Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein & Lee Smolin: Judging Theories of Everything, ID, & UFOs 👽 (#146)

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Eric Weinstein & Lee Smolin: A conversation on Theories of Everything: String Theory, Geometric Unity, Loop Quantum Gravity, Lisi’s E8 etc. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 Michio Kaku & the God Equation: problematic? https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI 10:00 Is String Theory sucking the oxygen out of physics? 15:00 There are challenges to challengers like loop quantum gravity 30:00 A rubric for judging theories of Everything? 1:00:00 Intelligent Design?! 1:05:00 UFO’s and Pentagon data dump 1:10:00 How to treat an 👽 1:15:00 God and Man: don’t be like Captain Cook! Please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Michiio Kaku GOD EQUATION https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?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 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on 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: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguable from magic. Are live with two of my very good friends. My friend, Dr. Eric Weinstein, my friend, Dr. Lee Smolin. How are you wonderful gentlemen today from California and from Canada? Well, today, gentlemen, we are going to have a nice, clean fight. No, we're not going to have a fight. We're going to have a discussion about a series of events that have been occurring lately, which are these theories of everything.

There seems to be a proliferation of theories of everything, which come with monikers like the God equation, the mind of God, and all sorts of other identities. And I wanted to really just take a step back. We had a conversation last summer with PBS, Space Time Studios, about theories of everything. I want to take stock where are we at now? with some recent events that have come up that some say

give us reason to cleave to one theory or another. And these are events that are anomalies, that are unexpected, that bring up problems, perhaps cracks in the standard model of physics. And these are the LHC Beauty Experiment and the G-Minus 2 experiment at Fermilab. And it's funny because, as was said of Stephen Hawking, he was the safest person to ever make a bet with, because no matter what side you took, you'd always win the bet. So all the sides of these different theories of everything seem to claim credit post facto.

I want to ask you first Lee. I had on Michi Okaku on The Into the Impossible podcast. He said that these new anomalies are totally consistent and in fact may be evidence for the God equation, a.k.a. string theory. Do you think that such things can, Eric, no laughing. Do you think that such things could even count as evidence for string theory? We don't even have a scorecard. We don't have a rubric for what counts as an A-plus on a scorecard of a theory of everything.

How can we say that it's evidence for string theory if we don't even know what it predicts? I was confused for years about what the rubric was. There was a thing about crossing it. Anyway. The Rubicon. Oh, I see. Look, with the G minus 2 of the muon, let's, can we get real up for a minute and I, I can you can back me up on this or not? The G minus 2 is the correction to the magnetic moment of

the muon coming from a load of different physics. Some of it comes from quantum corrections in quantum electrodynamics itself. Some of it comes from the weak and strong interactions, making contributions to small quantum corrections, but that's what this is about. There are different groups of theorists and collaborations of theorists who have worked on what is the actual standard model prediction. And I think it's important to say that there's not agreement, among the theorists about what the standard model prediction is. And I don't know enough to have a view as to which group is right, but they seem both legitimate collaborations,

good collaborations of scientists. So to start with there's not one prediction or two predictions, and this experimental result agrees with one of those predictions and disagrees with another one of those predictions. So what we have, depending on what is the right theoretical prediction, either an agreement or a disagreement with the standard model. Now, it's much more fun if it's a disagreement, but if it's a disagreement, what is the nature of it?

It's not profound. It's something to the, if I remember, it's the eighth of the ninth decimal place of, some measure. It could be explained by some additional elementary

particles added to the standard model. And I haven't thought about it, but my guess is that there's a number of different ways you can accomplish that because you're trying to push a high number and a decimal expansion of places.

And the question, of course, will be, can you do that and not upset the other precision measurements of the standard model. But I don't think there are that many of the precision predictions of the standard model. So my guess is without being totally ignorant, is that if we decided that this was a new physics, there's a lot of different new physics it could be. Could some of it be motivated by string theory?

sure, because you can get almost anything you want to. That reminds me of what Nathan Cyberg once said. He said, most string theorists are very arrogant. If there is something beyond string theory, we will call it string theory. Now, he's a well-known proponent of string theory. He's not some enemy. Eric, how do you react to these claims that, you know,

kind of, in hindsight, they can be made compatible with almost anything? Well, that one, I think I called that your attention at some point, so that even if you are an anti-string theorist, you are therefore a string theorist because string theory is whatever, you know, it's heads I win tells you lose. Now, of course, it's not really that way, but it is too much that way. With respect to the G-minus-2 anomaly, I think Lee said it well, and I just want to to emphasize this one point, which is it's not so much that you're invalidating the standard model if this turns out to be durable. But if you took the standard model to be complete, you would be invalidating that assertion of completeness. Because one way that this can happen is that there's simply some processes that we don't know about yet. And if you imagine that in order to get the right answers through precision measurement. You have to sum over all possible processes,

which is sort of goes under this Feynman moniker of sum over histories or path integral. An anomaly can detect the fact that there are channels that you know nothing about without telling you what those channels are. My guess is that what will happen if this turns out to be durable is that you'll have a change in the inhibition structure of the professional research community. The first things you'll start to see will be the absolute minimal alterations

that don't really have much in the way of intellectual heft. So people will introduce, for example, sterile neutrinos, or they'll introduce a Z-prime particle. They'll try to do the absolute minimal to add to what we already know. And there will be very little reason

accept that it sort of is kind of a race to say something that isn't dead on arrival. Then you'll burn through that period in all likelihood, and you'll get to the point where people are actually proposing bold new frameworks. I think that in part that goes back to your question, Brian, about why is there a flurry of activity in so-called theories of everything? And I think it has to do with the fact that the way things have worked up until very recently is that the quantum field theory community that sort of became the string theory community really was very aggressive about shutting down alternate approaches and then pushing for this one approach by seemingly relaxing some of the standards that it is asked to satisfy while demanding that everyone else and their

mother satisfy the highest levels of you know agreement between theory and experiment while making excuses. So I think we're in a very interesting situation, and I think what we're talking about is a race to find something new in experiment that gives people the right to be bold before we lose the coherence of the theoretical physics community from about 50 years of frustration. Yeah, I was talking to Lee earlier on the 15th anniversary of the trouble with physics, and echoing a statement that he makes in that book, which, you know, check my math, Eric, you're a mathematician, as you frequently remind me, not a physicist, that that book makes statements about the lack of progress in the preceding 25 years,

so 25 plus 15, that's 40. So that means 40 years of stagnation, relatively speaking, in fundamental physics, not in other, in particle physics, et cetera. And I think our mutual friend of all three of us... Who, let's say fundamental physics. Theory-led fundamental physics. Theory-led fundamental particle physics. I mean, there's fundamental condensed matter, etc., that we could argue that there has been substantial progress. But anyway, our colleague,

Sabina Hasenfeldern, friend of the show, has argued as well that, you know, beauty or aesthetically pleasing should not appear on the rubric. In other words, we should not have on the rubric, oh, your theory is aesthetically pleasing. And then, you know, frequent guest on the show, Frank Wilczek, and I know he's been on the portal as well, has said, you know, actually, beauty worked out pretty well for me and symmetry, et cetera. So it seems to me that we still have this debate, despite Lee's Apocal book of 2006, The Trouble with Physics, and despite Sabina's shots across the bow, we still have Graham Formello, who's coming on the show in the next month, arguing that. No, this is the way physics has always been. We look for guiding principles, nature is complex,

variegated, and beautiful. And so why not be led by those principles? In other words, not only do we not have progress. Maybe we can't agree on the rubric to begin with, let alone grade the students by their lack of progress or their progress towards some suspected goal. May I? Eric, you want to go ahead and then I'll... Okay, let's compare this with the case where science seems to be working. When the LIGO and Virgo saw the collisions of binary neutron stars or neutron star black holds in the gravitational wave data. And one of the first things that they announced

that they could measure is the speed of gravitational waves. And that came to within measurable error within the speed of light. And this was clean. We can say it cleanly. Everybody can understand what it means. And there were a lot of theories. it turned out to people who've been developing modified gravity theories, modified versions of general relativity. That didn't predict this. General relativity, it happens, does predict it.

And so this is a clean measurement with a clean implication, and it leads to a question. And the question, this is a friend of mine who came and said, so can you guys explain this? Can we understand why the speed of light and the speed of gravitational waves are the same? And I don't think we can. So it raises a question. But that's a case of science working. It's not a question about jiggling the ninth decimal place of something. It cleanly means something, and the measurement is pretty clean.

Oh, well, that also, sorry, Erica, I just want to make one comment myself, which is that I actually made that comment to Michi Okaku. I said not only has the speed of light been confirmed, but also the dimensionality of space time. I said the dimensionality of space time is limited by, by, oh God, I'm blanking on this, the name at Chicago, but David Spurgel, our friend and colleague, a friend of the show, and professor at Chicago, my fans on the show will suggest his name.

Anyway, the dimensionality of space time via the inverse, what? Mike Turner. No, it wasn't Mike Turner. It was a younger physicist. Dan, it's another Dan or Dave. I'll look it up and I'll get it up again. But anyway, this comment, this result was that the deviation from inverse square law, which limits the number of spatial dimensions, is microscopic. In other words, we have no reason to think of at large extras spatial dimensions. And this was met by a thud from people like Kamran Vafa and others. So, I mean, at what level do we, guys, do we start applying some Bayesian inference that there's evidence that we should start to say, look, this should start to count against different theories. And it could be against E8, it could be against geometric unity. It could be, but it seems like string theory by virtue of its prominence, by the attention, give it to it, invested in it by the field, it has sort of a higher burden of proof.

And I don't see it passing as many tests, but maybe I'm being too harsh on this. What do you guys think? Eric, why don't you take that? Well, you know, my concern is that we keep talking through proxies. Like I think that Sabine is very correct about her stance so far as using beauty as an excuse. But she's not correct about using beauty as a super selection tool to think about the intellectual rigor of interlocking frameworks, which was sort of Dirac's point about beauty, that beauty is really kind of coherence.

The great danger that we're in is that we can't talk in the present about what's really going on, which is the political economy of theoretical physics. It has to do with geopolitical struggles and the way in which physics has been a security issue, it's been an economics issue, it's a prestige issue, it's a religious issue. There are various different groups.

And the real reason that things are happening, as soon as we start abstracting away from money and particular people and the way in which jobs are doled out and all these kinds of things, all of these human aspects are causing us to say wrong things about science. So I appreciate what Lee is saying about, you know, that with LIGO science is working the way it shows. But to be honest, there's this sort of meta-scientific method, which is the totality of everything that has ever worked, which includes the scientific method, but also includes Kakuli getting fever dreams about snakes eating themselves and discovering benzene as a ring. So whatever it is that actually works is part of the meta-scientific method. Well, Lee doesn't believe in the scientific method. No, that's what I agree with that. I think Lee and I have been sort of sympathetic on this for a long time. I think that the problem that we're having with string theory is that its durability has to do with very uncomfortable truths.

Some of them are scientific having to do with one community better understanding the requirements of renormalizability than any other community. but it also has to do with one community being absolutely blocked on target in this particularly repetitive, perseverated argument about how this is the theory of everything and everything else can take a hike. And I'll be honest, listening to Michiokaku, I wonder what decade I'm in that he is running around talking about string theory is the theory of everything,

shifting the burden onto every critic that they have to come up with the particular vacuum or background out of 10 to the 500 choices in order to test string theory that that's not his responsibility. I honestly think that the problem here is somebody needs to fund a multi-day symposium with all of the contenders for ways forward to go at it and then actually film it and see what it looks like. rather than just have these people constantly sort of brushing off all of these claimants and string theory will soldier on. I think what we've learned, and I'll close with this, is something kind of horrific, which is a lot of the string theorists wish to die being on the horse that is the best failed horse rather than trying to turn the field over to other people who might succeed doing something else. And so if you want on your tombstone, I was a proponent of the best failed theory of everything that we ever came up with. And I killed the field in order to go out in this particular fashion.

