Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 141]

Sam. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Science and Technology. Q and A for kids and others. I am back in my natural habitat. So let's see. What questions do we have here? Jamie asks, have you had a chance to try Apple's new VR headset? Yes, I did get one a few days ago and yes, I've had a chance to try it. It's pretty cool. It's, you know, there's a lot of hardware problems that I think have been rather nicely solved and a lot of user experience that's I think been again rather nicely solved. It's not completely free of bugs, but particularly in interacting with non Apple stuff. But so far it's pretty interesting. You know, I think that the, I've thought over the course of the last, I don't know, I first used virtual reality systems back at the beginning of the 1990s. So what is that, 30 something years ago? And they were very clunky. This is, you know, finally this has sort of smoothed things out. I think it's fair to say that it is getting close to what happened with audio in the 1990s. Before that time, if you were actually there at a concert or something like this, the audio was very different from whatever you could possibly get as a remote thing just with headphones and so on. And then digital audio came in and it started to be the case that it, you could get sort of audio that was as good as being there with video. That's not been the case until pretty much now. I mean the, this new Apple headset thing is pretty close to having sort of video that's as good as being there. You know, you can kind of tell because in its generic mode, you just put it on, you'll see the environment that you were in, but you're not really seeing it like you're not seeing it with the same photons that came from the actual objects in the room. You're seeing cameras on the headset looking at what's there and sending you a. And having the display inside the headset show what you would see if you were just, if you took the headset off and were just looking at things and it's high enough resolution that you know, you can read your phone through the headset, so to speak, with, in that kind of virtual way. So that's, and I really think we're, we're pretty close to the point where it's, you know, video that's as good as, as if you were there type thing, which is pretty interesting. And I think the thing that to me, it's kind of like, well, you bring up a window and there are these windows that float in front of you and there's nice UX associated with how you pick up a window and move it around, how you can move it closer to you, further away, how you can resize it, how you can just put it somewhere in the room and then you walk around the room. The window will stay in a fixed place, like a physical object that you put there, except it's just in this kind of virtual space. And then in terms of, well, you know, I have to say I have not yet done things that involve typing seriously, while I'm looking at windows in the virtual space, you know, doing things like browsing the web and so on, it works pretty well. It's, you know, high resolution and so on. And what's kind of interesting is you can make these sort of giant windows in your visual, in your visual field and you can put them all over the place. So, you know, this, this metaphor of the desktop that one has with ordinary windows, which I have to say, when I first saw that metaphor of putting windows on a screen that were reminiscent of pieces of paper on a desk, I was like, really? You're going to have something as messy as your desk on your computer? And I have to say, when I first saw this, which must have been 1979, I think at Xerox, seeing their very original Windows system that had been built, you know, I was like, you know, there are all kinds of awkward things that happen. If you put one window on top of the other, you can't get at the one that's underneath. And how are you going to deal with that? And I have to say that when I use window systems, which I do, as everybody does all the time, you know, I always remember that, you know, when I'm like, oh, I want to get to this thing, but it's behind this and I'm trying to move this file from here to there and I can't do that because the thing is obscured. I sort of remember that moment when I first saw this, this kind of thing back in 1979 or so, where it's like, yes, this is going to be awkward as it is awkward on pieces of paper on a desk. So it is awkward on what you see there. But now we've got sort of a yet new paradigm for this kind of 3D sort of windows in space type thing. And I have to say I haven't yet had the experience of dealing with a kind of highly multi window environment. And a thing where one's sort of really, you know, where I'm trying to do a complicated piece of work and I've got 15 windows open and they're all in different places around the room and so on. I haven't yet had that experience. I think when you look at sort of 3D imagery, and we've got some nice things coming with Wolm language, with the format that one can use to put things into, into VR, it's so far I haven't had a chance to study my own kind of scientific interests in sort of VR3D. But just looking at some other kinds of things, it's certainly very compelling. It's very, you know, you really feel like you're there. Now the question is, well, it's something where you really