Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein – Ask Me Anything Live (#102)

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel‘s investment firm, a position he has held since 2015. Though not an academic physicist, he proposed a unified theory of physics in 2013. He and his brother Bret Weinstein coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits. Weinstein received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the Mathematics Department at Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott Find Eric’s Portal Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR85PW_B_7_Aisx5vNS7Gjw   Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.phpJoin my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. Hello everybody. Welcome to this fourth edition of the week of the Into the Impossible podcast. Join live and in person and direct with your friend in mind, Dr. Eric Weinstein. Hello, Eric. How are you, sir? All the way back there. I'm great to be here at the University of California at San Diego. We've been working all day on new theories and new experimental techniques. And I thought it only fair to let in some of my audience to get to know you better in the world of physics and math that makes you tick. Now I'm going to see if people can hear Eric. So Eric, they're saying they can't hear you so well. Can you can you scooch on over, scotch on over, still in the frame. Is that better? Let's see. Give us a thumbs up if you can hear Eric. Is that better? All right. This is great. All right. That's it. That was all we wanted to do. Good night.

Shabbat, Shalom. No, we are going to go and have a wide-ranging conversation with it. one and only the effervescent Eric Weinstein. So we've been talking a lot about theories of everything today and that's been a lot of fun for me. Let me just see the chat in the chat room. I want to make sure we get questions answered. We decided to do an ask me anything really about Eric asking Eric anything and I'll tag along for the ride. I did get one comment that I want to start off with and then I'm going to exalt my host prerogative at different points during the conversation. But the first question is you pitch yourself as an outsider in physics and yet you've had opportunities that many people would die for, being a postdoc at prestigious institutions

around the world. Why do you consider yourself an outsider in physics? Why don't you consider yourself more closer to an insider in that you've done these things on the inner level at the highest levels of theoretical physics? What's an interesting question? I would say that first of all, there's an issue of respect. Whatever my issues are with the theoretical physics community, I view it as being probably the most important intellectual community that we have. And I don't think that an outsider says, I'm a physicist. I think that that's an occasional privilege that physicists dole out,

and I'm not so presumptuous to think that I am one. I mean, there's a physics sequence, right? It has to do with a couple of semesters of mechanics, of electromagnetism, of quantum theory, of thermodynamics. Of this, I've had only one of the regular courses, which is the mechanics, the first semester of mechanics. So whatever it is, it's not the standard sequence. So I guess in part, it's the same thing as in economics.

If you haven't taken the classes, if you haven't come up the standard sequence, You owe it to people to let them know that you are not coming at this from the expected perspective. So it's more of a kind of humility, out of respect, deference for the true physicists that are working cradle to grave and physics. You know, when you're the sort of a person who's giving your all to compute perturbation series and to make sure that you don't drop a minus sign over seven pages of calculations, I got all the respect in the world. for people who do theoretical physics professionally for a living and take it seriously. And yeah, I mean, I think that there's also just, it's just professional respect. I'm not a physicist by my own understanding of what it is a physicist.

I mean, I play the guitar, but I'm not a guitarist. So it's the same sort of a thing. I recognize what it takes to be those things. Do you feel like an outsider under those definitions can actually be accepted by the orthodoxy of physics, Leaving aside the point of whether or not you can actually contribute something as a non-physicist. On my worst day, with respect to my feelings about the theoretical physics community, I don't think it's ever been so corrupt that it would turn down a right answer if somebody from outside the community could come up with it, no matter how horrible that person is.

Now, whether the community was gracious about it, whether they put somebody else's name on it, whether they did. There are all sorts of things you can fault physicists for doing. But I've never known them to turn down the right answer in service of doing something stupid when they've understood that both are options. Okay, we have our first question coming in from the audience here. This is from UF, and this is a paradigmicmatic question. I get asked a lot. He has a theory, two new fields of math that deal in analog quantities. They allow for hypercomputation and pianos axioms, analog matrices, and point wave geometry.

how should I gift them to the world? What would you say to such a person? Realizing that sometimes people might think what you talk about in geometric unity is analogous. But let's put it in the same terms then. Yeah, okay, let's do it. The key issue is the following. When you ask people to evaluate your work,

and Brian, we have to come up with some way that people aren't looking quite so directly into your scalp. Yes, I know. My bald spot is going to be revealed. Okay. There we go. How about this? All right.

I think it goes like this. People don't understand that the major cost in evaluating a theory is time. And so if you have the most brilliant thing in the world, first of all, recognize that you're almost certainly lying to yourself. And this is the painful thing that people will not tell aspiring outsiders. In general, almost everything that comes in from outside is wrong. And so the quick cut is if somebody isn't playing by the rules, There's only one reason not to play by the rules, and that's that you don't have anything and you want to believe that you have something.

So whether you're trying to fool us directly or trying to fool yourself first and us secondarily, the suspicion is that if you don't do things the usual way, there's only one reason it's because you don't really have anything. And that's the biggest thing that you're up against. What you're up against is people will feel that you're wasting their time and that you're threatening their credibility. And they won't tell you those things. They'll say things like, well, just write it up, put it on the archive, break off an experiment, show what your theory does that no other theory does. And I don't think any of those things are likely to work for a long time, because honestly, your theory is not going to get read.

And the major fear people will have that they won't tell you is that maybe they'll think your theory is right, and they won't catch how wrong it is, and then they're going to look like an ass in front of their colleagues. and that's why nobody wants to do this stuff. Yeah, we were talking earlier today about the tortured path that Einstein took to get to the general theory of relativity.

Starting in, I believe, 1913, he came up with a very crude estimation. He and Marcel Grossman. Grossman, yeah. And Grossman was, of course, instrumental until the eventual, you know, acceptance of the theory of relativity. They were competing, but they were also

deeply collaborative. I think they were really much more collaborative than they were competing. But everything that has succeeded, needs a story and sometimes a story of competition is the one that sells. But anyway, the 1913, 1914, 1950, 1916, until 1917, when the final version of GR comes out, and it includes something that later would be apocryphly called His Greatest Blunder, Einstein's greatest blunder. That's hearsay, but yes.

Yes, exactly. Mario Livio, who's been on my podcast, The Into the Impossible Podcast. Oh, and I want to remind people out there, I've done, you know, what, 17 interviews just this month, alone with Nobel Prize winners, friends like my friend Eric Weinstein and others, scientists and not. And so please do me the favor of subscribing, liking, thumbs-upping, or whatever, is that even a verb? But I know that you need exercise. Every doctor's tell you to exercise your finger. So push the subscribe button while we're talking. So this tortured path that Einstein, not to mention for Eric Weinstein's channel. Yes, Eric Weinstein, you have a small channel of some of the key. The question is, you know, the provisional nature.

Can you imagine GR being accepted in the age of Twitter? And I don't mean like, oh, it's just stupid. But like actually legitimate questions about the inadequacies of the theory in 1913 as compared to the final version. And then the final version has this big bang, you know, latent within it. So to speak. Yeah. Yeah.

The, I think that in large measure, we know that the Twitter sphere would crap all over general relativity as the world sort of crapped on it until it realized through Eddington's work that this had powerful predictive power and even then there was stinginess about it. So I think the answer tends to be that when something really big happens, we're very frightened to imagine that things could really change because nobody wants egg on their face. And in general, that's what happens when new things are proposed as we find out they're not nearly as cool or correct. And I know that that's, by the way, what I'm up against. People imagine that you don't understand what it sounds like to be thinking. about these things and you don't understand what the issues are but you know definitely

these are the issues. All right we have a question from good mother, a super chat which pays my college kids, kids college tuition and I give a portion to Eric. No he does not. No I don't. I just give you bad coffee. Super chat asking our good mother asking is freedom of speech the answer to geometric unity? I don't know what that means. Okay. I don't think so. Yes or no? We had another super chat And that is from pie to nine decimal places. Super chat.

Pie, I'll donate every hour. Pour a drink, take your time, keep it going. That's not a question, but I'll allow it. For 10 bucks, we go back to this, to the preceding question here. I had a question about, let's see, I saw one about, oh yes, this is from Reza Habib. Reza says, I'm currently a third year

mathematics student with an interest in mathematical physics. further. What specific areas of math would you advise me to explore further topics within differential geometry? Boy, I would recommend, look, let me give you a few books that I think changed my life completely. One would be Einstein Manifolds by Bess, which is actually a fictitious collective like Borba Key that happened to write a book that's not really about Einstein Manifolds, best book on differential geometry I've ever seen. I think it went out of print. There's another book called Spin Geometry by Michelson, which I would highly recommend. There's an old paper by Iguchi, Gilki, and Hanson, which was how geometric methods were sold to physicists

to begin with. It was really a book, but it came out as if it were an article to make it timely that I think is worth going back to. And I would say that those are, oh, the book called Geometric Quantization by Woodhouse. I would highly recommend, and that gets you all the way up to the idea that quantum field theory is now best understood as an enhanced form of boredism from differential topology in many cases. And I would look up modern treatments of quantum field theory, topological field theory, conformal field theory, as enhanced boardism and go from there. But those books are terrific, including, I guess there's all also a book by Getsler, Berlin, and Verne on heat equation methods in Tia Singer Index Theory, which I would highly recommend.

There's a book called Differential Geometry, Quantization and Physics, something like that, one of these green and white books. Was that the one by Cecil Moret, the three women? Yes, I think that's it. And they have two volumes, and those books were great when they were written. and I don't know if they're really up to date. Mama Iraqi is asking, how would Alpha Fold revolutionize the natural wine industry specifically

with regards to varietals and taroar? Ooh, this is a... Let me get my bottle of Simon's Observatory Select while Eric complements this question. Well, I guess what the question is, is if we can understand the three-dimensional conformal properties of various proteins using Alpha Fold, can we effectively figure out through gas chromatography

and experiment and design how to come up with wines that are ever more interesting in terms of enhancing old world grapes? I don't know. This is like really, this is a, terroir has some, to some extent, been discredited. What is terroir is sort of the theory that the French tell us that it's something about the piece of land, the way that the wind hits it and the way the sun shines on the vines that is indescribable and therefore can only be done in France. But of course the University of California, Davis, they focused us much more on varietals and the idea that terroir was to some extent marketing bullshit, although there's still a component of it.

And so I would say that's sort of how I read it if I even understand your crazy but wonderful question. Speaking of beverages, so this is Simon's Observatory Select. So this is a friend of mine, a friend of yours, maybe two, Michael Shermer has a buddy here in San Diego. I forget his name. But he makes fine and grave glass box. glass bottles and we had one made with a Glenn Livet which we're not going to partake in

again because it's it's bad to drink two nights in a row and we had some fine... This is the first I hear of this. Clearly not a Russian. But we are going to have some Jocko Go right now. This is for we don't get any pennies on this. In fact, Jock will not come on my show. You will not answer my emails as much as I'd love to have them on the show but we'll do a free plug to Jock Go. Enjoy this. What is it? What am I putting in my body? This is an energy drink that enhances and force multiplies your cognitive abilities. Has anyone tried this out there? I'm a little bit worried. You don't want to try it? Well my friend Melissa Chen tried an

energy drink on the Joe Rogan program and I think went into the beginning of cardiac arrest. So I think I'm gonna hold up. We've got a good medical center just across the street over there. Okay, I'll tell you what I think of the terroar of the jaco girl. Okay, very good. Which I think comes from Maine. Has anyone tried this? It's interesting. It's kind of like coconut, a peanut kaleata mixed with a red bull. Okay, Philip, I can't pronounce your last time. I'm so sorry. Chavidnik. Let's stop moving. Okay, what do you think, hi Eric, just wondering if you had any thoughts in the P versus N.P. Wow. Talk about a simple question. What is P versus N.P. really quickly,

and then do you have any thoughts on it? I really don't. It's one of the Hilbert problems having to do with computational complexity, whether problems that can be described in one way are guaranteed sort of solvable within certain limits. I don't really think that I, I think I'm overextended enough without wanting to get into the remand hypothesis or p equals NP, two of the most famous unsolved problems that come out of mathematics and computers.

We're getting a question or comment about the Discord server. I don't think we'll take that. I don't understand it. I've tried to log onto the Discord server. I'm having a lot of trouble with it. There's been some issues with the community bifurcating. One of the things that I found out

is that academics and trolls have a lot in common. And if you give academics the ability to become trolls, then you've got a problem with academic trolling, which I didn't know is a thing, but is very much a thing. Ooh, I love this in the eigenbrose. I follow the eigenbrose, the feeling is not mutual, but Igenbrose asking about two brothers, Eric and Brett, who would win in a fight?

Two men enter, who leaves? First of all, if you listen to my third essay on my most recent release, we don't throw other people under buses, nor do we sell ourselves short. And we don't say we got your back. No, we do if you have someone's back. We don't if you just think it sounds cool.

Okay, this is an interesting question from Luke Gamble. Eric, you have a personal kind of life association with Moses. Would you talk to us about that? Less interested in just time to get off the planet, more in whether you choose such a myth or if it chose you. That's deep. Well, I do feel like we have to get off the planet, and I do feel that only physics can get us off the planet.

And I do think that the reason that we have to get off the planet has been very recent. It's only since 1952 through 54 that we have to get off the planet. And it has to do with the power that we were able to unlock in physics and biology. And so... Would you have unleashed it if you could go back to the 50s? You know, some say apocryphly or not,

Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, et cetera. He understood the implications that was lurking within the theory, would you, you know, kill Einstein's grandfather? Would you have prevented this from happening? If I was a better person, I'd contemplate that. I can't even contemplate that. And actually, the complete next question, oh, sorry, go ahead.

But the other thing is, there was no way out. We were always destined. If you let cephalopause, if you let cuttlefish develop long enough, eventually cuttlefish would have fused the atomic nuclei, right? So the problem is with high, hydrogen. Right? The fact that you confuse hydrogen while on Earth with a little bit of mathematics, it was always there and it's always been like that and there's no way out. And so I really I think that in some sense we can blame Zillard, we can blame Teller, we can blame Einstein, but that's not the culprit. The culprit is human ingenuity and the fact that we are smarter than we are wise. I think the real

the real analogy would be the promised land is on earth. I mean, you have no interest in space, right? And it's not like you want to go to Mars. I don't want to leave the earth. The promised land is staying on Earth, not like Moses didn't. No, I don't agree with that. You want to get off the earth. It's not a question if I want to.

I think that the promised land wasn't much. Egypt was a nicer place. It had indoor plumbing. Maybe it had streets. Who knows what it had? It had something. But you have to know when it's time to leave. And that's the point is that we can't stay here.

unless we're going to get a lot smarter. So some people are gambling that we can get smarter, and I'm gambling that we actually have worn out our welcome here and that we better spread out so that some of us don't blow up everything. Question from Succulent Succulents. Hello, Eric. Have you had a serious look at Stephen Wolframs and Teams physics projects? Well, you may not remember Mr. or Mrs. Succulents that we did a podcast together.