I think that would be very highly accurate. Almost everyone we see who's a diehard string theorist comes from a very particular cohort. It was, in some sense, a fad that lasted way too long, was far too aggressive and was able to simply. badger people to give up on whatever it was they were doing. And I think it needs to be stopped. Well, it's Steelman string theory since Michio's not here. Not for lack of trying, although I didn't invite him today, but I'm certainly happy to have him on with you two and others. And he has been extremely gracious in recording my podcast twice. But I'll steal man. So I said to him, I said, as Lee and I just talked about on a podcast, it will come out probably in the next month or so.

I said, you know, listen, Michio, you know, there's a problem with string theory. You say in your book, you tell me the vacuum equation of state out of the 10 to the 500 vacua, and you'll tell me what the anomalies are and so forth and what the one loop corrections to the Feynman diagrams are. And he said, well, how many equations are there in, how many solutions of Newton's equations are there? I said, infinite number. How many equations, how many solutions of the Maxwell's equations are there? infinite number, I said. And he said, well, and I said, well, but that's, you know, that's really not fair. You're not, in physics, I can observe things and I can determine the boundary conditions. I can specify

initial conditions. And then the problem is uniquely determined. It's not like the vacuum has to be determined from, we have to first select the universe. And I said, that's a huge lacuna in, in string theory, from my perspective. And I said, it's one that say loop quantum gravity doesn't have. And he said, loop quantum gravity is a joke. It doesn't have fermions in it. And how can you even consider it as a candidate for a quantum theory of gravity? It contains no fermions.

And I said, but blu-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l. I said, OK, well, I'll have to let that lie fallow until I talk to my friend Lee Smollin and Carlo Rovelli, et cetera. But I said there are theories like geometric unity has fermions in it. And really, there wasn't really much. of a retort to that, but the comment that I, that I'm really trying to make is that, you know, it shouldn't be on, the burden really shouldn't be on string theorist, I guess is his

perspective. String theory is anomaly free. It has this remarkable ability to, you know, this anomaly cancellation. It has, it has, it's self-consistent. It has made, you know, kind of predictions, as Cameron Vafa said on my show. Okay, they're not super constraining as say the mass of the electron being greater than the plank mass and less than the proton mass, as he said it. I can't remember the exact specification, but he said that was a unique prediction that was unconstrained until string theory made that prediction. So there are predictions. They're not, you know, they're not particularly impressive by, you know, by particle physics standards. So what do you say that these other kind of, I mean, yeah, okay, go ahead.

I'm just tired. We don't have to be talking about. Micho Ococco, and with apologies and do respect to you. Eric, we have to talk about, because Eric has been underheard and underrepresented and under-porentionship. Otherwise, we should be talking to Sabrina Paternik. Do you know who she is? No. She's 27, and she doesn't worry about what string theory was and what Lupine gravity was. she has a new direction and you ought to get her on. Yeah. I love this.

She's done it in Belgium who is also somebody who is 27 or 28 and has a new direction for fundamental physics. And there are lots more, get these people on. And if you have me on, have me on because of what I'm doing now, Yeah. Because 30-something years ago, I helped invent Leuk Chronon Gravity, which has some successes and some failures, but is truly by itself, not the, it doesn't have the ring of truth.

Right. And so, but there is excitement. And look up, look up right now, Sabrina Gonzalez, paternity. Yeah, I'm looking her up, yep. So, can I just say something about what I just? heard. If I heard correctly, you heard Lee Smollin say, I and a bunch of other people founded this field, lu quantum gravity, and by itself, it doesn't have the ring of truth. Something like that. Yeah. I've been saying that for years. Okay, but let me just make the point. How extraordinary is it that Lee can do that?

And nobody says, okay, well, then we have to throw it into the trash can. No, we keep it around. We keep it on a shelf. We know what we know about it. We keep looking at it from time to time. And what he said is by itself, it doesn't carry the day. Now, that is one of the best arguments for loop quantum gravity that I've ever heard. And the argument is loop quantum gravity does not force you to join a cult. It allows you to continue to be a scientist. It allows you to continue to listen to other people. And by the way, I feel the same way about GU. My desire is never to shut up any rival. I don't want string theory shut up.

I want string theorists to stop being so aggressive and trying to shut down everything else. And, you know, they have a weird point. They have a point that a lot of the other claimants to the, you know, potential next leap don't understand some of the issues that they understand best, particularly around renormalizability.

Okay, fine, very well. But tough luck. At some level, at the moment, we've been so long without success, allowing all sorts of diseased, partial ideas, things that, you know, new spins that are incomplete, all of these things should be welcome in a field that's in danger of not being able to renew itself. And I just think that what we heard was what Lee said is the way scientists are supposed to sound. It's not the fact, you know, somebody could easily say so-and-so is a string theorist. He or she has spent their whole life.

It's understandable that, of course, they're not going to change when they're older. Well, Lee is older. He's spent his entire life in research, and he's still a scientist. Right. And I think it's just we have to recognize something very weird happened in string theory in particular. It doesn't look like any other subfield of fundamental part. So I want to talk about, from my perspective, you know, I'm just a humble experimentalist. I've got Sabrina's picture up.

I think it's her. And by the way, she's made in her PhD, which was at Harvard, an actual prediction. Wow. Okay. And she's a pilot. That could be verified by LIGO, of a physical observable that the relative is missed. Wow. And she's mentored by Freeman Dyson, who's a guest on the show.

way back when I first started The Into the Impossible podcast, which reminds me, please do subscribe. I've had nine Nobel laureates, Eric Weinstein several times, Lee Smollin several times, Stefan Alexander, Sabina Hassanfelder, and many, many other great guests and more coming up. I will. You'll be blown away. I absolutely will. And, you know, in cosmology, things are also challenging, right? Because we have a paradigm that is dominated by a single monopolistic entity, namely inflation.

which has stunning successes, but also maybe the analogy is that it can't account for its own initial conditions any better than string theory can account for its initial conditions. And I think physicists struggle with this and conflate the problem of cosmology with cosmogony, you know, the theory of cosmic origins. And it's inevitable that things like this will come up. But Lee, I've made this point to Eric, you know, that theories are cheap and they flourish like software and compared to hardware, it's much harder. You know, how many software companies were started outside of a perimeter, you know,

we're starting Blackberry, you know, how many software companies were started in the greater Toronto area or the California area compared to hardware companies? They're very few in California that are hardware compared to software, which is great. And so it's easier, in some sense, to create wonderful software than hardware. And kind of experiments are like that. And whenever I hear, I've got this great new theory of everything, and my colleagues say, well, we just need to build a bigger collider to test it. I say, well, God gave you these two giant 30 solar mass stars to collide together and black holes to collide together. Isn't that good enough?

