YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Wilczek

lines on the record: 145
first: 2021-05-29
most recent: 2021-05-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's been a joy, and I hope people enjoy it. And I think the kind of mind expansion that I've enjoyed by interacting with physical reality at this deep level, I think can be conveyed to and enjoyed by many, many people. And that's one of my missions in life. It's beautiful.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, interacting with people I love, my family, and I have a very wide circle of friends now, and I'm trying to produce some institutions that will survive me as well as work. And it's just, it's how should I say it's a positive feedback loop when you do something and people appreciate it and then you want to do more and they get rewarded. How should I say? This is another gift that I didn't earn and don't understand, but I have a dopamine system. And yeah, I'm happy to use it.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of machine learning and things like that but I'm also concentrating within physics on exploiting directions that I've already established and the laws that we already have and doing things like I'm very actively involved in trying to helping people experimentalists and engineers even to design antennas that are capable of detecting axions. So we're deep in the exploitation stage. It's not a matter of finding the new laws but of really using the laws we have to kind of finish the story off. So it's complicated but I'm very happy with my life right now and I'm enjoying it and I don't want to cloud that bye. Thinking too much that it's going to come to an end. You know, it's a gift I didn't earn.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several years ago, now, when I was 50 years old, I was at the Institute for Advanced Study and my office was right under Freeman Dyson's office, and we were kind of friendly. And he found out it was my 50th birthday and said, congratulations. And you should feel liberated because no one expects much of a 50-year-old theoretical physicist. And he obviously had felt liberated by reaching a certain age. And yeah, there is something to that. I feel I don't have to catch. I don't have to keep in touch with the latest hypertechnical developments in particle physics or string theory or something because I'm not going to be exploiting that. But where I am exploring in these directions.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. This is a classic subject in computer science, actually, in machine learning, that when you're in an unusual circumstance, you want to explore to see what the landscape is and what gathered data. But then at some point, you want to use that, decide choices and say, this is what I'm going to do and exploit the knowledge you've accumulated. The longer the period of exploitation you anticipate, the more exploration you should do in new directions. And so for me, I've had to sort of adjust the balance of exploration and exploitation. Explored quite a lot. Yeah. Well, I haven't shut off the exploitation at all. I'm still hoping for the exploration, right? I'm still hoping for 10 or 15 years of top flight performance. But the...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, afraid is the wrong word. I wish it weren't going to happen and I'd like to think about it. Occasionally I think about, well, I think about it very operationally in the sense that”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As soon as possible, because it's like learning a language to produce great works and express yourself fluently and with confidence. Should be your native language, these things should be like your native language, so you're not wondering what is a derivative. This is just part of your, it's in your bones, so to speak. And the sooner that you can do that, then the better. So all those things can be done in parallel and should be.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The context of the human being that created those ideas. Right. And brings it down to earth in the sense that it was really human beings who did this. And they made mistakes. I got inspiration from Bertrand Russell, who was a big hero and H.G. Wells. Read the master's. make contact with great minds. And when you are sort of narrowing down on a subject, learn about the history of the subject because that really puts in context what you're trying to do and also gives a sense of community and grandeur to the whole enterprise. And then the third piece of advice is complementary to both those, which is sort of to get the basics under control as soon as possible. If you want to do theoretical work in science, you have to learn calculus.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History and read the masters of the history of ideas and masters of ideas. I benefited enormously in my career from reading in physics, Einstein in the original and Feynman's lectures as they were coming out and Darwin. You can learn what it is in Galileo. You can learn what it is to wrestle with difficult ideas and how great minds did that. You can learn a lot about style, how to write your ideas up and express them in clear ways.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But So that's one thing. Cast a wide net, look around. And that's... A pretty easy thing to do today because of the internet. You can look at all kinds of things. You have to be careful though because there's a lot of crap also. But you can sort of tell the difference if you do a little digging. So don't settle on just what your thesis advisor tells you to do or what your teacher tells you to do. Look for yourself and get a sense of what seems promising, not what seemed promising 10 years ago. So that's one. Another thing is to. Is kind of complementary to that. Well, they're all complementary. Complementary to that is to read.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And promise, yeah, and those you have to balance those two things. You can have things that catch your imagination, but don't look promising in the sense that the questions aren't ripe and things that you, in part of what makes things attractive is that whether you thought you liked them or not, is if you can see that this ferment and new ideas coming up, that's attractive in itself. When I started out, I thought when I was an undergraduate, I intended to study philosophy or questions of how mind emerges from matter. But I thought that wasn't really right. Timing isn't right yet. Timing wasn't right for the kind of mathematical thinking and conceptualization that I really enjoy and good at.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there is an audio book. That's awesome. Yeah, I think I can give three pieces of wise advice that I think are generally applicable. One is to cast a wide net. To really look around and see what looks promising, what catches your imagination.