Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Physics Of Everyday Things 20170709

Local independent bookstore. We are excited to have our guest tonight. Technically the store closes at 8 00 p. M. But we will keep a register open and you will be able to exit the building out the back parking lot here. A perk. On to tonights guest, the taylor professor and he has served as the science consultant on movies such as watchman and the amazing spider man. His latest book, the physics of everyday things, was published by crown last week and that welcome be in joining james kakalios. We will be back with more live coverage from the eighth annual gaithersburg book thank you very much. Joe. Thank you to the University Bookstore for hosting this event and thank you everyone for coming indoors on a beautiful may day to sit inside and listen to talk about physics. You are my kind of, nerds. [laughter] we live our lives surrounded by the most amazing technologies such as, usb drives that can store entire libraries, are smart phones which far exceed the capabilities of anything imagined in star trek, in the star trek communicators. Our touchscreens that we have everywhere, the security at tsa; Magnetic Resonance imaging where they can see inside your body without a cut of a knife; microwave ovens that cook our food in fractions of the time a conventional oven does. These devices, how they work, it seems like magic. I felt that it was very important as a physics professor that i explained to the public that it really is magic. [laughter] now, i dont mean magic like Doctor Strange from Marvel Comics with the all seeing eye but rather magic like penn and teller magic show at las vegas. There is the fantastic affects and not breaking the laws of physics, they are exploiting the laws of exit six. Using them to create their illusions. These devices use physics to do what they do. Magicians dont like to tell their secrets but professors, you cant get them to shut up. So, in the physics of everyday things i describe how everything from your fitment wrist fitness monitor works to highspeed elevators, things as conventional as airplanes to more esoteric like voice untreated noise canceling headphones. As mentioned, ive written Popular Science books the physics of superheroes came out about ten years ago and that was followed out by the amazing story of Quantum Mechanics which i took as the premise that we are in the 21st century and we were promised jet packs and flying cars and we got cell phones and laptop heaters instead. Really what happened was the writers of the sciencefiction pulp bought that in the future we have a revolution in energy which is what you need in order to let the car up off the ground and keep it off the ground. We got instead was a revolution in information. That information revolution is made possible by Semi Conductor physics which in turn is made possible by close of mechanics. The physics of superheroes went into a second edition with more heroes, more villains and more science and just last week, as mentioned, the physics of everyday things came out in front. Before i get to that let me give a little background about how did a mildmannered physics professor become associate with spiderman and superman. In my day job the experimentalist so experiment this means i work in laboratory opposed to doing theory and finance matters of a way of saying solidstate physics. My research actually goes from the nano to the neuro. We do work with Semi Conductors where we make nano crystals. These are crystal and germanium and they have diameters of a few nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter effectively the length of three atoms linked to end. You can make a crystal with a diameter of three oh nanometers and that will only have 200 atoms and 140 atoms will be on the service and these crystals are so small that the electrons actually feel there inside a box. The properties of the Material Change simply by changing the size of the nano crystal. Thats great because frequently if you want to change the properties of the material you had to add other elements and make other compounds. Right now if you have another. [inaudible] it frees us from the tyranny of chemistry. [laughter] we make nano crystal light from one Semi Conductor and we invent them into a matrix of another Semi Conductor and readiness to try to make superior cells or transistors and then i have another project right collaborate with professors of neuroscience where we use the techniques we developed to study electronic noise and apply them to voltage fluctuations in the brain. Thats not why im here tonight. Here tonight because back in 2001 i created a freshman seminar class in the university of minnesota that was originally called everything i know about science and learned from reading comic books which my calyx essay explains a great deal. This is a real physics class that covers everything from isaac newton to the transistor but theres not an inkling plane or pulley insight. These examples come from superhero, books and is much as possible when superheroes get their science rights. I illustrate here in action comic that i bought back in the 60s when it first came out with a grand total of 12 cents and im very old. [laughter] in the story, superman visits a College Campus and as a kid, i was interested in what life in college would be like. Perhaps i had some premonition that i would never get out. As a kid, i do this part wasnt correct but there were things in the comic that did turn out to be accurate portrayals of life at the university. For example, all professors at all times always wear caps and gowns and all professors are 800 yearold white man. [laughter] now, the class the first time was in first fall 2001 in the spring of 2002 the first spiderman movie, the one directed by sam and toby require was about to open. I thought this would