You know, at what level do we need to test the fundamentals of physics by always promising it's just beyond the far horizon? And I think physicists, we're not doing ourselves a great service. As Eric points out, we kind of have the best score ever written, and we're the best, you know, we're the worst performers of that score. Something to that effect. Eric, you can quote yourself slightly better than I can. You're the Bob Dylan's of the sciences. Okay. I'm not 100% sure what that means.

But yeah, go ahead. I don't think theory is cheap. And as somebody who has actually tried to make new theories, it's bloody hard. And Eric is another person who has tried over a lifetime to make a new theory. And you'll agree with me. It's really hard to get that. Oh, yeah. Oh, certainly it is.

Bad theories are cheap. Bad theories, yes, exactly. Right. Whereas no one will build, you know, a 37-kilometer, you know, accelerator ring that's bad, you know. And also I think that all experiments are beautifully. I think, you know, whereas, you know, Sabina might have a point about theories being, you know, to lost in beauty and lost in math, but all experiments are beautiful in their own right,

even the ones that are ugly. In other words, we look for symmetry, we look for jackknives that fail, we look for departures that don't make sense. And that's part of our stock and trade as good experimental, is to assay what is nature trying to tell us? And I look back to someone like Isaac Newton. He didn't need a spectrometer, you know, et cetera, to, you know, with an x-ray diffraction, you know, spectrometer to understand waves and so forth in the wave nature of light. He had a prism and he had a darkened room and he had the sun and he understood color synthesis and so forth. And I'm wondering, are there theories whose low energy limit we can test very easily with low cost experiments and maybe with data that you and Stefan and Geron and other people

are looking at with machine learning? Are there, you know, data sets out there that may contain low energy physics that can already be tested without always looking to this bigger, better collider down the street or down the horizon. Yes, and I'll tell you what you have to think about. What you have to think about is when you say the gravitational field goes to flat space time, when you go to infinity, there's actually an infinite number of flat space times that could be gone to. And there is, which are connected, of course, by two morphisms,

And it could be going to a different flat space time in that direction and in that direction and in that direction. And what these young people have been inventing, these new observables that come from giving a kind of non-integrability of what you mean by flat space time when you go out in that direction and in that direction. when they produce and Eric your geometry I think if you look at these you'll understand what's going on and they produce

predictions for LIGO and Bergo and DeL and DeLisa and so forth and that's the very rare thing of theorists thinking hard about their theories

and coming up with new things for cosmologists to look for I think that the last really impressive tabletop sort of surprise might have been, and Lee can correct me, might know the history quite a bit better than I do. The Aeronov-Bome effect in the 1950s was sort of an opportunity to say we don't need a bigger collider, we just need to actually believe in something that makes almost no sense intuitively, and then go look for it and find out that it's true.

And, you know, a little bit more complex than that was the weak force asymmetry experiment with the Cobalt 60. And I worry in some sense that we are both attached to that kind of simplicity in terms of a relationship between theory and experiment. But it's not necessarily applicable. And by the way, the G-minus-2 is, in some sense, a precision experiment rather than a super-high-energy experiment coming off of the ring that was at Brookhaven and moved to Fermilab. So I do think that precision is one way to get around higher energy requirements, but it's a trade-off between precision and energy. And then I also think, I'll be blunt about it, that I don't think I understood the relationship between theory and experiment in a human context. I thought of it as a scientific thing absent humans. I think that in large measure, one of the reasons that experiment really matters

is that a very small number of humans can remain disciplined and honest over long periods of time when nothing much is happening. An experiment is this very rude shot. You don't find many bullshitters in the free solo community in climate. because if you bolt shit against a granite wall, you're kidding yourself. So I do think that in large measure, experiment is sort of like the tide going out. You can see who's wearing swim trunks. When you don't have a lot of great experiments, people can tell a lot of stories.

And I think that that's just something very difficult for us to actually recognize. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point-of-sale system connected by Spectrum fiber-powered business internet, helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based customer support and local technicians. It's only everything. Get business internet advantage free forever when you get four mobile lines from Spectrum. Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to find out how.

Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. And when I look at the history of physics, often it's pointed out that, you know, a good experiment should be a decisive experiment. You know, there's some word for that in Latin. And they point to, you know, the Eddington experiment of starlight bending by the sun, you know, and scientists debate whether or not that was actually technically feasible, even to this day. But nevertheless, it was, of course, verified in the 60s with radar astronomy. But there's a virtue in keeping even wrong theories alive, as Carl Popper said. And Lee, I'd like to talk to you about,

this because we didn't have a chance in our solo episode. But I believe that as the soft sciences have physics envy, and as Freud used to speak about certain kind of envy, I believe physicists have math envy in that mathematicians like our friend Eric have an ability to bound what is knowable and what is not consistent via the girdle incompleteness theorem. But there is no such thing for physics. And therefore, we cobble together. We construe this amalgam of Popper

and Cune and the scientific method. And we say that this is what science is and it's predicated on falsifiability. But even Popper in his writings, Helga Krog and others point this out. He said there's a virtue in keeping even a known wrong theory

around. It has a certain assay value in its own right. What do you think about this infatuation with falsifiability. Is it sacrosanct in physics? So first of all, you left out fall fire oven, who I think is in some sense the antidote to Popper and to Cone. I think we do the best we can.

And for me, and I appreciate very much what Eric was saying, These are communities and my understanding of how science works is as a community. You don't get to be a scientist all by yourself. There is a community that you enter and you enter it by basically establishing that you can make a case for an argument that is worth your colleagues paying attention to. And there's an ethics and there's an ethics, and there's an ethics, of being honest, taking seriously other people's claims and other people's evidence. And where did everybody go?

