David Tong – Real Genius
Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
David Tong’s office has a view of the courtyard where Sir Isaac Newton once lived, and just beyond that, the location of the famous apple tree that gave birth to Newton’s theory of gravitation. Tong, like Newton, is a fellow of Trinity College, and his gig as theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge comes with a myriad of such history-infused perks. He’s lectured in the same room as Michael Faraday, considered the godfather of electromagnetism; roamed the same halls as Sir J.J. Thomson, the Nobel Laureate credited with the discovery of the electron; and worked in the same lab (Cavendish Laboratory) where 30 researchers have gone on to win Nobel Prizes. Tong’s area of focus is quantum field theory, a topic made popular in the mainstream by the Large Hadron Collider, located in Geneva, Switzerland. Remember the LHC? The switch got flipped, and billions of protons flew around a seventeen-mile loop at nearly the speed of light until they smashed together hard, harder than any subatomic particles have ever been smashed together on earth. It was the greatest, most anticipated, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. It also proved the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, better-known in pop culture as the “God particle,” which was the last holdout particle remaining hidden during the quest to check the accuracy of the Standard Model of Physics. Tong, like the rest of the scientific community at the time, was keenly interested in the experiments at the LCH, but he was hardly surprised by the results.
“It was almost anticlimactic,” Tong says of the July 4, 2012, discovery of the Higgs. “The science had long predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, and the fact that it agreed with the Standard Model made absolutely perfect sense. Nonetheless, it was a profound discovery.”
Tong pauses. He understands that, for the most of us, the Standard Model is a complete and utter snoozefest.
“The theory, to put it simply, is the pinnacle of science,” he continues, in his gentlemanly British accent. “It’s the greatest theory we’ve ever come up with, and yet we’ve given it the most astonishingly rubbish name you’ve ever heard of. The Standard Model. You can’t get much more boring than that.”
Born in Crawley, England, David Tong came of age at a time when Britain was being convulsed by a social, cultural and political counter-revolution. Margaret Thatcher emerged as the political face of the decade. There was violence on the football terraces and on the inner-city streets. Graffiti artists like Robert Del Naja, otherwise known as 3D, came to symbolize the disaffected youth in the dark dystopia of 1980s Bristol. The forces that drove the punks and new wave bands that followed them were similar to those that motivated the Thatcherite ideologues – profound desire for consensus-breaking transformation. This was also a time of great innovation in pop music, as bands inspired by the can-do attitude of the punks and by the art-school cool of David Bowie began to experiment with synthesisers and computers, new technologies that would change forever the way music was made. Tong is a reflection of this creative-yet-turbulent period in British history. He emerged from humble beginnings, growing up in a working class neighborhood, himself as ordinary a boy as you might imagine. The 2008 winner of the Adams Prize, the highest honor at Cambridge University, is a real genius who has made it on his own steam, socioeconomic barriers be damned.
“That period was hard on Britain’s working class,” Tong replies, when asked about those bleak days during the ‘80s. “We weren’t alone in that respect. Everyone else was in it right along with us.”
Talk to him today and you’ll discover that Tong’s just as comfortable ranking Aerosmith’s discography as he is theorizing about dark energy, the mysterious antigravitational force causing everything in the universe to repel everything else. Close your eyes and it’s easy to imagine him making regular hit-and-run raids on London to visit clubs such as the Wag, the Electric Ballroom, the Cha-Cha under the arches at Charing Cross, and the Camden Palace. That’s because Tong, for all of his genius, did his fair share of partying during his late teens and early twenties.
“Let’s just say there were times when I could have applied myself more,” he says with a laugh. “It took a while for me to prioritize things properly.”
Tong’s life at that time, like everything else during the mid-80s, became becalmed. Britain’s fiercest political battles had been fought and won. The miners were defeated. Free-market fundamentalism was the new orthodoxy. People began to feel richer. The pop music was dismal. The culture became coarser and more reactionary. Tong would make his way north from Crawley to London in search of the latest concert, unsure of how he’d make it back home after. Memories just as meaningful as his road to higher learning.
