Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - (part 1): Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein in Conversation (#106)

Episode Date: January 1, 2021

Max Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. Check out his new center at MIT: https://iaifi.org Find him on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/mtegmark Watch Max’s appearance on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast in 2020 discussing Theories of Everything: https://youtu.be/3MX8EpvLwao Eric Weinstein, host of the Portal will share insights from Geometric Unity and thoughts on the meaning of it all! Find Eric at https://www.youtube.com/c/EricWeinsteinPhD/ Watch Eric’s previous debate with Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/OI0AZ4Y4Ip4 Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek  Jill Tarter  Eric Weinstein Sir Roger Penrose  Juan Maldacena’s First Podcast Interview Jim Simons Sara Seager Venus Life Noam Chomsky Sabine Hossenfelder Sarah Scoles Stephen Wolfram ‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is interstingial for magic. But welcome to Dr. Brian Keating's rockin' New Year's Eve with two of my good friends, Max Tagmark, Eric Weinstein. Guys, I can't thank you enough for joining us today. We're going to have a fun conversation to end. It's really been like a fun year for everybody, right? Nothing bad has happened this year. Where are you guys? Same old.

Where are you guys weathering, weathering the storm that, has been 2020. Max, where are you currently joining us from? I have home and the great metropolis of Winchester, Massachusetts. Ah, Winchester. And Eric, where are you joining us from today? An undisclosed location somewhere in Los Angeles. Those are the scariest ones of all. When I was a kid, in New Year's Eve, we'd watch pro wrestling, you know, which is maybe a moniker. I don't know how professional you need to be. But anyway, it would always be the scariest wrestlers were from parts unknown.

Like, they don't know where, like the guy didn't put it on his resume where he's from. Well, the undertaker can't be from Middlebury, Connecticut. That's right. He has a small candle shop and he does some scrimshaw in there. But, boys, we are here. You guys were last gracing my presence this summer together, at least, although you were separated in time when my channel partnered with PBS Spacetime Studios, Matt O'Dowd and his team, on a discussion of theories of everything.

And we had two live streams over the summer. I'll put links to those in the notes box below. But since then, you both have been involved in some really interesting kind of side hustles, I think. And I think the audience would be appreciative if we could talk about how things have gone since that summertime show a pair of suarez where I should say, you two were not on the screen at the same time. But so today was the chance for three men to enter. And then, no, no, there'll only be, all three of us will exit because we have New Year's Eve, plans tonight. Max, what have you been up to since this summer's theory of everything,

Shinday? Well, aside from some remote teaching and torturing MIT freshmen with physics, I've been spending a lot of time on this attempt to make our news a little bit less lousy. I think we have such amazing opportunities to do great things as a species, as long as we we actually have a clear idea of what's actually going on. I think things have gotten a pretty notably worse on that front in recent years, partly because media has gone online and put so many traditional journalists out of work. And even more importantly, because just machine learning algorithms have started to create these filter bubbles and new tools for manipulating people to be a really, quite poorly informed of what's happening.

And the basis of doing good things in science is always step one, you know, figure out where you are. Yeah. And Eric, what about you? This has been a very peaceful season, I'm sure, in your corner of America. What have you been thinking about ruminating on? Well, in part, I've been trying to get past the election. I actually, because I've been politically active,

I'm very concerned, as Max seems to be, about the news, but also the way the meta news and our integration into the news is working. And I'm particularly distressed about the attempt to control intellectual thought as if it is subversive, you know, undermining of the country with everyone picking on either Russia or China or some nefarious group, the Trump family. And the idea being that if we will just trust, you know, the Washington Post or Dr. Fauci or Mitch McConnell, everything will be okay. don't and I don't trust YouTube and I don't trust Google I don't trust things that I can't talk about and so I'm particularly distressed about the idea that we're entering an era in which

things are so serious that we have the we have an obligation to get people who disagree with consensus off the air because they are subversive because I don't know how we make pro if we can't tell the difference between cranks mavericks heterodox thinkers geniuses and all of that stuff we are toast and it's imagine if we said that Max Tagmark overnight can't show up to his office at MIT because, in fact, he's producing harmful conversation. I just can't imagine that all of our institutions other than Trader Joe's and maybe Coinbase have capitulated. I'm so glad to hear you say this, actually.

It's very refreshing because Richard Feynman, you know, is one of my superheroes. to say that the essence of science is don't trust anybody, you know, not even yourself and your own your own prejudices, right? And science had to fight really, really hard to get this ability to start challenging everybody. If Galileo tweeted that, hey, the sun is actually not revolving around the earth, and then the Pope's fact checkers say, fact check, this violates community guidelines, it's actually the sun going around the earth. That would not have gone so great. And in fact, the 1600s version of that kind of happened to Galileo. We fought so hard against for this freedom, a scientist, to have everybody count equally. And yet here we are now.

You know, if you're in China and there is a government that tells you this is what the truth is. If you're in North Korea, you have a government that tells you what the truth is. And now somehow it's a good idea to try to have, I think there's a lot of good intent behind the fact checking today. But if you say that there's some committee at some big corporation that has a monopoly of what's saying what's true, that's exactly the opposite of what we've learned from science all these times. In science, there is no, we acknowledge it it's hard to figure out what the truth is, right? That's why we didn't want the Pope to say it or Kim Jong-un. My papers get refereed by random other scientists, right, not by some appointed committee at a company. Right.

And I think that, you know, in some ways, and yet it moves is the original harmful conversation. And you can imagine if the Pope put a little tagline under it saying, This claim is disputed by experts everywhere. The key thing is understanding the difference between mavericks, cranks, and what I've called Knarks. And of course, Mac, because you're Swedish, you'll appreciate the word Knark, which is crank spelled backwards. And they sit at the center of our establishment, and they do cranky things from the chairs

of greatest respectability. And it's very important to me that Knarkey behavior be distinguished from cranking. behavior be distinguished from heterodox behavior. And I wanted to plug Max's effort, FQXI, which is an attempt at non-cranky heterodox thinking in physics and now beyond. And it's the leading organization. It's sort of analogous to the Institute for New Economic Thinking in the economics field. Of course, the Perimeter Institute was founded in the Santa Fe Institute was founded in this regard.

