← Unexplainable
Unexplainable
The musical structure of the universe
00:53:02
If matter is a result of vibration, what causes the vibration?
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- [00:02]
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Noam
Hey, it's Noam, and today on the show we've got a conversation with a theoretical physicist who's also a world class jazz saxophonist. But it's not like he's a scientist in his normal life and he's got a jazz side project. The music is part of his research. He thinks really deeply about the connection between music and the biggest questions he's working on why the universe is the way it is, how it improvises over a kind of rhythmic structure, how playing music can open up new scientific ideas he'd never considered before. This interview first aired on the Gray Area, another podcast from Vox, and it's a fascinating conversation that's really made me look at the night sky differently. It's honestly made me want to listen to the universe rather than just look at it. Here's the Gray Area with host Sean Elling.
- [01:54]
Host
Today's guest is Stephan Alexander. He's a professor of physics at Brown University and the author of two terrific books, the Jazz of Physics and Fear of a Black Universe. I have always loved the scientists who go out of their way to engage the public. People like Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall. They don't just talk to the public. They translate the science into stories. They use colorful analogies. They find the poetry in the data. Alexander is this type of scientist. One big reason for that, I suspect, is that he's a theoretical physicist who's also a world class jazz musician, and his musical sensibilities influence both his research and the sort of language he uses to communicate it. But on top of that, for a person whose head lives in a world of abstractions, Alexander is a pragmatist who's up front about how hard it is for physicists like him to really explore their wildest ideas, especially when the research is dependent on grants and the whims of funders. So I was excited to invite him on the show to talk about music and physics and how he's trying to make sense of the universe. Stefan Alexander, welcome to the show.
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Stephan Alexander
It's a real honor and pleasure to be here.
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Host
I appreciate that. I'm really excited to have you. Something I have heard people say, people who are either in physics or adjacent to physics, certainly people who know more about physics than I do, which is anyone who knows anything about physics, but I. I have heard them say that physics is stuck right now as a science. Is that true? What are those people seeing? And. And maybe just only what are they not seeing.
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Stephan Alexander
I think what people are seeing is that there's been a great tradition and pathway that has been successful. You had quantum mechanics and you had relativity, in this case special relativity. And there was an attempt to unite them because there were physical regimes where you needed to describe, say, a quantum mechanical particle moving at relativistic speeds. And so that unification was successful. That became the bedrock of particle physics, like all the. What we call a standard model, that theory. So that logical progression has been successful. And I think that physicists have been very successful over the last century, and there's no reason to expect that direction to stop. And I, you know, and I think that we. We must continue moving in that direction. And I. When I talk about fear in my book Fear of a Black Universe, we're talking about how do we confront the legacy and the contributions that has been made, and what's the strategy for getting to new ground or maybe, you know, making new breakthroughs. I myself am a researcher in theoretical physics, and honestly, there are days when I'm like, I have no idea what direction to go and.
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Host
Tell me more.
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Stephan Alexander
Well, a lot of what we do in physics, especially in the profession itself, we have to go through peer review. We write papers, we submit our results to journals. It gets reviewed anonymously by our colleagues. And we also have to apply for grants. We have to apply for money to support our research, to support our students. If you deviate from what's expected, deviate from the judgments that's made about what the right directions are, what the trends are, and what it means to do good physics. So there are judgments about, well, if you work in this field, then you actually know what you're talking about. And if you don't work and you work in a different field, you don't really understand what we're doing, therefore, we should not take you seriously. Maybe if you work in a different field, you try new things out that deviates from the status quo. There Might be penalties waiting for you, the same way penalties could await if you deviate from a social order. Right. So part of the fear is that if you're a young person and you're trying to break new ground, there's a warning, which is wait till you, after you get tenure, to work on those kind of problems or think about things in that new way.
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Host
Part of what makes you unique is your musical background. To an outsider, it might seem like there's some kind of tension between being a scientist and a jazz musician, or at least that these are very unrelated activities. But the point of your book is to say that that's not the case. Right. That actually this kind of bounded thinking is part of what's holding science back.
