Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #187

1. 0:00 – 1:07

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT who won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interaction. Quick mention of our sponsors, The Information, NetSuite, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Eight Sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a word about asymptotic freedom. Protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of an atom. Strong interaction is responsible for the strong nuclear force that binds them. But strong interaction also holds together the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons. Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Politzer came up with a theory postulating that when quarks come really close to one another, the attraction abates and they behave like free particles. This is called asymptotic freedom. This happens at very, very high energies, which is also where all the fun is. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Frank Wilczek.

2. 1:07 – 9:39

   Are there limits to what physics can understand?

   1. LFLex Fridman1:07

      What is the most beautiful idea in physics?

   2. FWFrank Wilczek1:11

      The most beautiful idea in physics is that we can get a compact description of the world that's very precise and very, uh, full, uh, at the, at, at the level of the operating system of the world. Um, that's, uh, an extraordinary gift, and we get wo- uh, and we get worried when we, uh, ha- find discrepancies (laughs) between our, uh, description of the world and, and what's actually observed, uh, at the level even of a part in a billion.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:46

      You actually have this quote from Einstein that, uh, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its com- is that it is comprehensible," something like that.

   4. FWFrank Wilczek1:55

      Yes. That's, so that's the most beautiful surprise that I think, uh, that, that really was the, to me, the most profound result of the scientific revolution of the s- of the 17th century with, uh, the shining example of Newtonian physics that you could aspire to completeness, precision, and a concise description of the world, of the operating system. And it's gotten better and better (laughs) over the years to, and that's the continuing miracle.

   5. LFLex Fridman2:27

      Exactly.

   6. FWFrank Wilczek2:27

      Now, there are a lot of beautiful sub-miracles too. (laughs) Uh, the form of the equations is governed by high degrees of symmetry, and, and they have a very surprising, kinda mind-expanding structure, especially in quantum mechanics. But if we ha- if I had to say the, the single most beautiful revelation is that, in fact, uh, the world is comprehensible.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:53

      Would you say that's a fact or a hope?

   8. FWFrank Wilczek2:56

      It's a fact. (laughs) We can do, we, you can point to things like, uh, the rise of, uh, gross pro- gross national products grow- you know, per capita around the world as a result of the scientific revolution. You can see it all around you, uh, of, of in may- in recent developments with exponen- so exponential production of wealth, uh, control of nature at, uh, a, a very profound level where we do things like sense tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny vibrations to tell that there are black holes colliding far away, or we, uh, test laws as, as I alluded to

   9. NANarrator3:40

      (laughs)

   10. FWFrank Wilczek3:40

       ... as a part in a billion and do, you know, things and what appear on the surface to be entirely different conceptual universes. I mean, on the one hand, pencil and paper, or nowadays, computers that, that calculate abstractions, and on the other hand, magnets and accelerators and detectors that look at the behavior of fundamental particles. And, and these different universes have to agree or else we get very upset. (laughs) And that's, uh, yeah, I mean, it's an amazing thing if you think about it, so, and, and it's telling us that we do understand a lot about nature at a very profound level. And, uh, there are still things we don't understand, of course, but as we get better and better answers and better and better ability to address difficult questions, we can ask more and more ambitious questions.

   11. LFLex Fridman4:35

       Well, I guess the hope part of that is because we are surrounded by mystery. So we've, uh, one way to say it, if you look at the growth, uh, GDP over time, that we figured out quite a lot and we're able to in- in- improve the quality of life because of that, and we've figured out some fundamental things about this universe, but we still don't know how much mystery there is. And it's also possible that there's some things that are, in fact, incomprehensible to both our minds and the tools of science. Like, we, the, the sad thing is we may not know it because, in fact, they are incomprehensible. And that's the open question is how much of the universe is comprehensible.

   12. FWFrank Wilczek5:18

       Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman5:18

       If we figured out the, the everything, uh, what's inside the black hole and everything that happened at the moment of the Big Bang, does that still give us the key to understanding the human mind and the, the emergence of all the beautiful complexity we see around us? That's not, uh... Like, when I, when I see these objects like, uh, I don't know if you've seen them, like cellular automata.

   14. FWFrank Wilczek5:41

       Mm-hmm.

   15. LFLex Fridman5:41

       Uh, all, all these kinds of objects where the, from simple rules emerges complexity-

   16. FWFrank Wilczek5:46

       Yes.

   17. LFLex Fridman5:46

       ... it makes you wonder, maybe it's not reducible to simple, beautiful equations, the whole thing, only parts of it. That's the tension I was getting at with the hope. (laughs)

   18. FWFrank Wilczek5:57

       We- well, when we say the universe is comprehensible, we have to...Kinda draw careful distinctions about, or, uh, uh, uh, e- uh, uh, definitions about what, what we mean by, by that. Uh, so-

   19. LFLex Fridman6:12

       Both the universe and the quantum, and the comprehensive book.

   20. FWFrank Wilczek6:15

       Exactly, (laughs) right? So, uh, the, so in certain areas of understanding, uh, reality, we've made extraordinary progress, I would say, in understanding fundamental physical processes and getting very precise equations that really work, and allow us to do, uh, the profound sculpting of matter, you know, to make computers and iPhones and everything else, and they really work, and they're extraordinary productions. Uh, on the other, but, uh, and th- that's all based on the laws of quantum mechanics, and, you know, and they real- and they really work, and (laughs) that, uh, and they give us tremendous control of nature. On the other hand, uh, as I s- or as we, as we get better answers, we can also ask more ambitious questions, and there are certainly things that have been observed even in the, uh, in what would be usually called the realm of physics that aren't understood. For instance, uh, there seems to be another source of mass in the universe, the so-called dark matter, that we don't know what it is, and it's a very interesting question what it is, uh, then, uh, but also as you were alluding to, there, there's, it's one thing to know the basic equa- equations (laughs) , it's another thing to be able to solve them in, in important cases, so we run aga- we run up against the limits of that in things like chemistry, where we'd like to be able to design molecules and predict their behavior from the equations. We think the equations could do that in principle, but, but, uh, uh, in, in practice, it's very challenging to solve them in, in all but very simple cases, uh, and then there's the other thing, which is that a lot of what we're interested in is, uh, historically conditioned. It's not, uh, it's not a matter of the fundamental equations, but about what has evolved or come out of, of the early universe and formed into people and frogs and societies and things, and the laws of physic- the basic laws of physics only take you so far in tha- in that, it kinda provides a foundation, but doesn't really, that you need entirely different concepts to deal with, uh, those kind of, uh, systems, and all we c- uh, was, uh, uh, one thing I can say about that is that the laws themselves point out their limitations, that they, they kind of-

   21. LFLex Fridman8:50

       Okay.

   22. FWFrank Wilczek8:50

       ... they're laws for dynamical evolution, so they tell you what happens if you have a certain starting point, but they don't tell you what the starting point should be-

   23. LFLex Fridman8:59

       Mm-hmm.

   24. FWFrank Wilczek8:59

       ... at least, yeah. Uh, and, uh, the other, the other thing that emerges from the equations themselves is the phenomena of chaos and s- uh, s- uh, sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells us that, uh, you have, that there are intrinsic limitations on how well we can spell out the consequences of the laws if we try to apply them.

   25. LFLex Fridman9:26

       It's the old apple pie. If you wanna, um, what is it? Make an apple pie from scratch, it- you have to build the universe or something like that.

   26. FWFrank Wilczek9:33

       (laughs) Well, you- you're much better off starting with apples than starting with quarks. Let's put it

3. 9:39 – 18:08

   Beautiful ideas in physics

   1. FWFrank Wilczek9:39

      that way. (laughs)

   2. LFLex Fridman9:39

      In your, uh, book, A Beautiful Question, you ask, "Does the world embody beautiful ideas?" So the book is centered around this very interesting question. It's like Shakespeare, you can, like, dig in and read into all the different interpretations of this question, but at the high level, what to you is the connection between beauty of the world and physics of the world?

   3. FWFrank Wilczek10:02

      In a sense, we now have a lot of insight into what the w- the laws are, the for- the form they take that- and allow us to understand matter in great depth and control it, as we, as we've discussed, uh, and it's an extraordinary thing how mathematically ideal those equations turn out to be. In the early days of Greek philosophy, uh, Plato had this model of atoms built out of the five perfectly symmetrical platonic solids, so there was the, somehow the idea that mathematical symmetry, uh, should govern the world, and, uh, we've out-Plato'd Plato by far (laughs) in modern physics because we have symmetries that are much more extensive, much more powerful, that turn out to be, uh, the ingredients out of which we construct our theory of the world, and, and it works, and, uh, th- so that's certainly beautiful. So the, the, the math- the idea of symmetry, which is, uh, a driving inspiration in much of human art, uh, especially decorative art like at the Alhambra or in wallpaper designs or things you see around you everywhere, uh, also turns out to be the dominant theme in modern fundamental physics, symmetry and its manifestations, be it the laws turn out to be very, to have these tremendous amounts of symmetry. You can change the symbols and move them around in different ways, and they still have the same consequences. Uh, the- so that's, that's, uh, beautiful (laughs) and, uh, th- that, that, that, uh, these things, uh, these different, these concepts that humans find appealing also turn out to be the concepts that govern how the world actually works. And, uh, I don't think that's an accident. I think-... humans were evolved to, uh, be able to interact with the world in, in ways that, uh, are advantageous and to learn from it, and so we are naturally evolved or designed to, to enjoy beauty and, and to symmetry, and this, and the world has it, and that's no... That's why we, that's why we resonate with it.

