Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein & Dan Green: Can New Physics Be Tested? (#299)

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

Please support the podcast by taking our short listener survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/intotheimpossible Join Eric ( @EricWeinsteinPhD ) and Prof Dan Green (twitter.com/nu_phases) A discussion on the state of physics -- both theoretical and experimental -- and ways to make progress in the future. Watch Physics is NOT In Crisis! Physicist Dan Green Into The Impossible Podcast https://youtu.be/ZhthGWoIMlU Join this channel to get access to perks: www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast: scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5-star rating and review for The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. You can assure you, I can go, you know, on very large platforms and talk about very concrete ideas. I can try to tell you why I believe that there are three generations of matter, why it's chiral, et cetera, et cetera. And I promise you that the very weird behavior is that people don't take it seriously

because what they're really trying to do is not ask questions. They're really trying to say, how do I make this problem go away so I can get back to the cargo cult science that I've made a career around inside of a large community? That's what's dangerous. Welcome everyone to this physics insider Battle Royale edition of Into the Impossible. Your host, Brian Keating, moderates a lively debate between physics iconoclast and audience favorite Eric Weinstein and theoretical physicist UC San Diego professor Dan Green. In Brian's previous episode with Dan entitled, Physics is Fine, Dan discussed his Twitter storm touting his list of the most significant fundamental physics

results with the last 40 years that did not win a Nobel Prize, arguing that physics is doing just fine. All contrary, are physicists stuck in old paradigms? Where are the breakthroughs in particle physics and unified theories? Are precious scientific resources being spent on the wrong things with outdated standards? Have we lost creative initiatives? Are theorists doubling down on their own worn-out traditions, shutting out newer independent thinking, is quantum gravity at a dead end? And if you applied to graduate school lately, has academia become too limiting for its own good? Decide this fundamental physics fight for yourself as you stretch the boundaries of your mind with this lively debate between Dan Green and Eric Weinstein refereed by your host

Brian Keating on The State of Physics. And please, win-lose-drave-dra. And please, win-lose-dra. If you value intellectual honesty and thoughtful dialogue, reward us with a five-star rating. And do let us know what you think about this episode and any suggestions to make the show better in a review. Professor Keating reads them all. Like this one. From P. Galeigh. Any sufficiently intelligent podcast listener will find Brian Keating indistinguishable from fascinating, accessible, and fun. It's like magic.

and from Alex Bills, unbelievably fantastic. Professor Keating is an absolute gem. And the guests he gets for the show are top of the line, a must watch for both physicists and the general audience alike. And now get ready to rumble on the state of physics. Just fine or stagnant in need of a shakeup, you decide as we go into the impossible with Dan Green and Eric Weinstein. efficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the bud bay doors, please, Hel. Recently had a very, very popular episode, said that we called physics is fine, and it was based on a Twitter thread storm that came out at the end of December in which Dan highlighted discoveries in physics that had not been really rewarded with the accolade of the Nobel Prize yet, perhaps never, but at least as of the moment, had not been rewarded. with that particular remuneration. And there's been a lot of controversy, as I said, around the description of physics as having stagnated. Most forcefully or vocally by Sabina Hassenfeld, are also eight-time guest on the podcast, just behind Eric's record set for this particular event. But I wanted to have both gentlemen here together to discuss the future of physics as they see it and what's right with physics, what we could do with physics,

or what we could change or modify, what opportunities there are, and sort of moderate that from the perspective of a simple experimental cosmologist and my perspective on things. So we're going to talk about particle physics, experiment theory, we're going to talk about unification of forces and fields, perhaps, and we're going to have it, as I said, a nice, clean fight. We're going to go TOE to TOE. I did it.

I made that joke. You didn't think I would. So I think I'll start with Dan just to recapitulate from our previous episode that aired last week, you can find it, and the channel archives called Physics is Fine. What was the motivation for that particular tweet storm? Yeah, so thanks for having me on. It's nice to get a chance to talk to both of you. So the motivation behind the thread was to articulate some of the things that I've picked up on being an active researcher that I thought were, you know, important events for me in understanding how the world works and making progress in clearly observational topics like cosmology, but also important theoretical ideas that had a huge impact on how I see the world that I didn't think were always well understood or appreciated by people, like even other researchers outside of their own fields. So it was just to kind of communicate the value of what had been happening. And one of the reasons for that is that, you know, as a researcher, it's really important to know, you know,

what are what am I aiming for like what would be a result that would really stand out amongst the best results the past five years you know we'd all like to be Einstein but just for me I just you can't always you won't always achieve those but maybe having a hierarchy of results in your mind is really important for just gauging you know where progress you know what counts as progress what kind of progress is going on and Eric you've been interacting you've been interacting and engaging with this said tweet and also with our friend Sabina and Martin Bauer, who generously provided a book called Nobel Dreams, which is somewhere around here. What was your reaction to this? You had sort of a provocative comment that we should just get past the point that, yes, there's been a lot of progress in condensed matter physics and theoretical astrophysics, experimental cosmology. What are you most interested in doing to move the conversation forward from your perspective? Thanks for asking. So I'd like to do this in the... of the clickbait kind of thumbnail sketches. I was outraged, Dan, frankly, by this tweet storm. Sorry, it's going to get a little contest. I'm bored by all the opening moves. We have a suite of moves where somebody says there's a crisis in fundamental physics,

and then somebody mishears it and says, you have no idea what's going on in material science. It's never been a more exciting time. You say, that's not what I said. Well, who's to say what's fundamental? Is cosmology fundamental? So this is the sort of weird dance. that people get into at the beginning, and I've said, I'd rather just say Roy Lopez-Spaskey

variation and get to the middle game rather than wasting time on the intro. So I think it would be appropriate, given that I'm not a physicist, to cede a bunch of things, first of all, being that I'm not a physicist. I think that the issue is not about physics in the large. It's really about the sort of core central issue, which people are very squeamish about now, because nobody wants to say that any field is any more important than any other, which is ridiculous. There is a central core of fundamental physics, which is the thing that scratches the itch we have. When we're not physicists, we want to know what is the universe, who am I, where, why am I here?

How does the world work? What is this place made of? And those questions have stagnated, and I'm sort of somewhat arbitrarily, but not that arbitrarily, tying that to February 1st of 1973 with the publication of the Kobayashi-Maskawa paper, enlarging the Khabibo angle to three generations. And I believe there are eight particle theorists left on Earth who have won a Nobel Prize. Now, that also causes a certain variation in the opening because somebody will say, well, you seem to be very hung up on the Nobel Prize.

It's like, no. Not more than me. But the fact. The fact is that the Nobel Prize is a somewhat conservative measure of progress. And as a conservative measure of progress, when you're down to your last eight people who have proven that they are physicists by being able to make contact with reality at that level, 50 years is a long time. I think the longest recent drought of this kind was between 1928 and 47, with the advent of QED

by Dirac as the first real quantum field theory before the sort of primitive renormalization program came in and cleared up the ability to compute. So I absolutely celebrate Dan's Tweetstorm. I think that it had lots of great papers, many of which I knew nothing about. So I educated myself. I got a chance to look at Dan's work a bit. But that said, one of the things I think that Tweetstorm did, and I think Dan acknowledged as much, is that it didn't clearly state the results that would constitute unambiguous change in fundamental physics. That is, what is the field content of the world? What stuff is it that's running around? Are there new things that we haven't figured out? What constitutes the new interactions of the stuff that we have and the stuff that may come to be?

And the other issue of unification would be spaces. So we currently have something called space time, and it's not clear whether there is a problem with space time itself. So I would say that Dan did a great service, talking about all the sorts of things that are not in crisis, and I wish to seed instantly that it is not that physics is in crisis, which is the thing that everybody can understand easily, but it is the core central issue of what physics can be and is meant to be that excites our imaginations and our passions, answers philosophical questions, that is in a prolonged state of, I would say, a necessary self-inflicted crisis. Well, just before, Dan, you get the opportunity to address that.

Are you familiar with this essay by David Foster Wallace called This is Water? You're drinking some vodka, so hopefully you're familiar with it. So it's a parable of these two fish that are young fish, and they're in the ocean, they're swimming around, and all of a sudden, an older fish comes by and says, hey, boys, how's the water? And he goes on his way. And then the two fish look at each other. One says the other one, says the other one, what the hell is water? Is that possible? Let me ask Dan.