This has a long tradition. And I really think that even though we may be doing this on YouTube and things, YouTube needs to butt the hell out of the idea of we know what reality is and we'll let you post about it or not as we see fit because that's just that's going to grind society to a halt and we're not having it yeah and if it were so easy to actually find out the truth science would be done all of us scientists should be fired we could go home right you just have some government officials or corporate officials saying this is true this is false right this is why we need science and the first we can consult the truth and safety the trust and safety committee

and they can finish it off. We don't need the AI to tell us the secret. So speaking of YouTube, as some of us make our living from YouTube, no, I'm just kidding. I don't, Gavin Newsom, my boss, if you're listening out there. I'm hard at work, as you can tell every day, but these podcasts do. And Gavin Newsom bite me. Oh, seriously. YouTube bite me. We've got to stop looking at our incentive structures. Yes, they can shut us all down tomorrow. Let's stop kowtowing and, and, groveling in front of people who don't deserve it. Should we talk to some science? Yeah, let's get into that. But first, I want to ask you something frivolous, which is that I promised, I swore, Eric, that if anyone came out of this pandemic with a six-pack, I would kill them. Okay, and you, my friend,

have done that. You've dropped serious way. I said, I dropped five pounds from my double chin to my stomach, but you have come out with a six-pack. I wonder, was this part of your New Year's resolution last year? And what is your New Year's resolution? Each one of you guys this year. I think they're very important to make New Year's resolutions. Eric, what was yours last year? What's yours for 2021? I forgot what mine was for last year. I think for 2021, I'm going to push out geometric unity as in written form. Wow. Okay. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. This is the first time I've said that too. And I am going to provide whatever meager means of support I can provide to do that. A Million, you're worth max a million dollar.

I remember when I met you, I said, is your name Max a Millionian? You said, I'm not a millionaire yet. So is 2021 the year you become a millionaire and get some of that Elon Musk, Kwan? Or what do you want to do in 2021? You do so many things so well, so interesting. You just suck the juices out of life. What do you have plans for in plan for 2021? Money is never something I've particularly cared about.

I have two new year resolutions. One is to improve the news project, which I mentioned, and make it way better. I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of people have sent me a lot of ideas for doing something much better than the sort of fact-checking that we were whining about here, which is much more science-inspired and make it easier for people to actually find out what's going on. That's my nights and weekends job. And then my day job is to do some really awesome research at the interface of artificial intelligence and physics. I'm so fortunate to have an amazing group of students and other colleagues to work with at MIT. And so I was sitting yesterday looking at all these project ideas and ranking them and just feeling so excited and wishing that 2021 would be much longer than 365 days. Well, we're going to talk a lot about time as we continue here. First of all, I'm going to start taking some questions from the audience. And I think, well, so there are people asking, what does Max think about geometric unity? There are people asking what does Eric think about Max's mathematical universe. I am willing to go there if you guys are, but that wasn't the pretext in which I tricked, I mean, invited you guys to come on. But so, but I think it's interesting to get a status report. Maybe I'm,

on the theory of everything side, and then we'll turn to power of AI in physics and different projects that you and I are interested in Eric and Max. So first of all, what are you guys thinking about, let's just say your own field, your own projects, and then if you don't want to comment on the others project, at least the value of having multiple projects. And I'll say this very lovingly, but to my friend Sabine Hassanfelder, who's got a wonderful channel of hers, and she's really amped it up and upped her game. She's one of my kind of role models I'm trying to look up to.

She has said that, you know, she basically doesn't have time to think about these new theories of everything, whether it's, it's Eric's or Stephen Wolfram, who's been on the show, or Garrett Leasy, or even maybe Max Tagmark. So what do you think, though, of the value of pursuing alternatives to the dominant paradigm, which is, I would say, is probably string theory right now in terms of a candidate theory of everything. Max, you go first. What are your current thoughts on theories of everything other than your own? I think it's, I applaud people pursuing the full spectrum of theories. As I said earlier, if it were so easy to know the truth, we wouldn't need science. We'd be done, right?

And it's very unhealthy to have an intellectual monoculture where everybody is looking under the same lamp post. That's not the best search algorithm to find your keys or the theory of everything. So in fact, my main meta-alorithm. them as a scientist, which has served me surprisingly well, is that if I noticed that the whole herd was going in this direction, I would usually go in a different direction, look there. Because you never become the first to find something if you're just following others. Right. And Eric, what do you think about not only, you know, the value of GU or the status of GU, for example? I was going to, I thought I was going to do Max, and Max was going to do me.

Oh, yeah. Max, do you want, well, Max, do you want to comment on, you? alternative theories of everything. 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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maybe for the benefit, since we don't have time to get into something super detailed and I still haven't had a chance to read the paper that you've now officially pledged that you're going to write next year, maybe you could just very briefly summarize an idea or a theme for the benefit also of our readers

and then I can comment on that. Sure. Well, then let me go first. first and then Brian call to take Max and I'll try to integrate something in to tee it up for him to spike, to dunk on me rather. So the first thing I would say is that I don't think Sabina's being truthful. And I think that she's being polite. She is a ferocious and fierce friend of physics who cares very much about the honesty of the subject. But she's personally really saying something else, which I think we should say, that she doesn't. doesn't believe that these theories are worthy of her time because they don't have a certain

Genesequa that suggests that they are effectively correct and the cost of exploring them seems high. So I want to not take Sabine's particular gift of her diplomacy and lean too heavily on it. She has the time to record music videos. She just doesn't think that this crop smells good enough in order to dig into it as what I really think is going on. And I I think that that's really common because what's really suffusing the field is a sense of hopelessness where we don't really believe that anybody is on the verge of the theory of everything in the way that Dirac and Einstein were pushing things forward at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, I also disagree.

I don't think that's where we are. I think we've been stalled out for almost 50 years in a certain sense, not in others. I don't think that string theory is still the leading candidate, or if it is, it's only because it's greatly diminished and nothing else has taken its place. I think Max's mathematical universe is an interesting issue. I've come at it from a different way. So I've never actually had this conversation with Max. We can find out whether we dovetail on this.

But I say sometimes that the theory of everything or fundamental physics is really the one place that we have where we think that the map may be the territory. And that's a little bit of the way in which I interpret the special nature of the theory of everything. and some with the lens through which I understand Max's ideas, which is that the math is the reality, not that the math models the reality. Then there's some extra stuff which says that all math is effectively created in a physical instantiation in some sense. On that I will remain silent because it's only this sector that I have any direct tangible experience with. I think that that's quite possibly the truth. We may be looking at things where the map and the territory are not. distinct like Greenland is the map of Greenland. As for GEU, just to be quite clear about it,

my take is that we haven't owned up to the fact that the final step is different than all the previous ones and is conceptually much harder. And so my attempt was to say can we drag three generations of chiral fermions with the particular sorts of interactions that we see plausibly from a radically simplified hypothesis so that we get everything emergently. We don't get something from nothing, but we get something from almost nothing. This is sort of inverse to the Garrett-Lisi method where what you do is you take the most complicated simple object in the universe. That sounds like a contradiction, but isn't.

