Stephen Hawking's Legacy - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 9/8/20

George Noory and Dr. Leonard Mlodinow discuss his memoir of his work as a collaborator with the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, how they met, and how Hawking developed his theories on black holes and quantum computing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George
Norri with you, doctor Leonard Mulatta now back with us
theoretical physicists noted author's latest book is called Stephen Hawking
just came out, and he was on the faculty of
the California Institute of Technology. And one of his other
book is called Elastic Unlocking your Brain's ability to Embrace Change.

(00:25):
And he has been a dear friend of the late
Stephen Hawking. And here he is back on Coast to
Coast Leonard, Welcome back, my friend. Happy to be here.
This is my twelfth appearance. That's fantastic, always fun. George.
How much do you miss Stephen Hawking? Oh? I missed
him a lot. He added so much to my life.
You know, people know him as a as a great physicist,

(00:47):
but once you get to know him as a person
and to see what he went through, in the kind
of character he had, than that that really teaches you
great human lessons far much apart and beyond his physics.
What a fighter he was, wasn't he? Yeah? I mean
every day, every every moment of his life was a
battle um in the in the in the book, I

(01:10):
talked about when I was first in his office and
I see him some sweat going down his brow, and
I was like horrified because he can't move, And I
know what that feels like. It's like Chinese water torture. Right,
It's just like a little pile and would just wipe
it away without thinking. And he couldn't do that, and
he'd have to either accept it or wait for one

(01:31):
of his carrots to notice didn't wipe it off. And
what he was able to do was really to learn
to to control his own feelings and his own happiness
from within and to the couple of himself from a
lot of these outside things that are that he has
to go through, so that you know, whereas it really

(01:52):
would bother you to him, he told himself that he's
not gonna be bothered by it. And you know, people
don't realized that in his everyday life. You know, feeding
him was difficult. They had to cut all the food.
He could move a little bit into his head so
he could chew a little bit, but some of it
would come out. Yeah, his head was always tilted to
the side, wasn't it Yeah, he couldn't hold it up,

(02:13):
and so feeding was quite an ordeal. He breathed through
a stoma hole in his chest that would get clogged
up and he'd start to suffocate. They'd have to clear it,
you know, moment after moment, hour after hour. He had,
you know, horrible we would each consider a really horrible experience.
And yet he learned, you know, how to be happy

(02:33):
and optimistic and energetic and have a joy of life
despite all that. It was so how can you be
with that all day, every day for you know, many
days and not have that rub off on you and
you apply it to your own life. He had that,
Louke Garrigan, He's als, which of course destroyed his entire
ability to have any muscles or anything. How many years

(02:54):
did he have that, Leonard? He had it for I
think about fifty five years. You know, most people die
it's I think within two years. He was given two years.
About twenty percent make it past ten years, but he
went fifty five years as a record as far as
I know. As a physicist, I mean, he was one

(03:16):
of the best. What did he leave us? Well, Stephen
started a physics career in the early sixties and you know,
it's interesting again. It was his disease that made him
a great physicist. He was kind of a goof off
as an undergrad at Oxford, and he still did fine.

(03:38):
He was brilliant, but he didn't really apply himself. And
when he was after he was diagnosed, and then he
was at Cambridge for his graduate school and he was
given two years, he said to himself, I want to
address I wanted to make my life means something. And
you know, finding meaning in life is so important, maybe
the most important thing in life, and the most important

(04:00):
thing having you overcome obstacles. And for him, the meaning
was to understand where we came from, why we're here,
why is the universe the way it is? And he
decided to dedicate his dedicate his last few years. What
he thought would be a few years to that turned
up to be fifty five. So he ended up working
on problems that no one else, well very few people

(04:21):
were interested in. Back then. It was the origin of
the universe and these crazy things called black holes. And
back then physicists thought that we have no way of
studying the early universe experimentally or observationally, and the same
with black holes. So why study them theoretically because we
can't test our ideas, and you know, that turned out
to be wrong, and it turned out that those are

(04:43):
very important realms to study and that we can probe them.
Later on technology developed that allowed us to do that,
and we learned a lot by studying them. And he
was one of the main pioneers who would like put
that on a map and made it not just respectable,
but but a hot topic. Did he talk much about
the late Albert Einstein? Well, of course, all physicists talked

(05:06):
much about a lot about Albert Einstein. And one Stephen
studied two theories that he put together that was especially
One was Einstein's general relativity, which is the theory of gravity,
and the other one, and that's a that's applicable and
the astrophysics and the large scale of stars and galaxies
and the beginning of the universe. And the other theory

