Александр Дмитриев: «Дальше будет лучше» // «Скажи Гордеевой»
AGE LIMIT 18+ THIS VIDEO IS NOT, AND IS NOT INTENDED TO, PROPAGANDISE ANYTHING NOTIFICATION AT THE DEMAND OF THE RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES THAT THE MATERIAL WAS CREATED AND DISTRIBUTED BY A FOREIGN AGENT We are literally becoming dangerous to ourselves. Physics and mathematics are the foundation of understanding the world. Get degree in physics, become a person. Science was, nano, science. It didn't become nanotechnology. Is the idea of Russia to make life better? No one thought during the war to create nuclear energy, so the light in the house would shine.
No, everyone wanted the bomb from the start. Time travel is impossible. Nanotechnology is not that piece of crap that Chubais showed Putin. What we have checked is a glass of water in the ocean. But when it really gets hot, we see what humanity is capable of.
We are the meaning of the Universe. This is the entrance to Gothenburg Physics. Gothenburg University is a huge organization, where there are faculties, within faculties there are departments. There is a faculty of natural sciences, and it has 8 departments, including marine science. There is biology and chemistry, they are researching new medicine.
There is geology, there is mathematics, that's the neighboring building. And there's physics. This is the Faculty of Natural Sciences. And you're the head here? Sasha, we came to the conclusion that it seems, humanity is trying to destroy this world in every way possible. But we know extremely little about the world itself.
We decided to start the story "how our world is structured" with questions to people, who understand this a little more than we do. You're first. Agreed. You're a brilliant scientist, you're a professor of physics, but we also went to the same school. The fifth school in the city of Rostov-on-Don.
Exactly. I'm going to ask you questions that bother me, and everyone will be interested to know the answers. Tell Gordeeva Alexander Friemann Dmitriev Professor of Department of Physics University of Gothenburg Typical stone foundation, three wooden floors, courtyards. Carlson, whom we read about, lives on a roof like this.
Roughly, yes, he lives on a roof like this. This is how the shipyard workers lived. Gothenburg is an industrial city, so we have a ball bearing plant, shipyards, Volvo.
People here actually worked on raising industry. That's why the university is so focused on engineering. Chalmers graduates, they work at Volvo, at Ericsson, in all these productions. The university served as a forge for engineering personnel. Getting a university education is quite easy.
So there are many people with higher education. Interesting difference, I did my postgraduate studies in Germany, and I knew how much weight a doctorate or PhD in Germany had, in Sweden it has much less weight, these degrees. In Sweden, you're more likely to be considered overqualified. Swedish industry is mainly focused on university graduates. You graduated - good job.
You got a Master's in something. You're the most important personnel for the industry. If you went further and defended your dissertation, it's already a bit too much. There are, of course, industries where this is necessary.
Pharmaceutical, for example. So, AstraZeneca in Gothenburg is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. The R&D center is located in Gothenburg.
Everyone has a doctorate, of course. Regular engineering professions... It all depends on the area of application. You can become overqualified.
Our interview with you is dedicated to the memory of our physics teacher Vladimir Semenovich Gamburg, I definitely owe him a great love for this science. What does physics study, if you say it in one sentence? Physics studies nature and the world, how it is structured and how it can be changed for the better. These are questions that affect all of us and our existence. And it's super interesting. Physics and mathematics are the foundation of understanding the world. Physics shapes your worldview very strongly, you become a skeptic, you know that you need to always check certain statements.
You can apply this to everyday life. I write something on social media, I apply roughly the same principles, as I apply in writing articles. I have to check something. If I want to say something, I have to verify it. This is journalistic too.
This is a common scientific habit too. You can't just say something out of the air, convoluted. It should contain some essence behind it. Top 5 laws of physics since the foundation of science that have determined the development of humanity. You can start with Archimedes' law.
So. Displacement of fluid. The laws of thermodynamics are very important. First, second, third, let's combine them.
Newton's laws, laws of motion. This very much determined the development of physics. That's three, four. General relativity. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. That is, we are already beginning quantum mechanics.
My personal one, of course, is Maxwell's equation. I deal with light, I deal with electromagnetism. Maxwell's equation fully defines what we do. And then, from your point of view, what is the most... The Big Bang theory. Of course.
Yes, that's six already. Yes, bonus track. In a time like now, it's sometimes even awkward to think about taking a break. But recently, I realized that if I don't at least sometimes pause work and take care of myself, then there will come a time when there won't be enough resources for myself, for work, or for loved ones. And then it's bad.
To learn how to properly recharge, we came to Austria, a country that knows a lot about resting. The Ausseerland region in the historical area of Salzkammergut is considered a place of power for Austrians. When we arrived here in the morning, we were skeptical for a while and rubbed our eyes. Did we dream all this beauty? Is this real? I confirm, everything is absolutely real. You don't feel it, but I feel the smell of freshly cut grass. This place is called the green heart of Austria.
There used to be salt mines here, and now it's one of the best spa resorts in Central Europe. In this fantastically beautiful and naturally rich region, you can realize absolutely any vacation ideas. Actually, regardless of your budget. But if you, like Austrian aristocrats of the 19th century, dream of long walks against the backdrop of idyllic landscapes and healing baths, then you need to come here, to the Narzissen hotel. It stands in the valley at the foot of the Dachstein mountain range. That's over there.
And if we zoom in, you'll see glaciers that don't melt even in summer. The hotel has 52 spacious rooms. A saltwater spa, saunas, massages, salt caves, therapeutic exercise classes, individual wellness programs with dozens of specially selected treatments.
