Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Olaf Dreyer: This One Number Explains the Beginning

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Every episode days early, ad-free, plus my essays: https://curtjaimungal.com This is a podcast on gravity, from the ringing of black holes to the number 0.04. Olaf Dreyer, a theoretical physicist who did his PhD with Abhay Ashtekar and now works in finance, joins to explain how he thinks spacetime and matter emerged together. We discuss black hole spectroscopy, the test he and his collaborators proposed and LIGO later ran. Olaf found that 0.04 in a condensed matter textbook, the same value as the tilt of the cosmic microwave background. He argues this means our world began in a phase transition, and he sketches a new way to implement the equivalence principle. The conversation also covers Robert Laughlin’s bucket of water, what banking taught Olaf about funding physics, and consciousness. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.com - Twitter: https://x.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.gg/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - Ashtekar's Failure Slide - 12:12 - String Theory's Carbon Copies - 19:47 - Don't Kill Ideas Early - 24:51 - Black Hole Spectroscopy Origins - 33:55 - Coherent States Critique - 42:51 - What Counts as Quantum Gravity? - 52:10 - Can AI Truly Create? - 1:02:17 - Consciousness Beyond the Hamiltonian - 1:07:44 - Emergence and the "Little I" - 1:14:16 - Strange Loops and Experience - 1:20:17 - Laughlin's Bucket of Water - 1:27:29 - Cosmological Constant Problem - 1:36:56 - The 0.04 Coincidence - 1:42:26 - Just Numerology? - 1:48:53 - Rethinking the Equivalence Principle - 1:55:38 - Gravity as Gauge Symmetry - 2:05:35 - Don't Be Arrogant About Tools - 2:11:41 - Narrowing Before Collapse - 2:17:34 - How Perimeter Became Normal - 2:23:34 - Next Generation's Burden LINKS: - The World Is Discrete [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6169 - Black Hole Spectroscopy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0309007 - Quasinormal Modes, the Area Spectrum, and Black Hole Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0211076 - Olaf's Papers: https://inspirehep.net/authors/1021936 - Principles of Condensed Matter Physics [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0521794501?tag=toe08-20 - A Different Universe [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/046503828X?tag=toe08-20 - AQFT: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/ - LIGO Black Hole Collision Sound: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2 - LISA: https://lisa.nasa.gov/ - Lee Samuel Finn: https://web.archive.org/web/20141020034610/http://gwastro.org/us/lee-samuel-finn - Rob Laughlin: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1998/laughlin/facts/ - DESY: https://desy.de/index_eng.html - Max Planck Institute: https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en - Perimeter Institute: https://perimeterinstitute.ca/ - Modern Canonical Quantum General Relativity [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0521741874?tag=toe08-20 - I Am a Strange Loop [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0465030793?tag=toe08-20 Full reading list for this episode (all 61 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My rec league goalie says he plays for the love of the game. You gave up six goals last week, Steve? Maybe play to win, huh? Like with Bet365, I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. Steve, Bet365, the home of winning early. Must be 19 and older, Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca or call 1866-5-1-2,600. Terms and conditions apply. It was the weirdest as thing. cannot possibly be a coincidence. There's something missing. This number, this 0.04, is the thing that we see in the sky.

When I saw this, I was like, what? This is physicist Olaf Dreyer, who earned his PhD at Penn State and helped develop black hole spectroscopy. That is, testing Einstein's theory through the ringing of black holes. His top two papers are some of the most talked about in the field of black hole spectroscopy

and loop quantum gravity. When I asked him about how he views the field of high-energy physics, he said, I want the new stuff. Don't be arrogant about tools. You can't kill things too early. Just sort of be open.

On this channel, Ikeh-Imungle interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. I want to understand nature, not to abstract math. Today, I'm thrilled to bring you Olaf Dreyer on how space-time and matter emerged together. And even toward the end, we talk about the puzzle of consciousness. How could we ever know? I mean, I don't know that you're conscious. There's a slide that's been burning your memory. Yes.

It's been very important for me. So maybe like a short backstory, right? So I'm from Hamburg, and in Hamburg there was this group of theoretical physicists, and they called themselves algebraic quantum field theorists. And it was an attempt to make quantum theory rigorous, which appealed to me somehow. I'm like this mathematical kind of guy. So I became a student in that group.

And it was, in some ways, it was great. I mean, Buchholz was maybe the best advisor I've ever had. He's like, Buchholz is the professor working on that algebraic-confield theory. But that field, I think it's fair to say, never produced any result that is, of node. You have three generation of people working in that field and they produce nothing

you need to know. In algebraic QFT? In algebraic quantum field theory. And that's different than axiomatic QFT? It's a bit different because in the fundamental object in algebraic quantum field theory is an algebra, just an abstract algebra. And all the physics supposedly is in the mapping of space-time regions to algebras.

Right? That means very abstract and almost says nothing, right? In algebraic, sorry, in quantum field theory, in axiomatic quantum field theory, you are a bit closer to the standard quantum field theory in that the fundamental objects are actual fields, right? The actual fields. And what about the recent work with Witten and Pennington with type 3 algebra? like of the past five years or so?

That I'm not familiar with. I'm sure this is very different from what Haag did then. I see. I see. It's a completely... I mean, it's a very different thing. There's almost no... I mean, they're their own group, like,

completely separated from the rest of theoretical physics. Okay. So I was there, student. I loved. I mean, there was this thing of sitting with Buchholz in this office on the blackboard and figuring stuff out. It's like the best advisor experience I've ever had. But as I said, I think that they didn't produce anything. And I didn't go into physics to not produce anything.

I want to understand nature, not to abstract math. All right, that's different things. And so I was getting kind of like nervous. Like, okay, what am I doing here? What is this? And then Abai came to Hamburg. Abay Ashtika. Abayashdaka.

I didn't really know about, like very remotely knew about him. And I think he was visiting Nikolai. Herman Nikolai. Does that, do you know him? No. He was at that stage, was the professor at Daisy.

at the Institute for Arthetical Physics and then later became the director director of the Max Pag Institute in Berlin which is like a super important position and he played a role sort of in their sort of time of string theory when it was like super hyped and they had one of the big string theory conferences

in Berlin okay so he invites Abai he gives a talk and I don't remember anything of talk except this one slide. And this one slide was like a sort of a road map to the Abai-Ahtika quantum gravity

program. And so he said like, okay, first we're going to do this and then we do that and then this is the way to like success. And if this doesn't work out, then there was this one corner which I remember, which was almost like a waterfall. Okay, so if this, if we

end up here, then everything falls apart and it won't work. and that to me was the most important thing because it told me that there was a person who considered the possibility of failure and to me this was always the I always thought that of course you need to consider

the possibility of failure because we are in a business that sees sort of fundamental progress only every what, 50 years, 100 years or something like that. So why don't you point out, what do you mean that we need to concern ourselves with failure? We need to be prepared for that, right? We're doing something that is so rarefied, right? We're trying to understand nature.

What I mean is, isn't it clear that as a subfield of science, you prepare yourself with failure all the time, anything you put out as tentative? Yeah, but we don't act like that. Well, we don't act like that. that's not what we do. And I think the string theory, except for your interview with Suskind, right, which I think is a remarkable thing. Because most of the time, that's not what happens.

Most of the time, people invest decades of their lives into a field, and they realize it's not really working out. But they don't say it. Right? And they don't say it. Why don't they say it? They say it because they don't say it because they have now post-archs, they have people depending on them, they have money depending on it,

they have their own careers depending on it, their own sort of appreciation by the world, maybe a book contract, stuff like that. All of that hangs on this program that they invested decades in. So they know that something is not working, but instead of saying that, which would be the thing, to do because that allows other people to then not invest in that and work maybe on something new. Right? They don't say that.

What they say is, no, it's all great. We are just, we just need to work harder. And then you get these things where people say like, oh, maybe in a hundred years or something, we're going to be there. And so I think it's obviously true. that working in theoretical physics is sort of fraud, right? You need to know that there are no guarantees. You can be the most intelligent. You can work as hard as anyone else.

But there's no guarantee that you will find a path. Yeah, so I think that this is important, right? And I think the proper way to address this is to give it your best. But also recognize that the real thing that you might be contributing to science is not the result, but the fact that you were good in teaching. You taught new students and you prepared the next generation for the search. You guided the institution properly, all these things. These things you can do well, no matter the result.

the result might come or it might not that you just can try give your best and see what comes out but there are no guarantees right and I always thought that of course it must be like that because of our story if you look at the history that the timescales between

like breakthroughs is decades or more right it's like between Newton and Einstein or even between special activity and generativity, there's like decades where you think and you might find something or not.

Who knows? So I think the Are you speaking about fundamental physics as distinct from just general physics right now? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then furthermore, are you speaking about

both loop quantum gravity and string theory and virtually any other approach to quantum gravity? Or you single... Okay. So, I mean, they, so I think that, I mean, they are, they were proposals, right? They were attempts, right? People came up with this idea and said, and people got excited about it, and they did it. They worked on it and tried to make it make it work.

But as long as you don't get all the way and make it, contact with this world we're living in, you're not done. And there's no guarantee that you get there, right, that there isn't. And the slide that Abai presented was very appealing because it signaled to me that this part of the job, he understood, right? He understood that there's a possibility of failure. And that is something that I had never heard before from the algebra. con-fuel theorists.

Don't even in string theory, even in a first lecture, they say, well, they say something like, suppose we add another parameter so that it's not a world line, it's a world sheet, suppose we add tau. They don't say, the world is such that tau exists. So do you think that then that phrasing starts to go away? Because to me, it seems like all conditionals, if then, if then. And the if they may not obtain. Well, they might say that, right?

but they don't act like that. They don't, um, so they might say that this is just one attempt and it's just, but de facto, what happened was that 80, 90% of the funding in that, in sort of quantum, sorry,

in quantum gravity kind of research, went into this one direction. And I think that, okay, you can do that. And maybe you should, if people are excited about it, but there's still no guarantee, right? There's no guarantee.

And I think now, I mean, now it's like a long time has passed. Definitely since the early days of Searing Theory, but also definitely since the, I don't know if you remember that, there was this time when Witten gave, was talking about M theory and stuff like that. And that was an excitement,

which was just like palpable. You could like tell. And those were the days where I was at Perimeter. And one of the cool things at Perimeter was that even as a postdoc, you were part of the selection of the new set of postdocs. So I read all these proposals, research proposals, of string theorists, loop quantum gravity people and stuff like that. And this was the weirdest experience of my life

because you could take the research proposals of all the string theories and then they read like carbon copies. Every one was the same. What are we doing? There was literally no distinction between them. It was the weirdest thing. Everybody was doing the same thing, which was...

And theory. And it was almost the same sentence. It was almost the... What is happening? So even if you have... Even that is now 20 years past, and nobody's excited about that anymore, right? That that has also kind of like gone away and then... And why do you think that is?

Well, because it didn't deliver, right? You want a result. You want, like, physics. You don't want something in the airs. You want, like, okay, can you solve physics problems? There's stuff that happened, right? It's stuff that we saw, like CNB stuff or something. or you wanted to make contact with this world.

