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

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Sabrina. Sean, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Man, I've been excited about this. So you're labeled, and I know you're probably going to downplay this, the next Einstein.

You don't like that. No, I mean, it's just not accurate, but I do like the notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit about what that legacy is and like our feel is a whole and how do we kind of leverage that or or do what good with it? Well, I think we're going to get into all that. But, um, you know, this stuff you're doing, I don't even know. I don't even know how to say it, but it sounds like we're going to get into it a minute.

But it sounds like what you're studying is if everything is a hologram. Most literally, yeah, but the thing that I study is that, and I do find it's fun. Like to kind of take a step back and talk to people who are not researchers to see how they interpret the words that we attached to things or how like visceral literal. Like the researcher versus like the person you're talking to takes it. Right on, right on. We're ready to get into it. Absolutely.

All right, let's do it. I'm going to start you off with an introduction here.

Sabrina Gonzalez Posteroski. Born in Chicago, Illinois, first generation Cuban American,

it aged nine. Your first flight lesson ignited a lifelong obsession with flight and physics behind it. Between ages 12 and 14, you spent two years building a single engine zenith. Rejected by Harvard, wait listed at MIT, you got off the wait list because of the airplane you built. Earned your PhD from Harvard in 2019 in high-energy theoretical physics, leading the celestial holography initiative. A project aimed at encoding the entire universe as a hologram to

unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. Name two scientific Americans, 30 under 30 in 2012, in Forbes 30 under 30 science list in 2015. One of the Albert Einstein foundations 100 greatest innovators in 2018. First woman to chair the flagship annual strings conference for the global

string theory community. First female to graduate number one in MIT physics. And like I said before,

many consider you to be the next Einstein. Which you hate. You, you, you, you don't like this.

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

It's a cool label. Yeah. Be proud of that. But um, so actually before we get into it, just can you give me a quick, I think I know what string theory is, at least a little bit, but is this, is this like, uh, what are they quantum communication? So, so basically, like quantum information or they kind of like, uh, the sense in which you might be thinking

is more like in holography, there are definitely connections between, uh, foundational aspects of like entanglement and different, like protocols you can do in a quantum mechanical system and then mapping it to a gravitational one. So string theory is not related to that directly, but there's

“a sense in which the research I do probably is like more closely related if that's what you're”

asking. But basically, the whole point is we want to try to, as a field, not individually,

understand like what the basic rules are, what are the laws of nature? And if you aren't going out and measuring things, what do you really have at your disposal? You're roughly trying to use mathematical consistency of your frameworks to try to piece together a picture. And so if you have rules for the very short distance physics and very long distance physics that are kind of in their own world and you want to try to have a framework that connects both of them. You run into

various problems and string theories. One example of a uh, route that people have found to kind of avoid the pitfalls of like understanding how to have a graviton or how to have like a quantum mechanical system with gravity. But in practice, you're roughly setting one little facet of these

mathematical frameworks and trying to push it pretty far or generalize it to different situations.

Okay. What is the, read something that China's was working on for communications, where they will vibrate half of an atom, and then no matter what the distance is, the other at the other half of the atom will mimic exactly what? Talking about some entanglement or what?

“Yes. That's what I was thinking about quantum entanglement. Sure. So I think that the, I am less”

like on top of all of the experiments when it comes to trying to see like not just entanglement, but maybe like some sort of like position dependence or whatnot, which is like closer to like seeing like how gravity and quantum interface. But um, so I don't know exactly which experiment, but I know that there's a lot on like kind of the, there's a lot of progress on like the quantum

computing side of things, which I guess is like the closest thing to an engineering subfielder

right now within like high energy theory, but a little bit not high energy. All right, so a couple things to crank out here. Yes. You got a patreon. Okay. You got a patreon. Yep. And um, they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from J.D. Pardon. All right. It's 12. You weren't playing video games. You were in a garage building a Zenith CH601 XL. What did that mechanical grease

under the, under the fingernails experience teach you about solving abstract physics problems

“that a textbook never could. I think it's not, maybe it didn't teach me like enough for what I have”

done so far, but it definitely instilled a sense in which like there's a value to try to find the things that can be straightforward and systematic and build something cool out of it. And I think that that's one thing that maybe theoretical physics personally felt like it was lacking because I had this bias of growing up around people who like built cool shit or whatnot is like is there a sense in which you can try to find the engineering aspects of what you do in the

systematic things and like build tools for that. So that's the thing that that project probably has instilled in me, but I don't think I've like lived that out yet. Right on. Yeah. Right on. And then I got you a gift. Okay. Everybody gets a gift. Okay. Don't be honest. I heard. Thank you. Good job, Sly. Going Bears made the USA up at Michigan. Oh, you want to try him? Go ahead. They're going to love him. Okay. I know how to open a damn bag with thanks.

Yummy. That's a good. Nice. What made you want to have gummy bears as a product because it's super fun. Actually, I was going to do CBD gummies for Slype and um yeah, my marker is that I'll get sued for catering to kids. So I said, I would just do regular gummy bears because I like those too. I can eat them in. Right. Right. But but um so I want to do a full-life story on you and then get into everything that you're doing right now. So where did you grow up?

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois and um like in the city, but like near the outskirts of the city part of the city where a lot of like firemen and cops would like us live because they had to live technically in the city. Um you know I love like Chicago is a kind of fun like well-designed city where you have like a lot of like awesome public schools and I went to a medicinal gift center was nearby where I lived at the time my parents picked that location to be near in a schools um and it was

you know fun growing up awesome having like smart peers and being challenged in school and then um yeah I guess I can I can keep iterating on different parts of it but I definitely had some enthusiastic parents and and that's where this whole like taking advice for mentors and kind of just following different rabbit holes led to where I am now.

and like the in the way all of their lawyers fancy sense um so my dad uh for most of his career was a public defender so he worked for like the like Cook County and then my mom works for the

“EPA so more like um I think the rags for like making sure that companies that accidentally”

polluted like various like groundwater or or things that like affects people like they have to pay and fix their problems. Wow so nothing to do with physics. Nothing to do with physics but my dad did have an electrical engineering like undergrad degree and so definitely growing up like we were the ones doing repairs in our house we didn't really hire contractors except for maybe

some things that had to be welded um so that was interesting too. And you did your first flight lesson

and we should the other one of your parents who I let they weren't at the time. My dad got a license much I mean he got a license at some point um pretty soon after but um maybe he had a relative back in the day that had phone or whatnot and I like Harry Potter was cool at the time and I think I wanted like a flying broomstick so like they definitely convinced me like Santa Claus was real. It was really funny. I think they'd used like these extrinsic motivation things to like

get me to be a good kid or whatnot so like I was convinced Santa Claus is real because the presence was awesome um but like I guess like a little greedy and I wanted like a flying broomstick because like Harry Potter was cool and then they were like flight lessons so like I mean that's cool. I mean it but it's like and it's funny because it's a bougie style hobby but it's very much more like they would just do anything for their one kid if that makes sense like it's like yeah. That's all

my mom's family like so her dad was like a carpenter when and then he like they moved from Cuba and then on my dad's side his his father was a bit in trouble with with things and some point

“that's why he became a public defender and so to them they made it and no they you know they”

want to invest in their kid man so that so and and you build a plane yeah I mean but the thing is age 12 yeah and that and that comes from the fact that like I mean like people do this right so so what's the the way that this stuff works out so you're your nine-year-old flying and then you're dad's like oh look my kids like so cool flying like like like before these people that they can meet that you go to a lot of like air shows like because he was a lawyer so he has some sense of

rags like there was this kind of fun thing of looking for like how can you get around the fact that you'd have to be like 16 to fly alone in the US but in Canada you can only you can do this at 14 and so I had found out that like Jamal Arkins was this aerobatic pilot who had gone up to Canada to the flight train to get through this kind of legal loophole of how old he could be to fly alone wrote a essay about it and then I started getting these like mentors in the FAA and then my dad was

super encouraging of like going out and networking and it's very easy to network when you're cute little kid you don't have to be good at public speaking you're like you're just like you're just a kid with some pictures of you like flying or like the big parachute behind you and they're fully like it's like overpowering and like you can walk your way into things like you're bring like a crispy cream doughnuts to the FAA it's perishable you know and you start making friends

and then you see all these people who are you know building kit planes and then you're like damn it's hard to get into school these days like can you do some sort of trick to get into

either like there's like selective high school and so I went or MIT and yeah and then I always just

trusted my like like I thought my dad was new to everything because he was really like kind of a jack of all trades fixing things around the house so when he is like over my shoulder or like teaching me how to do some things and I'm just going and riveting things together unlike this is great I know if he says it's fine it's fine like like and it was cool because basically before the it turned into this set of mentors suggesting oh you could do this thing like whenever it was just

“that much effort put into like school projects so I had like like I think whenever like people were”

like first burning DVDs we'd have like a room in our house so one of the better homes are painted chroma key blue that I would go and like reenact little teens for my history projects and like no kid and put into I had like some like doctor who episode or something like that so it was

we'd like we'd basically we're just trying to do like like say a plus star on every little school

project which is a bit of a waste of time but just a funny little like effort and then to translate that into something where then the narrative was like okay you're gonna take flight lessons you're then gonna like you know try to build an airplane and then want to work for these aerospace companies like a linear kind of story arc with a bunch of like fast-paced like projects type of thing in between was something I think that came out of this otherwise like intense like wow do it

well attitude what what what did you start reading oh I I mean I don't know I don't think I don't recall myself as being like a like a better reader than my classmates if anything when I was in kindergarten like Allison Lairby could read all of the joke cups and so like I mean I could read but like maybe my vocabulary was not as expansive and so then my parents would like buy all of the Dixie joke cups like you know in bulk to then be able to at least read the words on but like

but then the kids still would just go to Allison maybe because she was like the first person

yeah so I don't think I was necessarily reading faster but I probably was talking a lot

or like and they used to do the thing where it's like I could write it out then they'd let me like if I asked for a car ride at some random time and I'd if I could write it on the little chalkboard they'd take me on a car ride so a lot of extrinsic motivation though right on right do you have any brothers and sisters? I don't and that's that's very wild the intense story stuff is because it's like one kid one shot you know what else I mean what else were you

designing inventing building I mean I would say that like the it wasn't anything that like before it would have been just like going all out on every little class project just for this the heck of it not um nothing that cool and I think that but the one thing is it was like kind of like it was pretty clear to see how easily like the goals were shaped by either like strong reactions

too or like taking on ideas from like the people that you talked to so like when I was flying

everyone would be like oh one day you're gonna be like flying the our Boeing one day when we're like we're um like taking a vacation I'm like no I don't want to do that I don't want to do that um and then you see these people building kit planes super cool at these air shows uh when you're putting together they're like a one day you're gonna be building the Boeing I'm like I don't want to do that um and so it's just more of like a someone says you can do it and

the my dad's like yeah you can do it then we see how you can do it or and then someone's saying

“you will be doing it you're like no I don't want to do it and so that's how accidentally pivoted”

into physics later like we can get to because I was like ah it's not as cool if you're not actually like you know there's the designs aren't really changing and you're not like putting to you I mean it was somehow more fun to have something where you do straightforward work somebody else kind of told you the steps for you modifying it or find like that but then you have a product that you built versus when you're just engineering something a little it's like a little

two theoretical I might have outgo the whole it's other extreme of purely theory which is maybe

about choice but but it kind of what did you get you into physics yeah so funny sorry so basically

I think the first hint at it was the high school I went to this math and science school like all of the like a large fraction of the faculty had PhDs and so I didn't grow up with people who had PhDs I mean my parents both had like you know their lawyers so they went to like you know state schools for that um but suddenly now all of your peers think they have to get a PhD to be cool so that's a weird thing like suddenly have this mind shift we're okay I need a PhD

probably not true but like that that starts I mean definitely not true but that that starts getting seeping in the person who founded my high school uh was like a former director for me lab and he'd have like these lunches with Nobel laureates with like they'd come in and give talks and then he would have lunch with the students if it was just him every um Monday or something I remember wait hold on yeah I thought you want to public school I went to really it's a public school so

like so this is not Chicago public school so I went K through eight Chicago public schools and they have like these kind of magnet like programs like give designer type of thing lived different types of magnet programs so CPS is like so large that they have fun schools for kids who like school I guess okay then I went to the state school that's three years boarding school paid for like mainly by like state of Illinois um math and science school and

“I'm math and science academy so I think it's fun to do the umbrella of like university of Illinois”

or whatnot there's presidents in South Carolina I believe in Texas and others where it's just like a STEM boarding school that the state runs it it's a it's public wow but it's like it's like you get this if take the SAT to get in and things like that but it's kind of actually cool that there are these like that is school you took the SAT to get in uh yeah I mean and this course for kids getting in like to high school or not that good or not definitely wasn't the type of person who

did well on standardized test I do well and like the ones in school because I cared about the teacher of training press but um yeah it was neat because it was a public school but it was very much like a little bit of this vibe of like a gifted private yeah type of school experience in the sense of you know you're at a boarding school but it was nice because then it could get kids from all over like even our elementary school was like your busing kids in from all over the city and so

we have a lot of like just gifted kids from like various socioeconomic backgrounds there and then similarly with like the boarding school aspect let's you be from anywhere in Illinois wow so nice wow

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so that's all the PhDs got you into physics so it was the PhDs plus the fact that the founder was a physicist like a Nobel Laureate in physics who then somehow when like the plane is very final assembly like near and work or partner by this high school and he thinks it's cool he's like oh you can be a physicist and then suddenly that gets into our minds and then all of these aerospace like executives who were running these like private aerospace companies so I guess not Richard Branson

but Elon Musk and Basos both like like physics for whatever reason like they are like dropped out of some physics-ish like material science degrees Sanford or thought about majoring in Princeton so my heroes were these guys who like could just do cool shit like they had built a company to have the resources to then do something that's valuable but not necessarily profitable or I'm sure