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Stephan Alexander
Yeah. I would definitely be a different physicist without my music and a different musician without my physics. And some examples of that would be when I'm working on any kind of theory or calculation, an idea, maybe I have an idea and I'm pursuing it. There are times where you might get so enamored about your idea. You might fall in love with the idea, get attached to it, and months would go by. But you just don't want to give up on the idea. It's important to know when to pivot and when to give up. And I find that being a jazz musician, it's all about embracing in real time, pivoting. If you. You might play a wrong note, and you have to make something of that, or you might find a phrase that you think sounds very good in the middle of an improvisation. But you have to move in a new direction now. And I think that this idea of, like, that as a jazz musician, the improvisational side, teaches you how to just move on to new ideas and not get too attached to ideas, but also how to commit to something. I mean, in my jazz practice, my practice as a musician has been a lifelong process of refining my technique and refining my theory and put myself out there and playing with other people and learning how to play in a band and all that stuff. And that discipline, that practice, it plays a big role also in my practice as a physicist. So they go back and forth here.
- [09:29]
Host
Your day job is physics. But, I mean, how serious is your music career? I mean, do you tour? Are you in a band? Do you just sort of play on the side at clubs when you get a chance? I mean, how big a role does it play in your life?
- [09:43]
Stephan Alexander
At different times of my life, it's played anywhere from very, you know, like every. The other night, I'm playing out at some Club with a quartet to. Maybe once a semester I'll play. So it depends. But these days, yeah, I have. I do have a band. I'm very fortunate to be playing with Will Calhoun, who's a drummer for the band Living Color, and Melvin Gibbs, the bassist, played with the Rollins Band and others, Harriet Tubman. So I've been very fortunate to play with those fellows. We have a band called God Particle.
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Host
I love it. I love it.
- [10:24]
Stephan Alexander
And we'll play a few concerts, larger scale concerts, a few times a year. So, yeah, it differs from time to time, I'll jump in a session and sit in for a few songs. And a lot of what I do these days is I'm just happy to go home and work on some new material and shed some new scales.
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Host
Didn't Einstein say that his best ideas came to him while playing his violin? Or am I just making that up?
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Stephan Alexander
I do recall Reed and Einstein saying something like that. Yeah. I mean, one thing for sure that I have confirmed about his relationship with music and the science is that there have been times where I. If I get stuck on something or my brain is just overload and I just pick up my horn and I'll just start playing through some things. And I find it to be very helpful. I find that things like it or not happening offline in terms of how I'm doing my physics, like, you know, the art of physics and exploring those connections.
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Host
There is a question you ask in your previous book, the Jazz of Physics, that I want to put to you now, and I'm just going to quote. If the structure of the universe is a result of a pattern of vibration, what causes the vibration? Now, let's give everyone a second to hit their bongs, and then you got to answer. You got to answer that for me. I don't know what it means, but I love the question, and I'm dying to know the answer.
