Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein: Imposter Syndrome, Donald Trump, & the Future of Theoretical Physics (#097)

Episode Date: November 28, 2020

Eric Weinstein joins me live to take your questions about the past, present and future of physics. We’ll discuss my recent chats with Lenny Susskind, Shelly Glashow, and Barry Barish and Eric’s recent podcasts with Lex Fridman too. Eric and Stephen Wolfram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Join us in the chat room to ask questions! Previously featured: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Podcast mentioned: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJUskAl8mzw?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe for new interviews with Sheldon Glashow, Barry Barish, Cumran Vafa and more!   Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two. Welcome everybody to this special live stream edition of the Into the Impossible podcast with my friend, my mentor, my advisor, my teacher, I don't know, my rabbi. It's a few of saying drinking, buddy. Dr. Eric R. Weinstein. How are you today? I am well-ish. Well, I've been better and I've been worse, but I'm better now that you are here.

And we have a couple of hundred people already gathered around to watch us converse about the future, the past, and the present of physics, of astronomy, of cosmology, and of even things like this golden piece of gelt that I've been fixated on for a long time. and we're going to get some questions from the audience because they're complaining that you have not had a update on your YouTube main channel with 250,000 subscribers. People are getting, they're getting peeped, let's just say it. Did I not foresee this and actually post a recent episode of the portal on my YouTube channel? Brian, you're behind the time, sir. Oh, okay. It must have been like in the last 20 minutes because I've been checking,

it hourly. All right. So, yes, and there is certainly a portal community, and you should check out Eric's channel, a portal, and you should check out portal clips. He has multiple channels. He's gone fully Hollywood, which I salute.

And today we're going to talk about a bunch of interviews and a bunch of new topics that I've been getting into as we near the end of the real first season of Into the Impossible. The podcast that I've run here from UC San Diego, I've had on many, many guests. None is great as

Eric, of course, even despite all the accolades that some of my guests have on. You've got to be kidding. Who have you had recently? Sheldon Glashow appeared? I had Sheldon Glashow. No. Tomsky. You're killing on the guest, sir.

I'm doing well. I'm trying to bring science communication to the masses. And we're going to have on Frank Wilcheck next week. We're going to have on Martin Reese, Lord Martin Reese. The hits just keep coming. The Astronomer Royal is coming on my channel to tell me my horoscope, as he does with the queen herself. All right, so we're going to start off with a conversation between me and Eric, kind of riffing on, you know, we chat frequently. You're very generous with your time and your space and your space time.

And we're going to talk about a depression, a malady that I had this week, existentially getting to, you know, really, what is this channel about? why am I doing the podcasting that I'm doing? Why is it merely a service to do for the community, which I love and I love scientific outreach? And maybe should it be an obligation on scientists to communicate? And I want to harken back to our first conversation way back in April, which you can find on my channel in various places. But that was about the awful, terrible, no-good job that physicists do with the best material on Earth, literally on Earth in the heavens and we do a terrible job according to one Dr. Eric Weinstein with publicizing, popularizing, and monetizing what contributions we've made to humanity. What say you, sir?

I think it's still true. I think that I thought, first of all, you have to realize that because I'm not a member of your community, but a member of your viewing public, I very much appreciate physics from the perspective of somebody with a bit of a math background who's been focused on the reason for learning mathematics for some of us is theoretical physics. I do think that we see that the physics community has some of the world's most interesting product, if you want to put it in kind of crass terms, and there's a huge demand for it because everyone wants to know what is this most difficult of fields, what is it telling us about ourselves, the purpose of being reality itself, and yet there's this translation issue,

which I sort of analogize at times to not having an orchestra to perform sheet music for people who desperately want to listen to symphonies. So you keep handing out pages of sheet music, and everybody looks at it says, wow, it's a lot of squiggly black dots and lines. And a tiny number of people say, oh, my God, I cried. and you're thinking, I wish I could get there, but I have no idea what you're talking. Yeah, I often say, you know, we're accused of preaching to the choir, but you have to do that when the choir forgets the melody, right?

You cannot ignore it. And in fact, there's no shortage of controversy in our field. I mean, just this week, this epic brouhaha erupted with none other than our friend, Sabine Hassanfelder, Dr. Sabina Hassanfelder, who you debated live with me over the summer in Theories of Special Podcast. It was brutal. And the thriller in South California, I don't know how to say it. But anyway, the point being that she is embroiled with other Titanic intellects, including Lenny Suskin.

So she called this. Oh, my God. She picked the fight with Lenny Suskin. She picked the fight with something. She's fearless. You know, she's like, what, five foot two. And she punches, you know, above her weight. Let's just say that.

You know, I'm just something in my throat. Honey badger. Honey badger. All right. Well, we can't say that. That is forbidden here at the University of California. We may not refer to anything. Because she's tenacious and she's very rarely intimidated. That was where I was going. Yeah, but I have, I want to, okay, so I'm going to be the contrarian today. You're going to be the optimist. You're going to be the Polyana. I'm going to be the Cassandra. I think a lot of what's happening in physics has become fashionable to criticize physics. To say nothing good has come out of physics. Everything in physics is overhyped. That was her thing this week.

It was, oh, the black hole information loss paradox, which I want to get into because I talked to Lenny about that this week. She calls that the most overhyped aspect or topic in all of science, and she's sick of it. She says that it's total nonsense. You can't test it. It's irrelevant, and it's by no means the biggest, most important thing. Whereas Lenny said that he literally, the Black Hole War, that he waged with Stephen Hawking and his book, The Black Hole War, made the world safe for quantum mechanics. And the reason he said this is that he, as you know,

I've been having a lot of debates lately with people like Jan 11 even, not debates, but she's been on my show. I've had on other people, like Lenny, like Sir Roger Penrose. And I said, show me the evidence that a singularity actually exists. I know they're beautiful mathematical objects. I know that they have wonderful, delightful properties. And I said to Lenny, show me an example where, you know for certain that singularities exist and then I'll say it's a problem that we can't

unify gravity with quantum mechanics and nobody can do that and even Roger when you were out you you did a guest appearance on my show with Roger recently and nobody can come up with a reason that there has to be a singularity whatsoever so my claim is do we even need a quantum theory of gravity Sabina's even saying that's not even as important as as unimportant say as is this issue of the black hole information loss problem So just to recap for people that didn't see the video, Lenny claims that the most fundamental law of nature, the so-called negative first law of thermodynamics, is that information is conserved. And he claims, moreover, that the black hole event horizon, or actually to be technical, this thing called that he calls a stretched horizon, some people call the firewall, that that's even more quantum than the singularity. But getting back to my point, what if I told you there is no.

singularity or we'll never know there's a singularity or not and we don't know if the big bang actually was a singularity or if it's like sir roger postulates or my friend paul steinhart postulates that's a cyclic universe there is no need for quantum gravity whatsoever so shouldn't you get out of the geometric unity business in other words why do you think there has to be a theory of ever a unified theory of gravity with um you know just because shelley did it with with a lecture week do we have to even have a reason to think that it's true for gravity plus the other lighter forces. You have opened up multiple cans of various sizes of nematodes, sir. And I don't even know what to say.

Let's just try to figure out this out for the public at Lock. See if we can hide our own ignorance at the same time. I guess what I would first start by saying is that what's on the line here is that Sabina has become sort of the curmudgeon to the world of theoretical physics, where you can sort of reboot in Sabina mode rather than safe mode, and she will keep you from being hoodwinked by the various people who wish to sell you snake oil in the halls of physics. Lenny, on the other hand, is one of the architects of the most dominant and appealing theory. And I would say certain the largest deep program we have, whether string theory is right or wrong, let us not make

the mistake of being anything less than generous at first. It's an incredibly generative structure that has produced a wealth of beautiful mathematics. It may have nothing to do with the physical world, but it is still richer as a theoretical and intellectual system than anything else that is being bandied about as a potential candidate. So there's a lot on the line when the most prominent permudgeon, whether you think she should be or shouldn't be, that's up to you, is speaking to the most prominent of claimants to the founders of the top theoretical framework underdevelop. What's this really about?

It's really about the fact that we're solved. We should be working on new ideas. is we can't quite figure out what to do. So everyone has figured out in some sense what he or she is capable of pushing as a series of pawns across the chessboard. Sabina can easily say there's no testable consequences. It's angels on the heads of pins.

Why do we even need a unified theory? Maybe it's not unified. Maybe it's not beautiful. Maybe maybe, maybe, maybe. And Lenny can say, wait a second, that's a lot that's a lot of emptiness. We at least have done some stuff in string theory. We predicted gravity.

Technically post-dicted it because we knew it was there. Then he's going to say something about black holes. Now, I think it's really important to sort of get kind of the culture of you guys. Again, I'm not stepping into this physics ring. But in a weird way, the quintessential example of a physical system, if you had to learn one simple physical system and milk it repeatedly, You say it's a wait on a spring? Mm-hmm, yeah.

