Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 1: Eric Weinstein: Geometric Unity...REVEALED! (#135)

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Eric Weinstein, host of the Portal Podcast, reveals Geometric Unity, his provocative new Theory of Everything. First discussed in 2013, later explored on the Joe Rogan Experience and Lex Fridman’s podcast, I am delighted Eric revealed the published version FIRST on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. Thanks to today’s sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs! Visit linkedin.com/impossible to post your job ad for FREE! Get a copy of the paper at https://GeometricUnity.org See this Collection of Videos in Support of Geometric Unity https://pullthatupjamie.com Watch Weinstein’s April Fool’s 2020 episode of The Portal, where he explains aspects of his theory of Geometric Unity: https://youtu.be/Z7rd04KzLcg Watch Eric Weinstein’s latest interview on The Joe Rogan Experience: Harvard suppressed me: https://youtu.be/l1jTUhwWJYA and the Wuhan theory here https://youtu.be/6hrd9Z4gUL4 See Eric Weinstein on Lex Friedman’s podcast https://youtu.be/ifX_JnBfxTY https://youtu.be/wf0_nMaQ6tA 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein & Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe & review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Artwork: Sloan Sobie Research: Nick Daigler Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to part one of this special two-part episode of Into the Impossible. Sit back or rather lean forward as our intrepid host, Professor Brian Keating, has an in-depth discussion with Eric Weinstein about his controversial theory of geometric unity. Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinction from magic. A longtime friend of the campus, a friend of this cosmologist, a friend of this cosmologist, a friend of physics. And that is none other than Dr. Eric Weinstein, who today is joining us from an undisclosed location, but maybe we'll get into that. We have already 114 people watching with many thumbs up. One thumbs down for my mother. Mom, how could you do that? That's wrong,

Mom. Don't do that. Just to me, she says, not to you. Eric, how are you doing today? I'm well, Brian. Good to be with you. It's great to be. with you. It's been four months exactly, or three months exactly, since we last conversed via this medium when we had on our mutual friends, Max Tagmark and Garrett Leasy. And that was, of course, very enjoyable for me to go over this, go over some of the longstanding questions I've been having in this exploration of the multiverse of brilliant minds that grace me with their presence on the Into the Impossible podcast. I have been not a stranger to the work that you've been working on. Some say it is the work of a lifetime. Some say it is revolutionary and could have tremendous implications. Some have

questions about it because of its far-reaching implications. And we're talking about universal theories of everything, perhaps a new one created by today's guest, Eric Weinstein. And that goes by the moniker geometric unity. And I've been fascinated with this ever since I heard about it probably 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago now. And today I thought it would be fun to get Eric on the show as he has promised to at least be interested in coming on to discuss recent developments that the listenership of this spine podcast would be interested to know.

And as you know, Eric, we go deep. So first of all, I want to say thank you. And I want to ask you, what is new in the theories of everything's space? In particular, we're hearing a lot of talk nowadays from people like Michi Okaku, who will be a guest on my podcast next week, about the God equation. And my first question to you, which is always of interest to me personally, is why does a theory of physics have anything to say about God or any relevance to God whatsoever, before we get into the nitty-gritty details? Well, there are two things I think that are up, which are, one is man's rigorous attempt to understand his circumstance necessarily intersects you with God, which is a traditional explanation for why is everything here. And the other is that God sells.

And part of the problem is that if you name something, the really important particle that we just discovered, that's not going to sell as many books as the God. particle and so we want to know God's thoughts we want God particles and then we back away from them we claim no no I didn't mean God particle I meant God damn particle and this is a game that we play with the public where we try to amp the public up and get them hot and bothered and once they're sufficiently in a lather we try to educate them about the real nature of the universe so think about it from a computer perspective is syntactic sugar we're pouring God all over something, hoping that people will swallow them.

And of course, I'm holding up on the screen right now. In my screen, I'm sharing a highlighted section from that great work of literature, known as a brief history of time. And this was one of the books that got me interested in cosmology and astronomy by the late great Stephen Hawking, who passed away exactly three years ago on Einstein's birthday, on Pye Day, at least here in the United States, the 14th of March. By the way, do you know what other famous figure he shares his demise date with Eric? I don't.

