YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Frenkel

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257
first
2023-04-10
most recent
2023-04-10
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Well, in that respect, I think what I was really craving was a deeper understanding. And up to that point, the deepest that I could see was were those diagrams, but that story that a proton consists of three quarks and a neutron consists of three quarks, and they're called up and down and so on. But I didn't know that there was actually underneath, beneath the surface, there was this mathematical theory.”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Have to learn what are groups, what is group SU3, what are representations of SU3. There was a coherent and beautiful, I could appreciate the beauty even though I could not understand. Heads and tails of”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's kind of like a Bible, you know, like a substantial book. And he opens somewhere in the middle. And there I see the diagrams that I saw in popular books. But in popular books, there was no explanation. And now I see all these weird symbols and equations. It's clear that it is explained in there. Oh my God. Said, you think what they teach you at school is mathematics. Like, no, this is real mathematics. So I was instantly converted.”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And I said, Yes, of course, I know about quarks. Quarks are constituents of particles like protons and neutrons. And it was one of the greatest discoveries in theoretical physics in the 60s that those particles were not elementary, but in fact had the smaller parts. And he said, oh, so then you probably know representation theory of the group SU3, like SU1. In fact, I wanted to know what were the underpinnings of those theories. I knew the story, I knew the narrative, I knew kind of the basic story of what these particles looked like. But how did physicists come up with these ideas? How were they able to theorize them? And so I remember, you know, like it was yesterday. So he pulls out a book.”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, isn't it funny? I'll be remember numbers. So his name was Evgeny Yevgenovich, Petrov. And if this doesn't remind you of the great works of Russian literature, then you haven't read them, like War and Peace, with the patronymic names. But this was all real. This was all happening. So my mom one day by chance met Evgeny Evgenovich and told him about me that I was the bright kid and interested in physics. And he said, oh, I want to meet him. I'm going to convert him into math. My mom was like, nah, math, he doesn't like mathematics. So they said, okay, let's see what they can do. So I went to see him, so I'm about 15, and a bit arrogant, I would say, you know, like every teenager. So he says to me. So I hear that you are interested in physics and the metric particles. It's like, yeah, sure. For example, do you know about quark”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “To delve into this finer structure of the universe. So then something happened when I was 15 years old. It turns out that a friend of my parents was a mathematician who was a professor at the local college. It was a small college preparing educators and teachers. It's a provincial town. Imagine it's like 117 kilometers from Moscow, which would be sometimes 70 miles, I guess. You do the math.”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union. Small town near Moscow called Kalumna. And I was a smart kid, you know, in school, but mathematics was probably my least favorite subject. Not because I couldn't do it. I was a straight A student and I could do all the problems easily. But I thought it was incredibly boring And since the only math I knew was what was presented at school. Thought that was it. And it's like, what kind of boring subject is this? So, what I really liked was physics and especially quantum physics. So I was buying, I would go to a bookstore and buy popular books about elementary particles and atoms and things like that and read them, you know, devour them. And so I thought my dream was to become a theoretical physicist.”

    2023-04-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source