be an Good Opportunity to get science into the newspaper. I wrote up a story about how a key incident in the spiderman, quark, the death of gwen stacy spidermans girlfriend in, as you all know, amazing spiderman number 121 turns out to be a textbook illustration of forces and momentum. I wrote up the story and was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the friday that the spiderman movie open and the university put out a little press release because of this article. Well, spiderman is on the big screen but if you want to know about the science of superheroes the person to ask is about Professor James teaches a special seminar. The university put out press releases about me before and about my work on Semi Conductors and electronic noise and the result was zero. You write one story about spiderman, however, so this came out on friday and the movie open on friday in the press release went out on friday by monday there were calls from cnn, bbc, the london times, the Associated Press came to my office where i just happen to have these lecture demonstrations. [laughter] that was a lucky break. You know, at this stage in my career, ive reconciled myself to the fact that i could win three nobel prizes and i know what photo theyre using and my obituary. [laughter] i say this to my colleagues and they say when three nobel prizes how, in a crap game . This article actually went around the country and this is a clipping actually from the chicago suntimes that my sisterinlaw sent me and heres a clipping from turkey where one of the graduate students sent me where i think there i know what theyre saying about me then i started showing up in places that physics professors dont usually appear. So, this coming weekend, if youre playing a family game night, say youre playing trivial pursuit and you have volume six, i will tell you right now that if you get card 291 the science question, the answer is correct on. The question is what planets gravity to science Professor James say calculator the force to leap over building in a single bound. Now, i didnt even know about this but one of the graduate students of unit diversity of minnesota brought it to my attention, so i piled the card it went down to the Physics Department main office and went to my Department Chairman and showed him the card and said allen, who is the most famous scientist you know mark he looked at the card and he looked at me and he said steven hawking. [laughter] and hes not a genius, well, then it is you. In the physics of superheroes we use details of superheroes superpowers themselves are obviously not physically justifiable and i dont see my job as being a doctor and this could never happen and this is impossible and what the deal with the hogs pants anyway, unstable molecules. I grant each character a onetime miracle invention from the laws of nature and say well, if you were superstrong orchid stretch like rubber band or run at superspeed like the flash, could you run across the ocean or up the side of the building or snatch bullets in midair all things that the characters are shown doing in the comic books and once you make the suspension of disbelief. Uses superheroes to show basic principles and i show how the physical principles apply to real life and we start off way we do in a standard physics book with newtons law of motion, conservation of energy and we eventually build up to thermodynamics we build up to more modern topics. That wasnt going to work in the physics of everyday things. Very few devices use just newtons law of motion or one bit of physics. Rather, the physics of everyday things we have narrative something that my editor coins narrative physics where you are the superhero and we follow you as you have the amazing pics adventure of an ordinary day. Throughout the day, whenever you interact with any technology, any devices, eyepopping and explain how it works. Hopefully by the end of the book, youll start to develop your own physics intuition and will be able to try to guess how things are working. And notice them around you and say i totally knew it was going to be a capacitor or Something Like that. When you look at the table of contents of the book its almost like a fun with dick and jane premise. It starts off chapter one, you begin your day. You get up in the alarm on your smart phone goes off and you tap the screen and you make breakfast. You brush your teeth with electric toothbrush then, chapter two, you drive into the city, you get into your hybrid automobile and you navigate using gps and use that to the towline at the highway using your easy pass and use the self parking picture in your car and explain the physics. You go to the doctor, he takes her temperature with a digital thermometer, xray, ultrasound, david talk about Magnetic Resonance in imaging and explain how that works. Then you go to the airport. You picked out your ticket, you go through tsa, you have all the screening done to you and then you take a slight. Youre in the airplane, you take a digital photograph of a cloud and you try to upload the cloud and the person next to you is wearing noise canceling headphones and then you get to where youre going and you get a business presentation to use an lcd. Injector or laser pointer or microphone and finally, you go to the hotel and you walk down the hall and the motion sensors turn on the light. So, the next thing i want to do is talk about as you continuing going through the fullbody scanner so let me read the narrative part from the book, the person ahead of you in line for the metal detector has thrown a wrench. The tsa precheck detector should not have been set up by the rich was a trend wristwatch. Levels need to be adjusted to avoid false positives. The tsa agent instruction to the fullbody scanner. And senior pockets of everything including paper money you secure from the atm you place it in a plastic