YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Gates

lines on the record: 114
first: 2019-12-25
most recent: 2019-12-25
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

“But I quickly realized that this mathematical language was not known by mathematicians, which makes it pretty interesting because now you have to actually teach mathematicians about a piece of mathematics because that's how they make their living. And the great thing about working with mathematicians, of course, is the rigor with which they examine ideas. So they make your ideas better than they start out. So I start working with a group of mathematicians. And it's in that collaboration that we figured out that these funny pictures had error correcting codes buried in them.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what do you need to do? You need to change your sense of reference, your frame of reference, your perspective. So, when I saw these funny pictures, I thought, gee, that might be a way to solve these problems with equations that we don't know how to do. So that was for me one of the first attractions is that I now had an alternative language to try to attack a set of mathematical problems”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody else in their right mind would, so let's not go there. But we figured out that the data that was in the equations was in these funny pictures that we could draw. And so that was stunning. But it also was encouraging because there are problems with the equations, which I had first learned about in nineteen seventy nine when I was down at Harvard and I went out to Caltech for the first time and working with a great scientist by the name of John Schwartz. There are problems in the equations we don't know to solve So, one of the things about solving problems that you don't know how to solve is that beating your head against the brick wall is probably not a good philosophy about how to solve it.”
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 think We were looking at equations. The story is a little bit more complicated, and it'll take too long to explain all the details. But the reader's digestion is that we were looking at these equations, and we figured out that all the data in a certain class of equations could be put in pictures. And the pictures, what do they look like? Well, they're just little balls. You have black balls and white balls. Those stand for those two buckets, by the way, that we talked about in reality. The white balls are things that are like particles of light. The black balls are like electrons. And then you can draw lines connecting these balls. And these lines are deeply mathematical objects. And there's no way for me to, I have no physical model for telling you what the lines are. But as a math, if you were a mathematician, I would do a technical phrase saying this is the orbit of the representation and the action of the symmetry generators. Mathematicians would understand that.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And that's the way that actually modern physics deeply fundamental modern physics is how it works. Earlier we spoke about the Higgs boson. So why do we go looking for it? Answer is that back in the late 60s or early 70s, some people wrote some equations, and the equations predicted this. So then we went looking for it.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that if you So let me describe an experiment and come back to it. Suppose I had a glass of water and I filled it up and then I moved the glass slowly back and forth between our two faces. It would appear to me like your face is moving, even though you aren't moving. I mean, it's actually, and what's causing is because the light gets bent through the glass as it passes from your face to my eye. So Einstein in his 1915 theory of general relativity found out that gravity has the same effect on light as that glass of water. It would cause beams of light to bend. Now Newton also knew this, but Einstein's prediction was that light would bend twice as much. And so here's a mathematical idea. Now, how do you actually prove it? You've got to watch it.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closer than string theory. It is not yet been validated. In some sense, you mentioned Einstein, so let's go there for a moment. In our book, Proving Einstein Right, we actually do talk about the fact that Albert Einstein in 1915 wrote a set of equations which were very different from Newton's equations in describing gravity. These equations made some predictions that were different from Newton's predictions. It actually made three different predictions. One of them was not actually a prediction, but a post-diction because it was known that Mercury was not orbiting the Sun in the way that Newton would have told you. And so eyes theory actually describes Mercury orbiting in a way that it was observed as opposed to what Newton would have told you. So that was one prediction. The second prediction that came out of the theory of general relativity, which Einstein wrote in 1915,”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put the S in front of their name. So in the lower quadrant here, we have electrons, and this now newly filled quadrant, we have selectrons. And the quadrant over here, we had quarks. Over here, we have quarks. So now we've got this balanced pi, and that's basically what I understood as a graduate student in 1975 about this idea of supersymmetry, that it was going to fill up these two quadrants of the pi in a way that no one had ever thought about before. So I was amazed that no one else at MIT found this an interesting idea. So it led to my becoming the first person in MIT to really study supersymmetry. This is 1975, 76, 77. And in 77, I wrote the first PhD thesis in the physics department on this idea because I just drawn to the balance.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you say, okay, so right now the mathematical electron, I know how to do that, a physicist named Dirac first told us how to do that back in the late 20s, early 30s. So take that mathematics and then you say, let me look at that mathematics and find out what in the mathematics causes two electrons to bounce off of each other, even if I turn off the electrical charge. So I could do that. And now let me change that mathematical term. So now I have something that carries electrical charge. But if you take two of them, I'm sorry, if you turn their charges off, they'll pass through each other. So that puts things in the other quadrant. And those things we tend to call”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you did that, you would have a force carrier, so you would say first it belongs in this force carrying bucket, but it's got this property of bouncing off like electrons. You say, well, gee, wait, no, that's not the right bucket. So you're forced to actually put it in one of these empty quadrants. So those sorts of things, basically we give them a, so the photon mathematically can be accompanied by a photino. It's the thing that carries a force but has the rule of bouncing off. In a similar manner, you could start with an electron.