The musical structure of the universe

If matter is a result of vibration, what causes the vibration? Our friends at The Gray Area ask, “Is the universe behaving like an instrument?” Guest: Stephon Alexander, theoretical physicist at Brown University For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠ Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. If you listen to this show, you probably enjoy discovering new things. It is built into the DNA of the show that curiosity is its own reward and that there's always a deeper dive to do. And one place to explore some of the topics we've covered here is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 1:01Speaker 02

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• 1:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hey, it's Noam. And today on the show, we've got a conversation with a theoretical physicist who's also a world-class jazz saxophonist. But it's not like he's a scientist in his normal life and he's got a jazz side project. The music is part of his research. He thinks really deeply about the connection between music and the biggest questions he's working on. Why the universe is the way it is, how it improvises over a kind of rhythmic structure, how playing music can open up new scientific ideas he'd never considered before. This interview first aired on The Gray Area, another podcast from Vox, and it's a fascinating

• 1:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  conversation that's really made me look at the night sky differently. It's honestly made me want to listen to the universe rather than just look at it.

• 2:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Here's The Gray Area with host Sean Allen.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Today's guest is Stephane Alexander. He's a professor of physics at Brown University and the author of two terrific books: "The Jazz of Physics" and "Fear of a Black Universe." I have always loved the scientists who go out of their way to engage the public. People like Richard Feynman, and Carl Sagan, and Jane Goodall. They don't just talk to the public. They translate the science into stories. They use colorful analogies. They find the poetry in the data. Alexander is this type of scientist.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  One big reason for that, I suspect, is that he's a theoretical physicist who's also a world-class jazz musician.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  And his musical sensibilities influence both his research and the sort of language he uses to communicate it. But on top of that, for a person whose head lives in a world of abstractions, Alexander is a pragmatist who's upfront about how hard it is for physicists like him to really explore their wildest ideas, especially when the research is dependent on grants and the whims of funders. So I was excited to invite him on the show to talk about music, and physics, and how he's trying to make sense of the universe.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Stefan Alexander, welcome to the show.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  It's a real honor and pleasure to be here.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  I appreciate that. I'm really excited to have you. Something I have heard people say, people who are either in physics or adjacent to physics, certainly people who know more about physics than I do, which is anyone who knows anything about physics, but I have heard them say that physics is stuck right now as a science. Is that true? What are those people seeing? And maybe just as importantly, what are they not seeing?

• 4:47Speaker 05

  I think what people are seeing is that there's been a great tradition and pathway that has been successful. You had quantum mechanics and you had relativity, in this case, special relativity, and there was an attempt to unite them because there were physical regimes where you needed to describe, say, a quantum mechanical particle moving at relative speeds. And so that unification was successful. That became the bedrock of particle physics, like all the, what we call standard model, that theory. So that logical progression has been successful. And I think that physicists have been very successful

• 5:28Speaker 05

  over the last century. And there's no reason to expect that direction to stop. And I, you know, and I think that we must continue moving in that direction. And when I talk about fear in my book, Fear of a Black Universe, we're talking about how do we confront the legacy and the contributions that has been made? And what's the strategy for getting to new ground or maybe making new breakthroughs? I myself, I'm a researcher in theoretical physics. And honestly, there are days when I'm like, I have no idea what direction to go in.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  Tell me more.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Well, a lot of what we do in physics, especially in the profession itself, we have to go through peer review. We write papers, we submit our results to journals. It gets reviewed anonymously by our colleagues. And we also have to apply for grants. We have to apply for money to support our research, to support our students. And if you deviate from what's expected, deviate from the judgments that's made about what the right directions are, what the trends are, and what it means to do good physics. So there are judgments about, well, if you work in this field, then you actually know what you're talking about. And if you don't work in, you work in a different field, you

