Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Hello, it's Eric. I wanted to talk about the death and the afterlife of the blues. Now, the difficulty in talking about the blues is that people do not have a common picture of what I mean.
Some will hear in the phrase the blues a reference to mood. Others will associate it with the music that fits a depressed state of mind. And musicians will hear it as a reference to a class of structured music analogous to sonata form in Western classical music or the ritualized three-part structure of a classical Indian concert. Well, permit me to pretend that you were where I was as a young man coming of age, which is that I knew nothing about it.
All I knew was that I loved rock and roll, and that within rock there were certain songs more than others that I would listen to over and over again. And oddly, I would notice several names recurring on the song credits. For example, W. Dixon. Who the hell was W. Dixon? And the other name that came up repeatedly clearly sounded like a patrician blue-blood senator. McKinley Morganfield. There were others, of course, as well. Ellis McDaniel sounded Scottish to me as a name, but he wrote like he was straight out of Texarkana.
This was confusing. All these rock bands knew about these guys and played their songs, but these names weren't listed on any performances. So who were these people and why did I love everything that they did? I asked around in my circle of family and friends and no one had an answer or even thought the question particularly interesting. So one day, in the days before the internet, I went to the Tower Records store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, near where we lived, and determined that I would screw up my courage to ask.
Now I say that for the benefit of those of you who may not regularly visit record stores or musical instrument shops because you may not understand who works behind the counter and on the floor. Music is a weird sector of the economy because it behaves somewhat like a legal drug which some people can handle while others cannot. And as a result, many musicians of near infinite ability exist who still cannot earn much of a living doing what they love most, which is playing music. Thus, almost everyone working in any area that touches music is usually overqualified by orders of magnitude.
and Tower Records on Sunset was effectively a university-level music and folklore department, with shaggy professors manning the cash registers on the floor. I would have my parents drop me off there just to listen to the conversations at their classical music annex across the street from their larger popular music store. But on this one particular day, I got up the courage to go to the general information desk and ask my question. May I help you, young man, the bearded gentleman said to me with what sounded like it might have been a faint snort of contempt.
"'Yes, sir. Who is W. Dixon?' I said meekly. "'Never heard of him. Sorry. Next!' "'Wait!' I exclaimed desperately. "'I'm not done with my questions.' "'Go on, then,' the bearded man said. "'Who is McKinley Morganfield?' Suddenly the man's face brightened. "'You mean Muddy Waters?' "'No,' I protested. "'It's not a body of water or a song. "'It's a person, a songwriter.' The man called over some associates to laugh over the situation I was creating."
this young man is trying to discover the blues and he has never even heard of muddy waters the man said i was now panicking as this was fast becoming an embarrassing scene with lots of grown men laughing at me and my questions let's try my last question instead who is ellis mcdaniel all the men laughed and said the same words simultaneously bo diddley
Then the bearded man said, oh, and that mysterious W. Dixon you asked about is going to be a bass player out of Chicago named Willie Dixon. Then you know what I'm talking about. So why are you all laughing at me, I asked. Because your life is about to change today and you don't even know it or just how much, said the man. How can you know that, I demanded. Well, you'll see, said he. The bearded man then got up and walked me over to what was not much more than a single bin or two in the huge store labeled Blues off to the side of the jazz section.
As he left, I started going through the records and started seeing all of the song titles that I had loved, only they were no longer being performed by the Rolling Stones or the Doors. And what was more, almost all of the musicians were black, but often in the same configurations as white rock groups, electric guitar and bass, keyboards and drums, for example. Sure enough, there was a singer called Muddy Waters, a guitarist named Bo Diddley, and a world of people I'd never heard of.
I decided to take a risk and bought two of the cheapest of these mysterious records, a collection of B.B. King songs, and a double album of John Lee Hooker. I got the records home, and, feeling humiliated, I determined never to go back to that store again. I opened the shrink wrap and took the B.B. King record out of the paper sleeve first, and I remember watching the stylus drop down to the vinyl, and I waited nervously, listening to the scratches over a tiny eternity for whatever was to come next.
The song started and my life changed in under 10 seconds. I felt like I was being born, so I'm not going to sugarcoat this. Put on the song, You Upset Me Baby, and you'll find that it begins with a tasty, upbeat guitar that introduces the mood. I felt like I wanted to dance immediately. I didn't feel at all depressed. It made no sense. Then I heard B.B. King's voice for the first time.
The lyrics are the description, without apology I might add, of a woman who is 36 in the bust, 28 in the waist, 44 in the hips, she got real crazy legs.
Well, growing up in a progressive household, I was mortified and excited all at the same time as I dove for the volume knob to turn it down. What was I listening to? And wasn't that like eight inches larger down below than what I was taught were the fabled perfect measurements? And this B.B. King, he wasn't embarrassed at all. I mean, he was literally shouting her measurements to the world like he expected she would find that flattering rather than feeling objectified or needing to diet. But it wasn't the lyrics that got me.
It was that I had swum upstream and discovered the distilled essence of rock and roll without knowing that there was anything there to discover. If this was a scene from Kung Fu Panda, I would be stumbling upon the pool of sacred tears where it all began. I liked this music so much more than rock and roll that I couldn't get enough of the sound. This was audio heroin to me. I went to the piano my family had downstairs and tried to figure out the notes, but they didn't fit the do-re-mi skills I'd once learned in six months of failed piano lessons.
Well, what I soon learned was that there was a musical art form called the blues that was more dance music than mope fest. Oddly, it wasn't well understood by anyone I seemed to know, and it was based on two main secrets. It is perhaps easiest to say what they are while sitting at the piano. The first secret is that the left hand in the bass plays a repeating 12-bar cycle of three chords in a particular sequence known as the blues progression.
The other secret is that the right hand improvises using a scale known as the blues scale that is neither major nor minor and that cannot even fit onto the white keys alone in any key. This was literally music to my ears. Many of these blues musicians, like me, were unable to read music. A good number of them were even blind. Yet they had developed a mature art form like haiku that used a largely rigid formula to produce work of infinite variety and emotion.
Why was I never told that this existed? Why was this never even offered to me as a possible alternative to classical music? The short and perfect answer is race. The blues, even more than jazz, really is black music, which black Americans had largely outgrown by the 1960s, if we are honest, just as some white musicians were learning how to master it.
There is a famous song by Muddy Waters about what he calls the story that's quote, never been told, close quote, where the title and main line of the song is, the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.
The reason for my confusion is that there's often no real difference between rock and roll and the blues. You can look on YouTube for Keith Richards showing how the Stone song Satisfaction is actually a disguised country blues hidden in plain sight. Or you can hear Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin tell the audience that a whole lot of love really derives from Willie Dixon's You Need Love.
And if we are honest, there is a certain financial premium to be earned by white musicians for simply taking the work of black blues musicians and repackaging it for white audiences as rock and roll before we even get to what they have legitimately added as true innovation in a collaborative process. It is also true that it represents different cultural norms. I remember my grandfather, who was not a bigoted man, telling me that he personally disliked this music and that I was bending guitar notes and trying to sing with melisma and wide vibrato.
why not listen to a schubert song cycle instead he asked to him and others i was clearly going in an unexpected and disappointing direction away from the formal regimented western classical music that my parents and grandparents held up as the gold standard yet exactly what my grandfather detested was what i loved most
The warmth, the excitement, the improvisational brilliance. By the time I snuck out of the house at 15 to see Ray Charles at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with my friend Ed Tuttle, I could see that this was really another world. The audience was part of the show, or at least that was true when black musicians played before black audiences. People would stand up in their seats and shout at the stage or dance in the aisles. And the performers would talk back, sometimes in words and sometimes with their instruments.
When I went to see B.B. King years later in Boston in two back-to-back concerts over two nights, the first one was in a black area of town and it was joyous and raucous. The next night's event, however, was like looking at an autopsy of the previous evening by comparison. The white concert hall audience waited respectfully until the end of every song to clap vigorously as if they were seated at a symphony. I didn't want to be black necessarily, but I wanted to be in with black America.
If blues was developed largely around call and response, the white audience simply did not understand how to give back to the musicians and the music always suffered as a result. So what is the blues and why does it matter? Well, except for a moment that if American classical music means anything at all, then we are really talking about the art form known as jazz. Blues is, in a certain sense, an ancestor to jazz as well as rock and roll and R&B with the so-called talking blues a forerunner of hip-hop and rap.
Thus, despite black audiences largely turning away from the blues as an art form, it can't really ever die because it is the foundation for so much of the American contribution to world music. Further, it is a place for musicians to meet. When two musicians who do not know each other or their respective styles want to play together for the first time, in my experience they are most likely to try to play a 12-bar blues the way strangers would shake hands and introduce themselves.
It is also a superpower waiting to be discovered in the life of everyone who dreams of playing music. Because it is based on just two musical rules, the initial overhead for entering the world of blues musicianship is quite a bit lower than other forms, while the limits of virtuosic elaboration within the idiom have never been found and tested even by the likes of Art Tatum or Jimi Hendrix. If you think you can't play music at all, but you have two strong working arms, start with a guitar and a slide like a coffee mug and a chart of the 12-bar blues cycle.
You can probably play your first blues song within 15 minutes with a little bit of instruction from a friend who is knowledgeable. Now you may be guessing that there is a payload to this story, and there is. I fell deeply in love with black America completely by accident before I was 14.
it was from afar at first having few black friends but love turns to progressive understanding over decades and infatuation turns to deep appreciation of gifts quirks and flaws at this point i don't even have a strong sense of distance and objectivity as it is all through my life by now one of the things i found was that i had developed a very different picture of black americans than almost anyone i knew as a result
and central to that picture was that black Americans took merit and meritocracy as seriously and definitionally as any group I ever met with the possible exception of Soviet Russians. As a folklore minor at the University of Pennsylvania, I advanced a thesis there that I want to share with you all, and that is this: We non-blacks are missing the history and role of merit and particularly genius in black culture.
Having been fenced out of white institutions by discrimination, and having been stripped of their heritage by slave owners who wished to erase their past, black Americans came up with an ingenious solution to rebuild their identity in the space of the hundred years since slavery. They would use open head-to-head high-stakes competitions in, well, just about everything. In the schoolyard, they called it the Dozens, and it was a game of insult played for keeps.
At open mic night, they called it head-cutting competitions to see who could blow the other clear off the stage. When it came to the spoken word, they would have pitted Robert Frost against T.S. Eliot had they both been black in a poetry slam. Regular chess often took too long, so they hustled at blitz-style chess in public parks against all comers. In comedy, competitive roasting and the blow-torching of hecklers reign supreme. And in hip-hop, the concept of a rap battle is well known to all.
And this is why I don't really get the race and IQ discussion. Because this is a genius-based culture whose principal gift, after all, lies in out-thinking the rival with creative generative solutions under maximal pressure that will never be found on a multiple choice test. This is exactly how Eminem could win at rap battling because fairness in judging is how blacks maintained an air of superiority over whites who needed to cheat by exclusion.
I have threatened for years to come up with an IQ substitute test that favored blacks based on my study of black history. It would involve multiple people competing directly against each other head-to-head in real time to solve open-ended analytic problems under maximal pressure where no answer was known to begin with to those making up the test.
But despite my reverence for black genius, I also came to see flaws and faults as one does in any deep cross-cultural relationship of sufficient length and depth. For example, where I learned to see the white society to which I belonged as being systemically violent in ways that I had never understood or imagined, the initial unparalleled warmth of black society that mirrored my Jewish upbringing eventually peeled back to reveal a comfort with the idiosyncratic horror of Louisiana Red's sweet blood call that
It made me physically sick the first time I heard both men and women clapping and joking about what seemed like misogynistic madness beyond any murder ballad I had ever heard. Now, what am I to do with all of this?
On the one hand, I cannot pretend that I would even recognize the U.S. without the black contribution. If there were a crime of cultural appropriation, I would only be let off the hook for attempting the crime without succeeding. That is how badly I wanted to understand and learn from Art Tatum, Richard Pryor, Harry Belafonte, the Nicholas Brothers, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Eric Lewis, Stanley Jordan, Dick Gregory, and my other heroes.
But we outside the black community, in our modeling guilt and performative shame, are now in the process of losing the ability to meet our own amazing subculture of black America as equals. Think about it. We fear, we idolize, we covet, we desire, we condescend, and we steal from them. We feel as if we have no right to mean our own people as intimates due to the fear of offense. And there is no true love where we cannot share what it is that we see and pass through the valley of offense to deeper understanding.
This alienation is in fact the origin of the stock character from cinema of the Magic Negro, possessed of otherworldly wisdom, but who was always a supporting character as drawn propelling the Caucasian narrative ever forward. And quite honestly, I see in our shame that we don't have enough of the deep friendships between blacks and whites where we might actually come to love each other from a position of intimacy and knowledge, rather than an oscillation between idolization and demonization. So I will leave you with this thought.
Those of us in white America who believe most in our black brothers and sisters are not going in for this groveling performative bullshit. We have already many times stood with our friends in shock when the cab which slowed to pick us up then sped off when it saw who we were with. And I can assure you that we were never called something so genteel and euphemistic as N-word loving race traitors as we were physically bullied in school.
Just as my black colleagues can mostly understand antisemitism, I can get most of anti-black prejudice too. Sure, maybe not the whole thing, but this pretend divide has to end. What is the purpose of the heights of black oratorical skill if not to make us understand each other better? And speaking directly to black listeners, we are equals and very lucky to have each other. I am so very glad you are here and I wouldn't be who I am without your gifts.
Forgive me, but no true friend of mine has ever asked me to wear a hair shirt for my connection to racial crimes of slavery committed by people who vaguely looked like me decades before any of my family ever came to this country. I will support you and do believe that you have triumphed over the humiliation of oppression.
but don't ask me for reparations to abolish the police to repeat lines that you feed me to kneel when you instruct or to accept lower standards of empathy between people because of the uniqueness of your pain i am not going to simply take your word for it that no white person fears the police nor am i going to ignore statistics that in turns both confirm and cast out on so-called lived experience daniel shaver was white and died on camera in an arizona hotel room be honest had he been black you would know that racism was behind the deed
And yet because he was white, we know that it played no role. The true solution to race problems isn't competing to demonstrate just how guilty we are. It is true love and friendship and critique and offense and fumbling in the dark until we get it right. We Jews do have a problem with sexual predation. Our Muslim brothers have had problems with terror. Blacks have problems with violent crime. And if you have true friends who are any of these, you discuss these things in an arena of trust.
As a black friend of mine once said, I cross the street when a big guy with a do-rag comes towards me. I'm not sure why I feel just a bit weird that you do it too. But above all, thank you for immeasurably enriching my life. It will be an honor to try to help your children do for science and technology what you have already done for culture, letters, music, comedy, and national character. This country of ours isn't perfect, but it's not 1840 anymore, and no group of us has the right to scuttle this beautiful ship we share called America.
Let's reform prisons and law enforcement like grownups. I'm saying this because I believe in us as intimates and not because I'm trying to hold on to an insulating layer that others built into the system. I'll be back after a few brief words from our sponsor to introduce today's guest.
The nutritionists at returning sponsor Athletic Greens have formulated a powder, which when I mix with water turns into a fulfilling green juice drink that satisfies most of my nutritional needs every day. Oddly, I've even been successful in using Athletic Greens to help me lose weight during the COVID epidemic. That's because I know that it's an all-in-one health drink packed with 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients that include prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, superfoods, and more.
So I know I'm getting a fairly complete nutritional offering in a drink that I find extremely fulfilling. So whether you're taking steps towards a healthier lifestyle or you're an athlete pushing for better performance, Athletic Greens can take the guesswork out of everyday good health at athleticgreens.com slash portal.
Why not just try it? Jump over to athleticgreens.com slash portal and claim our special offer today. That's 20 free travel packs valued at $79 with your first purchase. That's athleticgreens.com slash portal. Returning sponsor, Bowlin Branch, helped me to solve one of life's little mysteries. At some point, I noted that in certain people's houses or in certain hotels, I get a great night's sleep. But otherwise, I get merely a modest night's sleep.
It never occurred to me that my sheets actually determined something of the quality of sleep that I get every night. With Bowling Branch, they make some of the best sheets anywhere, and they're available only online, trying to cut out the department store, which may add a markup that would discourage you out of the luxury bedding market.
