theory of superstring theory and understanding understanding physics he has written i might i might like to show right here at the also while were getting started on what could be an extended conversation into physics comprehensive and is written specifically in mind even though physics has a great deal to do with mathematical formula and macro mathematical thinking but this is a book written to try and give an understanding that can be grasped by the layman of the excitement and the developments of of of physics is written in a way that it makes a very accessible to people is it difficult to take these complex subjects of physics and right on the cutting edge of physics and make it a political to the layman or do you think some of these most complex ideas of the universe and the theory of everything and some of the things you talk about are concepts that can be made accessible to a wide audience without losing the specialized integrity that is necessary for advancing the field i just wonder as a general question i thank you for the book but i wonder in general can some of these very complex ideas which we do want to talk about be made available to the general society so that we can have an understanding as physicists do what makes this universe tick how it got started and what's going on i think so all right in other words everyone thinks about space and they're high and we see star trak and we see star wars and the terminator and we have questions about the universe that is time travel possible can i meet my parents before before i was born is it possible that there is intelligent life out there that has  physics and these concepts are accessible to children these concepts are understandable to children it's only adults that have a hard time visualizing hyperspace in these things right now the concept by the way of looking glass universes was actually in a dues by a mathematician who wrote a children's book he knew that adults would have a hard time grasping the fact that a looking glass could join two universes together so he wrote it as a children's book and he called it alice in wonderland all right and through the looking glass here it professional mathematician of oxford university who said this concept is so beautiful so simple i shall make it for children that he was a professional mathematician writing as lewis carroll mesereau and so it was available that way d and he was reflecting things that were developing understanding that were developing that were very very complex about understanding the universe and though those those complexities and those developments have had a history of their own and i want to go through a member to begin at the beginning what what are we talking about we go back to th century greece we go back to the beginning of euclid geometry we go back to the beginning of physics maybe if you give us a primer of worries and bring it up to the contemporary moment some of those who were in mind i wrote this book when i was a visiting professor at the institute for advanced study at princeton and i want this book on the rd floor of th hall directly above einstein's office wow and late at night when i was on the word processor i could swear i heard a viking down to the library and it must have been the ghost of albert einstein maybe in slippers and if you take a look at this long term perspective as you pointed out right here it was euclid over two thousand years ago who told us that the world is flat flat like a table that we have circles and squares and only three dimensions and that you have length width and height but there's just no such thing as a th dimension you us from euclid two thousand years ago is about to fall because of perhaps the greatest revolution in the last ten years in the medical physics the theory of everything that perhaps light gravity the nuclear force that makes the stars shine and generates the energy of hydrogen bombs perhaps that could be explained if you add higher dimensions member this is no longer twilight zone we're talking about we're now talking about solid physics whereby physicists are believing that and there's nothing called up there's nothing up the universe is shallow everybody knows that and what you cannot measure does not exist therefore the universe must be flat must be shallow and they spend their whole time in this universe and there was just a few inches away from this car and wondering what would happen if one day i reached and grabbed one of these cars and lifted them up into the rd dimension yeah all of a sudden the scientist would say oh my gosh they would see li that are beyond their comprehension they would see people that could move without fins and that is a new law of physics that's right movement without fins on and they would begin to realize my god there is a rd dimension there's a new dimension of space beyond that of the pond that today we've businesses believe not all because this is an extremely difficult theory to test but a lot of hundreds of physicists believe that we live in a ten dimensional universe all right now that that's getting into physics as as a discipline that all right and there's been a great deal is going to it's been development of quantum mechanics has been development of einstein's theory has been people who are precursor to you know that's all part of the story that led to it made it possible to this and there's still debates going on between devices about what it is that makes up the universe in terms of the modern experience the developments that einstein was able to come up with and the people who he was dependent upon there was a mathematician you mach a mathematician the german math that just so this development of the mathematics in the developments of