“they found ways to make a profitable but I thought that was- I think they're doing all right”

I think they're doing no no but even in the scope of like can you like how do you just build a no I've got to get what you said so I thought that was the coolest thing and I wanted to be like that and I figured okay like if I just worked for them when I ever still be like that I don't know maybe and I got a little dissolution about like what's the product I'm gonna build every if you build like some some orbital thing if like you accidentally kill a rich person I was like I'm

gonna just be dead you know but they did a good job like they didn't do this I was surprised I'm like damn like if you accidentally kill a rich person would you know you know I'm so like you're you so that type of thing scared me a little bit and then I figured they like physicists so like how can I be cool to the people I find cool let me go into physics which is like the wrong reason to go into physics and then by the way like I grew up with a bunch of like kind of

like mechanics slash engineers who maybe see like the physics says like this bottleneck that the physicists aren't doing it right like there's gotta be some cool tech that can come out of this and I'm like yeah I'm gonna go in the field and it's like completely not like you gotta hide that at least when you're actually trying to like I'll do it right now very much wrong reasons to

go into the field wow what what I mean what was what was the first project that really grabbed

your attention because you obviously love it you're still in it I'm still in it no but I still

“think the thing it's for that bigger picture goal so I think the thing that grabbed my attention”

is more you know I I liked my math and science course in school I think that maybe in hindsight looking back just the notion of being computing something draws your attention in in a way where then once you're in it you're hooked and that's good for my job mechanically in the sense that like our job is to give you things but I do think that I was still more excited by the bigger picture view or this notion of the possibilities of what physicists could do

then in practice what it is in the same sense that like you know someone working at Google like isn't necessarily actually like it's a thing about search they're doing one specific little widget or something you know type of thing but yeah what do we go from high school oh so from high school we go to being a little bit too cocky and like being like MIT for aerospace however for physics and then not getting in because you wrote too many poems or didn't

“early like I think that the one thing about the admissions of these schools I mean it's so much luck”

so that's a bit sad I think that grad admissions is fairer because you're already kind of differentiated in your skill set and like the people with meeting you and the people who care about the field that you're going into but I think I thought like all these other kids are taking the AP courses they're checking off all these boxes for their extracurriculars they don't want that they want something different it's like no maybe it's just like you know like they're seeing a large array

boxes and more or something I think I didn't I didn't handle it right but then I knew how to bother people because I'd been networking some say was a kid so you find like Sheila Woodenol or

“who else I think like we shouldn't might not have helped with the admissions it was more like”

Earl Merman but basically I'd be this kid with this little like photos of this airplane

build walking around and like my parents would drop me off at different places so like wondering MIT hallways to try to like say hi to someone with this book and and I was like okay and then I just patiently wait I mean probably not as cool as like waiting for like a sniping mission but like you're just there you're like somebody's here I'm gonna say hi to the mission is to get this book in the hands of some MIT for wow I mean cool people and it was like you give

farce the secretaries or whatever things like that um so a lot of networking is a kid and eventually it helped because I had some friends who couldn't be like hey admissions office like maybe she didn't present this clearly enough in our application this is kind of cool letter and then I got in uh of the way it was done by T you got anywhere off the way it was to MIT yeah that way

'cause you try to get into Harvard too right yeah I got rid of my rejected but I mean to be fair

lots of kids get rejected lots of awesome kids get rejected it's not something it's something more about like teaching you not to um like rely on other things happening for you that you can't control right so like yeah what was it that got you off the way list of MIT it was probably the step of networking thing like you know trying to like rely on some people who could vouch for me once you're on this way list it wasn't the plane well there was a plane exactly so I'm saying

this how did the plane with like the little like photo book of the airplane and then meeting you literally brought the photo whole good evening I would like like I had little business cards

“back in the day I mean I think I mean I like it's very cringy I but that's awesome I blame it at”

no but like it was like you had little like photo books of the plane little business cards and like like thinking of who you want to meet and you're gonna meet that person and you're this cute little kid I mean like you to get like a little bit less cute once you're in your teenagers but between like you know 12 and 14 you're pretty cute so like walking around like with that like train introduced myself to like various MIT faculty say or like at the air shows various people

me if a or like maybe Peter demand is or or folks who had done cool stuff and either like the private aerospace like like initially sorry had gone up uh in a Soyuz capsule and then demand has had the x-priced so like definitely a lot of like trying to network but with like little man that is a yeah I'm gonna do that with my kids no I mean worse it's like an arbitrage opportunity it's like there are things that like the kid can get the access and yeah that's smart

I love it I love it so how did you like how how was it getting into MIT so I mean it was very early because I didn't get into college otherwise right I mean I was very dumb I was like very narrow minded in the sense of like or like laser focused on I want this thing or this thing not enough I have standards but you can't like have standards if you're not like what they want but I guess it helps to be able to have a little bit of that story and some of that network to like

petition or whatever put a good word in once it was on the way up so yeah how do you like it

“oh I loved MIT was it challenging yeah but I love that you know and I think that's the thing is like”

I actually I loved it way more than my experience at Harvard but like not to say that other people don't like each for their own but it was just I like the fact that it was intense and like like you knew where you stood it wasn't a bunch of kids bullshitting like in like you take you know you take the courses that you're ready for and then get you up to the next speed and not a bunch of if everybody gets an A then you can pretend that you know stuff and the if kids sitting

in on courses they shouldn't be in and them like who knows what it's like babble versus it just felt more like when in worked hard it got something out of it I love structure and and yeah something helping push you yeah yeah what exactly were you studying so I ended up majoring in physics so I like when I went in there's like a lot of just general institute requirements at the beginning for years so I was able to sneak into being like this internship at can be space center with a

bunch of older eroestro kids and then I think it was the after that first summer I also interned at

Boeing and I guess at the time I was scared of like this whole like narrative of like the airplane build and like flying as a kid like how much that would confine me and I so I guess my Rebelling was like going the other option was physics somehow and so I like I like my physics courses I did well and I just pivoted into like letting major in physics because you did it you did an internship of Boeing yeah but it wasn't I mean probably it's a lot of kids do internships it

was probably because of the kit plane and stuff like that and these these connections that I was maybe considered as a freshman or like younger than maybe other people would have but you know you end up you were you you did an internship as a freshman at Boeing between I think I hope I'm right between freshman and the sophomore year I'm like if I'm not memory I mean as a freshman you were

I don't have any companies lots of MIT kids have companies but I hope I hope the spirit is there

for the for the wrong application but when I was at Boeing I probably and this is the type of mistake that I would make often is you have like you make awesome mentors that you want to learn

“something from but sometimes you want to not just literally take their advice and so I think that”

my family and I we accidentally would you know work for the person that gave you that introduction rather than thinking about okay we're also Boeing what I rather being necessarily so I ended up in this arm where they were doing some cool like R&D for a project that didn't feel like it was ever gonna be built by Boeing because it was kind of a McDonald Douglas acquired branch of the company and that this illusion me a little bit not because it it should have but because it's just like

like engineering isn't always the same thing or academic engineering isn't always the same thing

as like building something and I think that I thought it would be closer to like we'll fast-break things do cool things and I think if I had seen any military side of Boeing it would be a very different experience but I was kind of just like you know sometimes the technology of within a given field isn't the thing that then advances that field and so and again because of these super reasons of like a bunch of like we like not knowing enough about physics to realize that isn't the right route like

you know maybe studying like the fundamental laws of nature would it would help you more than studying like coding or something if like the the new tech is like other drones or better engine designer whatever for like pushing aerospace forward so very naive but kind of disappointing with the fact that you could see that even at a big company that's doing some awesome things like there's a sense in which you can get lost in the R&D phase you just mentioned something you said that the the latest

technology in a field isn't necessarily what's going to advance you know how do you make that determination so I'm I think what I'm saying is just like a lot of times you can see it in like and I see this in physics with people who complain about physics who are not necessarily in the the in crowd or whatever and like they can say true things and maybe draw the wrong conclusions about intent or about like what to do about it I think that oftentimes like you can just kind of see

that there's like a lot of low hanging fruit and then it stagnates a bit and like I mean to they accept like you know the design for like a passenger airplane really hasn't changed so much and so like do you just look at like try to find a definition of progress and see that it's slowing down and not blame yourself for not being smart enough but try to see like what do I actually care about do I like it because I like doing the thing or do I want to product and once you

“have the product in mind probably it's easier to decide like what you need to learn and go do”

okay yeah let's rewind it for a minute you you had a high school internship at Blue Origin a little bit but that was so short that was like I mean so the the internships at Boeing was a real normal internship and then the one where it was a Blue Origin was some mentors were nice and like let me I forget exactly I probably I'm not I can pretend that this idea I don't remember exactly all the the utility of the thing that I was playing with at the time there and then the one at

NASA was also very much more like show-in-tell I felt like we were learning like operations instead of any particular cool tech but we got to see a lot of fun stuff on the tours we'll kind of fun stuff like I thought the coolest thing was somehow these like tiles where you could heat it up and it would still be really hot on the inside you could touch it on the outside like that was that was one but it was just like going around a different parts of like can be space entering

literally getting a tour with a bunch of aerospace engineer students and at the time and then this is kind of funny too because I used to think if I was a little bit bullshitting to have these and I'm again I don't know like I'm not knowing it's all the experts but something felt off about there being a whole enterprise around like how you organize your enterprise it feels like kind of like prompt engineering now it's surprising how how much of a discipline do you make the things that

feel like soft skills and so that internship was very much like trying to see how different parts

“of NASA were working together or like like that but it's such a high level view that I think I was”

like this isn't the tech and maybe in hindsight though I should have like appreciated it more but I think at the time I was just weird going from like you know playing to uh what what are your what are the other interns were there other interns yeah I mean one of my things in a sort of so we they were awesome um I was probably just a little bit annoying because I was younger and like and I was like I turned out I turned out I turned out like oh my god this is a kid

of ours it's freaked out over like I turned things out but um like it's like who could see

documents oh but uh but basically they like one of them I think was going to go in the air force

maybe he did I hope so I don't I don't know I didn't really follow up because I ended up going to

it was a you know I think I didn't appreciate how valuable your peers are until I started going more towards physics just because then I got into the whole like research community and stuff but um yeah I probably was just annoying little freshman and then like how do you think they

“felt about you how much younger were we all the green oh no I mean no I think I wasn't that much younger”

but enough when you skip a year or so like right college is you know if you're how old I would have been like 17 or something in there like 21 or 2 it's still a bit different if you're a yeah they're more independent and life and then you had an internship at Surn yeah so then I went over to physics because I guess so I made that choice for physics because I liked my physics courses and again all of these tech people who were in aerospace were my heroes

and they liked physics so I'm like I'm gonna try and press them how hard you can be um and then

but the the mistake I made was I guess that I just kind of took the first internship type

opportunity from the person who was technically my undergrad advisor and so it was at Surn. So I started as cool but I'm sure that like like I didn't necessarily make the right choice in the sense that I wasn't like scanning all opportunities of things within the field I could be in turning it or whatnot. I was very lucky that the one year that I do the first year I go to Surn they discovered the Higgs boson but like you know science is slow especially in like a calculator.

First year you want to Surn. They're like they're discovering Higgs boson that's nothing to do with me but just the right timing of like discovered what Higgs boson? I'm sorry. What is that? It's like so trying to understand the um the origin of like masses for like the standard model particles um it's an extra feel that was projected to be there to describe also like a lecture week symmetry breaking in et cetera. It's like the the the the the field content of like the the

things that made it interactions between particles um and so basically they have a new discovery

in a way where that's like really rare but like you know sampled by us of like you're in there they do cool stuff so like okay that was neat um but again Surn is huge right so it's just it's interesting to also see how hard it is to make some measurement for like some quantities within theories that are also a terric and so it's it's a fun thing to see the engineering side of physics research um but but again I was just I'm just a kid dying of like

“having some fun doing like a little bit of like a I think it was some just for my”

undergrad thesis along lines of like some data analysis back of the envelope thing for a future detector type of them. And what what is that what there's a lot of conspiracy that all kinds of stuff on out of all. I wish that see this thing is these conspiracy

that are never like it's always just not as cool as they make it sound and what are they doing?

