Virtual Lecture Library

[00:00:01.84] DEBORAH ROACH: Hello.

[00:00:02.72] AUDIENCE: Hello.

[00:00:03.10] AUDIENCE: Hello.

[00:00:03.49] AUDIENCE: Hello.

[00:00:04.57] DEBORAH ROACH: I'm Deborah Roach. And I hope that you all are here to talk about the uplifting story about aging.

[00:00:13.79] [LAUGHTER]

[00:00:14.94] AUDIENCE: Old age.

[00:00:17.19] DEBORAH ROACH: And so I am fairly freshly retired only about a year and a half ago now from the Department of Biology. And while I was in biology, I actually taught a course on the biology of aging for about 25 years. And so I've gotten to know a lot about the field. But when I think about the field of biology, the biology of aging, I have to tell you that I don't just think about humans.

[00:00:54.82] I also think about plants. And I think about other animals as well. And so as we go through and talk about aging, I'm actually going to throw in some examples from other species too. But, of course, the focus for today and for the next week is really to talk about human biology of aging, and what we can do about it, how we can look at some of the myths that are out there and know what works, and what really doesn't work, OK?

[00:01:29.99] I have to say, first of all, that I said I taught this class for a long time. But I was talking to 18 and 20-year-olds. And it's different when you want-- I start the class out. And I always say, well, what's aging? And they look at me. And they talk about the cells and the sort of thing. And they had no idea. And so this is a really different audience for me to talk to. And it really makes it-- it's kind of fun.

[00:02:01.05] So I think all of us have a sense of what aging is all about. And so please, as we go through this, ask questions, OK? I'm sure you've wondered, what's this seminar going to be about? So what is this I've been thinking about experiencing over the years? So please don't hesitate to ask questions. And for people online, I'd also say welcome. And please write questions in to Kelly. And Kelly, just go ahead and raise your hand when someone else has raised a question. And is everything, before we go on any further, is everything OK online? So we're all set?

[00:02:47.03] AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you.

[00:02:49.06] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, OK.

[00:02:50.24] AUDIENCE: Maybe you let us know where they're going to pan the audience.

[00:02:52.74] [LAUGHTER]

[00:02:55.79] DEBORAH ROACH: OK. So when we think about aging, it's, of course, as the population has aged, and so forth, there are just many, many more books and myths, and there's so much out there that's really been thrown at us. And as a professional in the field also, I've always been surprised at how captured people feel, and militant almost, about what their research is about and how what they're doing is going to solve the problem.

[00:03:39.51] And so I go to meetings and so forth. And you see people living, their research, people working on caloric restriction or are eating very little at lunchtime during the breaks, and that sort of thing. And so it's really very interesting to think about all the ideas that people have about aging. And I guess what I'd like to say is the big take-home message is that aging is complex. And there is no one answer. So that will be the take-home message.

[00:04:22.74] But there's also an optimistic message that I hope you all walk away with. And that is this idea that, in fact, we can do something. We can actually look at biological processes and see that we can reverse this process, or increase our defenses against this process. And so that's where we're headed. And that's what I hope that you'll start to understand as we move forward.

[00:04:49.64] So today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a little bit about lifespan, and then move into defining exactly what aging is all about. And then what I want to do is I actually want to then tackle one of the myths. And the myth that we're aiming for here is this idea that social interactions like these, the retired faculty association, actually can have an impact on biological aging. And I'm getting way ahead of myself. But I just want you to know where we're headed.

[00:05:30.67] And so let me get started. And I cannot start a-- I can't start a discussion about aging without talking about the two people, male and female, who have lived the longest. And this is Madame Calment, who lived for 122 years, and Mr. Kimura, who lived 116 years. And we all want to look at these individuals and say, wow, how do these people live this long? And what were their secrets?

[00:06:18.73] And I have to tell you that there's been a lot more research done on Madame Calment. In fact, there's been a book written about her. And some of the secrets as people talk about it from her are that she ate pounds of chocolate.

[00:06:37.60] [LAUGHTER]

[00:06:42.28] She drank red wine regularly. And the other thing is she rode a bicycle until she was 100.

[00:06:50.41] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[00:06:51.22] DEBORAH ROACH: And, yeah, seriously. And she lived independently until she was 110.

[00:06:56.65] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[00:06:57.88] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah. So, I mean, this is someone we would call a super ager, because it wasn't-- she was living long. But she was also healthy. And I have to tell you that in my professional network, I knew someone who interviewed her. And he would interview her every couple of years to get information, see how she was doing, take all these health measurements. And one time when he was there, and he was in his mid-sixties, and he was finished his analysis and so forth, and was about to leave, and he turned and said, see you next year. And she said, yeah, you don't look so bad.

[00:07:42.73] [LAUGHTER]

[00:07:45.04] Saying that. Well, she, at that time, she was 117. So another take-home message from this is a sense of humor is actually a really good characteristic. And maybe it had something to do with this fact that she was a super ager. I don't know. But what I can tell you is that there's a lot of research going on looking at these people who are living to late ages, and trying to understand what their characteristics are, do they have unique genetics? Do they have innate behaviors? Do they have different unique environments, diets, and that sort of thing, to try to put all these things together? And there is a lot of research that's going on with respect to that.

[00:08:35.44] And there was something that I read about just recently, which suggests that when we think about the-- very often, you think, well, people who have genes that are going to predispose them to a high chance of getting Alzheimer's disease, for example. Well, it turns out, the expectation is that those people will have shorter lifespans. Well, it turns out that there's now a lot of good evidence that, in fact, some of these people who are living to these late ages and are healthy are also carriers of some of these genetic age-related diseases. Wow.

[00:09:24.58] And so the question then is, do they have other parts of their genome which are actually counteracting their susceptibility to these diseases? Or in fact-- or is there something about their environment that actually is limiting the expression of these deleterious diseases? And so it's really very interesting. And there's a whole lot that's being done to look at these, as they called, unexpected heroes, those who are living for really long periods of time. Now--

[00:10:03.39] AUDIENCE: What did they die of?

[00:10:07.85] DEBORAH ROACH: Honestly, I don't know. But I have had friends of mine who are in this field. And they get so frustrated when the doctor then signs what did they die of? Old age. And-- yeah, yeah. But that-- I don't know. I don't know if there are any physicians in the room, are there? Yes--

[00:10:29.69] AUDIENCE: I'm a retired pediatrician.

[00:10:31.03] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:10:33.23] --be helpful.

[00:10:34.82] DEBORAH ROACH: OK. So you won't be able to speak to that. But it is a good question. And I don't remember with respect to Madame Calment and Mr. Kimura. But--

[00:10:47.39] AUDIENCE: Maybe there was no autopsy done, right?

[00:10:49.53] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. That's true, too. That's true, too. It's a good question. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to take you-- actually remind you of one of the things that actually the paper that you read all raised. And that was this idea that, in fact, we have increased lifespan over time in a very dramatic way. And this is, this is actually life expectancy. Life expectancy is basically the average lifespan of a group of individuals who are born in a particular year.

[00:11:32.37] And so what I'd like you to see here is that, in fact, life expectancy was, from the 1700s, until to the mid-1900s, was pretty flat. It was about 30, 35 years. And then we've had these dramatic increases in life expectancy. And such takes us to the point, as mentioned in your reading, that we have Hong Kong and Japan who have a life expectancy now of 85 years, OK? So that's the average lifespan.

[00:12:12.79] So there are many more people who are going to be living to really late ages, given this change. It's been a dramatic change. In fact, the change was-- this was a very linear change here. In other words, every 10 years, there was an increase in life expectancy about 2 and 1/2 years, so really, really fast. Any suggestions about what was going on here?

[00:12:39.66] AUDIENCE: Penicillin, maybe?

[00:12:40.86] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah. Clearly, a lot of antibiotics and all sorts of things, yes, that would have impacted mortality rates.

[00:12:54.90] AUDIENCE: Vaccines.

[00:12:55.81] DEBORAH ROACH: Vaccines, yes. And, so clearly, a lot of health advances, but a lot of social advances as well. Hygiene, you think from the-- going from the mid-1900s until now, things like hygiene, just basic socioeconomic levels, increasing food and lifestyle. And so--

[00:13:21.24] AUDIENCE: And infant mortality--

[00:13:22.08] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:13:23.96] AUDIENCE: Those figures are funny because they-- again, somebody, everybody.

[00:13:30.04] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. Infant mortality is the biggest point in the lifespan that has changed with respect to mortality rates during this period of time. But there is also all age mortality has actually improved as well, even for the elderly. But infant mortality is one of the key factors which has led to this. And there's a lot of discussion in the literature about whether or not we're reaching a limit, and things are going to start to slow down or not. But it is resulting in an extremely extended lifespan.

[00:14:08.32] Now what I want to do is also mention that environment is something that's very important. And one way we can see how the environment is important is to look at the US. And so this is life expectancy by state. And I always find it fascinating that, in fact, there is such a range here. So the best performing countries primarily out in the West have a life expectancy within the state between 78 and 80 years old. And those are the worst performing. It's almost 10 years less than that. It's 71 to 75 years. And that's this purple color here. And--

[00:15:01.47] AUDIENCE: Let's go somewhere else.

[00:15:02.79] DEBORAH ROACH: Pardon me.

[00:15:03.30] AUDIENCE: Let's go somewhere else.

[00:15:04.59] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Even in Virginia, we're not doing as well as we might-- as we might like to. But yes--

[00:15:13.50] AUDIENCE: So it doesn't take ethnicity into consideration, I suppose. The West coast is your Asian population.

[00:15:22.10] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, I think that you're raising a really good point. And that is that there's a lot of heterogeneity in the US. And so in fact, that's why the US is not one of the best performers. The US is ranked like 47th in terms of life expectancy compared to other countries. And a lot of that is due to the heterogeneity with respect to ethnicity, with respect to socioeconomic situations, and things like that are really--

[00:15:52.48] AUDIENCE: --comparing states, migration patterns, where people want to live-- half the state of Washington--

[00:15:59.00] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah.

[00:15:59.82] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I mean--

[00:16:00.82] DEBORAH ROACH: That's absolutely right. And in fact, there are also differences among states. And I'd love to superimpose another map to show these differences in terms of issues with respect to socioeconomic levels, but also things like addiction, and things like that. As we know, we've heard about the opioid crisis. And we know that it's been isolated in certain parts more than others. And that has an impact.

[00:16:35.91] AUDIENCE: I think that Florida surprises me. I would have thought that would have been--

[00:16:39.58] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, yes.

[00:16:40.68] AUDIENCE: --top of it. But I guess all those old people are dying.

[00:16:43.84] [LAUGHTER]

[00:16:46.32] DEBORAH ROACH: Thank you. That, they do OK. So what's the take-home message here? The take-home message is that when we think about lifespan, really, there are-- let me go back a second, and to say that when we think about lifespan, one of the things that's very important is environment. A lot of the things that we've been talking about are environmental impacts on lifespan.

[00:17:16.89] And so when we think about also this expanding life expectancy, and so forth, what we also want to recognize is that as we increase lifespan, there's this area of healthspan. We, sort of, mentioned that a little bit earlier. And this is an idea that you're fairly healthy for some part of that lifespan. But then there is this phase of the lifespan where you are suffering from age-related diseases.

[00:17:53.32] And so when we start thinking about aging and understanding aging, we want to-- ideally, most of us don't really want to keep pushing out lifespan so much, especially if it means pushing out this period of age-related diseases. Really, what we'd like to do is to maximize this period of healthspan, and then have a very small period of age-related diseases.

[00:18:27.67] And to go back to what we've been talking about with respect to lifespan across the US, and historically, we have to recognize that both the environment and aging are determining lifespan. And the goal of most aging research these days is not so much to increase lifespan as we historically have been, but really to try to figure out how we can tackle this piece. And so we'll be talking about that in multiple different ways.

[00:19:06.84] And there is some good news, though. And that is that, in fact-- When we think about lifespan, there is a very large-- as we've been talking about, there is a large environmental piece. And so that means that, in fact, we can do something. It may not be as complicated as we may have thought.

[00:19:37.06] So what I'd like to do is to say, OK, so what is aging? Now OK-- now your reading for the session today talked about how much historical interest there has been in finding the fountain of youth. It's this idea that we're going to find this restorative spring. We're going to all jump into it. And then we're going to come out the other end. And we're all going to be young again.

[00:20:17.17] I like this painting from the 1500s, where, in fact, they're bringing in old ladies on carts and on stretchers. And they get into these restorative waters. And then they come out as young males on the other side. And it all suggests that, in fact, there is something special going on. But in fact-- and that we just have to find the right answers. And we'll be able to solve all this problems. In fact, you know the stories about Ponce de Leon, who went out to look for the fountain of youth. And what did he find? He found Florida.

[00:20:57.42] [LAUGHTER]

[00:21:03.29] AUDIENCE: And they're all white there. They're all white. That's, you know, an interpretation. But there were Black people.

[00:21:09.09] AUDIENCE: Really?

[00:21:09.74] AUDIENCE: I know these ones.

[00:21:11.96] DEBORAH ROACH: So--

[00:21:13.67] AUDIENCE: I've never been to, is it called Albemarle dermatology. But is that what it looks like?

[00:21:20.87] DEBORAH ROACH: You're right.

[00:21:21.74] AUDIENCE: They seem advertised--

[00:21:22.59] DEBORAH ROACH: --restorative, yes.

[00:21:23.41] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:21:25.28] AUDIENCE: --facials and restorative this and

[00:21:27.29] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:21:28.19] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, this is a big business, with advertising yourself is doing some anti-aging type of restoration. Yeah, it's a big business. So there is some good news when we look in the natural world. And that is that there are some species that can escape. And I'm going to tell you about one of them. And that's the lobster. And you'll never look at lobster again the same way.

[00:22:00.86] So negligible senescence. Senescence is-- and is what we're referring to as aging OK? And negligible senescence is that here's a species that doesn't seem to show any aging. Well, how does it do it? So what happens, a lobster continues to get bigger as it gets older. And as it gets bigger, a big lobster, it's about two feet long, can make about 100,000 eggs, huge level of food production. And as they get older, they make even more eggs.

[00:22:43.14] And so what happens, though, is that as they get bigger, they have this hard shell on the outside. And what they're going to do is they're going to shed their aging body and throw it away. So basically what happens is that this lobster will then-- the skin cells under the shell start to get enlarged.

[00:23:10.69] And then basically, they drain the calcium out of the shell, because they're going to need that calcium later on. And then they're going to basically pump seawater in and throw off their body. And just before this, what they've been doing is making the foundation for their new shell. But with-- this would be like throwing away all our skeletal-- all--

[00:23:41.89] AUDIENCE: Does that happen all at once?

[00:23:43.69] DEBORAH ROACH: No. In fact, when they're young, it does it about-- they do it about five or six times a year. And when they're older, they do it about once a year. And so-- yeah, come on in. So the idea is so in fact, they don't age.

[00:24:07.33] AUDIENCE: But we get rid of ourselves every seven years, don't we? We replace them, more or less, all of them.

[00:24:12.25] DEBORAH ROACH: Not all of them. And the trouble is that we're accumulating other damage. And so--

[00:24:18.55] AUDIENCE: Not fast enough.

[00:24:19.87] DEBORAH ROACH: No, that's not enough just to get rid of ourselves, because we've got a whole lot of other things that are getting damaged. But this is one way to, in fact, to have no aging. But I want to ask you a question. So do you think that to say that the lobster doesn't age, do you think it lives forever? Is it immortal?

[00:24:41.80] AUDIENCE: It's a different lobster.

[00:24:43.49] DEBORAH ROACH: No, no.

[00:24:44.50] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:24:47.38] No, let's just say this one individual, OK?

[00:24:50.92] AUDIENCE: Well, it's changed everything.

[00:24:53.59] DEBORAH ROACH: It has changed, yeah.

[00:24:55.09] AUDIENCE: Doesn't a lobster have organs?

[00:24:57.28] DEBORAH ROACH: It does. It does. It does. And in fact, they have-- their organs actually have cells that have the ability to constantly continue to repair, and so forth. And so they've got other mechanisms as well. But the throwing away of the body, except for those internal organs, is something that's the most--

[00:25:23.56] AUDIENCE: Is a 15-year-old lobster as tender as a-- yeah. Really, I mean, so you got this 27 pounds lobster, we would enjoy the meat.

[00:25:35.65] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, Yes. Yes, exactly. But you know what's interesting? And this-- just mentioned this. There's this wonderful book by Trevor Carson on The Secret Life of Lobsters. And it's really about conservation of fishing with the fishermen, and then all of the biologists who want to be sure that you've got the idea that you're preserving the oldest individuals to keep the populations going.

[00:26:08.70] And so in fact, there's a very narrow window that you're allowed to keep the lobsters, because these big mamas, if you will, are very critical to keep the population going. But an individual lobster, if it can continue to get bigger and so forth, over time, it's not going to live forever, OK? It's just not going to age. It's not going to get any older.

[00:26:39.86] But there are other things that go on. There are other-- mortality of a lobster is also dependent on the environment. Every organism encounters some level of environmental mortality. It may be constant, but it happens. And so even by accidents or whatever random chance alone, age independent mortality is happening.

[00:27:04.69] AUDIENCE: Are they easier prey for other animals--

[00:27:08.41] DEBORAH ROACH: No.

[00:27:08.83] AUDIENCE: --when they get older?

[00:27:09.85] DEBORAH ROACH: No, don't think so. I don't think there's any evidence that that's the case. So, in fact, the general thought is that there's sort of a constant probability of dying with age, but that that's fairly constant with age. And that's actually how you would define not aging.

[00:27:29.48] AUDIENCE: They get diseases, or--

[00:27:33.38] DEBORAH ROACH: Not that I-- honestly I don't know.

[00:27:36.35] AUDIENCE: OK. How do they die? I can hardly wait to hear--

[00:27:40.40] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, there are situations with predators that come along. And actually, one of the things, one of the most vulnerable stage in a lobster, then we're going to have to go on, the most vulnerable stage in the lobsters, when they throw off their skin, they throw off this body. And in fact, they haven't actually solidified this hard outside shell. That hard outside shell prevents a lot of predation. But before in between times, when they don't have that shell, they're actually very vulnerable.

[00:28:14.53] AUDIENCE: Certainly. All right.

[00:28:15.90] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I've mentioned that, in fact, that no aging means that, in fact, there's this constant chance of dying just due to predators and other environmental factors. And in fact, aging is then this idea that, in fact, your chance of dying is actually going to be increasing over time.

[00:28:43.61] Now, I want to show you this as we transition here to say, what is aging. And I want to show you this with respect to a beautiful. picture here, painting, actually, that represents the bridge of life. But it actually was a very specific painting. And this painting was put together in response to the Benjamin Gompertz, who, in 1825, put together the mathematical, a good mathematical understanding of how death rates change with age. They increase in a linear fashion. And they keep increasing as you get older. And that's depressing. But anyway, we'll get back to that.

[00:29:39.85] And this picture actually shows this very nicely. And that is that as an infant, some individuals may be carrying genetic diseases, and so forth. And so this skeleton here with the skull on the top is representing ancestral diseases that some infants may die of very early on in life. But then this child and young man have very few things except random chance sorts of things that are impacting their death rates.

[00:30:14.76] And the way that's represented here, this is very violent. The way this represented is that as we go through ages of life, these weapons that are used to cause mortality, if you will, become more and more accurate. OK. So here a bow and arrow here, and some sort of a musket here.

[00:30:38.73] And then here, just remember, this is from the 1800s, this was the ultimate weapon, which was very accurate, the Winchester rifle. And so over time, these causes of mortality become more and more accurate, and more and more precise until life ends, and some limit is reached. And so this was basically to depict this idea that, in fact, the older you get, the higher the chance you have of dying. And that's one of the fundamental features of aging.

[00:31:19.50] But I want you to-- I really want to translate that into something that makes sense. And I'd like to think about it as a balance between damage and repair. So when we're young, then we have-- there are a number of things that can cause damage. And we'll talk about those in a second here. But when we're young, there's a very nice balance between damage and repair. And most there's-- what little damage that occurs with respect to environmental factors, for example, the repair systems were working too. And everything's in very good shape. And in fact mortality is very low.

[00:32:12.74] Then as we get older, damage levels increase. And so-- wait a second here. The repair processes may also increase to a certain extent. But then the repair processes themselves may start to decline. And so we get this imbalance between damage and repair. Now, from a-- yeah, let me just leave that there like that, because what I want to do is I want to take you to the next slide here.

[00:32:46.49] And this is what I've been talking about. And this is this balance between damage and repair. And what's determining that? Some of it is our genetics. But a lot of it is environmental factors. Environmental factors are increasing the levels of damage. And when there's a lot of damage, there's repair. But there's a lot of unrepaired damage that starts to accumulate with age. And the higher the levels of damage accumulation then lead to aging, lead to this functional decline, and lead to the susceptibility to age-associated diseases and cancers.

[00:33:39.28] Before I go on, does that make sense at this point? OK. And I want to use one example just to let you know-- give you an example of this in a little more concretely. I want to talk about the accumulation of DNA damage in the body. And when I talk about the environment, I'm talking about things like radiation, chemicals, toxins, that sort of thing, which can damage the DNA. And I'm also talking about metabolic processes that are occurring. And we'll talk more about that in the next session that we'll have.

[00:34:20.00] But in fact, even metabolism creates damaging materials that can then have an impact on the amount of DNA damage. And then what happens is that with this accumulation of DNA damage, we actually have a decline in cellular functions. We have cell death. We have aging of the body. And also, as it turns out, we have a decline in DNA repair mechanisms. And then we have this, again, accumulation of damage, which is then contributing to aging.

[00:35:04.89] Now in your reading, the reading talked about the hallmarks of aging. And I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. But I did feel that given that it was in the reading, I wanted to mention what they were talking about. And so here, we have things like genomic instability that's associated with cancers, and that sort of thing. And all of these are processes that are fundamental to the biology of aging.

[00:35:44.37] And generally speaking, there are, depending on who you read, they're either 9 or 12 fundamental processes that are getting damaged, increasing the levels of decline in function. And these are then genomic instability, epigenetic alterations. So what that means is that our DNA is actually getting these caps on them. And we're going to talk about this in a few minutes a little more. But our DNA is getting modified with these chemical markers, which then end up turning the genes off. It's not changing the structure of the DNA. But it's actually turning genes off. And well, let me hold back and talk about that a little more later.

[00:36:41.93] And I'll just tell you about a few more of these things. But our chromosomes actually have these little caps on them. And over time, those caps get smaller and smaller and eventually reach a limit. And so we can't go through the cell cycle. And what we do, what we end up with is we end up with a lot of dead cells in our body. We have this accumulation of dead cells in our body. And so one of the pathways that we need to then try to sort out is how can we get rid of that? But this declines in telomere function can lead to immune system problems, and all sorts of things.

[00:37:28.38] And let me just talk a little bit more about one of these, and then we'll move on. This idea of proteostasis, and this idea that there's this accumulation of proteins in the body, which are no longer folding correctly. And there are all these errors that start to accumulate. Well, those are the types of errors that are associated with Alzheimer's, with Parkinson's, and with cataracts.

[00:37:58.51] And so all of these changes that are occurring at the cell level in the body are not only themselves creating functional problems for us, but they're also interacting with each other as well. And so there's a lot of cross-talk here between all of these different changes that are occurring. And the take-home message is aging is really complex. And again, there's no one answer that we're going to come up with that's going to be able to sort all this out.

[00:38:40.74] And the idea is that we have this accumulation of damage, which then results in these functional declines. But it's only really if we understand this biology piece of it, which we're only just beginning to understand. Are we really going to understand how we may be able to ameliorate some of these conditions?

[00:39:06.18] So I don't usually use bullet points in my slides. But I am here because I want to be sure that we get all of the different pieces, if you will, of what aging really is. So aging is time independent. Some of us are aging fast. And some of us are aging slowly, even if we're the same age. It's progressive, cumulative, increases in damage. And that's-- we can't-- everybody is experiencing that. That's a universal feature.

[00:39:47.92] And it's caused by both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. As I said before, some of it is-- a lot of it is the environment, toxins, and so forth. But it's also intrinsic. There are metabolic processes that are creating these wastes that are causing the damage. It results in the deleterious loss of physiological, structural, and cognitive function. We all know that. And eventually ends in death.

[00:40:17.90] Now. It's unpredictable. And I think that one of the other things that needs to be understood is that it's universal. If we look across all of the different species that show aging, every individual on that. species, whether it be humans or horses, they all age. And it's something that's shared among them. So what I want to do is to shift a little bit and ask and say, take you back to the reading and say, is aging a disease? I'd like to ask that question.

[00:41:08.28] AUDIENCE: No, good point.

[00:41:09.47] AUDIENCE: No, don't think so. I think it's just lifespan determined. Because if we-- like a butterfly has a lifespan. All Different organisms have lifespans. And we have one of them. And when I just see it all around, it's sort of like people get to be 80. It's like there's something that happens that's qualitatively different. And then--

[00:41:36.26] AUDIENCE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:38.73] DEBORAH ROACH: And how is that different than other disease?

[00:41:42.12] AUDIENCE: We all have-- we all have diseases from acne. I mean, and they're age-related. I mean, I don't have acne anymore.

[00:41:49.36] [LAUGHTER]

[00:41:52.37] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:41:55.60] Well, yeah.

[00:41:57.00] AUDIENCE: So different things happen at different times in a human being's life that aren't-- looking for a cure of aging is just going to happen.

[00:42:07.80] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, that-- yeah, that's-- does anyone else want to comment?

[00:42:11.59] AUDIENCE: Well, I was so unsettled when I read that it was a disease. And that's what the article says. I thought at the end, it would say, aging is not a disease. But that's not where it ends. It's still it's that position forward. But it's hard to think of aging and disease in the same sentence. But that's what you want us to do.

[00:42:35.26] AUDIENCE: I thought just the opposite.

[00:42:36.85] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, so-- yeah.

[00:42:38.32] AUDIENCE: That's what I got out of it is aging is not a disease, something that happens. And as far as I can tell from what I read, the disease is something that occurs at any given moment during the aging process. But it's not the same. And we probably be happy have you explained what you really mean by that.

[00:43:06.60] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, one of the things-- I mean, I think you've both-- this is good because I can take off from this here. Because first of all, not every-- we don't all suffer from the same diseases. We all suffer from aging. But we don't all suffer from the same diseases. So that's one big difference between aging and disease. We can't cure aging. But we can hope to cure most diseases, OK? We don't talk about a cure for aging as we talk about a cure for a disease.

[00:43:48.44] AUDIENCE: How do we know we can't cure aging?

[00:43:52.80] DEBORAH ROACH: Because even-- I'm going to show you-- well, let me just flip to this for a second and show you that if we were to eliminate diseases, and particular, age-related diseases that we are vulnerable to-- if we were to eliminate heart disease and cancer, we would actually only add about seven years life expectancy. And we would be susceptible to other diseases.

[00:44:25.51] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I'm not thinking of eliminating diseases as eliminating aging. I'm thinking of it as a different process of eliminating the damage that's done somehow, damage that's done, sort of, all over our bodies.

[00:44:43.45] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. And, in fact, I think that there's a general consensus that what we want to figure out how to do is to push out the functional declines that are due to the accumulation to the latest ages. Aging biologists-- or biologists, excuse me, not aging biologists. Biologists study aging. Really, they use the expression, they want you to die with your boots on. In other words, you have-- you try to figure out how to push off the functional declines, the susceptibility to the age-related diseases to the very, very last stage, and keep that as short as possible. But we won't-- there's no expectation that we'll be able to cure all the aspects of aging.

[00:45:32.78] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:45:35.68] AUDIENCE: --that you showed that arrow [INAUDIBLE].

[00:45:38.91] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. That's right. But to get to your point, Beverley, about what the paper was saying, my understanding of what the paper was saying was that, in fact, there are differences between aging and disease. But they were suggesting, well, maybe to get bring attention to any say, drug that may be available to actually put off or to delay aging to a later age, the only way that we're going to get the FDA to notice that is to call-- is to somehow, yeah, put these two things together, because aging is such a complex thing.