   4. LFLex Fridman12:31

      Well, it's interesting that the ideas of symmetry emerge at all, at many levels of the hierarchy of the universe. So you're talking about particles, but it also is at the level of chemistry and biology and, um, and the fact that our cognitive, sort of our perception system and whatever our cognition is also finds it appealing, or somehow our sense of what is beautiful is grounded in this idea of symmetry or the breaking of symmetry.

   5. FWFrank Wilczek13:06

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman13:06

      Symmetry is at the core of our conception of beauty.

   7. FWFrank Wilczek13:09

      (laughs)

   8. LFLex Fridman13:09

      Whether it's the breaking or the non-breaking of the symmetry.

   9. FWFrank Wilczek13:12

      Yes.

   10. LFLex Fridman13:13

       It makes you w- wonder why, why? (laughs)

   11. FWFrank Wilczek13:19

       (laughs)

   12. LFLex Fridman13:19

       Like, uh, so I come from Russia, and, and the question of Dostoevsky, he's, he, he has said that beauty will save the world. Maybe-

   13. FWFrank Wilczek13:27

       (laughs)

   14. LFLex Fridman13:27

       ... maybe as a physicist you can tell me what do you think he meant by that?

   15. FWFrank Wilczek13:31

       I don't know, I don't know if it saves the world, but it, it does turn out to be a tremendous source of insight into the world. When we, uh, investigate kind of the, the most fundamental interactions, things that are hard to access because they occur at very short distances between, uh, very, uh, special kinds of particles whose, whose properties are only revealed at high energies. At a, uh, we don't have much to go on from everyday life, but so we have, when we guess what the, so we ... and, and the experiments are difficult to do, so you can't, you can't really, uh, follow a very im- uh, wholly empirical procedure to sort of s- in the Baconi- Baconian style, figure out the laws kind of step by step just by accumulating a lot of data. What we actually do is guess, (laughs) and the guesses are kind of aesthetic really. What, what would be a nice description that's consistent with what we know? And then you try it out and see if it works, and, and, and by gosh it does in, in, in some, in many profound cases. Uh, so there's that, but there's another source of symmetry which I didn't talk so much about in, uh, in A Beautiful Question but does, uh, relate to your comments, and I think very much relates to, uh, um, the source of, of symmetry that we find in biology and, uh, and in, in our, in our heads, you know, in our brain, (laughs) which is that, uh, although I ... well, it is discussed a bit in, in, uh, A Beautiful Question and, and also in Fundamentals, is that when you have ... symmetry is also a very important, uh, means of construction. So when you have for instance, uh, simple viruses that, that need to construct their coat, their protein coat, the coats often take the form of platonic solids. (laughs)

   16. LFLex Fridman15:43

       Oh.

   17. FWFrank Wilczek15:43

       And the reason is that the viruses are really dumb, (laughs) and they only know how to do one thing, so they make a pentagon, then they make another pentagon, and they make another pentagon, and they all glue together in the same way, and that makes a very symmetrical object sort of. So the rules of development when, when you have simple rules and they go, they work again and again, you get symmetrical patterns. That's kind of a, in fact it's a recipe also for generating fractals. You know, really like, uh, the, uh, the kind of broccoli that has all this internal structure, and I wi- I wish I had a picture to show that made people remember it from the, from the, uh, from the supermarket, and you say how did a vegetable so intelligent to make such a beautiful object with all this fractal structure? And the, the, the, the secret is stupidity. You just do the same thing over and over again. And, uh, in our brains also we, you know, we've, we came out, we start from single cells and they reproduce and they, they're, uh, each one does basically roughly the same thing. They, they, uh, the program evolves in time of course, different, uh, different modules get turned on and off, genetic, different regions of the genetic code get turned on and off. But, uh, but basically a lot of the s- same things are going on and they're simple things, and so you produce the same patterns over and over again, and that's a recipe for producing symmetry because you're getting the same thing in many, many places. And if you look at, uh, for instance the beautiful drawings of Ramon y Cajal, the great neuroanatomist who drew the structure of different organs like the hippocampus, you see it's very regular and very intricate and it's symmetry in, in, in this, in that sense. It's 'cause, it's, it's many repeated units that, that, uh, you can take from one place to the other and see that they look more or less the same.

   18. LFLex Fridman17:52

       But what you're describing, this kind of beauty that we're talking about now, is a, is a very small sample in terms of space time, in a, in a very big world-

   19. FWFrank Wilczek18:01

       (laughs)

   20. LFLex Fridman18:03

       ... uh, in a very short brief moment in this long history.

4. 18:08 – 21:56

   Space and time are really big

   1. LFLex Fridman18:08

      In your book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, I really recommend people read it, uh, you, uh... (laughs) You say that space and time are pretty big-

   2. FWFrank Wilczek18:19

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman18:19

      ... or very big. How big are we talking about? Like, what, uh, can you draw... Can you tell a, a brief history of space and time?

   4. FWFrank Wilczek18:28

      It's easy to take, to tell a brief history (laughs) , but the details get very in- involved, of course. But, uh, one thing I like to say is that, uh, if, if, if you take a broad enough view, the history of the universe is simpler than the history of Sweden, say. (laughs)

   5. LFLex Fridman18:43

      (laughs)

   6. FWFrank Wilczek18:43

      Because you don't... You, your standards are lower for, for, uh... But just to make it a, a quantitative, I'll just give a few highlights (laughs) . And it's, it's, it's a little bit easier to talk about time, uh, so let's start with that. The Big Bang occurred, we think, the universe was much hotter and denser and more uniform about 13.8 billion years ago, and that's what we call The Big Bang, when, uh... And it's been expanding and cooling, the matter in it has been expanding and cooling ever since. So, in a real sense, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. That's a big number, kinda hard to think about. A, a nice way to think about it, though, is to map it onto one year. So if... So let's say the univer- uh, and just linearly map the time intervals from 13.8 billion years onto one year. So, the, the Big Bang then is at, on January 1st, at (laughs) 12:00 AM. Uh, and, uh, you wait for quite a long time, uh, before the dinosaurs emerge. The dinosaurs emerge on Christmas, it turns out. And-

   7. LFLex Fridman19:58

      12 months-

   8. FWFrank Wilczek19:59

      (laughs)

   9. LFLex Fridman19:59

      ... almost 12 months later.

   10. FWFrank Wilczek20:00

       Getting close to the end, yes (laughs) .

   11. LFLex Fridman20:02

       Getting close to the end.

   12. FWFrank Wilczek20:03

       And, and the extinction event that, uh, let mammals and ultimately humans inherit the Earth from, uh, from the dinosaurs occurred on December 30th (laughs) . And all of human history is a small part of the last day. And so, so yes, so t- so we, we're occupying only a... And a human lifetime is a very, very infinitesimal part of this, uh, uh, uh, interval of the- this, these gigantic cosmic reaches of time. Uh, and in space, we can tell a very similar story. In fact, a very, uh... It's convenient to think that the size of the universe is the distance that light can travel in 13.8 billion (laughs) years. That's cuz I was... 13.8 billion light years, that's, that's how far you can see out, uh, that's how far things can, uh, signals can reach us from. And, um, that is a big distance (laughs) beca- because compared to that, uh, the, the universe, the, uh, the Earth is a fraction of a light second. So again, we... It's really, really big. And so w- we have... If we wanna think about the universe as a whole in space and time, uh, we really need a different kind of imagination. It's not, it's not something you can grasp in terms of psychological time in a useful way. You have to think... You know, you have to use exponential notation and abstract concepts to, to really get any, uh, hold on, on, on these vast times and spaces. Uh,

5. 21:56 – 29:17

   There are billions of thoughts in a human life

   1. FWFrank Wilczek21:56

      on the other hand, let me hasten to add that that doesn't make us small (laughs) or make the time that we have to us small. Because, uh, again, looking at those pictures of w- you know, what our minds are in some sen- the components of our minds, these beautiful drawings of the cellular patterns inside the brain, you see that there are many, many, many processing units. And if you analyze how fast they operate... I tried to estimate how many thoughts a person can have in a lifetime. That's kind of a fuzzy question, but I'm very proud that I (laughs) , I was able to, to find it pretty precisely. And it turns out, we can... We have time for billions of meaningful thoughts-

   2. LFLex Fridman22:45

      In a lifetime.