And then you find the Baroque complexity of our world inside it using something like E8. what I do is I start with four degrees of freedom, and I say Einstein made it a very interesting mistake, and a beautiful one, which is that he started with the concept of space time, and that space time is the picking out of a particular system of rulers and protractors responding to the matter on the four-dimensional extended structure called a manifold, but that what we should be looking at is the original four degrees of freedom, the proto-space time, together with all possible rulers and protractors. And that creates a 14-dimensional world called a bundle of metrics. And that each individual metric is like a periscope going between the four-dimensional world and its

14-dimensional emergent extension. And just the way, if you poke your periscope up in the Arctic and you see a polar bear hunting a seal, you're receiving the image down below inside your submarine. And what we are currently experiencing in my understanding is that we are in a 14 dimensional space looking at it from a four dimensional space via the metric, which is the pullback, is what we would call a pullback. It's the agent of pulling back the data from 14 to 4. And that the 10 dimensions of rulers and protractors that Einstein put, his 10 coupled differential equations are in fact the same 10 dimensions that would crop up in grand unified theory of the S.O.10 or spin 10 variety, or more important, the Patee Salam theory, which is spin six cross

spin four. You take 10 dimensions and you break it into sort of two pieces, if you will, and that that arises naturally from the way in which the 10 rulers and protractors emerge from the three one components and to dovetail the two. Brian, you asked me before whether Wolfram and I had a connection. I think Max and I actually have a much richer connection than Wolfram and I have. I would say that the 401322, 3-1-0-4 sectors all exist, but that we'll never meet them because we can't get to them. And it may be that we are in the anthropic sectors that support life. I also believe there are only two generations, Max, not three. The third one is an imposter that would unify differently with particles that we haven't seen and that the world is not actually

chiral but only emergently chiral and in that light in low gravity environments it appears to be chiral but if we were near a black hole or the beginning of the universe we would suddenly see a lot of matter that now appears dark coupled to the matter that we are so I take it you have it's not a question of whether you've read the paper I released an episode of on Geometric Unity with video from the Oxford lecture and that that's sort of a quick fly over if you want to if you want to start hunting fish in a barrel yeah you'll be proud of me for actually having watched this video this morning even to get it fresh in my my memory here it's very interesting stuff i i really agree with um

with what you said there in that there i don't see any particular disagreement incompatibility between what you're saying and what I'm saying. First of all, it's very striking that even though you did talk about a polar bear, you know, that was an example. I was reaching up to my Swedish brethren. Exactly.

Everything you said about the theory itself was mathematical. And it's interesting as well. If you talk to string theorists or loop quantum gravity fans, you know theories are utterly mathematical as well there's really no leading contender i would say on the market for a theory of everything right now which is not mathematical so it's not so shocking in that context to talk about the idea that maybe the ultimate theory is mathematical and then another another very strong commonality is you you said yourself here right that it's pretty natural in your theory that the ultimate physical reality that exists is

bigger than the part that we actually have access to and can see. And I find it kind of emotionally amusing that so many people get all twisted up about this and all stressed out about the idea that there could be things that actually exist physically that we can't access. It seems so arrogant to me. I mean, if you're an ostrich and you stick your head in the sand, should you really be arguing to yourself that if I can't see something, then it somehow has no moral right to exist? I mean, if you start the other way around with just the premise that there is some stuff that exists physically, why should we be so arrogant as to think that it's all going to be accessible to us?

It seems like a kind of hubristic starting point. So I'm very interested in when you finish the technical papers, seeing more about how the details actually come out because the devil is always in the details as well as well. Let me say maybe two more things philosophically that sort of give a grounding. I think one of the reasons that we have failed to unify physics very successfully, I mean, obviously we had Maxwell and then Glashow, Georgia, Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam. Those are the great unifications that we've had to date in a certain sense. But I think that part of what's going on is that we are unifying into an intended structure.

And that the structures that we will end up unifying into are actually tensions between structures. So, for example, my guess is that two of the four main equations, if we go field by field, will unify into one equation. The Dirac and the Einstein field equations, whatever succeeds them, I have in one equation. and the Yang Mills and the equation governing the Higgs field, which we would call a modified Klein-Gordon equation, would unify into a different one, and then one of those two unifications would effectively be the square root of the other. The other is that replacing spacetime by a pair of spaces rather than a single space.

So in essence, things unify into pairs, and there are tensions within the pairs. But one of the things we've done in our radical reductionist heyday, before any of us were born, was to try to unify things too simply into a single structure that is not capable of supporting the weight of what we know. So I claim that there will effectively be two equations, one of which will be the square root of the other.

There will be two spaces that replace one single unified space time. And that weirdly, we've got everything slightly wrong. If we had it wildly wrong, we would figure out that we had it wildly wrong. And if we had it absolutely right, we'd be done. And so weirdly, we're sort of slightly wrong about everything, including three generations. It strikes me that you don't, Max, have an initial recoil. How can there not be three generations, or how can matter not be chiral?

Or how can space time be dispensed with? Those are the things that I was expecting to have to. Look, if I've learned anything as a scientist again, to have a very open mind and be humble, as we talked about earlier, we need to be about everything. It's easier to do when you're tenured tall and good-looking, but I get your point. It's incredibly, it's incredibly hard to take a simple mathematical theory and predict what is it going to feel like to observe.

who live in that world, right? Yeah. In the case of what Galileo did, it was so the correspondence are so direct that it was easy. You said here is a point in the mathematical and Euclidean space and it corresponds to the position of my apple, it's moving. Whereas already when you got to Einstein, it was super hard. The genius of Einstein wasn't that he was the first person who was able to write down

the equations of special relativity, right, which are a relative. Karee Lorenz, but that he was able to understand what it would feel like to live in a world governed by those equations. It would feel like time slowed down. You went fast, then you got shorter and other weird things. In general relativity, it was even harder, right? It wasn't Einstein who invented Riemannian geometry, but he was the one again who was able to translate the math into physical predictions and realize that it actually made sense. Quantum mechanics has taken us yet another level up where we've had the equations now. We've had the shredding your equation now for almost a century.

And our colleagues are still arguing about what it means exactly. So that's exactly why I do not allow myself to recoil when someone puts out some equations where it's not obvious how that's exactly going to match reality because that is exactly the thing we've learned. I love it so hard. Yeah. I want to ask just a related question. that, I've had a conversation with Paul Steinhart, who's the Einstein professor of natural science at a place called Princeton University.