(05:30):
was quantum theory, which isn't normally applicable in those realms
because it's really a theory for the very small the
atoms and subatomic particles. And in fact, the quantum theory
and Einstein's relativity they class they can't both be right there,
they're contradictory. But physicists before Stephen didn't really mind that

(05:53):
so much because some of them work and you know,
extra galactic stuff with Einstein's theory and some work with
quantum theory, and the clash never shows itself. But by
concentrating on the problems he did, such as out just
outside of black hole or the early universe, it turns
out that you need both and those those are two
of the only situations where you really need both. And

(06:13):
he had to make an out of this of applying
a little bit of one and a little bit of
the other and just the right way that they don't clash,
and to extract some some answers. So he was a
big you know, I mean, he idolized of Einstein, as
we all do. And uh. And he was one of
the people who took Einstein's theory and moved it forward.

(06:34):
How did you get to know Stephen Hawking Leonard, Well,
he had read my first two books, so Uclud's Window,
which was about curved space, and the second one was
called Fiman's Rainbow, a memoir Friendship. Now that's a new one.
Other pressure um search from You've gotten so many out
there now, huh. Yeah, I've got, well, I've got these

(06:54):
two of two icons of the century. Actually, Richard Fiman
was called a Search for Beauty and Physics, and in
life about my relationship with him when I was in
my twenties and now with Stephen, you know, in my
fifties and sixties, so it's kind of interesting. But he
read those two books, and he was looking for someone
to write with because writing and communicating is so difficult
for him, and he apparently had been looking for a

(07:17):
while and couldn't find somebody that he wanted, someone where
was a sense of humor, who's writing he liked, and
who also really knew physics like a physicist. And one
day I got a call from my agent that his
office had contacted her and said, well, would I'd like
to write with him? I didn't have to think very long. Yeah,
I think I would so. And the idea then was
to rewrite his famous book, A Brief History of Time

(07:40):
in a way to make it more understandable. He knew that,
you know, even though it sold more than ten million copies,
that most people didn't finish it or didn't understand all
of it, and he wanted to make a clearer version
and so that's what we did together. That was called
a Briefer History of Time, and that was a classic here. Yeah,
and after that we you know, I said hey, and

(08:01):
I was on the faculary of Celtech and he would
come for four to six weeks each year. And so
the next time he came, I looked him up and said, hey,
it was so much fun writing that other book. Let's
write a book about your new stuff, you know, because
that's all about the stuff he did in the seventies
and eighties. And I thought he would have to think
about but he was like me. He immediately said, sure,

(08:21):
but that was only the part of that book. Let
me tell you, Leonard, explain to us what is a
giant quantum computer? What is a quantum Okay, so, well,
can I assume that everyone knows how a computer works?
Or should I start? We may not know that either.
So a computer is. The idea behind a computer is

(08:42):
that you can use the laws of logic or arithmetic too,
not only to do math problems, to solve problems in
the everyday world, if you just translate them somehow to
a mathematical language. So a regular computer does that. It
has it's a bunch of switches that are connected and
they talk to each other. They're either on or off,
and and by reducing language or reasoning to the rules

(09:06):
of logic, you can get a computer to answer questions
in business, or in math, or in different areas. And
that's how our phones work and everything that we use works.
You know, it's make millions and millions of little switches
that are connected in some brilliant way to allow them
to make do these functions that we want. Now, that's

(09:26):
a regular computer. It's I mean, it's the switches are
either on or off. So that makes them we would
call physicist a classical computer, or just a computer that
works in the same way as Newton's laws. Now, quantum theory,
if you just look in the realm of atoms, it
would be things behave differently, and a switch can be

(09:46):
on and off at the same time. It can have
it can be what we call superposition of on and off.
And that sounds kind of weird, but you know, we
won't get into that. I just have to accept that's
quantum theory. And so if you make a computer based
on switches that are of that nature that can be
on and off at the same time, it turns out
that you can get a much more powerful, much faster,

(10:08):
I mean extremely unimaginably faster, better computer that way than
the than the other way. So that's what a quantum
computer is. A computer that works with switches that are
like atoms. The atoms each switches say an atom or
or a molecule, or maybe the state of a photon,
which is a particle of light. People are trying to

(10:28):
figure out which kinds of particles to use to build
their quantum computers. It's just at the beginning stages now.
But but that would be the components would be that
instead of the switches that we that we have, the
tiny molecular switches that we now have in computers. Listen
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(10:51):
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