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Stephan Alexander
I think our most direct experience of this is music and sound. A musical tone is basically a vibrational pattern of airwaves that comes to our ears and, you know, our body responds to that. Obviously, there's a whole mechanism of how that happens. But a sound wave, like, for example, you know, notice how you can hear sound in a swimming pool. So you can actually hear sound in water, right? You can hear sound, obviously, in air. And that's because the medium is vibrating, right? The medium can vibrate. But what is vibrating? What is vibrating actually is the fact that any type of medium, like water, can actually undergo a change in pressure. If you push against the Wall, you're exerting pressure, which is a force that distributes itself over, like, a region of space, right? So it turns out that sound is nothing more than a pressure wave. Basically, our direct experience of vibrations. And the way that I talk about it is through music. And it turns out that in the early universe, the metaphor here goes pretty close to sound. So we have this picture of a universe that's been expanding for billions of years, which meant that if you ran the clock backwards, the universe, you can imagine it contracting and being very small, hot and dense. So in the early universe, you have a hot, dense soup of energy. And that past universe is devoid of structure. It's devoid of galaxies and stars, planets and people. It's just all energy. So the question that we ask in physics is, how is that past universe? How does that evolving universe come to create the structure that we see today? The stars, the galaxies, the planet, the people? And what we know from observations from satellites is that in the early universe, we see vibrational patterns of this soup of energy. Okay, the soup of energy is basically. We call it radiation. Okay? The universe is filled in a hot quantum soup of radiation and fundamental particles. And the wave, like motion actually set up sound wave. So the physics of the early universe, those vibrations are actually sound waves, very similar to the sound waves that, you know, are passing through in air. And those sound waves that are vibrating in the early universe carry energy, and that is the onset. Basically, those energetic waves are the onset of the formation of the first structures in the universe, such as stars, which eventually all cluster together, become galaxies. So it's in that sense that, you know, that metaphor with sound is, you know, I would say, pretty exact. In the early universe.
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Host
What does it mean to say, as you do, that the universe is like an instrument that plays itself?
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Stephan Alexander
Well, the metaphor is that, you know, if you think about, like an instrument, for example, like a drum, the surface of the drum undergoes vibration. And, you know, obviously the vibration of the drum basically sends out, you know, sound waves. Similarly, the universe in its past, which is very small as some type of vibrating system, then the question is, what is the hand that hits the universe? If you want to use this. This analogy. But since our definition of the universe is that there's nothing outside of the universe, whatever sets off that vibration, it's some entity that's of the universe that's doing that. And the status quo right now in our field, the field of cosmology is that there's something called the inflaton field, right? The inflaton is the name of a field. And so for the listeners out there, what is a field? We need to understand then what a field is. And we are in direct contact with fields anytime you play with a magnet. So if you take two magnets, notice that a magnet can exert a force on another magnet without the magnets actually touching each other. And so the thing that's actually transmitting the force between two magnets in between at the empty space is a magnetic field. It seems to be invisible, but it acts over space, right? And so the idea is in the early universe there's a similar type of field. It's not a magnetic field, it's an inflaton field. And this field is playing two roles. Actually. One role is to make the universe expand very rapidly, right? Which is the thing that's igniting the expansion of the universe. But the inflaton field is actually known as a quantum field. So there's something quantum about this inflaton field. And guess what's quantum about it? The field can vibrate in a discrete fashion. So you know, when you think about vibrations, right, you think about like a wave that's, you know, going up and down, say an ocean wave going up and down. And you can imagine seeing all different types of wave patterns, right? But these wave patterns are more like notes. Like if I play A, B, C, D, G, these are discrete notes, right? They only occur in steps. And so the analogy now is that you can think about the quantum fluctuation of the infoton field as basically discrete notes of this infoton field. This is a metaphor, but actually the metaphor goes very, very almost in a one to one correspondence. So that's the idea. Let me get. That's a paradigm. Then you can say, well, okay, where does the inflaton field come from? What is its nature? Right? And these are all good questions that we're asking, but the real answer is that we don't know yet.
- [19:03]
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Host
It's interesting to me to think about this in the context of the so called fine tuning argument. This idea that the fundamental laws of our universe are perfectly arranged so as to make life possible and if they were tuned like a guitar, even slightly differently, life wouldn't exist. Or to put it differently, the instrument that is the universe wouldn't play. First of all, is that true? And if it is, what does that tell us about the nature of the universe that it's held together so precariously?
