Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Does Stephen Wolfram's Theory of Everything Work?

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

How does Stephen Wolfram's Physics Project work and what have we learned? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host, Jay, Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, how can you tell the difference between a physicist and a crackpot? Is this one of those internet memes? Can you tell which picture is a homeless man and which one's a physics professor? Well, you usually can't, but I guess I mean, you know, if someone has a crazy new idea, how do you know whether to take them seriously or just ignore them? Well, the truth is, mostly you can't tell. I mean, some crazy ideas about the universe turn out to be true.

Like, look at quantum mechanics. Wow. So does that mean that you read every theory that people send you over the internet? I try to, but, you know, there are just two. many. There's so many people out there with fun and silly and crazy ideas. So honestly, most people in physics just ignore them. Oh man. Does that mean that the theory of everything could be right now buried in a spam folder? What a tragedy selected for the junk mail pile by some AI.

Hi, I'm Borham, a cartoonist, and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I'm always on the hunt for the theory of everything, but I don't expect it to show up in my inbox. Is that how you usually get your research ideas through emails, Pam? That's right. I just like look in there with a slush pile and say, like, maybe somebody emailed me exactly the idea I need right now. Oh, man, it's called tenure. sit around and wait for emails to pour in. No, but I do get messages, some from our listeners, suggesting new ideas and even, like, grand theories that could describe some of the open puzzles in physics.

Oh, wow, that's awesome. It's awesome that people are listening and getting, you know, stimulated intellectually, and they come up with their own ideas about how the universe might work. Yeah, and it's not just our listeners, and it's not just me. I think basically everybody who's a physicist gets a few random suggestions for theories of everything in their, inbox every week. Do you think maybe that's sort of a basic human curiosity? You know, we're all trying to figure out how it all works. We all are. And as we say on this podcast all the time, wondering belongs to everybody. And these questions about the universe are ones that everybody wants to know the answer to. And frankly, I love that people are thinking about this and that

they're imagining that maybe they could come up with the idea. They could have that moment of insight, which explains deep questions about the universe. Well, speaking of everybody, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, a production of IHeard Radio. In which we examine all those big questions about the universe and take you to the forefront of what science knows and what it doesn't know and what it's hoping, you will email it to it. Because, you know, I guess it turns out that science doesn't know everything. There's a lot we don't know. We know a tiny amount. We've only recently learned how little we know about the universe. And so while it might feel like a lot of the stuff around you is understood, the fraction of the universe that we know is very small. And big, crazy new ideas await. So it's sort of like the universe is still up for grabs.

You know, anyone out there could potentially come up with the theory of everything because we are pretty far away from it right now. We are very far away from it. In fact, if you delivered it to me today in complete form, I probably wouldn't understand it. It would take like days, weeks, months to digest it. It might require whole new branches of mathematics, which I'm totally not familiar with and nobody has even thought of. So even if aliens arrived and emailed me or delivered in golden engravings, the theory of everything, it would take a while to understand it.

I might immediately dismiss it. You mean, are you saying my handwriting is that bad? Are you an alien? Are you admitting that finally? I am a doctor technically, so I think we're required to have bad handwriting, cryptic handwriting. But the point is that the truth about the universe might be something which is strange and weird and sounds wrong. on the surface, which makes us think about the universe in a different way. And that's the difficulty.

But that's also the beauty of science, is that we follow the data, we follow the clues, and eventually we get to the right answer. It's amazing that the process works. Yeah. And so today on the program, we'll be tackling something, a new theory, a new clue about the universe that just, that is super recent. It's hot off the presses. It just came out.

And physicists are still sort of scratching their heads and trying to think about whether or not this is something that's actually. true and describes the universe or maybe it's something that's totally wrong. That's right. It sort of came out of left field and it's a bold claim from a man famous for bold claims and dropped like 900 pages of stuff on the physics community. And it's fascinating that people are taking it seriously. He's not a physics professor, but he's attracted the attention of a lot of top physicists. Since the end of the program, we'll be asking the question, come up with a theory of everything.

Well, he definitely came up with a theory. The question is, what's it a theory of? And does it describe our universe or any universe or does it even work at all? And some listeners actually wrote in asking us to break this down for them. Hey, Daniel and Jorge. This is Keir from Chicago. And I recently read about Stephen Wolfram's physics project where he's trying to come up with a fundamental theory of physics that I know a lot of people have been searching for for a long time. And it sounded really interesting to me, but it was also a little bit over my head.

And you guys are really great at explaining these kinds of things. So I was wondering if you could maybe tell me a little bit about how his theory works, how it's different from other theories that are out there. And if you feel like it actually has the potential to truly answer one of the great mysteries of physics, thank you guys, and keep up the great job. Thanks to everybody who wrote in with those questions. Well, let's talk about Stephen Wolfram, because I know the name from my college days when I used a program called Mathematica.

But tell me what do you know about this person, Stephen Wolfram? Yeah, so Wolfram is sort of a polymath. He's a really smart guy. He graduated, got his Ph.D. at a really young age. He studied particle physics. He worked with Richard Feynman. Oh, really? He's a physicist.

He's a physicist for sure, yeah. Oh. He was a professor at Caltech. Oh, he was a professor. He was a professor, yeah. Oh, I see. He made a time like maybe he wasn't a professor. No, no.

I mean, the guy was really smart. definitely has the chops. He's the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award. He got it at age 21. So it was pretty clear from a young age that this guy had a brain on him. And he's known for writing Mathematica, which is a software that engineers and mathematicians use to simulate things, right, and crunch equations and numbers. Yeah, Mathematica is a beautiful piece of software. It does a lot of the really gorgeous physics animations that you probably see on Twitter and elsewhere. But it's also really good for doing symbolic mathematics. Like, there's lots of ways to get computers to do numerical calculations, add these two numbers. But it's much harder to

tell a computer, like, take this equation and simplify it. And mathematics is really powerful to doing that kind of stuff. And so it's really the premier way to do math on the computer. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing idea because it can do symbolic math, which is not just number crunching, but like manipulating, you know, concepts and symbols and functions. That's right. And though he's got off into founding a company and becoming super rich and writing this software, he's always had an interest in theory and in physics because this is where he started. That's where his heart was. Yeah. That's where all of our hearts are, right? That's not where his money was, pocketbook was.

But he always had a sort of a passion for Anna and the chops and the background for it to think about particle physics and things like the theory of everything. Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of famous people who started out. in physics and ended up, you know, becoming super rich or started out with, like, deep mathematics and went to Wall Street and became hedge fund gazillionaires, you know. So these people do penetrate sort of the wider culture. They don't know. We just stay in the white halls of academia. But, you know, they're always wondering, I think, you know, could I crack that problem or, you know, could I still contribute? And I guess maybe you're saying he's unusual because he sort of came out with this new theory of everything, not from an office in a university. I guess that's what's kind of unusual

or at a research center. It's like he sort of did it on his own in his house. Yeah, he did it on his own, I mean, in his company with a couple other folks, but he's not part of a mainstream research group, right? Like, I see. He has a team. He's a small team. He attracted some young students who wanted Cambridge and other places to work with him on it. This is getting more legit by the second, Daniel, I have to say. I feel like we started the episode talking like a crack butt, but I'm like, oh, man, I don't see the difference between this guy and Daniel. Well, he's a lot richer. Except he's rich. Yeah, that's difference number one. But no, this is not like, you know, sheets of paper you found under the homeless guy at the bus station, right?

This is a guy who everybody respects as intelligent, but that doesn't mean necessarily that he's always on the forefront of knowledge. I mean, the guy's busy doing a lot of other things. It's difficult to stay on the forefront of knowledge and to keep up with academia and to understand the current ideas. And if you're not part of the community of academia, it's difficult to contribute, you know? Some people think of science as like a single-minded pursuit of truth. That's true, but it's also it's people. It's right. Which means it's people having a conversation. It's cocktail parties. It's hanging out on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, but it's also, it's a big conversation and people are talking about stuff. And if you're talking about things nobody else is interested in

or talking about, then even if you're right, it's going to be hard to attract their attention. So you have to speak the language and you have to know. how to talk to people in order to get scientists to pay attention. So you can be totally right and understand the universe, but if nobody will hear you or talk to you or understand what you're saying, you can't really have any impact. So there's this human side of science that I think is underappreciated. It strikes me as not a good thing, though, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like it strikes me as like, you know, people at a cocktail party, not

wanting to listen to somebody else just because they're not in their little group. Yeah, it would be better if we had more people, so we had more diverse ideas, we had more for science. If it was more accessible and more open, absolutely. It'd also be better if humans were like objective and had ways to measure these things, you know, objectively, but we can't, right? Human science is done by humans for humans, or at least until the aliens come. You had to press the alien button then. Well, maybe Stephen Wolfram is an alien. That seems very likely. This guy seems too good to be true. Oh my gosh, maybe, maybe this is the aliens coming to give us the ideas, right? You're saying Stephen Wolf from being down. He just went from

crackpot to respectable physicists to alien to maybe the next, the second coming. Where will this end up, Daniel? But this is unusual. It's very weird to have somebody outside of academia, even somebody who used to be a professor, come back and try to contribute. Often these ideas are not given any attention. So it's unusual to happen, and it's unusual that it has gotten so much attention. Interesting. So, okay, so he's sort of been working on this, apparently with the team for a while, and he came up with a theory of everything.

And he sort of popped into the cocktail party of physicists and dropped a huge pile of paper saying, I got it. Yeah. And there was a little bit of a hint that this was going to happen because about 20 years ago almost, he wrote a mammoth tomb called a new kind of science in which he unveiled the way he thinks about science. And you can tell from even just the title of the book, A New Kind of Science, that he thinks very highly of himself

and his own work and its importance. How would you have called Daniel a possible new kind of science? A suggestion for a new kind of science? Well, you know, I am a strong believer in humility. I value that a lot. And I think that's sort of the conclusion you leave for other people to draw, you know, that you've invented a new kind of science. And a lot of the criticisms of that book is that there's a lot in there.

It's like 1,200 pages, but a lot of it is not actually that new. He's not always either familiar with the existing work in the field and sort of reproduced it and claimed it as his own. And some of the stuff is actually wrong. So there's a danger to working all on your own in your own ivory tower and then delivering a 1,200-page tome is that, you know, you can make mistakes early on and you could have benefited from some notes. notes yeah and so he made sort of a splash last week and so physicists you were telling me are still sort of going over his theory but there's been sort of a big initial reaction people on the internet have reacted to this yeah and so he's sort of a famous guy and people give him attention and so he captured the world's attention especially the attention of physicist when he announced

back on april 13th that he had a model for everything in the universe space matter and whatever and whatever and so wow and whatever is that his technical term. And he put out a really long blog post and a video and then submitted a couple of sort of academic style papers to journals for review. But in the meantime, physicists have been trying to digest it. And, you know, I'm part of this community and everybody's been talking about it. If you read it, what do you think? And there's sort of a, you know, there's strong reactions to it. Yeah. So you collected a couple of reactions from Twitter about a physicist or well-known physicists who have sort of commented on this potential discovery. Yeah. And so, for example,

Sabine Hosenfelder. She's a physics theorist and she's also famous for being sort of an alt theory consultant. She's the one that runs that program where you can email her your theory and you'll get like half an hour with an actual particle physicist to give you opinions on it. Did Wolfram consult with her? I don't think so. Because she says, I looked at it and I don't think it's interesting. Wow. I spent five minutes with it. I think she dug into it. Then there are other folks like Sean Carroll. Yeah, Sean. He's a famous science popularizer. And, you know, he's also a theorist working at the forefront of knowledge? Yeah, so you have here that Sean said, I'm in favor of taking swings at fundamental physics with wildly non-standard ideas and seeing

what happens. Most such efforts will inevitably fail, but the payoff is huge if you hit the target. Yeah. All right. Well, it sounds like people are not embracing this right away, but keeping an open mind. Yeah, I think people are sort of hopeful, like, wow, that would be awesome if you came up with a grand new theory. At first glance, it doesn't seem like maybe it really accomplishes everything that Stephen Wolfram claims, like his claims are really broad and very grand, and I'm not sure he really delivers. But it's going to take the community a little bit of time to read these papers carefully and to digest them properly. All right. Well, let's get into what this idea that Stephen Wolfram just dropped in the physics community. And let's talk about

how that describes the universe. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled. metal, glad. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age.

It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers.

The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon.

And on our new show, no such. thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, Stephen Wolfer. I'm famous millionaire, philanthropist, mathematics, code writing, genius.

Just dropped on the fittest community a theory of everything. And so let's first talk about what this theory is, because I'm super curious. And then we'll talk about whether it actually describes the universe we live in. So what's the basic idea, Daniel, here. So the basic idea is one that I like. It says, let's look at this really complex, vast universe with all these different kinds of things in it, at different scales, you know, from little particles up to galaxy superclusters. And let's try to explain all that using a simple set of rules. You know, that's the sort of basic principle behind particle physics, right?

You could just describe the universe as like, it is, this is what it is. But we're seeking a reductionist answer. We want to pull it apart and explain everything in terms of something underneath that drives it, right? And, you know, we've had success with stuff like that. Like, you look at the periodic table, and you discover that all the patterns in the periodic table come out of very simple rules for how electrons fill their orbitals. So complex emergent phenomena can come from a simple set of rules. That's the motivation, right? Right.

