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Jim Gates
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- 2019-12-25
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- 2019-12-25
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“The only thing that exceeds them are some family experiences like when my kids were born and that kind of stuff, but they're pretty high up there.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like Einstein and the vicissitudes that prevented the 1914 measurement of starlight bending, the universe is constructed in such a way that I didn't become an astronaut, which would have, for me, I would have faced the worst choice in my life, whether Whether I would try to become an astronaut or whether I would try to do theoretical physics. Both of these dreams were born when I was four years old simultaneously. And so I can't imagine how difficult that decision would have been.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nope. My mother died when I was eleven years old. And so I immediately knew what the end of the story was for all of us. As a consequence, I've never spent a lot of time thinking about death. It'll come in its own good time. And sort of, to me, the job of every human is to make the best and the most of the time that's given to us in order not for our own selfish gain, but to try to make this place a better place for someone else.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the space of engineering. I was out at a Q Station, as you may know. Microsoft has this research facility in Santa Barbara. I was out there a couple of months in my capacity as Vice President of American Physical Society. And I got it, you know, I had some things that were like lectures and they were telling me what they were doing It sure sounded like they knew what they were doing and that they were close to major breakthroughs.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that looks on the immediate horizon, like we're going to get to, is quantum computing. If we actually get there, that's going to be extraordinarily interesting.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I saw it, you know, people actually misunderstand that because it's not what it doesn't mean what we generally take it to mean colloquially, but it's such a beautiful expression.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. And that's, as I said, those of us who have been in that position, it's stunning to see it happen because you don't expect it.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scientific or non scientific. Complicated ideas don't have to be scientific ideas. Like I said, I've seen him in real time process complicated ideas with a speed that was stunning. In fact, he shocked the entire council. I mean, we were all stunned at his capacity to be presented with complicated ideas And then to wrestle with him and internalize them and then come back more interestingly enough, come back with really good questions to ask.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that to me was extraordinary. As I said, I've been around other executives and I've never seen one quite like him. He's an extraordinary learner, is what I observed, and not just about science. He has a way of internalizing information in real time that I've never seen a politician before, even in extraordinarily complicated situations.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about President Obama, he is a deep mystery to me in the same way perhaps that the universe is a mystery. I don't really understand how that constellation of personalities could come to fit within a single individual. But I saw them for seven years. I'm convinced that I wasn't seeing fake news. I was seeing real data. He was just an extraordinary man. And one of the things that was completely clear Was that he was not afraid And not intimidated to be in a room of really smart people. I mean, really smart people, that he was completely comfortable. And asking Some of the world's greatest experts, what do I do about this problem? And it wasn't that he was going to just take their answer, but he would listen to the advice.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I've met other presidents beside President Obama. He is the most extraordinary president I've ever encountered.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was very scary, but I did not feel that I could say no because I wouldn't be able to sleep with myself at night, saying, you know, that I chickened out or whatever And so I took the plunge, and we had a pretty good run. There are things that I did in those seven years of which I'm extraordinarily proud. One of the ways I tell people is if you've ever seen that television cartoon called Schoolhouse Rock is this one story about how Bill becomes a law. And I've kind of lived that. There are things that I did that have now been codified in U.S. law. Not everybody gets a chance to do things like that in life.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's clear that there's a purpose of why the question is asked that way. But then he made it clear to me he wasn't joking. And literally, one of the few times in my life my knees went weak and I had to hold myself up against a wall so that I didn't fall over. I doubt if most of us who have been the beneficiaries of the benefits of this country When given that kind of opportunity could say no. And I know I certainly couldn't say no. I was frightened out of my wits. Because I had never Although I have My career in terms of Policy recommendations is actually quite long. It goes back to the 80s, but I had never been called upon. To An advisor to a president of the United States.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were offered the opportunity to serve on the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, what would be your answer? Was amused at the formulation of the question.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the history of our species. So, the idea of service comes to me essentially from that example. So in 2009, when I first got a call from A Nobel laureate actually in biology, Harold Phar My way to India, and I got this email message, and he said it needed to talk to me. And I said, okay, fine, we can talk. Got back in States, I didn't hear from him. We went through several cycles of this, sending me messages. I want to talk to you and then never contacted me. And finally, I was on my way to give a physics presentation at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Jess had stepped off a plane My mobile phone went off, and it was Harold. And so I said, Harold, why do you keep sending me messages that you want to talk but you never call? And he said, well, I'm sorry, things have been hectic and that he said,”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know, like General Zhukov, for example, was something that you wouldn't know about, but you might not know about a patent. But you're right. Georgi Zhukov or Rakasovsky. I mean, there's a whole list of names that I've learned in the last 15 or 20 years looking at the Second World War.