens?

• 2:21:12Speaker 03

  Oh, in general, I mean, statistically, I mean, so like, I think there's a fun thing. So like, either we're super, super special, or like, sure, there probably are, why wouldn't there be life somewhere else? Where are the initial conditions for where we are so special? I think that, you know, people who study, like, I, I don't do this myself, but like, there's some, the fact that you haven't interacted with them gives you some bounds on how common it can be, or like, whether they need to be like, in some environment where you can have water, or all those types of fun things. But sure, I think that, like, I mean, unless, and I mean, the funny thing, it's called tension with religion and stuff too. Like, I think there's no reason to think you're special unless there is a reason that you're special. Um, and so, modding out by, or maybe the prior being, like, we're probably not special, would tell you, sure, there's some.

• 2:21:57Speaker 03

  Something like an alien somewhere. Will you ever interact with it? You don't know. But I don't believe in like necessarily like I definitely like I wish that we had talked to him. It'd be pretty cool. Like, all right.

• 2:22:10Shawn Ryan?

  So you think all these sightings are bullshit?

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  Oh, that's hard. I mean, I want to. Yeah, but I don't want to say it like that's mean to say like that people don't believe what you see type of thing. But because I'm saying like, I wish if it weren't bullshit. Wouldn't that be more fun? I think what I'm saying is like, I wish things were as cool. All these conspiracy theories make it seem like there's much more structure and organization than there is like. Just like, I mean, maybe.

• 2:22:33Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you.

• 2:22:34Speaker 03

  Maybe your bias though is that you've seen the military when it works fucking well and like that there is some cool shit that I wish I knew about.

• 2:22:39Shawn Ryan?

  I've never seen any cool UAPs in the military that go into the water and have revitic propulsion systems or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, I've never seen anything.

• 2:22:49Speaker 03

  I don't. I think.

• 2:22:51Shawn Ryan?

  I've only seen stuff on the news.

• 2:22:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I think what I'm saying is like.

• 2:22:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't believe the news.

• 2:22:55Speaker 03

  I know. That's. Yeah, it's funny. I don't know how many people are actively.

• 2:23:03Speaker 03

  I think that we don't always give credit to the fact that people cannot realize their biases or that they are self-serving sometimes. Like, I mean, like, I don't know how much of it's like Machiavellian or like emergent Machiavellian or whatever it would be like.

• 2:23:17Shawn Ryan?

  The one that really gets me is the Nimitz.

• 2:23:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I was already saying more. But I don't know.

• 2:23:21Shawn Ryan?

  You don't know about the Nimitz?

• 2:23:22Speaker 03

  I don't know. I guess not.

• 2:23:23Shawn Ryan?

  Multiple people saw it. It was some kind of a. What was it? It was like an egg shaped, whatever.

• 2:23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Shawn Ryan?

  Projectile and it went in the water.

• 2:23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:35Shawn Ryan?

  I don't believe it lost any speed. Came out of the water. Pilots saw it. People on the ship saw it.

• 2:23:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:23:42Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of it was a collective.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  That's super cool. I wish, I mean, I always thought these things are.

• 2:23:47Shawn Ryan?

  Heard about this?

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  I'm, you're definitely different, like a set of like Twitter, like internet feeds.

• 2:23:54Shawn Ryan?

  We definitely live in different worlds.

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  Which is, no, but that's, and that's fine. In the sense of like, I know that I have biases coming from like the experience of like, like who I would have like kind of spent a lot of time around, but um, no, I mean, I mean, I think I always thought maybe it's cool military projects. I don't know. Like, and then like sometimes like optical illusions for like if it was physically impossible, but.

• 2:24:15Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I wanted to ask you about.

• 2:24:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:16Shawn Ryan?

  Why? How could it be an optical illusion?

