Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Stephen Wolfram & Eric Weinstein: The Nature of Mathematical Reality (#065)

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

  I thoroughly enjoyed this deep and wide-ranging conversation with two mathematical mavericks. Thanks goes out to both Eric and Stephen for a fascinating live conversation!   Find out more about Wolfram’s Physics Project: https://www.wolframphysics.org Buy Wolfram’s’s new book here: https://amzn.to/3iA6RNh Watch Wolfram’s TED Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=60P7717-XOQ Find Eric’s Portal Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR85PW_B_7_Aisx5vNS7Gjw Find Stephen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephen_wolfram Find Eric on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericrweinstein Find Sabine Hossenfelder’s commentary on Stephen and Eric here: https://youtu.be/mdu9KvLxHFg    ‍♂️ 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/DrBrianKeatin… ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, into the Impossible listeners. This is your fearful host, Brian Keating. And I am so thrilled that I got to participate in this live webinar conversation between two Titanic mathematicians, mathematical physicists, Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein, who both have new, intriguing ideas about the nature of our mathematical and perhaps physical reality. I hope you'll really enjoy the conversation that we had. We had a live chat. You can check that out on my YouTube channel, on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating, the R. Brian Keating. And I just want to ask everybody out there if you're enjoying these podcasts, please, please, please leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever else you're listening to this audio. Because the algorithms we are not yet able to hack and get them to promote this channel to the levels of stratospheric content that we believe it deserves. So that's my one humble request. Thank you so much for being loyal listeners and look forward to many, many more exciting episodes like this to come.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Okay, we are now live with Doctors Weinstein and Wolfram. Welcome, gentlemen. I'm going to just publicize that we are going live and I will then ask us to introduce ourselves and we'll get started. We have graciously been joined with two of the most prominent and two of my real heroes in this field that are Maverick mathematicians who are self-made mathematicians in a way. And I want to talk about how they view the current spirit of the times, the zeitgeist, as we say, in terms of theories of everything that are percolating around in the atmosphere. And to begin with, I'll ask my guest, Eric, to introduce yourself and say a little bit about where people can find you.

We'll do that right up front. And then we'll get started with our discussion topics. We're going to have a nice, clean fight. We're going toe to toe to toe. No, there's not going to be any fight. It's going to be very, very respectful. So thank you both for joining. Eric, can you introduce yourself and I'll buy me some time to tweet out this link.

Well, didn't I just tweet out the link that I just saw you tweeting out? Oh, you did? Perfect. Okay. Okay. phenomenal. Okay, great. Check my feed. Eric Weinstein. I'm managing director at Teal Capital. I come from a mathematics background, so I'm not a physicist, and I have an eclectic podcast called The Portal, which I hope to have, in fact, I've got agreements from both of these gentlemen to be my guests on the portal, so I'm really looking forward to that, and happy to, help blow up into the impossible, Brian. You're doing a fantastic job. I love it. And it's all thanks

to you guys. You guys were actually my first guest in what I call the pandemic podcast series, which began back in April, actually late March with Stephen, was the first of the two of you to come on the podcast and really kicked off this whole idea of getting some of the world's most brilliant minds to engage around this topic of understanding the fundamental nature of the universe. And at that time, because of the pandemic, perhaps, Stephen's schedule was amenable to coming on my podcast. So we chatted for a mere three hours or so. And he's, as I said, gracious enough to come back. Stephen, where are you joining us from today? I'm in Concord, Massachusetts. And do I introduce myself? I'm speaking all from my do science and technology

and things I've built some technology things lots of people use. I've built some science, lots of people use. And about 30 years ago, well, I used to be a particle physicist long ago. I did that when I was a kid. And then I got interested in computation and have kind of alternated between doing basic science and doing technology. And I've now done about five cycles of that. And I think it's a very interesting process, actually, alternating between basic science and technology, because they kind of build on each other,

and it's sort of a progressively spiral upwards, so to speak. Yeah. But the big surprise for me was about a bit more than a year ago now, a bunch of things that I've been thinking about, about how to make a fundamental theory of physics, actually thought, I think I actually have some way forward, and a couple of young physicists were really enthusiastic about working with me on it. And so we're like, okay, let's try and really do something.

and the huge surprises that it's worked, which I didn't expect. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, we've been, we're at 100 years roughly for, you know, general relativity in quantum mechanics, which are the two sort of big achievements of 20th century physics, and, you know, they've taken us a great distance. But, you know, I had a bunch of ideas that have been sort of based on things that came out of the whole computational thinking that I've done. And anyway, the big surprise that's worked and not only that it seemed to have worked when I last talked to you, it's been going absolutely spectacularly since then.

And it's really, it's kind of like embarrassing because there are a lot of things I should have been able to figure out 20, 30 years ago, which are now becoming obvious. And I think one of the other things to say is that one of the surprises to me is that I had thought we were building this kind of prong in the direction. of kind of computation that would be really different from the mathematical physics and so on that people have done before. Turns out we basically built a sort of a low-level machine code for how things work. But it turns out an awful lot of the formalisms that people have worked on in mathematical physics in the last 50 years or so, they actually fit beautifully into the kinds of things that we're doing. And they seem to kind of illuminate what we've done and hopefully what we've done illuminates what they're doing.

And actually, my favorite analogy in recent times for this is what happened in early days of computation theory with things like Turing machines, which was that people had come up with, you know, models of computation, combinators, Lambda calculus, general recursive functions, things like this. But it wasn't clear how they fit together, and they all seemed rather abstract,

and people couldn't kind of tether them. And then Turing machines came along, and, you know, in the usual way that science history is done, could say immediately everybody understood, but actually it took, let's see, how long, 40 years, 50 years, so immediately it was actually 40 or 50 years. But people understood from that kind of, you know, more concrete tethering of these ideas about computation, how all these different things fit together. So that's been, I mean, it's both scientifically interesting to me and I think also sociologically interesting because often, you know, you come in with the big new theory, so to speak,

and it's like you're kind of gunning down everything else, but that's not what's happening here. I mean, what's happening here is that we've got something which is sort of orthogonal to what other people have thought about. It's kind of a low-level, you know, low-level machine code, and we can kind of, you know, see how things fit together at a higher level. Anyway, that's my, that was my long, short introduction. That's your elevator pitch that goes to the space elevator docking station.

Thank you, Stephen. And both of you guys are notable, as people are pointing out in the chat, which I'm monitoring. So behave in there. I am seeing a lot of questions from younger people. And I think the two of you in particular have an ability that other scientists have not yet really been able to achieve, which is to engage young people. And Stephen, you just talked about engagement by these young people. physics students that we and I spoke about in our first conversation back in April. And with Eric,

people are, you know, engaged on discord, on comments and people all over the internet are really engaged with it. What do you think it does, you know, this podcast, the Intent Impossible podcast, I like to fashion myself as, you know, someday I'll be the Joe Rogan of physics. There's already one Joe Rogan. But I'd like to know what is it about these theories of everything that really engages young people. And what I want to do is kind of translate. It's fascinating that you have the sort of bucket theories of everything. Yeah. I don't kind of view it as a bucket like that. I think it's a, you know, for me, you know, I spent my life basically developing computation. And, you know, the fact that I happen to have discovered that that relates to kind of fundamental theory of physics

is kind of a singular event as far as I'm concerned. It's a, it's a, the kind of the bucket of theories of everything is not a bucket I particularly identify. Right. If I can agree with... What's that? If I can agree with Stephen, there can only be one. That was what I said today. That's one of the surprising things that we've discovered is that really isn't true.

So there can be many ways of approaching that theory. Yes. But the thing that's interesting is that you could say there's only fair enough. I mean, it depends what you mean by only one. That's an interesting kind of ontological. epistemological question. But I mean, it's like, you know, you could say about computation. There could only be one theory of computation and its touring machines and its general

recursive functions. The thing that's surprising about physics that has become increasingly clear is that this kind of there's this notion of, you know, what are the possible, what are the underlying rules and then how do we observe those underlying rules? And it's becoming clear that you can basically, the only thing that is absolutely, rigid is the underlying rules are computational and not hypercomputational. That is, once you say that the underlying rules are purely computational, it then follows, it seems, that the things we observe from 20th century physics are inevitable consequences

of that and a few other kind of unspecific assumptions. There are more, it's, it's, this is a hard thing to explain. Actually, we're just, I think, okay, so here's a remarkable connection that's just been becoming clear. So we have this notion of, you know, you have some underlying rules, you follow these rules, you know, reproduce how the universe works. But on the other side of that, we are observing how these rules are working and interpreting them to say this is how the universe works. the thing that is surprising is that one can, I mean, in the language of our kind of theory, there's this thing called the rural multi-way system, which is this kind of this branching system

that runs sort of all possible rules. And this is, we're now jumping into the most abstract, most complicated, but I just want to say one thing about it, which is kind of interesting, which is it's turning out that this incredibly abstract thing that we have, this ruleyal multi-way system, appears to be the same as this thing called the infinity groupoid, which was developed by Gryphundeeke in when it was at the 70s, I guess, 1970s, which is kind of a pinnacle of abstraction of category theory and other areas of mathematics. And what is really quite remarkable to me is that it seems like this thing that's coming out of our theory kind of maps into this incredibly

abstract mathematical thing. And the observations that we have of the universe correspond to a particular in mathematical terms kind of vibration of this infinity groupoid thing and that basically what we are our our way of interpreting the universe is kind of a slice of that of that mathematical object and so it's it's the statement there's only one theory in a sense all these theories are equivalent but the you know the question is how how we are observing them. And again, this is, we can, we can unpack. Again, I was making a pop culture reference. The intellectual spirit of it is that you can have a summit and there are many faces that could be used as assaults on that summit. In the end, however we traverse, you know, Einstein, for example, came up with his divergence-free equations after some rumbling around in differential geometry.

Hilbert went, you know, immediately to a Lagrangian description. They were describing something in common. So I didn't mean to suggest that there was a single description, but there can really only be one underlying theory. And we, all of us who are, and I was trying to agree with you, Stephen, that the most probable number for wrong guests on this live stream is two. But in all probability, if it is not two, then one of us is wrong.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Let me just advance that at least so I can make my wrong statement. It strikes me that you have gained confidence that what you are doing is actually not only capable of producing a fundamental final theory. And we can talk about what the right language is. I'm not wedded to any particular description if you have an objection.

But it sounds to me like you are increasing, convinced that week by week, this is really the most promising assault on our foundations. First of all, if I'm wrong, I hope that you or Garrett Leasy or one of these other crazy people turns out to be right. It would be a pleasure to lose to you, sir. Well, you know, the thing is, the thing to understand is the kind of system that we've built, it is very likely that, you know, I don't understand what you've done, but, you know, I know a little bit of the mathematical background. You know, the whole, for example, understanding local gauge invariance and understanding how fiber bundles work in our systems, as a student actually at our recent summer school, mathematical physicist, who managed to make great progress on that.

And it's actually very clever and much simpler than I expected. the way that essentially sort of fiber bundle type structures and local gauge invariants arise in our theories. Now, what you do with it, once it's arisen from this kind of low-level machine code, that's often running with much more traditional mathematical physics. And I don't think that there's a, you know, it's not an incompatible thing to say, oh, there's some complicated structure to do with, you know, high-dimensional systems and fiber bundles and so on. That doesn't, that's not like, there's no divide yet. Well, let's try to state how you and I could both be fit into the discussion that Brian is trying to conduct.

Yeah, I mean, one thing I definitely agree that, you know, conciliance is nice and it's wonderful to have consonants. What the viewers want as argumentation. I'm just kidding. I don't care about that. But what I do think. We should get Sabina back on. I think it would be, exactly. I think it would be really a great outcome of this discussion would be kind of the joining of your two different approaches.

I don't know about Eric's stuff, so I can't really comment on that. No, no, I mean the people out in that are watching that have, as you just said, fiber bundles, hop fibration, gauge invariants, how it fits in. Talk about those things. Those things I understand. Exema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to disappear eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking ebbglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Ebglis, Librikizumab, LBKZ. A 250 milligram per 2-millimeter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults in children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

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Ask your doctor about Ebbglis. And visit Ebbglis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1-800-545-979. Yeah, no, those things you understand. Sure. But way of having sort of a Rosetta Stone, if there are people out there, I'm not asking or tasking you guys, God forbid, with homework, but people in the respective domain experts in both of your two categories, I think that would be an interesting kind of project to see.

Can these be reconciled? Because what if you found out that... So maybe I should explain what we're doing, okay, because there's a fairly large effort at this point. I mean, it's, you know, what's been happening, you talk about engaging young people. You know, what... I've been trying to figure out how to do this

because there's been a lot of enthusiasm for our project, A lot of people interested. A lot of people say, I want to contribute to this project. Okay? So right now we're just about to kind of roll out. I think we have 30 research affiliates and junior research affiliates who are mostly people who came to the summer school that we just spent a month having. And there are people who are sort of in motion, sort of doing research along the lines of this project

and, you know, producing papers and so on. And, you know, one of the important objectives there, There's several important objectives, but one of them is making these bridges to other kind of mathematical physics approaches. Another thing is just being able to check off the list. There are, you know, these effects known in quantum mechanics. There are these features of general relativity, for example. Can we go down the list and say, okay, you know, we have destructive interference, we have spin statistics connections, we have this, we have that. The thing that's just absolutely amazing is every time I think one of these is going to be really hard, it turns out to be much

easier than I think. And that's been a big surprise to me. I mean, I've been, my expectations keep on being kind of exceeded. And I think that the, I mean, the other question is, for example, something like John Rott's City, which I know, you know, you have a lovely cosmic microwave background globe and the back there, it's, um, right, that's the, uh, it's very cool. Yeah. It's, um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, the, the, the, it's kind of the, the, the, God's eye view, right. Yeah, right.

Um, but, um, uh, you know, so, for example, there's the, you know, we have a sort of mathematical proof that in some limit, we can reproduce general relativity. But the question is, can you actualize that? And so here's an interesting example of how sort of, you know, a direction we're going in, which is an interesting sort of way to validate theories. It's the following thing. So when people normally study gravitation theory, they say, oh, we've got Einstein's equations from 1915. They work great.

But if we actually want to find out how two black holes merge, we don't get to kind of work out, you know, with Mathematica or something, the exact, you know, result for, you know, how this black hole merger will work. we have to make numerical approximations to the Einstein equations, sort of break them down into something discrete, solve them on our computer, see what the implications for this process are. But that kind of break down the Einstein equations into something discrete that can be solved on a computer, there's an alternative way to think about that,

which is start from our theory, which is born as something that you can run on a computer, and then go up from there to get to something which can reproduce what happens in black holes, so on. And so, you know, this is the kind of thing I happen to do this years ago with fluid dynamics, where you can start with these very simple, in that case, cellular automaton models of fluid dynamics and build up from those to actually reproduce fluid phenomena. Anyway, so the thing is what I might call proof by compilation, so to speak, which is that you're taking the kind of, you're going from the

kind of low-level structure of the model to actually do computations that can then be compared with black hole dynamics, even though you sort of know it has to work because you have a mathematical proof that the two things are equivalent, but it's very satisfying to see it actually work. It hasn't. We haven't done that yet, but we're in the process of doing it. And more interestingly, actually, in quantum field theory, where numerical methods have been much harder to apply, it looks like we have a pretty good way to do sort of numerical quantum field theory in a different way than it's been done before.

When you say it's easy, by what metric or what? What measure function are you defining that? Easy in terms of just easy for a brilliant grandmaster of physics to unravel, or easy in terms of computational efficiency in some sense? No, I mean, for example, one of the things is, do we have to know how electrons work to be able to, or do we have to know what photons in detail are before we can reproduce effects in quantum mechanics?

The answer is a lot of these phenomena seem to be more generic than I expected and more amenable to being kind of explained without having that whole tower of features built. So that's the main thing I mean by easier. I think in terms of the technical difficulty and the mathematical depth of what's going on, I mean, we're doing what physicists often do, which is we're skating over many of the mathematical difficulties.

I mean, in some of these derivations, they're like 12 different limits that have to be taken of, you know, this thing, is small compared to the size of the universe, but large compared to this, but small compared to the curvature of that, but large compared to this, and so on. And, you know, each one of those limits is a significant amount of mathematical work to validate and so on. And, you know, this is the typical thing that's been done by physicists through the ages, I'm afraid, that just skate right over those things. Now, we have a big advantage, which is you can do computer

experiments, so we kind of know it's going to work. I mean, we know we're not going to be too far off because we can actually check a bunch of these things in actual experiments, although the experiments we do, you know, if the universe has 10 to the 400, you know, atoms of space in it, we certainly don't have that many in our computer. So we're doing very small versions of this. You know, I want to say that I think it might be interesting for us to talk a little bit about kind of the more sort of societal and structural aspects rather than getting too deep into the, into the, sure. Wait a minute. I was looking to get, I wanted to get into the, into the damn weeds.

Go for it. We will, we will. Small amount of weed, weed whacking. And then we can talk about the bigger picture of science and the world and so on, which I think we probably both have things to say about. So I think that segues nicely into a question that I brought up with both of you separately and then earlier today. And that's kind of the structure of the way that scientific revolutions

take place and it's become a trope, you know, nowadays to say, well, there's a paradigm shift, which is brought upon by some new idea, radical, usually some lone genius like you guys, working almost in solitude. I'm just teasing, but, but just going to get us into trouble with Reddit. That's all you're doing. You're just bathing Reddit. Well, hopefully Dr. Reddit is not watching yet. I guarantee you she is. What do you think about this notion of paradigm shifts? Do you think it's really the way that science takes place or is it just, sort of a retrospective, retradiction, historical narrative of what has taken place that is just convenient as a hack for the human mind to say, okay, in retrospect, the paradigm shifted with

Galileo's observation of the Jovian satellites. What do you, Eric, think about this notion of Cunian paradigm shifting? Well, I mean, you have to have lived through stasis and stagnation and through revolution and boom. And even if the boom isn't the largest boom on record, like the gold rush or something, in science, I lived through one or two revolutions, one of which was a Rosetta Stone between differential geometry and quantum field theory,

or at least the structure underneath quantum field theory that was figured out in mid-1970s. It doesn't have a historical, like you can't go to a biopic about it, which is weird. but your friend Jim Simons, Brian, and C.N. Yang, arguably, maybe the greatest of living physicists, figured this out over lunch. And that revolution is going on to this day called the Wu Yang Dictionary. There was another one having to do with the discovery that quantum field theory was a mathematically natural structure, not just a grab bag of techniques, and that it would have been discovered as an

enhancement of something in algebraic topology, since Dr. Wolfram brings up Alexander Groth and Deek. In algebraic topology, we have a theory called boardism, which is an extraordinary callumology theory, and quantum field theory would be discovered in enhancing boardism theory, as Ed Witton, Michael Attia, and Graham Siegel and others taught us in the 1980s. Having seen revolutions, yes, there are things that you can tell people where they're never the same again. They come to understand, you know, as I've said before, there should be a tattoo on all of our seekums. If you can read this, you're too close. When you pull your head out, you can better understand the world after the revolution. And what Dr. Wolfram is discussing

is that we've had a small number of complete revolutions in our thinking and many more minor elaborations in our thinking. There was one around scale, which might be called the first and second renormalization revolutions, originally of Feynman and Schwinger, but then Ken Wilson really was probably the big name in that area. Having been through a few of these revolutions, having been close enough to study them, and also in a few different fields like biology with CRISPR-Cast-9 or optogenetics or something like this, yeah, no, these things are real. And they change everything. And, you know, my resistance to Stephen's theory will one day turn into, you know, my saying, oh my God, I can't believe I didn't understand what you were saying.

It was too new. To use Feynman's famous quote from when he tried to introduce his path integral or some over history's approach, he said, my machines came from too far away because he was derided. And you see a lot of people, we were talking before about Reddit, just to close this out. A lot of people are trying to figure out what the hell is going on in these live stream. and why does one person get to be in them and who's a crank and who isn't. They're trying to use some sort of indicia, which is, does that person sound like their wild eye? Does that person sound sober? And it's a really odd moment because on the one hand, everybody sounds crazy and some of the crazy people sound among the most sane.

And I think Dr. Wolfram, for example, despite the fact that I think he's wrong, I think that he is one of the sanest voices out here, one of the most interesting for sure. And Part of the problem is the mainstream of the community sounds mad as a hatter to me. Dr. Woffrom sounds much more reasonable. Okay, so let's comment on paradigm shifts and so on. I've been fortunate to live through some myself, even probably responsible for some. I think, you know, the main process that seems to happen is a methodological advance is made. That opens up some new area.

there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit to be picked in that area. Lots of exciting stuff happens for five years, ten years, maybe a little bit longer. That area of science gets big. It gets quite institutionalized. It slows down. There's 50 or 100 years of sort of stasis. And then maybe there's some methodological advance and it opens up again. And typically in the, you know, in terms of sort of the conceptualization of these methodological advances,

It's usually a long process for the people involved in them. And it's usually, you know, you have to sort of think about things in the right way. And then maybe there's some moment when you realize, yes, I can actually see how this works. Now, for example, in my current activities in physics, you know, one of the embarrassments of that is that the fundamental model, which is based on, you can think of it as based on rewritings of hypergraphs or very minimalist, very sort of abstract. thing about transformations for relations between elements. And that idea you can also think of as transformation rules for symbolic expressions. Well, the idea of transformation rules for symbolic expressions is what I've been using technologically in building computational languages for 40 years.

And it is super embarrassing in a sense that the core idea, which seems to have unlocked what we're doing now in physics, is actually something that I've been more. working on for 40 years. But I didn't see that connection. I mean, what's happened is that normally in using symbolic expressions and transformation rules for symbolic expressions in computational languages, those symbolic expressions actually immediately mean something. They mean, you know, adding things together.

