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

Summary

The Shawn Ryan Show, Ep. #312

Guest: Dr. Sabrina Pasterski (Theoretical Physicist)
Date: June 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Shawn Ryan Show features Dr. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, a decorated young theoretical physicist at the forefront of efforts to decode the fundamental structure of the universe. Sabrina and Shawn engage in an expansive, candid, and approachable conversation about cosmic puzzles—ranging from her early engineering feats and academic odyssey to her groundbreaking work in string theory, black holes, gravitational memory effects, and the celestial holography initiative. They also tackle myths (flat Earth, black holes, UFOs), discuss the interplay of theory with experiment, and Sabrina’s experiences navigating academia, tech, and the challenge of science communication.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Challenging the "Next Einstein" Label (00:59–03:22)

• Sabrina's Rejection of the "Next Einstein" Tag:
  Sabrina is often dubbed "the next Einstein,” a label she finds misleading.

  "It's just not accurate... But I do like this notion of thinking about what that legacy is and how do we do good with it." (01:13, Sabrina)

2. Early Years: Flight, Building, and Physics (03:24–11:00)

• Origins:
  • Grew up in Chicago with supportive, non-scientist parents (public defender dad, EPA lawyer mom).
  • First flight lesson at nine; built a Zenith airplane as a preteen when others played video games.
• On Building vs. Theory:

  "It instilled a sense in which there's a value to trying to find things that can be straightforward and systematic and build something cool out of it." (06:29, Sabrina)

• Mentorship and Networking:
  • Her father's practical skills and encouragement led to resourcefulness and “arbitrage opportunities” as a young networker (e.g., networking with MIT faculty in person with photo books as a teen—see 24:43–26:39).

3. Academic Path: From Rejection to Harvard PhD (11:00–28:40)

• Schooling:
  • Attended top public magnet and Illinois Math & Science Academy, both public but highly selective.
  • Waitlisted at MIT, rejected by Harvard as an undergraduate—eventually got into MIT via persistence and networking.
  • Earned a physics PhD at Harvard; significant early research on gravitational waves and the “spin memory effect.”
• Navigating Admissions

  “It was probably this type of networking thing... with a little like photo book of the airplane and then meeting [faculty].” (25:22, Sabrina)

4. Exposure to Big Science: Internships & Early Research (28:40–41:48)

• Internships:
  • Interned at Boeing, NASA Kennedy Space Center (where she felt disillusioned by bureaucracy/soft skills over tech), Blue Origin, and CERN (where she witnessed the Higgs boson discovery).
• CERN & Particle Physics:
  • Describes the experience and demystifies conspiracy theories (“No, they’re not trying to make black holes... It’s so sad. The no-gos are the worst thing.” 38:50, Sabrina).

5. Theoretical Physics—Meaning, Challenges, and Hype (41:48–54:33)

• Research Focus:
  • Excitement for frameworks connecting gravity and quantum systems, even as many aspects of physics and tech are overhyped (“Quantum computing is way overhyped” 39:26, Sabrina).
• Role Models & Disillusionment with Tech Hype:
  • Explains her evolving views on Elon Musk (“He was my hero as a kid... then I went through different phases...” 51:25–54:33).

6. Gravitational Memory Effect (67:39–77:36)

• Explained (Analogies Used):
  • Ripples in spacetime after cosmological events (like black holes merging) leave a lasting “memory” or shift—akin to buoys in water after a boat passes.

  “If you have two detectors... the distance between them is going to change... there’s a relationship between this distance changing and the kind of net kinematics of the energy in the things that were scattering.” (68:11–72:15, Sabrina)

• Her Variant:
  • Discovered a variant tied to angular momentum loss (spin memory), cited by Stephen Hawking.

  “I discovered a variant... based on the connection to these symmetries.” (72:44, Sabrina)

7. Universe as a Holographic System—Celestial Holography (97:19–109:08)

• Celestial Holography Initiative:
  • Seeks to encode the universe’s physics as a hologram—projecting 3D/4D phenomena from 2D boundaries (akin to a cosmic “hologram”).

  "I think that I’m trying to build a version of a holographic framework that works for... spacetimes that are not anti–de Sitter. So, like, space times more relevant for scattering. How does gravity want to be described by a boundary system?" (102:51–104:06, Sabrina)

• Is Everything a Hologram?
  • She frames it carefully: It's about equivalent mathematical descriptions—not “everything is literally a hologram,” but the math works as if it were.

  "If everything is described in terms of boundary observables, then it does call into question which questions are well defined in the bulk." (103:52, Sabrina)

8. Black Holes, Flat Earth, and Misconceptions (84:00–97:04)

• Flat Earth Debunked:
  • Satellites, GPS, and basic observations prove curvature (84:24–86:52).
• Black Holes:
  • “I think the… thing that one should take away is that there are still situations where people don’t understand all the assumptions they make… it’s not breaking physics, it’s showing that there is something broken in our assumptions.” (87:11–89:19, Sabrina)
  • What happens if something goes in? "You don't really know that you went through [the horizon]… eventually when you get closer to where the curvature is larger, [there’s] spaghettification." (90:36–92:04, Sabrina)

9. Science Funding, Academia vs. Tech, and the Future (62:11–66:00, 123:08–126:15)

• Advocates innovative funding structures and collaboration between academia and industry (e.g., the Perimeter Institute—a private-public partnership for theoretical physics research).
• Cautious optimism about AI’s democratizing impact and potential to accelerate but not “solve” physics without human expertise.

  “There’s skill sets that are open to me because it’s been kind of democratized. So I’m grateful… that kind of hype led to technology that’s actually useful for my job.” (126:15, Sabrina)

10. Miscellaneous: China, UAPs, and Philosophical Puzzles (135:10–145:32)

• Physics US vs. China:
  • US is ahead in “useless” (pure) physics; China funds “things we don’t value doing” (137:15–137:41).
  • Advantages in scale, funding, and freedom to fail in the US.
• Aliens & UFO/UAPs:
  • Believes statistically in the possibility of life elsewhere, but not that any has contacted us.

  "I wish they were real... if it weren't, wouldn't that be more fun?" (140:58–142:08, Sabrina)

• Legacy and Motivation:
  • Desires to harness new tools (AI, data mining) to break out of intellectual silos and connect the tapestry of fundamental physics.

  “I just want to basically understand better what is the information content of what I work on in the human sense, not in the ADS. Safety sense.” (132:53–135:10, Sabrina)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the "Next Einstein" Hype:
  “I think I’ll probably benefit from it too much. … But I do like this notion of … what that legacy is and like our field as a whole.” (03:22, Sabrina)

• On Networking for College Admission:
  “Little photo books of the plane, little business cards … It works. It’s like an arbitrage opportunity. The kid can get the access.” (25:01–26:39, Sabrina)

• On String Theory:
  “String theory is kind of chubbying out this graph to a sheet ... You could imagine, let's try to build some mathematical framework within which I have the spectrum where I have this graviton … and then I avoid some pitfalls.” (45:08, Sabrina)

• On Gravitational Memory:
  “There's a relationship between this distance changing and the net kinematics of the amount of energy in the things that were scattering and the waves coming out. … So, yes, you have these two probes sitting far away … the distance between them is going to change.” (68:11–71:20, Sabrina)

• On Academic Impostor Syndrome & Research Hype:
  “The people that you see as the physicists publicly are not the real physicists somehow.” (49:13, Sabrina)

• On AI’s Promise for Physics:
  “I can basically redev the same thing with Claude code, which is amazing… you get to basically just have fun. And I like that a lot.” (126:15, Sabrina)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Start | End | |------------------------------------------------|------------|-----------| | Sabrina joins, “Next Einstein” intro | 00:59 | 03:22 | | Early life and building a plane | 08:04 | 11:00 | | Magnet school and college journey | 13:26 | 27:14 | | Internships (Boeing, Blue Origin, NASA, CERN) | 28:38 | 41:48 | | Introduction to string theory & theoretical pivot| 44:18 | 46:33 | | Gravitational memory effect explanation | 67:39 | 77:36 | | Black holes, misconceptions, “Flat Earth” | 84:00 | 97:04 | | Celestial holography, hologram universe | 97:19 | 109:08 | | Science funding, AI, Perimeter Institute | 123:08 | 126:15 | | Physics US vs China, global landscape | 135:10 | 140:55 | | UAPs & aliens, skepticism | 140:58 | 145:32 |

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Final Reflections and Sabrina’s Vision

• Sabrina is forging a new path in making fundamental frameworks of the universe more accessible, connectable, and potentially more useful via computational tools—while fighting against hype and ensuring scientific integrity.
• On her future:

  “I think I’m getting into being a shitty vibe coder and just seeing, getting to have fun, do my physics and then on the side… try to look at this bigger scale picture of the corpus and see how far I can go with a little do-it-yourself type of attitude…” (147:38, Sabrina)

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This episode provides an exhilarating yet down-to-earth look at the life and work of a leading theoretical physicist—offering both the wonder and the humility behind some of the most fundamental questions in science.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Sabrina, Sean, welcome to the show.

[A]

Thank you for having me, man.

[B]

I've been excited about this. So you're labeled and I know you're probably gonna downplay this the next Einstein. You don't like that?

[A]

No, I mean, it's just not accurate. But I do like this notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit about what that legacy is and like our field as a whole and how do we kind of leverage that or, or do good with it.

[B]

Well, I think we're going to get into all that, but, you know, this stuff you're doing, I don't even know, I don't even know how to say it, but it sounds like. And we're going to get into it in a minute. But it sounds like what you're studying is if everything is a hologram.

[A]

Most literally. Yeah. Like the thing that I study is that. And I do find it's fun, like to kind of take a step back and talk to people who are not researchers to see how they interpret the words that we attach to things or how like visceral, literal, like the researcher versus like the person you're talking to takes it right on.

[B]

Right on. You ready to get into it?

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

All right, let's do it. I'm going to start you off with an introduction here. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, born in Chicago, Illinois. First generation Cuban American. At age nine, your first flight lesson ignited a lifelong obsession with flight and physics behind it. Between ages 12 and 14, you spent spent two years building a single engine Zenith. Rejected by Harvard, waitlisted at mit. You got off the waitlist because of the airplane you built. Earned your PhD from Harvard in 2019 in high energy theoretical physics, leading the Celestial Holography Initiative, a project aimed at encoding the entire universe as a hologram to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. Named to Scientific Americans 30 under 30 in 2012. In Forbes 30 under 30 science list in 2015, one of the Albert Einstein Foundation's 100 greatest innovators. In 2018, first woman to chair the flagship annual strings conference for the global string theory community. First female to graduate number one in MIT physics. And like I said before, many consider you to be the next Einstein, which you hate. You don't like that?

[A]

I think I'll probably benefit from it too much. And that's a bad thing?

[B]

Yeah, it's a cool label. Be proud of that. But so actually, before we. Before we get into it, just. Can you give me a quick. I think I know what string theory is at least a little bit, but is this. Is this like. What do they call quantum communication where they.

[A]

Oh, so basically like quantum information or kind of like the sense in which you might be thinking of, like, if you were talking to someone who does quantum computing and those facets is more like in holography. There are definitely connections between foundational aspects of entanglement and different protocols you can do in a quantum mechanical system and then mapping it to a gravitational one. So string theory is not related to that directly, but there's a sense in which the research I do probably is more closely related, if that's what you're asking. But basically the whole point is we want to try to, as a field, not individually, understand what the basic rules are. What are the laws of nature? If you aren't going out and measuring things, what do you really have at your disposal? You're roughly trying to use mathematical consistency of your frameworks to try to piece together a picture. If you have rules for the very short distance physics and very long distance physics that are in their own world, and you want to try to have a framework that connects both of them, you run into various problems. And string theory is one example of a route that people have found to kind of avoid the pitfalls of, like, understanding how to have a graviton or how to have, like, a quantum mechanical system with gravity. But in practice, you're roughly studying one little facet of these mathematical frameworks and trying to push it pretty far or generalize it to different situations.

[B]

Okay, what is the. I read something that China is working on communications where they will vibrate half of an atom, and then no matter what the distance is, the other half of the atom will mimic exactly what.

[A]

Talking about some entanglement or whatnot. I don't Know what?

[B]

That's what I was thinking about. Quantum entanglement.

[A]

Sure. So I think that I am less on top of all of the experiments when it comes to trying to see not just entanglement, but maybe some sort of position dependence or whatnot, which is closer to seeing how gravity and quantum interface. So I don't know exactly which experiment, but I know that there's a lot on kind of the. There's a lot of progress on the quantum computing side of things, which I guess is the closest thing to an engineering subfield right now within, like, high energy theory, but a little bit not high energy.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right on. All right. So a couple things to crank out here.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

We got a Patreon.

[A]

Okay. You got Community. Yep. So we gotta make them happy.

[B]

They're the reason that I get to sit here with you today.

[A]

Super cool. Yeah.

[B]

So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from J.D. pardon?

[A]

Okay.

[B]

At 12, you weren't playing video games. You were in a garage building a Zenith CH601XL. What did that mechanical grease under the fingernails experience teach you about solving abstract physics problems that a textbook never could?

[A]

I think it maybe didn't teach me enough for what I have done so far, but it definitely instilled a sense in which there's a value to trying to find the things that can be straightforward and systematic and build something cool out of it. And I think that that's one thing that maybe theoretical physics personally felt like it was lacking because I had this bias of growing up around people who, like, built cool shit or whatnot. Is like, is there a sense in which you can try to find the engineering aspects of what you do and the systematic things and build tools for that? So that's the thing that that project probably has instilled in me, but I don't think I've lived that out yet.

[B]

Right on. Yeah, Right on. And then I got you a gift.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Everybody gets a gift.

[A]

Gummy bears, I heard. Thank you.

[B]

The Jones League Gummy Bears. Made in the USA up in Michigan. Oh, you want to try them? Go ahead. You're gonna love them.

[A]

I hope I know how to open a damn bag. Right? Yummy. That's good.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

What made you want to have gummy bears as a product? Because it's super fun.

[B]

Actually, I was going to do CBD gummies for sleep and melatonin ones. Yeah. My marketers, I'd all get sued for catering to kids. So I said, fine, we'll just do regular gummy Bears, because I like those too.

[A]

I can eat them in.

[B]

Right, right. But, but so I want to do a full life story on you and then get into everything that you're doing right now. So where did you grow up?

[A]

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois and in the city, but near the outskirts of the city. Part of the city where a lot of firemen and cops would I guess live because they had to live technically in the city I love. Chicago is a kind of fun, well designed city where you have a lot of awesome public schools. And I went to a Edison Regional Gifted center was nearby where I lived at the time. My parents picked that location to be near nice schools. And it was fun growing up. Awesome having smart peers and being challenged in school. And then yeah, I guess I can keep iterating on different parts of it. But I definitely had some enthusiastic parents. And that's where this whole taking advice from mentors and kind of just following different rabbit holes led to where I am now.

[B]

What did your parents do?

[A]

So my parents are both lawyers, but they're not lawyers in the way. Oh, they're lawyers. Fancy sense. So my dad for most of his care was a public defender. So he worked for like Cook county. And then my mom works for the epa. So more like the regs for like making sure that companies that accidentally polluted like various like groundwater or things that affect people like they have to pay and fix their problems.

[B]

Wow. So nothing to do with physics?

[A]

Nothing to do with physics. But my dad did have an electrical engineering like undergrad degree. And so definitely growing up like we were the ones doing repairs in our house. We didn't really hire contrastors except for maybe some things that had to be welded. So that was interesting too.

[B]

And you did your first flight lesson. Was either one of your parents pilot?

[A]

No, they weren't at the time. My dad got a license much. I mean he got a license at some point pretty soon after. But maybe he had a relative back in the day that had flown or whatnot. And Harry Potter was cool at the time and I think I wanted a flying broomstick. So they definitely convinced me Santa Claus was real. It was really funny. I think they'd used these extrinsic motivation things to get me to be a good kid or whatnot. So I was convinced Santa Claus was real cause the presents were off. Awesome. But like, I guess I got a little greedy and I wanted like a flying broomstick because like Harry Potter was cool. And then they're like flight lessons. So like, I mean, that's cool. I mean, and it's funny because it's a bougie style hobby, but it's very much more like they would just do anything for their one kid, if that makes sense. Like, it's like, yeah, that's awesome. My mom's family, like, so her dad was like a carpenter when. And then he like they moved from Cuba. And then on my dad's side, his father was a bit in trouble with things at some point. That's why he became a public defender. And so to them, they made it. And then they want to invest in their kid.

