Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Geometric Unity: 40 Years in the Making | Eric Weinstein

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Starting point is 00:01:23 That's huel, H-U-E-L dot com slash theories of everything. All one word. Thanks again to Huel for supporting the show. Become a Huel again by visiting the link in the description. Why are you nervous? I... You're formidable. Sean Carroll doesn't make me as nervous as you do. And he's hostile and you're not.

Starting point is 00:01:50 You've arrived. I'm nervous for the right reasons because we're actually going to have a conversation. And I never have a conversation. What is a core idea of geometric unity that if people knew more about it, it would get them as excited about GU as you are? That despite the fact, I mean, it's a great question, first of all. I believe it is the only claim of a theory that starts from essentially as close to nothing as you can in mathematics

Starting point is 00:02:29 to try to derive everything we see. And because we see a world that is complex and baroque like the standard model in general relativity, that process of development and unfolding has to be fairly lengthy. Just the way human development from a has to be fairly lengthy. Just the way human development from a single fertilized egg is. And I think that what gets lost, and I think what you did beautifully is to show that just because something has a simple starting point doesn't mean that the theory remains simple. This concept of writing something down on a napkin that represents the entire world

Starting point is 00:03:06 skips many steps of what you're really trying to do is to understand where you are, who you are. And I think the fact that it starts basically from four degrees of freedom and a tiny amount of sectoral information like which spin structure is active and how many temporal dimensions do you want? Um, that's it. That's really the only starting point for geometric unity. And the only comparable claims that I know of would be Garrett Lisi saying, let's start from the most complicated, simple Lee group possible.

Starting point is 00:03:44 from the most complicated simple Lie group possible. Peter White saying, let's start from SU4, and we'll quotient out by SU3 cross U1 to get the electrostrong group, and then we'll try to figure out how to get an SU2 from a wick rotation inside of a projective space. Or Stephen Wolfram saying, maybe this all comes out of a very simple cellular rule. And I don't think that any of those have actually gotten to the point where they can make the claim that that's a logical train of development.

Starting point is 00:04:18 So to me, that would be one way of answering the question. Another way of answering it is how much do you care about the actual particles of matter that make up everything? Do you care about the up quark down quark, electron, tau particle? Do you care about these symmetries of nature? Where is this crazy SU3 cross SU2 cross SU1 coming from? Where are the three generations, why is this chiral and therefore asymmetric, left-handed, right-handed or different? And I guess one of the things I'm astounded by is the way that those questions when I was 17

Starting point is 00:04:57 were on the lips of every theoretical physicist. And through whatever process we went through starting in 83, 84, those questions got relegated to not particularly interesting or relevant questions, which I think if you told me that you could get physicists to stop worrying about three generations, the famous who ordered that problem, Isidore Rabi, I wouldn't have believed you. So two notes. Number one, you contacted me 48 hours ago and said you're coming to Toronto. I normally prepare for a podcast weeks in advance mentally, and then also just studying like psychologically and then studying.

Starting point is 00:05:41 So this is a teaser podcast, which somewhat assumes people have watched some of the geometric Unity iceberg so that we can go into some depth. As for greater depth, that will be in the non-teaser, which will be, I don't know how long from now, but it's upcoming. And I'll come back to Toronto for it because I can't tell you how much that has impacted me. For the first time, I'm having a real conversation about a real thing with another human being that I've spent my entire life talking about to myself, myself alone.

Starting point is 00:06:19 The second note is that that first question about what is the greatest idea about geometric unity or some core idea. What would you what would be impressive I think was. Yeah. Comes from Richard B. Heal. If I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. He has a fantastic YouTube channel. I'll place it on screen.

Starting point is 00:06:36 He's the one who did the Higgs particle video recently and did a spinner video recently. So plenty of this will be me also reiterating what you're saying so that I can ensure that I'm following along. And I'll try to make sure you get your act back like TCPI. Okay, let's see. How would you summarize GU simply? Okay, now let me let me put a caveat to that. Yeah, again on screen.

Starting point is 00:07:02 I'll put a link to this video where I talk about the perils of explain like I'm five else you don't understand it. I have a video where I say there are three factors here, much like there's cost, speed and quality in the business world. Very often there's a trade off. Many things, whether it's human relations or pedagogy or business or whatever, here's three things that you feel are essential, choose any two. Sure, exactly.

Starting point is 00:07:27 So I think for teaching, it's succinctness, accuracy and simplicity. So if you want something that's simple and accurate, it's going to take quite some time. So that's say an algebraic geometry textbook. It's actually quite simple because it starts from something rudimentary, but it takes a semester to go through.

Starting point is 00:07:49 If you want something that's accurate, but succinct, you sacrifice simplicity. And that's what, sorry, yes. Accurate, but succinct. You sacrifice simplicity. Yes. So let's say, what is the standard model's gauge group? So you can say it's SU3 across blah, blah, blah. Then you can say it's modded L by Z6.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Super succinct, it's not quite simple. So anyhow, I'm asking you to sacrifice some accuracy now. Oh really? Cause that would be great. To tell GU in a simple and succinct manner. succinct manner. A life begins as a four manifold, which begets failed. So someone said that in my explain like I'm five videos for geometric unity, I use the word engendered.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Yeah. And they're like, what five. I use the word engendered. Yeah. And they're like, what five-year-old knows the word engendered? So let alone manifold. Now we're not aiming at the five-year-old. Okay. Here's the, here's the thing. Most people, why do they care about fundamental physics? Because it's existence. You're here in this miracle place.

Starting point is 00:09:00 You don't know what you are. You don't know where this is. And you want to know like God's thoughts. And that's the thing where, when we talk about a crisis in physics or whatever, and people say, well, what about condensed matter? Well, that's not the part that scratches the philosophical itch of who am I? Where am I? What is this?

Starting point is 00:09:19 I want to know before it's all over. Right. So the key thing is we are waves in a medium. The medium is called a bundle. It's a very strange thing that you are a wave and nobody told you what the name of the medium is. You'll have an entire, you're an entire conversation about the ether. And like the bundle is probably the right concept of the ether, you know?

Starting point is 00:09:42 And instead for some reason, they stopped minting new words after ether, so we're still discussing the ether and we're not discussing bundles. So if you're a wave in a medium, the universe is a newspaper story. You want to know where and when, who and what, how and why, where is space, when is time, put the two of them together, you have space time. Then there's the whole two of them together. You have space time. Then there's the who and what those are the bosons and fermions that make up the matter in the case of the fermions and the force and the other field in the case

Starting point is 00:10:18 of the bosons, so you have matter acting on force and force redirecting matter. Whichever way they're interacting. And then how and why is what we would call the equations in the Lagrangian. And so that's a pretty good idea about how to remember how a physicist thinks about reality at the deepest level. Tell me where it's going on. Tell me what the equipment and the players are. And tell me what the rules are and what the consequences are. So basically geometric unity says that we have this wrong. Not wildly wrong in the sense of I can't connect it.

Starting point is 00:11:01 It's very connected to what I'm claiming and what Einstein was claiming and what the authors of the Standard Model are claiming. But the first thing is that the arena is not space time. It's a different kind of a gadget called a bundle. And one thing you can think about it is that there's sort of two spaces in a bundle, not one space. And that gives you a little bit of an opportunity to say, maybe if you're going to sacrifice accuracy, let's go for it.

Starting point is 00:11:27 The quantum is happening on a 14 manifold, and the classical is happening on a four manifold, and they're not on the same space. They're not native to the same space. So a lot of the attempt to say that you have to quantize gravity or which slit does the photon or electron go through in the double slit experiment, all these things, come from the fact that you're trying to answer a non-spacetime question in a construct called spacetime that, because Einstein sort of wrote down

Starting point is 00:11:56 the rules around 1913 through 1917, sometimes with Grossman, sometimes in rivalry with Hilbert. That story has confused us. We, it's like having a Mercator projection of the world on your, on your wall and starting to think, well, that is the world. No, it's a distortion. Einstein distorted the world for his time. And geometric unity asserts that ultimately, if you want to not look at the map and you want to look at the territory, you have to keep putting in a

Starting point is 00:12:29 new map until finally in the end, reality is its own exegesis. There's no tool to look at it. So geometric unity says, you're not living on one space. You're living on a relationship between two spaces. In that relationship, you've put the quantum on one space, the classical on another, which decreases the amount of conflict between them. It also says, for example,

Starting point is 00:12:56 that the classical world is by far the more important of the two worlds than the quantum. How does it say that? Look, I want to riff with you differently than I can riff with anyone else. I'm in the rare position where I'm talking to the only person who has actually talked about one of the great revolutions of our time that actually happened.

Starting point is 00:13:17 When you did that show with Eva Miranda on geometric quantization, you took one of the three great developments in physics after the Standard Model and you made it publicly accessible with Professor Miranda. So what is the situation? Isn't it amazing we had a revolution called geometric quantization and there's no trace of it? Yeah. The public doesn't know, but for your channel, that it exists.

Starting point is 00:13:44 And if you wanted to say it in a really funny way, it's that Hamiltonian dynamics, one way of, there are two ways of basically figuring out the consequence of a rule, if you use the Hamiltonian formalism, it self-quantizes. There's a thing called a symplectic form that generates how the world develops. And what we didn't realize is it comes from something else. It's the curvature tensor of a connection on a bundle over something called phase space. So we had this concept of phase space to figure out how classical physics

Starting point is 00:14:17 develops. And classical phase space births and bootstraps its own medium for quantum waves. So once you know that and it's not perfect, but just we're sacrificing a little bit of accuracy to say something like dramatic, meaningful and punchy. If I tell you the classical theory, you have to figure out the consequences of it quantum mechanically. But the quantum fetish that you see is kind of weird and wild. Yes, there are systems that don't appear to be the quantization of any classical structure. But the standard model is a classical theory that then gets quantized.

Starting point is 00:15:05 And it, in some sense, it figure, it bootstraps its own quantization. Once you give, like you'll hear physicists say, once you've given the Lagrangian of the action, everything is in place. It's just a question of figuring out the consequence. Well, if that's true and the action is classical, then what do you mean that you're so focused on the quantum? So I guess, look, it's embarrassing, but I just think we have a quantum fetish. And we have a tiny number of people who convinced everyone to repeat the same statements about, well, you know, the world is quantum mechanical.

Starting point is 00:15:40 So if you say, I think the classical is more important. They don't hear that as an informed statement. They hear that as you didn't get the fact that the world is quantum, you still think that you live in a classical world. Or for example, the fact that why does the classical world dominate? Why are we confused about the quantum world? Why isn't it evident that it's everything is quantum? It's Feynman voting. Have I ever talked to you about Feynman voting?

Starting point is 00:16:06 No. Imagine that you have 10,000 people lost in a featureless landscape, and they're trying to figure out which way to go. And you've got one cult of like a thousand people, right? So a small group of people, and they all agree. And you say, we're gonna take a poll, we're gonna add up, we're gonna point average out by the number of people.

Starting point is 00:16:27 And we'll go in that direction at that speed. Well, the key point is, is that everybody who's not in the cult is pointing in some different direction. And that's randomly going to average out to going in no direction at all. Except for the cult. And that's going to be a out to going in no direction at all, except for the cult and they're all going in the same direction. So in finding voting, the classical thing contributes a much more coherent picture of what should happen.

Starting point is 00:16:59 And that's why the classical world dominates, even though it's a minority perspective. Okay. Why can't you say that the action itself is not classical. You have an action and you can interpret it in two ways. One is a quantum way. Then another is a classical way. You can do that.

Starting point is 00:17:16 But the action itself is not or the Lagrangian itself is not classical. I, this is Logomachy. We're arguing over words rather than substances. Okay, let me be semantically clear. Okay. You can get classical observables by taking the action, or you can get quantum observables by doing something else with the action. And the classical one just looks at a small part of the action and says, okay, this is where everything is happening.

Starting point is 00:17:46 And the quantum one actually looks at all of it. And so it has more information, the quantum one, sorry, the quantum one interprets more of it. I'm a little bit confused because they're both local. The quantum picks up more information because you're looking at the wave function over the entire space. But what actually happens with the observable is that you have a function, and you can either measure the function at the point and then multiply it by the quantum wave, or you can

Starting point is 00:18:17 take that function, differentiate it to get a one-form, stick it into a symplectic form to get a vector field, throw the vector field to a connection and use that connection to take a directional derivative. So one of these ends up as the position operator. One of these sort of ends up as a momentum operator for the p's and q's and the underlying coordinate ization of phase space. But

Starting point is 00:18:38 that process of promoting a classical observable, which is just like some number, um, I don't really think that think that that works exactly because the function is defined over the entire phase space. So in a certain sense, even if you're thinking classically, you're both, you're working over the entire space of possibilities in both cases. The only thing that's different is the state of the system is seen as naturally looking at the entire space, whereas in this other case, you actually imagine a physical situation

Starting point is 00:19:15 which only one part of it is relevant at any time. So in the classical case, are you saying that because we use a variational principle that we're seeing all of the space? In a certain sense. Well, look, you're defining an action or a Lagrangian on the entire space, and then you're defining observables that you wish to measure. So you're thinking about for the space of all possible initial conditions, if I then measured the system, you know, n units of time later, I believe

Starting point is 00:19:47 I would be sampling this function at this point. And it's the point part of it that is narrowing things to a single point, whereas a state that is distributed, every wave is a wave in a medium that's distributed over an expanse. So what I meant was that if you do some variation principle and you say, okay, let's take the extreme of that. Yeah. Only that for the classical case contributes to an observable. Yes.

Starting point is 00:20:16 Whereas in the quantum case, it doesn't have to just be that single part. Well, again, the variational sounds more Lagrangian than Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian sort of says, I don't need to know about all that. I'm just going to start from here and move. Well, you can, the genre map, no? You certainly. Okay. So if you're lost, don't worry.

Starting point is 00:20:37 This is just the beginning. I have some other questions. It's two friends talking late on a late on a Friday. So. In GU. Yeah. I have some other questions. There's two friends talking late on a Friday. In GU. Yeah. Again, I'm just going to assume that the iceberg is out and people have watched this.

Starting point is 00:20:51 You and I can talk instead of having to cover GU. Put the link in the- Sure. There's a Frobenius inner product that's introduced. Yeah. Why the Frobenius inner product? Presumably there are other inner products that could have been used. In fact, it's not the Frobenius inner product. It's the Trace reversed Frobenius inner product? Presumably there are other inner products that could have been used. In fact, it's not the Frobenius inner product. It's the trace reversed Frobenius inner product.

Starting point is 00:21:09 And the only reason it's trace reversed is that we don't have a grand unified theory of the observed world that uses spin seven cross SU2, which would really be spin seven cross spin three. Right. One of the problems is that the typical description of the Patissalam theory that we've discussed is that that theory is usually presented as SU4 across SU2 across SU2. And it's not that the field doesn't know that that's equivalent to spin six cross spin four, but it is meaningfully different because it's not that the field doesn't know that that's equivalent to spin six across spin four,

Starting point is 00:21:45 but it is meaningfully different because it pushes you then how you call something determines how you think about it, this is a very human thing. And it really is spin six across spin four because GU, and I don't know that you and I have even had this discussion is a machine that could also accept a 111 space-time or a 115 any multiple of four dimensions with one of them taken as

Starting point is 00:22:13 time results in a GU why would a 111 work sorry do I say 111 I meant 711 I meant one seven no no I'm messing you up now. No, 1-11. Yeah, no, why? Because that's... You have to add up 12. 12 is a multiple of four. Uh-huh, okay.

Starting point is 00:22:31 No, I did it right. Did you? Yeah. Doesn't have to add up to 14? Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away. Don't be like the economy.

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Starting point is 00:24:44 Thanks for tuning in. And now let's get back to the exploration of the mysteries of our universe. Again, that's economist.com slash toe. Doesn't have to add up to 14? That's in the, that's in the, in the total space. I'm saying the input is a one and a three. Uh-huh. And that begets you the 14.

Starting point is 00:25:04 Okay. Now the next one up is, okay. I see what you're saying is one in seven and then it's one in 11 and then it's one in 15, et cetera, et cetera. In each one of those, there's a petit salam analog. In each one of those, there's a standard model analog. And in each one of those, there's a spin 10 analog and an SU5 analog and in all of those cases above 1 comma 3 this the Petit Salon thing is a spin cross a spin it's not an SU cross an SU so it's meaningfully spin 6 cross spin 4 I don't think I've ever had

Starting point is 00:25:43 a chance to see like know, basically everything is always that this goddamn explain it like I'm five level. So we never actually get to anything interesting. Um, that's a great question. That's what determines which for being is in a product. And you know, you want to have something fun. If you watch the Oxford lecture, I screw it up. I know that I'm screwing it up. Why is this? It's because, look,

Starting point is 00:26:09 I don't think people have a clue, Kurt, as to what it is like to work completely on your own. Trying to remind yourself, if you think about how much you've forgotten about GU, I bet it's huge. Then you have to refresh it. Okay. I had forgotten all sorts of stuff I'd already done.

Starting point is 00:26:28 One of the things I'd forgotten is that you end up with a 3,7 metric on the fiber, which can't work. And so while I'm giving the talk in Oxford, I'm thinking, I know this works, but I have to be honest that I'm coming up with 3 and 7 and 3. And right at the end I say, are there things left to do? Certainly there are. In fact, you have to get somehow. Sure.

Starting point is 00:26:51 I'm trying to be honest. But I'd forgotten, oh yes, it's the trace reversal of the Frobenius metric. Now most people don't know that Frobenius metrics even exist because they've never, it is not typical in an entire career in mathematics that you had to induce a metric on the space of metrics. Well, the space of metrics isn't even talked about. Much. I mean, I think it's never discussed. It's just actually, there's two different ways.

Starting point is 00:27:20 There's a language problem. Do you mean the space of metric sections or do you mean the space of point-wise metrics Do you mean the space of metric sections or do you mean the space of pointwise metrics? So certainly the space of metric sections is is very much discussed Pointwise metrics has never really been focused on Now if you say something like that, I guarantee you somebody will pull out papers From 1957 and Bryce Stewart looked at this and who knows what I don't know

Starting point is 00:27:44 But most people never induce a Frobenius metric in their lives. And so it comes, this is one of the taxes that you see, is that if you do something really different, even if it's not like developing a new collection of mathematics, people have an idea of, I bet there's one or two or maybe three changes from what we usually do. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 00:28:07 And G.U. says, I accept the standard model, I accept general relativity, but everything we do is slightly wrong. We call, we call Patisse along by the wrong name. We have the wrong grand unified real forms of the group. SU5 is really SU3, SU3, comma two. Real forms of the group su5 is really su3 comma su3 comma 2 So 10 is really spin 10 and spin 10 is really spin 6 comma 4 Like the amount of wear and tear on the mind to hear somebody say no no no I accept all these things But we we've minorly got everything shifted. I think it's a huge barrier to entry in GIA. Anyway, you asked me why the Frobenius metric.

Starting point is 00:28:49 I don't think there are many different metrics. I think there are exactly four metrics if you don't add a parameter to figure out how much trace to how much traceless you want. In other words, if it's only plus or minus 1, there are precisely four metrics you can define and only four metrics you can define and two of them are consistent with experiment and two of them are ruled out by experiment and the two obvious ones are ruled out by experiment.

Starting point is 00:29:16 The trace reversed ones remain in the game. And I, you know, it is kind of fun because Einstein forgot to trace reverse the Ricci tensor. It is kind of fun because Einstein forgot to trace reverse the Ricci tensor. And you know, it's like, if I could recapitulate anyone's mistake, that would be the one I'd recapitulate. So the Observer's, is it the same as the metric bundle, or is it the tangent space of the metric bundle, the tangent bundle to the metric bundle? Well, the Observer observers is the package.

Starting point is 00:29:45 You know, and here I was thinking actually a little bit about growth in D, where growth in D replaced the concept of a variety with the concept of a scheme. I don't wanna say that the total space is the observers. It is the bundles and the relationships and the pullbacks. Like it is the package that is the observers. Okay.

Starting point is 00:30:11 So think about if we can, I love the fact that you trust your audience. So let's trust your audience. Take a page from object oriented programming. In a class definition, you've got member variables and you've got bound methods. So let's take a page from object oriented programming. In a class definition, you've got member variables and you've got bound methods. So that's like stuff and stuff you can do with and methods and you've got nouns, you got verbs. You got stuff and you got things you can do with the stuff. So that's what the Observer is. It's two spaces with a fiber and sections connecting them.

Starting point is 00:30:49 And then it's bundles on top of them. And if you wanted to talk about like the shift in perspective from Einstein, most of what we're going to do in GU takes place not on X4, but on Y14. Mostly we're not dealing with the tangent bundle on Y14, the way're not dealing with the tangent bundle on y14 the way Einstein dealt mostly with the tangent bundle. You're dealing with the spinner bundle on y14. Mostly you're not dealing with the Einstein-Hilbert action. You're dealing with this new action that has homology to both the Einstein-Hilbert action and the Chern-Simons action and additional components.

Starting point is 00:31:27 You've noticed- Has homology to both or analogy to both? Sorry, you want to know if it's funny? The biologists use homology to mean similarity. Right. So somehow I was in the wrong part of my head. Yeah, it has similarity and analogy. I thought I missed something.

Starting point is 00:31:42 No, but it's very interesting. I always tell people that if somebody has a meaning to the word, puts a meaning to the word Hamiltonian, you know that they're in only one field because it means one thing in civics, one thing in physics, and one thing in biology because Hamilton is a great name in human history. So yes, I didn't meet homology in the sense of algebraic to call it. Okay. Let me tell you some of my gripes when I was going through GU. I knew this was going to be a gotcha interview. Then I'll tell you some of what I,

Starting point is 00:32:20 and then I'll ease the wound. You're nagging me. Yes. Great. In part, one of the reasons I made the iceberg was so that I could understand GU and also try to explain it to someone else who, if they have a differential geometric background, they could understand it. So mathematician or physicist. So when I was going through the paper, there were some terms. This is why I think there's, this is one reason I think there's a communication gap.

Starting point is 00:32:52 Please. Okay. So going through the paper, there were some terms introduced which were not used. Again, like invasive fields versus native fields. They're introduced on like page six and then I did control F because I'm like, did I miss something? And this is like in film, it's called Checkoffs Gun. When you're reading something, you want to know it's leading somewhere. So then it takes up working memory. Okay, so there was that. There was something you just did right there with object oriented programming. You're like, okay, let me give you an analogy. And then you go into object-oriented programming. So in the PDF, I believe you give an analogy. You're like, if you don't know what sections are, think of indifference curves in economics.

Starting point is 00:33:33 And then I'm thinking, most mathematicians and physicists don't know what indifference curves are for foliations. I think that's what it was. So then I'm like, you want to stay in someone's field, like if you're explaining to them, not jump outside and assume their competency there. So for instance, if I said a fiber bundle is like the entity class component in video game architecture, people are like, what the heck are you talking about? But yeah, but I don't know how to not do this. Okay, well anyhow, so I was-

Starting point is 00:34:01 I'm sorry, look, this is wonderful because I'm aware that I do this. I'm sorry that I do this. It's not like- I say this as a friend. I'm not trying to- this is not a gotcha. I don't feel it's a gotcha. I think that to be honest with you, if I can play with it- Please. You and I are both facing the same problem. Right? I watch you across different fields. You're not just the physics guy, you're also in the consciousness space.

Starting point is 00:34:28 I think that you're pretty responsible about all sorts of things. I have no idea how it is that we bridge this. And partially what I love that you're doing is you just throw things out. You try your best to make them understandable. You try to say them clearly, but the person has access to chat, GPT and grok and you know, Claude, all these things, these are great tools. Okay. So use them.

Starting point is 00:34:54 And by the way, if you're convinced that you and I are bad explainers, you've picked the wrong time because you can sit there with one of these AIs and say, make this make sense to me. And the AI can't do it. Well, if people watch this video that I have on, I don't know what the title is currently because we keep changing the title. But at one point it was Explain it like I'm five Okie dokie. That was the original title. Okay. And I think currently it's the this is hurting popularizing of science, something like that. Currently It's, it's this whole, explain it like a five and give me the whole the give me the simplistic explanation.

Starting point is 00:35:33 Right. So if you watch, okay, so then someone may say, but Kurtz, what about these videos from wired, where a mathematician goes through something at five different levels. So then I give a specific example with Emily Reel, a professor of category theory is known for being the top category theorist. She's been on the podcast before as well on infinity categories. So this was her explaining infinity at five different levels. And actually, if you watch it, what she does is she explains something about infinity, like something that's unbounded to a nine year old, not a five year old. Okay. Then she explains Hilbert's hotel to someone else. And then she explains cardinality. And then she explains the axiom of choice and its equivalences.

Starting point is 00:36:14 But the point is that by the end, when she's speaking to another professor, she's speaking about infinity categories, yes, and also how you can construct proofs by looking at one space is some domain and the target space is a proof and that's what a mathematical theorem is. And then, okay, so now if you look at it and you're like, okay, was that explained at five different levels? No. It was just tangentially concepts related to this that was explained at five different

Starting point is 00:36:39 levels. Because the internet has its own weird intellectualism that is horrendous. I mean, let's just be honest. The internet wants to know all sorts of things and it believes certain things. Like one thing it believes is, is that you can watch a conflict between two people on a topic that you can't possibly understand. And by looking at body language and who's sweating and all these things. Yeah. He curb stomped that guy.

Starting point is 00:37:11 No, both of them were wrong. And one of them was more polished and you know, if I put my shoulder back, I appear to be more confident in my position. So the internet is making us incredibly broad. It's informing us. It's making us incredibly broad. It's informing us. It's making us stupid. It's making us smarter. It's distorting our relationships.

Starting point is 00:37:32 You know, like I, I'm so glad we're doing this in person because I can't stand doing interviews over zoom. I didn't caught a rise of the wound. So allow me to say something. Sure. What struck me to say something. Sure. What struck me about geometric unity. At first, I thought it was extremely convoluted. Just that was just my impression.

Starting point is 00:37:54 I hadn't gone through the material. Then as I started to go through it, so firstly, I encountered new terms being introduced, which that was something that I tried to overcome in the iceberg to explain it in the way that I would explain it because I wouldn't do your paper in the way that you did your paper. Maybe I screwed up. I'm open to it. I tried to put some order to it because it was a

Starting point is 00:38:13 collection of results, right? Like slime mold, but in a positive manner, sure like many arms. So I tried to put some narrative to it. It's difficult to but I tried to. What struck me was that it's remarkably simple. I remember I said that to you, and I thought you'd be angry at me. The highest compliment you could possibly pay me, because I know how hard it is.

Starting point is 00:38:37 Look, Kirk, if I'm honest, I've failed every year for 40 years to communicate this. I want to say also that I make it my living to go through different people's theories of everything. Sure, there are shortcomings. There are shortcomings to every theory of everything. There are shortcomings. A laundry list to string theory, and string theory has been around for decades.

Starting point is 00:39:10 It takes tens, if not hundreds of minds to solve a particular problem. And it's not even clear if it's been open or shut. There's loop on the gravity and so on Blah, blah, blah, blah. I haven't seen such novel ideas from a single theory, from a single person, sorry. Ever. And I don't know if anyone else will tell you this, but what you've done is remarkable, man. I don't even know how to be with that, to be honest. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:39:59 Right? Like one of the things that's just hard. Look, I'm not trying to compliment you for the sake of complimenting you. No, no, no. And I'm not saying this as an endorsement that this is the correct theory. I think this is, I'm saying this is fantastic. I don't know who else will say that to you. Well, look, you know, part of what I wouldn't stay with anything for this

Starting point is 00:40:20 long, if I didn't believe in it. So I really believe in it. I believe it is the answer. And I don't know how to be with that. It's a very weird thing to say, you know, and to have to promote something. And I look at the distortions in myself, you know, very often when you meet somebody who's got a history of trauma, you can see that they're trying to stop the things that have gone wrong to begin with. There's this wonderful interchange between the things that have gone wrong and the things that have gone wrong. And I think that's the answer. And I think that's the answer. He's got a history of trauma. You can see that they're trying to stop the things that have gone wrong to begin with.

Starting point is 00:40:47 There's this wonderful interchange in Kung Fu Panda where Uwe says to Shifu, we often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it. I couldn't understand why does the world not see flakes of this. Right. One flake of GU made it into the world and that's what's now known as cyber Whitten. Now you have to be very careful. There's two separate things that make up the constellation. That's called cyber Whitten.

Starting point is 00:41:24 There's the cyber Whitten make up the constellation that's called Cyberg-Witten, there's the Cyberg-Witten equations, which is what I'm talking about as a flake of GU. And there's Cyberg-Witten theory, which has nothing to do with anything I know how to do. That's just some wonderful thing that Natty Cyberg and Ed Witten came up with. But the equations occurred around 1987 at Harvard as a flake of GU.

Starting point is 00:41:50 And, and this is something that I don't know that I agree with in your treatment of GU. GU happens at two different layers. The first thing you do is you do the Einstein-Durac portion of the theory. And once you have the Einstein-Durac portion of the theory, there's a second Lagrangian in an action that gives you the Yang-Mills-Higgs in addition. And so that's something that probably you and I could work through and I could,

Starting point is 00:42:13 and maybe I've learned something from you. You know, one of the things I believe with you is you're not just curating, you're actually in there working on the theory. you're actually in there working on the theory. So what I would say is that, when I flaked that off at Harvard, it was referred to as insufficiently nonlinear. And what's worse is that my point about it was, this is an Einsteinian equation.

Starting point is 00:42:44 It's not a Yang is an Einsteinian equation. It's not a Yang-Millsian equation, right? Because there is no derivative in front of the curvature tensor, it belongs to the Einstein sector. Now, because all of Donaldson theory and self-duality and instantons was trumpeted as self-dual Yang-Mills theory, people didn't understand what part of speech it was. instantons was trumpeted as self-dual Yang-Mills theory. People didn't understand what part of speech it was. So I was having an argument with people like Roman

Starting point is 00:43:10 Jakiev at MIT. And I would go around and talk to people and they would say, no, no, you don't understand these equations. I understand that they look physical to mathematicians, but they're really only instanton sector equations. So people couldn't hear that I was actually questioning that. Like, isn't this really an Einsteinian concept? And it sort of predates something which I'm hoping to see a Kurt

Starting point is 00:43:38 Geimungel treatment of, which is the double copy problem, which is the relationship that was discovered through amplitudes between Yang-Mills and general relativity. It was entirely unexpected. In a certain sense, Einstein is a square root of Yang-Mills, but it's not Einstein that's the square root. It's the thing that replaces Einstein is the square root of the thing that replaces Yang-Mills-Higgs. And so when I flicked this off, there was no interest in it.

Starting point is 00:44:12 And what's more, it just got me into trouble. So I was being punished for what I thought was great work. After this was rediscovered by Natty Seiberg and Ed Witten around 1994, and I was in the lecture at MIT where Ed Witten puts this up and says that there's a replacement for Donaldson theory. He didn't say what it was. I believe Alan Knudsen, who as I recall was seated below me and to the right as I faced Ed Witten in the audience,

Starting point is 00:44:48 said in the Q&A, do you want to tell us what these equations are? I think he's now a professor at Cornell. This is a detail lost to history. He writes these two equations. I think if I recall correctly, he used phi rather than psi for the spinner field. Because another thing I'd been told was that I had violated spin statistics. And since I was talking about a classical theory, I had no idea why anybody was telling

Starting point is 00:45:18 me I was violating spin statistics seven years earlier. Okay. There's an entire story that nobody knows about Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts, having a very dim view of Princeton, New Jersey. And the thought was we worked very hard at Harvard to get great results in Donaldson theory. And then Princeton tells us after the fact, yeah, yeah, we know all this stuff from quantum field theory, but it's always like, yeah, yeah, we know all this stuff from quantum field theory. And then Princeton tells us after the fact, yeah, yeah,

Starting point is 00:45:45 we know all this stuff from quantum field theory, but it's always like taking credit for work we've already done at Harvard. And a very dramatic thing happens. I don't think I want to tell this full story here right now, where when the lecture is finally given, it's on the title of the lecture is Witten's magical equation. I think there's no S on the end of it.

Starting point is 00:46:10 Now there were two equations. So it was like weird and Cyberg was nowhere in sight on the title. And the, the professor at Harvard, you know, three weeks later, who was giving this lecture was the most dramatic lecture I've ever seen. And he said, if Ed Witten hadn't told us, I never would have believed it. And he looked directly at me afterwards after saying that, because he had said, no, you don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it.

Starting point is 00:46:37 I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it.

Starting point is 00:46:44 I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. And he looked directly at me afterwards after saying that because he had said, no, you don't get it. You think this is Einsteinian, this is Yang-Milzean, this is not enough non-linearity in the squaring of the spinner. You can't just replace SU2 by U1, blah, blah, blah. So that was like really dramatic for me, which is that a flake of this theory could change the world. And it was clear that it was a flake of the theory.

