evening step for science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations our distinguished guest tonight is david kaiser of massachusetts institute of technology where he is the  and professor of history of science the director of the program in science technology and society and senior lecturer in the department of physics he is also an mit mc bigger faculty fellow dr keyser received two ph d s from harvard university one in physics and the other in the history of science he joined the mit faculty in two thousand and became director of the program in science technology and society in twenty eleven david kaiser has two areas of research history and physics his historical research focuses on the development of physics in the united states during the cold war specifically on how physics was influenced by the politics and culture of that time his physics research is on early universe because of knowledge working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation dr keyser has produced a number of award winning books including the very popular how the hippies save physics he's an elected oh of the american physical society and an editor of the journal historical studies in the natural sciences he's received numerous honors for his work and he's been featured in many magazine articles and also american and british public radio programs tonight dr keyser discusses the relationship between political eras and the development of critical advances in physics he will also tell us about his current work on the early universe it's a very special honor to welcome david fun is it will never get out of it but you're right and i think many people have a have a notion of science as being somehow separate from so to speak the real world or the daily lives of ordinary people and so it's been very fascinating as as a and and then and then we can see signs of that that we can see traces in which it was really deeply embedded as part of that world not separate from and so one of things that i find funny is thing about different examples of what what should be sort of the same activity we think well how do say theoretical physicists go about their daily job and then we can start seeing really quite interesting differences in how they do that over a pretty short span of time we don't have to go all the way back very far deep in the past in history or to or to the far flung reaches of the globe we can look even say in the united states of the last several decades or compare say you know britain in the u s places that look kind of similar in many ways and yet we can see pretty dramatic changes in how people have assumed they should do their job what do they think it was to be say a scientist or a physicist in those times and places it one of my favorite books actually that got me thinking about this some years ago was by a colleague andy warrick was in a story and very gifted historian and he wrote a fascinating book on the making of young scientists in cambridge university in the u k over really over the sort of nine hundred centuries long nineteenth century  and for much of that period or certainly for many decades every single undergraduate student at cambridge university had to prove themselves by taking an income enormously complicated exam in pure mathematics i mean it sounds like a torture instrument today we can't do that  and not only was it was it a very very rigorous exam it self but they published the rank ordered list of every sort of graduate the national newspapers so i mean imagine how that felt and they were you know mental breakdowns and all th human dramas you might expect and the idea was cambridge and britain more broadly was not aiming to make you know ten thousand about mathematical physicists not at all if the goal at the time was to produce what they considered kind of discipline amazing way of showing how the assumptions about what higher education learning should be all about really sets in motion sets in train a series of these reforms so we have a very to our eyes kind of strange looking elite you know  incredibly powerful institution that looks at the bears the marks of time and place right so they trained people very smart people very well there in ways that don't make any sense to us and you know today make sense and other frats of the time so the example of that where we don't have to go too far away to find places where it's not that society has sort of intervened and messed up what would otherwise been very good science an elite world class science gets done in  curious kind of place specific ways time specific ways i mean that's something that was really really captured me even as a young student to think about you know i mean as a college and i was learning certain things certain ways i'm working very hard of my homework assignments and college this has broken down at different times the greeks at a certain period broke all the rules i guess and maybe in other cases in other cases and were leading up to your most wonderful example of this in the to prove racism and sometimes yes yes well no unfortunately has as you know there's no shortage of examples where again from where we sit today it's easier to see what clearly when things went wrong  yeah and there's a there's a a very rich history alas we have what's often called scientific racism or seemingly scientifically based theories of human origins and human difference which today we can see it was shot through with with bias and assumptions  again not just from long ago or far away and what fascinates me is that is to turn it around and see all the examples of really wonderful science i think we have to hold up as example of today there was no more outside of society than there was quite egregious examples land and so so that