I know Max knows him well. They were colleagues together before they both jumped ship from a certain Ivy League institution that I won't name because I have good friends and good colleagues there. But I want to talk about a conversation I had with Paul, and he said he didn't know if he could come up with things like inflation or epirotic universe or things like that in the age of social media in that, you know, as soon as he might have some tentative idea, as, you know, Eric described to me once, you know, we were sitting in my office here in UC San Diego, and he's writing on the chalk, like, what did Einstein think in 1914, 1915, 1916,

finally 1917, you know, it evolved. And numbers changed, the equation changed. Maybe the meaning didn't fundamentally change. But in an error of social media, by the way, I'm going to take one quick break to remind people that carpal tunnel syndrome kills 750 million people every year in America alone. So exercise your finger. Hit the like button if you're enjoying this. A thumbs up on Facebook or YouTube. Hit the subscribe button. I put links to Max's YouTube channel, which needs some love Max. You've got about a thousand subscribers. We're going to amp that up right now. Subscribe to Eric Weinstein's channel as well. I put those in there of the portal. Subscribe to Dr. Brian Keating's channel if you like conversations like this. In the age of social

media, where you have sensors in a certain sense that have cell phones instead of instead of, you know, swords, well, what do you think is the probability that you guys could have and come out with theories or new models can come out? Because necessarily you guys are theoretically inclined. I'm experimentally inclined. We don't really put out results until, you know, it takes years to make an experiment. But were you guys making theories or making conjectures about philosophy and the nature of reality? How is the impact of social media stifled you, if it has? Or does it stifle creativity of young people in particular? Max, we'll start with you, and then we'll go Eric? Well, I think it's always been rough throughout human history to be contrarian and one's

ideas. And I have to say, I was under no illusions when I was a grad student being super excited about these biggest questions that anyone else was going to care in any way whatsoever. I used to joke with my friends that if all I worked on was this, you know, my next job was going to be in McDonald's. So I just accepted that. said, I'm not doing this for any kind of public recognition. I'm doing it because I love it. That's the best reason to do science. So I didn't even tell my thesis advisor about the first these four papers I wrote as a grad student. I only showed them to him after he had signed my dissertation. I just kept doing enough mainstream stuff on the side that I could, you know, get

another job afterwards. And it's actually been been quite surprising to me that many years later, some of those old things that I thought no one is ever going to care about. Now, some people are actually building on them and doing things with them. But I think the most important thing is to do science for the right reasons. The right reason to do science is this is the greatest detective story ever. You know, we get to be part of this amazing mystery solving about our universe and its nature and its origin and destiny. And how cool is that to get to be part of this, hunter hunt, you know, and connect with these great minds throughout history. If that's our motivation, then we will never be disappointed.

It's just going to be a bonus if anyone else ever cares or tweaked it. Yes, absolutely like an intellectual heroin addict. I'm exactly the same way, Max. My feeling is that the problem of this detective story, as you say, I haven't heard somebody call it. That's great. Is that it competes pretty well with money and sex and drugs and anything else you can come up with. It's hard to find anything that, you know, if you offered somebody a billion dollars or a peak at the actual understanding of the universe, there's no question that I wouldn't be taking a billion dollars.

There is nothing like it. And people often say science is fun. I don't really think that's true. Most of the time it's just really difficult and it's often boring. but it is the most deeply fulfilling and at times peak exciting thing you can do with a human brain. It's astounding to me that something that we use to find food and water can actually understand partial differential equations. It's very, very confusing with that. No, it's a genuine mystery. With respect to the general question, remind me, Brian, of its formulation.

What creativity of an Einstein. Oh, yeah, no, I remember it now. Can I just chime in while you're clarifying this? the question. There also say one more personal thing I want to share that I think is so rewarding is precisely because I think about the grandest questions, simply because I love the being part of this mystery solving, it also means that whenever I run into other people, like you, Eric, or a lot of other physicists who obviously do it just because of that reason, Then I feel a really touching kind of brotherhood, sisterhood with these people, right?

Even more broadly, just going to physics. Like every single one of my colleagues in the MIT physics department could easily multiply their salary by pie if they went and did something on Wall Street or whatever, right? And they don't, right? And that makes me feel also a really cool kinship. You know, hear all these people who have chosen to make much less money to follow some, these things that they're passionate about. And we're, this just makes me feel so excited and honored to get to be part of a community of people who are doing things for this reason.

So I remember your formulation. I think what, what Max just said is incredibly important. Imagine that if Eddie Van Halen could have been a hedge fund manager and multiple applied his assets, you know, would it have been worth it? And we wouldn't have Eddie Van Halen. So it's really important that things are able to compete with money. And that's very tough when inequality is so high, but it's really also important that we boost the amount of funding to scientists. I just want to be very clear about that. The thing that you were saying before, Brian, about social media, there's an interesting feature. There's two kinds of really negative behavior

that affects a lot of us when we're working on heterodox ideas. There's trolling negativity where people are just taking a piece out of you and the cookie cutter sharks are tearing into your hide and extracting their little core of fat and swinging off happy that they've, you know, they've trolled you, they've dunked, they've dragged, blah, blah, blah. Then you have the same phenomena in a weird way coming from your academicians. And the academicians, I think the biggest intellectual offense that I ever experienced in physics.

Again, I'm not a physicist, but was hearing string theorists say, well, string theory isn't threatened because if you do anything outside, it will just tell you that it's string theory, and so we'll absorb you. And I thought, wow, cool. What a wonderful advertisement

that your theory can't be wrong because if we come up with anything, you've kept the naming rights to say that what we do is string theory. I think that that negativity from our colleagues, the negativity from the trolls has a very important effect. What if really great theories were found by people who are not highly disagreeable? Now, I've disagreed with Susan Wojicki, even though I'm on YouTube, with Gavin Newsom, I've said that Sabine Hassanfelder is lying, that she doesn't have time

for these theories. I'm obviously highly disagreeable. It doesn't mean I'm not personable, but I've been cultivating this very trait because it's necessary to do science. when everybody is wrong. So in the great financial crisis, I was part of a very small number of people who were saying this whole thing is going to blow up. Nassim Taleb was another one. And he was disagreeable enough

that when I quit this game of going on conferences and saying, hey, mortgage-backed securities are posing a real threat. Nassim said, you're going to regret crapping out in 2005. You need to stay the course. And I said, everyone's laughing at us. I don't know whether you're not paying attention. You're not hearing.

He says, no, no, no, you're not. getting it, you're bailing out of the trade before the trade is actually mature. And I learned a lot from Nassim. Naseem is incredibly disagreeable. On the other hand, you need people who are like Richard Feynman. And one of the things I might do on the portal this year is to read his letter of resignation from the National Academy of Sciences, where he didn't want to say why he was, but he just didn't want to be hooked up to his peers. And, you know, Max, when you were talking about the fact that your peers are other physicists. I'm very concerned that we have too much group think in physics, and we need to be flipping

the bird collegially and constructively to our colleagues as well as to the trolls. And I do see that there's a lot of commonality between academicians who huddle around respectability, peer review, the idea of their accolades, whatever awards and prizes they've been given, whatever their title is. And that too much, we, the academicians, in an era in which we have not been advancing some of our fields quite as quickly as we used to, have become prisoners to the little bit of respectability that we have left, and we need to reclaim the right to be highly disagreeable without constantly saying that everything comes from consensus. The most depressing part of this

is the idea that the so-called Great Man theory of science is under attack by people who claim a priori that it is always communal when anything happens, which is preposterous, particularly when you think about how singular somebody like a Dirac was or an Einstein was and or a Feynman or a Powley or a Weinberg. And all of these people are so individualistic to all of us who've read their work that we have to recognize that we are under some generalized social attack for what it is that we have proven beyond any doubt we do, which is to use single individuals disagreeing with their entire community and getting the entire community to come along after the fact.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. Very good. So let us take a quick break and have a musical interlude while I queue up some questions because we have questions. You know, Max has a relativity song. Oh, he does. Okay. Well, I know he's one of the original members of Abba getting back together. This is by my friend Miguel Tully, who runs the Yeti Tiers website and other things. So I'm going to just look for some fun questions and we'll get that queued up. So I'll put up another yeti in the meantime. Oh, yeah, there's a Yeti. That's right.

I have a Yeti tumbler somewhere around here, fill of vodka. Getting ready for this, rocking New Year's Eve. You're joining Max Tagmark, Dr. Eric Weinstein, Professor Max Tagmark, and yours truly, Brian Keating, on a special edition of The Into the Impossible podcast. All right, we have a question about entropy, one of Max's favorite topics. This is by Jeremy Payne. Why is the entropy at the beginning of time low, but the entropy in a black hole is so high? Ah, wonderful question. Why is entropy at the beginning of time so low and entropy in the black hole so high?

First of all, I said we have to be humble, and so I'll be the first to say we actually don't know that the entropy was low at the beginning of time. We don't even know if there was the beginning of time. That's how humble we have to be here. What we do know, what I do feel we've learned, which is quite remarkable, is that, you know, first of all, entropy, for those of you who aren't, We need a bit of refresher is the physicists measure of how messy things are. So my room, I'm here where I do this, tends to get higher and higher entropy, messier and messier. Why is it that you see things getting messier? Why is it that you've seen eggs fall on the floor and break and not see them fly up and

unbreak? People argue about that for a very long time until the shocking insight came that the reason that the entropy is lower, is higher now than it was lower this morning, than before I dropped the egg than now, is because it was even lower yesterday. And the reason for that was it was even lower the day before that. And the reason for that was it was very low 13.8 billion years ago at the time when those images, baby pictures of our universe were given off,

sitting right behind you on the sofa there, Brian, the causing micro background, and so on. Somehow our flow of time towards greater messiness has something to do with our origin of our universe, that I feel we have learned. So that's progress. But now the question of why was that is something where many of my colleagues disagree violently with each other. I have written the paper there, which I think it's fair to say has very little support. Let's just say what it's concluded anyway, which is that if you take some of it. seriously the idea of inflation and also the theory that the wave function does not collapse according to you everett you can do some math and and get an explanation for for why that happened but i think it's a it's a wonderful mystery and um i'm open to all ideas for what what the deal is with this and and black holes came up here of course which uh something else we know where ultimately the weather a great truth

I think yet to be discovered. So we have a question from a person with a very lovely name. I should have used it for one of my children. The name is just given as R. But R asks, Eric, what advice would you give to a young person pursuing a PhD in mathematics as you pursued back in the 1980s, I believe? Take an advisor. What do you mean?

I didn't have an advisor. And I did not understand that you don't need an advisor to do mathematics. You don't need an advisor to come up with new ideas. You need an advisor to negotiate the system. And in effect, the way in which we regulate population in mathematics is that just like many avian species, we don't feed certain chicks. And if you don't get fed as a chick, it doesn't matter how good you're eyes. ideas are. So in large measure, your advisor is somebody, I didn't want an advisor, but I had to try taking one, then it didn't work out, and I just decided to do it without. And then it was

forced upon me. You'll find that I can't fix my Wikipedia entry because the system insists that Raoul Bot was my advisor, lovely, wonderful human being, but it just didn't happen to be my advisor. The thing then that I would say is once you had to take an advisor, you know, you need to have a really frightening conversation with that person where you come in and you say, I know what my odds are. And if you are not willing to swing for the effing fences, I am going to die, you've assessed me. I want you to tell me where I stack in my chance of viability. I don't care about anything else. I want to know whether you think I am viable and if so at what level. and if that person is not willing to say,

I think you're one of the top people, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure you survive, provided you do what I think you're capable of, get out. And you will not have that conversation because you're going to be a pussy about it. And by virtue of not having that conversation, you are going to find out later

that when that person withholds the high praise necessary to secure a job for you and to secure opportunities for you, you will then wither and die. And if you'll just look at the survival rates, if you can't get to one of the top four or five departments, it's almost not worth going. It doesn't mean nothing good happens below that.

But what you're dependent on is a system of selective pressures in which your parents have to kill and feed you for a period of time before you can hunt and kill for yourself. And that situation is one in which you are going to, be squeamish and your advisor is going to intimidate you away from asking the questions. But quite frankly, having done research in this area for the American Society for Cell Biology, advisors usually form an impression almost immediately, whether you are viable or not, then your department will extract labor out of you for a period of time.

Your advisor may get you to work on subroutines for their career, and then your carcass will be discarded. and if you do not understand that this is what has happened in the academic hunger games, you will not be able to defend yourself. The fact that nobody's talking about it, you watch. Nobody in the university system will tell me that I'm wrong. They'll just tell me to shut up. Max, when you are approached by a young Beaver at MIT, what do you look for in a promising young PhD candidate? or you've done a lot of work with undergraduates, but I recall you being a very lovely mentor to me as a graduate student when I was at Brown and you were at Penn. But even before that, when you were a postdoc, I recall, are good advisors born or are they made? Oh, that I actually don't know,

but I will do my best answer the rest of your question. And maybe the first, before I even do that, I'd like to just add a little bit to what Eric said there, because you painted a very, very scary sounding image of academia. You mentioned death many times and being devoured and anything like this. And for those out there listening who are considering going into a job of academia, I actually feel a lot more optimistic about, and I would like to give a more optimistic end of year message for those of you and say, go for it. and don't be scared off by all this talk about death there.

First of all, you have to remember that if you go into academia and you have this vision that you're going to stay in academia for the rest of your life and it doesn't end up that way, what will happen is not that you're going to be starving to death somewhere in some corner, but that you will instead end up in doing something else where you're going to make a lot more money than you would have in academia. and most people I know who have left academia seem quite happy,

right? So there's really not much to be afraid of. The second thing I would say is, yes, I agree with you. It's very important to have an advisor who can support you. I agree with you there, Eric. I also think

if you're like Eric and me and Brian and you're fascinated about big questions but may be very unfashionable at the time and have ideas that are unfashionable. I say pursue them anyway, but do it as a scientist where you have a really scientifically valid game plan also for how your career is going to work nonetheless, right, where you spend some of your time doing what your heart is burning for, and then some of the time just making sure that your career is going to be fine anyway. So, you know, you Eric have

solved it by making money in other ways so that you can continue doing the great science that you do, right? I similarly developed the strategy very early where I, that I confessed earlier, where I would just write enough mainstream papers that I could stay in academia, and then on nights and weekends and so on, I would do the things I was really passionate about. In other words, as long as you have a sort of scientifically or sound business plan for how your career is going to go, then don't be afraid of following your heart. Isn't it also a challenge that we have, you know, As some of my listeners, no, I'm a pilot and I am actually a commercial pilot, not for, you know, wanting to deliver passengers or mail or tow banners over the San Diego seashore. I do it because when I'm learning, I am becoming a better teacher.