A Jewish intellectual by the name of Karl Marx. So Carl had an impact on universal capitalism. And Einstein, of course, was born that day. And Hawking died that day. And in the final paragraph of the book, he says, if we can discover, if we can all have part in a final theory, then we shall all philosophers. scientist and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of the question of

why is it that we in the universe exist? If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason for then we would know the mind of God. And as you said, these things sell. It was rumored that he said every equation cuts your audience readership in half. Every mention of God doubles it. So at some level there's conservation here. I was always taught with physics is not for why questions. And yet, there it is. He's bringing up why questions. What do you make of that? Can physics provide the why? I feel like when you are talking in these terms, you are reasonably confident that the person is not trying to read the mind of God because one wouldn't trifle with God in such a way. I believe that in some sense, if you really worry that the telephone

is connected. You'd probably speak about this differently. You might be humorous. You might, I don't know. There's something about the fact that we talk in this way, and it feels to me like when Moses is seeing a bush that is not consumed by flame, but appears to be in flame, he knows pretty well that you should be a little careful. And I just, I don't understand the impulse to constantly godify everything.

And certainly I'll have on Michi Okaku next week on the end of The Impossible Podcasts. And I hope maybe we'll get a cameo from you. But in his book, he writes something very provocative. And he says at the end of his book, he quotes those lines from Stephen Hawking, which is kind of like this infinite regress, which I, you know, kind of strange credulity, so to speak. But he says, at one point, he says, it's not fair to test string theory, to ask to test string theory experimentally, because we don't know its final principles. But the same I claim could have been said about quantum mechanics. Do we know the final principles of quantum mechanics?

Does that immunize it from experimental test? Again, these are the same questions over and over again. There's something very wrong about the simplistic nature of the scientific matter. method and the relationship between experiment and theory and instance and idea. And we're effectively playing through the exact same set of problems where we hold up one theory to some sort of experimental threshold. We give a pass to another theory. And we're all the time pretending that we're not actually doing what we're really doing,

which is observing who believes in what theory. One of the reasons string theory got such a boost is that the brilliance of the initial volunteers for the first string revolution around 1984 were so good that we were inclined to give them a huge pass, at least at first. And then we have this differential application where the string theory has become paradoxically the most persnickity about what is a prediction because they don't want to give up the fact that they aren't really making predictions. And so if you, for example, predict internal quantum numbers of the next particles to be found,

but you don't come up with an energy threshold and you don't say what will invalidate your theory, they get angry because, in fact, what we've done is we've given them an asymmetric relationship with the scientific method through special pleading. So we have a really unfortunate situation, which is that we have highly simplistic paparians, highly simplistic devotees of the scientific method. And I really think that people need to go back to Dirac's 1963 Scientific American article to understand that the real issue is very weird. And we haven't really talked about it.

There were three big names in the 20th century in my mind who contributed something like physical law. And leaving Dr. Mills out of it for the moment, I would say that Einstein, Dirac, and Yang tower, not necessarily that there were the best physicists, although I think I could make a pretty good claim in all three cases, but that physical law is different than the consequences of physical law. And the people who seem to do well with physical law employ mechanisms that would drive Sabine Hassanfelder to distraction. They talk a lot about beauty and elegance and simplicity. What Daraq said was that don't force people who come up with new physical, laws to play the game of agreement with experiment because the instance of an idea can easily be off and not agree with experiment.

And then you have a problem whereby you're pushing people initially, the instant you open your mouth, say what it is that would invalidate your theory, so we'll know that you're wrong if you're wrong. And I don't know who this is intended to fool. It's completely irresponsible. And what it is is an attempt to constantly take anyone who would come forward with an idea and put them instantaneously on the defensive. And I think that the right thing to do is to sit people down and say, you're supposed to be adults.

And if we look at our history, everybody who's proposed new physical law and gotten it right, had errors. Einstein didn't get the divergence-free part. He was vague before that with Grossman. Famously, Dirac's theory of quantum electrodynamics took almost 20 years before the renormalization revolution supplied the ability to compute with it. We had a confusion between the bear and the dressed mass,

and famously the degeneracy in, well, between the electron and the proton, We had two particles. We claimed that Dirac claimed to be anti-particles because he was too timid to suggest a positron and an antiproton, which highs the mass asymmetry. Yang's theory, if left massless, wouldn't come up with the right rates for beta decay if you didn't impart mass to the W&Z to the intermediate vector boson. So I think that you have a situation by which new ideas are always. not properly instantiated. I think that the idea is that people are foolish enough to play this game with the most

aggressive members of the community because the implication is if you won't come up with a testable prediction that invalidates your theory, you're anti-scientific, we have no time for this. And so people, like, you know, at the SU5 theory, they immediately said, okay, well, it predicts proton decay. Well, grand unification is a larger idea, and some versions and instantiations do predict proton decay and some do not. So, you know, what are you going to say about that? I think that the problem is, is that we're not in an adult phase where we faced up to the fact that we have almost 50 years

of stagnation. And what you're seeing with this proliferation of new claimants to have fundamental theories is in part that string theory has finally weakened itself and the aging of the particular cohort, which is baby boomers, who are the string theory proponents, they've gotten weak enough that effectively other people feel emboldened. And I think, you know, Stephen Wolfram said this recently, that in a previous area, he would have expected to have been attacked. But we've been waiting around for so long that perhaps the political economy of unification and wild ideas has changed someone. And before we get off the subject of the why questions, I do like a framework that I've heard you and almost no one besides you portray laws of fundamental physics.