I can't hear you. Oh. Oh, no. We lost audio contact with Dr. Brian. Ground control to Brian, kidding. Brian, I cannot hear you, so. Oh, no. There we go.

How about now? I'm not panicking. You hear me now? You hear me now? You don't hear me. You don't hear me. Three words? I hear you.

you don't hear me that's weird dark now you don't hear anything I do hear anything I do hear you you can hear me you hear me

okay so maybe I'll keep talking and then you keep saying stuff in case they reestablish the audio we can always try back people hear me can someone out there

say that they Brian I'm going to open a or find me on it start sending me chats I hear you Eric let's see You don't hear me.

Let me hold on one second here. We apologize. Brian, I wonder if I should hang up. You should keep the stream open and I should try to log back and see if that's all over. Let's try that because I don't know if people can hear me out there. Yeah, go for that. Do that. Okay.

Yeah, do that. I believe you can still hear me. Let me see. Find me how it starts sending me chats. I hear you. I hear you and people hear him. So I'm going to try to get Eric back. on the line here. Everybody hears both of us, so good. Okay. I hear you. And let me try to get Eric

back on. Hold on one second. I'm going to get him back on. Please pardon the interruption, but we're getting more and more people in the chat room, which is good. I tried to switch to a different headset. Now, Eric. Doctor, can you hear me? Yes, I hear you. Do you hear me? All right, I'm going to try it. Can you see me? Now I see you. Do you hear me? Yep. All right, great. So you were saying about Sabina as playing this role of Cassandra, so to speak,

but I'm kind of decrying it that that's become the fashionable way to go about things. Yeah, and I love the fact that you're giving me an opportunity to be more optimistic by pointing out too much pessimism, right? And so I appreciate the opportunity. I don't usually get a chance to do it. A lot has actually happened in the period that I would say is generally stagnant. And one of the things that's happened is that the foundations of the mathematics underneath theoretical physics has gotten shorn up at an incredible level. One of the reasons I think that we think that this is going to be more unified is that we find certain motifs permeating every layer of the physics stack.

In particular, I would say differential geometric bundle theory, whether it's It's the tangent bundle of space time, which is kind of the default bundle that comes with the arena in which physics occurs, whether it's this crazy new bundle called SU3 cross SU2 cross U1, which handles the non-gravitational forces, or whether it's what we would call pre-quantum or quantum line bundles that live on top of these structures, which give us the quantization of those. classical theories. One of the things that's happened is that we've gotten almost all, I would say, all of theoretical physics at its most foundational level now appears to be differential geometric and differential topological. Now there's a huge question. One of the reasons why I thought that Lenny was in some sense evasive when you tried to ask him about the singularity. It was kind of an interesting evasion to be honest about it. But what he said is it doesn't really matter because we don't see the singularity, the singularity in the black hole is screened.

So what we should really be looking at is the last thing that we can probe experimentally, which might be the event horizon or the outside of the disk. Who knows? And then the point is, now I don't even have to worry about the breakdown of the laws of physics and the challenge to Einstein that's happening inside that, be because if the only things I can test are outside, that even if physics is happening on the other side of an event horizon, what's it to me?

And then you can also go further and say, maybe the classical stuff that Einstein was up to and all of this bundle theoretic stuff of Simons and Yang, you had Jim Simons on your program, you absolutely have to get Cian Yang. And when I get you on Rogan, you cannot eat in front of him because he's got misophonia, I think, and he's very susceptible to sounds. No one can see me eating with you. But I digress. I think that, you know, in essence, Lenny is

he's equivocating. He doesn't know what's going on on the other side of that thing. And what I take is I'm processing it for meaning. I think that space time isn't a crutch to get you to your quantum theory. It's not, you know, there's this very fashionable position, which is we shouldn't be quantizing classical theories. We should be taking the classical limit of quantum theories. Therefore, your attachment to this quaint religion of man and bundles and all of the stuff that makes us feel good as geometers. This is just an intermediate way of getting to the ultimate truth, which has to do with correlation functions and quantum measurements. Now, I think that's kind of ridiculous. Even if you take the classical theory to be effective, it is so astounding in its completeness as a description for the substrate. of a quantum theory in the standard model, that I think it really raises the question, maybe this bundle structure is pretty close to being right and that maybe Einstein's a little bit wrong.

And boy, if Einstein were a little bit wrong, wouldn't that be great? Because a lot of the no-go theorems, think of him as your unfun parent who won't let you do all the things that you want to do. In some ways, you're not going faster in the speed of light, no matter how fast you think that the Ferrari should go. It's capped out.

So I think it's really important to realize that one of our best hopes for Einstein being wrong is the idea that a true theory in a certain sense, and I'm going to say something to make Sabina crazy, but it doesn't mean what it sounds like, shouldn't have these singularities. But the singularity, you said that they were beautiful. I thought that was interesting because I find them to be repugnant. Yeah, I mean, certainly they are. And again, I don't think I've asked you this, but I've asked a lot of guests, including Lenny and including Sir Roger. And I also want to get to the point of what do you do when you're talking to somebody?

And you've talked to people outside of science. So none of the people I talk to in science are BS artists, but you talk to besides me, you do talk to people that are sometimes accused of BS. What do you do when you're talking to somebody and you know they're wrong? Like you know that they're not intentionally obfuscating, they're not mendacious, but they're just wrong. And how do you handle that as a host? I mean, it's, and I'm not by any means. I'm not comparing myself to any of my guests. I view myself as a simple, as I said, I'd call myself a simple plumber,

except for the fact that Lenny Suskin was a plumber, and Shelley Glashow was a plumber. And actually, Lenny worked for Shelley's father, who still has a fleet of plumbing trucks in New York City. But anyway, I digress. I'm a simple experimentalist. I build things, I tinker with things. but actually I'm going to defend experimentalist later,

but I'm not saying I'm brighter than these people, but I know in the case of Sir Roger that he's made some mistakes. And I think those mistakes attest to a confirmation bias that he has that I pointed out, and I'm not talking behind his back. Lenny is, you know, I don't know them as well, but, you know, there are times when I was like,

I'm not sure, you know, if Sabina were here, if she would agree with that. I'm not saying I agree with her either. Go ahead. Give me an example. Save now at Whole Foods Market. It's the Summer Splash event with great everyday prices on 365 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert. They have yellow sales signs on ready to cook beef or chicken kebabs too.

Level up with savory marinate, spices and rubs, and complete your cookout with a crowd-pleasing cherry pie and their balsamic chicken salad. Available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash Savings now at Whole Foods Market. So Sir Roger talks about the Bicep 2 data that I played a big part in producing the Bicef experiment, that that manifest evidence for hawking points, for the persistence of memory, of black holes that survive through the catastrophic end of the heat death of a previous aeon, going through to a new eon. And he claims there's evidence for this in the Plank data, in the Bicep 2 data, and so forth. there's been proven, I think, pretty conclusively that neither one is true. And in fact, in one case, Eric, what he did was, you know, the Fourier transform of an image or the image itself contains a lot of information, but none as much as the hologram of an image,

from which you can construct phase and amplitude information. What he did is try to extract phase information from a photograph, which is fundamentally impossible. And I knew that. And I pointed it out to him, and he's still talking about it. And by the way, the paper that I talked to had live streamed with him two weeks ago about, and he's so super gracious. I love him to death.

But that paper was held up in publication up until he won a certain golden, gilded piece of guilt. And the question is, you know, does that influence things? I don't think it should. All right. Well, I'm going to make a really crazy argument, which is irresponsible and will probably get me thrown off of your channel. But here goes. Because we're just playing, right? That's right.

Maybe part of the problem, it goes back to Dirok's observation on Schrodinger. And his point was that Schrodinger delayed publication because there was a failure to fit with experiments. And his claim was that we pushed this on people. Your theory, when it's found wanting, you should capit to it. And Diorak said no. There was a small issue of spin which caused the data not to conform to the theory. and its predictions, and Schrodinger was unduly intimidated by this. And so I think what I want to talk about is cheating and theft in the life of a theorist

versus the life of an experimentalist. Yeah, let's go there. All right. So here's the really crazy idea that will immediately get me laughed out of your channel. The problem is every good idea is dead on a rock. Care to a level. Sure. We have a machine in physics for producing good ideas.

If something is commutative, we say maybe it's non-commutative. If something is symmetric, we say maybe it's super symmetric. Maybe the symmetry is broken. Are there four dimensions? I think there are more than four dimensions. What if there were fewer than four dimensions? We keep varying each parameter. It's very similar actually to what the neoclassical economists do.

They have a concept of a perfect market. And then they relax the hypotheses and they say if this failed, what would be the consequence? So in a weird way, you hold up this idealized thing, which is the perfect market, and then you violate the hell out of it all the time because that's what produces research. Well, where we are in physics is that physics can't move. The straight jacket has gotten so tight that Houdini can't dislocate his wrist to get out of it. And so if you start piling on all of the experimental indications, all of the no-go theorems, all of the instances where some brilliant person tried for 10 years and failed to make progress on a particular area, we've been failing for so long because we succeeded many years ago so well that it now appears that we can't get to the end,

we can't figure out what this is all about, in part because every imaginative idea dies instantly when it gets checked against something in the mind. In the mind or in the marketplace of ideas and data? I think there's a big difference. Well, so this is this thing. I brought a guitar, and the point that I was going to make is that... I thought you're not a string theorist. Ha-ha.

