Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
barry barish a theoretical physicist at
caltech and the winner of the nobel
prize in physics for his contributions
to the ligo detector and the observation
of gravitational waves
ligo or the laser interferometer
gravitational wave observatory is
probably the most precise measurement
device ever built
by humans
it consists of two detectors with four
kilometer long vacuum chambers situated
three thousand kilometers apart
operating in unison to measure a motion
that is ten thousand times smaller than
the width of a proton
it is the smallest measurement ever
attempted by science a measurement of
gravitational waves caused by the most
violent and cataclysmic events in the
universe
occurring over tens of millions of light
years away
to support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation with barry
barish
you've mentioned that you were always
curious about the physical world and
that an early question you remember
stood out where you asked your dad
why does ice float on water and he
couldn't answer and this was very
surprising to you
so you went on to learn why
maybe you can speak to what are some
early questions in math and physics that
really sparked your curiosity yeah
that memory is
kind of something i used to illustrate
something i think that's common in
science that people that do science
somehow have maintained
maintain something that kids always have
a small kid
eight years old or so
asks you so many questions usually
typically that you
consider them pests you tell them to
stop asking so many questions
and
somehow our system manages to kill that
in most people
so in school we make people do study and
do their things but not to pester them
by asking too many questions
and
i think
not just myself but i think it's typical
of scientists like myself that uh
have somehow escaped that maybe we're
still children or maybe we
somehow didn't get it beaten out of us
but
i think it's i teach in a college level
and it's to me
one of the biggest deficits is the lack
of curiosity if you want that we've
beaten out of them because i think it's
an innate human quality is there some
advice or insights you can give to how
to keep that flame of character i think
it's a problem of both parents and
and
the parents should be should realize
that's a great quality we have
that you're curious and that's good
instead we have we have expressions like
curiosity killed the cat
and
and uh
and more but i mean that basically it's
not not thought to be a good thing you
get curiosity killed the cat means if
you're too curious you get in trouble
and i don't like catholics anyway so
maybe it's a good thing yeah yeah
that to me needs to be solved really in
education and in homes it's a
realization that there's certain human
qualities that we should try to build on
and not destroy one of them is curiosity
anyway back to me in curiosity i was
passed and asked a lot of questions my
father generally could answer them
and at that age
and the first one i remember that he
couldn't answer
was
not a very original question but
basically that
ice is made out of water and so why does
it float on water
and
he couldn't answer it
and it may not have been the first
question it's the first one that i
remember and and that was the first time
that i realized that
to learn and answer your own curiosity
or questions there's various mechanisms
in this case it was going to the library
and
or asking people who know more and so
forth but
eventually you do it by what we call
research
but but it's um
driven by
if you're
hopefully you ask good questions if you
ask good questions and you have the
mechanism to solve them then you do what
i do in life basically not necessarily
physics but
and it's a great quality in humans and
we should nurture it
do you remember any other kind of in
high school maybe early college
more basic physics ideas
that sparked your curiosity or
mathematics or science engineering i
wasn't really into science
until i got to college to be honest with
you
but
just staying with water for a minute i
remember
that i
was curious
uh
why uh what happens to water you know it
rains and there's water in a wet
pavement and then the pavement dries out
what happened to this
water that came down
and i you know i didn't know that much
and then eventually i learned in
chemistry or something water is made out
of hydrogen and oxygen those are both
gases so how the heck does it make this
substance this liquid
[Laughter]
yeah so but so that has to do with
states of matter
you've uh i know
perhaps ligo and
the the thing for which you've gotten
the nobel prize and the things much of
your life work
perhaps was a happy accident in some
sense in the early days but is is there
a moment where you looked up to the
stars and also the same way you wondered
about water wandered about some of the
things that are out there in the
universe
oh yeah i think everybody's
looks and
is in awe and is curious about
what what it is out there and you know
and as i learned
more i learned
of course that we don't know very much
about what's there and the more we learn
the more we know we don't know i mean we
don't know what the majority of anything
is out there it's all
what we call dark matter a dark energy
and that's one of the big questions 20
year when i was a student those weren't
questions so we even know less in a
sense the more we
uh the more we look so
of course i think that's
one of the areas that
almost it's universal people see the sky
they see the stars and they're beautiful
and
and see it looks different on different
nights and it's a curiosity that we all
have
what are some questions about the
universe
that in the same way that you felt about
the ice
that today
you mentioned to me offline you're
teaching um a course on the frontiers of
science frontiers of physics yeah what
are some questions
outside the ones we'll probably talk
about that kind of
yeah fill you with uh
get your flame of curiosity up and uh
firing up
yeah you know fill you with all
well first i'm a physicist not an
astronomer so i'm interested in physical
the physical phenomenon really so
the question of of uh
dark matter and dark energy which we
probably won't talk about are rece or
recent their last 20 30 years or
certainly dark energy
dark energy is a complete puzzle
it goes against what i'll
will what you will ask me about which is
general relativity and einstein's
general relativity it basically takes
something that he thought was
what he what he called a constant which
isn't and
and uh
in the if that's even the right theory
and it represents most of
the universe
and then we have something called dark
matter and there's good reason to
believe it might be an exotic form of
particles um and that is something i've
always
worked on on particle accelerators and
so forth and it's a big puzzle what it
is it's a bit of a cottage industry and
that there's
lots and lots of searches
um but it may be a little bit like you
know looking for a treasure under rocks
or something you know it's hard to
we don't have really good guidance
except that
we have very very good
information that
it's pervasive and it's there
and that it's probably particles small
that the evidence is all of those things
but then the most
uh logical solution doesn't seem to work
something called supersymmetry
and
do you think the answer could be
something very complicated
you know i like to hope that think that
most things
that appear complicated are actually
simple if you really understand them
i think we just don't know at the
present time and it isn't something that
affects us it does affect it affects how
the stars go around each other and so
forth because we detect that there's
missing gravity but
uh but it doesn't affect
everyday life at all i tend to
think and
expect maybe and that the answers will
be simple we just haven't found it yet
do you think those answers might change
the way we see
other sources of gravity black holes
the way we see
the parts
of the universe that we do study it's
conceivable
the black holes that we've found in our
experiment and now we're trying now to
understand the origin of those
it's
conceivable but not
doesn't seem the most likely that they
were pre-primordial that is they were
made at the beginning and they in that
sense they could represent at least part
of the dark matter
so there can be connections dark
black holes or
how many there are how much of the mass
they encompass is still pretty primitive
we don't know so before i talk to you
more about black holes let me take a
step back to yeah i was actually went to
high school in chicago and would go to
uh take classes at fermi lab
uh watch the buffalo and so on yeah
so let me ask about you mentioned that
enrico for me was somebody who was
inspiring to you
in a certain kind of way um
why is that can you speak to that sure
he was amazing actually uh
he's the last
this is not the re i'll come to the
reason in a minute but the
he had a big influence on me at a young
age
he uh but he was the only the last
physicist
of note
that was both an experimental physicist
and a theorist at the same time
and he did two amazing things within
months
in 1933.
he
it was we didn't really know what the
nucleus was what uh
radioactive decay was what beta decay
was when electrons come out of
a nucleus
and in
nearly near the end of 1933
um he
the neutron had just been discovered and
that meant that we knew a little bit
more about what the nucleus is that it's
made out of neutrons and protons the
neutron wasn't discovered till 1932
and then once we discovered that there
was a neutron and proton and they made
the nucleus and then their electrons
would go around the basic ingredients
were there
and he uh wrote down not only just the
theory a theory but a theory that lasted
decades
and has only been
improved on
of beta decay that is the radio
radiation he did this
came out of nowhere and it was a
fantastic theory he submitted it to
nature
magazine which was the primary
play best place to publish even then
and it got rejected as being too
speculative
and so he went
back to his
drawing board in rome where he was
added some to it made it even longer
because it's really a classic article
and then published it in
the local italian
journal for physics and the german one
at the same time in 19 january of 1932
giulio and curie for the first time
steve saw artificial radioactivity
this was an important discovery because
radioactivity had been discovered much
earlier and you know we'd they had
x-rays and you shouldn't be
using them but they there was
radioactivity people knew it was useful
for medicine
but radioactive materials are hard to
find and so it wasn't prevalent but if
you could make them
then they had great use and julio and
curie
were able to bombard
aluminum or something with alpha
particles and
find that they excited something that
decayed and gave
decayed and gate had some half-life and
so forth meaning it was artificial
version
or let's call it a not not a natural
version an induced version of
radioactive uh
materials
and uh
fermi
somehow
had the insight
and i still can't see where he got it
that the right way to follow that up was
not using
charged particles like alphas and so
forth but use use these newly discovered
neutrons as the bombarding particle
seemed impossible they barely had been
seen
it was hard to get very many of them
but it had the advantage that they don't
um they're not charged so they go right
into the
to the nucleus
and that turned out to be the
experimental work that he did that won
him the nobel prize
and it was the first step in fission
discovery of fission
and that's he did this two completely
different things an experiment that was
a great idea
and a
tremendous implementation because how do
you get enough neutrons
and then he learned
quickly that not only do you want
neutrons but you want really slow ones
he learned that experimentally and he
learned how to make slow ones and then
they were able to make go through the
periodic table and make
lots of
particles he missed on fission at the
moment but he had the basic information
and and then fission followed soon after
that forgive me for not knowing but is
the birth of the idea of bombarding with
new uh
neutrons
is that uh
is that an experimental idea was it born
out of an experiment you just observe
something or is this an einstein style
idea where you
took a combination because he realized
that neutrons had a characteristic that
would allow them to go all the way into
the nucleus when we didn't really
understand what the
you know what how what the structure was
of all this so that took
uh
an understanding or recognition of the
physics itself of how a neutron
interacts compared to say an alpha
particle that giulio and curie had used
and then he had to invent
a way to have enough neutrons and uh you
know what he had a team of
associates and he pulled it off
quite quickly so you know it's pretty
astounding and probably maybe you can
speak to it
his ability to put together
the engineering aspects of great
experiments
and doing the theory they probably fed
each other i wonder can you speak to why
we don't see more of that is that just
really difficult to do
it's difficult to do yeah i think in
in both theory and experiment in physics
anyway
was um
it was conceivable if you had an the
right person to do it and no one's been
able to do it since so i had the dream
that that
was what i was going to be like fermi
but so you love both sides of it the
theory yeah yeah i never liked the idea
that you did experiments without really
understanding the theory or the theory
should be related very closely to
experiments
and so i've always done
experimental work that was closely
related to the theoretical ideas
i think i told you i'm russian so i'm
going to ask some romantic questions but
is it tragic to you that
he's seen as the architect of the
nuclear age that some of his creations
led to potentially
some of his work
has has led to
potentially still the destruction of the
human species some of the most
destructive
weapons yeah
uh
but i think even more general than him i
i i gave you all the virtues of
curiosity a few minutes ago there's an
interesting book called the ratchet of
curiosity you know a ratchet is
something that goes in one direction
and that that it's written by a guy
who's probably a sociologist or
philosopher or something
and he he picks on this particular
problem but other ones and that is the
the danger of knowledge basically you
know you're curious
you learn something so it's a little bit
like curiosity killed the cat you have
to be worried about whether you can
handle
new information that you get so in this
case the new information had to do with
really understanding nuclear physics
and that information maybe we didn't
have the sophistication to know how to
keep it under control
yeah and fermi himself was
a very a political person so he wasn't
very driven by or or at least
he appears in all of his writing the
writing of his wife the interactions
that others had with him as either he
avoided it all or he was pretty
apolitical i mean he just saw the world
through kind of the lens of a scientist
but you asked if it's tragic uh
the bomb was tragic certainly on japan
and he had a role in that so i wouldn't
want it as my legacy for example
i mean that but broader to the human
species that
it's the ratchet of curiosity that we
uh
we do stuff just to see what happens
that that curiosity that uh in sort of
my area of artificial intelligence
that's been a concern
they're on a small scale on a silly
scale perhaps currently there's
constantly
unintended consequences you create a
system
and you put out there and you have
intuitions about how it will work you
have hopes how it will work but you put
it out there just to see what happens
yeah and uh in most cases because
artificial intelligence is currently not
super powerful it doesn't
create uh large-scale negative effects
but that same curiosity as it progresses
might lead to something that
destroys the human species and the same
may be true for bioengineering there's
people
that
you know engineer viruses to protect us
from viruses
to see you know how do uh how close is
this to mutating so it can jump to
humans or going you know or engineering
uh defenses against those
and it seems exciting and the
application the positive applications
are really exciting at this time but
we don't think about
how that runs away in decades to come
yeah and i think it's the same idea as
this little book the ratchet of
science the the
uh ratchet of curiosity i mean
whether you pursue take curiosity and
let
artificial intelligence or machine
learning run away with
having its
solutions to whatever you want or we do
it
it's i think a similar consequence
i think uh from what i've read about uh
enrico for me he
he became a little bit cynical about the
human species towards the end of his
life
both having observed what he observed
we didn't write much
i mean he died young he died soon after
the world war uh
there was already you know
the
work by teller to develop the hydrogen
bomb and i think he was a little cynical
of that you know pushing it even further
and
uh rising tensions between the soviet
union and the u.s and looked like an
endless thing so but he didn't say very
much but a little bit as you said yeah
there's a few clips to sort of uh maybe
picked on a bad mood but in in the sense
that uh almost like a sadness a
melancholy sadness to
um
a hope that waned a little bit about
that uh yeah perhaps we can do
like
the science this curious species can
find the way out
well especially i think people who
worked like he did at los alamos and
spent years of their life
somehow had to convince themselves that
dropping these bombs would bring
lasting peace and it didn't and that it
didn't yeah
as a small interesting aside it'd be
interesting to hear if you have opinions
on this his name is also attached to the
fermi paradox which asks if there's uh
you know with
it's a very interesting question which
is
if it does seem if you sort of reason
basically that there should be a lot of
alien civilizations out there if the
human species
if earth is not that unique
by
basic
no matter the values you pick
it's likely that there's a lot of alien
civilizations out there and if that's
the case
why have they
not at least obviously visited us or
sent us loud signals that everybody can
hear
fermi's quoted as saying sitting down at
lunch i think it was with
teller
and uh herb york who was kind of the one
of the fathers of the atomic bomb
and he sat down and he says something
like where are they
yeah
which meant where are these
other and
um
and then he did some
numerology where he
calculated you know how many what they
knew about how many
uh
galaxies there are and how many stars
and how many planets in are like the
earth and blah blah blah that's been
done much better by somebody named drake
and so people usually refer to the i
don't know whether it's called the drake
formula or something but it has the same
conclusion
the conclusion is it would be a miracle
if there weren't other
you know uh there's the statistics are
so high that how can we be singular and
separate
that so probably there is
but there's
almost certainly life somewhere
maybe there was even life on mars a
while back but
uh
intelligent life
probably why were we so so you know the
statistics say that communicating with
us
i think that it's harder than people
think
we might
not know the right way to
expect the communication
but all the communication that we know
about travels at the speed of light
and we do we don't we don't think
anything can go faster in the speed of
light that
limits the problem quite quite a bit and
it uh
makes it difficult to have any back and
forth communication you can send signals
like we try to or
look for but to have any communication
it's pretty hard when you it has to be
close enough that the speed of light
would mean we could communicate with
each other and i think
and we didn't even understand that i
mean it's an advanced civilization but
we didn't even understand that
a little more than 100 years ago
so uh
are we
just not advanced enough maybe
uh to know something about that's the
speed of light maybe there's some other
way to communicate that isn't based on
electromagnetism i don't i don't know
gravity seems to be also this have the
same speed that was a principle that
einstein had and something we've
measured actually
so is is it possible i mean so we'll
talk about gravitational waves and
it in some sense there's a
there's a brainstorming going on which
is like
how do we detect the signal like what
would a signal look like and how would
we detect and that's true for
gravitational waves that's true for
basically any physics phenomena
you have to predict that that signal
should exist you have to have some kind
of theory and model why that signal
should exist i mean is it possible that
aliens are communicating with us via
gravity
like why not well it it
yeah it's true why not uh
for us it's very hard to detect these
gravitational effects they have to come
from something
pretty that has a lot of gravity like
black holes but we're pretty primitive
at this stage
there's uh
very reputable physicists that look for
a fifth force
one that we haven't found yet maybe it's
the key so you know
it's what would that look like what
would a fifth force of physics look like
exactly well usually they think it's
probably a long range for longer range
force than we have now
um
but uh
they're reputable for colleagues of mine
that spend their life looking for a
fifth force so longer range than gravity
yeah
super it doesn't fall off like one over
r squared but maybe
separately
gravity
uh newton taught us goes like inversely
one over the square of the distance
apart you are so it falls pretty fast
that's okay so now we have a theory of
what consciousness is it's just the
fifth force of
physics yeah there we go that's a good
hypothesis
uh
speaking of gravity uh of gravity uh
what are gravitational waves let's maybe
start from the basics
we learned gravity from newton
right you you and you were young you
were told that if you jumped up the
earth pulled you down
and when the apple falls out of the tree
the earth pulls it down
and maybe you even asked your teacher
why but
most of us
accepted that that was newton's
picture the apple falling out of the
tree but newton's theory never told you
why the apple was attracted to the earth
that was a missing in newton's theory
newton's theory also
newton recognized at least one of the
two problems i'll tell you one of them
is there's more than those but one is
why does the earth what's the mechanism
by which
the earth pulls the apple or holds the
moon when it goes around whatever it is
uh that's not explained by newton even
though he has the most successful theory
of physics ever went 200 and some years
with nobody ever seeing
a violation but he accurately describes
the movement of an object falling down
to earth but he's not answering why that
what's yeah yeah because it's a distance
he gives a formula right which which
it's the product of the earth's mass the
apple's mass
inversely proportional to the square the
distance between and then the strength
he called capital g the strength he
couldn't determine but it was determined
100 years later
but no one ever saw a violation of this
until a possible violation which
einstein fixed which was very small that
has to do with mercury going around the
sun
the orbit being slightly
wrong if you calculated by
newton's theory
but so
um like most theories then in in physics
you can have a wonderful one like
newton's theory it isn't wrong
but you have to have a
an improvement on it to answer things
that it can't answer and in this case
einstein's theory is the next step we
don't know if it's
anything like a final theory or even the
only way to formulate it
either
but he formulated this theory
which
which he
released in 1915
he took 10 years to develop but even
though in 1905 he solved three or four
of the most important problems in
physics in a matter of months and then
he spent 10 years on this problem before
he
uh let it out and it's called general
relativity it's a new theory of gravity
1915 in 1916
einstein
wrote a little paper
where he
did not do some fancy derivation instead
he did
what i would call it used his intuition
which he was very good at too
and that is he noticed that if he formed
if he wrote the formulas for general
relativity in a particular way
they looked a lot like the formulas for
electricity and magnetism
being einstein he then took the leap
that electricity and magnetism we
discovered only 20 years before that in
the 1880s
have waves of course that's
light and electromagnetic rays radio
waves everything else so he said if the
formulas look similar
then gravity probably has ways too
that's such a big leap by the way i mean
maybe you can correct me but that just
seems
so that seems like a heck of a look yeah
and so that and it was considered to be
a heck of a leap so first that paper was
except for this
intuition was
uh
poorly written had had a serious mistake
it had the a factor of two wrong and the
strength of gravity which meant if we
use those formulas we would
and
two years later
he wrote a second paper
and in that paper it turns out to be
important for us because in that paper
he not only
fixed his factor of two mistake which he
never admitted he just wrote it fixed it
like he always did and
and then he
told us
how you make gravitational waves what
what makes gravitational waves
and
you might recall in electromagnetism we
make electromagnetic waves in a simple
way you take a plus charge and minus
charge you oscillate like this and that
makes electromagnetic waves
and a physicist named hertz
made a receiver that could detect the
waves and put in the next room
he saw them and moved forward and
backward and saw that it was wave-like
so
einstein said it won't be a dipole like
that it'll be a four-pole thing and
that's what
it's called a quadrupole moment that
gives the gravitational wave so he saw
that again by insight not by derivation
that's at the table for what you needed
to do to do it at the same time in the
same year schwartz child not einstein
said there were things like called black
holes so it's interesting that that came
the same so what year was that
2015.