They mean, I don't know, some other identifiable kind of operation. Whereas in the way we're using them in physics, it's just the infrastructure. They mean nothing. they get meaning because the things in them turn into the things like the atoms of space and so on. But to begin with, they mean nothing. So for me, that's sort of an interesting case because it's something which has been right under my nose for 40 years. And it took that amount of time for me to have the right sort of conceptual framework to see how it could be applied in this particular case. And, you know, I think that's, I mean, this was a question of kind of how people, you know, how these paradigm shifts and so.

on kind of land in the world. I mean, okay, so there's one big one that I've been deeply involved in, which is the whole idea of using computation and programs as models of the world instead of using mathematical equations as models of the world. So you roll the clock back, you know, 300 or so years. We get to Galileo and Newton and so on. And they had the problem explaining to people, no, you can't just reason about how the world works.

You can write down a mathematical equation and solve. and that will tell you how the moon moves or something. And, you know, at that time, it was a sort of complicated battle to have people realize, yes, you can just, you know, solve the mathematical equation, it will tell you how the world works. It's not a question of reasoning about it. Okay, 300 years go by. And then we're at the point where, oh, mathematical equations are the way the world works. Is there some other way to describe how the world works?

No, no, no. There can't possibly be another way to describe how the world works. So, you know, when I started thinking about kind of generalizing sort of rules for how the world works and thinking about simple programs and what they do and kind of exploring the computational universe of simple programs, there was sort of, I would say actually looking back on it's interesting. You know, I published this big book called The New Kind of Science back in 2002. I would say that many fields were really quite receptive to what I had to say. Fundamental physics was actually one of the only exceptions.

But what was interesting there was people, you know, some people said, oh, you know, programs, we don't need programs to describe the world, mathematical equations do just fine. Okay. Now you look just maybe 15 years later. And if you look at new models that people are inventing of things, they are overwhelmingly based on programs, not based on mathematical equations. Yeah, but there's a dark story underneath this, which is that as tech has been really the, and by tech I really mean computation because most of the rest of technology seems to have vanished.

As computation became the one bright spot in a relatively stagnant world, and I hate to say it that way, and there are caveats, but let's keep going. It came to be that many people started to dress up whatever they were doing in terms of computation, because it was possible to seek funding from a Uri Milner or a Mark Zuckerberg or, dare I say, a Jeffrey Epstein, you know, all of these sorts of things which had exotic funding sources or possible prizes around them in computation. It also became the case that funders were more eager at the government level to hear a proposal for something having a computational nature. So the problem that we have is that there were all of these old ideas about, you know, von Neumann of Schrodinger, of Hawking, et cetera, et cetera, touring about the world as a computer. And at the moment, there's a system of selective pressures that partially has to do with how difficult it is to fund one's research.

So I don't want, I'm very worried about the event horizon of the computational paradigm. It's absolutely true what Stephen is saying that this is torn through theoretical physics, but I'm very dubious as I was. No, it hasn't. No, it hasn't. Not theoretical physics. No, it hasn't. That's an area where it has not made great progress. I mean, if you look at other fields. No, no, the length, people aren't necessarily doing what you're saying, but they are dressing things up in terms of computational. So I think you're, you know, interesting points, I think not quite right. Okay. So you're absolutely right. And in theoretical physics, for example, quantum computing has become this giant, you know, fundable thing. We can talk about that separately. Or black hole information paradoxes or the idea of the universe as a computer, John Wheeler had old points.

But that feel, again, is... Yeah, but that's not what I'm talking about. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that there is a way of thinking about doing science that says, you write down an equation, you can solve this equation, and it will tell you how the world is going to work. Right. That's one model of doing science. Computational scientific materialist. Well, that's sort of the old line of reductionism, which is if we could just solve these equations, we get beautiful close forms. Exactly. So the surprising thing that, you know, I really got serious about in the 1980s was this phenomenon where if what you think is going on is that it's just following computational rules, then that doesn't work anymore.

There's this phenomenon of computational irreducibility where the system is doing. what it does and it's doing a computation, and we're trying to figure out what the system does, and we're also doing a computation, and there's this thing I call the principle of computational equivalence, which is basically the statement or the claim, which we're getting more and more evidence for, that our ability to think through what a system does is of the same level of computational sophistication as what the system itself does. So we never get to outrun the system. We don't get to do what has been the kind of banner story of a lot of traditional mathematical science, which is find this reduction, this reducible computation,

where we can just say, and the system is going to do this. We're kind of stuck. Well, there's the issue about whether we can compute it out once we find the rules. So the idea is that you could imagine a world in which Maxwell's equations are perfect, you know, all the way down. And you still might not be able to compute the consequences of Maxwell's equations. Like the Einstein equations like now is stuck. Same, so it happens, but it's very obscure in those equations, because when you look at, like, the Navier-Stokes equations, the standard equations for fluid flow, one of the most notable features of fluid flow is fluid turbulence. You know, fluid flows quickly, it looks kind of random. You say to people who study the Navier-Stokes equations, can you reproduce that from the underlying equations? Is that something that's in the underlying equations, or is it maybe a sign of some, you know, smaller scale molecular processes that are getting amplified, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they'll typically get, I mean, these days they have a lot of empirical ways to do it. But if you really push on the fundamental question, they'll get kind of embarrassed because they just don't know.

Well, it's like court confinement. If you know the rules of corks, can you prove that they're not never going to be found in isolation and only going to be found typically in hadrons and protons? That's a similar thing, which actually has that particular one actually has a more direct story of. So let's all agree that we're modern people and we don't have the old reductionist dream. But so, Bob, that's a non-trivial point because in theoretical physics, that point has not yet been understood. Well, I think it has. I think that the extent to which we talk about what is emergent, what is not, what is anthropic, what is not,

we now have many concepts, including, you know, Galois sorts of, in the context. Gilwa, girdle sorts of concerns that are cropping up in theoretical physics. Finally, yes. I wrote this paper about undecidability in theoretical physics back in the early 1980s. No, I think it needs to be said, you know, again, by somebody who hopes to be your competitor, that you were very early on a lot of these topics. You weren't doing it as part of a fad. You were, in fact, the pioneer coming out of the computational ability of mathematics and all that you've set up. And you've wrapped some beautiful libraries with many more functions than anybody ever thought we could have. So, you know, kudos to you. There was a huge resistance

inside of theoretical physics because it was a very closed, arrogant community. It had many reasons to be arrogant. It has fewer reasons to be arrogant now. And so in part, I think, that you were dismissed unfairly. It's very important that you not be the one to blow your own horn. So I would be happy to say that I remember when that book came out. I remember the derision, the anger. Didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. particular, and it was not listened to properly, even though I don't think that it actually is doing what you say it's doing now, but one, happy to be wrong, and it was always a really important point that you were making within that. I just don't think that it really got hurt.

What do you make of that, Steve? Hold on a second. I want to just correct that impression, because the fact is, you know, I was looking at this recently, right? What, you know, sort of insofar as there was negativism about that book, where did it actually come from? Because there was tons of positivism. I mean, you know, the negativism, it turns out, was specifically concentrated in people who did fundamental physics. And if you look outside of that area, it was not negativism, it was actually a lot of positivism. It's a lot of positivism. It's a steal man and the critics, which I hate to do.

What's that? To steal man, rather than straw man, the critics. the critics have a feeling that there's a tiny number of fields where it's very difficult to check people. It's very hard to say when a theoretical physicist is bullshitting. It's very hard to say when a theoretical, very pure mathematician is speaking nonsense. So there is this fear. How do we know that what he's saying in some sense is correct? Correct enough, sorry, Eric, to interrupt, but correct enough to devote many precious hours to unravel it.

That's the crinisc. There's that, but there's not that much to unravel at the moment. So I'm not that sympathetic with that. You know, this is sort of Sabine. I don't have time for this stuff. My feeling is, to hell, you don't have time. There's almost nothing happening. Now, with that said, you know, what I think is that there was a fear that, quite honestly,

people like you and like myself are cheating. I want to be open about this. The fear that comes out of whatever is left of the core community is you guys don't have a right to go direct to consumer. You don't have a right to talk about the field that belongs to a tiny number, the privilege of a tiny number of people who do this morning, noon, and night, who are all possessed of common beliefs. And that's something that both you and I have been fighting. Now, I would also suggest that Stephen and I probably are not eager to open the door to every lunatic with a red crayon who wants to scribble something on a roll of paper towels and say

that they've got a unified theory. So there have to be some sense. standards. On the other hand, the core group that's been trying to gate this has failed. Well, okay. So I have a starting to... Go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, I mean, you know, the first thing, so it was historically interesting to me. So I was, you know, I did particle physics during its kind of golden age in the late 1970s when I was a late teenager, so to speak. And I think I did pretty well. You know, a bunch of I got, you know, got was sort of pretty successful in the field, and I wrote a bunch of papers that still get cited

because I lived in the sort of golden age, and not a lot came after that. I mean, not because they were necessarily, you know, it was a question of picking low-hanging fruit. But I think, and so that meant that I know a large fraction of the kind of leading people in theoretical physics above some age. And so I was quite surprised by the level of kind of

angst when new kind of science came out. But the typical thing that I heard was, oh my gosh, if this is right, what we've been doing for the last 50 years, all has to be thrown away. And I kept on saying, I don't think that's what's going to happen. But, you know, and people would say to me, like, you know, I was noticing, I think I made a, you know, wrote a sort of historical piece about this and I described it as Nobel Prize winners with pitchforks. And so there was a, it was quite a parade.

It was quite, it's quite, kind of interesting, looking back on it. I was going to send one of them an email, actually, just when my new thing came out, and then the person went and died. So, so I, so I, but, but, but, you know, I think what was, what was interesting to me was at that time, 20 years ago, there was a lot of kind of, you know, you know, we're going to make it. string theory is going to do it. We're almost there. You know, we don't need anything else. I think that's changed now.

Well, that's like after you left. That's about 1988. That's about 1984 through 86 when the string mania was at its height. Yeah, yeah, right. No, I think that, you know, now, you know, we've got a lot of mostly younger physicists who are pretty seriously working on this stuff. and I think, you know, it's going great. Of the older crowd, you know, I've sort of been in contact with a large fraction of them, and it's like, oh, this seems interesting. And it's like, you should actually work on this. I keep on telling them, you should actually work on it.

And some of them have, you know, been on live streams we've done and things like that, and we certainly talked about things. But I think, you know, a lot of people, they do something for a living, and this isn't what they do for a living. And I don't know whether they'll kind of make the end. effort to kind of turn what the change, what they do for a living, I don't know whether it matters. I think that the concept that, you know, it is probably, particularly 20 years ago, it was still the case that the kind of institutional structure of things like physics was very strong,

as in it was like, we have this institutional structure, and this is how this field is going to work, and we don't need anything from the outside. My impression is that that's weakened in the intervening years, but maybe I'm wrong. I think, you know, the perception that I get from comments, from people is almost like being candid with both of you as friends. On one hand, Eric is criticized for a complexity, a technical, you know, sort of a toolkit that is beyond even many theoretical physicists. So, you know, I disagree that, you know, they'll say, I don't have enough time, but it is true that there's, you know, general stock and trade of a theoretical cosmologist is not necessarily hop fibrogy. vibrations, fiber bundles, et cetera. It might be perturbation theory. It might be quantum field theory. And on the other side of the coin, Stephen, I think sometimes the perception is it's too simplistic, not in the sense, or it's too elementary.