[00:46:30.49] It's hard to make it sexy in terms of funding, and that sort of thing. And so I think that that's really what the point was, was we're-- how can we-- how can we get the funding that's necessary? Because, in fact aging itself, you go to the National Institute of Aging, and in fact, people are studying age-related diseases. They're not actually doing a lot with these actual processes, these hallmarks of aging decline--

[00:47:02.68] AUDIENCE: The age-related disease can be something that occurs among people of a certain age and still not be-- it's kind of a correlational relationship, and not a causational--

[00:47:16.20] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:47:17.76] DEBORAH ROACH: --causation.

[00:47:18.72] AUDIENCE: --business in this paper. It's just have to look at it very carefully.

[00:47:24.48] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. And it's that causation, it's that basic biology, which is what we need to get at.

[00:47:30.31] AUDIENCE: You can intercede and alter those processes.

[00:47:33.22] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:34.02] AUDIENCE: Otherwise-- so age-related disease, to me, is just in this-- in my group, there's more likely to be Alzheimer's. And then now that's not a good thing. So what do we do about it--

[00:47:49.78] DEBORAH ROACH: What do we do about it? That's right. That's right.

[00:47:52.29] AUDIENCE: --into that.

[00:47:52.96] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:47:55.18] AUDIENCE: OK.

[00:47:56.88] AUDIENCE: Well, age-related disease, there are clearly genetic diseases that are age-related that are not primarily environmentally determined.

[00:48:07.77] DEBORAH ROACH: Well-- but there are-- but there are environmental factors, which may mediate the seriousness of any of those age-related diseases. So I think there's a combination of both genetics and environment that are important. But yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right.

[00:48:26.69] AUDIENCE: And one of the things that-- I'm sorry I was late. I had a trouble-- I'd never been to this place. I'd had trouble finding it.

[00:48:33.69] AUDIENCE: Many of us did.

[00:48:35.61] AUDIENCE: age-related.

[00:48:37.72] AUDIENCE: I was at NIH. And there was one researcher who was able to actually transplant young-- transplant the thalamus in rats. And you can actually see on the slides the difference between the young cells and the old cells. Now, I don't know what that would have to do with human beings, but it certainly would have to do with what you're talking about, that the young cells can recover or can repair some of that damage, and the old cells cannot. But this was in the same living organism in the brain that have some young cells and some old cells.

[00:49:18.63] DEBORAH ROACH: Wow, wow. Yeah, I don't know about that work. But it sounds fascinating. Yeah, yeah. That's neat. I don't want to run too-- I know I'm not even going to get through everything I was going to do. But let me-- let's go on here. Because what I'd like to do is I'd like to show you these two gentlemen here, OK? Now, how old do you think they are? Anyone want to take a guess?

[00:49:53.35] AUDIENCE: Well, there's a gentleman sitting right next to me. And I missed his age by about 15 years.

[00:50:03.64] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:06.45] AUDIENCE: I'm actually 42.

[00:50:07.52] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:16.02] AUDIENCE: Are they the same age?

[00:50:17.11] AUDIENCE: I was going to say that--

[00:50:18.16] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they are. They are. They're both-- they're both actually 72. This was part of-- one of my colleagues was working with Danish twins. And the Danish twin study is a really big study that they've been following people for a long period of time. And they asked nurses, they show them photographs and say, how old do you think this is, and this person is, and then show another picture. And how old do you think this person is?

[00:50:55.62] So the perceived age of the gentleman on the left was 80. And his brother, who was the same age, was perceived to be 73. And that's like summarized here at the bottom of the slide. Those who looked older had a higher probability of dying. And even after just, just two years. And so this is really interesting, because, as we talk about aging, and as we try to figure out how are we going to measure how fast someone is aging, we need a meter. We need some way. We need some way to be able to identify how old people are, and what their susceptibility is to dying, what their functional situation is.

[00:52:03.27] But I have to tell you that even in the lab, if you have nematode worms, and they're all genetically clones of each other, and they're in exactly the same environment, and they have different rates of aging. So there's some random chance that's going on, too. And so we don't really know how to-- the puzzle has been to figure out how are we going to measure aging and understand the damage levels that are accumulating. And yeah.

[00:52:41.81] AUDIENCE: --just having two really quick comments there. Probably, many of us have been to 50th high school and college reunions. And the perceived age of our classmates, the differences is really strange.

[00:52:53.48] AUDIENCE: Amazing, isn't it? Yeah.

[00:52:55.85] AUDIENCE: And this is another strange comment. I wondered if the older-looking brother had had a hair transplant, had had Botox, had had a different wardrobe, might he have been treated differently by his physician? Might he have-- might there have been other things that influenced the death rates?

[00:53:18.15] DEBORAH ROACH: You're right.

[00:53:19.95] AUDIENCE: Are they identical twins?

[00:53:22.38] AUDIENCE: No.

[00:53:24.66] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah.

[00:53:26.24] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:53:28.21] --they've got-- yeah. And so-- and they've got-- they're both-- they did this for both men and women.

[00:53:34.64] AUDIENCE: I guess the question would be if they were identical twins, would they look the same?

[00:53:39.98] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, right.

[00:53:40.86] AUDIENCE: Because of aging.

[00:53:41.94] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. No, the answer is no. They don't. They don't. And in fact, it's absolutely known that in fact, any way that we can measure function, and so forth. The twins actually seem to diverge the older they get in terms of their biology, in terms of their function, which is--

[00:54:06.12] AUDIENCE: Which has certain environmental factors and situational.

[00:54:09.43] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right, it does. It does. But we know from the worms, even if the environment is constant, that doesn't help.

[00:54:19.56] AUDIENCE: But before you go, that's just fascinating. So if at a certain age, what if one went into an exercise program or a training program? It seems like that should make some difference. But you're saying not necessarily?

[00:54:34.49] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, it does. And so that gets me to where I'm headed. So this idea that really what we want to do is-- these guys are the same chronological age. And so what I'm saying is that really, what we want is something that will measure biological age so that-- chronological age is how many birthday candles do you have on your cake.

[00:55:03.19] And then, on the other hand, biological age is how much damage is accumulated in your cells. And it's this-- and really, that's what we want to know. We want to be able to know who is aging at a faster rate than the next person. And the other reason it would be really nice to get these aging meters, if you will, is that-- and this takes me back to what I'd like to talk about in the bigger picture of things is, it would help us to evaluate the myths.

[00:55:41.38] It would help us to say, OK, if you take this treatment, did it actually reverse your biological age? Did it change? Did it actually make you age at a slower rate, accumulate less damage than the person who had a placebo? And that's what we want to do, is we want to be able to set this up.

[00:56:06.14] And so what I'm going to do is-- OK, I know. So the data that's being used for this is, and I'm sure many of you have probably heard about this. But there are a lot of studies going on across the world. I'm just going to talk about one of them. And that's the Baltimore Longitudinal Study. And the Baltimore Longitudinal Study has had-- it's been going on for 60 years. And it's been following people for a long time. And it's still taking in new people.

[00:56:44.92] The gentleman down here has been in the study for 51 years. And so he goes in, I believe it's every other year. And they have this whole host of physiological traits that are measured on him and all sorts of tracking that's done, both with blood samples, as well as metabolically. And they're trying to find out who are the super agers, and what sorts of markers might we be able to use to be able to develop this meter that we're going to be able to distinguish people who are the same chronological age, but different biological ages.

[00:57:34.38] So there have been a number of interesting results from this study. One of the things is something that we've already talked about here. And that is that there are more differences between people who are older than people who are younger. It's not that-- when we were younger, we used to say all old people look alike. And so they all must be. No, it's actually there are more differences. We are more different as we've gotten older.

[00:58:03.24] And really, what the whole plan is here is to try to understand what's normal aging. And the really good news, and we've sort of talked about this a little bit, is that, in fact, when we look at variation in biological age, and we look at all these people that have been coming in, repeated measures of the same individuals over time, just it's a gold mine of research and data. About 20% of the variation in performance changes over time is due to genetics, but 80% of it is lifestyle.

[00:58:46.55] Some of that's fixed. Some of that was fixed before age 30. So some of the things like education levels, early life diseases, those sorts of things, all do have an impact on this, what we're calling biological age. But they're fixed. But there are a large part, probably about 50% of that lifestyle impact on aging. It's actually also are things that we can do ourselves now.

[00:59:18.67] And that's really-- I'm going to just summarize today's talk by saying that, what we want to do is we want to measure biological age. And we know our chronological age. So there'll be those people who have a normal aging rate. But there are those who are the super agers. And in fact, as they're older, their biological age is actually much younger. And then there are, of course, those who have accelerated age, like the older-looking twin.

[01:00:03.24] And so what I'm going to do, I didn't get quite through everything I had planned to talk about today. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take, first of all, define a nice meter for biological age that has been created. And it uses this damage accumulation on the DNA to actually measure biological age.

[01:00:33.98] And then I'm going to use that tool to then test some of our myths, some of the myths like, how does having a good supportive social structure in your life matter? Does it really matter? What about diet? What about exercise? And I want to look at those types of interventions that we hear about all the time and say, is it actually impacting biological age? Or is it just making you feel better? So that's where we're headed. And I really look forward to talking to you all. And thank you ever so much for being such an engaged group. It's been really fun.

[00:00:00.11] DEBORAH ROACH: Welcome back, and before we get started, I just want to say, again, please interrupt, discuss because I thought we had a great session last time. And even for those online, please go ahead and submit a question if you have and don't forget to just let me know.

[00:00:26.91] OK, great, so just as a reminder about where we were, basically last time we talked, we were talking about how aging is this due to an imbalance between damage and repair. And this damage and repair eventually gets really off balance because of this increasing accumulation of damage to the body as we get older.

[00:00:52.25] And also one of the positive take-home messages is that about 50% of that variation in the increase in damage is environmental. And so we can do something, and it's environmental. It's behavioral, and so what we're going to do today is I'm going to actually look at a number of different myths that we have, a number of different ideas that are out there about how we can actually modify aging rates.

[00:01:33.09] And what I want to do is I want to link it to those hallmarks of aging that we were talking about before that. Those fundamental processes that are actually causing the aging damage, and then those processes then increase our susceptibility to age-dependent disease. So that's where we're headed today is to look at what sorts of things can be done, and do they or do they not impact these hallmarks of aging, which we want to look at?

[00:02:05.82] Now what I need to do, though, is I need to pick up where we left off, and the last thing we were talking about is this idea-- why isn't my-- let's see if this works. Why are we not able to-- just try the-- there we go. OK, don't know why. OK, thanks, so we were talking about the development of tools to be able to quantify biological aging.

[00:02:45.60] Because remember, any time you look at a group of people that are the same age, you have to recognize that we're all aging at different rates. And so the question is, who is a successful age or who is not? What are the issues going on? And the other very important take home message from last time was that even within our own bodies, different parts of our bodies are aging at different rates.

[00:03:13.65] And that's different within individuals across the spectrum. So we really would like to develop this sort of tool to figure out how we can distinguish individuals of the same age who may be biologically different ages. And the other interest, by the way, in developing this meter of aging is that it will allow us to be able to identify the critical stages that occur in our lifespans that actually may be determining how we are aging and actually then be predictive.

[00:03:54.55] So there would be a lot of very interesting medical uses for this if we can identify that. Now the other thing that I would-- thing that we'll be talking about today is we'd like to use this tool to actually look at these myths of aging, when people talk about different behaviors and so forth that may influence the aging process.

[00:04:22.14] So what evidence can we use to be able to develop this tool and then evaluate these theories and practices. Now I have to tell you that in my lifetime in the field, as a researcher in the field of aging, when I first got started, the biggest thing was grip strength. And someone would come to a meeting with a grip strength meter, and we'd pass it around. And we've come a long way.

[00:05:01.42] But I have to tell you that this is a very active field of research to try to figure out what this meter is going to be, and it ends up to be very complicated because there are so many different physiological traits that need to be put into this to be able to truly understand and to truly validate these methods. But really, what we're trying to do is measure the cell damage and measure the cell damage as it's changing over time.

[00:05:32.99] And remember, and we finished this last time, this idea that this tool will give us a normal change in pattern, if you will, of the relationship between chronological age and some metric that we have of biological age. What are normal individuals doing? What is the average change? And then who are those individuals who are actually aging at a slower rate, and then we can then look at those individuals and understand why they're aging at different rates.

[00:06:13.60] Aging at different rates really means your cell health. Now, the major tool that's being used these days is something that actually quantifies changes, modifications on the DNA that we can look at over time. And I mentioned these because this is actually one of those hallmarks of aging. Remember, over time, the DNA gets certain modifications attached to the surface of the DNA or around the DNA that end up turning the genes off or turning the genes on.

[00:06:55.40] So in fact, these markers on top of the DNA, which are called epigenetic markers, can actually change over time. And here in this figure, you'll see that one thing we know is that these epigenetic markers change ages going down here. And these epigenetic markers increase with age, and a modification is represented here in red as a gene that's been modified.

[00:07:27.27] So we do know that increases with age, but it differs across individuals. And it differs over time, and it also differs with what particular genes you're looking at as well. And so this is a very-- computationally a very difficult thing to put together, and there are lots of different markers using these epigenetic changes that are out there.

[00:07:56.34] And I went out on the web and could easily find several different markers where you can actually order a kit. And some of them are pretty expensive, but don't go out and buy them yet. This is still a work in progress. But on the other hand, there are a number of clocks out there, and people are starting to use these to quantify biological aging. Yes.

[00:08:30.21] AUDIENCE: What would be the point of buying a--

[00:08:31.83] Yeah, exactly.

[00:08:33.12] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, I don't know. I totally agree with you. I mean, what's it going to do if it's going to tell you that-- well, yes, your biological-- yeah, it's fine if it's going to tell you you're younger, but it's not so great if going to tell you you're older than your biological age. So what are we going to do about that? But it's interesting. One of the takeaway messages from the biological aging clocks that we have so far is that-- thanks, thanks.

[00:09:12.71] One is that-- you know what? We were talking about identical twins last week, and identical twins actually converse-- diverge, excuse me, they diverge over time as they get older and older, which is fascinating. Because remember, there were these twins that looked very different ages than each other. And we also know that the rate of acceleration of these marks is actually indicative of different diseases as well.

[00:09:48.71] So we know that there's an increased disease risk, the higher your epigenetic score in terms of cancer, in terms of Parkinson's, in terms of Alzheimer's. These are all markers that are very important. And before I finish, I want to say that the future here in terms of developing these clocks is to not only use these epigenetic markers on the DNA but to also then combine that with things like blood pressure and cholesterol and other blood markers that we have to really get a good comprehensive marker for the future.

[00:10:31.09] AUDIENCE: Do the epigenetic markers eventually get to the same point if we live long enough?

[00:10:38.65] DEBORAH ROACH: No, no, no, just like aging is very different across individuals so people will have different epigenetic markers, even depending on things like early life diseases and early life stresses. And we're going to get to that right now. Yes.

[00:10:57.86] AUDIENCE: The chat says, 2024 AACR meeting offered an abstract reporting that the increase in cancer incidence among young people is a consequence of early aging within the target population drawn from a UK health care database. Conclusions drawn from prevalence of cancer and blood studies showing high inflammatory markers. Any comments?

[00:11:20.72] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, so high inflammatory markers, in particular, is what I want to pick up on because the inflammation is caused by senescent cells. That was one of our biomarkers-- excuse me-- hallmarks of aging that we talked about. So, yes, I would be curious to know whether or not there were any epigenetic analyses done in that study as well.

[00:11:51.80] AUDIENCE: I might be able to unmute [INAUDIBLE].

[00:11:58.21] DEBORAH ROACH: Shall I go on?

[00:12:00.97] AUDIENCE: I'm here. It was largely a database study. It wasn't clear-- it was an abstract so it wasn't clear to me that epigenetic studies were done. I suspect a full publication will be coming forward.

[00:12:20.35] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, but if I remember correctly, I think that part of this-- the consistency with this study and what we've been talking about here is that it was early life issues that were impacting later life. Is that correct?

[00:12:39.37] AUDIENCE: Yeah.

[00:12:39.97] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, and--

[00:12:42.26] AUDIENCE: And I think the frequency of cancer though was in those-- increased frequency was in those under the age of 50. Cancer below the age of 50 and the--

[00:12:58.64] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, huh, well, that sounds that sounds really neat, actually, and I thank you for that. I honestly can't-- does anyone else have any other thoughts on that--

[00:13:19.71] AUDIENCE: Except that it's entirely logical.

[00:13:21.77] DEBORAH ROACH: It makes sense.

[00:13:22.80] AUDIENCE: Almost tautological.

[00:13:24.06] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, right, right, right, right, right, so what I'd like to do is I'd like to, first of all, look at our first hypothesis that's out there that social interactions impact our aging. And of course, I chose this study also because it uses a epigenetic clock to evaluate this. So we often hear that social interactions are good in terms of our biological aging and vice versa.

[00:14:11.20] That in the absence of close relationships, people often experience faster aging. And actually there are studies from other animals, even birds, raised alone versus in groups are aging faster, and you can look at these hallmarks of aging and see that the ones in isolation are declining faster in terms of some of these hallmarks of aging.

[00:14:39.71] And what I want to tell you about is a very recent study actually was published at the end of last year. And this is from the health Retirement Study which is a big group of about 20,000 people, and this is out of the University of Michigan, and all the participants are over the age of 50.

[00:15:02.69] And in this particular part of their study, they surveyed people three times over a span of 10 years. And what they did was at the end of these 10 years, they actually took a blood sample, and they're going to be looking at this epigenetic clock. and I want to tell you a couple of things that are really positive about this study.

[00:15:26.90] First of all, it's a long term study of the same people. It's not just a snapshot. It's a longitudinal study for 10 years. That's great. And also, it's a prospective analysis because they actually measured people's social interactions and so forth at the beginning and then through the study, and then did the blood sampling later.

[00:15:50.58] So the question is, is the level of social interaction, social support, and is that at all reflective of the rate of aging if we can use this epigenetic clock as a measure of the rate of aging?

[00:16:09.20] So they asked these people these survey questions like do you feel like your friends support you and that they understand your feelings? And can you open up if you have a serious problem? The scale goes from no, not at all, to yes a lot. And then how often do you see your friends? And then they also asked this with respect to family and children as well.

[00:16:37.74] So over this time then, so the results were such that individuals who have higher social support and contact frequency with friends had significantly slower epigenetic age than participants who perceived their support to be lower, and they had fewer contacts with friends. And then similarly with family, that the more contact with children and so forth impacted their biological age in the way that we expected. And so they also-- in this study, they also then controlled for demographic traits and took that out and also in terms of health of the individuals.

[00:17:29.71] AUDIENCE: What about sex?

[00:17:30.84] DEBORAH ROACH: And there were no differences between genders.

[00:17:36.36] AUDIENCE: That's interesting.

[00:17:36.99] There's two comments. One person suggested that we hold all questions and interruptions until it ends so that you can finish. And then there's a question that says, what is this imply regarding introverts versus extroverts?

[00:17:51.67] DEBORAH ROACH: Thank you for the second as well. I want to address that second question because this is actually-- I don't know how much they took in personality into consideration, and I think that this is really considered the first step, and this is the most up-to-date study that I could find in terms of looking at social relationships, but yes, there are many other layers to be looked at.

[00:18:22.12] And, in fact, one of the other layers that needs to be looked at is they didn't really talk about negative relationships. They kind of offered our lives for family or sometimes even friends. So, in fact, that's missing.

[00:18:36.37] And the other thing that's missing is that this was done in the US and there may be cultural differences elsewhere, and I believe that it was a completely Caucasian population that they used. So again, there may be differences here as well. So there are limits.

[00:18:55.75] I see a shocked look on one of our members here at the table, and I want to explain that this is a problem with any of these long-term studies that-- and I'm very aware of this in aging that asks volunteers to come in and they're often very wealthy, and they're white, and they're-- it is a problem, and they're usually highly educated too.

[00:19:25.07] And so that there's--

[00:19:26.69] AUDIENCE: Like us.

[00:19:27.84] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, exactly. But there is a bias. There is a bias, and there's a lot of bias. But this is one of the first applications of a biological clock analysis to social relationships. And so I think at this point, things look-- are positive.

[00:19:51.48] Now what I'd like to tell you where this biological clock in this epigenetic marker was really first used because it's kind of an interesting study, and that is-- I need to remind you perhaps of a little bit of history.

[00:20:09.61] I don't know if you recall, but in 1944-45 in Holland, the Nazis were really actually trying to punish the population because they created this-- there was controversy because the Dutch were refusing to transport Nazi troops, and so the Nazis blockaded the food supplies, and so there was a major famine in the Netherlands in 1944 and '45, 20,000 people died. So it had a major impact on the population.

[00:21:02.48] And one of the things that happened, one of the things-- one of the analyzes that was done was that they looked at people who were pregnant during this time, and this is a time when food rations were very low that the graph here is actually looking at the number of kilocalories per day in the population went way down to 500 during this blockade.

[00:21:35.77] And they looked at children born then shortly thereafter, and they looked at their health and basically, they found, number one, that before the age of 63, they had a 12% higher mortality rate than the cohorts that did not suffer this stress. They had increased obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia.

[00:22:04.78] And now we know because of further analysis that there were epigenetic markers on the DNA of these children following because of this famine.

[00:22:20.11] And there's something that's incredibly interesting, is that one of the major epigenetic markers, one of the genes that was turned off was a particular gene that's in high frequency in centenarians. And in other words, people that we know that live to be 100 have a high expression of this gene is called IGF1.

[00:22:44.56] And it influences the anti-aging pathways that are inherent in our bodies and I'll get to that in a minute, but that was turned off in these individuals. And so here we have a scar of a experience from very, very early childhood, which carried over and increased the susceptibility to age-related diseases and also lifespan. Really fascinating.

[00:23:19.03] But it really is something that people are following up with, and it's clear now people are using-- are actually recognizing that, in fact, a lot of these early life experiences do leave these scars on our genome, which then impact our later life. Yes.

[00:23:44.11] AUDIENCE: Someone put in the chat, it actually depended on what trimester.

[00:23:47.98] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't want to go into too much detail, but that's absolutely right. There was the particular trimester, and I honestly can't remember which one.

[00:24:01.21] And so it's fascinating, and so now actually there are a lot of discussions going on now about how poverty, how refugee status and things like this are impacting people's epigenome, which will then impact their later life and their rates of aging.

[00:24:22.26] Now before I move on, I do want to remind you we had this figure last week and this was basically these hallmarks of aging that I keep referring to, and so what I wanted to mention was that here we've been talking about these social interactions and the early life experiences that are impacted by these epigenetic markers.

[00:24:47.84] And these epigenetic markers are a major component of our aging biology, if you will. And remember the whole point of the reading that we did the other day last week was basically to say we need to understand this basic biology, and we need to understand that and tackle those issues before we can really understand the age related diseases and the susceptibility that we're really fundamentally experiencing and want to follow up on.

[00:25:25.58] So I'm going to leave this epigenetic clock behind at this point, but it'll come up as we're continuing. What I'd like to do-- there are no other questions, right, Kelly?

[00:25:39.47] AUDIENCE: No.

[00:25:41.88] DEBORAH ROACH: I'd like to shift a little bit and talk about some age-related damage that occurs that I haven't told you about yet, and that's oxidative damage, and I need to talk about that before we can evaluate some of the other ways that we can manipulate aging.

[00:26:02.58] So oxidative damage is a major source of damage to the body. So I have-- there's a tomato up at the top there and it's being left out, and it's declining and it's becoming oxidized, if you will. And in the similar sort of way, our cells also become damaged over time, and suffer from oxidative stress.

[00:26:32.53] And basically this idea that there are all these-- there's a high level of free radicals that are causing this, and I'll tell you about what that is in just a second, but I do want to have you note that there are a lot of diseases and problems here associated with oxidative stress. And so this is a major problem, and this is a major increase-- this is a major issue that we need to address.

[00:27:03.48] Now where's all this oxidative damage coming from? It's coming from free radicals, which are basically molecules that are missing an electron. But no matter what, we end up-- there are lots of different sources of this free radical damage, and so exposure to light, air pollution, and smoking, inflammation that's all causing oxidative damage in our bodies.

[00:27:39.63] And I also want to note right here and we'll get to this in just a second, our basic metabolism actually creates free radicals that cause oxidative damage. The saying is every breath you take hastens your death.

[00:27:57.94] [LAUGHTER]

[00:28:06.40] So some of these things, we can do something about. We can't do a whole lot about. But there are-- we do have defenses against this oxidative damage. Now this is, again, one of these examples of damage increasing with age, but we do have some repair systems.

[00:28:27.92] The central repair system for oxidative damage is antioxidants. So here we have a cell, and these red dots are the free radicals that are damaging the cell caused by radiation, toxins, chemicals, stress. And all those free radicals are bouncing around and causing all sorts of damage in the cell.

[00:28:57.30] Well, we also have antioxidants. They give an electron-- they give up a spare electron and they can stop those chain reactions. They can stop that damage and pull the free radical out of circulation. And basically, they neutralize it.

[00:29:22.38] And so where are these antioxidants coming from? Well, there are two types of antioxidants. We have within our bodies, the primary internal antioxidants that we have. Does anyone know? Has anyone ever-- does anyone want to take a guess at any of this?

[00:29:50.73] I'm going to ask you-- OK, I'll get to the second part in a second. I hope you can. But our internal antioxidants are things like-- you may have heard of sodium superoxide dismutase and catalase, and these are antioxidants in our bodies that actually can attack this oxidation process and stop some of it. We can also we also have secondary dietary antioxidants. Anyone know what those are?

[00:30:33.65] AUDIENCE: Hear about blueberries and dull vision.

[00:30:35.72] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, well, they are in blueberries. Yes, there are things like vitamin C and vitamin A. And to get to your point, there are lots of plant phenols and flavonoids and carotenoids.

[00:30:54.65] All of these pigments and so forth that are in plants are antioxidants, and this is for me, when I was teaching aging this was my chance to say, listen to your mother, and these are all antioxidants.

[00:31:13.25] Our foods or our supplementary defenses against oxidative damage, and there's very good evidence that these types of foods and so forth do stop these-- stop this oxidative damage. Now what I want to talk about, though, is to get back to that metabolism a little bit.

[00:31:42.79] So the myth there or fact that I want to address is what about exercise because as I said, metabolism is increasing the free radicals. On the other hand, we went to a function last week at our granddaughters preschool, and on the gym wall, they had this, why should I exercise?

[00:32:13.61] Well, we know that there are some good things about exercising. My stamina is increased, sharpens my thinking, my body gets leaner, helps me relax, relieves stress. So which one's right?

[00:32:27.22] Well, it turns out that we've always thought that exercise was anti-aging, but we haven't really had a lot of good evidence of it except that of course, we do know that there are a lot of positive things that occur.

[00:32:45.02] For example, building muscle and steering away from the decline in muscle gain and that sort of thing. And here, if we just look at the figure for a second, there are lots of other types of positive impacts of aging on the body.

[00:33:08.11] Now what I want to tell you about is a study that was actually published in 2021 where they had 3,500 adults, and they followed them. They were from 18 to 79 years old, and they followed them for 12 years. So again these longitudinal studies to follow what impact does exercise have over time?

[00:33:35.64] And those results are what's pictured here. And so they-- first of all, they compared individuals who were working out about anything greater than 150 hours. In other words, they were-- this is about 30 minutes a day for five days a week in terms of working out, and they compared those to people who did less than two hours a week, so pretty sedentary people.

[00:34:09.48] But these they showed remarkable improvements in all the ways that we might expect them to, and they also had better balance and all that sort of thing. And that's all great, but what about those-- what about aging? And this is really neat because this is the first study that actually ever looked at aging with the markers that we want to use those hallmarks of aging.

[00:34:40.00] And I put a red circle around the hallmarks that were impacted, and you can see absolutely all of the nine hallmarks of aging that we've talked about were improved, and they had markers with from these people over this time to demonstrate that, in fact, yes, exercise does-- it does decrease the number of epigenetic markers.