dish on the xray machine conveyor belt. Step into the scanner with your elbows but you raise your arms above your head and then you suck in your belly. You stand still wallet orbits roger. I surrender you say, just dont let me miss my flight so, how does this work . How does the see under your clothing . Youre standing here and they orbit around you and quickly they have an image that can tell if you have anything secured under your clothing. There are two ways to emit something you can have the light passed through the object and look for the differences in how much light is transmitted, call transmission mode where you can look at how much light is reflected. In transmission mode like avonex or a and xrays are highenergy light and an xray will be deflected by the electrons in an atom. Border molecules are mostly water. They have ten electrons. The calcium in our bones has 20 electrons. Calcium atoms are more effective than scattering xrays than the soft tissue which is mostly water. So when you have xrays pass through the body it goes easily through the soft tissue in larger items like the calcium in your spine her rib cage will deflect xrays away. The detector sheet will be dark and when theres few xrays because i got scattered it will be lighter. So we get an image this way. Or, we can look at reflections in the light and look for variations in the reflection. The fullbody scanner does not use xrays it uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that has a wavelength of 1 millimeter. Or more generally, microwaves. If i have an electric charge on arad and i waive it back and forth, and generate a very in electric field which generates a Magnetic Field and as they propagate out we call that light. If i shake it back and forth at one time per second thats the frequency of the light. It would have the wavelength of about 300 millimeters. If i shake it couple hundred millions times per second i would generate radio wave. Shake it back and forth a billion times i generate microwave. Faster still, you would actually start to see this is visible light. Faster still you get ultraviolet then xrays and gamma ray. Theyre all the same phenomena. Still alternating electromagnetic waves. The only difference is the wavelength and frequency. These microwaves that have a wavelength of about a millimeter. Because the wavelength of those electromagnetic waves is large compared to the fibers that make up your clothing. Just as in large ocean wave is not scattered by one swimmer in the water but would be scattered by a large ocean liner or the show, the Millimeter Waves pass through your clothing but are reflected by your skin. Theres anything underneath your clothing that has a different reflection that scatters late differently than your skin that will show up as a changing contrast. None of these touch screens would work without ito. Let me actually read the narrative part from the book. The person that is in line for the metal detecter through a wrench in the work. I surrender you say. There are two ways to image something. You can have the light pass through the object and look for the differences in how much light is transmitted or you can look at how much light is reflected. Lighter. So we get an image this way. Or, we can look at reflections in the light and look for variations in the reflection. The fullbody scanner does not use xrays it uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that has a wavelength of 1 millimeter. Or more generally, microwaves. If i have an electric charge on arad and i waive it back and forth, and generate a very in electric field which generates a Magnetic Field and as they propagate out we call that light. If i shake it back and forth at one time per second thats the frequency of the light. It would have the wavelength of about 300 millimeters. If i shake it couple hundred millions times per second i would generate radio wave. Shake it back and forth a billion times i generate microwave. Faster still, you would actually start to see this is visible light. Faster still you get ultraviolet then xrays and gamma ray. Theyre all the same phenomena. Still alternating electromagnetic waves. The only difference is the wavelength and frequency. These microwaves that have a wavelength of about a millimeter. Because the wavelength of those electromagnetic waves is large compared to the fibers that make up your clothing. Just as in large ocean wave is not scattered by one swimmer in the water but would be scattered by a large ocean liner or the show, the Millimeter Waves pass through your clothing but are reflected by your skin. Theres anything underneath your clothing that has a different reflection that scatters late differently than your skin that will show up as a changing contrast. That would be a way of seeing underneath the close the scene what you have. In this way it would indicate theres something more that another test needs to be done. Thats why have to completely into your pocket of any paper or anything else because that would scatter the Millimeter Waves differently. By the way, no matter how long a student phone booth youre not going to get baked like a baked potato. The power is thousands of times weaker than a microwave oven or cell phone. Is it the same part of the spectrum that yourself one uses. The slower power and you would get the same amount of radiation in the first two minutes of your airplane flight. We evolve in a sea of electromagnetic radiation. So, that part is not too hazardous. The next and to go on your luck seems to have run out. Your bag has caught the attention of the tsa agent operating a scanner. As you return the contents of your pocket back to where they belong you hear the full word you never want to hear at an Airport Security checkpoint. Is this your bag . You not in the agent tells you he wants to test it further. He takes you back to a stainless steel