Exploring Curiosity with Nobel Prize Winner
Barry Barish

Speaker:

I think it’s innate. I think we’re all curious.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

So it’s hard for me to say that it’s something we have to teach. It’s something that we have to support and something that we have to let grow and thrive. And that’s why all kids, they they are adventurous. I really don’t think the big problem is somehow teaching kids how to be curious. I think it’s somehow stimulating them to be curious in an effective and positive way.

Brian Keating:

Barry Barish, Welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast. It’s your 3rd time on the on the show. Thank you so much for doing this. Hi, Brian.

Speaker:

Go ahead.

Brian Keating:

You’re one of our, audience’s most favorite favorite guests for many reasons and Very special to me and, influence on my life and career. I’m actually the progenitor in some sense of my 2nd book called Into the Impossible. Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, which you did honor me by writing the, foreword to that book, the 2nd the 2nd book. And, since you’ve been on the show, the first time in 2020, when the kind of inciting incident that we’ll get to Led to the creation of this book. I’ve added a new feature to my to my episodes where I ask authors of books To help me and the audience judge their books by their covers, which

Speaker:

Oh, by their covers? Yeah. You’re never supposed to

Brian Keating:

do that. Right? You don’t judge a book by it. But else do you have to go on? Right? There’s there’s almost no information, especially if it’s somebody, you know, that’s a relatively unknown author. So an author spent a lot of time ruminating about, you know, what To call the book and and so forth. But, I thought we’d play, you know, we we play that same game even though you didn’t write this book, but your name is on the front. So when we talked first, it was actually the 2nd or 3rd time we had ever met. We we spoke about this notion that it’s very common in science called the imposter syndrome. And I remember, you know, clearly as day, and I told my wife that I just couldn’t believe that we closed out the interview when I asked you, as I asked all my guests as well, what advice you’d give to your former self.

Brian Keating:

And you basically said, you know, to kinda get over the imposter syndrome. And I often think I’m not good enough to have the imposter syndrome, but but I was blown away. And I said, Barry, you won the Nobel Prize, and you said you still have it. Maybe you could recount a little bit of that, that that, sentiment that you Expressed, originally.

Speaker:

Well, I think anybody, if they actually think about it, has it. I I happen to have a psychoanalyst for a wife, So I can’t avoid kind of the self reflection that that, makes it maybe more evident than than otherwise. But No matter what, you’re I think anybody is in company where people are, have more ability or whatever you’re talking about than you do. And I don’t remember what I said in the in the early one, but the The image that comes to my mind was actually at the office of the foundation for the Nobel Prize. Did did I talk about that?

Brian Keating:

Yeah. That’s what I’d like. Yeah. I’d like to reiterate that.

Speaker:

That was the so I’ll just repeat it in a few seconds. And that was it. You go and, you You know, there’s all this excitement, everything. It makes you feel like you’re 10 feet tall through a week of celebration for the Nobel Prize. And at the end, you go to collect your check and sign the book and get your, the portrait that they use. And, as the official portrait in the foundation offices, which aren’t very, like, yeah, you know, fancy or anything. It’s just a set of offices, in a nondescript building in Stockholm. And so you go and you go through all this stuff.

Speaker:

Take your picture and so forth. And eventually, they they say, oh, but you also have to sign this book. And they pull out this little book. It’s It’s nondescript. It’s more nondescript than yours. It doesn’t as I remember, it didn’t have much of a cover. Maybe it’s all leather coming down.

Brian Keating:

This Segment.

Speaker:

And they opened to a page that had nothing on it, because of the fact that, in Nobel’s will, physics is first. So physics is the first one to get it and probably the 1st one in the office. I my name starts with b, so I must have been the first one. They were they opened this book to a blank page, And the top said, 2017. They just said sign your name. It’s okay. I signed my name, and then I didn’t know what to do. So I page backwards.

Speaker:

And then you see the names of all the people you idolize in your life, you know, Einstein, Feynman, blah blah blah. And, if that isn’t a moment when you feel like you don’t belong, which is kind of the through dramatization of this syndrome. And then, you know, something’s wrong with you, I think. So so I think it’s a it’s a feature that we all have, and should just be aware of it. It shouldn’t stop you from anything. It’s true that you should be aware that you’re not uniquely, because nobody is better than everybody else in the world at everything in in the world. So the fact that you can do some things better than others and other things better, and that you have some real perspective on yourself shouldn’t make you feel like an inferior person. But I think everybody should have has should have or else are unaware of it, some semblance of this syndrome.

