 So, to me, this quest that I'm a part of, it relates to thinking about the early universe, that's the very big. It relates to thinking about the microscopic structure, that's the very small. But it most of all relates to asking the question of how does a complex world come out of simple laws. And that, I think, is the most profound answer to why this is worth doing. Using these tools to share MIT's perspective, MIT's understanding, MIT's vision, MIT's knowledge in a way that will empower people whom I will never meet to change the world. Boom! What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are at MIT's Open Learning in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about all things physics, all things open learning. I'm very excited to have Dr. Krishnan Rajakopal joining us on the show. Hello. Hi there. Thank you so much for coming on. Huge shout out to Sanjay Sarma for introducing us. Thank you. Very grateful. And this is such a cool place. We just had our dean on the show as well. We love open learning, what you guys are doing here. And for those that don't know Krishnan's background, he's dean for digital learning and professor of physics at MIT. His focus is range from quarks in the microseconds old universe to sharing the best of MIT knowledge and perspectives with learners around the globe. And you can check out Krishnan's links below in the bio. All right, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions. What is your current take on the state of our world? Yeah, so I'm not sure where to go with that question, but what I'll say is that my current take on the state of the world is that now more than ever we as educators at a place like MIT have both a responsibility and an opportunity to make the world a better place via education. And so when you say state of the world, I think about how we can make the world better and for us that comes through education. And we now have the opportunity to think about education, not just of our own students at MIT, which always for us comes first, but to think about education much more broadly and really globally. And we'll come to that later. In this responsibility that you speak of is such an eloquent way to describe it. It's these multi-10 plus billion dollar endowment universities that have their potential to open up and open source a lot of the materials and distribute them around the world. Yeah, we can talk much more about this later, but I think of it as sort of what we are doing in open learning is turning MIT inside out. And but we can come back to that a little bit later. That's a great analogy for it. Yeah, yeah. So, OK, let's get into the journey. So, Krishna, who were you as a kid? How did you get the interest in physics and even challenging yourself to come into the MIT system? So I grew up in Toronto, Canada. I was actually born in Germany. My dad's from India. My mother was from Germany. They met as students in England. And then my dad finished his PhD and took a postdoc in Munich where my mother was. And so I was born in Munich. So I actually like to say I'm one of the Bavarian Rajagopals. They're not too many of us. So I was born in Munich, but we moved to Toronto and Canada when I was less than a year old. So all my growing up is Toronto. I'm Canadian of whatever plate hockey. I went to public schools in suburban Toronto. I would say I've been interested in physics really since pretty early on at the level of reading popular books. Carl Sagan and the popular science books of that day. I was a high school student in the early 80s, suburban North Toronto, North York in fact. But my high school physics teachers were the opposite of inspiring. And actually I would say my really formative experience in terms of an educator whom I remember and to whom I credit a lot of what I did later is my high school biology teacher. I had a tremendous biology teacher in high school who brought the discoveries of recombinant DNA and the beginnings of the molecular biology revolution brought them into a public school classroom in a way that was inspiring. So I actually went to Queen's University, arrived there in 84. I went there playing a major in biology. And I think that if I had gotten to Queen's University and my Bio 101 class had been the class that Eric Lander now teaches at MIT and that we have an online version of I would be a biologist today. After I got to Queen's and the biology course that I took in my first year felt like I was just being asked to memorize lots of stuff. And I had a tremendous first year physics class taught by Dr. Chow. My biology teacher was Mr. Reynolds, Dennis Reynolds. And Dr. Chow's physics class you could just keep asking why, right? Some questions was encouraged and there was a sense that in a physics class if you asked why there'd either be an answer or if there wasn't an answer it'd be really interesting. This was just freshman physics but the way he taught it was you had a sense that you were on the beginning of a journey of exploration of discovery and that really I think torqued me back from biology to physics and I've been a physicist really since undergrad days I would say. I had several really great undergrad research opportunities in Canada and then I went to Princeton and did my PhD which is where I got interested in quarks and in fact although not in a way that I'll describe now because we understood much less back then but I was already back then interested in the physics of very hot quark matter and the stuff that filled the very early universe although we knew much less so I won't go back and talk about exactly the things I was doing back then but I've been interested in that other other physics topics also but really since then. And then when I don't know how much you want to linger on Harvard and Caltech but I spent three years as a postdoc at Harvard PhD in Princeton and then I was a year at Caltech and then I joined the faculty at MIT in in 97 I've been physics professor at MIT for 22 years yeah Dean for digital learning for a little less than two years. So I want to also understand when you were younger and your first getting to really taste what science the biology and the physics and your fascination with that what did it unlock for you that made you dedicate the next even 10 years of your life to it. It was a sense of discovery and understanding understanding how the natural world worked playing a playing a role in sort of in in uncovering the next layers of understanding. You know I one of the things that so I don't do this in a in a