He Found Computer Code BURIED Inside the Universe's Equations | S. James Gates
S. James Gates Jr. is one of the most decorated physicists alive, a former member of Obama's science advisory council and the first Black theoretical physicist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. On Danny Jones, he sits down to do something he says most interviewers never let him finish: explain, carefully and in his own order, the strangest thing he has ever found in physics.
Published Mar 16, 202656:11 video28 min readAdded Jun 14, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
S. James Gates Jr. is one of the most decorated physicists alive, a former member of Obama's science advisory council and the first Black theoretical physicist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. On Danny Jones, he sits down to do something he says most interviewers never let him finish: explain, carefully and in his own order, the strangest thing he has ever found in physics. Working inside the equations of supersymmetry, Gates and his collaborators discovered that a class of error correcting codes, the very same kind that keep a web browser from garbling data, appears embedded in the mathematical structure that may describe the fundamental laws of nature.
This page rebuilds the whole conversation in the order it happened. Gates first teaches supersymmetry from scratch using Mendeleev's periodic table as the analogy, then walks into the codes, and then does the thing that makes him worth listening to: he tells you exactly what the codes do not mean. He flatly rejects the simulation reading the internet has hung on his name for a decade. He offers instead a more careful and stranger idea, that the math describing our universe may have evolved, the way genetics evolved error correction to suppress mutations. From there the talk widens into consciousness and AI, dreams that solved 300 calculations, why we cannot get back to the moon, life in Jupiter's atmosphere, and a quiet plea against worshipping scientists as gods.
The discovery is real and published. The interpretations Gates floats, transporters, anti-gravity, evolving physical law, he labels honestly as speculation, intuition, or science fiction. Keeping that line visible is the point of the whole interview, and the point of this page.
Mendeleev's holes: how to teach a missing universe
Danny asks for a high-level view of supersymmetry, and Gates refuses to hand over a slogan. He builds it. Walk into any high school chemistry class, he says, and on the wall is a chart with an H in one corner and HE near it: the periodic table, created by the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev. The crucial historical fact is that Mendeleev's first table had holes. He did not know all the elements. And he used the presence of those gaps to predict elements no one had ever seen. We later found every one of them, and many more besides, so the modern table has essentially no holes left. The table evolved.
That is the whole rhetorical engine of the interview, set up before supersymmetry is even named. Hold it in mind: a chart with gaps is not a chart that is wrong, it is a chart that is incomplete and predictive.
Then Gates lays out what we actually know about the universe right now. There are electrons, which belong to a family called leptons, things kind of like electrons but slightly different. Inside protons and neutrons sit quarks, which also come in families: two up quarks and a down quark make up every proton. That, he says, is the best observational data we have about the smallest things in the universe. But you are not a bag of loose particles, you are an organized structure, which means something has to link the particles together. Those links are the four fundamental forces.
The two kinds of things, and a picture that is not balanced
Gates names the four forces with a teacher's economy. Electromagnetism: like charges repel. The strong nuclear force: the form of nuclear energy that powers the sun. And a separate weak nuclear force, for which he gives a wonderful handle. In old 1950s science fiction movies, radioactive things always glowed. That glow, he says, is the weak nuclear force. It is a real thing, not Hollywood selling a story. Hollywood was inadvertently correct.
So the universe looks like it is made of two kinds of things: the things that get hooked together, and the things that do the hooking. Each force has a carrier particle, and those carriers are called bosons. The boson with the Greek symbol gamma is the photon, drawn in yellow. The strong and weak forces have their own carriers. And the H, the Higgs boson, is on the chart too, because it is also a force carrier, a correction Gates makes pointedly against the popular media framing of the Higgs as merely the particle that gives things mass.
Then he turns the diagram into a question. He asks Danny: is that a balanced picture? Is it pretty? Danny says no, it is definitely not balanced. That is the trap sprung. The matter particles crowd the lower left, the force carriers sit alone in the corner, and the whole thing is lopsided. To Gates and many physicists, this lopsided chart looks exactly like Mendeleev's first table of elements. It has holes.
Figure 1. Gates's own teaching slide, reconstructed. The known particles (left) make a lopsided block with isolated force carriers in the corner, just like Mendeleev's first table. Supersymmetry (right) predicts a mirror partner for every particle, filling the holes and restoring the balance. The Large Hadron Collider was built partly to find those partners. It has not, yet.
Supersymmetry: a mirror partner for everything
If supersymmetry is an accurate description of nature, Gates says, we are going to find all these other particles, and the move is almost exactly like going from Mendeleev's initial table to today's. That is why supersymmetry is so hotly studied, and it was a primary reason the Large Hadron Collider was built: the hope that it would begin to see the additional particles. It did not. If we do start to see them, Gates says plainly, the answer to whether that brings fundamental breakthroughs is yes.
He is careful about the philosophy underneath. The symmetric chart is his own creation, made to show people what physicists mean by symmetry: balance. Symmetry, he says, has guided us in understanding nature since Isaac Newton. He will not overclaim. He cannot say everything in nature is symmetric, only that symmetry has been a reliable guide for several hundred years.
Danny, having clearly done his homework, asks about extended supersymmetry. Gates laughs ("you've done your homework too well") and explains that the chart he is showing is just simple supersymmetry, the N equals 1 case. Extended supersymmetry would add many more particles, outside the blocks he is drawing. All of it sits under superstring theory, the math beneath the particles.
The science fiction hat: transporters and anti-gravity
Here Gates does something disciplined that the rest of the interview keeps echoing: he puts on what he calls his science fiction hat, and he tells you when it goes on and when it comes off. Invoking a running joke about predicting the future being a hazardous business, he speculates out loud.
On the chart sits the electron, which we know exists because all our technology works by manipulating electrons. Scroll over and you find an E with a little tilde, a "twiggle," on top. Supersymmetry says that for every particle we know, there is an undiscovered partner that exists if our universe is supersymmetric and we get the technology to measure it. The partner of the electron is the selectron. And because the two sides are balanced, you can ask whether there is a physical law that lets you switch between them. If there were, you could swap ordinary electrons for selectrons, which have different properties: they are more malleable, and you could move them through substances an ordinary electron cannot pass through. That, Gates says, when he wears the science fiction hat, could be the scientific basis of a transporter, as in Star Trek. He stresses the framing: this is the first piece of mathematics that even suggests a transporter is in the realm of possibility. He cannot get there, and the hat is firmly labeled.
Danny pushes on anti-gravity. Gates answers with the same discipline. Supersymmetry research has looked at this since the 1980s. There are versions of supersymmetry, not the one on his chart but very similar equations, where anti-gravity is definitely present. We do not know how to extend those particular models to include electrons, but the models exist and have been in the literature for about 20 years. Established math, no electrons in it yet, no overclaim.
Then Danny asks how this connects to the Adinkra symbols. Gates says "oh my goodness, I didn't know you were going to go there," and asks for a break. The interview cuts, and returns at the heart of the matter.
The discovery: codes inside the equations
Danny restates the claim he wants Gates to confirm, with a careful disclaimer that he might butcher it: the equations Gates was led to are indistinguishable from the types of equations used for search engines and web browsers. Gates says that is exactly right, and tells the story in order.
He and his collaborator Michael (the physicist Michael Faux) first figured out that you can take the data from supersymmetry equations and embed it into images. These images are the Adinkras, named after the West African symbols, a graphical way to represent supersymmetry algebra as networks of dots and lines. It was clear to Gates that they were doing something no one in their corner of physics had thought about, and clear that it was mathematics. So, almost immediately after writing their paper (around 2004), Michael reached out to mathematicians he knew, and it turned out Gates had unknowingly interacted with them before. The six of them, three physicists and three mathematicians, formed a math-physics collaboration to study the mathematical properties of these images.
