Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Nobel Laureate Who (Also) Says Quantum Theory Is "Totally Wrong"

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quantum mechanics predictions are totally wrong. Picture reality as a cosmic pinball machine. Every ball follows a deterministic path, no exceptions. To Nobel laureate, Professor Gerard Toft, the fact that we can't track all these balls is why we invented quantum mechanics, effectively to handle our ignorance. This is quite a startling proposal,

Starting point is 00:00:25 especially from the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work on the Electra Week in 2019, interaction. To the professor, there are no real numbers. There's no superposition, not even wave functions, fundamentally. Instead, there are these discrete cellular automata, updating in quantized steps. Today, we discuss why he thinks standard physics has it backward. Particles don't exist in multiple states. Cats aren't simultaneously dead and alive. The universe never plays dice. I'm Kurt Jaimungle, and in this conversation, we tackle superdeterminism. Why seemingly absurd theories get more support than, ostensibly realistic ones, and how recognizing space-time quantum

Starting point is 00:01:06 clones solves the problems of black holes. Professor, when we were speaking off-air, you mentioned to me that the crazier the proposal, the easier it is to get accepted. What did you mean by that? Well, it happens very often, rather surprisingly, if you come with a very simple theory or idea, then people have all sorts of complaints and objections. The only company is something which clearly cannot be corrected direly and sounds like a really long-distance approach. Then that gets special support in general. For example, I first encountered that

Starting point is 00:01:50 when I was in heavy discussions with my advisor Veldman about renormalization. And we agreed there's still one very important problem to be handled, which was, can it all be done consistently? The equations that you have not contradicting each other. And I searched very hard and I had the idea of adding a fifth dimension to space and time. And it worked, but then it only worked for one-loop diagrams and then it went wrong. So eventually I said, well, maybe if I take 3.9,000,

Starting point is 00:02:27 dimensions or 4.01, then everything is formally finite and calculable, and there are no contradictions. So all I have to do is take the limit and the number of space time dimensions goes to four. But then I thought how I'm going to explain that to Feldman, because he's very critical. So now I said, well, I have this idea about changing the number of dimensions of space time, not by an integer, but by a small fractional number. And much of my surprise, you got immediately an enthusiastic right away. And that was for other colleagues as well.

Starting point is 00:03:03 They immediately accept such a wild idea, which I thought was all rather crazy. Whereas in contrast, if you talk about quantum mechanics, and you suggest maybe quantum mechanics is just a deterministic theory in disguise, in these guys, because there's so much going on in this universe,

Starting point is 00:03:21 you can't really check whether it's deterministic or not. But I thought this was a very natural sort of zero, attitude you would have towards quantum mechanics. But again, then people come with lots of objections. But when you propose someone that there are two or many universes at the same time, some more real than the other, but they're all real, different realities, I find that total nonsense. I can't understand how that works.

Starting point is 00:03:47 But very rarely you hear objections against that. You hear only alternatives, which are equally crazy. But the idea that the world is just completely deterministic, simple-minded, just like grains of sand, if you play around in a bucket of sand, then that would be the easiest thing to assume. But then people come with all sorts of objections. So why do you think that is? Do you think it's because our validation criteria is off? Or do you think it's because the more fantastic idea, the more it appeals to people? or is it the more fantastic idea

Starting point is 00:04:23 the more difficult it is to find an error with it? Yes, I think it is that with more fantastic ideas you can make noise, you can shout that we now have a fantastically crazy idea and it works or maybe it works to some point but it seems to work. And then you are a hero, whereas if you propose something very basic,

Starting point is 00:04:45 something very mundane, something very ordinary, then they say, yeah, yeah, we had that and we don't believe that. It's something more complicated. Uh-huh. So this is no attitude you find among people. Now, you've also expressed some frustration with quantum physicists in terms of blind spots.

Starting point is 00:05:04 You just alluded to it. So regarding interpretations of quantum mechanics, let's flesh that out some more, please. Yes. Well, the important point is that quantum mechanics only gave. statistical answers to any questions as to what will happen when you make such an experiment. And you directly get the statistical answer, which is part of the world of possible answers that some seems reasonable. And so quantum mechanics you did correct probabilistic predictions.

Starting point is 00:05:41 But the real world isn't probabilistic. It's only probabilistic if you don't have all information to be sure that this book is there and that book is there. No, if you just open a cupboard, you find all books fall on the floor and you can't predict how they will fall on the floor except

Starting point is 00:06:01 like to make a kind of predictions just as in quantum mechanics where you say, no, no, we don't know where this book is going, you don't know where that book is going, but we just know the probability that something happens. And this you can calculate and this you can check against experiment. Do we get

Starting point is 00:06:17 wide deviations from the probabilities predicted by quantum mechanics. So in that sense, the theory is right, but the theory gives completely wrong predictions as to say, well, where now exactly will everything come? Quantum mechanics can only give statistical predictions, and I think those predictions are totally wrong, but they are closer to the truth than anything else you can predict. So, and they're closer to the truth because in many cases you cannot make any better predictions.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Think of an insurance company. The insurance company is not interested in exactly where and when you made your accident. The insurance company will just want to know how many cars, how many people are driving these cars, how many have alcohol in their blood, how many have done this, how many have done that. So they want a statistical answer.