the understanding has been a long role within the modern experience within the last one hundred years or so things have been developing as well and that story is part of what you have in your necessarily for us to understand these broader developments right right and in fact in this book over some of that which airs in a primmer way again right here in this book i tried to summarize the two main currents that have have been at the forefront of physics that is the theory of gravity the theory of mind stine in curved space also the quantum theory the theory of particles the theory of adams and quarks and molecules and their nature seems to have two hands the left hand talks about space black holes and big bangs and galaxies and the other head deals with atoms the neutrons and protons and corks and these two hands don't talk to each other particle particle physics does not talk to general activity of einstein and it is of nature had two brains and two arms can you imagine walking with two hands and two arms didn't communicate with each other we cannot i believe that nature could be that complicated and silly that it would have unified theory there's a glue was missing that we didn't have the glue to put these things together although the knowledge is growing all the time in the mathematics in the things available to us the knowledge base is available to us one of the things is coming now in such timber the knowledge is coming at such speed such almost exponential speed we were talking before off camera about that the knowledge is coming but we had to build this up over a period of time planck was max planck evolved in terms of the quantum mechanics the guiding principles that he used to utilize in order to come to theory of relativity and some of the grounding principles of modern physics right think of a sheet of paper for example right this is the world of euclid flat and interesting in the world of triangles that we had to learn when is complicated there are all these forces everywhere you know now we're looking at the sheet of paper knows that there's no such thing as force the world is in some sense still flat what is difference is that space itself has curved and that curvature of space gives you what marble around the bed run the marble of course circulates around this large rock and you say to yourself my god that's gravity that's force there's a force exerted by the rock on the marble well we know of course there's no force at all it's just the smooth bending of space and time so remonde mach and these people had the germ of the idea that perhaps it is the warping of space that gives us force and of course and steins great contribution was he finally wrote down the complete mathematics of that that's that that's one tradition the tradition of the left brain now nature has another brain and that is the subatomic world of the atom and in that world is the world of max planck where we have little packets of energy little packets of energy whizzing back and forth quanta quanta you know little packets of discrete energy and the quantum leap in fact is not part of our common conversation yes discrete not continuous jumps that is antithetical to the smooth bed sheet of einstein that we now have little packets of energy running around and these two traditions could not be placed together for fifty years we physicists have been carrying our hair out trying to unify these two theories into a unified field theory of everything you know so you realize that many attempts have been try all have failed niels bohr father of the atomic theory once listen into a lecture by w with his version of the unified field theory well niels bohr stood up and he said mr polly we in the back are all agree that your theory is crazy but what divides us is whether your theory is one of the most beautiful unifications possible two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle beautifully meshing together once you go into hyperspace you know now how is that possible if you go back to the car carb swimming in a pond and it rains yeah i think of it raining one day and all these vibrations go on the surface of the pond and now think that how the carp views these vibrations the cup and said there's a force there's a force somewhere in this mysterious unseen dimension force at a distance as  that's basically what light is now when i was in college by the way i was at harvard and i asked my professor at harvard what is light and he said light is a wave well i said of light is a wave and how does it come from us from the vacuum of out of space nothing is waving and he said yes in a vacuum nothing is waving but light is a wave we can see an absolute talking about a space that's right and i said no way to me that's ridiculous you're saying that nothing can wave how's that possible yes and he said yes nothing can wave and i said that's crazy and he said we just get used to it that's all right right right we've been used to the idea that nothing can a wave now we believe that what is waving is the th dimension not you may say to yourself off why stop at five when i go to six seven well when the six hundred and seventy eight dimension starts to vibrate then instead of getting the light for us to get the nuclear force now this is profound you know you realize that nuclear force has stumped the world of physics for the last understood as basic elements are basic forces that are operative in terms of matter energy and if you just even go step through that with us they're right because that's going back to the basic primmer stuff again with these four main things have to be in a certain rectified if we want to water earth and fire right ok and then we began to realize that air is not really an element that