36: Dark Matter, Black Matters and All That Jazz

Dark Matter, Black Matters and All That Jazz
Information
Guest	Stephon Alexander
Length	03:11:13
Release Date	11 June 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
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Portal Blog	Read
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Stephon Alexander is a first class jazz musician as well as a first rate physicist and a professor at Brown University. As the New President of the National Society of Black Physicists, Eric sits down with Stephon over a good deal of wine to discuss particles, politics, blackness and STEM, and other matters as they look back on the last decade of their friendship and their sprawling discussions across music, politics, mathematics, physics and beyond.

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Transcript

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [on-hold blues music] Hello, it's Eric. I wanted to talk about the death and the afterlife of the blues. Now, the difficulty in talking about the blues is that people do not have a common picture of what I mean. Some will hear in the phrase the blues a reference to mood. Others will associate it with the music that fits a depressed state of mind, and musicians will hear it as a reference to a class of structured music analogous to sonata form in Western classical music or the ritualized three-part structure of a classical Indian concert. Well, permit me to pretend that you were where I was as a young man coming of age, which is that I knew nothing about it. All I knew was that I loved rock and roll and that within rock there were certain songs more than others that I would listen to over and over again, and oddly, I would notice several names recurring on the song credits. For example, W. Dixon. Who the hell was W. Dixon? And the other name that came up repeatedly clearly sounded like a patrician blue blood senator, McKinley Morganfield. There were others, of course, as well. Ellis McDaniel sounded Scottish to me as a name, but he wrote like he was straight out of Texarkana. This was confusing. All these rock bands knew about these guys and played their songs, but these names weren't listed on any performances. So who were these people and why did I love everything that they did? I asked around in my circle of family and friends, and no one had an answer or even thought the question particularly interesting. So one day, in the days before the Internet, I went to the Tower Records store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood near where we lived and determined that I would screw up my courage to ask. Now, I say that for the benefit of those of you who may not regularly visit record stores or musical instrument shops because you may not understand who works behind the counter and on the floor. Music is a weird sector of the economy because it behaves somewhat like a legal drug which some people can handle while others cannot, and as a result, many musicians of near infinite ability exist who still cannot earn much of a living doing what they love most, which is playing music. Thus, almost everyone working in any area that touches music is usually overqualified by orders of magnitude, and Tower Records on Sunset was effectively a university-level music and folklore department with shaggy professors manning the cash registers and the floor. I would have my parents drop me off there just to listen to the conversations at their classical music annex across the street from their larger popular music store. But on this one particular day, I got up the courage to go to the general information desk and ask my question. "May I help you, young man?" the bearded gentleman said to me with what sounded like it might have been a faint snort of contempt. "Y-Yes, sir. Who is W. Dixon?" I said meekly. "Never heard of him. Sorry. Next." "Wait," I exclaimed desperately. "I'm not done with my questions." "Go on then," the bearded man said. "Who is McKinley Morganfield?" Suddenly the man's face brightened. "You mean Muddy Waters?" "No," I protested. "It's not a body of water or a song. It's a person, a songwriter." The man called over some associates to laugh over the situation I was creating. "This young man is trying to discover the blues and he's never even heard of Muddy Waters," the man said. I was now panicking as this was fast becoming an embarrassing scene with lots of grown men laughing at me and my questions. "Let's try my last question instead. Who is Ellis McDaniel?" All the men laughed and said the same word simultaneously, "Bo Diddley." Then the bearded man said, "Oh, and that mysterious W. Dixon you asked about is going to be a bass player out of Chicago named Willie Dixon." "Then you know what I'm talking about, so why are you all laughing at me?" I asked. "Because your life is about to change today and you don't even know it or just how much," said the man. "How can you know that?" I demanded. "Well, you'll see," said he. The bearded man then got up and walked me over to what was not much more than a single bin or two in the huge store labeled blues off to the side of the jazz section. As he left, I started going through the records and started seeing all of the song titles that I had loved, only they were no longer being performed by the Rolling Stones or The Doors, and what was more, almost all of the musicians were Black, but often in the same configurations as white rock groups, electric guitar and bass, keyboards and drums, for example. Sure enough, there was a singer called Muddy Waters, a guitarist named Bo Diddley, and a world of people I'd never heard of. I decided to take a risk and bought two of the cheapest of these mysterious records, a collection of B.B. King songs and a double album of John Lee Hooker. I got the records home and, feeling humiliated, I determined never to go back to that store again. I opened the shrink wrap and took the B.B. King record out of the paper sleeve first, and I remember watching the stylus drop down to the vinyl, and I waited nervously listening to the scratches over a tiny eternity for whatever was to come next. The song started and my life changed in under ten seconds. I felt like I was being born, so I'm not going to sugarcoat this. Put on the song You Upset Me Baby and you'll find that it begins with a tasty upbeat guitar that introduces the mood. I felt like I wanted to dance immediately. I didn't feel at all depressed. It made no sense. Then I heard B.B. King's voice for the first time. The lyrics are the description, without apology I might add, of a woman who is thirty-six in the bust, twenty-eight in the waist, forty-four in the hips, she got real crazy legs. Well, growing up in a progressive household, I was mortified and excited all at the same time as I dove for the volume knob to turn it down. What was I listening to? And wasn't that like eight inches larger down below than what I was taught were the fabled perfect measurements? And this B.B. King, he wasn't embarrassed at all. I mean, he was literally shouting her measurements to the world like he expected she would find that flattering rather than feeling objectified or needing to diet. But it wasn't the lyrics that got me. It was that I had swum upstream and discovered the distilled essence of rock and roll without knowing that there was anything there to discover. If this was a scene from Kung Fu Panda, I would be stumbling upon the pool of sacred tears where it all began. I liked this music so much more than rock and roll that I couldn't get enough of the sound. This was audio heroin to me. I went to the piano my family had downstairs and tried to figure out the notes, but they didn't fit the do-re-mi scale I had once learned in six months of failed piano lessons. Well, what I soon learned was that there was a musical art form called the blues that was more dance music than mope fest. Oddly, it wasn't well understood by anyone I seemed to know, and it was based on two main secrets. It is perhaps easiest to say what they are while sitting at the piano. The first secret is that the left hand in the bass plays a repeating 12-bar cycle of three chords in a particular sequence known as the blues progression. The other secret is that the right hand improvises using a scale known as the blues scale that is neither major nor minor and that cannot even fit onto the white keys alone in any key. This was literally music to my ears. Many of these blues musicians, like me, were unable to read music. A good number of them were even blind. Yet they had developed a mature art form like haiku that used a largely rigid formula to produce work of infinite variety and emotion. Why was I never told that this existed? Why was this never even offered to me as a possible alternative to classical music? The short and perfect answer is race. The blues, even more than jazz, really is black music, which black Americans had largely outgrown by the 1960s, if we are honest, just as some white musicians were learning how to master it. There is a famous song by Muddy Waters about what he calls the story that's, quote, never been told, close quote, where the title and main line of the song is, The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll. The reason for my confusion is that there is often no real difference between rock and roll and the blues. You can look on YouTube for Keith Richards showing how the Stones song Satisfaction is actually a disguised country blues hidden in plain sight, or you can hear Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin tell the audience that Whole Lotta Love really derives from Willie Dixon's You Need Love. And if we are honest, there is a certain financial premium to be earned by white musicians for simply taking the work of black blues musicians and repackaging it for white audiences. Rock and roll before we even get to what they have legitimately added as true innovation in a collaborative process. It is also true that it represents different cultural norms. I remember my grandfather, who was not a bigoted man, telling me that he personally disliked this music and that I was bending guitar notes and trying to sing with melisma and wide vibrato. Why not listen to a Schubert song cycle instead, he asked. To him and others, I was clearly going in an unexpected and disappointing direction away from the formal regimented Western classical music that my parents and grandparents held up as the gold standard. Yet exactly what my grandfather detested was what I loved most. The warmth, the excitement, the improvisational brilliance. By the time I snuck out of the house at 15 to see Ray Charles at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with my friend Ed Tuttle, I could see that this was really another world. The audience was part of the show, or at least that was true when black musicians played before black audiences. People would stand up in their seats and shout at the stage or dance in the aisles. And the performers would talk back, sometimes in words and sometimes with their instruments. When I went to see B.B. King years later in Boston in two back-to-back concerts over two nights, the first one was in a black area of town and it was joyous and raucous. The next night's event, however, was like looking at an autopsy of the previous evening by comparison. The white concert hall audience waited respectfully until the end of every song to clap vigorously as if they were seated at a symphony. I didn't want to be black necessarily, but I wanted to be in with black America. If blues was developed largely around call and response, the white audience simply did not understand how to give back to the musicians and the music always suffered as a result. So what is the blues and why does it matter? Well, except for a moment that if American classical music means anything at all, then we are really talking about the art form known as jazz. Blues is, in a certain sense, an ancestor to jazz as well as rock and roll and R&B with the so-called talking blues a forerunner of hip-hop and rap. Thus, despite black audiences largely turning away from the blues as an art form, it can't really ever die because it is the foundation for so much of the American contribution to world music. Further, it is a place for musicians to meet. When two musicians who do not know each other or their respective styles want to play together for the first time, in my experience they are most likely to try to play a 12-bar blues the way strangers would shake hands and introduce themselves. It is also a superpower waiting to be discovered in the life of everyone who dreams of playing music. Because it is based on just two musical rules, the initial overhead for entering the world of blues musicianship is quite a bit lower than other forms while the limits of virtuosic elaboration within the idiom have never been found and tested even by the likes of Art Tatum or Jimi Hendrix. If you think you can't play music at all but you have two strong working arms, start with a guitar and a slide like a coffee mug and a chart of the 12-bar blues cycle. You can probably play your first blues song within 15 minutes with a little bit of instruction from a friend who is knowledgeable. Now you may be guessing that there is a payload to this story, and there is. I fell deeply in love with black America completely by accident before I was 14. It was from afar at first, having few black friends, but love turns to progressive understanding over decades and infatuation turns to deep appreciation of gifts, quirks, and flaws. At this point, I don't even have a strong sense of distance and objectivity as it is all through my life by now. One of the things I found was that I had developed a very different picture of black Americans than almost anyone I knew as a result. And central to that picture was that black Americans took merit and meritocracy as seriously and definitionally as any group I ever met with the possible exception of Soviet Russians. As a folklore minor at the University of Pennsylvania, I advanced a thesis there that I want to share with you all. And that is this. We non-blacks are missing the history and role of merit and particularly genius in black culture. Having been fenced out of white institutions by discrimination and having been stripped of their heritage by slave owners who wished to erase their past, black Americans came up with an ingenious solution to rebuild their identity in the space of the hundred years since slavery. They would use open head-to-head high-stakes competitions in, well, just about everything. In the schoolyard, they called it the dozens, and it was a game of insult played for keeps. At open mic night, they called it head-cutting competitions to see who could blow the other clear off the stage. When it came to the spoken word, they would have pitted Robert Frost against T.S. Eliot had they both been black in a poetry slam. Regular chess often took too long, so they hustled at blitz-style chess in public parks against all comers. In comedy, competitive roasting and the blowtorching of hecklers reigned supreme. And in hip-hop, the concept of a rap battle is well known to all. And this is why I don't really get the race and IQ discussion. Because this is a genius-based culture whose principal gift, after all, lies in outthinking the rival with creative generative solutions under maximal pressure that will never be found on a multiple-choice test. This is exactly how Eminem could win at rap battling because fairness in judging is how blacks maintained an air of superiority over whites who needed to cheat by exclusion. I have threatened for years to come up with an IQ substitute test that favored blacks based on my study of black history. It would involve multiple people competing directly against each other head-to-head in real time to solve open-ended analytic problems under maximal pressure where no answer was known to begin with to those making up the test. But despite my reverence for black genius, I also came to see flaws and faults as one does in any deep cross-cultural relationship of sufficient length and depth. For example, where I learned to see the white society to which I belonged as being systemically violent in ways that I had never understood or imagined, the initial unparalleled warmth of black society that mirrored my Jewish upbringing eventually peeled back to reveal a comfort with the idiosyncratic horror of Louisiana Red's sweet blood call that made me physically sick the first time I heard both men and women clapping and joking about what seemed like misogynistic madness beyond any murder ballad I had ever heard. Now what am I to do with all of this? On the one hand, I cannot pretend that I would even recognize the U.S. without the black contribution. If there were a crime of cultural appropriation, I would only be let off the hook for attempting the crime without succeeding. That is how badly I wanted to understand and learn from Art Tatum, Richard Pryor, Harry Belafonte, the Nicholas brothers, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Eric Lewis, Stanley Jordan, Dick Gregory, and my other heroes. But we outside the black community, in our maudlin guilt and performative shame, are now in the process of losing the ability to meet our own amazing subculture of black America as equals. Think about it. We fear, we idolize, we covet, we desire, we condescend, and we steal from them. We feel as if we have no right to meet our own people as intimates due to the fear of offense. And there is no true love where we cannot share what it is that we see and pass through the valley of offense to deeper understanding. This alienation is in fact the origin of the stock character from cinema of the magic Negro, possessed of otherworldly wisdom but who is always a supporting character as drawn propelling the Caucasian narrative ever forward. And quite honestly, I see in our shame that we don't have enough of the deep friendships between blacks and whites where we might actually come to love each other from a position of intimacy and knowledge rather than an oscillation between idolization and demonization. So I will leave you with this thought. Those of us in white America who believe most in our black brothers and sisters are not going in for this groveling performative bullshit. We have already many times stood with our friends in shock when the cab which slowed to pick us up then sped off when it saw who we were with. And I can assure you that we were never called something so genteel and euphemistic as N-word loving race traitors as we were physically bullied in school. Just as my black colleagues can mostly understand anti-Semitism, I can get most of anti-black prejudice too. Sure, maybe not the whole thing, but this pretend divide has to end. What is the purpose of the heights of black oratorical skill if not to make us understand each other better? And speaking directly to black listeners, we are equals and very lucky to have each other. I am so very glad you are here and I wouldn't be who I am without your gifts. Forgive me, but no true friend of mine has ever asked me to wear a hair shirt for my connection to racial crimes of slavery committed by people who vaguely looked like me decades before any of my family ever came to this country. I will support you and do believe that you have triumphed over the humiliation of oppression. But don't ask me for reparations, to abolish the police, to repeat lines that you feed me, to kneel when you instruct, or to accept lower standards of empathy between people because of the uniqueness of your pain. I am not going to simply take your word for it that no white person fears the police, nor am I going to ignore statistics that in turns both confirm and cast doubt on so-called lived experience. Daniel Shaver was white and died on camera in an Arizona hotel room. Be honest, had he been black, you would know that racism was behind the deed. And yet because he was white, we know that it played no role. The true solution to race problems isn't competing to demonstrate just how guilty we are. It is true love and friendship and critique and offense and fumbling in the dark until we get it right. We Jews do have a problem with sexual predation. Our Muslim brothers have had problems with terror. Blacks have problems with violent crime. And if you have true friends who are any of these, you discuss these things in an arena of trust. As a black friend of mine once said, I cross the street when a big guy with a do-rag comes towards me. I'm not sure why I feel just a bit weird that you do it too. But above all, thank you for immeasurably enriching my life. It will be an honor to try to help your children do for science and technology what you have already done for culture, letters, music, comedy, and national character. This country of ours isn't perfect, but it's not 1840 anymore and no group of us has the right to scuttle this beautiful ship we share called America. Let's reform prisons and law enforcement like grown-ups. I am saying this because I believe in us as intimates and not because I am trying to hold on to an insulating layer that others built into the system. I'll be back after a few brief words from our sponsor to introduce today's guest. The nutritionists at returning sponsor Athletic Greens have formulated a powder which when I mix with water turns into a fulfilling green juice drink that satisfies most of my nutritional needs every day. 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Again, shipping is fast and free. Restrictions may apply, so see bollandbranch.com for details using code PORTAL. I'm releasing this episode, recorded before the corona epidemic, to honor my friend, the Trinidadian jazz saxophonist Stefan Alexander. Now, Stef is a multi-talented musician who has risen from a modest upbringing and has, most famously, played alongside the great Ornette Coleman. So every time Stef humors me by inviting me to jam with him or asking me to come to see him play a date in a club, I feel highly honored to get to see how a great mind like his thinks about jazz when we drink and talk afterward. I will admit that sometimes there is a lot of drinking and the discussions and arguments can rage into the small hours of the morning, best visited by the livers and brains of younger men. But I'm not honoring Stef for his horn playing here, because Stef has an unusual side gig where he is professor of theoretical physics at Brown University, working simultaneously in particle theory, quantum gravity, and cosmology. In addition, he is also the author of the book The Jazz of Physics, which connects his two major passions. Not bad for the immigrant son of a cab driver from the Bronx, right? Well, let's put it this way. The man is phenomenal and hanging with Stef is a great way to humble the ego. So in addition to thinking about Chern-Simons cosmology, harmolodic theory, and quantum foundations, Stef has just become the president of the National Society of Black Physicists. I'm not quite sure how he does it all, but I think that this tenure could potentially be a big deal if all goes well, as we selfishly stand a lot to gain by tapping this most overlooked of pools of talent. And I wanted to hold this back until he had assumed office, as I think that as a visionary, he may have a dramatic effect on attracting top young black students into theoretical physics, as he is a terrific pedagogue and leader. Where others have had difficulty in the past with this, I think that Stefan may yet succeed. Dare to dream. In part that is because when we met, I helped talk Stef into staying in physics when I saw him being nudged out of the field subtly by virtue of his intellectually sui generis nature. This all came about because our mutual friend Lise Mullen asked me to assess whether Stefan would be happier outside the field at the time. I met with Stefan in New York City and was instantly so impressed by his originality while talking shop that I made an odd decision which frankly surprised me. I reasoned that Stef might actually be psychologically better off leaving physics at the time, but that the field would actually be worse off for having him leave due to his originality. So I tried to convince him to stay in and ride it out. Thankfully he did and everything resolved beautifully just as I'd hoped. So let me say a few things about what you're about to hear. You are going to hear two friends who have had a million conversations about tensor analysis, romance, bebop, and academics. And quite honestly, when it's late, we drink. So in the interest of authenticity, I wanted to do that only with the microphones on. So it is a bit unruly in places. If you want perfectly polished podcasting, might I suggest something highly produced from the New York Times offering perhaps? But in my defense, let me tell you what you may get here that you won't get elsewhere. Right now as this podcast is being released, the United States as a nation is trying to talk about race in the wake of the ostensible killing and murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police before onlookers in broad daylight. And the nation is trying to figure out the new rules about how to think and talk about race. These new rules, of course, assume that if we just follow the tortured standards of conversation coming from critical race theory properly and feel the proper amount of guilt and shame that we can end the nightmare of racism. Well, allow me to offer a very different perspective, almost an opposite one in fact. There is also the simple idea of appreciating our differences and just loving our way through it. With acquaintances, perhaps, having many rules to ensure respect for our differences and traumas is an approach one can take. But honestly, it leads to distancing where the rules actually ensure that you never get beyond a certain level of honesty. Thus, the conversation can ultimately be guaranteed to stagnate. And just like the tortoise and the hare, the rabbit that is critical race theory may get off to a good start, but it is the plodding tortoise of real appreciation and intimacy that gets you to the finish line. Here you are listening to a progressively lubricated conversation with two people who have so much trust in each other that we often don't say, do, or think the right thing at all, at least according to the scolds. Well, screw 'em. I think that this way is much more powerful. This was, after all, the original dream, and you'll notice that there are long stretches in the conversation that have very little to do with race at all. Because honestly, in our relationship, it's usually a spice, and just as I wouldn't serve you paprika as a main course, identity isn't the main issue here. It's neutrinos, friendship, and tritone substitutions. But towards the end of this episode, we talk about some things frontally that are nearly impossible to discuss if you don't really know, love, and trust your interlocutor. I am, for example, much more positive about inclusion and diversity as standalone ideas than I am about the artificial nature of the coercive diversity and inclusion juggernaut with its focus on guilt, equality of outcome, and shame. And identity can be talked about across the divide and then shoved to the side when it doesn't belong at the heart of the conversation. At one point, for example, we talk about how we know that we are seen and resented by others who presume we are getting special treatment for irrelevant characteristics. This is a major downside of succeeding through identity politics. No one ever really accepts that your work is what brought you to the big dance, and they often won't tell you to your face. That unfair cloud of suspicion is an important issue that is very difficult to discuss if you are constantly talking about abolishing the police, reparations, and Black and brown bodies in weirdly hypnotic ritualized speech. You are inflicting a cost on people of extraordinary ability who happen to be brown or Black, and I can assure you having worked with Stephon on numerous ideas that Steph is the real deal and that the world of Black physicists could be poised for a sea change should all go well. I'm really looking forward to having Steph call on me whenever he needs to open the field wide up in the best possible way. So mazel tov, Steph. And to all you out there, I hope you will enjoy this unique mind as much as I do in the conversation ahead. We will be back with my uninterrupted conversation with Professor Stephon Alexander after some brief messages from our sponsors. 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That's two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free. You can get started and join today by heading over to skillshare.com/portal to get two free months of unlimited access to thousands of classes at skillshare.com/portal. [upbeat music] The situation was dire. I, the world's foremost mushroom hater, had become addicted to returning sponsor Four Sigmatic's mushroom coffee, which clears my head and tastes like my regular coffee. But I'd gone through my entire stash and could not call for help due to optics. Then, just like in "Radar Love" by Golden Earring, a package appeared filled with mushroom products that I crave but cannot ask for. A huge thank you to the crazy mushroom beverage wizards who make their tea, latte, coffee, and cocoa with the healthy mushrooms that I need, but without altering the beverage taste that I already love. Okay, you've probably heard me talking about this weird mushroom beverage thing long enough that you may be ready to raise your game. If so, I want you to take the next two big steps with me. First, I want you to go into a room completely alone, and I want you to look into a mirror and say the magic words that I believe will set you free. "I am mushroom curious." And then before the feeling dissipates, go to foursigmatic.com/portal or use discount code PORTAL at checkout to get 15% off your Four Sigmatic purchase. That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/portal or use discount code PORTAL at checkout to get 15% off your delicious mushroom beverages. That's foursigmatic.com/portal. Good luck. [upbeat music] Hello, you've found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I am here tonight with my old friend, Stephon Alexander. Stephon, welcome to the portal, sir.

00:29:03
Stephon Alexander: It's good to be in the portal.

00:29:04
Eric Weinstein: It's good to be with you.

00:29:05
Stephon Alexander: [laughs]

00:29:05
Eric Weinstein: Um, now, you and I have been friends for a few moons now. Um, and-

00:29:11
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, 11 years.

00:29:12
Eric Weinstein: Is that right? Maybe, maybe a little bit more.

00:29:14
Stephon Alexander: No, more, more. More. A little more than, than what-

00:29:15
Eric Weinstein: Maybe 13 years.

00:29:16
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, 13 years. That's right.

00:29:17
Eric Weinstein: And we have been through some weird and interesting times, but I wanna introduce you to our audience slowly. Um, one thing that I've been fascinated, uh, by in our relationship is that I get to talk music theory and jazz history with you as an accomplished saxophonist. Now, how did you end up playing for Ornette Coleman?

00:29:44
Stephon Alexander: Oh, that's a good question. Well, first of all, I wanna, um, say that I still consider myself just to be a student of the saxophone. I'll be a student of that instrument for the rest of my life. Um, but I'll t- you know, I'll take your compliment.

00:29:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:29:59
Stephon Alexander: [laughs] Um, so-

00:30:00
Eric Weinstein: It's a hard sell. I mean, I've, I've seen you in jazz clubs and really enjoyed, uh, the fact that y- you can, you can hang with almost anybody and, uh, a- and it's, it's always inspiring when I get a chance to hear you play.

00:30:12
Stephon Alexander: Thank you, sir. I did play at your birthday once.

00:30:14
Eric Weinstein: Oh, that was, that was a night.

00:30:15
Stephon Alexander: That was nice, but I was very intimidated 'cause that, that... Was it Joshua Bell was there as well?

00:30:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, yeah, it was, it was a random birthday, and I-

00:30:22
Stephon Alexander: It was a random birthday for me

00:30:23
Eric Weinstein: ... and I tried to just Buy some kebabs and then, like, Nassim Taleb showed up-

00:30:28
Stephon Alexander: Yes

00:30:28
Eric Weinstein: ... Joshua Bell showed up, and then-

00:30:30
Stephon Alexander: Sean Lennon showed up

00:30:31
Eric Weinstein: ... Sean Lennon brought a piano.

00:30:33
Stephon Alexander: He brought it, that's right.

00:30:34
Eric Weinstein: And he left it. Like, I said, "Bring an instrument," so mo- mostly people usually bring a guitar or a harmonica. He brought a piano and just left the piano.

00:30:42
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, that was cool because that was the first time I met him. And after your birthday, we ha- we went back to his place, and I jammed with him and his bandmates-

00:30:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:30:51
Stephon Alexander: ... at, at his place in the Village. That was pretty cool.

00:30:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:30:54
Stephon Alexander: Thank you.

00:30:54
Eric Weinstein: I mean, Sean's an amazing-

00:30:54
Stephon Alexander: That was a nice birthday present.

00:30:55
Eric Weinstein: That was very, it was very cool.

00:30:56
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

00:30:56
Eric Weinstein: Then Nels Cline, uh, of Wilco showed up. Um...

00:31:02
Stephon Alexander: How long ago was that? That was right before you left New York, wasn't it?

00:31:05
Eric Weinstein: I'm gonna say this was about seven years ago.

00:31:07
Stephon Alexander: Oh, see, I didn't know.

00:31:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:31:08
Stephon Alexander: Okay. How very... That was a very-

00:31:09
Eric Weinstein: But that was a very random birthday party.

00:31:11
Stephon Alexander: And, um, Ed, Ed, Ed was there.

00:31:13
Eric Weinstein: Ed Frankel.

00:31:13
Stephon Alexander: Ed Frankel was there.

00:31:14
Eric Weinstein: Esther Perel.

00:31:16
Stephon Alexander: Um, TJ. TJ was there.

00:31:17
Eric Weinstein: TJ, the book publisher.

00:31:19
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

00:31:20
Eric Weinstein: Um, so yeah, we, I mean, we, we really had a great crew.

00:31:23
Stephon Alexander: It was a great crew. We miss you.

00:31:25
Eric Weinstein: Oh, well, thanks.

00:31:26
Stephon Alexander: Come back out east, man.

00:31:27
Eric Weinstein: I, I love New York. I will.

