Physicist David Tong is among the line-up for ALSO Festival weekend (14th to 16th July) – he explains a bit about the universe as a teasing taster
This weekend (14th to 16th July) the ALSO Festival at Park Farm, Compton Verney, offers a brilliant smorgasbord of wild swimming, music, crafts, comedy and speakers. Among them is Cambridge physicist David Tong. He shares some mind-bending thoughts with Gill Sutherland.
In a nutshell, what is quantum physics?
It’s our understanding of the universe on the most fundamental level possible. It’s an accumulation of 350 years of humankind, starting with Galileo and Newton and working through to Einstein, and we’re sort of still continuing on that journey.
What’s been going on in the universe of late that you will share at ALSO?
Loads of new things, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to talk about yet if I’m honest. There were some wonderful results last week – we discovered for the first time that there’s a background hum in the universe. These enormous black holes collide constantly and so violently that they cause space, and in fact time itself, to wobble slightly – and we’ve detected that wobble. We talk in terms of noise, a hum, but that’s more of an analogy. Completely amazing.
What are some of the craziest theories that people struggle to get their heads round?
The explanation of the universe that comes out of quantum mechanics. All these theories are written in equations and the challenge in explaining it to a more general audience is to somehow find the right analogy to capture what the equation is telling us. Like the equation that there’s something out there like a multiverse – that the world we are in is constantly splitting and infinitely creating a tree of different universes where lots of different things are happening.
The Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once has some ideas from quantum mechanics – it’s not just science fiction, but rooted in real science.
Well you know I’m sort of quite happy with the ones that have been proven. That’s kind of what I wanted to do, just explain what we know is true about the universe – Einstein’s theory of space and time or quantum mechanics. There’s a theory called string theory I’m quite partial to.
Can you explain wormholes?
There is this idea that you could sort of have a portal in space where you walk into it and you’re instantly transported into some other part of space. It’s a question of how much you trust the mathematics, but if you take Einstein’s equations then you can find solutions in the equations that look like wormholes.
I wasn’t a genius but I was pretty good at maths at school, as I think all of my colleagues were, but yeah then I just got more and more into physics. One bit of evidence that I was not a maths genius is that when I applied to Oxford I got rejected. So I went to the University of Nottingham and I had a wonderful education. The nice thing about doing physics is that it’s something which is done all over the world, so I spent my 20s just traveling from one university to another. I fell in love with his subject and what it can tell us about the world we live in.
An obvious one is Stephen Hawking, I was very much inspired by him when I was a kid in school. In fact I bought his book A Brief History of Time when I was 16 when I was looking for the right path, and that was definitely the thing that turned me onto physics. It made me realise there was a job where you could just think about black holes for a living.
The best thing is just to go to people you’ve never heard of before. So I’ll just to turn up to random things. Having said that I am going to make a point of seeing Marcel Lu Cont, who is a completely amazing comedian – I know I’m going to laugh until I cry.
Is it easy for you to get up on stage and chat?
I’m absolutely terrified every time I stand up to give a talk – even after doing it for 25 years. But I genuinely think what I’m talking about is the most exciting thing in the world, so hopefully that enthusiasm comes across.