Wired Science

When James Gates was a young boy, he wanted to be an astronaut.  That plan didn’t work out for him, so he was forced to become one of America’s foremost theoretical physicists.  A professor at the University of Maryland, Gates is famous for his work in supersymmetry, part of that field of study known as string theory.
 
His world is filled with subatomic particles called bosons and fermions.  It’s a theoretical world of supergravity, where every particle has a mysterious and not-yet-discovered superpartner.  After 13 years, a new particle accelerator, just commissioned in Switzerland, may finally allow Gates and his fellow string physicists a chance to test their theories. Ziya Tong meets physicist James Gates.

Ziya Tong:  Hey, Jim, welcome.

James Gates:  Hi, Ziya, how are you doing?

Ziya: Good, thank you.  It’s great to have you here.

Gates: Oh, I’m very happy to be here

Ziya: Now, often, people have no idea what it means to be a theoretical physicist.  How would you describe your job?

Gates: Well, my wife likes to say “My husband makes things up for a living,” because in some sense, we combine mathematics, which is sort of a yin, with nature, which is a yang, and these two things have to work together if we’re doing our job right. 

One of the ways I explain it to people is being a theoretical physicist is like being a composer of music on a planet with no sound, because we’re trying to do something that is so disconnected from the experience that we have in everyday life that it’s almost impossible.

Ziya: So it’s almost like you have indicators that sound exists, but it’s something we can’t perceive.

Gates: Absolutely, and that’s a very perceptive comment, because when I talk to people and the public about physics, what I tell them is I have a set of scores, but they’re the equations that I write.  So imagine that you’re a deaf person who only reads music.  Now, what is it that you imagine when you read a score?  That’s what being a theoretical physicist is like.

Ziya: Now, did you kind of grow up at the dinner table discussing theories of the universe?

Gates: Well, not really.  My dad was in the army, so we moved a lot when I was a kid.  The one thing that we always discussed at the dinner table was school and what happened.  My dad, even though he had not been able to finish high school, had an absolute commitment to all four of his kids going to college.

Ziya: Now, you’re considered one of the founding fathers of supersymmetry.  Can you break that idea down for us in a nutshell?

Gates: Well, I could try.  I must admit, though, I find it funny to be called the founding father, although in some sense, perhaps it’s true.  I wrote the first thesis on super-symmetry at MIT in 1977 when no one else at that world-famous institution had any interest.  So what is supersymmetry?  Well, roughly speaking, when you look at our world, it breaks into two parts. 

There are things like protons and electrons, and that’s what—those are our parts lists, that’s what makes up atoms, and atoms make up us.  Now, these parts are held in fixed patterns or forms, and something has to be responsible for that.  The things that are responsible for holding the fixed patterns are the bosons.  The bosons spin at a different rate from the fermions, and that explains the different behaviors that they have.

Ziya: How would you describe the difference between a boson and a fermion?

Gates: Well, the simplest difference is if you could actually see an electron, it would sort of be like a little spinning basketball, and it would spin at a certain rate.  But the funny thing about it is that you can’t speed it up, nor can you slow it down.  It’s always the same rate of spin, either—

Ziya: It’s like a Globetrotter basketball. 

Gates: Like a Globetrotter basketball, either spinning clockwise or counterclockwise.  So that’s what an electron sort of looks like, at least mathematically, this is an accurate description.  On the other hand, if you look at a boson—and a particle of light, by the way, is a boson—it also behaves like a basketball, but its rate of spin is twice as fast.  So it’s the rate of spin that distinguishes these things.

Ziya: Now, what kind of new technologies are you working on in your field?

Gates: Well, directly, none.  Because theoretical physicists, I often tell people, are useless, absolutely useless.  We don’t build things, we simply study things and write the mathematics.  However, the larger physics community is completing a new collider in Geneva, Switzerland, called the Large Hadron Collider, LHC is the acronym.

Ziya: I’ve heard about that, it’s the particle accelerator.

Gates: It’s the famous particle accelerator that we all expect to be commissioned by the end of this year.  It’ll be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, and will let us more carefully probe the structure of nature than mankind has ever been able to before.  And we hope to see many new things there.

Ziya: And what are they looking for?

Gates: Well, primarily we’ll be looking for this thing called the Higgs boson.  It’s a particle that seems to be responsible for creating mass.  After all, you know, we all have some weight, and scientifically we describe that as mass.  And in our equations, we can see that mass coming from this thing called the Higgs boson.  It has a vacuum expectation value is the technical term, and that seems to give the mass to everything else.