it was in parallel
with i did
i should probably know this but did i
say not have any intuition that there
should be such things as black holes
that came from schwarzschild oh
interesting
yeah
so schwartz child who was a
a german theoretical physicist he got
killed in the war i think in the first
world war a year two years later
or so
he's the one that proposed black holes
that there were black holes it feels
like a natural conclusion of uh general
relativity you know
or is that uh
[Music]
well it may seem like it but i don't
know about a natural conclusion it is a
it's a result
of curved space time though right and
it's but it's such a weird result that
you might have to uh yeah it's a special
yeah it's a special case yeah
so um
i i don't know anyway
einstein then the interesting part of
the story is that einstein then left the
problem most physicists because it
really wasn't uh derived he just made
this
didn't pick up on it or general
relativity much because quantum
mechanics became the thing in physics
and
einstein
uh
only picked up this problem again after
he immigrated to the u.s so he came to
the u.s in 1932
and i think in 1934-5
he was working with another physicist
called rosen who he did several
important works with and they revisited
the question
and they
had a problem that most of us as
students always had that study general
relativity general relativity is really
hard because it's four-dimensional
instead of three-dimensional and if you
don't set it up right you get infinities
which don't belong there the we call
them coordinates singularities
as a name
but it but if you get these infinities
you don't get the answers you want and
he was trying to derive now general
relativity out from general relativity
gravitational waves and in doing it he
kept getting these infinities
and so he wrote a paper with rosen that
he submitted to
our most important journal physical
review letters
and
that when it was submitted to physical
review letters it was entitled do
gravitational waves exist
a very funny title to write 20 years
after he proposed they exist
but it's because he had found these
singularities these infinities
and so
the
editor at that time and the part of it
that i don't know
is peer review we live and die by peer
review as scientists send our stuff out
and it's we don't know when peer review
actually started
or what what peer review einstein ever
experienced before this time but the
editor of physical review sent this out
for review
he had a choice he could take any
article and just accept it he could
reject it or he could send it for review
right i believe the editors used to have
much more power yeah yeah and he was a
young man his name was tate and he ended
up being an editor for years but
so he sent this for review
to
a theoretical physicist named robertson
who was also in this field of general
relativity who happened to be on
sabbatical at that moment at caltech
otherwise his institution was princeton
where
einstein was
and he
saw that the way they set up the problem
the infinities were like i might get as
a student because if you don't set it up
right in general relativity you get
these
infinities
and so he reviewed the article and told
he gave an illustration that they set it
up in what are called cylindrical
coordinates these infinities went away
he's the
editor of
uh physical review was obviously
intimidated by einstein he wrote this
really not not a letter back like i
would get saying you know you're screwed
up in your paper instead
it was kind of uh
what do you think of the comments of our
[Laughter]
referee einstein wrote back and it's a
well documented letter wrote back a
letter to physical review saying
i didn't send you the paper
to send it to one of your so-called
experts i sent it to you to publish
i now i withdraw the paper
and he never published again in the in
that journal that was 1936 instead
he
rewrote it
with the fixes that were made changed
the title
and published it in what was called the
franklin review which is the
uh franklin institute in philadelphia uh
which is benjamin franklin institute
which doesn't have a journal now but
did at that time so the article is
published it's the last time he ever
wrote about it
it remained controversial
so it wasn't until
close to 1960 1958 where there was a
conference in which brought that brought
together
the
experts in general relativity to try to
sort out whether there was uh
um
whether
it was true that there were
gravitational waves or not
and there was a very nice
derivation by a british
theorist
from
the heart of the theory that gets
gravitational waves
uh and that was number one the second
thing that happened at that meeting is
richard feynman was there
and feynman
said well if there's a typical feynman
if there's gravitational waves they need
to be able to do something otherwise
they don't exist so they have to be able
to transfer energy so he made a
idea of a gadonkan experiment that is
just a bar
with a couple rings on it
and then if a gravitational wave goes
through it distorts the bar
that creates friction on these little
rings
and that's heat and that's energy so
that that meant is that a good idea that
sounds like a good idea yeah it means
that he showed that
with the distortion of space-time you
could transfer energy just by this
little idea and it was shown
theoretically so at that point
it was
believed theoretically then by
people that gravitational waves should
exist
no and we should be able to detect them
we should be able to detect them except
except that they're very very small
just so what kind of uh there's a bunch
of questions there but what kind of
events
would generate
gravitational waves you have to have
this what i call quadrupole moment that
comes about if i have uh
for for example two objects that go
around each other like this like the
earth or the earth around the sun or the
moon around the earth or in our case it
turns out to be two black holes going
around each other like this so how's
that different than basic oscillation
back and forth this is just more common
in nature oscillation is a dipole moment
so it has to be in three-dimensional
space yeah kind of oscillations so you
have to have something that's
three-dimensional that'll give what's
what i call the quadrupole moment that's
just built into this and luckily in
nature you have stuff
and luckily things exist
and it is luckily because the effect is
so small that you could say look i can
take a barbell
and
and spin it right and detect the
gravitational waves but unfortunately no
matter how much i spin it how fast i
spin it it's so i know how to make
gravitational waves but they're so weak
i can't detect them so we have to take
something that's stronger than i can
make otherwise we would do what hertz
did for electromagnetic waves go in our
lab
take a barbell put it on something spin
it ask a dumb question so a uh a single
object that's weirdly shaped does that
generate gravitational waves so if it's
if it's rotating
sure
it it was just much weaker
it's weaker well we didn't know what the
strongest signal would be that we would
see
uh we targeted seeing something called
neutron stars actually because black
holes we don't know very much about it
turned out we were a little bit lucky
there was a stronger source which was
the black holes well another ridiculous
question so
you say waves what is what does a wave
mean like
the most ridiculous version of that
question is what does it feel like
to uh ride a wave as you get closer to
the source
or experience it well if you experience
a wave imagine that this is what happens
to you
i don't know what you mean about getting
close it comes to you so it's like it's
like uh this light wave or something
that comes through you so when the light
hits you it
makes your eyes detected
i flashed it what does this do is
it's like going to the amusement park
and they have these mirrors you look in
this mirror and you look short and fat
and the one next to you makes you tall
and thin
okay
imagine that you went back and forth
between those two mirrors once a second
that would be a gravitational wave with
a period of once a second
uh if you did it 60 times a second go
back and forth and
and then that's all that happens it
makes you taller and shorter and fatter
back and forth as it goes through you
at the frequency of the gravitational
wave so
the frequencies that we detect are
higher than one a second but that's the
idea so but uh and the amount is small
amount is small but when if you're
closer to the
to the source of the wave is it the same
amount
yeah it's it doesn't dissipate it
doesn't dissipate
okay so it's not that fun of an
amusement ride well it it does dissipate
but it doesn't it doesn't it's it's just
it's proportional to the distance right
it's not uh it's not a big power right
gotcha so but so
it would be a fun ride if you get a
little bit closer or a lot closer
i mean like i i wonder what the
this is a ridiculous question but i have
you here
like the getting fatter and taller
i mean that experience
for some reason that's mind-blowing to
me
it brings
the distortion of space-time to you
i mean space-time is being morphed
right like this is a way right
that how that's so weird and we're in
space so yeah we're in space and it's
moving
i don't know what to do with it i mean
does it okay um
how much do you think about the
philosophical implications of
general relativity like that we're in
space time
and it can be bent by gravity
like
is that just what it is are we are we
supposed to be okay with this
because like newton
even newton is a little weird right but
that at least like makes sense that's
our physical world
you know when an apple falls it makes
sense
but like the fact that entirety of
the space time we're in can bend
well that's uh
that's i that's really mind-blowing
let me make another analogy this is a
therapy session for me at this point
right another analogy thank you so so
imagine you have a trampoline yes
okay
what happens if you put a marble on a
trampoline it doesn't do anything right
no just saves a little bit but not much
yeah i mean just if i drop it it's not
going to go anywhere
now imagine i put a bowling ball at the
center of the trampoline
now
i come up to the trampoline and put a
marble on what happens
they'll roll towards the bowling ball
all right so what's happened is the
presence of this
massive object distorted the space
that the trampoline did
this is the same thing that happens to
the presence of the earth
the earth and the apple the presence of
the earth affects the space around it
just like the
uh bowling ball on the trampoline yeah
this doesn't make me feel better i'm
referring from the perspective of an
aunt
walking around on that trampoline
then
some guy just dropped the ball and not
only dropped the ball right it's not
just dropping a bowling ball it's making
the the ball go up and down
or doing some kind of oscillation thing
where it's like waves
and that's so fundamentally different
from the experience on being on flat
land and walking around and just finding
delicious sweet things as ant does and
just it just feels like to me from a
human experience perspective
completely it's humbling it's truly
humbling
it's something but we see that kind of
phenomenon all the time
let me give you another example imagine
that you walk up to a
a still pond
yes okay
now i throw
it you like to throw you throw a rock in
it what happens
the rock goes in sinks to the bottom
fine and these little ripples go out
yeah and they travel
out that's exactly what happens i mean
there's a disturbance
which is the safe
the bowling ball or our black holes and
then the ripples that go out in the
water they're not they don't have any
they don't have the rock any part pieces
of the rock i see the thing is i guess
what's not disturbing about that
is it's a i mean it's a i guess a flat
two-dimensional surface that's being
disturbed
like for a three-dimensional surface a
three-dimensional space to be disturbed
feels weird it's even worse it's
four-dimensional because it's space and
time yeah
so that's why you need einstein is to
make it uh
four-dimensional no
to make it four-dimensional yeah yeah
it's gonna take the same phenomenon and
and
look at it in all of space and time
anyway luckily
for you and i and all of us
the amount of distortion is incredibly
small
so it turns out
that if you think of space
itself now this is going to blow your
mind too if you think of space as being
like a material like this table
it's very stiff you know we have
materials that are very pliable
materials that are very stiff
so
space itself is very stiff
so when gravitational waves come through
it luckily for us it doesn't distort it
so much that it affects our ordinary
life very much
no i mean that's great
that's great i thought there was
something bad coming no this is great
that's great news so i mean that i mean
perhaps we evolved as the life on earth
do we
so to be such that for us this
particular set of uh effects of
gravitational waves
uh is not that significant maybe maybe
that's why you probably used
this effect today
or yesterday
so it's it's pervasive well you mean
gravity or the way the external
because i only curvature of space
curvature of space how i only care
personally as a human right the gravity
of earth but you use it every day almost
oh it's curving uh-huh no no no it's in
this thing
every time it tells you where you are
yeah
it how does it tell you where you are
it tells you where you are because we
have 24 satellites or some number that
are going around in space and it
asks how long it takes the
being
to go to the satellite and come back the
signal to different ones and then it
triangulates and tells you where you are
and then if you go down the road it
tells you where you are do you know that
if you did that with the satellites and
you didn't use einstein's equations oh
no
you want it you won't get the right
answer that's right and
in fact if you take a road let's say 10
meters wide i've done these numbers and
you ask how long you'd stay on the road
if you didn't make the correction
for
general relativity this thing you're poo
pooing because you're using every day
uh you'd go off the road and you'd go
the middle road well actually that might
be so you use it so so well
well i think i'm using an android so
maybe and the gps doesn't work that well
so maybe i'm using newton's physics uh
so i need to upgrade to general
relativity um so
gravitational waves and einstein
had uh wait fireman really does have a
part in the story was that one of the
first kind of experimental pro
proposed detect gravitation well he did
what we call a gadonkan experiment
that's a thought experience okay not a
real experiment but then after that
then people believe gravitational waves
must exist you can kind of calculate how
big they are there's tiny
and so
people started searching the first idea
that was used was feynman's idea
and the
very end of it
and it was to take a great big
huge bar of aluminum
and then put around and it's a it's made
like a cylinder
and then put around it some very very
sensitive detectors so that if a
gravitational wave happened to go
through it it would go
and you detect this extra strain that
was there and that was this method that
was used until we came along it wasn't a
very good method to use
and what was the
so we're talking about a pretty weak
signal here yeah that's why that method
didn't work so what can you tell the
story of figuring out what kind of
method would be able to detect
this very weak signal of gravitational
waves
so
remembering the
remembering what happens if you when you
go to the amusement park yeah that it's
going to do something like
stretch this way and squash that way
squash this way and stretch this way we
do have an
instrument that can detect that kind of
thing
it's called an interferometer
and what it does
is it just basically takes usually light
and the two directions that we're
talking about you send light down one
direction and the perpendicular
direction and if
nothing changes it takes the same and
the arms are the same length it just
goes down bounces back
and if you invert one compared to the
other they cancel so there's nothing
happens
but
if it's like the amusement park and one
of the arms got you know got shorter and
fatter so it took longer to go
horizontally than it did to go
vertically then when they come back when
when the
light comes back that comes back
somewhat
out of time
and that basically is the scheme
the only problem is that that's not
a very done very accurately
in general and we had to do it extremely
accurately so what uh
what what's the what's the difficulty of
uh
doing so accurately okay
so the the measurement that we have to
do
is the distortion in time
how big is it one it's a distortion
that's one part and 10 to the 21 that's
21 zeros and a one
okay wow and this so this is like a
delay in the thing coming back
uh it's a one of them coming back after
the other one but the difference is just
one part and 10 to the 21.