By keeping their quality extremely high and their prices very low, I've been able to switch over completely to Bolan Branch. And now you can too, because Bolan Branch is offering their 30-day guarantee. If you don't absolutely love your new sheets, you can return them for a full refund.
Remember, you'll only find Bolan Branch sheets online at bolanbranch.com. It's spelled B-O-L-L-N-B-R-A-N-C-H-D-O-T-C-O-M. If now's the time to make such a purchase, use code PORTAL and get $50 off your first set of sheets. Again, shipping is fast and free. Restrictions may apply, so see bolanbranch.com for details using code PORTAL. I'm releasing this episode, recorded before the corona epidemic, to honor my friend, the Trinidadian jazz saxophonist, Stefan Alexander.
Now, Steph is a multi-talented musician who has risen from a modest upbringing and has, most famously, played alongside the great Ornette Coleman. So every time Steph humors me by inviting me to jam with him or asking me to come to see him play a date in a club, I feel highly honored to get to see how a great mind like his thinks about jazz when we drink and talk afterward. I will admit that sometimes there is a lot of drinking, and the discussions and arguments can rage into the small hours of the morning, best visited by the livers and brains of younger men.
But I'm not honoring Steph for his horn playing here, because Steph has an unusual side gig where he is professor of theoretical physics at Brown University, working simultaneously in particle theory, quantum gravity, and cosmology. In addition, he's also the author of the book The Jazz of Physics, which connects his two major passions. Not bad for the immigrant son of a cab driver from the Bronx, right? Well, let's put it this way. The man is phenomenal, and hanging with Steph is a great way to humble the ego.
So in addition to thinking about Chern-Simons cosmology, harmolotic theory, and quantum foundations, Steph has just become the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
I'm not quite sure how he does it all, but I think that this tenure could potentially be a big deal if all goes well, as we selfishly stand a lot to gain by tapping this most overlooked of pools of talent. And I wanted to hold this back until he had assumed office, as I think that as a visionary, he may have a dramatic effect on attracting top young black students into theoretical physics, as he is a terrific pedagogue and leader. Where others have had difficulty in the past with this, I think that Stefan may yet succeed.
dare to dream. In part, that is because when we met, I helped talk Steph into staying in physics when I saw him being nudged out of the field subtly by virtue of his intellectually sui generis nature.
This all came about because our mutual friend, Lise Mullen, asked me to assess whether Stefan would be happier outside the field at the time. I met with Stefan in New York City and was instantly so impressed by his originality while talking shop that I made an odd decision which frankly surprised me. I reasoned that Stef might actually be psychologically better off leaving physics at the time, but that the field would actually be worse off for having him leave due to his originality.
So I tried to convince him to stay in and ride it out. Thankfully he did and everything resolved beautifully just as I'd hoped. So let me say a few things about what you're about to hear.
You are going to hear two friends who have had a million conversations about tensor analysis, romance, bebop, and academics. And quite honestly, when it's late, we drink. So in the interest of authenticity, I wanted to do that only with the microphones on. So it is a bit unruly in places. If you want perfectly polished podcasting, might I suggest something highly produced from the New York Times offering, perhaps? But in my defense, let me tell you what you may get here that you won't get elsewhere.
Right now, as this podcast is being released, the United States as a nation is trying to talk about race in the wake of the ostensible killing and murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police before onlookers in broad daylight. And the nation is trying to figure out the new rules about how to think and talk about race.
These new rules, of course, assume that if we just follow the tortured standards of conversation coming from critical race theory properly and feel the proper amount of guilt and shame that we can end the nightmare of racism. Well, allow me to offer a very different perspective, almost an opposite one, in fact. There is also the simple idea of appreciating our differences and just loving our way through it.
With acquaintances, perhaps, having many rules to ensure respect for our differences and traumas is an approach one can take. But honestly, it leads to distancing where the rules actually ensure that you never get beyond a certain level of honesty. Thus, the conversation can ultimately be guaranteed to stagnate. And just like the tortoise and the hare, the rabbit that is critical race theory may get off to a good start, but it is the plodding tortoise of real appreciation and intimacy that gets you to the finish line.
Here, you are listening to a progressively lubricated conversation with two people who have so much trust in each other that we often don't say, do, or think the right thing at all, at least according to the scolds. Well, screw them. I think that this way is much more powerful. This was, after all, the original dream, and you'll notice that there are long stretches in the conversation that have very little to do with race at all.
Because honestly, in our relationship, it's usually a spice. And just as I wouldn't serve you paprika as a main course, identity isn't the main issue here. It's neutrinos, friendship, and tritone substitutions. But towards the end of this episode, we talk about some things frontally that are nearly impossible to discuss if you don't really know, love, and trust your interlocutor.
I am, for example, much more positive about inclusion and diversity as standalone ideas than I am about the artificial nature of the coercive diversity and inclusion juggernaut with its focus on guilt, equality of outcome, and shame. An identity can be talked about across the divide and then shoved to the side when it doesn't belong at the heart of the conversation. At one point, for example, we talk about how we know that we are seen and resented by others who presume we are getting special treatment for irrelevant characteristics.
This is a major downside of succeeding through identity politics. No one ever really accepts that your work is what brought you to the big dance, and they often won't tell you to your face. That unfair cloud of suspicion is an important issue that is very difficult to discuss if you are constantly talking about abolishing the police, reparations, and black and brown bodies, and weirdly hypnotic ritualized speech.
you are inflicting a cost on people of extraordinary ability who happen to be brown or black. And I can assure you, having worked with Stefan on numerous ideas, that Steph is the real deal and that the world of black physicists could be poised for a sea change should all go well. I'm really looking forward to having Steph call on me whenever he needs to open the field wide up in the best possible way.
So Mazel Tov, Steph. And to all you out there, I hope you will enjoy this unique mind as much as I do in the conversation ahead. We will be back with my uninterrupted conversation with Professor Stefan Alexander after some brief messages from our sponsors. Long-term listeners to the portal will know that I frequently analogize loyal sponsor Skillshare to being the university that you carry around in your pocket.
But in truth, I think that's only part of the story. Because while like a university, Skillshare does maintain an extensive catalog of very highly curated courses, in Skillshare's case, they're taught over the web through short instructional videos by master pedagogues.
But at Skillshare's case, unlike at a university, many of the courses are actually designed to have an immediate impact in your life. For example, many of you ask me, why don't we have merch at the portal? Well, I found a great class called Design Great Stuff, How to Make Merch with Draplin, taught by Aaron Draplin, the designer and founder of the Draplin Design Company. Perfect.
So if you're ready to explore your creativity, you can now get two months free of premium membership at Skillshare.com slash portal. That's two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free. You can get started and join today by heading over to Skillshare.com slash portal to get two free months of unlimited access to thousands of classes at Skillshare.com slash portal.
The situation was dire. I, the world's foremost mushroom hater, had become addicted to returning sponsor Four Sigmatic's mushroom coffee, which clears my head and tastes like my regular coffee.
but I'd gone through my entire stash and could not call for help due to optics. Then, just like in Radar Love by Golden Earring, a package appeared filled with mushroom products that I crave but cannot ask for. A huge thank you to the crazy mushroom beverage wizards who make their tea, latte, coffee, and cocoa with the healthy mushrooms that I need, but without altering the beverage taste that I already love. Okay, you've probably heard me talking about this weird mushroom beverage thing long enough that you may be ready to raise your game. If so, I want you to take the next two big steps with me.
First, I want you to go into a room completely alone, and I want you to look into a mirror and say the magic words that I believe will set you free. I am mushroom curious. And then, before the feeling dissipates, go to foursigmatic.com slash portal or use discount code portal at checkout to get 15% off your Four Sigmatic purchase.
That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash portal or use discount code portal at checkout to get 15% off your delicious mushroom beverages. That's foursigmatic.com slash portal. Good luck. Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I am here tonight with my old friend, Stefan Alexander. Stefan, welcome to the portal, sir.
It's good to be in the portal. It's good to be with you. Now, you and I have been friends for a few moons now. 11 years. Is that right? Maybe a little bit more. No, more, more. A little more. Maybe 13 years. Yeah, 13 years. That's right. And we have been through some weird and interesting times. But I want to introduce you to our audience slowly. One thing that I've been fascinated about
uh binary relationship is that i get to talk music theory and jazz history with you as an accomplished saxophonist now how do you end up playing for ornette coleman oh that's a good question well first of all i want to um say that i still consider myself just to be a student of the saxophone i'll be a student of that instrument for the rest of my life
But I'll take your compliment. Okay. It's hard to tell. I mean, I've seen you in jazz clubs and really enjoyed the fact that you can hang with almost anybody. And it's always inspiring when I get a chance to hear you play. Thank you, sir. I did play at your birthday once. Oh, that was a night? That was nice. But I was very intimidated because that wasn't... Joshua Bell was there as well? Well, yeah. It was a random birthday. It was a random birthday. And I tried to just...
buy some kebabs and then like Nassim Taleb showed up, Joshua Bell showed up and then Sean Lennon showed up. Sean Lennon brought a piano. He brought us one. And he left it. Like I said, bring an instrument. So mostly people usually bring a guitar or harmonica. He brought a piano and just left the piano.
Yeah, that was cool because that was the first time I met him. And after your birthday, we went back to his place and I jammed with him and his bandmates at his place in the village. That was pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, Sean's an amazing- That was a nice birthday present. That was very cool. And then Nels Klein of Wilco showed up. How long ago was that? That was right before he left New York, wasn't it? I'm going to say this is about seven years ago. Okay. That was a very random birthday party. And Ed was there? Yeah.
Ed Frankel. Ed Frankel was there. Esther Perel. TJ. TJ was there. TJ, the book publisher. So, yeah. I mean, we really had a great crew. It was a great crew. We miss you. Oh, well, thanks. Come back out east, man. I love New York. I will. Okay. But all right. So, I mean, I've always been sort of in awe of Ornette in part not just because of his being a great musician, but because he actually came out with this –
really deep, weird, mysterious theory of harmilotics. - Yes. - And among the jazz cats that I know who really know their stuff, it's very polarizing, very controversial still. - Yes. - What was it, what was going on with Ornette in late stage jazz, do you think, that was really different? And how did it take the hand off from earlier grades?
Yeah, and I think that comes back to my introduction to Arnett. I think it happened maybe, I would say, about 19 years ago. 19 years ago, at that time, I was a postdoc in London, and I would come out to Columbia to hang out with Brian Green and his crew. And I got a phone call
from a friend of mine, Jaron Lanier. Jaron. Developer of virtual reality, maybe the innovator there and some sort of incredibly mysterious human being. He is one of the, you know, like you, one of the more talented and intelligent human beings I've met, even though there were times in the past where I'm like,
what the heck is he saying? And then of course, like it's one of these things, 10 years later, like, oh, that's what he's saying. I will tell my Jaron linear story when you're done with yours. Okay. As long as I get to tell. Yeah. You first. So, so Jaron calls me up and he goes, he goes, Steph, that's what my friends call me, right? There's somebody I want you to meet. I'm going to go hang out with him right now. And I'm like, I just can't like get up, you know, from what I'm doing. He goes, I'm just going to go jump in a taxi right now and go see Ornette.
I said, "Which Ornette? Ornette Coleman?" He goes, "Yeah, Ornette." I said, "Where are you at?" So he said, "Just meet me at this address, somewhere midtown." And we get there, go upstairs into some private place, we know where Ornette lives, this beautiful place. And as I walk in there, it's very clear that he and Jaron are extremely close.
Jaron introduces me to Ornette and that was that, that was it. I mean, so the first thing he asked me was, what are you thinking about? What are you thinking about? In this kind of Ornette way, what are you thinking about? You know, this kind of thing, right? I said, at that time I was actually working on vortices, right? You know, line-like regions of trap energy because I was working on a model of the early universe that made use of vortices, right?
And so I told him that. I said, I'm working on vortices. And he pulls out a piece of napkin and says, and we're right by the, he said, show me. So then I start showing him the vortices and he is way into it. And then after I explained to him the physics and a little bit of the math, you know, without getting too much into the math, he goes, I play the vortex. Then I said to myself, wait a minute, this, so then we started talking about
The idea of playing shapes. This was really a game changer for me as a saxophonist because, I mean, a big part, especially when you're trying to learn how to improvise within the jazz tradition, within the bebop tradition, there's all, you know, sometimes you don't know your head from your feet. It's hard to find a practice regime or what the important thing is. It seems infinite.
Unless you have a good teacher or, you know, and I certainly didn't have that. I, for the most part, was self-taught, but I was fortunate to have teachers later on, including Ornette. So we just, you know, then he pulled out his saxophone. He had his white saxophone and he goes, play it.
And then, of course, I was freaked out. So by vortex, we mean some sort of toroidal donut-like shape? Yeah, like water that's flowing down a sink. That sort of helical motion, but you make the eye of a storm. It's a very common object, but as you probably know it as the fundamental group. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
maps from s1 to s1 so in other words a fundamental group is like a lasso that you're trying to pull to the point where there's no lasso at all by getting it to slip all the way down right except for that except for that that point which ends up becoming like you know a string um look if it could get trapped sometimes it gets trapped like you can't pull the lasso closed because it gets caught on something like an inner tube that's right yeah that's exactly what it is right right and um
these solutions are quite commonplace, actually in the standard model. I guess we'll talk a little bit about that later on. But the point is, Onet was all into this, right? That's the point. What I found amazing about him was
his mind was so wide open and that he was able to engulf any information I was giving him. He was genuinely interested in it. And it wasn't BS. I mean, I understood what he meant when he said that he was playing the vortex because it is basically you're compromising your life
energy, right? You have a situation where energy gets trapped and it's a compromise between, you know, energy to basically, you know, there's this thing we call gradient energy, right? And so the compromise basically is to form this string. And this idea of trapping energy in some spiral-like way, that's the shape. So this idea, that's right. So this will be edited.
No, let's just keep going, man. It doesn't look, first of all, the, to let the folks at home know we're doing this after you've been lecturing, uh, Chapman university for a little while. And we're doing this really comfortable after hours with a bottle of red wine. We've got another one if we, if we get that far through it. So let's just do this as friends in front of the people. Okay. Um, yeah. Yeah.
So that's right. So the thing about this vortex was in fact, this sort of spiral like structure. Yeah. And I actually deliberately told him that I was working on the vortex because I actually sensed actually by listening to his, his solos that there was, you can hear spiral like motion in the tones and the notes themselves. His playing is, can be sometimes very angular and,
you know, Ornette's plane. That's what makes it so hip. And, you know, a friend of mine, Diego Cortez, once told me that he always felt that Ornette played shapes. So I also believe that too. And by telling him about these very interesting geometric things that we find commonplace in physics and quantum field theory, it was just my way of...
have you may be basically using on it as a soundboard right and seeing how he responded to that and then he said he after that said um i'm going to show you something and he took out the same piece of napkin and wrote a couple of notes me and goes that's for you um um this these see the sequence of notes will allow and will help you play through any chord change all right so um
But I'm not really allowed to tell anybody. I mean, it's like your mantra. It's been given to you by a guru, and now it's yours and yours alone. Basically. That's cool. I did tell it to one other person. Uh-oh. Well, don't tell me who you told it to, because I don't want to summon the demons from the vacuum. So, yeah, I mean, I guess the one famous circle inside of music is the circle of fifths, which if we're technical about it,
In even temperament, it's a circle. But in just temperament or Pythagorean temperament, it's actually a spiral. Yes. Because it doesn't really close. So in a weird way, that's actually a candidate vortex. And then there are all of these weird things you can do when you have certain tones that appear to be infinitely rising because you're always putting...
subsonic note on the bottom and you're letting something go out the top of the frequency spectrum. And so it's always a chord and you're not noticing that you're removing a note at the top and putting one at the bottom. So the appearance that the tone is always rising, which we've been talking about Penrose stairs, you can easily imagine that we could construct some sort of mathematical figure that would realize something of this
toroidal or vertical, I don't know what you want to call it. There's another interesting question, which is that Mark Cutts had this paper called Can You Hear the Shape of a Drum? And the idea was that the harmonics that determine a two-dimensional membrane's vibrational modes might be unique enough
to detect what the shape of the drum is just by listening to what the harmonic sequence is for that particular two-dimensional memory. So you think about any kind of crazy shape of a weird drum that nobody's ever made. Most drums are circular. So if you came up with a weird drum, it would have some crazy harmonic pattern. And then you could ask, can I guess what the shape of the drum is by listening to the sequence of vibrational modes?
that turned out not to be true. That there were different drums that had the same exact harmonic patterns. Oh, that's really cool. Isn't that cool? So, um...