becomes the job of these stories and in some sense the broader public at large to try to understand how how are these ideas fitting together making sense  given the kind of ideas and resources that at hand and that those those are those the cost of those change over time and so there are as a horrible examples as well as when we look back you know examples of science that we still hold up and teach your students and think is is just wonderful still came from very specific kind of cultural and institutional moments another thing there is that we were talking a little while ago about the slow emergence out of more mythical mystical kinds of thinking and we were talking about very great scientists like newton and so on this was the nature of science at least in the west that it came about in this slow progress and would you say that that's true of a lot of the scientists was true in physics yes and i came out i certainly would and  who know the less who are convinced in their day that either their favorite ideas lead them to certain conclusions but we now look no longer would see that connection or their work was inspired by ideas that we might consider you know mythical mythical or occult or somehow that's right and so that's another maybe a nice example of how you know the scientists of course are people right humans he would have living in a time and place and and that i think accounts for the great riches of size i don't think it's a problem to be to be to be solved  that's just how the world has been and still is yes which leads us to this will you how the hippies say physics and you have pointed out here you have mean this is the best of the book that these people were really out there so that the ways and persisted with this and yet the peculiarities of this time led to an enormous breakthrough which you step us through that sixty's revolutions that we now can sort of take off one after the other but also intellectually in this case in certain areas of science and physics on so what fascinated me about this group that i want to bring about they call themselves the fundamental physics group was very playful they spelled way and then they sort of hit the job market when the bottom fell out this is one way we see a very blunt version of society busting into two ordinary signs so between the late sixty's and early one nine hundred seventy s many many fields in academia but physics hardest of all went through tremendous very rapid change the bottom fell out so physics had been growing faster than any other field after world war two on the heels of these dramatic wartime projects like the atomic bomb and radar and many many other small projects every field grew rapidly after world war two with the influx of new students and the g i bill and all the rest physics outpace them all almost every field went through some sort of contraction around one nine hundred seventy then what they couldn't do for the most part was follow a kind of familiar career path and the jobs dried up very very rapidly much more rapidly than the student numbers did it was a huge mismatch of really thousands of extremely talented very well trained young people in physics engineering mathematics many allied fields who had gone into the field with dreams of an academic career were told by the federal government that the nation needed many  era and then the sort of jobs simply weren't there when they got when they were done and that was true especially of the folks i want to write in most about so they were sort of at the wrong place at the wrong time so they they kind of bumble along through different accidents of history biography sort of bring them together in berkeley in the early seventy's they find each other and what captivated me was that they had this exclusively strong discipline and training they had done their ph d s and done extremely good work and were suddenly kind of thrust out of a kind of comfort zone or an expected path of the sort that they certainly had anticipated or been looking forward to and so they became actually i guess today we call them very entrepreneurial and they really s do with what they had and were very creative in creating a kind of parallel universe to the kind of institutions a structure is that would have been familiar at the time so they found their own ways to support the research and even theoretical research is expensive because you have to eat some time you have to pay the rent yeah right so they found their own patrons they found their own ways to sort of share their ideas amongst themselves as well as disseminate their work in very again very creative some very effective but kind of off the beaten path sorts of ways and and so on so they they made a kind of like a parallel universe to the kind of modern university and so they combined this  chronicle did as well as the berkeley bar i mean it really was sort of spanning the types of newspapers or sort of yeah so that really was literally front page news especially in the bay area in that time and some of these folks were really these were two sets of curious ideas that it's up there to others maybe sort of the weirdness is a quantum theory which no matter how you slice it they say they can sound awfully weird recently counterintuitive maybe those actually could account for me that explain mean not all that much longer ago couple centuries ago magnetism seemed like you know the stuff of spirits and right now how is this strange effect be happening now we'd say there's nothing spooky it's we understand something about magnetic field and so many these folks wondered  is this the next thing are these strange notions of kind of consciences consciousness and it's possible powers in the world or in some cases you know reputed powers in the world are those the