[00:35:10.15] It does improve protein folding. It impacts every single one of those factors, and so it clearly is a very positive thing. And by the way this happened for individuals at all ages in this study.

[00:35:27.66] But wait a minute-- what about the metabolism? And how do we understand that? And what they found was to go back to our figure here, but now I'm showing the results here. What the exercise did, exercise is a little bit like a stress because it's creating oxidative stress in the body, is creating damage. But it's a levels that these people were exercising in.

[00:36:00.76] What happened was these primary internal antioxidants were up-regulated, and they were actually working harder. And this is actually very-- it's very promising because it's like it's saying basically a good behavior going to-- working out and going to the gym and so forth actually makes your body respond and fight this process of aging. And it's really neat because it says that, in fact, we do have inherent processes that aren't maximized.

[00:36:40.27] Now I need to mention that-- I think you can go back to this slide and you can see-- see the but here? Longevity effects on aging, but the last-- if, in fact, you're exercising an extreme amount, so that extreme amount is about five hours a day for seven days a week. now that's a lot.

[00:37:08.65] But there's very clear evidence from a number of different studies that this actually causes more damage and the repair processes can't keep up. And in fact, there is no upregulation of these internal processes because they're just totally overwhelmed and it's too stressful. There's excessive weight loss, there's chronic injury, and decrease in the immune system and all sorts of things.

[00:37:38.32] So there is a limit, but it's very nice that a mild stress does actually up-regulate the anti-aging pathways that are inherent to our bodies, which is really kind of cool. Now so let me now-- so yes, in fact, exercise does improve your agent in multiple ways.

[00:38:07.45] So what I'd like to do now is to look at caloric restriction because you-- my gosh, this gets so much publicity about people doing fasting, people doing all sorts of reduced diets and so forth to improve their aging.

[00:38:35.08] And a lot of the interest in this has come from studies that were first started with rodents and also with some non-human primates, and I'll show you two-- these are two rhesus monkeys who were put under caloric restriction.

[00:38:59.98] So we have canto here and Owen over here, and they're both the same age. It's kind of like looking at those twins the other day. Now this says-- in the fine print here, it says although a senior citizen is-- average lifespan and capacity is 27 years, and he's aging fairly well. Actually, I'm not sure he looks so happy, but that's how I look. And his skin is smooth and his blood work shows he's as healthy as he looks.

[00:39:32.60] Well, he was getting what? He had about 50% less-- fewer calories than Owen who gets more food. His posture has been affected by arthritis, his skin is wrinkled, his hair is falling out, and he's frail, and his blood work shows unhealthy glucose levels. So clearly, there's evidence from animals.

[00:39:58.88] Some of the other-- in some of the rhesus monkeys studies, there were differences in lifespan, and that's been shown in rodents as well. Lower core body temperature is another common feature, lower blood pressure, delayed reproduction is also a common response to this treatment.

[00:40:27.13] But again, we haven't had many studies done with humans, although many people want to just believe this and just go for it. Now there is a long term study that's been going on. It's actually started in 2007, and this is-- it's called the calorie study, meaning the comprehensive assessment of long-term effects of reducing intake of energy. That's where calorie comes from.

[00:41:01.18] This study was started in 2007, and it has about 220 individuals in it. My first exposure to people who were part of this study was at a meeting in the middle of the summer in a big auditorium, and it was-- I remember giving a talk and asking someone later, who are those people in the back row with their ski jackets on? And they said, those are the calorie people. They come to all these meetings. And their core body temperature was clearly being impacted by their treatments.

[00:41:42.27] Another common response to this is extreme fascination with food and psychological issues and depression and so forth associated with having to live under these-- to do this type of cutting back now because most of these in the calorie study, the goal is generally to have a target reduction of about 25% of normal calorie intake.

[00:42:20.54] And what I want to tell you about, though, is a study that was just published in 2003, and this was, again, one of the very first studies to be able to look-- that actually looked at these hallmarks of aging, and asked the question, does this work in humans?

[00:42:45.20] And the target now was that they were going to go-- they were aiming for 25% reduction in caloric intake. It actually ended up to be about 12%, and they can measure this by doubly-labeled water and so forth. And there was also lots of behavioral support for people to stay on the diets, and to keep the participants from dropping out of the study and so forth.

[00:43:16.89] So the results were-- the graphic shows that basically the muscle health was something that was well preserved in this study because that was quite surprising because, in fact, on average, individuals lost about 20 pounds in the first 12 months, but then after that, they didn't lose weight.

[00:43:46.86] But their muscle mass was conserved, and their muscle function was preserved. The only other treatments that have ever been shown to actually do that are exercise to preserve this.

[00:44:02.78] The other thing that's very interesting is that now this study went on, they followed these individuals for only two years, OK, and so this is just a two-year study. So we don't know how it impacted their mortality rates and that sort of thing. And the study was actually relatively small because in the end, the they had only 220 individuals monitored, and the numbers were too small to be able to do a lot of analysis, but they did do some good blood work.

[00:44:38.12] And looking at these hallmarks of aging, in fact, they did find that things like protein folding, things like cellular senescence, and epigenetic markers were all improved. Everything that has a red line around it suggests that, in fact, that this did work and that this short-term study does suggest that there are some positive things about caloric restriction.

[00:45:12.57] Now as I said, it's a very difficult thing to think about doing, and it's very hard to do, and in fact, many people are trying to look at the pathways and say, OK, so what's going on when we're doing caloric restriction? And can we impact it in ways other than reducing calories? And it turns out that just like exercise, this is a mild stress.

[00:45:40.32] Caloric restriction is a stress and in response to that stress, the antioxidants and other pathways are actually up-regulated, and there's very nice evidence that there are these-- the anti-aging pathways that are being affected here are again inherent to our organisms-- to our bodies, excuse me.

[00:46:06.63] And so , again, the sample sizes are small. It's very, very difficult, and there are a number of pharmacological mimics that people are trying to develop that would actually try to touch these same pathways and get these same results. So we'll see.

[00:46:29.76] This is something that I'm sure there'll be more written about in the future, but yes, it's very interesting and, in fact, caloric restriction does seem to be working-- does seem to work.

[00:46:45.00] So how about-- thinking back to Madame Calmette from last week, what about that red wine? Remember I said--

[00:46:53.35] [LAUGHTER]

[00:46:54.71] That sparked a little conversation last week. So does red wine decrease your rate of biological aging? And this came out of what was called the French paradox. This idea that how is it that the French can have this high-fat diet, so much cheese, and actually still have a relatively long lifespan within the population?

[00:47:27.07] And so one suggestion was that it was the wine. And, in fact, there's something particular in the wine. It's this substance called resveratrol. And resveratrol is on the market, and you can buy it online, and it's supposed to help fight dangerous free radicals, help slow the aging process and all that sort of thing.

[00:47:57.66] AUDIENCE: Oh, come on.

[00:47:59.19] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah.

[00:47:59.34] [LAUGHTER]

[00:48:00.72] OK, well, wait a second. This is still out there as a suggestion for aging, but I have to tell you about another study that was done with mice. Now these mice, there were three groups of mice.

[00:48:25.29] In group 1, they had a high fat diet, 60% of their calories from fat. Really high-fat diet. Group 2 had the high-fat diet plus resveratrol. And group 3, which is our control group, is a normal diet.

[00:48:43.74] Well, the mice in group 1 gained a lot of weight, and they started dying early and they had issues with a lot of blood markers associated with diabetes and that sort of thing. They were having a hard time. They had a relatively short life span.

[00:49:07.51] The individuals in group 2, they still had a weight gain, but they did not have those markers associated with diabetes. And, in fact, they had an extended life span that was the same as those mice in group 3. So the resveratrol had some impact, and that's why this got so much excitement and so much publicity. I think a cartoon in The Washington Post really summarizes the issues.

[00:49:46.38] So honey, you'd be better-- you'd be healthier if you lost some weight. Listen, there's good news. Scientists gave obese mice a compound found in red wine, and the mice stayed healthy. The study said that to get the same dose as they gave the mice, a person would have to drink between 750 and 1,500 bottles of red wine.

[00:50:14.51] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:17.47] And see? It's getting better and better. OK?

[00:50:23.37] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:26.22] It doesn't work. It doesn't work. But there are-- right now there are studies that are being done by the same group that in fact, tried to push resveratrol as an anti-aging cure.

[00:50:50.11] They're now working on trying to figure out what this pathway is, and can we find some other pharmacological solution to do this? Right now they don't have anything. There's nothing out there, and the resveratrol itself doesn't work. So what I'd like to do--

[00:51:14.26] AUDIENCE: Yeah, but we still want to drink our wine.

[00:51:16.15] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, you can have your wine, yes, but at least you don't have to poison yourself with alcohol--

[00:51:20.71] AUDIENCE: --1,500 bottles.

[00:51:23.59] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. Now there's something else. I've presented this last thing as a myth or a fact but, in fact, it's really something that I-- the only reason I want to present this in this way is that it's something we all need to be looking for and at. And what I'd like to talk about is some future work that's being done. It's actually going to target some of the damage and removing some of that damage.

[00:52:03.81] And so because-- the whole idea here is that if we could remove damage from the cells, then maybe, in fact, we will then reduce our susceptibility to age-related diseases, and maybe we'll be able to maintain our health span if we can remove damaged cells.

[00:52:22.32] And I want to tell you the basic problem here is that-- so here we have a young individual, and we have healthy cells, all these white cells, and then we have a few senescent cells. And senescent cells are really defined as cells that have stopped dividing, but they're still alive, but they're non-functioning.

[00:52:51.20] And what happens is that these cells that are still there but they're not dividing anymore, actually excrete these red substances which are called senescence activating substances. And so they're causing-- they're starting to cause a little bit of inflammation.

[00:53:11.75] And as we get older, we have even more of these senescent cells, and the excretion of these senescent activating substances is actually decreasing the function of healthy cells and making healthy cells decline in their function as well. And so we have lots of-- this is actually the major source of information.

[00:53:42.14] So the idea is, what if we could remove some of these senescent cells? And the reason that this is so important for us to want to talk about removing senescent cells is that, first of all, we have this increasing number of senescent cells as we get older, and that just exposes us to more and more of these age-related diseases.

[00:54:10.80] And as you can see, we get all the way out to the end there. And we've got frailty sarcopenia, which is muscle declines and decreased healthspan. And all of that can be traced back to this accumulation of aging cells.

[00:54:28.74] And so the hope here is that maybe-- what happens if we could remove some of these cells. And so normally, our immune cells will help to remove some senescent cells, but our immune system declines with age and that process becomes more and more-- becomes less efficient.

[00:54:55.97] And so there are these drugs that have been developed, these senolytics that basically-- the idea is that they will then repair-- they will then eliminate these senescent cells from our bodies and repair and help us maintain function.

[00:55:17.08] And the neat thing is that there's good evidence in mice that this is going to work because-- so what they've done is first of all, they took old cells and they put them into a young mouse, and the young mouse got older really very quickly. And then they actually gave these senolytic drugs to old mice, and actually they maintained their health for longer, and they actually lived longer.

[00:55:52.70] And they even did it the other experiment where they put these senescent cells in the young mouse, and that they also gave them these senolytic drugs and they live longer, and it lived they lived-- there wasn't the same declines that they had found without the drugs.

[00:56:11.04] And so in many ways, this drug is a fountain of youth, and people are really actually very excited about it because it can be used to target cells. For example, it can be used to target cells that are causing neurodegeneration, cells that are causing osteoarthritis, and arterial arteriosclerosis, and there are-- so there's a lot of interest in using these target drugs to look at different systems.

[00:56:46.86] And so I looked up this morning to see what human trials are going on, and they are starting to recruit. We don't have any data on this yet, but they are starting to recruit people to actually use these senolytic drugs, and they have been approved to do so in some situations.

[00:57:08.12] And interesting thing is that you might want to ask what is this senolytic drug? What is it? What's it all about? It turns out it's a combination of a leukemia drug and also the plant compounds that are found in fruits and vegetables, and it's this cocktail that is somehow, at least in mice looks very promising. So I can't tell you whether or not this is fact or fiction yet, but it's something to look forward to.

[00:57:43.88] I'm running short on time, so let me just-- I'm going to skip forward and say that, yes, you can modify your rate of aging, and remember when we started out, we talked about-- the goal of research in aging is to try to minimize this period of time here, this age related-- when we were suffering from age-related diseases and to expand our health span as much as we can.

[00:58:17.55] Factors that are slowing aging that we have talked about are having a robust social support, healthy nutrition rich in antioxidants, low calorie intake, no smoking, moderate exercise and appropriate responses to stress. And factors that are accelerating aging are just the opposite of those.

[00:58:39.18] And in fact, there is increasing evidence these days, and in fact, we can modify our rate of aging, and then also improve our health span, which is actually pretty exciting. So I'll leave it at that, and I know I've just come to the end, but if there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

[00:59:08.05] AUDIENCE: Now the red wine comes out, right?

[00:59:09.76] [LAUGHTER]

[00:59:11.59] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. So are we all set on line 2? Good.

[00:59:17.92] AUDIENCE: We're going to talk again about the lobster because it sounded like that's what we want to do with this. We want to--

[00:59:24.61] DEBORAH ROACH: Throw away our bodies now. We can't do that. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah, we can't really do that.

[00:59:33.04] AUDIENCE: Where were the studies that you saw.

[00:59:35.41] DEBORAH ROACH: Pardon me?

[00:59:35.89] AUDIENCE: Where were the studies that you saw?

[00:59:38.43] DEBORAH ROACH: All over the place. And this is something that-- this is one of the reasons I really enjoyed teaching the biology of aging was that every time I looked and including for these talks, things are updated, and it is a fast-moving field, and that's we-- it's nice. And there was more and more coming for sure.

[01:00:04.99] AUDIENCE: I want to ask if your slides would be available.

[01:00:07.91] DEBORAH ROACH: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:00:11.26] AUDIENCE: Can you talk a little bit about appropriate stress response versus a poor stress response?

[01:00:16.81] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, well, we could go back to the exercise and see that extreme exercise, of course, was bad for the body, but appropriate exercise actually regulated natural anti-aging pathways.

[01:00:33.61] And in a similar sort of way, when we think about psychological stress or any other types of stress where we up-regulate our corticosteroid levels, and if we stay-- if we have a high level of sustained stress for a long period of time, that actually costs the body.

[01:00:57.49] And it will cost the body in terms of epigenetic markers that we've been talking about and it'll also stress the body in other ways, whereas if appropriate response would be somehow to modulate that and address stress issues in a managed way that keeps those stress hormones at a low level. Yes.

[01:01:25.16] AUDIENCE: I'm so stressed right now, and have been for months that I cannot find a good stress response. Sorry. I've seen shrinks, I don't know, It's hypothetical, of course. So what it's suggesting there is really not that--

[01:01:50.84] DEBORAH ROACH: No, well, I think what I'm suggesting is recognizing that and trying to figure out what is an appropriate response and try to figure out things like-- well, what other things could you do that are good for you? Make sure you diet. Make sure you're exercising. Make sure you're getting out in nature. Those types of things.

[01:02:16.85] AUDIENCE: Do something about the politics of the society that I'm in.

[01:02:21.62] DEBORAH ROACH: Stop watching the news. There you go. Yes.

[01:02:27.14] AUDIENCE: Perhaps consistent mild exercises you're taking seems to reduce stress. I mean, if you're under-- if you have a stress that you can't change the stress but you may be able to change your response to it.

[01:02:45.88] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. Yeah, I think that's right.

[01:02:49.51] AUDIENCE: James said, I'm 83. When do you think the senolytics will be available?

[01:02:53.92] [LAUGHTER]

[01:02:56.62] DEBORAH ROACH: I wish. Yes, there are a number of things that are being developed these days. That was just the one that I chose to talk about, but yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's out there.

[01:03:09.05] And there are also a lot of these pharmacological solutions that are targeted at the dietary restriction, and there's one that's called rapamycin, which actually was discovered in the soil on Easter Island, and it was first discovered because it's an anti-inflammatory agent and people were interested in that with respect to the immune system of people who are on Easter Island.

[01:03:44.03] AUDIENCE: Are there studies of taking through fields as it were the reserve patrol, so you don't-- I mean, a few glasses of red wine is fine, but 1,500 day is a bit much. But can you take enough resveratrol not to have side effects? Perhaps you wouldn't get the pleasure--

[01:04:08.04] DEBORAH ROACH: This is one of the-- these side effects are a major issue on all of these types of pharmacological interventions. And with respect to the resveratrol, it turns out that, in fact, it has a very short shelf life. And so by the time you get the little bottle of pills, a lot of them may have lost the-- be out of date. And so that's another issue with respect to that particular drug.

[01:04:35.33] And as I was saying with this substance that they are now working on with respect to dietary restriction and this idea that maybe there will be things out there that we can up-regulate these pathways, but then still have a regular diet, and not have to take reduced calories and that kind of stuff.

[01:04:58.24] AUDIENCE: Is there a theory to why women live longer?

[01:05:01.50] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, I'd love to TALK-- So the question is-- the question is, why do women live longer than men? And does anyone have any thoughts before I--

[01:05:14.98] AUDIENCE: We do a lot of those things that you talked about.

[01:05:20.05] DEBORAH ROACH: You're saying better-- you're saying we're better behaved.

[01:05:21.99] [LAUGHTER]

[01:05:25.30] I'm not going to go there.

[01:05:30.40] AUDIENCE: Female babies do better than boy babies in the nursery. So some of it is probably genetic.

[01:05:37.81] DEBORAH ROACH: They do. And, in fact, this difference between males and females starts really early stages in life.

[01:05:49.47] AUDIENCE: Yeah, you talk to a pediatrician.

[01:05:50.57] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. And I have to tell you, though, that it actually-- there's no evidence right now that in humans, that females have a slower rate of aging than male in terms of the biological. If we could measure biological age at this point in time, there's no evidence.

[01:06:11.61] And so a lot of it has to do with the fact that we have two X chromosomes and then males have XY chromosomes, and any genetic diseases that may be carried on an X chromosome that may on one of our X chromosomes-- would be expressing it from the chromosome that actually does not have that defect.

[01:06:42.33] Whereas a male they have an X chromosome disease. They have to express it because they don't have that duplication of genes. And in fact, there was also a really neat study in today about two weeks ago, about the disappearing Y.

[01:07:01.65] Someone at UVA was doing-- is doing a study about the Y chromosome and diseases on the Y chromosome. And in fact, so that-- in fact, the Y chromosome itself may carry some genes that impact lifespan in males. And then there's also questions of hormones. Estrogen is generally positive impact and testosterone is it can be associated with some behaviors that are not positive. Yes.

[01:07:38.41] AUDIENCE: I don't know whether it was a UBI study or not, but I read recently there's been a number of new genes discovered on the Y chromosome. So yes, and I don't know whether they're good ones or bad ones.

[01:07:49.69] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, right. No, but that's right, but the trouble is that there's no duplication, and so you're stuck with what have. Yes and so, yes-- that's another reason that females live longer than males.

[01:08:06.70] In some situations and there's also a lot of discussion about whether or not there may have been some selection for females to live longer than males. In other species because of their maternal care.

[01:08:21.01] And so if there's any selection for longevity because it increases it's survival of the offspring, may be the case. And there's a bit of a controversy about that with respect to human populations, and there's evidence on both sides.

[01:08:38.32] But it's absolutely true with whales. And pilot whale females live to be 90 years old. They stop reproducing when they're 40, but they live to be 90. And but if the female dies then her offspring have a higher chance of dying as well. And if she's not around because she is beneficial-- primarily because she's a wealth of knowledge about when best to find the salmon and food sources.

[01:09:08.45] And so it's neat and similar sorts of patterns are found in elephants as well, the elderly matriarch is quite critical to the survival of her offspring, and if she dies, then it's a problem. I could keep going.

[01:09:26.68] [LAUGHTER]

[01:09:30.95] But thank you very much, all of you.

[01:09:32.58] AUDIENCE: Thank you.

[00:00:09.63] KATHRYN THORNTON: OK, good afternoon. Nice to see everybody who made it out today. I'm Kathy Thornton. I'm president of the Retired Faculty Association. And if you came here today thinking you were going to hear Phil from the School of Data Sciences, you're in for a surprise. We had been hoping to get Ken Ono to come talk to us for quite some time now.

[00:00:31.42] So we were delighted when he graciously stood up at the last minute and agreed to come here and help us out. So we'll try to get Phil back on another occasion, but we are very happy to have Ken Ono here with us. Ken's impressive bio is in the email message that Kelly sent you yesterday. So I encourage you to read that, and you can wonder, like I do, how in the world he does all those things.

[00:00:56.31] But I'll touch on just a few things. Ken is the STEM advisor to the provost, and the Martin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics. He's also Professor of data science, courtesy appointment, and professor affiliate in the Department of Statistics. And in addition to his extensive scholarship and professional service, he is actively involved in mentoring mathematicians of all ages.

[00:01:23.05] Outside of academia, he was the associate producer and mathematical consultant on the 2015 film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, which he says is available on Netflix if you want to check it out, about the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and is a technical consultant for elite swimmers, including NCAA national champions, Olympic medalists using mathematical analysis and modeling to help them with their performance.

[00:01:53.17] He mentions just a few minutes ago that he has another film out now or coming-- that he'll talk to us-- he'll maybe tell us a little bit about that if we beg him in a little bit. But not in his bio, but memorable to me, he starred in a Super Bowl commercial in 2022. As a world-renowned expert in number theory, the Molson Coors company called on him to definitively confirm that AD is a larger number than 64. And that was an attempt to lure beer drinkers from the 80-calorie Bud Light to the new 64-calorie Miller Lite.

[00:02:34.12] So apparently, beer drinkers are a pretty stubborn lot. So I remember that, and you were awesome. Without saying anything, he had this look on his face that said, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. It was amazing. So we're looking-- you were amazing. So I'm looking forward to hearing from him today. When he's finished, we'll have about 15 minutes of question and answer, and then we will enjoy some fellowship. Over to Ken.

[00:03:05.44] KEN ONO: Delighted to be here. I haven't been here-- thank you.

[00:03:10.27] [APPLAUSE]

[00:03:13.47] I came to the University of Virginia in 2019, not so long ago, and I have to say this is probably the best decision I've ever made professionally. My parents, they still are with us. They live in nearby Baltimore, so it's a great opportunity to also be closer to home but without being too close, if you know what I mean.

[00:03:36.30] I've had the opportunity to meet with many of you before. Some through work. We had lunch at-- do you remember? This is a world famous astronaut, and I remember you telling me the stories about being in the-- I don't even know what part of the spaceship you call it, but in the vacuum. It's fascinating. In my work here at the university, unlike anywhere I've worked before, it's been wonderful to get a chance to talk to people who are experts in so many different things.

[00:04:05.97] And so I hope the lecture I give today is interesting, but might be more interesting for me to speak to you than it will be for you to listen to the lecture that I'm giving. The union of knowledge that's represented by a university faculty is incredible. And at a place like the University of Virginia, I'm amazed that all of you came to a talk like this.

[00:04:33.80] And I think it speaks to the quality of institution that UVA is. Great, well, so thank you for coming, and I hope that your relationship with the university continues to be a strong one. And in my role in the provost office, I invite emails. My job in the provost office is to promote STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, both on grounds and to the greater community.

[00:05:03.32] And so if you have ideas, let me know because it's only through, like I said, the accumulated knowledge of the faculty and all of the people in our community. Only with that help, can I do my job. Great, and that could also include complaints. Feel free to complain, because as you all know, graduate students are really good at complaining. So it's payback time. Great.

[00:05:31.81] Yeah, so the lecture I want to give, I'm a little bit nervous about it because there's some math, not too much math. But the point of this lecture is really about a story, and it'll take me a few minutes to get to that story. And so I feel like it's important for me to tell you that there is this important story coming. So the reason why I mention that is that for many of us in our individual fields, there are those-- how to say-- superstars who come along very rarely, whose ideas are so important that they really propel fields forward.

[00:06:16.13] They're very rare. Think Einstein. Think Newton. And in my case, there is an Indian mathematician by the name of Ramanujan, who I'm going to raise up to that level. Maybe you know his story, but maybe you don't. But if you don't know his story, what I want to impress upon you is that, one, I do deeply believe that as a mathematician, he earns that right to be in the league of those names.

[00:06:44.75] But on top of it, his personal story, for many of you, it might be what you take away from today's lecture because this man that I'm going to talk about means so many different things to different kinds of people, even if you know nothing about mathematics. So a different title for this lecture could be, why does the man who knew infinity matter?

[00:07:08.48] And by the end of this lecture, I hope at least one of my answers to that question speaks to you. So to begin with, I just want to admit, I'm a son of a mathematician. My father came to this country from Japan shortly after World War II, and he was invited to this country because he was good at math. He got a post-doctoral appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study.

[00:07:31.70] And so I was born in a country where my parents were, quite frankly, aliens. They came from Japan. They came from the country that bombed Pearl Harbor. So I won't go into that in much greater detail, but I want you to imagine what that was like. How do you leave everything that you know, barely able to speak English, and end up accepting a wonderful academic opportunity in a country where everything that you were taught would be either despised, or I think you can picture where I'm going with that.

[00:08:05.44] So I was brought up by my parents who had this very strong belief that there was nothing higher than pure mathematics. In fact, when my parents hear me talk about some of the other work that I do, my dad, he kind of snickers at it. Why do you care about swimming, or why do you care about-- OK, but that's my dad.

[00:08:29.02] So my dad would subscribe to this view, where if you arrange fields by purity, mathematicians are not even on the map. But I hope that you agree that here at the University of Virginia, that's not what we think. Mathematics, we like to think, is the language of science. And just by driving across ground, you can see it. We have a brand new school of data science popping up.

[00:08:54.20] I assure you, there's a lot of math there. There's lots of things going on there, but maybe the first takeaway is that, although I will be talking about a little bit of pure math at the outset, I want us to adopt a holistic view. Great, OK, but now for the math. So very simply, as a pure mathematician, if we were to not think about what the applications of mathematics might be, some of us, and I still think this way for a couple hours every day.

[00:09:29.03] For me, when I think as a pure mathematician, I think I'm doing art. I'd like to think that I'm a musician with numbers. I'd like to think I'm drawing pictures but with functions and numbers. And as strange as it might be, I just want you to accept that. And what sorts of features would I want to look for in a mathematical problem that would be beautiful?

[00:09:51.87] Well, these are things that I can explain. We like symmetry. A mathematician is really bothered when there isn't symmetry. So I like symmetry, like what you will see here in this picture. Things that are mirror images, reflections. Things that are unchanged under rotation. Things that are translation invariant. I like that. But going beyond the art that might be embodied by these ideas, there's real science that is born out of these ideas.

[00:10:23.33] So in your high school algebra class, you probably remember studying functions f probably in the variable x. You probably wrote down things like f of x equals f of negative x, or f of x equals f of x plus a, or f of theta plus 2 pi is f of theta. And you might remember that those are examples of the mathematical formulas that embody the symmetries I just described to you, might be objectionable.

[00:10:50.40] But if not, they mean the same thing. And depending on whether you are or are not a scientist, you probably still remember that trigonometry is based on a lot of these functions. And depending on what you remember or enjoy in science, you might have written down equations involving these sorts of parameters a lot. And you either enjoyed them, or you didn't.

[00:11:20.96] But the only point I want to make is that a lot of what is central to trigonometry and the basic stuff that you study in physics and chemistry begins with just these three kinds of symmetry, which I hope you could agree are beautiful. And if we're going to send rockets out to space, I'm sure you know, you need to get these equations right.

[00:11:48.92] It turns out that in the world of pure mathematics, there is a different level of symmetry that I might have a difficult time convincing you is beautiful. It's called the theory of modular forms. It's something that's way beyond trigonometry. If you don't want to-- this is almost over. So it's like going to the dentist. We're almost through the novocaine part.

[00:12:11.72] There are functions that are called modular forms that embody infinitely many symmetries at once. A mirror reflection is one kind of symmetry. A rotation is another kind of symmetry. The translation is one kind of symmetry. Can you imagine a function that is required to satisfy infinitely many distinct symmetries at the same time? It should sound like that's impossible, but there are such things.

