Allan Adams. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Allan Adams “became a physicist to understand how the world works at its most fundamental level.” Adams, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT, points out that the things we’ve learned so far are pretty incredible: We know the universe began just 13.8 billion years ago, and have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. We have a recipe for all the particles in the universe.

But to Adams, the most spectacular idea in modern physics is something called holography. He explains, “It reinterprets the structure of space and time, challenges our very notions of what it means to be fundamental.”

The story starts with black holes. By definition, black holes are things from which nothing can escape — and they aren’t just figments of our imagination, they really exist. Now, if you look straight at a black hole, what would you see? You’d think there would be nothing — the whole point is that nothing gets out. But it turns out to be more complicated.

To help think about it, imagine a fish swimming up a waterfall. As the fish gets closer to the waterfall it has to swim faster and faster. Eventually it hits a point of no return, where it can’t swim fast enough to escape. This is the horizon. No fish that falls through the horizon will make it back.

But what happens beyond? If you were a fish upstream, you would never know, since no fish that goes through ever returns. “Does the waterfall continue forever? Does the fish get torn apart? Is there another pond on the other side?”

This is a perfect metaphor for black holes, but what’s flowing into the black hole is space itself. As you fall into a black hole, eventually you reach a point where even the speed of light isn’t enough to escape. But, asks Adams, “What happens behind the horizon of the black hole?” It turns out you can’t just calculate the answer, the math breaks down — “You get things like: The probability that I’ll get pulled into the black hole and turned into a giraffe is 300%. That’s nonsense.”

But maybe we can see what’s happening as something falls in? So strap a flashlight to the fish and throw it in. As it gets closer, the light has to work harder, so they take longer and longer and are weaker and weaker. Eventually the light is just stopped. We never see anything fall into a black hole, it’s just smeared on the surface.

The amazing part, though, is that according to the fish nothing interesting happens. It just keeps going and sailing through the horizon, and the flashlight keeps going. So there are two descriptions, a fish flying through three dimensions, or a fish smeared on the surface of a black hole. “That’s kind of problematic,” says Adams, “Who are you going to believe, me or the fish?” The utterly remarkable answer is that both are right. The two descriptions turn out to be mathematically identical. Completely the same. But it turns out to be true. A description of a universe in three dimensions with gravity is identical to a universe in two dimensions without gravity. “That might sound strange, but to a trained theoretical physicist who hears it for the first time, it sounds like the ravings of a complete lunatic.”

It turns out to get even stranger yet. The surface of the black hole turns out to behave like a quantum liquid, and that behavior shows up in all sorts of other places: in the fireball after the Big Bang, in cold gases of atoms, in superconductors. All these phenomena are related.

But the thing that really, really thrills Adams the most is what it does to our understanding of what the world is and what it does. We have an intuitive sense that the components, particles interacting with forces moving through three dimensions, are fundamental. But it turns out that maybe they’re not fundamental at all. There is no single answer to the basic question “How many dimensions are there?” It turns out it depends on how you ask the question — not randomly or any which way, but there isn’t just one answer, and that’s a profound change to how we view the world.

Allan Adams. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In a surprise talk tonight, Allan Adams took the stage to explain a remarkable discovery announced just yesterday. And since he’s here and is amazing, Randall Munroe of xkcd illustrated the talk.

As Adams tells us, if you look into the night sky, you see stars … and if you look further, you see more stars. Further, galaxies. Further, nothing.

And if you look even further, “Finally you see a faint afterglow. The afterglow of the Big Bang.” This is the Cosmic Microwave Background. Since its beginning, it’s had a long time to cool down, 13.7 billion years, so it’s only 2.7 degrees Kelvin. But we’ve mapped it, and the shocking thing is that it’s almost completely uniform, it’s almost the same in any direction. But there are small differences, only 10 parts in a million. And that’s important because, Adams says, “Where it was a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there’s more stuff, we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies.”

Now that’s cool. “But what they found on Monday is cooler.”

Imagine you strike a bell. It rings, and then it fades and fades and fades. The early universe was like that, but the bell was the fabric of spacetime, and the hammer was quantum mechanics. Early on, gravitational waves put a slight twist on the afterglow, and the collaborators on the experiment BICEP2 put in three years at the South Pole looking for this ringing. And they found it.