In fact, it's coming up on 100,000 download views, at least on YouTube, my most popular episode featuring my handsome friend here. And that did involve one of these books that I have over here. Yeah, a project, and Stephen is a friend of ours on the show, and he is gracious with his time as well. Quick thoughts since that podcast, any new developments? Have you looked into it anymore? Yeah, I mean, I think roughly speaking,

Stephen is very interested in certain roles that he thinks can generate geometry, and that through geometry he will generate physics. And he believes that these simple rules, are on the verge of doing it and I wish him the best of luck okay so let's see oh Kevin Flowers with a big ticket item I'll pay for one tenth of one of my kids college textbooks Kevin which books would you recommend and apply gauge theory so you gave your general overview of books both in the realm of economics like with your work with the lovely and talented Pia Malani and or

other fields more broadly very good question so I would say that first of all the first chapter of Pia Malani's dissertation. So we did this joint work in Gage theory and economics, but she wrote up the first chapter pedagogically aware that economists didn't know anything about the fiber bundles and connections and parallel transport. So I would say that that happens to be probably the finest general introduction to this stuff, even though it happens to be in the service of economics, but that makes it quite concrete. So I would say that really gauge theory hasn't been successfully applied outside of differential topology geometry

in the math side and fundamental physics on the physics side. And this will be applied everywhere that differential calculus is applied once people figure out that gauge theory isn't some remote thing. It's just a version of the differential calculus. So I... Oh, sorry, yeah. Yeah. So I had a thought that just as gauge theory, you know, kind of applies economically as you, as Pia and and you discussed, which I should point out was popularized by Juan Maldesana, who's been on... Well, Juan Maldesina used it. He used Pia's thesis in particular, originally not citing it, but he did use it, and I spoke to him about it, as the basis for how to explain his receipt of the, what is it, the millennial, the breakthrough prize of Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg. So he had to explain how he had to explain how

he was linking string theory and gauge theory. To explain gauge theory, he used foreign exchange mechanisms building on the work that P&I did that appears in her thesis. So you can also take a look at his lecture explaining that at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yeah, I did an interview with him about two months ago on this podcast. I did a live chat with him. And I brought that up, and he did acknowledge that you guys were the source of it. But you're right.

And I can say this, Eric can't. But this does appear very often. So what happens, I did an interview with Kamran Vafa, which will be appearing hopefully on Tuesday. And in Kamran's new wonderful book, Problem or Puzzles to Unlock the Universe, I have it somewhere around here, at the end of the book, he describes Gage Theory, and he cites Juan Meldesena's paper on this. So you have to be careful, and you have to do your research. And Eric says things and people will say, well, he doesn't publish it. That's not really true. If you look back in, you know, if you're willing to take the time and go back, you're willing to take the time and go back,

will see and been able to verify everything that he has said has come true. Now, whether or not gate, you know, geometric unity will come true or we can prove it in some sense, whatever that means. That's something you and I are working on, but I would not spend my time investigating it if I didn't think you had credibility. And because of the nature of physics, we, there's a, there's a saying in one of my Russian advisors to say, every five years you must rewrite the literature, meaning you basically forget everything that came before you and you act, and this is, I do this too, like I just rediscovered the wheel. And this is common thing.

And the problem is when people cite that, it's like Wikipedia will have a reference. Eric Weinstein is the deep right, you know, whatever. I don't even know. Far right. And then someone will cite that Wikipedia article in a newspaper article. And now it's too level deep. That's the game.

And the game is to misremember who did what. And, you know, let's be honest. You have a young woman of color from a developing country, immigrant to the United States, comes up with what I think of in this collaboration as the most profound theory at the heart of neoclassical economics, completely foundational, buried by a bunch of old people who didn't understand it, never knew gauge theory, didn't understand group theory, because it threatened them. And what I'm really upset about, and one of the reasons that I'm sort of avoidant about doing all this,

is that I've watched what seems like tens of stories, if not hundreds, of very established people making sure that people who need the citations and the attribution, that they never get it. And they don't have careers. And so effectively what we have is we have a group of people who just doesn't know that they absolutely have no choice in who they cite if they're going to cite work that is done by people who are struggling, to establish themselves.

And I think that part of the problem is many of the smartest people in my generation are working outside of the academy, whereas before the smartest people were working inside. And in large measure, it's because the people who got established stopped feeling that they had to acknowledge with attribution where they got these great new ideas from. And it's just, I don't know of a nice way of saying it, but we've done this with telomeres on my program, We're going to do it with gauge theory and economics. We're going to do it with self-dull Yang-Mills equations and their Cyberg-Witten extension.

We're going to do it with Geometric Unity. And the real reason that I'm avoiding talking about this is that it's the attribution game that I won't put up with. Right. And one's bitten and twice bitten and three times bitten. I agree. No, my point is I'm not, I'm just not put up. We're large enough that we will never have to put up with this again.

So there's a question. What does geometric unity say about singularities in a black hole? Well, what it gives is, hope. You see, when you have equations, the equations may have an essentially defective nature which manifests in what we might call essential singularities. And so when Penrose, for example, showed that you couldn't get rid of the singularities in a black hole or at the beginning of a symmetrical early universe with like a Friedman Walker-Robertson metric, what it was effectively saying was that Einstein,

gave us equations that had defects in them. And since his equations seemed kind of perfect in a certain weird way, it was disturbing. Do the perfect equations have a defect or does the defect tell us that the equations are imperfect and that there's something more to find? The key problem with Einstein is that Einstein's first act is to say, let X be a spacetime manifold. And it's so hard to figure out what you can say before that. There's so little structure that Einstein is getting so much power out of simply choosing a spacetime metric on a manifold that we don't know what we can do to go beyond Einstein. One of the reasons why Einstein has been so stable is that the assumptions are so radically minimalistic. And then one of the things that geometric unity tries to do is that there's this old quote where Einstein says,

my equations are like a mansion, half of which is made of fine marble, the other half of cheap wood. And so we've sort of made the assumption that the fine marble might be the problem. And if you wanted to bury a body and have nobody dig it up, you'd put it under something that nobody wants to destroy. And so in some sense, the idea of getting underneath the concept of a spacetime metric to replace that with a fiber bundle with two separate spaces and a relationship involving metrics that isn't a metric itself, it's quite hard to do that. And the hope, of course, is that by getting pre to Einstein, by going upstream from Einstein, which is almost impossible, that maybe we can have an equation that doesn't have singularities. And I'm betting that geometric unity will not actually have those singularities. Okay, question from Ardvarp.

What importance would you put on understanding proofs for learning the mathematical machinery gauge theoretics of high-level physics? That's a little hard for me to parse that. Well, let's try it. Yeah. What importance would you put on understanding proofs? So I'm guessing that proofs might be the, the, yeah, for learning the mathematical machinery. All right. So are proofs the right way of emphasizing the pedagogy around the machinery for high level physics? I think that's an interesting question, actually, because what it's saying is proof theory tends to be more about mathematicians and what they need. On the other hand, if I'm a physicist, is it right to take on the math. mathematicians need for rigor or is it good enough to have a physicist kind of working knowledge of something that proxies for that kind of fussy finishing school attitude that the mathematicians bring to the table? I don't know. I think the mathematicians have actually proven that they think about these things better than the physicist.

