so the first question I was also to to breach today was what are the kinds of scientific things that I think are beautiful and elegant and over the last few years I've been really interested in in what makes us human what makes actually what makes life living what's the difference between inanimate and animate matter and there are all kinds of fascinating things if you think about uh uh the natural world one of the things that you may you may know but I found very fascinating is how many genes we share with other organisms so we share something like 15% of our jeans with eoli 25% with yeast 50% with flies 70% with frogs if you kiss one it becomes a prince then it's 100% or at least and 98% with chimpanzees I actually grew up in galon in central Africa my parents were biologists we had a lot of animals at home including Bera a chimpanzee that I grew up with and just to be absolutely clear um for those of you that can't said this is me and that is a chimpanzee okay my mother says that all whether we look different we behave remarkably similarly so the question really is what makes us you know what makes us different and one of the things that makes us different is actually not the number of genes that we have but the way that they're connected so one of the things I Look At You see there in that corner of the gra is these each of these is a gene and each of those connections are they're like switches you're probably have you might be under the Mis apprehension that genes are like blueprints like architectural drawings but that couldn't be further from the truth they're much more like like networks of switches like chips and so you can rewire them and get completely different Behavior out of them and of course what's fun about this if you're a physicist is that the way that you can model these is with differential equations and so off we go and we crank and we're very happy for a long time and so this is one of the things I'm interested in what makes biological complexity emerge from this set of interactions is there something that emerges from there that's different from just the underlying things another thing I'm very interested in in my lab is that you see on this picture this is a bacterium bacteria swim and many of them swim with this little motor this is a a model from kg numa's group of how the bacterial Feller motor assembles this is an incredible little piece of nanom Machinery it can spin at 100,000 RPM can stop in something like a cure of a turn if you saw something like this and I could hold it in my hand I'd assume was made somewhere in a factory some very complex system put it together but these things make themselves these particle these proteins just float around and they somehow know exactly where to go you may not know this but you have 10 times as many bacteria in your body as you have cells in your body okay before you all rush off to the hospital that's perfectly normal they're what smaller than your cells your gut is full of them in fact you are part human part microbe we talk about the microbiome your part microb and so this is a very interesting thing to think about so while I'm speaking to you today this process that you see here will be happening millions of times in your body um during this talk and so I I actually saw this movie a number of years ago and I thought to myself wait how does that work how did those particles know where to go clearly nature does it all the time but that is an absolutely staggering Fe and one of the great things about being academic is I could then start thinking about it and um I won't lie with my own Super I'm not won't lie my own superficiality I actually got into this field because I saw a movie and I thought huh how does that work um and this is the movie that I saw and so I'm interested in this question how do you make things that make themselves and also how do you evolve things that self assemble to make themselves that's a really interesting and fascinating question it's the kind of thing that um I work on today I spoke at the physics department about how these things evolve and I want to show you a little bit more about how these things self assemble I sometimes tell people that what it's a bit like is like taking Lego blocks and if I could figure out how this works I could take Lego blocks put them in a box shake the Box all right and out it would come a fully formed train in fact as a Christian I think that this is how God probably made the world did God create the world all at once or did he make the world through something which makes itself surely the latter is a much more beautiful much more elegant much more interesting way of thinking about the way creation is so that's kind of a fun thing to think about and the main thing to get away from this is that science is is fun okay science is fun it's amazing that I get paid money to think about these things um a few Generations ago I would have had to be independently wealthy to do this but here me a boy from very uh um very humble Dutch gavane backgrounds can sit here and get paid money and it's people's tax money um not yours but other people's tax money your tax money will probably fund Max at some Point uh it gets paid and and it's great and the reason for that is because we find that many of the best discoveries come from this thinking about what we think is interesting so science is very fun I realize here I'm in the MIT audience and so many of you probably are from science and I'll tell you a few other tips about science that are helpful so I I do a lot of flying um I'm often on a plane I just want to be quiet either read or sleep and you know how you have somebody next to you who uh starts ask you all kinds of questions like what do you do generally if I say what they say what do you do I say I'm theoretical physicist that more us kills the conversation exactly exactly that's true it's true right and if that if that doesn't I just I they keep talking to me I say I like equations what's your favorite equation um so this is probably a stereotype that we put in um I'll skip this little joke i' I've solved this one actually um happily but uh took a lot of calculation so um so let me tell you something else about equations that I that um really struck me a lot as a as a um a young student so so I have a confession to make which was when I was at you know in secondary school in high school here I was interested in the usual things girls football so we have football which is a real football the one where you kick not the one that you hold in your hand I don't know why it's called a football um I think Max the same right the real football those things but I also was interested in quantum mechanics I taught myself quantum mechanics in high school and I realized I can admit that here because I'm probably certainly not the only one in the room but then when I went to University I started studying I I took a course and this is one of the most beautiful things that I've ever seen this is Paul dck one of my great Heroes of mathematical physicist in Cambridge who in the early um in the late 1920s was thinking about the following so I'm sure you're familiar here with the shinger equation this is MIT Shing equation the theory of very small things and J was that had been worked out in 19 19 26 by Erin schinger and so D was asking himself a very simple question what if I combine the schinger equation which works for very small things with Einstein's special relativity from 1905 very fast things very simple question take an electron what happens when it