Are we obsessed with space time? Are we in space time in the same way that these fish are in water? And are we rightfully to be maybe ashamed or view it as something to be dispensed with altogether, as I think Einstein or Lorenz or both of them or neither of them or Nimas have claimed? What is space time? Why is that sort of the pinnacle? And how can you see that getting under Eric's skin? Yeah, I mean, for sure, that's one of the great questions of science.

So we think that space time probably emerges from something, and a lot of examples we've studied, life strength theory, where our ultimate hope for resolution of the singularity, the beginning of, you know, beginning of time is probably something non-geometric. If we understand what's going on there, it will not be in terms of geometry, at least of the kind of space time we experience. I think the thing I would say is, in response to you, are we unnecessarily obsessed with it, I do think that there are questions of this nature, like, you know, what was what happened before the Big Bang? And some of those questions, we don't have the tools to answer. We don't have data to help guide us. And even if someone writes down a theory that works, like, we may

have no way to test it. Someone can come up with another theory. And so there is a lot of, like, we're not guaranteed that we're going to be able to answer all the questions that, you know, are deeply held questions of humanity going back at eons. But I do think that like, so there are aspects of these questions. I don't think we're guaranteed that we can make progress on all the questions we'd like to. And, you know, what happens at space time when it ceased to be, you know, the kind of thing we experience on our scale, does it continue to exist down to these scales? You know, we'd love to be able to answer that question.

But I also don't think we necessarily are promised that we'll ever have answers, or at least in hundreds of years' time scale. And so I don't see that as the benchmark of which all decisions of progress have to have to be made. And I guess when I hear that, I check it against things that I believe. So one, when you say geometric, it's not that it will be non-geometric. It's that it won't be the specific geometry, and you sort of corrected that mid-flight. So if Albert Einstein told us to embrace semi-Romanian geometry, it's not simply going to be a semi-Romanian manifold, which is basically four degrees of freedom together with one set of rulers and four rulers for each degree of freedom and six protractors between them. So you have ten variables that get chosen by an equation. And then that thing, to the extent that I understand your point, it's that there are these singularities.

One is at the beginning of time, if you will, in the standard Friedman-Robertson-Walker model. And the other one is at the base of a black hole, which is the Swartzschild singularity. And one modern interpretation is that the singularities result from crimes and sins that we don't even know we've committed. And so we're trying to figure out what to do as penance so as to remove these singularities. But if I listen to what you're saying very carefully, I see something which I'm very alarmed by, which is the, you're not suspicious, either one of you, enough of the language, before speaks to one dimension of time. And only R1 has an ordering in the absence of other structure. R2, R2, R4, don't have such a thing. So when there is an arrow of time, it makes good sense ordinarily to say nothing of cardinally to speak of before. But if the ultimate structure, as I believe, has, multiple dimensions of time, you will find that the crutch of saying initial conditions has to be replaced by something like boundary conditions. And in such a situation, one of the things

that's really interesting to me is that we have the Lagrangians, the equations, the field content, which is the science, but we also have this way of talking around it. And the way in which we have of talking around it carries a tremendous amount of weight. And a lot of that, I think, is grooving each generation to fail as its successors failed, because what we're doing is we're putting a tremendous amount of pressure saying, if you don't learn to speak the way we do, you will not be able to survive to adulthood to have your own thesis students, and therefore, you had better learned to talk as we do. And I think that that's one of the things that I'm very concerned about. I don't believe that before is as simple as we're making it out to me.

So I guess I would push back on that. I mean, I don't think it's, I mean, we can use, it's helpful to use everyday language and then add, okay, it could be different, right? Like, it's helpful to start from the things we know are true. And we can ask questions like, could there be extra dimensions of time or, you know, even just the evolution from is, do we know that quantum mechanics is the only possible way that the world could work? There are lots of people, and I include myself in them, that are interested in pushing the boundaries. But it also helps to start from a place of what we know. I think there are plenty of people who throw away literally all of physics and they go, well, I don't want to be constrained by the structures of physics.

And it really hurts their careers because they can't, they don't even understand basic physics, which stops them from being able to make meaningful progress. Because if you can't, if you can't explain what we already understand, you can't extend the structure in new and interesting ways. So with the example of multiple time directions, like people do consider this, like, in, you know, well-respected theoretical physics groups for many different motivations, either purely just as a tool to understand physics, but in other cases, really, because they're interested in, like, what would it mean and what are the implications?

But since we, like, all of our life experience is still rooted in one time, like, I think it's still reasonable to say. For sure, you have to recover that. But at the same time, I don't think, like, I think it's good to establish that, like, we have a language that works well for describing a lot of the universe and that we talk about how we break those things in controlled ways. So generalizations of, say, like, number of time dimensions or, say, changes to the rules even so we're not even doing quantum mechanics.

Like, those things are really interesting directions, but they're very constrained because most of them don't even describe daily life in any meaningful way. Most mutations in biology lead to things getting far worse rather than better. It's a rare mutation that works. But what you've said is not actually true in science. It's often the case that people make huge breakthroughs because they don't understand the errors of a previous generation. So, for example, you know, you had the stray hydrogen atom on the nucleotides that was in. all the books in the wrong place. And it happened that Watson and Crick were in an office with Jerry Donahue who said,

you know, all the books are wrong. And if you look in the double helix, it's about, you know, a page and a half or something before Jim Watson figures out the hydrogen bonds that explain the Chargraf equimolar relations. And you have similar things. If you were, you know, in the 1940s trying to study electromagnetism and its effect on electrons, you would almost certainly think that it was the electric and magnetic fields that impacted an electron beam passed around the solenoid. And surprisingly enough, in the 50s we learned that there were classical consequences of electromagnetism that we had really wrong because we put all of our weight, if you will, on the E&B fields of the electromagnetism and not on the electromagnetic four potential,

which in fact is something, which is not a convenience product meant to recover classical. electromagnetism. It in fact has weight, as was shown by Bowman-Earonov. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get this day you When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I mean, I don't disagree with that point of view. I would just say that there's not, I don't think there's a lack of contrarianism in the field.

And I don't think that that, I don't think there's people feel they're unable to take, take risks. I think the problem is that like there's no, if you don't. understand the starting point, it's very difficult to take risks that are in a productive way. Right. So if I don't understand why we think the world, how the world works in this room, it's very difficult to think, well, what are the limitations of how I break the structures that I understand? So I would say, you know, people understanding, you know, the, you know, trying to propose, you know, generalizations in all kinds of directions, almost all of them are doomed to fail from the start. And I think many people were like, well, that's, you know, people trying to put

unnecessary constraints on me. I'm a free thinker. It's like, no, that's not people trying to put it. That's reality putting constraints on you. And I think that's, we have to separate. There's definitely sociological challenges for young people to do really creative things. But there's also just reality that presents a real challenge to being super creative. I don't, I just have a completely different impression of your field from outside, which is people come to me. And that's, they say, I can't afford to work on what I really want to work on. I don't believe many of the things that I'm being fed with my mother's milk. I can understand them, but every time I deviate more than a certain amount or in a way that is not thought well of by the community, all conversations

die off. I'm cautioned that this is an extremely brave thing to do in the sense of bravery is stupidity. And I think that what you're saying is a hope and a wish, which in a few cases, I don't want to say that it's 100% across the board, but I do believe that in part, we don't have this freedom in this field, and we don't have the freedom to continue to get engagement from the community, because in general, we get these mega programs that are cropping up. And in the mega programs, there are all sorts of assumptions that have been layered on, which are not proven. And, you know, I would love to apply this rule to some of the major mega programs and say,

hey, you're in the wrong number of dimensions. You've got the wrong signature. You've got the wrong symmetries. You've got the wrong field content. And, you know, it becomes this thing where the person then says, oh, no, no, it's a toy theory. You know, I'm in a small Euclidean number of dimensions with SU2 is the symmetries of the universe.