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me go back to my father first of all. I earlier mentioned that my father served 27 years in the U.S. Army, starting in World War II. He went off in the 1942-43 to fight against the fascists. He was part of the supply corps that supplied General Patton as the tanks rolled across Western Europe, pushing back the forces of Nazism. Meet up with our Russian comrades who were pushing the Russian Nazis starting a Stalingrad. The Second World War is actually a very interesting set of piece of history to know from both sides. Here in America, we typically don't. But I've actually studied history as an adult, so I actually know sort of the whole story.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's something that affects the way I do science, quite frankly. It also affects the way I talk to the public about science. It's one of the sort of my mantras that I keep deeply trying to keep deeply before me when I appear in public fora speaking about physics in particular and science in general. It's also something that Einstein said in a different way. He said he had these two different formulations. One of them is When the answer is simple, it's God speaking. The other thing that he said was that what he did in his work was simply the distillation of common sense, that you distill down to something. And he also said you make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. So, all of those things, and certainly this attitude for me first sort of seeing this was exemplified by being around Richard Feynman.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things, well, it's funny because one of the things that I didn't hear Feynman say this, but one of the things that reported that he said. If you're in a bar st A And you can't explain to the guy on the bar school next to you what you're doing. You don't understand what you're doing. And there's a lot of that that I think is correct. That when you truly understand something as complicated as string theory When it's in its fully formed final development, it should be something you could tell to the person in the bar school next to you.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a fair number of stories, but I'm not prepared to tell them. They're not all politically correct, let me say. Me just say, I'll say the following Richard Feynman, if you've ever read some of the books about him, in particular there's a book called Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. There's a series of books that starts with surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. And I think the second one may be something like, why do you care what they say or something like that? I mean, the titles are all three of them. When I read those books, I was amazed at how accurately those books betray the man that I interacted with. He was irreverent, he was fun, he was deeply intelligent. He was deeply human. And those books tell that story very effectively.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I think it will exceed normal human lifetimes. But there are other prizes that are given. I mean, there is something called the breakthrough prize. There's a Russian-American immigrant named Yuri Milner, I believe his name, started this wonderful prize called the Breakthrough Prize. It's three times as much money as a Nobel Prize, and it gets awarded every year. And so something like one of those prizes is likely to be garnered at some point far earlier than a Nobel Award”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If perhaps other things related to the idea of supersymmetry borne out, those are going to be the first powerful observationally based pieces of evidence that will begin to do what the Eddington expedition did in 1919. But that may take several decades.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that the string theorists are probably going to retrace this path, but it's going to be far longer and more torturous, in my opinion. String theory is such a broad and deep development. That, in my opinion, when it becomes acceptable, it's going to be because of a confluence of observations. It's not going to be a single observation. And I have to tell you that I gave a seminar here yesterday at MIT. It's on an idea I have about how string theory can leave signatures in the cosmic microwave background, which is an astrophysical structure. And so if those kinds of observations are borne out,”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's be clear on this. The theory of general relativity. Had its critics. Even up until the fifties. So, if you had, if the committee had wanted to give the prize for generativity. There were vociferous critics of general relativity up until the 50s. Einstein died in 1955.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is correct. Well, first of all, that's something that is misunderstood about the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Nobel Prize in Physics is never given for purely proposing an idea. Is always given for proposing an idea that has observational support. So he could not get the Nobel Prize for either special relativity nor general relativity because the provisions that Alfred Nobel left for the award prevent that.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, putting myself in that time, I would want to, like I said, I think I have a feel excitement. I would want to know what the mathematics is. And then I would want to do the calculations myself. Because one thing that physics is all about is that you don't have to take anybody's word for anything. You can do it yourself.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a mathematical creature. I was four years old when I first decided that science was what I wanted to do in my life. And so if my personality back then was like it is now, I think it's probably likely I would wanted to have studied his mathematics. What was a piece of mathematics that he was using to make this prediction? Because he didn't actually create that mathematics. That mathematics was created roughly 50 years before he lived. He's the person who harnessed it in order to make a prediction. In fact, he had to be taught this mathematics by a friend. So, this is in our”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's trying to answer The thing that left Isaac Newton puzzled. Isaac Newton says gravity magically goes from one place to another. He doesn't believe it, by the way. He knows that's not right. But the mathematics is so good that you have to say, well, I'll throw my qualms away because I'll use it. That's all we use to get a man from the Earth of the Moon was that mathematics. I'm one of those scientists, and I've seen this. And if I thought deeply about it, maybe I know that Newton himself wasn't comfortable. So, the first thing I would hope that I would feel is gee, there's this young kid out there who has an idea to feel in this hole that was left with us by Sir Isaac Newton. I hope would be my reaction. Have a suspicion.