And that's using the good old-fashioned mechanism. We were all taught in high school journalism, the 5W approach. And I wonder if we could start there with why that is a good deconstructivist approach. to ascertaining the realm of validity of a physical law, of a purported new theory, a theory of everything, which I dislike that moniker, as you know. But nevertheless, can you talk about that framework and how, for our up-and-coming but bright listeners, of which there are many, currently watching right now, how you approach that using the five Ws, why that's so important, and then maybe that will segue into a description of the actual physical instantiation of that framework.

I will point out that how has the W on the end. Yeah, I think that I usually do it as where and when, who and what, how and why. And let's just say, first of all, what we generally speaking mean by a theory. What we're usually talking about is a way in which waves can propagate and interact in various media. The theories of the world are theories of waves and interaction. Waves imply media. So the where and when is sort of a particular kind of a substrate usually, which Einstein imbued with the name space time, where being space when being time. The who and the what I take to be

fractional spin and integral spin particles. Every particle that we know of that's fundamental is one or the other. So let's say that the what is the fermionic fractional spin particles and the who is the integral spin, generally speaking, force particles, non-gravitational. But then we also have to throw in the Higgs and the metric for spin-zero and spin-2. And then there's the how and the y, which would be the how would be the equations of motion, and the Y would be the Lagrangian that generates the equations of motion. And so in some sense, it's not surprising then that a theory has to conform to the basic idea of when you're trying to tell somebody something. These are the questions that we want to ask.

And it's a surprisingly tight mapping. And I just find that people can better remember that. Because very often what we've done is we've taught people to focus on the wrong things when we talk about fundamental physics. They're overly focused on entanglement. They're very focused on quantum measurement. They have no idea about bundles. They don't have ideas about symmetry groups or why symmetry groups are important. And so for some reason, when people learn about theories of everything, they're very animated,

but they're very animated as to the grounds of what has sold books recently. That's right. We have no shortage of multiverses, double-slit experiments, spooky action at a distance, and other invocations of this gentleman. I point out that Einstein is Weinstein with a W. Okay, you have a fascination with Ws, obviously. So I want to go starting with Einstein to something that I know is very influential to you,

and it's sort of a provocative question that has inspired you, apparently. And that was a question, a stylized, question posed to Ernst Strauss by Albert Einstein regarding the amount of freedom present in our field theoretic universe. What is that question? Well, the question is how much freedom is there in what we take to be the standard model, and that's our, I'm using a term of art accidentally, how much freedom is there to construct a universe? And is this one of many that could have been? constructed or is it effectively unique? Are we talking about the God concept, if you will, as a design

constraint where things are the way they are because they could not be otherwise? And I think that, you know, this is a very, it's a very interesting question because in some sense, I don't know that he meant it this way, but I took it to be a research program. And in terms of it providing this direction for you, is the question itself the research direction, or is the overarching theme of sort of freedom, flexibility within physical laws, the programmatic, you know, kind of marching orders that you took unto yourself? It's an interesting question. I mean, I think that what I don't understand is that people talk about theories of everything casually as if a theory of everything is sort of, It may not be a very artful term. It's sort of theories of all the rules, not what can be played once one knows all the rules.

I guess what I take it to mean is that we have a problem of even conceiving of what a non-effective theory would be. What is an ultimate theory? I mean, I think that, you know, in large measure, I see two kind of canonical versions. One of them I would sort of associate with Garrett Lise's EA idea, although I don't believe that that works. You start with something incredibly rich that exists by necessity, like a large exceptional league group or maybe a large finite group or something that is somehow distinguished. And then you attempt to milk it for peculiarities that can be identified with our world, and that's how you get the richness of our world. Whether or not you believe in Garrett's theory, I do think it's emblematic of an approach. Another approach is sort of closer to embryology, where you start with something that is deceptively simple, like a single fertilized egg.