moves close to the speed of light will it transform a COR will it be Loren can WR write down Loren variant version of the schinger equation and what I learned in that course is something really fascinating which is that if I try to write down a version of the sh equation that transforms accordance to the laws of special relativity the only way that it works is if I I need a certain kind of non commuting algebra that only works if I have not just two components for spin up and spin down but another component some other objects and J and his great genius said well this is what the math says and and wrote down this equation and a few years later the positrons the antimatter was discovered and I remember as a student doing this derivation and thinking that is too amazing to be true how could the mathematical structure of two very disperate theories when they combined together generate something even more Fantastical like antimatter how could that demand that kind of obedience if you wish from the physical world um and I think these are some of the most beautiful things that there are in our world mountains are beautiful sea is beautiful but this is extraordinarily Exquisite and EXT ordinarily beautiful and uh um I just want to tell you about that because that's something that I think is very fascinating about our world which is what we call um Eugene wigner a famous no priz Winer called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve and so one of the really interesting questions when we look at the physical world is why do we see this incredible Elegant Beauty underlying it and why can't we human beings understand understand anything about that beauty um it's just one of the most striking things that there is in the world by the way on this D equation I was sure dur was wrong um I sure that that couldn't be true I spent the whole night once trying to figure out where he'd miss something it's a typical hubus of Youth I had to bow to the Great Master um and I now you know over time I realize even how great he really was compared to someone like me but this is one of the most beautiful things in the world and a question for all of us is what does this mean does this have any meaning why is the world this way why is the world so beautiful in fact I often give this quote to my students from HRI pangare a scientist does not study nature because it is useful he studies it because he Delights in it and he Delights in it because it is beautiful if nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing and if nature were not worth knowing life would not be worth living you can see that P was a Frenchman um so uh so there is something really exquisitely beautiful about the natural world and about the way we're able to understand it and so this is something which has always inspired me and I'm trying to apply these ideas these mathematical ideas to The Living World and seeing whether I can make any progress and that I think is a really worthwhile thing to devote one's life to so my brief from the varitas team was to give an introduction to my work and then a give a brief explanation where I think these laws of nature come from and then on a a third point to discuss how these physical laws may make me think about ethics or behavior so I'm going to talk now about this kind of brief explanation of where those laws come from and my worldview and why I believe it I mean these are a lot of things to cover in 15 20 minutes uh so I will be skating over them I think one really important thing about science is that science allows an enormous worldview plurality so the scientists in my lab that my PhD students have a wide range of of kind of metaphysical views about the world and as long as they hold basically to things like uniformity the world is more or less the same everywhere it's regular there's not Miracles when your equation doesn't converge um and intelligibility I can understand something about the world then then they're they're welcome to be in my lab that's one of the great things about science is enormously democratizing of all kinds of views we have about who we are and how we should live and what's interesting is that some of these basic what what might be interesting from a Christian's point of view is not that we that we agree on these general laws but the kind of met the question where do these principles come from why is the world why is nature regular why does it follow regular laws that even why can't we understand them and we're so used to these ideas today that we don't realize that they're weren't actually that obvious to most people through most time and the reason for that is that if you just live in the natural world doesn't seem to be always that regular it seems to be capricious it changes itself all the time and so what you can show I think quite quite um decisive ly historically is that these ideas these metaphysical underpinnings of science uniformity regularity intelligibility have deep theological Roots the Roots go back to a long history of theological reflection on a God who is faithful and sustains the world therefore in a regular way and um if you like this kind of thing there's a there's a lot of literature on this is a book that I recommend by James Hanan that looks at the um it's how the Christian Middle Ages launched the Scientific Revolution so one thing I as a Christian I think there's a very natural explanation for why we can do science that's because God if God sustains the world and God is a god of order and God of reg a god of faithfulness then I expect the world to follow regular laws some people would call this the customs of the Creator so what I'm doing in my lab is studying the customs of the creature the regular ways that God sustains the world so I think that within Christianity there is both historically and basic atically a very strong kind of argument for why science would work and why we should do science it fits very naturally into that world view but it can fit into other World Views and that's one of the great things about doing science we can ask a bigger question about um our kind of worldview and what does science tell us about that um but perhaps I want to do a little side question first and just say what if I wanted to ask you why is there something in other words why is there something rather than nothing well there are to first order roughly three possibilities something like our natural laws the laws of nature have always has always existed so there's always been something and then you can also what caused the current Universe well it was something before that one and what caused the current laws of nature well it was something before that but that quickly becomes kind of you know something and what caused that well something else caused it as long as you're working in this kind of Paradigm of natural laws and you end up with an infinite regress of causes in some way or the other that means perhaps another option is possible POS that would the option that the laws of nature not our universe but the actual laws of nature themselves popped into being out of real ontological nothingness so there really was nothing as opposed nothing nothing not a Quantum vacuum fluctuating but nothing and out of it popped the laws of nature that too is very different from anything that we would normally think about in our scientific world that's something outside of the categories that we are used to a third option would be the traditional one of traditional theology which would say the whole of space time is dependent