The great danger is that let's imagine that we got it wrong that you shouldn't model physics by geometry. If you only knew geometry, you wouldn't have the ability to even formulate that thought. Now, I don't think that physics is non-geometric, but you always have to remember that so far, the mathematics and the geometry is still the map of the territory. It may be a very accurate map, but the map is not yet the territory. And so we have to be a little bit careful that if what we do is really learn only from books about geometry, then we have to say if we've missed anything, if we've misencoded anything, we may be trapped forever if we don't go back to the lab. Okay, super chat from the Ohio,

from the great state of Ohio. What do you think about the new trend of econophysics papers challenging economics orthodoxy and the kinetic exchange model, if you have read about it, which I assume you have? I've not read about the kinetic exchange model. The issue of econophysics, there are these different intellectual disciplines that cross paths inside, of markets. So finance, for example, has a very different feel intellectually than does macro, then does micro, then does econophysics, then does the gauge theoretic physics that PNI have introduced. And so what I would say is that in general, the core of neoclassical economics is a field evenly divided between

bullshit and insight. And they don't like the bullshit being disrupted because the bullshit gives the power to economics. Where there is bullshit, economists can say, well, you have to do things this way or that way, and they can wield political power, like saying, we have to free up our trade, or we have to change the way we measure inflation. So they transfer a lot of wealth claiming that it's coming out of pure theory. What are we doing here, Brian? I'm looking at the chat room. Okay. And in that, I just don't know which camera. Okay. So in that way, the problem is economists don't like things that weren't invented inside of economics in general, because they don't know whether it's going to restrict the freedom to go to Jackson Hole for the meetings of the macroeconomists and Davos and all of these things.

And that they have to say, well, we used to tell you what you needed to do, but now we have to surrender to some model that some kid came up with. So I do think that in part, it's a cultural issue where economics would rather have power than accuracy and diverse economic opinions. Hey, everybody. I just want to stop in the middle of this podcast as you're super excited and super interested and all the cool stuff we're hearing about from today's guests. And I want to do so to make an advertisement. No, this isn't for manscaping or some other type of product that I've been pitched to pitch to you. I don't think I've found quite the connection and resonance with manscaping, but maybe other things will fit the bill.

But I do want to advertise on behalf of some other podcasts. And why would I do that? Well, it's kind of like when I get asked to blurb a book. After all, books are zero-sum games too. If you're reading somebody else's book, you're not going to read Losing the Nobel Prize or my upcoming books, which I hope to be announcing shortly on this very podcast. but instead I do want to recommend to you that you listen to some podcasts by my good friends,

some of whom gave me a start on their podcast long before the Into the Impossible podcast. First one is a young man, a graduate student named Brandon Dratchler. Drackler, you can find him on Twitter, a T-S-O-T-U pod. And that stands for the State of the Universe podcast. And just recently in late November, he interviewed Dr. Daniel Whiteson, who's one of the other podcast hosts that I'm going to recommend to you. So Daniel and his colleague and friend Jorge Cham, they host the Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe podcast.

You're going to hear a lot of universes here. And these podcasts are really interesting and valuable contributions to the scientific podcast world. And I really enjoy listening to them, and they've had me on their podcast, both of these podcasts, have hosted me as well. And the last podcast that I want to recommend is a podcast by two up-and-coming podcasters who started a podcast over the summer. And they are named Daniel Hooper, another Daniel. And Shama, his co-host, Shama, is a graduate student. I believe she's at Columbia, is Shama.

and Dan is a physicist at Fermilab. And so what makes them so interesting is that they go deep into the podcast world. And this is Shaima Wegman. I'm sorry, I forgot to mention her last name, but she's soon to be a PhD, or maybe she already is a PhD at NYU. And she is a co-host of the Why This Universe podcast with Dan Hooper. They do tremendous work. Also, there is a podcast Twitter account called Why This Universe,

and they claim to discuss the biggest ideas in physics broken down. And they come out with episodes every other Monday. day. So please turn into these podcasts and I hope you'll stay subscribed to the Into the Impossible podcast where we do cover things in the universe and beyond into the multamers. But we also do other things that I hope you'll find fascinating as well. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with many more Nobel Prize winners as well as with maybe even a solo episode or two about my ideas as to where I think experimental physics should be going. I thought a lot of lot of guests on the podcast, and I will continue to do so, folks like Eric Weinstein,

folks like Garrett Leasy, Stephen Wolfram, and Julian Barber is coming on the show. But I want to think maybe a little bit less in 2021 about theories of everything and more about experiments of everything. So stay tuned for that, as well as guests totally outside the realm of the physical sciences. Look for an interview with psychologists and with lifestyle optimizers and maybe some brand name podcasters that you know and love. So with that, I'll end this quick quote-unquote advertising break, return you to the action on today's podcast episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you so much for being a friend of the show.

Please do help me out. The biggest help you can do, cost you nothing, is to rate the podcast and share it with other people. So I hope you'll rate it highly. I read each and every comment. So if you want me to check out your theory of everything, give me a comment, at least read it, and that will be one way that we can continue to grow and share the love of this wonderful,

magical, mysterious multiverse, perhaps that we inhabit. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day and now. Please enjoy the rest of this podcast. We've brought some props. You have brought some props with you, and I think this might help to answer Kusall Facker's question, or help to at least encourage an answer. What are some books to equip oneself?

with the mathematics required to comprehend the references your talks make as someone who doesn't have a quantitative background. The reason I say that is that I think you think geometrically and you think geometrically in terms of physics. So some of these items that you've brought, I want to, and I should say, we are working, and I would love help with this. I don't know how we can recruit into the Impossible podcast and the portal podcast together. You've got to be careful. There are a lot of crazy people out there. No, there's a lot of wonderful people out there. There are a lot of wonderful, but there are a lot of crazy. Don't think I don't see you at there.

Yeah, there they are. There you are. But listen, Eric did a wonderful podcast with his brother, Brett. And in that, you go through a mathematical description for a non-mathematician. Oh, that was the one on his podcast. Yes. And you go through a very, very nice geometric interpretation. I've started a project to turn that into a mini e-book.

Just what you've talked about there, not geometric unity. What's a fiber bundle? We were talking about this later. If people can help with this, maybe on Discord or wherever we can figure. it out. I think that would make an answer to Kussel Thacker's question. You'd have something geometrical, we'd have images, we'd have and maybe animated movies for the e-book or whatever, where we show what is a fiber bundle? What does it mean to have covariance? What does it mean to be a one form, even simple thing? And then build up so you'd have the mathematical prerequisite

for a possible approach to understanding geometric unity or any theory of geometric physics. What do you think about that? Well, this is something I do piecemeal a lot. So, for example, Brian is forcing me to hold up a water wiggle, which they did not have water. That's the technical name of it? I think so. You didn't get this from that Riley Reid podcast?

Passing over that in silence. The water wiggle is, in fact, a torus. It is a donut filled with fluid, and they've suspended some little stars and things in the fluid, but the key thing is that the tube rotates through your hands while you're holding the material. The material isn't moving in your hands due to friction, but the torus is rolling and it's very easy to let go of it and have it just slip on out. That thing is an example of what we would call a U1 principle bundle over the one sphere. So in other words, the two The two-dimensional torus, which is the surface of a bagel, is in self a fiber bundle with fiber U1, where U1 is a fancy name for the circle over a second copy of the circle.

And this thing, which it's doing by rolling, I mean, the kids can play with it, but what it really is would be called the G action of the structure group on the principal bundle. So this would be called a PG bundle. and this rolling motion would be called the G-action of U-1 on its own total space of a principal bundle. So while I'm saying U-1 principal bundle, everything is super confusing. On the other hand, you played with a water wiggle, presumably at some point, or your kids have,

and that is actually the same thing. So you have some super-confusing language, and then you have some toy that you actually have intimate physical familiarity with. Dicerole, yeah. I found it very... And so that's... Then you take the same structure, which is a different version of the donut in the form of a hair tie, picked up at some boutique in L.A., and if you start to rotate some of these rings in some directions,

but different amounts, that's exactly what we mean by a gauge transformation on the nose. It's not, that's an analogy to a gauge transformation, to the extent that you can see that is the surface of a torus, that rotation of that hair scrunchy is actually what we mean by a gauge transformation. Now, you can also go to Sean Carroll's mindscapes and ask him, well, what's a gauge theory? And he'll show you some equations and some principles, and he'll say everything right. He's very clear and very clean. But the idea that nobody seems to have realized that scrunchies and water wiggles are principal bundles in which we can talk about cage transformation, I don't know what we're doing.