If you prefer something more active, then hiking, golf and mountain bikes in summer and access to ski slopes and trails in winter. You don't need to worry about paying for food, drinks, and other services at the hotel, because you can use your personal NFC bracelet everywhere, which instantly transmits information about your expenses to a common database, and they are recorded to your room. Right behind Narzissen are golf courses, and behind them is a true paradise for hedonists. DIE WASNERIN Adults Only hotel.
That is, it's only for adults. Yoga, rock climbing, Nordic walking, paddle boarding on lakes, hiking and boat trips with cold wine and fish snacks. There is a small cozy restaurant called Das James with a summer terrace at the hotel. Chef Christian Welkart cooks fusion style, using only local seasonal produce. Narzissen Dorf Zloam is responsible for family vacation in Salzkammergut.
An entire village consisting of special holiday homes, which can be rented in whole or in part. Around there are swimming pools, playgrounds, stables, tennis courts and even an indoor rink. Narzissen Dorf Zloam is located on a small slope, in winter you can also ski here.
In general, if you've already decided to recharge, but you don't know yet, how to spend it, we highly recommend Salzkammergut. A place that knows a lot about quality rest. All links to hotels and details are in the description of this video. What is nanophysics, which you are involved in? It's not quite the future, it's almost the past. And a harsh present.
All our electronic devices work on nanotechnologies. Intel is now making 7-nanometer processors. The latest. 10 years ago it was 30+ nanometers.
We are already counting single nanometers. All this will break down when it reaches, for example, 1 nanometer in thickness. And then you won't be able to isolate electricity. The silicon layer will be too thin. Now we are practically on the cutting edge. We already need to move to the next step.
Wait a minute. We are from Russia, and for us nanotechnology is the giant Rosnano building on Leninsky Prospekt. And a lot of money that was spent, but we don't know the result. Of course, nanotechnology is not that black and white piece of crap, that Chubais once showed Putin. And nano is not just about computers. Nano is about treating cancer, nano is about medicine, about new energy and about new materials.
Literally our life is crammed with all this. And what is it? What is nano? You are dealing with sizes that are not yet atomic, and not molecular, but somewhere in between. For example, microchips were in the 80s and 90s. Now all this has become nanoschemes. It's a nice size because, for example, the sun emits light from 400 to 780 nanometers in wavelength. That's a size of 10 to the power of -9 meters.
The well-known coronavirus is 120 nanometers in size. This is a good size because technology allows to make things this size and much smaller. Plus, we can directly enter biological systems and interact with them. For example, how the covid vaccine works.
You make a 100-200 nanometer ball, it comes to you, enters your cells, forces your cell's machinery to produce antibodies that will fight. Out of what you're doing, what can make my life easier? Many things. We're dealing with technologies that can make storing your data on magnetic disks 10,000 times faster than what we have now. Superfast magnetic disks or super-efficient solar panels. It's convenient to work with solar panels and improve them using nanotechnology for better photon absorption, for better conversion into electrical current.
This can improve your life as an energy payer. This makes the world greener. Then we dealt with biosensors. Biosensors are used for diagnostics. You take your blood or saliva and try to diagnose for the presence of bacteria and viruses. The simplest case is covid tests.
These are nanoparticles that glow red. And the same with a pregnancy test. Blue nanoparticles. Chemistry works differently, but the visualization of the test results, is nanotechnology. When they say that nanotechnology has exhausted itself and has reached the edge of what was possible to know, what does that mean and what will happen next? On the one hand, Moore's law, he was a chemist and founder of Intel. He derived a law about doubling the number of transistors per square micrometer.
This doubling happens every 4 years. This curve was going up, but now we've almost reached the limit. There will be no doubling, because there are physical limits, how small electronic components can be. Nano has already reached its limit, what will we do next? Maybe we should come up with a new logic instead of the usual 0-1 logic, for example, work with quantum computers, or with neuromorphic systems.
Neuromorphic systems work by analogy with the human brain. Is this close to AI, after all? Yes, AI can be implemented into these systems much easier. The problem with AI isn't that it's fast or slow, it consumes a huge amount of energy, which it's unclear where to get, plus it also releases energy, because there are a lot of losses to heat, so they need to be cooled. And where do we get energy? We burn oil, which means it's not good for the planet. Of course, the future is energy-saving technologies.
Nano can also help a lot in this. We're working on sensors for identifying plastics in plastic recycling. You know, that island in the Pacific Ocean that's floating around? Because everyone throws away bottles. We produce an absolutely huge, immeasurable amount of plastic, only 10% of all plastic has been recycled from the total volume. 90% is somewhere.
We buried it in the ground, we threw it into the ocean, we burned it. You can't just burn plastic, you need the right temperature. It's very difficult to burn it correctly, otherwise it will be another loss. Unfortunately, our society has developed to such a point, that we are literally becoming dangerous to ourselves.
And we're not talking about someone detonating a nuclear bomb. The problem is generally everyday. Plastic, depletion of resources. It used to seem that plastic was invented, how cool. Now you can sell a lot... And we're so into it that it's time to narrow the scope a bit.
We've become more, everyone has started living better in the world, on average. So everyone has started consuming much more. China didn't eat meat before, now they all eat meat. This is the maximum methane release into the atmosphere.
The development of our civilization implies the depletion of resources. So our main task now is, and it is a task of physics, chemistry: the task of all natural sciences to return to consumption, that is compatible with the life of this planet. We need to completely reformat how we create technology. We create technology to produce more and more. Now we need to think about how to produce technology, that will allow us to live on this planet. Live carefully, yes.
There is a wonderful word in Swedish "lagom." You have to live peacefully, without excess. Our endless consumption is an excess. So let's calm down with this consumption and live "lagom."
Friends, I decided to tell you a little about how we are implementing the idea, that we need to meet more often, which came to mind in the spring. Then I consulted with a huge number of comedians, how to start a stand-up career. And Sasha Nezlobin gave me the most valuable advice. He advised me to be myself.
"It's clear that, on the one hand," he said, "no one expects you to have brilliant humor, and on the other hand, I'm a cheerful person." And Sasha said that you need to give people a chance to breathe. This is how I exist, and you sometimes call it a collective therapy session, and sometimes an immersive-intellectual performance "Tell Gordeeva." And I continue to insist that this is unusual stand-up, in which there is a lot of personal. Come and see for yourself.
October 8 - Alicante, 9 - Valencia, 10 - Madrid, but there are no tickets left, 11 - Barcelona, 12 - Lisbon and 14 - Malaga. And then in November 29 - Hamburg, 30 - Dresden and December 1 - Prague. And then we'll take a break until spring. Ticket link in the description. See you.
The most important question, probably, now. If we're going to kill ourselves, it's good to know before that, where we came from? What is this Big Bang theory, what are these complex theories, that we all came from some point and then collapse into this point. Can you explain it in very simple terms? This is a revolutionary idea. Before there was Newton. The apple fell, gravity, so one body is attracted to another, the moon flies around the Earth because it is attracted. But Einstein had a truly grandiose idea, that in fact gravity is just the curvature of this space-time.
There is some kind of fabric of space-time, which under the influence of heavy objects is curved. Okay? Actually, gravity is when objects travel in this new landscape of curved space-time. It's not an interaction. For example, we have planet Earth, which is heavy, there are heavy Jupiter and Sun. They rotate around each other, because if you have a rubber sheet you put a metal ball in it, it will all bend.
If you launch another ball around, it will experience the fabric of space-time, which is curved by some other object. What does this idea lead to? Everything should eventually collapse into one point. The entire Universe should just collapse into one point and disappear. But this doesn't happen. The consequence of this brilliant idea of Einstein was that space should not be static. Space-time, it should expand or contract.
This is the whole idea. We used to think our space was static. Balls hang in space.
But it turns out, they don't just hang, they warp this space. But it's also constantly expanding at a huge speed. Right now. So it was once so small. So there was this point once. So there was a big bang.
Accordingly, the entire Universe was once a point. Then, when measurements were made, we discovered black holes. It used to be thought that a black hole was a stupid object, it couldn't exist. So what is a black hole? A black hole is a point with a giant mass. It's a point the size of one atom and the mass of a billion Suns. Black holes appear when stars die.
This is the final stage, when there was a star, it expands, contracts, expands. In the process of this expansion and contraction, all the elements appear. We are naturally made of stars. Stars expand, shrink, go through all stages, and finally under the weight of their own mass, they turn into a black hole.
Is it true that inside a black hole, space and time can swap places? Space flows, and time changes. I think there is no time inside a black hole at all. It disappears there. And there is no space either. By the way, there's a law of conservation of information. If something fell in there, information about it can't just disappear.
Nothing ever disappears in the Universe. Where is this information? There's an idea that information is somehow imprinted on the walls of the black hole, and then, the black hole can also emit Hawking radiation, and this information can be retrieved from there again. Following Einstein, Karl Schwarzschild appeared. Schwarzschild believed that if some traveler could survive the journey to the center of the black hole and not be torn apart into tens of thousands of tiny travelers, then at some point in one point, like in a kaleidoscope, the past and the future will converge, and he will be able to superimpose one on the other and see this information. And see God. Absolutely.
As for me, God doesn't exist. I immediately state that I am an atheist. No one knows what's inside.
I think that, like before the Big Bang, there was no time there either. When you know that nothing is happening, there is no time either. There's the concept of entropy. Entropy is when we move from order to chaos. Before there was order, and then everything started flying apart, exploding, entropy started to increase, which means time flowed.
That's why time travel backwards, it's most likely impossible, because you can't rewind entropy. Time travel forwards, yes, it's possible. You travel at the speed of light, missed all these years, they passed for you in a month, but for the inhabitants of planet, a millennium has passed. Here you are in the future. But you have to move very fast for that. And, the question, what's inside the black hole.
We've learned to visualize black holes. We've been measuring them recently, for a couple of years. We just got a picture of a black hole, which looks like the picture, that everyone knows from Interstellar. Just there, side view.
The anus of the Universe, in short. What explains the essence of a black hole? It's a circle, a donut, a bagel. It's a little fatter on top, a little less on the bottom. This explains, if you turn it on its side, there will be a hump. In Interstellar, Kip Thorne told the director how to show it. This is the man who recently won the Nobel Prize, told Hollywood how to show a black hole.
But when the source of thermonuclear energy is depleted, everything turns into a black hole, right? Everything collapses, yes. And that's what awaits us. What will the Universe turn into in trillions of years? The Universe is only 13.8 billion years old. If you take tens, hundreds of times longer, it's still flying apart at a huge speed.
There will be a lot of emptiness, individual protons will be flying around. Black holes will also disappear, it used to be thought that what fell in, disappeared. Stephen Hawking discovered that they radiate. If you radiate, you gradually lose. That is, black holes will even disappear.
There will just be a mass of space, about like in this apartment, or bigger. Particles will be flying around at a huge distance from each other. It will be boring. And that's it. Our human brain would like there to be some cyclicality. How can we imagine infinity? Infinity, if something pulsates, it grows, then shrinks, then grows.
Unfortunately, we probably can't promise that for our Universe. It will always expand. And eventually turn into an empty place. From your point of view, what is the most important thing physics should understand in the near future to change our vector of development? It seems like we've stalled a bit. No, I don't think the rate of discoveries has slowed down, if you look at the Nobel Prizes, significant prizes are awarded every year. Speaking of Nobel Prizes.