Starting point is 00:07:12 They don't want the explicit answers. So I think in the world of science also, quantum mechanics will give you the statistical answers and not the true answers. But to me that means that the theory is incorrect. We should basically have a theory which if you start with a situation where every single particle, every single atom, every single photon is exactly localized the way where it should be, or having the probabilities that it should, having the properties that it should have without any doubt, any uncertainty, then the theory should predict explicitly where every single particle is going. Now, we don't have such a theory, and quantum mechanics is not such a theory, but eventually

Starting point is 00:07:59 what I want is have a theory that gives this kind of predictions. If you knew all the initial data with infinite accuracy, with mathematical precision, then the theory gives you an explicit result that every single particle only collide in one particular way and all the others are simply not happening. So that's the theory I want for quantum mechanics even though I know very well

Starting point is 00:08:23 that nobody will ever be able to use that property in practice. In practice we don't know the initial states so accurately that we don't know how particles will collide so any answer will be as good as any other. But then quantum mechanics is a perfect ingenious theory that gives you exactly the right probabilities,

Starting point is 00:08:43 which is what we want in practice anyway. So for practical use, it's not so meaningful to search for a theory that predicts everything with the internet prediction. But for me, searching for what such a theory look like will give me some idea about the ultimate truth, a theory that like quantum mechanics

Starting point is 00:09:06 gives you very precise probabilities, but if you knew the initial state, it would be infinitely precise. Such a theory have my strong preference, even if we don't even know how to start building such a theory. And that's in the peculiar situation

Starting point is 00:09:22 right now that even if you wanted a deterministic theory, it is very hard to design it just from scratch. We don't know enough. So, when you say quantum theory is, quote, unquote, totally wrong. I'm sure, firstly, some people may be thinking hidden variables. Is that what

Starting point is 00:09:42 this professor is arguing for? Hidden variables have been disproved. We can get to your cellular automata approach shortly. But why would you say that it's totally wrong? Because the counterargument is that it's considerably precise in its predictions, and it's been verified to more digits than anything else in any other field of our knowledge. what is wrong is that the theory doesn't ever talk about generally existing situations which I have a probability one of happening and probability zero of not happening or any other situation is probability zero. Think of two particles in a beam like at CERN. The two particles will hit each other and suppose we knew exactly how these two particles, how many of them will hit

Starting point is 00:10:28 and how they will hit and so on. Then still, quantum mechanics gives you a probabilistic outcome even though the initial state the initial state were precisely defined then still the theory gives you a statistical answer and that according to my intuition cannot be right

Starting point is 00:10:48 okay so the probability distribution is not such that it's zero everywhere except at one place and gives 100 yes yes I see and by the way you said, you wanted to ask a question about hidden variables, but what I'm talking about really is the hidden variable theory, or rather the philosophy of the hidden variable theory,

Starting point is 00:11:12 is exactly followed. Except when people try to make computations with hidden variables, they don't follow its own philosophy, and that's why they get contradictions which are worse than the contradictions in quantum mechanics. So they say, no, that cannot be right. Tell me about this. What's the distinction between hidden variables,

Starting point is 00:11:30 as people conceptualize it and then the so-called philosophy of hidden variables. What is the philosophy of hidden variables? Well, in principle, it degrees. That's why I call it a philosophy of the hidden variables. The hidden variable itself obeys this philosophical intuition that it should be giving infinitely perfect, infinitely precise predictions.

Starting point is 00:11:53 The probabilistic outcome or distributions that we measure in our experiments comes about because we don't know well enough how to do any calculations that will give you a more precise result. It's the same like when you in the weather forecast, you predict there will be clouds there,

Starting point is 00:12:12 there will be rain there, but we cannot possibly predict where every single rain top will be falling, how exactly the clouds will be shaped and so on. Of course we cannot do that, that's much to hard. But it doesn't mean that the meteorologist who makes this prediction

Starting point is 00:12:28 doesn't try to believe as accurate as he can what the shapes of the clouds will be and so on. But as you know, of course, they're not far from getting very precise theories about that. So there are broadly speaking two interpretations of the wave function. One is called sciontic, and then another is called sci epistemic. And for people who have vaguely heard these terms,

Starting point is 00:12:58 Ontic refers to something existing in reality, and then epistemic has to do with our knowledge of it. So, sciontic, people who believe the wave function is real, tend to be Everettians, for instance. And then sci epistemics, I assume you would qualify as such. And then the counter-argument would be, well, what about the PBR theorem? So there are loopholes. Can you speak about these loopholes, please? And also, I would love to know your view on many worlds. It's basically the same that Many Worlds is as untrue as the other theories of quantum mechanics

Starting point is 00:13:38 where you have several realities, but the Many Worlds theory is the extreme logical conclusion from this hidden variable theory, but from the Many Worlds theory, that every single outcome is possible with a certain quantum probability. I'm saying, well, you would expect even a deterministic theory to give such predictions because you are not able to do every computation as accurately as you want. So even if you have a deterministic theory, then still you would only be able to make statistical predictions. So you have to take the complete world of all possible states. That's your in-state, your initial state.

Starting point is 00:14:21 The final state will also be a distribution of certain, of infinitely many, possibilities and your theory is better if these probability distributions look more similar to the reality so yeah we that's the kind of theory which one could call hidden variable theories and I agree that that's basically the main idea that there are variables that we cannot identify exactly today but which happen only with certainty never with a distribution of superposition of possibilities, but only

Starting point is 00:15:03 single sharp states. Roger Penrose is also known for saying quantum theory is wrong. Note, I also spoke to Roger Penrose about this very topic. Link in the description. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong. It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. I say this

Starting point is 00:15:21 very blatantly because it's a blatant topic. I mean, Einstein and Schroding are much more polite. They said, It was incomplete. Incomplete means wrong. But you're telling it like it is. We've got to change it, so it's wrong. And I'm curious, given that you're both Nobel Prize winners

Starting point is 00:15:36 who believe quantum theory is incomplete, which is how I would characterize it, just so you know. Have you ever had a conversation with Penrose about this? Yes, but very often I disagree with him, and there are basic issues. But his formulation is a bit vague as what exactly means, but he has many theories that I don't believe in. But my only belief is that the ultimate theory of nature,

Starting point is 00:16:04 whatever it looks like has only variables like hidden variables, and everything that happens with certainty. This happens, that does not happen, but there's nothing in between. There's never a supposition between a dead cat and a live cat, for instance. That's the famous example where you bring that quantum mechanics to the extreme. No, I would think that. We don't know what the theory will predict whether the cat will die, whether the cat will survive. We don't know that.

Starting point is 00:16:30 That's very, very hard. But in principle, the theory should predict whether the cat will be alive or not. And the cat will not be in a superposition. That's only because our understanding today of the true loss of nature is too uncertain and too imprecise, to be able to do any better than saying that the cat will have a certain probability of surviving this experiment. and we can calculate even that probability, but we don't know how to do it better than that. So I know we spoke briefly off air,

Starting point is 00:17:04 and I want to reference something. This is a quotation from you, I believe. I hope I wrote this down correctly. My claim is that if we ever hit the true equations, there will be no superposition any longer. Yes. So this is what you're referring to. That's what I'm saying, yes.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Okay, please expand on that. So why would it be that if you found the true equations, there would be no superposition? Well, I still remember your first question was about why do people not believe the easy things? And why do they have such more difficulty, less difficulty with the, let's say it again. In your first question, you, I talked about how the more outlandish and zany the theory the more it's accepted, at least it's cognitively easy for a physicist to not find objections with it. The thing that people now always put in doubt

Starting point is 00:18:02 is, to me, the far most obvious situation. I think that grains of sand are particles just like planets and stars, rocks, or atoms or molecules. They're all particles, and they all are very equations. And, okay, the equations of the molecules and the atoms are a bit different. basically should be the same, that is to say there are variables

Starting point is 00:18:25 which determine what it will do next. But an atom or molecule is much more complicated than what people think. It's not just that a molecule consists of so many atoms and then they're in a wave function and that's it. No, they are not in a wave function. There are things there which I don't know even whether there are atoms or molecules, but something else.

Starting point is 00:18:45 And they are only obey equations that need to certain outcomes. all the initial states with infinite certainty. That holds for rocks, for sand, for atoms and molecules, and elementary particles, and photons and neutrinos, you'll name it all. They're all only obeying deterministic laws. I would find this the most obvious suspicion, because I can't prove it. I can only say, this is my favorite view of what the scientific world ultimately will

Starting point is 00:19:17 be facing a theory of that nature. but I find very difficult to imagine anything else whereas all these people who come with these fantastic quantum stories they think they can get away with much more complicated ideas without anybody questioning just a moment don't go anywhere hey I see you inching away don't be like the economy instead read the economist I thought all the economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to

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Starting point is 00:22:13 So maybe that's related to your newest approach. You use the word epistemic. You use the word epistemic, which is that it describes things, and the wave function is epistemic. That's exactly what it is, I believe. It's because we haven't got anything better than that wave function. So let's assume that wave function is a way to describe the probability distributions that will come out of your experiment.

Starting point is 00:22:36 The real reason why you get probability distributions will be that we don't understand and we don't have the initial state is in this position. Which is what you would need to get a precise non-pabilistic answer but just a certain answer as to what is happening.

Starting point is 00:22:55 But... Okay, so why don't we get to your cellular automaton approach? And why don't you walk us through how it was initially and then what it's evolved to now? It didn't change very much. The original idea was that

Starting point is 00:23:10 the, well, the world, although it looks like a probabilistic world, where notions as temperature and entropy are very well defined, better defined than many of the deterministic notions of particles and molecules. So the cellular automaton is a collection of cellular automata, which are all influencing each other. But basically, their data which only influence each other, when they are nearest neighbors. So the position of things

Starting point is 00:23:42 is very important because it can only affect its neighbors. It cannot affect directly things that you further away than a few fundamental distance, exceptions in fundamental distances. So it's typically what you get in a pinball machine, although the pinball machine

Starting point is 00:23:59 is designed to generate random numbers, but if you could predict it into the position, precision, what is happening to these balls, in the machine, then they all go in a predictable orbit, they go down the machine. And the rest depends on details that are too difficult for us now to calculate. That's what the machine is made for. But in principle, everything should be predictable.

Starting point is 00:24:23 And in the cellular automaton, you built more basically on that idea. But now you say, let's take the rules about how one object affects its neighbor. let's suppose those rules are completely fixed by very simple prescriptions. For instance, there's a patro here and a patro here. Whenever they cut this one start to vibrate, the other ones start to vibrate, and the way they react upon each other's behavior is completely fixed by some simple law. So I could show on screen right now just for the viewers John Conway's Game of Life as an example. That's a nice example, except it's not reversible in time.

Starting point is 00:25:06 Whereas the real world, as you see it, seems to be, and I would emphasize, seems to be reversible in time. That is to say, if you have something happening, the same event happening backwards in time. If you make a movie of me talking, but you show a movie backwards in time, then the same equations are obeyed. Well, actually, the situation is a little bit more difficult. You have to replace particles by antiparticles and some, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, There are particles as well. But that's the detail. The important point of the ultrometan,

Starting point is 00:25:43 and that is probably important if you want to impose quantum mechanics, if you want to say that this thing actually can be turned into quantum mechanics. And probably what you want is have a time reversible set of laws. The set of laws can be extremely simple because you only need to say what happens when the particle sees another one at his neighbor. and if you know where all the particles are situated you can have waves that go through this situation you can make it look as complicated as the real world and that is very important I think the real world to me does not look any more complicated than this except that for the real world I don't know the

Starting point is 00:26:24 equations and I'm not going to find out anymore in my lifetime so we don't know the equations but maybe one day physicists will guess the equations and from that guess they'll discover that not only the equations sort of seem to agree more or less with what we know experimentally but it can also predict what kind of particles this will produce because particles are phenomena that you can also describe in these automata particles are quanta of energy that's the most precise definition not an infinite precise but very precise definition of particle is that it is a quantum of energy

Starting point is 00:27:06 and energy is something you can define classically even though it's not quite deterministic and that's an important complication in the whole theory but basically we have time we have energy we have momentum with other properties of particles and they all interact in a completely fixed prescribed way if these fixed laws only act on integers and on fixed time steps then everything can be put in a computer because a computer also works with infinite with only discrete numbers and discrete time steps

Starting point is 00:27:49 but then the computer can be extremely accurate as well sometimes it may make a mistake because you have fluctuations but not very often so most computers are very precisely as a result what the outcome of an experiment will be. There's a good reason to suspect that such a theory could also predict that actually before we understand how things happen in practice, what we will see is that there are things that look very much like the particles that particle physicists have been talking about for years now,

Starting point is 00:28:22 so-called standard model of elementary particles. The standard model is a quantum model, but as a quantum model it gives you very precise statistical predictions which can be measured and checked with the experiment and you find it a standard model today is the best possible way

Starting point is 00:28:40 we can describe these particles so the next step would be if you have a discrete discretized model as like the cellular automata that they should reproduce the same world of standard model particles and now the fact that you can't