I feel like we're just completely dropping the ball on pedagogy. where all we're doing is talking about entanglement over and over again and the multiverse and it's enough already. You brought this last time we constructed this in the Keating laboratory, lest you think we're not doing experimental physics. Well, explain what this is. Well, what this was was a model of the observers. So the geometric unity theory is all about a concept called the observer's. And if space time were a circle rather than a four-dimensional manifold, and we consider a circle one-dimensional, even though many of you would call it two-dimensional, which would be mathematically inaccurate, if we lived on a circle, then the observer would be a gadget that looked like this. It would be the space of all possible rulers that we could put at any point on a circle, and it would break up into two directions, one which would be.

be the ruler direction and the other which would be the circular direction. So rulers plus circles gives you a tube. And then the idea would be that you have this bundle, which I've called the chimeric bundle, and never mind, many of you won't know what a bundle is, but it breaks up into two pieces. One piece lies along, this space of all metrics, space of all rulers, space of all measurement devices, whatever you want to call it. And part of it sticks out. And the whole game is to get the part that sticks out to go along the ruler to be a complementary direction, not perpendicular, but along the ruler. So my point here is Brian, Brian's a physicist. We were able to use this to just talk about what the observer is, what geometric unity does using a simple example we can build to get our

intuition into higher dimensions. Because many of you don't have the background to say what a base space, a fiber bundle is, a horizontal bundle, pullback. There's a whole bunch of gadgetry. But the key point is what we're really doing is building things that can be seen and then generalizing them into the realm where we can't see anything. And that's part of what we can do is we can create concrete objects, which people can say, okay, I didn't understand what he said, but I saw a tube, there was a toothpick going along the tube, there was a toothpick going away from the tube there were some lines on it what the F is going on and then as long as you're willing to see it out I guarantee you there's nowhere for it to hide it can't

escape then you've got the thing trapped because you actually have a physical model of it and then you just have to bring that up to higher dimensions I have to get this back to the Smithsonian hold on a second so talk very briefly about this really cool exercise that you did with a young person going through the double helix so the analog between reading about you know the play-by-play of the Lakers versus the Spaskey Fisher match and playing through the chess pieces on your own the difference in visceral retention and comprehension well actually the people who figured this out weirdly were the Gracie's in Brazil and the the Gracie challenge was such that they said

come anyone who thinks you have a better fighting system than we have and we'll we'll fight you and the Gracies started remembering all of the fights and playing them back as they occurred They'd film them, they'd learn what all the moves are, and they would replay wrestling matches, grappling matches, and striking matches as if they were chess games. And so what I did with my kids was to read the double helix, which is an incredibly well-written book. I mean, it stands as a work of literature to say nothing of the science. But then the part where they actually work out the pairing relationships between the nucleotides

in the nucleic acid, all takes place because a guy named Jerry Donahue informs them, he says, you know all the books are wrong. He's like, what? Well, all the books are wrong. They all have hydrogen atoms in the wrong places on the nucleotides. And within two pages or something, Jim Watson has figured out the right hydrogen bonds from A to C and T to G. And that action you can actually play through with your children by moving the hydrogen

atoms on a on a bunch of plastic chemical building blocks and then you watch you recapitulate the history of 1953 yeah and you're actually it is visceral right and i'd highly recommend buying the book with a series of um with a model for molecular for for making molecules on amazon yeah just like i got this on amazon thanks to your recommendation actually i got this 20 years ago is that right this a Klein model so this is imagine trying to read about this explain this, et cetera, talk about complex concepts to try to get your head around. But then to actually have one of these, a Klein bottle, I think the guy's up in Berkeley. Cliff Stoll.

Cliff Stoll. Yes. So I bought these from Amazon. He has a store on Amazon where he sells these things. Not too expensive. What a bargain. 50 bucks. You get a climb bottle.

So Stephen's asking the etymology of gauge. I think that comes from railroad gauges. Basically the fact that he was change. Herman Vile, I think, was the one who used the word gauge in gauge theory, which was the original attempt to show that something was scale invariant. The original gauge theory wasn't that successful, but it came back as a concept years later. Good.

OK, let's go through. We have some more questions coming in here. So thank you, Stephen, for that question. Let's see, we've got a whole bunch of questions. About 700 people there. Ooh, a big ticket one from Andrew Carey. What does space time emerge from? So this pre- let's unpack this a little bit.

What does it mean to emerge? What is space-time? Does it, how does it, and what could it possibly emerge from? Well, that's, that's a great question because that's part of what we were talking about with Einstein locking us out. When you say let X be a four-dimensional space-time, you're foreclosing it. It's emerging from anywhere because you're putting it in by hand. So about the most minimal thing you can say that is, prior to that would be let x be a manifold but without a metric because it's the space time metric

that turns an ordinary four-dimensional manifold and i've been saying this recently just bought an amplifier uh and it has treble medium base and reverb on it and those four dimensions define a four-dimensional manifold just by buying an amp i immediately got a four manifold but it didn't have a metric on it. If I say, well, base is perpendicular to mid level and mid is perpendicular to treble and they're all perpendicular to reverb, then I would have angle. And then if I have a zero to 10 scale on all of them, I would have a metric. And that would put rulers and angles, but that would probably give it not a space time, but a Galilean sort of a metric because reverb would be measured in the same zero to 10 scale. Then if I made it

at zero to negative 10, it would get closer to the concept where reverb was somehow different. Okay, well, how do we get a spacetime metric to emerge? The concept of the observers is to say, work over the space of all possible ruler protractor combinations. You pick up what a computer scientist might call technical debt. So you now have a much bigger space. Now, not only do you have the four original dimensions, but you've got four rulers to measure size in all of the those dimensions, so that's 4 plus 4 equals 8, and then you have six protractors that give you the angles between T with X, T with Y, T with Z, X with Y, X with Y, X with Z, Y with Z, right? And so those extra six protractors, together with the four rulers, together with the original

four directions, gives you 14 dimensions. And a space-time metric is then a map from your original four-dimensional space, shoving it into a larger 14-dimensional world, but a 14-dimensional world. but a 14-dimensional world that was built from the original four-dimensional structure to receive it. And so then you see Einstein is basically giving us a tiny filament inside of a much larger space as a space-time metric. And what you then have to do is to accept that that's telling you to do physics on the 14-dimensional object and interpret it on the filament.

But it's actually happening much more generally inside of a large... So is it right to say that space four-dimensional space-time would emerge from this 14-dimensional observance? So one other point to note, Andrew, is that there are proposals, the Hawking Harking-Hardle-No-Boundary proposal, is suggestive of space being permanent, but time emerging, somehow cleaving off and being nucleated at a certain moment that we call the Big Bang, or we would call, without a singularity, having to require the infinite amount of temperature and density that seem to be required at least. least in the original formulation of the hot. But I would also say that in my model, there's parts of this observers that look like

four space and no time, two time and two space, three time and one space, four time, zero space. All of those things have a reality to them, but we aren't in a sector where we can see that reality. Good. So we've got, we're probably about the 15, 20 more minutes to go here. We've got lots of people in the chat room. Reminder talking to Eric Weinstein. On the Into the Impossible podcast, find him at the portal podcast. And find him on YouTube.