It's too fundamental in a sense that you use in your wonderful new book, which you're kind enough to send to me. And congratulations for writing a shorter book than a new kind of science, I think, by about 40 pages. How come Brian gets a copy? Well, I think Stephen will send you one, I'll give you. I'll give you. one when we get together. I've got multiple copies. But Stephen, you know, so let me, let me just start with you for a second. Eric knows his critics. He knows what people say, and I think he brings up a good point. Wait, I have critics. This is the first I hear of this, friend. There's two. One's named Pia something and the other one. But Stephen, in your case, I think it's absolutely correct that, you know, people are blown away by the contributions. I have people, you know,

asking me to thank you, you know, from the depths of their heart for, for Mathematica, for new kind of science, that in some ways, it's amazing that you guys have, I get comments, I'm reading them, you save my life, you touch my life, you change my life. It's so amazing. But on the other hand, I think that that in, in the, you know, real scientific circles, oftentimes breeds a class of, of almost undermining and, and question. Let me explain something, which is, which I think is interesting. Yeah. So I am, that people think what I've done is simplistic is a great compliment.

Because I've spent a huge amount of effort trying to take the things that I'm thinking about and make them simple enough that both I can understand them well and I can explain them well. And I knew, when I wrote new kind of science, I even said this in the introduction, I said, the fact that this appears to be very simple, appears to be very straightforward, will make people who thought, you know, who work on technical science, think that, you know, they must really understand this and this must be something simple and irrelevant. It isn't true. And, you know, the fact is it is much more difficult, at least for me, maybe it isn't for everybody, but I think it probably is for almost everybody, to turn things into things that can be described simply than it is to kind of, you know, well, maybe there's a certain challenge to sort of building up the tower of being able to, to talk about, you know, fiber bundles and self-dual connections and all this kind of thing. But that's a, it's a well-defined tower you have to climb. I mean, I think that the, you know, the problem of turning things into, so for example, right

now I happen to be working on kind of a very bizarre thing that, again, I never thought would come out, which is a kind of a general theory of metamathematics. So in mathematics, one thinks about, you know, there's the particular mathematics people do, the 3 million theorems of mathematics that have been published in the literature of mathematics in human history. But then there's the kind of full metamathematics of all possible theorems. And the remarkable thing is that it looks like we can actually derive kind of the analog of Einstein's equations in metamathematical space. Very bizarre. So we keep coming to this point. I want to just put a pin here just in case it's of interest. I don't think that

it's very difficult to imagine recovering Einstein's equations given Hilbert's contribution so that we know in a weird sense that Einstein did something very, very difficult. And I've compared it to half dome, where there's a sheer face that Einstein went up, and then there's this gentle face that Hilbert went up after he knew that it could be climbed. It seems to me that because we know that Einstein's equations results from the simplest objective function that you could have, which is the scalar curvature in Rwandan geometry, that that's not a great target. I mean, it's great that you can produce

something that looks like Einstein's theory out of computational rules. The next one on the list would be Yang Mills theory. I mean, they're only really four basic equations. Again, the objective function is as simple as it gets. So to Stephen's point, What we know about the current physical world is that two out of the four equations, fundamental equations, for the fields, the things that dance in our world and we call particles or waves, both of those come from the simplest possible curvature equations that one can have in geometry. So if you think that the geometry is largely about curvature, then the two simplest structures that can generate equations called the Yang-Mills-Legrongian or the Yang-Mills-Mex-Mex-Pi,

LaGrangean, which is just you take the size of the curvature and you square it, and that's it. And the other one is you just take a piece of the curvature without squaring it when you have a piece to take called the scalar curvature, and that's it. The other two equations have a slightly different character. I want to leave aside the Higgs field and what would you call the Klein-Gordon equation with the potential. But I would say the next order of business is, do you find the derived? equation because it's very difficult to find spinners. Spinners, yes. Arising from

computational rules. Well, you can do it with you can do that. Yeah, I mean, no, there's nothing difficult about so so the answer is do we know how we managed to get spinner representations the rotation group? No, no, no, you can you. Okay. We know how to construct these things. Yeah. There is a misconduct. about why they are there to construct. Now, there are people who will go to their graves saying, there is no mystery, I know how to construct it, therefore, I know what it is, which is never true.

I mean, we only really understand something in mathematics when we can walk all around it and see it from many different angles. I agree that we know how to construct spinners. I know how to construct Dirac operators. But this is a highly non-trivial question in our world. It comes out of what I call the psychedelic of mathematics, square root construction where you ask a question like what is x squared equals minus one it has no solution in the reels you have to jump into another space in order to answer the question right so it has

this different character which is the answer to the problem isn't found in the in the space in which the problem was posed in the case of einstein's equations and in the yang mills equations or the souped up version of maxwell's equations non-linear maxwell theory if you will you have something which has a character where I understand where it comes from. In the case of the Daraq equation, you've got much bigger problems. I tried to bring this up on the last live stream, didn't work at all. What do you do in quantum gravity when you don't have an observation of the metric, for example, and therefore you cannot construct the ocean in which the electron is a wave? Now, if you think about it very carefully, in a weird way, electrons are basically functions, and photons are basically derivative operators.

That's a bizarre way to think about it. It's not a bizarre way at all. You can think about it. I mean, I know the mathematical physics, so I understand what you're talking about. But I think it's not. Then you wouldn't say it's a bizarre way at all, I don't think. In any event, what we're talking about is we're talking about versions of the X, Y, plane, and functions and derivatives. Right? And the idea of the X, Y, plane, that grows up to become something called fiber bundles, which Stephen mentioned at the beginning. The idea of functions grows up to be something called sections. And the idea of derivatives grows up to be something called connections. Now, these are the basic bread and butter of what goes on before you get to the quantum. And in that picture, there's a big difference between recovering the easiest bits and recovering the hardest bits. So I don't mean to put X,

weight on Stephen's shoulders. If he can do the first bits, that's great. But there's a series of challenges that are of escalating difficulty in terms of recovery because of the simplicity of some portions of our model and the Baroque complexity of other portions of the model. For example, the internal quantum number assignments that give the particles their personality, the number of generations, the chirality of the situation. It's very interesting. Stephen's rules are going to have to pick a left or a right. So it's very interesting to how he's going to recover a chiral world. And I just want to...

This is silly. This is silly. You know, let me give you my point of view here. Okay? You know, we can talk about details of mathematical physics. It's quite interesting. I know you know a bunch about it. You know, we can go deeply into, you know, how, you know,

half integer spin versus integer spin versus integer particles work, etc, etc., etc. I mean, what you're doing is you're making the paradigm shift mistake. You're talking about things in terms of kind of existing mathematical physics

ideas, and yes, you're saying, oh my gosh, you'll never be able to get spinners. No, I'm saying. No, no, no, I don't think you're saying that in fairness. Let me just make a few points about this. Yeah, go ahead, Stephen. Yeah. Okay. I mean, the fact is

the, you know, we're actually hot on the trail of understanding how fermions versus bosons work. It's quite interesting. It has to do, it seems, with cases where in our, and again, it's sort of a somewhat complicated story, but it's a, you know, these branch pairs and branchial space, whether they end up being things that merge after a small number of steps or not,

seems to be what is the distinguishing feature between bosons and fermions, how that relates to half a hundred of spin, we don't completely know. It seems to be related to various features of homotopy in the multi-way causal graph. And, you know, it's quite possible that some of the kinds of mathematical physics that you like a lot are highly relevant in understanding how that homotopy works in the multi-way causal graph. It looks like a limit of the multi-way causal graph is quite possibly related to Twister theory. and that one can understand some of the things that happen there on the basis of Twister Theory,

whether we can get, you know, we're now understood, we've understood quite a bit about how rotational invariance works, how angular momentum works, but it's kind of a weird business because, in a sense, we're trying to build from the machine code up. And, you know, we can have a detailed mathematical physics conversation. Where's the silliness? That's what most people are.

interested in. Oh, I disagree. I think that people actually want to see whether or not, you know, both of us are saying outlandish things. By the way, I don't think what I was saying was silly at all. No, no. It's not a miscommunication. It's started mathematical physics. Yeah, I think that's standard mathematical physics. And the fact is, I'm going to invoke my referee. I'm going to hold on, hold on one second. I do want to point something out. I think it's very important. I've heard this from people that I hold in high esteem. Paul Steinhart was probably Stephen's roommate at Caltech when, uh, something like that. No, it wasn't. I met him once at a conference in 977 when I was 17 years old. But one reason that, sorry, yeah, one reason that Paul says he refuses to

ever get a Facebook or, or Twitter account is because he would invariably be tempted to propose an interesting idea, which by necessity would be new, novel, untested, unproven at some level. And then immediately it would be attacked, assailed, uh, subjugated to, to, to, uh, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to constraints and concerns. And I think you guys have both seen that for the following reason that you both are master explicators of what you do. You both are obviously domain experts in what you know and you understand the other branches of physics and mathematics that are pertinent to it.

However, neither one really knows the other ones, the intimacy of the other one's theories. And I think it's important to realize that just like people assailing your theories from without, I think it's too soon to tell, at least in the case of Stevens' work, which is, you know, in some sense, 20 years old or coming up on 20 years old. And in some sense, it's also brand new because I think when you look at the successful applications, I feel like we should just check those off, Stephen. I mean, biological systems, crystallography, you go down the list, finance, economics, where the Wilfram approach, the new kind of science approach first outlined in 2003 or so, that has already been proven.

It doesn't need to be proven. Where I think it's different is where we lay on this extra layer of computability as a fundamental nature of the universe, which, for my perception, maybe Stephen, correct me if I'm wrong, has sort of a multiverse component to it. You talk about different aspects of the universe. Well, you talk in an essay that you wrote in 2017 about, you know, the space of all universes where these rules... That was before I understood what I now understand. Yeah, so, but we are barely... coming up to where you were in 2017.

So can we take a step back? We talked about the paradigm issue. I want to talk a little bit more about how these ideas get into the firmament or get into the zeitgeist. Yeah, before you do that, I want to just clear something up. Okay.

Because otherwise it'll stick in my crawler. Stephen, I'm not trying to scuttle your theory. I believe that your theory, if you have an approach that works, and it's a face up the same, mountain. My belief is that you will get to answer these questions. You may tell us for the first time spiritually what a spinner is from a computational perspective. I'm not saying you've only done the easy stuff and the other stuff is really hard. The stuff that you're talking about is really

hard. What's going to pick out the Riemann curvature tensor. How we got that's easy? That one's fairly easy. Well, I believe that because it's very natural. There's a reason that in some sense it came first before the Wu Yang Dictionary. I think spinners are going to come out as, I mean, the latest thing, which is only a week old, so it's still uncooked, right? Yes, yes. Okay, so we're tricking him to sharing this on the live screen. It's an exclusive.