And then you ask, does that attempt, in some sense, to bootstrap itself into the totality of existence? And that's much closer to what I ended up doing. I considered Garrett's EAD thing before I ever met Garrett because E8 is spinorial, it's chiral, it has lots of stylized things that seem to fit our world, but I couldn't figure out how to really make it into a theory. And then I went the other direction. I think it's pointless to ask why is there something rather than nothing, unless I'm mistaken. I think that the point of a fundamental theory is to get the scientists to accept the initial

input is so uninteresting to go beyond that they put down their pens and the theologians and philosophers take over. And you imagine that the initial input to the universe is just four dimensions, for example. I don't think that many scientists would be motivated to say, why are there four dimensions at a scientific level? Because that sort of begs the, it's not enough of a clue. for anything to proceed scientifically. I mean, maybe all versions of multiple dimensions. Maybe there's 17 dimensions, too. So I think that in large measure,

the gambit that I've tried to follow, as misguided as it sounds, is four dimensions on its own in the form of a manifold with a few extra mild conditions, like a single unique spin structure or something like that. orientable. Is a nice four-dimensional manifold sufficient to start

the universe from effectively no other major assumptions? And that's how crazy this is. So when you say this, we're talking about geometric unity. A reminder, we're talking to Eric Weinstein, Dr. Eric Weinstein, proprietor of the portal podcast.

And you can find his YouTube channel at Nobani 88, which is a cryptic reference. to the year I had my first kiss. I don't know why it's called that, but it should be the portal. We'll get that fixed. Eric, in the meantime, could you tilt your webcam down just a tiny bit so your head is not at the bottom of the frame? That would make it.

Yes, very good, very nice. So what is fundamental? I've had these conversations just recently on my podcast with Dr. Stephen Meyer, who you know is a proponent of the intelligent design hypothesis. I'm not going to get into that. I am a critic of that, and we are yet good friends. But, you know, he makes the case in things like the Gooth, the Lincoln conjecture, or in the Lawrence Krauss universe from nothing.

We always start with the laws of nature and an instantiation thereof. So, too, with debates I've had with Sean Carroll, a friend of mine and a greatly respected mentor in the field, that God could have chosen to start the universe with an empty Hilbert space, is his conjecture, and therefore there's a simpler universe and then when we inhabit. We're not going to talk about Sean necessarily. We're not going to talk about Stephen Meyer. But I want to talk about what is the fundamental element, the Yelm, the thing from which emerges space time, or is the space time or obsevers, if we can go there now?

Is that truly fundamental, or is it emergent? What comes first, the observer's or the observer? Well, first of all, I mean, let me just say a few words. What we're talking about is crazy. I think it's really important to just own up to the fact that for people who want sober physics, this is probably not the channel for you today. Now, no, I mean, I take this stuff very seriously because I don't like the bullshity aspect. And we're using April 1st as a contrivance because I think that many,

people are induced to self-inhibit because particular members of the community are incredibly aggressive in making it extremely expensive to explore ideas. And I'd like to think that living outside the community, I could start a tradition to make it at least inexpensive one day a year to throw the middle finger to those people who like to play Simon Says games or reputational destruction games. Now, a purge, a purge for physics. Well, there should be many more such days, and I'd love to get there, but let's at least start with one a year. So this is my second year round trying to hit this.

Look, I believe at some level that the initial ingredient may just be a four-dimensional manifold, and then things emerge from that. and a four-dimensional manifold with a little bit of extra structure. But that's why this is crazy. So it starts from very modest inputs, and from such modest inputs comes a rather extravagant universe. And let's talk about the inputs. And I don't know how closely you want to follow

if you want to share screens or anything like that. We're free to do that. What are the inputs? There are the players, the matter players, there are the gauge bosons. There are new predictions. There are new concepts that geometric unity has provided. And so the question, I guess first of all,

is how close do we want to follow this prescription of what has been portrayed in the past? Or do we want to talk about what is new in the preceding year since the last episode of April? Fool's Purge podcasting began with the Portal special episode? Well, you know, it's very interesting to consider that we've had a year where there's been a fair amount of interest in it. And let's be honest, very little of the interest has been particularly detailed.

I would have thought that maybe what I said was un-understandable, and then oddly a paper purporting to critique the theory managed to demonstrate that they had understood fairly well what I had said and that it was understandable. Unfortunately, there was one named author and a imaginary friend, and I don't respond well to people posing behind pseudonyms. So effectively, what I'm asking is, can a manifold X4 produce the Baroque structure of the standard model?