Is your channel just like Eric Weinstein? Probably Eric Weinstein. Put that in the comments, people, if you know the actual name of his channel. Okay, what would you say Ryan is asking, Eric, what would you say, studying nonlinear dynamics and complex systems now will be worthwhile in, or would you say, in the next 10 years? It often feels, though, a lot of it is hype. Thank you, Ryan.

You know, nobody knows these things. Like, there are lots of ideas that mostly live as some kind of hype until suddenly somebody figures something out to do with it. I think a good example of this is Brownian Motion in Finance, where we didn't really know what to do with that model up until the 60s when Black Shoals Merton came along and showed us how to price options using stochastic differential calculus. So if you'd ask me about stochastic differential calculus, before that I would say maybe it's nice, but it doesn't really do anything.

And that's all you need is one paper to kick your ass and say, okay, apparently I had no idea what I was talking about. So, you know, the horrible advice is go into a field that is incorrectly priced. Go into a field in which it doesn't seem that anything is going on and then show that everybody had it wrong, which would be like if you understood the blockchain in 2010. You know, you just had to wait for a while where everybody thought you were an idiot. And now you're going to, you can invite them all on your private plane to your private island. So I had on Shelley Glashow this week. And one thing, we didn't get the debrief after that.

It was a lovely podcast. I'll find it earlier on this week. And Shelley said there was a point when Gilman, you know, kind of put forth the eightfold way. When he was literally, when Shelley was literally one of the few people on Earth who understood it. And so he immediately knew that he wasn't going to be the one that discovered it and, you know, won a Nobel Prize for that. he would win his Nobel Prize, you know, 17 years later for lecture week unification. But Shelley knew that Galman was right. And so, but nobody else believed it for years.

People didn't believe that Galman was right. And so he started doing all these calculations making use of this insider trading is the way I took away from it. And do you ever, you know, do you think that that can be applied in other systems in physical, you know, in physics? Well, I can say it openly. Like Pia Malani's thesis revolutionized all of economic theory, and it hasn't been understood. If you want to do something revolutionary, I promise you that that's been, it's an arbitrage. I can share it with the world. Nobody will do anything with it because the world decided to stand in the way of that progress.

That's an incontrovertible fact to me. And years from now, it'll come out, and somebody will say, why? did we not understand that this was done 50 years earlier? And then there'll be this series of podcast appearances where it's like, well, didn't he keep telling us that, yeah, because we've all got our heads wedged up there so far we can't see straight. That's the general nature of academics. It's not really a claim about, oh my God, you know, you're bragging so much about the various things that have happened in your family. No, it's very different than that. It's a claim that American STEM research has been going great guns and that the baby boomers and silent

more or less held back a ton of different insights. This is why we're still dealing with string theory all the time, is the string theory is a movement almost entirely moved by baby boomers in earlier. And it's not a movement of Gen X. It's not a millennial movement. Yeah. And so, you know, this comment at Planck about funeral by funeral, I'm sorry to say it.

It has much more to it than it should. Should we take a few questions that are really technical in nature rather than super chat questions? Okay. You dog. Someone's calling me a dog. All right. Technical question. Eigenboroughs were asking about the relationship of Yang Mills theory within GU. Let's find the question so we can answer. Great.

In geometric unity, there are effectively four major equations that exist before you get to GU from the standard model and general relativity that deal with each of the different spin fields. So for spin zero and spin one, that is the Higgs field and the vector potentials, those things belong to an equation that is generated analogously to Yang Mills theory. If you think about the curvature tensor as being an obstruction to a certain differential complex being a cohomology theory, if D squared does not equal zero, but D squared equals curvature coupled to a connect. then the idea is that you can take the size of the curvature, square that, and use that as what we would call a Lagrangian, an objective function that penalize some states of the world and privilege others.

And that's how we do physics. Well, what you do is you form a bosonic complex that's two-step. You have two differential operators. You would imagine that if you compose them, you would get a second-order differential operator. You don't. Then you think maybe I get a first order. You don't. All of those terms die. You're left with a zero-th-th-order term. you take the size of that and square it just as you do in Yang Mills theory. Now, the problem is that the two other main equations, by the way, the Aginbro's have been pretty loyal followers of this stuff, so it's a pleasure to be able to answer this. The other two equations are the Einstein field equation for the spin two field and the Dirac equation for the spin one-half fields. And those, in fact, go into a different set of equations that come from the square root of the original Lagrangian.

So just the way Einstein took the square root, sorry, just the way Dirac took the square root of the Klein-Gordon-Legrongian and got the Dirac-Legroxian and the Dirac equations, we take a square root of this second-order Lagrangian, which produces the obstruction analogous to Yang-Mills theory, and get a second Lagrangian, which is much closer to a Chern-Simon structure and a Dirac structure. So the Einstein and the Dirac go into one place in the theory, and they unify in that square rooted part. And the Higgs field and the Yang Mills field go into a different portion that have to do with minimizing a norm square of an obstruction term to a two-step elliptic complex, much the way you would in the deformation theory of self-dual Yang Mills. Okay, now this might be a technical question or it could be full of something else. David Kiercy. Eric, did you study the relationship between ciphered fiber spaces, eight geometries of three space, and the non-a-billion finite simple groups, 27 sporadic groups, prior Lise's favorite, 18 simple groups,

fam, your favorite, G2. Do you understand this? Vaguely. Not as you've written it. I mean, I am very interested in exceptional algebra. I've been much more interested in the large exceptional legal. groups than in the finite groups. I don't think there is anything profound the way Garrett would think about E8 and its relationship to the world. I think it's an artifact of putting together

spinners and adjoint representations of orthogonal groups that's tantalizing, but it doesn't really get you a hyperunification without supersymmetry because, in fact, you have to quantize the whole thing bosonically. I don't buy that Garrett's move to infinite dimension solve the problem. I hope to be proven wrong. He's going to be on the show in a couple weeks. That's great. But again, you know, my feeling about this is large exceptional league groups

are something I'd love to talk about. I haven't found them to be particularly important within physics. And that was my second favorite unification scheme. I'm glad Garrett is doing it so I can think about something else because my favorite is much more important to me than is that second one.

Do you want to try another technical one? Well, I look for one. why is Stephen Wolfram wrong in your opinion? Can there only be one as the Highlander said? Well sort of. My hope is that he's not wrong but I hope that if my theory turns out to be right, his won't be as important and that's not personal to Stephen. I'm perfect. If I'm wrong, he's one of the people I'd love to be right. But what I believe is is that once you have a theory that bootstraps itself from four degrees of freedom, you don't need a lot to get started. You don't need a super critical cellular automata to give you everything.

You just need it to give you four degrees of freedom. And if you're willing to accept, you know, sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, then pretty much that's as good as treble, mid, bass, and reverb. You don't really need something to get you started. So if I'm right, it doesn't mean Stephen would have to be wrong, but if I were right, Stephen would have to be not as important as the role that he's planning to play. And if I'm wrong, then we're going to need to get the complexity in some way. And he's going to have to somehow do that in his theory.

So my friend Eden, Raphaelie, asked a question, is academia becoming too Tedified? Took that off the screen. It's not a technical question. This TED Talk, whizban. We joke about, oh, wormholes, oh, time warps. And you see things, Michi Okaku, goes on Lex Friedman, and talks about the God comes in here.

And it's just like, give me a break. As sure, as you will, two twins separated at birth. Lex, Lex is a smart guy. Why does he fall for this nonsense? It's not that. The problem is that we have to keep people excited. We have to keep them a state. Do we have to tennify it?