This is an exactly very good here. Well, we probably talked about it on our working session live streams. But, but, I mean, the current thought, let me try and explain it. So in, okay. in quantum mechanics, one of, okay, first point is in our models, quantum mechanics is a very natural thing. When we think about traditional classical mechanics, it's like you throw a ball, it goes in a definite direction. In quantum mechanics, kind of the idea is that the ball, you know, tests out all possible paths, and then we only get to see various probabilities about what happens.

Okay? In our models, they're these things called multi-way systems, which basically are enumerating all the possible paths. And the whole sort of dynamics of how quantum mechanics works comes out of these multi-way systems. Now, what happens is when you look at one of these multi-way systems at a particular time, you take a slice through it and you get this thing we call branchial space. Brantial space is the analog in the space of quantum states

to physical space in kind of ordinary position in the universe. By physical space, you mean a space like hyper-slice? Yeah, I mean, I mean, these branchial surfaces are the analog, they're branch-like hypersurfacees, which are the analog of space-like hypersurface in standard space-time. Okay, so this branch-like hypersurface in branchial space, there's an extent in branchial space, which is where as you move through branch-year space, you're moving through the space of sort of quantum entanglements.

And so states that are further away in branchial space, space are less quantum entangled than states which are close in branch-hill space. What is your notion of a distance? Well, it's based on, if you look at the multi-way graph, the nearest neighbors in branch-heel space are things which have a common ancestor one step back in the multi-way graph. So those are what we call branch pairs. I mean, this is, unfortunately, it gets fairly... I appreciate that, but the idea is you have some ordering by number of steps.

A metric. Yes. It's a metric-like. Based on sort of common ancestry in the multi-way graph. And essentially what happens is that just as there's, oh, look at that. That's a branchial space. Well, that thing on the left is a multi-way causal graph. The thing on the right is a kind of way version of a kind of mixture of branchial space and physical space.

So not the best visualization, but it's something. something. But anyway, so the idea is, so there's physical space that we're all familiar with. There's this branchial space, which is the kind of space of quantum states, just like there's a speed of light in physical space. In our model, there's a maximum entanglement speed in branchial space, which is kind of the maximum speed at which kind of you can, maximum speed of kind of entanglement in that space. So, okay, why is any of this relevant? Again, this is, I'm in the Einstein equations, which have to do with physical space,

one is looking at, and one way to view the Einstein equations is to think about what happens to a GDC, what happens to the path of a particle in space time. And essentially, what's happening in the Einstein equations is that energy momentum causes deflections in GD6 in space time. In branchial space, the exact same thing happens. Essentially, energy momentum causes deflections in GD6 in branchial space. And it turns out that that deflection process gives one the Feynman path integral, which is really cool.

And it's one of the things that I sort of found the most elegant in the things that we've done so far in this, in this theory that what in the in physical spaces the Einstein equations and branchial spaces the path under goal. Okay. Why is this relevant to fermions and bosons? The reason it's relevant is that I just want to take a moment to think about what you just said. You said that something in general relativity that is Einstein's equations which are maximally resistant of all of our structures to quantization is analogous in some way. to the Feynman Path integral, which I'm going to disagree later with your characterization, which is Feynman's sort of characterization, the linguistic description of what we claim is happening

when we're taking one of these integrals. But the point is that you're just making a claim on pasant, which is astounding to begin with, which is that the Einstein equations are somehow intimately bound up in the quintessential centerpiece, of quantum field theory, not even quantum mechanics. Yep, yep, yep, yep. So they are the, the Einstein equations, I mean, this is a remarkable thing, which I certainly did not see coming,

that the path interval is the exact same thing as the Einstein equations, but in a different kind of space. Never heard this. Right. So that's one of the things that we discovered, like, I don't know, six, seven months ago, that was like, wow. And those two things,

meet up when you think about black holes and black hole information and so on. There's sort of this, and in fact, the ADS-CFT correspondence is almost certainly taking this multi-way causal graph and projecting it into space time and projecting it into bansheal space. But it's the same graph projected in two different ways, corresponds to the kind of general relativity ADS side of ADS-CFT and the quantum field theory CFT side of it. That's almost certainly what that is and various people are working on. filling in the details of that. So it's pretty neat.

So then, okay, you asked about fomions and bosons, and I was going to tell you this week's kind of way of getting to that. And, you know, these are complicated things. So it takes a few steps. Okay, so the next thing to realize is in quantum mechanics, you know, one of the things that emerged particularly from von Neumann's work was this idea of, you know, there is an amplitude, it is a complex number. it operates in Hilbert space, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

One of the things that was implicitly done was something which I think turns out to be a mistake, which is that the magnitude and the phase of these quantum amplitudes would sort of all package together. You're in the projectivization of a Hilbert space. Yes, yes. I mean, the fact that, well, the fact that you can think about it as a magnitude in phase is just a complex number.

What in our models, what ends up happening is the magnitude and the phase come from completely different places. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our scene.

It's just so beautiful. on Pluto TV free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. And so what happens is the magnitude has to do with the counting of paths going through this multi-way graph. The phase has to do with essentially where you land up in branchial space. And actually one of the things that we figured out about a week or two ago is it's just unbelievably easy to get the double slit experiment to work. And we get nice pictures. I don't know what that means, but the first point I understand. Interference in quantum mechanics.

I understand that. Right. It's not what. Okay. You mean you don't understand how it's easy? It comes out naturally in some sense. No, what he's saying, I mean, we have to go back and unpack what the good doctor is saying. He is talking about the fact that we claim that we work in a Hilbert space.

We don't work in a Hilbert space. We work in something called the projectivization of a Hilbert space. and effectively that destroys a certain amount of structure. So we begin with something like a vector space. We remove the origin. We pluck it out like the seed out of a cherry. And then we take all of the sort of meat and we compress it in this particular way. And what Stephen is saying is that that is a loss of information that we teach physicists with their mother's milk

and that this may be, in fact, throwing away information that is actually experimentally much more important. More or less. I mean, I think that let's not get in, let's not go off into projected Hilbert Space for a minute. Let's I mean, the point. You guys never take me anywhere. Buy me to the Hilbert Space.

Right. The thing that ends up being interesting is when you think about kind of these again, this is the kind of the these sort of quantum GED6, what ends up happening is the phase of the quantum

amplitude is essentially defined by its position in branchial space. So you think about these, in general relativity, you'd think about, you know, a GEDIC is deflected by the presence of mass that, you know, it's attracted to some massive object moves around it. It changes the direction of the GEDIC has changed by the presence of mass. Okay. in branchial space, it's the same story. The GEDIC is deflected by the presence of energy momentum.

That presence of energy momentum corresponds to the Lagrangian in quantum field theory. And what one is doing is deflecting that GDIC. The deflection of the GDIC, the interpretation of that is it's changing the phase of the quantum amplitude. It's changing where that GEDIC is going to land in Brantial space, which changes the phase of the quantum amplitude. And amusingly enough, what appears. is in the Feynman path integral is exactly E to the I over H bar times the action integral. The action integral is the integral in our world of the divergence of causal edges, which corresponds to the Lagrangian.

So there seem to be multiple things going on here if I can just... I do want to invoke my privilege here, being the moderator. We've covered the first of our six or seven topics in an hour and 15 minutes. I just want to finish on bosons for a second. Okay, please, yeah, please finish up bosons, and let's move to our next, which will be experimental testability. The flavor of this is that what ends up happening with bosons is this kind of collection in branchial space, this kind of focusing in branchial space, and what seems to happen with fermions is a divergence in branchial space. And one of the things that I've always been curious about is why are there only fermions and bosons,

why isn't there lots of intermediate paris statistics and so on? And I think that the answer is that it's going to end up being the case that basically in branchial space, things either diverge or they don't diverge. And that's going to, but there's much mathematical physics packing that has to go around this. And if I could just take 15 seconds to riff off this. You have a situation in which the great thing about general relativity, for example, is that all you need is length and angle. and lengthen angle turns out to amount to a derivative operator, which turns out to have mixed

parcels that don't commute. You can measure their failure. That's the curvature. You knock it down with linear algebra. And you create gravity. It's a miracle. It's fantastic. On the other hand, it's not that surprising that if you have a situation in which you have some notion

of like size and perpendicularity, that you can create something like that. For example, you do have something called malinobus distance that you can get out of data. You can treat a covariance matrix like a Ramanian metric, if you will. So there are all sorts of ways in which we already know that anything that leads to length and angle becomes geometric. And I think that that's both very good for Dr. Wolfram and it is also just a bit of caution for the rest of us that on the early part may lead you on because it's a different way of describing length and angle in the consequences, which thanks to both Einstein, Grossman, and I guess Hilbert, we know that all we're looking for in some sense is the most basic consequence of that. It'll be cool to see it come out.

And I do believe that you may likely get fermions out of a question. You may have to ask the question about how to take the square root of something. I'll be astounded if you have fermions without taking a square root. But the key feature is that you're not. that far away from geometry as soon as you're talking about melhanobus distance and covariance matrix and data. Okay. So, you know, one cool thing is that the uncertainty principle in our theory is basically the analog of Riemann curvature in branchial space. So the non-commuting of variables is just like the non-commuting. And in geometric quantization, it is literally the curvature tensor on in the Hamiltonian picture.

Absolutely. So by the way, in terms of the square root thing, I have the following guess, okay, that what basically happens in branchial spaces, you have these branch pairs and they converge, okay? Branch pairs, next step, they converge. I think that the boson cases, they diverge and they converge. The fermion cases, they diverge and they don't converge. And so in some sense, the square root is being taken by the fact that you're having the beginning of that diamond,

but not the end of the diamond. Sounds like the difference between commutators and anti-com. Yeah, yeah. It's the, it's my first guess about how that works. And it'll, it's, I mean, the thing that, again, I thought we were going to have to, you know, find actual electrons to be able to distinguish fermions and bosons. It's seeming increasingly likely that we can basically understand fermions in bulk without having to know exactly how particles work. By the way, well, actually, let me kick it over to you, Brian. I'll save my comments from this. They'll fit in somewhere. Okay. What I want to do now is sort of compare and contrast different approaches, not necessarily only from the two of you, but in the context that I often get, well, first of all, the common thing that I get from all my, you know, friends on Reddit or wherever else this gets posted is, you know, how come these things aren't being peer reviewed and what kinds of falsifiable predictions are they making? Let's start with the latter. Stephen, you and I talked back in April, and you made it clear that things such as the fundamental consensus.

of nature, the speed of light, are emergent, or embedded, encoded, encrypted within your new findings. I want to know, are there new predictions that could be used instead of retradictions? Not that they don't have validity, not that they don't have a value. After all, Einstein, you know, in some sense, validated his theory on a retradiction, which was known for millions of years. It was known for years, the perihelian advance of the planet Mercury. and it had to be reconciled with Einstein's predictions,

and through observations it was found to be true. I want to know, Stephen, are there new fundamental predictions that you can point to that have at least in principle a chance of being detected? And then I'll have a similar question for Eric. Well, let's see. I don't do the dueling theories theory. No, I'm not going to, yeah, I'm not going to do. It's somehow, I'm, you know, the thing that,

Okay, falsifiability is a weird concept that has all kinds of problems. But the fact is, you know, first thing is the number one thing that we're building is a framework, like calculus. Calculus is not something that's falsifiable. Calculus is a framework for doing things. Second question is, does calculus usefully apply to the universe? That's something we can validly ask. And that's something that we can, you know, there are things which are sort of generic predictions from the framework. So the thing we're trying to do right now is what people should do when they first introduce some, you know, new set of ideas, which is can we actually reproduce?

