full interview_stephon alexander_1.mp3
Stephon Alexander [00:00:00] I'm Stephon Alexander, I'm a theoretical physicist and a musician.
Speaker 2 [00:00:08] What does a theoretical physicist do all day?
Stephon Alexander [00:00:13] We stare at the sky, no. A theoretical physicist ponders the physical world in terms of, through the lens of theory. So we try to understand the complexities of the world and try to relate it to simple things. That's a bad answer. That is a hard question.
Speaker 2 [00:00:35] Two seconds here, and you'll notice we have this. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, let's do this off. Actually, we've got something to do. Well then, when somebody asks you a cocktail party question, you know, what do you do? Unless they're other physicists, they probably don't know. So what would you say?
Stephon Alexander [00:01:06] What do I do? I need to think about that. It's a hard question. I wrote an entire book about what I do and I took a book to do it. As a theoretical physicist, I look at the current laws as it exists to explain the physical world, look for where they fail in explaining phenomena, we sometimes might call it anomalies, and try to improve those theories. And sometimes we use mathematics as a tool, we use the imagination, and sometimes I actually use my music.
Speaker 2 [00:01:51] Tell us about that, music and physical.
Stephon Alexander [00:01:55] Music and physics, they were one at the very birth of Western science with the Pythagoreans. Music of the Sears. Um, let me answer the question again. You guys have to be, we'll be editing this stuff.
Speaker 2 [00:02:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it. A lot of this is what you want to talk about, okay? You know, you do a lot of things. We have a lot questions, but we want you to feel comfortable. I mean, we're interested in, I can just tell you, we are interested in our series, which is about art and science and how we inform each other, how we help each other in what they share and also maybe what they don't share and you're kind of a good example of the two tracks working together. So we just want you share your feelings about that. Okay.
Stephon Alexander [00:02:44] Okay, okay. Um, so you...
Speaker 2 [00:02:48] So you don't, I don't even have to ask you a specific question as much as I'm interested in how does your music help your physics life, how does physics help your music life, you talked about imagination, just curious, you can riff on this.
Stephon Alexander [00:03:01] At first, as a young person, my music and my pursuit in the sciences were separate and very divergent. But as I got older, those two worlds started to overlap for many reasons.
Speaker 2 [00:03:24] So just tell us about it, it's good, tell us a bit about it.
Stephon Alexander [00:03:26] Um. I think the first time I start to think about the music science connection, the music physics connection was when I heard John Coltrane's The Giant Step. I heard it when I was a teenager, when I really started listening to that and started to study that as a saxophonist, and it's something I still study. I had this idea that Coltrane was exploring more than just jazz patterns and scales and chords, right? I had the intuition that there was something mathematical, something beautiful, something about him trying to create a new structure in music informed by physics. That was a hunch. And so I took it on myself to sort of do my own research on that and to try to figure that out. And it turned out much later on that I did discover that Coltrane was highly influenced with Albert Einstein and explored some of the principles such as the symmetry principles that Einstein used to formulate his theories of relativity. And so that started getting me to look for other connections, other sort of. Theories, I started to, the same way I would look at my physical theories as an object of theorizing, I start to look at music that way, especially jazz improvisation. And there's nothing new about that because jazz musicians, in some ways, when they analyze, when they do some analysis to figure out how to strategize an improvisation. Chord changes and what notes are possible, what notes to avoid. There's some planning and practice that goes behind that. That's very similar to what I do as a theoretical physicist, except instead of notes and chords, we look at the structures of the laws and the mathematics behind it and the intuition. Another tool that I as a theoretic physicist engage in that others do too. Comes from Einstein's tradition of the Gidankin thought experiment. And the idea there is that sometimes we want to liberate ourselves from the math and imagine worlds or situations and experiments that cannot be performed on Earth to sort of figure well, you know, maybe a paradox that needs to be resolved. Sometimes that's a very irrational process and it can be a very improvisational process. So that's another overlap with sort of why I'm so attracted to jazz music because improvisation is at the focus of jazz. And so, another place I find, you know, my overlap, the way my jazz and my music and, you know. Say my, my. Playing music and practicing music and thinking about music and improvisation informs my physics is I think the practice of actually improvising in real time with other musicians it's a form of training maybe of practice to get my mind fluid enough to deal with my physics So in other words... When one is improvising, in real time and in the moment, anything, so when one is improvising, you're doing your best to play in the changes and do something interesting, do something musical, and you might make a mistake. And in real-time, you have to deal with that mistake and make that wrong or right. So I think that, you know... Playing jazz for me trains me to not get too attached to being wrong because you're gonna be wrong. You gotta do something about it. And you're in front of other people being wrong, right? So you're going to be embarrassed too. So I think that when I approach my physics research, I am less concerned because of this practice in my improvisational life as a jazz musician. I'm less, if I make a mistake or I do something maybe that I appear to be dumb or I make a math error or what have you, I'm a less hard on myself. I think that that flexibility, that fluidity maybe that the improvisation lends itself to in my physics research allows me to maybe explore more widely without being too concerned about being wrong. Right? So, that's I think... One place, I think, that my practice as a jazz musician informs how I do my physics. Not to say that others don't, without a jazz practice, don't function in the same way, But that's just how it is to me.
