Stephon Alexander: Jazz & Physics
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Marianna
I’m here with Stephon, watching the sunset from the Brooklyn patio. We’ve been discussing his new book, Fear of a Black Universe: Reflections on the Dark Side of the Cosmos, as well as where we think ideas come from and what it means to work at the intersection of several fields. Thanks for making the time, Stephon.
We’ve talked about how creativity is a state we can dip into, and many people try to capture and recreate the experience on command. Do you have a routine or ritual for entering into a creative headspace?
Stephon
I do. I try to create a situation that involves elements of play and openness, so as to avoid censoring my own ideas - that fosters a creative headspace. There are specific spots that invite play and openness for me...visiting the beach in Tobago, for instance. I find an isolated beautiful Caribbean beach with crystal clear water, go for a swim, observe and play in the waves. Spaces like that keep me from censoring my own ideas, which is critical to the process of creativity.
Sometimes if I’m working on a problem or project prior to finding myself in such a space, some of my ideas will go offline - so when I eventually find myself at a beach or another such space of openness and play, [the ideas] will just show up and way through will just show up as well.
Marianna
Do you have any habits you've built for yourself to foster creativity?
Stephon
I have two consistent daily habits I’ve had throughout my life since I was eighteen and in college. By the way, I was a cross country runner all the way through college. The first is the habit of getting out for a good run in the mornings, the habit of just even going for a long walk - the act of getting physically active. I do something like that every day. I’ve also been doing insight meditation twenty minutes a day every day, and sometimes I go to day-long meditations. I’ve been practicing consistently.
Marianna
Do you find that meditating and being active outside helps you think more creatively?
Stephon
Absolutely. Everyone must have their way I’m sure, to apply the principles behind those two habits. Many paths to realize it, but for me, those two things have been consistently a part of my life.
Marianna
And we were just talking about this - where do you think ideas come from?
Stephon
I love that question because I’m going to reverse your question. Thinking cannot access the ideas. It’s beyond thought. The converse, in other words of your question, is that thought itself can’t access it, ideas come from a place of no thought. And that’s what I find interesting.
Marianna
So when do your best ideas hit you?
Stephon
Well, you need to prepare yourself for when the ideas hit. In other words, it could be that great ideas are showing up all the time, but you just aren't paying attention to how it might connect - so you have to prepare yourself. In my case, there are certain kinds of math and skills to hone, so that I have prepared myself for the ideas to hit.
Marianna
What are you working on honing and exploring right now?
Stephon
I’m working on ideas around quantum gravity, the unification of quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity, we have very good reasons to know they should come together. Within my physics work and that field, I need to make sure there's personal enjoyment in using all those tools so that I can feel open, see the landscape, and know how to take it to the next level.
Having a good command of all the techniques and technology of that field, it forms a big part of the foundation necessary to achieve breakthroughs.
Marianna
And you do you think that, then, the overlap you have music and physics affects you coming up with ideas and breakthroughs?
Stephon
Absolutely. Hard to explain, but I say the hardest thing I do is play the saxophone. Being a musician challenges me a lot more than physics (laughter). There is a whole science behind the music in various genres, it extends forever in my mind.
For example, the logical internal consistency that happens in bebop because you are taking western harmony and African harmony and you are merging them and need mastery of those traditions. There’s a whole science to music that feels infinite. Just music, in general, is infinite. That’s much harder for me than physics. But there’s a science in both spaces, that’s for sure.
Marianna
Do you have a process for putting yourself in a place where ideas will come to you?
Stephon
That’s an interesting question. Half of my family is from Trinidad. They were coffee estate growers in Trinidad. They have great coffee in Trinidad. The first time I apparently drank coffee was when I was three years old. I have this deep connection to coffee all my life. Having a cortado. A Cubano. I love it all.
So for me, being in a quiet cafe with some really good coffee, the ritual of drinking coffee and sitting with myself, and then playing around with ideas in that space, invites creativity. Sometimes in that space, ideas strike.
Marianna
Do you work a lot in coffee shops?
Stephon
Yes. I’m a regular at Bolt Cafe in Providence, Rhode Island - upstairs from the RISD museum. It’s a beautiful cafe. And they are serious about their coffee. I’m doing two things that I love - thinking of new ideas and drinking coffee - at the same time and maybe that amplifies the effect for both.
Marianna
Now if you’d like to share a story. What unexpected turns did your life take to lead you to where and who you are today?
Stephon
Great one. I started my life as a young musician. I was in middle school and I was in the school band and got nominated to attend the School of the Performing Arts in New York - you know, Fame, it does exist. My teacher, a jazz musician, nominated me, and this was a big deal for me at the time. My middle school was in the Bronx, John Philip Sousa Junior High School PS 142, in the Edenwald Projects. It was one of the toughest middle schools in the United States. It was no joke.
Interestingly enough, a lot of great hip hop artists were from that area too. DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Slick Rick, all from that part of the Bronx. Point was, I was there in the music project and our principal was Dr. Hill Brindle, he was a professor at city college and decided he wanted to become a principle of this school. He was this big military guy, 6 7”, wore a suit, greeted me with “my man! Let’s see your bookbag!” (laughter) Every week, each grade would wear a white shirt and black slacks, and we would have an assembly featuring a special guest.
So one day, the special guest is a man in an orange jumpsuit holding a boombox, we thought he was a clown! We were all dancing, laughing at the hip hop beats, and he puts the boombox down and says “Hi, I’m Fred Gregory, and I’m the first black astronaut. I’m here to visit. Do you guys like this beat? Cool. Well, if I take this radio apart, I understand how it works. That’s power.” I was stunned. For the first time, I met a scientist, an astronaut who looked like me!
