with your training, when people come up with alleged woo or crackpotty idea, it takes a long time to talk them down from it because there's probably a reason why they've connected with something like that, isn't there?

Yeah, and I mean, what is universally true with people with that kind of inclination is they don't know any math.

And so the way to, you know, and this never actually really helps not convince them, but they have some conception, which is very heuristic.

And when you say, okay, that's, you know, it's an interesting idea, but you have to back it up with math and show me, you know, show me the equations.

And, of course, they haven't studied, so they can't do that.

And it's not trying to be dismissive.

It's just math is the language of physics.

there some correlation between physics and music in some way? Is there some formula you could plug in to write a hit song that you think would correlate mathematically?

Well, weren't we expecting to potentially see supersymmetric particles with the LHC? Yeah, I'll get to that in a minute, but

that is something people had hoped to see at the LHC.

With the extra dimensions, you can say, well, obviously there aren't nine large dimensions, right? We would know that.

We live in a universe, as far as we can tell, is one time in three space dimensions.

What if the extra six dimensions were very small and curled up into a shape that, again, we can't see in our kind of macroscopic everyday lives, but there are some vestiges of this if you could explore very, very small distances.

So another way of saying this is that the potential to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity is it's such a hard problem to solve that maybe you're willing to put up with some difficult things to put up with and then see if you can get around them somehow.

For a while in the, let's see, late 80s, people, some physicists really went overboard with the string theory hype.

How testable is this stuff? So

What can physics teach me that can be helpful in my pogo sticking?

Okay.

Well, a couple of things.

first of all what you want to do is you want to find if you find the resonant frequency like the natural vibrational frequency of the springs let's assume you're all you physicists love to say let's assume some kind of uniformity okay so let's assume you're using all the same springs on these pokers you want to find the natural resonant frequency that they kind of vibrate at with you on them and if then if you bounce at that frequency you'll create uh you know what they call resonance and then you'll be able to get even higher so you're kind of helping the spring work with you does that make sense it's like you know sometimes when you it's it's kind of the same principle like you're in a room and you know you start making it now a noise whatever and sometimes you hit this frequency where you're like whoa this is like really filling it up you've hit a natural frequency for the room what you want to do is is you want to find the natural frequency of your pogo spring and then try to bounce at that frequency.

For whom? Not at pro level, given our previous

discussion.

No, no.

Shocking, isn't it? So for the first year out of college, I actually, in college, I was a music and math major and then decided I wanted to do physics.

Teach us some math.

Teach us some math.

Okay.

So, um, I like math a lot.

And, uh, one of the most interesting things about math to me is that you can formulate simple problems that are nevertheless very, very difficult to solve.

And I'll give you probably the most famous example, the Goldbach conjecture, okay? Goldbach conjecture says that every even number greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes, at least one way, right? You'd think, okay, you start checking examples.

You're like, four, cool.

Why should we solve these problems then?