Wrapping the Interviews: The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Today's stop: the Institute for Advanced Study to film interviews with Nima Arkani-Hamed and Juan Maldacena. On what had to be one of the coldest days of the winter, we traveled down to Princeton New Jersey to put up our set at the Marquand House at the IAS. Founded in the 1930’s, the IAS is one of the world’s preeminent centers for theoretical research. It's been the academic home for Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, and Kurt Gödel, to name a few. Today it is the intellectual home to two of our interviewees Nima Arkani-Hamed and Juan Maldacena.

Nima Arkani-Hamed, Theoretical Physicist

By 9am everything was set up, thanks to the primary fuel of the film industry: coffee. The grand piano moved and balancing on its side in another room, and gigantic lights secured outside the windows, as our director of photography, Eric Brouse likes to create an artificial sunlight that remains constant throughout a day-long shoot.

Now all we had to do was to wait in anticipation, wondering if we were going to shoot anything at all.

The thing was, there was no telling if Nima could even make it to the location. Although he lives close to the shoot location, he had started that day nearly 150 miles away in Baltimore. Some of the worst snow in years had blanketed the Interstate 95, threatening to disrupt all travel. Luckily for us Nima was raised in Canada. Undaunted by the treacherous commute, he had the right skills and grit to win through on those icy, half-salted roads.

And so Nima arrived with a burst of energy and sat down with Matt to give us the real news: Spacetime is doomed (not the show, the 3+1 dimensional manifold). The bedrock principles of our best modern theories—like locality in general relativity and unitarity in quantum mechanics—may not be so fundamental after all. If we take seriously the hints from Nima’s work on the Amplituhedron then even the fabric of space and the passage of time must be emergent from some deeper (potentially geometrical) reality. But what does that reality look like? Nima doesn’t know (yet), but impressed on us that, if future advances follow the trend of fundamental physics over the last 400 years, we may need to abandon our preconceptions about what the nature of fundamental reality actually is.

Juan Maldacena, Theoretical Physicist

Juan’s commute to the location was treacherous in its own way. Even though didn’t have to deal with an arctic I95, he did choose to ride his bicycle! Pedaling the quaint, Hogwarts-esque streets of Princeton was also a habit of Einstein's, so who are we to question it? However, on this frigid day the single-digit windchill did a real number on Juan's own digits. Once his hands defrosted with a hot cup of tea, he proceeded to give us all chills by explaining the real implications of the holographic principle.

We covered the "usual" stuff about how our universe might be the inward projection from its infinite, lower-dimensional boundary--but then we got oh so much more! We learned exactly how to add a dimension via quantum entanglement on the surface, and how these entanglement connections are related to wormholes via Juan's famous ER=EPR conjecture, and whether or not the holographic boundary is more “real” than the interior. Finally, we discussed how, in our universe, that boundary may not be a faraway place but rather a faraway time--the infinite far future of ... spacetime! And a bit of trivia: We have off-the-record confirmation from someone who was on the set of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at IAS, that our production did in fact have more cameras than Oppenheimer did while at IAS. Andrew sees this is as big accomplishment, though quickly adds: as long as you ignore the fact that the value of just the IMAX cameras used to create Oppenheimer is roughly double our film’s total budget.