The Universe Behind the Equations | DeMystifySci on the Vance Crowe Podcast

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] I think everybody who's had some sort of scientific breakthrough in their life has this experience where they just, they see it and they're like, oh my God, everybody's gonna be so excited when I tell them about this. And then they spend usually the, you know, next 40 years of their life becoming ever increasingly depressed at how difficult it is to actually get anyone to hear, let alone care. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Buckle up. We have Demystify Science on here. Now I have to tell you, anytime somebody puts a science podcast out there, I pretty much flatly reject them as a guest. Science in so many ways has turned into what is the established way of thinking. And if you gotta ask questions about what they're saying, they'll say, no, this is a noun. This is, we already know these things. And I find scientists to be the least exploratory, or at least the ones that get podcasts of anybody I know. But I was working with AI the other day and I said, how can I find a really great podcast? And it said, well, send me some of the guests that you've had on and I'll tell you a great podcast guest to have that's adjacent to them. And I decided, you know what? One of my favorite guests was a man named Michael Levin. So I'm only gonna put one name in. As soon as I put that name in, bang Demystify Science came back and it said, this is one of Michael Levin's best interviews and you ought to consider having them on. I have to admit, I rolled my eyes. I was like, I don't know, science podcasts. These people are always just so stodgy and stiff and I don't know, it's not gonna be a good podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:01:35] But then I went to their website and I started looking at some of their videos, some of their YouTube shorts, and they were pretty edgy. They were talking about physics and economics and does evolution allow for a soul? It was pretty wild stuff. And so I decided to have 'em on. And then when they came on, we talked all about their book and I had no idea how much I could love a conversation about physics and science and what is known and what you are in for. Now that you are here is an incredible conversation. We're gonna get to it in just a moment. But if you are a listener of the podcast, you know that I do Legacy Interviews where I record people telling their life stories so that future generations can know their family history. If you are interested in having me interview one of your parents or one of our hosts maybe for Christmas, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to this interview with Demystify Science Nasia and Shiloh, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you. Good to be here. So back during COVID, I started having scientists on, and very quickly I got really frustrated because every time I would talk with them, they spoke as though things were totally settled and that science was like basically a noun. And then it was like, no, this is what the science says. So I quit interviewing scientists almost completely. Why do you think that happened?

Guest [00:03:03] Oh man,

Vance Crowe [00:03:04] Man. Come out with the big guns right out of the gate. I think it's just like in any, any discipline where you, where people spend hundreds of hours refining their craft. I think that once you get to the top of professional sports or you know, high, high level industry of any sort, you're gonna run into people with varying positions about how things should be done and how things work in science is what we're all trying to do. Figure out how things work. And so there's gonna be conflicting opinions, there's gonna be status hierarchies on those opinions, and it, it can get carried away by, by money and interests and politics just as much as anything else, honestly.

Guest [00:03:46] Yeah. And if you combine the status hierarchy with a sense of what is the right thing to do and does science have access to that, now you have a moral status hierarchy in addition to just a theoretical status hierarchy. And I don't think that scientists were ever quite so central to anything in culture ever. This is like the first un

Vance Crowe [00:04:15] Until the pandemic.

Guest [00:04:16] Until the pandemic, yeah. This was the first moment, yeah. Where they had the reins where they were like, we, we got the mic finally. Yeah, this is what you should do. And I think that people just kind of went drunk with power.

Vance Crowe [00:04:29] I mean, you saw it all the time that people would talk about things like, well, we know this. And I mean, anybody that's been around a field in science, you're like, well, we know it for now, right? We know, we know somewhat of how this works, but things change. But there, there was like no allowance for any sort of like hedging or this kind of is right, or this is what we directionally know. I think it alienated people. I think people started to have a real strong valence against scientists, and yet you guys are out there really kind of exploring the like weird edges of science. Does your science tribe accept you? I mean, you guys are, are finding kind of those edges edge places. I mean, I think it, it was really shocking when this all happened. I, I remember I was playing in a band and I, I got a job my first job as a professor teaching astronomy at this university down here. And I like told the guys in the band and they were just like, I could just tell they, and I'm not even gonna repeat like the quote, but they, they did not think it was cool, let's put it that way. Like, that's dumb. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, that was, that was pretty shocking. In terms of our audience, our, our audience seems to be all refugees from the academic approach to things that they've kind of exhausted the details that can be found. I mean, one of that's one of the crazy things about our project is that in many ways we're revisiting all of the data that's just lying on the table. And this is something you get, get really good at when you're in grad school, like doing a PhD. You go to these seminars and you read papers, but you don't read the conclusions, you read the results and you analyze the figures and it really sharpens this muscle in you.

Vance Crowe [00:06:08] That's an interpretive muscle. And that's a really, really important component of being a scientist that seems to have atrophied in the minds of people who, you know, get stuck in these tracks. Because of course you have to sort of follow the leader. And when, you know, as you're climbing these hierarchies, and

Guest [00:06:28] There's three types of people in the science track, there are the people that do you, do you know the bell curve meme?

Vance Crowe [00:06:36] Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. With the, the goofy guy on one side, the, the monk guy on the other, and then the, the middling normie, that's like losing his mind.

Guest [00:06:45] And so that, those are the three tribes. There's the people that don't know a ton of science and they just love ideas. They love Graham Hancock, they love Michael Levin. They love anybody that can tell them a story that is new. And sometimes those stories are really, really good. Sometimes those stories are really, really bad, but they're just people that have a tendency to, towards being curious, number one, and being open. And they're not terribly disagreeable usually. Like they're disagreeable with the fact that they know that the standard story doesn't really work, but they're really open to whatever the fringe is willing to offer them. Then there's the people that are on the monk side of the bell curve, and these are the people that are the super bosses in some field, and they are super well renowned. They're very, very secure. And by virtue of their security, they're willing to play and they have some kind of ability to engage with ideas, with absolutely zero fear. And these two ends of the bell curve are absolutely our tribe. The people in the center are like, you can't do that. That's bad, that's dangerous. Whatever you're doing is dangerous and you need to stop right now. Know.

Vance Crowe [00:08:09] Do you get that? Do people actually tell you what you're doing is bad and dangerous?

Guest [00:08:12] Oh, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:08:14] Well, maybe what we should do to set a little context, you mentioned about your project, what, how would you describe your project? What is it and, and how did you guys get started in this? This

Guest [00:08:23] Is the hardest question. Every time she and I get asked this, we freeze for a moment. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:08:28] What do you do for, you go to a dinner party, like, Hey, what do you guys do? It's like, oh geez.

Guest [00:08:31] It's like, oh, I got, I need a minute.

Vance Crowe [00:08:33] Yeah, well, it's very complex. So I mean the, the, we're just, I'm assuming we're just talking about science right now. So we do science, we do music, we do a lot of stuff, but, and, and we do our own science, but we also talk to people about their science. And those are all very different versions of the same thing, which is really just structuring a legible picture of something that no one's ever heard of in, in all cases. And, and so, you know, you have different elements of creativity in each of those.

Guest [00:09:04] Yeah. I mean, we're trying to find stories about nature that people have not heard yet. So if you assume that there is a picture of our understanding of the world that is in the textbooks that you read in high school and college, that's a snapshot of the way that consensus worked 20 to 30 years ago, maybe even 50 years ago. It's like old knowledge. Then when you get to grad school, you start to realize that that knowledge is very much fractured at the edge because there's some people that think that the old stuff still works, other people that are looking into the future and discovering that there's actually a new better way to understand the world. And what we do is we seek those people out that are on the very frontier of knowledge that have not just gone forth and found a bunch of data points that they think are interesting, but have taken the time to weave them together into a story about how they think this knowledge is going to change the way that we see some field. Whether that's history or economics or archeology or physics or biology.

Vance Crowe [00:10:16] And, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they often disagree with one another. Yes. That's what, that's what's really interesting is that people will spend their lives devoted to a particular way of seeing some aspect of nature. By nature, we literally just mean everything in existence. So that's what's really cool is that by talking to lots of different people with say the podcast for instance, we get to triangulate a better version of how things work in some elements. And it could be as like Nacio said, it could be economics, it could be physics, same approach, really. Alright, we're gonna take a break for just a moment for me to share something else that I've been working on. All of you that have been listening to the podcast know that I love communication. In fact, what I'm trying to do in this conversation with Demystify Science is to try and deepen my understanding of what they know, get them to talk about things, share where I don't understand and really let them keep talking. If these are skills that you would like to learn, you might be excited to know that I've written a book. It's now in the editing phase. I'm sure it's gonna take all the way until the fall of 2027. But if you're interested in learning more about these techniques and you'd be open to helping me edit the book, we'll send excerpts to you once a week, once every other week, and you can send me feedback about how the ideas hit you, what could be done to tighten it up. If you're interested in doing that, go to Articulate Ventures slash book and sign up either to have me just tell you when the book is ready or to participate in the editing process. Alright, we're gonna head back to the interview with Demystify Science

Guest [00:11:48] To answer the question of how we got into this when, so we went to graduate school for biophysics. Both of us had worked in laboratories for many years. Shiloh had worked on cancer, mostly cancer right

Vance Crowe [00:12:01] Before grad school. Yeah.

Guest [00:12:03] I had worked on infectious disease, I had worked on reproductive medicine. By the time that we got to graduate school, it was kind of obvious that we wanted to shift where we were because cancer research was I think a harrowing experience for Shiloh. Intellectually. The stuff that I was doing in infectious disease was also really, really crazy. And when we got to grad school, we started studying biophysics because biophysics felt so, so material and so mechanistic. It felt like it was a puzzle that you could finally pull to together in order to be able to understand the way that the machine of nature geared into itself and actually operated. We came looking for answers. And there was a crazy thing that happened, which is that for both of us at the center of what we were studying, there's this feature of nature called charge

Vance Crowe [00:12:57] Electric. Charge

Guest [00:12:58] Electric charge. And everybody's talking about charge all day every day. And Shauna ask the question of, okay, well what is charge? I know you can have negative charge. I know you can have positive charge.

Vance Crowe [00:13:13] We got really good instruments to measure it.

Guest [00:13:14] Yeah, I know we have the equations for it, but what is, what is it? What, what changes in a molecule that's negatively charged versus positively charged physically?

Vance Crowe [00:13:26] And this turned out to be quite entertaining to our mentors. So we were lucky enough to, you know, be studying at this university that had this tremendous physics legacy. Right. So this is Columbia University physics program goes way back. You know, everybody I, I mean, you know, we shouldn't even get into, but we had the opportunity to be going to physics colloquiums to both of our adv. My advisor was in the physics department, Nastia was in the electrical eng. One of her advisors was in the electrical engineering department. And this turned out to be a really, really incendiary line of questioning because that is a bedrock concept in physics, but it has no material basis. There's no actual mechanical understanding of what this means. And this was just mind-bending to us. And when we, when we figured, you know, we eventually we would find the person to talk to who would have some lead on it. And it just never materialized. And we were going around campus knocking on doors, meeting all of our heroes, nothing whatsoever. So that really kicked off this whole project that, you know, 10 years later culminated in this book where I think we've answered that question finally.

Guest [00:14:34] But I think that it also served as the inception for the podcast because we realized that there was a class of questions that had not been answered and that there was a reason that they hadn't been answered and that nobody in the academy had the time to be pursuing them and figuring out the answer to those questions. 'cause that's not really, you don't really need to answer what is charged to get a grant in order to do some electrical engineering or to do some physics. It doesn't really matter what charges

Vance Crowe [00:15:01] Or to build a computer host a a streamy yard session or whatever. Right. Yeah, just having the accounting is good enough. As long as you can measure the quality. It doesn't really matter what it, what it means. It seems like this is one of those things that's so fundamental to life where you're like, oh, we're just gonna skip over this one. We'll get back to it later. And yet everything is built on top of it. And so when you start cracking away at this and you start discovering what is charge, you said it became incendiary. Tell me what that was like. What, what did, what experience did other people have with you guys exploring this subject? Well, I think it was incendiary because it's poking at a crack in the foundation. And it's one that for some rea I'm actually still kind of confused why us, like why, why it's us two who are, who are bringing this to, to everybody's attention. It's very str by the way. Charge isn't the only one. Pretty much all of the fundamental measurable parameters don't have a material basis. And fundamental physics like mass, help me out some more. It

Guest [00:16:08] Was light

Vance Crowe [00:16:08] Gravity, light magnetism. Yeah. It goes on and on and on and on. So, you know, but I think it was, it's was sort of amusing to the people that we were close to in that, in that academy. I think they, they actually thought it was kind of fun. I mean, my advisor, bless his heart, he would just let me sit and talk about this stuff for hours in his office. He, he thought it was really fun, but he was also, he

Guest [00:16:31] Was also like, we don't do that. We

Vance Crowe [00:16:32] Don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. So, sorry, what was the question? The

Guest [00:16:36] Question is like why it was so incendiary to people and I think that you kind of hit it, which is that it's a question that you're not supposed to ask. You know, so you, you, you gave this example of, you know, somebody shows up and they're selling some kind of chemical and they're giving you a story about how the chemical works and you're kind of like, what's that, what's that mean? Like, you're using words that, I understand the words that you're using, but there's no picture in my mind of what it is that you're trying to convey. And as you ask that person more and more questions and they realize that you are asking something that they should know that they thought that they knew,

Vance Crowe [00:17:17] I would actually add one more.

Guest [00:17:18] They get very upset.

Vance Crowe [00:17:19] They do get very upset. I, I think there's another level to this too, which is that maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal to us except for the fact that when you don't understand something as primary to your discipline as charge, the ultimate explanations that you end up with sometimes are bat shit insane. Like, there are these things in physics that no other science tolerates called paradoxes, right? There's several of these that that literally means that the conclusions that we have prosecuted logically from our axioms don't make sense. And so that's, that's really, I think that's why it's such an emotional subject. 'cause everybody kind of knows like that. We have a point about that. And that's really uncomfortable because these guys are supposed to be the, like physicists think of themselves as the smartest people in the whole university and they feel like they're on the hook to answer all these questions all the way into the metaphysical realm. Especially as like religion has become less and less popular amongst intellectuals. It seems like the physicists feel like it's their job to explain the universe like everything to everybody. And so when they come up with these conclusions that are just kind of crazy and you point it out and you say, Hey, maybe it's 'cause we don't actually have a physical basis for the initial assumptions going into the matrix that's being prosecuted to output the conclusions. I mean, that's a very uncomfortable truth to sit with. I think, I mean, I think I feel this like myself when somebody starts talking about quantum physics, right?

Vance Crowe [00:18:55] And all of a sudden they start saying like, oh well there's lights and then there's particle and they, they, they cooperate but they don't and they have these spins and you start being like, anytime I push on any one of these things, I don't know if the reason you can't answer that is 'cause for some reason I'm not intelligent enough to understand it. Or because you are doing this like wavy hand thing where at the, at the other side of it you've just said a miracle occurred. And that's how we know. And I think that's why a lot of people have kind of thrown up their hands and kind of been a little bit like, I don't know, physics, quantum physics. It's, it's almost a joke. Yeah. It's kind, it's kind of a tragedy. I think the we're smarter than you thing worked for about a hundred years, but I, I don't think it's gonna work too much longer is the problem. Especially as, okay, so why do people think physicists are the smartest guys in the university? Are they the smartest guys in the university? Probably not, but they probably are better at math than almost everybody. But the weird thing about our present modern moment is it does, it's starting to not matter whether you're that good at math because we have incredibly powerful language input computers that can pretty much prosecute mathematics for you better than anything. I mean, I'm not worried about AI taking over humanity or anything, but they're really good at math and they're really good at coding. And, and so I think that that playing field's getting leveled out very quickly. So I, I don't think that we're smarter than everybody Defense is gonna hold out for too much longer. And I think that's wonderful because I, I think that it's high time that we took the last a hundred years of experiments and made sense of them like real sense, you know, material sense of them.

Vance Crowe [00:20:33] I think with physics the, one of the reasons people give it the credence that it is like the hardest or whatever is that it is, it was kind of claimed to be the least abstracted. Right? You know, you have that chart where they say, oh there's math and then there's physics and then there's chemistry and then there's biology and each time that you go, go out another layer or build on top of it, right? Those are kind of complicated and those people know less about what they're talking about. But it sounds like from what you guys are saying, wait, wait, wait. Like the jump from mathematics to physics, how does it make it into the material world is not nearly as well known as, as what it should be and or maybe what it could be and that that we are actually building everything on these abstract beliefs that are not proven. 'cause we don't know how charge works, we don't know where mass comes from.

Guest [00:21:20] Well, so it's really interesting because there's two ways of seeing this, one of which is that it's totally fine that we don't understand because it's just, it, it works. Like we don't really need to know what electrons are in order to be able to build a semiconductor and then to build a computer chip it, whatever theory that we have right now seems to be functional enough that it has gotten us a really, really long way. And then there's the other view which is that, okay, mathematics does seem to be really powerful, but if, can you imagine going back in time to the early 19 hundreds prior to us having any kind of insight into the physical mechanisms of biology and then saying that okay, we can have a really good mathematical description of inheritance, we can have a really good mathematical description of, you know, how much bat guano you have to put on your field in order to get x number of bushels of, I don't know, corn.

Vance Crowe [00:22:34] I dunno. Yeah. You could put together like a this is good, you're doing great. You could put together like a statistical wave function to describe these things.

Guest [00:22:40] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:22:40] You know, a genetic wave function

Guest [00:22:42] And it would work, right? You would be like, okay, so we have a genetic wave function that tells us about the probability that this cross of like these types of sheep is gonna give us even better sheep or what fraction of the sheep are gonna be kind of dysfunctional. And just go with that. And you might very well still have a decent agriculture, you might still very well have a decent understanding of biological outcomes that are probabilistic where you can say, okay, so if you do this cross, we have a 72.359% chance that we're gonna get the desired outcome and then the remainder is, is just gonna be garbage. And so we have to do this cross this many times in order to really make sure that we hit the mark.