Starting point is 00:47:13 And there was zero, you know, there was a conference afterwards at Princeton. Well, what is this new set of equations that then was called Cyberg-Witten after that lecture? And I asked to speak at it. I, it was ludicrous. Why should you speak? So, cause those are my equations.

Starting point is 00:47:34 It's so hard to say it. People say, well, do you want credit for the, no. Do you want them to be called cyber written? That's fine. But if somebody, if there was justice in the world, the thing I would love to be called them to be called is the insufficiently nonlinear equations. Because that's what they were called for seven years. Anyway, look, that experience taught me that I can't interact with this system.

Starting point is 00:48:03 You do great work. You hand the work to the system, and the system thinks nothing of assigning the credit to somebody else. And that matters because that credit was supposed to be health insurance, the ability to raise children, to buy a home, maybe even a second home. And when credit is reassigned in academics, very interesting. People have this whole act that they do. Like, ah, who cares who gets the credit? The only thing that matters is the underlying subject matter.

Starting point is 00:48:31 And then they fight tooth and nail to get credit after saying that. And they have names for this stuff. It's called the Matthew effect. If you go to Washington, D.C., and you talk about the problem that older people are stealing credit from younger people or reassigning names and who knows what. They say, oh, it's just the Matthew effect. It's like that's just the casting couch in Hollywood. You're like, you are talking about rape or some sort of very serious coercion. Yeah, it's just the casting couch.

Starting point is 00:49:00 Well, in academics, it's called the Matthew and the Matilda effect. The Matilda effect is that we don't credit women with results if they raise it, colloquially known as heap eating. So what is the claim? I know you want to perhaps save it for another time. Is the claim that Whitten or someone close to Whitten took those equations from you or independently came up with them? Absolutely not. Ed Whitten or someone close to Whitten took those equations from you or independently came up with them? Absolutely not.

Starting point is 00:49:27 Ed Whitten is as brilliant as you could possibly be. Those equations probably came from Natty Seiberg. Natty and I have talked about this. Natty said, I never understood what the big deal of the equations was. To this day, he still doesn't understand or at the time? No, I think he doesn't understand. I think he's a physicist and Ed, look, I will say some serious things.

Starting point is 00:49:54 It's not really clear what Ed Witten is. I think that's fine. I don't need it to name it. But when you say Jackie Chan is an actor who does all his own stunts, you're totally missing it. Jackie Chan is a stunt man who does all of his own acting. So far as I know, Ed Whitten is the world's greatest differential geometer who does all of his own physics. Right? The math is really the impressive stuff. The physics has never gotten to the same level. And because that's so counter-narrative, one of the things that's really important in academics

Starting point is 00:50:32 is that there is a single official narrative just the way there is a single blockchain. There's consensus about what happened, who did it. We all know that it's sort of not right. But we agree to officially talk about a story. The story is completely wrong. And that's one of the reasons why you can't really do this from podcast space. You can't contradict the official narrative in the journals.

Starting point is 00:51:03 There's so much that's just wrong. in the journals. There's so much that's just wrong. And Ed Whitten did not steal this. Natty Seiberg and I also resolved this. When Natty Seiberg got $3 million for the Breakthrough Prize, he and I encountered each other at a San Francisco fundraising event for the Institute. And this is a very dramatic story. I won't tell the whole part of it, but we hugged it out for the institute. And this is a very dramatic story. I won't tell the whole part of it, but we hugged it out at the end and we accepted.

Starting point is 00:51:31 It's like, I don't have a beef with Natty Syberg or Ed Whitten on that front. The problem was is that Harvard had a very clear perspective and that is we do incredible nonlinear analysis. That's why we get the results. It was a morality play. Because we do better nonlinear analysis than anyone else, we get better topological results than anyone else, including Donaldson. And the point was, no, you guys landed in the new world and you built an entire city, the first site that you found, and you built it in a swamp and

Starting point is 00:52:06 that's why your lives are so difficult just Go over there and you build your city and everything will be fine and they didn't want to hear it And then when they when they realized how how wrong they'd been for a decade Then it became like this rush to credit the great Witten who is great. And by the way, Cyberg-Witten theory, which I have no claim on whatsoever. The equations, yes, the theory, no. I don't know whether anyone fully understands it to this day. I mean, it's an unbelievable achievement. I didn't know whether anyone fully understands it to this day. I mean, it's an unbelievable achievement.

Starting point is 00:52:46 I didn't have that. I really saw it as general relativity and part of the, one of the most uncomfortable things about geometric unity and partially why I've held things back and haven't handled things great in the end, it'll become very clear where the cyber Witten equations came from. They came from Einstein, not Yang-Nelson. About holding back with geometric entity, have you thought about publishing it on the archive? Yeah. I tried to get access to the archive at some point.

Starting point is 00:53:24 I think, I can't remember how many. Helping access, you mean? Because anyone can access it. Oh, yes. Rather than read. Okay. Okay. I think at first you could, and then you needed to have a.edu. Why should there be a.edu requirement? It's like we don't serve Negroes here.

Starting point is 00:53:50 Oh, really? I know that sounds fine to your ears, but doesn't sound good to mine. As Muhammad Ali and Dick Gregory said, that's okay. I don't need them. Then I think I interacted with Paul Ginsberg and he said, no, no, no, this doesn't apply to you. We'll get you a special exemption. And then I was like, why do I get a special exemption?

Starting point is 00:54:13 And a friend of mine just got his paper that I read turned down by the archive. There are people, there's a string theorist on the archive committee who says, no, no, you can't post. So I think people have this idea. Why don't you just submit things? It's like, maybe you don't understand the critique. You haven't, you haven't succeeded in over 50 years moving the Lagrangian of fundamental physics.

Starting point is 00:54:41 Do you understand that part of the critique is the way peer review works, the way credit is apportioned, the way disputes are adjudicated is the problem. Your culture is decaying. You were no longer the people who were able to do the standard model. You've accepted such a degraded state in your culture that your institutions are repugnant to me. I don't, I don't apply for your grants either. in such a degraded state in your culture, that your institutions are repugnant to me. I don't, I don't apply for your grants either.

Starting point is 00:55:10 I'm trying to, I would love for GU to be evaluated with my H index as low as it could possibly be. If I could have an H index of zero, if I could do this with no PhD, I'd love that. But everybody pays lip service to know nobody cares where it comes from, nobody cares about it, but everybody does. Everybody's just, we're a deeply hypocritical culture, which we don't realize we've abandoned science, we've abandoned mathematics.

Starting point is 00:55:38 We have where we used to have the scientific method, we have what might now be termed the academic method. What's the impact factor? What's your H index? Who cares? What's, what's girdles? So the answer is I'm not, I'm not against sharing it, but I'll tell you what will not happen.

Starting point is 00:56:01 Um, I have a joke that I tell. What's the difference? People have to say, why do you say that's a work of entertainer or that you're an entertainer? I say, okay, what's the difference between a professor of physics and an entertainer? An entertainer has rights. I reject wholeheartedly things that other people have never even heard of.

Starting point is 00:56:25 There's a concept called restricted data that exists nowhere else in US law. Do you know about it? No, the 1946 and 1950, I'm going to say something's going to sound totally crazy. And after I'm done saying the totally crazy thing, go ask chat GPT, whether I was accurate, put in the portion of the transcript. Right? Cool. I like doing that.

Starting point is 00:56:49 It's a great new thing. In 1946 and 1954, we passed the Atomic Energy Acts. And if you couple that to something called the 1917 Espionage Act, there is a question that occurs, which sounds totally outlandish. Can you be put to death for doing theoretical physics well? You ever heard of the zone of death theory in Yellowstone National Park?

Starting point is 00:57:19 No. Some legal scholars figured out that there's a sliver of Yellowstone that is not in Wyoming, but is in Idaho where no one lives. And if you committed a crime on federal land in Idaho, where there is no one living, you would have to impanel a jury from people who lived there. So you could actually commit murder if you could lure somebody into the Idaho portion of Yellowstone. Like, it's an unexploited vulnerability in our legal code.

Starting point is 00:57:50 To this day? Yeah, I think so. I don't think anyone's done it, but I think it's actually been used as a trope in like movies or something. Okay, here's a crazy one. Okay, here's a crazy one. Most physicists do not know that if you do any work on a napkin that could possibly influence a nuclear weapon, it is automatically Q classified without anyone in the government choosing to Q classify your work. This is technically known, you can look this up in a search engine as born secret. Okay.

Starting point is 00:58:26 If you seek Q classified material without a Q clearance, that can be viewed as treason and you can be put to death under. So if you combine 1946, 1954, Atomic Energy Acts, which have a provision against free speech found nowhere else in the law. And I can't believe you're not warned about this when you sign up to do physics. ChatGPT told me, yes, it is technically possible to execute someone for doing theoretical physics correctly if it creates any change in the theory around nuclear weaponry, because you're seeking a Q clearance document without Q clearance.

Starting point is 00:59:10 So my claim is, I don't think the average physicist has a clue what physics is, where it's been, what the national security architecture is around it. I don't think they know that the Department of Energy is really the Department of Physics, which was created at the end of the 70s in the Carter administration. Yeah, physics is serious national security. And if you fail at it long enough, you just think it's an academic subject. But this is so dangerous. This is so powerful that we go to a movie called Oppenheimer and we see like,

Starting point is 00:59:53 Oh, there's Feynman, you know, there's beta, there's Teller. Yeah. All those guys, you know, wiped out two Japanese cities. This is, this is no joke. And we don't connect it to what we do because what we do doesn't work. This is what I call nerf physics. I don't know if we've ever discussed this. No, but I want to get back to, so you, you wanted access to the archive, right?

Starting point is 01:00:19 Access. They said you need an EDU email address. They then said, well, we'll make an exception for you. And then you didn't want that 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Why didn't you want to publish on the archive? I did. Everybody wants to start. Look, everybody starts by wanting to play the game right.

Starting point is 01:00:38 And then I did. Suddenly I'm missing my work. It's attributed to somebody else. I was like, oh, my publication would, I triggered that system in the 80s. So my experience isn't the same as the professor who says, oh, you know, you submit stuff, sometimes it gets rejected,

Starting point is 01:01:00 you take it to another journal. Of course, there are times when you want to submit something to, let's say, HEP-TH and they tell you, no, that's really HEP-PH. The idea is it's annoying, it's a little bit cumbersome, it's bothersome. Sometimes somebody gets more credit than you think they should deserve. That's not my experience.

Starting point is 01:01:19 My experience is totally different. My experience was it's a secret world that has all ways that it works that aren't advertised. And if you talk about it, you're treated like a crazy person. But I can point, I'm like one of the world experts on what doesn't work in academics. And what I've seen is, oh, you know, a good friend of mine in the last two weeks had a paper, PhD in physics, not accepted, no reasons given on the archive.

Starting point is 01:01:49 It's like, what does it cost you to store this on the archive? Oh, no, no. Didn't tell, didn't say it's bad. Didn't say it's wrong. The system isn't what you think it is. It's never been what people think it is. There's some sort of an agreement not to talk about it. Like if I, if I say peer review has not existed, uh, back to the

Starting point is 01:02:10 beginning of the Royal society, outside review has peer review hasn't. Peer review is mostly a response in 1975 to something called man, a course of study. It originally comes out of Utah. Um, and it has to do with the Great Society programs, which in the mid-60s are passed that makes the federal government the main payer for Medicare. And so what it really was was a defense by the physicians from having the government pry into their pricing because suddenly the government was paying for everything. It was the peer says you're not good enough to supervise what we do in medicine.

Starting point is 01:02:48 Okay. Let me just finish it out. Sure. If you have the belief that the system works pretty well, then I understand you completely. You want to know why aren't you following the rules? Well, my point is it didn't work well when I tried interacting with it repeatedly, over and over and over again.

Starting point is 01:03:09 If you do something different enough, you get a very different experience. And that's sort of what I'm trying to say, which is like, I tried, I believed, I got burned. Why is it that I have to go back to the same casting couch, to the same director to be put into a movie? No, I'll start my own studio. I'm not going into that office. I'm not going to play that game. I'm just not going to do it.

Starting point is 01:03:33 Now, if you told me, hey, we've heard you, you want to make sure that you understand that credit matters to you. If I'm the only person in physics that credit matters to, I'm happy to say that on camera. Everybody else credit matters to, it's the lifeblood. It depends whether, you know, can you afford to have another child?

Starting point is 01:03:53 Can you afford to be in the same city as your spouse? How is it that that doesn't matter? Academics and physics is suffused with a totally insane level of duplicity. Of course credit matters and it should. I'm not playing with people who are that disingenuous. How often have you heard this? The only thing that really matters is the truth.

Starting point is 01:04:21 Please don't bother me with sociologists. Yeah. I had a terrible experience. The number of people who had terrible experiences is insanely large. We could do an entire channel that every week featured a different academic horror story. Yes, the people who remain in the system have agreed to say, oh, it works pretty well. No, it doesn't. Clearly it doesn't. So I have the internet.

Starting point is 01:04:46 I have a very large channel. I'm probably the most followed mathematician on planet Earth. And I will forever pay a price by not wanting to play the game with people who stole something from me. By the way, I highly recommend looking at Alexander Grothendieck's rejection of the Crawford Prize, where he says, I won't participate in the culture.

Starting point is 01:05:10 I will not take money from a culture that now believes that theft from young people is absolutely acceptable to the profession. So I'm with him. So my understanding is said that after the university started accepting military funding and he was extremely anti-military. He was a guy with a certain kind of integrity who I think got driven mad by having that integrity.

Starting point is 01:05:39 Let me just be honest and forthcoming about a very crazy sounding thing. Imagine GU is right. Let's go on that branch of the decision tree. Kurt, let me just be honest and forthcoming about a very crazy sounding thing. Imagine GU is right. Let's go on that branch of the decision tree. If it's right, this is the most crazy dramatic story anyone's ever heard. It's dramatic scientifically, it's dramatic personally, it's a big deal. If it's wrong, none of this is true and I'm living in a Walter Mitty world and that's fine.

Starting point is 01:06:04 But it's not like I'm not aware of that. My goal is not just to benefit from this, but I wish to help out science. I wish to help out many of the people whose names are not on their results, who are not employed currently after having done great work like Doug Pressure and Green Fluorescent Protein. Terrible story. after having done great work like Doug pressure and green fluorescent protein. Terrible story. My goal is to break peer review.

Starting point is 01:06:34 My goal is to open the archive to any one credential so that there is no committee sitting over it. My goal is to get the national security apparatus to come out of the shadows and say, look, this is serious business. We need to classify this. We should have fights with them about what should be open, what should be classified. I wish to change science and get it much closer to what we think about with the scientific method, with norms of collegiality and decency to each other, where we are progressing in the science. We are not a medieval theological debating society about angels and heads of kalabi-ow pins and all that kind of nonsense.

Starting point is 01:07:14 This is broken and I refuse to be referenced to a system that can't buy a base hit in 51 years, 52 years. It doesn't work. Why do I care about my colleagues opinions? If they're not leading physicists, the leading physicists of today are not leading physicists. There's no proof that they're doing physics. Like Frank Wilczek, I recognize him.

Starting point is 01:07:44 I talked to Frank. Right. In general, we're not really doing science anymore. And I don't want to, I don't want to spend our time on this. I want to talk to you about three generations. I want to talk about SU3 cross SU2 cross SU1. The problem is, is that somehow the only people who know what those things are, are the survivors suffering from survivor bias in a system that doesn't work. So more or less, 100% of my seated colleagues are people who got through the system without

Starting point is 01:08:29 raising much of a fuss about something that obviously is unethical, not civil, not collegial and doesn't work. So yeah, I'm happy to be wrong, but the problem is, is that it sets me up in this absolutely monotonous pattern of opposition. Eric, why are you so arrogant? Eric, why are you so forceful? Oh, only because I'm opposing 10,000 people who are all in lockstep, who believe the same things and aren't getting anywhere.

Starting point is 01:08:57 Yeah. So I'm confused. Two ways. So if you were willing to publish on the archive before and you still had the trauma of having credit taken from you and so on, but you were willing to, and then there was this conversation that you don't have an EDU, but you could also get an EDU just by emailing Harvard and sending the places. No.

Starting point is 01:09:18 No. There's something called post.harvard.edu that they stopped accepting because that meant that you were an alum, but you weren't active. Interesting. There's a game going back and forth. Okay. I think you should have Jacques Dissler on your podcast and ask him these questions. I'd rather do science.

Starting point is 01:09:36 And then you said that there's no proof that these people who are dealing in fundamental physics for the past 50 years are doing anything related to physics. Then what if someone said, okay, but what's the proof GU has anything to do with fundamental physics? Well, this is the thing I was trying to talk about when you deftly steered me away, if I may. There's something I call not even remotely physics. Now, the acronym for that is NERF physics. So you can tell how many safeties are on the gun and how far you are

Starting point is 01:10:05 away from doing it. Does your theory put dimension four in pride of place? If you're working in dimension three or dimension 10, if you're not highly focused on dimension four to begin with, that's a strike against you. Do you have one temporal dimension to begin with? If so, you're doing real physics. If you're in Euclidean signature, generally speaking, you're not doing real physics. Do you have SU3 somewhere in the structure group of your model? If you're only using SU2 or U1,

Starting point is 01:10:37 you're not wrestling with quantum chromodynamics. That's a strike against you. Do you have three generations of fermions, which is a feature of our world? That's an artificiality. No, no, no. I'm only worrying about one collection of fermions. Okay. If I look at the sheer number, oh, does your Higgs field value itself in the adjoint

Starting point is 01:10:57 representation of your structure group? That's not what the real Higgs field does. So I could take a new metric and we could pass an AI over it and say how many papers, oh one last one I forgot this is, is your work phrased in the language of geometry and bundle theory? If you just take those things where I would imagine the average paper would be a four-dimensional manifold, one-time dimension, SU3 would be included, there'd be three generations of matter, and it would be phrased in bundles and connections in geometry.

Starting point is 01:11:38 I believe essentially the number of people working in actual physics approaches zero. And that that is a decidable proposition as to whether I'm right or wrong. I believe essentially physics has stopped at its most fundamental level. And we can just test it. So if you're out there, do me a favor, write a script that uses AI, regular expressions,

Starting point is 01:12:08 and checks papers, ingests PDFs, and checks how many of those safeties are on the gun. I don't wanna work in 10 dimensions before I get to four. I don't wanna work with no time dimensions. I don't wanna work if SU SU3 isn't in the picture. And I don't want to pretend that you can do this without bundle theory. I believe that effectively no one is doing physics. Full stop.

Starting point is 01:12:36 Okay. Now what if someone said that this metric that you came up with with six or so criteria, that your theory will fall through that sieve. So it stops other theories because they didn't satisfy it. Yours goes through. Okay. No, we're starting.

Starting point is 01:12:55 You're starting from a wrong premise. The standard model and general relativity, we all accept. I think if you don't accept them as effective theories governing our world, you're really not part of a serious conversation. I think Sean Carroll is exactly right about that. He said it on your show. He said, you have a theory. That's great. Well, I have a theory. My theory is called the standard model. I heard those words from him.

Starting point is 01:13:20 Why is the standard model his theory? That's just how he said it. He didn't mean that he developed it, but he did sound a little bit like Colonel Jessup saying the blanket of freedom I provide is something you Lieutenant Caffe should be grateful for. Okay. Is the standard model after the Wu Yang dictionary in bundles? Yes.

Starting point is 01:13:43 Is it on a four manifold? Yes. Is it one comma three? Yes Does it have three generations? Yes, it doesn't have SU three in other words the theory that we all agree Goes through that sieve. We all agree on the standard model. It goes through the set I'm not coming up with something that selects my theory. I'm saying that any theory that is trying to go beyond the standard model and general relativity will have these characteristics. Okay.

Starting point is 01:14:14 And by the way, if I'm wrong, let me just look right. If I'm wrong, write the script. I'm happy to come back on the show and say I was wrong. Where I was going is that there are other people who have their own checklists and it tends to be a checklist that their theory passes. So for instance, Wolfram may say something like we have to explain why these laws, not any other law, and we have to explain observers and his theory purports to solve both of those.

Starting point is 01:14:46 So he says those are the most important. So I find that when I'm dealing with people in the special place of theories of everything, I am engaging in special pleading. I took the assignment to be going beyond the standard model means going beyond the standard model. And I took going beyond general to mean going beyond general relativity. And I took the idea that it should be on a napkin to mean it should develop from very few assumptions. These are things everyone repeats and no one follows.

Starting point is 01:15:21 We all talk about this, you know, what the scientific method is. We don't follow it. We talk about what attribution should be. We don't follow it. Past laws, we don't know that they exist. We're living in like loony land. And so what I'm doing is I'm saying, I see your collective fictions. I have collective fictions of my own.

Starting point is 01:15:39 It's not like I don't understand what a collective fiction is, but I'm not going to get any science done if I live in your collective fictions. So my claim is I took those, that's a core set of assumptions. If you have additional assumptions, I understand that, but I'm claiming that nothing passes even those. Like for example, GU is not phrased as a quantum theory. So, what do you imagine the quantization procedure to be for GU ultimately? It's a little confusing.

Starting point is 01:16:13 It's not so confusing if you think about it downstairs on the base space. The big problem is that it's not one... The difference between zero temporal dimensions, one temporal dimension and multiple temporal dimensions is enormous. With zero temporal dimensions, you're in elliptic theory and you have access to a Tia Singer and all the great stuff that comes from that. If you have one dimension, we know a lot about Hamiltonian dynamics and development and initial conditions. Problem is if you have two or more temporal dimensions, you're in something called ultra hyperbolic equations

Starting point is 01:16:50 and very few people can think in two or more temporal dimensions. GU has several things. This is something that like it's a great pleasure to be able to talk about what am I critical about GU? That's not a question that I get much. I didn't ask that, but I'm curious to know. Glad you asked that of yourself.

Starting point is 01:17:10 So for example, I don't know how to deal with ultra hyperbolic equations. So if I think upstairs on the 14 manifold, I'm not, there are no initial conditions because that's a co-dimension one concept. Really what you have is boundary conditions. And now good luck. I don't, I think I had to be told that the Cauchy problem

Starting point is 01:17:35 was well posed in ultra-hydraulic equations. That's something I, yeah, but this is not stuff I know. So it's a good example. If I'm not, if you know, the entire concept of physics is that I have an initial state. Wouldn't that mean there's no Cauchy horizon? I don't, I believe that they are well posed, but I don't know, I don't know how to push Hamiltonian dynamics in multiple temporal dimensions. Is the bundle trivial?

Starting point is 01:18:06 Which bundle? The metric bundle. Depends on the topology. Well, the reason I say that is because in GU there's a global section. So you can't take a global section unless the bundle is trivial. There isn't a global section. You're talking about the metric section. No, no, no.

Starting point is 01:18:26 That was the thing that you actually cut. This is fun because like I now get to actually have a meaningful argument. Um, didn't we agree that there are patches on which there's only a connection defined on the tangent bundle and then where you're doing observations is where you have the metric defined and that's one of the ways in which we get around some of the quantum gravity problems. Okay. So let's, let's, let's go, man. Because just like you've forgotten much of you or you have to reintroduce it to yourself.

Starting point is 01:18:55 Same with myself. By the way, thank you for saying that because when I, when I say things like I forgot aspects of this, this is like a city where you don't remember what your work is from 17 years ago, and it's stored in some piece of paper you can't find, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. My recollection is the PDF has IOTA,

Starting point is 01:19:15 which is a local section, and then it has GIML, which is a global section. But I'm saying that the existence of the GIML implies that the bundle's trivial. This is interesting. This is a problem I never had before because occasionally I would have to do a refactor of the theory because I realized that

Starting point is 01:19:31 the notation was cumbersome or conflicted with something. There are only so many letters, all that kind of stuff. So then this was my other critique, Hebrew. So there are other letters that are used not much by mathematicians other than in cardinality, Hebrew letters that were used in G.U. So and then there was some that I chose to keep in. And if I was to introduce this to a friend, a fresh, I wouldn't use the variation pi,

Starting point is 01:20:01 which was funny because I called it variational pi, which in math, there's something called taking the variation. Right. And funny because I called it variational pie, which in math there's something called taking the variation. Right. And I didn't mean that. I know. But so you made an error. And the thing is, is that the error is now immortalized in the video.

Starting point is 01:20:16 But the point is... I put in a pause to emphasize that. And also the point that I left in... Please. ...the different notation, because it's my understanding that you implemented that notation to honor certain people. And I don't have that same relationship to those people. So I don't honor them.

Starting point is 01:20:33 Even though you're honoring, trammels your explanations. It's that communication gap I mentioned. Pi is my wife. Zeta is my son. New is my daughter and I'm Epsilon. And so I wanted us to be together. It's also that's a humble view of yourself to give yourself that as a lot. Look I'm the roadie for a group of superstars.

Starting point is 01:20:59 Epsilon is usually diminutive. So that was the joke. Yeah, let's let's I'm uncomfortable being here. Look, I'm sharing that with you, but like it's very important to me that some jerk doesn't come in and say, we're going to change all the notations. Like, no, these people suffered for this theory. And I'm going to make sure that we're going to write

Starting point is 01:21:16 their name. We're going to burn their names into the theory. And by the way, the Hebrew letters, it matters to me too. You know, I come from a tiny, tiny community that is always in danger of being wiped out for reasons that we can go into, but it's a scary thing. Yeah. I can make it worse.

Starting point is 01:21:33 I can call, um, the base space Haaretz for the land and the total space Hashemite. No, I'm saying you asked me a question. I'm to answering it because I'm saying you asked me a question, I'm answering it. Because I'm proud of my people. And to be honest with you, the Tao homomorphism, which is not just the gauge group being included simply trivially into the first factor, the Tao comes from the Hindi concept of being Tara or slanted, right?

Starting point is 01:22:01 So I didn't say that, but at some point I had a Devnagari character, and then I found that people just really didn't say that, but at some point I had a Devnagari character and then I found that people just really didn't like it. And so I said, that's too bad because I run out of letters regularly and I'm very proud of our family's Indian heritage. And so I wanted to honor India as well as I wanted to honor Jews in Israel. So yeah, that's a personal choice and I get to make it and I'm pretty unapologetic about it. So I'm sorry if you have to learn Gimel and you'll have to learn Aleph.

Starting point is 01:22:30 It's pretty painless and it's over quickly. What else have you not said about GU? So great. Um, one of my beliefs about GU is that GU gets a lot of its power from the fact that it's willing to consider killing forms that are not positive definite. Yeah. How do you deal with unbounded spectra? Well, I don't know. What my claim is, is that we don't know how nature deals with it because we're shielded because of maximal compact subgroups. In other words, what is picking out spin 6 cross spin 4 as the Patissalam model is maximal compact inside of a different real form of spin 10 than the SO10 theory. So in the SO10 theory, if you ask, well what's the

Starting point is 01:23:17 maximal compact? That's just the whole group. But how you're getting somehow from the D5 Dinkin diagram down to spin 6, spin 4 is that nature is saying somehow I'm going to handle this indefinite killing form, but I'm not going to show you yet because you haven't gotten that. So I'm just going to show you the compact subgroup to which it is broken. Okay. That's totally different intellectually, completely from saying, no, nature can't do that because this will lead to problems and cause out.

Starting point is 01:23:50 No, nature is not listening to what you can do today and what you can't do today. You also have a, well, how do you do a Feynman integral? Nobody knows. Right. Unless it's, unless it's very restricted. Okay. But you're using it. You're using a bunch of analogies.

Starting point is 01:24:07 Who said I can't go into technical debt and say, I don't know how she's going to quantize this theory. The reason I have it is a classical theory. It's not that I don't understand anything about quantum theory. It's that almost certainly the physics community is mostly confused. Of course you can have an indefinite group. We have spin one comma three that we're forced to deal with. And if everybody understands the rest of the theory, I hope that one of the biggest,

Starting point is 01:24:39 one of the most important agendas becomes, okay, we've got to learn to deal with an indefinite killing form. Let's, let's get our best people on it. Right now we write an occasional paper like Witten's written on this. Um, so that's a early super gravity theories. So you have gauge though that were non-compact. They did some call set though, but it was still non-compact.

Starting point is 01:25:01 Yeah. There's that on the multiple time. And, you know, like I think Steven Weinstein, a philosopher who does physics at perimeter institutes, ultra hyperbolic, there's it's like bars, two time physics. So if GU is right, what it should do is to say, look, Eric took on technical debt in order to do

Starting point is 01:25:22 this thing, let's pay it back. And that's by the way, that's normal science. What does pay back? Do you mean solve it? Do you know what technical debt is in computing? That's again, one of my, yeah, please explain. So sometimes you do something that is kind of not right while you're coding. And you say, okay, well, I'm taking on technical debt.

Starting point is 01:25:42 I have to fix this somehow, but right now I'm just going to do this now. And then being expedient sort of, yeah, it's, it's like a stopgap measure that you have to go back and fix. Okay. Yeah. So my claim is, is that one of the ways that things have gone horribly wrong with critique, I think most of the critiques in physics are not critiques. And what you see is there's a huge difference between saying,

Starting point is 01:26:11 let me understand you first. Let me steel man you second. And let me give criticism that is constructive third. That is normal to me. And by the way, I actually weirdly modeled this with Terrence Howard. Let me see if I understand you in your own terms first. Let me put your best foot forward relative to my community, the math community, second. And let me give you criticism only after I've done those two steps.

Starting point is 01:26:39 Yeah, I don't think your real genius is GU. I think it was making sense of Terrence Howard in real time. You know, Terrence is a perfect example of, we tell everybody, everybody can be a scientist. You can learn this on your own. We don't care about credentials. And if you ever try that, we're just gonna laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Starting point is 01:26:59 And I think it's terrible. And I'm still friends with Terrence. And I will tell anybody. Neil deGrasse Tyson totally missed the fact that Terrence took a regular tetrahedron and spanned the affine group, which is a six dimensional group with six almost regular pentagons arbitraging the difference between 108 degree internal angle and a 109.47 inch change angle inside the vertices from the center of a tetrahedron.

Starting point is 01:27:30 Genius move. Lots of stuff I think is garbage. Terrence laughs and laughs and laughs at me saying that, he's like, you talked about the baby in the bath water. You know what? We're colleagues, we're friends. I don't think he's a mathematician. I don't think he's a physicist. I don't think he's a physicist.

Starting point is 01:27:46 I think he's got some great ideas. I think he's got some good ideas. I think he's got some lousy ideas. We don't do that. And I think it's really important to talk about this, but I do want to get back to the science. What we do is we pretend we, the community of academicians,

Starting point is 01:28:03 if you come into my office and you say, hey, I've got a really crazy theory and I want you to listen to it, take it seriously and give me feedback. We're sort of, we know we're obligated to do some of that. We first, we find out we're incredibly busy. So the person who's incredibly busy is then playing ping pong in the lounge and doing all sorts of other things. The next thing we do is we try to find the critique, which causes us not to have to listen ever again. If I can just find one flaw, we can dismiss your theory.

Starting point is 01:28:34 That's not how science works at all. And there's a question about, did you ever steal man, the theory to begin with? I think the first, I think the GU went 41 years without ever being steel man. Like that's impossible. I could steel man, Garrett Lisey, Peter White, string theory, loop quantum gravity, all of them in general, it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get the gist of a, an idea in this world that takes much more as you know, to fill it in, but I take as almost proof that GU is really interesting and different in that there are no steelmans

Starting point is 01:29:19 of it. It's just a portrayal of a crazy person talking garbage on the internet, which is not, can I say it's not true? It's false. There's so much there. And simple stuff. I was just meeting with Lee Smolin at his home in Toronto today. I said, you know, Lee, one generation of standard model fermions is just the pullback of a vile spinner

Starting point is 01:29:47 Properly understood from the space of point wise Lorentz metrics to the four-dimensional manifold And I started talking about something else I said, did you hear what I said? I Want to talk about GU yeah, let's do that. Something I endeavored to do with this channel is to understand the theory of someone to the point where recapitulating it back to them is met with agreement and only then do I think I've apprehended it. And so when you're saying that that should be the first step, I wholeheartedly agree. I hope you felt like I didn't misrepresent

Starting point is 01:30:25 GU. I hope you felt that I didn't misrepresent GU because you know, to be honest, keeping something alive while wanting to be open to the serious critique, wanting to make sure credit isn't taken away at the same time as not wanting to interfere with the scientific. It's impossible. There's no way of solving this puzzle currently.

Starting point is 01:30:46 What's interesting is that we're talking about a group of people who've appointed themselves the border colleagues of academia. And anytime somebody starts to stray and say, I want to self publish, I don't really think that this is the correct story, whatever. They slam that person and that person is pushed back into, well, clearly you're a self-promoter.

Starting point is 01:31:12 It's like, really? Have you looked at what your university has put out in terms of PR releases with the lousy research, with the huge claims, et cetera, et cetera. Have you once talked about the problem of the leading people in the field, totally misrepresenting things? There are certain tells that they're not even aware of. Have you once talked about the problem of the leading people in the field totally misrepresenting things? There are certain tells that they're not even aware of that show you that they're not interested in the underlying subject matter. What they're very interested in is we've got to make sure nobody arbitrages the flaws in the system. And I'm here to arbitrage the flaws in the system because they are flaws in that system.

Starting point is 01:31:52 Now when it comes to steel manning, that's a really special moment because you get a chance to see whether the person has not only understood something, but added something. And that's one of the things that I got out of your treatment of geo. I think that there are places where you say wrong things, but then you know what? There are places where I say wrong things. And what isn't true is that when you say something wrong, the theory collapses. Or if there's a flaw that you weren't aware of, or there is a flaw that you were aware of, that the theory collapses. This is part of this different academic method, which says the outside world

Starting point is 01:32:29 can't tell the difference between a colleague trying to be a colleague and assassin trying to destroy something or steal it. There's a horrible phrase that I learned in graduate school called gripe and swipe, where the idea is you complain about something and say it's incomplete, it's flawed, it can't work. And the idea is that now you know as much about the theory and if you can fix the flaws, then it belongs to you. It's one of the reasons I'm an entertainer.

Starting point is 01:32:57 I'm not an academic because there's no such thing as gripe and swipe. If I, if I release a con a version of a song and it could be improved, it doesn't become that person's song without dealing with the issue of copyright. I don't know if copyright will protect you. I don't mean copyright really legally. It's an unexplored area of the law. Oh, no, no, no. I mean in the math sense. If you publishing something related to math, claiming it as an entertainer, I don't believe copyright covers that. Well, you know, there was a point where John Stewart reported the news by saying he was

Starting point is 01:33:35 reporting the fake news. He would say, and now the fake news. And then he would say real things that weren't sayable on CNN or NPR. I'm an entertainer. Let's leave it at that. Let's get back to GU. Okay. So I want to know what is GU. Now I know that's an odd question to ask someone after I've investigated it as long as I have. But the reason I say that is that I've heard you say more than once, can't recall where, so I can't place the citation on screen, but it was something akin to, look, Dirac should have had the convictions.

Starting point is 01:34:11 Courage of his convictions when it came to predicting an antiparticle to the electron. And the reason was something like he proposed a theory. Actually, he proposed a specific instantiation of a theory. So you take something here that's a theory, a theory, the theory, cloud, reify it, and then this gets disproved. And then you say, well, the theory itself has not been disproved. So then that can sound like from the outside as hedging. Like I'm going to put forward whatever GU is Someone could find critiques then I can retreat up here and say but what GU is has not been disproved

Starting point is 01:34:54 You've disproved my explication of GU. Yeah, so what is G like? What is it that you see is up here? Sure What makes GU GU such that if you were to see it in the wild, someone would say a wild GU appears. This is such a great question, Kurt. I really appreciate this. Um, you ever, you ever seen the Zen of Python? No. There's this thing called the Zen of Python, which tries to reduce the

Starting point is 01:35:23 Python programming aesthetic to, you know, to a list of 24 Zen co-ons or 26 or whatever it is. You know you're in GU, where you, when you replace the inhomogeneous Lorentz group with the inhomogeneous gauge group. You know you're in GU where you spend most of your time on a 14 manifold rather than on a 4 manifold where the 14 manifold is constructed from the 4 manifold. You know you're in GU when there are no internal symmetry groups. You know you're in GU when the Higgs field

Starting point is 01:36:08 comes out of an add-valued 1-4. You know you're in GU when you begin with a 4-manifold, use it to construct a 14-manifold that behaves like a 3-manifold. You know you're in GU. Just a moment. So you're referring to Chern-Simus theory? Hmm. And yeah, there are two beautiful Lagrangians that are incredibly different.

Starting point is 01:36:35 That both result in Euler-Lagrange equations where there's a curvature tensor. And then you called me out on this very well. I really appreciate it. I often say that something is a projection operator and you point out that it's a contraction operator, which is quite, you were correct. I'm wrong. Cool. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:56 My belief is that Einstein was the first person to really relate a curvature to form to an implied gauge potential by taking his contraction operator to get the Einstein tensor capital G mu nu from the Riemann tensor. That thing, there's two branches, right? There's a branch that uses the star operator to do this little trick, which is called the Chern-Simons branch, and then there's the Einstein contraction, and both of those results in Euler-Lagrange equations with the curvature tensor with a contraction that gets you from two forms to one form. That's how you know you're in GU because you're using the equivariance that's provided in having the gauge group. Like why, why are we failing to quantize gravity from, I claim that they're answers to this.

Starting point is 01:37:57 There are people that I didn't know about until I started talking about GU called MacDowell and Mansouri who tried to get I started talking at GU called MacDowell and Mansoury who tried to get gravity to come out of a gauge theory on potentials. Now their thing I think doesn't work because you don't use the space A of gauge potentials you work on a group. By the way there's another one you know you're in GU when you take Einstein's unified field concept much more seriously than the need to quantize gravity. Right? In GU, unified field means something.

Starting point is 01:38:35 It's algebraically unified. And the idea is you start with the inhomogeneous gauge group and then you effectively supersymmetrize it and that is the gauge content. So you're doing, I love this aspect. with the inhomogeneous gauge group, and then you effectively supersymmetrize it, and that is the gauge content. So you're doing, I love this aspect, you're doing field content that is an algebraic gadget. Um... Boy, there's so many questions. Okay, may I linger?

Starting point is 01:39:00 Yeah, by the way, we can also do a multi-part series at some point later, but this is the teaser. Effectively supersymmetrize. Yeah. So that was, we can also do a multi-part series at some point later, but this is the teaser. Effectively supersymmetrized. Yeah. That was something that confused me before. My understanding, and you can correct me if I'm incorrect, is that in the 70s, there was supersymmetry. Yes.

Starting point is 01:39:14 I forget who invented it in 1971. In 1973, there was Wessex Zoumino, as far as I recall. Right. In 1974, there was Strathi Anselam, who created some wizardry or machinery called the Strathdee-Salam construction, could be, took in space-time and outputted a superfield, or took in fields and outputted a superfield,

Starting point is 01:39:36 or the Poincare group. I would say it took in an affine space and gave you an automatically supersymmetric field theory. So the idea is you didn't have to ad hoc construct an action and then check laboriously that this crazy term cancellation happens, uh, up to a surface term. So when you say supersymmetry is in your theory, I'm thinking, I was thinking space-time supersymmetry

Starting point is 01:40:09 because that's the only supersymmetry that exists in the literature. Totally reject space-time supersymmetry. Okay. By the way, what a key point, and it fits exactly what you're trying to ask earlier. Should you call something that isn't space-time supersymmetry, supersymmetry? Like I've never liked the word supersymmetry, can't stand it. My take would be no.

Starting point is 01:40:33 Okay. Now you have a different take, I wanna hear it. All right, well one, I don't wanna slight anybody who's, like, you know, McDowell and Mansoury doesn't work and I don't want somebody telling me, oh, you're just doing a modified McDowell and Mansoury. That's like dismissive. No, they tried something that was really good. Had a lot of good ideas.

Starting point is 01:40:52 It failed. Okay. I also don't want to take credit for all of supersymmetry just because space-time supersymmetry doesn't work. Right? So I claim that you will never see super partners of the type that we hypothesize would spill out of the LHC. It's not gonna happen.

Starting point is 01:41:12 The concept is broadly do you want to adjoin to the Lie algebra fractional spin fields which have an algebraic pairing that land you in the Lie algebra of the honest group. And I do, but the input is not Minkowski space. Minkowski space doesn't exist. It's a fugazi, right? It's an approximation. The space of connections is a legitimate affine space.

Starting point is 01:41:47 It is an affine space. It's not, okay, well, we won't ding it and put curvature into it. It's a flat space. That was always meant to be what the Salam Strati machine did. Now, I believe that there are supersymmetric theories that don't come from a Salam Strathi thing. But the cool thing about Salam Strathi, by the way, if we're mangling this name, I apologize to the Strathi family. The cool thing about the machine is, is that it guarantees you that your output will have good characteristics.

Starting point is 01:42:19 And so what I'm claiming is what fixes the number of generations at an effective level is the number of generations that are output will have good characteristics. And so what I'm claiming is what fixes the number of generations at an effective level at three is the extension of the inhomogeneous gauge group to include supercharges. Now you call them supercharges because? They're fractional spin fields that should have commuting rather than anti-commuting products that land you in the space. Look, if you want, you know, the informal claim that super symmetry, you're

Starting point is 01:42:56 taking the square root of the, um, momentum. G use says, no, no, no, that idea should be you're taking the square root of connections. You're taking the square root of the gauge potentials. That's a powerful idea because the gauge potentials are typically associated with first order differential operators. So you're taking a square root not like of the Laplacian the way Dirac did, but you're taking a square root of a first order operator. So the thing is, is that I don't want to get, the reason I say supersymmetry like things is that I notice we have an epidemic of spell checkers and if you

Starting point is 01:43:43 spell like something wrong, they pretend that they can't read it and that it's garbage and that there's nothing. I don't quite know what they're going to object to. No, there are dimensional limits on space-time supersymmetry. And then there's infinite dimensional concepts of supersymmetry. And so I don't know, if I use the phrase supersymmetry, there's this, you break it, are you saying it's a supersymmetric theory? Do you have an action?

Starting point is 01:44:14 I don't want to get into that because that's not what we need to do to do GU. But it's the same basic format. And I'm trying to, I think what I'm really trying to say is I want to honor the concept of supersymmetry, which I think is a brilliant idea, which was terribly instantiated. And if it turns out that this thing works, I want to say that this is its spiritual. I want to actually not take credit for this. I think you're going to find out.

Starting point is 01:44:45 Okay. So are you doing going to find out. Okay. So are you doing the opposite of what was being done earlier with the cloud being instantiated where it's, you're looking at the instantiation of space time, supersymmetry and saying supersymmetry exists here as such. And I come from here, not down here. But I'm trying to, I'm trying to not obliterate. Yang Mills theory is really non-abelian Maxwell theory. Okay.

Starting point is 01:45:11 We didn't do that to Dirac. Or Maxwell's Avelian Yang Mills. Well, what I'm trying to say is I don't understand, I don't have a clue how Chern Simons became Chern Simons Witten without becoming churn Simon Schwartz. Right. Like Schwartz, this guy was there in the seventies and he's one of the great intellectual feats of all time. So my claim is I, I think what Yang and Mills did was great by adding that AYJ.

Starting point is 01:45:42 However, isn't it funny that we don't have a concept like Dirac and Maxwell occurred at the same time in quantum electrodynamics. We have a non-abelian version of that Dirac equation. We have a non-abelian version of Maxwell's equations. We call the non-abelian version of Maxwell's equations Yang-Mills theory. We call the other thing Dirac theory as if nothing happened or changed. So this is just like, we're wildly inconsistent about who we bury.

Starting point is 01:46:11 This is a really interesting point. We have this idea that Einstein was in a race with Hilbert to get to the answer. This is total nonsense. The person who really should get the credit along with Einstein is not Einstein's wife, and it's not Hilbert, it's Grossman. Marcel Grossman was there in 1913, and the basic idea of GR, of general relativity, occurs

Starting point is 01:46:33 in that paper. Grossman absolutely got shafted by history. And we have particular people over and over again who get shafted like Stokelberg gets shafted. Right. Just along with the Matthew and the Matilda effects for To him who has much much as will be given so that we have attribution magnet There's also something I've been trying to name for years called the Sudarshan effect George Sudarshan was one of the absolute giants of physics and we don't honor him.

Starting point is 01:47:05 I was visiting with Cathy Fries at the University of Texas at Austin. She's in his office. I was just like, Oh my God, I'm in Sudarshan's office. Well, how many people recognize how much Sudarshan did because he never gets the credit and never gets a Nobel prize for all of his great work. So I have no idea why it is that Robert Herman wasn't credited with figuring out Yang Mills theory was bundle theory. We have this weird thing where we just don't honor things right.

Starting point is 01:47:37 So I'm trying as best I can to be very, very careful about the spiritual nature of the work. to be very, very careful about the spiritual nature of the work. The idea to take, once you have the idea that you're taking an analogy with the Pancrè group, that Lorentz becomes the gauge and the Momentum becomes the gauge potentials, do you really want to claim, hey, I had this brilliant idea. I'm going to see whether it can be extended to spinners. That's not anybody would try that. And so the thing is, is that I want to call it supersymmetry.

Starting point is 01:48:14 Like, because if it turns out to be right, I want to honor all the people who worked on supersymmetry in the wrong instantiation. And by the way, I also just think everyone should read that 1963 Dirac article in Scientific American because he makes the point that this idea of saying, we will force you to pin yourself to one instantiation and that is your theory. That's like terrible science.

Starting point is 01:48:44 I'm starting to clear up some of the confusions I have. Go for it. By understanding you more psychologically. Oh, no, but you see, I haven't, I haven't had this conversation in my life. I see that honoring is extremely important to you. Extremely. And spirit is also important to you. That's right.

Starting point is 01:49:03 But I'll also define spirit in a different manner. So spirit can be spiritual, but spirit in the way that I'm going to speak about it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to that. So you would say it's a battle between Grossman and Erisman, the battle for fundamental physics, something like that. No, I would say Riemann and Erisman. Are you sure? Well, there's Grossman versus Hilbert as the people who might have been given credit for general relativity.

Starting point is 01:49:31 That's one thing. So you see it as Grossmanian geometry versus Erismanian geometry or Riemann versus Erisman? It's Riemann versus Erismanian. So why not Riemann versus Whitney or versus Steenraud? Tell me about that. Well, if both of those were there in the early days of differential geometry, So why not Reimann versus Whitney or versus Steenrod? Tell me about that. Well, if both of those were there in the early days of differential geometry, why is Erisman getting credit

Starting point is 01:49:50 when Whitney introduced the concept of a fiber bundle before Erisman added G actions on it? So I think of these, well, I think of these, yeah. So Steenrod, Cartan, these are important names. And I'm not fetishistically saying we can do a perfect job with attribution. Whatever we do, if I was given all the time and information in the world, there's no way of naming things that's going to work exactly. So I'm not claiming we should, we should go for perfection, but these

Starting point is 01:50:19 gross injustices are offensive to me. So I'm really, I'm trying to say I'd like to do as little violence as as practical and humanly possible. I can't stand George Zweig not being given credit for substructure of the nucleons. If I start giving a talk and I say, all right, we have three valence aces inside every proton and neutron. Everyone will say, you mean quarks. And then they will say, oh, I remember that he called them aces inside every proton and neutron. Everyone will say, you mean quarks. And then they will say, oh, I remember that he called them aces and

Starting point is 01:50:50 that there was a conflict, right? So for example, another one of these, I could give a talk about QCD and the theta angle and I could say, all right, we've never actually seen hyglots in the wild, but the search for Higlitz should actually be very important. Everyone would say, Higlitz? Don't you mean Axion? Then they'd realize, oh yeah, yeah, there was a conflict between Weinberg and Wilczek.

Starting point is 01:51:16 I believe that Weinberg, who has many things credited to him, graciously agreed to use Frank's terminology. Because we will always remember the names of Wilczek and Weinberg, I'm much more worried about George Zweig, whose one contribution to physics that's lasting ended up with Murray Gellman's name. Murray Gellman was a great attribution magnet. Like some of his work really was done by Sudarshan and some by Stuckelberg and some by, I don't know, the late, late 18th century, but he was a great attribution magnet. Like some of his work really was done by Sudarshan

Starting point is 01:51:47 and some by Stuckleberg and some by Zweig as well. And so there's a question about conflict, but it's very important to me for personal reason that the Zweigs of the world are retained and remembered, even if we don't use their language and the Sudarshan's and the tiny, you know, like we have a problem that there've been very few high level females in math and physics in the tiny number of instances where we can prove that we've done injustice to them.

Starting point is 01:52:17 And I think Madame Wu and Emmy Nerder are the two great injustices of 20th century physics. It's very important to me that we honor those people. And so, yeah, I have a personal code, personal notion of justice. And I, in particular, just despise the debunking community. There's just this background chatter of laughing at people. And I saw that done to Terrence Howard. And I saw some of the laughter being open and some of the laughter being,

Starting point is 01:52:50 no, I think there was a movie or something called the game where you brought the biggest idiot to a dinner party. And then everybody sort of laughed at the guffaws and mistakes that the person made at the table. at the guffaws and mistakes that the person made at the table. You know, it's this issue about when you see someone drink their finger bowl because they don't know what they're supposed to do. And that, I probably don't have a rational reaction. I probably have a hatred of people who do that because whenever I see somebody mispronounce a word.

Starting point is 01:53:28 I think, wow, you learn that from reading and self study. Right. Let me tie in a Weinberg story with another woman in physics, Quinn. Tell him Quinn. Cause this goes into your specification versus the spirit. Pete Slauson Please. Jared Slauson And the spirit versus the text is also there

Starting point is 01:53:50 biblically. You're not supposed to disregard the spirit in favor of the text. Pete Slauson You know, we have a division in Judaism between the oral Torah and the written Torah, and there's a word that isn't used often enough in this way. I think petty fogging can be used as the intention of arbitraging the letter of the law against its spirit. There used to be something called a court of chancery that wasn't just about law in the sense that we mean it now, but was that fair?

Starting point is 01:54:19 Was that just? Did the law anticipate how it would be wielded? And in part, it's very important to me that we destroy the debunking Was that just? Did the law anticipate how it would be wielded? And in part, it's very important to me that we destroy the debunking community as it exists today because I think it's having terrible, terrible effects. I think we should care much less about peer-reviewed research because peer review is actually peer injunction. Peer review is what happens when people start talking about your ideas.

Starting point is 01:54:44 And I think that quite honestly, there are so many unsung heroes that weren't strong enough to defend themselves early in their career. But I hope that the AI will read a bunch of theses and realize, oh my God, here's the, here's the injustice that we did at a scale. We didn't even know what was going on to people who were trying to contribute to a field and were so vulnerable that they could be killed off at the beginning of their careers. Please I'm going to read this but while we're on peer review so what people think is the injustice of peer review is that you minimize type one errors false positives right. At the expense of type two errors.

Starting point is 01:55:24 of type two errors. That's what peer review does and that's what most people think is the injustice. You have a different view, but forget about the different view as you've already talked about it. What would replace peer review then to push back on your anti-peer review rants? I like the old system. Ask yourself the following question. If you go into Google n-grams, you'll find that peer review does not exist as a phrase before 1965. Just doesn't. People don't know that. I show academicians they're absolutely shocked. They're convinced that this goes back to the 1700s. What was the old system? I'm the only person bearing this torch. It was powerful editors making decisions for which they were accountable.

Starting point is 01:56:06 The double helix was never peer reviewed because it could not be peer reviewed. And that was one of the statements that nature made. They said, in order to give this out to anyone outside, which is external review, which was what was present in 1953 when peer review didn't exist. We would, this, once you see the structure of the double helix, you can't that which is external review, which was what was present in 1953 when peer review didn't exist. We would this once you see the structure of the double helix, you can't unsee it, particularly because it gives an instantiation geometrically of the source of Chargaff's rules of equimolar relations between the nucleotides. That thing had to go into press without an outside review. We need powerful editors who do not all agree.

Starting point is 01:56:55 And particularly we can't have the only game in town. If you want to hear me get completely crazy and rant, the only game in town as a concept that occurred in the quantum gravity community that said quantum gravity there there is no quest but quantum gravity and string theory M theory is the only game in town to make it sound like the Creed of Slung. Right? Anyone found trying to say that only string theory, M theory can and should be, uh, researched at the most fundamental level. And the quantum gravity is the Holy grail when there's no trace of this phrase before 1973, 72 is committing a grave ethical sin at a professional level.

Starting point is 01:57:42 Now, something I never talked about before to the best of my ability to remember is something that I only heard from Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman somewhere says, I want to talk to you about ethics, but only professional ethics. I don't care what you do in your personal life, but this whole thing that we have collapses if you're not following certain rules. And I see a world in which I see Sodom and Gomorrah. That's what I see.

Starting point is 01:58:11 Now in Sodom and Gomorrah, I'm not capable of being the person that I wanted to be. I'm far too forceful. I'm far too pumped up on my own ego. People always say to me, Eric, why are you egotistical? Why are you loud? Why are you loud? Why are you this? Why do you cut people off?

Starting point is 01:58:27 You try dealing with Ed Witten and everybody who came along with him. You're talking about the single most arrogant, insufferable, unethical approach to fundamental physics. A group of people who would murder you in your crib if you so much as suggested that quantum gravity was not the quest and that string theory, M theory was not the path. And my claim is you failed for 40 years and you've only succeeded at what the evolutionary theorists have a name for called interference competition, which is something I learned from my brother, where you make sure that your competitors can't get access to the

Starting point is 01:59:02 salt licks or the fresh water in the lake so that they all starve to death. And my claim is, is that that particular thing is a, it is a personal quest of mine to destroy the theory that came in with the idea that there is only string theory and everything else is just words in the words of Edlund. That is professionally unethical behavior. Full stop. else is just words in the words of Edwin. That is professionally unethical behavior. Full stop. I'll read a quote.

Starting point is 01:59:33 Please. This is from a lecture of hers. I don't recall what the lecture was on, but I wrote this quote down. This is Helen Quinn. Yeah. Helen Rutter Queen was saying she was thinking about a students, a student of June, June Schrenners, who was working on something called source field beer. Oh, yeah. Which was Julian's way of reformulating fontam, the lecture, the dynamics, Steve, or Frank, Steve Weinberg.

Starting point is 01:59:58 Steve didn't like the source theory as the student began to speak. And this was the students PhD defense. Steve began asking him questions about why source theory was valid. and Julian, the founder of source theory, was right there. Naturally, Julian jumped in to defend his students. This is something Quinn witnessed, so she's just relaying this at a lecture. She said, this meant that the student didn't have to explain the theory he was working on, but could focus on explaining his own work. It turned into an argument between Steve and Julian about what constitutes a good theory. I wish I had a tape recorder because having two Nobel Prize level physicists discussing the merits of different types of theories was extraordinary. Julian was arguing that

Starting point is 02:00:37 the best theory is one that can absorb all new information. He was talking about a type of theory, a class of theories. Meanwhile, Steve was saying that you need to have an explicit realization so that you can test it and rule it out. Those are two points of views and I think they're both correct. I think we need to be seen in the context of what we mean when we say a theory. Do we mean a theory or do we mean a type of theory? That is a sophisticated scientist. It is absolutely important that we have the scientific method to get rid

Starting point is 02:01:19 of wrong instantiations and it is absolutely imperative that we have the Dirac method to keep good ideas where an instantiation has been invalidated. And my private language for this, which is not as exalted as the great Helen Quinn is right freeway, wrong exit. The two great ideas of the 1970s were supersymmetry and grand unified theory. And both of them were correct. Right freeway, we took the wrong exit on both. We drove the wrong conclusion because of the simplistic relationship and look,

Starting point is 02:01:54 there's entirely different ethics of science that involves who's allowed to take on how much technical debt. I'll say somebody I don't really get along with very much with is Sean Carroll. And Sean Carroll said something brilliant on your podcast. He said, I don't really like the demarcation problem to call people pseudo-scientists, which is basically to impugn their character and their mind and their sophistication.

Starting point is 02:02:23 He says, I just like to say that things are not good science. And this is great. And then again, on your, I mean, I don't think you really realize how much is happening that is happening nowhere else on your podcast, because then Leonard Susskind talking to you about Peter Wojt, when you said, well, if you don't know these theories that you're claiming don't exist, I would be happy to explain them to you, which has never happened. I've never seen that interaction.

Starting point is 02:02:51 So what's amazing then is that you have Susskind on camera saying that Peter White's physics and math is just bad. Now I really appreciate that statement, because it is so laughably stupid and obviously wrong. Peter Wojt's Mathematics, that book he wrote on group representations in quantum theory, Leonard Suskin wishes on his best day that he could write a book like that. Leonard Suskin has written some great books

Starting point is 02:03:26 and he's had some great ideas. But he's not what he thinks he is. And to him, the only, this is another thing people don't know about me. I tend to be very polite to people up until there's like one of these transgressions where they're just mean or wrong or they do something. I would never have said what I said about Ed Witten if Ed Witten hadn't misbehaved.

Starting point is 02:03:49 If Leonard Suskind hadn't misbehaved by saying that Peter Wojt's mathematics is bad, I wouldn't say Leonard Suskind is not the mathematician that Peter Wojt is. And he's never written a book as good as Peter Wojt's book on group symmetry and quantum theory. You mean rigorously. It's also just poetry, the pedagogy, and the fact that he standardized all these different concepts. You know, it's like with Jared Diamond writing Guns, Germs, and Steel. You know, there are books. People always ask me like, what's your favorite, what are your

Starting point is 02:04:24 favorite books? They want to hear Moby Dick or, you know, Tale of Two, people always ask me like, what's your favorite, what are your favorite books? And they want to hear Moby Dick or, you know, Tale of Two Cities. And it's like, oh, there's White's book on group theory and quantum theory. There's Woodhouse's Geometric Quantization. There's Bess's Einstein Manifold. Like these are great books,

Starting point is 02:04:39 Spin Geometry by Lawson and Michelson. I want the movie rights. These are some of the greatest books of all time. Peter Wojt, no, who knew that Peter Wojt was one of the great physics expositors of our time? I didn't, I know Peter pretty well. Yeah, I would love to debate Leonard Susskind on that. And by the way, then you asked like about Eric Weins, he said, I have no idea who that is.

Starting point is 02:05:04 It's so funny, I have no idea who that is. It's so funny, I'm sitting next to Leonard after talking to him at Stanford at a Natty Seiberg lecture. These guys pretend that like, you don't talk to them. I have no idea what this is. It's like a thing, it's a theater troupe. I want to know what you think of this classification. Please.

Starting point is 02:05:23 There's pop academics, which are those who give lectures to the public and engage in popular science. Sean Carroll's of the sort. Sean Carroll in some of his instantiation is in that world. But there's also Sean Carroll who came up with a version of Chern-Simons theory where you violate Lorentz invariance and you have a vector field that's non-vanishing

Starting point is 02:05:47 on four space to try to move three-dimensional to four-dimensional techniques. Michio Kaku is a pop guy, but he wrote this book on string theory that's quite- And also helped invent string field theory. I know. So string theory has a problem with not being non-perturbative.

Starting point is 02:06:03 And string field theory is non-perturbative. Yep. So there's a serious Michio Kaku who we haven't seen for years. So like one of the memes is Michio Kaku is out of control. Get Michio Kaku in here with me. Like that's a meme in this little physics space. Yeah. Michio Kaku is a serious person and a non-serious person.

Starting point is 02:06:24 Sean Carroll is a serious person and a popularizer. Okay, keep going. So I'm saying there's a pop academic. Yeah. And then there's also the Jim Ratt academic. What I mean is the person who's just, I don't want to speak to the public. There's no sense. Why am I going to engage in a podcast?

Starting point is 02:06:40 I'm just here to do my work. Neema or Connie Hamed is of that sort. Like, why do I have to engage? And he will engage, but he's thinking I'm just going to do my work. Neema or Connie Hamed is of that sort. Like why do I have to engage? And he will engage. But he's thinking I'm just gonna do research. Although within academics, to an audience of academics, he's the great showman of our time. Keep going. What has the reception of GU been like? That's different between the top academics versus the gym rat or closed door academics.

Starting point is 02:07:06 Well, there's two things. There's GU and there's me. Some doors are closed to me because people know that I worked for Peter Thiel. I'm just going to be honest about it. Their idea is you've worked for the devil. Never mind that I don't see Peter as the devil. Their point is you work for pure evil. Therefore you are a far right.

Starting point is 02:07:30 Uh, you're, you're practically a KKK member. Good day. That's one of the reactions to me and to Gia. Um, there isn't, if you look at what, let's say, Stefan Alexander or Ed Frankel or Marcus de Sotois or Brian Keating or my hosts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, if I showed you on my phone me with all sorts of top tier academics, you'd say, wow, you're clearly having all these conversations with top people and it's true. Nobody gives it the time it takes.

Starting point is 02:08:11 Like I assume that you found that even though it's weirdly a simple idea, it takes forever to get some of this stuff across. Yeah. So the typical thing is if I'm invited into an academic department, um, they won't apportion enough time. They won't say, why don't you give a series of four lectures?

Starting point is 02:08:31 So everything's always an hour. Then you're trying to figure out how to sort of do all of the universe in an hour, which is impossible. At least I don't know how to do it. But I would say that there are tons of top academics who are interested in who will talk, nobody has digested enough of it. It requires at some point, some top person who in good standing with the community will say, I think there's way more here, and that will change everything. I think what you said is key, some top person.

Starting point is 02:09:08 Yeah. Because it doesn't matter if it's a person, there's a hierarchy. Yeah. So one of the reasons Peter White has not looked favorably upon in the string circles, generally speaking, is not because his critiques are invalid, but because they think who are you to be saying that?

Starting point is 02:09:25 It's very interesting because first of all, whether you know it or not, would you, let me ask you, would you agree that Peter Wojt's blog is the most read blog in all of physics? I'd say he's top two. Okay, what's the other one? Sabine. Okay, so both of these people are known to know physics.

Starting point is 02:09:46 Now I agree and disagree with both of them as humans do. But lots of people read Peter Wojt's blog for the physics, not for the critique of strength theory. Note there's also Scott Erison's blog, though it's not exactly a physics blog, it's more about quantum computing. I spoke to Peter Wojt, Sabina and Scott on this podcast several times and the links are in the description. And they won't admit that they take Peter Wojt very seriously.

Starting point is 02:10:15 So we have this very weird thing about people sneaking off to go read, not even wrong, and then say, well, of course I frown on the negative view of physics or this low level of understanding. Obviously Peter Wojt is a very serious mind and he's a PhD. Who the hell is trying to get away with saying this guy's an idiot? It's weird. I'm sorry, I just, it's weird. I'm sorry. I get emotional because it's like you're benefiting from the blog and you're lying about your colleague. Sabina, everybody knows what her, before you get to what she, what she says should or shouldn't happen. She's talking about the crisis in physics that Sean Carroll denies is happening.

Starting point is 02:11:03 Wouldn't it be logical? talking about the crisis in physics that Sean Carroll denies is happening. Wouldn't it be logical? When have we ever seen the top people as thought about from inside the field interacting with the top critics? Effectively, almost never happens. Every time something like that happens, I was put on a panel with Brian Greene. I told the organizers, Brian Gre Green will drop off of this panel. And immediately Brian Green drops off of the panel.

Starting point is 02:11:31 And then I said, okay, I've come all the way from England, all the way to England so that Brian can phone in from his office. And then I say, you know, are we going to set an empty chair? Are we going to, should we talk about the fact that Brian Green is going to vanish from this? say, you know, are we going to set an empty chair? Are we going to, should we talk about the fact that Brian Green is going to vanish from this? I think the tastemakers occur for a reason that we don't like to talk about.

Starting point is 02:11:55 In our time, there arose one tastemaker. And I can tell you this because when I went and talked about GU and this is probably no longer true. But GU has been around since like 84, 85. It wasn't as complete, but the core ideas were forming then. Whenever I tried to talk about it, people would say, what does Ed say? Have you talked to Ed? What's Ed's thought? would say, what does Ed say? Have you talked to Ed? What's Ed's thought?

Starting point is 02:12:26 I said, well, what do you say? Ed was so dominant at that point that no one wanted to venture an opinion lest they find themselves on the wrong side of the world's greatest intellect. So you weren't getting a hundred different opinions. You were getting a hundred different people trying to guess which way Ed would go. And that's unhealthy. Like I'd rather say what I thought and find out, yeah, Ed's right again. I'm wrong. But that's not what happened.

Starting point is 02:12:57 What happened was as we created a world that was afraid to disagree with the top person. And you know, Nima has been incredibly kind to me. He invited my son and I into the Institute of Advanced Study to meet with him and he just couldn't have been more constructive and a better advocate for physics. He's our top, in many ways, Nima is our top guy. He stayed true to actual physics. I think all of his theories have ended up sort of wrong.

Starting point is 02:13:28 I could be wrong about that. But he's honest, and he's genuine, and he's trying. And he's a great showman. He's a great advocate. Brilliant is the day is long. Toronto product. Right, right. Yeah, he was at U of T with my brother.

Starting point is 02:13:42 Yeah, he said this thing to me. He said, it doesn't really matter where you go. It just matters that you solve lots of problems. Solve as many problems as you can and enjoy life doing it. By the way, Neema is also perfectly happy to be heretical. Neema will talk about negative energy and chasm or states and negative mass and the ch, the Chasmur effect, all of these wonderful things.

Starting point is 02:14:07 And that's not at all, you know, there's a very small number of people who achieve top status outside of string theory, M theory, and you know, Lisa Randall might be one, Nima would be another. So this thing was absolutely brutal. It was V burn actually, and the double copy stuff, even if it came from string theory, somebody who needs to be promoted. Yeah. When you ask like, what's the reception? It's not, it's not what I would expect.

Starting point is 02:14:44 I just gave a talk about it. I, it's not what I would expect. I just gave a talk at Hebrew university and the first thing I say is here's the formula for the dark energy. Like I wrote down a formula and I say, you know, from this new DESI experiment that if it continues, there isn't a cosmological constant, it's variable. And it's already a problem that the cosmological constant would be so many orders of magnitude lower than it should be, right? So what if there's a term that can respond, imagine that you set T mu to the stress energy tensor equal to zero.

Starting point is 02:15:25 If there is a capital G mu nu curvature tensor, Einstein curvature, then you need the dark energy term to go up and down with it, right? You need it to be able to achieve a VEV, if you will. The reason that we're stuck with the cosmological constant is that there's an automatic identity inside of the Einstein curvature, which is that the full Riemann curvature has a Bianchi identity. The contracted version, the Einstein tensor, is what has the divergence free due to the Bianchi identity. Therefore, set T mu nu equal to zero, throw the dark energy term to the other side, it

Starting point is 02:16:02 better have an automatic differential equation because it's equal to something that has one. Okay, so now the only equation, there are only three real tensors, again, say something slightly inaccurate, there are only three real tensors in Ramanian geometry. There's the metric tensor, there's the torsion tensor, and there's the curvature tensor. Sure. Curvature tensor is used by Einstein to do gravity. The torsion tensor is the weak sister that never makes it to the big dance. So all you've got is g mu nu and it's got one equation, which is that it's annihilated

Starting point is 02:16:33 by its own Levy-Civita connection. Therefore, all you can do is put a lambda in front of that so that the divergence has a product rule. The derivative of lambda with g mu nu left alone, plus lambda times the derivative of g mu nu. That the derivative of g mu nu dies. That means that the only thing that you can count on is that the derivative of lambda has to die.

Starting point is 02:16:58 That is what doomed Einstein to having to include this goddamn term in his equation, which he never liked. Because it was just, there were three terms. There was the beautiful term. There was the greatest blunder term. And then there was the cheap wood relative to the pure marble, which was what the stress energy tensor was as he described it. And torsion.

Starting point is 02:17:22 Well, the torsion isn't in the Einstein field equations because of the palatine, the fact that if you open yourself up to torsion, then the oil of Lagrange doesn't select for it. So the reason was that, so one of the contentions, you know you're in GU when instead of using the torsion, you think about contortion and then instead of using contortion. Contortion is not called contortion to me What is it called? What do I call it? What do you call it? I don't know because you're using a different term Okay, so if you take the displacement tensor displacement torsion tensor we haven't gone to distortion yet torsion is

Starting point is 02:17:59 Something involving some commutation of X and Y vector fields, as you've seen in Riemannian geometry. Then there's an equivalent- Augmentor torsion. But that's the thing I'm introducing. We haven't gotten there yet. Contorsion isn't something I've introduced. Okay, got it. Yeah, great.

Starting point is 02:18:17 My understanding, again, I've been out of academics for a long time, so maybe I'm screwing it up. If I have a bundle and I have a Levyia Vida connection, I can ask for what's the difference between any connection and the Levitia Vida connection that has to be an add value one form. That is called the contortion and you can get the regular torsion from the contortion or the contortion from the regular. In other words, they have equivalent.

Starting point is 02:18:44 I didn't know that had a name. Yeah, I believe that, and this is stuff that nobody knows, so I'm going to be a little bit careful. I believe that the torsion and contortion have three separate representational theoretic components. So the add in the add value one form is lambda two, and the one form, valued in the two forms, breaks into a sum of three irreducible representations under a Lorentz group. That thing, if you take different proportions of them,

Starting point is 02:19:17 one proportion combination is the torsion, one proportion combination is the contortion. They're equivalent. Neither one of those works. And so the whole one, you know, you know you're in geometric unity when you use the gauge rotated Levy-Chevita connection in what would be the contortion instead of the torsion tensor. Because that thing has incredible invariance properties and equivariance properties under the gauge group

Starting point is 02:19:49 acting on the inhomogeneous gauge group. Do I know that as the tilted gauge group? The tilted gauge group, I love this. Tilted gauge group, the tera, for our Hindi speaking friends, gauge group, for our Hindi speaking friends, gage group is mapped in by this what I now call tau sub plus and you can multiply on the right or you can multiply on the left by the inverse so that you get a right action on both sides. You can take the double coset construction. The double cosetset of the in-homogeneous gauge group by the proper tau tilted homomorphisms acting on both sides results in something

Starting point is 02:20:33 equivalent to A mod G, which is what the McDowell-Mansouri people didn't understand. They started with the wrong space. Again, I want to honor them. Look, I found this without knowing about them, but they had a piece of the puzzle, you know? And so this thing has a beautiful differential equation that allows it to be the analog of divergence free. Let me see if I understand this. Sure. So, the inhomogeneous gauge group double co-set it by the tau subscript plus, which I forgot

Starting point is 02:21:11 what I called it. Doesn't matter. The tilted homomorphism. Is isomorphic to A mod G? Yeah. Think about it. Is isomorphic to A mod G or there's some extra structure? If you want to get technical, there's two different, because they're multiple homomorphisms,

Starting point is 02:21:24 but think about this. An inhomogeneity, sorry, a semi-direct product topologically is a Cartesian product. It's just the algebra that's the semi-direct. Okay. So, what if you had G cross or G. Now you're speaking of a group G. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for keeping me

Starting point is 02:21:47 honest. So you have a gauge group, Cartesian product with the space of add-valued one-forms. Up to an origin, add-valued one-forms is the same as the space of connections. So first start with the inhomogeneous gauge group. Realize that that's equivalent to gauge group, Cartesian product, gauge potentials. Realize that the gauge potentials are equivalent to the space of connections. So therefore, that's the whole inhomogeneous gauge group is equal to gauge group, Cartesian product connections.

Starting point is 02:22:20 Now mod out by G, just try to cancel the G. So G mod G goes away. Now you're left with an A. Now you're mod out by another G and you get A mod G. You know you're in GU when A mod G is replaced by the double coset of the inhomogeneous gauge group by its own tilted subgroup. And you'll know you're in GU when the dark energy term, which is the cosmological constant times the metric, VAR pi, an add-valued one-form, minus the epsilon gauge transformation inverted, counter-rotating the exterior derivative coupled to the olive connection applied to the epsilon gauge transformation, the sort of the Moirer-Cartan form.

Starting point is 02:23:28 That thing is what solves the cosmological constant problem in Gia. Now it's just a VEV. Now your only question is why is it so flat where I live? Because you have this different term that doesn't have to be constant. Look, Eric, I have this geometric unity iceberg. I can see the reaction from the comments and people who email me. It comprises professors, laypeople, researchers,

Starting point is 02:23:56 graduate students in string theory, by the way, and in not string theory. So it's not as if string theorists don't like you or you don't like string theorists as a whole. But I don't know what the reaction to GU or the iceberg, GU itself, is in the academic world. I know what the reaction is like from the pop academics that we talked about earlier. And most people see pop academics just by definition because they're popular. They're the people who put themselves out in the public. But that's a biased set.

Starting point is 02:24:25 So one can't generalize and say academics think X about GU because pop academics think X about GU. And that's even provided that pop academics think X about GU. So what is it like behind closed doors? I would say that for the most part, I take a tremendous number of high-level academic meetings with people at the very top of the field. So I frequently go to seminars at Caltech at UCLA. I meet with people afterwards.

Starting point is 02:25:03 I could name names. I'd choose not to at the moment, but names everybody would know. The dominant reaction to GU, by the way, is silence. People don't know what to make of something this crazy, this bold. And it draws on a skill set. The number of people who both know the standard model cold still, and still thinking like bundle geometric terms is about zero.

Starting point is 02:25:37 You can, uh, here's an exercise for your listeners. Put in the term vector bundle. You'll get hundreds of thousands of hits on Google. Put in the term CKM matrix, which is a reference to the standard model, and then require both of them with a plus sign before the quotation marks, and it drops to three digits. In other words, the number of people who are in contention to be working on the standard model is now vanishingly small. That is in part the problem, is that nobody who's thinking in vector bundle terms in physics

Starting point is 02:26:17 is really focused on the standard model. They're mostly in string theory or maybe some very high-end GR stuff. Most of the people thinking about the CKM matrix have no idea really what vector bundles are other than something they saw when they were a graduate student. So in general, the major note is silence. The only group that is really vocal is the negative pop side people, the negative pop academic people. Some of them aren't even in math or physics. And their thought is, well, this is obviously garbage because it has the following characteristics. You've got somebody who's close to 60 years old, is not in an academic seat, making crazy claims, very large.

Starting point is 02:27:13 And this is a classic failure mode of something going wrong psychologically. So yeah, that's what their point is. Well, if you're avoiding the archive, you're avoiding submitting to journals. The only reason for that is you're hungry for clicks and trying to make a fortune bamboozling the public. So I'm just, I want to say that so that they hear, do you imagine I can't see you on the internet? Okay.

Starting point is 02:27:42 How many of you understand what the standard model gauge group is and, uh, understand vector bundles and have looked at the various theories so that you have an idea of what Peter Wojt and string theory and loop quantity, like this is a group that doesn't exist. So more or less, what you're seeing is you're seeing people trying to make a heuristic distinction about, well, it violates these heuristics. So if you're not going to play by the rules, we're going to treat you like a crank. And I would say that there's some reflection of that in math and physics departments.

Starting point is 02:28:21 But there's also, if you listen to the way I speak when I'm talking mathematics, which is rarely, people don't usually see me in this. Well, fine. If you don't like what I'm saying, I would imagine you'd take issue with it on a blackboard. Why is the third generation the imposter generation? Because when you do the decomposition, it looks like the first generation is the one that's different than the latter two.

Starting point is 02:28:46 Well, it depends what you call first, second and third. So the claim is that you're looking at zero forms tensor spinors direct sum one forms tensor spinors. So I call zero forms tensor spinors the first generation. Now it could turn out to be not right, but I believe that's the way it'll go. The second generation would be what you get by taking a direct contraction, which you call the trace. Gamma trace, gamma traceless.

Starting point is 02:29:18 I don't know if that's the right language. Is it? No, I don't know. I don't know either. It was my understanding. I know, I know. That's why don't know either. It was my understanding. I know, I know. That's why you were saying to me before that Eric, you mis-portray a contraction as a projection

Starting point is 02:29:30 and I'm saying, yeah, this is what happens. We're fumbling. I see. So you say that in analogy, the gamma trace part where you take a one-form tensor spinner and you contract the one form against it using Clifford multiplication is that I would call that the second generation you've called it the gamma trace. I see. And then you started with the gamma trace lists as the

Starting point is 02:29:53 second generation, which I didn't think I said. So it's a little bit of a discrepancy between you and me, which is great. Cause this is like, this is, this is because it's real. Like we're trying to develop something and you're making a point where there's confusion of language. And I want to show that this is a process as opposed to I hand you the perfect finished thing. It is flawless.

Starting point is 02:30:11 Yeah, sure, sure. So the claim is first generation is spinners tensor zero forms. Second is one forms tensor spinners contracted across the tensor product. Just a moment. Would you say that it's zero forms valued in spinors? It's just spinner fields, but in order to make it consistent, I see, like I would never have introduced zero form valued spinors, except I know that one form valued spinors are in the mix.

Starting point is 02:30:41 So then I have to point out that it is true that ordinary spinner fields can be technically and pedantically called zero forms value in the spinners. So you have zero form valued spinners, that's the first generation. Then I claim the second generation is what you get when you take one form valued spinners and you Clifford multiply across the tensor product. Right. And it's all of those things that, um, I guess it would be the inverse image. You Clifford multiply what though? The spinner with the one form.

Starting point is 02:31:23 Okay. Yeah. Cause you have a metric. That piece, which is equivalent to the spinners, so you're looking for the... You got it, Eric. I'm going to screw up the kernel, co-kernel, all this kind of stuff. The easy thing to say is the third generation piece, which is the kernel of that map. Right?

Starting point is 02:31:53 And then the issue is what is the complement to the kernel? That would be the second generation. That's what you're calling the trace. The trace and the traceless. Yeah? Gamma trace. So these all look different. So why are you saying that two of these are equivalent in some sense? Because at the representation theoretic level, two of them are equivalent and the third is not an equivalent representation. But you can have two groups, sorry,

Starting point is 02:32:20 you can have two group representations at the level of a subgroup that are isomorphic, which at the level of where they came from in the total group are not isomorphic. And I think sometimes it's maybe called, somebody should check me, lepton universality, where you believe that you have to be technically, this isn't much discussed, but we don't know whether these three generations that we have will continue to be identical up to mass as the energy scale increases.

Starting point is 02:32:57 So I'm claiming two of them will, one of them will not. That's like a prediction. You know you're in GU when you actually have predictions about what the remaining matter is to be found and how it would behave if you went to higher and higher groups rather than just broken subclass. Okay. Let's speak about predictions. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:17 Suppose someone wanted to know something concrete, like tell me what happens when two electrons scatter. Well, first of all, I'm not the best person to answer that question. Sabina made an excellent point. She said, look, there are only three places to find new physics. Again, if Sabina, if I don't get this exactly right, forgive me. One place is you can have things that are incredibly massive and require energies that we've never gotten to.

Starting point is 02:33:47 So we wouldn't see them because we haven't gotten to enough energy equivalents to the mass that we actually see the objects in the phenomenon. Another thing that can happen is, is that things can be so weakly coupled that we can barely detect them. Neutrinos are all but dark matter. They're very weakly coupled. They're not the ones we see aren't massive, but. So both of those are things. Then the third one is the most interesting one, which is effects that you only get to see in special configurations.

Starting point is 02:34:15 So that would be like Eddington waiting for the moon to pass in front of the sun and getting in the right place to see the moon to pass in front of the sun and getting in the right place to see the effect of bending the light of distant stars. Or the Bohm-Aronoff effect, which showed how did we get so far into the story of electromagnetism and we didn't even know that we had it wrong. So it's accessible at low energies. It just requires some novel constructions. Yeah. That one's also funny because it's really a classical effect,

Starting point is 02:34:47 but it's quantum detected. One thing I didn't know because I'm not a physicist, is that there's this thing called a phenomenologist. I didn't know what a phenomenologist was. I just thought they were people who were closer to the standard model. I think what a phenomenologist is, is a bridge object between the pure theory community and the experiment community,

Starting point is 02:35:17 where the pure theorists are not really good at saying, you should build a calorimeter that does this. So the phenomenologists have the trickiest jobs. build a calorimeter that does this. You know, um, and so the phenomenologists have the trickiest jobs, don't they? And I think they're kind of, you have to speak both languages, to speak both languages and they, they, they're not highly visible. Like Brian Keating makes an excellent point that almost everyone you hear of from,

Starting point is 02:35:42 from in the popular version of, of physics is a theorist. And he said, what about the experimentalists? I'm a, I, Brian, I'm an experimentalist. Well, the theorists are broken into two categories and we never really hear from the phenomenologists. So I agree. And I didn't understand this. Like things I got wrong in life.

Starting point is 02:36:02 I didn't understand. I'm not supposed to be asking questions. Um, but I can tell you the effects that I think you should look for. I don't think the world is chiral. You know, you're in GU when your theory is not chiral. Like one of the critiques of my theory is, is that I have a chiral anomaly, which I find funny because it is not chiral. But nobody notices it, by the way.

Starting point is 02:36:29 Now, you can still have an intermediate chiral structure though. Sure. But you have an effective theory, right? So the idea is that- Or an anomalous triangle diagram or an inconsistent regularization procedure. So, GU is not Cairo, but it has to produce a Cairo world because effected at an effective level nature is Cairo. So what you have is you have a field of VEV in a Dirac like operator. Again, this Dirac, Rurida, we are thing that comes up to meet.

Starting point is 02:37:07 The scalar curvature. In the Einstein equation. Analog of geo so geo has it. What it claims is an improved Einstein equation therefore there is like ramanian curvature in it. It coaxes this thing out of the vacuum that then plays the role of a fundamental mass scale. So what happens when things flatten out? The scalar curvature drops and the masses drop. If the mass drops sufficiently,

Starting point is 02:37:37 then a Dirac type operator decouples into Weyl type operators. So the claim is, is that what we have is we have a non-chiral world where there were two chiral halves that were coupled because of a vev. And then when gravity gets low enough, what I believe you have is you have a decoupling into matter sectors and we, what we call luminous will be connected to matter that is currently dark when gravity becomes strong enough.

