Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - She Says Spacetime Points Are Just Where Fields Meet

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

SPONSORS: - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE - One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code CURT at https://www.Ridge.com/CURT #ridgepod - Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better — or your money back. For a limited time our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at https://cheershealth.com/TOE. - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This episode is about relationality — the idea that spacetime isn't a stage but something built out of fields defining each other. Lucrezia Ravera, physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin, joins to explain the dressing field method she's developing with Jordan François, and why she thinks the manifold itself disappears from the physical picture. We discuss Einstein's hole argument and the point coincidence argument, why gauge symmetry is a feature of physics rather than mere redundancy, and how a system as simple as two particles can act as quantum reference frames for one another. The conversation also covers relational quantum mechanics versus classical relationalism, why time and space variables vanish once you write physics in terms of fields on fields, and what it means to be a "first principle thinker" navigating a hyper-competitive, metrics-driven physics career. I hope you enjoy. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Bundle Differential Geometry - 00:05:31 - Dressing Field Method - 00:10:40 - Einstein’s Point Coincidence Argument - 00:15:45 - Relativity vs. Relationalism - 00:21:00 - Gauge Redundancy vs. Symmetry - 00:26:30 - Relational Quantum Mechanics - 00:33:52 - Gribov-Singer Obstructions - 00:39:00 - Invariant Path Integral Quantization - 00:45:00 - Lorentz Dressing and Locality - 00:52:11 - Ontic Structural Realism - 00:58:00 - LQG vs. String Theory - 01:03:10 - Relational Quantum Field Theory - 01:09:00 - Foundations of QFT - 01:14:40 - AI and Truth-Seeking - 01:20:00 - First Principle Thinking - 01:25:30 - Creativity in Physics LINKS MENTIONED: - Lucrezia's Website: https://lucreziaravera.com/ - Lucrezia's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@R3Fram3D - A Hundred Years Since Quantum Mechanics [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/UE0RKcnNdR0 - On The Geometric Approach To The Boundary Problem In Supergravity [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01462 - Relational Bundle Geometric Formulation Of Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02046 - Geometric Relational Framework For General-Relativistic Gauge Field Theories [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04043 - Lecture Notes On Symmetry Reduction Via The Dressing Field Method [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29505 - Stueckelberg Action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stueckelberg_action - The Hole Argument: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/ - What Is Observable In Classical And Quantum Gravity? [Paper]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231078109_What_is_observable_in_classical_and_quantum_gravity - Relational Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002 - Wigner's Friend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner's_friend - Mechanics As A General-Relativistic Gauge Field Theory, And Relational Quantization [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19845 - Jordan François: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s1_4CYkAAAAJ - Dynamical Implementation Of The Constraints In Conformal Gravity [Paper]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&user=cmc4wx8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=cmc4wx8AAAAJ:M05iB0D1s5AC - String Theory Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/X4PdPnQuwjY - Simon Saunders [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ihv542rCUns - Carlo Rovelli [TOE]: https://youtu.be/hF4SAketEHY - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/XVZzuIUZveg - Juan Maldacena [TOE]: https://youtu.be/6LbRHMvyrik - Leonard Susskind [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok - Neil Turok [TOE]: https://youtu.be/_xxLW71vT4s - Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FkYer0xP37E - Yang-Hui He [TOE]: https://youtu.be/wbP0KjWm0pw - Jacob Tsimerman [TOE]: https://youtu.be/6uIJdXmB4vE Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Physical space time is really where fields meet. There are fields everywhere that's barbells and also a bit scary maybe. Why is it scary? This is Lucretia Vivera, a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin. She's rewriting quantum mechanics in bundle differential geometry, where the wave function becomes something called a co-cyclic object. The time, T, and space acts, variables, disappear from the picture. With Jordan Francois, she's developing the dressing field method.

What it does is pull out what's physical without fixing a gauge. These are cutting-edge techniques, and don't worry if you don't follow all the technicalities. The point isn't to drink from the fireholes is to just get wet. I tend to have a geometric mind. Maybe it's part of just of my personality. On this channel, I, Kurtzai Mungle, interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today, Lucretia explains what relationalism is and how you can't make sense of physics unless you realize that the field co-define one another and how this upends our traditional view of space time.

The manifold is not there anymore. Lucrezia, what excites you about physics? How did you get started in it? Yeah, well, I'm a curious person, and I like problem solving. It's one of my skills. I like solving problems, understanding things. And I'm very, very curious. So everything starts from there, actually, because physics,

is precisely the way in which I get to do this. I had at a certain point in my life several options. I was interested in many disciplines, but then, yeah, I went for physics. And in fact, I started, for curiosity, I started with my bachelor and master degree in string theory. And precisely because at least to me, that was entirely new. I did just one course on string series. So that was entirely new for me, and I was very curious about it. And after that, I did move on to supergravity with my PhD.

And there also, it was again pushed by curiosity to learn new things and therefore to experiment theoretically, of course, but with new series. And there I did supergravity in a geometric way. It is called the geometric approach to supergrapers. gravity in super space. And this was so because I tend to have a geometric mind, a geometric mindset. And so it was very nice to me to get to know super gravity with this approach.

And then I did gravity, alternative theories of gravity, gauge field theory, and finally my current research that I'm developing now, that is the dressed in film method. Oh, great. You mentioned you have various curiosities. So what else besides physics? Well, precisely because of the fact that you get to try to understand how nature works, to get to understand something about reality.

And so that's what's different. I was also intrigued by, for instance, philosophy, in particular philosophy of physics, and then also by other disciplines like arts and things like that. But then physics, one, because it's there that you really have to push yourself, to ask yourself questions, possibly the right questions, which is key, and to try to understand how the world works. At the beginning, I wasn't sure if experimental physics or theoretical physics, it just came to me the choice as the best for me that I could figure in that moment.

But after, of course, it was in analytic mechanics, I said, and I saw for the first time Einstein's equations, also the Einstein's not for generative I say, okay, no, I want to do theoretical physics. So, because, yeah, yes. You mentioned that you have a geometric mindset. Yeah. What's the difference between a geometric mindset and a visual one? That's a hard question because I tend to inflate a bit to the two because, okay,

maybe because I'm thinking more of a differential geometric mind, which differential geometry has also, at least, well, to me, I don't know if it is because of my mindset, but I think it tends to be very visual also. Like I think of differential geometry, differential geometry of fiber space. And so you have to, so you have geometric properties, is a side of mathematics in which you think with, you deal with the geometry, but also it's very visual. So all the objects at play, the mathematics at play, you get to visualize it somehow. And so that's what I, when I said geometric mind, I mean both when I have to think of physics in mathematical terms, so in the language of physics that is indeed mathematics.

And when I do computation, when I have to visualize what's happening, somehow, of course, there are things that we cannot truly visualize, but we can have visual hints somehow, and that's what I mean. I see. Okay. And for the people who are listening, there are going to be visual. speaking of visuals, there are going to be various visuals throughout. Maybe there were already. So watch on YouTube or the video version of Spotify in case you're interested. Okay, now we're going to get to the development of this dressing field method, along with your collaborators.

