Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein: Theories of Everything, Geometric Unity & Science’s Paths. Into the Impossible (#048)

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

   Part 1 of Brian Keating’s fascinating interview with mathematician & economist Eric Weinstein on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. Topics include Eric’s provocative new ideas on physics and science culture. Weinstein is a vocal critic of modern academic hierarchies and advocates for advances in scientific theory over an emphasis on experimental results. Keating’s own issues with what he calls the “academic Hunger Games” leads to a lively debate about funding, academic freedom, and theoretical vs experimental physics. Find show notes and resources are available here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 00:11:09 Is there middle ground between cranks and peer review? 00:20:23 The value of Weinstein’s approach to communicating science. 00:30:50 The ethics of attribution. 00:41:26 Surviving the academic Hunger Games. 00:54:24 Theoretical physicists can save human life by getting us off Earth. 01:11:52 “Great science is whatever people have done to make major advances.” 01:22:00 Experiments are only the last step, theory is the bulk of science. 01:29:15 The logic behind questioning accepted theories on April Fool’s Day. Eric Weinstein has a Ph.D. from Harvard in mathematical physics. He is the managing director of Thiel Capital. Weinstein hosts the podcast The Portal  Find Eric Weinstein on the web: https://ericweinstein.org and Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein Watch Weinstein’s “April Fool’s” episode of The Portal, where he explains his theory of Geometric Unity Watch Weinstein’s latest interview on The Joe Rogan Experience  ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes  ‍♂️ Find Brian Keating on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A friend, a sort of superhero in some sense, although I'm going to try to challenge you on a couple of things in your theories and in your politics and so forth today. I hope we'll have a wide-ranging conversation. But Eric Weinstein, pleasure to welcome you on to The Into the Impossible podcast. Brian, it's a total pleasure to be here, and I appreciate your strategy of build them up first

for an initial dopamine hit and then tear them. down later during the remainder of the podcast. That's right. Well, I always say, you know, I got that from your mother. And if you want, I can get it from your mother-in-law, how to introduce you. But either way, I think you're in good shape. So I had on my podcast a couple of weeks ago now, a certain mathematician, and that mathematician generated some controversy, as they would say in his homeland. And I want to just say that the mathematician's last name begins with a W.

I won't say who it is, but I want you to sort of opine on this and let me know your feelings how you would react to it if the W stood for, let's just say Weinstein. So it said, Mathematician W, it has been said about his theory, is that it's not clear what his goals are. He says he wants the intention and feedback of the physics community, but his unconventional approach soliciting public comments on exceedingly long results from perhaps long ago almost endures and shall it remain obscure. Mathematician W. says he wants physicists respect. The ones consulted said gaining it would require him to recognize and engage with the prior work of others

in the scientific community. So this is not written about Weinstein, just spoiler alert. It's written about somebody else. Another person I have great respect for. But I'm curious. Who is not a mathematician? Who is not a mathematician? Right. Yeah. So what do you? you think about this? Is this something that you can abide by? What's your feeling on those sort of sentiment expressed by the author in this quote? Well, this is a very difficult question and a very interesting one. What I've been opining on recently is that we have two communities that are behaving very strangely. And one community is central to the institutional world of science. The other is outside of that world.

Now, traditionally, in very difficult fields like physics, we assume that people who are working outside of an institutional framework are cranks. And there are reasons that that has been a good general bet. I think that you'd have to say that it has almost always been correct, at least with respect to fundamental physics. But we've developed a new problem, which is you'd like to say that many of the core research programs currently, let's say at the heart of theoretical physics, are fringe. But how can you call something fringe if it's at the center of respectability? Because fringe means two things. One, it means peripheral, which these things cannot be because they lie at the heart of our institutional science and our institutional sense making. but wacky, yes, they are.

So when you have a wacky center and you have a wacky fringe, you need different language. And so I've come up with the term Knark or the wacky center, which is crank spelled backwards. So right now, the problem that you have is you have a very difficult situation.

The language is too impoverished to capture what is going on. Most of the people who are wacky at the center of theory, critical physics are competent. That is, if the field suddenly knew what it was doing again, and when I say theoretical physics, there's just one stupid gotcha we have to get through.

I mean fundamental physics. I mean the kind of physics that you go to bookstores, to read about, to fill your soul with wonder. Right, and that's a topic of this latest physicist who starts with the W is project. I mean, Stephen Wolfe. Correct. Figured it out.

Skidush. So the situation is that I think that if the Institute for Advanced Study were to get their hands on the next great thing, they would instantly go back to being regular style physicists. And I'm not positive that most of the crank community would do that. In some sense, what's gone on in the center is that you have physicists who are like generals who haven't fought a war in forever, but have been playing war games. increasingly come to believe that the war games that they're playing is actually the business of being general, you know, or a soldier or sergeant. And in fact, what they've been doing is playing with toy theories that don't seem to really be attempting to do what they're supposed to be doing. So nobody knows what to do with this circumstance. And having the old war about

whether or not it is better to be respectable and incremental versus, you can, you know, wild wiggie out there and to take the hit to one's reputation, that seems like a very poor choice of activities in which to spend our energy. We have a real problem, which is that since the 1970s, we haven't had theory-led breakthroughs in fundamental physics that would take anyone to Stockholm as a crude measure. I would talk about the worth of the Nobel Prize, but it's not distracted, just as a group.

Yeah, although. Nobody knows what to do the fact that we're coming up on 50 years of being lost in the wilderness in some sense. And some people choose to deny it. They say supersymmetry, guts and strings, M theory, quantum gravity are all promising. One should just calibrate one's expectations. Other people are saying, what the hell are you talking about? We've never been in a situation that's dire. I do want to push back.

just slightly on that, Eric, because I did consult with a friend who is a colleague here at UCSD for just a partial list. This was done in response to Peter White, who I know as a friend of yours and Sabine Hassanthelder. Their kind of claims, again, similar to what you're saying in the lack of the dearth of progress in the last, you know, let's call it four decades. And here's an incomplete list that I got back when I asked, you know, what are some of the theoretical-led, driven fundamental physics breakthroughs? Here's a list. incomplete list, thermodynamics of information, quantum computing, inflation, conformal field theory in two dimensions, conformal field theory in greater than two dimensions, modern effective

field theory, heavy quarks, binary black holes, superconductivity, and then the cosmology. Again, we can sort of debate. I don't even think these are the most impressive things necessarily. I would have that the, you know, Quillen's theory of the determinant line bundle and the Quillen connection, geometric quantization, the rigorous founding of quantum field theory around issues of enhanced boredism. No, I didn't think that was a good list. So it's not, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm not trying to make this stupid kill shot here against the community. I'm trying that the community is fundamentally dishonest. It's a dishonest community now. It lies,

about its achievements, it lies about its failures. So I think that what I'm doing is I'm giving it its due. I'm saying that I don't think guts are dead, grand unified theories. I don't even think supersymmetry is dead. I think that the field doesn't know how to explain itself. The field doesn't know how to defend itself. It lashes out at anybody who dares to contradict the official narrative. And it's enough. I mean, we're just all sick to death of listening to David Gross and Ed Witten, tell us what's what, because we don't believe them. Well, I think there's this, you know, and you've spoken about this, you have, you know, sort of a Nobel-worthy level of pithy three-letter acronyms, some even more famous than others.

But one of them that I do cotton to is this idea of the gated institutional narrative. And I saw this on display, and, you know, again, we can edit out anything you don't like. But, you know, there were people that as soon as you posted your, I think, you know, it was maybe provocative to post it on April Fool's Day, but nevertheless it was reacted to with great almost vitriol bordering, at least in some corners of the internet on almost like ad hominem level attacks. And I experienced the same thing when I interviewed Stephen Wolfram. And I ask people, you know, do you not think these folks deserve a voice? I mean, you cannot claim that Stephen is not a brilliant mind. You may think he is arrogant or that he, you know, tends to be self-promotional, et cetera, et cetera. And even people were criticizing me for not asking him about his employee relations.

And I said, look, I'm not 60 minutes. I'm going to interview him. I'm going to be respectful, as I always am. I'm going to hear both sides. And if you don't like it, you know, I'll give you your money back on the Internet for the subscription costs. But I feel, I want to know. And again, we don't have to talk about it. anything you don't feel like talking about. But I feel like this narrative that is being proposed

is sort of part of this. Like the first reaction, which I think is a sign of sloppy thinking, is I'll believe it when it's published. Now, I've heard people say that about the most extravagantly, you know, hyperbolic claims. I've heard people say that about ordinary claims. And it's sort of become a canard, a shibboleth. And I wonder how you feel about that. I mean, after all, we're treating peer review as if, A, it's sacrosanct handed down from, you know, God or Muhammad on the mountain. Or, if you like, that it's been around in science as a useful vehicle. Of course, it has utility and it can't have utility. But what do you make of the veneration of peer review, which, as Stephen Wilfrum has said in connection to this, he said, I think it's corrupt.

I think the traditional route is a giant story of somewhat corrupt gaming. I think it's some sort of inevitable that happens with these very large systems. It's a pity. And I point out, you know, there wasn't peer review for Galileo. There wasn't peer review for much of Newton. It wasn't peer review for Watson and Crick in 1953. That's right. But now I also get a similar level of, you know, criticism for people who do say legitimately,

well, you get a lot of emails from true cranks and true people that are seeking hyperbolic attention. So how do you manage the gated narrative with having some value? I always say the hardest thing is for somebody to strike a middle ground, not to be polarized. That's easy to be polarized. It's bogus. If it's not peer reviewed, it's corrupt if it is. How do you strike a middle ground? Is there a value in the middle ground?

That's a lot. And these are important questions. If you really want to dig into it, I'd be gained. Yeah, please do. All right. So first of all, Stephen Wolfram is breaking the rules. And there's suspicion that he's breaking the rules because he doesn't have a theory everything and he's advertising it as if he does.

Yeah. Using PR and he's using the weight of his name, in part to make a splash. And a lot of people who feel that that is wrong to do, particularly as an individual, take exception to that. And one can easily understand why they would take exception to that, because it's an end run around some kind of quality people. Okay, so that is probably true. The other thing is that it complicates the life.

of a working physicist to hear constantly, you know, my friends, has an uncle whose best friend thinks he solved the theory of everything and he has a perpetual motion machine to prove it. Like, will you come out to his house in Peoria and check it out? Nobody wants to lead a life like that. And I think that that's entirely understandable.

