He's a theoretical physicist and professor at Brown University, working on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.

He served on former President Obama's Council of Advisors on science and technology, and he's now the co-author of a new book titled Proving Einstein Right, about the scientists who set out to prove Einstein's theory of relativity.

You may have noticed that I've been speaking with not just computer scientists, but philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, economists, and soon, much more.

To me, AI is much bigger than deep learning, bigger than computing.

It is our civilization's journey into understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in the machine.

That journey includes, of course, the world of theoretical physics and its practice of first principles mathematical thinking and exploring the fundamental nature of our reality.

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You had a profound realization that the stars in the sky are actually places that we could travel to 1 day.

Do you think human beings will ever venture outside our solar system?

Wow, the question of whether humanity gets outside of the solar system.

It's gonna be a challenge, and as long as the laws of physics that we have today are accurate and valid, it's gonna be extraordinarily difficult.

I'm a science fiction fan, as you probably know, so I love to dream of starships and traveling to other solar systems, but the barriers are just formidable.

If we just kind of venture a little bit into science fiction, do you think the spaceships, if we are successful, that take us outside the solar system will look like the ones we have today?

Or are fundamental breakthroughs necessary?

In order to have genuine starships, probably some really radical views about the way the universe works are going to have to take place in our science.

We could, with our current technology, think about constructing multi-generational starships where the people who get on them are not the people who get off at the other end.

But even if we do that, the formidable problem is actually our bodies, which doesn't seem to be conscious for a lot of people.

Even getting to Mars is going to present this challenge because we live in this wonderful home, has a protective magnetic, magnetosphere around it, And so we're shielded from cosmic radiation.

Once you leave the shield, there are some estimates that, for example, if you sent someone to Mars, With our technology, probably about 2 years out there without the shield, they're gonna be bombarded.

That means radiation, probably means cancer.

So that's 1 of the most formal challenge, even if we could get over the technology.

Elon Musk, SpaceX, and other folks, NASA are really pushing to put a human being on Mars.

Do you think, again, let's, forgive me for lingering in science fiction land for a little bit.

Do you think 1 day we may be able to colonize Mars?

First, do you think we'll put a human on Mars?

And then do you think we'll put many humans on Mars?

So first of all, I am extraordinarily convinced we will not put a human on Mars by 2030, which is a date that you often hear in the public debate.

So, there are a couple of ways that I could slice this, but the 1 that I think is simplest for people to understand involves money.

So you look at how we got to the moon in the 1960s.

It was about 10 year duration between the challenge that President Kennedy laid out and our successfully landing a moon.

I was actually here at MIT when that first moon landing occurred, so I remember watching it on TV.

Well, we had this extraordinarily technical agency of the United States government, NASA.

It consumed about 5% of the country's economic output.

And so you say 5% of the economic output over about a 10-year period gets us 250,000 miles in space.

So you have at least 100 times the challenge.

And we're spending about one-tenth of the funds that we spent then as a government.

So my claim is that it's at least a thousand times harder for me to imagine us getting to Mars by 2030.

And he had that part that you mentioned in the speech that I just have to throw in there of JFK, of we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard.

That's such a beautiful line that I would love to hear a modern president say about a scientific endeavor.

Well, 1 day we live and hope that such a president will arise for our nation but even if like I said, even if you you fix the problem the technical problems the biological Engineering that I worry most about however, I'm gonna go out on a limb here.

I think that by 2090 or so, or 2100, should I say 120, I suspect we're gonna have a human on Mars.

Wow, so you think that many years out, first a few tangents.

So as I said, the real problem with interstellar travel, aside from the technology challenges, the real problem is radiation.

And how do you engineer either an environment or a body, because we see rapid advances going on in bioengineering, how do you engineer either a ship or a body so that something, some person that's recognizably human will survive the rigors of interplanetary space travel.

It's much more difficult than most people seem to take into account.

So if we could linger on the 2090, 2100, 2120, sort of thinking of that kind of, you know, and let's linger on money.

So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are pushing the cost, trying to push the cost down.

I mean, this is, so do you have hope, as this actually a sort of a brilliant, big picture scientist, do you think a business entrepreneur can take science and make it cheaper and get it out there faster.

So bending the cost curve, you'll notice that has been an anchor.

This is the simplest way for me to discuss this with people about what the challenge is.

So yes, bending the cost curve is certainly critical if we're going to be successful.

Now, you ask about the endeavors that are out there now, sponsored by 2 very prominent American citizens, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

I'm disappointed, actually, in what I see in terms of the routes that are being pursued.

And this 1 is going to be a little bit more technical.

So if you look at the kinds of rockets that both these organizations are creating, Yes, it's wonderful reusable technology to see a rocket go up and land on its fins just like it did in science fiction movies when I was a kid.

But the real problem is those rockets, the technology that we're doing now is not really that different than what was used to go to the moon.

And there are alternatives, it turns out.

There's an engine called a flare engine, which, so a traditional rocket, if you look at the engine, it looks like a bell, right?

But there is a kind of engine called a flare engine, which is essentially, when you look at it, it looks like an exhaust pipe on a fancy car that's long and elongated.