[00:12:38.54] And the symmetries I'm describing involve functions that are symmetric with respect to this crazy picture on the right. It's not beautiful what you see on the right, but there is a world in mathematics where you ask that a function satisfies this crazy rule, which I'm not going to describe, but there's infinitely many of those rules.

[00:13:01.95] There's only three of these rules. There's infinitely many of those rules, and this is the world in which I live when I think about pure mathematics. And let me tell you that you don't have to memorize anything on that slide. But if you drink the Kool-Aid, if you drink the Kool-Aid and adopt that this is actually beautiful, then I can introduce you to 20th and 21st-century mathematics if you are willing to take that dive.

[00:13:28.30] We're not going to do that. I'm just going to give you a glimpse of what is accessible to you as a scientist if you learn that stuff. How is this related to the story I'm about to tell you? I'm going to tell you there was a prophet who died over 100 years ago who believed that there was an Indian goddess who gave him as a gift visions of mathematical formulas that he wrote down in his notebooks.

[00:13:56.10] These formulas we don't understand. Many of them, we don't really understand to this day. I'm going to tell you about what we can prove if we know some of those formulas, and those formulas are about the functions I'm describing here. So what are some of the applications. This is an application from high school or elementary school.

[00:14:18.94] You probably remember the Pythagorean theorem, a squared plus b squared equals c squared, where a, b, and c are the side lengths of a right triangle. Great, all right, that's not the most important equation in the universe. But maybe for a middle school student, it's everything. I regret to say, it's only one example. So where I'm going with this, and I think maybe some of you will know this theorem called Fermat's Last Theorem.

[00:14:47.27] There's a famous theorem. It was proposed as a problem in the 17th century, and it's about the equation a squared plus b squared equals c squared, except where you place the exponent 2 by any larger number. a cubed plus b cubed. Could that ever be a c cube? Could the sum of 2/4 powers ever be a 1/4 power. And if you're a pure mathematician, you wouldn't care about whether anyone else in the universe cared about the answer.

[00:15:15.27] You just wanted to know. Are there numbers that you can plug in for a, b, and c to solve that equation? So this might not speak to you, but if it does, I'll tell you one of the most important advances in mathematics in the last 30 years is this work by Andrew Wiles, where he confirmed that no matter how hard you look, you will never find a solution.

[00:15:39.26] And this is an important thing. You can look for things forever not know whether there is extra terrestrial life. You might not know whether there are certain things out in space. In mathematics, sometimes you can actually prove something is literally impossible, but it's probably hard. Just because you've never seen something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[00:16:03.27] Here's a picture. I'm a social guy, before I lost my hair. I had hair. So here is a photograph of me with Andrew Wiles, who proved this big theorem. And when he proved this theorem, he got on the front page of the New York Times. And my friend James Maynard, who won a Fields Medal. And what I like about this picture is off in the background right behind Andrew's right shoulder is a picture of the man who I'm going to spend most of today talking about, Ramanujan.

[00:16:30.69] Without this prophet, who was an autodidact I haven't really told you very much about yet, this fancy theorem could have never happened. What else would have been inaccessible to us without this Indian prophet? Well, another one of the most famous results in the recent history of mathematics has to do with sphere packing.

[00:16:54.80] So if you have a hornet's nest in the backyard, you might cut it down, and you might be really angry. But imagine slicing that hornet's nest in half and looking at the beautiful pattern that the hornets have mastered. Have you ever thought about that? It's beautiful. It's called a hexagonal lattice, and this lattice has this very beautiful property that if you were to fill in each of those cells with a circle, it is the most efficient way of filling up space using circles.

[00:17:28.23] The bees. The hornets figured out the solution to this mathematical problem. Nature knew the answer. But what if I wanted to fill up space using spheres, balls all of the same size? You would think that's an easy problem. You'd think Whole Foods has figured it out when they stacked their oranges. Is there a smartest way to stack oranges?

[00:17:48.81] Would you believe that we didn't know the answer to that problem-- the most efficient way to stack cannonballs-- until about 30 years ago. What might be kind of embarrassing to the mathematicians is that the guess that Whole Foods uses turns out to be the right answer. So there are instances where you know what you're supposed to prove, and you confirm your speculation.

[00:18:17.56] But there are also instances where you turn out to discover you're absolutely wrong. Now, it turns out that in mathematics, there are many problems like this. And in signal processing, where you're sending messages back and forth, say, from a satellite to Earth, errors can creep into your messages. How do you make sure that the message that you get from a satellite was the intended message?

[00:18:42.89] Well, the sphere packing problem is a model of that. What if we invented a language where maybe some of the characters would get screwed up when the message reaches us. But if we make sure that they never collide, which is something like having tangent circles that never overlap, maybe we could devise the optimal mathematical model to avoid having errors.

[00:19:04.27] So I'm kind of dumbing that down, but I think you get the idea. Circles that never intersect or tangent would be models for the simplest way of separating information so that they never collide, and you wouldn't be far from correct. And so the question is for higher dimensions, what is the optimal way of filling up space with circles of the same size?

[00:19:26.08] Would you believe we've only been able to answer that for five dimensions? So imagine your alphabet. Maybe you invent your own alphabet with 90 characters. How would I fill up 90-dimensional space? We wouldn't know how to do that, but we did solve that for dimensions 8 and 24. And that was a big thing that won Maryna Viazovska the Fields Medal two years ago.

[00:19:52.51] And what was her key? These magic functions that this prophet told us about. The very functions, as [? prophet ?] I'm going to end up telling you about, wrote down the functions that appear in this cutting-edge work. And just to prove that I was a social guy. So yeah, this is me. I still had hair back then, and that's with Maryna. She's only the second female to ever win the Fields Medal, and this is amazing work.

[00:20:21.40] If you've ever flown on an airplane, you probably have been canceled, quite frustrated. You're probably aware of the fact that airlines have hubs, and if you fly Delta, you might go to Atlanta. And you might wonder what's the mathematical reason behind that? Well, that's an example of a problem in mathematics. How do you connect 1,000 points optimally-- called graph theory-- without having too many edges?

[00:20:47.41] I don't want to have to have a flight that connects every two cities on the planet. That would be horrible, horribly inefficient. So what's the trade off? What's the mathematical theory that's the trade off between having high connectivity, while at the same time, having an efficient network. So here's an example of what is called a Ramanujan graph.

[00:21:11.42] It's highly connected, but it is efficient, and it is not over connected by having too many edges. And this was the result of a Wolf-- this won Peter Sarnak the Wolf Prize. And without again, this Indian prophet, this work would have been impossible. I think you're trying to get my theme. In physics, it is true. You can carry out a calculation or observe something from space that confirms or offers something like a confirmation for speculation of Einstein.

[00:21:43.46] That's a big thing, and I'm trying to make that parallel, that level of depth. And for me, if you're interested in gravity, one of the most difficult things that we don't understand is how gravity works. We know some rules. Newton's laws of motion. Newton's laws of gravity are mathematical equations that we believe the heavenly bodies obey.

[00:22:10.22] And by making telescopic observations of the heavenly bodies, you might be able to predict with some accuracy the existence of something you might not ever be able to see. Let me give you an example. Wouldn't you think it was wonderful if there was a mathematical theory that said, point your telescope out there, and you're going to find a Black hole?

[00:22:31.48] That's not crazy. We're almost there. We are almost there using gravity. But you know what we're not good at? We're not good at understanding gravity. Let me give you an example. There's this famous story of a planet called Vulcan. I think maybe some of you, maybe many of you know it. It's not just from Star Trek. There was a planet called Vulcan that is supposed to orbit inside the orbit of Mercury.

[00:22:55.31] Vulcan is hot. Mercury is [INAUDIBLE]. OK. And that prediction was based on a strong belief that Newton's laws held at all scales. There are even astronomers in the 19th century who wrote papers saying, I finally found planet Vulcan with my telescope. OK, well, science is two steps forward, one back. That would be backwards. There is no planet Vulcan, and the point about gravity is we didn't understand, and we don't still really understand how to apply mathematical equations properly because there are hypotheses.

[00:23:33.24] And of course, I'm talking about Einstein's theory of relativity. People didn't really understand at the time that the mass of sun exerts relativistic effects that have to be taken into account. This is how science works. Two steps forward, one back. You learn a little bit more. And what we don't know, honestly, is anything about gravity.

[00:23:53.27] So the problem of quantum gravity is often called one of the hardest problems in physics, and one of my works is related to a mathematical model that was developed by Ed Witten, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. It's called the umbral moonshine problem. I solve that using these modular forms, again, using equations that were written down in a notebook long before anyone even knew what a black hole was.

[00:24:22.93] And it actually even made it in to television. This is fun. This is Sheldon, apartment 8A, or whatever it is on TV. And those are some of those equations that you can find written down over 100 years ago in a notebook that you can find in a library in Madras. And it solves these theorems. So this is the backdrop. I wanted to say that a lot of modern mathematics flows through these functions with infinitely many symmetries.

[00:24:54.97] And I want to impress upon you that the collection of applications is broad. One of them, which already came up, which might be surprising to you, is it helps people win world championships, set American records, and hopefully in Paris, come back with a whole bunch of records. So I won't have time to go into how the modular forms appear here.

[00:25:19.25] But let me just say there's some differential equations that are used to keep track of movement in space. We model them, and I think a lot of the other countries and college teams wonder what we're doing under the hood. Maybe we'll tell some time, but I just want to show you a short film clip of two of our Olympic champions, medalists Kate Douglass and Alex Walsh. They won silver, and bronze in the Tokyo Olympics in the very same event. And I'm going to show you them executing something called butterfly, and I just want you to watch.

[00:26:04.14] And what you might have noticed is that they were completely different. They were swimming the same event. Did everyone see that? Just look at the timing of their knee kicks. Look at the timing of their knee kicks. I don't want to take much time going over and over again, but I think you can agree, they look very different.

[00:26:28.85] The theory of modular forms, just like the Human Genome Project allows for medicine, is precision work. You go to the doctor, and they take your blood. They run a DNA test. They come back a couple hours later saying whatever the outcome is. There's a good chance they're doing a screen against the Human Genome Project to help you.

[00:26:52.84] So what I want you to think is that we're doing some of the same things to precision train our athletes instead of saying, Michael Phelps does this, Katie Ledecky does that. So we want to swim like them. I want every other coach on the planet to say that because what we will do is we will assemble a digital twin of each athlete and determine what is best for them.

[00:27:12.72] And there's some differential equations that come into play, and then we have a year to train the athletes to actually execute what we think they should be doing. And there's a lot of factors, aerobic capacity, so on and so forth. But at the end of the day, it is science and all of that. Everything that I know, and almost everything I've ever done in mathematics, comes from the story I'm about to tell you.

[00:27:39.48] So whether it's Olympic champions, getting on a television show, Big Bang Theory, solving Fermat's last theorem, or signal processing, it's all related to the story I'm about to tell you. I hope this is OK. So now the math is over. Are we good? Srinivasa Ramanujan, for this lecture, I'm going to call him the modular forms prophet.

[00:28:02.41] No more math. But here, modular forms, I want you to think that's heavy important stuff. And as mentioned earlier, I was very lucky in that I was invited into this project. And it was a film called The Man Who Knew Infinity. At first, I was invited to help out with the art work, and I still can't believe any of this happened.

[00:28:28.86] By the end of it, I was going to film festivals and ended up being an associate producer of a Hollywood film without any knowledge of the film industry at all. I knew I could find Hollywood on the map. I know if I go to LA and look up on a hill, there might be a word that says Hollywood. So I knew literally nothing about making films, which was actually quite an interesting experience because I had no stake in the industry when I joined onto this project.

[00:28:57.02] And it was fun. I was like a Boy Scout. It was super fun. But to tell you where this story begins with me, I need to go back to 1984, Saturday, April 7. I was in 10th grade. We were all in high school once, and I don't know if my experience as a tenth grader will resonate with you. But in 10th grade, the last thing I wanted to be was anything that my parents wanted me to be.

[00:29:29.64] And I admitted that my father was a mathematician, and Professor Jack Morava, who's in the audience right here. He was a he was a colleague of my father's at Johns Hopkins, might even remember me at this height. And my dad might have shown off that I could solve geometry problems, and I hated that. Last thing I wanted to be was a mathematician in 10th grade.

[00:29:51.96] Saturday, April 7th, 1984, this letter arrived at the house, and it brought my father to tears. It's a long story that I won't go into, but let me read this letter to you. Dear Sir, I understand from Mr. Richard Askey, Wisconsin, USA, that you've contributed for the sculpture in memory of my late husband, Srinivasa Ramanujan. I am happy over this event.

[00:30:16.68] I thank you very much for your good gesture and wish you success in all of your endeavors. Signed S. Janakiammal. To make this long story very short, let me just say, and I tried to plant the seed of this thought in an earlier comment I made, is that my parents took a risk leaving Japan to come to this country shortly after World War II.

[00:30:42.58] They came from the country that bombed Pearl Harbor, but the reason that he came was that my father was one of many Japanese mathematicians who attended conferences in Japan that were held by the Young National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation in this country was formed in 1950, and one of their first acts was to rebuild universities in the country of Japan.

[00:31:09.67] I think we should be proud that as a country, we did that. And my father, along with a large list of Japanese mathematicians, attended this conference. And important professors from Harvard, University of Chicago, and Princeton came to help rebuild the universities. One of these professors was named André Weil. And André Weil, at this conference, gave a lecture about this Indian prophet who he had been studying, and he invited the Japanese students, you should study this guy, Ramanujan, because nobody else yet is, and it's going to be important.

[00:31:49.31] And Jack can tell you, oh my god, there was a generation of Japanese mathematicians that worked in this field leading to many of the results that I described. So why did this bring my dad to tears is because, think about it, in the early 1950s, they had a choice to make. Do they leave their family to come to a country that they thought would hate them?

[00:32:15.58] And so in receiving this letter, he was reliving this very famous conference in Tokyo where the Japanese students huddled around saying, we should go to America. We might not be welcomed there, but we should go to America and see what we can make of ourselves. What did I hear [INAUDIBLE] when I was in 10th grade? I thought, this is the strangest letter.

[00:32:37.33] It doesn't even say "Takashi Ono." It's not really to. It's written to you and a bunch of other people. So here is where Ramanujan first became important to me. My dad tells me, you're not going to believe this, but this guy, Ramanujan, who died at the age of 32, left behind notebooks that we still can't figure out today. I study them.

[00:33:00.08] I have copies in my library upstairs. I'll show you. And mathematicians all over the world are trying to figure out that page or this page or this entry, and they're making a living out of it. And then on top of that, this Indian mathematician is a two-time college dropout. That's what I heard as a tenth grader. The 10th grader, I'm thinking SATs.

[00:33:22.52] I'm supposed to go to one of these schools. GPA. By the way, it's much worse for kids today than it was for me in the '80s. But it was still-- I think you get it. And I heard my parents say for the first time, it's not the pursuit of grades that matters. It's the quality of your achievements and the quality of your character. And the story I'm about to tell you about what this guy overcame to become somebody.

[00:33:48.18] So for me, Ramanujan mattered because it indicated hope. I'm not about to join some race and education just because that's what we're supposed to do. There is a level where even my parents will say something is beautiful and worth doing that's not related to a credential or a grade. And as a tenth grader, I needed that.

[00:34:09.57] So the first time Ramanujan mattered to me-- might come as a surprise to you-- but it was that. And that's what this letter means to me. Come visit me in my office. This is the most valuable thing that's on the wall in my office. So, Ramanujan, when did he live? He lived a long time ago. He was born-- is this interesting?

[00:34:29.04] So Ramanujan was born in the late 19th century in lush South India, Tamil Nadu. If you've never been to India, go. Make sure you get your shots. Because if you don't get your shots, you will regret going. But it's a beautiful country, very beautiful. People are very kind. And in fact, if you've never been, you'll probably learn a lot about the culture, but you might end up learning more about yourself.

[00:34:54.91] He was born in the late 1880s. He was born a Brahmin, and what won't come as a surprise is that he was an outstanding student as a high school kid, and he won a scholarship to college. What might come as a surprise, and this isn't normal, is that he discovered mathematics as a young boy. And by the age of 13, had discovered much of trigonometry by himself.

[00:35:23.09] And as a teen, he received, as a gift from a friend, a book. I've actually seen this book. His book is called a synopsis of elementary results in pure mathematics, which was little more than an Almanac of formulas. He wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge in England at the time. There was no such thing as Stanley Kaplan. There was no such thing as the internet.

[00:35:50.97] You might have to hire a tutor that could help prepare you for the entrance examination, and there's a good chance they would use this book. But this gift, this book, when Ramanujan received it, was an introduction to what he thought was higher mathematics. And it ignited his passion for mathematics. And following the style he found in these notebooks, he decided to make his own notebooks.

[00:36:14.07] Actually, that's weird, right? If you get a book for a class, the first thing you probably-- you're probably not thinking, I'm not going to write my own book on the subject. But yeah, for Ramanujan, formulas started coming to him, and he started leaving them in his own notebooks. And he thought that's how math was done so tried to imagine what the rest of the universe would think trying to make sense of his notebooks when this was an absolute amateur from every perspective.

[00:36:44.97] Ramanujan ended up spending all of his time doing math, and as a result, he flunked out of college. He was given a second chance, but he flunked out again. But that was certainly not the end of the story. He found a job as a clerk. He was very good at numbers, and so what he did was he worked as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust doing the accounting, the books. And at night, he did his formulas, filling up three notebooks with formulas.

[00:37:13.95] And nobody could comprehend his math. By the way, equals, for all of you. If I said a equals b, we already know, that means that we agree that a and b are the same thing. There's no equal sign means? For Ramanujan. equal sign didn't mean that. So if you were to make your way through his notebooks, you'd be very frustrated. That equals that. I can see that they're different. What is he talking about?

[00:37:41.31] So, like I said, we made a film, and I'm going to slowly walk through the story. Is this OK? It's interesting? So the film is better than me talking. So we made a film about the story that I'm telling you, and we didn't want to have math be really that important.

[00:37:59.94] But we had to somehow convey the idea that there are people out there, quite a few, definitely not the majority, would never win any election. They found math beautiful so we wanted to get that across. Let me share with you a film clip where we want to introduce Ramanujan's isolation, not having anyone to communicate with about his mathematics, but at the same time, get the idea that math could be a work of art.

[00:38:29.83] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[00:38:34.97] - Go ahead. You can look. Please.

[00:38:51.57] - What does it all do?

[00:38:55.87] - It's like a painting, I think, only imagine it is with colors you cannot see.

[00:39:06.17] - What good is that?

[00:39:09.31] - Not much for you, I'm afraid. But for me, it is everything. Maybe there is someone else who can see and understand it as well. And for them, it will be important.

[00:39:26.66] - Have you met them?

[00:39:29.68] - No, not yet.

[00:39:36.60] - I want to understand, more than just colors I can't see.

[00:39:45.48] - What do you see?

[00:39:47.76] - Sand.

[00:39:48.81] - Yes. Imagine if we could look so closely, we could see each grain, each particle. You see there are-- there are patterns in everything. The color and light. The reflections on water. In maths, these patterns reveal themselves in the most incredible form.

[00:40:15.86] [END PLAYBACK]

[00:40:16.57] So I hope you feel that. I love that scene. When we invite our students as first years into our engagement courses, I know what they're thinking. They're thinking, how do I get into that class, or what major will be best for me? But I think, like all of you as faculty members, that's maybe not the first thing that we want them to think about.

[00:40:42.11] They're embarking on a journey, where they're going to become something else. We always talk about helping people find their passion. What does it look like? So in the film, we wanted that to be something along those lines. If you've never met someone that talks about numbers in this way, I hope that achieves that goal.

[00:41:03.43] So like I said, I invited you all to go to India. And if you do go, I invite you to go to the University of Madras in Chennai, and you can go to the library at University of Madras and ask the librarian, can I see Ramanujan's notebooks? And believe it or not, they'll bring them out. I don't think it should be allowed. I feel it's something like, I want to see the Book of Kells, go to Trinity college, produce them for me.

[00:41:32.30] But in India, they'll do it. And so I've done this a number of times, and I learn something every time I do it. And it's definitely kind of a special experience. So Ramanujan, obviously, somehow became known, although he was in isolation in India. He was in people-- his friends encouraged him to start writing out to the mathematicians in the West.

[00:41:59.81] And he wrote a letter to a very famous Cambridge professor by the name of G.H. Hardy. If you were a biologist or if you know anything about genetics, you'll know the name Hardy because this is the Hardy of the Hardy-Weinberg law. And the letter he wrote to Hardy begins with these very beautiful words. I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk.

[00:42:23.48] I've had no university education. I have not trod into the conventional regular course, but I'm striking out a new path for myself, and the results I get are termed by local mathematicians as startling. In our film, we were very lucky. We had Jeremy Irons play G.H. Hardy. G.H. Hardy read the letter, which was startling, and he invited the Indian boy, Ramanujan, to study with him in England in the early 20th century.

[00:42:54.08] He arrived in 1913, and I want that to sink in for a moment. The world was about to enter into the depth of World War I when this was happening. Hardy was a distinguished chaired professor at Cambridge. Ramanujan was a poor two-time college dropout from India at a time when India was subjugated as a small piece but large geographically and by population piece of the British empire.

[00:43:19.76] It is extraordinary that Hardy read this letter and invited Ramanujan to study with him. It is extraordinary that happened. Had Hardy not responded, everything I just described at the beginning, whether you like math or not, would have never happened. And at least for me and for many of us working in the sciences that pertains to, that would be a history that we cannot fathom.

[00:43:48.04] It would be like not having cars, if you ask me in my field. Automobiles were never invented. And we asked Jeremy to replicate this pose. And he-- kind of amazing, actually. Yeah, so Hardy invited Ramanujan to study with him in Cambridge. At first, Ramanujan did not agree, did not accept the invitation out of fear and also for cultural reasons, because at the time, it was frowned upon for Indians to make this long journey across the seas.

[00:44:22.98] But he accepted, and I'd like to share with you the scene where Jeremy-- I'm sorry, Hardy and Ramanujan meet for the first time in Hardy's Cambridge office.

[00:44:35.93] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[00:44:36.30] - Ramanujan, we decided that for the good of everybody, you should attend some lectures.

[00:44:44.16] - But I'm here to publish.

[00:44:46.35] - Yes, all in good time, I hope. But first, we need proofs of your work.

[00:44:54.03] - It's really nothing to worry about. It's simply a question of acquainting you with the more formal methods that will benefit our future work together.

[00:45:04.62] - We need a common language. You wouldn't expect us to converse with you in Tamil.

[00:45:09.84] - No, but you expect me to speak English.

[00:45:15.66] - Quite. So there'll be plenty of time for publishing.

[00:45:21.57] - I'm sorry, but with all humility, how does anyone know that? I don't want this to die with me.

[00:45:29.29] - I assure you, it won't.

[00:45:31.11] - Thank you, sir. But I have much more to share with you. As I told you, the letter only contained a small sampling of my discoveries. You'll see I have even found a function, which exactly represents the number of prime numbers less than x in the form of an infinite series.

[00:45:46.95] - Exactly?

[00:45:48.00] - Yes, I thought if we were going to publish, it should be something groundbreaking.

[00:45:54.34] - This is the most unexpected.

[00:46:08.18] - This will take a lifetime.

[00:46:11.69] - Maybe two.

[00:46:15.27] [END PLAYBACK]

[00:46:17.13] I'm glad that you laughed because this was a little joke that I kind of snuck in there because I have lots of friends that will be proud to say that they are a part of that lifetime. It was a little nod to them. Yeah. OK, great. So this is kind of an important scene. It emphasizes that Ramanujan had not revealed to Hardy how much he had, but it also reveals that Ramanujan had no idea that you were supposed to give arguments, give support, evidence.

[00:46:48.17] It meant nothing to him because his ideas were visions from a goddess, and maybe we don't want to go there. And then, of course, well, you don't expect us to speak Tamil. I think that speaks volumes. All right, so glory and tragedy together, despite the fact these two people could not be more different. The shared English professor, and the two-time college dropout in Ramanujan who didn't know how to write down formal mathematics.

[00:47:19.81] Two people who shouldn't have been able to get along. And at first, they didn't. But by the end of the day, they did. And they wrote 30 papers together, laying the groundwork for what I call this modular forms theory, which I hope I made a good case at the outset, has become the stuff of 20th and 21st-century mathematics.

[00:47:41.35] Ramanujan overcame racism and the difficulties of World War I to achieve this. It's extraordinary that this ever happened, and I'm going to get to that in a moment. I want to return to that. And this is a little bit funny. Ramanujan as a Brahmin was a vegetarian. He couldn't eat the English food. So you can probably predict the joke I'm going to make.

[00:48:04.96] If you go to England today, the English food is Indian food. It just wasn't that 100 years ago. Tikka masala, where do you go for that? Go to London. And despite these hardships, Ramanujan was the first Indian scientist elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and he was elected at the age of 30. Try to imagine being elected to a National Academy at 30.

[00:48:29.57] But then imagine being, for the time, an Indian. Crazy, but this is all true. By the way, I want to touch on this point. In 2018, just a few years ago, right before COVID, was 100th anniversary of Ramanujan's election as fellow of the Royal Society. A big thing. Now, there are a lot of distinguished scientists that are members of the Royal Society. Newton, Rutherford.

[00:49:00.20] I mean, this is an old society, centuries old. So if the society took upon itself as an obligation to recognize all the famous scientists that are members of the Royal Society, there would be no time for doing science. So they exercise the most extraordinary standards when they decide who to celebrate years after their election.

[00:49:27.85] In 2018, I'm delighted to say the only scientist that they recognize from the class of 1918 for 100th anniversary was Ramanujan, and many of us descended on London and celebrated. And it was really special. from the physicists to the signal processors to the mathematicians, we had a really beautiful weekend telling our stories from so many different areas of science.

[00:49:58.45] Regrettably, there's tragedy here. Ramanujan fell ill towards the end of his stay in England. He returned to India, hoping for a turn to good health. It would not be, and he died in 1920 at the age of 32, which makes you wonder what science don't we have access to today because he died at 32. It's hard to get tenure by 32. You thing about [iNAUDIBLE] right?

[00:50:23.59] That is mind boggling to me. I'm often asked, what would you want to know about Ramanujan if you had a time machine or had you been able to live a proper life? And yeah, it's crazy. I would like to give him a personal computer, even just a hand calculator. What would he have been able to discover if he had access to computing power, even a small percentage of what we have available today?

[00:50:50.86] So this is the idea of Ramanujan. I wrote about this with my student, Robert Schneider, for a Hollywood magazine, because it was hard to put into words because he means different things to different people. And what we wrote is this, Ramanujan matters because he represents endless curiosity and untapped potential, which we all have to believe in to proceed in the sciences.

[00:51:15.91] Science usually advances on the work of thousands over generations fine tuning and extending the scope of understanding. But from time to time, creative fireballs like Ramanujan burst onto the scene, propelling human thought forward. Whether it's science or whether it's being an iconic figure, a role model for students of science. He certainly, I think, speaks to that.

[00:51:45.03] Here's a picture that is going to answer, I think, the question, why does Ramanujan matter in a direction that you might not be expecting. And this might be a date that you don't want to remember. Maybe it's one you want to remember. This is the last week of October in 2016. Essentially, one week right before a presidential election.

[00:52:09.99] The outgoing president was President Barack Obama. And as is tradition, as is tradition-- this is not politics. I'm talking about Ramanujan, by the way. As is tradition, an outgoing president holds transition events for the leading candidates to be the next president. You probably know about this, and this was a Friday.

[00:52:32.83] And what the Obama administration did was devoted Friday to science. So they brought in France Cordova, my friend. She was, at the time, the director of the National Science Foundation brought in the director of DOE, NIH, so on and so forth, to train the incoming transition teams about the business of being president. You get to oversee and participate the execution of science in this country. That is an awesome responsibility.