l air consists of nitrogen oxygen and they internally broken up in the neutrons and protons begin to realize that use these machines will have for england but i do know one thing and that is one day you will tax them and they certainly have a day or two percent of the gross national product of the planet i think that's right about fifty percent of the world's wealth is linked to television radio computers cars tractors prefer generators if you turn off electricity we are literally thrown back to the time of ice  of the planet i tried so when i learned history in high school we learned about kings and queens and i knew that history was not in terms of kings and queens look at in terms of force that when newton in the one thousand six hundred dollars funny worked out the force of gravity he also worked out what it's called mechanics mechanics now gives us machines and machines unleashed the industrial revolution which toppled the kings and the queens of europe absolutely so you can sense the unleashing of gravity and tinkering in their laboratories and working with equations said half the age of radio set out the age of electricity all of a sudden we had refrigerators and televisions and radios and vacuum cleaners and the took the time for that technology applied right but again detonation of an atomic bomb that is perhaps the simplest unleashing of the nuclear force which in turn once again changed all of world history and then also war everything changed with the discovery of the nuclear force it has never  what do we call them basic forces in universe by which we we are concerned with in terms of that when did we understand what brought us to the point if i'm if i'm correct in that these are four basic building blocks of the universe and moving toward of everything when did we come to the scientific community come to understand that that was in fact things with which and the reconciliation of the mathematics and physics of these forces is something that we have to deal with if we're trying to move toward a theory altma everything when we come to understand about world war two about world war d two it was just today and i that's right you realize that this realization perhaps the greatest realization and modern science is a recent one that around world war  two before then they thought it was just gravity electromagnetics and who knows what the nuclear force is right now we're back in that back in the days of ernst mach and one thousand nine hundred and five in those those things were going on at that time we did not understand these things we thought gravity and electromagnetism magnetism and then there were there were other binding forces or something that people tried to understand but the knowledge was quite primitive in a certain sense until there relativity coming out of these great traditions the addition of einstein looking at space and time and that force is nothing but geometry it was ernest maka the great philosopher who began to talk about these kinds of ideas but he wasn't a mathematician it took einstein to put down the mathematics by which space and time can be better struck or not a mathematician was a philosopher he was a  me i had the idea of this crumpled sheet of paper in that space was somehow essential to the understanding of force but they didn't have the equations einstein was a master of equations and he was able to then put down t mathematics by which the bending of space can be represented as a force and then parallel to that hair well it's about development we have the development of the atomic bomb and the development of the atomic bomb gets us into the nuclear force which was perpendicular and paralleled distant from what einstein was trying to do now remember at the institute for advanced study einstein was considered a god but an aging god god that no longer had great ideas anymore all the action wanted to unite these two great traditions yet tradition of mock and remind and the highest fruition being general activity which gives us black holes and big bang yes right space wars and the other tradition the tradition must be a theory where everything is made out marble the wood must turn to marble and he spent the last thirty years of his life at the institute thinking and thinking about how space could be used to describe matter his idea was that we are nothing but condensations of space that space somehow condenses like a cloud condenses out of nothing right all of a sudden on a hot day a cloud condenses and rains all of a sudden right einstein said that maybe space condenses and instead of a cloud we get people maybe we are nothing but condensations of space now the irony is that even though the young and said that what god has torn asunder and let no man put together that god had meant these two traditions to be separate marble shall not be wood geometry shall not be quarks is it fair to put one in the term holistic or comprehensive view and the other into a more quantified or specialized kind of approach that around it is unfair to put those whose did exactly as being a holistic approach as opposed to a quantitative harvard harvard yeah that's right and i basically was smashing atoms all my life in the last ten years has been a dead end for that branch of physics we've smashed all the atoms we can and we find very little to explain why we have the world that we have today why do we have so many thousands of particles you know oppenheimer once who discovered the atomic bomb i made the statement that we should give the nobel prize in physics to the physicist who does not discover a particle believe that the two traditions the tradition of marble and wood can ultimately be merged together in hyperspace people from both sides of the sphere