“I had so much fun on those trips to London,” he says. “We got to see so many great concerts, and some bad ones, too.”
Tong attended Hazelwick, a comprehensive school whose notable pupils include Laura Moffatt, a Crawley native and former member of Parliament. From there he attended the University of Nottingham, earning his Bachelor of Science in Mathematical Physics. His next stop was at Kings College in London, where he earned his Masters of Science in Mathematics. In 1995 he headed to Swansea, where he attended the University of Wales and completed his PhD in Theoretical Physics. All of this setting the stage for his jump across the pond – to the University of Washington as a visiting student, then to Columbia University for his postdoctoral research, followed by stops at MIT and Stanford.
“I grew up at MIT,” Tong says, reflecting on his journey to the hallowed halls of Cambridge. “Until I got there, I wasn’t truly invested as I should have been. At MIT, I learned what it takes to be a serious physicist, and I think that’s when I truly applied myself.”
Today, Tong is fully invested in quantum field theory. His lectures include classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, condensed matter, and statistical physics. The charismatic professor has been a part of the Royal Institution’s Friday Evening Discourse lecture series (be sure to check him out on YouTube), which date back to Faraday’s time at Cambridge. And he continues to ponder the biggest problems in our universe, including the ever-elusive quest for a theory of everything.
“If you are a theoretical physicist, it’s something you endeavor to – but it’s also something that you’re likely to fail at. You know this going in. It’s the price of admission.”
Tong’s generation of theoretical physicists is only the most recent to embark on it. The idea seemed logical enough when Einstein first set out on it in the 1920s. If general relativity explains the universe from afar – why gravity pulls the earth around the sun – and quantum mechanics explains the world up close – how atoms, protons, and neutrons react to electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces – surely there must be a way to put the two theories together. After all, whether cosmic in size or minuscule, the particles and forces that govern our universe were all born at the same primordial moment. Yet Einstein failed. And in the interim, armies of physicists, equipped with similarly well-intentioned yet ultimately faulty or unprovable ideas, have followed him to the same well-trod dead end. Tong knows this going in, but that doesn’t make him any less determined.
“We theoretical physicists are gluttons for punishment,” he says, chuckling. “The only way you make a breakthrough is to keep hammering way. It’s what we do.”
Let’s jump in a DeLorean and time travel back to your childhood.
To be honest, it’s not the most interesting time of my life. I grew up in Crawley, England, which is a commuter town about 30 miles south of London. It’s an ugly town [laughs]. It’s got Britain’s second largest airport next to it – Gatwick Airport – so there was zero unemployment at a time in the 1980s when unemployment was rife in the country. I don’t have many complaints. It was a fine place to be, but it’s not a place that I’m desperate to go back to – actually, that’s not quite true because my mom still lives there, and everybody wants to go back home and see their mom! Other than that, there’s not too much going for it.
What was the school system like in Crawley, England?
Education is clearly important if you’re going to be a theoretical physicist. I went to a fairly good school, but there is a gap in this country between private education and what you guys in the States call public education. In the UK we have this Orwellian speak. Public schools are the fancy ones you pay 30,000 pounds a year to attend, and then you have the state schools, which is the kind that I went to. I had an okay education. In the context of my larger family, there wasn’t a history of education or going to university. No one in my family had ever gone to university before, so I was something of a trailblazer in that respect. I had very supportive parents, my mom in particular. She was a schoolteacher, so she really thought that education was crucial. I went off to a place called Nottingham. My American friends think this is fictional, because that’s where Robin Hood is from, but it really exists.
When did you become interested in science?
Around the age of seventeen. I was always good at math, but at some point in my life I learned that there was this bigger thing out there called physics. I think the moment was probably when I got Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time for my birthday. Until then, it never occurred to me that there was something called quantum mechanics, or that there were black holes. You don’t do any of the stuff in school, and it just blew my mind. It was utterly astonishing. And then on top of that, I learned from Hawking’s book that there existed this job – being a theoretical physicist. That had never occurred to me. The fact that you could just think about these things for a living was equally as mind blowing. I decided very early on that this is what I wanted to do, while also realizing that it was probably not where I was going to end up. Somehow, everybody gets diverted, so I thought that it was unlikely that I would become a theoretical physicist.
What did your family think of your career path?
My family did encourage me along the way, but always with a sense of bafflement. I don’t think they ever really understood what I was doing, but they always made it clear that they were extremely proud of me. Going to university, being the first person in the family to do that, there was a clear sense of support in that way. My wider family were genuinely baffled. At some point when I went on and did a PhD, my grandfather took me to one side and sort of let me know that one degree was okay, and maybe the Masters was pushing it, but why do a third degree in physics? He told me, “You know, your cousin…he’s a few years younger than you, but he’s got a good job. He’s laying carpet, he’s got his own van. It’s about time that you did something like this. When are you going to get your own van?” [Laughs.] His advice came from a sense of love. Actually, my cousin is doing tremendously well with his carpet business and is earning much more than I ever will. So my grandfather was probably right with his advice.
Was there a particular teacher or class that helped fuel your interest in science and mathematics?
I think everybody has wonderful teachers at one time or another during their schooling. Some of them I don’t think I was very nice to, to be honest. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. Mrs. Salter was one of these teachers that was very strict, very stern. You really wouldn’t get a smile out of her, but she was an amazing math teacher.
Did you ever struggle in school?
I almost bombed physics. I had a year where we really didn’t have a physics teacher, and I was bombing physics because I didn’t understand it. She was a biology teacher, and she was saying stuff that didn’t make sense, so it wasn’t really working for me. I wasn’t alone in that respect. I think everybody in the class was bombing, so they decided to put in a proper physics teacher. He was an old Air Force guy with no hair and a very distinctive head, as if it had been molded by his Air Force helmet [laughs]. Mr. Hobbs. Again, very stern. When he started explaining stuff, it just clicked. Suddenly it all started making sense.
You went to high school at Hazelwick. Please tell me about that.
Hazelwick is a Comprehensive School. This means it is a state school, which is the most common kind of school here in the UK. It was run by a headteacher that sort of had delusions of grandeur. He thought it was more prestigious than it actually was, and yet I think that vision did turn it into something more prestigious. By that I mean it was a school which focused very much on academic excellence, even though it was the kind of school where that typically wasn’t the priority.
You’ve described yourself as a geek in high school. What were you into during this period in your life?
When I was a young teenager I was super nerdy. Super geeky. I was into computer games. I had friends, but I wore a big, thick-rimmed glasses, kind of like the ones I wear now, although they are a little cooler now than they were considered back then. At some point I started meeting friends who were way cooler than I was, and I slowly realized that there is a bit more to life than just sums.
I had a set of friends that were into really bad ‘80s metal bands. By the time I was 17 we were going up to London and going to all of these rock concerts. There were times when we were sleeping out because we had missed the last train home. We saw some great bands like Aerosmith, but we also saws some really terrible bands as well. Poison – why was I into the band Poison and their song Every Rose Has Its Thorn?
Scientists are often stereotyped as humorless, arrogant, and introverted. That’s not you at all.
Oh yes, I would describe myself as humorless, arrogant, and introverted [laughs]! Have you seen The Big Bang Theory? I have to say that there is a little bit of Sheldon Cooper in all of us theoretical physicists. Maybe not quite that level of arrogance…it’s just under the surface, I think most of us are just hiding it well.
You received your Bachelor of Science in Mathematical Physics from the University of Nottingham. What did you do for fun?
I’m not sure I even remember extracurriculars. There was lots of doing what young people do, like clubbing, although looking back on it I’m not even sure I liked nightclubs. Looking back at it, there was lots of time spent in nightclubs and going out drinking. Maybe just a bit too much partying, to be honest. But I got a good education there.
Was Nottingham your first choice?