[B]

And you build a plane. Yeah, I mean, a plane.

[A]

But the thing is, age 12. Yeah. And that comes from the fact that, I mean, people do this, right? So what's the way that this stuff works out? So you're a 9 year old flying and then your dad's like, oh look, my kid's so cool flying. Who are these people that they can meet? Da da da da. You go to a lot of air shows, like, because he was a lawyer, so he has some sense of regs. There was this kind of fun thing of looking for, like, how can you get around the fact that you'd have to be like 16 to fly alone in the US but in Canada you can. Only you can do this at 14. And so I had found out that like Jamal Larkins was this aerobatic pilot who had gone up to Canada to flight train to get through this kind of legal loophole of how old he could be to fly alone. Wrote an essay about it. And then I started getting these like mentors in the faa. And then my dad was super encouraging of like going out and networking. And it's very easy to network when you're a cute little kid. You don't have to be good at public speaking. Like, you're just like, here's a kid with some pictures of you like flying or like with a big parachute behind you and airplane. Like it's like overpowering and like you can walk your way into things. Like you bring like Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the faa. It's perishable, you know, and you start making friends and then you see all these people who are building kit planes and then you're like, damn, it's hard to get into school these days. Like, can you do some sort of trick to get into either? Like, there's like selective high school IMSA where I went or mit. And yeah, and then I always just trusted my like, Like I thought my dad was. Knew everything because he was really like kind of a jack of all trades, fixing things around the house. So when he is like over my shoulder or like teaching me how to do some things and I'm just going and riveting things together, I'm like, this is great. I know if he says it's fine, it's fine. And it was cool because basically before it turned into this, of mentors suggesting, oh, you could do this thing like whenever. It was just that much effort put into like school projects. So I had like, like, I think whenever, like people were like first burning DVDs, we'd have like a room in our house of one of the bedrooms. I painted chroma key blue that I would go and like reenact little scenes for my history projects. And like we filmed and put until I had like some like Doctor who episode or something like that. So it was, we'd like, we basically were just trying to do like, like say a plus star on every little school project, which is a bit of a waste of time, but just a funny little effort. And then to translate that into something where then the narrative was like, okay, you're going to take flight lessons, you're then going to try to build an airplane and then want to work for these aerospace companies. A linear kind of story arc with a bunch of fast paced projects type of thing in between was something I think that came out of this otherwise intense go do it well attitude.

[B]

What age did you start reading?

[A]

Oh, I mean, I don't know. I don't think. I don't recall myself as being like a, like a better reader. Than my classmates. If anything, when I was in kindergarten, like Alison Larrabee could read all of the joke cups. And so like, I mean, I could read, but like, maybe my vocabulary was not as expansive. And so then my parents would like buy all of the Dixie joke cups, like, you know, in bulk to then be able to at least read the words on them. But like, but then the kids still would just go to Alison, maybe because she was like the first person like that they knew could read the joke cup or because she had more friends. I don't know. Yeah, so I don't think I was necessarily reading faster, but I probably was talking a lot early on. And they used to do a thing where it's like I could write it out, then they'd let me, like, if I asked for a car ride at some random time of night, if I could ride it on the little chalkboard, they'd take me on a car ride. So a lot of Extrinsic, motivational.

[B]

Right on the way. Do you have any brothers and sisters?

[A]

I don't. And that's probably why all the intense story stuff is because it's like one kid, one shot. Yeah.

[B]

What else? I mean, what else were you designing, inventing, building?

[A]

I mean, I would say that like the. It wasn't anything that like, before it would have been just like going all out on every little class project just for the heck of it. Not nothing that cool. And I think that. But the one thing is, it was like kind of like it was pretty clear to see how easily like the goals were shaped by either, like, strong reactions to or like, taking on ideas from, like, the people that you talk to. So, like, when I was flying, everyone would be like, oh, one day you're going to be like flying or Boeing. One day when we're like, we're like taking a vacation. I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to be a. I don't want to do that. And then you see these people building kit planes. Super cool. These air shows, when you're putting it together, they're like, oh, one day you're going to be building the Boeing. I'm like, I don't want to do that. And so it was just more of like a. Someone says you can do it. And then my dad's like, yeah, you can do it. And then we see how you can do it. Or then someone's saying, you will be doing it. You're like, no, I don't want to do it. And so then you pivot. And so that's how I accidentally pivoted into physics. Later we can get to. Because I was like, ah, it's not as cool if you're not actually like, you know, there's. The designs aren't really changing and you're not like, putting together. I mean, it was somehow more fun to have something where you do straightforward work. Somebody else kind of told you the steps for you modifying it or fine like that. But then you have a product that you built versus when you're just engineering something a little. It's like a little too theoretical. I might have all go the whole other extreme of purely theory, which is maybe a bad choice, but it kind of.

[B]

What did get you into physics?

[A]

Yeah. So funny story. So basically, I think the first hint at it was the high school. I went to this math and science school. All of the. A large fraction of the faculty had PhDs. And so I didn't grow up with people who had PhDs. I mean, my parents both had their lawyers, so they went to state schools for that. But suddenly now all of your peers think they have to get a PhD to be cool. So that's a weird thing. Like, suddenly have this mind shift where, okay, I need a PhD. Probably not true, but, like, that starts. I mean, definitely not true, but that starts seeping in. The person who founded my high school was, like, a former director of Fermilab. And he'd have, like, these lunches with Nobel laureates with, like, they'd come in and give talks, and then he would have lunch with the students if it was just him every Monday or something.

[B]

I remember. Wait, hold on.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I thought you went to public school.

[A]

I went to. It's a public school, so, like, not for. So this is not Chicago. So I went K through 8 Chicago Public Schools. And they have these kind of magnet, like, programs, like gifted center type of thing. They have different types of magnet programs. So CPS is, like, so large that they have fun schools for kids who like school, I guess.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Then I went to the state school that's three years boarding school paid for mainly by, like, State of Illinois Math and Science School, Illinois Math and Science Academy. So I think it's funded under the umbrella of, like, University of Illinois or whatnot. There's precedents in South Carolina, I believe, and Texas and others where it's just like a STEM boarding school that the state runs, that it's public.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

But it's like. It's like, you get this. You have to take the SAT to get in and things like that. But it's kind of actually cool that there are these.

[B]

That is cool.

[A]

Public schools.

[B]

You took the SAT to get in?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, and these scores for kids getting in to high school are not that good. And I definitely wasn't the type of person who did well on standardized tests. I did well on the ones in school because I cared about the teacher I'm trying to impress. But, yeah, it was neat because it was a public school. But it was very much like, a little bit of this vibe of, like, gifted, private. Yeah. School experience in the sense of you're at a boarding school. But it was nice because then it could get kids from all over. Like, even our elementary school was like, you're busing kids in from all over the city. And so you have a lot of, like, just gifted kids from, like, various socioeconomic backgrounds there. And then similarly with, like, the boarding school aspect lets you be from anywhere in Illinois. Wow. So it was nice. Wow. Yeah,

[B]

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[A]

so that MIT has been cost a lot.

[B]

So all the PhDs got you into physics.

[A]

So it was the PhDs plus the fact that the founder was a physicist like a Nobel laureate in physics, who then somehow when the plane is final assembly near Aurora Airport nearby this high school and he thinks it's cool, he's like oh, you can be a physicist. And then suddenly that gets into our minds. And then all of these aerospace executives who were running like private aerospace company, so I guess not Richard Branson, but Elon Musk and Bezos both liked physics. For whatever reason, they either dropped out of some physics ish material science degree at Stanford or thought about majoring at Princeton. So my heroes were these guys who could just do cool shit. They had built a company to have the resources to then do something that's valuable but not necessarily profitable. I'm sure they found ways to make it profitable. But I thought that was.

[B]

I think they're doing all right.

[A]

I think they're doing all right. No, no. But even in the scope of, like, can you. Like, how do you just build a.

[B]

No, I get what you're saying.

[A]

So I thought that was the coolest thing and I wanted to be like that. And I figured, okay, like, if I just work for them, would I ever still be like that? I don't know, maybe. And I got a little disillusioned about, like, what's the product I'm going to build. If you build, like, some suborbital thing, if, like, you accidentally kill a rich person or is it going to just be dead, you know, but they did a good job. They didn't do this. I'm surprised.

[B]

I'm like, damn, if you accidentally kill a rich person.

[A]

No. You know, so that type of thing scared me a little bit. And then I figured, they like physicists, so, like, how can I be cool to the people I find cool? Let me go into physics, which is like, the wrong reason to go into physics. And then, by the way, like, I grew up with a bunch of kind of like, mechanics, slash engineers who maybe see, like, the physics as this bottleneck, that the physicists aren't doing it right. Like, there's gotta be some cool tech that can come out of this. And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go in that field. And it's like, complet. You gotta hide that at least when you're actually trying to, like, get by in the field. Right. So very much a wrong reason to go into the field.

[B]

Wow. What. I mean, what was. What was the first project that really grabbed your attention? Oh, I mean, because you obviously love it. You're still in it.

[A]

I'm still in it. No, but I still think the thing, it's for that bigger picture goal. So I think the thing that grabbed my attention is more, you know, I liked my math and science courses in school. I think that maybe in hindsight, looking back, just the notion of computing something draws your attention in a way where then once you're in it, you're in it, you're hooked. And that's good for my job mechanically in the sense that our job is to compute things. But I do think that I was still more excited by the bigger picture view or this notion of the possibilities of what physics could do than in practice. What it is in the same sense that someone working at Google isn't necessarily actually gets to think about search. They're doing one specific Little widget or something, you know, type of thing. But yeah.

[B]

Right on.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Where do we go from high school?

[A]

Oh, so from high school we go to being a little bit too cocky and, like, being like, MIT for aerospace, Harvard for physics, and then not getting in because you wrote too many poems or didn't really like. I think that the one thing about the admissions to these schools, I mean, it's so much luck. So that's a bit sad. I think that grad admissions is fairer because you're already kind of differentiated in your skill set and the people admitting you are the people who care about the field that you're going into. But I think I thought all these other kids are taking the AP courses. They're checking off all these boxes for their extracurriculars. They don't want that. They want something different. It's like, no, maybe it's just like they're seeing a large array of applications. You don't want to be anomalous in a negative way. You just check the boxes and more or something. I think I didn't handle it right. But then I knew how to bother people because I'd been networking since I was a kid. So we found Sheila Widnall, or who else I think she might not have helped with admissions. It was more like Earl Merman. But basically I'd be this kid with this little photos of this airplane build walking around. And my parents would drop me off at different places. So wandering MIT hallways to try to say hi to someone with this book. And I'm just like, okay. And then I just patiently wait. I mean, probably not as cool as waiting for a sniping mission, but you're just there. You're like, somebody's here. I'm gonna say hi to them. The mission is to get this book in the hands of some MIT person.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And you meet cool people, and it was like you give flowers to the secretaries or whatever, things like that. So a lot of networking as a kid, and eventually it helped because I had some friends who could be like, hey, admissions office. Maybe she didn't present this clearly enough in her application. This is kind of cool. Let her in. And I got in off the waitlist at mit.

[B]

You got in where?

[A]

Off the waitlist at mit? Yeah, that way.

[B]

Because you tried to get into Harvard, too, right?

[A]

Yeah, and I got redirected. But I mean, to be fair, lots of kids get rejected. Lots of awesome kids get rejected. It's not something. It's something more about, like, teaching you not to, like, rely on Other things happening for you that you can't control. Right. So like. Yeah.

[B]

What was it that got you off the waitlist in mit?

[A]

It was probably this type of networking thing, like you know, trying to like rely on some people who could vouch for me once you're on this wait list.

[B]

It wasn't the plane.

[A]

Well, no, it was a plane. Exactly. So what I'm saying, this whole idea going around with like the little like photo book of the airplane and then meeting.

[B]

I literally brought the photo book of the airplane.

[A]

Believe me, I would like I had little business cards back in the day. I mean, I think, I mean I like it's very cringey.

[B]

That's awesome.

[A]

I blame my dad. No, but like it was like you had little like photo books of the plane, little business cards and like thinking of who you want to meet and you're going to meet that person and you're this cute little kid. I mean you get a little bit less cute once you're in your teenagers but between like you know, 12 and 14, you're pretty cute. So like walking around with that, like trying to introduce myself to like various MIT faculty say or like at the air shows, various people in the FAA or like maybe Peter Demandis or folks who had done cool stuff in either like the private aerospace, like Anush Ansari had gone up an ASUYU capsule and then Demandis had the X Prize. So like definitely a lot of like trying to network but with like little man, that is.

[B]

I'm gonna do that with my kids now.

[A]

No, with the kids. I mean it works with. It's like an arbitrage opportunity. It's like there are things that like the kid can get the access and the.

[B]

Yeah, that's smart. I love it. I love it. So how did you like, how was it getting into mit?

[A]

So I mean it was very, it was a relief because I didn't get into college otherwise. Right. I mean I was very dumb. I was like very narrow minded in the sense of like or like laser focused on. I want this thing or this thing, nothing else. I have standards. But you can't like have standards if you're not like what they want. But I guess it helped to be able to have a little bit of that story and some of that network to like petition or whatever put a good word in once it was on the waitlist. So. Yeah.

[B]

How'd you like it?

[A]

Oh, I loved mit.

[B]

Was it challenging?

[A]

Yeah, but I love that, you know, and I think that's the thing is like actually I Loved it way more than my experience at Harvard. But, like, not to say that other people don't like each for Their Own, but it was just. I like the fact that it was intense and you knew where you stood. It wasn't a bunch of kids bullshitting and you'd take the courses that you're ready for and they'd get you up to the next speed and not a bunch of. If everybody gets an A, then you can pretend that you know stuff and you have kids sitting in on courses they shouldn't be in. And then, like, who knows what it's like Babble versus. It just felt more like you went in, worked hard, you got something out of it. But I love structure and something helping push you.

[B]

Right on. Yeah. What exactly were you studying there?

[A]

So I ended up majoring in physics. So when I went in, there's a lot of just general institute requirements at the beginning. First year or so, I was able to sneak into being this internship at Kennedy Space center with a bunch of older aeroastro kids. And then I think after that first summer, I also interned at. At Boeing. And I guess at the time, I was scared of this whole narrative of the airplane build and flying as a kid, how much that would confine me. And so I guess my rebelling was going. The other option was physics somehow. And so I liked my physics courses. I did well, and I just pivoted into, let me major in physics.

[B]

You did an internship at Boeing.

[A]

Yeah, but it wasn't. I mean, it probably is. Lots of kids do internships. It was probably because of the kids and stuff like that and these connections that I was maybe considered as a freshman or younger than maybe other people would have. But you end up.

[B]

You did an internship as a freshman

[A]

at Boeing between, I hope I'm right. But between freshman and the sophomore year, if I'm not memory.

[B]

I mean, as a freshman, you were named the first in MIT history.

[A]

The little entrepreneur thing. Yeah, but I wasn't very entrepreneurial. I don't have any companies. Lots of MIT kids have companies. But I hope the spirit is there for the wrong application. But when I was at Boeing, I probably, and this is the type of mistake that I would make often is you have, like, you make awesome mentors that you want to learn something from, but sometimes you want to not just literally take their advice. And so I think that my family and I, we accidentally would, you know, work for the person that gave you that introduction rather than thinking about, okay, where else at Boeing would I rather be necessarily? So I Ended up in this arm where they were doing some cool like, like R and D for a project that didn't feel like it was ever going to be built by Boeing because it was kind of a McDonnell Douglas acquired Branch of the company. And that disillusioned me a little bit. Not because it should have, but because it's just like engineering isn't always the same thing or academic engineering isn't always the same thing as building something. And I think that I thought it would be closer to move fast, break things, do cool things. And I think if I had seen any military side of, of Boeing, it would be a very different experience. But I was kind of just like sometimes the technology within a given field isn't the thing that then advances that field. And again, because of these stupid reasons of a bunch of not knowing enough about physics to realize that isn't the right route. Maybe studying the fundamental laws of nature would help you more than studying coding or something. If the new tech is like either drones or better engine design or whatever for pushing aerospace forward. So very naive, but kind of disappointed with the fact that you could see that even at a big company that's doing some awesome things, there's a sense in which you can get lost in the R and D phase.

[B]

You just mentioned something, I think you said that the latest technology in a field isn't necessarily what's going to advance humanity. How do you make that determination?

[A]

So I think what I'm saying is just a lot of times you can see it in, and I see this in physics with people who complain about physics, who are not necessarily in the in crowd or whatever and they can say true things and maybe draw the wrong conclusions about intent or about what to do about it. I think that oftentimes you can just kind of see that there's a lot of low hanging fruit and then it stagnates a bit. And I mean to the extent of the design for a passenger airplane really hasn't changed so much. And so do you just look at, try to find a definition of progress and see that it's slowing down and not blame yourself for not being smart enough. But try to see what do I actually care about? Do I like it because I like doing the thing or do I want a product? And once you have the product in mind, probably it's easier to decide what you need to learn and go do.

[B]

Okay, yeah, let's rewind for a minute. You had a high school internship at

[A]

Blue Origin a little bit, but that was so short. That was like I mean, so the internships at Boeing was a real normal internship. And then the one where it was a blue origin was some mentors were nice and like, let me. I forget exactly. I probably can't even. I'm glad I can pretend that this NDA thing, I don't remember exactly all the utility of the thing that I was playing with at the time there. And then the one at NASA was also very much more like show intel. It felt like we were learning like operations instead of any particular cool tech. But we got to see a lot of fun stuff on the tour.

[B]

What kind of fun stuff?

[A]

Like I thought the coolest thing was somehow these like tiles where you could heat it up and it would still be really hot on the inside and you could touch it on the outside. Like that was, that was fun. But it was just like going around to different parts of Kennedy Space center, literally getting a tour with a bunch of aerospace engineer students. And at the time, and this is kind of funny too because I used to think it felt a little bit bullshitty to have these. And again, I don't know, I did not know how to insult the experts. But something felt off about there being a whole enterprise around how you organize your enterprise. It feels kind of like prompt engineering nowadays. It's surprising how much of a discipline do you make the things that feel like soft skills. And so that internship was very much like trying to see how different parts of NASA were working together or like that. But it's such a high level view that I think I was like, this isn't the tech. And maybe in hindsight though, I should have have like appreciated it more. But I think at the time it was just weird going from like, you know, rivet, rivet playing to

[B]

what, what are your, what are the other interns? Were there other interns?

[A]

Yeah, I mean one of them I think ended up going, they were awesome. I was probably just a little bit annoying because I was younger and like, and I was like, I turn, I taught, I turn. No, like there's a kid of lawyers is freaked out over like I turned things in but who could see documents. But basically one of them I think was going to go in the Air Force. Maybe he did. I hope so. I don't know. I didn't really follow up because I ended up going to a different major later. But I think one of them had Internet, SpaceX or things like that. So it was a. I think I didn't appreciate how valuable your peers are until I started going more towards physics just because then I got into the whole research community and stuff. But yeah, I probably was just annoying little freshman.

[B]

How do you think they felt about you? How much younger were you?

[A]

I think we all agree. No, no. I mean, no, I, I think I wasn't that much younger. But enough when you skip a year or so, like, right. College is. If you're how old? I would have been like 17 or something. And they're like 21 or two. It's still a bit different if you're. Yeah, they're more independent and like kind of.

[B]

And then you had an internship at cern.

[A]

Yeah, so then I went over to physics because I guess. So I made that choice for physics because I liked my physics courses. And again, all of these tech people who were in aerospace were my heroes and they liked physics. So I'm like, I'm going to try to impress them. How hard can it be? But the mistake I made was I guess that I just kind of took the first internship type opportunity from the person who was technically my undergrad advisor and so is at cern. So assert is cool, but I'm sure that I didn't necessarily make the right choice in the sense that I wasn't scanning all opportunities of things within the field. I could be interning it or whatnot. I was very lucky that the one year that I do, the first year I go to cern, they discover the Higgs boson, but science is slow, especially in a big collider.

[B]

The first year you went to cern,

[A]

they're discovering Higgs boson. That's nothing to do with me, but just the right timing of.

[B]

Discovered what?

[A]

The Higgs boson. Oh, sorry, what is that? So trying to understand the, the origin of masses for these standard model particles. It's an extra field that was conjectured to be there to describe also electroweak, symmetry breaking, et cetera, the field content of the things that mediate interactions between particles. And so basically they have a new discovery in a way where that's really rare, but sample bias of like you're in there. They do cool stuff. So like, okay, that was neat. But again, CERN is huge. Right. So it's interesting to also see how hard it is to make some measurement for some quantities within theories that are also esoteric. And so it's a fun thing to see the engineering side of physics research. But again, I'm just a kid dying of like having some fun doing like a little bit of. I think it was some. Just for my undergrad thesis, along the lines of some data analysis. Back of the envelope thing for a future detector type of thing.

[B]

What is that? There's a lot of conspiracies and all kinds of stuff going on about it.

[A]

That stuff was cool. I wish. See, this thing is these conspiracies are never. It's always just not as cool as they make it sound.

[B]

What are they doing?

[A]

They're just colliding like particles, right? Like you want to send things in at higher energy so they get close enough and then you can start to see the structure of the thing. So imagine like you have like this bag of quarks and you start to see that the kind of component nature of your protons and things like that. So it's just you're colliding and then you're trying to measure what's coming out and you want to try to infer how your theory of the interactions is

[B]

consistent with that, what is coming out.

[A]

So I mean, it should be jets at some point these things hydrogenize. Sorry. So like basically you're colliding, say depending on the collider you're planning, like say electron positron and other colliders. And this is like say two protons are colliding and you're going to have. The protons are made up of some quarks and then they're going to have some interactions and then they're shooting out other quarks. But there's other particles in your standard model field theory. And those interactions will determine, I guess, the rate at which different things are produced. And so there's a theoretical thing. You're modeling those very short distance scale interactions and then you're trying to infer from the energy deposited or different particle tracks that this thing is actually what happened to. Then say something about your, your theory and that's fun and that's cool. But the scary thing is just how big, like how hard it is to like probe those high energy scales. And you see these huge. I mean the collider itself is like these rings are amazingly huge.

[B]

It goes around three countries, right?

[A]

I mean, well, they're near a border, but yeah, but yeah. So very interesting engineering feats for fundamental physics. And that's cool. And something I probably didn't appreciate as much as I like because I went into theory. I obviously somehow didn't appreciate it enough. But yeah, it's cool. I don't know. You end up knowing so little compared to all the things you wish that you knew about the stuff.

[B]

Is there any truth to the fact that you're trying to create some Type of a black hole.

[A]

They're not trying to. No. I think that there's. So that was a fun thing to see. I think I finally met one person who is kind of this back of the envelope, fear monger, fun guy for the millionaires. Like, I could understand, like, I mean, if you're probably from a defense kind of point of view, you want to understand the risks or whatnot. And I'm like, I wish it were that fun. I wish it were that risky. Like, nah, like if we were. I mean, I'd love to be like building wormholes. But they're not going to be like, you're not going to be able to transverse anything. No. So it's, it's so sad. This is the no gos that are the worst thing.

[B]

Like, I. I'm just curious because it sounds like now you're into. You're really into black holes and you're.

[A]

Yeah, no, but I, again, I spent most of my childhood convinced that there was cool stuff that could be done. And then most of learning grad school or an event of grad school the hard way. It's not that cool. And then being upset at the fact that all these people overhyped things and it's not as cool. Quantum computing is way overhyped. And then suddenly AI actually is useful and you're like, holy shit. So I don't know where I should land in the end or what I should learn from the fact that it like. Yeah. Completely disillusioned to like overly enthusiastic in a. In a couple weeks.

[B]

How long were you at CERN?

[A]

Oh, just like two summers. Like whatever the, like less than 90 days or whatever for the work permit. I forget now, but just two summers.

[B]

I mean, what's it like there? What's it like when you walk in? What, what's in there?

[A]

It looks like old buildings. Like, I think that it's a bunch of. The weirder thing about it is the way that it interfaces with say the US institutions or things like that. You'll just have a lot of like, I don't know what year, like 50s or something. They look like dated buildings, but with a bunch of people in offices. And then all of the cool, expensive technology is in the actual like detectors say. So it just kind of looks like, I don't know, like what you would imagine probably some, some industrial complex thing. It's a vibe.

[B]

Is it? I mean, do you go underground?

[A]

I wouldn't for what I'm doing, but sure. For a tour or if someone was actually like putting together Detectors. Absolutely.

[B]

They do tours?

[A]

Yeah, they do. Yeah. When it's not running.

[B]

Yeah, I gotta check it out.

[A]

They got a hard hat.

[B]

So how do they get two atoms to collide in a.

[A]

So this is way above my pay grade, but it's a bunch of magnets accelerating these things to higher speeds. And then I wish I knew. Literally, I should probably know what detector is saying, but luckily I'm not technically studying the manufacturing or engineering of the things to test experiment. I'm purely in the theory side.

[B]

Do you see when the particles hit?

[A]

So they would see the tracks afterwards? So that's a funny thing too, is like, you're not actually seeing, like, you don't see the Higgs boson. You're seeing, like, the fact that the things that came afterwards are consistent with it being there. And I think that that was a kind of funny thing too. Again, very silly, but maybe visceral in the sense of, like, you're not actually seeing the thing, you're inferring the thing versus, like, for gravitational waves. It really is like, it's a sound wave where they're seeing the, you know, the mirrors move apart. And that's kind of fun. It's fun when it's the. They're just. They're actually seeing the thing they're saying they're seeing instead of. Of indirectly inferring the thing.

[B]

Interesting post processing is what does that all mean?

[A]

To each their own. I think that. Sorry, what it means in some sense is you've tested a particular theory and so you're kind of ruling out some parameter space of, okay, there's no super partners or things like that too. Or we understand this Higgs mechanism.

[B]

Did you say super partner?

[A]

Oh, so basically, I think that at some point a lot of people were looking for extra particles that would come if there was this, like, symmetry relating fermions and bosons. So things that want to be apart from one another, you only want to fill one at each state versus things that like to kind of cohere or have amplified each. That's a bad analogy. But there's two types of particles, like integer spin and half integer spin. And some people were trying to conjecture that when you build these colliders, you're going to see more and more particles, and then that'll change the way that we think of these frameworks being organized and things like that. But turns out, maybe not. We don't know when the next new discovery is going to be. And so it's weird because then you're trying to fund an Experiment where you don't know what the answer is going to be and you're like, how expensive is it to motivate or to build this thing?

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Yeah. But luckily I'm not as involved in that. I'm purely theory for the sake of. That way I can be decoupled from these high costs experimental ventures for a bit and then just tackle that problem of kind of like mathematical, I guess, induction or something on the theoretical physics corpus, I think is one way we say it.

[B]

I didn't really think much about skincare before, but after enough long days, travel and stress, you start to see it in your face whether you want to or not. That's what got me into Caldera Lab. It's a straightforward routine built for guys, nothing complicated, just a few steps that work. I use the good in the base layer, takes less than a minute, absorbs fast and has no greasy feel. But the difference is noticeable. My skin looks healthier, more even and just more dialed in overall. And it's not loaded with junk either. It's made with clean, clinically backed ingredients and does exactly what it says it will. It's one of those small habits that adds up over time and changes how you show up day to day. Give it a shot. Go to calderalab.comsrs and use code SRS for 20 off your first order. That's calderalab.comsRS where do you go from CERN?

[A]

So from CERN, I use the fact that it's easier to get into grad school via experimental things to get into grad school at like I went Harvard at MIT school options. I went to Harvard because it would be more easy to pivot, I thought because I'd already worked for the people at MIT and then at Harvard, I think it was like quantum computing or string theory. And I thought that quantum computing was overhyped. So then I picked the other one. And I don't know how people feel like string theory was so cool back then. And it was like Brian Greene was very much making it cool when I was a kid. And I still think it's super cool, but it's not for the same, like almost for the same reasons that people sometimes hate on it a little bit. Yeah.

[B]

So can you, can you give me a dubbed down version of string theory?

[A]

Maybe. Okay, so you're basically quantum field theory is giving you these fields that explain why particles are identical because they're like the electron is just an excitation of this field. So like I have multiple electrons or excitations of the same field. You can think of, say, the mechanical process of how I'd compute some amplitude, like this thing, predictions for CERN as a bunch of world lines coming in with some rules for how they interact and split off and create other particles. String theory is kind of chubbying out this graph to a sheet, kind of like a literal pair of pants, say, interacting, and you have this world sheet. So what it does for you is it kind of two things. One thing is it kind of of opens up this UV behavior. So instead of points, it's kind of just like this branching of like a tubing thing. And then the other hand, it also gives you a particle spectrum. So basically, it's like you could imagine, okay, let's try to build some mathematical framework within which I have the spectrum where I have this graviton, they expect this gravitational field. And then I avoid some pitfalls of trying to treat gravity as a quantum field theory too. And so. And then people just keep building off of it. And then there's years and years of papers that you're, like, behind on when you're a new grad student. But the main idea is trying to find some underlying mathematical framework that can let you have, you know, your cake and eat it too, like gravity and quantum theory.

[B]

Okay, okay. All right, all right. So we go to Harvard.

[A]

We go to Harvard.

[B]

Get your PhD.

[A]

I'm working on my PhD, and I think the whole airplane story. I have a bunch of friends who are in aerospace who think, oh, this kid's cool. I'm doing some fun research with Andy and friends with spin, memory effects, stuff like that. And then you get overhyped really quickly because any press is good press if you're trying to start a company, but not if you're trying to get along with the 2,000 people in a field that are sometimes bombarded by, what is string theory doing? Type of thing. So very much closed ranks type of thing. So that happens in the middle of my PhD. So I. I guess I'm lucky that I didn't take all of these advanced grad courses and just took a lot of E and M for some of the stuff that my advisor happened to be doing was very like, you have a charge, when it accelerates, it radiates. Kind of like when you have an antenna, you're seeing the radio signal from some charges moving up and down antenna. So it was very easy math compared to a lot of stuff that people do in my field that I could latch onto and then think of some sort of fun little experiment. Well, not real experiment, more like a thought experiment type of thing of how you'd measure angular momentum loss in an inspiring binary system. Say. So I have a fun result pretty early on in my career, but it's a lot of luck that if Andy's on the paper, then people care and people will write about it. A spin memory effect or something versus it's. So you get a little bit of. That's cool. I'm lucky in hindsight. Very much love the kind of way that sometimes ideas can come together really quickly and then other times you're wasting a lot of time just being stuck. So I have. I'm lucky to have some good experience at the beginning of my grad program, but then I get hyped up in a silly way with this Einstein bullshit, and then I'm like, oh, because my family thinks it's awesome. You know, like, I mean, yes. When I was a kid, if I was going to be a physicist, wouldn't you want to be like, an amazing physicist? Like, of course. That's the goal. You go to Lindau. You go to these conferences where all these Nobel laureates get to hang out, and you're the students who get to meet them. You know, like, this is the life. I mean, maybe not exactly. I think it's better if you earn the money and then you whatever, but. But like, there is a lifestyle to. Like, just being good at your job would get you. And it's like, I wish. I wish it were real, you know, because, like, hype will just go away at some point. So I got a taste of the. The dark side with that, but also seeing just a little bit more of the sociology of. Why do people like this, like, narrative of, like, a individual doing something cool? And how does that fit into the fact that within our field, the people who write popular science books are not necessarily ostracized, but it's just like, it's distance a bit and then it's hard to work with them. So it's funny. The people that you see as the physicists publicly are not the real physicists somehow.

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

And I don't. Yeah. And I think it's just funny. Politics almost or whatever.

[B]

So you want to be under the radar. You don't?

[A]

No, I don't. No. I mean, I am. I wish I did. I wish I did. No, I want to be. For the sake of wanting to do well in my job. I need to be right. I don't want to be above the radar as a physicist in the sense of, like, I don't deserve attention as a physicist. Right. I wish that I did something cool enough where I felt like this wasn't complete, like whatever thing. But I do think what I want is that there should be a way for the fact that people care about science is good. How do you better kind of link together the folks who are good at outreach or the folks who are lucky enough to have opportunities to have outreach and the research in a way that benefits. The research is best for the physics and I'm excited for that being something that we can change now. And I think that maybe, I don't know if it's because I'm faculty now or because the times have changed with how science is funded, that people are more open minded to a little bit of being creative with how you interact with industry, for example. And that's exciting to me because things can get done a lot faster when you're not just in a group of people who've all decided this is the way it's done. Because it's been like that. Yeah.

[B]

Where did the Einstein analogy come from?

[A]

I think it's just some Aussie article trying to be flashy and it was good. Clickbait. I don't know. I mean, to be fair, you wouldn't use those words. I mean, you are studying gravitational waves and then people just try to be nice. I don't know if it was a girl boss, time of decade or whatever. 2016. 2015. 2016. So that stuff, I have no clue. I pretty sure you don't see the articles before they come out. And I didn't want any ridiculous comparisons because mostly airplane build kit stuff probably makes it a cool story. And then you're doing fun stuff with top people in the field. And sure, Hawking starts to work on stuff with Andy, so there's that part of it too. And Hawking is one of the few examples of somebody who is known for their research and their outreach and actually really good at both. I think it's rare to have somebody where they're popular and they did really cool stuff. Penrose is another example. I'd say, and I'm sure there's more that I could start listening, but. But it's rare.

[B]

Elon Musk.

[A]

See, that's the thing. He was my hero as a kid. And then I went through different phases of how I feel about the guy.

[B]

What? No, I know, I went, I gotta hear this.

[A]

So when I'm a kid, and this is me being very, very dumb and not realistic, but I'm in high school and I See this Quanta article about Tallulah Riley taking physics courses at Caltech. And I'm like, she's not a physicist. She's just taking a few physics courses. I could do better, whatever this guy thinks. I'm like, I'm a kid. This is dumb. But I was like, like, these guys like physics them. But no, but I didn't understand to what extent they did. So, like, I saw him as somebody, like, post this thing to Iron man in the sense of build cool shit and get people to build cool shit. And, like, I thought if I were in his shoes, I'd do the same thing, right? And then you see, like, you start getting a little shaky of, like, how much does he actually know how to do? It's like, you know, how much is the team behind him that's really holding it up and then how much? Which I thought, okay, if I get the PhD or something, I'll be the actual expert to then be able to be more legitimate in a position where you get to do cool stuff. But I think that's the kind of wrong attitude. So I went through phases where I was very disillusioned with the fact that he kind of represented science or tech. People believed whatever he said was right and that he also was the engineer and he also was all this stuff. Not saying he is or isn't, but I'm saying there was definitely this sense in which there's no way he's actually doing all this stuff, because I see how hard it is for people to do all these things right? And then you, you know, you get over it or whatever, and you realize how, you know, there's a lot of value to being able to get other people on board with the same vision, because then you can really push for it. And as long as that push is to something that's possible, then you're good. If it's a push towards something that's impossible, that's scary. And I think that that was something where again, before. Before the AI stuff, I was very disillusioned and being like, man, they're like taking buzzwords and concatenating them with, like, quantum computing and. And what else was I solutioned by? You'd see things that, as a physicist, you know, there's certain no gos and they're still getting funded. And you're like, you know, like, we don't have this lack of vision. We wish we were doing cool stuff, but, like, somehow we can't. Now I think that's changing. And at the same time, these People are just overselling things, kind of adjacent to what we do and acting like they're going to be better because they're entrepreneurs and we don't know what we're doing. And I was very, almost resentful of that at some time. But I think the coolest thing now is like, damn, the products they're building with Claude code or whatnot are super useful in the sense of, as a physicist, not many people in theory know how to do much more than pen and paper, use Mathematica, whatnot. If I wanted to think about questions that are more systematic, you just want to compute all of these different things numerically or whatnot. Those are not valued because their field is so small that one person doing it would be considered a waste of time because they're not. Not going to have a chance of getting a breakthrough. But when you have tools that open up your ability to, basically, instead of hiring a dev team, you don't need the resources for that. You can still just do it yourself. It's really cool. So I'm super grateful that maybe some of that hype led to technology that's actually useful for my job, or at least the things that I wish my job were. So I think my opinions clearly oscillate a lot about some of these folks.

[B]

But what do you think? Do you think we're going to make it to Mars?

[A]

Oh, so I think, I mean, I think he could make it to Mars depending on his definition, right? So, like, when I was a kid, it was really almost grim or, like, very pragmatic. I was like, you just want to get to Mars, you don't necessarily need to come back. So, like, can you do, like, you know, the first person to go to Mars one way could bring a bunch of, like, genetic material and a little ark and have it, like, cryogenically frozen. I don't know, I was thinking, like, send him one way. So I think someone could get to Mars absolutely, if they change the definition or the scope of what their goal is. But, yeah.

[B]

How fast do you think we can get there?

[A]

Oh, I'm not going to be the expert on that. I think that I definitely would be parroting things when I was a kid off of what other people were saying. And I do think it depends what you want for it. I always thought manned missions were cooler than automated missions. The vibe was cooler. But it does make sense sometimes to not raise risk, you know, life and limb for no reason. I do think that. Yeah, I don't. I think it depends what the goal is. I think like I'm open minded for getting around red tape to do something cool. And again, I kind of also, I really liked like it's weird because I think that like I had like secondhand sci fi because I never like read these sci fi books growing up. But all of like the people I admired did. Did I still kind of like the Earth. Like I like, like I'd rather, if I, if I had the same resources it probably would be more like less aerospace now. It'd be more like infrastructure, like trains and things like that. Just like a lot of things you can do, people would care about terra firma but, but yeah, so, but it's funny because it can align like your vision a certain way. Like if you want to get to Mars and you think, oh, I need some sort of like invention to do that then and we gotta build this AI to be smart enough to help us figure out how to do that. And then we need to build the AI to also figure out the energy problems so that we can scale it up the right amount to be smart enough to do that. I don't know. So it's a kind of funny thing where you can use end goal to tell you how to get somewhere. And so maybe he's used that or maybe it's just a good marketing thing. I don't know. But yeah.

[B]

Do you think we're gonna need to go to Mars?

[A]

I mean, I think, I don't feel that existential need the same way in the sense of the point where you need to get to Mars if you're not already able to go, like try to avoid that first maybe. And you have, you actually would have more expertise on that side of things. How scared you are about like chaos

[B]

and I don't know, man, I always think the world's ending.

[A]

Yeah, but like that's a bias that you'd have. I mean, I'm sure that's why they have to get you like trained to. Yeah, to save it. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I don't know. I don't know. But who else do you look up to? Did look up to?

[A]

I mean I looked up, I mean different parts of lots of people. But like at the time when I was a kid it was because, you know, why is Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX were the ones who were kind of these, the big players in this private aerospace industry and they were like whenever any parts of their companies were at these air shows, like that was the cool stuff. And I again, I like this notion of trying to make profitable or Build something that wasn't necessarily its best value proposition, wasn't so much the capital that it could get, even though you try to make it self funding or something like that. I like that kind of encapsulation of doing things because I think, for example, theoretical physics research, you can have a lot of YouTubers go around and debate why is a taxpayer funding this or is it stagnating? Da da da da da. And it's kind of missing the point that, okay, so say you defunded this subfield field, who's going to actually know quantum field theory amongst the people who are doing data driven stuff that doesn't, that's making progress now. So it's like, how do you take advantage of the fact that there are things that are worth funding, that are not necessarily worth funding because they make money or because they have a product and then try to align it in a kind of maybe not corporate structure or something where you make it so that it doesn't need to rely on things that like always having been that way, you know, can you innovate in that space of trying to fund or have self fund valuable enterprises that are not driven by profit, but driven by the thing that they're after. So whether it's space exploration or like solving physics or something like that, I'm inspired by that a lot.

[B]

Who's doing that?

[A]

I mean, I hope we can do it. No, I don't know. See, the thing is right now it's this funny, we're at an interesting time where I think like the technologies that like everybody cares about, about AI whatnot really can help doing the job that I do. There's a thing of like, I don't know how to make the right pitch for somebody who believes it's going to do everything and also conveying what exactly it means to solve physics or not. So in practice, I do think there's a sense in which we're trying to axiomatize these laws of nature and maybe there is some uniqueness or rigidity to that structure that, that it can find. But I think that a lot of people think, oh, there's a particular open problem and it's going to write a paper that the researchers are going to be like, whoa, this is better. And that's what physics research is. So I'm scared of not having a good collaboration, say with the industry folks and the academic folks to really kind of pin down, okay, say you can accelerate science. Did you finish it or did you now open up a new chance to build more infrastructure for how that knowledge is stored and related to one another. Because we don't just want to answer by. I think that if I was an engineer, I want to know the answer to this math equation to predict what I would need for my engineering problem versus for physics. It's more like, okay, here's the answers, but why? And really just distilling that, kind of compressing that basic set of rules that lead to that why? And so I'm scared slightly that if this field is stagnating because we're only individuals doing something and we can't make our field very modular as it is because of the just like historical precedent or whatever, the number of people is that when somebody comes along and actually does have a result that's better than these things, is it like, oh, let's just put all our eggs in one basket now, this is the better bet. And I think it should be a fun collaboration. And I think that the night thing now is that there are a lot of some crossovers with people spinning sabbaticals at these big ten companies and some care about research, which is great, but how do you make it so it's not just like, I think I like academia in a way. I don't know, it's institutions. Right. But can you try to use the fact that there is some value proposition or exchange there to, like, try to drive, like, innovation for, like, let's try to get the best product that, like, can do theoretical physics. Well, maybe I'm using other people's products, whatnot. Fine. If there's any IP or value in that, use that to help fund a field going forward instead of it being relying on taxpayers, whatever, for a very specific, small, highly purely theory thing. Because there's value that can come from the engineering side of it. So, for example, when you build CERN or you build these other big detectors, a lot of the time the value proposition isn't okay. We're learning something about the laws of nature, which is cool. But it's also that all of the engineering that's going to go into that is going to be super valuable. Can you do that with theory? And I think that now the answer is yes. And maybe it's already being done in some sense, like when they're selling intelligence and they're getting fundraising for these companies, maybe that is the pitch and that's what they're doing. But I find it fascinating to be kind of. I feel like we're back at this moment when CERN helped invent the World Wide Web. Can you instead of whining and begging like, oh, we should have had better structures that endowed a field or something like that. Maybe it's not even the right thing to do. Can you do that now without begging for things that have been different in the past and just know there's opportunity now. Go for it. Do it right. Don't just care about papers, care about some of the infrastructure.

[B]

You know, cern, CERN helped build the World Wide Web.

[A]

I mean, that's what they say. I hope I don't get all the facts wrong, but yeah, like, they were. They're trying to. They have a lot of data and they're wanting to like, serve it to different places. And I think DARPA gets a lot of credit too there for actually like what you think of as the Internet. But, you know, like when I used to. And this was the type of thing that bugged me a lot because I think I had these heroes in, in tech that thought like, oh, if the physicists maybe just did things differently, they'd have all these whatever cool thing. And then you walk into the door of where I worked and there'd be a thing on the side because it was funded by a tech person of saying how quantum mechanics leads to the transistor technology and understanding general relativity helps with timing of satellites and gps. Imagine if you had quantum gravity or the blue sky research you do now might lead to something cool in the future. And I believe in blue sky research and it's great. But I think the thing is, normally it's still there's a reason for it and how do you. It's a weird pitch to try to say, oh, it's worked before, so keep giving me money now. It doesn't feel honest. I mean, in some sense, yes, but I didn't like that. I think the cooler thing would be again, to try to see how do you align things that are valuable with the thing that you want to do as a physicist and go from there? Because anything that you want to be able to do, if you can't do it already, there's something missing. And it probably, if you're a human interacting with it, it's an engineering thing, it's a product you could build and not an equation you're trying to solve. So I think that's a fun thing that's kind of opening up probably because of the way that funding is weird in academia right now. Can you decouple this? We basically view universities as just educational institutions until you go to grad school and you realize it's a research institution and all of the great grades you get in undergrad, you realize they don't care. They just care about their research. This is not that. This is some way the US Is basically funding private institutions to do research at scale and the overheads seem crazy, but this is how they funded in Europe. They'd be funding the schools more directly. There's such a dichotomy between, I think, how I used to see MIT or Harvard before I went to grad school and how I see it now of completely different value propositions or priorities in the institutions. And so, like, how do you make sure research gets funded and is super cool? And it's maybe that the experts in the field are the ones deciding how the resources for that field are allocated rather than it being kind of okay. These institutions get money from revenue streams from teaching students. So it's like the best people in different fields all in one or big tech says it's broken or whatever come into our private lab. Yeah.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Wow. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll start getting into space. Most gear looks good until you actually start using it. Then you find out pretty quickly what holds up and what doesn't. That's why I keep coming back to Roka. These aren't just lifestyle sunglasses pretending to be performance gear. I've worn mine training on the range, traveling and outdoors for long days, and they stay locked in place the entire time. They're incredibly lightweight, the optics are razor sharp with zero glare, and you honestly forget you're even wearing them. But they still look clean enough to wear anywhere. Not overly tactical, just modern functional design that works every day. Roka was born in Austin, Texas, and everything about them reflects that performance first mindset. And if you need prescription lenses, they offer both sunglasses and eyeglasses options built to the same standard. And whether you're outfitting a law enforcement unit, a military team, or looking for corporate gifts that don't suck, Roka offers wholesale partnerships to make it happen. ROKA isn't just eyewear. It's confidence you can wear every single day. They're the real deal, ready to upgrade your eyewear. Check them out for [e-mail] and use code SRS for 20% off site wide at checkout. That's R O K A dot com and use code SRS. Welcome to Hollywood versus Reality. They do it right. What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong because I don't watch any of this little flick like that right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it. In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazine. Supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're. And now we're bringing them back. It does look pretty cool. I gotta. I gotta admit that. All right, Sabrina, we're back from the break. We're going to get into your current work. Gravitational memory effect. I need you to slow down just a little bit for me. I'm not. I'm not on your level quite yet. Maybe by the end of the interview.

[A]

I just talked fast. Yeah.

[B]

So, okay, so what is gravitational memory effect?

[A]

So there's different kinds. The easier one is not the one that I came up with. It's much older. And it's this notion of you're going to have these big bodies out in somewhere in the galaxy or whatever, or far away, coming in and colliding, and then when they collide, they're going to coalesce maybe into like another black hole or whatever it is. But there's some ripples in the space time that come out to you. So these gravitational waves are propagating away from this collision.

[B]

So this is like indentations in the weave of space?

[A]

Yeah, roughly. I mean, I think actually it's pretty accurate in a sense of like, I'm looking at, like, say at a given time, the positions of some mirrors that have been moving back and forth. So the thing about the memory effect is basically that there is like a very, like, long timescale thing that's imprinted because of this scattering process.