• 6:51Speaker 05

  don't really understand what we're doing, therefore, we should not take you seriously. Maybe if you work in a different field, you try new things out that deviates from the status quo, there might be penalties waiting for you, the same way penalties could await if you deviate from a social order, right? So part of the fear is that if you're a young person and you're trying to break new ground, there's a warning, which is wait till after you get tenure to work on those kind of problems or think about things in that new way.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Part of what makes you unique is your musical background.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  To an outsider, it might seem like there's some kind of tension between being a scientist and a jazz musician, or at least that these are very unrelated activities. But the point of your book is to say that that's not the case, right? That actually this kind of bounded thinking is part of what's holding science back.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would definitely be a different physicist without my music and a different musician without my physics. And some examples of that would be when I'm working on any kind of theory or calculation or idea, maybe I have an idea and I'm pursuing it.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  There are times where you might get so enamored about your idea, you might fall in love with the idea, get attached to it. And months would go by, but you just don't want to give up on the idea. It's important to know when to pivot and when to give up. And I find that being a jazz musician, it's all about embracing, in real time, pivoting. If you might play a wrong note and you have to make something of that, or you might find a phrase that you think sounds very good in the middle of an improvisation, but you have to move in a new direction now.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  And I think that this idea of like, that as a jazz musician, the improvisational side teaches you how to just move on to new ideas and not get too attached to ideas. But also how to commit to something. I mean, in my jazz practice, my practice as a musician has been a lifelong process of refining my technique and refining my theory and put myself out there and playing with other people and learning how to play in a band and all that stuff. And that discipline, that practice, it plays a big role also in my practice as a physicist. So they go back and forth, yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Your day job is physics, but I mean, how serious is your music career? I mean, do you tour? Are you in a band? Do you just sort of play on the side at clubs when you get a chance? I mean, how big a role does it play in your life?

• 10:06Speaker 05

  At different times of my life, it's played anywhere from very, you know, like every other night I'm playing out at some club with a quartet to...

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Maybe once a semester I'll play. So it depends. But these days, yeah, I have, I do have a band. I'm very fortunate to be playing with Will Calhoun, who's a drummer for the band Living Color. And Melvin Gibbs, a bassist, played with the Rollins Band and others, Harriet Tubman. So I've been very fortunate to play with those fellows. We have a band called God Particle.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  I love it. I love it.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  So and then, you know, we'll play a few concerts, you know, larger scale concerts a few times a year. So, yeah, it differs in time from time to time. I'll jump in a session and sit in for a few songs. And a lot of what I do these days is I'm just happy to go home and work on some new material and shed some new scales.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Didn't Einstein say that his best ideas came to him while playing his violin? Or am I just making that up?

• 11:18Speaker 05

  I do recall reading Einstein saying something like that. Yeah. I mean, one thing for sure that I have confirmed about his relationship with music and the science is that there have been times where I, if I get stuck on something or my brain is just overloaded, I just pick up my horn and I'll just start playing through some things. And I find it to be very helpful. I find that things like it or not happen in offline in terms of how I'm doing my physics, like, you know, the art of physics and exploring those connections.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  There is a question you ask in your previous book, The Jazz of Physics, that I want to put to you now, and I'm just going to quote. "If the structure of the universe is a result of a pattern of vibration, what causes the vibration?" Now, let's give everyone a second to hit their bongs. And then you got to answer, you got to answer that for me. I don't know what it means, but I love the question and I'm dying to know the answer.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  I think our most direct experience of this is music and sound.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  A musical tone is basically a vibrational pattern of airwaves that comes out of ears and, you know, our body responds to that. Obviously, there's a whole mechanism of how that happens. But a sound wave, like for example, you know, notice that you can hear sound in a swimming pool.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  So you can actually hear sound in water, right? You can hear sound obviously in air.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  And that's because the medium is vibrating, right? The medium can vibrate. Well, what is vibrating? What is vibrating actually is a fact that any type of medium like water can actually undergo a change in pressure.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  If you push against the wall, you're exerting pressure, which is a force that distributes itself over like a region of space, right? So it turns out that sound is nothing more than a pressure wave. Basically, our direct experience of vibrations and the way that I talk about it is through music. And it turns out that in the early universe, the metaphor here goes pretty close to sound. So we have this picture of a universe that's been expanding for billions of years, which meant that if you ran the clock backwards, the universe, you can imagine it contracting and being very small, hot and dense. So in the early universe, you have a

