There is no best viewpoint, and that best viewpoint is subject to the question. We should not say this is the way to look at it. Everything else is bad and so on and so forth. Contradictory sounding views are sometimes necessary to understand the subject. Openness and the fact that duality shows us that multitude of attitudes and views It's important to appreciate and connect, not only in a scientific context, but in in a broader human society last week that I think would have a good applications.

Welcome everybody To this edition of the Into the Impossible podcast, I am your fearful host, Brian Keating. And today, it is a great pleasure, a treat in fact, For me to welcome none other than Kamran Bafa of Harvard University. How are you, Kamran?

Thank you very much, Brian, for having me your program. It's a Great pleasure. I'm fine and, looking forward to our discussions.

Yes. I've been, just devouring your book, which we're gonna Talk a lot about today, puzzles to unravel the universe. And I've been fascinated with puzzles my whole life, mostly my inability to solve them, but you are noted for having made tremendous contributions to the world of theoretical physics, and this is your 1st popular science book as I understand it. And I always like to say there's a piece of advice that you never should judge a book by its cover. But on this on this book, not only do you have A very mysterious and and puzzling imagery, but you also have endorsements in from none other than Edward Witten, Well, I've tried to get on the show unsuccessfully, but I'll I'll talk to you about that later. And also, Brian Green, another Brian. Actually, my kid's Favorite Brian in astrophysics. But I wanna ask you, how did you come up with the name of the book, Puzzles to Unravel the Universe? And how did you come up with the artwork that so beautifully graces the cover of this book?

The title, I think, was motivated by a course I'm Teaching, for Harvard's freshman called physics, math, and puzzles. It's a freshman seminar. And, so the book was Basically, the was drawn out of its course. And, so I decided I was thinking about what title to choose if I had Chosen physics, math, and puzzle sounded a little bit, maybe boring, so I thought maybe I should use some elements of it without Sounding too academic and a bit more kind of exciting in terms of applications to the real world and so on. So I thought that, which which involves actually the motivation behind the whole course, which is the connections with the real world. So I thought unraveling, the universe through Puzzles, puzzles to unravel the universe does justice to what I wanted to convey, and, that's why I chose that. As far as the cover, I got some help from some some people online, but, this whole design and all that happened during the pandemic. So I decided, during the pandemic, one thing I could do, is to finish this series of notes into a book, which I decided doing and the sub publisher just to go over, get it quickly out and get it done, so that it's people who may wanna be looking at it could could have a chance to do it during the pandemic as well.

So so So it was done in a bit of a speedy way at the end, but, so that's that's what it is. But I'm very happy with the with the the cover of the book as well as the way the book came out.

Yes. It's very, intriguing, and it matches the subject matter as well. I wanna make A distinction between mysteries and puzzles, and wonder if you do that as well. To me, there's a difference between a mystery and a puzzle, And I and I once discussed this with, Freeman Dyson, who I know you knew, the late great Freeman Dyson. And it was that, you know, a puzzle is something that could be solved. Maybe I can't solve it because I'm not as smart as you, but, a mystery might not be solvable. And I wonder, do you make a distinction between mysteries versus puzzles?

Well, in a sense, puzzles aspire to be mysteries. That's a good puzzle. Aspire to be like mysteries. That's not quite solvable, but gives you an creation to new ideas. So I view puzzles always like that. But I I I think for example, in the book I talk about the enigma of quantum mechanics, I still view it as a mysterious features that we encounter even though we think we understand quantum mechanics. You know, the features of experimentation within quantum mechanics are serious still to me. And so with that in that sense, I agree we we haven't solved it or it's it's not solvable at this point.