But it gets even better. The new observation provides the first clear support for the theory of inflation, the idea that in the early universe, a tiny pocket expanded at a tremendous rate, becoming the universe we see. “The reason this is so exciting” says Adams, “is that it tells us we are one large bubble surrounded by something else. It’s a theory that’s been around for a while. We never thought we’d see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence.”

Read more: A detailed explanation from TED Fellow Renee Hlozek >>

Also watch: One of the scientists who predicted this, at the moment he hears the news >>

He does it with two metaphors. One from the beginning till now, and another from now till the end.

Brian Greene. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The universe today is 13.8 billion years old, and it can be very hard to get our minds around that number. So Greene uses a metaphor pioneered by Carl Sagan. Imagine that we’re part of a single calendar year. All of cosmic history compressed into a single calendar year. On this calendar:

• May 12, the Milky Way is formed.
• Sept 2nd, the Earth is formed.
• 11:40pm New Year’s Eve, Humans evolve.
• 11:44pm, we domesticate fire.
• 11:58pm the first cave paintings are made.
• 11:59:49pm writing is developed, so all of recorded history takes place in the last 10 seconds.
• 11:59:58, the Renaissance.
• 11:59:59, modern science begins, allowing us to figure this all out.

And to top it off, that science includes the observations that led to the discovery that there was a Big Bang in the first place. Those were done by Edwin Hubble, “an Oxford-trained lawyer who changed to become an astronomer, which to me means there’s hope for absolutely everyone.”

Brian Greene. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The future

For the future, we can now make predictions. Greene switches to a metaphor based in space, rather than time. He uses the Empire State Building. Imagine that each floor represents 10 times more time than the previous one. So the first floor is 1 year, the next 10 years, the third 100 years, and so on. All of history till now reaches to just above the 10th floor. On this building, physicists predict a future that looks like this:

• On the 11th floor the Sun gets red and engulfs the inner planets, possibly including the Earth.
• On the 12th floor, galaxies driven away by the expansion of the universe, leaving ours in the darkness.
• On the 14th floor stars have used up nuclear fuel and go dark.
• On the 20th floor, if it wasn’t already swallowed, the Earth will spiral into the dark sun.
• On the 30th floor, any stars left will fall into central black hole of galaxies.
• On the 37th floor, protons will disintegrate.
• Between the 68th floor and the peak, black holes will “…evaporate and spew out a a bath of particles that will waft through an ever larger and ever colder cosmos.”

Greene concludes, “What then does it all mean? Will life persist?… I don’t know, no one does. But I’d like to think that when the last human is about to leave a soon to be uninhabitable planet Earth looks back, she’s smiling at a job well done, proud to be part of a species that every so often could lift itself above the challenges of survival… and unravel so many profound mysteries of the cosmos.”

TED Fellow Renée Hlozek — currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University — recently established a fund and mentoring program to bring young South African female science undergraduates to the US for summer research. The mentorship’s first recipient, Julia Healy, just completed four weeks working alongside Hlozek at Princeton. Here, the two tell us about the experience.

What is the Hope Network, and the Hope-Princeton Exchange?

Renée Hlozek: The Hope Network was started by me and some female friends a few years ago in South Africa as a way to encourage female students in the physical and natural sciences, engineering and medicine. We realized that by making a small contribution each, we could actually start a scholarship! The program assists female students in their fourth (and final) year of undergraduate studies. I realized that while I can help financially, I could also help in the mentoring aspect of the fellowship. So together with the Hope Network, I started the Hope-Princeton exchange, which funded Julia’s trip to the US to work with me for four weeks over the US summer — or South African winter — holiday. It is something I hope to be able to continue in years to come, and to expand to other institutions in the US. I’m lucky to have the support of my department in this, and my hope is that other institutions will also see this as a great opportunity to mentor students from South Africa.

Tell us about the student you brought over. What was the process, and how did you choose Julia?

RH: Once I realized that I could fund one trip, the next stage was putting out a call through my contacts in South African universities for students who wanted to work on astronomy projects over the summer. We put out the call to third and fourth year students, and got applications from such fields as engineering and mathematics. There was a requirement on the grades of the applicants, to make sure that the student could handle the mathematics and discussion required over the summer, but what was important for me was also the personal statement. Julia expressed her enthusiasm for learning and astronomy very well, and her initiative shone through too — she has worked on and led many projects both within and outside her academic environment.

