>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name
is Amy Draves and I'm pleased to welcome Leonard
Mlodinow to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker
series. He's here to discuss his latest book, "The
Upright Thinkers," in which he points out that the
way we think has just as much an influence on science
as science does on human thinking. Curiosity and
striving to learn are critical for the future of
mankind.
He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max
Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. He
has written for several publications and is an author
of five best sellers, including "The Drunkard's Walk"
and "Feynman's Rainbow."
He has also written for television series like
McGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Please
join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Good morning, everyone. Well,
a little bit after morning I guess, but for some of
us it's morning. So I'm going to talk about the
human journey from living in trees to understanding
the cosmos today. I structured my book
chronologically. There are a few different eras that
we've gone through in our development. The first
eras take millions of years. The next one takes
thousands of years, then hundreds of years, and now
we make as much progress in just decades that we
would make in a million years previously because the
pace of the growth of knowledge is ever increasing
because the amount of new knowledge we get is
proportional to the knowledge that we have already
and to the number of people that we have, and so it's
really exponential growth.
But in the beginning we were just apes living in the
wild, and there were actually many species of human.
"Homo" means human. It's a genus, a group of
species. We're Homo sapiens, or actually Homo
sapiens sapiens, which is a subspecies, but there are
many other homo specious, and all the rest of them
went extinct except for ourselves.
And we tend to think that we're smarter than other
animals and that that intelligence has somehow helped
us to survive, but really, the reason that we have a
bigger brain, scientists believe now, is for social
cooperation, because to understand each other and
what each other are thinking and to work in a way
that helped us survive in the wild, despite some of
our physical inadequacies, took a lot larger brain
than other species have.
So when we look at somebody, we can read on their
face what they're thinking, what they're feeling. We
can -- we have an idea what they think we're
thinking. We have an idea what they think we're
thinking they're thinking. We have an idea of what
they think we think they're thinking we're thinking,
and so psychologists say we can do this to six
degrees of depth, and that's pretty amazing. I can't
even say it to six. I stopped at four, I think.
But, so for that reason we have -- we've developed
these huge brains, and but once you have, as you guys
know, I guess, once you have the software capacity,
you can use it for many things, even beyond what it's
designed for.
So around 10,000 BC we started to do that. That's
the time of what people call the neolithic revolution
or the agricultural revolution. And in school you
may have learned that that was a time when humans
were living as nomadic tribes wandering around
without a permanent home and they settled down, began
to settle in villages and domesticate animals and
grow crops.
And back when I was in school, we were told that
that's because that was a more efficient way of
growing food so it led to a better life. And that's
completely wrong.
We have now done many studies of the skeletal remains
of people from back then and they actually, when they
settled down, they lived shorter, they had more
disease and a lesser -- worse diet.
So why did we actually settle down? Well, a leading
theory of that has to do not with what we eat but our
spiritual nourishment. It was around that time that
the first temples were built and that people started
to wonder about what happens after death and what is
the meaning of life. And so by settling down, they
could keep their departed loved ones with them. They
literally kept them under the floorboards.
Generations of generations just lived on top of the
graves.
And so this is what caused -- people believe what
caused the first settlements. And these could have
thousands of people, but they weren't really cities.
A city is defined as a settlement where there's a
division of labor. So each family is not
self-sufficient but there's butchers and bakers and
candlestick makers and so forth.
And that started around 3,000 BC, and that
development was huge for the development of science
and all intellectual things because in order to live
in a society like that, we had to invent writing and
arithmetic. And writing is a very difficult
invention. All nomadic tribes speak. There's never
been a tribe found through the centuries that didn't
speak, have spoken language, but scientists believe
that written language only originated two or three
times, and all the other languages, all the languages
that we have today are derived from those couple
inventions.
So when that happened, we started to have the first
scholars and the first jobs devoted to the intellect.
They were bookkeepers, record keepers and there were
scholars, professors, so to speak, of reading,
writing and arithmetic. And eventually they start
thinking about other deeper things. They would
collect books of -- not books, but written tablets of
aphorisms, like don't piss in the river and
statements -- very useful statements for life like
that.
And then a few hundred years later or a thousand,
couple thousand years later the Greeks had this idea
that we could use reason to understand the world and
we start moving away, some of us, from believing that
gods, everything is due to the gods and looking at
whether observation and logical analysis could tell
us something about the world.
That culminated really in Aristotle, who was an
extremely good empiricist, and I call him a one-man
Wikipedia because he really study everything. He
studied fish, people's stomachs, the climate,
volcanoes. Anything that you can think of as science
today almost, he studied it and probably wrote a book
about it. Unfortunately, most of his thoughts were
wrong and they were in the wrong direction because he
had the idea that all of nature derives from a
purpose, a final purpose of the world, and he didn't
do anything in a quantitative way. It was all
qualitative.
So the next big step to liberate from Aristotelian
thinking came in what's called the scientific
revolution, and again, this is not really a
revolution because it happened over hundreds of years
and different people did different parts and they
were very confused and weren't quite sure what they
were doing, but we call it the scientific revolution
anyway.
And then finally, the decades I'm talking about was
the beginnings of quantum theory and modern science,
modern physics but also modern chemistry and biology.
And this was a huge departure in the way people
thought about the world because prior to this the
only thing we dealt with was -- were phenomena that
we could see, feel, smell, sense with our senses. We
might have something like a microscope or a telescope
to help us, but that eventually we saw things with
our eyes, and so we were really dealing with the
world as we could take it in with our senses.
And around 1900 we started to have enough technology
to look beyond that. We discovered x-rays, for
instance, which made film change color and the
electrons would impact upon phosphorus and screens
and you could see electrons indirectly that way, and
we started looking at radioactivity and we realized
there's a whole kind of universe out there that's
beyond our senses.
