The Daily Stoic - Leonard Mlodinow On The Poetry, Power, And Beautiful Challenge Of Physics

Episode Date: August 5, 2023

Ryan speaks with Leonard Mlodinow about his book Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, how physicists deal with imposter syndrome and egotism, whether there is truth in physics or just better theories, how his own personal practice of self-sufficiency aligns with the Stoic ideals, why science says that there is no separation between emotions and rationality, and more.Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist, mathematician, author, screenwriter, and video game developer. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and his groundbreaking work on the large N expansion and the quantum theory of light has garnered international renown in the physics community. Leonard has also written five New York Times best-selling books, including The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives; The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, which argues that invoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe; and War of the Worldviews, co-authored with Deepak Chopra.He also makes public lectures and media appearances on programs including Morning Joe and Through the Wormhole, and debated Deepak Chopra on ABC's Nightline. You can find Leonard’s work at leonardmlodinow.com and on Twitter @lmlodinow.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time

to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. another episode of the Daily Stood podcast. There's not a lot of people that I wanted to put in my books that I haven't found an opportunity to, right? Like I get to read a lot, and this is my job, I get to read a lot, follow them up with interesting figures or anecdotes or stories, and then I get to work them into the Daily Stood emails, I get to work them in to my books.

And the only person that I really am fascinated by that I've read quite a bit about, that hasn't made as strong of an appearance or a showing in my books as I would have liked or even just have expected, is Richard Feynman. I guess, I guess he's in the intro or the preface of ego is the enemy as this cool quote about how the first thing is that you don't fool yourself and the problem is that you're the easiest person to fool. Feynman's written a bunch of amazing books. I think we carry surely your joking Mr. Feynman in the paint and porch. Awesome. Not just, it's just a great book of writing, period, and wisdom, and insight, period, but that it's written

by a physicist. It just makes it even more impressive because at least for me, because I know nothing of physics or chemistry, my brain fogs over when I hear anyone talk about it. So recently I was trying to fix that and I went and I wanted to read some biographies of Feynman. And I struggled, I bought a couple and I read the beginnings and then I got bored. And then I found this book, Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Millendo.

And I just loved it. It's a short little book. It's about Leonard's time at Caltech. He has the office next to Feynman. And he's trying to find out if he loves physics or doesn't what research he should do. And it's kind of this beautiful little memoir that's also a biography of Feynman and a bunch of other great physicists. I just loved it. We just started at Kering at the Pain in Porch. I liked it so much.

And it's just, it's really interesting. And again, I give it a lot of credit that I found it interesting, given that I don't know or care that much about physics. But Leonard is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician. But like Feynman, a man who wears many hats, he's also a screenwriter and an author. He wrote this book, The Drunkard's Walk. He wrote one called The Grand Design. He wrote a book called The War of the World Views, which he wrote with Deepak Chopra. He wrote this cool book called Subliminal. And he's written for Star Trek and MacGyver. He created computer games. He wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Horizon. Just a fascinating guy. So I was really excited to have him on the podcast. I recorded this not from

the studio in Bastrop, but remotely here in Los Angeles. We were probably not that far from each other, he and I. There was a little bit of technical difficulties to keep glitching. So if you hear a little offness in the interview, that's what that was. But I think it was a great interview. There's lots in here about Feynman, lots in here about Leonard's work. And I hope to have him back on the podcast someday. And I hope you enjoy this interview. You can go to his website, Leonardmillendo.com, or follow him on Twitter and Instagram, L-M-L-O-D-I-N-O-W, but I'll link to that because it's kind of a tricky spelling you'll see. Enjoy. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's podcast, Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama and financial disasters.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. So I have a strange question for you as we start. So I realize I'm not coming at this exactly like a forest gump over here, but what does it feel like to be very, very smart? Like I know there's people who can read and there's people who are good at what they do. But there is a sort of a cow tech theoretical physicist level smart. And I'm just curious, what is that like? What is it like to go through the world like that? Well, first of all, I guess I really don't go through all thinking that I'm very smart. In fact, more often than not, I'm thinking that I'm dumb.

And I think a lot of physicists are like that because in physics, you run into problem after problem, after problem that you can't solve. Sure. And you spend most of your time trying to find some ways to find approximations or you're trying to solve a problem and go down a blind alley and you just keep thinking nature is much smarter than I am. So yeah, so I guess it's hard to answer that question because I don't really feel that way, but I can say that I feel like the population in general could use a little

more skepticism, a little more analytical thinking, just in treating the issues of the day. I'm not even talking about, I mean, those things that I'm saying can be annoying, I think, in your family life, from any relationships. But as you approach the issues of the day, I wish that people had a more scientific approach and scientific attitude to where they thought a little harder and deeper and more analytically about issues.

So I'm getting that. Because then I ask is like, it's one thing, for instance, to know what it's like to have a nice amount of money, right? To have a nice salary, you're not starving, you're not wanting for anything necessarily. And then there's whatever it feels like to say be a billionaire, to win the lottery, right? There's this sort of other level.

And I've got to imagine a Richard Feynman or someone like that. I imagine it must be strange or there must be something somewhat ineffable about being in a brain like that. We're having a brain like that. I, are you talking about my brain or Richard Fibon's brain. I'm talking about both. I mean, that's what's so interesting to me about your book is that you're sort of looking up at this person and you're kind of in awe of them and at the same time, you are colleagues at the same, you know, rarefied university.