You're there. Just spotlighting you. So I think that good science is done by people who care about finding out about nature and who have an ethics which allows other people with the same. same training or similar training to evaluate their claims as painful as that sometimes is. And I think you become a scientist by recognizing the paradox that's involved in being part of a community. And the paradox, for me, is you have to push your own ideas and discoveries no one else will. And so you've got to be confident, sometimes arrogant.

And at the same time, you have to be deeply respectful of the community, of other scientists, because it's them who are going to ultimately judge whether your work is a value. And I think being to live on that edge is not easy, speaking for us. It's to me, and I think I'm reinforcing what Eric said. It doesn't work unless the people have the commitment to the truth at whatever it costs. And I know that sounds naive and silly, but that's what I think it is in. Eric, you want to respond? Yeah, so it's an interesting point.

You see that there are two separate ways that we, mathematicians and physicists are divided by what they can check against. Mathematics has internal consistency as its coin of the realm. And so if you can make an argument that your colleagues believe is internally consistent and that can defeat all challengers, we say that you have proven something. And then you can get into a very detailed argument about what constitutes proof because it's not always clear.

In the case of physics, you have this very different way of checking your answers. Effectively, you check them against nature to the best of your experimental friend's ability to conduct something. Now, in an overlap region, you might have something like, let's say, the Feynman Path integral, which can sort of be checked in terms of, let's say, a perturbation series. the first few terms of it can be checked. For once it's not my baby. For once it's not one of my babies. Go ahead and Eric.

I'll take that. There we go. He has become a faday of pop-off ghost. What you're able to do is to ask, did nature agree with the first few terms of a perturbation series? though she did to high order roll that's that's fantastic um but that's very different because you don't have that opportunity often in mathematics to check it against something external so therefore you have this this funny situation with with Feynman where it's not proven mathematics and you could say

that math has physics envy that we wish we knew what nonsensical expressions we could write down that would be meaningful um and the last thing about this which is probably the most important thing is why I'm so terrified by the scientific method people don't understand this at all it's naive scientific method that we should be fearful of and Daraq makes this point perfectly his point if properly understood is that you may have a theory and an instance of the theory so you have a particular concrete version of the equation that embodies an idea, let's say.

And you may have no agreement with experiment because the instance of the theory was not the right instance, but the theory had multiple instantiations and another one can be right. And so this idea of, you know, there's a Feynman video clip from, I think, Cornell, where he says, if your theory doesn't agree with experiment, It's wrong. It's wrong. And it's like, no, it's really unhelpful. Yes, in a technical sense, your instantiated theory is wrong if the experimentalist did his

or her work, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't mean your theory is wrong. It means the instantiation of your theory is wrong. And this issue of wanting to hold up scientific figures holding very simplistic but therefore powerful points of view. Another one is if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it, right? And then, yeah, and they'll put Feynman's name or something on that. And then he'll say, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. Right. So at some level, part of the problem here is that everyone right now is so badly behaved because mom and dad had been

gone for like 50 years and your useless older brother has been, you know, holding a rave in the house for almost, you know, for 40 of those 50 years, everybody is behaving terribly, in my opinion, almost. And as a result, we're having warned about what is science, what isn't science, because we're not doing science. And if we were doing science and we were evaluating each other's theories and proposing experiments and asking, why are we in the situation? We were holding conferences, you know, with terrifying title,

like Wither Theoretical Physics, That would be indicative of the sort of pre-apocalyptic state that this field is in. We're not doing that. And so I fear that in part we're spending our last gasp of energy, pretending that everything is going normally and not recognizing that this is an absolute emergency. You need to have wins in a field in order for the field to know how to work. If at some level you look at orcas or tigers, they teach their children how to hunt. right? And if you don't actually have the ability to hunt, you starve. And this field has lost the

ability to hunt. I want to ask a question of both you guys. And that is whether we could come up, if we have the temerity, to come up with a rubic ourselves. I mean, what stops us from coming up with the scorecard? And Eric and I have talked about this offline on one of the many 10,000 steps Eric has taken to not only get a six-pack, but a 12-pack, which, you know, would invalidate any jabs I would give him. He's so studly. It's really frustrating. Anyway, but I want to ask, let's run this by Lee. What would you expect from a theory of everything? So, pace, Kakoo for a minute, but I would, I would want to know, does it include the three generations of fermions? Eric would surely ask about the origin of chirality.

I would want to ask about antimatter. I would want to ask about does it incorporate the origin of the universe itself? Eric would want to ask about where does the KM matrix come from? Eric, can you think of others? Lee, can you think of others? Would you talk about space time emergent? What would you add to a requirement? You're grading the three of us, admittedly somewhat biased observers.

We're grading. A theory of everything comes across our desk. How do you grade it? What do you include in the scorecard? I don't want to do that. All right. I think it's a unique occurrence. We don't need some formal thing like that to agree. At least I don't, that we're in trouble, that there's an issue to be understood.

And I don't think that kind of thing, with respect, at least I don't want to play that way. I think that when we have something which answers a substantial number of the open questions in a way that's convincing and clearly the best explanation on the table, to quote David Deutsch, we'll know it. And I expect to get surprised. So maybe that's the only thing I'll ask. Yeah, I totally didn't agree with this. Sorry, Eric, what? I totally disagree with my friend Lee here. Okay.

You have a certain number of very stylized features of the world, and you want some answer to all of them, including that's not actually a problem, right? So you want, for example, some, let me take a simple one. Around 1984, we went from talking about unified theories to talking very specifically about quantizing gravity. It was a strange replacement where it was not even clear that you want to quantize gravity. You certainly want to make gravity compatible with quantum theory, but the idea that you want to treat gravity as another field and quantize it

and that you know this and everybody who doesn't know this is wrong and they don't get it is insane. Okay. But so you'd want to pull back and you'd say, okay, I want to know how does your theory attempt to harmonize the coexistence between gravity and quantum theory? And that's, that's, there's nothing wrong with that question. And I think what Lee's fear about is that somebody puts up the wrong set of questions that misguide the field. But if you pull back on all of these, you could say, why do we think that we see three generations?