If I pluck the string holding my finger exactly over the halfway point, I get a sound that vibrates at twice the frequency. That's supposed to be almost exact. If I play the harmonic that divides the string in thirds, that sounds like a perfect Pythagorean fifth. But it's not the same thing as what we would call the even-tempered fit. your piano will produce a different notion of the note G than you would get if you played that trick with the string. And it's off by a tiny fraction. In fact, you cannot square.

And even temperament intervals are like quantum mechanics and gravity. They don't yet fit together. And in fact, in that case, we can prove that they can't be fit together. So my plan is, you could then say, okay, So that fifth is not really the perfect fifth. So then we shouldn't make musical instruments that are even tempered, and then nothing will happen. Well, it turns out that that's a really bad thing to do. Your piano works fine, and your ear will compensate for a certain amount of problem,

and no one will ever solve it because we can prove mathematically it can't be solved. That means that we get to play the piano rather than just immediately packing up and say, oh, my gosh, unfortunately, your theory has faster than like communication. unfortunately, you know, your theory is inconsistent with observational data from a survey of the galaxies. We can see, blah, blah, blah. It's important to get enough space to be imaginative. And I sort of think that in part the theorists have to steal from the till in order to do some business to put more money back into the till by the end of the day. I sorry Eric your mic's breaking up a little bit yeah it's uh I don't know if you're on it but I

actually brought this up to Lenny and I said you know part of the reason you're so successful is because you're not on social media but in reality there's some truth to that he he hates social media he feels like it's ultimately a very pernicious entity and the reason I'm bringing it up is because I had a conversation with Paul Steinhart more than two years ago maybe and he was talking about and he's a very creative He can think outside the box and he's a member of the orthodoxy of physics at the highest levels the Einstein professor of physics There's that name again at Princeton Can you hear you

I think it's your might be yeah Sound system I'm hearing you I think people are Mixing the audio. I don't yeah can you say something? It's not coming through again Are you sure you can't hear me? I hear you now. I hear you Okay, so but the point is that you might come up with an idea and then someone takes a picture picture of it at a conference and then tweets it around the world and you get ridiculed. So these things become, you know, stillborn, so to speak. Is that what you're talking about?

Are you talking about, like, actually, I show you this plot of data and I say, you abuse the data. You violated the constraints that this data have been posed upon it. Like, for example, we make maps of the microwave sky. We're not seeing it in real time. We have a lot of filtration. We have to get rid of the ground. We have to get rid of time diurnal effects, calibration effects.

Those are very hard things to evade as hard as evading, you know, Lawrence invariance. So I wonder exactly what you mean. Do you mean that like, you know, these things shouldn't be subject to the same constraints that, say, data analysis would put upon them? Well, think about it in terms of our history. There used to be something called the tau theta puzzle that had to do with weak interactions and beta decay. And the Tau Theta puzzle sort of created a paradox, but it assumed that the universe was symmetric in a mirror. And the solution to the Tau Theta puzzle involved, what if the universe actually had a beauty mark like Marilyn Monroe or Cindy Crawford so that you could tell, right? So I have a few moles on my face.

I don't know. Yeah. So, but I thought people would rather think about Cindy Crawford. Yeah, that's true. yeah, Maryland, no, no, no, no, than either one of us. So the situation there was that it was very painful to propose the idea that maybe the weak force, different from all other forces, would decide that it would break this kind of mirror reflection symmetry. And who knows why?

I mean, it's one of the most astounding discoveries in the history of physics that that's true. But Feynman gave a description of being at a conference or something in which some lower-ranked person said, why are you guys so keen on the idea that the universe has to be left right symmetric? And Feynman said, I'm asking this question for so and so. Everyone claimed that he was doing that to humiliate the guy because he wasn't strong enough to do it himself. Feynman says, no, he would have been able to.

But this gets back to the issue of disagreeability. Now, disagreeability is one of the things that leads people to being called a-holes in science, because you don't go around along with the crowd. I've interacted with Lenny before. He's not an a-hole, but he's grumpy. He's highly disagreeable. He's got the strength to say things that other people wouldn't say. You know what's amazing about that before you go on?

I asked him, I asked Shelley, and I asked Barry Barish. I said, you know, what thing did you not know when you were 20 that because you had courage to go into the impossible, as is the name of this podcast, now you believe to be thoroughly, eminently feasible, but only because you have the courage to go a little bit into the impossible. Two of the three of them said it was overcoming imposter syndrome. That basically, so two of, that means one of them was a Nobel Prize winner. Can you guess the one that wasn't, that didn't say he suffered from imposter syndrome?

And what is my group? The group is Lenny, Barry Barish, and Shelley Glash out. I'm going to guess that that Shelley does suffer from it. He did suffer from it. And I don't know very bearish. It was actually Barry and Lenny. Okay. Barry said, and this gave me chills.

It gives me chills to talk about it right now. He said when he accepted his Nobel diploma in Stockholm, he was asked to sign a book. and in that book when he received this medal he said he wasn't intimidated by this he was intimidated by this he saw Einstein's name yeah

he got he panicked and I haven't released the interview but it was one of the most deep interviews I've ever done and it's just so touching that this guy said no, the laureate and he could talk for hours and Lenny is like that too you know when Lenny

got over imposter syndrome he was 50 he said full professor at Stanford University University, Feshbach professor, I think he has, National Academy member. He says it wasn't easy. And that disagreeability, which I think you have, you have a confidence, you have a swagger. And I think that that has served you, but also I think it pays to have a little bit of insecurity. I have a question from one of my listeners who wants to, I think it's harbting to your interview with Lex Friedman.

I want to get to it because he paid $15 to ask this question. and thank you guys so much out there. It goes into my Nobel-Gelt collection fund. So this is Elon. How much did he pay for this? What's that? How much did he pay for this? He paid 15 for it.

I'll answer it for eight. Oh, no, you can't do it. Now we can't do it. Okay, so fine. No, no, no, it's a Jewish joke. Anyway, keep going. You're trying to undercut the marketplace? Elon Tusk is asking,

Eric, when you say it's time we got off this planet, please explain to us, which I think you did with Lex Friedman, please explain to us what this looks like if my less successful cousin Elon Musk were to implement this technology, assuming it's possible to his ship. So in other words, what does it look like

to get off this planet? He's not asking the question I would ask, Elon, you should have asked this question. Why is Eric concerned with getting off this planet? But he just asked you the technical question. Sorry, Eric, can't hear you. Give me a response in the chat room. Can you hear me in the chat room?

I don't hear. I don't hear Eric I have not changed anything Does anyone hear me Please type in the chat room If you hear me And oh Elon is a Jew as well Interesting I don't know

Nobody's perfect Just kidding So Eric do you hear me I don't hear you Does anyone in the chat room here Brian Please let me know Elon's technology took us off line all right it looks like he's coming back you don't hear Eric but you hear me so I will

now play my guitar no I can't play anything the only instrument I play is the iPhone and I don't even play that very well all right let me call Eric back yes you guys are all saying I'm gonna tell this to Eric I'm gonna tell Eric Eric are you there can you hear me Eric active now he has to invest some of Elon Tusks money into a microphone. Eric, can you hear me? I can hear you. Okay, now I can hear you.

Okay, so Elon is giving us this money, and I want you to use it to get yourself a quality microphone. I hear you. And this is, this is good. Okay, everyone in the chat room, tell me if you can hear Eric now. You guys all hear me. Okay, good. It's when you guys talk at the same time, Eric falls up.

Anyway. So now I've changed my microphone and my camera, and people are going to be angry because my Dell computer is going to be looking up my nose. You're going to see that comments a lot. I've only heard that. thing i've heard more than that is when is eric gonna publish this theory of geometric unity that is verboten we're not talking about that today folks okay all right how do we get off this planet just how not why how well i think part of it would it would have to do with using degrees of freedom that

if there is a way and if there is any first you know there's like a lot of ifs so just assume that we go through the boilerplate so that the theory was right assume that in in some sense 14 dimensions somewhat replaces four dimensions we have now 10 extra dimensions It might be that you'd be able to travel along those 10 extra dimensions rather than along the four. And it might be then much more economical, let's say, to come up, you know, to move along the 10 dimensions, then move along the 4 where it's easier. And then to go back up the 10 and now you're somehow farther apart. I don't even know whether that's a sensible thing. But the key thing is we're a bunch of co-traveling waves.