Speaker 2 [00:08:50] So it's interesting how they're hearing the noise here. Yeah. You talked about, I mean, I would think that physics is, in fact, very rule-bound and rigid, is it not? And it's not like it probably is. You can improvise with physics. Convince me of the-
Stephon Alexander [00:09:08] Yeah, so the field that I work in uses some of the most beautiful and daunting mathematics, differential geometry, topology, multivariable calculus, tensor analysis, all this really beautiful, high-tech mass, okay? And so the structures that we work with have rules. I like to think about those structures and that mathematics as a palette that a painter might have. And then when you use that as your palette to paint something hopefully new and something that's correct and says something correct about the real physical world. It's a tall order and I think we spend, there's a wide community of us around the world that's trying to do that, hoping that we get lucky. So Now, the painting, using the tools, right? I mean, this is where creativity comes in. This is where the imagination comes in, this is where persistence comes in and intuition comes in and I think Albert Einstein says it well, right, when he was asked, how did he come up with the theory of relativity? And he goes... This is like a very important quote, so I should get it. The invention of... It'll come back to me.
Speaker 2 [00:10:41] Alright, so, actually let's talk about what you just said. You said all this beautiful map. What do you mean beautiful?
Stephon Alexander [00:10:49] Yeah. Math is for me, and math is for me like watching a Picasso painting. Why is that beautiful? I can feel the question, why is math beautiful? For me, math is, the part of math that I find most beautiful is where I have a mathematical equation and that equation encodes entire worlds, right? Or that equation gives me a mental picture of something that a painting cannot ever reveal, for example. It's also beautiful because the same piece of math can be applied to completely disparate phenomena. For example, the mathematics of waves can be apply to the motion of a pendulum, to the rotation of planets going around each other, right? To sound waves. So the same type of math could be applied all of those different phenomena and to there's beauty in the elegance there. So that's it.
Speaker 2 [00:12:17] Do you remember when you first realized that in your life?
Stephon Alexander [00:12:24] Yeah, I first realized that when at one level you had A squared plus B squared is equal to C squared, a Pythagorean theorem, but those letters were exactly equivalent to drawing a triangle. So the fact that a picture could encode an equation and vice versa. This is amazing, because what if I was on a planet where I couldn't see anything, like I didn't have a visual apparatus, I could encode it with this equation, and vice versa. Math is also beautiful because it's actually challenging. And I think that there's something about, you know, encountering something that may first appear to be alien, and that with our facilities, you know? That we could reach a deeper understanding. It's like a sixth sense, in a sense. We have these five senses that give us access to the outside world. Math is like another sense that gives us access to physical reality that our five senses can't perceive directly. That's one of the things that Albert Einstein showed us.
Speaker 2 [00:13:28] So you use math and physics? Yeah.
Stephon Alexander [00:13:36] There's definitely a deep link between some parts of mathematics and music. I mean, musical tones and vibrations are very nicely described by a piece of mathematics called the Fourier transform, or basically the mathematics of signals and complex waves. Right? What's beautiful to me about that is that, why should one have anything, why should have anything really to do with the other? If you think about it, you don't hear mathematics. You don't, you know, if I listen to a Debussy, I'm pronouncing his name correctly. If I'm listening to Debussy piece, you know it has a power to evoke emotions. While mathematics makes me feel cool, it doesn't do the same thing. So why should one have to do with the other and do the other? So I think that the fact that they do, they are linked, is surprising. What's interesting there is, of course, now you have the role of mathematics in electronic music without the mathematics We wouldn't be able to design synthesizers. We wouldn't be able just make samplers and all of the tools that we now use in modern electronic music and the music industry in general.
Speaker 2 [00:15:12] It does seem to be something, though, about physicists and math. I'm sorry, physicists and music, you know. I mean, I talked to a physicist and, yeah, there's something, there is some connection there. He knows a lot of physicists who really even play music, and they're amateurs, or it's just really a part of their life in a different way than painting would be.
Stephon Alexander [00:15:30] For me, a place where physics and music just directly connect is that a musical instrument is a physical apparatus. It is an apparatus that we humans have actually designed and built to actually vibrate in ways that we can manipulate to make music. And so it's a physical instrument that, you know, so it is a piece of physics actually. Right? It's technology. And. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:16:07] There's something also, I would call it magic, about sound waves, what is it about sound waves playing a certain way in a certain combination that can make you cry or me cry or evoke emotion.
Stephon Alexander [00:16:23] Yeah, you know, I have friends and colleagues who study the question about what it takes. I have friend and colleagues whose research focus is to understand how it is and why it is maybe, certain sequences of musical tones or chord progressions or rhythms can make us feel so deeply. And to some of them it still remains a scientific mystery. It's something that we're trying to understand. Now, I have my perspective from my own research, from the perspective of physics. And I think that if you look at the physics of musical tones, for example, you find that there are relationships to the different types of vibrations or the different types of harmonics that are consonant. For example, the perfect fifth, right, or what we call a dominant. In the key of C. If C is da, then the fifth is da. And da wants to come back, da, da. So a lot of western music is about that movement from the fifth back to the one, central to jazz, jazz improvisation. And if you look at that perfect fifth, that is basically resonance. That is actually, if you just look at the vibration of waves. That's just, you know, a resonant wave relative to the what we call the fundamental BC and the third harmonic, resonant harmonic of a wave. So it's basically energetics and resonance, so physical phenomenon. Now is that the reason why we hear the perfect fifth in the way we hear it? I don't know, but physics tells us why that fifth is important relative to thing.
Speaker 2 [00:18:21] When we're filming, we're going to film you with, tell us about your band, and what will we see? If we're watching you, what will be see? What's going through you when you play with them?
Stephon Alexander [00:18:35] Well, sometimes I think too much and then I suck when I think too much, when I'm playing, you know. Sometimes I find myself, especially if it's a new piece of music, if I get caught in the fishhook of like, okay, what the chord change is, what's going on here. You know, it's very useful if I have practiced that piece. But what goes on, let's say in the ideal situation, what goes is, you know, I am tracking that melody. There's a head usually in jazz music. Ba-ba-da, ba-ba, ba, ba. There's some head. You know, I am definitely in the middle of my improvisation. In the background, I'm tracking that. That's a device I have. I learned that from Sonny Stipp. One of my teachers took a lesson from the great Sonny Stipp and passed it on to me. Aside from that, I am basically trying to play music and I'm trying to playing and listen to the other musicians, and play music with them. And if I pull it off, and I try to enjoy myself, but if I pulled it off. I, you know, then I'm trying to also not go too crazy, because sometimes I have a tendency to go, to just go bonkers and play way too many notes. So, yeah, I'm just trying to play it to be musical. I wanna make sure that my tone fits in. Trying to play with space. So, the emptiness of my playing, of, you now, So not just the notes that I'm playing, but the pauses I take in between. So yeah, and trust in that it's okay if I play that wrong note. Part of the fun is to do something about it right afterwards.
Speaker 2 [00:20:32] What do your fellow musicians make of the fact that you're a theoretical student? It's an unusual job, I would say, for a jazz musician.
Stephon Alexander [00:20:42] You know, many of my jazz friends, they're the ones that just can't stop talking with me. So just like as a physicist, I'm fascinated with music, especially my jazz friend, or they just, they will, I would, you know, they'll, many of my friends and the cats that I play with, right, they just cannot stop asking, or even they have their own theories too, right? And they're all as fascinated in me talking about. Me talking about. Yeah, the cats that I play with just can't stop talking physics.
Speaker 2 [00:21:25] Yes, okay, so say that again and just tell us more about that.
Stephon Alexander [00:21:31] Yeah, the cats I played with just can't stop talking physics with me. Like for example, a great bassist I played at Melvin Gibbs, I mean our friendship was basically based on him coming to me with his own ideas, his own theories, all of which were interesting to say the least. But yeah, but that's where we met and then I started bringing music questions to him, So we had this very interesting exchange. And through that, actually, we started composing music based on those conversations, right? So we started looking at symmetries and scales, for example, and the idea that in physics, symmetry is not as interesting until you break the symmetry. So by using things like, for example symmetric scales, like, you know, the whole tone scales, these are scales that are symmetric. Debussy uses that a lot, for examples. Stevie Wonder uses that, that scale. But the idea is that if you break symmetry of those scales, we started making musical compositions based on, but it was born from these intersectional conversations between music and physics, from a professional musician and a professional physicist. Yeah, so.
Speaker 2 [00:22:48] Tell us about the...
Stephon Alexander [00:22:52] Oh, yeah. The band I belong to is called God Particle. And of course, it's a play on... Jesus, what's his name? A physicist. Higgs? Not Higgs. No, Leon Letterman. So the particle physicist, Leon letterman, when he was frustrated to find the Higgs particle, he called it the God damn particle or something like that, God forsaken particle. And so... It then became known as the God Particle. So we decided to play on that and call ourselves the God Particle, this is me Melvin Gibbs and Will Calhoun. And we, you know, we don't play a lot, but when we play, we really play. And yeah, so the idea of, you know, I think the kind of music we make is definitely physics-inspired jazz, and we can take a concept such as quantum entanglement, just the idea that a quantum state like an electron can be, two electrons can actually be entangled such that at very, very far distances they can know about each other's spin, for example. So the idea of maybe playing with entanglement and... Using as an analogy or metaphor for how maybe complementarity can occur between the different improvisers in a group improvisation setting. So anyway, we really think about ways we can use ideas in modern physics as a device for composition. So that's another, I think, interesting theme with a lot of my friends. You know, many years ago, when I lived in London, one of my mentors, people that really inspired me in Long's direction, Brian Eno, was a person that also I saw, you know, him really engaging with mathematics and physics in a very serious way as, you know, a way or ways of sort of inspiring his compositions and his art. So that definitely I think had an impact on me 20 years ago when I was a postdoc in London. So yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I find really interesting is that I've always found myself to be the physics nerd that goes to my music friends and starts nerding out about, oh yeah, this, you know, one time I was in a jazz club in New York and I heard this great pianist play, singer Sasha Perry playing, And so I remarked to one of the sax players. Whose name I won't mention because, you know, and I said, man, you hear the geometry in this plane? And the guy goes, I don't know what you're talking about, man. I don't know what your talking about man. It just sounds good, right? So this idea of open analysis can sometimes go too far because at the end of the day, it don't mean a thing if they ain't got that swing. Now, having said that. Just the other day, I was at a Newport Jazz Festival. It reopened, and I met an old friend, Bernice, who plays with Robert Glasper. He's one of the best bassists in town, okay? And I said, yeah, you know, I remarked to him. I said yeah, man, sometimes I just overanalyze. And he goes, yeah man, but your concepts are really, really interesting, man. So a lot of my music friends do get something out of this because, and why shouldn't they? Because in a lot ways, they're also exploring. I mean, the birth of bebop jazz really started with, you know, a big part of what gave birth to bebop was exploration, was experimentation, was theorizing, was coming up with new systems to make the music, right, take it to a higher level. As a higher art form and an intellectual pursuit as well as just, you know, getting up there and playing music. Jazz, especially jazz, definitely, I find that jazz musicians are very hungry for coming up with new ways of strategizing or new inspirations to help them create new music or new ways for improvising. So, new things to practice, right? So I think that that drive that we find, that I find myself in theoretical physics. Is starting to become very similar with my music practice and my playing and my improvisation.
Speaker 2 [00:27:52] Okay, so your call is at noon? It's at noon.
Stephon Alexander [00:27:54] It's happening, so I can...
Speaker 2 [00:27:56] Well, okay, but I don't want to stop you in the middle of an answer, so either we break now or... You know what you can do in four minutes, you can tell us that story again about the geometry of clay.
Stephon Alexander [00:28:06] Okay yeah okay yeah so when I was younger and this was you know I was less confident as a musician and so my way in to try to connect with the more serious musicians this was a small jazz club in the 90s was to basically over analyze things and try to maybe show my mathematical knowledge so one time Sasha Perry the great Sasha Perry was playing he was soloing and it was probably like four in the morning. And I looked over to another sax player who was a tremendous player, who is a tremendous player, and I said, man, his playing is so geometrical. And I started blurbing, you know, I started going off on some particular types of geometry I was hearing. And he looks at me, he goes, I don't know what you're talking about, man. His shit just sounds good, okay? Okay. No. Ha ha ha. Ha ha. Makes me feel so.
Speaker 2 [00:29:10] Okay. You were attracted to math and physics, as a young man I'm assuming, and you were attracted to music. Did you see those things as separate? Tell us about it.
Stephon Alexander [00:29:26] Yeah, when I was younger, I mean, when I was a teenager, yeah, when i was younger I was attracted to math and science, sparked my curiosity, right? Wanted to know how the world worked. And music was more of a plaything for me. You know, I had a saxophone and it was kind of like function as a toy that made sound. Um, and I especially like, you know, sort of playing along with the popular music I heard on the radio. Um, is this mine?
Speaker 3 [00:30:06] Good to be here.
Speaker 2 [00:30:12] The thing on the side should make it silent. Just turn it off. Can we? What? And just put it on the mirror or mute for just a minute. It's so weird. I'm gonna record it.
Speaker 3 [00:30:35] It's just, I need to be a kind of friend right now.
Speaker 2 [00:30:42] Alright, I'm sorry, we're going to have to tell them.
Stephon Alexander [00:30:49] Um Um, what was that?
Speaker 2 [00:30:53] Okay, so when you were young.
Stephon Alexander [00:30:55] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:30:57] Oh yeah, so. Yeah, okay. You saw the saxophone as a toy. Yeah. I want you to go back.
Stephon Alexander [00:31:03] Yeah, so when I was younger, I played piano for like five years from when I was eight till I was 12 and I just didn't really enjoy practicing. Then I was given a saxophone and the saxophone just functioned as a toy that made sound. I would just play by ear and play along with the, you know, popular music on the radio. So, music... For me was something, you know, I did as an adolescent, you know, to, I mean, I, it just, it functioned as a hobby, and had nothing to do with my, you know, curiosity in science and math.
Speaker 2 [00:31:51] Is that the way you think that things work in our society, in our world, that math and science and art and music are kind of kept apart?
Stephon Alexander [00:32:01] As a young person, the stereotypes and the image presented about musicians were certainly different than the stereotypes in the images presented about scientists. I would say that I definitely saw a lot more musicians that looked like my future selves than I did scientists. Okay, so it was, you know. I would say that, like, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:32:37] Do we silo, I guess what I'm trying to get at here is I'm curious about your thoughts about the way we teach music slash art and the way we teach science in this country, in this culture. Our feeling is that they should have kept apart. And maybe that's not the healthiest thing. I wonder what you think about the kind of two spheres.
Stephon Alexander [00:32:59] Yeah, you know, in my education growing up, the arts and music track was different and separated and segregated from the science and math track. I think also in terms of how young people, how you're taught to identify yourself, you You know, the rock musician is, you know, it's cool and you know. And the scientist is a nerd that wears a white lab coat, and has social, it's socially inept, is inept a good word? The scientist is somebody that's socially inept and the musician is out there and cool. So anyway, so those things I think were at work when I was younger, and I started to realize that I had a dual interest. So should I be the cool musician or should I be the nerdy scientist, right? And yeah, so I think it's a reality. And I think that as an educator, it's very clear that we inherit students who might say, I'm a musician. This is what musicians do. And musicians don't do this. And I'm the scientist. Thank you. You know, we don't do that. We don't engage in that, you know. We don't talk about... I'll give you an example. In this class I teach, it's a class where I try to relate music and physics. I basically use some of the analogies in music where appropriate to talk about ideas in modern physics. And they learned some of the math actually in this class as well. One time, like, you know, I mentioned something about the effect of the observer on a quantum state, right? And I played a little video. And then during office hours, a student who was more of the type of like, I'm here to be a physics major, da-da-da, to say, to kind of complain that why are you bringing in questions about consciousness and the effect when we're talking about physics. So then I had to spend some time with the student and basically say listen, actually some of the founders of quantum mechanics actually were inspired by those very questions. So I think a lot of it too is that this apparent dichotomy that we see in music education, art education, and science and math education is actually not the reality. If you look back in the past, like Kepler and Galileo. I mean, they also had a musical training, and they used that musical training actually as tools of inquiry in their sciences. I mean Kepler came up with his laws of planetary motion by actually writing down musical notes associated with the velocities of the planets, right? So, it's not... I think there's a lot of opportunity to break down some of those stereotypical boundaries and educational dichotomies that exist between the arts and the sciences.
Speaker 2 [00:36:25] In your own life. Is that useful? Yes, no, no. That was perfect. That's perfect. Yeah, because we were talking about capillary last night, and that was great. Creativity. Do you see the same kind of creativity in your science work that you do in your music work? Is there a commonality to coming up with new ideas, failing, trying to get...
Stephon Alexander [00:36:54] You know, I see a lot of, I continually see and learn over the years, I've learned over the years just how similar the intensity of creativity, sorry, let me say it again. You know, over the years, there's a word for this song, when it becomes more and more... Yeah, increase them, but there's a, it builds on, piles up. Huh?
Speaker 2 [00:37:31] We are
Stephon Alexander [00:37:35] Aggregates, that's another word. Over.
Speaker 2 [00:37:40] What do you do when it's a map term, right?
Stephon Alexander [00:37:45] Yeah. You keep adding and adding and
Speaker 2 [00:37:51] It keeps increasing. The algorithm is going to keep increasing the way it's fine.
Stephon Alexander [00:37:57] Um Yeah, I think... Um Cumative, that's a word. The ways in which physics and music requires creativity and the type of creativity it requires has been more and more cumulative in my experience. Let me talk a little bit about the type of creativity that's involved here. I think that, you know, you can't, for me, it's hard to be creative if you don't have well-developed skill sets and tools. So for me developing my chops as a physicist, what does that mean, okay, like, you know, developing intuition, you study and work out problems, having soundboards, having conversations with other physicists, right, teaching, you All of these things build skill set, they provide a practice, right, so that when I now work on an unsolved problem or I work on something new, I can draw from all of that. But I think for me, one type of creativity is the ability to basically allow yourself to just dream big and actually really you know, explore theoretical terrain that's just complete, as absurd as possible, just to prove it wrong. And I think the path of actually looking at theoretical constructs and ideas that's outside of the skill set that you're working with, you know suspends you in a space where the path is going there theoretically. Even if you're wrong, you learn something new. And that way of basically making a mistake, trying new things and learning from that and also deliberately trying to prove yourself wrong is an important part of the creative process as a theoretical physicist. I find that the same thing happens when I'm actually trying to learn a new tune. I'm trying to look through the chord changes and say, okay, if I'm going to imagine when I improvise, how do I go from this minor chord to this, you know, diminished 7th or whatever, right? So. So just looking at the known things in the practice and just exploring and trying things out before I get on the stage or in a jam session is again a similar type of thing. So I would actually, you know, and I practice an improvisation, I would literally like try to play out. I'll try to place something that's outside of the chord structure to hear what that sounds like actually. So I think that combination of practice and then using the practice to explore new terrain and being bold about that is a kind of creative process. Another one I think is important for me is actually dumbing it down. I think one of my great mentors in physics, Nobel Prize winner Leon Cooper, he's like a magician. And he was able to solve an almost 50-year-old problem by kind of like... Stripping, you know, leaving the mathematics and really trying to figure out the dumbest way to solve the problem. You know, I put quotation marks in the word dumb, but I think this idea of like, you know trying to find simplicity, like literally trying to strip away from complexity or maybe being too smart or too sophisticated into actually looking at something from a very simple-minded. Perspective is I think something that I find similar. I find great music. I listen to Miles Davis. I think Miles Davis is a good example of this. Wayne Short is another person where you can have crazy stuff going on structurally in the music and then they'll play really simple notes or a few notes when it's clear that you can just blast the song with tons of notes, right? And I find that a similar thing happens in physics. There's a kind of really great physics. There's perspective where you can see a lot of complexity, but there's another perspective where it's actually very simple and elegant.
Speaker 2 [00:42:59] So when you play a game, and you feel you really nailed it, that must give you a certain feeling, what's the equivalent in your physics practice? Or is there an equivalent? Like, when you have, like, a player, like a playa-
Stephon Alexander [00:43:15] Yeah, I think, you know, when I play a gig, obviously it's real-time improvisation. And there's a communion, that there's something that happens with the group of people you're playing with, because you're doing this together. Or if you're going to solo, they're supporting you to do this. So there's the kind of gratitude that I carry with a good, for example, rhythm section. Number one player. And I think likewise, you know, a place where that happens in physics is when I give a seminar. So I go out and I talk to colleagues elsewhere about my research and the questions that they'll throw at me. And sometimes, you, know, they'll throw stuff at me, right? And I have an opportunity to now respond to that in real time. How I respond to that is really a question of like, am I choosing to play something elegant or am I choosin' to, you know. Yeah, so. Another place where that happens is actually if I'm involved in a conversation with another physicist or student about an idea or something well established and there's a back and forth. Right? So one interesting thing that I learned from my postdoc advisor Michael Peskin was One of the things I felt was really brilliant about his way of engaging in research and training younger physicists was I could say the most wrong thing to him and he would take that and boomerang that thing right back at me to give me something to chew on. So there's this sort of ability to take garbage or lemons, throw it back at your and have them, you know, sort of... Process that so that eventually something really interesting comes out of that
Speaker 2 [00:45:25] So I come to you, I'm just a regular person, regular American, I think, professor. I don't understand this. I'm scared of all this science. I don't know anything about science. I never, you know, I suffered through it in high school but none of it stuck. What do you say to somebody about science which can appear to be don't?
Stephon Alexander [00:45:48] I would say that it's actually that scientific inquiry, you know, just like what scientists basically do, you already do. You already kind of did that as a kid, which is that really great science starts off with play. It's right that you have a toy as a kids and you manipulate the toy. You play with the toy, you explore with the toys, right? You might even break it apart, right. And so play in curiosity and persistence and interest. Is kind of part of what we do already as humans and there are already some child psychologists that have already shown that what kids are already engaged in in play is a scientific process. So, the first thing is I would basically, you know... Convince that friend that actually there's a lot of what they've already done as a young person that is much closer to being a scientist than maybe what they think a scientist is about. At first you have to really just dismantle the misperceptions about what the media portrays is not actually what we actually do. A big part of what I do is play. I play with ideas, right, and. You know, how different is this than playing a video game, okay? At first, when you try the game, you lose the game. But then you learn the rules by what? By playing it more and more and more and then you get better and then you enjoy it even more. No difference than scientific inquiries, right? A lot of it is curiosity and play and persistence. But, you know the persistence is fueled. Hopefully by passion and by the payoff that every time you learn something new, right, it brings you the pleasure of, as Feynman says, right, it's about the pleasure, of figuring things out.
Speaker 2 [00:47:43] That's great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. All right. May I? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a good point for anybody to weigh in.
Speaker 3 [00:47:51] So, Stefan, you wrote an article in Notes about Ryan and Trevor Oakes and how looking at one of their drawings helped inform the way you were thinking in the moment. Could you tell us about that briefly?
Speaker 2 [00:48:08] I mean, what we're interested in is the idea of people who are not in your field, okay? But nevertheless, it sparks a lot of...
Stephon Alexander [00:48:17] Yes. Yeah, so there are twin artists, Brian and Trevor Oakes. Yeah, so there are these twin artist brothers, tremendous artists, Ryan and Trevor Oakes, and they're... Ryan, sorry, sorry. Ryan there. So there are two twin brothers, and they are artists, Ryan and Trever Oakes. And their approach to sketching and drawing and painting... Involves the physics of actually how light propagates and how light moves in three-dimensional space. So when I actually looked at this, at one of their sketches, it got me thinking about a project that I was working on, and it had to do with how light propogates in four-dimensional space-time, as described by Albert Einstein. And so it was more like, you know, just the idea that these artists were like... You know, really trying to understand the physics of light and trying to use that as inspiration or as a device, and how that back-reacted on to inspire me to, you know... I think it was just simple. I would think it's important, as a scientist, to be open to inspiration, and I think there's a lot of inspiration that you can get from looking at the works of good artists and musicians. So that's kind of, you know, I think that was the thing that was valuable there. I'm very open to engage in with artists and musicians, especially, because I think they have something to say. I think their way of approaching their art and the music, actually, it's part of my creative process. It's necessary for me to talk to others that know things that I don't know, right? Why do I only wanna talk to people that know the things that know? How am I gonna learn something new? And I might be surprised in terms of how it's going to inform my research in physics.
Speaker 2 [00:50:30] Chris, you got a thing? Was that good? Yeah, that was great. Come on. We're good to go. So you're good? Sandy? I just have one more. I actually have a weird question. I was watching something that you did last night. And you talked about being, that Ornette Coleman taught you something.
Stephon Alexander [00:50:52] Yes.
Speaker 2 [00:50:53] What did Coleman talk to you about? Something about the idea behind the music and the idea behind what you're doing as somehow being almost the forefront of what ultimately you get. I mean, can you just talk a little bit about that?
Stephon Alexander [00:51:09] Yeah, so I was very fortunate to have, I've been very fortunate to have had Ornette Coleman as a mentor. And one of the things that if you ever tried to like get too theoretical with Ornett, he would stop you in your tracks and say, if you can tell me where an idea comes from, then I'll engage you on this theory stuff, right? And that to me showed me that like, you know, that's the kernel. Great physics as well, right? It's about the ideas and then the techniques, the tools, the theory, all that comes in now to the idea drives basically what, you know, all the things you're going to to see that this idea comes to fruition or has anything to do with physical reality. I think the same thing applies in what Ornette was saying there about that, you know, the idea, you know. There's a musical idea that comes first. And, you
Speaker 3 [00:52:17] Okay, one more quick question. So in the jazz of physics, Stefan, you refer to flashes of insight about physics that would hit you when you were soloing on your tennis bat.
Speaker 2 [00:52:36] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.
Stephon Alexander [00:52:40] Yeah, I mean when I'm playing what goes on my brain is ideally music and I'm really just trying to be musical I mean, but of course, you know, there's a history of whatever that practices whatever is going on with in real time with the band There have been times I've been very fortunate very rare to it really happens where a flash of some kind of insight on the problem that I was working on for a while. And I think what simply, you know, I'm working on something plain for me is very important because, you know it takes me away from the problem and maybe that problem is being worked on offline and maybe, you, know this act of improvisational playing ignites, you know what had been simmering in my unconscious. I think that that happens in other domains. This is my way, maybe, of insight and inspiration. Yeah, but every now and then I get lucky and I do have a flash of insight on a problem that I worked on, but it's very rare.