They're just colliding like particles right like you want to you want to send things in at higher height energy so they get close enough and then you can start to see the structure of a thing so imagine like you have like as bag of quirks and you start to see that like the like the kind of component nature of your um like protons and things like that. So it's it's just you're colliding and then you're trying to measure what's coming out and you want to like try to

infer how your theory of the interactions is consistent with that. What is coming out? I'm sure I mean so I mean it should be jets at some point these things have organized. Sorry so like basically you're colliding say the depending on the collider you're putting like say electron positron and other colliders and he says like say two protons are colliding um and you're going to have the protons are made up of some like quirks and then they're going to have some interactions

and then they're shooting out other quirks but like there's other particles in your your standard model field theory and those interactions will determine I guess the the rate at which different things are produced and so there's a theoretical thing you're you're you're modeling like those very short distance scale interactions and then you're trying to infer from the energy deposited or like different particle tracks that this thing is actually what happened to then say something

about your your theory and that's fun and that's cool but the scary thing is just how big like how hard it is to like probe those high energy scales and you see these huge I mean the collider itself is like this rings are amazingly huge it goes around three countries right yeah I mean well they're near a border but yeah but um yeah so very interesting engineering feeds for fundamental physics and that's cool and something I probably didn't appreciate as much as I like because I

wanted to theory I obviously somehow didn't appreciate it enough um but yeah it's it's cool I don't I don't know you end up knowing so little compared to all the things you wish that you know about the stuff is there any is there any truth to the fact that you're trying to

“create some kind of a black hole they're not trying to you know I think that there's so that was”

the fun thing to see I think I'm finally met one person who is kind of this back of the envelope fear-monger or fun guy uh for the millionaires you know like he's like I can understand like you mean you if you're probably from a defense kind of point of view you want to understand the risks

if we were if I mean I'd love to be like building wormholes but they're not gonna be like you're not gonna be able to translate anything though so it's it's so sad this is the no-goes that are the worst thing like I'm I'm just curious because it sounds like now you're into you're really into black holes and there's I'm yeah I know but I like again I spent most of like my childhood convinced that like there was cool stuff that could be done and then most of like the like learning grad school

or an an event of grad school the hard way it's not that cool and then being upset at the fact that all these people overheight things like it's not as cool kind of competing is like way overheight and then suddenly I actually is useful you're like holy shit so so I don't know where I should land in the end or what I should learn from the fact that like yeah completely dissolution to like overly enthusiastic in a couple weeks how long are you answering out just like two summers like

whatever the like less than 90 days or whatever for the work from when I forget now but just two summers I mean what's it like there what's it like when you walk in what's it there it looks like

“old buildings um like I think that it's a bunch of either where to think about it is the way that”

it interfaces with say the US institutions or things like that you'll just have a lot of like amount of what year like 50 years or something they look like dated buildings but with a bunch of people in offices and then all the cool expensive technologies and actual like detectors say so it just kind of looks like um I don't know like what you would imagine probably some industrial companies think it's a vibe is it I mean do you go underground uh I wouldn't

for what I'm doing but sure I better for a tour or if someone are actually like putting together the detectors absolutely yeah they do tours um yeah when it's not running yeah I gotta check it out yeah they're gonna hardhead so how how do they get two atoms to collide in it so this is a way above my paper but it's a bunch of magnets accelerating these things to like like higher speeds and then I wish I knew I I should literally like I should probably you know detectors then but luckily I've

not technically studying the manufacturing of uh or like engineering of of the things the Tesla experiment I'm like purely in the theory side do you see when the particles hit so they would see the tracks afterwards so that's a funny thing too is like you're not actually seeing like you don't see the Higgs boson you're seeing like the fact that the things that came afterwards

“are consistent with it being there and I think that that was a kind of funny thing too again very silly”

but maybe visceral lessons of like you're not actually seeing the thing you're inferring the thing versus like for gravitational waves it really is like a it's a soundwave where they're seeing the you know the mirrors move apart and that's kind of fun it's fun when it's the they're actually seeing the thing they're seeing they're seeing sort of indirectly inferring the thing that's interesting what's processing is what is that all mean uh to each their own I think that sorry you know uh

what it means in some sense is like you've tested a particular theory and so you're kind of ruling out some parameter space oh okay there's no super partners or things like that too

or we understand the taking secondism um do you say super partner so like basically I think that

at some point a lot of people were looking for like extra particles that would come if there was this like symmetry relating um for mounds and bows on so things that want to um like be a part from one another like you only want to like fill one at each uh state versus things that like to kind of cohere have like um amplify each or like like I sorry that's a bad analogy but there's two types of particles like like intruder spin and half integer spin and some people were trying to

conjecture that when you build these colliders you're going to see more and more particles and and then that'll change the way that we think of these frameworks being organized and things like that but you know turns out maybe maybe not maybe you know we don't know when when the next like new discovery's going to be and so it's weird because then you're trying to fund an experiment

where you don't know what the answer is going to be and you're like how expensive is it to motivate

or to build this thing? Wow. Yeah. But luckily I'm not as involved in that. I like I'm like purely theory for the sake of that way I can be decoupled from these a high cost experimental ventures for a bit and then just tackle that problem of kind of like mathematical like a induction or something on the theoretical physics purpose I think is nice one maybe. Say it. I didn't really think much about skin care before but after enough long days travel in stress

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the experimental things to get into grad school at Harvard at MIT grad school options. I went to Harvard because it would be more easy to pivot. I thought because I'd already worked for the

“people at MIT and then at Harvard I think I was. It was like quantum computing or string there”

and I thought that quantum computing was overhyped but so I picked the other one and I don't know how people feel. Like string theory was so cool back then and it was like you know Brian Green was very much making it cool when I was a kid and I still think it's super cool but it's not for the same like almost for the same reasons that people sometimes hate on it a little bit. So can you can you give me a

dub-down version of string theory? Maybe so basically quantum field theory is giving you these

fields that explain why particles are identical because they're like the electron is just an excitation of this field so like I've multiple electrons or excitation of the same field. You can think of say the mechanical process of how I compute some amplitude like these think predictions first are in as a bunch of world lines coming in with some rules for how they interact and split off and create other particles. String theory is kind of chubbing out this like

graph to like a sheet kind of like a literal like a pair of pants say so interacting and like you have this world sheet. So what it does for you is it kind of two things like one thing is it kind of opens up this UV behavior so they sort of points it's kind of just like this branching of like a

two-ling thing and then the other hand it also gives you a particle spectrum. So basically

it's like you can imagine okay let's try to build some mathematical framework within which I have the spectrum where I have this gravaton they expect this gravitational field and then I avoid some pitfalls of trying to treat gravity as a quantum field theory too and so and then people just keep building off of it and then there's years and years of paper is that you're like behind on when you're a new grad student but the main idea is trying to find some underlying mathematical

framework that can let you have you know your cake can eat it to like gravity and a quantum theory. Okay okay all right so we go to Harvard. We go to Harvard. Get your PhD. I'm working on my PhD

“and I think the whole airplane story I have a bunch of friends who are like in aerospace who think”

oh this kid's cool I'm doing some fun research with like with Andy and friends with like it's been memory effects of like that but then and then you get overhyped really quickly because you know any press is good press if you try to start a company but not if you're trying to get along with the two thousand people and I feel that like you know or someone's been barred by like what a string theory being moving into everything so like very much close ranks type of things so

that happens in the middle of my PhD so I like I guess I'm lucky that I didn't take all of these advanced grad courses and just took a lot of E&M for like some of the stuff that my advisor happened to be doing was very like you know you have a charge when it accelerates it radiates kind of like you know when you have an antenna like you're you're seeing like the the radio signal from some charges moving up and down antenna so it was very easy math compared to a lot of stuff that

people do in my field that I could latch on to and then think of some sort of fun little experiment well not real experiment more like a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure in your momentum loss and inspiring binary systems say so I have a fun result pretty early on in my career but it's like it's a lot of luck that like you know if Andy's on the paper then people care and people will write about it has been memory effect or something versus it's

so you see you get a little bit of like that's cool a lucky in hindsight very much love the kind of way that sometimes ideas can come together really quickly and then other times you're wasting a lot of time just being stuck so I have a lucky to have some good experiences in the beginning of my grad program but then I get hyped up in a silly way with this Einstein bullshit and then I'm like oh because my family thinks it's awesome you know like I mean yes when I was a kid if I was

gonna be a physicist when you want to be like an amazing physicist like of course that's the

goal you go to a linda you go to these conferences where all these noble laureates get to hang out and you're the the students who get to meet them you know like this is the life I mean maybe

“not exactly like I think it's better if you're in the money in the new era but but like there is a”

life to like just being good at your job would get you and it's like I wish I wish you were real you know because like hype will just go away at some point so I've got a taste of the the dark side with that but also seeing just a little bit more of the sociology of why do people like this like narrative of like a individual doing something cool and how does that fit into the fact that within our field the people who write like popular science books are not necessarily

ostracized but it's just like it's distance a bit and then it's hard to work with them so like it's funny the people that you see is the physicists publicly are like not the real physicists somehow interesting and I don't yeah I think it's just funny politics almost there you see you want

wish I did no I want to be for the sake of wanting to do well in my job I need to be right

I don't want to be above the radar as a physicist in the sense of like I don't deserve attention as a physicist right I wish that I did something cool enough where I felt like this wasn't completely like whatever thing but I do think what I want is that there should be a way for you know the fact that you know people care about science it's good like how do you better kind of link together like the folks who are good at outreach or the folks who are lucky enough

to have opportunity to have outreach and the research in a way that benefits the research is best

“for the like the physics and I'm excited for that being something that we can change now and I think”

that maybe I don't know if it's because I'm faculty now or because the time to change with how science is funded that people are more open-minded to you know a little bit of like um

being creative with how you interact with industry for example and I and that's exciting to me

because that's like things can get done a lot faster when you're not just in a group of people who have all decided this is the way it's because it's been like that yeah where did the where did the Einstein analogy come from I think it's just some Aussie article trying to be flashy and it was good quick but I don't know like I mean to be fair like you wouldn't use those words I mean you're our studying gravitational waves and then people just try to be nice and I don't know if

it was a girl boss type of a decade or whatever 2016 or 2015 when six days um so that stuff I have no clue I'm pretty sure like you don't see the articles before they come out and like I didn't want any ridiculous comparisons because mostly you know airplane build kit stuff probably makes it a cool story and then you're doing fun stuff with you know top people in the field and sure Hawking starts like to work on stuff with Andy so there's that part of it too and he

Hawking is one of the few examples of somebody who is like known for their research and their

“operation like actually really good at both I think it's rich rare to have somebody where they're”

popular and they did really cool stuff Penrose is another example I'd say and I'm sure that there's more than I could start listening but but it's it's rare uh on most see nothing he was my hero as a kid and then I went through different phases of how I feel about the guy what no I know I would be here I would get in here like so so I don't like it and this is me being very very and not realistic but like I'm in high school and I see like there's like quanta article about

Toulula Riley taking like physics courses at Caltech and I'm like she's not a physicist she's just taking a few physics courses I could do better this guy thinks I'm like I'm a kid this is them but I was like these guys like physics them um but but I didn't understand to what extent they do so like I saw him as somebody like post this thing to an Ironman and sense of build cool shit and get people to build cool shit and like I thought if I were to choose I do the same thing right

and then you see like you start getting a little shaky of like how much does he actually know how to do it's like you know how much is a team behind him that's really um holding it up and then how much like like I thought okay if I like get the page that you're something I'll be the actual expert so then be able to be more legitimate and a position where you get to do cool stuff

“but I think that's the kind of wrong attitude so like so I went through phases where I was like”

very dissolution with the fact that he kind of represented science or tech like people believed whatever he said was like right and that he also was the engineer and he also was all this up not saying he's a reason but I'm saying like there was definitely this sense in which there's no way he's actually doing all this stuff because I see how hard it is for people to do all these right um and then you you know you get over it or whatever and you realize how you know

there's a lot of value to being able to get other people on board with the same vision because then you can really push for it and as long as that push is to something that's possible then you're good if it's a push to something that's impossible that scary and I think that that was something we're again before before the AI stuff I was very dissolution and being like man they were like taking buzzwords and creating them with like quantum computing and and what

also was like solution by like you'd see things that as a physicist you know like there's certain no-goes and they're still getting funded you know like you know like we don't have like this lack of vision we wish we were doing cool stuff but like somehow we can you know now I think that's changing and the same time these people are just overselling things kind of adjacent to what we do and acting like they're going to be better because they're entrepreneurs

and like when we don't know what we're doing and um I was very I almost resentful of that at sometime but I think the coolest thing now is like damn like the products they're building with like cloud code or whatnot are super useful in the sense of you know as a physicist not many people in theory know how to um do much more than like pen and paper or he's mathematical I whatnot if I wanted to like think about questions that are more like systematic like you just want

to like compute all of these different things numerically or whatnot those are not valued because they're filled with so small that one person doing it would be considered a waste of time because they're

not gonna have a chance of getting a breakthrough but you know when you have tools that open up

your ability to basically like instead of hiring or hiring a dev team like you don't need the resources for that you can still like just do it yourself it's really cool so I'm like super

or at least the things that I wish my job were um so I think my my my opinion is clearly oscillating a lot about about some of these these folks but what do you think they were going to

“make it to Mars oh so I think I mean I think he could make it to Mars depending on his definition”

right so like I but I was okay it was really almost grim we're like very pragmatic I was like you just want to get to Mars you don't necessarily come back so like can you do like a you know the first person to go to Mars one way could bring a bunch of like genetic material in a long arc and have it like credonically frozen out I was thinking like send him one way um so I think someone could get to Mars absolutely if they change the definition of the scope of what their goal

is but yeah how fast you think we can get there oh I I don't I don't I'm not going to be the expert on that I think that I definitely um would be parroting things and I was a kid like off of what other people were saying um and I do think it depends what you want for it like I always thought you know man missions were cooler than automated missions like the divide was cooler but it does make sense sometimes in our risk you know life a limb for a note reason um I do

“think that yeah I don't I think it depends what the goal is I think like I'm open”

did for getting around red tape to do something cool um and again I kind of also I really liked

like it's weird because I think that like I had like second hand sci-fi because I never like

read these sci-fi books growing up but all of the like the people I admire did I still kind of like the earth like I like I'd rather if I if I had the same resources it probably would be more like less aerospace now it would be more like infrastructure like trains and things like that just like a lot of things you can do what people would care about tear affirmant but um but yeah so but it's funny because it can align like your vision a certain way like if you wanted to get

to Mars and you think oh I need some sort of like invention to do that then we got to like build the sci to be smart enough to help us figure out how to do that and then we need to like you build the eye to also figure out the help of the energy problems so that we can scale it up the right amount to be smart enough to do that I don't know so like it's it's a kind of funny thing when you can use end goal to tell you how to to get somewhere and so maybe he's used that or maybe it's just a good

marketing thing I don't I don't know what do you think we're gonna need to go to Mars I mean need I think I don't feel that existential like need the same way in the sense of like the point

“where you need to get to Mars if you're not already able to go like try and avoid that first maybe”

and you have you actually would have more expertise on that side of things how scared you are about like

chaos and I don't know man I always think the world's ending yeah but they but like this

advice that you know I mean I'm sure that's what they have to they have to get you like you train to yeah to save it right yeah I don't know I don't know but who else do you look up to did look up I mean I looked up I mean different parts of lots of people but like at the time when I was a kid it was because you know it was burgeon galactic, blorige and the SpaceX were the ones who were kind of these big players in this private aerospace industry and they were like whenever any

parts of their companies were at these ratios like that was the cool stuff and I again I like this notion of trying to make profitable or build something that wasn't necessarily the it's best uh value proposition wasn't so much the capital that I could get even though you try to make itself funding or something like that like I like that that kind of encapsulation of doing things because I think like for example theoretical physics research you can have a lot of

youtubers go around and debate like why is it taxpayer funding this or is it stagnating no no no no and it's kind of missing the point that like okay so say you defunded like this subfield who's gonna actually know quantum field theory amongst the people who are doing data different stuff that doesn't like you know that's making progress now so it's like how do you take advantage of the fact that like there are things that are worth funding that are not necessarily

like worth funding because they make money or because they have a product and then try to align it in like they kind of maybe not corporate structure or something where you make it so that it

doesn't need to rely on things like always having been that way you know um can you innovate in

that space of trying to fund or have self fund valuable enterprises that are not driven by profit but driven by the thing that they're after so whether it's space exploration or like solving physics or something like that I'm inspired by that a lot who's doing that I mean I hope we can do it no I don't know I see the thing is right now it's just funny where to interesting time where I think like the technologies that like everybody cares about you know I whatnot really can help

doing the job that I do there's a thing of like I don't know how to make the right pitch for somebody who believes it's gonna do everything you know um and also conveying what exactly means to solve physics or not so like in practice like I do think there's a sense in which like we're trying to maximize these laws in nature and maybe there is some uniqueness or

particular open problem and it's gonna write a paper that the researchers are gonna be like whoa

“this is better and that's what physics research is so I'm scared of like not having a good like”

collaboration say with the industry folks and the academic folks to really kind of pin down okay say you can accelerate science did you do you finish it or did you now open up a new chance to build more infrastructure for how like that knowledge is stored and related to one another because we don't just want to answer about like I think that if I was an engineer like I want to know the answer to like this math like the equation to like predict what I would need for my

engineering problem versus for physics it's more like okay here's the answer but why and really just distilling that kind of compressing that basic set of rules that lead to that why and so I'm scared slightly that like you know if this field is stagnating because we're only individuals doing something and we can't make our field very modular as it is because it's just like historical precedent or whatever the number of those that when somebody comes along and actually

does have a result that's better than these things is like oh let's just put all our eggs in one basket now like this is the better bet and I think it should be a fun collaboration and I think that the night signal is that there are a lot of some crossover is with people like spending sabbaticals at these big ten companies and they some care about research is great but how do you make it so it's not just like I think I like academia in a way I don't know

it's institutions right but can you try to use the fact that there is some value proposition or exchange there to like try to drive like innovation for like let's have try to get the best product that like can do theoretical physics well maybe I'm using other people's products right not fine if there's any IP or value in that use that to help fund a field going forward instead of it being relying on taxpayers whatever for a very specific small like

highly purely theory thing because there's value that can come from the engineering side of it so for example when you build certain or you build these other like big detectors a lot of the time the value proposition isn't okay we're learning something about the loss of nature which is cool but it's also that all of the engineering that's going to go into that is going to be super

valuable can you do that with theory and I think that now the answer is yes and maybe it's already

being done in some sense like when they're selling intelligence and they're getting like fundraising

“for those companies maybe that is the pitch and that's what they're doing but I find it fascinating”

to be kind of I feel like we're back at this like moment when Seren helps him at the World Wide Web like can you instead of like winding and begging like oh we should have like head better structures that like endowed like a field or something like maybe it's not even the right thing to do can you do that now without like begging for things to have been different in the past and just like you know there's opportunity to now go for it and do it right don't just care about paper is

care about some of the infrastructure you know. Seren helped build the World Wide Web. I mean that's that's what they say I hope I don't get all the facts wrong but yeah like they were they're trying to they've a lot of data and I wanted to like serve it to different places and I think DARPA get so lot of credit to their for like so like what you think of as the internet but you know like when I I used to and this was the type of thing that bug me a lot because I

think I had these heroes and in tech that thought like oh if the physicists maybe just did things differently they'd have like all these whatever cool thing and then you walk into the door of where I worked and there'd be a thing on the side because it was funded by a tech person of like saying how quantum mechanics like leads to like the transistor technology and like understanding general relativity helps with like timing of satellites and GPS like imagine if you had quantum

gravity or like the blue sky research you do now might lead to something cool in the future and

“I believe in blue sky research and it's great but I think the thing is like normally it's still”

there's a reason for it you know and like how do you like it's a weird pitch to try to say oh it's work before so keep giving me a money now I don't I doesn't feel honest I mean it's it's in some sense yes but like I didn't like that I think the cooler thing would be again to try to see like how do you align things that are valuable with the thing that you want to do as a physicist and like go from there because there's anything that you want to be able to do if you can't do it already

there's something missing and it probably if you're a human interacting with it it's an engineering thing that's a product you could build and not like an equation you're trying to solve so I think that's a fun thing that's kind of opening up probably because of the way that like funding is

weird in academia right now like you know can you decouple this like we basically view universities

just educational institutions until you go to grad school you realize it's a research institution and like all of the great grades you get in undergrad you realize like they don't care they're just care about their research this is like this is not that this is like some way the US like is basically funding private institutions to do research at scale and and overhead seem crazy but that's this how they fund it in Europe they'd be funding the schools more directly so like like there's such a

dichotomy between I think how I used to see MIT or Harvard before I went to grad school and how I see it now of like completely different value propositions or priorities in the institutions and so like you know how do you make sure research gets funded and is super cool and it's maybe like that the experts in the field are the ones deciding like how the resources for that field are

revenue streams from teaching students so it's like the best people in different fields all in one

or big Texas ah it's broken or whatever like come into our private lab and yeah wow wow let's take a quick break when we come back start getting into this place most gear looks good until you actually

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that's roca.com and use code SRS Welcome to Hollywood versus reality they do it right what does he do in the movies to tell me if I'm doing this wrong because I don't watch anything little fleck like that right seems pretty cool it is pretty cool god of silence and in another lifetime I did gun reviews for a living proprietary magazine supposedly the best engineering in the world when that breaks

you're fit and now we're bringing him back it does look pretty cool I got I got it met that all right Sabrina we're back from the break we're gonna get into your current work gravitational memory effect I need you to slow down just a little bit for me I'm not I'm not on your level quite yet maybe by the end of the interview is stuck fast oh yeah so okay so what is gravitational memory effect so there's different kinds the easier one is not the one

that I came up with it's much older and it's the notion of you're gonna have these big bodies out and somewhere in the galaxy whatever or per way coming in and colliding and then when they collide they're gonna coalesce maybe into like another black hole or whatever it is but there's some ripples in this face time that come out to so these gravitational waves are propagating away from this collision experiment so this is like indentations in the weave of space

“yeah I mean I think actually it's pretty accurate since I'm like I'm looking at like say”

given time the positions of some mirrors that have been moving back and forth so the thing about

the memory effect is basically that there is like a very long time scale thing that's imprinted

because of this it's gathering process well can I can I make another would this be like the wake of a boat in some says almost liter I think that the the thing about the wake of the boat is there's different approximations for like a deep water wave and like it's not as universal I think like I'm a friend who is a family who's like into like a nautical stuff so I think we concluded that like the there's a sense of which sound waves and the water could be approximated

is having a memory effect like if they're deep underwater but like a surface waves is not going to have a universal relation between the the boat passed and then it moved but okay so imagine let's do the buoy analogy so I don't think the math works out the same but imagine you have like some boat passing and you knew that like you could infer like the amount of like munitions on this boat because like the buoy's move to certain amount no like you know I mean like some some net

“property of like the of the thing so it's not as close as I think that in this in that situation”

it's not a universal relation between the things that scattered had some kinematics that then set the value of this shift but but yes you have these two gravitational like my detector some probe

and then the distance between them's going to change okay and like depending on where they were

relative this thing there's a certain like pattern in the sky that would and you're seeing that there's a relationship between the distance changing and like the kind of net kinematics of the amount of like energy in the things that were scattering and the waves coming out and so there's this relationship it's like conservation of energy generalized to this kind of fun asymptotic symmetry version of it turns into deterministic imprints in the night sky of these moved detectors and then to see

the like the angular momentum at all get to go a little bit sublating which is the spin

“memory oh shit okay I think I'm picking this up so so you're saying okay how do I just”

I don't explain this okay so if we have a sheet or a blanket or something and I put I don't know a mark on the here and a mark over here and then we put a ball in the middle and then they come in more but is that what you're saying it's like so that would be kind of an analogy for like maybe like the it's just gravitational like potential kind of curving you in I think this is closer to the boolean log of the math is wrong it's what this isn't true for this

case I'm pretty sure of like imagine that you could have some boolean pretty far away and you knew

that there was always a shipping route where they go like from here to there and like the only

options are like the direction in which they came and like maybe the like the momentum of that boat and you could infer from the boolean shift those types of quantities regardless of whatever they did in the middle so that's not going to be true for the the water wave this I'm pretty sure it's not true for the deep water wave case but for the this gravitational system there's

“symmetry reason why I can see that type of shift like the boolean's move by something about”

that means plot like this amount of energy was deposited like type of thing okay so does the imprint stay like that in space that's the whole point so this is supposedly like the at the very end it stayed now in practice that's not super useful because they're like we do these things where we have a theoretical framework where the math is rigorous and then it's completely bias in the sense of that's not the thing you're going to measure so like in my framework I'm doing that single

whatever ship crossing type of thing as the entire everything happened in the whole world if and amount of time but what you do then is you say okay there's this effect that this framework studies but it really is only accurate for like each individual scattering experiment is like a chunk and so there there's a shift from that scattering experiment and the sure something else is going to move it around later but if they're spaced off enough in time can I approximate

this thing is like the memory of it okay so let me let me explain this to you to see if I'm

“getting it so basically what you're saying is it will leave an intention an imprint”

in the fabric of space yeah exactly until and in it will stay there forever until something else moves it yep something else moves it and then there's a very formal version where we say amaduate for infinite amount of time tell me the beginning and the end and that's technically the memory effect but in practice it's closer to like let's pretend there is just one thing that happened one thing you're detecting so one event and as far as those times

those are concerned it's a lot longer than any other thing later moving it okay so then then that's a memory and you discovered this I discovered a variant of this based on the connection to these symmetries what is the variant is like angle momentum loss instead of energy loss

in the gravitational waves and the spinning particles kind of so basically it's like and

those are kind of fun things so I come into my PhD and you're almost just going to do like classical radiation so like you know you accelerate a charge it's like emitting radiation and the fun thing about you know gauge theories or sort of the so gravity and electromagnetism kind of fit into this framework of the there's an extra symmetry when you try to write down a field like it's set of equations that are local so what happens is that

when you have a charge object so say you take some cat and you're like I don't know like some ribo electric effect thing to get some charge on like the fur you like set of electricity or these things where you see like the balance of charge you you probe it far away right so I can with gauge theories or with like these like fun things I can be away from the charge and see it so I don't need to come up and pick up oh look I have like an electron charge it's like I

can see the electric field is like pulling me in like you're saying with this blanket and like the it being deformed so like I can measure the some features of this object in the center from the boundary and that's kind of one of the ingredients to this kind of holographic principle of like can I just talk about the things of the boundary in isolation as its own theory but for the very specific scope here it's like that gauze law type of set up of okay if I am very far away and I measure

they like the electric field everywhere in some sphere I can determine the total charge inside the analog of that when I then have an accelerating like scattering experiment is kind of like the this imprint of this universal like I know from this low energy part of the radiation

some scattering process so what makes the particle scatter is it a collision this their own

“interactions with each other and that's if anything it's these long range directions that are”

buzzing in a curse so like the fact that they're charged and then they're gonna like have some

photons exchange between them or um other particles it's the is the thing but we basically like

there's something about the very low energy that is is universal almost because of these cousin classical equations of motion um so like a long story short when I do this idealization where I pretend I'm in flat space that's my world and I want all of these solution sciences equations that obey these boundary conditions then I see that you know things that the boundary are gonna move so like what you're saying as I have like these two detectors are sitting there

they're not just gonna stay there they're gonna move but they're gonna move by a certain amount that's maybe a certain like controlled parameter as compared to where they are if I just push them out to infinity and so like because you have this kind of whole symmetry framework that you're