so for that reason we make it big
let it let the arms be long
okay so one part and 10 to the 21.
in our case it's kilometers long so we
have an instrument that kilometers in
one direction kilometers in the other
kilometers we're talking about four
kilometers four kilometers in each
direction
uh
if you take then one part and 10 to the
21 we're talking about measuring
something to
10 to the minus 18 meters
okay
now to tell you how small that is yeah
the proton yeah the thing we're made of
that you can't go and grab so easily is
10 to the minus 15 meters
so this is 1 1000 the size of a proton
that's the effect size of the effect
einstein himself didn't think this could
be measured have we ever seen
actually he said that
but that's because he didn't
you know anticipate modern lasers and
and techniques that we developed
okay
so
maybe can you tell me
a little bit what you're referring to is
ligo the laser uh interferometer
gravitational wave observatory
what is ligo
can you just elaborate kind of the big
picture of you here before i ask you
specific questions about it yeah so
in the same idea that i just said we
have
two long vacuum
pipes
10 to
4 kilometers long okay
we start with a laser beam and we divide
the beam
going down the two arms
and we have a mirror at the other end
reflects it back
it's more subtle but we bring it back
if there's
no distortion in space-time and the
lengths are exactly the same which we
calibrate them to be
then when it comes back if we just
invert one signal compared to the other
they'll just cancel
so we see nothing
okay
but if one arm got a little bit longer
than the other
then they don't come back at exactly the
same time they don't exactly cancel
that's what we
measure
so
to give a number to it
we have to do that
to
we have
the change of length to be able to do
this 10 to the minus 18 meters to one
part in 10 to the 12th and that was the
big experimental challenge that
required a lot of innovation to be able
to do
what you gave a lot of credit to i think
caltech and mit for some of the
technical developments like within this
project
is there some interesting things you can
speak to
like
at the low level of some cool stuff that
had to be solved like what are we yeah
i'm a software engineer so okay all of
this i have so much more respect for
everything done here than anything i've
ever done so it's just code so
so i'll give you
an example of doing uh
mechanical engineering
and a better look at at a basically
mechanical engineering and geology and
maybe at a
level which
okay uh so what do we what's the problem
the problem is the following that i've
given you this picture of an instrument
that i by some magic i can make good
enough to measure this very short
distance
but then i put it down here
it won't work
and the reason it doesn't work is that
the earth itself is moving all over the
place all the time you don't realize it
it seems pretty good to you i get it but
it's moving all the time so somehow
it's moving so much that you we can't
deal with it we happen to be trying to
do the experiment here on earth
but we can't deal with it so we have to
make the instrument
isolated from the earth
oh no
at the frequencies we're at we've got to
float it that's a mechanical that's an
engineering problem not a physics
problem so when you actually like uh
we're doing we're having a conversation
on a podcast right now there's uh and
people who record music work with this
you know how to create an isolated room
and they usually build a room within a
room
but that's still not isolated in fact
they say it's impossible to truly
isolate from sound from noise and stuff
like that
but that that
that's like one step
of
millions that you took
is building a room inside a room because
you basically have to isolate all now
this is actually an easier problem you
just have to do it really well so the
making a clean room is really a tough
problem because you have to put a room
inside a room yeah
so this is this is really simple
engineering or physics uh-huh okay so
what do you have to do how do you
isolate yourself from the from the earth
yes
first we work at
uh we're not looking at all frequencies
for gravitational waves we're looking at
particular frequencies
that you can deal with here on earth
so what frequencies would those be
you were just talking about frequencies
i mean we know by evolution our bodies
know it's the audio band
okay the reason our ears work where they
work is that's where the earth isn't
going making too much noise okay so the
reason our ears work the way they work
is because this is where it's quiet
that's right
so if you go to if you go to one hertz
instead of 10 hertz
it's the earth is
it's really moving around so
so somehow we live in a what we call the
audio band it's tens of hertz to
thousands of hertz that's where we
live that's where we live okay
if we're going to do an experiment on
the earth i might as well do this it's
the same frequency that's where the
earth is the quietest so we have to work
in that frequency so we're not looking
at all frequencies okay
so the solution for the for the shaking
of the earth to get rid of it
is pretty mundane if we do the same
thing
that you do uh to make your car drive
smoothly down the road so what happens
when your car goes over a bump
early cars did that they bounced right
okay but you don't feel that in your car
so what happened to that energy you
can't just disappear energy so we have
these things called shock absorbers in
the car
what they do
is they absorb they take the the thing
that went like that and they basically
can't get rid of the energy but they
move it to very very low frequency
so what you feel isn't
you feel like go shh
smoothly okay
all right so uh
we also work at this frequency so if we
so we basically why
why do we have to do anything other than
shock absorbers so we made
the world's fanciest shock absorbers
okay
not just like in your car where there's
one layer of them they're just the right
squishiness and so forth they're better
than what's in the cars
and we have four layers of it so
whatever shakes and gets through the
first layer we treat it in a second
third
level so it's a mechanical engineering
problem yeah that's what i said so
it's not there's no weird tricks to it
like uh like a chemistry type thing or
no no just well the right squishiness
right need the right material inside and
ours look like little springs but
they're
springs they're springs so like
legitimately like shock absorbers yeah
what
okay okay
and this is now experimental physics at
the at its limit okay so you do this and
we make the world's fanciest shock
absorbers just mechanical engineering
just mechanical genius is hilarious but
we didn't yes we weren't good enough to
discover gravitational waves
so
uh so we did another we added another
feature and it's something else that
you're uh
aware of probably have one
and that is to get rid of noise you've
probably noise which is you don't like
and that's the same principle that's in
these little bose uh
uh earphones noise canceling
noise cancelling so
uh so how do they work they basically
you go on an airplane and they uh sense
the ambient noise from the engines
and cancel it because it's just the same
over and over again they cancel it and
when the stewardess comes and asks you
whether you want coffee or a tea or a
drink or something you hear her fine
because she's not ambient she's a signal
so are we talking about active canceling
like where the action is canceling
so this is you okay so another don't
tell me you have active canceling uh on
this yeah besides the show absolutely
so inside this
array of shock absorbers yeah we you
asked for some interesting this is
awesome
so inside this it's harder than the
earphone problem but it's just
engineering we have to see measure not
just that the
engine still made noise
but the earth is shaking it's moving in
some direction
so we have to actually tell not only
that there's noise and cancel it but
what direction it's from so we put this
array of seismometers inside
this array of shock absorbers and
measure the
residual
motion
and its
direction and we put little actuators
that push back against it and cancel it
this is awesome
so you have the actuators and you have
the thing that is sensing the the
vibrations and then you have the actual
actuators that adjust for that and do so
in perfect synchrony yeah
what if it all works right and so how
much do we reduce the shaking of the
earth
i mean
one part in 10 to the 12th
part
inside what gets through us is one part
and 10 to the 12th
that's pretty big reduction you don't
need that in your car but that's what we
do and so that's how isolated we are
from the earth and that was the biggest
uh
i'd say technical problem outside of the
physics instrument the interferometer
can ask you a a weird question here you
you make it very poetically and
humorously it's saying it's just a
mechanical engineering problem
but is this one of the
biggest
precision
mechanical engineering efforts ever
i mean this seems exceptionally
difficult it is and so it took a long
time and uh i think
nobody seems to challenge the statement
that this is the most precision precise
instrument that's ever been built ligo
i just i wonder what like listening to
led zeppelin sounds on this thing
because it's so isolated i mean this is
like uh
i don't know no background noise nope no
back it's wow
wow
wow that so when you were first
conceiving this um
i would probably uh if i was
knowledgeable enough kind of uh laugh
off the possibility this is even
possible i'm sure
like how many people
believe that this is possible did you
believe oh oh uh i did
i didn't know that we needed for sure
that we needed active when we started we
did just passive but we were doing the
tests to develop the active
to add as a second stage which we ended
up needing
um but there was a lot of
you know now now there was a lot of
skepticism a lot of us especially
astronomers
felt that money was being wasted because
we were all so expensive
doing what i told you is not cheap so it
was
kind of controversial i was funded by
the national science foundation
can you just linger on this just for a
little longer with the actuator thing
the act of canceling it um
do you remember
like little experiments that were done
along the way to prove to the team to
themselves that this is even possible
so from our
because i work with quite a bit of
robots
and to me the idea that you could do it
this precisely
is uh humbling and embarrassing frankly
because like this is another level of
precision that i can't even
um because robots are a mess
and this is basically
one of the most
precise robots ever
right so like uh can you is there uh
yeah do you have any like small scale
experiments that were done that's just
believe this is possible yeah and larger
scale we made we made uh test uh
chan that also has to be in vacuum too
but we made test chambers that had this
system
in it our first mock of the system so we
could test it
and
optimize it and make it work but it's
just a mechanical engineering problem
okay
[Laughter]
humans are just ape descendants i gotcha
i gotcha uh is there any video of this
like um
some kind of educational purpose
visualizations of this act of canceling
uh i don't think so
i mean is this does this live on
well we work for parts of it for the
active canceling we worked with for the
instruments for the sensor and
instruments we worked with uh
a small company and met near where you
are because it was our mit people that
got them that were you know interested
in the problem because they thought they
might be able to commercialize it for
making stable tables to make
microelectronics for example which are
limited by the how stable the table is
i mean at this point it's a little
expensive
so you never know you never know where
this leads
okay so
maybe on the
let me ask you just
sticking it a little longer this silly
old mechanical engineering problem uh
what was uh
to you kind of the darkest moment
of what was the hardest
stumbling block to get over on the
engineer side like was there any time
where there's a doubt where it's like
i'm not sure we'll be able to do this
a kind of uh engineering challenge that
was hit do you remember anything like
that i think the one that that
my colleague at mit ray weiss worked on
so hard and uh
was
much more of a worry than this this is
only a question if you're not do it well
enough you have to keep making it better
somehow
but
this whole
huge instrument has to be in vacuum
and
the vacuum tanks are you know this big
around and uh so it's the world's
biggest high vacuum system and the cons
so how do you make it first of all
uh how do you make this four meter long
sealed vacuum system it has to be made
out of four kilometers four kilometers
long would i say something else meters
four or four kilometers long big
difference yeah and uh so but to make it
yeah we started with uh
uh a roll of stainless steel and then we
spi roll it out like a spiral so there's
a spiral weld on it
okay so
the engineering was fine we did that we
worked through
very good companies and so forth to
build it
uh the big worry
it was
what if you develop a leak
this is a high vacuum not just vacuum
system
typically in your in a laboratory if
there's a leak you put
helium around
the
the thing you have and then you detect
where the helium is coming in but if you
have something as big as this you can't
surround it with helium so you might not
actually even know that there's a leak
and it will be affecting well we we have
we can measure
the
how good the vacuum is so we can know
that but there a leak can develop and
and then we don't how do we fix it or
how do we find it
and uh so that was you asked about a
worry that was always a really big worry
uh what's the difference between a high
vacuum and uh and a vacuum what what is
high vacuum that's like some
a delta close to vacuum is there some
threshold well there's a unit
high vacuum is uh
when the vacuum and the units that are
used which are tors there's 10 to the
minus 9.