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you take that mathematics and then you ask yourself a question. You see, mathematics is a palette. It's just like a musical composer is able to construct variations on a theme. Well, a piece of mathematics in the hand of a physicist is something that we can construct variations on. So even though the mathematics at Maxwell gave us about light, we know how to construct variations on that. And one of the variations you can construct is to say, suppose you have a force carrier for electromagnetism that behaves like an electron in that it would bounce off of another one. That's changing a mathematical term in an equation.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So earlier, the way I describe these two buckets is I gave you a story that started out by putting us in a dusty room with two flashlights And I said, turn on your flashlight, I'll turn on mine. The beans will go through each other. And the beams are composed of force carriers called photons. They carry the electromagnetic force. And they pass right through each other. So imagine looking at the mathematics of such an object, which you don't have to imagine people like me do that.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea of symmetry, the fact that our Innate sense of symmetry winds up aligning with just incredible mathematics. To me, it is the most beautiful thing. It's very strange, but true, that if symmetries were perfect, we would not exist. And so even though we have these very powerful ideas about balance in the universe in some sense, it's only when you break those balances that you get creatures like humans and objects like planets and stars. So although they are a scaffold for reality, they cannot be the entirety of reality. So I'm kind of naturally attracted to parts of science and technology where symmetry plays a dominant role.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chances of being successful, I should strike it in a direction that other people were not studying. And so as a consequence, I surveyed ideas that were being developed. And I came across the idea of supersymmetry. And it was so, the mathematics were so remarkable that I just, it bowled me over. I actually have two undergraduate degrees. My first undergraduate degree is actually mathematics and my second is physics, even though I always wanted to be a physicist. Plan A, which involves getting good grades, was mathematics. I was a mathematics major thinking about graduate school, but my heart was in physics.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supersymmetry was actually born in the Ukraine in the late 60s, but we had this thing called the Iron Curtain. So we Westerners didn't know about it. But by the early 70s, independently, there were scientists in the West who had rediscovered supersymmetry. Bruno Zemino and Julius Vest were their names. So this was around 71 or 72 when this happened. I started graduate school in 73. So around 75, I was trying to figure out how to write a thesis so that I could become a physicist the rest of my life. I did a, I had a great advisor, Professor James Young, who had taught me a number of things about electrons and weak forces and those sorts of things. But I decided that if I was going to. Have a really opportunity to maximize my”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's exactly right because we humans actually have a very deeply programmed sense of symmetry. It's something that is part of that mystery of the universe. So how would you make it symmetrical? One way you could is by saying those two empty quadrants had things in them also. And if you do that, that's supersymmetry. So that's what I understood when I was a graduate student here at MIT in 1975. When the mathematics of this was first being born.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, yes. So, you remember the two buckets I told you about perhaps earlier? I said there are two buckets in our universe. So now I want you to think about drawing a pie that has four quadrants. So I want you to cut the piece of pie in fourths. So in one quadrant, I'm going to put all the buckets that we talked about that are like the electron and the quarks. In a different quadrant, I'm going to put all the force carriers. The other two quadrants are empty. Now I showed you a picture of that. You'd see a circle. There would be a bunch of stuff in one upper quadrant and stuff in others. And then I would ask you a question. Does that look symmetrical to you?”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, now you've touched on a very deep mystery about physics There are a lot of such questions in physics about why things are as they are. And as someone who believes that there are some things that certainly are coincidences, like you could ask the same question about, well, why are the planets at the orbits that they are around the Sun? The answer turns out there is no good reason. It's just an accident. So there are things in nature that have that character. And perhaps the strength of the various forces is like that. On the other hand, we don't know that that's the case. And there may be some deep reasons about why the forces are ordered as they are, where the weakest forces gravity, the next weakest forces, the weak interaction, the weak nuclear force, then there's electromagnetism, there's a strong force. We don't really have a good understanding of why this is the ordering of the forces.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space time is enough like that so that when spacetime oscillates, you create these waves. These ways carry energy. We expect them to carry energy and quanta. That's what a graviton is. It's a wave in space-time. And so the fact that we have seen the waves with LIGO over the course of the last three years, and we've recently used gravitational wave observatories to watch colliding black holes and neutron stars and all sorts of really cool stuff out there. So we know the waves exist. But in order to know that gravitons exist, you have to prove that these waves carry energy in energy packets. And that's what we don't have the technology to do yet.