Wishes would resume earlier the country's high peace council urged the militants not to return to fighting the wife of a Cambodian prince who previously served as the country's prime minister has been killed in a car accident who was traveling with her husband Prince Norodom a runner it to meet his political supporters when they were involved in a head on collision with a taxi world news from the b.b.c. Forces loyal to the Libyan military strongman general handy for half say they've launched a major offensive against rival groups in the country's crucially important oil producing region the generals militia controls the facilities in what's called the Oil Crescent in eastern Libya the Saudi led coalition has reportedly carried out air strikes on the airport that serves the Yemeni port of her data which is held by rebels the Saudis are backing a Yemeni government offensive that aimed at capturing her data Meanwhile the u.n. Envoy to Yemen is holding a 2nd day of talks in the capital Sana'a aimed at securing a rebel withdrawal from the port which is vital to the flow of aid supplies speaking to the b.b.c. From son of the UN's humanitarian coordinator Elisa ground they said a resolution was urgently needed there's no humanitarian solution to this crisis there is only a political one and that's why our special envoy is in gauged with everyone trying to reach an understanding I think everyone recognizes that the humanitarian cost of this war has been enormous There is no other country in the world for 75 percent of the entire population depends on assistance in order to survive that's because of the war and that's the reason the Boer has to stop now the Japanese car company Toyota has won the Lamont 24 hour race in France with Spain's for me the one double world champion Fernando Alonso victorious on his debut Alonso share the driving in his Toyota hybrid with the Swiss driver Sebastien where me and Japan's Kazuki Nakajima. In the latest match of the football World Cup in Russia Serbia have beaten Costa Rica one nil later all eyes will be on the favorites Brazil who play their 1st game of the tournament the 5 time World Cup winners will play Switzerland they've looked sharp in their preparations winning $1218.00 matches the current holders Germany also begin their defense against Mexico those are the latest stories from b.b.c. News. Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world we hunger for more these are wars of the Nobel physicist Frank we'll check in his book a beautiful question it's a winsome joyful meditation on the question does the world and body beautiful ideas probing the world by way of science as a work of art Frank will tick is the unusual scientist willing to analogize his discoveries about the deep structure of reality with deep meaning in the human every day my experience of how his mind makes connections took off as we bantered before our formal conversation could began. I just wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal that I thought might be interesting to discuss . What it was about it was about my experience I had at the. Botanical Garden in Phoenix the desert botanical garden there was an art exhibit called fields of light by Bruce Monroe which consisted of acres in the desert on a hillside of light that slowly pulsated asynchronously and different colors it was the night time it just made me think in a different way about what it might be to wander inside a mind while thought looks like to me it was awesome because it brought together so many analogies and metaphors and ways of thinking about thinking and visualizing it I suddenly thought that this is what God really is. I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Frankel tick won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries about quarks that helped eliminate our understanding of the strong force or strong interaction one of the 4 fundamental forces of nature in the standard model of physics though Frank will take more poetically calls the standard model the course SCIRI gravitational field he calls geometry and coding flew it he's a professor at mit and he grew up in Queens I spoke with him in 2016. I know you grew up you were the your father was an ecological engineer radio really Iceman and it sounds like you had a fascination with how things worked I mean there's this story you told somewhere about a coffee percolator that was going to be yes remember he said that's my earliest memory and I'm pretty sure girlies memory altogether yes. It's pre-verbal I just remember it and picture but I remember very vividly sitting on my parents' teaching floor with a tile pattern and and we had a percolator at an old fashioned coffee percolator which had 7 pieces. You could take it and they were big so it was something I could manipulate even the house didn't have fine motor coordination and I just was taking it apart putting it back together and seeing that it could actually be done over and over again in that things would fit and somehow it was that that moment that I realised that there was a world outside and me and saw it and those were different things out and I made a big impression on me and I still remember her vividly you know you talk about how you were very drawn to questions of meaning and John philosophy early on and somehow always in making these connections and in seeing these echoes in analogies and even in the story you just told about that where were you at the Botanical desert botanical gardens or gardening so seeing the light but then also thinking about you know the extent our world and the internal world yes like you've always made those connections Yeah I guess I have. Something just obsessed with some things right now at that's definitely one of them what do what is the connection between. Experience the inner worlds of consciousness and. Sensation and the extra world which kind of impinges on it's whether we like it or not and has its own structure yeah you know I usually begin our Vic very early in my interviews after one inquire about their religious or spiritual background of someone's childhood I feel like this discussion we just kind of organically leapt into is kind of an answer to that and you take up this question in your your most recent book which is published in 2015 a beautiful question which I would almost say it comes to be a theological question does the world and body beautiful ideas is that question a variation or an alternative to the question that is more commonly that questions what can I say to you know does the world have meaning well to me it's it's clearly related it's in the same family it has some kind of the same feeling about it but to me it's much more addressable and I don't know what it would mean to say what the meaning of the world is you know I'm not sure what an answer could possibly look like. But if we ask this question was sort of has the same feeling about it does the world embody beautiful ideas I think we can get quite far in finding illuminating answers and there's a lot of positive evidence it's not that there's a metaphysical concept of beauty that rules the world no beauty is a human experience it's something that has to do with how humans react to the world and and and perceive the world and it's notoriously thought to be subjective but it's not entirely subjective there's a very rich history of art objects and music and what people have found beautiful. And literature and we can compare that to what scientists find in their deep investigation with what the world has and see not whether those things coincide they clearly don't coincide there are forms of beauty that are not found in science and there are facts about the world that are not beautiful but there is a remarkable intersection and I think a remarkable overlap between the concepts of beauty that you find in art and literature in music and things that you find as the deepest thing of our understanding of the physical world. And I don't think I've interviewed. Any say group of people across my years of interviewing who use the word beauty more or who have a deeper reverence for beauty and people who work with mathematics Yeah and I and I'm one. And many and several of the most important episodes in my scientific career had been driven. Not in a vague way but very concretely by wanting to make things beautiful. I remember almost a magical moment when I was speaking with one of my colleagues after a seminar trying to figure out what this seminar meant it was about fractional charts and it was a very difficult seminar to understand neither of us really did but then i sed tried to write an equation which captured the way it should work and the equation almost wrote itself and it was just so pretty that I knew it had to be correct and not turned out to be the key to a very important investigation that you still ramifying through physics you know I think when one talks about mathematical beauty or beauty as revealed through mathematics and physics that can sound a lofty and abstract to. To many people you make a wonderful observation that I think is just so so useful in terms of letting people in which is that our brains are a tumour and to the deep structure of the physical world in ways that we've done we don't even can't even begin to grasp it and when it comes to beauty and our perception of beauty our perception of reality in fact our perception of the physical world you say each of us is born to become an accomplished if unconscious practitioner of projective geometry. So explain why you have the most impressive abilities Yeah that. Humans children do routinely without thinking about it although they have to learn a part of it and yet we have not been able to teach sophisticated computers to do it that is humans do and astonishing feat routinely and very quickly. That is they interpret the messages coming through little little openings in their eyes and projected on a 2 dimensional screen the retina at the back which then get the light gets turned into electrical signals and from that crazy scrambles in coding we reconstruct the next turn a world of 3 dimensional objects in space we recognize that if we move our head there are still the same objects and we can we determine these effortlessly we do a job which is it literally is impossible we use all kinds of tricks and rules of to guess what what the external world is and sometimes it's wrong with undercover agents but basically. In most circumstances we do this and me markable feat of reconstructing a 3 dimensional world from 2 dimensional information that's all scrambled up with things and top of each other through these I take for granted completely and I take it very hard and and kind but nature has a quick does with extraordinary abilities in geometry and I knew this abstractly but in preparing the book I decided I should actually learn something about perspective and projective geometry and it was a real revelation I I'm terrible at drawing just terrible. The worst person I've ever met but I learned some of the rules of perspective that artists use and they are just so beautiful they're so elegant and using them I was empowered to create accurate kind of buildings and town squares and so forth I just astonished myself and I wasn't able to reproduce it sort of consciously but now with knowledge I was able to do it and it was just magic to suddenly see these things emerging from my geometric construction vehicle and looks like the extra world. And it had a tremendous. Fact historically and psychologically when these rules were discovered in the Italian Renaissance as one of the things that really powered the Renaissance the artistic and Norma's joy in their sudden ability to render the world the way it actually looked that is so interesting again to point that out that what we see that most of us would it would be impossible to think about creating perspective which is essentially creating 3 dimensional image onto differential space but we don't realize that we do that in our When we open our eyes constantly without being aware of it and how complex and amazing that yes but then and people who were started to work on it artificial intelligence thought at the beginning that would all be trivial because it's so easy and we don't think we don't have to work very are right they thought that would be very easy where as a teaching a computer to play chess would be very difficult but it turned out to be just the opposite of the things that we do unconsciously in our part of our daily lives that are important for survival or things we're really really good at. I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being today exploring beauty with Nobel physicist Frank well to. Symmetry is an important notion in the perception of beauty for the human brain and I want to tease out I believe and I want to make sure I get this right that you're saying that Einstein's kind of what you say call his new style in physics helped bring symmetry home in a sense or helped us understand the importance of symmetry or Cemetery as a bit of an aspect of a reality how would you say that well the symmetry as used in common language is. Kind of a vague word it means balance harmony. Goodness somehow it has nice connotation like Hillary