I mean, isn't that sort of how we've built all of our science theories? I mean, it's all based on, like, simple particle interactions that then, you know, accumulate, and then that's how the universe exists. That's right. And Stephen Wolffrom likes a particular kind of this theory. They're called cellular automata. And the idea is just take a couple of basic objects and a couple basic rules for how they can interact. And from that, you can get really complex behavior. Yeah, like there's a guy who recently passed away named John Conway who devised this thing called the Game of Life,

who showed that you can devise a really simple game based on just like black and white squares and a few simple rules and really complex patterns. emerge, patterns that look a little bit like how life looks. Okay, so I'm guessing that cellular automata, this concept is not related to cells, like human cells, like biological cells. It's more like a mathematical term. Yeah, it's like a little basic object. And you can also think of them as like nodes. And so, you know, like a little dot. And the idea is just like have a little very simple thing and write down simple rules for what it can do and then study the behavior as you go to a zillion of these things or you take some

a zillion steps forward and you discover that you can get from very simple things emerge complex behaviors that's what the game is life is all about. Oh, I see. So is the idea that he's sort of approaching it from the bottom up instead of the top down. You know like, you know, physicists

like what you do is you take regular big stuff and you break it apart and you sort of see what it's made out of. Is he saying that maybe a better way to approach the theory of everything is to start like let's let's see if we guess what the smallest thing does and then it's build it up to see if it works. Absolutely. And in that sense, it's very similar in motivation to string theory. String theory says maybe the whole universe

is a bunch of tiny little vibrating strings and here are the rules for how those strings interact. Can we then build up the whole universe that we know and the physics that we've discovered from those simple rules? Very similar motivation, very similar approach. But it's not the same as string theory? It's not. No. Okay. So how is it different? How does that, how does this theory describe the universe. Like what's he actually doing here? So what he's actually doing is he says, let's begin with a couple of nodes.

So he makes this graph where he says, I have a couple of nodes and then I connect them with lines. Of what, of space, of matter, of energy? Just mathematically pure, right? So far, we're just mathematically pure. Just like draw a dot in your mind and another dot and put a line next to them. Oh, man.

Start with like total abstraction. Just the concept of a dot. What is a dot? in the beginning there was nothing and Stephen Wolfram created a dot he said and he just went from alien to God

let there be dots from the second coming to the actual father himself well he sort of imagined that's the point you know not to be God but to imagine from what is the universe originated what is the basic element of it

you know if you wanted to build a universe what is the essential source code and he would like if the essential source code of the universe was just two or three lines that you just run a zillion times. So he's saying, let's build up the universe from scratch. And let's start with this a little bit of math and code and see what happens. And see if it ends up if you pile it on, if it ends up into funny and interesting podcast about physics.

Exactly. And he's hoping that if you start from very simple rules and you build up a structure, then you could then recognize in that structure familiar rules of physics, the things in our universe. because that would tell you that maybe those are then the simple rules of our universe. So he starts with, you know, a couple of dots and a line. And he says, all right, just pick a random graph. It doesn't really matter.

Make four dots and draw some lines between them. He just know how it begins. And then make up some rules, like say, well, if two things are connected to the same thing, then, you know, you can add a line between them or you can add a new node or you can add a thing, whatever. Just make up some simple rule. Some rule. It's kind of like a simple game.

like Go or Othello or Checkers. Yes, exactly. You need a basic starting point, and then you need an update rule that says how you can change the graph, how you can grow it. And so that's the whole idea is, you know,

maybe the universe starts from a structure like that. And then he takes it, and what he did with his team was make of some of these simple graphs and develop them, you know, a million times, a billion times

with his very powerful mathematical language and visualize them. And then he looked at them and he asked, do I recognize in here things from physics. So he took a whiteboard with his team there in his compound

and drew four dots, drew lines between them. And then did he guess what these rules might be? Or did he have a powerful computer say, all right, try to come up with a bazillion rules and see if any of them come up to the universe. Yeah, he just guessed a few rules. And the kicker is he didn't find a rule at works.

Like he has a few examples. And in those examples, he shows oh there's some things in here that look like physics and that's what motivates him to think oh maybe I'm on the right track and we can dig into it a little bit more but he hasn't actually found a rule that describes our universe oh I see he's more like saying

maybe this approach will work oh I see huh so he hasn't he doesn't actually have a theory yet of the universe he just has what he thinks might be a way to get to the theory of everything yeah it's sort of like a recipe for a theory and his theory is also a recipe for building a universe

So it's sort of a recipe for a theory for a recipe for the universe. You scheme you a headache. So now he's a cook as well. He's a chef in addition to being God. He's cooking up universes, man. He has a recipe for a theory that might result in the universe. That's right. And, you know, it's more than just like, hey, maybe this will work.