In 2008 the six came to the discovery. The structure of the pictures contains bits, and not random assortments of bits, but bits arranged in the form of what are known in computer science as classical error correcting codes. They are literally embedded in the structure of the Adinkras. Gates calls this the wildest thing he has ever been part of in physics. The significance, in his own framing: if supersymmetry is true, and if we can observe it, this would be the first instance in science where computer codes are part of the fundamental laws of physics.
Figure 2. Two structures Gates says turn out to be the same thing. Top: an Adinkra, the graph that encodes a set of supersymmetry equations, white nodes for bosons, black for fermions, colored edges for the symmetries. Bottom: the shape of a classical error correcting code, real data bits plus redundant parity bits so a corrupted bit can be detected and repaired. The codes Gates's team found are block linear self-dual codes living inside the Adinkra structure.
What it does not mean: not the Matrix
This is the section Gates says people rarely let him reach, and he thanks Danny on camera for the chance to say it to a general audience. For decades, he notes, people have claimed "Jim Gates has proven we live in a simulation," that the codes mean our universe is the Matrix. He does not believe that for a moment.
His objection is not aesthetic, it is methodological. The simulation claim is not a scientific statement, because science by definition is about things you can prove false. The simulation hypothesis can never be proven false, which is exactly why it is not science. He is not calling it wrong. He is locating it outside the domain where his tools apply.
What he offers instead is more careful and, he admits, weirder. His own intuition, one he suspects he will never live long enough to see resolved, draws on genetics. There is a long-standing argument that error correction must be present in genetics, because it suppresses random mutations. A genome that evolves needs that, because if you let random mutations run free the offspring are not viable. So genetics likely does carry some error correction, and that is the only place in nature, in our several millennia as a species, where we have seen error correction sitting inside a physical system.
So how did the error correction get into the genome? The answer is evolution. Systems evolve to have these corrections: traits that aid survival get selected, like the advantage of walking on two limbs and freeing the other two to manipulate the world. Now run the parallel. Evolution is likely to be some kind of error correction. We have found error correction sitting inside the equations that might describe our universe. To Gates, that suggests something like evolution happened, with the math that describes our universe. Danny presses: the laws of physics likely underwent an evolution process? Yes. Are they still evolving now? Here Gates declines to go along. Biology is still evolving, but the laws of physics do not necessarily apply to biology, and while he cannot prove the laws are not still changing, it seems very unlikely to him. He calls this the far-out weirdness his scientific journey has taken him to, and frames it as a privilege: all his heroes followed their own path, and this is where his led.
Established Published, peer reviewed, found by a six-person math-physics team in 2008.
Adinkras faithfully encode supersymmetry equations as graphs
Established The graphical method Gates and Faux introduced around 2004.
If supersymmetry is real, this is the first code inside fundamental law
Conditional True only if supersymmetry is confirmed in nature. The LHC has not found it.
The codes mean we live in a simulation / the Matrix
Rejected Gates says explicitly he does not believe this, and that it is not even a scientific statement.
The math of our universe may have evolved like genetics
Speculation Gates's own intuition, offered as such, not as a result.
Selectron swapping could be the basis of a transporter
Science fiction His "science fiction hat," labeled out loud.
Some supersymmetry-like equations contain anti-gravity
In the literature Real models, ~20 years old, but not extended to electrons.
Figure 3. The honest ledger. Gates spends much of the interview keeping these rows from collapsing into each other. The discovery is solid. The grand readings are flagged as intuition, speculation, or fiction.
Shannon, Hamming, and why codes exist at all
Danny and Gates trace the codes back to their inventors. In the 1940s Claude Shannon came up with the idea both computer scientists and physicists call the entropy content of information: information itself carries entropy, and he wrote the equation for it. Then Richard Hamming showed that digital structures which communicate reliably must have error correcting codes built into their structure. These two, Gates says, are his guide stones for understanding the strange result. The mechanism is concrete: when you transmit a data packet from a computer here to one in Beijing, fluctuations in the medium flip bits, and unless you build in a mechanism to unflip them, the data corrupts. That mechanism is the error correcting code. That was Hamming's observation, and it is the same kind of code the team found in the equations.
It from bit: information, mass, and dark matter
Danny runs an extended thought experiment, and Gates models intellectual honesty by repeatedly declining to bluff. A blank hard drive, all ones or all zeros, is low entropy. Write this podcast onto it and it becomes a chaotic mess of bits, higher entropy, yet plugging in a monitor gives it meaning. Gates finds the framing interesting but will not commit, and it rings a bell: physicist John Wheeler said effectively the same thing with his phrase "it from bit," the idea that information is foundational to physical reality. Danny notes the monitor acts like a consciousness, transcribing raw physical data into meaning, into knowledge.
When Danny pushes into thermodynamics, what leaves the drive when you erase it, Gates says simply: you have exceeded my comfort zone. He adds a line that becomes a theme of the episode: when people ask him questions he has not thought about, he does not answer with whatever comes up, he needs time to think. Danny floats Rolf Landauer's idea that information has mass, that all the data on the world's drives and server farms would weigh about a kilogram, and since mass and energy are interconvertible, so might information be, possibly even connecting to dark matter, mass that is electromagnetically undetectable and flattens galactic spin curves. Could dark matter be a computational cloud? Gates again says these are not ideas he has thought about and he has no comment, but he offers a real anchor: Richard Feynman once said at a conference that there is a staggering amount of computation going on to make physics work, and he found it mysterious. Gates tells Danny to look the comment up.
Consciousness, AI, and outputs that exceed inputs
The computation thread runs naturally into consciousness. We have not reconciled how consciousness arises from matter, from protons and neutrons and electrons. Gates, who interacts with ChatGPT and Google Gemini almost every day and calls them his two friends, has watched computing go from punch cards and von Neumann machines to today. His belief is that something indistinguishable from consciousness is likely to arise in computers, but he sets the bar past the Turing test, which he calls a mechanistic first level, inputs to reasonable outputs.
His distinction is sharp. Current AIs are inference engines: they do not do the calculations, they infer a result from the data you give them. Inference is not consciousness. Consciousness, from his life experience, has the property that the output exceeds the inputs, and until he sees that, claims of machine consciousness do not match what he believes. Danny connects this to aha moments, where what arrives feels far greater than the sum of inputs. Gates points to the neuro-psychological idea that each of us is two computing systems, the conscious mind talking now and a subconscious that, for instance, prefers green to red for no rational reason, and that the subconscious processes orders of magnitude more data than the conscious mind. He believes that hidden part generates the aha moments.
The dream that solved 300 calculations
Then Gates tells a story he says he has never told publicly before, and insists, twice, is literally true and not a joke. Some of his dreams have been mathematical. The most recent example came from his work at Brown University. A graduate student urged him to watch an online lecture by a French mathematician on a subject Gates had never heard of, at an event hosted by an Indian research institution. That night Gates had a dream. The next day he knew the answer to a set of 300 calculations, straight from the dream. He took it to the student and said write some code and check it. It was right.
The objects were not equations but graphical images that gave rise to equations, specifically a piece of mathematics called permutohedra, which turned out to be relevant to the Adinkras. The resulting paper they titled "the 300 Correlators," a joke on the 300 Spartans. "I like to have fun when I do physics," he says. He has other such experiences, mostly without witnesses. He holds up the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who reportedly received results in dreams regularly, as the greatest example. Danny brings up Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet" who supposedly slept on his books and woke knowing them, and Gates admits that what he once thought impossible he is no longer so sure about.