• 14:12Speaker 05

  hot, dense soup of energy. And that past universe is devoid of structures, devoid of galaxies and stars, planets and people. It's just all energy. So the question that we ask in physics is how is that past universe? How does that evolving universe come to create the structure that we see today? The stars, the galaxies, the planet, the people. And what we know from observations from satellites is that in the early universe, we see vibrational patterns of this soup of energy, okay? The soup of energy is basically, we call it radiation, okay? The universe is filled in a hot quantum soup

• 14:57Speaker 05

  of radiation and fundamental particles. And the wave-like motion actually set up sound wave. So the physics of the early universe, those vibrations are actually sound waves, very similar to the sound waves that, you know, are passing through in air. And those sound waves that are vibrating in the early universe carry energy. And that is the onset, basically. Those energetic waves are the onset of the formation of the first structures in the universe, such as stars, which eventually all cluster together, become galaxies. So it's in that sense that, you know, that metaphor with sound is, you know, I would say, pretty exact in the early universe.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  What does it mean to say, as you do,

• 15:53Speaker 04

  that the universe is like an instrument that plays itself?

• 15:56Speaker 05

  Well, the metaphor is that, you know, if you think about like an instrument, for example, like a drum,

• 16:08Speaker 05

  the surface of the drum undergoes vibration.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  And, you know, obviously, the vibration of the drum basically sends out, you know, sound waves. Similarly, the universe, in its past, which is very small, as some type of vibrating system. Then the question is, what is the hand that hits the universe? If you want to use this analogy.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  But since our definition of the universe is that there's nothing outside of the universe, whatever sets off that vibration, it's some entity that's of the universe that's doing that. And the status quo right now in our field, the field of cosmology, is that there's something called the inflaton field, right? The inflaton is the name of a field. And so for the listeners out there, what is a field? We need to understand then what a field is. And we are in direct contact with fields anytime you play with a magnet. So if you take two magnets, notice that a magnet can exert a force on another magnet without the magnets actually touching each other.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  And so the thing that's actually transmitting the force between two magnets in between at the empty space is a magnetic field. It seems to be invisible, but it acts over space, right? And so the idea is in the early universe, there's a similar type of field. It's not a magnetic field, it's an inflaton field. And this field is playing two roles, actually. One role is to make the universe expand very rapidly, right, which is the thing that's igniting the expansion of the universe. But the inflaton field is actually known as a quantum field. So there's something quantum about this inflaton field. And guess what's quantum about it? The field can vibrate in a discrete fashion.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  So you know, when you think about vibrations, right? You think about a wave that's going up and down, say an ocean wave going up and down. And you can imagine seeing all different types of wave patterns, right? But these wave patterns are more like notes. Like if I play A, B, C, D, G, these are discrete notes, right? They only occur in steps.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  And so the analogy now is that you can think about the quantum fluctuation of the infoton field as basically discrete notes of this infoton field. This is a metaphor, but actually the metaphor goes very, very, um, almost in a one-to-one correspondence. So that's the idea. I mean, that's a paradigm. Then you can say, well, okay, where does the infoton field come from? What is its nature, right? And these are all good questions that we're asking, but the real answer is that we don't know yet.

• 19:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 19:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right. One of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room, but you gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 19:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 20:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp, they've got great bass, and I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this like truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So, I don't know, if I want to head outside for a minute. It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system.

• 20:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 21:05Speaker 00

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• 21:49Speaker 00

  or how different astronomical discoveries got made, or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. Start with a simple question, and suddenly, you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The Sausage McMuffin with Egg Extra Value Meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 22:32Speaker 02

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• 22:45Speaker 04

  It's interesting to me to think about this in the context of the so-called "fine-tuning" argument, this idea that... The fundamental laws of our universe are perfectly arranged so as to make life possible. And if they were tuned like a guitar, even slightly differently, life wouldn't exist. Or to put it differently, the instrument that is the universe wouldn't play.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  First of all, is that true? And if it is, what does that tell us about the nature of the universe? That it's held together so precariously?