Vance Crowe [00:23:23] By the way, this isn't hypothetical, this is, this is corn breeding. This is, you are literally describing all of breeding. Yeah. By the way this actually happened, like Nazis setting this up like it's a thought experiment that there really were biostatisticians

Guest [00:23:34] Biometricians

Vance Crowe [00:23:35] Biometricians back in the, in the early 20th century who were advocating that it was silly to worry about the material basis. Like they thought looking for that genetic crystal that turned out to be a DNA was a fool's errand and who cares because we have statistical models to satisfy.

Guest [00:23:52] Yeah. Those

Vance Crowe [00:23:53] Solutions.

Guest [00:23:54] Absolutely. And so my intuition is that if we had stayed with that biometric view on biology, that we would be much less far along in terms of molecular biology, in terms of biochemical biophysical stuff where we're at the point where we can sequence DNI, we can find a single mutation for some diseases. We can fix that mutation in a grown-ass person and cure them of their disease. It's still rare, it's still difficult because most diseases are not single point mutation diseases. But that's possible in a probabilistic biology where all that we have is the genetic field. It's impossible to imagine that we ever get to the point where we have a substance that carries the information of inheritance that we can physically manipulate in order to actually make something happen. And that's where we are with physics right now, where we have, look how far we have made it with a probabilistic physics and think about how far we could make it if we actually had something material that we were thinking about that we could think about how to manipulate as opposed to being like, I don't know, it's just equations. Man.

Vance Crowe [00:25:08] That's fascinating. So if I understand you correctly, you're saying, look, if in the past we could have just done breeding by watching the outcome, let's mix together these sheep slam together some pollen on this corn and see what comes out. And we know most of the time what's gonna happen, but you won't be able to make the really big advances until you actually understand the structure. And that physics has been kind of pretending like we knew what the structure was underneath it, but we've not found physics version of DNA and so therefore a lot of what we've been building on the, on the way physics will work and how far we can take things is only gonna go so far. 'cause you can only get so far in biology if you can't see DNA.

Guest [00:25:47] Yeah, that's basically it.

Vance Crowe [00:25:50] Yeah, I mean you've gotta, I, I have a little bit of sympathy for how this happened too, in all honesty, because you gotta think at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even really know what an atom was like they, they didn't really even agree that stuff was made out of bits yet. Like it's a several thousand year old hypothesis that people have been wavering on the entire time back and forth. So I think that the unreasonable effectiveness of the probabilistic approach to these invisible phenomena was just too promising. And it, it quite frankly just sidelined the discussion of what was at the roots of it. But it does matter, not just because making sense of reality matters, but it also matters because I think that's how we get these huge leaps, right? If we wanna be able to actually, you know, build next generation propulsion, next generation energy production, we're gonna probably have to have a real leap in our understanding of basic physical phenomena. And I don't think that's possible without the equivalent of DNA. Well this just made this podcast really exciting because if I heard you correctly, you said that you wrote a book where you think you have actually discovered where some of the stuff is coming from. What, what is the electrical charge? Is that right? Yeah. Well what, yeah, I believe so. But what we've done is provide sort of a roadmap for how one would go about doing that. That's really the primary offering. What, what would such a satisfying explanation look like? And what rules would you play the game by in order to produce such an explanation?

Vance Crowe [00:27:23] And then the back half of the book is our own humble attempt at doing that for some really basic stuff that we're all experiencing right now. Like, why are we stucked to the floor? Why, you know, how does electricity work, magnets, what's up with that light? You know, things that are just everyday stuff. Can we apply a material approach to physics to derive satisfying explanations? And yeah, I think we, I think that we've made our best offering of that and I, I'm very satisfied with, with many of the elements of it. And there's a lot of work to be done on other ones too. Power of listening in conversation. It's like in cycling when you have to fuel to make sure you have the energy to get around the race course and to get over the next hill, being a better listener fuels you. It fuels you with more information, it fuels you with more power. Effectively. I would say that I've improved my ability to listen strategically. And by strategically, I mean deliberately, selfishly, I'll get more from the conversation if I focus more selflessly on them during the conversation. I think these things will be profound in, in helping me be a better listener. I totally endorse it. I totally recommend it for businesses, for individuals seeking career advancement, figuring out how to better empower themselves for the next stage of their life. A thousand percent Interest-Based Communication, learn more at Articulate Ventures slash IBC.

Vance Crowe [00:28:57] So instead of me just asking, what did you figure out maybe what was the process of discovering these things? If you're talking about every time you showed up at your heroes, they said, wow, you know, we're good for you, but we don't really do that here. How do you go about finding answers to questions that nobody else is asking?

Guest [00:29:15] So our process was first to ask the question of why in the world did people stop looking for these answers? Because it seemed wild that no one around us was looking for them. And it seemed impossible that nobody had ever looked for them. And so our question was, okay, well what was the moment? Was there a moment where people just abandoned looking for it? And in physics, prior to, you know, the, the early 19 hundreds, there was this, we knew that there was this concept of the ether, it's called the lumous ether. And it was the substance that hosted the transmission of light lumous because it was the medium that allowed for light waves to travel. They knew that light was waves, they knew that they had a speed, they knew that in classical physics, the speed of a wave was defined by the square root of the stiffness over the density of the medium. And so they were like, okay, the medium is the ether. And they did a bunch of experiments where they tried to find the ether, the ma, the most famous of which is the Michelson Morley interferometer. And so the idea was that they were basically gonna take a set of mirrors, they were gonna float them on a bath of mercury in the basement of a building, and they were gonna align one of these mirrored paths in the direction of the earth's travel and the other one perpendicular. So like pointing at the sun.

Guest [00:30:47] And they were gonna see if there's any difference in the amount of time that it took for the light to travel through these arms. And then they were gonna swivel the machine and then show that there was, if they pointed it like into the direction of the earth's travel versus into the tail, like to the tailwind of the earth's travel, that there was like a difference. And that would be a sign that there was a lumous ether. If this took less time to travel and this took more time to travel, that would give you basically, because

Vance Crowe [00:31:13] You're kind of like leaving the light behind, it's like throwing something out the car window, you know, to kind of travel.

Guest [00:31:18] That's exactly, that's exactly right. And they did this experiment and they didn't find any difference. It was the exact same both into the direction of the earth's travel and into the, into the, the wake of the Earth's travels through the ether. And at the moment them not finding anything was really, I think a devastating process. But at the same time, it was also this nail in the coffin that closed the lid on being able to talk or think about the ether. And that was very strange because that's not generally how science works. Like you don't do a single experiment and then have the entire community to be like, okay, well I guess that's done, we're just never gonna talk about that again. And so for us sitting there looking back into history, we knew that Michelson Morley was important, but it seemed impossible that it could carry as much importance as it seemed to have. And so we started digging through the history, and what we discovered was that prior to the late 18 hundreds, there were lots and lots and lots and lots of people that were trying to figure out how to explain action at a distance. Why do magnets act across empty space? Why does light travel through the vacuum of space? Why does gravity affect us at a distance without there being some kind of intervening substance? But they were operating in a world that was highly limited because they were missing a key component of reality, which is they didn't know that atoms existed, they didn't know that Adams existed.

Guest [00:33:01] Like literally they were just kind of like, I mean, matters probably they

Vance Crowe [00:33:05] Didn't know Adams existed when they were doing this experiment.

Guest [00:33:08] Yeah. Like they basically, like, so Adams were not accepted as, as really having been proved until like 19 0 5, 19 0 6, when Einstein did some experiments with brownie in motion. And he calculated that when you looked under a microscope and you saw these things kind of jittering around from just thermal motion, he calculated the source of that thermal motion and concluded that it could only come from the existence of atoms, invisible little subunits that were bumping around into each other to produce the jitter. Before that he was like hypothesized. But even,

Vance Crowe [00:33:42] Yeah, but even then, like for the next 20, 30 years, the conception of the atom was just really bizarre. It was very schematic. It, it wasn't this, you know, solid material body that we think of today. Well,

Guest [00:33:55] I mean it was ki it was kind of like there because the quantum Dalton, you had the Dalton atomic model that was more or less like these like hard incompressible balls. And then like quantum mechanics did something really weird with it. But it, it was just, we were, we were just stunned to discover how much time people had spent arguing about this and how little atoms actually figured into the story. And so what we found was that there was a moment where they abandoned the idea that there's a medium and they're like, it's just fields and we can talk about what fields are in a second. But the moment when they, these ideas of there being a substance that could be responsible for this action at a distance, they don't have atoms. They're not thinking about atoms. They're not asking the question of, okay, well could the atoms be doing something that's responsible for all of this? Like if we're talking about charge, is there something that's happening to the atom that produces charge

Vance Crowe [00:34:52] Structurally,

Guest [00:34:53] Structurally, materially, they don't even have the atoms to think about. And so that's, that was the first loose thread that we pulled on. We were like, okay, well we do have atoms and we know a lot, we know a lot more about atoms than we did in 1900. Is there something about Adams that we could piece together

Vance Crowe [00:35:12] Or something that's been forgotten

Guest [00:35:13] Or something that's been forgotten that can help us start to untangle these pieces?

