- [Reporter] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(air whooshes) (soft music) - I study string theory which is the interface between particle physics and gravity.
Particle physics is the study of the microscopic details of all the things you see around you, whether it's solids or liquids or the silicon in your computers' transistors.
Gravity is the study of what keeps us on the earth and what keeps galaxies orbiting around each other and the large scale structure of the universe.
So why are these two things related to each other?
The ultra small and the ultra large?
Early in the history of the universe, everything was very dense and very hot and very compact and understanding how that relates to the large scale structure, what we see, that's what string theory tries to understand.
It's hard to summarize the history of the universe in 30 seconds.
(laughs) (air whooshes) (soft music) So I'm a glider pilot.
It's one of my favorite things in the world to do.
In the glider, of course you have no engine.
So how do you get altitude?
How do you keep flying forward?
You're always slowly falling down through the air.
So the trick is to find air that's rising faster than you're going down through that air.
So it's sort of like if you imagine taking a ping pong ball.
The ping pong ball has no engine, it's falling.
But if you blow, you can shoot the ping pong ball upwards.
So you can do exactly the same thing in the glider, you just have to find air that's going up.
(blows air) Of course, air is transparent so that's maybe not so trivial.
So the trick in flying a glider is being able to look at the sky, look at the ground and anticipate where there's gonna be upward welling of air.
When you have hot asphalt surrounded by trees you get a convection current.
So as a glider pilot, you dive for that spot and when you get the lift, you know it 'cause the whole plane just gets pushed up.
You feel viscerally the whole thing, just lifting you and boom, you're in lift.
That's fantastic.
So then you circle in the lift and up you go.
(air whooshing) My first solo flight, I was jumping at the bit.
You're not allowed to fly solo in a glider in the US until you're 14 years old.
So on my 14th birthday I skipped school and we went out into the countryside.
I flew the glider and my dad was my tow-pilot, which was really cool, he's a terrific pilot.
He was a jungle hopping guy, crazy, no fear.
Hi dad.
And I was terrified, oh, I was terrified.
But the minute the tow rope goes tight, all the nerves go away.
So we towed up to a couple thousand feet.
My dad waved me off and off I went.
So normally what you do, when you're solo you land, but I cut lift and it was a beautiful day.
So why not stick around for a little bit?
Meanwhile, my mom is down on the ground going, "oh, please land, oh, please land."
So I figure this is probably not a very good idea and came back and landed.
I also remember vividly that my mom was the first person that hugged me, which was totally delightful.
(lady chuckles) (air whooshes) (soft music) If I go the long way, my walk to work involves walking along the Charles River.
Every time I walk past the river, I stare at the waves.
I'm a total junkie for waves.
I can spend hours just watching the waves and trying to intuit the patterns.
I just get a thrill from watching the complicated patterns evolving and changing.
And Rebecca, my wife, she has to drag me along when we walk across the bridge.
My wife also indulges me in this.
So we have pictures of waves all over the house which are just totally spectacularly beautiful.
When I was an undergraduate there was a course called The Physics of Waves.
And at the time I was thinking, "waves, what a boring thing."
Quantum mechanics is the cool stuff.
I wanna learn string theory.
And as I've grown as a scientist waves are it.
The way we describe particles in particle physics is in terms of complicated waves.
If you study the physics of electrons in a superconductor it's very similar to the physics of waves on the surface of the Charles.
Sound waves and air waves, it's very similar to the physics of waves and water.
And these simple structures turn out to be incredibly powerful organizing principles for describing all sorts of wonderful things.
And the idea that some simple little object that you can describe very, very easily and very well can underlie enormous wealth of complexity, that's power.
It means you can make beautiful things starting with simple ingredients.
Just spectacular.
Yeah, I love waves.
(air whooshes) (soft music) Joy, finding joy in the sky.
I like Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park" just because he was a source for chaos.
I like calling them awesome conductors 'cause they're way better than just super.
Every day, many times, many times every day.
Eight hours and that was a 700 kilometer flight out of Menden, it was beautiful.
Probably my mom.
She does good things, she's a good person.
Why wind?
Why engine?
Come on.
Oh, blackboard, oh, Blackboard.
Tiny bacteria, billions of years ago fall to the bottom of the ocean, turned into chalk.
Other rock gets metamorphosed, we take some of it and stick it on the wall.
We take the other bit of rock.
We rub it against each other and we're doing theoretical physics.
How cool is that?
Amelia Earhart, Amelia Earhart really pushed things more broadly than just flying.
I admire her.
You can do it.
(soft music)