on a non-spatial temporal reality a being who cannot exist who's normally called God and so by the principle that the explanation of something can't lie in the thing that is being explained to me this seems the most natural explanation for why there is something rather than nothing and I think to myself I just look around at the world the incredible Rich facundity of the world the beauty of the world and it seems very hard for me to believe that that could simply have popped into being out of an logical nothingness or just be something of an infinite regress of causes it seems to make a lot more sense that this would by the principal explanation um come from a being who cannot not exist something who is outside of space and time so that is a very brief argument to where I think those laws come from and the last thing I was going to look at is how do those sources of physical laws how do it make me help me with ethical choices so this is where I think science doesn't help me that much and I'll give you and I think it's a mistake and actually a dangerous mistake to think that science can ground our ethics science can help us making ethical decisions but it can't ground them in way and so I'll give you one trivial example what if I wanted to measure the value of a human life that's a tremendously important question very important question for all kinds of practical ways that we govern ourselves and we live well I'll be a bit factious how would I measure the value of a human life well if I was a chemist I could measure the value of the elements but surely somebody with gold fings isn't worth more than somebody without them has a physiologist can measure the size of your brain a psychologist how smart you are an anthropologist how the Community Values you an economist how much economic value you produce homo economicus I feel like I'm measured that way by my um um my superiors but we all recognize that those are the wrong axes on which to measure the value of the human being this really important question of do humans have value and how should we value them has to come from somewhere else and very briefly the way I like to think about it is this it's a bit like you're on a walking on a dark Street and there's a very bright light that shines down and that bright light is the light of science the great power of science is the ability to really in a in this incredible tractor beam like way focus on certain types of problems but there are only certain types of problems that are immutable to the scientific method science great success comes precisely from imposing self from self-imposed limits and the idea that you could only find Truth where the light is is a little bit like a drunk looking for his keys who only looks into the light because that's the only place where he can find them the fact is that the really important questions of Life the questions of meaning the questions of purpose the questions of human value come from the Shadows if you wish that's where we should look it's isn't so there there aren't kind of scientific methods that we can use to independently adjudicate for everybody where they are but we have no choice but to go there and to look and to look as carefully and as as carefully as we can and so my last few minutes that's that's a very quick summary of a lot of ideas I realize so we have questions and answers afterwards so how would I go about then looking at adjudicating about where to ground these questions of purpose and value I already told you that I'm a Christian uh I'm a I'm an an Orthodox Christian I believe the the classic Creeds of the the church I think they're actually really true um and so I think that the the point in the all these kinds of arguments is that you that the best way of going about them is the follow the following so the best way of looking at the evidence um the problem often with the bate is not the evidence but how to weigh the evidence and the best way to weigh the evidence is to start from one of two possible starting points one is that in the beginning God there's a God who created the world and then look at the world and think is the world does it resonate better with that assumption or the alternative assumption in the beginning nothing either it came out of ontological nothingness or there's some kind of something that preceded it and I think that starting from the assumption that there is a God makes a lot more sense of the word the world is if you ask me I think it explains in a natural way the basis for modern science for why we see such beauty and Fund in natural world I think it helps grounds really important questions moral questions it grounds a kind of moral realism in a way I think is very important I think it grounds questions of human dignity and value in ways that are absolutely critical and I think that if I start from the Assumption there is no God and then look at the worlds then for me the tapestry of that tapestry that puts together the whole not just the each part separately is for me a lot less um satisfying I think this idea that there's a God behind the world EX is makes makes the the unreasonable effect of mathematics something that much more natural than if the world just popped into being out of nothing why would that be true why would we understand it why would the rule even be mathematical obviously all of these arguments are really just very generic Arguments for theism and you might think well that's fine but which God should I choose and I think that is a different question for a different time but an incredibly important one because I think what you can't do is kind of sit on the fence and say why don't we know and so I'm not going to care you you have to make a choice either one way or the other because these questions are so important they really matter to How I Live Our Lives they matter to questions of purpose and meaning and so just very briefly in the last minute why do I believe in particular in Christianity well there are many arguments for it one is that you know if you think if there is a God it would not be at all be surprising that this God would want to communicate with us and so finding some kind of Revelation is something that we one might look for and in in the case of Christianity there's the Bible which I think is a really remarkable book and for me has has had an in incredible impact on my life and I think it it points towards the kinds of truths that are deep and Powerful there's a resurrection of of Jesus Christ the life and teaching of Jesus Christ which I think are have exactly that kind of unexpected character and when you once you find it it seems something very deep and Powerful just like when you first do look at D theorem you think that has this completely unexpected the deration unexpected but deeply beautiful and non-intuitive but powerful truth to it in this way also I see this in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and of course things like religious experience are really important and all these things weave together into a tapestry for why I believe in in Christianity and in particular why I'm a follower of Jesus I've skated over a lot of things um I just want to conclude to say science and religion really I think are cousinly disciplines they're open-minded searches for Motivated belief and for me Christianity is both intellectually robust and existentially satisfying and I'm throwing those things out there in the hope of stimulating some later conversation and with that I thank you very much for your [Applause] [Music] attention