And I'm super symmetric. I'm doing all of this stuff, which is not the physical world that we live in so far as we understand it. And the idea is that that person, is saying, I wish to suspend the normal rules of science because I'm doing toy stuff in order to learn about the structures that are going to elucidate the actual one physical universe that we're in. Now, when you do that, I understand that. But what we're talking about is something like scientific immunity. And if you've ever met somebody with diplomatic immunity,

some of them have the feeling that they can park wherever they want to and they don't have to pay finds and that they're not subject to the laws of the land that they inhabit. And what I'm trying to say is you cannot have these mega programs casually imposing the strictest expectations on its competitors and then giving itself a permanent free pass to go on for decades and decades about nothing. Well, just to push back with loving respect. So I have two actual physicists against one non-physicist. I like my odds. I know, but you're an honorary physicist. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to tell you. You're an honorary physicist. So, you know, you're taking basically the opposite point, if I'm wrong, correct me, but of this guy up here,

not Weinstein, but Einstein, you know, who never thought any of his predictions would be verifiable, and yet they proved to be very, very useful approximations, toy models. Look at a Schwarzschild. I mean, we already mentioned the Schwarzener's singularity. That was thought to be, you know, completely impractical, never detectable. Einstein subsequently, also disavowed the detectability of gravitational waves, gravitational lensing, and yet it was remarkably prescient in that the toy model works in, you know, basically 99.99% of all situations where we could ever hope to apply it. So toy models are extremely powerful. And just to add on to that, you and I were talking before Dan came in about, you know, string theory in that very realm, you know, sometimes

it is useful to take a, and again, I'm speaking as a simple experimental cosmologist, not a theorist. But to take a toy model or take something that we know works in certain situations like the Klein Gordon equation, which it doesn't apply, unless I'm wrong, to any real particles, but it is useful to apply in a way of generating other solutions. It's sort of does with modifications. With an idealized modification. That's proving my point. It's a toy model. So what's wrong with toy models? We get a lot of mileage out.

Nothing is wrong with toy model. You're saying that you're being excluded or maybe not part of the physics program. unless you engage in something that... I don't think that's... This is just uncomfortable because it's a... Like, let me begin by saying string theory can't hurt anyone. Right? String theory is a set of ideas.

It's a constellation of hypotheses, and it's a place to play. There's nothing wrong with string theory, nor loop quantum gravity. The problem is with... And I don't want to put it all on string theory. The problem is quantum gravity sociology, which has blown a physics-shaped hole in... fundamental physics and replaced it with a set of double standards in which I want to know what are the rules. If the rules are, we all get to play, then hot diggedy dog, let's all play.

And if the rules are, we should be very careful that things agree with experiment in any attempt to talk about something that is violated. You know, like as soon as Dirac finds that A times B is not equal to B times A when he tries to take the square root of your, your, you know, Klein Gordon equation, you know, it's a short period of time before he says, well, maybe A and B aren't numbers, the matrices. And then it's like, okay, so you did something that was wrong, that didn't make any sense, and then it did make sense later. The problem that I have is that we have one set of players that is functioning in some sense as both the referees and a team. So imagine that you're playing in the NFL, and you've got the foot locker sends a team. So all their employees are dressed in vertical black and white stripes.

And they take the field, they're not particularly talented, but the one thing that they have... It would be worse than on Sunday's Super Bowl final call. What they do is that they start saying, you know, off sides. You're like, what... Why do you guys get to do this? You're not, you're playing on the field. You're not in a position to do that. The problem is the cancerous sociology of quantum field theory, because this field is given excuses that the rest are not,

And it imposes the most strict attempts to impose like scientific falsifiability and to tell people that you're out, you're out, you're out. Well, 70 years later, after Bryce DeWitt enters an anti-gravity competition with his famous essay, we're still wrestling with a product that doesn't ship, which is imposing the standards on other fields. And it's really important to blow that up in our lifetime so that we can all move forward together. So I actually celebrate what you're saying about toy models. I just want to make sure that we don't have scientific immunity for quantum gravity. Well, I just want to point out that Bryce DeWitt's book on anti-gravity is so engaging that you just can't put it down. Dan, I want to ask you, are we having a discussion about sociology, or are we going to talk about the actual ideas behind these issues? Because when you and I spoke, I said, when you guys get to, I don't know what you guys do over there in theory, but the, but the vice.

Bottom line, someone's got to keep an eye on you. You know, I know we don't pick a person. We don't pick a field when we want to hire a young professor. We wanted to hire you. I was part, you know, the milieu. I didn't actually, I wasn't on the committee, but it was part of that milieu. So I didn't say, oh, I really want someone who, you know, has worked on string theory. No, it's sort of a target of opportunity in some cases.

We were stealing you away from another university. But the point is, is the sociology inside the host organism, or is it something that is perceived as being afflicting it from outside, from outside. So I'm going to agree with Eric in some ways and disagree in others, but let me, let me, let me, let's start with what we agree. I'll start, I'll start where we agree, which is like, so the problem when a field gets too big is that it doesn't have to refer outside, right? And that's, I think, what you're getting at, which is like, we make our own rules, we play by our own rules. And I never have to make

contact with, not just with nature, but the rest of the world, right? I'm big enough. And, you know, we can go to conferences with a thousand people and never talk to anyone who's spoken a different language or thought about another problem. So I think I'm saying that because what I really see is makes the difference most of the time between the areas where the toy model makes progress or the people working on the toy model really are meaningfully moving the field forward. Is their ability to both what they're working on connects to other fields, but they're also able to understand what other fields need from them

and how their toy models are addressing that. So for someone working on, let's say, quantum field theory in two dimensions, like, you could do it, and you could do it in such a way that's like, why are these people wasting all their time? But then there are other people that we're working on quantum field three in two dimensions

who are like condensed matter physicists. And they were like, you know, no, we're working on this because these are solvable models of phase transitions and I can make material. And it's the ability to communicate outside of your area that's really important for the health of the health of the field, and to keep those toy models coming in contact with nature, right? If you're not interacting with the people for whom your toy model is supposed to be making

contact, then it really is useless, right? If you're not, I mean, maybe it'll be useful eventually someone 100 years later. But, well, but I do think it's valuable to both parties, the people who are more in touch with nature and the people who are just trying to make progress to communicate with each other in a productive way. And where I will agree with you is that, and I'm not just going to say string theory, I think many fields reach a point

that they're so self-sustaining that nobody in that field feels the need to talk outside of the field. I'm happy not to say string theory once for the rest of this. I want to talk about quantum gravity as the problem, which subsumes string theory, and it doesn't point the finger at string theory in particular. Yeah, but I would say, like, again, and that doesn't, I would not even, I would say it's true even in areas that are experimentally

driven. Like, this phenomenon of a field becoming big enough that it does not have to refer to nature or progress or anything. And it's just, as long as we're making everyone in our community happy and we're all speaking the same language, then we're all doing fine. Are you emissurating other communities? Am I? No, no, in these large programs, I'm even somewhat understanding if you guys want to, to take some portion of the resources and go off into a cloistered monastery and talk to each other for 40 years. As long as it's not too much, that's fine. It's when you start telling other people that they're stupid and when you say that, I don't know why anyone else works on

anything else that's dumb. And then you start talking about the fact that you play up all of your competitor fields problems. You don't own your own. What you're talking about is sort of scientific pathology and our discomfort or discomfort in dealing with this phenomenon causes us to do proxy arguments one proxy argument is quantum gravity the problem with it is it doesn't make contact with the experiment come on right or it doesn't fit the scientific method oh you're going to repeat the big bang and so you have large end give me a break right another one is beauty sabina is very you know focused on beauty well she's she's doing that in a way to avoid the head-on colloquy with what she's really trying to say.

I'm not trying to avoid the head-on collision. What I'm trying to say is we cannot afford for an imperial culture to be telling other cultures that are trying to work on the same problems, that they cannot exist because you've got everything wrapped up. And literally, we have a situation in which your colleague, David E. Kaplan, was recently featured in an interview where he just let loose. And I know David, who did the film Particle Fever.

And what he was talking about was the feeling that he was dumb and stupid and couldn't get something. And we used to have a game called Tag War in my neighborhood. A new kid would come. We'd say, let's play Tag War. And they would try to figure out the rules of Tag War. And more or less, it was hazing and abuse. And after about two and a half, three weeks where we changed the rules over and over again so that a person says, I don't understand the rules.

It feels like there are no rules. they became part of the neighborhood because it stood for the game without any rules. That was what tag war meant. And my feeling about this is we have a tag war problem coming out of quantum gravity that is stalling the core field that has to get addressed in the lifetime of the people who are still there who created the problem because good science requires that they go back to their statements where there are a lot of people who are no longer here. People who began their careers in the 1980s. How old were you during the anomaly cancellation, 1984? Two years old.

There you go. You have no idea what it was like. And you can read about it, but the fact of the matter is it was an absolutely brutal thing. And, you know, Brian Green and I have been having a back and forth about this. He got asked on Kurt Jymongles program about what are these issues that people keep talking about. And he said, oh, well, you know, we were very enthusiastic. And I heard you say this thing about, you know, particle theorists are like bosons. They all line up in the sort of find the same things interesting. No, North Koreans line up and find the same things interesting. Iraqis, under Saddam Hussein, all voted the same way.