next set of phenomena that today seems booking tomorrow curiosity in first principles foundational physics and an openness to so many other topics and that was a very and they were doing it outside the ordinary kind of university environment for the most part and so it was a very creative kind of free flowing hodgepodge in a university setting would that have been a bit more difficult like if we were in your physics with these people have been able to talk about this in a physics class the way that they were talking about in fundamental physics senior figures in the field shared at least an open history curiosity rarely would they share the kind of enthusiasm but they would say well this is curious and physicists need to be open to all things now that was by no means the norm but there were some and so there was at the time not mainstream stuff and nor my saying it should have been time it was not a judgment they were just looking at who was doing what where it was really not the stuff of classroom discussion there were pockets they were there were no two who they could be connected ok now these people were all interested in quantum mechanics generally but this this developed into something and if i follow you correctly it seems as though this really was a change and that is that it was sort of causative that they they were as you said well trained open to some really complicated stuff but having this kind of mentality at that time first i thought i would just offload that to my friends and it didn't help there is another wonderful metaphor people developed they get increasingly kind of byzantine but it only accentuates the fact that it's really is a challenge to put it into a kind of ordinary language radioactive source not so bizarre could spit out pairs of particles the strangeness comes and we try to describe what's going to happen to particle be given what we know has to happen a particle what it really boils down to is that it's him according to quantum theory at least it's impossible to give a description of particle b without referring in a very concrete way to particle and that there if you like their fates are linked to speak metaphorically there's no way to describe a self contained description of particle b that doesn't also sounds kind of weird so he was the one who upped the ante and show that this was an inescapable prediction from quantum theory it wasn't so clear was this you know do the equations require that or was it a misunderstanding john bell among other things clarify that this really is a hard textbooks of what was taught in the in the ordinary students training so as i say john bell derived this very elegant proof that one can't escape this kind of behavior at least within quantum theory that was a nine hundred sixty four almost a decade or the better part of a decade went by before most physicists even took notice some of the first to take notice in fact were these folks at a moment reading them who were well ahead of the curve we call them like early adopters today that they saw this was fascinating and it ordinary curriculum not in the textbooks by the time and so they were among the first to say there's something here this really is it is counterintuitive it's strange and yet you know we have the tools to try to pursue it especially for them one of things that they were hooked on was this fast in the seeming faster than light question if i do something a particle a here does its twin respond really faster than light could it round is a really instantaneous i often make the joke that you know if you tell a bunch of his this is something happens fast and light it it makes the hair stand on end i mean for me you couldn't tell of course but you know but this is just it's not supposed to happen yeah we'll tell you nothing should be able to travel faster than light no no physical force or affection instantaneous and here it is at this at the cornerstone of modern physics this proof that at least the equations suggest this is an inescapable consequence so that looks like we're on a collision course we have two major pillars for modern physics relativity which sets the sort of speed limit and speed of light and then quantum theory which is at least skirting around that is certainly pointing to some curious kinds of long distance connections and so members of this group some of them because they thought it would crack the nature of conscious some of the because it was just a juicy problem and sort of everywhere in between really hammered really drilled on that is is quantum theory compatible with relativity does something like entanglement sort of fight the other grand pillar is a whole edifice you know about to shake down or is there some very subtle way that they'll fit together and so in that they developed a series of thought experiments very clever ones i think a whole series of more and more kind of almost rube goldberg kind of a lever bells and whistles let alone could you could you then explain telekinesis but just in general could we could we get parts of physics to fight basically and and some of the first examples were people were other people know here there's a loophole you missed this very subtle point these were not trivial errors they were what i like now to call productive mistakes and even the authors of these ideas these so called hippies they'll admit they were they were mistakes but they were very very juicy one of tests trials and then often it was some of the members the group often other members other people yeah who would finally sort of shoot them down to show why they won't work as has as advertised and so there was a kind of cat and mouse game there well ok you found buy first design wouldn't work to harness this feature of quantum theory but about this one