I applied to Oxford, but Oxford didn’t want me so I went to Nottingham. I got a good education there, that’s important to stress. England is a bit strange; if you are an undergraduate in England, it’s Oxford and Cambridge, and then everything else is considered a cut below. I guess the closest comparison in the United States is the Ivy League. And it’s extremely competitive here. I can see that now, as a professor at Cambridge. We get the best people from all around the world and put them together and challenge them. As a professor, I think that is fantastic. However, had I come here when I was 18, I think I would have struggled to no end. I wouldn’t have been able to compete with the students from the super fancy schools, or the brilliant minds excelling in the International Math Olympiad and International Physics Olympiad competitions. I think I would’ve probably ended up doing something else. So, somehow not getting into Oxford was a bit of good luck. It allowed me a little bit more time to learn physics, and to learn about myself as well.
From there it was on to Kings College, in London. Was the city a distraction?
Yes. I spent a year in London during the mid-90s, earning my Masters in Mathematics. Take any guy who’s 21 and put them in the middle of London, and they might not be doing as much work as they’d hoped. I had two years like this. Some years later I had a year in New York, where I had the best time outside of academics, and maybe my physics career didn’t quite progress as it should. I needed to refocus.
You earned your PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of Wales, Swansea.
Swansea wasn’t considered a top rate university, but they had just hired a new Theoretical Physics Department, which consisted of maybe eight people, all very young, all super ambitious, and all super smart. It was the best place to be. There was no hierarchy. You’re going out with the professors for beer in the evening, or doing picnics down on the beach together…there was a real sense of everyone starting something exciting. I had a brilliant advisor who was doing cutting edge stuff. We were learning about string theory, which was really quite exciting.
In 1997 you spent two years as a visiting student at the University of Washington.
Seattle is a hell of a town. I think it was the first time I had left the UK in four or five years. I remember the plane flying in over the mountains, and I had never seen mountains in my life before. I didn’t have anywhere to stay when I arrived, so I stayed in a youth hostel between Christmas and New Year’s Day. What I’ve come to learn is that there are very few clear days in Seattle, but one of my first days there was the rare exception. I stepped out of that youth hostel and it was utterly clear and you could see the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula just silhouetted in the horizon. My word, it just took my breath away. It’s utterly spectacular. It was a wonderful time. The physics department was prestigious, and also you had many extraordinarily talented people, including David Thouless, who had recently won the Nobel Prize. For the first time I was immersed in an environment where I was learning physics in a way that I hadn’t before.
The next step was your postdocs. What’s that like?
The way it works is that you do your PhD, and then six years of postdocs. These are usually two or three year positions. It’s wonderful, really, because they allow you to do anything you want. They give you a desk and a computer, and they just say, “Do your best work.” The flipside is that in two or three years you’re going to be unemployed and you are going to have to find another job.
Where did you conduct your postdoctoral research?
I think I applied for 120 positions the first time around, basically everywhere on the planet that did my kind of theoretical physics. I got one offer. That one offer was in Mumbai, India, so that is where I went. After marrying my wife, moving to India ranks as possibly the greatest decision of my life. It’s amazing there, just a wonderful place. In terms of science, this was 20 years ago, and back then India wasn’t a country that could inject a lot of money into science. Fortunately for me, theoretical physics is dirt cheap – you need maybe a pen and paper and a computer – so that wasn’t really a barrier. They also had some of the best theoretical physicists in the world, so it was the perfect place to learn. And I was able to immerse myself into the country’s amazing culture, music, and food, while making the best friends. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much in my life as I did in that one year in India. It really was a spectacular experience.
Your research career includes stops at Columbia University, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Cambridge. That’s a pretty impressive portfolio.
