YouSaid · the spoken record

Don Lincoln

lines on the record: 207
first: 2026-05-29
most recent: 2026-05-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's true that the CERN accelerator, the big accelerator, is now much higher energy than the Fermilab accelerator was. No problem. But that's not how they make antiprotons. All of these big laboratories, it's not one accelerator. Fermilab, there were five distinct accelerators. And it was basically like shifting an old standard car because you couldn't just go zero to super speed. Current experimental program. They're doing a fascinating experimental program, including trying to figure out, does anti-gravity fall up or down, which is kind of neat. And we sort of know the answer to that separate. But anyway, so getting back to the antiproton business. While Fermilab doesn't do it now, it was top dog. It's not anymore. The only really big antiproton accelerator creator is a small accelerator at CERN.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There that is typically making antiprotons as opposed to making all particles in general. So let's focus on the antiproton side to begin with. All right. So Fermilab doesn't make antiprotons anymore. We stopped making them in 2011, and it's because we shut our big accelerator down to concentrate on a different facet of particle physics. However, at the time, we would smash protons with an energy of 120 GeV. And in that, we would make antiprotons. So that's a ton of energy.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collide two protons together at kind of low energy. You just don't have enough energy to make an antiproton. And so it doesn't happen. You get to a certain energy and you can just barely make them. The more energy you collide them together, the more you make. So that is just sort of how it works. More is better.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to make antimatter electrons, you smash together energy at a certain, it's just easier with electrons because the electrons to the best of our knowledge have nothing inside them. So they're simple. They have a certain mass, and that's that. So if you smash particles together with the right energy, you can make them very, very easily because it's like an old style radio back in the day where you had to dial it in. You could get right on the station and you could hear the signal. And if you were off a little, it didn't work. The problem for things like protons and so forth is they're not point-like particles. They're kind of like garbage cans full of stuff. And so it's very difficult to make antimatter protons. Now, you can get more of them by increasing the energy at which you collide two particles together. If you're at below a certain energy, and you collide, say you...”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very costly in order at the Fermilab machine, we would have to smash 100,000 protons into something to make one antimatter proton. So, I mean, it took some work.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, any particle that doesn't exist in nature we can make in this way. You can make the antimatter electron by taking two particles, smashing them together. The energy sits there and it will make an electron and an antimatter electron. And it just does. And we know that the antimatter electron was discovered in 1932. This is all pretty easy. The antimatter proton was discovered in 1955 at the Berkeley Bevatron. And so this is just what you do. You can convert energy into a matter antimatter particle. Now, the converse goes through in that something we might talk about. You can take matter and antimatter and bring it together and it'll make energy. It's the process can go both ways. Energy can make matter and antimatter. Matter and antimatter can make energy. And this is.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The directions cancel, so the net momentum, the net energy of this has no motion. So you have these two things coming in with exactly balanced energy. And if they collide, they could stop. Well, that energy has to go somewhere. And that energy can literally create mass, create particles. Now, there are special rules about what happens if you have two things coming together and it creates a particle. It has to create an antimatter particle to balance it. That's just kind of the rules of the laws of nature. Why is that the case? Well, we have some ideas, but in many respects, the answer is because those are the laws of the universe. And that's the things that we try to understand. But this is absolutely true. So what particle accelerators do, among other things, is simply transform energy into particles. And so”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But buried inside that equation is a really thoroughly fascinating concept that energy and matter are equivalent. And you can, in fact, convert movement energy into mass. And so this is something that we've known for a long time. This was predicted back in basically 1928, so a long time ago, actually almost 100 years ago. And it is not in the slightest bit controversial. We can do this all the time. So the simplest thing is to take two particles that have no structure. So, you know, the closest thing you can have to BBs that are just true mathematical BBs. If you smash those two things together, it's coming in with a huge amount of energy from one direction, a huge amount of energy from the other direction.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody has heard Einstein's equation equals mc squared. Nobody knows what it means. Maybe they heard that energy equals mass and mass equals energy. I don't know, you know. But they heard the equation. The most famous equation in all of science.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what we can do is not see the field, but we can actually excite the field, make it vibrate, and detect the vibrations. So the Higgs boson idea was predicted in 64. It became useful in 67. And then scientists started looking for it. So in the early 2000s, people were starting to think that we had built particle accelerators more powerful or powerful enough to actually be able to create these vibrations and detect them. So the accelerator that was working at the time was a large particle accelerator outside Chicago at Fermilab called the Tevatron. And we were colliding protons and antimatter protons near the speed of light at very high energy. And that was the accelerator at which the top quark was discovered in 95. But we had”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, excellent. So we have never seen the Higgs field. Higgs Field is a hypothetical, theoretical thing. But that is true of most of our fields. We've never seen the electromagnetic field. We've never seen the gravity field. We've seen the effect of the field. And so all of these theories are now what we call quantum field theories. And the whole idea of quantum fields, if you have a quantum field, but that field can vibrate like a drum head. And so it doesn't vibrate just exactly like a drum head, but it vibrates locally. So you can have specific localized vibrations. And those specific localized vibrations are the particles. In the electromagnetic field, the vibration is the photon. In the Higgs field, the vibration is the Higgs boson.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to fix the theory, and you need to fix the theory by effectively putting a band-aid on the theory. Higgs theory is just a band-aid on top of Electroweak symmetry theory, and that is the bandaid that fixes it because it gives mass to particles at low energy.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is when the universe cooled down after the Big Bang, it was very hot, very high energy, nothing had mass. The universe cooled and at a certain temperature, what happened is the Higgs field turned on. And at the moment it turned on, it gave mass to the weak force particles, did not give mass to the photons. So that's what we call electroweak symmetry breaking. So it's a mouthful. But all it says is there was a moment in time early in the history of the universe at 10 to the minus 12 seconds after the Big Bang. The Higgs field turned on and particles got mass. So that's the whole idea. So this is another really neat thing. So the electroweak symmetry theory doesn't need Higgs because that only really applies at very, very high energies. But in order to make it work at low energies,”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't interact, it has no mass. So that's kind of what Weinberg and Salamik Last Show said is that very high energies, the Higgs field is zero, since the Higgs field is zero, the weak force particles don't feel massed, and therefore they can travel at the speed of light, just like the photon does, and everything's happy.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is really all the Higgs field is. Some particles have effectively what you would call the Higgs charge that interacts and sees the field. And other particles don't. And that is really what you read just basically means. Now, it's kind of neat because in the ordinary day, there is a Higgs field right there, and the Higgs field is not zero, just like gravity is not zero and things will get mass. But it's super high energies. The Higgs field, the strength of the Higgs field goes to zero. So other things have mass, whether they have a Higgs charge or not, they have no charge or they have the Higgs charge.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here we go Great. This thing has mass and we drop it. How remarkable it falls. But when we step back and think about what really happens, it's the mass of this thing and the interaction with this invisible field we see here, that's what gives this weight. Now I have this particle here that you can't see, but it's there. It has no mass. I leave it there. Well, since it has no mass, it doesn't feel gravity, it's still floating there.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I were to take something, a pen or whatever, and put it there, it feels a force and a false. Very insightful, I know. So we have the gravity field and we have the pen that has a mass, and the mass and the gravity field interact, and it drops. Now, if we had another”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So let's talk about something a little more familiar just to try and hang some intuition on those words. All right. So right in front of us, there is a gravitational field. Now, you can't see it, but right there, right there. Check it out.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we make it so that there is now an electromagnetic force and a weak force is the force carrying particle of electromagnetism has no mass. The force carrying particle of the weak force has a mass. And so what was done is a field was postulated that there was this additional field that was kind of distinct from this electroweak field, and we call it the Higgs field. And the Higgs field permeates all of space. And here's the kicker, some particles interact with a field and some particles don't interact with a field. The ones that interact with the field get mass, and the ones that don't interact with the field don't have mass. And so that's the idea. Is that Higgs Field gives the weak force particles mass. However, the photon laughs at the Higgs field, doesn't see it, and it has no mass”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to say, oh, they're the same, and yet one can reach across the universe and one can't reach out of an atom. Well, that's just dumb. I mean, the obvious thought here is, well, we just prove that that whole idea is stupid. So throw it away. Ridiculous. And that is where these ideas from 1964 came in and saved the day. So how can it be true? That the electroweak force is real, an electromagnetism, and the weak force act so differently. The way that could happen is if these forces were transmitted by a particle moving from one subatomic particle to the other, in the case of electromagnetism, it's the photon. In the case of the weak force, we call them now the W and Z particles. So the idea Electroweak force is real.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And that was in'67. All right, everybody talks about this thing happening in 64, but it really wasn't. It happened over quite a few years, actually. But, all right, so now what you said is true. So Weinberg, Glashell, and Salam showed that electromagnetism in the weak force at high energies were the same. There was a problem, however. And the problem is that electromagnetism has an infinite range. And we know that because we can see stars that are millions of light years away. I mean, that shows you that the range of that force is essentially infinite. The weak force, however, basically becomes non-existent on distances much smaller than the size of a proton.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the story that you're told in articles about this, about what people have called the Higgs boson of the God particle, the story is very, very simplified. Because in 1964, there were three groups with six individuals who came up with important papers talking about what's called the Higgs field. And I'll get to what that is in a minute. But the Higgs Field is important. But it wasn't until 1967. So three years later, that Stephen Weinberg and some others actually unified electromagnetism in the weak force.