DARPA, blue sky, and thinking outside the box
The dream thread opens onto institutional creativity. Danny mentions a guest who wrote The Pentagon's Brain, about DARPA (formerly and now ARPA), which since the Cold War has invited the world's top science fiction writers to brainstorm future weapons. Gates, who claims only modest connections, says part of why the Pentagon is so effective is this deeply intellectual side that thinks far outside the box. The logic is competitive: every country is inside the box, so to get ahead you must go outside it, which is what "blue sky" research is, throwing money at insane ideas regardless of payoff. He recalls the old aphorism about Thomas Edison testing a thousand substances that failed before finding the filament that worked.
Why we cannot go back to the moon, or on to Mars soon
Returning to AI's power demands, Danny notes the human brain runs on about 5 watts, nothing next to an AI. Gates points out this is tied to the current evolution of AI, deep neural nets and large language models, and that other, far more efficient approaches may exist that no one has figured out yet.
Then a long, grounded passage on space. Danny notes Elon Musk recently pivoted from Mars to the moon. Gates is not surprised. Years ago, on a panel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with then-president Shirley Ann Jackson and retired astronaut Ellen Ochoa, Gates was the lone voice saying we are not going to Mars on the hyped timeline. His reasons are physical and human. First, Earth's magnetosphere shields us from radiation, and a crew traveling to Mars leaves that shield, so over any realistic trip duration the radiation, without special shielding, would likely cause horrible mutations and disease. He would not be surprised if we reach Mars by 2090, but not in the short term.
The second reason is the one that stuns. Around 1980 Gates applied to be a NASA astronaut, encouraged by his friend Ronald McNair, the Black physicist astronaut who later died in the Challenger explosion (they were friends from 1969 until McNair's death in 1986). Going through the process, Gates talked with engineers who had built the ApolloSaturn V. In 1980, only 11 years after the first landing, they told him: we cannot do that now. The reason is a deep truth about complex engineering. A complex system almost never works the way the paper design says, and getting it to work depends on engineers with extraordinarily deep, tacit understanding of the mechanisms. That generation had retired, and their irreplaceable knowledge went with them, like muscle lost without exercise. Danny adds that the Saturn V was expendable while today's money goes to far harder reusable rockets, which Gates agrees has been a real triumph for SpaceX. Watching rockets go up and come back down moves him personally: as a kid in El Paso he watched a science fiction show called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger where rockets did exactly that, and he has lived long enough to see fiction become reality.
1969 Gates and Ronald McNair become friends; the first Apollo moon landing happens the same year.
~1980 Gates applies to NASA to be an astronaut while at Caltech working near Feynman and Gell-Mann; Apollo engineers tell him "we can't do that now."
1986 McNair dies in the Challenger explosion.
~2004 Gates and Michael Faux publish the idea of encoding supersymmetry equations as Adinkra graphs.
2008 A six-person math-physics team finds classical error correcting codes embedded in the Adinkra structure.
2012 The Higgs boson is confirmed at the LHC, which still finds no supersymmetric partners.
recent A dream after a French math lecture hands Gates the answer to 300 calculations, verified by his student's code, published as "the 300 Correlators."
Figure 4. The spine of Gates's story, from a friendship and a moon landing in 1969 to a discovery in 2008 and a dream-solved paper. Dates for the discovery arc are as Gates recounts them in the interview.
Magnets, life beyond carbon, and a plea against worship
Could anything beat rockets, which are essentially guns? Gates, invoking Arthur C. Clarke and the line that predicting the future is hazardous (Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed by Stanley Kubrick), suspects we eventually will. Nuclear-explosion rockets have been discussed since the 1950s but are still "shooting the gun." The thing he can imagine beyond that is electromagnetic: since the sun produces a magnetic field, a deeper understanding of magnets might let a craft interact with that field and be propelled, becoming surfers on the sun's magnetism. He doubts any private aerospace outfit secretly holds breakthrough fundamental science, because scientists collectively love to brag, and no organization could keep such a discovery quiet.
On life beyond Earth, Gates leans on Carl Sagan's line that if we are the only intelligent life in the universe it was a lot of wasted space, and notes almost every scientist he knows thinks intelligent life likely exists elsewhere. Whether it resembles us is another matter. The Goldilocks-planet framing assumes carbon-based life, but silicon behaves much like carbon at higher temperatures, so silicon-based life is conceivable. He cites MIT's Sara Seager, who gave him the first rational argument he had heard for not ruling out life in Jupiter's atmosphere, an idea Sagan raised in Cosmos. Microbial life can do without oxygen, like methanogens that live on carbon dioxide and release methane near deep-ocean volcanic vents, so it is short-sighted to assume only carbon-based life exists. When Danny pushes on alien gravity and evolution, Gates again declines, saying his intuitions there are worth no more than Danny's.
The interview closes on character. Gates says he rarely does podcasts, because many hosts impose their own preexisting matrix on a guest's thoughts, and he saw Danny as the exception that would let him say what he actually thinks. Pointed to his roughly 30 science documentaries, he highlights the last, Hawking, Can You Hear Me?, authorized by Stephen Hawking's family, whose daughter reached out. What mattered to Gates was that it lifted a veil of false worship and showed the person rather than the image, because all of us are just people. What mystifies him about our species is how many wish to worship other members of it, and this documentary was, in a small way, undoing that.
Key takeaways
The Standard Model chart is lopsided and looks like Mendeleev's first periodic table: it has holes. Supersymmetry predicts a partner for every known particle, which would fill the holes and restore the balance.
Symmetry has been a reliable guide to nature since Newton, which is why a manifestly asymmetric particle picture reads to physicists as incomplete rather than final.
Gates and a six-person math-physics team found, in 2008, that classical error correcting codes (the kind Shannon and Hamming pioneered) are embedded in the Adinkra graphs that encode supersymmetry equations. This is published, peer-reviewed work.
If supersymmetry is confirmed in nature, this would be the first time computer-style codes appear inside the fundamental laws of physics. The LHC, built partly to find supersymmetric particles, has not found them.
Gates flatly rejects the simulation reading attached to his name. It is unfalsifiable, therefore not a scientific statement. His own speculation is different: the math of the universe may have evolved error correction the way genetics did, to suppress mutations.
He keeps a hard line between established result, conditional claim, intuition, and science fiction, and labels which hat he is wearing throughout. The transporter and anti-gravity musings are explicitly speculative.
He distinguishes AI inference from consciousness: consciousness produces outputs that exceed inputs, which inference engines do not.
He recounts solving 300 calculations from a dream after watching a math lecture, verified by his student's code, and ties creative breakthroughs to a subconscious that processes far more than the conscious mind.
We cannot quickly return to the moon or reach Mars on hyped timelines, partly because of radiation outside Earth's magnetic shield, and partly because the tacit knowledge of the Apollo engineers retired with them.
Chapters
Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read. The video has no creator-set chapters, so these markers are estimated from position in the conversation.