Well, that's what I'm trying. I'm not trying to do that. I know you're not. But what I'm trying to do is to try to say, look, you want to talk serious stuff? We can talk about hop vibrations. We can talk about principal bundles. We can talk about any of the beautiful. Experiments, yeah, beautiful experiments.

Beautiful experiments, as we've been talking about. For some reason, we're in whizbang mode. And we think that the universe is all about us and that studying physics is going to bring us closer to some different way to stare into our own navels. And I hope that that's true. But that's not the only reason we do this stuff. We do it to get it right. And I'm sorry to say, but part of physics that we get, part of science that we get wrong is we tell everybody that science is exciting. Science is interesting.

Right. No, it's not. Sometimes it's dull. Sometimes nothing happens for a decade. And if you're constantly expecting to be on the edge of your seat about what's happening in physics, when for my way of thinking, right, theoretical physics has not budged much in certain ways in 50 years, just under. Okay, if you don't have that kind of patience, you probably don't belong in the field. And if you're impatient, then you better get in here and, you know, bring a shovel and a mop.

If you dropped a trillion dollars on either theoretical or experimental physics, which would have a bigger impact? My feeling is that you get the biggest impact from immunizing physicists from having to be scrutinized. Meaning what? Immunizing them. They shouldn't be. I don't like transparency. You don't? No.

F transparency. We have so much transparency. You're laughing because you know that everyone thinks transparency. Transparency is a good thing. What we need is more transparency. Why can't we have transparency? We need transparency. You know what we need?

We need feedback, best practices. We need some way of scoring things, better metrics. You're devitalizing everything about the field. Somebody should tell you, take your H index and take your forms in triplicate and go fill them out somewhere else because we're trying to do science in this place. Go get us some money. And then black, you know, black the windows out so nobody can see. see what we're doing and let's make progress. But if you do all this transparency stuff, what you get is group think. And how's that working out for us since 1984 in the anomaly

cancellation and strength here? It's been a disaster. So less transparency. We need more smart people. We need to get the people who aren't very smart, not very generative, not very creative, out of the field. And we have to realize that this is super serious business that's contributed so much to the economy that it should never have to beg for another penny. Yeah, but I mean, that sounds great. And, you know, we should, nobody. should go hungry, but there are priorities, right? So how do we balance these priorities? I mean, you made a suggestion when you first appeared on my podcast, oh, we got to tax, you know, semiconductor instructions because the physicists invented the, but no theorists looked in,

hmm, look at these equations of Brillowon zones and transistors. Let me predict, or in, in, semiconductors, let me predict that this will have an application in supercomputers. No, it's different than this. You want to screw yourself over as a society? Let me give you an idea of how to do it efficiently. So you can screw up the, the power, the, the, the power the United States and our economy for the foreseeable future. By all means, ask physicists to justify what they do every four seconds. Make sure that they tell you about the importance of understanding the early universe in terms of whether or not it can make your microwave oven five seconds faster.

And make sure that you get as much say about choosing who goes into the field as possible, not on ability but on extraneous details. Right? And then make sure that you're getting update reports every few seconds. to know that people are actually making progress. And everyone will lie to you in the field. The field will grind to a halt. If you want to make actual progress

and increase the diversity of the field, give the field money and stop asking so many questions. Let them do what they know how to do best. And stop pushing them to lie about all the success that they're having because they're failing. It should be succeeded or failing based on not what technical applications it produces, right? The problem is that it has technical applications.

Yes, but my point is that physics has proven itself so many times that if you're going to ask, well, what have you done for me lately? It's clear you don't understand the history of theoretical physics and its impact on the economy and on geopolitics. And so go read up and then come back and you'll understand why it's really important to leave physicists alone. Okay, let's see. We've got questions about UFOs. I don't know if you want to answer those. Should we build a bigger collider?

I'll take that one. No, I don't think we should build a bigger collider. And I gave the example when I talked to Barry Barris that will air next week. I think it will air next week. And I said it was good for him personally that the superconducting super collider was canceled because we ended up building or the world ended up building a super collider of sorts called the LHC, which did what the SSC was designed to do. The only natural target at that time was the Higgs.

That was the last missing element in the 1990s when it was canceled during the early 1990s, 1993, I think. And it caused Barry to search for a new job. And the job that he settled on was called LIGO. And LIGO made a detection many, many, many, many years later. And in fact, years after, you know, three or four years after, actually two years after, three years after, three years after, the announcement of the Higgs detection at the LHC, for which Peter Higgs and Glert won the Nobel Prize. But none of the 6,000 experimental brothers and sisters, my brothers won a Nobel Prize. So he missed out, he would have missed out on this little golden medallion, which I stole from. him when he wasn't looking had not been canceled.

So tell me what this future collider would be used for and I'll tell you if it's a good enough use of taxpayer money. Oh, may I? Yes, go for it. Okay. No, we should definitely build the next collider and it may find absolutely nothing and it's not necessarily true that by just increasing energy we always find something. If somebody told you that, they lied to you.

The reason we should build this thing is completely different than what Brian said, in my opinion. In my opinion, the reason to build this thing is that we have the money, we have the know-how, we're going to lose the know-how, and we're losing contact with the successful part of humanity. We don't know, why should I build this? If I don't find anything, there's no reason to think, no, it's not the right reason. We should build it even if it fails. It's cheap. We've earned it.

Stop being so stingy and ridiculous about this. This is the, we've also created a disaster in unleashing the power of nuclear weapons. And if theoretical physics doesn't go further, my concern is that we've marched us into the valley of death and we're not going to find a way out. And in part, this is already dangerous enough. The next thing to do is to understand particle theory and physical theory to see if there's any way to actually get somewhere outside of our solar system. And quite honestly, this is, I feel embarrassed even.

saying this when I'm talking about people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, you know, with tens of billions of dollars. And it's just like for F's sake, you know, I'm happy to not sit on top of the fact that a lot of that was taxpayer funded stuff that then got monopolized and concentrated in a few places. But for F's sake, you know, if you're going to have ridiculous levels of concentration, don't give me $3 million for a little cute prize to keep your money. Cut it out. You know, if you've got real money to throw around, we should be actually building things that make a difference and matter.

And this is ridiculous. And I also feel embarrassed on behalf of the physicists talking about money and can we afford to do this. Of course we can afford to do this. Look, I never say that we should take all these theorists. And again, you and I were debating this last night over some beverages. Very good ones. Very good ones, yes, from Japanese beverages.

We were debating, you know, theory in some sense is abundant and plentiful. And experiments are very expensive. Just the fact that there's only one experiment that you can name in particle physics, which would supersede the current one, whereas there could be 10 or 12 different theories and different dimensions. See, we disagree about that too. I say that the number of real theories is almost zero because the constraints are so high. I didn't used to be the case.

But I think that really what's going on, and this is the kind of thing I can say that you can't, is that Brian is quite correct that our experimental friends are not getting a huge amount of mind share. And we were talking about like the great experiments, the Cobalt 60 experiment with respect to the weak force or the Aeronov-Bome effects which showed us some aspect of electromagnetism super late in the game in the 1950s It could have been done at any time that's so mind-blowing we can't even think about it or the famous you know Magnetic Monopole that one time went through Palo Alto California Velazcavera's laboratory right and so we've got scandals we've got the discovery of the Higgs particles

We've got the neutrinos coming from 1987, a supernova. Jason Wilson discovering the microwave background, serendipitously, yes. And what's the old, what's the name of the antenna? Holmdale. Holmdale antenna in New Jersey. So there's so many great stories we've been remiss telling the experimental side of our story. And I think it's really important to give the experimentalists their due and not only fetishized theory. Yeah, why is it that we have, yeah, when you ask a theorist, it's you, it's Lisa,

Randall, it's Jan 11. These are all friends of mine that have been on the podcast. It's Brian it's Mitchie O'Coccu. When is it going to be, you know, Elena Apreel who leads the Zenon one-ton experiment? Well, but it's also, I mean, to be fair, even in the theorist's case, why isn't it Edward Witten? Why isn't it Carlo Rovelli? Like, we have a bunch of these people who actually try to theorize about this stuff. And the podcast world thinks that Brian Green, Sean Carroll, Jane and myself, you are where it's at, it's up to us. Look, I mean, I can be resentful of those characters at times, but it's really important to say that the mainstream of theoretical physics

is concentrated not in the podcast world, but at the Institute for Advanced Study. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV! Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is out.