table behind the checkpoint invites wipes outside of the bag. He places the disc into a large device which you know is labeled the next also traced detector. Less than a minute later it gives the all clear in the tsa agent thinks you for your cooperation. Youre free to go and not a moment too soon. Youll have to hurry to get your gate on time. Spoiler alert, you make it so, how does the device work . Weve all had at some point where they wipe around your luggage with this piece of paper and put it inside a box i was suspect that they just burn the paper and wait a minute and say your fine. They do burn the paper, but theres other interesting physics. If you handle many explosives, powders there will be traces of it embedded in the grease of your fingertips. When you touch Something Else some of those molecules will be transferred to the things you are touching. Even if you started with a milligram of there still an anagram that can be measured. What theyre looking for is tnt. Actually thats not true. Theyre looking for a tracer molecule that has to be placed in all explosives. That way youre not sensitive to a particular type. If they find it they know that something is amiss. Tnt is a big organic molecule has carbon atoms and nitrogen atoms, hydrogens and large configurations. I want to be able to tell and distinguish this and say the other adams run the atmosphere such as to nitrogen or to oxygen. These are smaller and have a reduced profile than at t molecule. This is trying to figure out the difference between a mack truck and a mini cooper. Its obvious that i could look at them and tell which is which but what if you couldnt look at them, what if they were so small that you could not visually inspect them . How would you tell the difference between the mack truck in the mini cooper . One would be to have them run a race. Will make it a fair race and will put the same engine in both vehicles. The have the same power but the heavier truck which has a larger surface area so more air drag will take longer to run the race than the lighter and aerodynamic cooper. So you look at which vehicle crosses the finish line first so is the mini cooper in the truck and then we can tell the difference. This is what is done in the explosive traced detector. One of the techniques that is use. The first step is to burn the paper and drive the molecules up into the vapor. Then one electron is removed from each molecule. If i take away one which has the charge of minus one now they each have the charge of plus one. At the other end of the two i put a negative voltage. That attracts the positively charged molecules. The only thing that measures that its like put in the same engine and all the vehicles. Fill the tube with a certain pressure of gas so they experience the same drag i would like to see how long it takes for the molecules to make it to the end and the lighter ones get their first in the heavier ones take a longer time period from calibrations we know how long it would take and if we see any molecules crossing the finish line at that point we know the person dealing with the bag was in contact with explosives and it warrants additional investigation. So thats how these devices work. It seems like magic but once again simple physics you can see how they do it. Some of these are rather clever, the scientists and engineers were extremely clever. One of the things that struck me in writing the book was the universality of physics. I kind of knew this but it was striking. Theres at least 42 devices i talk about in the book and to understand them you only need to know handful. Once you have them then you see the same physics get used again and again. For example magnetic induction electric currents create Magnetic Field. We know because theres electromagnet on the larger the currents is the greater the Magnetic Field. An electrical current is a moving charge and generates a moving field. Beautiful symmetry of physics is moving Magnetic Field can induce electrical current. This gets exploited in the senior credit card. That has your account information is presented on the front is a series of numbers but also on the back of your card in this black stripe which is actually a region of magnetized material and you either have a north pole up or down and so on. This is a one, zero one and zero. But now how do i read it, how do i get this information that is where you use magnetic information. I dont have the demo here but i dont need it because of the internet that i found from the university of colorado a great demonstration. Heres a coil not connected to a battery theres a lightbulb and a voltmeter hooked up i will take the magnet and move it through the coil. I will change the amount of Magnetic Field in the coil. When i do that i get an electrical current induce. Notice its only a changing Magnetic Field. I can leave the magnet in the coil and nothing happens. Currents create Magnetic Fields. Currents are moving charges the faster the Magnetic Field changes the greater the currents it induces. If i move it out or in slow i get very Little Current induce. I yank it out fast to ever take a credit card and swipe it and it doesnt read and you have to pull it faster because the faster you pull the larger the current in the easier it is for the reader to detect the information encoded. That physics also gets used when you recharge your electric toothbrush. You have the electric toothbrush and you know that is . You have a battery in here its powering either crystal or motor that makes the bristles move back and forth. Eventually the battery moves out and we want to recharge it is not something that will be a groundwater so i plugged the recharger into the wall outlet and when i place the toothbrush on the recharger it charges up in a few minutes time. If i look at three charger comments plastic. The bottom of the toothbrush is plastic. Plastic