Looking to connect with new people, mathematician Seth Cottrell sets up an ‘Ask a Mathematician’ booth at Burning Man.

Seth Cottrell earned his PhD in mathematics from the Courant Institute at NYU.  His research is in quantum information and he teaches at New York City College of Technology.  For ten years, Seth has talked to complete strangers about math and physics and written about it at
askamathematician.com.  His new book is “Do Colors Exist?: And Other Profound Physics Questions.”

This story originally aired on December 21, 2018 in an episode titled “New Friends: Stories about unexpected connections”.

Story Transcript

A few years ago, I found myself in the middle of the desert desperately trying to answer the simplest question anybody had ever asked me.  The guy asking the question, he had these long dreadlocks and he was wearing an old beat-up t-shirt and nothing else.  And his question was, “Why?” 

Now, listen.  I know exactly what you're thinking.  That’s a really good question.  At the time, I couldn’t answer it immediately.  I was a little, let’s say I was distracted.  But what I'd like to do tonight is maybe put that question in a little bit of context and take another running leap at answering it again. 

Now, if you've ever heard of Schrödinger’s Cat or Spooky Action at a Distance or entanglement, the really weird stuff from quantum mechanics, that’s what I do and it’s a lot of fun.  I’m a quantum information theorist.  I got started down this dark and treacherous road because one of my deepest passions all my life has been finding somebody who’s an expert or just knows more than I do about whatever and just pelting them with questions.  My dentist, the dentist who still returns my phone calls is a saint. 

Then when I was in high school I figured that all expertise were kind of equivalent, so when one of my school counselors asked if I'd like to join her and a group of students for a spirit vision I said, “I got a lot of questions.”  She claimed that you can enter a meditative trance and then you could talk to just about anything and they, whales and wolves, will be able to answer your questions about the universe at large.

Now, the first claim turned out to be pretty true.  You really can enter these states of mind where you feel like you're talking to dogs and whatnot.  The second claim turned out to be just totally false.  I mean, coyote never knew anything that I didn’t know, and I mean basic stuff, like what’s for lunch or where did I lose my keys.  I mean nothing at all.  I was a little disillusioned after that. 

So when I started hearing about all of the crazy predictions of modern physics, if something goes fast it shrinks and particles can be in multiple places at the same time, I was a little incredulous.  But it turns out that physics is a little bit different from spirit visions.  You can keep asking questions. 

And if you're asking a physicist, and they're even decently responsible about it, they'll never say things like, “You must search within yourself,” or, “Trust me.”  They'll say, “Well, listen.  Just try it yourself.”  And that is too damn tempting to pass up. 

Now, many of you may realize this already.  It turns out that one of the difficulties of physics is you got to learn how to speak math.  At least at first that’s a difficult thing.  You see, math is how our mental reach can exceed its grasp.  It’s how we can take lots of tiny little insignificant things and build them up into something that’s so profound it doesn’t fit into our heads all at once.  So I studied math, obviously. 

Studying math ended up landing me in New York where I met my extremely New York friend Spencer.  Now, he and I shared an office together and we learned math for a couple of years and so naturally we got to be pretty close.  So when he was invited to Burning Man, it just made sense that he would invite his most California friend to come along. 

Now, I cannot begin to describe how massively unprepared we were.  I knew that it was in the desert and there were some hippies and that story from a minute ago about spirit animals might go over well, and while that is not untrue, it’s really not a complete picture at all. 

When we were driving out, Spencer kept leaning his head out the window and smelling the air and saying, “You know, it smells like flowers and sugar out here.”  And there is nothing, I mean it is a salt flat, there is just nothing at all.  And I’m smelling exactly that.  Nothing. 

Then something occurs to me that I’m pretty sure what he was smelling, for the first time in a long time, was not New York.  If you've ever seen a native New Yorker in a Walmart for the first time, it’s amazing.  You can almost hear David Attenborough in the back of your head.  Suffice it to say we were massively unprepared.

But our lack of preparedness really complemented each other.  For example, I remembered to bring instant coffee, which turned out to be very important.  And Spencer remembered to bring food and shelter and water.  I would have figured it out after a couple of days but it was really good that he was there. 

Now, Burning Man has a longstanding tradition of giving back to the community.  They call it a gift economy.  Basically, you show up and you give stuff to whoever happens to be wandering by, usually services instead of stuff.  Now, we couldn’t fix your car, we couldn’t cook a meal without a can opener, but what we could do is talk for a really long time about our research and what we have been studying.  I've been harassing people with questions for my entire life.  I figured, hell, maybe other people want to do the same thing. 

So we picked a particularly empty patch of nothing, nailed some wooden stakes into the ground and duct taped a rug/piece of cloth to it for shade and nailed up a little sign that said, ‘Ask a Mathematician, Ask a Physicist’ and just sat there to see if anything would happen. 

The environment out there is exactly as unpleasant as you imagine it is.  There's a hell of a lot of sun.  Every time the wind blows it kicks up these stinging dust storms so everyone is wearing goggles and these gas mask filters.  It’s awful.  But despite that, we had just this constant stream of people showing up at the booth and asking questions. 

We met this massive variety of people.  We met geophysicists, engineers, a couple of naked people, some shamans, just ran the gamut. 

The very first person who showed up, first person, first day had this amazing juxtaposition of this very festive happy hat and the saddest face I've ever seen in my life.  This guy saunters up and he says, “You guys, how do I find the love of my life?” 

I had not seen that coming.  The obvious answer, the correct answer is, “Dude, you got to go out and meet everybody on earth.  Now, presumably, one of those people is going to be the love of your life.” 

He was a pretty reasonable, rational fellow so he decided that that seemed a little bit unfeasible so we did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation.  Crazy, I know.  It’s probably not the best idea.  But, luckily, we had some math in our corner.  There's a very old math problem called the Secretary Problem or, in this case a little bit more applicably, the Fuzzy Suitor Problem.  It allows you to find the best of n things when you encounter them sequentially when you don’t necessarily know what ‘best’ is.  By the way, ‘thing’ could be anything.  It could be pogs or Beanie Babies or human beings with souls and life stories.  Anything at all. 

It turns out that there is an optimal solution.  You pick out n people, doesn’t really matter who, pick out n people, date the first n over e of them, that’s the about the first third, and then immediately marry the first person after that third who you like better than any of those first people.  This doesn’t come up a lot but it turns out that this algorithm works a hell of a lot better, firstly, if they say yes and if they don’t find out about the algorithm. 

The thing is this is not an ideal solution.  It is merely the optimal solution.  It works about a third of the time so I thought this was kind of a disappointing answer.  I expected him to be like, “Okay,” and just wander off, but he just lit up.  I guess it’s nice to know that the problems you have, other people have been thinking about them for hundreds of years and have come up with terrible answers.  But they're still answers and it warms your heart. 

We had some questions we find have been haunting people for just decades, I mean keeping them up at night and driving wedges into their marriages and turning bar bets violent.  One woman came riding by in her bike and, when she saw the sign over the booth, she was so excited she got off of her bike without slowing down.  She ran up and sat down with us before the bike even fell over.  She just slides to a halt and just freezes. 

She gets her thoughts together and she goes, “Okay.  If the universe exploded out of a pinhead, why can we still see light from the Big Bang?” 

That’s a profound question.  It was a good question. 

So the light she's talking about is the cosmic microwave background.  It’s this kind of dull glow that’s coming at us from every direction all the time.  And her friends have been giving her shit about this for years and making fun of her.  Like, “It’s established science.  You just don’t get it.  Get smarter.” 

But she had a solid logical point.  Her thinking was this.  If light is the fastest thing in the universe then if everything exploded out of a pinhead then the matter in the universe right now should form kind of a ball and a center of the sun and whatever we can see is kind of floating around in there somewhere, and the light, the initial light should be forming a shell around that and moving out.  It’s moving away from us.  We shouldn’t be able to see it.  Solid reasoning. 

Well, it turns out that the resolution of this is the Big Bang didn’t happen in some particular place.  It happened everywhere.  And that expansion isn’t because things are flying away from an explosion, it’s because the space itself is expanding, which is freaky enough.  That’s a lot harder to convey that ‘bang’. 

Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for us, we had a bunch of dirt on the ground and some sticks and we could draw pictures and diagrams and debate it for a while.  Once she had a solid grip on the idea and she was so excited, she was ecstatic, she immediately started making lists of all the I-told-you-sos she was going to be doling out.  She gets on her bike and rides off. 

Learning something new and profound and true about the universe, it’s good for your soul but it feels so much better when it means that somebody else is wrong.  Honestly, that’s why half of people go into physics is just so they can win bar bets. 

A couple of years ago, we had a psychic come up to the booth, and I mean the whole nine yards psychic.  She was the kind of person you could see her coming from a mile away and somehow you just know she was psychic.  She had the scarves and the bangles and the little eyeball tattoos all over the place.  I mean, super psychic. 

And came up and she said, “Listen, how do vibrations heal people?” 

I said, “I’m glad you asked.  You can use a sonogram to look inside of people and see what’s wrong and there's some procedures for pulverizing kidney stones without surgery using sound.” 

Now, you're a California crowd so you're probably already aware that she did not mean ‘sound’.  She meant vibrations in the ‘good vibes’ sense.  Of course I didn’t mean healing energy when I was talking about sound.  But the thing is we got to sit down and have a conversation.  It was actually really nice.  She got to learn a little bit about sound, and who’s that going to hurt, and I got to learn a little bit about crystal healing which is shockingly involved. 

She had twelve rings.  For those of you who understand the Pigeonhole Principle, you know why that’s funny.  She had twelve rings with twelve different stones on them that all did something very specific that I can’t begin to reconstruct for you right now. 

But I really like talking to people that I just categorically disagree with, if it’s a friendly conversation.  It really underscores the fact that what is true almost never has anything in common with what sounds true or even what’s reasonable.  I personally, fervently believe that an incomprehensibly long time ago, the earth was populated by giant bird monsters that all died out in a fiery death when a mountain fell on Mexico. 

And the things I've learned about quantum theory are so massively bat shit I don't even bring them up in public anymore.  So compared to that, believing that the tiger eye grows wealth and the I think it was a fractured quartz does a good job of storing positive energy, that’s pretty tame. 

So when a conversation starts to swerve vibrational, so to speak, it’s nice to be able to say, “Well, here’s an experiment that demonstrates such and such and here’s the thinking behind this.”  In other words, try it yourself. 

To actually circle back to my naked friend’s question why, well, I like to wander around in public and just talk to people about math and science and physics in public parks or subway cars or in the middle of the desert, if the case may be.  I do it because it humanizes the whole experience.  We’re not talking about these wild Eldric symbols and abstraction.  We’re talking about here now, this stuff where we are.  And it’s not information that’s being handed down from on high.  It’s a bunch of people, regular people walking around, arguing with each other about this big, crazy world. 

Now, all of us have questions.  Most of us feel a little bit embarrassed to ask them because we always feel like we’re going to be stupid, but the people around you have questions and you have questions and you may as well turn to them, not right now, but you may as well turn to them and ask.  And even if you don’t know the answers, hell, you're talking about them and that’s pretty nice. 

But don’t trust me.  Try it yourself.  Thank you very much.