0:00 Teaching supersymmetry: Mendeleev's periodic table and its holes
5:30 The two kinds of things: matter, forces, and the four fundamental forces
11:00 An unbalanced picture: the Standard Model chart has holes
15:00 Supersymmetry, the LHC, and extended (N greater than 1) supersymmetry
18:30 The science fiction hat: selectrons, transporters, and anti-gravity
22:00 The discovery: Adinkras, the math-physics team, and codes in the equations
27:00 What it does not mean: not the Matrix, and why simulation is not science
31:00 Evolution of the laws: error correction in genetics as the better analogy
35:00 Shannon, Hamming, entropy, and why codes exist
38:00 It from bit: Wheeler, Landauer, mass of information, dark matter
42:00 Consciousness and AI: inference engines versus output exceeding input
45:30 The dream that solved 300 calculations; Ramanujan and Edgar Cayce
48:00 DARPA, blue sky research, and thinking outside the box
50:00 Why we cannot return to the moon, and Mars radiation
53:00 Magnets beyond rockets, life beyond carbon, Sara Seager and Jupiter
55:00 Against worship: Hawking, documentaries, and "all of us are just people"
Notable quotes
Our universe looks like it's made of two things. The things that get hooked together and the things that are doing the hooking.
James Gates, 8:40
If supersymmetry is an accurate description of nature, we're going to find all these other particles.
James Gates, 14:10
Symmetry has guided us in understanding nature since Isaac Newton.
James Gates, 16:20
This will be the first instance in science where computer codes will be parts of the fundamental laws of physics.
James Gates, 25:10
A lot of people like to say something I don't believe. They like to say that means our universe is as depicted in the Matrix movies.
James Gates, 26:30
Science by definition is about things that you can prove are false.
James Gates, 28:00
Error correction appears to occur in genetics because it suppresses random occurrences of mutations.
James Gates, 30:10
Inference to me is not consciousness. Consciousness has this element about it where the output exceeds the inputs.
James Gates, 43:40
That night I had a dream. And the next day I knew the answer to a set of 300 calculations.
James Gates, 46:10
We can't do that now.
Apollo engineers, quoted by James Gates, 51:00
All of us are just people. And one of the things that mystifies me about us is that so many wish to worship other members of our species.
James Gates, 55:40
The headline writes itself as "physicist finds proof we live in the Matrix," and Gates spends this whole conversation refusing it. What he actually found is real and remarkable: classical error correcting codes, sitting inside the Adinkra graphs that encode supersymmetry, the math that might describe the deepest laws of nature. What that means is genuinely unknown, and Gates models the rarest thing in popular science, the discipline to say so. The codes are established. The simulation reading is not even a scientific claim. His own intuition, that physical law may have evolved its error correction the way life did, is offered as intuition, not fact. The gift of the interview is not the wild headline. It is watching one of the most decorated physicists alive keep the line between what we know, what we suspect, and what we are merely imagining, sharp and visible, all the way through.
Full transcript
Danny Jones: I want to try to do a breakdown of supersymmetry so people can understand it.
James Gates: Okay. Can you give me just a high-level view? I can try.
Danny Jones: On what this is?
James Gates: Sure. I actually have graphics and talks that I give, and I'm happy to share them with you afterwards.
Danny Jones: Maybe you can find some. Are they online at all?
James Gates: They're in some of the talks I have given online, yes. So let me try to start this way. If you walk into a high school chemistry class and you look on the wall, you're likely to see a chart. In one corner it has a letter H, and at the other side it has the letters HE. It's the table of elements. This is something almost universally known.
Now that table of elements was created by a Russian scientist named Mendeleev. And when Mendeleev first had the idea of creating the table of elements, he didn't know all the elements we know. And so if you look at his old chart, which, like I said, I have copies of that I talk to people about, when you look at his old chart it actually has holes in it. And he used the presence of these holes to predict elements that no one had ever seen yet. And not only did we eventually, as a species, find all those, we found a lot more. So the modern table of elements has gone through an evolution.
Now let's talk about what we know about the universe right now. We know about electrons, and in fact electrons are a member of a family of things that are called leptons. So there's a whole family of things that are kind of like electrons but they're slightly different. Inside of protons and neutrons there are these particles called quarks. And they also come in families. So if you ask me, or any scientist, what is the best observational data we have about the smallest things in the universe? We're going to tell you about those objects. And like I said, I have a chart that I'm happy to share with you.
However, you're not just a bunch of particles floating around. You're an organized structure. And that means that these particles have to have things that link them together. And these links are the four fundamental forces, because nature actually has four. There's electromagnetism. For example, like charges repel. That's a simple one. There is the strong nuclear force. The strong nuclear force is the form of nuclear energy that powers the sun. Then there's a separate nuclear force called the weak nuclear force. And the simplest way I can give you access to that is to tell you that if you look at old science fiction movies from the 1950s, radioactive things always glowed. That glow is due to the weak nuclear force. So it's a real thing. It's not Hollywood just out there selling a story.
So our universe looks like it's made of two things: the things that get hooked together, and the things that are doing the hooking. And that's a chart that you can find in many, many places, but the particular version of the chart that I use highlights the fact that it looks, to me and like a lot of us, like what we're looking at is the equivalent of Mendeleev's first table of elements. It has holes. And if that's true, then if we're fortunate, we will one day get the technology to fill in those holes, just like we filled in the holes of the Mendeleev table of elements. This turns out to be part of superstring theory, by the way. So I say it's the math that sits under all this stuff.
So over here we can see a demonstration of the table of elements as Mendeleev saw them. And as you can see, if we scroll down a little bit, there are holes there, those white spaces. Those correspond to elements that no one had observed at the time that Mendeleev put this table together. Now let's go to the next image. This is the modern table of elements, and you'll notice it has essentially no holes left. And there are lots more boxes here. That's because we have discovered, since Mendeleev, many, many more elements. And so that's why this is the thing that you see in high school.
Now let's go and look at elementary particles. This table here, that letter E inside of the sphere that you see there, that represents the electron. And you'll notice there's a grouping of things around it. Every single one of those other spheres represent particles that we have observed in the last 100 years. Those particular particles behave a lot like electrons, which is why they're grouped down there in the same color. Now, next to that you see there are a group of particles inside of red spheres. Those are the quarks that sit inside of protons and neutrons. And in particular, the U is called the up quark, the D is called the down quark, and two up quarks and a down quark sit inside of every proton.
Now, up in that upper right-hand corner, you see more spheres. What's in the labels there are not talking about particles like the quarks and electrons. These are the particles that carry the forces that cause the electrons and quarks to glump together to form atoms. Every force in nature has a carrier particle. And so this is what we know about the universe right now. This is the extent of our science of asking what's the most fundamental objects you find in the universe.
Danny Jones: And these carrier particles are called bosons?
James Gates: Yes, they're called bosons, and the one with the Greek symbol gamma is the photon. It's in yellow. Remember we were talking about nuclear forces, we said there are actually two different forms of nuclear forces. This is strong nuclear force, which is the source of energy for the sun. And there's the weak nuclear force, which is why radioactive things glow. And so since those are forces, they also have carriers. And those carriers are what you see up in the upper quadrant. And the H is the Higgs boson, because it's also a force carrier. Now, I have a question for you, Danny. Is that very balanced? Is that a pretty picture?
Danny Jones: It's definitely not balanced.
James Gates: Okay, can we switch to the next diagram? If supersymmetry is an accurate description of nature, we're going to find all these other particles. And this is almost exactly like looking at Mendeleev's initial table and then looking at today's table. And that's why the issue of supersymmetry is so hotly studied. In fact it was the hope that the LHC would begin to see some of these additional particles. That's one of the primary reasons it was built, but it didn't. So that's where we're aiming for. And you ask, are we going to have fundamental breakthroughs? If we start to see these things, the answer is yes.
Danny Jones: Wow.