said it's not itself a Arness though even fairy f.l. Symmetry looks like yes proportion but in science we need to have a more precise concept and the concept that we use that's more precise that has something in common with the common usage but has a special case of it and gets amplified in different directions is that symmetry and physics and mathematics means change without change. That seems kind of mysterious and mystical but it can mean something very concrete Einstein's theory of relativity it says that if you ride by the world at a constant velocity any constant velocity although things will look different so some things will be coming at you other things will be moving away faster. That this same physical laws will apply to this new configuration of the world so you can make a change in the way everything looks and but you don't change the laws a simpler example might be helpful here. Where he used to the idea that a circle is a very symmetrical object what does that have to do with change without change while a circle is an object that you can rotate around its center by any angle and although it might have changed in every point in fact moves the circle as a whole design not move and that's what makes it symmetric if you take a more lopsided shape and you rotate it there's no way it won't come back to itself I'm tell you call your hand if you take an equal lateral triangle it'll come around after you turn it one 3rd of the way so it has some symmetry but much less than a circle so that's a concept change without change things that might have changed by don't that picks out special kinds of objects like circles it turns out that very symmetric laws seem to be the laws that nature likes nature likes laws and likes equations that support and Norma's possibilities for transformation where things look different to get different names and different situations are described but the same equations apply. So is it right did I read to you and lived in the house Einstein lived in Princeton Yes yes throughout the 1990 s. We know that we would have done the house where he invited Marian Anderson to come stay when she came to sing in Princeton and it was a segregated city and she couldn't stand any of the nice hotels. Yes that was the house all right amazing it's a nice house. Good. Good yes I still stand so do you it doesn't look large from the street but it's very very long it's a big house and has a beautiful yard yeah I liked it very much. I want to actually point out that you know there was a piece in on December 31st in the Wall Street Journal where they they asked a number of thinkers what to expect in 2016 and that you predicted that we would soon detect gravitational waves which again you I feel more poetically called tremors in space time. And you represent correct very soon yes yeah yeah and I didn't have any inside information but I did know what was publicly available that this instrument was. Going to acquire enough sensitivity to plausibly detect sources that were very likely to be out there in the universe so I wasn't completely confident that we would be found in the year in a year I was very confident it would be found in a few years but as it happened you know it was a matter of months and you know I've made the prediction that. Was and it's a great event for physics and I and I said exciting to bring you this it was that you know definitely it was a beautiful the poetic day as many narratives come together it was 100 years ago that Einstein from very kind of abstract intuitions of beauty incoherence wrote down the modern equations for gravity general relativity theory. Which has been the pattern for many of our successful theories later including our theory of the strong interaction then and this give a new picture of what gravity is due to ignorance due to warping as in space and time extraordinary concept that space and time themselves can be banned and then as part of it kind of excitations in space and time can take on a life of their own Those are gravitational waves that move out spread like ripples on a pond to far away so in principle things that happen way over there can transmit through these waves information to very far away like light waves but that's different kind of thing you're sensitive to but the effects are predicted to be so small that I'm Steinem self had no hope that they would ever be detected. It's another part of the extraordinary progress in physics that we've learned the technology has advanced so that we can detect extraordinarily small subtle the facts. But the fact that physics has advanced to the point where you can. Master nature so well as to detect such tiny effects reliably is just an extraordinary tribute to how well we've come to understand kind of going to your lifetime world that advance and that step change yes yeah now it's actually scary I mean. It's 100 years back to the origin of the prediction of gravitational waves and I've lived more through more than half of them. And I still think of myself as a kid there are a. Short break more conversation with Frank we'll check subscribe to on being on Apple pod casts to listen again and discover produced and edited versions of everything we do support for on being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world learn more at Fetzer dot org. Some people claim jazz is dead others are like Esperanza Spalding still when I look up in the morning if I need something like my soul or with my spirit I want to ask Peterson I want to like I want to eat donuts. Esperanza Spalding d.j. Iyer and the future of jazz. To the best of our knowledge from p r s. This morning. Next time a velocity talk the logic of regret if you were great doing something you can't be happy about any of the consequences of it so if you're happy about something you can't reasonably regret any of the events that led to it exactly I wouldn't exist if there hadn't been an Irish Potato Famine you regret my existence are you happy about the Irish Potato Famine I regret that you can't think more clearly about these things a logic of regret the next time on philosophy talk. This morning unless you are a happy. I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being today with an exploration of beauty the deep structure of reality and deep truths in the human every day with noble physicist Frank we'll check his book a beautiful question is a long meditation on the question does the world and body beautiful ideas this physicist has a poetic way of seeing and naming reality even scientific truths and observations so it's somewhere you say this is against a child full imagery you know y