So I think we have to sort of, first of all, just demonstrate that we're not confused about why people would have this in a working world. Wouldn't it be great to have a nifty little shibboleth and discount everything that came in? So if all the cranks used red crayon on napkins, and that's how they submit everything, then you have an idea of who's a whack job

and who's actually... All right. Now you have a different problem, which is that you've got whack jobs inside of the leading institutions. who have been part of whack job programs. And the whack job programs have whack job journalists inside of the whack job leading papers. So if I open up the Science Times for years, there were these breathless stories

about how M theory was going to give me better toast, clean my fingernails, and give me the theory of everything in short order. What happened to that? Well, those are institutional canarks. And the problem is that the canarks really dislike the cranks. And the cranks are,

trying to avoid the Knarfs. Now, first of all, you should know that I am not aware of the vitriol that you're talking about from the professional community aimed at me. I'm aware of it towards Stephen Wolfram. And I have been told that there are certain Reddits that got shut down, very personal, very unpleasant. And first of all, you have to remember

that the field has a lot to be embarrassed about. I published essays in Edge.org. critical of the string M theory program, particularly some of the nastiest things they have ever I mean, it's just so bad it is funny. One of the things I forget whether David, whether Joe Polchinsky maybe was credited with this, but there was the claim that if anybody comes up with anything that isn't string theory will just incorporate it into the string theory program and say it is. So it's like, oh, wow, is that how the locals play?

Great to know. you know, there's this sort of, when nobody's got a theory of quantum gravity, you have loop quantum gravity and string theory buying to be the leading non-theory of non-quantum gravity because neither of them seem to work. Yep. All of this leads to complete disarray. And of course, all that people have to fight over is prestige that's left over, you know, from the feast that was served by Dirac and Einstein and company. Feynman, and now their descendants are chewing over the bones that were thrown in the scrap heat, and it's pretty slim pickets. So, of course, people are going to be nasty. I think that you have to expect that they're going to be nasty. And I think that you also have to be sympathetic,

which is that if you're slaving away on a tiny fragment of a long ago abandoned program, because that's what you did your dissertation and then you happen to have an office somewhere in the .edu ecosystem, you're pretty pissed off that a guy. guy like Stephen Wolffroom who might be, you know, I don't know, pulling around flying private, you know, is hiring his own armada with the PR agent and creating a splash. So I think it's, I think envy, the invidious nature of this, the palpable sense of failure, the sense that he doesn't really have a theory of everything, et cetera, this animates

people and it should animate people. And there are sensible questions. Like, why is it that people who come from outside the people? community only work on the theory of everything. Why don't they work on adding a couple of extra digits of precision to some QCD calculation? Right. Or, you know, revisiting or trying to prove Altman was wrong.

Whatever. I mean, you know. It's always Einstein was wrong. And here's why. I always feel like it's, you know, it's like Dungeons and Dragons. I think they're going to get, you know, Einstein sort of. It's so funny. Because like the one thing that I really never want to do is I never want to damage Einstein.

I feel like we're so blessed that he can. came through this way, like the idea of trying to go after them because you want to. Teams really perverse. So let's get into, you know, your approach to. I want to make sure that we settle that because people are going to focus on this segment if they focus on this at all. I've built a fairly large platform from talking about things other than physics predominant. And I'm not a physicist.

You know, people always say physicist, Derek Weinstein, and I almost always correct them. to be really quite good about saying, hey, I'm not part of your professional game. I'm not taking your professional resources. I'm not dirty, pristine archive, Hep-H-P-T-H pre-print server. And they're still pissed off. They're still angry, and they're angry because of hubris. it takes a ridiculous sense of self-possession and delusion to think that you're going to make progress in a field

that is probably the hardest field of human endeavor that's been stuck for the longest time on the hardest problem. So I'm weirdly sympathetic to these momsers. I don't know what you want to call them. They're not very pleasant people. I wish that they would, you know, I don't know, weed is legal. They should probably smoke a joint, chill out, and actually think about whether this really represents where they want to be in their lives, shouting at people after such a

dearth of results for decades upon decade. Well, you know, my tagline is always, you know, I love astronomy, I love physics, because it's not like in astronomy, there's a Republican constellation over there, and there's a Democratic comment over there. It should be like a political free zone and not necessarily a safe space where, you know, ideas can't be challenged. And, you know, part of what I respect about people like you, like Wolfram, is that you're willing to come on. I'm not a push over to just accept everything that he or you would have to say. And yet, I feel like it's extremely valuable. And I'm not just saying, I would say this about anybody who's, of course, you have to get over some gate to use the Weinsteinian expression. But at the same time,

because there's only so much time in the day, let's be honest. I only have so much time to do the actual work I get paid to do by the state of California and also explore other things and do other projects. I think A, there is a jealousy. There is a sense of jealousy. But B, I do think there is validity to people that say, look, these people are bypassing our traditional time-tested modalities of going at and attacking scientific nature.

And then this guy who's very eloquent and very deep goes on Joe Rogan, and he just blasts away and he'll get more attention than the exponent of my H-index. and I think that there is a balance there. I would love to take issue with that if you don't mind. Yeah, let's go for it. The H Index, by the way, originates here at UCSD by my colleague Jorge Hirsch, and I tease him about that

because his highest cited paper is actually about the H Index. And I hope to have him on the podcast that sometimes talk about attribution and credit. First of all, one of the things that's interesting about the H Index, if you think about it, maybe you could apply it to Kurt Gertl or somebody who published almost nothing. Right, yeah, exactly. Right.

And so I partially have an aspiration, if I'm going to have any impact on physics whatsoever, God willing. I would love to do it with like an H index of zero or undefined in order to destroy the H index because it's a proxy. And people get very carried away with showing you how much hard work they've done in a cargo cult that in general is nonproductive. So it's a pretty bad proxy when it becomes circular. With respect to Joe Rogan, first of all, your community has a huge problem. I can't tell you how bored most of us are hearing about the multiverse or many world or entanglement. We're going to talk about all of those, by the way, but go on. Double slit experiment.

It's not that they're not interesting. It's not that they're not fascinating. It's not that they're not confusing and perplexing and deep and all these things. But we've heard it 12,000 times before. And whether Sean Carroll has a new wrinkle on. on the multiverse or not is irrelevant. Part of the problem is that you guys haven't even pushed out the DRock equation. People don't really know who DRock is.

They don't really know how to spell the word spinner. They don't understand the hop vibration can be visualized. So with all due respect to the community, you've failed. You guys are just, you're terrible. And when I don't think there's something sexy. Actually, I want to take. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, go on, go on.

When I go on Joe Rogan and I push out the hop vibration, even if I don't explain it, if I just show people, here is a principal fiber bundle. This is the kind of object on which gauge theories take place. I've got artists all over the world trying to depict the basic structure so that people can see. Rather than Lawrence Krauss going on Joe Rogan and giving some analogy that is supposed to be about what gauge theory is, I'm trying to go on Joe Rogan and say, look, you know, the Penrose stairs, Escher staircases? What if that is actually the depiction of horizontal subspaces defining a connection in some sense, and what you're looking at is holonom? I'm starting to get the right words into the hands of dangerous children of the Internet

who may not have access to Princeton, Stanford, or Harvard, or MIT, or Oxford, or Cambridge. Yeah. No, I think that is valuable. So, okay, but like with a little bit of self-righteous self-testification, match me. Instead of coming on and one more time telling me the same sort of mind-numbing stuff about the article seems to go through both. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event.

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Can you please just explain this thing properly? Just get to the point where you're talking about you know, her mission operators and eigenvectors and eigenvalues rather than all this mumbo-jumbo-jumbo speak. And if you don't mind, yes, I'm going to show them pictures that they've never seen before that you should have been showing them.

And so the fact that you didn't do your job, don't come after me, blaming me. Join me, beat me. Yeah, I think that that's some of the most valuable service. I know it's not necessarily intentional. Maybe it is. I mean, knowing you, it could be intentional. That controversy sheds sometimes too much heat,

but it does bring light to these obscure topics. And other guests that I've had on, and, you know, Joe always takes, you know, the best of my guess. So he's, you know, I've had on Sean Carroll. I've had on, you know, Stephen Wolfer and I've had on Roger Penrose, and I know you've had on him as well. And he's another person. And it's like, you know, what do you have to say about him? Of course, he doesn't go on Joe Rogan for a Tad of the guy's 82 or something years old. He's not going there to bolster his social, you know, his social hits. He's going on there because he's passionately curious about

extrapolating from the ivory tower where we both inhabit, although I believe less so in the case of an experimentalist, and I do want to get to that. But he's, you know, bringing to mind the same concept, Escher's, you know, infinite hyperbolic space projection, things that, yeah, what if there is some young kid who, instead of being, who, let's just say she can have the choice, she can look at the double-slit experiment. That's wonderful. But yeah, what about looking at projective, you know, spaces? What about these conformal transformations? I think there is, and that he was the first science writer that I ever read popular science writer as a 17 or 18 year old. I didn't understand much of what he was saying. And if there was a Joe Rogan back then, maybe it would have

turned me on even more. And maybe I would have, you know, had a better career as a theorist, although I doubt it. Maybe, but, you know, I guess what my take is going to be is that if I'm talking about the Wu Yang Dictionary, and most physicists don't even think about the Wu Yang dictionary, and these are the pivotal moments in your life, you know, I'm not taking a ton of flack for saying wrong things. Sometimes people say, well, that wasn't a complete explanation. Well, no kidding. You know, my last one went out to, I think it's now at 6.1 million people. I mean, even for Joe Rogan, that's pretty large.