Can we make theoretical predictions? Can we reproduce what has been known before? And can we get out vastly more than we put in? Yes. We put very little in, and the question is, do we get all these things out? Or do we have to add some special cluge to get fermions? Or do fermions come out naturally as soon as we understand how to get there? And the thing which has been remarkable so far is, you know, we've been checking off.

Do we get this? Do we get that? Do we get that? So far, touch wood, no cluges. I mean, so far, it's been hard work, but nothing has been like, oh my gosh, the universe, you know, the theory predicts the universe. universe should be 26 dimensional. We have to explain why it's not type thing. We haven't had any of those kind of, you know, cluge barriers, so to speak. So that's encouraging. Now, in terms of actually making

specific measurable predictions, a couple of issues. First issue is going from the raw theory, the low-level machine code, to something where you turn a telescope in that direction and you see a particular thing, there's lots of, you know, there's lots of hard work and lots of astrophysics and so on to be done in going from one place to another. The first point. The second point is that to actually make one of the things in our theory is there is one scale. Same happened with Einstein's theory, actually, although for various reasons that, well, we can talk about that, but there's one scale, which is this maximum entanglement speed. We don't know what the value of that is. We have some guesses, but we don't know its value. If we knew its value, we would have a whole bunch of

predictions immediately, but we don't know its value. Einstein had the same problem. He had the cosmological constant. He didn't know its value. It's, you know, a lot of predictions he might have liked to make, he couldn't make because he didn't know the value of the cosmological constant. You know, he had one meta prediction was that the universe wasn't expanding, he thought, which is why he added his cosmological constant in the first place. But that's his scale. So then he had a few scale independent predictions, in particular the, you know, the bending of light around the sun being a factor of two larger than I've been predicted in previous theory, things like that.

So one thing that we've been interested in is what scale independent predictions can we make? That's question one. And question two, what predictions can we make that are, as soon as we know, this one scale, we immediately have predictions. And then which predictions can we make that have the shortest distance in terms of the tower of astrophysics or particle physics or whatever they have to be done? It's a cautionary tale that like Newton, for example, you know, he goes, through his whole, you know, Principiae, and he works out lots of things about his law of gravity,

and he has a section about the moon, and the section about the moon ends with the sentence, I think, but the abs of the moon is twice as great. Right. In other words, he got the wrong answer. And, you know, one might have said, oh, my gosh, he got the wrong answer. He better abandon the whole theory and run away, so to speak. Turns out it was just hard to do those calculations. It took another 150 years to get them nailed down. So that wasn't, you know, so one has to be a little bit. And Einstein also, you know, the first time he computed the bending of light around the sun, he got it wrong. And it was, you know, fortunate the first, you know, experiment that was going to be done on that didn't end up getting done because of World War I. And so,

you know, by the time an experiment did get done, he'd managed to get the right answer, whether the experiment was right. It's a different story. But that's another other thing. But I think that the, so the question of, you know, do we have kind of scale independent predictions? the answer is quite possibly. I think there's one quite likely one that has to do with two-photon correlations for photons in orbit around rotating black holes. It's a slightly obscure thing, but it's not completely out of the range of what's experimentally accessible. Other, I mean, it's kind of amusing that that's so bizarrely similar. It's kind of a quantum analog of Einstein's bending of light around the sun type thing.

But that's one kind of thing. Another thing is a suggestion, at least from the theory, about the existence of particles much lighter than the electron, maybe 10 to the 20th times lighter than the electron. That number depends on the scale parameter that we don't know. The existence of such particles probably has a bunch of implications for dark matter, which are things that we're planning to work out. There are a bunch of implications for cosmology. I mean, there's an expectation, not a necessary feature, but a suggestion, at least from the model, that the universe starts in an infinite dimensional and only gradually kind of decayed down to the sort of modest three dimensions that we have now. That has a bunch of implications for inflationary scenarios for the universe and so on. I think the most outlandish possibility, which I don't think will actually happen, is that still at the time of recombination, you know, when your cosmic microwave background globe was minted, so to speak, that it would still be, that there would still be a trace of some of the early, discrete processes that happened in the very early stages of the universe.

I really doubt that it would have survived that long, but if it did the absolutely outlandish possibility, is that the kind of the rule for the universe might be painted in the microwave background radiation, which would be truly... I don't think that would happen. I think it's very unlikely. But early density perturbations, there might be some things that would be a result of this changing dimensional scenario that's rather different from the traditional exponential expansion in four-dimensional space time of inflationary cosmology. That's on the one side.

On the particle physics side, and well, one of the things is that it's looking very much as if quantum computing at some fundamental level can't work. However, seeing that and seeing the actual effects of theory for decoherence and things like that, it's not at all clear that the can't work point is something experimentally accessible. And I think that the, you know, it's a question. There's some clever experiment that can be done in quantum computing that could see this maximum entanglement speed. That's basically the – and we don't know what the value of that speed is, so we can't really tell. One estimate that we have of that speed is 10 to the five solar masses per second. If that estimate is correct, then it is possible that in black hole – well, it's possible there will be a small effect in a black hole merger of, you know, one and a half solar mass type size would have a bigger effect if, you know, two.

sort of central black holes of two galaxies happen to collide and merge, then there will be a bigger effect. It's also conceivable that there might be an effect when black holes initially form. And this is an astrophysics question for you, Brian. How long does it take a black hole to actually form? Once you have in-falling matter, the question is what the actual weather in 10 to the minus five seconds, something, whether one can tell what's happening in the last 10 to the minus five seconds of the formation of a black hole. If one can, then if our estimate of the maximum entanglement speed is right, then there will probably be differences from the predictions of general

relativity for that case. This is a big question. Primordial black hole formation, the end of inflation. These are really important questions that, you know, it's good to hear, especially that you're providing potential full employment for my graduate students down the line. Yes, there will be lots of work to do in figuring out the consequences of these things. I mean, it's a particularly when we get this kind of way of actually doing computations in general relativity from our model set up as a piece of practical numerical relativity. And that will probably happen fairly quickly. We'll actually be able to see a bunch of these effects directly in the computations that we do. But there'll be, you know, just layers of astrophysics to do.

And Eric, I want you to sort of opine on this provocative. question that I'm being asked in the chat room. And that is, you know, what, of what value is a theory if it is not to be testable? You know, that which can be claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, as our friend Christopher Hitchens used to say, I believe. So in the context of geometric unity, not asking you to talk about somebody else's book, but talk your own book for a second, are there things that are testable by graduate students in my group or other brilliant students around the world. Are there predictions, are there retradictions that are crisp enough to satisfy Popper, A, and do you think we should continue to feed Popper as he had enough? Popper

Corn? All right. So the first point would be there's a missing layer between you and myself. What we do typically, Stephen notwithstanding, is that we come up with you. a classical model in the form of some sort of geometry. Hopefully it quantizes itself or something like geometric quantization. And then we try to figure out what the testable consequences are at any given energy level through a bunch of phenomenologists, experimentalists, and pure quantum field theorists working hand in hand in our harmonious fashion. At least that's the theory.

So given that we have a missing layer, there's tons I can say about, what's new, what's different, and what my theory says, and effectively what would make it wrong. So I'm happy to get into that because it effectively says that a lot of our standard verbiage around what we found is in fact wrong. So for example, standard thing is the world is chiral. The weak force sees the difference between our left hand and our right hand, spiritually speaking. My claim is that the world is not fundamentally chiral. It is emergently chiral. And that in fact it begins in a non-kiral fashion, which solves the problem that Sabina does not see, which is what chooses whether it's going to be the left half or the right half effectively

that makes up us in some sense. So don't we already know from neutrino masses that we're not seeing a completely chiral situation? Well, we can get into the issue of how to interpret neutrino masses. My claim would be that we have entire sectors that we're not. not seen. So for example, unadorned spin one-half bundles that would be tensored with, if you will, the conjugate of the 16-dimensional representation, which imparts the particles, their personalities. So that is not something that's seen.

And I've analogized, for those of you watching at home rather than listening, where you have a hand and you see with three fingers in the middle that you think there's a symmetry in the hand. And then you have this problem about how do I make my pinky look like my thumb, and you don't realize that there's an entire other hand, and that it's thumb to thumb, and pinky to pinky to thumb, it's the symmetry. So there is a non-chiral world that is emergently chiral, which is fooling us into thinking it's fundamentally chiral. There are only two generations, not three generations.

People will immediately say, well, how do you explain the fact that we've seen the tau particle, the top and bottom works? and the claimant is that is not a generation because it will not unify as you heat the soup up in the same way as the first two generations will unify. In fact, it will unify with another collection of particles, also spin one half, which I believe, if I recall correctly, the thing that will be misinterpreted as an internal representation, I think it will be like 112 dimensional rather than 16. There will be no internal representations.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, let me just get through it. There will be no internal symmetries. This has been a huge trip up for things like super symmetry where we keep looking for these super partners, which I've analogized a little bit to what happens if you're convinced that Spider-Man should be, in fact, Clark Kent, should be accompanied by Clark Kent and Peter Parker should be accompanied by Superman.

We have this wrong. There is no internal symmetry, nor should you expect internal symmetry, because this comes out of two unification, two fundamental origin stories, one for the spacetime manifold, another for effectively the Y axis above that as the X axis. So we decide that somehow we have space time in Einstein, and then somehow we get this thing called SU3-plus, SU2 cross U1 that falls out of the sky, which is a second origin story. There is not two origin stories. There is one.

Einstein, I believe, one of the problems, Stephen, I'm going to say, is that we have been in a very difficult position relative to Einstein. It's like, unlike anyone else, because of the thought experiments, we have a reverence for not only what he gave us in terms of equations, how he thought and the beautiful humanity that he imparted to everyone. so we don't want to harm him in any way. It's also the fact that he was wrong. And he was wrong in an interesting way,

in the same way, I believe, that Newton was wrong, and we souped up Newton with Einstein, but that physics is taking place, in my opinion, on two separate spaces. You can call X and Y, or Brian, I've a joke with you, calling it Ha'Arres and Hashemai, the heaven and the earth.