Now, in gravity, and if you think back to the famous mug popular in the CERN gift shop, there really isn't that much going on in the standard model if you group terms in particular ways. But there's a lot of weirdness. Why the Lorentz group? Why, SU3 cross, SU2, cross U1 for the internal symmetries generating the forces, Y3 families. And I thought that's something that many younger viewers may not be aware of. of is that things really changed around 1983, 84. And if you think about the original anomaly cancellation of Green and Schwartz in 1984, I believe,

you could ask, what was physics like right before that moment? And I think it's absolutely shocking because we don't realize the extent to which the string theorists really redefined what the major process. problems in physics were. I think most people in the post-string era somehow believe that the major issue is quantum gravity. And I don't really, I just find it astounding because that's really what the string theorists were selling. So this is from Murray Gelman's address to the second Shelter Island Conference, where they were trying to recapture the magic from Ramshead Inn after World War II when the young physicists were invited to, you know, you know, feeling that they had done well on the engineering project that was the Manhattan project. They were buoyed in their confidence. And, you know, years later in 1983, Murray Galman

says, well, what are the big problems? As usual, solving the problems of one era has shown up the critical questions for the next. The first ones that come to mind looking at the standard theory of today are. And then I think this is absolutely shocking. And it indicates the extent to which the current generation has really given up on doing what we would typically have called physics, um, relegating the things that are relevant to the physical universe that we see, usually to the realm of particle phenomenology. Um,

okay, so what are these big questions? Why this particular structure for the families in particular, why flavor chiral with left and right handed particles being treated differently by the weak force rather than say vector like which left and right are transformable into being treated the same? Next, why three families? That generalizes Robbie's famous question. Who worded that as if the universe was a Jewish deli?

Comment on the muon. How many sets of Higgs bosons are there? We talk about the Higgs boson, but maybe there are multiple sets, and there are multiple different scales at which symmetry is broken and mass is imparted through soft mass mechanisms. Lastly, why SU3 cross SU2 cross U1? Remember, SU3 is the color force for the strong force, but SU2 here is a weak isospin, which has not yet become the W&Z, and this U1 is weak hypercharged,

which has not yet become electromagnetism through symmetry breaking. And in some sense, I just feel sort of sad that we don't think of these as questions because we know not to ask them, and somehow we got convinced that we were being called to quantize gravity, not necessarily if gravity is geometric, you could just as easily have said should we be geometrizing the quantum? And if we had geometrised the quantum, you would notice that this era would have been triumphant because that's really what happened. We didn't do a lot of physics, but we really did put the framework of physics, that is quantum field theory, quantum measurement, classical field theory.

all in very geometric frameworks. In fact, I would say that there were three really big revolutions, although we don't talk in these terms. One was the discovery by Simons and Yang of the Wu Yang dictionary, blanking on Wu's name, which is singer was also instrumental in taking to Oxford. Then there's the geometric quantization revolution, where the quantum was understood to be intrinsically geometric

because the Heisenberg uncertainty relations should emerge, from the curvature tensor of a pre-quantum line bundle, but the sections being the states of a vector space, once polarization is taken into account. And then lastly, the geometric quantum field theory revolution in which we came to understand the quantum field theory really isn't about the physical world, it gets applied in one particular set of inputs

to the physical world, but it's actually a mature mathematical enhancement of boardism theory from topology, strangely. So those three, three major revolutions all went exactly counter to quantized gravity. They said, let's geometrise the quantum instead, and so they did. And how successful should we regard the resulting byproduct or lack thereof, progress, lack thereof in the intervening? This is very unpleasant to have to say this, but I think that we are talking about a great era with heroes.

The top hero among them is undoubtedly Ed Witten. But I do believe that Yang and Simons, I think Yang and Simon's discovery of Erismanian bundle theory, which has a precursor, and I'm blanking on the gentleman's name, all the self-published books from the 60s, it'll come to me, but there was a man in Boston who probably got there a little bit earlier. And then I would say that, you know, you had accidental physicist.

Dan Quillen, for example, did a huge amount to talk about, you know, connections on determinate bundles and the like, which come out of various quantization procedures, particularly with Bersin integration of Fermion sectors. So I think that a lot of things got done to shore up what we do to mature input into a quantum theory. It just, it wasn't physics per se. It was sort of the mathematics of physics. And I think that that was very frustrating, which is, you know, it's sort of to physicists, it's yeoman's work.

They wanted to go to Stockholm. And they ended up, you know, winning the first Fields Medal won by a physicist. And I think it's weird. It's like, what is your time? Your time is whatever it is that can be done. And they thought their time was to quantize gravity. Well, guess again, nature said, we have something incredibly important. So I feel like I'm trying to rescue their legacy.

They want to go down as string theorists for the most part. And they want to say that string theory was the most successful of any claimant, even though it wasn't very successful. Now, can you say it's not? Go ahead. But yes, I feel like we can say that it's not very successful because they gave us the terms in which we should evaluate it. You know, I remember being told, give us 10 years, we'll have the whole thing cleaned up. Don't worry, you're pretty little head.