• 23:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it might tell us one of a few things. I mean, first of all, when we use the word fine tune, the way I like to think about this is, imagine we listen to a nice stereo system and you have, well, back in the, in the days where we had equalizers that we can manually shift up and down. They say, well, I want a little bit more treble.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  And I want a little bit more bass.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  Think about now the universe as an equalizer, meaning that how much treble, how much bass controls now some of the fundamental properties of subatomic particles or the forces, right? That's needed to make a star burn, right? Which we know if, to have life, the star has to burn at a given rate. We don't want our sun to burn out too quick, right? If our sun will just burn its fuel in one second, then good luck with any seasons here on Earth, right? So the sun has to burn at the right rate for, for billions of years to sustain life on Earth. But it turns out that actually the rate in which the sun actually does thermonuclear like

• 24:37Speaker 05

  conversion depends very sensitively on these equalizers, these parameters that dictate how strong the force may be or how weak it may be. And it does appear that when we look at our theories that describe those forces, that those knobs that dictate how the various forces are controlled are very finely tuned to certain values that don't seem to be explained very nicely by the theories themselves. So it seems that the theories themselves cannot explain the determination of those finely tuned parameters. And as a result, we're seeking new ideas out there. And there has been new ideas. One idea is called the anthropic principle, which is basically saying that the universe

• 25:22Speaker 05

  actually is finely tuned. Such that we can be around to observe it. So the anthropic principle is a statement that the laws of physics are such that if they were any different than the form that they currently have, there would be no life. And therefore, there would be no universe for life to actually observe. It's almost circular in the sense that the universe exists such that it can create life. And if there were no life, the universe would not exist.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I recall that Steven Weinberg quote, "Where else could we be except on a planet that can sustain life?"

• 26:03Speaker 05

  Right, it's, if it is a, there's something circular about it. Then you can say, well, how does it, but how does the universe do that? And so ideas out there could be that maybe there are many, many universes. We live in one of such many universes where the universe, as it replicates itself, it gets to try out, like a jazz improvisation, maybe. Think about in a jazz improvisation, you know, you get to try out a new solo every time the form of the song repeats itself. The idea is that the universe gets to try out new parameters until it hits the jackpot.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  So is this-

• 26:38Speaker 05

  And the jackpot is us.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Just to jump in there a little bit, is what you're describing there what people call the multiverse theory?

• 26:44Speaker 05

  Yes, that's what people call the multiverse theory.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Do you buy that? And if you do, you're gonna have to explain it in terms of lowly country podcaster like me can understand, because I don't get it. I mean, I guess I get, I get it conceptually, but it's, it's a little mind blowing to ponder.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, so 24 years ago, when people in my field were talking about the multiverse, I was a research scientist trying to build my career and they eventually tried to get a job. And when I, one of the leaders in the field, I went to him and said, "How do we do physics now?" I mean, because the idea of the multiverse is that you have to- Not rely on doing calculations in your theory to make a prediction. You posit that there are just many universes out there and there's some random chance. You know, let me just use that word very loosely, a random chance that the universe replicates itself.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  So to have a multiverse, you need a mechanism for the universe to basically replicate, to produce new so-called baby universes. And what, you know, one picture you might want to have in terms of an analogy is like blowing bubbles. So if you have a bubble maker or whatever and you're blowing bubbles, like you can create many bubbles. And if you think about every universe as some bubble that basically nucleates and gets created. And inside of every bubble is an environment that you can call a universe. But in different bubbles, bubbly baby universes, the universe actually takes on different values for the forces. And when those values happen to be the right values to produce life, to produce stars,

• 28:26Speaker 05

  to produce all the things that we see, that's the idea of how the multiverse can actually maybe create our universe. But when I went to this senior person, he said, well, you know, um, I mean, basically it was like tough luck. You know, this is where the field is at. And it was very difficult at that time to see how I can make a life for myself as a physicist, as a theorist. And I think that back then I was not a fan of the multiverse because I found it very difficult to do research in that field.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  But why weren't you a fan back then?