there's high vacuum is usually used in
small places the biggest vacuum system
period is that cern in this big particle
accelerator but the high vacuum where
they need really good vacuum so
particles don't scatter and it is
smaller than r so ours is a really large
uh
uh high vacuum system i don't know this
is so cool i mean this is basically
by far
the greatest listening device
ever built by human the fact that like
descendants of apes could do this
that evolution started with single cell
organisms
i mean is there any more i'm a huge uh
theory it's like yeah yeah but like
bridges when i look at bridges
from a civil engineering perspective
it's one of the most beautiful creations
by human beings it's physics
you're using physics to construct
objects that can support huge amount of
mass
and it's like structural but it's also
beautiful and that humans can
collaborate to create that throughout
history and then you take this on
another level
this is this is like
this is like
exciting to me beyond measure that
humans can create something so precise
but but another concept lost in this you
just said you started talking about
single cell yeah okay
you have to realize this discovery that
we made that everybody spot off on
happened
1.3 billion years ago
somewhere and then the signal came to us
1.3 billion years ago we were just
converting on the earth from single cell
to multi-cell life
so when this actually happened this
collision of two black holes yeah we
weren't here we weren't even close to
we're both developing a single
yeah we were at we're going from single
cell to multi-cell life at that point
all to meet up with this at this point
yeah
wow that's like uh that's almost
romantic how though
it is
uh okay so
on the human side of things it's kind of
fascinating because you're talking about
over a thousand people team for ligo
yeah uh that started out with uh you
know around a hundred
and you've uh
for parts of the time at least led this
team
what does it take to lead a team like
this of incredibly brilliant
theoreticians and engineers
and just a lot of different parties
involved a lot of egos
a lot of ideas you you had this fun
funny example i forget where
where in publishing a paper you have to
all agree on like uh
you know the phrasing of a certain
sentence or the title of the paper and
so on that's a very interesting simple
example i'd love you to speak to that
but just in general how
what does it take to lead this kind of
team
okay uh i think the the general
idea
is one we all know you wanna you wanna
you wanna to get
where the
the
sum of something is more than the
individual parts is what we say right
yeah
so that's what you're trying to achieve
yes okay how do you do that actually
mostly if we take
multiple
objects or people and when you put them
together the sum is less
yes
why because they overlap
so you don't have individual things that
you know this
person does that this person does that
then you get exactly the sum but what
you want is to develop where you get
more than what the individual
contributions are we know that's very
common people use that
expression everywhere and it's the
expression that has to be
kind of built into how people feel it's
working because if you're
part of a team
and you realize that somehow the team is
able to do more than the individuals
could do themselves then they buy on
kind of in terms of the
process so that's the
that's the goal that you have to
have is to to achieve that and that
means
that you
have to
realize
parts of what you're trying to do
that require
not that one person couldn't do it it
requires the combined talents to be able
to do something that neither of them
could do themselves and we have a lot of
that kind of thing and i think
um i mean
build into the some of the examples that
i gave you
and so
uh how do you then so so the key almost
in anything you do is the people
themselves right so
in our case
the first and most important was to
attract
to spend years of their life on this and
the best possible people in the world to
do it so
the only way to convince them is that
somehow it's
better and more interesting for them
than what they could do themselves
and so that's part of this
uh idea that's it yeah that's powerful
but nevertheless there's best people in
the world there's egos is there
something to be said about managing egos
the human problem is always the hardest
and so there's that's an art not
a science i think
i think the fact here that
combined
there's a was a romantic goal
that we had to you know do something
that people hadn't done before which was
um
important scientifically and and a huge
challenge
uh enabled us to say take
and get uh i mean what we did just to
take an example we use the light to go
in this thing comes from lasers
we need a certain kind of laser so
uh the kind of laser that we use there
were three
different institutions in the world that
had the experts that do this maybe in
competition with each other
so we got all three to join together and
work with us uh to work on this as an
example so that you had and they had the
thing that they were working together on
a kind of object that they wouldn't have
otherwise
and
were part of a bigger team where they
could discover something that
isn't even engineers these are engineers
that do lasers so and they're part of
our laser physicists and
so could you describe
the
moment
or the period of time
when finally this incredible creation of
human beings
led to a detection of gravitational
waves
it's a long story unfortunately this is
a part that
uh we started failures along the way
kind of thing or all failures that's all
that's built into it
okay if you're not a uh if you're not
mechanical engineering
you build on your failures that's
expected so we're trying things that no
one's done before so it's technically
not just gravitational waves and so it's
built on failures
but anyway we we did
before me even the the
people did
r d on the concepts
but starting in 1994 we got money from
the national science foundation to build
this thing
it took about five years to build it so
by 1999 we had
built the basic
unit
it did not have
active seismic isolation at that stage
didn't have some other things that we
have now
what we did at that at at the beginning
was
uh
stick to
technologies that we had
at least enough knowledge that we could
make work or had tested in our own
laboratories
and so then we put together the
instrument
we made it work
it didn't work very well but it worked
and
we didn't see any gravitational waves
then we figured out what limited us and
we went through this every year for
almost 10 years
never seen gravitational waves we would
run it
looking for gravitational waves for
months
learn what limited us fix it for months
and then run it again
eventually we
knew we had to take another big step and
that's when we made several changes
including going adding these active
seismic isolation which turned out to be
a key
and we
fortunately got the national science
foundation to give us another
couple hundred
million dollars 100 million more and
we rebuilt it our fixed
or improved it
and uh
then in ninth uh in
2015 uh we turned it on
and uh
we um
almost instantly saw uh this first
collision of two black holes
um
and
then then we went through a process of
do we believe what we've seen yeah i
think i think you're one of the people
that went through that process it sounds
like some people immediately believed it
yeah and and then you were like so as
human beings we all have different
reactions to almost anything and so
quite a few of my colleagues had a
eureka moment immediately i mean it's
that's amazing
the the the figure that we
that we put in our paper
first is just data we didn't have to go
through you know fancy computer programs
to do anything
and
and we showed next to it uh the
calculations of einstein's equations it
looks just like the what we detected wow
and we did it in two different detectors
halfway across the us so it was pretty
convincing but
but you don't want to
you don't want to fool yourself so we
had a
being a scientist
we had a
for me we had to go through and try to
understand that the instrument itself
which was new i said we had rebuild it
couldn't somehow generate
things that look like this
that took some tests and then
the second you'll appreciate more
we had to somehow convince ourselves we
weren't hacked in some clever way cyber
security question yeah even though we're
not on the internet the the but yeah
no it can be physical access too yeah
that's that's fascinating it's
fascinating you would think about that i
mean
not not enough
i mean because it's it's uh it matches
prediction
so the chances of it actually being
manipulated is very very low
but nevertheless
we still could have disgruntled old
graduate students who had worked with us
earlier that who
want you to i don't know how that's
supposed to embarrass you i suppose yeah
i suppose i see but
but about what i think you said within a
month you kind of convinced yourself
something within a month we convinced
ourselves uh we kept a thousand
collaborators quiet during that time
then we spent another that's funny month
or so uh
trying to understand what we'd seen
so that we could do the science with it
instead of just putting it out to the
world and let somebody else understand
that it was two black holes and what it
was the fact that a thousand
collaborators were quiet
is a really strong indication that this
is a really close-knit team yeah over
and they're around the world
or either strong
uh either strong knit or tight-knit or
had a strong dictatorship or something
yeah either fear or love you can rule by
fear of love yeah you can go back to
mecca valley yeah
all right well this i mean
this is really exciting that that was
that that's a success story because it
didn't have to be a success story
right
i mean eventually perhaps you could say
it'd be an effect but it could have
taken it over a century to get oh yeah
yeah it's uh and
and it's only downhill now kind of
[Laughter]
what do you mean it's only uh you mean
with gravitational waves well we're yeah
we've it's we've now we now
uh well now we're off because of the
pandemic but when we turned off we were
seeing
some sort of gravitational wave event
each week
and now we're fixing we're fixing we're
adding features where it'll probably be
when we turn back on next year it'll
probably every one every couple days
and they're not all the same so it's
learning about what's out there in
gravity instead of just optics and
so it's all
uh great we're only limited by
the fantastic thing other than that this
is uh
a great field and you know it's all new
and so forth is that experimentally the
the great thing is that uh
we're limited by
technology and technical limitations not
by science
so
the the the
uh
another
a really important discovery that was
made before ours
was what's called the higgs boson made
on the big accelerator at cern you know
this huge accelerator they discovered a
really important thing it's
you know we have einstein's equation e
equals m c squared so energy makes mass
or mass can make energy and that's the
bomb
but the mechanism by which that happens
not fission but but how do you create
mass from energy
was never
understood
until there was a
a theory of it about
70 years ago now
and
so they discovered it's named after a
man named higgs it's called the higgs
boson
and so it was discovered
but since that time and i i worked on
those
experiments since that time they haven't
been able to progress very much further
a little bit but not a lot further and
the difference is that we're really
lucky we're in
in what we're doing in that
there
uh you're you see this higgs boson but
there's tremendous amount of other
physics that goes on and you have to
pick out the needle in the haystack kind
of of physics you can't make the physics
go away it's there
in our case we have a very weak signal
but once we get good enough to see it
it's weak compared to where we've
reduced the background but the
background is not physics it's just
technology you know it's getting
ourselves better isolated from the earth
or getting a more powerful laser
and so each time each since 2015 when we
saw the first one we continually can
make improvements that are enabling us
to turn this into a
a real science to do astronomy a new
kind of astronomy it's a little like
astronomy i mean
galileo
started the field i mean he basically
took lenses that were made for classes
and he didn't invent the first telescope
but made a
looked at
neptune
and saw that it had four moons
that was the birth of
not just using your eyes to understand
what's out there
and since that time we've made better
and better telescopes obviously and
astronomy thrives
and in a similar way we're starting to
be able to
for you know crawl but we're starting to
be able to do that with gravitational
waves it's and it's going to be more and
more that we can
do is we can make better and better
instruments because as i say it's not
limited by
um
picking it out of other yeah it's not
limited by the physics so you have an
optimism about engineering that event
you know as we
as human progress marches on
engineering will always uh find a way to
uh
to build a large enough device accurate
enough device to detect the size as long
as it's not limited by physics yeah
they'll do it
so
you
two other folks and the entire team
won the nobel prize
for this yeah big effort
there's a million questions i can ask
for but
looking back
where does the nobel prize fit into all
of this
you know if you think hundreds years
from now
i venture to say that people will not
remember the winners of a prize
but they'll remember creations like
these maybe i'm romanticizing
engineering
but i guess i want to ask how important
is the nobel prize in all this
well that's a it's a complicated
question it's uh
as a physicist it's something if you're