You, as a Swedish professor, nominate for these prizes... You nominate? Yes, yes. Any Swedish professor can nominate for the Nobel Prize. I see the Nobel Prizes as our Swedish contribution, our contribution to the recognition of global science. I personally know many members of the committee. I have a more personal relationship with the Nobel Prize.
I think it's our responsibility to give the Nobel Prize to worthy people of the world. Would you want a Nobel Prize yourself? I wanted it before. People who want a Nobel Prize, they're in science for the wrong reasons. You don't do science to get a prize, you do science to understand the Universe. For example, my case.
We did science for a long time to understand. We are now moving into science that can actually change something in human life. We're making the first prototype.
A machine that sorts plastic. With 100% purity. When we conquer plastic, we will know that it is the merit of Professor Dmitriev.
Yes, and we are creating a machine that we will supply to municipalities. Everyone who recycles plastic, all your dirty bags, everything you produce is brought to a large municipal pile. We'll give this pile a machine that will process 20-30 tons per hour. It will turn it into what? It will be clean piles that can then be turned back into plastic. The problem with plastic is not that it just needs to be recycled. It needs to be turned back into the same product.
Is this recycling? Yes, but, for example, you can make a sofa for your patio out of bottles. That doesn't count as 100% recycling. Ideally, a bottle is produced from a bottle.
The cycle is closed, you don't need more oil, you don't need more plastic production. But it's very difficult. That's why you need purity. You need to tear it off, because it's a different type of plastic. A bottle, a cap, and a label are three different types of plastic.
Everything should be sorted. If you throw it away and don't sort it, it's burned with the rest of the trash. Of course, it's better than just throwing it away, but it doesn't solve the recycling problem. Full-cycle industry requires pure materials. When the chemical industry produces plastic, it provides a pure material.
The industry wants a pure material, but it's difficult, if you have a bunch of mixed garbage coming in. How to separate it into clean, specific piles? Or the manufacturer says, I want to get my plastic back. For example, Hewlett Packard wants a printer cover, to produce a cover again. And will your machine be able to find it among thousands of other covers? It can find it.
First we will chop this cover into small pieces, and we will put all 100% of the pieces into a basket, which we will send back to HP, and they will make their cover again. And put the materials. Fantastic. Science can be about the laws of the universe, how a black hole works, and where we came from.
Or you can get super enjoyment from the fact that you know. We will recycle one hundred percent of the plastic. This is the real Gothenburg. Welcome. It's not just supposed to rain, but rain and wind.
A maritime city. It smells fresh, it smells of salt. The city isn't very big. But it's the second largest city in Sweden. All civilization is here. And look at the trams.
Yes, and trams. Trams run in Rostov, trams run in Gothenburg. They've been collecting them here since almost the 1950s. There are super modern ones, there are very old ones, there are ones where, to request a stop, you need to pull a rope that's stretched along the tram. All the trams have names.
They're cultural or sporting personalities of Gothenburg. There are three football teams in Gothenburg. At some point, all three of them were in the top league. The biggest one is IFK.
They have a blue and green flag. Football in Sweden started in Gothenburg. There's a very old club, Örgryte. IFK Gothenburg won the European Cup in the 1980s.
And the football legends are guys who worked in the port during the day, and played football in the evening. Or they worked at the ball bearing factory. And play in the evening.
Real working men, but at the same time they play football. Some of their names are on these trams. But if you don't support IFK Gothenburg, you're a fan of Örgryte or a fan of GAIS, there's another club, then you don't ride these trams.
You don't ride in the tram that bears the name of an IFK legend, on principle. What do you ride in then? I ride a bicycle. You don't have a car? We don't. Two kids in the family, and no car.
And it's not because we're crazy and ultra-green. In Gothenburg, it's organized so that to get to the center by car, you have to pay. So if you live close to the center, my work is 15 minutes by bike, my wife's is 20 minutes by bike.
Our car stood and rotted on the street for a long time. And then we just threw it away and decided to live without a car, because why do we need it. Let's go to the office.
These are flat organic molecules, they have iron in the center, each navel is an iron atom, and on top we added oxygen. And it switches the magnetic anisotropy of these atoms. In simple terms? The molecules sit on the surface, we organized them very cool, we add iron to beautifully organize them into flowers. Each iron atom can be a bit of magnetic memory. Only instead of a large piece of magnetic material there will be one atom.
It sits here, beautifully divided. Is it a tiny magnet? The question is, how are you going to switch this iron atom so that there is memory? You add oxygen, and then it becomes this way or that. Cool! These are small nickel discs.
The distance between them is about 200 nanometers. Light is drawn here, which has been converted into a special form, when it's no longer just light flying through space, but light that sits in the material. We just shine, and the light stays on these small discs. But the wavelength of light is 600 nanometers, and the disc size is 200. How? Light shouldn't see them, they're small. But thanks to clever physics, we made this light not only see them, but also enter and stay there.
This is one of the latest, the most interesting. We created a material called the Tellegen material. It was predicted in the 1930s. Bernard Tellegen, there was such an engineer.
At the same time, Landau described it theoretically, and the Soviet physicist Dzyaloshinskii demonstrated it experimentally, but at microfrequencies. The idea is that this light dipole is glued to a magnetic dipole. Usually how? What is light? It's a magnetic field and an electric field.
It goes through. But to make them together and parallel, it's very difficult to do. We created a material where they are together and parallel, and it all works with visible light. You could potentially make a window from this material, that's completely transparent on one side and completely black on the other.
The equation that describes this material, is the same physics that describes axions. What are axions? These are dark matter particles. It's not dark matter itself, but a model of it that we can create in the lab and study the properties of dark matter and at least learn what it is.
We know what equations it's described by because we know that the Universe is structured this way, not otherwise, there must be dark matter and dark energy in 76%. We don't know what it is specifically, but we know what equations describe all this. It's difficult to work with this experimentally, it's still space, and we're small, we're sitting on Earth here.
We created a material where you can just on your desk with the help of visible light from a light bulb, you can do experiments with matter, which is described by the same laws as dark matter. How did you feel when you did this? This is the first work, theoretical, and we're now doing the experimental one. I think I'll feel it when we can physically touch the thing. When there's physically a piece of this material, which breaks the symmetry of time and the symmetry of space.
You go one way, but not the other, sorry. When we get it, it will be a shock, of course. It will be super interesting. It's pure fundamental science. But nobody says that tomorrow we won't make plastic sensors out of this. What's more interesting to you? – Everything! You can't do applied science without fundamental science.
Because you have to use knowledge. And if you don't have it, then you have to create it yourself. For example, if you want to work with any kind of nanosensors, first you need to figure out how physics works.
If nobody does it for you. First, you add your part to the general cloud of fundamental science, then you decide, am I interested in doing something practical. The further we go there, the more it's just engineering.
You have to build these machines. And the envelope is rubber. There's not much left of nanotechnology there anymore.
But at the heart of it is fundamental science, it turned into applied science, then it goes to waste factories. You come to the waste factories and say, we have nanotechnology here. Can you explain why what Chubais showed Putin isn't nano? And what's going on in the world about the famous Russian nano? Maybe it was nano. Just low-functional.
You just take an Apple product and take this product, which I called a piece of crap, which it was. There was probably electronics that they bought somewhere in China. The idea itself is that you have to create something first in the world, something that drives technology forward.
In Russia there were very strong groups in our field, which is called nanophotonics and nanophotonics. In the MITP and in St. Petersburg, who also worked with nano. They were not connected to Rosnano, it was Moscow University. This was nanoscience. It didn't become nanotechnology.
For nanotechnology you need the participation of the state, and the participation of business, and the participation of society, as consumers of these technologies. For this, you need a brain that's bent on using effective, cutting-edge technologies to make life better. Is the idea of Russia to make life better? And what money do you do all this on? This is public funding.
This is the state and taxpayers, but also agencies, they get money from the state, which they distribute to us as grants. Private funds. One of the very large funds is the Wallenberg family. Raoul Wallenberg. Is this Raoul Wallenberg, who was tortured in the cellars of Moscow's Lubyanka? Yes, he was a member of this family. This is a family of diplomats, businessmen, investment bankers.
They very powerfully fund both fundamental and applied science. They're building a Swedish quantum computer. They're really working at the highest global level. They have a system for evaluating these grants. They are, this could be 10% of all Swedish funding. Of course, it's mainly state money.
It's believed that when you run, play sports, especially tennis, when you can't think about anything else except chasing the ball and hitting it, something happens in your brain at that moment that allows you to think really well afterwards. Any physical activity affects the brain. People who are physically active think better, their brains work better. That's a known fact. You don't have to play tennis, you can run, you can lift weights. You might think you should sit down, concentrate, and spend your days in a dusty room at a desk, scribbling with a pen and paper.
No. It's really important to play sports, especially if you're a knowledge worker. How many times a week are you here? At least twice, sometimes three times.
I have a partner we train with. We don't even play matches, we set up cones and exhaust ourselves with training. Serve training, forehand training, backhand training. The same way regular tennis players train, that I've seen in person. We have a tournament in Sweden, in Bastad. It's an ATP 250 tournament.
Last year, Andrei Rublev, our favorite Russian tennis player, won this tournament. This year, since the tournament was before the Olympics, Rafael Nadal came to this tournament. I had a chance to see him play. And I also saw how the tennis players train, how Andrei Rublev trains, and how Roman Safiullin trains.
We were sitting right in the front row. I cheered him on as best I could, yelling, "Come on, Andrei!" Andrei got mad at first. You know how Andrei responds. Andrei first cursed in Spanish, then he cursed in Russian.
And that was it, I realized everything was going to hell. We continued to support him as best we could. Andrei lost, left, and was very upset.
Why are Russian artists canceled, Russian scientists canceled, Russian athletes in all areas canceled, but Russian tennis players remain, participate everywhere, and there are no any questions? All these tennis players don't live in Russia, they're not very connected to the federation, or to government structures. Safiullin, they train in Marbella, Daniil Medvedev has lived in Monte Carlo his whole life. He's French, he speaks French perfectly. He hasn't lived there his whole life, he studied at MGIMO. He's sponsored by French brands, he speaks perfect French, the audience loves him, at the French Open Roland Garros, he's kind of French.
I think this affects the general perception of Russian tennis players, who play for themselves, not necessarily representing the motherland. It's a bit of a similar situation in science. We're on the side of the universe, we're not on the side of a particular country. There's no Swedish science, there's no Russian science, there's world science. And the more global it is, the better for that science. That's an interesting comparison to tennis.
The better you play, the better for the sport, the better for the viewers, for us, to enjoy your game. And it doesn't matter what country you're from. This is done in the name of sport, and we do something in the name of knowledge, which doesn't belong to any country. How did you manage to get on the list of traitors on Tsargrad TV channel? Yes, it's amazing. You left Russia, by all objective assessments, you are a traitor, a Russophobe.
You left, you're enjoying discovering the mysteries of the universe somewhere in Western countries. But my whole life, ever since I left Russia, I remained a representative, I'm half Ukrainian, half Russian, but we grew up in Rostov-on-Don, we're kind of Russian, we speak Russian. Just with the letter G.
Just with the letter G, which turned out to be connected to Ukraine. Now you speak with Ukrainians and feel at home. I represented Russia in the sense that everyone came to me and asked, "What does this mean?" What happened in Beslan, what does it mean? And then the Kursk sank. You tell us, you're Russian, you know. Tell us. Were you in charge of Russia here? Yes, I was.
It seemed like I didn't need to, I left, I'm a traitor. But I always projected the image that there are normal Russians, there's a normal country. Yes, this is a crime, this is a crime, this is embezzlement, this is a takeover.
I represented myself, this is what a Russian is like, you're communicating with me, right?" Yes, I'm normal, so there's hope. Our first wave of activism happened in 2012. The first time Navalny was arrested and we went out to protest demanding, Release Navalny, return the elections. That was 2012.
We went out here, in Gothenburg. Why is it important to you in Gothenburg that Navalny be released and the elections be returned? I want everything to be good in Russia. Why? I feel like I'm part of Russian culture, my language is Russian.
And I was born and raised there, a significant part of my life is connected to it. And Russia, where we grew up, and our fifth school, that's important too. And we want things to be good there.
Of course, I read Navalny, his Live Journal blog. We translated his blog into English, I was involved in that. Now it's Biden who calls Yulia Navalnaya. But back then, it was just Alexei, who was trying in his blog to get through to Western opinions. We discussed it with him, we just had a short exchange, like how we could write to European politicians, how this could be achieved in Sweden. I felt a shared interest with Navalny, I felt we were on the same wavelength, I understood him.
And when he was arrested, and when 2012 began, I felt I had to participate in this. But what is this? What is this part of the Russian soul, that's even half Ukrainian by blood? What is this inner call in a person who doesn't work with Russia, where they were last decades ago? What was it? Maybe I needed to do it for myself. Of course, it didn't have any impact, what difference does it make, 10 people standing at the Russian consulate in Gothenburg? Then the war started, Russia attacked Ukraine, everyone was shocked. What should we do? We went out.
Naturally, Ukrainians came out, and they came out every day. In Gothenburg, in front of the consulate, the former Russian consulate, Ukrainians protested every day. At first, it was those who live here, then people who came from elsewhere joined them. And we were there too. There was such tension because there were also Belarusians with us. We were like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, we came to protest with those anti-war flags.
And I felt I needed to speak at this rally. I started representing Russia again, normal Russia. And who am I? I'm just some physicist. I sit in the lab, and here I have to come out. I went.
Some Ukrainians were shouting, "Screw him, he's Russian." Then they started listening to what I was saying. That's our mission. We're normal people who are against this nightmare. And we have to speak out.
And then it just took off. We started going out with Ukrainians and without Ukrainians, both for Navalny's freedom and "Putin is a murderer". At one point, we found out this list was published. Tsargrad published it with completely idiotic comments.
And there she is, she came to Russia. Look, he has dyed hair. About me, it just says, Dmitriev Alexander Vladimirovich, born in 1975. Wow, they dug up secret information. Yeah, yeah. And my photo, by the way, is cool.
I'm wearing an FBK Free Navalny sweatshirt there. And we reported it to the Swedish police. Well, what else? It's dangerous. What is the mechanics of publishing this list? Where does the list of people living in Sweden come from? How does it get transported to Russia? Does the embassy have any reflection on this or not? If you're accused of something that's popular in Russia now, you received a free Russian education, but now you work for the benefit of a capitalist country. You could say the same thing to any student in any European country. If you studied in France, you're directly obligated to give back to your homeland...
That's how they say it in Russia. Well, it's wrong that that's how they say it. Education is important for the state.
The fact that there are educated people is a huge plus for the state. The more educated people there are in society, the healthier the society. But your education, our fifth school and the physics department of Rostov University, did it turn out to be convertible in the end? Strangely enough, yes.
We studied at school, then I followed in Kira Serebryannikova's footsteps, she graduated from our school and with honors from the physics department of Rostov University. What does the physics department give you? Solzhenitsyn graduated from the physics department. Do you want to be a writer, do you want to be a famous director? Get degree in physics, become a person. Of course, my parents are in physics, my family had a huge influence on my choice.
We had a great physics teacher. Physics was interesting, but I wasn't a genius, neither in physics nor in mathematics. It just came easily to me.
In my first year, I was an excellent student in the physics department. But then the wild nineties started. As a result, I was a very bad student. I was a C student, barely getting by on crutches and supports, and crawled through. And I never planned on doing science. Okay, we got a degree, and then we're going to continue with the advertising business, we're going to continue with investment banking, everything that was going on back then.
Buy and sell. But then I decided I didn't want to live in Russia. My parents lived in Brazil. I thought, what am I doing in Rostov? Why? What am I even doing here? Family, Putin.
That was 1999. The 1998 crisis had passed, the travel agency wasn't doing very well. The dollar rose six times. Those who remember know. And then there was corruption. Why do I need all this? I can do something else.
When I left, I was on the SV train, Rostov-Moscow. In that compartment, we were traveling with a guy, with whom we discussed my future plans for business in Brazil. I arrived in Brazil, and my dad said, Try taking some courses here now. We both learned Portuguese at the same time, I could take a theoretical electrodynamics course in Portuguese. At the university. Because the formulas are the same.
Because we all speak French. Family with French roots. And knowing French, naturally, it's easy to learn Latin, Portuguese. And my dad, without any pressure, "Try it, take a course." It was interesting there.