And you didn't. Wouldn't the counter be that there's so many consistency checks that string theory is passed that other theories of quantum gravity haven't passed? And it's extremely non-trivial to have two of these consistency checks, let alone four or five? Yeah, I don't buy any of that.

I don't buy any of that. It feels weak. It feels weak. I mean, do some physics. Do physics. Don't tell me you have 10 to the 500 vacuar and for some abstract reasons

one of them clearly must be our world. Okay. Okay, how about I count something else? How about I count black hole microstates? And I'm Strominger and Vafa. In 96 or so. That's it. I mean, that created like a lot of

work, right? That was excitement. And it was cool. It was cool. But then what? Then? Right.

It's, I don't know. I feel like that I mean, there was this time where this was like the number one question, right?

There was like, you had Hawking's magazine Hawking's result and the question was, okay, why? These are calculations in classical GR, why on earth would you get an entropy?

I mean, literally it makes no sense, right? An entropy means there are microstates somewhere. What microstates? You're just looking at a classical... So it feels like it's the most important question. It's like an obvious hint. And it's something people looked for. And so luquantum gravity has an answer,

one that I also worked on with this sort of connection with quasi-normal modes and stuff like that, which I don't know, we could get into. But I feel like it's not enough of a constraint. It didn't, in the end, it didn't pick the theory.

It's, I don't know, I feel like these questions, they kind of, they were sort of exciting. Everybody talked about them. And I feel they run their course. They're not,

at least I'm not moved by them anymore. They feel like, you know, like, they feel like in a nice 80s pop song. You know, like, wham. Every once in a while you hear it on the radio and go like, yeah, this was nice.

And I feel like this black hole question is like that. That's a good analogy. Yeah, it's like, okay, cool. Now what? And yeah, it's maybe time to revisit that, but first go another way.

Like, open it up. But to be fair, any song, I mean, to take this analogy a bit further, any song, modern song, it ends, and you also say, okay, but now what? No. No, what I mean is,

what I want is, I don't want to tune the station always to the classics. I want the new stuff, you know, the kid on the blog that's trying something. And that is something that I feel is happening now. And I think you are part of that sort of development because, so just checking out some of your videos, I'm seeing people with new ideas. And I think that that's important.

They might not be right. But as I said before, there's no guarantee anyway. Actually, Suskind himself told me that at first he was thinking, well, maybe you shouldn't listen to the weirdos, and he was just being a bit sarcastic with the word weirdo. He wasn't meaning anything demeaning. He was just playing with his words. And then he said, well, maybe you should.

But it was a maybe. But still, that's to come from one of the founding fathers of string theory, that's huge. It's huge. And I think that part, it's statements like that that make me really appreciate him because I think

I mean he was a weirdo he was a weirdo but he was a guy who said don't look at like lines them it's strings it's like what

there's obviously a weird idea before people worked on head worked it out and saw that there's something there okay and that's how it should be So, something just happened recently. The Economist sat down with Elon Musk, who told them that AI will surpass human intelligence within five years, and then in 10, humans won't be running the world.

It went viral, and I recommend you check it out. See, the Economist is more than a magazine. Actually, I subscribe to the Economist's annual subscription. Their science and AI coverage is among the best that I found anywhere, and I say that as someone who reads plenty of it, they even covered how dark energy may be weakening with time. If that holds up, it completely changes our understanding of the universe's fate. Those are exactly the kinds of questions that we explore every week on this channel. Now, the Economist is, of course, known for global affairs, both political and economic reporting. Interestingly and flatteringly, Toe is one of the only podcasts that the Economist partners with.

So, as a Toe listener, you get their exclusive sale, 35% off the annual subscription. This is not a deal they have just anywhere. head to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash toe for 35% off. I mean, people say, if you interview almost any physicist in high energy, they'll say, well, we do need new ideas. But then you want new ideas to also pass some tests. Yeah, but this is where it gets tricky. Because the point about that is that if you apply the tests to early,

you kill the baby in the crib. You need to let it breathe for a bit, right? Just like, if you always just say, well, yeah, but you didn't think of that, so you are a crackpot, which is always possible, right? Because, I mean, if you really, imagine quantum gravity is not something that we considered before. It's like really something different.

then you have to think about all the theoretical physics since 1915. Of course you haven't thought about everything, right? You can't. It's too much. But how else would you make progress? So you start with something and then there's a problem. Okay, let's think, is it a killer? Is it not a killer?

So you don't even have the test. You don't know what the proper questions are in the beginning. And that's why I think it's important that you allow for this sort of wild patch, you know, where things are kind of like weird. I always have to think about the papers that Einstein wrote between 1995 and 15. Yes. He only knew about differential geometry in the last two years. So in the time between, they're kind of like weird papers.

He's talking about physics, but the math is not there. So you recognize some things, other things are not quite there. And it required this additional sort of ingredient. So if you had in 19, I don't know, 1908 and said, yeah, well, but Newton said, and then this, and of course you didn't think about, so you don't pass the test, you could have killed it. But that's, you know what I mean, right?

It's sort of, it's easy to say that certain things need to pass certain tests and stuff like that, but there's a danger, and you need to be aware of that danger. You can't kill things too early. So let's get back to the, slide what happened after? I applied at Penn State and I was accepted, which was very cool. So that's why my life on this side of the Atlantic happened.

The Canada part had to wait a bit, but I got Penn State and then eventually I made it to the center and became a biased student. and yeah it was a very good time. I think the center is something that a bike created and it is a thing really to his credit. There was like a really good place for science. Like good mix of people,

good atmosphere, high level, and that was something he did. It was very impressive, I think. Yeah. I mean, Penn State is kind of a weird place. Have you ever been? No. It's

I mean, it's in the middle of Pennsylvania. Which means if you want to get to any city, like a real city, you drive a minimum of three hours through woods. There's nothing. Okay. Nothing. And then you get there, And the biggest structure in Penn State is the football stadium.

It's bigger than any soccer stadium in Germany. So when the Netany Lions have a game, it's like 120,000 people show up. It's crazy. It's like a religion. So that's like the most important thing. That religion and bars. and there's a university too somewhere but right

which was a kind of an interesting life it was kind of fun because there was nothing to do so you always hung out with the same people and it was fun and we did some good science there I think and how does this lead to your Galileo moment

right okay so there were two sort of things that were done at the center one was quantum stuff, which is the Aztecateka program of quantum gravity, luquan gravity, so you ought to have people like Lee

and Carlo and all the new quantum gravity people would be there. And the other part was classical gravity. And the thing that just started to get going was gravity wave physics. So these were the days before gravity waves had been

observed. Right? But LIGO was financed. It wasn't running yet. but there was money for LIGO. So people were thinking about it. And one of them was Sam Finn. And he taught a course on gravity waves. And it was a great course.

So we went through like all the basic papers and all the sort of basic math about it. And it was just a basic introduction to gravity waves. there's one fun so if you ever read there's one of the weirdest papers which is a paper by hawking seam hawking about gravity ways

and it's the basics and it just collects results right and after every result there's an asterisk and in the box it says this is not a result that we derived at but

it's a result by this person Yes. Whose name I've forgotten. Was all the same person? It's always the same person. So basically there's this paper that has Hawking as an author, but none of the results are his.

And it's because this one guy was, I don't know, too lazy or whatever, to write them down, write the paper himself. And it's a good paper, right? All these are like the important results in like the early sort of gravity wave stuff and they're all good

it's all way written but none of them are by walking it's fun to read just for that okay so we did the course and as part of the course we did two projects so me and Badri Kushnan and Sam Finn and some other people

we did this thing where we said okay there's this thing called the quasinal modes of a black hole. I don't know if you know what they are. I know the paper. Okay. So just... And by the way, that paper is in the introduction. So if you all have skipped the introduction, just go rewatch the introduction to get an understanding as to what this episode's about. Okay. So the... It's 23 years old now, that paper. It's 23 years. Jesus. Jesus. Well, I think it got published in 204, but I think you've finished writing it in 203. Yeah, it had a story because we basically abandoned it after the course.

And then we said, like, after we were already had our PhDs, went on to postdocs, we said, like, no, we should write it down. Me and Badri. And we did. So that took us some, I don't know how long it took a year or whatever to write it on. So the idea is that the black holes have this extremely interesting spectrum. of excitations, which are called quasanormal moles. So if you just have a schwaist-shild black hole, it's a discrete spectrum.

It's almost like quantizing a harmonic oscillator or something like that. So it has this discrete set of frequencies, and frequencies, I mean like real frequency plus damping. So it's almost like ringing a bell, right? It rings with a certain frequency, but it dies off. And that's what the black hole horizon does. It rings, and then the ring becomes weaker, weaker, weaker, and that's it. Right.

Which is cool, because it's discreet, you can use that to sort of reverse engineer information about the black hole. And what we said is if you observe two of these frequencies, you can find not only the mass, of the black hole, but you can also find this angular momentum. Right? And it's very cool. It's a cool observation, and basically it all relies on the fact

that the spectrum of quasanomals of a black hole has this discrete structure. Can you find its charge? Then you would need one more. Well, you could. Yeah, in principle. I mean, the, the spectrum, spectrum changes.

The spectrum changes. Yeah, but we didn't look at that. I didn't look at that. I mentioned the charge is roughly neutral, though. It's always neutral. For astronomical stuff, it doesn't matter, which is why we didn't care. So we wrote that up,

and basically the expectation, our expectation was. So this was before any gravity waves were seen, right? So we made like a rough estimation of how many objects there would be that could be observed with LIGO, which would be the first detector that would go online.

And we were like, no, this is never going to happen. So we say, and you can see it in the text because we basically did the calculation for Lisa, which is this space-based gravity wave detector,

which the European space agency I think is going to launch, which is an amazing thing, right? The arm length of that thing is like five million kilometers. is an amazing engineering thing. It's amazing, it's really amazing.

So we did the calculation for that. But then the LIGO goes online, they observe gravitational waves, and then they actually see these things, like what we proposed, right? You see two frequencies, you use them to derive the angular momentum and mass of the black hole. call. And yeah, it happened. It's there. And I don't know, they did. So if you take the observed frequency and instead of having like gravity waves, you just make sound waves with the same

frequency and decay, you get like a sound which I can send you. Yeah, so we'll play it on screen right now. Yeah. It's very, it's very short. Like it's like, but it's very cool. And that's actually seen. And then now it's it's like it's like a. It's like a. It's, it's like a screen. It's, it's, it's like a standard method. And I find that this is one of these, this is, I would compare it to this moment when Galileo had the telescope, because this was the first time that you could look outside in like this new way, completely new way. And gravity waves are like that. Right. There's, no one has ever looked at the universe with these kind of waves, with these kind of signals.