care about going down that little passageway in this complicated graph structure or whatever it is. You know, is that something where it's going to be useful? Is it something where you're going to get sort of the right feeling about what's going on? I will say, hardware wise, one of the things over the years I have been interested in doing is kind of using VR to explore kind of network models of space time and so on. Actually, back when I first was sort of paying attention to VR, first exposed to it back at the beginning of the 1990s, also was the time when I was first beginning to think about sort of network models of space time. And I have to say, at that time I sort of imagined, oh, I'm going to explore these network models of spacetime by having a VR system and this giant, you know, exist in a giant spider web and be able. I even had this, you know, was imagining at the time that you would see the places where there was activity in the network and it would be kind of glowing and you could pick up pieces of the spiderweb with your fingers and move them around and so on. And in all the years since then, and it's been, what, 30, 35 years now? No, little. Yeah, little less than that. The. Yeah, close to that, actually. 30, 33 years. Let's say that the, you know, I've continued to think, well, this might be useful. And I did try. About three or four years ago, I tried some experiments in VR with sort of hypergraph rewriting in our physics project and models of space time and so on. I didn't find them terribly useful or compelling. And within, with the systems that existed at that time, it was, you know, five minutes to motion sickness, so to speak. For me, I didn't Find that with the Apple system. So I'm impressed by that. I think the frame rates are higher and the way of tracking head motion and so on is better. And I didn't get motion sick, you know, using it for a couple of hours. So that's one thing. Another thing I found interesting is there's kind of this notion of you can have a background. It's kind of not like a screen background. It's a fully around you background. You can kind of set it. So it's a 360 degree background and they only have a few available yet, but you know, they're nice natural scenes. And I have to say that I found it surprisingly compellingly relaxing, so to speak, to be sort of reading my windows, so to speak, in this natural scene with sort of wind rustling and trees and so on. The trees weren't moving, but at least in one of them there's ripples on a pond that's moving and so on. I was surprised that that makes a difference. I mean, it felt like one sort of had the peacefulness of being out in nature, even though it's purely virtual thing. Actually one of the environments that they have is the Moon. And I sort of found that interesting because I, you know, looked at pictures of the surface of the Moon for forever. But actually looking at this, I realized, I assumed that it's a, you know, it's an actual picture, so it's accurate. It kind of doesn't look exactly as I had expected because it's kind of like they're these craters, but they've, they look like they've been eroded. They have been eroded in a sense by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that comes from the sun and over the last billion years or something, because not a lot changes on the Moon. It's not like the Earth where the atmosphere and the wind and so on are continually picking things up and raining on things and all those kinds of things. On the Moon, you put a footprint there, it's still going to be there a billion years later. Although what's clear is that the solar wind, which is not a wind in the sense of stream of air particles or something, it's a stream of protons and electrons coming from the sun. That, that, that causes sort of gradual kind of smoothing out of the lunar surface. And you can kind of see that. Also notable is that kind of on the lunar surface they're like, there's little details. It's not like, oh, it's just flat and there are occasional craters there. No, there are Actually, lots of little details. I don't entirely know what those are caused by. And possibly the little detail has been there for a billion years, I'm not sure. And when the Moon was formed, the Moon probably was formed in this kind of big splat of an asteroid like object hitting the Earth, liquefying most of the Earth. One piece of it ended up in the Moon and the other piece of it sort of ended up reforming to the Earth. And presumably when that happened, gravitational forces made the Moon roughly be spherical. And it has kind of a lump on one side, at least gravitational lump. Even though the shape, as one can see plainly by looking up in the sky, it's pretty spherical. But the details of the surface, the fact that gravity in general makes the thing be spherical, the details at the level of individual mountains or at the level of individual kind of few millimeter or a few centimeter sort of kind of details on the surface is not determined by gravity. And it's presumably determined by something about the solidification process for the rock that that's developed there. Okay. Anyway, that was, that was irrelevant to the, the VR headset story. But, you know, the other thing about it is I was actually just doing a zoom call in which I was in the headset, so to speak. And although there were some bugs around exactly how that worked, people were able to see the avatar of me, which the headset kind of captures. And you know, it asks one, and it's set up to take a picture of yourself and to take a picture of yourself with various different expressions. And then what it's doing is it's looking at your eyes because it can see your eyes, it has cameras watching your eyes, and then it's synthesizing what you would look like, so to speak, given that kind of eye motion. And it looked a bit weird. I will say one thing that's very basic thing that I wondered about for a long time about VR is what the right way to click on something is. And I have to say that I would say it works really nicely with this system because literally you look at something and it has good enough eye tracking, it can really see with quite high resolution what you're looking at. And you just touch your fingers like this. And that's a selection and it really works nicely. And also the kind of the hover effect of a user experience type thing, when you look at something, it can kind of blob around and show you, yes, this is what you're looking at type thing. And for example, how do you get to the home screen. Well, you just sort of look up and this little arrow shows up and you can kind of select it. And then that gets you to a home screen where you can navigate and go to other kinds of things. So it's. What will I use it for? Well, I'm going to try using it as a way to actually do work rather than having a bunch of physical big screens, have these virtual screens. It's a very nice bright display. And I think it'll be something where, for example, if one's kind of out and about and one's sitting on a plane, I don't know, coffee shop, whatever, and one couldn't unfurl one's whole collection of monitors and so on, you got this thing on and then you can at least virtually see a whole arrangement of giant screens at high resolution. And so that's potentially something that I think will be useful. This whole thing about sort of are you inside the object and walking around and so on. I don't know how that's going to feel in, in the system. I also don't really know. The kind of pass through video is good enough that certainly one could imagine sort of doing some manual thing with one's, with one's hands and sort of seeing what one's doing. But with augmented information, I haven't seen that working yet. But that's the thing that one could, one could certainly imagine and that might be interesting. I mean, it's kind of like, oh, you want to tie a knot? I can completely believe that you can see your hands. You've got a piece of rope or whatever, you can see your hands. But it's being, you know, it's being annotated or a whole variety of manual tasks like that, where it's kind of like the machine is treating us humans with our fingers and so on as, you know, kind of. You're the robot, the machine is in charge. And it's telling you put this finger in this place and that finger in that place. And it's really doing that in a very explicit way with augmented reality because you're kind of almost seeing your hands, but you're seeing your hands with those extra indications of what you should do and so on. I would say that the thing, as I say typing, I think it's perfectly possible to use an external computer with its keyboard and so on and to type on that. There's a virtual keyboard you can get up. I'm certainly not a fast typer on these virtual keyboards. Maybe one could learn to be a faster typer. And maybe the right way to use them is that these are virtual keyboards that are coming up in virtual reality. And when you type on them, you're putting your finger, you know, you're poking through the air, so to speak, to type on them. And it may be that it's a better experience if you actually have a physical surface there and you're just tapping your fingers as you would on a regular keyboard. It might be that that's a more kind of at least a more familiar experience. Maybe one can get used to the other one, but. So a few thoughts about that system. Hive is asking, do you think travel vlogging is a new possibility with a headset? Yeah, I mean, yes, it's a, you know, it has a. Take a picture, take a 3D picture so that you can be sort of back in the environment that you were in before. I have to say, you know, I, I was thinking as I was sort of sitting there in these different virtual environments, you know, I'd kind of like to see the sights of the world in this kind of high resolution 3D form. And it's like, oh, you know, I want to be in the depths of the rainforest with a bunch of, you know, Toucans talking to me and so on. I want to be somewhere in the Himalayas or someplace where I never, you know, or someplace in Antarctica or something. Places where likely I'll never go as an actual sort of physical human, so to speak. But I wouldn't mind the kind of in depth experience, just like that thing I was talking about, about the moon I found kind of interesting to it. It really did. You know, it's kind of like this, probably like what it would be like to be, you know, hanging out on the moon, except there isn't. You're not feeling the 1/6th gravity and so on. And it's an awful lot less trouble than, you know, getting to the moon, so to speak, which, you know, I doubt I'll ever do. So, you know this question about motion sickness, I see, Paul, are asking about this. As I say, I didn't. I can say, you know, empirically I didn't get motion sick with this, with this thing. I don't know what would happen if I tried using this, for example, interesting question is whether if I tried using it in a car where I normally would get motion sick, will that get me doubly motion sick or will it not get me motion sick at all, or will it have the same motion sickness as if I was just in the car? I don't know. I Mean, generally, motion sickness comes from sort of this mismatch between what you are feeling in your kind of orientation sensors in your ears and acceleration sensors in your ears and what your eyes are telling you is going on. And that's kind of why it's kind of, well, just look out of the window and you'll feel less motion sick. But I don't know how that will play out with sort of these two layers of potential motion sickness generating kinds of kinds of things. Well, let's see. So those were a few thoughts about. About VR. Kerr asks, will AI courses be common in curriculums? If so, how would you approach the subject? Well, you know, we are actually building an AI tutoring system, and it's not easy. The main thing to say about it is it's hard. It's kind of a complicated mixture of sort of pure computational programming type technology with kind of linguistic interface, LLM, AI type technology. And it's something where, you know, you're trying to explain something. You've got to be kind of rooted in computational knowledge, which you know is correct. You've got to be able to kind of assess what some student does and get that right. You've got to be able to sort of maintain tracking of what's happening as the curriculum progresses, those kinds of things. It's looking quite promising. It's looking like it's a lot of work, but it's looking like one can make it work. Part of what one can expect is a very personalized sort of approach to learning where the AI is getting to know the student and couching the things that it's talking about in terms that the student cares about, the kind of topic application areas the student cares about, and so on. Plus, for me, one of the kind of holy grails is have the AI know a lot about what I know about so that when there's something new that it's trying to explain to me, it knows this is the one thing I should be saying to this particular person to have them understand this point, because it's the, you know, based on what they already know, this is the extra little piece they need to put into the fabric to make the whole thing close and let them understand the whole story. But my feeling is that this kind of AI tutoring mechanism is going to be assuming we can make it work. And there's a long history of sort of computer aided education that hasn't worked. Using tools in education, whether it's Mathematica or Wolframalpha, other kinds of tools that's worked well, having the computer be part of the sort of main motivation learning loop has not worked well. And perhaps with the new generation of AI tutors, we can finally solve that. And I think it will be routinely the case that that's how you do a lot of your learning, that there's a kind of a unique, yes, I'm trying to interact with this human who's a teacher, but a lot of the kind of just learn the skill type thing is going to be done at the sort of AI tutoring type level. And I think it's going to be pretty neat. If this works out, it's definitely going to be a great leveling of the playing field of access to a certain level of educational quality and so on. And I think that's pretty interesting. It means that sort of, there's a wider range of people who can get access to even quite specialized types of education. And that's a neat thing. I mean, there's been a certain amount of that that's happened through sort of massive online courses, but those haven't played out quite as, you know, the early enthusiasm for those things I don't think has really sustained. And I think people. There's sort of often kind of a bit of a motivation problem. And it ends up being that people really have to have a human at the other side of things to sort of get motivated to do things. Whether that can be appropriately simulated by an AI that gets to know you, we don't yet know, but I think it's a, it's a reasonable possibility. Kerberos asked, do you think VR headsets have a place in classrooms or maybe a new opportunity for remote learning? You know, it's a funny thing. Every time there's a new technology, people say it's going to be great for education. They said that about movies, they said that about television, they've said that about all kinds of things, computers, all sorts of things like that. And usually what happens is, yeah, it's kind of interesting for education, but the big story of education is something different. We'll see what happens with this AI tutoring type technology. We'll see how sort of how central to the education mission that ends up being. I suspect it will be, assuming we make it work, it will be more central to that than things we've seen so far. Now, in terms of sort of the VR headset thing, I mean, I will say one thing. The actual Apple VR headset, it's pretty expensive object and it's very personalized. You know, I, I have, you know, it's like, I sent in my eyeglass prescription and I get back these inserts that are sort of matched to my vision. And my vision happens to be good enough. You know, I can take off my glasses and read things perfectly well. And I'm sort of just a vision perfectionist. So I end up trying to sort of have optimized vision and glasses and so on. So I probably could do without that sort of layer of optical correction in this VR system. But given that you've snapped that in there, it's for my eyes and my particular astigmatism and so on, not the generic person. And similarly, you know, it's kind of like when you get it, it's like scan the shape of your head to get the right kind of insert so that you can make a proper seal, but between, you know, your face and the VR headset so that you're not seeing light coming from the. From the edges and so on. So it's very kind of personalized to a particular individual. And in the setup, it's kind of like, look at these particular dots going around the. Around a circle and so on, and that's kind of tracking how your eye is working and look at it in different ambient light levels and so on to see what happens when you change the. The size of the pupil and all these sorts of things. And I'm no doubt that the system can immediately know if you have various kinds of eye visible medical issues and so on. But any case. So it's pretty. Right now, it's pretty personalized to each individual who's wearing it. And that certainly would create a problem in terms of, oh, let's just have this lab full of VR headsets not going to work. And it's certainly. It's pretty sensitive. I mean, in other words, you put the thing on your head and if you move it just a few millimeters, it won't be in focus anymore. So it's really something where I think it has to be quite seriously personalized to each individual. And it's pretty expensive now, and that doesn't seem realistic quite yet. Eventually it presumably will be. And in terms of what's the quote's educational value? I don't know. This kind of go visit both things that exist and things that don't exist is potentially interesting. I mean, one of the things, there's a sort of a demo thing on the VR headset right now that's some kind of dinosaur encounter thing. And yeah, it's pretty convincing. You know, it's like it's almost as if you were there and there's a, you know, butterfly flapping around and there's a dinosaur that comes and, and the dinosaur supposedly interacts with you. Although I couldn't make it do very much. I was telling it to show away and I was telling it to eat me and so on, it didn't seem to pay much attention. But it's a, you know, it's a very, it's, it's. I mean, I don't really know what it would have been like to be in the, you know, Jurassic period or something watching these dinosaurs do their thing. But it seems fairly and possibly a bit of based from seeing movies that are kind of the artist's impression of it. I mean, this is one of the challenges. Often even in science fiction movies, there will be a phenomenon, a physical phenomenon, and there's what it would really look like and then there's what people would expect it to look like. You know, a real rotating black hole is definitely would not look circular. It'll look very smooshed. But when you have in a movie like this happened in the movie Interstellar, when you have something which is supposed to be a rotating black hole and you're showing it in the movie and you show something which is a pancake, people are going to say, what the heck is that? That's not a black hole. I thought a black hole was a hole, a circular thing. So you kind of have to break the physics. But. So I don't really know what dinosaurs in the Jurassic would have looked like, but I probably know better is what movies have said dinosaurs in the Jurassic look like. So I don't know how, you know, I don't know how realistic it is and I don't know if, for example. Well, I was sort of struck by learning something about the surface of the moon from my little sort of experience there. I wouldn't say I felt I learned anything about dinosaurs from the experience in that case. Now, it wasn't a very long short and perhaps one could learn more from something else. But. So I'm not yet convinced about that sort of feature. I will say again that it surprised me and I've seen other VR systems over the years. This one, the degree of immersion into a scene seemed for some reason that I would have to think through to realize why it felt more that way than other systems that I've used in the past. Maybe. Well, I'm not sure, but it seemed to be quite surprisingly compelling. It seemed to be, as I say, surprisingly like I'm really there. And I'm having the responses to being there that like, oh, I'm out in nature now type thing or whatever it is that I don't think I've had with the slightly lower fidelity VR that's existed in the past. Okay, wait a minute. We've got more questions. Hybe is asking. Can you explain the tech behind the new headset? Just can't seem to grasp a new trend of walking to get coffee and bumping into headset wearers. I don't know, you know, this thing about new technology and people's sort of experience of new technology. This particular thing, it kind of looks like a ski mask, which is probably a good thing because it's sort of familiar. Now. You don't really expect people wandering around in the coffee shop having a, a ski mask on. That doesn't make a lot of sense in most places. But it's a metaphor that you can sort of understand. It's not totally weird. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, somebody might come in and have, you know, those reflective metallic sunglasses. You don't see their eyes. It doesn't. You don't see the whole face type thing. It's. That's not. It's something for which we have a pattern of something to expect. And this is sort of an even more extreme version of that that I suppose, you know, if you. It gets pretty weird. If you, you know, combine the sort of burka and, and headset thing, then you've got a full Darth Vader, more or less. And, you know, no doubt that will, that will come in some sense. And, and what people's reaction to that is, I'm not, I'm not really sure, but in terms of. I, again, I haven't yet had the experience of kind of walking around in the outside environment wearing one of these things. I will say that back in probably 1987 or so, you know, I had a cell phone when these were very early, and they were the size of a shoe. And I did have the experience of, you know, walking down the street in various places holding this shoe up to my ear and talking to my shoe type thing. I mean, by shoe, I mean an early cell phone type object. And it was kind of interesting to see people's reaction to that. It was. Some people, in some places, they just walk right by and others kind of look and they're wondering what the hell's going on? Why is this person talking to somebody? What is this object that they're holding up to their ear? Those kinds of things. So know the sort of social character of what's going on is, is interesting. And I, I don't know how that's going to play out with this, I will say an experience I had just a few weeks ago. I'm not sure I've talked about this here. Friend of mine who's built a humanoid robot dropped in to see me and his humanoid robot has kind of a realistic head, but the rest of the body is just pure 3D printed lattice work. And you kind of get to see what all the electronics inside. And for various random reasons, I mean, the thing doesn't walk, it just sits in a wheelchair. But its head has good head motion and the eye motion is good. And it also has an LLM connected to it so it can have a conversation and so on. For various sort of detail reasons, we ended up meeting at a restaurant and taking this thing there. And so there was this thing sitting at a table in a restaurant and it's a weird humanoid robot. And I have to say it was really interesting. All sorts of people came up to us and started asking about the robots. It was too loud to talk to the robot there, but it was, was really interesting to see the dynamics of people's reaction to it and, and the extent to which people really did sort of anthropomorphize, humanize this robot and treat it with kind of more respect, sort of human level respect as opposed to, look, it's just a lump of electronics type thing. I thought that was fairly interesting. And sort of that's another frontier of this kind of user experience is what is the user experience for interacting with a humanoid robot kind of system? And I don't know how that relates to the user experience of interacting with people wearing VR headsets and so on, but I think these are sort of somewhere in some continuum of related things. I mean, they're all in a sense, bizarrely dehumanizing human connection, removing kinds of technologies. And in the, in the big arc of history, that may not play well. Just as to many people, the younger generation that lives on their phones, they're sort of disconnecting from the common reality that we're in now. I suppose maybe they're existing in a different common reality. That's the online common reality. But it feels, at least to the older generation, it feels kind of wrong that you're disconnecting from real reality and going somewhere else. And perhaps sort of in the VR case, you know, the bad news is that could really accelerate and what consequences that has. I'm not quite sure. And you know something? The future will tell. Let's see, Some questions here about very different topics. Let's see. Harry is commenting about AI tutoring. Let the AI first ask a few basic questions and let the student define some words, not for judging them, but to gauge what they already know. Absolutely. That's. That's what our AI tutor. It's kind of like it starts off by just having a chat and then it's kind of trying to make its own mental model for the mental model that the student has. And then you're kind of off and running. Being able to have a kind of Socratic interaction, so to speak, where the student is hopefully learning things. And hopefully it's just sort of another kind of user interface where you're kind of interfacing with the learning process of the person and we just have to make it work. It's just, you know, a difficult piece of technology. Let's see. Boy. Okay. All kinds of questions about things like magnetism and metals and so on. Let's see what I can address there, because I actually do have to go in. Not too long here. Any more questions about VR coming in. Let's address those if we're going to talk about those things. Otherwise, let me tackle some other kinds of things. Now. There's some questions here about physics. And I have to say you're now making me wonder, gosh, golly, what would happen if, given that in a VR headset, I'm really not seeing real reality. I'm seeing a transduction of real reality through the headset, so to speak, camera to display. So