And then we started, I worked in the lab, we gave practical lessons. You take, you mix materials in an iron chamber, and you mix them very hard, and they start to fuse. And my first article appeared. 2000. A decent journal like that. Then we moved back to Europe, to France.
The place where my parents worked until they retired. The European synchrotron in Grenoble, where my dad was the head of the line. And I just sat in the office there.
And at that moment, my dad suggested I apply to graduate school. Out of ten or twenty applications sent, there were many rejections. Then one person came up and said, "My employee is doing measurements on this synchrotron now. He'll come by to see you." It was the director of the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart. And that's how I became a graduate student.
It was a huge stroke of luck, of course, that we immediately started producing crazy beautiful images of this kind, molecules, iron atoms. The field is called scanning tunneling microscopy. You scan individual molecules. It's like surface chemistry. And when you talk to chemists, they just gloss over it all, but we say, "No, we see them." Here's one molecule, here's another, they're connecting, here's the reaction happening.
Of course, I ended up in a magical place where there was an immediate explosion of scientific results. But it was very difficult to resist and not become a scientist. One of the turning points in the development of physics was the emergence of the concept of quantum mechanics. At first, everything was logical, and then nothing made sense anymore. Yes, we have to accept that the world is quite strange. We accepted that space-time exists, that there is no gravity, it's simply a journey through a changed space-time landscape.
We also have to accept that there are strange interactions, that everything is determined by probabilities. What is quantum mechanics and why was its emergence revolutionary and so upset Einstein? He didn't fully accept it? He partially accepted it, partially not. These disputes, for example, there is still no quantum theory of gravity.
And how do you even describe this using probability function operators? The idea that energy is quantized, it exists... Energy is quantized into specific values, instead of being continuous. In classical mechanics, the movement and state of matter are both continuous. But here, a particle can be both a wave and a particle at the same time.
We are now describing an electron. This isn't what Rutherford thought. There is a nucleus. They used to think it was like a positive lump of dough, and electrons were like raisins in it. That's school physics.
This is what I stopped at. That's the atomic model. That planetary model. There's a nucleus, and electrons rotate around it. But now it turns out that electrons don't fly around, but it's just a cloud with some distribution probabilities. Everything is getting stranger and stranger. Many physical laws are only explained by quantum mechanics.
So we just have to accept it. The most important law of quantum mechanics is that nothing... Nothing can be determined simultaneously, position and velocity. You determine everything by probabilities.
For example, there is a room, and if there is an electron, every point in the room is described by some probability of the electron being there. That's quantum mechanics. Everything is described by probabilities.
Here we are close to the famous Schrödinger's cat meme. Schrödinger also tried to describe the laws of quantum mechanics, he didn't succeed, and he went down in history for this cat. Can you explain what's going on with the cat? It's the same with any photons or... By measuring you change the system. You look at it, and it becomes different. Until you look at it, you can't say if it's one or the other.
But what's about cat? This is a way to explain that there can be both life and death at the same time. Until we measure it, it's not determined. And by the act of measurement we define it.
We either kill it or keep it alive. The cat itself doesn't exist. And it exists only as probabilities.
By measurement, we narrow the probability and choose one of them. So is the cat there or not? Until we measure it, we don't know. And when we measure it, it becomes either alive or dead.
Students here wear these overalls. It's a dedication for the young. The color corresponds to a specific program. Mechanical engineering, water, and something else. If you see guys with big cardboard things, with a zero drawn on them, that means you're a zero.
You've just started. You need to mark the squares, which assignments you've done, jumped into the fountain, and other silly things. Is the education here free too? Of course.
It's enough to be a citizen of the EU. What language is the education in? In Swedish? Depending on the courses. Mostly, the first three years are in Swedish. Then there are programs, workshops, the third, fourth, and fifth years. They're in English. How many students are there at your university? 13-15 thousand.
For a city of 600 thousand people? Yes. 13 thousand university students? Yes, but many are from outside the city. If you want to become an aeronautical engineer, this is the best program at Chalmers, and if you want to be a biochemist, then there's a very good program at the University of Gothenburg or at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Students here are mobile, they travel all over Sweden. Does a high school student from Russia have a chance to study in Gothenburg? Yes, that's a good question. Of course, there's tuition.
It's much less than American and British universities. Have you met any Russian students here? I meet people at the graduate and postdoc levels. There are a lot of people here from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The problem is that the government's policy towards foreigners has become stricter. It's not specifically against Russians.
It just doesn't work well and is slow. You have a work contract, but you wait for a visa renewal for a year or a year and a half. It's very important to be part of this scientific community, it's very important to communicate with people, if you have such a situation with the migration agency, it's very good for your career.
There's no such forbidden list, saying Russia is an aggressor, and we're striking it off. There is a difference between people and states. What advice would you give to a young man from Rostov-on-Don now, who wants to make it in the scientific world? It's gotten a bit more difficult now, because being from a state that started a war, but 5-6 years ago, there were a lot of people from Rostov, working at the Synchrotron, working at CERN, in Europe, in America. Back then, people came and said, "We don't want to stay here, we don't want to build our careers here, because things are great for us."
It's fine for us in Rostov and in Moscow. I think they may have regretted it, perhaps. And if a person wants to build a career now, is it possible to do so within Russia? How connected Russian and the global science? Now, perhaps, there's no such thing as Russian science integrated into the global community. For example, the Hitler University.
We can't collaborate with Russian universities, where the rector signed a letter supporting the attack on Ukraine. It's just impossible. We have official rules, where we can't collaborate with those who have supported the war. This doesn't apply to individual scientists. Individual scientists can be very different people.
Some support it, some don't, or some are doing science in a shell. But as an official organization, if you say, what is Russian science and its universities. How can you collaborate with that? Of course not. I think that Russian science is not represented anywhere now.
But individuals exist. I'm not a Russian scientist and never have been. But there are people who are.
They get their degrees here and work as postdocs, And not just Russians, but also Belarusians. We're in a similar situation with them. Deterministic thinkers used to believe that physics was a science that would explain something about matter. Everything that happened in the past would become clear. And we could predict everything in the future. But it turned out that physics is like poetry.
It speaks in metaphors and doesn't explain anything. Everything that remained unclear was put into the category of religion. What can physicists trying to explain the world do now? I don't agree that physics hasn't explained anything.
We've made great progress in explaining even phenomena that don't directly relate to us, like black holes and how the universe is structured. The existence of black holes and the curvature of spacetime don't affect our daily lives as much as plastic. Physics has advanced significantly in this area too. This mix of quantum physics and physics explaining the structure of the universe at large scales. It's no coincidence that many Nobel Prizes have been awarded to astrophysics and cosmology.
People ask, "Where's the practical application?" Usually with the Nobel Prize, you first discover something, it enters everyday life, and 20 years later, it's everywhere. For example, the latest prizes were for quantum dots. You turn on TV, and there are quantum dots. They were discovered in the 80s, people were just playing with sizes. Wow, LEDs are everywhere, white light, it's all quantum dots.
Why did they get the Nobel Prize for that? And when you get the Nobel Prize for quasars people ask, "Why? How is that?" To answer your question, we've made great progress in understanding such global questions as... Where did we come from? And where we go? Now I can say that there are a lot of open questions. Physics doesn't provide answers to everything. But you don't even know everything about light. What do you mean? Wave or particle? We learned that it's both a wave and a particle. But that's a very counterintuitive concept.
All of quantum mechanics is a very counterintuitive concept. Even all the concepts about space-time and curvature and expansion of the universe. The human brain can't even comprehend it.
It's okay if you don't understand how it works. A lot of people are working on it. They want to understand the foundations of the universe. We, of course, deal with more down-to-earth things.
Nano is an example of a more down-to-earth approach to physics. We use the laws of quantum mechanics, of course, but we turn them into devices, into technology. We have super-fast magnetic memory or sensors for plastic.
Or solar panels. They used to have 15% efficiency, now it's 16.5%. It seems like, "Well, so what?" But in reality, it's the most powerful engine of progress for civilization. Our existence is at risk. The temperature is rising, and there's too much waste. We are saving this planet.
We might not know how black holes function, but saving our planet is our task. Are nanotechnologies used in warfare? That's a good question. No one has asked me to do anything for warfare.
In Europe, there's even an agency that gives money for projects, where civilian scientists can do something for defense. For example, camouflage. It's like war, but on the other hand, it's to prevent our guys from being killed. Swedish, in this case. You don't create offensive weapons, but use technology to save human lives.
There was a project like that, I didn't participate. But, yes, it's possible. I'm not sure truly advanced technologies are really needed for offensive weapons. It's enough to simply stay at the level of good electronics, good sensors. Nano is a bit too much there.
I have a feeling that any physical discovery sooner or later becomes a tool for killing. For example, Fritz Haber saved a lot of people, he discovered chlorine, as a fertilizer to prevent famine. But then the same chlorine killed a lot of people in World War I, and then it turned into gas, which was used to kill in the Auschwitz chambers. Or the example of the atomic bomb. That's a bit backwards.
First, they fundamentally discovered nuclear fission, decay, neutrons flying. Beautiful. But then it immediately turned into a bomb-making program in Germany. Then the Americans quickly bombed it all and created their own bomb, but nuclear energy also emerged at the same time. It's more of a reverse example.
Our world is developing in a positive direction. Fewer people are dying in the world now than 50 years ago. The number of victims of World War II is incomparable to the number of victims of all wars happening right now. It's horrific what's happening in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, but 20 million people aren't dying.
All technologies lead to improving life on planet Earth. We started living too well, and so we started destroying our own planet. Maybe technologies lead to the death of people, a lot of people are dying right now from climate change. We wanted to improve, but we developed it so much, that now we don't know what to do with plastic. But I'm optimistic and believe that science will solve these problems. In our lifetime? In our lifetime.
We saw it with COVID, when they really took everyone to task, when humanity realized that it was all about to start, the vaccine appeared right away. Of course, scientists had been working for the previous 10 years, everyone ignored them, no one was interested. When the time came, they immediately turned it into an industry, millions of doses, millions of human lives saved. We haven't had an example like that for a long time, when humanity came together and solved a problem.
For example, the climate problem, there are constant negotiations, discussions, how many summits there have been, Copenhagen, Paris. Agreements are very slow to come, but when it really gets hot, we see what humanity is capable of. Yesterday we were standing at the bus stop, this wasn't filmed, a tiny bus drove by and you said it was a special bus, which takes disabled people and elderly people to where they need to go for free. The social benefits here are the best, you've ever seen in your life.
Yes, absolutely. Let's start with the elderly. The concept here took shape in the 70s, that if you are elderly, you have the right to live independently.
You shouldn't depend on your family and children. You should live so that you can live alone. Of course, Sweden is also a nation like that. People love being alone.
The concept is that your old age should be provided for so that you are completely independent of family ties. You should have an apartment, you should have money for food. Pensioners are independent people, who live independent lives of their own. If they want to go shopping or to the hospital, they call this little bus. This doesn't mean that a son or brother has to come get them.
It's a kind of compensation for the weather. Yes, yes. But it's really warm. Also the concepts of equality between men and w
2024-10-12 19:35