• 29:03Speaker 05

  No, but truthfully speaking, because it was aesthetically not pleasing to me. And it just goes to show you how aesthetics, right? Affect what types of research you choose to pursue. Simply put, it was aesthetically not pleasing to me.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Well, what's not aesthetically appealing to you? Is it because it's not elegant and simplistic? Is it because it, it, it, it almost seems like it takes? A picture of the universe we don't quite understand and then smuggles in like a new concept to sort of explain it all away.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  The aesthetic side of this is coming from when we usually what we see in physics is some unity, some ways in which one problem you may be trying to solve would be connected to something else. And by not considering that something else, or not seeing that other thing, you would not be able to solve the problem. So the idea here would be like, well, maybe the fact that the laws that we see seem to be fine tuned is telling us something very deep, and it's so deep that it just simply just can't be, you know, this multiverse idea. The same way, you know, the advent of quantum mechanics said something profoundly deep about the world.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  And so it's more about this ambition that we're looking for something profound and so deep that we have not been clever enough to figure it out.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  I think part of the reason I was asking it, it sort of surprised me to hear you say it wasn't aesthetically appealing to you, because I guess my intuition was that the multiverse would be the kind of theory a jazz musician in particular would find appealing. If the universe plays jazz, then it does kind of seem like the multiverse is the kind of world we might get. It feels very improvisational.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  You know, jazz for me plays a couple of different roles. One of the metaphors that I have developed and has even turned into a little music collaboration with my friend and collaborator Donald Harrison, who's the NDA Jazz Master, one of the great jazz musicians of our time, is that it's the metaphor of applying a more improvisational logic to interpreting some aspects of quantum mechanics. So that the idea that a quantum particle is not doing some probabilistic dance, but it's improvising.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  See, that's really interesting to me. I mean, I've heard you talk about Donald Harrison before. He's a very well-known jazz musician from New Orleans, actually, really close to my home. And you talk about how he wrote to you about his quantum theory of music. And he said, "Yeah, I don't play the chord changes. It's like quantum mechanics. I don't play in the changes. I play through the changes." I don't know what that means, but it sounds extremely cool. So what does that mean? And is it as cool as it sounds?

• 32:18Speaker 05

  It is cooler than it sounds. In traditional jazz repertoire, we are given a structure of a jazz song, meaning that as a song unfolds in time, there is a structure, there's a form. What I mean by that is that there's some type of rhythmic structure. And that rhythmic structure repeats itself. And then there's a harmonic structure as well. You know, so there's melody, there's harmony, and there's rhythm. And the improviser should improvise some line, musical line, musically meaningful line, as that structure unfolds. And so, one thing that we're challenged to do is what we call play within the chord changes.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  As the chords change, we're supposed to weave like a melody through those chord changes. And that's the name of the game, how one does that and the practice of doing that. And there are all these different strategies, maybe, of how to do that.

• 33:17Speaker 05

  And what Donald Harrison, who is a master in like, you know, he knows all the traditional ways of playing through those changes. But the beautiful thing about a person like Donald is that that's not enough. He is engaged in his own research, just like a scientist is, to figure out new ways, new strategies of playing a jazz solo over those changes. And... He, in his own self-study of quantum mechanics, and then, of course, in our follow-up conversations, he found a lot of interesting ideas in terms of how quantum mechanical things, like a quantum particle,

• 33:58Speaker 05

  may actually occupy a certain energy level over time and how a jazz pattern, you know, could be improvised. Yeah. And so this idea of getting from point A to point B in a musical improvisation, Donald Harrison intuited that the way a quantum particle actually moves through space to get from point A to point B, according to, say, Richard Feynman, which is that the particle must consider all possible paths as it goes from point A to point B. That an improvised line, I'm now quoting Donald, there are just infinite possibilities presented and that an improvised line, basically, is a consideration of all those, you know, it's closer to quantum physics