in a big sense but I've gone into schools typically my kids schools I've gone into my kids classes my kids are now 14 16 but as they were growing up you know every year I would go into their elementary school or middle school classes and one of the things I like to say when I was talking with the little kids was I can't remember how to set it up but I would I would I would you know spend half an hour with them and we've done some some stuff gee whiz stuff I would have brought liquid nitrogen or electromagnets are we and and I would have gotten them asking me questions we've had a and then I would say if you if you want to I would always that's right remember how it set up I would always try to include something that was not understood as opposed to things where I was showing them how things worked I would always try to find something that I could that I could describe to them that wasn't understood and I would say maybe you'll be the ones who will discover how this works and and then I would say that if you want to be a scientist and if you want to try to figure stuff like that out you you today have a big advantage over most scientists what's your advantage and I would let them think about it and the advantage is that they just ask questions right and so what I would tell them is that if you want to be a scientist don't stop asking questions that's my that's my pitch to the to the to the really little kids is just you know little kids they're natural they're just they just keep asking why it's just just what they do and they just if you want to be a scientist you just have to keep doing that yeah that's a cool perspective that when children come into the world they're natural scientists and then somehow the culture and society at large somehow just it just mold some since some ways just molds them into just workers rather than the continuous probing of the universe with these questions and how things work with these questions and then I also really appreciated how you took the initiative yourself with your kids to go into the classroom yeah you set up the experiments with the with the tiny bit of I don't know how to do that either yeah if you want to learn how to do that pursue science yeah if you want to learn how to do things that science and society doesn't know go into science and yes so one of the things I would do with again I do you know bring liquid nitrogen in you know play with balloons play with bananas play with roses but then I would also have a high-temperature superconductor which floats on a magnet get them all gather around you can see the little magnet floating on this sort of hockey puck of high-temperature superconductor which is in the liquid nitrogen you can see it floating there and then I would say so what do you think the electrons in there are doing to make it float on that you know to make that magnet float on what do you think the electrons in that black stuff are doing and the kids would try to answer and I told nobody actually really knows people I mean people know a lot more than you know people know more than nothing but nobody truly understands how that works people understand how low-temperature superconductors work but people don't have a full understanding of how type height so that that was one of my things that I would bring in and it all again kind of like you said starts with your desire to understand that natural world and how it works and that seems to be a reoccurring theme of a lot of the people that we sit down with that insatiable curiosity grow probing the universe with that scientific hypothesizing and and learning all right let's go into all right this is a very complicated field we've had several shows I'm trying to unpack particle physics it's not it's not easy to wrap our minds around so I think what we can do is we can start with the notion that atoms make up everything yeah and that atoms have protons and neutrons in the nucleus and then electrons orbiting yeah that good okay then this is where things get a little strange is that the protons and neutrons on the inside of the nucleus are made up of quarks yeah why is that strange because now it's just for all we know the quarks are made up of something on the inside of the quarks it's just we haven't nobody's built a powerful enough microscope yet to see the to see any structure inside quarks or electrons so as far as we now know quarks and electrons are the elementary featureless indivisible components of the world of the world that we're made of right so the the quarks are assembled into protons and neutrons the protons and neutrons make nuclei the nuclei have electrons around them so it's all electrons and quarks but you know that's just what we know based on the microscopes we've been able to build if we could if we could study the properties of matter with a thousand times finer resolution microscope who knows what we would find but at the moment I don't think quarks are any harder to understand than electrons okay so now you know double click us a little bit deeper into your fascination with quarks and also how that relates to the the first parts of the Big Bang and the soup of quarks that was there good so we we sign we've understood really since the 1970s that if you get to a high enough temperature protons and neutrons shouldn't exist that the at high enough temperature the protons and neutrons will be bumping into each other and smashing smashing into each other enough in a really high temperature system so that the they just have to fall apart into quarks and that's that's been known at a theoretical level since the 70s really since quarks were understood and so we've also known even for even longer that the universe began with a hot Big Bang there's now a TV show that that confirms this fact and and so if you go back to early enough in the universe the universe was that hot was hot enough that there were no protons there were no neutrons so this has been at a qualitative level like we're talking here this has been understood really since the 70s the first papers about the quarks in the early universe are from the 70s but do we know where the quarks came from and well that's the question of what what happened before the Big Bang and the answer is no we don't know okay but so what's what's new in the last 10 or 15 years is that we now have the ability to actually make a little droplet of stuff in a matter in the lab which is that hot turns out you need temperatures of a few trillion degrees trillions trillions of degrees that's not the it's not