And that left a lot of people behind, because it was
a very hard thing to accept because there was a lot
of opposition to things like the atom and the
quantum, but over several decades that was developed.
So that's kind of the time line that I follow in the
book from millions of years BC to today. But it's
not really why I wrote the book and that's not really
the let's say, the soul of the book.
This is a picture of my parents when my father
proposed to my mother. And he's a Holocaust
survivor, went through concentration camps, and he
was at the Nazi underground and he saw some of the
worst of humanity and some of the best. He only had
a seventh grade education, and when I hit seventh and
eighth grade and started reading about science and
talking about science, he took a great interest in
it. And not in the technical theories of science but
in what science means for humans and what it tells us
about people that people do science and how is
science done, and he wanted to understand the soul of
science. So I always thought I would write a book
about that one day, and that's what this book is.
He's been dead for almost 30 years now, 25 years, but
better late than never. So here's the book.
In school we learned that science is about the
scientific method. I certainly had this in high
school. You ask a question. I'm sure being at
Microsoft, you've all seen this many times. I state
a hypothesis. You do an experiment. You check to
see whether your prediction was right. You adjust
your theory or throw out your theory, or you believe
in your theory a little more than before you did the
experiment, and that's how science is done.
And my daughter, who is 14, a freshman in high
school, came home recently and said: Daddy, Daddy, I
learned all about the scientific method and I learned
how Darwin was following it with evolution. So she
was really excited, and this is really cool, and
she's telling me all about it.
And I look in her book to see what it says, and there
it was, talking about Darwin found evidence for his
theory. He had a theory or a hypothesis, found
evidence from fossils and geography, and in
particular from the finches on the Galapagos, so he
went from island to island. And you could see that
the bills of the finches each were different on each
island according to the habitat and according to what
the finch had to eat, and so different species
developed because the fittest ones survived, and this
is all great evidence for evolution.
And then they also use the Internet a lot for their
studies, so here is a BBC website that talks about
it. While studying wildlife on the Galapagos, Darwin
noticed the finches showed wide variations in the
beak, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's only -- this is a very nice explanation
and illustration of the scientific method that
suffers from only one problem, that it's completely
wrong and it didn't happen that way at all. And I'm
surprised to learn that they still teach it like
that, but maybe I shouldn't have been.
So in the "Upright Thinkers" I try to talk about how
we really got from stone tools to -- and
trial-and-error exploration of the world to modern
science and what is the scientific method and what do
scientists really do. And some of the lessons are
these: That science is far more complicated than
these myths portray; that most pioneer "geniuses"
experience failure after failure after failure before
they have hit the right thing.
So it's very important to be able to accept failure,
to be wrong, to admit that you're wrong, and that's
something that people in many areas of life have a
hard time with, but if you're a scientist, you're
faced with it all the time and you have to be willing
to accept that if you want to be successful. Unless
you're super lucky, but it's hard to think of anyone
who was that lucky. Even Alexander Fleming, who
supposedly came upon penicillin by a chance
observation, that if you read the real story, it was
much more complicated.
Also, scientists are often confused about their
theories right up to the moment they complete their
theories, and they're often confused about their
theories even after they complete their theories.
So we'll see that examples throughout history where
that happened where the people, they think that
they're showing one thing and then later on it takes
years and years to interpret what they really said,
and the theories that we learn in school in our
textbooks, which have been fine-tuned, made more
elegant over the years, is not the form that these
theories often came up in and not the way that the
inventors understood their theories. Also, most
scientists' ideas prove wrong, so as I said, you have
to be ready to say that you're wrong.
And so throughout science, history, curiosity,
stubbornness, and what the psychologists call grit
have proved more important than scientific insight.
And grit, I don't know if you've heard of grit, but
it's a big topic in psychology these days and it has
to do with your ability to overcome obstacles and
keep going despite daunting problems in front of you,
and it seems to be correlated to success in
everything from the military to marriage and is
certainly important in science.
So in this talk I'm going to tell you three stories
today, and let's start, the first one is a Darwin
story. "Darwin's Barnacles," I call it, "The real
Story." So Darwin did start by asking a question, as
the scientific method said you should, but his
question was what should I do with my life.
He had been sent to medical school by his father, so
I like to say even though Darwin wasn't Jewish, he
seemed to have a Jewish father, and yet he
couldn't -- didn't do very well because he couldn't
stand the sight of blood, and this was a time when
you operate on someone, blood is flashing everywhere
and the patient is screaming because there's no
anesthetic, and Darwin just didn't have the stomach
for that, so he quit.
And then his father decided he should be a clergyman,
and Darwin thought he might do that, but he suspected
that it might not be too quiet a life for him, and he
was looking for something to do instead when this
offer came to go on the Beagle.
Now, we say that Darwin is was the Beagle's
naturalist because the ships did carry along a
naturalist in those days, but the reason he was -what the captain really wanted was a companion
because the voyage is several years long. This was a
five-year voyage, and the captain, being of a certain
social class, was precluded from talking to the crew,
so you're basically in solitary confinement for five
years unless you find somebody of your class that can
join you.
So the previous captain of the Beagle responded by
shooting himself in the head, attempting suicide, and
he survived, actually, but then he died from
complications some weeks later. And the second in
command took over, and he was now going to be the
captain on the next voyage and he thought I'd better
find someone to talk to.
So he ended up picking Darwin after the first fellow
he asked turned him down. And even though Darwin
came on board to be the ship's naturalist, he didn't
really think of himself as much of a naturalist as he
did a geologist. His real interest at the time was
in geology, not in biology.
So at the start -- now, we know a lot about what
Darwin was thinking, from his notebooks, his
journals, and his letters. So that's where all this
insight into what he was really thinking comes from,
from scholars studying all those documents. Sometime
decades after he came up with evolution, he wrote his
own stories of how he got to it, and that's where
some of the myths arise from, but if you look at the
stuff he wrote at the time, you get the real story.
