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i like to
ask questions that i think are deep
and difficult and beautiful the
aesthetic sense of what makes a a
question elegant and beautiful matters a
lot to me and then i try to pick
problems where i can make progress you
know some problems are beautiful but are
sort of impossibly out there so i do
feel that the way you build your great
edifices is by putting bricks in place
the thing is uh very often you can
actually do that for things that you
would think would be impossibly
difficult so it's a matter of just being
creative and bringing to bear tools that
you've learned from different fields and
putting them together in a different way
i'm a theorist and i work in sort of
broadly across multiple areas of physics
theoretical neuroscience and computer
science so you know in my daily work i
move smoothly between all these fields
i'm doing them all at the same time
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my phd and my training was in you know
the fundamental laws of nature the
nature of space and time
uh gravity near black holes and the
early universe
and how you quantize the theory of
gravity so that's a
core component what i do is thinking
about you know basically the foundations
of physics and the fundamentals of what
space and time are
i've clearly been interested throughout
my career in the nature of information
what it is
and how it appears and is processed by
systems in the natural world
i've been interested in questions on the
one hand like
black holes and do they destroy
information basically hawking's famous
paradox you know how is that possible on
the other hand i've been interested in
questions like
how can neural systems take information
from the world encode it and then
transmit it to the central brain there's
another clearly a chain that's been
running through my work which
which has to do with the notion of
complexity i've written a lot series of
papers at various points about how some
kinds of physical dynamics produce
complex states
of matter and others don't basically
going after the question about how
physical and biological processes can
produce complexity
from states that weren't complex to
start with
so overall uh you know i'm interested in
the laws and principles that govern the
organization of systems in nature
whether they be living or non-living and
so i sort of tend to span a rather
enormous range of scales i guess while
there's a lot of talk of
interdisciplinarity in academia in
practice
in fact it's a it's somewhat more rigid
than that because basically you get a
degree in a field you're rewarded for
performance in a field by the standards
of that field so navigating the sort of
doing multiple things um you know that
that kind of career requires some care
in the sense that you have to establish
street cred in the discipline separately
the people in each field except that
you're worthy of the standard of being
an expert in that field maybe knowledge
doesn't have to be cut that way
when i was like seven i think we were
living in calcutta in india we used to
go to the market and they had these uh
booksellers i saw how and why wonderbook
lives the famous scientists i remember
thinking wow you can do this
it just seemed amazing right i mean
these people just sat around and figured
out what the world was like
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physics as a discipline i used to see it
anyway at the most fundamental right
it's the basic laws from which
everything else is built so it was clear
i'd be a physicist but i think as i
began to go through high school and
learned to program machines and stuff
like that it occurred to me that you
know if computers that i could program
were constrained in what they could do
by the nature of the circuits they have
then surely i am too so i began to feel
that there was a problem with my
understanding of the laws of nature and
that i clearly needed to understand how
we're able to think the thoughts that
we're able to think
i was a junior fellow of something
called the harvard society fellows which
is not affiliated to any particular lab
you can do whatever you want so i use
that freedom to sort of moonlight in
neuroscience labs and basically learn
the subject and by the time you know i
had amassed a different toolkit i would
say than most people i knew lots of
things in theoretical physics i knew
lots of math i knew tons of computer
science
one of my first papers as a graduate
student occurred because i had just
learned general relativity and therefore
knew how to work uh describe the
mathematics of differential geometry and
curved spaces and at the same time i had
been thinking about the question of
occam's razor is there a mathematical
reason
why a simple explanation in some sense
is actually a better description of a
phenomenon and i started thinking about
the geometry of the space of
mathematical models as explanations
using the tools i just learned by
studying general relativity and that was
my first paper as a graduate student and
you know it's very well cited and all
that kind of stuff and i really enjoyed
that because it was just putting
together pieces that people hadn't
really put together before and kind of
assembling these all into a story
i have many tools in the toolkit so with
my students in postdocs we've been
basically deploying those tools when we
were thinking about the circuits in your
brain there's something called the grid
cell system that make the maps that you
have of the world we realized that the
self-organizing dynamics of this neural
circuit is an analogy of classic
self-organizing problems in condensed
matter physics in particular something
called the frenkel contra over model
that we were able to take and say oh
great what we need is a two-dimensional
generalization of this thing so once we
realized that we were able to guess
how to organize a system of neurons to
have a dynamics to produce these kinds
of hierarchical maps of the world so the
idea came directly from knowing some
problems in condensed matter physics
for me literature matters a great deal
you know i spent much of my childhood
summers you know reading books my
imagination was basically formed by
reading these stories
the liberal arts really are getting
short shrift in our world today i think
it's extremely dangerous
because i don't think
science and technology teach us how to
live i think the liberal arts teach us
how to live
the dangers of becoming unmoored from
our cultures and our histories and our
past
are on ample display around the world if
there isn't a healthy society to support
science science will die
even the history of science and
sociology of science matters we often
have this heroic narrative of you know
the world was in darkness and then great
person x came along and had this sort of
deep insight and then all of a sudden
all was good and we knew something
that's not the way science works there's
this sea of developments that made that
possible and that matters
in moon teaching what i do is i try to
use literary examples and analogies
every week in addition to the sort of
science stuff we would keep aside half
of one class to read something from
literature and something to
contextualize
so this is in the first chapter of
swan's way the first book of the
remembrance of things passed by marcel
proust
so he says
for many years already everything about
comrade had ceased to exist for me when
one day in winter as i returned home my
mother seeing that i was cold suggested
that i have a little tea
she sent for one of the squat plump
cakes called petit madeleine that look
as though they have been molded in the
grooved valve of a scallop shell but at
that very instant when the mouthful of
tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my
palate i quivered
suddenly the memory appeared
that taste was the taste of the little
piece of madeleine which on sunday
mornings at kombre my aunt leone would
give me after dipping in her infusion of
tea or lime blossom
i think it's just a remarkable
document about the power
of taste and smell to evoke memories
science is great but uh you know every
time you walk around it's good to know
what's around you what made the world
what makes the world and sustains the
world is the
culture and society of the people around
you
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