And in my estimation, we think we're co-traveling waves in four dimensions. but we're actually co-traveling waves in a larger space. And that larger space includes the rulers and protractors of Einstein's space-time metric. And so if those are actually legitimate degrees of freedom, try to imagine, like you could, at least theoretically, you could imagine if I shrink all of the distances by expanding the rulers,

then suddenly, you know, my first operation might be expand the ruler, expand the rulers and then move in that new world where you know a mile is now an inch and then contract the rulers so that would be the kind of by incorporating the spacetime metric is one of the degrees of freedom on which waves can propagate there might be something to do like that the key point is you need to know what the full source code is before you know what you can and cannot do if we have our current picture as a bunch of effective theories you might have no go theorems in the effective theory that aren't no-go theorems in the ultimate theory. And so the question is, does the ultimate theory inherit the same set of restrictions as we

currently have in our partial theories known as general relativity in the standard model? I hope that was worth your $15. All right. Well, now we have a bidding war because someone is asking a $20 question. See, it's very profit. This is why I do these super chats. Okay. This is from a man who has a name that I...

promise not to sing for 50. Well, I was saying, you know, you asked me if I can play any, someone's asking me if I can play an instrument. I said, yes, I played the iPhone, but not very well. A super chat from a man or woman by the name of R. Maybe it's the software, R. Anyway, two questions. So he wants or she wants two questions.

What is the role of category theory in physics? And what do you think about teaching advanced mathematics using computers? For example, use Mathematica. We're going to get to our conversation with Stephen Wolfe from, not too long from now, and sage math, I'm not familiar with that, to teach advanced differential geometry. So two questions. Category theory, I guess should we teach it at a yearly age when we teach calculus, and then also what's the role of computers in the teaching pedagogy of mathematics?

Thank you, R. So, first of all, for those who are not familiar with category theory, category theory sort of got forced almost on the mathematics community because you would notice that certain patterns were highly concerned. So something that seems to be about algebra and like the algebra of symmetries might also be true for spaces and geometric objects. And so you would notice that certain relationships in very different sounding places were carried over. Categories of things are in fact related to each other through things called functors, which are sort of like maps of theories to other theories. In essence, we do category theory for two reasons.

One, we do it to clean things up and to get to the heart and elucidate what's really going on at the purest level, not to be distracted by the instantiation, which may appear different, but it's the same thing in different guise, same sort of underlying. It's sort of a way of dealing with platonic truths rather than examples of truths. The other reason we often do it is to avoid work. We don't know what to do. So we say, okay, well, how does that work category theoretically? Maybe we should use two categories or three categories.

You make things more and more abstract to avoid a reckoning. And so there's a good reason to do category theory, which is usually not essential, but it's very helpful if you know how to do it. And then there's this other thing that we do, which is that we sort of go into it. You know, mathematicians have this phrase that they call it abstract nonsense, sometimes affectionately, sometimes in a derisive way. How does it relate to physics? Well, what we have, I mean, a good example of this would be quantum field theory.

In a weird way, quantum field theory takes initial states and asks about the transition to final states. But we have another geometric theory called boredism theory, where you have an incoming manifold and an outgoing manifold that look like incoming and outgoing states. And then in the 1980s and early 90s, we sort of found out that these two things were the same. And that kind of category theoretic version of some sort of equivalence where something quantum field theoretic and something differential topological were actually the same underlying things. So I think that there's lots of things that category theory can do if you have a very nice formulation of a theory. of a theory that makes sense as rich mathematics,

I also think that it's a way of avoiding our more fundamental problems in the subject. So I hope some of you will not listen to me and will show me that category theory actually breaks the logic. Now, I should point out that you and I have formed a partnership, a supergroup, which also will involve a certain young Weinstein, not young Einstein, but a young Weinstein, and that we are working on the second part of ours question, which is a question, which is about teaching pedagogy and mathematics does the computer enhance it and I don't know about sage math but we we had a live debate this summer with Stephen Wolff from

I'll put that in the chat room right now but just so people can refer to it by the way if everyone's out there sitting down your fingers are getting numb and at risk this is my advertisement now okay Eric you're now we're gonna make some real money your fingers can get carpal tunnel syndrome unless they're exercise so please take your finger stick it on the subscribe button to this channel and that will do me a big favor because we want to get more attention for live streams just like this and the one that we did this summer. Love the hustle.

What's that? Love the hustle. Got a hustle. Got a hustle. Okay. So what do you think about teaching Young Zev and others, mathematics, by using Mathematica, for example, by our friend and compatriot in all things theoretical of theories of everything, Mr. Dr. Stephen Wolff.

I think it's great, but you have to know what some of the problems. with it are. So one thing I would say for example is that let's imagine that you have a matrix, a matrix with two rows and three columns. Sometimes in the computer it makes a difference as to whether it's if it's three rows of two columns or if it's two columns of three rows, you know, in some weird way that's irrelevant to the mathematics but makes sense as to how the memory is allocated inside. of the computer. So I think it's very important to make sure that whatever you're doing in a pedagogical fashion using the technology, you keep track of the ways in which the technology actually fails to mirror reality. For example, in the original formulation of Python, there was a problem with the ring of integers where the brilliant founder of Python, Guido Van Rossen,

had an idea that the product of two integers is an integer so that if you divide one number by another, you should stay in the same class. But if you divide seven by three, that's not an integer. And so he cast it to the nearest integer. That was an example of something where you thought you understood what you were doing inside of the computer. I'm dividing seven by three, but you might find out that you're going to get either the number two or the number three unexpectedly.

So you have to keep track of what it is that the computer is actually doing versus what did you think of is doing. But I think it's a great, you know, Sage Maxima, Wolfram's Mathematica project, I would also point to our friends in Austin, continuum research with the Anaconda release of Scientific Python, all of these are very helpful, tools but don't you know just know where the map between the real math and the computer's

representation of it breaks that here we have another friend this time across the pond i presume walter bishop uh chipping in with a five pound note question for brian and eric up to what point do you agree with string theorists before the disagreement branches out um so i'm going to say before i asked that question i asked shelley glashow this week author of this really wonderful book that I want this copy is for Zeb when he comes down and visit. I want to know, I want to know he has a scorecard, he has a rubric, and I'm going to go all through it with you to ask what in the 32 years since this book was written. It's a wonderful book. It's actually probably the best book on the pedagogy of elementary particle physics of unification. And we went

through, in this video, I'll post probably next week. And reminder, I'm going to have people on. I'm trying to get Gerard to hoofed. I hope I'm saying that right. I'm hoping to get the big dog. Ed Witton. Who knows? Yeah, I think it is. I think I'm going to try to get Ed Witten. Speaking of string theorist, Walter Bishop, I'm going to try, but I'm going to need a lot of help out there because he doesn't do podcast or so he says. Anyway, what's that? Ed Witten did one. He did one, yes. Yes, yes, he did one. You have to rub that in. Thanks, Eric. Thank you. You're the only EW who comes on the podcast. So why are there some...

with, I loved it. Now, you never read this book, but you actually resonate very well with it. So here's the first thing that you and I ever talked about. Why are there so many basic particles? Why are there so many free parameters? Why does the number three play such a big role in elementary particles? And how many families are there all told? So he asked these questions.

Presuming he'd find out answers, you know, before the year 2000, let alone the year 2020, hopefully may it be gone and forgotten soon. Although I'm hoping it's been 5780. That was the problem. And now we're in 5781. Things are smooth. Anyway, what do you make of this? That we haven't made progress since this book was written,

and not for lack of spending money. And then I'm going to give you something really pro. I'm going to say it's a good thing that the SSC was canceled. But for now, please answer this question. What grade would you give these three different problems? Why are there so many particles? Why are there so many free parameters? Why does it number three come in?

What grades would you give to theoretical particle physics? Well, it depends what you mean. So let's do the first one. Why are there so many particles? Yes. I would say that he's saying that the number three matters because there's three collections of 16 particles with sort of four space-time states apiece.

So that's, all of that is coming from, trying to figure out to say this to a partially lay audience. But in essence, we have these four, gadgets called Lee groups, never mind their collections of symmetry. But the full name of it would be SL2C cross SU3, cross SU2, cross U1. And then you have to specify a particle by giving some idea of what those groups of symmetries symmetrived in the form of something called the vector space. Now it turns out that partially due to shell, I mean there's a hidden kind of agenda almost, in this maybe, which is that Shelley was one of the first people to talk about so-called

grand unified theories. Now, because we have to make everything difficult for the guests like me in theoretical physics, you'd think grand unified was more unified than unified, but it's less unified. It's only three out of four forces. So we do that to throw off the Russians in case they're going to invade or something like that. We don't know. So you have this weird thing, which is that Shelley figured out a model called SU5, which reduced the numbers of particles, in essence. The space stayed 16-dimensional, but it really broke up as 1 plus 5 plus 10.