At the start of the cruise he wrote back home that
geology and invertebrate animals will be my chief
object of pursuit through the whole voyage, so maybe
a little bit of studying some worms or something, but
mainly geology.
And then after the voyage did he write, wow, this was
an amazing voyage. I figured out evolution and I
found all kinds of evidence for it, and now he said
during this cruise I have done little accept geology.
Well, that's what he planned to do and that's what he
did. And actually, he got pretty famous for it. He
made some great observations along the way. And when
he got back, the geologists were really applauding
him.
So where did evolution come from? Well, he sent
specimens back as he went, and so other scientists
were looking at the specimens, and this got him
thinking about evolution. I mean, he wasn't the
first one, by any means, to think about evolution,
but he was the first one to really make it scientific
and to look at a mechanism for it.
But as far as the finches go, he did collect finches
and send them back, but most of them were
misidentified as blackbirds, grosbeaks and other
things and they weren't marked according to which
island they were in, so they really weren't that
useful.
And he wasn't a very good ornithologist, but in his
studies over the years, as he was developing
evolution, just to show you what kind of work he had
to put in, this is an example of just one byproduct
of his studies. It's a book, 635-page book on the
topic of different species of barnacles. So he wrote
635 pages on barnacles. And that's just one of his
undertakings that he took over the years as he was
developing evolution, and it was a lot of harder than
looking at a few finches' beaks.
And just to show you graphically how long it took him
and how difficult it was, this is a picture of Darwin
when he started The Theory of Evolution. This is a
picture of him when he finished.
So I'm just going to list quickly a few things that
he was up to. He studied the animals in the zoo. He
fed birds seeds and studied their poop because he was
interested in, you know, as plants spread, how do
they spread and how can they spread from islands or
across bodies of water. Well, birds can carry them
in their feathers if they get stuck or they can eat
them, and what are the chances that a seed will
survive intact and come out in the poop and how long
can it last like that and so on. So he studied that.
He examined the work of people who were doing
artificial selection and breeding animals. So even
though he was queasy at the sight of blood, he
dissected hundreds of animals to compare their
anatomy.
And he studied the emotions of monkeys and other
primates and also of people from other countries to
see what kind of expressions they have on their faces
and to compare that to see if they were universal
among humans and to compare them to other primates.
And this is a work that's still referred to fairly
often in neuroscience today. Of course, he did the
barnacle work and a lot of other work.
So his true time line was he spent five years on the
voyage as a creationist. He started developing his
theory. Still a creationist. Five years after he
started developing his theory, he finished a 35-page
synopsis of evolution. So of someone who writes
books, I go, wow, a guy who is even slower than me,
seven pages a year.
That just shows you how hard it was and he was still
a creationist at that point, even though he was
believing in evolution. So he had to modify his
ideas of creationism a little bit. I don't think
this has filtered down to Kansas yet. But his
modification was that so original creationism says
God put animals on here and they never change, and
his new version was God put animals on here and
designed their habitats so that they would evolve in
a certain way, and that's what we're seeing is God's
plan at work.
So he was able to reconcile his deep religious faith
with his theory of evolution. Although, you know,
his faith perhaps was not as literal or as strong
through the years, he still was considered himself a
devout Christian and a creationist for most of his
work.
And what really changed his -- what finally destroyed
his faith in God had nothing to do with science at
all. It was when his ten-year-old daughter, Annie,
died in 1851. And it was after that that he became
an atheist. And so when people talk about evolution
being godless, it's much more complicated in Darwin's
case than that.
And it was 1858, some 20 years after he started
working on the theory, that he finally felt he had a
theory well enough developed and enough evidence for
it to announce it.
So just a brief aside about the danger of some of
these myths is that they make science simple and
easy, and today we're faced with that in many
domains. People who think perhaps they heard the
story of Darwin and the finches or Newton and the
apple and they see something, too, and they think,
well, I have my own theory and that is all I need to
have a theory.
And I just want to show you an example of about
autism and vaccines. So here's one of the early
papers on that. This was -- they studied 498
individual cases and analyzed them and analyzed the
timetable and found no correlation between vaccines
and the onset of autism.
And it's an article that was referred to by more than
2,000 researchers over the past 15 years, which means
there's at least 2,000 other people looking at the
same thing and they all conclude the same thing, that
there's no connection.
But then if you just think you can -- that science is
easy, maybe you don't need that, and you get
statements like this: "I've heard of many tragic
cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound
up with profound mental disorders after vaccines..."
And that's Rand Paul.
Sorry? So I think that one of the problems with
believing in the myths of science is that it makes it
too easy to draw facile conclusions and think that
it's true or maybe he's just being a demagogue. I'm
not sure which is the case. Because he's not a dumb
guy, but he makes statements like that and a lot of
politicians do.
So one final example of what science has come to
today and how unsimple it is, since I'm a physicist,
I like to talk about the large Hadron Collider. We
discovered the Higgs boson. We saw, quote, "the
Higgs boson."
So what does it mean that we saw the Higgs boson in
the world today? Okay. Well, first of all, our lab
is 27 kilometers in circumference, so it's quite a
big lab. If it were to run for a year, it would
consume the same amount of energy as the country of
Madagascar. So I named the unit for it, 1
Madagascar. And it a total of 10,000 scientists
working together.
So I talked about social cooperation to survive in
the wild, but now we're -- to me, this is the most
impressive feat of social cooperation in human
history, that 10,000 people in 60 countries around
the world can collaborate with a very delicate and
complex and 27-mile long electronic machine and
measure something to many decimal places and get it
right.