00:31:28
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

00:31:29
Eric Weinstein: But all right, so-

00:31:31
Stephon Alexander: All right

00:31:31
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I mean, I've always been sort of in awe of Ornette, in part not just because of, uh, of his being a great musician, but because he actually came out with this really deep, weird, mysterious theory of harmonolatics.

00:31:44
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

00:31:44
Eric Weinstein: And among the jazz cats that I know who, um, really know their stuff, it's very polarizing, very controversial still.

00:31:53
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

00:31:54
Eric Weinstein: What was it... What was going on with Ornette in late-stage jazz, do you think, that, um, that was really different, and how did it, how did it take the handoff from, from earlier greats?

00:32:05
Stephon Alexander: Um, yeah, and I think that comes back to, to my introduction, um, w- um, my introduction to Ornette. Um, I think it happened maybe, I would say, uh, um, about 19 years ago.

00:32:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:32:23
Stephon Alexander: 19 years ago, I was, um, at that time I was a postdoc in, in London. Um, and, um, I would come out to, um, Columbia to hang out with Brian Greene and his crew. Um, and, um, um, I got a phone call from a friend of mine, um, Jaron Lanier. And Jaron-

00:32:48
Eric Weinstein: The developer of virtual reality-

00:32:50
Stephon Alexander: Reality, yes

00:32:50
Eric Weinstein: ... maybe the innovator there-

00:32:52
Stephon Alexander: Right

00:32:52
Eric Weinstein: ... and, uh, some sort of incredibly mysterious human being.

00:32:57
Stephon Alexander: He is one of the, you know, you know, like you, one of the more talented, um, and intelligent human beings I've met, even though there were times in the past when I'm like, "What the heck is he saying?" And then, of course, like, it's one of these things 10 years later, you're like, "Oh, that's what he's saying." Um-

00:33:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I will tell my Jaron Lanier story-

00:33:14
Stephon Alexander: Okay

00:33:14
Eric Weinstein: ... when you're done with yours.

00:33:15
Stephon Alexander: Okay, as long as I get to tell.

00:33:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, you're, you're first.

00:33:17
Stephon Alexander: So, so Jaron calls me up, and he goes, his, um, he goes, um, "Stef," that's, uh, my, what my friends call me, right? Um, um, "There's somebody I want you to meet. I'm gonna go hang out with him right now." Uh, and I'm like, "I just can't, like, get up, you know, from what I'm doing." He goes, uh, "I'm just gonna go, um, jump in a taxi right now and go see Ornette." So I said, "Which Ornette? Ornette Coleman?" He goes, "Yeah, Ornette." I said, "Where are you at?" [laughs]

00:33:43
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:33:43
Stephon Alexander: So he said, "Just meet me at this address," um, it was somewhere Midtown. And we get there, go upstairs into some private place. Uh, we know where Ornette lives, um, this beautiful place. And as I walk in there, um, it's very close... It's very clear that he and Jaron are extremely close. Um, and Jaron introduces me to Ornette, and that was that. That was it. I mean, so the first thing he s- he asked me was, "What are you thinking about? What are, what are you thinking about?" In this kind of Ornette way, "What are you thinking about?" You know, this kind of thing, right?

00:34:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:34:17
Stephon Alexander: Uh, so at that time, I was actually working on vortices, right? You know, line-like, um, regions of trap energy, um, [clears throat] because I was working on a model, um, um, of the early universe that made use of vortices. And so I told him that. I said, "I'm working on vortices." And he pulls out a piece of napkin and says... And we're right by the... He said, "Show me." So then I start showing him the vortices, and he is way into it. And then after I explained to him the physics and a little bit of the math, you know, without getting too much into the math, he goes, "I play the vortex." Then I said to myself, "Wait a minute, this..." So then we started talking about the idea of playing shapes.

00:35:13
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

00:35:14
Stephon Alexander: And this was really a, um, a game changer for me as a saxophonist because, I mean, a big part, especially when, you know, when you're trying to learn how to improvise within the jazz tradition, within, you know, the bebop tradition, there's a, you know... Sometimes you don't know your head from your feet. You don't, you don't... You know, it's hard to find a practice regime or what the, what the important thing is. It seems infinite. Um, unless you have a good teacher or you, you know... Um, I, and I certainly didn't have that. I, for the most part, was self-taught, and I, uh, but I was fortunate to have teachers later on, um, including Ornette. Um, so we just... He, you know... Then he pulled out his saxophone. He had this white saxophone, and he goes, "Play it." And then, of course, I was freaked out and-

00:36:05
Eric Weinstein: So by vortex, we mean some sort of toroidal donut-like shape?

00:36:09
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, like a, you know, like, uh, um, water that's flowing down a sink, you know?

00:36:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Okay.

00:36:15
Stephon Alexander: That, that sort of helical motion, but you make, you know, the eye of a storm.

00:36:19
Eric Weinstein: Eye of a storm.

00:36:19
Stephon Alexander: It's a very common object, but as you probably know it as, um, the fundamental group.

00:36:25
Eric Weinstein: Aha

00:36:26
Stephon Alexander: Ah. Um, m- maps from S1 to S1

00:36:29
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, a, a fundamental group is like a lasso that you're p- trying to pull to the point where there's no lasso at all by getting it to slip all the way down

00:36:37
Stephon Alexander: Right, except for that, except for that, that point, which ends up becoming like, you know, a string, um, of, of trapped energy

00:36:45
Eric Weinstein: But if it could get... Sometimes it gets trapped. Like you can't-

00:36:47
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:36:47
Eric Weinstein: ... pull the lasso closed because it gets caught on something like an inner tube

00:36:51
Stephon Alexander: That's right

00:36:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:36:52
Stephon Alexander: That's exactly what it is, right

00:36:53
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:36:54
Stephon Alexander: And, um, these, um, uh, these solutions are qu- um, quite commonplace in the s- actually in the standard model. I guess we'll talk a little bit about that later on, but-

00:37:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:37:06
Stephon Alexander: ... but the point is, Ornette was all-

00:37:06
Eric Weinstein: I'm trying to, I'm trying to stick with jazz

00:37:08
Stephon Alexander: ... Ornette was all into this, right?

00:37:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:37:09
Stephon Alexander: That's the point. W- what I found amazing about him was f- his mind was so wide open-

00:37:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:37:15
Stephon Alexander: ... and that he was able to, um, engulf any information I was giving him. He was genuinely interested in it, and would f- um... And it wasn't BS. I mean, I understood what he meant when he said that he was playing the vortex, because it is, you know, it is basically, um, you're, you're compromising-

00:37:35
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:37:35
Stephon Alexander: ... um, um, you're compromising, um, energy, right? You have a situation where energy gets trapped, and it's a compromise between, you know, energy t- to basically, um, um... You know, there's this thing we call gradient energy, right?

00:37:54
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:37:55
Stephon Alexander: And so the compromise basically is to form this string, and this idea of trapping energy in some, in some, um, spiral-like way. That's the shape. So this idea... That's right. So, um, this will be edited.

00:38:11
Eric Weinstein: No, let's just-

00:38:11
Stephon Alexander: Oh, okay

00:38:11
Eric Weinstein: ... keep going, man.

00:38:12
Stephon Alexander: All right

00:38:12
Eric Weinstein: It, it doesn't... Look, first of all, the, to let the folks at home know, we're doing this after you've been lecturing, uh-

00:38:20
Stephon Alexander: All day

00:38:20
Eric Weinstein: ... Chapman University for a little while, and we're doing this really comfortable, after hours, with a g- bottle of red wine. We've got another one if we, if we get that far through it. So let's just do this as friends in front of the people.

00:38:34
Stephon Alexander: Okay. Um, yeah. So d- that's right. So the thing about this vortex was, in fact, this sort of spiral-like structure.

00:38:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:38:44
Stephon Alexander: Um, and I actually deliberately told him that I was working on the vortex because I actually sensed, actually, by listening to his, his solos-

00:38:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:38:56
Stephon Alexander: ... that there was, you can hear spiral-like motion, um, in the tones, in the notes themselves. His playing is, can be sometimes very angular, you know, Ornette's playing. It's, that's what-

00:39:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:39:07
Stephon Alexander: ... makes it so hip.

00:39:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:39:09
Stephon Alexander: Um, and, um, you know, a friend of mine, um, Diego, um, Cortez, once told me that he always felt that Ornette played shapes. So I also believe that too. And by telling him about these very interesting geometric things that we find commonplace in physics, um, in quantum field theory, it was just my way of, um, have, may- yeah, basically using Ornette as a soundboard, right? And seeing how he responded to that. Um, and then he said, uh, he, he, after that said, um, "I'm gonna show you something." And he took out the same piece of napkin and wrote a couple of notes for me, and he goes, "That's for you. Um, um, this, these seq- this sequence of notes will, a- allow and h- will help you play through cha- um, any chord change."

00:40:01
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

00:40:02
Stephon Alexander: All right? So, um, but I'm not really allowed to tell anybody what-

00:40:07
Eric Weinstein: You mean it's like your mantra. It's been given to you-

00:40:09
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:40:09
Eric Weinstein: ... by a guru, and-

00:40:11
Stephon Alexander: Right

00:40:11
Eric Weinstein: ... now it's yours and yours alone.

00:40:13
Stephon Alexander: Basically.

00:40:13
Eric Weinstein: That's c-

00:40:14
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:40:14
Eric Weinstein: ... that's cool.

00:40:15
Stephon Alexander: I did tell it to one other person.

00:40:16
Eric Weinstein: Uh-oh.

00:40:16
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

00:40:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, don't tell me who you told it to, because I-

00:40:18
Stephon Alexander: I won't, I won't, I, I, I, I won't tell you

00:40:19
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I don't wanna summon the demons from the vacuum. Um, so yeah, I mean, I guess the one, the one famous circle, uh, inside of music is the circle of fifths with-

00:40:30
Stephon Alexander: Yes

00:40:30
Eric Weinstein: ... which if we're technical about it, in even temperament it's a circle, but in just temperament or Pythagorean temperament, it's actually a spiral-

00:40:39
Stephon Alexander: Yes

00:40:39
Eric Weinstein: ... because it doesn't really close. So in-

00:40:41
Stephon Alexander: Right

00:40:41
Eric Weinstein: ... in a weird way, that's actually a candidate vortex, and then there are all of these weird things you can do when you have certain tones that appear to be infinitely rising, because you're always putting a subsonic note on the bottom and, um, you're letting something go out the top of the frequency spectrum. And so it's always a chord, and you're not noticing that you're removing a note at the top and putting one at the bottom so the, the appearance that the tone is always rising, which, we've been talking about Penrose stairs.

00:41:11
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

00:41:12
Eric Weinstein: Um, you could easily imagine that we could construct some sort of mathematical figure that would realize something of this, uh, toroidal or vortical, I don't know w- what you wanna call it. There's another interesting question, which is that Mark Cutts, uh, had this paper called Can You Hear the Shape of a Drum?

00:41:34
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:41:35
Eric Weinstein: And the idea was that the harmonics that determine, um, a two-dimensional membrane's vibrational modes-

00:41:43
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:41:43
Eric Weinstein: ... might be unique enough to detect what the shape of the drum is just by listening to what the harmonic sequence is for that particular two-dimensional membrane. So you think about any kind of crazy shape of a weird drum that nobody's ever made. Most drums are circular.

00:41:58
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:41:59
Eric Weinstein: So if you, if you came up with a weird drum, it would have some crazy harmonic pattern, and then you could ask, "Can I guess what the shape of the drum is by listening to the sequence of, uh, vibrational modes?" That turned out not to be true, that there were different drums that had the same exact harmonic patterns.

00:42:18
Stephon Alexander: Oh, that's really cool.

00:42:19
Eric Weinstein: Isn't that cool?

00:42:20
Stephon Alexander: So, um, so have people actually made instruments of this sort-

00:42:24
Eric Weinstein: You know, I don't know

00:42:25
Stephon Alexander: ... like weird-looking drums and-

00:42:26
Eric Weinstein: The, the really cool one, and I, I g- I got very in- interested in this, is that I tried to figure out what made these hand pans that came out of Switzerland. So y- first of all, you come from Trinidad and Tobago.

00:42:37
Stephon Alexander: Trinidad and Tobago, that's correct.

00:42:38
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay. Now you-

00:42:39
Stephon Alexander: I was just there

00:42:40
Eric Weinstein: You were just there? Okay, so in Trinidad and Tobago, they figured out how to beat the crap out of a steel drum

00:42:46
Stephon Alexander: That's where it was invented

00:42:47
Eric Weinstein: ... and to c- to come up with, uh, the steel... I mean, oil, oil drums rather

00:42:52
Stephon Alexander: That's right. Mm-hmm

00:42:53
Eric Weinstein: ... and those became the steel drum. Now, those always sound very kind of distinctive because they're muddy. And that mud-

00:43:00
Stephon Alexander: There's also sympathetic vibrations

00:43:02
Eric Weinstein: ... sympathetic vibrations. That mud is some of the charm, but what it doesn't do is it doesn't have the same harmonic sequence of a one-dimensional vibrating medium, like a string or-

00:43:12
Stephon Alexander: Yes

00:43:12
Eric Weinstein: ... or like an air column, like you'd have in a flute.

00:43:15
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

00:43:15
Eric Weinstein: The Swiss, being those kind of uptight anal perfectionists that they are, said, "What if we went to the Caribbean and took that idea-

00:43:24
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:43:24
Eric Weinstein: ... but we f- got really precise about it and machine the first few harmonics to behave as if they were a one-dimensional medium?" So now you've got a two-dimensional object, like a, you know, the gamelan in, uh, in Indonesia. Each village's gamelan is so distinctive that you can tell which village you're in. Why? Because two-dimensional media, metallophones have different properties.

00:43:50
Stephon Alexander: Right. Right.

00:43:51
Eric Weinstein: But the Swiss said, "No, no, no, we c- we can make at least the leading part of the series behave. We will get it to submit to our will." And that's why these hand pans called hang drums, I, I guess I shouldn't call it hang drum, but people do-

00:44:05
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:44:05
Eric Weinstein: ... um, have this luminous quality because you've never heard a metallophone that's been that carefully machined.

00:44:12
Stephon Alexander: Yes. Now, there is a w- the person that was responsible for the modern tuning of the steel drums, his name is Ellie M- Manette.

00:44:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay

00:44:21
Stephon Alexander: Um, and he... I mean, basically a genius and, um, his tuning, his... The, the pans that he tunes is a, on a whole different level.

00:44:30
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

00:44:31
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, and, um, um, if you wanna hear that sound and compare it to this other, it's far superior. I, I will, uh-

00:44:39
Eric Weinstein: If you do say-

00:44:39
Stephon Alexander: And, um-

00:44:40
Eric Weinstein: ... you're Caribbean

00:44:40
Stephon Alexander: ... Ellie Manette, and the person that plays his pan-

00:44:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:44:43
Stephon Alexander: ... if you wanna... People, if you wanna hear his stuff, um, is, um, this, um, Andy Narell, who's actually an American who went out to Trinidad, his father took him there, and a- he fell in love with the pan and moved to Trinidad, became a, a Trinidadian citizen, and he's, like, one of the top pan jazz players.

00:45:01
Eric Weinstein: Wow. That's so cool.

00:45:01
Stephon Alexander: And he plays Ellie's, um, steel drums.

00:45:04
Eric Weinstein: That's a beautiful story. How do we find out more about it? I just...

00:45:08
Stephon Alexander: Um, you know-

00:45:09
Eric Weinstein: The, the, the-

00:45:10
Stephon Alexander: ... give some love to Andy Narell, I guess

00:45:11
Eric Weinstein: ... does he tour?

00:45:12
Stephon Alexander: Um, yeah, yeah, he tours. Yeah.

00:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay. You know, I found out about this guy, I'm gonna screw up his name, Edmar, E- Edmar Castaneda, I think fr- came from, like, Peru or Venezuela, and he has this kind of hyper-aggressive harp playing. And normally when we say harp, we mean harmonica.

00:45:30
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

00:45:30
Eric Weinstein: No, this guy is playing, like, an actual harp-

00:45:32
Stephon Alexander: Like a real harp

00:45:33
Eric Weinstein: ... and beating the crap out of it and getting jazz that you've never heard before in your life. I mean, just so inspiring, and it's so idiosyncratic. I would love to figure out, like, what, what is jazz mutating into in that region?

00:45:46
Stephon Alexander: You should get him to jam with your, your friend EL.

00:45:49
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Eric Lewis?

00:45:50
Stephon Alexander: That's what I'm saying. [laughs]

00:45:51
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I, I, I dare not even speak the name.

00:45:54
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. [laughs]

00:45:55
Eric Weinstein: You... We have not released Eric Lewis's podcast yet.

00:45:58
Stephon Alexander: Oh, okay. I'm looking forward to that one.

00:46:00
Eric Weinstein: Um, but you, you've y- you've hung with him.

00:46:02
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, he's a, he's a genius.

00:46:04
Eric Weinstein: He's a gen-

00:46:04
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:46:04
Eric Weinstein: ... I mean, straight up, right?

00:46:05
Stephon Alexander: No, straight up. Yeah, yeah.

00:46:06
Eric Weinstein: You know the other person-

00:46:07
Stephon Alexander: He's also a great guy

00:46:08
Eric Weinstein: ... he's, he is a great guy.

00:46:10
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

00:46:10
Eric Weinstein: But-

00:46:10
Stephon Alexander: They usually sometimes don't go hand in hand, but he is-

00:46:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, if, if you cross him e- ever so slightly-

00:46:15
Stephon Alexander: No, really. [laughs]

00:46:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, because, you know, he didn't get the recognit- I mean, he's gotten a ton of recognition. I still don't think he's gotten as much recognition as he deserves.

00:46:22
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, he deserves far more.

00:46:22
Eric Weinstein: Far more.

00:46:23
Stephon Alexander: Far more. Yeah.

00:46:23
Eric Weinstein: Right. Right, right, right. The person that w- uh, was evoked when you were talking about Ornette to me, have, have you ever hung out with Stanley Jordan?

00:46:32
Stephon Alexander: Oh, yeah, I hung out with Stanley, um, in, um, in Stockholm. We had a, we had a, um, cosmological constant, um, workshop in, at Nordita in Stockholm two years ago, and he came out actually to that to hang out with the physicists.

00:46:48
Eric Weinstein: Now-

00:46:49
Stephon Alexander: You know, you mean the jazz... He's als- yeah, he's on a different-

00:46:51
Eric Weinstein: He's, he, I mean-

00:46:52
Stephon Alexander: Like, he's on a different wavelength than you

00:46:53
Eric Weinstein: ... he's not from this planet

00:46:54
Stephon Alexander: ... he's not, he's not from this planet, yeah.

00:46:55
Eric Weinstein: Right. He was mining-

00:46:57
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah

00:46:58
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, I think he was a student of Milton Babbitt-

00:47:00
Stephon Alexander: Yes. At, at Princeton, yeah

00:47:01
Eric Weinstein: ... who was very focused on group theory and symmetries in jazz, and, you know, you can have a-

00:47:07
Stephon Alexander: He, he does a lot of symmetry breaking, Stanley. [laughs]

00:47:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, actually, but, you know, Stanley tuned his guitar, so he, he, he's sort of this very weird mutation on Eddie Van Halen, as he's really into tapping, but sometimes he'll tap on two separate guitars, and he tunes the guitar... Normally, a guitar is tuned mostly in fourths, but one, one of the pairs of strings is tuned in thirds, and he said, "No, I'm gonna break that. I want the whole thing tuned completely regularly," because he wanted to do it symmetrically.

00:47:36
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

00:47:37
Eric Weinstein: He was exploring how to mine the world of chemical elements and molecules for vibrational patterns and trying to play the vibrations that are natural to important compounds.

00:47:51
Stephon Alexander: Okay. He didn't tell me that, but that's, um, that would make sense.

00:47:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, but he's, like, the most... Okay, so you, you, you're just talking to one of these super geniuses-

00:47:59
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah

00:47:59
Eric Weinstein: ... and he's the most shy, retiring-

00:48:01
Stephon Alexander: He's extremely bright

00:48:02
Eric Weinstein: ... and kind and-

00:48:03
Stephon Alexander: Um, and ridiculously modest. And in fact, I remember, I look back and I'm like, "What a fool you made of yourself." I remember, like, 'cause we... He spent two weeks, um, with, with the workshop at Stockholm.

00:48:15
Eric Weinstein: What?

00:48:15
Stephon Alexander: So he and I hung out a lot.

00:48:16
Eric Weinstein: Oh, wow.

00:48:17
Stephon Alexander: Like, we were, you know, kind of, um... Yeah, we would go to, you know, go get coffee together, go to, you know, get dinner together and, um, and talk a lot. And I got myself talking theory with this guy, music theory.

00:48:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:48:29
Stephon Alexander: And looking back at it, I'm like, "What was I thinking?" Because he was so modest.

00:48:35
Eric Weinstein: He's so kind.

00:48:35
Stephon Alexander: He, yeah, he-

00:48:35
Eric Weinstein: You don't realize that he-

00:48:36
Stephon Alexander: He knows so much and, you know-

00:48:37
Eric Weinstein: You're in the shallow end and he's-

00:48:39
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:48:39
Eric Weinstein: ... way off-

00:48:40
Stephon Alexander: Exactly

00:48:40
Eric Weinstein: ... swimming with the-

00:48:41
Stephon Alexander: Right

00:48:42
Eric Weinstein: ... the sharks in the deep.

00:48:43
Stephon Alexander: Right.

00:48:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um-

00:48:45
Stephon Alexander: And he's... But he, you know... But he, he's continued speaking with me about this stuff.

00:48:49
Eric Weinstein: I, I just... I was so It's funny what we, what we revere, right?

00:48:55
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

00:48:55
Eric Weinstein: Like somehow, you know, there are people... If I met Keith Jarrett, I'd probably freak out. You know? It's like, or y- y- you can't even im- imagine... I... Remember what Fats Waller said when Mark Tatum walked in?

00:49:06
Stephon Alexander: No.

00:49:07
Eric Weinstein: He's, "L- ladies and gentlemen, God is in the house."

00:49:11
Stephon Alexander: [laughs]

00:49:11
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] You know, um, there are people whose abilities-

00:49:17
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:49:17
Eric Weinstein: ... are just so far beyond ours that it, you can't even imagine what it is that they're doing in a conversation with you.

00:49:24
Stephon Alexander: Yes. I've been in that situation many a times and didn't even realize it-

00:49:30
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

00:49:30
Stephon Alexander: ... until, yeah, hindsight, yeah.

00:49:32
Eric Weinstein: So-

00:49:33
Stephon Alexander: But now I do.

00:49:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's, let's, uh, draw your mic ever so slightly closer and-

00:49:38
Stephon Alexander: Sure

00:49:39
Eric Weinstein: ... let's, uh-

00:49:40
Stephon Alexander: I'm not sure

00:49:40
Eric Weinstein: ... let's talk about... So i- it's one thing that you're this incredibly, um, gifted musician, uh, with the sax, but then you have a, this little side job.

00:49:52
Stephon Alexander: I remain flattered. I remain flattered. I don't know.

00:49:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's, I'm putting you in a bad spot, but we, we do it to each other, my friend.

00:49:57
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, that's fine.

00:49:57
Eric Weinstein: We do it to each other. The, um-

00:49:59
Stephon Alexander: You can slouch yourself.

00:50:01
Eric Weinstein: Uh, no. The, the other job that you hold down is that you're a professor of physics and astronomy, cosmology. What, w- you, you're sp- you're spread between particle theory-

00:50:13
Stephon Alexander: I do it all. I mean, yeah, I am-

00:50:15
Eric Weinstein: Physics.

00:50:16
Stephon Alexander: I'm a Creole.

00:50:17
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:50:17
Stephon Alexander: Creole soul.

00:50:18
Eric Weinstein: Sp- speakin' the pidgin.

00:50:20
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

00:50:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah. Um, so you're-

00:50:21
Stephon Alexander: I'm a, no, I, I, I, what I meant to say, I'm a physics, I'm a Creolized physicist.

00:50:26
Eric Weinstein: Creolized physicist.

00:50:27
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

00:50:27
Eric Weinstein: So you draw from particle theory traditions, from general relativistic traditions, and also from cosmological and astronomical traditions.

00:50:36
Stephon Alexander: And condensed matter as well.

00:50:37
Eric Weinstein: And condensed matter.

00:50:38
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:50:38
Eric Weinstein: Uh, and you, you've, you're pulling this off, I mean, I've, I've tracked you from Haverford to Dartmouth, Penn State, uh, maybe Perimeter. Now you're at Brown University?

00:50:48
Stephon Alexander: That's where I teach now, yeah.

00:50:49
Eric Weinstein: All right. So talk to me about how you see, uh, from all of these different vantage points, the state of theoretical physics, its culture, the community, and what it means to the outside world, if not to the inside world.

00:51:05
Stephon Alexander: I'm gonna-

00:51:05
Eric Weinstein: But no pressure.

00:51:07
Stephon Alexander: [laughs] Um. [laughs]

00:51:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, but just like where, where... The thing is the world wants to know-

00:51:13
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:51:14
Eric Weinstein: ... a, a couple of weirdly different questions. One question is, is it gonna make a better toaster for me? Like, what is it gonna do for me in a very direct sense? The other question it wants to know is, who am I? Why are we here? And do you have a direct line to God?

00:51:28
Stephon Alexander: Yes. Um, so the answer is no, no, no, um, about all those things, and I would like to get yeses for all those things.

00:51:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Even the toaster.

00:51:39
Stephon Alexander: But, um, what I would say is, um, um, we are living in, in the physics in, in p- physics and by physics I mean, um, sometimes what we call fundamental physics. Cosmology fits in because the study of the universe is about asking some of these fundamental questions. Um, and as we speak right now, um, we are both... Well, the Large Hadron Collider basically has been running, and, and, and it n- nailed down what we expected to see in the standard model. What I mean by that is we found, you know, the basic forces and, I mean, the force carriers, right? The three, um, basic-

00:52:32
Eric Weinstein: S- super fast recap.

00:52:33
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, super fast recap. We have-

00:52:35
Eric Weinstein: We, we have, we have this thing that's been hanging around for almost 50 years, which is made up of, like, matter-

00:52:40
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:52:41
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and the force that pus- pushes it around. Um-

00:52:44
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:52:45
Eric Weinstein: ... the only other thing that's really fundamental is general relativity. These are the two big dogs in the, in, in, like, philosophical physics space, and the key question is-

00:52:55
Stephon Alexander: And it's been a dog fight

00:52:56
Eric Weinstein: ... it is, it has been a dog fight-

00:52:58
Stephon Alexander: Right. Yeah

00:52:59
Eric Weinstein: ... um, for bragging rights and territory, and the Large Hadron Collider is not an atom smasher, but a proton smasher, so it's really kind of like a hydrogen atom smasher almost.

