Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Geometric Unity Iceberg... Oh Boy.
Episode Date: April 23, 2025I've been working on this project assiduously and secretly since last year. It's been several months in the making, with several rewrites and several re-edits. It's finally ready to be released, thus ...shadow dropping it now. It's a 3-hour iceberg on Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity. I work on understanding and explaining different Theories of Everything for a living, and this one is unlike any other you've seen. This iceberg covers the graduate-level math, but it also constantly provides explainers aimed at different levels for those who are uninitiated with physics and differential geometry. Enjoy. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Welcome to the Iceberg of Geometric Unity, a comprehensive and technical edition.
This iceberg format is one that will guide you through the intricacies of this theory
of everything, beginning with foundational concepts and then advancing into the more
sophisticated hinterlands.
In this special episode, we rigorously explore Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity, moving
beyond metaphorical explanations
to engage directly with the mathematical underpinnings of the theory.
If you skip the rigor and opt for explanations aimed at a 5 year old, well I'm not sure
how many 5 year olds you've spoken to, but sure it's cute, you can't explain what a
Dirac operator is to them outside of making a TikTok video that gives the
impression of knowing without actually understanding. My name's Kurt J. Mungle, and on theories of
everything, I use my background in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto to explore
the unification of gravity with the standard model, and have also become interested in fundamental
laws in general as they relate to explanations of some of the largest philosophical questions
we have such as what is consciousness and how does it arise.
In other words, it's a paragrenation into the all-encompassing nature of the universe.
Today we'll cover the abstruse math of bundle theory, of index theory, of course the standard
model with general relativity.
Just so you know, this episode took a combined 250 hours across three
different editors and several rewrites on my part. It's on par with the most
labor that's gone into any single theories of everything video, comparable
to the iceberg of string theory, and that's saying something. If you're
confused at any point by the exposition, don't worry, GU may seem like a
formidable subject. That's what I thought before I started reading what Eric's write-ups were.
And then I realized that it only uses standard notions in differential geometry,
the primary challenge of which lies in the novel constructions and the terminology introduced by Eric,
yet these are accessible to those with a graduate level understanding of mathematical physics.
Even if you're not at that level, don't worry,
because I'll explain and I'll re-explain several points. First, I'll provide a quick overview of
geometric unity, followed by an overview of modern physics. Then I'll give a more detailed
explanation of GU to thoroughly explain the derivations. Finally, I'll relate it back to
modern physics. There are timestamps in the description to help navigate around. Don't worry
if you get lost, this video is meant to be watched and rewatched, where each
time you'll glean something new.
So let's begin with the first layer of the iceberg.
Layer 1.
Firstly let's ask, what is a theory of everything?
Now most of the lay public thinks that it has something to do with quantum gravity.
However that's just a single approach to reconciling general relativity with the quantum world.
Furthermore, quantum gravity isn't a toe, it's not a theory of everything.
A theory of everything in the physics sense is a framework that encompasses both the standard model of particle physics,
as well as general relativity.
In other words, it's not just about something being quantum. You can then ask the question, okay, well what's the minimal input that such
a model has in order to recover the particles that we see, the gauge groups, the Lorentz
group, the Yang-Mills action, and other ingredients of modern physics?
There's always the temptation to make your theory more tortuous in terms of what's added
to it as elements to the stew.
But the goal of a toe has always been an elegant one.
This means that you start with a tiny set of assumptions and you recover a plethora.
Now this iceberg isn't going to be hand wavy or vague.
It will give you analogies, yes, to help you if you don't understand the math.
But if you do know these topics on screen, then that's enough to understand all of the
conclusions, the derivations, and the claims of geometric unity.
By the end of this iceberg, you'll not only be familiar with geometric unity, but also
with the current state of fundamental physics as a whole.
I'll explain GU in four words, in 30 words, and then in 20,000 words.
In four words, Einstein knows petit salam.
Not terribly informative to people without a physics background.
However, you can see my notes here on this sub-stack on eschewing simplistic explanations
as you only get to choose two of these three.
Simplicity, accuracy, and succinctness.
Now, slightly more accurate is the 30-word explanation, general relativity grand unifies
the standard model's first generation by pulling back vial spinners from the space of metrics
after trace reversing the Frobenius metric on the fibers.
Again, that's a handful, that's actually only 28 words, and that will make sense to someone
who has a differential geometric background, but maybe not to you yet.
Now the 20,000-word explanation is the rest of this iceberg.
One problem is that there are three legs to this mathematical physics stool.
Geometry, algebra, and analysis, or in other words, calculus.
The issue with quantum field theory is that it developed in an unbalanced manner.
It's predominantly analysis.
And we discovered super late that we'd been neglecting certain topological, geometric,
and algebraic aspects.
Starting in the 1970s with Jim Simons, for the last 50 years, people like Witten, Seagull, Quillen, Singer, Attia, Hitchens,
Donaldson, Dan Fried, C.N. Yang, and Alvarez-Gomay have been making quantum field theory more
geometric.
When you're taught quantum field theory in graduate school, it's generally from the point
of view of effectively a generalization of multivariate calculus.
But this tool of analysis is too crude of a tool to bear the responsibility
of advancing fundamental physics.
Now, I'll give some simple examples.
How do you avoid issues with pseudotensors by ensuring that physical quantities are tensorial
and coordinate independent?
Or number two, how do you ensure that the time evolution of a quantum state preserves
the non-negativity of the probability density during propagation?
Number three, how can you tell if you have an anomaly in quantum field theory?
Number four, how do non-local spectral contributions arise in ostensibly local theories?
And number five, of course, how do you formulate quantum theory on curved spaces?
None of these considerations that I've just mentioned are natural in an analytic framework and analysis.
But geometric principles ensure that all of these conditions are met.
I won't say the answers now, but I will address them later in the iceberg.
Needless to say, it's exactly the same issue where phenomenon that are difficult to prove,
regarding convergence and analyticity in the real case become completely obvious or even trivial when you extend to
the complex case.
For now, let's look at the current state of fundamental physics.
Hi everyone, hope you're enjoying today's episode.
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hit subscribe and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show.
Just so you know if you're listening it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJaimungal dot org.
What's on screen are terms which are the ingredients of modern physics. In the same
way that you have flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and milk to form a cake, but following our
ingredients of the universe as we know it.
The universe combines these all, but we don't know how.
And further, we don't know of a source that could give rise to all of these.
Is there something like the four simple base pairs of DNA that give rise
to the protein bonanza that we call life? Let me go through these one by one. Firstly,
we have Einstein. Now specifically, this term represents the Ricci curvature tensor, defined
as the contraction of the Riemann tensor. Most people don't realize that this is quite
odd as the Riemann tensor has its antisymmetry
in the last two factors coming from it being a two-form, whereas the first two factors
have antisymmetry coming from the Lie algebra, which is actually after you pull down the
i with the metric.
More on this later, but intuitively the Ricci scalar measures how volume changes in a curved
spacetime, capturing the gravitational effects of matter.
Next is Yang-Mills-Maxwell and this term is the Yang-Mills action for gauge fields, where
F A is the field strength, also known as the curvature, associated with the gauge connection
A, given by this formula here.
And this inner product is something called the killing form on the Lie algebra of the
gauge group. Intuitively, this term on the Lie algebra of the gauge group.
Intuitively, this term represents the energy stored in the gauge fields.
The next term describes the action for fermionic fields, psi and psi-bar,
where psi-bar is the Dirac adjoint of psi,
and this D with a slash is the Dirac operator coupled to the gauge connection.
The gamma matrices here satisfy the Clifford algebra and this guy describes how particles like electrons and quarks
move and interact with gauge fields within spacetime. Confusingly this psi
here isn't the same psi as a wave function. This is just one of the many
ambiguities in physics. You're just gonna have to get used to it. The next is Higgs
and this governs the dynamics of the Higgs field, and through the potential
here it gives mass to gauge bosons like the W and Z ones via spontaneous symmetry breaking
when this Higgs field acquires a vacuum expectation value.
And this next factor here is when the Higgs field acquires a VEV of vacuum expectation
value, this time giving rise to mass for fermions, which is
in proportion to the strength of the Yukawa coupling.
At this point, don't worry if you're confused.
Again, this video is meant to be watched and rewatched.
And furthermore, this is standard physics, so nothing here is specific to geometric unity.
All of this will make sense and I'll explain and re-explain, just keep watching.
Now this next term, spin 1-3, I could have also said SL2C technically, which is the double
cover of the proper orthochronous Lorentz group SO plus 1 comma 3, which is actually
necessary for representing spinner fields and anyhow this is what allows us to correctly
describe particles with half integer spins.
Then there's this which you hear of plenty. SU3 x SU2 x U1.
This product group is the gauge symmetry group of the standard model, where roughly speaking
SU3 corresponds to the strong force, also known as quantum chromodynamics, and SU2 corresponds
to the weak force, technically isospin, and U1 corresponds to electromagnetism,
though technically hypercharge.
Next we have the family quantum numbers.
These will be outlined later in this talk, but intuitively speaking, this space encodes
all the intrinsic properties that distinguish different types of particles within a particular
generation.
Now next, speaking of these generations, this denotes that there are three generations of matter.
Now some people call them three families.
I've also heard it called three flavors of matter, confusingly again.
This field here, psi, can be decomposed as follows.
That's what this symbol here means, which represents these three generations or families or flavors or whatever you call it. This accounts for the existence of particles like the electron, the muon, and the tau,
which are all similar in behavior but they differ in mass.
And lastly, please don't make me pronounce these, the CKM matrix explains why quarks
can change types or flavors during weak decays leading to phenomena like the decay of a strange
quark into an up quark.
And the PMNS does something similar but for neutrino mixing or oscillations as they're
sometimes called.
There are two key equations which can be derived from these terms but I'll include them on
screen anyhow for completeness.
So one is the Einstein field equation and the other is
the Yang-Mills equation. Since the Einstein tensor on the left-hand side
can be thought of as an operator that acts on the Riemann tensor, you can
rewrite it into this form. Now I'm going to write both of these equations
suggestively as Weinstein suggests in a suggestive manner. If you squint you'll
see an analogy here between Yang-Mills and Einstein.
Both theories involve operations acting on curvature tensors to map them back into field variables and sources.
However, one huge difference is how these operators interact with symmetries.
In Yang-Mills' theory, gauge covariance is preserved under gauge transformations due to
the structure of the covariant derivative and field strength. In contrast, the linear contraction
operator which I've denoted p, which is used to form the Einstein tensor, denoted g, in general
relativity doesn't commute with gauge transformations. I'll leave my proof of this on screen for those who
don't believe me. You can just pause. But but also there are show notes in the description with a full breakdown of everything
in this video.
This, by the way, is partly what Eric means when he talks about the twin origin problems,
but more on that later.
In Yang-Mills theory, this involves the algebra-valued one-forms, which are also known as the gauge
potentials or connections, while in general relativity it involves symmetric rank two tensors or the metric tensor as
you may know it. What other analogies exist and how can we make these
analogies not only precise but derived? Furthermore, how can this be done with
the smallest set of simple assumptions possible.
That's what geometric unity aims to achieve.
Layer 2.
Geometric unity begins with the 4-dimensional manifold X4 and then it constructs a bundle
of metrics called Y14.
This 14-dimensional space comes about naturally.
How?
Well, at each point in the original manifold, you can assign a symmetric bilinear form,
which is a metric of 10 independent components, plus of course the 4 dimensions of the base
space to account for each point in the manifold.
Rather than choosing a metric which is what's ordinarily done, GU instead works with the
space of all possible metrics simultaneously point-wise.
This is extremely important because traditionally, spinners require a metric for their definition,
and this creates a chicken-and-the-egg problem with quantum gravity.
How is it that matter can exist for mionic matter when a metric isn't well defined?
We'll speak more about this later.
The key innovation is what Eric calls the chimeric bundle over the space, constructed
as follows.
Where V is the vertical bundle, so changes in the metric at a point, and H star is the
dual of the horizontal bundle, so movement in the base space.
The vertical space inherits a natural metric via something called the Frobenius
inner product which is a fancy word for this formula on screen here. Again, all of this
will be explained with examples. Now what about that horizontal space? Well, it gets
its structure from a connection choice. This allows us to define spinors without first
choosing a metric on x4. Now the structure group of GU is precipitated from spin 7,7 or spin 5,9 and this signature
by the way is because we have this decomposition here between the vertical and horizontal components.
This leads to a complex spinner representation.
This dimension 64 by the way comes about because the spinner representation of spin 7,7 has
dimension 2 to the 7, which is 128, and that splits into two 64-dimensional pieces.
Note, these vial spinners are not of definite signature.
Importantly, they are two vial spinners of split signature 32,32, and then, of course,
another 32,32.
Eric then introduces something called the inhomogeneous gauge group and that
combines gauge transformations which are H with so-called translations in the
space of connections. That's just an analogy and we call that N. This
structure parallels how the Poincare group combines Lorentz transformations
with spacetime ones. But this time we're in the context of gauge theory. Later on,
Eric then introduces something called the augmented torsion tensor. Again, this is
plenty of jargon and new terminology. It does need to be introduced because when
you name something, you can then use that concept on its own rather than having to
construct it from scratch every single time. Now this augmented torsion tensor,
which again is on screen but will be explained more later, is what combines aspects of gravity and maintains that gauge covariance
that we talked about before. This is what resolves Einstein's quote-unquote twin origins problem,
or more specifically, Eric's coining of the twin origins problem. Now where does the standard
model's gauge group SU3 cross SU2 x SU1 come about?
Well what Eric does is instead of using a compact group, he uses a larger non-compact
one which has as a maximal compact subgroup the standard model.
In other words, the gauge group of the standard model comes about not by an arbitrary choice,
certainly not three arbitrary choices, but rather as a necessary consequence of the
geometry itself.
The three generations of matter come about from decomposing spinner-valued forms on this
larger space Y14, with something special happening for the two generations, and then the third
is more like a remnant.
So the first two come about from what's on screen here, a function, a spinner-valued
field, so spinners, and then a spinner-valued
one-form.
However, the third generation is actually a Rarita-Schwinger field in the decomposition
of zeta.
And all of this comes about from minimal assumptions on the original manifold X4.
Again, Erich's theory, geometric unity, makes unification not by adding new structures,
but via recognizing that the ingredients of modern physics, remember that Einstein equation,
Yang-Mills theory, fermions, Higgs, etc.
They all come about from geometry and moreover from X for itself.
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Step one, the observer's construction.
Let's begin with what's familiar.
That is a four dimensional manifold.
This is that tiny input, it's the priming of the pump necessary to construct the rest
of geometric unity.
There's no metric needed, there's no connection, there's no additional structure yet, other
than being spin or orientable or connected etc.
But there are generalizations of GU without these facets.
I personally find it easier to assume these.
However, instead of working with X4 directly, Eric constructs what's called the Observer's.
Now this Observer's is actually a triple, even though before I denoted it simply as
Y14, it's technically the base space X4, the total space Y14, and then the map pi that
projects down between them. So recall at every point in the manifold there's a fiber and this consists of all possible
metrics that one could have had at that point.
Now let's be precise, what the heck is meant when I say all possible metric tensors at
this point?
Well okay, at any point x in x4, a metric tensor is a symmetric, non-degenerate, bilinear form,
g sub x, say, which takes in two vectors at that same point and then outputs linearly
something from the real numbers.
The space of such metrics forms a 10-dimensional manifold because a symmetric 4x4 matrix has
10 independent components and then you get the extra 4 because of the
base space.
So what's different about this construction?
Rather than fixing a metric, which is what we ordinarily do in general relativity, we
consider all possible metrics simultaneously, and then this allows one to study how would
physics look if you didn't make any specific choice of a metric.
Eric's maneuver, which I haven't seen done before, is instead of quantizing gravity directly
on the base space X4, which as I'm sure you know, has problems with renormalization.
Instead Eric works on this larger space Y14, and then he pulls back information to X4 via
what he calls observation maps.
So I should spell out what a pullback is and what an observation map is.
Eric, confusingly to me initially, calls the local sections of this bundle observations.
So that's all it is. It's nothing more than you look at a local patch of the manifold and you think,
okay, what am I smoothly going to assign as a metric from the larger space Y14?
Okay, let's clarify what's meant by pullback. Anytime you have a map, let's say something that goes from A to B,
and then you have some structure on B in that target space,
whether it's a differential form, a tensor field, or a function,
a pullback is the corresponding structure on A,
which you can actually define because you already have a map which goes from A to B.
And the definition is on screen here.
Step 2, the frame bundle and its double cover.
Okay, let's construct one of the other essentials, the frame bundle over our base space.
At each point in our base space for this frame bundle, the fibers consist of all possible
frames or bases for the tangent space.
The group structure here is gl4r.
Nothing here is unique to GU. This is standard in differential geometry. But
what exactly is a frame? Well again, at each point a frame is an ordered basis
for the tangent space and I'll give you some examples. Here is the standard basis
that you know probably by x, y, z, and t in some coordinate system and then
another frame could look like so.
In differential geometry, by the way,
your bases are vectors, which are differential operators.
These frames are related to one another via an element of GL4R.
In other words, if you had a base and another base,
there exists a transformation between them,
which is a member of GL4, in order to get you from one to the other.
But here we hit our first snag.
GL4 does not have a finite dimensional spinner representation.
Why?
Well, if you take an element of it, say A, and you square it and you get negative i,
any finite dimensional representation A would need to satisfy that A also squares to negative i,
which is impossible over the reals.
This is an extremely important point so it deserves some elaboration.
Let's consider this matrix which satisfies that condition of a squared equals minus i.
The eigenvalues of this matrix would also need to be square roots of minus 1 which don't exist in R.
So to fix this we need to do something called passing to the double
cover. The map is on screen here and then we do something called the lifted frame bundle
which has the structure group of this double cover of GL4R also known as the meta linear
group.
Step 3. We construct observation maps. Now what exactly do we mean by observation map? I
understand this is plenty of new terminology as we have an observer so now
we have observation maps and you may have heard of the Shiab operator or the
Chimeric bundle. Eric is evidently an enormous fan of these neologisms and
this is just something we'll have to get used to. There is a method to the madness
though because when we give a name to something, it means
that we can then pick it out again and reference it without having to construct it anew each
time.
So back to the question, what are observation maps?
These are local sections, so some map from a neighborhood of a point x going into the
larger space y, but why do we call these observations?
More on this later,
but for now, you can think of it as how one measures geometry. Each of these IOTAs, each
of these maps, picks out a specific metric at each point in its domain. For any such
of these maps, we get a pullback map that brings geometric data from Y back down to
X4. Specifically speaking, if you have any tensor, say
omega, on y, then you can pull back the corresponding tensor on x4. Think of this
like a probe into the space of all possible metrics. The spin 1 comma 3
bundle comes about as follows. At each point little y in the larger space big y
we have a metric g little y on x4.
This metric determines a principal SO1,3 bundle of orthonormal frames.
The insight from Eric is that this bundle naturally admits a canonical double cover
by a spin 1,3 bundle by this construction on screen here.
The other insight from Eric is that this bundle has a 14 dimensional
matrix representation broken up into the 10 vertical and then 4 horizontal, actually asterisk
on that, dual horizontal. And that is the bundle that we're calling C, the Chimeric
bundle. Now this C has a metric on it and part of it is actually canonically isomorphic
to the original 14-dimensional tangent bundle.
The other part requires some extra structure.
By the way, when someone says a bundle admits something, they use this word admit, what's
meant is that there then exists something.
In this case, when we say that a bundle admits a double cover, we mean there exists a bundle
map that's locally 2 to 1. More precisely,
for any point in here there are exactly two points in here that map from here to
here and this mapping here preserves the bundle structure. This is analogous to
how the complex function, say z which maps to z squared, gives a 2 to 1 map
from the circle to itself. Why do we need this double cover?
Because SO1,3 doesn't admit spinner representations.
More precisely, there's no finite dimensional representations of SO1,3 that, when restricted
to rotations, gives the spin half representations of SO3.
However, spin 1,3 does admit such representations, and this is how Eric will eventually describe
fermions.
Step 4.
We construct the tangent bundle and its dual.
At each point in the larger observer's capital Y, we have a tangent space which has the same
amount of dimensions, namely 14.
And again, 10 of them come from the symmetric matrices at each point, which represent all
the possible metrics.
And we have the other four dimensions coming from the base space below.
The dual space consists of linear functionals from the tangent space to whichever is your
underlying field, namely the reals in this context.
To be specific, at a particular point in the observer's Y, it can be decomposed as the base space X and then the metric G.
Specifically speaking, you can see this isomorphism on screen here, where this guy represents
the symmetric 0,2 tensors. And recall that in four dimensions, symmetric matrices have
ten independent components. Now you may ask, why do we need both the tangent space and its dual tangent space?
The answer lies in how Eric defines field content later.
Some fields will naturally live in one bundle and others in its dual.
In fact, we'll see that without a metric on why, these bundles are not naturally isomorphic.
And this is what leads Eric to later construct the Chimeric bundle.
I'll be using this phrase field content, so I should define it.
In physics, when people talk about field content, we just mean the collection of fields that
appear in the theory.
So these could be a scalar field like the Higgs for instance.
It could also be a vector field like the electromagnetic potential.
It could also be tensor fields like the metric.
All the previous examples were tensor fields as well. be tensor fields like the metric, all the previous
examples were tensor fields as well, or spinner fields like electrons. The word
content just means collection or set. It's like the complete list of ingredients
in our theory. Step five, the vertical and horizontal bundles over Y. At each
point in the observer's Y, we have a splitting of the tangent space,
decomposed as follows.
The v is the vertical space, which is tangent to the fiber,
and the h is the horizontal space, which is non-canonical,
meaning one needs to make a choice.
Precisely speaking, the vertical bundle
is defined as follows.
To visualize this, you can think of the vertical subspace at y
as the space of all possible velocities for the changing metric at x, while staying in the same fiber over the x.
In other words, if h of t is a path in this metric space where h of 0 is g, then taking the derivative with respect to time and setting it to 0 is an element of the vertical tangent space.
This is all standard in differential geometry.
Step 6.
The Zoral construction is named for its zigzag pattern and this is what provides a canonical
manner of defining the horizontal distribution.
Now when I say canonical here, what I mean or what is generally meant by canonical is
that there's a natural choice or natural option that doesn't depend on arbitrary decisions. It's similar to how
when you have a vector space, there is no canonical basis. However, you do have a canonical
dual space. Here the Zoro construction gives us a natural method to split T-y, T-y being
the tangent space of y or the observer's or the metric bundle in other words, without
making loathsome arbitrary choices.
Here's how it works.
You'll see this construction here, which looks like the backward z of Zorro, which is why
Eric denoted it the Zorro construction.
And this funny symbol here is a gimel, which is a Hebrew letter.
And then this symbol here, which looks like Hebrew letter, and then this symbol here which looks like an N is an Aleph.
Note, I'm unfamiliar with using Hebrew letters in math unless it's Aleph for cardinality.
Now these two symbols on screen here look almost identical to me, which are Gimel and
Beth respectively.
You may see me confuse these symbols throughout, but don't worry because anytime they're referenced,
they mean the same thing, namely a section of the metric
bundle. Note that the augmented torsion tensor is now called the displacement torsion tensor
by Eric. I've also heard him call it distortion, but I'm going to continue to call it the augmented
torsion tensor for the remainder of this iceberg. To me, I wouldn't use these Hebrew letters,
and in fact, I changed this gimel to the iota from before, the only difference is that the Gimel is a global section whereas the iota from before is a local one.
Now the Aleph represents the Levi-Chevita connection, G sub-Aleph is the induced metric
on Y and A sub-Aleph is the resulting connection on Y. However, I should point out that Eric
uses this Gimel symbol and the lowercase g to prevent confusion that
was coming about from calling two different metrics on two different spaces both by the
traditional g.
Thus I understand that the Gimmel and Aleph aren't there arbitrarily as the way Eric
sees it all of the drama takes place on this larger Observer.
The reason Eric has this induction from the Zorro construction is that he wants the freedom to later not have a metric on the base space when not
observing the system for instance and this is Eric's move to make the quantum
metric make sense later. Let's break this down step by step. We start with a
metric which is a choice of a global section on x4 akin to iota from before.
This determines a unique levy-Chevita connection,
which Eric denotes as Aleph on X4, and this comes about by the fundamental theorem of
Riemannian geometry, nothing not standard here. Next, this Aleph then introduces a metric
on the larger space Y through the Frobenius inner product on symmetric matrices. And finally, the G of Aleph determines its own Levi-Chevita connection, A sub Aleph on
Y.
This process gives one a canonical manner of splitting T-Y, so the tangent space, into
the vertical and horizontal parts without making arbitrary choices.
Recall that the horizontal subspace at Y is precisely the space of vectors that are deemed
to be parallel to x4 according to A. Sub-Aleph.
And a smooth choice of a horizontal subspace is the same as a connection.
So to answer the question of why do we need this Zorah construction, it's because it gives
us a canonical method to lift vectors from xquote lift vectors from x4 to y the larger space
Without making choices the horizontal subspace is precisely the space of such lifted vectors when I say lift
By the way, what I mean is we take something that's defined on a lower space
And we find a corresponding object to it in a higher space such that it
space and we find a corresponding object to it in a higher space such that it projects downward to give us what we started with.
More precisely, if this here is a fiber bundle and we have a vector that's a tangent vector
at say B at the base space, then a lift of the vector from the base space is another
vector in this larger space such that when you project down you get the same vector.
Now the horizontal distribution or the choice of horizontal subspace gives us an approach
to choose such lifts.
Step 7.
The Chimeric Bundle.
You'll notice we're introducing plenty of terminology.
There's chimeric bundle, there's the observer's.
This isn't just jargon for jargon's sake.
Instead we're actually enhancing the clarity because we're avoiding repetitive exposition,
having to define these over and over.
These terms will become familiar as we proceed, and recall this entire iceberg is meant to
be watched and rewatched where you learn something new every single time.
Alright, let's define this beast.
First of all, notice that if we take Y14 as its own bundle, the observer's as its own
entire bundle, and we take the tangent space at a particular point in it, it can always
be decomposed as follows, a vertical component and a horizontal one.
You know from differential geometry, a choice of a horizontal subspace is a choice.
That is the same as a connection which then becomes something like curvature.
However, in GU, you're always trying to minimize the amount of choices you make.
You can even think of summing up GU as if you cannot have one, then you must have them
all.
Anyhow, let's take a look at that Frobenius inner product that we referenced before.
And let me just give you an example of two matrices.
So this isn't actually from the bundle.
It's just what I could write on screen.
But let's imagine you have one, two, two, three,
zero, one, one, minus one.
Well, you can just do the math
and compute its Frobenius inner product.
And it works out to minus one.
Now this chimeric bundle defers
in the second component, it's H dual.
It's not the horizontal bundle but the
dual of it. This asymmetry will turn out to be required for the theory's ability
to unify gravity with gauge theory.
Hi, Kurt here. If you're enjoying this conversation, please take a second to like and to share
this video with someone who may appreciate it. It actually makes a
difference in getting these ideas out there.
Subscribe, of course.
Thank you.
Step eight, the Frobenius inner product.
At each point in the large space y, we need to define an inner product
on the chimeric bundle.
So how do we do this without already having a metric on y?
The way Eric goes about doing this is by noticing that V
inherits a natural metric via the Frobenius inner product.
Again, for symmetric matrices A and B, the Frobenius inner product
is defined as follows on screen.
Also notice that you can decompose the trace and the traceless parts
of a symmetric two tensor.
The trace part has dimension 1, and the traceless part has a symmetric two tensor. The trace part has dimension one and the traceless
part has all the other dimensions. To see why this decomposition is reasonable and valid,
consider that for any symmetric matrix A, you can always write it as follows, where
you have a trace part and a traceless part. The traceless part has a signature, in this
case 3,6, whereas the trace itself contributes either a 1,0 or a 0,1, depending on a choice.
Here is where you make a specific choice.
So we can either choose 4,6 or 3,7.
For geometric unity, Eric chooses 4,6 for reasons that will become clear later, though
there are generalizations of geometric unity
with other choices.
Step 9.
Choosing a signature.
Why is it that we have to be so careful about this signature?
The answer is representation theory.
The signature determines which spinner representations are possible.
With our choice of 4,6 for the vertical space and 1,3 for the horizontal space from space-time,
we get a total signature of 7,7.
Note, GU could have had a signature of 5,9 and I believe Eric isn't sure which of these
is the sector of our universe in his theory.
But for the remainder of this iceberg, we're going to select spin 7,7.
But why these particular signatures, Kurt, you may ask.
Now the magic lies in representation theory, the representation theory of spin 7, 7.
When we have a metric of a signature, an arbitrary one, p, 6, the real spinner representation
has dimensions 2 raised to the floor of p plus q over 2.
Now for 7, 7, it gives us 2 to the power of 7.
This signature is essential because if you take the dimension of a spinner bundle,
it equals this formula on screen here, where you get 2 raised to some floor function.
In this case, it becomes 2 raised to 7, which equals 128.
And this 128 splits not into C64 plus C64
But into that equally split signature that we talked about before
C32 comma 32 and then another C32 comma 32 remember these are vile spinners of split signature
Again, the same is also true for a spin 5 comma 9 bundle matching what's required for the standard model
Again more later. This is somewhat of a flyby overview.
Step 10, defining spinners without a metric.
Here's where everything so far comes together.
The spinner bundle on the chimeric bundle decomposes as follows.
Now what's so special about this decomposition?
Well it's the exponential property of spinors at work.
For any direct sum of vectors, v, say, direct sum with w, as long as they have metrics,
we have the following.
Think of it like if you have a particle that can move in two independent directions, its
quantum states multiply rather than adding.
This is the quote unquote exponential property of spinners that Eric mentions.
When you pull this back via an observation map, IOTA, you get the following decomposition
into tensor products.
This decomposition eventuates in both spacetime spinners and internal quantum numbers exactly
what's required for the standard model fermions.
Now this alchemy happens because the vertical part V contributes internal symmetries,
whereas the horizontal part, or more specifically the dual to the horizontal part,
gives us spacetime properties.
When one pulls this back to X4, the spinners decompose perfectly
to give both the spacetime transformations of the particles
and their internal quantum numbers like color and isospin.
The implication? Eric has now constructed spinners without choosing a metric on spacetime.
Instead, they're fomented from the geometry of the observers.
This resolves a long-standing chicken and egg problem in quantum gravity,
which is how can matter exist between measurements if a metric is required for that matter to be defined?
The answer, according to Eric, is that matter lives in the observer's, namely that larger
Y space, where spinners exist prior to any choice of a metric on spacetime.
Step 11.
The Structure Group.
The Structure Group of our theory originates from the spinner representations of spin 7,7.
Why these dimensions?
Recall 7,7 comes about from combining 4,6 with 1,3.
And you can see that one is vertical and then the latter is horizontal.
Let's pause and ask, why do these signatures even matter?
Again, the 4,6 signature comes from the Frobenius inner product on symmetric matrices,
while the 1,3 comes from spacetime.
It's actually here that we make a choice.
Because we could have had anything that's summed to 4, and we're just choosing 1,3,
this is one of the only places in this entire theory that I can see a choice being made.
Now you may be wondering, why can't we just use any group here?
And the answer lies in representation theory.
We would like a group whose representations can accommodate both gauge fields and fermions.
The spinner representations of spin 7,7 do exactly that.
Why do we need a structure group at all?
When we started we had a base
space, an X4 manifold, and then we immediately got the frame bundle with the structure group
GL4. But now we're working on Y14, and we require a group that preserves the structure
that we've built. The signature 7, 7 is not arbitrary. It comes from the natural metric
structure on the chimeric bundle. Now you may be wondering, why can't we just use any old group here?
We need a group whose representations can accommodate both gauge fields and fermions.
The spinner representations of spin 7,7 do precisely that.
So why 7,7 and not say 14?
The key is that we would like to preserve the signature that comes about naturally from
the vertical and horizontal decomposition.
But here's the rub. The Frobenius inner product, which by the way Eric sometimes calls the
Frobenius metric, but I'm going to continue to call it the inner product, is given by
this formula on screen here in components. When you have 4x4 symmetric matrices, this naturally gives a 4,6 signature
because the space of symmetric matrices compose into what's called a trace and a traceless
part.
Again, let me just be extremely specific. A 4x4 matrix actually gives different signatures
depending on its signatures. Now in the 1,3 case, it naturally gives a 3,7. And this isn't
often remarked on. Seeing this 4,6 signature here is extremely subtle because it requires
remembering that you can do something called flipping the trace, which is what Eric says,
and technically that's a trace reversal. And that's by the way what Einstein did when he
realized that his equation couldn't just be the Ricci tensor equal to the stress energy tensor.
Instead, you require the minus r over 2 correction.
So let's take a look here.
Recall that trace is a single number, which is why you can represent it by something of
dimension 1, which is just the real numbers here.
And then the rest becomes the traceless component.
And then you wonder, well, what's a representation space of 7,7 and it's U64,64.
And that 64 again comes from half of 2 to the power of 7.
Thus we preserve the Z2 grading on the spinners.
Step 12, the principal bundle construction.
Let's pause again.
We've constructed this elaborate chimeric bundle with its spinner
representations, but how does one actually implement gauge theory here? You may think,
well, let's just use this spin 7,7 directly. However, there is a subtler approach that
Eric takes. His idea is that spin 7,7 acts on that 128 dimensional complex vector space via its spinner representation.
This space splits into two 64 dimensional pieces as we've said before and we wonder
why is it we're using this unitary 64 comma 64 rather than just U of 128.
It's because the spinner representation preserves a metric of signature 64,64.
This brings us to our principal bundle on screen here where we finally have a gauge
group or a structure group, namely U64,64, and then we have what's called an associated
bundle.
This is from taking the frame bundle of the chimeric bundle and then doing what's called
a lift to its double cover. We then use that row representation to convert the spin 7,7 transformations into U64,64 transformations.
Step 13, the inhomogeneous gauge group.
Okay, let's carefully build up our gauge structure.
First, what do we mean by gauge group?
In physics, gauge groups represent redundancies
in the descriptions of nature.
In other words, they're different mathematical descriptions
of the same underlying physical reality,
which is unobservable.
So for instance, you can measure your height in inches,
you can measure it in centimeters,
you can measure it in meters.
It doesn't change your height.
Those are just different representations of your height.
Now let's think about electromagnetism.
You can add a gradient to the vector potential without changing the physics.
That's a gauge transformation.
But there's something deeper going on here that we're going to explore.
So let's clarify an important distinction in gauge theory.
There are two related but distinct concepts that are often confused, and so I'd like to spell it out.
There's a choice of connection, and then there's gauge transformations. There are two related but distinct concepts that are often confused and so I'd like to spell it out.
There's a choice of connection and then there's gauge transformations.
The choice of connection, let's call it a one-form A on a principal G-bundle, which
has a total space of P going down to M, is a Lie algebra-valued one-form satisfying certain
properties.
The space of all of these connections, calligraphic A, is an affine space.
Here's what we mean by affine space by the way. A vector space has an origin. Some people
like to say a vector space has a preferred origin. Actually, anything that has an origin
is not an affine space. So you don't even need to put the word preferred there.
Okay, now what about gauge transformations? Gauge transformations are bundle automorphisms that preserve the fiber structure.
Again, they're not just bundle automorphisms, which are often said, they have to preserve
the fiber structure.
They form a group, calligraphic H, acting on connections via what we see here.
Now let's unpack this.
The first term here you can think of as a rotation of a sort, of the connection.
And the second term is a correction to the connection that you need in order to preserve
the transformational properties. In physics language, this ensures that the quote unquote
covariant derivative transforms properly. For a concrete example, let's just take the
non-Abelian gauge theory case of QCD. If this A mu here is a gluon field and this G of X here is some varying spacetime dependent
element of SU3 and that SU3 comes from the SU3 cross SU2 cross SU1, then you have this
situation over here being satisfied.
And importantly, this describes the same physics, which is why people call it a redundancy. So the
choice of connection is not redundant but the gauge transformation is and
that's something that's quite confusing when you first learn about it. Now here
this calligraphic H by the way is the smooth sections of the associated bundle
P sub H with the adjoint action of H, where H, again, not calligraphic, is U of 64,64.
In fact, I'm going to stop just calling it H because that's confusing.
I'm going to say U64,64 from now on.
In simpler terms, we have a principal U64,64 bundle,
and these are our gauge transformations of it.
Again, I can be even more precise.
Let's say we have a Lie group G and we have its adjoint representation where G goes into
the automorphisms on the Lie algebra, which acts on the Lie algebra by conjugation.
Then the adjoint bundle with the lower case a is the vector bundle associated to the principal
bundle P subscript U 6464 via this representation.
The inhomogeneous gauge group is then this calligraphic G which has the calligraphic
H semi-direct producted with this calligraphic scripted N.
Now this is like translations in the space of connections but not in a trivial manner.
There's a multiplication rule here.
And this is what shows how gauge transformations act on the translation part.
It seems like Eric is creating this structure to parallel Poincare's group's combination
of Lorentz transformations with spacetime translations.
But this time in the context of gauge theory rather than spacetime symmetry.
It should be noted here that this is quite a large move.
We're neither working on a space of metrics like Einstein,
nor on a space of connections like
Yang-Mills or Yang-Mills Maxwell as Eric says.
Instead, what I'll do is I'll overlay
a dictionary here that you can take a screenshot of.
But recall, there are further notes in the substack at
C-U-R-T-J-A-I-m-u-n-g-a-l.org,
curtjymungle.org, myname.org, so you can sign up there if you'd like the PDF.
This is, as far as I can tell, Eric's interpretation of Einstein's Unified Field.
Unified means algebraic in the eyes of GU.
Step 14, defining a right action on connections.
Now we need to understand how our gauge right action on connections. Now we need to understand
how our gauge group acts on connections. For any connection A in this calligraphic
A and any element lowercase g in this calligraphic G, we define the following.
And you may ask, Kurt, are you going to read that? No, it's tedious, just look, take
a screenshot. Why this complicated formula? Well, let's be like Curtis Blow and
break it down.
This term here is the familiar gauge transformation.
This next term represents translations in the space of connections.
And this term here is a correction term to ensure the consistency.
This right action was constructed to satisfy this specific property,
making calligraphic A into a right calligraphic G space.
Step 15.
The augmented torsion tensor.
So what happens when we try to combine gauge theory with gravity?
Well, there's several problems, but an immediate one is that gauge transformations don't play
well with Einstein's way of contracting indices. However, what if we could find a quantity that transforms correctly under both?
That's what Eric has found with the augmented torsion tensor, defined on screen as follows.
And now this variational pi, at first I thought this was an omega, it's technically a variational pi,
is a member of the adjoint valuedvalued one-forms on the larger
space y.
And that's going to be the gauge potential.
Whereas this variation on epsilon here, belonging to calligraphic H, is a gauge transformation.
Now the key property is that under gauge transformations, we have this formula on screen here.
So let's break this down piece by piece.
What is, firstly, this variational pi?
Well, it's an adjoint-valued one-form, as I said before, which means it takes in vectors
from ty, and it returns elements of the Lie algebra H of the gauge group H, which again
is U64,64.
And now this other term here looks complicated, however, it's just the gauge
transformation of the base connection A0.
By the way, when I use the word variational pi, it's not in reference to anything about
variational calculus. It's instead because Eric's notation is to use this symbol right
here. And in LaTeX, it's written with a slash and then VAR pi. It's
a variation of pi in the same way that there's a variational phi. So var phi or var phi as
some people call it. Just letting you know, because you'll be hearing me use this term
variational pi and upon rewatching this iceberg for maybe the fourth, fifth time, too many
times to count, I realized that this can be confusing.
Now let me make a concrete example.
Let's say we have a U1 gauge theory and our variational epsilon is e to the i theta.
Then what we have is this on screen here.
This is exactly the gauge covariant combination that appears in electromagnetism.
Now this is quite interesting because it combines aspects of both gravity, so torsion, and gauge
theory, so covariant derivatives, while maintaining gauge covariance.
The way that I see it is it's like finding a method to make Einstein's gravitational
theory speak the language of Yang-Mills theory.
Step 16, the Schiab operator.
How do we generalize Einstein's contraction of the Riemann tensor in a gauge covariant manner?
The answer lies in what Eric calls the Schiab operator.
That's spelled S-H-I-A-B.
Now for a gauge covariant two-form C, which some people call Casie, but I'm just going to say C,
and it's not the letter C, it's this symbol on screen.
You have this formula here where the
shiab operator acts on this two form and gives you a richy like term which will
explain more later and then a scalar curvature like term again more will be
explained later note the circle with a dot in the center is my notation for the
shiab operator Eric actually writes two concentric circles with a dot but I wasn't able to get this to consistently render in my workflow, so
just note that whenever you see this Shiab online outside of this video, it
will likely have two circles and a dot. Let's further break it down piece by
piece. First, what is this operator doing? It's taking a gauge covariant 2
form, and then it's returning another differential form that transforms, this time properly, under gauge
transformations. So why do we need such an operator? Think about Einstein's
theory. When you contract the Riemann tensor to get the Ricci tensor, you're
using the metric to raise and to lower indices. However, this operation doesn't
respect gauge symmetries. It treats all copies
of two forms in the same way. The SIAB operator fixes this by incorporating the gauge transformation
epsilon explicitly. Here's how it works. These forms phi, phi 1, phi 2, for instance, are
invariant under the action of spin 7, 7. When one conjugates them by an epsilon,
we get objects that transform co-variantly
under gauge transformations.
And now you also may ask, hey, Kurt,
why these particular combinations of wedge products
and Hodge stars?
And again, the answer lies in representation theory.
Just as the Einstein tensor splits
into trace and traceless parts, the Shiab operator
respects a similar decomposition.
However, this time it's one that's compatible with gauge structure.
For a concrete example, consider the case of U1 gauge theory.
Here the C would be the electromagnetic field strength, and the Shiab operator would give
us something akin to the following.
This is gauge invariant because F itself is gauge invariant in abelian theory.
The general non-abelian case is more subtle, but the principle is analogous. Eric is building
an operator that combines the metric and gauge structures consistently.
Step 17. The first order action. The action principle in GU takes a form reminiscent of
both Einstein-Hilbert and Chern-Simons. Now you may look at this and say this looks nothing like Einstein, it looks nothing like
Chern-Simons.
What's remarkable about this action?
First, notice that its first order in its derivatives, like Chern-Simons theory, but
unlike the second order of Einstein-Hilbert action.
Also notice that the field variables are omega, which actually comprise this epsilon and then
this variational pi here, where epsilon is a gauge transformation and pi is a gauge potential.
The first term combines the augmented torsion tensor with the curvature through the Schiav
operator.
This generalizes both the Einstein-Hilbert term and the Yang-Mills term.
The second term is like a mass term for the torsion with coupling constant kappa.
Remember, in vanilla gauge theory, one can't put the gauge potential directly in the action
because it's not gauge covariant.
So in general relativity, you can't put the connection directly in the action
because it's not diffeomorphism invariant.
But here, the augmented torsion gives us a covariant object we can use directly.
Note you also have to recall that every element omega that comes from the
inhomogeneous gauge group actually produces two connections. One is A and
another is B. The difference between these two is called T. Also you should
note that at this point the theory is purely bosonic. The fermions haven't
come about yet. This reminds me of how string theory was initially bosonic prior to being fermionic or having both. Step 18, field equations.
From our action principle, we derive the field equations through a variational principle.
The result is deceptively simple. It's on screen here, so what is going on? The shiab operator
acts on the curvature here, much like Einstein's
contraction acts on the Riemann tensor. The primary difference is that this operation
preserves gauge covariance. The augmented torsion tensor term T omega enters with a
coupling constant kappa. This E term here is essentially something that helps the theory's
consistency as it makes the equation properly reflect the variational principle from which it's derived. I think of it like an error term.
Eric demands this because it's necessary for recovering both Einstein's
equations and Yang-Mills theory in the appropriate limits.
Step 19, fermions and supersymmetry. Where do fermions enter? Recall that
fermions act as quote-unquote square roots of gauge potentials.
For spinner-valued forms, which we see here as a zero-valued spinner form and a one-valued spinner form,
we get a Dirac-like operator. Now this is fascinating because traditional supersymmetry relates bosons and fermions through spacetime translations.
Here we're seeing a different sort of supersymmetry based on the affine space
of connections. The operator here combines aspects of the Dirac operator with our gauge structure.
The upper left block involves the Shiab operator acting on the derivative of a spinner-valued
one-form. This is like the square root, quote-unquote square root, of the Yang-Mills operator. The off
diagonal blocks couple scalar spinors to vector spinors
similar to how supersymmetry transforms fermions into bosons and vice versa.
When one decomposes the spinner representations under spin 7,7, one finds the following formula.
Now this is how the three generations of fermions come about. Notice that upper index of 3 there.
The first two generations come
from a spinner-valued zero form and a spinner-valued one form directly, whereas the third generation
comes about from Rarita-Schwinger fields in the decomposition of zeta.
Step 20. The deformation complex. How do we study small perturbations around solutions?
We require a complex.
Now this complex is what's necessary for understanding the physical content or the field content
of the theory.
The first map here encodes infinitesimal gauge transformations.
It tells us how the fields change under small symmetry transformations.
The second map gives us the linearized field equations.
It tells us how the field propagates. The
cohomology of this complex, which is the kernel module of the images, describes the physical
degrees of freedom. At the first level, we have the first homology, and it gives us the
gauge-inequivalent perturbations. This is analogous to how in electromagnetism, two
gauge potentials differing by a gradient describe the same physics.
Explicitly, these operations take the form on screen here.
And we also have the d-squared equals zero property that makes this a complex, ensuring
the gauge invariance of the linearized theory.
Note that the second term is actually slightly more complicated, but I will cover that later
and or in the PDF notes on my substack
and or with the upcoming podcast with Eric Weinstein himself.
Step 21, the seesaw mechanism.
Now here's where it gets fascinating if it wasn't already.
Our Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger complex leads us to an operator of the form, which is on screen
here that we've talked about before.
Now why is this interesting at all?
It's because this structure mirrors the neutrino-seasaw mechanism.
So the seesaw mechanism explains neutrino masses through the mixing between light and heavy states.
Here, we're mixing between different spinaural sectors.
The zero block in the lower right corner is actually essential because this is what allows
for the hierarchy between different types of fermions and this potentially explains
why we see three generations of matter with such different masses.
Step 22, analyzing the structure group reduction.
I debated whether this section should go earlier in the script or later just because it's representation theory and there's
nothing specific to GU here, however I placed it here due to its length. The
reduction of spin 7 comma 7 to the standard model gauge group follows a
path through intermediate subgroups. So let's go over how does this reduction
work. Let's peel back the layers.
Firstly, you have a spin 7,7 acting on a 128 dimensional space of spinners that we've talked
about ad nauseum and it splits into positive and negative chirality parts.
Now here's where we get something different.
You can reduce this to a maximal compact subgroup, spin 7, cross spin 7.
Why this particular reduction of all the reductions we could make?
Well, experimentalists haven't ever observed non-compact internal symmetries in particle
physics.
Indeed, there are compelling theoretical reasons why physicists don't consider non-compact
groups.
So, for instance, the famous or infamous Coleman-Mendula theorem, which essentially states that the
symmetries of the S-matrix, which describes particle interactions, must be a direct product
of the Poincare group and an internal symmetry group, though there are some assumptions here.
This internal group must be compact for unitary representations, which means you need this
for a consistent quantum theory.
But why must it be compact?
Well it boils down to these two reasons.
Unitarity that we mentioned already, and then positive energy.
Non-compact groups often lead to these theories with negative energy states which are physically
problematic.
We'll discuss the reasons why Eric's model circumvents these objections later.
For now, let's break this down into the standard model's gauge group step by step.
Again, the complete structure group reduction path begins with U64,64.
In low gravity and in Eric's model, this decouples into two vial halves, bringing us to spin
7, 7. This contains a spin 1, 3 cross spin 6, 4 where the first term, the spin 1, 3 represents
space-time or specifically the space-time symmetries.
Then you have to notice that the spin 6, 4 part has spin 6 cross spin 4 as its unique
maximal compact subgroup. And then this gives us SU4 cross SU2 cross SU2 via an isomorphism, which is precisely
the Patissalam model.
This answers a constitutional question.
What is the maximal compact subgroup of the fiber structure group of our observable universe?
The final reduction down to SU3 cross SU2 cross U1, our
standard model, comes about when the metrics carry an additional special
unitary structure. Keep in mind that much of the above is somewhat standard in GUT
circles, so grand unified theory circles. Eric though follows a different path by
using the non-compact group SU3,2 which is a real form of SL5,C.
The standard model gauge group comes about now as the maximal compact subgroup of SU3,2.
The specific real form corresponds to the A4-Dinckin diagram, and this distinction is what allows
Eric to resolve the proton decay controversy and other issues that plagued 1970s grand
unified theory schemes and approaches
or what have you because they used real forms that in Eric's eyes were incorrect.
So how do we get this SU3,2?
Well spin 7,7 has a space-time split given on screen here.
One of those, the 6,4 has SU3,2 as a complex structure inside.
We can then take the maximal compact subgroup of that, which is taking the special part
of U3 cross U2.
And we can further make an isomorphism of that to the standard model.
Keep in mind that each step involves symmetry breaking, which in physics corresponds to
the vacuum state not respecting the full symmetry that used to be there in the Lagrangian.
This breaking can be spontaneous, dynamical, or explicit, put it into the Lagrangian by hand.
Now, in this section there are a plethora of subgroups being taken.
So one question naturally comes up, which is can we just take any subgroup willy-nilly in physics?
And the short answer is no. Each time you take a subgroup, you're saying that the symmetry is broken,
and thus you're introducing new physics.
So for instance, the breaking from SU4 to SU3 cross SU1 in step 4
corresponds to the separation of leptons and quarks.
This is both a boon and a curse.
Since there's new physics, it means you're deviating from what's standard, however it
also means that there are predictions which can be falsified.
Step 23.
Three generations from the complex.
Again we're going to make this painfully clear.
The Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger complex on Y14 gives us this generalization of the Diram
complex, which is what we need to deal with
the spinner-valued forms.
On screen here, you take a one-form with the Shiab operator, technically the Hodge star
of the Shiab operator and then some other differential, which takes you from a one-form
to one dimension less than the manifold, so 13 in this case.
Note, you may be wondering why you haven't seen this complex before and that's because as far as I can tell
It's a novel Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger like complex introduced by Eric. This is brand new in the physics literature
This complex yields three distinct sets of fermions. How? Well the scalar spinner here
New gives the first generation. The zeta vector spinner here splits into two
parts. A gamma traceless part, which gives the second generation, and a gamma trace part,
and that's what gives the third generation. So the first generation again, this space
is the scalar valued spinners on Y14, and when you pull it back to x4 these correspond to the familiar first
generation fermions like the electron, the electron neutrino and the up and the down
quark.
The second and third come from zeta which is a spinner value to one form.
The decomposition of this is where it gets interesting.
The first term here on the left side of the direct sum gives what Eric considers to be
the second generation.
And the last term, which is on the right hand side here of the direct sum, is where the
third generation comes from.
These decompose to give us distinct generations because of how these spaces transform under
the Lorentz group and internal symmetries when pulled back to x4.
This is Eric's explanation for the three generations of matter.