And now we do, and it's just an instrument. It's a new instrument, and observations are getting better, we're understanding the instruments better, new instruments are coming online, new theories are being developed, the whole thing, right? It's like a new thing, and who knows what's going to happen with that? So what's going to happen?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But this is not the thing that I focused on, right? So Badri, the one, the co-author, he sort of went in that direction and followed that. So he's in the team with, he might even be the lead author of the team that did the observation or the calculation for the observation. Sorry, I said, what will happen to something you just said, we don't know what will happen. I meant to say, what do you hope will happen?

well that something is observed that nobody is thought about you know like the kind of thing where you go like oh shit you forgot something or something like that

but my I mean my my decision was a different one right which was not so I liked that stuff but I was always more attracted to this basic question which is that

it's obviously a problem that GR and quantum mechanics are not compatible or are sort of fighting each other. That to me was always clear. Something had to be done there. Something we need to understand this. This is like clearly a big question. And since, so now we are at the stage

where, okay, I'm at Penn State and I feel like they're also realizing we're not making the progress we wanted to make. The question that is the hard question

is how do you derive a classical space time from these quantum states? And I felt like the way the discussion was done was not correct. not right. In loop quantum gravity?

In luke quantum gravity. Yeah. Why? Okay, so there's a technical answer and there's a sort of, like, just observational answer. So the technical answer is that what do you need to do, right? So you have all these states, and you've solved the diffeomorphism constraint. And in lukechronic gravity, there's this next step, which is the Hamiltonian constraint, which is sort of the dynamics of the theory.

And only after that, you expect there to be a classical space time. So the way this was done when I was there. So Thomas Tiemann was proposing something which I thought was obviously not correct. was obviously flawed. So do you know this paper, this one of the earliest papers on quantum mechanics by Schroeninger? There's this, there's this observation

that he made, which is that if you take the ground state of a harmonic oscillator and you move it along the path of the classical oscillator, that thing, right? So you move the center of the of the Gaussian on the path of

the harmonic classical harmonic oscillator, that thing solves the Schrodinger equation. Which is amazing because basically it means, okay, cool, it looks like the harmonic oscillator is like centered on this classical path, only that there's a distribution, but the distribution moves like the classical particle. Right? Yes.

And there's a footnote in this paper that Schrodinger did. And the footnote says, this is true for the harmonic oscillator. oscillator and it's likely to be true for every other quantum mechanical system. And that's just not true. Right? But this remark sent physicists down the wrong paths for like 100 years. And one of them was Thomas Tiemann.

Because what he did was he said, okay, I'm going to construct a Korean state. This is what these things are called for the... A Korean state. Korean state. Korean. Korean. Yeah. Did I say Korean?

It should be introduced. So he constructed this Korean state, which is something that is, just like in the case of the harmonic oscillator, centered on a classical geometry and peaked sort of at this classical geometry. And he said, okay, this is a classical state. But that were true if gravity was a harmonic oscillator,

which it is not. So you're sort of doing the trivial part. You're saying like, okay, we solve the trivial part, which is finding something that's peaked at the classical geometry. But that doesn't help you anything, because that thing, when it encounters dynamics, will not stay there. It will do anything.

It will not. So, okay, what have you done? And to me, there was always, there was like clear and I tried to say that but it was then you you got this feeling

there was like this politics happening right no but Thomas Tiemann said so we need to I'm not understanding you want or Thiemann or sorry T-man

I've always read these yeah T-man is a German so probably you said like in your mind you said like Thiemann because of T-H yeah

okay or maybe even Thiemann yeah so anyhow what's wrong with having your what I'm understanding of what you're saying is that the quantum expectation value needs to equal the classical expectation

or whatever you would observe classically. What's wrong with that? No, that would be fine, but you want that to be the case not just at one time. But you want it to be, I mean, Minkowski space is Mokovsky space now and in an hour and in two hours.

And you want that to be the case also with your quantum thing, right? that like just like with a harmonic oscillator where it stays like concentrated on the classical path. So what you want is you want to you want to have it concentrated on the classical geometry, turn on the dynamics and stay concentrated there. And that there's no reason why that would happen. There's no reason. I would bet money that it wouldn't.

But I mean, the point was that, of course, we could never do that, right, do this dynamics. And, I mean, the thing that I think, which is what led me then to some other way of thinking about this, is the way I would think about that is that, okay, if you want to get a space time, what you need is you need excitations that you can probe, that can give you. you information about the space time. So the classical example would be light. You can build a space time just out of sort of light and their interactions. If you have light cones, you're almost at a Minkowski space.

Stuff like that, right? But that, what would be required is that you solve the dynamics. It's not a system, it's not something that you can do without the dynamics. And the discussion was always just about the dynamics, the dynamics, the dynamics was not part of it. And I didn't, I was like, this is not right. And that for me was sort of the point where I thought,

okay, just do something else. Just think about something else. For me, the most difficult part about most of the conversations is what happens after. That is, the follow-ups that I'm supposed to send or the ideas that I have on walks, especially that that just escape my mind by the time I sit down. Fortunately, I've been using Plod, that's P-L-A-U-D. In fact, I have three of them. I stopped trying to hold everything in my head, and it helps me be present in this world,

because I don't have to reach for a screen to transcribe. I can just dictate seamlessly with haptic feedback. There's the Note Pin S, which is a wearable, and it's completely hands-free. Again, I use that when I'm moving around when I'm out for a walk, when I'm cycling. I even have another one just for the shower, so whenever I don't want to pull out my phone. And when I need to capture phone calls, or just more intentional conversations, I use the Note Pro. It actually magnetically attaches to phones. It records calls, meetings, and keeps everything organized.

Plot turns my thoughts into something that I can use, like summaries, action items, follow-ups. It doesn't give me the mental overhead of having to be. to reconstruct everything later, completely diminished and most of it forgotten. So if your work lives in conversations, whether that's research, medicine, law, or just a huge amount of meetings, I recommend you look into it. It's also built around enterprise security standards, SLC2, HIPAA, and GD-R compliant. Check it out at plod.a-a-I-S-U-R-T. That's P-L-A-U-D-R-T, and use code Kirt for a 15% discount. This video is sponsored by Plaud-A-I-I-S-U-R-T-R-R-E-R-R-T. This video is sponsored by thought. All opinions are my own.

Give people a flavor of what it means to do quantum gravity. What I mean to say is what makes some theory, you're handed a theory, and then you say, yes, this is a theory of quantum gravity. Yeah. So in other words, playing with a 52 deck of cards, a 52 card deck.

There are queens, there's jacks. So let's say jacks are quantum gravity. But then there are different types of jacks. It's strange. It's not just quantum gravity. There's string theory is a type of quantum gravity. But that's gravity is a type of quantum gravity. Yes, but that's the point.

I mean, that's the thing that I think one should rejoice in. So, okay, so let me try to say that in a way that it's not a well-post question. Right, it's not a well-post question. It's not like, so for someone like Ashtaka or Timan or Karl or Lee or something like that, finding quantum gravity is finding a way to take the classical metric and sort of put a head on it, meaning that to turn it into an operator on a Hilbert space or something like that, right? Whatever you have to do, that's what you want to do. That's quantum gravity.

Right? And, I mean, if you look at the T-Mine wrote a book, and on the first page is basically what he writes. And that kind of thing attracts people that want clear definitions for what they do. That's like, okay, I understand this. It's a mathematical problem. You give me metrics, I want to turn them into operators, and that's it. Right. But maybe it's not like that.

So the string theorist, at least at first, they want to look at that. We have strings, and there are these spin-two excitations, which are gravity. and that's the thing. And there are other people who do other things. So I think that is the interesting part, is that it is not the... You will only understand what chrono-gravity is when you have it. Going back to the cards analogy,

what makes the Jack of Hearts and the same type of card in a sense as Jack of Spades and Jack of Clubs is that they're all jacks. So what I mean is you're looking at all these different approaches to quantum gravity. What is it

that makes them all the same? What are they trying to do? You mean what makes them quantum gravity? So the point is that you need gravity. Gravity has to P and somewhere. Which is very clear.

We know what gravity is. So I know that this is more a semantic, but I'm interested in semantics. So someone like Jonathan Oppenheim who says, I have an approach to solving or reconciling or harmonizing quantum, the quantum, the quantum with gravity, but it is not a theory of quantum gravity.

I find that interesting. Exactly, me too. This is exactly the point, which is it is not clear what the right path is. And he takes one path. And it could be the correct path. and this is what I find interesting about this time which is that

people have looked at Stern Theory luquine gravity for 40 years or something like that it's still kind of like lacking it doesn't feel right and now people try different things and often I was one of them the what's his name?

Frederick Schuller? Yes so here's something else I don't know if I just spent a day with him at perimeter actually. Yeah, right, good. I mean, we were together at Perimeter. And I don't know, I'm going to actually, now that I think about it, I should contact him again.

We met in Frankfurt everyone, so I should meet him again. So he has another thing. Then there are other people. I mean, so Roger, with this sort of attempt, it's like another facet. And I find this, this is how it should be. right this is how it should be now do you think this is how it should be

with the goal of ultimately finding V1 yes of course but this is how it should be you should have like different attempt not I mean it's

it's because you seem to be struggling just with the word like quantum mechanic which makes me believe that you're maybe the also of this type that feels like it should be defined

from the beginning which it is not. So since I know of this finance sort of experience, right, maybe that helps, right? So if you have a bank, there are these two parts in a bank. They are the risk managers, and they are the traders.

And these are totally different people. You look at them, you spend five minutes with them, and you can tell, okay, you are trading, you're a risk manager. And what really sets them apart is that the risk managers think that the answer to a question is in a mathematical model, in a regulation, it's known, it's somewhere out there, you just need to do your homework and write it down.

And the trader doesn't care about any of that. He goes like, I can make money there and I don't care what you think. And yeah, I know what's right and what's wrong. Right. And so the bank becomes stable because it's sort of balancing these two forces. Right? You need both, right? Because the trader will bankrupt the bank.

He's left alone in like no time. And this guy will never make money. Right? So you need both. And I feel like that physics is like that. Right. So that people who go into quantum mechanics and look for a definition, like this, this, is quantum mechanics.

Like, we need to turn G into G head. These are like the risk people, right? They think that the answer can be derived from smarts, math, you know, like axiom or whatever, and that's it. That's all that is required. But then there are other people,

like Suskind or something like that, right, who go like, eh, No, gravity is this. And so this is, I think, interesting because we say quantum gravity, but that means different things to different people. And as long as we haven't gone all the way, we will not know. We will not know. When I was speaking to Daniel Dennett, a philosopher.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's dead. Yeah, yeah. No, I really like this stuff. I was asking him once for a definition of something. I don't recall what it was. Could be consciousness, could be free will. And then he said, you know, even though he has his own definition,

he said, I think philosophers get too bogged down in definitions, which is quite surprising for an analytic philosopher to say. Whether he's an analytic philosopher is another issue, but he's more on the western end of philosophy. He's not on the continental side. Right. And he said, what you should do is you should circle a problem from any point. of you and get a handle on it, don't try to come to an early conclusion as to what the

definition is, because it could blind you. Exactly. That's exactly, and I think that is exactly the mistake we made. But it's what happens. What are you going to do, right? I think that the last 40 years are like that. We accepted something. Quantum gravity is X, be it strength, strength or low quantum gravity.

and that's all we did. Now, wouldn't the mathematician in you or the German in you, wouldn't it also say, look, if we don't know what we're talking about, how can we talk about it? If we're not defining our terms, then we're speaking... Yes, but this comes back to the thing that I said before, which is that you need to allow for this period where you don't know what you're talking about.