What did you work on together?

RH: We decided to do a stacking analysis in the recent maps from the Planck satellite, to look for the signal from dusty galaxies detected in other wavelength bands. This project is important because it will teach us about the properties of these galaxies which live far away from us, through the light they give off in the microwave regime of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Julia came to work with me during the astrophysics department’s undergraduate summer research program, which I run with Dave Spiegel and Emily Rauscher, two other postdocs here in Princeton. So there was a group of 10 other students who were also doing research projects for the first time. I think this made a natural environment for her to fit into, and also meant that she made her first international colleagues — something I really appreciated when I was starting out my research career. My hope with this exchange is that South African students are reminded that the research world is international, and that they form an integral part of the global network.

Julia Healy, the Hope-Princeton Exchange’s first recipient.

Julia, tell us about your experience.

Julia Healy: The four weeks I spent at Princeton were a great learning experience. I am working on a project with Renée looking for dusty red galaxies in the cosmic microwave background. There were so many different opportunities for me to learn: listening to the discussions about the latest research papers over coffee, I was able to absorb a little bit about the content however it often went over my head. And I was able to pick up how to write a good research paper. The seminars held on Tuesdays at lunch exposed me to ongoing research in the Princeton astrophysics department as well as taught me some invaluable skills, such as how to present a research paper to a group of people.

I learnt a lot about conducting science research and the environment in which it is conducted — lots of the myths surrounding what the typical researcher is like have been broken. I had lots of fun learning new things every day, and am more certain now that I want to continue into postgraduate research. By the end of the four weeks, I did not want to leave — I was quite happy to continue working. I am continuing with the work now that I am back in Cape Town.

And Renée, how did this initial experience inform how you plan to run this exchange in the future?

RH: This pilot was super useful to me, and gave me a lot of insight into how to organize things. I was pleased that Julia had a group to work with, and I will continue to include the students in our summer program. The only challenge is that for Julia it is the South African winter holiday, and so she had to leave after four weeks, rather than experiencing the full nine weeks that the US students get in our program. We are continuing to work together now, though. Personally, I felt enriched by this experience and only hope we can bring more students over next summer!

As part of TEDxCERN, physicists from the famous institution, home of  the Large Hadron Collider (and birthplace of the Word Wide Web), teamed up with animators from TED-Ed to create easy-to-understand animated lessons that explain concepts like dark matter, big data and the Higgs boson in lay terms.

Below, watch all five animations and find out: How did the universe begin? What’s up with antimatter? And why is everyone so excited about the Higgs boson? Enjoyable whether you are new to these terms or have been studying them for years.

The beginning of the universe, for beginners. (Lesson by Tom Whyntie, animation by Hornet Inc.)
How did the universe begin — and how is it expanding? CERN physicist Tom Whyntie shows how cosmologists and particle physicists explore these questions by replicating the heat, energy and activity of the first few seconds of our universe, from right after the Big Bang.

Exploration on the Big Data frontier. (Lesson by Tim Smith, animation by TED-Ed.)
There is a mind-boggling amount of data floating around our society. Physicists at CERN have been pondering how to store and share their data for decades – stimulating globalization of the internet along the way, while “solving” their big data problem. Tim Smith plots CERN’s involvement with big data from 50 years ago to today.

Dark matter: The matter we can’t see. (Lesson by James Gillies, animation by TED-Ed.)
The Greeks had a simple and elegant formula for the universe: earth, fire, wind and water. Turns out there’s more to it than that — a lot more. Visible matter (and that goes beyond the four Greek elements) comprises only 4% of the universe. CERN scientist James Gillies tells us what accounts for the remaining 96% (dark matter and dark energy) and how we might go about detecting it.

What happened to antimatter? (Lesson by Rolf Landua, animation by TED-Ed.)
Particles come in pairs, which is why there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the universe. Yet scientists have not been able to detect antimatter in the visible universe. Where is this missing particle? CERN scientist Rolf Landua returns to the seconds after the Big Bang to explain the disparity that allows humans to exist today.