think that way the leading business believe this ok now remember this is a very difficult theory to test this is the theory of geometers gave us the big bang theory that is that the twenty billion years ago there was a cosmic explosion but they couldn't explain what happened before the cosmic explosion they couldn't explain where it came from or take a black hole which we've actually discovered now outer space it was announced in one thousand nine hundred and four before the summer that m eighty seven galaxy that is fifty million light years away is a swirling gas containing perhaps billions of solar masses and in the very center is a and then shooting off radiation into the north pole in the south pole looking like a cosmic top at the very center is the black hole this is the black hole now this is where gravity began to break down here is at the very center of the black h if you take a look at einstein's equation and look at them continuously at the very center of the black hole is a looking glass to another universe there is a parallel universe a wormhole that takes you through the black call be connected by the form that's right we look at this all theoretical thought theoretical and this is where einstein's general theory began to break down i don't want i want to bring in something that can be just put it maybe completely off to the side and not have anything to do we're talking about but does this have anything to do with fract but you see at this point the relativist these pure geometers begin to realize that they were running out of gas they could not explain the instant of the big bang they could not explain the center of the black hole rhinestones theories actually say that there is a looking glass looking theory or dimension a higher dimension and at this point we have now the victory of whole is over reductionism we dutch inist said we have to smash the atoms get to the quarks but what's inside the quirks we now think that what's inside you could go across the apple the long way or the sure way to disburse all right to the apple like a worm does and that's called the worm hole and in order to do that you have to have another universe to which one is going and that's right most people are of the mind that we live in this universe that we understand from big bang i thought it was fifteen you say twenty billion years ago we have this understanding all of which comes to be accepted common knowledge as it were among the physics and the broader intellectual or the community we understand this big bang and that that was the theoretical from long for a long time and if not how long and when did this come up this idea of parallel universes and the wormhole d and that sort of a mr hawkins talks about this as a physicist but maybe you could fit in there and we'll go along that and ok so he ten years ago these two great traditions the tradition of marble d mock remind einstein curved spaces came to a halt when they had to deal with what happened before the big bang the other great tradition the tradition of adams and quarks and molecules that also came to a halt because we realize that we didn't understand why they were too many thousands of particles and why you couldn't write a quantum theory of gravity why couldn't you write a theory of all forces because in the quantum theory they could get a combination of these mathematically if i make the mathematical formulation zur are these think a lot of this is mathematics of course but that they could not enter accommodate as it were gravity atoms they wanted to get smaller and smarter particles hoping to find some kind of simplicity among the billions of particles they were discovering and instead they were getting deeper and deeper mired in the mathematics and the flood the tidal wave of particles coming out of our atom smasher haven't we discovered a great deal but i mean if we were to look at academia we look at the breaking up of knowledge i mean there's a seamless web and understanding in a certain sense you've got the ultimate theory of everything but the academic process the whole process of learning the whole process of understanding the whole adventure of universe and the biological system and the whole academic process learning process is one now of tremendous specialize  on specialization right and hasn't however the source of a considerable amount of progress and hasn't there been a skin suitable amount of progress toward increased understanding i don't know of the analogy is right between you know the theory of everything or or unified field theory as a as a comprehensive view of the universe but the specialisation and the breaking down of everything into its component parts it's reflected in our in our in our societal organization there's no something good to be said for that when you see that some people think of medicine as being so specialized that we don't talk to each other in the field of medicine however there is also a unification process taking place in medicine with the discovery of d chemical which is d n a so out of all these specializations and biology came a unification called the strange d n a fly into things we have a similar thing happening in physics we have people who specialize in gravity people specialize in eyes nuclear force i know now right after all these specializations you realize that we're talking about the same object and i'm still in a store string and i'm still saying in terms of the way the society organizes the basic premise is that specialization is the way to go and if you become specialized and they become specialized and little little disciplines all the time and the more specialized they are the more you are and if you do not specialize you do you in the scientific community