And if you shut that down too early, if you start with a definition or you kill it. There might be years where you talk about stuff that only you understand. You're not really understanding it, right? But you have a feeling and it's not, and you need to sort of like perform it. So in other words, good ideas and bad ideas are born of the same birth, namely groping around in the dark, tripping over something, and stumbling your way forward.

Yes. That's right. That's right. And I think that that is the, that is what makes it great. Is that. Without that, it would be, I don't know,

you know, something that chat GPT could do. But it's that. And the fact that you don't know, that makes it great. Do you have many thoughts on A. and physics. I just interviewed actually in the spot that you're sitting,

Jacob Zimmerman, a mathematician. Right, right, yeah. About AI and math, but how about AI and physics and its impact? So my hope, fear, is that it's a tool that can be very helpful, but that this thing that we just talked about, you know, with the groping in the dark

and sort of finding a new way, will not be done by AI. That's my hope. That's my hope. So in which case, it's fine, right? So if you have... That's your hope is interesting that you say that. Yeah, because, I mean, I had this discussion, I mean, with Cole, right?

Cole Fury, and she was like, nah, I think they can do, like, genuine novelty, these things. And if they can, then we are in a different game, right? I mean, for me, if I, so if, I don't know, if I look at texts written by AI, art produced by AI, it's sort of fine. Stuff happens.

But it's not great. There's something missing, something, it's kind of like generic. It sounds nice. But, The punchline is missing. I don't know if you ever had that experience with AI written.

Witten had a paper about the Jones polynomial, I think in the 80s. Editor's note, I have a substack on this very topic of Witten's most, one of his most famous papers on the Jones polynomial, something that helps secure him the Fields Medal, and it's on screen, and in the description, it's on substack, kurtjymungle.com. I don't know if AI would be able to come up with something like that. Exactly.

This is the key question, right, because if it, can. We are in a different, this this is really like a sort of singularity event that we're living through. Right? So the question is, I mean, the oldest counter is

we think we're novel. I mean, what are we doing that's actually creative? Most of creativity is recombinations of something old. It's like the invention, we think it's the invention of a new basis vector, but actually it's the combination of previously existing basis vectors. Some linear combination.

I don't know. I mean, so let's take some example. I mean, one of the greatest inventions, just to come back to gravity, is this step that Einstein made from special activity to generativity. That, I think, is just nuts. It's crazy. I think it's, I mean, this thing that you replace a force

with this manoeuvre, fault and geometry is a step. I mean, it's gorgeous. And I don't think if AI could come up with something like that, right? So you give it the problem and it goes like in a completely weird direction, which nobody asked for, right? I mean, before Einstein wrote this down, nobody asked for money faults. Nobody. And you can tell from Einstein's writing that he's not that familiar with Manifolds himself.

Right. This is all kind of new stuff to him and you realize that. Right. Any, any, I don't know, second year math student is more proficient in sort of geometry than he was. So if I could come up with something like that, then we're in a new world. And it is my sincere hope that it does not. You hope this because... Then it's not clear what... Because I think that part of what makes humans great is that ability. So I spent the last couple of days in the art gallery of Ontario. And it's kind of nice. It's a good place. And that's another kind of place where humans create something, right?

There's genuine creation. and they're like steps, right? You go through there and they're like, wow, right? I mean, currently they have this impressionist exhibition. And that's something, right? All of a sudden, there's a completely new way to look at the world. But you see that in the decades, in the centuries before, too, right? So that gives humans a kind of dignity, a kind of worth, right, that comes from this ability.

to create. And if AI can do that, our sense of self is different. We're different people. It's a different thing. I mean, at that point, can't we just ask the AI? Well, given that you're infinitely intelligent relative to us, what is our purpose?

Right? Can you just ask what can we do? Forty-two. I mean, look, Eric Frum, there's this person named Eric Fromm, a philosopher, and he said there's two modes, there's the having mode, so you want to acquire, and then there's a being mode where you're just being.

But I think there's also a doing mode, and I think that the doing mode is something that AI could do, it could do human tasks, but I don't think it could be humans, better than humans. What does it mean be? I mean, so the thing that I was thinking about was this, was particular this creation part.

So the one thing that people do with AI, which I do too, is write code. Right? So, and it's quite amazing, right? So you tell it to write something. It still blows my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's amazing. But, but, so one example was that

was something I recently did where I replaced or introduced some sort of graphical language to describe like waterfalls and asset-backed security, right? So it's just a nice way of changing it and playing with it and stuff like that, right? Which is an idea that is new, right? We're not talking quantum gravity, just a new idea. It didn't exist before. and so I can help you implementing that, but could it come up with that idea?

And so far I think the answer is clearly no, right? You would have to tell it, I don't know, you have to give it guiding questions, like what would be the best way to describe it, maybe it can come up with something. But I think that this thing that I did, which is a human did, is like a genuine idea.

It's a genuine sort of new thing. And if I could do that, like an art in science, then we are in a different ballgame. Then we're in a different ballgame. And it's interesting. It's a really interesting time. And we will know at some point, right? We will know.

It's, yeah. I mean, so there was this time like 20 years ago, or something like that. When people said, like, had discussions about consciousness. Some people said, okay, once they pass the touring test,

we know what consciousness is. Computers now do that, but I don't think anyone argues that we know what consciousness is. Yes, that's right. That's right. And so I think that we are, they do something,

but there's something that is still lacking. It might come, who knows? But I don't think we're there yet. I don't think it does that. Theories of Everything is brought to you by Mod. Mod prescribes a once or twice daily medaphanil drink that can keep you energized and alert throughout the day. Here's the mechanism.

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we find quantum gravity, like tomorrow. I don't think it would change the world. It's just a theory, and people would have an attitude towards it that is just like string theory. It doesn't change the world, right? It's not, if we find out what consciousness is, that's a whole different thing. Because right now you can still be of their opinion

that consciousness is something completely different from the material world. There are even people that say that, right? That consciousness is like a charge. You know, like it's like an additional thing on top of the material world. And it could be true, right? Honestly, it's one of the most interesting science questions

there is. And it's interesting because we don't even know conceptually how to talk about it. You could invite a philosopher and you could spend hours defining your starting point and I find that fascinating. There's literally no way, right?

I can write down the Hamiltonian that describes you. Sure, right? The carbon atoms, the oxygen, the whatever's in you, right? It's an expression, it's fine. and I would have in principle I could evolve that

right I could say okay this is this is Kurt there you go and I would have no way of knowing that that thing would be conscious I have no way of going from this description that I think is fundamental

and all on like everything about you is in the Cimotonia What is the reason that is so difficult because you need to switch then you need to find this eye. Right? So when I write down the Hamiltonian of view, there's this external point of view.

Right? It's just coordinates and forces between the atoms, whatever. And it's an external point of view. And that point of view stays external forever, which is a problem. Right? So all my machine,

that I have is machinery that doesn't allow me to switch the perspective. Right? So my point, so what would be the job? The job would be to find an eye in there, right? They sort of to switch the perspective and say, okay, there's like this conscious eye that is part of that thing. Does the eye need to be self-aware? That is the self-awareness. So, I mean, that's a bit tricky because then it is.

No shit. What I mean is there are animals who I assign consciousness to experience. They can experience pain, for instance, that are sentient. Yeah. But that I wouldn't say they're self-aware. Well, I don't know. Yeah, that's hard to say, right? Because, I mean, I think the coolest thing are these experiments where you put a dot on them

and then have them look in the mirror. That's a fraction of the animals that exist that pass that test. Exactly. It's tiny. But they are, I think that that means that they have like an idea. There's like an eye. I mean, yeah, I know some people say that. I don't know if that implies that they haven't a concept of self.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, right? So because we have, the thing that matters is that our most important experience of the world is consciousness. Right? We wake up and it's there. and we don't know how it relates to the other stuff we do in science. And I think that's fascinating. Do you think the problem is the scientific method as it currently stands

is not suited to understand first-person perspectives? Or do you think it's that we don't have a definition of consciousness going back to this defining? Yeah. Okay, so that comes back to this other part which we started to talk. about, right? Which is, so I'm of the point of view that emergence is like a key thing that we talk about and the word has been overused, but we're not done with it. It's, we, there are big parts of it that we don't understand. And I think the issue is there. So, um, so the, let me give you the, it's not the false solution. With the groundbreaking false solution here first on theories of everything.

No, so the one thing, let me, I mean, the, the way I think about it is that, so emergence is, the one of the key things about emergence is that it produces entities or the entities that kick back. So let me explain what I mean. So you take this can of water, right? And the thing that, I mean, this is one of the points of Moore is different if you, the paper. The thing that's amazing about these things is that if I can do this and it kicks back, right? I can feel it. And that's a property that. Much you bring that up to the camera so they know what you're doing.

Sorry. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I'm, yeah, right. So this thing here, it's something that's so, that is so natural to us that we don't think about it. We don't think about that part. But it's an incredibly important thing. It's something that, that's like the more different kind of key concept,

which is that this thing that defines this object which is I use this hand which is another thing made out of a large number of atoms that all don't have this property but together they do I take that and I kick this thing and I get

this new property which together they define themselves and I can probe them yes probing right that's a thing that I can do I can say that's how I would characterize but I wouldn't characterize it as defining so explain that part

defining so this is the most important property or the most important thing about emergence is that a property emerged from the collective of atoms

that make up this can right so this is the key thing right and and in more is different this is called generalized rigidity right it's okay so in this case

what it allows us to do is it allows us to define things like position or something like that right I can take this and I can say it's here and I can take another one of these and hold it next to it and define something like space

from these things because now they do have this property right that's like a like a very important thing and it's so it's so common that we don't think about it, right? It's not something, because it's like, I mean, it's literally how we perceive the world,

right, when you're a child, you sort of touch around and you get this idea of the world by how your hands relate to the world, right? It's like this extension, there's this thing, aha, so there's like this thing in the world somehow. Okay. So that's a key thing. So in this case, it allows us to define something like position.

Okay, so now we make the jump to consciousness, which is like... Okay. So I think that in our brain, there are things like that, emergent things like that, but the thing that they define is not just something trivial like position, but they define representations of things that we see in the world, world. Right?

I don't know, tables and chairs and you, lamps, stuff like that. And now we come to the eye, and I call it the little eye, which is it's not an abstract representation of the lamp or the camera

or the sofa or whatever. It's the thing in relation to us, which makes them useful, Because that tells us that if I take this other representation I might have of this can, and I expect that I feel something when I put it down on the sofa. So the point is that these representations, these emergent things in our hand,

contain knowledge, contain a little eye as part of the emergent behavior. And you need that because otherwise the presentation would be useful, useless. You couldn't do anything with it, right? But it's this relation to I to this thing, the body, that makes it useful. Because then I know I can grab it, I can walk around it, and that's the thing. So that's what I call the little I. So the thing that I don't know yet is, so you have all these emergent things, which are

representations of stuff around us. And they're not just abstract representations of stuff around us, but they're representations of stuff around us in relation to this thing, which is what I call the little eye. But then how... The last step is missing.