is not a good conductor of electricity. Its a horrible conductor of electricity. So how does it charge up . When you plugged into the wall the current coming from the wall is whats called alternating currents. Often outlaw, but we keep on going. The current from the wall is an alternating current changing direction 50 times a second. So that current goes to a coil the base of the charger. It creates a Magnetic Field that points the north pole up or down, 60 times per second. The constantly changing Magnetic Field. We have another coil in the base of the toothbrush handle. The Magnetic Field passing through the toothbrushs north pole up or down, it changes 50 times per second see induce a current in the coils of the toothbrush. Then we do a bit of shenanigans and we convert that to a direct current that recharges the battery. In this system you have a coil thats not make an electrical contact with another coil but nevertheless the electrical power in the first is transferred to the second coil, this is called a transformer. Seems like a simple device but theres more than what meets the eye. Thats a transformers joke. I know. I fought with my editors for months over it. I said how can i write this and not have an optimist prime book and she said jim, its not that funny so anyway, the same physics thats used in your credit card reader is used when you recharge your electric toothbrush. They look like very different devices. The same physics shows up in your metro card or your card for your hotel. You have a metro card and it knows that you have money and it deducts a certain amount from the card or you go from your hotel and it unlocks the door for you and how does this work, again missing physics inside the card is a coil and the reader generates a changing Magnetic Field that induces a current in the coil. That energizes a chip embedded in the card and now that it has power it sends out a signal to the reader which is also listening and says how much money is in the account or Identification Number that indicates this is your hotel room and to allow you entry. At the same physics seven electric toothbrush charger for the credit card reader in this way. Also the same physics when he walked through tsa. You have an alternating Magnetic Field and if theres anything metallic it will induce a current and then the metal detector turns off unless since to see if there is any decaying field generated by an electrical current and if it detects that it says there must have been metal nearby unless you bury which we now know about because were supersmart sumac so all of this is the same physics used again and again. Want to finish up and talk about the sociology of physics. The attitudes of society towards science and scientists reflected the Popular Culture any see it more strikingly in the comic books. This is tales from November November 1961. Marvel comics before they are publishing the fantastic four they put out, quickset and sciencefiction adventures. Every month the earth was being attacked by giant monster is trying to conquer the planet. Inevitably local Law Enforcement cannot stop them the military was helpless and the earth would be doomed if not for the efforts of one lone scientist. Who inevitably would figure out the achilles heel of the one weakness for the monster in order to defeat them. So here is tales to astonish number 13, this is actually the same route that shows up and guardians of the galaxies. But when he first appeared he was a monster. Yes had marvel vocabulary. Theres the last panel from the story you see the sheriff and when he hears the scientists plan he says i never even thought about that in the town person says thats why evans is a scientist in your only a sheriff. And it evans wife says so darling forgive me i been a fool. Never complained about you again, never personally i cant tell you how often i hear that in my own house. The Tax Collector from outer space. Well, you notice the attitude and the reverence towards scientists in this story and this flies comic books and Science Fiction in general. And why this is is i think because scientisted had made the contribution that scientists had made to society was evident. They had not won world war ii but certainly contributed to the success in world war ii, not just the development of the Manhattan Project but the development of radar and the prom pros estimate fuse, and they led to nonmilitary applications whether its Atomic Energy or radiation for radiation treatment of illnesses, radar, commercial aviation, and i even the proximity fuse, we see in selfdriving and selfparking features. I talk about that in the book. You know, in the 60s you had the space race going on. 66 years after oroville and wilber wrath can do their first flight at kittyhawk, the longest of which didnt last a minute. 66 years later Neil Armstrong steps on the moon. And so there was a radical transformation in transportation made possible by science and engineering, and that was impossible to ignore by the public as a whole. Now we still have these fantastic advances. I have been a professor at the university of minnesota for going on 30 years now, and every spring, every summer, you always see students lying out on the main quadrangle and talking and soaking and get something sun. Unlike when i first got minnesota, now theyre also on their phones, watching movies that are being streamed. And this is just happened recently and it seems impossible. It seems miraculous and thats what i try explain in the book. The reason why i think its important to explain this is most of the people who read my book will never become scientists or engineers. But they all, i hope, will be citizen is and voters, and as citizens and voters, were all being called upon more and more to have opinions about scientific and technological issues whether its Climate Change or alternative energy, genetically modified organisms, nano technology. So the more that we can educate ourselves the more we can make informed decisions that will be technically sound and not just sound technical. We have a lot of problems, and the idea of the physics being the physics physics and being ul also should help inform us in how we address the scientific issues that face us as a society. Like loudspeakers. Were going on. For example, Quantum Mechanics explains how molecules interact with light and we know that certain materials will let visible life pass but absorb infrared radiation. We can make a lightemitting diode that emits radiation, and one that changes it resistance when you shine the light on it and when you put then together you have a tv Remote Control. So without understanding you wouldnt have tv Remote Controls. For the men in the audience, youre welcome. This also explains why putting double or triple panes of glass in your windows helps trap the heat inside. Because the visible lice passed through the glass but absorbed the infrared and readmits it back into the room. Window glass is mostly silicon dioxide. And Carbon Dioxide is very similar claim e clemty to silicon dioxide and are similar the way they absorb infrared right. So by saying the physics is the physics mean if you put double or trimble panes of Carbon Dioxide Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere and the physics we like in the tv Remote Control doesnt magic include stop working when we put it in the steam. In the atmosphere. We have to accept that and the ingenuity that make our everyday extraordinary can also solve the most pressing problems but only if we accept the science. Fineman rode in the final line of this report, when he was a part of the team that investigated the challenger Space Shuttle accident, reality must take precedence over Public Relations for nature cannot be fooled. Thank you all for your attention. Thank you all very much. [applause] im happy to answer any questions, any super hero questions. We go back to a few slides from the capacitors and the touch scenes. Let me try to Something Like here . Yep. What you said before was your finger is a little bit it has a little electric charge. Right. Yes. You are actually have a certain your body has a certain capacitior so you can store a certain amount of charge. If you store too much charge can you basically shock your screen . Absolutely. Absolutely. You could do the same if you store too much charge, thats exactly right. This is why some of these dish if you were to open up look under the hood of your computer, say, and Start Playing with me motherboard, the first step you have to take is you have to ground yourself to make sure you dont have any excess charge because those devices can easily get shocked and then the current that passes through it is so high that it locally melts the silicon chip, and now theyre fried. And the thing is useless. So you can absolutely shock your screen that way. How do you that would be burned out, then, if you or two do if you were to do that. Yes, sir. Can we go through the last the last slide. Okay. I actually forgot to show the very last slide, which is to thank you all very much. But i think you meant this one. Im a Structural Engineer and i was [inaudible] thank you very much. I dont know if youre familiar with the name professor steven jones or amile hairat. Sound familiar. Took the [inaudible] measure the time and then actually came to the conclusion that the official story cannot be true. Collapsing at near [inaudible] my concern is not whether they are right or wrong. My concern is there seems to be a kind of a politically correct science vs. Politically incorrect science. Those people are never given the opportunity actually to speak publicly on television or invited to conferences to speak, like why are we kind of a slave actually to allow the scientists who speak a language that is not politically correct and conform with the official story so have no chance in speaking. Thats an interesting point, and to just summarize, if i may, the issue is, who determines, who decides whether our legitimate scientific questions, and what are not. There is a Scientific Community and there are certain i mean, on the one hand most of us work and were kind of like craftsmen that are putting our bricks of knowledge in a large wall, and were not changing the wall direction, were not changing its geometry, about we are adding to it and building it on that way. We build on we follow what has been done before and the people come after us add more remember every now and then there are truly brilliant people who figure out an entirely new way of building a way or entirely new direction that the wall of knowledge needs to take and those people are revolution revolutionary and tend to be ignored by the older, more established scientists. Max plunk, a founder of Quantum Mechanics said that revolutionness science do not win out by superior evidence or reasoning. They win out when the older scientist die off and theyre no longer there to object. Now, he was being somewhat facetious but not completely. To some extent, what determines whether someone is a visionary or, you know, a not, is dependent on whether they succeed or not. I know a guy who spent seven years up in his attic, trying to solve a 300yearold mathematics problem. Eventually he solved it, and this was andrew wilde who solved the theorem and he is not considered a crank because he succeeded. If he had spent all that time and never got anywhere you say oh, he waste all his time. And that was actually he was afraid of being labeled as such he didnt actually tell anyone he was working for seven years on this problem. So, to some its an interesting point. We have only a certain amount of time and sometimes we get things in the mail or now thanks to the internet, theyre sent via pdf, on people