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think physics in the larger sense has a lot to contribute here. Not the physics of finding fundamental new laws in the sense of another quark or axions even. But physics in the sense of, you know, physics has a lot of experience in analyzing complex situations and analyzing new states of matter and devising new kinds of instruments that do clever things. Physics in that sense has enormous amounts to contribute to this kind of endeavor. But I don't think that looking for a so-called theory of everything has much to do with it at all.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be, you know, it could be human brains or cells that realize something like human brain architecture within. Within artificial environments, you know, shells, if you like, that are more adapted to the conditions of space. And so that's entirely man-machine hybrids, as well as sort of remote outposts that we can communicate with. I think those will happen.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And information processing, what you mean, how should I? I think human bodies are not well adapted to space. Even Mars, even which is the closest thing to kind of human environment that we're going to find anywhere close by, very, very difficult to maintain humans on Mars and going to be very expensive and very unstable. But I think the process, however, if we Take a broader view of what it means to bring human civilization. Outside of the earth, if we're satisfied with sending mines out there that we can converse with and actuators and that we can manipulate and sensors that we can get feedback from, I think that's That's where it's at.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On rocket design, on anything, any technology whatsoever. And now we're talking about much more esoteric things. And since I don't know what they are, I can't say for sure that they won't affect technology, but I'm very, very skeptical that they would affect technology. Because to access them, you need very exotic circumstances to make new kinds of particles with high energy. You need accelerators that are very expensive and you don't produce many, many of them and so forth. It's a pipe dream, I think. About space exploration. I'm not sure exactly what he has in mind. But to me, It's more a problem of. Something between biology and maybe a little.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might. I can't say that it won't, but I can say that in the 1970s and early 1980s, we achieved huge steps in understanding matter, QCD, much better understanding of the weak interaction, much better understanding of quantum mechanics in general, and it's had minimal impact on time.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. The predicted rate of radiation from those black holes is so tiny that it's absolutely unobservable and is overwhelmed by all kinds of other effects. So it's not practical in the sense of technology, it's not even practical in the sense of application to astronomy. We are existing theory of general relativity and quantum theory and our theory of the different fundamental forces is perfectly adequate. problems of Technology, for sure. And Almost all problems of astrophysics and cosmology that appear except with the notable exception of the extremely early universe, if you want to ask, what happened before the Big Bang or what happened right at the Big Bang, which would be a great thing to understand, of course.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that's yes, maybe it understands black holes, but That's not useful in my book. And, well, not only, I mean, to understand, it's worse, you know, it's not useful in the sense that we're not going to be basing any technology anytime soon on black holes, but it's more severe than that, I would say. It's that the kinds of questions about black holes that we can't answer within the framework of existing theory. Are ones that are not going to be susceptible to astronomical observation in the foreseeable future. There are questions about very, very small black holes when quantum effects come into play so that black holes are not black holes. They're emitting this discovery of Hawking called Hawking radiation, which for astronomical black holes is a tiny, tiny effect that no one has ever observed. It's a prediction that's never been.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, probably not. Well, I shouldn't, it's dangerous to say that, but probably not. I think we, not certainly not in the foreseeable future.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's usually meant in the literature perpetual motion is Kind of macroscopic motion that you could extract energy from and somehow it would crank back up. That's not the case here. If you want to extract energy, you can. This motion is not something you're going to extract energy from. If you intervene in the behavior, you can change it, but only by injecting energy, not by taking away energy.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is one. So time crystals do obey do have this structure in time, but it's not a free lunch because although in a sense things are moving, they're already doing what they want to do. So if you want to extract energy from it, you're going to be foiled because there's no spare energy there. So you can add energy to it and kind of disturb it, but you can't extract energy from this motion because it's going to, it wants to do that. That's the lowest energy configuration that there is. So you can't get further energy out of it.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but it requires a critical examination of the laws of thermodynamics. I mean, let me say on background that the laws of thermodynamics are not fundamental laws of physics. They are things we prove. Under certain circumstances emerge from the fundamental laws of physics, we don't posit them separately. They're meant to be deduced, and they can be deduced under limited circumstances, but not necessarily universally. And we found finding some of the subtleties and sort of edge cases where they don't apply in a straightforward way.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the crystalline form. You could also have time liquids, or you can have all kinds of other states of matter. You can also have space-time crystals where the pattern only repeats if with each step of time you also move at a certain direction in space. So, yeah, but basically it's states of matter that display structure in time spontaneously.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And many materials, if you cool them down gently. Will form crystals. And so we say that that's a state of matter that forms spontaneously and an important feature of that state of matter is that the end result, the crystal. Has less symmetry than the equations that give rise to the crystal. So the equations, the basic equations of physics are the same if you move a little bit so you can move the homogeneous, but crystals aren't. The atoms are in particular places. So they have less symmetry. Time crystals are the same thing in time. Basically, but of course, so it's not positions of atoms, but it's ordering orderly behavior that certain states of matter will arrange themselves into spontaneously if you do them gently and let them do what they want to do.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there have been quite a few false alarms, and I think there are some of them still, I mean, people desperately want to find this thing. But I don't think any of them are convincing at this point. But there are very ambitious Experiments and kind of you have to design new kinds of antennas that are capable of detecting these predicted particles and it's very difficult. They interact very, very weakly. If it were easy, it would have been done already. But I think there's good hope that we can get down to the required sensitivity and actually test whether these ideas are right in coming years or maybe decades.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explain, yeah, would solve this fundamental question of finally of why the laws are almost but not quite exactly the same if you run them backwards in time and then seemingly in a totally different conceptual universe it would also provide give us an understanding of the dark matter that's not what it was designed for and the theory wasn't wasn't proposed with that in mind but when you work at the equations that's what you get”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd like to think so. And many physicists are coming around to this point of view. I've been a voice in the wilderness. I was a voice in the wilderness for a long time, but now it's become very popular, maybe even dominant in the...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evolved over time. And that energy takes the form of particles, fields that are in motion are always associated with particles. And those are the axions. And if you calculate how much energy is in these residual oscillations, this axion gas that fills all the universe, if this fundamental theory is correct, you get Just the right amount to make the dark matter that astronomers want. And it has just the right properties. So I'd love to believe that”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this case, it's been fruitful to think and work out a theory where that Strength of interaction. Is actually not a constant. It's a field. It's fields are the fundamental ingredients of modern physics. Like there's an electron field, there's a photon field, which is also called the electromagnetic field. And so all of these particles are manifestations of different fields. There could be a field, something that depends on space and time, so a dynamical entity instead of just a constant here. And if you do things in a nice way, very much suggested, aesthetically by the theory. But the theory we do have, then you find that you get A field Which as it evolves from the early universe, Settles down. A value That's just right to make the laws very nearly exact, invariant or symmetric with respect to reversal of time.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't occur. So we still got a problem. Why doesn't it occur? So we're close to really finally understanding this profound gratuitous feature of the world that is almost but not quite symmetric under reversing the direction of time, but not quite there. And to understand that last bit. Is a challenging frontier of physics today. And we have a promising proposal for how it works, which is a kind of theory of evolution. So there's this possible interaction, which we call a coupling, and there's a numerical quantity that tells us how strong that is. And traditionally in physics, we think of these kinds of numerical quantities as constants of nature that You just have to put them in from experiment. They have a certain value and that's it. And who am I to question when I've gotten to it? They seem to be just constants.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of them occurs and leads to a very rich theory that explains the Cronin-Fitch experiment and a lot of things that have been done subsequently has been used to make all kinds of successful predictions. So that's turned out to be a very rich. Interaction, it's esoteric and the effects only show up at accelerators and are small and so, but they might have been very important in the early universe and lead to them be connected to the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the present universe. And so, but that's another digression. The point is that that was fine. That was a triumph to say that there was one possible kind of interaction that would violate time reversal symmetry and sure enough, there it is. But the other kind...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the late part of the 20th century, in getting to an understanding of fundamental interactions in general that shed light on this issue, it turns out that the basic principles of relativity and quantum mechanics plus the kind of high degree of symmetry that we found, the so-called gauge symmetry that characterizes the fundamental interactions. When you put all that together, it's a very, very constraining framework. And it has some indirect consequences. Because the possible interactions are so constrained. And one of the indirect consequences is that the possibilities for violating the symmetry between forwards and backwards in time are very limited. There are basically only two”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to get to the bottom turtle. So it became, so it got to be a real, I mean, it's a really puzzling thing why the laws should have this very odd property that we don't need. And in fact, it's kind of an embarrassment in addressing empirical reality, but it seemed to be exactly true for a long time. And then almost true. And in a way almost true is more disturbing than exactly true because exactly true. It could have been just a fundamental feature of the world. And at some level, you just have to take it as it is. And if it's a beautiful, easily articulable regularity, you could say that, okay, that's fine as a fundamental law of nature. But to say that it's approximately true, but not exactly that's not weird. And then so there was great progress”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's yeah, it's embarrassing. Well, people Worked hard at what's this is a problem that's thought to belong to the foundations of statistical mechanics or the foundations of thermodynamics to understand how behavior, which is grossly not symmetric with respect to reversing the direction of time in large objects, how that can emerge from equations which are symmetric with respect to changing the direction of time to a very good approximation. And that's still an interesting endeavor. That's interesting. And actually it's an exciting frontier of physics now to sort of explore the boundary between when that's true and when it's not true, when you get to smaller objects and exceptions like time crystals.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could tell, but you'd have to do very, very subtle experiments with at high energy accelerators to take a movie that looked different when you ran it backwards. Two great physicists named Cronin and Jim Cronin and Val Fitch in the mid-1960s, previous to that over all the centuries of development of physics with all his precise laws. They did seem to have this gratuitous property. That they look the same if you run the equations backwards. It's kind of an embarrassing property, actually, because life isn't like that. So empirical reality does not have this imagery in any obvious way. And yet the laws did.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like a mirror in time. If you run the movie backwards, it would look very strange if you were looking at complicated objects and, you know, a Charlie Chaplin movie or whatever, it would look very strange if you ran it backwards in time. But at the level of basic interactions, if you were able to look at the atoms and the quarks involved, they would obey the same laws. to a very good approximation, but not exactly.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And time and space reversal. If you do all three, then you get the same physical consequences. Now, but that means that CP is equivalent to T. But what's observed in the world is that T is not quite an accurate symmetry of nature either. So most phenomena at the fundamental level, so interactions among elementary particles and the basic gravitational interaction. If you ran them backwards in time, You'd get the same laws. So again, this time we don't talk about a mirror, but we talk about a movie. If you take a movie and then run it backwards, that's the time reversal.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CPT is an accurate symmetry of nature. It's on the same level as relativity and quantum mechanics basically. So that better be true.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem. Shove them off. Okay, great. Because it's easier to talk about tea, which is time reversal symmetry. We have very good reasons to think.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't necessarily hold. It doesn't quite hold, and examining what the exceptions are turned out to lead to low kinds of insight about the nature of fundamental interactions, especially properties of neutrinos and the weak interactions. It's a long story, but it's a very, it's a”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same laws as the sources of their images. There's no way of telling left from right, for instance, that the laws don't distinguish between left and right. Now, in the mid-20th century, people discovered that both of those are not quite true. Really, the equation, that the mirror universe, the universe... That you see in a mirror is not going to obey the same laws as the universe that we actually exhibit and interpret. You would be able to tell if you did the right kind of experiments, which was the mirror and which was the real thing. Anyway”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so let me start with what this strong CP problem is. First of all, Well, charge conjure C is charge conjugation, which is the transformation, the notional transformation, if you like, that changes all particles into their antiparticles. And the concept of C symmetry, charge conjugation symmetry, is that if you do that, you find the same laws would work. So the laws are symmetric if the behavior that particles exhibit is the same as the behavior you get with all their antiparticles. Then P is parity, which is also called spatial inversion. It's basically looking at a mirror universe and saying that the laws that are obeyed in a mirror universe, when you look, the mirror images obey the”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Born free. That's very good. Yes. Chris was born. So in atomic physics, I mean, a similar thing happens in the theory of stars. Stars are hot enough that the interactions between electrons and photons, they're liberated. They don't form atoms anymore. They make a plasma, which in some ways is simpler to understand. You don't have complicated chemistry. And in the early universe, according to QCD, Similarly, atomic nuclei dissolved and take the constituent quarks and gluons which are moving around very fast and interacting in relatively simple ways. And so this opened up the early universe to scientific calculation.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, in that regard, asymptotic freedom is a tremendous blessing because it means things get simpler at high energy.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similar kind of dynamics. I say, I like to say that QCD is like QED on steroids. And instead of one photon, you have eight gluons. Instead of one charge, you have three color charges. But there's a strong family resemblance.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we now would understand, I think most physicists would say it's the theory of quarks and gluons and how they interact. But it's a very precise. And I think it's fair to say very beautiful theory based on mathematical symmetry of a high order and another thing that's beautiful about it is that it's kind of In the same family as electrodynamics, the conceptual structure of the equations are very similar. They're based on having particles that respond to charge in a very symmetric way. In the case of electrodynamics, it's photons that respond to electric charge. In the case of quantum chromodynamics, there are three kinds of charge that we call colors, but they're nothing like colors. They really are like different kinds of charge. They rhyme.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very similar to the way that, well, broadly similar to the way that clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces give you atoms and ultimately molecules. Protons and neutrons are like atoms made now out of quarks. Quark clouds held together by gluons, which are like the photons that give the electric forces, but this is giving a different force, the strong force. And the residual forces between protons and neutrons that are left over from their basic binding are like the residual”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For most purposes in chemistry, you can just idealize them as concentrations of positive mass and charge, you don't have to look inside. But people are curious what's inside. And that was a big thing on the agenda of 20th century physics starting in the 19, well, starting with the 20th century and unfolding throughout of trying to understand what forces held the atomic nucleus together, what it was. Anyway, the story that emerges from QCD is that”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And the nucleus are kind of the, well, they give the positive charge and most of the mass of matter, but they don't, since they're so heavy, they don't move very much in chemistry. And I'm oversimplifying drastically. They're not contributing much to the...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source