Starting point is 00:28:56 accept any integer any non-intigent numbers in the center of automaton also means that when these standard models particles interact, they collide and they go away in different directions, then this whole phenomenon of the collision will be described by integer numbers only. And that's very interesting from the point of view of standard model physicists, because that's how the standard model does not have. It also has numbers of pie floating on numbers which are not very precisely known, but certainly they can fill a complete continuum

Starting point is 00:29:29 of constants of nature in the standard model. This continuum should be broken up, and that's what my theory would predict, that the likely models, the models that work in practice, will have only integers even in their coupling strength, and that is not, as we understand the particles now, but something one might expect in the distant future,

Starting point is 00:29:54 to be discovered that, yes, you can also compute how all the particles interact with integers. So is discreetness important? Is it extremely important? So the reason is that you could have the universe following rules that go stepwise. Well, I guess when I say stepwise, that is discrete. But what I was going to say is there could still be some dependence on real numbers, which are continuous. So, for instance, one of the updating rules could rely on pi, all of the digits of pie.

Starting point is 00:30:30 So is the discreteness through and through important? I think yes, because if you don't have discreteness but a continuum of possibilities, the continuous numbers are the real numbers, the digital numbers, but the real numbers, every single real number is only specified if you have specified in infinite number decimal places. That's very hard to realize

Starting point is 00:30:52 in a finite model like the cellular thermatron. So I don't believe in the existence of real numbers in physics. Well, that's very strange because everything in physics today seems to be controlled by real numbers. So why am I saying that? I'm saying that only that this may hold only in this idealized model with theory, which hasn't been discovered at all now, which you don't know of any of the details, how they work.

Starting point is 00:31:17 But if we find the details, my prediction would be those details will only depend on integers, not even rationales, because a rational number can also have infinitely many values. No, only integers have finite values, and the integers shouldn't be too big also. They should be between one and two, perhaps, or between one and 157, or something like that. But finite numbers, and only then can your model be deterministic without ever needing to make statistical approximation. Whereas with real numbers, you never know for sure whether the real numbers will hit each other or not when two particles collide with different impact parameter, which is controlled by a real number.

Starting point is 00:32:01 Those real numbers are different than at one situation, the particles will collide. In the other cases, they will not collide. But it will be very hard to make a theory where all this will come out with certainty only. And that's the basic demand I have for the future theory is it will only be based on certainty. Well, we don't understand anything today, so today's science is without certainties. Fine. So we have work to do as a scientist. We have to work to do to find this theory which only contains certainties, and therefore

Starting point is 00:32:33 it may only contain integer numbers, even the time steps. But time is one possible exception that things might go like when you have embroidery, if you have a needle and a thread, and a needle goes... two and four, then the needle will follow a continuous orbit, and then depending on that continuous orbit, the knots that you create are discrete tiles and only indicated with integer numbers. In that way, time is formally real, but this real number won't play a role in the predictions that you make. That's only the position of the particle as a function of time, but in the real world, time makes so many steps that we are not even

Starting point is 00:33:20 aware of the time be possibly discreet or continuous So there are two key people that come to mind that have worked on super determinism a word which I don't think we've said yet but we're going to get to

Starting point is 00:33:35 and you're a large proponent of super determinism the other two are Tim Palmer and Sabine Hosenfelder Tim Palmer has rational quantum mechanics so I don't know if you've looked into that But if you have, I would like to know what your thoughts are.

Starting point is 00:33:55 Well, I think it's a typical example of someone going very far in my direction, yes, but not as far as I am. Because I'm saying that the numbers should never be rational, because then you have still an infinite number of possibilities. There should be numbers determined by rules. Of course, a rational number is a numerator divided by denominator. So yes, those are integers. So if the rational numbers he talks about are really numerators and denominators, but themselves are only carrying integer numbers, even integer numbers which are restricted, then be would coincide.

Starting point is 00:34:32 But so, Paul is then not precisely as ready as I am to decide to accept only the completely integer world. Now with this discreetness, do you have to have to have, a preferred foliation in order to describe this discreteness in your model, or is the discreetness something else that isn't exactly space-time discreetness? That's the hard part of the question.

Starting point is 00:35:02 We have Einstein's equations. We have curvature of space and time. So that will usually any theory that uses that will have to have such sheets. And how to make those

Starting point is 00:35:18 discrete eyes is very difficult. But there is a scene such as loop quantum gravity that tries to do something of that sort. So they have my sympathy, but again, they're not going far enough to my taste in determinism. Stephen Wolfram's another person

Starting point is 00:35:35 who doesn't go into superdeterminism, but also has cellular automata. So you're a unique blend. I want to get to how lonely it feels at another question, but it would be great to talk about the early 2000 Stephen, because now the Stephen, is hypergraphed, Stephen,

Starting point is 00:35:51 but earlier it was cellular automata, Stephen. What is the difference between your approach and his? And did his influence yours, or did yours influence his? Was it independent? Maybe not quite independent. I think he was much earlier in looking at cellular automata than I am. So if there's any, what is it? Causal priority?

Starting point is 00:36:16 priority than it belongs to him because he worked very much earlier with cellular automata I remember the game of life as being an example but that has absorption and that's not really not really as deterministic as I wanted but yes I think that Palmer's ideas and mine are very close, but just not quite, it's exactly the same. So, again, when we are speaking off air, we talked about how many people send you their theory of everything or just their theories on physics, and most of it, it's not terribly useful to you.

Starting point is 00:37:06 There was a diamond in the rough, though, from Edward Fredkin, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. He is one of the exceptions to the, The rule, and the rule is basically that these people who come with their own crazy idea. Their ideas are too crazy, and they show a lack of understanding of what already scientists know about the world. And what scientists know is that the standard model of the particles works extremely well. That cannot be in accident.