Step 24.
Higgs from Yang-Mills.
So where's the Higgs field at?
Well, it's lurking in the gauge potential variational pi here.
Here's how.
Firstly, we decompose this form as follows.
The second term here on the right hand side
contains the Higgs field. Why? Because symmetric two tensors decompose, remember, into a trace
and a traceless part that we talked about ad nauseum again. Let's unpack this further.
The gauge potential is a one form on the Y14 space, which is valued in the adjoint bundle
of the principal bundle P sub G.
When we decompose the one-forms on this space, we're essentially splitting it into parts
that live on X and parts that live in the vertical direction in the fiber.
The key term is this one.
This is the space of symmetric two tensors on x4, and it contains scalar fields from
the perspective of x4.
Among these scalar fields is our Higgs field, according to Eric.
But what's the justification for even calling it the Higgs field?
Well, it behaves like a Higgs field because of how it transforms under gauge transformations
and diffeomorphisms of X4.
The trace component R in the decomposition transforms as a scalar under diffeomorphisms
just like the Higgs field should.
Moreover, under gauge transformations of the structure group G, this component transforms
in the adjoint representation exactly how one would expect the Higgs to transform in
gauge theories.
Step 25 Trace and Traceless Contributions The decomposition of the symmetric tensors
into trace and traceless parts sounds like some mathematical pedantry, but it's not.
Why?
Consider the symmetric tensor aij, which you can write as follows where you decompose
it into trace and traceless parts. The traceless part gives spin two contributions, and the
trace part gives spin zero contributions. This mirrors exactly what happens with gravitons
and the Higgs.
Now, we've discussed the trace and traceless decompositions before in the context of the Frobenius inner product, but let's go further.
So we have this gravitational sector here where the traceless part is on screen and
it corresponds to the spin-2 field.
In general relativity, this represents gravitational waves or gravitons in quantum theory.
So why is it spin-2?
Because it's a symmetric traceless rank 2 tensor, which transforms under the spin2
representation of the Lorentz group.
The scalar sector here is what engenders the Higgs field, in geometric unity at least.
This decomposition has these as a consequence.
It suggests that the graviton, which is spin2, and the Higgs field, which is spin 0, are
intimately related.
Interestingly, it's called geometric unity for a reason because these two are different
aspects of the same geometric object on Y14.
Step 26 Natural Quartic Potential
Why does the Higgs field need that particular Mexican hat
potential? Is it possible to get it to emerge in something that resembles
something natural? Well, the Yang-Mills action contains terms like the following
where you take the normed squared and you get Quartic terms. This matches the
structure of the Higgs potential. So, is it possible that the emergence of the
Higgs potential comes from the Yang- possible that the emergence of the Higgs potential
comes from the Yang-Mills structure? Let's continue to explore this. In standard Yang-Mills
theory we have this term here and that represents the self-interaction of gauge fields. However,
in GU, remember that A contains components that we identify as the Higgs field. Let's
write this out explicitly. Here, phi represents Higgs-like components.
Now then, we expand the a wedge a squared term to get terms like the following.
Notice this last term here.
This looks precisely like a quartic term in phi.
Is this the origin of the famous Mexican hat potential?
Eric says, of course bro.
You may wonder, where's the negative mass that gives the potential its characteristic
shape?
Now this comes from the coupling between phi and the other components of A. Specifically
from terms like ADX wedge phi, comma ADX wedge phi.
This geometric unity specific derivation is to me phenomenal because it shows that the
Higgs potential, far from being an ad hoc addition to the standard model, emanates inevitably
from the geometry of gauge fields.
Step 27, Yukawa as minimal coupling.
The traditional Yukawa coupling also looks ad hoc, at least to me and to most other
physicists and mathematicians.
But in GU, it comes about inevitably.
This time, it stems from viewing the Yukawa coupling as minimal coupling.
Minimal coupling, by the way, to a mathematician just means a gauge covariant derivative.
This A-mu term, when it contains the Higgs component, gives the Yukawa interaction.
This is the reinterpretation of the Yukawa coupling, and it's a prime example of how
geometric unity unifies seemingly disparate aspects of particle physics. To be specific,
in the Standard Model, the Yukawa coupling is introduced by hand to give fermions mass.
In contrast to geometric unity, this Yukawa coupling comes
about from the geometry. Here's how.
Recall that in GU, the Higgs field, phi, is part of the gauge potential A. This Dirac
operator coupled to A is D slash A here on screen. Expanding this, you get this plus
phi mu, where this new a with a little tilde on top
are the usual gauge fields and this Higgs is the component, and we get this full formula
on screen here.
This last term is precisely the Yukawa coupling.
Step 28.
The correspondence between the Higgs and the Yang-Mills sectors.
First, let's write out the Yang-Mills Dirac action in the language of
geometric unity. Here this alpha is our gauge potential and f sub a is the field
strength as usual and we also have some left and right-handed fermions. The
covariant derivative acts as follows. Now compare this to the Higgs-Ukawa action.
Here this capital Phi is traditionally viewed as a scalar field which is valued in
a representation of the gauge group. But in geometric unity, it comes about as a component
of this variational pi under the decomposition of one-forms when pulled back to x4. This
correspondence is surprising because we have kinetic terms like d sub a alpha squared and
d sub a phi squared and d sub a phi squared
and they match and we also have this quartic term which correspond to one
another we also have this quadratic coupling which parallels this we also
have the fermion couplings and it takes on analogous forms but how can a gauge
field component act like a scalar field? Just remember there either is right now
or is going to be an accompanying PDF to this Geometric Unity iceberg,
so if you'd like more notes, such as expansions on these topics and proofs that I wasn't able to get to in this iceberg,
then subscribe to my sub stack as that's where I'll publish it.
It's curtjamungle.org, or C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. Step 29.
The missing quadratic term.
The Einstein field equations have traditionally been written on screen here with gμν plus
the cosmological constant and we set that all as something proportional to the stress energy
tensor.
However, in GU, one needs to include a quadratic term in the field equations.
So you get a modified equation which takes the form on screen here.
This term here with the T omega comma T omega is the self-interaction of the augmented torsion,
similar to how the Yang-Mills field strength contains A comma A.
And it means that the theory maintains gauge covariance while it preserves Einstein's intuition
about geometric contraction.
Think about it.
In Yang-Mills theory, the field strength is F sub a, which equals dA plus a comma a, and
it needs a quadratic term to be covariant, namely that last part.
Similarly, our augmented torsion needs its quadratic interactions to maintain gauge covariance,
while allowing for some Einstein-like contraction.
Step 30, the emergence of the cosmological constant and CKM matrix.
Lastly, both the cosmological constant and the CKM matrix come about from components of the gauge
potential, variational pi here.
How does that work? The gauge potential decomposes as follows. You see that it splits into these
components based on how they transform under the structure group when pulled back via an
observation which, recall, is iota. So the first part is what gives the standard model
gauge fields. The second is what gives the Higgs field as we've discussed earlier.
The third contributes a constant term into the Einstein equations.
And the fourth determines mixing between generations.
When one pulls this back to x4 via an observation,
the component variational pi sub lambda gives the cosmological constant
term in Einstein's equations, and then this variational pi sub ckm is what gives the mixing
angles between the quark generations.
Seemingly disparate physical phenomenon like dark energy, quark mixing, are all derived
from the geometry of the observers.
Ordinarily we think of these as independent parameters
that we need to add in by hand.
However, in geometric unity, they're
intrinsic parts of the geometric structure.
Just so you know, if you have any questions, which you likely
do, that's all right, I'm going to have a large solo podcast
with Eric just on geometric unity.
It will be unlike any other podcast,
because we'll delve into the particularities of it, especially now that they've been explored in a fair amount of detail. Therefore, feel
free to subscribe to be notified of this upcoming podcast with Eric Weinstein.
Layer 3
Welcome to Layer 3 of the Geometric Unity iceberg. Let's recap what's been done so far. In Layer 1, we gave a brief overview of Geometric Unity as well as the universe as we know it.
In Layer 2, just now, we went over Geometric Unity in 4 minutes, and then I gave the longer
1 hour or so version of it as well.
It's been quite a journey, and now in Layer 3, here's where it all starts to come together.
Again, if you haven't understood much of this so far then that's entirely fine because this
iceberg is designed to be watched and rewatched where you glean something new every single
time not only from geometric unity but perhaps from physics and math as well.
I've worked on this like I would work on a documentary with hundreds of hours put in.
Also note that I will be recapitulating often so that your hand is held, metaphorically so,
unless you're into that.
Now as I mentioned, in layer one we talked about the universe as it's currently known
and we went over symbols and equations that are at the heart of our models of the physical universe.
They were the Ritchie scalar, which is at the heart of the Einstein-Hilbert action,
as well as for other actions there's the Yang-Mills Maxwell one.
There's the Dirac one. There's the Higgs one. There's also the Yukawa coupling.
There's also the Lorentz group or the double cover of it, namely spin 1, 3.
There's the internal gauge group of the standard model,
so SU3 across SU2 across SU1. There's also the family of quantum numbers. There were
also the three generations of matter or families of matter or flavors of matter, I've heard
some people call it. There's also the CKM matrix and the PMNS matrix for quark and neutrino
mixing respectively.
Now there are also these which are alternative writings of what I've just mentioned.
So there's the Einstein field equations, there's the Dirac equation, the Klein-Gordon equation,
the Yang-Mills equation, and the Higgs field equation.
While I've reviewed the different steps of geometric unity as I see it, the question
is well, how do we integrate these concepts that I've just mentioned
within geometric unity?
Exactly.
Now, GU's explanation for these equations and concepts encompasses essentially everything
in modern physics, and the derivation of which is what this layer is about.
Einstein-Hilbert action in GU.
In standard GR, one writes the Einstein-Hilbert action as follows, where the Ritchie tensor
is computed by contracting the Riemann curvature tensor with the inverse metric, and then you
further do a trace.
In geometric unity, however, there's no single metric that's privileged, as you know, and
instead, Eric begins with the curvature of a distinguished connection, A0, which is defined
on the frame bundle over the manifold lifted to the double cover so that spinners can exist.
Now this A0 is obtained via the Zoro construction that we talked about earlier and more precisely,
one starts with the frame bundle of X4, lifts it to its double cover, so F tilde, so that spinners can be defined.
Then, Eric uses the unique Levy-Chevita connection associated with any
metric, which itself again is not fixed on X4, but instead it varies over the metric
bundle, over the observers, and uses that to define A0. Notice I use the term lifted
here, and I do so in the sense of a standard bundle theoretic lift. That is to say, given
a projection from F tilde to F, we can look at a connection which is a zero on the regular f,
and that can be lifted, quote-unquote, to f tilde by composing with the covering map.
Precisely this means what's on screen here, which is a two-to-one covering,
and a zero is a connection on the base f, which is then lifted to an a tilde on f tilde, and it satisfies
this equation here. In other words, for any vector in the tangent bundle of f tilde, you
can define a connection by just pushing that vector forward. This allows for the proper
transformation properties that Eric wants for spinners.
As I'm reviewing this iceberg several weeks later, recall this is many months, many, many months in the making,
I'm realizing that I sometimes use A0 and I sometimes use A aleph.
You may be wondering what is the relationship between these.
These are the same.
My mistake is that in ordinary math notation one would use A0,
but in GU, because Eric is referencing something specific with the aleph,
then the A sub aleph is used, and it refers to the choice made in the Zoro construction.
Now, geometric unity reinterprets this contraction process
as coming from an algebraic operator,
which compresses the full curvature two form on Y,
the metric bundle, the observer's, into a symmetric two tensor.
You'll notice that the domain of PE consists of
a tensor product with two fundamentally
different factors.
So this first component is a differential form, which is intrinsically tied to the manifold
Y itself.
The second factor here has a Lie algebraic character.
In Einstein, it's S O 1, 3, the Lie algebra.
So what's interesting is that this P E operator contracts mathematically distinct structures
using a metric on Y.
So the operator P sub E, it contracts these two using the metric on Y much in the same
spirit as how Einstein in his original approach obtained the Ricci tensor by contracting the
indices of the Riemann tensor like we talked about just a minute ago.
Now where did these two forms come from?
Well, one comes directly from the curvature of the distinguished connection,
namely what's on screen here, while the other is an internal two form from
the contraction mechanism itself induced by the metric on y.
Thus, both copies of the two form are essentially the same curvature data.
However, Eric regards them as having different transformation behaviors
under the gauge group.
This is reminiscent, again, to how Einstein in his approach also had two appearances of two forms in the Riemann tensor treated identically by the metric contraction.
In fact, one way that I think of this algebraic operator is that it encapsulates the same idea as forming inner products via the Frobenius metric. If you take two symmetric matrices and multiply them together using the natural inner product on screen here,
you obtain a contraction that produces a scalar.
Here, however, this algebraic operator
acts extended bilinearily to the tensor product
to yield an element of the symmetric 0,2 tensors,
thus compressing the curvature information into
a form that mimics the Einstein tensor.
What you're doing is you're allowing an algebraic operator, which is defined to act on a curvature
tensor and then it's supposed to return something from the parameter space of field content.
In Yang-Mills, this involves a Lie algebra-valued one-form, while in general relativity, it
involves symmetric two tensors. After this algebraic operator on y,
we then pull back the result along the section,
which was that observation map,
so that the effective Einstein tensor on x4
is given by this formula on screen here.
So you begin again with fA0, which is a two-form.
The contraction operator is defined locally such that we have
this formula on screen here so that we can then pull back
with an observation and we get the formula on screen here.
That's where the R comes from in geometric unity,
re-derived from a gauge covariate contraction on y.
The Yang-Mills Maxwell term.
Next, we will derive the Yang-Mills Maxwell term within geometric unity.
In conventional settings on a fixed spacetime x4,
the Yang-Mills action is written as follows,
where the fA here is the curvature as usual of the connection A on a principal G bundle.
And the inner product denotes the invariant bilinear form,
also known as the killing form, on the Lie algebra G.
Editors note, in a local trivialization,
that is on a patch of the base space where the bundle is trivial,
each connection is represented by a Lie algebra valued one form, A.
Its curvature is the following,
but when you're comparing two different connections,
say A and B, then you often write it as follows.
The connection B here can be viewed as a reference or a base connection.
Now when you set B to equal zero, that is the trivial connection,
you then recover the usual single connection formula.
This will become important later in the Higgs sector portion of this geometric unity iceberg.
Eric considers the principal bundle here with the structure group of U64,64 coming from
that spinner representation of spin 7,7.
The gauge field is defined on Y as a curvature 2 form with the transformation property as
follows.
Now recall that the key step is that this inner product here, which we use
to contract F A, is actually induced from the metric on the larger space Y, which is
in turn built from the vertical Frobenius metric on the symmetric two tensors from the
base manifold. And the horizontal lift via the Zoro construction. Explicitly for local
coordinates on Y, we can define the following slightly hairy formula at least to look at on screen.
This ensures that the contraction is performed in a manner that's compatible with the dynamical nature of y.
Now in our current context, A represents the full gauge field on y and A0 denotes that distinguished background connection which is chosen by the Zorl construction. Therefore, you should actually understand that this connection is supposed to be expressed
as A equals A0 plus alpha, where alpha is like a correction or a fluctuation.
In contrast, this FA0 that appears in some derivations is simply the curvature of the
background connection alone.
Our full curvature, FA, is thus containing extra pieces,
and then the contraction via the Schiab operator is engineered to handle these extra terms.
Moreover, the domain of this operator is the space of Lie algebra value two-forms on y,
and its target space is typically the space of scalar fields or symmetric two-tensors,
for instance, because it compresses the two- into a lower degree object using the metric structure on y.
This guarantees that under the gauge transformations H, for instance,
we have the following, which preserves gauge covariance.
Technically, it's the below, but the above is much more succinct.
Now you may be confused. Look, is P E an example of the Shiab operator,
or vice versa, or nothing?
Now the answer is that the P E in Einstein's theory
is an algebraic contraction that maps two of something.
This is a two form and then some Lie algebra data.
Their domains and target are different.
Also you'll see that this lambda with a bullet
is what represents in Eric's theory
the U64,64
Lie algebra structure, while the Shiab operator maps these two forms, which locally involve
both a two-form part and a Lie algebra data part, to a one-form or another suitable counterpart.
The idea here is that the Shiab operator is a generalization of Einstein's contraction operator, except
Eric constructs it to be compatible with both the base manifold and the fiber gauge structure.
At this point, I should point out that the function space for the Balsonic theory is
the inhomogeneous gauge group.
It has two components.
One looks like the gauge potential and functions like a connection.
The other piece does the symmetry work.
It allows the Shiab to be defined without destroying equivariance in contraction.
Why don't we just do a step-by-step derivation. So step A, let's say, you get that distinguished
connection from the Zoro construction. Step B, you define the gauge potential correction.
Step C, you compute the curvature. Step D, you then apply the Shiab operator.
Now you'll notice that this form is analogous to the standard Yang-Mills action,
except contracted by the Shiab operator here,
replacing the usual inner product contraction on F A.
Now one has to show that in a suitable limit,
after pulling back to X4, that this actually reduces to the familiar expression. For
an explicit demonstration you would take a local section from x4 to y, then you
would note that the induced metric on x4 satisfies that the metric is a pulled
back metric and that the Shiab operator on the curvature when pulled back is
the same as the inner product of the curvature with itself.