   3. FWFrank Wilczek22:45

      ... in a lifetime. So, so it's a lot. We shouldn't-

   4. LFLex Fridman22:49

      Can you, uh-

   5. FWFrank Wilczek22:49

      ... we shouldn't think of ourselves as terribly small (laughs) , e- either in space or in time, because although we're small in those dimensions, compared to the universe, we're, we're large compared to meaningful units of processing information and, and, uh, and being able to conceptualize and understand things.

   6. LFLex Fridman23:11

      Yeah, but 99% of those thoughts are probably food, sex, or internet related.

   7. FWFrank Wilczek23:16

      (laughs) Well-

   8. LFLex Fridman23:17

      But yeah, that's-

   9. FWFrank Wilczek23:18

      Well, yes. Well, they're not nece- (laughs) , that's right.

   10. LFLex Fridman23:20

       Only like point one is Nobel Prize winning ideas, but-

   11. FWFrank Wilczek23:24

       That's true. But, uh, you know, there's more to life than winning Nobel Prizes (laughs) .

   12. LFLex Fridman23:27

       How did you, um, do that calcula- Can you maybe break that apart a little bit just kind of for fun-

   13. FWFrank Wilczek23:32

       Oh.

   14. LFLex Fridman23:32

       ... and sort of an intuition of how we calculate the number of thoughts?

   15. FWFrank Wilczek23:35

       Yeah, um, the number of thoughts, right. There, there... It's, it's necessarily imprecise because a lot of things are going on in different ways, and what is a thought? But there are several things that point to more or less the same, uh, rate of being able to have meaningful thoughts. Uh, for instance, I'm, um... The one that I think is maybe the most penetrating is, uh, how fast we can, we can process visual images. How do, how do we do that? Uh, w-... if you've ever watched old movies, you can see that, that when, wh- well, any movie, in, in fact, that in, a motion picture is really not a motion picture. It's a series of snapshots that are playing one after the other. And it's the f- because our brains also work that way, we take snapshots of the world, integrate over a certain time, and then go onto the next one, and then by pros- post-processing create the illusion of continuity and flow. Uh, we can deal with that. And, uh, the, if the flicker rate is too slow, then you start to see that it's not, it's a series of snapshots, and you can ask what is the, what is the crossover? When does it change from being something that, that is matched to our processing speed versus too fast? And, and it turns out about 40 per second. And then if you take 40 per second as, as how well we, how fast we can process visual images, you get to several billions of thoughts. Uh, if you, similarly, if you, uh, ask, "What are, what are some of the fastest things that people can do?" Well, you can, they can play video games, they can play the piano very fast if, if they're skilled at it, and again, you get to similar, uh, units. Or how fast can people talk? You get to sim- uh, you know, within a couple of orders of magnitude, you get more or less to the same idea. So, uh, so that's how you can say that, that, that there's, there's billions of meaning, there's room for billions of meaningful thoughts.

   16. LFLex Fridman25:42

       Yeah, it would be-

   17. FWFrank Wilczek25:42

       I won't argue for exactly two billion versus 1.8 billion. It's not that kind of question, but, but I think any estimate that's reasonable will come out within, say, 100 billion and, and 100 million, so, uh, it's a lot. (laughs)

   18. LFLex Fridman26:01

       It would be interesting to map out for an individual human being the landscape of thoughts that they have sort of traveled. If you think of thoughts as a set of trajectories, uh, what, what that landscape looks like. I mean, I've been recently really thinking about, uh, this Richard Dawkins idea of memes.

   19. FWFrank Wilczek26:24

       Mm-hmm.

   20. LFLex Fridman26:24

       And just all this ideas and the evolution of ideas inside of one particular human mind, and how there's, they're then changed and evolved by interaction with other human beings. It's interesting to think about. So if you think-

   21. FWFrank Wilczek26:39

       (laughs)

   22. LFLex Fridman26:39

       ... the number is billions, you, you think there's also social interaction, so these aren't-

   23. FWFrank Wilczek26:45

       Yes.

   24. LFLex Fridman26:45

       Uh, like there's interaction in the same way you have interaction with particles, there's interaction between human thoughts, uh, that are perhaps that's, that interaction in itself is fundamental to the process of thinking. Like without social interaction, we would be like stuck, like walking in a circle. We need-

   25. FWFrank Wilczek27:04

       Yes. (laughs)

   26. LFLex Fridman27:05

       We need the perturbation of other humans to create change and evolution.

   27. FWFrank Wilczek27:09

       Once you bring in concepts of, uh, interactions and correlations and relations, then you have what's called a combinatorial explosion. (laughs) That the number of possibilities wrap, e- expands exponentially technically with the number of, uh, the number of things you're considering. And, uh, it can easily rapidly outstrip these bill- (laughs) these billions of thoughts-

   28. LFLex Fridman27:35

       Yeah.

   29. FWFrank Wilczek27:35

       ... that we're talking about. (laughs) So we, we definitely, uh, cannot, by brute force, master complex situations. And, or think ab- think of all the possibilities in a complex situations, I mean, uh, even, even something as relatively simple as chess, uh, is still, uh, something that human beings can't comprehend completely, even the best players lose to (laughs) still sometimes lose, and they consistently lose to computers these days. Uh, and in, in computer science, there's a concept of NP-complete, so large classes of problems when you scale them up beyond a s- a few individuals become intractable. And so that, in that sense, uh, the world is inexhaustible. (laughs)

   30. LFLex Fridman28:21

       But, and that makes it beautiful that we can make, uh, any laws that generalize, uh, efficiently and well can compress all of that combinatorial complexity just like a simple rule. That, that-
6. 29:17 – 37:39

   Big bang

   1. FWFrank Wilczek29:17

   2. LFLex Fridman29:17

      Uh, can I ask you about the Big Bang? Uh, so we talked about the space and time are really big.

   3. FWFrank Wilczek29:23

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman29:24

      But then, and we humans give a lot of meaning to the words space and time in our, in our, like, daily lives.

   5. FWFrank Wilczek29:32

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman29:33

      But then can we talk about this moment of beginning and how we're supposed to think about it?

   7. FWFrank Wilczek29:39

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman29:40

      That, that the moment of The Big Bang, everything was, uh, what, like, infinitely small? And then it just blew up.

   9. FWFrank Wilczek29:48

      We have to be careful here 'cause there's a, uh, there's a, a common misconception that the big tha- The Big Bang is like the explosion of a bomb in empty space that, that, uh-

   10. LFLex Fridman30:00

       Right.

   11. FWFrank Wilczek30:00

       ... fills up the surrounding pl- place. Uh-

   12. LFLex Fridman30:03

       It is space.

   13. FWFrank Wilczek30:04

       It is, yeah. The, as w- as we understand it, it's the fact, it's the, the, the fact or the, the hypothesis, but well-supported up to a point, (laughs) the, that, uh...... that everywhere in the whole universe, early in the history, uh, matter came together into a very hot, very dense... If you run it backwards in time, (laughs) matter comes together into a very hot, very dense, and yet very homogeneous, uh, plasma of all the different kinds of elementary particles and quarks and antiquarks and gluons and photons, electrons, and antielectrons. Everything, you know, all of that stuff, uh-

   14. LFLex Fridman30:45

       Like, really hot.

   15. FWFrank Wilczek30:47

       Really hot.

   16. LFLex Fridman30:47

       And really dense.

   17. FWFrank Wilczek30:48

       Really hot. We're talking about, uh, way, way hotter than the surface of the sun. Uh, you know, uh, well, well, in fact, if you take the equations as we, as they come, the, the prediction is that the temperature just goes to infinity, but then the equations, uh, break down. We don't, we don't, we don't, don't really... There are various... The equations become infinity equals infinity, so they don't feel... (laughs) That's called a singularity. We don't really know, uh... This is running the equations backwards, so you can't really get a sensible idea of what happened before the Big Bang. We don't... And so we need different equations to address the very earliest moments, uh, that, uh... But, so things were hotter and denser. We don't really know why things started out that way. We do, we have a lot of evidence that they did start out that way. Uh, but since most of the, uh... You know, we don't get to visit there (laughs) and do controlled experiments, most, most of the, most of the record is, is very, very processed. And, uh, we have to, we have to use, uh, very, uh, subtle techniques and powerful instruments to, to get information that has survived.

   18. LFLex Fridman32:11

       Get closer and closer to the Big Bang.

   19. FWFrank Wilczek32:12

       Get closer and closer to the, the, the beginning of things. And what's revealed there is that, uh, as I said, there was, there undoubtedly was a period when everything in the universe that we have been able to look at and understand, and that's consistent with everything, is, uh, um, the... Was in a condition where it was much, much hotter and much, much denser, uh, but still obeying the laws of physics as we know them today. And, and then you start with that. So all the matter is in equilibrium, uh, and then with small quantum fluctuations and run it forward, and then it produces in car- at least in broad strokes, the universe we see around us today.