- So have people actually made instruments of this sort? Like weird looking drums? - You know, I don't know. The really cool one, and I got very interested in this, is that I tried to figure out what made these hand pans that came out of Switzerland. So first of all, you come from Trinidad and Tobago. - Trinidad and Tobago, that's correct. - Right, okay. - I was just there. - You were just there.
Okay, so in Trinidad and Tobago, they figured out how to beat the crap out of a steel drum. That's where it was invented. And to come up with the steel, I mean, oil drums, rather. That's right. And those became the steel drum. Now, those always sound very kind of distinctive because they're muddy.
And that mud. There's also sympathetic vibrations. Sympathetic vibrations. That mud is some of the charm. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't have the same harmonic sequence of a one-dimensional vibrating medium like a string or like an air column like you'd have in a flute. The Swiss, being those kind of uptight anal perfectionists that they are, said, what if we went to the Caribbean and took that idea but we flung
got really precise about it and machined the first few harmonics to behave as if they were a one-dimensional medium.
So now you've got a two-dimensional object, like the Gamelan in Indonesia. Each village's Gamelan is so distinctive that you can tell which village you're in. Why? Because two-dimensional metalophones have different properties. But the Swiss said, no, no, no, we can make at least the leading part of the series behave. We will get it to submit to our will. And that's why these handpans called hang drums, I guess I shouldn't call it hang drum, but people do,
have this luminous quality because you've never heard a metallophone that's been that carefully machined. - Yes. Now, there is a, the person that was responsible for the modern tuning of the steel drums, his name is Elie Manette. And he, I mean, basically a genius. And his tuning, the pans that he tunes is on a whole different level. - Is that right? - Yeah.
If you want to hear that sound and compare it to this other, it's far superior. I will... If you just say you're Caribbean. And the person that plays his pan, if you want to hear his stuff...
um is um this um andy norell who's actually an american who went out to trinidad his father took him there and he fell in love with the pan and moved to trinidad became a trinidadian citizen and he's like one of the top pan jazz players that's so cool and he plays ellie's um steel drums that's a beautiful story how do we find out more about it just um you know get some love to andy norell i guess does he tour
Yeah, yeah, he tours. Okay. You know, I found out about this guy. I'm going to screw up his name. Edmar. Edmar Castaneda, I think, came from like Peru or Venezuela. And he has this kind of hyper-aggressive harp playing. And normally when we say harp, we mean harmonica. No, this guy is playing like an actual harp. Like a real harp. And beating the crap out of it and getting jazz that you've never heard before in your life. I mean, just...
so inspiring and it's so idiosyncratic i would love to figure out like what what is jazz mutating into in that region you should get him to jam with your friend el i mean i i dare not even speak the name we have not released eric lewis's podcast yet oh okay i'm looking forward to that one but you you've you've hung with him yeah he's a he's a genius he's a genius straight up straight up yeah yeah you know the other person he's also a great guy
He is a great guy. They usually sometimes don't go hand in hand. Well, if you cross him ever so slightly. Well, because, you know, he didn't get the recognition. I mean, he's gotten a ton of recognition. I still don't think he's gotten as much recognition as he deserves. Far more. Far more. Right, right, right, right. The person that was evoked when you were talking about Ornette to me, have you ever hung out with Stanley Jordan? Oh, yeah. I hung out with Stanley in Stockholm. We had a...
We had a cosmological constant workshop at Nordita in Stockholm two years ago. And he came out actually to that, to hang out with the physicists. He's on a different way. He's not from this planet. He's not from this planet yet. Right. He was mining. I think he was a student of Milton Babbitt. Yes, at Princeton, yeah. Who was very focused on group theory and symmetries in jazz. Yes.
And you know, you can have it. He does a lot of symmetry break-ins, Stanley. Well, actually, but you know, Stanley tuned his guitar. So he's sort of this very weird mutation on Eddie Van Halen as he's really into tapping. But sometimes he'll tap on two separate guitars and he tunes the guitar to
Normally a guitar is tuned mostly in fourths, but one of the pairs of strings is tuned in thirds. And he said, no, I'm going to break that. I want the whole thing tuned completely regularly because he wanted to do it symmetrically. He was exploring how to mine the world of chemical elements and molecules for vibrational patterns and trying to play the vibrations that are natural to important compounds.
Okay. He didn't tell me that, but that would make sense. Okay, so you're just talking to one of these super geniuses and he's the most shy, retiring... He's extremely... And kind and... And ridiculously modest. In fact, I remember I look back and I'm like, what a fool you made of yourself. I remember like, because we... He spent two weeks with the workshop at Stockholm. So he and I hung out a lot. Oh, wow. Like we were, you know, kind of...
And yeah, we would go to, you know, go get coffee together, go to, you know, get dinner together and talk a lot. And I got myself talking theory with this guy, music theory. Yeah. And looking back at him, like, what was I thinking? Because he was so modest. He's so kind. You don't realize. He knows so much. You're in the shallow end and he's way off. Exactly. Swimming with the sharks in the deep. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
um and he's but you know but he he's continued speaking with me about this stuff i i just i was so it's funny what we what we revere right like somehow you know there are people if i met keith jared i'd probably freak out you know it's like or you can't even imagine i remember what fats waller said when mark tatum walked in no he's ladies and gentlemen god is in the house you know
There are people whose abilities are just so far beyond ours that you can't even imagine what it is that they're doing in a conversation with you. Yes, I've been in that situation many a times and didn't even realize it. Is that right? Until hindsight, yeah. But now I do. Let's draw your mic ever so slightly closer. Okay. Let's talk about... So it's one thing that you're this incredibly...
gifted musician with the sax, but then you have this little side job. - I remain flattered, I remain flattered. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I'm putting you in a bad spot. We do it to each other, my friend, we do it to each other. - Don't slouch yourself. - No. The other job that you hold down is that you're a professor of physics and astronomy, cosmology, you're spread between particle theory. - I do, I mean, yeah, I am-- - Physics. - I'm a Creole.
Creole soul. Speak in the pigeon. Yeah, yeah. So you're... What I meant to say, I'm a physics... I'm a creolized physicist. Creolized physicist. Yeah. So you draw from particle theory traditions, from general relativistic traditions, and also from cosmological and astronomical traditions. And condensed matter as well. And condensed matter. And you're pulling this off... I mean, I've tracked you from Haverford to Dartmouth, Pennsylvania,
Penn State, maybe perimeter. Now you're at Brown University? That's where I teach now, yeah. All right. So talk to me about how you see from all of these different vantage points, the state of theoretical physics, its culture, the community, and what it means to the outside world, if not to the inside world. But no pressures. The thing is, the world wants to know. Mm-hmm.
a couple of weirdly different questions. One question is, is it going to make a better toaster for me? Like, what is it going to do for me in a very direct sense? The other question wants to know is who am I? Why are we here? And do you have a direct line to God? Yes. So the answer is no, no, no about all those things. And I would like to get yeses for all those things. Okay. Even the toaster. Um, what I would say is, um,
We are living in the physics and by physics, I mean sometimes what we call fundamental physics, cosmology fits in because the study of the universe is about asking some of these fundamental questions. And as we speak right now, we are both...
Well, the Large Hadron Collider basically has been running and it nailed down what we expected to see in the standard model. What I mean by that is we found the basic forces and I mean the force carriers, right? The three basic- Super fast recap. Super fast recap. We have this thing that's been hanging around for almost 50 years.
which is made up of like matter and the force that pushes it around. The only other thing that's really fundamental is general relativity. These are the two big dogs in like philosophical physics space. And the key question is- - It's been a dog fight. - It has been a dog fight for bragging rights and territory. And
The Large Hadron Collider is not an atom smasher, but a proton smasher. So it's really kind of like a hydrogen atom smasher almost. That's right. There's a family of particles called hadrons, which are when quarks come together to form quark atoms. And the proton and neutrons are the stable versions of those hadrons. When three quarks love each other very, very much. That's right. Right.
As long as you allow me to talk about the pion later on. Oh, we're going to go Mesa? Pion is going to be really cool. All right. So those particles, when we smash them together, we hope...
that we're going to see a cascade of weird stuff in the debris that's going to teach us something new that we didn't know before because that was the game that kept working. It was the gift that kept on giving for many different ramp ups in energy. We had these like atom smashers, we kept turning up the juice, we'd get more and more stuff and then
Pavlov Dog needs to learn a new trick. Uh-oh. So that's right. The amazing thing about particle physics, as we discovered a zoo of particles way back in the 30s and 40s, all these particles were being discovered, and it seemed that there was no rhyme or reason. And these organizing principles, thanks to the mathematicians, you all,
had a nice piece of mathematics called group theory which allowed us to group together using symmetry principles these particles and they form these very nice patterns. Murray Gell-Mann of course used some of this beautiful math to realize that these symmetries govern the patterns of these particles that were thought to have no rhyme or reasons. They were grouped together under these symmetry like rotating around a sphere or something like that. And
These symmetries, the pattern we started to see was the higher and higher energies we were scattering and colliding these particles at, which also corresponds to probing shorter and shorter distance scales, would reveal we saw more and more symmetries being revealed. And so this was good. The payback just keep turning on the energy, ramping it up.
and you would find more and more symmetry. But there's a flip side to that too. - So energy in, treasure out. - Yes. - Yeah. - But the flip side to that is as you know, I'm a theorist. And theorists, we were also working on our theories and making predictions and realized actually, and there were good reasons in our theories to actually want these symmetries. These symmetries, to give you an example,
Fermi, Enrico Fermi, had guessed a model that would explain some aspects of the nuclear interaction. It was called the Four Fermi Theory.
Of course, Fermi was also the inventor, was named the inventor of, well, there's a particle like the electron called a fermion. - A class of particles. - Right, and at some point I'm gonna ask you to give me a mathematical description of the fermion. - Uh-oh. - Teach me some-- - We're gonna have to drink a little bit more red wine. - Teach me some stuff, yeah, right. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
I mean, a big part of what I think was great about, what's been great about our friendship is that when if I get stuck on some new math terrain, I come to Ellie's and have coffee with you and you'll,
you know give me a nice little differential geometry spin on it no pun intended yeah so yeah the the four Fermi theory was this guess and it worked it worked well with experiments so we're talking about beta decay beta defects exactly beta decay very important there would be life there would be no life without beta decay all right so beta decay is this weird thing where if I had a neutron and I left the neutron alone
with a half-life of about 17 minutes, it's going to shoot out a beta particle, which we found out later is the electron. Very high-energy electron. Very high-energy electron. And it is going... It's like it's trans. It's going to morph into a proton, which is a very strange thing, that a neutron is going to decay into a proton by emitting an electron. But Fermi said... Fermi basically found a theory, actually wrote down a theory, and actually...
You know, Fermi's a genius, right? He won a Nobel Prize. And I believe it was, let me not say what I believe it was for this, but basically this four Fermi theory made the correct predictions, not only for beta decay, but for a wide class of such nuclear processes.
The problem is, and here's where it gets interesting for the theorists. The theorists were using the rules of quantum physics to actually predict this time that you mentioned. That's a calculation that you can do using the laws of quantum mechanics and packaging a type of quantum mechanics called quantum field theory. What's quantum there are fields like the electromagnetic field.
So things that are distributed in space and time. Yeah, you could think of it as a nice little blanket, right? And the height of the blanket is the height of the field, and the field could warp and bend like this blanket. So like the height of waves in the ocean would be like a field theory of waves. That's an even better analogy. All right. That's a better analogy. All right. Keep going. Okay. And so the theorists would do these calculations and get the right numbers. However...
there would be infinities, meaning there would be parts of this calculation that would give me the number infinity. And infinity for what? For physical quantities. So things like energy or the force would end up being an infinity or incalculable.
And there's a word for this, the theory wasn't renormalizable. It was non-renormalizable. It's just a fancy word for saying that we don't know what to do with the infinities. - So in other words, if I just understand this correctly, I've got a neutron that's kind of slowly meandering through my lab, and so I have a little bit of a track that I'm using to say that I think I know where it is, and then suddenly it decays into three particles.
It decays into a proton, which is mostly where the mass is. It shoots off this electron at high energy. And then there was this missing... Mr. Pauli. Yeah. The baby neutron, that's right. Right. So there was this mystery that there wasn't quite enough energy afterwards before the decay as there was before. And he said, well, what if there was a pathological particle that couldn't be seen by the strong force?
It didn't have any electromagnetic charge on it. It would be very difficult to detect. And then sure enough, that placeholder turned out to be real. - The neutrino. - The neutrino. - That's right. - All right, so this would be the anti-electron neutrino? - Yes. - Okay, so then the idea is that it's actually the antiparticle of what we would typically call the neutrino. So now I've got these,
four lines, one coming in, which is the neutron, and three going out, proton, electron, and anti-electron neutrino. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, and I think a nicer way to look at this, actually, is the game of pool, right? Yeah. I mean, I have my, you know, if I have three balls sitting there, I think of those three balls as some constituents that's part of what this, you know, what this proton is going to become.
So what the neutron is going to become. And well, actually, that's not that's actually not a good analogy. The cube would have to disintegrate. The cube would have to disintegrate, basically. Into those other things. Into those other things. Yeah. So let's stand and still. Right. Yeah. So that's what I'm just doing. I was thinking about scattering process. That's a different analogy. Yeah. Yeah. So but the point was that there was something. If you reverse it in time, it'll be something like that. Right. But.
All right. The math guy asks, is the problem that those four lines are connecting at exactly one point? Yes, that's the problem. Exactly. When you actually look at the equations that describe this problem,
Process of real objects, you know, disintegrates a neutrino, right? It's sitting at rest and it emits, right? From itself, these other particles and then transmutes into the proton as a result. When we look at the equations that correctly make this prediction, that equation has...
badness in it. It has infinities in it. And the fix now, right? The fix is that if you can figure out a new... There's a fix to this. The fix is what now becomes a part of what we call a standard model. Is that there is an interaction that was missing. That this four Fermi theory was holding its place. And this interaction was there's a force carrier that
that's doing the job of this emission. And that's called a W boson.
The W boson is like very similar to the photon, to the photon, the particle of light. The particle of light is a particle as Feynman-Tortoise is responsible for the electromagnetic force. I have two charged particles, but Feynman-Tortoise is that those two charged particles, the reason why they can feel a force between them is that like a boomerang, it exchanges, it emits a photon, this particle, which is a particle of light.
or the particle associated with an electric field, and it exchanges it and imparts momentum and makes this other one feel the force. So the W boson is like a photon for this force that's responsible for disintegrating this neutron into a proton. And that fixed this issue of the infinity. All right, so it...
So am I right that we would call this FPI four point interaction theory? Yes. For me. And so the, the fix to the four point interaction theory is to sneak another particle, which I bet it would be like a W minus particle.
If the neutron's gonna decay, so there's a W minus, a W plus, and a Z naught to keep our UK friends amused. And these three different hidden boomerangs, as you say, that these other particles are exchanging, are what communicates the weak force. And so if you really take a magnifying glass, hypothetically, to that point where the four lines meet, they don't actually meet.
They don't actually meet. There's something in between that's softening in a sense, this infinity. Love it. And we call this usually a new state. A new state because, yeah, a new state meaning like quantum mechanically speaking, you know, energy levels. You can think of a different state I occupy or climbing up a stairs. If I go up one stairs, I'm a different state, energy state. If I go down the stairs, I decrease my energy. I'm a different energy state. And this fix...
part of the problem with this infinity. And so the pattern here is that we would see this when we go to higher energy, we see the state, we would see this W boson, WZ, W plus, W minus and Z boson. - We didn't see them for a long time. - We didn't see them for a long time. - We didn't see them until 1984. - The theorists, that's right. Steven Weinberg, Glashow and Salam, right? - Abdus Salam. - Abdus Salam wrote down a theory that would fix this infinity.
that the four Fermi theory had. And in so doing, it made these predictions, you see? And then later on, the experiments reveal the existence of these bosons. And this is an important part of Pavlov's dog, Pavlov's physics dogs. - Needs to learn a new trick. - Right, 'cause this was a payoff. You keep going to this high energy, new states reveal themselves.