00:53:10
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

00:53:11
Eric Weinstein: Um-

00:53:12
Stephon Alexander: There's a family of particles called hadrons, which are when quarks come together to form quark atoms, and the proton and neutrons are the stable versions of those hadrons.

00:53:21
Eric Weinstein: When three quarks love each other very, very much.

00:53:23
Stephon Alexander: That's right. [laughs]

00:53:24
Eric Weinstein: Right. Um-

00:53:26
Stephon Alexander: As long as you allow me, allow me to talk about the pion later on.

00:53:28
Eric Weinstein: Oh, we're gonna go mesa?

00:53:30
Stephon Alexander: Pion's gonna-

00:53:30
Eric Weinstein: All right

00:53:31
Stephon Alexander: ... be really cool.

00:53:31
Eric Weinstein: All right. So those, um, particles, when we smash them together, we hope that we're gonna see a cascade of weird stuff in the debris that's gonna teach us something new that we didn't know before, because that was the game that kept working. It was, it was the gift that kept on giving for many different ramp ups in energy. We, we, we had these, like, atom smashers. We kept turning up the juice. We'd get more and more stuff, and then-

00:53:59
Stephon Alexander: Pavlov dog, um, needs to learn a new trick.

00:54:03
Eric Weinstein: Uh-oh.

00:54:03
Stephon Alexander: Um, so that's right. We, the, the amazing thing about particle physic- physics, um, as you know, we discovered a zoo of particles way back, you know, in the '30s and forw- all these particles were being discovered, and they wouldn't, it seemed that there was no rhyme or reason, right? And these organizing principles, thanks, thanks to the mathematicians, um, you all, um, had a nice piece of mathematics called group theory, which allowed us to group together, using symmetry principles, these particles, and they form these very nice patterns. Murray Gell-Mann, of course, um, used some of this beautiful math to realize that, um, these symmetries governed, um, the patterns of these particles that were thought to have no rhyme or reasons. Well, they were grouped together under these symmetry, like rotating around a sphere or something like that. And, um- [clears throat] Um, these symmetries, the, the pattern we started to see was the higher and higher energies we were scattering and, you know, um, colliding these particles at, which also corresponds to probing shorter and shorter distance scales, um, would reveal... We saw more and more symmetries being revealed. And so this was good. The payback, just keep turning on the energy, um, you know, ramp- ramping it up, um, and you would find more and more symmetry. But there's a flip side to that too.

00:55:30
Eric Weinstein: So energy in, treasure out.

00:55:32
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

00:55:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:55:34
Stephon Alexander: Um, but the flip side to that is, as you know, I'm a theorist.

00:55:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:55:37
Stephon Alexander: And theorists, um, we were also working on our theories and making predictions, and realized actually, and there were good reasons, um, in our theories to actually want these symmetries. These symmetries, um, uh, to give you an example, [clears throat] um, Fermi, Enrico Fermi, had, um, had guessed a model that would explain, um, um, some aspects of the nuclear interaction. It was called a four-Fermi theory. Um, of course, Fermi was also the, um, the inventor, was named, um, the inventor of, um, well, there's a particle like the electron called a fermion.

00:56:18
Eric Weinstein: A class of pet particle.

00:56:19
Stephon Alexander: Right. And, uh, um, at some point I'm gonna ask you to, um, you know, give me a mathematical description of the fermion.

00:56:26
Eric Weinstein: Uh-oh.

00:56:26
Stephon Alexander: Uh, teach me some-

00:56:27
Eric Weinstein: We're gonna have to speak a little bit more Red Boy

00:56:27
Stephon Alexander: ... teach me some stuff.

00:56:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

00:56:29
Stephon Alexander: Right.

00:56:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:56:30
Stephon Alexander: Um, I mean, a big part of what, I, I think what's great about, what's been great about our friendship is that whenever I get stuck on some, um, some new math terrain, I come to Ellie's and have coffee with you, and you'll, you know, give me a nice little differential geometry spin on it. No pun intended.

00:56:45
Eric Weinstein: Ha ha. Yeah.

00:56:46
Stephon Alexander: Um, so yeah, the, um, the four-Fermi theory was this guess, and it worked. It worked well with experiments.

00:56:51
Eric Weinstein: So we're talking about beta decay, right?

00:56:52
Stephon Alexander: Beta dec- exactly. Beta decay. Very important. There would be life- there would be no life without beta decay.

00:56:58
Eric Weinstein: All right, so beta decay-

00:56:59
Stephon Alexander: The sun-

00:56:59
Eric Weinstein: ... is this weird thing where if I-

00:57:00
Stephon Alexander: Use it

00:57:00
Eric Weinstein: ... if I had a neutron-

00:57:01
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

00:57:02
Eric Weinstein: ... and I left the neutron alone with a half-life of about 17 minutes, it's gonna shoot out a beta particle, which we found out later is the electron.

00:57:10
Stephon Alexander: Very high-energy electron, yeah.

00:57:11
Eric Weinstein: Very high ener- energy electron. And it is going... It's like it's, it's trans. It's gonna morph into a proton, which is a very strange thing-

00:57:20
Stephon Alexander: Right

00:57:20
Eric Weinstein: ... that a neutron's gonna decay into a proton-

00:57:23
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:57:23
Eric Weinstein: ... by emitting an electron. But Fermi said-

00:57:29
Stephon Alexander: Fermi basically, um, found a theory, actually wrote down a theory, and actually, um, you know, it was, uh, he, you know, Fermi's a genius, right? He won a Nobel Prize. Um, and I believe it's, I believe it was... Let me not say what I believe it was for this, but basically this four-Fermi theory made the correct predictions not only for beta decay, but for a wide class of such nuclear processes. Um, the problem is, and here's where it's, where it gets interesting for the theorists.

00:57:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

00:57:56
Stephon Alexander: Um, the theorists were using the rules of quantum physics to actually predict, right, the, this time that you mentioned. That's an, uh, calculation that you can do using the laws of quantum mechanics, and, um, packaging a po- a type of quantum mechanics called quantum field theory, right? Where the quant- what's quantum there are fields, like the electromagnetic field. Um-

00:58:19
Eric Weinstein: So things that are distributed-

00:58:20
Stephon Alexander: Things that dis-

00:58:20
Eric Weinstein: ... in space.

00:58:21
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

00:58:21
Eric Weinstein: ... and space and time.

00:58:22
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. You could think of it as a nice little blanket, right? And the height of the blanket is the height of the field, and the field could warp and bend like this blanket.

00:58:29
Eric Weinstein: So, like, the height of waves in the ocean would be, like, a field theory of waves.

00:58:34
Stephon Alexander: That's even better analogy.

00:58:35
Eric Weinstein: All right.

00:58:36
Stephon Alexander: That's a better analogy.

00:58:36
Eric Weinstein: All right.

00:58:36
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

00:58:37
Eric Weinstein: Keep going.

00:58:37
Stephon Alexander: Okay. Um, [clears throat] and, um, so the theorists would do these calculations and get the right numbers. However, there would be infinities, meaning there would be parts of this calculation that would give me the number infinity. And infinity for what? For physical quantities, so things out of... Like energy or the force would end up being an infinity or incalculable. Um, and there's a word for this. The, the theory wasn't renormalizable.

00:59:10
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:59:10
Stephon Alexander: It was non-renormalizable. It's just a fancy word for saying that we don't know what to do with the infinities.

00:59:15
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, if I just understand this correctly, I've got-

00:59:17
Stephon Alexander: Mm

00:59:17
Eric Weinstein: ... I've got a neutron that's kind of slowly meandering through my lab, and so I have a little bit of a track that I'm using to, to say that I think I know where it is, and then suddenly it decays into three particles. It decays into a proton, which is mostly where the mass is.

00:59:33
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

00:59:33
Eric Weinstein: It shoots off this electron at high energy.

00:59:36
Stephon Alexander: Uh-huh.

00:59:36
Eric Weinstein: And then there was this missing-

00:59:38
Stephon Alexander: Missed a Pauli.

00:59:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So missed a Pauli-

00:59:41
Stephon Alexander: The baby neutron, that's right.

00:59:42
Eric Weinstein: Right. So there was this mystery that there wasn't quite enough energy afterwards before the decay as there was before, and he said, "Well, what if there was a pathological particle that couldn't be seen by the strong force, it didn't have any electromagnetic, uh, charge on it, it would be very difficult to detect?" And then sure enough, that placeholder turned out to be real.

01:00:06
Stephon Alexander: The neutrino.

01:00:06
Eric Weinstein: The neutrino.

01:00:07
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:00:07
Eric Weinstein: All right. So th- this would be the antielectron neutrino?

01:00:11
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:00:12
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So then the idea is that it's the a- it's actually the antiparticle of what we would typically call the neutrino. So now I've got all these f- th- four lines, one coming in, which is the neutron, and three going out, proton, electron, and antielectron neutrino. Correct me if I'm wrong.

01:00:30
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. And I, I think a nice way to look at this, actually, is p- the game of pool, right?

01:00:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:00:34
Stephon Alexander: I mean, I have my, you know, if I have three balls sitting there, I think of those three balls as some constituents ma- that, that's part of what this qu- you know, what, what's ins- you know, what, what this proton is gonna become. Sorry, what the neutron's gonna become. And, well, actually, that's not, that's actually not a good analogy.

01:00:54
Eric Weinstein: The, the cue ball-

01:00:54
Stephon Alexander: That's not-

01:00:54
Eric Weinstein: ... would have to disintegrate

01:00:55
Stephon Alexander: ... right. It would have to, the cue would have to disintegrate, basically. That's-

01:00:58
Eric Weinstein: Into those other things.

01:00:59
Stephon Alexander: Into those other things, right.

01:00:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So let's not do-

01:01:00
Stephon Alexander: Standing still, right. Yeah, so-

01:01:01
Eric Weinstein: But that's what I'm just doing is lines

01:01:02
Stephon Alexander: ... I, I was thinking about scattering process. That's a different analogy.

01:01:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah. So but the point was is that there was something-

01:01:08
Stephon Alexander: If you reverse it in time, it'll be something like that

01:01:10
Eric Weinstein: ... right, but the- All right, the math guy asks-

01:01:13
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:01:14
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, is the problem that those four lines are connecting at exactly one point?

01:01:20
Stephon Alexander: Yes, that's the problem. Exactly. When you actually, um, look at the equations that describe this process of re- real objects, um, you know, disinte- this case a neutrino, right? It's sitting at rest and it emits, right-

01:01:39
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:01:39
Stephon Alexander: ... off, uh, from itself, um, these other particles, and then transmutes into the proton as a result. Um, when we look at the equations that correctly make this prediction, um, that equation has badness in it. It has infinities in it. And the fix now, right, the fix is that if you can figure out a new so- that if... There's a fix to this. The fix is what now becomes a part of what we call a standard model, is that there's a, there is a interaction that was missing, that, that this Four-Fermi theory was, was holding its place, and this interaction was there's a force carrier that's doing the job of this emission, and that's called a W boson. The W boson is, like, very similar to the photon, to, you know, the photon, the particle of light. The particle of light is a particle, as Feynman taught us, responsible for the electromagnetic force. I have two charged particles, what Feynman taught us is that those two char- charged particles, the reason why they can feel a force between them is that like a boomerang, it exchanges, it emits a photon, this particle, which is a particle of light, um, or the particle associated with an electric field, and it exch- exchanges it and imparts momentum and makes this other one feel the force. Um, so the W boson is like a photon for this force that's responsible for disintegrating this nu- this neutron into a proton.

01:03:23
Eric Weinstein: So there, there-

01:03:23
Stephon Alexander: And that, that fixed this issue of the infinity.

01:03:27
Eric Weinstein: All right, so it, it, so am I right that we would call this FPI, Four-Point Interaction theory-

01:03:33
Stephon Alexander: Yes

01:03:34
Eric Weinstein: ... this Fermi? And so f- the, the fix to the Four-Point Interaction theory is to sneak another particle, which I bet it would be like a W minus particle.

01:03:45
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:03:45
Eric Weinstein: If the, if the neutron's gonna decay, so there's a W minus, a W plus, and a Z nought to, to keep our UK friends amused, and these three different, like, hidden boomerangs, as you say, that these other particles are exchanging, um, are what communicates the weak force.

01:04:06
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:04:07
Eric Weinstein: And so if you, if you really take a magnifying glass hypothetically to that four, to, to that point where the four lines meet, they don't actually meet.

01:04:15
Stephon Alexander: They don't actually meet. There's something in between that's softening, in a sense, this infinity.

01:04:20
Eric Weinstein: Love it.

01:04:21
Stephon Alexander: And we call this usually a new state.

01:04:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:04:23
Stephon Alexander: A new, a new state because, um, yeah, a new state meaning, like, quantum mechanically speaking, you know, energy levels, you can think of a different state I occupy, or climbing up a stairs. If I go up one stairs, I'm a, a different state, energy state. If I go down the stairs, I decrease my energy. I'm a different energy state.

01:04:40
Eric Weinstein: So this came at a s- yeah.

01:04:41
Stephon Alexander: And this fix, um, part of the problem with this infinity, um, and so the, the pattern here is that we would see this when we go to higher energy. We see the state. We would see this W boson, WZ, um, W plus W minus and Z boson.

01:04:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, we didn't see them for a long time.

01:04:58
Stephon Alexander: We didn't see them for a long time.

01:04:59
Eric Weinstein: We didn't see them till, I think, 1984.

01:05:01
Stephon Alexander: The theorists, that's right. The theorists, that's right, Steven Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam, right?

01:05:06
Eric Weinstein: Abdus Salam.

01:05:07
Stephon Alexander: Abdus Salam wrote down-

01:05:08
Eric Weinstein: And Sheldon Glashow

01:05:08
Stephon Alexander: ... a theory that would fix, that would fix this infinity that the F- Four-Fermi theory had, and in so doing, it made these predictions, you see? And then later on, the experiments reveal, um, the existence, this, of, of these, of these bosons.

01:05:23
Eric Weinstein: So just, just to-

01:05:24
Stephon Alexander: And this is an important part of this p- of Pavlov dog, you know?

01:05:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:05:28
Stephon Alexander: Pavlov's, um, physics dogs.

01:05:31
Eric Weinstein: Needs to learn a new trick.

01:05:32
Stephon Alexander: Right. He, 'cause it, it, th- this was a payoff. You keep going to this high, uh, high energy, new states reveal themselves. You keep going to higher energy, build, you know-

01:05:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, the craziest thing about this-

01:05:41
Stephon Alexander: ... bigger detectors, and we'll find more states that in turn makes our theories, um, um, more tractable and better in control, and more unified.

01:05:55
Eric Weinstein: So this is-

01:05:56
Stephon Alexander: Right

01:05:56
Eric Weinstein: ... so the great unification-

01:05:57
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:05:57
Eric Weinstein: ... before this-

01:05:58
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:05:58
Eric Weinstein: ... correct me if I'm wrong, was James Clerk Maxwell taking all kinds of crazy different phenomena-

01:06:06
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:06:06
Eric Weinstein: ... magnetism, electricity, visible light, non-visible light, X-rays, whatever this, and r- writing down some equations that generated this incredibly diverse myriad of phenomena.

01:06:23
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:06:24
Eric Weinstein: This is a smaller version of that because i- if, if I understand it, I'm not a physicist, as you know, we had to come up with two new forces that we didn't actually see, and we called one of them weak hypercharge and one of them weak isospin, and we got rid of the photon. We said that the photon and electromagnetism was not fundamental, and we said that these two things that nobody's ever seen are going to generate the thing that everybody knows, which is electromagnetism.

01:06:57
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:06:58
Eric Weinstein: And they're also gonna generate in their, in this kind of broken-down state, um, what we see as the weak force, so that in essence, this perfect, this more perfect version of this unification is hidden from us.

01:07:15
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:07:15
Eric Weinstein: And what we're seeing is the pieces after that thing somehow breaks down.

01:07:20
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:07:22
Eric Weinstein: All right. We don't see that these W and Z particles until Carlo Rubbia and, what is it, Se- Simon van der Meer, the engineer who does, like, the stochastic cooling, comes up with the experiments that in, I think, bear fruit in, like, 1984 or thereabouts.

01:07:41
Stephon Alexander: Um, I w- I, I was, um, I don't remember that, but-

01:07:47
Eric Weinstein: When did you become conscious in theoretical physics? Like, I would say the year that I became conscious in theoretical physics would be something like '82, '83.

01:07:56
Stephon Alexander: Um, yeah, I became conscious in theoretical physics the year 1995.

01:08:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:08:02
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

01:08:02
Eric Weinstein: I'm a little older than you.

01:08:05
Stephon Alexander: Um, you don't look it. Um-

01:08:07
Eric Weinstein: Just fishing for that. You know that.

01:08:10
Stephon Alexander: [laughs] You haven't aged a bit.

01:08:11
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:08:12
Stephon Alexander: Um, right, so this, so this pattern continues, and then, and so we, we, we, um, the theorists get, you know, we have principles that we, w- the, the symmetry principle's a fundamental principle that we-

01:08:27
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:08:27
Stephon Alexander: ... it, it always pay, it, it has always paid off for us. So then we have this guiding principle that guides us to make our theories, um, more predictive. We discover new things, new physics. These, um, symmetry principles also allow us to discover the new nuclear forces, um, subatomic forces. Um, but they also allow us to... What, what drives us are the problems, though. The problems with our theoretical models, like these infinities-

01:09:01
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:09:01
Stephon Alexander: ... um, we're trying to fix, in trying to fix those problems, um, the fix ends up usually telling us that some new particle should be out there, and it's that new particle that's basically controlling the would-be, you know, um, problems.

01:09:18
Eric Weinstein: So our, our great-grandfathers metaphorically-

01:09:20
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

01:09:20
Eric Weinstein: ... were on this gravy train-

01:09:22
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:09:22
Eric Weinstein: ... where, just to say it right, uh, it felt like if you saw something that you couldn't understand, you would hypothesize that th- things were more unified at a higher energy, and the unification mean- meant symmetry, and the symmetry meant new particles.

01:09:38
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:09:38
Eric Weinstein: New forces.

01:09:39
Stephon Alexander: New particles and new forces.

01:09:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so the idea is that there's some weird dictionary which says if there's a symmetry, then very often there's a force to go with it, and I'm gonna t- just, I w- uh, just to be argumentative-

01:09:51
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:09:51
Eric Weinstein: ... I think it, it's not always the case that symmetry really works out. So for example, when, when Gell-Mann was figuring out how do you generate the, the neutron and the proton from smaller constituencies, which we, we now call quarks, and a guy named George Zweig called aces, uh, it was really the same theory, th- they didn't generate the eightfold way, I think, or maybe I get my history wrong, using what we now call the right threefold symmetry or e- eightfold symmetry involving SU3 color.

01:10:24
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:10:24
Eric Weinstein: They were using SU3 flavor.

01:10:27
Stephon Alexander: Flavor, yeah.

01:10:28
Eric Weinstein: And SU3 flavor isn't a real symmetry.

01:10:30
Stephon Alexander: No.

01:10:30
Eric Weinstein: It's sort of an i, it's an imaginary symmetry.

01:10:33
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:10:33
Eric Weinstein: So there's times when you see a symmetry that's faking you out, and it's like, it's a temp, it's a temptress, and you shouldn't answer her call, right? Or for example, you look at the hydrogen atom. It seems to be beautifully symmetric due to the Coulomb potential, and you could get very tempted to say, "Well, all of the higher atoms are just perfectly symmetric Coulomb potentials." But the more you add in neutrons and protons in the center, in the nucleus, the more irregular that potential would have to get. And so that symmetry, even though it's a great heuristic, is it's, it's a false-

01:11:09
Stephon Alexander: That's right. That's an example

01:11:10
Eric Weinstein: ... it's a false prophet.

01:11:11
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:11:11
Eric Weinstein: So we have to, we have to be very careful because sometimes symmetry is our salvation, and other times it's our ruin.

01:11:18
Stephon Alexander: Very good, and that's exactly, now you're asking me where are we at, what's going on, um, is, um, we had other symmetry principles that, um, we thought would really help us solve some other haunting problems.

01:11:42
Eric Weinstein: Really?

01:11:43
Stephon Alexander: Um, yeah. So I'll name three of these problems. Um, one problem is, um, one problem is, um, the dark matter problem, okay?

01:11:57
Eric Weinstein: Dark matter.

01:11:58
Stephon Alexander: The dark matter problem.

01:11:58
Eric Weinstein: How long have we known that there's a dark matter problem?

01:12:01
Stephon Alexander: Well, Fritz Zwicky, um, discovered, um, dark matter and, um, and also, um, Vera Rubin, um, by studying the rotation of galaxies.

01:12:13
Eric Weinstein: We just lost her not too long ago.

01:12:15
Stephon Alexander: Not too long ago. I was very fortunate to have, um, shared a stage with her, um, many years ago-

01:12:21
Eric Weinstein: I did know her

01:12:21
Stephon Alexander: ... uh, when I was a, yeah, I was a post-doc, and-

01:12:24
Eric Weinstein: Somebody who never got her due during her lifetime.

01:12:26
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Um, she should have gotten a Nobel.

01:12:29
Eric Weinstein: Amen.

01:12:30
Stephon Alexander: Um, um, yeah, my, my good friend Brian Kean- Kean, um, wrote a book, and I think in, I believe in this book, he said he made the case, um, Losing the Nobel Prize, um, that's the name of the book. He made the case that Vera Rubin, that we should have, like, a, I guess a posthumous Nobel Prize. Um, I, I don't wanna misrepresent, but I believe that he did say that, so this might be an opportunity.

01:12:55
Eric Weinstein: I think we should have a correct, we, we should have-

01:12:57
Stephon Alexander: Okay

01:12:57
Eric Weinstein: ... a corrective prize, like-

01:12:59
Stephon Alexander: Oh, a corrective.

01:13:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I have a vendetta-

01:13:01
Stephon Alexander: Like what, like, like, yeah

01:13:02
Eric Weinstein: ... against the Nobel Prize.

01:13:02
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, tell, sure.

01:13:03
Eric Weinstein: So, all right. So [laughs] you and I-

01:13:06
Stephon Alexander: I don't want a Nobel Prize, by the way-

01:13:07
Eric Weinstein: What?

01:13:07
Stephon Alexander: ... just to let you know.

01:13:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, all right.

01:13:08
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

01:13:09
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Um, so the thing about the Nobel Prize is I-

01:13:13
Stephon Alexander: I want an Ig Nobel Prize.

01:13:14
Eric Weinstein: You, well, we, we, we know that those are given out at MIT.

01:13:17
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

01:13:18
Eric Weinstein: Um, the Nobel Prize, and my theory of it is, is that it's used to correct the narrative so that certain things don't fully happen. So for example- Here are my real pet peeves. You gave it to Schrödinger and Dirac, and you forced them to share it to dilute the fact that both of them were giants and should have had it outright on their own.

01:13:43
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:13:43
Eric Weinstein: You give it to Einstein, but you give it to him for the wrong thing, for the photoelectric effect-

01:13:48
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:13:48
Eric Weinstein: ... because you don't want him having too much power in the community.

01:13:51
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:13:52
Eric Weinstein: You d- you dilute the hell out of Feynman, Tomonaga, and Schwinger with renormalization theory, and you put Dyson way off to the side so that he doesn't accumulate too much power, because he's a dangerous guy. Uh, Steven Weinberg, arguably the greatest of living theorists if it's not Yang, uh, those that have been confirmed by experiment, um, is made to share with, uh, Glashow and Salam. All three of those could have gotten it individually and on their own. And my theory of this is that it's really being used by the community in general to dilute and to shift emphasis, um, to particular people. So for example, Murray Gell-Mann, who's one of the great physicists of the 20th century, nevertheless stepped on many toes.

01:14:46
Stephon Alexander: Mm.

01:14:46
Eric Weinstein: He stepped on Stueckelberg's toes.

01:14:48
Stephon Alexander: I didn't know this.

01:14:48
Eric Weinstein: He stepped on Sudarshan's toes, and he stepped on Zweig's toes, because all of those people had discoveries that were right in his neighborhood. And if you, very careful, Feynman tends to give a certain amount of credit and say, why, why did Dirac not get more credit for the path integral formalism? Why did Stueckelberg not get, uh, more credit for his interpretation of sum over histories? Whereas if you look at Gell-Mann on, um, the web of stories, Gell-Mann is no- now gone. Now, nobody's gonna debate that Murray Gell-Mann was an amazing physicist, but he's very aggressive about who should get credit, and it's usually Murray Gell-Mann.

01:15:28
Stephon Alexander: [laughs] Was he the guy that when, um, when he discovered the quarks, he went to Feynman and said, "I'm gonna call them quarks," and Feynman said, "What, quacks?"

01:15:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, but then-

01:15:39
Stephon Alexander: What's the, what's the-

01:15:39
Eric Weinstein: ... Feynman said-

01:15:40
Stephon Alexander: Uh-huh

01:15:40
Eric Weinstein: ... Feynman said, um, "Uh, I've got a new idea. I'm gonna call them partons, uh, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna hypothesize something which clearly seems like quarks." And so Gell-Mann got back at him and said, "I'm gonna call them put-ons, because you're putting me on that y- that these are-

01:16:00
Stephon Alexander: [laughs]

01:16:00
Eric Weinstein: ... an independent discovery."

01:16:01
Stephon Alexander: Put-on.

01:16:01
Eric Weinstein: So these guys were really-

01:16:02
Stephon Alexander: Listen

01:16:02
Eric Weinstein: ... they were petty, and these are famous stories, and I think they're part of the culture. They speak to why I both revere and detest this community.

01:16:12
Stephon Alexander: Um, well, I'm glad we're friends.

01:16:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. [laughs] I can say things that you cannot say.

01:16:17
Stephon Alexander: That's, that's right. Exactly. [laughs]

01:16:19
Eric Weinstein: Um, but getting back to it-

01:16:21
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:16:21
Eric Weinstein: ... now we've got this problem that you were, you're, you're talking about-

01:16:24
Stephon Alexander: Yes, yes

01:16:24
Eric Weinstein: ... which is we've got some stuff in our world which we don't know how to account for.

01:16:29
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:16:29
Eric Weinstein: And the key question is-

01:16:31
Stephon Alexander: Kind of, yes

01:16:31
Eric Weinstein: ... are symmetry is going to save us?

01:16:33
Stephon Alexander: Yes, and-

01:16:33
Eric Weinstein: The floor is yours.

01:16:34
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, so let me say a, a, two things about dark matter that I think is really, um, important and interesting. So, right, um, the way we should think about what is dark matter is, is I take a, um, um... One idea is take a s- you know, kids like to do this a lot, you know, take a stone or an ob- a stone tied on a string and, you know, spin it around.

01:16:59
Eric Weinstein: Like David.

01:16:59
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, like David, yeah. Like, about to get Goliath. And of course, the stone, the, the stone has a, a mass, right?

01:17:07
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:17:07
Stephon Alexander: And, you know, what you can do is you can pull the string in, and what you'll see is that the stone moves faster and faster, right, as you pull the string in, as the string gets closer to you. So you spin around, and as the stone gets closer and closer to you, it moves faster and faster, right, as you go around.

01:17:27
Eric Weinstein: Like the ice skater when she's bringing her-

01:17:28
Stephon Alexander: Like the ice skater, right. That's right

01:17:29
Eric Weinstein: ... her hands in and she's twirling faster-

01:17:32
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:17:32
Eric Weinstein: ... because of the conservation of angular momentum.

01:17:33
Stephon Alexander: That's right. So galaxies are collections of stones, um, in a spiral type of way, like a Frisbee, like a disc, but the stones now are stars, like our sun. Our sun is a very typical star.

01:17:50
Eric Weinstein: What's playing the role of the string?

01:17:51
Stephon Alexander: Huh? Oh, gravity.

01:17:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay, gravity's playing the role of the string.

01:17:55
Stephon Alexander: Right.

01:17:55
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:17:56
Stephon Alexander: So gravity, so b- now these things are spinning around under the gravitational force due to the total mass-

01:18:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:18:03
Stephon Alexander: ... of all of the things. So it's like a... Right. So you have gravity operating to basically keep this, this collection of very massive stars spinning around. Um-

01:18:14
Eric Weinstein: So I can see the mass-

01:18:16
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

01:18:16
Eric Weinstein: ... and I c- and I know the laws of gravity-

01:18:18
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:18:18
Eric Weinstein: ... so I should be able to calculate how fast these things are going.

01:18:20
Stephon Alexander: That's right. That's right. Um, and Johannes Kepler taught us how to do this.

01:18:24
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:18:24
Stephon Alexander: One of Kepler's laws. If you know, right, if you know the mass of the total system, which is the make of all the stars-

01:18:32
Eric Weinstein: So it's the mass-

01:18:33
Stephon Alexander: ... and you know, and you know the distance-

01:18:33
Eric Weinstein: ... the stuff going around and the stuff in the middle

01:18:35
Stephon Alexander: Right.

01:18:36
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:18:36
Stephon Alexander: You can know how fast it's moving. And it turns out when Vera Rubin measured the velocity of these stars, um, about on the order of 85 to 90% of the mass was missing. Um, so if you then you try to account and go back and maybe there's other stuff there, right? There's, you know, there's no way you could account for this mass.

01:18:58
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, we can see the mass because the mass is-

01:19:01
Stephon Alexander: The-

01:19:01
Eric Weinstein: We think we can see the mass because it's sh- it's, it's sh- showering us with photons-

01:19:05
Stephon Alexander: That's right

01:19:06
Eric Weinstein: ... that we're c- we're catching here on Earth.

01:19:07
Stephon Alexander: Right. So people like to call this thing dark matter. What it really is, because dark things actually absorb light, right? That's why it's, you know, your dark jacket is really-

01:19:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:19:18
Stephon Alexander: ... right? Um, your silver shirt is emitting light and-

01:19:23
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:19:24
Stephon Alexander: ... right? Um, but this is absorbing light, and that's why the light doesn't get to me and I see it as being dark. So dark matter actually is a misnomer. It's really invisible matter. Because this type of matter doesn't interact with light at all. That's why we can't see it. [clears throat] Um-

01:19:41
Eric Weinstein: Good point

01:19:42
Stephon Alexander: ... so we see this now in every galaxy that we've observed. That's the first thing. So it's not like only our galaxy has this, is missing mass. Um, every galaxy that we've seen has this. It's universal.

01:19:56
Eric Weinstein: So the stars are spinning around too fast.

01:19:58
Stephon Alexander: Right. We also see it from measurements of the early universe, right? So my, my colleague, David Spergel, who was one of the, um, it- principal investigators of the WMAP satellite, the Wilkinson-

01:20:11
Eric Weinstein: Princeton?

01:20:11
Stephon Alexander: ... at Princeton.

01:20:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:20:12
Stephon Alexander: He's now at the, um, the, um, of, um, the Simons, um, Center for Computational Astrophysics. He's a director. And David was one of the people that used cosmology, pictures of the baby universe-

01:20:25
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:20:25
Stephon Alexander: ... when there, there were no galaxies around. This is the universe 14 years ago, light that's emitted from 14 billion years. [clears throat] We can look, we can... This satellite is able to see light-

01:20:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:20:37
Stephon Alexander: ... that took 14 billion years to get to us.

01:20:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:20:39
Stephon Alexander: So we're looking at a picture of the universe 14 billion years ago, and when we look at that data where there are no galaxies, what we're seeing now is energy. The universe when it's in a very energetic, hot and dense state. Yeah.

01:20:53
Eric Weinstein: Right. So when we're looking at the universe right now-

01:20:55
Stephon Alexander: Mm

01:20:55
Eric Weinstein: ... we're actually looking at baby pictures of the universe.

01:20:57
Stephon Alexander: We can look at it, yeah.

01:20:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:20:58
Stephon Alexander: We can look at light from back then.

01:21:00
Eric Weinstein: And then, what, how is that behaving-

01:21:02
Stephon Alexander: You can measure the dark matter back then, too.

01:21:05
Eric Weinstein: The-

01:21:06
Stephon Alexander: That's what's-

01:21:06
Eric Weinstein: ... the invisible matter, as you point out, that we-

01:21:08
Stephon Alexander: Invisible

01:21:08
Eric Weinstein: ... call the dark matter.

01:21:09
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, the invisible matter.

01:21:09
Eric Weinstein: I'm gonna do that a few times just to learn-

01:21:11
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:21:11
Eric Weinstein: ... learn my lesson.

01:21:12
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah.

01:21:12
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:21:12
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. I mean, this would be a perfect... I wish that Ralph Ellison knew about [clears throat] invisible matter-

01:21:18
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:21:18
Stephon Alexander: ... so that when he wrote Invisible Man-

01:21:21
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:21:21
Stephon Alexander: ... he could've, like, that could have been an interesting thing, yeah? But maybe that's for some- somebody else to write.

01:21:27
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:21:28
Stephon Alexander: Maybe you can write it

01:21:29
Eric Weinstein: ... fr- from my experience as, as a Black man growing up in the United States-

01:21:33
Stephon Alexander: I mean, I mean, you know, I think it'll be, uh, you know, a too easy a, you know, um, you know, too easy a giveaway to call it Black matter.

01:21:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:21:41
Stephon Alexander: Right? Um-

01:21:42
Eric Weinstein: Fear of an invisible planet.

01:21:43
Stephon Alexander: Fear of an invisible.

01:21:44
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] All right. So-

01:21:46
Stephon Alexander: [laughs] Right. So the point is that this dark matter is, we knew, we know that it existed also in the past, and it played an important role in sculpting-

01:21:56
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:21:56
Stephon Alexander: ... because it has extra gravity. And so to form galli- to form stars in the early universe-

01:22:01
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:22:01
Stephon Alexander: ... from hydrogen, you need to capture all of that gas quickly enough, and the dark matter, um, aided in, um, in enhancing the capture of that. So that's what it w-

01:22:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So we've got a picture of our galaxies.

01:22:13
Stephon Alexander: So in a sense, it's dark matter.

01:22:13
Eric Weinstein: We got a picture from the early universe.

01:22:14
Stephon Alexander: Right. But we don't know what the dark matter is. That's the point.

01:22:16
Eric Weinstein: All right. So in other words, if our understanding, 'cause there's another place that could have been something could be off. If our notion of gravity were wildly off, then maybe we would see all of the dark matter. Uh, th- th- then there wouldn't be any need for dark matter because it w- it would be the force law playing the role, role of the string in your analogy-

01:22:34
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

01:22:35
Eric Weinstein: ... that would be causing things to spin faster than, than expected.

01:22:39
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, that's right. That's right.

01:22:40
Eric Weinstein: But we also see these lensing effects, right?

01:22:42
Stephon Alexander: That's right, 'cause, um, Einstein-

01:22:45
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:22:45
Stephon Alexander: ... um, taught us that gravity really is a feature, the gravitation force, of warped space-time.

01:22:53
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:22:53
Stephon Alexander: And therefore, light will bend around that, and so we can measure, thank you for saying that, measure the, the mass, um, also independently-

01:23:03
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:23:03
Stephon Alexander: ... um, of galaxies and the amount of dark matter contained in it. Um, now let me use the word dark matter again.

01:23:09
Eric Weinstein: All right. We're g- g- Let's just deep dive into the rabbit hole.

01:23:10
Stephon Alexander: By looking basically at this lensing effect.

01:23:12
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:23:12
Stephon Alexander: That's right. So I like to think of it as, um, literally as, um, a magnifying glass. If you take glass and you don't distort the glass and keep it str- And you, you know, it, it will, it will not distort an object. But if I bend the, the glass by making a lens out of it, obviously the object can look smaller or, or, or bigger, and it will distort the, the, the image that you- that's passing, the light from that image that's passing through the lens. And m- by analogy, if space really is warped and I'm looking now at light passing through that warped space-

01:23:48
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:23:48
Stephon Alexander: ... what's warping it? The dark matter. So I can't see the dark matter directly, but I can see the effect of the dark matter on, in warping space. Why? 'Cause Einstein taught us that matter and energy has the effect of warping the space around it.

01:24:01
Eric Weinstein: So I'm looking at some galaxy.

01:24:03
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

01:24:03
Eric Weinstein: And suddenly I realize I've seen that galaxy before. [laughs]

01:24:06
Stephon Alexander: Right.

01:24:06
Eric Weinstein: And I've got four copies or five copies of that galaxy in the night sky, and the idea is that it's, no, it's just one galaxy with a bunch of something between me and it, and that something is causing the light from it to go off in all of these different directions-

01:24:21
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:24:21
Eric Weinstein: ... giving me the illusion. It's like Agent Smith in The Second Matrix.

01:24:23
Stephon Alexander: Do you get a funny one they call it the Einstein cross?

01:24:26
Eric Weinstein: What? [laughs]

01:24:28
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. I mean, that, that was a, that's a famous, right, gravitational lens, as you pointed out, which is that you can g- get kaleidoscopic effects. What you thought to be four galaxies is really just a warping effect-

01:24:39
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:24:40
Stephon Alexander: ... such that you see four copies of the same galaxy. Um, that's pretty weird.

01:24:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, which, it's important not to drink heavily when you have time on the telescope.

01:24:48
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

01:24:48
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. All right. So you're not only seeing double, you're seeing multiple. Sometimes you're seeing a continuum. So we know that there's this warping.

01:24:55
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:24:55
Eric Weinstein: So let's say that we're almost positive that it's not the law of gravitation. It's really that there's something else that doesn't send us the photons that we're hoping for, but we infer it indirectly. And, and just to, to bring it back, this is sa- this is really the same game as Pauli's inferral, inferring the neutrino exists by saying, "I can't see something directly, so what I can see is is that I can see the effects on things that I can see." And I, I, I've, I took these two examples and I said, um, "Let's come up with an aphorism so people can remember it." I said, "The invisible world is first detected in the visible world's failure to close." In other words, look at the things that you know are supposed to be there, and when you see them behaving bizarrely, you, you can guess that there's an invisible hand.

01:25:46
Stephon Alexander: Yes. Um- Um, uh, an astr- as- [clears throat] astrophysicist, um, said brilliantly, I think her name is Katie Mack, I believe. Uh, and it, it was, like, the best way, uh, metaphor for dark matter. She called it the, the, the cosmic poltergeist.

01:26:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:26:04
Stephon Alexander: Right? It's sort of like you see something moving in ways that, um, you can't account for it by ordinary laws.

01:26:11
Eric Weinstein: So for example-

01:26:12
Stephon Alexander: Right

01:26:12
Eric Weinstein: ... like, let's just imagine that you had a high-profile prisoner in a federal prison, uh, and the person were to lose, lose his or her life, and all the cameras were to fail, uh, in a, in a miraculous cascade of coincidences. You might infer that things weren't exactly, uh, what they were portrayed to be as a simple suicide in federal prison.

01:26:38
Stephon Alexander: Right, right.

01:26:38
Eric Weinstein: Like, that would be an example of inferring an invisible world from the visible world's failure to close and make sense.

01:26:44
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:26:45
Eric Weinstein: But hypothetically.

01:26:47
Stephon Alexander: That makes sense.

01:26:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:48
Stephon Alexander: That, that makes sense.

01:26:48
Eric Weinstein: I-

01:26:48
Stephon Alexander: I like that. I have to use that in my, in my, um, cl- in my-

01:26:50
Eric Weinstein: I would be careful using that

01:26:51
Stephon Alexander: ... in my class. I'm, I am... Yeah, I'm, I'm teaching, actually, I th- I think in the next couple of weeks I will be teaching, uh, giving a lecture on dark matter.

01:26:59
Eric Weinstein: Dark matter.

01:26:59
Stephon Alexander: And this will... I'm gonna use this, so.

01:27:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:27:02
Stephon Alexander: Good. Will I be able to get a clip of this, you know? [laughs]

01:27:05
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Um, um-

01:27:05
Stephon Alexander: I could just play them this, you know, this, um, conversation.

01:27:09
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:27:10
Stephon Alexander: So yeah, so, so this dark matter, we can measure its effect, but the question now, you see, um, we like, physicists, we like to know everything about this o- this object, this thing-

01:27:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:27:22
Stephon Alexander: ... dark matter. Um, we would like to know does it, what, what are its properties? Why is it there? You know, how did it come about on the scene? And what is its identity, right? Um, for example, is it, um, a, um, is it a particle? And how does it fit in to the pattern of the visible stuff in our world?

01:27:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, wait a second.

01:27:46
Stephon Alexander: Uh-huh.

01:27:46
Eric Weinstein: I'm sitting here on Earth-

01:27:48
Stephon Alexander: Mm

01:27:48
Eric Weinstein: ... and I'm inferring that this stuff exists out there.

01:27:51
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:27:52
Eric Weinstein: Now, how many different long range messengers carry information from the cosmos to me here on Earth? So we have photons.

01:28:02
Stephon Alexander: Yes, photons.

01:28:03
Eric Weinstein: And we, that's both visible-

01:28:05
Stephon Alexander: And, and gravity

01:28:06
Eric Weinstein: ... Oh, oh.

01:28:06
Stephon Alexander: I would say that's pretty much it.

01:28:07
Eric Weinstein: No, I think there's another one.

01:28:09
Stephon Alexander: Um, well-

01:28:10
Eric Weinstein: I would say neutrino astronomy is also-

01:28:11
Stephon Alexander: Okay. That's definitely, there's definitely a neutrino from supernova things, yeah

01:28:14
Eric Weinstein: ... you had mentioned our friend Mr.-

01:28:15
Stephon Alexander: From solar neutrinos, yeah

01:28:16
Eric Weinstein: ... Dr. Ke- Dr. Keating.

01:28:17
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. There's, that's right.

01:28:18
Eric Weinstein: Does- doesn't he operate a little telescope in the-

01:28:20
Stephon Alexander: The Simons, um, Array telescope, that's right, will be trying to directly mea- will measure-

01:28:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh, is this it?

01:28:25
Stephon Alexander: ... the mass of neutrinos. That's right.

01:28:26
Eric Weinstein: Is it IceCube in Antarctica or something?

01:28:28
Stephon Alexander: There's IceCube as well.

01:28:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:28:29
Stephon Alexander: Um-

01:28:29
Eric Weinstein: So we've got neutrinos that can reach us.

01:28:31
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:28:32
Eric Weinstein: We've got-

01:28:32
Stephon Alexander: Is that five?

01:28:33
Eric Weinstein: ... gravity that can reach us, and we've got photons of various kinds in the form-

01:28:36
Stephon Alexander: Okay

01:28:36
Eric Weinstein: ... of radio-

01:28:37
Stephon Alexander: Right

01:28:37
Eric Weinstein: ... X-ray, and visible s- s- spe-

01:28:39
Stephon Alexander: Okay. I thought you were refer- referring to forces, of the four forces, the ones that are-

01:28:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, just, I, no, I just mean long range-

01:28:43
Stephon Alexander: Things that can reach us, right

01:28:44
Eric Weinstein: ... things that c- things that can send us information.

01:28:46
Stephon Alexander: Right. Yeah. Yes, yes.

01:28:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:28:48
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:28:48
Eric Weinstein: Uh, you usually are traveling at or near the speed of light.

01:28:51
Stephon Alexander: And of course, some people also believe if the dark matter were a particle, dark matter as well.

01:28:58
Eric Weinstein: Dark matter?

01:28:59
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:28:59
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So-

01:29:01
Stephon Alexander: Because it's pervades not just out there, the dark matter. If you b- if you, it's all over the galaxy.

01:29:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, neutrinos come pretty close to being dark matter.

01:29:11
Stephon Alexander: They come, that's right. Neutrinos, so let me now say a little bit more. The, the, the properties, we actually know a little bit more about the properties of dark matter.

01:29:19
Eric Weinstein: Tell me more.

01:29:20
Stephon Alexander: So one thing we, we do know is that it also has to be what we call collisionless.

01:29:26
Eric Weinstein: Collisionless?

01:29:26
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, collisionless. So actually, a, an example of collisionless, um, is, again, let's go back to our pool table.

01:29:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:29:33
Stephon Alexander: If you're a horrible pool player-

01:29:35
Eric Weinstein: I am

01:29:36
Stephon Alexander: ... right? So I, you know, I go on the table and I, I'm, I'm very good at breaking the pool table, you know, uh, with, you know, um, start the game. Now imagine that all the balls are nicely scattered across the pool table.

01:29:49
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:29:50
Stephon Alexander: And collisionless is simply that I go, I u- take my white ball and I just try to hit a ball, and it just goes right through everything, and it doesn't collide or hit anything.

01:30:00
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:30:01
Stephon Alexander: So that's an example of a collisionless effect. [laughs] Um, now imagine it gets more interesting than that, and I have my galaxy, and I have all these stars that are going around each other.

01:30:13
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:30:13
Stephon Alexander: Um, very rarely do these stars run into each other. So that, that system is also a collis- collisionless system, the system of stars in my galaxy. Dark matter, whatever it is, um, we do know that it rarely runs, they rarely, um, collide with each other. Okay? Um-

01:30:32
Eric Weinstein: This is the dark matter amongst itself?

01:30:34
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Right. And the reason why we, we know that is because... Well, let me, before I tell you that, let me say that another property, it also has to be extremely cold. And actually, the collisionless part comes with the cold, because to heat something up, actually what temperature is, the me- um, temperature, if I have a, a hot gas or, um, hot cup of coffee, is because the, the molecules in that fluid are constantly colliding with each other and basically exchanging kinetic energy-

01:31:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:31:10
Stephon Alexander: ... energy associated with motion, and that becomes, you know, um, a sort of a randomized situation. And the measure of that velocity, the faster these collisions are happening-

01:31:21
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

01:31:22
Stephon Alexander: ... the higher the temperature is. And so dark matter, what we know is that that rarely hap- those collisions rarely happen, so as a result, the dark matter has to be cold. Um, it has to be cold because when you actually, um, when something is collisionless, um, it doesn't dissipate as much.

01:31:43
Eric Weinstein: I see.

01:31:44
Stephon Alexander: Right? So i- I, I imagine, like, a fluid flowing without ever stopping its flow, because it's not the, you know, it's a nice streamlined flow- Rather than the chaotic sort of like, um, I guess, you know, there's a word for this, um, that you, you, uh, fluid dynamicists use. Um, turbulence.

01:32:02
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:32:03
Stephon Alexander: A nice... Turbulence is, like, a lot of collision, right?

01:32:05
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:32:06
Stephon Alexander: Versus a nice smooth, you know, um, um, flow. Dark matter has more of that f- that, that less turbulent flow, and that's important because in the early universe, um, dark matter's role, it's not just this invisible thing, you know. Um, I wa- I was gonna have a, a corny pun, and I'm gonna avoid having my corny-

01:32:30
Eric Weinstein: I would avoid

01:32:31
Stephon Alexander: ... because-

01:32:32
Eric Weinstein: Can I pour you another-

01:32:32
Stephon Alexander: But the dark matter, it, it matters, okay?

01:32:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It matters.

01:32:36
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, it matters. It plays a key role in forming... Oh, thank you, my brother.

01:32:42
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

01:32:42
Stephon Alexander: Um, in forming galaxies. 'Cause the question that we're really after in, in cosmology is, how did these galaxies come about? From a early universe that was expanding, right, into the, uh, uh, to become the current large universe, how did this early universe actually, um, you know, that was fairly featureless and chaotic without any galaxies or stars-

01:33:11
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:33:11
Stephon Alexander: ... how did those things form? Given the fact that the universe is running away, you know, how do we actually, you know, how do I capture the hydrogen gas in a nice, compact manner-

01:33:23
Eric Weinstein: You're saying without the dark matter-

01:33:24
Stephon Alexander: ... to form stars

01:33:25
Eric Weinstein: ... you wouldn't have an ability to nucleate-

01:33:25
Stephon Alexander: Without the dark mat- without this collisionless, cold dark matter-

01:33:28
Eric Weinstein: We can't nucleate the galaxy

01:33:29
Stephon Alexander: ... you wouldn't have the g- you couldn't nucleate the galaxy.

01:33:31
Eric Weinstein: Wow. All right.

01:33:32
Stephon Alexander: That's really important.

01:33:33
Eric Weinstein: All right. Well, that's pretty structural.

01:33:34
Stephon Alexander: And that physics is, um, you know, that physics is pretty well understood. That's more cosmological stuff.

01:33:40
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:33:41
Stephon Alexander: Now, um, and that's where we can... You, uh... I know where your question was going.

01:33:48
Eric Weinstein: Did you?

01:33:48
Stephon Alexander: Yes, I did.

01:33:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:33:49
Stephon Alexander: I know where your question was going.

01:33:50
Eric Weinstein: If I had to-

01:33:51
Stephon Alexander: Why should this dark matter have anything to do with the stuff that we're colliding and looking for a- at the Large Hadron Collider?

01:33:58
Eric Weinstein: That, that was my question.

01:34:00
Stephon Alexander: See?

01:34:00
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:34:01
Stephon Alexander: Um-

01:34:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but the point is-

01:34:03
Stephon Alexander: But those of you out there, you know, you spend enough time with Eric over the last 11 years, you can actually learn how to read his mind.

01:34:10
Eric Weinstein: Soon- sooner or later, everyone goes into syndication, my friend.

01:34:12
Stephon Alexander: [laughs]

01:34:12
Eric Weinstein: All right. So let's, let's drink to the dark matter.

01:34:16
Stephon Alexander: Yes, let's drink to the dark side.

01:34:16
Eric Weinstein: And let me ask you a couple of questions. To the dark side. Now, if you're trying to get the power of the dark side, you need to figure out, what are its properties, not just at a general level, that it's cold, it's collisionless, but I also wanna know, okay, well, how does it d- what are the forces that are acting on this? What are its... Is there dark light? Is there, is there dark nuclear force? What kind of properties? Can we do dark chemistry?

01:34:46
Stephon Alexander: Oh, this is great. So, um, yes. Um, my, um, in fact, um, there, people have proposed, so there are now models on, on the market. You can go to the dark matter marketplace and find your favorite-

01:35:02
Eric Weinstein: On the dark web

01:35:03
Stephon Alexander: ... model.

01:35:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:35:03
Stephon Alexander: Um, you can find your fa- your favorite dark m- model, model.

01:35:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:35:08
Stephon Alexander: Okay? Dark matter model, and there are a couple. And one very attractive one is, um, one that involves dark electromagnetism. So it, you know, the physics of electricity and magnetism that we really love to have our nice self-driving cars and things like that. Um, what if, the question is, there were things like dark electrons? Again, these, these are electrons that don't interact with our electrons. They have their own dark forces, as you pointed out, and they also have a dark photon, a dark particle of light. And, um, this was worked out very well by, uh, my colleague Lisa Randall, um, and, um, and her colleagues. And they found a very interesting, um, result, that if you had such a thing, um, then you would also have potentially, the same way you have galaxies forming into disks-

01:36:07
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:36:07
Stephon Alexander: ... you can have dark disks as well. Um-

01:36:11
Eric Weinstein: When you say galaxies forming into disks, it tends to be the case that a lot of the action is taking place in something like a f- a kind of a thick plane.

01:36:19
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:36:20
Eric Weinstein: But is the dark matter just in that thick plane, or is it-

01:36:23
Stephon Alexander: In this case, yes. In this case, the dark matter will actually squish into this plane.

01:36:27
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:36:27
Stephon Alexander: And it could be also aligned with our galaxy, or, or it could also be, you know, not necessarily matched up with the disk of our galaxy.

01:36:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, I heard sometimes that you get a sphere of dark stuff, and the luminous stuff is-

01:36:39
Stephon Alexander: You can get a, a dark halo as well.

01:36:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:36:41
Stephon Alexander: And that's actually what we now know this is, um, to be the case, that you have, um, the picture that, um, we should have about, of dark matter. If I... I can't use a Klein bottle. Um-

01:36:53
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Don't, don't copy it

01:36:54
Stephon Alexander: ... but let my hand, let my hand be the disk of a galaxy.

01:36:57
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:36:58
Stephon Alexander: So it's going around this way. That's my galaxy. And the idea of the, how we should think about dark matter is that literally, um, have a bubble, a bubble surrounding a th- uh, um, surrounding this disk that extends really far away from the disk. Um, and that bubble would be the, the distribution of the, of the invisible or the dark matter, and the amount... So it's more like a, a sphere that encompasses the disk, and that is how we imagine, um, the, the distribution of the dark matter to be-

01:37:38
Eric Weinstein: So we have a gal-

01:37:39
Stephon Alexander: Around every, around every spiral galaxy-

01:37:41
Eric Weinstein: Every spiral galaxy

01:37:42
Stephon Alexander: ... every spiral galaxy-

01:37:43
Eric Weinstein: Nuts

01:37:43
Stephon Alexander: ... has been observed to have this.