We'll be fine. You know, or we have a finite number of theories to check. And then lo and behold, there's a continuum. Or why is it called string theory when there are brains involved? And it was because if you ask once upon a time, they say, well, you know, it's not like math. mathematicians think about higher dimensional objects beyond strings. There was an explanation for why there were no brains. And, you know, that, yeah, string theory has failed in its own terms.

Now, is it solvable? Are there pivots beyond? Yeah, sure. I'm not saying that they didn't stumble on a tremendous amount of structure. Maybe that structure ultimately carries the day. But I do think that the idea that they're entitled to this many pivots, without having to become self-reflective is preposterous. And I think many people feel that way,

and they know that they might pay for such a statement with their career. And since I've prepaid, it falls to people like me and to you, perhaps, to say, look, the string theorists weren't able to confront their failure. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home.

With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. When we talk about these things and rather, you know, some say grandiose, terms. I think sometimes we do lose sight. I really don't want to use the word grandiose. Are we going to talk about grandiose unified theory?

Let's be honest about it. Physics is the most honest way to ask the most grand questions in the universe. If physics is grandiose, then we've got real problems. Then grand doesn't exist. And if grand doesn't exist, then grandiose doesn't exist. So my feeling is, no, this is the actual grand quest, and we're not going to back off it and be

pussies about it. This is not grandiose. This is the real deal. I was thinking of myself, being as self-aggrandizement of seeking these ultimate questions, but we do, and I was going to give physics a good deal of credit, because we do ask these ultimate questions. And yet, of course, a day-to-day basis, I remember wanting to help you out as a little role I could play in the exposition of this magnificent opus that you're working on and saying, you know,

like, Eric, this is great, but I got a bunch of kids. I got to go pick up. And you said, well, maybe that's why I will never get off the planet, you know, because guys and girls. Everybody has to pick up your dry cleaning. Every time you've got to pick up your dry cleaning, but when we lose sight of it, I find with my colleagues, and I'll speak, you know, because I doubt many of them are listening. I really don't feel like they're that curious intellectually.

I think it is a job. I think their job is the dry cleaning. And I can sort of prove that in some ways because I often hear them say things like, well, Eric is a showman. You know, he's a podcaster. He's a host, you know, and he's had training, and he's very smooth and he can speak well. And I say, do you think he emerged from the womb like that? And by the way, you do Mr. or Mrs. Professor, Dr. Dr. Professor, you got a lot of training in quantum field theory and string theory yourself. that was presumably a challenge for you.

You didn't emerge womb-like from the caverns of the womb knowing quantum filter. So you had to work at that. So it's all about prioritization. Why do you think physicists aren't more troubled by the lack of progress that our mutual friend Sabina has pointed out in the last 50 years, at least in fundamental physics? My colleagues will rightfully point out tremendous advances in cosmological theory, in condensed matter theory, et cetera. But why isn't that more troubling?

I think the answer is we're not that curious. You have a vision of us that's maybe more refined than I think we deserve, and that's because you're not a professional physicist. Look, you know, I feel very similar about my feelings about physics as an outsider to the way I view the UK. When I go to the UK very often, they seem to be defeated because they lost their empire, which they should never have had in the first place. But, you know, my feeling is if you really do.

really look at the UK. It's an amazing place. And any outsider should be able to see that. I guess what I think about here is that any outsider who really takes physics seriously should be able to see that this is our premier community, intellectually. It is the most accomplished of intellectual communities. And it's also very badly behaved and it's fallen on hard times. And, you know, it's like seeing a grand family that's forgotten itself because it has to constantly submit to the archive. And, you know, we now have the snarkive, as you know, and the snarkive is filled with papers that are indistinguishable as a Turing test from archive papers. I think I look for like, I don't know, the gelma, Nisha Jima formula on HEPTH. And I realized that people really weren't doing physics.

You know, there's certain things that you would have to do if you were going to do physics. And I don't mean to say that no physics is going on, but my God, it's really people that just don't believe anymore. I think that when you're talking about almost 50 years of a particular kind of failure in fundamental physics, where theories and predictions effectively become accepted as being the likely explanations for the universe, we're getting to the point where everybody who's contributed to the standard model after this, year will be over seven. What do you say to the younger people who say they can't understand it? They can't comprehend geometric unity, our friend, Sabina.

She can't understand it. Is it too complex for her? No, there's a bunch of different games. One game is the I can't understand all this fancy pants stuff. Another game is be hyper-specific so we can invalidate you. There's another game which is, well, we know that you don't know quantum field theory really well. So what energy level do these things kick in at? And I find all of this incredibly dispiriting and exhausting because it's also transparent.