[00:53:04.24] And to our surprise, Obama thought there should be-- well, maybe this part isn't a surprise because maybe they always just do this. But Obama thought, well, we have to have a social event to end this week of transition events. Let's have a party. So while I want to screen the film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, our little independent film that maybe most of you have never even heard of.

[00:53:30.67] So I want to screen for the transition film, for the transition teams, this film, and let me tell you why. And this is before COVID. He said, on the horizon are many significant challenges that the scientists of our future will have to contend with. You know some. Do we have green energy? Climate change? We're still looking for the cure for cancer.

[00:53:56.62] And whether you like the mathematics or not, when I saw this film, what spoke to me was that you had an Indian, basically a Black man in England, who somehow got along with this distinguished English professor. And you're telling me he proved some of the most awesome results in mathematics? I don't care about the mathematics, but that says we need international cooperation in science.

[00:54:26.89] I want that to be the story of Ramanujan. None of us thought that when we made this film. We made this film like, I love Ramanujan. I want to tell that story. These two very different people, just seeing their interaction, you didn't know that that's what it would mean to the President of the United States. So he invited us. Jeremy Irons came, and this is us standing in front of the West Wing of the White House right before we screened the film to end that week.

[00:54:57.02] What are we doing here? Maybe you recognize DJ Patil at the time. He was the chief data scientist for the United States, and we did a little event live on stream to maybe five people. I don't know if anybody ever watches it, but here we are giving a math problem to whoever was out there watching. And the problem is, what is the smallest number that is the sum of two cubes in two different ways?

[00:55:21.90] And if you were aware of the story of Ramanujan, there is an answer. If not, that's just a very strange question that Ramanujan happened to know the answer to off the top of his head. And who knows answers to questions like that off the top of your head? And this is an example of how extraordinary Ramanujan was. If you want to know the answer, there's a Tesla out there with the license plate, and that's my number.

[00:55:47.15] But isn't that amazing? Our little film didn't make a lot of money. It took eight years to make, and it had this unintended interpretation. So the last slide I want to show you is this. We got a lot of help to make this film. Making a film about a mathematician in a period film is not like making Batman versus Superman or a Marvel film.

[00:56:17.40] People aren't saying, oh, yeah, please, I will give you my $8 million to make this film. I won't mind. It doesn't work that way. It's very hard to make these films, and we got help from the Breakthrough Foundation. I think you might know the Breakthrough Foundation. They give out prizes to distinguished scientists. You know their names like Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner, Jack Ma. They have assembled a giant pot of money to support science, and they made our film possible.

[00:56:51.00] They don't generally advertise that, but they helped make our film. And the little payback, the little thing that they requested was, well, can we screen the film at one of our events, and could you bring some of the actors? So the Breakthrough Foundation funds SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they asked us to bring our film with the actors.

[00:57:22.14] And we would be an activity at the end of the SETI conference. You might actually remember the SETI. This particular conference. This is when they announced something called Breakthrough Starshot, where they're going to send these little spaceships. I don't know where they are on that now, but that was that event. And so at the conclusion of the screening, Yuri Milner asked me to come up on stage.

[00:57:44.90] I'd met someone named Jill Tarter, who turned out to be really amazing. She was the first lead for SETI. Yuri Milner said, we're going to do a Q&A with you. Everyone in the audience is a scientist. They're going to get the autographs from these, but you're the scientist. So I probably had a little bit-- one or two glasses of wine too much for dinner before this.

[00:58:11.76] And I don't know what got into me, but I recognized everybody in the audience is from SETI. So I did say something almost exactly like this, just like all of you searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Maybe we should be searching our own planet, too, for natural, earthly intelligence. Isn't that what our movie is about?

[00:58:37.66] Ramanujan almost was never brought into the light. And as I mentioned, and I use very carefully the term, it is unfathomable to me to imagine where we would be today had he never been brought into the light. And he was an extraordinary outcome. 15 minutes later, walking to the parking lot, a man by the name of Edward Serazin-- you might know his name.

[00:59:01.39] He recently stepped down as president of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. He ran down the driveway, said, you are so right. I was about to give all this money to SETI. I'm giving it to you. So thanks to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, we've been doing it. And we've now given out $5,000 little grants. $5,000 can transform your life if you're-- for what? Right?

[00:59:31.78] You don't have access to the internet, or if you're from Egypt with no access, $5,000 can literally change your life. And so, yeah, as of last June, we've given out 125 prizes to students from 23 different countries. I have some-- well, I don't want to go into many examples. Here are some of our first winners. This little boy on the right, he's now a graduate student at Oxford.

[01:00:03.02] But we discovered him in Qatar, and he had invented his own formula for pi, digits of pi. One of our first winners, we discovered her as-- I don't want to say we discovered her in the sense of science. We brought into the light. She came from a very small village in China, and thanks, in part, to our award, she ended up going to MIT.

[01:00:29.56] She graduated from MIT in three years. She won something called the Morgan Prize. She won something called the Schafer Prize. She won something called the Rhodes Scholarship. And today, she's a PhD student at Stanford in mathematics while concurrently enrolled in law school at Stanford. If we had not made this film, she might still be in that village.

[01:00:54.76] And I remember her telling-- she's kind of a difficult person, actually. So as awesome as that is, you could imagine it's a very-- right? But I remember her saying, my parents just wanted me to get married, find a boy, go to MIT. Even as a student at MIT, go find a boy. So anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about. I hope this was interesting.

[01:01:16.55] [APPLAUSE]

[01:01:24.62] You have a fascinating story, and you are a gifted speaker. Who else?

[01:01:34.56] Can you hear me? May I just say that the man knows what he's talking about. He's not making this stuff up.

[01:01:43.58] KEN ONO: Ramanujan?

[01:01:44.81] AUDIENCE: Sorry. OK, OK, all right. No, you, you're the story that you're telling.

[01:01:51.80] KEN ONO: Thank you. Thank you. Everyone, that's Jack Morava. There's a whole theory of mathematics named after him. Yes, there is.

[01:02:06.94] KATHRYN THORNTON: Who else has a question?

[01:02:08.13] AUDIENCE: If he was called The Man Who Knew Infinity.

[01:02:10.21] KEN ONO: Oh, thank you very much. So-- oh, I totally dropped the ball on this. There was a biography by Robert Kanigel, who was a journalism professor at MIT, about Ramanujan called The Man Who Knew Infinity. Wrong answer. He wrote this book in the early 1990s. He called it The Man Who Knew Infinity because he thought it would be kind of a catchy title.

[01:02:35.89] Rather luckily, on our first day of shooting in London, the night before the first day of shooting, I got that question. And Robert said, you got to come up with an answer right away. It's not acceptable to say it was a catchy title. And rather beautifully, there is an excellent answer. So in number theory, there's a function called p of n that counts the number of partitions of n.

[01:03:01.45] It's very easy to define, but I'll spare you. It's a sequence of numbers that grows at a very rapid rate. It starts out with the numbers one, one, two. But by the time you get to the 20th term, it's in the hundreds of thousands. It goes very quickly, and one of the major accomplishments that Ramanujan came up with was what's called an asymptotic formula for these numbers.

[01:03:27.51] It wasn't the exact right answer. It gives you an approximation. But what does it mean to say you know infinity? Well, this was my opportunity to explain what an asymptotic formula is. Although you're not getting the right answer, measured the right way, it becomes perfect.

[01:03:44.41] So if you have an approximation, and you divide it by the actual numbers, as you write down more and more cases, if that gets close to one, that is an example of a formula that gets perfect as you go to infinity. I think some journalists even wrote that down somewhere. So in any event, it's just an asymptotic formula, and anyone who knows that, we'll call them the people who infinity.

[01:04:08.37] KATHRYN THORNTON: Who else?

[01:04:17.96] AUDIENCE: Some of these ideas are so important that they're just discovered independently by people working in different fields, and that's certainly true of symmetry. But it also means there are language distinctions between what different people mean by symmetry. So metallurgists and chemists and all have developed a specific language. And they also tend to be restricted to three dimensions, rather than more multiple dimensions.

[01:04:43.23] But the problem of packing oranges, for example, was known by those a long time ago. So hexagonal close packing and face-centered close packing both are equivalent things there. And so this may be confusing to many people because the meaning that some modern physicists and mathematicians use for symmetry is much more general than the idea of symmetry by the classical metallurgists and people like that.

[01:05:13.36] KEN ONO: Exactly right. Yeah, let me clarify what I was saying about hexagonal. So you can construct infinitely many different kinds of packings that get really, really close to what turn out to be the optimal packing. The hard part is to prove you can't actually find one that's a little bit better. So in practice, these other lattices that had been produced, nobody in their right mind should ever be trying to reproduce them in nature. So there are these instances where the answer nature that comes quickly are clearly, but are difficult to establish, are optimal. In the higher dimensions, it's all bets off.

[01:06:02.72] AUDIENCE: Yeah, can we bring it home a little bit? Can you talk a little bit about the university here, some of the things that are going on as it relates to this? The timing seems to be extraordinarily opportunistic. The fact that we've been given the kind of money to develop in the way we are. Could you just say a little bit about what's happening here and how unique or not is what's going on here?

[01:06:28.47] KEN ONO: OK, I feel like I'm back at work. Did this all day. I had meeting with UVA today. Yeah, I'd be delighted to. So in my role in the provost office, I think I've had the perfect job made for me. I get to be a cheerleader for the extraordinary talent that we have here at the university and help develop that. So some examples include, of course, our student body.

[01:07:02.55] But the most prominent examples that I think you all see evidence of will be, for example, the School of Data Science. We received a $200 million gift to build a school of data science here at the University of Virginia, which I predict within 10 years will be one of the four or five best in the country. If you compare with what other universities are doing, there are a few exceptions. Berkeley is doing a great job.

[01:07:28.46] There are a few exceptions, but what is closer to the truth is schools are trying to figure out what is data science. And even places like UCLA, which in your mind probably is one of the best public universities, struggling to figure out what that should mean. Should we hire two more statisticians and two more computer scientists, and maybe they'll form an alliance?

[01:07:49.62] We've got a dean, Phil Bourne, who is the head data scientist for NIH, which had the most extraordinary data science problem, the human genome, at our helm. And we've assembled an extraordinary group, and that's one thing that's happening. The Manning family, you might know Gordonsville for the barbecue exchange or the cute-- Gordonsville, which, by the way, I'm delighted to say that my PhD advisor is from Gordonsville. Basil Gordon was my PhD advisor.

[01:08:24.12] And when I was his student many years ago, he talked about the lovely campus that Thomas Jefferson built in Central Virginia. Basil Gordon was from Gordonsville. The Manning family have resurrected that spirit of Gordonsville that we all get to enjoy today, and on top of that gave another $200 million to establish this institute for biotechnology.

[01:08:48.93] People don't just give $200 million to universities because they like the universities. The Mannings have no direct connection to the University of Virginia. They could have given their money to any number of schools. And the truth is, we had to prove to them that we had the ability to prove we could do something with that $200 million, leverage it, and make something out of that.

[01:09:13.30] That's exciting. If you have diabetes or have a family member that struggles with diabetes, you might know about this Dexcom device. It's an integrated insulin pump with a glucose monitor. That is state of the art stuff. It used to be that you had to-- your finger-- it's horrible. But there's a lot of scientists and researchers here at UVA.

[01:09:39.89] They had to come together at the right time to realize that potential. There was a mathematician by the name of Marvin Rosenblum. I hold the chair that was endowed in his honor. He taught a course on differential equations that was taken by Boris Kovatchev, who was a visiting graduate student from Bulgaria many, many years ago. Why do you know that name?

[01:10:06.10] Because he's now the director of our Center for Diabetes Research. He took the mathematics there and recognized that he could turn that into an algorithm that in real time can make very precise predictions about where your glucose level will be given these 40 or 50 different parameters. That is a math problem. But there were engineers that he could work with that said, I can make the pump.

[01:10:29.14] And they've been perfecting that. Those sorts of things that go beyond what might be your image of the university, which for many, I predict, is the college. Jefferson's image of the college. That's not going away. It's a colored history, but let's make no mistake. There's a lot that's happening from the School of Data Science to a brand new dean in the School of Medicine. Engineering is-- we have a great engineering dean, Jennifer West. If you've never met her, I encourage you to meet her.

[01:11:02.90] This is an exciting place to be. So I don't know if I'm answering your question. Maybe it could be as go to the Forum Hotel and have a nice meal because all of that has been transformed. The number one law school in the country at a public university is University of Virginia. We are lucky. Yeah, am I-- do I do my job well? Tell Jim.

[01:11:31.26] KATHRYN THORNTON: Who else? Got time for one or two more.

[01:11:35.49] KEN ONO: Go run with Jim.

[01:11:41.58] AUDIENCE: So infinite ideal movement for the human body that you are working on right now, and I'm curious to know where that's going, and is an entire science being developed based on that?

[01:11:57.84] KEN ONO: I don't-- we are-- hmm. So I don't-- that's not my research area. I do that for fun. So I do that for fun. So what is it that we are doing? Let me describe it in a different way. And if you're interested in it, our article was-- we wrote an article. People were asking about it. It will come out in June, and a trimmed version will appear in Scientific American right before the Olympics.

[01:12:27.52] What we do isn't data science applied to sports, and let me explain why. There are reasons why in AI and large language models, so on and so forth, people are taken by the power of supercomputing. But when it comes to many important questions, it gives you the wrong answer. It trains to-- these entities generally trained to what has either been observed before or is the average of what can be scraped from the internet. If you want to set a world record-- I'm sorry.

[01:13:09.86] You want to do something that has never been observed before. We want to do the anti large language model, the anti AI. So there's some things where what you want to do is the average or the majority. Winning an election, you want the majority. But if you want to set world records or make an important advance in science, you don't.

[01:13:36.01] You use these tools because it allows you to have access, almost real time, to the accumulation of knowledge. That's what I think is the true power here. Does that answer your question? So what do I really do? I subject the athletes that we test to lots of strange looking tests with video and various kinds of sensors, and we assemble what we call a digital twin, and we try to imagine how, given this person's characteristics and their current aerobic capacity for that event, how might they be able to best execute that race.

[01:14:18.95] So this has several kinds of-- this is useful for coaches in a number of ways. First of all, we might identify a flaw that is easily corrected. OK, that's easy. Every coach can probably even do that with their eyes. They might not know the severity of a flaw because they don't know the numbers, but they might say, that doesn't look as fast as that.

[01:14:42.36] With our work, I can tell you how much you should predict how much you can say. The power of science is a predictive tool. But another way in which it is useful is that I might identify what is really someone's best event, and they don't know it yet. So the first story that I think the university promoted about our work with the swimmers was the story of Paige Madden, who ended up going to the Olympics.

[01:15:09.70] She won a silver medal, but it's very difficult to make the Olympic team. The top two in an event get to go. 120 qualify per event. You have to be one of the top two. But there's a catch. If you swim on a relay, you have to be top six because four make a relay. But there are several rounds, so they have alternates. And the customary wisdom would be go for one of those six spots in a relay because they take six.

[01:15:36.10] And in our work with Paige, I said, no, I really think you should swim the 400. And I know there's someone named Katie Ledecky who is going to beat you every time. And I know that means you're racing for one spot, but you can do it. And at the time, her best time was four minutes and nine seconds. And I think it was something like 19th in the country.

[01:15:59.78] And the coaches thought I was crazy. And when they got to the Olympic trials, we were very lucky because one of the first days at the Olympic trials was the 400. And they were like, don't race it. Save all of your energy for the 200 to try to get-- well, you know, why don't you just get the rhythm of the trials out of the way so that when you swim, the 200, the nerves are gone.

[01:16:22.34] She went to the Olympics in the 400. She cut six seconds that day. So the second way is the predictive power. There's actually four ways. The third way is aspirational. Given your digital twin, you should be able to, if everything works out, which is the long list of things and usually don't work out, but you might be able to aspire to swim this race with this time. And it's shocking.

[01:16:49.83] At the University of Virginia, I have files that say "world record for," and "a world record for." This is how you do it. And the coach will say, that's impossible. So you have one year to build this skill. And now I just read the news. Read the news. Kate Douglas two weeks ago broke the oldest record for women in the breaststroke, and she didn't even rest to do it. Just wait. Wait till Paris.

[01:17:21.26] And then there's the fourth part. If you're now as an athlete, having enjoyed this sort of data for the last three or four years, when you get up on that block for national championships, it's amazing how calm you are. Everyone else from all the other teams are nervous. This is the race I've been waiting for, and from their mind, I see it.

[01:17:39.85] All I have to do is Dr. Ono's formula, and I'm going to do well. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. And there's that psychological-- It's real. They are so calm. And you know what? They haven't lost. We won 11 of 18 events at the last collegiate national championships for the women in an American record time. But it's a formula.

[01:18:08.27] KATHRYN THORNTON: Do you do have a security detail that protects you?

[01:18:10.81] KEN ONO: Yeah, so I'm not going to answer-- I'm not going to tell you how we do the digital twin.

[01:18:15.76] AUDIENCE: Can you work with the men?

[01:18:17.55] KEN ONO: I do. They are coming a long way. We own the 200 freestyle relay record without any of them being All-American. Top 16, four men, 50 yards. We own the American record. None of them are top 16 in the country.

[01:18:34.03] AUDIENCE: You have two. If you have about three or four of your best young swimmers, coming next year.

[01:18:38.41]

[01:18:40.14] KEN ONO: We do. We do and have already-- yes. So Tom-- and I've already been working with them. I've gone out to-- I've worked with Team USA and the junior national team.

[01:18:48.69] AUDIENCE: I hope you have a bonus in your salary.

[01:18:52.50] KATHRYN THORNTON: I'm hoping he has a bodyguard. Well, let's thank our speaker one more time, and then we can adjourn and chat. We have a gift. A small gift. This is made by one of our local craftsmen, Bob Ribando over there makes that, and that is-- apparently hanging bananas is the most efficient mathematical way to store your bananas.

[01:19:15.59] KEN ONO: Thank you very much.

[01:19:16.57] KATHRYN THORNTON: Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy some refreshments with us. Thanks, everybody.

[01:19:20.27] [APPLAUSE]

[00:00:01.25] MEL LEFFLER: Welcome, everybody. I'm delighted to see so many people here today. I'm Mel Leffler. I was a Professor in the History Department here for many years and Chair of the History Department and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

[00:00:20.45] I'm especially delighted today to be able to introduce my friend and my colleague, Risa Goluboff. Many of you know Risa as the experienced, dynamic, thoughtful Dean of the law school. We historians, however, know her as the author of two truly outstanding books. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, published in 2007, and another book called Vagrant Nation, that came out about a decade later.

[00:01:06.81] For each of these two books, for each of them, Risa won not one but several of the most prestigious prizes that the historical profession and the legal world can bestow on any author. And as a result of her distinguished scholarship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and President Biden, a year or two ago, selected her to be a member of the prestigious committee that oversees the writing of the official history of the Supreme Court.

[00:01:52.54] In her work, Risa shows how the law shapes and is reshaped by human agents who make critical decisions about the meaning of the law and its possibilities. In The Lost Promise, she illuminates, in a very provocative way, how the lawyers who developed the strategy to overturn Jim Crow legislation in the 1940s and the early 1950s, nevertheless, may have lost an opportunity to promote economic equality and social justice for all working-class people.

[00:02:55.27] In her second book, Risa shows how vagrancy laws were challenged in the 1960s by activists and lawyers who used the Constitution to challenge prevailing police practices and who thereby reshaped the meaning of freedom in the United States. In other words, in all her writings, Risa relates the law and the Constitution to society.

[00:03:38.00] And it's in this context that she's now exploring Charlottesville 2018 as legal history. Many of you probably know that she led a committee here at the university to assess how UVA dealt with the events leading up to and during those two turbulent tumultuous days of August 11 and 12, 2018, to the extent that she now has time-- Risa, do you really have any time? [LAUGHS]

[00:04:14.68] To the extent that she now has time. She's pondering how to write a book about those days. And she wants to interrogate her own role. She wants to illuminate how white supremacists use their constitutional rights to free speech to maximize their visibility.

[00:04:40.39] And she wants to examine how different groups, organizations, and government agencies struggled to organize a legal response to those two days-- two days of violence, two tumultuous days that shook our university, our city, and indeed, our nation. Risa, we look forward to hearing what you have to say.

[00:05:11.27] [APPLAUSE]

[00:05:20.54] RISA GOLUBOFF: Good afternoon. Thank you, Mel, for that lovely introduction. And I think it was 2017, so people were trying to-- yeah, but that's OK. So I'm really happy to see you. And I feel badly that on this joyous occasion, when everyone is together for the first time, post-pandemic, I'm going to talk about something very serious. But I think it's important and I hope you'll stay with me.

[00:05:50.01] So as Mel said, I have chosen to talk about this topic that is quite new in terms of being a scholarly project that I'm engaged in. And I've called it "Charlottesville" as Legal History. We don't tend to think of these two days as "Charlottesville" because "Charlottesville" means so much more to us, but people in the outside world tend to call it "Charlottesville," hence, the square quotes.

[00:06:14.39] So one of the things I've thought about in sharing this with you is that we don't talk, as scholars, very often about what a project looks like at the beginning. We see the outcome, we see the book, we see the article, but we don't often say here's when the aperture opened, and here's all the possibilities of what this project could be from the beginning.

[00:06:38.58] We look back and we recreate it, how it falls nicely into what it became. But I'm going to talk about what it looks like from the start, before-- when the aperture is opened and there is all these possibilities before it closes again. And I will tell you, I am still in the open aperture moment, so I don't have set answers to what a book could look like, though that is what I'm aiming for.

[00:07:02.22] So as you might imagine, and I'm sure as many of you feel this, too, this journey, for me, of figuring out what a book about Charlottesville would look like, is a very personal one to me. So the first part of this talk is organized explicitly around three points of autobiographical inflection. And then the remainder is more analytical about the project.

[00:07:26.49] And I've organized it this way partly because I don't really know how else to organize it. It is autobiographical. Why I have come to this project is very personal. I am both in it and trying to be above it and look at it with some perspective. And so my journey is partly me coming to terms with what happened.

[00:07:46.59] In part, though-- and I don't think this will be a surprise to any historians in the room, but I wonder what other scholars of other fields will think of this. I think all the work that we do is always related, in some ways, to our autobiographies. And who we are shows up in certain ways, in how we conceive of and organize all of the scholarship that we write.

[00:08:07.59] OK, so the first moment of inflection, I think of this as so many cases. So in December 2018, I was at a holiday party, an alumni event, talking to a local judge who was an alumnus of the university and the law school, who told me that he had 13 distinct cases on his docket, different types of cases, all related to August 11 and 12.

[00:08:33.41] And it made me start to wonder how many other cases were out there, of what kinds, were they civil or criminal cases? Were they in state court or federal court? Like many of you, I was living in Charlottesville during these events. I'd been living here for 15 years at that point with my family.

[00:08:53.60] I was an active member, still am, of Congregation Beth Israel, the local synagogue. A faculty member at UVA and I had been dean for all of one year when this happened. I led the university-- I led the law school community in the aftermath. And then as Mel mentioned, I chaired the committee that was created by the university to coordinate its response. And I spent much of the 2017, 2018 school year working on and leading that committee.

[00:09:21.39] So given my involvement and the fact that I'm a historian and a civil rights and constitutional lawyer, a lot of people had encouraged me to write about these events and their aftermath. But prior to this conversation with this judge, I had been pretty resistant.

[00:09:35.79] I'd written some smaller things and given some speeches, but even after a year and a half, it felt too raw to write about. And my own feelings about it felt too complicated. But when the judge started talking about his docket and these cases, I saw the scope of the cases in a new way. And I could see the beginnings of an archive.

[00:09:55.23] In the past, to the extent that I had thought about writing it, it was really kind of part memoir, part institutional accounting about my roles in the institution. But for the first time, I started to think about what Charlottesville meant to a legal scholar and what it would mean to think about the law in what happened on those days.

[00:10:13.36] And so this was the first time the aperture had opened. So I started to identify all the cases that I could that were related to August 11 and 12. And I found 109. And there are still more coming and I'm still counting them. Of these 109 cases, you have likely heard of three.

[00:10:32.05] Two involve James Fields, who was the person who drove his car into the crowd and killed Heather Heyer. So one of those was a state murder charge against him, and the other, a federal civil rights charge against him. And the third case you've likely heard of is Sines versus Kessler, which is the multi-million dollar private, federal, civil rights lawsuit against the White supremacists. There was a big trial here almost two years ago now.

[00:10:58.85] So these three cases already give you a sense that not all of the cases that came out of August 11th and 12th were the kinds of state criminal prosecutions that you might expect to see. There were charges for various criminal acts like assault, failing to disperse from a riot, using pepper spray and tear gas.

[00:11:18.70] But given the thousands of participants in this violence, one might have expected to see more than the 78 state criminal cases that I have found in my archive, and more with white supremacists as defendants, as they only make up a third of the defendants in the state criminal cases that I have found.

[00:11:36.89] Indeed, what you find instead are a whole bunch of different kinds of suits-- wrongful death suits, First Amendment claims, civil rights claims, the Confederate statutes cases-- statutes cases themselves. So after my conversation with the judge and as I amassed these records, I started asking fairly basic questions. A narrow and conventional thought about the law were the questions I wanted to know.

[00:12:02.08] I wanted to know how did these cases come about? How did different individuals, organizations, social movement, actors, government institutions, how did they all mobilize different legal actions in different legal forums in response to these events? In other words, what has the now six-years-long legal response to two days of violence and lawlessness looked like? How does the law respond to violence? Does it? And if so, how does it repair the breach in the rule of law?

[00:12:37.51] Moment of inflection, too, I think of as the one particular case. So the first one was the many cases. This one is the one particular case. So two months after that conversation with the judge, on Valentine's Day, 2019, I was called for jury duty.

[00:12:54.82] I went into the courthouse downtown, and there was a lot of energy and there were a lot of people. And one got the sense that there were definitely more potential jurors who had been called than usual. Something was up. So I went into the courtroom and I realized that I knew the defendant.

[00:13:10.57] She was a high school teacher who had been my kid's summer camp counselor for many years. She was a defendant because during a press conference, Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the rally-- this press conference was held the next day on August 13. He held this downtown in front of City Hall. And she was arrested for assault and battery for, quote unquote, "bear hugging him and yelling, 'We love you, Jason,'" which led to the two of them falling to the ground.

[00:13:40.49] So according to him, she was assaulting him. According to her, she was trying to protect him from aggressive counter-protesters who had showed up at this press conference. The judge gave us a bare outline of the facts of the case than I just described to you, though it had been in the news. And he told us that Jason Kessler was the complaining witness, though he was not in the courtroom at the time, but I would later learn was in the court house at the time.

[00:14:10.93] So during voir dire, I shared that I knew the defendant. And I later shared that I knew Jason Kessler in my various roles as dean and chair of the University's response. One after another, many of the other potential jurors in the room also stood and shared their stories, where they were on August 11th and 12th, the harms they suffered, their views of and feelings about the White supremacists.

[00:14:38.34] Twice, the prosecutor asked the judge not to continue the voir dire process in open court for fear of contaminating jurors who might otherwise be unbiased, but the court-- the judge said no. As the process went on, it indeed became increasingly unlikely or seemed increasingly unlikely that they would be able to seat an unbiased jury.

[00:15:00.44] The judge and the lawyers eventually conferred in chambers and we were removed from and then brought back to the courtroom. The judge told us that an agreement had been reached in the case and thanked us for our service. And the defense attorney said that our presence resulted in the case being resolved and also thanked us.

[00:15:18.38] We later learned that the defendant had to apologize to Jason Kessler, perform community service, and maintain good behavior. And the case would be dismissed after six months. That experience was a galvanizing and empowering one for me, individually, and for the other jurors-- the other people in the juror pool that day, collectively.

[00:15:38.44] And even as I know, intellectually, and as a lawyer and the dean of a law school, that the law cannot tolerate vigilante justice, in my heart, I had not really understood why the defendant had been prosecuted at all. And so the outcome, and even more, the way the voir dire functioned to invite cathartic testimonials, seemed, to me, to re-impose community norms, allow for community healing, and affect a kind of rough justice in the face of what seemed to so many in the courtroom that day, an unjust charge on behalf of an undeserving complainant.