You keep going to higher engine, build bigger detectors, and we'll find more states that in turn makes our theories more tractable and better in control and more unified. So the great unification before this, correct me if I'm wrong, was James Clerk Maxwell taking all kinds of crazy different phenomena, magnetism, electricity, visible light,
non-visible light, x-rays, whatever this, and writing down some equations that generated this incredibly diverse myriad of phenomena. - Yes. - This is a smaller version of that because if I understand it, I'm not a physicist as you know, we had to come up with two new forces that we didn't actually see. And we called one of them weak hypercharge and one of them weak isospin.
and we got rid of the photon. We said that the photon and electromagnetism was not fundamental, and we said that these two things that nobody's ever seen are going to generate the thing that everybody knows, which is electromagnetism. - Yes. - And they're also gonna generate in this kind of broken down state what we see as the weak force,
So that in essence, this perfect, this more perfect version of this unification is hidden from us. Yes. And what we're seeing is the pieces after that thing somehow breaks down. Yes. All right. We don't see that these W and Z particles until Carlo Rubio and someone Vandermeer, the engineer who does like the stochastic cooling thing.
comes up with the experiments that in, I think, bear fruit in like 1984 or thereabouts. I was, I don't remember. When did you become conscious in theoretical physics? I would say the year that I became conscious in theoretical physics would be something like 82, 83. Yeah, I became conscious in theoretical physics the year 1995. Okay. I'm a little older than you. You don't look it.
Just fishing for that. You haven't aged a bit. Right. So this pattern continues. So we...
The theorists get, you know, we have principles that we, the symmetry principle is a fundamental principle that it has always paid off for us. So then we have this guiding principle that guides us to make our theories more predictive. We discover new things, new physics, these things.
symmetry principles also allow us to discover the new nuclear forces, subatomic forces. But they also allow us to, what drives us are the problems though. The problems with our theoretical models, like these infinities, we're trying to fix and trying to fix those problems. The fix is,
ends up usually telling us that some new particle should be out there and is that new particle that's basically controlling the would-be, you know, problems. - So our great grandfathers metaphorically were on this gravy train where, just to say it right, it felt like if you saw something that you couldn't understand, you would hypothesize that things were more unified at a higher energy.
And the unification meant symmetry, and the symmetry meant new particles, new forces. New particles and new forces. Okay, so the idea is that there's some weird dictionary which says if there's a symmetry, then very often there's a force to go with it. And, I mean, just to be argumentative, I think it's not always the case that symmetry really works out. So, for example, when Gelman was figuring out how do you generate the neutron and the proton from neutrons,
smaller constituencies, which we now call quarks and a guy named George Zweig called aces, was really the same theory. They didn't generate the eightfold way, I think,
maybe I get my history wrong using what we now call the right threefold symmetry or eightfold symmetry involving SU three color. They were using SU three flavor. And SU three flavor isn't a real symmetry. It's sort of an, it's an imaginary symmetry. So there's times when you see a symmetry that's faking you out. It's like, it's a tempt, it's a temptress and you shouldn't answer her call.
Or for example, you look at the hydrogen atom, it seems to be beautifully symmetric due to the Coulomb potential. And you could get very tempted to say, well, all of the higher atoms are just perfectly symmetric Coulomb potentials. But the more you add in neutrons and protons in the center, in the nucleus, the more irregular that potential would have to get. And so that symmetry, even though it's a great heuristic equation,
is it's a false that's right that's a false prophet that's right so we have to we have to be very careful because sometimes symmetry is our salvation and other times it's our ruin very good and that's exactly now you're asking me where are we at what's going on um is um we had other symmetry principles that um we thought would really help us solve some other
problems really um yeah so i'll name three of these problems um one problem is um one problem is um the dark matter problem okay dark matter how long have we known that there's a dark matter problem well fritz wiki um discovered um dark matter and um
And also Vera Rubin by studying the rotation of galaxies. We just lost her not too long ago. Not too long ago. I was very fortunate to have shared the stage with her many years ago. I did not. When I was a postdoc. Somebody who never got her due during her lifetime. Yeah. She should have gotten a Nobel. Amen. Yeah.
Yeah, my good friend Brian Keaton wrote a book, and I believe in this book he said he made the case, losing the Nobel Prize, that's the name of the book. He made the case that Vera Rubin, that we should have, I guess, a posthumous Nobel Prize. I don't want to misrepresent, but I believe that he did say that, so this might be an opportunity. I think we should have a corrective prize. Oh, a corrective.
Yeah. I have a vendetta against the Nobel prize. Yeah. Sure. So, all right. So you would, I don't want a Nobel prize, but I just let you know. Yeah. All right. Okay. Okay. So the thing about the Nobel prize is I want to ignore the prize. Well, we know that those are given out at MIT. Okay. The Nobel prize. My theory of it is, is that it's used to correct the narrative so that certain things don't fully happen. So for example,
here are my real pet peeves you gave it to schrodinger and duroc and you forced them to share it to dilute the fact that both of them were giants and should have had it outright on their own you give it to einstein but you give it to him for the wrong thing for the photoelectric effect because you don't want him having too much power in the community you do you dilute the hell
out of Feynman, Tamenaga, and Schwinger with renormalization theory, and you put Dyson way off to the side so that he doesn't accumulate too much power because he's a dangerous guy. Steven Weinberg, arguably the greatest of living theorists, if it's not Yang, those that have been confirmed by experiment, is made to share with Glashow and Salam. All three of those could have gotten it individually and on their own.
My theory of this is that it's really being used by the community in general to dilute and to shift emphasis to particular people. So for example, Murray Gelman, who's one of the great physicists of the 20th century, nevertheless,
stepped on many toes. He stepped on Stuckelberg's toes. I didn't know this. He stepped on Sudarshan's toes and he stepped on Zweig's toes because all of those people had discoveries that were right in his neighborhood. And if you're very careful, Feynman tends to give a certain amount of credit and say, why did Dirac not get more credit for the path integral formalism? Why did Stuckelberg not get
more credit for his interpretation of some over histories. Whereas if you look at Gelman on the web of stories, Gelman is now gone. Now, nobody's going to debate that Murray Gelman was an amazing physicist, but he's very aggressive about who should get credit, and it's usually Murray Gelman. Was he the guy that when he discovered the quarks, he went to Feynman and said, I'm going to call them quarks, and Feynman said, what, quacks?
Well, but then Feynman said, Feynman said, I've got a new idea. I'm going to call them partons because I'm going to, I'm going to hypothesize something which clearly seems like quarks and
And so Gelman got back at him and said, I'm going to call them put-ons because you're putting me on that these are an independent discovery. So these guys were really, they were petty and these are famous stories. And I think they're part of the culture. They speak to why I both revere and detest this community. Well, I'm glad we're friends. Yeah. I can say things that you cannot say. That's right. Exactly. But yeah,
getting back to it. Now we've got this problem that you were, you're talking about, which is we've got some stuff in our world, which we don't know how to account for. Yes. And the key question is kind of our symmetry is going to save us. Yes. Yeah. So let me say two things about dark matter that I think is really important and interesting. So, right. The way we should think about what is dark matter is, is I take a, um,
One idea is take a, you know, kids like to do this a lot. You know, take a stone or a stone tied on a string and, you know,
Spin it around. Like David. Yeah, like David, yeah. We're about to get Goliath. And of course, the stone has a mass, right? Right. And what you can do is you can pull the string in and what you'll see is that the stone moves faster and faster as you pull the string in, as the string gets closer to you.
So it's spinning around. And as the stone gets closer and closer to you, it moves faster and faster. Like an ice skater when she's bringing her hands in and she's twirling faster because of the conservation of angular momentum. That's right.
So galaxies are collections of stones in a spiral type of way, like a Frisbee, like a disc. But the stones now are stars, like our sun. Our sun is a very typical star. What's playing the role of the string? Huh?
Or gravity. Okay, gravity is playing the role as well. Right. So gravity, so now these things are spinning around under the gravitational force due to the total mass of all of the things. So it's like a, right. So you have gravity operating to basically keep this collection of very massive stars spinning around.
- So I can see the mass and I know the laws of gravity, so I should be able to calculate how fast these things are going. - That's right, that's right. And Johannes Kepler taught us how to do this, one of Kepler's laws. If you know the mass of the total system, which is the make of all the stars, and you know the distance-- - So the mass, the stuff going around and the stuff in the middle. - Right, you can know how fast it's moving. And it turns out when Vera Rubin measured the velocity of these stars,
about on the order of 85 to 90% of the mass was missing. So if you then you try to account and go back and maybe there's other stuff there, right? There's no way you could account for this mass. So in other words, we can see the mass because the mass is, we think we can see the mass because it's showering us with photons that we're catching here on Earth. Right. So people like to call this thing dark matter. What it really is, because dark things actually absorb light.
That's why your dark jacket is really... Your silver shirt is emitting light. But this is absorbing light, and that's why the light doesn't get to me, and I see it as being dark. So dark matter actually is a misnomer. It's really invisible matter. Because this type of matter doesn't interact with light at all. That's why we can't see it. Good point. So...
We see this now in every galaxy that we've observed. That's the first thing. So it's not that only our galaxy has this, is missing mass. Every galaxy that we've seen has this. So the stars are spinning around too fast. We also see it from measurements of the early universe.
So my colleague, David Spergel, who was one of the principal investigators of the WMAP satellite, the Wilkinson at Princeton. He's now the Simon's Center for Computational Astrophysics. He's a director. And David was one of the people that...
use cosmology pictures of the baby universe, where there were no galaxies around. This is the universe 14 years ago, light that's emitted from 14 billion years. This satellite is able to see light that took 14 billion years to get to us. So we're looking at a picture of the universe 14 billion years ago. And when we look at that data, where there are no galaxies,
What we're seeing now is energy. The universe, when it's in a very energetic, hot and dense state. So when we're looking at the universe right now, we're actually looking at baby pictures of the universe. We can look at it. Yeah. We can look at light from back then. And then how is that behaving? You can measure the dark matter back then too.
The Invisible Matter, as you point out, that we call the Dark Marrow. I'm going to do that a few times just to learn my lesson. Yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah. I mean, this would be a perfect... I wish that Ralph Ellison knew about Invisible Matter so that when he wrote Invisible Man, that could have been an interesting thing. But maybe that's for somebody else to write. Well... Maybe you can write it. From my experience as a black man growing up in the United States...
I mean, you know, I think it'll be too easy, you know, too easy a giveaway to call it black matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Fear of an invisible planet. Fear of an invisible. All right. So. Right. So the point is that this dark matter is, we knew, we know that it existed also in the past and it played an important role in sculpting. Right. Because it has extra gravity. And so to form stars in the early universe. Right. Hydrogen. Hydrogen.
You need to capture all of that gas quickly enough. And the dark matter aided in enhancing the capture of that. So that's what we've got a picture of our galaxies. We've got a picture from early. But we don't know what the dark matter is. That's all right. So in other words, if our understanding, because there's another place that could have been something could be off. If our notion of gravity were wildly off, then maybe we would see all of the.
dark matter, there wouldn't be any need for dark matter because it would be the force law playing the role of the string in your analogy that would be causing things to spin faster than expected. That's right. But we also see these lensing effects, right? That's right. Because Einstein taught us that
Gravity really is a feature, the gravitational force of warped space time. And therefore, light will bend around that. And so we can measure, thank you for saying that, measure the mass also independently of galaxies and the amount of dark matter contained in it. Now, let me use the word dark matter again. All right, let's just do dark matter. By looking basically at this lensing effect, that's right. So I like to think of it as...
literally as a magnifying glass. If you take glass and you don't distort the glass and keep it, you know, it will not distort an object. But if I bend the glass by making a lens out of it, obviously the object can look smaller or bigger and it will distort the image that's passing, the light from that image that's passing through the lens. And
by analogy, if space really is warped, and I'm looking now at light passing through that warped space, what's warping it? The dark matter. So I can't see the dark matter directly, but I can see the effect of the dark matter in warping space. Why? Because Einstein taught us that matter and energy has the effect of warping the space around it. So I'm looking at some galaxy, and suddenly I realize I've seen that galaxy before. Right. And I've got four copies or five copies of that galaxy in the night sky.
And the idea is that it's no, it's just one galaxy with a bunch of something between me and it. And that something is causing the light from it to go off in all of these different directions, giving me the illusion. It's like agent Smith. When they call it the Einstein cross. What?
I mean, that's a famous gravitational lens, as you pointed out, which is that you can get kaleidoscopic effects, which you thought to be four galaxies is really just a warping of light, such as you see four copies of the same galaxy.
That's pretty weird. It's important not to drink heavily when you have time on the telescope. Yeah, exactly. All right. So you're not only seeing double, you're seeing multiple. Sometimes you're seeing a continuum. So we know that there's this warping. So let's say that we're almost positive that it's not the law of gravitation. It's really that there's something else that doesn't send us the photons that we're hoping for.
but we infer it indirectly. And just to bring it back, this is really the same game as Pauli's inferring the neutrino exists by saying, I can't see something directly. So what I can see is that I can see the effects on things that I can see. And I took these two examples and I said,
Let's come up with an aphorism so people can remember it. I said, the invisible world is first detected in the visible world's failure to close. In other words, look at the things that you know are supposed to be there. And when you see them behaving bizarrely, you can guess that there's an invisible hand. Yes. An astrophysicist
said brilliantly, I think her name is Katie Mack. And it was like the best way metaphor for dark matter. She called it the cosmic poltergeist. Yeah. Right. It's sort of like you see something moving in ways that you can't account for it by ordinary law. So for example, like let's just imagine that you had a high profile prisoner in a federal prison prison.
the person were to lose his or her life and all the cameras were to fail in a miraculous cascade of coincidences, you might infer that things weren't exactly...
What they were portrayed to be as a simple suicide in federal prison, right? That would be an example of inferring an invisible world from the visible world's failure to close and make sense Yes, but hypothetically that makes sense. Yeah, I like that. I have to use that in my in my class I would be careful in my class. I'm I am I'm teaching actually I think in the next couple of weeks I will be teaching giving a lecture on dark matter dark and this will I'm gonna use this so okay, so
Will I be able to get a clip of this? I could just play them this conversation. Yes. So, yeah. So, this dark matter, we can measure its effect. But the question now, you see, we like, physicists, we like to know everything about this object, this thing, dark matter. We would like to know, what are its properties? Why is it there?
You know, how did it come about on the scene? And what is its identity, right? For example, is it a particle? And how does it fit in to the pattern of the visible stuff in our world? Okay, well, wait a second.
I'm sitting here on earth and I'm inferring that this stuff exists out there. Yes. Now, how many different long range messengers carry information from the cosmos to me here on earth? So we have photons. And that's both visible. And gravity. I would say that's pretty much it. No, I think there's another one. Um,
I would say neutrino astronomy is also... Okay, there's definitely a neutrino from supernova. You mentioned our friend, Dr. Keating. Yeah, that's right. Doesn't he operate a little telescope in the... The Simons Array Telescope, that's right. We'll be trying to directly...
The mass of neutrinos. Is there Ice Cube in Antarctica? There's Ice Cube as well. Okay. So we've got neutrinos that can reach us. Yes. We've got gravity that can reach us. And we've got photons of various kinds in the form of radio, X-ray, invisible. I thought you were referring to forces. Of the four forces. No, I just mean long range. Things that can reach us. Things that can send us information. Right. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay.
You usually are traveling at a speed of light. And, of course, some people also believe if the dark matter were a particle, dark matter as well. Dark matter. Okay. Because it pervades not just out there, the dark matter. It's all over the galaxy. Well, neutrinos come pretty close to being dark matter.
Yes, right. Neutrinos. So let me now say a little bit more. The properties, we actually know a little bit more about the properties of dark matter. Tell me more. So one thing we do know is that it also has to be what we call collisionless. Collisionless. Yeah, collisionless. So actually, an example of collisionless is...
is again, let's go back to our pool table. If you're a horrible pool player. - I am. - Right? So I go on the table and I'm very good at breaking the pool table. Start the game, now imagine that all the balls are nicely scattered across the pool table. - Right. - And collisionless is simply that
I go, I take my white ball and I just try to hit a ball and it just goes right through everything and it doesn't collide or hit anything. Right. So that's an example of a collisionless effect. Now imagine it gets more interesting than that. And I have my galaxy and I have all these stars that are going around each other. All right. Um,
Very rarely do these stars run into each other. So that system is also a collisionless system, the system of stars in my galaxy. Dark matter, whatever it is, we do know that it rarely runs, they rarely collide with each other. Okay? This is the dark matter amongst itself? Yeah, right. And the reason why we know that is because...