And to do the analysis, with we needed the most
powerful supercomputer in the world made of many
computers that are networked together. So when we
see this -- so in the old days we would see
something. When Newton saw something, he maybe saw
the apple fall, right? Later on we had the telescope
where you see something, but you still record it with
your eye, but you enhance it with a telescope or a
microscope.
And around the turn of the century we would see like
electrons by their image on a screen. We would see
something indirect or we saw the x-rays, but in this
case, what are we really seeing?
So the Higgs decays very quickly, so you don't see
the Higgs hit anything. The Higgs decays into other
particles. They decay into other particles, and they
do it -- it does it in different ways. There's only
a probabilistic description. So there's many
different ways the Higgs can decay, so there's all
these possible outcomes.
Eventually there are electronics, which are something
like the old phosphorescent screen but much more
sophisticated, but the electronics take measurements
on the decay products of the Higgs. So it's an
indirect -- indirect particles that we're looking at,
not the Higgs itself, right?
But we're eventually detecting them with electronics.
But even that isn't really what we're doing because
we're not -- you can't tell anything from just one
incident. We're looking at millions of incidents and
the statistics of millions of incidents and the
statistics of the different decay products over
millions of incidents. That's what we mean when we
saw the Higgs. You're not even seeing one instance
of it.
So this amount of indirect, indirect, indirect has
been taken to the Nth degree now, and when we say we
saw something, what we really mean is that we
recorded some statistical evidence of it. So it's
all much more complicated than it used to be.
And just to show you, when you do this, you have to
match it to the theory, of course, so let's look and
see what the theory looks like. This is the standard
model. These two pages are the standard model of
particle physics that describe leptons, hadrons, and
the Higgs particle. So except for gravity, this
describes and has been very successful in all areas
of particle physics.
But it's something that takes years to understand.
It's not something that you can take a course in.
When I was in college, we took a course in quantum
mechanics and by the end of course I could solve the
helium atom and other physical systems, but for this
you have to know a lot. You have to know pretty
advanced mathematics.
Of course, there's a lot of hidden in here, matrices
and differential equations. This was built by not
one or two people but by hundreds of people. There's
all these parameters of the masses, for instance,
that have to be measured by people over the years.
So it was quite a team effort to try to put this
together.
And to add the cherry on top, having this doesn't
tell you anything because we can't solve what this
says. There's no way to know what this says other
than using approximation methods, we use what are
called Feynman diagrams, if you've heard of
perturbation theory, where we -- to calculate this,
so you need a whole other set of knowledge to derive
the predictions from this and then you need a
computer to put it all together. So it's all quite
complicated and removed from what one person could do
or from an apple falling.
So my next story I want to tell is -- I call it "We
may be right, but we doubt it: The Story of Quantum
Mechanics." And you'll see the significance of the
title later on.
The equations I'm using to illustrate it here are the
equations for the helium atom. This is what's called
the Hamiltonian for the helium atom. And just to
show you how things have changed in the past 100
years, this is a lot easier to understand than this.
And in fact, I can tell you really quickly what these
different terms are.
The R1,2 is the force between the two electrons.
It's a repulsive force. It has a plus sign. The one
over R1 and one over R2 represent the force between
the nucleus, which is blue, and the red electrons, so
they have a minus because they're attractive forces.
And the first two terms are differential operators
that represent the kinetic energy, and that's it, and
that's the helium atom.
So it's simple to write down at least. It's
impossible to solve, but we again solve it using
approximation methods. But 100 years ago this is the
kind of equation that physicists dealt with.
So the first step in quantum theory was taken by Max
Planck. I was showing my daughter this slide, and
when she saw this, she said, my God, he invented
quantum mechanics and he only lived to be three years
old? And I said, no, no, he invented quantum
mechanics during those -- that period. He was doing
that work in that period.
I like Max Planck a lot because I have a complicated
name, Mlodinow, and so when I make a reservation in a
restaurant, I say I'm Max Planck, and they always get
that, and only one person has ever recognized what
the name, so it's not a problem.
So what did Max Planck do -- or Max Planck. He
started, just as you would understand from the very
simple description of science, he started from a kind
of a hypothesis or an idea, simple idea that there's
no such thing as atoms. So he wanted to find
evidence for the fact that there's no such thing as
atoms. He was one of those people who didn't believe
that physics should be dealing with things that we
couldn't see, even though there were reasons to do so
that arose from observations in those days.
And he decided to attack a problem called black body
radiation and to try and solve that problem without
referring to atoms, and this would help bolster up
the case for the idea that there are no such thing as
atoms.
Does everybody -- do you guys know what black body
radiation is? I don't -- no? Okay. So that's the
radiation of a body, of any object that's due to its
temperature. So today we know that things are made
of atoms. The atoms have charges. They jiggle
around. They jiggle faster at a higher temperature,
so because they charged things that jiggle give off
radiation, there's this stuff called black body
radiation. And it depends on that temperature
because things are jiggling faster at higher
temperature. Doesn't depend on the material that the
body's made of. This is just what's due to the
thermal motion.
And so there's a certain characteristic curve for how
much energy is given at a particular frequency. And
when physicists of the day tried to calculate that
from Newton's laws, they got nonsense. So people
were wondering what's going on. They weren't
wondering about Newton's laws. They were wondering
what mistakes are we making in our model that we get
the wrong answer.
And Planck was one of those, and it was an important
problem in the day because the lightbulb had just
been invented and people were trying to figure out
how to make a more efficient lightbulb. So here is a
graph. The different curves represent different
temperatures. Along the horizontal axis is the
wavelength of this graph.
So as you can see, the shorter wavelengths are toward
the origin, and then the red and infrared and so on
are to the right. This is what he was trying to
explain, and he spent three years trying to explain
it, so he'd have to have patience and have to accept
failure. And he failed and failed and failed, but he
didn't give up, and he backed up and he said, oh,
forget about how it happens. Let me try and find an
equation that describes the curve, because no one
even knew the mathematical form of the curve.