It was sort of an interest in contrast. Yeah, and it was an amazing experience, both my students and the faculty at Caltech just to be in that environment surrounded by super brilliant people. But I think even more important for me was people who are all passionate about the same thing that I'm passionate about. Yeah. And I'd say that was, uh, that isn't that sense a little bit like a paradise. And I look around me and look at how smart everyone is, but I don't look in the mirror and say that. Yeah. I've got to imagine that everyone has a little bit of an imposter syndrome there. Like no one is quite convinced that they deserve to be there. I think when you're young and when you first get there, I think that's true. I think over the years I've realized that I can hold my own.

And so I mean, it's not that I feel super smart, but I feel like I know I can do this, just like with the writing, I can write, and I understand that there are people who can't, but that doesn't, that contrast doesn't really play a role in my thinking. I mean, I can't have friends who are great at the piano, I have friends who are great at sports, much better than me.

And so this is my thing, that's their thing, that's all. Well, my favorite story in the book was actually kind of pertaining to that, where you're telling Richard Feynman about the monkey that uses a tool and sort of makes a discovery. And you're sort of thinking about this on this one level, and he kind of boils it down to a much more simple level, which sort of illustrates the lesson that you just said.

If you want to explain that. Yeah. Well, this was about an experiment on about a hundred years ago today. And the experimenter was investigating monkeys thinking and problem solving abilities. And so he put a banana out of reach of the monkey. So the monkey was used to reaching out through the bars and to get things. And the monkey also had a stick with which he was used to using for other purposes. And what the scientists wanted to know was would he put two and two together and realize that if

he reaches out with the stick, he can deploy the stick in a new novel way to pull the banana toward him. And sure enough, he did that. So that was a simple problem solving experiment. And Feynman asked me, what I learned from that, and I told him that I learned that a lot of discovery is about using things in different ways, or putting things together in novel ways. And I went on and on about my intellectual journey and reading that story.

And then I said, I don't think that's what you learned at all. You know what I think you learned? Or you know what I learned from that? It's that if a monkey can discover something, so can you. Yes. So I guess I should have prefaced that with that was being a little insecure about what I ever I had a done a great PhD thesis that got me a lot of recognition,

got me the job at Caltech and I'm there thinking can I ever do that again? You know? And so that was the background of that story and he was trying to give me a curse. It is sometimes helpful to realize like the dumbest people who have done what you've done. It kind of I go like who are some of the worst people ever to write a book right or who are some of the dumbest people ever to successfully raise kids or go to this school or you know invest properly or whatever and you realize that it's not rocket science. Most of it is not rocket science, and that people who are much less able than you have managed to figure it out. Yeah, it's always good to look at people and go, oh, well, I could beat her or beat

him. beat him and so yeah so I'm not the worst. I'm gonna be the best but it's good you're not. Well you know when I look at books there's a lot of books out there that are published that I wonder how they got published and there are physics papers out there that I wonder how they got published too but you know I then I think to myself wait a minute is it maybe this is self-delusion? Because those people are looking at mine and going to say, saying the same thing. Yeah.

You do realize that a lack of self-consciousness can be a huge advantage in careers and in life. You realize that the fact that you're thinking about whether you're an imposter or not, whether you're qualified or not, whether you're good enough or not, is dragging you down. And some of these other people are perhaps not thinking about it at all. And you know, they're just, it's not slowing them down in the same way that it's slowing you down.

Yeah, and I don't have that problem though. I mean, I look at it and I don't necessarily think I'm the smartest one or the dumbest one. I'm just do what I do and I don't worry about it. But if I do try to be self-aware of what my place is and look at my work as objectively as I can or look at how other people see it and learn from that. But if you are self-aware and are kicking yourself over it, then that's how writers get writers block two, I think. Yes. And that's a bad thing.

Fimon told me once if you're happy, don't think about it Because you could realize you have no right to me. You get you could ruin it But if you're not happy that's when you need to analyze more and I'm not sure that's totally true But but definitely there's some truth of that Well, there's kind of a ego on on two ends of those spectra right? There's the egotistical person who's going around thinking about how they're the best and they're perfect and, you know, everything is about them. And then there's this kind of lower order egotism too, where you're just thinking about how worthless you are, how you're not good enough, how everyone is questioning you. Like there's a self obsession on both ends that's probably not healthy.

Yeah, that's true. And a lot of the best people in physics are suffering from the first male. They think about how great they are. Fiamine was not one of those. I think he was pretty down down to earth. And a lot of people, when they first start, I think they suffer from the second one, the imposter syndrome being the root of that. And it's, yeah, the neither one is good. It's, anyway, it's better not to worry about it. I think I was just podcast about stoicism, or at least it's in the name. And I don't know that much about it.

But what I do know is that it was, and what always attracted me to that philosophy was that it's about self-sufficiency. It's about living a life where you don't depend on external, other people, other things for your happiness. It all comes from you. And if it comes from you inside being happy and satisfied with yourself and what you're doing, then no one can take that away from you. If it's external or as other people, and if you need people to clap and cheer when you walk into the room, then that's a big burden. But if you're satisfied with you clapping and cheering for yourself, then that's something you can mine achieves. And I think I try to live by that to really look internally for my satisfaction and try to, you know, notulate myself from being dependent on other people,

you know, giving me approval or having material possessions, not that I'm against material possessions, but it's just important not to make them too important in your life. Well, does that tie into an idea in physics which you talked about a little bit in the book which it seemed like an intimidated you early on, which is you have to work for years and years and years on an idea. And you might not be making any progress. People might think you're going down a blind alley. And you just have to enjoy doing it. And you have to be confident that you're going in the right direction. And you do have to be sort of self-sufficient and self-contained in that regard, or it'll eat you alive.