Well, before I tell you that, let me say that another property, it also has to be extremely cold. And actually the collisionless part comes with the cold because to heat something up, actually what temperature is...
The temperature, if I have a hot gas or hot cup of coffee, it's because the molecules in that fluid are constantly colliding with each other and basically exchanging kinetic energy, energy associated with motion. And that becomes, you know, sort of a randomized situation. And the measure of that velocity, the faster these collisions are happening, the higher the temperature is.
And so dark matter, what we know is that those collisions rarely happen. So as a result, the dark matter has to be cold. It has to be cold because when something is collisionless, it doesn't...
it doesn't dissipate as much. - I see. - Right? So I imagine like fluid flowing without ever stopping its flow because it's not the, you know, it's a nice streamlined flow rather than the chaotic sort of like, I guess, there's a word for this, fluid dynamicists use turbulence. - Right. - A nice turbulence is like a lot of collision, right? - Right. - Versus a nice smooth, you know, flow.
Dark matter has more of that less turbulent flow. And that's important because in the early universe, dark matter's role is not just this invisible thing, you know?
I was gonna have a corny pun and I'm gonna avoid having my corny, because-- - I would avoid it. Can I pour you another-- - But the dark matter, it matters, okay? - Yeah, it matters. - Yeah, it matters. It plays a key role in forming, oh, thank you, my brother, in forming galaxies. 'Cause the question that we're really after in cosmology
is how did these galaxies come about? From an early universe that was expanding, right, to become the current large universe, how did this early universe actually, you know, that was fairly featureless and chaotic without any galaxies or stars, how did those things form? Given the fact that the universe is running away, you know, how do we actually, you know, how do I capture...
The hydrogen gas in a nice compact manner. You're saying without the dark matter, you wouldn't have an ability to nucleate? Without this collision, this cold dark matter, you couldn't nucleate the galaxy. Wow. All right. That's really important. All right. Well, that's pretty structural. And that physics is pretty well understood. That's more cosmological stuff. Now, and that's where we can, I know where your question was going.
Did you? Yes, I did. I know your question was going. Why should this dark matter have anything to do with the stuff that we're colliding and looking for at the Large Hadron Collider? That was my question. I see. All right. But the point is- For those of you out there, you spend enough time with Eric over the last 11 years, you can actually learn how to read his mind. Sooner or later, everyone goes into syndication, my friend. All right. So let's drink to the dark matter. Yeah.
And let me ask you a couple of questions. - To the dark side. - To the dark side. Now, if you're trying to get the power of the dark side, you need to figure out what are its properties, not just at a general level, that it's cold, it's collisionless, but I also wanna know, okay, well, how does it, what are the forces that are acting on this? What are its, is there dark light? Is there dark nuclear force? What kind of properties? Can we do dark chemistry?
Oh, this is great. So, yes, in fact, people have proposed. So there are now models on the market. You can go to the dark matter marketplace and find your favorite model. You can find your favorite dark matter model. Okay. Dark matter model. And there are a couple. And one very attractive one.
is one that involves dark electromagnetism. So, you know, the physics of electricity and magnetism that we really love to have our nice self-driving cars and things like that. What if, the question is, there were things like dark electrons? Again, these are electrons that don't interact with our electrons. They have their own dark forces, as you pointed out. And they also have a dark photon.
Dark particle of light. And this was worked out very well by my colleague, Lisa Randall, and her colleagues. And they found a very interesting result that if you had such a thing, then you would also have potentially the same way you have galaxies forming into disks. Right. You can have dark disks as well.
When you say galaxies forming into disks, it tends to be the case that a lot of the action is taking place in something like a
kind of a thick plane but is the dark matter just in that thick plane or is it in this case yes in this case the dark matter will actually squish into this plane okay and it could be also aligned with our galaxy or it could also be you know not necessarily matched up with the disk of our galaxy well i heard sometimes that you get a sphere of dark stuff and then you get a dark halo as well yeah
And that's actually what we now know this is to be the case that you have the picture that we should have about of dark matter. If I can't use a Klein bottle. Don't copy me. Let my hand be the disc of a galaxy. Okay. So it's going around this way. That's my galaxy. And the idea of how we should think about dark matter is that literally have a bubble of
a bubble surrounding this disc that extends really far away from the disc. And that bubble would be the distribution of the invisible or the dark matter. And the amount, so it's more like a sphere that encompasses the disc. And that is how we imagine...
the distribution of the dark matter to be around every spiral galaxy. - Every spiral galaxy. - Every spiral galaxy. - Nuts. - Has been observed to have this. - All right, Stefan, how do I make progress? Assume that I wanna make my money. - Yes. - In dark matter physics. - Yes, you wanna make your money good. - But we've got the stuff, I can't detect it. It's like what Morpheus says about the matrix, that it's a prison that you can't see, taste, or touch. How am I gonna make progress?
In dark matter, if we can't get our hands on this stuff. Good. That is the nature of the game. It's a hard problem. Many research groups around the country, around the world, we are investing our brainpower, computer resources, and everything else that's worth money and resources to study and figure out. So how you would do this? Okay. Well, some people want to know the identity of the dark matter. What is it?
or its properties. Well, what we do know is that the things that are familiar to us are made up of particles. So if you assume that a dark matter is a particle, then you find that there's this really interesting thing that happens. And some people call this a miracle, rather than it's known as the WIMP miracle. WIMP? It's an acronym for Weakly Interacting...
massive particles, I believe. But the definitely weakly interacting part serves my memory right. Yeah, yeah. My memory is that Sheldon Glashow was not secure in his masculinity and he proposed machos
There are. Right. Something massive, some accelerating compact halo objects. Because he couldn't stand the fact that we were looking for WIMPs. WIMPs, that's right. And much of the machos have been ruled out. Okay. What does the A in macho stand for?
I don't know. Okay. I don't know. That goes to show you how much I've worked on machos. I wrote one macho paper. You wrote a macho paper. We call it mini machos. Even there, you're taking the piss out of the macho theory. Okay, very good. It was a way to get around the observational constraints and still have machos, but they have to be mini machos. So, yeah, so the WIMPs are particles that magically have...
If you assume that they are particles, and actually because they are particles, they are subject to a force amongst themselves, a dark force. It turns out that the strength of that force, if it happens to be similar to the weak nuclear forces, W and Z bosons that we were talking about. Right, with the Fermi theory. If that force was of the dark particles, was similar. Right.
then it turns out that all the properties that we've seen about dark matter fits in very nicely. So it's a coincidence of similarities with something that we do know very well. And it fit very nicely into the pattern that I was talking about, the symmetry pattern. Because one of the symmetries that
we were going after to like solve the problems that I talked about earlier on, singularities and unification, getting more and more unification, is a symmetry called supersymmetry. And this theory that unifies these forces, even more so, in this case, the symmetry now is between
The force carriers and the matter itself, the electron and the photon, supersymmetry will basically be a symmetry that says that those things are really the same thing. You mean like matter is force and force is matter. Cats are dogs, the dog's a cat. That's right. What comes out quite naturally as a prediction from supersymmetry is the dark matter particle.
So it's really cool, right? It was very cool when we saw that this theory that was going to continue feeding our Pavlov physics dog by getting more symmetry to solve our problems in particle physics naturally predicted
this particle, or basically there are a few of them, that would be the ideal candidate for what we're seeing in outer space, in our own galaxy, in other galaxies. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful story. Yeah, it's physics too, because you have a theory, you have principles guiding this theory, principles that have proven themselves to pay off in the past. Lots of Nobel Prizes given for this pattern.
of behavior, of inquiry, of inquiry. And now you have shouting at you, look, this dark matter, you're going to find this thing when you go to higher and higher energies. Because when you find this symmetry, you will find this dark matter particles. And it gets even better. Because my... Wait, before you go on getting it better and better, my concern is... It really does get better. Okay. The jokes aside, the situation...
reminds me of being a Jewish kid around a lot of Christians in my neighborhood. So we just had parents who gave us some kind of semi-crappy gifts for Hanukkah, but the Christian kids were always running around talking about, oh man, Santa Claus is going to bring me this, and Santa Claus is going to bring me that. And we were always a little bit jealous, but we also had a deep suspicion Santa Claus didn't really exist.
And we didn't want to tell our Christian friends that Santa Claus didn't exist because they were so expected and so happy and so hopeful. I find myself a little bit in this situation with supersymmetry, where I've been sitting around listening to the goyim say this thing about, oh, well, Santa Claus is going to bring us Spartacles and super partners and the hierarchy problem will be solved and lots of infinities will cancel. And Santa Claus is going to do all this wonderful stuff in the form of supersymmetry.
Now, I'm not saying that there is no miracle because Lord knows that when we have a retail explosion in December, lots of merchants find that they can finally get their year to close out in exactly the right, beautiful way. There is a miracle of Christmas, Stefan, but I knew that was coming. But, but I don't, I don't want to be the Jewish guy who takes away the miracle of Christmas. It is a retail miracle, but
But it is not the same miracle that the children of the Christian households are taught to believe.
Now, my problem is this. I've been listening to the Santa Claus story for decades and decades and decades. What is the current status of supersymmetry? Experimentally. Experimentally. Yeah. How much... What's the most successful supersymmetry experiment? Well, so a lot of work, a lot of hard work and... I've read thousands of papers. Thousands of papers and myself included. You know, I was...
Look, I mean, I, you know, super symmetry saved my life when I was a postdoc. I was hired to work on super gravity. And I had almost, I got a nice fellowship to do this, to do some of this stuff. So I would say, and so there's a lot, a lot of work that went into actually making sure that the predictions were extremely precise and
and nice. - Oh, gorgeous. - Right? With a nice, yeah. And we call this, so when the Large Hadron Collider started to run, amazingly, yes, we found the Higgs boson. - That was great. - Which was a big triumph. And of course, there's another problem that supersymmetry, before I give you the answer,
Can I just say one more? I've stayed up so late waiting for Santa, knowing that he's going to... I made cookies and milk. Yeah, but there's another present, a better present that Santa was going to give you. Oh, which was that? Well, first of all, Santa has a cape, so he's Super Santa. Super Santa? Right. All right. Okay. And Super Santa basically said, actually...
We found this Higgs particle, the particle that gives everything mass. Yes. Right? Without this Higgs. I don't even want to let that slide. No. It imparts an as if weak form of mass. I just don't like lying to the public. Okay, fine. Okay, it's not a real, it's not real mass. It's a soft mass mechanism. It's an as if kind of sort of mass at an effective level. It's not real mass. It's not real mass. Mass is energy.
Go on. Okay. Now, this Higgs particle is, right? The Higgs particle is really a field and the vibration in the field is a Higgs particle. Okay. Okay. This vibration...
This particle has trouble. If you find it, you have to expect to find trouble with this. And I'm going to delay that trouble, discussing this trouble, even though it's a beautiful story. But can I say, if you're a ball sitting right at the top of a hill, right? And I just balance this ball right at the top of a hill.
- You wanna do an instability thing for me? - Well, here's the thing. I bought this beautiful bottle of wine. - Okay, that's good. - And the wine has a funny, I'm trying not to. Feel a little tipsy, feel a little good. The bottom of this bottle of wine has this strange indentation known in the trade as a punt. - Oh, punt, okay, I didn't know that. - So the punt has the shape of the potential
that we put the Higgs field into because we want to lure the Higgs field away from the most obvious value of zero. And so we say, look, why don't we put a little punt at every point in space and time? And the Higgs field can start off at the center of that punt, but with the slightest little tap, and it'll fall into a well around that punt. And then because we weren't politically correct, we called it
By analogy, not the wine bottle hunt potential, but the Mexican hat potential for which we will be duly punished by the Latinx community. Okay. But, you know, we give them love. We give them love. Yeah. All right. So now we've got this Higgs field that's acquired this thing that you guys call a vev.
A vacuum expectation value means that we've lured the field. - To fall to the bottom. - To fall to the bottom. - To be nicely stable. - So that the symmetry that would come from having the field resting at each point at the top of that thing, no, it's gonna fall somewhere into the trough. And the combination of the trough and the field that fell into some particular place breaks the symmetry
creates the vev, gives us the soft mass that we so desperately need to make sure that we don't go relativistic and go zooming off at the speed of light. - Yeah, we don't. You don't, I don't, maybe you're relative, but I like to be right here. But the Higgs is doing all that for all of us. - That's a lot of work. - It's quite an omniscient type of field. - I think in Greek tragedy, they call it deus ex machina. It's the god of the machine, the Mexican hat saves the day,
And it turns out we found it. So great triumph. Huge. But now there's a problem now. There's a problem? There's a problem. Oh, no. Because this Higgs particle, which we found at the Large Hadron Collider, which got the Nobel Prize and all that nice stuff. We gave you your due. Keep going. All right. It's actually not stable even when it got to the bottom there. Quantum mechanically. Now, because it's Higgs, it's a quantum particle. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
And I want to give a flavor since I know, you know, you give such great descriptions and you're a master doing this stuff. I did see a thing on gauge symmetry. Stop it. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to accuse me of having flavor. You got, you got lots of flavor. Okay. I don't want to make any flavor, flavor puns here, but watch. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, I grew up with public enemy, but, um,
So, yeah, so this Higgs particle, we think, and we would like it to be stable, and you know, guess what? It is stable because we're stable. So we know that it is stable, but guess what? If you trust all of that physics that you use to even predict this Higgs particle, it's not just a regular ball, a particle like the particles that we know, it's a quantum particle, which means it actually has quantum jitters, you know, and...
these quantum jitters actually can make the energy of the Higgs particle grow as well. And I want to give a good analogy with this, actually. Let me give it a go.
Please. So I want to think of this Higgs particle as a particle that's sitting on top of a mountain. Yeah. Like a ball, a bowling ball that's sitting on top of them. The analogy now is that this bowling ball is a Higgs particle that has a mass, some mass. A symmetrical mountain? It's a symmetrical mountain. So it's nicely symmetrical. Okay. Completely symmetrical. No wind. No wind whatsoever. All right.
Now, the other thing I want to also add to this is that the mountain has grass on top of it. So there's a little bit of friction, meaning that if I let this particle sit right there, the grass will be enough to keep it nice and cushy.
Provided nothing too crazy starts happening. But now quantum mechanics is reigning supreme here. It's now, I turn, it becomes a quantum Higgs bowling ball. And the quantum effects, what the quantum effects is going to do is make... Random transitions. Yeah, make the mass actually grow more and more. And it'll shake a little bit. Imagine if it gets the mass, the mass will get so...
The quantum effect is going to make the mass grow. I know it's weird. Why is this mass growing without bound? This is quantum mechanics at work. And the Higgs particle eventually overcomes its mass or overcome this friction of the grass that's keeping it fixed there. And eventually it will roll over this hill. Okay. When it rolls over this hill, it turns out that
This hill is an infinite height. It's just going to, like Mount Everest, and it's just going to roll down. It's no Mexican hat at all. No Mexican hat. And guess what? It becomes unstable. Okay. And the mass grows without bound. The kinetic energy grows without bound. And guess what? We interact with...
- Through a power coupling that just makes us- - With its head. So we also- - Become infinitely massive. - Yeah, I mean- - We can't get up out of our chairs, our chairs can't get- - Yeah, I mean, there's no diets gonna help. - This does not sound good. - It's not good. There's some magic that is preventing this from happening. So one thing that you can imagine, this analogy gets nice now, because the grass, imagine the grass also is quantum, right? - What? - The grass is given this particle friction to prevent it from rolling down. - What is the grass here?
- The grass is gonna be the supersymmetric particle. - Oh, okay. - All right, so there's something else that could counter the effect of this Higgs. The Higgs is bound to get mass. Quantum mechanics is always gonna make this happen. You have to counter it. This is what's, the same physics-- - You need grass. - You need grass. And it turns out, so this analogy, to make the analogy work now, you need another particle that's playing the role of this friction effect.