You have a problem, which is why they're behaving like bosons rather than fermions, and why the fermions are being, you know, evolutionary theory has a concept called interference competition, where if you have one animal that tries to keep another animal from being able to get to the salt lick or the water or the food, and that other animal that's being kept from that dies off. And that's how we've lost these people. There are so many theories and interesting people who are no longer with us because of this mad grab for resources, quoting something like white man's burden, you know, manifest destiny. It is our manifest destiny to change the problem. We used to have a concept called unified field theory or unification.

That went away. And it got supplanted by something called quantum gravity. And that became the thing that got rolled out through Dennis Overby in the New York Times repeated in Science magazine. ad nauseum until everyone was brainwashed thinking, you know, the problem of our time is quantum gravity. And it's not. I mean, are you saying we need, you know, literal tribunals to get Edward Witten and, and Polchinsky? Well, we can't get Polchinsky anymore. But what is it, what's really bothering you? I understand that this is, that these are challenges. These are, it's frustrating to have a field that's had from one perspective, the lack of progress, but entrenched because of,

of the prestige of the previous practitioners. But again, I like to point this out. In 1859, there was a very bright guy by the name of James Clerk Maxwell, who worked very hard and had a successful model of electromagnetic wave propagation in the sense that had predicted experimental observables. But it was based on whirlpools and eddies and all sorts of other things to substantiated an ether-like material for it. So he was right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reason.

Galileo, same thing. He thought the tides were caused by the Earth's rotation. they're really caused by the moon. So in other words, why is it so important that we punish Edward Witton? I mean, I would like to be. It's not a question of punish. Maybe Edward Witten has something to say about this behavior. And I would love to hear Coomron and Brian Green and Lenny Susskin, as well as, you know, Natty

Cyberg and Eva Silverstein. It would be great to have these people in a dialogue. You know, Natty Cyberg said something. You said, string theorists are very arrogant. If somebody comes up with something that makes progress that isn't string theory, we'll just say it's string theory. And I'm like, no, there's a concept called mustn't. You don't get to do that stuff. You're in the wrong field, if that's how you feel.

And I know, Natty, and we have a cordial relationship. You don't get to play that way. You don't get to call people stupid unless you're going to back it up, or it can come back at you. I mean, I would be happy to talk to Lenny Susskin and talk to him about all the people he's insulted over the ears. Because he's very open about it. He's not hiding it. And just say, you're an old man. You're at the end of your career.

How to go? What happened? Did you make the progress that your friend Feynman made or Murray Gelman or any of the people that you knew from a previous era? And my feeling about this, pardon me? That's a very high standard. Let's talk about, you know, the A team, the Institute for Advanced Study, at some point recently, Robert Dygraph, a string theorist as its director, Natty Seiberger string theorist, Edward Witten, Juan Maldesana, and then Nima was sort of off a little bit in non-necessary quantum gravity land.

That's an enormous investment in quantum gravity. And the problem that I'm having with this is, you know, Dan Friedan, a prominent quantum gravity researcher, talked about this openly. He said, science only works when we actually go back and look at how we've behaved and confront our own failures. This is the same thing with the bootstrap method. I feel like what we're doing is we're living the Jeffrey Chu nightmare all over again. Do you feel like that's the challenge that we're facing in theoretical? Well, I'd first like to just, like, I think we can agree that there can be sociology problems,

but I would also say, like, as a young person, I find the same level of saying that, there's been no progress in physics, you know, it's insulting to young people who are not part of this, who feel like we're making real progress, who see real progress happening. And to say,

but at the same time, if you're going back to like a generate, a much older generation, and you're saying, and we're painting everyone who's come back in the past 40 years as being complicit with this, and we can't think for ourselves, and we're being influenced by it.

And it doesn't make it easier for us to go off, to just say, we've made no, progress doesn't help it easier. But that's a total mischaracter. I mean, it's just I've never said anything so simplistic in my life. What I've said is when you try to say that you're going to quantize gravity, what you're talking about is quantizing geometry. And what happened was the most romantic backfire possible in the sciences is that you instead geometrised the quantum. And the great legacy of these people is that they figured out that quantum field theory really has nothing to do with

physics. Physics, as we understand it, the physical world is one input to the quantum field theory machine. Quantum field theory is really about waves on waves. And that happens in cobordism theorem and algebraic topology. It happens to conformal theory that has nothing to do with the physical dimensions and realms. What we found out was fascinating because, in fact, it backfired. And there's nobody who would like to celebrate all the good that digraph and Natty and Ed and company did in this story, including the celebration of the toy models. The problem that I'm having is that they reordered the field. I mean, if you, this is a book that I keep very close to me because it's a conference that happened at the exact moment before the anomaly cancellation.

And Murray Gilman gave a keynote address at Shelter Island 2, the conference that was supposed to recapitulate the 1947 conference that got physics back on track. So they're trying to get back the magic. He says, as usual, solving the problems of one era has shown up the critical questions of the next. The very first ones that come to mind looking at the standard theory of today, he's talking about the standard model. Why this particular structure for the families, in particular, why flavor chiral with left and right-handed particles being treated differently?

Why three families? That's a generalization of Robbie's famous question. How many sets of Higgs bosons are there in the standard theory? and why SU3 cross SU2 cross U1, why those symmetries. Now, in all of those cases, those are classical questions. And what you see, and the reason that it's important that your generation know its history, is that one of the things that happens in marketing is that you have a product and you have to create a problem so that your product fills that hole, right?

And this is what happens with the 76 trombones and the music man, right? You got a problem and it's pool and the solution is music. And, okay, what these people did to the field was that they reordered our concept of what our principal problems were around the problems that they thought they were most likely to solve. And I don't need them to be in pain. I don't want to see. I'm not particularly vindictive. But what I do want to see is tell me about all the people whose careers were terminated during this. Tell me what they were working on.

Should we have them back? Shall we have conferences devoted to what if quantum gravity doesn't exist? Shall we actually ask, because what you talked about with heterodoxy is that you're usually talking about orthodoxy plus epsilon. You know, I'm going to go out in a limb and say sterile neutrinos. Well, that's not really very heterodox. And then maybe you go a little bit. I'm going to say that there are multiple axions to solve the strong CP problem plus, you know, create cosmic biofarin. whatever these things are, they're not really what we're talking about in terms of heterodoxy.

And it's just, it's very important to either impose these rules on this group of people or to relax the rules for other people so that we can have truly different ideas. Because I think that we will probably find that over the last 50 years, there were many ideas that will fall into the final theory that were pushed aside into the dustbin by this group. I mean, again, I want to take it back to what I think is certainly not to invalidate anything you've said, Eric, but I think that that might be prerogial to the extent that it may involve certain members of the community who aren't affiliated with these three-letter organizations like IAS or MIT or what have you. NSA. But I think what's more interesting, and, you know, Dan is free to opine any way he likes and respond to you. But the point, you know, I think is how many flowers should be blooming right now? I mean, there are, you mentioned a couple of different, you know, alternatives, a luponum gravity and other things. At what point do you, would you have to say the portfolio should be fully diversified and we should actually devote, you know, equal, you know, amounts of attention?

Right. But I know, but now you're saying, well, we should have, you know, hold these people to account. Well, first of all, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Edward Witten's published something on string theory. in a decade. I mean, the last thing I saw is he wants us to go visit a black hole to see if there's a microsecond time delay at the edge of, you know, 5AU or something like that. I don't know to what extent he's still holding sway over the field that you're in Eva is actually much, much younger. What do Coombe said?

What would do you say? Yeah. He was on the podcast two years ago, and I confronted him as all podcasts are legal, podcasters are legally obligated to do. And I said, what about this claim that there's been no, you know, experimentally falsifiable things predicted by by string theory. He said, oh, no, no, you're wrong. And you can go back and see this episode. But didn't you ask about, like, what do you want it on his tombstone? Oh, what do you want on his tombstone? Yeah, that and, and Michi Okaku, very similar answers. The equations of string theory, right? So, but let me just finish. One thing that he did say is, well, no, it's not

true. Strength theory does predict the mass of the electron shall be between 10 to the minus 35 plank masses and 10 to the minus one plank masses. And yeah, that sounds all. funny, we can laugh about it. But, you know, in, you know, logarithmic space, it's not, it's not terrible. I guess the point being, to what extent were something like loop quantum gravity, which many people, including my friend Carlo Rovelli, who's been on the podcast many times, he has said that, yeah, there are challenges, there are experimental falsifications of some of the claims of loop quantum gravity, in particular for propagation of velocity versus electromagnetic frequency of distant quasars. But the point I guess I'm trying to make is, if you were the

director of the IAS, you know, you clean house. Is it really, I mean, would string theory have, have, you know, just yes or no, simply yes, would string theory have a place in there? Would loop chronic gravity have a place? And there would geometric unity have the primary position? I don't think we need to worry about permanent positions. I think that the key issue, I mean, let me just say some things that people won't associate with me.