Completely. So, so when I was doing my PhD thesis, I chose a problem. I didn't think that much about the problem. It just seemed interesting. I didn't strategize about how important or big or small. But it was to solve, it was to figure out with physics of a certain situation. I'll try to, outside of neutron stars, which were the very high magnetic field and made other methods difficult to apply. And I spent a whole

year, my first year working on that problem, making no progress. I mean, I had some promising approaches, and then they wouldn't work. And I get another one, and get all excited, and it wouldn't work. And when I look and get all excited and it wouldn't work. And when I look back, it's an amazing that I had that patience to spend a whole year. And my advisor wasn't very interested in the problem or he wasn't anymore. So I was all on my own. And just went in every day happily and beat my head against the wall. But so I think to be a physicist or to do a lot of great things in the world, you have

to be happy beating your head against the wall. If that doesn't bring you enjoyment, you might never get through the wall or you might never develop that headache that you're looking for. But it takes the enjoyment of the trip, that's the cliche, right? Enjoy the journey. And so I had no real, I wasn't that goal oriented as you have to be, let's say, one year on the faculty later, especially before you get tenure. And I did make a breakthrough after about a year and that launched my career. And I see that it happened, you know, there's different kinds of problems that people treat as scientists or as physicists. Some of the problems are things that you can get done in a month or a few months and they're not, they're a little bit easier to address.

There's still no guarantee when you start that you're going to get it, but they, you know, you can kind of crank them out and you, you know, physics progresses incrementally. And then there's other problems that are super hard and are the equivalent of my, the problem I had as a student where you have to beat your head against the wall for maybe years. And that's why tenure is so important for one thing, but it's also why just being really dogged and persistent

is really important. And you know, you might be doing other writing other papers and exploring other problems along the way as you think about your big problem, but it really takes people thinking about those big problems for many years and not giving up to make some of the real breakthroughs that we made. Like for it's famously, Einstein worked 11 years on general relativity between special and general relativity. John Schwartz and Michael Greenwork for, I don't know, 10, 12 years before the first, they

call super string revolution, brought string theory into popularity. I mean, whether or not, that was a good thing or whether or not it pans out was another issue. But the point is that to make certain progress, you just have to keep at it. And that's what Stephen Hawking told me was his greatest trait in his physics, which was stubbornness. You have to be really stubborn and passionate and not worry about whether you're going to get somewhere.

And by the way, I think the same thing applies in writing when I'm working on my books. A lot of times I explore an idea for a chapter or a story that I'm writing or in a novel I'm writing now I explore an idea that may not pan out, that may be dumb. And I'm not even sure, it's just a different original idea. And I write it out and may be dumb. I'm not even sure. It's just a different original idea.

And I write it out and then I might just throw it away. And so deadlines, I think, are really deadly in writing because if you have a deadline and you feel like you have to produce a certain number of usable pages, you're gonna go with the things that come to your mind first, probably the clichés, the not so interesting stories or scenes. And if you demand more from yourself and just give yourself the freedom to have your mind wander and to go down blind

alleys, you might make a great discovery and that works on the large scale where I'm standing and working on the small scale if you're just writing the chapter of a book. Yeah, it's like when you're writing an article, you know, it's a small, contained unit that you can kind of wrap your head around. But when you're working on a book, you know, you could spend days or weeks and make no measurable progress. And so it requires that ability to, I think, get totally lost in it, have a sense of where you're going, but also not be too attached to where you think you're going and to just, just to keep chipping away at it and trust the process, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, it's easier when you have more experience and you know that you always find

a solution. Yes. Although in physics, I don't always find a solution. Sometimes I just, you know, sometimes I've actually written papers where I was trying to prove one thing and ended up proving that that isn't possible to prove. Right. So. Well, that might be interesting, right?

Like, so if you're a physicist and you spend 10 years on a problem and then you come out the other side, is that almost a dangerous, like a wicked lesson? Because now, you know, you have some other idea, does it take you 10 years to figure out that you're not going in the right direction, right? Like, how do you know? It can, it can. Does it take you 10 years to figure out that you're not going in the right direction? Right?

How do you know? It can. It can. And part of it, whether or not you make the right choices, is a lot part of it is your talent, your intuition. But one of the most important things in physics isn't just doing the calculations, doing the math, and being able to solve problems, it's being able to choose the right problems. So another thing Feynman said was that he categorized the kinds of problems that you choose.

There's some problems. The problem is going to be, going to have some issues, some difficulty, some barrier or it would have been solved already. So what causes them not to be solved? Well, there's two types that he classified, two types of problems. One was the problem is no, maybe it's even obvious, but figuring out the answer is extremely tough.

And the other one is the problem itself is not something that has occurred to anybody before because it's maybe a very important issue to question to ask, but no one's thought of asking it or thought of looking at it that way. So there's the scientific progress that comes from seeing the right problem, and there's a kind that comes from being powerful at solving the problem that everyone already saw. And you know, everyone you have to choose, and sometimes you do one kind, sometimes you do the other,

but there's never a guarantee, and that's, I'm part of the life of a physicist. And by the way, you might just say, you know, I've done enough on this, I don't think I'm gonna get anywhere, and someone else will pick it up and get somewhere. That's why we publish papers. And you know, something people maybe don't realize is that in science, the published articles are not necessarily not so much, um, finalities as they are just part of a conversation. A lot of the papers, uh, go end up going nowhere.