The basics of boson. (Lesson by Dave Barney and Steven Goldfarb, animation by Jeanette Nørgaard.)
In 2012, scientists at CERN discovered evidence of the Higgs boson. The what? The Higgs boson is one of two types of fundamental particles, and it’s a particular game-changer in the field of particle physics, proving how particles gain mass. Using the Socratic method, CERN scientists Dave Barney and Steve Goldfarb explain the exciting implications of the Higgs boson.

It’s just a teeny, tiny question: How did the universe begin?

Today, TED-Ed has unveiled a new lesson that answers this in less than four minutes, “The beginning of the universe, for beginners.” This is the first of five animated lessons developed by CERN scientists and brought to life by TED-Ed’s talented animators. The other four animations – which tackle the topics of Dark Matter, Anti-Matter, Big Data and the Higgs Boson — will premiere at TEDxCERN on May 3rd and will be shared on TED-Ed that same day.

The lesson above, “The beginning of the universe, for beginners,” was conceived by CERN physicist Tom Whyntie. It explains how cosmologists and particle physicists explore questions like, “How is the universe expanding?” by replicating the heat, energy and activity of the first few seconds of our universe — immediately following the Big Bang.

To see the premiere of the next four lessons in real time, tune in to the TEDxCERN live webcast on May 3rd, from 14:00 to 20:00 (CEST). It will be available to the public here »

TEDxCERN will feature talks from scientists and big thinkers of all kinds. For more information on TEDxCERN, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

An artist’s rendering of the Planck satellite. Courtesy of: ESA

Today—March 21, 2013—the much-anticipated cosmological results from the Planck satellite have been released. In a recent blog post on her own website, TED Fellow and cosmologist Renée Hlozek describes why this is a big day for astrophysics and cosmology. We asked her to explain what the excitement is all about.

“Planck is the ‘next generation’ satellite that measures the tiny fluctuations in the temperature and polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – which is light that comes from shortly after the Big Bang, and has been travelling towards us for over 13 billion years,” she says.

“Planck has been operating in space since 2009, and will dramatically increase the precision with which we can measure this radiation, which tells us about the physical conditions of the universe at very early times. We use this data to fit a cosmological model, to figure out what the universe is made of, its properties and how it is changing with time. So today is a big day because it further refines our picture of where we came from and where we are going on the grandest scales imaginable!”

Planck results are now available at the Planck Legacy Archive »

TED Fellow Renée Hlozek speaks at TED2013. Photo: Ryan Lash

Gazing up at the night sky is always both humbling and thrilling. In this episode of TED Radio Hour, you’ll hear from speakers who share a sense of wonder and curiosity about our place in the universe. Phil Plait breaks down how we can defend Earth from an asteroid. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute explains why it’s crucial for humans here on earth to continue searching for sentient beings in the cosmos. And Cosmologist Brian Greene unravels the strange tale of dark matter and why our universe may be one of the many in the “multiverse.”

Check your local NPR schedule to find out when the show airs today, or listen via NPR’s website »

Or head to iTunes where the podcast is available now »

What is it about space and the investigation of dark matter and antimatter that captures your imagination?

Well to me, the question is, Why are we here? Or, why am I the way I am? And what made me the way I am? And that in itself is a cosmological question. It’s clear that a very big mechanism is at hand to make this universe exactly the way it is.

We know that about only 4 percent of the universe is made up of matter like us. And then there is something really mysterious called dark energy, which is making the universe expand and accounts for 73 percent of the energy of the universe. And then there’s this other part, about 23 percent, which is called dark matter and is mostly what is holding galaxies together. So most of the matter in the universe is actually dark matter. And that’s pretty amazing stuff.

And it’s fascinating to me to think that there is some matter that’s passing through me and I don’t even feel it — and we can even calculate its speed, something like 380 km per second. But we don’t know what it is — that’s dark matter. And then to think, Why am I made of matter? Why not antimatter? Is there a reason? Maybe there is a reason. Maybe there is something really fundamental about an asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but we haven’t figured it out yet. And I find many things fascinating, like neutrinos. There are about a trillion of them passing through me right now just about the speed of light, and that gives me goosebumps.