In general, the string theorist, part of the quantum gravity, I have to use string theory there because they're smarter. and that's uncomfortable. But they're really, really smart, and they're really, really good at quantum field there, you know? And I see that, and I'm happy about that. What's more, many of them are really good at geometry. And it's incredibly impressive,

and I think that it does wonderful things for the field to have progress going on in the gym on the treadmill when you're not actually running a marathon. So in a certain sense, in that particular sub-community, people are in extremely good shape. The generals have been playing war games for 50 years because there were no war games to fight. They have a distorted sense of what being a general actually is because they haven't seen action.

But I would never want these people driven out of the field. I don't know anyone I praise as much as Edward Witten for his contributions principally to geometry and to the structure of quantum field theory, although not the quantum field theory that we seem to live with in. So I don't think that that's really the argument that I'm making. And I think that part of the problem is that this is a very clickbait thing about, you know, string theory is BS versus no, strength theory, the power and the glory of strength theory. It's of no interest to anyone. What you said about loop quantum gravity, though, was interesting.

I asked Lee Smollin about this. He was a friend. He said, yeah, the original hope for loop quantum gravity is not realized. Without other ideas, this does not work. It doesn't carry the day. And it doesn't behave as expected. Now, say what you want about Lee Smollin. And I'll be honest, a lot of people in this.

that other community in quantum gravity say incredibly negative things about Lee Smollin. But he behaved properly. There's no need for a tribunal when a leader of the field says, you know what? We were exuberant, and they were exuberant. We were optimistic. They were optimistic. But they didn't go about with this manifest destiny nonsense. And they can reflect and say, you know what, it doesn't work the way we thought. Or we can't get fermions into the theory comfortably or something like that. And I really think that we have to understand the different, the ethics in loop bottom gravity are much better than the ethics in its competitor. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're

built for what you're building fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Well, I think, I mean, again, I think where I push back is just I think you're a, often identifying understanding quantum field theory with doing quantum gravity research. And for me, like, I would say the young people in the, so you want the older veterans of the field to say they were wrong. And that may never happen. No, no, no. Maybe they're not wrong. I think if you talk to the, like, I think the response you're talking about, which is like, do people see the challenges?

I think what a lot of younger people would say the lessons have been learned from string theory is that, We didn't understand quantum field theory well enough to be ready to jump. Like we've learned so many lessons about just quantum field theory that we were kind of out over our skis thinking, oh, we've got this quantum field theory thing solved. We should be jumping to quantum gravity. And we've learned so much about quantum field theory. And quantum field theory is certainly relevant to, you know, data and real life and cosmology. It covers everything.

It's the, you know, to steal a headline from an article in the CERN Courier, it's like the theory of theories. It like organizes not just like one theory, but sort of how all theories fit together. So what is the theory of theories? So this was used as a title to an article about effective field theory. But it was just understanding that a lot of what we've been learning is, you know, what is the space of theories that are self-consistent? Like what are the rules? And part of the, you know, why was, like one of the things we got out of string theory,

like the string community was ADS-CFT. And what that told us is a lot of things that we had been thinking, were people had been thinking were problems that were going to be solved by the string or really phenomena that was living in an everyday quantum field theory that we hadn't fully understood. And I would say my generation probably more, like a lot of people who I think you might look at and say, you know, based on their training, like who their PhD advisors were, you might say, well, that's a string theorist.

And I would say, I don't think they ever do string theory. Like they do quantum field theory and they do quantum field theory relevant. They've moved to that. But I think something never did it. Like literally at no point in their graduate career at any. point, they have a, like, so myself, I did string theory when I was younger. I would not characterize myself as a string theory or someone who ever used a string theory. Nobody told me I had to do string theory while you have characterized yourself as somebody who finds it useful in what you do.

Absolutely. You are using string theory. Because I learned, because the, to phrase what was useful is a string theory was always characterized as, you know, what is the problem of quantum gravity we're trying to solve? We're trying to solve problems about the fact that. that the thing doesn't make sense of short distances. And of course, all these things are supposed to make sense along distances because they're good effective field theories. We don't, like, unless we're doing ultra short distance physics, it has, you know, everything should just make sense in some reasonable way.

And, but I learned what I was learning about loop quantum gravity, that's nowhere in sight, right? Because there are, like, there's so many lessons I didn't learn that were just basic lessons about, you know, how should theories be organized, that were never in the luke quantum gravity playbook, at least when I was learning it. And so, yeah, what I learned doing string theory was like, I really learned effective field theory.

I learned when is there a problem that I actually have to worry about string theory to? And what I mostly learned is that this is very small. And you can do a lot of really, really exciting and cool stuff that's, I would call fundamental without ever talking about. I've looked at your career. And to the best of my understanding, your career is a stool with three basic legs, one of which is cosmology, where you're going to get data from all the great new instruments that we're putting. towards the heavens. The second thing is effective theory so that you're going to reduce

everything to something which at some particular scale is very cleanly defined and you can work with it. And then the other thing is some amount of particle theory where you're going to hope to use the cosmological through the effective theory to elucidate the nature of the fundamental fields

as waves and collision. So that's, I see, your particular gambit. And I'm 100% supportive of it. You did refer to yourself as a young person. You're over 40, if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately. Okay. So you're not a young person. I think I just crossed the threshold by academic standards. No, no, no, no. But you know, Derox's old thing about a physicist past the 30th year, this is elongated in part because the fact that we deviated from scientific norms, we don't have 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds who are running the field the way I think of is

normal. I think there are way too many people in the field, to be honest, when you're asking, what would you do? And I feel that of those people, they're not properly arrayed across, well, they're not fermionic. There are plenty of people who, like, Brian Green feels no need to query Peter Waite, who's putting forward a Twister theory based on the group SU4 and its inclusion of SU3 cross U1 as a subgroup. In Twister space, with a, with continuation to SU2, press SU2, where one of the two halves gives the weak force

and therefore gives you an idea of the asymmetry. You have to read your colleague's stuff, whether you like it or not, to be a good colleague. You don't have to read all of it, but when you can't put in 45 minutes, and there was a piece of French that was between 45 minutes that I didn't say on air,

and you say, I'm too busy, and then we catch you playing ping pong in the lounge, or you're going to drinking or you're writing a blog about nothing in particular, it's completely disingenuous. Now, another example of this is Garrett Lease. Garrett Leasy is a snick... Garrett Leesie, you mean that thing that Disler dismantled? Okay.

No, it doesn't work. I don't think it works. It's got tons of interesting good ideas in it. And this condescension against individual research programs, where somebody has a really interesting idea. And I think both Peter White and Garrett are wrong and it's not going to work. But I'll be goddamn if I'm going to stand back and say, because I think I can see why it's not going to work,

I'm going to pretend that you have no ideas, and I'm going to slag you behind your back as a colleague, and I'm going to dunk and drag on Twitter. This is toxic behavior. And so what I think is that we have very few idiosyncratic programs that are able to even share a stage. There's no point of contact where I have an unusual bookmark in this book. It's a dollar.

This is a dollar signed by Sheldon Glashow where I won it in a 20-minute discussion in his office. And it took him 27 years to 27. I'm going to turn it into an FTA and bigillions. It took him 27 years to acknowledge that he'd lost. the bet on whether G2 contained SU3. I have no idea why that took 27 years. I like Shelley. We have a good relationship.

But the fact is you can't have people saying, oh, I'm late to pick up my kids. I have to go out to dinner or whatever and never actually make eye contact with the fact that they're not giving real answers. And by the way, I would love to actually talk physics rather than about physics. But what I'm trying to say is that our meta problem

is that with all the money floating around, nobody holds a conference saying, you know, the last 40 years, WTF, with a bunch of different theories, like, does anybody else have an idea?

And I can assure you, I can go, you know, on very large platforms and talk about very concrete ideas. I can try to tell you why I believe that there are three generations

of matter, why it's chiral, et cetera, et cetera. And I promise you that the very weird behavior is that people don't take it seriously because what they're really trying to do is not ask questions. They're really trying to

say, how do I make this problem go away so I can get back to the cargo cult science that I've made a career around inside of a large community? That's what's dangerous. See, I don't agree with that. I mean, I would say that a lot of people aren't going to engage with, I mean, the idea that what we need to do is find the right way to unifying the forces, I think is just, as you said, it's been unproductive. And a lot of people don't find that that's how they're like, you know, there are weird hints from nature, right? Like cosmological constant is a weird hint for nature. Sure. And like we'd like to, we'd like that unification or that unification wouldn't work. But Daniel, if I ask you, what is your best guess as to why there appear to be three generations

of matter? Would you say you have a guess? No, I wouldn't, I mean, I would say there are many people who have worked hard on coming up with models. All seem, many seem plausible. Like, It could be, like, I have no particular opinion. And I don't think that we're going to find the answer. So if somebody came up to me who could pass sort of a basic competency test and said, I think I know why the three generations of matter. I would find that fascinating. Brian and I were on the phone.

We were talking about this issue. And Brian said, well, what if I were to tell you of something so exciting that it has, you know, seven segment, this, that, which is, to me, would you race down to San Diego? I said, sure. And I think he wasn't prepared for that answer. There is something about the excitement of believing things, trying things, and caring about what your colleagues believe. Do you have any high-conviction beliefs about the extension of the standard model? So, my high-conviction belief is that anything that extends the standard model will look

like something that's an effective field theory at low energy. So if I'm going to look for hints, experimental hints that are going to tell me which way the world actually works, my strategy is going to be write down everything I could imagine that would look like a change to the effective theory of the standard model and go look for that. Okay. And that is what most, but that avoids the question. Do you personally have any high conviction beliefs, and I'll extend it. Do you think we have anything wrong in the standard model, not just in terms of the Lagrangian and its consequences, but in terms of how we talk about it?

And do you have any high conviction beliefs for what extends it and what is likely to be true that are really things like this I believe? Can you say the phrase this I believe that the universe is Lorenzen variant at short distances, that whatever unifies the standard model is not breaking Lawrence invariance. such that if you observe, if we were to observe something cosmologically or laboratory, that would break your conviction or it would cause you to reveal excitingly. You believe in relativity. Yes, absolutely. That is not very bold.

Okay. But, by the way, sorry, most things that are being proposed as extensions to the standard model by definition are, well, they might be wrong. Most of them are wrong. How do you know, Eric? We haven't looked for acting. Well, because they can't all be correct. They're not all compatible.

Some of them are mutually because all I'm saying is to say that the universe is manifestly Lorenzo-in-variant is an interesting claim that could be falsified and by falsification, I think that would excite you. That wouldn't depress you. That wouldn't ruin your day. It would totally change how I think. I love your puppy point. Puppies are adorable. Ice cream is delicious. I understand.

Mom and apple pie are good things. But there are, I mean, I think that's a case where people have legitimately proposed ideas that break. Lawrence and they are interesting ideas. So, you know, someone who had an idea that broke this principle that was within the kind of traditional community, but really broke away from it, was Petrohara with this, you know, non-Lorentz variant solutions to gravity, his proposal. And again, like, it was an interesting idea. I didn't look at that and go, I understood what he's doing. You read those papers. Everyone was like, that's interesting. But I also don't think that's the way the world works. And I also, that's not what I'm talking about. Like, if Zhao came out,

with something. Maybe you look at it. And then you say, okay, that's pretty wild. I don't buy it, but I understand what you're doing. But I think, again, the difference between Petter, who was definitely devying away from the community was not that they're like, he's a card carrying member of the community, is that he was able to communicate his idea in a way that made sense to everyone. And but that, but I guess what I would say is like, you're asking me to take a definitive position about a theory we could never test. No, no, I think you're a theoretical physicist. Yeah, absolutely. You are, you know, and to be fair to you, because I'm not, there's no gotcha or zinger

here, I see you as mostly a cosmologist who is keeping the door open to particle theory through the conduit of effective theory, right? And that may not be fair, because I've only been studying your stuff today. I understand. I guess what I would say is that no, effective field theory is life, right?

Like, it's like, it's how it's how everything we organize, it's just, it's all we see, right? I'm living here in this, like, there's not, like, Newton's laws weren't wrong. No, no, no. There's an effective theory relevant If we were to talk about biology, right? So we have the stratification.

We have cytology, the study of cells below. We have histology, the study of tissue. We have physiology above that. And we have the organization in anatomy. And if you stayed down at the level and saying, you know, it would be absolutely responsible for us to speculate into different regimes because we understand that we don't actually have information. We've learned the lesson of Ken Wilson very well.

That would be pretty disappointing. If you think about, for example, Wheel of Fortune, there are these one-letter solves where somebody actually actually guesses the entire puzzle from a single letter. Look up a guy named Rufus, for example. I understand. Now, my claim is, is that the dark side of the genius of Ken Wilson, and by the way, Ken Wilson is a good example. We just lost Jeff Beck as a guitarist. He was every professional electric guitarist's favorite guitarist, but he wasn't everybody's favorite guitarist who didn't play guitar. In a certain sense, Ken Wilson walks on water within the

competent community of physics researchers. But there's a dark side. also, just the way Jeff Beck maybe put too much emphasis on the wambi bar, of pushing everything into this realm where it's denuded of much of its meaning. If I were to say to you that the Higgs field shows up in effective theory as a spin-zero fundamental scalar, but I don't think that that's its purpose. I think that it actually belongs to the actual. And the way in which it's disguised so that its spin appears different than its naive spin, which is its function as a part of a connection,

that's something in which effective theory is not going to necessarily point to that because effective theory tends to show you this picture that is often denuded of higher level structures because we're not too afraid to guess. The idea is just that you can have as wild variation of the difference of the origin of two theories as you like, and if our limit my observation,

to some energy scale, that's been sent by colliders or whatever I can do, that the only way that I can tell them apart is by the parameters of long-distance. So now the parameters can be really useful hints. So in the 60s, Weinberg guessed at asymptotic freedom, which was that the idea that the theory is really made up of, you know, quarks and things that look like microscopic particles is bouncing around, even though they live inside a proton. He guessed at this because of the specific relationships between certain of the couplings of, you know, nuclear physics because we couldn't go and look inside of the proton at that point in history. So it's absolutely true that through this lens, you can discover exactly as you're saying. You can within this lens say, ah, there's a pattern here and I can use the tools at my disposal to say the only way to get this pattern points at some deeper, deeper structure. So that's exactly what we do. So, for example, why proton decay experiments were so exciting, because,

even though they're a low-energy experiment, they would tell us about physics of very high energies because we only know a few ways to create proton decay, or this is why people are really excited with the neutrino masses, because neutrino masses hint at something going on at extremely high energies that will never, ever be able to probe in the lab. But if you don't kind of, on the other hand, if I write down a theory that only changes the gears of how the universe works

on some scale that I can never observe, my only hope is to see it through the pattern. But then you're mislearning the lesson of the beryon, which is that the baryon isn't decoded into the Lagrangian, the corks are. But that, you know, I don't even know if we're talking about it, say, infrared slavery with physics conscience. But, you know, the issue is that protons and neutrons are not what is seen in the Lagrangian. You have to actually unpack them, unpack the fundamental constituents to get the observable constituents. Now, that lesson, when overlearned, which is what I'm concerned your community has done, becomes inhibitory.

And everybody gets enervated because nobody wants to be the fool who didn't learn the lesson of effective theory and renormalization. And that's what's concerning me is that in general, we have a group of people who are incredibly worried about their union card being respectable. And when they're heterodox, they're heterodox in the most mild and unhelpful way, particularly if you have a metastable state where small, perturbations don't work out very well. And so in all of these situations, you know, when I try to engage you in terms of, do you want to actually talk physics on a podcast, we always talk around physics, we talk about physics, but we don't actually say, well, what do you believe? What are the high conviction bets? And I'll say something more. I think you're an extremely good scientist.

I've read some of your stuff. I don't aspire to be focused on good scientists, because I believe that we have a confusion that great science is just good science turned up to 11. And I think if you, you know, I had this conversation with Jim Watson, his basic point was we were not, Watson Crick were not good scientists in Jim's view. He said, Rosalind Franklin was, and the reason she didn't get the double helix was not because it was stolen, which there are certainly issues, but because she refused to spend a day decamped into the idea that the Maltese cross near X-ray crystallography represented a helix. And so his point was, our search space is tiny because we're only looking for helical models.

