YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Al-Khalili

lines on the record: 62
first: 2021-01-29
most recent: 2021-01-29
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

“Exactly. For example, we don't know what dark matter is made of it. It might be made of a new kind of particle. That particle may not exist very long. It may be very hard to detect. But we do need to find out all the building blocks that make up the whole universe. And we sort of feel we're not quite there yet.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're important in order to enable us to understand how Matter and energy interact and all fits together. In order to get a picture, a unification of the forces of different types of matter, we do need the full set. And even though some of the other more exotic flavors of quarks, top quarks and bottom quarks and charm and strange, they don't live very long, but they play a hugely important role if we're trying to get to a unified theory of everything. We need them.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disappe Yeah, in a sense, if we want to describe what we're all made of, I make this point in the book, actually, the whole world we see is just made of two kinds of particles, quarks and electrons. That's it. And there's two flavors of quarks, up quarks and down quarks. They make up the protons and neutrons, which themselves make up the nuclei of atoms, and then around them you've got electrons, and everything's made of atoms. Atoms make molecules, molecules make stuff, right? So if you break down everything you see around, you just get down to the very, very simple constituents. But you're right, physicists do say, no, you know, that's just one family of particles. There's all these other categories. There's the particles that control the forces between the other particles, for example. They're important. It's true. Most of the particles, the particles zoo, what we call the standard model of particles, have very short lifetimes. They just have a fleeting existence.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It sort of is now thermodynamic because people are trying to combine thermodynamics with Einstein's general theory of relativity. So there's something called the black hole information paradox. Stephen Hawking was working on this, right? To the end of his life. And the idea of the thermodynamics of black holes and black holes, collapsed stars is where Einstein's theory of relativity really comes into play. So there's the, you know, at the forefront, there's a combination of thermodynamics and relativity. I'm working in an area called quantum thermodynamics. So that's bringing thermodynamics in quantum mechanics. But no one knows yet how to bring all three of them together. So that's the big challenge.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, somehow it's more fundamental. And so I was trying to bring in order to really get to that ultimate sort of nature of reality, we need all three together to combine it. We don't know how to do it, but I think we need to combine all three to get a unified theory.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We forgot about thermodynamics. It became sort of a bit of the poor relation. And many physicists even today who are working at the forefront of trying to answer the big questions, the mysteries that still remain about the universe, they talk about how do we bring quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity together? How do we combine them to give us a theory of everything? And what I was trying to get across in the book is that we're not going to get a theory of everything just from quantum mechanics and relativity. We also need this theory. Don't forget about thermodynamics, guys. Even Einstein, there's a famous quote of his, which I can't remember it exactly, but he says basically quantum mechanics may be incomplete, may be wrong. Relativity may one day be replaced, but the second law of thermodynamics, the law that says things decay and unwind and get older, that's never going to be overthrown.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very large, the very fast, it's sort of on a much grander scale. And in a sense, because quantum mechanics and relativity were so revolutionary, they so overturned our ideas. Einstein's work basically replaced Newton.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things can run out of energy. Things can run out of useful energy, things unwind, they decay, something we call entropy, a measure of the disorder. And thermodynamics gives us a direction to time because it says things get older. The milk stirs into the coffee, it doesn't unstir easily, you know, the cracked egg can't reassemble itself, all that business. So there's directions to time. So thermodynamics was known to be very, very important. But at the beginning of the 20th century, we had this two revolutions, one in the world of the very small, which gave us quantum mechanics to describe the nature of atoms, and it showed that atoms behave and interact with each other very differently from the way our everyday objects interact, which is Newtonian or classical mechanics. Round about the same time, beginning of the 20th century, Einstein developed his two theories of relativity, which is to do with the”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thermodynamics is the oldest of those three pillars. I mean, I guess in a sense there is a fourth pillar which is most of the physics that we learn at school, which is what we now call classical mechanics, Newton's physics. So all the stuff about bouncing balls, rolling down slopes, springs, forces and momentum and kinetic energy and all that business. That's all Newtonian mechanics. Obviously that was developed a lot earlier. Thermodynamics was developed in the 19th century and it's really about the nature of heat and energy. It brings in a subject called statistical mechanics. So people, if they think back to their school days, certainly those who maybe have done A-level physics, not everyone would have done A-level physics, but something called kinetic theory. So we try to understand what does pressure or temperature mean? And you say, well, it's to do with vibrations of molecules of a gas, for example. Thermodynamics is also about the idea that...”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for a theoretical physicist it's in a sense easier because we can detach ourselves from the real world and bury ourselves in the maths. The maths is logical, maths is precise. It's not weird. There's an equation or there's an integral that you have to solve. It might describe a really counterintuitive concept in the real world. And if you had to try and explain what it means, that's where the weirdness is. But, you know, we take solace and comfort in the fact that we can focus on the maths and that all makes sense. It's when you try and then transfer it and say, does the universe really behave according to these Greek symbols? Well, that then becomes the narrative, explaining what the symbols mean. That can be the harder part.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the thing, theoretical physics. You can do a lot of thinking. I tend to sort of get my best ideas lasting at night just as I'm falling asleep. The trick is remembering it in the morning.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great to be here. Yeah, I'm doing not too badly. I always feel a bit guilty saying people say, oh, how is it cheating? I say, oh, I'm getting a bit fed up. But I know, you know, I'm lucky. I can carry on doing the physics that I'm doing. I'm doing my broadcasting, my writing, my lecturing, supervising my research students, all from my office here at home. I'm coping pretty well. And I know a lot of people aren't. I shouldn't complain.”
2021-01-29 · Intelligence Squared · Jim Al-Khalili on The World According to Physics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source