Then there was another theory called S-O-10, which, again, should have been called spin-10, but the physicists have the wrong name. I don't know why they do that to me. And what they do is they put everything in one 16-dimensional symmetric situation. So the number of particles goes down in a certain sense, but the space of the particle expands. I think it's if you believe in the so-called S-O-10, which is really spin-10 theory,

and there's a different version of this called Pétis Salam. You can grade me to see whether I'm a good tourist here. That theory is very similar to the S-O-10 theory, but it's slightly different. It makes use of something called spin-6-plus-spin-4, otherwise known as SU-4-cross-S-U-2-2, never mind. That theory, both of those indicate that there's a lot more unification. We just haven't seen that it's true yet. So I think that the idea is that we actually have a speculation that there are fewer particles in a certain sense once you heat things up to see the hidden symmetry and that they're just fewer numbers of more capacious articles in a certain technical sense. The number three is mysterious because of the number of generations experienced.

people think that they've seen three copies of Lego. Imagine that you had a Lego set made of plastic, one made of wood, one made of lead. The Lego would sort of be the same shape, but the weight of each set of Lego would be different. Now, is there a tungsten platinum set? Is there some other platinum set? Is there some Lego set beyond the three that we know about? I actually claim that we only have two generations of matter. because what's really happening in my mind is that for something to be a true generation,

it shouldn't just be a generation at low energy. It should retain the same properties as the others when you heat them up. So if you have three things that look the same when they're cold, but only two of them look the same once they're heated up, then you might have only two generations. Or maybe there's only one unique generation, and there's three different versions of it, and they all look the same when they're cold.

So I've ever heard anyone in my life say that. I don't know why, but I believe that that's a consequence of my theory, that there are only two generations, not three, whereas everyone else would say we know that there are three, maybe there are more, but there are limits on it for Master of Physics. What are the other questions?

Well, the number three, why are there so many parameters? Why are there so many particles? There are some things that there is a grade that I would say is higher than an F-minus, which I used to get a lot of in high school, such as, you know, are our neutrino's massless? He asked that question back in 1988. Now we know they're not massless. At least one of them has a mass.

We know that surprisingly for astrophysical experiments, not unlike the ones that my colleagues and I do on the Simon's Observatory, etc. Cosmicroid background, barren acoustic oscillations, et cetera. people are asking so we got a 50 krona i don't know i think that's about seven dollars i'm not sure 50 kroner a question uh actually it's not a question it's just how to pronounce that's uft so thank you very much from norway for that people are are questioning again how do we fit and reconcile the need for something when there may not even be evidence of lack In other words, is there a lacuna in physics?

If the old one, as Einstein called God, hands us a piece of paper, and it says there are no singularities at the center of black holes, and there was no singularity in the early universe. Sir Rogers right again or Sir Paul Steinhart is right, there is no singularity. Would you give up, G.U? Give me a break. Give me off a piece of that game.

That chocker. Give me a break. That Kid Cat Bar. Have a break. Have a Kit Cat. Sorry, I don't think there is a singular. Okay, so singularities are not part of the motivation to unify gravity with the other higher energy. This is the uncomfortable part.

One of the problems is that we love Einstein a little too much. You know, we sort of treat our great physicists as heroes, and then we make the mistake of taking the top of our pile, and they stop looking like the rest of the rest of the, of us. I don't think that Newton and Einstein have the same sort of feel, even Dirac. I mean, weirdly, Maxwell, I think, did this unbelievable work, but I don't think that we live in terror of Maxwell. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's too far back. Weirdly, Newton, because of the calculus, everybody's in awe. I think that the great fear is that we're afraid to challenge Einstein. Most people who challenge Einstein do it.

because they don't. It's sort of like picking a fight with Kaviv Nirmagimedah. If you were smarter, you wouldn't do it. So dumb people pick fights with, like, the most dangerous people around. Well, you remember that, yeah, I always compare it to, like, Dungeons and Dragons. I get these emails literally every day. I'm sure you get them too. And it's like Professor Keating, Einstein was wrong.

I can prove how. And if you help me, I will share my portion of the Nobel Prize with you. And I told that to Adam Rees, who won the 2011. Nobel Prize and he said yeah how do you think I got this you know I answered one of those emails someone's asking a young Weinstein let's say there was young wine like I have I wanted to get to the previous oh yeah finish that yeah and then we'll get to it so the point is that the singularities give me confidence that Einstein isn't the last word that he's correct in his domain but that you know he had this wonderful thing about his aphorism

about my equation is like a house with two wings one made of fine marble, the other made of cheap wood. And one side of it comes from curvature and geometry, and that was the marble side, and the other side was like, you just throw together whatever it is that creates something called the stress energy tensor. And I always thought, okay, what does the contrarian do? The contrarian imagines that the problem is with the marble.

And is there a body buried under the marble? Are we so afraid to talk about Einstein's greatest achievement meant that we were giving him a kind of reverence that's holding us back. And so I think you both have to sort of go after Einstein, but it's going to be imperative that you restore him once you take him down from his pedestal. None of us really want to do it because, quite frankly, we love him. We love him because he was everything we wanted to be. He was right about the most important, crazy things.

He was decent. He was wise, you know. Yeah. No, it's true. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you have to kill your father and, you know, I don't know, what do you do after that. So you're going to take over my son's tutelage and tell him that. No, no, you will withdraw your tuition. Singularities give me confidence to say I don't think that Einstein is the last word. And I don't think non-physicists and mathematicians, it's a little bit weird that we're so reverent for one of our own,

where there's still people walking around who met him. And I think we just, we haven't gotten over our Einstein issue. And we won't until he's made into an effective theory, and that's coming. And even, yeah, even as I said, the great Nobel laureates and the others still suffer from imposter syndrome when they get confronted with even just seeing his signature gives them, yeah. I mean, what else is it? But by the way, Eric, I mean, I also feel like,

and you know from my book Losing the Nobel Prize that I feel like this medallion and even the recognition of hero worship is a form of idolatry. I feel like we worship people and ironically we professed

many of us professed to be agnostic or downright atheist. Lenny is a hardcore atheist and yet when we were talking and this happened with Gad Sad, I had Gad Sad on my channel who's a devout practicing atheist and he was quoting things

basically unknowingly quoting from the schma and from and from other canons of Judaism and Christianity and so was a lenny Lenny said what's the most important thing because I ask all my guests is I'm going to ask you in about 15 20 minutes you know what would you put in your Zava ah and your ethical will not your material will I know most of that's coming to me when you're 120 but that good teal scratch it's coming my way baby but I want to know what you put in your ethical will shelly refused to answer that question Glashow. He would not answer that question. The first time it's ever happened to me. It's kind of awkward, to be honest with you. But Barry answered that question, and Lenny answered it basically as

justice, justice, you shall pursue. Now, these are these atheists, they're all Jewish. It happens to be, there have been some Jews, and there have been many people believing Muslim. I've had on Marwa El-Dwinni. I have to give her a shout-out. She's your biggest fan. She wants you on her podcast, even more than me, which she had on. So she's a devout Muslim. And, And most of scientists would believe and profess to be atheist, and yet they worship Galileo. They worship. Uh-oh.

Eric has been knocked off the channel, just as we were talking about God. Can you hear me, Eric? What? Yeah. You there? Can you hear me? Yeah, I hear you. Okay.

So what do you make it as hero worship? Is it hero worship? Like, we want to feel like there are people that are these super ninjas of the brain. And that, like Jack Nicholson said, you want me on that wall. You need me on that. Yeah. We need them. What do you think? I don't know.

I mean, I feel like I've seen, I've met my heroes and they survived. And you survived. You know, I used to hang out with this guy, Isidore's singer, Isaac Bischva's cousin at MIT. And you don't find people at that level of intelligence in everyday life. It's true. It's real. You know, every week, you have lunch with the same person. I rarely sort of don't have this fear of hero worship.

My feeling is you don't know what the human mind is capable of until you get into a small number of areas to prove, you know, I mean, look, Eddie Dan Halen and Art Tatum prove it as well as Paul Therak and Albert Einstein. There are just certain things the mind can do that nobody's prepared for. And you met somebody who's touched the cosmos in that way. They are altered. Yeah. And yet they put their pants on, you know, one leg at a time, right?

Eric, your microphone is a little scratchy. Can you, is there anything you could do to it? People are saying how slim you're looking. Maybe that's causing it. I'll use this option to remind people to take out their fingers. Stretch your digits regularly. Push the subscribe button on this channel so we can grow and continue to get guests like Ed Witten, hopefully someday, another EW.

And I'm going to ask Drew's question. I think this is a fascinating question. what area of STEM is most ripe for disruption or paradigm ships. In other words, I'm going to ask that in terms of where would he advise his children to go into, and my children to go into, what field of science is most ripe for disruption. Eric, can you hear me? I can't. Can you hear me? Yeah, it's very scratchy.

You want to use your phone? People are saying to use your phone. Maybe let's try that. Do you have your Skype, your phone nearby? I do. Let me see what's better in a situation. Oh, 3% world thinner. He's theorist.

Let me see if I can... Is that any better? That's much better. Yeah? Yeah, much better. Okay. Okay, good. All right, so where would you send your children or my children?

What area of STEM is most ripe for a paradigm shift or disruption? Well, I mean, obviously the things that are new and have a lot of novelty, are what get people. So you're going to see a lot in machine learning, a lot in distributed computing. You're going to see a certain amount that's kind of new and exciting. Look, look, I'm going to go in an opposite direction.

I think it's theoretical physics and fundamental physics at that. And I think that there's no indication that this is about to happen that is generic. And that's why I'm going to be. I feel excited to predict that a stagnant field is going to move. But I think it's been pretty stagnant for a very long time. Again, there are a lot of caveats to the word stagnant in that sentence.

But I don't think that it's easy. Look, nothing is working the way it should. You can't get a PhD in any field that I'm aware of and have an expectation that you're going to become a professor. Yeah, that's extremely unlikely. Yeah, so I think that in part we just have to recognize that we have got to take the system back. We've got to get tons of money to our best people. We've got to stop killing off everybody who gives it a shot either by bouncing them out of the field or working them to the bone

or threatening them that if they don't follow the fashion, they can't be employed. We have a terrible situation, and it's up to people like you and me, Brian, to let, the people who've been in charge of this for too long, we have to tell them, your time is up, it's over, we need to revitalize these fields, these need to be careers, these aren't, it shouldn't be that you spend, you know, your life to age 35 before you find out that you're not even employable and you can't have children and your spouse can't live in the same state as you. This is preposterous, and I think I'm just sort of embarrassed about the question, and the richest nation in the history of the world, I'm actually telling you don't go into science when you

desperately need it. Come on. Yeah, I want to make a provocative statement. Are you on your phone, by the way? Where are you on now? Because we don't see your lovely visage. To some... Is that right? I hear you great, but I don't see you at all. There you are. Okay. It's a little scratchy still. I think that the problem is that don't send your kids into STEM until Brian and I get to the National Academy of Sciences and turn over a few people and shake money out of their pockets into the coffers to pay for young people to actually have careers with stability and freedom. It's also incredibly important that we get some of the transparency out of the field because

you need the freedom to think crazy thoughts and we are doing safe science. And I personally think that our desire to not waste taxpayer money is wasting taxpayer money. What you need to do is to give the money to people who are dangerous, people who are original, let them figure out who they need to fund, make sure that it's not such a cutthroat environment. Let's get on with it and get back to being Americans. It is the greatest scientific country in the world partner. So I want to conclude with a couple things that are on my mind. One is very provocative, which is that I was talking to Barry Barish,

winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for detection of gravitational waves, using LIGO, very wonderful man. He was working on a project called the Superconducting Super Collider, and they had been working on that for many years, and then it got canceled. 1993, Congress canceled it. I make the statement that that's a good thing. And in fact, perhaps he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize,

and maybe LIGO would never have succeeded, because he was the decisive person, along with Ray Weiss, who will be on the podcast too, another reason to subscribe. He's coming on the podcast soon. These are guys who are getting up there. I'm trying to get women, by the way, and they just won't come on the show.

I don't know why. Well, I know why. I asked Donna Strickland, who is a hero of mine. You just said, Gen. I had Gen. I'm saying Nobel Women. There aren't many, but I'm trying my best to have them on because I really want to feature them

because I have a lot to learn from them, and we both have daughters, and we want to be inspired, and our sons, too. But anyway, she just doesn't do podcasts, she said, and I'm trying to get a hold of Andrea Gez, who's a colleague at UCLA, but it's been tough. Anyway, I want to get back to this. SSC cancellation.

My controversial opinion is it was good because Europe ended up doing it. It was built to detect one thing, which is the Higgs boson, effectively. I mean, people can argue with me. It costs $20 billion when you actually add up the money. And by the way, whenever a physicist tells you something is going to cost X billion dollars,

always double it, because to operate it costs as much as to build it over 10 years. It costs 10% per year to operate of the construction. construction costs. That's operations rule of thumb number 101. So if he had stayed on the superconducting super collider, we would have spent 20, maybe 30 billion dollars. We would have detected the same thing, maybe a little bit earlier, maybe not, and he wouldn't have worked on LIGO and LIGO wouldn't have succeeded. So it's a good thing that LIGO, that SC

got canceled. What do you say? Wow. Okay, tell me where I'm where I'm lost. Well, first of all, we pissed off Congress. And we lied to Congress about a science shortage. And if you take, for example, our mutual friend, Rabbi Walpey, his cousin, Howard Walpy, held hearings. And the basic question was, why did you the National Science Foundation and you, the National Academy of Sciences, lie to us?

You had a special deal with us. And you stupid effing morons, in fact, concocted a scheme to, for some reason, that we can't figure out to do shitty science inside the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Science, you bamboozled us. You got us to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, and then we find out that, in fact, this is an incompetent demographic study because it didn't take demand in the labor marketing. This is the same time that they also said, what are you doing buying art for the SSC at these prices? And quite honestly, I'm incredibly disappointed

with the senior leadership of the physics community, for one, not understanding the political sensibilities in Washington, but also not leveling with them, which is, you take our toys away from us, you're going to screw yourself over. In effect, we have intellectual SEAL Team 6 at your disposal, and what we like to do is to train and work out. We work on physics, but we're available to you guys,

and this is an advanced technological nation that brought forth atomic weaponry, you need your best and brightest to go into these fields and to make sure that you're current, given, for example, that the World Wide Web, for example, came out of CERN. There is no question in my mind that if you try to do a cost-benefit analysis on why are we spending so much money to look for particles for these people, you're getting it wrong. We are at almost the end of perhaps the greatest story in the history of the world,

and we're acting like a bunch of pusses. And $20 billion is not that much for the people who helped end World War II with two monstrous weapons dropped on our now-allied Japan, which is incredibly horrific for all those who died. But it was also the decisive end to World War II. Your communications devices, the semiconductors in your phone, Almost all of this comes from theoretical physics. As much as I really often dislike dealing with theoretical physicists,

but it's like I'm sure I wouldn't want the SEAL Team 6. They'd probably think I was a pussy. On the other hand, do I want SEAL Team 6 to be well-funded and to be there whenever I need them? Absolutely. Well, this is what it takes to get the world's smartest engineers, the world's best mathematicians, the world's top physicists in mind, working together to be available.

to our government and our country when we need it, and to make progress and potentially, you know, let me turn it on you guys. You guys brought us into the Valley of Death, and the only people are going to get us out of the Valley of Death after the atomic weapons of World War II, and then the fusion devices that followed in the early 50s, the only people are going to get us off the planet are physicists. Elon started as a physicist, but those rocket engines aren't good enough to get us diversity beyond the solar system. We need a huge number of different planets to experiment with so that we don't all go up in one fell swoop on the one that we have. So the short answer is we pissed off the government. We changed our agreement with them catastrophically.

It was part of two separate sets of hearings. And quite frankly, I think it's the mismanagement of the physics community's legacy by senior physicists. And it was a horrific thing that's a loose. So I want to give some news to folks that we are going to be working together on a project for revitalization and in concert, experiment, and theory working together. Eric and I have plans for this. Stay tuned for that. Again, please subscribe to Eric's channel, the portal, the portal clips, and listen to episodes. I believe I will be on an episode in the not too distant future before the universe doubles in size.

We've recorded an episode. someday that will be available and I want to thank Eric for that I want to close with a couple more questions from the audience we have one from Russia with love and that if I can find it By the way just to come back to the very end let's come back to the question about what to do

with a guest who says something that you don't feel comfortable Well let's do that now because yeah time is running out the day is short I want to know you know I'm dealing with guests and this week was this kind of up and down rollercoaster for me I had just being honest I had wonderful guests that were really edgy, interesting, controversial, but don't even care about their legacy. I had other guests on this week that are very considerate of how their reputation is handled and not wanting to be too controversial, even when I know that they have controversial opinions.

And I'm not here to be Jerry Springer of physics. But the bottom line is I think that they sometimes will manage an image in a way that is contrary to what is best for at least my audience. Now, maybe they don't care about my audience. And why should they? Uh-oh. We've lost Eric, but we haven't lost me. I will keep going. So the existential crisis that I faced is whether or not to involve...

Eric, can you hear me? Yes, Brian. Sorry, you said you had guests on. You had a tough week, and then I couldn't hear anymore. Yeah, no, just having guests that are generous with an open and willing to be vulnerable. And I think that those are the most interesting people. And they help demystify the Einstein. Einstein syndrome that we revolved to crying.

And when I'm dealing with that, I'm like in real time. First of all, I want to know, Eric, when you're interviewing somebody, do you have a metric that you're using like, I'm doing a good job with this interview or I'm doing a bad job? I have one or two, but I want to hear what are your tips as podcasters, especially with really intellectual guests that you get on, excluding me? I haven't solved this puzzle. I talk over people too much. I'm too aggressive.

Sometimes I don't want to embarrass somebody, and I maybe shortchanged the intellectuals. sometimes I want to do the intellectual right and I feel like I didn't take care of the person proper. There's a huge number of competing pressures. And I think people see us failing at one thing or the other. They don't realize that it's not because we didn't consider, maybe I should shut up, maybe should let people finish. It's sort of like, wow, if I don't say something, then this is going to go on for a 20-minute riff and we're going to lose the audience.

Okay, so in this situation, you know, I had a little bit of this situation with Garrett Lise. I like Garrett, and I care about him. I think he's very imaginative, and I think he brought a lot of good ideas into the world, even though I think his theory is wrong. I don't make a secret of saying that his theory is wrong, but it's clear that I hold him in high regard as a human being, that he's generative, that he's original, that he's trying,

all sorts of positive things. When I interviewed him, I guess he had decided that he had moved from E8 to an infinite dimensional version of his own theory, and that this was the solution of the problem. And it was a significant enough pivot that I didn't know how to address it entirely. Because I sort of felt like you should at least acknowledge that the other thing didn't work

and maybe this pivot works. But, you know, one of the problems in startups is that if you keep pivoting, then, you know, the question is, was there something there at all? And I think that, you know, Garrett had a really interesting, good idea that doesn't work. in the case of, you know, and in Rogers case, you know, I interacted with him, and there were some places where I feel like we didn't have a satisfying intellectual connection.

So I think that that's normal. And I think that when you love people and your friends, like, it's possible that you and I could talk about geometric unity and you would say, well, isn't that a minus sign? I'll say, no, no, no. Oh, is it? Oh, really? Did 35 years of work just go out the window? It's a nightmare and it's funny. It's hysterically funny that we live our lives like this.

But the thing is, what else can we do? I mean, at least we're trying. At least as a theoretical physicist or mathematician looking at this stuff, you're trying. And if you fail, all that can be said is nobody else figured it out either. Yeah, you fail daring greatly, like Teddy Roosevelt said. So when I'm doing something, I want to get your opinion about, if I'm interviewing you or, I mean, you and I are good friends, But if I'm interviewing a hostile witness, and I hear them say something like, that's a good question. I kind of think that that is a good question, whereas I hear them say, well, as I said before,

then I realize, I'm not doing so great. Or similarly, when somebody says, like, they just stop and think. And I'd let them try to, like, hang themselves, like, not hang themselves, but I let the silence do the work? And I wondered, like, do you have this loop in your head to be a good interview? And we're not trained in this. We're doing the best we can. See, I try to embrace things like, you know, you said imposter syndrome. I've listed my occupation as imposter on numerous occasions.

You know, I talk all the time about the fact that I'm not a physicist, and here I am, we're pining on these shows and blah, blah, blah, blah. In all of these circumstances, you have to sort of play with it and make fun of it. Like, you know, I'll be honest, when you said Lenny Susskin, it was obviously incredibly successful, I had a moment where I said, is he? You know, I mean, I understand that he's very highly regarded and he's contributed many theories, but does it cash out properly?

You know, if I were to list Kumran Voffa, if I were to list Ed Whitney. Who's going to be a guest next week, Cumbern Voff? Yeah, that's a good question. I have a question for you. I'm sorry to interrupt, but time is short, and I do want to get to a few things for you. And maybe we'll do this again next week,

but the point, Eric, is, I say this, another provocative thing, which you'll probably shoot me down for, but I say it wouldn't have made a difference if Electra Week unification was discovered in 1962, as it was by Shelley Glashow and collaborators, or if it was discovered in 1982, but it would have made a big difference if the transistor wasn't discovered in 1956 and instead was discovered in 1976. So I think that there is sort of a fungibility in some sense of theory. In other words, theory is going to be discovered. but experimental or inventions, which is what Alfred Nobel wanted to recognize. I mean, what do you say about that? That there's sort of this time and time value of money and that we really should invest it purely in experimental physics and not any in theoretical science. I mean, nobody looked at the quantum mechanical laws of Strontenard and said, let's build a transistor. These are some guys fritzing around in a garage.

And if you look at the original transistor, it's chewing gum, it's a coat hanger, it's a crystal. It's pretty wacky stuff. Nobody looked at the shortening equation to solve it. Boy, do I have a different impression. I mean, my life is so determined in part by the synthesis that it occurred by the mid-70s. And if it weren't for Jim Simons and C.N. Yang at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, figuring this out, my life would be completely different. I think that, you know, so many things hinged on the fact that the Glashire, Weinberg, Salaam model with, speaking of it,

hooked, showing the renormalizability of these gauge theories and the way in which all of this stuff conspired is incredibly important from allowing other fields to progress. In particular, differential geometry and topology in this beautiful Renaissance. So I think it actually was super important that this stuff should have been discovered earlier.

It would have been nicer if when Yang and Mills was at 1954, 53, something like that came out with their theory that they had understood it to be geometric. I really think it's a tragedy that we don't have C.N. Yang on our lips, whenever I hear people say that Stephen Weinberger, Ed Witten, is the world's greatest living theoretical physicist. I always say, I'm waiting for the day when another name is as added to that, and C.N. Yang is my favorite. I'm going to try to get him on the show. Godspeed. But, look, you know, in part, I think it actually really does matter. The problem is that it's a story to which almost no one is paying attention.

And if we're going to get off this planet, we are going to need a fundamental theory. You're going to want those theorists in Jack Nicholson's... You're going to want those theorists on that wall. Actually, the wall is at Stony Brook, and you and I are going to go in with a chisel one night and chisel some equations on the wall. Okay, we have a few minutes left. Any other questions? I want to scan quickly through, make sure people got their monies worth.

But while I'm doing that, Eric, I want to ask you a question. that I asked this is from Allison Walker a quick one thanks what's written on top of a Purple Heart okay I don't know what that means but Allison is a good friend of the show thank you I want to know if you subscribe to this notion of the ethical will and I asked this of all my guests I asked this of Jim Simons to Jan 11 to almost anybody that's come on the podcast and and I want to know in your opinion if if you were to leave a legacy not of material goods but an ethical will, a will of wisdom, a will of experience, based on your experience,

that would be not only for your biological children and grandchildren, may there be many, but also for your ideological children, of which there are already, you realize you make a huge impact on the world, Eric, and what you say, people listen to and pay you to hear, and I get it for free, and I should reimburse you someday. I'll pay you that three bitcoins that I promised you 20 years ago. But anyway, what would you leave in your ethical will? And then we'll finish up with a question from our friend Tyler. I mean, I think what I'd leave is, look,

the only thing that I've ever done in my life that has the ability, even potentially, to compete for the attention to people a thousand years from now, would be geometric union. And it's quite possible that it's just wrong. You know, I don't think it is. I'm betting heavily on it. That would probably be the first thing.

And what that thing is is, it's about hope. It's about all sorts of crazy human motivations. It was an incredibly self-destructive undertaking. And I worry about communicating it to my son, which is, do I want to tell you to try to do something against all odds? Money is no object. Health is no object. I mean, my guess is that I was probably overweight for a large number of years,

in part because I'd stopped thinking of myself as a number of, member of this planet, which is probably incredibly unhealthy and delusional. Wait, you intentionally, you feel like that was intentional? I mean, for me, I'm addicted to food. I eat too much because of course, but my point is that I sort of checked out. And I mean, I really, when I talk about this twin nuclei problem, I'm not kidding around. I really do believe we're all wearing face masks potentially because of something that might have come out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And the thing that gives me the most confidence is just how certain I'm not supposed to say that YouTube and the federal government is. So I don't know whether we're going to have a problem with nuclear weapons. I don't know whether we're going to have a problem with these viruses. But we have to get out of here because we've outgrown this planet. And we're too powerful and we're not smart enough. Our politics is a mess. And we've got to spread out because we can't have one correlated experiment. So the core of my ethical will is that.

Now, I speak a lot on a lot of different. different programs. And one of the things that I feel very confident of is that if my children ever choose to pay attention to me again, there will be a corpus of audio and video that indicate what did I think. What did I think about politics? What did I think about decency? What did I think about, you know, how we treated homosexuals years ago when we wouldn't allow them to marry? I think I've opined on so many things that if we're to die this instant, there would be a huge record of my thinking. And I think, too, as I've told you, what if you stumbled upon something from the

stettles of Eastern Europe and it said, you know, great grandma, Nachama Weinstein, and you found this book and they said it's going to be 100 Bitcoin, you would pay it. And so I want you to think about your children's children's children and think about putting something in writing because we have books from Galileo. We have books from Einstein. You're lying. You've been trying to get me to write a book for ages, and now you're pressuring me,

and you're negging me on international television. I'm just saying people are out there. Okay, people are asking, what is Lex Friedman like, and what is his uniqueness in the role of the podcasting world? And then we have one comment. Brilliant, gorgeous, and ladies, he's single. And Tyler is asking a question.

I'm trying to find Tyler Goodstein has a question and I want to get to that It's it's that the the the Allison not gonna go rapid fire let's do rapid fire. Yeah, okay Vulnerability is kind of we realize it's based time Let me see here you need the energy up Brian what's that take the energy up okay okay Okay, what do you think about girdle? Girdle's incomplete in the theorem I never wear them I'm sorry I think that it's fabulously interesting, but I think that we tend to do it too much as a G-whiz.