And this effect is going to counter the tendency of this Higgs mass to grow to kill it off. And that is a supersymmetric particle. Oh, wow. This is the same type of WIMP particles that we think is the dark matter or its cousins. That's part of the supersymmetric package of your present that Santa Claus is going to give you. You like that? I do. To be honest. So you have the same thing that's given us the dark matter. You get all in the price of one.
You know, you get not just one present, you get a couple of presents. You've been at my house for Shabbat dinner. You're a beautiful Shaggots. Don't lie to me about Santa Claus. Is this going to come? So now we had this theory that predicted all this stuff and that theory is ruled out.
And the beautiful thing about physics is that the experiments reign supreme. The Large Hadron Collider ran. Wait, wait a second. Theorists did a lot of work and that work should have happened. It needed to happen because this was a pattern. This is a payoff. We always saw this happening.
right this is the print the driving principle the symmetry principle so this was inevitable as a community of physicists to pursue this path we went there we the we were expecting to find this thing many people met i mean i wasn't one of them i didn't um so then why are you carrying water for them because i'm not carrying water i'm just well you're just explaining like the see you're one of them about you're one of the you're part of the tribe you didn't buy this thing
i worked on other things no you worked on this a little bit i worked on it a little bit but i remember you were not part of this i wasn't a part of it i wasn't a part of it but i but i was a i i there was a part of me that was a a a kind of a distant admirer because i did think that the theory
was elegant, it was beautiful. In the same way that, you know, the quantum fields you learn. I'm not coming in against supersymmetry. However, this particular version, what we call low-scale supersymmetry, that version that solves this, by the way, this thing is called the Higgs hierarchy problem. Right.
And the mechanism that you talk about is something called electroweak symmetry breaking, and they're connected to each other. This instability, this electroweak instability, it's still a real problem that needs to be solved. So it's exciting because that means the experiment showed that this particular way of thinking about it is wrong. We're not going to get to the point of it's exciting. Something has gone wrong in the history of science. I just sat and I listened to a beautiful fairy tale for a fucking long time, right? Yes. And I'm sick of it.
Okay. There is an accounting that has to happen, which is that there was only one part of this community that was convinced that Santa Claus was real. Now the rest of us,
We're not necessarily against supersymmetry. We weren't necessarily against. That's right. That's right. But this particular arrogance that this very simple story was going to happen with near certainty that we're going to switch on the machine. Then not only were we going to find the Higgs particle and the Higgs field, but we were going to find supersymmetry and black holes and all of these things that would justify the funding.
And these guys told everybody, no, Santa Claus is real. My, my uncle met him. I've got photos with him on, on Instagram, blah, blah, blah. And they lied. They lied that the community was so clear about this. The community was divided. And the problem is, and this is the part of the story that we can't tell is that what they wanted to say is that the smart kids and the cool kids knew that super symmetry was going to be found at low energy and,
and it was gonna be natural, and it was gonna solve all of these problems. And the problem is, is that it was a beautiful dream if you were very focused on part of the physics story. You were focused on the renormalization story, you were focused on the quantum field theory. - All things, by the way, all things that, you know,
all things that was part of everybody's tradition, you know, as a viable solution. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - But there were other-- - No, no, no, I'm just not, I'm not buying it. - Okay. - The point is that other people said, look, maybe you're right, I don't know where you're getting your confidence from. If it happened the way you say, it's going to look ugly in some ways and beautiful in other ways. The analogy I always give is like a fitted sheet.
Like stupidly, you bought a queen size fitted sheet for a king size bed. And somebody's like, oh, I've got this. I'm going to put this over this corner. I'm done. This is beautiful. You're like, have you noticed that the sheet is not working on the other corners? And so as soon as you try to get the sheet to work on those corners off the corner that you've already done off, it pops.
My problem is, is that the community that was so clear and so gung-ho and wrote so many papers and was so certain needs to suck it up. We need something like truth and reconciliation. They need to come forward and say, oh my God, were we off? And, and, but you know, um, so I read a nice paper by, um,
a great theoretical physicist, great physicist, Schiffman, who did come clean and said, we were expecting to find this thing and we were wrong, basically. But he was also optimistic. He was also optimistic in the sense that we will find something. It may not be that, but there's a sense of like, this is still exciting because now the experiment has told us where not to look and where
where we might want to look. There needs to be, there needs to be hair shirts and suffering. There needs to be a public accounting. There needs to be humiliating articles written by Dennis Overby saying, what was I doing listening to this community quite so credulously?
There needs to be a comeuppance. The people who make the grant decisions need to not be the people who are gung-ho about low energy supersymmetry. These people need to go away. They need to not be in control of the field. They not need to be not in control of the purse strings. They need to be diminished in their stature and their status. They need not to be revered. They don't need to be giving all of the talks at the beginning of every goddamn important thing just because we think that they're smarter.
This is a cosmic screw up, Stefan. And I'm sorry, but at some level, the Jewish kids who never went in for the Santa Claus story have a right to say, hey, there is a miracle. And you guys did do some great stuff. It is true that retail spikes every December. That is a true thing. And I'm not even counting supersymmetry yet.
Right. But the key thing is some people are that you can, you might, but we have a designated winner system and the designated winner system says that certain kids are the cool kids and that they always get to win because they're smarter than everyone else. Right. That is definitely. Okay. They're not because even if they are neurally more advanced, even if they are more knowledgeable, um,
their inability to reconcile themselves with their own cosmic repeated extensive failure constitutes scientific malpractice and they deserve to lose. And a lot of new voices, particularly voices that never went in for this deserve to ascend. And these people deserve to be diminished. What am I getting wrong? Um, um, I would say that, um,
I definitely, what I am for, okay, is exactly these other voices. Other physicists that have put out other ideas and attention should be paid and resources should be shared. A graduate student should be able to say, why am I listening to more of this stuff?
Why is it that you are giving the plenary? Why are we listening to your recounting, your narrative, your telling? Did you not say with fair clarity that you were convinced that these were the solutions and this was what would happen? If you did, I'm not telling you that you should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
But why do you get to keep control? And why do I still care about what you think at the same level as I did when you said, don't worry, we've got this? Because you didn't. You failed. Yes. Why aren't we doing science? Who gets invited to the reindeer games? Who gets it? What's going on with Rudolph? How many Rudolphs are out there? There's a, I mean, there is a sociological element. Well, this is what I'm trying to say. Why? Let's talk revolution.
Let's talk revolution. Let's talk revolution in physics because we're all scared because we know that if we say that the people who are in control of the field, in control of the purse strings, in control of the journals, and if we say you shouldn't be, you stayed too long, you got it wrong, you couldn't reconcile yourself, we understand your failure.
We actually love you. And we actually haven't given up on supersymmetry as much as you might think we have, but your naive hopes and implementations are offensive to the history of science. Full stop. Yeah. I mean, basically what I'm hearing is, can we let other people play in the band? How about the idea? So we're talking about jazz before. Yeah. That's kind of, you ever have a situation where somebody takes a solo and they go through one chorus and two chorus and the seven chorus. They're like, everybody else is looking at this guy and,
How many choruses do you expect to take for your bass solo? That's right. And there's a collective, you know, there's a collective agreement that if that happens, you know, you need to get off the stage and let somebody else get on. Right. I mean, you know, it's pretty dangerous when you're on stage with some good people to decide that you're the only, you know, what was that line from David Bowie, you know, about Ziggy? He was the special one. I forget what it was.
Yeah, yeah. He was the special man. Yeah, yes. Where were the spiders, man? Where are the spiders? Yeah. I mean, all I can say is I know within the domain that I exist at, my university, my research group, I definitely give voice to my students and the researchers around me, right, that work with me to explore ideas and also disagree with me.
You know, I am perfectly comfortable with that kind of discomfort and with also being wrong because I was taught by my mentors and my teachers who are actually great physicists, Leon Cooper being one of them.
Great physicist Ed Brown. Ed Brown, right. Who figured out how fermions could behave the way bosons behave by pairing up and giving us superconductivity. Superconductivity. Okay. Which is to really solve difficult problems in physics, you first have to respect the difficulty and you might have to take many different takes on it. And you might end up having many failed models, but you need to generate...
different strategies and different, you know, an array, a pluralism of different ideas and not bank on one, you know, one or a limited set of ideas, but to, you know, create opportunities for people to have many different ideas. How do we take back this field?
You know the old adage, I think, was it Planck who said that science proceeds funeral by funeral? I don't want to have to wait for the deaths. No, no, no. I don't want to have to kill anybody. How do we proceed so that we're not waiting for funeral by funeral? This is boring. I just can't stand listening to the same voices anymore. I think one thing that has proven to work in the past was, first of all,
So you probably know that I play a leadership role in an organization called the National Society of Black Physicists. You told me I was an advisor. Yes, you're going to be one of those. Yeah, and I told you that you should probably take a little bit careful look at who you're asking with my poor scene hue.
you know, some people define blackness as a state of stigma, social stigma. - Social stigma. - So, you know, I think-- - Thank you, sir. - Okay. - Okay. - So-- - Yeah, so what are you gonna do with the Society of Black Physicists? - So for example, and one of the things I said at our national meeting, I had to give a talk to the entire community, I said,
We do not have, as physicists, as black physicists, we don't have the leisure to exist in silos. And what I meant by silos, I meant sort of intellectual silos. But, you know, this notion of if you have a, say, in theoretical physics, different bifurcations of subfields within the umbrella of theory. Yeah.
The reason why Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer was able to solve the 46-year-old problem of superconductivity when everybody else worked on it, Einstein, Feynman, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, they all worked on it and failed. Similarly, they similarly failed. It was because actually Cooper was actually a particle physicist.
An outsider. He was an outsider. And Bardeen engaged that outsider. And I think one revolutionary thing, and it's not that revolutionary. It actually happened before in the past. Somehow this, in other words, we need to have people from different walks of this theory game, including people outside of the academy.
All right. We need to have opportunities, real opportunities for crosstalk to happen, real crosstalk.
You just pulled me in, for example, to a Quantum Foundation seminar, which I didn't expect to end up almost teaching. That's right. You did. And they learned something from you. And this is one of the top groups in the world for quantum foundations, by the way. I didn't know that. Yes. Yes. That's where Yakov Haranoff is at. Well, I mean, Serge. Yeah. Amongst other people. And so the reason why that is interesting is...
I didn't realize that I was, because I'm kind of like this, which is that I, if I know something extremely well, and there are very few things I know extremely well, but in my field, which is the interface of particle physics and cosmology, there are some things that I'm highly published in and I know it really well. Right. I'm not interested in talking to people that know exactly that stuff.
I'm interested in talking to people that know things that I don't know. And people also that will challenge me and make me and will actually challenge the assumptions that I'm making. Because I see that's where the growth, that's where the opportunity to find something new is going to be. And that is very different, I think, than the model that I inherited throughout my grown-up years in physics, theoretical physics. Let's explore something that's quite dangerous, which I don't think people really talk about, which is...
What is the really huge benefit? Quite frankly, a lot of the time when we're talking about the need for minority groups or underrepresented groups to be present in the sciences, there's a secret undercurrent of we should lower our standards to get people who can't quite cut it to come into the field because it's like a good-for-you thing. And so even though we're going to tax the field by not having people
Quite the level of people you'd get if it was a pure meritocracy, it would still be good for our soul. Okay. There's a different cut on this, which is monoculture. The problem that happened in theoretical physics with strings, with supersymmetry, with the lying, with the over promotion, with telling everyone else that they didn't know what was going on with one group taking over. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm on a roll and I'm not going to be quiet. All right.
Yeah, I'm an uppity white man, right? Now here's the issue. The black church, for example, in American politics was hugely important and influential because it was a different distributional system. It was a different place to get your information, to get your analysis. It has faded in importance. But because the black church was a counterweight, anything that went wrong inside of the dominant system, at least we had a backup system. You know, it's like if you go scuba diving, you've got
the main regulator that you're using, but you also have your backup regulator called your octopus in case something goes wrong. Under any telling of the tale, I think in Bush v. Gore, everybody who didn't want Gore to concede the race, I think was black, right? And there's just this idea of we need other cultures to be strong enough and present, not as some sort of good for you fiber that you're supposed to eat, but nobody actually likes it.
but because God damn it, this monoculture problem is huge. And to your point about blackness, the reason that I am excited about race in science is not any of this kumbaya bullshit.
It's because, do you remember the night that you and I had dinner with James Gates and Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I was the white guy at the table. Otherwise, it was just high level black physics talk. That's right. Right. And it took place in a totally different idiom. The cadences were different. The rhythm was different. It was the same subject matter.
but it was happening at a different level i want it was jazz it was jazz right and the riffing and the ideas it was this is nothing new by the way i mean there's nothing new because you know when i went when i after i did my i mean yeah when i went overseas to europe to um
to do theory, theory work. I realized that like, you know, the British, right? I mean, the way they did physics is different, very different than the French. I mean, I'm talking about, it's a human activity and people's culture. Yeah. What do you, I just had Roger Penrose.
Those guys tolerate real eccentricity, very quirky, very individualistic. And historically, it's very important that there be... Yeah, Chris Isham was a great example. Yeah. He would never, I mean, he's a very eccentric and brilliant physicist, English physicist. Dinesh Shama, Dirac, all of the... Dirac was, you know, transplanted French.
It really matters to me that there is something that we can call British physics as opposed to homogenized physics that happens to be located in Britain. Yes. French. Yes. If you think about the Bourbaki school. And there's a linguistic element. I mean, there are cognitive scientists that study how language affects thought. I mean, Lara Boroditsky, right? That's her work.
So I think we're afraid to say, for example, I mean, the French use elegance as a weapon.
The Italians had a surplus of style in mathematics. It surfaced in the crazed lack of rigor in the Italian algebraic geometry tradition that eventually got it into trouble. But they were just so swashbuckling and debonair and cool about the whole thing that they were able to do stuff. The Russians, their psychotic attachment to abstraction, power, and one-upsmanship.
You know, these were really important, different national characters. Really bothers me. I mean, Albert Einstein was a jazz physicist, very improvisational. Very improvisational. And also willing to take risks. All of these things about how he blundered and he wasted his years. My feeling is,
Good God. That's like the third string talking about the superstars and not understanding that you're never going to get to be Herbie Hancock or Miles Davis if you don't play sour notes now and again. You know, this is getting a little bit tad personal because one of the things that I was told right before I was going to go off to graduate school by a sociology professor of mine who actually...
I took many classes with him. And there was Bill Hohenstein. I'm actually tomorrow flying out to celebrate his 80th birthday. Okay. Yeah, he said, hey, Keith, so I'm like, you know, Irish working class roots in Philadelphia. And he goes, I said, Bill, you know, I'm going off to grad school to make it to try to do physics. He goes, well, kiddo, you know, if you make it, and I'm not saying that it's going to be easy, but if you make it,
And if you, especially if you make it big and I'm like, me make it big. He goes, it's important that you're not just a physicist, but that you're a black physicist. And I remember the heck this guy's saying. Yeah. What is it? What is it? It doesn't make sense. It makes any sense at first. Now it makes sense.
If a state trooper pulls me over. And clearly they're seeing something like the pattern if I get pulled over a lot more than average. And that did happen to me for some period of time when I was a younger professor with long dreadlocks, wearing a nice suit and driving a really nice car. So clearly there's something about me that stands out there. That's obviously not what Bill is talking about. But...
I guess there is something to say about being comfortable in one's skin. And why I will be the last person to want to monolithize, is that the correct way? Blackness, yeah. As one category of being. You know, what I was hearing from Bill was the opposite of that, which is,
don't dilute don't try to just fit in and talk and act yeah don't give up my difference lesser version of the other thing yeah there was something and and so when i did make it but when i might make it um it was really important for me that i was going to do my best thinking when i was my best me
Okay. And there were pressures for me to sort of fit into that cultural mode of the way, the culture of doing physics, right? And that was not me. That was not the guy, the Trinidadian kid that grew up in the Bronx. Okay.
Yes, I mean, my culture got modified. I mean, I got modified in my behavior as I went through. You know how to behave in the dominant culture. What I love about, I mean, I just saw you lecture yesterday. Was it yesterday or two days ago? I can't even remember. At Chapman is that you lecture as yourself. And there is, I mean, to abuse the word, there is more flavor.