Yeah. I think it is. Principal bundles out at scale so that I'm accosted in airports. What with people saying, I didn't understand there's a, there's a U1 vibration and an SU vibration. You're damn straight. I'm doing your PR for you. You guys can't even figure out how to get enough dollars into your field to keep you guys solvent and despite the fact that I'm a huge critic of how you guys run your shop you don't mind

I'm going to try to get you some funding some visibility and I'd appreciate it to shut up yeah I think there is a lot of validity to that Eric I feel the same way about Wolfram and it would be interesting to get your have Wolfram on your show at some point because I think you know these or maybe I could host both of you at the same time because I think there is a value and and I see a parallel between what he does in what you do and in your life's mission, at least in the Geometric Unity Project. And it comes down to kind of this classic description of what, you know, I think Einstein or somebody else used to say is like wood and marble, you know, the kind of operational, quantized, you know, computational world of physics and the pure geometric, you know, irreducible fundamental

side of physics. The wood and marble, the wood is the stress energy tensor. Yes. But I would say actually it's steel, because it should be man-made or human-made. or human made, right? It shouldn't be, I mean, wood is naturally occurring and marble is naturally I don't speak German. The original quote is in German and I think it's cheap wood and sometimes it's even translated as balsa. Holtz, I think HALTS. My concern is that the real problem, of course, is in the marble. I assume that the problem is in the wood. Yeah. So let's turn to that now. Just today I heard

a wonderful, read a wonderful piece, not that I agree with it necessarily, but in Quantum Magazine, which is doing wonderful kind of popularization of very complex mathematical and technical, you know, cosmological, et cetera, the hottest topic sort of in the field and has great writers to boot. And there's a piece today that says what goes on inside of a proton. The quark math is still in conflict with experiments. And they go through and they show, you know, these beautiful animations of quark gluon plasma. And they talk about this million dollar math prize awaits anyone who can solve this type of equation used in QCD to show how massive entities like protons form. And I'm thinking like what

percentage of people are going to understand it, even in the physics community, as you point out, I'm a physicist. Or in the map community. We're in the math. We're talking about the mass gap, right? Luckily for me, I had Robert Brandenberger and Jerry Goralnik as, you know, cosmology and group theory teachers. And I learned a great deal from them and from my colleague, Stefan Alexander, I mean, your mutual friend, who is incredibly creative and productive. Otherwise, I wouldn't have learned about it. I mean, I can go, I went basically my whole education without being required to learn about group theory.

And arguably, does it come into play when I'm building a microwave radiometer for use at 17,000 feet above sea level? No, it doesn't. But on the same time, it's the reason I got into physics in the first place. Yeah. And so what I want to kind of just toss around with you is on the experimental side. Because I think we see things, you know, hammer theory. We see everything like it's our own personal hammer.

You're obviously coming mathematically. But it gives you great visibility into, you know, I always say like, if I go like this, you know I have a problem, but I don't know I have a problem. I'm covering my eye for people that are listening on the audio version of the podcast. And I think getting a perspective from outside, there are things that really hit a nerve. When we talk about things, especially things that may be untestable. And for example, the multiverse. I personally have a lot of issues with the multiverse, and I know people celebrate.

I actually ask Sean Carroll. In this branch, you have a lot of issues. Yeah, exactly, right. I asked Sean Carroll, you know, what would you say is the, you know, is the likelihood that the multiverse is true? And he said 50 percent. And I asked him, well, what's the likelihood that God is true? He said less than 1%. He wouldn't say zero.

He's certainly, you know, very, very knowledgeable about how to ascribe his priors. But on the other hand, I think, yes, when you get into the, these descriptions. Of course it's not, and I don't want to go through geometric unity, except to ask you if we can post the PowerPoint in the show notes that you showed after your April Fool's Day podcast. Because I do think, you know, people are leaping and saying, well, you know, in 2013, you promise there was an archive paper coming and, you know, I look for it. I don't see it. But would it be possible to post the PowerPoint that you use just for the people, because I don't want to go through it. You've gone through it with Joe. You've gone through with Lex Friedman.

But first of all, I mean, you can screenshot the PowerPoint. I can probably come up with the PowerPoint. I get very enervated by this talk. Community is really badly behaved. And my feeling is that you don't really, I don't think you really care that much about the PowerPoint. Most people in the community who have this kind of like paper or didn't happen, this kind of attitude,

this is shorthand for please, just say Lagrangian so we can go through it and invalidate. you know. That's really the energy. The gated institutional of Lagrangian. Well, no, the point being that a Lagrangian is a very clear and clean way of saying what a theory is. And there's a fascination in the community, which is, well, if you think you've got this whole thing, why don't you put your pen down? Tell us what it is. You know, and like, I'm not even that necessarily that's scared of that. That's not the issue. The issue is, you guys just aren't honest about where you're really at. You're irritated. You're pissed off. And you're pissed off partially at me, but you're

pissed off largely at yourselves. And everybody knows it. And one of the reasons that I, you know, I don't have a ton of fear is that I don't have, you know, somebody else regulating my oxygen in the community. So the issue of what a theory is, how to, how to milk it for information, a lot of this was dealt with very well in Dirac's 1963 scientific American article deserves to be very widely read even though it was popular audience

he somewhat used Schrodinger as his stalking horse where he talked about Schrodinger's failure to agree with experiment and the issue

is that apparently that Schrodinger hadn't taken into consideration certain aspects of spin so this has to do with what I call the suit maker and the tailor. If you have a kind of a weird way of paying for things, where like whoever discovers the island doesn't get the island named after them, but whoever climbs to the top of the highest summit on the island and puts a flag there, that's the name

of the island. So the guy who's spending his time tying up the boat at the dock, you know, gets beaten by the guy who races to the summit. Okay, well, that's a pretty enervating thing. Like you pay for the last leg of the relay different than who did the best time in the relay race. You saw this with, for example, the Poncaray conjecture in mathematics where somebody's building on several large steps, but it's, you know, a pro-man solution to the conjecture. So you've got all these sort of issues of the political economy of physics and mathematics. And, you know, this is what causes people to get really pissed off because Dirac's point was, Schrodinger came up with the suit, but until the tailoring is done, you don't know whether it fits the patient, which is experiment or, you know, the client. And so this is sort of the problem, which is why do you want to deliver a suit to somebody who's going to claim that the tailor made the suit when they did the last alteration?

And I think that this is part of the problem with Popper, at least the naive application of Popper. and people have to realize there's a price for playing all of these incredibly enervating games with credit and pretending that nobody cares about credit and then everybody behind the scene staffs each other being outside of the system I've never seen such a group of completely hypocritical people who all seem to only want to serve nature, God, and Jesus. But on the other hand, what they really seem to do is behind the scenes demand that they get proper credit, proper citations.

And just another quick point. When Juan Maldesana won his breakthrough prize, he had to explain what he'd been up to. He was talking about gauge theory, and he had to illustrate it. And he chose to illustrate it with the economics of exchange rates, which actually came out of work that my wife did at Harvard. It happened that he didn't credit my wife's dissertation where some of this work appeared. He knew about the, you know, and when I ran into it. him in San Francisco, he changed that. He also diluted us a little bit by quoting some irrelevant work. So, you know, my feeling about this is the community also has a huge problem, not acknowledging

people that it doesn't think are going to show up at the next conference. You sort of know who all the regulars are and you play with them using the game theory. So you would attribute it outside of the community. Very often the citation games don't work, the credit games don't work because we don't have a credible threat. And one of the nice things about having a relatively large podcast and access to some of the largest platforms in the world is the community hasn't really quite figured out that you're not necessarily going to see me at your conference if you don't invite me. But if you don't credit my work and you start to, you know, talk about it, you are going to have a problem with repeated games. I think the academic game works best when you have repeated

games. And part of the problem with why people take on cranky affectations when they don't start off as pranks is that they come to understand that the system doesn't work as advertised. But if you want to get into the substance of what these theories are, that would be fun, too, not just talking around them, but talking about. Yeah, I do want to talk about that, but just to circle back, you know, I mean, you, it seems to be common for, you know, one of two different approaches. You can attribute malice or incompetence. Now, it's hard to believe that, you know, Juan would be incompetent because he is brilliant. So I guess, you know, if that's your only alternative to attribute something malicious, that is, you know, that's certainly you're right. It's a, it's a behavior

pattern. Look, I love Isidore Singer, who's been a dear friend of mine in the past. But he would forget when he heard something from me. because I wasn't somehow properly in the right place in his consciousness. We see this with women very often in meetings where they'll say something, five minutes later a man will say more or less the same thing, and everybody will say, oh, Jim's done it again. Matilda effect, right. Call this he peeding.

There's something called the Matthew effect. Matilda effect, right, yeah. And then there's the Matilda effect. So all of these things have to do, the way in which our social brains compute how we wish to be diluted going forward, who we wish to acknowledge, and we make an implicit calculation. Am I likely to see this person tomorrow or not? Right. Yeah, I do look at it. I'm just here to remind people, it got more expensive.

Certainly, it is true that you have a prominence, which I think is unquestionably earned, that you've, you have developed a personality and, and a unique modality of thinking, you're also incredibly courageous, which is one of the rarest of all traits. I don't think you really give a figure, I'll say, because it's a PG conversation. On the other hand, you know, I look at, I look at you and I see these kind of a different image of a lot of my colleagues who are very dear. They kind of remind me of these, you know, fiddler crabs that you see at the beach here in San Diego. You know, they're incredibly well developed on one side of their, of their shell.

And the other side is this puny little digit, but you don't see them going around, you know, and kind of like berating the other crabs that have two equally sized, you know, for tuberances or whatever you call claws. And that it's kind of, it's puzzling to me because you see it for people like Mildegress Tyson, who is not, you know, an active scientist or Bill Nye, who is an engineer by training. And they're outstanding communicators. And yet there's some of the largest targets of jealousy. It just seems strange. It's like me criticizing the conductor of an orchestra for being, you know, getting attention during this.

Well, I don't. Let me take my, my opponent's view and steal man it slightly. Yeah. It in part has to do how much deference and fairness these people give to the community that they are implicitly mining. So I think everybody knows that they in some sense benefit from Neil deGrasse Tyson's popularity. You know, Brian Green is potentially kind of a more interesting version of this because it's got great comic timing. Oh, boy, that guy would have been fantastic in vaudeville. On the other hand, he's a straight-up geometric gangster, you know, he can hang with the best of them. I think that in the case of Bill Nye, this sort of the sense is,

how did a guy with a bow tie come to speak for the rest of us who are doing research? And so I think that there are healthy tension. I think one of the points that I keep trying, to make is I'm not speaking for the community as their voice. Like I may be pissed, but I also think, you know, I think I've been very clear that the theoretical physics community is the intellectual version of Steel Team 6 and our underfunding of theoretical physics is a tragedy. And it's in part what causes the community to be unspeakably beastly to not only each other but to outsiders. Right. They're fighting over the crimes of this crumbs of this cookie that's shriveling up. Well, you guys need more money. You've struck the world's worst licensing deal. Somebody's got to defend the theoretical physics community because you're not allowed to license

what you've contributed to the world. And therefore, you can't, you know, if everybody had to pay for every semiconductor instruction or every URL, every email ever sent, or every, all the protection that came from the hydrogen bombs and lives that were saved to America by being able to end the whatever it is. It's enormous. It's enormous. The theoretical physics community should never have to beg for another dime. They should, the ought from is though, Eric, how do you actually, what are we going to, are we going to apply a tax? I made this point. You call them taxpayer dollars. I'm not a physicist. Those are $50 for the most part. The extent to which the modern economy is built on physics, whether it's communications or computation or protection or or chemistry or whatever. Let's

Let's be clear. They're physics dollars. We had a licensing deal. And you guys, Welch, you, the general public wealth, the taxpayer, Welch, don't bug me about your taxpayer dollars. You guys are the beneficiaries of the best deal in history. Shut up. Fund the theoretical physics community.

Yes, they're horrible. Yes, they're failing. Not doing their job. Yes, they're lying to you. Start paying them. They will be much better. They'll still not be perfect. They're arrogant because they're the reason for the arrogance.

against him. I don't hear anyone else saying anything remotely like what I'm saying. And I try to be fair, just like with one. I settled up our differences. I'm not saying that I'm pissed at him. I am saying that it's a very common behavior pattern. I've had the same issue with John Baez over the Octonians. You know, again, I can settle my differences. But I'm just telling you that from the outside, it's very strange that when I go to a gathering, if I come in as a Harvard PhD, I'm treated one way. But if I come in as an employee of Peter Thiel, I'm treated as the dumb money. It has to be convinced that we should throw it at the community because community is doing the most mind-blowing stuff of all time.

When I start talking technically, you see people have the feeling like, wow, you're not supposed to be able to do that. Right. And then you go through this phase transition and break out the hop vibration. I want to ask you, does this not result naturally as the evolutionary culmination of the, what I call the academic hunger games? I mean, you start off and get into the best college, you need to do all sorts of activities and get good grades and take good tests and so forth. Then you go to college and you're competing in the physical sciences.

Let's say you're going to be a theoretical physicist. You're competing with some of the brightest minds who have ever lived in your peer group. You've got to outlast them to get a good PhD slot. Then you've got to shine as a PhD student, get the attention of your advisor. Then you've got to get a good letter recommendation and a job offer, a prestigious postdoc. then you've got to get a go. It's just a mine. It's gotten so much worse since 20 years ago when I went through the final rung in this ladder. And then 10. Yeah, go ahead. We have to stop this. How do you stop it? How do you undo a thousand-year-old tradition? This is not a thousand-year-old tradition. This has to do with Vannevar Bush, the endless frontier, the expansion of the post-secondary education system. You know, I was thinking I was hanging out with the provost at the UCSD. And he didn't even understand. the effect of the Eilberg Amendment of 1976, by Dole in 1980,

the fraudulent NSF and NASS projections of a looming shortage that opened the floodgates, foreign labor universities, that's misclassification as student apprenticeship. There's an entire recent horrible history of turning the modern professor into a surf, not just the graduate student into a surf, but attempt to destroy academic freedom. If you cannot tell people to screw off

and know that you are still funded the next day, you can still come into your office, the field is lost. Yeah, but I mean, so I do want to talk about, let's just go there now, academic freedom. Is it still valuable? Is it still necessary? I make the claim that in my field,

in experimental physics, until COVID-19, which I do want to pick your brains on, until COVID-19, I had 100% employment rate for all my PhDs and my undergraduates. This is 14 people, as of yesterday, have become a PhD. They've gone out to professorships, prestigious postdocs, and so forth. So there's no gating up until that point. That's certainly a seller's market, you know, job seekers market up until this level.

I don't know exactly in the same sense for in the theoretical market, although I have very many friends, but they take fewer students. And so it's a little bit normalized in that sense. But in terms of academia and freedom, I mean, I could say whatever I want, but I could also, even if I didn't have tenure, I could say, you know, I could say whatever I want also and go and get a job in industry or go and get a job in finance. Not to diminish it, Eric, sorry, just not to diminish it, but just saying that I have a valuable set of Liam Neeson-like skills that I convey to my students that are very flexible.

And I know that's true of theorists as well. So to what extent does a professor of physics need to be tenured and guaranteed fiefdom for life, arguing against my own interest? But, you know, or let's go sociology. Very important. Yeah, go ahead. It's very important. This is the replacement of FU money. And it's not just about whether you have a job.

There's all sorts of ways to turn up the heat on a professor. You can put them in a shitty office. You can give them a huge teaching load. You can humiliate them. There are all sorts of ways to fire people who can't, be fired. So there's an old joke. Unfortunately, I've lived long enough that it's no longer relevant, which is what's the difference between free speech under the Soviet and American Constitution? And the answer is that the Soviet Constitution gives you the right to say anything

and protest your government, but the American Constitution guarantees your freedom the day after So the key question is, can you tell your field to screw off and still get grants? That's a question. Right. Can you tell your department chair that they're out of line trying to force you to sign a diversity and inclusion of which you should, you know, tremble reverently with your pen in hand to sign? No. know that when you don't sign, you're going to be fine. So I think that partially the problem is also that you cannot say that giving

academic freedom to people who will never use it. If you over-vete and you make sure that the people who get academic freedom are the people you can trust never to need it, that all of these things don't work. The key issue is you need dangerous, safe people, dangerous by virtue of the fact that they can say everything that needs to be said, safe, and that they're not. going to abuse it to say things that shouldn't and needn't be said. And if you can't have dangerous safe people knowing that they're going to be fine, the day after they said what needed to be said that pissed everybody off, that woke everybody up, then it's not academic freedom.

Do you really feel like that could happen? If I criticize Ed Witten, am I going to get my tenureship or my teaching assignment at UCSD, you know, greatly enhanced, punished in that way? Well, I'm not saying that there's a direct transmission mechanism. I didn't know that you and Ed Witton were in the same game. But I'll say that Ed Witten is perhaps the finest, you know, mathematician of our time, but that his leadership of the theoretical physics has been arguably disastrous and that he earned effectively as a geometer and spent as a string theorist, that's a very dangerous statement if I was, in fact, at let's say,

the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. And I feel about Ed Witten, the way people sometimes feel about Voldemort, which is that you want to be very carefully in saying his name. At this advanced age of my life, he's one of the few people that I find absolutely terrifying. And that's not politically, just intellectually. The neurons on that guy just, I've never seen anything like it.

Yeah, I mean, just recently, he came up with a way to test for a black hole in the outer solar system. So now he is venturing into my turf. He's got into astrophysics. So I could be, I could theoretically be endangered, I suppose. Well, but I'm just trying to say that part of the problem was I didn't hear people after David Gross. David Gross, who, again, you know, fabulous physicist and one really the seminal figure to cross over from the, you know, last major improvements in the standard model into the world of strings and beyond, you know, he gave these talks year after year to sort of say where the theoretical physics community was going,

and there wasn't enough ability to say, are we going over a cliff? Is this crazy? Is this insane? I mean, what are we doing people? Like, that voice was silence because people were terrified. I would hear people say, well, I'm so glad you said something, but I could never say something. And I really dislike them. So, I mean, what way of incentivizing is there a market, you know, mode of of operating. You guys need more money. But, I mean, I agree. I'm not going to turn down more money.

And, you know, ever since the Phoenicians... Oh, no, it's super important that you guys have a guarantee... Universal physics income. Ralph Garmory of the Sloan Foundation said this thing to me. He said, the bargain was always that you weren't going to get super rich as a professor, but you would have the freedom that came from your job. That's how we got great people. When we lost the freedom, we stopped being able to compete effectively for the top people.

And so my version of this is you need the freedom of a billionaire without the wealth. We have had, you know, and this is a huge shift in science funding, arguably, I mean, the last, you know, 10 years has been some of the biggest struggles in my career to get funding from federal sources and some of the most successful to get it from private foundations because I think there is sort of a freedom that comes with the private foundation and yeah you can talk about the FU capital that they can supply but on the other hand they also have priorities that may not align with the priorities of the entire nation right so so I wonder you know if you're talking to you know somebody who like Jim Simons who's been criticized for merely pursuing his own intellectual

interest I don't think that's fair it's like you guys working on a cure for autism You know, by what standard... Jim Simons is an all-around fantastic. He's a unique human being. A unique human being. But Jim Simons had the correct instincts. There's nothing more important, in my opinion, for the preservation of humanity than theoretical physics.

Yeah, you think it's actually culturally relevant to the survival of a society? If so, how did we do without it, you know, until the 1940s or so, in 1930s? Well, I don't agree with that. I mean, my feeling about this is, first of all, that it's necessary for the survival of humanity for a couple of different reasons, which have to be pulled apart. The first of which is theoretical physics is unique in the sense that it somehow trains the pure mental facility and the gritty mental facility to work together.

like nothing else we've ever discovered. I'm not saying it's not possible to duplicate it again. But even relative to mathematicians, who I could make an argument, might even be smarter in a certain kind of technical sense. The power of the hybrid vigor of pure cleanliness and pure grit produced something where we never knew that the human mind was capable of those flights, as we've seen in theoretical physics. So I really believe that if you wanted to talk about, you know, the gym that trains bodies to be at their peak, well, for the mind, that's theoretical physics, fundamental physics.

That's the dojo. All right. It's the dojo. And the idea that you get, like, I mean, I'm going to say this the horrible way. If China was smart, they go and buy the Institute for Advanced Study. They just buy out all those guys. They're like, what, five guys who are just all of them unbelievable, whatever my issues are? I mean, people are like, I understand, are you for Ed Wittin, are you against him?

Well, I have a complicated relationship with these guys. Right. If I were China, I would pay each of those guys $10 million a year to have a deal. And the fact that we wouldn't bid that up is because we're idiots. Right? So you want the world's smartest people happy and at your beck and call. And maybe you call them up once every 25 years. It's a bargain.

Shut up. Pay it. It's their money anyway. Their grandfathers and grandmothers created it, you know? So if you look at it, and I agree with you that physics, I broaden it to experiment because I think the best experimental physicists should know the most about theory. Actually, we are encumbered. I was going to get to that.

Yeah. Okay, go ahead. Take it away. So CERN is the most obvious, but then they're like high precision experiments. There's all the amazing stuff doing at the South Pole. is the fact that LIGO can pick up these faint, there's an analog in the experimental end of this, which is look at what we've done.

This is the reason that you push computers, you know, to their limits, engineering tolerance, is creativity. All of this stuff is hugely valuable any time you want to convert it to something else. But people want to do the sexiest stuff when they're not being tasked for practical stuff. The Manhattan project was an engineering project. It wasn't really a theoretical physics project.

It did have a positive effect. If you look at the Shelter Island Conference, clearly these guys were not suffering from the same level of learned helplessness that Dirac's quantum electrodynamics had induced before we normalization taught us how to extract measurable predictions. But in all of these things,

the key issue is the first thing, The first aspect of why you find theoretical physics is that you want to know that you can call up the world's smartest people whenever you need them to solve your analytic problems that have grit and indeterminacy in them. And there is an absolute parallel on the experimental site. The second thing is that we learned just over 100 years ago that we've got fundamental limitations on visiting rights to the universe. And I can't stand to constantly hear that Yulong was.

wants to go to Mars to save the world because the Mars, the moon, Titan, Enceladus. There's just not enough diversity locally to do any. And so we may be trapped here. It may be that whatever Einstein figured out, more or less is unhackable. And that even when you move from effective theories to ultimate theories, it can be that there's nothing new to do. But right now, between 1952 and 54,

you put the world on notice that we're going to blow ourselves up unless we have a wisdom explosion, which doesn't look likely. We've got to get off this rock, and you've got to stop hearing that as science fiction or somebody who watched too many Star Wars movies. It's only going to take one device going off in a mid-level city as a demonstration of prowess to let people know that you can't always stop something

because of ballistic missile. you can't detect all of the enriched fissile material. Whatever we're in, theoretical physics changed the game with the hydrogen devices of the early 50s. And we're now in the adaptive valley, and we're going to die here as a species. If we do not get out, the only group of people who can get us out are either the people who would upload us into silicon and forgive me, that sounds completely ridiculous to me, or the people who could find out whether or not when we pass from effective Einsteinian theory to ultimate theory, we are in fact limited.

And so to actually... So to determine that, right. So I wanted to bring this up actually in a series of rapid fire questions at the end where I'm just going to ask you to say yes or no if you have greater than 50% credulity and various items. Keep in mind, you're asking a non-physicist. No, I know that, Eric, but you're a thinker. and you know very much about risk,

and you know you're very well-schooled in Bayesian reasoning. And I'm just an internet personality. And a podcaster, noted podcaster. Noted podcast. So you look at the Drake equation, and it was born right after World War II in 1961. Frank Drake came up with this famous theory, and actually most of the terms in that equation,

it's not really an equation that would satisfy any mathematician of note, nor does it ever come along with concomitant error, error bars, error analyses. It's always just multiply these fractions together and you'll get a likelihood. But the one uncertainty that we haven't revealed, in other words, we know star formation rates of galaxies, we know the number of stars that have habitable zone like planets, but we don't know L, the lifetime. And it sounds to me, and we had a conversation about this last week offline, you know, that you are actually very deeply, it's not just, you know, kind of a headline, you know,

grabbing thing, that you are very concerned. I don't know if you're a member of the, you know, atomic bulletin, whatever, this union of atomic scientists, bulletin of atomic scientists. If it's respectable, I'm not part of it. You would never join such a group. No, no, no, I would never be asked. I see. Okay. This one's run by your friend Lawrence Krauss. So I wonder if it could be I've never met Lawrence Krauss. Okay. So in the Drake equation, the letter L stands for the longevity lifetime of a civilization. Do you really believe that, that, that, We might be in our final hour, you know, 30 seconds to midnight as this clock is being set currently? I'd be astounded if we don't do anything clever that we make it 300 years.

Wow. So your approach, and we briefly touch upon this, but I want to delve into it, does geometric unity offer a potential avenue to break the speed limit, to transgress C as a fundamental limitation? If so, it would be very interesting to Stephen Wolfram because he's claiming in his competing approach to find a fundamental theory. He has a competing approach. Well, I'm saying his theory of the fundamental physics project is that the speed of light emerges from what he calls branching space,

which I take to be essentially a Hilbert space-like object that can subdivide a certain rate. And because of that limitation and the propagation of these networks, nodes, et cetera, in branching space, the speed of branch. Again, I'm summarizing it. You can watch my interview with him or watch one of his many well-produced and delightful interviews. But on the other hand, he believes that he can predict it.

It's actually a retradictive. So wouldn't that stand in contradistinction to any hope to actually find that C is just a milestone, if you will, a speed limit that is not truly fundamental? Yeah, I don't understand the question. Will a geometric unity, can the speed of light ultimately be derived as a prediction from geometric unity? Or are we sort of hoping that it might have a, it might not be the fundamental limit? I mean, you're, you seem, you know, we're worried about the lifetime of civilization and we want to get far away, farther away than Saturn, right? Yeah.

Would you permit me to rephrase the question slightly? Please. Yeah. Whether it works. So first part of it. it is people tend to feel better if they can link you to something like oh well you're peter teal's employee or oh well you and stephen wolfer have this rival none of this is right i'm i'm super glad that stephen wolf from is doing whatever stephen wolfe is doing it has almost nothing to do with

anything i know it does but yeah okay so just to be clear um i think what your question should be is first of all, how is Einsteinian space time recovered from within your theory, given that Newton, for example, had to be recovered from Einstein in low-velocity situation? The question would be given the fact that you're not, because, see, whenever I say something about getting off this rock, people map that, oh, faster than light. and that assumes that you're still staying in the space-time paradigm. Right. The idea is that somehow you've broken the speed limit in the four dimensions with metric

that Einstein bequeathed. In essence, the claim is that Einstein fillayed the metric bundle. In other words, one way of looking at Einstein's theory in a modern context would be that he took four degrees of freedom, He built the metric bundle on top of that, which would be a pointwise bundle of fibers of dimension 10, because if you take four degrees of freedom and you take four squared plus four divided by two, that's 16 plus 4 is 20 divided by 2 is 10s. You get 10 degrees of freedom, which is why Einstein's field equations occur in sort of 10 coupled differential equations.

Now, that object is only relevant for the particular space-time metric that Einstein uses to endow the four degrees of freedom with this extra structure to create space-time. What if that's the big error that, in fact, you should be having the fields mostly propagate on the 14-dimensional space, which would be the four degrees of freedom plus the 10 degrees of rulers and protractors, otherwise known as symmetric, non-degenerate two tensors. Then the idea is that a particular choice of Einsteinian metric is a section of that bundle. That section can be used to pull back information

from the 14 dimensions down to the four dimension. And then you have this interesting thing, which is maybe not all the fields live on the 14, Maybe some are native to the four, some are native to the 14, but they all appear to be pulled back on the four so that we constantly live in Plato's cave where we can't see the 14. And we sort of know that this 10 is out there

because then in this 10 would sort of be the same 10 as the Spin 10 theory that contains the SU5 Grand Unified Theory, or more correctly, my guess is that it lines up with the Petit Salam theory, which is a theory based on the group SU5, cross SU2 cross SU2. Now SU4 by low dimensional isomorphisms is oddly spin six, whereas SU2 cross SU2 is another name for spin four.

So spin six cross spin four, four plus ten is ten again. And so you get back to this magical number of 10. And I don't think that I've seen that much identifying these 10 dimensions that are hidden in the Petit Salaam, somewhat more explicit in what you guys call SOTEN, which you should call spin 10, but I don't want to quibble over terminology, because that's just Logomachie.

And then you have this issue where that actually has geometric and dynamic significance, and what we're looking at is kind of the restriction of these fields to a filament, confusing fields that are native to the four with fields that are native to the induced 14-dimensional. structure. So that's how Einstein fits in to the observers in the most geometric unity is broader than this. It doesn't have to use the metric bundle, but in the most aggressive version of geometric unity, that 10 appears twice. I don't know that that connection has been much remarkable. No, I don't think it has. Is it true that you basically

would have only fermion-like particles, in other words, intrinsically spinorial operators or spinners that would then compose both the particles, the massive particles, and also their mediators? No. No, no, no. You would have...

See, one of the key problems, which I can't seem to get any physicist to care about, is it when you have everybody scurrying around saying that they want to quantize gravity, which is sort of weird. It's a weird replacement, right? We used to want unified field theories, and then somebody subtly said, oh, Holy Grail is quantizing gravity. An incredible sleight of hand, my greatest taste.

If you want to quantize gravity, my key question to you is always about the electron as opposed to the photon. The photon as a spin-one particle would be a perturbation in a bundle that will exist whether or not a metric is chosen. So if you imagine that you have a period of time when there is no metric between observations, whatever that means, the ocean in which the photon is a wave

still is well defined, but the wave may not be known. What happens when you don't have a metric and you look at the electron ocean? Well, then there's no ocean. In other words, there's a different feature with fractional spin, which you're going to call fermions,

matter, which is that finite dimensional matter is not defined for what would be called GL4R double cover. So you have a flabby symmetry group and you only get the ocean of electrons once you take the flab out of it and make it rigid. So if you want to quantize gravity, I always want to know, I understand sort of what you might need in a world of photons only. But if there are fermions in your world, I have no idea what you're talking about when you want to quantize gravity between observation. It's one thing not to know where the waves are. It's another thing to misplace the Pacific between every moment that you don't have rulers in protract. This is a big problem.

And one of the things geometric unity does is it finds a spinner bundle that does not depend on metric. It just can't have a four-dimensional space. It's forced into the 14. And it's not the honest spitter bundle that you would associate with the tangent bundle. It's very closely related, something called the chimeric tangent bundle, which leads to chimeric spinners. Upstairs in the 14-dimensional world, you're interested in both bosons and fermions. In fact, you're interested in something that's a supergroup structure. and that object upstairs pulls back to what we seem to perceive.

As far as I'm concerned, I think we're having a 14-dimensional conversation. I'm usually accused of being one-dimensional. I think we're having a 14-dimensional conversation, and we're taking a four-dimensional filament of it. And maybe that's what Sean Carroll is talking about when he's going on, about how he believes wholeheartedly in the multiverse, 50% of them anyway, 50% of them he doesn't. I don't know.

But I just think that in general, what happened is that around the time the unified field theory gave way to quantizing gravity, nobody noticed the slight hand, nobody noticed the real conceptual problems, and that you've got generations of people repeating what their more recent ancestors said that would have shocked, I think,

a lot of the guys who actually built this stuff in the early 20th century. So you've mentioned, are we off of this topic for now, Eric? Are you on it? I don't know. I mean, it's your podcast. If you want to talk, I'd rather try to talk physics. Yeah, I would like to talk physics. I'd like to talk about, you know, because, again, I use simple-minded.

I like to use everything, treat everything like a nail. And my hammer is looking at things through experimental lenses. Before we do that, we briefly touched up on Popper and we briefly touched on Girdle. And I had this conversation with Stephen Wilfrum, and I've had it with other thinkers ranging from Freeman Dyson to Roger Penrose and Jim Gates. And I'd like to know your take on this. I believe that physicists are suffering from math envy, you know, in Freudian language, replacing certain protuberance with the word math. And that's in a sense that Gertil at least showed them the limits of what was possible in mathematics or impossible, the so-called incompleteness theorem. And for decades or maybe not, it's been taken as sort of sacrosanct at a level, which I believe is unearned, that Popper provided an analog for physicists, for ways to determine the credulity one should have in a physical theory.

And that was whether or not it could be falsified. And falsification has come to mean not just evidence or evidence against, but even the ability to, you know, the ability to. to retradict certain things that are known to be subsumed within the theoretical or physical theory. I'm wondering, what do you, what would you, or do you believe in Popper's, you know, dialectic, or do you believe, you know, in his, in his demarcation claim? Or is there something superior in your mind that could replace it? And then obviously I want to turn that to geometric unity. So first, what do you think about the Gertel-Popper distinction that I'm making here? These are these beautiful hopes that we're going to be able to codify what science is and what science isn't.

I think it's important that we say why we're animated by this. Trying to get rid of pranks and losers and freaks and weirdos distract us and figure out what the magic formula is that we can do science by so that we can say, look, we're an open community. We welcome everyone who wants to try to pull the sword out of the stone. And in fact, you guys broke the rules, so you guys don't get to try and. anymore and the people who are playing by the rules good kids and the other ones get a lump hole

in their stock. So that's what our motivation is because frankly we don't want a huge line of incompetence trying their hand. You know it takes days to debunk somebody who's filled with bunk and there's always 12 more behind that person. So I think it's really much better to talk about

the political economy of this and talk about the opportunity cost of debunking people. It's very expensive to talk to them. What I find ridiculous is when people treat somebody like me like that because they're looking for a demarcation solution, which is, it's just very silly, but the locals sometimes want to play that game. In general, I haven't found that many people who want to play with me, but let's keep going.

I think that we're in some very different place with Popper. And what I've said before is that the scientific method is actually the radio edit of great science. And I mean something very particular by that. Great science is whatever people have done to make major advances, and then whatever people might do make major advances. I remember hanging out with Jim Watson, where he more or less said that Rosalind Franklin was a much better scientist than he was.

But his point was that we were great scientists, and she was very, very good, and we were not very, very good. Not just the great is better than good. It's two different styles. You want to look at a really revolutionary essay he wrote, something like succeeding in science, Rules of Thumb or something like that. The style of great science is in general indefensible.

If you looked at, in my opinion, sort of the three great names of 20th century physics, and I'm going to come up with a list of other people aren't going to love, they're going to agree with me on Einstein and Dirac. And then weirdly Frank Yang, Cien Yang, gets left off because people want to say Weinberg, Feynman, something like that. I find that very weird.

I think Yang is way up there. But those guys are the ones with their names on the laws of nature. And if you look at what they say, they're all talking about beauty, so they're notwithstanding. The problem is, have beauty as a method. There is the beauty method in science.

And it almost never works, up for our very best people. So if you go to look right at the top of theoretical physics, everyone's talking about beauty, but it's like three guys, you know? And what do you do with a method that's, you know, a little bit like, you know, what was it, the Blackbird aircraft that almost no one can fly,

but it's the highest performance, you know, airplane in the sky? Well, that's what the beauty method is. It's not about popper, it's not about falsification, it's about intuition. but guts. All the things that you want to tell, if you're an average person, do not use this. It will cause you to crash into the rocks.

So trying to give advice for good science and advice for great science is very frustrating because it's not the same thing. In general, great science looks like bad science that happens to work. And, well, you know, it's like, okay, Kikuli is thinking about a snake eating itself and it turns out to be benzene.

You know, how are you going to recommend people do that? There's an old joke or something about that we don't use the Feynman method in this class. What's the Feynman method? You look at the problem. You think you'll hard. You write down the answer. We have to recognize that in general there isn't a scientific method. There's something that we can clean up and show to try to say that what we're doing is

defensible and that we're not talking mumbo-jumbo. But I'm going to tell you the horrible dirty secret at the bottom of all of it. It's about taste and everyone knows it. Whether or not you give, you know, who is it, I guess it was Murray Gelman who gave Schwartz a job at Caltech because he had the sense that this guy's working on something important. Whether I'm a string theory booster or not is not really the important point. You know, Schwartz-Gelman was right. And you have this problem that at the bottom of all this is not something that is sanitized

that can be cleaned up to show your parents. This is a terrifying, marginal, bizarre activity. And this is part of why you get people who are so angry about people breaking the rules because, honestly, those aren't the rules. Peer review is not really long for, has not been long in our world. This is about personal communications.

If you look at what happened with Freeman Dyson trying to defend Feynman to Oppenheimer and having to call in beta and then, you know, Oppenheimer puts this note in his inbox, no low contendary, and the guy had a job at the Institute for Advanced Study with no PhD in either math or physics

for the rest of his life. This is how badasses get shit done. It's that it's about knowing people so intimately and trusting people so intimately and having enough resources that you can run something like the RNA tie club and share early results knowing that everybody's good enough

to get their own goddamn Nobel Prize and if they don't get Nobel Prize, everybody knows who's good anyway. We don't really need this internally. Nobody's confused about Stucklberg outside of the, you know, inside the community. We all know that he was super important. He got shafted.

So it's very important to recognize this as a small, intimate activity of weirdos, freaks, madmen, it's a circus. And the adorable focus on the demarcation problem that comes from history and sociology of science programs is very touching and sweet. But they should get the hell out of our fields and let us get down to work and do what we do best, which is breaking rules and doing anything that's been known ever to come to an answer.

But of course there's a greater possible abstract space of possibly true theories or possibly true laws of nature than actually true. And I think what you care about, you know, Einstein famously said imagination is more important than knowledge. But as I said, I was talking to Sasha Sagan, Carl Sagan's daughter yesterday on the podcast. And, you know, here's her father. There's a little doll of her father. And, and I was saying, you know, imagination is great. And it's wonderful to have it. And we should cultivate it. Obviously, Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. But I don't want my neurosurgeon, God forbid, you know, to be like, I'm going to be really creative, you know, and curious about you know, Brian's brain surgery, God forbid.

You know, I want him to have a lot of knowledge or her to have a lot of knowledge. And in the case of, you know, these theories, who decides? That's wrong. Who does? Well, so you would like to have a creative approach to, you know, things that have a true yes or, in other words, I'm arguing direct wouldn't have been Dirac. He said it's more important your equations be beautiful than that they be right or something to that effect. It's more important to have beauty in one's equations than that they fit to experiment.

Yeah, and so it sounds like you agree with that. And I'm saying the ultimate, Dirac didn't become direct until we discovered the truth of the direct equation, of the existence of which he was wrong about originally identifying the positive. I mean, I'm not faulting him. Obviously, he went on to a good career despite what Brian Keating might think about it. But the point is, it is the arbiter. I might be arguing my own book, but I'm arguing that we need experiment to validate.

And maybe that's the ultimate gatekeeper in your language. Okay, so explain this. This is the problem that we're weak. And this is physics bowing down to history and sociology of science. The key point was, why did Einstein know what he was doing when Einstein engrossment appeared, I think in 1913, which just vaguely said, the answer is something like a linear expression in the remand curvature tensor

equal to the stress energy, not specifying what it was. Then he gets it wrong. And he says it's the reachy tensor. Right. Distilled. And that was shown not to be, what's the operator you guys call it perpendicular to the orbits.

Covariantly, not covariantly constant, but divergence free. Maybe you call it divergence free. So then he puts in the one-half scalar curvature correction to that. And that's not enough because of Hubble. So then you put in the cosmological. And then Hilbert finds, okay, your super complicated equation is actually the simplest boiler Lagrange equation that comes from the simplest action.

You know, it's like, okay, well, how did he know ahead of time that he was on the right path because he kept correcting it? And then this whole thing about the electron versus the positron. Now, Durek wasn't wrong. He was insufficiently courageous. And, you know, this is exactly what I'm going through, which is, like, when you have detractors, you're constantly trying to placate your detractors. Oh, no, no, no, I didn't say that.

I didn't mean that'll, please, please. I mean, it's just stupid. The issue is, if you let him say, okay, yeah, I don't have the answer for that. If you stop pushing for agreement, stop pushing for immediate agreement with experiment. I mean, this is the difference between authors and copy editors. The copy editors have taken over at some levels. You've got the lunatics promoting the string theoretic agenda, which has completely failed that they can't be honest about.

And then you've got the copy editors, which is like, you didn't say Simon says. It's like, shut up. Enough. It's something in between. It's a very fine sensibility. And it has to do with a tiny number of people. The thing is intrinsically elitist because face is what you, you're using before you get to the ability to agree with the experiment.

Is the question that in the end it has to agree with the experiment? Of course. But like that's some super late stage thing. And again, it's the same problem of privileging the tailor as if the tailor made the suit. I've got to agree with the experiment. He put the last dot on the last eye. Really? I mean, are you that soulless that you can't actually recognize that Hilbert was not in a race with Einstein?

I think if you look at it and you see, you know, you see the prestige levels, and I'm not, you know, one for going through the sociology of science anymore than I believe you are. But you look at the prestige afforded to physicists. And, you know, it goes, it goes, as you said, it'll go, you know, Einstein in this last, you know, 150 years, you know, bore, it'll go to Feynman, it'll go, if it makes it to someone who did an experiment, it'll be Fermi. And, you know, we can argue and debate it whether or not he was. So I think, it's a lot, I think you're certainly right. The prestige goes to it. And I think, you know. I can't shut up about Madam Wu. Yeah. Right. You look at that.

And then you look at many of the great discoveries by quote unquote experimentalists or non-theorists and, you know, resulting in Nobel Prizes or other metrics. Pick your favorite one. You know, are for serendipitous discoveries that we, you know, maybe even the theorist had discounted. But it's usually not, I think Dickie is an exception because I think he was equally, you know, facile with his theory and he was a top-notch experimentalist. He's kind of my hero in that sense.

And it harkens back to the Galileo model. But, you know, that being said, if there were ways to channel to test GU, I mean, could we speculate as to what they are? Because I think, I think, Eric, there are ways to test it. I mean, you are talking about certain things in your lecture. I'm not trying to avoid that, Brian. Yeah.

No, I know you are. avoid is that I'm trying to avoid the infant mortality, the infant mortality that would come from, oh, this is not worth pursuing because he's not putting it in a journal and requiring an experiment. I know that's a high bar. No, it's not bad. It's just I'm sickened by watching a noble family forget its role in the world, right? Like, you know, it's the arrogance without the accomplishment. you guys haven't figured out

you have to tell the interlopers from outside you know this is something it's an elitist activity like as much as I hate to say it the top three guys in the 20th century were just different they were using different methods I might even in group Feynman

and I might talk about Stuckelberg which people aren't going to necessarily want to hear about you can't, it's not egalitarian. It's not fair. It's not a fair subject. And if you want, well, tell me what science is and what it isn't so that I can apply the rule. It's like, okay, when you're up this high above the tree line, the world works differently. And there's no reason that an ape should be able to do these things.

It's a huge surprise that this is even possible. With that said, my frustration is that this noble family has fallen into so much poverty that it can't behave properly scientifically. And my story about Oppenheimer and Dyson was that maybe Dyson did need Beda to come in and say, hey, pay attention to the kid, he's got it going on. But it got done. It worked out. people did not lose their livelihoods, their jobs,

they didn't need PhDs. It's like we knew who was good and who wasn't. We gave them time. We gave them space. And so you're coming after me. Huh, the joke's on you. I'm not even, I mean, I'm using none of your resources at all. What are you going to do?

Cut off my oxygen. You can't. Absolutely can't. You can't cut off my internet. Yeah, I'm in my boots. Yeah, but you're covering. But you want to get back to testing. Yeah.

The key point is, Imagine people came to say, instead of, hey, how do we get rid of you? They said, we're really interested. What do you think you might be telling us? We know you're not a physicist. We know that you're working at a geometric level. We know that it needs to be quantized. We know that you don't understand exactly how we calculate in quantum field theory.

Because you're terrible pedagogues, but everyone. What could we do constructively? I'd be all over that. Well, I've got some suggestions. Let me just say something. Yeah, go ahead. Brian Keating, Professor Brian Keating, is unusual in that he's been after me for years to come to UC San Diego and lecture, which is very courageous. So I don't know if I'm courageous, but I know, sir, that you are.

I want you to be a visiting scholar here, actually, which we'll talk about that. It would be an absolute honor. It would be an absolute honor. What I would say is a bunch of new particles that I can read off their properties relative to the internal symmetry groups. So we've got weak hypercharge, weak ice spin, strong internal quantum numbers. There are a huge number of new particles that are predicted in this theory to exist. Now, the instant I say the word prediction, I get into a different thing. First of it goes, oh, what energy level?

Would we have seen them? You know, where would they be in the in the presence with, and the decay rates, blah, blah, okay, so that's that energy of whatever. I don't know how to do all that stuff. I can tell you that if it was somebody else coming up with this theory, they'd say, oh, well, we would think that we should have seen them. That would be like Dirac saying the antiparticle of the electron must be the proton because I don't know of a positively charged particle of the equivalent of the electron

because positron hadn't been found by Anderson. Stupid Dirac, yeah. Stupid Dirac. Right, but like if you pressure me, it's like, oh, I don't know. And I'll make the same mistake Dirac makes. And then you can have your Heisenberg come out and say, oh, Eric didn't know about this. Let's leave that energy aside. Yeah.

If it was somebody inside of the community, they might say, look, I've got something that fits almost everything. And it's off a little bit over here. Let's tailor it together. Well, that would be an invitation to a conversation. What could we do? Is there a new field that we might introduce to suppress it? Maybe this is actually naturally occurring. Same point about Dirac and Georgia.

You know, maybe, oh, you didn't. didn't take into account this aspect of spin. What can I tell you about the theory? First of all, I don't think that what you guys call antimatter is antimatter. I think there's an entirely different sector that would properly be understood as antimatter. I think there's a 14-dimensional space. You guys are applying these things all in dimension four. I think that there is spin three halves matter that is actually real. I don't think that one of the three generations is a true generation. I believe that if you amp it up in terms of energy, it will unify. with other particles you've never seen.

I believe that probably in gravitationally weak places, what we see is a decoupling of equations, but the near black holes, you might very well see the things that had been decoupled become coupled, and therefore a lot of stuff might come surging into view, and so that what was dark might become light. I mean, there's any one of a number of things that you can read off. I don't think that I've had a single,

friendly, competent inquiry in a month since I released it. Well, yeah, I've been thinking about it since you released it and we made contact last week. I want to talk to you about, well, first of all, I want to talk to you about something you kind of made as an offhand comment in your April Fool's Day podcast. And I'm sorry to keep calling it. That's just easier for me to remember. Oh, that's what I tried to do. I wanted, if this works, let's imagine just dream with me.

Yeah, yeah. So then it works. Yep. published on April Fool's Day. Right. And every year, all the pent-up energy of all of these communities would you'd be able to air these things

without losing your job. Oh, this is the Weinstein tradition. Like, you want to talk about honoring me. Imagine that every year we could say things like, I wonder if stress doesn't cause ulcers. I wonder if grains should be at the base of the food period. I wonder whether or not the Yamabi problem solution in the literature really works. I wonder if the weak force might be asymmetric.

You know, how many things have we been afraid to say? Like with COVID, I'm positively convinced that there are doctors who are looking at this saying, no make no make sense of it, this doesn't make sense, it doesn't work, something is weirdly off. The danger, The danger of this is that people are holding back for fear of being drummed out of their fields. So the whole point of releasing April 1st is my fantasy would be if this were to work,

not only getting humans off this planet, but making sure two things. One, that an H-index of zero became a respectable thing, saying, I choose not to avail myself of your insane community, and it's bizarre rituals because you're Knarks and you're trying to fight the cranks, but lots of us are neither Knarc nor crank. And every year, I want you to know that you have a day where you're free. Yeah. I have the same thing. Like, I think David Gross is not leading the theoretical physics community properly.

And as brilliant as Ed Witten is, I think he's contributed. and not lose your job. Yeah, I kind of see it as, what's that movie where they have like one day of the year, they can commit any crime. But now the listeners are screaming, I mean, I'll put it in the show notes, people, don't worry. But there's a, and then unavoidably, if you are,

you know, it'll be essential to quote that it was released on April Fool's Day. So I think it's a brilliant piece of intentional or unintentional. It was recorded on April Fool's Day. I missed by a few minutes. I know, I know, but I'm just going to keep calling it that. Anyway, in the podcast, you talk about, you know, one of the great moments of relief for you,

at least at some point, when you discovered that, you know, your theory wouldn't work if neutrinos were massless, but it did work because we know that they have masses. We don't know what their masses are. And I wonder if you are aware, you probably are, but it's not absolutely known that the, that all three neutrino species have mass. In other words, there's only known to be a mass difference, a mass square difference to be technical, between the two different eigenstates.

But we don't know, actually, one of them could be massless. Would that in some way false, if we discover that one species is massless, you know, mu one or something like that, one flavor, then would that be a falsification opportunity for the pauper? What it really needs is it needs, If you think about the SU5 theory, let's say, Grand Unified Theory, there's like a five and an anti-10 representation. You can put in an inactive singlet.

But the important thing is that it be 16 particles in a generation. And so the issue that I was having, it wasn't even necessarily the case that it wasn't, that there weren't 16 particles. But people were still very much trying to be conservative and saying, well, why do you? I don't hypothesize, if you have, what is it, a right-handed, neutral one, you know, then it's effectively dark. And so the key issue is just that there be a spinorial representation, not really about mass. So it's easier to say it in terms of masses and neutrinos, but I'm not trying to hide anything, So I'll say the more correct version is it has to come from a 16-dimensional representation,

or rather a spinorial representation of 2 to the end, or you can do it more broadly with the Rarita Shwinger, but it's a very restricted class of it. So that would not be, you know, if we are cosmological experiments like Simon's Observatory and Bicep, etc., are trying to, you know, in some level, constrained. the mass neutrino, the sum of the mass of neutrinos, and then that combined with reactor experiments might actually reveal the absolute masses instead of just the sum of their squares and square rooted, so to speak. I'm getting questions from a listener who wants me to ask you

is a distinguished professor at Brown University, and he's asking me to ask you in real time. Does he play the saxophone? He does play the saxophone. He does. He's also the president of the National Society of Black Physicist, which I am a proud honorary member of. And yes, it is Stefan Alexander, my best friend and best man at my wedding. And Stefan's asking in real time, what does your theory have to say about the cosmological constant problem or about dark matter? We sort of hit on anti-matter. Tell us, answer Stefan's question about the cosmological constant and or dark matter. So first of all, I would say that the cosmological constant would not be a constant. It would be a VEV.

I mean, look, I'm going to try to speak physics and hang. Yeah, please do, yeah. But if I screw up... It's okay. You get a pass. Don't try this at home, kids. You could put on the mathematician hat if you make a mistake. Well, we don't talk like this.

I would say that it's a VV. And the VEV is lured away from zero because... there is a curvature piece that is pervasive, that as the universe is spread out, God, I hate talking like this. As the cross-section, three-dimensional space-like cross-section is spread out, that VEV has gotten very low, but it's still non-zero,

and that the, let me just say it this way, that you're luring something away from zero, potentially because you've got a topological contribution. And if you have some sort of galspanet theorem, then you have to be able to recover the topology from the curvature. So you could have a reason that you couldn't get rid of the curvature, but you could spread it out, and therefore you have a counterbalance in Germany.

With respect to dark matter, there's a lot of it. Part, this is the decoupling. So the claim is that the matter wasn't dark originally. in high gravitational situation. But it became dark, and as the VEV went down, then effectively a coupled equation broke into effectively decoupled equation. The decoupled equations would have things like dark light, dark glons. Axions, right.

So, you know, there's a ton of, there's a ton to be speculated. And you don't know that it broke the way your half broke. So if you're in sort of one half of the stuff, and again, when I say half, I don't, there's stuff that we haven't found in our half in this theory. Yeah. Stuff that is decoupled. So there's like, it's more than half would be dark. But you might be able to say, look, I don't know exactly how the other part broke. but what I would say is

you know that how it would unify the example I just give to people who are watching is if you have a hand you see three fingers two and four your digits two and four are pretty symmetric and the middle finger is symmetric you could say oh I wonder if there's a symmetry there where my index and my ring finger

are mirror images of each other And then you throw in these two and you say, oh, shoot, well, maybe it's spontaneously broken. And, you know, these things are like weirdly off, but maybe my thumb and my pinky are more or less the same. And then you find out, oh, my God, it's thumb to thumb, not thumb to pinky. And this stuff is dark because it's decoupled. And so this is all remaining to be found. And this is where the proper antimatter would be. But because you're not even aware of the 14-dimensional substructure.

you're thinking about everything in four-dimensional terms, which is after it's been pulled back. Mm-hmm. And so if are we done with that thread, particular answer? Because I have a couple. Ask Stefan. He's the man. All right.

Well, he's not listening live. Unfortunately, we should have called him in, but I think we'll do that next time. Brother Stefan, how could you do this? I know. We're just texting back and forth, sharing pictures of our daughters today is his daughter's birthday. 12th birthday or something, right?

That's right. Yeah. I always share a happy birthday from you. I want to stick with mysterious particles and ask you if they've maybe already been found. I want to quote from an article in not the most necessarily prestigious scientific journal, but Scientific American, no less.

It's not a peer-reviewed journal, but it's a discussion of mysterious particles lurking underground. And this is underground the great icy continent that I've been to a couple times called Antarctica, in particular two experiments that seem to show show some concordance, at least in the... Anita. Yes, is Anita and Ice Cube.

So Ice Cube, I think it would be interesting for you to talk to an actual Ice Cube scientist and an Anita scientist, but they claim that the particles that they're finding, they don't have much understanding. Technically, this is two particles, two events, but extremely high significant, statistically speaking, we call 5.8 sigma and 7 sigma. So these are, you know, chances of fluke occurrence to the 100,000, to one in a million level. And if those are possible, certainly not seeing them,

it would be like the magnetic monopole problem, which was claimed, again, on a special date on a holiday, to be discovered at Stanford Blasca Berra's Group, the Valentine's Day event where he claimed back in 1987, I believe that he detected the magnetic monopole in our universe, and that was later had to be reanalyzed, and at least the claim, it wasn't a blunder. It was just not as significant as...

I think Galane Maxwell has the other one. Yes, that's right. They're sneaking around, trading between different places on planet Earth. But what do you make about these particles? Is there a way to... I mean, so here's an opportunity. Geometric Unity, you know, can we say, how would these fit in to the geometric unity framework?

Invite me to a physics department. I will. You already have an invitation. So we have thought... But this is the issue, which is that I'm... I live so far off of your grid that I'm not going to seminars. I'm not discussing the stuff with people. So I don't really know how to answer that,

but I can show you what the representations are, what the equations are, what the Lagrangians are. And, you know, in large measure, what holds me up from this sort of saying is this issue about the tailoring. which is I don't want to get into a war about the tailor. Well, you said it's this and actually you forgot a factor of, you know, Yeah. Eye over two.

No, you, but. But I've played with these guys before and I can't. I don't think you have. I actually have to challenge you there. I think you're painting all physicists, including my brethren and sister in experimental physics with the same brush that may or may not be justified. Okay. So great.

So what I would like is I would like a full-throated acknowledgement of work in economics engaged theory from. Mr. Juan Maldesana. It would be my pleasure because I'm a huge fan of Wans and I'm not a detractor of Wans. To have that held up as the credit that should have gone to myself and Pia Malani. And your wife.

Yes, I know that, but I have no control over that. But I do have control over. No, I understand that. I'm just trying to say, you want to talk about the, you know, when I submitted certain work at Harvard, which was peculiar to dimension 8, one of the things was, well, if you can't solve this on the octonianic projected plane, then it's nothing.

And, well, the octonianic projected plane is Dimension 16. So I've played various games of gotcha and Simon says. And what you're looking at is somebody who is mature, but also is traumatized and traumatized specifically by the nonsense of these games. So I would love to participate. I would love to play. but in part what it means is I will not be playing the game like you know people always love to say Hilbert you know and Einstein weren't a race for the equation they were not if Einstein and Grossman's first paper was all that we had and he never put anything else in it it would still be general

relativity due to Einstein and Grossman so I'm going to push back on your pushback and I'm saying no the field really has a problem with credit and attribution that was 116 years ago But I will say... And it's gotten worse since then. In a theory, I can't speak to that. I agree with you in principle, because I have seen nastiness. Maybe it's unique to UC San Diego, which has produced such luminaries as your enemy, Dr. Garrett Lise. He's not my enemy.

He's my arch nemesis. Sorry. We love Garrett here. And he's a good friend. Hopefully come on the podcast soon as well. But I want to talk about, you know, this notion. There is a difference between the experts. Let me just get back to what.

It would be a great pleasure to see to have the Anita experiments translated from an experimental finding having to do with things apparently coming through the surface of the earth, yada, yada, yada, into bundle geometric language. And I can come some of the way towards experimental. But, you know, I don't know, maybe that requires me being somewhere for a week in constant dialogue. And I don't think I've done that since I've been at the Perimeter Institute, you know, I don't know, almost a decade ago. Oh, yeah, we're a 90-minute, you know, train right away. So, but let me say this. I had a conversation with none other than Sir Roger Penrose, who's been on your podcast, and I take it as somewhat of an inspiration to you as he is to me.

And he sat down, and he told me, I believe that your bicep results were correct, that you did detect B-Modes. And they just weren't from inflation. You know, he has a theory called the conformal cyclic cosmological model that features. and inflationless, you know, aeon system of aons, cycling back and forth between different eras, aeons, as he calls them. And he pointed out evidence being, you know, these so-called hawking points that he claims were discovered in our maps. And he pointed to the images that we produced and the publication held the great fanfare in 2014. And I stopped them and I said, Roger, those are basically, you know, PR shots. Those are, those have zero scientific content

within them. Anything that you find in it what I would take to be almost a falsification of your theory that these exist because these are highly processed and none of the details, it's just basically like a sketch. Like if I released an artist's sketch of a criminal, it's no more or less

credible than the, you know, than basically a computer generated image. It's just publicity. And he said to me these wonderful, you know, words basically like, oh, well then I have to reevaluate that, but I, you know, could it be possible that this other element, magnetic Fields survived, not that black holes. And so it launched a wonderful discussion. And he's, you know,

82-year-old guy. And he wants to come here and he is coming here on an annual basis. And we talk about this and he's open to, and he's done an experimentalist. And I don't think he's in the orthodoxy, although he's at a level of renown that you have to take him seriously. And so again, I just want to say, don't tar and feather all physicists because I think there is something. Obviously, you know I'm friends with Stefan. Yeah. I've spoken very highly of Juan of Edwitten. Edwitten, Nima Arkani Ahmed, David Kaplan, the University of Maryland. That's not what the problem. The problem has to do with when something goes wrong. There's this sort of like, oh, yeah, yeah, that happens all the time. It happened to me when I was a young guy. Like, there's such a lot. It's like being in

Nigeria talking about corruption. Love people, like people, but it's endemic to the field. And it has to do with there not being enough resources and not enough success. And

my standards are very different. Like, you know, if you imagine that you're a hot chick in an office in the 1950s, you know, and you're getting patted on your on your ass when you walk down the hallways

and you try to imagine a modern woman having a reaction to that kind of a culture. Yes, there are all sorts of things that are normal and supposedly good people are engaged in them because the norms are all shifted. Well, in a world in which nobody's really apologized for string theory except for maybe Dan Free Dan at an appropriate level

and all of the things that happened as a result of it, the community is in an unhealthy state. I'm not tarring all individuals I'm trying to say that when this is over, we will look back on a lot of this, the way we look back on Jeffrey Chu and the bootstrap method. This is a very weird period, and for some reason, I'm not under its spell.

And, you know, people say, well, you know, of course everything was very promising in 1984 with the anomaly cancellation. Well, no, it wasn't. It wasn't then. It wasn't in the 90s with the second string theory. I mean, lots of interesting things came out of it. But the point is, no, it was always nonsense.

It was always crazy. It was always a madness. And it had to do with the fact the field hasn't succeeded. And that too many people have concentrated power. And the people who had, you know, how would you go up against an Ed Witten and say, actually, even though you're so brilliant, I still think you're wildly off. And David Gross, even though you're so accomplished, I think you're incorrect. these issues, or Joe Polchinski, if you make the argument that everything is string theory after the fact, well, can you imagine putting your hard work into something that no matter what you do,

they're going to claim it and they're telling you ahead of time? All of these things have to do with the need to clean up the field. And I just wanted to be very clear that I am both its biggest proponent and critic. And if you want to think about it as Trottinger's enthusiast, that's what I am. Okay, well, good. I know you're super busy, but I can't resist if you'll indulge me. No. Because it's so rare I get to chat with you, and it's so much fun to talk to you.

I got to tell you, I was thrilled and pleased as punch, that you were going to take neither a booster approach nor let's teach them a lesson approach. So I want to say that there's not a lot I would want to put on a jacket for, but this was important. Okay, great. Well, I'll definitely be citing that quote on repeat, playing it for my children and friends. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu.

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