Columbia University was fun. There was a time in the 1950s when the Physics Department at Columbia University was the center of the physics world, and every single name on the corridor had Nobel Prizes or was going to have Nobel Prizes. The fact that I was enjoying New York City – perhaps a little too much – meant that I probably didn’t get as much out of physics as I could have. I definitely enjoyed myself there. Then, two months later, I got this offer from MIT. That was really my dream job. I was seriously torn about whether I should stay in New York, which presumably meant dropping physics, or whether I should go to MIT. Well, MIT is usually ranked as the best physics department in the world, so I felt that the opportunity was too good to turn down.
In many ways, MIT was where I really learned to become a physicist. It was late in my life, I had my PhD, and I had done three years of postdocs. But moving there and seeing very smart people working incredibly hard and with unbridled passion – people that had won the Nobel Prize or who were on the cusp of winning it – that kind of turned my head. It made me realize that if you want to be good at physics, then you have to be very serious. I just looked around: If they are obviously smarter than me, and they are working much, much harder than me, then what chance do I have? I think that’s when I kind of grew up a little bit, to be honest. I realized that physics can be a fun hobby, but if you really want to make it into something more, then it requires a dedication. It was probably at MIT when I first really did that.
Let’s talk about the Royal Institution and the history there. Is the desk where you’ve lectured the same desk that Michael Faraday gave his famous Christmas lecture in 1856?
I make a comment on the YouTube video during my lecture, which says that if that is Faraday’s original desk, then he could have made life very easy for himself.
How so?
Because there’s a three-pin plug socket, and he could’ve just discovered electricity there [laughs]. I think the desk has been replaced at least once, but aside from the socket it’s an exact replica. It was probably replaced 150 or 200 years ago, and then modified to have electricity.
Some giants of science have lectured in that room, Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy among them. Please tell me about these two men.
Humphry Davy was the first Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. He was a very prominent chemist who discovered at least four elements of the periodic table. He’s a pretty impressive guy. Faraday was his protégé. Surprisingly, Faraday was almost entirely uneducated. He left school at the age of 14 to become a bookbinder. He somehow pushed his way into the Royal institution to work as a lab tech for Humphry Davy, and from there pushed his way to become one of the greatest scientists of all time.
I’ve read where the lecture series was Faraday’s idea.
When Faraday was 34, he started this lecture series at the Royal Institution, called the Friday Evening Discourse. He gave most of the lectures for the first 40 years, and they used to be held every single week. Now they only do them once a month, but they have been running since the 1700s, so the tradition is still there.
And now we can add David Tong to the esteemed list of lecturers.
It was such an honor to receive the invitation and speak in this room. There are some traditions that aren’t clear from the YouTube video, one of which dates back to the early 1800s. The story goes that a guy named Charles Wheatstone was due to give a lecture, but he was a very nervous speaker, and, as it turns out, he was also a runner. Just before Wheatstone was supposed to turn up, he abandoned the lecture and Faraday had to stand in a give a lecture in his place. So to prevent this from happening, for the last 200+ years, they have a tradition of locking the speaker in a room for 10 minutes before the lecture.
Now, to say I was nervous to give this lecture was an understatement. To be locked in a room for 10 minutes before I was supposed to go on…my heart was beating through my chest! They finally came and let me out, and escorted me to the lecture hall entrance. There were two guys in uniform holding these big, fancy doors, and through the door I could almost hear somebody introducing me. Then they opened the door and in I went. The tradition is that you enter, but you don’t say, “Hello.” You don’t say, “Welcome.” You just start off with the lecture. So, it’s a very strange experience. I loved it. It was really a thrill to do that.
Today, you teach at Cambridge. That’s quite an honor.
I’m associated a with place called Trinity College, which is a college within Cambridge University. Let me say that history hangs heavy. I have two offices; my departmental office is very nice and modern, and I have blackboards everywhere. My other office is located in Trinity College. It’s in a building that was built in the 1600s, and it overlooks an astonishing court – if I crane my neck I can see where Newton lived, and beyond that, the spot where his apple tree was located. The people who have passed through Trinity include J.J. Thomson, who discovered the electron; Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the structure of the atom; and James Clark Maxwell, who discovered the theories of electricity and magnetism and who put Faraday’s work on proper mathematical footing. The list just goes on and on and on. At some point you just have to shrug and laugh it off, because these are not people whose footsteps you can fill. So, it’s a privilege, it’s an utter privilege.
