Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Peter Woit: Unification, Twistors, and the Death of String Theory

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

YouTube link https://youtu.be/9z3JYb_g2QsProf. Peter Woit discusses string theory, its decline, and introduces his graviweak unification theory using Euclidean twistor in Euclidean spacetime. TIMESTAMPS:- 00:00:00 Introduction- 00:00:00 String theory's fundamental issues | Mathematicians' challenges- 00:02:20 Spacetime and twistor theory insights- 00:20:00 Bundles & diffeomorphism groups- 00:38:34 Spinors as a spacetime point- 00:46:57 Dominance of string theory & Ed Witten's influence- 00:54:17 Quest for quantum gravity- 01:03:22 String theory's lack of predictive power  - 01:09:33 Machine learning meets theoretical physics- 01:18:56 Personal attacks vs. intellectual debate- 01:24:49 Mathematicians vs. Physicists | Academic silos- 01:37:15 Developing a contrarian view & the origin of 'Not Even Wrong'- 01:40:54 Langlands & representation theory- 01:48:51 Spacetime is NOT doomed- 01:58:47 Sean Carroll's crisis in physics (odd responses to criticism)- 02:13:21 Differentiable structures by dimension- 02:26:10 Gravi-weak unification & chirality- 02:32:57 Chern-Simons theory- 02:42:20 Gravity as torsion or curvature- 02:50:07 Category theory in physics- 02:56:43 Defining a fulfilling life - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!)- Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE- PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt- Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs- iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802- Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e- Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything- TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch LINKS MENTIONED:- Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's Blog): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress- Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's Book): https://amzn.to/40NFeaK- Spacetime is Right-Handed (Peter Woit's Article): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/righthanded.pdf | https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress- Podcast w/ Edward Frankel: https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc- The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene): https://amzn.to/3sNmk7x- The Trouble With Physics (Lee Smolin): https://amzn.to/47lCCUj- Podcast w/ Sabina Hossenfelder on TOE: https://youtu.be/walaNM7KiYA- Podcast w/ Stephon Alexander Part 1: https://youtu.be/VETxb96a3qk  - Podcast w/ Stephon Alexander Λ Sal Pais: https://youtu.be/PE4C7OI7Frg- Podcast w/ Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/KElq_MLO1kw- Podcast w/ Stephen Wolfram Part 1: https://youtu.be/1sXrRc3Bhrs- Podcast w/ Stephen Wolfram Part 2: https://youtu.be/xHPQ_oSsJgg- Podcast w/ Jonathan Oppenheim: https://youtu.be/NKOd8imBa2s

You cannot play any games about this. You have to admit that this is wrong. I think especially for mathematicians to come in and see an environment where there's guiding ideas that people haven't really worked out and a lot of things are known do not work for known reasons but people are still acting as if this is not true and trying to figure out how to do something and make career for themselves. Peter Wojt is a theoretical physicist and a mathematician at Columbia University. He's been an influential figure in the ongoing debates surrounding string theory. His critiques, as articulated in his book, Not Even Wrong, strike at the heart of many popular assertions about this framework.

Professor Wojt also has a widely read blog in the math and physics scene called Not Even Wrong, so it's the same name. And the links to all resources, everything mentioned will be in the description as usual We take meticulous timestamps and we take meticulous show notes in one sense The problem with string theory is the opposite of the problem of fossil fuels with fossil fuel companies. You have a goal Let's say it's to wash your clothes and you're able to achieve that goal But you produce negative externalities where a string theory has plenty of positive externalities But arguably achieves little toward its initial goal professor white introduces a novel tow approach called Euclidean-Twister unification. You may

recognize that term twister as it's primarily associated with Roger Penrose. Twisters provide an alternative to spacetime descriptions in quantum physics. Peter's application of twisters is in the Euclidean setting, and he talks about how this significantly changes the playing field. It opens up a connection between gravity and the weak interaction, because space-time in this formulation is inherently chiral. We also talk about spinners and Michael Attia. You know how some people are Christian mystics or Muslim mystics? Well, Attia seems to be a spinner mystic.

We alternate between technical and more intuitive discourse. If you're new to the Theories of Everything channel, this is par for the course, and my name is Kurt Jaimungal. Usually what we do is we interweave between rigorous, steep technicality, and then periods of explaining the intuition behind what was just said. In other words, you can think of it as high-intensity interval training for the mind. Recall the system here on Toe, which is if you have a question for any of the guests, whether this guest or from a different Toe podcast, you can leave a comment on that podcast with the word query and a colon. This way, when I'm searching for the next part with this guest, I can press control F, easily finding it in the YouTube studio backend.

Further, if I'm able to pose your query, I'll cite your name verbally, either aloud or in the description. Welcome and enjoy this episode with Peter White. Welcome, Professor. episode with Peter White. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to be able to talk about some of these topics. I've certainly enjoyed some of your other programs. The one with my friend Edward Frankel recently was really spectacular. Thank you. Yeah, that's all due to Ed, of course. Okay, what are you working on these days? What's your research interests?

Yeah, so there's something very specific. I'm just in the middle of trying to finish a short paper about an idea, which I'm not quite sure what they're – I guess I've for now entitled the – the draft of the paper is titled Space Time is Right-Handed. There's a slight danger I'll change conventions. It'll end up being that space time is left-handed, but I think it will stay right-handed. conventions it'll end up being that slight space time is left-handed but i think it will stay right-handed and and that that's um it's related to the twister stuff that i've been working on for

the last few years which i um i'm still quite excited about but but there was always there's something at the there's one kind of basic claim at the bottom of of what i'm trying to do with the twisters which is um i, to the standard way of thinking about particle physics and general relativity and spinners, it's initially not very plausible. I should say one reason that I actually didn't, it took me a long time to get back to the Euclidean twister stuff from some early ideas years ago, was that I didn't actually believe that this basic thing that I needed to happen could happen. And I think lots of other people have had the same problem with this. And the more I looked into the twister stuff, the more I became convinced that something like this had to work out.

But more recently, the last few months, I've come up with an understanding in much simpler terms, not involving twisters, just involving spinners, about the really unusual thing that's going on here. And I think that I've been trying to write up kind of an explanation of the basic idea. And I think it's a fairly simple one. And as I've been writing it up, I keep thinking, well, wait a minute, can this really work? There's no way this can actually really work.

But the more I've been thinking about it, the more I've been convinced, yes, this actually does really work. So I'm hoping within the next few days to have a final version of that paper. Well, not a final version, but a version of that paper I can at least send around to people

and try to get comments on and also write about it publicly on my blog. I read the paper. Thank you for sending it. Yeah, what you have is a very early draft of it, which made even less... Hopefully, I'll have something that will make more sense, will be what the public will see, but we'll see. Yeah. Do you think spinners are more simplified or easy to understand than twisters? Yeah. Do you think spinners are more simplified or easy to understand than twisters? Oh, yeah, yeah. So spinners are really very basic, very, very basic things. I mean, every elementary particle, like electrons, the way you describe them, they're spin what have nature as spinners.

You have to, electron wave functions are spinners. And so they're in every you know every physics textbook or every if you do quantum mechanics or you do quantum field theory you have to spend a fair amount of time to spinners so spinners are very very basic things and they're not um i spent a lot of my career kind of thinking about them trying to better understand them and i keep learning new things and it's the last few months I realized something about them, which I think is new, at least. I'd never seen before.

And this is what I'm trying to write about. But they're very fundamental objects. It's a little bit hard to... Anyway, I can give you a whole lecture on spinners. I'm not sure how much of that you want or where you want to start with that. Right. Well, there's one view that we can understand them in quotes algebraically, but that doesn't mean we understand what spinners are. So that's the Michael Atiyah approach,

where he says it's like the letter I, the complex I, the imaginary I, back in the 1400s or 1500s. It's only now or a couple hundred years later you realize what they are. And so sure, we have many different ways of describing spinners mathematically but it's still a mystery as to what they are so do you feel like no we understand what they are or there's much more to be understood more than the formalism well yeah it's very interesting yeah you bring up atia yeah so atia at various points was um you know did did make this argument that there's something very interesting and which we don't understand going on with the spinners and that yeah he i think was thinking of it in a much more general context spinners

you know are really if you try and do geometry of any kind um or reminding a geometry you re um expressing everything in terms of spinners instead of in terms of vectors and tensors gives you a very different and in some ways more powerful formalism, but one that people are not that used to. And it has some amazing properties. It's kind of deeply related to notions about topology and K-theory and the Dirac operator gets into it. about topology and k-theory and the Dirac operator gets into it.

So the thing that made Atiyah really most famous, his index there with Singer, it's basically saying everything comes down to a certain kind of fundamental case, and that is the fundamental case of the Dirac operator and spinners. So he was seeing spinners kind of at the you know you know as as this really kind of central thing to to the most important thing that he'd worked on and so there's a lot to say so there's a lot known about spinners but there's also a lot it's a little bit mysterious where they come from i think the the new stuff that i've been more and so i've been thinking about that a lot over the years but uh but the new stuff that I've been more, and so I've been thinking about that a lot over the years,

but the new stuff that has gotten, where I think there's something new that I see going on is not the general story about spinners, but a very, very specific story about spinners in four dimensions. So you have spinners in any dimension. In any dimension, you can write down spinners and they're useful.

But in four dimensions, some very, very special things happen. And the other very, very special thing, interesting thing that's going on in four dimensions is that from the point of view of physics, there's two different signatures that you're interested in. You're interested in either spinners in the usual kind of four dimensions where all four dimensions are the same and you're just trying to do Euclidean geometry in four dimensions, which I might sometimes call Euclidean spinners, or you're

interested in spinners of the sort that you actually observe in a relativistic quantum field theories where the geometry is that of Minkowski space so sometimes we refer to those as minkowski spinners and so you have two different versions of four dimensions one with a totally positive signature and one where one direction has the opposite sign than the others in the um in the metric so time you have to treat time differently than space and that's been kowski space so there's two's two different things in the general story that I'm interested in here. One is very specific, specifically the geometry of four dimensions, and the other is very specifically the relation between Euclidean and Minkowski signature spinners.

So is it your understanding or your proposal that the world is actually Euclidean and it's been a mistake to do physics in a Minkowski way? When we wick rotate, we see that as a mathematical trick. And you're saying, no, no, no, that's actually the real space. That's the real quote unquote, even though there's something imaginary about it. And the Minkowski case was the mistake. Like an analogy would be, we operate in usd and then for some calculations it's easier to go into yen and we think that the actual world is operating in the united states and the

calculations are just something to make the numbers easier and then you're saying no no what's really happening is in japan and it's been a mistake to go into the usd or the usd is just to make the math easier so is that what you're saying or no? Well, so, so, so this goes back more to the, um, the Euclidean twister stuff. Yes. So, so there, well, it's, it's been well known in physics that you really kind of, that the problem is a problem in Minkowski space time. If you try and write down your theory of minkowski space time you um the simplest story about how a free particle evolves you write down you know the formulas for what's a free particle going to do what's its propagator and you see that it's just ill-defined there is no you know you've written down a formula which mathematically is ill-defined. It needs more information in order to actually be a well-defined formula.

I mean, technically, if you look at any physics book, you'll see they're saying, well, we're going to do the answer is this integral, and you look at this integral, and this integral is going straight through two poles, and that's just ambiguous. You don't know how to define define such a there are ambiguities about how you define such intervals so the one the aspect you've always known you have to do

something like wick rotation you have to do something you have to get rid of those ambiguities and one way of getting rid of those ambiguities is you know analytically continuing and making time a complex variable analytically continuing it analytically continuing maybe making time a complex variable, analytically continuing it, analytically continuing maybe to Euclidean signature, and there the formulas are well defined. So it's, yeah, I'm not sure, I'm very comfortable saying one of these is real and one of these is not. It's the same, it's the same formula, it's just you have to realize that to make sense of it you have to kind of go into the complex plane in time and you can um if you things are analytic if this is a holomorphic function in time you can you can you can either evaluate what happens at

imaginary time or you can make make time real but you have to take the limit in a certain way, moving perhaps starting with imaginary time and then moving, analytically continuing a certain direction to get real time. But that's the standard story. That's not me saying this. That's the standard story. Right. Then there's a, what sense do you make of this?

Is this just a mathematical trick which a lot of physicists will say well, that's just some kind of weird mathematical trick It's not as I think to a reality or do you take this more seriously? So what's always fascinated me is more is that? It's it's fairly clear. What's going on if you just talk about scalar fields if you talk about particles with a spin zero or fields that transform trivially under rotations you know what happens when you um go to go to imaginary time is you know it's quite interesting and in some ways tricky but it's um is very well understood but it's never actually been very well understood what happens when you have spinner fields and this is the the problem is that these spinners in euclidean signature and spinners in

a calcium signature are quite different things and so you can't just say oh i'm gonna analytically continue from one to the other because you're it's they're not they're not related anyway it's very unclear how you're going to do that and so there's also a similar story in twister theory you can um you can do twister theory on kowski space time which is what penrose and his um collaborators mostly did or you can do it in euclidean signature space time which is what atia and uh a lot of other people and mathematicians have done and and and in principle the two are related by analytic continuation. But the way that works is quite, you know, I think it's much subtler than you expect.

And what I've been interested in most recently, this business about, it really is a claim that the standard way of thinking about how you analytically continue between these two different kinds of spinners is um you're making kind of a wrong choice when you do that and there's a there's a good reason for the standard choice you're making when you normally when you do that but there is actually another choice you can make which is that um you know that instead of working with spinners which are kind of symmetric between there's two there's two different kinds which by convention you can call right and left-handed or positive and negative chirality and the standard um setup treats this question um you know symmetrically

but between the plus and minus the chirality is between right and left spinners but it's um what i've kind of realized recently is it looks like it's quite possible to to make this setup um you know completely asymmetric so that this so that you you just describe spinners using right these right handed or positive chirality spinners you just don't use the left-handed ones at all in your construction of spacetime you can do that it appears to be and that's that's why i'm this paper is called space-time is right-handed and yeah is it the case that you could have called it space-time is chiral and you could have equivalently described as left-handed

or is there something specific about right-handedness no yeah yeah it's certainly it's a matter of convention which um but you basically i, to say it a little bit more technically, you know, the Lorentz symmetry group is this group called SL2C. It's two by two complex matrices, a determinant one. And what you realize is if you work in a complex version of four dimensions, the symmetry group is two copies of SL2C. And you can call it a plus copy and a minus copy, or you can call it a right copy and a left copy, but there's two of them. and the the standard convention in order to get analytic continuation to work out the way people expected has been to make to say that the physical lorenz group that we that corresponds to our real world is is not kylely symmetric it's it's kind of a diagonal which is you use both the right and left and you have to complex conjugate when you go from one side to the other but it it kind of the lorenz the lorenz group the sl2c lorenz group we know is supposed to sit as

kind of a diagonal thing which is both right right and left but um what i'm kind of arguing is that no you can actually set things up so that the um the the lorenz group is just one of these two factors you can call it could have been the right factor left factor you have to make your a choice of convention but but if so it is very much a a chiral setup um but you only the strange thing about this is you only really see this when you complexify if you just look at minkowski space time you know youetime, you don't actually see this. Anyway, you don't see this problem, or you don't see this ability to make this distinction. It's only when you go to Euclidean spacetime where the rotation group really does split into two completely distinct right and left

things. Or if you go to complexified spacetime where you have this two copies of SL2C, it's only in those contexts that you actually see that there is a difference between choosing the diagonal and choosing the right-handed side. So for SL2C, you call that the Lorentz group. Is that technically the double cover of the Lorentz group? Yeah, people use both terminology. If you're going to work with spinners, you have to use a double cover of the Lorentz group? Yeah, people use both terminology.

If you're going to work with spinners, you have to use a double cover. But yes, it's also... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes you might want to say that SO3-1 is the Lorentz group and this is the double cover. But mostly you're working with... You're interested in working with spinners

and then you have to use the double cover, really. Yes. Is there a reason that triple covers or quadruple covers aren't talked about much? Is it just because of experiment, there's nothing there? Well, it's more the mathematics that they don't... The rotation groups of any kind have this twofold nature. They have these spin double covers. In many cases, one way of seeing this is just a basic topology.

The topology of rotations has a plus and minus thing in it, which you kind of, and you have to do something about that. So there aren't any kind of known, interesting, mathematically interesting triple covers, et cetera. Now, in the standard model, the way that it's written in bundle language is that it's a principal bundle, and then the gauge groups are the structure groups.

And then for general relativity, you have a tangent bundle. And then some people say that the gauge group of GR is the diffeomorphism group. But is there a way of making that into a bundle, like a principal bundle with the diffeomorphism group? How is one supposed to understand that as a bundle construction? Yeah, yeah. supposed to understand that as a bundle construction. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there's a lot of different ways.

There's several different ways of thinking about geometry and about Riemannian geometry. Yeah, this starts to get a complicated subject. But maybe the best way to...

Thinking in terms of different amorphous groups is something you can do. It's actually not my favorite way of doing this kind of geometry. And for the reason is that it, maybe let me just say something about an alternate way of thinking about geometry, which seems to me more powerful. Maybe actually to motivate this a little bit better. Sure. If you just think about diffeomorphism groups, it's very, very hard to understand what spinners are and where they come from.

You really kind of can't see them at all if you're just thinking about the diffeomorphism group of a manifold. in if you're just thinking about the diffeomorphism group of a manifold so the the the there's the other formulation of geometry going back to carton which is um which makes it much makes it much easy to see where spinners are going on going and it is a lot more powerful in other respects is to uh to think not about your not about a manifold, but about a bigger space, which is a bundle that for each point in the manifold, you consider all possible bases for the tangent bundle. It's also called frames. And so this is sometimes called the frame bundle.

And so it's kind of saying if you want to understand geometry, you should look at the points of space and time. But at the same point, you also got to think about the tangent space and you should think about the possible bases of the tangent space and the so-called frames. So you should always kind of think, instead of writing all your formulas in terms of local coordinates on the of writing all your formulas in terms of local coordinates on the on the manifold you should think think about your problem as being a problem that lives up on the frame bundle and that you always you're not just you're not just at a point in space time but you but you've also got a frame

and then but then you have to be careful to kind of work kind of equivariantly that you have you you know you can you can change your choice of frame. You can rotate your frames. So you kind of work up in the frame bundle, but equivariantly with respect to rotations or whatever. So that gives a lot more structure to the problem. In particular, it allows you to easily say what spinners are, which you couldn't if you just talked about it.

So anyway, there's a lot more one could say about difumorphos and groups and that, but just in terms of the relation to the spinner stuff, maybe it's best to... Yeah, to forget about it. To say it that way. It's not... You have to do something quite different if you're going to talk about spinner. Right. Okay, now the problem you were working on earlier that you said you weren't sure if it would have a solution and you're finding that it does what was it in the early part of the conversation what you're working on your research

interests well oh do you mean right at the beginning where i'm still what i'm still confused about yeah okay but it seemed to me that you were saying you're solving the problem oh this yes so this was i think it could be solved you're surprised yeah so this actually i mean this was actually it goes back to when i was graduate student or postdoc it was first occurred to me look you know actually maybe to kind of explain how this all came about so i was a graduate student at princeton and um i was working on lattice gauge theory. So we're working on this kind of formulation of Yang-Mills theory on a lattice. And so you can actually do computer calculations of it. And so I was trying to understand, you know, there's a lot of interest

in topological effects in Yang-Mills theory. And i was trying to understand how to study those in the kind of numerical calculations on the lattice and and then so i made some progress on that but then um and the next thing that really occurred to me was exactly spinners came up it's like besides having yang mills theory on the lattice we also want to put spinner fields on the lattice so there's this really beautiful way of putting um gauge fields in the lattice yang mills theory which kind of respects the geometric nature of the gauge fields very very nicely it's kind of the wilson's lattice gauge theory but the but there isn't if you try and put spinners in the lattice a lot of very mysterious things happen and and again in some sense the problem is that

if you're just looking at this lattice that you've written down, it's clear kind of what the discrete analogs of thinking about spinners in terms of standard geometry of lines, planes, etc., you don't really know how to put the spinners on a lattice in a way that respects their geometry. And if you try to write down the formulas or do anything, you run into a lot of weird problems. Anyway, there's a long story about what happens if you try to put spinners on a lattice. Is this related to doubling? Like species doubling? Yeah, so one thing you find is that you really... There's no consistent way to put

a single fermion in the lattice. If you try and do it any way you know of doing it, it produces all these extra versions of the same thing, and you have to somehow disentangle of produces all these kind of extra versions of the same thing, and you have to somehow disentangle those. That's part of the problem.

Okay. But that's when I started thinking about the geometry of spinners and some ideas about putting them on the lattice. And then what I was seeing, I started to see that, wait a minute, you know, if you, so this is all happening in Euclidean space, where the rotation group is a copy of two two su2s there there's again a left-handed one and a right-handed one if you like and um what i was seeing really was that the what some of the choices are the geometry is trying to use to put these things in the lattice gave me kind of things occurring and kind of multiplets that had the same SU2 structure as what you see in a generation of electroweak particles.

So in a generation of electroweak particles, for instance, you have a neutrino, left-handed neutrinos, and you have right-handed and left-handed electrons, for instance. And those have certain transformation properties under the SU2 and under a U1. And those were the same ones that I was seeing when I was trying to construct these spinners. the so it seemed to me if you can think of part of this rotation group this su2 as an internal symmetry as the as the symmetry of the of the weak interactions uh of the weinberg's law model then you know you could actually anyway you you got all sorts of interesting things to happen but but the thing that this but making this idea work really required some explanation of why in Euclidean space, what you thought were spacetime symmetries really broke up into half spacetime symmetries and half internal symmetries, which didn't affect spacetime. So this is what, for many years after looking at this i was like well this just can't work i mean you can't if you just look at the whole formalism for how you've set this up and

you know you both of these su2s have to be space-time symmetries you can't they're both going to affect space-time you can't you can't get away from that other people didn't see this as a problem no no i think everybody saw this as a problem i mean i think anybody who ever looked at this idea of of trying to get you know one of the part of the four dimensional rotation symmetry to be an internal symmetry has probably backed away backed away from it for the same reason saying well wait a minute this can't you know i just can't see how that could actually happen that you have to you're telling me this should be an internal subject which doesn't affect space time but it looks to me that

you're rotating space time with it so you can't do that and so this so this is what um for many years kind of kept me from going back to that from to those ideas and as i learned more about quantum filtering actually one motivation as i was teaching this course on quantum filtering quantum filtering in the back of my mind is okay you know as i go along and teach this course i may not explain this to the students but i'm going to very very carefully look at the at the formalism and and i'm going to understand exactly how this analytic continuation is working of these spinners and and i'm going to um you know and i'm going to see that you know it looks like this has to work and i'll i'll finally understand why and then i can stop thinking about this but but i but i kind of as i was teaching this as i was looking at this i kind of never actually saw you know anyway it it i never

actually really saw the art the argument for why this why this has to be a space-type symmetry. It looked like it had to, but you couldn't quite pin down why. So then when I went back to the twister stuff, I became convinced that if you think about everything in terms of twisters, then the whole twister setup is naturally chirally asymmetric. So from the twister point of view, this kind of thing looked a lot more plausible. And I got more interested in it again.

But it's only very recently, the last few weeks, the last couple of months, that I have a very good understanding of exactly why it seemed that, you know, that what I, what I, that, that why I was right, that this should be impossible. There is a standard assumption that you're making, which, which makes what I wanted to do impossible, but it's also possible to not make that assumption and do something else. And that assumption is? It's the symmetry between right and left. It's kind of when you go between Minkowski and Euclidean spinners, the setup that you use to analytically continue,

do you do that in a setup which is right-left symmetric? And if you want the setup to be holomorphic, then you have to use the right-left symmetric. And if you want the setup to be holomorphic, then you have to use the right-left symmetric one. But simultaneously, I realized, yes, you can. Yes, I mean, in the standards, there was a very, very good reason that I and everyone is skeptical that this can make sense. But there actually is a way around it. And you can just uh decide okay i'm gonna i'm i'm gonna

just use right-handed spinners and i'm and i'm gonna and and you can get uh you can get a theory that makes sense i don't know if i'm jumping ahead but i recall in one of the lectures that i saw online of you and you were giving the lecture i believe cole fury was in the audience you're saying that what we have to use are hyper functions yeah am i jumping ahead because you're saying no no it's not going to be holomorphic no i mean that no but actually hyper functions are really part of the holomorphic story they're um yeah they're not they're uh i mean hyper functions are really just saying so what i was saying when i was trying to explain this business about you know why about wick rotation and that and that

things were um that if you write down the standard formulas you end up with something in in a cascades based on which is ill-defined okay and ill-defined. And then you have to define it via rick rotation or analytic continuation. There's just another way of saying that, putting it in a more interesting mathematical context, is to say that the things that you're looking at in Minkowski space-time

are not actually normal functions. They really are best thought of as hyperfunctions. And in this case, they really are what about they are they are best thought of as hyper functions and in this case they're hyper functions which are just um analytic which are just kind of bound boundary values of analytic things as you uh approach uh approach the real line but um yes so the hyper function story is just kind of part of the standard it's really part of the wick rotation story yeah okay yeah but what I'm, I mean, this latest thing I'm trying to do actually gets away from

analytic continuation. You're not, you really, I'm really, it's what's kind of, I'm still kind of, you know, trying to wrap my head around exactly what the implications of this are, but you are, you're not doing the standard sort of analytic continuation anymore. The standard sort of way of analytically continuing, which uses all four space-time dimensions, you're not doing that. You're doing something different, and it's unclear. Anyway, if you start writing down formulas you'll still

get the same story with hyperfunctions but um what prompted you to then go look at twisters and by the way is it called a twister formalism or twister formulation i don't know either one is i don't know if those are used interchangeably because i hear for instance that there's different quantum formalisms like wigners or interaction or path or categorical, but then sometimes I hear, yeah, the categorical formulation of quantum mechanics. I'm like, okay, you get the idea. Well, the thing about twisters is they're not actually... I mean, maybe a good thing to say about twisters is we don't actually know exactly what their relevance is to the real world. So if you have a well-developed idea using twisters for describing the real world and you wanted to contrast it to other similar descriptions, you might want to say, oh, this is the twister formalism or maybe twister formulation.

I don't know. oh, this is the twister formalism, or maybe twister formulation, I don't know. But it's a little bit, but either one is a little bit premature in terms of physics, that we don't actually know exactly how twisters are related to the real world. So it's not like you can translate a real

world problem to twister formalism and then back? Well, you can, so twisters, maybe so twisters are a bit like spinners. So they have some of the mathematical properties of spinners, but they do something more interesting. They're kind of a higher dimensional thing. Maybe one of the best things to say about them is that they're very useful.

So if you want to understand Minkowski spacetime. This is what Einstein figured out. You can use Minkowski's geometry, Minkowski metric, if you want to talk about just vectors and metrics and tensors. Or if you talk about Minkowski spacetime spinners, if you want. That's what I've been most interested in. But the other interesting thing about our theory is when we write them down in minkowski space time um theories of like mass of massless fields and uh things like yang mills theory there they have this bigger invariance group than just the under rotations and translations they're conformally invariant so the the So the geometry of crystals really comes into its own

if you're trying to describe, to understand the properties of space-time under conformal transformations. And anyway, so that's kind of a motivation. So if you don't care about conformal transformations you may not be very interested in spinners but if you really want to understand you know what is how do i write down my theories and how do i have a version of you of mitkowski space time that um where the conformal group acts in a nice linear fashion and where everything works out and and the spinner you can call it now you can call it a formalism or a formulation but it's a way of doing

conformal geometry it really comes into its own so that's so so spinners you know go i mean twisters go way way back and and you know this really was mainly Roger Penrose is doing in that in the 60s and you know and he was very interested in using them to to understand you know things things happening in Minkowski space-time and especially they can formal invariance of these things and so there's a huge amount of effort and a lot of beautiful things discovered during the 70s, especially by him and his collaborators in Minkowski space-time. And then Atiyah realized that you could take this over and do some very, very interesting things in Ramanian geometry and Euclidean space-time. Yeah.

So I kind of learned about this geometry at the raise points. That sentence could be said about Atiyah in the most general form. And then Atiyah realized you could use this for underscore with geometry. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so I've been kind of aware about twisters for a long time, but I didn't see... Anyway, I actually wrote a very speculative paper long long ago about this and and it mentioned the connection to twisters but it um but there's just a lot about them that i

didn't understand back then it took me many years to understand and especially the um the relationship between is euclidean signature and minkasi signature spinners how they're related is that that's that's quite a tricky story which took me a long time to understand so you have the splinter in your thumb for decades about the space-time symmetries and them acting not just on space-time what happened in 2020 and 2021 um i think now i'm trying to think what specific one thing that happened in 2020 was covid so right in your mind what happened 2019 then no no no but this is actually relevant because because actually in in 2020 i was much more um and i was thinking of this stuff but yeah but yeah but in 2020 all of a sudden you're kind of you know you're at home you're at home a lot that you're just sitting there and uh

opposite home and i don't have a lot of all the usual distractions or whatever and so and and so that actually um i actually gave me some of the more time to kind of think peacefully about uh about some of the stuff that makes them and make some progress yeah so i'd have i'd have to i mean i kind of remember now that, you know, exactly which things became clear at which times, but it's, it's been a slow,

it was a slow process of various things clarifying, but, but I think maybe that was one of the main things is to finally get a picture in mind of how, how Euclidean and Minkowski twister theory all fit together. Awesome. How does it fit? Is there a way of explaining it? Well, I mean, maybe the best thing to say about

twister theory is that it really kind of naturally wants to be a theory of complex space-time. And this is the thing. If you say I'm going to study four-dimensional complex space-time and I'm interested in its conformal group and things like that, then the Twister story is actually very, very simple. I mean, you're basically just saying that there's a four-complex dimensional space, and a point in space-time is a complex two-plane in that four-dimensional space.

in that four-dimensional space. So points... Anyway, yeah. So instead of thinking of the way of normal thinking of some space with these points, well, you've got to think about... Just think about the complex two planes and complex four-dimensional space, and everything just kind of drops out of that.

And there is one... There's a beautiful relation of that story to the theory of spinners, is that... And this is kind of drops out of that and and there is one there's a beautiful relation of that story to the theory of spinners is that and this is kind of the relationship between the theory of twister and theory of spinners in twister theory a point in four-dimensional space space-time is a complex two-plane that by definitely that's the definition of what a point is. But that complex two-plane, that kind of tautologically answers the question of where do these spinners come from? Because the space of spinners is a complex two-plane. So from the standard point of view, as I was saying, if you just think about the diffeomorphism, it's very, very hard to even say what a spinner is.

So where are these weird complex two planes coming from? Well, from the point of view of twister theory, it's purely tautological. It's just, you know, the two plane is a point. the spin one half two plane complex two plane which is describing the spin of a of a um of an electron is exactly a point anyway that that's exactly what what the definition of a point is so you can't um a point in twister space or a point in space time going in space time yeah so twister space is a four-complex dimensional thing, but the points in it correspond to the various structures in spacetime, but the complex two planes in it correspond to the points in spacetime. Anyway, that's one of the basics. statement that the points in spacetime are the same as spinners or the points in spacetime or the structure of spacetime gives rise to the structure of spinners and vice versa or are none of those statements correct i think yeah i know i i think both of them i mean it really is telling

you twister theory is really telling you that it's a it's a way of thinking about spacetime in which and sorry this is four dimensional spacetime four dimensional space i mean yeah yeah yeah it's a way of thinking about yeah so. So twister theory is very, very special to four dimensions. It doesn't really work in other dimensions. But it really is, it's a way of thinking about space-time in which, you know, the occurrence of spinners and their properties are just completely tautological. They're just built into the raised definitions. into the raised definitions. Sociologically, why do you think it is that Penrose's Twister program firstly has been allowed to continue because many other programs

just die out if you're not loop or string or causal or asymptotic. There's just four as far as I can tell. Five with Penrose. So why is it alive and then why hasn't it caught on? Or maybe you disagree, it's not alive. no no it's very much it's very much alive it's very much alive and still but and so there's an interesting kind of history but but a lot of it was really penrose so he you know he he had this idea and he's raised places explaining how he came up with it and he was very very struck by this and and you know so he quite

successfully at oxford built up a group of people working on this and so, you know, it was a kind of You know a good example of kind of house How normal science kind of works sociologically? you know somebody comes up with a good idea and they actually build a group of people around them and People do as people do more work. They learn more interesting things about this more this more people get interested so you know he always you know throughout the 70s i would say into the 80s there always was a quite healthy group of people um you know working on pedros or people somehow having some relation to pedro's collaborators were working on this so it was um raters were working on this so it was um anyways perfectly normal science it wasn't um it wasn't so clear though how to get um it was clear some things were very clear some things were clear

that this was really a beautiful way of writing down conformally invariant wave equations and studying their properties so there were there was the beauty of the idea and the power to do certain things was known but but it didn't seem to be necessary or have any particular connection to specific problems in particle physics. So particle physicists would look at this and say, well, that's nice, but that doesn't actually tell me anything. If I needed to do some conformally invariant calculations, I might be able to use that, but it's not actually telling me something really that, you know, really knew I can't get elsewhere. And then, you know, and then in the 80s, you also had, you know, Atiyah got into the game and there's a lot of mathematicians got into it

through the relations to the, on the Euclidean side. So, you know, it was, you know, especially among mathematicians, you know, it was especially among mathematicians, mathematical physicists, it remained a very active area, and it still is to this day. A lot of it was based in Oxford, but also a lot of other places.

But in terms of its implications for physics, I would say the thing to me is I think Penrose and his people trying to connect this to physics in an interesting way, they kind of ran out of new ideas. There were some things that they could do, but they couldn't actually get any kind of a really killer app, if you like. And from my point of view, I don't know if I can, I think, anyway, I don't know if I'll ever be able to convince them or what they think of it these days. But the problem was that they were thinking of connecting this to physics purely from the Minkowski spacetime side. So they're looking at Minkowski spacetime twisters, Minkowski spacetime spinners. And the twister theory just didn't... If you just look at Minkowski spacetime, you don't see the sort of new things which which i'm finding interesting which i think tell you

something new about particle physics you don't see this kind of internal the fact that one of these factors can be an internal symmetry you just can't can't see that in minkowski space time and then so and and then there's some other more technical things about um i better not get into that but but the there's kind of a well it's okay the audience is generally extremely educated in physics and math yeah i i would actually well maybe maybe to to connect this what i'm saying right is i think you know the also the way people think about general relativity in Cassidy's signature, general relativity is not a chiral theory. It's supposed to be left-right invariant, parity of symmetric theory.

So the problem with thinking about general relativity in terms of twisters is that your setup is completely chiral. chiral so you you you can you naturally end up end up with um if you try and do gravity with it you end up with kind of something that's not quite the right theory of gravity it's kind of a chiral version of gravity and anyway this is a very interesting story but but i and i think um penrose always referred to this as the the googly problem right right yeah something about cricket yeah and cricket there's something about how the the balls we're north american so yeah yeah so i yeah anyway but so if you know about cricket you can definitely yeah maybe this makes more sense to you but he always referred to this as a googly problem that he was kind of in the twister theory he's only getting one he's only

getting things spinning one way and but but anyways, you can see from my point of view, that's evidence of exactly what I'm trying to say now. Well, space-time is right-handed. So it's a related problem. But that was always kind of a... So Penrose and the people

around him, I think, put a lot of effort into trying to revamp twister theory into something chirally symmetric. Now, why would they want to do that if the standard model isn't? Well, they weren't really,

they weren't really trying to describe the standard model. They never really have. They really wanted to, they thought twisters were a way of thinking about space time. So they wanted to do general relativity and general relativity is not a chiral theory. So they, yeah. So, so they were trying to

find kind of a how do we get rid of all this chirality and uh and they never really successful at that so you're saying it's a pro not a con yeah yeah exactly it's a feature not a bug yeah yeah right right but in terms of one interesting fun thing about the sociology, though, is that what, you know, so the idea that you could get, use twisters to quantize, to do general relativity and perhaps quantize it. That was always something which, you know, Penrose and his people were working on. But, you know, most physicists, I think, felt that wasn't really going anywhere. This wasn't going to work. this wasn't going to work. And maybe Witten was an example of somebody, I think, who really could see the mathematical power of these ideas and how important they were as new ideas about geometry. Again, that's a general statement that can be said.

And then Ed Witten saw the power of this mathematics, dot, dot, dot. Yeah. I think even going back to a postdoc, he learned about twisters. He was trying to do some things with it. But he never kind of, but he then actually finally found something. And this was about 20 years ago. And what became known as the twister string. So he actually became, he found a way of kind of writing, you know, a different way of writing down the um perturbative calculations in yang mills in terms of um of a sort of string theory except it's a very different kind of string theory than the one that the one that's supposed to be the theory of everything and and it's a theory where

the string lives in twister space so written wrote this really kind of beautiful very very beautiful paper about twister string theory and so and so since Witten is talking about twisters, of course, all of a sudden there's a lot of physicists who were never had anything good to say about twisters all of a sudden are rushing out to learn about twisters. So, so that, and there's, but there's been an ongoing story of, um, of this twister string story story which is a lot of people have done a lot of things but again a lot of it has has had hasn't really worked out the way people want like and for the same reason as penner that penner's always had that the um people are trying to find quantize a kairali version a kairali symmetric version of general relativity using this thing and that's not what

it really wants to do so um anyway but but that that's kind of that's sociologically very important about why most high energy physicists you know have more have heard about twisters and and don't and often have nice things to say about them is because of the twister string okay there are quite a few questions that I have. Okay, one is, the particle physicists' repudiation of twister theory or just distancing from it because it's not useful to them, is that something that they also slung at string theory or were they more embracing of it? I'm not quite sure.

Who do you kind of mean? Are we talking about you? I'm not sure. Earlier you said that the particle physicists weren't initially adopting string theory, sorry, twister theory, because it didn't provide them with anything that's new. You said, well, okay, if we need to do some conformally invariant calculation, we'll use twister theory. But at the same time, string theory is known, or at least colloquially known, for not producing what's useful to high-energy physicists,

but useful outside of high-energy physics, physics like to mathematics or maybe condensed matter physics but what i'm asking is around the same time when they were distancing themselves from twister theory you're not using it were they then embracing of string theory or they gave the same critique well okay so we have to you should start if we're trying to talk about string theory yeah that's a kind of a complex this is kind of a complex story and and it has the whole story of particle physics and string theory that that's pretty well pretty much completely disconnected from from twisters because um i mean the issues that that that you know people about why people were doing string theory or why they might mind i want to do string theory. It really had nothing to do with

twisters. Twisters is kind of a... Anyway, a speculative geometric framework. And then twisters kind of make a small kind of appearance due to Witten at 1.20 years ago, but that's kind of about it. Yeah, so I mean, I can...

Maybe we can start talking about that about the whole string theory and particle physics business but i'm not twister anyway just twisters it seems like a bad place to start i'm not trying to mix up twisters with it what i just meant to say was it's interesting what gets accepted and what doesn't yeah and so why was string theory accepted take us through the history of that and also you could tell people who may have just heard the term, the name, sorry, Ed Witten, but all they know about him is that he's a genius. But they don't realize the influence that he has.

Yeah, okay, so this is a good place to start, yeah. And, you know, Witten is really kind of central to this story. And so, you know, I think the short summary of the history of this subject of particle physics was that you know by 1973 you had this thing called the standard model which was this you know incredibly successful way of talking about particle physics and and and capturing everything that you see when you um you know in these in when you do energy physics experiments and and and the story you know when you, um, you know, in these, in, when you do a high energy physics experiments and, and, and the story,

you know, when I kind of came in, it feels, I went to start learning about, probably started reading books and things about what's happening and particle physics, probably right, right around the mid, late seventies,

mid seventies. I went to college in 75 and I spent most of my college career, a lot of it learning about the standard model and, and this stuff. And then, and, um most of my college career, a lot of it learning about the standard model and this stuff. And then, so by the time I left grad school, I mean, by the time I left college in 1979 and I went to graduate school at Princeton, people were starting to get... People had now spent, you know, let's say just six years, let's say, trying to figure out how to do better than the standard model. And one thing is how to do, find some kind of new...

Anyway, how to do better than the standard model as a theory of particle physics. But one thing is the standard model doesn't give you a quantum theory of gravity. So the other thing was, how do we get a quantum theory of gravity? So these were kind of the big problems that were already in the air. And Witten is a genius. And he had been a grad student at Princeton.

He actually came to Harvard as a postdoc, I think, in 77, 78. And I met him when he actually was a postdoc, I think in 77, 78. And I met him when he was actually was a postdoc. And, you know, and he quickly, you know, was started, you know, doing some, some really, really amazing things. I went to Princeton 79 a year or two later, he actually, you know, you know, you know, he went directly from a postdoc at Harvard to becoming a full professor at Princeton, becoming a professor at Princeton,

becoming a professor at Princeton very quickly. And he was there. And so the years I was in Princeton as a graduate student were from 79 to 84. And those were years, you know, people, I think, were getting more and more frustrated. There were lots of ideas coming up, but every idea that people kind of tried to do better than the standard model or maybe to quantize gravity really didn't you know didn't quite work i think there's a lot of and people were kind of cycling every six months through there's some new idea you'd work on it for six months or a year and people start to realize well this doesn't really do what we want to do let's find something else so

there were a lot of new ideas but but nothing really working out but so but but whit whiton then you know he he had been interested there was this idea that was very unpopular that very few people were working on to try to quantize gravity and you and unify it with the particle physics through string theory. And so it was people like John Schwartz and Michael Green were working on this, but it was a very small group of people and there wasn't much attention being paid to that. But Witten was paying attention. I think one thing to say about him is that besides being very, very smart, he's also somebody who can read people's ideas or talk to them and absorb new ideas

very, very quickly. So he was also spending a lot of time looking around, trying to see what other ideas are either out there. And this was one that he got interested in. But for various reasons, technical reasons, he thought, you know, there's a technical reason, so-called anomaly calculations, about why this is not going to work out. And what happened right in the fall of 84,

I actually went as a postdoc to Stony Brook. And right around that time, Green and Schwartz had done this calculation that showed that these anomalies canceled, except there's some specific case where these anomalies canceled. And so Witten then became very excited about the idea that you could use in that specific case of this so-called super string theory to um yeah so so so whitten heard about this and he said i said okay you know the thing that had been that reason i had in my mind why super string theory couldn't work as a unified theory and now it looks maybe like maybe you can get around that so he kind of then started working full full time on trying to you know come

up with models or understand super string models that you could use to do unification. And so throughout kind of, I was now at Stony Brook, but I was kind of hearing reports of what's going on at Princeton. And throughout late 84, 85, 86, this was, you know, Witten and the people around him, this is what they were working on. And they were, you know, Witten and the people around him, this is what they were working on, Obora. And they were, you know, they had a very specific picture in mind. It was that, you know,

the super string only is consistent in 10 dimensions. So you can get rid of four of them by the so-called Calabi-Yau compactification. And hopefully there's only a few of these Calabi-Yaus and one of those is going to describe the real world and you know we're all gonna we're gonna have this wonderful beautiful unified theory using this kind of six-dimensional geometry of Klabiaus and we're gonna have it within the next year or two and that was what the way they were thinking and

you know a lot of the people you know friends and colleagues of mine who you know were doing kind of the thing that you would often do is go down and go you know when you're in princeton go talk to witten and say here's here's what i'm working on you know can you what do you think about this and i got several of them reported back to me yeah i went down to princeton i talked to whitten and he said well you know what you're working on that's all very nice well and good but you know you really should be working on strength theory because that's actually where all the action is. And that's really and, you know, we're almost going to have the theory of everything there. And you can work on string theory. So, you know, this just had a huge effect.

So and and this was called the so-called first super string revolution. and you know uh there's kind of there's a story over the next five or ten years of how you know people were brought into this field and people some people are always skeptical but um you know it it kind of gained more and more influence and became institutionalized during kind of the decade after that and in some sense the weird thing the weird thing the weird thing that's hard to understand string theory is why you know once it became clear these ideas really weren't working out why didn't you know this just fall by the wayside and people go and do something else but 40 years later we're still it's still here and so it's a very strange it's a very strange story so what do you see as the main physical problem, or even mathematical problem, of string theory?

Do you see it as, well, how do we search this landscape? Or how do we find the right manifold, the six-dimensional Kaler manifold? Yeah, I think that was always the thing that bothered me about it from the beginning, which I think is the fundamental problem. And it's the fundamental problem whenever you decide to use higher dimensional Riemannian geometry. This actually goes back to Einstein and these Kluze-Klein models. People have often said, okay, well, we had this beautiful theory of four-dimensional geometry and Einstein general relativity, and had this this particle physics stuff going on which seems

to have some interesting geometry to it so let's just let's just add some dimensions and and write down a theory in five or seven or ten or whatever dimensions and then do geometry there and that's going to solve and that's going to be the unified theory so i mean this is sort of thing einstein was thinking about but um if you start thinking about this the problem is you you realize that these kind of internal dimensions that the the geometry of particle physics and the geometry of special relativity are quite different they're not um you know they're these metric degrees of freedom in four dimensions. And if you try and you don't really have those in, like in the standard model, it just doesn't have things like that.

So if you put those sort of dynamical variables into there, the ability for these other dimensions by the four one two all the you you you have a vast you you hugely increase the number of degrees of freedom and you have a theory where you have to now explain why all this extra geometry which you've put in there and and which you're only trying to get a a kind of small kind of very rigid kind of couple pieces of information out why is are all these infinite number of degrees of freedom why how can you just ignore them how can you you have to find a dynamics consistent dynamics for them and then you and that consistent dynamics has to explain why you don't see them yeah and and so that's always been the problem with like

Kaluza-Klein models and with any kind of extra-dimensional models. And string theory just kind of has this problem in spades. You know, instead of point particles, you have strings. They have a huge number of new degrees of freedom. You have to

say that, well, the string vibrations are all happening at such high energies we can't see them and then the extra 60 then they're trying to use the fact that super strings have very special properties in 10 dimensions they um and they're trying to use that to argue that our strings are moving in 10 dimensions and that four are the ones we see and six six are going to be described particle physics and so anyways it becomes a very complicated theory you have to write down in order to kind of make any of this work and make any of this look like physics and the um from the beginning there was kind of no story about why is anything that looks like the real world going to drop out of this, you know, and why that? And that's still the case 40 years later.

And the whole thing just suffers from this problem that you don't you don't actually you don't actually have the theory there's kind of a when you say that you have a string theory and people say oh we have this mathematically elegant well-defined unique theory they're talking about that's not a full theory that that that's that's a perturbative limit of a theory and so what they really need in order to answer the questions they want to answer is they need something more general, a non-perturbative kind of general version of string theory. And sometimes people will call it M-theory. So if you want, we can call it M-theory.

And they need an M-theory. And nobody knows what M-theory is. No one has come up. You can write down a list of properties that, you know, M-theory is supposed to be some theory with this list of properties, but you up you can write down a list of properties that you know m theory is supposed to be some theory with this list of properties but you can't actually write down a theory and so on the one hand you don't actually have a real theory that you can nail down say this is a theory we're going to solve it and look at the solutions and see if they look like the real world so what you what people end up doing is saying well we don't

really know what the theory is let's assume that but it seems that maybe there's one that has some properties that look like the real world so let's work with that and and then try to constrain see what constraints we can get out of it will tell us you know are we seeing something like the real world and then they just end up finding that, no, there aren't really useful constraints that you can get almost anything out of it. So you get this landscape of all possibilities. And then, you know, 20 years ago, things got very weird when people just started to say, well, you know, instead of saying that normally if you have a theory, it can't predict anything because, you know, almost everything is a solution to it. You say, okay, well, that was a bad idea and you move on

instead you saw people saying oh well that's it just means the real world is you know all of these possible things exist in the real world in the multiverse and yeah and just for you know for anthropic reasons we happen to live in this random one and you know i mean anyway it's the fact that anyone ever took any of that seriously is just still kind of i don't have any explanation for it it's just yeah okay so to summarize somewhere around this is not a part of the story that was said but somewhere around the 1960s some amplitude called the veneziano i think veneziano i don't know how to pronounce it yeah that was the first inklings of string theory and it had to do it was come up with because of the strong force. They were trying to solve something.

Then it was forgotten about. And then around the 1980s, there were some other problems with string theory that were solved. And so this is the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation. Yeah. And then some people say that that was the first revolution. But it's also more accurate to say that that precipitated Ed Witten to take it seriously. And then that's what precipitated the first string revolution. Okay. Then from there, then you realize that there are different ways, something like five to the 100 or 10 to the 500 or some extreme amount that if you

were to do some calculation, all those books behind you, the amount of words ever written, not just books ever published, words ever written, I think easily letters ever written, not just books ever published, words ever written, I think easily letters ever written, like single letters, it would be like saying, find this one letter in every single book that's ever been written, including all the ones that have been on fire and underwater and so on. Okay, that's not such a problem if you can figure out how to reduce the search space. But if you can't, then it turns out the problem is NP-complete, which means you just have to brute force. Is that a correct summary?

Actually, maybe to go back to one thing I said, yeah, so this is one part of the story I didn't say, is that string theory had originally come out as a potential theory of the strong interactions. And that actually was one reason Witten, I think, was looking at it, is that one of the open problems that the standard model left open was how do you solve the strong... We have this strong interaction theory, but how do you solve it? And it looked like maybe you could use the old ideas about strings to solve it. And I actually spent a lot of time learning about

strings as a graduate student because of that, and that was related to Witten. But the problem with because of that and i was ready to win but but but the the problem with um this kind of multiplicity of solutions of string theory of is that it's not just that there are too many of them it's just that that you don't actually have a definition of the problem you know so so people this kind of drives me crazy people often talk about well the problem is that we don't know how to put a measure on the space of solutions of string theory. And if we could put a measure, then we could figure out, you know, maybe it's concentrated someplace. Right. And that would be great. But I keep pointing out that the problem is not that you don't have a measure of the space. The problem is that you have no idea what the space is. As I was saying, you know, to even define what a string theory solution is requires knowing

precisely what M-theory is. You don't know it. There are no equations anyone could write down which you say, if we were smart enough and we could find all the solutions to this, this would, you know, these are all the solutions to string theory i mean you just don't don't have that so all of the things that you do have like you can go out and say well well maybe it's these gadgets and you have 10 of the 500 of them or whatever those are all just kind of cooked together possible approximations to to what you think might be a string theory solution those are not there aren't you know there are solutions to some equations you've written down which are not, they are not the equations of string theory. There's something

you wrote down and think maybe these things have something to do with string theory. So the problem is much worse than any of these practical problems of there's too many of these things. And this whole business, and now it's become kind of these things yeah and this whole business and now it's become kind of an industry that well let's apply machine learning techniques to this and it's just i mean you're just applying anyway you're just does this frustrate you yes i mean it's this data is garbage you know so you you basically are throwing. You basically do not actually know what your problem is, so you're cooking up something which you can feed to a computer, but it actually is kind of known to be garbage. And you're doing processing on this and producing more garbage and getting grants to do this and going around telling people that you're looking for the for the universe i mean it's real that's just utter nonsense i'm sorry many people don't

know because they don't know the history but since 2010s it's become somewhat cool to dunk on string theory at least in the popular press okay maybe not inside academia but you were alone you and lee smolin were lone wolves early lone wolves yeah yeah can you talk about that and talk about some of the flack you took maybe still take yeah anyway it was certainly a very strange experience a very time strange time but you know i think the thing to say is that you know throughout you know i was never i was always fairly skeptical about about string theory but you know, I was never, I was always fairly skeptical about string theory, but, you know, initially for many years, my attitude was, well, you know,

who knows, you know, Boynton's certainly very smart. These people are, you know, they're going to sooner or later, they'll figure out for themselves, either they'll figure out this works or they'll do something else. But then, you know, just as time went by, years went by, this was just not happening. And you had more and more kind of popular books. I have to confess, maybe in some sense, it's somewhat of a reaction to Brian Green, who is my friend and colleague here at Columbia. So he did a very, very good job with PBS specials convincing the world that this was a success, that this was an idea on the way to success when it really wasn't. So I thought, okay, well, somebody should sit down and write a book about what the real situation here is. And it's not like when I talk to people privately about this,

I would say that people who are not string theorists mostly would, would, would say, yeah, you know, yeah, you're probably right. This is not, this doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but you know, whatever. And then the, um, and people, and when I talked to strength theorists, I have plenty of strength theorist friends, they would often say, yeah, you know, yeah, there are a lot of huge problems and we just, we don't really know anything better to do right now. So we're going to keep doing this, but yeah, yeah. All these problems you're pointing out are really real. So what's wrong with that? Well, the weird thing, I think, was this disjunction between the private opinions of people, what people were saying to each other privately, what you were saying in the popular press.

And one aspect of this was people not wanting to publicly criticize something. And I think the subject became more and more kind of ideological. And the string theorists kind of started to feel kind of embattled. They were very well aware that a lot of their colleagues thought what they were doing was not working. On the other hand, you know, so they became more defensive. And there was a lot more. And a lot of people, I think, would tell me, yeah, you know, you're,

yeah, you know, I agree with a lot of your saying, but yeah, but don't quote me on this publicly. I don't want to get involved in, you know, in that mess and in alienating a lot of my colleagues and who are anyway.

So, but I, I have this weird status that I'm actually in a math department, not a physics department. And, you know, I don't have a lot of the same reasons that you don't want to annoy some powerful people in physics math department, not a physics department. And, you know, I don't have a lot of the same reasons that you don't want to annoy some powerful people in physics,

like, you know, trying to get grants, get your students jobs, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't really apply to me. So I thought, well, you know, if somebody is going to come out here, it might as well be me. And, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff.

So I started writing this in around 2002, 2003. And the book was finally published. It was a long story about getting it published, but it finally got published in 2006. And in the meantime, Lee Smolin had been writing a book. He was coming from a different direction. Trouble with physics? Yeah, the trouble with physics. And he had his own motivation

so it was trying to write something i think more more general and sociological but with this as an example and i think the way he describes it the example kind of took over the general theory and so he ended up also writing a book about string theory and uh and the books ended up coming out at the same time which i think you know it was kind of a force multiplier there that you know people if one person is writing a book which says well you know a lot of the things you're hearing you're hearing are not right or people say well that's just one person's opinion but if two people are do it are saying everybody's like oh you know there must be something to this and so i think the the combination of the two books i think it did have a lot of effect on, it did make a lot of people realize there was a problem here.

It made a lot of the strength areas, you know, much more defensive. I mean, it also caused, I think, a lot of people, young people thinking of doing strength theory or people doing strength theory to decide to move on to something else. move on to something else but um so so they they um people very often tell me that you know about effects this book had on on them or other people they knew um in terms of their decisions about you know what to do with their research or their career the book is called not even wrong the links to all resources mentioned will be in the description including this book so you mentioned that your colleagues would talk to you privately and then they would say something else to the popular press. Now, when you say popular press, are you also including grant agencies with that, like just the public in general? Because it's not just a popular science issue, it's also a grant issue,

where the money goes. Yeah, so it's not just the popular press and and to be clear i should say it's not that they would say one thing one place the other thing it's just they would carefully just not say you know that there are things that they would say in conversation with me or i think in conversations with other people not just me that they would just say okay this is not something that okay sin of commission versus omission yeah it it's not like they were going out and saying oh the strength theory is going great it's just that you know anyway they were they were they were not kind of they were not saying this is really appears to be a failure um but uh yeah but but yeah but you're right this this issue kind of occurs at all levels from you know the very very popular press from kind of television specials

um to you know more more serious popular press or what what gets into scientific american you know what what gets into uh now we have quantum magazine you know which are more more serious uh parts of the parts of the press aimed at the public, all the way down to exactly, like in grand proposals, what do you write in grand proposals, whatever, or if you're trying to explain to some kind of funding person or something about what's you know, what's, what's going on in your subject. Do you, um, yeah. And what do you say about string theory? And so the, you know, the string

theorists I think have often, you know, that they've, I think everybody, whatever you're working on, you're often forced by this business of getting your students a job or getting a grant to be you know to say to go right up to up to the boundary of what's defensible and and being optimistic about what you're doing but um and they're you know so that's what string theorists have certainly always been always been doing you could argue you know in many cases it's not different than what other other scientists do but it's um i i think the thing which i i have to say i have found more and more disturbing the reaction of and and this started when my book came out and i think lee small had a similar reaction the um i think both of us were expecting

a much more serious intellectual response to the issues we were raising um you know we were raising serious serious technical questions and we were getting kind of back you know kind of you know personal personal attacks and from people in the community or from the public from people in a no from people in the community i mean i, I think, you know, what you're getting from people who don't, in the public, don't know much about this, you're getting some completely random combination of people who are annoyed because you're saying something different than what they heard and other people who become your fan because you're saying something different. And so you end up with a huge number of fans who you don't necessarily want as your fans but anyway the uh yeah so both of us were expecting you know that you know we we put a lot of effort into making a you know a serious intellectual case about what these problems were and instead of getting a serious response we were getting um you know you know these kind of personal attacks of how dare you say this and so for

instance you know there's one prominent blogger who um says who would write these endless blog entries about what's wrong with peter white and what he's doing and and at some point i was trying to respond to these and at some point i realized you know what this guy's talking about has nothing to do with what i actually wrote in my book and then and and then he actually kind of publicly admitted that he was refusing to, he refuses to read the book. So this is a, anyway,

this kind of blew my mind. How can you be an academic and engaged in, you know, academic discussion, intellectual issues. And, and you're, you're spending all this time arguing about a book and,

and you're refusing to read it. I mean,'s just really crazy and that was a string theorist yeah just a colleague yeah okay string theorist yeah speaking of brian green oh sorry continue yeah no yeah no that it wasn't brian green no no no anyway i didn't mean to suggest that no no but but anyway but anyway that's just one example. And I think this is an ongoing, I think, disturbing situation that people are just not, people are kind of defending that field and continue and research there with just kind of refusing to acknowledge the problems or to have kind of serious discussions of it i think you know you're on your last year last thing with it with edward frankel i think it's kind of funny because he you know i know him and i actually was out visiting him in berkeley in june or something and we're talking about things and he told me oh peter i'm you know i'm going to go to the strings conference and it's the first time i've been to a strings conference you know and you know he's heard me go on about this for and he's kind of nodded his head

politely and you know he said well i'm a mathematician i'd rather not you know but this sounds a little bit maybe published with witten yeah and then you know so he and he knows all these people he and he you know he knows a lot about the story but but he and and i think you know he knows me well enough that i'm you know i'm you know i have a somewhat i'm not a complete fool and i have a somewhat serious point of view but you know, I'm, you know, I have a somewhat, I'm not a complete fool and I have a somewhat serious point of view, but you know, maybe I'm really a bit too extreme about this, but then he went to the, this conference and then after when he comes back, he gives me a call and says, basically, you know, Peter, I didn't realize how bad it really was. You're right. This really

is as bad as you're, you've been saying. So it saying. Anyway. What was bad? The exuberance of the young people or the old people telling, misleading the younger people into a useless pit? Or what was bad? Yes, it is as bad as you say. Well, I think what's bad is really just this kind of refusal to admit. I mean, this is a field which intellectually has serious problems. Things have not worked out. These ideas really have failed to work. And instead of admitting that ideas have failed and moving on, people will just kind of keep acting as if that's not true. And so the, you know, I sorry to interrupt i'm so sorry so why would edward

expect an admittance of the failure of string theory at a strings conference i think one thing to say you know i mean part of the story about him is you know he's a he's a mathematician and and you know so mathematicians if you do mathematics the one thing you have to be completely clear about is you know what you understand one thing you have to be completely clear about is, you know, what you understand and what you don't understand and what is a wrong idea and what is the right idea, you know, and if something doesn't work and is wrong, you have to, you can't play a game. You cannot play any games about this. This is, you know, you have to admit that this is wrong. And so I think, especially for mathematicians to come in and see an environment where there's you know

The kind of guiding Ideas that people haven't really haven't really worked out and a lot of things, you know are known Do not work for known reasons but people are still kind of acting as if this is not true and trying to figure out how to kind of Do something and make career for themselves in you know in this environment it's a very you know i think he he recognized that but it is part of it is the um i mean mathematics is a very unusual subject that people things things really are wrong or right and yeah and you're're you know it's you absolutely absolutely cannot seriously make progress on the subject unless you recognize that and uh and mathematicians are also much more

used to um they're much more used to being wrong i think one of my colleagues john morgan likes to say that uh you know mathematics is the is the only subject he knows of where, you know, if two people disagree about something and they each think the other is wrong, they'll go into a room and sit down and talk about it. And then they'll emerge from the room with one of them having admitted he was wrong, the other one was right. And that this is just not, it's not a normal human behavior, but it's something that is part of the mathematical culture. Earlier, I said, speaking of Brian Greene, and what I meant was, I had a conversation with Brian Greene about almost a year ago now, and I mentioned, yeah, so Peter White has a potential toe, Euclidean twister unification. And then he said, oh, does he? Oh, I didn't know. He is in your university. Not to put you on the spot but why is that well i it said aloud i don't think it's true by the professor of physics mainly who studies string theory well

there's so many proposals for toes yeah there are proposals in your inbox but there aren't serious proposals by other professors there aren't that many serious proposals of theories of everything, at least not on a monthly basis. Well, I mean, this really doesn't have anything in particular to do with Brian. You could ask, since people on this subject, in principle, should be interested in this. I've gotten very little reaction from physicists to this. And in some sense, it's kind of clear why. I mean, I wrote this paper.

I read it on the blog. And I've gotten no reaction in both cases. I don't have reaction from people writing, telling me that I talked to about it or saying, oh know this is this this is wrong this can't work for this reason but well i think that this is this is very very much the problem with the the paper that i wrote about this it's very it uses some quite tricky understanding of how twisters work and twister geometry works, which is something that very few physicists have. So I'd be completely shocked if Brian actually really understood some of the things going on with twisters that I'm talking about. And the problem, I think, for anybody who then, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, I have this great idea, it involves, you know, these subtle subtleties of twister theory.

And you're like, well, you know, I'm really not in the mood to spend a week or so sitting down trying to understand that subtle as a twister theory. So I think, you know, maybe I'll just nod my head politely and go on my way. That's part of it. And then part of it is also that a lot of you know this is very much a speculative work in progress you know i'm seeing a lot of very interesting things happening here but i'm not um i in no sense have completely understood what's going on or or have the kind of uh you know understanding of this where you can write this down and people really understand can follow exactly what exactly what's going on so um

it's not too surprising i haven't got that much i can see why i understand the typical reaction to this and um brian is somewhat of a special case because i mean he also actually is very um i i think actually he actually a lot of his effort is as has in recent years has gone into other things especially the i mean the world science foundation I think, is now more or less. It's mostly Brian Greene at this point. So he's thinking about other things. And I have very little contact with people in the physics department. I mean, they're mostly thinking about very different things. I have very little contact with people in the physics department.

I mean, they're mostly thinking about very different things. And it's kind of a sad fact here at Columbia, but it's true essentially everywhere else that the, you know, the mathematicians and physicists really don't talk to each other. They're really separate silos, separate languages, separate cultures. And, you know, places where you have kind of mathematicians and physicists and kind of active and high-level interaction with each other is very unusual. It doesn't happen very much. I have a couple of questions again.

I'll say two of them just so I don't forget them and then we can take them in whichever order you like. So one of the questions is how slash why did you get placed into the math department? So that's one question. And then another one is you mentioned earlier that Witten has this power to survey a vast number of people and extract the ideas at great speed. And so a large part of that is raw IQ, like sheer intellect. But is there something else that he employs like a technique that you think others can emulate? I imagine if Witten was to read your paper, he would understand it.

And I imagine that he would see, oh, he would see the benefit of it and maybe the application to string theory or maybe it offshoots in its own direction. But anyhow, so those are two separate questions, one about Witten and then one about you and the department you're in. Okay, yeah, I've got,

yeah, they're two very different. Let me start, let me just say something quickly about Wney just just saying about you having dealt with them over the years you know one thing i i find very interesting about him is just you know you know he travels around a lot and you know he but but he let's just say let's just say his way of socializing is to you know if he's to a, to come to a department and he's at tier or whatever, he'll, you know, and he's introduced anybody, he almost immediately will ask him, okay, well, what, what are you working on? You know, explain it to me. And so,

so just a lot of what, anyway, that's a lot, a lot of what, what he's done over the, over the years has, has just been, has just been, you know, trying to really be aware. And, um, you know, anyway, I've said what I've been doing and tried to get him interested. He's... Anyway, we'll see where that goes. Maybe I'll have more success with this new paper, maybe not.

But he's... He's responded, though, or no? He has responded, but it's more that he's kind of looked at it. The first version, he actually made some comments more about the beginning of it, but I think he didn't engage with most of what I was talking about. We're going to get back to the math question soon, the math department question. But do you think a part of that is because there's a sour taste given your book? Yeah, yeah.

Again, I've known him since i was an undergraduate you know i think you know he's i think he's aware you know this guy is not an idiot but but he's also i'm also not his favorite person in terms of kind of you know the impact i've had on his on his subject and um yeah and i think you know he also i think he understands it's not personal but you know not personal, but it's very hard to deal with somebody who's been this main figure telling the world that the thing that you think is your main accomplishment in life is wrong. Anyway, I'm not his favorite guy, but anyway, we're still... It's fine. I think he's a very... Anyway, he's a very ethical and very...

And I think when I complain a lot of... Most of the worst of what the kind of... This kind of pushing of string theory in ways which really were completely indefensible. He's mostly been not... He's rarely been the worst offender in that i mean that's really other more other people than him but um but yeah he's a he's a true believer he's really enthusiastic about it he still is okay so to get back to my own personal story so what happened you know so i went i got a postdoc at the stony brook institute for theoretical physics in

84 i was there for four years and that was the in the physics institute but but the physics institute was right above it's the same building as the math building and so and and the things i was interested in i was trying to stay away from string theory and i was interested in some other things and you know i was often talking and i was i was trying to learn a lot of mathematics. I was trying to learn more mathematics to see if I could make any progress on these other problems. So I spent a lot of time talking to the mathematicians in Stony Brook. And some of them, there are some really great geometers, there are some really great mathematicians, and I learned a lot from them. And that was a great experience. But at the end of four years there, I needed another job.

I did set out some applications for postdocs in physics, but the, I would say that that was kind of the height of the excitement over string theory. And especially somebody like me saying, you know, I'm really interested in doing something about the mathematics and physics, about applying mathematics to physics, but I don't want to do string theory. physics but i don't want to do string theory that was just that was not i was not going to get any any kind of reasonable kind of job that way that's just not going to happen so um anyway so i ended up realizing well maybe the better thing i'll have better luck in in a math in a math department and i'm getting me and so i um ended up going up spending a a year in Cambridge as kind of an unpaid visitor at Harvard, partly, and I was also teaching calculus at Tufts. And so then I had some kind of credential. Okay, well, at least this guy can teach calculus. And I applied for a one-year postdoc at the Math Institute in Berkeley, MSRI, and I got that. And so I spent a year.

Is that how you got to know Edward? and I got that and so I spent a year. Is that how you got to know Edward? No, no, he wasn't. That was before him. He would have still been at Harvard and a much more junior person. Yeah, he came to Berkeley later. That was like 88, 89.

But that was an amazing, that was actually a fascinating year because that was the year that Witten had come out. Witten had kind of dropped string theory for a while and was doing this topological quantum field theory stuff

and Chern-Simons theory. And he was doing the stuff which won him the Fields Medal. And, you know, it was just just mind-blowing bringing together of ideas about mathematics and quantum field theory. And so most of the year was devoted to learning about that and thinking about that and you know witten came and visited and atia was there and i actually a lot of chance to talk to

him which was wonderful and um so that that was so that was a really fascinating year at a msri but and partly because because so much of this was going on um you know math departments were more interested in hiring somebody like me even though i didn't have the usual credentials because they felt this is somebody who actually understands this new subject which is having a lot of impact on our field so so columbia hired me to um this non-tenured for your position uh and uh so i was do that i was teaching here and um after a few years again i was getting the point okay well now i got to find another job but um and they so so so so the department needed somebody to um they'd set up a position for somebody to teach

a course and maintain the computer system and And I said, well, you know, I can probably do that. And that's not a bad job. And so I ended up agreeing to take on that position. And that's always been kind of a renewable position. It's not tenured, but it's essentially permanent renewable. And I've gone through various kinds of titles of various kinds of versions of that since I've been since the 90s. And it's worked out very well for me. I'm actually quite happy with how it's worked. But it's a very unusual career path. And it has given me a lot of

insulation from the normal kind of pressures to perform in certain ways and to do certain things allowed me to get away with all sorts of things, if you like. Like what? Well, like writing a book called Not Even Wrong, explaining what's wrong with... How did that come about? So, for instance, this is going to be incorrect because I'm just making this up, but then correct it. For instance, you're walking along someday, you have this idea, maybe it's a splinter in your thumb for a different reason about string theory. So then you go to a publisher and you say it, or you say to a journalist, and then the journalist hears it and they say, you should write a book. And you say, maybe, then you think about it, you start writing a chapter.

The nitty gritty details, how does that happen? How did it go from Peter White, mathematics professor, to then writing this popular book? mathematics professor to then writing this popular book. Well, so, so, you know, throughout,

let's say throughout the nineties, you know, I was very much, you know, I'd always, you know, I was interested in the same kind of questions. Can you do different things in math and physics? I was trying to follow what's going on in physics.

I've been trying to follow what's going on in string theory. And I was getting more and more frustrated throughout the late 90s at this. What I would see in the public and what I would see or just to not reflect my own understanding of what actually was going on. And partly I kind of mentioned, you know, there's a there's a, for instance, Brian's PBS special about the elderly. I mean, it just that just seemed to me to be giving that just didn't really didn't agree at all with what I would actually saw going on. And so I thought, well, somebody, you know, somebody should write this up. And I would have hoped it would be somebody else. But then as you go along, there's no one else is going to do this. And, you know, I'm actually pretty well placed to do it for very reasons I started thinking about it and I think around 2001 I actually wrote kind of a short thing that's on the archive of

kind of you know a little bit of a kind of polemical several page thing you say look here here's the opposite side of the story here's what's this is really not working and here's why and that that was the beginning of it and like i got a lot of reaction reaction to that and and i started to more and more feel that you know you the right way to do this was to actually you needed to write something kind of at book sit down and at book length explain exactly what's going on and and i also wanted to do something also more positive to try to explain some of the things that i was seeing about how mathematics, you know, there were some very positive things happening in the relationship between mathematics and physics, which has some connections to string theory,

but we're also quite independent, like Witten's Chern-Simons theory, for instance. So I also wanted to also write about, so I also kind of wanted to write about the story of what's going on in this kind of physics and this kind of fundamental physics, but kind of informed by someone who's actually spent a lot of time in the math community and informed by a lot more mathematics than is usual in this thing. So there was kind of a positive. It's rarely noticed, but there are a bunch of chapters in this book like on topological

quantum field theory yeah nothing to do with string theory which nobody really paid much attention to or understands but anyway so i i wrote this and i was so i just said well i'll just write this thing and i think i around then i may have also had a friend who had he'd done a book proposal and written a book and but by the time he'd was writing the thing, he was just kind of sick of it. And he didn't really want to be writing it. But somebody had given him in advance. So he had to write the book. So I thought, well, I don't want to do that.

I'm not going to go out and make a proposal to a publisher. I'm just going to write what I want to write. And we'll see how it turns out. And I think we'll see if someone wants to publish it, great. And so then I was getting to the end of this, and somebody from Cambridge University Press showed up. He was just in my office going around asking people, what are you working on? Is there some kind of book project we could work on? And I told him about what I was doing, and he got very, very interested in it.

work on and i told him about what i was doing and he got very very interested in it and so it actually then became um you know uh cambridge university press was then considering it for a while and they they sent it out to various for reviews and and the reviews were kind of fascinating there were half the reviews said this is great this is wonderful somebody is finally saying this this is fantastic and the other half said oh this is absolutely awful this was this will destroy the reputation of cambridge university press so interesting and the problem with the university press is you know they're not um they're actually not really they're not really equipped to do con to deal with that kind of controversy i mean they they've got they have like boards of so-and-so that have to vote on their on everything and they um they're very pretty conservative institutions so at some point it became pretty clear that things were not going well there and so i sent it around to a bunch of

people and anyway and one person i sent it around to was um rorose. And he ended up getting interested in it and asked me if he could send it to his publisher. And they ended up publishing it. Oh, great. Yeah, he's not a fan of string theory either. No, no. Or supersymmetry. Yeah, so he definitely agreed with me about that.

Yeah. Now that you're in the math department, is that what allowed you to see the connections between Twister theory and the Langlands program, or is that something that existed before? Oh, well, I mean... The connection, not the Langlands program. Obviously, that goes back to Langlands. Well, oh, no. Whether there is, I think it's still, you know, whether there is any connection between Twister Theory and the Langlands program That's a very, that's extremely speculative idea and fairly recent one. I would say.

Yeah. Yeah. So that. What aspect of the Langlands program, like the local or geometric. Maybe to back up a little bit. I mean, so the,

the language program is. Anyway, this amazing story, I guess you heard a lot about it from Edward, but it, it, it's a, one reason I got into it is it became more and more clear to me that the right way to think about

quantum mechanics and quantum field theory issues was in this language of representation theory that that was The language of and then it started to say okay well I should learn as much as possible about what mathematicians know about representation theory. And sooner or later, you find out about the Langlands program, and the Langlands program is saying that all of the basic structure of how the integers work and how numbers work and things is closely related to this representation theory of Lie groups in this amazing, amazing way. And, and there's just, there's,

there's just an amazing set of ideas that ideas behind the geometric language program, which, you know, they have a lot of similar flavor to the things I was seeing in some of physics. So it was, you know, I've just spent, it's just been a many, many years process of slowly learning more and more about that. But, but, but that stuff never really had anything to do with twisters and uh so the one the the interesting the interesting relation

to twisters is that um you know i had actually i'd actually written this paper i'd given some talks about um about the twister stuff, and I'd pointed out that in this way of thinking about things, there's this thing that I told you that a point, a space-time point, is supposed to be a complex plane. Well, if you take this complex... Actually, in Euclidean space, it's something... You can think of it as a complex plane,

or you can mod out by the constants and use the, the real structure of Euclidean space. And, and you, and you, you get something, a geometrical object corresponding to each point, which is called the twister P one.

It's basically a sphere, but you identify opposite end points of the sphere. And, and so I'd written about that in the, in my paper. And, and, It's basically a sphere, but you identify opposite endpoints of the sphere. And so I'd written about that in my paper and some of the talks I was given, I kind of emphasized that. And then so then I get an email one day from Peter Schultze, who's one of the people who's making this really great progress in the Langlands program in number theory. And he's been coming up with some of these fantastic new ideas relating geometric Langlands and arithmetic Langlands. And he basically said, yeah, I was looking at this talk you gave, and it's really nice about this geometry,

and seeing this twister P1 going there. He said, what's amazing is this twister P1 is exactly that same thing as showing up in my own work. p1 going there he said what's amazing is this twister p1 is exactly that same thing is showing up in my own work you know if you um there's this work he was doing on the on on the on the gym the relation of geometric langlands and if you specialize to what happens kind of as a at the infinite prime or at the the real, not at finite primes, the structure he was seeing was exactly the twister P1. So, I mean, he kind of pointed this out to me and asked me some other questions about this.

I don't think I could tell him anything useful, but that did kind of blow my mind that, wait a minute, this thing that I'm looking at in physics, that exactly the same structure is showing up in this, in this really new ideas about geometry of numbers. And, you know, and so, so I said, I then spent a few months kind of learning everything I could about that mathematics and twister P one, and I'm still following it, but, but, you know,

I should say that, you so to my mind it's just a it's just a completely fascinating thing at these these new things that we're learning about the geometry of number theory and these speculative ideas about about physics that you're seeing a same fundamental structure on both sides and and but but I have no I mean I have no understanding of how these are related i don't think anyone else does either yeah have you asked peter if he would like to collaborate well there's not is that like uncouth no but but but i think he and i just have very

you know i mean too incompatible no no no no it's just you know he's doing you know he's doing what he's doing i mean i mean first of all i mean one thing to say is he's having such incredible success and doing such amazing stuff that you know interfering in it with that anyway and telling you about oh why don't you stop doing what you're doing and do something i'm interested in seems to be a really bad idea but uh it's um anyway so so yeah he's doing extremely well doing what he's doing and most of what he's doing isn't related to this i mean he's you know he really really understands in an amazing way what's going on with the geometry of pietic numbers and these things like this which i don't understand at all

and so and he's just been revolution he's been revolutionizing that subject. And, um, it's something I can only kind of marvel at from a distance, the kinds of issues that were on kind of stuck that I kind of, for me are, are actually much more, they really have nothing to do with his expertise. They're really kind of more, you might probably should be talking to more physicists or whatever. So he's, more more you know i probably should be talking to more physicists or whatever so he's um yeah but uh i mean it's certainly i think it's in the back of his mind oh you know this this stuff that i'm seeing i should should every so often look and think about what if i can understand the relation to physics and it's in the back of my mind the stuff that i'm seeing physics i should try to keep learning about that number 30 stuff and see if i see anything but

but that's really all it is but a lot of this is very new i um i just heard from him a few weeks ago that you know he actually he actually has some new idea about this about this particular problem from his point of view and um he was supposed to give a talk about it on um last thursday at this conference and in germany and i'm hoping to get a report back of that but so but but this is all very active and very poorly understood stuff but it's it's not um but definitely the connection between math and physics here is very very unclear but but i i'm if there is one it will be mind-blowing and i'm i'm i'm it's certainly kind of on my agenda in the future to try to learn more and look for such a thing. But I don't have anything positive to say about that, really.

So I want to get to space-time is not doomed. There's quite a few subjects I still have to get to. I want to be mindful of your time. But how about we talk about space-time not being doomed? It's something that's said now. I don't know if you know, but there's someone named Donald Hoffman who frequently cites this. He's not a physicist, but he cites it as evidence or as support for his consciousness as fundamental view. And then there's Nima Arkani-Hamed, who's the popularizer of that term, though not the inventor.

Yeah, so maybe to—I mean, I can kind of summarize that. Yeah, so I don't really have anything useful to say about about hoffman i mean he's interested in consciousness and other things i don't really have too much i don't really know much about or i'm useful to say but maybe to say what the um i mean this has become i mean the reason i wrote that there's this article you're referring to about space time is not doomed i I wrote partly because I was getting frustrated at how this had become such a. So it's such kind of an ideology among people, among people and working in physics and on quantum gravity, this idea that. And I think one way I would say it would say what's happened is that.

And I think one way I would say what's happened is that... So when people first started thinking about how do you get quantized gravity, how do you quantify gravity? So one of the initial ideas was, well, we've learned that we have this incredible successful standard model, so let's just use the same methods that work for the standard model and apply them to gravity and we'll do that. let's just use the same methods that work for the standard model and apply them to gravity and we'll do that. And so it's going to be anyway. So, and you,

and you're thinking of space and time in this usual way. And then there are these degrees of freedom to live in space and time, which, which tell you about the metric and, and the geometry of space and time. And you're trying to write a quantum theory of those things living in space and time. And I think, you know anyway people tried to do this there's lots of problems with doing it

it's an incredibly long story string theory was partly reaction to the story but even string theory was still a theory of strings moving around in space and time so you weren't yeah i mean you were still starting thinking thinking in terms of a space and time but but more recently you know as string theory hasn't really worked out the way people expected there has been this ideology of oh well let's you know let's just get rid of this space and time somehow and and then and then we will write some theory in some completely different kind and in the low energy limit will recover space and time as some kind of effective structure which you only see at low energies and that's become almost an ideology like our connie holland likes to say space time is doomed you know meaning the the truly funwell

theory is going to be in some other variables and space time variables. He has his own proposals for this about these geometrical structures he's using to study amplitudes. Anyway, the things that I'm doing, you actually do get a theory. It looks like gravity should fit into this and it will fit into this in a fairly standard way um this is this is standard space and time except you know that in the twister geometry point of view on it and interesting things happening with spinners you didn't expect but it's still there is a usual idea about space and time are there. So my general feeling with the,

the problem with this whole kind of space-time is doom thing is you have to have a plausible proposal for what you're gonna replace it with. It's all well and good to say that there's some completely different theory out there and the theory people are used to is just an effective approximation. But, you know, first you gotta convince me that your alternative proposal works.

And the problem is that people are just doing this without any kind of, you know, without any kind of plausible or interesting proposal for what it is you're going to replace space-time with. And often it even comes down to this crazy level of kind of this multiverse thing. I mean, we have this theory where everything happens. So fundamentally, everything happens, but then effectively, you only see space and time. And it's kind of, you know, you can say words like that, but it's kind of meaningless. Why is it that they have to come up with a decent proposal or replacement? Why can't they just say, look, there are some, with our current two theories, there's an incompatibility that suggests that spacetime, quote-unquote, breaks

down at the Planck level, or maybe before. So for instance, Nima's argument that if you were to measure anything classically, you have to put an infinite amount of information somewhere, and then that creates a black hole. And then there's also something with the black hole entropy that suggests holography but that doesn't mean space-time is doomed it's just a different space-time yeah yeah no but from my point of view i mean what what what has been become the focus of that field a lot is this is are actually quite tricky you know very non-perturbative very kind of strong field problems about you know how you know what's going to happen to the theory when you've got black holes and black holes are you can and so you've kind of moved away from i mean but but but the problem with the inconsistency between quantum mechanics and general relativity is a different...

That is normally the one everybody worries about is normally a different problem. It's a very, very local problem. It's just that if you think of this in terms of the standard kind of variables, like what's the metric variables, and you use the Einstein-Hilbert action for the dynamics for these things, if you try and apply standard ideas of quantum field theory locally to that, at short distances, you get these wrongly renormalization problems and the theory becomes unpredictable. So that's always been considered the real problem. How do you deal with that? But instead of having a proposal to deal with that and having a real kind of a new idea about what's really going to happen, what are the right variables at these short distances

that will not have this problem? What are you going to do they kind of ignore that decided to ignore that problem and say well maybe string theory solves that problem who knows and and then to move on and to try to do you know something much much harder which is to to resolve these issues about what happens in black hole backgrounds and stuff. And I don't, I don't, but it seems to me kind of a separate, a separate issue. You can still have space time and have these, these, these issues about,

you know, what's going to happen in black hole backgrounds and stuff, and you could still resolve them in different ways, but, but they're just, they, they really, it's, it's a very frustrating subject, I think, to actually try to learn about.

You see people making these statements, and then you say, okay, well, what exactly do they mean? I mean, it's all well and good to say these very vague things about this is doomed and what about infinite amount of information, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, write down, tell me what we're talking about here. And there really isn't, it's almost comically impossible to kind of pin people down on what is the, what are you talking, what theory are you talking about? And then finally, when you pin them down, you find out that what they're actually talking about is they're talking about some very, very toy model.

They're saying, well, we don't know what's going on in four dimensions, so let's try it in three dimensions and maybe two dimensions, maybe one dimension. And so they're talking about some comically trivial toy model, which they kind of ended up studying because, well, you could study it. And then maybe there's some analogous problem happening in there. And all they have are these kind of toy models, which actually don't seem to have any of the actual real physics of four-dimensional general relativity in them. And that's what they're all studying these days. I see. Even Nima. Well, I mean, he's somewhat different because he's coming at it from a

different point of view he's coming at it from this point of view of really trying to see find new structures in the um in the perturbative expansions for um you know for standard quantum field theories so he's got a he's got kind of a specific program looking at... Yeah, I mean, he's not... He's not studying toy models. He's studying real four-dimensional physical models.

But they're not... But they're generally models like Yang-Mills theory, where you know exactly where the theory is. And it's not... This isn't solving the problem of quantum gravity or anything. It's well in theory. But I think maybe I'm saying this a bit too quickly without thinking, but just to try to give a flavor of what I think he thinks he's doing. He's trying to take a theory that you do understand well, like Yang-Mills theory, and look at its perturbation series, Feynman diagrams, find new structures there and a new language, and then see if you can rebuild the theory in terms of these new structures. And then if you've got kind of a new way of thinking about quantum field theory in

terms of these new different structures, like his amplitude, Hadrian or whatever, then maybe you can then apply it. Once you've got a way of thinking in terms of new structures, you can go back to the problem of quantum gravity and all that. Yeah. So I think, but you know, I don't think he's not in any way as far as I know claiming to have actually gotten anywhere near there but he's yeah and and this gives you a lot to do there's a lot of interesting structure though there's a lot to work on and and so he and his collaborators have you know have done a huge amount kind of calculationally with these things but i at least to my mind i i don't see them coming up with what I think they hope to come up with, which is a different geometric language that really works and is really powerful that's going to get you something new. Did you listen or watch Sean Carroll's podcast on the crisis in physics?

on the crisis in physics um well no i i i skimmed through the um the transcript of it i was kind of wanting to see what he was i mean this is certainly something i'm very interested in but uh yeah i thought i thought anyway i thought the whole thing was actually quite strange because it this is it's like four four four and a half hours long and and it's just him talking so he's just anyway it's I thought the whole thing that was actually very odd and and it's something to do with kind of a the odd nature of the response to the to criticisms in the subject and so I think it was another kind of weird example it's you know there's he's kind of wants to say something about this issue of you know that many people are now are now kind of very aware there is some kind of problem here and they're referring to it as a crisis in physics

but um you know instead of but you know but but just kind of talking about it for four hours or four and a half hours yourself is just kind of kind of strange um and and and especially since he's got a podcast one of the obvious things to do is to invite somebody on who you know thinks there is a crisis in physics if you don't and he doesn't think there's one it seems and well you could actually have an interesting discussion with this person for for some time but instead of discussing this, it's like there's a controversy going on of two kinds. And instead of inviting somebody on to discuss this controversy with you or two people, you just go on for four hours about your view that the other side is wrong. It was very odd. Also, it wasn't as if he was arguing with the people that were saying that there's a

crisis in physics. So when people say there's a crisis in physics, they generally mean that there's a crisis in high energy physics, particularly with coming up with fundamental law. And so what he was then taking it on to mean is there's a crisis in physics as a whole, like cosmology or astrophysics. And then he's like, no, but look in solid state physics and the progress there. That's called a straw man, where you're not actually taking on the argument, you're taking on a diminished version of it. Well, he was also often involved in these arguments over string theory with me and Lee in 2006. And it was often the same kind of thing that he's kind of...

And the whole thing is just odd from beginning to end because he's actually not a string theorist. And this is another weird sociological thing I found is that you find non-string theorist physicists who somehow want to take a bit of side in this and want to have a big opinion about it and get emotionally involved in it, even though they actually don't know't actually understand the issues this is not what they do this is not their expertise so and um so i know i think some of this you know knowing not knowing sean and what he's trying to do i think he's not the only one who you see this phenomenon that there are people who, you know, they see what, what they want to do in the world is really to bring to the public and understanding of the power and the great things that the subject has accomplished. And so he,

and even in his four hours, he spends a lot of time, you know, giving very, very good explanations of, you know, various parts of the story of the history of the physics and the history of this.

And, you know, they kind of see see them their goal in life is to kind of convince this um you know the rest of the world who doesn't actually understand these great ideas or doesn't really appreciate them or skeptical about them you know to bring them to them and and i think part of the whole reason is i think he was kind of doing doing this or does this is because you know having people out there on twitter or whatever saying oh you know physics sucks it's got all these problems it's all wrong blah blah that this is you know this is completely against his whole goal in life is to stop this this kind of thing and to really get people to appreciate the subject so he and i think in kind of a misguided way then and to enters into this from the point of view of oh i have to stop the and this kind of crisis people from saying things

about a crisis in physics and get them to really appreciate you know that this really is a great subject and wonderful subject and it's um but he kind of that goes too far and and then you know starts to defending things which really aren't defensible and things which he often doesn't really know much about for instance just the details of strength i mean the the reason i wrote this book is that some of these problems of strength theory these questions you know people will go on about ads cft and this blah, blah. This is incredibly technical stuff. It's just to even understand exactly what these theories are on both sides of the ADS-CFT thing. What is known about them?

What is the real problem here? What can you calculate? What can you not calculate? What can you not find? What can you not find? What happens in other dimensions? It's horrendously technical, and very few people actually really know it but lots of people want to kind of get involved in discussions about it and argue about it without actually understanding

actually what's going on and part of the reason for writing the not even on the book but was to try to kind of you know to sit down and try to write about about about you know what what was really what was really going on what what the specific technical issues actually were you know as much as possible with it in in a somewhat non-technical venue but um anyway so that that's some of my reaction to this and and in particular, I mean, he just starts off the whole thing by, he picked up on something from Twitter about somebody had found a paper from somebody written in 1970s complaining about how, you know, there was a crisis. There wasn't any progress in the field. And this was a time when there, somebody completely ignorant wrote a completely paper no one ever paid attention to in the mid-1970s that was wrong about this. And he wanted to use that as to kind of bludgeon the people who are making serious arguments about the problems today.

So, I don't know. I thought it was kind of a weird performance. I thought it was kind of a weird performance, but, but, but, but, but it is, I think this is a good thing to ask kind of people on this other side of this argument, why there's very little willingness to actually engage in technical discussions publicly with people they disagree with. I mean, you know, Sean has never invited me to be on his podcast. He hasn't invited Sabina Hassenfelder.

It's not, there is no appetite for that at all among people in this subject. And I think, you know, a lot of that is because, you know, they're well aware that, you know, they're really serious, difficult problems with this going. Whether you want to call it a crisis or whatever it is, there are are real problems and they're just not very interested kind of acknowledging and publicizing that yeah well i have a tremendous appetite for it and the people in the audience of everything do so if ever you have someone who you feel like would be a great guest with the opposite view that is defending string theory or the state of high energy physics, then please let me know. And I will gladly host you both.

Okay. I know we spoke about some people behind the scenes, some people who are likely to say yes and have a congenial conversation. Well, there's actually most people are, I mean, there's the funny thing is actually early on in this, I was invited,

a guy down at university in Florida invited me and Jim Gates to come and debate string theory. And so I think we really disappointed this big audience by agreeing on almost everything. So, you know, he's a well-known string theorist. on strength there is and and uh and and you know and so we actually found that i think things have been interesting to do this to do this again now but this was almost 20 years ago but let me maybe a little bit less 15 years ago and you know the way i would describe it then is you know if we started talking about the details what our disagreements came down to where it was kind of more you know should you be out you know we would agree about the details, what our disagreements came down to where it was kind of more, you know, should you be out, you know, we would agree about the state of current things. But what do you think? Where do you think this stuff is going? Are you optimistic? I see reasons why this can't work.

He would see reasons why this is actually the best thing to do. He knows how to do and this might work. And and there it's just that kind of, you know. Disagreement about ideas, which is it's just that kind of disagreement about ideas, which is perfectly reasonable. And actually, Gates told me, I remember at the end of when we were talking after this thing, he said, yeah, you know, I was asked to write a review of your book about it. And I thought, oh, well, I'll just I'll pick up this book and I'll see, you know, the guy's got it all wrong about string theory or whatever, and then I read your book and I realized that a lot of what you were saying was the stuff about the importance of representation theory in physics and that's actually exactly the way I see what's important in physics, so I find myself agreeing with

much of your point of view and and the book so i couldn't i i didn't anyway so so that was you know anyway at the level of these these ideas i think especially back then i think there wasn't um it's perfectly happy impossible to have a reasonable discussion uh it i think i think it has become weirder now you know 20 years later they're really you you i i think it was a lot more possible to reasonably be an optimist back 20 years ago and say well you know the lhc is about to turn on it's good we're going to look for these super partners maybe they'll see super partners there's you know we have all this stuff that might vindicate us and um we should we we're all hoping for that but now you know the lhe has has looked the stuff is not there there's really not um and you know that's one thing that's somewhat shocked me is

people willing to um people who were often to me or in public saying look you know the crucial thing is going to be the results of the lhc you know we believe that you're going to see we're going to see these super partners and this is going to show that we're on the right track and then the results come in and you know you're wrong and you just you just kind of keep going and without even kind of skipping a beat about how, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's, I think, the line. Well, there was a comment on your blog that said the LHC has just, it's great for string theory because it divides in half the moduli space. Anyway, you can make any kind of joke you want.

But, you know, that was certainly my feeling a lot when I was writing the book, whatever, is that this was going to be a crucial thing, the LHC, because either the LHC was going to see something along the lines of what these guys were advertising and which they were often willing to kind of actually bet money on or it wouldn't. And then they would back down and start saying, OK, well, maybe the critics have a point. But no, I mean, it's just kind of amazing and people will just kind of completely ignore the you know the experimental results and keep going about representation theory for people who don't know what representation theory is can you please give them a taste and then also explain why is it important more so than say you want a group to act on something like okay yes but how much more involved does it get than that well anyway yes so just to say that to give a flavor of what we're talking about yeah

so I mean it's very common for people to talk about the importance in physics of symmetries and and when you say that you know it's important to study the symmetries of something people often then just explain it in terms of of a group so mathematically a group is just a set with a you know you know with a multiplication operation you can multiply two elements to get another but the um the interesting thing about symmetries really is not so is actually not so much the groups but the things that groups can act on so what are the things that can be so the standard example is like the group of rotations you can pick things up and rotate them in three-dimensional space but what are all the what are all the things that you can kind of do rotations to and um so and those are those in

some sense are the representations or the representation theory is kind of the the linear version of that theory and and if you try to work with a group action on something it is a non-linear you can look at the functions on it and turn it into a linear problem. But anyway, so group representation theory is really, you know, in, it really is the study of kind of, of symmetries. What are the possible symmetries of things? What are the possible things that can have symmetries? And it's really, it's really fundamental both in physics and it's really, and in mathematics. And, I mean, large fractions of mathematics you can put in this language of what are,

there is some kind of group and it's acting on some things and what are the representations. You can, I mean, the amazing fact about the Langlands program and number theory is how much of number theory you can formulate in that language. And you can formulate a lot of geometry in this language. You can, it's kind of a unifying language throughout mathematics at a very deep level.

But then, I mean, to me, the amazing thing is that the same, if you start looking at the structure of quantum mechanics, if you look at what are the, quantum mechanics is this weird conceptual structure that states are, state of the world is a vector in a complex vector space, and you get information about it by self-adjoined operators acting on this thing um so from the that looks like a very very weird like where did that come from but if you if you look at that formalism it fits very very naturally into the formalism of group representations it's's really... And this is kind of why I wrote this book, taught this course here and wrote a book about quantum mechanics from that point of view. What's the book called?

Quantum Theory Groups and Representations and Introduction. It's kind of a textbook. So it was the second book I wrote. Okay, that link will be in the description. Yeah, there's also a free version with kind of corrected, with errors that I know about corrected on my website. You can also link to that. No, we want people to pay. They have to pay for the errors. Or you can buy a copy from Springer if you'd like a hardcover book or whatever.

But, yeah, so anyway, it really is kind of amazing. One of the things that most fascinates me about quantum theory is that there is a way of thinking about that it's not just some weird out-of-the-blue mathematical conceptual structure that makes no intuitive sense. I mean, it really has a structure which is kind of deeply rooted in understanding representation understanding certain fundamental symmetries have you heard of this theorem by raden moyes in differential geometry about the amount of differentiable structures that can be placed on different dimensions so for dimension one there's only i think up to some up to diffeomorphism or up to differentiable structure i forget the exact term there's just one and then there's just two for dimension two or just one. There's a finite amount for every dimension, except dimension four. In which case

there's not just an infinite amount, there's an uncountably infinite amount. Yeah. But there's even yeah, but this is actually also one of the most famous open problems in topology, the smooth Poincaré conjecture, which says that, you know, is there... There you're thinking about it specifically, the four manifold, yeah, so is there a...

Now I forgot what I used to know about this. But yeah, but there are exotic... Well, the point is that dimension four is picked out. And so it would have been nice for physics if dimension four was picked out and finite, whereas the rest were infinite, because then it just means, well, it's nicer for us, but it's picked out and made more diverse and more mysterious. Yeah, but it's... Where does this go?

Yeah, but it's... Where does this go? Anyway, four dimensions is... Anyway, topologically, four dimensions is very, very special. One dimensions and two dimensions, you can kind of pretty easily understand. The story is pretty... The classification story is pretty simple. Three dimensions is harder, but especially with the solution of quackery conjecture you could you actually have a good three-dimensional classification and then once you get above five

four dimensions things basically there are more ways to move things so things simplify so you can actually you can actually understand above four dimensions what's going on. So four dimensions is kind of a peculiarly complex case. Yeah, and so it's, yeah, it's, but there is, anyway, it's very, I've never actually seen any kind of clear idea about how, what this has to do with four dimensional, with physics. I mean, yeah, it's, I mean, mean the thing the stuff that I've been doing you know very much crucially involves the fact that four dimensions is special because the way spinners work or if you like the rotation group in in for in every

dimensions is a simple group except in four dimensions in four dimensions the rotation group breaks up into two independent pieces and that's at the core of what a lot of what i'm trying to exploit but um so four-dimensional geometry is very very special and i don't know speculative very speculative maybe the this weirdness about you know infinite numbers of topological structures under four dimensions that the fact that you've got the rotation group has two different pieces means that it's behind that but i have no i have no i know no who knows of course yeah it's interesting that the fact that it's semi-simple is a positive here like you mentioned it breaks

up into two yeah whereas usually in physics for the grand unified theories what you want is simple you don't want semi-simple you want to unify into one large group yeah well even you know there's nothing really in terms of unification it's just yeah maybe maybe it's a maybe i should also say something about this about why what i'm trying to do i think is quite different than um the usual sort of unification that the and what the usual yeah yeah and please explain euclidean twister theory once more again for people who are still like i've heard the term i've heard him explain twisters i somewhat understand twisters has to do with lines and points and planes okay and spin And spinners, something called spinners.

I think I understand that. What is Euclidean twister theory? Minkowski is like special relativity. Okay. So they're still confused. Okay. Well, maybe it's better to talk about what other, what standard kind of unification ideas are. And I think, and to my mind, I mean, basically almost essentially all attempts to do unification

found her in the same problem. So one way of stating the problem is we go out and look at the world and, you know, we see gravity and we see the electromagnetic interactions. And that's kind of based upon a U1 gauge theory, which is a circle. We see the weak interactions are based upon an SU2 gauge theory, that's a three sphere. And we see the strong interactions that are based upon an SU3 gauge theory. So where in the world did this U1, did these three groups come from, and the way quarks and other elementary particles behave under those groups? So it's a very small amount of under those groups.

So it's a very small amount of group theoretical data. Where did it come from? I mean, why that? And so the standard answer to this very soon after the standard model came out was that, well, there's some big Lie group. Like you take the group of all unitary transformations of five complex dimensions, or take the group of all unitary transformations of five complex dimensions, or take the group of all orthogonal transformations of 10 dimensions, let's say SO10, and then you fit that data and show that that data fits inside that bigger structure.

Within that SO10 group, I can fit U1 and SU2 and SU3, you can get them in there. And then I can put all of the known particles together with their transformation properties and give them and make them have it and put those together as a transformation property of SO. So you can kind of put stuff, this kind of package of algebraic data, we're trying to understand where it came from, you can put it together in a simple group and into a group where... the problem is in terms of group theory, it's a package involving several different groups and so you get several different simple groups so you can you can anyway you can put this together but but but the problem with this

is always is if you try and do this you can then write down your su5 or so10 Theory whatever and and you know it looks a lot nicer than the the standard model it's only got one one term where you had a lot of terms before but you have to then explain but wait a minute why don't we see that why do we you know why do we see this this more complicated thing and not that and so for instance the standard thing that grand unified theories do is they you've put the weak the weak interactions and the strong interactions into the same structure so So you should have, anyway, so all sorts of things,

there are all sorts of new kind of forces that you're going to get in this bigger structure, which are highly constrained, which have to exist, which are going to do things like cause protons to decay. So like, you know, why? Sure, sure. Yeah, so you put the stuff together, all of a sudden it can interact with itself and it can do things which you know don't happen and your protons don't decay. So your problem, when you write down these theories, the problem is you

haven't necessarily done anything. You've put the stuff together in something bigger but you haven't you've just changed the problem from why you know why why these pieces to to why did this bigger thing break into the how do i how do i why did this bigger thing break into these pieces you haven't actually solved until you have an explanation for that you haven't actually solved anything and this is i think the fundamental problem with these grand unified theories they don't have they don't come with a really the only way to to make them break down into these other things is to introduce more higgs particles and more complicated structure and more degrees of and more numbers and and you lose predictability if you do that you also find that yeah they also don't look like what you see in the real world if you do experiments. But most people who have tried to come up with some unification have done some version of that actually.

I mean, so for instance, I mean, I don't want to really get into things like what Garrett Leasy is talking about. But they're all versions of this. They've all got their own version of this. And I think when you see people kind of dismissing theories of everything and green and white theories, and you see Sabina Hassenfelder saying, well, these people are lost in math, then they're all really referring to the same problem, that people are trying to get a better understanding what's a deeper understanding what's going on by putting things together into a bigger structure

and then and they're and they're all kind of foundering on not having a an answer as to why why this breaks up so um so the thing that i'm trying to do, why I'm much more interested in these ideas about spinners and twisters is that I'm not actually, I mean, a lot of what I'm doing, as I said, I mean, the fact that there are these two SU2s, that's an aspect of four dimensions. There really are. Maybe the thing to say is that I'm not introducing kind of new, I'm not introducing lots of new degrees of freedom and then having to explain why you can't see them. I'm trying to write down something. I'm trying to write down a new geometrical package which packages together the things we know about and doesn't actually have all sorts of new stuff. Penrose said this was his motivation as well for twister theory.

Yeah. So in some sense, twister theory is a bigger structure, but it doesn't contain anything really new. It contains the same spinners you had before and puts them in an interesting new relation where, so you can understand conformal invariance, but he doesn't, it's like,

you know, twister theory is not the things you knew about twister theory. It's not spinners and vectors and the things you knew about plus some other completely unrelated stuff. It's the things you knew about in a new, more powerful conceptual framework. And so that, that's the sort of thing I'm trying to do. Part of the problem is that it's, I guess, a misnomer to really say this is a well-defined theory. It's more a speculative set of ideas about how to uh but but but but that's the crucial i mean

probably i think the most important new idea here which which for this to be right has to be true and which is something is exactly this idea about um about rotate that if you think about rotations in four dimensions in euclidean space time when you relate it to Mancassi spacetime in the real world, one of the SU2s can be treated as an internal symmetry. And that can explain the weak interactions. That's kind of a crucial... That's why it's also referred to as gravel-weak unification by you or by other people? Well, other people have have you know i mean other people have noticed this and and actually it's interesting when you read the um some of the you know literature on

twister theory people point this out they say exactly the problem i was pointing out that this is a very chiral chirally asymmetric view of the world and a lot of people said oh well that means you know maybe you should you should be able to understand you know the weak interactions are chirally asymmetric. So maybe there's something here. But the twister people, I think, never really had a version of this. I mean, there are various people who have tried to write down to do this. I mean, one is actually, there is a paper by, you know, Stefan Alexander has worked on this and Lee Smolin. They actually had a paper attempt to do this.

But they, I mean, what they're doing is significantly different than what I'm trying to do. In particular, they're staying in Minkowski space. I mean, this idea of going to Euclidean space to get this thing to behave like an internal symmetry is not something that isn't their work, I know. You know Jonathan Oppenheim? A little bit, yeah. Jonathan Oppenheim, Stefan Alexander, and Nima Arkani-Hamed all were graduate school peers at the same time as my brother in physics. Oh, okay. That's interesting because then later on in my life

this was all in canada right yeah yeah so u of t nemo was at u of t university of toronto with my brother but then in graduate school oppenheim and stefan alexander i spoke to stefan on the podcast as well yeah no so he uh there have been very few physicists who've been encouraging about this. So he's one example. Yeah, he's extremely open to new ideas and playful. He's a playful person with that. Much like with his music. I think that both qualities rub off on one another. And I think also in his own research he's also I think he hasn't

it's not so much that he's followed up on this grab a week stuff but he's he is very interested in you know it is there some way in which grab it you know that gravity actually is a chiral theory there is some chiral asymmetry and gravity and and especially you know can you you know anyway I mean are there are there astrophysical and cosmological places you can go and look and see, is gravity really chirally symmetric or not? I know that that's something that he's worked a lot on. He's working on experimental tests of the chirality of gravity,

but that doesn't mean experimental tests of your theory. Your theory is a chiral theory of gravity theory just no theory is a chiral theory of gravity yeah it's a it's a chiral theory but but it's not um it would be validation of your theory or attestation no i mean i it's kind of i mean first of all again i have to keep saying i don't really have it i don't i would love to say i i would love to say i i've written down a consistent proposal for a theory of quantum gravity based on my ideas, but I'm not there yet. And I think what he's doing is more, it doesn't involve, doesn't have, the structures I'm trying to exploit are not there in what he's doing. But I believe what he's doing is more kind of thing you kind of add Chern-Simons kind of terms.

Chern-Simons kind of terms. You assume that maybe there's some Chern-Simons term in the theory and ask what the observational implications of that would be and try and go out and look for that. But I haven't really carefully looked at what he's doing just because it's quite different than what I'm trying to do. Can you explain what Chern-Simons theory is? So what it means to add a Chern-Simon's term? I know Stefan's worked on Chern-Simon modified gravity,

and then there's something like Chern-Simon terms in the Lagrangian of particle physics, but I don't know if those two are related. Yeah, I don't... Yeah, I shouldn't try to talk about it, because I don't remember exactly what he was doing. But, um... Well, Chern-Simon... work i don't i don't remember exactly what he was he was doing but um well turns i mean

it did they're very hard actually one one funny thing is that i actually went to uh i don't know so i actually started thinking about churn so so maybe maybe i can go back to um you know how i first encountered them so when i was doing my PhD thesis, my problem was I'm trying to understand. I got engaged on a computer. And I've got this anyway, this version of gauge fields, and they're described on links on a lattice and in a computer. And you can store them in a computer and manipulate them. And I want to look at one of these configurations and say, you know, there's supposed to be some, there's some interesting topology in this engaged theory.

And this is what people are getting interested in the seventies and eighties. And so in particular, there's something called the, let's say the, the instanton number. And so, you know, these gauge fields are supposed to have some integer invariant called the instanton number. And if somebody hands you a gauge field on a compact manifold, you should be able to calculate its instanton number. And then if you could measure these, if you could calculate these instanton numbers and see them, you could do interesting physics with it. So the

problem in some sense, the problem with my thesis was, you've got these gauge fields, what are their instanton numbers? Can you define them? And so... And they're just integers? They're just integers, yeah. So they're invariants, but they're not invariants of the base manifold. You basically have a bundle with connection, and they're invariants of the bundle. And if you know the connection, you can, you're sensitive to this invariant. But the one way of looking at that though is if you look at the integral formula for this thing, it's a total derivative so that if you try and integrate it over a ball or a hypercube, the formula that's supposed to add up to this instanton number, you can write it as an interval over the boundary. It's the interval of d of something, so it's the interval of boundary. It's a total derivative, so you can see.

Sure. It's a total derivative, so you can see. Sure. So the thing that it's a total derivative, the thing that lives on the boundary is the Chern-Simons form, actually. So this is kind of the first way that people started seeing this thing in physics is that and so so so one idea was i well i could um if i could instead of calculating these instanton numbers if i try and do it in terms of their local contributions from each hypercube i should if i could just calculate the churn simons not the churn simons number the contribution for you know the if i could cut cut that the

that thing then then then i would be done and so i spent a lot of time looking at the churn simon's formula and and then i spent a lot of time trying to put that in the lattice and then i kind of finally realized it's kind of gauge the the problem the problem is that it's very gauged and very and so any kind of idea you have about how to calculate or construct it tends to be just an artifact of some choices you're making because of gauge symmetry. led to one of the great experiences of my life i was at when i was at a msri um you know attia was visiting and at one point attia and a bunch of people were talking the blackboard and somebody was asking attia said oh you know how how would you like in you know how would you calculate this churn simon's network then churn time has become incredibly important because of witten and and um and so so everybody was

like, Witten had said, you can get these wonderful knot invariants and three-manifold invariants if you can do path integrals, and that you should take the path integral to be e to the i times the Chern-Simons number. Exactly that integral that I was talking about. But Witten now wants to integrate it over a whole three-manifold. were asking Atiyah, well, you know, can we try and think about how can we actually do this calculation? What are we doing? And so and then Atiyah for thinking for about for about five seconds comes up and says, oh, well, maybe, you know, you could calculate it this. You could calculate it this way. Do this.

And I was then I was luckily standing there. And since Atiyah had thought about it for about 10 seconds, I thought about it for about three years. I could say, no, no, no, that doesn't work. You can't do that because of this. Oh, great, great, great. So that was one of the high points of my mathematical career. Yeah. But I don't know that this is in any way answered any question, but that's one definition.

definition of it but it's a very um it's it's kind of an amazing um piece of information about you know about about gauge fields about connections and um it tells you some very subtle things and it turns out to be useful for all describe all sorts of interesting and unexpected physical phenomena and these speculative ideas of yours of gravel-weak unification, have they been sent to Penrose? Has Penrose commented on them? I haven't heard anything back from Penrose. Penrose is a little bit of a problem that I don't actually... Anyway, whatever email I had from him back when he was helping me,

my book no longer works, and other emails tend to bounce and say you don't have mutual friends um i i i i i could make more of it i i haven't made more of it i also keep also hoping i've i've come this close to actually running into him and being at the same conference or something to him and being and having a chance to talk to him personally i keep expecting instead of making a further effort to get to get a manuscript to him part having a chance to talk to him personally and I keep expecting instead of making a further effort to get a manuscript to him part of the problem you'll see if you don't know his email and you try and contact him you end up getting a secretary who may or may not

be reporting things to him but I keep hoping yeah I was actually at Oxford last year and actually was there, somebody was showing me, Oh,

that's Penrose's office. And then I went to do something else. And then the next day they said, Oh, you know, 15 minutes after we were there, Pedro showed up. Oh boy.

So anyway, the lowest points of your mathematical career. Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how this would work. I, you know,

my, my, from things that he said about this kind of thing, I think he's made it very clear that he has always explicitly, he's followed the kind of thing Atiyah did, the kind of Euclidean version of the theory. But he's always said very clearly that in his mind, the Euclidean version of theory is not the theory.

The theory is what's happening in the Kasky space. And so he's, anyway, whether I could convince him otherwise, I don't know. But I think he's kind of pretty clearly in his mind thought through, okay, there is this interesting Euclidean theory, but that's actually not really the physical thing is Kasky. So I don't actually believe you're going to, working over there you're gonna actually tell me something important but um but so i would i think i'd have to get around that particular uh initial reaction from him so forgive this fairly foolish question but if both gr and the standard model can be formulated in terms of bundles, then why can't you just take a direct product of the groups?

So for instance, you have the standard model gauge groups, and then you direct product with SO13. So that's the principle. And you make an associated frame bundle. That's like just a projection of SO13. And then you say that's general relativity. And the other one is the other associated bundles, the standard model. And then you call that unification. is that unification what are the problems there

well the problem is that um so general relativity is a is is a different well maybe the thing to say is so gauge theory is really just what you have is a but is is a bundle and the fibers are some group and and you have connections and curvature on that you write down the interesting lagrangian is the norm squared of the curvature and anyway so so gauge series is a nice pretty story um if you try and write generatively the same language you you know you can do it it's fine you you you have a g bundle where g is so31 or the euclidean ridge whatever yeah and you have a connection you have a curvature but the the problem is that you you crucially the problem is that you you you crucially have something you have other something else and you have other

things specifically because you're not some arbitrary g bundle you're the frame bundle Because you're not some arbitrary G bundle, you're the frame bundle. And the frame bundle, you know, it has, you know, it's a principal bundle for, you know, the group of just all changes of frame. But it also is, I mean, people use the term soldered or tie. It's also, it also knows about the base structure. So a point in the fiber of the frame bundle is not just an abstract group element. It's a frame. It's a frame down on, you know, if you take vectors, you can predict it on the base space, and it's a frame for those vectors.

So it's kind of soldered to the tangent space and it so it it what what this means in practice is it means that there's there there's there's new there's new variables which which are in the um which you have which are part of the story which are not just the not just the so31 connection and curvature there's also you know so you've got this connection, one form of curve. Soldering form? Yeah, it's called the soldering form or the tetrad. Or, I mean, there are a lot of different people and names for it. But there's kind of a one form.

You feed it the vector and it tells you. And, you know, since you're up in the frame bundle, you've got a frame and this one form has components which tell you what the components of the vector are with respect to the frame. So it's a very kind of canonical object, but it's there. The spacetime geometry depends upon it. So the spacetime geometry doesn't just depend upon the connection, the curvature. It depends upon the connection and this canonical one form. So the problem is that you've got extra variables, which you didn't have in that. These just don't exist in the Yang-Mills case and you have to and so you can and and with those variables you

can you can write down a different look a different lower order Lagrangian instead of taking then taking the curvature squared you can take the curvature times some of these guys and you can get the Einstein Hilbert Lagrangian so you seeHilbert Lagrangian. So the fundamental Lagrangian of gravity is very different than the fundamental Lagrangian of Yang-Mills theory, and it's because you've got these extra gadgets

to work with. I see, I see. They've got to go one form. So that's one way of saying it. But people have speculated a lot about why not just try like adding these higher curvature terms like you had in the in the yang mills case add those to gravity and anyway there's a long long story about trying to mess with different change the lagrangian

of gravity to try to make something better behave now have you found any unification attempts that are between gravity and the standard model or gravity in any of the interactions that are improved if you don't view gravity as curvature but rather as torsion? So, for instance, this is something Einstein was working on later in his life. And then there's also non-metricity. Cartan was working on that.

Yeah, yeah. And they're equivalent formulations of gravity, at least the torsion one. The gravity is actually not curvature, it's just torsion. Yeah. Yeah, so the... Well, one way to say it is,

so now once you've got these... So the thing about... If you start writing down a theory of gravity well first of all I mean non-metricity I think some of that may just mean actually I'm not sure what exactly people mean by that I shouldn't say so the two compatibility conditions to

create the Levy-Civita connection I believe it's called is that you have no torsion and that you have that the metric doesn't change with the covariant derivative if you take the covariant derivative on the metric it's zero if you don't have that then you have non-metricity in other words along the parallel transport the metric is preserved yeah okay yeah i'm not so sure about that but but i can't say about torsion that the um

but your your problem is that if you um so if you just write down a theory with some, you put together a Lagrangian, which is going to give you equivalent results to the Einstein-Hilbert, you put it together out of the curvature and the canonical one form. Now your problem is that you've got, you know, when you try to get through all the Lagrange equations, you can vary the canonical one form, and you can vary the connection. So you've got, and one of them, let's say, I guess it's, if you vary the connection, then you end up, that gives you the torsion-free condition. So you've got more variables, so you need more equations. So you recover gravity, but you recover,

with the standard Lagrangian, you recover not the Einstein's equations as one equation, but also the torsion-free condition as the other one. So, I mean, So the standard simplest version of Einstein-Hilbert in that theory has no torsion again. But you can certainly write down different Lagrangians in which torsion is not zero, but has some kind of dynamics and does something.

And that might be interesting. Yeah, I was watching a talk maybe a few weeks ago or a couple months ago about when trying to modify gravity, especially for explaining, quote-unquote, dark matter. You can explain dark matter as a particle, but if you want to do modified gravity, it's useful to have torsion in your theory. Well, anyway, what I was thinking was, okay, if it's useful to have torsion in your theory well anyway what i was thinking was okay if it's useful there maybe it's not actually the case that that explains dark matter but maybe it would be more useful to try unification with torsion models of gravity than with the regular curvature model of gravity yeah i don't i should say one kind of funny thing about all this is that I've always, I mean, before I got involved in this particular thing, I tended to kind of stick to thinking. you know got really serious about them and developed any real expertise with them because

um i always kind of felt that they're i don't know i i'm trying to understand what's going on in part in particle physics and the standard model and there's there are these groups of people who you know just think who just think about quantum gravity and that you know they're very smart they've been doing this for 30 or 40 years and even and a lot of them aren't strength it is and um and you know i don't i'm not seeing anything that they're doing that i that or that i could have any kind of you know that i could do it anyway better like you know that they seem to be doing interesting things with torsion but they know more about torsion than i don't do so right right yeah so i i i kind of Yeah. So I kind of...

Anyway, I kind of stayed away from... You come from a more particle... Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the other way of saying it. But I really stayed away from kind of going more in that direction, becoming more expert at a lot of these things,

figuring, yeah, I mean, until I see something that maybe I can do something with. I mean, if it's just a... It's interesting to see what the story is there, but they're, they're really smart people have been banging away at the story for a long time and I can't help. I I'll stay away from it.

But, um, so yeah, so, so I, I kind of have the, I've actually partly because of this had to, had to learn a lot more about it,

get some remedial education on some of this stuff. And so I'm, but I'm still in some sense the wrong person to talk to about theories of gravity and about the yeah before we wrap up there are a couple other proposed toes someone with lisi like you mentioned and then eric weinstein has geometric unity and wolfram has wolfram's physics project i believe that's still the title and chair marletto has a framework, not an actual TOE, but Constructor Theory. So, which of those have you

delved even superficially into, and what are your comments on them? I should say, I mean, the Wolfram, or the other one you mentioned, so these ideas that you're going to start with some completely different starting point like wolfram we're going to start i don't know whatever you want to call whatever he's starting with the fact that you're going to start from this kind of completely different thing it has nothing to do with any of the mathematics that we know of and that you're going to then reproduce the standard model whatever this that seems to be highly implausible and anything I've ever looked at it and of his for,

for briefly, you know, doesn't change that opinion. I just, I just don't see how you get from anyway. Yeah. I mean, you're telling me that you're,

you're going to go and start way, way, way far away at something else and, and, and make some progress right here. And I don't see how you're going to get, you're ever going to get back. And so, yeah. So, so there's a lot of that. Some progress right here, and I don't see how you're gonna get you're ever gonna get back and uh-huh

Yeah, so so there's a lot of that. Um Leasiest thing I looked a bit At a bit so I know Garrett and Eric both fairly well, you know, so Garrett has slept on my couch like many people but it but uh And and and yes, it's a Garrett. I think you had a fairly well defined proposal but but to my mind it has exactly the same the, so Garrett, I think, you know, had a fairly well-defined proposal. But to my mind, it has exactly the same problems that I was telling you about. You know, he wants to put… So these are the same problems you explicated about grand unified theories earlier.

Yeah. So he wants to put all these things together, and he wants to put it together and have it live inside E8. And it's very nice, except that he doesn't really have a, to my mind, by doing that, he hasn't actually solved the problem. He has to tell me why the E8 breaks down into the pieces that we know about. And he doesn't have any, as far as I know,

has no useful idea about that. But he is a fairly well-defined thing. I mean, Eric, you know, I've've talked to a lot about this over the years. I don't know. And I've looked a bit at paper that he finally put out. But again, it seems to me it has the same kind of problems. Again, he's trying to put everything together into this bigger geometric structure.

And then, but, but he, he doesn't, to my mind have, have any kind of plausible idea about how he's ever going to break that down and recover what, what,

what we, uh, the real world that we see. And, and, and his, his, his is a lot harder to see exactly what he's doing or unless Lizzie is kind

of following much more kind of a standard story. You can, you can see exactly what he's doing unless Lizzie is kind of following much more kind of a standard story. You can see exactly what he's doing where it's harder to tell. But both of them, I think, suffer from the same problem as Guts as far as I know. What about category theory? There's plenty of hype about category theory in physics, but you're also in math, and so you're much more close to category theory. Is there a hope that somehow higher categorical structures will elucidate how to make progress in high-energy physics? The things people are doing with those are actually much more trying to understand. There's a lot of people actively trying to use some of that mathematics to understand classification and more the kind of theories you would use in condensed matter systems. it's possible that, you know, the right way to understand, you know, gauge groups, you know, the infinite dimensional group of all gauge transformations,

or maybe you can even think of the diffeomorphism group, about how to think about representations of those groups, those groups. It may be that the higher categorical stuff has something useful to say about that because there the problem is that the standard notions of what a representation is don't really... The problem is when you're dealing with these influential groups, you really don't even know what... You can't just say representation. You have to put some more additional structure to make this well-defined and,

and what the additional structure is unclear. And maybe it would help with those, but, but anyway, I haven't really followed it. I've spent some effort trying to follow that mathematics, but I don't, uh,

don't do that. And, and, and anyway, category theory in general is just a very, very general, I, you know,

I mean, the problem is it's a very, very general idea. So it's, it's something it's part of, you know, the the problem is it's a very very general idea so it's something it's part of you know the way mathematicians think about every subject you know that i really it's very very useful to think not about representations but the category of all representations to think of that and that opens up all sorts of new quite new ways of thinking

and questions to that but it's um but it it's just a very real abstract language so it it can be used for many many things and i think what i realized at some point when i was a student i was very i thought okay well you know the way to understand mathematics is to find you know look at these these the mathematics are teaching us and look for the more and more general structures and then just find them understand the most general structure and Then you know you'll be able to drive the rest of the stuff And so and then it looked like category theory was that was this thing which was the most general thing that people were using

And so I thought I should go learn category theory but then at some point I realized that what I was did what you're doing is that as You go to greater and greater generality, you're saying something about more things, but you're saying less and less. And so in the limit, you're saying nothing about everything, which is really not actually a useful limit. And that's the problem with category theory as just in its most general meaning. It's very useful. It can do all sorts of things

but it's not anyway, it's telling you a bit about everything but yeah, it's too much generality to really kind of... Now what if someone retorts about the polemics against string theory by saying, hey, look, string theory has produced something much that's positive.

So, for instance, the math is used in condensed... Sorry, is used in the fractional quantum Hall effect and many other condensed matter systems. No. Yeah, no, the string theory hasn't, that stuff doesn't. First of all, I mean, a lot of the time when people are talking about this, they're talking about something which didn't actually come from a string theory. It's quantum field theory.

So yeah, like the fractional quantum Hall effect. I mean, I don't think, there's nothing in string theory. There was a comment that said, look, I'm a physicist, and I'm not a string theorist, but we use string theory in the fractional quantum Hall effect. And that was a comment on the Ed Frankel video. Well, I think probably, I mean, the problem is string theorists are happy to kind of claim, yeah, anyway, I mean, they're kind of claiming that everything comes from a string theory. And

they're actually at this point, David Gross kind of argues that, well, you have to shut up and stop arguing about string theory because string theory and quantum field theory are actually all one big thing. And so you're arguing against quantum field theory. So that's just a waste of time. Because string theory is supposed to be a generalization of quantum field theory? Well, it's because, oh, you know, with these dualities and M-theory, whenever we realize it's all the same. And so, anyway, so I don't know in this specific case, I'm not an expert on that, but I strongly suspect that the saying that this came from string theory is that

it's really some fact that they learned from string theory. And string theory is happy to say this can't be string theory, but it's not actually... And to make this whole thing even more frustrating, more complicated, is that no one actually can, at this point, has a definition of what string theory is. So you can... People then start talking about kind of like what Gross is trying to do.

He's trying to say, well, string theory and quantum field theory are all the same, so when I say string theory, I mean quantum field theory. And people just keep doing this and you know, so unless you're really, really expert and you know exactly what

the story is about what string theory is and how it's related to quantum field theory or whatever, you easily get very confused. Another weird thing I found what string theory is and how it's related to quantum field theories, whatever you, you, you, you easily break it. Very confused. Another, another weird thing I found is that almost everyone believes that Ed Whitten wrote,

um, one, uh, feels metal for his work on string theory, which is just not true. It's just not true. I mean, the things that he won,

the feels metal for is, he's totally amazing. Things in mathematics are actually quantum field theory. Things are they actually have yeah, basically nothing to do with string theory, but the positive energy theorem Yeah, and and and those things I mean they're They're not string theory But but you know it's it's really hard to convince anyone of this even even most mathematicians believe this if you go up and ask a mathematician you know did whitten the string theory part of what whitten when the hill spell part of that i'm sure they'll all most of them will say oh probably is yeah sounds right so what's a fulfilling life for you peter well i'm very i i'm quite happy i mean one

i think you know when my book came out a lot of people's a lot of people, the ad hominem attack was, oh, here's this guy who was not a success and didn't really, and he's just embittered and unhappy. They didn't realize that I'm actually quite disgustingly pleased with my life and very happy with myself. I've had a weird career here at Columbia and it's a it's a very. But I've been extremely well treated by the department and allowed pretty much to do to get away, as I said, get away with doing whatever I want and treated well and paid well and had a very, very happy life. And so I'm meaningful. Yeah, and I'm actually proud of the books I've written, some of the things

I've done, and I'm actually quite excited about what I'm working on now. This was always one of my great frustrations, is that there were a lot of things that seemed to me that something interesting was going on, but I didn't understand enough to really be sure this is really something.

I've really got something here and uh now i'm much more optimistic about that and so i'm trying to i'm getting older though i'm 66 i'm trying to figure out i'm actually trying to negotiate with the department of university some kind of exit strategy out of my from my current position is somewhat some different kind of situation here and I made where I might be doing less teaching and less to end and and and less involved and less taking care of the computers get other people to do that so we'll take care of the computers well I told you about this so it's a part of my my I'm my official title is senior lecturer. And the weird thing about this title is this is a title that the university gives to people who are,

they're non-tenured positions but are teaching courses here. And so I'm doing that. But I've also, part of the deal with the department has always been that I do relatively, not that much teaching, but also make sure the department computer system runs. And so I actually do on a day-to-day basis, I also make sure our computer system's going. So I do. You don't want to do that anymore. Well, let's just say I'd like to do, maybe a better way of saying it is, I mean, I've actually kind of enjoyed of enjoy that actually there's actually that's always been never that's always been been in some ways fun but um there there is an inconsistency i found between you know having the time and focus to work on making progress on the stuff i want to make progress on

and also teaching a course and also having to deal off and on with computer problems and trying to fit all this together in a 40 hour week is not really doesn't work so well. So one of the and I've decided in my life, I definitely have to prioritize the working on these new ideas. I've got to start dumping some of the other things and change things. But we'll see. things and change things, but we'll see. I managed to find that specific comment that was referenced earlier, and I sent it to Peter Wojt over email. Here's the comment, and then subsequently there'll be Peter's response. I am a physicist, and I use string theory all the time in my research on the fractional quantum Hall effect. What Frankel means here is that the expectation to find the standard model in the 90s by Calibri-Yau compactification of one of the superstring theories turned out to be unfulfillable to this date. This does not harm the theory. The prediction was just wrong, therefore the title of this video is misleading. String theory revolutionized the way we understand physics and math in general, and it continues to do so. By the way, it's the only consistent theory unifying quantum field theory and gravity. Peter's response is, hi Kurt, in the podcast I misunderstood what you were telling me,

that a condensed matter theorist was saying that they thought understanding the fractional quantum Hall effect used string theory. I was speculating that they were misunderstanding some QFT explanation as a string theory explanation. It seems, though, that this is not a condensed matter theorist, but a string theorist. The quote-unquote string theory revolutionized the way we understand physics and math in general and continues to do so is just pure hype. It's the sort of thing you will ever hear from a string theorist devoted to that cause. I was unaware that some string theorists have worked on embedding the fractional quantum Hall effect system

in a complicated string theory setup. I don't understand the details of this. From long experience, I think it's highly likely. This, like many string theory explains condensed matter physics claims, is just hype. String theory, since the beginning, has had a huge problem, and it continues to this day. The current tactic for dealing with the failure of string theory hype around particle physics is to double down with new hype about nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum information theory, etc, etc. Peter then quickly sent a follow-up email, hey, I just read the thread, I'm guessing this is a string theory undergrad or graduate student, the claims about the fractional quantum Hall effect are based on relating it to Chern-Simons theory, which is a QFT story,

so a quantum field theoretic story. Also, all fans of david hestine should know that i did ask peter about geometric algebra but he's not familiar enough to comment on it okay well it was wonderful speaking with you and i hope we speak again i hope we meet in person oh sure let me know if you're ever in new york oh yeah i go quite frequently so i'll let you know the next time i'm there and maybe i'll see at Perimeter if you ever come down this way. Yeah, I haven't been there yet, but I would at some point like to go there. I just signed up to participate via Zoom. They have a conference on quantum gravity at the end of the month. But it's mostly virtual. And so you can, anyway, I'll watch some of the talks on Zoom, but someday I'll actually get there physically. All right, sir.

Take care. Okay. Thanks. Thank you for coming on. Bye now. Bye-bye. The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching.

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