   20. LFLex Fridman33:06

       Do you think we'll ever be able to, with the tools of physics, with the way science is, or the way the human mind is, will ever be able to get to the moment of the Big Bang in our understanding, or even-

   21. FWFrank Wilczek33:20

       Oh.

   22. LFLex Fridman33:20

       ... the moment before the Big Bang. Can we understand-

   23. FWFrank Wilczek33:22

       Well-

   24. LFLex Fridman33:22

       ... what happened before the Big Bang?

   25. FWFrank Wilczek33:24

       ... I'm, I'm optimistic both that we'll be able to, uh, measure more, so observe more, and that we'll be able to figure out more. (laughs) So, uh, there are very, very tangible prospects for, uh, observing the extremely early universe, so much, even much earlier than we can observe now, uh, through looking at gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, since they interact so weakly with ordinary matter, uh, sort of send an unp- a, a, a minimally processed sign- signal from the Big Bang. It's a very weak signal because it's traveled a long way and diffused over long spaces, but, uh, but people are gearing up to try to detect gravitational waves that could have come from the early universe.

   26. LFLex Fridman34:16

       Yeah, LIGO's incredible engineering project-

   27. FWFrank Wilczek34:19

       Yes. (laughs)

   28. LFLex Fridman34:19

       ... is the most sensitive, precise-

   29. FWFrank Wilczek34:22

       Yes.

   30. LFLex Fridman34:23

       ... devices on Earth. The hu- the fact that humans can-
7. 37:39 – 43:42

   How life emerged in the universe

   1. FWFrank Wilczek37:39

      questions.

   2. LFLex Fridman37:39

      So you- you mention at- at the bi- at the Big Bang in the early days, um, things were pretty homogeneous.

   3. FWFrank Wilczek37:46

      Yes.

   4. LFLex Fridman37:48

      But, uh, here we are sitting on Earth-

   5. FWFrank Wilczek37:50

      (laughs)

   6. LFLex Fridman37:51

      ... two, uh, hairless apes you could say, with microphones. In talking about the brief history of things, you said it's much harder to describe Sweden than it is, um-

   7. FWFrank Wilczek38:02

      (laughs)

   8. LFLex Fridman38:03

      ... uh, the- the universe. So there's a lot of complexity, there's a lot of-

   9. FWFrank Wilczek38:06

      Yes.

   10. LFLex Fridman38:06

       ... interesting details here. So how does this complexity come to be, do you think? It th- it seems like there's these pockets-

   11. FWFrank Wilczek38:13

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman38:13

       ... we don't know how rare of, like, uh, where-

   13. FWFrank Wilczek38:16

       Well-

   14. LFLex Fridman38:16

       ... hairless apes just emerge.

   15. FWFrank Wilczek38:18

       (laughs) Yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman38:19

       And then c- they came from the initial s- soup that was homogeneous. Was that, uh, is that an accident?

   17. FWFrank Wilczek38:26

       Yeah, it was... Well, we understand, there, we understand in broad outlines how it could happen. We certainly don't understand why it happened exactly in the way it did, or, but- but, uh, or, you know, there- there are certainly open questions about the origins of life and how inevitable the emergence of intelligence was and- and how that happened. But, uh, in the very broadest terms, uh, the universe early on was ve- quite homogeneous, but not completely homogeneous. Uh, there are, there were part in 10,000 fluctuations in density within this primordial plasma. And, uh, as time goes on, there's an instability which causes those density contrasts to increase. There's a gravitational instability. Where it's denser, the gravitational attractions are stronger, and so that brings in more matter and it gets even denser, and so on and so on. So- so there's a natural tendency of matter to clump because of gravitational interactions, and then the equations get complicated. (laughs)

   18. LFLex Fridman39:40

       (laughs)

   19. FWFrank Wilczek39:40

       When you have lots of things (laughs) clumping together, uh, then, you know, then- then we know what the laws are, but we have to- to a certain extent wave our hands about what- what- what happens. But, uh, basic understanding of chemistry says that if things, uh, and- and the physics of radiation tells us that if, as things start to clump together, they can radiate, give off some energy so they don't re- just, they slow down. They, as a result, they lose energy, they can conglomerate together, cool down, form things like stars, form things like planets. And so in broad terms, there's no mystery. There's, uh, that- that- that's what the scenari- that's what the equations tell you should happen. (laughs) But because it's a, uh, process involving many, many fundame- individual units, uh, the- the application of the laws that govern simp- individual units to these things is- is very delicate. Uh, uh, you know, computationally very difficult. And m- more profoundly, uh, the equations have this probability of chaos, or sensitivity to initial conditions which tells you tiny differences in the initial state can lead to enormous differences in the subsequent behavior. So- so physics, fundamental physics at some point says, "Okay, chemists, biologists, this is your problem now." (laughs) And- and, uh, and then again in broad terms, we know how, uh, it's conceivable that- that the, uh, humans and things like that can- can, uh, that c- complex structure can emerge. It's a matter of, uh, having m- m- the right kind of temperature and the right kind of stuff. So you need, uh, you need to be able to make chemical bonds that are reasonably stable and be able to make complex structures. And we're very fortunate that carbon has this ability to make, uh, uh, backbones and- and elaborate branchings and things, so you can get complex things that we call biochemistry, and, uh, and yet the bonds can be broken a little bit with the help of energetic injections from the sun. So you have to have both the possibility of changing but also the possib- a useful degree of stability. And we know at that very, very broad level, l-... physics can tell you that it's conceivable.

   20. LFLex Fridman42:17

       Yeah.

   21. FWFrank Wilczek42:17

       If you want to know what actually, what- what's- what- what really happened, (laughs) what really can happen, then you have to-

   22. LFLex Fridman42:24

       The history of things.

   23. FWFrank Wilczek42:25

       ... then you have to work a bit to, uh, go to chemistry. If you have t- if you wanna know what actually happened, then you really have to consult the fossil record and biologists. And so, so, uh, the, the, but- but it's- it... So these- these ways of addressing the issue are complementary in a sense. They bo- they, uh, they, uh, they use different kinds of concepts, they use different, uh, languages, and they address different kinds of questions, but they're- they're not inconsistent.

   24. LFLex Fridman42:56

       Mm-hmm.

   25. FWFrank Wilczek42:56

       They're just s- complementary. Right?

   26. LFLex Fridman42:59

       (laughs) It's- it's kinda interesting to think about...

   27. FWFrank Wilczek43:00

       (laughs)

   28. LFLex Fridman43:00

       ... those early fluctuations...

   29. FWFrank Wilczek43:03

       Hmm.

   30. LFLex Fridman43:03

       ... as our earliest ancestors.
8. 43:42 – 53:34

   Aliens

   1. FWFrank Wilczek43:42

   2. LFLex Fridman43:42

      That brings up the question of, uh, asking for a friend here if there's, uh, you know, other pockets of complexity, uh, commonly called...

   3. FWFrank Wilczek43:54

      (sighs)

   4. LFLex Fridman43:54

      ... as, uh, alien intelligent civilizations out there. You're-

   5. FWFrank Wilczek43:59

      Well, we don't know for sure, but I- I have a s- f- much strong suspicion that the answer is yes, because the, uh, the one case we do have at hand to study here on Earth, uh, we sort of know what the conditions were that were helpful to life, the ri- the right kinda temperature, the right kinda star (laughs) that- that keeps, maintains that temperature over a long time, the liquid environment of water. Uh, and, uh, once those conditions emerged on Earth, which was roughly four-and-a-half billion years ago, it wasn't very long before what we call life started to leave relics. So we can find, uh, uh, uh, forms of life, primitive forms of life that are almost as old as the Earth itself in the sense that once the Earth became reason- be, was- was turned from a- a- a very hot boiling thing and cooled off into a solid mass with a- with water, uh, life emerged very, very quickly. So- so it seems that these general conditions for life, uh, are enough to- to make it happen, uh, relatively quickly. Now, the other lesson I wi- I think that one can, uh, draw from this one example, it's dangerous to- to draw lessons from one example, but that's all we've got.

   6. LFLex Fridman45:26

      (laughs)

   7. FWFrank Wilczek45:27

      Uh, and, uh, that- that the emergence of intelligent life is a different issue altogether. It, uh, that took a long time, and seems to have been pretty contingent (laughs) , uh, that, uh, you know, the- the, for a long time... Well, for most- most of the history of life, it was single-celled things, you know? (laughs) Um-

   8. LFLex Fridman45:54

      Yes.

   9. FWFrank Wilczek45:55

      ... even multi-cellular life only arose about 600 million years ago, so much (laughs) after, you know. So it's, uh, and the- the, uh, uh, and then intelligence is kind of a luxury. You know, if you think, (laughs) , uh, many more kinds of creatures have, uh, big stomachs, (laughs) than- than big brains. In f- in fact, uh, most- most- most have no brains at all in a r- in any reasonable sense. That- that- that then, uh, and the dinosaurs ruled for a long, long time, and some of them were pretty smart but they- they were at best birdbrains because, you know, birds came from the dinosaurs and, (laughs) , uh, and, uh, and it could've stayed that way, you know? And- and- and then human, then the emergence of humans was very contingent and kind of a very, very recent development on evolutionary timescales, and, uh, you can argue about the level of human intelligence. But it's, you know, I think it's, (laughs) -

   10. LFLex Fridman46:56

       Pretty impressive.