the better way of thinking about it is you need temperatures that correspond to the energies associated with the motions of quarks inside of a proton and and those energies are in the hundreds of MEV so mega electron volts but if you turn it into a temperature it's it's a few trillion ten trillion degrees so how do you make a droplet of stuff that's ten trillion degrees hot you build an accelerator like the large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva or in fact these experiments were first done at the relativistic heavy iron collider Rick which is in Brookhaven Long Island not that far from here and you take two nuclei and and smash them together very simple I mean it's an extraordinary piece of technology to do this at the required energies but you take two nuclei slam them together at high enough energies and you will create a little blob of stuff which is ten trillion degrees hot if you if you can make a stronger high powerful enough accelerator you can make ten trillion degree hot matter not a whole room full not a whole universe full but you know one nucleus size full okay and that that gets through that strong nuclear force that's normally repelling them actually this it they it has to overcome the electromagnetic force they're positively charged but you these are at such high energies that you can they just slam into each other and you make the nuclear force is in fact attractive once you get close enough once you get close enough right and then that will turn two trillions of degrees yeah it's it's just it's just you're creating lots of entropy it's not it's it's it's just it's a collision right you slam two Swiss watches together they break apart into their components instead of Swiss watches you know if you if you slam if you you know collide to slide collide two Swiss watches at a hundred miles an hour right you're gonna get a pile of screws and strength and springs you collide two nuclei at 99.99999 a lot of nines times the speed of light you're gonna get a pile of quarks percent of the speed of light yeah and and then you get a lot of quarks and is that that's the process where we discovered also the Higgs boson a similar process Higgs boson in principle you make Higgs bosons in these collisions but it'd be very hard to find them so for Higgs bosons you collide protons okay you solely protons or or you could if you could get enough energy you could collide electrons and make Higgs bosons although that's there there are reasons why protons are a better choice but anyway do we do any electron collisions right now yeah okay we do at a place called Jefferson lab in Virginia but at much lower energies we had a facility at the Stanford called the Stanford linear accelerator which did electron collisions and there is a lot of discussion in the in the physics community of building a new higher energy electron collider but that that's for the future but so what I wanted to say is that these so you everyone understood that at high enough energies you could recreate this stuff of the Big Bang okay and everyone was right about that but they were wrong about the following so before the experiments were done the expectation was that when you collide to nuclear sufficient energies you would free the quarks your protons and neutrons would fall apart you'd free the quarks and there was an expectation that the quarks that would would form a gas basically a very hot gas you know 10 trillion degrees it's gonna be a gas that there were better arguments for this than that but the expectation was you're gonna form a gas of quarks quarks are charged and so a gas of quarks is a plasma and so this this stuff was named before it was made okay it was called cork gluon plasma quarks are quarks gluons are the particles that bind the quarks together so you the idea was you would have a plasma sort of a tenuous plasma of quarks and gluons which we we can we can leave out and that turned out to be not quite correct was half correct and so what we learned so these experiments started in the year 2000 and what we understood from the experiments by about 2005 so since 2005 we've known that when you make this stuff of the Big Bang it turns out to actually be a liquid so in a way that can be made precise yes you you destroy the protons and neutrons and you make lots of quarks that are not bound up into individual protons and neutrons but they're also not free they don't fly long distances like in a gas they're always bumping into each other okay so it's much more like a liquid so so when I you know we're having a long conversation but if if we sit down on a plane and somebody asked me so what do you do I say I study hot cork soup okay and and that is a much better name than quark gluon plasma because every word in it is correct it's very very hot made of quarks and it's it's like a soup it's a liquid every it's you know everything it's not gaseous it's it's an incredibly hot liquid and it turns out to be a very interesting liquid with interesting properties and but if you'll permit me I'll tell a story please so in sometime in the late 60s or 70s predecessor at MIT named Vicky Weisskopf a great theoretical physicist from a previous generation when I arrived at MIT in 1997 Vicky was long retired he was still present he was very late in his life I met him very near the end of his life long after he had retired but so that was 97 sometime in the 60s or 70s he was giving an after-dinner speech okay and his the speech was on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Edward Purcell a colleague at Harvard and Purcell had done some great work on fluid flow hydrodynamics and Vicky wanted to honor him and so he gave this speech it's a magnificent speech and one of the things he said was to honor Purcell for his work on fluid flow was he said I think if you take a group of the best theoretical physicists in the world and you put them on a desert island and you give them the laws of quantum electrodynamics how electrons interact with nuclei you know you give them the the laws of nature that describe electrons and nuclei and ask what do these laws describe so Vicky said I think that a good student could have figured out that they describe atoms you take one of these nuclei you put electrons around it and it describes atoms anyone who had learned quantum mechanics could probably have figured that out from the laws and a really good theoretical physicist and sorry and that student could then have realized that gases exist because what's a gas it's just a bunch of atoms