Starting point is 00:37:37 So we want to use that. And we don't want to throw away the standard model before we have anything better. eventually the model is not infinitely good it has some weak spots we all know that scientists are aware of this they try to repair the weak spots but they don't try to overthrow the standard model entirely

Starting point is 00:37:58 because there's so much good and sound science that went into it so the idea is what is the mathematics that you need to compare you cellular automaton with a with the standard model or similar models

Starting point is 00:38:17 whereas the boundary is there any boundary I don't believe there is one but it looks like it and of course then you get the question that space and time are curved according to Einstein that again also is something we know practically with certainty

Starting point is 00:38:33 because I have been many observations that have been made that confirm Einstein's theory so that's that is not the point to start adapting on that so those things you want to keep, you want to keep general relativity want to keep the standard

Starting point is 00:38:49 model. The first thing to drop would be the non-deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics but then we have to make many more steps to see how the existing understanding of the world as you know it how this becomes

Starting point is 00:39:06 completely folded into a usual theory. Professor, something I don't understand is if this approach, your cellular automata approach, depends so sensitively on initial conditions such that any stochasticity that we perceive can always be said to be just ignorance, then given the initial conditions aren't accessible to us in anything that resembles the precision I imagine you'd require, how could you possibly falsify your theory? I think that's going to be very high,

Starting point is 00:39:43 certainly for the time being. But as long as a theory isn't completely understood, like we don't know exactly the automaton equations that we want to obey. So as long as that's the case, the theory has not been even remotely proven to be correct. Only if the theory would start to make predictions about standard model interactions.

Starting point is 00:40:11 For instance, the masses of the neutrinos, as you don't know very well today, and the mass relation between other particles that we can measure, but not calculate, or not in terms of features of the theory that you completely understand. As long as that's the case, you can't harsh declare that this model has been, outlawed, they can come closer and closer to the truth. I hope, however, that maybe with the use of artificial intelligence that is more intelligence than the average human being, much more than maybe machines will find the way to uncover such a cellular automaton.

Starting point is 00:40:58 Maybe the machine will know how to the quantum field theory of many, many particles and why they can be effectively the way a cellular automaton exhibits itself. Because I see lots of relations between a quantum theory of, a really quantum theory of quantum particles on the one hand and a cellular automaton on the other. So I see that relation. And that's where I differ from Wolfram. Wolfram didn't really ask the question,

Starting point is 00:41:30 how come that our world looks like some cellular automaton in disguise and he tries many examples but I'm sure that by trying just a model of the sort you won't get to the truth. The truth is too complicated. So

Starting point is 00:41:45 I believe that we have to combine the work from experimental scientists who measure all the properties of the standard model as accurate as they can and then the theoreticians ask why these different parameters that characterize the theory

Starting point is 00:42:02 why they relate with this particular ratios where do these numbers come from then maybe one day someone will find oh but this number I can recognize from the cellular automaton. It's that number. So a famous number

Starting point is 00:42:18 of that sort is a fine structure constant in electromagnetism. The ratio between the electric charge and some other fundamental constants if you square that then you get one over

Starting point is 00:42:32 137 but the number has many more decimal places behind the zero and the comma and that's a famous number that nobody can compute

Starting point is 00:42:45 but it exists can be measured very accurately but we don't know how to compute that number and the cellular automaton if it's worth that name should be able to compute where that number comes from

Starting point is 00:42:57 and what it is Okay, this sounds like a great time to talk about what is super determinism and how is it contrasted with regular determinism. Well, it's not determinism as bitten by a radioactive spider. So what is determinism and how does that contrast with super determinism? I think different people have different interpretations as to what superdeterminism should mean. and the problem is it's something that may be beyond determinism but you can think of that in two ways when I think that the laws of nature are conspiring with each other such that we are made to believe in quantum mechanics is real as a reality is just a statistical phenomenon but it can also just mean that that determinism occurs

Starting point is 00:43:54 at all levels in principle. So not only at the level of atoms and molecules, but also bigger things like larger biological molecules or chemistry or even small particles, and then eventually large particles, stars, universes, they all should be described by deterministic equations. I go to the extreme. I think in principle we have completely deterministic equations.

Starting point is 00:44:20 In practice, we don't have the illusion that we will ever be able, even the AI people will not be able to calculate how things will evolve exactly. That'll be far too complicated ever to achieve. But we can then believe that the world has that determinism built in those laws as well, even if we can't ever derive the laws in its precision. So if a superdeterminism means that, then I'm totally behind it. I cannot expect anything else, that the entire world is controlled by equations that only say yes or no

Starting point is 00:44:59 and whenever it asks, answers a question, it never says, maybe, it never gives you a probabilistic distribution, the probability is different from zero or one. And if that is a superdeterminism means, and I'm totally in favor of it, but sometimes people believe that superdeterminism means that, okay, the world is deterministic, but there's a gods, pulling some switches, to make things happen the way you are caught into thinking that quantum mechanics is the true theory or something of that sort, some mysterious intervention of a divine ghost of something that makes things happen that otherwise would be understandable. If that is what superdeterminism means, then that's not what I believe at all.

Starting point is 00:45:47 So there's nothing, nothing will be needed to other than complete determinism. So you're much more in line with Einstein who believed God doesn't play dice. I think Einstein would agree with me here. I would agree with Einstein. He was the first. Okay, so superdeterminism is nothing over and above determinism. It's actually just determinism through and through. So most people, they think, well, Newton's laws are deterministic. There's some wiggle room there with Norton's dome.

Starting point is 00:46:20 Superdeterminism is determinism all the way. How complicated this thing is that you're looking at, in principle, its laws are deterministic. The subtlety here is that there's Bell's theorem, which seems to exclude determinism, and one of the loopholes or one of the assumptions is statistical independence. So superdeterminism is usually spoken about as taking statistical dependence. So can you please explain what statistical independence is, why it's relevant to Bell's theorem and then where you land on it? Well, I think Bell, with all respect, you know, he was a very nice person and modest and he had just this ideas, and he tried to prove to understand how determinism works, and then he found that in his theories the opposite is true, so that determinism didn't work for his theories.

Starting point is 00:47:13 But I think he made a very elementary error, I would say, mistake. And that's to say that things that happens in the past have nothing to do with. that happened at the present. So Bob and Alice, his two observers in his experiment, the Gdanken experiment, but still it's an experiment. Bob and Alice, they decide the last split second what to measure, whether it's a spin up inside his direction or down or whatever. Or you could talk about photons, you could talk about smart spinners anyway.