Speaker:

So

Brian Keating:

Yeah. I always find it tough to strike balances in life between, you know, Extremes. It’s always so easy to fall into extremes, and that’s why there’s so much polarization in politics and even in science. But To kinda go down that middle road of being humble on one hand as you say, but also, you know, you need to have a little bit of swagger To feel that you can accomplish something that we set out to do as scientists because it’s so ambitious. Right? I mean Oh,

Speaker:

I think you need a lot of swagger. Having swagger is not orthogonal or, to having some sense inside yourself of your own limitations and your own So if not being better than everybody at everything, it’s just I don’t think those are contradictory at all. Mhmm. I think to accomplish something, you need to have a Spirit of gambling. You need to have, spirit of adventure. You need to have a swagger, and you need to be willing to fail. Probably that 4th one’s the most important.

Brian Keating:

The the other revealing thing that you kind of struck me with, like, a thunderbolt the first couple times we spoke Was this notion of of curiosity being the driving factor? And and you highlight something which I had, you know, kinda glanced glanced over, glossed over, whatever, You know, that there are all these negative associations with curiosity. Yeah. Can you speak why do you think that is if it’s such a valued Component of the, and unique to human experience. Why is it why is it sort of spoken of in cautionary terms?

Speaker:

That’s really a good question. I I don’t have my My wife would have a better answer. I think I think it’s probably somewhat psychological. Right. I think it has to do with us trying to, from a young age, have structure, and feeling how important it is for kids to have structure, but yet kids are adventurous. So I think probably the the time period that I picked on because it’s what I think is more or less where it’s dramatic, is a kid that gets to be capable of doing a lot. Maybe a preteen kid, a kid between 5 and 12, where the kid has a lot of natural Curiosity is very adventurous. It’s hard to contain.

Speaker:

And yet we have, parents who try to discipline them and then schools who put them in a Cage. And curiosity and following curiosity is fits into this, you know, adventurous spirit that a Young kid has. I I think it’s really to try to feel we have to make kids grow up and have structure. And Unfortunately, it that’s true for parts of growing up, but it’s gotta be tempered in ways and somehow having enough sophistication to let kids pursue curiosity while they maybe don’t, you know, wreck something in the house or other things that you control them is is an art that parents need to be better at. And especially schools where where we really do emphasize the discipline and and basically, kill the curiosity. And that to me is, something for fortunately for me, I avoided and that It could easily have happened to me as others. It just happened. I escaped and still have that.

Speaker:

And and probably you did and certain others, but I think a lot of, adults have basically limited themselves because their discipline of the system. Schools could be changed, and parents have limited them so them in their way of approaching.

Brian Keating:

And, also, You know, you mentioned the word art. You know, there’s art to parenting. There’s an art to being a graduate student adviser. There’s an art to being, you know, a teacher, a TA of Of undergraduates, if you are graduates. I guess the thing, you know, I’ve studied, you know, kind of, meta scientific, you know, People that studies the habits of scientists, the sociology of scientists, which which you you remarked on, at one point with, in our conversations. But I guess the question I have is, you know, I think it was Merton or or somebody like him who said, you know, like, if Einstein didn’t come up with relativity, you know, someone else would’ve. Whereas, you know, the Mona Lisa, if if, you know, if it wasn’t painted, you know, as As it was, it wouldn’t have just spontaneously come about in exactly the same way. Maybe something of equal beauty.

Brian Keating:

I mean, you could say The Scream or who knows? But do you think that’s It’s possible to teach, you know, art. Let’s say, as an artist, I don’t know that I believe you can teach someone who has no ability to be an artist. Like, I have no ability to play music. I can hardly play Spotify on my phone. Right? But and I don’t think I could be taught to play music. But I know I was taught to be a physicist by mentors and folks like you, and and I endeavor to do that. And I said, do you think that science and art Our different cultures as as, you know, Lewis or others used to call it, are are fundamentally can you teach someone to be a curious, imaginative, scientific thinker Who may not innately be, predisposed in that direction.