have completely new theories to prove how einstein is wrong. And for the most part, most scientists dont spend a lot of time trying to trace through and find out where the errors are. We have such a large body of evidence to support einsteins theories that we start with the prejudice that it is correct, and we work from there. But if someone were to come up with compelling evidence eventually that would win out. Yes, sir. Recently called the man who knew infinity, and at the very end of the movie it said all of this brilliants had a black cal consequence practical consequence because his brilliant pertained to black holes. If i recall that right. So, how does all that brilliance as a practical matter have that beneficial effect with respect to black holes . Im not like i say im a humble but lovable solid state experimentalist so im not an expert on black holes, but i think the larger point youre asking is, how does abstract mathematics show up and describe the physical world that is developed independently . And i tell you, if i knew, i would tell you because it is spooky how often this happens. That mathematicians develop tools, develop things just beau they find them intellectually interesting. Its as if you had tools and you say, im going to invent a screwdriver, and im going to invent all sorts of different screwdrivers, one with a glass head, one has a cross, hex head. Look at these amazing tools. And you say, well, thats great. And then 100 years litter, people discover that the world is full of screws that need to be turned. And who knew . And, oh, instead of having to invent it 100 years earlier someone invented the screwdriver. And we can now use the tool to turn the screws. This happens again and again and again in physics. And not every bit of mathematics finds an application in describing the physical world, but every all of our descriptions of the physical world do employ mathematics, and so why that works, how they could look at things in number theory and then many, many years later, after he is long dead, other scientists say, hey, dont have to actually invent a solution to this problem. This solution already exist us. Thats just like one of the spooky things about the world. It was either or wegner wrote an essay, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the world. Its much better than you think it should. I can add, if i may, to uhhuh. Math originally was a language, invented by physicists to show the amount of writing and the like, for example, you can say x plus y equals 100. Somebody wants to see that the fear of science was the fear of shoes is equal to 100 but they found that writing that is too long so they invented the x and later the y. So actually math originated by physicists to describe the fall physical law. So no wonder mathematicians can invent new words and then later on go back and find that it is a physical phenomenon. If you read the comic books on the history of mathematics. Still works minute better than it should im still mystified by it. Yes, sir. So, Stephen Hawking came out and said he thinks were living in a simulation. What are your thoughts on that . That were living in a simulation. Man issue wish it was a better one. Theres all sorts of ideas and hypotheseses but you have to come up with something that is a test. People have suggested various ways they might be able to test such a proposal. It has to do with subtle issues and Quantum Mechanics and im not very up on it myself, i have to say. I tend to think that theres some thing that might be a simulation, like my paycheck or Something Like that, but for the most part, i think we just the simplest explanation is usually the right one. The multiverse. I have privilege of the multiverse because ive shown up as a fascist in a marvel comic describing why theory why theres only two can hold thors hammer. And one lives in the Marvel University and one works in silicon and does research on thors hammer. 616 and im not sure what the numbering of this one is. No other questions well,. Advance of science over the last 100 years, and i appreciate that and im one of the people who do, but are we sometimes doing things too fast without actually considering like, a practical an environmental disaster. It was good but now its kind of a real big problem. So, are we supposed to kind of constrain science a little bit and make sure that this is not damaging us rather than i hesitate to say to agree with that simply for two reasons. One who is gets to make that call . Who determines that the rate should be, what the correct, proper rate of Scientific Development should be. Since i doubt very much theyre going put me in charge, i would rather hesitate, especially with my colleagues and putting them in charge. The other thing is that nobody complains were solving and curing diseases too quickly. No one ever complaints that were finding too many treatments for illnesses too fast. And its the same type of investigation, and in some cases the investigates are unabled by studies in other fields. When development in physics have to take place in order for there to be advances in medicine. The Magnetic Resonance imaging is an application of nuclear magnet resonance, of quantum mecklenberg cantics and they were trying to determine how that understanding a generation later made the transist are so and later responsible now you get Smartphones Smartphones andp computers and dvds and everything without which my kids would say life is not worth living. I you went to irwin when he developed the equation, the foundation of Quantum Mechanics and said, nice equation,er win, whats it good for . I dowd he would say if you cant to storing content on a digital format but a handful of summer heroes of science the world we live in would be profoundly different. Thank you all very much for your attention. Thank you for coming out. Appreciate it very much