And it's a type of rocket engine that we know, We know if there have been preliminary testing, we know it works.

And it also is actually much more economical because what it does is allow you to vary the amount of thrust as you go up in a way that you cannot do with 1 of these bell-shaped engines.

So You would think that an entrepreneur might try to have the breakthrough to use flare nozzles as they're called as a way to bend the cost curve.

Because as we keep coming back, that's going to be a big factor.

In fact, what we see is what I think of as incremental change in terms of our technology.

So I'm not really very encouraged by what I personally see.

So incremental change won't bend the cost curve?

Just linger on the sci-fi for 1 more question.

Do you think we're alone in the universe?

Are we the only intelligent form of life?

So there is a quote by Carl Sagan, which I really love when I hear this question.

And I recall the quote and it goes something like, if we're the only conscious life in the universe, it's a terrible waste of space because the universe is an incredibly big place.

And when Carl made that statement, we didn't know about the profusion of planets that are out there.

In the last decade, we've discovered over 1,000 planets and a substantial number of those planets are Earth-like in terms of being in the Goldilocks zone, as it's called.

So, in my mind, it's practically inconceivable that we're the only conscious form of life in the universe.

But that doesn't mean they've come to visit us.

Do you think they would look, do you think we'll recognize alien life if we saw it?

Do you think it'd look anything like the carbon-based, the biological system we have on Earth today?

It would depend on that life's native environment in which it arose.

If that environment was sufficiently like our environment, there's a principle in biology and nature called convergence, which is that even if you have 2 biological systems that are totally separated from each other, if they face similar conditions, nature tends to converge on solutions.

And so there might be similarities if this alien life form was born in a place that's kind of like this place.

Physics appears to be quite similar, the laws of physics across the entirety of the universe.

Do you think weirder things than we see on Earth can spring up out of the same kinds of laws of physics?

From the laws of physics, I would say yes.

First of all, if you look at carbon-based life, why are we carbon-based?

Well, it turns out it's because of the way that carbon interacts with elements, which in fact is also a reflection on the electronic structure of the carbon nucleus.

So you can look down the table of elements and say, well, gee, do we see similar elements?

And 1 that 1 often hears about in science fiction is silicon.

So maybe there's a silicon based life form out there if the conditions are right.

But I think it's presumptuous of us to think that we are the template by which all life has to appear.

Before we dive into beautiful details let me ask a big question.

What to you is the most beautiful idea, maybe the most surprising mysterious idea in physics?

The most surprising idea to me is that we can actually do physics.

The universe did not have to be constructed in such a way that our, with our limited intellectual capacity, that is actually put together in such a way and that we are put together in such a way, that we can, with our mind's eye, delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe.

That, to me, is pretty close to a miracle.

So there's simple equations, relatively simple, that can describe things, you know, the fundamental functions, that can describe everything about our reality.

That's not, Can you imagine universes where everything is a lot more complicated?

Do you think there's something inherent about universes that simple laws

Well, first of all, let me, this is a question that I encounter in a number of guides is, a lot of people will raise the question about whether mathematics is the language of the universe.

And my response is, mathematics is the language that we humans are capable of using in describing the universe.

It may have little to do with the universe, but in terms of our capacity, it's the microscope, it's the telescope through which we, it's the lens through which we are able to view the universe with the precision that no other human language allows.

Well, I don't even know if this 1 looks like I think it does.

But the beautiful surprising thing is that physics, there are laws of physics, very few laws of physics that can effectively compress down the functioning of the universe.

I like to use the analogy with computers and information technology.

If you worry about transmitting large bundles of data, 1 of the things that computer scientists do for us is they allow for processes that are called compression, where you take big packets of data and you press them down into much smaller packets, and then you transmit those and then unpack them at the other end.

And so It looks a little bit to me like the universe has kind of done us a favor.

It's constructed our minds in such a way that we have this thing called mathematics, which then as we look at the universe, teaches us how to carry out the compression process.

Do you think the human mind can be compressed?

To be able to compress the information that captures some large percent of what it means to be me or you, and then be able to send that at the speed of light?

And let me try to take it apart, unpack it into several pieces.

I don't believe that wetware biology, such as we are, has an exclusive patent on intellectual consciousness.

I suspect that other structures in the universe are perfectly capable of producing the data streams that we use to process, first of all, our observations of the universe and an awareness of ourself.

I can imagine other structures can do that also.

So that's part of what you were talking about, which I would have some disagreement with.

Of us humans, Is consciousness, is the thing?

I think that's the most interesting thing about humans.

And then you're saying that there's other entities throughout the universe.

I can well imagine that the architecture that supports our consciousness, again, has no patent on consciousness.

Just in case you have an interesting thought here, there's folks perhaps in philosophy called panpsychics that believe consciousness underlies everything.

It is 1 of the fundamental laws of the universe.

Do you have a sense that that could possibly fit into physics

I don't know the answer to that question.

1 part of that belief system is Gia, which is that there's a kind of conscious life force about our planet.

And I've encountered these things before.

My own life experience, and I'll be 69 in about 2 months, And I have spent all my adulthood thinking about the way that mathematics interacts with Nature and with us to try to understand nature and all I can tell you from all of my integrated experience is that There is something extraordinarily mysterious to me about our universe.