• 34:41Speaker 05

  than the way jazz may be traditionally taught and these strategies are traditionally taught. Another interesting insight into that is Sonny Rollins. When I interviewed Sonny Rollins in my first book, you know, the legendary sax player, he said to me, you know, I practice, I practice, I practice a lot. I've practiced a lot throughout my life. But it's very important that when I'm playing that I'm not thinking at all.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, and look, it's worth saying, the universe isn't exactly a jazz composition, but the idea that it has some kind of functionally musical quality, that's a pretty old idea. I mean, the Pythagorens thought the universe was fundamentally musical, right? I mean, even Kepler borrowed this idea from them.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  And I wish that when I was a younger person growing up, that was something I was taught at the outset, like when we think about our science and art curriculum in, say, high school or even before that. I wish that my science teachers or my music teachers were aware, I'm sure about whether they were aware of it or not. That's why I wrote this book, to make people aware of it, that the birth of Western science started simultaneously with music and physics. In this case, when I say physics, I mean astronomy. But when the Pythagorens and Pythagoras, as the legend has, came up with this idea that the cosmos, and I believe that that word was created

• 36:35Speaker 05

  to actually deal with that which has order in the universe, which in this case had to do with the planetary motions, that the reason why the planets were moving in the way they were had to do with music of the spheres. And, you know, moving 2,000, you know, years or so into the future, that Kepler relied on this Pythagorean idea of music of the spheres to actually figure out the elliptical orbits of the planets. And in fact, he wrote down musical notes first for these planets before writing those equations down, that those equations came, right, in part from a musical analogy. So that there's always been historically

• 37:19Speaker 05

  this intimate connection between music and the universe, music and astrophysics and physics.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 38:00Speaker 06

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• 39:09Speaker 04

  I'm curious if you have a favorite philosopher. It seems to me that if you're doing theoretical physics, and you're trying to understand the origins of the universe, you reach a certain point at the frontier where it almost, just out of necessity, collapses into poetry and metaphor. Because we just don't know, and we can't empirically wrap our arms around it. So I guess what I'm really asking is, where's the boundary here when you're doing big, grand theoretical physics, between science and philosophy?

• 39:53Speaker 05

  Well, I think the connecting link to that is mathematics. And like, you know, because as you know, there's a very deep connection between mathematics and philosophy.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  Like mathematical logic and, you know, very abstract things, category theory and, you know, there's a set theory. There's all this, all this, you know, way in which math and philosophy and physicists. The language you speak and the tool we use, a big part of our toolkit is mathematics. But of course, physics is not just mathematics. Physics is, you know, physics is physics and it, it, it deals with, with the physical world. So physics is also the ideas and, you know, physics is created by humans. And we'd love to think that maybe the creations and physical laws are independent of the human, of, of, of us creating them. But that's another philosophical discussion.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  But one philosopher, it's really funny, I, I did a lot, I almost majored in philosophy and I did over the years. I tried to do a lot of reading in philosophy. And one philosopher that I was influenced by was Schopenhauer.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh. He was also obsessed with music.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  Oh, that I didn't even know. I didn't, I didn't know that. Uh, it turns out Schopenhauer was influential on, on, on one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schr ö dinger. But, you know, it's funny, as I was thinking about this, I, I, I've read a lot of philosophers and I can't remember anything that I, that I read. But I just remember that, you know, those things were influential. I've also read a lot of, I mean, definitely a lot of, um, Vedic philosophy and, you know, eastern philosophy as well. I found that, and again, that's nothing new. I mean, um, you know, Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg.

