Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - John Moffat on Modified Gravity, Theories of Everything, and meeting Schrödinger

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

These interviews can be extremely technically dense at times but I'm not willing to sacrifice depth, nor my personal engrossment, for views.The latter half of this video is primarily for posterity and I think you'll find it intriguiging only if you care about the history of physics around the time of Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman, which is why I put the answers to the more contemporary questions up front. John Moffat is an 88 year old luminary, which means there's a tendency to drone / ramble, since he doesn't perform much public speaking. But the content is there. Enjoy. - CurtPatreon *NEW*: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/bluthefilm0:00:00 On "Modified Gravity" (or MOG) and how new theories are born 0:24:58 Does MOG agree with the data? 0:29:53 Black holes are characterized by "mass, spin, and alpha" not "mass, spin, and charge" 0:32:49 His thoughts on current Theories of Everything, including Weinstien's and Wolfram's 0:34:56 The problem with quantum gravity 0:43:16 Modifying Quantum Field Theory and Moffat's method for learning 0:55:27 The advent of the Higgs, due to the non-renormalizability of SU(2) x U(1) 1:00:16 The Higgs is needed for unitarity, not renormalizing (in Moffat's theory) 1:04:54 On the Arrow of Time 1:06:44 When Moffat met Feynman (brief story) 1:07:36 Why modifying gravity is so difficult, apart from quantum gravity 1:10:58 What Moffat is currently working on 1:12:01 Non-technical books Moffat has written, explaining all his theories 1:14:04 Black hole singularity points often being dependent on coordinate choice 1:18:55 Moffat's start in math and physics from a painter with PTSD who had no previous predilection for mathematics 1:30:16 The history of Einstein's first attempts at a Theory of Everything (or Unified Field Theory) 1:41:04 Bohr and Schrödinger hating on Einstein 1:52:17 Attending Dirac's course 2:02:44 Some love for Prof. Brian Keating from Moffat

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checkout. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash theories. But in my opinion, they're not going to detect the dark matter because it doesn't exist. That's my personal opinion. I'm here with Professor John Moffat. Part of what I'm doing with this channel, as well as this documentary, is to place people who I think have gotten not as much press as they should. You've heard of Lee Smolin. You've heard of Eric Weinstein, especially from the intellectual dark

web. You've heard of Sabine Hossenfelder because of her YouTube channel. But not many people have heard, at least in the public, have heard of John Moffat. And he deserves just as much credit. He's put out quite a few theories. And not many people put out even one theory. They usually develop an existing theory. So I'm super excited to meet with John in person. John, how are you doing? Very good, thank you.

Let's hear about your modified theory of gravity. So, this non-symmetric theory, which I worked on, I decided that the anti-symmetric theory which I worked on, I decided that the anti-symmetric part of this metric tensor was not the electromagnetic field. It was additional degrees of freedom for gravity. It was part of the gravitational field.

So I called it the non-symmetric gravitational theory. Now comes the first acronym, NGT. Let me just break this down for the audience quickly. So in general relativity of the two tensor, as I was saying before, then you have the symmetric. It's a symmetric tensor, but any tensor can be broken up into symmetric

and an anti-symmetric part. You can decompose it much like you can with coordinates. There's an x and y. Or if you know about principal bundles, there's a horizontal vertical part. So you can decompose. So you can decompose a tensor into symmetric and anti-symmetric part.

Anti-symmetric part is just zero in the Einstein field equations, typically. And what Moffat is working on, or was working on, was realizing that this anti-symmetric part, which Einstein also tried to work on, doesn't represent electromagnetism, which is why Einstein threw it out, because he was trying to make it fit. You're like, well, maybe it's not electromagnetism, but it's something else. Okay. And you can correct me if I'm incorrect. Very good. Perfect. That's a succinct description.

So I published a paper in Physical Review, 1979, called A New Theory of Gravitation. What you do in Theoretical Physics is the following. You have an idea. As Richard Feynman said, you guess an idea. Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we...

Don't laugh, that's really true. Okay, you have this idea, it takes seconds to have the idea, okay? But then you have to formulate it in terms of a mathematical system, mathematical equations. So you do that and it has to be self-consistent. And then you have to test it against experiment. And there's three phases. And the latter part, the third phase, is very important And the latter part, the third phase is very important because you have to know whether it's correct or not experimentally.

It's physics. You're doing physics, not just mathematics. And if it doesn't fit the data, then you throw away that guess, that idea, and you start with some other idea, or you quit. And this is how physics is done. So I had tried to find some way of verifying this non-symmetric gravity theory. It's not easy. Doing experimental gravity physics is difficult. Of course, I had to agree with Einstein's theory of gravity.

That's the first necessary thing to find is correct. If it doesn't agree with the sole experimental data, for example, then the whole thing is off. So, also there were some people who criticized it too. You have to have criticism. Physics is a very conservative business. You do not change the paradigm in physics unless you absolutely

have to. And it's the paradigm shift that's usually driven by experimental physics. Some present theory, so-called standard theory, by the way I don't like that word standard, but anyway, standard theory doesn't agree with some data, or a theory comes forward that makes a prediction, and your theory fits the data that prediction fits, but the older theory doesn't. This is how physics progresses. And so also at this point, this was 1979, so I worked on this in the 1980s. I had students working on it. For example, I had Neil Cornish, a graduate student who was from Australia, and he's now a professor at the University of Montana. He's quite a senior professor there, head of a gravitational physics group.

And so we worked on this, I had a potential solution for a black hole which did not have a horizon. Using your modified theory? Using this modified theory. A black hole with no horizon? That's right. Konish applied for a position at Cambridge University to be Hawking's assistant, Stephen Hawking's assistant. And he became his assistant. It's quite a funny story because, as Neil told me later, he was sitting in one of the rooms of the Department of Applied Mathematics,

Silver Street, Cambridge, where Hawking was. And he's looking at a blackboard, and he suddenly hears this voice, computer voice. Ah, so you're Neil Cornish. So you don't believe in black holes, I believe. That was his first thing. So anyway, so this is the 80s. So then I started doing particle physics again and left it for a while. I worked on unified theory again with another

graduate student, David Ball, who ended up as a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He was chair actually of the department at one point. David Ball, B-O-A-L. And also with Gabor Kunstader, who became professor and dean of science at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. We worked on this stuff, but there was no clear experimental evidence that could prove it. You have to have one piece of experiment, some prediction, something that you have in your theory that cannot be fitted by the other theories. This is very difficult.

This doesn't happen often in physics. Maxwell's prediction that light has to move as an electric wave with the speed of light is a prediction which hurts physicists light is a prediction which hurts the physicists' approach to experimentally to be correct.

This is a remarkable result. Dirac's equation, one of the fundamental equations of quantum field theory and quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum physics, and predicted antimatter. They went and looked for antimatter in the Anderson Caltech found in 1932. This is an amazing prediction. This happens a few times in physics. Einstein's theory of general relativity had to pass the solar system experiments. And the bending of light, of course, 1.575 arc seconds, the bending of light by the sun. The first eclipse experiments were not all that great actually, and time had to go on before we had a really confirmation of the bending of light prediction by Einstein. And the perihelion advance of Mercury,

this is the Rosetta precession of Mercury's orbit. Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun. And it resets in a reticent shape, which confounded Newtonian gravity. Where does your modified theory come in? So I had to fit all this with my modified theory. But then I got interested in dark matter. I got interested in dark matter because there was beginning to be interest in the 70s. Vera Rubin, the woman astronomer, and Ford, a colleague, did observations of rotation curves of galaxies, you observe Doppler shifts, light coming and going, blue shift and red shift, and from these observations you can determine how fast stars are moving around in the galaxy, in any galaxy. And they found, with great surprise, that the stars were moving faster than could be accounted for by Newtonian gravity.

If you plot the rotation curve of the speed, velocity, vertical axis versus the distance of the size of the star from the center are equal to zero, radially, then the curve comes up and flattens out, whereas Newtonian gravity predicts that it should fall off. And there's quite a six times the difference between Newtonian gravity and this flat rotation curve experimentally, observationally. It's a factor of six. And that's confined to a galaxy? That's what happens in our galaxy.

Well the reason I'm saying that is because we're gravitationally pulled by some other galaxy, so if that curve extended out extremely far then we should be spinning. You get back to Newtonian gravity, you must go, as you go out towards infinity. So, so it flattens out and then comes back down again. So this intrigued me because Einstein gravity contains Newtonian gravity and we effectively use Newtonian gravity for galaxies because the gravitational field is weak. All experiments on gravity are for weak gravitational fields. The solar system is weak gravity except for neutron stars. Einstein, Newton, it doesn't work. Dark matter. What is this? In the 70s, the first physicist astronomer to note this problem was Zwicky in 1933.

Swiss astronomer, rather eccentric character. He has his name on virtually every aspect of physics. He did some calculation for what are called clusters. These are clusters of galaxies, not stars. Galaxies containing stars. And these clusters are huge. And he found that by what's called the Virial Theorem, that if you use Newtonian gravity, they can't be stable, they

have to blow apart. Gravity is not sufficiently strong to maintain equilibrium, stability. So he said, well, there's got to be extra matter, dark matter. And that's it, already 1933, matter. And that's it already, 1933, and so on. But no one paid much attention to it. But because of Vera Rubin and the problem with the galaxies, now things became serious. And more and more attention was paid to a stock matter. And now, it's to me, in my opinion, one of the major problems of modern physics, because due to the standard cosmology, which I will get into, the standard cosmological model, dark matter plays an essential role. 85-86% of all matter is dark matter according to fitting the data, cosmological data. So, after decades of effort and large sums of money, millions, billions of dollars, one experiment after another,

they've been looking for dark matter particles, and no one can detect them. No one has detected them. So what does this mean? I call it potentially the modern ether, because ether was accepted as being a fact at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.

It was a fact, because you had to have electric waves move through some medium, like sound moves through air as a medium. Maxwell believed in the ether. And so what does your modified theory of gravity say about dark matter? So I decided to say that the anti-symmetric part of my gravity theory was the part of gravity that modifies gravity without dark

matter, you see? Because the first modification of gravity, a serious modification, was Isaac Newton, was Albert Einstein, who modified Isaac Newton's gravitational theory published in 1687 in the Prokipia. So I'm modifying Einstein. Einstein is failing. Newtonian and Einstein are failing. cannot describe this issue without inventing invisible matter. But one is always agnostic in physics. If you can find the dark matter,

next month these huge experiments that are still ongoing, trying to detect what's called WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles. If they find that it fits in and they can explain the rotation curves of the galaxies, then forget about modified gravity. Einstein's theory of gravity is a beautiful theory. It fits the data and that's it. But in my opinion they're not going

to detect the dark matter because it doesn't exist. That's my personal opinion. So I published papers doing this, identifying this anti-symmetric part with a new degree of freedom in gravity so that I could fit the galaxy rotation curves, the flattening of the curves, with our dark matter. And I did. And I published a paper in 1995, Physics Letters B, doing this. But it was... Astronomers complained because non-symmetric gravity theory is complicated. And they don't... Astronomers don't like this complication. So I said, all right, I'll produce a simpler version. So I produced what's called MSTG, Metric Skew Symmetry Gravity.

Is it different than your previous version? It's taking the previous version and making it a simpler theory. And when you say it's simpler, what are you sacrificing for the simplicity? I'm sacrificing a lot of the mathematical mathematics. I made it into a simpler version by means of throwing out a lot of the complicated nonlinear mathematics. Okay. So the way that I'm imagining it is like a Taylor expansion.

You just take the linear part and just remove the higher part. Exactly right. Okay. So then I published papers with this on dark matter. I simplified it again because astronomers were still complaining it. So I said, okay, I'll make it simpler. So now we're down to scalar tensor vector gravity, STVG. And this consists of taking Einstein's theory.

You've got to have Einstein's theory as a base. Otherwise, it's not going to work. When you say you have it as a base, you mean you drive it in a limit, like Newtonian driving? That's correct. Exactly. You have to do that. Einstein was confounded by the fact that he couldn't get Newtonian gravity over a period of a year or two. He gave up at one point, but then he went back in with Grossman and eventually they got around to getting what's called the Poisson equation and Newtonian gravity as a limit, natural limit of Einstein gravity. So I had to have this. So it's okay. So now I have a theory where I need a stronger gravity.

So I made big G, I call it big G, Newton's constant. I made it a variable constant. Interesting. And following what Paul Dirac did in 1938, which seems a royal society, in Nature article. You also have variable speed of light? Is that tied to the variable G? That's another theory. So, by the way, the photon of gravity, the quantum, the photons, in quotes, is the graviton. The graviton is the quantum particle that is exchanged between particles, matter particles,

and produces newtonian gravity or Einstein gravity. Electrodynamics, Maxwell's electrodynamics is a relativistic version of Maxwell's theory. The photon is exchanged between electrons to produce the Coulomb force. So the graviton is the photon. No one's ever detected a graviton, and probably no one ever will, because gravity is so weak. It would take the whole galaxy as an accelerator to detect a graviton. As Freeman Dyson said, if you have a big enough mass to detect a graviton, that mass would collapse to a black hole.

Anyway, that's the theory, okay, the graviton. So here I have the metric tensor field of Einstein, and I have a new degree of freedom, the vector field. And the vector field corresponds to a spin-1 graviton, field. And the vector field corresponds to a spin 1 graviton, or a symmetric tensor T mu nu corresponds to a spin 2 graviton. So I complete gravity theory with an extra graviton, spin 1 graviton. And this vector field is

sourced by matter, by mass. So the electromagnetic potential, a mu of Maxwell's equations, is sourced by electric charge. My vector field is sourced by mass, just like Einstein's metric field theory is field is sourced by matter, by density of matter.

So that's effective to the theory. I wrote it up and published it in 2006. And eventually I started calling it MOG, Modified Gravity, because it's more than Mordecai Milgram in Israel. He was the first to publish a modification of Newtonian gravity called MOND, Modifying Newtonian Dynamics, in 1983. in 1983. And he's a pioneer to do this because people were critical, you know, modifying Einstein gravity. So this is MON. But MON is a non-relativistic formula. It's not relativistic. It's just a modification? It's a modification of Newtonian gravity. And it's based on assuming there's a special acceleration,

a sub zero, a for acceleration, and a sub zero makes it special as rotation. And this is a number, it's 1.2 times 10 to the power minus 10 meters per second squared. This is the unit of acceleration. That's MOND. Even if MOND had correct predictions, it would still be incomplete, because how does it comport with the general relativity would be the open question. Because people attempted to generalize this non-relativistic phenomenological formula, a simple formula. By the way, astronomers like this simple formula.

Astronomers like the simple math. Yeah. So it's a high school level formula, okay? So level formula so I don't want it's not a sense of my sense of humor but I call it MOG instead of MON

instead of but this is silly but MOG it's important it's called MOG because it's modified gravity

as opposed to modified Newtonian dynamics. So you've got to have general relativity. Okay, so the big question everyone wants to know and the experimentalists who are watching this is do you make predictions that agree

with the data? Okay. So back to the three phases of physics. Have an idea, guess it. Mathematical formulation, STVG, publish it. Now comes what I call, I call physics is imagination in a straitjacket. Imagination, the idea, the straitjacket is experimental physics. Can you agree with experimental physics? Can you predict something that the other people can't fit?

It's hard. That's why physics is so hard. Because when I paint, I still paint. There's no criteria you have to match. No, I paint, but I don't think. It's all left, it's all right brain more or less, feelings, color, composition. So I finish, put it up on the wall. and you either like it or you don't like it. I don't have to prove anything. I don't have to prove the painting.

It's not phimpological. I don't have to prove it. Just if you don't like it, well, okay. Maybe you'll like this painting. But in physics, the test is the experiment. And this is what makes physics so hard. It's very challenging. That's why I like it, okay?

So, okay, moving forward. One paper after another. I've been publishing papers now for 14 years. STVG was published in 2006. from 14 years. STVG was published in 2006. So then in 2015, I published a long paper on mock black holes

because I found a black hole solution. Right. And I called them mock black holes. I called them Schwarzschild Mog Black Holes or Kerr Mog Black Holes. Kerr, my former collaborator and friend from Trinity. And there's been a lot of... I've lost track how many papers are published

on Mog Black Holes. Oh, okay, great. Because one of my questions was, what's the reception like from the physics community? There must be, I don't know, I'm guessing 50, 60 papers. That's a lot of citations. Hundreds of citations, in fact. I'm up to something like 6,000, 7,000 citations.

Holy moly. Yeah. like 6,000, 7,000 citations. There's something called ResearchGate, which is a portal. He's rats on that. So I'm up to something like 11,000 readerships. Holy moly!

So a lot of people know me from my physics. But this paper I just sent you, just from Chinese, from China. That just got published yesterday. It's on the archive. It'll be published eventually.

It's a very good paper. Because I published in my big paper on Mark Blackholt, published the European Physical Journal C, and this is a major European journal in 2016, and subsequent papers.

I published a solution of my modified gravity theory for an object which may not have horizons and is regular, it does not have any singularity at the center. It's completely regular. Interesting. But it's close to having a horizon because there's a critical, in the development, there's a free parameter called alpha in the mathematics of the metric describing my black hole. And this alpha is a deviation parameter. It deviates the theory from Einstein

black holes, the size of alpha. When alpha is zero, you get Einstein black holes. When alpha is non-zero, you don't. So in addition to the black hole with the horizon, my solution, Mach black hole, always has two horizons. The parameters are just mass and spin and alpha, three parameters, that's it. So I published a... No charge? Mass, spin and alpha? No charge? No electric charge. By the way, black holes, astrophysical bodies do not have electric charge.

They're electrically neutral. Because you have positive charge electrons and you have positive and negative charge. Clumps of charge, right? And they neutralize one another. I mean, this is electrically neutral. All astrophysical bodies are electrically neutral. The sun is

electrically neutral. There may be a tiny amount of charge, but it's negligible. So it has very little, if any, effect on the space-time metric. Through Maxwell-Einstein equations. Okay, this is for astrophysics.

So black holes should be electrically neutral. Papers are published showing this is the case. They neutralize. So they discharge their charge. So this theory is just mass. But mass is positive. It doesn't have a negative counterpart. There's no negative mass.

So there's no electric so-called equivalent of a dipole. There's no mass dipole, okay, because you can't have a positive-negative mass at two poles. So, anyway. By the way, if someone is interested and they have a penchant for mathematics as well as physics, and they want to learn about your theory, do they just read the papers? Or do you have a book that you published? Much like there are books that introduce someone to general relativity from nothing.

No, I haven't actually published a textbook on this. I'm too busy working out the theory. I do these, but I just dictate them. But doing a textbook is much more complicated because you have to deal with all the equations. But eventually I hope to get a review. all the equations and this but eventually I hope to get a review but there was a review published by Daniela Perez and Gustave Romero they're at the institute for physics in Argentina

and they published a whole large big review of my MOG in a book. What do you think of current theories of everything? Are they missing some key ingredient? Are they missing that they're trying to unify GR as it is, and they're not unifying MOG? Or is there something else that you feel like they're lacking? Okay, well, there's a long history to this. We just talked about unified theory way back with Hermann Weyl and Albert Einstein, 1918. But, yeah, it's... I don't...

Like there's loop, there's M-theory... I'm not happy with this TOE, the acronym TOE, because what does it mean to have a theory of everything? I mean, what, everything? I mean, the whole universe, biochemistry, chemistry. Consciousness. I don't know. What does it mean to have a theory?

I don't understand what that means. So you much prefer grand unified theory than Tau? Grand unified theory. Grand unified theory somehow tied in with gravity. Have you had a chance to look at the Eric Weinstein video that I sent you? Yeah, I didn't understand it. You have to ask him about that. What about Stephen Wolfram?

Have you heard of Stephen? I appreciate that they both made a lot of money. Apparently, Eric Weinstein is manager of a hedge fund, Netron Fund in New York. So, he's also a mathematician. So, he has fun with it.

But, these theories have not been successful. Quantum gravity, let's talk about that for a minute. Because I publish papers on quantum gravity. I try to publish on all of these things. successful. Quantum gravity, let's talk about that for a minute. Because I've published papers on quantum gravity. I tried to publish on all of these things. And several papers actually over the years.

Quite well cited actually. I published one paper in 2000 called Non-commuting Quantum Gravity, which has many citations. So you have the coordinates of space-time not commuting by momentum and position in quantum mechanics, non-commutative. Non-commutative gravity. Yeah. Moffat. Okay. The problem with quantum gravity is that there are no data. Okay, let me repeat that. There are no quantum gravity data. And you can't do physics without data. That is my main criticism. There may be. I mean, I'm

not saying there won't be. But as of August 2020, there are no... Let's put it this way. In quantum field theory, the Feynman graphs describe what's going on, relativistic quantum field theory. So you have what's called tree graphs. These are trees, okay? So you have a line here, and you have a line there.

These are two electrons, and they interchange the trees, okay, so you have a line here and you have a line there, these are two electrons, and they interchange the photon, which is a quigley line, and it's just trees. But that's classical electromagnetism, it's classical electrodynamics, tree crops. So the quantum comes in with what's called loops. So now you begin to take the lines and make them into loops, close in on loops, okay? And these loops are the quantum corrections to the classical tree graphs, okay? So let's go to gravity. Gravity, you have a neutron, two neutrons, two electrons,

and they have mass, so their mass causes a graviton to be interchanged between the two massive electrons or protons, whatever. And that's classical. I can then derive from that tree graph with graviton and two protons, I can derive Newton-Newton's law of gravity, one over r squared law. Dealing with getting general relativity is a different business. And the loops, quantum

gravity comes in when I form these loops, which are proportional to Planck's constant. Now, Planck's constant comes in to the game. And these are called self-energy loops so they're loop graphs and there's no experiment that can determine these loop graphs none this is where the quantum gravity comes in so you construct a theory of gravity a quantum gravity

you know there are lots of there's loop quantum gravity where you know, there are lots of there's loop quantum gravity where you take space time and make it into little pieces, atomic pieces, lattices and you then try to get general activity coming, emerging out of this, spin network and all that. There's a string theory where you have these strings like violin strings and one of the strings is a

spin to graviton so these strings oscillate and, they're not points in space-time. So your issue is that they're theorizing with no constraints because there's not much data? Yeah, so string theory has to be formulated in 10 dimensions or 11, otherwise it's not self-consistent. And you have to have supersymmetry. Supersymmetry has to come in, otherwise it's not self-consistent, physically speaking. What's the difference between being self-consistent and being consistent? Well, for example, you need more dimensions in string theory, otherwise the Lorentz algebra

doesn't close. It's not Lorentz invariant. It's because the string is a surface, it's not a point. So then I worked in string theory. I once gave a course of summer lectures at the University of Western Ontario in London for students and I published it actually. And that turned me off string theory. In fact, the claim is that string theory is finite to all orders of perturbation theory. So you take my tree graphs and my loops and you do what's called perturbation theory. The loops are perturbations on the tree graphs. And in string theory, these loops are supposed to be finite,

whereas in standard quantum electrodynamics or quantum field theory they lead to divergences so you have to renormalize the loops you know you have to take one infinity and subtract it from another to get a finite result so um so these two gravities by the, gravity is not renormalizable. This was proved by Toft and Veltman and others in the 70s. And this was a big problem. And so it doesn't behave like other standard quantum field theories in particle physics.

And so it's not really normal. It's just divergences, you can't get rid of them. So this is what loop chronograph is supposed to deal with. And string theory is supposed to be finite. But I discovered that I wasn't convinced that string string theory is finite. There was never any rigorous proof that string theory is finite. Still to this day? Yeah. And so let's get to the phase three. What about testing these theories? Well, string theories was a theory of everything, supposedly, a TOE. That's where the acronym came from, and Edward Witten and so forth, in the 80s claimed that this is the theory, okay,

of everything in particle physics. So, well, no one has ever detected a higher dimension beyond three spatial dimensions. Time is a dimension, but that's just space-time, clocks versus rods. And, okay, so we've never seen a higher dimension. The Large Hadron Collider has looked for them for years and find nothing, no experimental data. Okay, supersymmetry, we need supersymmetry to make the Fermian sector or string theory consistent.

There are reasons why I say consistent, but let's go on. So they've counted for supersymmetry for years, LHC. We know supersymmetry doesn. So that's all gone, okay? There's no evidence for supersymmetry. So the Large Hadron Collider is at 14 TV. It's been working at 13, 14, 13 TV, and they hope to get it up to 14 TV with, even beyond that

but you know the supersymmetric particles keep getting heavier and heavier and we can't detect them so that's gone so what's left of string theory okay there's no experimental test of string theory that you can say well

this experiment's done and it passes this test and no other theory no theory without supersymmetry can fit that data doesn't exist you modified gravity have you worked on modifying qft okay so another i, the standard model, why I formulate alternatives is not because I'm trying to be a difficult person, I'm just curious about how stable, how true the so-called standard model is. How robust is it? So that's why I, at all times, mentally somewhat lazy. I can't just sit and read someone's textbook.

So in order to learn a theory, I produce another theory. And through this, I can't produce another theory unless I really understand the so-called standard model theory. And that makes me, forces me to understand it. So this is a strange mental way of proceeding, but that's why all these alternatives come in, because I'm trying to understand the standard model by producing another one. And so the other one is also strong strong man woman so to speak you know i can knock it down or

make it look true so the way that i analogize it is that it would be if as if someone can't watch movies or can't understand movies so they're like let me make my own movie and then i got to watch this movie and understand how this director made it in order for me to make mine. And that's my actual goal is to understand this director. Yes, that's right. Exactly. So, yeah, so supersymmetry. So then I got interested in the fact of renormalization theory. I mean, I published papers on particle physics after doing my

PhD. So I've been doing this for years. I had PhD students working just on particle physics, quark physics, and lots of... I had 38 graduate students, by the way, who did PhDs. That's quite a lot. So I was interested in the following. Can you develop a theory which is ultraviolet complete, UV complete? In other words, in standard quantum field theory, these loops I was talking about, they have divergences, they're called ultraviolet divergences, and they have to be cancelled using renormalization theory. So you do what's called charge and mass renormalization.

And Dirac never liked renormalization theory. He thought it was unsatisfactory, rather artificial. You take one set of infinities and subtract from another. Why do you have these infinities in the first place? Feynman, in the 80s, he was interviewed, he said he wasn't satisfied with renormalization theory even though he was one of the inventors with his Nobel prize in quantum related dynamics. And so I constructed a different quantum field theory and I used what's... so instead of having in these graphs you have two graphs, two lines, or three lines meeting at a point. It's called a vertex. And that's where these three particles interact, at the point.

So in local quantum field theory, they interact at a point. And this point is effectively described by delta function, invented by Dirac, by the way, who didn't like renormalization theory. And as Feynman already understood in his papers from 1947, 1950, already there you already have a problem. As soon as you introduce the delta function and the point for the Feynman graphs,

you get subvergence immediately. So delta function in mathematics is what's called a distribution. You know, you get into distribution theory. So I thought, well, I'm going to give a different distribution at a point. So I use what's been called the entire function. Entire function of mathematics, entire function. Entire function is a digit for a distribution has an infinite number of derivatives. It has in the complex momentum square plane, there are no poles, but there's an essential singularity of infinity. That's the only singularity. So it's an infinite Taylor series of derivatives. So it's infinite derivative theory, okay? And so it becomes non-local.

The operators become non-local. So I have a non-local field theory. But I stress that I published this, that I proved that even though the operator field operators are non-local, the theory does not violate microcausality. Microcausality is the commutator of a field at two different points. And it's supposed to vanish with space-like separation outside the light cone. And I proved that this is, even though the field operators are non-local, they still have these vanishing commutators outside the light cone. So the theory is local, even though it's called non-local. The actual result in the end is local. That's interesting. So I published a paper in 1989,

a physical review, a long paper doing this. What's the reception been like? It proved that it was finite to all orders. It was unitary to all orders. What's the reception been like? Okay, so Richard Woodard, I got to know him.

He's a professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville. This was 1990. So he came up to Toronto to give some lectures. I invited him up. He said, what are you doing? I said, non-local field theory. What? He said, well, that can't work.

I said, well, I'm publishing this paper. So six weeks later, in comes an email. We were already emailing then, saying, I've had epiphany. Epiphany. I think this is really interesting. Let's collaborate. So we collaborated with myself and his student and my student, my postdoc, and we published a long paper in Physical Review where we did quantum electrodynamics from start to finish.

Everything. And proved that the theory is unitary to all. This is S-matrix. It's unitary to orders. All the perturbation loops are finite to orders. And the tree graphs work and da-da-da. So we really went to town on this. So that paper has had many citations, okay? So people are publishing, just the other day a paper came out, they're coming out citing

my papers. I've had hundreds of citations on this. So I got back into this recently. Because I switched, I thought I'd been done enough black holes and gravity. Let's do some particle physics for a change. So I looked back into the standard model. And the Higgs particle has been discovered. The discovery of the Higgs particle has been discovered. The discovery of the Higgs particle is the narrative for that is in my book, Cracking the Particle, Court of the Universe, Oxford University Press. No, Tom Collins, Harper Collins.

It says Oxford on top. Yeah, yeah. So, there, the standard model, so what you do is you have the strong nuclear force is called quantum chromodynamics, and you have quarks, all the quarks, and the photon in this case, the quantum is the gluon, and the gluon is colored. And when you say photon in quotations, you mean the particle that mediates the force? It's the medium of the force. The mediator of the force. And then you have electromagnetism, electro-dynamics, QED it's called, and you have electroweak. And these are put together by Glashow and

basically SU3 equals SU2 equals U1. SU3 is the color nuclear force, strong force group. SU2 equals U1 is the electric weak. And the U1 is the electromagnetism. So these are the three forces of nature. Porticallon is called simple group. And why is it SU3, SU2, SU1?

So how do they do this? Okay, well, in order to get a renormalizable theory, we use a delta function for the graph, Feynman graphs at the point, local field theory. the craft, farming crafts at the point, local field theory. You need a gauge theory.

The theory has to be gauge invariant. And quantum electron dynamics is gauge invariant because the photon is massless. So massless theories are gauge invariant.

And gauge invariant theories are normalizable. Okay. Now, quantum chromodynamics, SU, the gluons are massless. Hooray! We have a gauge theory. All right. It's renormalizable. It's called QCT, quantum chromodynamics. What about the weak force? There's always been a problem. So the

weak force, these forces are described by, fields are described by Yang-Ngou theory. Yang-Ngou theory is what's called in mathematics a non-Abelian gauge theory. It's gauge theory. the particle mediating particles are massless. Okay, so for a long time the problem was that the electric week is not massless because the mediating particles are the Z or the Z boson and the W bosons. There are three three of them two W charge and one neutral they're not massless in fact they're big masses and the fermions are not massless

the electrons and quarks the top quark is the heaviest quark is 173 GeVs compared to the electron, which has a mass of a half an MeV. So, OK, so SU2-corrosion 101 is not gauging variant.

So it can't be renormalized. You can prove this. What to do. This took a long time. So the scalar field was invented, the Higgs field, which has the quantum numbers of the vacuum. So what they had to do was to say that the electroweak's tires were zero mass, so we put all the masses to zero.

The W, the Z, and the 4,000. Zero mass. Okay, well, 173 GV is put to zero, okay? 173 GV is put to zero, okay? And the W mass, the Z mass, was 90 GV or so. Zero. Okay, well, everything is... So then what they said was that the Higgs field,

the so-called Higgs mechanism, breaks SU2 cross U1 down to U1. So you break the electroweak down to the electromagnetic. And during this process, the Higgs field produces the masses. Magic, okay. So, great. Now that thing is renormalizable. So this Higgs field has what's called a potential V of phi. Phi is the Higgs field.

And it's equal to V of phi equals lambda phi to the fourth. Phi is the fourth power of the scalar Higgs field assume that if you assume that then you can get what's called Higgs mechanism, it's the breaking of the Higgs symmetry SU2 cross U1

which is supposed to produce the masses you keep drawing this because of the Mexican hat, or is this referring to something else? That's right. So, this is all done at the classical level, the Higgs mechanism, not the quantum level. It's classical.

But then there's something called the Yukawa Lagrangian, where you have coupling of massive particles with the Higgs field. You multiply them together to interact. And for example, the electron field multiplies the spinor electron direct field, multiplies the Higgs scalar field stuff. And they have a coupling constant, g, g sub e for electron. So where do the masses come from? Well, it turns out that the symmetry breaking can sort of produce the W into Z mass.

You can get a prediction for the W into Z mass, which looks reasonably good. But the fermion masses, all the quarks and leptons and so on, they have to be put in by hand. And each mass has a coupling constant, and this is called Yukawa Lagrange, which is just fitted by hand. So you never calculate the masses. It's put in by hand as a free parameter.

That's why the standard model has something like 21 or 26 free parameters depending on how you count. It's lots of parameters. So I looked at this and I thought, okay, well let me do my finite quantum field theory as I call it. And it works whether you have masses or not. Because it's not, it has a renormalization but it's a finite there are no infinities so I don't have to worry

about putting the masses to zero so I rewrote the standard model assuming that the masses are not zero that the symmetry is what it is SU3 equals SU2 equals U1, it's not broken SU2 equals U1

it's not broken and when you came U1, it's not broken. And when you came up with this, this was before the Higgs was discovered? Yeah, when I did that, I was doing this before the Higgs. But then when the Higgs was found, I had to put this in as a particle field, which I did. And by the way, you need the Higgs field still. I don't need it for renormalization and I don't need it for producing the masses, okay? But you do need it because without the Higgs exchange between two quarks, you violate what's called unitarity at a perturbation level already at about 600 GeV. This is bad. So when you put in the Higgs field and to redo the calculation it cancels all the unitary violations.

So this means you get unitary. You have to have unitarity. Probability has to be conserved. So you still need the Higgs. Okay, so I redid the whole thing and made everything finite, did all the calculations, proved that I get all the low energy experiments of the H-tron collider. And now comes the problem. How do I calculate the masses? No one's ever been able to do it.

The Fermian masses. So I work on this occasionally, and I have a way of doing it. So Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel Prize for initiating this idea of the Higgs mechanism and putting all masses to zero for leptons. It was called the lepton model at the time. He has recently published a paper trying to solve the problem of the masses. Steven Weinberg is very clever, by the way. Steven Weinberg is still alive? Yes, he's about my age. I think he's brilliant. But he failed to do it by his own

admission. Was he using your modified quantum field theory? No, he was just doing the standard. So another criticism is that there's no experimental data that shows that this Higgs potential is lambda, which the company calls lambda times 5 to the 4th. In order to do an experimental verification, you need a Higgs decaying into two other Higgs's, or three. And the amplitude for this decay product is the tiniest. So there's no evidence for this potential.

That's the standard tale that I've heard, and that everyone has heard. That's the standard tale that I've heard and that everyone has heard. Yeah, the statement is that the quarks and the electrons move through this Higgs field vacuum molasses. And they're moving very slowly. And the heavier particles move in the molasses slower than the faster ones. This is all okay. I mean, it's a hypothesis, a theory, and I don't necessarily believe in it. Imagine this case. This is completely hypothetical. But imagine we see two electrons and they repel.

Now we see them, but we see them without photon. We didn't discover the photon. Then later we discover the photon, and then we say, oh, okay, that makes sense because we thought that there must be a mediator, an exchange particle between these two, but we've never seen them exchange. So it would be like that. We see the photon. We think there's there must be a mediator and exchange particle between these two but we've never seen them exchange so it would be like that we see the photon we think they're supposed to be a particle and that's why we predicted the photon but you're saying we just found the photon in this case the Higgs but we don't see its mechanism in the way that you're saying

the mechanism exists we just see the Higgs and the Higgs can be explained alternatively via your theory at least. The point is that all experiments with Higgs particles, all you ever do experimentally is look at what's called the decay products, because these particles are so short-lived. They only live 10 to the power of minus 20, 10 to the minus 22, 10 to the minus 23 seconds. So you can't scatter the Higgs off one another like you scatter off electrons. Electrons are stable particles and protons are stable. You can scatter them. But these things are... So what you do is you do experiments on the decay products. How does this heavy particle

decay into the others and so on? And from that you extract the electroweak physics. So there are times I publish papers where I did way back some years ago. Mexican hat, but now we're violating special relative Lorentz interference, okay? And so we violate SO3.1 down to SO2.

And so the Mexican hat, you remember you go around the room and you have different arrows. So I choose to break the arrow in the direction of time for cosmology. And so I start with a very low entropy and the entropy increases as the universe expands. That's the explanation for the error of time through violation of Lorentz invariance. But this happens fractions of seconds after the Big Bang.

Okay, the violation or instant variance in experiments today is, it's, forget it, there is no, for me the violation occurs seconds of fractions, fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, and then it immediately, through a phase transition, goes directly to the speed of light that we measure today. That's important. Whereas if you violate Lorentz invariance, the way Bekenstein did with Milgram's relativistic

extensions, you get into trouble. Incidentally, I have met Feynman here. I had dinner with him in Hungary once at a conference. He and his wife. Any interesting stories? He was great. I went to one of his lectures at Caltech. He gave lectures on quantum field theory, and I sat in the audience, and he was lecturing away, and I put my hand up to scratch my head,

and he looked at me, yes, do you have a question? I said, I'm just scratching my head. He said, well, that's legitimate. You're allowed to do that. He had a great sense of humor. I also met Gell-Mann, of course. I knew Gell-Mann quite well, Murray Gell-Mann. It's in my funny stories, anecdotes.

By the way, I want to interject the following. When you modify gravity today, and you think you can do it without dark matter or dark energy or explain dark energy, that's another dark issue. You have to fit all the data. You can't cherry pick the data. So man does okay for galaxies. it doesn't do well for clusters.

This is well known. So I have to fit, MOG has to fit both galaxy data, it has to fit what's called the lensing data, I just published a paper on that, another one, so it has to fit all the cosmological data. It's a huge amount of data. So life has become very difficult for those people who think they can modify gravity. You have to fit all the data. Otherwise, someone comes along and says, okay, you fit the galaxies, well, you fitted that. But what about the cosmology?

What about the, do you fit the galaxies or you fitted that. But what about the cosmology? What about the, do you fit the acoustical power spectrum at this cosmic microwave background? Do you fit the matter power spectrum? That's the spectrum for statistical analysis of pairs of galaxies. galaxies and to fit the structure growth of cosmology. So all of this has to be fitted. So I had to learn all of this. You have to do all the astronomy and you have to do all the cosmology, solar system data, everything has to be fitted. And so far, Munch is successful. There are issues to do with what's called dwarf galaxies. By the way, there's just a big review put out by Ivan de Martino, published in a journal just recently where he reviews my mog

he reviews Mond and Mog as the two leading theories of gravity without dark matter and the galaxy fits are very good and so on

cluster fits of data, cosmology. But there's something called dwarf galaxies. It's very wrong. Dwarf galaxies are never galaxies. These are tiny galaxies. And they have what's called very large mass-to-light ratios, m over l, which are huge. So the idea is that the dark matter dominates them.

But the problem is that they're probably not virilized. Some of these 12 galaxies are not stable. Tidal deformation destroys the stability of the realization. And so you can't use them as data. So, I mean, so that's how it goes. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes.

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Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. So what are you working on these days? Well, let's see. I've been working on my modified gravity, which I call, the acronym is MOG, which stands for modified gravity, but privately modified, Moffat gravity. Moffat gravity. But that's not public, that's private.

Right, right, right. but that's not public it's private yes there are various issues I've been developing generalizations of Einstein's gravity theory already at the PhD level at Cambridge, at Trinity College

Cambridge over the years but But I've worked on many other subjects. Yes, so developing this theory. I also work on quantum field theory and particle physics and cosmology. Those are my three main areas. Why don't you tell the audience a bit about your books? Yeah, so this is my latest book, The Shadow of the Black Hole, an Oxford University Press publication

that just came out. It's a history of the gravitational waves, their detection by LIGO Observatory, and the history of black holes. And so the book has a narrative description of LIGO detection of gravitational waves, and also the observation of the first image of a black hole in the galaxy M31. So that's the book. I also published a memoir.

Einstein Wrote Back. It's a musical. And this is my first book, Reinventing Gravity, which is a history of gravity starting from prehistoric times and through the Greeks and the history of how gravity developed

through Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and and then this is the book before my latest Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe. It's the history of particle physics and the ramifications of quantum field theory

and that development, and the description of the Large Hadron Collider and all its findings over the years. When you were mentioning the Schwarzschild radius and the equations, you said that it's dependent on the choice of coordinates, the singularity. Can you explain to the audience, because to them they might think, well, what do you mean dependent on a choice of coordinate system? First of all, what the heck is a coordinate system and why does the singularity depend on that? Yes, well, the original solution, the Schwarzschild solution published by Schwarzschild

who was an astronomer and by the way, he did the work in the trenches of the First World War. He was in the military, German military, in the artillery. And Einstein thought that his equation was so complex that finding an exact solution would be near impossible. And then one year later, Schwarzschild, while in the trenches, came up with the solution. He actually went back to Berlin and wrote it up there.

But then he developed an autoimmune disease, an immune disease, which killed him. He died not soon after publishing the paper. So yeah, so in the original mathematical solution, one uses what's called Schwarzschild coordinates. Coordinates are x, y, z, three dimensional. And time is the fourth dimension. So that produces space-time. And you can choose other coordinates. For example, if you do a picture of the Earth, the planet,

you can use polar coordinates or other kinds of coordinates to determine the structure of Earth. So if you use polar coordinates, you get a singularity on the North and south pole and similarly in the schwarzschild solution uh the the horizon the schwarzschild radius is singular in schwarzschild coordinates but you choose other coordinates for example it was the mathematicians from Princeton published a paper where they did what's called a analytic continuation of the Schwarzschild coordinates space to a much bigger space in

which the actual membrane of the horizon was not singular. So this was a problem because Einstein wasn't aware of this issue of coordinates. And people didn't believe in the black holes because it was singular. Einstein didn't like singularities in his theory. He always tried to avoid them. And this prevented them, this issue of the singular surface, horizon prevented them from believing in these black holes. But eventually that was cleared up in the early 60s.

And so then from that understanding of not having a singular membrane surface, a raising surface, one could begin to believe that these black holes made mathematical sense. And by the way, there's another singularity for the black hole. When a star collapses because it has a large mass, too massive to sustain itself, it collapses because the pressure due to what's called degenerate gas, neutron gas for example, neutron particle gas, the pressure there is not big enough to balance due to the attraction of gravity, so the star collapses. And it collapses in Einstein's

classical theory to a singularity at the center, at the coordinate center, which is radially, the distance radially is zero at the center. And this singularity has bothered physicists from the beginning. And this is an issue which I can get to eventually. So these are the two possible singularities. The singularity at the center in Einstein's classical theory is there. You can't avoid it by choosing another coordinate system.

It's called essential singularity. Whereas, as I explained for the horizon, you can choose different coordinates and not have a singular surface. So the coordinate singularities are more like figments of your coordinate choice, and the essential singularity is one that is truer? That's right. It's always there. And the classical theory of gravity, Einstein's theory. You started studying physics around the time you were 16. You had a correspondence with Einstein directly. 20. were 20 you had the correspondence with Einstein. And then you started developing your own theory and extension of general relativity. Okay.

Well, I had an unusual background. I left school when I was 15 because I wanted to be an artist. What kind of artist? I paint. I still paint. An abstract painting. So I joined, I went to Paris when I was 17, just turned 17. And I had learned about Asayish Polyakov, an abstract painter who exhibited paintings in Copenhagen before I left for Paris. I was very impressed with his work. So I looked him up.

He lived in Oytussen. How do you look him up? This is before the internet. I looked him up in the sense of not the internet. I went to his house. He had a little apartment. He lived there with his wife, Madame Poliakoff.

He just showed up at his house. A 17-year-old kid. 17-year-old kid. And he had this little boy, Alex Poliakoff. And that's where he painted his room. And he played the guitar at night because he wasn't well known at all. Then he became famous. And I was there with him for about a year. So you showed up at his house and you stayed for a year? No, no. I had a room in Porto Leon outside in the suburbs of Paris.

Just one room. And I had saved up some money to be in Paris, but the money was running out, and I couldn't find any employment because I was British Danish. I was a British citizen because of my father. And so I painted so he

one day he said bring some paintings along to the studio and we're going to show you in a show at the museum

Musee d'Art Modern Avenue Wilson in Paris so all of a sudden I have four paintings up, four or five, in this big museum, modern art museum.

And I was surrounded by these abstract painters, Vasarely, Modigliani, Polyakov, who are now famous names in art. So you were there before it was cool, before it was famous. Before it was, and I was

interviewed by journalists for Le Monde and other, Figaro, because I was 17. and other figaro because I was 17, very young, to be exhibited at such a famous installation. The exhibition was called Rue L'Étienne Nouvelle, actually. It was a spring exhibition every spring in Paris. So I got to know these famous artists and I was with them for a year. And then I ran out of money, I had to go back to Paris, my parents again, small apartment. I got interested in, I started reading voraciously everything, classics.

Are you a quick reader? No. I'm slow. I absorb everything carefully. That tends to be true of mathematicians. It turns out that if you study IQ, and IQ can fractionate into mathematical and verbal IQ, that verbal IQ is inversely proportional to mathematical.

So the more highly gifted you are mathematically, the less you are verbally, and then the reverse tends to be true. I must say that at school I was not a very good student. the reverse tends to be true. I must say that at school I was not a very good student. The only subject I did well in was chemistry. For some reason I was fascinated by chemistry.

But not physics? No, I was poor at physics and math. You didn't care too much about physics? I didn't care about it. I didn't find it interesting. And this is around 15? No, this is around 10, 11, 12, 10. We were living in Glasgow at the time. What year is this? This would be 1942, 43.

So this is during the war? During the war. Anyway, so actually when I left school in Copenhagen, I did try to get into university and I went. In those days in Copenhagen, you went to what's called gymnasium. More like, it's something like the old German system, educational system. And then you went into the university. So I was interviewed by this teacher, school teacher, to see why I should be admitted to a gymnasium, which is the portal for university.

And he asked me that. I should say, by the way, that during the war in Bristol, this was 1942 in the Battle of Britain, July, August 1940, there were bombings day and night. And I did schooling underground, the ground, with sandbags. It was terrible. And the teaching was really quite not very good. And anyway, so we went on a vacation to Western Supermere,

a little seaside resort, coast of England. We were walking along the beach road promenade and suddenly these two mission-made bombers came up. I looked and I could see the pilots and the planes and they dropped six bombs and they fell on the beach which is right this is to that tennis court down there and

that's not too far not too far so they went into the sand which somewhat muffled the blast but we were blown across the street so I suffer from PTSD I still do actually which somewhat muffled the blast, but we were blown across the street. So I suffered from PTSD. I still do, actually, to some extent.

Did you suffer any physical injuries? Yeah, I suffered a concussion. So this had an effect on me. Back to the interview by the school teacher, I'm flashing back and forward. Right. He asked me these questions at the Blackburn Mathematics. And because of my, what we now call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, I just froze.

I couldn't, I froze. And I couldn't answer any questions. So he said, he said, I can tell you, Moffat, I'm actually sure you'll never become a mathematician. And he rejected me. I was rejected from going to the gymnasium. That was the end of the possibility of attending university in Denmark. So anyway, back to, so yeah, Paris, Copenhagen again. I got interested and did a lot of reading. So I read Arthur Eddington's books, popular books.

I got very interested in that, in the physics and astronomy. And I started getting excited about that. So I decided this was something to pursue. So I started learning maths and physics. So it turned out that I could attend the library, the university library, the University of Copenhagen library, and get books on physics and maths, which is unusual for cities. You can't do that in the University of Toronto. The robust library, you have to be a member of the university.

But back then, any member of the public could take out university books. Any member of the public could go in. So I took out these books on maths and physics. So then it just suddenly clicked. Within about a week or two I learned calculus, trigonometry. So you found that you had a natural aptitude for math? I had a natural aptitude for math. Or did you find some trick?

I have to tell you, I never understood how I did this. To this day, you don't understand? I still don't understand it. And within a couple of months, I was moving fast, okay? I was going through all of mathematics and physics. You must have had some great books too. Yeah, I somehow understood as I moved forward what to look for, what books to look for. And so within six months, I got up to general relativity.

And then I did general relativity within a month. Okay, for people listening, you went from a teacher saying that you're never going to learn mathematics, to you also not knowing much of mathematics at that time, to then you picking up your first book in the library for whatever reason you were curious about it, to then learning general relativity in the span of six months when you were around 15 or so? No, 19, 20. Up to then I had no interest in

science in general, but then I suddenly, something lit up. And so, then I went on to Einstein's unified field theory and studied that and found a problem with it. When you say Einstein's unified field theory, you're not referring to general relativity? No, this is what he called a non-symmetric theory of gravitation. He called it a generalization of gravitation theory. He didn't call it unified field theory.

Generalization of gravity. Ah, okay. Because this was around the time when Einstein was publishing. People, like for example me, we don't know much about what Einstein published that didn't work. We're only taught what worked, which is GR, and the special relativity first.

So I actually don't know about the specifics of his unified field theory attempts. Yeah. Now he, when he, this is, a lot of this is described in my book, Reinventing Gravity. I go through the whole history of this. After 1915-16, publication of General Relativity,

Einstein kept publishing applications like Detection of Gravitational Waves, his famous book on cosmology and so on, his famous article on cosmology. But he was more interested in unifying electromagnetism with gravity and making the one geometrical theory. And he started this in 1918, 1919. Isn't general relativity already compatible with electromagnetism? 1918, 1919. Isn't general relativity already compatible with electromagnetism? It was, because you can incorporate Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism into general relativity in what's called a covariant way, a way of not being dependent on any particular coordinate system.

It's called the Einstein Maxwell theory. And it is, but Maxwell's equations are not unified with gravity, so to speak, in a geometrical structure. Ah, okay. So he worked on and off on these unified theories, his generalization of gravitation theory, his theory. And in 1925, he, for example, he followed Kaluza and worked on high-dimensional gravity to include the electromagnetic field, Maxwell's equations.

And he wasn't happy with that. those equations. And he wasn't happy with that. And then he, Weyl, Hermann Weyl, the famous German mathematician who published a book, famous book on Einstein's theory of gravity called Matter and Space Time, Space Time and Matter. He developed a unified theory called the Weyl unified field theory. And this was actually the beginnings of what's called gauge theory in quantum field theory, quantum physics. But that failed because Einstein criticized it. There was a problem with understanding how clocks work in the theory because of this so-called gauge theory. But then in 1925

Einstein generalized his general relativity theory by saying the following. General relativity is based on a space-time metric, which is a symmetric tensor, okay? G mu nu, it's called. Mu nu run over space-time coordinates one to four. And so he said, well, why should this metric, this tensor be symmetric? It can be non-symmetric. You have a symmetric plus an anti-symmetric part added together. Just let me explain this a bit to the audience. So there's a metric which is a two tensor and a tensor is what you can think of as taking two vectors, you know what a vector is, and then outputting what your underlying field is, which in most of the cases it's the real numbers. So that is you eat two

vectors, give me two vectors and I'll give you a real number. And you have to satisfy some conditions like linearity and so on. You can also switch those two vectors. So you can say, give me vector a, give me one vector, and then give me another one. Or give me that one, and then give me the other one. So give me a and b, or give me b and a. And then if the result is the same in your calculation, then you call it symmetric.

That's right. So anyway, he developed mathematics for this and published it as a paper in 1925. There was a lot of excitement about any publication that he produced because 1925, he was famous. famous, but the painting of light verified general relativity in 1919, Arthur Heddington's expedition to Africa and solar eclipse and so on. Anyway so back to the non-symmetric theory. Then he left it and tried other, made other attempts to have a unified theory. He felt they failed. So 1945, in collaboration with Strauss,

he was Einstein's assistant at the Institute for Bad Study in Princeton, where he now is, okay, 1945, professor there in the Institute. He went back to the non-symmetric theory and worked with Strauss. But there was a problem because the field equations of the theory attracted beautiful looking. It's quite natural to generalize Einstein's theory. There's no reason why this tensor should be symmetric. And so what's called the connection

which is associated with the metric tensor at the affine connection is also non-symmetric in this theory. It has a symmetric part, which is the affine connection, which is not a tensor, and the anti-symmetric part, the skewed part, which is a tensor. Anyway, so it turned out that the field equations, which are supposed to describe Maxwell's equations, were not Maxwell's equations.

And he couldn't get the equation of motion for a charged particle. It was called the Lorentz force law. Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, developed this at the time of the 20th century. The Lorentz force on the charged particle didn't come out of the theory. This is pretty bad. Serious. So people criticized this in publications.

And so I looked at his theory, and I found another problem with it. So he did, at that time, he had what's called an emission metric tensor. So he had the symmetric part was real, and the anti-symmetric part was an imaginary quantity, imaginary square root of minus one times, imaginary part. And I found a problem with the Lagrangian,

what's called the action principle, from which you get the field equations. So I wrote him a letter, and I wrote two papers, actually. That is to say, you found a problem with the Lagrangian or the action that he wrote? The structure of the action as to whether it was real or not. The Lagrangian has to be real, otherwise you get into trouble with the development of the theories, not self-consistent. So I wrote these two papers, typed on an old typewriter. With the math symbols on the old typewriter too? No, I had to put them in by a pen.

It's all very primitive compared to what we do today. And sent him these manuscripts and a letter. I never expected to hear from him, because I mean famous Einstein people were writing to him

all the time. Like writing Obama and then Obama replying to him. Exactly. So, however, my charisma was correct. 20 or 22? 20. I was 20, yeah. And so he read, looked at the manuscript, and, hmm, okay.

So you corrected Einstein. Yeah, so not correct. I questioned what he was doing. And so he, amazingly, a letter comes in from Princeton, from Mercer Street, where he had his house, and discussing my papers, and discussing this issue I had raised, and so on. So we got into a correspondence, and this went on for some months. And I also criticized the fact that he was only unifying gravity with electromagnetism,

and that we knew about the nuclear force. I mean, it was already what we call nuclear physics. So how can you leave that out? Okay, and he responded to that. So how can you leave that out? Okay, and he responded to that. So then we had a friend, my father had a friend who was a chemist and living, he called me an American. And he got to hear about me and then he

somehow got Niels Bohr at the Bohr Institute got to hear about me and I was invited to the Bohr Institute and I was interviewed by Niels Bohr for two hours he criticized Einstein because people felt Einstein was wasting his time. Bohr criticized Einstein? Yeah, and said that Albert was wasting his time. He said Albert's like an alchemist trying to turn lead into gold and so on and so on. I just sat there. Famous Nobel Prize winner thinks another famous Nobel Prize winner is wasting his time.

Okay. I didn't think Einstein was wasting his time. He was doing unified theory before it ever became popular at all. He was actually ignored at the Institute by physicists. All of his work was just wasting time. So I was a British citizen, you see, because I never became a Danish citizen because I was born in Copenhagen, but I took my father's citizenship. Copenhagen, who got in touch with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London, and they invited me to London. And so I went there, and they arranged for me to be interviewed by professors

to see whether I was the real article or some figment of somebody's imagination, including my own. And I was interviewed by William McRae, a professor in London University. William McRae, he's a professor in London University. And then I was sent to William Bonner, he's a professor at Liverpool University,

who was working on Einstein's unithyphil theory. He was one of the people who criticized Einstein's theory for the fact that you couldn't get the equational motion for a charged particle from the theory. And also that Maxwell's equations didn't look like Maxwell's equations as they should do. So then I was sent to Dublin to do a study in Dublin

and Armin Schrodinger, the famous Armin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, was director of the institute. So I went there and I went up and was interviewed by Schrödinger. He sat on his bed with a wool cap on his head, a small bedroom. And he had my papers which I had sent to Einstein

So Einstein sent it to him? No, I had copies and I had just given them to Bohr at the department that I was invited to in London and so on, and they sent it to Schrödinger. So then he got angry and said, why are you using Albert's methods to do this theory?

Because Schrödinger was working on the non-symmetric theory. Schrodinger was working on the non-symmetric theory. He published several papers. He published in the Brazilian and the Royal Irish Academy, which published papers on Greek philosophy and all sorts of issues. And there was a dispute between Einstein and Schrodinger, it turned out, because Schrodinger was interviewed by newspapers because of his publication of Unified Field Theory and claimed that he had solved the problem. Albert wasn't happy about this, because he had solved the problem. So they had this dispute.

And Pauli had to intervene, because it got rather heated. Poor Albert threatened to sue Schweringer. Oh, yeah? Anyway, so Pauli damped things out. Wolfgang Pauli, famous physicist, Nobel Prize winner. And anyway, so this was the atmosphere I was interviewed in. And so Schrodinger had his way of deriving the non-symmetric theory Einstein had his way doing it

Schrodinger was angry because I wasn't using Erwin Schrodinger's way why are you not using my way? I said I will do that in future I had to be diplomatic. Anyway, so back to London. So the next thing is that Schwering had sent a letter

to the people in London, this Department of Scientific Research in London. And the letter ofation must have been something because the next thing is I'm sent to Trinity College, Cambridge to be interviewed by Dennis Sharma, who was a student of Paul Dirac. And he was a darn fellow of Trinity College. And he was also a lecturer at the time at Cambridge University. And so I was interviewed by Shama in his rooms at Trinity.

And after about 20 minutes, he said, come with me. So we walk across the Trinity Great Court lawns. Only a don can walk on the lawns, but I was with him. I couldn't hear him. And otherwise you had to walk on the gravel path. And taken to the brochure's office, the Trinity and Dennis said, this gentleman, John Moffat, has to be matriculated as a Ph.D. student. And this is without an undergraduate degree nor a master's. So they looked into this person.

He said, but he doesn't have any degree. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No. Okay. So we're matriculating him. And yes. Okay. So we're meticulating him. Yes. Okay. Alright. So I was given

a supervisor, a professor, a supervisor, Fred Hoyle. And I went to see him at St. John's College in his rooms. He said, well, you don't have an undergraduate degree. No. Well, maybe you should think about taking the tripos exams. These are the famous exams,

undergraduate exams at Cambridge. There's something called the mathematics tripos, first part and second part and so on. And, well, I was rather precocious and somewhat arrogant, I should say, as a young man. I felt that. So I said, well, Professor Howe is just going to waste my time because I know all this. So he looked at me dubiously. He went through the tripods himself.

In his biography, Hoyle's biography, he had problems with that, getting through. He was brilliant, of course, but there were very hard exams. And so he's probably thought, well, if I had to do this, why is this person with no 20, 21-year-old, you know, so I can understand his attitude.

So I decided that something should be done about this. So I wrote three papers, okay, within two or three months, and submitted it to the Procines of Cambridge Philosophical Society. And the first paper was very mathematical. It was a generalization of Riemannian geometry. And the other two were my first modified gravity theory. And long

papers. The paper on the, I was trying to unify gravity and electromagnetism in my own way, okay, so I invented this. Not Schrodinger's way. Not Schrodinger's way. Not Schrodinger's way. This is a different way of doing it. And they accepted them. Three papers.

So, I mean, Cambridge Proceedings has an ancient history. I mean, famous mathematicians, mathematicians have published there. Schrodinger published papers there, quantum mechanics. So I went back to Fred Hoyle and I gave him the papers. And he sat and looked at them. And he said, well, forget about the tri-pose exam.

Just continue with what you're doing. And that was it. So I did my own research. I had to go to California to do his steady-state theory and work with William Fowler at Caltech in Pasadena and visit other institutions. So I had to get another supervisor, so I got up to Salam, who was at that time a lecturer at St.

John's College where Dirac was, and I just did my own thing. I attended two courses. I never took any exams. I didn't bother with that. But I attended a couple of, I attended Dirac's course twice because it was brilliant. And I just, quantum chemistry, it was fascinating. I learned quantum chemistry myself. How was Dirac as a teacher, as a lecturer? Very good, very clear, excellent. Did he speak much? He has a reputation in the science.

He started off with a loud voice, and to make sure that he was being heard. And then, especially in the back of the classroom, a lot of the students attended, all the graduate students, research students attended in physics because they were famous. It's based on his book, On Quantum Ecuries. And then his voice would be somewhat muted because he realized that the people were able to understand his speech. Anyway, so I continued my work on general relativity. I worked on the equations of motion in general relativity. It's what's called the Einstein-Nofl-Hoffman method.

And I worked on my unified theory. This was going to be my thesis. And then I switched to particle physics because I was already well ahead with my gravity work. But I started becoming interested in particle physics and quantum field theory. So I started doing quantum field theory. And by the way, the first year as a student there were about six or seven of us in the math department at what's called Bennett Street, Cambridge. And we had a room where we could meet, a big room. And so after a year, we were told to give a lecture. We had seminars every Thursday.

And I had to give a seminar on my work, which was on quantum field theory, not gravity. And I worked on the axiomatics of quantum field theory and what's called Haag's theorem, developed by a German physicist called Hag, Rudolf Hag. And Pali worked on this Hag theorem at the time, Wolfgang Pali. So I gave this lecture, and it was fairly original work. I used notation of Friedman, an American quantum field theorist in New York University, published a book. So I, Dirac, said to me, asked a question. He says, what are those round brackets? I said, this is what you call bras and kets, the triangular brackets. I said, this is what you call bras and kits. The triangular brackets.

And he said, well, that's very interesting. He was fascinated by this. Who invented this? Professor Friedman. Anyway, so so three of them failed.

It was pretty brutal. There was no exam. We were just given a lecture on original physics research. And if you didn't make it, you were out. You were sent down from Cambridge. And so I was one of the ones who survived. So, PhD in 1958. During the course of my work, I met Roy Kerr, the current metric.

He came in from New Zealand to be at Trinity College, where we became friends. And so he said, what should I do? I said, well, what said, what about physics? He was a brilliant mathematician. I said, well, do gravity, general relativity. You don't have to worry too much about the physics at the moment. Because general relativity was not that well developed at this point. We're talking about 1956, 57. So even after Einstein died, general relativity wasn't completely developed? No.

So the general relativity that we learn in university is the fully articulated form that Einstein didn't even put? Yeah, it was being developed, still being developed and so on at the time, mathematically speaking. There was not enough experimental data, you see. It was not that the cosmology was in infancy. During my work, I read a paper by Einstein and Infel, published in 1949. And Infel was a Polish physicist, more so. And I found a mistake. It was wrong. So I got ahold of Roy and I said, have a look

at this. I did the calculations. And he looked at it and he said, yeah, you're right, it's wrong. So we brought a paper together. We thought we should do something about this. And there was a famous paper. There was a famous photograph of Albert Einstein at the front of the at the front of the paper.

It was the Canadian Journal of Mathematics that published the paper. And this photograph was by Karsh, a famous photographer called Karsh. Anyway, so we wrote up this paper and sent it to Physical Review. It was reviewed by Peter Bergman, who was one of Einstein's assistants

at the Institute at one point. He was one of Einstein's assistants at the Institute at one point. He was one of the editors of Physical Review, and he wrote back saying, we can't publish this paper because it besmarks the reputation of famous physicist Albert Einstein. So I got upset about that. And I was angry about that. I was at the verge of leaving physics. I can't deal with this. So because you have responsibility for posterity, younger physicists who can use this work. So I got my PhD.

They were not happy about it. I put this, I started working on it to collect it, okay, and wrote a paper, and I put it into my PhD thesis. And my examiners were not entirely happy about this. But there wasn't anything they could do about it. So I then eventually I got my PhD with an undergraduate degree. By the way, I think the one at that time, maybe still the only student at Trinity to get a PhD without an undergraduate degree.

I think in theoretical physics anyway, that I know of. Maybe that's still true, I don't know. But, so it's fairly unique. The examiners weren't happy about that either, of course, because they had this guinea pig, okay, so to speak, who was going through the system in Cambridge. Is it possible to do this? Okay, well, I did it. So then I got a fellowship from the same Department of Scientific Industrial Research who originally got me to England, a two-year fellowship. That's why I went to Imperial College.

In the meantime, Abdu Salam was made professor at Imperial College London. And here I was. I was put in an office next to his office. I was his first postdoctoral fellow and started working in particle physics and field theory.

But I was worrying about getting a job. At this point I was married to my dad. So I corresponded with John Wheeler, and he suggested I apply for a job at the Institute for Research in Baltimore, Maryland, which I did. They offered me a job. So I went there in 1959 and was at this institute. I was a senior researcher there. I was doing particle physics and field theory.

They also had a math department. And Solomon Lifshitz was the director of the Maths Institute. Then quickly I published papers in particle physics, published a lot of papers rapidly in particle physics. Then I was offered a job at the University of Toronto as an associate professor already, with the promise of being made full professor within a couple of years, which, again, is very unusual. And I got a job there. I had to do teaching, full-time teaching. So I started teaching undergraduate courses,

and I never attended undergraduate courses. But I did okay. And graduate courses and so on. So, that's it. Do you know who Brian Keating is? He's an experimental physicist. Yeah, I read his book, How to Lose the Bell Prize. Quite an amusing, entertaining book.