Why does nature appear to be flavor chiral? Why this assortment of internal quantum numbers? Why the number of 16 particles in the generation? Where did the KM matrix come from? Why does the Higgs sector, which looks geometric at one level, not look familiar from the point of view of differential geometry where every other sector looks exactly like top drawer differential geometry to a mathematician? So you can list, and we used to list, a large number of stylized problems that you could then say, any theory, this theory declines to answer this, this question, this theory refraims this question, this theory gives an answer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I remember, for example, that in the early days of string theory, I was told with certainty that the reason there were three generations of chiral fermions was that there was a six-dimensional manifold called a Kalabi-Yau at every point in space and time, and that its topology carried an index in the index of elliptic operator theory that determined the number of generations to be three. Now that's a very... I always told the same thing. Pardon me?

I always told the same thing. Okay. That's like a very specific claim about why there are three generations. And I think that that should be listed on a matrix. And if it's changed or while we have 27 different ways of generating three generations, or we'll tell you

once you tell us more about the universe, whatever it is, put it down. And I think what Lee is fearful of is we don't want certain people writing down this list so that their theories specifically, you know, it shows off whatever their theory does well. I think I heard Michio say it should agree with general relativity, it should agree with the standard model, and something very specific about like, I don't know, the one loop level, or some calculation of finiteness for gravity to one loop or who knows what and then throwing in something about anomaly free. Now, what you want is you want to say, sure, you should put down anomaly free.

You should put down unitary. You should put down, you know, maybe you want positive energy, whatever it is. But what you should then do is that you should pull back and ask, if we think of these things as technical debt, you may start a project not knowing how you're going to solve something in particular. Just get each theory to take on its technical debt without pretending that if you can actually find something that somebody can't answer to your satisfaction, then they're out. That thing is a string and friends of string theory specialty.

It's just trying to clear the deck out of other people working on different approaches. And those people are allowed to take on the same kind of technical debt that string theory is, and given how many people have worked on string theory. I think what I'm trying to say is we don't have a problem with string theory. We have a problem with the political economy of string theorists. It is not the only absolutist religion in academia. If you go into economics, there's something literally called economic imperialism, where they celebrate the destruction of other fields at the hands of economics, right?

the absolutist triumphalist strain of American academics is the problem, and you find it in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, you find it in classical economics, and you find it in string theory. And the key thing is the field needs to fight back against the totalizing absolutist impulse of the triumphalists. You feel like that, I mean, can that comment extreme danger? I mean, for example, I tweeted out last month when the G-minus-2 anomaly was announced that was there, I just asked an innocent question. I said, was there any concern due to the fact that the storage ring for these muons was the identical unit used to store the muons at Brookhaven?

That came up with a 3.8 sigma detection 22 years ago, or was first built 22 years ago. Brookhaven didn't appreciate my sub-tweeting. and I didn't get any reply from that. There's also that's been pointed out that the Higgs particle has only been really discovered or inferred to exist from a single decay channel, and that was a 5-Sigma result, which is obviously very powerful

and definitive in physics circles, but the fact that the single channel, photon-photon-chatel, for example, we have a plethora of, of black hole and neutron star mergers that have occurred. They all seem to have the same, you know, mass range and spin orientation. Now, that could just be, you know, some sensitivity effect or something that is peculiar to the instrument.

But, you know, I can ask these questions as an outsider. Maybe it's annoying at some level. But, you know, I'm not really in the game. And maybe I'm just doing it to satisfy some. some, you know, speculation. But is there not a great greater risk to do that, you know, when you're a young, you know, postdoc searching for a job when you're... Yeah, go ahead.

It's our job to fight for the young, which is one of the things that I'm very upset about with the older generations. This should not be life and death. Somebody should be figuring out at the beginning. Are you good enough to be doing research? these fields. If you are, it's very important to recognize that you're prohibited from taking part in the economy. There are rules on intellectual property by not commercializing fundamental discoveries and things like that. We should be fighting like hell to ensure that the young

have enough to eat and that they don't have to follow the elderly in order to survive. And I just I want to make very clear that there's no way of solving this with the Hunger Games. If we're going to run the Hunger Games, we should just kiss the field goodbye and stop pretending to do physics. So, Lee, speaking of natural selection, Darwinian competition, I have a question from a listener. Do you see any way for the cosmological natural selection principle to counter the prime mover the necessity of a prime mover? Sure. What's the problem with the necessity of a prime mover?

Well, I guess would you, does the cosmological natural selection that you advocate in the life of the cosmos, does that have any bearing on the necessity of a creator? No. No.

If you care about that kind of question, you can just push it back. I mean, if cosmological natural selection is right, the Big Bang is not the first moment of time. And it's something that happened in a prior, causally prior universe. And there were other causally prior universes because it has to have been going on for some time. And if that bothers you, then you just keep going back. And at some point, if you're the sort of person who wants to know, Was there something that God started?

Then you can ask your question there. I don't, I'm a scientist. I don't think answering that question is part of my job description. I have had intelligent designers on the show. I don't shy away from that. Stephen Meyer, who's a philosopher of science at Cambridge University, PhD. I had him on the show. He has a new book called Return.

of the God hypothesis in which he argues against the notion that structure, that information comes from the, from natural processes. But if the universe pre-existed the Big Bang, it doesn't sound necessarily to be in conflict with that necessarily, although I don't assume that you're an intelligent design proponent. I don't think I've ever talked to Eric about this. Eric, when Stephen Meyer or other proponents of intelligent design say the following, they say, information can always be traced back to a creator of that information. How do you react to that? Well, first of all, you're opening up, let's just be very clear what you're opening up.

The two words, intelligent and design when placed proximate to each other, constitutes a sort of rotating buzzsaw that you can push someone into. What do you think about intelligent design? And in the normal world, you say, oh, I don't know if there's anything to it. Maybe there's something to it. I don't know. But if you say that in science, like, what do you mean? You don't know that it's quackery in pseudoscience?