He sees some cool stuff in these things that he built up. You know, for example, you take these graphs and you have a few rules and you let them run and they build up interesting things. Like, some of them build up what look like 3D space. What? You know, like a mesh, a mesh, you know, a nicely organized mesh, that you could say, hey, maybe space is quantized. And we've talked about how maybe space is just an emergent phenomena and it's, you know, a bunch of dots connected together. Yeah, we have an episode about quantum foam. Yeah, quantum foam and, and, you know, the pixelated universe.

And so that's sort of the leap to physics. He's saying, I'm coming up with this mathematical construct. And then without building it in, without saying, please build space, just letting it run, he sees that from it emerge things he recognizes like a structure you could identify with space. How can you, boy, how can you get three dimensions, three dimensional space out of some dots? I guess that's my question. Yeah. And actually his space is not three dimensions, which is one of the problems. He makes a space which is 2.7 dimensions, which is pretty weird.

Actually, that's pretty cool if you think about it. Fractional dimensions are cool, but I mean a little inconvenient. Like, where are you going to put your stuff? You have 3D stuff. It doesn't fit in 2.70 space. Well, that you just described my closet. And everybody's closet. I feel like my closet is made out of 2.7.

I know. I'm like, if you're going to do fractional dimensions, do three and a half at least. You know, give us some extra. Don't just, you know, lose 0.3 dimensions. These days, everybody needs more room. Some of us need a little extra space, you know. That would have been nice. That would be a good.

selling point for the theory. So he runs this idea and he, you know, grows it, sort of lets it grow itself, right? That's kind of the idea. And you're saying he gets some things that maybe look like what might be space and also other things, right? Yeah. And so he identifies, you know, this mesh with a higher dimensionality space. And I encourage you to look up his blog post. There's some really nice visualizations there. And you can understand how he goes from like a mesh of points to imagining the dimensionality of that points. Essentially, he's thinking about, like, the density of points as you move away from a central point. Like, in three dimensions, the density of points, you know, drops in a certain way.

In two-dimension, the density of points drops in another way. So just by measuring, like, how many points there are as you take five or six steps away, then you can sort of measure the dimensionality of the space. But it's a leap, you know, like, this is a mathematical construct. it has some relationship to some things we see in the universe. Does that mean it is how the universe works? That's kind of a deep philosophical question, right? I guess my question maybe at this point is,

how does it differ from some of the other theories that we've talked about, like quantum foam and is he coming at it totally from the left field or is he sort of saying maybe these ideas have some validity to them, but I have my own spin on it. Yeah, and that's one of the problems with his work is that he doesn't really put it into the context of existing ideas. And as you say, people have been thinking about quantized space as a building block of the universe and trying to go from there to recovering Einstein's equations, for example.

And that's tricky, people have been working on it for 10, 20 years. And they haven't quite gotten there yet. Whereas he's starting from a slightly different point. He's not saying, let's start from building blocks of space. He's like, let's just start from these nodes from which we get space. and then from which we also get time and general relativity and quantum mechanics and all this stuff. He's going a level deeper.

He just blew my mind. He's claiming to have gone even further than everybody else has gone. He's starting deeper and he's claiming to have gone further. So you understand why there's a little bit of skepticism that he could have accomplished all of this by himself with a couple other people while also running a big company. Well, if he's an alien chef second coming,

then it's totally possible. But yeah, he just made real. It's like he's trying to go from dots in a whiteboard to time itself and space itself. To time itself, yeah. And a lot of this stuff is interpretation, right? You look at this structure in the graph that comes out and you say, oh, that looks to me like time. All right. It looks to you like time, but maybe you were looking for time, you know?

Would you have deduced this just from looking at it? Would you have found Einstein's equations on your own without Einstein? Or are you just sort of like looking at a room full of typing monkeys and saying, hey, look, this one's typing Shakespeare, therefore typing monkeys is the way to write great literature, right? Well, that strikes me as a little bit of what you guys do in a way, right? Like theories, she's like, you know, not to equate physicists theories with monkeys, but, you know, you guys started throwing out theories and then the experimentalists have to see which ones work.

Yeah, experimentalists have to see which ones work. That's the critical test. Here, you know, there's a lot of these different spaces, and the fact that some of them can reproduce theories we already have and that have been tested doesn't necessarily. mean that this is the fundamental structure of the universe, right? There's lots of ways to reproduce physics theories. I could just have monkeys type and occasionally they would reproduce physics theories. Doesn't mean that the universe is a bunch of monkeys. Remember, Daniel, keep an open mind. Maybe it is. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's a monkey universe. Maybe it is,

right? It's monkeys all the way down. All right, let's get into whether people think this theory actually works or whether it's so out there that nobody is taking it seriously. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio, out Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane

and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers, the pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land

the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these.

Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, talk to me about 2.7 dimensional space that is still blowing my mind.

How can you have two, like, fractional dimensions? Is it that, like, one of them is not quite a dimension? Well, he doesn't really have any spatial dimensions at all, right? It's just points and lines. He just connects the points with lines. And he tries to make an analogy to dimensions. He says, if you take a point. and I walk four points away, and I walk four points away in every direction, then I can count

sort of how many points are in that object. You can take paths away from that point in every direction. You can ask how many points are within four steps away, and how many points are within 10 steps away, and 15 steps away. And that grows differently if you're in three-dimensional space or two-dimensional space or four-dimensional space. So he's taking that as a measure of dimension, right? It doesn't have any dimensions built in.

You could take his whole hypergraphs and just lay them flat on a piece of paper. Or you could spread them out in 3D. It's totally arbitrary. There's no place to hang these things, right? They don't have locations. They just have relationships. But he's contending that from these relationships, there is a structure, and that structure is very similar to dimensionality.

Oh, I see. To the relationship that things have in actual space physically. Yes. Yes, exactly. So, you know, volume grows. with r cubed for a sphere. Area grows like r squared for a circle, right? In four dimensions, things grow with a different dependence. And so he just asks, as I take steps away from a single point, what's the density of points? And that's my measure of the dimensionality of my space.

And he doesn't get a number of two or three. He gets this weird 2.7. And so you're like, what does that even mean? Well, if you round up, you get 3. So, you know, it's not, you know, you just have fudge factor it a little bit there. Physics is like hand grenades and horseshoes, right, as long as you get close. Well, you make an interesting point, which is that, you know, if just because something does something the way that you see it doesn't mean that it's how things are. Kind of like, you know, just because you can build an artificial intelligence, for example, or like a function that spits out or happens to simulate how a ball gets tossed up in the air doesn't mean that that's how the universe works, that balls float through the air. according to an AI. Yeah, and I think there's two different issues here.

One is exactly what you just said. You know, you can't just identify similar behavior and say that's the truth. But that's actually a really hard philosophical problem. Like, if you have a theory of strings that completely describes the universe, does that mean that strings are real? I mean, and somebody asked us this question over Twitter just yesterday, they said, what if I had an alternative theory of bananas? and it also described the universe and you could never tell the difference between strings and bananas,

would that mean that bananas are also a valid theory of the universe and which would be true? Oh, I see. If you have two theories that both describe the universe, how do you tell which one's true, or the right one?

Yeah, and if you can't tell the difference, if they're like both make exactly the same predictions, but they have very different descriptions of what's really happening, then which one is what's really happening? Well, the answer is we can't tell. So it depends on what you think true means, you know. Is there some untestable actual truth in the external universe or is it really just about describing what we see?

So that's sort of a deep, unanswerable philosophy question. But there's a more practical angle to it, which is can you do more than just describe what we already see? Can you predict something we haven't yet seen, right? It's very easy to look in a sea of garbage and pick out something sparkling. They go like, look, I produced one diamond or something. me. Like my theory, my simulation, my code predicts how this ball will do if I toss it up in the air. But that's sort of not interesting to physicists. Yeah, like we have all these. Everything that he's derived, we already have. We have Einstein's equations. We have special relativity. We have quantum mechanics. Right.

The question is, has he revealed any new insights? Has he made any predictions? If his theory is really true, it should predict something. It should say, oh, the universe also works in this other way that you hadn't yet realized. And then we can go out and verify that and be like, oh, well, then maybe your theory is true, right? It's not just enough to say, to describe the universe, because my 100 typing monkeys will eventually do that also. But they will generate nonsense predictions. Don't tell me anything about the universe I don't already know. You just have to give those monkeys more bananas. I mean, that would make it all more. But it sort of sounds like maybe what he's doing that's new and interesting is he's actually sort of making that connection between a really simple.