if you're trying to win a nobel prize
forget it because they give you know
one a year
so there's like there's been
200 physicists who've won the nobel
prize since 1900 and
and so that's
you know
and so things just have to fall right so
your goal cannot be to win a nobel prize
it wasn't my dream
uh
it's a
it's
uh tremendous for science i mean why the
nobel prize for a guy that made dynamite
and stuff is you know what it is it's a
long story but
it's the one day a year where actually
the science that people have done is all
over the world and so forth
forget about the people again you know
it is really good for for science
celebrating science it celebrates
science
for
you know several days different fields
uh you know chemistry
medicine and so forth
and uh
everybody doesn't understand everything
about these they're
generally a fairly abstract but then
it's you know it's
on the front page of newspapers around
the world so it's really good for
science it's not easy to get science on
the front page of the new york times
it's not there
uh should be but it's not
and uh
so the nobel prize is important in that
way uh
it's otherwise you know
i have a certain celebrity that i didn't
have before and
um and now you get to be a celebrity
that advertises science it's a mechanism
to
uh to remind us how incredible well
how much credit science deserves and
everything well it has a little bit more
one thing i didn't expect which is good
is that you know
we have a a government
i'm not picking on ours necessarily but
it's true of all governments are not run
by scientists in our case it's run by uh
lawyers and businessmen yep okay
uh and at best they may have an aide or
something that knows a little science so
so our country is
and all countries are hardly
hardly take into account
science
in
making decisions yes okay
and
having a nobel prize the uh
people in those positions actually
listen
so
you have more influence i don't care
whether it's about global warming or
what the issue is there's some
influence which is lacking otherwise
and uh i
people pay attention to what i say if i
talk about global warming they wouldn't
have
uh before i had the nobel prize
uh yeah this is very true you're like
the celebrities who talk uh
celebrity has power uh celebrity has
power and that's that's and that's a
good thing that's a good thing yeah uh
singling out people i mean on the other
side of it singling out people
has all kinds of you know whether it's
for academy awards or for this
have unfairness and arbitrariness and so
forth and so on so
uh
you know that's the other side of the
coin jessica said especially with the
huge experimental projects like this
you know it's a large team
and it does the nature of the nobel
prizes singles out a few individuals to
represent the team yeah
nevertheless is a beautiful thing uh
what are ways to improve ligo in the
future increase the sensitivity
i've seen a few ideas that are kind of
fascinating
is are you interested in them
sort of looking i'm not speaking about
five years perhaps you could speak to
the next five years but also the next
hundred years
yeah so let me let me talk to both the
instrument and the science okay
so that's they go hand in hand i mean
the thing that i said is if we make it
better
we see more kinds of weaker objects and
we do astronomy okay
we're very motivated to make a new
instrument
which will be a big step the next step
like making a new kind of telescope or
something
and
the ideas of what that instrument should
be uh
haven't converged yet there's different
ideas in europe they've done more work
to kind of
develop the ideas
but they're different from ours and we
have ideas
so
but i think over the next few years
we'll develop those
the idea is to make an instrument that's
at least 10 times better than what we
have
what we can do with this instrument 10
times better than that
10 times better means you can look 10
times further out
10 times further out is a thousand times
more volume
so you're seeing much much more of the
universe the big change
is
that if you can see far out you far you
see further back in history yeah you're
traveling back in time
yeah and so
we can start to do what we call
cosmology instead of a astronomy or
astrophysics
cosmology is really the study of the
evolution of the
oh interesting yeah yeah and uh so then
you can start to hope to get to the
important problems having to do with uh
how
the universe began how it evolved and so
forth which we really
only study now with
optical
instruments or
electromagnetic waves
and early in the universe those were
blocked because
basically it wasn't transparent so the
photons couldn't get out
when everything was too dense what do
you think sorry on this tangent what do
you think an understanding of
gravitational waves from earlier in the
universe can help us understand about
the big bang and all that stuff yeah
that's that's so but it's a non
it's a it's a
it's another perspective on the thing is
is there some insights you think could
be revealed just to
help a layman understand sure first we
don't understand we use the word big
bang we don't understand the physics of
what the big bang itself was
uh
so i think
my my
and in the early stage there were
particles and there was a huge amount of
gravity and mass being made and so
uh
the big
the so i'll say two things one is
how did it all start how did it happen
and i'll give you at least one example
that we don't understand what we should
understand
we don't know why we're here
yes
no we do not
i don't mean it philosophically
i mean in terms of physics okay
now what do i mean by that if i go into
my laboratory at cern or somewhere and i
collide particles together put energy
together i make as much antimatter as
matter right
antimatter then annihilates matter and
makes energy so
in the early universe there
you made somehow
somehow
a lot of matter and anti-matter but
there was an asymmetry somehow there was
more matter and anti-matter
that matter and anti-minor annihilated
each other at least that's what we think
and there was matt only matter left over
and we live in a universe that we see
that's all matter
we don't have any idea we have an ideas
but we don't have any
we don't have any way to understand that
at the present time with the physics
that we know
can ask a dumb question does
anti-matter
have anything like a gravitational field
to uh send signals
so
how how does this asymmetry of matter
anti-matter
could be investigated or further
understood by observing gravitational
fields or weirdnesses in gravitational
fields i i think that
in principle if there were you know
anti-neutron stars instead of just
neutron stars we would see
different kinds of signals but
it didn't get to that it's we live in a
universe that we've done enough looking
because we don't see anti-pro matter
anti-protons anywhere no matter what we
look at that it's all made out of matter
there is no antimatter except we go in
our laboratories
so
but when we go in our laboratories we
make as much antimatter as matter so
there's something about the early
universe that made this
asymmetry so we can't even explain why
we're here that's what i meant yeah
physic physics-wise not you know
uh not in terms of
how we evolved and all that kind of
stuff so uh so there might be
inklings of uh
of some of the physics
that uh gravitational so so
gravitational waves don't get obstructed
like light so i said light only goes to
300 000 years so it goes back to the
beginning so if you could study the
early universe with gravitational waves
we can't do that yet
then
it took 400 years to be able to do that
with
optical but
then you can really understand the very
maybe understand the very early universe
so in terms of uh
questions like
why we're here or what the big bang was
um we should be we can in principle
study that with gravitational waves so
to keep
moving in this direction it's a unique
kind of uh way
to understand our universe do you think
there's more nobel prize level ideas to
be discovered in relation to
i'd be shocked if their gravitational
waves if there isn't uh not even going
to that which is a very long range
problem but
i think that
we only
see
with electromagnetic waves four percent
of what's out there
there must be we looked for things that
we knew should be there
there should be
i would be shocked if there wasn't
physics objects science
and with gravity that doesn't show up in
everything we do with telescopes so
i think we're just
limited by not having powerful enough
instruments yet to do this
do you have a preference i keep seeing
this uh
e-lisa idea
yeah
is it
do you have a preference for
earthbound or space-faring
mechanisms for they're complementary
it's a little bit more signal it's a
it's completely analogous to what's been
done in astronomy right so astronomy
from the time of galileo
was done with uh visible light yeah
a strong the big advances in astronomy
in the last 50 years are because we have
instruments that look at the infrared
microwave
ultraviolet and so forth so
looking at different wavelengths has
been important basically going into
space
means that we'll look at instead of the
audio band which we look at as we said
on the ear surface we'll look at lower
frequencies it's so it's completely
complementary and it starts to be
looking at different frequencies just
like we do with astronomy isn't it
it seems almost incredible to me
engineering-wise just like on earth to
send something that's kilometers across
into uh into space is that is it harder
to engineer
then it actually is a little different
it's three satellites
separated by hundreds of thousands of
kilometers
and they send a laser beam from one to
the other
and uh
if they
the distance if the triangle changes
shape a little bit they detect that from
the gravity the passage did you say
hundreds of thousands of kilometers yeah
sending lasers to each other
[Laughter]
okay it's just engineering
[Laughter]
uh is is possible though
yes
okay
uh that's that's just incredible because
they have to maintain i mean the
precision here is probably there there
might be some more what is it maybe
noise is a smaller problem
i guess there's no vibration to do
to worry about like seismic stuff
so getting away from earth maybe you get
away from yeah those parts are easier
they don't have to measure it as
accurately at low frequencies
uh but they have um a lot of tough
engineering problems the
the
in order to detect that the
the uh gravitational waves affect things
the
sensors have to be what we call free
masses just like ours are isolated from
the earth they have to isolate it from
the satellite
and that's a hard problem they have to
do that pretty not as well as we have to
do it but
very well and
they've done a test mission and the
engineering seems to be
at least in principle in hand
this will be in the twenty thirties
twenty thirties yeah
this is incredible this is uh
this is this is incredible uh
let me ask about black holes um yeah so
what we're talking about is observing
uh
orbiting black holes
uh that i get i saw the terminology of
like binary black hole systems
is that's that's when the the one that's
when they're dancing
okay going around each other just like
the earth around the sun okay is that
weird that there's black holes going
around each other
so the finding binary systems of stars
is similar to finding binary systems of
uh black holes well they were once stars
so
um
so
we haven't
said what what a black hole is
physically yet yeah so what's a black
hole so
black hole is a is first it's a
mathematical concept or a physical
concept and that is
a region of space
so it's simply a region of space where
the curvature of space-time meaning the
gravitational field is so strong
that nothing can get out yeah
including light
and there's light gets bent
in gravitational if the gravitations if
the space time is warped enough and so
even light gets bent around and stays in
it so that's concept of a black hole so
it's not a f
and maybe you can make maybe it's a
that's a concept
that didn't say how they come about
and there could be different ways they
come about the ones that we are seeing
there's a we're not sure
it's what we're trying to learn now is
what they but the general
expectation
is that they come
at the bl these black holes happen when
a star dies
so what does that mean that a star dies
what happens
a star like our sun
basically makes heat and light by fusion
it's made of
and as it burns it burns up the hydrogen
and then the helium and then
and slowly works its way up to the
heavier and heavier elements that are in
the star
and when it gets up to iron the fusion
process doesn't work anymore
and so the stars die
and that happens to stars and then they
do
what's called a supernova what happens
then
is that a star is a delicate balance
between an outward pressure from fusion
and
light and burning
and an inward pressure of gravity trying
to pull the
masses together once it burns itself out
it goes
and it collapses and that's a supernova
when it collapses all the mass that was
there is in a very much smaller
space
and if a star if you do the calculations
if a star is big enough
that can create a strong enough
gravitational field to make a black hole
our sun won't
it's too small too small
and we don't know exactly
what it but it's usually thought that a
star has to be at least three times
as big as our sun
to make a black hole but that's the
physical way there you can make black
holes
that's the first um
explanation that one would give for the
for what we see
but it's not necessarily true we're not
sure yet what we see in terms of for the
origins of black holes no the black
holes that we see
in gravitational waves so the but you're
also looking for the ones who are binary
solar systems like so they're binary
systems but they could have been made
from binary stars so there's binary
stars around so that's