And so he came up with what's called Planck's law,
which is there, and the old law that Newton's laws
gave was a Rayleigh-Jeans law, which is shown there
and that you can see how it just goes up to infinity
and it's totally wrong.
But Planck figured out that this equation works
pretty well. So he went -- of course, this was the
days before computers and before you can look up data
on the Internet. And so he wasn't sure quite how
well it worked, but he went to the October meeting of
the Berlin Physical Society and presented his work,
this equation, said I don't know why it works, but
look, it's a pretty good equation.
And one of his friends, who's an, experimentalist,
took it home and started plugging in the experimental
data and he got so excited, he worked all night and
plugged in point after point after point doing all
the calculations by hand and found that this works
amazingly well, much better than it had a right to do
given that it was just guessed by Planck.
So Planck now got desperate to derive the law, and
that's how he stumbled on quantum theory. The first
thing he did was he said, okay, I couldn't derive
anything by not using atoms, so to his great credit,
what did he do? He did what a scientist is supposed
to do. He said, okay, maybe I'm wrong. What if
there are atoms? Let me try and derive the law using
atoms.
And that worked, and that's how he discovered quantum
mechanics.
So Einstein was a big admirer of Planck because he
was able to do this, to step beyond his prejudice and
to find the truth.
But in order to derive the law, he had to make one
additional really weird assumption, which is that
atoms could not have just any energy. They could
only have certain discrete set of energies. So if
you imagine my hand, I can shake it faster and faster
and faster at any speed, apparently, but for atoms it
seemed like they can only go like that or like that
or like that and certain discrete matter.
Well, that was really weird, but it did give the law.
So he went back to the Berlin Physical Society in
December and announced his explanation. And he got
to be very well known as a person who explained the
black body effect, the black body radiation, but
nobody thought that this was a big deal. Nobody
thought that this was a new way of looking at nature.
They thought this is some property of material was
causing this and we didn't understand that yet, but
Planck figured out what property the material and we
would eventually figure it out.
And some people just didn't like it at all. Just to
show you how science works, here is Mr. Jeans, Sir
James Jeans, who was one of the inventors of that
Rayleigh-Jeans law.
So when Planck's law, if you set H equal to zero, you
get the Rayleigh-Jeans law. So Planck introduced
what's called the Planck's constant, which describes
how the energy can only have discrete values. If
it's zero, then the energies have continuous values
and you get the old law, which doesn't work. And he
fixed what the value of H must be by fitting the
curve.
And what was Jeans' reaction? Of course, I'm aware
that Planck's law is a good agreement with
experiment, but essentially, I don't believe -- I
still don't believe it and I like mine better.
So I'd like to quote Robert Frost on this one. "Why
abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be
true." That seemed to be the attitude of many
physicists. And for the next five years not one
single paper was written to further this theory.
guess who came along, finally, and took the next
step? It was Albert Einstein.
And
So Albert Einstein was now the young kid, just
shortly out of school, and he's looking at Planck's
work and he goes, wow, there's something deep there.
Planck himself didn't see that, but Einstein did. So
he's the first one to interpret Planck's quantum
principle as a general law of nature.
And then he invented the idea of the photon. He said
light must be -- it's not just atoms that can't have
any energy. Light also can't have just any energy.
And so it must come in particles, and so this is the
quantization of light. And he put together this
quantization of light with Planck's idea of
quantization of atom energy. Well, this is fine, and
if that's all he had done, he would be like one of
these people who often send me emails and say, wow, I
have this idea that the early universe was like stars
and this and that and, see, it's this and this is how
it works. Isn't that great? And I go, well, I don't
know. Those are just -- it doesn't really tell me
anything. Anyone can come up with ideas, even Rand
Paul, and it doesn't prove anything.
So if you want to prove something, you have to show
that it works. So this is what he did. He applied
this to another effect, another problem of the day
that hadn't been solved called the photoelectric
effect. That's the effect of when light hit certain
metals, they eject electrons and you get a current.
And when you study how that happens, the experimental
results again didn't match the theory based on
Newton's laws, and Einstein showed that this picture
did match it.
So what happened here? Did people go, wow, quantum
theory, let's work on it, that's great? No. People
had the same reaction that they did to Planck's law.
They said, wow, you explained the photoelectric
effect. You know, don't make it bigger than that.
You just explained the photoelectric effect. We
don't quite get it, but you explained it.
Even eight years later in 1913, somebody was writing
a recommendation for Einstein to get the Noble Prize,
okay? And that somebody was Max Planck. And he said
Einstein's a great guy. He has a lot of good ideas,
except that stupid idea about quantizing the
electromagnetic field, this photon idea. Except
where he took my Planck's constant and tried to make
it more important than it is, if you ignore that,
he's done a lot of good stuff.
And indeed, when Einstein won the Nobel Prize, it was
for the photoelectric effect without any mention of
quantum theory. So the guys who really ended up
putting quantum theory on the map for good are first
Werner Heisenberg. Not the guy from Breaking Bad.
The other Werner Heisenberg.
As a physicist I found it very hurtful that if you
Google Werner Heisenberg, the first couple pages are
the other Werner Heisenberg. So I think we need to
have more physics shows about real physicists, but -and then Erwin Schrödinger.
So these guys each invented a new -- so I say that
they kind of put quantum theory on the map to stay
because they each invented their own theory that
could actually replace Newton's laws as a quantum
version of Newton's laws. So it wasn't just here's
an idea, I'll apply it to this phenomenon. Here's an
idea, I'll apply it top that phenomenon. It's a
whole theory to replace Newton's laws in 1925.