That moment was when it hit me - wait, I could do that! That looks like a lot of fun! This guy was an astronaut, but he was talking like he was from my neighborhood. Who would've thought that would happen to me? Up until that point, I was on my path to becoming a jazz musician. I would have been a broke saxophonist (laughter). Instead, I became a theoretical physicist.
Marianna
Has your musical practice ever led to a breakthrough in physics for you?
Stephon
Small breakthroughs, yeah! One time as a postdoc, I was playing a sax solo in a club in London, my eyes closed and I remember “ I don’t want to think about what I’m playing”. To zone out, I sometimes would hold an image in my head, and move my fingers in sequence to that image. I had been working on a physics problem earlier that day, thinking a lot about geometry and algebra, and I must have been playing with that pattern in my head. And as I played, it manipulated itself in this way, where when I played with it, later on, it helped me find some new solutions to the physics problem.
Marianna
How has working at the intersection of being a physicist and a musician affected your thinking?
Stephon
It’s not obvious, because we have the habit of looking for conceptual connections, but pick up a tenor saxophone, moving your fingers to play notes, using chord sequences. Within that, you’re experiencing the flow of time during your improvisation. For me, the shared physicality connects the two. My playing translates into my work in physics because there are an embodiment and an embodied knowledge of physical concepts. Coordination connecting to your mind. Perhaps this enables pulling up new things into your imagination, from quantum physics, jazz music, what have you.
Marianna
I’m curious. You talked about physicality connecting music and physics - do you find yourself driven by gut or instinctual reactions in your work? Does your body respond to certain ideas? Is this an important part of your process?
Stephon
You know, yes. Physicality extends to both. If you're doing something, like solving physics problems, that appears to be very focused, but that control can be a relaxed physical control. Quiet control. High awareness and control of your physical state.
Marianna
Maybe then intuition is the gathered threads of multiple parallel streams of thinking that we can’t access consciously, but that somehow, through some other channel not visible to us, we are internalizing all that data and it’s coming through as intuition, as a gut feeling. The connection to the physicality of thinking.
Stephon
(Laughter) I mean, yes, we have to discuss that more afterward. Yeah.
Marianna
Back to physics. Anything specific you’re working on right now?
Stephon
Yes. Bohr Complementarity Principle is something I’m really trying to wrap my head around right now. [Complementarity principle, in physics, is the tenet that a complete knowledge of phenomena on atomic dimensions requires a description of both wave and particle properties.]The textbooks all claim to understand it…the thing that works really well in physics is that there's a mysteriousness between some types of mathematics and physical reality. I don't claim to understand it. My mentor Leon Cooper doesn't claim to understand it either. It might manifest itself in how we are plugged in and coming up with answers. Albert Einstein said it right - the most incomprehensible thing about the universe, about the world, is that it’s at all comprehensible. That we are the ones comprehending it.
Marianna
Yes. How immense the universe is, and we’re stuck in our 3D bodies, viewing the world from our limited perspective.
Stephon
Yes. There’s a space, not a physical space, but you tap into some area and you have to be ready to recognize it when you “see” it. Einstein’s great insight was something anyone could have thought of, but he was the one to recognize it. If I’m in a situation where there's no gravity, and you realize that’s equivalent to falling, it is free to fall. Equivalent to zero gravity. So how can motion equal non-motion?
And his great idea was to question, “why was that?” That led to his theory of general relativity. That literal space is a malleable entity, it’s dynamic and it moves around matter, and that’s what gravity is.
Marianna
Let’s hear a bit about the new book and the ideas behind it! What’s the title?
Stephon
The working title of my next book is Fear of a Black Universe: Reflections on the Dark Side of the Cosmos. It’s filled with interesting stories about traveling the world, theoretical physics and the great fun we have doing what we do. The stories are also about the ongoing conversation around problems that my generation of physicists are trying to solve, have been trying to solve for the last 30 years. And perhaps the necessity of the outsider perspective in all this.
An important thread of the book is: if we’ve been working on something like a community for 30 years and haven’t been able to break ground, then maybe that construct is not sufficient and it’s time to break through that. Not destroy it, but build on the foundation and use modalities we as a group wouldn’t normally rely on. It’s important to realize that people like Einstein and Shrodinger were doing it just in this way. The book is about those ideas - the ones that sound so absurd or wrong at first glance you get ousted out of the club. But that you should always explore every idea and never censure an idea - and then make a judgment about whether it does or does not work!
There may be real fear around those new ideas, and it may end up stigmatizing you - maybe kicking you out of your comfort zone. So it definitely touches on new ideas and the fear around stigmatization, becoming an outsider. But it’s also about empowering the reader to have their own ideas, their own thinking, and feeling comfortable disagreeing with anyone, disagreeing with me! That’s all I’ll share for now.
Marianna
Okay. Last question. Do you have any favorite thinkers, problem solvers?
Stephon
Leon Cooper. He figured out a superconductivity theory when he was young, in his 20’s, by having an outsider's perspective. New York kid. A problem that took 40-50 years to solve. He was also a founding father in unsupervised neural networks - and his work is experimentally confirmed at MIT. He’s such a great problem solver, that’s the guy.
Marianna
Great. Thanks, Stephon.
Stephon
Thanks, Marianna.
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About Stephon Alexander:
Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, musician, and author of The Jazz of Physics known for blending the worlds of theoretical physics and jazz music. Alexander obtained his Bachelor of Science from Haverford College and Doctorate from Brown and was a research physicist at Imperial College, London and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University. Stephon Alexander is a Professor of Physics at Brown University.
Alexander’s works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe pushing Einstein’s theory of curved space-time to extremes, beyond the big bang with subatomic phenomena. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-Branes. In such models, the early universe emerged from the destruction of a higher dimensional D-brane which ignites a period of rapid expansion of space often referred to as cosmic inflation.