You write a paper. Someone else finds it interesting, comments on hundreds, thousands of people refer to it and do their own papers and it goes nowhere. That happens to the community, too, not just to individuals. In fact, strength theory may be one of those situations where, okay, it's spun off, certainly spun off some intermediate results that are interesting, but the goal to find a unified theory of all forces and one that is somewhat demanded by certain fundamental principles does not seem to have gotten anywhere. And so that's the way it works. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory. But the new podcast Sports Explains the World brings you some of the wildest and most surprising

sports stories you've never heard, like the teenager who wrote a fake Wikipedia page for a young athlete and then watched as a real team fell for his prank. Diving into his wikipedia page we turned three career goals into 11, added 20 new assists for good measure. Figures that nobody would, should have believed. And the mysterious secret of a US Olympic superstar killed at the peak of his career. Was it an accident? Did the police screw up the investigation?

It was also nebulous. Each week, Sports Explains the World goes beyond leagues and stats to share stories that will redefine your understanding of sports and their impact on the world. Listen to Sports Explains the World, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Sports Explains the World early and ad-free on Wondering app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to sports explains the world early and ad-free on Wondering Plus. I like that in the classics they call it, the great conversation.

This idea that we've been having this conversation for 2,000 plus years, and there really maybe aren't any actual answers. Well, that's not now if you want to get in the philosophy, which I don't normally, but and Feynman would yell at me if I tried, but, but, um, yeah, I mean, that's a question. What is, is there truth in physics or is it just, uh, better theories? And we never know if I have a theory of we have quantum theory, for example, or it's really quantum theories. It's a funny concept because it's in itself. So, it's not a theory

as much as a principle that guides that other theories have to adhere to. But anyway, quantum theory, as far as we know, is correct and describes the nature and the way nature is. But before we realized that quantum theory was the way to do it, people thought classical Newton's laws. They thought classical theory was correct. They were equally convinced that classical theory was correct as we are now that quantum theory is correct. And if there's a new schmont them theory that's coming in 10 years, we'll then say all those people who believe in quantum theory, they didn't know schmont them theory and look at, you know, ha ha, but now we know that schmont them theory is the way the world really is. And then a hundred years later, there's a new theory, Xavier's Choice Theory. I don't know.

Ryan's Theory. I doubt that will be what it is. But yes, I get the point. What is, what does that actually look like? Like I know as a writer, you know, you're working on a book, you're sitting there, you're reading, you're thinking, I kind of know what that beating your head against the wall looks like.

What does that look like for a physicist? That's a good question. And I'm sure it's different for different people. So, you know, Fymne, for example, tend to work by himself and not take students, or not take many students, other people like work and collaboration I always work with

Usually with one other person and I do a series of papers with people that I find I can work well with And because part of for me a big part of the process is Shooting out ideas and beating the ideas back and forth And if I'm not doing that with somebody I'm sitting there doing that with myself And for me it's more you get interested in a problem. So that's the first thing. And to me, I don't choose a problem strategically for as much for what's I think is good for physics or for my career or anything like that. I just read, I'm interested in the subject. I read about it. I get an idea and I go, huh, this is cool. This this aspect of it is cool. What I wonder what is this? What about this? And I look up and all the I do the my recent, you know, looking all the papers. I don't know

one's answered that. No one's thought of that or no one's answered that question or and so I start looking into it myself. So it it means looking into it means you know playing with the math You look at the equations and then your idea Probably translates into some other equations and can I solve them? Can I approximate them? Can I extract anything from them? And you know in physics equations are connected to to the physical world So when I look at an equation, it's not just the math It means something physically to me So and that helps you solve the equations too because because you know what's going to happen physically,

and that you just translate to math and you go, okay, this is what should happen mathematically. But anyway, it's like an adventure. It's an exploration. In my mind, I learn about the landscape of this problem, and I go in some direction direction and I see how far I can go and what I run into. And if it's fun and interesting and I'm driven to keep going, I do. And if I get bored with it or get frustrated, which doesn't happen easily to me, I might give up.

Or as I said in some cases, I turn around and go, maybe the thing that I'm trying to prove isn't true and maybe I can prove that it isn't true and sometimes you do that and then sometimes you publish that because then it tells other people don't try this direction. You know, you used a word there that you used in the book or that you got from Feynman which is that you have to find the problem interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's a famine was like a child.

That's the great thing about, I mean, in Fymons' rainbow, I talk a lot about Fymons, also about Murray Gelman. And those were like, I call them the twin titans of Caltech and of physics. They were the leaders of physics and their generation. And they, you know, didn't quite get along. They didn't, they didn't. And they were rivals. And they had completely different philosophies

of how to approach physics. And Murray was much more important. And he wanted to have a big influence in the field and on the faculty and the department. And he also thought very, in very mathematical kind of abstract terms, very much looking for big, beautiful ways of looking at things of ordering, classifying, and fineman was the opposite. He just wanted, he had no interest in any of those political aspects. And he just wanted to solve problems that he found interesting.

And it didn't even matter it can be in this field, that field. There was a student once who wrote him a letter and said, I was your student and he was working. Then later at JPL doing some very applied practical things. And he kind of apologized to Feynman that he wasn't treating the big questions and the fundamental physics revolutionary stuff, like Feynman did and Feynman wrote him back and said, you got me all wrong.

I think, you know, the problem you're with, I think it was on water waves or something or you know He said the problem you're working on it, you know is it fascinating? You is it interesting then it's it's worth doing it's wonderful to do and it's all about us finding problems that Doesn't matter whether it has to do with fundamental physics of the universe or the way a book falls off a shelf if that If that physical issue interests you and you can attack it, then that's a wonderful thing to do and that's what physics is all about.

I know a friend of mine, I'm not an AREV, he's in his 90s now, a very, very famous Caltech physicist, worked on quantum optics. I run into him at the cafe every now and then and he's working on a problem that has to do with how shower head spin when the water comes out of them and he's totally fascinated by it. He thinks he found he found some kind of new effect in the way the water flies off and I'm going that's what a physicist is. It's not you know I'm gonna go and I have to study the the four fundamental forces and and and and unite them. It's it's It's finding interesting phenomena around you,

mathematicizing them and figuring out how they work. And when you do that, you have a much deeper appreciation of the world. And you can appreciate the beauty of nature. I think much more than someone who's not a physicist. People think that physics is dry, on a romantic pursuit, but it's quite the opposite. When a physicist looks at a bookshelf,

just knowing how the things stand there and how everything works and why the colors of the book, why the colors of the book cover are what they are and how they affect your eyes. I mean, that's just seeing things on a deeper level and you can appreciate nature much more. It's one of the, I mean, if you really want to appreciate the artistic beauty of nature, become a physicist.

Yeah, there's kind of a poetry in the way that, or a poet's eye that the physicist shares, where you're fascinated by some strange natural phenomenon or the question of how something works or why it comes together the way that it does and a wanting, if not to figure it out, then figuring out how to express it or capture what's happening, be it in an equation or a beautiful string of words. Yeah, and that's where the book comes from, Fymons Rainbow, because we were walking and looking at a rainbow, and we start talking about how they cart figured out, just explain

the rainbow and why you see the colors that you do. And he asked me what I thought, you know, what inspired this brilliance of Descartes to be able to explain that, to figure it out, and I gave some technical answer. And he said, no, no, no. I think the inspiration was, it's beautiful. And I think that's very much a part of a physicist's life. There's a passage in Marcus Realius' Meditations where he's sort of marveling at what he calls natures inadvertence.

He's talking about how you put a loaf of bread in the oven, and when it bakes, it cracks open at the top. And he's like, we don't know why this happens. It doesn't mean anything, but it kind of wets the appetite, right? And he's just kind of marveling at the strangeness of why things happen the way they do. And maybe we have figured out why bread does that now, but his point was, it's just weird

and cool and beautiful and part of the world. Yeah, and understanding how it happens just adds to it because you understand on a certain level as to what causes it, but then there's all those deeper levels that you still don't understand. And I mean, this is because it's never going to get to the bottom of it because whatever equations we say, this equation explains everything, and you go, well, who created that equation? Yeah, why is that equation there? So now I got to do it a whole other theory to explain where that equation came from. Isn't that the John Wheeler line about how

as the island of knowledge grows? So does the shoreline of ignorance? You're just constantly bumping into new questions with each one that you answer. Yeah, and that's what's great and exciting about it. God forbid, we should ever really come to the end and then it would be very boring just filling in the blanks, right? Yeah. Well, no, I like that idea of being fascinated by it

because sometimes when I talk to people they go like, oh, I'm thinking about writing a book about, you know, insert subject. And I go, if you're just thinking about it, you shouldn't. I say like, you have to, you can't not do it. That has to be the attitude that you have. It is literally painful for you to not explore what that means, because the process itself is gonna be really painful. And so if you're not driven or almost compelled to go down this road, you should probably save yourself and the world, the trouble, and just go in a different

direction. Yeah, that's true. I had one of my students at Caltech came to me once. She was a PhD student in chemistry. And she said, I love chemistry. I'm doing well, but I'm having a little problem because everyone is working day and night, seven days a week all the time on their problems. I just don't feel like doing that.

I don't know how I can compete with them because I just don't see it that way. To me, it's more of a 40-hour or whatever, a normal job, and I enjoy the job, but I don't feel like those people do. And what should I, you know, what does that mean for me? How can I compete with them? And I kind of, I don't remember the exact words and I tried to be diplomatic about it, but my answer was, well, if you're not completely, if you're not passionate driven by this and the thing you really want and you can't think of anything else and you're not passionate driven by this is the thing you really want and you

can't think of anything else and you're not and you just have don't have to do it, go do something else. You know, because it's a, you know, first of all, there is a competition of those who are that way, but it's not just that, it's just that it's so hard that if you don't really feel that way and have that push, that drive and that passion, then you might, it will impede you, but also you probably won't be that happy because you won't have the success or you'll see, you'll see that you're not wanting to put into time and the effort that it takes to really get somewhere. And I, that's how I feel, both my writing and my physics.

I've done many things in my career and I've gone in and out of academia, but I've published papers constantly throughout that. I'm luckily that I'm a theoretical physicist on the experimental list, so I don't need a lab. So when I was making computer games or writing for Hollywood, I was also doing physics and my spare time in publishing papers. I've always published papers no matter what job. I have, you know, on a physics paper, academic paper,

under your name it has your affiliation. I have papers that have my name and the affiliation is the Walt Disney Company. It was work, computer games there when I wrote the paper. And I thought, that's really cool. I'm not sure that it's the best marketing for the paper because of the physicist, my reading, go, this couldn't be interesting. But anyway, you know, so I think that that's really, it's really important on all the arts because you know, it's not a nine to five job, it's not a, it's not a, necessarily a job where you have a lot of job security and it has to be something you

just have to do and then that's what it takes to get there. Well, isn't that kind of the proving what we were talking about earlier, which is you felt compelled or fascinated by these other fields, these other domains, which is writing or computer games or Hollywood. And you followed that interest, even though it took you away from the thing

that the elite club that you had been, you know, you had, that people were killing themselves to get in, that probably seemed, it's probably seemed a little crazy to your peers or, you know, even your family, but you follow the interest and then ultimately it took you back around, but you, you have to have the kind of the, the courage and then also the self-sufficiency we were talking about to go, no, this is what I want to pursue. I don't really care what it looks like to other people. Yeah, I'm probably the only one who ever turned on a 10-year physics offer to start trying to write for Hollywood.

And I don't know. I mean, one of the things that that book, the Fiamines Rainbow, was about was my grappling with the fact that I enjoyed writing and other things and physics and how do I balance that and and what do I do any given time and I wouldn't recommend what I did to other people. I mean, it's up to you, but it's not necessarily going to work. I was just lucky. I mean, each point in my career, I did whatever I felt like doing. So I did physics. And when I got the itch, because I always liked used to write since I was in third grade. And I got my first job at a Keltec. I got this idea. I'm being in LA. I should try writing for film or TV. And eventually I left physics to move to Hollywood with $6,000 in the bank and

no real job prospects. And I thought like everyone else who does that, instead of being a waiter, I was a physicist and it worked and I wrote for Star Trek and Next Generation, McGuyve, and wrote for comedies because I used to be funny. I wrote for the nightcourt and it all worked out. And then at some point, the computer windows was being developed and computer games was a real frontier. And I love Hollywood people were doing that.

I moved to that and everywhere, you know, each place when you move, what you lose is you have to pay your dues again. So I got to where I was doing well in physics and then I'm a zero in Hollywood. And I got to where I was doing well in physics, and then I'm a zero in Hollywood. And I got to where I'm established a little bit in Hollywood, and now I'm in computer games. And then I started writing books. And I don't know, I mean, that's the one drawback

is you have to be willing to pay the dues over and over again. But I'm lucky that each of the different steps I took didn't leave me on the street. And I always had a plan B of a way where I may back to go back to something if it didn't work. But I felt that what's important to me in life and in being happy and in being successful and what I'm doing is being passionate

about what I'm doing at the time. And if that's now something else, go do that. You're losing some of the gains that you've accumulated in those industries and you're starting over, you're paying the dues, but aren't you also gaining a new way of thinking, a new set of skills, a new language that you end up speaking? Totally. It's for a personal point of view, it's very rewarding. I can't imagine that if I had picked one career and done it for 40 years that I would just be so stale and bored and you know but that's me. Some people do that and

certainly all the advice I got was to do the you know to do the 40 year thing. Not only that when I was a young physicist I got the advice of don't even do problems in different fields. I had a tendency to do a problem, and this field a problem in that field. And they said, well, then, you know, the work that you did in, in, you know, atomic physics people who do quantum optics, well, well, know about that and don't care. And vice versa. So you never, you know, at least when you're starting before you get tenure, you should go in a kind of a narrow direction and

and I didn't, I didn't do that either and I went in such a broad direction like in real screenplay. But, you know, the different part, you know, I see what my kids are doing. I don't want them to do what I did because I'd be all nervous that it's not gonna work and I was just to, I don't know what it was about me, but I was too dumb to be nervous about it. I just did it and assumed things would work out. Not that I did it out of, I assumed that out of some kind of arrogance that I can do anything.

But that's what I did. Yeah, I think it was, I'm trying to look here. There's a quote, it's from a scientist, maybe a timeline, but it's basically, he says, a specialization is for insects. Yeah, I love that. And you know, there was a famous mathematician named Hilbert, who lived a little over a hundred years ago, and he changed fields every five years, I think, he said, because he didn't want to get stale. I think there's something to that.

You know, you do give up a lot of the intuition that you've developed and the skill in that field, but the tradeoff is, at least for me, you can get an approach that was new energy. Do you think it made you a better physicist, ultimately, or a worse one? I think it makes you a better physicist ultimately or a worse one? I think it makes me a better physicist. I obviously, the fact that I straight and have done other things has made means that I don't have the output I would have had had I focused on it.

And it's also getting harder and harder for me since I do it part-time to follow the whole area of physics. In my career, which has now been about 40 years, obviously things have changed, but one specific thing has changed, which is the number of papers, number of scientists, the number of papers, the speed at which we're making new discoveries. And it's been growing exponentially. And and by that I don't mean fast because exponentially doesn't mean fast it's a certain shape of a curve. It's a, it means that

it's more than fast. Well, it can be slow at the beginning. So what it means is that the growth at this moment is proportional to the amount you have at this moment. So the more you have the faster it grows and it feeds and so it starts like that and then it goes, and so when I was young, it was like, it was like here, but now it's like under this part, right? It's just, it's just exploded because knowledge feeds on itself. And I mean, I don't remember now how many thousands of papers are published every month. And so I find that I have to narrow, so like the last few years I've been working on an interesting project, which is on the connection between information and the laws of physics.

So right now, quantum information is a big area in physics. And of course, over the last decades information theory and computers and Understanding that has been big and people have found a connection between that and the physical world the world of actual matter and Electrons and and Quarks and all you know everything that that we are made of and I found that fast saying that that we found a connections between the laws, so to speak, of information and the laws of physics. So that in a way, the physical world

arrives from arises from information. And in some sense, the world is a big quantum computer where there are certain rules about how neighboring points can interact and trade information. And those translate actually to the laws of physics that we know, the laws of what we call, let's say, the D'Arac equation or quantum electrodynamics. So I've been exploring that with my collaborator, Todd Brunn, for some years now. So I've narrowed my focus to that and related things.

And I can't follow everything that's happening and quantum information or quantum computing because I'm spending my other time where I would be doing that writing books. So. But it is interesting how timeless that problem is, right? Like when you read a Aristotle or something and you go, oh, this guy was a philosopher and a naturalist

and a political theorist, right? There was so much less knowledge that one singular person could be world class in like 15 things and be breaking new ground in all these domains. And then you get to the renaissance and the enlightenment and now you almost do have to specialize because it's impossible to wrap your head around one field,

let alone ten fields simultaneously. Yeah, very true. We lose something from that. I wonder sometimes if there aren't in physics, at least, if there aren't pieces of knowledge in one realm of physics that could be well exploited and others, but just hasn't been noticed. And there is cross-pollination for sure, so that does happen that people do notice. But I wonder how many hidden gems there are

and let's say, a little temperature physics theory that something that people who in quantum field they might, you know, don't know and should know or something like that. Didn't Feynman kind of have a range of interests, right? I mean, he was obviously all in on physics, but then he's picking locks and he's drawing and he's playing music. He did seem like he was kind of eccentric and he followed these different passions. He did.

So he did do that. And he was much, very much broader than a lot of physicists are. Now, he even, it's interesting. He had to see, well, the thing about physics is that we apply it to the, to the, to understand the laws of the world, but physicists because really about curiosity.

And so, for example, he, he got curious about books. He said he was reading a fairy tales and he thought he had a friend who was a novelist and he started reading fairy tales and thinking about what his friend does and, and he's reading the fairy tales. And I said, oh, this is, you know, this is pretty, pretty easy stuff. I wonder how you come up with this. I mean, I think I could do that. It's just like, like a lot of people said, oh, I have a, I have a book on blah, blah, blah

that I want to write a film of time or whatever. I go, yeah, good. Well, when you do it, let me see it. You know, because, but, but Feynman actually said, let me see what it's actually like. Not that he wanted to write a book, but he wanted to see if he could really do it and what it was like and what are the issues that arise and what are the problems that arise that you try. And it was interesting because he was known for his imagination, but he said he found he didn't have the imagination to write that.

He started writing and he couldn't write anything other than what he had already read or things that are like he thinks he had already read coming up with something new He found was very hard and so he you know I've been to that so because he was curious about how it works and he realized that it's something you should you know that You should have some respect for because it's it's not as easy as a look reading something is not as easy as writing something Okay, but people don't always get that point It is funny though because he he seemed to be so dismissive of the humanities.

And yet he is an amazing writer. Like, I always wondered if that was more of an act, because you couldn't be such a good writer if you didn't truly love the language and literature. You just, nobody is naturally that good. Well, I think that, I don't think he was dismissive generally of the humanities. For instance, in literature, I think he appreciated some literature, but he thought,

I think, other literature, like a beach novel, was kind of like junk. He maybe was a little snobby in that way, but I know that he didn't like philosophy in particular. He made a big thing about not and that I think was part of his show. He was kind of a showman and I think that he he didn't think philosophy was was very useful for physicists, but I think he made more of a show about that because it was fun to put fun at philosophy. But as a writer, he was a really great scientific writer. He

explained things very well because he thought extremely clearly. And if you're running nonfiction, there's a couple of elements that are important, but the most important one is to be able to think clearly, because if you can't think clearly, then you can't explain it to people very clearly. I mean, I think there's other aspects if you really want to be successful that are important such as storytelling, being able to make something interesting, compelling, and so forth. But the bottom line is the clarity. And he would write papers and he wrote physics books

that were really amazingly beautiful and clear. And that's what Pat would inspire me in fact to get into physics were his books. And then his books of anecdotes, he could tell anecdotes and he worked with somebody who would write them into books. But I'm not aware that he ever wrote any short stories or any fiction other than that attempt I mentioned.

Well, that's what I like so much about your book is I've read all of Feynman's books, or at least the ones for the sort of the lay audience. And then I read some of the biographies of him, and I found that he was better at writing than people were about writing about him. And yours, I think by being so short and then personal you manage to sort of cut through that problem. But the other biographies I've read about them, it sort of reminded me of Feynman's thing where, like, if you can't, he said, like, if you can't explain it clearly, simply and interestingly, then you don't really understand it.

And I kind of wondered if some of his biographers never really understood him as a person. Well, thanks. I appreciate you're saying that. And the one thing I could say about it, about that is that having worked in the, you know, along near him, but also we did, we did have some discussions about a research problem that I was working on that he helped me with, that that gave me a certain, and being a physicist,

it gives me a certain understanding of his essence that maybe it's hard to get if you're just a journalist. And in general, when journalists write books about science, I find that there's often a certain something that they're missing because they haven't done it themselves. So it's hard to, it's like if I was to write about Thailand without ever going there, I can study about it. There's there, I can start to learn. Yeah, there's a lifeless miss.

Yeah, yeah, some degree, yeah. Yeah, he, um, and he's such a character, obviously, that maybe that, that's what, so I, someone, someone who, who was a biographer of Churchill was saying that the problem of writing about Churchill is that anything you could say about Churchill, he said better about himself. And so you're up against that. I like that. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So in Fiamines Rainbow, I didn't feel the, perhaps one advantage was I didn't feel the compelling need to the perhaps one advantage was I didn't feel the compelling need to be encyclopedic about his life. I tried to give his essence and how it affected me.

So that was a modest goal, which made it easier. I heard one anecdote about Feynman that I've been trying to track down and I wondered if you'd heard about it. There was something about when he went to accept the Nobel Prize, it was something about he was reluctant to do it because you had to bow when you accepted it. Had you heard this? No, I hadn't heard that. I heard that he didn't want to have to bow to a king. And so he was reluctant to accept it. But it's one of those things, maybe you get this sometimes as a writer, you hear something or you read something

and then you forget where you got it and then you're trying to desperately find, like work your way back to it, but you can't. And you don't know whether you just made it up. Yeah, well, then you start looking on the internet and sometimes you find it, but then you're not sure if you can trust that source and try and find it from. That happens a lot with quotes. Yes. And I wrote a book with Deepak Chopra where we were really debating each other about our

views of the world and the universe. And he would give me, he would quote people. And they were often quotes that I had heard before, but I would go always and kick the tires and see if that was legit. Yeah, a lot of times I found that, you know, no criticism to Deepak, they were close to people accepted, but when I would dig into them, I would find that no, this person didn't say that.

There's a lot of that goes on. I know, I just found this, I'm just kicking myself, is it one of my books I found a quote that I was swore was real and I remember where I got it and then it turned out it wasn't and it made it all the way into print and I'm some, I hate doing that like I It drives me nuts, but yeah, the the provenance of the information is is such a it's a constant struggle

Yeah, and you know soon I think we will be seeing people videos of current and past figures saying phony quotes. Yes. That they've never said, but we'll see them on video and we won't be able to tell whether they're real or not. And then now we're going to go, oh, I just did say that. Here's a, here's a, here's a little film of him and he'll be, man, I'm going to be, but it's not even true, but it'll be even worse. It's going to get harder and harder. No, and we'll have to have AI checking the AI to see if that was actually real or not, because no person can get on their head.

And AI number one is going to say real, and AI number two is going to say not real, and then AI three will be the, yeah, I don't know. I actually did. I was reading something about that, that some of the AI stuff is getting worse because AI has already produced so much garbage that it's now absorbing some of its own media art. You know? Yeah, yeah.

That's funny. Well, no, that's crazy. Well, the last thing I wanted to mention to you, I'm just curious, obviously writing and talking a lot about the still, it's the sort of intersection between rationality and emotions. That's what I think about all the time. I haven't read your new book, which I'm excited to read. But there is this idea that these things are enemies, but then also the idea of just suppressing the emotions to be the rational robot, something gets lost in there too, it feels like.

Yeah, well, that's what the whole point of the book emotional is to, is that the, this idea that, well, the general idea or the classical idea that people have about emotions is all wrong. So there's no separation between emotion and rationality. There's no part of the brain that's the emotional center versus the rational center. And emotions are not counterproductive. They're in fact, generally, I mean, there are times where they are. Just like your eyes have optical illusions as well. But they play in fact a key role in your thinking, in your analysis of everything, in your thoughts and your actions. So the point of the book is to talk about that and how emotions are

really a functional state of your brain that cause you to process information depending on the emotion in this way or that way, suited to a certain circumstance. So we evolved that we're in this circumstance, we go into this mode of thinking, let's call it fear or love or whatever it is. And then as information comes in, that affects the way we process it, it affects even our rational processing of it. And then that helps to guide the conclusion. And so it's really fascinating, and something that's just come up in science that has been discovered in the last 10, 20 years.

And so I thought it was a great book for me to write. You know, when you're writing, when I'm writing one of my non-fiction books, it takes about a year and a half and so I'm careful with the pick because I want something that I find fascinating enough that I can work for a year and a half on it and keep my interest. So that was definitely a good choice. And boy, and I try to make this distinction, and because I think, again, people think Stoicism means has no emotions. I try to make this, right?

Yeah, which is certainly not what it actually has objectively was in reality. But I try to make this distinction between having the emotion and taking the action, and that those are two different things. Right. And in fact, I talk about stoshism a little bit in the book. And it's not that it's not that you shouldn't have emotion. You know, that's what we associate with things stoic. It's just that you shouldn't be a slave to your emotion, just as you shouldn't be a slave to materials or to other people think. So, but emotion, again, is what it really is, is a mode of thought.

You know, like your phone has low power mode and regular mode. So low power mode has a certain reason that you want to do that. And you phone will act differently when it's a low power mode. And your brain acts differently when it's in fear mode or happiness mode or anger mode. And I think it's important, I think, for people to understand how their mind works and what those emotions do

and how they're important and they're thinking, how they guide their thinking and their decision making, and then how they can regulate them if that's necessary, if they're becoming too strong or too much of a problem sometimes. So that's all very important for people to understand about themselves. Yeah, and I feel like Eastern thought is so interesting, you know, the practice of meditation and such, the ability to sort of recognize that one is having a feeling or a thought,

and to be able to see it as this thing that is both you and not you, and you can let it pass, or you can pick it up and examine it, or you can wait on it, you know, the idea that's just like you're not having, you are not the emotion, you are having the emotion and you can sort of decide whether you take the lead or not. Yeah, and I think that I talk about that too and mindfulness is very important. The understand what's really going on with yourself and then being able to therefore take control of it. understand what's really going on with yourself and then being able to therefore take control of it. And it's something that you put so when I wrote the book with Deepak we, even though we're like this, debating each other, we became friends. And I have to give him credit for, I mean,

when he started his career, meditation is considered some kind of like, weird old thing. And now we have papers, scientific publications, and neural science, and talk about how it's good and what it does, and how it works in your brain. Yes, totally. Well, it's a reminder of why you should follow what's interesting or effective for you, because you never know where it will go for you and who you might bring along with you on that ride. Yeah, very true.

It wouldn't be a shame to go, well, I had this idea, but I didn't do it because I wanted to do things that were more likely to work or the people looked accepted more. And then it turns out that that thing you passed off was, would have been the discovery of your life. Yes. Well, Emerson said that, something something about you see your own rejected thoughts with the kind of alienated majesty. When you go, oh, I thought that before, but I was too much of a coward or too intimidated

to take it out. Yeah. So, you just, anyway, you trust yourself. That's the best thing you can do. I love that. That was the message that I took from your book. And I really appreciate you having this conversation with me. Well, thanks Ryan.

It's been a lot of fun. And it's been very interesting. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon

Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.