So you know, what was the reaction to this? Again,
now they have the whole theory, so you'd think
everyone would jump on it, right? Well, this is why
I said we may be right but -- I might be right but I
doubt it. Einstein thought he might be right but he
doubted it. He said he didn't like quantum theory,
as you all probably know, because the interpretation
had these probabilities in it, right?
Schrödinger didn't like it either after he saw what
it meant, and he said I wouldn't have even published
it if I had known. And he actually derived his
theory shortly after Heisenberg's, and his
inspiration was Heisenberg's because he didn't like
Heisenberg's. He hated Heisenberg so much that he
derives his own and he happened to get it right.
But the two theories looked very different. So he
published his own. He thought, ah, I finally got it
right. Heisenberg is wrong. I like mine. It was
much more like a classical theory. It involved
waves. Heisenberg's looked very weird to scientists,
okay?
So he was very happy with that. Einstein
complimented him. They were all very cheering each
other on. And then someone proved that the two
theories are mathematically equivalent. So now
Schrödinger turns against his own theory because, oh,
my God, it has the same predictions. It might look
different, but it's really the same as that schmuck
Heisenberg, and so this is horrible.
Well, ironically, guess who proved that they were
equivalent? Schrödinger. So that's again a
compliment to Schrödinger because even though he
hated the fact that they were equivalent, when he
saw -- he was trying to find the difference between
the theories and when he saw there was none, he went
ahead with it and published it and hated it.
Meanwhile, what did Heisenberg think of Schrödinger's
theory? He said, the more I reflect on Schrödinger's
theory, the more disgusting I find it. What he wrote
is crap.
So it wasn't exactly a mutual admiration society, and
it wasn't exactly a case where everything is seen
clearly by those who invent it. So it's just the way
science is done.
So now before my last story, we're going to do
something completely different, briefly. Play a game
I call "Who is the crackpot." Okay? Here's a man, I
can tell you some things that this guy believed. The
floor plan of the Lost Temple of King Solomon in
Jerusalem contains mathematical hints regarding the
end of the world.
Moses, Pythagorus, and Plato had all discovered the
law of gravity before Newton and encoded it in text
to hide it from the unfaithful.
The truths of nature are contained in code in the
Bible and only revealed to one scholar in each age.
And a mixture of turpentine, beeswax, rose water, and
olive oil will cure tuberculosis and protect you from
the bite of a mad dog.
All right.
crackpot?
Sound very interesting.
>>:
Maxwell.
>>:
Newton.
So who is the
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Newton. Newton himself. He
spent years not trying to work out gravity, laws of
motion from calculus, but trying to find it in the
writings of Pythagoras and Plato. So I think Newton
had a lot of ideas and went through a lot of dead
ends and a lot of failures, showing that Thomas
Edison was right when he said, "To have a great idea,
have a lot of them." And he did have a lot, and one
of them was great.
And so I called this "Who is the crackpot, NOW? The
Isaac Newton Story." Well, we know a lot about
Newton because if Newton was alive today, he'd be on
a reality show. Anyone guess what reality show he'd
be on? The Horders. Newton was a horder. Newton
kept every scrap of paper he ever wrote or even
received, so if he went into town and bought -- what
did you buy in the 17 century? Let's say a couple
sheets of paper or a cup, he would take the receipt
and he would take it home and he'd keep it. So we
know a lot of about Newton by looking through all the
stuff that he kept through the years. Just like
Darwin, we know from his writings. We Newton, we
know a lot.
This is Newton's time line. 1665 and 1666 was not
his miracle year. Whether or not he saw an apple
fall, we don't know. He did tell the story later, so
sometimes these myths come from the person himself.
But if you look at his notebook where he wrote down
every thought that he had, he was not even close to
his law of motion or his law of gravitation.
Then he went on when he went back to Cambridge to do
some other work, optics, algebra, and then he spent
over ten years and even beyond that on alchemy and
his analysis of the Bible looking for when the
world's going to end. He had a huge alchemy lab and
he owned every single book that was ever written at
the time on alchemy. And when he died, he went to
his grave with a content of mercury in his hair that
was 15 times the healthy limit, and several times
more for other elements like antimony and lead. So
he did a lot more work in alchemy than he ever did on
physics, and also on the Bible.
It was to the point where, at age 40, had Newton
died -- this is from Historian Richard Westfall,
Newton's biographer: "Had Newton died in 1684 at age
41, we would at most mention him in brief paragraphs
lamenting his failure to reach fulfillment."
So what changed that?. Well, it was kind of chance.
A fellow named Sir Edmond Halley of comet fame
dropped by and asked him the question. He knew that
Kepler's laws described orbits and said that planets
go in irrationals or ellipses, and he was wondering
if you could prove that using the idea of a force
that diminishes with the square of the distance. So
one over R squared force. And so he asked Newton
that question.
Meanwhile, a sometime nemesis of Newton -- they got
on each other's nerves -- Robert Hooke had sent
Newton a letter saying you could describe motion in
an ellipse or a circle by decomposing it into two
components. One is tangential, which means, let's
say if you just -- if you're like swinging something
around in a circle and you cut the string, it just
flies off from that point in a line, that's the
tangential motion, and then the radial motion is back
toward the center, so you get a sawtooth like that.
But with Newton's ideas about calculus, you could do
that. You could make each of those legs very, very
small and so the sawtooth shrinks down and starts to
look like a circle. So that was very important in
Newton's thinking and he refused to credit Hooke for
it. And Hooke thought it was the basis of everything
that Newton did. They were both wrong, really.