[00:16:11.95] This experience refocused my lens and it raised a whole new set of questions for me about my incipient project, although, to some extent, those questions sounded in a scholarly register, concerning the role of the jury and especially how such juries and trials more generally operate in a small town like Charlottesville. These questions were fundamentally of a different sort. They were the questions of a Charlottesville local, a community member and parent, a juror and citizen, a participant and interested party, a university leader, and a dean.

[00:16:45.08] It seemed to me that this jury process had worked in some crude and whiggish way. And I wanted to know, in that crude way, whether the law had worked in the other 108 cases I had been amassing. Who won those cases? On whose behalf was the justice system effectively mobilized? On whose behalf was it not effective? Where did the power of the law come down?

[00:17:11.21] I wanted to know, was the law providing redress? Did it and would it protect us? And the us that I had in mind were those for whom I did and do feel responsible. Those I want to protect and defend-- my children and my students and my university and my various Charlottesville communities-- against them, the white supremacists, who came here to do and cause violence.

[00:17:38.57] Though I understood the thoroughgoing normativity of these questions, I found it exceedingly difficult to escape them. So I began looking at my archive through this new lens. What I saw were some instances where the law seemed to work in just this way.

[00:17:56.46] There was a state civil suit that was brought under the Virginia constitution and statutes that argued that any militia had to be under the authority of the state. And this led to consent decrees permanently prohibiting the rally organizers and militias and alt-right organizations and their leaders, essentially, from returning to Charlottesville in groups of more than two with weapons.

[00:18:16.70] This meant that they did not return on the first anniversary of August 11th and 12th, which contributed to the peacefulness of that anniversary. It is also the case that the three high-profile cases I mentioned before somewhat showed the law working in this way. A state jury found James Fields guilty of first-degree murder and other charges, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

[00:18:39.23] In the federal civil rights case, he pled guilty to 29 of 30 counts and he was sentenced to another term of life in prison. And in Sines v Kessler, a jury found 23 defendants liable and awarded them $26 million in damages. But then there was the flip side. The urgency with which I wanted the law to work, resulted in no small part, from having seen the law, emphatically, not work. In this same sense, on August 11th and 12th themselves.

[00:19:09.90] What we had all witnessed and what I spent so much time responding to in my institutional roles was the failure of the law, in the sense of the police monopoly, on violence and force, around the statue here on August 11th and all day on the 12th. The law is meant to stand between these interactions, prevent the violence that we saw, and it failed to do so.

[00:19:33.25] The notoriety of Charlottesville nationally and internationally seemed to derive as much from the failure of law to prevent this violence, as from the demonstration of hate offered by the White supremacists themselves. The cases that followed hardly seem poised to rectify these harms. There were only four prosecutions stemming from the violence around the Jefferson statue at UVA on the 11th. And only 21 stemming from the rally itself in downtown Charlottesville on the 12th, despite the thousands of people involved.

[00:20:04.06] The main Justice Department took no action. And six years later, it is not clear how much monetary redress there has been, including none yet collected in Sines v Kessler. My equivocal answers mostly highlighted the flaws in my questions. The answers, obviously, depend on any number of things-- what it means to win or lose-- and it's hard to tell from many of the cases.

[00:20:26.63] In fact, the defendant in my case, was that a win or a loss? I saw it largely as a win, but one could see it also that she had to do community service and apologize and maintain good behavior as a loss. The answers depend also on the timeframe that one has in mind and the notion of causation.

[00:20:44.45] Did the law work because litigation served to bankrupt many of these white supremacist organizations and then send them back to the internet from the streets, which meant that we didn't see many additional events like Charlottesville, or did it fail because experts now think that that shift might be to blame for the increase in individual lone-wolf white supremacist and anti-Semitic attacks, including mass shootings nationwide?

[00:21:10.00] Whether these cases have been successful or not depends also broadly on what one thinks of the law. In order to understand how the law worked, one needed to, and I did, expand my archive to the cases that were not brought, as well as to the ones that were, to the administrative responses in UVA and other institutions, to developments in the Charlottesville City Council and Charlottesville politics more broadly, to state legislatures, federal agency actions, and social movement responses on all sides.

[00:21:41.74] Even as my archive began better to match my usually more capacious vision of the law, in which law operates within and on and is operated in and on the rest of the world, neither beginning nor ending in the formal legal processes that made up my initial archive, I still found it difficult to escape my crude, normative questions, my relationship to these events, and their legal ramifications.

[00:22:06.28] But still, these questions would not have produced a book that I wanted to write. And so the project might have ended there without moment of inflection number three, which I think of as the invitation. In the summer of 2019, I was invited to give the plenary lecture for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.

[00:22:25.27] And that invitation was an epiphany for me. It highlighted that I am not only dean and chair and juror and community member. I am also, and perhaps first in time among those things, a legal historian. And that epiphany prompted a whole host of new questions, a legal historian's questions, about how to tell the story of Charlottesville as legal history.

[00:22:48.07] Questions about sources, people, institutions, processes, narratives, arguments, perspectives, normative challenges, and the relationship between law and history and legal history. Not just any aperture was open now. The legal historian's aperture was. And I could finally start to see the analytical alongside the personal.

[00:23:09.34] So in the rest of the lecture, I'm going to describe how one might adjust and how I have thought about adjusting both the methodological and then the narrative lenses of this project, before I return at the end to the problem of autobiography that I don't think the legal historian's lens can solve.

[00:23:26.33] So the first lens adjustment is a methodological one. And it's about the role that law plays in this story. So as soon as I started thinking like a legal historian, I could see more clearly that my frustrations with my earlier questions stemmed from the crude way that I was thinking about law only as output.

[00:23:43.82] So legal historians and legal scholars generally discuss how the law is output, the opinions that come out of the judicial process, but it is also input. Law also shapes society itself. Law is also, a third thing, its own arena of struggle. So I'm going to talk about each of these two. I've already talked about law's output, though you didn't know that's what I was doing.

[00:24:06.33] Now I'm going to talk about law as shaping society or what legal historians call the constitutive power of the law. And then I'll talk about law as its own arena and how these two ways of thinking about law open up new vantage points on this project. So legal historians call law as input the constitutive power of the law.

[00:24:26.06] We live within the frameworks the law create. We don't always see them, but they inform how we think about ourselves, our relationship with others, our institutions, our actions. When I got married, one of my advisors was a main proponent of the constitutive power of the law. And I came back after my wedding, and he said, how does it feel to be institutionalized?"

[00:24:48.08] And I didn't know what he meant at first. And then I realized he meant I am now in a different legal category. Being a wife comes with a legal institution. And that's kind of a good example of what the constitutive power of the law means. That we can't actually even understand ourselves or see the world, except through the legal categories that exist everywhere.

[00:25:09.57] I sometimes find that very hard to see, and it's a very abstract concept, but I see it very clearly in this history of August 11th and 12th in two regards, with regard to race and with regard to free speech. So the headline about race and August 11th and 12th, at the time, was the surprise that many whites expressed at the existence of these blatant forms of white supremacy and that many people of color, and especially Black Americans, found less surprising.

[00:25:39.18] But whichever way you saw it, August 11th and 12th seemed either to reveal or confirm the prevailing stories about the end of overt racism were not true. Thinking constitutively, it is more than that. It is also that the form that the law has taken over the past 70 years has structured our thinking about the world and the racial categories we use.

[00:26:02.97] And we can see this in the rhetoric and framing of the White supremacists, their self-presentation, and their claims. Whereas many of those who marched on August 11th and 12th identified themselves clearly as white supremacists, Jason Kessler called himself a white advocate. And he and others insisted that they were not white supremacists. They were merely white advocates.

[00:26:25.62] This shift, this use of the phrase, "white advocate", was made part-- was made possible, in part, by the domination of an anti-discrimination approach to equal protection law over the past 70 years. That approach, which is quite ascendant today, treats all race-based governmental action as constitutionally equivalent. It does not differentiate between, say, Jim Crow segregation and affirmative action.

[00:26:52.11] This approach framed August 11th and 12th. By deeming all racial categories suspect, the dominant anti-discrimination norm, wittingly or not, lent rhetorical, intellectual, and constitutional heft to the position of the white supremacists. It facilitated white victimhood and white racial grievance as the losers in a discriminatory legal regime and facilitated the rhetoric of white discrimination and the white advocate.

[00:27:21.07] The background conditions of free speech doctrine and its penumbras even more fundamentally shaped every aspect of what happened on August 11th and 12th. And the background conditions I have in mind are the constitutional and cultural norms. That peaceful expression is protected and categorically distinct from action, and in particular, from violence.

[00:27:41.56] In public forums, our law says speech must be allowed within certain content-neutral constraints like times and places and manners. Speakers engaged in peaceful protests are deserving of fundamental protection and receive the imprimatur of the law. In the context of August 11th and 12th, the dominant form of this legal framing was an event that never actually took place, and that was the Nazis marching peacefully in Skokie, Illinois.

[00:28:11.38] That image and that framing did enormous, sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, work in shaping what the university, the city, the courts, the lawyers, and the various police forces saw, how they prepared for and responded to the event, what they understood to be their options and degrees of freedom, how the counter-protesters responded, and how unmediated interactions between white supremacists and counter-protesters unfolded in a whole host of contexts.

[00:28:38.16] So to give just a few examples, as you know, prior to August 11th and 12th, there were several other events that took place during what has been called the Summer of Hate. And the police's understanding of those events was that it was their job to ensure that the white supremacists could speak freely and that the counter-protesters would not try to stop them. And they distributed a First Amendment refresher leaflet to all the police in the city to remind them of the importance of the First Amendment here.

[00:29:06.77] Another example that I find particularly telling is that when the city tried to revoke the white supremacist permit and move the event from downtown Charlottesville, the white supremacists retained as their lawyers, the ACLU of Virginia. There are few things in our society that reveal or reify the free speech backdrop of a case than the involvement of the ACLU.

[00:29:29.96] And that is especially true when the court agrees, as it did here, that the permit revocation had been based on the content of the white supremacists' speech, rather than public safety, and was therefore unconstitutional. The point here is not that the white supremacists weren't free speakers. They were, but that free speakers are also or can also be violent actors. And that they can be both free speakers and doers of violence.

[00:29:56.90] Adjusting the lens to see law as input then, we can make visible the often invisible or submerged legal categories, the legal ocean in which we all swim. And doing so, I think is enormously fruitful. But I still struggle against this methodological lens adjustment, in part, because I feel the pull of my own normativity, and in part, because I miss the people and the human agency.

[00:30:22.01] I fight against the tendency toward abstraction and inevitability. The law does. The law constitutes. The law structures, talking about backdrops and frameworks. As I explore these background conditions, what I see is people strategically deploying these background conditions to their advantage or trying to.

[00:30:40.88] So how did the white supremacists get constituted as free speakers? Were they really just the passive beneficiaries of this abstraction of the law? At whose behest does this constituting happen? And who else deployed or tried to deploy the law in what ways?

[00:30:56.62] So brings me to the final conception of the law, beyond the methodological approach, to think about the law as output, and then second, to think about it as input, as I did just now. A third is to think about the law as a medium, as its own arena of struggle. And actors on every side, in August 11th and 12th, saw the promise of deploying the legal process as one among many arenas of struggle, alongside formal politics, social movement jockeying, social media and regular media, and the physical, violent arena of struggle that occurred on the streets of Charlottesville and on our grounds.

[00:31:34.98] Both groups did so pervasively in a variety of directions and to a variety of ends. And who won in these individual cases was sometimes the point, but only sometimes. The goal could easily as be-- could as easily be harassment or coercion or incapacitation or bankrupting and scattering an organization or using the law as political theater and a platform for one's views or as proof of the government's complicity in the domination of someone else's views.

[00:32:04.02] This approach gets at the way we are awash in law, not only in the constitutive sense, the background understandings, but also in a very mechanical sense, that the availability of legal processes and the opportunity to deploy the power of the law on one's behalf, pervades our interactions with one another. You could say that the availability of these mechanisms is itself constitutive.

[00:32:26.52] But I think of it like this-- if the constitutive approach makes visible laws otherwise invisible presence, this law-- this approach tries to make sense of the highly visible uses of law everywhere. And it moves law from background condition to foregrounded weapon. It shows how people self-consciously and in sophisticated ways trade on as well as resist the background legal rules.

[00:32:50.25] So for some examples, this is, I think, what Jason Kessler and others were doing when they announced that they were not white supremacists. And indeed, when they called themselves "unite the right", that was intended to place themselves within the tradition of protected political speech. They were merely a conservative political coalition coming together in Charlottesville to peacefully protest the decisions about the Confederate statues.

[00:33:17.07] They reinforced the Skokie image, announcing in those early days that they were engaged in peaceful demonstrations and asserting, nobody here is committing violence. According to a legal expert who testified at the Sines v Kessler trial, the white supremacists purposefully distinguished between their public face and their private plans, attempting to maintain plausible deniability that would, quote, "shield themselves" from being blamed for wrongdoing, including criminal conduct.

[00:33:44.76] He cited the Daily Stormer style guide, which said, quote, "It's illegal to promote violence on the internet. At the same time, it's totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality or inevitability." Counter-protesters fought the free speech framing of the white supremacists at every step.

[00:34:03.81] Sometimes they rejected the speech violence distinction, viewing the speech itself, hate speech, as inherently violent. Our constitutional law does not view hate speech as inherently violent, and it is in fact protected. At other times, they tried and often failed to shift the white supremacist from the category of free speakers into the category of committers or at least intentional provokers of violence.

[00:34:28.86] They begged law enforcement to intervene and to retain its force, its monopoly of force, on August 11th and 12th. And they tried largely unsuccessfully to shift to themselves or at least share the mantle of free speakers, for example, by engaging and centering the clergy, who are clearly peaceful protesters.

[00:34:49.75] We can see in their failure, the confluence of the constitutive and the instrumental. In a free speech narrative, with only two clear roles, protected free speaker and heckler, the White supremacists had claimed the speaker role. And the counter-protesters found it very difficult to escape the heckler role and position themselves as equally protected and protectable free speakers.

[00:35:12.28] The frustration that they felt at this framing is palpable, and we could see it in all of their sources. It is as palpable as the vindication of the violence that the white supremacists felt when it was engaged in. These struggles over deploying legally available categories were most acute in the speech context, but you see them in the 109 cases all over the place.

[00:35:35.71] People on both sides were calling upon the law to back them up. They were using the law regularly and strategically and aggressively, often unmediated by lawyers, partly for strategic reasons, partly because many of the folks involved could not afford to retain lawyers. That said, lawyers have always been a big part of my scholarship and they are a big part of this story, too.

[00:35:58.46] There are lawyers from outside of Charlottesville who see themselves as defending democracy and see these cases as part of that defense. There are the locals who see themselves as part of the defense of Charlottesville, working in tandem with local progressive activists. Lawyers for the white supremacists, who have taken up that cause.

[00:36:19.43] The Virginia ACLU lawyers caught up in a conflict between free speech absolutism and their substantive political commitments, as well as federal prosecutors, federal public defenders, committed generally to the rule of law and the right of every defendant to a lawyer. And this will certainly be their story, too.

[00:36:37.88] But the effect of reading through this archive is one in which many cases, the law is brutal and direct and unmediated. The law really is a field of battle. It is not high-minded ideals or sedate concepts. It is the often ugly and crude imposition of state power into acrimonious relationships, political and ideological disagreements, violence, and conflict. And the law is, of course, all of those things. And so it's no surprise that we see them all here.

[00:37:10.65] So onto the narrative. Those are the methodological moves, as I said. I haven't quite decided on where I land, but that opens up the aperture. So the other aperture that opens up is how to frame the project. How big a story is this or how little? Where to start and end the story. What role does Charlottesville itself play?

[00:37:27.73] So I want to start by zooming out to what I think of as the grand narrative. The grand narrative is not my speed, at least, not as a way to begin a project. I like to begin at the margins. I began The Lost Promise by thinking about those who are held in involuntary servitude in the 1940s. And I thought about Vagrant Nation. I started there with Vagrants.

[00:37:48.27] I eventually came in to fairly central things in our legal and political history. Brown or the 1960s writ large. That said, I did initially think of Charlottesville as the center or a center of this project. And up until now, I have largely focused on August 11th or 12th as almost the singular unit of analysis.

[00:38:09.19] But there are many other centers for which Charlottesville might be the margins. You can put this zooming out in terms of spatial, rather than conceptual terms. Charlottesville is clearly part of a national and, in fact, global story, or you can put it in temporal terms. Charlottesville might be some middle point between different beginnings and endpoints. And we historians are always in the business of choosing where to start and where to end.

[00:38:34.41] Or you can put the zooming out in disciplinary terms. Legal history, often, maybe always, in modern form, combines with other sub disciplines of history-- political, social, cultural, economic, individual. So if you zoom out in all of the above, I think part of what makes Charlottesville Charlottesville is its resonance with so many different narratives about the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and in particular, with the grand narrative of the 21st century about the relationship between race and democracy,

[00:39:06.66] Arguably, this story goes back to the origins of our nation, in which white supremacy is deeply bound up with our aspirations for democracy. More directly, this grand narrative begins during Jim Crow, with white supremacist violence in places like Tulsa and Wilmington, that Charlottesville echoes. As well as post-Charlottesville white supremacist rallies in Boston DC and elsewhere.

[00:39:29.91] The same era that spawned the Confederate statues as part of the terror that violence was meant to do, whose continued presence and meaning raised conflicts about American heritage and our relationship to race, as well as the relationship between local, state, and national ideas about politics, race, and inequality, continues the narrative.

[00:39:49.47] Then it moves with the Civil Rights movement, in all of its forms, and the 70-year dynamic of civil rights progress and backlash that we have seen since Brown versus Board of Education, including resurgent or newly visible forms of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and Christian nationalism on display during August 11th and 12th.

[00:40:09.12] It continues on into the national prominence of new movements for Black equality, the mass of protests after the killing of George Floyd, and the focus clearly at issue on August 11th and 12th on police and criminal justice. When racial equality activists did reclaim the mantle of free speakers, and white supremacists became, again, the counter-speakers. And then again with recent political and legal backlash against those movements.

[00:40:35.79] These dynamics are on display in politics as well as in law and social movements, with the election first of Barack Obama and then Donald Trump, and the race and class politics those elections reflect. And then, of course, on January 6, which both grew out of August 11th and 12th in certain concrete ways and resembled it in more general ones, the rise of global fascism, anti-Semitism, and political violence, and the challenge to US democracy that has dominated the political and legal landscape for the past several years.

[00:41:05.73] All of this culminates in questions about the relationship between democracy and pluralism and whether democracy can survive true pluralism as we head toward majority-minority status in a few decades. It's unclear to me, at this moment, whether this grand narrative will turn out to be a story of continuity or change, of declension or triumph or irony or tragedy, of Charlottesville as part of a last gasp of white supremacist reaction or the continuation of an enduring internal racial tension within our democracy, or a major inflection point in the breakdown of that democracy. It remains to be seen.

[00:41:42.83] That this history is so recent, seems both to curtail possible endings as we are still very much in the middle, and also to proliferate them. We do not yet know which aspects of this history will look significant from some future perspective, when historians will be preoccupied with new and different questions to which these events might provide an answer.

[00:42:03.52] What is clear is that this grand historical arc that has not yet ended, decenter Charlottesville in August 11th and 12th. It moves from particular to general. The Charlottesville statues are interesting because they're related to all Confederate statues. White supremacy in Charlottesville is tied to white supremacy everywhere.

[00:42:23.38] In this story, Charlottesville might become a case study, or a lens through which to understand all of this, or perhaps just a footnote to this larger story. And my fear is that, ultimately, it will not be a story about Charlottesville at all, which brings me to zooming in rather than out.

[00:42:46.53] And I think of this as law, place, and power. So much as I resist the Charlottesville moniker, this is very much the story of an actual place, actual people, and an actual community, or set of overlapping communities, our communities. We lose something if we lose sight of that.

[00:43:04.62] The personal stories, how a community experiences trauma, is a protagonist in that trauma, can be responsible for that trauma. The small city's reckoning with it's, our own history and our own aspirations for the future. Of course, it is necessary to frame this project to make sense of Charlottesville and its place in the larger world as part of that grand narrative, but not at the expense of the specific and the grounded, the archive I have been creating, the rich and textured sources, and the legal historical questions my own jury service-- my own jury participation generated.

[00:43:39.58] So I would start by zooming all the way in to that courtroom, or rather, the many courtrooms in which jurors encountered August 11th and 12th in related cases. In so many cases, over 100 jurors would be seated-- we'd be called to seat 21. In the Fields case, the voir dire transcript spans more than 1,000 pages. And the voir dire itself took over 27 hours.

[00:44:02.23] Groups and individuals engaged in voir dire that showed themselves in this transcript, they show a testimony of trauma, catharsis, anger, defiance, and healing. And there are so many snippets in there about these personal experiences. I was at this place at this time, and this is how those events affected my life.

[00:44:25.51] So many people who referred to Heather Heyer as Heather, who had never met her when asked, but that was how they thought about her. Those who, in case after case, had personal stories to tell. And those who after my jury-- my jury participation, ended early because the case was dismissed. Perfect strangers offered to drive each other home after this shared experience that they had had in this courtroom.

[00:44:53.53] This story might have something to say historically about juries. There's a common story historians tell about how, once upon a time, juries were self-informing. They were chosen for their knowledge of their community and the events at hand. But at some point, between the 14th and the 16th centuries, jurors were no longer expected to have such knowledge. And such knowledge, in fact, became disqualifying, or at least biased knowledge became disqualifying.

[00:45:19.97] So in that context, what do you make of a voir dire process and a case that was resolved after testimony that reads like a ritual of personal and community catharsis? Whatever it tells us about juries, it most certainly definitely tells us something about Charlottesville, the place, not the symbol.

[00:45:40.30] I don't want to romanticize my jury service or overstate the sense of unity that I see in these voir dire transcripts, because, we have all seen something very different from that in our small Southern diverse, stratified university city in the aftermath of August 11th and 12th, where there has been a lot of anger, a lot of acrimony, and a lot of question of responsibility.

[00:46:03.84] It's been a major inflection point for us here, highlighting inequalities that had long been submerged. And asking what we should do about those equalities has shaped our local politics and governance ever since. This is most emphatically that story too. A story about both coming together and coming apart.

[00:46:23.09] Sometimes I think I have to tell this story, not that I am the only one who can-- I am certainly not-- but because I am among those who can. I know things that cannot be found in the traditional sources, like the story of my jury case. The only inkling in the actual trial transcript that the jury pool played any role in the outcome of that case was the defense lawyers thanks, otherwise, no one would know about the testimony that happened there.

[00:46:50.20] We often think, as historians, that sources become less available with distance in time, that records are not made or they're lost, firsthand participants and observers are no longer available to share their memories. So I was surprised, in 2022, how much is lost to the proverbial record immediately.

[00:47:08.53] We have a transcript. We have an abundance of-- overabundance of sources, and yet, the record is still so partial. And partial in ways that are, to me, vitally important. I am a primary source, and perhaps that brings with it a certain obligation to tell some version of this story.

[00:47:27.83] But sometimes I think I can't possibly, precisely because of my personal relationship to these events. And you can see I'm back in the autobiography section at the end of this lecture. For one thing, my participation creates not only access but challenges. I am a potentially unreliable narrator with many roles to navigate. And I worry that it is wrong to place myself in the center of the story or in it at all.

[00:47:53.50] For another, I remain unwilling, perhaps unable to let go of my moral framing of these events. I have called those who have incited-- who incited violence on August 11th and 12th white supremacists, rather than "unite the right" or even something more neutral, demonstrators, or protesters. I don't want to see them as they saw themselves or as they tried to get others to see them.

[00:48:18.13] And even as I acknowledge that some counter-protesters also engaged in violence and in illegal acts, the moral asymmetry in the causes of the two groups pervades my sense of everything that occurred. I am not sure it makes sense to write a legal history in which one does not try to understand the motivations of all the actors and, certainly, of those who play significant roles.

[00:48:41.84] And finally and most fundamentally, I am not sure I will write this book because it may just be too hard. I had not wanted to write this book. I had not wanted to write about the violence of August 11th and 12th when I had imagined writing about it directly.

[00:48:57.95] My conversation with the local judge, my jury pool experience, and my thinking about Charlottesville as legal history made it possible. Turning to law would provide distance from the humanity and the inhumanity of the story. Thinking of this project in terms of formal law, whether triumphant or failing or ironic, whether constitutive or pluralist, whether part of a larger narrative or in a close reading of sources, would create a buffer from the horror, would abstract away from the humanity.

[00:49:25.70] But as I have worked through this open aperture moment and what it would really mean to do Charlottesville as legal history in any of the ways that I would want to, I realized that all of those distancing moves necessarily fail. Of course, I can't hide behind law. That is not how or why I do history. Certainly, not how or why I do legal history.

[00:49:48.26] I don't want to push the people, the violence, the humanity, and the inhumanity from the center to the margins, and play some dry and abstract notion of law at the center. I don't think these margins and that center, the lived experience of the law, and the formal legal process can be separated.

[00:50:07.66] A legal history book devoid of all of that would be one that I don't want to write and would probably not find all that interesting to read. And so, as I've amassed my archive and thought about writing a book, the non-law has kept hitting me in the face. And I use that violent analogy on purpose because there is so much violence here. Violence that I can't avoid if I'm going to do this story justice as legal history or in any other way.

[00:50:34.64] As I sat writing the first version of this lecture for the plenary address a year ago, we were commemorating the fifth anniversary of these events. And as I wrote, literally, bells were tolling on UVA grounds for the dead and injured. Media interest was renewed. The Cav Daily reprinted articles from the days and weeks afterward, including an interview with me in my capacity as chair of the response.

[00:51:00.03] How can I write this story, I wondered, even if I call it legal history? I don't know if I will or where I will end up, but I do know this-- if I write this book, It will involve law as output, input, and everything in between. It will involve law and humanity and inhumanity. It will be messy and normative and grand and specific and personal and deeply flawed. I hope that I will be able to write it. And I hope that you, who also lived through these events, will want to read it. Thank you.

[00:51:33.59] [APPLAUSE]

[00:51:48.11] SPEAKER: Thank you very much. That was very enlightening. Those of us who were here during that have, I'm sure, our recollections of it. And as the queen says, recollections may vary. But that's important to catch that variety of recollections. So Risa has agreed to take some questions. Just to let you know, we are recording this, so let's try to get the questions on the mic. So if you raise your hand-- Denny has one and I have one. And I'm sure you have lots of questions.

[00:52:25.30] AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering, in this whole story, does the fact that President Biden has mentioned Charlottesville, does that help the dynamic? Does it diminish it? Does that-- how does that influence what might happen?

[00:52:39.08] RISA GOLUBOFF: Yeah, absolutely. So I left some things out for the purposes of time. But one of the things that I definitely am aware of is that President Trump commented on Charlottesville. President Biden launched his campaign from Charlottesville, speaking explicitly about Charlottesville and democracy. His administration also launched a new domestic anti-terrorism project from Charlottesville a couple of years ago.

[00:53:06.01] And I think what that says to me is the resonance of Charlottesville in national politics, up to the highest levels, is really significant, which is why one can't tell the story of Charlottesville just at the local level. It is embedded in national politics.

[00:53:23.03] It has become a symbol of a number of different things for different people. But it is truly something that speaks to people on the national and I think even global stage. So it is something that will definitely be a part of the book if it is written, but didn't quite make it into the lecture.

[00:53:43.20] AUDIENCE: Hi, I have a quick question. I'm clearly not a lawyer, but when does free speech cross the line? If you're carrying tiki torches up the lawn, that seems to go beyond speech into action. And I also know that a year afterwards, some mothers went out and bought every tiki torch that they could find in Charlottesville so that it didn't happen again. But where is that line? And how does the law deal with it when it starts to get murky like that?

[00:54:16.11] RISA GOLUBOFF: It's a great question. And I will say, first, I'm not a free speech expert, though I have written about it some in this context. But there are others on my faculty who can do more justice to your question. But the tiki torches themselves do not necessarily switch from protected to unprotected speech.