And if you stop learning in aviation, you die. And so one of the things I started to do a few years ago is get my flight instructors rating. And to do that, you need to be a commercial pilot first. So I got my commercial pilot. I got my, and then I started looking through, well, what does it take to become a flight? instructor. It turns out the federal aviation administration has one and only one to my knowledge a branch of government that has in its handbook for practitioners of this federal agency, it has the words love. You imagine like the IRS, like to be a good IRS auditor, you have to have

love. No, you have to have the opposite of love in some cases. No offense out there. I mean, Eric made fun of YouTube. That's more powerful than the IRS. So, but, but it has Maslow's hierarchy of needs encoded in the handbook of testing for future flight instructors like me, hopefully. And I wonder, I never got sat down, Max. I don't know if you did by my dean or my stagio dean. And they never said, well, here's how you teach. You need to make sure that your students feel a sense of love. David Spurgel is famous for saying that his best piece of advice is that a student needs to feel love. Now, obviously it's platonic, but the student needs to feel a sense of love. But when did you ever get taught how to be a good teacher? And maybe Eric, you're suffering

because you're at true advisor, maybe didn't love you enough. And that's saying maybe you need more, a little more. True advisor is, I know that. That's what I'm saying. You're a self-made man, Eric, and you're in love with your creator. Sorry, I, I'm passionate about something here that I just need to say it in a different way. I love the fact that Brian and Max and I are trying to take our passion for this subject. But if you're watching this, live stream or a recording of it, you're looking at three of the most anomalous people in this game having a conversation as if, hey, you can do this too. My situation is so exotic that I can't recommend it. Max, you know, admitting that he's effectively chosen the superhero route,

you know, mild-mandered Clark Kent by day, Superman by night, or, you know, Bruce Wayne, or who knows what. Look, here's what you need to do. Go to the math. genealogy project, okay? Look for everybody who was a, for the survival rates of advisors before 1972 and the survival rates of their students after 1972. We had an actual singularity happened in our markets in around between 1971 and 73. And if you look at somebody like Norman Steenrod who stopped advising and when he died, I guess, in the early 70s, almost Almost all of his students survive. And if you look at anybody, like the top advisors today, they can't match that previous thing.

So Max is quite correct. You can bounce into a certain number of technical fields if you do it at a high enough level. Many people don't make it to Google. They don't make it to great six-figure jobs that, you know, give them fulfillment. Many do. Depends where you're going. I'm trying to give you the tough love. Max is trying to give you the optimist.

And I think it's great having both. Go look at the data and ask every department that you're applying to. Can you please show me your outcome statistics and show me how well you've done? Because we're all lying about the fact that since 1971 through 73, academics has been in a depression, period, the end. Max, how do you react to that? I didn't claim the, I wasn't lying. I didn't have said nothing to dispute that fact that there is, that, that, that, that, that, There's been a very sad development and the support from society in terms of funding for academia.

And that's just the way it is. And I think, I wish it could change. But even in the poor situation we are now, you know, where the amount of money spent on all physics funding in the United States in a year, right, is less than a couple of days of military budget. But even in that state, I think going into science is a really good move if you're excited about it. And I would encourage listeners to do it. And here is my data that you asked for. I really, really get attached to my past students and I try to keep in touch with them over the years. And to the very best of my knowledge, every single one, so half a dozen of them are professors now.

A bunch more probably will be. a number of them have left and gone into other fields, but every single one of them, to the best of my knowledge, is quite happy with the fact that they did science first. And let me just finish here. So I think that there's no real indication that it's a recipe for an unhappy life to go into science. Contrary-wise, as long as you have an exciting time while you're doing the science, and then maybe later you do something else. What's so bad about that? You know, we're all going to die anyway, for real at some point.

That's not an excuse to not make the most of life while we're still alive, right? Let me just say something very quickly, which Max can't say. Max is also exceedingly conscientious and concerned about this by founding FQXI and giving even small grants to people. A lot of what Max has been doing has been taking care. care of the heterodox community in all of physics. So you're looking at, in some sense, the most anomalous person in our space. Well, I act as the anti-matter to him then. I'm the worst advisor possible as my students will have tested. You're in a different area where we're talking

really, really theory for the most part. Max and Anthony Aguier, the co-founder, I don't know how you guys, these guys are serious about trying to keep the field afloat. And Max is not a lot. And Max is not is coupling his optimism with the fact that he's going above and beyond what almost anyone else is doing. And I think it's fantastic. That's why I love hanging out on this live stream. But I just don't want to give the indication that Max is somehow your typical professor. No, there's obviously survivorship bias that's coming in here. But I have to say, as I said earlier, one of the names that Max will recognize is my friend Chris O'Dell, who is the graduate student who came after me at Peter Timby, who is my advisor. And Peter Timby is coming on the Into the Impossible

podcast. So those of you out there get to hear from my PhD advisor. What a schmendrick I was back 30 years ago. What a brave guy you are. I just love him and he's going to talk about his advisor, David Wilkinson, who Max also knew. But Max was like this when he was a postdoc. So I think Max is preternaturally gifted in this way. I do think that as we learn about quantum mechanics Max or as we learn about, you know, topological field theory or whatever Eric does. We need to also spend time learning about how to teach, how to manage, how to lead. I've had a lot of Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist on my show lately. And the question I keep asking them is, like Barry Barish and Ray Weiss, who co-led the LIGO experiment that won the Nobel Prize in 2017. They foolishly left

their Nobel Prize with me. When they did the show, I picked the pockets clean after they got off of my couch over there. But the point is, we have to study these soft skills. And I think one of my colleagues here, Darren Lopomi, does a great job. He teaches a whole YouTube and course about the soft skills outside of the laboratory. So I just wanted to say that before we move on to the question of academic funding, and one of the ways I am solving this problem of academic funding is I'm accepting super chats. I'm taking super chat. No, this is not how I'm going to do it. Actually, though, I do want to donate the proceeds from today to both of your guys' favorite charities. You guys will tell me afterwards, and it can't be, you know, to the Brian Keating Fund.

I won't do that, but I'll donate all the money I'm getting from the superchats. You're willing if it's the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association. You are a brave man. I get their newsletter. What are you talking about? Am I willing? All right. I subscribe, buddy.

And Max will obviously do it to any of the projects you're interested in. So please keep those super chats coming. We have one from Sweden. We have a Swedish chrono. Max, tell me if this is a lot of. money. We have 100 Swedish croner coming from Joaquin Peters Pedersen who

asked, can I ask, Max and Eric, if they follow John Williamson slash Thad Rogers slash John Mackin theory of space time as a fluid. First of all, Max, am I going to be able to put my kids through college with this 100

Swedish cronar? And do you think about space time as a fluid? With those 10 bucks, I have to say, Paxomache. We'll make sure to put it to send it to a charity that puts it to good use. I clearly do need to follow this theory since I'm the first to admit that I don't know as much about it as I should. Eric, you want anything about it, Eric?