James Gates: Now this particular rendition, can you go back one slide for me? This particular rendition is my creation to try to explain to people what we mean when we talk about symmetry. Because you can see this thing is not balanced, whereas the second one is, and that's the symmetry, it's the balance. Because everything in nature is symmetrical. Symmetry has guided us in understanding nature since Isaac Newton. And so I can't say everything is symmetrical, I can only say it has been a reliable guide for several hundred years.
Danny Jones: Extended supersymmetry, where does that go?
James Gates: Oh boy, you've done your homework too well. So if we can switch to the next picture, if extended supersymmetry is an accurate description of our nature, what's going to happen is that there'll be many more particles added to these blocks.
Danny Jones: Outside of it?
James Gates: Yeah, outside of the ones I'm showing here. This is just what we call simple supersymmetry, N equals 1. So you've had your physics lesson for the day.
Danny Jones: [laughter]
James Gates: Now, what could supersymmetry lead to? This is a good question, and remember I will appeal again to Officer Klink's statement about predicting the future being a hazardous business. So what could it lead to? Well, if I put on my far science fiction hat, part of the really fascinating things about this table that I'm showing with all the super partners. If we can get the arrow over on the E symbol to the left in the bottom left-hand corner, there's a mathematical representation of the electron. And we know electrons exist because the technology we're using right now is based on manipulating electrons. Now if we can scroll to the right a little bit, stop, you'll notice there's an E with a little tilde on top of it, a twiggle. So supersymmetry says that to the particles we know, which are on the left-hand side, there are these particles we have never discovered that exist if our universe is supersymmetric and we obtain the technology to measure them.
Now, what's special here? Well, because these are sort of balanced, you can ask yourself, the next question is, is there a way to make a transition between these two sides? Is there an instrumentality or physical law that lets me switch them? Because if you can, it means that you can replace the E's over here, which are electrons without the funny tilde on top of them, with the electrons with them. The electrons with them have different properties. And the thing that's really interesting is, when I wear my science fiction hat, that could be the scientific basis of a transporter.
Danny Jones: A transporter? As in Star Trek?
James Gates: Yeah. And this is my science fiction hat, I can't get there, but if you ask me what is possible in the realm of possibility, this is the first piece of mathematics that suggests that you might be able to build a transporter.
Danny Jones: And how specifically does a theoretical transporter work?
James Gates: So the reason you would want to convert electrons to these things called selectrons, and you wanted to switch on all the particles, is because these super things are more malleable. You can actually move them through substances that you can't move an ordinary electron through. And so that's why it would be the basis of something like a transporter.
Danny Jones: Oh, wow. Could this extended supersymmetry lead to potential anti-gravity effects?
James Gates: This is something that supersymmetry research has looked at since the 1980s, I think it was. There are versions of supersymmetry, not this version, because remember what we're talking about here is our mathematical equations. But there are versions of very similar equations where anti-gravity is definitely present.
Danny Jones: Interesting.
James Gates: Yes, but those mathematical models, we don't know how to extend them to having electrons. But those models do exist. They've been in the literature for about 20 years.
Danny Jones: Okay. Now how does this connect to the Adinkra symbols?
James Gates: Oh my goodness. I didn't know you were going to go there. Can we break?
Danny Jones: Yeah, yeah, of course.
James Gates: Sorry.
Danny Jones: No problem. [laughter] Howdy folks. 70% of y'all aren't subscribed. Did you know that? So if you're already watching, I think you rock and I'm really glad you found us. So hit the subscribe button down below to get more awesome episodes like this, which will also help us get more great guests. Now back to the show. In your attempt to understand the fundamental nature of reality, it led you to this set of equations that are, and I might butcher this, indistinguishable from the types of equations that are used for search engines and web browsers that we use on computers.
James Gates: It's the next part of the story, and that's exactly right. It turns out that, so when Michael and I first figured out that you can take data from equations and embed it into images, it was clear to me that we were doing something that no one else in our part of physics had ever thought about. And it was also clear that it was mathematics. So immediately, almost immediately after Michael and I wrote our paper, which I think was in 2004, he reached out to some mathematicians that he had known. And it turned out I had actually interacted with these mathematicians without knowing it. And we formed a math-physics collaboration. And the purpose of the collaboration was to study the mathematical properties of these images that Michael and I had created.
And in 2008 the six of us, there were three physicists and three mathematicians, the six of us came to this discovery that the structure of these pictures includes bits, but not just random assortments of bits, but bits in the form of what are known as classical error correcting codes in computer science. They're actually embedded in the structure of these pictures. And thank you for asking the question, because this is the wildest thing I've ever been part of in physics. Because if supersymmetry's true, it's got to be accurate, and if we can observe it, this will be the first instance in science where computer codes will be parts of the fundamental laws of physics. That's the real significance of this.
Danny Jones: What does that even mean?
James Gates: Well, a lot of people like to say something I don't believe. They like to say that means our universe is as depicted in the Matrix movies.
Danny Jones: We live in a simulation.
James Gates: Right. There are lots of people, before, for decades, who have been saying Jim Gates has proven that we live in a simulation. I don't believe that for a moment.
Danny Jones: Well, to folks that are not scientists, yes, but not to the scientists.
James Gates: The problem with that statement is that it's not a scientific statement. Because science, by definition, is about things that you can prove are false. And that statement can never be proven to be false. That's why it's not science. And so I actually have a more complicated intuition, and I probably will never live long enough to see it sorted out. My intuition is that error correction not only occurs in computer science, but error correction appears to occur in genetics, because there's been this long-standing argument in genetics that error correction must be present, because it suppresses random occurrences of mutations. And if you have a genome that's evolving, you want to do that at some level, because if you let random mutations occur, then the offspring are not going to be viable. So genetics likely does have some error correction in it. Now, that's the only part of nature that we have observed, in our several millennia as a species on this planet, where error correction appears to be in a physical system.
So then you can ask, how did it get there? How did the error correction get into these systems? And the answer is evolution. Systems evolve to have these error corrections. How does evolution work? Well, what it says basically is, as you look at how species survive in time, the ones that have the right genetic codes have survival advantages. Let's see, what's a prime example of this? The ability to walk on two limbs instead of four. You have a certain advantage with two over four, because that then frees the other two to manipulate. So this is a fundamental thing. The way evolution works is it says that if you have a selection of possibilities of traits of a population, then the environment will pick out those traits that are more valuable in terms of survival, because otherwise they will die. That's the essence of evolution.
So if I look at this explanation for evolution in genetics, and then look at the fact that we have found error correction, well, first of all, evolution is likely to be some kind of error correction, and the fact that we have found error correction in the form of the equation suggests to me that there's something like evolution happened.
Danny Jones: With math?
James Gates: Yeah. With the math that describes our universe. So that's my explanation. That's not the Matrix.
Danny Jones: And so whether this is the case or not, and thank you, by the way, for giving me the opportunity to explain this to a general public, because I cannot tell you the number of times people have not allowed me to say this part. It's very difficult to grasp this concept. You're saying that the fundamental laws of physics likely underwent some sort of evolution process.
James Gates: Some sort of evolution process.
Danny Jones: And they're probably currently still evolving.
James Gates: I wouldn't accept that. I mean, maybe that's true.
Danny Jones: Because we are still evolving.
James Gates: We are, but that's biological. These laws of physics don't necessarily apply to biology. I mean, look, I can't say that I know the laws are not continuing to evolve, but it just seems very unlikely to me. Oh my god. So that's the far-out weirdness that my scientific journey has [laughter] taken me to. You know, it's exciting to be able to give these sorts of ideas to the scientific community and the public. Remember I commented that all of my heroes follow their own path. It's exciting to be able to do that and come to these kinds of conclusions.