Starting point is 00:47:48 but Bell assumed that the decisions made by Bob and Alice to measure something is independent of what happened in the past and my reaction was well I first didn't really see

Starting point is 00:48:04 clearly what he was trying to say but then I realized what he was trying to say is something that cannot be true that Bob and Alice cannot change their mind without something happening in the past that caused them to change their minds. And if you do think so, then you have assumed that Bob and Alice do something

Starting point is 00:48:23 without any explanation in the past. Well, that's precisely what my ideas are about super determinism, or determinism, whatever, says that no, everything we do is also controlled by the same theory. So our decisions to measure this, to measure that, to measure that also depends on what happened in the past. And if Bell says the opposite, and he needed that, the opposite of that, he needed that the decision of Bob and Alice to mention something is independent

Starting point is 00:48:56 of what the atoms dealt in the distant past. Just because he needed that, I say, well, that disproves his approach as being anything else, anything that would disprove the indeterminism, or disprove the determinism of to mechanics. No, he made an assumption

Starting point is 00:49:14 which you cannot hold. If you believe in super-determinism, you have to believe in super-determinism all the way. And that's what he didn't do. Now, what about the critique that super-determinism makes experimental science meaningless?

Starting point is 00:49:34 It makes it experimental science harder, but not meaningless. Why not? I mean, we're doing science all the way, and the interpretation of the quantum equations that we get is just something else. It means that the ultimate source of the quantum equations is not what people think they are. It's not that there are many realities.

Starting point is 00:49:59 And I think actually Bell also showed that because he made this assumption that these particles in a distant past can have any probabilistic distribution regardless as to what the decisions are that Bob and Alice make. No, as soon as Bob and Alice make a decision, you can point out in a deterministic, completely deterministic theory, you can point exactly which atom in the past has made Bob and Alice to change their settings of their measurement.

Starting point is 00:50:31 So, okay, allow me to be precise. I'll give some example. Let's suppose you have a thousand mice. Some of these mice are going to be predisposed. to cancer and some are not. And we just don't know which one of these mice are predisposed. So we just are going to randomly divide them. And how do we randomly divide them? Well, we pick the 2 millionth digit of pie and we say if that digit is odd, then this mouse here, this mouse right up front will go to the left in one group.

Starting point is 00:51:04 And then if the digit is even, then the mouse will go to the right. And we just keep sorting based on, okay, now the 3 millionth digits of pie, now the 4 millionth and so on. So standard statistics would say that each group would have roughly the same percentage of cancer-prone mice. If we later see more cancer in one group that's smoke, say we make these mice smoke, so we give them cigarettes or what have you, then we conclude that smoking causes cancer. If we deny statistical independence, it means that somehow these mice could have conspired, not the mice themselves, but somehow the universe conspired,

Starting point is 00:51:41 such that the smoking group just happened to get more cancer-prone mice in it. And I remember that tobacco companies use this to say that this is one of the reasons why smoking doesn't necessarily cause cancer. So how does statistical independence not fall prey to these sorts of arguments? Because Alice and Bob could choose their measurement settings based on coins or quantum random generators or quasar photons. There would still somehow be correlations there. Explain this for me.

Starting point is 00:52:19 Help me you understand. Well, I think what one should may well expect from a deterministic theory is that the ratios of events are more or less the way you expect them. So when you try to understand how the deterministic theory works, you will find it's far too complicated to calculate exactly what happens. So we can't talk about exactly what will happen when exactly you do your experiment. The million-th mouse goes in that direction, then one million and first mouse goes in that direction. If that's what you do, then we know very well that we'll never be able to compute within his position in such a deterministic world, what will happen.

Starting point is 00:53:06 so at some point one has to make an assumption and the assumptions must sound reasonable the assumption will be that all these mice are controlled by the same biological rules as others some mice will be immune against or more immune against a disease that gives me cancer others will be more sensitive to cancer cells

Starting point is 00:53:30 but you can compute all these things from the model more easily then to compute literally what every single mouse will do, what will happen to it. And the same holds for insurance companies. Insurance companies never worry about whether the atoms which were taking the place, whether the car accident would take place,

Starting point is 00:53:54 that those atoms were in the wrong position. He won't blame the atoms. They say, well, they can be in any position, but there are so many of such initial states that we can use to see that randomness does enter into our world whether we like it or not. So even in a deterministic theory, you'll have randomness in practice.

Starting point is 00:54:17 And so then that wipes away the mouse problem because then you say, well, every mouse is controlled by random phenomena anyway. My deterministic theory of the deterministic world would give a prediction if it could if it could be handled it in the position but we can't and we never will be so we are so far away from that situation

Starting point is 00:54:45 that we can make such measurements that the next to best thing is to use the biological arguments to see that someone in the insurance company is cheating and so on and so forth we can name all sorts of reasons for one mouse to die sooner than another mouse or a cat being survived or death,

Starting point is 00:55:06 that in practice, you never need to worry that this is going to be contradicting the deterministic theory. Okay, so this is a great point for people who just happen to skip forward to this point in the conversation. Most of the groundwork has been laid. Why don't you just outline what is your view of quantum mechanics? What is going on? What is the cellular automata approach?

Starting point is 00:55:29 Now, I know you've already talked about it, but I'm just saying, let's recapitulate it. So what does standard quantum theory say? And then what does your approach say? What my ideas about quantum mechanics say is that there is a way to identify parameters. He called them hidden variables.

