Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The State of The Universe With Eric Weinstein: Part 2 0f 2 - Trust in Science, Optimism About the Future and Eric's Crystal Ball (#228)

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Eric Weinstein and I go for a wide-ranging quarterly catch-up on all sorts of goings-on in our Universe. We'll chat about Elon Musk and Twitter, censorship and control, abortion and leaks, a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox on intelligent aliens, Galileo Galilei, and more! Topics Include: Does Elon Musk have Buyer’s Remorse over Twitter? Roe vs Wade and the immorality of leaks Trust in science is at an all-time low. What can we do? Advice to Elon Musk RESOURCES MENTIONED: Previous Videos with Eric Eric Weinstein: UFOs, Portal Podcast Reboot, & 2022 Predictions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMS02ueFso0 Eric Weinstein: What is WRONG With The World?!: https://youtu.be/CzbElaoMfjk Get GALILEO’S DIALOGUE ON TWO WORLD SYSTEMS Audiobook https://briankeating.com/dialogue Translated by Stillman Drake. With a Foreward by Albert Einstein. Salviati narrated by Carlo Rovelli, and Sagredo narrated by Brian Keating. Simplicio narrated by Lucio Piccirillo Albert Einstein’s Foreward read by Frank Wilczek Translator’s preface read by Sylvester James Gates Galileo’s Dedication read by Fabiola Gianotti.” My PragerU Book Club episode about the Dialogue Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Paywall jumper https://12ft.io/ Fermi Paradox Please join my mailing list for twice-monthly updates on the most important discoveries in science and technology; click here 👉 briankeating.com/list Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to part two of a very special conversation with Eric Weinstein, Dr. Eric Weinstein, a mathematician, a capital manager for Teal Capital, and a real thought leader in many, many different domains. If you miss part one, we talked about Elon Musk and why he seems to be obsessed with rockets instead of bending laws of physics. And we discussed a little bit about abortion and the leak of Supreme Court preliminary decisions. So if you miss part one, go back in the feed an episode, you'll find part one. In today's episode, we talk about my continuing fascination with all things mathematically related, things related to the basics of quantum field theory that is so intriguing and how we might be able to read or maybe even put right on a short t-shirt or a little mug like Eric holds up in this episode, which reminds me, please tune into my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating.

if you want to see the two of us in conversation and see this mysterious mug that Eric keeps talking about in this episode with the laws of quantum field theory displayed beautifully upon it. And don't forget to tune in to future episodes. I have conversations coming up with Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Powers, I have Philip Goff talking about consciousness, panpsychism, and Galileo's error.

And that reminds me to also remind you to check out my newest work of love on Galileo's dialogue. which was done over the course of the past year with Carlo Rovelli, Frank Wilczak, Jim Gates, Fabiola Gianati, and Lucio Picciarillo, my good friend of over 30 years, a labor of love. You'll have to check it out. It's available wherever you can get audiobooks. And there is information about it at my website, briankeeding.com, where I hope you'll sign up for my mailing list as well. But for now, go into the impossible me and Dr. Eric Weinstein as we cruise through the dimensions of space and time that are accessible to us and think of ways we can warp it, perhaps in the future, to make contact with species beyond Earth.

That may be a dream. That may seem impossible, but we're used to going into the impossible on this podcast. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please help. Pointed to one thing in there, you mentioned universities and how important they were.

Now, in 1492, the university system was only about 400 years old, at that point and and it's it's aged since then and starting in 1080 or so in bologna. And very little has changed. And I wonder, you know, the best and the brightest, so to speak, what they might be getting sucked up into this orbit of Elon, no pun intended, or this kind of thinking or many other things, crypto, but at least people like Michael Saylor, who I had on the show last year, is very gracious and forward thinking as well. you know, he started Sailor Academy.

And that's sort of a university that only is going to produce STEM majors, not going to produce, you know, gender studies majors, and it's not going to produce things that are not related to pure science, technology, engineering, and math. Because he believes that we need, you know, a million PhDs in these fields in order for us to progress. And I actually think the, I think the limiting factor for Elon is going to be humans. It's not going to be robots.

It's not going to be capital. It's going to be having enough people. And so the fault that I have for him is that I don't see any. And I'm not saying, oh, give, you know, yesterday a billion, $100 million was given to Stanford University for sustainability. I'm not even saying Elon, you know, hook UCUp, Stee up with the Musk Institute and will churn out your P.A. Because I don't think I can do it either. Is there fundamental limitation for us getting off the planet in your language or becoming interplanetary in his language or transcending the laws of physics in your language, getting off the planetary species in his language? Is it humans?

and is it solvable? Because I can't just nucleate as good as I am. I can't just nucleate out of the vacuum kids. Well, but, okay, so let's look at the very weird question of anybody with a halfway interesting version of a theory beyond the standard model. And I don't mean, sorry, you're going to be very careful about the phrasing. We have large programs, grand unification, super symmetry, technicolors, super strings, super strings. etc. These are the big programs. More or less if you're not on a big program I know of

almost no one inside the university system who's got a truly interesting audacious idea for what to do next. I could tell you that Peter White for example has moved from being a curmudgeon to actually saying this I believe, which is fascinating. I mean, imagine if Sabina Hasenfelder, instead of complaining about the gobbledygook or the fact that people are actually, you know, and she's quite accurate, I think, about this, overselling things that don't work. But I really love that Peter moved towards saying this is what I think may be generating all of this. He's there in a non-traditional role inside of

the math department of Columbia University. He's writing books, he's writing papers, he's giving talks, but he's not a professor. Same thing with, you know, David Deutsch has a really weird situation at Oxford. Garrett Lecy has a very weird situation wherever he is. Julian Barboor has a weird situation, Stephen Wolfer. Inside the universities, we've turned it into the Hunger Games academically, And so everyone is worried about survival and nobody's actually worried about physics because they're worried about personal survival. They're not worried about general survival. I think what you have to look at is that there is a reluctance.