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you something much more serious? In some ways, yes, but in other ways no. It turns out that the graviton is also, if you look at Einstein's theory, he taught us about this thing he calls spacetime, which is, if you try to imagine it, you can sort of think of it as kind of a rubber surface. That's one popular depiction of spacetime. It's not an accurate depiction because the only accuracy is actually in the calculus that he uses, but that's close enough. So if you have a sheet of rubber, you can wave it. You can actually form a wave on it.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's still out there, right? So the two buckets that I've actually described to you have all been first hypothesized and then verified by observation, with the Higgs boson being the most recent one of these things. We haven't actually verified the graviton, interestingly enough. We mathematically have an expectation that gravitons like this, but we've not performed an experiment to show that this is an accurate idea that nature uses.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Duke Beams actually pass right through each other. They literally pass right through. They don't affect each other at all. One acts like the other is not there. The particle of light is the simplest example that shows that behavior. That's a boson. Now let's imagine that we're in the same dusty room and this time you have a bucket of balls and I have a bucket of balls. And we try to throw them so that they pass, so that we get something like a beam, throwing them fast, right? If they collide, they don't just pass through each other. They bounce off of each other. Now, that's mostly because they have electric charge and electric charges like charges repel. But mathematically, I know how to turn off the electric charge. And if you do that, you'll find they still repel. And it's because they are these things we called fermions. So this is how you distinguish the things that are in the two buckets. They are either bosons or fermions.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have got two buckets if you want to try to build the universe. You got to start off with things on these two buckets. So you got to have things. That's the matter. And then you have to have other objects that act on them to cause those things to cohere to fixed finite patterns because those fixed finite patterns as building blocks. So that's the way our universe looks to people like me. Now, the building blocks do different things. So let's go back to these two buckets again. Let me start with a bucket containing the particle of light. Let me imagine I'm in a dusty room with two flashlights and I have one flashlight which I direct directly in front of me. Then I have you stand over to say my left and then we both take our flashlights and turn them on and make sure the beams go right through each other. And the beams do just that. They go right through each other. They don't bounce off of each other. The reason the room has to be dusty is because we want to see the light. The room dust wasn't there. We wouldn't actually see the light until it got to the other wall, right? So you see the beam because it's the dust in the air.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would accept that I am a physicist and we have long ago resolved this issue and the resolution came about Second great physicist. Most people have heard of Newton. Most people have heard of Einstein. But between the two of them, there was another extraordinarily great physicist, a man named James Clark Maxwell. And Maxwell, between these two other giants, taught us about electric and magnetic forces, and it's from his equations that one can figure out that there's a carrier called the photon. So this was resolved for physicists around 1860 or so.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not a trivial thing at all. In fact, it was a puzzle for Sir Isaac Newton because he's the first person to give us basically physics before Isaac Newton physics didn't exist. What did exist was called natural philosophy. So discussions about using the methods of classical philosophy to understand nature natural philosophy. So the Greeks, we call them scientists, but they were natural philosophers. Physics doesn't get born until Newton writes the Principia. One of the things that puzzled him was how gravity works. Because if you read very carefully what he writes, he basically says, and I'm paraphrasing badly, but he basically says that someone who thinks deeply about this subject would find it inconceivable that an object in one case or location can magically reach out and affect another object with nothing intervening. And so it puzzled him.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are four forces in nature, fundamental forces. There is the gravitational force. Its carrier is the graviton. There are three other forces in nature, the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. And each one of these forces has one or more carriers. The photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. The strong nuclear force actually has eight carriers. They're called gluons. And then the weak nuclear force has three carriers. They're called the W plus W minus and Z bosons. So those are the things that both in mathematics and in experiments, by the way, the most precise experiments were ever as a species able to conduct measuring the accuracy of these ideas. And we know that at least to one part in a billion, these ideas are right.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Electric repulsion between like charges. From science fiction, we have the object called the graviton, which is talked about a lot in science fiction and Star Trek. But the graviton is also a mathematical object that we physicists have known about essentially since Einstein wrote his theory of general relativity.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as we physicists look at the universe, you can, first of all, there are two big buckets of particles, that is the smallest objects that we are able to currently mathematically conceive and then experimentally verify that these ideas have a sense of accuracies. So one of those buckets we call matter. These are things like electrons, things that are like quarks, which are particles that exist inside of protons. And there's a whole family of these things. There are, in fact, 18 quarks and apparently six electron-like objects that we call leptons. So that's one bucket. The other bucket that we see both in our mathematics as well as in our experimental equipment are what are set of particles that you can call force carriers. The most familiar force carrier is the photon, the particle of light that allows you to see me. In fact, it's the same object that carries me.