flying around and he said and a really really good theoretical physicist could have actually figured out that solids are a possibility that these laws of nature describe solids but he said I don't think any theoretical physicist given the laws of nature could have predicted that liquids exist mmm so liquids are much too hard to understand you know it takes an Edward Purcell to understand liquids liquids solids are what happens when all the atoms just stop moving gases are what happens when all the atoms are flying around but who could have predicted liquid so he gave this after his inner speech and so Vicky was right because nature gave not on a desert island but nature gave all the theoretical physicists on the planet Earth the fundamental laws of how quarks interact those were discovered in 1973 so every theoretical physicist on the planet has known the laws of nature as they apply to quarks since 1973 and we had until the year 2000 because nobody did these nobody reproduced this stuff until the year 2000 everyone thought it was a gas and then in the 2000 the experiments were done it turned out to be a liquid so all the theoretical physicists on the planet Earth had had 30 years to work on it and none of nobody predicted that quarks could be a liquid at these temperatures it was a great discovery from the early 2000s and what I do now is really to ask well how can these fundamental laws of nature that we can write down on a sheet of paper how do they describe a liquid where is that liquid come from what are its properties if you could study it with a microscope what would you see what's its phase diagram how does it does it does it are there are there other phases of of quark matter and a way of saying why this is interesting so the quick again your first I mean on the airport the quickest answer is how cool is it that we can recreate the stuff of the Big Bang make a little droplet of Big Bang matter and study its properties right that's the quickest but that's actually to me not the most profound answer to why this is interesting for me this it so if you think about the great quests of physics there's thinking about the very big so thinking about stars galaxies cosmology the Big Bang this thinking about the very small you know as you started us off matters made of atoms atoms made of nuclei nuclear made of protons protons have quarks in them what's the small structure so those are those are two of the sort of big frontiers of physics and always happen but there's a third and the third is how do you complex materials come out of simple laws okay the laws of nature can be written on a t-shirt you've got the wrong t-shirt but they are some of the beautiful complex laws of nature the laws of nature can be written on a t-shirt yeah and and yet those laws describe solids liquids gases they describe magnets they describe super conductors they describe ferromagnets they describe anti ferromagnets they describe high-temperature superconductivity they describe wood they describe metal they describe glass they describe life so how how does complexity come from simple laws and and that's to me the third great frontier of physics and where this hot quark soup comes in it is I think in a real sense it is the simplest complex matter there is okay it's the it's certainly the first it is the first complex form of matter that formed in the universe the universe was a microsecond old when this stuff filled it and there it's it was the earliest complex form of matter and and it is also in a sense that's hard to make precise it's the form of complex matter that is closest to the fundamentals that's that's not a precise notion but I but I feel that it's the case and so I think our challenge is to understand how these laws describe this matter and I think if we learn how to do that that could help us understand how how fundamental laws describe other forms of complex matter so to me this this quest that I'm a part of it relates to thinking about the early universe that's the very big it relates to thinking about the microscopic structure that's the very small but it most of all relates to asking the question of how does how does a complex world come out of simple laws and that I think is the most profound answer to why this is worth doing yeah there's a lot to be able to figure out about that process that you're talking about how does this complex world we live in come out of such simple laws from yeah big bang until 13.8 billion years later a civilization on a rock orbiting a star and all the complexity of the laws that have now evolved from us our complex world as well that's too hard for me this is yeah and we're not even talking about how the brains inside of us are interacting all a billion of us also too hard for me yeah this is all extremely interesting for the kids that we can inspire to tackle these challenges now and I this is a good segue into the question I want to ask you about what are you teaching right now what are the kids learning right now in the physics classes what are they trying to probe about physics to give us a better understanding of our world well I have I have PhD students right now who you know a PhD student it's a very much an apprenticeship mode of learning so I would say I would say we are working together to understand exactly what we've just been discussing if you ask sort of more broadly you know we have I think the world's best physics department here at MIT and we have great strength across the board I think the biggest development in physics in the last couple of years is the discovery of the gravitational waves from two black holes inspiring into each other and colliding you know that piece of apparatus called LIGO which made that discovery that was the conceiver conceived by Ray Weiss here at MIT in the late 60s Ray and his colleagues you know done a remarkable made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the universe by allowing us to hear those gravitational waves for the first time and that you know that kind that flows into what we teach our students we have a sophomore level class where you get an introduction to relativity and then we have a class that is taken by many of our juniors and seniors although it's called a graduate class a lot of our juniors and seniors take it where you learn general relativity for real and certainly in that second class but to some degree in the first you get a sense of the science behind gravitational waves that's the example of something that that we teach right now we have a great quantum