Vance Crowe [00:35:19] And what did you find? Well, you know, piggybacking off the story Nastia just told, one thing that's really interesting is that the assumption of that story that killed the search for material mediators of invisible phenomena, the Michelson Morley, it assumed that that substance was separate from the atoms themselves. That's really interesting actually. And so

Guest [00:35:43] It was kind of like the idea that you have this goop and atoms, if there are, if bodies stuff, let's just call the bodies, bodies, bodies are just floating in the goop of limine earth, whether

Vance Crowe [00:35:54] It's the earth or atoms or people or whatever there, it's the separate external goop. They didn't really, different theorists had tried to structure that goop in various ways. Maxwell being one of the most famous ones. But a lot of people were working on it, but it was always the separate stuff. And so when we started thinking about what would be capable of doing that structural action at a distance, we took a really hard look at the structure of atoms themselves, and we made a really shocking discovery that was hidden in plain sight. Generally speaking, the way that people have come to understand atoms is by looking at where you would, you would touch the outside surface of it. The way that people refer to the outside surface of atoms is something called the electron shell. So you basically take a probe and you go reaching for when am I gonna feel an electron on my counter when I get close to this substance? And they model this with a formula called the electron wave function. And these little pictures you get in your chemistry textbook from high school where you got like little orbitals, you know, like they're kind of these balloon like structures. You know, those are really interesting because they actually obscure an important piece of the data that's used to generate those pictures. The piece they obscure is that they're actually just showing you the peak of a statistical distribution where you're most likely to touch the surface of the atom. The crazy part is that the probability of touching the surface of the atom actually falls off with a slope, but it goes off indefinitely.

Vance Crowe [00:37:28] So you can actually touch an atom, at least

Guest [00:37:32] It is very low probability.

Vance Crowe [00:37:33] Yeah, very low probability. It's unlikely you're gonna get the full, you know, electron counter to go off. But you can touch it at an increasingly farther and farther distance. And so, you know, this has been a little bit integrated into the way that the atom's been talked about. Sometimes you'll hear about the electron cloud of the atoms, something like that, which gets a little bit closer at, at what we're talking about when we talk about the surface of an atom. The problem with clouds is that they're not very good at pulling on things, right? It's hard to imagine taking a cloud and grabbing a hold of something with a cloud. And yet you and me and everybody here is stuck to the floor right now. Something's pulling on us. And so we, we realized that that same mathematics for that electron wave function that gives you the cloud, that gives you the shape of the atom. It also could display an atom that has a proper surface, but actually has a filamentary radial structure. It's furry, it's an actual filamentary atmosphere around the atom. It's not a cloud, it's actually a tensile structure that radially extends to its neighbors. And all of a sudden you end up in a position where you don't need a separate substance from the atoms to actually do the pole of gravity. It's do the pole of magnetism. You actually have hidden right in plain sight, a very possible configuration for the structure of the surface of the atom, which has extension and has the ability to convey action at a distance. And so let me see if I can, can I try and see if I'm keeping up with you? Absolutely. That, okay.

Vance Crowe [00:39:03] You're, if you imagine out in space now where we're here on earth where there's oxygen and, and nitrogen and everything in the atmosphere, but you're out in space, there's a question of like, why do magnets work? Why are they pulling on each other? Because if there's nothing in between those two magnets, how are they connected? What's going on there? And you guys extrapolated this out actually, not just to magnets, but to any physical thing. How is it that they attach or not attach? When does one begin in one end? And the very act of drawing an atom in the, in the textbook distorts the view because it says atom one is a bubble and it's over here, and atom two is another bubble. And you are pushing them together or pulling them apart. But they are physical things and, and what you guys have discovered is that actually they are not either a bubble or just kind of like a cloud. They actually have what you were calling filamentary. So lots of, I'm imagining like little strings that are coming off of them where you could say, it's very difficult to say, where does one atom begin and an atom end, because really it's the odds that it's further over here are very low, but it's not impossible that filament could actually extend very far. And so what we're actually seeing when we look at atoms is not a nebulous cloud and it's not a tight circle, but instead a fuzzy thing that is connected and overlays over other atoms. And somehow these things are held together to create form and mass and, and also has an impact on gravity.

Vance Crowe [00:40:40] Is that correct? That's pretty good. Yeah. That's amazing. I would say, I mean, it is a hypothesis, right? So we've never actually seen these things, but the cool thing about hypothesis is that they are statements which if true would be sufficient to explain the phenomena. So all of those things that you mentioned, the invisible phenomena, we could actually explain them where this, the, the true structure of the atom. Furthermore, it seems to be consistent with everything we do know about the atom. So we've not encountered any, anything about this description that is in any way incongruent with everything that everybody already knows about the atom. It's just a slight reframing structurally speaking of what's happening with the surface of the atom and with respect to the space and and so forth. That's absolutely right. But you gotta keep in mind, space is chockfull of atoms, actually. I mean, there's so many atoms. You, you, even if you go in between galaxies, you're gonna find thousands of atoms in every cubic centimeter of space, right? It's very, very difficult to find a place in the universe where there's atoms. So, you know, mathematically speaking, if you follow the electron wave function, these filaments should extend indefinitely. I, I don't think that's necessary. That's probably, you know, somewhat of a, of a limiting condition. Like may, you know, that that doesn't really make sense to me. But you don't need to is my point, right? There's atoms, even in the best vacuums that we can make on earth, you still have tens of thousands of atoms per cubic centimeter. So there's tons of atoms everywhere. Even when you pump as much as you can pump out of the chamber, you're still left with a bunch of atoms in there.

Vance Crowe [00:42:12] So, so tell me then, as you guys are, are imagining these answers or you are conceptualizing them, what is this process under which you're able to discover something that has not been co conceptualized or explained in this way? Did you stumble on somebody else giving you a close idea? Where does this come from? I mean, we come like, you gotta think about our academic backgrounds in biology and particularly in biophysics is largely about material mechanics. I mean, this is just the way we're trained to think. Like every single piece of the world that I worked in in academic research was about materials, engaging other materials. That's just the bedrock way in which you do science. You know, you use math to describe what the materials are doing to each other, but it's sort of a foregone conclusion that that's that's how things should work. I, I also noticed, like I was, I was working a lot in elastic mechanics in grad school with these little micro cantilever systems. And a lot of the oscillatory mathematics were, were very congruent to the many of the basic wave mechanical equations for quantum mechanics. And I don't know, we, we just kind of had a, a conversation going in the background.

Guest [00:43:38] We did. But there was also, I mean, we spent a lot of time trolling the scientific fringe. So like right from the very beginning, this was, so this is actually really funny because Shiloh and I are staunchly in different camps when it comes to this, where Shiloh has the most incredible ability to listen to the most insane presentation that you've ever heard in your entire life. And be like, you know, there's actually like one or two gems in there. And for me, I'm like, I don't, I don't have time, I don't have time, I don't have, I don't have two hours to listen to somebody who's crazy for 30 seconds of ideas. And Shiloh does, he's just, he, he just, he's he roots for that, for that gold. And he finds it. And I think that we came across the idea of, you know, interconnected atoms partially on the fringe. It was also really popular at the time. Like if you look at the way that fields are drawn in popular science

Vance Crowe [00:44:39] Or entanglement

Guest [00:44:41] Or entanglement between atoms is drawn. It's drawn as being connected by filamentary atoms. There's also a historical text from the Islamic golden age. There was an Islamic scholar Al Tabari that we quote in the epigraph of one of our chapters who basically talks about the fact that the only way to possibly understand natures to see that all everything is connected by filaments, you know, finer than hair and

Vance Crowe [00:45:13] Stronger than iron, I think stronger than iron soul connect us to the sun and so forth. You know, it's, yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of in the water a a little bit. The, the,

Guest [00:45:22] Oh, there's another, there's another thing that was really amazing to me is that the way that light was understood during the ancient Greek times was radially. They had this theory. So there were two different theories. There's the theory of intermission and there was the theory of extra mission for vision. And so intermission was where light came from the outside world and came into your eyes, and that's how you saw things. And extra mission was that you sent rays out from your eyes that interacted with things in the world, and then that information came back into your head. And that's how you saw, and in all of these theories, it was a radio almost filamentary trajectory because they were preoccupied by the fact that you could look out and not see things. And so you probably have seen the thing where, you know, the video with the, with the kids bouncing the basketball and you have to count the number of times that they, they bounce the basketball and because you're focused on the basketball, you don't see the other stuff that's happening. Exactly. And so they knew this and they were preoccupied by why it was that you could look out and not see things. And they were like, it's because vision's radial and there's literally gaps in between the rays. And so that's why you don't see things sometimes. And so it was just like the idea of a filamentary structure is something that shows up again and again and again. And if you look at modern videos of space time diagrams where they're like, what does space time actually look like?

Guest [00:46:53] It's a filamentary network. Like this is, this is in the water, it's, we just happened to put it into words and pictures.

Vance Crowe [00:47:01] Yeah. I think it's like we're presenting a pretty oversimplified picture of it. 'cause of course nature is always like chaotic and crazy and there's so much nuance to this. But yeah, I mean, the basic idea was, hey, look, people already describe light and gravity as falling off with this radial relationship. It's called an inverse square law. Pretty much all of these gravitational systems are described in network dynamics already. Like what if that's what it is? Like what if that it's that simple, would that make sense? And it, it turns out that the atom accommodates that structure perfectly. And so, yeah, is it as, is it quite, you know, do you wanna show him this picture for instance,

Guest [00:47:36] Or Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:47:37] Like is it as simple as, as a, a shell with little hairs coming off of it? Probably it's a lot more dirty and complex than that, but that basic pattern unfolds all of the mathematics of the quantum world for us. And so yeah, it might be a little bit different in certain ways, you know, maybe the next 500 years of research, we'll clean that up, hopefully. But the basic floor plan seems tenable. So I have many, many questions about this, but maybe the one that's the most interesting to pursue is, let's imagine you are correct. What does this change then, if you start saying, we're gonna view the world as Adam's having filaments and they're connected in this way, what does this change about the rest of your understanding going forward?

Guest [00:48:29] I think that it literally gives people the ability to actually have a mental model of the way that the world works. Like there's a really incredible quote that I, I should have pulled. It's, it's Fineman talking about the way that mathematics, the way that physics was possible without having mathematical knowledge at some point, like Einstein was not a mathematical genius. He had to enlist other people in order to do both, to do almost all of his mathematics. He just had some kind of profound insight into the way that the pieces of the world fit together. He was able to describe them, and then other people were able to fit mathematics onto them. Faraday was the exact same way. So Michael Faraday was the pioneer of electricity and magnetism. He was the leader of the laboratory at the Royal Institute. I think it was the Royal Institute. And he was a book binders son that had not,

Vance Crowe [00:49:30] I think it was the Cavendish,

Guest [00:49:31] I think it was the Cavendish. He, he was a book binders son who had no education, who literally set the stage for everything that we know about electricity and magnetism. So we have James Clerk Maxwell is a generation later, and he puts mathematical formulas to everything that Faraday did. But Faraday used no math whatsoever. Everything for him was experiment and just words. And so in this quote, I think it's an interview that Feinman gives to Omni Magazine, the reporter asks him if it's possible for physics to be done without mathematics, and he thinks it's laughable. He's like, no, that age is done. I just can't even imagine what, how you could possibly think about this without advanced complex mathematics. And that means that we have all of this knowledge about the world that is gated behind super advanced concepts. Because I can explain to, I can describe to you what's happening in this room right now with words really, really easily. But if I was tasked with coming up with a mathematical equation or a set of mathematical formulas that encompassed it to the same level of detail, I would be working on it until I died.

Vance Crowe [00:50:59] And you probably wouldn't understand it anyways.

Guest [00:51:01] I would, and I would, and I would fail at it. And so I think that the use the utility of something like this is to say, Hey, if you wanna understand if there's, if, if you were a curious person who maybe doesn't wanna spend the next 30 years of your life becoming the world's greatest mathematician, but you wanna be able to work on questions that pertain physics, you wanna be able to understand how the world works and how it is built from the ground up. It is possible the, the, the, the, like the American renaissance of people being able to actually actively contribute to problems, to be able to build new technologies, to be able to, to to start another golden age requires people to have access to mental models of how the world works that do not s come up against an impenetrable wall of mathematics.

Vance Crowe [00:51:57] Yeah. Can I add one little thing to that? Actually, not only is it important to bring everybody into the fold of how things work in our world, but I think that the alternative is devastating, but way beyond just physics itself, because I don't know if you've noticed, but everybody and their brother loves to point at quantum mechanics as an excuse for why the world shouldn't make sense, right? So that's, that's actually the, I think that that's the most meaningful part of bringing physics back into a, a material mechanical conception of, of the fundamental layers of, of reality, not, not reality. Like the love you have for your wife or something. I'm talking about a very de abstracted material basis for what's happening in the room. If those things don't have to make sense, then every charlatan and his brother is gonna come out of the woodwork and say, well, you know, the smartest people in the world say that, you know, at its fundamental level, reality doesn't make sense. So, you know, I know this doesn't make sense, but you should probably join my cult or whatever it is you should go with. Yeah. This is the Deepak Chopra conceit, right? Oh, if we're going, if we're gonna use quantum words or bandana shiva, and now all of a sudden if I've got the realm of quantum, now I have magic on my side and this Exactly. And I don't have to explain it because you didn't have to explain it. I think that's the most important piece. Yeah. The, as you guys are describing this, it reminds me of, of a concept that I kind of view the world through. I, I view that there are people, you know, we were talking before about the monk and the, and the, you know, low IQ person.

Vance Crowe [00:53:28] I view the world in, in terms of normies pattern spotters and chaos. And the chaos are the people. Pattern spotters are, are, of course, they're the people that are able to see patterns that are very difficult to see. Most people can't see them, but you can name them. And once you see 'em, everybody's kind of agreeing. The chaos, however, are locked out of a lot of the world. They have an intuition about things. They can feel it, they can try and draw it on a chalkboard. And people listening get lost because they're like, I want you to put that into words that I can, that I can understand. And the chaos is, is trying, like ambling, there's this man named Jason Mock, and he has been a foundational person in the farm, weird world where he is showing like, Hey, you can do this relay cropping where you plant wheat and soybeans next to one another. And I'm not just gonna say that it's, oh, they're grabbing the nitrogen from the soybean, fixing legumes of the, no, no, there's things that the soybeans are shading out line light, and it's in a pattern of phi. And he starts to go to try and draw this. And as soon as he runs into a physicist or a chemist or a biologist that says, no, no, you got that number wrong. Or I'm gonna need to see what that equation is before you can accept it. So people are very quick to write it off. But the, in the, in the world of, of agriculture, they're still making advances on genetics, but it's a linear advance, right? They're still going like this. And Jason believes there are huge explosions that you can make in this world, but it is very difficult to get anyone that you would say, quote unquote, serious to pay attention to him.

Vance Crowe [00:55:09] Because if you watch him at a chalkboard, it's like, it's, it's hard to understand what he's saying. I think you guys are, I, I love what you're saying because it seems like it deals Jason back into the game.

Guest [00:55:24] I think that one of the absolute hardest things to do is to figure out how to talk about your ideas. It is brutally difficult and learning to talk about and

Vance Crowe [00:55:37] Brutally political too. And I don't mean like partisan politics, I just mean, you know, being able to avoid the immune system of the establishment when you're trying to see something differently for the first time. I, I mean, I, I think everybody who's had some sort of scientific breakthrough in their life has this experience where they just, they see it and they're like, oh my God, everybody's gonna be so excited when I tell them about this. And then they spend usually the, you know, next 40 years of their life becoming ever increasingly depressed at how difficult it is to actually get anyone to hear, let alone care. And that is quite a mountain to climb in terms of really learning how to contextualize your, your own vision in the enormous intergenerational project of making sense of nature, which is really what, what we're all a part of here. It's like you're, you're on a bigger team than just yourself. And a lot of people have a hard time seeing that. And, you know, the, the establishments just loves to pluck off lone wolves as, as fast as it can. 'cause, you know, the chaos is inefficient. You, I'd love it if you held up your book, because one of the things we talked about before the show was how your book is set up that you, you've put out, I'd love you to give like a summary of it. But the beginning is peaking what I think is one of the most important categories, or one of the most important traits of humans, which is curiosity, right?

Vance Crowe [00:57:07] Like the only way anything changes in the world, the only way you discover something new is to go out into the chaos because you are curious about something. Talk a little bit about how you set this book up and, and where you go with it, because some of the words you used when I'm watching your show, I, I myself feel like, woo, I'm a little intimidated here. We're talking about really complicated things, but your book isn't set up that way.

Guest [00:57:31] Yeah, I mean, if I, so the book is Paradox Lost the Material Principles of Natural Philosophy. It's On Sale on Amazon. I was really astounded when it launched. It sat on the top of the history of physics charts for a little while. It has since settled, which I mean is probably to be expected, but it was, it was very reassuring to see. 'cause I think that if we can get people to, to buy it, to read it, to tell us what they think of it, we're actually going to be able to get to the point where the ideas have to be dealt with. That's ultimately the goal, is to find people that are in deep inside the world of quantum, deep inside the world of theoretical physics to say that, hey, there might be some things that have crept in over the course of the last a hundred years that you guys should reexamine. And we've actually tried to do this. There's this, we recorded an episode with this guy named Brian Keating, who's a very famous UCSD cosmologist. And on the basis of everything that's in this book, we were like, Hey man, I think that there's a problem with a fundamental story that you're telling about the birth of the universe. And he did not like that. He was very upset. He was very upset. Yeah. And so, but basically the worst

Vance Crowe [00:58:49] Episode, I, the

Guest [00:58:50] Worst, I mean, it was very

Vance Crowe [00:58:51] Popular.