[B]

Hold on, can I make another? Would this be like the wake of

[A]

a boat in some sense? Almost literally. I think that the thing about the wake of the boat is there's different approximations for like, a deep water wave. And, like, it's not as universal, I think. Like, I have a friend who has a family who's into nautical stuff. So I think we concluded that there's a sense to which sound waves in the water could be approximated as having a memory effect if they're deep underwater. But a surface wave is not going to have a universal relation between the boat passed and then it moved. Okay, so imagine. Let's do the buoy analogy. So I don't think the math works out the same, but imagine you have some boat passing and you knew that you could infer the amount of munitions on this boat because the buoys moved a certain amount. No, you know what I mean? Some net property of, like, the thing. So it's not as cool as that. Because I think that in that situation it's not a universal relation between the things that scattered had some kinematics that then set the value of this shift. But yes, you have these two gravitational wave detectors, some probes sitting very far away, just minding their own business. They're sitting along ga dash, this wave passes and then the distance between them is going to change. And depending on where they were relative to this thing, there's a certain pattern in the sky that it would. And you're seeing that there's a relationship between this distance changing and the kind of net kinematics of the amount of energy in the things that we're scattering and the waves coming out. And so there's this relationship. It's like conservation of energy generalized to this kind of fun asymptotic symmetry version of it turns into deterministic imprints in the night sky of these move detectors. And then to see the angular romantic analog, you have to go a little bit. Bit sub bleeding, which is the spin memory.

[B]

Oh shit. Okay, I think I'm picking this up. So you're saying, okay, how do I explain this? Okay, so if we have a sheet or a blanket or something, and I put, I don't know, a mark on here and a mark over here, and then we put a ball in the middle, move a little bit, they come inward. Is that what you're saying?

[A]

So that would be kind of an analogy for like maybe like the just gravitational like potential kind of curving you in. I think this is closer to the buoy analog. The math is wrong. This isn't true for this case I'm pretty sure of. Imagine that you could have some buoys pretty far away and you knew that there was always a shipping route where they go from here to there. And the only options are the direction in which they came and maybe the momentum of that boat. And you could infer from the buoy shift those types of quantities regardless of whatever they did in the middle. So that's not gonna be true for the water weight. I'm pretty sure it's not true for the deep water wave case. But for this gravitational system, there's a symmetry reason why I can see that type of shift, like the buoys move by a certain amount. That means blah like this amount of energy was deposited type of thing.

[B]

Okay, so does the imprint stay like that in space?

[A]

That's the whole point. So this is supposedly like the. At the very end it stayed. Now in practice, that's not super useful because we do these things where we Have a theoretical framework where the math is. And then it's completely BS in the sense that that's not the thing you're going to measure. So in my framework, I'm doing that single whatever ship crossing type of thing as the entire everything that happened in the whole world, infinite amount of time. But what you do then is you say, okay, there's this effect that this framework studies, but it really is only accurate for each individual scattering experiment is a chunk. And so there's a shift from that scatter experiment. And sure, something else is going to move it around later. But if they're spaced off enough in time, can I approximate this thing as like the memory effect?

[B]

Okay, so let me re explain this to you to see if I'm getting it. So basically what you're saying is it will leave an indention, an imprint in the fabric of space.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Until it will stay there forever. Until something else moves it.

[A]

Yep, something else moves it. And then there's a very formal version where we say imagine you wait for infinite amount of time. Tell me the, the beginning and the end. And that's technically the memory effect. But in practice it's closer to let's pretend there was just one thing that happened, one thing you're detecting. So one event. And as far as those time cells are concerned, it's a lot longer than any other thing later moving it. Okay, and so then that's a memory.

[B]

And you discovered this.

[A]

I discovered a variant of this based on the connection to these symmetries.

[B]

What is the variant?

[A]

So this variant is like angular momentum loss instead of energy loss in the gravitational waves and the spinning particles kind of. So basically it's like. And this was the kind of fun thing. So I come into my PhD and you're almost just going to do classical radiation. So you accelerate a charge, it's emitting radiation. And the fun thing about gauge theories. So gravity and electromagnetism kind of fit into this framework of there's an extra symmetry when you try to write down a, a set of equations that are local. So what happens is that when you have a charged object, so say you take some cat and you're like, I don't know, some riboelectric effect thing to get some charge on the fur, static electricity or these things where you see this balance of charge, you probe it far away. So I can. With gauge theories or with these. Fun thing is I can be away from the charge and see it. So I don't need to come up and pick up, oh, look I have like an electron charge is like I can see the electric field is pulling me in, like you were saying with this blanket and it being deformed. So I can measure some features of this object in the center from the boundary. And that's kind of one of the ingredients to this kind of holographic principle of like, can I just talk about the things in the boundary in isolation as its own theory, but for the very specific scope here, it's like that Gauss law type of setup of. Okay, if I am very far away and I measure the electric field everywhere in some sphere, I can determine the total charge inside. The analog of that. When I then have an accelerating scattering experiment is kind of like this imprint of this universal, like I know from this low energy part of the radiation, something about the kinematics of the charges scattering. So it's like Gauss law, but applied to some scattering process.

[B]

What makes the particles scattered? Is it a collision?

[A]

It's their own interactions with each other. And that's the funny thing, it's these long range interactions that are busting in a curse. So like the fact that they're charged and then they're going to have some photons exchanged between them or other particles is the thing. But we basically, there's something about the very low energy that is universal almost because of these classical equations of motion. So I guess, long story short, when I do this idealization where I pretend I'm in flat space, that's my world and I want all of these solution sciences, equations that obey these boundary conditions, then I see that things at the boundary are going to move. So what you're saying is I have these two detectors are sitting there. They're not just going to stay there, they're going to move, but they're going to move by a certain amount. That's maybe a certain controlled parameter as compared to where they are if I just push them out to infinity. And so because you have this kind of whole symmetry framework that you're importing from other instances where it's been useful in physics, you can apply it here and you realize, oh look, that tells me something about soft limits and scattering tells me something I can observe. Yeah. So early in my Ph.D. they had this connection between soft physics and asymptotic symmetry, ward identity. And then my first paper was on the subleting soft version of that, which was new and some people had speculated that there might be an enhancement of the angular momentum, like the rotation symmetry of the world in some sense. And then when you keep pushing that further then you can tie it to this experimental version because someone else understood that there is a physical. Like the spacetime physical thing you're measuring is related to the waveform that otherwise computing with this quantum field theory computation and. Yeah. So anyway, basically, long story short is you were just taking some mathematical framework framework and then trying to copy paste it to a new application. Once you have one iteration, you're trying to see what's modular about some computation. And then you get to import that and find something new because you pulled it out. Wow.

[B]

Wow. Stephen Hawking cited your solo and joint papers in 2016. Your dissertation is only the second Harvard Physics PhD published in Physics Reports. The other author won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's incredible.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, these things are fun, but it's always fun that you probably find a way to find a cool little way to frame what happens or not. But the Hawking's thing was cool because again, he visited at the end of. Near the end of his life. He came to Harvard, which was neat to see just the entourage. We were on a Congo line in this boat, kind of like this little river cruise type of thing, but in the Boston harbor, that was Hawking his whole entourage. And I was literally doing a little conga line behind. Behind him. And like, I mean, you can't. You can't. You can't make that up. You know, it's. It's a fun. Or it's a fun experience. Yeah.

[B]

So what is. What does this discovery mean?

[A]

I don't think it means that. I mean, it means I'm lucky that something experimental is gonna come out of like, something I did. Maybe I do. I don't think the things that I've done have like that deep of a meaning or something where, like, everyone should know these types of things necessarily. It's more like the fact that, you know, there is some value of trying to take these frameworks that are very abstract and try to distill parts of it that then you can try to then push for the more realistic versions of it. I think that's a fun kind of paradigm, and it's fortunate that there was some observables of this. But at the same time, I'm using Einstein's equations to get it. It's more of a test of the boundary conditions being a good physical assumption than a test of the theory itself. So I think that get. It's not like, super, super exciting. It's exciting to me, but it's not. I wouldn't say, tell Your audience, it's important or anything.

[B]

I think it's pretty cool.

[A]

Lots of things are cool though. Lots of things in this building, pretty cool.

[B]

Is the universe expanding.

[A]

So again, I think that that's a funny thing. I do think if you talk to a cosmologist, they believe in the cosmological constant, like, isn't necessarily being actually like, sorry, there's this experiment right now that's like trying to promote that maybe the cosmological constant is changing over time. And a lot of string theorists love that. A fellow faculty member when I was in grad school at Harvard, Rapha is kind of colleagues with Andy. He is very into the swampland program and trying to test things. I think that I am not too into the experiment to know why a lot of cosmologists don't trust the results yet or whatever. But. But I think that a lot of things are up in the air in the sense of there's always qualifications to things. So it's good at face value. Trust the actual results of an experiment, but you want to understand what is it actually seeing versus what you're actually over interpreting it as seeing. And so one option that a lot of people like is, okay, maybe the cosmological constant is changing over time and then it'll be asymptotically flat or the wrong sign, opposite sign to be where string theory likes to live. So I just, I guess I end up being very agnostic in a weird way, which is not good because somebody should just answer and say, yeah, blah, this is our model.

[B]

I'm to cdm, but it is true that stars, galaxies.

[A]

Oh, no, no, no, it's right. So there's a sense in which. Yes, like, so I think what I'm saying is, I'm taking it to be like, okay, you're looking at these various stars far away and you know, like, okay, so the fun thing about physics is you're often saying, the laws that I have here are the same everywhere. So if that's true, I know some features of my star or stellar formation. So I know the spectrum of the lines that are supposed to be there. So if it's moving further away, I'm going to see different frequency shifts and things like that. So there's a lot of cool stuff that you can see where. Yes, that's not in doubt. I think the thing that I latch onto, because again, it's close to this is your framework even physical, is the statement about some parameter like the cosmos are constant in Einstein's equations and whether everything I do, I'M like a flat earther as far as cosmology is concerned, because I just set it to zero. And now there's some experiments saying maybe that's okay. No, but what things are constant versus functions of other things that contain over time. Roughly. I mean, we gotta get the expansion thing.

[B]

Sure. You're not a flat earther.

[A]

No, no, I'm joking. So I don't want to encourage a flat earther. Sorry. So, like, you know, like. Sorry. So the extent to which you're on the earth and you see like the curvature scale of the horizon or whatever, or you're not seeing, and you're saying the world is flat. I'm just trying to make a joke. And probably it's dangerous to do it at the actual platform of the fact that do we see the curvature scales of the universe, the cosmological constant, at the scales where I care about it for particle detectors or for these gravitational waves from LIGO. And I'm always setting this constant to zero instead of whatever, 10 to the negative. Large power.

[B]

So if the universe is expanding or.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Or if we want to, the galaxies and stars are getting farther apart. Yeah, I mean, I feel like that means the universe is expanding.

[A]

No, no, no, Sorry, I think I'm saying. I'm not saying. No, I think you're right, but I'm saying that the physicists are worried more about, like, why is it right? Like, is there a reason that there is some like, like various, like cosmological constant there? Or like, is it all just like the different, like matter distributions and things like that that try to govern the reason we're. So, So I should have just said, yeah. But instead I was like, oh, by the way, there are experiments that are maybe changing our opinions a little bit or calling the question some notions of those parameters that describe this thing.

[B]

So if it's expanding, what does that mean? There's a wall.

[A]

So that's the thing. So the fun thing about cosmology, if you're doing holography for the sitter of space times, is there is a literal horizon where you can, as one observer, you're not seeing the whole thing. And so the world that I live in is kind of understanding the mathematical structure you can attach to the boundaries of the space time. And in most situations, in the ADS context, which is this wrong sign cosmological constant version toy model, or in the case where I do, it's really the space time boundary and not the boundary of some observer. And then you have to deal with observers and the sitter Is hard for lots of reasons.

[B]

So I just go, so if it's expanding, wouldn't that, the fabric, the indentions, what do we call it? The gravitational memory effect? Wouldn't that change?

[A]

No, it does. So you're absolutely right. And in the sitter, like the types of, like, you're basically propagating a wave on a curved background versus a flat background and it changes the form of it further away. And people have papers trying to talk about it, like memory on the observer horizon and to sit at which is the closest thing. But the thing that's relevant is you want to think about what scale is that important as compared to what scale I'm seeing the wave coming from this inspiraling binary system, at least for example, a lot of things I do are also relevant to. Not the memory effect so much, but these asymptotic symmetry stories can be applied to amplitudes. And there what you're doing, you have cern, you have this collider, and it's such a small scale where these things are interacting that the detector itself is considered to be at infinity. But it's not infinite. I mean, it's huge, but it's like that's hardly infinity. And so can I pretend or ignore that expansion? For some things sometimes yes, and then sometimes no.

[B]

Gotcha. Gotcha. Wow. We actually have a, have a hot question here. It has to do with flat Earth.

[A]

Okay, yeah, I'm ready. I think I'm accidentally reading this.

[B]

Here we go.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Surveys have found that up to around 1 in 10Americans say they agree with statements that the Earth is flat.

[A]

Flat.

[B]

From a scientific standpoint, what actually proves whether the Earth is flat or round and not just in theory. What real world evidence or systems make that determination undeniable?

[A]

Okay, I should have prepared more because I got the best. I know, the best answers. But I would just say, like, look at the pictures from them, like satellites or like people up in space. You could see the horizon. I mean, like, like what? I guess, I don't know what, why those don't work. For example, you know, when, like if I talk to someone who was a flat Earther, what would they try to say? If I said, you know, look at the right and see it's curved like, or go up on like a. I'm

[B]

not a flat Earther. Yeah, I don't know, but I've talked to a handful of them and they always, they always have.

[A]

What's the excuse that they use?

[B]

I can't remember what their excuse is. They think satellites are Balloons that are not in space. I do know that. I don't know what the argument is. It goes on here a little bit more because technologies like gps, satellite communications and global navigation all operate is if Earth is curved. So what are, what are the strongest proofs? And could any version of a flat earth realistically reproduce those same results?

[A]

Okay, I'm trying to, like, I would say no. But like, I think what I'm saying, I'm trying to think of like, how would I be the defense attorney for a flat earth? You know what I mean? Like, what would I try to do to make them feel as right as possible by caveating the hell out of everything they want to? I mean, like, I think that you can't, once you're trying to say, you're trying to apply a framework beyond its scope of applicability. And that's what these types of technology or something far away above the earth is seeing that it's wrong. But to their credit or not, when you're on a map, you print out your little chart. You're not going to go that far off when you're driving around town pretending that the Earth around you is flat out. Unless you try to park a car on a hill and you forgot to put your parking brake on. I don't know. Basically no. And that's not for the COVID trip, just for shit. But I think that, I don't know, I think that it's emblematic of the fact that it's hard to believe the things you don't have input for. You know, like, you build your intuition, we build our intuition. You know, walking around in a way where like, you might not notice these things. Like, do you notice the like, phases of the moon? I don't know, like how much people pay attention to those things or how much it affects their, their lives. And then doubling down on that worldview is sometimes funny, sometimes scary. I don't know what the right, the take on it is, but like, you know, there's value to questioning, I guess, like how much your assumptions or like the visceral world that you live in and the intuition you get from that actually extends beyond the things that you're able to probe yourself. Like, you can't go and just jump up into space and look down and be like, oh, nevermind.

[B]

Yeah, well, maybe soon though, maybe.

[A]

So maybe you guys send them up like, hey, they go free air. Like, they'll say it to get on the free, like suborbital flight or something.

[B]

Yeah, follow up. What's the biggest misconception people have about black holes, and is there anything about them that still completely breaks our current understanding of physics?

[A]

I think that if anything, okay, so breaking a current understanding. I think that sometimes it is the paradoxes that show that there are problems in our understanding. So I think that maybe breaking isn't as active word I don't think I want to use. I think that again, I always feel like I don't even understand these stuff well enough. And I think that's one problem when you're in a field that everybody's confused is like, how confused are you? Like, when I say I'm confused, does that mean I'm actually confused? Or are you less confused, who's relatively more confused? So there's these paradoxes that come from basically trying to say, okay, I think I know it shouldn't be that ridiculous if it's a big black hole, the horizon isn't that special. I only kind of know it kind of theologically or away from I don't know at the moment that I pass the horizon. So then why can't I put some quantum fields in it? And then I have pair production. One of them will go out to infinity, the other one's going to go inside. And suddenly you run into these issues of, oh, did I evaporate into a thermal system now, is it not unitary? And all this fun Hawking stuff. So I think the thing that one should take away is that there are still, I think, situations where people don't understand all the assumptions they make, where they can just follow one step after the other, think that they're doing something that seems logical or not, and then they realize, oops, together, something was wrong, wrong. And so it's not breaking physics. It's showing that there is something broken in our assumptions. It's not like the physics always has to be right. I think we believe that. It's just we don't quite know, again, the regimes in which our assumptions are valid or which one is the wrong one. So, yes, there's a lot of active things. I think I still have colleagues who believe that as soon as you cross the horizon, there's some firewall or fuzzballs. There's different models for what happens behind that. But we're all basically just playing with some frameworks, like mathematical frameworks that give us intuition for what we might guess, and then we're not precise enough with what we're assuming when we compute something. And then these don't fit together. That's the vibe. But I think I wouldn't Try to scare a random person with it. I would just point out that somehow the bread and butter of a physical theory where you don't make a measurement is seeing that these assumptions don't tie together. So something has to be wrong than propagating it back and trying to fix it.