   11. FWFrank Wilczek46:57

       ... that- that- that's what we're talking about, (laughs) , and it's very int- it's very impressive, and- and can ask these kinds of questions and discuss them intelligently. (laughs) Uh, the, uh... So I guess my f- my... So this is a long-winded answer or a justification of- of my feeling is that, uh, the conditions for life in some form are ve- probably cons- uh, satisfied many, many places around the universe, even, and even within our galaxy. Uh, I'm not so sure about the emergence of intelligent life or the emergence of technological sit- uh, civilizations. That- that- that seems, uh, much more con- much more contingent and special. And we might... Uh, it's conceivable to me that we're the only example in the galaxy, or... Although, yeah, I don't know one way or the other. I- I- I have different opinions on different days of the week.

   12. LFLex Fridman47:59

       But I will... One of the things that worries me in- in- in, um, in the spirit of being humble, that our particular kind of intelligence is not very special, so that there's all kinds of different intelligences.

   13. FWFrank Wilczek48:13

       Yeah.

   14. LFLex Fridman48:13

       And even more broadly there could be s-... many different kinds of life.

   15. FWFrank Wilczek48:18

       Yes.

   16. LFLex Fridman48:19

       So, uh, the basic definition, and I just had, I think, somebody that you know, Sarah Walker, I just had a very long conversation with her-

   17. FWFrank Wilczek48:27

       (laughs)

   18. LFLex Fridman48:27

       ... about even just the very basic question of trying to define what is life from a physics perspective.

   19. FWFrank Wilczek48:34

       Yeah. Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman48:34

       Even that question within itself, I think one of the most fundamental questions in science and physics, and everything is just trying to get a hold, trying to get some universal laws around the ideas of what is life, 'cause that- that kind of unlocks-

   21. FWFrank Wilczek48:48

       Yeah. Well-

   22. LFLex Fridman48:48

       ... a bunch of things around life, intelligence, consciousness, all those kinds of things.

   23. FWFrank Wilczek48:53

       I agree with you in a sense, but I think that's a dangerous question, because the- the answer can't be any more precise than the question. And the, uh, the an- the question, "What is life?" kind of assumes that we have a definition of life and that it's a natural phenomena that- that can be distinguished. But- but really there are edge cases like viruses, and some people would like to say that electrons have consciousness and thing, you know, so you can't... If you really have fuzzy concepts, it's, uh, it's very hard to- to reach precise kinds of scientific answers. But I think there's a very fruitful question that's a- adjacent to it, which is, uh, has been pursued in different forms for, uh, quite a while, and is now becoming very sophisticated and reaching in new directions, and that is, what are the states of matter that are possible, you know? So in- in high school or grade school, you learn about solid- solids, liquids and gases, but that really just scratches the surface of different ways that are distinguishable, that matter can form into, uh, uh, macroscopically different meaningful patterns that we call phases of mat- And then there are precise definitions of what we mean by phases of matter, (laughs) and, uh, and that have been worked out fruitful o- over the decades. And we're discovering new states of matter all the time, (laughs) and it's kind of having to work at what we mean by matter. We're discovering the capabilities of matter to organize in interesting ways, and, uh, th- some of them, like liquid crystals, are, uh, important ingredients of life, our cell membranes are liquid crystals, (laughs) and that's very important to the way they work. Uh, recently there's been a development in where we're talking about, uh, states of matter that not onl- that are not static, but that have dynamics, that have- that, uh, have characteristic patterns not only in space, but in time. These are called time crystals, and that- that's been a development that's- that's just in the last decade or so, it's just really- really flourishing. Uh, and so, uh, is there a state of matter that caus- or a group of states of matter that corresponds to life? Uh, m- maybe, but- (laughs) but the answer can't be any more definite than the question, um, so...

   24. LFLex Fridman51:35

       I mean, I- I gotta push back on the... The- the ques- those are just words. I mean, I- I- I disagree with you. The- the question points dir- to a direction.

   25. FWFrank Wilczek51:45

       Yeah.

   26. LFLex Fridman51:46

       The answer might be able be- to be more precise than the question, (laughs) because-

   27. FWFrank Wilczek51:50

       Well...

   28. LFLex Fridman51:51

       ... because, uh, just as you're saying, there- there's, uh, that we could be discovering certain characteristics and patterns that are associated with a certain type of matter, uh, macroscopically speaking, and that- that we can then-

   29. FWFrank Wilczek52:06

       Well...

   30. LFLex Fridman52:07

       ... uh, be able to post facto say, "This is..." Let's assign the word life to this-
9. 53:34 – 1:01:01

   Consciousness

   1. FWFrank Wilczek53:34

   2. LFLex Fridman53:34

      Well, can I ask you about the craziest one, which is, um, the one we know maybe least about, which is consciousness?

   3. FWFrank Wilczek53:42

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman53:42

      Is it possible that there are certain kinds of matter would be able to classify as, um, conscious? Meaning-

   5. FWFrank Wilczek53:51

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman53:51

      ... like the... So there's a... They're panpsychists, right?

   7. FWFrank Wilczek53:54

      (laughs)

   8. LFLex Fridman53:54

      They're philosophers-

   9. FWFrank Wilczek53:55

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman53:55

       ... who kind of try to imply that, uh, all matter has some degree of consciousness-

   11. FWFrank Wilczek54:01

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman54:01

       ... and you can almost construct like a physics of consciousness.

   13. FWFrank Wilczek54:04

       Yes.

   14. LFLex Fridman54:05

       Y- do you, um... Again, we're in such early days of this, but nevertheless it seems useful to talk about. I- i- is there some sense from a physics-

   15. FWFrank Wilczek54:15

       Well...

   16. LFLex Fridman54:15

       ... perspective to make sense of consciousness?... is there some hope?

   17. FWFrank Wilczek54:19

       Well, again, consciousness is a-

   18. LFLex Fridman54:22

       Imprecise.

   19. FWFrank Wilczek54:23

       ... a- a very imprecise word, and loaded with, uh, connotations that I think we should, we w- don't wanna start a scientific analysis (laughing) with that, I don't think. Uh, and it's often been important in science to start with simple cases and work up. Uh, consciousness, I think what most people think of when you s- talk about consciousness is, "Okay, I am, w- what am I doing in the, (laughs) in the world?"

   20. LFLex Fridman54:52

       (laughs)

   21. FWFrank Wilczek54:52

       "Like, this, this is my experience. I have a rich exper- rich inner life and experience of ... And, uh, where is that in the equations?" And I think that's a great question. A great, great question. And actually, I think I'm gearing up to spend part of the l- the, I mean, s- uh, uh, to try to address that in coming years.

   22. LFLex Fridman55:11

       One version of asking that question, just as you said now, is what is the simplest-

   23. FWFrank Wilczek55:16

       Yeah.

   24. LFLex Fridman55:16

       ... formulation of that-

   25. FWFrank Wilczek55:18

       Well-

   26. LFLex Fridman55:18

       ... of that to study? Or to study.

   27. FWFrank Wilczek55:18

       ... I, I think, I think I'm much more comfortable with the idea of studying self-awareness-

   28. LFLex Fridman55:23

       Hmm.

   29. FWFrank Wilczek55:23

       ... as opposed to consciousness, 'cause that, that sort of gets rid of the mystical (laughs) aura of the thing. And self-awareness is, uh, in simple ca- you know, the, uh, uh, I think, uh, contiguous at least with ideas about feedback. So, if you have a system that looks at its own state and responds to it, that's a kind of self-awareness. Uh, and more sophisticated versions could be like in information processing things, computers that look into their own internal state and do something about it. And I think i- i- that could also be done in neural nets. This is called recurrent neural nets, which are hard to understand and kind of a frontier. (laughs) The, the, the, uh, uh ... So I think understanding those and gradually building up a kind of, uh, profound ability to un- to, uh, conceptualize different levels of self-awareness. What do you have to not know and what do you have to know? (laughs) And when do you know that you don't know it or when do you kn- what do you think you know that you don't really know? And (laughs) the, the, the, these, uh, I think, uh, clarifying those iss- when we clarify those issues and get a rich theory around, uh, self-awareness, I think the, the, that will illuminate the questions about consciousness in a way that, you know, scratching your chin and talking about qualia and, blah blah blah blah is never gonna do.

   30. LFLex Fridman57:04

       Well, I also have a, a different approach to the whole thing. So there, there's, uh, from a robotics perspective, you can engineer things that exhibit-
10. 1:01:01 – 1:06:38

    Limits of physics

    1. FWFrank Wilczek1:01:01

       would.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:01:01

       So as I mentioned, I talked to Sara Walker.