Do you ever think about coming from such humble beginnings and being where you are today?
Almost on a daily basis. Certainly when I’m lecturing. Paul Dirac was a student here, and all he did was discover the equation for the electron – that, and win the Nobel Prize in Physics [laughs]. It is an astonishing story, really; Paul was staring into a fire when the equation for the electron suddenly came to him. It took him a long time to understand what it meant – about three years – and that’s when he realized that antimatter exists. He hadn’t just come up with the equation for the electron, but also an equation for another particle that had the same mass but had the opposite charge. Then, if the two particles with different charges came together, they would annihilate any burst of energy. Six months after he came to that realization, antimatter was discovered in experiments. To come up with something like that with just pure thought alone is mind-boggling. I’m no Dirac, but when I get to stand up in our beautiful lecture halls and write his equation on the blackboards and explain to our students for the first time what it means…there is something very special in that.
As a theoretical physicist, what is your particular area of focus?
I work in something called quantum field theory. It’s a strange subject because it’s the basis of all of our laws of physics. Everything that we know at a fundamental level of the universe is written in terms of quantum field theory, and yet we really don’t understand it at all. My mathematician friends will tell me that I’m talking nonsense when I do quantum field theory, and that’s because they need to define things very rigorously. For them, they need to make sure that every step is very well-defined; in more than 70 years, nobody has managed to do that with quantum field theory.
Does your work require a certain amount of creativity?
As physicists, we are sort of flying by the seat of our pants. We are working with equations and mathematics that the mathematicians haven’t yet invented, so we are way ahead of them in that regard. If you take a wrong step with the math, you just get nonsense answers. You need intuition as a physicist to avoid taking the wrong step and still try to get the right answer. So yes, there is high level of creativity involved.
What drew you to the theoretical side of physics, as opposed to the experimental side?
That’s not a hard question to answer – if I pick up a screwdriver, I’m going to be using the wrong end every single time [laughs]. I’m hapless, absolutely hapless, when it comes to almost anything practical.
The discovery of the Higgs boson was such a big deal that it captured the imagination of millions worldwide.
This might sound a little bit strange, but I was a bit blasé about it. The science told us that it was there. That much was absolutely clear. We have this theory called the Standard Model that involves different forces and different particles interacting with each other, and yet there was this one missing ingredient, but it was such an integral part of the theory that it couldn’t not be there. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think most physicists thought it was just absolutely obvious, and it would be nice when it was finally discovered, but that we weren’t really going to learn anything. And then the Higgs boson was discovered, and I was just blown away.
It’s just astonishing to think that scientists could be so sure of the Higgs boson’s existence with just with pen and paper. Then, theorize that if you build a machine that costs $10 billion – the greatest engineering feat ever – and you smash these particles together at unprecedented energies, you’re going to see a bump that has particular properties in some graph, proving its existence. And yet, that’s what happened. There’s something really astonishing about that achievement. I sort of felt something similar about the gravitational wave discovery several years ago. It’s obvious that if you take the Einstein equation, gravitational waves exist. It’s far from obvious that you can build a machine to actually detect them. So again, I was a bit blasé. You take for granted that they will be detected at some point in time. But then it happens, and you’re reminded that this is such an incredible moment. We’re talking about some of mankind’s greatest scientific and technological achievements.
Do you think the recent discovery of neutrino oscillations challenges the Standard Model?
It challenges it, but I think in a fairly minor way. It’s not too difficult to take the Standard Model and just add a mass for the neutrino. This was not a big surprise. It’s also a slightly different discovery in the sense that it took decades, with hints from solar neutrinos and more hints from nuclear reactor neutrinos. People painstakingly put this together, and then it was finally proven by the SNO experiment that Art McDonald and others were on. It wasn’t like the discovery of the Higgs boson, or the discovery of gravitational waves, where there was a pop culture moment and a press conference by the mainstream media to announce it. It was something that built up much more slowly in the consciousness of physicists. Having said that, it is true that adding the mass for neutrinos to the Standard Model opens new questions, as discoveries always do. It opens up deeper questions about where the mass comes from, so it’s certainly one of the more interesting questions in science today. I’m one of these people who get excited about everything in physics, so it was a big deal to me.