• 2:24:19Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen the thing to to know that answer, but I mean, like. First of all, it's gonna be more fun now that you can AI generate stuff like we're gonna have like a real like fake news at scale accidentally or maliciously. I don't know like that. That's scary. Um, and then the other side, I don't understand the extent to which things are physically impossible for it to be a just some like whatever drone or something you don't know. I know in this case, I'm not talking about this example of going in the water. It sounds good, but but I think what I'm saying is that.

• 2:24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess the word which is like when someone does believe it is that thing. There's so confidence in alien and not like whatever. Why do they think the alien can do something that we can't do? Cause if it's all the laws of physics, then probably it's the same capability. So then it's just a question of like, how advances the US military or other whatever. Right? Or what are you actually seeing versus what you think you're seeing? Because you're again extrapolating based on like other things that you're you're used to looking at.

• 2:25:14Shawn Ryan?

  Could it be a hologram?

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  I know, no, I'm not gonna go there. That'd be a fun. I don't get a little quote for that. Um, but uh, no, I I think again, I I'm saying more in the literal sense of like, you're probably misunderstanding what it's being seen if like, there's a reason why it physically couldn't be some military tech. It's what my my prior. I'd love to be wrong, right?

• 2:25:35Shawn Ryan?

  Could we project a hologram?

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm I think what I'm saying, like, I mean, sorry, to the extent I don't see any reason why you couldn't do a little like a little like come some save me. What's the what's the quote from the like Princess Leia? I don't know. Like that type of thing, which is a more literal version of the hologram, not the one that I what I would study.

• 2:25:54Speaker 03

  I don't know where laser shows are at nowadays or exactly what, but see the thing is, I always, I think I always take the more pragmatic attitude of like,

• 2:26:04Speaker 03

  like build cool shit, like, don't ask what is actually true, like try to engineer a thing so that it is if it's possible. But yeah, maybe it's less cool for the UFO type of thing, but like, you know, imagine the thing that would have to be true for that to be real. Do you believe it's true or do you want it to be true? Do you not want it to be true? Like, what's the conclusion that you draw if there's like really some like deep state type of thing that's hiding all these alien cool stuff like?

• 2:26:29Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's all bullshit.

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, I do too, but.

• 2:26:31Shawn Ryan?

  All of it.

• 2:26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like the person who then doesn't think it's bullshit has this probably in their mind like a more like powerful versions of the US government having like some really cool like Men in Black tech, right? I don't know, that's kind of appealing or fun like I. Yeah, I just, I think that we need to.

• 2:26:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's a fun thing to think about.

• 2:26:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, to lay off the conspiracies and make the, the cool stuff like that you can do.

• 2:26:54Shawn Ryan?

  I like that.

• 2:26:54Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? There's a lot, there's a lot of stuff that's like same isomorphism class of like, that's fucking cool, like this like whatever like autonomous F-35 thing you're talking about. Like, there's some cool shit that we can do.

• 2:27:05Shawn Ryan?

  What did you just say?

• 2:27:06Speaker 03

  Oh, like, no, that you, like, I was through, someone was going around and showing me the different things that you had. Oh. I forget, one of your teammates was showing the

• 2:27:14Speaker 03

  some like scaled down model of a military type of thing that a private company was doing. I don't know what, but, um, but no, this, I don't know. I, yeah, I think.

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  I wish that, yeah. It'd be fun if like people, like if it wasn't just defense funding that got to do the cool shit.

• 2:27:34Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you. I'm with you on that. Well, Sabrina, we're, we're wrapping up the interview. What, what are you getting into next?

• 2:27:41Speaker 03

  Um, I think I'm getting into being a shitty vibe coder and just seeing, like, getting to have fun, like, like do my physics and then on the side kind of try to look at this like bigger scale picture of the corpus and see how far I can go with a little like do it yourself type of attitude until I need help and then ask for help.

• 2:27:59Shawn Ryan?

  Love it, love it. Well, Sabrina, this is fascinating. Thank you.

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 2:28:16Shawn Ryan?

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