Guest [00:58:51] It was very popular, but it was disaster. It was very chaotic. But so basically the book is laid out where we start with explaining a lot of what we said here about how we started this trip, you know, what in the world happened that led us to spend the next 10 years of our lives hold up on the edge of the world, just focusing on these questions. And then the question we ask next is, okay, so this is what's happened in physics. This is what the world of physics looks like right now. Where to where do we go from here? Then chapter two is about learning to see what is invisible, because this is the biggest problem with science. It is fundamentally almost all of modern science is you're dealing with stuff that you can't actually see. You know, the stuff that it sounds like Jason is talking about with the shading and the, the way that the light is falling onto the plants. You, you can maybe sort of see it, but it's not a direct,

Vance Crowe [00:59:50] Oh, you cannot see what Jason is talking about. He's talking about the radial things of plant. I mean, you can see it in the sense that he can physically see it, but there's so much information that he, what his real value is, is he is distilling it down into an image in his mind. I, I take your point, like you can kind of see it, but you, you totally can't. And there's too much there and not enough, and it's very hard. That's how almost all of nature is at the most interesting levels. It's out of reach. It could be invisible because it happened thousands of years ago too. It could be invisible because it happened 14 billion light years away. Like there's, there's a lot of invisibility, a lot of murky pieces that you have to fill in, which is how the philosophers came up with the idea of a hypothesis and in the first place, and then ultimately theories that utilize those hypotheses.

Guest [01:00:35] Yeah. And so the chapter, the, in that chapter, we argue that the process of science is seeing the indivisible. And that's very, very difficult. And if we are to see the invisible, we can't rely exclusively on mathematics. And so all of these at the beginning are there in some ways, like philosophical arguments, especially the next chapter, which is about metaphysics. So metaphysics sounds like a very complex term. It's really not. Metaphysics is the rules by which you play a game. And so contemporary physics has a metaphysic.

Vance Crowe [01:01:11] That game is seeing the world.

Guest [01:01:12] That game is seeing the world. And so somebody who is an economist sees things through the metaphysics of supply and demand. If you look at the difference between like Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, the difference is, the thing that makes them different is they have different metaphysics. They have different rules about what can happen. You can have lightsabers and phasers and starships in Star Trek and in Lord of the Rings you have a orks and elves and flying, giant flying eagles. Like they're just,

Vance Crowe [01:01:40] There's no lightsabers in Star Trek, but I get your point.

Guest [01:01:43] Sorry, what?

Vance Crowe [01:01:46] Or sofas in, in the three body problem or whatever. It's the rules that the game gets played

Guest [01:01:51] By. Exactly. And so like that chapter basically deals with, okay, well, so if we accept these mathematical metaphysics that everything is made of math all the way down, it's just probability, it's just math, what happens to us? And then we start to go through, you know, how is it that we got here? How did we get so far? How did we get from Newton to the moment today where we don't have the answers for basic questions? Like, what is gravity? What is charge? What is light? What is electricity? What is magnetism? Why do we have this famous video of Einstein, of of Feinman being asked by an interviewer, you know, how do magnets work? And he basically melts down. He is like, I can, I can't, I can't answer that. Like,

Vance Crowe [01:02:36] You could do like a rubber band then, then you're gonna think this, and if I give it to you this way, you're gonna think that, yeah,

Guest [01:02:41] He just melts down. Like he can't answer the question. And that's pretty weird. And so then from there, like that's the groundwork. That's the first 60 pages. Then we start to go into the model.

Vance Crowe [01:02:50] Well, we start to lay out some axioms that would be complimentary to the, to the mathematical axioms. Right? So what would a satisfying physical explanation look like? Obviously you have to define what physical means in a way that's actually useful, which has never been done in this project of physics across the past a hundred years or so. And so that's, that's the argument we, we move to next.

Guest [01:03:15] And then there's a chapter, which is probably, it has the craziest most inflammatory claim in the entire book. We argue that the free electron does not exist. So like there's not, there's not an electron that you can just take and like move around.

Vance Crowe [01:03:30] Yeah. News like the, the electron turns out to, to be not a physical body itself. This is inconceivable and results in all sorts of paradoxes. But once you realize that the electron is something the atom does, it's an action of that material in a particular kind of motion. Everything explodes into sensibility.

Guest [01:03:51] Usually things exploding is bad. But in this case, it's a good explosion.

Vance Crowe [01:03:54] You guys, I mean, like, I have to say, like there's something that feels like deeply meaningful to me in what you're saying in that I remember being in chemistry and talking about things like the electron cloud and, and being so deeply frustrated when I would ask questions that I was like, well, I guess I just don't get it. Like, I'm just, I'm not capable of doing chemistry. And now as an adult, going back and being like, I'm completely capable to do chemistry, but there were things that I couldn't get answered. And you have to imagine this is happening over and over and over again to the best and brightest of people that are chaos, right? That have these ideas. They're probably really disagreeable people, right? That are like, no, I'm not going to just accept that. And they get pushed out of the system and told like, yeah, well, you don't get to play with the real tools because you're asking too many questions. And everybody else over here has given into these assumptions and these assumptions are what are required to ride the ride. And so you just like, those people are not able to contribute. I, I feel what you guys are saying at the same time, when I start feeling like that right, then I have to be like, all right, what would my most disagreeable friends say? They would be? Like, if somebody comes along and tells you that they can, they are rereading the laws of physics, you should question them deeply. Who is questioning you deeply? Who has been giving you guys really good feedback that somebody like me that has nothing beyond a high school chemistry background, what are, what are people pushing back on?

Vance Crowe [01:05:31] Well, that's the cool part about having a podcast. I think it's part of the reason we decided to do that with our, our lives with a huge part of our lives anyways, is that we get to talk to the best Harvard MIT people who are gonna really push back as much as possible and actually follow the argument that we're making. And we've of course, kind of made that argument quietly in these interviews. 'cause we're not trying to dominate it with our own ideas necessarily, but it has been a really peaceful way to check our assumptions about things with various people. And honestly, it was a very esteemed physicist at Caltech who pushed us to write this book in the first place because after spending many hours together, I, he is just a, a fantastic physicist in his own right. He actually worked with Fineman when he was in grad school and he, he kind of like really sat back at some point and was like, you guys should write this up. This is actually really interesting. And that was the first time that anybody in that level of the academy had really taken what seen what we were saying and taken it to have some merit. I don't think that he thought that we had all the answers or anything, but I think he thought the direction we were pushing was worth getting out there. So

Guest [01:06:45] I also think that it's really, really important to say we are not trying to rewrite any of the laws of physics. That's true. Like this is what the, so the, the crux of the book in what we're doing is we're saying, look, if we keep everything as it is in terms of the mathematics, all you get to keep all of the equations of quantum physics, you get to keep all of the wave functions. You get to keep every, like every, you know, v equals ir for, for

Vance Crowe [01:07:12] All the electrical engineer

Guest [01:07:13] Stuff. The only thing that we're asking is we're saying what is a physical system that could behave according to these quantitative rules? That's all we're saying. What is the physical picture that this math is describing? And so we're not saying, Hey, hey, hey, you have to change physics. We're saying physics all along has been describing a system that is underneath the mathematics because the mathematics cannot be primary. That's not how the world works. There has to be something down there

Vance Crowe [01:07:43] And like you can get pushback against that, but it's not very compelling. Like the, when we push people on that basic premise, the the, the only thing you really get is, well, I kind of like the magic and it's like, you know, I'm not gonna talk you out of that. Okay. But well, there's like a faith component there that, that there is nothing to, you know, like what would be the benefit. So in the back of my mind, I have this concept that I, this may just drop us right in the middle of the ocean, but I have this fundamental intuitive belief that the world is built on waves and that everything happens in waves. When I bring that up, what does that, what does that mean to you when you think of waves and where it fits into what you guys are talking about? Where are waves in all of this?

Guest [01:08:28] In the middle of the ocean?