I got nothing. All right, fine. We'll move on. Next super chat. We have 2,000. Oh, my God, 2,000 Russian roubles, which I think is about, what, Eric? I thought you said something. Are you suggesting Russian?

This is Russian collusion. This is Russian collusion for Eric Weinstein. Uh-oh. Eric, do you think that the perceived loss of information that happens when a quantum system collapses is because of equal probability events present in the set of causal chains of that quantum system, i.e., is there no other distinguishing factor we can identify? I think he's asking Alexander Apostletov. I can't pronounce this last time.

Alexander, Sasha, asking, what do you think of the perceived loss of information? when a way function collapses? Mejaveau. Okay. I don't think much about it. I think that this has to do with the fact that we formulated. Quantum theory is going to be with us forever, but I don't believe it's going to look like it currently does

with this sort of deterministic propagation, followed by violent introductions of probability when you ask bad questions, that is where the state is not an eigenstein, state of the observable representing your question. And I think that a lot of what we have is we have a theory that is good enough to work and get results, but is philosophically unsatisfying. And the way in which we used to weed people out in physics is that you had to profess that you actually accepted that this is exactly the way the world works more or less. And my

feeling is this is the way the world works relative to our current framework, which is clearly telling us don't overdo the analysis until we get to the right framework. I think this is really what Einstein was saying. He wasn't saying that he hated quantum theory. He said that he hated the idea that we were going to rush to say, hey, the universe is queerer than we can suppose. Hal Dane was right. And wow, this just proves that some of us can accept it and some of you guys are stuck in your classical world. I think that the problem is we've got way too much G-WIS in our physics. and G-WIS is fun. It just doesn't actually move the needle.

So I'm always up for trying to remove G-Wiz to get to the fun of looking for a better framework, and I hope that G-U will start to push in that direction. Can I add something? Of course. So, Privyat, Sasha, how do you la? I think that's a question about the wave function collapsed there.

Look, I think the wave function just does not collapse. This was the first way I got in trouble in physics, actually, with the Swedish professor, Eric. be proud of me for this. We Swedes never pass up an opportunity to make fun of Denmark and talk smack about them, so I won't for you. We'll miss that chance now either. Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation. I respond with Hamlet. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. My God. Talk about Stockholm syndrome. The wave function does not collapse. Let's face it. There's absolutely no experimental evidence for it. It appears to collapse, yes. But what you

you ever had showed so beautifully already back in the 50s, 60s, is that even if it does not collapse, if you just drop that entirely and just say, go with a shirt in your equation all the way, it's going to appear like it collapses. And it's going to appear like it collapses according to all the usual Copenhagen interpretation rules. And I would go as far as saying that this, it doesn't even have anything fundamental to do with quantum mechanics. If you have any sort of physics, which lets you make copies of an observer, classically or quantum mechanically, you will experience apparent randomness.

I like to imagine that the, and I suppose you, Brian, do you want to clone yourself for the new year so you can get twice as much done? Yeah, then I could, you know. So we'll take you into some San Diego at San Diego Medical Center and put one, we'll sedate you. And I'm telling you now, you're going to wake up. It's going to be January 1st, 2020. will be over. One copy of you wakes up in room one. The other copy wakes up in room two in the hospital. Okay. What do you predict is going to be the first thing you experienced when you walk outside your hospital room and look at the room number? My wife's going to yell at two guys that look like me

at the same time. But what are you going to see? Are you going to see a room sign that says you were in room one or you see a two? You cannot predict this because you know there will be two experiences. One, one, Brian experienced, this is one, one, two. So the best thing you can say is I'm going to go and I'm going to look and I'm going to say, oh, it seems random. I'm going to either see a one or two with equal

probability. This is what I think fundamentally is happening in quantum physics too. The quantum reality is just bigger than the one we thought we lived in before quantum mechanics and it has this ability that it can start with something which is in one way and make effectively being

in two ways. And And then when we make a measurement, sometimes we find out which copy we were. So I wouldn't worry about the way function collapse. That's a tremendous amount of technical debt to go to many worlds to take on to get rid of the collapse. I mean, in other words, it does strike me that what we've entered an era in which we can solve many of these problems, if you don't mind that we're positing something, even wildly more outrageous. Which, by the way, it doesn't mean it's false. It just depends on what you measure outrageousness in, right?

If what you mean is that something is more extravagant, if it involves somehow having more particles or reality being bigger, yeah, then sure. But I think you and I, Eric, both feel that maybe the kind of simplicity that we should value with Occam's razor is rather that the math is simple. The equations are simple. it's a very interesting point and I do think that what I'm not saying that Max Tagmark cannot get out of Max Tagmark's technical debt I'm saying that it would take a very good day being Max Tagmark to get out of Max Tagmark's technical debt in so doing that

by the way you're much more partial to the Schrodinger equation than I ever imagined I even got my wife to agree to have it hanging on the wall that's his love that was his first to his wife. I love you, dear. Here you go. So we're getting other questions that I want to come to, but I do think Eric and I have talked about this kind of the whiz-bang approach to physics that I believe is a little detrimental. And your mutual friend, Lex Friedman, up there, has had on other characters, in addition to the two of you guys, one by the name of Michi Okaku, who will talk waxing rhapsodically about the mind of God and how everything is encrypted and encropted. coded, and if we can get to the multiverse, and that really would be the singular. I find that I like Michio. He's very good as an entertainer, but I think the selling of physics is going to come back to haunt us and kind of just touting this stuff. And I'm guilty of it at times, too, but I won't utter the mind of God.

What do you think about this, the danger that we as people that are publicly facing have of potentially compromising the true appreciation of the most magnificent things in the universe, which take a lot of background. You can't dumb it down, and you shouldn't. I will never do that with my audience. Go ahead, Eric, first. It's a really interesting and tough question. I kind of hate it, to be blunt, because I feel like a lot of, I mean, let's be frank about this.

It used to be the case that we reserved the right to talk to the. the public in this fashion for the very top people and they sort of did it sparingly. And we made, yeah, we made certain, you know, it's one thing if you've got Gamoff talking to the public, you know, great figures in your field, but somehow we've got these science entrepreneurs. And, you know, I would even, I don't think that's primarily what I am, but you could make an argument that I've become partially a science entrepreneur. And I try to go away from this language. Now, if you ask me privately, what animates me,

it's very tough when you're talking about the basis of reality itself to say, come on, don't make too much out of it. Like, what the hell? I mean, come on. The only reason to do this stuff is that you're talking about existence. And can you please speak more modestly and with less purple language about existence itself? I don't know.