“importing from other instances where it's been useful in physics you can tell you play it here”

and you realize oh look that tells me something about soft limits and scattering tells me something I can observe yeah so early in my PhD they had this connection between like soft physics and a um synthetic symmetry word identity and then my first paper was on like the sublating soft version of that which was new and some people had speculated that there might be an enhancement of the angular momentum um like the rotation symmetry of the of the world in some sense and then

when you keep pushing that further then you can tie it to this experimental version because someone else had understood that there's a physical like the space time physical thing you're measuring is related to the waveform that the other I was computing with this quantum field theory computation and yeah so I mean basically long story short is you were just taking some mathematical framework and then trying a copy paste it to a new application once you have like one iteration you're

trying to see what's modular excited about like some computation and then you get to import that and find something new because you pulled it out wow yeah wow I mean Stephen Hawking cited your solo and joint papers in 2016 your dissertation is the only is only the second Harvard physics PhD published in physics reports the other author won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize that's incredible

yeah I mean these things are fun but it's always fun that you can you probably find a way to find a

cool little way to frame what happens or not but the Hawking thing was cool because again he you he visited at the end of like near the end of his life he was he came to Harvard which was need to see just the entourage we were like we were on a Congo line and this boat like kind of like there's like little river cruise type of thing but in the Boston Harbor that it was like Hawking his whole entourage and I was like literally doing like a little Congo line behind him and like yeah

you can't you can't make that up you know it's a fun nerd it's a fun experience yeah so what is what is this discovery mean I don't think it means that I mean it means I'm lucky that some of the experimental is going to come out of like something I did maybe I do I don't think the things that I've done have like that deep of a meaning or something where like I want to know these types of things is fairly it's more like the fact that you know there is some value of

trying to take these frameworks that are very abstract and try to distill parts of it that then you can try to then push for the more realistic versions of it I think that's a fun fun kind of paradigm and it's and it's like fortunate that there was some of the rules of this but at the same time like I'm using Einstein's equations to get it it's more of a test of like the boundary conditions being a good physical assumption than a test of the theory itself right so so I

think that it's not like super super exciting to me but like it's not like you know I wouldn't say

“tell your audience is important I think it's pretty cool a lot of things are cool the”

lot of things in this building is pretty cool so is the is the universe expanding um so again I think that's a funny thing I do think if we talk to a cosmologist they believe in like the cosmological constant um like isn't necessarily being actually like sorry there's this experiment right now that's like trying to promote that maybe the cosmological constant is like changing over time and a lot of strengthiness love that um I follow like a faculty member when I was in grad school

Robert like rough as kind of colleagues with with Andy he is very into some fun program and to train such things I think that I am not too into the experiment to know like why a lot of because of all just don't trust the results yet or whatever um but I think that a lot of things are

up in the air in the sense of you know like there's always qualifications to things so like

it's good to a face value trust the actual result of an experiment but you want to understand what are the extra like what is it actually seeing versus what you're actually over interpreting

constant is changing over time and then it'll be asymptotically flat or the wrong sign opposite

science would be where a string theory likes to live so I just I guess I end up being very agnostic in a weird way which is not good because somebody should just answer and say you know well this is our model I'm a CDM but it is true that stars galaxy there's no no no no no sorry

“so there's a sense of which yes like so I think what I'm saying is I'm taking it to be like”

you're looking at these various stars for a way and you know like so the fun thing about physics is you're often saying the laws that I have here are the same everywhere so that's true I know like some features of my star or cellar formation so I know like the spectrum of the lines that are supposed to be there so if it's moving further away I'm gonna see like different frequency shifts and things like that so there's a lot of cool stuff that you can see

or like yes that's not in doubt I think the thing that I latch on to because again now it gets to it's close to this like is your framework even physical is like the statement about like some parameter like the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations and whether everything I do I'm like a flat or third as far as like a cosmology's concern because I just said it to zero and like now there's some experiments saying maybe that's okay now I'm not

it but like what's things are constant versus functions of other things that contain it for a time roughly yeah I mean yeah yeah but the expansion thinks you're not a flat or a third no no I'm joking so I don't want to encourage a flat or sorry so like you know like sorry so they send to which you're on there and you see like the curvature scale of the horizon or whatever you're not seeing you're saying the world is flat um there is a I'm just trying to make a joke and probably it's

dangerous to do it at the actual platform of the fact that like you know do we see the curvature scales of like the universal cosmological constant at the scales where I care about it for a particle

detector is or for these gravitational waves from my go and I am always setting this constant

to zero instead of like whatever it tends to the negative like large power so if the universe is expanding or or yeah or if we want to the galaxy is it in stars or or getting farther or yeah

“I mean that I feel like that means the universe is expanding no no I sorry I think I'm saying”

I'm not saying no I think you're right but I'm saying that the physicists are worried more about like what why is it right like is there a reason that there is some like like various like cosmological constant there or like is it all just like the different like matter distributions and things like that that try to govern the reason we're anything so the I should have just said yeah but instead I was like oh by the way there are experiments that are like we be like changing our

opinions a little bit or calling the question some notions of those like parameters that describe this thing so if it's expanding what do they mean there's a wall so this thing is something something about cosmology if you're doing like a holography for like the sitter space times is there is like a literal horizon where you can like as one observer you're not seeing the whole thing and so the the world that I live in is like kind of understanding the mathematical

structure you can attach to the kind of the boundaries of the space time and in most situations like in the the ADS context which is this like wrong sign, cosmological constant version to a model or in the case where I do like it's really the space time boundary and not the boundary of some

“observer and then you have to deal with observers and the sitter is hard for lots of reasons so”

so I just go so if it's expanding wouldn't that the fabric yeah the intentions but we call it the gravitational memory effect wouldn't that change no it does so you're absolutely right

and in the sitter like the types of like I you're you're basically propagating a wave

on a curve background versus a flat background and it changes the the form of it further away and people have paper is trying to talk about it like memory on like the observer horizon in the sitter which is the closest thing but the thing that's relevant is like you want to think about like what scale is that important as compared to what scale I am like seeing the wave coming from this inspiring binary system and so like at least for example a lot of things I do are also relevant

to not the memory effects so much but like these asymptotic symmetry series can be applied to amplitudes and they're what you're doing you have you have certainly this collider and like it's such a small scale where these things are interacting and that the detector itself is considered to be at infinity but it's not infinite I mean it's huge but it's like that's hardly infinity and so like can I pretend or ignore that expansion for some things sometimes yes and then some

I don't know yeah yeah yeah yeah well we actually have a have a hot question here it has a good flatter okay I'm ready I think I'm accidentally getting there here we go yeah surveys have found that up to around one in 10 American say they agree with statements that the earth is flat from a scientific standpoint what actually proves whether the earth is flat or round and not just in theory what real world evidence or systems make that determination undeniable okay I should have

prepared more because like the best I know the best answers but I would just say like look at the pictures from them like satellites or like people up in space you can see the horizon I mean like

talk to someone who was a flutter through what would they try to say if I said you know look at the right and see it's curved like or go up on like a I'm not a flutter yeah yeah I don't know but I've

talked to here pull up and they always they always have I can't remember what their excuses they

think satellites are balloons they're not in space I do know that I don't know what the argument is it goes on here a little bit more because technologies like GPS satellite communications and global navigation all operate is of earth is curved so what are what are the strongest proofs and could any version of a flutter realistically reproduce those same results okay I'm trying to I like I would say no but like I think what I'm saying I'm trying to think of like how would I be the

defense attorney for a flutter you know what I mean like like what would I try to do to make them feel as right as possible by copying the hell out of everything they want to I mean like I think that you can't once you're trying to say like I mean like you're trying to apply a framework

“beyond its scope of applicability and that's what these types of technology or like the”

something far away above the earth is seeing that it's it's wrong but like you know to their creditor not like when you're on a map like you know you print out your little chart like you're not going to go that far off like when you're driving around town pretending that you know the earth around you is flat at most you try to park a current in hell and you're trying to put your parking brake on I don't like like basically like no and that's not for the coverage of

this version but I think that I don't know I think that it's emblematic of the fact that it's hard to believe the things you don't have input for you know like you build your intuition we build our intuition you know walking around in a way where like you might not notice these things like do you notice the like phases of them when I don't know like how much people pay attention to those things or how much it affects their their lives um and then doubling down on that worldview

it's sometimes funny sometimes scary I don't know what the right the take on it is but like you know there's value to questioning I guess like how much your assumptions or like the the visceral world that you live in and the intuition you get from that actually extends beyond the things that you're able to probe yourself like you can't go and just jump up into space and look down

go oh never mind yeah well maybe send them maybe send them up like hey they go free like

is they'll say it to get on the free like several little fighters something yeah follow up yeah what's the biggest misconception people have about black holes and is there anything about them that's

“still completely breaks or current understanding of physics I think that if anything so breaking”

your current understanding I think that sometimes that it is the the paradoxes that that show that there are problems in our understanding so I think that maybe breaking isn't as active word I don't think I want to use I think that like again I always feel like I don't even understand these stuff well enough and I think that's one problem when you're in a field that everybody's confused it's like how confused are you like when I say I'm confused does that mean I'm actually confused

are you like less confused who's really doing my confused so there's a paradoxes that come from like basically trying to say okay I think I know like it shouldn't be that ridiculous if it's a big back hole like the horizon isn't that special I only kind of know it like kind of like two logically you're like away from like I don't know at the moment that I pass the horizon so then why can I put some quantum fields on it and then like I have a pair of production one

of them will go out to finish the other one's gonna go inside and suddenly you're running to these like like issues of oh like that I evaporated into a thermal system now is I'm not unitary and

“all this fun hockey stuff so I think the the thing that's to one should take away is that there are”

still I think situations where people don't understand all the assumptions they make where they can just you know follow one step after the other think that they're doing something that seems logical or not and then they realize oops together something was wrong and so it's not breaking physics is showing that there is something broken in our assumptions like it's

not like the physics is always has to be right I think we believe that it's just we don't

quite know again like the regimes in which our assumptions are valid or which one is the the wrong one so so yes there's a lot of active things like some people I think I still have colleagues who believe that as soon as you cross our horizon there's like some like like firewall or fuzzballs like there's like different models for what happens behind it but we're all basically just playing with some frameworks like mathematical frameworks that give us intuition for what we might guess

and then we're not precise enough with what we're assuming we can compete something and then wrote oh this don't fit together like that's the that's the vibe but I think I wouldn't try to scare a like a random person where that I would just point out that somehow the the bread and butter of like a physical theory where you don't make a measurement is seeing that like these assumptions don't tie together so something has to be wrong

and then popping in it back and kind of fix it. What do I mean what is what is a black hole? I so I mean to I think some of something like there's literally just a sense in which like I have so much matter in some region that now even light can't escape and the way that I see it is like from a panorist diagram their straight up is just some reason that I cannot

but then there's other fun things about like the fact that if you put enough energy in some region that you're going to end up creating a black hole and that often is tied into this question of like quantum gravity has to be weird and different you know um and so like it's just and it's neat though because you see how much people like when they see even though it's not actually the horizon when they see like these images of a black hole and like the cushion to surround it or whatever

like generating the light like engineering is cool the fact that they can like reproduce that and just stare at a black hole um but like it literally is like a black hole that

“the picture which is happening right like you know like the way the light is spinning around it um but I think”

that the fun thing is really just more like um like the way a physicist would it first center

counter it is like there's a very specific solution to Einstein's equations so this is a different location with a specific solution that then has some weird ass properties of like the causal structure of the queer like particles are going to end up so what happens if something goes on it that's so that's the type of part so basically I think a lot of people would believe okay when you first go through you don't really know that you went through because like it's the buckles can be

different sizes right and so like if it were large enough the curvature scale when you're crossing the horizon isn't so extreme but eventually like if you just did like you know little probes on this this background I think people talk about like spigotification or like you're gonna be stretched out eventually when you get closer to where the the curvature is larger and blowing up at the singularity

but um I think that's the funny thing is people like you understand this classical geometry

and then you start having problems putting quantum fields on it and it's being some fun like paradoxical type of questions that then people aren't sure like they think that the the singularity is something so highly curved that the approximation of just treating it classically is bad now so

“then they don't know what happens if they've ever been but it's not like I think that's easy enough”

to try to say okay if I like have some nice numerical simulation and I can just write down this differential equation like for how something would propagate on a classical like buckled background that you could have something just like going through the horizon for a little bit and probably like in that model it looks fine but it's just like how valid are those hard as a numeric festival to do near there's her in regions and the way you set up for a skinning process probably

is also hard but it depends like it basically the problem is that sometimes it's like question

you're asking ends up being not the right question or things like that type of problems yeah I just I still I don't understand how it can swallow light no I mean so but it's basically like you're writing like um how does it so like you have this metric is telling you like the if I have a coordinate system for my space time and I have then a notion of like the distance between points on it and like a nice coordinate system is often

something like a spherical coordinate system we're okay like very far away I have this like you know directions in the night sky and it's like a time direction in this case and then in a coordinate system like the there's a solution to this differential equation that Einstein gives you where you don't have any matter sourcing outside and it ends up being a black hole solution where there ends up being a horizon and you can just kind of fly around with like how does like the

energy like redshift or whatever things like that it's it's a fun it's very much a math problem you know what I mean like you're playing with the given solution so it's like kind of like it's harder because it's not linear but like when you're doing like multiple moment expansions and you know we're like just like literally like if you give me some charge object put it here what's the electric field far away or I don't know if they've any fun I think if I try to make an analogy

like you could probably figure out one with a some telecom like reverse engineering from all these different radio signals what what's happening I don't know but what what what what do they look like from mint how do I say this yeah if we were to do if we were to do like a 360 model of a

“black I mean I think the best thing is like I forget which I mean I get the name of the movie”

wrong but like Kip Thorin was a scientific advisor to this whatever oh man I wish I would better recall of like it was of cool movies interstellar maybe I hope not wrong on that where they actually ran out like you know simulation for what it looks like I think that you have pretty good like images from either like that movie or um I've seen the images you're seeing the like coming out of it like they look like so you know if my fist here is

or my hand is a black hole what does it look like from this angle yeah but it's a flat or does it look the same I mean there's actually a hole that's you can access from any direction and so I run it but I definitely have like colleagues who play with these type of like racing relations more than me so the way when I see black hole I see like a metric I see an equation written down and I like oh this blows up here that's not but um but the point is that when you're

seeing this I mean I think a lot of it is you're seeing like imagine it some stars behind it and then how that light from the star is coming to you and so like maybe it looks funny because

came from it kind of but you're also seeing some like funny lensing of like the stars behind

like they're like kind of going on gps around and coming to you so so some of the artifacts are