There is, and I'll be honest with you. I've collaborated with you. We've never published a paper together, but we've worked together. Yeah, your ideas have influenced me. And yours have influenced me. I'm in a different head when I work with you. I'm less perfectionistic. I'm more intuitionistic. I'm much more in the flow. I allow my...
you know, because I don't really play jazz, but I sit down and improv enough that I can, if people are super nice to me, I can kind of hang with them. And sometimes they take a certain amount of interest because I'm interested in other things. I've gotten addicted
to what it's like to hang out with people who live in flow states and who prioritize creativity and being generative much more than initially checking whether every no-go theorem has been satisfied. Yeah, and there's value to both. There's value to both. But you need both. It's good to have both. But the thing that I think that's different, and I'm going to just pull some supremacy over here, is I don't see you or I
wanting to murder the string theorists. I want them diminished. I want them with less power, less control, less money. I don't want them speaking on behalf of the entire community the way they have. Oh, be nice to them. No, to hell with that. So you can't be an angry black man, but I can. I'm tired. And it's too long.
And the idea that everybody who's funding is tied to that community has to be careful is a travesty. And the glorious thing is, is that I'm going to sell toothbrushes and nutritional supplements and watches against this program. And that's going to give me the academic freedom that that system would never have given me.
And because I have sponsors and ads that I inflict on my audience and some of them can't stand it and they leave, but the rest of, no, I'm not kidding. The fact is, is that I'm going to sell a subscription to a wine company and I'm going to have the right to say, it's too much David gross. It's too much Ed Witten. Those guys are brilliant and they're terrific, but they need to fade into the background because we need to hear other voices because
But wait, I have a question. Why, why, why? I mean, can, can we have, because there's certainly a lot we can, we can learn from both from, they have a lot of technology to teach us. Right. So why does it have to be one or the other? No. Why can't we, I'm dining a la carte. If you ask, you know me fairly well. If you, if you were to ask me, who's the most important mind now working in
theoretical physics, whether it's Ed Witten. Okay. Don't ever tell me that I'm diminishing Ed Witten by saying that I don't want to hear his pronouncements on how string theory is the only interesting thing going on in physics. You know, at least it's interesting. It's interesting, but there are other interesting developments that have happened. Even if there isn't, even if there isn't, it's a chilling effect. In other words,
Ed is the number one insight machine in this area. His leadership is not at the same level. His leadership has been lacking. They say about Ronald Reagan that he was a third-rate intellect but a first-rate intuition. Ed Witten is an absolutely first-rate researcher.
but he's not a first rate leader of the field, nor was David Gross a first rate leader of the field. Nima might be, might blossom into a first rate leader of the field. He's got a more interesting, more playful, more hopeful, more optimistic perspective. No, Nima has always been, Nima has been like every time I would come to Nima with a crazy idea, he would engage it and he would actually throw something back at me. Yeah.
And I don't think Neiman does not have the depth that Ed has already shown us is true. I can only speak from my experience, but, you know, my limited experiences with, even with Ed, even when I was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, right? He, you know, he actually, he was, you know, he actually engaged my ideas as well. And, you know, I...
I learned a lot from him. Ed can see very quickly what is wrong with whatever you're doing. Oh, he's very good at that. Not only that. No, no, no. Let's give him all of his due. Because nobody's trying to take anything away from these people. Right. We're just trying to give to others. Ed both can see what's wrong with an idea almost instantaneously. He can also see that you're not pushing it far enough. He can see that...
the domain of abstraction that that idea is meant for. If you look at the number of theories that began as one, two or three names, and then has a dash Witten on the end. It's like you have churn Simons becomes churn Simons Witten, right? Or, um, Wes Zemino becomes Wes Zemino Witten because they didn't see the full power of the theory. So dash Witten was this thing that happened. If you left anything on the table, um,
Ed saw it and figured out what to do and put it in its final proper. Brilliant. Absolutely. Genius. Yeah. Right. What a poet. Yes. Yes. His papers are just incredible.
I mean, they are, I just remember when a new written paper would come out when I was a postdoc, I would print it out and go up to my, go up to the cafe and just, you know, get a nice latte and read this paper and really, you know, get so much out of it. And I can't do it justice. I've been out of this game for like 20 years in general. Yeah.
and I was never a physicist, but they always had the same structure. It would be like, it is a longstanding puzzle in such and such theory that, and then something that many people had never heard of. Then he would say something like, there are some interesting results of so-and-so that remain inconclusive. In this paper, and then he would say what it is that he does. Like it would have this kind of relentless form of,
And it was enervating. And I don't know whether you know this, but I have a playlist. I don't remember whether I've released it to the public called the Meeting Jimi Hendrix Story. And it's a collection of every great guitarist's experience meeting Jimi Hendrix. And it's always the same. It always sounds like I was the top guitarist in my little area. Then I heard one day that there was a guy named Jimi Hendrix who wanted to come see me. He jacked into my Marshall stack. I heard him play for five minutes. I never wanted to touch the guitar again.
you know? And so Ed had this effect because we all saw the wonder that was that particular human mind at that particular time. It was a perfect fit. Take all of that. That's enough reverence for one person that I don't think any fair person can claim that I'm trying to rob him of any of that. Not a great leader. Okay. And the problem of giving that much authority to the person with that capability is
And the other one of these was David Gross because David Gross came from the part of the world that had made contact with experiment. So he was sort of part of the last group to, to do the physics in the way that we think of physics. So you make a theory and you check to see whether experiment corroborates, et cetera, et cetera. David infused string theory with his kind of traditional physics. Kesha. He was the guy who made the transition from one world into the other. I think that those two voices are,
Were, I mean, unbelievable physicists. Nobody will ever take anything away from them. Lots of things happened under the string theory program. Many of them may be useful in the future. A disaster in physics leadership. You know, obviously I'm from a different, a different trajectory. This isn't you speaking. We're friends. You're not responsible for my ranting and railing.
But we're friends, and that's what friends are for. That's what friends are for. But there are some, you know, I want to kind of loop back to, because you did mention what you talked about the, you know, right now one word that is sort of pervasive across, wait,
across institutions and, you know, academic institutions, diversity and inclusion, right? And, you know, what comes with that sometimes though, is that there is an unspoken sentiment, which is why do we, you know, if we do this, it comes at sacrificing. This is kind of what we're talking about. And I think that we should look, take a deeper look at that, right? Instead of
Well, do you want to actually have that conversation? I'd love to do that. Yes. I'd like to have a conversation. So I'm of two minds. I'm just going to, I'm going to open myself up and say what I think a lot of people might want to say. I do not want diversity inclusion to the extent that I'm filling one of the few spots on a life raft with a person, just so we can say that that seat has been filled by somebody who has some characteristic. They're crippled.
They're they descended from slaves. They're transgendered, whatever weird characteristic that is. It's an irrelevancy to a scientist. Okay, good. That's interesting. Okay. Okay. On the other hand, if they carry their otherness in a way that makes them understand the importance of seeing different perspectives. So for example, being female, um,
or being Kurdish, or being black, or being learning disabled, or being in a wheelchair, if any one of those things informs their perspective so that they become more disagreeable, more willing to say, hey, you are forming a monoculture, then you're getting the real benefit of diversity and inclusion.
You're not sitting there saying, I want to have the nth version of women in science. You're saying as a woman in science, let me tell you, you can't see what's going on. You can't see the way you're forming a hierarchy around that person. And I'm not interested in talking about women in science today. I'm interested in pointing out that you're forming a monoculture and that the concentration of risk that that's going to entail is psychotic because there is not enough
evidence to reach the conclusions you're reaching as strongly as you are. And if this world were not quite so amenable to fealty, we would have a more diverse portfolio of ideas and the diversity of personal characteristics would be reflected in the diversity of approaches. I would welcome diversity and inclusion. Yes, as you should, because of, because of that. And I guess I would, um,
I think there are two things that from, and I can only speak also, I mean, I've thought a lot about this from, you know, also academically, but just putting myself into this as well. Let's say that there is a position and the position says, look, you know, I'm, you know, there are certain metrics of that, that this position actually calls for. And let's say that I, as a black person, I'm,
Meets all of those things. Right. At the highest level. The issue sometimes is when my being different. Right. And if that difference is already seen to be at a disadvantage, like, you know, that it's not valued. All right. To it.
Because in science, at least in science, the metric is also who is going to bring in maybe a new idea. Right. Or a different way of a different way of approaching a problem. Yeah. That doesn't exist yet. You know, given that's why you're probably hiring that scientist. Right. Right.
The issue here is the presumptions that people make that if you're different and you don't fit into the norms, the normative practices of that order, that somehow you being who you are, having these, let's call them characteristics, intellectual or whatever you want to say that's associated with my race,
In my case, it's my learning issues. So all things considered, I have the skill sets, I have everything, but you're not, but you're uncomfortable because by my being in that sphere of existence...
actually creates a level of discomfort and is also perceived to not be valuable in that metric of actually making a contribution. That's the issue here, which is that it's underlying, I think, the backlash of diversity initiatives is that first, if you don't actually value exactly what you were saying, that
difference is going to be is actually something that could be useful but i think the presumption that needs to be dealt with is that maybe it's not valued it's seen as a negative and it's seen as potentially coming in and interfering with the flow did you did you hear my episode with my brother
on this program no i i was i'm intended to watch it yeah so i had to do a very difficult thing with him which is i had to say do you understand that you're not being taken this is right right yeah yeah you're not being taken seriously by richard dawkins and jerry coin and the top evolutionary theorists because they don't understand who you are or what you've done and so the idea is that they took some indicia which is oh we discovered you at some weirdo
far left tiny college that nobody cares about in the research circuit called evergreen state. And as a result, you're typecast. Yes. Right. Yes. Now I'm going to say the same difficult thing to you and to me. So I'm going to spare neither of us in my case.
Oh, that's that crazy guy with a podcast who thinks that he's onto something and he thinks just because he's somewhat entertaining and he has a following because he got into Joe Rogan that he's allowed to tell the great gods that maybe he has some ideas about physics and math. That's what they say about me. What they say about you?
He got his position, not because he's very smart or has an interesting perspective, but because the field is desperate for black people to show that we have diversity and inclusion. And you are carrying that around and I'm carrying that around. Now, here's my point. I don't want to shrink. I don't want to shrink from it. I know that that's what they're saying. They want to say this. Yes. Furthermore, right. It's,
You know how people fixate? Like, I'll be honest. There are certain people who are black who I can't get over the fact that they're black. There are other people who are black. It's not a big deal. It doesn't occur to me. It's just like, let's talk. We don't even know why our brains keep track of this stuff. And it's not all about racism or not racism. We can't even check our own prejudices. It is so bizarre to me.
that with everything that I know about you and everything I know about me, we're still dealing with this bullshit. Like for example. - It's a very deep problem to solve. - And you hear it in your own mind. - I have a friend that's a social psychologist that his entire research
is this conversation. Right. I know in my own mind that I have these haters who say, you know, what's he published? What's he done? I don't understand. He's self-promoting. And it's not like, I don't know that this dialogue is there. In fact, it's internalized and it's internalized in you and in me and in everybody who doesn't subscribe. I was dominant merit. I was told when I was a postdoc, I won't, you know, but now I'm, and it was a,
I mean, I got there and, well, first of all, I benefited tremendously. I learned a lot and it helped me get to where I'm at now. So I'm very grateful. But there was an experience that I did have where...
It was a very competitive environment and everybody thought they were number one. It's a number one place, Eric. Something weird was happening because this particular place is a very interactive place. The postdocs and professors and grads, they're talking all the time and I'm there.
And I'm telling this story because time and time and time and time again, I mean, I've been a professor for like 14 years now. Right. And now the students, the minority students and the women students in my, throughout my, you know, trajectory, I hear these similar stories. So, and this story was at a place that everyone is talking and I'm in an office and
No one is talking to me. I would have an idea. I'd start talking to another person and nobody was talking. So I was sort of shunned. Yeah. And at some point I was like, well, is it me? Like, are my ideas silly? Because I do generate also silly ideas. You generate wrong ideas. I generate wrong ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of the things, and one day a good friend of mine who is, well, let me just...
This friend of mine who is someone I've known for a long time and has a razor sharp perception of things. He was visiting from Caltech and he was visiting our group and he pulls me aside and goes, and this friend of mine, he's a white person. And he says to me, I know what's going on. I was like, what are you talking about? And by the way, things got so difficult for me that there were days I didn't even want to, like I had to fight myself to go to work.
Because people were just not talking to me. I'm trying to figure out why people are not talking to me. He goes, I know what's going on. I was like, well, what is it? He goes, yeah, they're treating you like a dog, right? I was like, how do you know that? Are you only here for a couple of days? Yeah, you know, well, here's what's going on. Because I overheard what they were saying. You see, they felt that they work so hard.
to get to where they're at. They were number one at Harvard, number one at Princeton, and now they're at this place. It's the top place in the world for this thing. And you had it easy. You had it, I mean, I had it easy, you know. Cakewalk for me. Yeah, cakewalk for me growing up. But me and I had it easy because there clearly were affirmative action programs
that just made you know just opened the door for me and they had to work so hard and you know I can understand from their perspective if they assumed that this was the case yeah um and also that came with this that I just didn't have the competence so it became a kind of catch-22 situation because how could I get if if what they was believing was true right how could I get better if they're not talking to me right because part of
The game here is I have to, we, it's highly collaborative. People are writing papers together. Right. So as a result, it got interesting. What ended up happening was it didn't change much, but at least I knew what they felt. I never really told anybody about it. My friend told me he heard this, heard people saying this. And I had to swallow this pill and, you know, integrate this fact.
and kind of figure out, and luckily there were people, there were faculty, and a few, and we had the third world room, the other postdocs, one from Iran and one from India, and we learned from each other and wrote papers. But anyway, to make a long story short, by the time it came time for me to apply for faculty jobs, someone called me on the phone and said, you know, I've been pushing for you to get this job, and
And they said, we can't find anybody like, you know, like you. I said, no, this guy Alexander is right down the street. And he's at like a really top place. You should hire him. And they said, oh, we know about this guy. He doesn't do the work. He actually rides on people's back. Like people do stuff and he gets his names on the paper. So I said to him, hey, you know,
Can you go online and actually look at my publication record? Yeah. You'll notice out of the 13 papers that I wrote, that six were single author papers. Right. So the very situation that created the condition for me to write independent work still wasn't even enough because the perception, even there when I was looking for a job, persisted, right? That I wasn't a guy...
And this still exists. So when we talk about things like diversity and inclusion, even though, yes, we know that it does bring value, it does bring different perspectives. It can bring value. When, you know, diversity...
when a particle physicist comes into, um, to work on a condensed matter problem and employs those techniques and tools and perspective in that field, that's diversity and inclusion. I agree with this. And, but if people are presuming like my friends, when I was a postdoc that I had it easy, if that is not addressed and if, and if, and if, if it's not valued that maybe, um,
regardless of what program that was necessary for me to get in, that actually the experiences I've had and the lessons I've learned and cognitively what I bring to the table, including the fact that actually I know differential geometry as well. Because I knew my stuff. I went through the same educational system that many of them went through. There was a presumption. If those presumptions are not dealt with, then
People, the practices are still, people are just going to get more and more resentful
Well, because the question, how do we talk about it? Yeah. Right. Like the thing that I've loved about our relationship and I don't know that we've ever even talked about it. Is that you and I have always been able to talk about like in part, one of the things I hate about the current woke stuff is, is that you need to go to the most dangerous stuff in order to actually remain close to know that you've gotten past the bullshit.
Right? Like you do, if we're going to have a relationship, we have to disposition and negotiate the superficial junk that's going to keep us apart. You remember when you were thinking about leaving? That's right. I was thinking about leaving academic physics. That's right. Do you know what was going on with me when you came to talk to me about this? I did. How did you come to talk to me? Well, um, a mutual friend, right? Suggested. I named names. Lee Smolin, um, uh, a great friend. Um,
And colleague of mine, someone who I trust dearly, I said, Lee, I'm thinking of, you know, packing my bags and leaving a very cushy tenure track faculty position that many people will be online waiting for because I had my reasons. And he said, before you make this decision, you must talk to my friend, Eric Weinstein. That was in the year 2006, I think, 2007. Around then. Mm-hmm.