you have the danger of becoming called a popularizer or someone who is a generalist a jack of all trades master of none doesn't know what he's talking about because we specialist know all the nuances of what's going on in the specialized field and that's something that is current now in academic structure academics development and intellectual history and social organization well there is maybe the major problems facing mankind is we don't have a comprehensive vision there was a piece in the new york times sunday times this week saying that science  trying to come to a science of science or some sort of pissed amala gee that takes into the mall and brings them all together specialization is the order of the day now yes and no you see socialization is only the tip of the iceberg all right presently specialization is when you look at it now often and you say i'm going to specialize in the ear i want to specialize in the foot i want to specialize in the trunk i want to specialize in the tail right until you look at all of a sudden the big picture and you realize holy mackerel you know we specialize to the point that we missed the forest for the trees that there's a unification taking place that evolution has created a spectacular animal called the elephant you know the same thing now in physics that some people specialize in the trunk called light some people specialized in the foot called the nuclear force  people specialize in the tail call the weak nuclear force and all of a sudden looking at it from a distance we say to ourselves oh my god all these specializations going deeper and deeper into the structure of matter have given us a unification we see now the big picture work in the weak force to get to work in the strong force what you're specialisation going to be yeah right and that was the pathway towards acceptance and still is in the side twenty years ago in physics that is the way it in the society in the sense that they don't have room for comprehensive us but you see that either because you know either joan lyrically or economically or politically or you know take an analogy of nationalism and sub super nationalism they don't have a sense of ecological inclusion in terms of decision making and so forth specialization is still the course that is mapped out for our young minds to follow and it's a way d of i mean there is no discipline that of everything but there is you see what happens is as people begin to specialize you know the discipline itself forces you to come to a deeper more profound unified reality physics has forced all these graduate students working in four different areas to unite in a common theory of everything in biology we have all these people specializing  plants and animals and humans and wherever forced to come to grips with the unifying principle of d n a then you have the side the social sciences and then you have the arts in the humanities and the purpose you know in the biological the virology didn't good the link between the living in the say that einstein's having the last laugh because einstein saw the process of specialization he saw the people at the institute laughing at him saying that all gravity is old hat the new the new sexy stuff is adams and neutrons and protons and that's wh i want to specialize in and einstein revolted against that he didn't like the fact that all these physicists were especial izing into little pieces of physics and and drilling holes where where they could he once said that he has no respect for a physicist who takes the thinnest piece of wood and drills lots of holes in the thinnest piece of wood and says look i've made a scientific accomplishment i'm so i want to take the focus piece of wood and drill one clean hole through it you know not to take the thinnest piece of the specialization process taking place the last laugh is ultimately when you go to a deeper reality unification steps in that the discipline itself forces you kicking and screaming the discipline itself forces you to begin to have a comprehensive theory of everything ok the leap because if you're talking about a theory of everything i said earlier the science of science you know or for small g of understanding of how we know we know but that there is a unity coming hours i mean we would begin to get at some sort of an understanding of this being some sort of a qualitative transformation in the air and i shift a paradigm shift on a very large scale that's right i mean because we can we can begin and say fifteen to twenty billion years ago the big bang then there was the and four all of the curves are going exponential right they're going so they were coming into some sort of a new relationship to universe other than that to which we have been throughout the whole d of the human experience right  some people look at all the like a fairly limited and some people feel like overwhelmed and i used to feel overwhelmed when i was a grad student getting my ph d in one hundred and seventy two just overwhelmed by all this knowledge coming at us but i tell you nature i like to look at the analogy of an egyptian to two thousand years ago looking at the weather you know some people would specialize in clouds some people would specialize in why it got hotter as you went south why did why do the winds blow from from the west why does it rain why do we have summer fall winter spring broke in the west depending on what latitude you're at that's right but they did you know the weather was a complete mess everyone specialize in different aspects of the weather now take taken a gyptian into outer space take some of the specializations simplify and unify by looking at the rd dimension that's why hyperspace we in mathematics they always say you must leap