It's a challenge. This is what, you know, I go to synagogue where I don't believe, but I feel, and I'm filled with the spirit of the service. That's one thing, okay? You're all singing and praying together. It's another thing when you're alone at your whiteboard and you feel like, holy shit,

am I in an Indiana Jones movie? I'm so close to the base, to the hardware, the metal. It's like it's uncomfortably close to religion. And I think that what I find is that weirdly we talk about the mind of God for two reasons. When we're getting really far away from success in physics and we need some side hustle in order to keep people interested. By the way, this is the same language that we in math and physics used to hit on our potential mates. You know, we talk about the mind of God when we go to a party if we have to compete with a guy with actual money or who can play the guitar. So we pick that up as a bad habit.

But when you're also, when you're succeeding at science, that's the other time that you start to get into this. And so weirdly, if I hear somebody talk about the mind of God, I tend to think that they're either getting really far away from success or that they've gotten very close and they've reminded themselves. holy crap, you know, when I'm doing my stuff, I'm actually talking about something that is so profound. I can't even believe I'm allowed to address it or have enough information to feel that after standing on the shoulders of so many nested giants, like a giant matroshka, you know, we've got its giants all the way down and you're on these shoulders. Maybe I'm going to be the one to, you know, each one of us to turn in the baton at the end of the really race. who am I going to be turning this baton into? What if I actually, what if you have a theory of everything?

We don't actually spend time with this. It's a terrifying idea that just as the last landmass on Earth was at some point mapped. You just lost Don Wells. Remember the uncharted desert aisle of Gilligan's Island with satellite imagery we don't believe in it. I don't know that we would have said

uncharted desert aisle in the modern. And Mary Ann. And Marianne. That's what I'm saying. Don Wells. Oh, Donwell's. I thought, yeah, yeah. Don Wells, right.

So my belief about this is that you shouldn't fault somebody for talking about the mind of God. You should just ask yourself, is this because their research isn't working or it's really working? And in general, it's almost always the case these days that it's because our research isn't working. So, Max, I have a question about theories of everything. Oh, go ahead. Of course. Simon on this one also, about whether we oversimplify too much and whatnot. I really love Einstein's quote that we should tell things as simple as possible and no simpler.

This is what I always aspire to, whether I'm teaching a course or giving your research colloquium or talking to the person next to me on the airplane. And I actually feel I was not oversimplifying when I talked about the collapse of the wave function there. The argument I gave for you in the hospital, that was the full argument. It wasn't some sort of done-down version. If you think it through again on your own free time, I think you will conclude that, yeah, you will experience apparent randomness. That's my clone calling you. Yeah. And then if people come back and ask me follow up questions, I'm willing to go as far down the rabbit hole as they want.

So here, for example, is the Scheringeringer equation again, right? And what it's actually saying is that the state of the world, that's this. Greek letter sigh there, this bracket around it, right? It's saying that the rate of change of it is given, depends on the current state of the world, and you do this operation on it. And for the math nerds, this is a linear operation, which means that if the actual state of the world is this thing plus that thing, the rate, then the same thing, the rate of change will be that operation on the, on the, some of the two things. And what that just means, as Everett has pointed out, and many others have known for a very long time, is that in some circumstances, two different solutions to this can do their parallel thing.

We can talk at great length about the discoveries later, about decoherence and why it is that sometimes these different parallel branches are unaware of each other. But my point is, if you give a science nerd colloquium at a physics department, I think ideally you should also start in the same way you start discussing this with your grandma, just at the very high level. You know, here are the cool ideas. And then you can go as deep as the audience or the listener wants. From there. Max, it's not clear to me, even listening to this, I really liked what you said in the hospital by sort of a Sydney. Coleman thing where you try to take the majesty of

quantum mechanics and you divorce it from some of the accidents which people confuse it with. And so by coming up with a classical version of I really like that. What I don't know is whether or not it's really an isomorphism to the same phenomena because what you did is if I look at

consciousness, I think Brian goes to sleep in the example, so consciousness is paused. Then we have an action where you're trying to treat consciousness like it's mitosis, and we clone the thing or we call spawn inside of a computer, and then there's the awakening. So the quiescing is an important part of your story. Could you have told the same story without quiescing the system called Brian Keating? If it happened so fast, much, much faster than the timescale of a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second

on which Brian reacts, I think the argument, the argument is, is the same, although I think we don't have surgeons that quick in San Diego. That's the accident. But you understand what I'm trying to say. It's not clear to me that it's an isomorphism. Indeed. And we don't know for sure that the Schroding equation is actually that accurate a description of nature.

It's quite so exciting to see what's going to happen with the quantum computer efforts right now. Will they ultimately fail? Because physics isn't fully described by the Schroederinger equation, or will the actually succeed, you know, this is where ultimately our experimental friends will, will give us crucial insights. Even the Schrodinger equation, you know, this is the non-relativist. We know that the Schrodinger equation is wrong.

Well, it's right, and it's not complete. Well, we can also take quantum field theory and task. No, I understand what you're saying. What I'm trying to get at is that we have a situation in which when we talk to the public, I'm very sympathetic with what you're trying to do, or even our colleagues. The problem is, is that great analogies, you know, I do a superposition analogy classically with change in your pockets where some of it's in Swiss francs, some of it's in pounds, but the landing card says, is your change in either Swiss francs or is it in British pounds?

And then the idea is that there's no both. And so because the multiple choice answers don't list superposition. classical mechanics remains mute, and quantum mechanics weirdly says, I'm going to convert all your money into one or the other because the landing card says it by some mystical process. I'm very fond of these things. The problem is that even when you say that you're removing these things, an astute listener can often spot, wait a second, that's not actually an analogy because if I tracked it exactly, there was a sleight of hand. Sometimes the slight of hand matters. I don't think in what you were doing with the Schrodinger equation being non-relativistic that you were using any sleight of hand. I do think in the consciousness question, by not addressing the quiescing of the system, it's not clear that that's actually kind of a fair point.

Yeah. So before we just to bring closure to this, I'll be the first to admit that we ultimately don't know what's going on exactly with quantum mechanics. My personal guess, I'm happy to tell you because I like betting is that even quantum mechanics is probably an emergent theory. There may be an approximation of something deeper. Maybe we can get it out of GU somehow. But I also would guess, frankly, and here I am guessing the opposite of Roger Penrose, who you had on here earlier, that gravity doesn't really have much. much to do with this. I think you can look at being in a spaceship far away from any really any important gravitating objects and do your little quantum experiments with the stern

girl lock apparatus and you would get all the same fascinating things happening. I think blame it. I think ignoring gravity altogether, ignoring relativistic effects altogether, you can, you still have this thing that people love fighting about and arguing about. does the way of function collapse or not. And that's why I'm so interested in this kind of discussion we had, where you get at those very questions without worrying about that stuff.

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of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director. Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.