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human history is illustrated by that story. And it's one of my favorite things. You also learn things like in our book, how eclipses and watching eclipses was a driver of the development of science in our nation when it was very young. In fact, even before we were a nation, it turns out there were citizens of this would-be country that were going out trying to measure eclipses.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gives you a sense of this is a person struggling with something deeply. And although his deep insight led him to this, it is the circumstance of time, place, and accident through which we view him. And it could, the story could have turned out very differently, where first he makes a prediction, the measurements are made in 1914, they disagree with his prediction. And so what would the world view him as? Well, he's this professor who made this prediction that didn't get it right. Yes. Fragility.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they had made the measurement. Would have disagreed with his 1911 prediction. Because nature only has one answer. And so you then see how fortunate he was that wars in bad weather and accidents and transporting equipment stopped any measurements from being made. So he corrects himself in 1915. But the astronomers are already out there trying to make the measurement. So now he gives them a different number. And it turns out that's the number that nature agrees with.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in order to tell the story, you really have to have an incredible master of the narrative. And that was my co-author, Kathy Pellotier, who is a novelist. So we formed this conjoined brain, I used to call us. She used to call us Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. My expression for us is that we were conjoined brain to tell this story. And it allowed, so what are some magical moments? To me, the first magical moment in telling the story was looking at Albert Einstein in his struggle, because although we regard him as a genius, as I said, in 1911, he actually made an incorrect prediction about spending Starlight. And that's actually what set the astronomers off. In 1914, there was an And by various accidents of war and weather and all sorts of things that we talk about in the book, no one was able to make the measurement.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get married, they get divorced. They do terrible things. They do great things. They're people, they're just people like you. And so that part of telling this story allowed me to get that out there for both young people interested in the sciences as well as the public. But the other part of the story is I wanted to open up sort of what What it was like. Now, I'm a scientist, and so I will not pretend to be a great writer. I understand a lot about mathematics, and I've even created my own mathematics that... Know it's kind of a weird thing to be able to do.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's incredible. Right. So I'm very fortunate to have worked with a talented novelist who wanted to write a book that coincided with a book I wanted to write about how science kind of feels if you're a person. Because it's actually people who do science, even though that may not be obvious to everyone. So for me, I wanted to write this book for a couple of reasons. I wanted young people to understand that these seeming alien giants that live before them were just as human as they are.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. And that's one reason why I was happy to focus on the story of how Einstein became a global superstar. Earlier in our discussion, Went over his history where in 1915 he came up with this piece of mathematics. Used it to do some calculations and then made a prediction. But making a prediction is not enough. Someone's got to go out and measure. So, string theory is in that in between zone. Now, for Einstein, it was from 1915 to 1919, 1915. He makes the correct prediction. By the way, he made an incorrect prediction about the same thing in 1911, but he corrected himself in 1915. And by 1919, the first pieces of experimental observational data became available to say, yes, he's not wrong. And by 1922, the argument that based on observation was overwhelming that he was not wrong”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“group at Cornell, who using yet a third piece of mathematics found the same yourself. So the fact that extra dimensions is so widely talked about in the public is partly a function of how the public has come to understand string theory and how the story has been told to them. But there are alternatives you don't know about.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. And also, partly because of my own research. So earlier we talked about these strange symbols that we've discovered inside the equations. It turns out that to a very large extent a denkas don't really care about the number of dimensions. They kind of have an internal mathematical consistency that allows them to be manifest in many different dimensions. Since supersymmetry is a part of string theory, then this same property you would expect to be inherited by string theory. However, another little known fact which is not in the public debate is that there are actually strings that are only four-dimensional. This is something that was discovered at the end of the 80s by three different groups of physicists working independently. I and my friend Warren Siegel, who were at the University of Maryland at the time, were able to prove that there's mathematics that looks totally four-dimensional and yet it's a string. There was a group in Germany that used slightly different mathematics, but they found the same result. And then there was a...”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's a string? Well, in the same analogy, I would say now I want you to start with a piece of spaghetti. So we all know what that looks like. And now I want you to let the thickness of the spaghetti shrink until it has no thickness. Mathematically, I mean, in words, this makes no sense. Mathematically, this actually works. And you get this mathematical object out. It has properties that are like spaghetti. It can wiggle and jiggle. But it can also move collectively like a piece of spaghetti. It's the mathematics of those sorts of objects that constitute string theory.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the smallest thing? So Particles One way I try to describe particles to people is start. I want you to imagine a little ball. Want you to let the size of that ball shrink into it has no extent whatsoever. But it still has the mass of the ball. That's actually what Newton was working with when he first invented physics. He's the real inventor of the massive particle, which is this idea that underlies all of physics. So that's where we start. It's a mathematical construct that you get by taking a limit of things that you know”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what is string theory? Well, the simplest explanation I can provide is to go back and ask, What are particles? Which is the question you first ask me.