Gadgetory

Brian thank you for being here my pleasure you're a theoretical physicist you're a best-selling author but you're also a man which one of them which one of those do you prefer which one do you like the best you know it's hard to say it's the union that I think really makes it a package the package he'll come be together so okay I'm extremely stupid when it comes to all the things you're extremely smart about explain your string theory is sort of your thing that's sort of your bag everybody when they swing you hear about string theory everybody immediately says screams your name explain string theory and its most basic to me sure it's our best attempt to realize a dream that Einstein had which was what he called a unified theory which would be a single framework maybe a single equation a single idea that would describe everything that happens in the universe the fundamental laws the fundamental processes the particles and how they interact so that's the goal now what is the theory itself well it answers we believe or at least we think because this is not a proven theory by any means a question that the ancient Greeks asked what is stuff made of what's the fundamental ingredient in any piece of material the finest uncuttable stuff and it's important that that there is this unifying that to you at least this is it would be very upsetting to know that there's somehow things in the universe did not have some fundamental shake not everybody agrees so there are some who are the who are the bastards who don't give names some of the people who are on your hit list I'm not saying you're gonna kill them you know it's a perfectly valid perspective to imagine that maybe there isn't a single description of everything you need some equations that work for the molecules and atoms other equation that works for the stars and galaxies and black holes and some people believe that that's how altom utley things will play out people like me think that doesn't make any sense because when you take say a black hole well in the middle the center it's a huge amount of material that's crushed to a very small size you need a theory of gravity a theory of big things work now because it's so small you also need a theory of how tiny things in size work that's quantum mechanics so it seems that you should be able to put together the logs of the big and the small into one package to even be able to describe things that we believe are out there in the real world so if you don't want to ever say hey black holes the Big Bang whatever we don't understand we don't need to then perhaps you don't need a unified theory but if you want to answer those questions yeah you've got to go further and have a unified description okay so so tell me about explain to me eleven the eleven dimensions yes by the way that's a that sounds like a question somebody asks you when they're on very high on drugs yes tell me tell me about the eleven dimensions can you III thought there were far fewer dimensions that we had to which is have access which is again by everyday perception I'm glad you think that way it means everything is working you look around the world and you see left-right you see back forth you see up-down three dimensions of space yeah the equation I also see time is that normal time is fine to you still perfectly healthy okay so if you're willing to throw time in then you've got four dimensions three of space of one of time string theory when you look at its equations the equations don't work if those are the only dimensions if three space in one time is it it needs more dimensions and in the version that we are most confident about it does require eleven space-time dimensions what are the other dimensions well they're not in some sense much different from the ones that you know about so these are the ones that you experience the others are like those but either very very tightly wound up very small so you can't see them with the naked eye even though they're all around here or we may simply not have the ability with our eyes or with any of our senses to directly access those other dimensions even though there might be big all around it right so you read a lot about parallel universes and the idea of an infinite number of parallel and if I'm misquoting you stop me but an infinite number of parallel universes can you explain how parallel universe would work in I guess tandem with the universe that I'm experiencing or sure that you're experiencing when you talk about the beginning of our universe we often speak of the Big Bang this explosion if you will early on that created everything that we see around us our attempts to understand that process really deeply have led to theories that suggest that it may not have been a unique event there may have been many big bangs each giving rise to its own expanding realm its own universe and those big bangs could be happening even today so you'd have a larger reality in which our universes may be just one expanding bubble a big cosmic bubble bath of universes with everything that we know about being just one of those bubbles what's outside the bubbles yes so what I would say one way of thinking about it is think of a big block of Swiss cheese and think of the universes that I'm talking about as the openings in that block of Swiss cheese so this big expanding block of Swiss cheese that's basically a space exists regardless yes knitting outside of space not that these theories require so you can always imagine great things anything else I don't think so the only thing that drives me to take an idea seriously is if there's a mathematical reason for considering it and we don't need to imagine a realm beyond anything that I'm talking about now which is itself pretty huge really expansive right and this expansive reality would suggest that our universe is a little tiny piece of this grander hole and so those