Starting point is 00:55:49 You can call them any way you like. Let's call them hidden variable because that has been most hotly debated in the past. There are variables, let's call the hidden variables, which can only take the value yes or no. but nothing in between. Everything is determined by certain laws. In principle, it would be possible to compute what's such a model

Starting point is 00:56:12 in this infinite position. In practice, of course, it's nearly never possible. Even if you have an experiment at CERN and two beams of particles hit each other, no matter how sharply you focus one beam on the other beam, you still get some possibility of

Starting point is 00:56:31 arbitrary fluctuations that you don't have under control sufficient to make that what happens after the collision is all possibilities the particle can go in all directions with different probabilities by the way there might be correlations such that they give you a small peak in your observations such a peak might be the effect of a new particle

Starting point is 00:56:51 these things also happen but the theory does not will not work better than ordinary quantum mechanics in the best of all possible world. So, so the theory cannot be used

Starting point is 00:57:09 to make better quantum mechanical calculations. But it can be used to understand what the phenomena are and why the phenomena are there. Why are there mice that can die more easily from smoking cigarettes and others not? And so on. So those questions are,

Starting point is 00:57:28 to answer, not by being a scientist, where we're a biologist or a doctor who is investigating with all precision as he can to see what are the outcomes of this experiment, what are the spreadings, what can happen, what can you do? That is not going to be any better

Starting point is 00:57:48 with the deterministic theory. But what will be done better is that you can understand where all these laws come from. In particular, the standard, model of elementary particles, is the first in line to be researched

Starting point is 00:58:04 using statistical, using deterministic phenomena. So, Professor, since you have such interesting views on, or differing views on quantum mechanics, do you have any differing views on quantum gravity? So, for instance,

Starting point is 00:58:24 whatever the main line approaches are, do you disagree with them at some fundamental level, is there something that restricts what the mainline approaches would be if cellular automata were true? No, I think it's basically incorrect

Starting point is 00:58:41 to give a different role to gravity than to all the other interactions. So normally we have electromagnetism, the terms of how particles collide, sometimes there's a strong and weak forces, but gravity is one of these other forces. It happens to me a lot weaker than the other. But in principle, gravity should be controlled by exactly the same situation.

Starting point is 00:59:04 There are particles called gravitons, there are black holes, all these other things which can have in the gravitational theory. They are all controlled by deterministic laws, which will be very difficult. In the case of gravity, it really is very difficult even to think of how deterministic laws could be working in that case. So yes, this is a difficult problem. But I don't see why it should be impossible. There's no, no-go theorem that no-you-can't do that.

Starting point is 00:59:34 People write no-go-theirms just like Bell did with the Bell inequalities, which I think is a no-go theorem that you can punch through. I think you can also punch through the no-go theorems for gravity. It's just hard. And I think you have to be very intelligent, very smart, and very resourceful, and perhaps help with very clever experiments to see how, how this works, how you can bridge the gap between the elemental particles on one hand and quantum and gravitational particles in the other.

Starting point is 01:00:09 There's no doubt to mind that you have to use the same technique of quantum mechanics in both cases. So yes, that means quantum gravity as such works. In fact, classical gravity only works in the cases where the quantum effect are insignificant. You can't see them, but they are there and they are there because there are still statistical phenomena that have been taking place every now and then. Ah, okay, so I interviewed Claudia Doram of Massive Gravity, the interview I'll place on screen, and she had this advice to her students, which is that, sure, there may be no-go theorems. You should take them seriously, but don't take them as a total no,

Starting point is 01:00:49 because there are ways to evade them, and her massive graviton had a specific potential that removes or decouples the ghosts at all. orders. Also, there's a Weinberg-Witten theorem which she evades because she has a massive graviton. Do you give similar advice to your students that if you're violating some sacred assumption, well, yes, you should be concerned about it, but don't be too concerned. You can find your way around it. I would certainly say don't be too concerned about it, quite the opposite. if your theory is disagree strongly with the existing opinion about the situation, maybe it's a good idea to start to study it because then not so many people have studied

Starting point is 01:01:32 the opposite possibility yet. But in reality you have to realize that most likely the correct answers, as history has shown, most likely the correct answers are by combining different phenomena, like in the case of Maxwell it was combining electricity and magnetism as one theory and so that was a famous example but there are other examples where you can see where the gravity and elementary particles meet each other for instance the gravitons they will be difficult or impossible to observe but in the theory they're there and they're just like photons in many respects they look very much like photons and

Starting point is 01:02:16 and you can possibly learn new things, particularly if you take one step backwards. And I also have a strong advice for students. If you don't understand something and you don't believe that what you read in the books make sense, just make a step backwards. Try to ask the question, why do people say these things in the first place?

Starting point is 01:02:42 Can it be that they didn't listen to each other? If they listen to each other, they would realize that they both made some mistakes or some bigger mistakes than others. We all make mistakes. So take that into account and don't let you have yourself scared away from viewpoints which might be more useful by getting in a combination of different theories together in one theory. That is often a sign that you might be on a new time. track, which is important. But many students like to do, like their masters, like disbelieve everything,

Starting point is 01:03:22 quantum gravity doesn't exist or something like that. I don't know what such a theory looks like, but it doesn't look like the theory I would like to defend. Do you find that that many of the master's students are the ones with ideas that are trying to discard most of standard physics and reformulate everything? Or do you find that's mostly what characterizes your inbox? compared to your master's students.

Starting point is 01:03:46 No, I think that is what happens when you begin as a physics students. And that are the good students. They doubt on anything they learn. They say it could be different. Let's assume that what this teacher says is not true. Why did he say this? And then some do long calculations, some do the short calculations, but usually when they did the calculations say, yes, actually,

Starting point is 01:04:11 this teacher wasn't so bad after all. he is right and and what I first thought didn't hold so you have to understand that's the way you have to understand nature so try to take things that seem to be not not related yet giving different answers to different scenarios let's try to see if you can find a common denominator a theory that works for both of them so so that would be one certain of the many certain alleys of that sort that you can still investigate. If I understood correctly from our conversation off air, you suggested that some composite particles,

Starting point is 01:04:55 sorry, that some of what we think of as elementary particles may be confined composite particles, but I'm not sure if I misunderstood that. Well, the question is, again, in the other direction, what makes a particle elementary? and I was once I was entering a heavy discussion that people try to define elementary particles as opposed to composite particles

Starting point is 01:05:20 and then my immediate answer was well a composite particle is composite if it makes sense if it's useful to consider it as such it's elementary if you can't identify any composite ingredients of the particle anymore then it's an elementary particle such as the photon is basically elementary. The graviton will be basically in elementary particles.

Starting point is 01:05:45 But you cannot try to make such as definitions with infinite precision. If you use infinite precision, you know that a photon every now and then, you look like an electron-an-a-electron and then come back again. So the things that first look easy at one step, they become more complicated after more steps.