[00:54:38.04] And in fact, the even greater weaponry on August 12th didn't even necessarily switch people from protected to unprotected speakers. The line is really violence, imminent threats. There are a few others, but in this context, it's really violence and imminent threats.

[00:55:00.28] And best practices when you are facing an event that's going to have protesters and counter-protesters who might engage with one another in violent acts are to keep them separated. And that is not what happened on either August 11th or August 12th. And I think part of what made Charlottesville resonate so deeply is people really did expect peaceful protest.

[00:55:28.40] Whether they should have or not is a different question. But all the people planning for the response were expecting peaceful protests, peaceful counter-protests, and they did not create the conditions to keep apart these two groups. And I think it was a sea-change moment, in which that was not the intention of the white supremacists.

[00:55:48.39] And it's very clear they lied to the university police about what their intentions were on the night of August 11th. They told them they were starting in a different place than they were. They started earlier than they did. And so their intentions were violence. And that is pretty clear in the aftermath, but it wasn't necessarily clear at the time.

[00:56:08.77] The other thing that became clear at the time was that the university did not have mechanisms in place to regulate the time, place, and manner of protected speech. So the white supremacists needed a permit to be in a city park, but they did not need any permit or to inform anyone of their intentions to be on ground.

[00:56:29.11] So one of the things that we did in the aftermath as well was create a content-neutral time, place, and manner regulation to enable the university and the police to know when speakers were coming and to know where they would be and whether there needed to be protection for counter-protesters.

[00:56:47.94] I will say, though, in the vagrant nation, I do talk a fair bit about the blurry lines between protected and unprotected speech, and where those lines are drawn and how those lines move. And it's not an easy answer to the question.

[00:57:02.67] Let me say one last thing about that. The reason I mentioned August 12th is constitutional protection for the individual right to bear arms is fairly young in the United States. The first case was in 2008. And in 2017, it was a fairly immature doctrine.

[00:57:19.20] And I think one of the things that we're still working out in the aftermath of 2017 is what the interactions between the First Amendment, free speech, and the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, look like. And I think one possibility is the bearing of arms is symbolic speech, as were the tiki torches. And symbolic speech is protected.

[00:57:40.85] Another possibility is can you regulate the Second Amendment right in the name of protecting the First Amendment right, or does the Second Amendment right trump the First Amendment? So these are questions that haven't been answered yet and I think are really important to.

[00:57:58.30] AUDIENCE: This is a naive and uninformed question, but given the prominence that you've laid out for us of this incident in Charlottesville, why did it happen here? Do we know how they picked this place? I should know that, but I don't. And I'd love to know how it happened here rather than somewhere else.

[00:58:18.13] RISA GOLUBOFF: It's a really good question. And others might have different answers for me, but I'll tell you my answer. I think there are at least two reasons, and they're complementary. Well, maybe there are three reasons, I don't know. They're all related. But let me go through it and I'll see how many I end up with.

[00:58:34.80] So Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, two of the organizers, are graduates of the University of Virginia. And I think they saw the direction of the university as a betrayal of their sense of where the university commitments should lie and of their understanding of the founders and their understanding of Jefferson.

[00:59:01.67] I think that was exacerbated by the decision to remove the Confederate statues. Obviously, the Confederate statues are the reason they say they came, but there are Confederate statues in lots of places. So to me, I think they, in part, chose Charlottesville and UVA because they felt betrayed by a university that has become more pluralist, that has been trying to reckon with its past, that has been trying to live beyond its history of enslavement and white supremacy. And I think they saw that as a betrayal and they wanted to reclaim this place for the ideals that they believe in.

[00:59:39.51] I think the second really important point is that they were looking to provoke violence. And they wanted to come to a place where there would be an active progressive community that would meet them. And that would not stay home and that would vociferously protest their values and their actions, and they got that. I mean, that is what happened here.

[01:00:02.85] So I think there's a less rosy story about the university that could be told, that they feel comfortable in the university. And they came back because this is their university and that's the nature of this university. That's not the university I know.

[01:00:17.13] It's not the university that I think anyone here has been working toward for a long time. But there are critics out there who I think would say that as well, but I think it was a combination of feeling like it should be their university and is no longer, and wanting to come to a place where they would meet resistance.

[01:00:37.60] AUDIENCE: Thank you for your talk. One part of the story that I don't think is discussed very often is that 150 white supremacists came and caused this problem, but the students got together about six or seven days later and created something called "Take Back the Lawn".

[01:00:57.65] And I was part of it. And it looked like there was somewhere between 3 and 6,000 people there, and peacefully protested against the white supremacy. And that doesn't seem to be part of the narrative anymore. And I wondered if you have any comment on that.

[01:01:14.34] RISA GOLUBOFF: Yeah, I mean I think it should be part of the narrative. And again, I didn't mention it here just out of time, but if you've ever gone to the webpage and the website that was created after August 11th and 12th by our committee, the main picture on that webpage is of Take Back the Lawn.

[01:01:32.42] And I think it was a very significant moment. I was there, too. And the fact that our students did it, the fact that faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, Board of Visitors members were there, it was a really cohesive response.

[01:01:49.07] And when I've spoken less academically and more, I don't know, inspirationally about this, to me, I think Charlottesville has to be a rallying cry. I think a lot of people think of it as a tragedy, which it was, and yet the response to it was, "This is not our-- that's not what our place is. We won't allow that to be what this place is."

[01:02:12.30] And I think a lot of what we did after the students and all during that following year, was to say, "How do we make sure that we are not the place that they want us to be? How do we make sure that we continue our commitments to inclusive, plural, tolerant, equitable, being that kind of institution?" So I think you're absolutely right.

[01:02:37.69] AUDIENCE: Risa, thank you. I thought that was a really wonderful talk. But I'm wondering why anti-Semitism plays such a small part in your narrative. Anti-Semitism, after all, was probably the dominant trope of the white supremacists.

[01:02:58.30] And anti-Semitism should be important in your story because you're narrating it partly in an autobiographical frame and you identify yourself as part of the local Jewish community. And it's sort of surprising then that you don't interrogate that issue of anti-Semitism more explicitly. I wonder what your comments are.

[01:03:23.56] RISA GOLUBOFF: It's such a good question and I appreciate it. And, of course, I have a few answers, as I always do. So one of them is I am a historian of race and movements for Black equality. And I don't know as much about the history of anti-Semitism, and that's something I have to learn more about.

[01:03:43.95] So I think the short answer is I think it will be far more significant when I write the book if I write the book, and should be. But I don't yet know the frames in which to put it perfectly. And so it's harder for me to spin out what those look like right now. So they are certainly meant to be-- it is certainly meant to be a part of the book. I don't disagree with you that it was a huge part of these events.

[01:04:13.19] I will also say, I guess, part of why I don't talk about it more, well, I think two other reasons. One reason why I don't talk about it more is my discomfort with the autobiography. So I've never been a person who has written about myself. I have always been a person who has written about others, and so I haven't yet figured out how to navigate that.

[01:04:37.58] And when I talk about this in other registers, which I do, I talk about what it was to be the mother of two children who experienced this and how it changed our sense of the Jewish community in Charlottesville and our sense of safety and security, and what it did to our synagogue. And yet, I hesitate to do that in this project. And I imagine I will, at some point, have to, but I have not yet.

[01:05:06.26] And I guess the last thing I'll say about it is, from my institutional frame, it was really telling to me in the aftermath of these days, when I talked to so many students, faculty, and staff around the university to figure out what our committee should be doing. And the Jewish members of our community I talked to in the university were really worried about safety and security and were really worried about, were they going to come back? Was the synagogue safe? Was Hillel safe? Were there safe-- were they safe on campus?

[01:05:38.33] And the Black students I spoke to were worried about a much more fundamental thing, is this a white supremacist institution? Do I have a place here? And we spent a lot more time, institutionally, I think, thinking about the racial questions than the anti-Semitism questions, partly because-- the first thing we did was the safety and security stuff. That had to be the first thing.

[01:06:04.01] And we addressed that and we did-- we took a number of steps to ensure safety and security as best we could. And happily, they did not come back and mostly have not come back. But the sense of a lack of belonging was so profoundly different among our students of color than among our Jewish students.

[01:06:25.37] And so a lot of the way I thought about our institutional response was also framed by race. So that's to explain why I think more about race. But I don't disagree with you. And I do think that at the end of the day, the anti-Semitism story has to be a major one too.

[01:06:43.08] AUDIENCE: Thank you, Risa. I like the question to you about why it happened here and not elsewhere because I think it takes us to a methodological question that you raise. When you go to the constitutive powers, you're thinking about how you go from the events of history to a sense of history, [INAUDIBLE].

[01:07:09.54] There is a new French reception of that called Il Y A, There is, which is about the mode of appearing of a phenomenon, the very way it enters into our world. And you may want to look at the work of Claude Romano for that. He has a book called Il Y A, There is. And he writes about precisely how you go from [INAUDIBLE] to the new way of looking at it.

[01:07:47.59] RISA GOLUBOFF: Wonderful. Thank you. I will look at that.

[01:07:52.97] SPEAKER: Anyone else? More questions? OK, well let's thank our speaker so much for that.

[01:08:00.73] RISA GOLUBOFF: Thank you. Thank you all.

[01:08:01.98] [APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 1: All right. Danny, it's all you.

SPEAKER 2: Things out there?

SPEAKER 1: Sure.

SPEAKER 2: Hello. Welcome to a special 0 degree edition of Retired Faculty Association speaker series. Before I introduce our speaker, I'd like to let you all know that our next speaker will be on Wednesday, January 31, at Alumni Hall at 4:00 PM, and it will be Phil Bourne, who is the founding dean of the UVA School of Data Science.

The title of his talk will be the "UVA School of Data Science, A School Without Walls." And this is going to be what we hope will be the first in a series of talks about what is new at UVA. So it's my pleasure to introduce Kelsey Johnson. Kelsey is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. She has published over 100 research articles, mostly focused on the evolution of galaxies.

KELSEY JOHNSON: Oh, my God you did your homework.

SPEAKER 2: Yes, I did. She is a recipient of numerous research awards including NSF Career Award, NSF Distinguished Lectureship, a Packard Fellowship. She has also written for a broader audience and articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Scientific American.

She is one of the university's recognized best teachers. She's a recipient of a UVA All University Teaching Award, a Z-Society Distinguished Professorship or Professor, and she's been named as one of the Atlantic Coast Conference's distinguished professors.

As she is the current president of the American Astronomical Society, she's a past director of the Echols Scholars Program, and she is the founding director of UVA's Dark Skies Bright Kids Program, which is a program to enhance science education in underserved areas.

And finally, I'd like to mention that she is the author of the 2019 children's book Constellations for Kids, a copy of which will be given to my granddaughter at Christmas after I read it. Please join me in welcoming Kelsey.

KELSEY JOHNSON: Oh, my gosh. Thanks, . Wow, that's a treat. I didn't know you were doing an introduction at all. So once again, folks on Zoom, really, really happy to have you here. If something goes wrong technically on your end, please give a shout out. I don't think anyone in the room can hear you. I think Kelly is monitoring the chat, so go ahead and throw something in the chat if you need to, and she'll let me in the room, but also I've got you in my earpiece.

This is fun. As you may know, you may not know yesterday was the last day of classes. I don't know if you care about that anymore. So this is a great way to celebrate the end of the semester by talking about the beginning of the universe, which for me is fun. This is how I have fun.

And also I'll say it is a treat to have people in the room who are here of their own free will and want to learn, and there are no grades involved and I don't have to grade anyone, and I think that that's great. Sorry, there's a request to allow recording, so I'm to go ahead and allow that.

We are going to go from 0 to 60 in terms of existentialness pretty fast. And so I want to start with a little bit of just grounding us, and I'm going to start by telling you what I think is a kind of embarrassing story about my oldest daughter, who is now a third year here at UVA, majoring in bio chem, by the way, so if anyone wants to help her out.

She was about-- I want to say she was four years old. We live out-- we live down past North, like in North Garden, like down-- like Dr. Hose is our go-to, for example. So we have a pretty long drive into town. And I was driving her to preschool one day. She was about 4. She was siting in the back seat as she's supposed to, and it's raining. The rain is important part of the story.

And she's sitting back there kind of quietly staring out the window, and I think for those of you who have children, I think you know that when children are quiet for a long time, you know it's not quiet inside. Something is going to something is going to surface.

And I was kind of driving with some trepidation, hoping we could make it to preschool and could get to work without something erupting. And out she comes with her little voice from the back seat and she says, mommy, I have a question. And I think right away I know that tone, and I know she's going to come out with some Zinger because the week before she was like, mommy, I have a question. And she's like, where did the first mommy come from? And I was like, Oh, no. I'm not ready for this.

So she says, mommy, I have a question, and I'm like, OK. sweetie, what is it? And she's like, where does water come from? It's like, oh, phew, I've got this. so, I mean, keeping in mind she's 4 and explaining the water cycle to a 4-year-old isn't like totally trivial, but they know what rain is and they know what lakes are and they know what clouds are, evaporation is like the trickiest part of it.

But it was-- I thought it was going OK and I was pretty proud of myself explaining the water cycle to a 4-year-old while driving into town in the rain. She's watching the rain and I'm thinking that's why she's asking about water and maybe it is, and she's getting this-- I'm keeping my eye on her in the rear view mirror and she's getting this-- I call it crumple face when kids are just like, I'm not happy and I don't know how to express it, so my face is showing all of my emotions.

She's getting this crumple face, and I can tell she's unhappy and I'm like, what is wrong with my explanation of the water cycle? I feel like I nailed this. And she's like, no, mommy that's not-- no, no, where does water come from? What do you mean where does the water come from? And she's like, well, like where does it come from before it's in the rain? And I was like, oh, OK, so I'm an astronomer. I've got this.

And it turns out if you don't know this, this is kind of a fun fact, you can share it your next holiday party. Most of the water on Earth came from comets. And so there are these huge dusty-- I call them snowballs, but there's no snow in space. These huge dusty balls of frozen water of some form that crashed-- the early solar system was nasty and stuff was flying around and crashing into Earth, and comets brought a whole lot of water that was then frozen but became liquid to Earth.

So I'm explaining this to her and I'm trying to do it again in terms for a 4-year-old, and also the self-talk in my head is like, oh, no, now she's going to be worried about comets hitting Earth. So I'm prepping myself to try to tell her that comets hitting Earth are really-- could still happen, although I'm not going to tell her that, but it's really unlikely. We don't want it to happen anytime soon, and you're totally safe.

I'm ready for that follow up, and she's getting crumple face again and she's like, no, mommy, no, where's the water come from? And I'm like, what do you mean where does the water come from? I told you where it came from. It comes from comets. And she's like, no, where does it come from before the comets? And I was like, oh, no.

So on our drive to town, we went through the water cycle. We went through comets, we went through molecules and interstellar clouds, we went back through stellar nucleosynthesis, and then all the way back to the Big Bang, at which point, guess what she asks, where does it come from?

And I was like-- well, fortunately, we had pulled into daycare at that point and I parked the car and said, well, sweetie, lots of people have different ideas about this. I don't want to use words like hypotheses or theories because she's 4. Lots of people have different ideas, and we don't really know which one is right, and she's like, well, like what ideas? We're at school. Let's go in.

So I like this story, one, because I get to reminisce about my then 4-year-old who is now 20. I also like it because I think it speaks to-- I saw lots of you nodding. It speaks to this like, I think innate curiosity we have as humans to know where things came from, where we came from, what our origins are.

But the other thing that this story highlights to me that's really important is this concept of infinite regression. For every cause-- we're so used to taking causality for granted. If you drop a cup, it will break, and there's a cause. And we can take causality like x caused y and something caused x and then something caused the thing that caused x, and we just live with causality as part of our everyday life.

But when we hit the Big Bang, when we hit the beginning of the universe, this infinite regression actually becomes a problem. And even if I could tell you, and this is the spoiler alert, I'm not actually going to tell you what caused the Big Bang, just I'm going to give you some options, even if I could tell you what caused the Big Bang, then being educated, intelligent, curious humans, your next question might be, well what caused that thing that caused the Big Bang? And then what caused the thing that caused the thing that caused the Big Bang?

And we end up mired in philosophical infinite regression, and it's not clear what the path out of that is. And so we really hit the intersection here of science and philosophy and theology and think that's what makes it really cool to talk about. So yeah, Kelly.

Oh, that's annoying. I wonder how I can stop that and show what fun would it be if there isn't a technical problem. I wonder how to make that go away. Be well, I mean, we could just do it this way, and that could just make this really big. Not ideal, but it would work. Kind of a hack. Maybe we need duct tape and WD-40, and then everything will be fine. Is this doable enough? Does that work for people online? OK. Thank you for letting me know what that was.

Yeah, that's what I did, and then, I mean, I'll do it again. I'll do it again, and you can see what happens, and folks online can tell me if they're seeing the same thing. Yeah, our folks online seeing the same thing? Oh, all right. I wonder if I can hold on. Maybe I can make those go away. This slideshow.

OK. Let's try this. How about now? OK. Let's go with that, and then we'll see what happens. I can't see what I'm doing, but that's OK. That's overrated anyway. Let me-- I'm trying to move the Zoom window, which is blocking my controls. All right. That's fine. We'll wing it. If anything goes wrong, I'm sure you're a very forgiving audience.

So now what I want to do is take a moment and try to get our heads around the timescales we're talking about. I think even for astronomers who think about this every day, the timescales we're talking about, I think we kind of get desensitized to them. I imagine it's like if you were a surgeon and you do open heart surgery every day, you might get desensitized to blood and Gore and people dying, I don't know.

So for astronomers, we deal with these incredible timescales every day, but I think it's important for what we're talking about that we have kind of a visceral sense of this. So I want to introduce you to-- where did this is go? There we go. Here we go. The cosmic calendar.

All right. Now I've figured out how to turn them off. Let's see. Will this work? There's an off button. OK. If you fall asleep, I'm blaming it on you. I don't know how to keep the-- I've never taught in this room, so this room is like magic to me. I don't know what's going on. Let's try that.

All right. So this is what we're calling the cosmic calendar, and it goes from midnight on January 1 right to 11:59:59:59 on December 31. So it's the arc of a year with the Big Bang on midnight of January 1st and then the whole year January, February, March, April, you've got your months down, all the way down to December.

This is a time scale that we have all experienced many times, which is why I like it. Some of us have experienced this timescale more than others, but it's an arc you have a visceral sense for. So if you imagine this whole year with the Big Bang happening at midnight on January 1, it isn't until sort of May of that year that we even get galaxies like the Milky Way. So spring like the flowers are blooming. We get galaxies like the Milky Way.

It's not until September that we get our solar system. So we're in what I think is the best weather in Virginia in September. So we're September, and it's not until November that we get like eukaryotes, we're starting to get sort of decent kinds of life. We don't get multicellular life at all until December. So that's the arc of the year.

We're going to zoom into December, and on this calendar, the whole first half of December, it doesn't look like much happens at all. Imagine that if you were a critter living at that time, you thought it was very eventful, but from our perspective it's kind of like nothing happens.

So now we're in December. We're the last month of the year. It's not until Christmas Day that dinosaurs are doing their thing, and they go extinct five days later. So their whole arc of dinosaurs like ruling the Earth was like all of five days. And if we zoom in to that very last day, the whole arc of our evolution from primates happens on that last day on December 31. So I want you to get a visceral sense of really how incredibly young we are. And we can zoom in even more.

So here's that last minute of December. The whole year has gone by. Think back to what you were doing a year ago on January, and more than that time has gone by. And basically all of human history, all of recorded human history happens in that last minute. We have sort of prehistoric life here with some artifacts, all the way up to-- we get through written records, we have Christ, we have Muhammad, we have the Chinese dynasties, all of that goes up to here.

So guess what, we're going to zoom in once again to that last second so that very last two of December 31, it's literally about to till midnight where everyone celebrates and clinked champagne or whatever it is you do. I'm usually in bed, but some people celebrate, I'm told. That very last second is everything from the Scientific Revolution, through the Industrial Revolution, through the wars, up until today.

I think this is incredible right think this helps to keep our human hubris a little bit in check in terms of how young we actually are. So just to make this a little bit more personal, on the scale of this cosmic calendar, think for a second about what your lifespan has been and what you have lived through and the experience of the universe, and I won't make anyone share their answers, which I would do if I were teaching a class, but the average human life scale, the average human life span on this cosmic calendar is 0.23 seconds.

So don't know what you've done in the last 0.23 seconds. Apparently, you're wasting your life like listening to me talking. 0.23 seconds is like-- it's not even-- it's practically not even measurable. That's a photo finish and a race. So we really have some look back time here to reckon with.

Now that we've set the stage, we have a better I hope a visceral sense of the times that are involved. We can go all the way back to the beginning. And before we do that, what I want to do is spend a little bit of just a minute talking about the phrase Big Bang Theory to begin with because if you are a cross-section of normal humans and probably you're not because of who you are, but most normal humans have some pretty big misconceptions about what the Big Bang is and isn't. And popular culture really doesn't help with this, but I want to make sure we're all on the same page.

So the first problem with the phrase Big Bang Theory is, of course, the word theory. And part of the problem here with the word theory is that the word theory has been co-opted by popular colloquial language to mean like some idea someone's uncle had that whatever may or may not be true. It might be crazy. But in a scientific sense, theory has a real meaning. Theory means it's not just some random hypothesis, it's actually something that's been tested and is being tested, and can be tested.

And in the case of the Big Bang, what's even worse about using the word theory is that in science, the word theory is supposed to be used when something is being tested, but it hasn't been tested as much as it could be. Once you have tested something in every way you possibly can and you've thrown every test at it with independent data and independent methods and you've tried to break it over and over again and you can't break it, then you call it a law.

Effectively, that's what the Big Bang is. We have a mountain of evidence from all kinds of independent lines of inquiry that tell us that this is what happened, and we've tried to break it, and we can't. This is the only viable scientific answer we have on the table.

I want to be clear about the word scientific because there are things outside of science that could also be answers, but this is the only answer that can be empirically tested for the origin of the universe, and insofar as we can test it, it has passed with flying colors over and over and over again. So it really should be a law. It shouldn't even be a theory. The other so-- I want to back up. So we know that the Big Bang happened, but we don't know why it happened or how it happened, and those are different issues, and that's where we're headed.

The other problem with the phrase the Big Bang Theory is the term Big Bang. So for most people who see the term Big Bang, you might think that means like an explosion. That would make sense. And it turns out that's not actually what we mean, and this goes back to-- I don't know if any of you have heard of a scientist, a physicist named Fred Hoyle.

He was really quite brilliant and very popular in the mid 1900s, had lots of incredible advances scientifically, but he was, I would say, a staunch dyed-in-the-wool atheist. And because of his beliefs about atheism, he thought that the Big Bang meant that there had to be a creator, and if there had to be a creator, he didn't like it. And so he spent his life opposing the Big Bang to his deathbed.

He opposed the Big Bang because he thought-- because it didn't align with what he thought his beliefs were, which is like antithetical to science, so there's some irony built in here. But Hoyle was a very popular figure, and he did lots of radio shows and wrote things, and he was on a BBC Radio show and was making fun of this hypothesis for the creation of the universe as we know it.

And in making fun of it, in jest, he called it the Big Bang and it stuck. And now we're stuck with it because terminology and science has the inertia of-- I don't even know what has the most inertia of anything. Something big. It's a lot of inertia. And so we're stuck with the term Big Bang. It doesn't mean what we mean, though.

When we as astronomers talk about the Big Bang, what we mean is there was this tiny, little, possibly finite nugget of a universe that started out incredibly small, at least the observable universe started out credibly small, and in ridiculously short timescales, expanded a whole lot. If want to put numbers on that, it went from being like this tiny little-- you could think of a tiny little piece of the fabric of spacetime expanded by a factor of 10 to the 26th.

Now I don't know how many of you remember-- I know not all of you are mathematicians or scientists, but 10 to the 26th means you take 10 and you add 26 zeros to it. It's a really big number. I don't even know if it has a name-- a gazillion, bazillion, quadrillion, million, like I don't know what that is. it's a really, really, really, really, really big number.

And so the universe started from some kind of a pocket of the universe, this tiny little nothing, expanded by a factor of 10 to the 26 in 10 to the minus 32 seconds. So that's the opposite. So 10 to the minus 32 means we take a decimal point, and we put 32 zeros. So it expanded extraordinarily fast, much faster than the speed of light in what we call cosmic inflation. That is what we mean by the Big Bang. It's not an explosion in space. Is an explosion of space.

And to put a finer point on this, that means that the Big Bang literally happened everywhere, including where we are now. So 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang happened here, like right here, and the universe has been evolving since then, and here we are. So the Big Bang happened everywhere. It wasn't a place in space.

Now what caused that cosmic inflation, what caused it to expand by a factor of 10 to the 26th and 10 to the minus 32 seconds is an open question. We don't know the answer to that. In any case, this word causes lots-- this phrase causes lots of problems, especially the word theory in popular culture.

Back to this cosmic calendar. Now what I want us to think about is how far we can push science. In terms of our trying to understand the origin of the universe, what can we do with empirical inquiry? What can we do-- how far back can we do it? And that's where the rubber hits the road. If we can't test it, it's not science.

So thanks to an amazing new telescope known as the James Webb Space Telescope, we call it JWST, well, one of the things Danny didn't say in my introduction because I don't-- he said everything else he possibly could have.

I was on the advisory committee for the James Webb Space Telescope when it was being-- when it was being commissioned, and so I don't know if you all have been following the news releases from James Webb, but the photos that are coming out are just-- they're just breathtaking and phenomenal. I pulled this one as an example.

This is an image of the universe from-- well, there are galaxies that are-- sorry, let me back up. I realize you all don't stare at these images every single day like I do. So this is an image where the telescope is staring at this tiny little point in the sky and collecting light. And we see everything in that cone of light.

And so some things that we see in this image are actually not terribly far away. So, for example, a couple stars are peeking and you can see one here, you can see one up there because-- you can tell because they have these diffraction spikes which are-- for the record, stars don't actually have spikes. It's from optics, and we don't need to worry about that.

But when you zoom in, and just so you know, this is an image you can find online, and you can zoom in to actually see it with the proper detail to really see what you're looking at. You can zoom in and see teeny tiny little smudges that you can probably barely even see from where you're sitting. We can zoom into those, and we are looking at baby galaxies from when the universe was still like in the middle of January, from when it's less than a billion years old.

Now just to show you a few of these, I wanted to zoom in a little bit. Here are some of those teeny tiny baby galaxies. These are galaxies-- we're literally looking back in time because light has travel time. So we're literally looking back in time from light that has been traveling to us for 13 billion years. And so we are seeing these galaxies from when the universe was ballpark half a billion years old, halfway through January, and I love these. You can see they don't look regular. They don't look like nice spiral galaxies, they're blobby and they're clumpy, and they're super red, which has to do with what they're made of.

But JWST is-- oh, I really should probably plug my computer in, shouldn't I? That didn't occur to me as we were starting up. So JWST is giving us this power to look back to just incredibly early times. Let me pause for-- there we go. The alert went away that my computer is about to lose power. But that's not the farthest back we can see. We can also see back to here, when the universe was only about 300,000, 400,000 years old.

This is the cosmic microwave background. This is relic radiation from when the universe was basically a hot soup. I'm not going to go into the physics of this, but the point is we can get light from when the universe was 300, 400,000 years old. Now I want to show this because this image, the cosmic microwave background, in terms of empirical inquiry, which I care a lot about as a scientist, this is the farthest back we can get light ever.

So we can't probe the universe with telescopes earlier than this time. That is our limit. We can do a lot, like we can learn a lot about the universe back to there, but this is our limit in terms of actually using light. That's not the end of the story, though. It turns out that before this time, the universe was basically a hot soup, and I mean, a really hot soup, to be clear, not like a tepid lukewarm soup. Like a really hot soup.