“that which I guess is what it looks like but funny this is I think there's a legit you literally”

know what it looks like and I don't think it would be that hard to like do some sort of simulation of like your you're falling a gps down and then there's a bunch of um yeah I want to look at it for articles with you some light you know I just like want to put you on a set up like from the back so shoot so roughly has there was normal like non-reaching back home would have like spherical symmetry a lot of buckles are actually kind of rapidly spinning so there is some

like asymmetry you can see like it will depend on like where you are compared to this axis of rotation but um there's not like a front and back thing it's more like a like a axis of rotation difference so what is the shape it looks like those like it's sort of falling it's like I mean sorry it looks like when those images of the like the black hole have this kind of funny like distorted ball looking thing but again three to mention although what is it what is it look

that's yeah so you're seeing it it's like if you're a surface of evolution around it I think is rough the right picture like the things are symmetric roughly around that but again assuming that like and I think there's no reason to some other rise like the light sources around it are kind of

“evenly spaced because of things rotating so there's a rotational symmetry and you should fit that way”

do you think it could swallow a planet other I mean I've no reason to think not I guess the question is like what is I'm like sorry so like if to take us back and make sure I'm not like saying something there must for the experts really be concerned but like to the extent of what you want to consider a planet like I think that like just because something is like gravitating and it was

always there like you know our planet we're orbiting something that if I just wasn't moving like this

way I'd be falling in so like you know so like it's not just because it's there it is I mean it's like swallowing a planet but sure something could fall into it and I guess if you wanted to say like don't think I'm worried about as to whatever extent the thing was the original like thing the planet was routing around that you called it a planet for the reason you know um but yeah it's it's like it's a hole where you don't see light coming out but I don't think there's anything

stopping it I don't know if I've ever like looked or tried to find a nice numerical simulation of just imagine that I have a bunch me and a bunch of other particles with some light sources

“or together falling across the horizon would look like I think it doesn't look that special you know”

and the thing that looks special is you're outside and you're seeing all the light around it kind of being worshipped by that okay yeah I'm sure it would look kind of fun like I don't know why they don't like you could do it I mean there's nothing like that's just a differential equation here trying to solve this thing though yeah all right reducing all right let's move into celestial holographs yeah what is that so it says this is what it says yeah so yeah a lot of

I think some British twistier people have some fun like sensitive humor of how they name things as far as like celestial spirit and heavenly equations I think there's some things but um so celestial spirit literally is you know night sky stars um if you're like you're like millennium Falcon or whatever in your accelerating you might imagine but like you'll see the the distribution of the stars in the night sky move around a bit so like they're gonna dilate and so that's somehow

seeing that there is like either boosts symmetry of the space time is a dilatation of this sphere. This episode is sponsored by Better Help summer can be a great season but it can also get overwhelming fast travel picks up schedules change weekends fill up and before you know it you're trying to keep everybody else happy while you're running on empty sound familiar and I think a lot of people feel that pressure you're supposed to be enjoying the season but sometimes

you're just trying to get through it therapy can help you understand what you actually need where your boundaries need to be and how to build a summer that feels better instead of just busier better help is the world's largest online therapy platform with over 30,000 therapists

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US and better help starts with a short questionnaire to help match you with someone based on your needs and preferences and if you're not happy with your match you can switch to a different therapist at any time you don't have to say yes to everything this summer find support and therapy sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/saurus that's betterhalp.com/saurus So what we're doing is trying to do just like map all of the durables that we want to have

down to the night sky and the reason why we do it is again because we're just copying pasting

“and then generalizing things that have worked before so both someone like talking thinking about”

putting quite a field theory on a buck hole or someone who's like a strength therapist who's saying there's a 10 dimensions or 11 dimensions and I'm gonna like have all these all this extra field content that I then have to like have this extra dimension like wrapped up and be tiny and ever see it but both of those types of frameworks end up leading to this cute notion that somehow the easiest way to get around describing how quantum gravity system is to find an equivalent

non-gravitational system that it's dual to and so from the Hawking point of view it's like there's a sense in which this buck hole behaves like a thermal system where the entropy is this area law and so okay there's this fun kind of almost information theoretic vibe to like how like gravitational solutions then from the screen theory side there's this kind of more complicated like some theory and brains back reacting not about where you have a more precise actual equivalence

between I know some very esoteric like bulk strings on like some gravitational space time that's a wrong customer content wrong and dimensions yet yet but it's equivalent to another gauge theory that I know and so a lot of people in my field love like those precise dualities because then they have power on both sides maybe some things are easy to compute as a geometric object and other things are easier to compute on the other side and so you can study like

different like strong like a couple limits by having this other approximation or other approximation that's valid but both of these things to me are just saying okay you have again this effort so like there's a reason to think that maybe one tenant of quantum gravity is this holographic nature and then we're trying to apply it to these asymptotically thoughts based times which are again the kind of the the flatter they're in a log of cosmology

but like don't maybe I shouldn't say I should say yes sounds like the I have the core question here is everything we see in 3D space 40 space time actually projected from a 2D surface like a hologram see that's the things I would say in some sense yeah by definition but like how physical is it like

“I think what I'm saying is it and maybe this is a problem with someone who is sending too much”

time just in the equations and not in like real world like if we can describe things the same way

you might as well use whatever definition is useful for some things right so I think I don't always

take it too literally in the sense of like we are in this celestial sphere it's more like can I convert everything to variables on that celestial sphere and does that help me organize some scattering computations in a way that like we just get computationally complicated to compute all these five-minute irons or something like that that's the kind of goal like I think I view it as like it's another math framework that ideally if we do it right is equivalent

and then don't overinterpret like the physicality of that per se but it probably is my own problem for not trying to take things more literally because we are sending physics after all. So I don't I'm trying to understand this so are you are you trying to prove that everything we see is a hologram? I think that I'm trying to build a version of a holographic framework that works for spacetime that are not anti-dicider so like spacemes that are more relevant for

like scattering how does gravity want to be described like quantum gravity want to be described by a boundary system so we're trying to build that out and the same kind of if it were true then the two things are equivalent not that like so like if A equals B I'm not saying everything is B I'm saying everything that is A is B right so I'm I'm more like saying there's a equivalent set of things like you can imagine a world where maybe I don't know try to project everything

down to the earth and then talk about some rules for how those things interact and it was more convenient to talk about the extra dimension I don't know like um but like you're not trying to lose content that way certainly it's not supposed to lose anything but it is neat to think okay like if everything is described in terms of boundary if there were bulls then it does kind of call in a question which questions are well defined in the bulk for example so celestial holographic

is your way to prove this and use it to unite Einstein's theory of general relatively relativity with quantum mechanics the two foundational theories currently contradict each other so but again there's a lot of people where you could probably motivate their research as inspired by and the question is like I'll go and so it's funny these these things going in out of fashion like I think I heard from some like postdocs now that it's not cool anymore

“on your great applications to be talking about like quantum gravity but I still think that's why”

we go into like we don't go into the field because there's two maybe reasons why people will go

into the field I think some people genuinely like paradoxes and it always bothered me because it's just

like any paradox or someone actually had the answer in the end like you just defined it wrong so I went into physics because I like that I didn't have to learn as much I mean the sense of I don't have to have forever like an excellent working memory not only if the laws of physics are simpler to then figure out what the rules are simpler than the solutions so I like physics for that

I think the reason why we study something like quantum gravity is again because we have this bias or

we think that you know whatever the laws of nature are there there there's a fundamental set that then leads to all these different regimes that you're studying and if you didn't have that bias

“maybe you shouldn't you know be doing that job but if you have that bias then the thing that you should”

be doing is trying to again merge various rules into the single set of rules and so I guess the big outstanding one is just like short distance physics and long distance physics because at some point then you like we know there's quantum mechanics we know that the GR is important so like there's some sense in which the actual observations guide you to this still open kind of problem of how what theoretical frameworks can consistently limit to both I think I mean to the extent

that like why I should the rules of like tennis versus hockey have to be united right like like like like I think that like it's kind of cool that we think that the laws of nature are like there's something fundamental about it is something highly compressible like about that description and I think that's a fun hypothesis even rather than just a belief to try to test it and you can kind of automate what you do as researchers in the future but yeah. So are you are you saying

“that everything in space is potentially projected from a 2D surface? That would be sorry I think”

what I'm saying if so like space time so for me it's like depends so as I'm as a user it's space to mean space time but it's three plus one dimensions is our our role and then the boundary is one dimension lower typically and the celestial sphere is two dimensions lower because the

boundary for these flat space times is no in a way where like basically no other direction can

talk to each other so again the point would be can we find an equivalent description or almost like we've seen it work in the past how do we apply it to this regime and then how do we learn something by seeing how we can't import it. So again physicists are constantly using mathematical frameworks that they already have and then trying to tweak like like just like apply them to something different and then realize something goes wrong and then try to like learn about that framework

by seeing how to modify it to make it work and so like in some sense answers yes but at the same time you know you want to try to see if if I build a framework like that would it tell me anything different about the structure it scales I can't see but like ideally like you know it's a it's a bad framework if it can't like in principle encompass the things that we do have the intuition for in the bulk right in our role. But it's way over everybody's I mean the thing is it's like you know like

I think that I like especially when the type happened when I was younger I was very much like I'm going to go read a bunch of textbook because I want to be able to like answer good questions or like you know know how to tell the father there's why they're like you're representing science somehow and oh anyway and it's just like like you need a much better working memory for that or or I don't know I think the thing is that you know you don't need it like in our job you can do this kind of like you're

diving in you're doing a computation and then sometimes you lose sight of the the breath of it but I also think that now it's a fun time where you can kind of take us up back and see if there are things where you know the research limitations are just the way the physics is done doesn't need to be that way because like now you know one researcher doesn't need a higher whole team of like data scientists to treat the corpus as a data set and do something with it like there's a lot of

power to having like funny eye tools and like you get to just basically play around with doing things

that you never would want to do normally as it was a good researcher because that wouldn't help you

with your career. Okay I want to ask you some very very very basic questions try to understand this. Are you saying that a planet could be a hologram? Yeah but in weird lawyer sense not like in the way you know the star. I think what we're saying is like always obviously you're saying you're in the book and like there would be some state and the boundary theory that's equivalent to it in these types of holographic setups. I don't want to say that I understand flat-space holography to the level where like

I'm confident in that but in 80s CFT context their dictionaries are like yep like this massive state is this other operator in the CFT type. Potentially everything we see in space could be a hologram or are you saying the fabric space the everything it I mean sort of like basically the whole point is that there's two equivalent theories so the thing that you have in the book you want to add in the boundary theory. Can you formulate a theory that lives one dimension

lower that isn't just so like is there a natural sense in which you want to live one dimensional lower and for example one maybe one kind of intuitive thing of why it might be nice is that a global symmetry so I have something that's not related to the like these long distance interactions then typically I need to go and like kind of measure the the charges of the objects throughout

“the like constant time slice in them and the worst thing is this gas loss story that I can measure”

the electric charge and a configuration by just having some probe of the electric field like at infinity and so in ADSCFT there's a sense in which this boundary theory is evolving in time and

conditions of the bulk theory that end up like I guess telling you a this equivalent presentation of

“the bulk theory so the fact I think the fact that it is holographic is deeper and probably”

if it were true has deeper implications for like the right physical quantities to be talking about in the bulk but again and so I think that's a sense in which sure if I felt more confident that the state of the dictionary were where I really had a good intuition for the thing then I could try to pull back and say let me like the fact that it's described as a boundary theory what does that mean for what's a good thing to talk about in the bulk but I don't think it's formed enough

for me to have that type of assertion or make that type of enthusiastic claim given a danger of like how it's interpreted. What are you visualizing in your head as you describe this? I am visualizing as a penner's diagram with a sphere and just some like like like it's I guess um probably

that and/or yeah some equations so I'm basically just a bunch of penner's diagrams for

the slides and the talks I would give. I mean you're you're visual I can see it I think you're visual. Yeah I do I know but that's not necessarily very helpful right so like that's a problem with like when you're grandson and they often say like shut up and compute and I used to take it but it was like a personal if I'm like I could think to you know but the point is you're trying to be trained out of using your physical intuition you know for the things that you're doing

because again like you know you can't see 10 dimensions you can not even barely see like you know four if it weren't three plus one so like how do you what can you physically do in this world where we're clearly are interacting with certain energy scales three plus one dimensions at a time how do you get out of that and then you build this intuition by computing things I guess so then your intuitions are roughly a bunch of computations are a bunch of lowered

emotional projections of things if you happen to have someone who can make nice figures. What do you believe happens when we die? Oh god I don't know um but yeah I mean my mom's very

“Catholic I don't know I think the thing it's like that's a funny thing physics fairy tells you like”

usually some sense of which questions you want to ask or you know it and I guess the the right answer from the physics movie is I don't know. Do you think about it? Um I luckily like happy reason so I guess I don't but um no I I think that the that is the weirdest thing is often I can fight with people I think your friends in a fun way of like how to interpret the observer so like yeah like I definitely think that if you

and I mean to think that we're we don't agree like I don't know actually who's right on it if like how much is the fact that like I am immune like so no I I feel like physics and still describe or this doesn't doesn't obviously like tell me I couldn't have you know some objects that end up having these complicated like neural nets and them that interact with the environment and it changes the set of it and so it feels like they're making decisions based on that but it's a different