I'm sure that there's a formal way of saying it that sounds more like there's certain things that are true for good reasons. There are certain other things that happen to be true, but they don't have a good reason, and that means you can't necessarily prove that they're true inside of the system. I would love to hear somebody say it that way. I've never heard it properly done by a logician, so it has too much of a G-wiz thing. All right. Tyler Goldstein is asking, Eric, if I remember correctly, I think you said on a podcast, The next scientific dynamos may be religious people. Do you think these people would have to find unorthodox paths presenting their work outside of academia?

The problem is that right now we're having a huge problem with academics becoming too self-destructive. In a weird way, you pay a cost for being religious, that you often believe something on faith. There are religious scientists who are able to take their faith and their science and separate them so that they do good scientific work. but they use their convictions to potentially martyr themselves and put themselves in low probability of success situations. That's what that was a reference to. I happen to know some biologists who don't agree with Darwinian theory, but if there were problems in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, let's say,

you might find that the people like Richard Dawkins would be wanting to say there are no problems in that synthesis, and you might be dependent on somebody, Even assuming there's no God and everything is completely materialistic, the challenge might have to come from a religious person who would destroy their career going up against Neo-Darwinian ideas, but then that person might actually point out, you know, that thing you said about random mutations, they can't possibly be the engine of the principal engine of evolution because the search space doesn't conform even over long periods of time with

many bacteria exploring genetic variants of... certain primary secrets. So that kind of self-destructive energy comes from religions. One of the reasons why religions have been very difficult to get rid of by atheists, because in fact, when people have that kind of faith and conviction, they start thinking beyond themselves.

And that's a very potent force. Is there anyone you're afraid to debate? Sure. Care to name them? Care to name her? What? Care to name her? Let me think.

Well, look, there's one person. who absolutely terrifies me intellectually, and that's Ed Witton. All right, we're going to try to arrange that, as you know. That's my white whale, my white witten whale. Is there any position in physics that you think is being promoted purely for hype? In other words, wormholes, time works, the simulation hypothesis. I mean, these are all things that I think of as hype. What do you think is the biggest hype?

I think the whole gee-whizification of things that are real. like Boltzman brains, the multivars, you know? It's like we're always interested in time travel going, you know, going backwards and wormholes to parallel universes. And you've got to know when to quit and how to do science fiction, right? I feel like what we've done is we've taken a small number of topics with maximum sex appeal. We've sexed them up,

and we've forgotten how many gorgeous, beautiful ideas, You know, I've been talking, I'll be honest, I've been talking about this for a while, and then I saw Sean Carroll do a series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Now, Sean and I have sort of a weird relationship. We're cordial when we meet each other, but there has been some tension in it. And I wonder whether he had actually heard me on programs like Rogan talking about the hop vibration and things like that, saying, why is it that we're not extolling all the cool things that we do? why do we keep hitting these same topics?

Because I think he had hit the multiverse, the Boltzmann brain, that kind of stuff pretty hard. To be generous to Sean, if I can, I thought he did a beautiful job over a very large number of very difficult topics, some of which I had myself been experimenting with talking about. So I think we need to stimulate some of our science communicators to showing more of what it is that we actually do

because it's so effing pool that it's crazy that we keep it locked away while we bullshit about things that are of marginal importance. Okay, rapid-fire questions. James Thompson, is the universe expanding or are atoms shrinking? Yes or no? Don't love the question. Should my kids go to college or try to find something outside the college university system? I think we should try to send our children to graduate school and skip college.

We should try to find Lambda school-like opportunities to cut down the expense. We should partition the subjects that are super serious. Serious as a heart attack subjects and get them away from the subjects in which a penchant for bullshitting and fashion tends to take over the subject. We do some incredibly important difficult things at universities, and we do a lot of things that shouldn't be done at universities, and it's time to divorce them one from the other. So I think it would probably be good to start doing away with the current college model and try to figure out what's next. Do you think that Trump will leave office? will leave office?

I do. Do you think that he has a secret file on the incoming occupant of the Oval Office? I don't even care. I think that the key problem, my guess as to what's going on is the Democratic forces and the establishment forces have oversold just how little fraud there is, and the Republican and Trump-like forces have oversold how much there is. And so the weird part about it is that people are also kind of long. lying about the truth, and that's causing us to get very confused.

It's somewhat akin to the question of, did HIV cause AIDS? They jumped the gun on it, but it was also true. So if you were using a jump-the-gun detector, you decided that that was BS. On the other hand, if you used an underlying thing, you'd say, well, that wasn't originally true, but it turned out to be true. My guess is that there was way too much pressure to put Biden in office, that Biden actually did win the election, and that's going to be very difficult for a lot of the Trump supporters. You think he's going to come back in 2024? Well, you know, as a 78-year-old guy,

I think he's doing a lot of damage to himself. If Trump walks out of the Oval Office babbling incoherently about so unfair, so unfair, without putting up a serious conspiracy theory, I mean, at this point, I want to see a serious conspiracy theory or concede the election. What is your conspiracy? If you have the data, if you have the allegations, I want to know them in terms that I can really, understand. And I understand it might take you five years. We might find out the deep state through the election five years from that. We don't have five years to wait. So if you don't have it now, if you don't have it for the courts, you're going to have to leave office.

Would you rather have a Nobel Prize or be president for two terms, guarantee? I would definitely not want to be a president of the United States. Do you think it's dangerous if a Jew would become president? Would that be a good thing for the world, a bad thing for the world, what do you think? I think it depends on the Jew. Okay. Let's see here. Someone wants to hear a serenade on the way out. We'll give that in a minute. If you had a time capsule that you knew would last a billion years, like a monolith in 2001, a space odyssey, I may have asked you this, but I may not have. What would you put on that monolith in that monolith for some species in the future to discover when they're ready to discover it? There's a wall that we are going to visit in

the State University of Stony Brook, State University of New York, Stony Brook, where I was born. The whole point is to get that wall right. There's a bunch of stuff on that wall that shouldn't be on it, so we have to deface the wall to remove the things that are extraneous. We have to improve the things that aren't in their proper form. But that wall is an unbelievable mecca, and all you young kids, if you want to know what that monolith should look like,

go to the Simon Center for Physics and Geometry and take a look at that gorgeous Indiana limestone and the beauty of what is written into that and make your assignment for your life that you will understand what is carved under that wall by the time you hit your 30s. Would you rather shrink to the size of a DNA molecule or be able to visit the interior of a black hole

inside the event horizon? I was just hoping to get some sleep this week. Well, your Tuesdays canceled. Okay. Neither. Okay. I'm a meso scale kind of a guy. Would you rather go back in time 500 years or forward in time 500 years?

There's a particular weekend I would like to visit during my junior year of high school, but we don't get due over. All right. Okay, Eric. Someone's asking, will you serenade us out? Something mind-blowingly amazing from the world of Geometric Unique. underneath that Yiddisha kuff of hair where you serenade us and the guitar as you take us out maybe uh shalom alechem or something like that for the evening that's about to approach I don't know what's like that's awesome thank you so much Eric we'll do this again maybe

we'll make it regular I want to thank the audience I'll use super chatters regular chatters please subscribe to Eric's channel on iTunes no no Brian's channel all right fine if you must if you please subscribe we're got great guests jar toothed hopefully will come on see and Yang we have come run Bafa next week and we will we will update you all she'll look for Shelley Glashow others to come Eric say a few words that you can't say sure people need to understand that Brian is getting some of the best guests in the world they're not polished they're not necessarily professional podcast guests and I think that it's just really important to recognize that if

you're used to banter, excitement, joking, guitar, you're not necessarily going to get that on this channel. But what I want to say that he can't say is that he's crushing it with respect to who he's able to get. If you're able to listen to Sheldon Glashow, who paid me a dollar that he owed me for 27 years, I want to bet with him. Shelly was a prince of a guy to give me the dollar

after 27 years, finally conceding the bet. Kumran Voffa, Lenny Susskin, Noam Tromsky, I am clearly not qualified to sweep the floor of this channel. Habituate yourself, if you can, to understanding that these are some of the most important minds that you're going to listen to. And if they're not polished and if they don't make sense, I would start to pick up an acquired taste because the only podcast that's getting comparable guests is Graham Farmelos' podcast, which is barely a podcast at all.

and this is really an honor to get to appear here in the company of such incredibly serious people. So keep trying to figure out what we're doing here and we'll figure out serious scientific podcast. And I want to thank you for talking me down from the ledge on many occasions as I get my footing. Not true. No, no, no, it is. You actually do a great deal of good for me, for my family. I love you. We love you.

Shabbat Shalom. Everybody out there. Thank you so much. And we'll do this again and stay tuned for more wonderful content as we go. Into the Impossible, signing off your fearful host, Brian Keating, and his good buddy, Eric Weinstein. Good night. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review.

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

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