And so you can't casually ask me about intelligence. If you're actually asking about intelligent design, I'll say something terrifying. Yeah. The religious community of scientists who study intelligent design are split between those who are willing to play by the rules of science and those who are so desperate to get to the answer that it all comes from Jesus or the equivalent, that they're willing to cut any corners to make sure that the Bible is validated. They're not really scientists. They're quads. Okay. Now, the thing we don't appreciate is how important the religious scientists are because of the hunger games.

because people who are religiously motivated will take on issues that will sort of be tantamount to career destruction if they feel that the science is wrong. And I think you can make an excellent argument that the field of evolution, technically the theory of selection, tried to close the door on selection in certain ways, to say we have a theory, it got finalized, some maybe sometime in the early 70s more or less, and then use the claim that no one who's ever published in intelligent design has ever passed peer review. So it's a very efficient way of getting God out of the sciences to say that effectively

the Neo-Darwinian hypothesis is settled and that random mutation is the major engine of selection. And it's great that we have religious scientists who are willing to question that at great cost to themselves. The only difference is do they agree to play by the rules of science in their motivated search to find a problem with the science? Or do they believe that they are entitled to play by different rules because they have the truth and they can feel it in their bosom?

And so I'm pretty thankful that religiously motivated true scientists exist in part because of the economics. They are maybe the last people who will turn out the light if we continue to destroy ourselves through starving the young for security and any kind of feeling that they can survive to live another day if they follow their own ideas. Okay, may I just say something simple?

Of course. Eric, I appreciate that, but that's too sophisticated for me. There are mysteries in the world, consciousness, the meaning of life, the meaning of the universe, the beginning of the origin of the universe. I think that we who have a, what some people would call a scientific worldview, which is not all scientists, but a worldview in which, there is not a spirit or a God which does things which set the universe into motion. So we're investigating a different kind of hypothesis. And I think we should be upfront that the religious, deist hypothesis fulfills some things for many people, explains to them something about the meaning of life

and what's important about life. When we say, and I'm speaking to myself, we're not interested in that hypothesis. We fail to make up. That is, we leave a gap in the emotional, spiritual lives of many people that we don't address by just simply saying, for example, with Steve Weinberg,

that the more we understand about the universe, the more pointless it seems to be. And I think that we, who are not dear, have a responsibility to explain to our fellow human beings what we believe and what we have in mind for addressing those issues that religions did address or do address. And if we don't at least acknowledge that, we lose credibility. Because that's, I think that's really the situation. Now, there's been a long, there are, so I think it's important that people, I like very much the word of good faith, people of good faith, who have different views about spiritual religious problems and science in relation to

communicate with each other. Those people who have integrity and recognize the issues, I think it's interesting and important for us to communicate in that domain, and not pretend that it doesn't exist, and not pretend that the people on the other side are insufficient or dumb or something. And I personally met enough rabbis and Roman Catholic priests and Episcopal priests of various kinds who had profoundly interesting things to discuss. And they didn't challenge science in silly, stupid ways. and I accepted their authority and their domain, not over me, but what their studies meant. So I am not with Richard Dawkins. I don't think that we should disdain contact with religious people, especially thoughtful, accomplished, intelligent religious people.

And I think it's very important for the future of our civilization. Now, me myself, I don't know that I've ever said this publicly before. I was raised, I'm Jewish, but I was raised by parents who followed a certain practice called the Gurji-4. And I'm certainly not part of them now. But my religious spiritual background is very different than most people. And occasionally that comes out and things I say. But that's a, I don't want to hijack your program. What was that, what was that sub, was it the bird, what was it again?

GERG. I'll send it to you. He was a, he was a Russian Armenian who traveled in the East and studied Eastern practices and made a version of it that was stripped. of the historical and storytelling attributes for training to people in the West. Interesting. Yeah, I had on, well, Mitch O'Cocca, obviously, and he concludes his book, The God Equation with the five words that Stephen Hawking concluded a brief history of time with, which is if we get a theory of everything, then we could know the mind of God.

And in his book, he talks about his own upbringing, born to Buddhist parents, but raised Presbyterian, and then believing in what is, he calls Einstein's God, which is really Spinoza's God. It gets very complicated, but I'm speaking as a Jewish person who was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. So I really can't, you know, speak about complexities when it comes to religion. But I do want to say that I think Stephen Hawking was a very deeply religious person. It's just that he didn't, he wasn't practicing. And the Hebrew language, the word Israel means to wrestle or struggle with God. and Hawking constantly struggles with God in all of his writing, all of his books.

He's always making arguments against God and the necessity of God via M theory and the grand design, via the Hawking Hardle, No Boundary Theory. And actually, Lee, I've never heard you speak about the No Boundary Theory. In a brief history, he talks about it as if it's sort of accepted physics. Was that influential at all in your career? I mean, do physicists use the Hawking Hardle theory at any extent nowadays? in cosmology? I'm going to really get in trouble.

That's why I turned down a job offer from Steven. No way. Oh, wait, you can't leave that hanging. That's too big of answer. I am going to end what I have to say with a quote by St. Clair Semen, who is, I think I mentioned, is a great Brazilian sculptor. And once I was being interviewed by the BBC,

and I was fairly frustrated and felt that I and then I went to a party and I ran into St. Clair and I expressed that. And he said, look, I don't understand what your trouble is. Your book, this is the life of the cosmos, has a very simple message. And I said, okay, St. Clair, what's the message of that book? He says, the message of the book is that the universe is so splendorous and complex and beautiful that even the absence of God would be God is not.

That's right. Lee Wazel said a person can be angry at God, can be happy with God, but not without God. Eric, any final words from you before we wrap up this delightful stream? And Patchen, Omichio Kaku is calling. No, I'm just kidding. He's not calling. But that would be fun, wouldn't it? Any final words from you, Eric?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that we make a huge mistake. We're in the God business. That's why people care about theoretical physics. And what's fascinating here, of course, is that, you know, this stuff is written in the language of differential geometry and quantum field theory. And we don't have people who want to read, I don't know, Syriac or, you know, ancient Hebrew or whatever it is that, you know, the ruins are written in. Now, what I find amazing is that we have these programs. And I always hope that we're going to end up talking about like the nuts and bolts of what we've come to understand about the universe.

