Don Lincoln: prediction

Transcript context

…Right. The whole Darwinian evolution, the fact that our genetics has significant overlap with the genetics of a banana is, is pretty staggering, is astonishing- that that works. So that is amazing. But for at least the class of scientists that I am, what we think of is, well, sure, biology is interesting and all, but when you get right down to it, it’s caused– whatever happens in biology is caused by the movement of molecules. And then you say, “Well, that’s great and all, but molecules, they do what they do because they’re made of atoms.” And then the next step is, well, atoms, that’s great, but atoms work the way they do because of the nucleus and the electrons, and then the nucleus is protons and neutrons. And so there are those of us, myself included, who want to dig down to the very, very bottom and find out what is the smallest building block of nature from which all of these other far more complex and interesting and abstract things are. But what is at the very, very bottom? And also, that’s great, but if you know what the smallest building blocks are, that doesn’t tell you the story. It’s like having a whole bunch of Legos, but not knowing how to put them together. You also need to know how they interact, how they work, and so that’s why we study forces. So there are the various subatomic forces of which we’re familiar and for instance, electricity and magnetism are components of electromagnetism, which then governs the behavior of things like– This is amazing. Electromagnetism explains, of course, electricity, magnetism, but it explains how light works. It explains how much of chemistry works. So electromagnetism, 1860 or ’70, the wonderful thing about that is if you take Maxwell’s equations and you apply a little bit of calculus, it’s very easy to see that the laws of electricity and the laws of magnetism combined together make what’s called a wave equation, which that shows that these electric and magnetic fields oscillate. They vary, and if you have something that’s varied, that’s a wave, and the wave then moves. And if you do the math, you find out that the speed at which these waves move is the speed of light. And so people said, “Wow, the speed of light comes out of those equations.” And that had to be, I think, very persuasive. And of course, electromagnetism also plays a really significant role in chemistry because after all, atoms are held together by electromagnetic forces. There’s more to how atoms work. There is all the quantum mechanics stuff. But if you did not have electromagnetism, or if electromagnetism was very different, then atoms would be very different. So it plays a very big role in holding us together. he quantum mechanics stuff. But if you did not have electromagnetism, or if electromagnetism was very different, then atoms would be very different. So it plays a very big role in holding us together. So it’s a staggering advance in science to have a good behavior on that. And of course, being able to tame electromagnetism is why people can hear you when you do your podcast because through the miracles of the internet just– or just electricity running the computers. I mean, this is a case, if I can get on a small soapbox, where people back then said, “Well, why are you messing around with magnets and sparks?” And who cares? Well, that very fundamental digging into the laws of nature has spinoffs, and it has spinoffs– one of the big spinoffs is our entire technological society. Without being able to govern electricity, we’d still be farmers and shoemakers in cities. We certainly would not have everything that we do, so off my soapbox. But it’s really a lovely thing to show how this, this digging into deep, fundamental, not understood, mysterious things can, a hundred or two hundred years later, transform the world. And the type of science I do now, people often ask, “Well, what good is knowing about how the inside of atoms work, how the inside of quarks work?” And I don’t know the answer to that but just being a little more pragmatic, if I go back, say, a hundred years, where people were trying to understand how the protons and neutrons inside atoms held together, how they split, how they– how you could combine them and so forth, this has led to nuclear power. Now, whatever you think about nuclear power, and some people like it and some people don’t, but it is powerful. It will generate energy for humanity, and it may be that is the path that we take as we move away from digging fossil fuels out of the ground. Humanity is going to need power no matter what. Nobody is going to go back to the way things were in the 1700s. And one enormous source of energy that is there for us to take if we so choose is the modification of the nucleus of atoms. Seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with anything, and yet it provides humanity with an opportunity, which of course requires that we think carefully of how we do that and, and if we want to, but it gives us something that we didn’t have before. Yeah, it’s very clear that nuclear fusion and nuclear fission will unlock huge amount of energy that’s required for a civilization to flourish, but that’s almost like near term. Longer term, you can think about things like we’ll talk about dark energy crisis- … and antimatter. Maybe if you figure out some of the mysteries around antimatter, that too would lead to energy sources, how to produce energy. That too might lead to counterintuitive propulsion systems- … for us humans to travel through the universe. Now, right now it seems far-fetched, too expensive, too complicated, too difficult, but breakthroughs in the fundamentals theoretical physics might lead us to unlock some incredible energy sources, incredible technologies that will allow humans to explore the universe. And of course, we should also mention that as always with technology, it’s a double-edged sword. It will most likely lead to the development of more dangerous weapons or- … other sources of harm. And then we as a civilization kinda have to walk that line and hope we figure out how to do more good than bad with the technologies we build.…

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