Danny Jones: So there was a scientist in the '40s who came up with the idea of transmitting data, right? Ones and bits.
James Gates: Yes. Claude Shannon, I believe.
Danny Jones: That's exactly who it is. But there's also a contribution from another scientist named Hamming. So Hamming actually is the one who really stood up there. So you're right. Claude Shannon is the person that came up with the idea of what both computer scientists and physicists call the entropy content of information. That information itself has entropy associated with it. And he wrote an equation for this. Hamming comes along and shows that if you want to have digital structures that communicate reliably, they have to have error correcting codes built into their structure. And so, as I said, these are my guide stones in trying to understand this very strange result that we have found, classical error correcting codes in the context of equations that might describe our physical universe. Because when you transmit a data packet from one computer here to another computer in Beijing, the fluctuations in the transmission medium will flip bits, unless you put in a mechanism for unflipping the bits, and those are the error correcting codes. That was basically Hamming's observation.
Danny Jones: Okay. So a computer that transmits data in bits is bound by the laws of entropy, right? So if you have a blank hard drive with no data on it at all, that hard drive would be very low entropy, right? From a purely physical standpoint, it would be either all ones or all zeros.
James Gates: That's correct.
Danny Jones: When you encode data on it, say we store this podcast on that hard drive, it becomes a chaotic mess of ones and zeros.
James Gates: It could.
Danny Jones: Right? So that would make it high entropy. Chaos is typically associated with high entropy.
James Gates: Yes.
Danny Jones: So it'd be more chaotic from a purely physical perspective, but when you plug a TV monitor or a computer monitor into that hard drive, it gives it meaning. You have the video files or the documents or whatever it is on there.
James Gates: That's a very interesting point I hadn't thought about. I'm not sure I'm willing to comment, that's simply a point. I mean, the fact that you actually need to have an actor, namely the video code, that's actually very, what is it, that's ringing a bell with me. Oh, yes. It's ringing a bell with me because a scientist named John Wheeler effectively said the same thing about information in the universe. He said it's a statement called "it from bit."
Danny Jones: Yes, I've heard of that. And it's the statement you just made. The computer monitor kind of acts like a consciousness.
James Gates: Yes. To transcribing the physical raw data into meaning.
Danny Jones: Into meaning.
James Gates: Yes, into knowledge, I would say.
Danny Jones: What happens when you erase that hard drive? If it's bound by the laws of thermodynamics, and entropy always goes up, and net energy can only be transferred, right? Something has to leave that hard drive, right?
James Gates: You have exceeded my comfort zone.
Danny Jones: It's okay.
James Gates: You've been exceeding my comfort zone this whole podcast, so that's fair. When people ask me questions that I haven't thought about, I don't answer them with whatever comes up. I need time to think about something.
Danny Jones: Interesting. Hear me out, and you know, comment or not, but it's just interesting to me that this idea has been proposed to me that if you crack open a hard drive, the information on the hard drive, there's a gentleman who actually published this theory. His name was Rolf Landauer.
James Gates: Not familiar with the work.
Danny Jones: He did an equation that says all the data on all the hard drives and server farms throughout the world right now, if you had the tools to accurately measure and weigh the mass, it would equal like a kilogram of mass. He said it would equal mass. So if that theory holds, that information on a hard drive could equal mass, and since mass and energy are interconvertible, then mass, energy and information could also be interconvertible. So he says if you crack open a hard drive, it's invisible, you can't see that mass. It's electromagnetically undetectable. And he made that connection to, when we look at universes, the spin of the galaxies, the center of the galaxy spins at the same speed as the outer rim. And the dark matter is mass that's flattening the spin rate. So he made the connection to say if dark matter equals mass that's electromagnetically undetectable, because we can't see it, then maybe what's in that hard drive could be the same thing as dark matter.
James Gates: Again, these are not ideas that I have thought about, and so I have no comments to make.
Danny Jones: Yeah. Well, it's just interesting because it connects to the bits and the whole "it from bit" thing. And, tin foil hat, could dark matter be some sort of a computational cloud?
James Gates: This is a very interesting premise, and it's also something that Feynman himself kind of contributed to at one point. Feynman made this very interesting statement at a conference, that there's a whole lot of computation going on in order to make physics work, and he found that mysterious.
Danny Jones: A whole lot of computation going on?
James Gates: Yeah, that the magnitude of computation that the universe has to do in order to get our physics is staggering, or something like that. You should look this comment up if you're interested in this sort of thing.
Danny Jones: Yeah, and that leads to, you know, the idea of consciousness.
James Gates: It does indeed lead to the idea of consciousness.
Danny Jones: Like, can you build up to consciousness from protons and neutrons and electrons? We haven't found a way to reconcile consciousness from matter.
James Gates: If you include in the word "build" the actions of humans in this process, then I think the answer is yes, you can. Having watched the progress of computer technology in my lifetime, and interacting, as I said to Steve, I've been interacting a lot recently with some AIs, ChatGPT and, why can I never remember the other one, Google has Gemini. So these are my two friends. I interact with them almost every day. And so, having that experience of watching a world go from, essentially, computers are these big boxes that someone has in an air-conditioned room.
Danny Jones: The ENIAC?
James Gates: And the first time I was exposed to a computer, it was with punch cards. That's how old I am. They used to have these cards you punch the holes in.
Danny Jones: Wasn't that the von Neumann machine?
James Gates: The von Neumann machine, yes. And so, having watched this evolution of computers from those days to now, my belief, let me say it this way, is that at some point something indistinguishable from consciousness is likely to arise in computers. Now, this is beyond the Turing test. I don't know if you know what the Turing test is. What I'm talking about is actually beyond the Turing test, because to me that's kind of a mechanistic first level of consciousness, namely to be able to respond to inputs with reasonable outputs. In fact, the current AIs, from my experience with them, they are inference machines. And what I mean by that is they don't do the calculations, but they infer from the data that you give them a result. So they're inference engines. Inference to me is not consciousness. Consciousness, at least from all of my life experience, has this element about it where the output exceeds the inputs. And that pluses the role of consciousness. And until I see that, claims of consciousness are not consistent with what I believe.
Danny Jones: We've all had aha moments where it seems like something just comes to us, right?
James Gates: Yes.
Danny Jones: Where the sum of whatever that is is way greater than the sum of all the inputs.
James Gates: Yes. And neuro-psychologists have made statements that have imprinted themselves on my thinking about that. And one of them is to understand that each of us is actually kind of two computing systems. There is the conscious, and that's who's talking to you right now. But there's also the subconscious, which decides that I prefer green to red. There's no rational reason why that's true. And there are some writings in the neuro-psychological literature to the effect that the amount of data processed by our subconscious is orders and orders of magnitude greater than what goes on in our conscious mind. And therefore, if this is right, there's a part of all of us that is doing even more thinking than we sort of remember and can recall. And it's that part, I believe, that generates these aha moments.
Danny Jones: Yeah, and then you have dreams where you're processing all of the inputs from the previous day.
James Gates: Yeah, and in my case some of those dreams were mathematical. No, literally. It's literally true. It's not a joke. It's literally true.
Danny Jones: Dreams are literally mathematical?
James Gates: Yeah, it happened. I have people who can testify to having seen that in some of my interactions.
Danny Jones: What do you mean?