01:37:44
Eric Weinstein: All right. Stephon, how do I make progress? Assume that I wanna make my money-

01:37:49
Stephon Alexander: Yes

01:37:49
Eric Weinstein: ... in dark matter physics.

01:37:51
Stephon Alexander: Yes, you wanna make your money. Good.

01:37:52
Eric Weinstein: And but we've got this stuff. I can't detect it. You know, it's like what Morpheus says about the matrix, that it's a prison that you can't see, taste, or touch. How am I gonna make progress? ... in dark matter if we can't get our hands on this stuff?

01:38:08
Stephon Alexander: Um, good. That, um, that is the nature of the game. That's, um, it's a hard problem. Many, um, r- research groups around the country, around the world, um, we are investing our brainpower, computer resources, um, and everything else that's, um, worth money and resources to study and figure out. So how you would do this? Okay. Um, well, some people want to know w- the identity of the dark matter, what are its properties. So-

01:38:38
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:38:38
Stephon Alexander: ... well, what we do know are, is, are that things that, the things that are familiar to us are made up of particles.

01:38:45
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:38:45
Stephon Alexander: So if you assume that a dark matter is a particle, um, then you find that there's this really interesting thing that happens. Um, and some people call this a miracle, or rather it's known as the WIMP miracle. WIMP-

01:39:00
Eric Weinstein: WIMP. Careful

01:39:01
Stephon Alexander: ... is a, acronym for weakly interacting, uh, massive particles. I believe, but the definitely weakly interacting part is, is, serves my memory right, okay?

01:39:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

01:39:14
Stephon Alexander: So the idea is that-

01:39:14
Eric Weinstein: My, my memory is that Sheldon Glashow did not, was not secure in his masculinity, and he proposed MACHOs, um-

01:39:22
Stephon Alexander: There are, right

01:39:23
Eric Weinstein: ... something massive, some accelerating-

01:39:26
Stephon Alexander: Right

01:39:26
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, compact halo objects.

01:39:28
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:39:28
Eric Weinstein: Because he did, couldn't say the fact that we were looking for WIMPs.

01:39:30
Stephon Alexander: WIMPs, that's right.

01:39:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

01:39:31
Stephon Alexander: And much of, much, uh, uh, much of the MA- MACHOs have been ruled out.

01:39:35
Eric Weinstein: Okay. What-

01:39:36
Stephon Alexander: So it's, you know, bye to them

01:39:36
Eric Weinstein: ... what does the A in MACHO stand for?

01:39:38
Stephon Alexander: I don't know.

01:39:38
Eric Weinstein: Okay. All right.

01:39:39
Stephon Alexander: I don't know. Um, that goes to show you how much I've worked on MACHOs.

01:39:42
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:39:43
Stephon Alexander: I wrote one MACHO paper, but we call-

01:39:44
Eric Weinstein: You wrote a MACHO paper

01:39:45
Stephon Alexander: ... we call it mini MACHOs.

01:39:47
Eric Weinstein: Even there, you're, you're, you're-

01:39:48
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:39:48
Eric Weinstein: ... you're taking the piss out of the MACHO theory.

01:39:50
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah.

01:39:50
Eric Weinstein: Okay, very good.

01:39:51
Stephon Alexander: Um, it was a way to get around the observational constraints and still have MACHOs, but they have to be mini MACHOs, you know? Um, so, um, yeah. So the WIMPs are particles that magically have... If you assume that they are particles, and actually because they are particles, they are subject to a force amongst themselves, a dark force. It turns out that the strength of that force, if it happens to be similar to the f- nuclear f- the weak nuclear force, these W and b- Z bosons that we were talking about-

01:40:29
Eric Weinstein: Right, with the Fermi theory

01:40:30
Stephon Alexander: ... if that, that force was, of the dark pa- particles-

01:40:34
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:40:34
Stephon Alexander: ... was similar, then it turns out that all the properties that we've seen about dark matter fits in very nicely. So it's a coincidence, um, of, of, of, of, of similarities with something that we do know very well. And it fit very nicely into the pattern that I was talking about, the symmetry pattern. Um, because one of the symmetries that we were going after to, like, solve the problems that I talked about earlier on, singularities and unification, getting more and more unification, is a symmetry called supersymmetry. And this theory that unifies these forces-

01:41:19
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:41:19
Stephon Alexander: ... even more so, in this case, the symmetry now is between the force carriers and the matter itself, the electron and the photon. Uh, supersymmetry will basically be a symmetry that says that those things are really the same thing.

01:41:35
Eric Weinstein: You mean like matter is force and force is matter.

01:41:37
Stephon Alexander: Matter, right.

01:41:37
Eric Weinstein: Cats are dogs and dogs are cats.

01:41:38
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:41:39
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:41:40
Stephon Alexander: Um, what comes out quite naturally as a prediction from supersymmetry-

01:41:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:41:46
Stephon Alexander: ... is the WIMP dark matter particle. So it's really cool, right? It was very cool when we saw that this theory that was gonna do, uh, this, gonna continue feeding our Pavlov physics dog, um, by getting more symmetry to solve our problems in particle physics, naturally predicted this particle. Or basically, well, there were a few of them-

01:42:13
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:42:13
Stephon Alexander: ... um, that would be the ideal candidate for what we're seeing in outer space, in, uh, i- in our own galaxy-

01:42:19
Eric Weinstein: It's a beautiful-

01:42:19
Stephon Alexander: ... and other galaxies. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

01:42:21
Eric Weinstein: Beautiful story.

01:42:22
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, it's physics too, because you, what, you know, because you have a theory, um, you have principles guiding this theory, principles that have proven themselves-

01:42:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:42:32
Stephon Alexander: ... to be c- um, to pay off in the past.

01:42:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:42:35
Stephon Alexander: Right? Lots of Nobel Prizes given for, for this pattern of behavior, of inquiry, of inquiry. And now you have shouting at you, "Look, this dark matter, you're gonna find this thing when you, when you go to higher and higher energies. Because when you find this symmetry, you will find this dark matter particles." And it gets even better, 'cause my, um-

01:42:58
Eric Weinstein: Wait, before you go-

01:42:59
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:42:59
Eric Weinstein: ... on getting it better and better, my concern is-

01:43:01
Stephon Alexander: It really does get better

01:43:02
Eric Weinstein: ... well, [laughs] okay. The, um, jokes aside, the, uh, situation reminds me of being a, a Jewish kid a- around, uh, a lot of Christians in our, in my neighborhood. So we just had parents who gave us some kind of semi-crappy gifts for Hanukkah, but the Christian kids were always running around talking about, "Oh man, Santa Claus is gonna bring me this, and Santa Claus is gonna bring me that." And we were always a little bit jealous, but we also had a deep suspicion Santa Claus didn't really exist. And we didn't want to tell our, our Christian friends that Santa Claus didn't exist because they were so expectant and so happy and so hopeful. I find myself a little bit in this situation with supersymmetry, where I've been sitting around listening to the goyim say this thing about, "Oh, well, Santa Claus is gonna bring us sparticles and superpartners and the hierarchy problem will be solved and lots of infinities will cancel, and Santa Claus is gonna do all this wonderful stuff in the form of supersymmetry." Now- I'm not saying that s- that there is no miracle, because Lord knows that when we have a retail explosion in December, lots of merchants find that they can finally get their year to close out in exactly the right, beautiful way. There is a miracle of Christmas, Stefan.

01:44:21
Stephon Alexander: [laughs]

01:44:21
Eric Weinstein: But-

01:44:22
Stephon Alexander: I knew that was coming, Eric

01:44:23
Eric Weinstein: ... but, but-

01:44:24
Stephon Alexander: Wait. I'll just do it for you

01:44:25
Eric Weinstein: ... I don't, I don't wa- I, I don't wanna be the Jewish guy who takes away the miracle of Christmas. It is a retail miracle, but it is not the same miracle that the children of the Christian households are taught to believe. Now, my, my problem is this.

01:44:39
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:44:39
Eric Weinstein: I've been listening to the Santa Claus story for decades and decades and decades.

01:44:45
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:44:45
Eric Weinstein: What is the current status of supersymmetry?

01:44:48
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm. Okay.

01:44:48
Eric Weinstein: Experimentally.

01:44:49
Stephon Alexander: Experimentally.

01:44:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. How much-

01:44:51
Stephon Alexander: So, okay. So-

01:44:51
Eric Weinstein: What's the, what's the most successful supersymmetry experiment?

01:44:54
Stephon Alexander: Um, well, so a lot of work, a lot of hard work and, um, and-

01:45:00
Eric Weinstein: I've read thousands of papers. I've seen it all

01:45:01
Stephon Alexander: ... thousands of papers, and myself included, you know, I was... Look, I mean, I, you know, the supersymmetry, um, saved my life when I was a post-doc. I was hired-

01:45:11
Eric Weinstein: That's good

01:45:11
Stephon Alexander: ... to work on supergravity, um, and I had-

01:45:14
Eric Weinstein: That almost brought my father in

01:45:15
Stephon Alexander: ... I, I got a nice fellowship to do this, to do some of this stuff. Um, so I would say, um, and so there's a lot, um, a lot of work that went into actually making sure-

01:45:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:45:27
Stephon Alexander: ... that the predictions were extremely precise and nice.

01:45:31
Eric Weinstein: Oh, gorgeous.

01:45:32
Stephon Alexander: Right?

01:45:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:45:32
Stephon Alexander: Um, with a nice... Yeah, and, um, uh, we call this... So when the Large Hadron Collider, you know, um, started to run, amazingly, yes, we found the Higgs boson.

01:45:45
Eric Weinstein: That was great.

01:45:45
Stephon Alexander: Which was a big triumph. And, and of course, there's another problem that supersymmetry... Before I give you the answer, can I just say one more?

01:45:56
Eric Weinstein: I've s- I've stayed up so late waiting for Santa, knowing that he's going to... I, w- I ma-

01:46:00
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, but-

01:46:00
Eric Weinstein: I made cookies and milk.

01:46:02
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, but there's another pre- present, a better present that Santa was gonna give you.

01:46:05
Eric Weinstein: Oh, which was that?

01:46:06
Stephon Alexander: Well, first of all, Santa has a cape, so he's Super Santa.

01:46:08
Eric Weinstein: Super Santa?

01:46:09
Stephon Alexander: Right.

01:46:10
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:46:10
Stephon Alexander: Okay. [laughs] Um, and Super Santa basically said, "Actually, we found this Hig- Higgs particle, the particle that gives everything mass."

01:46:22
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:46:22
Stephon Alexander: Right? Without this Higgs, um, I-

01:46:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I don't even wanna let that slide.

01:46:26
Stephon Alexander: No.

01:46:26
Eric Weinstein: It imparts an as-if weak form of math. I just don't like lying to the public.

01:46:32
Stephon Alexander: Okay, fine.

01:46:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay? It's not a real, it's not real mass. It's a soft mass mechanism. It's an as if, kinda sort of mass at an effective level. It's not real mass.

01:46:44
Stephon Alexander: It's not real mass. Mass is energy.

01:46:48
Eric Weinstein: Go on.

01:46:49
Stephon Alexander: Okay. Um, now, the, this Higgs particle, um, is, right, the Higgs particle is really a field, and the vibration of the field is a Higgs particle.

01:47:05
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:47:05
Stephon Alexander: Okay. This vibration, um, this particle, um, has trouble. If you find it, you're to expect to find trouble with this, and I'm gonna delay that trouble, discussing this trouble, even though it's a beautiful story. But can I say, if you sit, if you're a ball sitting right at the top of a hill, right, and I just balance this ball right at the top of a hill, um, you wanna do a instability thing for me?

01:47:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, here's the thing.

01:47:40
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

01:47:40
Eric Weinstein: I bought this beautiful bottle of wine.

01:47:42
Stephon Alexander: Okay, that's good. You, you gonna spill-

01:47:43
Eric Weinstein: And the wine-

01:47:44
Stephon Alexander: Don't spill the wine

01:47:44
Eric Weinstein: ... has a funny... I'm trying not to.

01:47:46
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

01:47:46
Eric Weinstein: Feel a little tipsy.

01:47:47
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

01:47:47
Eric Weinstein: Feel a little good.

01:47:48
Stephon Alexander: Okay. Are you gonna-

01:47:49
Eric Weinstein: The bottom of this bottle of wine has this strange indentation known in the trade as a-

01:47:54
Stephon Alexander: Wine, uh-

01:47:55
Eric Weinstein: ... punt.

01:47:55
Stephon Alexander: Oh, punt. Okay.

01:47:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:47:56
Stephon Alexander: I didn't know that.

01:47:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So the punt has the shape of the potential that we put the Higgs field into because we wanna lure the Higgs field away from the most obvious value of zero. And so we say, "Look, why don't we put a little punt at every point in space and time, and the Higgs field can start off at the center of that punt, but with the slightest little tap, and it'll fall into a well around that punt." And then, because we weren't politically correct, we called it, by analogy, not the wine bottle, uh-

01:48:33
Stephon Alexander: The Mexican hat

01:48:34
Eric Weinstein: ... pu- punt potential, but the Mexican hat potential-

01:48:37
Stephon Alexander: That's right, that's right

01:48:37
Eric Weinstein: ... for which we will be duly punished by the Latinx community. Okay.

01:48:42
Stephon Alexander: Okay. But, but, you know, we give them love.

01:48:45
Eric Weinstein: We give, we give them love.

01:48:47
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

01:48:47
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:48:47
Stephon Alexander: Um-

01:48:47
Eric Weinstein: So now we've got this Higgs field that's acquired this thing that you guys call a VEV. A vacuum expectation value means that we've lured the field-

01:48:56
Stephon Alexander: To fall to the bottom of-

01:48:57
Eric Weinstein: To fall to the bottom, so-

01:48:58
Stephon Alexander: To be nicely stable

01:48:59
Eric Weinstein: ... so that the, the symmetry that would come from having the field resting at each point at the top of that thing, no, it's gonna fall somewhere into the trough. And the combination of the trough and the th- the, the, the field that fell into some particular place breaks the symmetry, creates the VEV, gives us the soft mass that we so desperately [laughs] need to make sure that we don't go relativistic and go zooming off at the speed of light.

01:49:29
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, we don't.

01:49:29
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:49:30
Stephon Alexander: You don't, I don't. Maybe you're relativ- I, I, I like to be right here, but the Higgs is doing all that for all of us.

01:49:35
Eric Weinstein: But that's a lot of work.

01:49:36
Stephon Alexander: It's a q- yeah, quite a, you know-

01:49:38
Eric Weinstein: You know, and in a-

01:49:38
Stephon Alexander: ... om- omniscient type of field

01:49:39
Eric Weinstein: ... in a, I think in Greek tragedy-

01:49:40
Stephon Alexander: Omniscient particle

01:49:41
Eric Weinstein: ... they call it deus ex machina.

01:49:42
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

01:49:43
Eric Weinstein: The, it's the god in the machine. The, the Mexican hat saves the day, and it turns out we found it, so great triumph.

01:49:50
Stephon Alexander: Good triumph.

01:49:50
Eric Weinstein: Huge.

01:49:51
Stephon Alexander: But now there's, there's a, a problem now.

01:49:54
Eric Weinstein: Oh, there's a problem?

01:49:55
Stephon Alexander: There's a problem.

01:49:55
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no.

01:49:57
Stephon Alexander: Because this Higgs particle, which we found at the Large Hadron Collider, which got the Nobel Prize-

01:50:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Yeah

01:50:03
Stephon Alexander: ... and all that nice stuff, right?

01:50:03
Eric Weinstein: We gave you your due. Keep going.

01:50:05
Stephon Alexander: All right. It's actually not stable even when it got to the bottom there.

01:50:11
Eric Weinstein: ... quantum, quantum mechanically or quantum-

01:50:12
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Now, because this Higgs, it's a quantum particle.

01:50:15
Eric Weinstein: Uh-oh.

01:50:16
Stephon Alexander: Ah. And I wanna give a flavor, since I know, you know, you give such great descriptions, and you're a master at doing this stuff. I did see a thing on gauge symmetry.

01:50:26
Eric Weinstein: Stop it.

01:50:27
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Yeah. You know-

01:50:28
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna accuse me of having flavor?

01:50:30
Stephon Alexander: You got, you got lots of flavor.

01:50:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay. [laughs]

01:50:33
Stephon Alexander: You- y- I, I don't wanna make any flavor flav, um, puns here, but-

01:50:37
Eric Weinstein: Watching.

01:50:37
Stephon Alexander: Anyway, yeah.

01:50:38
Eric Weinstein: Aha.

01:50:39
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

01:50:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:50:39
Stephon Alexander: Okay. I mean, I grew up with Public Enemy, but-

01:50:43
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:50:43
Stephon Alexander: Um, so, um, yeah. So this Higgs particle, we think, and we would like it to be stable. And, you know, guess what? It is stable because we're stable. So we know that it is stable, but guess what. If you trust all of that physics that you use to even predict this Higgs particle, it's a, not just a regular ball, a, um, a particle like the b- particles that we know. It's a quantum particle, which means it actually has quantum jitters, you know. And this, these quantum jitters actually can make the energy of the Higgs particle grow as well. And I wanna give a good analogy-

01:51:22
Eric Weinstein: Under control. Got it, under control

01:51:22
Stephon Alexander: ... and I wanna give a good analogy with this, actually.

01:51:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:51:24
Stephon Alexander: I think. Let me give it a go.

01:51:26
Eric Weinstein: Please.

01:51:26
Stephon Alexander: So I wanna think of this Higgs particle-

01:51:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:51:29
Stephon Alexander: ... this, um, as a particle that's sitting on top of a mountain.

01:51:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:51:33
Stephon Alexander: Like a ball, a bowling ball that's sitting on top of a m-... The analogy now is that-

01:51:38
Eric Weinstein: It's-

01:51:38
Stephon Alexander: ... this bowling ball is a Higgs particle. It has a mass, um, uh, some mass.

01:51:41
Eric Weinstein: A symmetrical mountain.

01:51:42
Stephon Alexander: Uh, it's a symmetrical mountain, so it's nicely symmetrical.

01:51:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:51:46
Stephon Alexander: Completely symmetrical, yes.

01:51:47
Eric Weinstein: No wind.

01:51:47
Stephon Alexander: No wind.

01:51:48
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:51:48
Stephon Alexander: Whatsoever.

01:51:49
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:51:49
Stephon Alexander: Now, the other thing I wanna, uh, uh, also add to this is that the mountain has grass on top of it, so there's a little bit of friction, meaning that if I let this particle sit right there, it, the grass will be enough to keep it nice and cushy, right?

01:52:05
Eric Weinstein: Provided nothing too crazy starts happening.

01:52:07
Stephon Alexander: Nothing, so-

01:52:08
Eric Weinstein: All right

01:52:08
Stephon Alexander: ... but now, quantum mechanics is reigning supreme here. It's now a q-... I turn, now it becomes a quantum Higgs p- um, bowling ball.

01:52:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:52:17
Stephon Alexander: And the quantum effects, what the quantum effects is gonna do is make-

01:52:21
Eric Weinstein: Random transitions and stuff

01:52:23
Stephon Alexander: ... ran- yeah, make the mass actually grow more and more.

01:52:26
Eric Weinstein: Uh-huh.

01:52:26
Stephon Alexander: And it'll shake a little bit.

01:52:29
Eric Weinstein: Doesn't sound good.

01:52:29
Stephon Alexander: Imagine if it gets the mass, the mass will get so... It just gonna, the quantum effect's gonna make the mass grow. I know it's weird. Why is this mass growing, uh, without bound? This is quantum mechanics at work. And the Higgs particle eventually overcomes, its mass will overcome this friction that, of the grass that's keeping it fixed there, and eventually it will roll over this hill.

01:52:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:52:52
Stephon Alexander: Um, when it rolls over this hill, it turns out that this hill is at infinite height. It's just gonna, like Mount Everest, and it's just gonna roll down and-

01:53:02
Eric Weinstein: It's no Mexican hat at all

01:53:02
Stephon Alexander: ... no Mexican hat. And guess what? It becomes unstable.

01:53:06
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:53:06
Stephon Alexander: And the mass grows without bound.

01:53:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:53:08
Stephon Alexander: The kinetic energy grows without bound, and guess what. We interact-

01:53:13
Eric Weinstein: Through a Yukawa coupling-

01:53:15
Stephon Alexander: ... through this Higgs

01:53:15
Eric Weinstein: ... that just makes our-

01:53:16
Stephon Alexander: Through this Higgs. So we also-

01:53:17
Eric Weinstein: Become infinitely massive

01:53:18
Stephon Alexander: ... yeah, I mean-

01:53:19
Eric Weinstein: We can't get up out of our chairs. Our chairs can't get-

01:53:20
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, I mean, there's no diet that's gonna help.

01:53:22
Eric Weinstein: This does not sound good.

01:53:24
Stephon Alexander: It's not good. There's some magic that is preventing this from happening. So one thing that you can imagine, c- this analogy gets nice now, because the grass, imagine the grass also is quantum, right?

01:53:37
Eric Weinstein: What?

01:53:38
Stephon Alexander: The grass is giving this particle friction-

01:53:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:53:41
Stephon Alexander: ... to prevent it from rolling down.

01:53:42
Eric Weinstein: What is the grass here?

01:53:44
Stephon Alexander: Well, I w- the, the grass is gonna be the supersymmetric particle.

01:53:48
Eric Weinstein: Oh, okay.

01:53:49
Stephon Alexander: All right. So there's something else that could counter the effect-

01:53:53
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:53:53
Stephon Alexander: ... of this Higgs. The Higgs is bound to get mass. Quantum mechanics is always gonna make this happen. You have to counter it. This is the, this is what's, the same physics-

01:54:03
Eric Weinstein: You need grass.

01:54:05
Stephon Alexander: You need grass. Um, this, and it turns out, so this analogy, to make the analogy work now-

01:54:09
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:54:09
Stephon Alexander: ... you need another particle that's playing the role of this friction effect, and this effect is gonna counter the tendency of this Higgs mass to grow-

01:54:17
Eric Weinstein: Great

01:54:18
Stephon Alexander: ... to kill it off.

01:54:18
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:54:19
Stephon Alexander: And that is a supersymmetric particle.

01:54:21
Eric Weinstein: Oh, wow.

01:54:22
Stephon Alexander: This is the same type of WIMP particles that we think is the dark matter, um, or its cousins-

01:54:28
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:54:28
Stephon Alexander: ... that's part of the supersymmetric package of your present-

01:54:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:54:32
Stephon Alexander: ... that Santa Claus is gonna give you. Um, you like that?

01:54:36
Eric Weinstein: I do. But to be honest, you-

01:54:39
Stephon Alexander: So it solves a p- so you have the-

01:54:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:54:41
Stephon Alexander: ... the same thing that's giving us the dark matter, you get all in the price of one. You know? You get not just one present, you get a couple of presents.

01:54:49
Eric Weinstein: But you've been at my house for Shabbat dinner.

01:54:52
Stephon Alexander: Yes, I have.

01:54:52
Eric Weinstein: We've always... Y- you're a beautiful Shaygets. Don't lie to me about Santa Claus. Is this gonna come-

01:54:58
Stephon Alexander: So now we had this theory that predicted-

01:54:59
Eric Weinstein: Yes

01:54:59
Stephon Alexander: ... all this stuff, and, uh, um, that theory is ruled out.

01:55:04
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:55:04
Stephon Alexander: And the beautiful thing about physics is that, no, the experiments r- reign supreme. The Law of Charge, Current, Light, Iran.

01:55:10
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait a second. They don't totally-

01:55:11
Stephon Alexander: Theorists did a lot of work to put, to, um... And, and it, that work should have happened. It, it needed to happen because this was a pattern. This is the payoff. We always saw this happening, right? This is the prin- the driving principle, the symmetry principle, so this was inevitable as a c- community of physicists to pursue this path. We went there. We, the, uh, we were expecting to find this thing. Many people-

01:55:37
Eric Weinstein: Ma- uh, uh-

01:55:38
Stephon Alexander: ... were expe- I, I mean, I wasn't one of them. I didn't, um-

01:55:40
Eric Weinstein: So then why are you carrying water for them? Because I don't-

01:55:42
Stephon Alexander: I'm not carrying water. I'm just-

01:55:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, you're, you're just tele-

01:55:45
Stephon Alexander: I was explaining, like, the ex-

01:55:46
Eric Weinstein: See, you are one of them

01:55:47
Stephon Alexander: ... why people are excited about it.

01:55:47
Eric Weinstein: You're, you're one of the, you're part of the tribe. You didn't buy this thing.

01:55:51
Stephon Alexander: I worked on other things.

01:55:52
Eric Weinstein: No, you worked on this a little bit.

01:55:54
Stephon Alexander: I worked on it a little bit.

01:55:55
Eric Weinstein: But I remember [laughs] you were not part of this-

01:55:57
Stephon Alexander: I wasn't a part of it

01:55:58
Eric Weinstein: ... Santa Claus myth.

01:55:59
Stephon Alexander: I wasn't a part of it.

01:55:59
Eric Weinstein: I know.

01:56:00
Stephon Alexander: But I, but I was a, I, I, uh, there was a part of me that was a, a, a k- a kind of a distant admirer, because I d- did think that the theory was elegant, it was beautiful. In, in, in the same way that, you know, the-

01:56:12
Eric Weinstein: I'm not coming out against supersymmetry

01:56:14
Stephon Alexander: ... the quantum fields theory learned. However-

01:56:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:56:15
Stephon Alexander: ... it, it, it, it's, uh, the, um, this particular version, what we call low-energy supers- low-scale supersymmetry-

01:56:22
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:56:22
Stephon Alexander: ... um, that version, that solves this, this, by the way, this thing is called a Higgs hierarchy problem

01:56:28
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:56:28
Stephon Alexander: Right? Um, [clears throat] and the mechanism that you talk about, something called electroweak symmetry breaking, and they're connected to each other. This instability, this electroweak instability-

01:56:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:56:38
Stephon Alexander: ... it's still a real problem that needs to be solved.

01:56:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:56:41
Stephon Alexander: So it's exciting because that means, um, the experiments-

01:56:44
Eric Weinstein: No, it is not that-

01:56:45
Stephon Alexander: ... show that this particular-

01:56:46
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

01:56:47
Stephon Alexander: ... way of thinking about it is wrong.

01:56:47
Eric Weinstein: We're not gonna- no, no, no, we're not gonna get to the point of it's exciting.

01:56:49
Stephon Alexander: Okay. Okay.

01:56:50
Eric Weinstein: Something has gone wrong in the history of science. I, I just sat and I listened to a beautiful fairy tale for a fucking long time, right?

01:56:57
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

01:56:57
Eric Weinstein: And I'm sick of it. Okay, there is an accounting that has to happen, which is that there was only one part of this community that was convinced that Santa Claus was real. Now, the re- the rest of us, we're not necessarily against supersymmetry.

01:57:15
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

01:57:15
Eric Weinstein: We weren't necessarily against-

01:57:17
Stephon Alexander: That's right. That's right

01:57:18
Eric Weinstein: ... but this particular arrogance that this very simple story was going to happen with near certainty, that we're gonna switch on the machine, that not only were we gonna find the Higgs particle and the Higgs field, but we were gonna find supersymmetry and black holes and all of these things that would justify the funding, and these guys told everybody, "No, Santa Claus is real. My, my uncle met him. I've got photos with him on, on, on Instagram," blah, blah, blah, and they lied. They lied that the community was so clear about this. The community was divided, and the problem is, and this is the part of the story that we can't tell, is that what they wanted to say is that the smart kids and the cool kids knew that supersymmetry was gonna be found at low energy, and it was gonna be natural, and it was gonna solve all of these problems. And the problem is, is that it was a beautiful dream if you were very focused on part of the physics story. You were s- focused on the renormalization story. You were focused on the quantum field theory.

01:58:24
Stephon Alexander: Right.

01:58:24
Eric Weinstein: It-

01:58:24
Stephon Alexander: All things, by the way, all things that, you know, um, um, all things that was part of everybody's tradition, you know, um, as, as a viable, a viable-

01:58:36
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

01:58:36
Stephon Alexander: ... solution. But there were other, there were other-

01:58:38
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. I'm, I'm just-

01:58:39
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

01:58:39
Eric Weinstein: ... not, I'm not buying it.

01:58:40
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

01:58:41
Eric Weinstein: The point is that other people said, "Look, maybe you're right. I don't know where you're getting your confidence from. If it happened the way you say, it's going to look ugly in some ways and beautiful in other ways." The, the analogy I always give is, like, a fitted sheet. Like, stupidly, you bought a queen-size fitted sheet for a king-size bed, and somebody's like, "Oh, I've got this. I'm gonna put this over this corner. I've d- I'm done. This is beautiful." You're like, "Have you noticed that the sheet [laughs] is not working on the other corners?" And so a- as soon as you try to get the sheet to work on those corners, off the corner that you've already done, off it pops. My problem is, is that the community that was so clear and so gung-ho and wrote so many papers and was so certain needs to suck it up. It- we need something like truth and reconciliation. They need to come forward and say, "Oh my God, were we off" and-

01:59:45
Stephon Alexander: And, but, you know, it, the, um... So I read a, a nice paper by, um, um, a great theoretical physicist, great physicist, um, Schiffman, who c- who, who did come clean and said, like, you know, "We were expecting to find this thing, and we were wrong," basically. And, but-

02:00:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay. That was wrong

02:00:03
Stephon Alexander: ... but he was, he was also optimistic. He was also optimistic in the sense that, um, we will find, we will find something. It may not be that, but we're gonna w- there's a s- sense of like, this is still exciting because now the experiment has told us where not to look and where, where we might-

02:00:19
Eric Weinstein: I'm sorry

02:00:20
Stephon Alexander: ... wanna look.

02:00:20
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no.

02:00:20
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:00:21
Eric Weinstein: There needs to be, there needs to be hair shirts and suffering.

02:00:25
Stephon Alexander: [laughs] Right.

02:00:25
Eric Weinstein: There needs to be a public accounting. There needs to be humiliating articles written by Dennis Overbye saying, "What was I doing listening to this community quite so credulously?" There needs to be a comeuppance. The people who make the grant decisions need to not be the people who are gung-ho about low-energy supersymmetry. These people need to go away. They need to not be in control of the field. They not need to be not in control of the purse strings. They need to be diminished in their stature and their status. They need not to be revered. They don't need to be giving all of the talks at the beginning of every goddamn important thing just because we think that they're smarter. This is a cosmic screw-up, Stephon, and I'm sorry, but at some level, the Jewish kids who never went in for the Santa Claus story have a right to say, "Hey, there is a miracle, and you guys did do some great stuff. It is true that retail spikes every December. That is a true thing." And I'm not even counting supersymmetry out.

02:01:26
Stephon Alexander: Right.

02:01:26
Eric Weinstein: But the key thing i-

02:01:27
Stephon Alexander: Maybe because some people-

02:01:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:01:28
Stephon Alexander: ... are arguing that you can, you might-

02:01:29
Eric Weinstein: But we have a d-

02:01:30
Stephon Alexander: ... you might find supersymmetry behind it, so

02:01:31
Eric Weinstein: ... but we have a designated winner system.

02:01:33
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:01:33
Eric Weinstein: And the designated winner system says that certain co- kids are the cool kids, and that they always get to win because they're smarter than everyone else.

02:01:41
Stephon Alexander: Right. That is definitely, um-

02:01:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay. They're not.

02:01:44
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:01:45
Eric Weinstein: Because the, even if they are neurally more advanced, even if they are more knowledgeable, their inability to reconcile themselves with their own cosmic, repeated, extensive failure constitutes scientific malpractice, and they deserve to lose, and a lot of new voices, particularly voices that never went in for this, deserve to ascend, and these people deserve to be diminished. What am I getting wrong?

02:02:16
Stephon Alexander: Um, um, I would say that, um, I definitely, what I am for, okay, is exactly these other voices. Um, other physicists That have put out other ideas. Um, and they should, um, attention should be paid and, uh, resources should be, you know, um, shared so that those others-

02:02:51
Eric Weinstein: No, somebody should be able... A, a graduate student should be able to say, "Why am I listening to more of this stuff? Why is it that you are giving the plenary? Why are we listening to your recounting, your narrative, your telling? Did you not say with fair clarity that you were convinced that these were the solutions and this was what would happen? If you did, I'm not telling you that you should, you know, be consigned to the dustbin of history, but why do you get to keep control, and why do I still care about what you think at the same level as I did when you had said, 'Don't worry, we've got this'? 'Cause you didn't. You failed."

02:03:32
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:03:33
Eric Weinstein: Why aren't we doing science?

02:03:34
Stephon Alexander: Who gets invited to the reindeer games?

02:03:36
Eric Weinstein: Who gets in [laughs] who gets in... What's going on with Rudolph? How many Rudolphs are out there?

02:03:41
Stephon Alexander: I mean, there's a, I mean, there is a sociological element to, to this.

02:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what I'm trying to say.

02:03:46
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:03:46
Eric Weinstein: Why... Let's talk revolution. Let's talk revolution. Let's talk revolution in physics, because we're all scared. Because we know that if we say that the people who are in control of the field, in control of the purse strings, in control of the journals, and if we say, "You shouldn't be. You stayed too long. You got it wrong. You couldn't reconcile yourself. We understand your failure. We actually love you, and we actually haven't given up on supersymmetry as much as you might think we have, but your naive hopes and implementations are offensive to the history of science, full stop."

02:04:23
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. I mean, basically what I'm hearing is can we let other people play in the band? I mean-

02:04:29
Eric Weinstein: How about the idea... Well, so we were talking about jazz before.

02:04:32
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, that's kind of a-

02:04:33
Eric Weinstein: You ever have a situation-

02:04:34
Stephon Alexander: That's right

02:04:34
Eric Weinstein: ... where somebody takes a solo and they go through one chorus and two chorus and then seven chorus, and they're like, everybody else is looking at this guy. How many choruses do you expect to take for, for your, uh, your bass solo?

02:04:46
Stephon Alexander: That's right, and there's a collective, you know, there's a collective agreement that if that happens, you know, [laughs] you need to get off the stage and let somebody else get on.

02:04:55
Eric Weinstein: Right. I mean-

02:04:56
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:04:56
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, it's, it's pretty dangerous when-

02:04:58
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:04:58
Eric Weinstein: ... you're on stage with some good people to decide that you're the only... You know, what was that line from David Bowie, you know, about Ziggy? He was the special one. I forget whether-

02:05:09
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

02:05:09
Eric Weinstein: He was the special man.

02:05:11
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yes. I-

02:05:12
Eric Weinstein: You know, but where were the, wh- where, where were the spiders, man? Where are the spiders?

02:05:15
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. I mean, all I can say is I know, you know, within the domain that I, I exist at my uni- university or my research group-

02:05:23
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:05:23
Stephon Alexander: ... I definitely give voice to, to my students and the, the researchers around me, right, that work, um, with me to ac- to, you know, to explore, um, and ideas and also disagree with me. Um, th- you know, I am perfectly comfortable, um, with that kind of discomfort and, and with also being wrong. Um, because I was taught by my, my mentors and my teachers, who are actually great physicists, Leon Cooper being one of them, um-

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Great physicist at Brown.

02:05:59
Stephon Alexander: At Brown, right.

02:06:00
Eric Weinstein: Who figured out how fermions could behave the way bosons, uh, behave by pairing up and giving us superconductivity.

02:06:08
Stephon Alexander: Superconductivity. Um-

02:06:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:06:09
Stephon Alexander: ... um, which is, um, to really solve difficult problems in physics, um, you first have to respect the difficulty, and you might have to take many different takes on it, and, and you might end up having many failed models, but you need to generate, um, different strategies and different, you know, an array, a pluralism of different ideas. And not bank on one i- or, you know, one or a, a limited set of ideas, but to, you know-

02:06:42
Eric Weinstein: How do we take-

02:06:42
Stephon Alexander: ... create opportunities for people to have-

02:06:43
Eric Weinstein: How do we take back-

02:06:43
Stephon Alexander: ... many different ideas

02:06:44
Eric Weinstein: ... how do we take back this field? You know the, you know the old adage, I think, was it Planck who said that science proceeds funeral by funeral?

02:06:54
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:06:54
Eric Weinstein: I don't wanna have to wait for the deaths-

02:06:56
Stephon Alexander: No, no, no

02:06:56
Eric Weinstein: ... and I don't wanna have to, I don't wanna have to kill anybody. How do we proceed [laughs] so that we're not waiting for funeral by funeral? Uh, this is boring. It's, I just can't stand listening to the same voices anymore.

02:07:05
Stephon Alexander: I think, I think, I think, um, one thing, one thing that has re- proven to work in the past, um, was first of all... So you probably know that I am, um, you know, I, I'm, I'm, I, I, I play a leadership role in, um, in an organization called the National Society of Black Physicists.

02:07:23
Eric Weinstein: You told me I was an advisor.

02:07:25
Stephon Alexander: Um, yes, you're gonna be one of those, yeah.

02:07:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But I, and I told you that you should probably take a little bit careful look at who you're asking-

02:07:34
Stephon Alexander: I-

02:07:34
Eric Weinstein: ... with my porcine hue.

02:07:36
Stephon Alexander: Um, you know, you know, um, some people define, um, Blackness as a, um, a state of, um, stigma, social stigma.

02:07:46
Eric Weinstein: Social stigma.

02:07:46
Stephon Alexander: So, you know, I think you-

02:07:47
Eric Weinstein: Thank, thank you, sir.

02:07:48
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

02:07:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:07:48
Stephon Alexander: Um, so, um-

02:07:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so what are you gonna do with the Society-

02:07:52
Stephon Alexander: So I think-

02:07:53
Eric Weinstein: ... of Black Physicists?

02:07:54
Stephon Alexander: So for example, and one of the things I, I s- I said at our national meeting-

02:07:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:07:58
Stephon Alexander: ... um, I had to give, um, you know, um, a, a talk to the entire community. I said, "We do not have, as physicists, as Black physicists, we don't have the leisure to exist in silos." And what I meant by silos, I meant sort of intellectual silos.

02:08:16
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:08:17
Stephon Alexander: That, you know, this, this notion of, um, if you have a, say a, in theoretical physics, different bifurcations of subfields within-

02:08:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:08:26
Stephon Alexander: ... the, um, the umbrella of theory. Um, the reason why Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer was able to solve the 46-year-old problem of superconductivity when everybody else worked on it, Einstein, Feynman-

02:08:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:08:38
Stephon Alexander: ... Heisenberg, Schrödinger, they all worked on it and failed. Similarly, they similarly failed Um, it was because actually Cooper was actually a particle physicist-

02:08:52
Eric Weinstein: Outsider

02:08:52
Stephon Alexander: ... that moved, uh, an outsider. He was an outsider-

02:08:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what I-

02:08:55
Stephon Alexander: ... and Bardeen engaged that outsider.

02:08:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is-

02:08:58
Stephon Alexander: And I think that we, I think one revolutionary thing to, uh, and it's not that revolutionary, it actually happened before in the past.

02:09:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:09:07
Stephon Alexander: Somehow, um, this, in other words, we need to have people from different walks of this theory game, including people outside of the academy. All right? We need to have, um, opportunities, real opportunities for crosstalk to happen, real crosstalk. Um-

02:09:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, you just, you just pulled me in, for example-

02:09:29
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:09:29
Eric Weinstein: ... to a quantum foundation seminar-

02:09:31
Stephon Alexander: That's right

02:09:31
Eric Weinstein: ... which I didn't expect to end up-

02:09:33
Stephon Alexander: That's right

02:09:34
Eric Weinstein: ... almost teaching.

02:09:35
Stephon Alexander: That's right. You did, and they learned something from you, and these, and this is one of the top groups in the world for quantum foundations, by the way.

02:09:41
Eric Weinstein: I didn't know that.

02:09:42
Stephon Alexander: Yes, yes. That's where Jack, uh, Haranoff is at.

02:09:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, Serge.

02:09:45
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, Serge. Right.

02:09:46
Eric Weinstein: This is the-

02:09:47
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, amongst other people. And so the reason why that is interesting is I didn't realize I, I, that, um, I was, 'cause I'm kind of like this, which is that I, if I know something extremely well-

02:10:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:10:01
Stephon Alexander: ... and there are very few things I know extremely well, but in f- in my field, um, which is the interface of particle physics and cosmology, there are some things that I'm highly published in and I know it really well.

02:10:13
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:10:14
Stephon Alexander: I'm not interested in talking to people that know exactly that stuff. I'm interested in talking to people that know things that I don't know, and people also that will challenge me and make me, and will actually challenge the assumptions that I'm making. But, uh, because I see that, that's where the growth, that's where the opportunity to find something new is gonna be.

02:10:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But I w-

02:10:32
Stephon Alexander: And that is very different, I think, than the, the model that, um, I inherited throughout my, my grown-up years in physics-

02:10:40
Eric Weinstein: But let-

02:10:41
Stephon Alexander: ... theoretical physics.

02:10:41
Eric Weinstein: Let's explore something that's quite dangerous, which I don't think people really talk about, which is what is the really huge benefit, quite, quite frankly, a lot of time when we're, when, a lot of the time when we're talking about the need for minority groups or underrepresented groups to be present in the sciences, there's a secret undercurrent of we should lower our standards to get people who can't quite cut it to come into the field because it's like a good for you thing. And so even though we're gonna ta- tax the field by not having the, quite the level of people you'd get if it was a pure meritocracy, it would still be good for our soul.

02:11:22
Stephon Alexander: Right.

02:11:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay. There's a different cut on this-

02:11:26
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:11:26
Eric Weinstein: ... which is monoculture. The problem that happened in theoretical physics with strings, with supersymmetry, with the lying, with the over s- promotion, with telling everyone else that they didn't know what was going on, with one group taking ov-

02:11:41
Stephon Alexander: But you're just one man.

02:11:41
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm, I'm on a roll-

02:11:42
Stephon Alexander: Okay, yes, yes

02:11:43
Eric Weinstein: ... and I'm not gonna be quiet. All right. Yeah. I'm an uppity white man, [laughs] right? Now, here's the issue. The Black church, for example, in American politics, was hugely important and influential because it was a different distributional system. It was a different place to get your information, to get your analysis. It has faded in importance, but because the Black church was a counterweight, anything that went wrong inside of the dominant system, at least we had a backup system. You know, it's like if you go scuba diving, you've got the main regulator that you're using, but you also have your backup regulator called your octopus in case something goes wrong. Under any telling of the tale, I think in Bush v. Gore, everybody who didn't want Gore to concede the race, I think, was Black, right?

02:12:31
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:12:31
Eric Weinstein: And there's just this idea of we need other cultures to be strong enough and present, not as some sort of good for you fiber that you're supposed to eat but nobody actually likes it, but because goddammit, this monoculture problem is huge.

02:12:48
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:12:48
Eric Weinstein: And to your point about Blackness-

02:12:50
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:12:51
Eric Weinstein: ... the reason that I am excited about race in science is not any of this-

02:12:57
Stephon Alexander: Kumbaya

02:12:57
Eric Weinstein: ... kumbaya bullshit. It's because, uh, do you remember the, a night that you and I had dinner with James Gates and Neil deGrasse Tyson?

02:13:07
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:13:07
Eric Weinstein: And, like, I was the white guy at the table.

02:13:09
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

02:13:09
Eric Weinstein: Otherwise, it was just high-level Black physics talk.

02:13:12
Stephon Alexander: That's right.

02:13:13
Eric Weinstein: Right. And it took place at a, in a totally different idiom. The cadences were different. The rhythm was different. It was the same subject matter, but it was happening at a different level. I want-

02:13:25
Stephon Alexander: It was jazz.

02:13:26
Eric Weinstein: It was jazz, right? And the, and the riffing and the ideas, it was-

02:13:30
Stephon Alexander: And this is nothing new, by the way. I mean-

02:13:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, no kidding

02:13:32
Stephon Alexander: ... it's, it's nothing new because, you know, when I went, when I, after I did my, I mean, yeah, when I went overseas to Europe to, um, to do theory-

02:13:41
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:13:41
Stephon Alexander: ... um, theory work, I realized that, like, you know, the British, right, I mean, the way they did physics-

02:13:47
Eric Weinstein: Is different

02:13:48
Stephon Alexander: ... very different, and the French. I mean, I'm talking about it's a human activity, and, you know, people's culture-

02:13:53
Eric Weinstein: Can we talk about the National Front?

02:13:53
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:13:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:13:54
Stephon Alexander: What do you-

02:13:55
Eric Weinstein: Um, I just had Roger Penrose.

02:13:56
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:13:57
Eric Weinstein: Those guys tolerate real eccentricity, very quirky, very individualistic, and historically, it's very important that there be-

02:14:05
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, Chris Isham was an ex- a great example.

02:14:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:14:08
Stephon Alexander: He would never, I mean, he, he's a very eccentric and brilliant physicist, um, English physicist.

02:14:13
Eric Weinstein: Dennis Sciama.

02:14:14
Stephon Alexander: Right.

02:14:14
Eric Weinstein: Um, Dirac, all of the, and Dirac was, you know, transplanted French. It really matters to me that there is something that we can call British physics as opposed to homogenized physics that happens to be located in Britain.

02:14:28
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:14:29
Eric Weinstein: French.

02:14:30
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:14:30
Eric Weinstein: If you think about the Bourbaki school-

02:14:32
Stephon Alexander: And, and, right, and there's a linguistic element. I mean, there are cognitive scientists that study how language, um, you know-

02:14:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:14:38
Stephon Alexander: ... affects thought. I mean, um, Lera Boroditsky, right?

02:14:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:14:42
Stephon Alexander: She, that's, she's, that's her work.

02:14:44
Eric Weinstein: So I think we're afraid to say, for example, I mean, the French use elegance as a weapon Right? The, the, the Italians have had a surplus of style in, in mathematics. It, it surfaced in the crazed, uh, lack of rigor in the Italian algebraic geometry tradition that eventually got it into trouble, but they were just so swashbuckling and debonair and cool about the whole thing that they were able to do stuff. The Russians, their psychotic attachment to abstraction, power, and one-upsmanship, you know, these were really important different national characters. What really bothers me-

02:15:24
Stephon Alexander: I mean, Albert Einstein was a jazz physicist, very improvisational

02:15:27
Eric Weinstein: ... very improvisational, um, and also willing to take risks. All of these things about how he blundered and he wasted his years, my feeling is, good God, that, that's like the third string talking about the superstars and not understanding that you're never going to get to be Herbie Hancock or Miles Davis if you, if you don't play sour notes now and again.

02:15:47
Stephon Alexander: You know, this, this ev- this is, um, getting a little bit, uh, tad personal because one of the things that I was told after, um, r- right before I was gonna go off to graduate school by a sociology professor of mine who actually, um, I took many classes with him, and it was Bill Hohenstein. I'm actually tomorrow flying out to go celebrate his 80th birthday.

02:16:10
Eric Weinstein: No kidding.

02:16:10
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, he said, he said, "Hey, Keith," so I'm like, um, Ken- uh, you know, um, Irish working class, um, roots in Philadelphia. Um, and he goes... I said, "Bill, you know, I'm going off to grad school to make it, to try to do physics." He goes, "Well, kiddo, you know, if you, if you make it, and this, I'm not saying that it's gonna be easy, but if you make it, and if you, especially if you make it big..." [laughs] And I'm like, "Me, make it big?" Um, he goes, "It's important that you're not just a physicist, but that you're a Black physicist." And I remember, "What the heck's this guy saying?"

02:16:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, what is that?

02:16:45
Stephon Alexander: What is it?

02:16:46
Eric Weinstein: Doesn't sound-

02:16:46
Stephon Alexander: What's this about?

02:16:46
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't make sense at first

02:16:47
Stephon Alexander: ... makes any sense at first.

02:16:48
Eric Weinstein: Right? Agree.

02:16:49
Stephon Alexander: At first. Now it makes sense. [clears throat] Um, if a f- if, you know, a state trooper pulls me over-

02:16:56
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:16:56
Stephon Alexander: ... [laughs] and, you know, clearly they're seeing something, like, a, a pattern if I get pulled over a lot more than average, and that-

02:17:03
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:17:03
Stephon Alexander: ... did happen to me for some period of time when I, I was a younger professor-

02:17:07
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:17:07
Stephon Alexander: ... with long dreadlocks, wearing a nice suit, and driving a really nice car.

02:17:10
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:17:11
Stephon Alexander: Um, um, so clearly there's something about me that stands out there. Um, that's obviously not what Bill is talking about. Um, but I guess there is something to say about being comfortable in one's skin.

02:17:33
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:17:34
Stephon Alexander: Um, and while I will be the last person to want to monol- lith- lithize for... Is that the correct word? Um-

02:17:45
Eric Weinstein: Position, right

02:17:45
Stephon Alexander: ... blackness, yeah, yeah, um, as one category of being.

02:17:51
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:17:51
Stephon Alexander: Um, you know, v- what, what I was hearing from Bill was the opposite of that, which is don't dilute, don't try to just fit in and-

02:18:05
Eric Weinstein: Don't give away your difference-

02:18:07
Stephon Alexander: ... talk and act, and yeah

02:18:07
Eric Weinstein: ... your gift.

02:18:08
Stephon Alexander: Don't give out my difference-

02:18:09
Eric Weinstein: You go do a lesser version of the other thing.

02:18:10
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:18:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:18:11
Stephon Alexander: There was something... And, and so when I did make it, by, when I, when I make it, um, it was really important for me that the, I was gonna do my best thinking when I was my best me, okay? Um, and there were pressures-

02:18:28
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:18:28
Stephon Alexander: ... for me to sort of fit into that cultural mode of the way the culture of, of doing physics, right? And that was not me. That was not the guy that, the Trinidadian kid that grew up in the Bronx, okay? Yes, I mean, my culture got modified. I mean, I got modified, and my beha- well, as I went through Ivy League schools and things like that.

02:18:51
Eric Weinstein: You, you, you know how to behave in-

02:18:52
Stephon Alexander: Right

02:18:52
Eric Weinstein: ... the dominant culture.

02:18:54
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:18:54
Eric Weinstein: What I love about, I mean, I just saw you lecture yesterday, was it yesterday or two days ago? I can't even remember, at Chapman, is is that you lecture as yourself, and there is, I mean, to, to abuse the word, there is more flavor. There is-

02:19:10
Stephon Alexander: Right.

02:19:10
Eric Weinstein: And, and I'll be honest with you. I've collaborated with you. We've never published a paper together, but we've worked together.

02:19:15
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, your ideas have influenced me.

02:19:16
Eric Weinstein: A- and yours, and yours have influenced me. I'm in a different head when I work with you. I'm less perfectionistic. I'm more intuitionistic. I'm much more in flow. My, I, I allow my m- you know, because I, I, I don't really play jazz, but I sit down and improv enough that I can... If, if people are super nice to me, I can kind of hang with them, and sometimes th- th- they take a certain amount of interest because I'm interested in, in, in other things. I've gotten addicted to what it's like to hang out with people who live in flow states and who prioritize creativity and being generative much more than initially checking whether every no-go theorem has been satisfied.

02:19:59
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, and there's value to both, and, um, in my case-

02:20:02
Eric Weinstein: There's value to both.

02:20:03
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:20:03
Eric Weinstein: Because the, the blessing-

02:20:04
Stephon Alexander: But you need both

02:20:05
Eric Weinstein: ... blessed be, blessed-

02:20:06
Stephon Alexander: But it's, it's good to have both.

02:20:07
Eric Weinstein: But we don't... But the thing that I think that's different-

02:20:10
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:20:10
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and I'm gonna just pull some supremacy over here-

02:20:13
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:20:13
Eric Weinstein: ... is I don't see you or I wanting to murder the string theorists.

02:20:20
Stephon Alexander: Oh.

02:20:20
Eric Weinstein: I want them diminished. I want them with less power, less control, less money. I don't want them w- speaking on behalf of the entire community the way they have.

02:20:30
Stephon Alexander: Oh, be nice to them.

02:20:31
Eric Weinstein: No, to hell with that. I'm, so you can't be an angry Black man, but I can. I, I'm tired, and it, it's a, it, it's too long, and the idea that everybody whose funding ha- i- is tied to that community has to be careful is a travesty, and the glorious thing is, is that I'm gonna sell toothbrushes and nutritional supplements and watches against this program, and that's gonna give me the a- a- the academic freedom that that system would never have given me And because I have sponsors and ads that I inflict on my audience, and some of them can't stand it and they leave, but the rest... No, I'm not kidding.

02:21:08
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:21:09
Eric Weinstein: The fact is, is that I'm gonna sell a, a sub- subscription to a wine company, and I'm gonna have the right to say, "It's too much David Gross. It's too much Ed Witten. Those guys are brilliant and they're terrific, but they need to fade into the background because we need to hear other voices." The, the, the-

02:21:27
Stephon Alexander: But wait, wait, I have a question. Why, why, why... I mean, can, can we have... Because there's certainly a lot we can, we can learn from both, uh, from... They have a lot of technology to teach us, right? So why does it have to be one or the other?

02:21:43
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:21:43
Stephon Alexander: Why can't we-

02:21:44
Eric Weinstein: I'm dining a la carte.

02:21:45
Stephon Alexander: No. No. Mm-hmm.

02:21:47
Eric Weinstein: I- i- if you a- y- you know me fairly well.

02:21:49
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:21:49
Eric Weinstein: If you, if, if you were to ask me who's the most important mind now working in theoretical physics, whether it's-

02:21:57
Stephon Alexander: It's, it's, it's Ed Witten.

02:21:58
Eric Weinstein: It's Ed Witten.

02:21:59
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:22:00
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Don't ever tell me that I'm diminishing Ed Witten by saying that I don't want to hear his pronouncements on how string theory is the only interesting thing going on in physics. You know, at least it's interesting.

02:22:13
Stephon Alexander: It's interesting, but there are other interesting developments-

02:22:16
Eric Weinstein: No, no

02:22:16
Stephon Alexander: ... that are happening right now.

02:22:16
Eric Weinstein: Even if there isn't. Even if there isn't.

02:22:18
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:22:18
Eric Weinstein: It's a chilling effect.

02:22:19
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:22:20
Eric Weinstein: In other words, Ed is, Ed is the number one insight machine in this area. His leadership is not at the same level. His leadership has been lacking, you know? They, they say about Ronald Reagan that he was a third-rate intellect, but a first-rate, uh, a, a f- f- first-rate intuition. Okay. Ed Witten is an absolutely first-rate researcher, but he's not a first-rate leader of the field, nor was David Gross a first-rate leader of the field. Nima might be, might blossom into a first-rate leader of the field.

02:23:02
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:23:02
Eric Weinstein: He's got a more interesting, more playful, more-

02:23:05
Stephon Alexander: Yes, yes, yes

02:23:06
Eric Weinstein: ... hopeful, more, more optimistic perspective. And if-

02:23:08
Stephon Alexander: No, Nima's always been, um... Nima's been, like, every time I would come to Nima with a crazy idea-

02:23:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:23:14
Stephon Alexander: ... he would engage it, and he would actually throw something back at me.

02:23:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, and I don't think that-

02:23:19
Stephon Alexander: Um, yeah

02:23:19
Eric Weinstein: ... Nima does not have the depth that Ed-

02:23:21
Stephon Alexander: But also, you know-

02:23:22
Eric Weinstein: ... that Ed has, that Ed has already shown us is true. But-

02:23:25
Stephon Alexander: I can only speak from my experience, but, you know, my limited experiences with, with, even with Ed, even when I was at the Institute for Advanced Studies-

02:23:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:23:31
Stephon Alexander: ... as, right, he, you know, he actually, he was... You know, he actually, um, engaged my ideas as well and, um, s- s- you know, I, I learned a lot from him.

02:23:46
Eric Weinstein: Ed can see-

02:23:47
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:23:47
Eric Weinstein: ... very quickly-

02:23:48
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:23:48
Eric Weinstein: ... what is wrong with whatever you're doing.

02:23:50
Stephon Alexander: Oh, he's very good at that.

02:23:51
Eric Weinstein: Not only that. No, no, no, let's give him, let's give him all of his due, 'cause nobody's trying to take anything away from these people.

02:23:56
Stephon Alexander: Right. We're just trying to give-

02:23:59
Eric Weinstein: No, but the-

02:24:00
Stephon Alexander: ... to others.

02:24:02
Eric Weinstein: Ed both can see what's wrong with an idea almost instantaneously. He can also see that you're not pushing it far enough. He can see the, the domain of abstraction that that idea is meant for. If you look at the number of theories that began as one, two, or three names, and then has a dash Witten on the end, so like you have Chern-Simons becomes Chern-Simons-Witten, right? Or, um, Wes Zemino becomes Wes Zemino-Witten, because they didn't see the full power of the theory. So dash Witten was this thing that happened. If you left anything on the table, Ed saw it and figured out what to do and put it in its final and proper place.

02:24:41
Stephon Alexander: Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

02:24:42
Eric Weinstein: Brilliant.

02:24:42
Stephon Alexander: Genius, yeah.

02:24:43
Eric Weinstein: Right?

02:24:43
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:24:44
Eric Weinstein: What a poet. Mm-hmm.

02:24:45
Stephon Alexander: Yes. Yes. His papers are just in- I mean, they are... I, I just remember when a, a new Witten paper would come out when I was a postdoc, I would-

02:24:53
Eric Weinstein: Oh my God, he's incredible

02:24:55
Stephon Alexander: ... freak myself, print it out, and go up to my, my, go up to the cafe and just, you know, get a nice latte and read this paper and en- and really, you know, get so much out of it.

02:25:05
Eric Weinstein: A- and I can't do it justice. I've been out of this t- this game for, like, 20 years in, in general, uh, and I was never a physicist, but they always had the same structure. It would be like, "It is a long-standing puzzle in such and such theory that..." and then something that m- many people had never heard of. Then he would say something like, um, "There are some interesting results of so and so that re- remain inconclusive. In this paper..." [laughs] And then he would say what it is that he does.

02:25:32
Stephon Alexander: Right. Right.

02:25:32
Eric Weinstein: Like, and it would have this kind of relentless form, and it was enervating. And I don't know whether you know this, but I have a playlist, I don't remember whether I've released it to the public, called The Meeting Jimi Hendrix Story, and it's a collection of every great guitarist's experience meeting Jimi Hendrix, and it's always the same. And it always sounds like, "I was the top guitarist in my little area. Then I heard one day that there was a guy named Jimi Hendrix who wanted to come see me. He jacked into my Marshall stack. I heard him play for five minutes. I never wanted to touch the guitar again." You know?

02:26:08
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:26:08
Eric Weinstein: And so Ed had this effect because we all saw the wonder that was that particular human mind at that particular time. It was a perfect fit. Take all of that. That's enough reverence for one person that I don't think any fair person can claim that Ed, I'm trying to rob him of any of that. Not a great leader.

02:26:29
Stephon Alexander: Okay. Yeah.

02:26:30
Eric Weinstein: And the problem of giving that much authority to the person with that capability, and the other one of these was David Gross, because David-

02:26:41
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:26:41
Eric Weinstein: ... Gross came from the part of the world that had made contact with experiment, so he was sort of part of the last group to m- to do the th- physics in the way that we think of physics, that you make a theory and you check to see whether experiment corroborates, et cetera, et cetera. David infused string theory with his kind of traditional physics cache. He was the guy who made the transition from one world into the other I think that those two voices were, I mean, unbelievable physicists. Nobody will ever take anything away from them. Lots of things happened under the string theory program. Many of them may be useful in the future. A disaster in physics leadership.

02:27:25
Stephon Alexander: Um, you know, obviously I'm from a, a different, like a different sort of-

02:27:31
Eric Weinstein: No, I'm not saying-

02:27:31
Stephon Alexander: ... trajectory and perspective. Yeah

02:27:32
Eric Weinstein: ... this isn't your, this isn't you speaking.

02:27:33
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:27:34
Eric Weinstein: We're friends.

02:27:34
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:27:35
Eric Weinstein: You're, you're not responsible for my ranting and railing.

02:27:38
Stephon Alexander: But we're friends, and, um, that's what friends are for.

02:27:41
Eric Weinstein: That's what friends are for.

02:27:42
Stephon Alexander: And, but, and I- but there are, there are some, uh, you know, you... I wanna kind of loop back to, because, um, you m- you did mention what, um, you talked about the, you know, right now one, one word, um, that is sort of, you know, sort of pervasive across, um, wait, across, um, institutions and, you know, espe- academic institutions.

02:28:09
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:28:09
Stephon Alexander: Diversity and inclusion, right?

02:28:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:28:12
Stephon Alexander: And, you know, what comes with that sometimes, though, is that there is a unspoken sentiment, which is why do, you know, if we do this, it comes at sacrificing.

02:28:25
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:28:25
Stephon Alexander: This is kind of what we're talking about. And, and I think that we should look, take a, you know, a deeper look at that, right? Instead of-

02:28:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you wanna actually have that conversation? I'd love to do that.

02:28:36
Stephon Alexander: Yes, I'd like to have a conversation.

02:28:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So-

02:28:38
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:28:38
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm of two minds.

02:28:39
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:28:39
Eric Weinstein: I'm just gonna b- I'm gonna open myself up a- and say what I think a lot of people-

02:28:44
Stephon Alexander: Please

02:28:44
Eric Weinstein: ... might wanna say.

02:28:45
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:28:47
Eric Weinstein: I do not want diversity and inclusion to the extent that I'm filling one of the few spots on a life raft with a person just so we can say that that seat has been filled by somebody who has some characteristic. They're crippled, they're, uh, they descended from slaves, they're transgendered. Um, whatever weird characteristic that is, it's an irrelevancy to a scientist.

02:29:18
Stephon Alexander: Okay, good. That's interesting.

02:29:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:29:20
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

02:29:21
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, if they carry their otherness in a way that makes them understand the importance of seeing different perspectives, so for example, being female or being Kurdish or being Black or being learning disabled or being in a wheelchair, if any one of those things informs their inspec- their perspective so that they become more disagreeable, more willing to say, "Hey, you are forming a monoculture," then you're getting the real benefit of diversity and inclusion. You're not sitting there saying, "I wanna have the nth version of women in science." You're saying, "As a woman in science, let me tell you, you can't see what's going on."

02:30:11
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:30:11
Eric Weinstein: "You can't see the way you're forming a hierarchy around that person."

02:30:15
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:30:15
Eric Weinstein: "And I'm not interested in talking about women in science today. I'm interested in pointing out that you're forming a monoculture, and that the concentration of risk that that's going to entail is psychotic because there is not enough evidence to reach the conclusions you're, you're reaching as strongly as you are. And if this world were not quite so amenable to fealty, we would have a more diverse portfolio of ideas, and the diversity of personal characteristics would be reflected in the diversity of approaches." I would welcome diversity and inclusion.

02:30:54
Stephon Alexander: Yes. As you should because of, because of that. And I guess I would, um... I think that two things that from, and it, I can only speak also, I mean, I've thought a lot about this from, you know, also academically, but just putting myself into this as well. Um, let's say that there is, um, a position, and the position says, "Look, you know, I'm, you know, there are certain metrics-

02:31:26
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:31:26
Stephon Alexander: ... of, uh, that, that this position actually calls for." And let's say that I, as a Black person, um, meets all of those things-

02:31:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:31:39
Stephon Alexander: ... at the highest level, right? The issue sometimes is when my being different-

02:31:48
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:31:49
Stephon Alexander: ... and if that difference is already, um, seen to be, um, at a disadvan- like, you know, that it's not valued, all right? To a... Because the, in, in science at least, in science the metric is also who is going to bring in maybe a new idea-

02:32:09
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:32:10
Stephon Alexander: ... or a different way of, of a different way of approaching a problem-

02:32:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:32:14
Stephon Alexander: ... that doesn't exist yet. And, you know, given that's why you're probably hiring that scientist.

02:32:20
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:32:21
Stephon Alexander: Right? The issue here is the presumptions that people make that if you're different and you don't fit into the norms-

02:32:30
Eric Weinstein: That the only reason is 'cause you couldn't hack it

02:32:32
Stephon Alexander: ... the normative practices of that order-

02:32:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:32:34
Stephon Alexander: ... that somehow you being who you are-

02:32:36
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:32:36
Stephon Alexander: ... and having these, these, um-

02:32:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:32:38
Stephon Alexander: ... these other, these, um, um, let's call them characteristics, um, intellectual or whatever you wanna say that's associated with my race is actually pre-

02:32:48
Eric Weinstein: In my, in my case, my learning issues

02:32:50
Stephon Alexander: ... presumed. So all things considered, I, I have, I have the skill sets, I have everything, but you're not, but the issue, you're uncomfortable because by my being in that sphere of existence actually creates a level of discomfort, and is also perceived, um, to not be valued, valuable in that metric of actually making a-

02:33:13
Eric Weinstein: But you've gotta deal-

02:33:13
Stephon Alexander: ... making a contribution.

02:33:14
Eric Weinstein: See, you've gotta d-

02:33:14
Stephon Alexander: That's the issue here, which is that it's underlying, um, I think the backlash of diversity Um, initiatives is that first, if you don't actually value exactly what you were saying-

02:33:28
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:33:28
Stephon Alexander: ... that, that difference is gonna be, is actually something that could be useful. But I think the presumption that needs to be dealt with is that maybe it's not valued. It's seen as a negative, and it's seen as potentially coming in and interfering with the flow.

02:33:47
Eric Weinstein: Did you, did you hear my episode with my brother on this program?

02:33:51
Stephon Alexander: No, I, I was... I'm intending to watch it, yeah. I intend to watch.

02:33:53
Eric Weinstein: So I had to do a very difficult thing with him, which is I had to say, "Do you understand that you're not being taken-"

02:33:58
Stephon Alexander: This is Bret, right?

02:33:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:34:00
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:34:00
Eric Weinstein: "You're not being taken seriously by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and the top evolutionary theorists because they don't understand who you are or what you've done. And so the idea is that they-"

02:34:12
Stephon Alexander: Right.

02:34:12
Eric Weinstein: "... took some indicia, which is, 'Oh, we discovered you at some weirdo, far-left, tiny college that nobody cares about in the research circuit called Evergreen State.' And as a result, you're typecast."

02:34:25
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:34:26
Eric Weinstein: Right?

02:34:26
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:34:27
Eric Weinstein: Now, I'm gonna say the same difficult thing to you and to me.

02:34:30
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:34:30
Eric Weinstein: So I'm gonna s- spare m- neither of us. In my case, "Oh, that's that crazy guy with a podcast who thinks that he's onto something, and he thinks just because he's somewhat entertaining and he has a following because he got onto c- Joe Rogan, that he's allowed to tell the great gods that maybe he has some ideas about physics and math." That's what they say about me. What they say about you, "He got his position not because he's very smart or has an interesting perspective, but because the field is desperate for Black people to show that we have diversity and inclusion."

02:35:04
Stephon Alexander: Well-

02:35:04
Eric Weinstein: And you are carrying that around, and I'm carrying that around. Now, here's my point. I don't wanna shirk f- I don't wanna shrink from it.

02:35:12
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:35:13
Eric Weinstein: I know that that's what they're saying. They wanna say this.

02:35:15
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:35:16
Eric Weinstein: Furthermore, right, it... You know how people fixate? Like, I'll be honest, there are certain people who are Black who I can't get over the fact that they're Black. There are other people [laughs] who I'm like, it's not a big deal, doesn't occur to me. It's just like, "Let's talk." We don't even know why our brains keep track of this stuff, and it's not all about racism or not racism. We can't even check our own prejudices. It is so bizarre to me that with everything that I know about you and everything I know about me, we're still dealing with this bullshit. Like, for example-

02:35:54
Stephon Alexander: It's a very deep-

02:35:55
Eric Weinstein: It's, it's deep

02:35:56
Stephon Alexander: ... problem to solve. I mean-

02:35:58
Eric Weinstein: And, and, and you hear it-

02:35:59
Stephon Alexander: Um-

02:35:59
Eric Weinstein: ... in your own mind. Like, here's the weird thing.

02:36:01
Stephon Alexander: That's why I, I talk all... I have a friend that's a social psychologist that-

02:36:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:36:04
Stephon Alexander: ... his entire research is this conversation.

02:36:08
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:36:09
Stephon Alexander: Uh.

02:36:09
Eric Weinstein: I know in my own mind that I have these haters who say, you know, "What's he published? What's he done? I don't understand. He's self-promoting." And it's not like I don't know that this dialogue is there. In fact, it's internalized, and it's internalized in you and in me and in everybody who doesn't subscribe-

02:36:28
Stephon Alexander: I was-

02:36:28
Eric Weinstein: ... to dominant merit, narrative

02:36:29
Stephon Alexander: ... I was told when I was a post-doc, I won't, you know... But, um, and it was, uh, that... I mean, I got there and, um... Well, first of all, I was, I benefited tremendously. I learned a lot and, and, and I, it helped me get to where I'm at now.

02:36:44
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:36:45
Stephon Alexander: So I'm very grateful. But there was an experience, um, that I did have where, um, it was a very competitive environment, and everybody thought they were number one. It's that one, it's a number one place, uh, Eric. Something weird was happening because this particular place is a very interactive place. The post-docs and professors and grads, they're talking all the time, and I'm there. And I, I want, I'm telling this story because time and time and time and time again, I mean, I've been a professor for, like, 14 years now.

02:37:15
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:37:15
Stephon Alexander: And now the students, um, the minority students and, um, and the women students in my, throughout my, you know-

02:37:25
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:37:25
Stephon Alexander: ... trajectory, I hear these similar stories. So, and this story was, um, at a place that everyone is talking, and I'm in an office, and no one is talking to me. I would have an idea. I'd start talking to another person, and nobody would talk. So I was sort of shunned.

02:37:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:37:44
Stephon Alexander: And, um, at some point I was like, "Well, is it me? Like, are my ideas silly?" Because I, I do generate also silly ideas as well.

02:37:55
Eric Weinstein: You generate wrong ideas.

02:37:56
Stephon Alexander: I generate wrong ideas.

02:37:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:37:58
Stephon Alexander: Um, but one of the things... And one day, uh, a good friend of mine, um, who is, um... Well, let me j- uh, this friend of mine who is someone I've known for a long time and is a very, has a razor-sharp perception of things. He was visiting from Caltech, and he was visiting our group, and he, uh, he pulls me over aside. He goes... And this friend of mine is a, he's a white person. Um, and he says to me, "I know what's going on." I was like, "What are you talking about?" Um, and by the way, I, things got so difficult for me that there were days I didn't even wanna, like, I had to fight myself to go to work because people were just not talking to me. I'm trying to figure out why people are not talking to me. He goes, "I know what's going on." I was like, "Well, what is it?" He goes, um, "Yeah, they're, they're treating you like a dog, right?" I was like, "How you know that? You're only here for a couple of days." "Yeah, you know, well, here's what's going on, because I overheard what they were saying. Um, you see, they felt that they work, um, so hard to get to where they're at. They were number one at Harvard, number one at Princeton, and now they're at this place. It's the top place in the world for this thing, and you had it easy."

02:39:18
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:39:19
Stephon Alexander: You, uh, d- you had it re... I mean, I had it easy, you know. You know-

02:39:23
Eric Weinstein: Cakewalk for you

02:39:24
Stephon Alexander: ... growing up, yeah, cakewalk for me growing up in a... But, uh, me and I had it easy because there clearly were affirmative action programs that just made, you know, just opened the door for me, and they had to work so hard. And, you know, I can understand from their perspective if they assumed that this was the case.

02:39:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:39:42
Stephon Alexander: Um, and also that came with this, that I just didn't have the competence. So it became a kind of catch-22 situation because-

02:39:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:39:50
Stephon Alexander: ... how could I get... If, if what they was believing was true-

02:39:53
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:39:53
Stephon Alexander: ... how could I get better if they're not talking to me, right? Because part of the game here is I have to, we, the, it's highly collaborative.

02:40:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:40:01
Stephon Alexander: People are writing papers together.

02:40:02
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:40:03
Stephon Alexander: So as a result, it got interesting. What ended up happening was, um, it, it didn't change much, but it w- at least I knew what they felt. I never really told anybody about it, but my friend told me he heard this, heard people saying this. And I had to swallow this pill and, um, you know, integrate this fact, um, and kind of figure out. And luckily, there were people, there were faculty, um, and a few, and, um, we had the Third World room, the, the other post-docs-

02:40:35
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:40:35
Stephon Alexander: ... one from Iran and one from India, and we, we learned from each other and wrote papers. Um, but anyway, to make a long story short, by the time it came time for me to apply for faculty jobs, um, someone called me on the phone and said, "You know, I was, been pushing for you to get this job." Um, and f- and I, and they said, "We can't find anybody like, you know, um, l- like you." I said, "No, this guy Alexander is right down the street, and he's at, like, a really top place. You should hire him." And they said, "Oh, we know about this guy. Um, he doesn't do the work. He actually rides on people's back. Like, people do stuff, and he gets c- his name's on the paper."

02:41:15
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:41:16
Stephon Alexander: So I said to him, "Hey, um, can you go on the, on- online and actually look at my publication record?"

02:41:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:41:24
Stephon Alexander: You'll notice of the 13 papers that I wrote, that six were single-author papers.

02:41:28
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:41:29
Stephon Alexander: So the, the, the very situation that created, um, the condition for me to write s- independent work still wasn't even enough because the perception, even there when I was looking for a job, persisted, right? That I wasn't a guy. And this still exists. So when we talk about things like diversity and inclusion-

02:41:52
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:41:52
Stephon Alexander: ... even though, yes, w- th- we know that it does bring value, it does bring d- different perspectives-

02:41:59
Eric Weinstein: Can bring value

02:42:01
Stephon Alexander: ... um, when, you know, di- when a particle physice- physicist comes into a, um, to work on a condensed matter problem-

02:42:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:42:09
Stephon Alexander: ... and employs th- those techniques and tools and perspective-

02:42:13
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:42:13
Stephon Alexander: ... in that field, that's diversity-

02:42:14
Eric Weinstein: It is diversity and inclusion. I agree with this

02:42:16
Stephon Alexander: ... and inclusion. Um, but if people are presuming, like my friends when I was a post-doc, that I had it easy, if that is not addressed, and if the, and, if, and if, if it's not valued that maybe, um, regardless of if w- what program that was necessary for me to get in, that actually the experiences I've had and the lessons I've learned and the, and cognitively what I bring to the table-

02:42:46
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:42:46
Stephon Alexander: ... including the fact that I c- actually, I know differential geometry as well.

02:42:50
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:42:50
Stephon Alexander: Right? 'Cause I know my, I knew my stuff. I went through the same educational system, um, that many of them went through. They didn't, they pre, they, there was a presumption. If those presumptions are not dealt with-

02:43:02
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:43:03
Stephon Alexander: ... then people are, the practices are still so, and people are just gonna get, um, more and more, um, resentful.

02:43:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, th- because they, they also-

02:43:13
Stephon Alexander: So the question, how do we s- how do we s- how do we deal with that?

02:43:15
Eric Weinstein: They also can't talk about it.

02:43:16
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:43:16
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, the thing that I've loved about our relationship, and I, I don't know that we've ever even talked about it-

02:43:21
Stephon Alexander: And they can't talk about it. That's right. We have not

02:43:22
Eric Weinstein: ... is is that you and I have always been able to talk about... Like, in part, one of the things I hate about the current woke stuff-

02:43:30
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:43:31
Eric Weinstein: ... is is that you need to go to the most dangerous stuff in order to actually remain close, to know that you've gotten past the bullshit, right? Like, you do-

02:43:40
Stephon Alexander: Like-

02:43:40
Eric Weinstein: If, if we're gonna have a relationship, we have to disposition and negotiate the superficial junk that's gonna keep us apart. Do you remember when you were thinking about leaving?

02:43:49
Stephon Alexander: That's right. I was thinking about leaving academic physics. That's right.

02:43:52
Eric Weinstein: Do you know what was going on with me when you came to talk to me about this?

02:43:55
Stephon Alexander: I did want to know.

02:43:55
Eric Weinstein: How did you come to talk to me?

02:43:57
Stephon Alexander: Well, um, a mutual friend-

02:44:00
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:44:00
Stephon Alexander: ... suggested I, I come to-

02:44:01
Eric Weinstein: Let's name names

02:44:02
Stephon Alexander: ... Lee Smolin.

02:44:03
Eric Weinstein: All right.

02:44:03
Stephon Alexander: Um, a, a, a great friend, um, and colleague-

02:44:08
Eric Weinstein: Yep

02:44:08
Stephon Alexander: ... of mine, um, someone who I trust dearly. I said, "Lee, I'm thinking of, you know, packing my bags and leaving a very cushy, um, tenure track faculty position that many people will be in line waiting for," because I, I had my reasons. Um, and he said, "Before you make this decision, you must talk to my friend Eric Weinstein." That was in the year 2006, I think, 2007.

02:44:36
Eric Weinstein: Around then.

02:44:36
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:44:38
Eric Weinstein: Do you have any idea what was motivating me and what I did?

02:44:43
Stephon Alexander: Well, first of all, let me say that you kept it very real with me. You actually, the things that you said to me, if it were someone else who did not embrace discomfort-

02:44:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:44:52
Stephon Alexander: ... and, and getting the raw deal, they would, um, they would consider you to be a very offensive person. But because I embrace that, it was very valuable. And look at me, I'm still an academic physicist.

02:45:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, you come from a Caribbean tradition, which can get very confrontational-

02:45:09
Stephon Alexander: Yes

02:45:09
Eric Weinstein: ... as part of the normal means of disposition.

02:45:11
Stephon Alexander: It's a sign of love.

02:45:12
Eric Weinstein: Sign of love.

02:45:13
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Right?

02:45:13
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:45:14
Eric Weinstein: So we have a little bit of that in the, in the, in the stronger forms of the Jewish tradition as well.

02:45:18
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

02:45:18
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So when I... I'll give you my, and I don't think we've ever had this conversation.

02:45:25
Stephon Alexander: Oh, we're gonna do it here? [laughs]

02:45:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Why not?

02:45:28
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

02:45:28
Eric Weinstein: What the hell? I saw you as technically underpowered relative to how generative and creative you were, and I saw you as a generative and creative powerhouse. You were trying all sorts of stuff, some of which I could see that can't possibly work. He doesn't know, but he's gonna figure it out in two weeks, you know? But, like, you were a wellspring of different ideas, and you were coming at things from a really different perspective. And in essence, the superficial aspect of, okay, he's coming from the Bronx, your father was a cab driver-

02:46:01
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:46:01
Eric Weinstein: ... you, Caribbean background. There was n- no part of you is anticipated by our system. There's no... You have no role models. There's nobody for you to follow. I mean, you know, th-this world of you, James Gates, and, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, all three of you t- are totally distinct. Your, the diversity that you rep-

02:46:25
Stephon Alexander: Uh, but Jim was a role model though.

02:46:26
Eric Weinstein: Wait, and-

02:46:27
Stephon Alexander: Is, is, is a, is a role model.

02:46:29
Eric Weinstein: But not-

02:46:29
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, but we're very d- we're different people

02:46:31
Eric Weinstein: ... it's not, it's not tight

02:46:32
Stephon Alexander: We are different people definitely, yeah

02:46:32
Eric Weinstein: ... it's not tight, you know? It's, it's a very different experience. You're borrowing a lot from him.

02:46:36
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm. Mm.

02:46:37
Eric Weinstein: You are the fire that lights itself. You c- I don't know how you got here, and that was what was so impressive to me, which was that there was a, there were two parallel stories.

