Filming in NYC with Jenann Ismael and Natalie Wolchover

We thought this shoot was going to be easy—no travel required! But New York City did what it does and threw three construction crews next to our booked filming location. Rescheduling wasn’t an option because we’d already pulled off a miracle in finding that one day when both of our very busy interviewees could make it. After a last minute scramble on the morning of the shoot, we found a location even more beautiful and fitting than the first. The perfect space for our conversations with Jenann Ismael & Natalie Wolchover.

Jenann Ismael, Philosopher of Science

Jenann Ismael is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and took the train up from Baltimore just for us. I can't emphasize what that meant to me personally, as I've been a huge fan of her work ever since a talk she gave at a neuroscience meeting some years ago. It was very important for us to include a proper philosopher in this film. That's because we're just as interested in the Why? of our search for fundamental truth as we are in the What? Yes, we do really want to know: What is the nature of reality? But equally important is: Why are we so compelled to seek these answers? and How does they change how we think about ourselves? It requires a very special type of mind and particular training to properly tackle these meta questions. In Jenann’s own words “as a philosopher, I take physics very seriously.” She’s a philosopher of physics, and so is profoundly more qualified to tackle these topics than the more common philosophizing physicist.

The conversation between Jenann and Matt took us through the Newtonian and Einsteinian scientific revolutions, which radically altered our understanding of reality AND our sense of our own place in the universe. She showed us how ideas like the relativity of simultaneity, determinism, and the arrow of time can teach us something so fundamental about our own natures as conscious agents embedded in the world. [Side note: I seriously agree with one of the meta points that Jenann mentioned a few times: If physicists took general relativity seriously, like, IF THEY ACTUALLY TAKE IT SERIOUSLY (sorry for the all caps, and also we can talk about what that means), we'd be able to finally graduate from the most tired debates on some the oldest foundational existential questions like free will, the openness of the future, and the nature of time. Then, maybe, we can finally move on to the next stage of this journey, which includes a much more interesting and scientifically well-founded picture of reality and of our place in it.]

Jenann has written absolutely brilliant books and these two are seriously required reading for anyone who is prone to existential ponderings, or who wants to be.

How Physics Makes Us Free Time: A Very Short Introduction.

Natalie Wolchover, Science Journalist

If you’re into reading and understanding physics, then you may already be familiar with Natalie’s work at Quanta Magazine. In her writings on fundamental physics, she has managed to bring illumination to ideas of incredible complexity and depth. She really changed what we thought was possible in science media. In acknowledgement of this work, Natalie won the Pulitzer Prize for her work in 2022. She's by far the best person to present a synthesis of the current landscape of theoretical physics.

Our conversation started with the confusion and tension generated by the Large Hadron Collider’s failure to find the predicted particles of supersymmetry, and flowed into the profound ramifications of this non-discovery, for example in the apparent fine tuning of the Higgs boson mass. Although Natalie is a consummate journalist (and so reticent with personal opinion) we managed to coax out her thoughts on which assumptions physicists are likely to have to let go of in order to move forward.

For example, to reconcile the LHC's missing particles and the apparently "lucky" value of the Higgs mass, do we need to accept that our universe itself is inexplicably lucky? Or perhaps anthropically selected from a vast multiverse? Or must we discard sacrosanct notions like reductionism and the fundamental nature of space and time, as some physicists speculate? Natalie made it clear none of the answers were particularly comfortable, and none preserved the status quo. Yet, counter to others' claims of stagnancy and crisis in physics, Natalie shared her excitement that we may be on the verge of scientific revolution on the scale of relativity and quantum mechanics.

With our New York shoots wrapped, we have around 50% of our film’s runtime in the can. Next up: the home of Einstein himself at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton!