Transcript

The Jazz of Physics | Stephon Alexander | TEDxSanDiego

I play the sacks, but I wasn't playing the sacks like that guy, the guy with the dreads when I was his age. They were amazing. Let's give it up to them. [Music] Yeah. Okay. So music has this mysterious power to affect us so deeply. And never in my wildest dream when I started off in my career to become a physicist did I ever think that there would be some deep connection between the functioning of our universe and music. And I want to take you a little bit on that journey today. The journey begins at Dwood Clinton High School. This is where I went to high school in the Bronx, New York in the 80s. And Da Clinton was the second most populated high school in New York City with about a 60% dropout rate. But we had teachers there that deeply cared about our well-being and our education. Um during 10th grade, our first day of our physics class, all of the students were anticipating Mr. Kaplan to walk into the room and walk to the front of the blackboard. and write down some daunting equations. But he did the exact opposite. That's a picture of Mr. Kaplan when he was a younger chap. It was the only picture I was able to get. But the Kaplan at the time had wild Einstein haircut and he walked into the room with a frail limp and actually went and sat in the middle of the room on someone's desk. and he reached into his inside pocket, actually one of the pockets, and um to get some mysterious object that actually made the thugs in the back of the room a little bit concerned. Okay. But it was just a simple tennis ball. And he took the tennis ball, looked around, threw it in the air, caught it. I'm glad I caught it. And then he asked the class when the ball was at the top of its flight, it had zero velocity. right before it hit my hand, what was the velocity of the ball? Now, we were about 14, 15 years old at the time, and I was fascinated by this because I didn't have to solve any equations. In my mind's eye, I had the image of the ball going up and down, up and down in slow motion, and I instinctively rose my hand and um I said, "Well, when the ball gets right right before it hits your hand, it's exactly the same velocity as when it left your hand." Mr. Kaplan got up and said, "This is brilliant. The the intuition is the lifeblood of a great physicist." Like, really me? It was the first time It was the first time in my life that a teacher actually, you know, exuded that I was smart. After class, Mr. Kaplan called me into his office. So, I went to his office and he had this huge office because he was a chairperson of both the music department and the all the science departments. And it had all these books. There was a book like actually this was one of the books. It's about a 2,000page book on gravitation. and he says to me, "You know, Stefan, I think you have what it takes to be a good physicist." I'm think, "What? What? I haven't even had one class with this guy yet. I've got one class. What's he talking about?" And he goes, "Yeah, do you know about Einstein's theory of gravity? You know, space is not what you think it is. Space is warped. The universe is expanding." And he goes, "What kind of music do you like to listen to?" So because in his office he had on one side of his office a picture of Albert Einstein and then another side of the office he had a picture of somebody I didn't know although I did play I play around with a saxophone when I was younger. I actually didn't know who this gentleman was. It was John Kotrin of course and of course I wondered why does this man have these two people in this in this office. Um, I know about Einstein, but anyway, to make a long story short, he basically told me, hey, what kind of music do you like? I said, I like rap music. Said, what about jazz? Said, you know, I like Kennedy for the So, he said, come back to my office next time. I came back and he handed me a CD. He goes, this is real jazz. And it was a John Cold Trains album, Giant Steps. All right. The years progressed along. I I discovered something very interesting about Mr. Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan was trained as a master composer and he was on his way to a very successful career as a composer but he got drafted at the Korean War and during the Korean War he got involved in radar and while working on radar he caught the physics bug because radar is about physics right and when he came back he pursued a career in physics and then became the head of the physics and music department pursuing both careers. He was also a jazz musician. But Mr. Kaplan could have taught at any of the elite schools like including Bronze High School Science, which is next door to Clinton. But he chose to be right there in that room with me. So I caught the Kaplan bug. Mr. Kaplan said, "You have to take calculus. You have to go to college, go to grad school, get a PhD, and then you can learn, you can understand this book." Well, I did that. It took 20 years to do that. Um so fast forward 20 years I am in London at the Imperial College um the theoretical physics group and I start to feel like that 10th grader again. I start to feel completely you know inadequate. There were all these other physicists there that I felt had a lot more than I had and I was getting nowhere in my research. So in that moment of despair I remembered Mr. Kaplan. I remember Mr. Kaplan being true to himself, paving his own path, improvising his life. So I decided, you know what? I'm just if I'm going to go out, I'm going out with my horn. So what I did was I started to hang out in the jazz clubs in Camden Town, London during the summertimes. I used to go to Smalls and I would bring my physics papers, my research, and my calculations to the jazz clubs. So now I'm in these jazz clubs in the middle of the night talking to the jazz musicians about my physics ideas. I used to tell them about, you know, expanding universe. They would give me weird looks. There was a time when a pianist was playing and I looked at another horn player. I said, "Man, his plane is quite geometrical." And guy goes, "I don't know why geometrical, man. This stuff just sounds good." So that was the story. But one thing happened that was interesting. During that moment, I realized that I was starting to have intuitive leaps in the jazz clubs. Sometimes irrational thoughts that would lead me to solve problems. Cuz many of us think that being a good scientist is about being rational and locking yourself behind some, you know, in a room calculating a desk or in a lab with a lab coat. No. Sometimes to get to the answer requires you to be irrational. and that's what was happening there. So that led me to solve a couple of problems and got me tenure at Dartmouth College. Um but now it turns out that I learned something very interesting that I wasn't the first to have that to do that. It actually turned out that at the very birth of astronomy, the very birth going back to the Pythagoreans 580 540 BC, they actually thought at the birth of astronomy that the universe played a harmony. They call it harmony of the spheres that all the planets were playing this harmony. And in the 1600s, the first astrophysicist, we have we're seeing a picture of him here, Johannes Kepler, in order to come up with the three laws of planetary motion of the elliptical motion of all the planets, Kepler actually went back to the Pythagorean thinking of a musical universe. And how he figured this out was very interesting. What we're seeing here is a sun and a planet going around an elliptical orbit. And at the perihelion where where the planet is closest to the sun, here's the sun. Planet is closest to the sun. He measured the velocity or the the velocity was actually measured furthest from the sun. He measured the velocity and he took the ratios of those velocity and assigned a musical note to every to that ratio. And he did that for all the planets and came up with the scales and through that musical thinking he transported that into his equations. So the Kepler's three laws are still used to launch satellites into outer space and keep satellites in orbits and to still study the motion of planets today. They're still correct. So, I was very inspired by that and said to myself, well, I guess I'm going to have to use musical thinking as part of my toolkit on top of the math and all the other stuff that I use. And I could I uh kept very um interesting um methods there. So, now we're thinking about 2020. I want to tell you guys what the current research going on in my field is. So I'm going to I'm going to talk about two things and focus on one. I'm going to tell you what the cuttingedge research is. So many of you heard about this idea called the big bang. This is actually Einstein's theory of gravity predicts that in the presence of matter and energy, the spaceime of the universe actually is going to expand. So what we're seeing from the from your left to the right. Yes. Your left to the right is that region where you have the shiny white light. That region actually is a big mystery. We call that the big bang. We don't understand how it came about and what happened before. That's what I get paid to do. Thank you taxpayers for paying me to do these kind of things. Um but what we do understand well is what happened afterwards. So what we're seeing there are the red and blue um this red and blue area there that is something called a cosmic microwave background radiation that's been measured way back you know in this in the 60s and that measurement has been confirmed up till today that corresponds to the early universe as it's expanded that was very hot and dense and filled with radiation energy nothing else no planets no stars no galaxies And as the universe continued to expand, it cooled and that radiation coalesed to form the first stars and galaxies that we now inhabit. And we understand that physics very well. But we don't understand the big bang. What happened before the big bang? Another problem we um don't understand very well um is are the laws of physics. We know that there are four forces of nature and all of these forces have different strengths. What we're looking at here is a typical star like our sun and at the center we see iron. Because of the immense pressure of the sun, the the um the immense pressure forces thermonuclear fusion to transmute light elements into heavy elements. So a star is a region or a factory that produces elements, heavier elements like carbon. If a star does not produce carbon, there would not be life as we know it because we we need carbon for our DNA. So the question is it turns out if you tweak the laws of physics, these forces, the strengths by a few percent a star could never make carbon. So, it's like the universe is like a perfectly fine-tuned instrument such that if it was any different, if those laws are any different, it would not produce the stuff necessary for life. A star is what produces the stuff to really made up of stardust. I want to show you a picture here. You see that arrow is pointed at a star within a galaxy and that star explodes into something called a supernova. It's brighter than the entire galaxy. Even though a galaxy has on the order of hundreds of billions of stars in it. All right? And so that's picture of a star right before it and that blows out all of the elements. Okay? So here's something really interesting. The big bang, the idea of the big bang, physicists today are thinking that actually this fine-tuning could be solved if before the big bang there were many bangs and there were many universe created in those bangs and we just happened to be in the universe where the coupling constants what we call the tunins of these prime are exactly necessary for life but the other universes have different laws. So we just hit the jackpot. Are you satisfied with that idea? Well, this is what this idea is what is you know what people are now working on at some of the top institutions around the world. So I returned back to my musical thinking and I said well what if like Kepler the universe was more than just harmony of the sphere what if the universe was like a jazz solo. So in a jazz solo as you heard these wonderful young people play you need two things to happen. You need a rhythm section. And what usually happens is that this rhythm section, this rhythm repeats itself like a cycle. And you have a harmony. And that harmonic structure repeats itself as well. And every time that repetition happens, the improviser, the soloer gets to try different things, get to improvise different ideas. So what if the universe was like something like that? So instead of having one bang, the idea is that you have an infinite success of bangs. The universe, our past universe expanded, contracted into a bang, expanded and contracted again. And every time it did that, the universe had an opportunity to solo different laws of nature. So with this idea, because that's what physicists, we do. we have an idea as crazy as it is and then we start putting some equations behind it. So we turn back to Mr. Einstein, we go back to his equations and we find me and my colleagues that the equations actually work out to actually say that. So I'm going to now close um with some inspiration from Mr. Kaplan. And as we're thinking about 2020, I want to say to Mr. Kaplan, you know, when I got my PhD, I went back to D Clinton High School to thank him. Um, and I found out that he had not too long ago passed away from cancer. And that what that little limb that he had is because he was actually suffering um from a terminal ill illness. So, I felt guilty. I dedicated my my PhD dissertation for him. I actually, you know, felt guilty that I never over those years I was so busy with my own life, I never got a chance to thank him. And that's why I'm here to kind of pass on the Kaplan meme, which is that Mr. Kaplan demonstrated the courage to be true to himself. He demonstrated the courage to think differently and not fall into the, you know, the traditionalism of of one's field. And he also challenged us to live a life full of improvisation because if the universe is improvising, why shouldn't we? Thank you.