• 41:37Speaker 05

  I mean, a lot of the founders of Albert Einstein, um, were, you know, very much influenced by both western and eastern philosophy.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just so interesting to me, this semi-permeable border between philosophy and science. I mean, even in your, I mean, I have your book in front of me right now. I was reading some of it.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  This morning, and you know, in the 14th chapter, I mean, you even you ask a question like, now I'm quoting, "For many years, I tried to get my mind around the question, what can exist if time ceases to exist?" That feels like a philosophy question as much or even more than a scientific question. But maybe I'm just seeing that as a philosopher and not as a scientist.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  It is a philosophy question, and I think that it's useful for physicists to see what philosophers have come up with in terms of that question, because I do find it, but at the end of the day, like, a good physicist for me is you have your skill set, you have your chops, whatever they may be. I mean, obviously, the more the merrier. And then, of course, you're trying to come up with ideas for yourself. And part of why you have students or, you know, younger people to talk to is that you hope in those conversations that something may come out where it might lead to a new idea. So we're kind of always, I think, a good physicists should fish for ideas. And that you should like cast a wide net and then consider ideas.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  And then, obviously, you get to try like a landscape of different ideas and hopefully something works. That's one strategy. I mean, you know, some people are good enough where they can just hit the jackpot and find the idea and it works. Or some people may just maybe find the answer by calculating their way to the answer. These are all different strategies, and I don't want to leave too many stones unturned in terms of finding new sources of ideas. And I think like philosophy, music, you know, I love, I mean, I love talking to laypeople about my physics and my research, because I sometimes find that they might say something that may knock me out of the way my pattern of thought, and that could be useful.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  I will say this, you know, the just talking about.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Ideas on the frontiers, you know, I, the physics of consciousness is a fascinating one for me. I mean, we seem to have no idea how this immaterial thing we call consciousness emerges from physical matter, from our brain. Hell, we still don't even have a good definition of consciousness. I mean, is this even a fruitful space for physics at the moment? Or is this just forever the domain of metaphysicians and theologians and philosophers?

• 44:22Speaker 05

  I think it is, it definitely is a deep, um, okay, you know, thinking about that you have different fields, you have different categories of fields, and with those things come academic and intellectual silos that you have to figure out how to, if you're serious about working in something like that, you know, how to collaborate with people and how to break through given those silos. I mean, that's, that's, those things, those realities are there. So for me, writing a book where I'm just, where I did talk a little bit about consciousness and fear of a black universe at the end, I gave myself permission and I was honest about that this is pure speculation and, um, and I was, but

• 45:06Speaker 05

  I would say, yes, I mean, I think at the heart of it, for me, since our experience of consciousness is that we, you know, we are housed in a physical body and we have a brain and somehow we know that different states of consciousness seems to be influenced by this, but this piece of matter between our head and our nervous system, that clearly there is some link between this internal experience we call consciousness and the matter. But the question, of course, is what is the interplay between matter and the organization of, say, and the maybe the complexity of neurons and the emergence of consciousness? I think for me, where the rubber hits the road is that

• 45:50Speaker 05

  One way into this is, well, the mystery of consciousness, right? Could be also connected to the mystery of matter. So in other words, at the level where we understand how neurons fire and neural networks and all that stuff, it could be that where consciousness is happening is not only, it's not to say it's either or, in the epiphenomenon of the complexity of neurons, right? Consciousness seems to be running on a hardware. And the hardware is not just neurons, but matter. But there are things about matter that we still don't understand. And what, so the question of, I think, where physics could come in and maybe useful is to maybe find that way of connecting the mystery of consciousness to actually the mystery of matter itself.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  I mean, the stuff about, you know, applying quantum physics to the world at our scale, you know, the world beyond just, you know, subatomic particles, that's where you get a lot of woo-woo. And the impression I've always received from serious scientists is that there's, down that road is a lot of bullshit. You know, you have a lot of new agey type people will look at some of the spookiness of quantum physics, you know, something like, you know, superposition, that particles can be in different positions in space and time simultaneously. And somehow if that were true, then, then I guess human beings could also be in multiple places at multiple times simultaneously, which

• 47:19Speaker 04

  seems to cut against our experience of reality. But I don't know, I mean, is, is, am I being too dismissive by calling all of that woo-woo? Or do you think there's some there, there?