In these two spaces, there is a map between, and that is the map that, in fact, Einstein started playing with, but he did not think to pull back the information from space two onto space one, from space X to space Y. I believe that there is a deformation complex, which in the Euclidean signature is elliptic, which in fact tells us why the self-dual equations and the Chern-Simon's Gave's theory that were studied in the late 70s, early 80s, are so important. In fact, it was a special example of a much more general structure that comes out of geometric unity.

But there is not two kinds of geometry in this situation. One, Ramanian geometry underlying general relativity, and Erismanian geometry of fiber bundles underlying the standard model. There is in fact one geometry. And that one geometry is why it's called geometric unity, and it has to do with the difficulty of a lie that we tell in general relativity, which is that we say that it is a so-called gauge theory, where we try to get the gauge group to be something called the diffemorphism group or general coordinate variance.

We allow it to act on the space of metrics, whereas in the case of the standard model, we have a space, not of metrics, but of derivative operators from calculus called connections, and the group we have is the gauge group. And the gauge group is an infinite dimensional beast that acts on the space of connection. We do not understand, in fact, that telling this lie to make general relativity look like a gauge theory, in fact, block progress and that we should treat it as an honest gauge theory. We are going to have to recognize that the cosmological constant is not constant. It is a field which acquires a Bev or a vacuum expectation value as it is lured away by topological mechanisms.

We are going to see that we got the Lorentz group wrong. We focused on the Lorentz group when we meant to be focusing on the gauge group. We formed its in homogeneous extension, called it the Ponqueray group. In fact, you're supposed to extend it by something called add-valued 1 forms to create effectively the inhomogeneous gauge group. That is the object on which you're supposed to do supersymmetric analysis. And so our concept of supersymmetry is wrong. In effect, we're acting on the wrong group. We've chosen Minkowski space as the naturally occurring affine space.

It is not the right place to be playing. The right place to be playing is the space of connections. There's a huge number of things I can tell you about the missing matter. What in our sector, it's SU3 across SU2 cross U1 internal quantum numbers will be. So that's, you know, 16 new particles that are spin three halves with conjugate internal quantum numbers. So the same thing as our usual 16 dimensional representation, but the complex conjugate thereof, which we have not seen yet. and explaining why the illusion of three generations is generated by what would be called branching rules with respect to Lee algebra and Lee group representation and composition.

So, yes, I can tell you a bunch of new particles. I can tell you about non-chirality, the number of generations, how Einstein is wrong, what spaces we're supposed to be doing this on. And then there's a question about, okay, well, what can you tell us about the accelerators? And by the way, this is all subject to if my theory is correct. It gets boring to say if my theory is correct over and over again. So there should just be a general caveat that all of this assumes general geometric unity is in fact correct. So yes, there's a ton of specificity.

And Brian, I'm looking forward to coming down to UCSD and actually doing it. But let me just say something. Yeah, I've been very pissed off about this claim that what I'm talking about, different from what Dr. Wolfram is talking about is so impenetrable and difficult. It isn't. And it really has to do with the sickness in our field that our field just isn't interested in some sense because it doesn't believe. We all know that the problems have gotten so difficult and so hard and so many smart people have been over them that a sense of learned helplessness has invaded the field, which we have to talk about. But wait, my friend, my friend, my friend, hold on.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, they, baby. All right, all right. A sense of learned helplessness has invaded the field. People no longer feel like they're actual physicists that can connect to Schrodinger or Heisenberg or Dirac or Einstein or Plunk. People don't even feel like Weinberg and Yang were still with us or in some sense. Nobody's gone to, I see losing the Nobel Prize over Brian's shoulder. Nobody's gone to Stockholm for advances. in fundamental physical theory since the theories put forward since the early 1970.

I think that's a correct statement. So all the people who've contributed to the fundamental canon are either dead or septuagenarians or higher, I think. Maybe Frank Wilczek was born in 1951 as at the end of the 60. We have to recognize that this sense that it is impossible has caused lots of us to start faking it and to start calculating it. and to start calculating what we need to do for our careers rather than how to actually advance the science,

which is one reason that both Stephen and I are viewed as incredibly brash, effectively too brusk, maybe too arrogant. And the answer, I believe, is that we have to drive this field out of its sense that it's playing at physics rather than doing physics, it's talking around physics. And one of the things I want to do on these live streams is I want to actually talk about the meat of the theories and let people scurry to Wikipedia or help each other out to try to understand what is said rather than make it an enjoyable product

for everyone. I agree. I agree. But Stephen has said earlier, you know, this is simple. Okay. It's not easy. It's not, you know, it's not trivial. My nine-year-old, who you'll meet someday, hopefully both of you guys, he can play around

with Rule 30. He can get stimulated. He can engage with it. So when you say, you know, that it's not. difficult. I don't agree that there's a character class that differentiates, and I'm not pitting it one against another, for certain, there are more complicated models than even Eric's, in my opinion. Wait, wait, how's my model complicated? I'm just a simple experimentalist. A 14-dimensional, you know, dual spaces. And look, if it's too complicated for Sabina to understand, I think, our general...

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is just unfair, and I want to be very clear about it. If you talk about general relativity, which Stephen has been talking about throughout our live stream. He's talking about the idea that you have a space, call it X, and it has a metric on. And that metric is a map into the space of all possible metrics, call that Y. That X and that Y are where geometric unity lives. So with all due respect to Sabina and her, you know, I can't understand anything. It's all so complicated. Cut the crap. You've got a map between A proto-space time and the space of metrics. That Rumani metric is simply a map between two topological spaces.

It's not that complicated. I don't, Brian, it's just not true. Okay. Let's move on, actually. I want to make a few comments about that. Okay, Stephen, go ahead. So maybe people will find interesting. I mean, so, you know, maps between topological spaces, diphtheromorphisms, these kinds of ideas.

But, you know, I happened to learn these ideas when I was a kid. most people don't. These are fairly, you know, most people learn those ideas in, I don't know, mid, you know, math college, if they go to a fancy college, maybe math graduate school, those kinds of things. They happen to be fairly complicated. You know, there are fields of science where people can contribute without having gone to graduate school. There are the fields where they can't contribute very much. We see that in, you know, people, one of the great things about kind of,

some of these computational areas of science is that because it's kind of, you know, because it's very new territory, it's possible for people to contribute without having kind of gone to graduate school and learned a whole big stack of concepts. One of the things, you know, I get pretty much every day, you know, a theory of physics from somebody. Eric's version is, you know, he went to Harvard and got a PhD in mathematical physics. So his version is much better dressed than most of versions that I see. Okay? And most of the versions that I see are, you know, I find it disappointing because it feels like people are, you know, writing poetry that nobody's going to read and they're doing it using kind of high school level physics knowledge. It's mostly cranks.

Yeah. Well, people who may be well-meaning, but they don't realize that they're way out of their depth. Yeah, right. But the main thing is that they don't know what got done on the 20th century in physics. Yeah. And what got done in the 20th century in physics, requires kind of graduate school level knowledge to understand. And we can say it isn't true, but it is true. I mean, it's, you know, general relativity and quantum field theory. You know, Eric may say they're simple theories. I think they're kind of simple theories,

but that's because I learned about them when I was, I don't know, 12, 13 years old, and by now they seem like simple theories. And if it's simple to you or if it's even marginally complex to Stephen, what help you? But also just the whole language of talking about, things. You know, this is kind of math graduate school type language. And that's, now, is there a way to state these things about fiber bundles and so on without sort of super fancy language? Quite possibly, maybe some of the things we're trying to do will give a way to do that. Yeah. And it's part of the

hope of just bringing your communities here. Let me move on just because we don't know much time. You guys are very gracious with your time. I want to respect it. And I have kids to put the bed. But I do want to ask the following question that my audience is asking. When we think about the power of these different approaches, let's take a step away from either one of yours. There's been a lot made about artificial intelligence and the prospects for, as Max Tagmark has put it, you know, an artificial physicist, an artificial Galileo. What role do you guys see artificial intelligence playing? And then you know where I'm going next. I know that you guys know I'm going to the simulation hypothesis.

And I've talked to you guys individually, maybe offline about this. But the audience is very keen to know your two esteemed gentlemen, what you think about the prospects for AI as a benefit to physics. And then later we'll ask about the simulation hypothesis. Let me start with Stephen, please. I mean, I've worked on what is now called AI for about 40-something years. So I know a tiny bit about it. I mean, you know, a lot of, I,

I don't know. I don't know where to start. I mean, if you're talking about machine learning, if you're talking about, oh, let's sort of throw everything we know about physics into a machine learning system and see whether it can figure out the laws of physics. That's one level. Yeah, that's one level. Noam Chomsky was on my show and said, you know, he has, he's sanguine about what you just described, perhaps, as is Max Tagmark. But the true creative stroke, he has no, you know, the kind of insight. The question is what, what is, it's a little bit complicated. because computational irreducibility tells us that we can know the rules for something,

but have no way to kind of have a large-scale narrative for how the thing happens. So in other words, we might say, yes, we've succeeded. We found rules that reproduce physics. You say, well, tell me how they work. You say, well, here are the rules. But you say, well, tell me a story about how they work. Tell me a high-level version of how they work. That may not be possible.

I mean, for example, in linguistics, picking on Noam Tromsky's area, and I talked to him about this. I mean, you know, we may have a description of how brains work and how brains process language at a sort of microscopic computational level. And we may still, and it may be completely accurate, and we may still not have anything we would call a satisfactory science of linguistics. So, in other words, it's a slightly complicated thing. And the question of whether, you know, whether we can get a current, you know, machine learning system to reverse engineer the laws of physics, you know, to some extent you can do that to a fantastic extent of figuring out everything. You won't be able to do that, I don't think. And, you know, the challenge, again, we keep on coming at things at really weird angles. But there's a, you know, okay, the way I see it, there's kind of what's possible in the computational universe, what simple programs can do.

There's this kind of ocean of computational possibility. There's what we humans understand. That's another kind of piece. And there's also what the physical universe does. And I've spent a large part of my life trying to bridge between the sort of ocean of computational possibility and what we humans understand. That's the whole sort of point of the computational language I've built is to have a way to have humans be able to think about things computationally. and be able to communicate what they want in a computational fashion.

Now we have the third piece of physics, and the question is how we describe, how we make this bridge between sort of the physical universe, doing what it does, our ability to tell a narrative about what's going on and this kind of computation in the middle as this kind of mediator of those two things. But, I mean, it's a mess.

I would say that there's a, I mean, this is a longer discussion, and I think there's probably the wrong angle to come at it with, you know, if you say, are we going to have a, you know, a magic thing that we can throw stuff into and get out the theory of physics? Well, I doubt it. You know, you talked about the simulation argument. I always find it kind of charming that people say, you know, I'm an atheist. I believe in science. You know, what I believe is that, you know, there's this, we're in this universe, and this universe is actually a simulation operated by, operated by, beyond the universe. It's like, but I'm an atheist. Exactly, right. And then all the morality that entails they're in. Yes, go ahead. Right.