James Gates: Well, the most recent example was partly connected to my work at Brown University. And I had a graduate student who urged me to go and watch a video of a French mathematician giving a lecture on a subject I had never heard of before the lecture, online, at an event hosted by an Indian research institution. That night I had a dream. And the next day I knew the answer to a set of 300 calculations. And it just came from the dream. And I took it to my graduate student and said, write some code and see if this is right. And it was.
Danny Jones: You had looked at this the day before?
James Gates: No, I saw a lecture the day before. And for whatever reasons, my subconscious used it to figure out something. I know it sounds like magic, and this is the first time I've talked about this experience, but I have a couple of other similar experiences, and a few of them have witnesses.
Danny Jones: And you were able to do this in your mind and you corroborated it with a computer?
James Gates: Well, my student did.
Danny Jones: Your student did. And what types of equations were these?
James Gates: So they weren't equations. They were graphical images that gave rise to equations, and somehow I made a connection.
Danny Jones: Graphical images. Like Adinkras?
James Gates: These things in question were not Adinkras. They're actually a piece of mathematics called permutohedra. But the point was that these are actually relevant for Adinkras, and so we were able to write a paper called "the 300 Correlators" as a joke on the 300 Spartans.
Danny Jones: The 300 Correlators?
James Gates: I like to have fun when I do physics.
Danny Jones: [gasps] Wow. And there's been many times where you've done something similar by going to sleep and dreaming about it?
James Gates: Other times, yes. But most of them don't have witnesses. I just come in and say try this and it works.
Danny Jones: Yeah, that's the crazy thing about the human mind and consciousness, that we haven't figured it out. And it does seem like magic in many cases.
James Gates: Yes, it does. There's a mathematician that I hold up as the greatest example of this, an Indian mathematician, Ramanujan. And if you read about him, you'll find out that he did this regularly.
Danny Jones: Who is the guy who would sleep on his books and then wake up and know it? That sounds like something similar to Ramanujan. The sleeping prophet, that was his name. What was his actual name?
James Gates: Oh, you're talking about Edgar Cayce.
Danny Jones: Edgar Cayce.
James Gates: So you should wonder why I know about such things.
Danny Jones: He would go to sleep on his school books and wake up and know all the content of the book.
James Gates: At the time I read those things, I thought, oh, that's impossible. I'm not so sure anymore.
Danny Jones: Well, it sounds like science fiction.
James Gates: It sounds like science fiction.
Danny Jones: But you know what's crazy is I had this woman in here who writes on national security, and she did this whole book about the Pentagon. It was called The Pentagon's Brain. And the people in the Pentagon who work for an organization, going back through the Cold War, called DARPA, now it's called ARPA, they would routinely, every year, invite the world's top science fiction writers to have some sort of intellectual brainstorm on weapons of the future.
James Gates: One of the things that's really amazing about our Pentagon, in my career I can't claim I had deep connections, but I've had some connections. The part of the reason that our Pentagon is so efficient at what it does is that it has this deeply intellectual part of it that does things like what you just described with DARPA, where people think very deeply and, some people would say, far outside of the box about possibilities.
Danny Jones: Well, they have to. They can't think inside the box because all the other countries are also inside the box. So the idea is if you want to get ahead, you have to actually go outside the box. And they have this blue sky research.
James Gates: That's exactly the word, yes.
Danny Jones: Where there's like, let's throw money at this insane idea and who cares if it doesn't pay off.
James Gates: At least when I was a child there was an aphorism about Edison, which went along the lines that he had to find a thousand substances that did not allow him to form an incandescent bulb before he found the one that did. It's something like that.
Danny Jones: Yeah, that's right. It's really wild. Going back to the consciousness stuff and AI, I don't know if I'm convinced. I agree with you that it will become so advanced that it will be indistinguishable from consciousness, but I don't know if it will actually become consciousness.
James Gates: Well, I don't know how to parse that statement, because if it's indistinguishable, which means some kind of observations are being done, I don't know how to ask a deeper level of questions that are not connected to observations. That's sort of what scientists do. And you can certainly ask those questions, but I don't know how to.
Danny Jones: Well, think about all the power it takes to power those AIs. And how many watts does the human brain run on again? It's like 5 watts?
James Gates: Something like that, yeah.
Danny Jones: Yeah, it's nothing. Compared to what they're doing.
James Gates: Well, part of the problem that you're talking about is this set of circumstances is tied up to the current evolution of AI. Namely, it's deep neural nets and large language models. There are other things that one could probably do. And who knows, since no one's actually figured out how to do these things, who knows how much more efficient they might be.
Danny Jones: I saw the other day that Elon Musk has been historically obsessed, and has made it clear that his mission is to populate Mars, get human beings to Mars. And I think just a couple weeks ago he posted something saying no longer is this my goal. Now we have to focus on the moon. Are you surprised at this?
James Gates: No. Several years ago I was on a panel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the question before the panel was, are we going to Mars? And the other panelists included Dr. Shirley Jackson, who was the president of RPI at the time. There's an organization called space.org, and the CEO of that organization, a retired admiral as I recall, was on the panel, and then Ellen Ochoa, who is a retired astronaut, was on the panel. And so there was this hour-long discussion about going to Mars, and everyone else were basically supporting Elon's claim. And I was the only one saying no, we're not going to do that. And there are lots of really good reasons to understand why that was never going to be possible.
Danny Jones: Really?
James Gates: Yeah, well, by never I mean, I would not be surprised if we get there by, say, 2090. But we're not going to get there in the short term, and the reasons are a couple. One of the reasons that it was always impossible to adhere to the time scale that was being hyped is because, if you look at the exposure. So we live here on the Earth, and the Earth is a hospitable home. It creates the conditions for us to live. It has an atmosphere we need to breathe, obviously. But it also has a magnetic atmosphere around it. And this magnetic atmosphere shields us from radiation. When you get in a rocket ship and plan to go to Mars, you go outside of that shield, and therefore the amount of radiation that humans would be exposed to in any reasonable length of technology to get to Mars likely suggests that, without special shielding, horrible mutations are going to occur, and that's likely to be diseases.
Danny Jones: Ellen talked about this.
James Gates: Yes. And so that was reason number one to know that Elon was talking out of his hat. Reason number two was there are a lot of technical issues. So if you look deeply into my biography, you'll find out I applied to be an astronaut around 1980 or so.
Danny Jones: Wow.
James Gates: Because I had a friend who was an astronaut, the black astronaut Ronald McNair, who died in the Challenger explosion.
Danny Jones: No way.
James Gates: He was a physicist. He and I had been friends from '69 to '85 when he died. When I was going to Caltech to work with Feynman and Gell-Mann, he had convinced me to apply to NASA because they were accepting new applications for astronauts, and I applied. And I got pretty far along in the process. And so I got a chance to talk to some of the engineers who had actually built the Apollo Saturn V that got us to the moon. And they made a statement which utterly astounded me at the time. So this is like 1980. The moon landings, the first one was in '69. They said, we can't do that now.
Danny Jones: That we cannot produce a rocket that would get us to the moon right now. And this is what year again?
James Gates: 1980.
Danny Jones: 80. 11 years later.
James Gates: Yeah, right. 11 years later.
Danny Jones: We'd done it in '73, too. So in 15 years, what happened?
James Gates: Well, what happened is something that people often don't understand about complex systems and complex engineering. When you build a complex engineering system, it is almost always the case that it does not work the way you thought it would when you designed it on paper. And the way that you get it to work is by having engineers of extraordinarily deep understanding of the mechanisms involved, and they figure out how to make it work. That generation had retired. And that's why we couldn't do it.