    3. FWFrank Wilczek1:01:04

       Mm-hmm.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:01:04

       And first of all, she says hi, spoke very highly-

    5. FWFrank Wilczek1:01:07

       (laughs)

    6. LFLex Fridman1:01:07

       ... of you.

    7. FWFrank Wilczek1:01:07

       Hey.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:01:07

       One of her concerns about physics and physicists and humans is that, uh, we may not fully understand the system that we're inside of, meaning, like, there, there may be limits to the kind of physics we do in trying to understand the system of which we're part of. So like-

    9. FWFrank Wilczek1:01:29

       Oh. (laughs)

    10. LFLex Fridman1:01:29

        ... the, the observer is also the observed. In, in that sense, it, it seems like the, um, our tools of understanding the world... I mean, this is mostly centered around the questions of what is life-

    11. FWFrank Wilczek1:01:45

        Mm-hmm.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:01:46

        ... and trying to understand the patterns that, uh, that are characteristic of life, and intelligence, all those kinds of things, um, we, we're not, we're not using the right tools because we're in the system. Is there, is there something that resonates with you there?

    13. FWFrank Wilczek1:02:01

        Uh-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:02:01

        It's almost like-

    15. FWFrank Wilczek1:02:01

        Well, y- yes. We, we do have, we, we have limitations, of course, uh, in the amount of information we can process. Uh, on the other hand, we can get help from our silicon friends, (laughs) and we, uh, we can get help from all kinds of instruments that make up for, for our perceptual deficits. And, uh, we have to... and we can use, uh, at a conceptual level, we can use different kinds of concepts to address different kinds of questions. So I'm not sure exactly what problem she's talking about.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:02:40

        It's the problem akin to, uh, an organism living in a, in a 2D plane trying to understand th- a three-dimensional world.

    17. FWFrank Wilczek1:02:47

        Well, we can do that. I mean, you know, we, we (laughs) , in fact, we l- you know, for practical purposes, most of our experience is two dimensional. It's hard to move vertically, (laughs) and yet we've produced, conceptually, a three-dimensional symmetry, and in fact, f- four-dimensional spacetime. (laughs)

    18. LFLex Fridman1:03:04

        Yeah.

    19. FWFrank Wilczek1:03:04

        Uh, so, you know, by thinking in appropriate ways, and using instruments, and liq- deman- and getting consistent accounts and rich accounts, we s- we find out what concepts are, uh, uh, uh, uh, necessary, and, uh, I don't see any end in sight of the process, or any, uh, showstoppers, because s- I d- uh, I... Well, let me give you an example. I mean, for instance, uh, q- uh, QCD, our theory of the strong interaction has nice equations which I helped to discover and- (laughs)

    20. LFLex Fridman1:03:40

        What, what's QCD?

    21. FWFrank Wilczek1:03:41

        Quantum chromodynamics. So it's our theory of the strong interaction, the interaction that is responsible for nuclear physics. So it's the interaction that governs how quarks and gluons interact with each other and make, uh, make protons and neutrons, and all the strong, uh, the, the related particles, and m- many things in physics. It's one of the four basic forces of nature as we presently understand it. Uh, and, uh, so we have beautiful equations which we can test in very special circumstances, uh, uh, using, at high te- high, high energies at accelerators, so we're certain that these equations are correct, you know, prizes are given for it, and so on. (laughs) And people try to knock it down, and they can't, and yeah. The, the, the, the, they, uh, uh, but, uh, but th- the situations in which we can calculate the consequences of these equations are very limited. So for instance, no one has been able to demonstrate that this theory, which is built on quarks and gluons, which no one e- which you don't observe, (laughs) actually produces protons and neutrons, and the things you do observe. This is called the problem of confinement. (laughs) Uh, so no one's been able to prove that analytically in a way that a human can understand. On the other hand, we can take these equations to a computer, to gigantic computers, and compute, and by God, you get the world from it. (laughs) The, so these equations, in a way that we don't understand in terms of human concepts, we can- we, uh, we can't do the calculations, but our machines can do them. So with the help of what I like to call our silicon friends, and th- their, their descendants in the future, we can understand in a different way that allows us to understand more. But I don't think we'll ever... no, no human is ever going (laughs) to be able to calc- to s- solve those equations in the same way. So, so, uh, but, but I think that's... you know, when we find limitations to our natural abilities, we can try to find worksa- workarounds, and sometimes that's appropriate concepts, sometimes it's appropriate instruments, sometimes it's a combination of the two. But I think, uh, uh, it's premature to, uh, get defeatist about it.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:06:26

        (laughs)

    23. FWFrank Wilczek1:06:26

        I, I don't see any, any-

    24. LFLex Fridman1:06:27

        I'd say we're limited.

    25. FWFrank Wilczek1:06:27

        ... I don't see any, uh, any logical contradiction, or, or paradox, or limitation that, that, uh, will bring this process to a halt.

11. 1:06:38 – 1:15:42

    Complimentary principle

    1. FWFrank Wilczek1:06:38

    2. LFLex Fridman1:06:38

       Well, I think the idea is to continue thinking outside the box in different directions, meaning-

    3. FWFrank Wilczek1:06:43

       What?

    4. LFLex Fridman1:06:43

       ... just like how m- the math allows us to think in multiple dimensions outside of our perception system, uh, sort of-... of thinking, uh, you know, coming up with new tools and mathematical computation or all those kinds of things to- to- to- to- to take different perspectives on our universe, right?

    5. FWFrank Wilczek1:07:04

       Well, I'm all for that, you know, and I- I kind of have even elevated it into a principle, which is of complementarity, following Bohr that, uh, you need different ways of thinking, even about the same things, in order to do justice to their reality and answer different kinds of questions about them. I mean, uh, we've several times alluded to the fact that human beings are hard to understand, and the concepts that you use to understand human beings if you wanna prescribe drugs for them or, uh, see what's gonna happen if- if they move very fast or get ex- or are exposed to radiation. And so that requires one kind of thinking that's very physical, uh, based, uh, based on the fact that, uh, the materials that we're made out of. On the other hand, if you want to understand how a person is going to behave in a different kind of situation, uh, you need entirely different concepts from psychology, and, uh, there's nothing wrong with that. You can have very (laughs) different ways of addressing the same material that are useful for different purposes, right? (laughs)

    6. LFLex Fridman1:08:14

       Can- can you describe this idea which is fascinating of, uh, complementarity a little bit? Sort of, uh, first of all-

    7. FWFrank Wilczek1:08:22

       Yeah.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:08:22

       ... what, uh, state is the principle? What is it? And second of all, what are good examples starting from quantum mechanics?

    9. FWFrank Wilczek1:08:30

       Yeah.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:08:30

        You used to mention psychology. Let's talk about this more. It's really one of... In your new book, one of the most fascinating ideas actually.

    11. FWFrank Wilczek1:08:38

        I think it's a wonderful... Yeah, uh, it's sort of, to me, it's- it's... Well, it's the culminating chapter of the book, and I think, uh, since the whole book is about the big lessons or big takeaways, uh, from profound understanding of the physical world that we've unders- or that we've achieved, uh, including that it's mysterious in some ways, (laughs) the, uh, uh, this was the- the- the- the final, uh, s- overarching, uh, lesson, complementarity. And, uh, it's a approach. It's- it's... So, unlike some of these other things which are just facts about the world, like the world is both big and small in different sas- uh, sa- and is- is big but we're not small, thing, things we talked about earlier. Uh, and the fact that the universe is comprehensible, and how complexity can emerge from simplicity, and so... Those things are, uh, in some, in the broad sense, facts about the world. Uh, complementarity is more an attitude towards the world-

    12. LFLex Fridman1:09:42

        (laughs)

    13. FWFrank Wilczek1:09:43

        ... and encouraged by the facts about the world. And, uh, it's the idea, the concept, or the approach that... Or the realization that, uh, it can be appropriate and useful and inevitable and unavoidable (laughs) to use very different descriptions of the same object, or the same system, or the same situation, uh, to answer different kinds of questions that may be very different and even, uh, mutually uninterpretable. Imu- mutually, uh, uh, incomprehensible. Uh-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:10:27

        But both correct somehow.

    15. FWFrank Wilczek1:10:29

        But both correct and- and sources of different kinds of insight.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:10:32

        Which is so weird.

    17. FWFrank Wilczek1:10:34

        Yeah. Well-

    18. LFLex Fridman1:10:34

        But it seems to work in so many cases.