Vance Crowe [01:08:30] Well, actually I think that's what kind of broke people's brains. Nazi mentioned the Michelson Morley as being the death of the search for these invisible mediators. I think it was the realization, first of all, everybody realized that all of these things were traveling in waves. And that waves were super fundamental to physics and to physical phenomena. The problem was that they also realized that measurements always occurred in discreet units of quanta, right? So anytime that you saw a change in a physical system, it was quantized. This just completely broke people's brains at that time. I, I don't, I don't know why they didn't push through it, but even if you read the conversations that, you know, famous physicists were having Einstein, you know, he was never comfortable with that. He was deeply disturbed by the fact that he couldn't reconcile the wave nature of reality with the particle nature that was also apparent. So I do think that waves are fundamental. I think that measurements being quantized, you know, state changes, being quantized is also fundamental. But for us, when we think about a wave, we always have to think about what's waving. 'cause a wave is, is something that is done by a group of actors, generally speaking, a stadium wave, a wave of, even in a wave of the ocean, you know, it's a bunch of little water molecules moving around and working in a concerted fashion. So we, we do take the wave mechanics to be fundamental. We just ask a new set of questions, which is what's waving and why does that waving produce these step changes in the state of the system?

Vance Crowe [01:10:05] And that can all be understood structurally is the argument. Does this have anything to do with the concept that you were just talking about? Electrons aren't a thing, they are in action. Is that in the same vein or is that wildly off? Yeah, that was a huge breakthrough for us. Oh

Guest [01:10:20] Good.

Vance Crowe [01:10:21] Yeah, that was actually pretty late in the project that we understood exactly what was waving with an electron and we almost didn't get there.

Guest [01:10:33] It was so, and I feel like normal couples fight about, you know, like, I don't know what they fight about, who's

Vance Crowe [01:10:40] Gonna take out the trash and who's turn it is to go change a baby, that kind of thing.

Guest [01:10:43] Yeah. Shiloh and I literally will be sitting on the floor of the kitchen at one o'clock in the morning arguing about how to make sense of the electron,

Vance Crowe [01:10:51] Like barn burners, not the electron. Yeah,

Guest [01:10:54] Just like paint peeling off the walls where we're both absolutely certain that we understand it. And then, you know, by the next day we realized that each of us had some piece of the elephant that we have to put together in order to get it. And so like I think that it would make sense to think about the wave of the electron to show the picture here.

Vance Crowe [01:11:12] I mean, what is, it's worth mentioning that a wave is not necessarily just like the thing you see on an ocean, a wave in, in a physical system is really just a periodic state change. Something is coming back to its starting place. So take us to the electrons. So everybody, the chemists for a long time have treated the outer surface of the atom as the electron.

Guest [01:11:33] Yeah. And so on screen we have our model of hydrogen in its simplest form. So

Vance Crowe [01:11:39] Hydrogen, just the simplest atom imaginable.

Guest [01:11:41] And so in this simplest form of hydrogen, what you have is you have a mostly spherical surface. And so if you were to go into like a, a physics textbook, this would be the S orbital. It's a spherical ground state orbital. And the electron is in this textbook picture, this kind of fuzzy cloud around a positively charged nucleus. And what we said is, we said, okay, but the physical properties that are ascribed to the electrons, such as its like spin one half such as its, its ability to influence charge, is also deeply related to the architecture of the atom itself. And you can map the mathematics of the electron onto this tural circulating surface. And so basically you have a Taurus is is a shape that has a pore in the center and as a continuous surface around that pore. And so as it rolls inward, it's also rotating around its equator. And it, that motion specifically gives it a very weird symmetry where in order for any point on the surface to return to its starting place, the equator has to rotate twice and the longitudinal rotation has to go through once.

Vance Crowe [01:13:04] And this bizarre symmetry, they call it spin one half. And you know, for most of the, the 20th century, this quality has been known of experimentally, but it doesn't have any physical basis. It's always treated as, well, it's not really a rotation. It's not like the electron's really orbiting like a planet around a sun or something. It's something else, right? But what we realized is that no, actually the rotational symmetry of spin one half works out perfectly. If you treat the electron wave as being a circulatory pattern of material throughout the atom, which has this approximately spherical surface, it also all of a sudden you get a new, wait, wait, let's say that again. I didn't catch that. So it works if, if you understand that the, there is an a, a series of, there's some material that the c that the atom is made out of, and that material is circulating throughout the entire structure of the atom that if it circulates in this toal fashion through the center of the atom, all of a sudden you have recapitulated the mathematics of spin one half for the electron. You also have a sensible reason why there's a nucleus on the atom, which has orthogonal motion to the outer surface. It's opposite, right? You have, you, you don't have this mystery of what the heck is this? Why is this surface holding on, you know, to this other thing in the center, like you have a cohesive structure that recapitulates the mathematical descriptions, which are rooted in experimentation for the atom itself.

Vance Crowe [01:14:40] You have a sensible picture for the electron, not as a thing, but as a particular action that the surface, the material of the atom is undergoing as that material circulates through it. And this opens up the door to explanations for electricity, magnetism eventually light everything downstream of that because that circulatory pattern at the surface at the shell that we had drawn on the screen here, it's putting the same tensions onto its outer radial filamentary region into its extended structure, the cloud of the textbooks, right? They're being tugged by the same surface motions and they're conveying that to their neighbors. And that's what allows us to unlock the particular patterned motions that are usually described by fields, right? The fields are this predictable way that your neighbor's gonna be influenced by you. And we have a direct mechanical coupling between those. All of a sudden, when I see your diagram, it makes me think of the planet Jupiter as as like, and when I think about planets, this starts helping me understand what you guys are saying. Like when you first look at a globe or you're ever taught about planets, you think, oh, there's the surface of the planet and then it's space outside of it. But the truth is right, it's a gradient of how much matter is being pulled towards that thing. And I'm sure Jupiter is that same way, like we construct the drawing of Jupiter as it's very clear now you're in Jupiter, now you're out of Jupiter, but the reality is probably much more like you're far enough away that you, is this an accurate metaphor?

Guest [01:16:18] I think that the, it's an accurate metaphor with one caveat, which is that as far as we can tell, Jupiter does not have macroscopic filamentary structures on it. And so the great, there's a, there's a change here in the structure of how the atom is organized. So there is a place, I

Vance Crowe [01:16:39] I would say though though, like I can see some congruence in terms of the phase transition. So they we're starting to understand that Jupiter has this metallic interior, it's, it's a liquid form of, of hydrogen actually a liquid metallic form that's packed in a certain way that it behaves like a metal and then there's some cloudy region outside of that, right? This phase transition zone. And, and so yeah, I think there definitely is a point where you would experience this discrete boundary when if you were to go take a dive into Jupiter, I mean your body would probably be torn apart by the pressure or whatever, but let's say you had like a really nice submarine, you would feel that that metallic phase transition at some point, and similarly with our atom, what we're saying is there, there is a discreet surface which is analogous to that phase transition that you're talking about.

Guest [01:17:24] Yeah. And the filamentary structures are necessary in order to be able to exert both push and pull because it's not you, it's not just push that you have to be able to do, you can kind of imagine being able to do push with clouds, right? Because, okay, so if you imagine you're walking down a street and there's a gust of wind that's really strong. It's basically kind of like being pushed with, with gas or with a cloud, but it's really, really hard to imagine being pulled with the same cloud. There's no gust of air that pulls you somewhere. And so in order to exert pull, you have to have some kind of tense, some, some kind of structure that's capable of tenile properties like a, a, a filament, a a a, a cable, something that you can pull on that allows you to actually exert pressure on somebody who's far away from you.

Vance Crowe [01:18:18] Okay, this is, you guys are doing an excellent job of describing this at least to, to get me on board. And those, that pole is somehow that the filament of one atom overlaps with another, somehow they hook onto one another and wherever they are able to put the hooks into you is probably where the end or the, the line between inside the atom or outside is, are those filaments able to grab onto something and pull it together? Yeah, the details of this are, are definitely the weakest part of the work that we've done so far. So actually how these filaments inter mesh, how they apply and break and snap that there's a enormous amount of material science that's necessary to unpack this. We tend to think of the atom as having some set of subunits. We just call 'em atomic fiber provisionally, but the filaments are made out of the same atomic fiber as the surface of their neighbor. And so you can almost think about filaments melting with their neighbors more than, you know, I don't know if cooking is quite right. I think it's quite, it's gonna prove to be quite a bit more complex than that. So I, I'm elated because this actually helps me think about, you know, when people are always like, oh, you could put your fingers through the table because there's a bunch of void space there. And I've always been like, this does not make sense. Like this just doesn't compute because, you know, why don't they just be pushed out of the way and let me go through it. But the filament answer does potentially give you a way to conceptualize it.

Vance Crowe [01:19:51] There's just, they, there may be a lot of space in between them, but there's enough of these things connected together, creating that tension that you can't just pass my finger through the table. Is that right? Almost?

Guest [01:20:02] I, yeah, like the fun, hold on one second. I wanna add something. So like, I, I think that that's intuitively correct. Shy might have a different perspective on it, but I just wanna add that, you know, the circulatory element of our model where you have a surface that's moving and it has to be moving fairly quickly in order to, 'cause it's on the atomic scale, it's, it's slower than the speed of light, but it's still like very fast. You, you have to think that a even a rarefied substance, like a, a loose weave of cloth that's mostly empty space that's moving that fast would create the appearance of a solid surface. The same way that a propeller is mostly empty space when it's still, but is absolutely a solid surface when it's going like you can up with your hand through it.