“question than like I feel I mean I feel interact with the world so I like I think if I want to say”

that physics like covers everything that I probably do want to have the observer be part of the system but I definitely have friends who are definitely not really just reading like that and still kind of call that observing the question and I just don't know because again I guess I don't like open systems I don't know like I'm like a from the the point of view of what are we doing as a theory but yeah there's fun questions about that are related to this in the

sense of like who with whom I versus like and is it the same thing as yeah I don't I think how active the observer is or something like that I still probably am biased to not including that but maybe that's them that could easily be done you know doing your mom talk about this you know oh she yeah sorry yeah I'm not good at when either of us are good at debating you know she definitely sees what I do as a variant of religion and all like but but I also

it's very easy because I think we're so close to like end up going too far with questioning this off she came from like she came from Cuba when she was a kid and they weren't allowed to be religious there and so I think that you know it it means a lot more to her part of our scene because of that but also maybe give serious like a very sensitive like guidance in the family life and things like that she I mean it means so much to her right and so yeah but you don't you don't

know I and if that's the things I personally view like attention with the like dogmatic aspects of like that you know the answer like I mean what I love about physics is that you know

there is a sense in which like the even though first of all like the love at which I actually

understand these things is so so silly and whatever but there's sense about science that if it's done right and honestly like you can have these revelations like you can learn something about nature and I think that whether religion not everybody appreciates like nature and so we're trying to find the rules and if anything that seems pretty close to the spirit of like the part of religion that gives you the like the like the like answers or some like sense of like this is the

origin story aspect of it I think that science is after but I think that I like the fact that we

are supposed to admit when we don't know things sometimes that doesn't always it definitely plays

out in a way weird way because a lot of people think they're experts and then like talk down to people who don't is so it's very dogmatic in practice but it's not supposed to be that and I love that about it and that's the thing that turns me a little bit off of religion sometimes it's just like

“you know like the can you question things or whatnot but I think this notion of not knowing it's”

clearly fits into this notion like if you thought there is something creating everything maybe that's more of a reason that we're special or more of a reason that the rules have to be simpler because but like I tried to be more agnostic and I also against the kind of dog monetization side of it a little bit but I'm happy to try to debate or change my mind up low. I seriously my mom and it's just like yeah my aren't there woman pre-seem. So what is it being if what does it mean

with the hologram stuff if it's projected from a 2D? So again I think the thing it will mean is once I understand it better that there's some types of things you do or don't want to talk about within the box-based time but I do think like I care about physics not because I mean you land on this one little corner of it that you get to play with and it's somehow the best

bet for you because it uses the things that you know but like it always frustrated me like how

hard it would be to jump between different fields because you like imagine if you have no experiment calling different parts of the research cannon it's just going to get harder and harder when there's more alternate attempts to something and I don't know enough about we've probably to tell them why they're wrong and I'm just basically vouching because I trust like one other person's opinion who might have looked at it and so this is funny thing where like this is the

kind of output of other people that are also really smart it's hard to internalize and compress so I like this notion of like being able to think about taking a step back and saying like we value physics for the type of reason of like finding these questions trying to like see that nature seems to be like have this highly compressed description how would you go about finding it like can we be ourselves instead of like individual people who maybe do a great thing and they could call

themselves an Einstein or whatever that instead of it like where this we're responsible for this legacy we're custodians of this cannon are there tools now that we have that we can be like help

“curate and like condense it more systematically and I think that that's a exciting time for me because”

I love that notion of you know don't just stain my little corner like how would I get out of that corner first of all personally but then how is it also like you view that venture something super valuable and close to these kinds of like deeper questions but but I don't think I think about the deep questions enough because I'm in the competition because that's the thing where the intuition comes from and then you just get stuck for authorizing if you're not if you're in the

you're too far away from it but I have an advantage in the process over all must manwaffen some glücklich then the apotheca with the shop apotheca app the art's besoет der schließlich genug sein löst ein eere zept komplett digital ein latter zu einfach die erbrunter halt deine Krankenkassenkarte ans Handy und schon kann zu deine medikamente direkt nach Hause liefern lassen so zaps to eine neue kvelle der Entspannung an für die ganze Familie alle Infos gibt's in der app und auf shop-ministerpotheke.com

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“how would this change a bit bang oh i think that i'd sing theory i think that the big big theory”

thing i'm sorry to tell me that something my framework has to be treated something like that i I do it more because again like you know like a cosmological origin type of thing is very much like not part of the thing i'm sitting up so the first side of it if i need to include the sitter the stuff that i'm studying is more of like a stepping stone to understanding how to generalize logigraphy um and then the second part of it is again like initial conditions

are things like that we're not necessarily always sometimes we're thinking about the equations

and not like the like the solutions of the equations and the particular ones that are relevant to the world so i would say that the it's not gonna do for the big big things more but with the big big thing tell me i need to like specify once i understand better if my framework encompasses that or not you know do you believe we can time travel uh forward a different right so oh i mean sorry i think what i'm saying is like i'm just making the joke if we're all going forward in time

but the to the extent that even they have this in the center so i'm moving if i got the name right um like a like this kind of twin paradox of like the your your clock is is affected by gravity and so you can you know go around and come back and have age differently than your twin but you're only still going forward um no it's fun because we don't like and that's a kind of fun thing too is like

get to play with all the fun things i think like i um like it's always this funny thing of like

sure you can do this thing but the caveat is it's not physical or whatever like uh right so this thing about like you can age differently but you can't like go back and time to anything um and it's also because it would be pretty sometimes things are built into assumptions like it would cause a lot of other problems if you can go back and like a close time like curve you're influencing your own future um but um like yeah i just wish that i think the thing is that like

“the in order to make progress in the field you have to be so in the nitty gritty that you don't get”

out like have fun like bullshitting around with like the the things that people think physicists do but promoter's pretty good so we have like we have a pretty fun um we have people who do that quantified nations and like a wide variety of just theoretical physics where sometimes that it feels a little bit more like uh maybe with the stereotype of a physicist of the chalkboard debating like existential things is alright let's talk about quantum mechanics versus Einstein

the flight at the edge of reality yes what do we start we're pretty as a fightman um no i think i might see as um more like again this is the type of thing of uh why do we believe the laws have to be coming from the same thing right um i think that that's a pretty bold and fun assumption and if you you can imagine that if somebody thought but like at every different energy scale just there's some new things because that's the way it is that you couldn't

predict that's a very different vibe than thinking about like there's a method of focuses here some kind of underlying principles that will carve out of space theories that's still can be consistent with with observations so what i view it as is again as a hip theorist we're making this bet about the structure of these like laws of nature that probably has some consequences that you wouldn't be able to see when you're just in the nitty grid of it um and that

excites me a lot thinking of like okay if i could zoom out and see the structure of the corpus and like like how which theories are actually consistent with each other when that be fun um um and so

“i think i like that because that feels closer to the kinds of things that excited me about physics”

of the kid now it's still further away from a lot of like there's some companies now that are trying to do like yeah for physics with a thing of like we're gonna like you know like robots are gonna come out of the physics things like i don't i it's probably not physics the way i define it when that's the case but there's cool like you could have a lot of cool things when like you're changing the way you're doing things and i think that i sorry for getting from this quantum gravity

it's again it's about trying to condense this corpus you're trying to like find a single description that can limit to two different things and right now we really have only a limited number of suggestions like roughly string theories if framework can you try to find other ones you probably

never would if you're just sociologically in a field where everything you're learning is in the

context of like within string theory it probably will be some variant of it at any point just almost by accident so i think it's kind of fun to do a little bit of a metal layer and think about like what are we actually after as a field and be clear about those goals yeah what is the perimeter institute oh i love it so perimeter is founded by um like let's read us he's one of the co-founders of buckberry and he's one of these like you know tech entrepreneur physics

fans so like i mean obviously like you kind of the head of his time with the smart phone type of thing um wasn't engineer awesome engineer and then like like physics that put a lot of money into

“physics you i'm not sure like i mean like you have to be a fun kind of uh i don't know if it's”

like a really an idea or a silly idea but it's definitely good for the physicists so what i love about it is that it's like a research institution that's like a private public partnership so like his money is highly leveraged in like the Canadian government sports it of just for theoretical physics and so this need because you can imagine you know if you cared about the product you care about research having something where the whole institution is dedicated to that is a very different

vibe than again like a university where you are like you're pooling like you're eight like auditoriums or your dorms or things like that and it's all these different research directions that are together sharing some resources and you're kind of like like cross-sectioning the field and then it's a reputation of that place that draws some talent in or not i think there is value to this kind of cross-sectioning um research by the product or by the discipline and perimeter is an instantiation of

that but like with the downside of it being just one place in waterloo material you know where he's company was and things like that so i do you mean we want there instead of

a round to one point one million dollars yeah but these these packages are for like research funding

and things like that so in the research is i guess i don't know people are expensive so that's where these things scale and sound like fancy numbers but i mean i you know um but at Brown it would be very much like a Ivy League professor sounds cool you're teaching a lot but um but again you're just kind of at a university that means one opportunity for other competitions i don't know like that type of vibe of like within the U.S. system harbour to get more money than Brownwood um and then

and then you try to make it that which is fun but i'll see if i let yeah so what are you doing

“at the perimeter? yeah so i i do my research there so i do my professor like a re-research”

and it's basically like your faculty don't have to teach you mentor mostly like master students up

and then you're but they're more forgiving or like like the the kind of institutional things that you're helping with it's normally it's like instead of being on committees that are just like in a big department or university we don't care you're closer to being able to help guide the institute sometimes and so it's kind of fun because you get to think okay like where this institute that has like outreach teams it has like teaching teams separate like that

really value each of those facets of physics um how can you help with that as the researcher and i i love that type of question i love thinking about like how we can position ourselves to collaborate more with like technical companies for like AI for physics and things like that and i don't think that question is as meaningful if you're at another university because you know that university doesn't care about their medical physics they can change their mind

and who they hire later in the commuter over time and sure there's probably awesome like CS departments at places but like you know like you can really focus on a thing when it's your whole mission and i love that about for you. do you think AI is gonna allow what do you think about it? i'm sorry

“like I used to be more so like again i think by opinion at least i'm happy that my opinion can change i”

feel like that's a positive but um like i was definitely more like jaded by oh people over cell things and like what if they overcell things too much the extent more than it hurts the um like it's not like there's value to expertise that i think that sometimes people overrecorrect um things and they don't trust like science stuff like that right so like how do you engage with like hard conversations of like where is this field going or things like that without throwing maybe

out with a bathwater or like making it hard to to like elaborate so i used to be more like oh no they're gonna say they're gonna do all these things i know that my heroes kind of like physics so is it gonna be like the like the guys of the funding get access to all data start making some claims of theories and then like like we are i don't know enough to be able to tell them why they're wrong yet i had a the rabbit ended up happening instead is more like oh we're kind of like

take the top people in the field like not like the harbor press is not that i mean um and uh just work with them and collaborate with them first and then it's a funny it's reputation thing but it's fine it makes sense of the business movement makes sense but it's a funny thing where we're more a part of it than i might have thought i thought it would be like we're gonna get overwhelmed with a bunch of crock pot papers by physics enthusiasts and it's less that and more um yeah more this

funny thing where it's as we're all in the labs for a little bit or not but like how do we really do this right instead of it being like okay so say one company wants to show that they're doing some research they can have like work with a few top researchers and then the top researchers can say it's interesting but like we want to do cool or shit then we couldn't dumb before and how do you like

“like i think that it's funny it's like you think it wouldn't be that hard to try to just get”

all bunch of string there's just like let's do the what they do from math right down a bunch of like well enough to find questions and there's someone to like try to automate it and even we could we could have more fun we could say like okay Sam Altman you're saying catchy pt8's going to solve quantum gravity let's put some parameters on that and make a bet and if you like do it by that time frame whoever did it gets that price pool if not give that money to fund the researchers

I don't know like it'd be like i think there's a fun way to do like surprise with these deadlines because the thing that scares me the most is there's a lot of confidence and once you start playing with the coding side of the product I could see you the confidence in that but like to what extent like

a company can always pivot and you can be like that claim is bullshit but but they still will find

something else that works and that's great for them so you don't want to short the company I think that like how do you call them out a little bit when they're overzealous if that overzealousness can hurt you on the flip side though I found like you know the agent at coding vibe coding capabilities are just amazing because you can have all these little daydreams of how you want to interact with the physics paper and like before when I was a perimeter they're supportive

of me like trying to use some of my like grant money or start up money to like hire some interns from like local universities to code something up but like I was a shitty cutter so I'm not good at managing people at task that I don't know whether I'm actually them to do and then like I was so bad I couldn't even like basically host this thing locally to show people what it was and like with it a few weeks like I could basically redev the same thing with cloud code which is

like amazing so like I kind of see that sometimes that hyper that push can drive a product to a level

where like now I don't need a higher adepting as a physicist I can start to do play around with things that I couldn't have done if I didn't know how to code myself for their skill sets that are open to me because it's been kind of democratized so I'm grateful to that and that's a bit intentioned with my kind of ear about like we're gonna solve physics and then it might like take the funny way out so so like at least like thank you I'm gonna do a place all physics no but this thing is

I that's the question is like what does it mean to solve physics I want to make sure we have the same definition of that um because I do think that it'd be hard to imagine actually solving physics

the coolest thing is to try to think okay there's a lot of things in our field that you would never

do because again research limitations so when you have a couple thousand people who awesome smart people like like definitely like I feel done all the time they're awesome people and they do their thing and you know like yourself select accidentally for the type of people who just love the mathematics to the extent where then like you can accidentally be ostracized if you are too ambitious with them that framework because again who are you right and then also just it doesn't

help you get a job so like there's some things where it's like almost like an emergent phenomena of things that people create a say our institutional problems it's like it's really not anybody being a bad actor it's just like you get stuck in the way that things are done because people like obviously like what they do and the people who like it stay in it and people who don't are expelled right so imagine like you have something where it's like if you feel comfortable

with things operating this way then you stay and otherwise you leave and you resent the