that's so so that's so this first
explanation is that that's what they are
gotcha um
other
explanati but but what we see
has some puzzles this is kind of the way
science works i guess yeah um
we see
heavier ones
than
up to
we've seen one system that was 140 times
the mass of our own sun
that's not believed to be possible
with the
parent being a big star because big
stars can only be so big
uh or they uh are unstable it's just the
the fact that they live in an
environment that makes them unstable
so
uh the fact that we see bigger ones they
maybe
come from something else it's possible
that they were
uh made in a different way by
little ones eating each other up or
maybe they were made
or maybe they came with the big bang the
prime what we call primordial which
means they're really different they came
from that we don't know at this point if
they came with a big bang then maybe
they account for
what we call dark matter or some of it
like there was a lot of them if they
came with them and yeah because there's
a lot of dark matter yeah
but uh will gravitational waves give you
any kind of an um intuition about the
origin of these oscillators we think
that if we see um the distributions
enough of them the distributions of
their
masses the distributions of their how
they're spinning so we can actually
measure when they're going around each
other
whether they're spinning
you know like this direction of the spin
or no the orientation whether the whole
system has any
wobbles
what
so this is this is now okay
we're doing that and then you're
constantly kind of crawling back and
back into and we're crawling back in
time and seeing how many there are as we
go back and so do they point back so
you're like uh what is that discipline
called cartography or something you're
like mapping
this the early universe
via the lens of gravitational
waves not yet the early universe but at
least back and forth earlier yeah right
so
um
so black holes are this
mathematical phenomenon but they come
about in different ways we have a huge
black hole
at the center of our galaxy and other
galaxies
those probably were made some other way
we don't know when the galaxies
themselves
had to do with the formation of galaxies
we we don't really know so the fact that
we use the word black hole
the origin of black holes might be quite
different depending on
how they happen
they just have to in the end have a
gravitational field that will bend
everything in
how do you feel about black holes as a
human being there's a there's this thing
that's
nearly infinitely dense can
doesn't let like light escape
isn't that kind of terrifying feels like
the stuff in nightmares i think i think
it's it's an opportunity
to to do what exactly
so uh
like the early universe is an
opportunity if i we can study the early
universe we can learn things like i told
you and here again
we have an embarrassing situation in
physics yes
we have two wonderful theories of
physics
one based on quantum mechanics
quantum field theory and
we can go to a big accelerator like at
cern and smash particles together and
almost explain anything that happens
beautifully using quantum field theory
and quantum mechanics
then we have another theory of physics
called general relativity which is what
we've been talking about most of the
time which is fantastic at describing
uh things at high velocities long
distances
you know uh and so forth so
that's not the way it's supposed to be
uh we're trying to create a theory of
physics not two theories of physics
so we have an embarrassment that we have
two different theories of physics
people have tried to
make a unified theory what they call a
unified there you've heard those words
for decades
they still haven't that's been primarily
done theoretically or try they people
actively do that
my personal belief is that the
like
much of physics we need some clues
so we need some experimental evidence so
where is there a place if we go to cern
and do those experiments gravitational
waves or general relativity don't matter
yes if we go to study you know our black
holes
elementary particle physics doesn't
matter we're studying these huge objects
so where might we have a place where
both phenomena have to be satisfied an
example is black holes inside black
holes yeah
so we can't do that today
but when i think of black hole it's a
potential
treasure chest
of
understanding the fundamental problems
of
physics
and maybe
can give us clues
to how we bring to the embarrassment of
having two theories of physics together
that's my own
romantic what's the worst that could
happen it's so enticing just go in and
look
do you think um
how far are we away from figuring out
the unified uh
theory of physics the theory of
everything i think what's your sense who
will
solve it like what discipline will solve
it yeah uh
i i think
uh so little
progress has been made uh
without
more experimental clues as i said that
we're not uh
we're just not able to
say that we're close without some clues
the best the closest
the most
popular theory these days that might
lead to that is called string theory
yeah
the problem with string theory is it
works
uh it solves a lot of beautiful
mathematical problems we have in physics
and uh
it's
it's uh
very satisfying theoretically
but it has almost no predictive
maybe no predictive ability because
it is a theory that works in 11
dimensions
we live in a physical world of
three space and one time dimension
in order to make predictions
in our world with string theory you have
to somehow get rid of these other
seven
dimensions that's done mathematically by
saying they curl up on each other on
scales that are too small to affect
anything here
but how you do that and that's okay
that's an okay argument but how you do
that
is not unique
so that means if i start with that
theory and i go to our world here i
can't uniquely go to it
and if i can't
it's not predictive and that's that's
actually and that's a killer that's a
killer and string theory is it seems
like from my outsider's perspective has
lost favor over the years perhaps
because of this very it's a lack of
predictive power i mean that science
has to connect to something where you
make predictions as beautiful
as it as it might be so i don't think
we're close i think we need
some
experimental clues it may be
that information on
something we don't understand presently
at all like dark energy or
probably not dark matter but dark energy
or something might give us some ideas
but
i i don't think we're
i can't envision right now
um in the short term meaning you know
the horizon that we can see
how we're gonna uh bring these two
theories together
a kind of um
two-part question maybe just asking the
same thing in two different ways
one one question is
do you have hope that humans
will colonize
the uh the galaxy so expand out become a
multi-planetary species another way of
asking that from a gravitational and a
propulsion perspective do you think
we'll come up with ways to travel close
to the speed of light or maybe faster
than the speed of light
which would make it a whole heck of a
lot easier to to expand out into the
into the universe
yeah
uh
well i think
you know we're not
that's a very futuristic i think we're
not that far from being able to
make a one-way trip to mars
that's a that's then a
question of uh
whether people are willing to send
somebody on a one-way trip but oh i
think they are i think there's a lot of
exp the explorers burn bright and with
their hearts yeah exactly people wanting
to die so
the opportunity to to explore new
territory yeah so uh
you know with this this recent
landing on mars is pretty impressive
they have a little helicopter that can
fly around you can imagine
you can imagine in the not too distant
future that you could have i don't think
civilizations colonizing i can envision
but i i can envision something more like
the south pole
we haven't colonized
antarctica because it's
all ice and cold and so forth but we
have
uh stations so we have a station that's
self-sustaining at the south pole that
i've been there
it has oh really yeah
what's that like
uh and
because that there's parallels there
to go to mars it's fantastic it is
what's the journey like
the journey involves going uh the south
pole station is uh run
in the u.s by
by the national science foundation
i went because i was on the national
science board that runs the national
science foundation
and so you get a vip trip if you're
healthy enough to the south pole to
see it
uh which i took uh
you fly from the u.s to australia to to
christchurch in australia southern
australia
and
from there you fly to mcmurdo station
which is on the coast and it's the
station with about a thousand people
right on the coast of antarctica
uh it's about a
seven or eight hour flight and they
can't predict the weather so when when i
flew from
christchurch to mcmurdo station they
tell you in advance you do it in a
military
aircraft they tell you in advance that
they can't predict whether they can land
because they have to land on uh
reassuring
yeah and so about
halfway the pilot got on and said uh
sorry this is uh they call it a
boomerang flight you know boomerang goes
out and goes back
so we had to stay a little while in
christchurch but then we eventually went
to
mcmurdo station and then
flew to the south pole the south pole
itself
is
when i was there was minus 51 degrees
that was summer
uh
it uh
zero humidity
and uh
and it's about
11 000 feet altitude
because it's
never warm enough for anything to melt
so it doesn't snow very much but it's
about 11 000 feet
of snowpack so you land in a place
that's high altitude
um
cold as could be
and dry and incredibly dry
which means you have a physical
adjustment
the
place itself is uh
it's fantastic they have this great
station there they they do astronomy at
the south pole nature wise is it
beautiful
what's the is what's the experience like
or is it like visiting any town
no it's very small there's only um
less than 100 people there even when i
was there
you know
there were about
50 or 60 there and in the winter there's
less half of that their winter when yeah
it's real cold it gets really cold yeah
and but it's but it's
it's a station i i think
and that's
i mean we haven't gone beyond that uh
on the coast of antarctica they have
greenhouses and they're self-sustaining
in mcmurdo station but we haven't really
settled more than
that kind of thing in antarctica which
is a big
uh
a country or you know
a
big plot a big
piece of land so
i don't
i can't envision kind of
colonizing at people living so much as
much as i can see
the equivalent of the south pole station
well in the computing world there's a
idea of
you know backing up your data and then
you want to do off-site backup
uh you know to make sure that if the
whole thing burn if your whole house
burns down then you can have a backup
offsite of the data i think the
difference between antarctica and
and mars is mars is a off-site backup
that if we have nuclear war whatever the
heck might happen here on earth it'd be
nice to have a backup elsewhere and uh
be nice to have a large enough colony
where we sent a variety of people except
like
uh a few silly astronauts and suits you
know have an actual vibrant
um get a few get a few musicians and
artists up there get a few uh
maybe like one or two computer
scientists those are essential maybe
even a physicist so
i'm not sure yeah maybe not
so that comes back to something you
talked about earlier which is fermi the
paradox family's paradox because you
talked about having to escape yeah
but
and so the missing one one number you
don't know how to use in fermi's
calculation or drake who's done it
better is how long do civilizations last
yeah
before they
are we you know we've barely gotten to
where we can communicate with
electricity and magnetism and maybe
we'll wipe ourselves out pretty soon so
are you hopeful in general like you
think we've got another couple hundred
years at least
or are you worried
well i and no i'm i'm i'm hopeful but i
don't know if i'm hopeful in the long
term
you know if you say
you know
uh
are we able to
to go for another couple thousand years
i'm not sure i you know i think
we have where we where we started the
fact that we can do things that don't
allow us to
kind of keep going or there can be
whether it you know ends up being a
virus that we create or
ends up being the equivalent of nuclear
war or something else
it's not clear that we can control
things well enough
so speaking of really cold conditions
and uh not being hopeful and eventual
suffering and destruction of the human
species let's let me ask you about
russian literature
you mentioned uh how's that for
transition i'm doing my best here you uh
you mentioned that you used to love
literature when you were younger and you
were even
or hoping to be
a writer yourself that was the
motivation
and some of the books i've seen that you
listed
that were
inspiring to you was was from russian
literature like uh i think tolstoy
dostoyevsky solzhenitsyn
yeah right um maybe in general you can
speak to your fascination with russian
literature or yeah in general will you
pick up from those all
not surprised you picked up on the
russian literature i'm sorry your
background but
uh
when i when when i you should be
surprised i didn't make the entire
conversation about this that's that's
the real surprise when when
i didn't really
become a
physicist or
want to go in science until i started
college so when i was younger i
i was good at math and that kind of
stuff but i didn't really i came from a
family nobody went to college and i
didn't have any mentors
so but i'd like to read when i was
really young and so when i was very
young i i read i always carried around a
pocketbook and read it
and uh
my mother read these mystery stories and
i got bored by those eventually and then
i discovered real literature i don't
know what age but about 12 or 13.
and so then i started reading
uh good literature and there's nothing
better than russian literature of course
and like reading
reading
good literature so i
i
read
quite a bit of russian literature
at that time
and so you asked me about the well
i don't know i say a few words said
dostoevsky so what what about dostoevsky
for me
um
dostoevsky was important
into i mean i've read a lot of
literature because it's kind of the
other thing i do with my life and
he made two incredible in addition to
his own literature
he influenced literature tremendously by
having
uh
i don't know how to pronounce polyphony
so he's the first real serious author
that had
multiple narrators
and that's a that he absolutely is the
first
and he also was the first
he began existential literature
so
the most important book that i've read
in the last year when i've been forced
to be isolated
was existential literature it was i
decided to reread
camous the plague
oh yeah that's a great book it's a great
book and it's right now to read it it's
fine i think that book is about love
actually
a love for his humanity it is but it has
all the men it has all the
you should if you haven't read it in
recent years i had read it before of
course but
to read it during this because it's
about a plague so it's really fantastic
to be done but that reminds me of
you know he was a great existentialist
but the beginning of existential
literature was dostoevsky
yeah so in addition to his own you know
great novels he had a tremendous impact
on on uh
on literature and there's also for
dostoevsky unlike most of their
existentialists
he was
at least in part religious i mean their
uh religiousity would permeated his
idea i mean one of my favorite books of
his is the idiot and
his which is a christ-like figure in
there well there's prince miskin is that
michigan yeah yeah michigan yeah in
michigan yeah that's that's one uh thing
about there you write it in english i
presume yeah yeah yeah so that's the
names that's what gets a lot of people
is there's so many names so hard to
pronounce they have to remember all of
them
it's like uh you have the same problem
but he was a great character so that
yeah i kind of uh
i have a
connection with him because i often
then the title of the book
the idiot is
i kind of i often call myself an idiot
because that's how i feel i feel so
naive about this world and i
i'm not sure
i'm not sure why that is maybe it's
genetic or so on but i
um
i have a of a connection the spiritual
connection to that character to michigan
to michigan yeah that you're just in but
he was far from energy yet
no in some sense in some sense
but in another sense
maybe not of this in another sense he
was yeah i mean he was a bumbler bunker
yeah
but uh you also mentioned soulja nitsan
yeah very interesting yes he did uh and
and he always confused me of course he
was really uh
really important in uh
writing about the
stalin and
first getting in trouble and then he
later he is
he he wrote about stalin in a way i
forget what it was what the book was in
a way that was very
critical of london
yeah he uh he's evolved through the
years he actually showed support for
putin eventually it was a very
interesting
uh transition he took no
journey he took through thinking about
russia and the soviet union
but
i think what i get from him is basic um
it's like uh victor franco has a man
search for meaning i have a similar kind
of
sense of um
of the cruelty of human nature yeah
cruelty of indifference
but also the ability to find happiness
in the small joys of life
that that's something there's nothing
like a prison camp that makes you
realize
you could still be happy with a very
very little well yeah he was he his
description of kind of how to make uh
how to go through a day and actually
enjoy it in a prison camp it's pretty
amazing
yeah oh and some prison camp i mean it's
the worst of the worst of the worst and
also just uh i i you know you do think
about
the role of authoritarian states and um
in you know like hopeful idealistic
systems somehow leading to the suffering
of millions and i you know
it might be arguable but i think a lot
of people
believe that stalin
i think genuinely believed that he's
doing good for the world
and uh he wasn't
it's a very valuable lesson that
even evil people
think they're doing good
otherwise it's too difficult to do the
evil
the best way to do evil is to believe
framing in a way like you're doing good
and then this is this is a very clear
picture of that which is the the gulags
and soulja is one of the best people to
reveal that yeah
the most recent thing i read it isn't
actually fiction uh was the
the woman i can't remember her name who
got the nobel prize about
within the last five years
i don't know whether she's ukrainian or
russian but there are
interviews have you read that interview
of ukrainian survivors of
well i think she may be originally
ukrainian so i'm the book's written in
russian then translated into english and
many of the interviews are in moscow and
places
but she won the nobel prize within the
last five years or so
but what's interesting is that uh
these are people of all different ages
all different uh uh
occupations and so forth and they're
reflecting on the
their reaction to
basically the present soviet system the
system they lived with before there's a
lot of
uh
looking back by a lot of them with uh
uh
well uh
it being much better before
yeah
i don't know what i
in america we think we know the right
answer what it means to be um to build a
better world i'm not so sure i think
we're all just trying to figure it out
yeah they're just doing our best i i
think you're right
is there advice you can give to young
people today
besides reading russian literature at a
young age
um about how to find their way in life
how to find success in career or just
life in general
uh
i i just
my own
belief it may not be very
deep but i believe it i think you should
follow your dreams
and you should have dreams and follow
your dreams if you can to the extent
that you can
and
we spend a lot of our time doing
something with ourselves in my case
physics in your case i don't know
whatever it is
machine learning and this
uh
we should yeah i should have fun
what was wait wait wait drink follow
your dreams what uh what dream did you
have because
well well originally i was
because you didn't follow your dream
well that's the change along the way i
was gonna be okay but i changed what
happened that was what happened
oh i read i decided to take the most
serious literature course in my high
school which was a mistake i'd probably
be a second-rate writer now and uh could
be a nobel prize winning writer and uh
uh
the
the book that we read
even though i had read russian novels
i was 15 i think uh cured me
from being a novelist destroyed your
dream yes cured you okay what was the
book moby dick okay
so why moby dick yeah why so i i've read
it since
and it's a it's a great novel maybe it's
as good as the russian novel i've never
made it through i i thought it was too
boring it's too long okay your words are
gonna
mesh with what i say excellent and you
may have the same problem at uh older
that's why i'm not a writer
it may be
so the problem is
moby dick is
what i remember was there was a chapter
that was maybe 100 pages long
all describing this why there was ahab
and the white whale and it was the
battle between ahab with his wooden peg
leg and the white whale
and there was a chapter that was 100
pages long in my memory i don't know how
long it really was
that described in detail the great white
whale and what he was doing and what his
fins were like and this and that and it
was so incredibly boring the word you
used
that i thought if this is great
literature
screw it
okay
now why did i have a problem i know now
in reflection because i i still read a
lot and i i read that uh
novel
um you know after
i was
30 or 40 years old
and the problem was simple i i diagnosed
what the problem was i that
novel in contrast to
the russian novels which are very
realistic and
you know point of view
is one huge metaphor
oh yeah
at 15 years old i probably didn't know
the word and i certainly didn't know the
meaning of a metaphor yeah like why do i
care about a fish why are you telling me
all about this exactly is one big
metaphor so reading it later as a
metaphor i could really enjoy it
but the teacher gave me the wrong book
or maybe it was the right book because i
went into physics and so
uh
but it was it was truly i think i may
oversimplify but it was really that i
was too young to read that book because
not too young to read the russian novels
interestingly but too young to read that
because i i probably didn't even know
the word and i certainly didn't
understand it as a metaphor
well in terms of fish i recommend people
read old man in the sea much shorter
much better it's still a metaphor though
so but you can read it just as a story
about a guy catching a fish and it's
still fun to read
i had the same experience
as you not with moby dick but later in
college i took a course on james joyce i
don't understand why
i was majoring in computer science i
took a course on james joyce
and i was kept being told that he is
widely considered by many considered to
be the greatest
literary
writer of the 20th century
and i kept reading like i think so his
short stories the dead i think it's
called was very good
well not very good but pretty good
and then you listen he's very good it is
very good only the dead the final story
is still rings with me today but then
ulysses was i i i got through ulysses
with the help of some cliff notes and so
on but
uh and so i did ulysses and then
finnegan's wake the moment i started
finning his wake
i said this this is stupid
this is that's when i went full into
like
um i don't know that's why i went full
kafka
bukowski like people who just talk about
the darkness of the human condition in
the fewest wars possible
and without any of the
music of language
um so it was a turning point
uh as well i i wonder i wonder when is
the right time to do the
to appreciate the beauty of language
like even shakespeare i was very much
off put by shakespeare in high school
and only later i started to appreciate
it's its value in the same way
let me ask you a ridiculous question
okay um
i mean because you've read russian
literature let me ask this one last
question
uh
i might be lying there might be a couple
more but what do you think is the
meaning of this whole thing
you're uh you got a nobel prize for uh
looking out into the trying to reach
back into the beginning of the universe
listening to the gravitational waves
uh
but that still doesn't answer the why
why are we here
beyond just the yeah the matter and
antimatter
the philosophical question i felt a
philosophical question about the meaning
of life i'm probably not really good at
i think
that
the individual meaning
uh
i i would say rather simplistically is
whether you've made
a difference a positive difference i'd
say for anything besides yourself
meaning you could
have been important to other people
or you could have discovered
gravitational waves that matters to
other people or something but something
beyond just existing on the earth
as an individual so
your life has meaning if you have
affected
um
either
knowledge or people or something beyond
yourself
do you it's a simplistic
statement but it's about as good as i
and i have that's that may in all of its
simplicity it may be very true
do you think about uh
does it make you sad that this ride ends
do you think about your mortality
yeah uh
are you afraid of it
i'm not exactly afraid of it but
saddened by it and uh
uh
you know i'm old enough to know that
i've
lived most of my life
and
i enjoy being alive
i can imagine being sick and not wanting
to be alive but i'm not and
so
um i'm
not getting a good ride
yeah i'm not and i'm not happy to see it
come to an end i'd like to see it
prolonged
but uh
i i don't uh
i i i don't
fear the dying itself or that kind of
thing it's more i'd like to prolong
uh what
is i think
a good life that i'm
living and still living it's kind of
it's sad to think that the finiteness of
it
is the thing that makes it special
and it
and also sad to um
you know to me at least it's kind of
i don't think i'm using too strong of a
ward but it's kind of terrifying the
uncertainty of it
the mystery of it you know the mystery
of death the mystery of it yeah of death
when we're talking about the mystery of
black holes that's somehow distant
that's somehow out there and the mystery
of our own but but but even life the
mystery of consciousness i find uh
so hard to deal with too
i mean it's not as painful i mean we're
conscious but the whole magic of life if
we can understand but consciousness
where we can actually think and
so forth it's pretty it's such it seems
like such a beautiful gift that it
really sucks that uh we get to let go of
it we'll have to let go of it yeah what
do you hope your legacy is
as i'm sure they will uh aliens when
they visit and humans have destroyed all
of uh human civilization aliens read
about you and encyclopedia they will
leave behind what do you hope it says
well i would i would hope they
if to the extent that they evaluated me
uh felt that i helped move science
forward as a
tangible contribution and that
i served as a good role model for
how humans should live their lives
and we're part of creating one of the
most incredible things
humans have ever created
so yes there's the science that's the
fermi thing right yeah uh the instrument
i guess and the instrument the
instrument is a magical creation not
just by a human by a collection of
humans the collaboration
is um
that's
that's humanity at his best
i i do hope
i do hope will last quite a bit longer
but if we don't
this is a good thing to remember humans
by
at least they built that thing
that's pretty impressive
barry this is an amazing conversation
thank you so much for wasting your time
and explaining uh so many things so well
i appreciate your time today thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with barry barish to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you some words from
werner heisenberg a theoretical
physicist and one of the key pioneers of
quantum mechanics
not only is the universe
stranger than we think
it is stranger than we can think
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you