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Look, there's definitely woo-woo out there. And usually when I hear that term, it means usually the same way, like, you know, if some people say, you're not playing jazz the right way. You're not playing within our tradition. You haven't done the work. Or you have an idea, but you didn't even realize that this has been considered before and it's wrong for these other reasons. So maybe it speaks to a certain naivety. And all of that is fine to criticize.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  Our job is to poke holes in things. So that's part of it and we and you know, I tell my students and myself that we have to embrace that. Now, having said that, I think that when I say the wave function in the universe and quantum mechanics, I'm talking about new things. I'm not talking about quantum mechanics as we know it now. But again, quantum mechanics itself and research at the foundations of quantum mechanics will require us to understand something new about quantum mechanics. And it's in that place that trying to ask whether or not there's something quantum mechanical about our entire universe is a research question.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  So I like to summarize it with a quote from Albert Einstein, which is, if we knew what we are talking about, we wouldn't call it research. But again, my my again, just like we talk about jazz and physics, like the name of the game is, you know, is that we try to get our chops together. We we're always in a continual path to refining our skill set and mastering what's currently understood. And we try our best to keep an open mind to break new ground.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  So would you say you feel good about the future of physics and where the science is going?

• 49:26Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I do feel good about it because there's some, I think, extraordinary young people that are coming on the scene that I have gotten to work with and know and and I think that they're able to do things and, you know, their minds are much faster and sharper than mine now. And I think that I'm, you know, I feel optimistic about their ability to take the baton and move forward. There is just so much that we don't understand. And I think that with all the this thing that's always surprised me is that just when we think something is impossible to solve, for some weird reason, we've been able to make advances in physics.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  So I expect that to happen, even though as I'm saying all this and I look at, you know, when I'm done talking with you, I'm gonna go back to my work with my research group. I have no clue how to, how to move forward on some days. I am definitely at a stage right now where I'm finding that I feel, I myself feel very stuck in my physics.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  And in terms of breaking new ground in, in my own research.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  Boy, that's a, do you have a few more minutes? Cause I would really love to know.

• 50:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I have time.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  I would just love to know why you feel stuck and, and, and what that means. I mean, I know, I mean, you do theoretical physics, obviously cosmology. I mean, these are, these are big, big, big questions you're wrestling with, but, but why do you feel stuck? What does that even mean?

• 51:07Speaker 05

  You know, when I first started from physics, I think I, I had this group, this idea that maybe I will, you know, find some breakthrough in the field or something like that. And now I'm like, I'm just happy to publish a paper and make a tiny little contribution to a tiny little problem. But you know, one of my mentors, Leon Cooper, always encouraged me, I mean, Leon won a Nobel Prize. He always encouraged me to think big and to never be afraid of asking the biggest questions. And you know, I have tried to do that.

• 51:39Speaker 05

  So there's a, you know, I think that ambition of trying to ask the biggest questions, sometimes I don't even know what question to ask. But that's part of the process and that's where I'm at now.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  And also I think part of it is to find jobs for your students and find ways where they themselves can have careers. And there's sometimes I put a lot of pressure on myself of like, I need to find things that they can work on or where they can actually,

• 52:07Speaker 05

  you know, have a career or get a job or get a postdoc, right? So those, those things come into play as well. And it, and also if I actually shake things up too much or I, you know, I do things that go too much against the grain, then that could actually jeopardize my students from actually getting a job because they'll say, oh, he's a student of, of this guy who is like doing all these things that we don't think should be done. So there's some of that going on as well, too.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Well, whatever you do, don't stop playing jazz.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Keep doing that. Keep making music.

• 52:41Speaker 05

  Well, of course, you know, the big fantasy is that in the middle of a jazz solo, the idea comes to me. But that's more of a pipe dream, you know, because I'll get to write a third book.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  I love it. You know what? I'm gonna moonwalk out of here on that note. There's just so much here and I could barely scratch the surface. So, I will say, once again, the title of the book is Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics. Stephane Alexander, this was a genuine pleasure. Thank you.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  All right, that was fun. A little jazz, a little physics. What else could you ask for?

• 53:45Speaker 04

  We don't usually use so much music in our episodes, but it felt right this time. Every song but one came from Stephane's most recent album, Spontaneous Fruit. There's also one track from his EP, True to Self. We'll put those links in our show notes.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  As always, we want to know what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com. I read those emails, keep them coming. And if you can't do that, rate, review, subscribe. All that stuff really helps. This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. And a special thanks to Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers.

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• 55:09Speaker 02

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