i've now encountered your concern there and that went on for many years and got you know it was very playful then with a great spirit of fun and a kind of intellectual adventure and we know we now know why they fit together they don't fight each other thanks to the efforts of this group and their you know their their dialogue partners and was not only them but they were they were really instigators and i did this also to the development of quantum information theory and the idea of quantum for communication it did so it indirectly i mean certainly it's a sprawling topic with by now tens of thousands of researchers around the world many of them in a mighty but you to show that those were productive mistakes productive yes but they were mistakes and the reason they're there ideas would not work those had we might now say very lucky unintended consequences because we now use those intellectual tools to design pushed and pushed and pushed and helped bring attention to it helps get other people to pay attention and that already is i think a great good thing and this notion of quantum entanglement can interact with entangled states that really is the from which all these wonderful new next been more difficult i think they did and you delay it if they do that is certainly right i think that's fair to say and what among the things they did is they helped smuggle this back in the classroom so this had not been in the classrooms when they were students yeah or their peers but they they were and these books were often very well positively received in the mainstream science community you know after years had passed they were on the so by you know when i was a student many years later as a supplementary reading the right resources and it they were associated with some pretty weird institutions in the cia was this just because we need funding and they took it where they could get it well i don't think it was just that i mean partly was this entrepreneurial  and that again goes this kind of cultural moment there were all these at one time highly classified intelligence reports many of them released through freedom of information act years later where independent of this activity analysts in the defense intelligence agency the cia which is actually within the pentagon and also within the cia which is similar but sort of separate agency then some of them became convinced that the soviets were way ahead of us never mind wars i mean how do you ever say the same these areas and said you know in effect your nation needs you it's time to invest in things like e s p and all the better if the physicists that is some physicist said well they might have an actual explanation whether it's something else so the money did indeed start rolling and as far as we can tell now there are upwards of twenty five million dollars spent on that over say a twenty year period and that is real money it's sort of rounding here is chump change compared  longstanding program that's what you mentioned also this had real influence on subsequent training educated the way scientists are trained and of course we're in the middle of how many countries are in the middle of this dilemma of how to train students just twelve not just in science and math general right how did this change you mentioned that it brought in some unusual books but did you do you see that there has been a change in trying to say scientists i don't know i wouldn't put that all in right right now but as we as we go longer as a longer quantum theory so students got very good at solving incredibly hard problems the problem sets were not easy by any measure and what was going to have bled out or really deemphasized during this nine hundred fifty s and sixty's mostly in the us to somebody else where tested and yet it's not like it's just what we expected right it's all has it's deeply i would say deliciously counterintuitive features to it and in the earlier period before world war two in this country it was common for even very advanced students to really have to practice to do to write essays explaining what they thought the kind of quantum weirdness was all about give their own interpretation of the equations they had to learn equations manipulate them with agility but also step back and kind of put into words what do they think is going on here what does this mean compared to what we might have expected it was and then during the fast for a few decades by the fifty's and sixty's that part had really just dropped out it's not in the textbooks it's not in the exams that we now find filed in various archives not of the homework assignments and so on and so that period which is when these folks were themselves going through training what it meant to be physicists you know was  certain kind of parameters certain bounds to it and what happened when that whole system kind of cracked or went through a real moment of of of deep change with the job crunch and the fall in funds and the real kind of a real a real pivot best places berkeley in the thirty's 's there was space again there was it was considered legitimate a place at the table by the time the nine hundred seventy s or in the early eighty's but by that time period it was considered legitimate again to wonder about the kind of quantum mysteries not at the expense of learning how to manipulate equations and do very careful disciplined work but that that was somehow not the sum total of manipulating of learning quantum mechanics so we see these kind of sea changes  and the hippies are at that they're illustrate a transitional moment they don't cause by themselves play means what comes later but they show us that kind of unstable moment of transition where what seemed obvious in one era is is clearly about to give way to to it to have a different courses in the interpret in these equations and not just manipulating them both are really important there are exciting developments in you know in this in areas that had once been deemed not science not in six hundred but in  that that's real physics too i say that's good and then your department adds some other dimension to this correct which seems like it should be essential everywhere the science technology and society program at m i t could you tell us a little bit about that sure so mit is program is among the earliest to be found at least in north america it's about forty years old and so it's we have a collection of faculty we have undergraduate courses graduate program we train ph d students and it really is an effort to understand in some city in some broad sense the how do sciences and technology engineering how do they emerge from the the world the messy world of science and politics and culture and how are they how do they remain imbedded in them and so whether that's a concern to unmask the kind say you have all sizes imbedded in politics that doesn't make the science wrong but does make us wonder about you know choices that are made why was that direct why was that scientific question prioritized over others and why were those people able to pursue that then and there and that could be for frankly perfectly good understand the reasons but the science doesn't just happen on its own you know one example that i mean think about for a different book project that still works is about einstein's general fifteen this seemingly otherworldly sort of austere ivory tower seeming kind of set of ideas was just thoroughly and mashed in some times of messiest messiest of the twentieth century from the trench warfare of world war one to the ri nuclear weapons development in the united states to concerns about soviet missiles it was part of the world and so for many many years one of the most quantitatively accurate tests of general to be one of the reasons we we had most confidence to believe these other and so strange sounding i this is the messy world this is the cold war nuclear age that in the process of fine tuning those radars calibrating the whole system it turns out there were very few missiles coming over the horizon  they couldn't just say well we'll wait for the next fifty missiles and see what we see as they were coming thankfully but other be smart people realize some of the planets in the solar system would look a lot like a missile at that stage of its trajectory if you could send radars to the planet venus then you could do target practice and figure out how this whole complicated state of the art highly high priority defense system is going to work and so as a byproduct of trying to find to a defense system to worry about if and when boston or new i prioritize this system over that so so that kind of work is what my colleagues my students and i are really fascinated by in the program and it sounds like a wonderful program by the way so  the video but do you first of all do you have a favor or two and then i would like to talk about what you're working on now sure well of course the like children you can't please take the values but i will say i mean working on the hippies book every single day that i got to work on that was just fun how about that it's a great great privilege to be a university professor it's a one job description on that and on top of that i mean even a step or two above that certainly for me i was getting to kind of immersed myself in that world and i just every moment that was really it was a joy you know my first book has it i have a different kind of sense of affection for it was trying to so you know they've all been fun well i'm glad because you produced a great number of them very readable very interesting because the public appreciates this very much because we need to hear from the scientific world you are working on some of fit together a coherent picture a coherent story of how our own universe could have and maybe actually did behave in sort of in otherwise im pos simply distant kind of conditions very high energies very dense states not like what we find ourselves in today and if so could we make predictions if if that had really happened fourteen billion years ago what might we see today what should we see as remnants of that in the song in the distribution of matter and roughly speaking it matches unbelievably well you'd have a very specific quantitative predictions now about little wiggles in the distribution of light from the earliest moment we had light streaming to us after the big unbelievably well to our ideas of where those bumps should have come from which comes right back to the heart of matter it is most fundamental it's a very it's a one of the time to study is that what has your book coming out this one that you're doing with alan well i should mention by the way who is famous for developing the inflation after that's big bang which is still full of problems i suppose but it was i guess the best answer right now well that's what i thought i would say the cup is more than half full but it's certainly it's a it's a remarkable set of ideas so alan i began working with this group of students about three years ago and he's been teaching a wonderful undergraduate course in earlier really appreciate your talking with us about this i wish you the very best of fortune for it's such a huge contribution to the general public thank you thank you i will stop here and let talked about mostly we need money experiments are expensive as i'm learning and so we are so my students and colleagues are busy trying to flesh out their very specific plans first of all so what which objects in th are we focusing on which quasars for example among the million that are being