[B]

I mean, what is a black hole?

[A]

So I mean, I think some extent, like there's literally just a sense in which I have so much matter in some region that now even light can't escape. And the way that I see it is like from a Penrose diagram. There straight up is just some reason that I cannot region that I cannot access from infinity. So it's very much like a feature of the geometry. But then there's other fun things about the fact that if you put enough energy in some region that you're going to end up creating a black hole. And that often is tied into this question of quantum gravity has to be weird and different. And so it's just, and it's neat though because you see how much people, when they see even though it's not actually the horizon, when they see these images of a black hole and the creation disk around it or whatever generating the light. Engineering is cool. The fact that they can reproduce or stare at a black hole, but it literally is a black hole in the picture. Which is kind of funny, right? The way the light is bending around it. But I think that the fun thing is really just more like the way a physicist would first intercom. It is there's a very specific solution to Einstein's equations. So there's a differential equation with a specific solution that then has some weird ass properties of the causal structure of where particles are going to end up.

[B]

What happens if something goes in it?

[A]

So that's the type of question, so basically I think a lot of people would believe, okay, when you first go through, you don't really know that you went through because black holes can be different sizes, right? And so if it were large enough, the curvature scale when you're crossing the horizon isn't so extreme. But eventually if you just did little probes on this background, I think people talk about spaghettification or you're going to be stretched out eventually when you get closer to where the curvature is larger, blowing up the singularity. But I think that's a funny thing is people, you understand this classical geometry and then you start having problems putting quantum fields on it and answering some fun paradoxical type of questions that then people aren't sure. They think that the singularity is something so Highly curved that the approximation of just treating it classically is bad now. So then they don't know what happens if anything. But it's not. Not. I think it's easy enough to try to say, okay, if I have some nice numerical simulation and I can just write down this differential equation for how something would propagate on a classical black hole background, that you could have something just going through the horizon for a little bit. And probably in that model it looks fine, but it's just like how valid are those? How hard is the numerics first of all to do near certain regions? And the way you set up for a scanning process is also hard. But it depends on. Basically the problem is that sometimes it's the question you're asking ends up being not the right question or things like that type of problems.

[B]

I don't understand how it can swallow light.

[A]

No, I mean, but it's basically like you're writing how do I say it? So you have. This metric is telling you if I have a coordinate system for my space time and I have then a notion of the distance between points on it and a nice coordinate system is often some notion of a spherical coordinate system where, okay, very far away I have this directions in the night sky and it's like a time direction in this case. And then in that coordinate system there's a solution to this differential equation that Einstein gives you where you don't have any matter sourcing outside and it ends up being a black hole solution where there ends up being a horizon and you can just kind of play around with like how does the energy redshift or whatever, things like that. It's very much just a math problem, you know what I mean? Like you're playing with a given solution so it's like kind of, it's harder because it's nonlinear. But when you're doing multiple moment expansions in E M or just like literally, if you give me some charged object, put it here, what's the electric field far away? Or I don't know if they've had any fun. I think if I try to make an analogy, you could probably help figure out one with it. Some telecom like reverse engineering from all these different radio signals. What, what's happening? I don't know.

[B]

But yeah, what, what, what do they look like from. Mean, how do I say this? Yeah, if we were to do, if we were to do like a 360 model of a black.

[A]

I mean, I think the best thing is like I forget which I'm going to get the name of the movie. Wrong. But like Kip Thorne was a scientific advisor to this. Whatever. Oh man, I wish I had a better recall of like names of cool movies. Interstellar maybe. I hope I'm not wrong on that. Where they actually ran simulation for what it looks like. I think that you have pretty good like images from either like that movie or.

[B]

I've seen the images.

[A]

You've seen the light coming out of it. Right.

[B]

So that's why it's like they look like. So you know, if, if my fist here is. Or my hand is the black hole, what does it look like from this angle?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But basically is it flat or does it look the same?

[A]

Oh no, it should be round. It should basically. I mean there's.

[B]

So it's actually a hole that's you can access from any direction.

[A]

And so ironically, I definitely have colleagues who play with these type of race and relations more than me. So the way when I see black hole, I see like a metric, I see an equation written down and I like, oh, this goes up here. That's not. But the point is that when you're seeing those simulations, I think a lot of it is you're seeing like imagine you had some stars behind it and then how that light from the star is coming to you. And so maybe it looks funny because literally you're not necessarily seeing the fact that nothing. You're also seeing nothing came from it kind of. But you're also seeing some like funny lensing of the stars behind their light kind of going on Gdesix around and coming to you. So some of the artifacts are that. Which I guess is what it looks like. But the thing I think there's. You literally know what it looks like. And I don't think it would be that hard to do some sort of simulation of like you're following a geodesic down and then there's a bunch of.

[B]

Yeah, I want to look at it.

[A]

Particles with you with some light. It's just a question of how do you want to set up from the back. Yeah. So roughly has the normal like non rotating buckle would have like spherical symmetry. A lot of buccals are actually kind of rapidly spinning. So there is some like asymmetry. You can see like it'll depend on like where you are compared to this axis of rotation. But it's not like a front and back thing. It's more like a, like an axis of rotation difference.

[B]

So what is the shape?

[A]

It looks like those, like, is it a ball? Sorry. It looks like when those images of the. The black hole have this kind of funny distorted ball looking thing.

[B]

But again, three dimensional though. What does it look like?

[A]

No, that's. Yeah, so you're seeing it. It's like if you have a surface of evolution around it, I think it's the right picture. The things are symmetric roughly around that. But again, assuming that like. And I think there's no reason to assume otherwise, like the light sources around it are kind of evenly spaced because this thing is rotating. So there's a rotational symmetry and you should do it that way.

[B]

Do you think it could swallow a planet?

[A]

I mean, I have no reason to think not. I guess the question is, like, what is. I'm like, sorry. So to take a step back and make sure I'm not saying something, that's where the experts would be concerned. But to the extent of what do you want to consider a planet? I think that just because something is gravitating and it was always there, we're orbiting something that if I just wasn't moving this way, I'd be falling in. So just because it's there doesn't mean it's swallowing a planet. But sure, something could fall into it. And I guess if you wanted to say, the only thing I'm worried about is to whatever extent the thing was, the original thing, the planet was rotating around that, you called it a planet for that reason. But yeah, it's a hole where you don't see the light coming out. But I don't think there's anything stopping it. I don't know if I've ever looked or tried to find a nice numerical simulation of. Just imagine that I have a bunch. Me and a bunch of other particles with some light sources together falling across the horizon. What it looks like, I think it doesn't look that special. And the thing that looks special is you're outside and you're seeing all the light around it kind of being warped by the.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah, I'm sure it would look kind of fun. I don't know why they don't. You could do it. I mean, there's nothing that's just a differential equation you're trying to solve. It's like. No. Yeah.

[B]

All right. All right, let's move into celestial holographs.

[A]

Yeah. Celestial holograms. Yes.

[B]

What is that?

[A]

So it's a.

[B]

This is what's depending on what's going on, right?

[A]

Yeah, I know. So, yeah, A lot of. I think some British twister people have some fun sense of humor of how they name things as far as Celestial sphere and the heavenly equations. I think there's fun things. So celestial sphere literally is night sky stars. If you're Millennium Falcon or whatever and you're accelerating, you might imagine that you'll see the distribution of the stars in the night sky move around a bit. So they're going to dilate and so that's somehow seeing that there's like the boost symmetry of the space time is a dilatation of this sphere.

[B]

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[A]

So what we're doing is trying to do just like map all of the observables that we want to have to this night sky times a null direction. That's complicated. So we just project it back down to the night sky. And the reason why we do it is again because we're just copying and pasting and then generalizing things that have worked before. So both someone like Hawking thinking about putting quantum field theory on a black hole, or someone who's like a string theorist who's saying there's 10 dimensions or 11 dimensions and I'm going to have all this extra field content that I then have to have this extra dimension wrapped up and be tiny. I never see it. But. But both of those types of frameworks end up leading to this cute notion that somehow the easiest way to get around describing a quantum gravity system is to find an equivalent non gravitational system that it's dual to and so from the Hawking point of view, it's like there's a sense in which this black hole behaves like a thermal system where the entropy is this area law. And so okay, there's this fun kind of almost information theoretic vibe to how gravitational solutions, solutions. Then from the string theory side, there's this kind of more complicated some theory on brains back reacting, da da da da, where you have a more precise actual equivalence between I know, some very esoteric bulk strings on some gravitational space time that's the wrong cosmological constant, wrong number of dimensions, yada yada. But it's equivalent to another gauge theory that I know. And so a lot of people in my field love those precise dualities because then they have power on both sides. Maybe some things are easy to compute as a geometric object and other things are easier to compute on the other side. And so you can study different strongly coupled limits by having this other approximation or other approximation that's valid. But both of these things to me are just saying, okay, you have again this effort. There's a reason to think that maybe one tenet of quantum gravity is this holographic nature and then we're trying to apply it to these asymptotically flat spacetimes, which are again the flat earther analog of cosmology. But maybe I shouldn't say, I should say.

[B]

Sounds like I have the core question here. Is everything we see in 3D space, 4D space time, actually projected from a 2D surface like a hologram?

[A]

See that's the thing is I would say in some sense, yeah, by definition. But how physical is it? I think what I'm saying is that, and maybe this is a problem with someone who ends up spending too much time just in equations and not in real world world, if you can describe things the same way, you might as well use whatever definition is useful for some things, right? So I think I don't always take it too literally in the sense of we are in this celestial sphere. It's more like can I convert everything to variables on that celestial sphere and does that help me organize some scattering computations in a way that would just get computationally complicated to compute all these 5min diagrams or something like that. That's the kind of goal, I think I view it as like it's another math framework that ideally if we do it right, is equivalent and then don't over interpret like the physicality of that per se. But it probably is my own problem for not trying to take things more literally because we are studying physics after all.

[B]

So I don't understand. I'm trying to understand this. So are you trying to prove that everything we see is a hologram?

[A]

I think that I'm trying to. To build a version of a holographic framework that works for spacetimes that are not anti de sitter. So like space times that are more relevant for like scattering. How does gravity want to be? Quantum gravity want to be described by a boundary system. So we're trying to build that out. And at the same time, if it were true, then the two things are equivalent. Not that like, so like if A equals B, I'm not saying everything is B, I'm saying everything that is A is B. Right. So I'm more like saying there's equivalent set of things. Like you can imagine a world where maybe, I don't know, try to project everything down to the Earth and then talk about some rules for how those things interact. And it was more convenient to talk about the extra dimension. I don't know. But like, you're not trying to lose content that way necessarily. It's not supposed to lose anything. But it is neat to think, okay, if everything is described in terms of boundary observables, then it does call into question which questions are well defined in the book. For example.

[B]

So celestial holography is your way to prove this and use it to unite Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics. The two foundational theories currently contradict each other.

[A]

Again, there's a lot of people where you could probably motivate their research as inspired by. And the question is, I'll go. So it's funny, these things go in and out of fashion. I think I've heard from some postdocs now that it's not cool anymore underground applications to be talking about quantum gravity. But I still think that's why we go into. We don't go into the field because there's two maybe reasons why people will go into the field. I think some people genuinely like paradoxes. And it always bothered me because it's just like any paradox where someone actually had the answer in the end, you just defined it wrong. So I went into physics because I liked that I didn't have to learn as much. I mean, the sense of I don't have to have an excellent working memory. Now, if the laws of physics are simpler to then figure out what the rule the rules are simpler than the solutions. So I like physics for that. That doesn't necessarily bode well when you have a very complicated corpus of Things and so on. I think the reason that we study something like quantum gravity is again because we have this bias or we think that whatever the laws of nature are, there's a fundamental set that then lead to all these different regimes that you're studying. And if you didn't have that bias, maybe you shouldn't be doing that job job. But if you have that bias, then the thing that you should be doing is trying to again, merge various rules into a single set of rules. And so I guess the big outstanding one is this short distance physics and long distance physics because at some point then we know there's quantum mechanics and we know that GR is important. So there's some sense in which the actual observations guide you to this still open kind of problem of what theoretical frameworks can consistently limit to both. I think, think to the extent that why should the rules of tennis versus hockey have to be united? Right. I think that it's kind of cool that we think that the laws of nature are. There's something fundamental about it. There's something highly compressible about that description. And I think that's a fun hypothesis even, rather than just a belief to try to test it. And you can kind of automate what you do as researchers in the future. But yeah.

[B]

So are you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Are you saying that everything in space is potentially projected from a 2D surface?

[A]

That would be. Sorry. I think what I'm saying is if too so like space time. So for me it's like depends on. So sometimes you use the word space to mean space time, but it's three plus one dimensions is our world and then the boundary is one dimension lower, typically. And the celestial sphere is two dimensions lower because the boundary for these flat space times is null in a way where basically no other direction can talk to each other. Again, the point would be can we find an equivalent description or almost like we've seen it work in the past. How do we apply it to this regime? And then how do we learn something by saying how we can't import it. So again, physicists are constantly using mathematical frameworks that they already have been trying to, to tweak, apply them to something different and then realize something goes wrong and then try to learn about that framework by seeing how to modify it to make it work. And so in some sense answer is yes. But at the same time, you want to try to see if I built a framework like that, would it tell me anything different about the structure at scales I can't see. But ideally it's a bad framework if it can't in principle encompass the things that we do have the intuition for and the book in our world.

[B]

This is way over my head, but

[A]

it's way over everybody's. I mean that's the thing is it's like, you know, like I think that I, especially when this hype happened when I was younger, I was very much like, I'm going to go and read a bunch of textbook because I want to be able to like answer good questions or like, you know, know how to tell the flat earthers why they're wrong. Or like you're, you're representing science somehow in a funny way and it's just like ah, like you need a much better working memory for that or I don't know. I think the thing is that, that you don't need it in our job. You can do this kind of like you're diving in, you're doing a computation and then sometimes you lose sight of the breadth of it. But I also think that now it's a fun time where you can kind of take a step back and see if there are things where the resource limitations or just the way the physics is done doesn't need to be that way. Because now one researcher doesn't need to hire a whole team of data scientists to treat the corpus as a data set and do something with it. Like there's a lot of power to having like fun AI tools and like you get to just basically play around with doing things that you never would want to do normally as a, as a good researcher because that wouldn't help you with your career.

[B]

Okay, I'm going to ask you some very, very, very basic questions to try to understand this.

[A]

We'll see.

[B]

Are you saying that a planet could be a hologram?

[A]

Yeah, but in weird lawyer sense, not like in the way, you know, a star. No, I think what we're saying is like all these objects that you're thinking in the bulk and there would be some state on the boundary theory that's equivalent to it in these types of holographic setups. I don't want to say that I understand flat space holography to the level where I'm confident in that. But in ads CFT context their dictionaries are like, yep, like this massive state is this other operator in the CFT

[B]

type of potentially everything we see in space could be a hologram. Or are you saying the fabric of space?