mechanics sequence one of the few universities with a three course undergraduate quantum mechanics sequence and then you can follow that up by taking two or three different classes on quantum information which is another frontier direction that you know there's a lot of a lot of excitement and activity as people are both trying to build a quantum computer and trying to understand if somebody built a quantum computer what could it do and try and understand what this teaches us about quantum information in many other contexts that also that that's another example I could keep going we've got I won't say we do everything because we don't but but we have you know a big enough department it's about 70 physics faculty at MIT out of the thousand faculty at MIT we have if you look at our undergrads we have 1100 undergrads per year about 80 or 90 of whom major in physics that makes physics the fourth largest major at MIT so we have a big impact on the world by teaching both undergraduates and PhD students I think we're the not sure if this I think we are either either the largest or very close to the largest department in the United States I won't say for the world because I'm not sure in terms of number of PhDs that we the number of students who complete a PhD in our department so we have people doing all kinds of amazing things whether it's gravitational waves quark along plasma quantum information biophysics you know cold atoms you know it's the kind of place where you sit down with your colleagues at lunch and some and and and you sit down with a colleague and we haven't seen in a year and there's something cool they've done in their group or in their lab that they tell you and so you want to have something to tell them you know it's a it's a place where people are making discoveries and where that's just that's that's just that's just what we do and it rubs off on the students and the potential that we have with more students getting involved in physics are things like being able to have an abundant source of of energy through nuclear fusion we have something like quantum computing which can run the super intelligence is that we plan on on building so this is extremely pressing for us so so a fusion I want to give credit to another so we have a nuclear science and engineering department at MIT and by the way one of the things about MIT a thousand faculty 70 in the physics department this is an out-of-date number but about 10 years ago one of my colleagues got you know the the the listing of all 1000 MIT faculty as as as we were back then and counted the number of MIT professors who had a degree in physics who were not in the physics department and at that time they're about 115 so there are actually more MIT professors with degrees in physics outside the physics department and inside it so physics is everywhere at MIT yeah well it's in many places and including in nuclear science and engineering so you mentioned fusion that is physics for sure at MIT it's in our nuclear science and engineering department and they have your spark SP ARC teach me what that is so you should get someone to come talk with you about spark so the world has this huge project called ETER which is being with ah ETER so yes spark is going to clean ETER's clock what so so so hopefully so ETER is being built in France it has major us participation but there's lots of countries involved it's the idea is that it's going to be the first fusion device that produces more energy than it takes to run it so it will be a net producer of energy for the first time oh is spark at the engine no it's maybe it's part of the engine it's part I think it might be okay okay cool but okay ETER 20 billion dollars been spent on it so far many more tens of billions yet to be spent it's good it's taking 20 years at least to build no we don't we I'm sure hopefully it'll work but it's still a long way it's like 60 or 70 meters tall or in diameter it's it's big in every sense it's it's big in size it's big in complexity it's big in expense it's big in time duration and so our friends here at MIT decided to ask well could can we with modern technology build a smaller token yes yes so spark is it's only two meters instead of 60 meters roughly I don't know the that's the scale of it roughly and tokamak is the is the cutting-edge nuclear fusion technology yeah and it's you need a you need a magnetic field to confine that hot plasma and there the idea of the people building designing and hopefully building spark is to use much stronger magnets interesting and so you can confine this plasma in a much smaller volume if you have much stronger magnets and I think the physics is completely sound the engineering is a real challenge yeah but they basically so that our nuclear science and engineering department our colleagues in that department are basically trying to make an end-run around ETER they're trying to build a smaller faster cheaper hotter tokamak that'll achieve the goals of ETER before ETER is ever finished so this is a good place to to come if you're just in the fusion also yes yes all right let's do some of our our digital learning our open learning so you ended up as you were associate head of the Department of Physics you ended up having an MITx freshman physics course in junior lab and then a MOOC on quantum mechanics and quantum field theory so that's kind of your transition into the right digital learning I I helped my colleagues build all the things you just yes yeah I wasn't yet to basically when I was associate head of physics this world of digital learning was just beginning Sanjay was our pioneer here at MIT I was associate head of physics I I worked with Sanjay to pull together the resources to find the people to do all the things that you just said I was the you know we work together I was the the person from the physics side he was the person from the digital learning side and we did a bunch of cool things and now I'm I'm here trying to do those same kind of cool things but across MIT as as Dean for digital learning but the way I got into this was as you said and then what was you know you really you there was likely a profound realization when the subjects that back in the time that you were going through the process of education like you started saying at the very beginning of the show you turned it inside out me and accessible globally and you were like wow we're recruiting 100,000 students or more into so one way of saying this is that when you know so I was doing very well as a professor of physics at MIT thank you very much now Sanjay comes and starts asking me whether I would like to put a lot of time and effort into being Dean for digital learning which is now my principal responsibility how did he twist my arm into doing that right physics is fun as we've been discussing how did he just my arm into becoming becoming a Dean and and I think about this through my kids and my father so that my personal motivations and they're different I have to explain so when I say my kids my kids are 14 and 16 now they're they're younger than MIT's undergrads but I know very well how my kids learn just from watching them as a parent and I also pay a lot of attention to how our undergrads learn and what I see is that 18 and 20 year olds at MIT or 14 and 16 year olds in my home they read books they read books if the English class they want to says read Wuthering Heights they read a book you know they read novels they read you know the biography of Jillian Edelman you know they read books but when they're learning something like math or chemistry or physics or you know learning about nuclear fusion or learning about toprax any of the things we were talking when they're learning about science or engineering they don't read books they they don't when I learned quantum mechanics I had a book and I over the course of the semester with a teacher I started at the beginning of the book I worked my way through it that's not how it works anymore because that's not how you learn when you're 14 and 16 anymore my kids and our students learn in a very hyperlinked way okay and they learn from video they learn online and so part of the drive is thinking about how we teach at MIT how do we teach our students the students of today not it's not me teaching the Krishna of 1980 where I was undergrad in 84 it's not me teaching the Krishna of 1984 it's me teaching the students of 2019 yeah okay and they don't like to sit for 60 minutes and listen to me at the front talk and this is not a criticism of me and it's not a criticism of the students it's because they've realized that there's a better way to learn yes okay and we've realized that there's a better way to teach the kind of material that you could teach in a lecture it's better to break it up into five six seven minute video segments put some active learning in between some some some some questions and answers in between the next segment to make sequences of videos and then to you know add online problems which give you instant feedback you know when I was a student and until recently you you you at MIT or Queens University where I was a student you do a problem set yeah yeah right on pencil on the paper page you hand it in ten days later you get it back and it's graded you never look at that feedbacks instant now and the feedback now is and so so part of the motivation for me is was realizing that with these tools we can teach MIT students better and and I and the way I think about that is is by looking at how my kids and our students learn okay so that's where my kids come in is thinking about how they learn and how you how they can learn better and so then once you have students at MIT doing this this kind of online work then in the classroom you have hands-on problem-solving experiences you have lab work you have undergraduate research you have maker spaces you have projects you have collaboration you have team building you have all kinds of things that are what make MIT MIT but you can you can free up more of the in-class in-person time for all of that by using these digital learning tools to to teach Maxwell's equations online so that that's part of the motivation and then the other part of the my father so my father can quick right before we get to dad yeah it's just that when you're explaining the difference in the last let's say 40 years in what we're doing now with education it also is starting to as we're starting to map neural activity we can really try to dive into what's happening in the brain of the of people when they're learning this way and so we now have a we know a lot more from cognitive science and we know that it's it's it's you know you shouldn't make the videos longer than about eight minutes and here we are making a one hour video by the way and it depends sometimes people go for long form nuanced interview content as well we're seeing it really does depend on exactly what is trying to happen in that time for you like for example the fact that we're talking what makes this okay actually is the fact that we're talking to each other okay there's no put there's no time during this interview when I lecture you for more than couple minutes right and but so dialogue a dialectic yes yeah and we're hitting the tennis ball back and forth right learning more about you about what you're building yes the importance of it anyway also learning in problem-solving learning the importance of retrieval and repetition sort of laying it down layer by layer all of this is informed by what we've learned from modern cognitive science so part of the motivation for me in doing digital learning is is helping MIT faculty to learn how to build and use the tools that allow us to teach our students at MIT better and so the drive for that is is as I've described but then the other half is we have an incredible opportunity to reach the world now and and so my I don't think of my when I say my father I'm not thinking my father of as he is today I'm thinking my father in 1950 my dad graduated from Loyola College in what was then Madras in India in 1950 as a math major you know first-class honors degree in mathematics from Loyola College 1950 and and at that moment in India his opportunities for further professional advancement were quite limited what he ended up doing was he taught for eight years at a small college called Alagapa College in Karekudi because that was the job that he could get and it was only through a certain set of lucky circumstances you know some grit some initiative some luck that ten years later he got a scholarship that took him to Cambridge England where he did a PhD and and from there he ended up you know he met my mother I was born but that's on the side he ended up getting a job as a faculty member at York University in Toronto but you know at that moment in 1950 he didn't have for someone who with the really good math he didn't have the opportunity to take the next step and I think that that repeats all over the world today at many many levels that could be anywhere on the planet doesn't have to be India could be Cleveland could be a Cambridge Massachusetts for that matter could be a 14 year old who needs who needs that little extra something could be a person you know graduating from from college who needs to help taking the next step could be someone who's working in there you know who's 30 years old who's working and who needs that needs to go back and pick up that new skill all of those things were much much harder to deliver but but now with these online courses that we can build and we can build online courses that address all those needs whether it's for professionals learning supply chain management or data science whether it's for kids learning about philosophy we have a court an online course at philosophy in the high school students whether it's for undergraduates wanting to learn about quantum information and quantum computing which they can learn from us in it go much deeper than you can get from most other universities there are so many ways in which we can add to the education of people all around the world including people like my father in 1950 and and so that's the other motivation it's using these tools to share MIT's perspective MIT's understanding MIT's vision MIT's knowledge in a way that will empower people whom I will never meet to change the world and it's it's I think a really powerful vision which is a real achievable goal you know where we are right now we have MIT we've built more than 150 online courses but we were far from done you know all the ones I mentioned we built but I told you we have why no linguistics course right we have we actually have three philosophy classes but why no linguistics course well we just haven't the faculty member interested in doing that it just doesn't happen yet except for the fact that now it's under construction I have two colleagues who are building a linguist intro to linguistics course why no cognitive science class we just haven't gotten to that one yet but actually we have a faculty member building the intro to cognitive science class so so there's I could within physics I could tell you what we have and what we don't have and what we're playing you know so so we're trying to build out sort of a suite of online courses that represent sort of the best that we can offer some of them are undergrad level some of them are masters level a few PhD level including one of our very first actually and you know I'm very proud of what we've done but we have a lot more to do and so that's that's a powerful motivation yeah and this is so wide ranging and everyone you can check out the links below to the MIT X also to the Micro masters program the open courseware program and so this is really it's it's building super highways to the knowledge right and then in my responsibilities as Dean open courseware MIT X micro masters and everything we do to support MIT faculty to teach better on campus that's my job description and it keeps me busy definitely and the ability to create the super highway like MIT is doing enables the full flourishing as in the as in the shirt we see that the seed gets to grow and have lots of fruits yes for the world and that's because it got the proper nutrients in the soil systems and that's the super highways of knowledge yeah basic love water food compassion the basic things shelter that that seeds need to do so and now electricity and internet and computers to get the connection to the super highway also just another thing for everyone to know is that these specific phenomenons that you're embedding into all of the MIT's digital learning are you know these closed-loop feedbacks you're getting it right away when we when we when we gain the ability to do so with simulation we will embed a quick bit of what did Krishna just teach about physics and then they'll get to address that so you you can if you want to think about doing that the edX platform which on which we put all of our online courses it's open source so you can create your own instance your own open edX platform in which you you could start doing exactly what you just said that's beautiful so a simulation we'll have to get to that point where you know scaling things up billion teams to be able to do so and we care a lot about being able to embed things like that that's excellent because that's going to help with the retention of the knowledge and also the fact that it's open through edX is so crucial and then also for the closed loop and also another thing is just this phenomenon of things like Bloom 2 Sigma to be able to have a mentor that you can work with on it as a tutor a one-on-one basis that helps you perform so much better than those that are just in a 30 person class with an individual teacher so we can you know we can do a lot better on that still we have a discussion forum in all of our MOOCs but it's that's not a one-on-one mentor we have a discussion forum in which questions are answered by you know a real person from MIT that's that's I think a really great thing that we're offering but it's not one-on-one mentoring what Erdine is doing with the boot camps gets a little closer yeah so you met with Erdine earlier so so the boot camps that Erdine is is is creating include a lot of coaching which is which which comes much closer to that one-on-one mentoring you know and though but the way I think about it with our MOOCs is that Christian it could be as simple as just pairing someone that's studying the physics MOOC to someone else in that community that's already in academia or industry in physics so we wonder can we use can we employ MIT alumni in this way I don't I don't mean employing a little bit can we engage them yeah can we engage MIT alumni in this way we have people who took the MOOC last year who stay in the MOOC this year and play that role we call them community TAs and they just volunteer they just do that because they want to but what I was really going to say is that I think what we can really work hard at doing is to engage with other educational institutions up and down the whole spectrum you know if I think in US terms community colleges two-year colleges four-year colleges liberal arts colleges the whole spectrum because each of them is filled with educators that know how to teach their students okay so we have a great partnership with San Jose City College which is a community college in in San Jose and they have created an educational opportunity for their students okay it's it's their teachers doing this for their students but that opportunity includes some initial steps and then there's an MIT online computer science intro to computer science class to two classes in fact from MIT and then there's several classes online classes from Berkeley so San Jose City College pick some of our stuff some of Berkeley stuff they added the the the the the introductory elements themselves they added internship opportunities they added the mentoring they added that and so they they put together an educational opportunity which is it's better than what they could have done just by themselves because they use the MIT content and the Berkeley content but it's much better than what MIT and Berkeley we don't we're not skilled at teaching those students they are right and so we put out content that they can use to make the education of their students better and that's what I love that model it's and so I want to see more and more institutions asking given the set of things that are out there online including what we offer but the whole world of online education giving the set of things that are out there how can we use those online opportunities to make the education of our students whom whose abilities we know how can we make their education better and we're talking with lots of institutions in this mode it's been such a great conversation I have a couple quick questions on the way out the first question is what would you say is one of the most crucial skills for young people and even adults to be developing going into the exponential technology age so I'll surprise you with my answer but this is the answer that I've given to many people including my kids if I think back so I'm a professor of physics you know what I do is very mathematical and this there's science that through and through and if you ask me what did I learn in high school that has been of the things I learned in high school what's the most important to my career what's the answer curiosity I learned that long before high school okay critical thinking questioning that that those are all important but it was how to write oh wow I write reasonably well I'm not a I don't write as well as the great writers of the world but I write well and and that's been incredibly important to my career to it's it's you know you got to apply for grants you got to write papers you got to write you know one pagers that persuade your department head or dean of something and I didn't I learned to write in high school you know I learned math and physics in high school yes it's true but I learned those much better later right I learned them over again I you learn math and physics you learn them over and if you become a professor of physics you learn math and physics over and over again at higher and higher levels but I feel that it was my high school English and history teachers that taught me how to write and that's been incredibly important so my advice to the kids to the little kids is is curiosity critical thinking keep asking questions all of those things and reading and writing you know and and the foundations of math which you know so the fundamentals and I think if you have to build that foundation at a very young age yes and then don't lose the curiosity yeah exactly yeah the roots the roots at a very young age all right and then are we in a simulation I don't think so and why well I have no idea really that's that's of course a question that I don't if it's a good enough simulation how could we possibly know right so you know I don't think so but I have no evidence I have no evidence that we aren't right but you know maybe I'm naive but I think there's a real world out there I don't think we're in a simulation but do I really know no I can't say I really know and then the last question is what is the most beautiful thing in the world oh my goodness when you're in the high Alps and you've you know spent a whole day I don't climb but I hike you spent a whole day hiking up to one of the the high huts you know just on the edge of a glacier at you know you know around 3,000 meters in the Alps and you're watching the sunset that's that's that's what occurs to me when you ask that question every summer we go to the Alps most often I pair that with spending time at CERN where the accelerator that I described is and so I talk with the scientists there find out the latest what I you know the best place to hear the latest unpublished results in my field is the cafeteria at CERN so I spent time at the cafeteria at CERN catching up and then the whole family we we spend time in the Alps and you know we we now each of the last two summers we've done something along the lines of all four of us with an alpine guide we we do a hike from the valley floor up to that hut at 3,000 meters that's the strenuous part of the excursion for me for my kids that's just a walk and then that afternoon they go and do some rock climbing with the alpine guide and then the next morning they leave at about five in the morning because they're summiting a 4,000 meter peak with the alpinist who his name is Robin he's a great teacher and so they traverse a glacier climb a rock wall summit this 4,000 meter peak and come down the other side to this other hut down the other side and meanwhile my wife and I have done this wonderful hike you know out this valley around and up the next valley to the other hut we meet the kids kids there and then the day three we hike back down we we have done something along those lines of two different spots in the Alps each of the last two summers and we're planning our one for this summer so these deep immersions into the beauty of Mother Earth yeah yes yes yes thank you so much for coming on show thank you it's been a pleasure yeah thank you very much thank you thank you thanks everyone for tuning in we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode also share more content around physics share more content around digital learning with your friends your family your co-workers online on social media check out the links in the bio below to Krishna's work as well as MITx and all of the other programs go and check it out and share it support the organizations the entrepreneurs the artists around the world that you believe in support simulation our links are below help us doing continue doing cool things like in 2020 hopefully building a recording studio our second one in Cambridge as well as our first one in San Francisco so we can actually have a physical location in this second beautiful cluster of intelligent people and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon thank you and thank you thank you and peace everyone