But first, what motivated it? Yeah, indeed. Well, first of all, I think that this method that I'm now developing and applying in various areas of physics. I find this very exciting because at the beginning, when you start your study, a PhD student, maybe you think, what if there is something, in all these, there are a lot of theories,

a vast variety of theoretical scenarios, and what if there is something that is ubiquitous, it appears here and there, but is also hidden, so to be discovered, something important there, that therefore unifies a common thread in all of these, and needs to be discovered and used, therefore, because if it is, if it starts appearing everywhere,

it means somehow that it is important and has to be used. And it just so happened that the dressing film method is such a thing. It is a tool, a mathematical tool. And what motivates it is the core of general relativistic gauge field theory, modern general relativistic gauge field theory, which is the presence of local symmetries. And so with generativistic gauge field theory, I mean general relativistic framework.

For instance, general relativity is a model of such a framework. And then we have gauge field theory, for instance, the standard model, electromagnetism are models within this framework. And together we may think of it, at least a classic, and then maybe think of quantization in a second moment, of general relativistic gauge field theory. And there we have the presence of local symmetries, that is gauge symmetries, so internal symmetries for gauge field theory,

and the thermophysms, there are spacetime symmetries in general relativity. and it is a common understanding that the physics of the theory is in the invariant content of the theory. And the dressing film method does precisely this. It allows you to extract in a systematic way the invariant content of a theory, would it be generative theory or gauge field theoretic? Technically, this is a, how to say, it's a conditional statement in the sense that if you manage to find a dressing thing, field in the pool of your fields. So it is a field that has to transform in a certain way under gauge and nephomorphism transformation. Then you will manage to build composite variables

that are automatically invariant and that represent therefore the physics. There are also, we may think of them as complete observables, DRAC observables. And so this is very nice. It appears as a tool. It works especially well. It is most powerful, I would say. in bundle differential geometry and in field space, that is the scenario, the mathematical scenario of modern field theory, I would say, is field space and possibly field space as a fiber bundle. But it can also be applied just field theoretically, so at different level of abstractions. And it works both non-perturatively, so it is intrinsically non-perturbatively, but it can also be employed perturbatively. And it unifies also several notions that appear in the literature that seem

apparently unrelated. There are, for instance, the Stucleberg field and Strukelberg method. So this is similar formally to the Drescent film method, but conceptually it implements asymmetry while the Dressing Film method reduces it. Hedge modes, quantum reference frame, scholar coordination. There are a lot of things in which the things like dressing appear and in fact we then discovered applying the dressing film method

that is, this is precisely the case. And most importantly, I would say conceptually, it is a nice natural relational interpretation. So not only comes as a powerful technical tool to achieve invariance, but also it has this nice relational interpretation And with relationality here, I mean the fact that there is no background, no fixed background structure and that fields,

field variables co-define each other and therefore construct this relational network. So in the end, physical space time is really where fields meet. It's defined with the point coincidental values of field. And so this is very nice, I think, because relational is the key insight of generativistic physics. So it's very nice to have a tool that makes the rationality manifest. Right.

You have a visual about point coincidence. And you talk about what relationality is. I think you created this. It has some music. It says physics and reality. Yes. And then you have the tablecloth. Ah, yes.

Okay, I see. That's okay. This was in a, yeah, it was a divulgative talk indeed. And it was to explain, yeah, it was a visual to try to explain the film of In particular. And the idea was, yes, that you may think of the manifold, of the differential geometric manifold as the table. And then this table cross as the metric field and then things over the table as the table

as the other fields, matter fields, electromagnetic field and so on. And then you drag, with a diphtomorphism, you drag the field. you drag the fields over the manifold, and so there was this dragging of the cloth over the manifold. And you see that object essentially what happens in the visual is that objects change position with respect to where they were before. And so one may ask what is physical, and actually physical is the relation between the object,

the relation between the object and the clothes, and not the table. The table disappear from the physical picture. So this was a table. theory, if I remember well in those slides, but it was just to explain something that is actually deeper. And this is, I would say, the dialectic between the whole and point coincidence argument by Einstein, and that's the way in which relationality emerged in generalativistic physics. And this can also be extended actually then to gauge field theory, to internal symmetries,

and to generativistic gauge field series, so to the generalized point coincidence argument. That is how relationality manifests itself. And more physically in field theory, what happens is that you may think of having the manifold and then fields on it. And so both the manifold and the fields are subject to the action of the thermophysms,

of the dephemophism groups. So the manifold transform and the fields are dragged over the manifolds. But then what happens is that you may think of a difeomorphism that is the identity everywhere, but in a hole where it has support. So there it is different from the identity. And so you will have some field equation in your theory. You will have that if you have two solutions that are difomorphic one another,

then they will be the same outside the whole, but they will be different inside the hole. And but the theory at the same time is covariant, the equations are covariant under the thermophysons. And so it will appear that the theory cannot distinguish, cannot truly tell you what is physical. There will be a sort of indeterminism of ill-defined a cushy problem technically, we would say. And so at the beginning, Asthma was even dropping to reply to this,

say, no, okay, we will therefore have to drop covariance, the general covariance principle as a principle, because we cannot have a determinism and some physics. But then the reply came with the point coincidence argument, of Einstein was then later named this way, that tells us that actually what is physical is this point coincidental value of fields. So it is something that is in by and can be dragged alone,

but it does not transform under the morphism. And therefore, in this sense, space time, physical space time is made out of field on fields, to quote also, Robelli. and the manifold, just it is there as a mathematical object, but it disappears from the physical picture. It's just a scaffold that is used to construct with you and then disappears. This is probably a great point to talk about the difference between relativity and then relationalism.

They sound the same. In fact, there's even relativism, which is more philosophical and has to do with truth and so forth, but here we're talking about relativity and then relationalism. Yeah, yeah, I see. That's a good point indeed. Because surely they are distinct things. They are different, but they are also related. At least there is some logic path that you can follow

to get from relativity to relationality. So we may think indeed of three kinds of relationships. So we have Galilean relativity, special relativity and general relativity. And the first two, so Galilean relativity, special relativity are more similar because well, they both deal with the relativity of observers, with inertia of frames and so on. But what they have in common especially is the fact that they are both based on rigid, on global symmetry groups. while with general relativity there's the big change

because there we have local transformation we have diphomorphisms and in particular there we have co-variance under dephemorphism. You may think there is this view of dephemorphism as passive transformations that is just there for general coordinate transformation and we have general coordinating variance

in differential geometric settings and so on So that is okay. But what's more subtor is the active view of diffeism. So here we have the thermophysm, the dress field, transformed, manifold. We have covariance under active deformorphisms. And that's what initiates the logic of the whole and then point coincidence argument, and therefore ends up with relationality. So there are distinct concept, relativity and relationality,

but from general relativity. And so the key insights from general activistic physics is rationality, I would say. Does the relationality of the dressing field method, does it depend on the whole argument? Or does the whole argument just motivate relationality? Okay. The fact is that the dressing field method is the technical way of implementing the point coincidence argument. That's key, actually. It's very important what you raised here.

because you may also just start with the point coincidence argument philosophically, conceptually. So you will not have to raise the whole argument as a problem, in principle, if you start with the solution. So the key insights of GR is actually the point coincidence argument and relationality. And what does the dressing film method is that it implements it technically, physically. And in the end you have, we may say that you have two dual pictures. One is the bare theory, so the standard theory, the bear theory, which has manifest covariance, and it is tacitly relational because of the presence of local symmetry and covariance under these local symmetries. And on the other hand, we have the dual description, which is the dressed description,

in which we have manifest invariance and explicit. relationality. And so I think this is particularly powerful because, yes, it's a duality, but from other dualities like holography, ADSTFT duality, you have two duals description and something is better read in one of them. It's easier to achieve. And that's surely the case with the Drus Infil method for achieving an invariant description to achieve the physical degrees of freedom, variables, observables of a theory, and so hopefully also to their quantization. Okay, so let's explain what gauge fixing is. Maybe the difference between gauge fixing and a gauge redundancy or gauge symmetry versus gauge redundancy, but let's do so first with an analogy for

those people who are unfamiliar, and then you could talk about it in more technical terms. So let's say one example may be, I was going to say you have a salad, but then there's salad dressing, so that's a bit confusing. Let's say I have macaroni and cheese. It's something I make. Now, I know you're Italian, and the way I make macaroni and cheese may be not the way you are. Okay, okay, let's do it. Okay.

Okay. So I have sodium citrate. I have this something called sodium citrate, which allows you to emulsify the macaroni and cheese. So sodium citrate, cheese, macaroni, and then milk. Okay, let's say those are four ingredients. Yeah, okay. You have a recipe that you make macaroni and cheese with. And in physics, sometimes our observable may depend on the macaroni and cheese.

cheese, and often the way we do this is we integrate over all possible recipes, and then someone says, whoa, hold on, that's too many. What matters is the ratio between the milk and the cheese and so forth. So you pick one. You say, let's gauge fix. Let's just choose our milk to be 500 milliliters, and then we get one recipe, and then we get something that's finite in the end. Something like gauge fixing there. Now, the rhyme there, people may hear is, well, the wave function is a ray and so the ray is is what is it you you're quotient out by u1 you're quotient out by a phase and then that gives you something that okay no no but i see what you mean it's just that it's really hard to do to make this work in a sense because uh well surely like if you i mean you have to

think of it as a redundancy somehow you have in mind a redundancy in the in the description And so you are associating gauge symmetry with a redundancy. It's true that some people think of it in this way, but it's not where I stand. So if we have to compare this to our recipe, it's a bit more complicated because it's like having many ingredients to do our recipe. And then possibly also another important thing is not to introduce further ingredients from the outside. so ad hoc ingredients that would be a dog dressing fields from the outside otherwise the relational description the relational recipe will be spoiled so you have to pick from your ingredients and try to arrange them in such a way that in the end

what you have is a complete dish a complete meal so it would be more of this kind and to picture a gauge fix It's like, I don't know, it may be like saying that you just use some of them, but there is not truly a perfect way of using them in such a way to make a complete dish. I don't know if it can make sense or not. No, I don't. We're listening to out that way. Explain that.

Well, but okay, I cannot, but at a certain point, be a bit more concrete. the physical sense, I mean, with this, but yeah, in the sense that we can differentiate this into two topics, I would say. So one is the fact that is related to the redundancy and the fact that, okay, I don't truly think that gauge symmetry is just a redundancy. It is a symmetry and therefore covariance and the gauge, we have the gauge principle. that is telling us how to build our theories. And it allows us also to discover particles.

We have the principle of general covariance for the thermophism. So this is the preamble to relationality because of covariance of your field equations under those symmetry, then you will have to come to the conclusion that rationality is there. It is tacit, but so it is fundamental in this sense. Theories of everything is brought to you by Maud. Mod prescribes a once or twice daily medaphanil drink that can keep you energized and alert throughout the day. Here's the mechanism. Caffeine temporarily blocks something called adenosine. That's a chemical

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That gets you 10% off, and it cuts out the middleman. Just head to ridge.com, use code Kurt, C-U-R-T, and you're all set. After your purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. please support our show, tell them, hey, Kurt sent you, theories of everything sent you. Take care. So there are two kinds of relationalism, maybe at least two kinds, maybe there are more, but one was by Rovelli in, say, 1991 or so, which is a classical kind. And then another is the more quantum kind from a 1996 Revelli as well.

Which one is yours? Yeah, well, surely I would say the classical one, as we were discussing before, I mean, it is about generativistic gauge field theory, and it's the key insights of generativity physics. So the one that you achieve with the dressing film method is that one. But also regarding the relational quantum mechanics, Alarvali, it is not super clear to me the way in which the classical relationalism relates to its quantum mechanics version. at least to me then really try to explain the thread,

but to me it's not very clear. And I think it's kind of different. But what's nice is that with the Drusimfilm method, we managed to expose the logic that you have at the classical level, so relationalism there, to the quantum mechanical framework in different ways. So it depends on the approach that you are dealing with to describe your quantum theory,

which quantum theory you are describing to, or model better. And therefore, technically, we reached the insights of the point coincidence argument there, but technically, and the relational reading, that corresponds in the end to the one by Rovelli.

And so I think that this is very nice. And for instance, we did it in a work where we were dealing with a system of end particles, point-like particles, both classically and then at the quantum level. And we did it in a bundle geometric setup, which is not necessary for this kind of system, but it was nice to introduce what we call a configuration space-time bundle. So it was powerful geometrically, unnecessary but powerful.

And so we derived like the classical dynamics, and then the Schrodinger equation, the weight function geometrically, in this formalism, and then the dress the Schrodinger equation and the dress wave function. And that was nice because the reading of it, so of the dress theory, was telling us that there is no meaningful way of ascribing a quantum state to a particle, to a subsystem of this system on its own, alone. It does not really make sense. It see itself as a classical, but the quantum network reveals in the moment in which it is put in relation with the rest of the subsystem. So each particle position in that case acts as a reference frame.

And each particle can witness the quantum dynamics and it is a sign of quantum state with respect to the rest of the system. So that's our relational reading, which I think it's pretty much aligned with Rebelly Quantum Mechanical. The interpretation is that. And we also introduce it. It comes naturally, actually, with the dressing field method, a way to switch among different reference systems. So in this case, change particle position to describe and to witness the quantum dynamics. And these are called, we call them transformation of the second kind.

It's just how we call that. We name them in this. This is just a way of changing dressing field. which in this case for these systems means change frame, change reference frame to describe the system. Ah, okay, so if any particles position can be a reference frame

serve as a reference frame, then how does the audience picture what a measurement is? Okay, this is a good question and it's actually a higher question also in the sense that measurement is next level. So this is like a physical frame covariance, which is kind of a law of nature,

is crucial and the fact that we found it in a nice geometric way is good. But the problem of measurement is more related to the interpretation of quantum mechanics is more complicated. So I don't have a neat reply regarding this, but what I may say is that we may think what a measurement is in quantum mechanics. So what you have is that you have some wave functions, some state that is acted upon by some operator and the operator

is an observable is something that interrogates the state, the weight function and then you get some results from this. And the operators have a spectrum

that is a set of possible outcome and that's how measurement work in standard quantum mechanics. When you think of the dress theory you will have the same situation but your wave function now your state, both your state and your operators will be dressed now.

And this is how in the dressing filmeto, you have this explicit relationality. So it really explains how relationality manifests at the quantum level. And in the end, you will have those dressed, state and observables, and you will get some result. But then you may have another dressing field. So another, in this case, when we were talking about the part, So you may think of having another particle in another position. And so you use it as a reference frame now. And so you will have to dress the theory with respect to that.

And you will get another dress state, another dress way function and other dress operators. And so you will get maybe a different outcome indeed. But what's important is that you will have also a map to understand how to relate those two, the two relational description. and this is indeed by physical frame covariance. And then you may have also, you may think also

maybe a third part of the system, a third subsistence, like in Wigner's friend, like a third particle that witness the quantum dynamics, and so you will have to dress with respect to it, the dynamics of the others, and so on. But there always would be a map

to change frame, a way to change frame and to relate. those relational descriptions. For the researchers watching or listening, what would you say is the dressing field method doing? It's converting what to what? Or is that the wrong way of thinking about it?

Like, is it converting, gauge variant quantities to gauge invariant quantities? Or, like, what is it doing? Yeah, it's not truly converting, I would say, because when the dressing field, to be a dress infinitas, to be, to transform in a certain way, a field, possibly, as I was mentioning before, to be picked from the fields that you have at your disposal

because that's where you will have a nice relational reading. So it has to be gauge variant. It has to transform, to transform on the gauge transformation and diffeasms. And then you will have a nice prescription that is a rule of thumb. You just replace the gauge the way in which the other fields transform. You replace the parameter with the dressing. This is technical, but essentially you would build, composite fields out of the field content of your theory in such a way that the result is composite

and it is gauging variant. So you kind of promote some of your fields if you can, so if you find them to dress in field, but it's just the way in which they transformed it will tell you if they are or not. And then you will build a composite variables that are complete observables that are automatically invariant. In the moment in which you find a dressing field in your theory, you will just dress all the rest, and it comes naturally or the rest of the construction. Okay, just stress the rest.

Okay. It is, yeah, it is not truly converting those. I mean, the bare objects, the bare fields, there will be still gauge variant and transform on the different fees and the gauge and so on. But the composite objects are. Quick question. So my understanding is Singer and Gribov.

Ah, yes. They showed that there's no global section. that you can take of connections for you have to module all the gauge group when the gauge group is non-commutative I believe but anyhow the dressing fields do they share the same obstruction okay um maybe we can we we may think of what what are gribles ambiguity gribo singer obstruction and where they appear first of all and then i i can tell you already that i don't have also a definite reply here is something that we think it works in this way, but we are still working on this too.

But what happens? And this is also to maybe discuss the difference between gauge fixing and dressing, because grible obstruction are something that appear when you gauge fix. So why you gauge fixed? Because you have those gauge symmetries, and you would want to have technically just a well-defined solution to your, a unique solution to your field equations to have a well-defined kushy problem. And then you fix in one way or another, there are more sophisticated technique like BRC

gauge fixing to do so, but then you try to fix the symmetry to constrain the fields. And we may think of this. I have also a nice visual for this. You may think of like modern field theory is done in field space. And you may think of field space because you have the action of gauge and you have the action of gauge and if you know, as a structural group of a principal bundle, so an infinite dimensional bundle that is field space, in which each point is a set of fields.

You may have the electromagnetic fields, the electromagnetic field, the metric, matter field, and so on. And so when you gauge fixed, you select a slice in this bundle. So you have that the bundle is fibred into orbits, and you are intersecting the orbits with this gauge. Gage fixing. And it's like, also technically, it's what is the image of a section. So from the base space of the bundle to the fibered space to this fiber bundle. And so this is a constraint slice gauge fixing. And gribles, obstruction are the fact that there is, it is sad and it is proved. Actually, there is no such a global section. So in other words, it cannot, it does not exist a perfect gauge fixing. And so now how this differ from the dressing film method. The dressing film method and a dressing field in particular is a realization of a projection from the bundle to the modular space.

So it actually realizes a coordination of the modular space where we, where physical degrees of freedom live, actually. So it is a space that you cannot truly access, but with the dressing, build a coordination of this space. And so you are not anymore in the space that you would end up with a gauge fixing. You are in a different space now that is supposed to describe the physical degrees of freedom. And so in this sense, you may circumvent grimo of ambiguities, gribe of obstructions. You are not truly solving the problem, no, because it's not the point is...

Okay, the problem doesn't arise to begin with? Yeah, it does not arise. Yeah, exactly. You may maybe have difficulties in finding such a well-defined dressing field, a global dressing or maybe, like for instance, since it has to be picked from the field at your disposal, you may say, but what if it has to be filled dependent? So what if a field is zero somewhere, then the dressing is singular there,

how it can be well-defined. But actually, for instance, in physically real situation, we don't really have that a field is zero. So this is just to say that it might be a way to circumvent agreeable obstructions, but not to solve the problem. Yes, okay. Now, if the dressing brings you to a different space, then do you have a different sort of quantization there?

Like how there's geometric quantization. Is there a dressing quantization or something else? That would be what we may call relational quantization, what we are calling you relational quantization, invariant quantization. Right, right. And I mean, the tools and disposal, it depends on what you are dealing with. But for instance, in field theory, what we have done and we are now developing, is that you may think of some Lagrangeam and action and therefore to develop a patty integral quantization.

And what's nice is something that we did in a work that we were thinking of classical mechanics as a one-dimensional general activity six-gauge field theory and then putting it on the bundle of course it's not necessary but it was nice to do that because in that way when you apply the dress infill method you just see that the theory you end up with in so the quantum mechanics of this system is the so the quantum path integral the dress the path integral correspond to the standard part integral by the fey mandirac path integral of quantum mechanics which is well defined. So, and it's not a gauge fixed version of it, is addressed the description.

So something that we are used to deal with is already addressed description in disguise. And so this was the first thing to say, okay, now we have to apply all of these machinery to the true setup of generativistic gauge field theory. And therefore, again, in bando geometric terms, with this bando geometric description of field space, we worked there and we worked out an invariant pat-integrate quantization. So again, with this tool of pat-integrate, which is

standard in filth-stioring in quantization, but the dressed version of it, which has nice properties like natural invariance, manifest invariance, explicit relationality, and also some other properties like

it automatically implements a mechanism for anomaly, cancellation there. So it has some good properties, say, this kind of this formulation. Right. And there's something that makes these dressed ghosts disappear. Yes, exactly. Okay. We also

this is related to the fact that a certain point we had to state clearly, which is the difference between gauge fixing and dressing. And so one way, one approach to gauge fixing, it is more sophisticated than powerful,

is this BRT, BV formalism, in which you start by rewriting the gauge algebra in a nice comological way. So you introduce the BRT operator and you introduce also ghost and acinichial trophies and so on. You introduce indeed the ghost. And then you rewrite your symmetry algebra and you do, you implement, it is said, in a co-variant way in the sense that you implement the gauge fixed. constrain in a dynamical way in the Lagrangian.

But so the point was what happens if we now take this formalism, so we start from the BRC algebra and we dress it. So we build the dressed BRT algebra. What will happen? Something different should happen because dressing and gauge-fixing are different operations. And indeed, if you fully reduce the symmetry, So if you reduce completely the symmetry group, you will have the dressed ghost vanish.

It's not the bear ghost, of course, that vanishes, but the dress ghost will be zero. The birst the algebra trivializes, and this reflects the fact that you achieve the invariance, indeed, and the relational description. Then there might be cases in which you decide to reduce just part of the symmetry, like a subgroup of the whole symmetry group.

And so in this case, you will have a residual symmetry, a residual gauge symmetry, and therefore you will still have that some residual ghost, that they would be dressed ghosts, but just with respect to a subgroup of the original symmetry group. And so those will not be zero, but in general you would want, when you have a gauge symmetry,

and diffeomorphism, you want to reduce the whole of it. So to make it to construct an environment with respect to all of it. So this can be seen as an intermediate step to reach, to achieve full, full variance. So yeah, in this sense. If you drink, you've been told you feel less than 100% the next morning because alcohol dehydrates you. Cheers Health says that's only 10 to 20% of it. The rest occurs while you sleep. Your brain compensates for alcohol by turning down its own calming system.

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Cheers says that you'll feel at least 50% better or your money back. Go to cheershealth.com slash TOE and use the code TOE for 20% off your entire order. That's Cheers C-H-E-R-S-Halth.com slash TOE. This video is sponsored by Cheers. So something just happened recently. The Economist sat down with Elon Musk, who told them that AI will surpass human intelligence within five years, and then in ten, humans won't be running the world. It went viral, and I recommend you check it out. See, the Economist is more than a magazine. Actually, I subscribe to the Economist's annual subscription. Their science and AI coverage is among the best that I've found anywhere, and I say that as someone who reads plenty of it. They even covered how dark energy may be weakening with time. If that holds up, it completely changes our understanding of the universe's feelings. fate. Those are exactly the kinds of questions that we explore every week on this channel.

Now, the Economist is, of course, known for global affairs, both political and economic reporting. Interestingly and flatteringly, Toe is one of the only podcasts that the Economist partners with. So as a Toe listener, you get their exclusive sale, 35% off the annual subscription. This is not a deal they have just anywhere. Head to Economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's Economist.com slash tow for 35% off. Does it trade the elimination of ghosts for non-locality? Well, in general, no, but it may happen. What may happen is that when you implement the dressing film method,

the reduction of the symmetry and therefore trying to achieve this environment content comes at the price of locality. It doesn't always happen so, but it may happen. and it may happen it is just in the construction of the dressing field and then it disappears in other entities,

objects in the theory. But yes, it may happen but there are also other cases like, for instance, in the electro-week model and so in the re-reading without spontaneous symmetry breaking of it via the dressing film method.

For instance, this is local. There is also like all kind of scalar coordination, so in which you, for instance, also in cosmological models in which you think of having some dust that is described effectively with a scalar field and then you have theometric field and you dress and the scalar fields act as a reference frame. And so in that case also the when you build, when you achieve environments with the dressing,

this is local. And also in the Lawrence dressing, I would say that it is nice because it's something. thing that is very common in physics to move from the description of generativity with the field and the spin connection, there are a differential geometric object, then you move from that to the metric description with the affine connection. And that move is addressing, even though sometimes it's not to recognize as such, but you reduce the Lorentz symmetry, you make, you're creating variants under that to Lorentz symmetry and you get the description with the find connection.

And that is local again. Interesting. Let me ask you a funny question. Yeah, okay. When you look at the world, like right now, you look around you. Yeah. What do you see? So what I mean is firstly, yes, I see walls, okay, I see the window, etc.

But many years ago I was at some co-working space, and I was just pausing and looking at the, well, not looking at anything. And then someone who was working there said, Kurt, what are you doing? I told them, I was just thinking about how many neutrinos are passing through me a second and how I can't see them and what else is out there that we can't see. And then as I started to learn more about philosophy and physics, then I started to wonder, well, is the physical all there is, and then is everything relational?

What does that look like? What does that feel like? So what I want to know is when you look at the world, okay, you as Lucretia, you look at the world, what do you see and what do you feel at the same time? We have a physical model. And that's written down on paper with integrals and differential forms and so forth. And that's fairly abstract. But do you make a connection between that and the way you experience the world?

I don't think so in the sense that when I look around me, I mean, I see things, the walls again, the kitchen and so on. I see things normally. Sometimes when I stop and think of, okay, the wonder that is around, that may happen, I think. And there are fields everywhere. So that's, yeah, that's barbells and also a bit scary maybe. But, yeah. Why is it scary?

Because, again, as you were saying, before like neutrino, passing through me constantly all things like that, if you think that all of this is happening and you cannot witness it, at least with your own senses, with your eyes, with a sense of touch and so on. Okay, it's impressive and also a bit scary. of all of this reality behind it we cannot see, but I think it's also extremely fascinating. And also it's nice, I think, to have somehow,

to get to have a feeling of it, or some visual of it through mathematics, differential geometry and physics itself, because, for instance, also if you think, to visualize, or have in mind the fact that there is this thing that is space time, made of fields and there are many dimensions, at least four. And how so we are, I mean, we are in a simple being.

We cannot perceive this. I mean, we can see space. We can perceive the past of time, but we cannot really understand with our senses. We cannot see reality. Like if we were, I don't know, in matrix and see the matrix. Yeah. Yeah.

No, but we can have, we can perceive it and try to think of it. I would say me I tend to think of it geometrically, mathematically, and therefore physically. When I'm doing my research, both conceptually and technically, because when I mean mathematics for me doesn't have a strict only technical sense. It is the language to express the physics. So in this sense, I need to visualize what's happening. So both like, I don't know, fields, an interaction stack of fields, and things like that. And also to have a geometric picture of it in another corner of my space of mind. And to see also the formulas by means of which, and to these formulas, I connect the notions and concept.

So it's like that. But only when I really stop thinking, otherwise I just live life normally. As normally as we can, yeah. So let's say when you're speaking to someone, say a cashier, do you ever look at them and think you exist only relationally? You think you exist absolutely, but you don't even exist. Like, is that how far your relationalism goes? Or do you not think like that? Or is there some reason why they do in fact exist absolutely? Yeah, I don't think like that, but what you're saying, okay, now we may, yeah, it puzzled me

a bit because in a sense it's true that how can you define yourself if not okay I mean relationality physically what I'm doing does not go there but now that I'm thinking of it how can you define yourself if not in a relation

with the others I mean your own inner nature is just you that you can assist to this while you are defining the world with the relations and yes in interrelations with the others. So in a sense, but usually I don't think of these of people like you exist only

relationally. So like say thanks. All right. Thank you. So in your theory, maybe you could say that we codify one another. Now, in your theory, I think fields codify one another. So if that's the case, then is there no ground? Like, what is underneath that? Is it just relations relating to one another? or are you a structural realist? Or is there something absolutely? Actually, most of the time when I speak to people who are relationalists, I find that they have some invariant structure underneath.

Even special relativity, Felix Klein wanted to call it the theory of invariance to Einstein. So sometimes relationality is not the correct word. There's something still, maybe the bundle structure is the invariant structure. Yeah. Yeah, I see. This is indeed a good question. And I think that it relates to a very important point that I mentioned maybe already before, but it's the fact that if with ground floor you mean like the manifold, I would say no,

there is not such a thing physically. It is there mathematically, but there is not this kind of ground floor. But because indeed fields are codifying each other. And so there is actually a ground floor, but it is made of fields on fields. sense. And so this is the view that we take with the dressing film method and our view of relationality. But on the other hand, we may also think of in a structural realist term. And that we can discern, I think, between like animinativism and non-animativist and non-animativist. Wait, what is that?

Yeah, because even before this, so it's how we are used to perceive reality. we think that objects typically, that object like a lamp, a bottle, the tables, objects are primary, and then they are connected by relations. So this is a nice visual that we can have. It's like having a graph. We have points that are objects, and then we can draw line among them. So relation comes, they are secondary and they come after. But for a structural realist, there is quite different.

this logic is reverted. And especially for enemy nativist, I think, is the fact that you think, if you're an eliminativist, you think that relations come first, and there is not such a thing, they are detached from the objects. So they are ontologically,

there is where there is the ontological way. Elimitivist. Yeah, in the network or relations only. While the non-elimativist is when you think that actually object and relations are coextensive in a sense that you cannot read the touch the relations from the object itself themselves. And I think this is the Eddington view of anti-structural realism. And for instance, Eddington knew about group theory, about gauge symmetry for group also. There is a nice example because if you take an element of a group, you cannot

truly define it without the relations with the other group elements and so with the composition maps and so and and so in in that view you will have that you cannot truly detach the object from the relations and so the dressing film matter and the relationality there is more with this view so both the object and the relation are coextensive and in fact like when you think of building dressing field in this case with bare fields and dressing fit to be the dress the variables and to access this relational network we have kind of these philosophical interpretative view in mind so to say two dressed descriptions describe the same physics then don't you need something like a global bundle it's automorphism group of the

diffuomorphism of that manifold and then the the gauge transformations and some prospective neutral moduli space, or no? Like, don't you need something that's invariant underneath that? I don't know, actually. You will not have the gauge symmetry will not be manifest anymore. It would have been reduced. You would not see, I mean, it is still there as a mathematical construction, but you will not have the fiber space anymore.

So you will not have to worry about picking a global section there. you will not and you will have just object that are in bias. There are equivalence classes also in jargon. But okay, they are complete observables and they belong to the, they live in a space that is a physical coordination of the modular space. So it is just there.

And I don't see, I mean, that's what's physical is the environment content. So I think that you would not need. other structures therein. When we were speaking off air, you mentioned that in loop quantum gravity, relationality is made more apparent. It's manifest. Not so much in string theory. It may be there.

I mean, but that's my question is, well, what is it that's different about loop quantum gravity such that relationality hits you right in the face, whereas when you studied your master's in PhD are in string theory, but it was deemphasized or what? Like, what's going on? Yeah, okay. I'm not an expert in loop quantum gravity. So now we are doing this dressing film method. We are developing it.

And it just so happened that it has this nice relational interpretation. But it is a separate thing is not related to luke quantum gravity. I'm not an expert in it. But as far as I can tell you, I see rationality as kind of fundamental to be at the foundations of luke quantum gravity. you have this graph, the speed network, you would want to quantize the geometry in a relational way.

You have this quantization of the metric and fields over it. So it is relational in spirit. You have a dimorphism in violence, and there is no background structure. Background independence and rationality are not the same thing, but still, okay, these are the features of loop quantum gravity. don't know how much of this is a and therefore so the relational view is exported to modern loop quantum gravity so to the modern developments in the field honestly but i see this yes as

as more foundational in as foundational in lupe quantum gravity of course in string theory is not is something that is never as far as i can tell again never mentioned is not a keyword in string theory, maybe also for some prejudice with respect to a word that is rationality that is sort of as belonging to lupt quantum gravity community. And so you know that the quantum gravity string theory are kind of competitors. So maybe because of this, maybe because it's just not there as a key concept. On the other hand, I think that it has to be there tacitly, but it has to be there and it could be made manifest and part of my project is also to do this, to apply the dressing film method it did in string theory, because in some limit, it has to

reproduce general relativistic physics and rationality is a key insight of general relativity. So it has to be there. It's just that maybe it's indeed not manifest. Explain what you mean when you say tacit relationality versus manifest relationality. Earlier, you also mentioned that with GR, with local symmetries are tacitly relational, and then something else was manifestly relational. Like, when the person hears this, they think, if something is tacitly so-and-so, in this case, relational, then it is relational. Like, it's just, it's saying that it's there, but you just need to look a bit closer.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's, I think it's kind of this precisely, in the sense that in the bare theory, if you want, but also without thinking of the dressing, actually, you just have some symmetry, so gauge symmetry and different morphisms in your general activity-gauge field theory. And the fact that those are there, so the gauge principle and general covariant principle already point at the relationality.

So because of them, again, it's the dialectic between the whole endpoint coincidence argument. So how do we get there? So they are the preamble to rationality, the motivation. And so, but you have a theory that in principle is just covariant under those symmetry. So the equation of the same form under those symmetry. And so rationality is not manifest. Well, it is tacit because you know that those are hints toward the fact that you may have,

you then we want to achieve imbrients. The physics is invariance. So you would want to have in the end of the relationship. But then if you really want so, you have to make it manifest. And so move to the dual picture in which you have manifesting variance rather than covariance and their relationalities manifest in your variables, in your co-definition of the variables that you have at disposal in this sense. Yeah.

What is the big problem that you're trying to solve? Well, yeah, it's, first of all, yeah, I'm trying to redrive some things carefully to understand in a neat, technical, conceptual way, the basics, the foundation of physics, to rewrite theoretical, fundamental physics in a manifest rationality. way and thus ultimately to converge to what I would call a relational quantum field theory and therefore to deal with the foundation mathematical and conceptual foundation of quantum field theory and therefore also ultimately to quantum gravity which in fact is a sub-me be seen as a sub-problem of this major problem on the fact that we don't have a full coherent mathematical foundation for quantum field theory and also therefore physical and conceptual understanding of it. Some physicists think that one of the issues, the major issues at the heart of quantum gravity

is time is treated differently in GR than in quantum mechanics. Now, is this something that relationality helps solve, or is the way I posed it not well posed? I mean, we can see it as you But I can tell you what I think about it anyway Because I'm not sure that this can solve the problem of quantum gravity But what I may say is that actually The way of dealing with time in a relational description is indeed different Because you will have some way of making maybe

the description involved in a manifest way, the time variable actually relation, so you will not have a time variable appearing and maybe you may have, what's even nicer is that you may have clock fields and therefore to use them to build your relational description without having to have time manifest as a variable.

As I was saying before, when you think of fields, on fields the time and the space X variables disappear from the picture they will not be part of the

physical picture anymore the manifold is not there anymore so you will have a different way to deal with this notion and to coordinateize time to coordinate with clock fields and anyway with

physical reference frame your physics what issues do you see with the way that research gets conducted these days? How does it compare to how it used to be when you first started? Well, I may see if we want two maybe main issues that are also related one another. One is surely the fact that there is a scarcity of resources,

scarcity of positions, in particular permanent positions in the field. And so this may incentivize, okay, you have to evaluate researchers somehow therefore in the field. So it's a sector that became more and more competitive. And also, of course, you have to evaluate

researchers, but the point that nowadays we use, we strongly use bibliometric indicators, metrics, may be an issue because in the moment in which the metric become a target, it is not a good metric

anymore because they will all point to this in the sense and this may come not always must say but can come a bit at a cost of quality in the sense that you tend to maybe produce more and more paper so more of a point into the quantity to try to get some strategy to be more cited and so on and that's also natural in a sense because physics is made of people so you will you will have to think of trying to do research, so through seeking research, but also your own personal life and career, of course. And this is maybe also related to the fact that it's harder to do regarding this through seeking nature of research. It's harder to do maybe interdisciplinary, genuinely interdisciplinary research, because it isn't kind of promoted the interdisciplinary research. And I'm thinking,

for instance of doing something that has to do with mathematical physics, philosopher physics and theoretical physics together. So this nice encountering of disciplines. But it can become especially hard then to maybe publish. And so therefore, because it's maybe more difficult to get an interdisciplinary paper published and appreciated by the community. And also the fact that maybe you will have less citation, I don't know. And so your metrics will not be as good as you.

were doing maybe some specialized topic. To me it sounds like you would get more metrics if you're interdisciplinary because you have more people that could read it. Unless what you're saying is you need the intersection of all three to read it. No, okay, it depends because it's actually difficult to find maybe interdisciplinary journals that have a high impact. There are, of course, but it's also maybe also hard to publish there. Ah, right.

So usually I think that typically for, especially for younger researchers, is difficult to do interdisciplinary research. Then it may come with a lot of benefits also. I'm just saying that I think it may be difficult. And also because nowadays those disciplines, I was thinking precisely of philosophy, physics, theoretical physics, and mathematics, they are more separate maybe than they used to be. So maybe it's harder or so for this reason.

We are in times in which we have an increase, of difficulties of, I mean, things are technically harder also to deal with. So you need to be more specialized. It's a factor to deal with them. But this specialization may also come at a price of, you know, less of a unity between those disciplines and aspects. So, yeah. What's the largest unsolved problem in physics that you see?

Because various people have various rankings. Some see the cosmological problem as the most important problem. and so on and so forth, confinement, whatever. What do you see other than quantum gravity, which is everyone's number one? Yeah, okay, well, quantum gravity is, yeah. To me, I mentioned that before, but yeah, I think at least me,

I'm pointing in that direction, but I think that the biggest problem is the understanding, one of the biggest problem is the understanding of the conceptual mathematical and conceptual foundations of quantum field theory. And therefore, and there, of course, Quantum gravity also comes as a subset of this major problem. At least in theoretical physics, I think that it is this.

You mentioned earlier something about relationality and the path integral. Is the path integral somehow well defined under the dressing approach? Yes, exactly. Yes, in the sense that it always depends on a formal measure. So that's the characteristic of the path integral. but I mean again it depends if you mean well defined because of the measure of

integration this is a problem that is a feature of the patina itself that is not going to change when you construct the dress theory but if you mean if it is if it has some better properties with respect to the bare formulation in the sense that

it will be automatic and in by and but the measure of integration and the rest of so the action and it would be invariant. And it will have an automatic, an intrinsic mechanism for anomaly cancellation also in the theory of quantum anomaly. So it has better properties, of course, whenever anomaly carries some physical information,

it has to resurrect in some other way into the dress theory. And it does so nicely with those transformation of the second kind, those transformation capturing physical frame covariance. So it has nice property but well-defined, if you mean formality, by means you write the measure, and all that would not change. So what's the reception been like? I know that it's recent, just a couple of years, since you started publishing along with Francois,

Jordan Francois, if I'm not mistaken, in the dressing field method. What's it been like? What sort of questions do you encounter? What do you see? Yeah, it was, yeah, it is very nice, actually, all of this process. program, I think, because I mean, I'm still doing gravitational series, supergravity series, but now with this view that the dressing film method provided and it's continuing,

and it still provides when we develop it, because it has to be developed as a formalism. It was introduced by Francois in mathematics in his works, and then we developed it together. We discovered that it had this national relational interpretation. and also and we start applying it to different contexts. We see cases of dressing emerging here and there, so being abic ubiquitous. And what we are now trying to do is, and the other nice thing is that there is a neat program to follow. So sometimes in research it may happen.

If you say, okay, I would want to dig into this question and it would be a work on its own. And then I move on to something else. And then you don't have to have always a clear path. humanifying all of these. While for this project it is so, so it was first of all to build it in the most general way for general activity-ativity-engage field theory

and while we developed the formalism, we also had a better understanding of the conceptual aspects of the philosophical and conceptual aspects of general activity-singage field theories, so the framework and the models the reign. And then think, okay, now we have to apply it to several theories

as much as we can understand some gauge fixing, rereading them in another way under the lens of the dressing film method. We applied it also to supergravity. We will apply it to string theory. And then develop the quantum version of the dressing film method and therefore applying it to quantum field theory, relational quantum field theory, relational quantum theory, relational quantum gravity to build those framework.

Yes. And then also to other scenarios like, I don't know, the electric physics, lattice computation, cosmological perturbation theory. So it is very versatile. This is very nice, I think. And this is part, we are doing this,

slowly, but sorrowfully. And so, yeah, like, yeah, in this scenario, applying it and into the physics there. When you were talking about jumping around and not having a clear direction, is that what characterized yourself earlier in your career? No, in my case was not much of that, but I know it may happen in sub-projects.

For me, it was more of curiosity-driven, changing topics still with some, I mean, for instance, from string theory to super gravity. There are different theories, but there is kind of a path also than to gravity, gauge-feel theory, so it was a smooth path. but when we zoom in into each sub-project, maybe there is some, on the single work, the paper that you are writing, and all the research that you're doing, that may be, maybe more on a specific topic

that is not maybe directly related to the other. In a big picture, of course, they would be related, that is maybe to reply to a single big question. Kurt here, note that if you'd rather listen to Toe, we're on Spotify, iTunes, everywhere with a podcast catcher, you can just search my name or theories of everything,

and also remember to hit subscribe. What about the impact of AI on your research? And then also just how you see it in your field. I see, yeah. I thought of it indeed. Well, in general, I think I thought about AI for humanity as a tool, as something revolutionary, and it comes also with some problems,

like famously the alignment problem and so on. But yeah, I think it is a very useful tool. And in particular in theoretical physics, I think it can be in physics, but it can be very useful. And for instance, it can speed up some processes. You can use it to prepare males to do fast courses maybe on some topic. If you want to get some new skill, to get knowledge fast in an effective way, Yes, you can use it that way.

But as a tool, I think that you may use it also in a bad way, say in the sense that maybe to produce just AI generated papers, so we will have a lot, again, quantity, against quality. So a lot of papers that maybe they don't have, they may also happen to have a good deep content, but it's rare. I would say it becomes more difficult, so to do self-generated papers. and also cases in which maybe researchers feel faulty about using AI,

some kind of fault for using AI to do computations, why we should be able to do our own computation. And so we did use AI only to write the paper and to generate the paper. And I think that that is dramatic because, I mean, it means it's good if you need to use it to check the syntax, to check the grammar. Also, if you are not native English, speaker, okay, that's great. Yeah.

But if you really need to write your own paper, your own ideas, and you're so lazy that you don't even try to rewrite them anymore. Okay, that can be a problem. So it may come, it can be used for good and for last good, say, things, that's for, for sure. So I think that asking the right equation is crucial. In physics, in general, not only to AI in general, it's more important than the answer in the sense that the answer will come almost together with the question if you ask the right questions. So that's for sure. If you prompt nice AI, it can be of a help. It can also

produce some new result that I think. So it can be also through seeking. There are companies that are trying to develop through seeking AI. But if you just prompt it to be to try to be faster, to produce papers as much as you can to have more chances like to survive the system put on because somehow to do your own career to get citation to have a huge number of publications okay this is uh this cannot be deeply good i think yeah i see it's too competitive so people try to gain badges on themselves with it yeah can be can be like that i mean i um i don't know, I don't know, actually, it can be. Yes, of course it can be. Yes. Yes. What advice do you have for students who are getting into physics? Let's imagine there's a 18-year-old student who's

listening, watching, they're interested in your approach, they like what you have to say, and they're looking to you now, and they want to know what advice do you have for them. Yeah. Okay, as I said before, maybe to ask the right questions, to be curious, to be threat-seeking, to end. And to ask not only, I mean, the right question, but also to ask questions in a sense to be aware of how the system works as much as possible to know that it's hard, especially in those times, but not to discourage, just to be aware, because that's to play your own strategy at best as you can, to do the best that you can with your resources. And as I was saying, to ask questions, to choose wisely your supervisor to ask a question to your supervisor, as to be. be mentored, really. Interesting. Meaning not only technically, like to, if you are asked to do computation, of course, do computation, it is important to get a new skill to know how to compute, but also not only

under a technical perspective ask question, but also how to network the field, sociological aspects about the fields to be made aware of what it means to be, researcher and or what it means to be a first principal thinker, what it means to be, to do through seeking research in this sense, I mean, and also to possibly, so therefore to be, to try to be at your best, a first principal thinker and also to recognize the people that do so. Ah. So I think that's it, yeah.

Yeah. So what do you mean when you say truth seeking? Do you mean to say that there's some way nature is and you want to probe nature itself? Or what do you mean? Yeah, I mean, ask yourself fundamental questions about reality. And so if you are curious and interested in something that you feel is deep, that you think is deep and you have good reason to think so, then investigate there, push yourself there and try to, again, ask yourself questions

and direct your research in this direction. And of course, then if it is needed, of course you will have to study to build your own baggage of knowledge and to also in principle you may not have opinions. It's legitimate to say, I don't know. So just to study, to build your own opinion

or your own baggage of knowledge and then also to learn how to compute as I was saying before, if you just asked at the beginning, you also say, okay, now you study this now compute, and so yes, you compute because it is necessary, it will be useful. And then, but always having in mind this thing, therefore asking fundamental questions

and dig deep into reality. Yeah. What's the biggest mistake you have made that you can talk about? Okay. that you want to discourage other people from making. Like they should learn from your mistake. It's an easy mistake not to make.

Well, that's, again, hard question. I wouldn't say truly maybe mistakes. I mean, not in this context at least. But maybe more of something that I lacked in a sense. I was maybe naive, a bit unaware of all of, of what we discussed about, so I'm being unaware of how the sector works. For instance, I did get to know about the existence of the archive only during my PhD.

Nowadays, of course, students, they also know about this before, actually. So I was a bit unaware, maybe in general. And together with this, also the fact that I was a bit shy, in the sense that it was hard to me to state my opinion, which, as again, as I said before, it's normal to maybe not to have a strong opinion about something if you don't know it really well already. So if you're still studying and so on. So it was maybe difficult. This and also being shy about asking questions about say, I don't know, I did not understand this. This is another

important point. So maybe I heard, I used to hear a conversation. I would say, okay, this I'm not understand this. So I'm lacking something you see. I'm not enough. I'm not good enough. But actually, this may not come only from you. It may be something that is lacking into that conversation into that conversation itself in the interlocutor. So maybe pointing nicely this out, so saying, I did not understand this. So let's discuss it and then it depends on the conversation. But pointing this out may help all the people in the conversations. And in my case, surely all of these would have helped me a lot in learning things, more things and faster for sure. So this I would say.

How did you get over that shyness or that timidity? I'm not sure that I really did get over it yet. Maybe it's part of just of my personality. But maybe in a sense, taking myself less seriously. So taking the game seriously. and so my work and my job seriously, research seriously, but myself maybe less seriously and what happens around. So just say, okay, I'm in the end, free to ask questions,

I'm free to interact with people. And by, Danny, if I say something wrong, okay, let's see. It just happens. I don't know, something like that. But, yeah, taking myself less seriously, I would say, sorry. How do you work on not taking yourself seriously? Do you practice that or is it just something that comes with time or do you actually put energy into that? No, well, it depends in the sense that I think it's something that came just aging.

One good thing of it should be. If there is one, if there is one, it's that possibly. But also sometimes I have to, yeah, I have to focus on it saying, okay, for instance, if I have to prepare something, a presentation, if I am, I don't know, if I have some applications, some performance to do. I get stressed and say, okay, let's focus on the fact that's, yes, you are just prepared. You go there with what you are, your baggage,

your knowledge and your way of just being your personality. And that will be enough. In any case, it has to be enough because that's what it is. And so just try to enjoy it and get the best of it without taking too much seriously.

I mean, and what if something bad happens if I do something that is not particularly perform just try to enjoy the process I well I hope I didn't stress you with this podcast no absolutely it was fantastic

no no I really no absolutely I'm glad and the audience enjoyed you and your personality yeah no no rather thanks a lot for it it was amazing fantastic I love I was very excited the idea of doing it and I still am very, very happy of this really. I thank you a lot. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Where can the audience find out more about you? Also, what's next for you? What are you working on? Yeah, I'm working, as I was saying before on this project, on the dressing film method and relational quantum field theory, relational quantum gravity, and also to apply in the dressing film method to diverse areas of physics. And also, for instance, now,

I'm currently researcher at Polytechnico de Torino is maybe also an occasion to apply to condense matter physics because it applies also there and to different scenarios, as I said before. And so people may find me on the Polytechnico Ditorino website. I also have a personal website that is lucrezera.com and on some social media. And then I have also a YouTube channel that is reframed. so because of reframing like physics with yeah in a relation

that's where that talk is which I highly recommend people watch so yes a link to your YouTube channel will also be on screen and in the description your personal website as well you mentioned you're into art do you have any art online

yeah well I have some that is separate from physics somehow because I sing I do some songs I'm a songwriter and composer yeah like that

And so, yes, I have a profile for that, but it's something apart. And also I used to paint, two things like that, but I don't, I mean, yeah, I tend to separate these two universities. Okay, well, let me talk about the conjunction between those two universes. So is there anything from your artist mindset or your painterly mindset or your composer mindset or your singing mindset? Anything from that artistry world that influences the physical world, the physics-minded research? I think, yes, there is something that they both have in common, indeed, and is creativity. Because I think that for being a physicist, for doing physics, you also have to be creative. And that's also what you do when you do, whatever kind of art.

I mean, so yes, I think that that's something that is there. Yeah, common ground. Thank you. Thank you for spending so much time with me. Thanks a lot to you, Kurt. and also for giving me this my first podcast so thanks a lot really Hi there

Kurt here if you'd like more content from theories of everything and the very best listening experience then be sure to check out my substack at kurtjymongle.org Some of the top perks are that every week

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