Starting point is 02:38:12 This is like a mathematician trying to sound cool, but that's what I think the equation said. Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger. Yeah. There's a complex and there's an operator. Let's take a DORAM complex where D squared equals zero on a manifold. And let's put a bundle on top of that manifold

Starting point is 02:38:32 with a connection. Let's imagine the connection is flat. So we've tensored this bundle, this vector bundle with the DORAM complex with a flat connection. D squared will continue to be zero. Now let's say, okay, let's relax the flatness condition. D squared is no longer equal to zero. D squared actually becomes definitionally

Starting point is 02:38:57 the curvature. Okay? Right? Because you need, like, you need to go from i forms to i plus 2 forms. And instead of it being a second order differential operator, it's a zeroth order differential operator equivalent to a degree to form valued in the adjoint bundle, which is the curvature. So, sometimes in such situations, you're like, oh no, that ruined my complex. The curvature, which I love,

Starting point is 02:39:25 ruined the complex structure of the tensored DURAM complex. So what do you do? You say, okay, I'm gonna roll it up into an operator. Instead of having a multi-step complex, I'm just gonna say, let's say even forms on one side, odd forms on the other, and I'll map the even forms up via D and I'll map them down via D star both coupled to a connection. So now you get a one-step

Starting point is 02:39:51 operator rather than a multi-step operator it's not a complex but that thing would be the DRAM complex the best you can do with the DRAM complex with a vector bundle tensored with it where the connection was not trivial Which was did not have trivial curvature rather. Let's say it that way So this is a rolled up complex That normally one would find on a three manifold remember I said that You're in GU when a four manifold births a 14 manifold, which behaves like a three manifold. There are two ways that that happens.

Starting point is 02:40:30 You pointed to one of them, which is, Oh, you mean churned silence. That was part of the truth. But then there's a second part of the truth. Only on a three manifold do I get a cheap version of a complex that has zero forms to one forms, one forms to two forms, two forms to three forms. So there are three non-trivial steps in that complex. This one goes zero forms to one forms, one forms to two forms, but the two forms then get contracted to D minus one forms, one forms to two forms, but the two forms then get contracted to D minus one forms, and then the D minus one forms get taken to D form. So if you put

Starting point is 02:41:12 those together, it looks like a three complex because you cut out almost all of the middle of the DORAM sequence. Right? Now that gadget gets rolled up and that's what this direct for Rita Schwinger operator is all about. That's what the Fermion sector looks like. And by the way, the idea that I haven't heard any commentary on this idea at all. It's just weird. It's like here is a bold, clear idea. Take the 14 manifold and that 14 manifold

Starting point is 02:41:57 has a chimeric bundle, which is equivalent to the tangent and the cotangent bundles. In fact, it's semi-canonically equivalent and is endowed with natural metric information. So you can build spinors without ever making a metric choice. Okay? That guy, because you can build spinors, you can think of that as a bundle with a U64 comma 64 structure group. um, bundled with a U 64 comma 64 structure group.

Starting point is 02:42:28 And what we're going to do is we're going to take the DORAM complex on that thing, which would normally have degree zero, degree one, degree two, three, four, all the way up to 14 before it died. So it'd have 15 different terms, 14 different operators. You're going to cut out almost all of them in the middle. So you're going to go zero to one to 13 to 14 and then die. And so how did you get from two to 13? Oh, well, you took two. Yes.

Starting point is 02:42:55 You did a contraction that got you back to one. Yeah. And then you did a star. And so that thing, when rolled up, has that zero in the south east corner of the matrix of a two by two matrix of operators, which is what I think will be found to be a seesaw mechanism. So there's an entire, there's a wonderful book by Michael Atiyah called the Physics and Geometry of Knots.

Starting point is 02:43:30 And you see this complex in that book. So the reason that the 14 manifold behaves like a three manifold, three is magical, just a magical dimension. There's the bosonic magic, which is Chern-Simon's like theories. There's the fermionic magic, which is that you roll up this very simple thing, and that's what leads to three generations. Do you still have the d squared property in this complex?

Starting point is 02:44:06 It's only three to four long. This is something I've never said anywhere. There is a new D squared. I think it's a cyclic crazy, beautiful complex that if you have two connections, uh, I created and have never released to anyone. I haven't even mentioned it because it's gonna engender more confusion. But suffice it to say, there's something that looks like, Oh God, what is it?

Starting point is 02:44:36 DA, F sub B for the second connection, identity DB. I think that's the four entry. Oh, sorry. There are two negative signs in the second column. So there is a new D squared, which is unbelievable. And one of the coolest things about this is that on shell where the equations get satisfied, a complex is birthed. So if you think about it, and this is more with my old math buddies, my

Starting point is 02:45:13 interpretation is that the Einstein condition is a cohomological condition. Because what it says is the curvature has some special property. But if the curvature is the obstruction to d squared equaling zero, then maybe on shell what that's telling you is that a new column columnologies theory is born on shell. So you're going to get a modulized space of connections and then you can look at the kernel and co-kernel of a columnologies theory on

Starting point is 02:45:43 that space and you get this gorgeous structure. But the thing is, is that, look, I went into math to avoid string theory. And, you know, there's just this very weird story, which I had, couldn't sort out in my mind. Where I, I was a 17 year old kid at the University of Pennsylvania who went to a lecture of Ed Witten on string theory in 1980, seemingly three. But Ed Witten doesn't give a lecture on string theory until 1984 after the Green Schwartz anomaly cancellation. And in this story where I'm clearly lying, I switch my major from physics to math because I can see the

Starting point is 02:46:26 effect that he's just had on a room full of physicists where suddenly everyone has given up like instant learned helplessness. And I never told that story because it's clearly time inconsistent. Like he, I'm in my sophomore year. I'm in college only for three years. I'm in my sophomore year when the Green-Schwartz anomaly cancellation happens, but I've already changed my major. I'm reading Peter Wojt's book about this period of time.

Starting point is 02:47:03 And he says, Witten doesn't begin to get interested in this until the Green-Schwartz anomaly cancellation. But he actually gives his first lecture on string theory in 1983 at a conference on grand unification. I read this and just think, you're kidding me. Tell me where this conference was. This conference was held at the University of Pennsylvania. I am the only 17 year old in that room.

Starting point is 02:47:26 I'm the youngest person to see the beginning. I'm almost 60 right now, as we speak, 59. I am the youngest person on earth to see the birth of the Witten era of strength. I'm the only person who can report accurately of what it's like to be an undergraduate and watch as the theoretical physicists in this room lose their minds because God is in the room saying things that are so incredible, claims that are so strong from a position of so much understanding and wisdom that nobody wants to oppose it. And I just looked at this and I said, I cannot go into this field.

Starting point is 02:48:10 This is going to take over everything. Gosh, man, there's many questions that I have pages and pages of questions from before. I'll come for several days. We'll do whatever you want to do. But may I say something? I think we're making history right now. Tell me more. So all these questions, what was it like to be in the room when nobody had heard these stories?

Starting point is 02:48:41 There's so much of my life that lives only in my head because everyone's still trapped of like, so wait a minute, you think the world is 14 dimensional, why do we only see four? Like that's sort of the level of my life. I never get to the real part of my life. My whole life has been lived alone. to the real part of my life. My whole life has been lived alone.

Starting point is 02:49:07 This is really creepy in a weird way. I'm having a discussion about something real. This doesn't happen. Let's go. Earlier when you said that we have the three generations, that two of them have the same representation, but one doesn't. See, physicists tend of them have the same representation, but one doesn't. See, physicists tend to mix up the word

Starting point is 02:49:27 representation with representations face. Mathematicians tend to be more careful about that. The representation is the map that goes from the group to GLV. Yeah. Or the endosysterium, the algebra. Great. Great. It is.

Starting point is 02:49:39 But representation space is the V. So we have a triple, we have a group, we have a group, we have a space, and we have a map from the group into the automorphisms of the space. So let's call that a representation, very good. So when you said that they have different representations, do you mean the representation spaces are the same

Starting point is 02:50:00 for two of them, but not the third, or what? You're asking the right question. Well, so let's back all the way up if we're going to do it from a math perspective. A breaking of a representation is a group, a subgroup, an initial representation of the ambient group into the automorphisms of some space, usually vector space. When you break from an irreducible representation or easily presented tensor product of representations to a subgroup, very often something that was irreducible breaks into

Starting point is 02:50:38 smaller irreducible subcomponents of the smaller subgroup. The claim that I am making is the spinors that we see, the 16 dimensional complex internal quantum numbers, tensored with the two complex dimensional vial spinors. As we go to the higher and higher groups in GU, what you're going to see is those dimensions of the spaces won't change. You will see something that looks like dark matter coming out of its non-luminous phase and being connected and coupled to the luminous matter at higher gravity regimes.'s my interpretation of your gravity regime just means higher curvature high curvature. Yeah

Starting point is 02:51:50 Really really what I'm thinking of is high curvature, but I'm trying to sound like okay, okay But the thing is that the there are two Even without high curvature, there are two spaces of fermions that we haven't seen in GU. There's spin three halves fermions that are really weird because, so they'll appear to be spin three halves on the four manifold we we know and love Tensored with a 16 complex dimensional space that will look like the standard model fermions Except it will be conjugated

Starting point is 02:52:38 So that is in our that's a prediction You know you're in GU and GU makes the prediction that there will be spin three halves matter coupled to a 16 dimensional vector space that looks awfully familiar, but that the parity is sort of reversed and flipped. And then you're going to have an additional collection of spin one half fermions that are coupled to, I forget, 144 complex dimensional vector space that nobody's ever seen, and the third generation of fermions that we see that's

Starting point is 02:53:14 also spin halves, spin one-half, will combine with that when the group rises from this broken SU3 cross SU2 cross SU1. So there will be a grand unification at a petit salam level. That's where they observe leptons, the electron and the electron neutrino become the fourth color of the quarks for the SU4 that contains the SU3, which is really spin six, but never mind. And then you're going to see all these other particles you've never seen before.

Starting point is 02:53:54 And so the physicists trying to dismiss the theories is great. You're making a prediction. Tell me something. Why haven't we seen these particles? Do you have a mass? Right? I don't really know. But we didn't see the third generation of particles for a while. Robbie was the one who said, why is there a second generation of particles? I assume that there's a mass prohibition because a lot of these

Starting point is 02:54:14 things are electrically charged. So yeah, there is a hidden, I think it's 144 dimensional complex representation that will be tensored with spin one half vile spinners. And it will combine with a third generation. Eric, it's a pleasure, man. I could keep talking to you for another couple hours. Well, probably a few. Yeah. I think we'll have at least another podcast on GU that will be more

Starting point is 02:54:48 in depth as mentioned. And also it wasn't fair to you. So maybe you're going to want to do it more structured. Well, that's fine. I mean, that's like five hours of notice. I haven't had time to prepare for this, but take care, man. Hey, really, really great to be here. And by the way, thanks for really

Starting point is 02:55:06 Taking an interest in this. I learned a great deal from watching your video. Okay enlighten me What did your observation math tell you? I can tell you what I learned. I think I'm less interested in giving you like a minus B plus all that kind of stuff. I had no idea that this was so difficult because I just remember all of the little problems along the way that I was trying to tackle. So whether this is right or wrong, whether it's delusional, we'll find out. But it has a kind of coherence.

Starting point is 02:55:45 And at least to me, to my mind, it's like, yeah, obviously, you know, because GU begins with an assumption of four degrees of freedom only, uh, together with a tiny bit of extra information, almost nothing, I always think of it as really simple, and I think that I just didn't have an appreciation for how overwhelming this is. I get no point. Did I feel like I was doing anything particularly unusual or clever? It's just a series of beliefs and intuitions that I followed and followed and followed. And I've always had this question about like, well, I don't understand, where is everybody?

Starting point is 02:56:29 And I think in some sense, watching you struggle with how to present it, I think I've become kinder to myself. I think I realized why I've taken on all these personality distortions and affectations of trying to have the same kind of, try to imagine having this conversation for 40 years I think I realized why I've taken on all these personality distortions and affectations of trying to have the same kind of, try to imagine having this conversation for 40 years. Eric, I've got 40 minutes.

Starting point is 02:56:53 Explain GU to me. And then like, I'll be three minutes in, the person will say, okay, let's design the experiment that will prove or disprove your theory. Like what? Or is there a double cover of GLV? Yeah. I think Ed Frankel and I recently spent an hour and a half on whether there's a double cover of GLV.

Starting point is 02:57:18 There's a meta linear group. It has an N lab entry. I didn't know that. I didn't know the name of it. I just worked out that it had to have non-tri, GLV had to have non-trivial pi one, and then I think I remember once running into a reference in Lawson and Michelson that says that there is such a group, but it's not important because there are no finite dimensional representations of it, which reduce to

Starting point is 02:57:44 the spin representation. It's like, that's the entire acquaintance I have with this, with this object. So I had no idea until theories of everything that I'd actually, like you say this thing at the end. I'll tell you something else I didn't, I didn't know the word unexampled. I was like, should I correct Kurt? Cause he's not using the English language properly. And I realized, no, I just didn't know the word you're using it beautifully. At no point did it occur to me that this is an unexampled phenomenon, that what you're actually asking is for people to use a heuristic.

Starting point is 02:58:30 Look, I'm not going to read all that. Just tell me whether it's right or wrong, whether he's full of it or whether there's anything to it. By the way, here's a story that I don't think I've told much. There's a guy named Eugenio Bianchi, who's I think still running around in physics. I went to a conference right after the Oxford talk in 2013. He said, we've been at this conference for three days,

Starting point is 02:58:54 this is our last day, the fourth. Everybody in the world, because like Lamond had written about this, the Guardian had written about it. He said, everybody wants to know, is there anything to this or is there nothing to this? So let's go and we'll ditch the conference. So we ditched the conference.

Starting point is 02:59:10 We sit down. I started explaining it to him. I don't know where he went. And he finally, he just said, stop right there. We're like 20 minutes in. And I should have listened to this. It was just like, I didn't have the confidence to hear what he had to say. He said, forgive me, Eugenie, if you're out there. He said, the only thing that's occurring to people is that there are either

Starting point is 02:59:35 zero new ideas or one new idea. And nobody imagines that there are two or more. And the most likely number is zero. And then he pointed at the displaced torsion of the augmented torsion tensor. And he said, just take that. He said, that's an entire field. He said, that one idea is worthy of a field. I didn't know how to process that.

Starting point is 03:00:08 And he said, the problem is there's new idea after new idea after new idea and nobody, no one has budgeted that this is a possibility. It was like, remember when you said something nice and I said, thank you. And I said, it's a struggle to figure out what to say. I don't know how to receive the idea. Like it's a weird thing that you work on the theory of everything and you think it's right.

Starting point is 03:00:42 You take those two statements. That shouldn't be a weird thing for anyone with a PhD and a technical subject. It's like, of course, that's what you're working on. If I was in biology, I'd be trying to cure cancer. You know, if I, if I owned a rocket company, I'd be trying to go to Mars. And to me, it's like, we're in theoretical physics to solve physics. Like, you know, I know Jim Watson as a person. That guy's name will be around for 10,000 years if humans still exist.

Starting point is 03:01:15 It's very weird to have like hung out with Archimedes for four days. Raoul Bott, I swam naked with Raoul Bott off Martha's Vineyard. He was a sun worshiper. Rowell Bott will be remembered forever. What we do is normal in a region which almost, things almost never work, but if they work, the prize isn't riches. You can look at Einstein's house on Zillow and it's like, I don't know,

Starting point is 03:01:45 a million, two million bucks. It's not much. If it works, you get to have your name perpetuated. And that's a weird thing to think about. We don't think about glory. We don't think about lasting contributions. We can talk about them for other people. Can't talk about them for ourselves.

Starting point is 03:02:05 What he was telling me was there's too much here. And just visiting with, with, with Elise Mullen, he once said this thing to me, which forever will, you know, it just disturbed me. No, and he said, Eric, you're too present. I still don't know what he meant. I think every time somebody had something to say, I was like, yeah, let's go, let's pounce. What can we do?

Starting point is 03:02:34 Ultimately, the hope of GU is that we get our own source code and we figure out whether we have to die on this planet from the fruits of previous generations of physicists. planet from the fruits of previous generations of physicists. I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share. And as always, feel free to contact me.

Starting point is 03:03:03 New update. Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future.

Starting point is 03:03:22 Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy, and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so.

Starting point is 03:03:52 Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself. Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and

Starting point is 03:04:32 podcasts. I also read in the comments that, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. And finally, if you'd like to support more conversations like this, more content like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal, there's also crypto, there's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time.

Starting point is 03:05:05 You also get early access to ad-free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon, video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much.

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