catalogued by astronomers what one is satisfied is a very particular constraints to make sure they have they were able to talk with each other in the history of the universe and that's really fun but still working on goes as well as saying you know this is expensive we need some more resources we write graphic pose and all the rest so with luck we could do the first round of kind of pilot test perhaps as or within maybe as early as within the year or maybe year and a half and that would be a kind of proof of principle experiment looking not a very distant quasars but nearest stars in our own galaxy so that makes things a lot easier wouldn't be a full test that we can visually but a show that we could we could do it and then with more money and more time we'd love to mount the full version maybe by two thousand and seventeen two thousand and eighteen where we'd actually be shooting this untangled particles between islands in the canary islands off the coast of africa  miles apart and then at the same time having telescopes focus on these very distant objects these quasars to determine what aspects of those and of those earthbound particles we want to measure and we want to use the stars are very distant objects it just takes a lot more time and money so you probably have to go into this without any bias but what do you think you're going to find you know right i have plenty of bias but i so i expect will find exactly predictions of quantum mechanics and that would be a great thing i mean that would be really closing down as much as my sins and i argue as much as we as anyone could in our universe closing down kind of rivals or alternatives to quantum theory which are not always sort of aesthetically pleasing alternatives but that are also not ruled out they really are logically still in play even given forty years a very clever tests of entanglement along the way they've always been subject to the so called loopholes every known test so far  and and that's not just a problem for kind of philosophy it's if these rival theories that are not quantum mechanics if they're still viable in the world then this whole machinery that we were talking about a while ago about quantum encryption is at least in principle vulnerable might not really be in practical terms but but part of the appeal of quantum encryption is that it should be guarded by the laws of nature not just guarded because it's hard for computers to see scramble certain numbers as a kind of practical matter but the real the real beauty i think the real pleasing aspect of quantum christian's that nature behaves this way and that disallows anyone no matter how clever to to hack into your signal right and that that sureness that foundation rests upon quantum mechanics governing the world and not some of these kind of woolly sounding alternatives those alternatives though not pretty are not ruled out yet we'd love to really say we've just we've put the you know the squeeze on  describe the world and we hopefully show that on the kind of on a grand grand scale you just say this in your book you mention about the whole  kind of pragmatic shut up and calculate mentality and how this was in a sense maybe not intentional but just kind of a naturally born reaction to that based on the time in the the events of the times in the kind of thinking and i would think that that was courageous i mean these students who have a reputation that they're cultivating i'm assuming that to go out on a limb and like look at you know something that may be considered medical science pseudo science or something like that takes a lot of courage but also might be something that's critical in terms of really finding deep truths what do you see that's happening today that might be like that where people might be subject to a lot of criticism but maybe they're just being very courageous it's a great question and you know i wish i knew in some sense that i know what to go you know direct my own students to what i want to work on what's going to be the next big breakthrough that everyone is you know dismissing today the fact is i you know i don't know i take heart in the notion of there is a much broader sense of what counts as kind of legitimate science say just in case of physics  s you know people learn things about the world then that we still take for granted a so it's not that this is all good or bad but there are your choices get made their styles that become kind of cultivated and and certain kinds of questions questions can flourish ma more easily in one sort of regime than another and i think we're in a time period today where there's recognized room for a variety of approaches that doesn't mean we're all you know going to the right path the right and most of us will be wrong most of the time but i think the boundaries of someone saying that's simply not science there certainly are boundaries but i think they're maybe maybe a bit broader a bit looser friends of mine work on ideas today that they really do  they can they can sound pretty outrageous or or or silly or knows what multiverse alternate universes you know extra dimensions of space that no one's actually ever seen any evidence for i mean on the face of those those room for real smart physicists to study that and to publish in the leading journals and to teach courses on that so that's why i think there's a kind of broader range of what counts as legitimate these days there are limits are we still missing things i imagine we likely are you know but i think that kind of very characteristic moment of the shut up and calculate i think there's plenty of that kind of science today which is which can lead to very good important science but that's not so the only game in town the way i think it was more or less dominant earlier on