And instead we sort of talk about what we've come to understand about the universe. We've turned physics very much, I think, narcissistically into a story about us. And it may be that humans can't stop talking about God and they can't stop talking about themselves because mostly these things are divorced from both contexts. But I think when you're actually in a situation in which you're talking about, well, what is this place? What is creation? What is the strange world in which we find ourselves? I think it doesn't do us any service to back out of the fact that we're trying to change the nature of the gaps in which gods of the gaps have traditionally lived. And I think that that's, you don't have to call it God.

You can simply say, I want to have a richer understanding of the place and the context in which I live in it, and the stuff of which I am comprised. And so what we don't want is we don't want pseudoscience. What we don't want is we don't want sort of storytelling and madness given how much is on the line. And, you know, I say this thing I said in passing to Joe Rogan, which is after the events of 1952 and 53, we are now gods but for the wisdom. I think that we have to recognize that when you can create a fusion event on the surface of the earth, you break it, you bought it. We are now, if we don't actually take on the responsibilities of who we have become in, in, in, you. in particular due to theoretical physics,

even if you want to say it's biological, look who founded molecular biology, it was theoretical physics again. So you have this very dangerous situation in which we are unlocking what life is, Schrodinger famously writing, what is life? Mathematician physicist John von Neumann

talking to us about the informational content of life. We are talking about the informational content of black holes, we're creating fusion on the surface of the earth, We're sending radio waves. We are also in a situation whereby our federal government is now going to stir things up talking about UFOs as real, which is going to have a hugely religious component. They've changed the federal government.

This is interesting. You haven't heard this? Our Defense Department in the U.S., well, you're Canadian. It hasn't gotten it yet. Oh, I'll send you a lot if you're gone. I know. Our Defense Department has gotten into a situation whereby we are supposed to have revelations about UFO research presented, I think, by the 1st of June. We've had former CIA directors, sitting senators, and the Defense Department saying that UFO footage is real and that these are frequent events.

I've never heard anything remotely this crazy. And one of the things, the fact that I'm just going to bring up, if Lee Smollin doesn't know that there's been a huge sea change in UFOs, it's a cinch that whoever it is that's running the UFO show is not reaching out to the physics and math communities, which would be the first two communities that you would want involved at the high level. Now, the kind of is this pandemic, but let me remember Hillary Clinton, who I once, from my amazement,

heard say that one reason to vote for her for president was that if she was president, she would make public the secrets about UFOs. Well, what I would say about this is there are very few really deep mysteries. I don't even know how to say it. Where we are going with this UFO narrative is going to get into religious questions if, no matter what they turn over, no matter what they turn over by this point. And it's very important that the math and physics communities stop avoiding these questions to celebrate their atheism yet again.

Instead, what we need to do is we need to say, look, this comes out of the impulse to understand the world, just as religion came out of the impulse to make sense out of the chaos. And we are going to have to stop with the overlap with the non-overlapping magisteria, because these things are going to start to impinge on each other. And I do think what we should do is take the religious impulse

and channel it into productive, rational, scientific behavior. You want to know, you want to be in contact, a dialogue with something larger than yourself. The way to do it is through data, responsible theorizing, and not fearing your own longing for the transcendent. Okay, I got to tell a story, and then I'm out of here. Okay.

With great respect for you guys. I was once on a radio show run by Canadian broadcasting about what we should say to the aliens when they land in Toronto and how we should converse with them. And I prepared for this by reading Homer and by reading a little book that I found in a bookstore called Amy greets the aliens. I'm not kidding.

And so when it was my turn on the radio show, which was filmed at York University, I said the most important thing, and I think that we should think about this, is hospitality. I said, as we learn from the Greeks, when somebody arrives from far, far away, you make them a feast, you give them a bath,

they're tired, they're dirty, they're hungry, and only on the third night you get to ask them, how their spaceship works or where they come from. When Amy and Greece the aliens had the same message, give them Kool-Aid before you ask them if you can go with them, wherever they're going. And I'm trying to maintain the right sense of, and I'm reacting a little bit because I haven't heard of this.

Of course, like so many of us, we grew up from little boys and girls who thought about running away with the alien. And I think we should, I think that if that's real, we should remember Homer, we should remember Amy. And long before we ask them how the spaceship works, we should ask them what they come here to tell us. But I... What speaking? Oh, go ahead. Sorry about this, Brian.

I think that the most important thing of Lee is going to do this is we need to remember the lesson of Captain Cook, that when Captain Cook, that when Captain Cook showed up in the Hawaiian Islands, he was treated as a god because they had a myth about a white god descending. They treated him to the feast that Lee talks about.

They treated him beautifully. Unfortunately, that meant that when he went to set sail, his people long for the good old days of going back to the feast. So when God came back a second time too quickly after having taken all of the best pigs or fruits or whatever,

they killed him. And so I always thought that was really interesting, that it only took one meeting to get over the whole reverence for God thing before you get to the point of what this guy's here again. So we need to remember all of these tales and greatly enjoyed speaking. That's right. When people say, oh, I'll believe in God when I hear, you know, as Woody Allen said, the divine sneeze, that's all I want. Speaking of aliens, I'm having on Andy Weir, author of The Martian on Tomorrow on The Into the Impossible podcast, followed by Stephen Pinker,

Stephen Strogett's and many other luminaries coming up. We have on the, great. I'm hoping to have Gerard Huft coming soon and many other luminaries in the world of physics, mathematics, philosophy, and many other things. But I greatly appreciate you two, a gentleman joining me today. Lee, your episode will be out. We recorded earlier this morning. Eric, you're always welcome on the Into the Impossible podcast. Propriotter of the portal, please subscribe over there. And Lee, have a wonderful day. We'll have links to all your papers that are coming up, Lee has three spectacular new papers that are out on the archive. Everybody, enjoy, and see you next time on the Into the Impossible podcast with yours truly, Dr. Brian Keating.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hello, I'm Stuart Volko, producer of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Keating, please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, rating and leaving reviews. It really helps keep our universe expanding. We appreciate hearing from you and read every review and comment. We're always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating,

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