That completes our derivation of the Yang-Mills-Maxwell term in GU.
The Dirac Action.
Eric derives the Dirac action in the framework of geometric unity,
solving the previously unsolved problem of defining spinors without a prior metric.
Now, in conventional formulations, the Dirac action is given as follows,
with the Dirac operator also written on screen here. And the gamma matrices, of course, satisfy
that Clifford algebra so equals twice the metric. Even though many people think Clifford algebras
don't rely on a metric, there is an implicit pre-assigned metric, and that's the dilemma.
The very existence of spinors demand a metric. However, one would
like to work in a framework where the metric is allowed to be dynamic, allowed to vary.
Now, Gmetric Unity sidesteps this by constructing the chimeric bundle, which recall is the vertical
component direct summed with the dual of the horizontal. Eric then uses the exponential property of spinors,
which you can recall if you have different vector spaces,
V and W direct summed together,
that their spinner bundle is isomorphic to the tensor of the individual components.
Now in our case, because our components are V and the dual of H,
we have the following.
The prowess of this construction is that it's like liberating.
It's like liberating the definition of fermions
from an a priori choice of a metric.
Instead, the metrics are actually determined
by the point that they are in Y.
This means that the Dirac operator can be defined on Y,
the larger space, rather than X4, the base space.
Concretely speaking, you construct a Dirac operator
acting on the sections of the spinner bundle
by creating something familiar here,
where the nabla is of course the covariant derivative
associated with the distinguished connection A0,
which is from the Zoro construction.
The gammas are the gamma matrices,
or more specifically the corresponding
gamma matrices to the 7,7 signature determined by the vertical Frobenius metric on V and
the induced metric on the horizontal space or the dual of the horizontal space H star.
The I of course runs over the entire indices of 14 dimensions and the alpha represents
additional potential coming from the inhomogeneous gauge group structure.
We're going to talk more about that.
Now one uses these observation maps
to pull back the spinner fields from the larger space y to x4.
And this is done using the standard pullback
of vector bundles on screen here.
You'll notice that this pullback yields a decomposition.
And what happens is that the v part
becomes the internal quantum numbers, whereas the V part becomes the internal quantum numbers,
whereas the H part becomes the spacetime Lorentz group spin 1, 3.
Now to spell it out in detail, if you look at the chimeric bundle, and let's just pick
a single point Y, then we have the following, and we then construct the spinner bundle as
follows again at a single point, and we take the pullback, which here I'll just show on screen every element.
By this construction, this last factor here is equivalent to the conventional spinner bundle on X4,
since H star evaluated at the pullback corresponds via the Zoro construction to the cotangent space on the base manifold,
which we denote by that S and then the slash and spacetime.
Meanwhile, the other factor here with the v, that's where the internal symmetry space
comes from, so that's why I placed a s with a slash through it and said internal as an
indice, whose dimension encodes the family quantum numbers, thus that decomposition that
you see above.
Finally, in GU, the action, or the Dirac action to be specific
is defined as follows, where that field there is a section of the chimeric spinner bundle
and mu is the natural measure on y. What I mean by natural is that the measure actually
comes from the induced metric on y itself, specifically the square root of the absolute
value of the determinant of G with the 14 dimensions dy.
This measure has the required properties, that is, it's locally given by the Lebesgue measure in suitable coordinates
and it transforms appropriately under coordinate changes so that the integrals such as the Dirac action are well defined and gauge invariant.
The Higgs Sector, Derivation of the Higgs kinetic and potential terms.
In geometric unity, the origin of the Higgs sector is the gauge potential written on screen
here with this variational pi, and the origin of the Higgs sector is when we decompose this
according to the splitting of the observers.
Now here, let me clarify what this gauge potential means. In GU, this gauge potential variational pi here is a one-form defined on the larger
observer's whose domain is the tangent space of Y and whose target is the Lie algebra of
the gauge group, specifically lowercase u 64, 64.
You can think of this as a rule that goes from here to here,
that tells you how to differentiate sections of the associated bundle.
There's nothing miraculous about this specific one-form.
It's the canonical gauge potential coming from the inhomogeneous gauge group structure on Y.
In other words, any connection on the principal bundle Y provides an adjoint valued one-form,
but this variational pi is our chosen representative that encodes fluctuations over the distinguished
background connection.
Now the gauge potential will decompose when pulled back to X4 via a local section.
See it decomposing as follows with alpha and phi.
Where the alpha represents
the Lie algebra-valued one-form component corresponding to the Yang-Mills fields, and
the phi is a scalar field, or at least appears as one, coming from additional degrees of
freedom in the vertical direction. When one pulls back a one-form, variational pi from
y, via the section, we then decompose, or
Eric then decomposes the tangent vector into horizontal and vertical components.
The horizontal part gives a one-form on the base manifold, since it involves directions
along the base, and we denote that by alpha.
In contrast, the vertical part is associated with the variations along the fiber.
So that is the variations of the metric at a fixed point,
which when pulled back,
effectively lose their quote-unquote direction along X4, becoming functions.
That is to say, they become zero forms valued in the symmetric two tensors,
which we did note by phi.
Editors note, in a more fine-grained analysis, and this is as Eric points out, you have to
decompose both the one-form part, the horizontal versus the vertical, and the adjoint part,
which is the pure horizontal, pure vertical and mixed, and concretely, the pulled back
one-form is written as a direct sum of six different pieces.
Each of the summands here are different sectors in 4D.
So some give a spin one field like the usual gauge bosons and others give a spin zero field
like the Higgs scalar and it just depends on how it transforms.
This is a refinement about the splitting of what I've just showed of alpha plus phi, but
my initial wave writing it was much more compact.
As you can see, it's quite tortuous otherwise to show every pairing of horizontal versus vertical
in both the one-form and adjoint representation.
Note that the vertical component corresponds to the infinitesimal changes in the metric at a fixed point.
Given that they're symmetric matrices, they contain both a trace and a traceless part.
In our construction, or more specifically in Eric's construction,
we use a contraction, so the trace,
to isolate the scalar degree of freedom,
which is then identified with the Higgs field.
To derive the Higgs Lagrangian,
Eric starts with the Yang-Mills action on y as follows,
where the curvature is here.
When we decompose A as A0 plus variational
pi, with A0 being that distinguished connection induced by the Levy-Chevita connection on
the base manifold, the field strength splits into parts involving our gauge connection.
In particular, the terms that are quadratic in the gauge connection lead upon pullback to terms like
d-phi-squared and phi-wedge-phi-squared.
Now remember, a0 is that classical background connection that encodes the standard geometric data
while the variational pi, the gauge, the full gauge potential, represents the fluctuations.
Now by writing a equals a0 plus variational pi, you separate this unchanging classical
piece from the quantum corrections, which you then pull back variational pi, its vertical
part, which then loses its vectorial character and becomes the scalar field phi, a candidate
for the Higgs field.
To explain this clearly, we begin with a gauge connection that gets decomposed as follows.
Then you insert that into the curvature and that leads to this formula on screen here.
When you then pull back this variational pi via the local observations, its vertical component
yields phi.
The derivative then contains a term that projects onto the derivative of phi, giving a kinetic term here.
Meanwhile, the gauge potential wedged with itself, when restricted to the vertical directions,
and then contracted via the Frobenius inner product, provides a quartic self-interaction term of the form on screen here.
In GU's language, after the appropriate contractions on the metric on X4, these pieces match the
standard Higgs kinetic term and the Mexican hat potential, typically written as follows.
What I find remarkable, personally, is that the gauge potential, when viewed through the
lens of the observer's and decomposed via the pullback, bifurcates into these two sectors.
One is that alpha, which reproduces conventional Yang-Mills as we'll see, and the other is
the phi, which embodies the scalar fluctuations of the metric, which then become the Higgs
field.
In this way, GU unifies the disparate sectors of gauge theory and spontaneous symmetry breaking
within a geometric framework, all following from the metric. Now every
step as follows, let me just repeat that, is you start with the full gauge
potential, you then split it into horizontal and vertical components using
iota to pull it back so that the vertical part which carries the metric
fluctuation degrees of freedom provide a natural candidate for the Higgs field.
The kinetic term is then given by the norm squared here, while the quartic self-interaction
is from the contraction, and both are computed via the Frobenius inner product on the space
of symmetric 0,2 tensors.
Yukawa coupling, the derivation via minimal coupling.
The Yukawa coupling term that gives mass to fermions come out as part of the minimal coupling
of the Dirac operator on the spinner bundle to the gauge potential.
Start with the Dirac action on the observer.
So we have this action here and of course this D slash is as follows which is the Dirac
operator coupled to the full gauge connection A and psi is a section of the chimeric spinner bundle, S of C, or S slash of C actually.
Now, the minimal coupling is another way of saying that the derivative in the Dirac operator
is replaced by a covariant derivative.
Inserting the decomposition of A we saw just a minute ago, we obtain the following.
In standard physics, the term here, phi psi, isn't actually present in the definition of
a derivative because the Higgs field is taken to be a separate independent scalar.
However, Eric's identification is that the Higgs field originates from a particular component
of that variational pi.
Now in practice, one arranges the theory so that the coupling of phi to the fermions takes the form on screen here,
where y is the Yukawa coupling constant.
Let's clarify the connection between this guy and this guy.
Now in GU, the gauge connection again decomposes as follows,
so that the minimal coupling replaces the ordinary derivative as follows.
And next, one decomposes the chimeric spinner into its left and right components.
This is so that the Dirac operator then splits into off-diagonal blocks as follows.
Here, the splitting into the left and the right-handed parts is fomented from the Z2
grading of the chimeric spinner bundle S of C as constructed via that exponential property we talked about
before ad nauseum.
In more detail, once a Spinner Bundle is defined on a space with a metric of indefinite signature,
that is 7,7, the associated Clifford algebra admits a decomposition into even and odd parts.
This decomposition allows one to identify chiral or vial sub-bundles,
usually denoted by S slash L and S slash R.
Some people put a plus and a minus instead.
Thus, psi is a section of the Chimeric spin bundle,
which decomposes into its chiral components.
Here the operator D minus A and D plus A incorporate the corresponding parts of the connection.
So in particular, the Higgs field contribution appears precisely in the following blocks,
where the first part, the A zero parts denote the chiral pieces of the Dirac operator associated with the background
connection a0 and phi after some projection or contraction behaves like a scalar.
Inserting these into the Dirac action yield the following.
Now these two terms here combine after appropriate normalization, absorbing constants into the
Yukawa coupling to yield the Yukawa action as follows.
Thus, geometric unity derives the Yukawa action from the original Dirac action
by expanding the covariant derivative to include the gauge potential's extra component phi,
which is associated with the Higgs field.
Now, this derivation is entirely quote-unquote minimal
once one posits that the gauge potential
contains both the conventional gauge fields and an extra component phi.
The Lorentz group and the standard model gauge group.
The Chimeric bundle is defined as the vertical component plus the dual of the horizontal
component with the overall signature of 7,7, now the relevant real spin group is spin 7,7, however
Eric works with complex Dirac spinners, thus the natural symmetry group is U64,64.
The real spinner representation of spin 7,7 has of real dimension 128.
However, once you complexify and then you split into chiral components,
it decomposes into two 64-dimensional complex of vial representations. In this complex setting,
the indefinite unitary group U64,64 is what preserves the Hermitian form and this is what
acts as the full symmetry group of the spinner bundle, even though the spin 7,7
governs the underlying real Clifford structure at signature 7,7.
All of this is as far as I understand it, and I could be incorrect, so I'm just telling
you what I've understood.
Now to recover space-time versus internal degrees of freedom, one uses the observation
map written on screen here, and the differential of this, or the
push forward of this, maps from the tangent space on the base space to the upper space,
so that the image is isomorphic to a four-dimensional subspace, the dual of H.
While the complement, V, of dimension 10 corresponds to the vertical variations, now this splitting
is what is allowing this reduction of the structure group.
So we start with spin 7, 7.
That then gets reduced to spin 1, 3 cross spin 6, 4.
Now this spin 1, 3 acts as the space-time horizontal part,
and it's isomorphic to the double cover SL2C of the Lorentz group.
The remaining factor 6,4 acts on the vertical 10-dimensional space.
Now, since 10 equals 2 mod 4, this is just a result.
That means that the vertical space admits a complex structure,
and you can reduce 6,4 in at least two ways.
So one approach is to reduce it to a non-compact real form,
SU3,2.
Alternatively, you can reduce spin 6,4
to its maximal compact subgroup.
And then you'll find spin 6 cross spin 4.
Now there are some isomorphic coincidences where spin 6 is SU4 and spin 4 is two copies
of SU2 and then that is precisely the Patissalam group.
If you know anything about grand unified theories, this is quite remarkable and should be surprising.
At least it was to me.
Now to obtain the standard model gauge group,
we then do a further reduction.
And from here, this is standard in GUT folklore.
So provided you choose a correct embedding of the residual U1 factor
as the difference between the two SU2 factors,
or equivalently by requiring certain trace conditions on the symmetric tensors,
then the physical gauge group comes about. So you take U3 cross U2 and demand that the
determinant equals 1, and then you get something that's isomorphic to the standard model gauge
group SU3 cross SU2 cross U1 up to discrete identifications. Note that the left-hand side is the maximal compact subgroup of SU3,2.
Now, this identification is enforced by the requirement that the internal quantum numbers,
which ultimately turn out to be 16-dimensional for a single family,
and we'll see more about that soon,
they match the observed hypercharge and color assignments of elementary particles.
So let me just sum up.
First we start with the full symmetry group, spin 7,7 on the chimeric bundle.
Then by application of the observation map, we split the geometry into a four-dimensional
spacetime with the spin 1,3 symmetry and then a 10 dimensional
vertical part which has a different structure group spin 6,4 which then
can get reduced to SU4 across SU2, SU2 and that further gets reduced to the
standard model. Now GU is broke with many alternate paths like a labyrinthian
roguelike video game as
far as I can see.
So one path that I mentioned is that Patissalam first, which is spin 6,4 reducing to Patissalam,
providing an immediate quark-lepton unification picture.
Now the other path is the one that goes through what I mentioned before, where you take U3
cross U2 and you take the special part, or you enforce speciality,
which means the determinant equals 1, and then you recover up to discrete
factors, the standard model gauge group. Neither of these, as far as I can tell,
is more fundamental. They're just complementary ways to see
how the indefinite group, spin 7,7, breaks into
the spin 1,3 spacetime group
and the standard model gauge group.
The family of quantum numbers.
In conventional SL10 grand unification,
the fundamental spinner representation is 16-dimensional.
Here, however, in GU,
the 16 is reinterpreted as coming from the structure of the metric
bundle.
So, let's recall that the chimeric bundle has that 7,7 signature in Clifford algebra
theory for a space of signature PQ.
I'm being general now.
The real spinner dimension is given by 2 to the P plus Q over 2, and you have to take
the floor function of that.
Now for 7, 7 that works out to 2 to the power of 7 which is 128. This 128 dimensional complex
representation on Dirac spinners naturally splits by chirality into two 64 dimensional
Weyl spinners. By the way you may wonder why is this with a W pronounced
Weyl, it's just German. As I mentioned a couple minutes ago, the properties of the
Clifford algebra are such that there's a Z2 grading into positive and negative chirality
parts, each of that 64 dimension. In technical terms, consider that for Clifford algebra CLPQ, the real spinner representation if it exists has this dimension here.
And it decomposes as follows.
Notice that this time I'm calling it S plus and then S minus.
This operator is unique up to scaling so that the splitting is canonical.
Now this action is defined by the standard representation
induced by the Clifford algebra
multiplication on this space.
In our context, the full Chimeric bundle's spinner representation later will be pulled
back and partially reduced through projection onto the internal degrees of freedom to yield
a 16-dimensional space corresponding to exactly the family of quantum numbers. Let me explain this reduction in more detail.
Here, think of the spin bundle on the vertical part
as encoding the internal degrees of freedom
associated with the variations of the metric,
a kind of quote-unquote gauge content.
And then the spin bundle associated with the dual horizontal
as encoding space-time properties.
When one performs an
observation and one pulls back via this observation back onto your base
manifold, then you get the decomposition on screen as follows. The careful
matching of these components with the quantum numbers like weak hypercharge
and isospin forces the internal part to be 16-dimensional. Now, this matching process exploits the fact that for any given element,
say k of u1, one can assign it a weight.
And the sum of these weights in a chiral multiplet
typically adds up to produce the correct quantization conditions.
Now, for instance, representing all of these components as little quote-unquote bit strings,
so not in the string theory sense but in the computer science sense,
as in conventional SU5 language, you'll find that the total number of independent states is exactly
64. You can actually prove this to yourself by looking at the exterior algebra of C5,
which has dimensions 2 to the power 5, which is 32, and if particles split into particles
and then antiparticles, then you get 16, one for each chirality.
However, GU doesn't just postulate SU5.
Instead, it recovers the same number from its more fundamental chimeric construction.
Explaining the Three Generations of Matter
Some of you may know that in Hodge theory you obtain cohomological information from
harmonic forms, but this requires a metric.
However, there's also the Dirac theory.
Now, in Diram theory, there's the metric independence.
So where is the Diram version of the DRAC operator?
What I mean to say is that Nigel Hitchens showed that the dimension of the space of
harmonic forms changes with respect to variations in the metric. It's only the difference between
these dimensions that's topologically determined by the A-roof genus.
Now, unlike harmonic forms, the individual kernels don't behave consistently.
In Hodge theory, regardless of the metric chosen, the dimension of the kernel of the
Laplacian remains constant and it's topologically determined.
So this then raises the question, can you make Dirac theory resemble Diram theory?
The way that I see it is that in answering this question, Eric derives the three generations of matter. To explain the
three generations, we study the Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger complex on the
full metric bundle Y14, also known as the observer. So I know I keep saying this
over and over. By the way, the way I'm calling it a complex may give you the
false impression that this complex exists in the literature,
but as far as I can tell, this is a novel construction by Eric himself.
Instead of merely considering spinner-valued zero forms, which are just regular spinner fields,
Eric assembles the combined complex as follows.
And then he defines a Dirac operator, or a Dirac-like operator, because it's not exactly Dirac operator or a Dirac-like operator because it's not exactly Dirac. Where here the D with the subscript A with the further subscript omega is a gauge covariant
exterior derivative involving the full connection of A. And then the D with the star is the
adjoint constructed with the Hodge star. And then this little dot circle guy is our Shiab
operator that everyone knows and loves.
It ensures that the quote unquote projection is gauge invariant.
I call it a contraction.
I've heard Eric repeatedly call it a projection.
Also this operator itself is another novel and central contribution of geometric unity.
You can tell that by the presence of the Shiab operator, but I'm just hammering the point
home anyhow.
What does it mean for this operator to quote unquote,
mix different spinner valued forms?
Okay, let's take a look at the block matrix form.
The off diagonal operators couple zero forms and one forms.
Consequently, any solution, like let's just say
there's a psi from the kernel of this operator,
it will take the form of these two guys here with one guy coming from a spinner-valued
zero form and the other guy coming from a spinner-valued one form.
Now a detailed index theoretic analysis which uses the Atiya-Singer index theorem adapted
to this context shows that the solution space, so the kernel of this, splits into three gauge
inequivalent sectors. Note that I do need to be careful as the T.S. Singer
index theorem only applies to Euclidean signature, thus more work needs to be
done here, which I've glossed over. In simple terms, the first generation comes
directly from the zero form spinners, and I'll just rewrite that here with psi 1.
Now the second part is where it's interesting
because the second part is actually a one form.
And this decomposes under the action of
the Clifford algebra into two components.
So you'll see here there's one that's traceless or gamma traceless.
Then there's another gamma trace part.
The gamma traceless piece is gotten to by contracting with the gamma matrices and requiring
that this contraction vanish, yielding the second generation, according to Eric.
And the complement is the gamma trace part, which produces the third generation, also
known as the imposter generation by Eric.
Those are Eric's words.
What you may not know is why he calls it an imposter. So he calls it an imposter in GU because unlike the first
two generations in Eric's framework, the third one has different unification
properties as one goes up toward U64,64. Now I should emphasize that each
of these components is isomorphic to the 16-dimensional
representation predicted by grand unification schemes.
That is, isomorphic at the level of reduction to spin 6 cross spin 4 representations.
But how do we know these pieces are exactly 16-dimensional?
Well, recall that the internal part of the Chimeric-Spinner bundle, here, comes from
the vertical bundle of metrics and by representation theory of the Clifford algebra
for signature 7,7, you get that the full spinner representations dimension is 128 and then
you just divide by 2 to get the 264 dimensional Vial representations.
Now you have to then pull this back and when when you do, the horizontal, so spacetime,
component factors out as the standard 4-dimensional spinner representation of spin 1,3, leaving
out a factor of 4, which you then just divide 64 by to get 16.
Thus, you get the full matter field on spacetime, as follows.
Now, not only does this yield the correct field content for a single generation in conventional SL10,
but you get the other three. You get this splitting of the three generations.
Again, this is as far as my reading of Eric's theory goes.
Now, why does this Rarita-Dirac-Schwinger complex give three dimensions instead of, let's say, two or four?
Well, let's just take a precise
look at the structure of the differential complex and its interaction with the Clifford
algebra.
The zero form part here contributes one block.
The one form part through the action of the gamma matrices splits into a part that vanishes
upon contraction, so the gamma traceless part, and a complementary gamma trace part.
An index theory argument, which I'll leave as a PDF, shows that the net index forces
the total kernel to split into three parts, and then you use spectral theory computation
to confirm that this has 16 dimensions.
You can show step by step that this Dirac-like operator, when acting on the 0 form plus the
1 form part, is Fredholm.
And that its index, which is the difference between the dimensions of its kernel and co-kernel,
is topologically determined by the Arouf genus of the Observer.
Now I should repeat that this Dirac-like operator is novel to GU, so perhaps we should call it the GU fermionic operator.
Now let me just recapitulate this all.
The operator structure on the complex here implies that its kernel splits as follows,
with each of these guys here individually being 16-dimensional.
By the way, to clarify the distinction between operators and complexes in the context of
Dirac, Rowida, Schwinger, etc., and these quote-unquote Dirac-Rowita-Schwinger types, formalisms,
and so on.
Let me just go through this one by one.
First, let's take a look at the Dirac operator on an n-dimensional spin manifold.
Now this is standard.
Nothing here I'm saying is new.
We have a spinner bundle S with sections as follows, and the Dirac operator is an endomorphism
on this space.
And the gammas here are the regular gamma matrices and that's the spin connection.
In even dimensions, S splits into its chirality parts, its chiral parts, and you have this
as follows, where it's not exactly an endomorphism.
You map instead the left to the right and the right to the left.
Now D alone is just an operator, a single first order map actually, and one often embeds it into a Dirac complex.
So you'll see this on screen here.
Complexes just mean that you have many vector spaces
and you tie them together by differential maps
that eventually terminate to zero.
And then there's some other conditions such that you want
subsequent compositions to equal zero.
And this is what allows people to study the cohomological properties and the index.
Now if none of those words meant anything, it doesn't actually matter.
Next is the Rarita-Schwinger operator, R, which deals with spin three-half fields.
And these are usually realized as vector spinors.
Concretely, you can write it as follows, plus some other possible constraints.
These are rarely encountered in standard physics because there isn't any known Rurita-Schwinger fundamental particle.
But this too anyhow can be placed into a complex as follows here where you see this sequence here,
and again you have these consecutive maps that go to zero. Actually, if you pause here,
this should confuse you because the one-form spinner part is not spin three halves. The reason is that the
one-form spinner part, it's that spinner trace sector that's the ordinary spinners and only the
spinner traceless part has the spin three halves and it's that part that gets mapped to the two
forms of the spinner bundle. This two form of the spinner bundle contains a part that looks like pure spinners, so the zero forms valued in spinners.
Then it has a piece that looks like a Rarita Schwinger spin 3 half part.
However, it has another piece that we haven't seen yet and that part looks like pure two
forms valued in spinners.
And these will vanish under any contraction in Eric's framework.
So this becomes analogous to scalar, traceless Ritchie, and vial sectors of the curvature.
See now in geometric unity, you actually merge the spin half and the spin three half fields into a single structure.
And it's that that gives this Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger type operator here.
Where the zeta is what contains the Rarita-Schwinger part,
it's just that it also has a trace piece that has ordinary spinners as well.
And the new is the Dirac part.
This block matrix operator generalizes both Dirac and Rarita-Schwinger simultaneously.
Why? Because it mixes the zero form and the one form spinner fields.
It's neither purely Dirac nor is it purely Rarita.
Hence, I've heard Eric call it a Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger-type system.
The CKM and PMS mixing matrices.
In the standard model, the CKM matrix comes about when you consider flavor mixing of quarks,
also known
as generation mixing, which happens under the weak interaction.
Now in conventional math terms, the CKM matrix is a unitary 3x3 matrix and it comes about
because the weak interaction eigenstates, so that is the states that participate in
the charged weak currents, don't align with the mass eigenstates, that
is, the states with definite mass.
So I actually talked about this here in this podcast with Lawrence Krauss if you're interested.
Link is on screen and in the description.
Let's say u, c, and t are the weak eigenstates and I'm just putting a subscript of L here
because we're dealing with left chirality.
Now these are weak eigenstates of quote unquote up type and now we have the DSB for the down
type quarks.
Then the physical mass eigenstate down quarks are in a linear combination of these via the
CKM matrix.
Mathematically we express it as follows.
Where the primed guys here are the mass eigenstates and the DSB
unprimed are the weak eigenstates. Now the question is whether this has an
interpretation or an explanation or a derivation in geometric unity. Let's
proceed by recalling again that GU constructs this unified field associated
with the gauge interactions from an inhomogeneous gauge group. And it's on
screen here with the variational pi.
This then gets pulled back via the observation,
and after we perform this pullback,
the spinner representation gets decomposed
into those three generations that we talked about
a few minutes ago.
Concretely, we can write it as follows.
Now, what about this indicates mixing?
Well, because as you move in the internal
space determined by the 14-dimensional construction, the observer's construction, the representation
of the unified spinner field isn't fixed in a way that preserves the labels of the individual
generations. So, in other words, that internal bundle that we talked about before, which is the spin
bundle of the vertical part, has extra substructure.
If you change trivializations or perform gauge transformations that act non-trivially on
these three families, then the mass term acquires off-diagonal contributions, generating a non-diagonal
mass matrix MAB.
In standard physics, you usually allow MAB to be non-diagonal mass matrix MAB. In standard physics, you usually allow
MAB to be non-diagonal by fiat, meaning that you just impose it. However, from the
GU standpoint, this non-diagonally is viewed as a consequence of leftover gauge
freedom, the residual transformations that don't block diagonalize the three
different families. So let's say if you write the
following then you have a Yukawa coupling here which is the capital Phi and
the diagonalization of MAB is gotten to by finding two unitary matrices that
separate the up type and the down type quark sectors. The physical misalignment
between these two guys here these these two block diagonalizations,
that is what gives a unitary matrix the CKM matrix.
So geometrically, you can see the gauge freedom in the internal 16 dimensional representation
spaces permitting these off diagonal transformations among say, Psi 1, Psi 2, Psi 3.
The way that I understand it is that suppose you write a gauge transformation as epsilon, like a 3 by 3 array of blocks, let's say epsilon AB.
Each block acts between the spaces corresponding to the different
generations. In the absence of any of these off diagonal blocks, the three
families are unmixed. They do not mix. However, if some of these guys with A
not equal to B, so the
off diagonal parts are non-zero, in which the mass matrix appears block diagonal, can
be altered producing mixing. So we have under a gauge transformation epsilon, the following
here, and similarly for say, Psi2 and Psi3. Because weak interaction eigenstates differ from the mass eigenstates by these transformations, the resulting mixing is
codified in the CKM matrix. You can view the CKM matrix as the relative rotation
required to diagonalize the up and the down type quark mass matrices so that we
have this equation here as the overall residual rotation.
So why would this be unitary?
Well again, the way that I understand this is that because the gauge transformations in geometric unity,
as in typical quantum gauge theories, are unitary at the relevant stage,
the resulting mixing matrix must itself be unitary, preserving probability.
That's the advantage or or the main want, of
unitarity. In effect, you no longer impose by hand that
psi phi psi can be off-diagonal in generation space. It's forced by the leftover gauge
transformations that don't preserve the decomposition here.
The GU derivation of neutrino mixing is essentially a copy and paste of the quark sector derivation
just applied to leptons, particularly the neutrino mass matrix.
The only difference is that quarks and leptons reside in different parts of the 16-dimensional
multiplets.
Now because of this, the unitary matrix that diagonalizes the quark mass matrix is called
the CKM matrix, while the one that diagonalizes the neutrino mass matrix is called the PMNS matrix. The Dirac equation in geometric unity.
Let's begin by recalling the conventional Dirac equation written as
follows, where Psi is a spinner field defined on a four-dimensional spacetime.
Here the gamma matrices satisfy the Clifford relation and that's what ensures
compatibility with this spacetime metric.
See there's always an implicit metric used to define spinors.
Next, any other connection A on this bundle can be expressed in the affine space of connections
as A0 plus an alpha.
Again this alpha is an adjoint-valued one-form representing
fluctuations. In conventional Dirac theory, you usually couple a spinner, psi, to a
connection a with the derivative, so the Dirac operator here. However, in GU, the
Dirac operator must be defined on the chimeric-spinner bundle, and it takes the
form of this calligraphic D where the omega, the
subscript, has two components, an epsilon and the variational pi. And that
represents the overall gauge data where we have a gauge transformation which is
epsilon and a gauge potential which is that variational pi. And precisely we
define or Eric defines this calligraphic D operator as follows.
You can clearly see that this acts on a two-component object.
Which one? Well, let's just write it as follows, zeta and nu.
The top one zeta is a one-form and the bottom one is a zero-form, so just regular spinners.
Here the operator is the shiab, which is designed or engineered to perform that generalization of
a contraction that Einstein used when forming the Einstein tensor.
But at least this time it's gauge covariant.
Now notice that D, the exterior covariant derivative, defined relative to the connection A omega,
itself is built from that distinguished A0 and a fluctuation, so the variational pi.
Now see this decomposition into zeta and nu,
it seems like it's different than the original decomposition
into this tensor, the spinner bundle of H dual.
It actually is consistent because the decomposition
into 0 and 1 forms come about because of the exterior algebra
structure on y.
And it later plays a role in distinguishing
the different generations.
Recall just a couple minutes ago, maybe 10 or 20 minutes ago at most, I talked about
the calligraphic D's kernel decomposition into subspaces of the first and the second
and third generation.
Now when someone says that fermions are quote-unquote square roots of gauge potential, someone like
Eric for instance, this is because the Dirac operator is a linear first-order differential operator
whose square yields the Laplacian up to curvature terms, and it's exactly like taking the square root of the Klein-Gordon
operator which leads to the Dirac operator.
This isn't language that I use personally. In GU, the Dirac operator, so the calligraphic D, plays a dual role.
In GU, the Dirac operator, so the calligraphic D, plays a dual role. It not only governs the dynamics of the matter fields for a given connection, but it also
encodes via the square, the meshing of gravitational and gauge degrees of freedom.
Let's now derive the gauge covariant form of the Dirac operator in GU step by step.
So firstly, we start with the Chimeric spinner, which is the decomposition
of zeta and nu, the one form and the zero form. Perspectively, you can think of them
as a vector-valued spinner versus just a regular spinner. Step two, you introduce that distinguished
connection A0 on the principal bundle, and you can get that however you like with an
observation or what have you. Step three, you define the covariant differential coupled to a connection A omega acting on
differential forms valued in the spinner bundle and the operator satisfies what you see here
which is just you move it up a form.
This obeys the Leibniz rule and when I say you move it up a form I mean if you are a
P form you become a P plus 1 form.
Step 4 is you construct the adjoint with
the Hodgstar operator which is actually defined because you do have a metric now
the Hodgstar requires a metric or at least it requires a volume form which
usually comes from a metric which we do have here on Y. Step five you introduce
the Shiab operator which is a contraction map and it's constructed to
mimic the contraction of the Riemann curvature tensor into the Einstein tensor while
maintaining gauge covariance. And when I say the SIAB I mean Eric's SIAB because
this is something Eric is introducing and it's not a standard term in the
physics or math literature. Neither is the following. Step 6 you assemble the
Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger operator as follows.
Also note that this could be called the GU-Fermionic operator. Step 7, you verify
that the composition of the lower and upper blocks satisfy that the square is
approximately the following, analogous to the standard property that we have with
the regular Dirac operator, Modulo Curvature Corrections. Step eight, you notice that under gauge transformations
of the entire operator, that it transforms covariantly.
In other words, if you take a capital Psi
transformed by an element of the inhomogeneous gauge group,
calligraphic G, then the calligraphic D, capital Psi,
transforms in the same way, preserving the physical content.
Step nine, you conclude that the Dirac equation in GU capital Psi, transforms in the same way, preserving the physical content. Step 9.
You conclude that the Dirac equation in GU may be written as follows, which covers both
the propagation of the fermionic fields and their coupling to the gauge and gravitational
degrees of freedom.
The Klein-Gordon equation in geometric unity.
Many of the ideas I'm about to lay out are inspired by geometric unity.
However, I wasn't able to find specific source notes on it,
so this is my best attempt to piece things together.
It may not align with how Eric sees it.
Let's now turn our attention to the Klein-Gordon equation,
which is the conventional way that we talk about spin zero fields.
In standard quantum field theory,
the Klein-Gordon equation is written as follows,
where the square is that double Laplacian,
also known as the de Lambertian operator,
and phi is the scalar field.
This equation is inherently second order in its derivatives,
and it comes about from the Euler-Lagrange equation,
which is on screen here,
and of course, we're up to a potential term.
So how does this come about in geometric unity? Well first, remember that we decompose the
symmetric 0,2 tensors as follows with a trace component and a traceless one, and the one
dimensional R subspace, so the trace subspace, is going to be the Higgs-like scalar field.
subspace is going to be the Higgs-like scalar field. Now in GU, the gauge potential, A with a subscript omega,
includes both the usual Yang-Mills vector components
and the scalar components coming from the vertical decomposition.
When we form the kinetic term, which is the square of taking
the derivative of phi, it comes about from the Yang-Mills Lagrangian
term on screen here
after decomposing the curvature into the parts that are quote-unquote purely horizontal and
those that are mixed or vertical.
More concretely, begin with the gauge curvature here.
This is standard.
Now note that A decomposes into the following.
Now the first part represents the conventional gauge field,
like I mentioned Yang-Mills, and the second part is going to be something like the Higgs component.
So, then you expand this expression and you obtain cross terms.
Cross terms that are linear with respect to the Higgs, so the variational pi subscript H,
and quadratic in A. You'll get terms like the following.
That's actually quarktic in the variational pi.
Now this quartic term then plays the role
of the Mexican hat potential in the Higgs sector,
typically written as follows.
Keep in mind that in Eric's framework,
the structure and normalization of this potential
are not arbitrary.
They instead come from these contraction rules
when one projects the curvature, so F A, onto the vertical subspace of the Chimeric bundle.
To be precise, we can define an algebraic operator as follows,
which compresses the curvature tensor in a gauge covariant fashion.
When applied to the curvature, the operator, P E in this case,
yields a symmetric two tensor whose trace
reproduces the scalar curvature relevant to gravitational dynamics.
And then there's some deviation and that deviation from the idealized form is what encodes the
self-interaction of the Higgs.
You can vary the action with respectify and it leads to the following equation, which one recognizes as the Klein-Gordon equation, except with a nonlinear potential.
To say this differently, the same contraction mechanism that transforms the full gauge curvature into a form suitable for gravity
also, when applied to the vertical fluctuations, yields the kinetic and the potential via the quartic self-interaction.
And these terms are characteristic of the Klein-Gordon equation for a scalar field.
The Einstein field equation in geometric unity.
Again, much of this is based on my own reading of Eric's notes and discussions about this,
but this is my current understanding, so I'll share it with you.
This is about Einstein's field equations.
So in standard form,
they read as follows,
G plus the lambda with the lowercase g equals the kappa times t.
It's quite familiar to most of you.
Now in geometric unity,
you still want to write some Einstein-like tensor, capital G,
but defined on the 14-dimensional observer's or the metric bundle.
Instead of simply writing the following, but defined on the 14-dimensional observer's, or the metric bundle.
Instead of simply writing the following, Eric introduces a projection operator, which I'm
calling P subscript E, which acts on the spin connection curvature, F of that distinguished
connection.
Concretely, we have the following.
Now, because naive contraction would break gauge covariance, Eric adjusts the vertical
Frobenius metric via trace reversal. This ensures that the curvature's quote-unquote traceful part is
treated so as to preserve the covariance. Now the result is a modified Einstein tensor G satisfying
G plus lambda lowercase g equals kappa t, where the t comes about from the matter fields that are on y except when
pulled back via an observation.
Now something I was confused about is what is the relationship between this p and the
Shiab operator.
Well the Shiab operator is a more general mechanism for contracting curvature in a gauge
covariant manner.
In GU, one usually denotes the Shiab operator that mixes the torsion type terms with the curvature to project out a
Ricci-like combination. Thus, this P operator can be seen as an Einstein-specific restriction
of the broader SIAB framework, focusing on producing the usual Ricci tensor minus half
the Ricci scalar G structure, except while remaining compatible with the inhomogeneous gauge group.
Consequently, the final Einstein equation on y, the larger space,
is not, like I mentioned, a naive contraction.
Instead, it's from the Schiav operator or a specific instance of it
to get this Einstein type decomposition.
This modified scheme is what recovers a gauge covariant version of G,
the Einstein tensor, plus a cosmological term equated to a derived stress energy tensor.
The Yang-Mills equation in geometric unity.
Finally, let's examine the Yang-Mills equation in the context of geometric unity,
beginning with the classical expression of dF equals J, Finally, let's examine the Yang-Mills equation in the context of geometric unity, beginning
with the classical expression of df equals j, where f is the curvature of the gauge connection
A and we're on a principal G bundle over spacetime in the standard formulation.
Now again in standard Yang-Mills theory, we're in four dimensions and the connection A is
a Lie algebra G, so a lowercase g algebra valued one form,
and its curvature is given as we've seen here ad nauseam,
where the wedge product incorporates both the exterior derivative and the Lie algebraic structure.
The gauge covariant derivative acts on sections of the adjoint bundle as follows.
Now under a gauge transformation,
the connection and curvature transform like so,
which guarantees that the df transforms homogeneously.
It makes it already gauge invariant.
In geometric unity, however, Eric sees the Yang-Mills as recast, except on the observers, of course,
where the gauge fields aren't extensions of some external field,
but a component of the Chimeric bundle associated with the space of metrics.
More precisely, the connection on the principal bundle over y is written as follows where
we have, like I mentioned, the distinguished Levi-Chevita connection coming about from
the Zoro construction and the variational pi which is just a one-form that is Lie algebra
valued representing gauge potential fluctuations.
The Yang-Mills curvature in Eric's framework is then given as follows,
which is a Lie algebra value 2 form.
So there's nothing new here,
except that in GU, Eric's trying to solve the problem that the usual contraction of
the curvature tensor that appears in Einstein's equations
don't straightforwardly commute with gauge transformations as we discussed earlier.
Something similar occurs in Yang-Mills theory if
one tries to insert the gauge potential directly into the action.
To remedy this, Eric treats the gauge potential as living in
an affine space which is modeled on the one-forms and defines
its action indirectly via the curvature which is manifestly gauge covariant.
Now, the Yang-Mills action in GU is defined as follows with the inner product defined
by the killing form on the Lie algebra and the volume being the volume form on y, which
is induced by the chimeric metric.
This affine space that I mentioned, the structure guarantees that every term, especially the
curvature, transforms correctly under the inhomogeneous gauge group,
and I'll just write it here again for reminder.
In other words, while the final expression mirrors the familiar Yang-Mills action, its
derivation is fully rooted in GU's framework.
So, Eric ensures gauge covariance and a natural incorporation of the horizontal and vertical
degrees of freedom.
When you try and vary that action with respect to a sub omega,
the Euler-Lagrange equation gives a familiar Yang-Mills equation form,
where the d with the star is the adjoint of the covariant derivative,
and j will represent the current from derived matter fields.
Now there's a subtlety here in that GU with the curvature,
it has to further be processed by the Shiab operator.
For clarity, the Shiab operator is defined as an algebraic contraction map designed to replace what I've called the naive metric contraction
present in Einstein's quote-unquote projection, although I see it as a contraction.
Concretely, let's say we have a two-form Kazai. The Shiap operator combines other forms, phi 1 and phi 2,
which are built from the geometric data of y via the construction as follows,
where the star is the Hodg star operator associated with the induced metric on y,
and the conjugation by epsilon is what ensures gauge covariance.
In effect, this operator is what compresses the two-form curvature into the lower degree
structure, analogous to a symmetric two tensor, in a way that commutes with the residual gauge
transformations. This construction is baroque and carefully done. It's necessary because
Einstein's usual contraction doesn't commute with gauge transformations, leading to inconsistencies when unifying gravity with gauge theory.
It's another reason why Eric calls it the ship in the bottle,
when I was telling him,
hey, isn't this just conjugation,
which is just something viewed from another perspective?
And it's from here that you can see why the ship in the bottle reference is more appropriate,
because of, like I mentioned, it's quite baroque and carefully constructed.
My current understanding is that the effective Yang-Mills equation in GU
takes the form as follows.
I'm writing it like this,
but also know that the following equations are already gauge invariant by construction,
and that's why they don't require the same specialized operator.
There will be an accompanying PDF to this so if you would like more notes such as expansions
on these topics and proofs that I wasn't able to get to in this iceberg then subscribe to
the sub stack as that's where I will publish it.
And that's it.
That's all of physics explained in geometric unity.
You can breathe now.
The rest of this iceberg will just be reprises of the derivations and the concepts that you've already encountered.
So congratulations.
Before we move on to the next and final layer, layer 4, which will be summaries and open questions,
I want to cover some notes on the simplicity of the equations that we've just outlined that underlie theoretical physics. The Dirac equation
for instance. It's the quote-unquote simplest of its kind. Why? Well in part
because it generates k-theory. So what is k-theory? K-theory is about the
differences between vector bundles. So sure we can add vector bundles but then
the question is,
what does it mean for one vector bundle to be subtracted by another?
In order to make vector bundles into a complete abelian group, you require a way of talking
about their quote-unquote formal differences. This is done by growth in DIC, called the
growth in DIC completion of the monoid of isomorphism classes of vector bundles under
direct sum.
It's quite a hairy term, but the point is that you have something called the index,
which generates the k-theory classification of vector bundles through something called
the Atiya-Singer index theorem, which we've talked about, and the Dirac operator is the
simplest operator in k-theory.
Well, now how about the Yang-Mills equation?
Well, it's the simplest geometric equation involving the curvature of a connection.
What about the Einstein field equation?
Well it's simple in the sense that it's derived from the simplest Lagrangian possible.
It's built not even from the curvature tensor but just the scalar curvature.
And also the Klein-Gordon is seen as one of the simplest equations, if not the simplest
of its class.
Paradoxically though, the Klein-Gordon equation, it appears to be the most geometric one,
with its metric hat potential, is actually the least intrinsically geometric of the four equations that I've just mentioned.
Differential geometers often overlook the Higgs sector.
Note, what I mean is that the Mexican hat is easily seen to be visually geometric but not easily seen to be differential geometric. However, to Eric, the Higgs sector
comes about as a vertical component of a connection form. So in GU, when decomposing the gauge
potential, the Higgs field appears naturally and the Yukawa coupling is just minimal coupling.
Now conventional field theories introduce various vector bundles
that are seemingly disconnected structures from the derived spacetime geometry.
In general relativity, symmetric 0,2 tensors decompose,
like we mentioned into the trace and the traceless component,
with the trace component carrying an Erich's formulation, the spin 0.
So Erich's innovation is that he lifts the frame bundle to the double cover
with the GL double cover, also known as the meta-linear group. And this structure may
be new to most of you, even though you're familiar with physics, and it's because mathematicians
tend to avoid the double cover as there's no finite dimensional representation that
can do the job of representing spinners. A fundamental group's obstruction exists because the GL4,R is real.
Now GU overcomes this by quickly passing to the spin subgroup and moving to the observer's
rather than working on the base X4 directly.
This then is topological rather than metric dependent.
Now the connection between these spaces allow the vertical components of the connection
to appear as the Higgs field when pulled back to space-time.
Eric constructs these chimeric versions of spinner representations in indefinite signature
space with the spin 7,7 that we mentioned before.
And then you reduce it through its maximal compact reduction in one of the paths that
I mentioned. And that's how it unifies previously disconnected geometric structures.
Just so you know, if you have any questions, which you likely do, that's alright,
I'm going to have a large solo podcast with Eric just on Geometric Unity.
It will be unlike any other podcast because we'll delve into the particularities of it,
especially now that they've been explored
in a fair amount of detail.
Therefore, feel free to subscribe to be notified of this upcoming podcast with Eric Weinstein.
Layer 4.
Finally, we're in the deepest layer, which is actually the most accessible now that you've
had the previous two or three hours of background.
Man, you don't see this, but this
iceberg took hundreds of hours of work across 10 months on and off. I hope you enjoy it. The feeling
that I get from Geometric Unity, I figured out how to make it into an analogy, is that firstly,
if you take a look at the standard model, it resembles a jigsaw puzzle. It's baroque, the edges aren't clean, there are little protrusions,
it's unclear where these pieces came from or what the source of the jagged edges, the spikiness,
the messiness is. What is clear is that it fits together and works somehow, except there's this
other piece beside it, which is a pristine disc, also known as gravity. And it's unclear how to combine these,
they look like they're different elements. One is like that colorful, baroque object
that I talked about, the jigsaw, and then the other is the gravity, the nice porcelain
disc. What geometric unity looks or feels like to me, is if you start with this disc,
generalize it, you get, say, a sphere, a perfect pearl. Then, if you allow this pearl
to drop on the floor, it will shatter into different pieces, but what's remarkable is
that some of these pieces exactly outline the aforementioned messy jigsaw puzzle. Then
you wonder, what are the odds? Look, I was trying to combine these two different pieces,
the jigsaw puzzle and this disc, and I couldn't make it work. But actually, they're
not just meant to naively be combined. Instead, they all fall out of the same structure. And
you don't need to do any work to get it to do so. You just let it drop on the floor and
examine the pieces. Well, that's the feeling of geometric unity, at least to me.
Now enough about feelings.
Let's get to this layer.
Right now I'd like to give you an explanation at four different levels.
So one is the explain like I'm five level, even though I have my issues with that.
And you can read this sub stack here, where I go into detail about how misleading and
foolish this enterprise of, hey, if you can't explain it to a five-year-old you don't understand it is.
After the ELI 5 you'll get the ELI U so that is explain it like I'm an undergrad
and then after it's explained at the undergrad level I'll explain it at the
graduate level and then I'll explain it at the PhD level. Then we're going to get
to open questions and then there's one more treat.
Hi everyone hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives
into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll
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By joining you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the
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of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know if if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJaimungal
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Explaining Geometric Unity to a Five Year Old
In physics today, we have these two primary theories that don't get along well.
One is about gravity, so general relativity, and one is also about particles, so it's
the standard model.
The universe seems governed by particles, but it also seems to be governed by gravity,
since you're made up of both particles and you stick to the ground, and you orbit the
sun, etc.
However, both of these theories, even though they describe the universe, they don't combine
well together, and the prefix of universe is uni, which means one.
So is there a unification that combines these?
That's what geometric unity attempts.
The key insight from Eric Weinstein is to take a look at this 4D space time and instead
of putting a metric on it, so it's actually not even a space time, it's just a 4D space,
you think of what are all the possible Einstein theories that can be placed on this?
Mathematicians sometimes call this a modulized space, but technically in this
case it's a 14-dimensional manifold, what
Eric calls the Observer's. Now in this
higher dimensional space, forces and even
the three generations of matter that we
observe in the Standard Model, they
aren't added in by hand. Instead they're
engendered from the geometry of this 14-dimensional
space itself. Explain geometric unity like I'm an undergrad in math or physics.
Start with a four-manifold. You then think about how do I make it geometric since currently
it's topological. Now geometric in this case means metrical, so adding a metric. However,
you want to be general.
You want to think about all metrics.
One way of thinking about this is by attaching
all possible metrics at a single point,
and that is technically called the metric bundle.
You then think about if this metric bundle itself
carries a metric that would be meta,
and it turns out it doesn't,
but there's a way that you can
metricize part of it,
namely the vertical parts of the tangent space.
You do so with a certain type of metric
called a Frobenius metric.
The name doesn't matter.
It's actually a somewhat natural metric.
And there are two choices here.
There's a regular Frobenius metric,
and then there's
something called a trace reversed one or just the reversed one. It doesn't matter, they're
both choices. The reversed one is preferred for various reasons. From there, you can then
think about what is the signature because you have a metric now. And now that you have
the signature, you can think about the spin group of this signature, so spin 7, 7.
And now that you have a spin group, you can think about what does this spin group act
on, and it turns out one of the spaces it can act on is a real dimensional space except
of 128 dimensions, so R to the 128.
Now since chiral fermions are complex chiral, and since real vector spaces can always be
complexified, Eric complexifies here.
And that also splits into two copies of C32,32.
Note, I'm not saying anything special, like a Newlander-Nuremberg integrability condition,
or that there's the vanishing of a certain nine-house tensor.
We're not dealing with complex manifolds.
I'm just making the observation
that anytime you have copies of R, you can complexify it.
That ability is there in the same way
that when you have a manifold,
you get with it a tangent space.
You don't have to provide anything special to the manifold.
It just comes with a tangent space.
We also know that a manifold has a cotangent space.
Just like I said, it has a tangent space.
However, there is not an isomorphism between the tangent and the cotangent
without a metric or without additional structure like a symplectic form.
A metric in this case for the base manifold
would be a choice of a section of the metric bundle.
Now you can think about why that is, and you'll be able to convince yourself that it's an equivalent notion.
So let's assume that you make that selection of a section.
Now although we won't fix what type of section, we'll just say that you choose some section.
At that point, you can make an isomorphism between the tangent and the cotangent.
And from there, given that your tangent space of the full metric bundle
will split into vertical and horizontal parts,
you can think of the dual of the horizontal now.
I should say at this point that there's plenty of twists and turns,
like there's so much to remember,
but the point is that you start from something simple
and you look at what structure is contained within.
In many ways, you can think of the claim of geometric unity
as the claim of what we think of as simple actually
has extreme complexity inside it.
And furthermore, a subset of that complexity
matches the standard model almost verbatim.
OK, so now we keep moving around in our little space
of complexity, and we use a result
from differential geometry about spinner bundles, which is that if you have A direct sum B has bundles, and you take the
spinner bundle of that, it's the same as the spinner bundle of A tensor the spinner bundle
of B. You can use this along with the isomorphism provided before to form spinners. And now
you wonder, well, okay, these spinners are built on the metric bundle and we live
in a base space, or at least we supposedly do, so what do these spinners look like from
the perspective of the base space?
Now the question about perspective from the base space is the same as a pullback operation
in this instance.
So that's what we do when we're allowed this pullback operation, because we've already
chosen a section of the bundle. Once this is pulled back, we then
get what matches the standard model spinners. As for the gauge group, this one
you can see because there's a reduction from spin 7, 7 down to spin 1, 3
cross spin 6, 4, and from there, after moving to the maximal compact subgroup, the second factor
goes down to spin 6 cross spin 4, which is Pati Salam's grand unified theory.
In this way, the quantum numbers and the standard model gauge group actually have different
origins and the quantum numbers are fixed, while the gauge group could have been different
or been broken down differently, theoretically, at least in geometric unity.
Now, as for the Higgs and other parts of the standard model,
those can be seen as different connections on the full metric bundle,
but also pulled back.
In some ways, you can think of this as wondering about
how we have these two different theories,
one that describes particles and one that describes gravity.
Gravity is like a simple dove in that it's
beautiful and innocent and the standard model is like this tortuous snake in that the standard
model is effective but it's convoluted.
People have been trying to put these together for decades and what Eric has found is that
if you look at gravity itself and generalize it, the particles come out.
You can visualize the four manifold as a chia pet, which grows fibers naturally, and that
living on the blades of grass are the different particles we're looking for.
Be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents.
Explaining geometric unity to a graduate student.
Firstly, we have to think about what's the goal.
So to explain to a graduate student, I'm going to use Eric's frame of mind.
What's the goal of Eric?
Eric is thinking, how do I resolve the chicken and egg problem of quantum gravity?
That is, how can matter, which is described by spinors,
exist between metric measurements if you require a metric in order to define the spinners.
The answer, according to geometric unity, is that matter lives in the observer's in this 14-dimensional metric bundle.
And spinners can exist there even though you're not making a canonical choice of spacetime metric.
So you start with a 4-manifold, X4, GU then constructs a metric bundle which is on screen and at each point you
have the decomposition in the tangent space as follows with the vertical
space representing the metric variations. Eric then uses a certain construction
where if you choose a section of this metric bundle it then gives you a
connection, the Levi-Chevita connection. Now that metric on y induces a connection itself.
And this is what a choice of a horizontal subspace means, a connection.
Now the Chimeric bundle combines the vertical space, which has the signature 4,6, with the
dual of the horizontal space.
So the signature 1,3, and that gives the total signature of 7,7.
I should note once more that spinners are derived on this chimeric bundle,
which has a metric without requiring a connection.
Now, because this chimeric bundle is isomorphic to both tangent and cotangent
bundles of Y, you get spinner bundles to exist prior to choosing a metric on the
base space X or even a connection on Y.
But once you do select a connection, you become canonically isomorphic.
This is that Zoro construction and it's a constitutional mechanism that powers geometric
unity.
The spinner bundle on this space then decomposes as follows.
There is something else called augmented torsion tensor and that is supposed to resolve, again
we have to think what is Eric thinking is the problem, what is the goal?
Well Eric's thinking I'm looking for a map from the inhomogeneous gauge group to the space of
connections, which is equivalent under this right action and equivalent on the left hand side as
well. This is what becomes dark energy. Eric sees another problem which he calls the gauge
incompatibility problem. What that is is that in Einstein's formulation, the Riemann curvature tensor is viewed as a two-form,
taking values in a two-form.
So essentially you have two copies of a two-form,
one from the connection and then one from the metric structure.
When you contract this tensor to produce the Einstein tensor,
you're treating both copies symmetrically.
However, that makes it not transform properly
under gauge transformations.
This mismatch in the origins of the curvature components is what Weinstein, Eric Weinstein
refers to as the twin origins problem. So this augmented torsion tensor is one way of
solving the problem with gravity that is not gauge covariant, but gauge theory is gauge
covariant. So how do you make gravity gauge covariant? Eric then introduces a Shiab operator which generalizes that contraction I
referenced about Einstein in a gauge covariant manner. The formula is on
screen here and then there's a Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger complex on this
larger space. This generalizes the Diram complex twisted by spinners in dimension 3. Now this complex gives three distinct sets of fermions.
The scalar spinner, which gives the first generation, and then there's a vector spinner,
which splits into two parts.
A gamma trace part, which gives the second generation, and a gamma traceless part, which
gives the third.
Each of these is 16 dimensional, and that matches the standard model's Fermion structure.
In particular, it matches spin 6,4, which is an alternative real form of spin 10 complexified,
and that's closely related to the well-known SO10 real form from grand unification theory.
Hi, Kurt here.
If you're enjoying this conversation, please take a second to like and to share
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Explaining geometric unity at the PhD level.
How about rather than quantizing gravity directly on x4, which gives renormalization problems,
how about we work with fields on y14, that metric bundle.
Then from there, we're going to pull it back to x4 via sections of the metric bundle.
Geometric unity's foundation is in constructing principal bundles over this y14,
so principal bundles on principal bundles,
this time with groups spin 1,3 and spin 7,7 and u64,64 as the structure groups.
And we have a chain of inclusions on screen here.
There's also something called inhomogeneous gauge group, which is on screen here, where the first factor is a genuine gauge transformation.
And the second is actually just gauge potentials.
Now this inhomogeneous gauge group calligraphic G combines the gauge transformations with
the translation quote unquote in the space of connections with a certain product structure
given on screen as follows.
Now let's say for any connection and any element inside this inhomogeneous gauge group, we
also have a right action. That right action is defined as follows.
The augmented torsion tensor, that is what gives a gauge covariant object
that transforms correctly under both gauge and diffeomorphism symmetries,
resolving that gauge incompatibility problem of the Riemann tensor.
The Shiab operator generalizes Einstein's contraction in a gauge covariant manner, and
I'll put the formula on screen here again.
The action principle, because we all want to know what is the action, what's the Lagrangian,
that takes the form of a first order equation reminiscent or it rhymes with Einstein-Hilbert
and even Chern-Simon's theories.
And that's on screen here.
The field equations are derived from this action.
The term involving the torsion T is what ensures the Euler-Lagrange current remains exact
for an action function I, which is important to note because D I yields the Einstein replacement equation.
This exactness property is what allows Eric the geometric formulation of the field equations.
There's also a quadratic term
and that maintains the gauge covariance.
The Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger operator takes the form on screen
and it acts on regular spinners plus spinner-valued spinners.
This operator on this space here comes from Eric
thinking differently about supersymmetry.
There is something pioneered in the late 70s by Salam and Strotti about constructing superfields,
which are just fields defined on super space.
This construction in Eric's mind was erroneously applied to Minkowski's space time,
rather than the space of connections.
To Eric, this explains why there's been so much time and money and effort wasted on finding superpartner particles on spacetime because superpartners exist in
connection space. The decomposition into three pieces occurs prior to the kernel operator,
each 16 dimensional. And now the first generation is the regular spinner-valued function, so
the zero forms. And the second and third come from the decomposition
of the one forms on the spinner field.
And those break up into gamma trace and gamma trace list
parts.
The Higgs field comes from the vertical component
of the gauge potential, so the variational pi.
And when you pull it back to your base space,
you get three parts, one that looks like a gauge potential
downstairs, so that is to say an add-valued one-form, interpretable as such on X4, the base space.
Additionally, you get a spin-zero piece downstairs, which gets interpreted as the Higgs field in Eric's framework,
and you get a remainder piece that has not been identified or not seen
and doesn't figure into our experimental observations in the physical universe so far.
Just remember, there either is right now or is going to be an accompanying PDF to this Geometric Unity iceberg,
so if you'd like more notes, such as expansions on these topics and proofs that I wasn't able to get to in this iceberg,
then subscribe to my sub stack as that's where I'll publish it.
It's curtjamungle.org, or C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org.
Open Questions.
Soon I'm going to do a full recap of the whole 30 steps of geometric unity,
except in a flyby overview, just to hammer the point home further and show you that all of this initially abstruse math is now understandable by you.
It's actually in part to congratulate
you.
At first you heard this foreign language and now you're able to be somewhat conversant
in it.
You can order dinner.
You can go back to your hotel.
You can pick up a date.
I'm taken by the way, but thank you.
Now first, let me talk about what open questions I have.
One of my questions is, what is the phenomenology of the theoretically predicted but currently
unobserved decoupled sectors?
I put them in quotations because I've heard Eric call these dark sectors, but I find that
terminology to be too evocative of dark matter or dark energy, so let's just call them decoupled
sectors. Would gravitational interactions at high energies
enable us to have direct or indirect observations of these? How?
Okay, that's one question. My next is about how does geometric unity account for the matter-antimatter symmetry
asymmetry. Is this observed asymmetry explained by
asymmetry? Is this observed asymmetry explained by disconnected chiral sectors where the antimatter is hidden, so it's a decoupled chiral sector, or is the
asymmetry still an initial condition? And another question I have is given that
Eric has squeezed plenty out of these numerical coincidences, particularly
about spinner structures like SL10 and SU5,
their connections to the Einstein field equations, the metric in four dimensions.
I believe Wilczek actually remarked about this.
So given that, and there's also the coincidences of the observed generations of fermions being precisely 16 fields, etc.
How far do these numerical coincidences go?
What other numerical coincidences are meaningful?
So what about Dirac's large number hypothesis?
What is a red herring versus a smoking gun?
Also, you should know that I'm going to be speaking with Eric
directly on the podcast in the next couple weeks.
So if you have questions, leave them below
and feel free to subscribe for that conversation
as we'll go further in depth into geometric unity.
At this point, I'd like to emphasize that I don't want you free to subscribe for that conversation as we'll go further in depth into geometric unity.
At this point I'd like to emphasize that I don't want you or other people to think that
there's something negative given that they're open questions as every single theory has
open questions.
For instance, here are some of my notes about open questions in string theory, in loop quantum
gravity and in asymptotic safety.
Eric's theory is a tour de force and unless you have an understanding of physics,
it's difficult to fully appreciate how many pieces there are in this one theory,
despite the open questions that I mentioned,
which this theory has been generated by a single person in isolation.
Now believe it or not, what I've shown you for the past three hours or so still leaves
maybe 30 to 40% of GU unexplored.
Just so you know, if you have any questions, which you likely do, that's alright, I'm going
to have a large solo podcast with Eric just on Geometric Unity.
It will be unlike any other podcast because we'll delve into the particularities of it,
especially now that they've been explored in a fair amount of detail.
Therefore, feel free to subscribe to be notified of this upcoming podcast with Eric Weinstein.
Now let me give a recap of the 30 steps of Geometric Unity for the interested viewer
who cares about the steps.
And this is a treat because you'll be surprised how much of this finally makes sense.
Maybe not all of it, but initially maybe 5% made sense.
So number one, you begin with a smooth 4 manifold, say X4.
You then construct its symmetric bundle Y14, where each fiber is the symmetric 2 tensors
on X4 and that happens to be 14 dimensional.
Number two, you construct the frame bundle with the structure group GL4, then you lift
to its double cover to enable finite dimensional spinner representations.
Next number three, you define observation maps which are actually sections or local
sections of this bundle.
Next you construct the tangent bundle of the metric bundle and you also construct its dual so its cotangent bundle. Next you construct the tangent bundle of the metric bundle and you also construct its dual so it's called tangent bundle. Next you split the tangent into
its vertical bundle which encodes the metric variations and the horizontal
part which is just directions along the base space. Next you use a certain
construction which Eric happens to call the Zoro construction. It's a way of
getting a section from the base space to the metric bundle. So you choose a
section, you're choosing a different slice of this whole metric bundle. How do
you get from there to a connection on the metric bundle? That's what this
construction is about. Next you define the chimeric bundle which is the
vertical space direct sum the dual of the horizontal. Next step 8 you
introduce the Frobenius inner product,
and that acts on symmetric matrices to metrize the vertical fibers.
Next, number nine, you decompose the symmetric 0,2 tensors into a trace and traceless part,
and you choose a signature. This is one of the only parts in geometric unity where you make an actual choice that wasn't there implicit in the structure.
In this case you choose 4,6 and that's for the vertical part and you choose 1,3 for the
H part, the horizontal part.
That gives an overall 7,7.
Number 10, you construct spinner bundles.
But you do so on the chimeric bundle and you use that exponential property as follows
on screen.
Next you identify the structure group of spin 7,7 who has a real spinner representation
of 2 to the power of 7, so 128 dimensional, and that splits, because you can divide that
into 2, into 2 chiral 64 dimensional real spaces, but you have to complexify. Now number 12, from the principal bundle
with the structure group of U of the unitary matrices,
64, 64, via the spinner representation here.
Then you define an inhomogeneous gauge group
where the first part are actual bona fide gauge
transformations and the second are just gauge potentials.
You just semi-direct product them together.
Number 14, you specify a right action on the affine space of connections.
And you do so with the following somewhat hairy formula, but not too hairy.
And this formula has group associativity to it.
Number 15, you define the augmented torsion tensor.
This is the gauge-equivariant analog of Einstein's contraction operator,
and this addresses Einstein's quote-unquote gauge problem,
or more accurately, it addresses Weinstein's rendition of Einstein's gauge problem.
Number 16, you introduce the Schiap operator.
That acts on two forms, and it's defined on screen here,
and that's the generalization of Einstein's contraction.
Number 17, you formulate a first order action.
So this is the action of geometric unity as far as I can tell.
Now 18, you vary the action to derive field equations and this is what gives you something
that's analogous to Einstein's field equations and also Yang-Mills.
Number 19, you introduce fermion fields as a spinner-valued form.
So there's firstly a zero form,
which is just a regular spin field,
and then there's a spinner one form here,
and that gives a Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger operator
coupling both sonic and fermionic sectors.
And that's why Eric sometimes refers
to this as supersymmetry.
I'm not a fan of that term
because supersymmetry means something in particular,
but Eric is taking the analogy here of
interchanging fermionic and balsonic degrees of freedom as supersymmetry,
instead of the supersymmetry algebra.
Number 20, construct the deformation complex here.
This has a cohomology which classifies
gauge-inequivalent linearized fluctuations about a solution.
Now number 21, you see that there's a seesaw structure inside this Dirac-Rarita-Schwinger
complex and that's what explains mass hierarchies, mixing between light and heavy spinners.
Number 22, you can do a reduction.
So you go from spin 7,7 to that spin 1,3 and you cross that with spin 6,4.
You can do some further reductions as I've described earlier on and that recovers the
standard model gauge group.
Number 23, you decompose the Dirac-Wareeda-Schwinger complex and again like I said, there's a zero
form and there's a one form. the one form splits into two different parts,
a gamma traceless part and a gamma trace part.
One of those is the second generation and the other one is the third generation, whereas
the zero form is just the first generation.
Number 24.
There's a Higgs field.
Where is this Higgs field?
Well, when you take the variational pi, the one form on the principal bundle, it has a scalar part and that corresponds to the Higgs field upon pullback.
Number 25 is that the symmetric 0,2 tensors themselves, which have a trace and a traceless
component, there's a trace component here which gets identified with the Higgs and the
traceless part becomes identified with a spin-2 graviton-like field.
Number 26, you can derive a quartic potential when you do some expansions and that was covered
earlier from the Yang-Mills term A wedge A squared.
And that actually gets you a Mexican hat potential for the Higgs field.
Number 27, you show that there's a minimal coupling in the Dirac operator, so on screen here,
and that gives you Yukawa interactions when the A, the connection here, includes Higgs components.
Number 28, there's a correspondence between the Higgs and the Yang-Mills sector because you decompose this variational pi,
and that gives you this unified origin of the Higgs and Yang-Mills in this geometric structure of the metric bundle.
This isn't even a step, it's more like a realization.
Number 29, you incorporate a quadratic term into the field equations, and this gives full
gauge covariance analogous to Yang-Mills self-interactions.
And finally, 30, you can decompose that gauge potential like
we talked about under the pullback and its constant component produces an
effective term. This then gets identified with the cosmological constant and
that's all of fundamental physics. Alright, thank you for coming along with
me on this journey through fundamental physics
and its potential unification.
Thank you to Eric Weinstein for providing this theory and giving me plenty to chew on
over the past few months.
Thank you to all the video editors who helped edit this together, even though all of this
probably look like and sound like hieroglyphics to you, or at least look like hieroglyphics
don't sound like anything.
If you're interested in more icebergs like this, you should know I have a string theory
iceberg where I outline the math at the graduate level for string theory.
I also have one where I cover different theories of consciousness.
Soon I'll be doing interpretations of quantum mechanics as well as an iceberg on algebraic
geometry so feel free to subscribe.
Again, thank you to Eric Weinstein.
It's an avant-garde and creative theory.
Kurt here, several months later.
This has been so long in the making, geez, you have no idea.
Anyhow, I wanted to say that I mean what I just said.
I may have said this before in the iceberg,
and if I haven't, I should have because it bears repeating.
I haven't seen a theory like this come from any single individual ever. Not one that's this fleshed out or
has this amount of unexampled connections within itself as well as to
what's known as the theoretical physics backbone that we talked about earlier.
And by the way, this is what I do for a living. I interview people on what theory
they have of reality, whether it's of consciousness,
or it's physics based, or logic based, or what have you. So again, thank you to Eric,
and thank you to you for watching this. I hope you enjoyed it.
I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they
recommend theories of everything to their students, and that's fantastic. If you're
a professor or a lecturer, and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free
to contact me.
New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and
ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written
there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything, it's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some
point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people
in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts?
While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present
deliberations on these topics.
Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.
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