out of flatland yeah when you leap out of flatland then you look down at flatland and see all these little specializations everywhere begin to realize my god it's simple it's so simple when you have a unifying principle yeah and one of the great unifying principles of mathematics and physics is to leap out of flatland yeah you know we had jump space we were talking about that mach and so we didn't talk about this of course incredible flatland which had such a convertible book where they had all the figures were drawn in flat you know one dimension you put a circle around of stick figure and he's in jail he's in jail right it was i'd show you a picture  lifting him out into the into the other dimension into the th dimension or i to another or rd dimension in that case right if that were the case that would be the possibility and particularly since we're being flooded with this information and we're having we were talking earlier on camera you have in cybernetic language you have a discussion that information or systems analysis if you have a information overload within the system or what bucky fuller would have called special case experience that you have information overall permits pattern recognition between a system that in that would be overwhelmed here but you can see pattern recognition between various other parts of the overall system that might dimension and look down we can see everything a pattern recognition of all different sets and this is why some theologians have said that god in spirits and ghosts live in the th dimension think of it for a moment if i have people living on a tabletop flatlanders yeah i can get a scalpel and cut right into their insides without cutting their skin without cutting their skin i could perform surgery on their inside or i could peel them off in which case they simply just disappear or flat land or if they have a safe with gold in it i could simply reach in the safe and just pull out the gold has gone into nowhere and is going to remember right now picasso was fascinated by this four dimensional perspective that you could look at a flatlander and see everything from the perspective of the eye that means lines of perspective shooting out from the eye and in the in the last supper for example you can see the lines coming out as you had jesus christ looking at the scene of the last supper right so renaissance art discovered the rd dimension what picasso said was that if medieval art was two dimensional  picasso was trying to capture the th dimension that just because we can see flatland all at once this means that a four dimensional person looking at us can see our two eyes or a silhouette side and back simultaneously right yeah and that is that became part parts of a system that could be an organism or it could be cells and organisms organs or an organism you could see it whole but then also had this concept of of synergy saying that there is a  embryonic state within the mother's womb is going to be coming into a new relationship to a universe that are two and two or two a world that can't be known from the context within the system itself there is from above that it can be seen in a certain sense in a new and different kind of way so there could be something that could be a little bit disquieting to people who are in a system that is comfortable uncomfortable to a flatlander to consider three dimensional it would read uncomfortable upon the operation of his in a related system spaceship earth within this patch right solar system within this galaxy within this hyperspace world it's a rather large kind of transformation to be a little bit difficult for a lot of people to grasp and yet that is exactly what in a certain sense your book is asking us and laymen to understand is the appropriate way for us to begin to think right and is speaking of synergy right some being greater than the sum of its parts take a look at a jigsaw puzzle that we have the jigsaw puzzle the different pieces make no sense but when we put them together all the big soft pieces all of a sudden make a picture yes and we suddenly say oh my god i picture just jumped out at us yeah that's the same thing these jigsaw pieces are the forces of nature right  jigsaw puzzle pieces gravity another one is light another one is the weak nuclear force the other one is a strong nuclear force and we put them all together into a picture all of a sudden something new jumps out at him and that is that have to mention that is in hyperspace in a out of flatland perspective looking down at two dimensions we suddenly see that all the forces of nature are simple whole and extremely easy there's another one of your principle of observations is the book is at another level things become simple an elegant at another level of understood a dimension of the level becomes simple and understandable trite and in a certain sense it might be this kind of vision of this kind of transformation that you met there's so much this ease among the american one the world citizenry if we're going to look at the real world we want to do that in a follow talk with you about we want to go into super soon fighting touchdown and trying to get at it and it's down but then we were going to this kind of a of a situation that's what people are in a very real sense perhaps looking forward now and makes this chinese expression let me not live in exciting times or something but we live in a time of unparalleled qualitative transformation in terms of the evolution of events in this part of universe and the understanding of that is what perhaps in a very real sense to go against the nd law of thermodynamics is to move across to entropy and bring increased patterns of understanding to the process which were apart we may be