[A]

Everything. I mean, so basically the whole point is that there's two equivalent theories. So the thing that you have in the bulk you want to have in the boundary theory, can you formulate a theory that lives one dimension lower that isn't just so like, is there a natural sense in which you want to live one dimensional lower? And for example, maybe one kind of intuitive thing of why it might be nice is that I have a global symmetry, so I have something that's not related to these long distance interactions. Then typically I need to go and kind of measure the charges of the objects throughout the constant time slice that I'm in. But we're saying this is Gauss law story, that I can measure the electricity, electric charge in a configuration by just having some probe of the electric field at infinity. And so in ADS cft, there's a sense in which this boundary theory is evolving in time and you want to find the dynamics of the boundary theory. So there's a dynamics of the boundary conditions of the bulk theory that end up, I guess, telling you it's an equivalent presentation of the bulk theory. So I think the fact that it is holographic is deeper and probably if it were true, has deeper implications for like the right physical quantities to be talking about in the book. But again, I think that's a sense in which, sure, if I felt more confident that the state of the dictionary where I really had a good intuition for that thing, then I could try to pull back and say, let me like the fact that it's described as this boundary theory, what does that mean for what's a good thing to talk about in the book? But I don't think it's formed enough for me to have that type of assertion or make that type of enthusiastic claim, given the danger of how it's interpreted.

[B]

What are you visualizing in your head as you describe this?

[A]

I am visualizing as a Penrose diagram with a sphere and just some light shades, I guess probably that and, or yeah, some equations. So I'm basically just a bunch of Penrose diagrams, right? The slides and the talks I would give.

[B]

I mean your visual. I can see it. I think you're visualizing.

[A]

Yeah, I do. I know, but that's not necessarily very helpful. Right, so that's a problem with, when you're a grad student, they often say like, shut up and compute. And I used to take it as like a personal offense, like, I can think too. No, but the point is you're trying to be trained out of using your physical intuition, you know, for the things that you're doing. Because again, like, you know, you can't see 10 dimensions. You can not even barely see, like, you know, four if it weren't three plus one. So like, how do you, what can you physically do in this world where we clearly are interacting with certain energy scales, three plus one dimensions at a time? How do you get out of that? And then you build this intuition by computing things. I guess. So then your intuitions are roughly a bunch of computations or a bunch of lower dimensional projections of things. If you happen to have someone who can make nice figures. Yeah.

[B]

What do you believe happens when we die?

[A]

Oh, God, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, my mom's very Catholic. I, I don't, No, I think the thing, it's like, that's the funny thing physics probably tells you. Like, gives you some sense of which questions you want to ask or not. And I guess the right answer from a physics point of view is I don't know.

[B]

Do you think about it?

[A]

Luckily I'm happier, so I guess I don't. But no, I think that is the weirdest thing is often I can fight with people I think are friends in a fun way of how to interpret the observer. So, so, like, yeah, I definitely think that if you, and I mean, to the extent where we don't agree, like, I don't know actually who's right on it. How much is the fact that, like, I am a me. Like, somehow I feel like physics can still describe or it doesn't obviously, like, tell me I couldn't have, you know, some objects that end up having these complicated like neural nets in them that interact with the environment and it changes the set of it. And so it feels like they're making decisions based on. But that's a different question than I feel I'm me and I interact with the world. So I think if I want to say that physics covers everything, then I probably do want to have the observer be part of the system. But I definitely have friends who are definitely not religious or anything like that and still kind of call that observer thing into question. I just don't know because again, I guess I don't like open systems. I don't know from the point of view of what are we doing as a theory. But yeah, there's fun questions that are related to this in the sense of who was, who am I versus like, and is it the same thing as. Yeah, I, I, I don't, I think how active the observer is or something like that. I, I still probably am biased to not including that. But maybe that's dumb. That could easily be dumb. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Do you and your mom talk about this?

[A]

You said no?

[B]

No.

[A]

Cuz like she. Sorry, I'm not good at. Neither of us are good at debating. No, no. She definitely sees what I do as a variant of religion. And I'm like, I. But I also, it's very easy because I think we're so close to like end up going too far with questioning the stuff. She came from Cuba when she was a kid and they weren't allowed to be religious there. And so I think that, you know, it means a lot more to her partially because of that, but also, I mean it gives her like a very sense of like guidance in the family life and things like that. She, I mean it means so much to her.

[B]

Right, but you don't, you don't.

[A]

No, that's the thing is I personally view like attention with the dogmatic aspects of like that, you know, the answer. Like, I mean, what I love about physics is that, you know, there is a sense in which like the. Even though first of all, like the level at which I actually understand these things is so, so silly and whatever, but there's a sense about science that if it's done right and honestly, like you can have these revelations, like you can learn something about nature. And I think that whether you're religious or not, everybody appreciates like nature. And so we're trying to find the rules and if anything that seems pretty close to the spirit of the part of religion that gives you the answers or some sense of this is the way things are. You're trying to find an origin story. Right? So that kind of origin story aspect of it, I think that science is after. But I think that I like the fact that we are supposed to admit when we don't know things sometimes that doesn't always. It definitely plays out in a weird way because a lot of people think they're experts and then talk down to people who don't. So it's very dogmatic in practice, but it's not supposed to be that. And I love that about it. And that's the thing that turns me a little bit off of religion sometimes it's just like, you know, like, can you question things or whatnot? But I think this notion of not knowing, it clearly fits into this notion. Like if you thought there is something creating everything, maybe that's more of a reason that we're special or more of a reason that the rules have to be simpler because. But like I tried to be more agnostic and I also am against the kind of dogmatization side of it a little bit. But I'm happy to try to debate or change my mind. I seriously, my mom. And it's just like, yeah, why aren't there women priests? You know?

[B]

Right on, right on. So what do you. What does it mean if. What if. What does it mean with the hologram stuff? If it's projected from a 2D?

[A]

So again, I think the thing that it will mean is, once I understand it better, that there's some types of things you do or don't want to talk about within the bulk. Space, time, time. But I do think I care about physics. Not because, I mean, you land on this one little corner of it that you get to play with and it's somehow the best bet for you because it uses the things that you know. But like, it always frustrated me, like, how hard it would be to jump between different fields because you, like, imagine if you have no experiment culling different parts of the research canon. It's just going to get harder and harder when there's more alternate attempts to something. And I don't know enough about loop quantum gravity to tell them why they're wrong. And I'm just basically vouching because I trust one other person's opinion who might have looked at it. And so it's this funny thing where the kind of output of other people that are also really smart is hard to internalize and compress. So I like this notion of being able to think about taking a step back and saying, we value physics for this type of reason, of finding these deep questions, trying to see that nature seems to have this highly compressed description. How would you go about finding it? Like, can we view ourselves as. Instead of individual people who maybe do a great thing and they could call themselves Einstein or whatever, that instead of it, like, we're responsible for this legacy, we're custodians of this canon. Are there tools now that we have that we can help curate and condense it more systematically? And I think that that's an exciting time for me because I love that notion of don't just stay in my little corner. How would I get out of that corner? First of all, personally, but then how is it also like, you view that venture as something super valuable, I think, and closer to these kinds of deeper questions. But I don't think I think about the deep questions enough because I'm in the computations, because that's the thing where the intuition comes from. Then you just get stuck philosophizing if you're not. If you're too far away from it

[B]

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[A]

Get the Unreal College Deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs.

[B]

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[A]

Oh, I think that it's Bang Theory. I think the Big Bang Theory thing would probably tell me that something about my framework has to be tweaked or something like that. I view it again, cosmological origin side of things is very much not part of the thing I'm setting up. So the first side of it, if I need to include de sitter, the stuff that I'm studying is more of a stepping stone to understanding how to generalize holography. And then the second part of it is again, initial conditions or things like that. We're not necessarily always, sometimes we're thinking about the equations and not the solutions for the equations or the particular ones that are relevant to the real world. So I would say that it's not going to do for the Big Bang. It's more what will the Big Bang tell me? I need to specify once I understand better if my framework encompasses that or not.

[B]

Do you believe we can time travel

[A]

forward at different rates?

[B]

How so?

[A]

Oh, I mean, sorry. I think what I'm saying is like I'm just making the joke that we're all going forward in time, but to the extent that even they have this in this interstellar movie, if I got the name right, like this kind of twin paradox of like your clock is affected by gravity and so you can go around and come back and have age differently than your twin, but you're only still going forward and whatnot. No, it's funny because we don't. And that's a Kind of fun thing too is there's still cool stuff, but the no gos are there and you never really get to play with all the fun things. I think it's always this funny thing of, sure, you can do this thing, but the caveat is it's not physical or whatever. So this thing about you can age differently, but you can't go back and time type of thing. And it's also because it would be pretty. Sometimes things are built into assumptions. Like it would cause a lot of other problems if you can go back in a closed time curve. You're influencing your own future. But yeah, I just wish that. I think the thing is that in order to make progress in the field, you have to be so in the nitty gritty that you don't get to have fun bullshitting around with the things that people think physicists do. But perimeter is pretty close. We have a pretty fun. We have people who do like quantum foundations and a wide variety of just theoretical physics where sometimes it feels a little bit more like maybe what the stereotype of a physicist or the chalkboard debating existential things.

[B]

Let's talk about quantum mechanics versus Einstein. The fight at the edge of reality.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Where do we start?

[A]

We're framing it as a fight, man. Oh, no, I got back. See, I see more like, again, this is the type of thing of why do we believe that the laws have to be coming from the same thing? I think that that's a pretty bold and fun assumption. And you can imagine that if somebody thought that at every different energy scale, just there's some new things because that's the way it is that you couldn't predict. That's a very different vibe than thinking that there's a mathematical consistency or some kind of underlying principles that will carve out a space of theories that still can be consistent with absorption observations. So what I view it as is again, as a hep theorist, we're making this bet about the structure of these laws of nature that probably has some consequences that you wouldn't be able to see when you're just in the nitty gritt of it. And that excites me a lot thinking of, okay, if I could zoom out and see the structure of the corpus and which theories are actually consistent with each other, wouldn't that be fun? And so I think I like that because that feels closer to the kinds of things that excited me about physics as a kid. Now it's still further away from a lot of. There's some companies now that are trying to Do AI for physics with a thing of. We're going to. Robots are going to come out of the physics thing. It's probably not physics the way I define it when that's the case. But there is cool. You can unlock cool things when you're changing the way you're doing things. And I think that I. Sorry, forgetting for this quantum gravity thing again, it's about trying to condense this corpus. You're trying to find a single description that can limit to two different things. And right now we really have only a limited number of suggestions. Like roughly, string theory is a framework. Can you try to find other ones? You probably never would. If you're just sociologically in a field where everything you're learning is in the context of within string theory, it'd probably be some variant of it at any point, just almost by accident. So I think it's kind of fun to. To do a little bit of a meta layer and think about what are we actually after as a field and be clear about those goals.

[B]

What is the Perimeter Institute?

[A]

Oh, I love it. So Perimeter is founded by Mike Lazaridis. He's one of the co founders of BlackBerry and he's one of these tech entrepreneur, physics fans, obviously ahead of his time with the smartphone type of thing. Was an engineer, awesome engineer, and then liked physics, then put a lot of money into a physics institute. I'm not sure you have to be a fun kind of. I don't know if it's a brilliant idea or a silly idea, but it's definitely good for the physicists. So what I love about it is that it's a research institution that's a private public partnership. So his money is highly leveraged and the Canadian government supports it just for theoretical physics. And so it's neat because you can imagine if you cared about the product, you care about research, having something where the whole institution is dedicated to that is a very different vibe than again a university where you're pooling your auditoriums or your dorms or things like that. And it's all these different research directions that are together sharing some resources and you're kind of cross sectioning the field and then it's a reputation of that place that draws some talent in or not. I think there is value to this kind of cross sectioning research by the product or by the discipline. And perimeter is an instantiation of that, but with the downside of it being in just one place in Waterloo, Ontario where his company was and things like that.

[B]

So I understand you went there instead of taking a $1.1 million.

[A]

Yeah, but these packages are for research funding and things like that. And research is. I guess I know people are expensive, so that's where these things scale. Sound like fancy numbers, but I mean, I. Yeah, but at Brown it would be very much like Ivy League professor. Sounds cool. You're teaching a lot. But again, you're just kind of at a university that has one reputation for other reputations. I don't know, like that type of vibe of like within the US System, Harvard will get more money than Brown would versus at least at Perimeter. It's kind of a startup vibe, or at least in principle could be. And then you try to make it that. Which is fun. But we'll see if they would. Yeah.

[B]

So what are you doing at the Perimeter Institute?

[A]

Yeah, so I do my research there. So I do my celestial aggravate research. And it's basically like your faculty. You don't have to teach. You mentor mostly like master students up and then you're. But they're more forgiving or like the kind of institutional things that you're helping with. And so normally it's like instead of being on committees that are just like in a big department at a university, we don't care. You're closer to being able to help guide the institute sometimes. And so it's kind of fun because you get to think, okay, okay, we're this institute that has outreach teams, that has teaching teams separate that really value each of those facets of physics. How can you help with that as the researcher? And I love that type of question. I love thinking about how we can position ourselves to collaborate more with tech companies for AI, for physics or things like that. And I don't think that question is as meaningful if you're at another university because that university doesn't care about theoretical physics. They can change their mind on who they hire later in the commuter over time. And sure, there's probably awesome CS departments at places, but you can really focus on a thing when it's your whole mission. And I love that about Free Eye.

[B]

Do you think AI is going to. What do you think about AI?

[A]

I'm excited. I'm sorry. I used to be more so again. I think my opinion, at least I'm happy that my opinion can change. I feel like that's a positive thing. But I was definitely more jaded by, oh, people oversell things. And what if they oversell things too much to the extent where then it hurts the. There is value to expertise that I think that sometimes people over correct on things when they don't trust science and stuff like that. So how do you engage with hard conversations of where is this field going or things like that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater or making it hard to collaborate? So I used to be more like, oh, no, they're going to say they're going to do all these things. I know that my heroes kind of liked physics, so is it going to be the guys with the funding get access to all the data, start making some claims of theories, and then we don't know enough to be able to tell them why they're wrong, yada yada. The route that ended up happening instead is more like, oh, we're going to take the top people in the field. Not like the Harvard first is not me. And just work with them and collaborate with them first to then. It's a funny reputation thing, but it's fine. It makes sense as a business move. It makes sense, but it's a funny thing where we're more. More a part of it than I might have thought. I thought it would be like, we're gonna get overwhelmed with a bunch of Crockpot papers by physics enthusiasts. And it's less that and more. Yeah, more this funny thing where it says, we're all in the labs for a little bit or not, but how do we really do this? Right? Instead of it being like, okay, so say one company wants to show that they're doing some research, they can work with a few top researchers, and then the top researchers can say, it's interesting, but we want to do cooler shit than we could have done before. And how do you like. I think that it's funny you think it wouldn't be that hard to try to just get a bunch of string theorists to like, let's do what they do for math. Write down a bunch of well enough defined questions and dare someone to try to automate it. And even we could have more fun. We could say like, okay, Sam Altman, you're saying ChatGPT8 is going to solve quantum gravity. Let's put some parameters on that and make a bet. And if you do it by that timeframe, whoever did it gets that prize pool. If not, give that money to fund the researchers. I don't know. I think there's a fun way to do experiments rise with these deadlines. Because the thing that scares me the most is there's a lot of confidence. And once you start playing with the coding side of the products, I can see the confidence in it. But to what extent? A company can always pivot and you can be like, that claim is bullshit, but they still will find something else that works and that's great for them. So you don't want to short the company or anything like that. How do you call them out a little bit when they're overzealous, if that overzealousness can hurt you. But on the flip side though, I found that the agentic coding vibe, coding capabilities are just amazing because you can have all these little daydreams of how you want to interact with the physics paper. And before, when I was a perimeter, they were supportive of me trying to use some of my grant money or startup money to hire some interns from local universities to code something up. But I was a shitty coder, so I'm not good at managing people at tasks that I don't know what I'm asking them to do. And then I was so bad, I couldn't even basically host this thing locally to show people what it was. And within a few weeks I could basically redev the same thing with Claude code, which is amazing. So I kind of see that sometimes that hype or that push can drive a product to a level where now I don't need to hire a dev team. As a physicist, I can start to play around with things that I couldn't have done if I didn't know how to code myself. So there's skill sets that are open to me because it's been kind of democratized. So I'm grateful to that. And that's a bit intention with my kind of, er, about like, we're going to solve physics and then in my. I like, take the funny way. Ah. So at least like, thank you.

[B]

What are you going to do if they solve physics?

[A]

No, but this thing is. That's the question. It's like, what does it mean to solve physics? I want to make sure we have the same definition of that because I do think that it would be hard to imagine actually solving physics to the extent where, like, until you build an experiment, you can't rule out space of theories. I think the coolest thing is to try to think, okay, there's a lot of things in our field that you would never do because again, resource limitations. So when you have a couple thousand people who. Awesome, smart people, definitely, I feel dumb all the time, they're awesome people and they do their thing and you self select accidentally for the type of people who just love mathematics to the extent where then you can accidentally be ostracized if you are too ambitious within that framework, because again, who are you? And then also just, it doesn't help you get a job. So there's some things where it's almost like an emergent phenomena of things that people try to say are institutional problems. It's like, it's really not anybody being a bad actor. It's just like you get kind of stuck in the way that things are done because people obviously like what they do, and the people who like it stay in it, and the people who don't are expelled. Right. So imagine you have something where it's like, if you feel comfortable with things operating this way, then you stay, and otherwise you leave and you resent the field. Then that's a bad thing sometimes. But now I think there's enough. So you have this thing where basically before a lot of people would go and you wouldn't value doing brute force, straightforward things that are just. Just scanning over spaces of stuff, because that won't lead to a breakthrough, or is it one individual? You can't do it. But if you can automate that, sure, there's a lot of value to types of questions that nobody would have cared about, but that then makes it a problem with benchmarking. So, for example, in other fields where there's more of an engineering challenge or a very specific goal in mind, you can say this goal is valuable, and then protein folding or whatnot, they can do it. Or even math. There's more, I guess, tests for kids. The community seems a bit more organized, a lot more IMO problems, different benchmarks of how good is it at this thing in our field, I think that we kind of don't often to say whose research is more valuable than others. We definitely feel like there's totally a vibe of judging things. But that kind of ethos lends itself to not wanting to just straight up say this is a valuable thing that you should do, because if it was so straightforward to do it, it wouldn't be an interesting question. And it's like, that's dumb, because anything that's worth doing, you'd think it'd be worth telling someone else to do. Right? And so I think that we just got to get over that in our heads a bit and realize that just because in the past you could only give faculty lines to people who happen to have a great idea that there isn't value, because the whole enterprise isn't. It's physics, it's not math. It's like there is some cohesive structure to this thing. How do we optimize for that. And I think it's fun because I think tech can disrupt that a little bit in a way that isn't going to necessarily. Hopefully not. Hopefully not in a way where it's completely just erasing it. I think that there's a lot of value to that expertise and how do we harness that to do something really cool with it, instead of it being this thing where someone who's not an expert just thinks it looks like it's doing the right thing.

[B]

What is something that you want to dive into that you haven't yet?

[A]

Yeah. So, I mean, for me, it's always. Grass is always greener on the other side in the sense of you feel siloed and it's not like no one's siloing you but yourself in some sense. Because I guess for me, the one thing that I wish I was like, it would be easier for me if it wasn't, is I really like extrinsic motivation. Sometimes too much. So when I'm computing, I can be happy. But I like if other people care about what I'm computing, and sometimes they don't because they each care about their own thing. And I don't think you're a better person or not for having less extrinsic motivation. But it's hard to navigate if every person just cares about their own thing. Thing. And you're like, how do I do something this person cares about? I want to jump into their thing, but then they see it as a waste of their time to necessarily transfer that knowledge or something because they have their own grudge and they have to do the research. So it's hard to move around in a funny way just because everybody's doing their own little math. So I just wish that I could better parse other people's papers, understand how their notation, their ideas fit into the things that I've already built in my mind. And so. So the type of thing that I'm excited about more so is just, can I take inspire at this database of all the different papers in the field and try to use large language models or whatnot, just for fun, to see how much I can try to parse the different concepts that are appearing in these papers? And I think it's a fun game to be like, okay, when I'm asked to explain something publicly, why am I so shit at it? I think I spent a lot of years, instead of getting better at public speaking, thinking, why the hell am I so bad at at it? And I think there's these trade Offs between we are selected for or at least in our job, it's better if you are not sacrificing accuracy. And so anytime you're making an analogy, there's so many caveats. The caveats get in the way of the intuition going through and then sometimes you don't even think that way. So it's just like, can I try to see the structure of the thing I'm studying a little bit better by playing around with it within the scope of things that I know? So I'm super excited just for the fact that I can experiment with that all I want to. Because before I might need to be better at coding in Python or understand the Inspire API keys and that's API calls and then that's automatic now. So you get to basically just have fun. And I like that a lot. And so for me, I just want to basically understand better what is the information content of what I work on in the human sense, not in the ads. Safety sense.

[B]

Right on. Let's talk about the, the physics race between the US and China.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Who's winning?

[A]

I mean, I think the US is still like. I mean, it's all right, but no obvious. I'm sorry, I think this is like. And I think this is something where I'm happy to hear your side of it too, a bit more because I know like, everybody who has any sort of military background has a different view or conception of China than like, probably because physics is so useless. This type of physics that I do is seen as that, that it's nice because everybody can be a part of it. So we love this notion that like, doesn't matter what country you're from, you're contributing to this corpus. And to be fair, everything that we're doing, we're publishing on Arxiv, so it's not like there's IP involved and various IP policies can affect things. So I like the fact that there's some little slice of research that's so far away from replication that everybody can be a part of it and it's not like what country you're in. And so when I see things about China funding an experiment, it's like someone top down could just say, we're going to fund it. Hey, it's an experiment. And honestly, maybe it's a good thing if they're spending money on trying to be better at research for just the type of research that's just for the cloud and not for the military tech or something like that. Let them build colliders. I do think that the pipeline of transferable technology is much slower than it is actually building a technology. My attitude is I could see that there is, and this is the type of thing too I think that very strong top down governance can do and also different relaxations of IP laws. There's a power to that that you can see Europe maybe overregulating things compared to usai. So I like to think that as we are right now, and I still think it's more feasible to say that the research that I do is so much less about the practical application locations and the technology for these SpaceX detectors. I still think that the European Space Agency 1 Lisa, or whatever the name is going to be that the US is a part of will outperform this particular one. I think that you were referring to Tianxin or something. But I think it's great that if they cared about it, they would fund it. Versus you have a hard time sometimes convincing the American taxpayer that this is worth funding.

[B]

So you think we're ahead?

[A]

We are ahead, yeah. But I think, think that like again it's like what do you want to be ahead on? Like, like isn't it great that like they spend their money on the things that we don't value doing? If eventually, you know, type of thing, if there's a reason why we don't value doing it, maybe it's great that they're doing it.

[B]

What are they doing that we're not doing?

[A]

Oh, I just think that they have like, sorry. For example, there's a lot of, I'm not sure if it's a good thing. So again, these could be like different people have different, they're different. I mean, I don't know what level you want to consider it as a regime versus a person or like whatnot, but there's a faculty member at Harvard or there who has a lot of influence in China, which is great because then he can have research centers and he can hire people who wouldn't get jobs in America. So I think what I'm saying is that in America it's like, oh, we only want the top person to get a job or these elite things and we can get them from all over the world. And that's what we typically do. And then their route is there's a lot of awesome people that are never going to get a job in the US system. We can hire them there and it sometimes works, but it also right now is still very isolated. So the US would choose not to do that. We don't want to just hire a bunch of More faculty. But then once we've made that choice, they're optimizing, given that constraint, what can they do that's valuable? And I think that then there's a reason why we made our choice. And that still has an effect of everybody that I know. It's really hard to. It's really hard in India and China, I think, to break out of those systems. Unless you happen to have an advisor or someone you knew who was in the US system, which is insane. I mean, I feel bad for the researchers. It's just like, it's so sociological in some sense. You can't just have a brilliant idea and get to be a part of this club in some sense because again, it's not just. It's almost more like if you don't speak the language the right way, people don't think you know what you're talking about or they don't understand you. And so there's pipelines that are very limited and very much go through the US and out. Almost like through, like Princeton, Stanford, like Harvard, mit and out. And that sucks. But that definitely just says that it's not like we're behind in that sense. Right.

[B]

Are there any projects going on in China that you're excited about?

[A]

I mean, I'm less of an experimental list type of person. I think a lot of. I mean, I'm excited for my phenomenological buddies. If they think that they can get somebody to fund an experiment that the US Wouldn't prioritize, I'm happy for that.

[B]

Them.

[A]

I still think the things that I'm more excited about are still in Silicon Valley as far as I'm concerned. But, but that's my, My own bias is my own.

[B]

Like, what about the U.S. are there any projects here that you're excited about? I mean, so you're not involved in.

[A]

I, I probably don't know all the cool projects that people are doing. I think that just the way that we. I mean, in the US There's a lot more money that can go into innovation in a way that when the timescales for research in a company are so comparable to the ones in academia, sometimes that rubs me the wrong way. I think that we're good at. There isn't a problem of putting money into innovation. So the question of whose hands does it go in? Or how's it controlled? But it's definitely the exciting things in the States. The States, you can move fast and break things in a way that I don't think you can many other places, but probably In China, IP laws would be such that unless, however we follow the law with copyrighted material for training things, I imagine that they could have had a lot of thought of. They couldn't have done that better, right? Because they don't care. If they don't. Maybe I don't know the actual setup, but a system who doesn't care about IP can definitely do cool things and stuff.

[B]

What do you think about all these UFOs and UAP sightings and stuff?

[A]

I don't know. I wish they were real. It'd be cooler. But no, I don't think I believe in aliens, but I don't believe in aliens that have contacted us.

[B]

But you believe in aliens?

[A]

Oh, in general, I mean there's. Statistically, I mean. So I think there's a fun thing. So either we're super, super special or sure, there probably are are. Why wouldn't there be life somewhere else? Why are the initial conditions for where we are so special? I think that people who study. I don't do this myself, but there's some. The fact that you haven't interacted with them gives you some bounds on how common it can be or whether they need to be in some environment where you can have water or all those types of fun things. But sure, I think that's funny thing is called tension with religion stuff too. I think there's no reason to think you're special unless there is a reason that you're special. And so modding out by maybe the prior being like we're probably not special would tell you. Sure there's some. Something like an alien somewhere. Will you ever interact with it? You don't know. But I don't believe in like necessarily. Like I definitely like, I wish that we had talked to anime to be cool. Like, never mind.

[B]

So you think all these sightings are bullshit?

[A]

Oh, that's hard. I mean, I want to, yeah, but I don't want to say it like that's mean to say like that people. People don't believe what you see type of thing. But because I'm saying like I wish if it weren't, wouldn't that be more fun? I think what I'm saying is like I wish things were as cool. All these conspiracy theories make it seem like there's much more structure and organization than there is. Like just like. I mean, maybe I'm with you. Maybe you've seen the military when it works well and like that there is some cool that I wish I knew about because like I just.

[B]

I see like the kind of UAPs in the military that go on the water and have rivetic propulsion systems or whatever the. I don't know. Yeah, I've never seen anything.

[A]

I don't.

[B]

I think I've only seen stuff on the news.

[A]

Yeah, but I think what I'm saying

[B]

is like I don't believe the news.

[A]

I know that. Yeah. It's funny. I don't know how many people are actively. I think that we don't always give credit to the fact that people cannot realize their biases or that they are self serving sometimes like, I mean like, I don't know how much of their. If it's like just Machiavellian or like emergent Machiavellian or whatever it would be.

[B]

Because the one that really gets me is the Nimitz.

[A]

Oh, wait, sorry, is that more. I don't know what they say you

[B]

don't know about the Nimitz?

[A]

I don't know. I guess not.

[B]

Multiple people saw it. It was some type of a. What was it? It was like an egg shaped whatever projectile. And it went in the water. Yeah, I don't believe it lost any speed, came out of the water. Pilots saw it, people on the ship saw it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

A lot of it was a collective.

[A]

That's super cool. I wish. I mean, I always thought these things.

[B]

You haven't heard about this?

[A]

I, I'm. You're. I mean you're in a differently, different like set of like, like Internet feeds.

[B]

We definitely live in different worlds, which is.

[A]

No, but that's. And that's fine in the sense of like. I know that I have biases coming from like the experience of like, like who I would have like kind of spent a lot of time around. But, but no, I mean, I think I always thought maybe it's cool military projects, I don't know. And then sometimes optical illusions for it being if it was physically impossible.

[B]

But that's what I wanted to ask you about. How could it be an optical illusion?

[A]

I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen the thing to know that answer. But I mean, first of all it's going to be more fun now that you can AI generate stuff. Like we're going to have a real fake news at scale accidentally or maliciously. I don't know that that's scary. And then the other side, I don't understand the extent to which things are physically impossible. For it to be just some whatever drone or something. You don't know. I know. In this case I'm not talking about this example of going in the water. It sounds weird, but I think what I'm saying is that. Yeah, I guess the question is when someone does believe it is that thing, they're so confident it's an alien and not. Whatever. Why do they think the alien can do something that we can't do? Because if it's all the laws of physics, then probably it's the same. Same capability. So then it's just a question of how advanced is the US military or other whatever, right. Or what are you actually seeing versus what you think you're seeing because you're again, extrapolating based on other things that you're used to looking at.

[B]

Could it be a hologram?

[A]

No, no, I'm not going to go there. That'd be a fun. I don't get a little quote for that. But no, again I'm saying more in the literal sense of. You're probably misunderstanding what it's being seen. If like there's a reason why it physically couldn't be some military tech is what my. My prior. I'd love to be wrong. Right.

[B]

Could we project a hologram?

[A]

I mean, I think what I'm saying, like, I mean, sorry, to the extent, I don't see any reason why you couldn't do a little like. A little like come save me. What's the quote from the. Like Princess Leia. I don't know, like that type of thing. Which is a more literal version of the hologram, not the one that I study. I don't know where laser shows are at nowadays or exactly what. But see, the thing is, I always, I think I always take the more pragmatic attitude of like, like build cool shit. Like don't ask what is actually true. Like try to engineer a thing so that it is if it's possible. But yeah, maybe it's less cool for the UFO type of thing. But like, you know, imagine the thing that would have to be true for that to be real. Real. Do you believe it's true or do you want it to be true? Do you not want it to be true? Like, what's the conclusion that you draw if there's like really some like deep state type of thing that's hiding all these alien cool stuff?

[B]

Like I think it's all.

[A]

Exactly. I do too. But all of it. Yeah, but like the person who then doesn't think it's has this probably in their mind like a more like powerful version of the US Government having like some really cool like men in black tech. Right? I don't know that's kind of appealing or fun. Right? Yeah, I just, I think that we need to.

[B]

I mean, it's a fun thing to think about. Yeah.

[A]

To lay off the conspiracies and the, the cool stuff like that you can do.

[B]

Really.

[A]

You know what I mean? There's, there's a lot of stuff that's like same isomorphism class of like that's fucking cool. Like this, like whatever, like autonomous F35 thing you're talking about. Like there's some cool shit that we can do.

[B]

What did you just say?

[A]

Oh, like, no, that you. Like, I was through. Someone was going around and showing me the different things that you had. And I forget one of your teammates was showing the some like scaled down model of a military type of thing that a private company was doing. I don't know what. But, but no, there's. I don't know. I. Yeah, I think. I wish that. Yeah, it'd be fun if like people like, if it wasn't just defense funding that got to do the cool shit.

[B]

I'm with you.

[A]

I'm with you on that.

[B]

Well, Sabrina, we're wrapping up the interview. What are you getting into next?

[A]

I think I'm getting into being a shitty vibe coder and just seeing, getting to have fun, do my physics and then on the side kind of try to look at this bigger scale picture of the corpus and see how far I can go with a little do it yourself type of attitude until I need help and then ask for help.

[B]

Love it. Love it. Well, Sabrina, this is fascinating.

[A]

Thanks.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you so much.

[B]

No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like comment and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

[A]

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