Speaker:

I think it’s innate. I think we’re all curious. So it’s hard for me to say that it’s something we have to teach. It’s something that we have to, support and something that we have to let grow and thrive. I think it’s built into oh, that’s why all kids, they they are adventurous. I I really don’t think the big problem is somehow teaching kids how to be curious. I think it’s somehow stimulating them to be curious in a in an effective and positive way.

Brian Keating:

When I, think back about, you know, kind of the things that drive Me and my career now, I seem to be much more kinda unifocused on on exploring the cosmic microwave background and and finding it, you know, kind of all consuming. And when I look at you, you were obviously at many points in your life focused on a single project. But how did you have this the the discipline, the sense, The kind of, you know, confidence to pivot as you did several times in your career to make outstanding and tremendous contributions. Is there is there a point when you realize it’s time for me to to make a change? When I spoke to Ray Weiss, I’ll just say your colleague and and fellow Nobel laureate, from LIGO, And he said when it’s not being fun.

Speaker:

Yeah. I I agree with that. That’s a piece of it. I I think as a scientist. Theorists are good at it because there’s not much overhead. Mhmm. Experiment what I mean, good at changing. Okay? They can go throw it in the wastebasket and take on another problem.

Speaker:

And what have they lost? Not very much. So somebody could have stimulated them. For us, there’s more of a balance. You’ve got a big investment in something. And I think it’s maybe a little more like an artist. When do they finish a painting and move on to the next one? There’s no there’s no defined way to define when a painting is done. And when you look at the variety of paintings, Right. Some are very sketchy.

Speaker:

Some are very, very detailed.

Brian Keating:

Warhol said, in fact, you know, great art is never finished. It’s just abandoned.

Speaker:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I think Picasso was very, very good and articulate about the fact that you have to Let it be. You’ve done it. It’s done. You move on. And somehow for experimentalists, we have a a big investment like somebody that did a very detailed painting.

Speaker:

And, there is an art. I don’t think you can learn to do it in order to know when you’re done as yourself and when to move on and how to move on and where to move on. And somehow It’s something I’ve kind of developed, but it has it had maybe was not a complicated thing maybe because of my personality. I I’ve not I’m not really, set where I do something in a particular way and have to get some in. But we also don’t wanna quit something too early. I don’t know. As a as a experimental physicist, I think, it’s Maybe a little bit like I criticize grade school teachers. I think we’re we are pretty bad in our education.

Speaker:

Mhmm. And the course that I teach here at Riverside and teach it. We’ll teach at Stony Brook next fall. It’s aimed at a problem that I I’ve always felt was there, and that is in graduate school. In fact, it was the reason why I started doing this teaching. In in graduate school, we’re very good at teaching theorists about physics, and then they go out in the world and they’re very good at crumpling paper, the good ones, and moving on to another problem. Experimental graduate students, we tend to it’s it’s hard. You have to learn techniques, and You have to do a lot of very hard boring work in a laboratory, and then you have to do something that’s publishable and blah blah blah.

Speaker:

And so, graduate students come into UCSD or here or wherever. And they have taken courses in a lot of things, and then they start to go to work for somebody. And as they proceed through graduate school, they become narrower and narrower, but deeper, at what they’re doing and narrower and narrower. And it’s very common for too common for a graduate student to get their degree and basically continue on the same track. I I contend that there’s nothing fundamental that make the fundamental fundamental that that restricts experimentalists from moving from one area to another. Mhmm. I mean, I’ve done it not because there’s something very special about me that, any more than there is. There’s more of an overhead.

Speaker:

You can’t crumple a paper. You have investment that as may have, equipment and money and so forth. So it’s gotta be somewhat more deliberate. But I think Still, as a research scientist, you should be doing not something because you have equipment or you have knowledge in a particular area, but because it’s going to move science forward the most. And so at some point, A different science problem than what than you’ve been working on may be more, a better way in terms of a product to to invest your time, energy, and effort. Mhmm. And, I I think there’s just there’s overhead in doing it, but it’s never been one that’s constrained me. I mean, the overhead mostly is the system.

Speaker:

You know, you you a university hires people in certain areas. When you go into another area, it screws up their bookkeeping, kind of. They don’t like that. The you’re you have, build a certain trust and ability to get funding and a certain by a certain funding agency. But it’s not just the funding agency. It’s a sub part that does the field that you’re doing. So when you switch, you have to so but these are all you were able to get funding the 1st time. You were able to convince your physics department of what you did the first time.

Speaker:

So the fact that you change is not a it’s never been a big big issue, I think. So and I think it also to be honest with you, it keeps you young. It keeps you going to change, and do other things. So to me, it’s not a it’s it’s a natural way to do things, and we don’t do our we don’t do a good job of creating products that have that mentality.

Brian Keating:

My thumb is very busy right now holding up good old Albert, but if yours is free, please go ahead and hit That like button. And don’t forget to subscribe. It really helps us with the algorithm. You use the word product, but I I guess I would say, what Should you know, what what is the obligation of the student? You know? Obviously, we feel a lot, you’re a product of the University of California System, UCAL Berkeley. Will maybe get to that later on. But what are the responsibilities of a student? Let let me ask it specifically. What Is the bare minimum what that a an experimental student grad student, what should he or she know about theory? And what is the obligation of a Theoretical graduate student to un you know, specializing in theoretical astrophysics or theoretical physics. What should he or she know about experimental physics?

Speaker:

What

Brian Keating:

are the obligations on the student?

Speaker:

Is the right word obligations or or the best way to be a effective scientist?

Brian Keating:

That’s that’s the slater.

Speaker:

Yeah. So So let let me just change of to be effective. Mhmm. I think, like all these questions, if you take the extremes, there’s no real answer. Or if you take theorists that are very mathematically oriented in their their, contribution to physics may be in moving the fundamental theoretical tools and ideas forward. Maybe don’t need to really understand much about interferometry and how LIGO works or about a CMB experiment. Right. Other than what the maybe what the acronym means or something.

Speaker:

And and on the other hand, very, very technical experimental students maybe don’t need to understand anything about string theory. And So I think it’s really the body of us that are more, in between any theorist that is doing theory that might be testable. So not string theory, which so far isn’t testable, but Experiments that is testable is a better theorist if they have some sense, what is what is testable when They do what what it takes to be testable, and maybe they’re more enriched also by understanding how, experiment validates theory or maybe leads theory in some cases because of what, what they found, and then we can go the reverse. And that is experimentalist size unless they’re totally, technologists. They’re developing, you know, the next laser for LIGO or something, are better off if they even if they’re developing fancy optics that we need in the upgrade that we’re presently doing to to LIGO. The end the what’s gonna come out of that is better sensitivity to see further out in the universe and some sense of what that will enable, I think is enriching. Mhmm. It should go beyond that.

Speaker:

It shouldn’t just be More It’s better. Of what no. It shouldn’t just be what’s your what’s the product of your own research, you know, that

Brian Keating:

I see. Yeah.

Speaker:

But, maybe be, as a trained experimental physicist to be able to appreciate if they’re in in working in LIGO to be able to appreciate CMB and so forth, because it’s basically understandable and so forth. So as a scientist, I think at some level to be able to understand and communicate and and know that enables them to not be then in order to Be practicing is fine to be in LIGO and be an experimental citizen theory, but to not have your eyes open broader means you’re again following this path that maybe you shouldn’t be on Mhmm. Your whole life.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely think there are aspects of the experimental method that can be useful to a theorist Trying ideas, doing thought experiments, obviously, you know, Einstein, didn’t spend much time in the lab. He has a few patents as you know, but but he, he didn’t spend much time, but he did his master and is extremely well known for the Gedanken thought experiments. And and thinking about those and and what Popper called decisive experiments and how They could not prove a theory, but falsify it. Right? And so you mentioned string theory, and I and I can’t, you know, help but but kind of pivot on This expertise that you’ve gleaned over your career in in in classical gravity, and wondering, because we’ve never talked about it, what are your perspectives on The possibility, the probability that we’ll ever have a quantum theory of gravity.

Speaker:

That’s a really good question. And I wish I knew the answer, but I’ll just tell you my Yeah. My belief right now. You know, I’m old enough. I’ve watched 50 years or something of people, theorists trying to bring these 2 fields together. It it’s been it’s been a very strong, Maybe if slightly fringe because they haven’t made progress. But, there there’s the attempts to do quantum gravity has been going on for 50 years and basically haven’t succeeded. Right.

Speaker:

Okay. So my Sense is that, like like other areas of physics, what’s the problem is that they’re working in a vacuum, if you want. They’re working without the clues that you need to actually find your way. That in physics, we need some sort of clues. And the problem is that, most of the physics that we do, the forefront physics now is very deep, very good, but it’s absolutely in one area or the other, whether it’s gravitational waves where, You know, we’re doing general relativity, and maybe we’ll see some violations of Einstein’s general relativity, and that’ll give us some clue. But But so far, we haven’t, but we’re doing something that’s pursuing general relativity. And if you go to CERN, they’re basically looking at the shortest and shortest distances, which is where quantum field theory is the king and does things. We need to find somewhere where you need both, the the science that general relativity is trying to describe, and the science that quantum field theory or or One of, physics at short distances is trying to define.

Speaker:

We don’t have that at the present time, but I could imagine places past our lifetimes maybe. And one is the very early universe. So the very early universe needs to be able to explain both, you know, how we make particles, why there’s more particles than anti particles, and all the, relativistic effects that happen in the very early universe. So if we could really explore the early universe, maybe someday with gravitational waves or some other way. But the true early universe, that would be a a laboratory where you have to satisfy both things. The same is true of, black holes. So if we could actually study the physics inside of black holes, which we don’t can’t do now, you have to preserve all the quantum numbers, all the things that we treasure in quantum physics, and you have to obey the rules of general relativity. We have to find a laboratory where both things are satisfied and and then get the clues, I think, to do this.

Speaker:

Unfortunately, we don’t have I don’t know of anything right now that we’re close to being able to do that. And so The experimentalists are failing to provide the information that would give us the ability to bring it together. So it’s not just that theorists are failing because They I think if they’re failing because not because of the lack of tools, they have different ideas, but but for to a large extent, because they don’t have the experimental hints or clues or things that they have Boundary conditions. And I can imagine there are places. I give 2 examples, but but maybe there’s other places. But what we have to find is places where, where you need both together. And that’s hard because one tends to work at very short distance It’s just the other at long distances and high velocities. So

Brian Keating:

I can’t resist asking you this question. So you’re an experimentalist. You’re, You know, known for tremendous contribution in many fields, but most recently with LIGO and the study of black holes. Let’s say you reach that biblical age of a 120. You’ve accomplished everything. You’re about to enter the the the promised land, which for you would be, you know, these these accomplishments. I wanna ask you. If you had a A one way ticket to visit a black hole.

Brian Keating:

Would you take it? At a 120. So you’ve got many, many years You should live and be well, but you’re about to reach that age. You got a letter from God saying your time is up. Do you take that trip?

Speaker:

No. Why not? I I don’t personalize the science that I do enough to to do that. There’s there’s things I’d like to do before I died. You know, I’d have, but it wouldn’t be to go to a black hole. Would you? I I would. I would.

Brian Keating:

If I if I, again, if I had lived that long lifetime and and gotten to that At the advanced age, you know, Moses didn’t get into the promised land, and this is my opportunity. I would I would, to wanna understand what it’s like. And by the way, you wouldn’t feel any pain. I’ve I’ve got another letter from God that says you wouldn’t feel any pain. That’s spaghettification or as my, 4 year old calls it, apostasized. But, but to see it and to experience and this brings up you know, I had this opportunity to speak to a philosopher of science recently, From Rice University, and and we had a great conversation. But at the end of it, I was left really, with kind of a existential crisis because, Essentially, everything that he said and and I mostly agreed with, it’s all perception. You know, even an experimental dial will will read something.

Brian Keating:

That’s just a translation into a voltage or an amplitude or, and so we never directly experience sensations or or the true reality. We have proxies. And and I guess the ultimate, you know, kind of removal of those is experiential. As you said, you’re not emotional. Maybe I’m more emotional. And so I would like to see it because, you know, at a certain sense, there’s that experiential opportunity. Obviously, this is not likely to happen. Disney is not likely to make, you know, Journey to a black hole anytime soon in reality.

Brian Keating:

But, but this notion I wanna ask you, I felt exasperated by talking to this wonderful man, brilliant, professor. But the sense that, like, there is almost no reality because everything is an interpretation of of, electrical signals that we perceive through our sensors They get processed through other chemical nodes in this fat and, you know, cellular based computer on our shoulders. And I got very exasperated about it Because it basically said you can’t really experience anything. It’s or that all experiences is almost illusory. And so I I feel like our job as experimentalists is to make, as Galileo said, you know, measure what’s measurable and make measurable what is not yet so. But do you ever feel like, you know, what we’re doing is is is only an approximation of reality, or do you does the do things like that not not really Trouble you.

Speaker:

Well, I I can relate to it, but it’s I think we’re a little different. And and that I I what I would say is that maybe I’m gonna say the wrong thing, but that you personalize your science much more than I do. Mhmm. If I wanna go to a black hole, my why don’t I do it instrumentally? And, I wish it would happen during my 120 years that we can actually get inside of a black hole and do what we’re talking about. But I would be Feel very satisfied by the fact that we built an instrument that could do it or and develop the techniques. Not that I personally was transported in, so I can look and and see. So I I I haven’t I maybe And maybe I’m a little jealous of you actually, then I think it it’s a nice feature to be able to personalize what you do with yourself. And I think you have, the I think it’s a good thing.

Speaker:

You have the feature that you are personalizing, in that image and probably in in personality, in the science, you do more than I do. I kinda wish I did. It would be with fun. Well, it’s

Brian Keating:

one thing you can I mean,

Speaker:

as my colleague said, you you should have fun? Yeah. And that’s what science is about. And I think it’s hard to have fun if you don’t personalize. So I think I think you have a capability you could exploit. Kevin’s is fine. It can be frustrated, but having trying to have fun is frustrating sometimes too. You do think so. It’s got the human emotions.

Speaker:

Mhmm. I think I detached my human emotions more from my science than, then you do probably. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing. It’s a personality

Brian Keating:

thing. It’s a personality thing to be sure. I I was really prompted by that Experience that a friend of mine, Peter Diamandis, who’s a medical doctor, a futurist, and and so forth, and he was the medical doctor Drew certified Stephen Hawking to take the zero gravity flight.

Speaker:

Oh, yeah.

Brian Keating:

And in the flight, you know, Stephen’s face was, you know, Purposely contorted because he couldn’t really smile in this way, and floating around in zero gravity was just this this highlight. He and and Eric Fierry is at UC San Diego as well. They coordinated this trip for him, and it just made me think, like, if he was that pleased flying on a, you know, on a on a d c 9 or whatever it was, You know, all the more so flying on, you know, Kip Thorne’s interstellar, you know, traveling device to to some black hole or something like that. But Pivoting now back to back to Earth, I I always find that, you know, people are fascinated with their origin stories, and and and so to speak. And you are a product of the University of California. I wonder if we could briefly recapitulate, the the the kind of early exposure that you had As as a young student at Cal and and how, you know, that maybe has carried lessons that maybe or maybe not Still exist to this day with the way that you teach and mentor and practice science.

Speaker:

So just to say, I I didn’t, really get interested in science until almost end of high school. I was thought I was gonna be a writer. I think I said that. But so I the closest I and I came from parents who didn’t go to college, so I had a little guidance. And I decided, I had to do something, so I applied to engineering schools. Those were UCLA. For me, it was, the the public education system, and it was either UCLA or Berkeley. Those were the 2 schools at the time.

Speaker:

And you had to take an exam to go in engineering. And I chose Berkeley. I got into both, and then I went to Berkeley. And I took usual freshman courses. And it was I didn’t particularly respond to engineering, which I’ll forget for now. But I did respond. It turns out to the fact that I had, a freshman physics where I was exposed at least secondarily, because it was a freshman physics course, which is kind of boring things, to the fact that they were discovering a lot of new particles and so forth up at the radiation lab. Mhmm.

Speaker:

And, in particular, the instructor I had was Owen Chamberlain, who Got the Nobel Prize for discovering the anti proton. He had discovered the anti proton before I was a student, but didn’t yet have the Nobel Prize at that point. And, it was really the inspiration of him who I never got to know really well. It’s just I was a young student, but it was Looking at Owen Chamberlain that that inspired me to at least change fields into physics. And, And again, it was through him that I got into research even though he did nothing for me in research. He was he I was a very good student, so I didn’t have to I had extra time. And He suggested I get into some research, which was uncommon in those days. Now we push our students to get into research as undergrads.

Speaker:

Yeah. And so I signed up for some research units with, Chamberlain, and He was at the radiation laboratory, which was a hike up the hill. Now there’s a shuttle bus that’s back and forth. In my way, I go up the hill. Yeah. And, I go up the hill and, on, I don’t know, Wednesday afternoons or something when I was just to my research units. And he was too busy for me, which was not nothing to do with me, But but it was there was a big overhead in going up the hill, so I’d wander around. And the the big accelerator at that time was the Bevatron.

Speaker:

You could go anywhere almost then. They didn’t have as much radiation, safety things. Yeah. But the bevatron was kind of inhibiting for me and a young kid wandering around. And I wandered up to the other cyclotrons and so forth and met people and learned how to do all that stuff, and that’s kind of what captured me. It was, it was open. It was fun, and it was all a new world. Yeah.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Nowadays, you know, you not only can’t go wandering through the cyclotrons, but Even the chemistry sets you get for your kids have, you know, baking soda and vinegar and no radium like they did when I was a kid. Yeah. We’ve really neutered a lot of what, the exposure that kids get to explore their curiosity. You know? Safety is sort of a trumped Trump, you know, exploration, but, you know, they’re they’re good aspects of it. I mean, our mutual friend, Gary Sanders, talks about, you know, people that would Go into the beam line, and and they would look to see inside the cycle, see if the beam is operating, with their eyes, and, thank God those those things don’t happen anymore. But When we look at the University of California, obviously, this is produced in in part with the, you know, UCTV, the best production studios in the world. And, we have the best students, I feel, in in on the on it as well.

Brian Keating:

Looking back, you said, you know, what advice you’d give to yourself, regarding, you know, kind of your your psychological perspective in a previous Joe, but I wanna ask now, scientifically, you’re starting grad school, take you back to Berkeley, back, when you started grad school. Is there something else that you Would be fascinating with if you were starting off today. You know, a lot of the low hanging fruit you know, we never have a term for high hanging fruit. I don’t know what it is. But I I feel like My son asked me recently, you know, what what’s science gonna be like in 2050?

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

And I and I felt like, which will be maybe the final question. We’ll talk about artificial intelligence and computer Physics, but, we’ll get to that in a moment. But I sorta suggested that maybe it’ll be, just as ambitious, but The discoveries might be smaller in a certain sense. I don’t know if you agree with that, but what would you do now as an incoming grad student at Cal or or, you know, a student a young student at Cal? What would you be studying? What would you be fascinated by?

Speaker:

Let me start with physics and then Maybe go broader. So so first, How is it different to be a grad student in physics like I was, compared to now? And how would you how might you approach it differently? When I was a Grad student, I think, I was really fortunate to be in a place where there was, there had developed all these world leading facilities, that I could learn about and be part of. But actually doing something, was different than now. So you had I know. So they’re so great. They they were do there was a facility. They were able to do new things. And but I had to do learn how to be a physicist and do physics.

Speaker:

At that point, it really when I was a student, you had to conceive of and build new instrumentation like you’re doing for your thing. But as a grad student, right, basically, that’s what you did as a young student. You basically had to be, had to build something that somebody hadn’t, to build electronics that would be faster, to do something to be able to do something somebody hadn’t done. I think that’s not the problem facing an experimental student today. I think it’s just almost flipped. And that is that The problem was physics at that time was ahead of instrumentation. And so, you had to build new instrumentation, and The physics follow new instrumentation before me with things like a bubble chamber. When I was there, we were just creating the electronics to do accurate time of flight.

Speaker:

The particles we go along, you do accurate time of flight, then you could tell the difference between a pi meson, k meson, or a proton because The heavier ones went slower. Mhmm. And you could distinguish them by doing time of flight. You had to make fast electronics to do that, but you couldn’t go buy it. You had to build it. And so the idea was there and you build it today. I think the problem is different. If you if you think of the technology that you need to improve, experiment for for CERN, the calorimetry or LIGO or other things.

Speaker:

Not the big ones that are very, very engineered, but but anything else. There’s a wealth of techniques and and technology that hasn’t yet been applied to physics. So I think the cleverest and most successful students of today that will stand out in the ways to say I’ve been fortunate to stand out, Have the will have the ability to be the 1st to use techniques that have been developed elsewhere. I don’t care whether we talk about machine learning, which is underused in physics and astronomy compared to other things for a reason that we use statistics to do our analysis to determine what’s right or wrong, and statistics and machine learning are kind of orthogonal because it’s a black box. But machine learning can do things very well. So how to apply machine learning to help you or developed electronics or other other things. The outside world has developed faster than we’ve developed. I remember when silicon detectors were first developed for, particle physics detectors, and they’re the most precise way to track particle.

Speaker:

And that’s basically using, something that makes, microelectronics and you do on, and the first ones were used in particle physics. They had the limitation. They weren’t radiation hard, so you put them around the beam and they wouldn’t last very long. And the early experiments, even the ones done at at Fermilab, had a lot of trouble employing these tracking detectors, which were 10 times more accurate than the tracking detectors where you have individual wires and so forth. And the first time it ever was done accurately enough, was developed by particle physicists, and they discovered the top. And the discovery of the top at At Fermilab was the last experiment done on an accelerator, not because, you know, the accelerator got better. It was because they had developed the technology of silicon, which couldn’t be done earlier. Now the outside world is a 100 times better at silicon than we are.

Speaker:

Yeah. And so There’s a lot of places where the technology has moved in the outside to be better. So, it seems to me, if I were a young starting graduate student now, I would Learn as much as I could about technology, and how I can answer our questions now that people couldn’t, decade ago, because of the technological advances. So I think the tables turned in the sense for experimental students.

Brian Keating:

So I said, maybe for the final, set of questions. We hear a lot about artificial intelligence, machine learning you mentioned, but they’re they’re they’re Distinct, but, there’s been not a small amount of discussion about whether or not you could make an artificially intelligent physicist, To basically, to explore datasets or to actually divine the laws of of physics and even Retrodict laws that we already know about and maybe predict new laws that we don’t have yet, knowledge on. I wanna ask you, this this quote from Einstein. You’re the man who gave you impostor syndrome, later on in life, despite winning a Nobel Prize and many other accolades. He said, do you remember he said that the happiest thought of his life was that an observer in freefall would experience no gravitational field? And he called that the happiest thought. Now and I always say to people that make these claims, like my friend Max Tegmark and and others, that we’re gonna have artificial Eins AI e a e, you know, Einstein. How can a computer, first of all, really replicate that? Because it wouldn’t Have an a sensation of free fall, because it doesn’t have the visceral sensation, a. And then b, what would happiness mean to Now maybe a computer would have some other metric that it could optimize that we could call happiness, but it seems to me what led Einstein to the Yeah.

Brian Keating:

Equivalence principle, in the form that he used to derive the laws of general relativity that you employed with your colleagues, are you sanguine about that? Do you feel like there will be Artificial Einsteins and and, and Kip Thorns and and so forth. Or do you think that there’ll be aids like we use, you know, to go shopping and to, You know, find the the best thing to watch on Netflix or ECTV.

Speaker:

I can only talk about the what I call the finite future, what I can see and what I can’t. I think AI can’t do what Einstein was talking about or, an element of what we all do. And that is as good as the fact that it’s getting great at playing chess. Go, analyzing data if it’s the right, if you have the right, kind of data, better than us at synthesizing a lot of data faster and so forth. It basically has made no progress at all in reasoning. Yeah. And reasoning is the word I would use. And reasoning, it seems to me decision making and reasoning, which is not made from doing an analysis of facts, but comes from somewhere else is the heart of what creates these other emotions.

Speaker:

It’s the thing that the fact that he reasoned what it was like to be in an elevator is what then gave him the emotion of happiness. But the fact is the reasoning that he did, could you duplicate that, not the happiness Right. But the reasoning itself. And there’s no progress in that at all. AI doesn’t do that. And so I think as long as and I don’t envision how it can. It’s something that’s in our brains that humans have that, I don’t we don’t have any we haven’t made any progress in being able to replicate, or understand. We have an ability to I mean, you can’t capture it in one word, but the word I would use is reasoning, not happiness as an emotion.

Speaker:

So no. I don’t think so. I think we’re unique as as our brains someday will maybe understand what consciousness is and And what something like reasoning is, how we make decisions based on not just an analytical thing and and choices and so forth. It’s a very human human element. It’s basically not something that scientists, whether physicists or anybody else really understands. And so I don’t see it, duplicated.

Brian Keating:

Well, it’s good to know we’ll have job security as physicists that

Speaker:

But as I said, that’s through our vision. How long we can save, but that’s probably through our lifetimes, anyway.

Brian Keating:

I appreciate your tremendous vision, Barry, as as usual, being so generous with your time and with your, inspiration and mentorship, Not just to me, but to millions around the world, and I I wish you many, many years until I can convince you to come along on the trip to the black Calls event horizon. Yeah. That’ll be for another time.

Speaker:

Thank you so much, Barry. Okay. Thank you.