Are you surprised by how well the Standard Model has held up?
We all thought that the discovery of the Higgs boson would sort of open the door to the next level of discoveries to whatever lies beyond the standard model, whatever the next level of nature is. We have lots of ideas. We have really fancy, zany ideas about things like supersymmetry or extra dimensions in the universe, all of these great things that we were hoping the Large Hadron Collider would discover. None of this came true. The Large Hadron Collider has done extraordinarily well since the discovery of the Higgs boson. It has done millions of experiments, and every single one of them agrees perfectly with the Standard Model, which should be cause for celebration because it’s taken us 70 years to develop the Standard Model. And now that we’ve got it, we can calculate anything we like.
Why would breaking the Standard Model be a win for science?
We do these extremely complicated experiments and everything agrees perfectly. That in itself sounds like a win, but science is all about pushing the envelope. Everybody wants to prove Einstein wrong, because they want to be the next Einstein. That’s being a little bit facetious, but the point is, it’s when your theory breaks down that you’ve managed to make the next big step and understand things deeper. The Standard Model hasn’t broken down. The entire scientific community doesn’t understand why it works as well as it does. There are so many questions. Why isn’t it cracking yet? Why aren’t we seeing gaps in the Standard Model?
Do you have a theory about that?
Everybody in the scientific community has their own approach. I have one, which is not the norm, and certainly not what most people are doing. As I mentioned before, there are lots of things we don’t understand about quantum field theory. Some are things that you can just brush under the rug and not worry about. With respect to the Standard Model, I think it might be time to lift up the rug. I think we need to start asking slightly harder questions about what quantum field theory means. What is it doing? Are there patterns there that we’ve missed? I think it’s time to take start exploring very well-explored theories in completely different ways.
What is the one thing today that excites you the most about physics?
Five percent of the energy in our universe is made up of stuff in the periodic table…things that are made of atoms, such as you and me, the stars in the universe, the dust in the universe, planets…stuff that we understand, basically. The other 95% is completely unknown. Still, we know it’s there, and we know that it falls into two different categories: Dark matter and dark energy. While they have similar names, they really have very little to do with each other. I’m not working on either of these things today because I don’t have any good ideas. In fact, no one really has any good ideas. But that’s the exciting thing about dark matter and dark energy.
That’s a big percentage of our universe.
About 25% of the universe is made up of dark matter. Dark matter is super exciting and interesting, but I’m not sure it’s that baffling, conceptually. Dark matter is some invisible particle that we haven’t made here on earth. We know it’s there, floating around in space. In fact, the galaxies that we see likely exist within dark matter halos. It would be brilliant to understand this better, but at the end of the day it’s almost certainly some sort of invisible particle.
The other 70% of the universe is much more baffling. The other 70% is made up of dark energy, which is an antigravitational force causing everything in the universe to repel everything else. The effect is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate over time, rather than slowing down. That’s because of this antigravitational force that we call dark energy, which is making everything fly apart at an increasingly fast rate. What the hell is that? That is just weird.
Final Question: You’ve achieved great success in your life. If you could offer one piece of advice, what would that be?
I don’t think theoretical physicists should be giving advice on life [laughs]. That’s not where we are the experts. But, I can give advice on pursuing science. Do it if you love it, because it’s a fairly miserable experience. You spend most of your time just being utterly stuck and utterly confused, and not having anywhere to turn to find the answers. There has to be a passion for the big picture, and yet you must get a level of joy from finding the very tiny, infinitesimal answers, and also from making infinitesimal progress. The little things have to be bigger than the misery.
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