But I think that the, more seriously, I think that that sort of argument is kind of philosophically doomed because by the time you have dead. definite laws for physics, there isn't much for the God to do, so to speak. Now, the only thing you might say is, but the God gets to pick the laws of physics, except that we now seem to have found that it actually doesn't matter what the laws of physics are. But in some sense, in this kind of, again, for reasons that, again, this is a slightly longer story, but what matters is that we are observing physics in a certain way, and that's what gives us the laws that we believe to be laws of physics. And there really isn't, in a sense, there's nothing for the God to do other than to decide

that our universe is going to be computational, not hypercomputational, not below computational. And even if those other sort of kind of conceptual universes exist, we, you know, again, it's a matter of science to be able to say that we simply can't communicate. with them. They're simply, they're just not things which are in any way connected to what we can perceive. So I think it's a, it's a, I don't know, I do like the idea, though, that there's a connection between sort of AI physics and the, and the simulation argument. I think that's a, that's a, that's an interesting and bizarre connection, which I think would be fun to unpack some more. And Eric, you want to opine on this? Or would you?

Yeah, go ahead. I don't really know whether it even requires AI or AGI. There's a particular kind of move that we haven't programmed into computers yet so far as I'm aware. Now, Stephen probably knows this much better than I do. But there's a weird move that comes up over and over again, which has to do with reaching for something outside of your model and knowing what to reach for. So, for example, you have a problem with the weak interactions that a neutron, when it decays into a proton and an electron called beta decay, doesn't seem to have enough energy in the final products to conserve energy from the initial products. So, Pauly had to. Oh, okay.

You're explaining how neutrinoes come to be. Yeah, okay, fine. Yes. Right, because it's like one of the most important stories we have. Not everybody knows it. You have a problem that you've got three lines coming in. into a point and there's a failure of conservation of momentum. And so you have to hypothesize a fourth line.

You had a different problem when Dirac came out with his theory, which is that he only had the electron and the proton. They were oppositely charged. So he decided that one was the antiparticle of the other. Instead, this is the part, you know, similar to the Peter Parker-Clark-Kent issue, he should have hypothesized a positron to be the anti-electron to be the anti-electron and an antiproton to be the antiparticle of the familiar proton. That move was too much, and in fact, Heisenberg chastised.

There's an issue about understanding how spin comes about. So effectively, when I've said that the square root is the psychedelic of mathematics, you have to give your computer program psychedelics effectively so that it can invent new stuff. That is, I can adjoin something called I or IJ and K to solve a problem, and it was posed in the real numbers, and then I get the Quaternians or the complex numbers or even the Octonians.

I'm going to augment my theory of something called differential forms to something called the theory of spinners. Can you discover something called the Fafian, which is the square root of the determinant for a particular class of matrices? Can you discover that the Euler class is, in a certain sense, the square root of something called the Pontriagin class? All of these things are these non-trivial moves

where something that is not present in the initial formulation is guessable as the thing that would be needed to complete the stuff that we can see with stuff that we can't to get a consistent system. If you can teach a computer about primitives and give it the ability to guess outside of the system that you've taught it so that it can self-adjoin, and I don't see any impediment to this currently, you would have a system. that would be potent enough to explore not only the theory that you feed it, but the theory is that it can build from that theory. In essence, the computer program is being asked to do something similar than what we're asking theoretical physics to do. Again, everybody complains about how complicated this is, and I'm sick and tired and bored of hearing it.

Steven's correct. You do have to learn some level of mathematics. Typically, this would be somewhat like learning the French language before exploring French literature. Yeah, it's expensive. If you want to learn a foreign language, it costs money. In time, same thing for learning differential geometry and quantum field theory. The situation that we're facing is that your computer program has to be capable of building larger worlds by adjoining things that would make puzzles in the worlds that it knows about makes sense.

And that process of inferential guessing outside of anything that's been taught is a different problem than the problem of finding, let's say chess moves or go moves by being able to search a larger space where the search space is implicit in the rules. So do I believe that it requires AGI? No, one of the stories that I don't think we talk that much about is how much we thought AGI or artificial general intelligence would be needed to do all sorts of things. And the great surprise is we don't need anything like artificial general intelligence to do most of the things that supposedly intelligence systems now do. we thought that AGI and our consciousness and our intelligence was necessary. It turns out that much less is usually necessary.

It is entirely possible that we don't need to wait around. We can have the computers guess it. And to the issue of atheism and the simulators and the simulated, we have two separate stories, one story in which we are going to build the intelligence, the AGI fear, which is it's going to be smarter than us. We have another one in which we are the simulated, and there's this simulator tour somewhere else, if you put the two stories together,

you see that in a weird way, God should be scared about us becoming intelligence when we finally learn what our source code is. This is the moment where SkyNet becomes self-aware, and the thing that nobody sees coming is that we are the AI, we are the AGII that emerged in somebody else's system. And whether or not that somebody else was sentient or not is a different question. But Einstein asked this thing, he said,

I don't care about the spectrum or this or that element. What really bothers me is whether or not the creator had any choice, or what interests me is whether the creator had any choice in the way the world was made. This is an interesting concept of not being all powerful, but being all constrained. And perhaps the creator's sole function, if you will, is to turn on the lights. And everything else follows from that. This is sort of a Leibnizian monad construction where the idea is that the rules effectively I'll tell us what is going to happen.

There's very little room for anything else. But I think that part of the reason we keep asking these questions is to be blunt, pessimism, rather than working on the actually hard stuff, either in Stephen's case of trying to do it through computation or my case, of trying to remain within the standard mathematical toolkit. People are so frustrated that we waste our lives talking about the mathematical universe hypothesis, the simulation hypothesis. We do all sorts of nonsensical work on theories that have nothing to do with physical reality. And I just think it would be better if we stopped wasting our time talking around physics

and started talking about physics itself. Great. Well, guys, I have to go. You guys have been so generous with your time. You've answered a lot of questions that the audience had. And for that, I'm very thankful from both coasts. Any final words? Stephen, I did think there's going to be one question you wanted to ask us about peer review and our attitudes towards it, which I think people are going to want to know.

I think we should wrap it up. Maybe we'll take that up on a future podcast with you guys individually. The time has really come to go or I'll be in a lot of trouble with a multiverse of children screaming at me. Stephen, anything you'd like to leave the audience with, any way that they can engage and perhaps participate in. in the exciting work of Wolfram Research. Oh, we... I don't know, you can use Wolfram Language, use Wolfram Alpha. You know, you can come to live streams we do frequently about the physics project.

You can look at the physics website. You'll find all of the programs and things there. It seems like people are finding this stuff, so I'm, I'm, which I, which is great. That is good. And, uh, yeah. And we'll put a link to the channel, the YouTube channel, folks can find your many and many live streams and presentations as well. Eric, something for close out.

Where can people find you and engage with you? I would say come find us at the portal. I think there's also an Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein.org. Look for the Geometric Unity presentation, which was a special presentation within the portal series. I am looking forward to hosting Stephen getting in into the thick of his theory and how it works.

I think that one of the things that people should get engaged with is both why people are so pessimistic and negative about every new emergence. You should learn about the no-go theorems and all of the things that a theory would have to fit. I don't think people are particularly negative. I mean, honestly, we've been playing up the negativism, but honestly, what I'm seeing is, you know, people being very enthusiastic about what we're doing. You know, so far, I haven't seen anybody.

you know, I'd be interested to hear from somebody credible who says, I mean, you've said, I don't believe your theory. So you're- Wait, wait, wait a second. No, I believe that your theory is either going to reproduce a lot of what it is that we already know and then tell us something new potentially. I don't, I'm not disagreeing with it. I've said that it might be a face up to some common sub-in.

It's certainly not the face that I'm taking, but I don't think that's character. We should hash that out when we do each other's podcasts. The issue that I wanted to get to, though, is, yeah, there is a lot of negativity. You can read about it in the Reddit comments. You can read about it very often left in the YouTube comments. Some people in the field are very disgruntled. Very few people have wanted to say I've waited in. I've tried to look at it.

I've really kind to understand it. And I still think these guys are talking crap. I think Stephen's exactly right. The coincidence of his work and my work being on the same show, I don't see any need to fit them together. And I think that if they're both right, then they would have to be fit together. And most probably, of course, they're both wrong because we have to say these words. With that said, get excited about people who are trying to find ways out of the learned helplessness

that comes out of the no-go theorems, the pessimism that came out of the LHC. I disagree with Steve. I still think that there is a core community that's angry, the people outside are speaking to the world through this direction. They may be angry about you. I don't think they're very angry about me. At least not there. There is pessimism.

I think Eric's talking specifically. I guarantee you there are people angry about YouTube. Stephen, it's not just about me. It's in general that we're all up against the question where nobody has any precedent. I think people have one thing that I think is the case is that it's, what I've noticed, for example, about peer review, which we're not going to talk about here in detail, but it's the people who say peer review is amazing. We need peer review are not people inside science. They're not people who actually know it up close. Because up

close it's actually people, in fact, one thing's kind of amusing. We set up a kind of peer review system for our project. And to date, not a single person has submitted a peer review. review. Not a single person. It's been several months now. How can you do that? How can we do that? Or how can people submit reviews of it? It just says there's just a link that says peer review. It's next to each one of our documents. So I encourage people to do it. I mean, honestly, I'm disappointed. I thought at least a few people would do it, even if even if they were like, you know, I didn't really read this, but it's all nonsense anyway. Or, you know, but what we actually asked for more specifically, which I think is useful,

is somebody to say, I read Section 3.7 and this, you know, and I think it's correct, or I think there's this mistake in it or wherever else. We have had people like Sabine Hassenfeld, an eminent scientist, and she's rooted in a video, which is the first time you guys appeared together, where she criticizes these theories, and she's an eminent, you know, fundamental theories. You know, we've been an email correspondence with her, and she asked a bunch of questions, which were a very valid question. Yeah, so right.

We gave her answers. We gave her answers. and she disappeared. So if she's still saying, he doesn't know what's going on, then there's a problem. Well, the fact is, is that you've answered her questions.

She had questions that were reasonable and at the beginning of the process, then if she continues to say, well, he hasn't answered my questions after he's answered the questions and she hasn't responded, then we're in a different situation. I know Sabina can be kind of gruff and unpleasant,

but I know her to be reasonably fair in most circumstances. Very good. Thank you guys. You guys are really spectacular. It's so generous of you to spend your time. And we got to see different sides of your ideas and try to reach some sense of different approaches that are radically different and perhaps, but they have the same common goal, which is to really introduce the world to concepts that take us out of our quotidian existence of politics, sports, and whatever. The grandest concepts, it's what I'm. You should have talked about those here. That would have been more interesting for me. Well, let's do more where we actually treat the people who want to get into the, into the meat of it, because I think that that's the thing. No, no, no, I was saying less meat, because I don't think this was so useful,

because I think I felt like, you know, I think we would have done better talking about kind of the culture of science and so on. I'm sorry. I think I'll blame. Yes, I know. I'm sorry. It's my fault for not getting good. Thank you, Stephen.

Thank you, Eric. I love your work. Bye, guys. Brian, thanks so much. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review.

For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD. Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human

Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.