hello, poindexter!

August 7th, 2008

I’m currently in the back of the tour van, (which I should abbreviate from this post forward as “BOV” or perhaps the reader can just assume that is where I reside for all perpetuity…) which is driving from Lisbon to Madrid. The six-hour drive through the Spanish countryside has provided me with ample time to extract something more ‘blog-friendly’ from an interview that I did with Dr. Subodh Patil. The transcript of the interview when viewed in Word (at a 10 point font, no less!) spans a daunting 35 pages, thus classifying it as more of a light screenplay than casual chat. Hey, it was my first interview! And he’s a pretty interesting guy.
Here is the cliffs notes version:

“My name is Subodh, and I am a theoretical physicist, though some of my friends still do not believe me.”

“Lately I’ve been worried about what if our universe is a bubble in a percolation of bubbles.”

Youtube links I provided when asked to produce something ‘awesome’:

“Self explanatory, a favorite among physicists, I imagine.”

“Love that Manchester sound…my vote for the best house tracks of all time. Plus the music video is not half bad.”

Favorite writing implement:

Heather (in italics from here on):
So you’re the first person that I’m interviewing for HelloPoindexter. How do you feel about having that honor bestowed upon you?

Subohd (in bold from here on):
Truly honoured…you’re the first person to ever want to interview me for anything; I don’t think that many scientists are interviewed all that often. Promise you won’t twist my words and take them out of context and make it sound like I support creationism?

I’m afraid I can’t do that. In fact, I want to fit your interview to the profile of a very old widow in PA who makes faceless dolls.
Guess I could live with that!
Yes, you will. So what are you/were you doing right now?
Trying to look up an integral of this annoying function so that I can finish off this calculation I’m working on…
Does this calculation warrant a new number-scribbles page in your notebook?
Yeah, well, this one calculation has taken up to a month…so more like, an entire notebook. I go through maybe one notebook a month depending if I’m in the ‘doing’ phase or not…
One calculation per notebook—that’s the worst math problem I’ve ever heard of. Does problem solving keep you from getting a good sleep?
Well, yeah, in a lot of ways! Many times if you get obsessed with a problem, it just always churns away no matter what. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I run to my desk—I get so excited that I can’t get it out of my system. But mostly, work is usually a lot of doldrums followed by bursts of inspiration. An old professor of mine once told me, “A good theoretical physicist is also an intrinsically lazy person”, which means that being a good physicist means knowing when to exert him or herself, and when not to. Anyone who knows the math can churn the handle with the math, but it takes a rare mind to cut through the cheese of the problem immediately and solve the thing with as little work as possible. Often the answer to a problem is always like, “Of course, why didn’t I see that before?”
Oprah would call that an ‘ah-ha’ moment. Are you close to your ‘ah-ha’ moment?
I’m working on this idea that perhaps the graviton has a slight mass, which would cause gravity to shut off at large distances. I think I’m almost done. The theory is someone else’s but I’m just trying to apply it to the ‘cosmological constant’ problem to see if this slight mass of the graviton can cause the universe to accelerate ever so slightly as we do today.
Ah, the old cosmological constant. Wasn’t that the bane of Einstein’s life?
Yes, it was! Einstein proposed the cosmological constant, because without it, the universe could not be static! And we all knew that the universe is static…until we saw that the universe was expanding. Einstein then realized that he didn’t need this constant and that his equations rather beautifully explained the large-scale structure of the universe we observe—from the bending of light, to the decaying orbits on binary pulsars due to gravitational radiation. His theory appears to work in many different contexts. But unfortunately, the more we look out there, the more we realize that we’re having to invent all this weird stuff to explain what we see. So the job is to go out and keep looking.
Right now, we’re in an in-between period in science (in theoretical physics anyway) and these are the moments where real science gets done—when mysteries abound. We see the universe behaving in such a way that it appears as if 70% of the stuff of the universe is in the form of this thing called dark energy, which no one has ever seen, or has any idea what it is. Theorists have 10000000001 models as to what it might be, but none to have convinced us. It has the properties (i.e. an equation of state) that make it look a lot like a cosmological constant, but therein lies the problem. It is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma as the cliché goes.
Do you find that you and your colleagues mostly agree about this stuff?D
There is a consensus in the orthodoxy that there is something out there called dark matter that makes up 25% of the universe and that there is something out there called dark energy that makes up 70% of the universe, and these have been tested in MANY ways, but all of these tests depend of certain assumptions, and there will always be people who will question these assumptions. Of course, until we make a direct detection, which may not be so far off…
When will we possibly make a ‘direct detection’?
Perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in a few months, if one of these particles goes blip in one of the many underground caves where we’re set up detectors for these guys, who knows? There’s a lot of effort going on to try and find these particles.
Can you put to bed those fears that the universe-as-we-know- it will be obliterated when that thing starts?
No worries! There is very little chance that the LHC will destroy us for the simple fact that there is nothing we could produce in there that our planet doesn’t get bombarded with frequently from outer space. The highest energy the LHC will reach is 10 trillion electron volts (some measure of energy particle physicists like to use), but we have seen cosmic ray showers that appear to have been triggered by photons from outer space with tens of million times that amount of energy, so no need to duck and cover. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve had this collective worry. Before the ‘trinity’ test at Los Alamos during the war, Hans Bethe and his team had to allay the fear that the nuclear bomb might cause the Earth’s atmosphere to catch fire.
It’s hard to imagine 10 trillion electron volts.
Sure…the electrons coming out of your TV light typically have energies of a few thousandths of an electron volt. Getting hit by one of these ultra high energy cosmic rays would be like being hit by a baseball pitch, even though the thing causing it is tens of thousands of times smaller than any atomic nucleus. What we make in the LHC would be of much lower energy that that. I think the first science run will be in a few months.
So what does this thing look like? Does it spin? Whirl? Are there lights?
It’s been refit with some super duper new technology designed to take us to energies 10-100 times higher than what Fermilab has accomplished. But really the way to think of it is in terms of reproducing the conditions not seen since the beginning of the universe, and the higher the energy, the further backwards we can go.
If you were to explain the process in recipe terms, could you? Like, you put a particle in a blender and it spins and suddenly a baby universe is created…
Well, maybe more like you had a giant food fight, except you’re not trying to make something…like you already have some really exquisite quiche and you wanna find the recipe…except the person who made it won’t tell you. So you throw it around the room against other stuff, like fruit or custard pies, and hope that the crap that flies out gives you some hint of the fine herbs and spices used. And yeah, with any luck…black holes and baby universes!
Will you be visiting this beast? Will you go with other scientists? Like a field trip?
Yeah, I’ll be working there around April because there’s a theory division at CERN. I hope I get to see the control room—I hear it’s just like the command room on the Starship Enterprise! CERN is gonna rule simply cause it’s the modern-day pyramids of Giza; it is without comparison the greatest experiment human kind has ever undertaken in terms of its scale and the number of people, countries, and scientists involved.
Who inspires you most right now?
I’d say that right now I’m very inspired by this physicist named Subir Sarkar, who is at Oxford. I saw him speak a few days ago in Heidelberg. He is a physicist’s physicist.
So you have a man-crush on him?
Maybe! I’d say more like a physics boner. He’s been worrying about what if the universe wasn’t the same everywhere; perhaps we live in a local bubble which is somewhat under dense, then we could re-analyse the data in ways that appear to do away with dark energy. Lately, I’ve been worried about what if our universe is a bubble in a percolation of bubbles…
And that’s going to be the title of this interview! So, do you think that studying all of this stuff informed/influenced your personal beliefs/philosophy? Sorry, I know that’s a rather meaty question!
That is a big one. Well, in a short sentence, the more I study the universe and physics, the more and more humbled I become at the order and beauty of it. I also realize that in our desire to impose a narrative onto our surroundings that we have perhaps erred as humans into projecting a lot of anthropomorphic nonsense onto our universe, when really, the thing itself is of such staggering beauty and simplicity, and of such symphonic order, that until now we have missed out on how we really don’t need to invent things like ‘God’ to satisfy our longing for a narrative. All we have to do is look. It is there, and it doesn’t give a shit about who you are, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful or awe inspiring to me. I certainly feel myself to be someone who used to long for answers to such existential questions that caused people in the past to turn to theology, perhaps religion—and in a way, a lot of scientists are acting on what (for lack of a better) word, others might refer to as the ‘religious’ impulse. Isidor Rabi said, “In life there’s two types of physicists: one who turns to physics because in their early life, something was wrong with their radio, and the other who turned to physics because in their early life, something was wrong with their God.”
I love that quote. And you’re the later?
I also felt that broken radio thing. I think ultimately, curiosity is curiosity.