We can say what geometric unity actually is. We can draw pictures. People can get it. In fact, I was talking to my good buddy Joe Rogan earlier today and a particular group of people who listen to my podcast, put up a site for Joe called pull that up jamie.com. And you want to navigate to pull that up jamie.com. In part, this is below Sabina's level. But I'm happy to, you know, if you got her on the horn, she could understand what's being said.

Yeah, I have no doubt about that. The question is, you know, when we talk in the language of bundles, of fibers, et cetera, at what level do people kind of lose the physics for the geometry, for the pure mathematical? And I think, yeah. Let's walk the first step, and then let's watch people who are technically capable claim that they can't follow what's going on, because I don't think it's true. So, you have XN from animals. and end dimensions. Make it orientable with a particular orientation, make it have a unique spin structure,

whatever you need to do to set it up as a decent manifold. Replace that manifold momentarily by the bundle of all metric tensors pointwise on the same space. In that way, space time would be a particular section of that bundle. So the first thing is that the obvious, observes versus replaces space time. And again, you're not trying to kill off Einstein. You're trying to recover Einstein from a different structure. I've got a four-dimensional manifold. Imagine that I'm interested in looking at the bundle of all pointwise metrics, which is going to be if the base space is four-dimensional, make four equal to N. It will be a dimension n squared plus three-end, divided by two. So four squared is 16 plus three N, three times four is 12. So 16 plus 12 is 28, divided by two is 14. If you have a one comma three metric downstairs, I believe that you are naturally courting a 7-7 or or 95 metric upstairs. And that is the first step.

in GU, which is that you replace a single space with one particular metric by a pair of spaces, a total space and a base space of a fiber bundle. This is in the strong form of GU. And physics mostly happens upstairs on the bundle of all metrics, not downstairs on the particular space that got you started. Here, U4 is an open set in X4. Okay. So effectively, what are we saying? We're saying that physics is going to dance on not only the space of four coordinates, typically X, Y, Z, and T, or thinking in a coordinate independent fashion, you know, simply four parameters, it's also going to dance on the space of rulers and protractors at every given point. And so that structure is the beginning of GU. And then, And you can recover Einstein space time by simply saying that if I have a section of that bundle, that's a space time metric. When you say in the simplest form or in the reduced form of GU, what do you mean? Well, I gave three forms of GU. One form is the trivial form in which you have the second space, Y,

the same as the first space X. That means that you can easily recover everything Einstein did as a form of geometric unity by trivially making the observers irrelevant. You're just repeating the same space twice, and you've got one map between them called the identity, and now you're back in your old world. So without loss of generality, you cover that. And another one is a completely general world,

which I think, whether we call it here, well, I called the middle one, the Einsteinian one, where you actually make the second space, why the space of metrics. And that's the one that I think is the most interesting, but I don't want to box myself in because I don't want to play these games of Simons. You said this, you see this.

I can play the lawyerly game as well as anyone, if that's what we were really trying to do. I thought we're trying to do physics. Right. The thing that I'm trying to get at here is that I believe you and I are somehow having a pullback of a 14-dimensional conversation right now. My guess is that there is a space with a 7-7 metric, probably more likely than a 9-5 metric on 14 dimensions where not only are the way. that are relevant going over the original coordinates X1 through X4. They're also going through four ruler coordinates on the tangent bundle of the original X coordinates.

So there are four rulers to measure the four directions. And then there are also going to be six protractors. Because if you name the directions, John, Paul, George, and Ringo, you'd have John with Paul, John with George, John with Ringo, Paul with George, Paul with Ringo, George with Ringo. George with Ringo, right? And so those six protractors are actually degrees of freedom

for the fields, and the fields live on that space. And then the question is, why do we perceive four dimensions and complicated fields? And the answer is pullbacks. When you have a metric, you have a map from the base space into the total space.

So Einstein, we don't think of it this way, is embedding a lifeless space, which is with that form, X4, into a 14-dimensional space before geometric unity ever even got on the scene and giving him the ability to pull back information, which he may say is only happening on that tiny little slice, that little filament that is the four-dimensional manifold swimming

in a 14-dimensional world with a 10-dimensional normal bundle. but why not imagine that actually the fields are actually spread out over all 14 dimensions and then all you're seeing is pullback information downstairs. Now the metric is doing something new that wasn't doing before. It's pulling back data that is natural to Y14 as if it was natural on X. but I call this invasive fields versus native fields, just because some species are invasive and some species are endemic or native.