Vance Crowe [01:20:53] I will be happily embarrassed if you guys are somehow proven to be crazy people because this makes so much sense to me that like so much more than the current explanation. And I think that's really endearing to me because it, it's like, oh, I can finally get on this train, right? Like I can finally start to conceptualize things where I don't just have to be like, forget all of your functional knowledge that you have about anything. Just forget about all of that and accept these things here. This seems much more intuitive and frankly like, you know, nature always has weird things about it. That's, no, no question about that. But also when you understand something about nature, you're like, yeah, I guess that does make sense, right? When you start to like, you know, I guess it's kind of, it's turtles all the way down, but every time you look at another layer of the turtle, you finally get it. You have that aha moment. You don't just say like, well I don't get it, but I'm gonna keep going. Turtles down if you do, your, your understanding is built on, on sand and, and you can't, you can't really, you can't come with any new insights if you don't actually have a fundamental model through which you're building things. Yeah, and I don't, I don't wanna oversell the particulars of this because the approach is what's really meaningful here. I mean, a lot of people are deeply uncomfortable with this filamentary discussion, particularly for a lot of the reasons you brought up. Like, how the hell do these individual transections happen? How are the filaments melting with atoms? There's a ton of work to be done.

Vance Crowe [01:22:25] And I think that the nuance that's revealed is people begin to think about the, the physical basis of fundamental physics this way will reveal a lot more detail about this than we're currently able to give. But fundamentally, yeah, there's subunits, they're displacing one another. You can't have, two of, you can't have two atomic fiber in the same place at the same time. There's a lot more of that atomic fiber at the surface, at the shell surface of the atom. So that's, you know, why you can't put your hand through a table, but where it's really rarefied and there's just these thin filaments, you can easily imagine them being much more easily displaced. You know, being able to actually interact with each other with a much less energy, being able to essentially be able to push each other out of the way in, in a way in which a huge glom of material isn't able to quite as easily. So, you know, I, I really do believe that this, this sort of approach is, is the way forward. There's so much work to be done though, and that's what's really exciting is we're always trying to invite people into that, you know, and, and there's people, there's different disciplines of the academy that are more interested in that. The electrical engineers seem very interested. They, they've always kind of looked over at the quantum business like, you guys don't know how circuits work. You couldn't build an antenna to save your life. And they've always been kind of partial to the idea that there's some material layer that could improve their own work. And so we, we've had a lot of success recently discussing these things with the electrical engineering community, much more so than with the people who just want to believe there's magic responsible for the quantum world.

Vance Crowe [01:24:04] Certainly you guys have thought about in five years and 10 years as, as your ideas get, you know, challenged in question and some of them get brought into mainstream thinking. What do you think will change about the world if your book is successful?

Guest [01:24:23] Oh man. So there's a really idealistic answer to this that I hope you'll forgive me if I, if I give it and not think me too naive, but I've really seen something a little bit weird happen as I've read through the history books where there was a moment where it seemed like there was real aspiration towards like a universal acquiring of knowledge. And I mean this in like the early 19 hundreds when, when somebody like Albert Einstein would show up by train in a city, huge throngs of regular people would show up, not educated people. Most people hadn't gone to college. They might not even really be super good at reading, but he was, he was an order. He could tell them stories about how the world worked and they were interested and they were curious and there was no contempt in Einstein for the regular person. He was so excited and willing to correspond with anybody. It is he's famous for it, that people would send him letters and he would, he would help them understand and he would explain the way that he saw it. And he had a fair amount of humility about the fact that, you know, maybe I don't see it the right way. Maybe this is all insane because like Shiloh said over and over during this conversation, he was absolutely instrumental in the quantum revolution. But then he spent the rest of his life holding his head in his hands, horrified at the conclusions that they were coming to, so got away from them.

Guest [01:25:59] But what I've seen is that there has been this rising contempt between two more and more separated parts of the population. There's the people that hang out in, you know, what Curtis Jarvin and others call the cathedral inside the academy, inside the ivory tower. It's this place where there's a set of esoteric knowledge that you accumulate over the course of your life and you use that to sneer at people who don't get it, that you use it to sneer at the chaos. And then there's the people that are on the outside of that system who look back and they're also sneering at those people because they recognize that they've bought into some kind of insane system that has led them terribly astray, that has made them the emperor in their new clothes that they can't even see for themselves. And so we live in a time of deep mutual contempt and I think that that's really bad for us. And if this book is successful, if it, if it accomplishes anything, what I really hope is that it lessens the era of mutual contempt because it opens the door back for people. Because we say, look, there's three rules by which you tell a scientific story. If you're going to play according to the metaphysics that we lay out here, which is the fact that physics is about bodies doing stuff to each other, that bodies are things with surfaces, volumes and locations relative to everything else, and that everything comes down to push and pull displacement, two bodies can't be in the same place at the same time.

Guest [01:27:32] They have to push and pull each other out of the way. Those are the rules, those are the metaphysics. You don't need more than that. You don't need less than that. That's what it means to do physics in this new phase. Go forth, show us that we're wrong. Come up with a better theory, do whatever you want, but play by the rules of that game. And then we actually have a world where we can agree on things again, and we can actually reason our way through presentations. We can act, we have some kind of ground reality that we can stand on even if we don't agree in the particulars of how we describe that reality. At the very least, we're not going in circles about, you know, weird arguments about like, what's time man? Is time primaries? Is it the thing that makes the world go round? Did the universe come from nothing? It's like, okay, let's just, let's pull back on that. Let's just have some kind of shared basis of knowledge that we can operate with in this book. We have done our best to provide our version of what that looks like, but like Shiloh said, we're not, if, if it turns out that there's something that we need to change because some new piece of knowledge arises or somebody points out that like something's not quite right, we'll change it. This isn't, this isn't set in stone. This is an active living attempt to piece it together and to to, to basically say like, guys, let's just, let's just set aside this, this insanity. Let's move forward. Let's think about things clearly. Let's make sense of things.

Vance Crowe [01:29:03] That was truly beautiful and I think probably a great place to, to leave it. So I want people both to know where to buy your book and where they can follow you guys for more. So where should people go to do these two things? The best place to get the book right now is on Amazon and we'll have an audio book up soon, but right now you can get it for Kendall or paperback card back, whatever you want. If you want to check out our stuff, we're just at demystify. Si everywhere. So Demystify, we used to be demystifying science, but somebody jacked our name in the early days. So we, we are now demystify si. But you can find us on most platforms. YouTube's probably our biggest platform, but we're everywhere that podcasts can be seen. And honestly, we don't just do this on our podcasts. We, we do do, do have a Saturday morning live stream where we do this. Most of the time we're just talking to thinkers. So we'll talk to people about ancient history, economics, anything, physics too. But

Guest [01:29:59] We also have a game show that we run once a month, maybe twice a month. We basically let anybody that has a theory put their name in the hat and then we pick, I don't know, maybe eight or nine names over the course of two hours and we give 'em 60 seconds to present their theory and then we interview them. Shiloh does all the live music for it because he's, he's an incredible musician. This is, science is just part of Shiloh's life. He is literally, I know, I know that women say this about their partners all the time, that they're just incredible. Shiloh is literally the best musician I've ever met in my entire life. He can walk into any room with anyone playing any genre of music and just immediately find the pulse of it and the stuff that he makes himself. He plays all the instruments on guitars, bass, drums, trumpet, saxophone, synthesizers, writes all his songs. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:30:50] Check out our project. That project's called Secretary of Nature. You can find it everywhere too. Well you two, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for joining me.

Guest [01:31:01] Thank you so much

Vance Crowe [01:31:01] Guys. Thank you. Really enjoyable. That's gonna do it for this week's interview. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. I know that I got off of this podcast and I was talking about it and texting all my friends. I hope if you've enjoyed this, you will like and subscribe to the podcast, but maybe even more importantly, you'll share this with somebody that would find it valuable. I don't often ask for you to do that, but after listening to them talk about their way of understanding science, I want to blow oxygen on the way that they think. And the way to do that is to share this with somebody that you think maybe would like having their view of the world shaken up in the way that only these two can. We're gonna head out, but I wanted to share with you a short clip of a legacy interview so you can know what it's like to have your parents, your grandparents, a loved one, sharing their life stories so that they can be passed on to future generations. We'll be back next week with another fascinating conversation. How would you describe this to somebody that never heard of a legacy interview?

Guest [01:32:04] Well, we have described it to our friends. Everybody that we talk to is like, whoa, that is really neat.

Vance Crowe [01:32:10] It's just a way of sharing who I am, who blend is who we are as a couple and 48 years of living together, being married together. There's so many things that happen. Was this what you thought it would be like? Yes. Yeah, pretty much. Both of us got good imaginations and yeah,

Guest [01:32:26] Yeah, we do Legacy Interviews. Learn more at Legacy Interviews dot com.