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Stephan Alexander
Yeah, it might tell us one of a few things. I mean, first of all, when we use the word fine tune, the way I like to think about this is imagine when you listen to a nice stereo system and you have. Well, back in the, in the days where we had equalizers that we can manually shift up and down, they say, well, I want a little bit more treble and I want a little bit more bass. Think about now the universe as an equalizer, meaning that how much treble, how much bass controls now some of the fundamental properties of subatomic particles or the forces, right, that's needed to make a star burn, right, which we know to have life star has to burn at a given rate. We don't want our sun to burn out too quick, right? If our sun will just burn its fuel in one second, then good luck with any seasons here on Earth, right? So the sun has to burn at the right rate for us for billions of years to sustain life on Earth. But it turns out that Actually, the rate at which the sun actually does thermonuclear conversion depends very sensitively on these equalizers, these parameters that take how strong the force may be or how weak it may be. And it does appear that when we look at our theories that describe those forces, that those knobs that dictate how the various forces are controlled are very finely tuned to certain values that don't seem to be explained very nicely by the theories themselves. So it seems that the theories themselves cannot explain the determination of those finely tuned parameters. And as a result, we're seeking new ideas out there. And there has been new ideas. One idea is called the anthropic principle, which is basically saying that the universe actually is finely tuned such that we can be around to observe it. So the anthropic principle is a statement that the laws of physics are such that if they were any different than the form that they currently have, there would be no life, and therefore there'd be no universe for life to actually observe. It's almost circular in the sense that the universe exists such that it can create life, and if there were no life, the universe would not exist.
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Host
Yeah, I recall that Steven Weinberg quote. Where else could we be except on a planet that can sustain life?
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Stephan Alexander
Right. There's something circular about it. Then you can say, well, how does it. But how does the universe do that? And so ideas out there could be that maybe there are many, many universes. We live in one of such many universes where the universe, as it replicates itself, it gets to try out, like a jazz improvisation, maybe. Think about. In a jazz improvisation, you get to try out a new solo every time the form of the song repeats itself. The idea is that the universe gets to try out new parameters until it hits the jackpot.
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Host
So is this jackpot is us just to jump in there a little bit. Is what you're describing there what people call the multiverse theory?
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Stephan Alexander
Yes, that's what people call the multiverse theory.
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Host
Do you buy that? And if you do, you're going to have to explain it in terms of lowly country podcaster like me can understand, because I don't get it. I mean, I guess I get. I get it conceptually, but it's. It's a little mind blowing to ponder.
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Stephan Alexander
Yeah, so 24 years ago, when people in my field were talking about the multiverse, I was a research scientist trying to build my career, and they eventually tried to get a job. And when I. One of the leaders in the field, I went to him and said, how do we do physics now? I mean, because the idea of the multiverse is that you have to not rely on doing calculations in your theory to make a prediction. You posit that there are just many universes out there and there's some random chance, you know, let me just use that word very loosely, a random chance that the universe replicates itself. So to have a multiverse, you need a mechanism for the universe to basically replicate to produce new so called baby universes. And what, you know, one picture you might want to have in terms of an analogy is like blown bubbles. So if you have a bubble maker or whatever and you blow in bubbles, like you can create many bubbles. And if you think about every universe as some bubble that basically nucleates and gets created, and inside of every bubble is an environment that you can call a universe. But in different bubbles, bubbly baby universes, the universe actually takes on different values for the forces. And when those values happen to be the right values to produce life, to produce stars, to produce all the things that we see, that's the idea of how the multiverse can actually maybe create our universe. But when I went to the senior person, he said, well, you know, I mean, basically it was like, tough luck, you know, this is where the field is at. And it was very difficult at that time to see how I can make a life for myself as a physicist, as a theorist. And I think that back then I was not a fan of the multiverse because I found it very difficult to do research in that field.
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Host
But why weren't you a fan back then?
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Stephan Alexander
Yeah, but truthfully speaking, because it was, because it was aesthetically not pleasing to me. And it just goes to show you how aesthetics, right, affect what types of research you choose to pursue. Simply put, it was aesthetically not pleasing to me.
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Host
What's not aesthetically appealing to you? Is it because it's not elegant and simplistic? Is it because almost seems like it takes a picture of the universe we don't quite understand and then smuggles in like a new concept to sort of explain it all away.
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Stephan Alexander
The aesthetic side of this is coming from that when we usually, what we see in physics is some unity, some ways in which one problem you may be trying to solve would be connected to something else. And by not considering that something else or not seeing that other thing, you would not be able to solve the problem. So the idea here would be like, well, maybe the fact that the laws that we see seem to be fine tuned is telling us something very deep. And it's so deep that it just simply just can't be this multiverse idea. The same way the advent of quantum mechanics said something profoundly deep about the world. And so it's more about this ambition that we're looking for, something profound and so deep that we have not been clever enough to figure it out.
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Host
I think part of the reason I was asking it, it sort of surprised me to hear you say it wasn't aesthetically appealing to you, because I guess my intuition was that the multiverse would be the kind of theory a jazz musician in particular would find appealing. If the universe plays jazz, then it does kind of seem like the multiverse is the kind of world we might get. It feels very improvisational.
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Stephan Alexander
You know, jazz for me plays a couple of different roles. One of the metaphors that I have developed in this, it even turned into a little music collaboration with my friend and collaborator, Donald Harrison, who's the NEA jazz master, one of the great jazz musicians of all time, is that it's the metaphor of applying a more improvisational logic to interpreting some aspects of quantum mechanics. So that the idea that a quantum particle is not doing some probabilistic dance, but it's improvised.
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Host
See, that's really interesting to me. I mean, I've heard you talk about Donald Harrison before. He's a very well known jazz musician from New Orleans, actually really close to my home. And you talk about how he wrote to you about his quantum theory of music, and he said, I don't play the chord changes. It's like quantum mechanics. I don't play in the changes, I play through the changes. I don't know what that means, but it sounds extremely cool. So what does that mean? And is it as cool as it sounds?
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Stephan Alexander
It is cooler than it sounds. In traditional jazz repertoire, we are given a structure of a jazz song, meaning that as a song unfolds in time, there is a structure, there's a form. What I mean by that is that there's some type of rhythmic structure and that rhythmic structure repeats itself. And then there's a harmonic structure as well, you know, so there's melody, there's harmony and there's rhythm. And the improviser should improvise some line, musical line, musically meaningful line, as that structure unfolds. And so one thing that we're challenged to do is what we call play within the chord changes. As the chords change, we're supposed to weave like a melody through those chord changes. And that's the name of the game how one does that. And the practice of doing that and there are all these different strategies maybe of how to do that. And what Donald Harrison, who is a master and like, you know, he knows all the traditional ways of playing through those changes. But the beautiful thing about a person like Donald is that that's not enough. He is engaged in his own research, just like a scientist is to figure out new ways, new strategies of playing a jazz solo over those changes. And he, in his own self study of quantum mechanics, and then of course in our follow up conversations, he found a lot of interesting ideas in terms of how quantum mechanical things like a quantum particle may actually occupy a certain energy level over time and how a jazz pattern, you know, could be improvised.
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Host
Yeah.
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Stephan Alexander
And so this idea of getting from point A to point B and a musical improvisation, Donald Harrison intuited that the way a quantum particle actually moves through space to get from point A to point B, according to say, Richard Feynman, which is that the particle must consider all possible paths as it goes from point A to point B. That an improvised line, I'm now quoting Donald. There's just infinite possibilities presented. And that an improvised line basically is a consideration of all those, you know, it's closer to quantum physics than the way jazz may be traditionally taught and these strategies are traditionally taught. Another interesting insight into that is Sonny Rollins. When I interviewed Sonny Rollins in my first book, you know, the legendary sax player, he said to me, you know, I practice, I practice, I practice a lot, I practice a lot throughout my life, but it's very important that when I'm playing that I'm not thinking at all.
- [33:39]
Host
Yeah, look, I. It's worth saying the universe isn't exactly a jazz composition, but the idea that it has some kind of like functionally musical quality, that's a pretty old idea. I mean, the Pythagoreans thought the universe was fundamentally musical, right? I mean, even Kepler borrowed this idea from them.