And her search space was enormous because she correctly viewed that that particular pattern was not sufficient to narrow it down. But I mean, someone watching is just dispassionate but has some knowledge of view in the field. I mean, you've ruled out, you know, just in words today and not to mention previous discussions we've had, alternative theories to, you know, anything but your own, you know, personal conviction, which is that she, so you've ruled out E8, you've ruled out Wolfram,

you've ruled out loop quantum gravity. Not, I'd say rolled it out like they shall be taken behind the woodshed. No, brother. No, so how much time... I think we should be invested in cellular automata. I think we really need to study the large exceptionally groups inside of the Titz Freud and Zoroidswryst structure.

I think that Peter White's theory to begin with SU3, which is the one part of the stymetry is that doesn't have another name because U1 is also spin 2, S02, the circle. Same thing with SU2 is the three sphere, spin three. SU3 is unique and that it doesn't have another name. And so he begins with that and he sticks basically U3 inside of SU4. And I think it's a great idea.

And I don't want to be mischaracterized. I am the only person pushing forward GU. I am also pushing forward when I was asked, recently by the Institute for Arts and Ideas. They wanted to say, well, tell us now about GEU after you've done all this service to our field. I was like, no, I don't want to do that. I would rather tell you about my competitors

in idiosyncratic, fermionic space. It's you guys who don't do that. So please don't put on me that I'm simply a proponent that is always pushing my product and selling from the stage. Far from me. I don't think of selling from it, but this is from a pragmatic standpoint.

Daniel's got a limited amount of theoretical bandwidth. My students do as well. It's not that much, right? No, I agree with you. I agree with you that to hear Sabina say, well, she doesn't have time to look at your theory and Garrett's theory and Wolfram's theory. She doesn't want to get stuck in. She doesn't want to. But it doesn't prove that it's right.

I mean, it's not evidence that they're correct. No, but it leaves the wrong impression. Right. And that's maybe not as collegial as it could be. But there's a limited. There's a limited amount. So the question is for working, you know, card carrying, as you called union members. Yeah.

I mean, what is it about what you're doing that is most exciting and most interesting to you? you and the reason that keeps you getting up in the morning and thinking about it in the middle of the night. What questions or what contributions are so interesting and promising, obviously promising from the current research direction you're pursuing. Okay. So, I mean, what have I spent the past years working on is trying to understand Decider Space. Now, Desider Space seems to be the universe we live in. It's also what do you mean by that? As in the expansion of the universe right now.

It's approximately Desider. Okay. But that's a big difference. Okay, yes, but at the level of approximation that the university living seems to be to CITER, we did not understand how to calculate things in the CITR. And there are people who claim that, you know, the Cedar was fundamentally unstable because of various things that they couldn't calculate. And this proved that, like, you know, it's impossible to have a positive causal module constant for this reason or the other. And so what I want to, like, why do I use effective field theory?

because many of the calculations that people were saying proved that this were like, they were instantly, you could see the mistake in the calculation. So as you say, like, yes, effective field theory, you can have your blinders on to what might be interesting. But more often than not in my career, it's like the way you say, hey, that calculation has a mistake in it. And like every time it's a mistake. It's like getting rid of pseudotensors. It's a very good place to catch errors. Absolutely.

So I don't, I am in no way saying, like, it's not interesting to think about things that, yeah, I'd be the first person excited about a thing that doesn't look like it lives in effective field theory, right? And so that would be awesome. And I have friends who, you know, explore, you know, modifications to quantum mechanics. And maybe that means or things that look like they violate the rules, those are extremely exciting and interesting things. A lot that people do seriously consider. But again, if you don't start from, but if I have a theory that fits a set of rule, it has to follow the structure. Or often not you just do calculations wrong, right? And it's like, yeah, you spend five years doing calculation, or in some cases in this airspace, like it was 30 years where people calculated things over and over again and literally we learned nothing. There's tons of calculations, and we learn no lessons from it. And the part of the point of Effective Field Theory is that, like,

it just organizes what are interesting calculations, what the answer should look like. And if something violates the effective field theory, then at least you can go like, like, where was the step that violated the rules? And if none of the steps violate the rules, then you've got a problem. And so what I would say for me, like, what's the ultimate goal of understanding desiderous space?

Like, it is getting back to, like, what did the beginning of time look like? What is the space, what are the space of possible universes? And, like, is the multiverse a well-defined thing? Does it even make sense? Like, these are questions that are enormous. And, but we can't answer. Like, there are people who want to jump to the, like, how do we define internal inflation? And they make up rules for calculating.

And they make up this and they make up that and they say, well, in my toy model with this rule and that rule it does this. It's like, we don't know enough to play those games. And I guess that would be my point of view. You're like in response to your comment about great scientists versus it. It's that the challenge is ultimately going to be like, you know, there are moments in history that just call for careful analysis of the laws we have. Or reasonableization in a certain sense. Absolutely. And the same with like Lagrangian mechanics, Hamiltonian mechanics.

Like, there's a huge time between Newton and changes the laws. And the science that happened was super important. The question is, what time is it? Is it a time for a conservative revolution? Is it time for wild-eyed revolution? And I don't think it's responsible for anyone to say, I know what time it is unless they have a very good reason for saying that they know what time is. So I think that to your earlier point, you want to let some conservative people hug the shore

and say maybe we have a small error. And you may also, I mean, the dressed in bare mass of the electron is a perfect example of what seemed to be a small error that cost two decades. So at a certain level, that's completely legitimate. And what I see you doing with effective field theory is in some sense using it as a substitute for experiment, which is how do we test whether our wild ideas actually make a certain kind of sense? And so I think it's very responsible, and part of the good science wrap that I'm sticking you with, is that you're trying to do something where you can't repeat the big bad.

You can't run an experiment in the lab where everything goes right. And effective theory is a great way of sorting some amount of wheat from some amount of chaff, provided that you always keep in mind that it also carries certain sorts of distortions that bias us against bold guesses, because many of our structures recur at various different strata of the effective stratification. I do not disagree with that at all. And I completely agree that, you know, even in our corner of cosmology, like, I would not characterize myself as a string theory.

But I have found string fair useful because sometimes, even though I have not found anything that cannot be expressed as effective field theory, like, it does push us in a weird direction. There's like that idea came out of left field and suitably reinterpreted. It was a really cool thing to look for. This is what Nima said to me about Rarita Schwinger fields and the Veloswanziger problem, as he said that it's very tricky to couple Rurita Schwinger to external. to internal degrees of freedom without having superluminal problems. String theory showed us a way to do that.

And so whether or not you're a string advocate or not a string advocate, you at least want to help yourself the bounty that came from this theory, which is one of the reasons why I'm absolutely not for ending support for string theory. But part of the problem is that this space is so polluted by stupidity, the world's smartest people acting like jackasses, is that we're not having this conversation fresh, knew, we're having this conversation after not even wrong. After, you know, and part of the problem is that the field became not even Pauley.

Pauley was a dick, and he was famously, he was a witty dick. He was a very high, you know, he had very high standards. I don't know, you know, Switzerland, they're very precise over there. But the fact of the matter is, is that he's a terrible person for most people to emulate because it's basically put down physics. And so, you know, what I really believe is you're trying to do good science. You're a new generation. I don't want you enmeshed in some of these battles,

but I also don't want you on the field of battle sort of muddling the stuff and saying, well, there are actually a lot of interesting things. We have certain things that we need to get to in order to make sure that as this generation before me exits the stage, they leave the situation like the cat in the hat. They've made a complete mess of things, and it's important that they straighten things up before mom gets home. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, but I guess I would, I don't disagree. there are a lot of things that need to be cleaned up to make it, you know,

but I think that it comes in many forms. And the problem is that the problem is that it's like you can say, oh, it'd be good if, you know, people came and fixed it. It is like a handful of people whose opinions, like just saying things carry anyway. Most people, it's the accumulation of a life of work in the community that eventually move the field. So like an example is like scattering amplitudes. Like, you know, there's an like, like, incredibly great physicists who spent their entire lives working on it.

And the way that they, like, their results became part of the rest of the community because of the sheer weight of what they had been doing. And it was not because it was like they get a compelling talk or because like people, you know, it was like really that it was just like, eventually they just solved so many problems that people were like. And look at the great, like this double copy problem is really exciting. Absolutely. And the amplitude.

Right. So. But again, what I would say is like, like, but, but, but that's where. I see that like I don't like your point of view is like the field is going to change when these people have to exit the stage and like and I think to be honest like I think a lot of people younger than already see these problems and it's just that like they're like the way they're not they don't have Edwitton's name they don't have one's name but they see what you're talking about and the way that that's going to manifest itself is that in 20 years you're

going to look back and say that's what the feeling these people don't know the hypercharged or the weak ice to spin on the fundamental fields. And I hate to say this this way, but I've dealt with people who are quite a bit younger than I am, who are working in this area of fundamental physics, and I start to talk to them about the field content of the standard model. And it's astounding what they say. They say things like, oh yeah, I remember this in graduate school. What the F do you mean? You're talking about the fundamental constituents of nature, and you can't remember the charge on the strange quark. You can't remember whether it's, you know, or up or dead.