So we’re going to be looking for the Higgs boson.  We’re also going to be looking for superpartners—new forms of matter and energy which we’ve never seen before in the laboratory.  And that’s how I got into this business.  When I was a graduate student back in the late seventies, I was trying to write a Ph.D. thesis and I one day came across the writings of another physicist.

It was mathematics, but I could see in the mathematics that he was describing new forms of matter and energy.  And so, I became extremely excited, because it is not common to be accorded the privilege of seeing a new idea about the universe just being born just as you show up on stage.

Ziya: Right.

Gates: So I wrote this thesis, even though there was no one else at MIT interested in supersymmetry.  And then it allowed me to actually get in on the ground floor of this development.

Ziya: So this Higgs boson that they’re looking for, what happens if they don’t find it?

Gates: Oh, that’s going to be pretty funny, in some sense.  It will mean that my community, which has been working under the assumption that the Higgs boson is there in nature for about 30 to 40 years, it’ll mean we’re wrong.  And if we’re wrong, it’s going to be uh-oh, back to the drawing board.

Ziya: And what happens if you do find it?  What kind of practical applications would, like, that have?

Gates: You know, people always ask that question about this kind of science, and what I have to tell them is in the immediate short term, there won’t be any practical applications.  This kind of science doesn’t generate a short-term benefit, but on the order of a century or so later, if you get it right, it’s an amazing contribution to the future.

Ziya: Now I understand you’re also working on a new type of mathematics, can you tell me about that?

Gates: Yeah, this is something that I’m really excited about.  I actually tried to tell the public a little bit about this before in a DVD collection I did called “Superstring Theory, the DNA of Reality.”  At the end of that, we describe a set of pictures.  Now, mathematics is very funny, because most people think of mathematics as this terrible, difficult thing, and a lot of us have math phobia, so let’s all own up to it.

But mathematics is also like music, and just like new musical compositions are always being made, new mathematical compositions are always being made.  So about three years ago, I was in the country of Georgia, north of Iran, and I got an email message from an American physicist who happened to be in Czechoslovakia.

And he had seen a research paper I had written and posted on the web, because there’s this central site where all theoretical physics gets posted on the web.  And he sent a message saying, “Gee, I think I have done something related to your equations.”  So we had a series of exchanges back and forth, and before too long, we were writing a paper on the web.

I had never met him.  Well, we finished this paper when I was in the West African country of Mali, and so we had this paper where we show that mathematics, which has the usual form of the equations, the equal signs, the plus signs, is—a particular set of mathematics is completely equivalent to some pictures.

Ziya: That’s odd.

Gates: We were astounded that these pictures contained every single piece of information that a complicated set of equations contain.

Ziya: So it’s a way of visualizing mathematics.

Gates: It is a visual representation of mathematics.  It’s like finding another language to understand something. 

Ziya: What happens if you transform the picture, then?  Are you also sort of transforming the equations as well?

Gates: Absolutely, and that’s the most remarkable thing about this graphical technology, is that by manipulating the picture, which sort of looks a little bit like the game of Cat’s Cradle—I don’t know if people are old enough to remember that—or also like a piece of macramé.  By moving the pieces in this picture, you are actually changing the equations that the picture corresponds to.

Ziya: That’s amazing.

Gates: And so we were shocked, and we needed a name.  So we started casting around, and my friend is named Michael Fox, and Michael had done a lot more travel in West Africa than I had, so we were thinking of names and maybe because I was in West Africa at the time, he suggested the name Adinkra. 

It’s a work from the Ashanti language in West Africa, and it refers to traditional symbols in their culture that have hidden meaning.  Well, our pictures certainly do have hidden meaning, so it seemed an appropriate name for us to appropriate.

Ziya: Great.  Now, I know some people have, like, a favorite animal or a favorite color.  As a theoretical physicist, do you have a favorite number?

Gates: The answer is yes, and it’s probably one that I share with many, many other theoretical physicists. The number is 137. 

Ziya: Why 137?

Gates: Well, it’s probably a number I share with a lot of theoretical physicists, and it actually is related to nature.  If you take the charge on the electron and multiply it by itself, divide by the speed of light, and then divide again by a small number called Planck’s constant, which describes the world of quantum physics.  It almost exactly equals 137.

Ziya: That’s very complicated.  My favorite number’s just seven, I think.  But thank you so much for joining us, Jim.

Gates: Well, thank you for inviting me.

Ziya: As you learn more about the secrets of the universe, I hope you’ll come back and share them with us.

Gates: I hope our new technology helps us get there.