what would happen if, for example, I set it up so that if I walk, I'm effectively walking at 90% of the speed of light and I see kind of relativistic distortion of my everyday scene? I suspect that I would very quickly understand relativity better. So I think I should do this. And for example, being able to see the effects of curvature in space time and so on, on the actual scene that I'm looking at, like, imagine there was a black hole on the other side of the room type thing, you know, and all kinds of bending of light around it and all those sorts of things were happening, that would be a. That would be kind of an interesting thing to see. And I'm sort of wondering, somebody should build that. I mean, it will be technically somewhat complicated, but that would be an interesting thing to see. I mean, I don't know the extent to which. If you're trying to learn about molecular biology, let's Say, in fact, I was looking at a demonstration of this kind of a 3D model of a cell and seeing what does the cell surface look like, what does this look like, what does that look like? Sort of imagine we are the size of a molecule type thing. What would the world look like? Perhaps this is relevant. I've quite often been interested in kind of what do alien minds, how do alien minds perceive the universe? Maybe we get to see an example of that with sort of, in a way that we can really internalize through these VR systems. All right, let me see, see what I have time for here. Well, okay, there's a question from without. What is a magnetic field and what medium does it exist? So what is a magnetic field? Well, the, to answer that question, I mean, we can start talking about what effect a magnetic field has. What in terms of what it is. One, one imagines that in the universe, so to speak, there are certain kinds of things we can distinguish. There's space, we can put things at different places in space. Then there are sort of effects in the universe that go beyond the mere positioning of things in space. In our model of physics, those other things are deeply associated with features of the structure of space. It's been known for 100 years, for example, that gravity is, can be thought of as being associated with the structure of space, that the curvature of space time is responsible for gravity. And you can kind of see that because if you imagine, if you say things without forces acting on them always go on the paths that are the shortest paths from where they started to where they end up. Well, if the thing they're going across is curved, they, the shortest path will be distorted by the curvature of the thing it's going across. Like if there's a big kind of hill in the middle in a two dimensional structure, you'll tend to, if it's a hill up, you'll tend to sort of go around the hill. That's the shortest path. And that kind of effect of the structure of space affects shortest paths. That's what in the general theory of relativity, that's what one can think of as being the source of gravity in our models of physics. The actual sort of underlying structure of space made up from this network of atoms of space, the sort of overall features of that lead to this effective curvature in space that leads to this effective gravity. And when you say, well, what is gravity? Well, what one's saying is that there is, for example, a piece of mass, and the presence of that piece of mass causes curvature in space. That curvature in Space then has the effect of deflecting shortest paths. And one can interpret all of this as in terms of a gravitational field, in terms of saying that mass produces something, an abstract kind of thing that exists in space that is having the effect of deflecting things in the way that gravity does it. So then the gravitational field, one could say. One could just say there isn't a gravitational field. All we're looking at is curvature of space and that's causing all these effects that we have. Or we could say, I'm going to assume space is flat. I'm not going to talk about curvature in space, and I'm going to say space is flat. But I'm going to account for these deflections by saying there's a gravitational field there. And that's what's causing these deflections. These are two sort of somewhat equivalent forms of description. One is something changed about the underlying structure of space. The other is there's the sort of overlay of gravitational field that is an abstract thing that has these various effects. Well, I think the same thing is true in the electromagnetic field, that the electromagnetic field is also a feature of this giant network that represents the structure of space. Essentially, what I think happens is that when you are in this network and you're going from. You have two different points in this network that represent two points that are separated in physical space. You can say, well, I'm going to go through the network and I'm going to go from step to step to step through the network and get to this different place in physical space. But some of the distance you go inside the network probably isn't actually advancing your position in physical space. It's probably sort of wiggling around in just being sort of the internal features of the network. And you can interpret those as not being kind of moving in physical space, but moving in some kind of internal version of physical space. Some sort of internal. Sort