The interesting thing about the bundle of all spinners, sorry, the bundle of all metrics, is that it almost has a metric on it. I don't know if I've ever heard anyone mention this. The space, repeat that, the space of all metrics has almost has a metric on it? Yeah, nearly. So in other words, well,

assume that you haven't chosen a metric on x4. What you have then is you have a 10-dimensional subspace along the fibers, which we can call the vertical space. And that 10-dimensional space at every point upstairs, every point is in fact a metric downstairs, speaking by construction, right? So that means that it imparts a metric on 10-dimensional

vectors along the fiber. Now those are symmetric two tensors effectively because it's a space of metrics. You have this really interesting space here. Call that V. Well, that V has a Frobenius metric based on the particular metric at which you are looking at the tangent space, which has got a 10-dimensional subspace picked out. If you map that 10-dimensional subspace into the 14-dimensional tangent space of, of the manifold Y14,

you can take a quotient and call that H. And that H will also have a metric. Yeah. Because it's isomorphic to the dual of the pullback of the cotangent bundle downstairs, and the cotangent bundle has a metric because at that point that you picked in Y14 is itself a metric downstairs.

So now you've got a metric on V. You've got a metric on H star, and you just don't know how, H-star becomes the complement to V&T. That's the only piece of data you're missing for a metric. So you've got a four metric, you've got a 10 metric. The 10 metric is sitting inside of the tangent bundle. The four metric is naturally sitting inside of the cotangent bundle.

They're weirdly complementary. You've got a metric on the nose but for one piece of data, which we call a connection. So up to a connection, the manifold Y-14 has a metric on it without ever having chosen a metric because it's made out of metric data. Now, spinners have a really interesting property, which I would call an exponential property.

That is, the spinner of a direct sum is the tensor product of the spinners on the sum ends. That's not true for any spin, is that true for any spin or just half integer? Well, that's true for any, no, it's true for the spin representation. It's not true in generically for any representation. I see. But it allows you to build the spinners on what should be the total space because now you've got a four-dimensional. So I think it's here at 3.12. If the spinners of a sum are the tensor products of the spinners on the sum hands,

and I create a new bundle, which is the 10-dimensional vertical bundle inside the tangent bundle, directs some, the four-dimensional bundle inside the co-tangent bundle, then the spinners on that thing, which is isomorphic, and in fact semi-canonically isomorphic to both the tangent bundle and the cotangible model being chimeric.

It's isomorphic, but it's not canonically, it's not fully canonically. It's only semi-canonically. So spinners on that will be identifiable with the spinners on why, as soon as you have a connection that completes this and makes it fully canonically isomorphic.

So take home message. There is a spin bundle up on the bundle of all metrics, which is nearly the spinners on the tangent bundle that exists without making a metric choice. And if you're really serious about quantum gravity, you should be very freaked out about the idea that once you quantize the metric, you've got a whole lot of pain because the electron and the hadron bundles and all the spin one half matter. the medium in which these particles are disturbances or excitations doesn't really exist in the absence of a metric choice. If you allow the metric to become quantum and allow it to blink out, the spin one, spin zero, and spin two particles may be indeterminate between observations. but the bundle itself, the medium, is indeterminate between fermionic, between observations of the metric for fermions. So now you're in a really different conceptual world. Everybody should want to free fermion bundles from dependence on the metric if they're serious about letting the metric blink out in some supposed quantum gravity regime.

Let me ask you about that for a second. So it seems like this is a huge, you know, huge if true, I always like. to say. Well, we say that, but I don't know whether I just, like, missed that one hell of a meeting. I just don't understand why everybody isn't worried about it. So this is huge, right? This is, what you're saying is that you can get spinners. If I haven't made a boneheaded mistake. Well, this is where I'm going to. I don't think you have, but I'm just a simple experimental cosmologist, okay? I traffic in nuts and bolts of cosmological experiments, telescopes, as you know, detectors and fields. I am out of my doubt.

in many cases. But this struck me like a freaking thunderbolt, that you are deriving essentially spinners can be defined without choosing a metric. That is new. I don't think that any critic, any anonymous pseudonymous or an anonymous person can really criticize that. I mean, that's just a fact. So why wouldn't, if it's not true, it would be, you know, almost surprising. But if it is true, why haven't physicists noticed this before? And why aren't they making, a bigger deal out of it. Partially it might be your fault because you haven't published this. Please join us for part two of this special edition of Into the Impossible on Geometric Unity with Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Hello, I'm Stuart Volko, producer of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Keating, please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, reading and leaving reviews. It really helps keep our universe expanding. We appreciate hearing from you and read every review and comment. We're always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. And join our premieres every Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time for live chats. Follow Brian on Twitter, Medium, and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating. For free access to exclusive content, please visit Professor Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com.

Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. For more information on the Arthur C. Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu.