Hello
and welcome to the Physics World Weekly podcast.
I'm Hamish Johnston.
This episode features an interview
with the American theoretical physicist Jim Gates.
In it, he updates his theorists bucket list,
which he first shared with Physics World back in 2014.
Gates also reflects on how the current political upheaval
in the United States is affecting science and society,
and what scientists can do to ensure
that the public has faith in science.
The interview was done in London by my Physics World colleague
Margaret Harris, who joins me for a quick introduction
and preview to the interview.
Hi, Margaret, welcome to the podcast.
Hi, Hamish.
So, Margaret, can you tell us a bit more about Jim Gates
as well as being a famous and esteemed researcher?
He also has a very public persona in the US.
So who is gates?
So Jim Gates is a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland,
and he has a list of honors as long as my arm.
His many awards include the US National Medal of Science,
which was given by President Obama.
And he's a fellow of the American Physical Society
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
as well as the Institute of Physics here in the UK.
He's also a past president of the US National Society of Black Physicists.
And as you mentioned, he's appeared in several science documentaries
aimed at the general public.
He's been kind of a friend of the magazine since, well,
I think about 2012 or thereabouts, when he wrote for us
the first time about, a topic that he was very close to his heart,
which was a dangerous which I'll get on to a little bit later.
Okay. And and he was in London.
That's where you you met up with him?
Why was he over on this side of the Atlantic?
Well, he came to wanted to give a series of talks, including, departmental
colloquium at Imperial College London in a public talk at the Royal Institution.
But I kind of up with him at a talk he gave at the Royal College of Art.
And one of the interesting things about Jim's work
as a theoretical physicist is that a lot of it is highly visual.
He invented this mathematical object that referred to called an Adinkra,
and it's a geometric representation of equations in an area of physics
called supersymmetry theory.
And these geometric representations look like a set of colored lines and modes.
And the more complex ones are visually beautiful, as well as being
sort of quote unquote beautiful in the physics sense.
And he wrote a feature for Physics World about these objects called the cross.
You can find it on our website.
And you first spoke with Jim Gates about his
theorists bucket list back in 2014.
I mean, what is this bucket list?
I'm guessing it's, it's things that a theoretical physicist
would like to do or like to see happen before they kick the bucket.
Is that the the general idea?
Yeah, that's the idea.
These are things that that,
Jim, as a theorist would like to see experimental evidence for.
And his bucket list in 2014 had four items on it.
The first was the Higgs boson,
which had actually already been observed at that point back in 2012.
And the second was gravitational waves.
The third was evidence for supersymmetry, and the fourth was evidence
for superstring theory. Now natural next question
what is supersymmetry and what is superstring theory?
I think we've probably talked a lot about Higgs bosons
and gravitational waves, but the other two might be
a little less familiar to listeners of this podcast.
So supersymmetry is a theory that each the fundamental particles
we know about in the Standard Model of particle physics has at least one
very similar twin that differs from it only in its mass and its quantum spin.
For example, the known force carrying bosons, which are the photon
and gluons and the W and Z particles, they all have quantum spins equal to one.
So there are super partner particles or particles as they're known for short
must be fermions, which have spins equal to one half.
Similarly, the matter particles, you know, electrons,
neutrinos, quarks, so on are all spin one half fermions.
So they're twins.
They're particles.
Must be bosons with spin equal to zero.
So that's supersymmetry theory.
Now superstring theory
takes us one level deeper and says that all these particles,
super super particles or otherwise, are in fact tiny vibrating strings.
And the different vibrational modes of these strings
is what gives rise to the very various particles with the properties we observe.
There's no observational evidence for this theory,
but it does provide a solution, or maybe a possible path to a solution
for some of the problems or inconsistencies in the standard Model,
like the fact
that gravity seems to behave differently from the other forces we know about,
which are the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
So that's a brief introduction, a very brief introduction to
supersymmetry and superstring theory.
Well that's great. Thanks, Margaret. Thanks.
Thanks for the introduction to Jim Gates and also to the those two rather esoteric,
bits of physics and, I suppose without further delay,
here is that conversation between Jim Gates and Physics World's Margaret Harris.
I'm here.
So a decade ago, Jim, we
spoke about the things on your theorist bucket list. Yes.
You have a list of the things you'd like to see discovered
or proven or explored or understood before you.
As you said, that's the bucket. Yeah. Well, exactly.
The first thing on your list you mentioned was the discovery,
the Higgs boson that has happened.
Yes. That's been ticked off.
The next thing on your list, again ten years ago was gravitational waves.
Yes. So that's also, I think, being successful.
The initial success in the detection of gravity waves
was a spectacular day for, a lot of us.
In fact, I was with Washington, D.C., at a conference
giving a talk, and, the, National Science
Foundation had organized a press event around the announcement.
And so I was, I was asked by some people,
if I would, make a contribution to BBC America
talking about, the discovery of, gravitational waves.
And I must admit, some friends watching the interview said, Jim,
you know, you were giddy, and I said, yes, I was.
Why were you so get it?
Well, first of all, because I had been following
the development of that detector almost from its birth.
So the first time I heard about detecting gravity waves was around 1985.
I was a new, maybe 85, 87.
I was a new, associate professor at University of Maryland
and, of a gentleman by the name of Rick Isaacson,
who was a program officer at the National Science Foundation.
One day he called me in of our office to say, Jim, I want to show you something.
It was the proposal from, the Caltech and MIT collaboration
to be funded to begin to build the detector.
And I read it and I said, this will never work.
Fortunately, Rick, Rick Isaacson, to those of of the community
who know the story, is, in fact, the superhero that made this happen
because for decades he was the person
in the National Science Foundation with a faith that this could happen.
And when it happened, it was just an amazing day.
So those works knew the whole story were giddy.
Why is it that the discovery of these gravitational waves,
why is it so exciting?
So there are a couple of reasons that, I know personally, I'm excited.
And I think, most, theoretical physicists would agree with this assessment.
The first thing is that this was probably Einstein's
final big prediction that there would be
observable waves of gravity, gravitational waves in the universe.
It's very funny.
If you go back into the literature, he first says, yes,
this is possible, but at some point he changes
his mind, says it's not possible that maybe these things don't exist.
And so there's another round of discussions
where some error was found that he reverses that. Yes.
It's possible.
So first of all, it's very interesting if you know the whole story, to think
about how human this is, the bounce back and forth
and this idea about whether, his intuition was correct
and then to have Mother Nature said, look, you got it right the first time, kid.
I mean, it's just so lovely story.
So that's
the one thing, is the confirmation of the theory of general relativity.
The a sharp current, a confirmation that is unlike anything that I
unlike anything I could imagine happening in my lifetime, quite frankly,
even though it was on my bucket list.
The other thing is because is because
our species knows about the heavens.
Mostly because
there have been entities in physics that are like mercury.
You know, Mercury was a guy,
carried
messages from Mount Olympus to humans
in our version of the story,
the character of Mercury is replaced by photons,
its light that has been telling us for hundreds of thousands of years,
maybe a million years, that there's something out there.
And we look up in the night sky and those are photons
bringing the message of whatever it is.
It's out there.
Now, of course, this drove
the development of science for several hundred years,
and certainly is part of the I would call it the science
Big bang that happened in Europe around Newton and Galileo.
So with the detection of gravitational waves, a new kids on the block
to do the messaging, the new kid on the block is the graviton.
That is, just as light
has an aspect as a particle, we call it a photon.
If you're a science fiction fan for Star Trek, you'll probably remember
these things called gravitas.
And so once we have detected gravitational waves,
the next big thing is to be able to detect gravitons.
Now there are a couple of steps in that.
And, LIGO is starting to take one of them, I believe,
now, because one of the things about
photons is what we call polarization.
They basically, if,
a photon is coming straight at you, you could spin
and they could spin either, in what we physicists call a right hand sense,
that's like closing your right hand and looking at your thumb.
Or it could spend in a left hand sense, in which case it's
the spin vectors pointing away from you.
Those are the only things that are allowed for light.
For the graviton.
It's also true.
And so the next thing you want to do is measure
polarization to confirm that prediction of the mathematics.
Like gravitons come in left handed polarized states.
And right here the polarized states.
Then the next really big step is you want to actually see gravitons.
Now for photons.
That was the work, that Einstein, gave, in 1905.
There were four just beautiful papers written that year.
One of them was on the photoelectric effect.
And the result of that observation is that the energy
in light comes in packets.
It's quantized.
And the particles that carry that quantized energy are photons.
So we want to verify that for gravitational waves
and see the graviton as a quantum mechanical particle.
It's not clear, how that technology is going to work out.
Once we get all that knowledge, then we're going to be able to do
something that we've never been able to do as a species in this universe.
So everybody
knows what the Big Bang, what came after the Big Bang.
Well, the first big thing that happens is what we call inflation.
When the universe went from being something smaller than the atom to
this huge structure that we inhabit now,
there was also a period of darkness.
It's the first night, and that first night
lasted approximately 380,000 years.
Now, what was going on in that period?
Well, in some sense, the average temperature
of the universe was so great and the
particles were in such chaotic motion that light could not travel through it.
Light was frozen in this universe, for the from the time of the big Bang,
up until 380,000 years,
and at 380,000 years, the universe had grown so much,
the average temperature
and density of particles had dropped so much that finally light could travel.
Now, what's really interesting is if you look at the universe with photons,
the only thing that you can see is the first time light is able to travel
through the universe. Sometimes this is called the first dog.
And so we have been seeing this first dog since the 60s.
It's called the cosmic Microwave background.
And so if you want to peer behind that, think of it as a curtain.
You can't use light, but with gravitational waves
you can image the universe before the house with microwave background.
This up there.
So we will be able, as a species eventually to look
maybe all the way back to the Big Bang.
And that's remarkable.
And then there's one other thing.
And that's the Star Trek League,
which has been the science fiction of Star Trek.
They use graviton.
And so maybe just as we have been
using photons
for our high technology coming out of the revolution
that really started here in England with Faraday and Maxwell, maybe
at some point in the future those steps will be repeated for gravitons.
And so maybe there's some gravitational base technology
out there that who knows what we'll do with at the time.
Hopefully it won't be just creating graviton balls or beams
like they do in Star Trek.
What's the of the path to see the graviton experimentally.
So so LIGO and its sisters, you know, Lord Ligo's,
at the time of detection, it was three different detectors, two
in the United States and one on the border of France and Italy, called Virgo.
There is an a new LIGO site coming online in India now.
And so what's going to happen is that
if the world remains dedicated to doing science,
which is a good question that we could talk about,
but if there's a global consensus on, you know, continuing
to do the science, more sites like this are going to come online.
And so we're going to have higher fidelity pictures.
And then when I say pictures now,
I mean the images that are brought to us by the graviton is not by photon.
So it would be able to developed well there.
So this way
it's going to be the difference between going from black and white TV to color TV,
because there will be more information coming out of the gravitons.
And so we'll be able to see more things of the universe.
Now, the pathway to detecting gravitons.
Like I said, there are two steps.
First of all, you probably want to measure the polarization.
And these fabri Perot parameter interferometers,
which is what the Ligo's sites are based on, have that capacity.
And one can imagine doing that measure.
In fact, ligo's, the way to think about ligo's is two pipes at right
angles to each other and light goes is the this is those pipes.
So the pipes are evacuated, the circular.
And so there's this, computer animation that I found
which is beautiful, which shows
what would happen to the shape of that pipe
if there's a gravity wave coming from the back of the pipe
towards your eye, the pipe deforms in a very particular way.
And, if it's a polarized, like graviton wave,
the bending has a certain signature, whether it's left or right handed.
And I've actually used this video many times as I've been talking
for the last decade about this.
So if we are lucky enough we can actually see polarization.
I would guess within the next ten years,
I guess gravitons were number two on a bucket list.
So that's like two A we've now covered two A let's get a two week two,
because a quantization quantization is going to be a challenge.
And back in the 60s,
physicist at the University of Maryland, Joseph Weber, developed it.
But now Weber bars are big metal bars.
And the idea was
you will call them down.
And then if a graviton impinges on these bars,
it would induce, lattice vibrations in the metal and you would detect those.
And so that's the principle behind so-called Weber bars.
So people and Weber bars,
Joe, actually, claim to have detected gravitons in the 60s.
But this is a claim that has never been verified independently.
So, one of the things I tell people about science
is that science can it probably doesn't have the capacity to see miracles,
because if it's something that happens one time, how do you verify it?
Right.
So there's going to be a big push,
I suspect, in going back and upgrading that technology.
But one of the most exciting things about that is, I mean, they might be
quantum Weber bars, not classical Weber
bars, where you take not these huge.
I mean, if you see pictures of Weber bars, they're big.
But you can imagine a tabletop quantum experiment
where the same principle
that Joe Weber was talking about, which is that a graviton, impinges on a
solid state system which causes it to which it takes photons.
And then you detect the phonons.
You can imagine now doing this with using quantum mechanical, Weber bars.
And so that's the road that I could see
to actually nailing down the existence of the graviton.
So that's gravitational waves and gravitons today.
And to be
number three on your bucket list ten years ago was super partners. Yes.
Supersymmetry. Yes.
How have the prospects for supersymmetry developed in the past ten years when,
there was a
Second World War on our planet and it lasted
longer in the Pacific version than the European version.
And when
the Emperor spoke to
the Japanese people, the phrase was repeated.
The situation has not developed to our advantage.
And so we could apply that to supersymmetry.
I believe, very accurately,
that the situation has not developed to our advantage.
Now, not all of us,
were at the same place in terms of expectations.
In 2006.
I actually published a paper in this in physics today.
And I said explicitly, I did not expect
the LHC to detect supersymmetry.
Why not?
Well, it was back of the envelope calculation.
I was looking at the issue of,
anomalous magnetic moments
because the numbers,
magnetic moments, if you look at the math and the how it works, it they can't
the magnetic models can be sensitive to particles you can't actually detect.
And so by looking at the anomalous magnetic moment
and then comparing the measured value to what is predicted by all the particles
that, you know, you can put lower bounds on the particles that you don't know.
And that's what I did to come up with this number that it looked to me like
the lightest super partner was probably going to be in the range of 30 TeV, okay.
Which is well beyond what the LHC, the LHC initial operation of seven.
It's currently at 14, so I'm feeling comfortable about this issue.
I'm not like the the people who said, oh my God, we got it wrong.
Well, no, I didn't get it wrong.
I think I got it right.
But like Cassandra in Greek mythology,
the seer, people don't listen to a seer.
Awful.
So now remember our theory.
So it might be 66 years.
It was 30, but to me, it's someplace that would seem reasonable.
If it's not found by 100 TeV, which I'm going to.
I'm going to kick the bucket by me.
By the time we get that technology,
if it's not found by then, I would get very worried.
It would, but I am confident that it's out there.
So that's one thing, is that
there has been a pushback on the hysteria around supersymmetry,
because that's what it was for me,
was a hyperbolic hysteria that many people bought into
one of the physics I most admire, Michael Peskin.
He's at slack, and Mike Michael wrote a
very highly regarded book with one of his students, Peskin.
Schroeder is a textbook
on, quantum field theory in elementary particle physics.
And Michael was totally committed to the idea that supersymmetry was at hand.
So he and I have had some discussions over the last year or so about,
you know, why he was so convinced and, this, this thing called naturalness,
which it's a it's a pretty argument, but I never found it convincing,
which is part of it.
Partly why I did not get on the
supersymmetry is going to be found that the LHC bandwagon.
So that's one thing.
On the other hand, in this article,
in the article that I did with you folks, in physics world
before the second scientific run at the LHC,
I pointed out that particle physics and observations
of particle physics, typically high precision,
observations, magnetic moments,
branching ratios, decay rates, all sorts of things
were not the only way to think about finding supersymmetry in particular.
One could imagine that, particularly
with string theory, that there might be cosmological implications.
Now, for most people, that was limited to the question of dark matter.
You know, in, in astrophysics and cosmology,
as far as we can tell, our technology has only allowed us to measure
something like 5% of the matter that's in the universe.
So there's a crisis there.
And one of the solutions was to imagine
that the other 95%
is made up of one component of dark energy and dark matter,
and with the greater, proportion going to dark energy.
But the
dark matter contribution, if you look at the mathematics of supersymmetry,
you can easily find that there are particles that we haven't observed,
and they might be the lightest supersymmetric particle
has characteristics that would be consistent
with what I think of as observable dark matter.
A very dark matter.
There are two kinds of dark matter, actually,
and I'm not sure how widely this is recognized.
There is dark matter
that still possesses either quantum chromodynamics
or quantum flavor, dynamic or electromagnetic interactions.
In addition to being dark.
On the other hand, there's another kind of dark matter,
which some people call profoundly dark matter, which would only interact
gravitationally and in fact, if you look at string theory,
it suggests that a profoundly dark matter
is probably a huge component to the structure of the universe.
But again, I I'm not a phenomenal largest,
and I don't really know any serious studies of this issue.
But as someone who believes a string theory basically is right,
I wish someone would begin to answer that question.
Now, why do why did I come back to this?
Well,
maybe a decade or so ago, Nima Arcanae, Hammett,
and Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Studies,
the place that was isat home when it came to us,
wrote me a very interesting paper in which they argued that
the heights of string theory predicts particles of spin greater than two.
And so they
looked at the issue of high spin particles,
therefore very massive, having glancing collisions
and, you know, not head on, but just grazing collisions.
And what might the signatures that be on the cosmic microwave background?
And so when they wrote that papers, I said, well, the next thing
they're obviously going to do is look at what happens if you add supersymmetry.
But they never wrote that paper.
So the first year I was at Brown University,
I had an opportunity to work with a young, astrophysicist there
by the name of, Stefan Alexander and some graduate students
and my postdoc, Konstantinos Lucas.
And we looked at the issue of what kind of signature
you would get for high spin, supersymmetric dark matter.
And so it has a it has a characteristic signature,
whether it's detect was a different question,
but the form of the signal you can calculate.
And that's what we did in this paper,
which is one of the few times I've ever left mathematics to do some something.
It looks like real physics.
So, those are the challenges that I see
for dark matters when we look up and begin to see signatures.
And the final thing on your bucket list,
which we've already touched on, was superstring theory.
And you said at the time you did not expect to see
either this or some of this
unless I, unless I'm, blessed with a life as long as Methuselah in the Bible.
I don't expect to see that.
But, for me,
for superstring to when
observational acceptance, it will likely come about
not from a single experiment, but from a confluence of observations.
So a confluence of the observations of the cosmology astrophysics types
I describe.
And, maybe, perhaps the lightest supersymmetric particle is found.
By the way, I don't expect extra dimensions ever to be found,
but that's puts me.
I'd like to say I'm a high dimensional refusenik, and probably so.
So those are the kinds of things that I if I lived several hundred years,
those would be the kinds of likely expectations I would have.
And have you added anything new to your bucket list over the past ten years?
You know, you're not sort of fixed to to stick with just one bucket list.
That's true, yes, but I don't quite know how to verbalize.
It has to do with a confluence of things around quantum mechanics and information,
because in my own research, one of the striking things
about these graphs that we developed to, we call them a decrease
to understand the representation theory of supersymmetry
is that error
correcting codes are part of these construction.
In fact, let me say that for me, this is the proudest
piece of research I've ever accomplished to discover
a kind of physics law,
at least the possibility of physics law
that includes error correcting codes.
I know of no previous example in history where law physics
includes error correcting codes, but we can clearly see it
in the mathematics around these graphs.
So that, first of all,
had a profound impact on the way I think about information theory.
So John Wheeler, in the 60s or so came up with this
very interesting way to think about quantum mechanics.
And one of the shorthand phrases of it
is it from bit, namely, that the information
that we see in the universe is somehow connected to bits.
And
I remember as a young person thinking, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard.
But when I, in my own research,
saw that it is possible for the
the laws of physics to contain bits in the form of error correcting codes,
I had to then rethink my rejection of what I thought was a wild idea.
In fact, now that I've.
Oh, I've concluded that
if you do theoretical physics long enough, you too can become crazy.
Because that's what sort of happened to me.
So the fact that there at least
in the
mathematics of supersymmetry, there is no way to avoid
the presence of error corrected codes and therefore bits.
And because of that, my new sort of item
for the bucket list is
an actual observational demonstration
that the laws of quantum mechanics
entail the use of information in bits.
That's the new idea.
Well, any predictions for when we might find that out?
Long after I've gone, though, that's all I could feel that.
Would you know if I had another hundred and 50 years of life?
That's where intellectually I would be going right now, because
the hints are so stark that it suggests something's going on.
And in some sense, often Richard Feynman is identified
as the father of quantum computing.
But if you actually go back and read, because I've read the actual writings
area,
it's not so much in my mind, not so much
that he's the father of quantum computing.
He basically says
that there's a whole lot of computation somehow going on in nature.
And that's a really exciting idea
because I've seen a national year of quantum.
We are asking a lot of people, we speak to this sort of quite nebulous and
philosophical question, what does quantum mean to you as a scientist?
I think it was, Feynman said.
Nobody really understands part of a context, maybe of some,
but some mainstream physics and this kind of right.
Except I think there may be a hold in the formulation.
So let me give you, as a physicist, a model to think about quantum mechanics
that I've been sort of I haven't written anything but I've been thinking about it.
Let's start with the bare okay,
bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
Right.
The three which is around the the cauldron.
So let's imagine that those three witches were actually physicists.
They might decide not to start the fire
just to observe what happens to the liquid in the cauldron.
It would calm down, and maybe one of them would put a
small twig or something on this calm surface,
give it a twitch,
and the twig would begin to move along the surface.
And if there were no friction, it would continue
to move in a straight line without any loss of speed.
That's what Newton teaches us.
Now let's start the fire in the cauldron.
The liquid heats up,
the surface of the liquid begins to bubble.
And then let's imagine doing the same thing with the twig.
What happens now?
It no longer moves in a straight line
because of the the bubbles coming up out of the liquid.
And so
since they're witches, they can live forever.
They can move form an infinite number of experiments like this.
And in particular, you might want to perform one experiment
where you say, even though the twig is not moving a straight line.
Suppose sometimes it gets to the place where it would have been
if it moved a straight line.
It probably happens an infinite number of times.
So you could watch those
experiments, but there might be some times
when it just gets a little a push, a little bit off of the straight line.
But then as it nears the other side, it gets a push back in the straight line
by these bubbles probably happens less than the actual straight line.
And the point is that if you go to this thought experiment,
you can begin to see why a fluctuating
substructure
moves away from Newton's laws.
And we know in relativity quantum field theory,
we know the masses that the vacuum is a fluctuating substructure.
And so all one thing I began to wonder about is,
is it just the quantum vacuum
that actually makes us depart from Newton's second law?
I posed this as an interesting thought experiment for anyone to go through.
So these are
the kinds of things that, as you said, year of the quantum.
I would like to see this kind of a question
address in a fully
rigorous way to ask,
are there classical models that demonstrate quantum behavior?
And that's what my cauldron in which is, is all about.
So we've talked a little bit about how science has changed
over the past ten years.
Of course, science is not
unconnected with the rest of the world, and there have been some changes in
other things that impinge on science, especially recently developing the US
with threats to science funding generally
and to support for diversity initiatives in science, specifically.
What's your take on that?
Where is that going to go?
So unfortunately, it's been very predictable.
I think it was two years ago.
I wrote an essay called Pushed Off the Mountaintop.
And in that essay, I was talking about the fact that people like me, I'm
a man of color, an African-American scientist,
that it looked to me like the United States was moving in a direction
where it would be less likely that people like me
would continue to have access
to the kind of educational training that it takes to do this.
And I took that title from a statement
by Martin Luther King, or he says, I've reached the mountaintop,
and the pushing off is closing down the opportunities for people of color.
And, I'm still of the opinion that that decision
that my country's Supreme Court made doesn't make sense.
And it doesn't make sense in a very peculiar way.
This is a decision about affirmative action. Yes.
It doesn't make sense, because if you want to your stockbroker
and you said, I don't believe in diversity, you would run out of the door.
And that's kind of what this decision is like, saying is that
that diversity has no role in providing and driving innovation.
And there's lots of there's lots of evidence that's not right.
The simplest evidence I can present to someone is to say, well, how do you think
cities came into existence?
They're places where innovation occurs.
And why do they occur in cities?
Because you have diverse people coming to cities, as you know.
That's so that's the one to me, one of the saddest things of
what my country is likely to go through for at least 50 years.
It's not many people think it's a short term development.
I don't think so at all.
I think it's at least a 50 year development.
I'm also some of an amateur historian
because I, I like history, I have my entire adult life.
And last time that these kind of conditions
arose in the country there, it's very funny.
In my country, there are two precursors to the current, conditions.
One was the period where the Civil War,
from 1865 to 1876,
and the other precursor that sort of like this
was what was called the, Red scare in the 1950s in the United States.
And so if you look at my country's history, that sort of
makes some predictions about politically where the country is going to be,
not for a short while, but for a considerable while.
You add to that the
presence of a new medium,
the internet
and the fact that
with this new medium.
Anyone can reach many millions of people.
Why is this a little bit frightening?
Well, fake news, misinformation.
I ran into,
a philosopher, about a year ago.
Less last summer, I guess it was.
I had the joyful occasion of getting my 10th honorary
degree from Harvard University.
And I was in a conversation with this philosopher,
and he made a statement to me which I found very profound.
I've been turning it over in my mind.
So I would this and trying to think, well, he said,
if you stop and think of the, printing press,
it allowed books to disseminate
to Western European society in a way that had never happened before.
And therefore it drove literacy, which is obviously true.
And he said, so think about the comparison to what the internet is.
So if we go back to the early example, how long does it take
for literacy levels to increase 50 to 100 years?
So then he says, now let's think about the internet.
What's different about it?
And the difference is that anyone can say anything and reach millions of people.
And so the challenge is
how long it will take for our species to learn to write the internet.
That is right.
And what he meant is write it without misinformation, a fake news.
And if he's right, that's a 150 year long period.
And so that's part of the challenge that, the US is facing.
But, I mean, it's not just a challenge for my country,
but somehow it seems to be particularly critical in the country.
So what does this do about science?
Well, in 2005, the outside world, your science,
I was invited to deliver a plenary address
to the American Association for the Advancement of Science large annual meeting.
And in that address,
which was entitled Einstein's Lessons with the Third Millennium,
I made statements about science being turned off
because it was clear to me, even back then in my country,
that there were elements in our society
that would be perfectly happy to
deny evidence as brought forth by scientists.
And it was also clear to me that these elements were becoming more strong.
They're not weakening.
So you put this all together, and it's going to be an extraordinarily
important and importantly, challenging time for the continuation of science,
because certainly at the level of fundamental science, this is something
that the public generally has to say, yes, we want to invest in this.
And if you have agencies and agents in the society
denying vaccines, for example, or denying
the scientific evidence throughout evolution,
or denying the scientific evidence about climate change,
if this is going to be
something that the public buys into, then science is so
potentially can be turned off.
And that's the thing I was warning about in 2 or 5.
What are some practical things that members of scientific community
who don't want that to happen, can do to help prevent it from happening?
First of all, to come down from the ivory tower.
I've been parts of
some activities in the United States,
and they normally are, under the rubric of
restoring trust, the public's trust in science.
And I think that's the wrong framing me, quite frankly,
it's the public faith in science as a under attack.
And so from my perspective, I
that's what I'd much rather have people really thinking about.
What is it that is the issue I don't think is just a matter of trust.
What would you say the differences between having trust the science
and having faith in science?
So what's the difference between faith and trust?
Well, in my mind, if I
trust some guy, I will listen.
If I have faith in something, I will listen and I will act.
And to me, this is a this is a sharp distinction.
Personally, even though I expect
that it's going to be really hard going for I am hopeful
and I would urge young people never to lose that.
We've got it.
It's funny if you lose hope, there is no hope.
It's just that simple.
And so I am hopeful.
Even though people may take my comments as, oh, he's just depressed.
No, no, I'm not I because I'm a scientist and, it's the only thing
I've ever wanted to be in life as a scientist starting at four years old.
But because I'm a scientist, I believe that one must,
in a clear eyed,
hard hearted manner, look at the evidence that's in front of
us and not sentimentally try to dodge what you see.
And that's who I am. So I am hopeful,
in spite of all the things that I've just said to you,
I tell people, I've often said,
Albert Einstein is my hero, Max of us in science, and he is.
And one of the things, if you read enough about Uncle Albert,
as I refer to him often, if you read about his
life, you come to understand a couple of things.
He was very religious up until age 12.
What changed?
Geometry.
He says it exposes near the end of his life, however,
you can find him talking about an illimitable spirit.
What does that mean?
He doesn't explain it.
He just uses the phrase but admits something to him.
And so
the way I interpret what he had to say
through the prism of my own life
is that there's something very mysterious about this universe
and that this great mystery, whatever it is, is something that
comes as close to a miracle as anything I've ever seen.
And that's what for.
What gives you hope?
Yes.
Then I'll probably leave it there.
Jim Gates, thank you very much for speaking to us.
Thank you.
Margaret, it's great to have the opportunity again
here.
If you want to time
travel back to 2014 and listen to Margaret and Jim's first conversation,
you can find that interview on the Physics World website.
Just look for the headline, Terrorists Bucket List.
That interview was a very early episode
of the Physics World Stories podcast, which we produce every month.
The February 2025 edition
looks at the delicate, glassy formations
known as Pele's hair and Pele's tears.
These are volcanic materials that are named after
the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire.
As the volcanologists Ken Rubin and Tamsin Mather
explain in to host Andrew Gloster
that episode is called Threads of Fire,
uncovering volcanic secrets with Pele's hair and tears, and you can find it
on the Physics World website or at your favorite podcast provider.
I'm afraid that's all the time we have for this week's podcast.
Thanks to Jim Gates and Margaret Harris for a fascinating conversation,
and a special thanks to our producer, Fred Isles.
We'll be back again next week.