set of things to the complex things, you know, like string theory has been around for a long time, but nobody has tried to build up the universe using strings, have they? But it sounds like maybe he's sort of done that and is seeing things that are promising. Well, that's one problem with string theory is that you can take strings and build up universes, but you get like 10 to the 500 different kinds of universes. And ours is one of them, but it doesn't necessarily predict hours, right? So then you ask, well, if the universe is just strings, how come we end up in this universe? And he has basically the same problem, right? He has a lot of potential possible rules for building up the universe using his hypercrafts. Some of them lead to universes sort of

like ours, though, you know, wrong number, dimensions, et cetera, but some of them don't. And so, you know, we're sort of in this vast sea of outcomes. It would be much more compelling if he had a basic set of rules that necessarily led to our universe, that there was nothing else. it could predict like it had to only be this way that would be much more compelling right that would be better maybe but maybe not even true or possible like maybe the universe is just this random set of rules oh man that what are we even doing right if the universe is not understandable but i know i give up i hope it is forget it i don't give up i don't give up i'm still hoping um and so it's totally valid to look for a new way to build things up from scratch, and maybe he's right, and it

would be deep insights if he was. But, you know, it hasn't really shown new insights yet. Hasn't really shown us anything new that can come from it. And there's also a lot of questions about the sort of the connections he's made between what his theory can do and what we've already discovered. I see. Well, maybe step me through some examples of what you mean here, because, you know, you were telling me earlier that in some ways his model, his, Theory of the universe sort of predicts causality and things like special relativity and particles. Is that not sort of interesting or? It's interesting and it's a good idea, but it's not clear that it predicts it or if he's just

sort of like identifying something in his structures, which looks a little bit like it and it's sort of wishful connections, right? There's a lot of leaps here where he's like, oh, look at this sort of structure. dot dot, dot, here's Einstein's equation. And you're like, well, hold on a second. You know, I can write down Einstein's equation on a chalkboard. doesn't mean that it's a necessary consequence of what I've just done. But there are some cool connections, for example, causality.

He takes his little hypergraphs and his little rules for updating them. In his picture, those rules for updating them, that's time. Every time you change your hypergraph by following these rules, that's like a step forward in time. And he shows that for some simple examples, it doesn't really matter which order you apply these rules in, like maybe you apply them first to this node and then to that node. And the other time you do it another direction. Sometimes you end up in the same place no matter what.

So start from the same initial conditions, do things in a different order, end up in the same place. And so for him, that's causality that says, look, this first place has to come before this other place. Because in these graphs, you always start with one and end up at the other. So that's where causality comes from. He sees behavior in this graph, you know, he sees shades of. what might, if maybe you look into it or if you sort of maybe keep going with this, you might sort of rediscover or create causality and special relativity and particles. Yeah, exactly. The way, you know, I sometimes listen to my children's random thoughts and say like,

oh, wow, look, you're a genius. You just had some great idea, you know. You can recognize in random babbling, you know, great ideas if you're hopeful, right? And so there's a little bit of that. Like, well, yeah, you could have said that. But are you just imposing on very complex structures the things you wanted to see? So that's one example. Another is he tries to describe particles. And he says, okay, in this case, if space is this mesh of points, right, then what is matter? How do you get matter in this mesh of points?

And so what he does is he says, well, maybe matter, maybe particles are these special connections between these points, these, you know, arrangements between these points. Like every time you have three nodes with these particular connection between them, you call that a particle. And he's tried to show that sometimes these particles are stable configurations. Like if they exist, they will continue to exist and they will move across the graph. So they're like patterns in these connections. The relationship between nodes sort of moves in the way that maybe a particle would move through space. Yeah, exactly. Recognize a relationship and see that relationship sort of translate itself across the

graph that would be what a particle would be wow i'm getting the picture of you know how in the matrix at the end neo sees the code behind the universe i wonder if this is that what he was feeling he's like oh i can see the whole universe it's just a whole bunch of notes yeah i am keanu reeves again if it worked he hasn't actually made that work he hasn't seen that happen on his graphs he's just sort of like hey that would be cool and he's mentioned that you know they're going to follow up on that in a couple of weeks and hope to figure that out and i'm like yeah i'd like to figure out particle physics in a couple weeks, too. Yeah, why didn't he just wait a couple of weeks before publishing this?

Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's like, okay, well, you have some cool ideas, you have some notions here. You haven't really quite figured it out, so why now? Well, maybe a question is, he's seen all these things, time, causality particles in his, you know, mesh of nodes. So is this, you know, the mesh from one simple set of rules, or is he like tweaking the rules every time and like, oh, if I tweak it this way, you get causality. If I tweak them this way, you get space.

He identifies all these things from one simple set of rules, but he's tried a few different rules. And he's tried this rule and that rule and the other rule. And he notices similar behaviors in a lot of these meshes, which is cool and makes it more compelling. But again, he hasn't found the rule that he thinks is convincing. And so one thing he'd like is for everybody to participate. He has a website where you can go and build a graph and enter a rule and see what universe it builds. And he wants to sort of like crowdsource the things. He's crowdsourcing making universes.