- [34:05]
Stephan Alexander
And I wish that when I was a younger person growing up, that was something I was taught at the outset. Like when we think about our science and art curriculum and say high school or even before that, I wish that my science teachers or my music teachers were aware, I'm sure, about whether they were aware of it or not. That's why I wrote this book, to make people aware of it. That the birth of western science started simultaneously with music and physics. In this case, when I say physics, I mean astronomy. But when the Pythagoreans and Pythagoras, as the legend, has, came up with this idea that the cosmos and I believe that that word was created to actually deal with that which has order in the universe, which in this case had to do with the planetary motions. That the reason why the planets were moving in the way they were had to do with music of the spheres and, you know, moving 2,000 years or so into the future. That Kepler relied on this Pythagorean idea of music of the spheres to actually figure out the elliptical orbits of the planets. And in fact he wrote down musical notes first for these planets before writing those equations down, that those equations came right in part from a musical analogy, so that there's always been historically this intimate connection between music and the universe, music and astrophysics and physics.
- [35:56]
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- [37:35]
Stephan Alexander
Foreign.
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Host
I'm curious if you have a favorite philosopher. It seems to me that if you're doing theoretical physics and you're trying to understand the the origins of the universe, you reach a certain point at the frontier where it almost just out of necessity collapses into poetry and metaphor because we we just don't know and we can't empirically wrap our arms around it. So, I mean, I guess what I'm really asking is where's the boundary here when you're doing big, grand theoretical physics between science and philosophy.
- [38:24]
Stephan Alexander
Well, I think the connecting link to that is mathematics and like, you know, because as you know, there's a very deep connection between mathematics and philosophy. Yeah, like mathematical logic and you know, very abstract things category theory and you know, there's a set theory, there's all this, all this, you know, way in which math and philosophy get physicists. The language you speak and the tool we use, a big part of our toolkit is mathematics. But of course physics is not just mathematics. Physics is, you know, physics is physics and it's, it deals with the physical world. So physics is also the ideas and physics is created by humans. And we would love to think that maybe the creations and physical laws are independent of the human, of us creating them. But that's another philosophical discussion. But one philosopher. It's really funny, I did a lot, I almost majored in philosophy and I did, over the years I tried to do a lot of reading and philosophy. And one philosopher that I was influenced by was Schopenhauer.
- [39:29]
Host
Yeah, he was also obsessed with music.
- [39:31]
Stephan Alexander
Oh, that I didn't even know. I didn't, I didn't know that. It turns out Schopenhauer was influential on, on one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger. But you know, it's funny, as I was thinking about this, I, I've read a lot of philosophers and I can't remember anything that I've, that I read, but I just remember that the, you know, those things were influential. I've also read a lot of, I mean, definitely a lot of Vedic philosophy and you know, Eastern philosophy as well. I found that. And again, that's nothing new. I mean, you know, Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, I mean a lot of the founders of Albert Einstein were, you know, very much influenced by both Western and Eastern philosophy.
- [40:17]
Host
Yeah, it's just so interesting to me, this semi permeable border between philosophy and science. I mean even in your, I mean I have your book in front of me right now. I was reading some of it this morning and you know, in the 14th chapter, I mean you even, you ask a question like now I'm quoting. For many years I tried to get my mind around the question what can exist if time ceases to exist? That feels like a philosophy question as much or even more than a scientific question. But maybe I'm just seeing that as a philosopher and not as a scientist.
- [40:52]
Stephan Alexander
It is a philosophy question and I think that it's useful for physicists to See what philosophers have come up with in terms of that question, Because I do find it, like, at the end of the day, like a good physicist for me is you have your skill set, you have your chops, whatever they may be. I mean, obviously, the more the merrier. And then, of course, you're trying to come up with ideas for yourself. And part of why you have students or younger people to talk to is that you hope in those conversations that something may come out where it might lead to a new idea. So we're kind of always. I think a good physicist should fish for ideas and that you should, like, cast a wide net and then consider ideas. And then obviously you get to try, like, a landscape of different ideas and hopefully something works. That's one strategy. I mean, some people are good enough where they can just hit the jackpot and find the idea and it works. Or some people may just maybe find the answer by calculating their way to the answer. These are all different strategies. And I don't want to leave too many stones unturned in terms of finding new sources of ideas. And I think, like, philosophy, music, you know, I love. I mean, I love talking to lay people about my physics and my research, because I sometimes find that they might say something that may knock me out of the way, my pattern of thought, and that could be useful.
- [42:16]
Host
I will say this. You know, the. Just talking about ideas on the frontiers, you know, I. The physics of consciousness is a fascinating one for me. I mean, we seem to have no idea how this immaterial thing we call consciousness emerges from physical matter from our brain. Hell, we still don't even have a good definition of consciousness. I mean, is this even a fruitful space for physics at the moment, or is this just forever the domain of metaphysicians and theologians and philosophers?
- [42:54]
Stephan Alexander
I think it is. It definitely is a deep. Okay, you know, thinking about that, you have different fields. You have different categories of fields, and with those things come academic and intellectual silos that you have to figure out how to. If you're serious about working in something like that, you know, how to collaborate with people and how to break through given those silos. I mean, that's. Those things, those realities are there. So for me, writing a book where I'm just. Where I did talk a little bit about consciousness and fear of a black universe at the end, I gave myself permission, and I was honest about that. This is pure speculation. And. But I would say yes. I mean, I think at the heart of it, for me, since our experience of consciousness is that we you know, we are housed in a physical body and we have a brain. And somehow we know that different states of consciousness seems to be influenced by this. This piece of matter between our head and our nervous system. That clearly there is some link between this internal experience we call consciousness and the matter. But the question, of course, is what is the interplay between matter and the organization of, say, and maybe the complexity of neurons and the emergence of consciousness? I think for me, where the rubber hits the road is that one way into this as well. The mystery of consciousness could be also connected to the mystery of matter. So in other words, at the level where we understand how neurons fire and neural networks and all that stuff, it could be that where consciousness is happening is not only. It's not to say it's an either or in the epiphenomenon of the complexity of neurons. Right. Consciousness seems to be running on a hardware. And the hardware is not just neurons, but matter. But there are things about matter that we still don't understand. And so the question of, I think where physics could come in and may be useful is to maybe find that way of connecting the mystery of consciousness to actually the mystery of matter itself.
- [45:06]
Host
I mean, the stuff about, you know, applying quantum physics to the world at our scale, you know, the world beyond just, you know, subatomic particles, that's where you get a lot of woo, woo. And. And the impression I've always received from serious scientists is that there's a down that road is a lot of, you know, you have a lot of New Agey type people will look at some of the spookiness of quantum physics. You know, something like, you know, superposition. That particles can be in different positions in space and time simultaneously. And somehow, if that were true, then. Then I guess human beings could also be in multiple places at multiple times simultaneously, which seems to cut against our experience of reality. But I don't know. I mean, is. Is. Am I being too dismissive by calling all of that woo, woo, or do you think there's some there, there?
- [46:04]
Stephan Alexander
Look, there's definitely woo out there. And usually when I hear that term, it means usually the same way. Like, you know, if some people say you're not playing jazz the right way, you're not playing within our tradition, you haven't done the work, or you have an idea, but you didn't even realize that this has been considered before and it's wrong for these other reasons. So maybe it speaks to a certain naivety. And all of that is fine to criticize. Our job is to to poke holes in things. So that's part of it. And we. And, you know, I tell my students and myself that we have to embrace that. Now, having said that, I think that when I say the wave function in the universe and quantum mechanics, I'm talking about new things. I'm not talking about quantum mechanics as we know it now, but, yeah, again, quantum mechanics itself and research at the foundations of quantum mechanics will require us to understand something new about quantum mechanics. And it's in that place that trying to ask whether or not there's something quantum mechanical about our entire universe is a research question. So. So I like to summarize it with a quote from Albert Einstein, which is, if we knew what we were talking about, we wouldn't call it research. But again, just like we talk about jazz and physics, like the name of the game is, you know, is that we try to get our chops together. We're always on a continual path to refining our skill set and mastering what's currently understood. And we try our best to keep an open mind, to break new ground.