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, quite frankly. This is something I thought about. And I mean, so I'm a spectator in the sense that as a scientist, I... Collecting collate data. So I've been doing that all my life and looking at my species. And it's not clear to me that we are going to avoid a catastrophic self-induced ending.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It certainly froze the conflict domain. It's interesting that nowadays it was with the removal of the threat of mutually assured destruction that other forces took over in our geopolitics.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physicists actually realized this pretty quickly. I think it was maybe Schr ⁇ dinger who said that these things are not really weapons. They're political implements. They're not weapons because the cost is so high. And if you take that example and spread it out to the kind of technological development we're seeing now outside of nuclear physics, but I picked the example of biology, I could have well imagined that there would be material science sorts of equivalents across That you couldn't use them because the costs are too high. And that might cure us”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not in terms of finance, but in terms of consequences. So if you look at technology today, you can have non-state actors acquire technology, for example, bioterrorism, whose impact is roughly speaking equivalent to what it used to take nations to impart on a population. I think the cost of war is ultimately, it's going to be a little bit like the Cold War. We survived 50, 60 years as a species with these weapons that are so terrible that they could have actually ended our form of life on this planet. But it didn't. Why didn't it? Well, it's a very bizarre and interesting thing, but it was called mutually assured destruction. And so the cost was so great that people eventually figured out that you can't really use these things, which is kind of interesting because if you read the history about the development of nuclear weapons,”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, part of it is probably based on my own trajectory through life. My father was in the Army for U.S. Army for 27 years. And so I started my life out on military basis. And so a lot of probably the things that wander around in my subconscious are connected to that experience.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even though you're not consciously solving problems, something is going on. And I've talked about a few other people, I've heard other similar stories. And so the way I guess the way I think about it is it's a little bit like the way that thermonuclear weapons work. I don't know if you know how they work. But a thermonuclear weapon is actually two bombs. It's an atomic bomb which sort of does a compression. And then you have a fusion bomb that goes off. And somehow that emotional pressure, I think acts like the first stage of a thermonuclear weapon. That's when we get really big thoughts.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the suffering is, I am convinced that this kind of this second mode of creativity, I like to call it, I'm convinced that this second mode of creativity is in fact that suffering is a kind of crucible that triggers it. Because the mind, I think, is struggling to get out of this. And the only way to actually solve the problem.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I experienced it this way, and I've experienced this more than once. So, this was just the first time why I remember it. So that's why when it comes to like really wickedly tough problems, I think that the kind of creativity that you need to solve them is probably the second variety, which comes somehow from dreaming.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was emotionally involved in my education because this is where I think the passion emotion comes to and it caused an emotional crisis that I was having these difficulties understanding the integral part of calculus. Why that's right, the why of it, not the rote memorization of fact, but the why of it. Why does this work? And so one night I was over in my dormitory room in Baker House. I was trying to do a calculus problem set. I was getting nowhere. I got a terrific headache. I went to sleep and had this very strange dream. And when I walk awakened, I could do three and four substitutions and integrals with relative ease. Now this to me was an astounding experience because I had never before in my life understood that one subconscious is actually capable of being harnessed to do mathematics.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out integral calculus was probably invented about 1700 years earlier by Archimedes, but we didn't know that when I was a freshman. So that's what you study as a student. And the differential calculus part of the course was, to me. How do I say this? It was something that by the drip, drip, drip method, you could sort of figure it out. Now, the integral part of calculus, I could memorize the formula. That was not the formula. That was not the problem. The problem was why in my own mind, why do these formulae work? And because of that, when I was in the part of the calculus course where we had to do multiple substitutions to solve integrals, I had a lot of difficult”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get more and more information, and suddenly it all congeals, and you get a clear picture. And so that's a kind of a standard way of working. And I think that's how most people think about the way technical people solve problems, that it's kind of you accumulate this body of information and at a certain point you synthesize it and then boom, there's something new. But I've also observed in myself and other scientists that there are other ways that we are creative. And these other ways to me are actually far more powerful. I first personally experienced this when I was a freshman at MIT, over in Baker House, right across the campus. And I was in a calcus course, 1801, you call it, MIT. And calculus comes in two different flavors. One of them is called differential calculus. The other is called integral calculus, differential calculus is the calculus that Newton invented to describe motion.