Exactly. We are all gods. That sounds like a smart god. He's like, God's like, I'm tired. I'm out of ideas. I'll just get one of my creations to help me create more creations. Right. I'm just going to leave the recipe on the counter here.

I want you to actually make the cookies. All right. Well, it sounds sort of like, you know, he's sort of a bit of an outsider. And he's sort of maybe taking a huge leap forward without bringing the rest of the community along. and there's some skepticism, but it sort of sounds like his idea is not too far off from what people are thinking or we're looking for. It sounds like maybe he just sort of skipped a few steps, you know, in the procedures of physics. Yeah, he skipped a few steps in the procedures, which is okay. I mean, if you deliver a 500-page treatise on the universe, it's a lot to swallow.

But hey, if it's true, thank you. Thank you. But he's also skipped a few steps in his treatise. Like, you read it and you're like, well, well, how do you get from here to there exactly? You know, and in this case, he knows all the results in advance. And so he's sort of like dot, dot, dot, general relativity. You know, you have to really show that it's the only consequence. And I don't think he's really compellingly done that. The way to do that really compellingly would be to come up with a new theory. Be like, okay, and here's dark matter or here's the dark energy.

Or this explains, you know, what happened before the Big Bang or something. And then we could probe that and see. that it's true. And wow, okay, maybe then the universe is just four lines of mathematics. Well, it sounds like maybe he is not quite there yet, but he's saying, look, it's promising. You can sort of see space. You can sort of see time. Totally. And it sounds like maybe the real answer is to be determined. Maybe in a couple of weeks, we'll know, Daniel. We'll know the theory of everything. Everyone will be stuck at home, but we'll know how everything works. Yeah. And he has made a prediction or two.

You know, he thinks that the size of these hypergraphs is something like 10 to the minus 93 meters. I mean the size of the little bananas that make up the universe. Yeah, the distance between these points in the node, right? The minimum distance, the basic unit of distance in his universe is 10 to the minus 93 meters, which is like almost impossibly small and hard to think about because remember, the smallest distance we've ever seen is like 10 to the minus 20 meters, which is already like, you know, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a proton.

And other people think the universe, like the quantum loop theory, people think the universe is like 10 to the minus 35 meters is like the size of a space pixel. So this guy is like 60 orders of magnitude smaller. Wow. And so that's a prediction that's almost impossible to test. So is string theory kind of. Yeah, so is string theory. But string theory, we think, operates on the Planck scale. So it's only 15 orders of magnitude away, you know, instead of being 60 or 70 orders of magnitude away.

Right. So it might be difficult to prove this ever, you're saying. Yes, yes. And, you know, he imagines that there might be particles down at that little scale. And maybe those particles are even dark matter, right? So I was saying earlier, he should make predictions. All right, well, he has made this one, but it's sort of out of reach. This is not something we're going to test in a couple of weeks. But at the same time, it could be that the real nature of the universe will never be able to probe. Man, you're really hoping for that, aren't you?

You're just like, Daniel, you're wasting your life. no it's true it's true that that's not what i'm hoping for it's true that the universe might not be understandable to humanity it's true the universe might not be understandable but for some weird reasons so far we've been making pretty good progress which suggests that this method of science and our way of thinking is somehow aligned with the way the universe works or can be aligned and so yeah we'd like to keep doing it yeah we're all wishful thinkers dano Not everybody thinks that we're wasting our time. All right.

Well, that's pretty interesting. I guess we'll find out in the future whether he's right or not. And in the meantime, I guess you can go online and read more about it and even make up your own universes. That's right. And, you know, he's done a bit of an unusual PR campaign with his blog post and his videos and his announcements. What? But he's... I know.

For physics. Yeah. But he's also submitted some papers to journals. And so they're being vetted by other physicists, taking them seriously, you know, peer review. And so that takes a little while. And so, you know, stay tuned. He learned his lesson from 2002 where he just dropped a book. Well, no, he's also writing a 900-page book, which will be out very soon.

I see. But he learned to post it on Twitter first. So stay tuned. You know, the top minds in the fields are thinking about this, and they will critique it and criticize it and find what's good and what remains to be worked on. But you're right. It could be the theory of everything. We just don't know yet. And we might never know.

Or it might come from somebody, not him, but somebody who is maybe listening. to this podcast. That's right. So if you're working on your theory of everything, take heart. You know, Stephen Wolfram might not be right. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,

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Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carpent, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes,

my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. podcast.