Plus, 200 hours of -- two years of 100-hour work
weeks. After all that, he ended up taking this one
challenge from Halley and turning it into what some
people called the greatest scientific book of all
time, The Principia. And in The Principia, you know,
we learn in school that Newton has three laws of
motion, but this is three volumes about motion. So
it's not just three laws of motion. It's extremely
complicated. And not only did he present his ideas
in his laws, he solved dozens of problems and showed
that his theory really works.
Here is a few examples. He, of course, predicted the
rate of fall of bodies, but to one part in 3,000 when
compared to experiments. He explained the tides,
calculated the speed of sound in air by assuming that
air is made of essentially atoms. He calculated how
gravity creates irregularities in the motion of the
moon, and also the precession of the earth's axis,
and many, many more applications. This is three
whole volumes of applications.
And they were very complicated. Here's an example of
some pages from the book. Newton didn't use many
equations. He used geometry, and it's extremely
complicated and tedious to try and understand. Plus
it's in Latin, which is hard for me since I don't
know any. But just to show you how difficult his
work was and what his 100-hour weeks were going into.
So I hope I've illustrated that, you know, yes, there
is a time line of science, but there's also an idea
of what real science is, that it's a group effort and
that, you know, it arises from skepticism,
creativity, clear thinking, curiosity, and that we
reward not just coming up with new theories, which is
difficult, but also debunking old theories.
And over the ages we've discovered thousands of
planets that could be like earth and stars that are
similar to our sun and galaxies from the early
universe, the blueprint for the human being and other
animals, but most important, we've increased life
expectancy.
Life expectancy, if you look at the centuries before
the industrial revolution, was between 30 and 40.
And then around 1800 when science started feeding
into the industrial revolution and we started getting
better chemicals and medicines and machines to make
life easier and to help us survive, life expectancy
has been taking a steady climb ever since then. And
let's hope that it continues and that we wake up
about some of the damage that we're doing to our
environment.
Let me just end with two quotes, one from Albert
Einstein: "The most beautiful and deepest experience
a man can have is a sense of the mysterious." And
then from Tom Stoppard, which I like even better:
"It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost
everything you thought you knew is wrong." And
that's the soul of the scientist. Thank you.
[applause]
>> Leonard Mlodinow: I'll take questions, if there
are any. Or answers if you have answers. Give me an
answer, I'll think of the question.
>>: I was really interested by that idea, that kind
of the myth of using scientific breakthrough is
harmful to the public. I was wondering if you have
any ideas about how to better the scientific process.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Well, with books like this.
But I mean, the real thing you want to do is reform
the educational system. And science is taught kind
of like history. So in one way it's boiled down to
just headlines that make it seem like everything was
easy and came out like a baby that's full grown,
right?
And the other thing is it's taught like history and
people just learn dates and they learn facts and they
don't learn the mystery, the curiosity, the wonder of
science. Science is approached just as if you're
just learning facts, like it's the history. It's
like history but it's facts about the physical world.
So good luck with that, though. I'm not -- don't
have a lot of faith. It's hard enough to get them to
teach evolution in certain places, much less teach
them how Darwin really discovered evolution.
>>: So we've come quite far, you would think, based
on what you've presented, but it seems like there's a
lot of doubters of science still in our society, and
to some extent, seems like it's increasing, right?
Are we living in a rational time period or not?
What's your take on that?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Well, I don't know whether it's
increasing or the people have always been this
stupid, but -- and it's more in this country. I
lived in Germany for years.
>>:
It is more in this country.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Yeah, it's more in this country
and a lot has to do with religious fundamentalism,
which we have plenty of in this country as well as
other countries, but, so, yeah. I don't know if it's
growing. But ->>: I mean, the knowledge is out there.
it's published. It's --
Obviously
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Oh, more. You could go online
and learn. Of course, you can also be misinformed a
lot online.
>>: But yet there seems to be serious doubts among
large groups of people. It just mystifies me. So I
was just wondering what you thought about it.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: I'm also -- I mean, in some
cases it's what psychologists call motivated
reasoning, which means that people, when you look at
arguments on both sides but you have one side that
you prefer, and even if you're sincerely trying to
jungle the arguments, you can't sincerely. You can't
really be neutral. Your unconscious mind takes over
and makes you disbelieve the stuff that tends to be
disconfirming about what you want to believe and
tends to make you value more the evidence on your
side, and that happens a lot, too.
>>:
Yeah.
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
But, you know, on another level
there are people who just completely dismiss any
ideas from science. I know I've heard them on the
radio and TV. They go, I don't care what you prove,
it's this way. I have no idea what they're thinking.
>>: So Feynman has this mythology around him as to
the brilliance and everything else. Do you have any
stories there?
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
Feynman.
>>:
Yeah, I wrote a book about
Oh, okay.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: "Feynman's Rainbow." It's
about when I was first at Cal Tech in the '80s and my
relationship with Feynman and finding his influence
on me. And I have known a lot of Nobel Prize
winners, but, yeah, he really was different, Feynman.
When you talk to him, yeah, I don't know. Maybe
there was some hero worship involved, but it did seem
like he was always saying sagacious things and I
talked to him a little bit about my physics work, and
even though he hadn't worked on what I was doing for
many years, he had great insight and very quickly saw
through the bullshit and always had good things to
say.
So -- but anyway, it's called "Feynman's Rainbow" if
you want to read it.
>>:
I'll check it out.
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
Sorry?
>>: Like toward the world or at the same time, why
did we invent like language, agriculture? How did it
come ->> Leonard Mlodinow: Well, I don't think we know how
language came out, unfortunately. Since there's no
writings left behind, no one really knows even
exactly when. They look at the fossils and the shape
of the throat, because I guess if you have -- you can
make certain vocalizations, that's an evolutionary
step that's only needed for language, so there's some
indirect evidence.
I don't remember quite when it started, but we don't
know a lot about that. And also there's, if you look
at DNA, there's certain genes that are necessary for
language.