I mean, one of the things I say that doesn't win me a ton of friends is it appears that nobody actually has any money. And the reason that I say that is that all sorts of, it feels to me like nobody, we have Rockefellers and they built Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago, one of our absolute jewels. You know, Vanderbilt, there's a Vanderbilt University. Carnegie had money. There's a Carnegie.

Layland Stanford, we don't want to invest anymore in this stuff. There's a general anti-science thing, partially, I think, fueled by the fact that when Anthony Fauci says, I am the science, trust the science. We are revulsed. We recoil in order, maybe I should say it that way. And I think people who have money are turning away from universities because those containers are seemingly very susceptible to revolutionary nonsense. And so why would you build a container and then put great stuff? in it only to have it instantly corrupted by the associate dean of niceness goodness and

fluffy puppy dogs for pediatric oncology patients you know it's like okay we need to help kids who are facing cancer we need I have a dog I like good things I scream blah blah blah blah but the university is attesting to their own fundamental goodness at every turn in the announcing everyone who disagrees with them as Gingus Khan, Hitler, or Lizzie Borden or whatever. It's not a very appealing pitch to people with resources. So what I'm seeing is that more or less people with incredible resources don't want to spend on things that are important. they've been tinged with this kind of failure and greediness and my you know Brian you're doing

something okay I think one of the things we need to do is if if the government is just going to renege on the endless frontier compact between the universities and the federal government I don't want to be in an intellectual property category where we can't monetize what we discover. I just want to take you by your ankles and say, God damn it, you fooled us, give us all our money back that we generated for you. We built the entire economy and you treat us like we're your servants. You're making me sick to my stomach. For God's sakes, grow a pair and recognize you've got the world's greatest deal and that these people basically have integrity. and you're turning their lives upside down into a horror

where people don't want to go into their offices and universities. And, you know, when I was just touring universities on the East Coast, professors would close their doors and in hush tones, they would say, you know, I can't really say this outside, but things have gotten really crazy here. And I'm thinking, you're the owners of the university. No matter what anyone tells you, you don't want to send your kid to a university

that isn't run effectively by its professors. universities are not primarily about teaching. You should go to a college if you're focused on teaching. Universities are about research. The research is done by professors, and by far the most research, the most important research, is done in STEM. I mean, I think that is a very important research

that's been done in folklore, ethnomusicology is something I considered going into. There's plenty of things that can be research that aren't STEM. But the most important things we do, is to better understand the world in which we live, gain power and wisdom to control it. And if the humanities aren't going to be giving us wisdom, but are going to be giving us negative wisdom, it's very important that anybody with hate in their heart who talks about anti-racism all day long, which is just another name for racism, should not be informing

people who might have to make nuclear weapons or fuel air explosives or any one of the horrible things that we may need to keep ourselves safe. It's very important to keep lunatics away from the stuff that actually works. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep 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 GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And I mean, I've always agreed with you in general terms. But I do feel like we have kind of an opportunity that is only, you know, kind of full of latency when it's thought prospectively in the future. In other words, the inventor of the laser, you know, Charlie Towns or the inventor of, you know, GPS and things like that, or Einstein, these people died, you know, not wealthy people. And yet, if they had attempted, and yet the creator of Ethernet, you know, their three-com, you know, is currently a triple. In what terms, Brian? Wealthy financially.

So, you know, we can define wealth otherwise, obviously. But let's pause that just for one second. I'm going to disagree in very strong terms. I went into academics in large measure for freedom. And that's why people go into business for freedom. I think that if you priced the freedom that somebody like Noam Chomsky enjoyed, you know, probably had his pension taken care of, probably was made an institute professor at MIT, could draw off on any topic, he had this giant army behind him that was.

would stand up for his freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry. The functional equivalent of Noam Chomsky's wealth was absolutely enormous. Oh, sure. I'm not debating that. And you can have, by the way, you can have both. Elon dictates you can have both. You can have intellectual capital as well. But I'm thinking purely for the translation ability of wealth to then be used to research

purposes. So you made the argument that we should have taxed, you know, semiconductor instructions or emails, all of which are invented by physicist or applies. No, no, we shouldn't have done that. We should have kept our agreements. But if you're going to be a prick about it, by all means, you're basically taking everything that was developed by people that you now treat as your servants, who you've actually legally hobbled.

And my feeling about this is that's completely unethical. 100%. All I'm saying is that the biggest lie in finance is that past performance isn't indicative. of a future, you know, returns. I mean, look at whatever, pick whatever pre.com company you like. So all I'm saying is that given that academia, academicians like the ones that you mentioned, have been treated like garbage and that physicists have not been able to not monetize for our selfish own internal purposes, which I believe we deserve, but I'm not going to talk

about that, for the purpose of physics, for the greater glory of physics, I claim we need to start with an educational campaign now. In other words, we need to say the next project that's going to be developed, quantum computing, or before it's monetized and we lose the rights to say, hold on, I didn't sign off on this IP. We need to be smart. And I don't think there's any training, you know, certainly I'm guilty. I don't train my graduates since I'm blessed to have so many brilliant kids. I never sit down. So if you ever get into a situation, I have two patents, by the way.

I never sit down and say, like, if I'm ever in the situation where this thing could make, you know, millions of, like, here's what I should do in order to benefit. But I think we need something. It should be in some way incorporate into our education. And I think the best way to do that, ironically, is through the humanities. Show through history of physics, as you know better than anybody.

Although I always say, if you want to damn somebody with faith praise as a scientist, he's really knowledgeable about the history of physics. You know, it's like, it's such a backhanded compliment. But you do, in all honesty, in all seriousness,

you do understand it. And you articulate it well. Let me push back on that because that's kind of a dig. My feeling about this is, you don't need to know the history of physics if you want to do relatively workman-like scientific research. The only people who really need to understand the history of physics aren't most physicists.

It's the tiny number of people who are going to do things like break new ground. So it's really important not to sell the history of physics to everybody. You can become a calculational monkey and go to any calculational monkey school and do calculational monkey equations. That's fine. the really hard thing is try to figure out how did people break out of cognitive prisons. And so, you know, some of the, one of the funniest things is when people have these insults, like the one you just said.

It's like, well, yeah, because you didn't understand what it was about to begin with. Yeah, I agree. I guess all I'm saying is, wouldn't it be great to have education so that the next time we invent the Internet, you know, hypertext protocols, that we can think for a second. How do we do this? How do we renegotiate the contract? That's what I want to say. You're very astute.

You picked up on the problem. But we can't go back and rectify the past performance, but we can say, given the way that the history of the field is gone, you when you invent the quantum, you know, beam, Bose-Einstein condensate laser that will be used for God knows what. Before you do that,

we should have an honest conversation about, or CRISPR, or whatever. Where are the mega fortunes that are interested in this stuff? And my claim is, we both talk to Jim Simons. Jim knows how important this stuff is,

and he's put a fair amount of capital behind this. In my, at some point I had a conversation with him about fixing education. And he said, I'd spend a fair amount of time on it, and the only thing that actually seemed to make sense is to take terrible teachers and make them slightly less terrible. And it was just, it was a heartbreaking thing. So I've seen people plow money into some of these things and get very little back.

Yeah. The things that work can't be said very easily right now because they're out of keeping with the ethos of our time. You meet people. How do you know who's good? Because you talk to them. You find out whether they have 12 ideas before they have a cup of coffee and three of them are good, you know? Three good ideas, that's astounding.

It's hard to have good ideas. We basically know who's good. And we don't get to dial their facial characteristics or look at their chromosomes or whatever. You know, good is good. famously, Ramanujan was, you know, sent a letter to Hardy and he and Littlewood, Hardy and Littlewood read it in Cambridge and they said, well, either he's a humbug or a genius. And we guessed genius because humbugs are relatively rare. Beautiful one.

We know who's good. We know who to fund and we know how to leave people alone. And nobody wants to do it. Everybody wants to say, oh, it's all in the ethos and the myth of the lone individual and, you know, this is so elitist and all this kind of nonsense. Okay, well, I don't know how to tell you this, but you're just, you're wrong 12,000 ways from Sunday and you're going to destroy everything that we know how to do. Many of the people who make real breakthroughs are very difficult to deal with. and if you don't want to deal with people who are difficult to deal with, you can just sort of write off most progress.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't leave Feynman alone with my daughter or your daughter, but he sure knew his way. That's true because we don't want Feynman maced or kicked in the groin because he's a valuable human being. And our kids are skilled in the deadly arts of the groin attack from Krav Maga training that we give him. And that is a mitzvah for all the years.

Yeah, exactly. So we're talking with Eric Weinstein, proprietor of the portal podcast, among the other things. You can find Eric at Eric R. Weinstein, at both Twitter and on Instagram. He has a website. It was about a year ago. We had a

conversation about geometric unity, and I want to talk about that because it's still, it's still it haunts my dreams. It's still something that's very delightful, and it represents a sort of, a sort of you know, candle in the darkness, a sort of hope, a scream in the void, thinking big things.

Obviously, it's not, you know, there are people that have, as you mentioned, Peter Lloyd, Garrett Lisey, there are a surfite of other contender theories that have their own lacunae. But where are you now with geometric unity? Where is the project at this point? Well, I'm talking to a lot more different physicists. Who have you met with most recently? That's the most exciting for you, besides present company, obviously.

Well, I mean, I don't want to get into details, but I think probably one of the best conversations I had recently might have been with Nima, Archani Hamid. There's a local graduate student. I'm going to mention his name because he deserves it, and is the name to watch. Trevor Schopener at UCLA is an unbelievable up-and-coming guy in I think Zvi Burns group.

But I've been, you know, talking with Avi about astrophysics, discussed with Alan Goof recently, some aspects of how multiple generations are generated. Just a fairly colleagues in France, I've been very lucky to have access to great people. And I think that one of the things that's happened is that with supersymmetry and with string theory not being able to find something

that really shows us that they're on the right track, people are slowly open to the idea of either shutting high-energy fundamental physics down and people are going to be up in arms about that. But there's like a huge move to move towards quantum computation. And you say, why is that? It's like, oh, well, because computers have been really important. And so the metaphor of the universe as a computer is really important. information power, maybe we can rebase everything around information.

It's something you can do, you can try. But I think right at the moment, where we are, is that we realize that the baby boomer program has run its course. And the baby boomer program was strings. Almost all of the people in string theory came up. They viewed the world a particular way. They changed the problems that we thought of as fundamental. Quantizing gravity became the problem to work on, which I think was absolutely wrong.

And what we find ourselves in is a world in which the old, the old thing that was crowding out everything else is in the process of dying, and that is string fundamentalism. One of the great things about talking to NEMA was, for me, that Nima is not captured by strings, but he's animated by strings, which is exactly the right position to be in, which is that you're not 100% sure that strings are the right direction to go, but you can say, look at all of the things that string theory accomplishes inside of quantum field theory. It gives us paradigmatic ways in which we can elude certain seemingly no-go theorems and the like. It's taught us a lot.

And I think that the toy theories that really came along with the string guys, because the string guys, they are mostly guys, not 100%, but too much, more or less used a lot of toy quantum field theories to explore some of these ideas. That was sort of a second program. That was very good, by the way, on their part, for developing quantum field theory

as a discipline, but it's been a disaster for uncovering new physical law, new physical explanations. So I do think that right at the moment, people would be open, but there's no... We should be building accelerators. We should be getting people. Here's the crazy thing, Brian. I'm dancing around it and trying not to say it,

but maybe I'll just say it. We just had this W mass announcement. The W particle appears to be much heavier, and by much, I don't mean like three times as heavy, but I mean by an appreciable amount, heavier than we had thought. And I watch everyone's explanations of this to the public. And I haven't seen one that really sounds to me

like what this thing actually is. We settle on these, here's how we talk to the public about the W massage. Well, what is the W particle? It's more or less a part of a derivative from calculus. And what does a derivative want to do? It wants to differentiate functions. Well, what functions does it have?

Well, it can differentiate something called a Higgs field. Now, if you look at this mug, for example, and I'm not good it going around. Drinking and deriving. Drinking and deriving. That term right there, which probably looks like D sub-mue of phi norm squared, that term

is where the W particle interacts with the Higgs particle. So you're effectively using the W particle to differentiate a Higgs particle just the way you use the photon to differentiate an electron. That process, by which

the Higgs particle gives mass to a small number of pieces of a derivative, the W and Z particles. It gives mass in some sense to itself. You've got this potential term here. You've got Ucawa terms here where it's giving mass the same phi is occurring here. All of... Sorry, not hold that up. So this is where the W particle is getting mass. is getting massed. This is where the Higgs is getting massed from itself through its interaction

with the Mexican hat potential, the sombrero. The Yukawa term where the the fermions, the electrons and protons get mass. That whole system isn't explained to anybody in the public, which is criminal. And then I've sort of been in this kind of self-examination phase, which is people say, oh, Eric, you use so many big words, why can't you understand mark we can't we understand you it's like well one thing is almost nobody's actually trying to tell you what's really going on and when i sit there and i say okay the w particle is part of a derivative all my colleagues know what i'm saying but they're not venturing out there to say something so simple and i don't know why they're not doing so the public isn't animated

Like the fact is this mug, if you had this mug in your house and you said, somebody said, let me tell you, more or less everything other than gravity is on that mug, somebody would want to know one person in your family, like, well, how do I read it? What does it mean? What are the different terms? They have names. Nobody is talking to the public about what it is that we do. Make every get together chill.

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See Store Online for details. And that's how I get into trouble. I say, you know, hey, I have an explanation for why there are three generations of matter. You're like, I don't even know that's a problem. Okay? So if you think about the sort of things that GU is doing different than, let's say, Garrett or Peter White, one of the things I think that's exciting is that a good theory should probably tell the standard model in general relativity what it got wrong. And I don't think anybody inside of the academic system wants to do that.

they want to extend only. You know, and this is why, for example, everybody will add sterile neutrinos to the standard model because it's like it's the least offensive thing that won't screw anything up. So I've been thinking a lot about this, which is why do none of us talk to the public in real terms? Why do we allow Feynman's dumbest statements to characterize what seems to be the height of sophistication? If you can't, if you can't explain it to your grandma, it means you don't understand it. I can't create the world myself, then then I'm useless. It's like, okay, well, it's a lot of machismo, but it's not very smart.

And in those, in those opportunities, none of us are really filling it in. We're not talking about what the W particle is. We're not talking about why it's important. We're not talking about why this is so exciting. I can hardly sleep. I don't even know that it's real. It may be wrong. Well, we know things are real.

We know calculus is real. and let's start with a, you know, when I learned calculus, I had a self-teach it to myself, because I actually wasn't placed it along a math track that would have taken me to take the APs, and I had a kind of self-motivate, and that came because of a love of astronomy that I wanted to find out, well, how do we know these galaxies are moving away? How do we know Haley's Comets orbit and all sorts of things that were going on at the time when I was, you know, pre-teen? And so I had to teach it myself, but once I learned it, I kind of felt like I had, you know,

gotten the cheat code, you know, and just I started to see. things in a different way and I went through the portal and at that moment I felt a great gift had been given to me and it was given by myself but in the sense that I was given these gifts from the great people that came before me including my hero Galilei Galile who I want to talk about because I have exciting news about a wonderful project that I've been blessed to work on the last couple of years now and it's come to fruition but but I feel like we're doing a disservice that's why I say I kind of joke in the past but I'm getting more and more serious I feel the scientists like me, especially like me, who get paid by the public, have a moral

obligation to teach the most exciting and most delightful, delicious developments to the public for free. And they should do that as part of their job, quote unquote. And they'll say, I'm not good at it. And to which I'll say, oh, yeah, I forgot. When you were born, you knew quantum field theory. Oh, no, no, I had to learn that. It was very hard. And it's very sophisticated. Okay, so you spend time on things you think are valuable, right? My fellow professors. And it doesn't make me popular around the faculty club, but I do believe that, you know, especially, but and every professor, every scientist is supported by the public at some level or another. So, you know, we have a, we have a huge, you know, we have a branding problem. We talked

about the marketing problem, but we also have kind of an education and a, and a, and a, and a, and a self-obligation that scientists don't feel. We feel like we can sit around, be the, be the equation monkeys that you were talking about before. Well, it's not true, Brian. I just, I mean, I disagree with this. Here's the basic problem because I've gone through this now. Let's imagine you want to understand what the W particle is and the Higgs particle and why this matters, right? So there's some safe thing that everyone can say and then you can try to actually be real and then get attacked. So I don't like being attacked. I've got idiots who follow me around who call up my colleagues and try to alienate everyone

from me. And my feeling about these people is once you understand what the cost is, you understand why nobody does it. But here's a cord, okay? This cord represents a function. The height of the cord is a function. And the W particle is in part a level. And that level could be horizontal, or we could use the level to define what is horizontal right and so if I pick this we all know that the derivative is the rise over run above that level but if I say you know what I have Fiat power and I'm gonna decide that not this but this is level then the cord that is tangent at that point is actually constant even though it appears to be rising okay now I

didn't use any big words you'll watch in the comment Eric showing off Eric is doing this. In the comments, people are saying, Eric, please write a book about this. Well, some, most of them, but my point is a tiny number of people who are terrible and who just don't want good things to happen don't want us to try and fumble in front of the public. And they don't want us to succeed because then we get large follower counts. And it's like, well, why is that guy the most, you know, followed mathematician on Twitter? It's like, that should be me.

Okay. maybe it should be you. I'll tell you one thing if you really have enemies wish them fame I promise you they want it you don't want it it's a great deal what we need to do is to be more courageous about saying look you're not going to understand quantum field theory but here's some things you can break out if you can keep up with the Kardashian you can you can keep up with quarks you can keep up with hadrons and leptons there aren't so many hadrons and leptons that you can't learn them all in an afternoon.

Right? There's probably about as many fundamental particles as there are Kardashians. And the idea that we don't talk about this, we don't traffic in it, we're not excited about this. Think about 90 years ago, this is the 90th year anniversary of the neutron. We didn't know that there were neutrons. So my aunt, who is in her late 90s, grew up before there were neutrons. So when she was a very little girl, nobody knew what a neutron was. Almost immediately after the discovery of neutrons, we get chain reactions and we get atomic weapons and atomic power.

That discovery within living memory made the world a completely different place and watch out for what comes next. As an adaptation of the old saying, you may not be interested in physics, but boy, is physics going to be interested in it? And the idea that you're not part of the conversation, which is who are we, what is this place, and can we go and look at the night sky and dream responsibly without wormholes and without sci-fi of visiting?

If that doesn't animate you, I guarantee you you probably can't find a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo that moves you either. And that brings up the other chords that you're capable of bringing out, which are your guitar, we're going to get that at the very end. So people in the chat room are saying things that Kim Kardashian actually has a nice set of bosons. That's kind of cool to know.

But Eric, if actually listeners and viewers, 800 people watching right now, if you'd like Eric to write a book about this, give a thumbs up to this video. And we'll see if we can create the ground source. well necessary to do this labor of love, which is writing a book. And I've actually just produced my third book, and I can't believe it, three books in four years. This one I didn't write. So this one I had a ghost writer literally, and the name of the ghost writer. Are we on the verge of a major announcement, which I don't even know? You don't know it. It is a major announcement, at least in my life. I've been putting it out on Twitter here and there, but now I want to come

clean and really announce it for for for all time and that is um 390 years ago a so 300 years before the neutron a man by the name of galileo galilee wrote a book that got him in a tiny bit of hot water he was kind of the Weinstein of his day not afraid to be provocative in some ways take liberties and take license and he wrote a book called the dialogue and this book it was in italian it's called the dialogo and it was in contradistinction to his first book called the Ciderius Nuncius. Cedarius nuncius, as you all know, as Latin for Starry Messenger, and he was allowed to keep publishing in Latin because nobody spoke Latin, and so it wasn't a threat to the Catholic

Church. But after he used the spyglass, as he called it, the perspective tube, the telescope, he found that he could not really get over the overwhelming evidence that was presented to him, and he wanted to share it for the world with the notion that the universe is not centered on the earth, that's centered on the sun. And so he was advancing Copernicus theory and other earlier theories as well. And he wrote this wonderful book.

It's called the dialogue. It's actually a trialogue between three characters, one of whom is modeled after Galileo himself. And he gave this character the name Salviati, the Salvation. And then the other one was modeled after the Pope, Pope Urban and his arguments. And he put his arguments in the name of a character

name Simplicio, the simpleton. not the great you know i love this because it shows like you know even the most biggest geniuses and and academia uh can have huge uh fatal flaws in their impolitic behavior and then there's a third character who's an intelligent lay person his name is sagredo so i got the most famous uh two italians that i know carlo roveli and fabiola gianati uh who you love for her use of comic sans uh and so uh we at the higgs bosun announcement so we should say that one of the them is a famous theorist that's attached to loop quantum gravity the other one is a big shot physicist with the CERN experiments yes the director of CERN which is where the

LHC is located and responsible for discovery of the Higgs boson so we and along with Jim Gates who's another friend of yours a professor at the Ford Foundation professor at Brown University where I will be returning and that's state two for a top secret announcement at the end of this month. I should say he's an acquaintance. I have great respect for him and I've enjoyed meeting him, but we are not close. So the five or six of us put together a audiobook, the first ever audiobook by Galileo. So it exists and you can get it wherever books are audio-bolized, including Amazon,

Audible, Google Play, wherever you like. I'll put a link to it in the show notes below. And it was really a labor of love. It took us a year to record it. it in our home studios around the world in Italy. Carlo was in Italy and in Aks and Provence or however you pronounce that and then my friend Lucio Piccherillo is the third character. We recorded it and so much of what comes through in this wonderful book is just beyond, you know, my comprehension as a physicist. And actually what, oh, Frank Wilcheck, I should say, narrated

the word and Nobel Prize winner 2004 Nobel Prize winner for asymptotic freedom. He narrated the dedication by Albert Einstein, the forward, to the book by Galileo, in which he calls this book by Galileo, the most important book ever written. Einstein called Galileo's book. Yes, Einstein called the dialogue, not just science book,

but really the most important book that had really ever been written, fiction, nonfiction, however you like to say it, including his own work. So it was incredibly gratifying to have these people come together and do it. And of course, this book is Italian and it was written originally in Italian and we had to have a

trans it was translated and so anyway I started off doing it really kind of as a kind of a lark but then I decided that there could be some spin-off opportunities not really just for me but I think maybe for physics and I want to get your your impression on so one thing about this book they're extremely expensive to get your hands on a original copy of the dial at 390-year-old books are very rare obviously so I decided I have a collector friend who allowed me to scan pictures from it, and we're making NFTs of it. And at first I thought it was kind of silly, kind of crazy.

Why would you make an NFT of a physical product or whatever? But the more I thought about it, like what if we could do, use blockchain technology and science, not just for preserving, or maybe we could make a Dow, one of these organizations, these entities to buy these books before they get lost or stolen or whatever, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars to get an original one.

But what if we could either custodize it or if we could use it to generate resources for physics? So I want to run that idea by you. Not specifically with my Galileo project, but that's just kind of my testing the water with NFTs. But you can find that on my website, Brian Keating.com. But, you know, for a fraction of an ether. But what do you think about NFTs and science? What do you think about the prospects for using this blockchain technology? By any means necessary is where I am at the moment.

Malcolm the 10th, I think, was correct that we needed to, there's certain things that are just so important that I almost don't care how they happen. My hope is that NFTs don't backfire on us. Because the right thing to do is to make very serious people very rich in autonomy me so that they never think about, you know, look, making somebody a low eight-digit millionaire, double-digit millionaire is probably sufficient to give them an extremely nice life. And there are tons of those who do far less for us than the people who do our molecular biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics.

So I do think that it's important if we're going to abandon all of our culture, we're going to leak everything, we're going to turn the universities into cesspools, et cetera, et cetera. We've got to get a few money to the people who built everything for us, in my opinion. Those, what I don't want to see is I don't want to see it backfiring. I don't want to see a claim. Oh, well, you guys have your NFT, so you're good now. It's like, no. we're scrambling because you screwed us over and you're idiots and it's time for you to be ethical and smart That's a very hard conversation to have

If we have to dramatize it by NFTs, so be it But my feeling is what if the NFT thing goes in different directions if it goes through to the moon Then it's a great move what if it goes in the toilet and now we've we've sort of staked our credibility and on getting involved in something that has a Ponzi scheme built into it. I'm not saying it is a Ponzi scheme. No, I got it. But there is Ponzi in NFT, just as there is genius in NFT. I also want to point out that the concept of digital scarcity,

if you go back to the original blockchain white paper of Satoshi, it's very, very clear that it's propagating something according to a conservation law, that you hand me your public key and I've got my private key and I've got this token that I'm laying claim to. I can propagate my token to you in this infinite chain of custody by virtue of the fact that something is conserved. Now of course you had to create new tokens out of out of the vacuum but my belief is is that one of the things is we should be talking about this in terms of digital conservation laws and digital physics and we should be active and I also think that you know having been playing with the the crypto

community a little bit at first they dismiss everybody because they think you come in from outside you don't care about anything you just want to tell people things but we do know that there are a lot of there's a lot of homology between Bitcoin and gauge theory. Conservation principles. Conservation principles have to do with symmetry. I am sure that if you and I got roaring drunk for two weeks with a whiteboard, we would come up with a symmetry principle for Bitcoin using some version of a

discreetized nerders theorem that took the conservation law that allows us to propagate. Satoshi's solution of the double spend problem is probably, worthy of some amazing science prize. It's just an ingenious idea. It's hard to understand, like, what is the substrate of, is it the idea that the individual wallets, the public-private key pairs, is it computers and nodes? Because, you know, the interesting thing is that it was engineered so that nodes could go dark. And, you know, that's like taking a chunk of space time out of commission. I think it's really important that physics get involved with NFTs, with conservation laws, with digital physics,

and actually contribute into the system to make it much more useful. And while some in the crypto community will say, oh, they're just talking their book. And to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a gauge theory, everything looks like a conservation law. Just ignore those people. There are so many good people in crypto who are interested in any interesting idea. We need to party with them. That's my thought.

So I want to ask you to look into your crystal ball and maybe we'll do the lightning round as we like to do, Eric. All right. Are we done with COVID? No. Explain. My feeling about this is that probably COVID is much worse. and we thought or that we understand and that people who understood it were protecting us against something. I don't know this to be true, but if I had to make a guess, the reason that China is so

ferocious about trying to stamp COVID out is that I worry that they know something, that it's not a flu, that it's a cumulative flu that destroys you bout by bout. I don't know what this thing is, and I think it's criminal that we're so far into this. And we have no idea why China is behaving the way it's behaving or why Fauci behaves the way he behaves or Peter Dajek or Ralph Barrick or any of these people. Somehow this COVID is taking place outside of science. And it's, I'm worried that we don't understand what COVID is and we don't know which wave is going to hurt and how bad. I mean, no, I don't think so. I think that we decided that we're done with it because Omicron was relatively mild.

But what COVID becomes next, I worry that certain people have much better understanding than you and I do, and that they know why this is so dangerous. I'm worried that the government lied twice for different reasons. The first time, I worry that they lied to protect what they were doing with DITRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Why was it working with EcoHealth Alliance Wuhan Lab? Why under kindly Dr. Fauci, who seems to have something to do with a weapons portfolio, getting around a couple of treaties that we signed and ratified in the 70s. I have no idea. But I think that that was a self-protective lying. And then I think that there may have been public-spirited lying, saying if we could have told you what it is that we created in this cauldron,

we happen to have some insight information about this fjuring cleavage site and the potential to attack T-cells and the degradation, and why this binds to so many different organs and can cross the blood-brain. I'm worried that they know that this is a much worse disease than it appears, and that we're going to find out over time why they were so draconian, because it does look like that they wildly overreacted,

not to say that people didn't die, not to say that this wasn't serious, but to shut down the world economy to the extent that they did clearly risked war at some level. It wasn't that it was free. And so I'm very worried that we don't really understand what COVID is and that Omicron seemed kind of relatively mild, but just wait something that's going to be wave after wave and we're going to learn over time what this thing that really is. Do you see the midterm elections coming out without a hitch? Do you think it'll be a nice, smooth, orderly, I don't want to say transition to power.

I don't want to assume what direction the elections are going to go. You think it's going to be a nice smooth election in November? You're asking one of the middle children what to do about crazy mommy and crazy daddy. And my feeling is that, you know, dad should go off into his meth den. And mom should move out of the house with her various lovers. And the same people who are left should try to get back to the United States of America. I don't know how to do this. I view the Republican and Democratic parties as being dead-enders.

You know, again, it's the Thelma and Louise problem. Do you decide that Thelma is better than Louise if Louise takes longer to hit the ground, you know, by a nanoseck? I don't know. I view, I'm so, you know what, I've become a tensionist. It's like you've got bloods and crips running your neighborhood, and you don't want to go blood or Crip. You just want them to fight each other enough

so that the rest of you can go to work, go to school, and buy some groceries without being terrorized. More upbeat note, are we headed for a U.S. involvement on the ground in the Ukraine? Next question. Are you excited about any recent discoveries in physics? We talked about the W-Boson mass discrepancy.

By the way, it's not that the mass itself is so much higher. It's that the precision is so with tension with the standard model. Not that you said that, but there are people in the chat room wondering, is it eight times too high, five sigma? No, it's higher. The bounds on this thing are radically, radically tightened up.

And this isn't new data, this old data, new analysis, and it should be taken with some degree of caution. But to that end, people have been speculating about the role of fifth forces and all sorts of things, ranging from G-minus-2 discrepancy, the magnetic moment of the muon, et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of tensions.

I always say physicists need a psychologist, I think we've got so much tension on our moments. But where do you think, what's exciting you? If you were a young physicist, or if you knew a young physicist who's starting out, what would you advise her to do? What excites you most in physics? Well, a theorist, I mean, we should talk about it

experimentalist and a theorist and I think we should talk about the experimentalist first because I think one of the things that you've done is to emphasize that constantly focusing on the lead singer, you know, it's like we're always talking about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is holding it down, making the thing awesome. Let's talk evenly about them. So what should a young experimentalist do? My feeling about that is you should figure out where there might be money and where there might be new tools and I would be thinking a lot about high precision experiments. I would be thinking a lot about gravitational waves because that's still relatively new. I would be thinking a great deal about which of these hints beyond the standard model physics might be most promising and how would I go

about the G-minus-2 anomaly or the W anomaly or any of the other anomalies. what are the tools and then you know the interstitial thing as you were saying in some sense new analysis of old data is new data in a certain of a kind right because we have to process the original raw data and so it's never it's never pristinely coming from the universe itself directly what am i super excited about i'm super excited about getting back to the big questions We traded all of our big questions for can you quantize gravity, which assumes that gravity wants to be quantized the way everything else wanted to be quantized. I'm tired of talking about white supremacy, but quantum supremacy, we can call it quantum maximalism.

Everything, it's sort of like dealing with Bitcoin maximalists. The people with the laser eyes are telling you quantize gravity rather than make the quantum more geometric because gravity has always been geometric since Einstein. What I'm super excited about in mass is looking at the different ways that mass can be generated inside of the models. So let's come up with three separate ways that you can generate mass. One way is that you could have more things to differentiate. If a piece of a derivative gains mass by differentiating something like a Higgs field, maybe there are multiple Higgs fields and that more mass somehow comes out of a richer Higgs sector.

That's sort of the, that's one of the things that might be interesting. There's a very funny result from dimension three that's peculiar to dimension three called topological mass that was pioneered by Roman Jekheave and others. And that says that if you have a Yang Mills term, so forgive me, if you have a term

that looks like this at the top of the cup with the double Fs, And then you add another term that looks a little bit more like a matter equation, and it's only got one derivative rather than two, sort of like the DRock equation. It's called the Chern-Simon's term. In dimension three, that gives you a new way to generate mass that's not available elsewhere. Then there's another way of generating mass, which is seemingly verboten, which is to put in a direct mass term for something like the W particle.

So rather than a soft mass term, which gains the appearance of mass through an interaction, I'll stop using this mug, I believe that in GU there are ways to generate mass directly rather than indirectly that don't violate gauge conservation. So there are sort of three mass mechanism channels that I'm looking at in GEU relative to the discovery of the W particle. And this is something that I was excited about before. But I don't know. I mean, what are you supposed to say? If everything is working fine, it was an embarrassment that there were these extra terms.

It's there in the draft. You can see where the mass is generated. but I don't think actually I put in the Yang-Milsian part to the draft because of having something to do with the Higgs sector, which I'm very excited about. The prospect for generating mass in novel ways, I think I expect to be one of the most exciting things to be coming out. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises.

It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Well, on that note, my friend, I want to wish everybody celebrating out there. There was a guitar question. Oh yeah, a guitar question. What's the guitar question? The guitar question is the guitar hero did. It's an interesting puzzle. We just had this dinner where I was invited by a guy named Pliny.

Yeah, talk about this picture. This guy tattooed everywhere except for maybe the whites of his eyes. You're talking about Tim Henson. Oh, yeah. Tim Henson is, I don't even know how to describe it. what kind of a wild guitarist he is, but look up Polyphia Goat for the most famous thing that he did. And I give the example, it's sort of like Havana-unana, you know, but imagine that you had, or like smooth, it's got this kind of a Latin rhythm and field flow.

But imagine that somebody was juggling a Faberget egg, a running chainsaw, and a nuclear weapon. And like it was just incredibly difficult to imagine the different things that they had to do when they were catching each one of these things. Tim is mixing up all sorts of ingenious. I just love this guy. Ingenious ways of taking and deconstructing and reconstructing. And I want to emphasize reconstructing. Things that our brains and ears are want to hear and are used to hearing. but need to be made fresh anew.

So I think that Tim is one of the most exciting guitarists out there, but I want to just, I want to flog a bunch of names very quickly, people who are exciting me. Pliny's exciting me. Rick Beato is doing amazing things on his channel. We are being treated to Mike Dawes and Tommy Emmanuel touring the country,

Mike Isinger of Incubis. John Mayer is one of the most unbelievable pedagogues out there. So he's not only playing his heart out with the blues, with the level of people like Joe Bonamassa and other people in that idiom, the guy named Kingfish, and Eric Gales and Josh Smith. I'm just naming a bunch of people who, if you're not, if you want to get excited again about guitar,

listen to these people as well as get excited about the gear. What's going on in gear? The folks at Positive Grid just sent me a tiny amp that is effectively you charge. You know, it's a little cube this big. And I've got the world's greatest amplifier simulated inside of this tiny little thing. What's going on at Neural DSP? in their ability to simulate and capture instruments and then you can capture your own amplifier and digitize it. So Doug Castro is doing amazing things.

The people at High Vibe acoustic guitar are blowing my mind by putting reverb, echo inside a classical instrument effectively or a wood instrument. This is out of France. and what they're doing is turning our, they're blurring the line between an electric and acoustic guitar, so you can have distortion on an acoustic guitar because it takes the signal in and then it transforms it, and then it uses the vibrating wood, which is where we hear most of the sound.

It's not from the strings, it's from the wood. That stuff is being vibrated by these little, I forget actuators or whatever they call them. I think guitar is incredibly exciting right now, and I think that what we're missing is we're missing spontaneity and the blues and whatever it is that caused every show to be wildly different.

We have too many people practicing very, very carefully. And I'll just shout out Tosa Nabasi and Mishamansur, and I'm going to have more to say about this soon. Good. Well, Eric, can't thank you enough. People are asking you to break out a guitar, but I'd ask you to plan that out. So unless you happen to have a little strat nearby, we'll have to do that next time. And people are asking us to go deep into the mug.

So I think what we should do next time is explore the mug in some detail. So on this channel... I would love to do that, but I would like to get some video aids. And the two of us get excited about letting people know, here's the recipe for the universe, so that maybe not everybody becomes a quantum field theorist, instantly. But this is the greatest show on earth. There's nothing more interesting than this. And you shouldn't get frozen out of it just because you didn't, math didn't agree with you in high school. So that's what I have to say. That's right. So we tied in guitar strings and string theory.

So Eric, we do have facilities for that. We have an enormous green screen glass whiteboard down here at UC San Diego where you're always welcome. You know where your office is. Japanese whiskey. We have Japanese whiskey. We have Japanese whiskey. We have Cuban cigars. We have giant mushrooms. And we have assorted accoutrements to go along with that. I want to notify people next week. There's going to be a big press release coming from the Event Horizon Telescope,

headed by my friend Shep Dolman at Harvard Center for Astrophysics. And they're making an announcement involving a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a feeling it has to do with the ginormous 6 million solar mass at the center of black hole. the black hole the black hole unless they've discovered another black hole and that would be almost equally you don't know what this announcement is are you teasing this do you actually know this is a announcement of a

press conference coming on Thursday next week the 12th of May I have a video queued up I've done an interview I don't know I have my very strong suspicions and so I'll have a video out that day about the results on this channel so I hope people will subscribe

I do a lot of introductory kind of physics videos, but I do a lot of advanced physics and I take the experimentalist tack, as Eric said. I love to go deep dive. I love my theorist. My best friends are theorists, including Eric and Stefan. Would you want your daughter to marry one?

I would allow one of them, yeah. But in the same token, I'm in the favor of mixed marriages. That's right. Experimentalists need some love too, the unsung exterminators of all theories in the universe. So for now, and I wish you all.

a fruitful Cinco de Mayo. We're going to go out drinking next time we're together, some tequila, and we'll have to avoid the anomalous worms. So I want to wish everybody that, and tune in next time to The Into the Impossible Podcast with your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, and his friendly friend. Eric, you're looking wonderful. Can't wait to we're in person in all seriousness.

Miss you, buddy. Been too long. All right, brother. Best to everybody. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Thanks, Grant. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Okay, well, that's a wrap. Hope you enjoyed this episode and the two-part series with Dr. Eric Weinstein. We covered so much ground, everything from aliens to abortion, from Zelensky to zoology, really a wide-ranging cornucopia of really delightful topics. I love talking to Eric, and he's agreed to come back regularly. So show some love. Leave a review. People have been leaving just some of those heartwarming reviews. We have over 500 worldwide, almost 400 just in the U.S. alone, including one I saw just recently from someone who goes by the name of Nighthawk on Apple Podcasts, where you can leave your own review of The Into the Impossible podcast, just right below where you might be listening to it. Or if you're on Spotify, you can just leave a star ranking. I hope you'll give me a small constellation, an asterism, four stars or greater, maybe even five stars. So I've earned your trust, if not your money back. Anyway, Nighthawk says this is an educational journey, a very entertaining podcast. Dr. Keating is brilliant, home-plushing, and presents the principles of physics in a very attainable way.

The guests on this podcast range through the greatest minds of our time. I highly recommend it. And that was review number 502 worldwide. Won't you add yours to, if you're able to, either on Spotify, Audible, or written review on Apple podcast? Don't forget to sign up for a monthly mailing list called Magic mailing list, because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For now, signing off yours truly, stay tuned for interviews with Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Powers,

an upcoming interview with Pulitzer Prize winner, Ed Young, and conversation with Philip Goff, with Gareth, and many, many of the most brilliant luminaries in our multiverse. Brian Keating, signing off and thanking you for going into the impossible. Have a great rest of your week. 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. Fit for your ambition for citizens back.