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in my workspace, which is basically where I am charged with coming up on a mathematical palette with new ideas that will help me understand the structure of nature and hopefully help all of us understand structure of nature, I've observed several different ways in which my creativity expresses itself. There's one mode which looks pretty normal, which I sort of think of as the Chinese water torture method, this drop, drop, drop.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to tell you about a conversation I once had with Eric Schmidt. I was sitting at a meeting with him, and he was a few feet away. And he turned to me and he said something like, you know, Jim, in maybe a decade or so, we're going to have computers that do what you do. And my response was not unless they can dream because there's something about the way that we humans actually generate creativity. It somehow get this sense of my lived experience in watching creative people that it's somehow connected to the irrational parts of what goes on in our head. And dreaming is part of that irrational thing. So, unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence that dreams, I have a strong suspicion that you will not get something that will fully be conscious by a definition that I would accept, for example”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, unless you can build something that's like a super, super, super version of the way the internet works, because most people aren't aware that the internet itself is actually a miracle. It's based on a technology called message packaging. So if you could exponentiate message packaging in some way to preserve the information that's in the data stream, then maybe your dream becomes true”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If that's the case, then you can export that to a piece of hardware, something metal, electronic, what have you, then you certainly will, ultimately that kind of consciousness could get to Mars very quickly. It doesn't have our problems. You can engineer the body. As I said, it's a ship or a body. You engineer winter boat. At a speed of light, well, that one is a more difficult one because that now goes beyond just a matter of having a data stream. It's now the preservation of the information in the data stream.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first thing is I would argue that it's probably very likely that artificial intelligence ultimately will develop something like consciousness, something that for us will probably be indistinguishable from consciousness. So that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment that we carry up here probably does not hold a pattern on consciousness because it's really about the data streams. I mean, as far as I can tell, that's what we are. We are self-actuating self-learning data streams. That to me is the most accurate way I can tell you what I've seen in my lifetime about what humans are at the level of consciousness. So if that's the case, then you just need to have an architecture that supports that information processing. So let's assume that that's true, that in fact what we call consciousness is really about a very peculiar kind of data stream.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know the answer to that question. One part of that belief system is Gia, which is that there's a kind of conscious life force about our planet. And I encountered these things before. I don't quite know what to make of them. My own life experience, and I'll be 69 in about two months, and I have spent all my adulthood thinking about the way that mathematics interacts with nature and with us to try to understand nature. And all I can tell you from all of my integrated experience is that there is something extraordinarily mysterious to me about our universe. This is something that Einstein said from his life experience as a scientist. And this mysteriousness almost feels like the universe is our parent. It's a very strange thing, perhaps to hear signs say, but there are just so many strange coincidences that you just get a sense that something is going on.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could imagine, I can well imagine that the architecture that supports our consciousness, again, has no pattern on consciousness.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, that's a big question. And let me try to take it apart, unpack it into several pieces. I don't believe that wet wear biology such as we are has an exclusive patent on intellectual consciousness. I suspect that other structures in the universe are perfectly capable of producing the data streams that we use to process, first of all, our observations of the universe and an awareness of ourselves. I can imagine other structures can do that also. So that's part of what you were talking about, which I would have some disagreement with.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's extraordinarily surprising. I like to use the analogy with computers and information technology. If you worry about transmitting large bundles of data, one of the things that computer scientists do for us is they allow for processes that are called compression, where you take big packets of data and you press them down into much smaller packets and then you transmit those and then unpack them at the other end. And so it looks a little bit to me like the universe has kind of done us a favor. It's constructed our minds in such a way that we have this thing called mathematics, which then as we look at the universe teaches us how to carry out the compression process.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, let me this is a question that I encounter in a number of guides a lot of people will raise the question about whether mathematics is the language of the universe. And my response is mathematics is the language that we humans are. Microscope, it's the telescope through which it's the lens through which we are able to view the universe with the precision that no other human language allows. So, could there be other universes? Well, I don't even know if this one looks like I think it does.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most surprising idea to me is that we can actually do physics. The universe did not have to be constructed in such a way that with our limited intellectual capacity that is actually put together in such a way and that we are put together in such a way that we can, with our minds eye, delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe. That to me is pretty close to a miracle.”
2019-12-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source