are those other universes are currently operational and their laws of physics might look different from here the particles that inside them could look different but the weirder thing of all is when you study the math you take it very seriously which maybe one shouldn't we don't know if our equations apply to this vast expanse of reality but the equations are pretty clear that there would be duplicates of this realm so how many how many are there is it infinite there could be infinite okay in infinite versions of this and in round variations of this we've swapped in chairs and I would be doing you in one of those universes and on and on it would go so you have a a theory that there's an equation that can this this idea that you can explain everything and and obviously you're sort of that you're studying this very closely lots people are studying at this unifying Theory how much closer are we now than we were say 10 years ago or 20 years ago how quickly is this moving hour or have we have we discovered things in the last say 25 years that have completely destroyed our ideas of what we believed or is this a much more incremental process it is very incremental but there had been breakthroughs that are thrilling right so you may have heard about the Higgs boson that was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider at this last year so that was a particle that had been in our equations for 40 years that everybody pretty much had come to accept it's got to be there but you don't know it's there until you find it right and it could easily have turned out that you smash these particles together in Geneva and the particle that you anticipate being produced this Higgs particle you don't find it and that would have been astounding and it would have been exciting in its own right but it's hugely gratifying that you follow the equations the equations say you should find this particle you build this ten billion dollar machine you smash protons together and holy smokes you find exactly what the equations said that you should find for somebody like me whose work is completely mathematical that's the kind of progression where we say we're not nuts right this mathematics can provide the window onto the next layer of reality that we've yet to see and you don't worry that we found ways to describe things that line up with the things that we believe and so don't worry about that okay so what what seems provable or proof yes just our perception of I do worry about that all the time and how do you combat those fears um you know I must see my therapist and we talk it through and you know you just try to come to to terms with these ideas look I worry but not all the time because it would be paralyzed by it is mathematics something that we just make up inside our brains it's very good at organizing those things that we can perceive or at least beyond our perception of the things that the math takes us to or is math really fundamentally the language of the universe and that's what we've tapped into and we really are in route to eternal deep truths do you feel like we're in a dangerous place right now in regards to science I mean are you feeling more positive or more negative about where we are as a society in terms of our relationship with science so I think what needs to happen there has to be a fairly dramatic a fairly radical cultural shift where science currently is in the outskirts and it needs to be brought right into center stage we need people to see science as vital to a full life as literature as film as theatre as music because it is and I think part of the way that you do that is you need to stop only having the interaction that people have with signs being the traditional classroom experience where you memorize stuff you take an exam and when it's done you're all too happy and you leave it behind science needs to be communicated as an ongoing story at Romantics and literally throw children into a black hole so they can experience the full excitement yes you know I got being stretched in the following sense so I wrote a story about a kid that goes to a black holes called icarus at the edge of time and the boy goes to the black hole it's like the original Icarus story except he doesn't die in this version he spends an hour around the black hole and to give away the ending because of Einstein's general relativity so he spends an hour around the black hole and his dad said don't go but he goes and he comes back to his dad what do you think I'm the first kid ever go to a black hole and it turns out his dad has gone because an hour near a black hole Einstein taught us is 10,000 years or more for everybody else that's how you would like to teach children about something while you're writing your whole family and there will be dead so so I wrote this book and when it came hot off the press you know it was dedicated to my son who's five at the time I didn't want to read it to him because it didn't want to be oh god dad writes these things and I have to listen to you know I didn't want it to have that feel to him so I just left copies of the book around the house hoping he'd find it and he did and they had my wife read it to him and by the end he was crying because the boy comes back and the dad is gone so yeah exactly so so people have asked me when I told them that weren't you upset that you kind of wrote a story that made your son crying the answer's no well yes at some level but no because you're happy about it because if the general theory of relativity which is core to this story can make a five-year-old cry it makes the science meaningful it's not just abstract ideas that he has to memorize he sees that these ideas can really matter and when you see that science really matters then you care about it and when you care about it it's not just a subject Brian thank you so much that was awesome I pleasure thank you