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done enough experiments, done enough theorizing to say that there were these four forces. And that was already a triumph. I mean, in our goal for a theory of everything, we like to think that there is one force, which is what we're talking about, the unification, maybe these four forces are just different ways of looking at a single underlying force. But in the 30s, that's where we were. There were the four forces. So we move ahead and in the late 50s and early 60s, some people were thinking that maybe the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism actually were the same. So they were working on trying to bring together these two forces to show that they're connected. And it came true. They were able to show that electricity and magnetism were actually two different facets of a single force that we now call the electroweak force.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, we're sort of jumping forward here now to the 1930s or thereabout. And by that time, people had realized that there are four distinct forces that do not seem to be connected. One is gravity, two is electromagnetism, and those are things people are relatively familiar with. But there are two other forces that only have any real importance inside the nucleus of atoms, which is why most people have no experience with them. One is the strong nuclear force, which holds the nucleus of the atoms together, and the other one is what we call the weak nuclear force. which is responsible for some types of radioactivity. And since most people don't play around with nuclei and most people don't play around with radioactivity, they don't know what that is. But by the 30s, scientists had...”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That combative, just downright kind of jerky critique that most people don't like. They don't like people saying your ideas might be wrong. But that is crucial. It is a crucial part of the scientific process.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're able to critique an idea, you might kill it. And that is, it's always depressing when I have this brilliant idea and it gets killed, but it's better to be killed and to keep it around and waste time on it. And so he was in that case not generating the aha, but he was saying, all right, let's take your aha. Let's see it's right. What does it mean? It means this that allows people to go test it. And so he was contributing very crucially to that other part of scientific advancement, which is not just the aha moment, but the beat it to death, tested critique it, and make sure it's real. And it's only after all of that has been done that you really assure you're right. And that's why science is such a powerful tool. It is that”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All fairness, it's weird for me too. But the thing is, even while that is true, and Einstein maybe spent the last few years of his life trying to blend electricity and magnetism, gravity in a single thing, and he was unsuccessful. But he still was a very, very valuable critic of quantum mechanics. It's not that he didn't understand it because he did understand it. He thought about the implications and all this quantum entanglement business, not all of it, but he was responsible for saying, well, if you're right, then this. And of course, then people went out and found out that Einstein's implication of quantum mechanics was real. And so they could say, see, quantum mechanics is real. He was thinking deeply about it, and he was doing exactly that thing I said. There's that spark idea, but there's that critique idea.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self critique that's necessary. And so they come up with these ideas and often it's easy to see where they just don't play out. So in order to be that person who changes the way we see the world, ideas themselves are not enough. These creative ideas, that's not enough. You need it with the discipline and the critique. And it's that amalgam of those things that make you a genius that history remembers.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think so. There's a lot about science. There's, of course, knowing what went before. There is knowing the mathematics that allows you to figure out the implications of your theory. There is the discipline to argue with yourself and other people because most ideas are wrong. But then there's what you just described, that intuitive spark. And that is something that is very, very difficult to create. There's a reason that we venerate these people is because it is an unusual feature. And most people only have that aha moment once in their lifetime if they have it at all. And then there's a tricky business because I'm sure you do. And I get a lot of letters from creative thinkers who don't have all of the history and the mathematical discipline and the”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. What Einstein realized was that if you were in a rocket ship and the rocket ship was a very quiet rocket ship and it was accelerating, it would feel like you were experiencing gravity. And so as you say, it's one of his happiest moments when he realized that acceleration and gravity feel very much the same. What I'm impressed by is that idea, which is already a pretty neat idea. Somehow led him to take his space time idea, take this acceleration gravity idea, and realize that he could describe gravity as the bending of spacetime. Spacetime being constant like east, west, north, south, that's already hard enough. But now he's saying, well, you know, take your map and crinkle it and bend it and so forth. And that's gravity. That is a staggering mind-blowing idea.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little kids, that the world was made of atoms. Now, that's crazy. Most people have never seen atoms, and yet nobody really doubts it anymore. And I think it's just a case of familiarity and then the culture slowly accepts it. And it's real, even without the evidence. In fact, one of the courses you described there, how we know what we know, I think that's a valid question. How do we know there are atoms? And of course, there are ways we do.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give you an even more basic example sodium and chloride. Sodium is an explosive metal. You put it in water and it's kind of neat. You put it in water and it doesn't quite explode, but it gets hot and it pops around. Chlorine, it's a gas. It's going to kill you. So these two things are deadly. They're awful. And yet when you mix them, you put it on your food at night, salt, right? And so this is a case where this whole A unification and B, this deeper understanding, in this case of chemistry, of how two things that are dangerous can be brought together and turned into something not only innocuous, but necessary for human life. And so this is not unusual, what you're describing. I mean, when you think about it, forget about everything else, just the fact that we tell little kids.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the speed of light through spacetime. Once you embrace that, that makes a whole ton of sense. It all of a sudden makes everything fall much more into place. I think that there is an ultimate speed isn't that shocking. It just simply says that it's a property of space in the same way that there is a space can transmit a certain strength, electric field. It can support a certain things. Whatever space is, and we don't know what space is, but whatever it is, it has the capability of transmitting these things at that one speed through space or time. And everything else comes from our insisting that we keep space and time different. That's how I view it. And at least for me. Once I accepted that, it all became very comfortable.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have to tell you when I first encountered this, it's pretty freaking weird. It's like pegs the weird meter. But as you become more familiar with it, as you become more comfortable with the idea, the thing to remember is the speed of light.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of light. So that is an actual measurement, but that is not something that was possible in Einstein's day. But it is now.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“95 or 97 or very large fraction of the speed of light. And then they decay into photons. And so you measure how long it takes for the photon to get to your detector. And it says it's light travels at the speed of light. Now, if it were that if Einstein's conjecture was incorrect, you'd have a particle coming out at near the speed of light. It would be decaying into a particle traveling at the speed of light. then that particle should have traveled at say two times the speed of light or something like that. So it should have taken half as much time to get to the detector, but it doesn't. So this is a hard, serious measurement that shows that something, we can measure the speed at which light comes out of this stationary created particle, and it's the speed of light, then we can measure what the speed is of it coming out of something that's moving, and it's still the speed.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, that assumption leads to predictions the predictions are true, so the assumption is true. Now, there is, for those people, for your viewers who want to say, well, how do you measure that the speed of light is the same for everyone? The particle physicists do this. And the way you do this is the following. There are some subatomic particles that when they decay, they emit light. That's their decay product. And so you collide two things together so you know when the particle was created. Then you have surround your collision point by a detector and you measure how long it takes for light to get to your detector. And by God, it's the speed of light, which it should be. However, sometimes in these collisions, some of these subatomic particles you make are coming out at very high speed. They might be coming out at”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Irrespective of how we're moving with respect to each other. You'll measure the speed of light to be a number. I'll measure the speed of light to be a number. And that's very, very different from what Newton would have said or Galilee or any of the old guys. And it was taking those two things together that caused all of the weirdnesses of special relativity. Now, you could then very easily say, well, that second premise that everybody measures the speed of light to the same is just dumb and that you could test that. So that's where testing relativity comes in. And Einstein's equations, which include those two assumptions, it predicts the behavior of everything perfectly well. Now, we've actually measured, done experiments where we can say that the speed of light is the same for everybody. That's not how that's been in the beginning.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a premise. He had two premises. One was that the laws of nature are the same for everybody. So if you're moving at some speed, or if I'm moving at some speed, I can say I'm not moving and saying you're moving at some speed. That's not controversial. That is what we call Galilee and relativity. It's from hundreds of years ago. But what Einstein said that was controversial was that everybody measures that the speed of light is the same.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time are actually pretty much the same thing. That runs afoul of our understanding of how the world works because time just moves its continuous, we know what it is at a visceral level. An experiential level. We might not understand it on a formal level, but we know what time is it's what keeps today today and not yesterday or tomorrow. Space is a little different. You can walk somewhere, you can walk back, you can move around, you have more freedom to move in space than you have to move in time. You can always move forward in time. It's just moving backwards. It turns out to be a little more difficult. But yeah, Einstein's understanding that that is the case, it caused everybody to think about the world very, very differently. And that was in 1908 when Minkowski really laid it out in a strict space-time.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different people moving at different speeds with respect to one another experience time differently, which is absolutely a mind blowing concept. Now, most people think that Einstein then said, well, he invented spacetime, that space and time are the same thing. And he was behind that. But that actual insight came from one of his teachers, a guy by the name of Minkowski, who looked at Einstein's equations. Minkowski was a little bit more mathematically inclined than Einstein. And he saw that if you look at the equations, you have basically one person's space and time equals some numbers times this person's space and time. And so that's kind of a staggering thing. So that is where Einstein and Minkowski really did this unbelievable concept that space and”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Einstein, he's a pretty amazing guy in 1905. He had his miracle year where he wrote multiple papers. The one that most people know about is special relativity, where he showed something that makes no sense to anybody who's not really dug into it very hard. And that is that two people experience time differently. Time is a fascinating thing. We don't really understand what time is, which is weird. You think that that'd be something we don't understand very well, but we really don't. We know a lot about it, but really understanding it not so much. But Newton thought that time was just universal for everyone. So my time, your time, some person's time on Mars or on Alpha Centauri, everybody experienced time the same. What Einstein showed was that that wasn't the case.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have to really remember while people worry about nuclear weapons, which are admittedly very dangerous, and even nuclear power, which has waste it has to be dealt with, what science is doing is Finding power that nature has presented to us. This is not new. Fire is like that too. Fire can burn down your house or it can cook your steak. Power is like that. And that's just something that we have to understand as humanity. And that's why this needs to be, you know, when we talk about science, it has to be a broad conversation by all of society because what scientists can do is figure out how the world works. Society has to figure out how we wish to apply that or not apply that.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to need power no matter what. Nobody is going to go back to the way things were in the 1700s. And one enormous source of energy that is there for us to take if we so choose is the modification of the nucleus of atoms. Seem to have absolutely nothing to do with anything. And yet it provides humanity with an opportunity, which of course requires that we think carefully of how we do that. And if we want to, but it gives us something that we didn't have before.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understood mysterious things can a hundred or two hundred years later transform the world. And the type of science I do now, people often ask, well, what good is knowing about how the inside of atoms work, how the inside of quarks work? And I don't know the answer to that, but just being a little more pragmatic, if I go back, say, 100 years where people were trying to understand how the protons and neutrons inside atoms held together, how they split, how you could combine them and so forth. This has led to nuclear power. Now, whatever you think about nuclear power, and some people like it, and some people don't, but it is powerful. It will generate energy for humanity. And it may be that is the path that we take as we move away from digging fossil fuels out of the ground.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us together. So it's a staggering advance in science to have a good behavior on that. And of course, Being able to tame electromagnetism is why people can hear you when you do your podcast, because through the miracles of the internet, or just electricity running the computers. I mean, this is a case, if I can get on a small soapbox, where people back then said, well, why are you messing around with magnets and sparks? And who cares? Well, that very fundamental digging into the laws of nature has spin-offs and it has spin-offs, one of the big spin-offs is our entire technological society without being able to govern electricity, we'd still be farmers and shoemakers in cities, but we certainly would not have everything that we do. So off my soapbox. But it's really a lovely thing to show how this digging into deep fundamental, non-”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Laws of magnetism combined together make what's called a wave equation, which shows that these electric and magnetic fields oscillate, they vary. And if you have something that's very, that's a wave. And the wave then moves. And if you do the math, you find out that the speed at which these waves move is the speed of light. And so people said, wow, the speed of light comes out of those equations. And that had to be, I think, very persuasive. And of course, electromagnetism also plays a really significant role in chemistry because after all, atoms are held together by electromagnetic forces. There's more to how atoms work. There is all the quantum mechanics stuff. But if you did not have electromagnetism or if electromagnetism was very different than atoms, would be very different. So it plays a very big role in holding.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what is at the very, very bottom? And also, that's great. But if you know what the smell of building blocks are, that doesn't tell you the story. It's like having a whole bunch of Legos, but not knowing how to put them together. You also need to know how they interact, how they work. And so that's what we study forces. So there are the various subatomic forces of which we're familiar. And for instance, electricity and magnetism are components of electromagnetism, which then governs the behavior of things like this is amazing. Electromagnetism explains, of course, electricity magnetism, but it explains how light works. It explains how much of chemistry works. It's very easy to see that the laws of electricity.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the whole Darwinian evolution, the fact that our genetics has a significant overlap with the genetics of a banana is pretty staggering. It's astonishing. Its cause, whatever happens in biology is caused by the movement of molecules. And then you say, well, that's great and all. But molecules, they do what they do because they're made of atoms. And then the next step is, well, you know, atoms, that's great, but atoms work the way they do because of the nucleus and the electrons. And then the nucleus is protons and neutrons. And so there are those of us, myself included, who want to dig down to the very, very bottom and find out what is the smallest building block of nature from which all of these other far more complex and interesting and abstract things are.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that's kind of important because the goal is, of course, to unify everything. If I could do what I want to do, I would have some unified theory that would explain the behavior of all energy matter, space, and time, which is a grand goal.”
2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source