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it comes directly from string theory. There are other things such as A property called holography, which allows one to take equations and look at them on the boundary of a space and then to know information about inside a space without actually doing calculations there. This has come directly from string theory. So there are a number of direct mathematical effects that we learn in string theory, but we take these ideas and look at math that we already know and we find suddenly we're more powerful. This is a pretty good indication there's something interesting going on with string theory itself.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There has been a very heated debate about whether string theory is some sort of hysteria among the community of theoretical physicists or whether it has something fundamental to say about our universe. We don't yet know the answer to that question. Those of us who study string theory will tell you are things like string theory has been extraordinarily productive in getting us to think more deeply, even about mathematics that's not string theory, but the kind of mathematics that we've used to describe elementary particles. There have been spinoffs from string theory, and this has been going on now for two decades almost, that have allowed us, for example, to more accurately calculate the force between electrons with the presence of quantum mechanics. This is not something you hear about in the public. There are other similar things, that kind of property I just told you about is what's called weak strong duality.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I doubt that I will be able to say anything to clarify the debate around string theory for For a general audience. Part of the reason is because string theory is done something I've never seen theoretical physics do. It has broken out into consciousness of the general public before we're finished. You see, string theory doesn't actually exist because when we use the word theory, we mean a particular set of attributes. In particular, it means that you have an overarching paradigm that explains what it is that you're doing. No such overarching paradigm exists for string theory. What string theory is currently is an enormously large mutually reinforcing collection of mathematical facts in which we can find no contradictions. We don't know why it's there, but we can certainly say that without challenge. Now, just because you find a piece of mathematics doesn't mean that this applies to nature. And in fact,”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether it's fundamental. I probably will not live to find out. This is going to be the work of probably some future either mathematician or physicist to figure out what these things actually mean.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there is. The craziest thing about these to me. Is that when you look at physics and try to write equations where information gets transmitted reliably You're in one of these super symmetrical systems with this exercisey symmetry, that doesn't happen unless there's an error correcting code present. So it's as if the universe says there's something about an error correcting code. This to me is the craziest thing that I've ever personally encountered in my research. And it's actually got me to wondering how this could come about because the only place in nature that we know about error correcting codes is genetics. And in genetics, we think it was evolution that caused this error correcting codes to be in genomes. And so does that mean that there was some kind of form of evolution acting on the mathematical laws of the physics of our universe? This is a very bizarre and strange idea. And something I've wondered about from time to time since making these discoveries.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, okay, so the simplest of these drafts. To have one white ball and one black ball, that's that balance that we talked about earlier. Remember, we want to balance out the quadrants. Well, you can't do it unless you have a black ball and white ball. So the simplest of these objects looks like two little balls, one black one, white, connected by a single line. And what it's talking about is, as I said, a deep mathematical property related to symmetry.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people who work with mathematics like me, our mathematical concepts are, we often refer to them as objects because they feel like real things, even though you can't see them or touch them. They're so much part of your interior life that it is as if you could. So we often refer to these things as objects, even though there's nothing objective about them.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this was an astounding thing that when we first got this result and tried to publish it, it took us three years to convince other physicists that we weren't crazy. Eventually, we were able to publish it. I and this collaboration of mathematicians and other physicists. And so every since then, I have actually been looking at the mathematics of these objects, trying to still understand properties of the equations. And I want to understand the properties of the equations because I want to be able to try things that are like electrons. So as you can see, it's just like a two-step remove process of trying to get back to reality.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A computer scientist named Hemming addressed the problem how do you reliably transmit digital information? And what he came up with was a brilliant idea. The way you solve it is that you take the data that you want to send, the ones in your strings of ones, zero, is your favorite string, and then you dump more ones and zeros in, but you dump them in in a particular pattern. And this particular pattern is what a hamming code is all about. So it's an error correcting code because if the person at the other end knows what the pattern is supposed to be, they can figure out when once got changed to zero, zero's got changed to one. So it turned out that our strange little objects that came from looking at the equations that we couldn't solve, it turns out that when you look at them deeply enough, you find out that they have ones and zeros buried in them. But even more astoundingly, the ones and zeros are not there randomly. They are in the pattern of error correcting codes.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the simplest way to talk about error correcting codes. Is first of all to talk about digital information. Digital information is basically strings of ones and zeros. They're called bits. So now let's imagine that I want to send you some bits. Well, maybe I can show you pictures, but maybe it's a rainy day. Or maybe the windows in your house are foggy. So sometimes when I show you a zero, you might interpret it as a one. Or other times when I show you a one, you might interpret it as a zero. So if that's the case, that means when I try to send you this data, it comes to you in corrupted form. And so the challenge is, how do you get it to be uncorrupted? In the 1940s”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source