But the physics of that are really straightforward and really well understood. It sounds like it ought to be complicated because we're talking about the beginning of the universe, but it's not. It's actually really straightforward physics. And to that point, we can in physics laboratories today recreate conditions and study them back to-- I want some kind of suspense music right now. Think how far back we can actually recreate conditions in the universe. 0.00000009 cosmic seconds after the Big Bang.

This to me utterly blows my mind. Now don't want to say these are small scale experiments, it's not like they're recreating the whole universe, but they can recreate in small pockets the conditions that existed in the universe at the time. So this is where empirical inquiry-- this is our limits of empirical inquiry right now, and I think it's actually pretty astounding.

It turns out that in terms of cosmic time though and everything that was happening, the difference between 0 and 0.00000009 cosmic seconds is a lot. A lot happened in the universe and that sort of fraction of a second, but this is one of our limits in terms of empirical inquiry.

So as we look back, so part of what I wanted to do is give you a sense of where we have confidence, where things are speculation, and where we throw up our hands. And so we have lots of confidence. Actually, the modern universe is far more complicated than the early universe.

We have all kinds of weird asymmetries and physics has done stuff, but as we go back in time, we can go back to 10 to the minus to 10 to the minus 4 seconds, and we still have a pretty decent understanding of the physics. I wouldn't say it's complete, but it's decent. We're not blind. When we go before that, physics really starts to lose our ability to test it. We're not quite there, and then now my zoom screen is blocking the bottom. I wonder if I can make this go away. That worked? Yes. OK.

Where we really hit a wall, so I've taken you as far back as astronomy can go with telescopes, I've taken you as far back as we can go in labs, and then we have theoretical physics at all, regardless of whether we can test it. That hits a wall at 10 to the minus 43 seconds. This is known as the Planck time.

When we hit the Planck time, all hell breaks loose in terms of physics, for a couple of reasons. One is that now quantum mechanics is sort of ruling the day because of the time scales, and the spatial scales we're thinking about. What that means-- for those of you who aren't familiar with quantum mechanics and that probably means your normal well-adjusted humans is that spacetime itself is not well defined.

Space and time are not well-defined entities. In fact, it means they're kind of a frothing, foaming, not defined form. So even defining-- talking about spacetime at all when we hit 10 to the minus 43 seconds doesn't even really make physical sense. So that's one problem.

The other problem, when we hit 10 to the minus 43 seconds is that this point, the two major pillars of modern physics that have held up to every test that's been thrown at them, we have general relativity on one hand, which deals with gravity and mass, and on the other hand, we have quantum mechanics, which deals with really, really small things. These are the two pillars of modern physics on which almost everything else is based.

When we get to quantum scales like this, and the two places this really rears its head in the universe are the Big Bang and in black holes, those two pillars of modern physics don't get along. They're not compatible, which means we know that we don't know the physics. We know that. Something's got to give, we just don't know what it is yet. There are some hypotheses out there, but they're not testable yet.

So we know we don't even know the physics, we know-- so literally the laws of physics, as we understand them, break down. That makes it awfully hard to proceed in terms of even empirical inquiry or science or logic or theory. And so this is where I think scientists have to be really careful about being honest about what we know and what we don't know.

After-- I should say before 10 to the minus 43 seconds, the only real leverage we have is to ask whether the hypotheses on the table are consistent with existing physics that seems to work. If they're not consistent with existing physics it seems to work, we tend to rule them out. If they are, they stay on the table. But there's probably a lot of stuff that's not even on the table because we don't know the physics that we don't know.

So we go back to equal zero, maybe one of the problems that now comes out of physics and our understanding of the Big Bang is that one of the conjectures that's on the table is that time itself, as a dimension, came into existence with the Big Bang. So if that's true, that would mean that time is finite. The alternative is that time is not finite, that it's infinite.

And both of these options, that time is infinite or time is finite, have sort of philosophical problems we have to work through, and great thinkers have been thinking about these for a very long time. So, for example, one of-- I happen to have an intellectual crush on Thomas Aquinas. I just-- I don't know where that came from, but I do-- he spent a lot of time thinking about this, and he used this argument thinking through the philosophical problems to actually conclude that this meant that God, a God existed and that God existed outside of time.

So how did he come to that? So one of the problems with time being infinite is-- let's say time is infinite. Let's say it goes back infinitely far before the Big Bang. Well, the question comes up, if time is infinite, of all these points in time, why did the universe began at this one, and not some other one because it should-- and why did it not already begin because there was an infinite amount of time before that? So what was happening then? And, in fact, if time is infinite, why has everything not run down? everything should run down.

So there are these-- all these problems with time being infinite. There's a fun quote, well, supposed quote. There's a little bit of debate on this, and if any of you are experts on this, I would love your take on it.

So many, many centuries before Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine was thinking about this, and there's an anecdote that he was asked, well, what was God doing before he made the universe? Which gets to this question of, if there was an infinite amount of time before the universe, what was going on? So what was God doing before he created the universe? And Saint Augustine answered along the lines of he was preparing hell for people who pry into the mysteries of the universe. So I guess I'm in trouble.

But what if time is finite? If time is finite, we also have problems. And a lot of it comes down to our system of linguistics and our inherent exposure and reliance on causality. If there's no time before the Big Bang, it isn't clear how we have causality. How can something cause something if there's no temporal framework in which that can happen?

And so we run into all kinds of problems with words like, we can't talk about before the Big Bang because that doesn't make sense because there's no time before the Big Bang. We can't talk-- we can't even talk about causes. Can't even talk about what caused the Big Bang if there's no time before the Big Bang. And so we end up in another philosophical problem.

So to be clear, I don't know what the way out is. Great people have been thinking about this for a long time. I don't have really anything to add to the thoughts. They've already come up with excerpts that it keeps-- this literally keeps me up at night.

I don't know if any of you ever have insomnia because you're thinking about stuff at work, sometimes it's like sociopolitical stuff, but sometimes, for me, it's like intellectual stuff. I get myself into an intellectual knot about this at night and can't fall asleep and it drives me crazy. So thank you for being here. It's like group therapy to listen to me talk about it.

The next philosophical problem is this-- let's just put the whole time thing aside and say, OK, we don't understand time, we know we don't understand time, let's put that aside. We also have this problem of demonstrably, in terms of empirical inquiry, we have something. We are here in this room. We have something. Why do we have something instead of nothing? It's only like one of the biggest questions of the universe.

And the problem with getting at this question is it turns out you have to define something, and you have to define nothing. So I'm sure this is greatly amusing to people who are paying tuition for my students. When I cover this material in class, we actually spend a whole class period talking about different types of nothing. I'm not kidding you, because we take-- I mean, think about if you were to define nothing, how would you define it?

It's just it's not a well-defined concept even academically. And so we have to think about how we define nothing. So to define nothing, I want to invite you to consider some different types of something. So normally, when we think of things, we think of actual things like tables or people or even light, we can think of as a thing.

So we think of-- I'm going to call it mass energy. Matter energy, we think of as like normal things, and I think normal people, when they think of nothing, just think of not having those things. For sure, not having tables and chairs, maybe if you're being even a little bit more abstract, not having energy, not having light. So not having those things. And that's fine. That's one form of nothing.

But there are other things that sort of exist in their own way. So, for example, space time in astrophysics, spacetime is actually like a malleable fabric. You can't touch it per se. We don't interact with it physically that way, but it's a thing that we think of as real that exists. So that's a thing. So you can imagine there being space, time that doesn't have anything in it but you still have that spacetime. That's not nothing.

Likewise, we have-- even if we didn't have spacetime, we have these rules or these laws of physics. Now they're super abstract and super conceptual, but they're still things that exist, that inform the universe and tell the universe what to do. So the first type of nothing is really pretty straightforward. We just don't have chairs and tables or light.

The second type of nothing means we don't have chairs and tables, but we also don't even have the room for them to be in. We don't have this arena in which things can exist. And that's harder to conceptualize, but it's not, I think, terrible.

And this third type of nothing is more like-- it's a nothing, nothing. We don't have stuff, we don't have the room for the stuff to be in, and we don't even have the rules that the stuff needs to follow. So when we talk about this, when I teach this material in class, we have to be really careful what we mean when we say we're getting something from nothing, and what does that mean.

And when we go through the different options for what could have caused the Big Bang or preceded the Big Bang, one of the things I invite my students to do and I want to invite you to do is think about what, if any kind of nothing they came from. And in many cases, you'll find they didn't come from nothing, and all we've kind of done is kick the can down the road because we just have a different kind of something.

I love this quote, I get hung up on this a lot. This is one of the things that drives me crazy. I think I have a very hard time envisioning a cosmos without laws or rules that tell things how to behave. But why those? And what sort of-- this is a quote from the late Stephen Hawking. "What breathes fire into them, and gives them a universe to describe?" So this is where I get really hung up.

One thing I want to point out before we start working through the options, for what could have caused the Big Bang is this, and this is my only slide with math. If you don't do math, that's fine. You don't need to. I'm going to explain this. This is actually a remarkable feature of the universe that I think is kind of underappreciated. It turns out the universe that we live in, that, we can observe has a net worth of 0.

And so it actually is in some sense nothing. What the universe did was it seems to have taken out a loan from somewhere. So in other words, what I mean by this is that if we look at math like we can look at all the math in the observable universe, all the mass energy that has the positive value, and you could-- if you wanted to fill it in, you don't need to.

So we have positive energy from the mass energy of the universe, and then we have gravity and we have potential energy. And if you think back to whatever physics, you might know potential energy is negative. In the observable universe, the positive mass energy is as near as we can tell. Exactly equal to the negative energy of the Earth.

And so the universe seems to have a net worth of 0, which is fascinating because now it's not-- why do we have something instead of nothing? So in some sense, we still kind of have nothing, but there was some mechanism for a loan. Where did the loan come from? Who is stupid enough to allow this line of credit to the universe? Like, I don't know. So the universe has taken out a loan, and so the question is where did that loan come from? What is it that gave the universe the ability to have these two in balance, the positive and the negative?

OK. Let's go through some options. I'm not going to tell you which is right because I don't know. I'll probably tell you which is my favorite, and I'll tell you why it's my favorite. And being my favorite, of course, doesn't make it right. It just makes it my favorite. So one of the first options on the table for what caused the Big Bang is a cyclic universe. This is a concept and a philosophy that has been popular across many peoples, across time, there's a lot of wisdom in different cultures that brings thing into cycles.

And so it has a lot of appeal, right, a cycle has appeal, it has an aesthetic appeal, it has an appeal in terms of balance. So in this case, we have a Big Bang and the universe goes on and expands, and eventually because-- it's like throwing a ball up in the air. You throw a ball up in the air, and eventually the ball slows down and it falls back.

The universe is kind of doing the same thing in this scenario. So we threw the ball up in the air, it went up as high as it could, and then it starts falling back down and collapsing. So in this scheme called the cyclic universe, right it just keeps going around and around and around the circle, and it may be that the universe we're living in is somewhere over here. We're still expanding.

Turns out, at least in the observable universe, we have effectively ruled this out. And what happened was-- this happened a couple of decades ago actually. This was a huge question. The question was, how fast is the universe expanding, and given how fast it is expanding, how much of that expansion slow-- it's expanding, but is that expansion slowing down? And how fast is it slowing down? Because that will tell us the fate of the universe.

So two really high-powered independent teams went out to measure how fast the universe is decelerating. The ball is going up in the air, but it's slowing down. How fast is it decelerating? They both went out independently like the Nobel Prize is on the line, there's a lot of fighting, intellectual, good-natured fighting, mind you, but like the teams are both literally vying for the Nobel Prize.

They go out to measure how fast the universe is decelerating, and the data start to come in and things are looking really wacky, and more data come in and they look more wacky and the teams talk to each other and they're like what is going on because both teams found independently simultaneously that the universe is not, in fact, decelerating, it's accelerating.

And this is what we call dark energy. It's one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics. We don't know what it is. We have some hypotheses, but none of them are bearing fruit. So for reasons we don't understand, something is injecting into the-- energy into the universe, and its expansion is actually accelerating. It'd be like-- if you threw that ball up into the air, and instead of slowing down and falling back, it actually accelerated away from you and like shot out into space, that's what the universe is doing.

Granted, there's a lot of physics about this we don't know. And we know we don't know and we don't understand, but insofar as we do understand it, there's no way this is going to happen right in fact, the fate of the universe is quite grim, very cold, very dark, everything moves apart from each other, and eventually there's nothing within your horizon.

So there's physics-- like, I said there's physics we don't understand. There are ways that this could turn around if we can come up with some kind of phase transition the universe could go through. But for now, I think this is off the table, which is sad because it would be a lovely explanation.

Next up, this is probably the most conceptually challenging I think of the explanations for the beginning of the universe. This came from Stephen Hawking and his collaborator, Hartle. Their idea was what if the universe didn't have a beginning because time didn't have a beginning?

And the way they thought about this, the analogy I like to use is you think about the globe of the Earth, and how lines of latitude and lines of longitude are orthogonal, and if you were to go-- you're an intrepid explorer and you're going to the South Pole, and those lines of latitude and longitude continue to be orthogonal, let's imagine the lines of longitude as lines of time right so as you go back to the South Pole you're going farther and farther and farther back in time.

When you get to the South Pole, this remarkable thing happens because of the coordinate system we use. There's nothing particularly special about the South Pole, except for that's where the Earth axis happens to have us rotating, but because of the coordinate system we've used and the fact that that's where the Earth's axis goes through, when you get to the South Pole, when you're at the South Pole every direction is North. There's no east, there's no West, it's just North.

And so what effectively happens depending on the coordinate system you choose, if you choose a system like that on the globe is that as you move back in time toward the South Pole, time the lines of latitude actually curve in and sort of act like space. So as you go back to the beginning of time, what would be time equals 0, time actually becomes spacelike.

So in this scenario that Hawken and his collaborators came up with, imagine this is the South Pole. As we go back in time, time curves in and becomes more spacelike. And so if there were before, it would be over here on the left, except there can't be because time sort of just goes to this pole and because of the coordinate system we're using, there's nothing before. It just is what it is.

So I think about this in terms of types of nothing. Now we get out of this causality issue, we get out of the issues of time being finite or infinite, but we still have to explain why this whole sort of situation exists to begin with, like why this? Where did this construct come from? It's still something. It's still not nothing. It just kind of kicks the can a little bit down the road.

OK. Next option, back to quantum mechanics. I love quantum mechanics. In this case, this is meant to be sort of a visualization of how we think about the fabric of spacetime when we get down to quantum mechanical timescales.

So like I said earlier, on these scale, space and time don't exist independently as things it's like a frothing foam, and so maybe out of this sort of quantum foam like a universe kind of bubbled up into existence and maybe this sort of throat here got pinched off and it went and floated off on its own.

I think that if you were to go to a party of physicists and sort of poll the room on what they thought the most likely explanation was for the creation of the universe, this is probably what most physicists would say if I had to guess, in part because there's a quantum loophole. We like that there's a quantum explanation that could get us to how this might happen.

Now there's a big difference between in quantum mechanics sort of particles popping into existence out of, I would say quote nothing, but it's really from quantum fields, and universe is popping into existence, but the loophole is there and there's a scientific path there. It doesn't explain where all this came from to begin with. So again, we're just kicking the can down the road.

Here's just another-- it's a slight variation on this. This gets into what is called eternal inflation. The idea is out of some initial quantum foam that in the cosmos, maybe it wasn't just our universe that came into existence. Maybe other universes are coming into existence too or did come into existence of all different shapes and sizes and properties and parameters.

Many folks like this idea because it helps us explain things like fine tuning, which I'm not planning to talk about today, but if you want to talk about fine tuning we can. This gets us an explanation for how fine tuning might happen.

We have membranes. So in this scheme, what you have to do because we have these puny 3D human brains that aren't so good at thinking about other dimensions, we have to envision that all of our three dimensions in space are actually like a two-dimensional membrane by analogy, and that we can't perceive this extra dimension for whatever reason.

There are viable hypotheses on the table with peer-reviewed papers with lots of citations that our universe could actually be a three-dimensional membrane sort of floating in a higher dimensional space that we call the bulk because we're really creative. And these membranes-- our membrane may not be the only one.

Who's to say like, I know we always default to thinking we're the center of the universe, and I'd like to think that we can move past that. But humans just have this tendency. There could be other membranes too, and maybe they're all floating around in this bulk. And what happens if they collide? Like, oh, OK, stand back. So that is one conjecture that is on the table for what caused the Big Bang.

This is going to sound maybe a little bit shocking this is starting to be empirically testable with what we see from particle properties in the lab. I won't say it's ruled out, but it's not looking promising right now. So but the fact that this is becoming empirically testable, I think is actually also kind of astounding.

This is my favorite explanation, just to be clear. The idea here is that in any universe when you form a black, hole and we form black holes all over our universe, what happens is within that black hole, within the mouth of the black hole, so you can imagine this scenario is a black hole forming in a universe, a baby universe could get spawned off.

This really technically could be like a wormhole, if you've heard of wormholes. Technically, they're called Einstein-Rosen bridges, which in the Thor movies, they actually got right and called by their proper scientific name. So if you want to go back and watch Thor, they call them Einstein-Rosen bridges. It turns out concepts like wormholes, which are allowed in general relativity, although not yet observed empirically, are very, very sensitive.

And if they exist, we think they would probably close off really fast. So in this, case a baby universe would be formed, the umbilical cord to this universe would probably be cut off fairly quickly, and then you would spawn off this whole sort of other baby galaxy. This, like I said, no empirical evidence for it, but it's my favorite probably in part because I have kids, but also I love all the possibilities this opens up.

It means with every black hole or maybe every black hole there's a new baby universe, which is kind of fun to think about. It's fun to think about our universe having come from a parent universe, which, by the way, all of our observations are consistent with. The Big Bang is consistent with this happening, and this would be the equivalent of like a white hole from the other side.

It gives the possibility of natural selection, and so in this case when baby universes are formed they could inherit some of the physical characteristics of their parent universe, kind of like genetics. And some universes would be more prone to make black holes than other universes. And if they're more prone to make black holes, they're going to have more babies. So you can imagine sort of almost evolution in terms of physics. So that is my favorite explanation.

And finally, you can't talk about the Big Bang and not talk about this-- a huge fraction of our population, and I'm not-- I try really to be really careful when I'm teaching this to not show my hand to my students, and I'm also not going to show my hand to you, but a lot of people believe, for reasons like Thomas Aquinas did, that all of this points to their having to be something outside of human our human ability to comprehend, including the possibility of a creator.

Now I want to be careful here because we're not necessarily talking about a conventional god. That's on the table, sure, we can't empirically test it. It could be, for example, a high school experiment. And some metaphysics extra universal concept, some super higher power being is literally doing a lab experiment or a homework assignment, where they're super higher being teacher has said, create a universe that evolves to have intelligent life. That could literally be a homework assignment. We can't rule that out.

And, in fact, it could also be a simulation. I know that is like a batshit-crazy idea that most people have a knee jerk reaction against for good reason, but there are actually deep philosophical papers written on the possibility of the universe being a simulation and what that would mean, and it's not as unlikely as it might sound, especially when we look at what would be needed. So a higher power of some kind is still on the table. It's outside of the realm of empirical inquiry.

And then the final explanation I always leave with, because we have to acknowledge our human brains and their limitations, we like to think that we're super intellectually advanced, and maybe we're the most intellectually advanced creatures on this planet, but that's not-- our DNA is what? Barely more than 1% different than chimps, some biologists in the room will correct me on that if I'm wrong.

What if our DNA were like even 1% more further advanced in terms of intellectual ability? Imagine what we could do? There's no way I could teach my dogs quantum mechanics or general relativity. There's just no way. So who's to say that we're the apex of intellectual achievement, that we've thought of everything that could be thought of, and that we've-- and we're just all that? I would argue that we're probably not as great as we think we are.

So we have to acknowledge-- we have to acknowledge if we don't want to be full of hubris and arrogance and myopic, that there are probably options and solutions we haven't thought of because we maybe don't even have the ability to think of them.

So finally, I just want to remind us one more slide after this. Right now, as of now, maybe this will change in the next generation, the limit of science, the limit of testability empirical inquiry is 10 to the minus 43 seconds. I would argue that any scientist that tells you that we know what happened before 10 to the minus 43 seconds is full of it, because we can't. We don't have the physics to do that.

Before that time, and this is meant to be an analogy to that South Pole as we go to the South Pole because of our coordinate systems. I just love this. I think here be dragons. It's unexplored, and we don't know. And I actually think that's one of the most beautiful things about it. I love talking about things in science that are open to possibilities for which we don't have answers, and we can think about possibilities, and we can be creative, and we can dive into what I think in this case is a really rich interdisciplinary space.

So I will leave that there. I'm right on time, I think. And, Danny, do you want to take questions or maybe Kelly you can tell me if there are any questions online. I'm happy-- I love questions. You all have been teachers. You know what it's like if you finish a lecture and no one asks you questions. It's like really depressing.

Yeah, good question. Let me repeat this for folks who are online. The question is when I showed the slide of-- can't hop to it quickly-- the cosmic microwave background, which is a big oval of blotchiness that you might recall the question is, why can't we see farther back in time than that? Which is a really, really great question.

Yeah. Well done. Yeah. Yeah, there have been three different generations of telescopes that have looked at the cosmic microwave background. In fact, did my senior thesis as an undergraduate using COBE data, which was the very first one. The problem is, and this gets into a little bit of physics. So if you want to turn out for the-- turn out for the physics, that's OK, but if you want to hang on, that's OK too.

Before that time in the universe, atoms were ionized, which means-- I don't mean to be pedantic, but I don't know if everyone has the same background. Like electrons and protons, we're not hanging out together. Every time an electron would try to join a proton and become an atom, it would get re-ionized. And so you have this plasma, you have this soup of protons and electrons.

What happens is the way that interacts with light because light is-- another name for light is electromagnetic radiation. And what that means is that as electromagnetic radiation, when light interacts with charged particles like protons and electrons, its path actually gets bent. And so because the universe-- before that time period, before 300 400,000 years was completely ionized, what that means is that light was doing like a Plinko.

Light would travel like this way a little bit and then go this way a little bit and this way a little bit. It just kept getting bent and bounced around and moved, and so it's kind of like seeing-- the best analogy I have is, what is it? Like translucent glass in a sense where you can see there's light coming from behind it, but you have no information about what's behind it. And because the light just keeps getting processed and moved from those ionized particles, so it's not that there isn't light from before, it's that all that light from before it has just gotten remassaged and moved around.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KELSEY JOHNSON: Yeah, all of it. Yeah, all of it, even radio wavelengths. Yeah, it would be great because it sounds like a lot about this. So radio light can make it through a lot of stuff. We won't get into the physics of that, but like you know that intuitively. You could turn on a radio and hear and you would get radio reception because radio can make it through stuff walls and clouds of gas and dust, but even radio light in this case can't do it, which is a real pity. So it's a real observational limit for light.

Now one thing you didn't ask but I'm going to answer anyway is there's a new-- I'm a great professor, right? That sounded really bad. I love answering questions people didn't ask. The question that maybe you would ask if I gave you enough time is we have another tool under our belt now that came online in the last decade that doesn't involve light-- gravitational waves.

We now have a way. We have detectors and they're nascent. But we have detectors that can actually measure ripples in the actual fabric of spacetime from massive things doing things in the universe. It's like if you could imagine playing in a lake and you spin around with your hand, your hand in that lake makes a wave, it makes a ripple that goes out. It's the same thing in the universe when massive objects move. They make these ripples in the fabric of spacetime.

Now for us to detect them right now with our nascent detectors, they have to be really big, whomping ripples, like black holes merging kind of ripples, but it's a new tool, and that could allow us to probe farther back in time, not with light, but with gravity. And so that tool I think is really over coming decades is really going to come to the forefront.

AUDIENCE: So you [INAUDIBLE].

[LAUGHTER]

KELSEY JOHNSON: I love talking to you people. Dark matter gets factored in with the mass energy because it does have mass, and so we infer the-- sorry, I should back up and explain dark matter to people. When we look out at the universe, there is something there, we don't know what it is, but it interacts with gravity. Gravity appears to be the only thing it interacts with. It doesn't interact with light, it doesn't appear to interact with any of the other forces. It only interacts with gravity.

Because it doesn't interact with light, that means we can't see it, we can't see it, either an absorption or emission or it's anything that does like that, but we can see its effect on stuff around it. And so we infer actually tremendous amounts of mass in the universe that we can't see. The fraction of mass we can see like tables and chairs and people and atoms and hydrogen and gas is incredibly small.

Most of the mass in the universe is in the form of this dark thing that we call dark matter, again, creativity for astronomers. We don't know what it is, but that is factored in because we can infer how much of it is there, even if we don't know what it is. So that gets factored into the mass energy bucket.

OK. So let me repeat the question for folks online. So the question-- the person has read Larry Krauss, who we could talk about later, have some issues with him-- what is the best book on my favorite baby universes? Probably the easiest to thing to find on the market right now is there's a physicist named Lee Smolin, S-M-O-L-I-N, who is generally credited with coming out with this idea. So he has some popular books on it.

The other thing-- I'll just put on the table in a very self-aggrandizing way, is I have a book that's coming out next fall that we'll talk about this. So if you want to wait nine months, you can get my book too, but the best book on the market right now is probably Lee Smolin's book, S-M-O-L-I-N. Anything else?

AUDIENCE: Could you explain again the mass? Because the [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: I can try. So the question is, how the mass energy in the universe is equal to the gravitational potential energy in the universe, and why that equals alone. So I'll start with a caveat that we only know what we can know from the universe that we can observe, and so there is a caveat there. There could be stuff outside of the observable universe, we don't know what it's doing.

But when we look at the observable universe with our Fancy Schmancy telescopes like James Webb or the very large array or any telescope you want, we can basically add up all of the mass energy in the universe by looking at the galaxies, looking at the dark matter, looking at the light. We can add it all up and say, how much is that? And that's all positive energy.

Then those very same telescopes, we can look at all of those things. Look at how much gravitational potential energy they have, look at how fast the universe is expanding, and we can determine how much negative energy things have dynamically. And so we do that and we add up that bucket of how much negative energy things have, and then we add up this bucket over here of how much positive mass energy exists in the universe.

And as near as we can tell, there's a little bit of wiggle room here because we're talking about astronomy. We're happy if we're within a factor of 2. But as near as we can tell, they're the same, which means the net energy of the universe is 0 or as close to 0 as we can get, which is wild.

And so what that means is normally one of-- many conservation principles I think are sort of drilled into students in school, and one of those conservation principles is the conservation of mass, there's conservation of momentum, there's conservation of energy.

So in this case, it's the conservation of energy is what really troubles people about the Big Bang because if we believe in conservation of energy, and then we get to how do you have something instead of nothing because that sort of violates our cherished conservation principles, well, if the net worth of the universe is zero, we haven't actually violated the conservation principle. We still have the same 0 energy we might have had before the Big Bang.

The question is, how did we go-- how do we go from having nothing, like no mass energy, to still having nothing, no mass energy, but also like a fancy house and a car that we owe the bank for? It's not clear how we were allowed to do that. I don't have a better answer for you. I hope that helps.

AUDIENCE: I think given the hour, I'd like to thank you, Kelsey, for [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: My pleasure. My pleasure.

AUDIENCE: And there's more.

KELSEY JOHNSON: There's more What the world?

AUDIENCE: So this is our much coveted Retired Faculty Association gift. Let me pull it out. If you can hang your Black holes on [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: Wow.

AUDIENCE: The other hanger made by [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: This is beautiful. Are we saying that people need more potassium? What is the message here? So I love bananas. This is great.

AUDIENCE: It's a banana thing in the conservation of [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: I love it. Thank you. That's great. And thank you for-- wow. I can't even imagine how you would make this. That takes a lot of talent. Well done. Well done. I'm very impressed.

Oh, God, yeah, I don't need another Jefferson cup. I don't think anyone does-- this was really fun for me. I hope it was fun for you, and I hope you learned something.

AUDIENCE: Yes. Thank you.

KELSEY JOHNSON: You're welcome. All right. Folks online, thank you for being there. Thank you for your questions, and I hope the technical part wasn't too annoying.