Because then I need to now, okay, go into this sort of family of emergent things and discover a story that contains eye as the central piece and my conjecture is that

it's made out of these this sort of a very important part is played by these things that I call little eye, these sort of relations to the thing. What's the difference between a little eye and then something that constructs a model of the world? So the little eye has a particular

reason for its existence, which is that I mean it's part of that right so so you have this this model of the world did you

the model of the world is the objects and their relations to me so it's in a sense it's it is the model of the world it's that but they're still

like have you read Douglas Hofstetter's work yeah of course okay so I mentioned I imagine that his work would have implications for your theory. Yeah. Because he's thinking about self-reference and infinite self-reference, in fact. Yeah, but I feel like, so I was like,

I read that part over and over again, and I... Have you read, I am a strange loop? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and I was like, because I feel like that, that's the answer, but I feel like the last step is missing. It's not, it's words, but it's not concrete enough. Our fantasy commission says for him it's all about the friendships. Cute, Kevin, but I disagree.

Like with Bet365. I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. No hard feelings, Kevin. Just faster payouts from Bet365. The home of winning early. Must be 19 and older. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca. Or call 1866 5 through 1,2600. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, even if it was concrete, what makes this have experience? Well, it would have experience if the... Imagine, okay, there's some mechanism, right, that I don't know what it is,

that turns these little eyes which are just part of these representations into an eye with an internal thing. Then that's experience, right? Because that eye would then be in relation to all these other things. and stuff like that, which... But that's the key part. I mean, so in the sense, your question is the question I'm asking, which is like, okay, how do you then make the last step, which...

I don't understand. So, you want a capital I to comprise several small eyes? Yeah, but that stuff is like, I don't know. I mean, if you're thinking about this for like, since before I'm a strange loop. Right? But it's not something I work on. It's just something I find like the most... I find, because if you find the answer to that, that is a thing, right?

That's like a, because we're still in a world where you could, which comes with sort of this soul kind of language, right, like from our Christian ancestors, where the soul is something that then, I don't know, has an eternal life in hell or heaven or whatever. And so far, right now, you can still tell that story, and nobody can tell you you're wrong. But if you have a story that tells you how consciousness arises from, like, material objects, that story, that Christian story is harder to tell. Right? So I think that's why I think that it's more important.

It's maybe the most important scientific question there is. why else is it most important well it's also very interesting right it's very different from any other question because of this this change how could we ever know I think we would know when you can do it because then we can build it

yeah but even if you build it how could you know if you build something that says it's conscious how do you know it's conch chat GPT could tell you it's conscious I mean yeah that's a good question and I think the only way See, I think that's what separates the consciousness questions, difficulty

from other physics, chemistry, biology questions. I completely agree. And I think the only reason you will know is because there's this, you read the explanation and you say, yeah, shit, we missed that. That's the only thing. So it behaves like a conscious thing,

which is good, but you said that this is not enough. And I completely agree. because you can chat GPT acts like a conscious being so that's not enough but if I give you the explanation and it behaves like a conscious being then I think you are

then you go like okay I mean that adds credence to it but doesn't no it doesn't but that's all I mean I don't know that you're conscious I mean it's likely I know we say this but I think we that's something we have to say

because we have to say, look, we're scientific beings, we're fallible, I don't have a great model of the world, and I could be wrong, and this don't me. But I don't know if we, you don't act like I'm not conscious, you don't act like the concierge, it's not conscious, you know. I honestly think that there's no better answer to that question. The only answer is, okay, here's the paper, it explains it, here's the thing that acts consciously. That's it. That's it.

Okay, there's one more thing, which is that we might be able to, imagine, that there's sort of more advances in sort of medical imaging, you know, like, I don't know, MRI types of stuff that is like getting better and better and better. And part of the, the explanation could involve, I don't know, certain things in the brain. And... But even there, even if... No, no, no, no, but I'm saying, you have to concede that that person is conscious already. So that's what I mean. Even you saying that the doorman is not conscious or the... bird is not conscious or what have you. But then at the same time, you have to look for evidence with MRIs and find patterns.

You have to assume that they're conscious in order for you to look at that and derive something from it. No, I'm serious about this point that it's key that I give you the explanation. I honestly think so. I think this is one of these moments where you go like, oh yeah. And we don't have it. We don't have it. You're pointing out the reaction we would have if we encountered a great theory or a good

explanation. But what I want to know is what would that even look like? Like what would be an outline of it? Not not I'm not asking you to give me well I told you I told you the best thing where I am which is not like I'm not that's not my fear right but I told you how I would go what I would think ingredients would be so there would be emergence there would be this little eye and then there would be this magic ingredient that I don't know what it is yet and by emergence you mean strong emergence not weak can you give me the definition here because this is one of these things which are

which I find not very well defined yeah or helpful or it's I always feel like this is one of these things where people try to be like smart about about like something and in fact they're just confusing stuff I don't I never so what do you mean by strong

weak emergence is where there's something like the murmurations of birds and that can be predicted from their parts whereas strong emergence is something where a new property emerges that isn't predicted from the parts and may have its own independent causal relationship to the parts.

And I think this is why I have so many questions about that. Just to tell you why, right? And I could be wrong with my definition. No, no, it's fine, no, it's fine. So we talked about this slide with Ashtika which was so important for me. Another important interaction in my life was with Bob Loughlin. Do you know Bob Lovlin?

Yeah. L-A-U-H-G-H or something like that. Okay, okay, okay. He's a Nobel Prize winning condensed metaphysicist. Uh-huh. A super cool guy. If you ever get the chance, find him. Yeah, I mean.

Interview, yeah. Interview. Sure. He's like a super cool guy. So for some reason, he decided to, show up at the parameter, uninvited. He was like, oh, I heard you have a new institute, let me, I want to check it out. Okay, cool.

He was there for a couple of days. And then one interaction I remember it was that, so he sits down, people sort of gather around him, and he says, okay, the situation is as follows. You can write down the Hamiltonian for a bucket of water, right? Very easy. but no one can take that Hamiltonian and derive from that the existence of ice, water, and water vapor. And I was like, what?

Why not? I wouldn't understand if you said wetness, whatever that means, but to say that you can't derive that water can be ice, why? Why? Why not? You can't. So when you know what, when you know that it exists, then you can make sort of arguments and say that. But if you just take that and you go like,

okay, now how do I discover that? You can't. Which is sort of very, very important that someone like him says that. Because what did he get as Nobel Prize for? He got his Nobel Prize for the quantum hall effect. the fractional quantum ball effect,

and he discovered a state of something that the Hamiltonia was known forever. You can just write down the electrons, it's not a big deal. But there's a certain state that you cannot derive just by looking at the thing, and he wrote it down. So basically the point that he was making

was that there are states of matter that you get a Nobel Prize for if you find them. although the fundamental Hamiltonian was known all along. Do you mean to say it's like the joke in P.E. That the best way to solve a PED is to know the answer beforehand? Right. Yeah. And this is, I mean, for me, this was like a thing where you went like,

what? Then what are we doing? And this came at the same time where, so I was just, it just came from Penn State. And basically the discussion we had at Penn State about the classical limit is exactly that. It's like finding ice from a bucket of water. We wanted to find the Makovsky space

from a bunch of spin nets. But back to this, we're asking like strong and weak and strong emergence. So is like the rigidity of ice, is that weak or strong emergence? weak then everything should be weak there is no strong

and this is why I find this discussion because you can't do it so in a sense it's really new right it's a new property but this is not the new the strong people mean right this is not what they mean right okay so if that's weak then

that's all we need most physicalists physicalist meaning not a materialist but someone who believes that physics is fundamental So material is almost an older word that refers to matter being fundamental. So some people like to say, well, I'm a physicalist because I also believe there's energy and I believe there's laws and so forth. So anyhow, but most physicalists are weak emergence.

I mean, don't believe in strong emergence. Yeah, exactly. I'm like that too. Yeah. And I always find that, then I also find this like a very confusing set of words, honestly. I never have had much use for it. So you mentioned this holy moly moment where if you look at, at something you'll when it comes to the explanation of consciousness that would be the reaction

it elicits you also mentioned to me with log 3 lawn 3 yeah that you expected or 0.0 4 you expected 0.04 yeah which is like okay it's like a whole different now we're going back to quantum gravity proper so i'm making an emotional connection right right right rather than a topical connection yeah yeah yeah so i mean that that that is like a long story um which of evolves from that moment with Lofton, basically, or from this earlier discussion in Penn State. But also, I mean, this moment with Loveland was very important. I mean, he wrote this book about sort of emergence and how he thinks that this is really important. We need to change our way of thinking about.

And I think that came out after that visit. And it's a good book. It's like a contact him. I don't even know if he's still around, right? this discussion was 20 years ago. I've seen it at, he gave this talk at the MIT, which was very cool. I saw him there,

but yeah, I don't know where he's. He must be retired by now, but I mean, who knows? Okay, so then I was like, okay, where is gravity? Like, okay, what do I think about gravity? I'm not that excited about string theory. I don't think that the new quantum gravity, people are going in the right direction. But I still think this is the most important problem.

So what do I do? What do I do? And that is a discussion that takes a couple of steps. Like that my way towards my thinking about quantum gravity takes a couple. Are we going toward internal relativity? Yeah. Is that what we wanted to do? Let's do it.

Okay. So the first thing that I thought about is this cosmological quantum, cosmological constant problem. Which is for those who don't know. Yeah. So there's this weird thing, which it's one of the like dirty problems of modern physics. And which comes from the fact that we treat the, that we treat space time as its own thing. Right.

So we have the metric. That's what Einstein came up with in 1915. and we think of the quantum fields, right, the elementary particles, everything, the electromagnetic field, as living on that space time. That's the mental image we have. And that comes from Einstein's work, right?

You think of the, he didn't, so Newton had sort of the stage, and Einstein didn't remove the stage, he just made the dynamic, But there's still a stage. And the thing that happens is that the stage reacts to what's on the stage. They do the dance. The stage influences the stuff on the stage, and the stuff on the stage influences the stage.

But there's still a stage. So the cosmological constant problem arises when you then look at the zero point excitations of the quantum fields. So you can think of quantum fields as this sort of set of harmonic oscillators, infinite set of harmonic oscillators, and each harmonic oscillators has a zero point energy of half H-bar omega. Okay, cool. So then what you do is you sum up all these H-bar omigas for all the different frequencies for the quantum field.

And you say, okay, probably something happened at the plank length, the prunk frequency. So I cut it off the interval, the integral there, and then you get an expression. And that expression is, if that were true, that has, it's like a

cosmological constant, that's how it behaves. If that were true, then it would be like 120 orders of magnitude of, right? The space would be so curved that we wouldn't be able to see our own north.

knows, right? And I wouldn't be able to see you. So some people termed it like the worst prediction of theoretical physics. Okay. So that thing is around. That problem is around. And there are different sort of ways of dealing with it. There could be, for example, if you had like fermions and bosons at the same amount and they could cancel each other. out, which is a bit of magic, right? If you have 120 orders of magnitudes that you're off, then you have to have the other opposing thing, also exactly at the right thing so that you don't get anything.

All of these things are not satisfactory. So basically, we are quiet about it. Wait, super symmetry is not satisfying to you because what? Well, because we don't observe it. Okay. Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's around and people propose answers to it and then there's like problems with it. And so for me, there's one.

So for me, the key, so what is the key thing in this argument that produces this problem is that matter sits on top of space time. That's the key. There are these two things. Matter, space time. They sit on top of each other, and because this thing is a quantum field, it moves. Okay. And the thing that I did point out, and I call it like background independent solid state physics or something, early looking for a name for internal relativity, was that this is a peculiar way in which excitation fields and backgrounds relate to each other,

one on top of the other. And what I said was this is different from the way excitations appear in solid state physics, where excitations are excitations of something. right so if you have like a spin wave or something in a I don't know lattice of

spins if a spin wave then the ground state of that thing so that system allows for spin waves right which in some large energy limit some fermion or something

whatever it is right so that thing allows for excitations so on a large scale it looks like a quantum field but when it's in its ground state, so no fields present, there are no zero point excitations of these fields. It's just the symmetric state of all the spins.

It's just the state. That's it. There's no problem with it. So there's this different, in a way, the excitations don't sit on the space time. They're part of the background. And I pointed that out, which is obviously true, but it's also kind of boring, because that only is interesting if you also provide an explanation for gravity. Where's the gravity in this?

Okay. But it's a thing to note. Emergent particles have a different relation to the background than particles sitting on a curved space time. That distinction is there. And for me, this was like a sign. This was like, okay, that's a sign. Right? Because otherwise you do recreate this problem.

The cosmological concept problem is a problem. It's a general problem. We kind of like ignore it and do our stuff anyway, but it's a problem. And for me, the fact that emergent particles have this different relation to the substrifice. to the underlying stuff was a key sort of insight. But it's a useless insight

unless you can tell me what gravity is. Okay. So that was step number one. Step number zero was sort of, okay, I'm looking at emergence. Step number one, cosmologically a background. There's

stuff on background versus staff excitation of background. But you studying emergence didn't come out of your wondering about the cosmological constant problem, is it? Well, no, I mean... It just happened to coincidence in the background of your mind. This all came with like Laughlin's sort of visit, with the Penn State discussion where I thought, okay, we need to...

This is obviously a problem of sort of many degrees of freedom, and the people who study many degrees of freedom are solid state physicists. Oh, okay. And so I was like in that kind of mindset. I read like solid state physics books for that. Okay. So it directly came out of it. Yeah, out of this whole thing.

Yeah, this whole discussion. I mean, the exact details are lost to memory. I don't know. And then the next thing was something that I, maybe one more thing in between, which is that some of these solid state systems have interesting emergent properties which mirror the things that you see around us,

like electrons and electromagnetic fields and stuff like that. So one of the people that I enjoy talking to was Jiao Gan Wen. He's a solid-state physicist, super cool dude, and he had this very odd theory of spins, and I mean, there were like these sort of almost string-like excitations of certain spin systems that then behaved like fermions and electromagnetism and stuff like that. So the point about that is that you can have

relativistic physics with fermions being emergent in solid-said-type physics systems, which for me was kind of cool. But then there came this one thing, which was... So the one thing that happened in my time was... changed. I remember being at this conference in 2001 in Washington, I think it was the American physical

APS, the physical society. And they had this boomerang experiment, which completely changed cosmology. You observed the CMB, the cosmological micro-Ref background to a degree

with accuracy that was unknown and you could test like models of cosmology, which was amazing. And one of the things I found was the spectrum of the CMB, which was flat, except for like a slight tilt. So it was not like K to zero,

but K to the minus zero zero four. Sure. Right. And that was kind of cool. And the interesting part about that was, so the theory that we have, the current theory is inflation. And for inflation to,

explain that, they have to postulate not only the inflaton, but also a potential for the inflaton. And the inflaton has, this potential is basically described by like two parameters. It's like the slope and then the curvature roughly like that. So two parameters, and you need those two parameters, you need to fix those two parameters to get this 0.04,

which always struck me as a kind of like, okay you put in two numbers to get one number it's not that great right it's kind of like a fake thing so there's this one one of the books i read right and one of the solid state books i read which is this just hold it by your face because then the camera can see it yeah it's a great book it's like it's a cool book it's an introductory book into solid say physics and it talks about these critical exponents um and there's this this thing here which i thought was just amazing, which is 0.04. And the point about that is that it's independent. So this is the anomalous exponent, critical exponent for the correlation function. So usually it's like minus d,

minus two, but there's like a little deviation. And that deviation is 0.04. And 0.04 is the slope of the CMB. And when I saw this, I was like, What? This cannot possibly be a coincidence. So I wrote this paper arguing that it's not. So I make this connection between the cosmic microarric background and the correlation function, blah, blah, blah. And I say, okay, this number, this 0.04, which is in a solid state physics book,

is the thing that we see in the sky, is the cosmological is a CMB. And it's, I don't know, it's a hand-wavy thing. It's a, not hand-wavy. It's a good calculation. It's like a fine argument. But what? Nobody cares.

Nobody cared. Which I thought it was, I mean, so in my mind, right, when I saw this, I thought like, okay, nature's saying, look at me. Yes. Look at me. And I thought that there. That was like the biggest hint for a theory of quantum gravity we had ever seen. Better than Hawking, Black, I could see, entropy, anything, because it's like not a theoretical thing, it's like there, right?

And it's, it, so the thing that, that, that, that, um, inflation needs to do with two constants and sort of hand-wavy kind of thing, this thing you get for free. it's just there. And what it means is that our world was created during the face transition. That's what it means. And that the thing that we call

the gravitational field is something like the order parameter of the underlying theory. The order parameter is characterizing what in this case? It's sort of So if you think about the spin system, right, then it's the direction of the spins that are of the ground state, which points in the same direction of what we had before, right?

So just to remind you, so before we had this, we were talking about the cosmological microwave background, right? And there also I said, okay, the background, the excitations are not sitting on it, but they are part of this ground state, which is the spins pointing up. And this one is saying the same thing. It's the correlation of these spins that form the ground state.

That's where gravity is. Right? So, okay. Just a moment. Just a moment. Yeah, yeah. Preempt what the audience is thinking. They're saying, look, Olaf, what you did is you went through this book

called Condense Principles of Condense Matter. Yes. Presumably there are a variety of numbers everywhere in the book. Yes. Okay. You know already that there's a number zero by zero four in the sky in the same area. You found one number here in one part of the book that says 0.04. And then you say, aha.

Ah, this must be it. Yeah. Okay. So, yes. Yes. What the heck? What the heck? Okay.

So a couple of remarks for that, right? So the first remark is that it's not just one number. The point is that it's universal, right? So if you look at the thing, it's like different dimension, different models, always the same thing. This is a key thing because it means that there's something universal about this. So it's not like it's any number between zero and 2000 or whatever. It's 0.04. That's an important part.

So that's the first remark. The second remark is that I was already primed for that because I was thinking about coming from this sort of emergent kind of point of view, I was thinking what if what is this is what we're dealing with, right?

The the thing I'm looking for so ever since Einstein we it seemed obvious to people that what we need to find is a quantum theory

to come back to your definition point is that the quantum theory of gravity is a theory that has a quantized G metric tensor. That's it. And I was like, hmm, maybe it's not like that. Maybe it's not like that. And maybe the story is

that the metric tensor is not the fundamental thing. It's not what it's all about. and so that's why I was open to that. Yes. Right. So I want to, I do, of course, I mean, this is a hint. No, but what I mean is, why don't you explain the connection between what the heck this number is characterizing here and what is characterizing the C&B?

Otherwise, people think you've lost your mind. Yeah. Okay. So the point is that, okay, so what is this characterizing? So what is this characterizing is the relation between spins at different. at different distances. Yes. Right, that's the two-point correlation function.

Okay, cool. And what I do is I make the identification between that and the spectrum of the perturbations. So, basically, I identify this spin direction with the value of the gravitational potential. that's the identification. And it works.

And I mean, we don't add, we don't go, there's some sort of nice things happening so that, for example, so that the dimensions come out right, that the exponents come out right,

and that the sign comes out right. So that's a bit technical, and I don't know, we would have to, I don't know, maybe do some technical thing with a blackboard at some point or something. And I'll also put a link to your paper, of course, and the calculation.

But the point is that I make it sort of, I make the connection between this thing and the, the perturbation of the, the gravitational potential. And it's a, if you read it, there's sort of things falling into place, right?

You have to make an argument that gets, I mean, what you want is, you don't want that exponent, right? You want the exponent, which is just the 0.04. And if you read it, there's this moment where it sort of clicks. That, dot, da, da, that. Yep, and it works out.

So what is the consequence of this? The consequence of this is that if that's true, then trying to find quantum gravity as the quantization of the metric is definitely not the right way to go. How do you get that from this? All so far I've seen that you get from this was, is that inflation may not be the proper explanation for the correlations. Yeah, inflation would be sort of done, like immediately.

I don't see the implication for quantum gravity, so explain that. Because the connection is between, so the order, what this says, so to make this connection, right, I have to identify this order parameter with the gravitational potential. Okay. And if you make that identification, then what it points, to you is that gravity is not about the metric. Gravity is about these order parameters. I mean, your objections, of course, noted, right?

I mean, for me, this is a hint. It doesn't prove anything, right? But I make the connection, the number comes out, right? And honestly, how often in your life do you see 0.04? I mean, I honestly don't think that this can be a coincidence. this cannot be a coincidence and it's I think it's telling us something

it's like a real thing so when I tell you what it tells me but this might be just me losing my mind whatever right but it's what it

sorry this is what it tells me so we already had this sort of hint that that from the cosmological concept problem,

that what we should be looking at is that the background is not some metric or something like that, but it's something like the ground state of the system. That's where the information is. And now I want to tell you, now I want to make a little detour about the equivalence principle.

Sure. Which I think is it's one of these things. It's like very, I think Einstein was like very bothered and thought about it a lot. But once you formulate gravity in terms of the metric, you sort of forget

about it. I don't think that, I'm not even sure that in Wall's book on gravity, there's even a mention of the equivalence principle. I'm not sure that it is. Why is that? Because once you're with a metric, it's all taken care of. You don't need to think about anything else.

So let's review. What is the equivalence principle? The equivalence principle started with, well, people say Galilea. I don't think it was Galilea, but throwing like the heavy ball and the wooden ball from the tower of Pisa and realizing, okay, they arrive at the same time, which is not what Aristotle said, but okay.

And then the, so, which means that if you think about it, a higher tower of PISA, not hundreds of meters, but kilometers, right? And instead of, so you throw them down, but you put a box in front of, like, around them. What it means is that everything falls with the same acceleration, heavy ball, light ball, whatever you have in your laboratory. So if you put a box around that thing, that person in that laboratory with the two balls doesn't know if it's falling or not.

Cannot make an experiment that says, okay, I'm falling, I'm not falling. Einstein called the Einstein elevator, right? This fault experiment. So the next step in the evolution of the equivalence principle was Newton. So you have ethical M.A.

Sorry, next step from Galileo. Because you just went to Iceland. It's like, it can't be next step is Newton. Sorry. So we ate Galileo, balls falling. Then the next step is Newton. Sorry, I'm talking too much.

That's all right. Sorry. And so how does it appear there? So you have efficacy M.A. And then you have the law gravity, G times M times capital M divided by something, and the M's cancel, which means that it doesn't depend, whatever the M is, the acceleration is the same. And there's an interesting point there, which is that the M in the F equals M is a different M in principle than the

in the gravitational law. And you need to say that they are the same, otherwise you don't get that, And Einstein, I mean, this is one of the most amazing steps. So anyone ever took, I think, in physics, which is they said, okay, cool, I'm going to do this differently. So he implements the equivalence principle differently. And the way he does it is that using the metric. So he says that locally there's always a way to make gravity disappear. And you can do that. If you have a metric, then you can choose a coordinate system

such as the Christophosimus are zero in a technical way. But so that is a coordinate system that is like this elevator for Galilei. And that is pretty cool, I think. That's a cool way of saying the same thing. So whatever happens, it happens as if gravity didn't exist, at least locally. Okay. So now comes my way of doing it, which is not using the metric.

My way of doing it is different. My way of doing it is that, so think about a spin chain. Right. So if you have like the most, the simplest spin chain, then the ground state of it could be something like all spins are pointed. out. Okay, cool garnet. The point is a state where they're all pointing to the right is also a proper ground state. All of them pointing down is also a proper ground state. So you don't have just one ground state. What you have is a manifold of ground states. So for the spin model,

this would be S2. Right? This would be S2. And what And you can pick any ground state you want in this thing. And all of these ground states, although they are different, have the same set of excitations. And the simplest model, it would be just spin waves. So that's the structure. You have a set of vacuia, spins pointing in different direction. And you have excitations. And there are excitations above a certain vacuum.

right? Spin chains, spin waves, wiggling, so once they would be wiggle like that, once they will wiggle like that, once it will... Okay, so that's the structure. So where's the equivalence principle? The equivalence principle is that I say what we are, the Einstein elevator is one of these ground states. this ground state, in this ground state, gravity doesn't exist. You have the excitations that make up, whatever, your camera, you, the sofa, whatever

it is. But, okay, cool, you can, of course, but then where's gravity? So gravity is in the, the idea for gravity is that this, this ground state changes.

It's, one thing here and it's another thing there. And it's this relation between the different ground state that gives rise to gravity. There's another way, which I just recently thought about, which is that you can formulate it in a kind of gauge theory kind of way. Okay, so imagine you have the space of ground states. Every ground state has a set of excitations above it, right?

whatever it is, electrons, or just spin waves, whatever it is. Every one of them. Okay, so imagine you are like a local observer in one of these ground states, and all your instruments are made of these excitations. Okay. And now a ghost comes along, right? And what the ghost, so switches off time for a second, and it takes you and your instruments made out of these excitations of this one ground set

and moves it to some other ground state. right so it's equivalent excitations different ground state turns back on time the internal observer you will not know the difference it's the same physics it's completely equivalent

right so there's this this symmetry and I call it the unused symmetry because I don't think anyone has ever pointed this out right there's like so it's completely natural that you have this set of possible vacua.

And it's usually some manifold. The simplest case is the S2 that I mentioned. But it could be much more complicated than that. Okay. And every one of these things has excitations which give rise to some physics, whatever it is. So if I take these excitations, move them to some other ground state, I would get the same physics. right? You, with your experiments in this vacuum,

you cannot know the difference to another vacuum. Sure. I call that. So the way to say this is that what I'm saying is that gravity is the gauge theory for this gauge symmetry.

Our fantasy commission says for him it's all about the friendships. Cute, Kevin. But I disagree. Like with about three six, I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. No hard feelings, Kevin. Just faster payouts from Bet365.

The home of winning early. Must be 19 and older. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca. Or call 1866 5 through 1,2,600. Terms and conditions apply. So you can locally move these?

No, it's not the moving. The moving was just me to simulate to tell you what the same. is. So this is sort of the key point is, okay, what do we have? We have a space of vacua, right? And these vacua are all different, but they all have the same set of excitations. Do we have a continuous space of vacuia? Usually yes, even if it's a discrete system. But it's not important. Okay, for these purposes, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. For this illustration, got it.

So in all the examples I know of, it's like a smooth manifold. Right, it's like S2, something like that. And I was thinking, just now I was hesitating because I was thinking of Wenz, Joggan Wens model, the Solid Safe Physicist I mentioned earlier. And I think there, the situation, is that we don't even know what the space of vacua is.

Right? So it's something, which... Okay. Which is also kind of cool, but it doesn't matter. Okay. Space of vacua, exotations above it. And the thing I wanted to point out is that there's a symmetry that we have not used or... Well, it hasn't been pointed out and it has not been used.

So what is that symmetry? The symmetry is that the physics about all of these vacuars is the same. So if I take you, your instruments, which are made out of the excitations about one vacuum, move them to another vacuum, you and your local experiments cannot know the difference. And what I'm saying is that gravity is the gauge theory for this symmetry. So in Gage theory, the usual thing is that the space of vacua is not a space of vacua, but some group manifold, some group, S.U.2, whatever thing. In this case, it's not a group, it's whatever the moneyfold is.

But the idea is the same, right? So where does gravity, what does, where is gravity? Gravity is the fact that this, these vacua are something here, something else there. Hi everyone. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy,

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Kurtzimungle.org. Does this mean that something like platinum and titanium fall at different rates? No. No. Because platinum and titanium are the expectations of that vacuum.

Platinum and titanium are in To simplify this, would be excitations of a given vacuum, right, of some vacuum. But there, the same vacuum, right? So this argument that I was giving about the falling things and something like that would apply to them together. That's why it's the equivalence principle. They wouldn't fall at different rates.

I mean, then, okay, what are you doing? So you're not dispensing with the equivalence principle. It's the same vacuum. That's what makes it the equivalence principle? No, what I'm doing is something else. I'm giving you a different implementation of the equivalence principle. So instead of saying the equivalence,

so what did Einstein do? Einstein said, okay, here's, the equivalence principle is given because I can choose a coordinate system such that the the Christopher's similar vanish, right? That it looked, locally looks flat. locally it's just Mikovsky

there is no gravity and I'm doing the same thing except that I'm replacing the gravity that the G, sorry the metric with whatever the point is on the space of vacuar so that's my main

that's my message my message is it's not so it's sort of more interesting than quantum gravity it's because I'm giving you a new explanation for gravity which is that gravity is about the vacuum changing over space.

Now, do you have a reason to fix that gravity pulls together instead of pushing as well? Well, I mean, that's the, that's, so, what fixes the sign? Because you want to minimize the energy. It's like when you, I don't know, you could do it like on a frying pan, filled with water, put like two things that you will see that they always attract, like two rice kernels or something like that. They always want to minimize the curvature in between, and they do that by being attracted to each other.

You can still minimize with the cool-on potential and get something going away from one another, no? No, because it's the same stuff. I mean, the cool-on potential would be something like one going down, the other one going up. Right, but they're always, they're always like, it's, it's always the, the excitation of the same thing. So, in a way, it's one of the, it's a way to explain why it's always attractive. Hmm, interesting.

It's, that, that is, it comes out for free. Huh. Now, do you have, okay, this is a bit of a nitty, gritty question, but. No, but all of the, so this is like, part of, it. partially written up. This is like live. Well, what I was going to say is in GR, there's some conditions on mass or energy, like positive energy conditions. Do you then have a reason to say that these are independently motivated? I have no idea. I'm not that far. Yeah. I mean, this is, so the thing that I,

where I am right now is that I can tell you, so locally you can use your excitations to define a metric, right? If you have a lot of. you have a light cone, so you have zero directions. So locally you can define a metric. What I'm saying is that that's not the fundamental object, right? But you can do it. And from the construction, you can show that whatever connection you have on this space of Acua, it gives you a connection that is compatible with this metric.

So that I know. What I don't know for sure is how to make this. So the right part of the Einstein equation is their work in progress, right? Which is the energy, right? So because for me, I mean, for Einstein there is this split between background, G and metric. And the connection is given by the Einstein equation, right? So you have the curvature tensor on the left. left-hand side and you have the energy momentum tend on the right-hand side.

For me, there's no such split, right? It's all one thing. It's just that you interpret one thing as the background and another thing as the excitation. I don't know. I mean, this is, this is, I mean, so this is where I am. And I think that the reasons that I gave, which is, I think the zero points of 2004 is the strongest thing, and I don't know why I'm the only one who is excited about it. Well, maybe now as a result of this, there will be other researchers to reach out to you. Right, right, that will be cool. And I'm going to, I don't know, this thing that I try to explain with the equivalence principle,

I'm going to try to give it like a goal and explain it like in a paper, which I think would be useful. Yeah. So why don't you talk about what's some advice that you've received that you impart to other people that you've taught to your students?

Okay, so one thing that I observed is there's this thing that can happen to you, which is that you understand the problem right? You completely understand the problem The best example is probably the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. You can understand that in one semester, even less.

And some philosophers of science, they understand that in like one semester. But what you should never think is just because you understand the question, you have the tools to find the solution. and you do not know beforehand what the tools will be. So don't be arrogant about tools. Just sort of be open. You know, like, so one thing that happens with, so if you get to the typical loop quantum gravity people,

where it be people who understand differential geometry like no one else on the planet, right? They know that. And they think because we're chronized gravity, then, okay, that's all we need to know. And I think it's be curious. You don't know which tool by which person in which field might give you the leg out that you need to solve whatever you're solving, trying to solve. You know, we were just talking about Frederick Schuller. Yeah.

What this reminds me of with you learning from or getting inspired. from condensed matter physics, I was speaking with him off air. I'll put a selfie on screen, actually, to be the funny one. He was telling me about this work in progress of his, which he may announce at some point shortly, that he's been inspired from engineering to not solve the measurement problem, but have a new spin on the measurement problem. And I was so intrigued by, see, as theoretical physicists, in the theoretical physicist community, you don't look to engineering for inspiration. You don't, you look for it maybe if you have something to do with experimental physics, but, but you don't, you think, well, my tools are the fundamental ones. I give you

the tools, engineers. Yeah, I think I come up with the screwdrivers. Yeah, I think that's, that's, wrong, bordering on stupidity. Because they're serious people, especially if you talk to, like, solid state, like good solid state physicists are very impressive. They have like a understanding of the, the physics, which is very intuitive and very can be very smart. I mean, I already mentioned Bob Lothlin, who was very cool, but also Jogun when, is very, I mean, this is very

cool. And if you, if you're just sort of narrow, then, I mean, there were people in Nuclear Gravity who all they knew was like the representation theory of SU2, right? How do I, decompose tensor products of

representations of SU2 cool, great now what? Yes, I actually Carlo Ravilli had a lecture on loop quantum gravity

I think the third lecture was SU2 and he was talking to the students and saying you have to fall in love with SU2 you have to know SU2 inside it out

and they do right they know it inside out they can like they know everything about it okay but it's not everything, there's more to know.

And just look around. Just look around. So what else is there for you? What are you working on these days? And where can people find out more about you? Well, that's kind of hard. Because I earn my money, like I work for a living. So I'm trying to put things out on the net.

and I will, what I told you now, just now, you could tell that it was like raw, right? It was like newish, but I will put it out, like, soon. But if you really are interested in something, just write me an email when I try to answer. And this is, I mean, this is the main thing I'm working on because I really think that this being internal relativity. Yeah, this kind of sketch of relativity that I just gave you. I think that's the answer. I think that's, I'm like, I think this is the way to go.

And I'm really, I really wanted like put forward like a good case for it. So that's what I'm doing when I have time. When we spoke, you said that physics has been stalled for maybe 40, 30 years or something like that. Then I was countering you and saying, well, it can't be all of physics. There's so much progress. No, no, because I told you, I mean, I told you about the gravity-based stuff, right? That's, like, genuine progress. I mean, like, in the fundamental questions of, like, quantum gravity and stuff.

I think there we put all the eggs in, like, one or two baskets, and that's not what you should do. It's just not. That's something you also learned in your financial world, diversification. Absolutely. Portfolios. No, it's not just that. It's also, there's a deeper, do you remember, before the financials,

crisis in 2008. There were people talking about how they solved the economy. I do not remember this. No, they did. There's even a talk by the Fed chairman, Benanki, I think. And the point was that the fluctuate, so there was a data point. And the other point was that the fluctuation narrowed, right? The fluctuation about anything, right? They sort of, it looked like all fluctuations had gone from the financial system. any sort of insecurity had vanished. And before the financial crisis, people looked at that and they went like, this is a good sign.

We understand the economy. And I think what's really true is that if you see a narrowing of anything, be alert. That's the moment things go wrong. And I think what we saw was a narrowing of the questions we considered in Qunong gravity through string theory, right? It was like all the getting, I don't know, the kind of detail, the kind of like person you needed to be, to be productive in string theory,

became like this incredibly singular person, right? It was very... What do you mean? Well, I mean, the kind of questions that were allowed to be asked and to be discussed were like narrow. What would be a question that you think should be asked that is not asked? It's what we do now. I mean, we just, we talked about people that are opening up the discussion, right?

So Frederick Schuller was one. Yvette is another. I mean, you talked about, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, camp. Oppenheim and so. Open up, yes. So, which is, I think exactly how it should be. Unless you have the solution, you cannot, like, become more specialized and specialize and specialized. So, and I think

this is like, it's almost like a law. If things become too narrow, they will break. This is not a time to relax. That means that there are fluctuations somewhere else. They're just waiting to swamp you. So it seems like you can never relax then. Because, look, it sounds like you're saying,

if you have signs that you're safe, you should not relax. But then if you have signs that you should not relax, You should also not relax. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. This is not a helpful message.

No, it's good. I think it's good. I mean, it's good. It's good. And it's also, I think for physics, it's the right. It's the job we currently have, I think, is that we need to find quantum gravity, but we also then need to make sure that the academy is in a good shape, meaning that it produces with right people with right skills to solve it,

even if you don't solve it now. And I think there you might argue that things didn't go quite well. As someone who was in perimeter before, has it changed in a positive direction, in a neutral and a negative direction since you were there? So let me tell you my experience with the parameter. So it was the best place to be

when it started. It was really, like, awesome. Money was no problem because Mike Lazaridis is like one of the great guys, right? Like, here you go. 100 million do your thing, right? Okay, so money was no problem. You could invite people, you could travel anywhere.

You could, I don't know, we had blackboards everywhere. It was awesome, right? And it was clear that we wanted to be different in the sense that we didn't want to just do the stuff that everybody else did. But then we need to hire people. And then there came this sort of sneaky way in which the outside world intruded.

And that was that we don't want to be known as the Crackpot Institute. So for every hire we ask for like eight reference letters or 10 or something. at an insane number, right? And from like really good people and the advisory committee was like staff with like really high profile people.

And I was like, okay, but you must, it must be clear to everyone here that this is contradictory to the other objective, which is that you don't want to do the things that everybody else does. Because if you ask 10 people to, rate the new hire and if you staff the advisory committee with like established people, what opinions do you think you're going to get?

You're going to get the opinions of the people that are in the established field. And I think that's to some degree what happened. I don't want it to be negative. I just want to say that it became a more normal institute. It's sort of, which maybe is all you can hope for is, I don't know. I think this is like a genuinely hard question. You want to do serious physics, you don't want to become a crackpot institute,

how do you do it? And I don't think you can make an argument that we did it well in the last 40 years. And I mean, there's one thing which I have to say, which is that I think that if you spend time with certain people, you know in which camp they belong. Right. So, I mean, I made this thing with the risk managers and the bank and the traders in a bank, right?

You know, are they the risk managers or the traders? You know that within like hours of talking to them. And you know if they, by looking at their work, you know if they're serious. people. And I think that's true. I think that I can tell you by looking at people, are they serious? And are they sort of on what side of the aisle are they? And I think what you should do is you should always take a certain amount of your budget and give it to these people, fully aware that you might never see a return from that, except in weird discussions that you have on the way to the bathroom.

Right. There's this kind of like, but how about that? And you go like, oh, shit, I didn't know. I mean, that's Nassim Talib's advice in Black Swan scenarios. When you have fat tails, you should be investing small amounts in extremely unlikely events. Exactly. Where there's huge upside and low delta. And I don't, honestly,

think that this is that hard to do in physics. Because, as I said, I think it's easy to figure out, like relatively easy to figure out, are they traders or are they risk managers? And as in banks, and by the way, you're saying T-R-A-D-E-R, not T-R-A-I-T-O-R. Okay, do me clear. No, no, like the people who make the money for a bank. You don't want to invest in traders. No, no. So banks know that for sure because someone needs to make the money, right?

But in science, our incentives are completely different. The risk managers, they will come up with papers like at a clockwork. Every few months they're going to have a paper and it's going to be awesome and great and technically, blah, blah, blah. Traders will not. So our incentive structures are not the bank incentive structures, because we produced incentives that say, give me papers.

Give me papers. And clearly, if you write 100 papers, that's got to be it. And it's not. Of course not. and I really do think that it's not that hard to tell and you need to be able to say this person might never create the thing that I hired them for but they still will be great to have around for your students

for you if you have like a weird question for just this sort of temperature in the room to have to evade this this trap of sort of narrow discussions you want this weird dude

and I think it's like obvious and I think that's where we made a mistake I mean there's one person that I'm thinking about is this she was also here

it's like Cole Co-fury I think it's obvious that she like all the criteria Brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Serious, crazy idea, works hard.

It's like it's obvious to me, right, that that's what you want. We got connected because of coal. Because of coal, exactly. And I think it's obvious that that is what she is, like obvious. But she's working in a field that everybody goes like, man, I don't know, man. But I think that's wrong. Someone needs to take it like a risk. like the traders would do

like everyone knows if you don't take risk you can't make money and I think we failed that's one place where science failed is not in the so we failed in the topic right the quantum gravity is not there yet

but we also failed in in in sort of forming the academy and that's a bigger failure in a sense because you cannot expect to find quantum gravity. But this thing you can do.

This is a thing you can do. This is something that just requires you to make certain decisions. And I think we always sort of defaulted to the standard measures. Who is the you that can make the changes? Well, okay. So the interesting thing right now is that we have a sort of change of guard. We being... The scientists.

I put myself in the scientist category, right? So the Abai is retired. Lee is retired. Carlos retired. They all retired. So the burden to do this is now falling on the next generation. So that's the we. That's the we.

And it requires... I mean, it requires a strength. It requires belief that the way to create the environment that creates breakthroughs requires you to take risks and to allow for failure to come back to a by a slide. And that is, I mean, that is something. So imagine you are like a government employee, right? You have the research budget of, I don't know, 10 million, 100 millions or something like that, right? And you want to, what you have to defend is that you give the money to some people, weird people with like,

and then 10 years later some people come and they say, like, they didn't do anything. Where's my results? Where's my return for the 10 million? And you have to say, I know, this is what I planned. But look at the institutes. They are vibrant communities. They come up with ideas. They didn't work out, but it's a, it's the great place.

These are good people. They are, they are hard, they're sort of serious people. And they train the next generation of serious people with good ideas. And that needs to be your argument, and that's enough. it's almost like gosh speaking about an inversion of space time

in this world in our world when you run you go faster and when you walk you go slower but it sounds like what you're saying is in the paper production world what's happening is they're running but they're running in place and to do good work you need to walk

and walking is actually what takes you further it takes you longer but one of the people who won the fieldsman recently. He produces extremely few papers compared to his other... Yeah, exactly. But he says what he likes to do is tackle. He doesn't even think in terms of fields, which is interesting.

Not fields as in the institute, sorry. Fields and disciplines of math, some disciplines. Which is strange, because most of the time you go in and you say, okay, I'm going to be an algebraic geometrist or something like that. He says, I'm going to go and I'm going to learn anything that I need to learn to solve this problem. Exactly. And then he goes and he takes five years to solve

this problem. And then he's been thinking about another problem for 10 years in the background. And you need to allow for that. And in those five years, that person might not publish anything. Where he's like in the library, at home, staring at a blackboard that's empty. And that might be the most important time on the... Yes, I have a book deal with Pagman Press. And I'm so fortunate that even though I promised them I'd give them my chapters, chapter one and two, in two months. It's taken me eight months because I'm, but I'm thinking every day,

every waking second of my life is spent on that book. Even sometimes during this, if I'm dazed off, I'm just, but that's how it goes. That's how it goes. And it's obvious that that's how it goes. And I think we need, we somehow lost the courage to defend that.

And it's, it costs us. We need people to say, I hired this person, he looks like he hasn't done anything, that's what it is, deal with it. And it might never produce anything, but I think he might. And if he doesn't do it, she does it or less. It's like one of them will, but they're talking, it looks good, he's reading the right things, that's where it goes. You haven't hired unconscious people, you already filtered for that, so you know that they're not just twiddling their thumbs.

And I'm serious. I think that it is not hard to find these people, because they do stick out. They do stick out. Like Cole Fury. Like Co Fury. Yeah. So the lesson of this is if you have money...

Higher CoFury. That's right. That is just true. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is fun. It's been a blast. Thank you. If you want access to the next conversation prior to anyone else, plus my actual opinions on these

theories and concepts, which I keep out of the interviews, then visit my substack, kurt-gyimungle.com. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.com. And if today's conversation grabbed you, there's an episode on screen somewhere right now over here, which is the next one that I'd watch. Enjoy. My reg league goalie says he plays for the love of the game. You gave up six goals last week, Steve? Maybe play to win, huh? Like with Bet-3-65, I get paid the second and my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. Come on, Steve.

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