    19. FWFrank Wilczek1:10:36

        It works in many cases, and I think it's, uh, it's a deep fact about the world and how we should approach it. Its most rigorous form where it's actually a theorem, if quantum mechanics is correct, (laughs) occurs in quantum mechanics, where the primary description of the world is in terms of wave functions, but let's not talk about the world. Let's talk about a- an- a particle, (laughs) an electron. It's- it's- it's... The primary description of that electron is its wave function, and the wave function can be used to predict where it's gonna be with different... If you observe with... Uh, it'll be in different places with different probabilities, or how fast it's moving, and it'll also be moving in different ways with different probabilities. That's what quantum mechanics says. And you can predict either s- set of probabilities if you... What's gonna happen if I make, uh, an observation of the position or the velocity. Uh, but... So the wave function gives you ways of doing both of those, but to do it, to get those predictions, you have to process the wave function in different ways. You process it one way for position and in a different way for momentum, and those ways are mathematically incompatible. It's like... (laughs) You know, it's like you have a stone and you can sculpt it into a Venus de Milo or you can sculpt it into David, but you can't do both. (laughs) You can, uh... And, uh, and that's an example of complementarity, but to answer different kinds of questions, you have to analyze the system in different ways that are, uh, mutually incompatible, but both valid to answer different kinds of questions. So, in that case, it's a theorem, but I think it's a much more widespread phenomena that applies to many cases where we can't prove it as a theorem, but, uh, it's a piece of wisdom, if you like, and- and ap- uh, uh, appears to be a- a very important insight.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:12:52

        Uh, do you, uh-

    21. FWFrank Wilczek1:12:53

        And if you ignore it, you can get very...... confused and, uh, um, uh, misguided. (laughs)

    22. LFLex Fridman1:13:02

        Do you think this is, um, a useful hack for ideas that we don't fully understand? Or is this somehow a fundamental property of all or many ideas, that you can take m- multiple perspectives and they're both true-

    23. FWFrank Wilczek1:13:20

        Well, I think it's both. (laughs)

    24. LFLex Fridman1:13:23

        (laughs)

    25. FWFrank Wilczek1:13:23

        Uh...

    26. LFLex Fridman1:13:24

        So it's both the answer to all questions.

    27. FWFrank Wilczek1:13:26

        Yes, that's right. It's not either/or, it's both.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:13:28

        It's paralyzing to think that, that we live in a world that's fundamentally, like, surrounded by complementary ideas. Like, uh, because it, it, uh, we want universe, we, we somehow want to attach ourselves to absolute truths, and absolute truths certainly don't like the idea of cl- complementarity.

    29. FWFrank Wilczek1:13:50

        Yes. Einstein was very uncomfortable with complementarity. And, uh, in a broad sense, the famous Bohr-Einstein debates revolved-

    30. LFLex Fridman1:13:59

        Or abouts.
12. 1:15:42 – 1:21:56

    Free will

    1. FWFrank Wilczek1:15:42

       uh, in other cases, like one that I like to talk, uh, like to think about is, or like to point out as an example is, is free will and determinism. It's much less of a theorem (laughs) and more of, more a, uh, more a, uh, a kind of, uh, uh, way of thinking about things that I think is, uh, reassuring and avoids, uh, a lot of unnecessary quarreling and confusion.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:16:16

       The quarreling I'm okay with, and the confusion I'm okay with.

    3. FWFrank Wilczek1:16:18

       (laughs)

    4. LFLex Fridman1:16:18

       I mean people debate about difficult ideas, and ... But the, the question is whether it could be almost a, a fundamental truth.

    5. FWFrank Wilczek1:16:26

       I think it is a fundamental truth.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:16:28

       That free will is both an illusion and not.

    7. FWFrank Wilczek1:16:32

       Yes. I think that's correct.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:16:34

       And I, Lodi-

    9. FWFrank Wilczek1:16:35

       (laughs)

    10. LFLex Fridman1:16:36

        There, there's a reason why people say quantum mechanics is weird.

    11. FWFrank Wilczek1:16:38

        (laughs)

    12. LFLex Fridman1:16:39

        And c- complementarity is, is, is, is a big part of that. You know, to, to say that the, our actual whole world is weird, the whole hierarchy of the universe is weird in this k- kind of particular way. And it's, it's quite profound, but it's also, um, humbling. B- because it's like we're, we're never going to be on sturdy ground in the way that humans like to be. It's like you have to embrace that, uh...

    13. FWFrank Wilczek1:17:11

        Well-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:17:12

        ... this, this, this whole thing is, is, is, uh, unst- like, un-sturdy mess.

    15. FWFrank Wilczek1:17:17

        Well, it's one of, it's one of many lessons in humility (laughs) tha- that we, uh, run into in profound understanding of the world. I mean, uh, the Copernican revolution was one. That's, that the Earth is not the center (laughs) of the universe. Uh, Darwinian evolution is another, that uh, humans are not the pinnacle of uh, of uh... you know, of, of God's creation. Uh, the, the, uh, and, uh, the apparent result of uh, uh, deep understanding of physical reality, that eh- mind emerges from matter, and human- there's, you know, there's, there's no, uh, no call on special life forces or souls. Uh, these are all lessons in humility. And I actually find complementarity a, uh, a liberating concept. (laughs) It's, it's, uh, uh, okay, you know, we-

    16. LFLex Fridman1:18:21

        Yeah, it is in a way, right?

    17. FWFrank Wilczek1:18:23

        (laughs) Uh, the, the, the... There's what I rem- there's a, there's a story about Dr. Johnson, and he's talking with Boswell, and Boswell was... They were discussing a sermon that they had both, both heard, and the, the sort of culmination of the, of the sermon was the, the, the speaker saying, "I accept the universe." And Dr. Johnson said, "Well, he damn well better." (laughs)

    18. LFLex Fridman1:18:49

        (laughs)

    19. FWFrank Wilczek1:18:50

        And, and yeah, (laughs) there's a certain, uh, there's a certain joy in accepting the universe because it's mind expanding, and, uh...You know, and, and, and to me, complementarity also suggests tolerance, suggests opportunities for understanding different, with different... Understanding things in different ways that add, uh, add to, rather (laughs) than, uh, detract from, uh, understanding. So, uh, I think it's, it's an op- it's an opportunity for mind expansion and demanding that there's only one way that, to think about things can be very limiting.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:19:36

        On the free will one, that's a trippy one though.

    21. FWFrank Wilczek1:19:38

        (laughs)

    22. LFLex Fridman1:19:38

        I think, uh, to think like I am the decider of my own actions and at the same-

    23. FWFrank Wilczek1:19:44

        Well-

    24. LFLex Fridman1:19:44

        ... time I'm not, is, uh, is, is tricky-

    25. FWFrank Wilczek1:19:49

        Well-

    26. LFLex Fridman1:19:49

        ... to think about, but it's... There, there seems to be some kind of profound truth in that.

    27. FWFrank Wilczek1:19:53

        I get... Well, I think it is tied up. It will turn out to be tied up when we understand things better with these issues of self-awareness and-

    28. LFLex Fridman1:20:03

        I think so.

    29. FWFrank Wilczek1:20:03

        ... and where we get wha- what, what we perceive as making choices, what does that really mean? And (laughs) what's going on under the hood. And, uh, but I'm, I'm speculating about a future understanding that's not in place at present.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:20:17

        But y- your sense there will always be a, uh, like as you dig into the self-awareness thing, there'll always be some places where complementarity is gonna show up? (laughs)
13. 1:21:56 – 1:27:19

    Particles

    1. LFLex Fridman1:21:56

       Let me ask you about some particles.

    2. FWFrank Wilczek1:21:58

       Okay. (laughs)

    3. LFLex Fridman1:21:59

       First the absurd question, almost like a, um, a question that, like, Plato would ask. What is the smallest thing in the universe?

    4. FWFrank Wilczek1:22:08

       As far as we know, the, the, um, fundamental particles out of which we build our most successful description of nature are points. They have zero... (laughs) They have, don't have any internal structure that's, they, uh... So that's as small as can be (laughs) to, uh... So what does that mean operationally? That means if you, that they obey equations that describe entities that are singular concentrations of energy, momentum, angular momentum, the things that particles have, but localized at individual points. Now, uh, that mathematical structure is only revealed partially in the world, because to, to process the wave function in a way that, that, that accesses information about the precise position of things, you have to apply a lot of energy. And that's not, you know, we... That's an idealization, and you can apply infinite amount of energy to determine a prec- precise position. But at the mathematical level, uh, we build the world out of particles that are points.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:23:26

       So do they actually exist? I mean, what are we talking about? So like-

    6. FWFrank Wilczek1:23:29

       Oh, they exist. Uh-

    7. LFLex Fridman1:23:29

       ... so, so let me ask sort of, uh, do quarks exist?

    8. FWFrank Wilczek1:23:33

       Yes. (laughs) Do electrons exist? Yes. Do protons exist? Yes. So-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:23:38

       But what does it mean for them to exist?