- [47:50]
Host
So would you say you feel good about the future of physics and where the science is going?
- [47:57]
Stephan Alexander
Well, you know, I do feel good about it because there's some, I think, extraordinary young people that are coming on the scene that I have gotten to work with and know, and. And I think that they're able to do things and, you know, their minds are much faster and sharper than mine now. And I think that I feel optimistic about their ability to take the baton and move forward. There is just so much that we don't understand. And I think that the thing that's all surprised me is that just when we think something is impossible to solve, for some weird reason, we've been able to make advances in physics. So I expect that to happen, even though as I'm saying all this and I look at. You know, when I'm done talking with you, I'm going to go back to my work with my research group. I have no clue how to. How to move forward on some days. I am definitely at a stage right now where I'm finding that I feel. I myself feel very stuck in my physics and in terms of breaking new ground in my own research.
- [49:16]
Host
Boy, that's a. Do you have a few more minutes? Because I would really love to know.
- [49:20]
Stephan Alexander
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have time.
- [49:22]
Host
I would just love to know why you feel stuck and what that means. I mean, I know. I mean, you do theoretical physics, obviously, cosmology. I mean, these are big, big, big questions. You're wrestling with. But. But why do you feel stuck? What does that even mean?
- [49:38]
Stephan Alexander
You know, when I first started from physics, I think I had this. This idea that maybe I will, you know, find some breakthrough in the field or something like that. And now I'm like, I'm just happy to publish a paper and make a tiny little contribution to a tiny little problem. But, you know, one of my mentors, Leon Cooper, always encouraged me. I mean, Leon won a Nobel Prize. He always encouraged me to think big and to never be afraid of asking the biggest question. And, you know, I have tried to do that. So there's a. You know, I think that ambition of trying to ask the biggest questions, sometimes I don't even know what question to ask. Yeah, but that's part of the process, and that's where I'm at now. And also, I think part of it is to find jobs for your students and find ways where they themselves can have careers. And there's sometimes I put a lot of pressure on myself over, like, I need to find things that they can work on or where they can actually have a career or get a job or get a postdoc. Right. So those things come into play as well. And also, if I actually shake things up too much or I do things that go too much against the grain, then that could actually jeopardize my students from actually getting a job, because they'll say, oh, he's a student of this guy who is doing all these things that we don't think should be done. So there's some of that going on as well, too.
- [51:06]
Host
Well, whatever you do, don't stop playing jazz. Keep doing that. Keep making music.
- [51:12]
Stephan Alexander
Well, of course, you know, the big fantasy is. Is that in the middle of a jazz solo, the idea comes to me, but that's more of a pipe dream, you know, because I'll get. I'll get to write a third book.
- [51:26]
Host
I love it. You know what? I'm gonna moonwalk out of here on that note. There's just so much here, and I could barely scratch the surface. So I will say, once again, the title of the book is Fear of a Black An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics. Stefan Alexander, this was a genuine pleasure. Thank you.
- [51:44]
Stephan Alexander
Thanks for having me.
- [52:09]
Host
All right. That was fun. A little jazz, a little physics. What else could you ask for? We don't usually use so much music in our episodes, but it felt right, right this time. Every song but one came from Stefan's most recent album, Spontaneous Fruit. There's also one track from his EP True to Self. We'll put those links in our show notes. As always, we want to know what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at the gray area@box.com I read those emails. Keep them coming. And if you can't do that, rate Review subscribe. All that stuff really helps. This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music and a special thanks to Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers.
- [53:11]
Stephan Alexander
Sam.