I’m really excited that physics could actually figure out what dark matter is in my lifetime, and so I want to contribute to that effort. I left Turkey 15 years ago to study physics at MIT, along with music and mathematics. During my time there, I got involved with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a particle physics experiment that was to be installed on the International Space Station. I started my PhD at MIT on the AMS, but after the Columbia accident, the future of shuttle missions became uncertain. So I decided to leave MIT and went to Oxford for my PhD. There, I worked on the ATLAS experiment, one of the Large Hadron Collider’s four big experiments. At Oxford we built the heart of the detector — the semiconductor tracker. And I worked underground for some years at CERN.

What were you looking for there?

Again, dark matter, in essence. But the Large Hadron Collider serves multiple purposes. For instance, we are also looking for the Higgs particle. We’re looking for extra dimensions, which might explain why gravity is so weak in the universe. After working at CERN for seven years — part of it as a fellow there and through various universities — I decided I missed home. So I accepted a faculty position here at METU, the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. I now divide my time between teaching as an associate professor here and conducting research at CERN. I’ve also rejoined the AMS project because it finally went to the International Space Station in May last year.

What does the AMS do?

The AMS is taking cosmic ray data. The universe produces high-energy cosmic rays — high-energy particles in stellar explosions, supernovas, and plasma jets in the galaxy. They come and impinge on the Earth and hit the atmosphere. If we can catch these particles out in space on the International Space Station, we can learn a lot about the universe from them. And maybe we can learn more about dark matter. But we’re looking for many different things, trying to understand more about the universe. If we found an anti-helium nucleus, for example, it would be really exciting. If were to find an anti-carbon atom, this could only be made in an anti-star, and an anti-star could only probably exist in an anti-galaxy. And that would be a very interesting find.

How can you get your head around something like an anti-galaxy? What does that mean?

Imagine a galaxy completely made of antimatter instead of matter, which is just really far away, so it doesn’t interact with us. If it were near, parts of it would be annihilated and we would see that signal. Antimatter is the opposite of matter — when matter and antimatter come together, they annihilate to two photons. At CERN we can actually produce antimatter, but in very, very small quantities, in hundreds of atoms. But we can’t store it for very long because you have to capture it somehow, and it eventually hits the walls of the container and then just gets annihilated. But we have learned that the laws of physics are very nearly the same for matter and antimatter. There may be a cluster of antimatter galaxies hanging out there somewhere. But matter and anti-matter behave similarly, so we may not have figured out it exists because light from it looks the same.

I have a group now working on understanding the data coming from the AMS detector with the aim of later analysis. My students are really excited to be working on data coming from space, as you can imagine. Some of them will soon be working at the AMS POCC (Payload Operation Control Center) at CERN this summer and are very excited about that, too.

Tell us about CERN’s Accelerating Science exhibition, which you helped bring to Ankara. Why was it important for you to bring this exhibition to Turkey?

When I came back to Turkey, I found that there was a lot of misinformation about CERN here. I think Turkish newspapers copied a lot of what the British tabloids have written about CERN, that it would destroy the universe. What people don’t realize is that we’re trying to answer very fundamental questions about the universe, but at the same time this science has an impact on their lives. When we do cutting-edge science, we end up developing technologies that the world didn’t know yet that it needed — for example, the World Wide Web was developed at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee. Another example is Positron Emission Tomography (PET) machines. Most people think antimatter is very special, but positron is simply the antimatter of electron. We use it for tomography — for medical imaging. Many people don’t even know this.

Fundamental science for its own sake eventually leads to great technological advancements. So it’s absolutely worth asking the questions. That’s what the exhibition is about. It also shows how technology is developing at CERN, and new technology is redeveloping — such as superconducting technologies — as well as new particle detection technologies and how they eventually could affect our lives.

Some people ask me, What good is dark matter? Well, we don’t know what dark matter is, so I can’t answer that question. But once we do know, maybe we will figure out a way to use it. And I think people do leave this exhibition with a greater appreciation of the value of fundamental science.

Has it been well received?

Yes. About 600 to 700 people visit it every day. When CERN’s director general, Dr Heuer, came to open the exhibition, the auditorium, which seats 900 people, was packed. Really, people were hanging from the stairs, 200 standing in the back.

It is the first time this exhibition has traveled outside the CERN member states. Turkey has applied to become a member of CERN. I absolutely support this idea because Turkey could really benefit, especially from technology transfer as well as educational and fundamental science programs.

Young people especially love it. The exhibition covers about 400 square meters and has different rooms with interactive exhibits. There’s a film about the evolutionary stages of the universe, which is projected onto the ground, so it feels like you’re falling into it. There are games and a “Spacebook” feature where fundamental particles each have a Facebook page, and they interact. We have games, such as building your own accelerator, changing its energy and seeing what particles come out. And there’s a 3D model of the Large Hadron Collider, of the ATLAS detector, with collisions coming out of the center, so it looks pretty cool.

The visitors don’t always understand everything, but they do walk away with a sense of wonder, because the exhibition talks about the universe and describes the scale of what we don’t know. We have volunteer guides who answer questions. Generally, we convey the message that we haven’t solved all the mysteries of the universe — there’s much to be done, and this opens the possibility of contributing to the effort. They like that, especially the young people.

What about your life as a musician? Did you give that up for the stars, or does music dovetail with your life in science?

It’s an extremely integral part of my life. I think I would be half a person if I were to leave music alone. In almost every culture, there is some music that goes hand-in-hand with science, because we get down to the mystical with science — and we also reach that mystical aspect with music. When the two go together, it can take us to a deeper dimension.

Actually, at the exhibition’s opening ceremony, Burcu Karadag — an amazing ney player — Talat Er, Ahmet İzgi and Orkun Eruygun played some mystical Turkish classical music while we showed images from the Hubble telescope. It was magic.

What music do you think best expresses the nature of the cosmos?

That’s a very hard question. I think there’s a lot of music that goes to the heart of it. The classical answer is Bach, as I’m sure many people would say. But I think that’s because we’re steeped in Western culture.

Why do you suppose everyone says Bach? Do you think there’s a real structural basis for that?

Clearly, Bach’s music has mathematical structures that are inherent in wave theory. I teach quantum mechanics, and the first thing we do before quantum mechanics is wave mechanics, because we model all particles as waves and particles at the same time. We then construct this thing called the wave function — which is how it turns out quantum mechanical particles behave. But before you can do that, you have to understand the classical wave. When you solve this famous wave equation, you immediately get these harmonics that form the basis of scales and major triads. How particles resonate in a cavity is equivalent to solving how the piano string vibrates. And that universality is amazing.

But how those scales have formed can also have many different colors. So the Western scale is an example scale, but is not the only scale that fits into that wave theory. We now mostly use the equal temperament in Western music rather than the well-tempered scale, so that we can play in many tonalities or scales. Turkish music has many different scales, not just the classical scales. In Turkish classical music, we use in-between notes. For example, between an A and a B in Turkish music, you can have many different notes. And using those in-between notes, you can make new scales. While to a Western ear this sounds very strange initially, these notes actually exist as harmonics of the lower notes and are therefore quite natural. We just don’t use them in the West because over time we have developed well-tempered and equal-tempered scales, which have other practicalities such as major and minor triads and, in the case of equal temperament, being able to transpose music.

Actually, when people hear Bach the way that Bach meant it to be, it actually sounds very different, because now we’ve got these perfect equal-tempered scales, and equal-tempered scales are not what Bach used to use. He used well-tempered scales some of the time, tuned A to around 415Hz instead of the 440Hz we generically use now.

I think there is no absolute answer as to which music best expresses the cosmic connection. Maybe Bach is the best answer in the Western tonalities, but I think that Turkish classical music, which uses the very mystical ney and some of these in-between notes, also goes a long way. And yes, maybe Tuvan throat singing or African djembe music gets there too! Why not?

How have you continued to be involved with the TED Fellows?

We have a new arts program at CERN called Collide at CERN. Instead of colliding particles, CERN decided to collide scientists and artists. I’ve helped some of the TED Fellows apply to that. Julie Freeman — who maps out fish movements and translates that to music — visited, and stayed for two days. I’ve invited a few other Fellows, and I hope they’ll come as well.

I do think we need to collide arts and science again somehow. I have a very long-term view on this; it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, but I think we need a new Renaissance. You know how Renaissance artists used to know so much science and its scientists used to be also artists? Now the two have fallen apart. Over the last hundred years, especially, science has gotten so wrapped up and compartmentalized, I think it’s no longer on the mind of the artist or the public. And it’s a shame, because both dig into the mystic — both ask the quintessential question of why are we here. With art and science disconnected, there’s an aspect of understanding we’re missing out on.