This is something that Einstein said from his life experience as a scientist.

And this mysteriousness almost feels like the universe is our parent.

It's a very strange thing perhaps to hear scientists say, but there are just so many strange coincidences that you just get a sense that something is going on.

Well, I interrupted you in terms of compressing what we're down to a consented at the speed of light.

Yes, so the first thing is I would argue that it's probably very likely that artificial intelligence ultimately will develop something like consciousness, something that for us will probably be indistinguishable from consciousness.

So that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment that we carry up here probably does not hold a patent on consciousness.

Because it's really about the data streams.

I mean, as far as I can tell, that's what we are.

We are self-actuating, self-learning data streams.

That to me is the most accurate way I can tell you what I've seen in my lifetime about what humans are at the level of consciousness.

So if that's the case, then you just need to have an architecture that supports that information processing.

So let's assume that that's true, that in fact what we call consciousness is really about a very peculiar kind of data stream.

If that's the case, then if you can export that to a piece of hardware, something metal, electronic, what have you, then you certainly will, ultimately that kind of consciousness could get to Mars very quickly.

Well, that 1 is a more difficult 1 because that now goes beyond just a matter of having a data stream.

It's now the preservation of the information in the data stream.

And so unless you can build something that's like a super, super, super version of the way the internet works, because most people aren't aware that the internet itself is actually a miracle.

It's based on a technology called message packaging.

So if you could exponentiate message packaging in some way to preserve the information that's in the data stream, then maybe your dream becomes true.

Can we, you mentioned with artificial intelligence, sort of us human beings not having a monopoly on consciousness.

Does the idea of artificial intelligence systems, computational systems, being able to basically replacing us humans.

Scare you, excite you, what do you think about that?

So I'm gonna tell you about a conversation I once had with Eric Schmidt.

I was sitting at a meeting with him and He was a few feet away.

And he turned to me and he said something like, you know, Jim, in maybe a decade or so we're going to have computers that do what you do.

And my response was not unless they can dream.

Because there's something about the way that we humans actually generate creativity, it's somehow, I get this sense of my lived experience in watching creative people, that it's somehow connected to the irrational parts of what goes on in our head.

So unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence that dreams, I have a strong suspicion that you will not get something that will fully be conscious by a definition that I would accept, for example.

You've played around with some out there fascinating ideas.

How do you think, and we'll start diving into the world of the very small ideas of supersymmetry and all that, in terms of visualization, in terms of how do you think about it, how do you dream of it, how do you come up with ideas in that fascinating, mysterious space?

So in my workspace, which is basically where I am charged with coming up on a mathematical palette with new ideas that will help me understand the structure of nature and hopefully help all of us understand the structure of nature.

I've observed several different ways in which my creativity expresses itself.

There's 1 mode which looks pretty normal, which I sort of think of as the Chinese water torture method, just drop, drop, drop, you get more and more information, and suddenly it all congeals and you get a clear picture.

And so that's a kind of a standard way of working.

And I think that's how most people think about the way technical people solve problems, that it's kind of you accumulate this body of information and at a certain point you synthesize it and then boom, there's something new.

But I've also observed in myself and other scientists that there are other ways that we are creative.

And these other ways to me are actually far more powerful.

I first personally experienced this when I was a freshman at MIT.

I live over in Baker House, right across the campus.

And I was in a calculus course, 1801 is called at MIT.

And calculus comes in 2 different flavors.

1 of them is called differential calculus.

Differential calculus is the calculus that Newton invented to describe motion.

It turns out integral calculus was probably invented about 1700 years earlier by Archimedes, but we didn't know that when I was a freshman.

And the differential calculus part of the course was, to me, I wouldn't, How do I say this?

It was something that by the drip, drip, drip method you could sort of figure it out.

Now, the integral part of calculus, I could memorize the formula.

The problem was why, in my own mind, why do these formulae work?

And because of that, when I was in the part of the calculus course where we had to do multiple substitutions to solve integrals, I had a lot of difficulty.

I was emotionally involved in my education because this is where I think the passion and emotion comes to.

And it caused an emotional crisis that I was having these difficulties understanding the integral part of calculus.

Not the rote memorization of fact, but the why of it, why does this work?

And so 1 night I was over in my dormitory room in Baker House, I was trying to do a calculus problem set, I was getting nowhere, I got a terrific headache, I went to sleep and had this very strange dream.

And when I awakened, I could do 3 and 4 substitutions and integrals with relative ease.

Now this to me was an astounding experience because I had never before in my life understood that one's subconscious is actually capable of being harnessed to do mathematics.

I experienced this, and I've experienced this more than once, so this was just the first time why I remember it so.

So that's why when it comes to like really wickedly tough problems, I think that the kind of creativity that you Need to solve them is probably this second variety which comes somehow from dreaming

If you think Again, I told you I'm Russian So we romanticize suffering but do you think part of that equation is the suffering leading up to that dreaming?

So the suffering is, I am convinced that this kind of creative, this second mode of creativity as I like to call it.

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Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right | Lex Fridman Podcast #60