It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Okay, so we're running short. Eric and I are going to be departing to welcome in a very important ritual in both of our lives. The Jewish Sabbath is coming soon. Let me see if we can figure out a couple of more good questions here.

If you had a 3D commuter model of your paper tube, what things would you want to do with it? I don't think it's just about the paper tube you want. You want a model of the obsevers in lower dimensions. The model of the observer's, the circle would be replaced by, let's say, a four-dimensional Taurus, and the one dimension of along the tube would be replaced by 10 extra dimensions. those 10 dimensions would be both related to something called S-O-10 theory as well as the 10 coupled non-linear equations that constitute general relativity. So it makes a linkage between those tens and

actually really something called the Petit Salam model but that has to do with low dimensional exceptional isomorphisms. Tyler what's your question? I can't find it so I'll give you a free question if you asked a hundred dollar super quick. And you ask it again really quickly just in the chat You don't have to do another super chat. Tyler's a friend of mine. I want to make sure we get that in. Where does consciousness come into geometric unity?

It's a great question. I think it's really important that we stop interposing ourselves between the world outside and what we are. And I just, I've become very disheartened that we have to be at the center of everything. I don't think the universe is about us. Maybe it's about us. Maybe there's a creator and there's a whole point to this thing. But we've got to stop asking, what is the universe done for me? It's sort of embarrassing that we've taken this thing of infinite complexity,

and we've decided that it's about humans. And it just isn't. And I really want us to stop making this about consciousness, about love, about spirituality. The universe is about the universe. What we should be figuring out is what are we doing to relate to it rather than trying to shoehorn it into a whole shape like us. Right. So a question about academia, why it's getting so hard.

I like to make the analogy. Imagine if it was possible to get into, someone's asking about patenting something. Wait, actually, I want to talk about things that mention things that sound technical. Yeah, I know. I'm looking for it. Can you patent anything? No, so that's not necessarily technical.

Where do the various gauge groups? Yeah, go for it. All right, you read it out. Where do the various gauge groups, e.g. S.U.2, SU3, lay in geometric unity. flavor space, color space, do these arise from GE's 14-dimensional construction? In 14-dimensionedions, you have a four-dimensional space and a 14-dimensional space. The four-dimensional space is embedded in the 14 or even immersed in the 14-dimensional.

The 14-dimensional space carries a bundle that is isomorphic to the tangent bundle, but is not canonically isomorphic. It has a metric. If you do spinners on that 14-dimensional bundle, I believe you get to the unitary group in 128 dimensions through the spin representation. So spin 14C, I think goes to U14C or something like that. You're pulling back that bundle that U128 via a map from Spin 14C into that large unitary group,

and that group is going to contain the SU3, the SU2, the U1, and I think it's going to do it along the Petit Salam breakdown, of 10-dimensional space into six-dimensional space and four-dimensional space. SU4, which is typically the Petit Salaam group, is exceptionally isomorphic to spin six, and SU2 cross-SU-2 is exceptionally isomorphic to spin four, and so the six and the four add up to 10, and I believe that that's how that story goes. So I asked about the shape of particles within geometric unity. Don't know what that means.

Does that even make sense? But I like the technical question that we just got. That was a good example, good use of our time. Something else about patenting something? I don't care. I know that, but listen to me. Just as it has a practical application understanding, you know, the strong force, the weak force, but you know what?

I'm tired of this. This is about what it's about. It's about trying to understand the universe and talking about how do you get rich from it. What can we do with it? No, no, that's not what I meant. Yeah, I know that that's what he meant. But what I mean is could this unlock, you know, technology? Could it unlock potential devastating power?

I am much more afraid that it's right than it's wrong. If it's wrong, it was a beautiful dream and it's over. If it's right, then we have to worry about the consequences. What can you do with this that you couldn't do before? All right. Last question I want to take. Sorry, Tyler, if you're hearing this, ask your question one more time. I'll try to get it to Eric.

Last question. Let's try to find one more technical question. Infinity. Biggest version of infinity. I don't know what that means. Painting can you create? Someone asked about music. Yeah, but I don't do any of that.

I want to do serious questions about the theory. When you talk about information, asks one of the universe. Because, you know, one of the things is that I'll be, if I talk fluff, people will say, well, that's all that fluff stuff you do on the internet. And then if I say, do you want to talk to technical, then what people will say

is, well, you lost everybody. So there's sort of no win. Is Bell's theorem, does it appear, does collapse of the wave from, where does the standard aspects of quantum of the, you know, unitarity to collapse, etc. Does it live? Does it have a place within GU for our final question for well I would say this different metrics sample different portions of metric space from the four-dimensional piece so if you had a

different metric then you're having a different observation of a different filament within the 14-dimensional space so I believe that that will have something to do with the quantization but it's phrased as a natural geometric theory because natural geometric theories post the 70s have the opportunity for geometric quantization since we figured out what to do with Hamiltonian mechanics in the symplectic geometry category by forming pre-quantum line bundles and then taking sections of the pre-quantum line bundles to give the state space of the theory generating the quantum out of the classical. So while it's not exactly true, there's an old saying

that quantization is an art not a functor, but it's less true after the 70s. It's more of a functor. The quantizations often suggest themselves that the theory is sufficiently geometrically natural, And what this is is a natural geometric theory that suggests that its quantization will be the standard model. And the claim is if you have anything that's remotely right, like three, if you have a natural geometric model that has three generations of 16 particles each with a 3-1 metric and all. If the stuff starts lining up, then it's highly unlikely that the quantization will be its problem. We know how to quantize a good theory. The problem is we haven't had a great theory to quantize.

Does this question make any sense? One of the fundamental particles made out of quote? Frank is asking, Frank Wilcheck, I assume. In string theory particles are explained in terms of nine-dimensional strings vibrating in this abstract space and time. What does GEU say about fundamental particles composition? Well, that this begins, it's non-revolutionary in this aspect. If we think that in the standard framework we have bundles and that these bundles have sections, which are a fancy name for functions.

Think of the XY plane as an example of a bundle. The x-axis is its base space. The translates of the y-axis or its fibers. Then functions are called sections in this new language. In that new language, particles are going to continue to be sections of bundles. So that's not an area where GU differs from the standard model in general relativity. All right. Well, I am now, so you all were here.

You watch this ad-free. Anyone who comes afterwards is going to have to suffer through. Eric, I want to thank you so much. I want to take us out with the little music from our friend, Mr. McGill, Yeti Tears. And Eric, I want to wish you continued success and continued visits to UC San Diego

many times in the future. May we go from strength to strength together. Thank you so much, my friend. And now we're off to dinner. Thank you for going into the impossible. Please subscribe. We've got great interviews coming up with guests such as Kamran Vafa.

and we have Ray Weiss, Barry Barish, and many other people coming up and Into the Impossible podcast. May they find their way from the UCSD podcast to the portal? Great guests. I'm supposed to get on the portal, right? Thanks so much. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review.

Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to you. your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences.

Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director. Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.