    10. FWFrank Wilczek1:23:39

        Okay. So, well, the hard answer to that, the precise answer is that, uh, we construct the world out of equations that contain entities that, uh, are reproducible, that exist in vast numbers throughout the universe, uh, that have definite properties of mass, spin, uh, and a few others, that, uh, we call electrons. And the, what, what an electron is, is defined by the equations that it satisfies, theoretically. And we find that there are many, many exemplars of that, of, of that entity i- in the physical world. So in elec- in the case of electrons, we can, you know, isolate them and study them in, individual ones in great detail. We can check that they all actually are identical. Uh, and that's why chemistry works. And yes, so, (laughs) so, so that, in that case, uh, it's very tangible. Similarly with photons, you can study them individually, the, the units of light. Uh, and, uh, nowadays it's very practical to study individual photons and determine their, uh, their spin and their other basic properties and, uh, th-... uh, and check out the equations in great detail. For quarks and gluons, which are the other two main ingredients of, uh, our model of matter that's so successful, uh, it's a little more complicated because the quarks and gluons, uh, that appear in our equations, uh, don't appear directly as particles you can isolate and, uh, study individually. They always occur, uh, within, uh, uh, bound- what are called bound states or structures like protons or... A proton, roughly speaking, is composed of three quarks and a lot of gluons, but... We can detect them in a remarkably direct way, actually, nowadays. Whereas at relatively low energies, uh, the behavior of quarks is complicated, at high energies, they can prop- they can propagate through space relatively freely, uh, for a while, and we can see their tracks. So u- ultimately they get recaptured into protons and other s- mesons and funny things (laughs) . But for a short time, they propagate freely, and while that happens, we can take snapshots and see- see their manifestations. Uh, this is the- actually, this kind of thing is exactly what I got the Nobel Prize for, predicting that this would work (laughs) . And similarly for gluons, although you- you can't, uh- you can't isolate them as individual particles and study them in the same way that we study electrons, say, uh, you can use them to- as- use them theoretically as entities out of which you build tangible description- t- tangible f- things that we actually do observe. Uh, but also you can, uh, add accelerators at high energy. You can liberate them for brief periods of time and study how they- that- that- that- and- and get convincing evidence that they- they- they- they leave tracks and- and you can get convincing evidence that they were there and- and have the properties that- that we wanted them

14. 1:27:19 – 1:40:33

    Nobel Prize in Physics

    1. FWFrank Wilczek1:27:19

       to have.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:27:19

       Can we talk about asymptotic freedom, this very idea that you won the Nobel Prize for?

    3. FWFrank Wilczek1:27:24

       Yeah.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:27:25

       So it describes a very weird effect, to me.

    5. FWFrank Wilczek1:27:30

       (laughs)

    6. LFLex Fridman1:27:30

       Uh, the- the- weird in the following way. So the- the- the- you know, the way I think of most forces or interactions, the closer you are, the stronger the effect, the- the- the stronger the force.

    7. FWFrank Wilczek1:27:45

       Yeah.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:27:46

       Right? With- with quarks, uh, the closer they are, the- the less sort of the strong interaction.

    9. FWFrank Wilczek1:27:53

       Yeah.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:27:54

        And in fact, they're basically- act like free particles when they're very close.

    11. FWFrank Wilczek1:28:00

        Very close. That's right. Yes.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:28:01

        Well, but this requires a huge amount of energy. But, like, can you describe me, um, h- why- how does this even work?

    13. FWFrank Wilczek1:28:10

        (laughs)

    14. LFLex Fridman1:28:11

        You know, how weird it is?

    15. FWFrank Wilczek1:28:12

        Well, a proper description m- must bring in, uh, quantum mechanics and relativity, and it's, uh... So a- a proper description and- and equations. So a proper description really is- (laughs) is probably, uh, more- more- (laughs) more than we have time for and- and, uh, would require quite a bit of patience on your part. But, uh-

    16. LFLex Fridman1:28:35

        Well, how does relativity come into play? Wait, wait a minute.

    17. FWFrank Wilczek1:28:38

        Oh. Relativity is important because, uh, when- when we talk about, uh, trying to think about short distances, we have to think about, uh, very large momenta, and very large momenta are connected to very large energy in relativity, and so the connection between how things behave at short distances and how things behave at high energy, uh, really, uh, is connected through relativity in sort of a s- slightly backhanded way. Quantum mechanics indicates that short- to get- to analyze short distances, uh, you need to bring in probes that, uh, carry a lot of momentum. This, again, is related to uncertainty because, uh, it's the fact that you have to bring in a lot of momentum that interferes with the possibility of determining, uh, position and momentum at the same time. If you want to determine position, you have to use instruments that bring in a lot of momentum. And because of that, those same instruments can't also measure momentum 'cause they're disturbing the momentum (laughs) that- that, uh... And then the momentum brings in energy and, yeah... So- so that- there's also the effect that asymptotic freedom comes from, uh, the possibility of spontaneously making, uh, quarks and gluons for short amounts of time that- that fluctuate into existence and out of existence. Uh, and, uh, the fact that y- that can be done with a very little amount of energy, and- and uncertainty in energy translates into uncertainty in time, so if you do that for a short time, you can do that. Uh, well, it- it's all comes in a package and you can't (laughs) you can't... So uh, I told you it would take a while to really un- to really explain. But the, uh, but- but the results can be underst- uh, I mean, we can state the results, uh, pretty simply I think. So, uh, in everyday life, we do encounter some forces that increase with distance and k- kinda turn off at short distances. That's the way rubber bands work if you think about it (laughs) where, uh, you- if you pull them hard they- they- they resist and- but- but they get flabby if- (laughs) if- if the- if the rubber band is not- not pulled. Uh, and-So there are, that can happen, uh, in the physical world. But what's, what's really difficult is to see how that could be a fundamental force-

    18. LFLex Fridman1:31:22

        Yeah.

    19. FWFrank Wilczek1:31:22

        ...that's consistent with everything else we know, and that, that's what asymptotic freedom is. It says that, uh, there are parti- there's a very particular kind of fundamental force that involves special particles called gluons with very special properties that, uh, enables that kind of behavior. So ex- there were experiment... At the time we did our work, there were experimental indications that quarks and gluons did have this kind of property, but, uh, there were no equations that were capable of capturing it, and we found the equations and showed how they work and showed how they... That they were basically unique, and this led to a complete theory of how the strong interaction works, which is the quantum chromodynamics, uh, we mentioned earlier. Eh, so, uh, so that's the phenomenon that, that quarks and gluons interact very, very weakly when they're close together. That's connected through relativity with the fact that they also interact very, very weakly at high energies. So if you have... So at high energies, uh, the simplicity of the fundamental interaction gets revealed. No, at the time we did our work, the su- the clues were very subtle, but nowadays at hi- at what are now high energy accelerators, it's all obvious. So we would have had a much... Well, somebody would have had a (laughs) much easier time 20 years later looking at the data. You can sort of see the quarks and gluons. As I mentioned, they leave these short tracks that, uh, would have been much, much easier. But, but we... From fundamental... From indirect clues, we were able to piece together enough to make that behavior a prediction rather than a post-diction, right?

    20. LFLex Fridman1:33:15

        So it becomes obvious at high energies.

    21. FWFrank Wilczek1:33:18

        It becomes very obvio- when, when we first did this work, it was, uh, frontiers of high energy physics, and at big international conferences, there would always be sessions on testing QCD and whether these, whether this proposed description of the strong interaction was in fact correct and so forth. And it was very exciting. There were big en- but, uh, nowadays, the same kind of work, but much more precise with calculations to more accuracy and experiments that are much more, uh, precise and comparisons that are very precise. Uh, now it's called calculating backgrounds because (laughs) it's-

    22. LFLex Fridman1:34:01

        Yeah.

    23. FWFrank Wilczek1:34:01

        ...because people take this for granted and, and wanna u- and wanna see deviations from the theory which would be, which would be the new discoveries.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:34:09

        Yeah, the cutting edge becomes the foundation, the foundation becomes boring. Yes.

    25. FWFrank Wilczek1:34:13

        Yeah. (laughs)

    26. LFLex Fridman1:34:14

        Uh, uh, is, is there some... For basic explanation purposes, is there something to be said about, uh, strong interactions in the context of the, the strong nuclear force for the, for the attraction between protons-

    27. FWFrank Wilczek1:34:29

        Yeah, well-

    28. LFLex Fridman1:34:30

        ...and neutrons and versus the, the interaction between quarks within protons and so on?

    29. FWFrank Wilczek1:34:35

        Yeah, well, quarks and gluons have the same relation basically to nuclear physics as electrons and photons have to atomic and molecular physics. So atoms and photons are the dynamic entities that really come into play in chemistry and, and a- atomic physics. Of course, you have to have the atomic nuclei, but those are small and relatively inert, really the dynamical part. (laughs) And, you know, for, for most purposes of chemistry, you just say that you have this tiny little nucleus which (laughs) this, which QCD gives you. (laughs) Don't worry about it. It just... (laughs) It's there. The real, the real action is the electrons moving around and exchanging and things like... Uh, the, uh, but, okay, but we wanted to understand the nucleus too, and, uh, s- so atoms bas- are sort of quantum mechanical clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces, which is photons, and then there's radiation, which is also a phon- another aspect of photons.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:35:43

        That's where all the fun happens is the electrons and the photons-

Episode duration: 2:22:20