02:46:47
Stephon Alexander: Joe Henderson has an album called Inner Urge, a song called Inner Urge.

02:46:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:46:51
Stephon Alexander: You know, it's, it's bad. It's, um, it's like, you know, it's... [laughs]

02:46:56
Eric Weinstein: There were two forms of diversity. There was the superficial or ostensible diversity. I don't even want to call it superficial because it's real, and-

02:47:03
Stephon Alexander: Mm

02:47:03
Eric Weinstein: ... in other words, when you and I collaborate, I move towards you language-wise so that you and I can be in flow together, you know?

02:47:12
Stephon Alexander: Mm.

02:47:12
Eric Weinstein: It's like I don't speak the way I speak generally when I'm speaking with you because fundamentally I wanna be catching the balls and throwing them back. You had this other diversity, which was your creative, scientific diversity. You would generate more different approaches to a problem faster than other people, and what I th- saw was in part, I had... You know, Lee gave me this assignment to, to, to h- like talk to you about this, and I was trying to-

02:47:40
Stephon Alexander: Talk me out of it. [laughs]

02:47:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, no. No, no, no.

02:47:42
Stephon Alexander: Okay.

02:47:42
Eric Weinstein: It was, it... That wasn't it. It was what was good for the field versus what was good for you, and what I realized is, is that it was probably good for you to leave the field if you didn't change your mindset.

02:47:54
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

02:47:54
Eric Weinstein: And it was probably bad for the field to lose you, and-

02:47:57
Stephon Alexander: You told me something that really mattered, though.

02:47:59
Eric Weinstein: Uh-oh. All right.

02:48:01
Stephon Alexander: Basically, it was like, it was sort of like the, you know, when your up, up, up, your, a very caring at some point tells you to grow up. Uh, it was more like, "You need to grow up as a scientist and find, and f- you know, don't run away from a real problem. Find it and work on a real problem, and don't pus- um, don't, you know, sort of, um, um, um, follow herds and things." So it was like, in other words, it res-

02:48:31
Eric Weinstein: Walk-

02:48:31
Stephon Alexander: ... it resonated with who I was already, and I was kind of tormented a- about this, and, and-

02:48:36
Eric Weinstein: Walk towards the pain. Eat the pain

02:48:38
Stephon Alexander: ... yeah, go for it. Yeah.

02:48:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:48:39
Stephon Alexander: And so, and also, right around that time, Leon Cooper told me the same thing.

02:48:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah? Yeah.

02:48:43
Stephon Alexander: He said, "You need to find a real problem and work on it."

02:48:46
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

02:48:46
Stephon Alexander: And, you know, uh, and, uh, when everyone says that you, um, a problem can't be solved is because, you know, they didn't, you know, they weren't smart to figure it out. So go work on it. Find a problem and, and work on it. This is a person that, you know, the ingenious Cooper pair that led to the solution of superconductivity. So I had to take that very seriously, very seriously, and it was either shape up or ship out, basically.

02:49:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:49:13
Stephon Alexander: And I had to... That was the choice.

02:49:15
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause then all, and then-

02:49:16
Stephon Alexander: And all, and then all this other stuff about diverse, all this stuff-

02:49:18
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:49:18
Stephon Alexander: ... that was just noise, really.

02:49:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but it is and it isn't.

02:49:21
Stephon Alexander: It, it is.

02:49:21
Eric Weinstein: So for example, when you invited me-

02:49:23
Stephon Alexander: It is noise, but-

02:49:23
Eric Weinstein: ... you took, look, you-

02:49:24
Stephon Alexander: But that became the fire that drove me

02:49:25
Eric Weinstein: ... two days ago or yesterday, I forget even, even when it was. You took a risk by inviting me in to a, what would be called a family group meeting of a research group, talking about a subject which I haven't thought about for a decade, you know? And you, I came in on your-

02:49:42
Stephon Alexander: That's, I didn't see it as a risk.

02:49:44
Eric Weinstein: You didn't?

02:49:45
Stephon Alexander: I did not see it as a risk, and I will-

02:49:46
Eric Weinstein: No, you brought me into your, your colleague-

02:49:47
Stephon Alexander: And we'll, and we'll be doing more of it too. [laughs] No, because I saw it, I, I saw it as, you know, um, right, what, what's this word? I mean, um, in sociology there's a notion of inconveniencing someone.

02:49:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:49:59
Stephon Alexander: When you're inconvenienced, that's where learning happens, all right? Um-

02:50:04
Eric Weinstein: Did they were in-

02:50:05
Stephon Alexander: True diver- diversity, dir- diversity comes with, um, with, um, that sort of that level of having a little bit of discomfort, and that experience in, in, in and of itself-

02:50:16
Eric Weinstein: This is, it's the constru-

02:50:17
Stephon Alexander: ... that's your-

02:50:17
Eric Weinstein: It's the constructive other

02:50:18
Stephon Alexander: ... if you bear with it, it, you learn from it. You learn. You, you grow from this.

02:50:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but like how, how much of our time that we've spent sp- talking about math and physics-

02:50:26
Stephon Alexander: A lot

02:50:26
Eric Weinstein: ... has been over alcohol? A fair amount.

02:50:29
Stephon Alexander: A fair amount, yeah.

02:50:30
Eric Weinstein: A fair amount, right?

02:50:31
Stephon Alexander: A fair amount.

02:50:31
Eric Weinstein: And it's, it's woven together in our relationship.

02:50:34
Stephon Alexander: Mostly wine.

02:50:34
Eric Weinstein: It's about mostly wine. Well, Fra- when Ed Frankle is present-

02:50:38
Stephon Alexander: Vodka

02:50:39
Eric Weinstein: ... it very often it strays off into harder stuff. Um-

02:50:43
Stephon Alexander: It does

02:50:43
Eric Weinstein: ... but, you know, these are some of the most remar-

02:50:45
Stephon Alexander: His mind requires, um, uh, the, the-

02:50:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, he's Russian

02:50:47
Stephon Alexander: ... he's, okay.

02:50:48
Eric Weinstein: You guys both have alcohol tolerances that I can only dream about.

02:50:51
Stephon Alexander: I've gotten much better.

02:50:52
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] But the, the point being that this is our style, you know? And the point is it's completely unconstrained. It's not tied to a whiteboard. It's not tied to rules about, uh, what it means to be collegial. It's tied to bad jokes, uh, drinking heavily, crazy ideas, and camaraderie and deep friendship and brotherhood, you know?

02:51:14
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

02:51:14
Eric Weinstein: And making fun of each other, and, and, and taking the piss out of each other, and putting it always, never going up to the line where you're actually hurting the person. That kind of intimacy is incredibly important scientifically, and this bloodless culture about office ... appropriate behavior. One of the great things coming into that work group-

02:51:36
Stephon Alexander: Oh, we're get- we're getting into some dangerous territory right now

02:51:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, no, but when I went into that work group-

02:51:40
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

02:51:41
Eric Weinstein: ... is that there was this very sweet guy from Italy who was talking about quantum foundations, and I just had to, to say, "Wake up, man." You know? Like, if you don't do something really different-

02:51:52
Stephon Alexander: And do it, and do it soon

02:51:53
Eric Weinstein: ... and do it soon, you are gonna-

02:51:55
Stephon Alexander: Don't do... Uh, well, I need to understand this for 40 years before I even try to think about the real problem.

02:52:00
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:52:01
Stephon Alexander: No. Okay

02:52:01
Eric Weinstein: You know, if you're not gonna be disagreeable, you're in the wrong field. Don't waste your life.

02:52:05
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm. That's what you told me.

02:52:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's the thing.

02:52:08
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah.

02:52:08
Eric Weinstein: And the, the key point is go big or go home, because there's no- there's not enough money in just m- muddling your way through.

02:52:15
Stephon Alexander: You know, and it's funny because I tell my, my postdocs, my graduate student, a similar thing. I was like, "You can make, with the skill set that you pick up as a physicist, um, you can go out and make a killing, you know, do some machine learning, do some good stuff there, and you'll be, um, driving a nicer car than me, living in a nicer house, and might even be happier [laughs].

02:52:40
Eric Weinstein: Maybe.

02:52:41
Stephon Alexander: And, and doing cool stuff. Um-

02:52:43
Eric Weinstein: But I'll be honest with you, even when you get the nice house and you make a little bit more money, when you move away from the, the privilege of working on God's own language, there's a way in which you curl up in the night and you just regret ever having gotten away from it, because the privilege of actually working on the one thing that almost no one even gets to see, this, this very low layer of reality itself-

02:53:08
Stephon Alexander: Well, I would like that to change.

02:53:09
Eric Weinstein: Tell me about it.

02:53:09
Stephon Alexander: I w- I would like to, I would like to see people who actually do... So for example, I have a buddy, brilliant, brilliant theoretical physicist, and he did some, actually, and he actually went after some big stuff. It didn't quite work out, so he went and did, did a startup. And every now and then, because I think, I mean, there's still things I f- I feel I can learn from him, I still call him on the phone and we talk physics.

02:53:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:53:36
Stephon Alexander: And I would like to do th- I would like to see more of those types of things formalized, in a way. You know? I, I really think that people who have left-

02:53:43
Eric Weinstein: Whenever you and I get together, we do that

02:53:44
Stephon Alexander: ... No, we do that.

02:53:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:53:45
Stephon Alexander: But I would like to see more of that in a way where it's, um, a little bit more formalized. People that may have transitioned into a different lifestyle or they're not doing it professionally all the time, but it doesn't mean that they don't, that they're not still thinking, and they might have contributions to make. Um, ways of plugging in people in a more sort of, um, professional-

02:54:12
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:54:12
Stephon Alexander: ... uh, ac- academic, you know, now we have private foundations that are doing research. There must be a way of... Again, I'm not talking about do- People have tried, like, the more corny ways of doing this. I'm talking about something that's real, that's, "Eric, I'm thinking about this problem, the cosmological constant problem. You came to my seminar, my, my talk, my technical talk, and you saw that my graviton leg was hitting a fermion."

02:54:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:54:41
Stephon Alexander: "And you said something to me that was very useful, that I got an outsider's perspective that I didn't got, get from within." These things are useful.

02:54:49
Eric Weinstein: But I have to be outside. I'm more radical than you are.

02:54:52
Stephon Alexander: But, but, but it's necessary.

02:54:53
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:54:53
Stephon Alexander: It's useful. It's valuable. It is generative.

02:54:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is-

02:54:57
Stephon Alexander: For progress

02:54:58
Eric Weinstein: ... but what I need, l- l- let me tell you what my dream is for you, not that I can tell you your business.

02:55:03
Stephon Alexander: Um, um-

02:55:04
Eric Weinstein: You need-

02:55:04
Stephon Alexander: ... my own private jet to go to Tobago?

02:55:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Tell me about it. Take you with [laughs] me. Um, I need you to make sure that you're inserted in a position to help, not necessarily the people who are coming in from the perspective of ostensible diversity, but you need to be in a position where you can find the actually uncorrelated individuals and shove the neural diversity, the diversity of-

02:55:34
Stephon Alexander: Yes

02:55:34
Eric Weinstein: ... intellectual approaches down the throat of this monoculture that should never have erupted in the most important and precious of all fields. I think you need to be in a position where you have purse strings that you're controlling for the benefit of others. And I don't know how to do that yet, but if this podcast can continue to grow and the influence can start to seep in, that there is a place that can advocate for the academy that isn't coming from the, the academy because the academy isn't free to say what I'm free to say. I've given up. I can't go back in any standard fashion. But I'm still invested. I mean, the, the instant I hit your seminar room, I'm just thinking about, like, the Atyia-Patodi and Singer index theorem, or I'm thinking about w- what is the effect of a graviton hitting an electron given that-

02:56:27
Stephon Alexander: But you're also thinking about quantum foundations now, 'cause you s- you talked to those per- those people, and it's gonna... And this, that, that reaction is-

02:56:33
Eric Weinstein: But this is the thing, it's like, let's... When, when do we pop the champagne and start having a party again as opposed to listening t- about the efficiency with which we use taxpayer dollars, transparency, diversity, inclusion? It's boring as shit.

02:56:47
Stephon Alexander: Let's just do it anyway, as is our-

02:56:50
Eric Weinstein: Let's do it anyway

02:56:51
Stephon Alexander: ... want to do it anyway.

02:56:51
Eric Weinstein: And, and let's, let's take back our own system. Listen-

02:56:54
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:56:55
Eric Weinstein: ... I could talk to you for forever, as you know. Come back anytime. You know who I'd really love to get you on the program with?

02:57:01
Stephon Alexander: Who?

02:57:02
Eric Weinstein: Our mutual friend, uh, Priya Natarajan.

02:57:05
Stephon Alexander: Oh, uh, sh- uh, she is the truth.

02:57:08
Eric Weinstein: She is the truth.

02:57:09
Stephon Alexander: She's the truth.

02:57:09
Eric Weinstein: But, you know, I've been having these conversations with her, and I, I don't wanna tell it... I'm not a huge fan of the, of the dime store version of diversity and, and inclusion. She is some next-level human being thinking about all of the ways in which these, these weird matters of gender, of race, of class. Like, she's even focused on the issue of, like, when you take people from the Indian subcontinent, what class are you take- what strata of society are you taking?

02:57:37
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

02:57:38
Eric Weinstein: She's got all sorts of interesting thing, and it, it goes into the physics. It goes into the science. The thing that I don't like about this discussion in general is is that once you start talking about, like, minorities in STEM, it tends to be this self-consistent system and you're never talking about neutrinos anymore.

02:57:57
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

02:57:58
Eric Weinstein: Right? I would love to have the world listen in to a conversation between you, Priya, and myself, uh, on this show, and maybe a few other people, who can actually animate this and say, "Here's what this, the payoff is. This can cash out in science."

02:58:15
Stephon Alexander: Right.

02:58:15
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't have to cash out in some sort of sanctimonious-

02:58:18
Stephon Alexander: Yeah

02:58:18
Eric Weinstein: ... good for you feeling.

02:58:20
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, I mean, and, uh, j- you know, uh, just to say, like, one thing I find really powerful and, um, is you were saying that that's been a big payoff for me, regardless of whether or not I'm gonna, you know, the problems I've worked on over the years are gonna be fruition, is that I, um, this, this semester I'm teaching, um, our graduate general relativity course, right? You know, differential geometry, at least the way that the poor physicists know it.

02:58:48
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:58:49
Stephon Alexander: And, but, you know, it's, um, it is, um, one of, um, our most advanced classes. In my class, um, the three Black physics majors are in this class. They're all under... It's a graduate level course, including one, um, guy, um, who is, um, got some nice tats up there.

02:59:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:59:14
Stephon Alexander: With, oh, you know, he has, right, from Philly, who's a freshman-

02:59:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:59:21
Stephon Alexander: ... an ace in the class-

02:59:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:59:23
Stephon Alexander: ... and sitting in front of the room and very comfortable in his skin. And if... I, I, I, I, I truly believe that when that happens, that's when you're doing your best, and if I can provide a space for students like that, who's gonna be to our benefit, that kind of genius, to come to their full fruition, right? Meet their full potential because they are truly themselves.

02:59:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:59:56
Stephon Alexander: And you know what?

02:59:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:59:59
Stephon Alexander: Um-

02:59:59
Eric Weinstein: I think this is so important to recognize that when you have an untapped population... And am, am I right that when it comes to really senior Black physicists, there's almost no one beyond who I've mentioned? I mean, there's, there's Shirley Jackson at, at some level.

03:00:18
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, I mean, there are very few of us.

03:00:19
Eric Weinstein: There are very few.

03:00:20
Stephon Alexander: There are very few of us, yeah. Clifford Johnson.

03:00:22
Eric Weinstein: Clifford Johnson, USC.

03:00:24
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

03:00:24
Eric Weinstein: Um, the way I view it is-

03:00:28
Stephon Alexander: Good friend. Mm-hmm

03:00:29
Eric Weinstein: ... you have a situation by which that community is like an untapped oil field. Assume that you had no interest in helping anybody for sociological reasons. All you wanted to do was to get the best physics. The fact that almost nobody-

03:00:45
Stephon Alexander: And by the way, let me say, like, I know most of, uh, pretty much all the Black... We are, we are all committed to, right? We're not... We're, we're all committed to bringing through that next generation.

03:00:58
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay. So the thing, the thing that I find most interesting-

03:01:00
Stephon Alexander: With excellence, with excellence

03:01:02
Eric Weinstein: ... the thing that really excites me is is that when you find an untapped population, you get a huge whoosh, whereas if you find a tapped population... Look, nobody is gonna be surprised if there's, the next Nobel Prize goes to an Ashkenazi Jew. My population has been tapped. We've been located. We've been found. We've been doing really well. However, it's not going to give you the huge whoosh when you find, like, an oil field that nobody knew about, because then you, you're just tapping the, uh, something that has never been tapped before. That means that the potential that's trapped in Black physic- physicists is enormous, and female physicists.

03:01:43
Stephon Alexander: Yes, yes.

03:01:44
Eric Weinstein: Right? So the, the really exciting thing-

03:01:46
Stephon Alexander: Yes. [laughs]

03:01:46
Eric Weinstein: I don't get excited from the point of view of obligation or sanctimony. I get excited from the point of view of greed. If I want the greatest opportunity to find new minds, I'm gonna go to the places that have been traditionally incapable-

03:02:00
Stephon Alexander: S- so you're agreeing with me, basically, when I say, when we talk about, you know, this, when we talk diversity and thing, if we don't address, right, um, the presumptions that we're making-

03:02:12
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:02:12
Stephon Alexander: ... and truly understand and come to the conclusion that you and I both have come through, through our own experiences, that when you bring in, right, women and minorities into these fields-

03:02:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:02:23
Stephon Alexander: ... right, they're gonna bring, um-

03:02:25
Eric Weinstein: They may bring

03:02:26
Stephon Alexander: ... they may bring, right, exactly, um, new things, new perspectives, value, intelli-

03:02:33
Eric Weinstein: So-

03:02:33
Stephon Alexander: Uh, right

03:02:34
Eric Weinstein: ... sometimes it's valuable. Sometimes it's not. So for example, there is a thing that comes in with women in physics that I don't love, which is a presumption that physics is, uh, science is communal, and I hear this more from women scientists than I do from men scientists that say, "Everything is social." Well, I understand that women may have a more social aspect and that there are more males who are isolationist and kind of, um, don't wanna deal with other people.

03:03:04
Stephon Alexander: Now, I'm pretty social.

03:03:05
Eric Weinstein: You are?

03:03:05
Stephon Alexander: So, yeah.

03:03:06
Eric Weinstein: I, I am-

03:03:07
Stephon Alexander: So, uh, but-

03:03:07
Eric Weinstein: ... mostly gregarious, but I have a part of me that's extremely isolationist.

03:03:11
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Right.

03:03:14
Eric Weinstein: I don't-

03:03:14
Stephon Alexander: I am too. I, I do have a part of me that's very-

03:03:15
Eric Weinstein: I, I think that there's an aspect of social-

03:03:17
Stephon Alexander: Yeah. Yeah

03:03:17
Eric Weinstein: ... which is incredibly important-

03:03:19
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm

03:03:19
Eric Weinstein: ... and I think women do a great job of managing it. I do think that there's an aspect where they try to deny that there are certain things that are not only non-social, but are actually asocial, where somebody is flipping the bird to the community, and they're actually more productive than the entire community. So that's, that's, like, one of these things where there's... It's a double-edged sword at a minimum. The specific things that I really love about-- Well, I love and fear about the Black experience is, is that you have to know that this whole Charles Murray thing about race and IQ means that a lot of people somehow believe that Black physicists and Black scientists and Black academicians are substandard.

03:04:04
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

03:04:04
Eric Weinstein: The really weird thing about-

03:04:06
Stephon Alexander: This whole eugenics thing.

03:04:08
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:04:08
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

03:04:08
Eric Weinstein: And the point that I wanna make is I wanna talk about it, because normally people don't talk about it because they secretly carry a belief that Blacks are less than. Now, I have three things that I care about as a weird IQ test.

03:04:23
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

03:04:23
Eric Weinstein: Because I don't like IQ tests because I don't do that well on them.

03:04:26
Stephon Alexander: I've never taken one.

03:04:27
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Smart man.

03:04:28
Stephon Alexander: I wouldn't do-- I probably wouldn't do well.

03:04:29
Eric Weinstein: Smart. Well, there's one thing called processing that kills me.

03:04:32
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

03:04:32
Eric Weinstein: Um, it's, uh, one of the four components.

03:04:34
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

03:04:36
Eric Weinstein: There are three things that really matter to me: music, science, and humor. Now, if I take our two populations, right? When it comes to humor, it's about even whether Blacks or Jews make better comedians. I, I would say you've, you've got great examples in both cases of totally genius-level comedians. There's no question that that requires a kind of plasticity of mind, brilliance-

03:05:02
Stephon Alexander: Oh, yeah. Yeah

03:05:03
Eric Weinstein: ... insight, quickness. I would never wanna go up against Jamie Foxx, you know?

03:05:07
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

03:05:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I would never wanna go up against Mel Brooks either.

03:05:11
Stephon Alexander: Right.

03:05:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. It's a draw from my perspective.

03:05:13
Stephon Alexander: Right, right, right.

03:05:15
Eric Weinstein: When it comes to science, we're kicking your ass. When it comes to music, you've been kicking our ass.

03:05:23
Stephon Alexander: Well, open the floodgates.

03:05:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing.

03:05:25
Stephon Alexander: Open the floodgates, and we will-

03:05:27
Eric Weinstein: My point is that we have some-- we're no slouches at music

03:05:27
Stephon Alexander: ... we will kick some ass in science.

03:05:29
Eric Weinstein: And you guys, a few of you are no slouches.

03:05:31
Stephon Alexander: We did jazz, and-

03:05:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, but that-

03:05:33
Stephon Alexander: And in my book, I make the case that, you know, this, uh-

03:05:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, but this is the-

03:05:37
Stephon Alexander: It's the same cognitive types of things going on when bebop jazz is-

03:05:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, but that, that's exact-

03:05:41
Stephon Alexander: ... transported into, into quantum physics

03:05:42
Eric Weinstein: ... that's exactly the point. What are the odds that Stanley Jordan couldn't do quantum field theory? It's, like, zero. There's no way that that mind-

03:05:50
Stephon Alexander: He picked it up really fast when we hung out [laughs]

03:05:52
Eric Weinstein: I guarantee it, right?

03:05:53
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

03:05:53
Eric Weinstein: Or, or, or Eric Lewis or any of these cats.

03:05:55
Stephon Alexander: Yeah, yeah.

03:05:55
Eric Weinstein: Right? The issue that we have that's different is because of this relationship to music and to humor, I'm absolutely positive that this particular population is a genius-based population. The Black experience, in my opinion, is dependent on high-pressure, very quick, extremely generative analytics, and y-you, you find this in head-cutting contests. You find this in playing the dozens. You find this in poetry slams. You find this in a preference for blitz chess over regular chess, right? It's very deeply woven through the Black experience, which is like, "Hey, we can't have access to the regular world, so we're gonna have a lot of very high-intensity contests to figure out who can cut it and who can't," which is why Eminem could rise up the rap, you know, circuit, because there was an open mic. Same thing with jazz. It's like-

03:06:54
Stephon Alexander: And with jazz

03:06:54
Eric Weinstein: ... if you're good enough, take the stage.

03:06:56
Stephon Alexander: That's it.

03:06:56
Eric Weinstein: If you get blown off, I'm sorry. You know, we're, we're not gonna cry on our beer over you.

03:06:59
Stephon Alexander: That's true inclusivity.

03:07:01
Eric Weinstein: That is true inclusivity.

03:07:02
Stephon Alexander: Mm-hmm.

03:07:02
Eric Weinstein: Based on merit.

03:07:04
Stephon Alexander: Yes.

03:07:04
Eric Weinstein: And there's no group that I've ever met that is more terrifying when it comes to merit than Black America.

03:07:11
Stephon Alexander: That's true.

03:07:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. We have so much out-

03:07:14
Stephon Alexander: Well, that, so that was the thing that was partially generative to the growth of, like, bebop jazz.

03:07:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, particularly-

03:07:19
Stephon Alexander: Was that the-

03:07:20
Eric Weinstein: ... Minton's, Minton's Playhouse in Harlem

03:07:21
Stephon Alexander: ... Minton's Playhouse in Harlem.

03:07:22
Eric Weinstein: The whole point is, is that y-you get somebody who's, who's sounding off that they know how to play, and you're like, "Okay, let's do this in 7/8 time in C sharp," you know?

03:07:32
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

03:07:32
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, Phrygian or something.

03:07:34
Stephon Alexander: Yeah.

03:07:34
Eric Weinstein: Like, and you're like, "What?"

03:07:35
Stephon Alexander: You should check out-- You should hear the, the-- There's a nice story that, um, the, the late, great, um, genius, um, um, Roy Hargrove talked about George Coleman when he went up to, you know, to Smoke, to a jazz club called Smoke, and sat in, and he was calling all these tunes in all these crazy keys and different time signatures.

03:07:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, I love the-- You know, uh, I think we talked before about the story about, um, the botched piano on "Giant Steps" because [laughs] the chord changes were just too hard. You know, and the whole point is I wanna tap this tradition. I wanna say, "Let's look at the intrinsic Black tradition about using merit above everything under high-pressure circumstances to, to select for the very best." And th- when we unlock that population, I'm excited because of greed. I'm not excited because of the fact-

03:08:32
Stephon Alexander: Yes

03:08:32
Eric Weinstein: ... that this is good for you.

03:08:33
Stephon Alexander: Good, and, you know, um, the, our National Society of Black Physicists, we're gonna be all about this.

03:08:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?

03:08:40
Stephon Alexander: Um, yeah, in my n-my n- in the next two years.

03:08:43
Eric Weinstein: Can't wait, my friend.

03:08:44
Stephon Alexander: Yes, and thanks for the, um, continued support.

03:08:47
Eric Weinstein: All right. Uh, you've been through The Portal with Dr. Stephon Alexander, the author of Jazz and Physics, who is welcome back at any time. Um, if you-

03:08:58
Stephon Alexander: Can I come tomorrow? No. [laughs]

03:09:00
Eric Weinstein: Almost any time.

03:09:02
Stephon Alexander: [laughs]

03:09:03
Eric Weinstein: Uh, please subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. Go over to YouTube. Not only subscribe to our channel, but also click the bell to be, um, notified via that icon whenever our next video drops, and we hope to see you all soon. Be well, everybody. [outro music]