But writing is different and writing is a technology
that was invented, like the wheel or fire, and it
came out when it did because people were settling
down and they had to engage in commerce. And it's
hard to run a store if you can't -- have no way of
keeping track of your goods. So the first writing
was simply lists. It was lists of goods, list of who
owes whom what, lists that are related to taxation
because there was then a centralized government that
was run by the clergy, and they had police, army.
They had to build walls around the city because these
cities were always fighting with each other. They
had to build irrigation, so they had to tax people.
And so writing was really very practical for those
purposes.
>>: So you mentioned that early human beings settled
down for nourishing spirituality.
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
For nourishing?
>>: For nourishing the spiritual. So is it all done
or are we still trying to nourish spirituality?
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
>>:
Sorry?
The spiritual journey.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Is our spiritual journey done?
I don't know. Mine is not. How about yours?
>>: So did we sidetrack somewhere when we settled
down for nourishing and then we more into technology,
science?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Well, you know, this dichotomy
between religion and science is very new. So the
pioneers, Newton was -- did science to learn about
God and Boyle and the chemists also same reason.
Priestly was a clergyman, too, although he didn't
work at it later. But I mean, Darwin, I mean, these
are all religious people who are studying science to
learn about God's creation of the world.
So I don't think there has to be any kind of split
between those two. And I wrote this book with Deepak
Chopra, "War of the World Views," where I argued
science and he argued what he calls spirituality, but
I didn't like that because I don't think that science
precludes spirituality. But then later we changed
the subtitle to be less combative and we called it
"Science and Spirituality." But no, I don't think
that either journey is over.
>>: You spoke a little bit about Feynman.
about Stephen Hawking?
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
What
What about him?
>>: Well, I had a question, too. You work with
these amazing people. Can you share something about
one.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Well, yeah. So I talked about
grit, and he's got like the most grit of anybody. He
always says his greatest quality is his stubbornness,
and I can attest to the fact that he is very
stubborn. And of course, to overcome his disability
he needed to be stubborn, and just -- but to do
physics, you also need to be stubborn.
It's interesting in the movie about him that just
came out, they have one of these myths that they
portray on screen. You know, he's famous for
something called Hawking radiation, which is about
how black holes radiate energy and shrink, and so in
the movie he's staring into the embers in the
fireplace, and just like Newton's apple, whoa, and
then the next scene is he's announcing that he has
this theory. And that's not how it happened.
So, you know, he was actually working on showing
something else. He kind of stumbled on it, kind of
like Planck did. He didn't believe it, and he spent
months trying to -- very frustrated and upset with
himself trying to find his mistake, his mistake of
this Hawking radiation that we call now, and finally
was convinced that it was not a mistake, and it was
all over a long period of time with a lot of
frustration involved and a lot of hard work.
But I guess on the screen they decided to take the
easy way and have him stare into an ember, so this is
the kind of thing that -- and then you get, like I
was, you know, I get people in the audience at these
live talks or on the radio when I'm on the radio,
they call in with their -- just like Hawking. I was
looking at a butterfly going and I realized that the
early universe could had two other universes
colliding and that caused the Big Bang. Isn't it
that true?
So, yeah, why not, if that's all it is. So, you
know, oh, look. Embers glow. Black holes evaporate.
Oh, yeah.
>>: You've got to admit, one of the things that we
did learn in science was the benzene thing.
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
>>:
The benzene ring.
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
>>:
Sorry, the what?
Benzene ring.
That he dreamt of it.
Is that true?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: I don't know. I didn't look
into that, but I've read that same story many times
and I think he wrote that story, too. He said that.
Whether -- but it didn't really -- so here's an
interesting thing. To really know if these are true,
you have to look at the historians of science. You
can't really look at popular media or books.
And you'd be surprised how many myths are false, and
even if they're quoting the person. Now, that person
could have, after the fact, for self-glorification
purposes, come up with the myth, or they sometimes
it's just that your memory is not that accurate.
And psychologists who study memory -- and I wrote the
book on the subconscious mind, subliminal, and I had
a chapter on memory, so I know a little bit about
that, that your memory is not a real record of what
actually happened. Your memory runs by having key
words, key events stored, and when you recall memory,
you're putting it back together.
And when your brain reconstructs this memory, it can
seem very clear and real to you, and it can be
totally wrong or it can partially wrong. And when
your brain is reconstructing it, it often -- it's not
just an objective reconstruction. You're putting in
your prior beliefs, your expectations, your desires,
and a lot of times things in the past get rosier and
cleaner, the geshtalt, psychologists study this, how
memories clean up with time.
So you can remember something that was kind of
complicated and had some complexities, and you ask
them a month later and a year later, and each
successive time it's all smoothed out and much more,
you know, storybook like.
So I don't know what is happening when these things
happen, like Darwin told a myth, Newton told a myth
of the apple. So they're not just things that people
necessarily pulled out of thin air, but they're often
not true either, and in that case, I haven't looked
at what was done.
And usually what has to be done, if you really want
to know, is you have to find the people's letters and
their diaries and their papers and you have to do a
lot of reading and figure it out. And so for Darwin
and Newton, people have done that. I don't know if
they've done it in that case.
>>:
You have time for one more question.
>>: So just imagine for a second God exists, and if
you met God, what is the one question you would ask
him or her, and why?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Okay. First of all, if I meet
God, so that's a hard question for me to answer
because immediately I realize, oh, shoot, my thinking
has to change completely.
So now I'm trying to put myself in the frame of
going, my God, there's a God. And so what would I
ask God?
I guess I would ask God, you know, what's the best
way for me to be happy and that's, for me, that's the
key, and to make other people happy that I love. So
why not ask that? Because everything -- if it
doesn't have to do with that, who cares, right?
Okay. Thank you.
[applause]