“feel then like that's a bad thing sometimes but now I think you know there's enough like so you”

have this thing we're basically before a lot of people would go and like you wouldn't value doing brute force straightforward things that are just like scanning over spaces of stuff because

that won't lead to breakthrough or like is it one individual you can't do it but

if you can automate that like sure there's a lot of value to types of questions that nobody would have cared about but that then makes it a problem with benchmarking so like for example in other fields where there's more of an engineering challenge or like a very specific goal in mind you can say this goal is valuable and then you know protein folding or whatnot they can do it or in even math there's more like I guess like test for kids you know like um the community

seems a bit more organized a lot more like I am no problems like different benchmarks of like how good is it as thing in our field I think that we we kind of don't like often to say who's research is more valuable than that we have definitely feel like there's totally a vibe of like judging things but like the kind of ethos threatens that lens itself to not wanting to just

“straight up say this is a valuable thing that you should do because it was so straightforward to do”

it they wouldn't be an interesting question and it's like that's dumb because like anything that's we're doing like you'd think it'd be worth telling someone else to do right um and so I think that we just got to get over that in our heads a bit and realize like that just because in the past you could only get faculty lines to people who like happen to have a great idea that there isn't value because the whole enterprise isn't it's physics it's not math it's like there's some cohesive

structure to this thing like how do we optimize for that and I think it's fun because I think that can disrupt that a little bit in a way that isn't gonna necessarily hopefully not hopefully not in a way where it's like completely just erasing it I think that there's a lot of value that expertise and like how do we harness that to do something really cool with it instead of it being this thing where someone who's not an expert just thinks it looks like it's doing the

right thing you know what what is something that you want to dive into that you haven't yet

yeah so I mean for me it's always grasping around the other side in the sense of like you get

you feel siloed and like it's not like like no one siloing you but yourself in some sense but because like I guess for me my the one thing that I wish I that was like it would be easier for me if it wasn't is like I really like extrinsic motivation sometimes too much so like when I'm competing I can be happy but I like if other people care about what I'm competing you know and sometimes they don't because they care about their own thing and like I don't think you're a

better person or not for having like less extrinsic motivation but it's hard to navigate like you know every person just cares about their own thing and you're like how do I do something this person because I want to jump into their thing but then like they see it as a waste of their time to necessarily like you know transfer that knowledge or something because they have their own graces they have to do the research it's hard to to arch and move around and if funny way just

because everybody's doing their own little math but so I just wish that I could better parse other people's papers understand like how their notation their ideas fit into the things that I've already built in my mind and so like the type of thing that I'm excited about more so is just you know can I take inspired by this database of all the different papers in the field and try to like use large-ing with models or what not just for fun to see like how much I can

“try to parse like the different concepts that are appearing these papers and I think it's a fun”

game to be like okay when I when I'm when I'm asked to explain something publicly why am I so shit I think I've spent a lot of years instead of getting better at public speaking thinking like why the hell am I so bad at it and I think there's these tradeoffs between you know we are selected for at least in our job it's better if you are not sacrificing accuracy and so anytime you're making an analogy there's so many caveats that caveats get in the way of intuition going through

and then sometimes you don't even think that way so it's just like can I try to like see the structure of the thing I'm studying a little bit better by like playing around with it within the scope of things that I know so I'm like so I'm super excited just for the fact that like I can experiment with that all I want to because before I might need to like be better at coding and Python or like understandings by her baby I keys and that's if you are calls and then that's like

automatic now so you get it basically just have fun and I like that a lot and so for me I just want to basically understand better like like what is the information content of what I work right and again

race between the US and China yeah who's wanting I mean I think the US is still like I mean it's

“sorry but obviously I'm sorry I think this is like and I think this is something where I'm happy”

to hear your side of it too a bit more because I know like everybody I who has any sort of military background has a different view or conception of China than like probably because physics is so useless so the type of physics that I do is seen as that that it's nice because everybody can be a part of it so we love this notion that like doesn't matter what country you're from your contributing to like this corpus and it should be for everything that we're doing we're publishing on archive

for this so it's not like there's IP involved in like various IP policies kind of fact things so like I like the fact that there's some little slice of research that's so far away from application but like everybody can be a part of it and it's not like what country you're in and so when

I see things like about like like China funding experiment it's like you know someone top

down could just say we're gonna fund it hey it's an experiment and honestly maybe it's a good thing if they're spending money on trying to be better at like research for just the like the type of research that's just for the cloud and not for like the military technology like that I know like like make them what the build players right but um i do think that the the pipeline of transferable technology is much slower than it's actually building technology right so so I mean

“my attitude is I could see that there is and this is type of things here I think that you know”

very strong like top down governance can do or and also different relaxation of like IP laws like they there's a power to that that you can see kind of Europe maybe over regulating things superday like a USA I right so I like to think that as we are right now and I still think it's more feasible to say that like the research that I do is so much less about the practical applications and the technology for like these space specs like detector is I still think that the European

Space Agency one Lisa that or whatever the name is going to be that the U.S. isn't part of will perform this particular one I think they were referring to um TN chainers to me but I think it's great that like if they cared about it they would fund it versus like if a hard time sometimes going to send the American taxpayer that this is worth funding you know so so you think we're a head we are ahead yeah and I but I think that like again so what do you want to be ahead on like

like isn't it great that like they spend their money on the things that we don't value doing eventually you know type of thing if there's a reason why we don't value doing it maybe it's great that they're doing it what do they do and that we're not doing oh I mean I just think that they have like sort of for example there's a lot of I'm not sure if it's a good so again these could be like you know different people have different I mean I don't what what level you want to consider

it is a regime versus a person or like but like there's a like faculty member at Harvard or like it was there who has a lot of influence in China which is great because then he can get to have research centers and he can hire people who wouldn't get jobs in America so I think what I'm saying is that you know in America it's like oh we only want like the top person to like get a job or like

“these like elite things and we can get from all over the world and that's what we typically do”

and then their route is like there's a lot of awesome people that are never going to get a job in

the U.S. system we can hire them there and sometimes works but also right now it's still very isolating so like the U.S. would choose not to do that like we don't want to just have hire a bunch of more faculty because like you know but then we don't see me that choice they're optimizing given that constraint what can they do that's valuable and I think that then like there's a reason why we made our choice right and that still has an effective like everybody but I know that like it's

really hard to I mean it's really hard in like Indian China I think to like break out of those systems unless you have to have an advisor or somebody you know who was in the U.S. system which isn't saying like I mean I feel bad for like the researchers is just like it's so sociological and some sense like you can't get some brilliant idea and like get to be a part of this like club in some sense because again it's not just it's almost more like you can't if you don't speak

the language of the right way people don't think you know what you're talking about or they like they don't understand you and so like there's like pipelines that are very limited and very much go through the U.S. and almost like go through like Princeton Stanford I'm like Harvard I might see it out you know and that sucks but um but that definitely just says that it's not like we're behind in that sense right are there any projects going on in China that you're excited about

I mean I've less of an experimental less type of price and I think a lot of um I mean I'm excited for my phenomenological buddies if they think that they can get somebody to fund an experiment that the U.S. wouldn't prioritize I'm happy for them I still think the things that I'm more excited about are still in Silicon Valley as far as I'm concerned by it but that's my my own bias of my own thinking what about the U.S. so there are any projects here that you're

excited about I mean it's not involved in I probably don't know the full projects that people are doing I think that um just the way that we

when the time skills for research in a company are so comparable to the ones in

“I can eat me as sometimes that runs me the wrong way like I think that we're good at”

we're not there's an problem of putting money into innovation so the question of like who's hands is it going or how is it going like but it's definitely exciting things in the state so states you can move fast and break things in a way that I don't think you can many other places but probably in China IP laws would be such that unless like I mean however we follow the law with like copyrighted material for training things I imagine that they could have had a lot of

they could have done that better right because they can they don't care if they don't maybe I don't know the actual sort of but a system who doesn't care about IP can definitely you know do cool things and so what do you think about all these UFOs and U.A.P. settings and stuff I don't know I wish I wish they were real big cooler but no I don't think I believe in aliens but I don't believe in like aliens instead of contact with us but

you believe in aliens oh in general I mean this is statistically I mean so like I think there's a fun thing so like either we're super super special or like sure there probably are why wouldn't there be life somewhere else where are the initial conditions for where we are so

“special I think that you know people who study like I don't do this myself but like there's some”

fact that you haven't interacted with them gives you some balance on how common it can be or like whether they need to be like in some environment we can have water all these types of fun things but sure I think that like I mean in less and I mean the funny thing is that it's called tension with religion stuff too like I think there's no reason I think you're special unless there is a reason they are special and so modding out by or maybe the prior being like we're probably

not special would tell you sure there's something like an alien somewhere we'll never know after

that you don't know but I don't believe in like this is certainly like I definitely like I wish that we had talked about in a very critical way. So you think all these sightings are bullshit. Oh that's hard I mean I want to yeah but I don't want to say it like that's mean to say like that people don't believe what you see type of thing but because I'm saying like I wish if it weren't bullshit when there'd be more fun there bad I think what I'm saying is like I wish things were as cool

like all these conspiracy theories make it seem like there's much more structure and organization than there is like I mean just like I mean maybe I'm with you I'm with you so is that you've seen the military when it works fucking well and like that there is some cool shit that I wish I knew about but I just didn't even know who it is in the military that go into the water and to have riveted propulsion

systems or whatever I don't know yeah I've never seen anything I don't I think I've only seen

stuff on the news yeah but I think what I'm saying is like I don't believe the news I know that yeah it's funny I don't know how many people are actively I think that we don't always give credit to the fact that people cannot realize their biases or that they are self-serving sometimes like I mean like I don't know how much of it's like knocking value in or like emerging knocking value or whatever it would be like because the the one that really gets me is the

nemmits oh it was I think more it's I don't know you don't know about the nemmits I don't know I guess not multiple people saw it was some kind of a what was it it was like an egg shaped whatever yeah projectile and it went in the water yeah I don't believe it lost any speed now to the water pilot saw people in the ship saw a lot of it was a collective

that's super cool I wish I mean I always think you've heard about this I'm I'm you're I mean

you're definitely different like a set of like the way to like internet feed we definitely live in different worlds which is no but that's and that's fine in the sense of like I know that I have biases coming from like the experience of like who I would have like kind of spend a lot of time around but no I mean I mean I think I always thought maybe it's cool military projects I don't know like and then like sometimes like optical illusions for like it being if it was physically impossible

“but that's what I want to ask you about why how could it be an optical illusion I mean I don't”

know I haven't seen the thing to to know that answer but I mean like first of all it's going to mean more fun now that you can AI generates stuff like we're going to have like a real like fake news outscale accidentally or I'm a lish of the editor like that's scary and then the other side I don't understand the extent to which things are physically impossible for it to be a just some like whatever drone or something you don't know I know in this case I'm not talking about this

example of playing in the water but but I think what I'm saying is that yeah I guess so I wish it was like when someone does believe it is that thing they're so confident in alien and not like whatever why did I think the alien can do something that we can't do because if it's all the laws of physics and probably it's the same capability so then it's just a question of like how advances the US military or other whatever um right or what are you actually seeing

or so what you think you're seeing because you're again extrapolating based on like other things

I mean I don't get a little awkward for that um but uh no I think again I'm saying

more in the literal sense of like you're probably in misunderstanding what it's being seen if like there's a reason why it physically couldn't be some military tech it's what my my prior

“kind I'd love to be wrong would we project a hologram I mean I'm sorry I think what I'm saying”

I mean sorry to the extent I don't see any reason why you could and do a little like a little like comes some save me what's the what's the quote from the like a princess layer I don't know like that type of thing which is a more literal version of the hologram not the one that I when I was studying um I don't know where laser shows are at nowadays or exactly what but

see the things I always I think I always take the more pragmatic attitude of like

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

“hiding all these alien cool stuff like I think it's all bullshit exactly I do too but”

all of it yeah but like the person who then doesn't think it's bullshit has this probably in

their mind like a more like powerful version of the US government having like some really cool

like men and black tech right I don't know that's kind of a feeling you're fun like I yeah I just I think that we need to it's a fun thing to think about yeah to lay off the conspiracy of the cool stuff like that you can do really you know what I mean they said there's a lot of stuff that's like the same ice amorphism class of like that's fucking cool like this like whatever like autonomous of 35 thing you're talking well like there's some cool shit that we

can do what is it like I was through some of them was going around and showing me the different things that you have I forget one of your teammates was showing the um is that like scaled down model of a military type of thing that a private company was saying I don't know it but um but no this I

“don't know I had yeah I think I wish that yeah I'd be fun if like people like if it wasn't just”

defense funny that got to do the cool shit I'm with you yeah well Sabrina we're we're wrapping up the interview what what are you getting into next I think I'm getting into being a shitty vibe go to and just seeing like getting to have fun like like do my physics and then on the side kind of try to look at this like bigger skill picture the corpus and see how far I can go with a little like do it yourself type of attitude until I need help and then ask for help love it

well Sabrina this is fascinating thank you thank you so much no matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from if you get anything out of this at all anything please like comment and subscribe in most importantly share this everywhere you possibly can and if you're feeling extra generous head to apple podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review. the day ago on a Pakistan's Pakomot of Cheeseet Minosak-Cion Day.