Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Physicist and founder of loop quantum gravity theory; author of bestselling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
On the island
Eight records
It's a song that has represented, I think, more than anything else the music of my life. It's about liberty, it's about freedom, it's about breaking out, and it's about taking a risk, taking things all the way through. There's a line that says freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, which is scary and at the same time marvelous, because you have to go and not be afraid jumping into things. That's the way to go, in my opinion. I've done that in my life. I never regretted any jump I did.
It's a song that reminds me of those years in which I was going into my young rebellion in Italy. I was living at the time in a sort of funny place in the countryside. It was a mixture between a hippie commune, a attempt to recreate the old Greek school, a farm in the old Italian style. So a group of us boys and girls living together and listening to this sort of music.
Violin Concerto in A minor, RV 356: I. Allegretto
I had the incredible fortune at the time of high school of I could go once a week in an empty church where there was a group that was playing Vivaldi, that was unknown at the time and later became one of the world famous chamber music group, Solis Divinity. And they were rehearsing once a week and we boys from the school would go there and listen to them and it was absolutely magic and it was my entry into music.
I think it captures this pure beauty which I see in physics. But in particular this piece, Für Alina, it's a short enchanted piece of purity, which for me is like a representation of the kind of cleanness and essentialness, the characteristic of being essential and simple, which is in theoretical physics.
Love Scene (from Zabriskie Point)Favourite
This music which I heard the first time in a movie by Antonioni. It's a [Zabriskie Point]. ... in the movie at some point there is a sort of surreal scene where the two characters make love in the desert and suddenly the desert fills up with couples making love in a joyful, happy light way. ... this lightness of love was marvelous.
Theresa Stich-Randall and Dagmar Hermann
It's a marvelous small little piece of a Bach cantata. And I remember distinctively I was in high school, I was at a party with some friends and a friend of mine came to me and said, You're gonna like this one and put some headset around my ear and these two voices, pure joy, started singing and since ever I keep hearing this piece of music.
It's a simple, sweet anthem of a generation and the world so many of us dreamed, quite different from the present world. A world where there are no boundaries, there are no separations, there's no war, and when somebody kills us, we don't react by saying, Okay, let's kill all of them, but we react by saying, Well, let's talk and stop killing one another.
It's a marvelous piece of music to which I often go back. I have had a rather stormy life. I've changed the countries many times, I've changed a lot in my life. This is so dreamy and it's about sleep, about maybe death, about being elsewhere. It's soft, it's sweet, and Jim Morrison's voice is so wonderful. It's about elsewhere.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:41Why do you want to spend your time writing for the general public?
I think writing for the large public for me was a way to try to share a passion and to communicate the beauty that I was seeing, that I see in theoretical physics. So it's like telling a love story in which I was immersed and I'm still is.
Presenter asks
3:33Why do people not have the same passion for equations as they have for Beethoven?
I chose a late Beethoven quartet in this metaphor, because that's not easy music. It's music that requires getting into Beethoven and listening a lot and then slowly you realize how beautiful this music. And I am not sure there are many more people who appreciate late Beethoven than people who appreciate Einstein equations.
Presenter asks
6:32How do you stop yourself from catapulting into flimsy conjecture when dealing with unknown unknowns?
That's the risky aspect of science, and that's why it's jumping. And that's a difficult equilibrium that we have in the development of knowledge between change and preserving what is there. There is always in science a point in which one recognizes that there is a problem, there is something that doesn't work. Quantum mechanics doesn't talk to generativity. And so one has to take the courage and throw away something and try in an intelligent way, but try.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Ah. Because the night on the islands will be long and I'm sure the telescope will fill them entirely and open an immense space. The island is small and the sky is immense.
Presenter asks
7:19Can you explain quantum mechanics in the simplest possible terms?
The reason is that quantum mechanics is a spectacularly successful theory, is something on which we build our computers, plenty of modern technology, but nevertheless is something we scientists have not yet fully understood. That's why it's hard to explain. We have some equations, we have some ideas, we have some pieces of things which are more or less clear. The world is granular in the small. Light is not continuous, but it's little packets of light, the photons. There is probability in the small. So we can say a number of things. But there is not yet a coherent picture of quantum mechanics, and that's why we have so much difficulty of telling what it is.
Presenter asks
10:57What do you mean by 'apparently happy' when describing your childhood?
R. D. Lange says that we can destroy ourselves by violence masquerading as slaves. I grew up in a very lovely family with a very loving Italian mother. I was an only child, completely immersed in this maternal love, which was great. It gave me security, gave me strength, but was also a prison from which I clearly had to escape at some point if I wanted to go my way and change the world view that I was finding around me in my family, my school, in my teachers, many of whom had nostalgia for fascism.
Presenter asks
29:54You seem very definite that there is no afterlife. How can you be so sure?
Well, we do have things we consider pretty obvious and reasonable, even if we are not sure about anything. So I would be very, very surprised if after dying I would wake up and find, I don't know, what, a big old man saying, Hey, you've been good, go that way, you've been bad, go that way. No, I don't believe so.
“Science is a passion in which men and women get involved and can't resist it and is a sequence of moments of desperation, moment of excitement and disappointment. In fact, mostly disappointment and sometimes moments of enthusiasm. The reality of science is full of passion.”
“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, which is scary and at the same time marvelous, because you have to go and not be afraid jumping into things. That's the way to go, in my opinion. I've done that in my life. I never regretted any jump I did.”
“I grew up in a very lovely family with a very loving Italian mother. I was an only child, completely immersed in this maternal love, which was great. It gave me security, gave me strength, but was also a prison from which I clearly had to escape at some point if I wanted to go my way and change the world view that I was finding around me in my family, my school, in my teachers, many of whom had nostalgia for fascism.”
“It never sued anybody living in a commune because it doesn't work, but it was but nevertheless it was a fantastic experience and I remember it as one of the defining periods in my life. And I was just feeling free and wandering and discovering. And in fact, I was beginning to study physics there. People laughing at me. I had huge rolls of paper and writing equations after equation after equation under a tree. And a lot of physics that I studied, I studied there.”
“I often ponder about the meaning of life. I think we all do. I get to the point in which I think that we all of us are full of meaning of life and we don't need to search for one. Before being rational, I think we are animals and humans and social beings full of desire, full of motives. So I don't think we need meaning of life. To the opposite, we have to resist the excess of meaning that come from inside ourselves. I think that life is short, is finite, there's nothing after it.”