There is some problem in which people have actually departed physics. I think, I know exactly what you're saying, and I know there are phenomenal like that. So a version of that, which I think is a fair criticism is that there was, I don't know the names, but I've heard the story that a someone who was up for a PhD, the, there were, at their PhD defense, and they were asked, what is the wavelength of visible light? And the person said, one meter. And the examiner said, do I look blurry to you? And, like, that's the kind of, like, you should have real world intuition about, like, in that case, it's very obvious.

I mean, I would say, like, I can't, I don't memorize the periodic table. I mean, period of people is obviously. But it's not the, but at some point. It's 15 or 16 entries in a column vector. But, again, like, you're asking, like, could I, if you woke me up in the. of the night, could I reproduce every single term in the standard model? Like, you know, like, I don't know that I could. I could get most of it.

I could get most of the searcher, but it doesn't matter to me in my, in my particular research. Wait, wait, wait, a second. I want to understand. You're not carrying around a copy of the representation theory of S. S.U.3 cross S.U.2, cross U1 on 15 or 16 dimensional complex space. I'm carrying an particle data book. Look, not as a spot quiz.

There's no spot quiz because I know exactly where to look it up when I'm writing. I know what most of the terms are, but if he had to get me like, what is the exact? For the same reason that memorizing a poem is important, because you can always look it up, but you're not going to be able to have it, if it's not cached close to the prefrontal cortex, you're not going to be able to make use of it in real time. It's essential. And I'm not talking, by the way, about understanding all the, hadronic resonances or anything like that.

What I'm trying to say is the sense of, oh, yeah, that's that stuff I learned in graduate school. I think to answer for Dan that he doesn't need, what Feynman said would apply. I mean, Feynman would disagree with you and say, what I can't derive, I don't understand. He didn't say what I can't memorize that. It's not a question of that. It's a question of, for example, let's forget the exact, you know, we hypercharge assignments. You could write down the source.

pseudo code of the standard model of logic. Absolutely. For sure. So that's first of all, I'm talking about people who can't do that. I understand what you mean. And I do agree that there's a problem. But at the same time, like, I think there's the like, should we do what the standard model? Should like just as an intellectual endeavor, should we remember?

Should we pass down the things that we've learned? We should definitely make sure the standard model is not read up. I'm saying that the younger people that we're discussing, the consequence of not having this reconciliation, by the way. of understanding what quantum gravity did to this field. This is that we have a number of people who are not intact in their research careers, who are not in a position. If the answer came screaming across their field of view, they wouldn't necessarily recognize it. I would say there's similarly a problem that has nothing to do with quantum gravity,

which was that the response to all of this is that particle physics has become divorced from experiment. And the problem is that particle theorists don't know what it's going on in experiment. And that has pushed to the point that most young people that I talk to who are particle phenomenologists. Now, there are people who previously would have known the standard model had a written down. Their feeling now is that like for them to get a job. And again, is this actually true or just what they perceive? It's probably some of both. But they feel they have to have an experiment with their name on it.

Otherwise, people will say, oh, they're not in touch with the real world. We need to get you guys more money. That would be fantastic. No, that's what we. I always say what we need to do is to give my detractors, my people who are not critics, but actually assholes, more money, because what you're seeing is the dynamics of hunger game mentality inside of physics. And as a result of this, we're not able to behave constructively. We're not able to behave collegially. We separate ourselves so that certain people on stage never encounter a critic. I was at Syphood in 2011, I believe, where Joe Polchensky and Yves Silverstein were talking about string theory in one of the rooms. And I went in and I listened to Joe's version of the history of string theory. And I raised my hand. I said, there are like seven or

eight things that you just said that are not true. And I went through them. And Joe, too, his credit, said, yep, that's fair. Yeah, that's true. That happened the way you said it, not the way I said it. And I watched Eva go white, right? She's just like, she's going to have to speak. And she had previously prepared slides that duplicated many of the same claims. You know, one of which, for example is that it wasn't that we never thought about higher dimensional brains. It was called string theory because there were actually arguments that those higher dimensional brains were guaranteed not to be part of the theory. And so once you actually go through the reconciliation where you say, how, let's talk about the eight times we were wrong. We said that there were finite number of theories,

then there turned out to be a continuum where those things were extreme. I can go on and on and on. In all of those situations, by not forcing people to say, yeah, we were wrong. And Joe Polchinsky is a really good example. I was pleased to see him on your list, not for string theoretic issues or quantum gravity, but because of the effective theory. And he was a good enough scientist to say, you know what, you got me, you're right. He also said to me something, which, you know, I want to be in the world. He said, you were to talk a lot about quantum gravity and string theory, and sometimes I don't think string theory exists. I said, what? He said, sometimes I just think we're running subroutines for Ed. And I thought that that was a profound moment, that in general,

one of the things that happened, which you may or may not know or feel or understand, is that when you would come up with a new idea, in a previous generation, everyone would look around and say, well, what does Ed say? And it had to do with the fact that people felt that Ed was channeling the cosmos, like Jimmy Hendricks played the guitar differently than everybody else. And so it was like, well, what would Jimmy say? What would Jimmy do? What would Jesus do? And you can't do that.

You have to actually say, well, here's my opinion, and I may be wrong. But the fact is we have to go back and say, why do we have this fictitious history of the last 40 years? And let's also celebrate all the great stuff, as per your thread and also my arguments, about the fact that we actually put quantum field theory on a more solid basis. It's highly geometric. And I believe that the geometrization of quantum field theory and its divorce from physics is one of the great intellectual achievements of our time. And it deserves to be celebrated. It's just like wrong way Kierrigan.

You think that you're going to end up as Lindberg. but you end up going the wrong direction. All right. Well, this has been the end of round one of this thriller in San Diego. I want to thank both of you guys, and hopefully we can do a round two. But actually, I'm more interested in doing something not on camera with you guys and just going through some really fun physics. I learned so much from you, both of you guys.

And I think, yeah, Dan is really a role model for many young students. physicist. I said it in the previous podcast. You know, never have I been so glad to be a guy enough, to be a thief, to steal you away from other universities. Because I think you really do exemplify what a theorist or what a physicist should be, not a theorist, not a experiment. You do both. You're interested in both and you're curious. And then that means so much to me. And Eric, of course, is always so delightful because you know, I used to say, the way to put a physicist down and say, well, he or she knows the history of the field really well. But you put your money where your mouth is. You're very devoted to it. I don't think it's

for personal attention. I don't think it's for, you know, the satisfaction of fighting the previous wars, as generals often do. But I think it's for the sake of heaven in the sense that we are trying to understand a universe that we came into, and we are like those fish that don't really know what the water is. You guys helped clarify, for me, simple experimental cosmologist. So now, I want you guys to say one thing about Dan? Yes, yes, sir. Yes, please. I also think that people often on the internet post these popcorn memes, oh, people are going to conflict. And the reason that we don't get great fights on the internet

that are actually productive and that help us learn about the subject is because we don't have a sense of Queensbury rules. And one of the things I just think is terrific about Dan, who I've never met before, is that I had a high level of trust that he was focused on the physics and not on scoring points, dunking and dragging. I think people don't remember what a critic is. is. I believe that Dan is a certain sense of my critic and I is, but the point is not to blind them or, you know, do small knuckle manipulation.

Higher cheek jumping from turnbuck. The key point is, if you want really good conflict, you have to establish Queensbury rules by people who are not going to go for the jugger, bite off an ear when they're in one of these things. And it's been an absolute pleasure to come down and have this conversation. So touch gloves. Dan, anything else you want to say? I mean, I do. Even that threat, I would say, I would say. I would say. say part of the role of a critic is not to be negative all the time. I mean, the real value of the critic is by being negative at times, when they're positive is real meaning. And so I view that as a, nobody's being positive out there. And let me be positive out of the world.

And look forward to big things to come from Dan. And another episode with Eric coming out soon. For now, Brian Keating, joining you from University of California, San Diego. We're blessed to have brilliant colleagues like Dan Green. and friends in the show like Eric Weinstein. Stay tuned. More great episodes coming up.

Susie Shee is coming out this week and special surprise guests coming next week. So stay tuned for now. Signing. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. For updates and insights into Brian's world,

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