of internal space that is sort of overlaid on ordinary physical space. But they're both just features of this giant network. Well, those internal degrees of freedom, that internal kind of space that I think can be interpreted as things like electromagnetism. And that's not the traditional view of how this works. But that's, I think, the emerging view that we have in our physics project about how this works. And then when you say, well, what is the magnetic field? What is the electromagnetic field? Well, what it is is it's some feature of the connectivity of space. And it's a feature that could just say, well, space has this particular complicated structure. And when some electron comes on, it is affected by the structure of space. And that the effect that the structure of space has on it is such that it would be like an electromagnetic force, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's one description. The other description is I don't think there's anything funky happening in space. I think space is really simple. But I'm going to describe all these effects as being as if there is an electromagnetic field, this abstract electromagnetic field that sort of exists in a completely featureless space, producing all these effects. In a sense, mechanistically, I think the origin of that field is that it is actually features of the structure of space. Just like the gravitational field we already know is, at least we've known in the past, is a large scale feature of the structure of space. We now have some understanding of its smaller scale characteristics. But if you ask sort of what is the ultramagnetic field, what is a magnetic field? That's I think what it fundamentally sort of ontologically is. That's not the explanation you'll find in a textbook yet. Wait another 50 years and it will be. But the thing that in a textbook, it'll just say there is a magnetic field and you can produce a magnetic field in a variety of ways. You can produce it by having an electric current that goes around in a circle that produces a magnetic field that goes. If the things going around a circle like this magnetic field is coming out like that. Similarly, an electron seems to act as if it's a tiny little loop of current going around that produces a little magnetic field associated with every electron. There isn't really a loop of current going around. It's just a feature of the structure of electrons that they produce that magnetic field. That in fact is probably related to how electrons exist in this network that represents space. They exist as these kind of structures in that network. And the nature of that structure presumably has the feature that it is associated with a certain amount of mass and a certain amount of magnetic field being produced. But so that's sort of how you make a magnetic field, is that you are just saying, well, it's current going around in a circle, electrons going around a circle, or it's individual electrons or protons, most of those have an intrinsic magnetic moment that produces magnetic field. And then when that's how you produce the magnetic field, then magnetic fields have features like, for example, so far as we know, every magnetic field kind of you're going from the north pole to the south pole of the Magnet, you kind of keep going and the field line loops around and comes back to the North Pole. All magnetic field lines, at least in static magnetic fields are closed. They always have to have, they always have to be in circles. Not true with electric field lines. An electric field, you have an electron and it's got a whole kind of a bunch of sort of spokes going out from the electron that are electric field, they, they start at the electron, they go outwards. For magnetic fields, that's not how it seems to work. Instead of magnetic field, every field line is closed. In order to have something, a field line which, which stops and starts, you would have to have what's called a magnetic monopole, a, an analog of an electron that's a source of magnetic field. So far as we know, there aren't, There aren't magnetic manipoles in our universe. And I'm realizing I am going to have to go in a second here, but that's at least the beginnings of an explanation from a very foundational level for what magnetic fields are. There's a question here from Robot. Do you think it will be possible to make the headset smaller in the future? I would assume so. I mean it's got a lot of compute power inside it. You can feel it getting hot and so on. But know, I think it's a marvel of engineering as it is. But it will surely get smaller just as. And you know, in the end it's somewhat limited by the fact that, you know, our heads are a certain size and our eyes are a certain size and in the end it's kind of responding to sort of human characteristics. But I would assume that it will be, you know, eventually it'll be kind of GL a glasses like thing. Although I guess it has to have some way of preventing light getting in from the side. So it'll be kind of some, some sort of weird glasses like thing. But that'll take a while. And it's already remarkable that you can get all that capability into something that is even as small as it is and not, you know, you don't really feel it as being, oh, I've got this giant weight on my head. All right, I need to run off here. Thanks for joining me and see you another time. Bye for now.