Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 1: Flatland -- Einstein's Muse

Starting point is 00:00:20 Welcome to The Scientists, a new podcast under the umbrella of the Into the Impossible Brain. I'm your host, Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. And each week on the scientist, I dive into the life and legacy of a legendary scientist, an experimentalist, a theorist, an observer. All of them, uncovering insights you can apply to your own work and your own worldview. Science didn't appear fully formed. It was built by real people, solving real problems under pressure with very human desires. Their ideas still shape our future. We'll examine not just what they discovered, what drove them to make those discoveries,

Starting point is 00:01:02 and most importantly of all, who they were, from their obsessions and honors to their most spectacular ideas, their most brilliant blunders, and their most beautiful of all human flaws. Imagine a world with no up. No down. Just length and width. No height. A flat, silent plane where geometry is destiny. And thinking in 3D is blasphemy. Welcome to Flatland. It's not just a story of math. It's a Victorian epic era, a science fiction fantasy. A red pill for physicists. It's the allegory that put the theory of geometric unification, into string theory, seven decades before string theory was even a glimmer in its creator's eyes.

Starting point is 00:01:57 It's the mirror maze that Einstein stared deeply into, and today we're diving deep as deep as we can into the flatland. But first, why would a novel written from 1884, written by a schoolmaster, still blow physicist minds today? And why do I give it out to everyone who subscribes to my Monday Magic mailing list on my website at brian keating.com slash list you'll actually get a copy of it email to you Einstein didn't read flatland once he devoured it reading it again and again because it taught him something that equations alone could not imagine being so trapped in your own world that the very concept of up was heretical that was flatland it's a fictional universe where you the narrate are a square, literally. Your name is a square. Society is geometry, and discovering an extra

Starting point is 00:02:57 dimension gets you locked away as a schizophrenic madman. But what if this weird little book from 1984 wasn't just satire? What if it was a user manual for future physicists? Because here's the truth. Einstein used it to teach relativity. Strength theorists use it to visualize ten dimensions. And every physicist you've ever admired has that, point pin a flatlander trying to escape from the plane. Stay with me, because in the next few minutes, we're going to explore and unlock the dimensional imagination that helps some of the greatest obsessive geniuses in history see the shape of spacetime itself.

Starting point is 00:03:37 And the ending, well, it's not just about some square. It's about you. Part one. The two-dimensional universe of obedience. Okay, so this book is written by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Yes, they double down, they squared his name. He's an English theologian, a headmaster, and a polymath. In 1984, he wrote Flatland, subtitle of Romance of Many Dimensions. On the surface, it's a fable, a science fiction fantasy. A geometrical fable, but underneath, it's a mathematical rebellion, a sociological scalpel, and a physics prophecy. Here's the premise. You are A square. That's your name. Capital S square. You live in flatland, which is a two-dimensional world. You can't look up or down perpendicular to the plane of existence. Those ideas, those dimensions to you and others do not exist. They're forbidden,

Starting point is 00:04:41 locked off permanently. All you know is forward, backward, left, and right. to catch your social class is literally the number of sides your polygon shape possesses squares have four triangles are of a lower class they're violent and dumb they only have three sides they're soldiers squares that's you are part of the middle class the bourgeoisie if you will pentagons hexagons and so on become leveling up level up their way to the Oh, in circles with infinite number of signs, if you will, they're the high priest of society. And women, they're not even two-dimensional. They're lines infinitely thin, and to a square they're regarded as dangerous.

Starting point is 00:05:38 So they're kept away, locked in rooms, lest they might pierce the polygonal shapes of the men that drive society. Now, Abbott was writing satire in the late 1800s, but he wasn't disguising it in metaphors. He disguised it in a mathematical Euclidean metaphor so Victorian censors wouldn't ban him outright. In Flatland, your shape is your destiny, and any deviation is treasonous. Part 2. The Heresy of Height. everything changes when one day, the square, is visited by a sphere. What? This globular blob arrives in flatland, not all at once, but in slices of perception.

Starting point is 00:06:35 First he appears as just a dot, then a glowing circle with no boundary in sight. But then, as his midpoint, his equator, passes through the plane of flatland, he shrinks smaller and smaller, circles diameter decreasing, and shrinking until all of a sudden all at once, he's gone. To the 2D beings of Flatland, it's supernatural, but it's not magic. It's a result of dimensional ignorance, and it might be something we too are guilty of and our inability to grasp higher dimensional realities,

Starting point is 00:07:13 such as those presented by possible theories of everything like string theory. So as Square, the narrator, wonders how can an object of being grow and shrink, always remaining perfectly infinitely sided, and then disappear without moving? The only way he can is realized is if he's not bound by your dimensions. We'll be right back after this short break. The sphere tries to explain these objects and the people and these inhabitants of Flatland have other properties. They have a luminous, they have a luminousness, they have cognition, they dwell in houses, they consume, and they construct a civilization that knows no third dimension. Now, the square.

Starting point is 00:08:14 That first can hardly process what he's seen. He fights. He refuses. He goes through the stages of grief, but then eventually he believes. But the problem is, he's alone. Like Galileo before the Inquisition, which happened to a mere 250 years before this book was written, the square starts preaching the truth.

Starting point is 00:08:35 And like Galileo, he's silenced. Flatland society isn't just blind to three dimensions. It's hostile to it. And of course, Flatland is leaving breadcrones, if you will, a blueprint to understand relativity. For us space landers, for us three-dimensional creatures, to appreciate and apprehend four dimensions, we can benefit from the square's apprehension of three dimensions. Einstein was born five years after Flatland was published.

Starting point is 00:09:19 But physicists for the next century would use Abbott's metaphor to describe four specific things. Time is the fourth dimension. curvature of that unified four-dimensional space-time, later extra dimensions in string theory and fourth, the multiverse so-called brains in the so-called M-theory or membrane theory. Now, other books we're going to encounter in this series that I've had the desire and passion and ability to read over these four decades of my scientific upbringing

Starting point is 00:09:57 with the greatest minds and history of my teachers, we'll talk about these ideas and how influential they were to people like past guest Lisa Randall, and past guest Brian Green. Lisa wrote warped passages, and Brian, of course, wrote The Elegant Universe, one of the most popular books, celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Starting point is 00:10:18 And even Carl Sagan's famous Apple demo on Cosmos. We'll get to Carl Sagan's biography, which is very contentiously, written by Kay Davis about 25 years ago, soon after he passed. It's not appreciated by the past guest on the show, Andrewan, or her daughter. He's also a guest, Sasha Sagan. We'll cover all those books in our Obsessive Mind series. But we are just Flatlanders trying to understand a higher-dimensional reality.

Starting point is 00:10:48 It wasn't just for the square. It's for us. It's not a metaphor. It's physics at its core. The fourth part of this book is, is the philosophy of dimensional ignorance. Flatland is also an epistemological bomb. How do we know what exists?

Starting point is 00:11:06 What are the limits of perception? How do we distinguish delusion from higher dimensional truth? Abbott Square didn't lack intelligence. He lacked a conceptual vocabulary for up. Just like today's humans, no matter how bright they are, lack the conceptual vocabulary to describe five-dimensional string vibrations. Or, as you'll encounter on my other channel, Professor Keating's experiments, we're going to talk a lot about Chern-Simon's actions,

Starting point is 00:11:43 which are topological gadgets that link together geometry with property of mathematics called holonomy and more. And the best part is these are observables that have been witnessed and even for which have been awarded Nobel Prizes. Can we imagine taste, the five different types of taste as a dimension, our senses as dimension? Even consciousness could be type of dimension. Philosophers sometimes call this a category error. You're asking flat questions in a spherical reality. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

Starting point is 00:12:25 the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. The fifth part of the book gets into the social dimension. And there's obviously a subtext. Flatland is a critique. Flatland is also a critique of gender oppression.

Starting point is 00:13:02 It's a roast of the British class hierarchy that extended to the subcontinent of India and, of course, to Africa and other colonies. But at its heart, it's a warning about the intellectual elite, the orthodoxy. We see that now in our academic institutions that are being attacked from without and from within. And I see that first-hand.

Starting point is 00:13:24 here, within the ivy-enscanced walls, actually the palm tree ensconced walls of the University of California. Abbot saw how societies enforce dimensional conformity and what that represents literally and metaphorically. Don't look up, don't think outside the box, stay in your plane, not in your lane. So does that sound familiar? Every revolution begins with a shape shift, a change. those that seem more than often are treated as criminals at first outcast, not as prophets. From Galileo to Beir Rubin, every scientific rebel that will encounter, including my first guest, Freeman Dyson, was once considered was once a type of dimensional heretic. So where are we still, us Flatlanders? When physicists refuse to engage with philosophers, when string theory becomes dumb,

Starting point is 00:14:24 doctrine instead of conjecture, when academics build walls siloing themselves instead of bridges, not only between themselves, but between the public at large who pay our salaries. I gave this warning months ago in my Magic Monday mailing list that when we treated the public as just a reliable source of income without giving back to them, without providing things like this, I have to say, not tooting my own horn, but giving back at no profit to myself, such that you, who pay my salary, can benefit from the discoveries that your hard-earned money and tax dollars have enabled. Flatland was a warning, maybe gave me a glimpse, but it's from more than a century before I actually read it. So the frontiers that we

Starting point is 00:15:24 always are seeking but never achieving in physics is not math, it's imagination. So what is more real, what you can measure or what you can conceive? The square saw a literal shadow of truth, and for that was exiled from his reality, his domain, and his society. But you, you have the sphere's story. You see what squares and triangles could not. But can you see beyond? Beyond our three-dimensional existence?

Starting point is 00:16:01 What will you do to peer into a new reality? Einstein once said, imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the three-dimensional world. I don't know about you, but if I'm going under the knife and surgery, as I recently did, for a torn ligament in my meniscus. and my knee, I certainly didn't want my surgeon to have all that much imagination and creativity.

Starting point is 00:16:39 I wanted him to have knowledge. And he did, and I'm feeling much better. But Einstein said this in part for poetic, with poetic license, but he also meant it. Before the tensor calculus, before the field equations, before the contractions and dilations, he asked a question that Abbott taught us how to ask. What does the world look like from another dimension? that's flatland Einstein read it not to laugh

Starting point is 00:17:05 or poke fun at the Victorian mindset of just a few decades before his birth but to train his mind to imagine motion as curvature to imagine time as space to see past what was visible and create what was true so let's tie the loop

Starting point is 00:17:23 Flatland isn't fiction it's proto physics it's what happens when you take curiosity seriously and let it mutate into genius. You clicked this episode because of Einstein, perhaps. So here's the payoff you've been waiting for. Before he discovered space time, Einstein had to learn to see the world like a square visited by a sphere. That's the lineage. That's the legacy. That's the inheritance. And guess what? Now it's yours. This episode shifted your dimensional perspective.

Starting point is 00:18:01 even by a mere fractional dimension, please share it with somebody who still thinks in two dimensions. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening or watching the audio gram. Leave a review, leave a comment, and stay curious.

Starting point is 00:18:17 Next week, we're going to be looking into some of the cosmologists who studied the hidden matter that matters lurking in the cosmos. Until then, don't just look forward. Don't look back. Look up. It's your privilege. It's your right. And this is the scientists on the End of the Impossible podcast network. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Starting point is 00:19:23 Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 1: Flatland -- Einstein's Muse

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.