Danny Jones: What was so special about that generation?
James Gates: That they did it. The point is, it's a usual thing. I don't know if you work out, but one of the things that we know about human bodies, if you don't exercise, you lose muscle. It's the same kind of process.
Danny Jones: Sure. One of the things that was described to me is that one of the reasons we haven't gone back is because the Saturn V was an expendable rocket, and now we're spending all of our money on reusable rockets. So to get a reusable rocket that far is exponentially more difficult.
James Gates: It is far more difficult. And that's one of the things that has been a real triumph for SpaceX, as we've watched them have rockets that you send up and then they back down. And when I was a kid in El Paso, there was a science fiction show called Rocky Jones, and they used to do that then. Rockets would go up and they would come back. So you know, I've lived long enough to see this go from a television science fiction show to reality.
Danny Jones: Do you think, I'm sure you've had to think about this, but I'm curious to hear your answer, will we ever have a more advanced way of traveling through space other than rockets? Because rockets are essentially guns, right? You're shooting a gun.
James Gates: That's correct.
Danny Jones: And what would it take?
James Gates: So Arthur C. Clarke, who was a very famous science fiction writer in the '50s and '60s, in fact he's the author of the book 2001 that became a movie. Stanley Kubrick made the movie. Arthur C. Clarke said something along the lines of, predicting the future is a very hazardous undertaking. So when you ask me ever, I don't know what time constant you're attaching to ever. My suspicion is that yes, we will get something other than rockets. Now, when I say something other, even, you know, you can build rockets that are basically powered by nuclear explosions. This is something that's been under discussion since the '50s. So we know that's in the realm of possibility, but again, that's shooting the gun as you described.
Danny Jones: Still, yeah. So what can you imagine would be technology beyond that?
James Gates: The only thing that I can think about is two things. Something that's electromagnetic, where instead of shooting the guns, you'd, you know, magnets repel each other. So you can imagine that if we had a deeper understanding of how magnets work, we might be able to take advantage of the fact that the sun produces a magnetic field, and then you would have a rocket that would interact with that magnetic field to be propelled. So if you ask a crazy person like me about what comes next, this is what comes out, to know that the sun produces a magnetic field so that we can become surfers on it.
Danny Jones: That's really interesting. Using magnets to propel. And that is using the model of physics as we understand it now. Do you think it's possible that there's any sort of fundamental science that could be held by private aerospace organizations that has been held from the academic public?
James Gates: I find that extraordinarily unlikely, because one thing about scientists is that collectively we like to brag when we do stuff. And I think if someone stumbled on something like that, there'd be no way in the world any organization could stop them from talking about it.
Danny Jones: Yeah, it's been one of the puzzling questions for me over the last 10 years, just seeing the slowdown.
James Gates: Yeah, well, maybe part of this thing that I'm talking about, this slowdown in invention.
Danny Jones: The slowdown, yeah. When it comes to the search for life outside of our solar system, what, first of all, do you think there is consciousness similar to ours outside of our solar system? Two, do you think, if there was, because there obviously is a whole bunch of different planets that we've found that are Goldilocks planets that could inhabit intelligent life, do you think it would resemble anything similar to us?
James Gates: Well, first of all, on the question of the possibility that it exists, I refer to what I regard as a wonderful statement by Carl Sagan. He said, if we're the only intelligent life in the universe, it certainly was a lot of wasted space. So most scientists that I know believe that intelligent life likely exists outside of our solar system. In fact, it's very rare that I find a scientist who doesn't think that's a reasonable statement. Do they have to be like us is a different question, because when you talk about the Goldilocks planets, that assumes that the conditions that support carbon-based life are the only ones that can give rise to conscious beings. One of the chemical arguments about why that might not be true is to look at the table of elements. In the table of elements, you'll find out that silicon is actually rather similar to carbon in its behavior. You just need to have higher temperatures. So one could perhaps think about silicon-based life. And there are other holes in the argument about why it has to be carbon-based.
There is a scientist at MIT, a female scientist, I can't think of her name. I heard her give a talk maybe three or four years ago about the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere. This is the idea that Carl Sagan talked about in his, what was his great show, Cosmos. If you look very carefully, you'll find it. But this particular scientist and some collaborators were putting together observational and chemical data. It was the first time in my life I heard someone give a rational explanation about why you should not rule out the possibility of life in Jupiter's atmosphere. So you know, the universe, uh-oh. Ah, Sara. Yes, this is the lady. Thank you. Sara Seager, that's the lady. So you might want to have some of your audience spend some time looking at her work.
Danny Jones: Okay, so this could be like microbial life.
James Gates: Yes.
Danny Jones: Life has not been observed in any habitat other than Earth, which has an oxygen-rich environment. While Earth's atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen gas, oxygen is essential for advanced living organisms. Some species of microorganisms do not require oxygen for metabolism, called anaerobic organisms, such as methanogens.
James Gates: Yep, which rely on carbon dioxide while releasing methane. Now, let me stop you here to remind you that methanogens have been observed here on Earth in terms of the volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean. So given that our universe and Mother Nature are incredibly ingenious, I think it's kind of short-sighted to think that only carbon-based life forms exist.
Danny Jones: And what would evolution look like on these other Goldilocks planets? If one of these Goldilocks planets was able to have similar conditions to Earth, it would not necessarily have the same gravity?
James Gates: You're again pushing me to an area where I don't feel confident giving answers. I can talk about my suspicions, my intuitions, but they're no more valuable than yours.
Danny Jones: Sure. Is there anything we haven't covered that you think we should cover that would be valuable?
James Gates: You have made this a deeply invasive investigation of who I am. I'm not complaining, because obviously I gave answers, and so there's nothing else right offhand I can think of.
Danny Jones: Well, thank you for doing this. This has been great.
James Gates: Thank you for the opportunity. Like I say, I don't do many of these things, because a lot of people who do podcasts have their own agenda and their own spin, because they're trying to satisfy what they think their audience wants, and I perceived you as the exception that would allow me to speak about what I think, as opposed to imposing any preexisting kind of matrix that those thoughts had to adhere to.
Danny Jones: Well, I greatly enjoyed this, and I learned a lot. So I appreciate you making the trip and doing it. Where can folks find out more about your stuff and the books you've written?
James Gates: Oh boy. Just put in James Gates, put James Gates in quotes, and then put some word after, what you're interested in finding. And you'll find it. There's a lot. Although I don't do a lot of stuff like this, there's a lot of stuff online about me.
Danny Jones: And you've been doing it for a long time. Lots of great documentaries, all kinds of good stuff.
James Gates: About 30 science documentaries. Yeah, and the last one. Let me tell you about the last one. The last one is a documentary that was authorized by Stephen Hawking's family, and it's called Hawking, Can You Hear Me?
Danny Jones: Oh, yes. You know this? You showed it to me before.
James Gates: And so I was very pleased to be asked to be part of that by the family, because I actually met Stephen's daughter on more than one occasion. She's the person who reached out. And the thing to me that was so interesting about that particular one was it sort of lifted this veil of false worship of Stephen. It was very much the person as opposed to the image that's out there, and I thought that was very important, that all of us are just people. And this is something that mystifies me about us, that so many wish to worship other members of our species. And this was kind of undoing that.
Danny Jones: That's interesting. Well, we have some Patreon questions for you, from our beautiful Patreon supporters. So we'll go and do that. This will be the end of the podcast. So thank you again, Jim.
James Gates: Thank you. It's been very interesting, Danny. Good night, everybody.