Do you have any idea what was motivating me and what I did? Well, first of all, let me say that you kept it very real me. You actually, the things that you said to me, if it was someone else who did not embrace discomfort and getting the raw deal,
they would consider you to be a very offensive person. But because I embraced that, it was very valuable. And look at me, I'm still in academic physics. - First of all, you come from a Caribbean tradition, which can get very confrontational as part of the normal means of disposition. - It's a sign of love. - Sign of love, right? So we have a little bit of that in the stronger forms of the Jewish tradition as well. Okay, so...
When I... I'll give you my... I don't think we've ever had this conversation. Oh, we're going to do it here? Yeah, why not? Okay. What the hell? I saw you as technically underpowered relative to how generative and creative you were. And I saw you as a generative and creative powerhouse. You were trying all sorts of stuff, some of which I could see that can't possibly work. He doesn't know, but he's going to figure it out in two weeks, you know? But like...
You were a wellspring of different ideas and you were coming at things from a really different perspective. And in essence, the superficial aspect of, okay, he's coming from the Bronx. Your father was a cab driver, Caribbean background, um,
There was no part of you is anticipated by our system. There's no, you have no role models. There's nobody for you to follow. I mean, you know, this world of you, James Gates and Neil deGrasse Tyson, all three of you are totally distinct. You're different.
The diversity that you represent. But Jim was a role model though. Is a role model. But not. Yeah, but we're different people. It's not tight. It's not tight. You know, it's a very different experience. You're borrowing a lot from him. You are the fire that lights itself. I don't know how you got here. And that was what was so impressive to me, which was that there were two parallel stories.
- Joe Henderson has an album called Inner Urge, a song called Inner Urge. - Yeah. - You know, it's bad. It's like, you know, it's... - There were two forms of diversity. There was the superficial or ostensible diversity. I don't even wanna call it superficial because it's real. In other words, when you and I collaborate, I move towards you language-wise so that you and I can be in flow together.
You know, it's like, I don't speak the way I speak generally when I'm speaking with you because fundamentally I want to be catching the balls and throwing them back. You had this other diversity, which was your creative scientific diversity. You would generate more different approaches to a problem faster than other people. And what I saw was in part, I had, you know, Lee gave me this assignment to like talk to you about this.
And I was trying to get me out of it. Well, no, no, no, no. It was, that wasn't it. It was what was good for the field versus what was good for you. And what I realized is, is that it was probably good for you to leave the field if you didn't change your mindset. Yeah. And it was probably bad for the field to lose you. You told me something that really mattered though. Oh, all right. Basically it was, it was sort of like the, you know, when you're up, up, up, you know,
a very caring at some point tells you to grow up and it was more like you need to grow up as a scientist and find and you know don't run away from a real problem find it and work on a real problem and don't push um don't you know sort of um um um follow herds and things so it was like
In other words, it resonated with who I was already. And I was kind of tormented about this. Walk towards the pain, eat the pain. Yeah. And so, and also right around that time, Leon Cooper told me the same thing. Yeah. He said, you need to find a real plan to work on it. And, you know, and,
When everyone says that a problem can't be solved, it's because they weren't smart to figure it out. So go work on it. Find the problem and work on it. This is the person that, the ingenious Cooper period that led to the solution.
of superconduct. It was, I had to take that very seriously, very seriously. It was either shape up or ship out basically. Yeah. And I had them, that was the choice. Cause then all this other stuff about diverse, all this stuff that was just noise really. Well, but it is. And it is. So for example, when you invited me, you took, but that became the fire two days ago or yesterday. I forget. And even when it was, you took a risk by inviting me in,
to what would be called a family group meeting of a research group talking about a subject which I haven't thought about for a decade, you know? And I came in on your-- - I didn't see it as a risk. - You didn't? - I did not see it as a risk. - You brought me into your-- - And we'll be doing more of it too. No, because I saw it as, you know, what's this word? I mean, in sociology, there's a notion of inconvenience in someone. When you're inconvenienced, that's where learning happens.
- Did they were instigated? - Diversity comes with that sort of, that level of having a little bit of discomfort and that experience in and of itself. - It's the constructive other. - If you bear with it, you learn from it. You learn, you grow from this. - How much of our time that we've spent talking about math and physics has been over alcohol?
A fair amount. A fair amount. A fair amount, right? A fair amount. And it's woven together in our relationship. Mostly wine. It's about mostly wine. Well, when Ed Frankel is present. Vodka. Very often it strays off into harder stuff. But, you know, these are some of the most romantic. His mind requires. Well, he's Russian. Okay. You guys both have alcohol tolerances that I can only dream about. I've gotten much better. But the point being.
This is our style, you know, and the point is it's completely unconstrained. It's not tied to a whiteboard. It's not tied to rules about what it means to be collegial. It's tied to bad jokes, drinking heavily, crazy ideas and camaraderie and deep friendship and brotherhood, you know, and making fun of each other and taking the piss out of each other and putting it always never going up to the line where you're actually hurting the person and
That kind of intimacy is incredibly important scientifically. And this bloodless culture about office appropriate behavior. One of the great things coming into that work group. Oh, we're getting, we're getting into some dangerous. Yeah. No, but when I went into that work group is that there was this very sweet guy from Italy. It was talking about quantum foundations and,
And I just had to say, wake up, man. You know, like if you don't do something really different. And do it soon. And do it soon. Well, I need to understand this for 40 years before I even try to think about the real problem. No, you know, if you're not going to be disagreeable, you're in the wrong field. Don't waste your life. That's what you told me. Well, that's the thing. And the key point is go big or go home because there's not enough money in just muddling your way through.
And it's funny because I tell my postdocs, my graduate students a similar thing. I was like, you can make, with the skill set that you pick up as a physicist, you can go out and make a kill and do some machine learning, do some good stuff there. And you'll be driving a nice economy, living in a nicer house, and might even be happier. Maybe. And doing cool stuff.
But I'll be honest with you, even when you get the nice house and you make a little bit more money, when you move away from the privilege of working on God's own language, there's a way in which you curl up in the night and you just regret ever having gotten away from it because the privilege of actually working on
the one thing that almost no one even gets to see this this very low layer of reality itself i would like that to change i would like to i would like to see people who actually do so for example i have a buddy brilliant brilliant theoretical physicist and he did some actually and he actually went after some big stuff it didn't quite work out so he went and did a startup
And every now and then, because I think, I mean, there's still things I feel I can learn from him. I still call him on the phone and we talk physics. Yeah. And I would like to do, I would like to see more of those types of things formalized in a way. You know, I really think that... Whatever you and I get together, we do that. We do that. But I would like to see more of that in a way where it's a little bit more formalized. People that may have transitioned into...
different lifestyle or they're not doing it professionally all the time but it doesn't mean that they don't that they're not still thinking and they might have contributions to make ways of plugging in people in the more sort of professional right academic you know now we have private foundations that are doing research there must be a way of
Again, I'm not talking about... People have tried the more corny ways of doing this. I'm talking about something that's real. That's... Eric, I'm thinking about this problem. The cosmological constant problem.
You came to my seminar, my talk, my technical talk, and you saw that my graviton leg was hitting a fermion. Yeah. And you said something to me that was very useful, that I got an outsider's perspective that I didn't get from within. These things are useful. I have to be outside. I'm more radical than you are. But it's necessary. It's useful. It's valuable. It is generative for progress. But...
Let me tell you what my dream is for you, not that I can tell you your business. I'm a private jet to go to Tobago? Yeah, tell me about it. Take me with you. I need you to make sure that you're inserted in a position to help not necessarily the people who are coming in from the perspective of ostensible diversity.
But you need to be in a position where you can find the actually uncorrelated individuals and shove the neural diversity, the diversity of intellectual approaches down the throat of this monoculture that should never have erupted in the most important and precious of all fields.
I think you need to be in a position where you have purse strings that you're controlling for the benefit of others. And I don't know how to do that yet, but if this podcast can continue to grow and the influence can start to seep in, that there is a place that can advocate for the Academy that isn't coming from the Academy because the Academy isn't free to say what I'm free to say. I've given up. I can't go back in any standard fashion.
But I'm still invested. I mean, the instant I hit your seminar room, I'm just thinking about like the Atiyah-Petodian Singer Index Theorem, or I'm thinking about what is the effect of a graviton hitting an electron given that... But you're also thinking about quantum foundations now because you talk to those people and it's going to... And this, that... But this is the thing. It's like, let's...
When do we pop the champagne and start having a party again as opposed to listening about the efficiency with which we use taxpayer dollars, transparency, diversity, inclusion? It's boring as shit. Let's just do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. Do it anyway. And let's take back our own system. Listen, I could talk to you for forever, as you know. Come back anytime. You know who I'd really love to get you on the program with? Who?
Our mutual friend Priya Natarajan. Oh, she is the truth. She is the truth. You know, I've been having these conversations with her and I don't want to tell it. I'm not a huge fan of the dime store version of diversity and inclusion. She is some next level human being thinking about all of the ways in which these weird matters of gender equality
of race of class. Like she's even focused on the issue of like, when you take people from the Indian subcontinent, what class are you taking? What strata of society are you taking? She's got all sorts of interesting things and it goes into the physics. It goes into the science. The thing that I don't like about this discussion in general is, is that once you start talking about like minorities and STEM and
it tends to be at the self consistent system and you're never talking about neutrinos anymore. Right? I would love to have the world listen into a conversation between you, Priya and myself,
on this show and maybe a few other people who can actually animate this and say, here's what the payoff is. This can cash out in science. It doesn't have to cash out in some sort of sanctimonious good for you feeling. Yeah. I mean, you know, just to say like one thing I find really powerful is you were saying that that's been a big payoff for me.
regardless of whether or not I'm going to, you know, the problems I've worked on over the years are going to be fruition, is that this semester I'm teaching our graduate general relativity course, right? Differential geometry, at least the way that the poor physicists know it. Right. But, you know, it is one of our most advanced classes. In my class, the three black physics majors
are in this class they're all under it's a graduate level course including one um guy um who is um got some nice tats up there yeah you know he has right from philly who's a freshman yeah an ace in the class yeah and sitting in front of the room and very comfortable in his skin and if
I truly believe that when that happens, that's when you're doing your best. And if I can provide a space for students like that, who's going to be to our benefit, that kind of genius to come to their full fruition, right? Meet their full potential because they are truly themselves. And you know what? Yeah. I think this is so important.
to recognize that when you have an untapped population and am I right that when it comes to really senior black physicists, there's almost no one beyond who I've mentioned. I mean, there's Shirley Jackson. Yeah. I mean, there are very few of us. Very few. Clifford Johnson, Clifford Johnson, USC. The way I view it is you have a situation by which
That community is like an untapped oil field. Assume that you had no interest in helping anybody for sociological reasons. All you wanted to do was to get the best physics. The fact that almost nobody- - And by the way, let me say, I know most of, pretty much all the black, we are all committed to, right? We're all committed to bringing through that next generation. - Right, okay. So the thing that I find most- - With excellence, with excellence.
The thing that really excites me is that when you find an untapped population, you get a huge whoosh. Whereas if you find a tapped population, look, nobody is going to be surprised if the next Nobel Prize goes to an Ashkenazi Jew. My population has been tapped. We've been located. We've been found.
We've been doing really well. However, it's not going to give you the huge whoosh when you find like an oil field that nobody knew about because then you're just tapping something that has never been tapped before. That means that the potential that's trapped in black physicists is enormous in female physicists. Yes, yes. Right? So the really exciting thing, I don't get excited from the point of view of obligation or sanctimony. I get excited from the point of view of greed. If I want...
the greatest opportunity to find new minds. I'm going to go to the places that have been traditionally incapable. So you're agreeing with me basically when I say, when we talk about, you know, this, when we talk diversity and things, if we don't address, right. The presumptions that we're making and truly understand and come to the conclusion that you and I both have come through, through our own experiences that when you bring in, right.
women and minorities into these fields, they're gonna bring-- - They may bring. - They may bring, right, exactly, new things, new perspectives, value, intelligence, right? - Sometimes it's valuable, sometimes it's not. So for example, there is a thing that comes in with women in physics that I don't love,
which is a presumption that physics is, science is communal. And I hear this more from women scientists than I do from men scientists that say everything is social. Well, I understand that women may have a more social aspect and that there are more males who are isolationist and kind of don't want to deal with other people. I'm pretty social. You are? I am mostly gregarious, but I have a part of me that's extremely isolationist.
I don't, I am too. I do have, I think that there's an aspect of social, which is incredibly important. And I think women do a great job of managing it. I do think that there's an aspect where they try to deny that there are certain things that are not only non-social, but are actually a social where somebody is flipping the bird to the community and they're actually more productive than the entire community. So that's, that's like one of these things where there's, it's a double edged sword at a minimum.
The specific things that I really love about, well, I love and fear about the black experience is that you have to know that this whole Charles Murray thing about race and IQ means that a lot of people somehow believe that black physicists and black scientists and black academicians are substandard. The really weird thing about this whole eugenics thing is
Right. And the point that I want to make is I want to talk about it because normally people don't talk about it because they secretly carry a belief that blacks are less than. Now, I have three things that I care about as a weird IQ test because I don't like IQ tests because I don't do that well. I've never taken one. Smart man. Well, there's one thing called processing that kills me. It's one of the four components.
There are three things that really matter to me. Music, science, and humor. Now, if I take our two populations, right, when it comes to humor, it's about even whether blacks or Jews make better comedians. I would say you've got great examples in both cases of totally genius level comedians. There's no question that that requires a kind of
plasticity of mind, brilliance, insight, quickness. I would never want to go up against Jamie Foxx. I would never want to go up against Mel Brooks either. It's a draw from my perspective. When it comes to science, we're kicking your ass. When it comes to music, you've been kicking our ass.
Well, open the floodgates. Well, this is the thing. Open the floodgates and we will kick some ass in science. And you guys, a few of you are no less. We did jazz. And in my book, I make the case that, you know, the same cognitive types of things going on in bebop jazz can be transported into quantum physics. That's exactly the point. What are the odds that Stanley Jordan couldn't do quantum field theory? It's like zero.
There's no way that that mind. - Picked it up really fast when we hung up. - I guarantee it, right? Or Eric Lewis or any of these cats, right? The issue that we have that's different is because of this relationship to music and to humor, I'm absolutely positive that this particular population is a genius-based population. The black experience, in my opinion, is dependent on high pressure, very quick, extremely generative analytics.
And you find this in head cutting contests. You find this in playing the dozens. You find this in poetry slams. You find this in a preference for blitz chess over regular chess, right? It's very deeply woven through the black experience, which is like, Hey, we can't have access to the regular world. So we're going to have a lot of very high intensity contest to figure out who can cut it and who can't, which is why Eminem could,
Rise up the rap, you know circuit because there was an open mic same thing with jazz It's like you're good enough take the stage if you get blown off. I'm sorry, you know We're not gonna cry on our beer over. That's true inclusivity. That is true inclusivity based on Merit yes, and there's no group that I've ever met There's more terrifying when it comes to merit the black America. That's true. Okay, so
We have so much opportunity. So that was the thing that was partially generative to the growth of like bebop jazz. Well, particularly at Mitten's Playhouse in Harlem. The whole point is that you get somebody who's sounding off that they know how to play. You're like, okay, let's do this in seven eighths time in C sharp, you know, Phrygian or something. And you're like, what? You should check it. You should hear the, there's a nice story that the late great genius, you know,
Roy Hargrove talked about George Coleman when he went up to, you know, to Smoke, to a jazz club called Smoke, and sat in, and he was calling all these tunes and all these crazy keys and different time signatures. Well, I love that, you know, I think we talked before about the story about the botched piano on giant steps because the chord pages were just too hard. You know, and the whole point is...
I want to tap this tradition. I want to say, let's look at the intrinsic black tradition about using merit above everything under high pressure circumstances to, to select for the very best. And when we unlock that population, I'm excited because of greed. I'm not excited because of the fact that this is good for you. Good. And you know, um,
our National Society of Black Physicists, we're going to be all about this. Yeah? Yeah, in the next two years. Can't wait, my friend. Yes, and thanks for the continued support. All right. You've been through the portal with Dr. Stefan Alexander, the author of Jazz and Physics, who is welcome back at any time. Can I come tomorrow?
Almost any time. Please subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. Go over to YouTube. Not only subscribe to our channel, but also click the bell to be notified via that icon whenever our next video drops. And we hope to see you all soon. Be well, everybody.