Starting point is 01:06:06 But still, physics is a science where there's no such certainty today there's no such certainty as I would like to see but I want to work away two theories which have more certainty built in than normally so and that I think is an interesting alley to investigate today can you make theories which are more certain than others and I found a very simple theory of that sort I call it the grandfather's clock, a pendulum clock.

Starting point is 01:06:41 So a pendulum has a pendulum, which goes one per seconds, it makes a full twist here. And then it has some gears in them. And while the gears are rotating, the pendulum does this. And I'm saying, yes, this is a model that has periodic behavior, and it has linear behavior in the hardly hands of the flock, move continuously. and both obey the same quantum laws. So we have a single set of quantum equations for the entire pendulum clock. And the nice thing about the pendulum clock is that on one hand it has an oscillator,

Starting point is 01:07:18 but it's a quantum oscillator. So the quantum oscillators are known. We're having discretized energy levels, and it's typically a quantum situation. But nevertheless, the entire model has also classical behavior. the hands of the clock move classically. So now you have a collision between deterministic theories and the quantum theories

Starting point is 01:07:45 in one object, the pendulum clock. Which is why I like the name pendulum clock, although you don't have to put all the ornamentations on it. It's still a thing that combines quantum mechanics with deterministic behavior. My belief is that you can do that with quantum mechanics itself. And there are many pendulum clocks, more complicated than the one that you normally have in your room.

Starting point is 01:08:09 And so this would be at the beginning of research into completely deterministic theories, which look quantum mechanical at first sight. So, Professor, speaking of quantum mechanical, I want to use that word quantum, because we talked about quantum clones before. it's more recent work of yours so there's work by Neil Turrock and Latham Boyle about Black Hole

Starting point is 01:08:39 Horizons acting as mirrors and you also have a theory of mirrors at the horizon so please talk about that and how yours is distinguished from their model yeah I don't know about this works let me see

Starting point is 01:08:54 oh perfect great this describes a black hole and the feature is the black hole

Starting point is 01:09:07 is a regional space time which is accelerated and when it is accelerated it has horizons

Starting point is 01:09:11 the dark blue lines are horizons the other arrows are patios going into the black hole

Starting point is 01:09:19 and this is the project coming out of a black hole and this is the way I think one should

Starting point is 01:09:23 understand how black holes behave in practice but then maybe you can repeat So there's a mapping between the future horizon to the past

Starting point is 01:09:35 and that preserves unitarity? So no it does not find it The whole thing is yes you want to get not to disobey unitarity or determinism So now when people draw black hole They say yes but there's a similar

Starting point is 01:09:50 space at the other side Let me put you draw it There's another there's another universe at the other side here. Great. And so when you have data in this whole system, you have data here and you have data there. However, this data there cannot be realistic.

Starting point is 01:10:15 Because if that were a genuine thing, and according to the equations, this space here looks exactly identical to that one. So this looks like a clone of that. But normally when you do physics, it isn't a clone, because you can throw them in a particle here without throwing in a particle here.

Starting point is 01:10:32 But you can also say, well, maybe if you throw in a particle here, then automatically an anti-observer, anti-physicists will also throw a particle in here. So then I said this is exactly a clone of that. That means you can leave away this green region altogether. So I talk about a single black hole now. And maybe that is enough to describe all the data that are there.

Starting point is 01:10:58 The advantage of that is that when you do this calculation, now, then determinism takes place in this one universe, then determinism or gravity takes place in the other one as well. In fact, this whole model, if this is just a clone of that, the whole thing can be called deterministic. If this is a separate universe, it's going to be very high, because these particles will disappear into the infinite future, and these particles will come from the past,

Starting point is 01:11:28 longer goal. But it's very difficult to say that this particular that gets out depends on the particle that moves in. And that's what you want in a good theory. So determinism is helped by identifying these two regions. And the side effect of that is that by identifying the two regions, you make that the entropy and other properties of the particles here is only half of what you thought it was. So when you have two, the entropy is much larger. Now, temperate, is a function of entropy in this model. So if you multiply the number of universe or you decrease the number of universes by a factor two,

Starting point is 01:12:07 you increase the temperature in both of them by factor two. So this is he also predicts a factor two difference from the usual outcome that people got out of those calculations. So the hawking temperature in your model would be times two of what the ordinary calculation is. This makes it even distinguishable, experimentally, potentially,

Starting point is 01:12:28 can get close enough to a black hole, measure its temperature and so on. It will be very high because in practice, such black holes will be very far away if they exist at all in our universe, because we cannot really, we don't understand the universe at the moment that it could have created such microscopic black holes, because it's not possible to make those black holes out of ordinary matter. So that's a temperature, temperatures too high. so what you're saying is that when a particle is incoming into a black hole it's not that that particle then appears somehow in the past

Starting point is 01:13:02 because that would create a time-like a closed time-like curve it's more subtle than that the both the in and the outgoing particle will go through a quantum regime and right when they both go through this point then the laws which are obviously craft here and obviously craft here are not obviously correct at this point. There's something else happening there, and that saves us, that makes the theory useful again, because

Starting point is 01:13:29 all these particles will, if you just let time do its work, these outgoing particles come out much later, they'll come up from this point, and the in-going particles will go in, not here, but also here. Then you find that you have to reconsider those

Starting point is 01:13:47 laws of physics, and that takes away the contradictions that's of normally would be got. Whereas in this world of two universes, I get contradictions that are much more difficult to avoid. So, paint the picture for the audience member who's wondering,

Starting point is 01:14:03 okay, if I, the person who's listening, approach a black hole and assuming we get rid of spaghettiification and so on, what occurs to them? What do they see? Do they see themselves as an anti-matter twin that they just touch and annihilate into a sea of photons?

Starting point is 01:14:20 Like, what do they see when someone falls in. In this model, that would be different than the ordinary model. The thing is that the physics happening here on this one and on that universe is not really physical at all. Because the physics is just

Starting point is 01:14:35 basically this half, where you have in going in here, and algorithm particles going in here, and algorithm particles are going out here. What they do in between has anything to do with it. It's a boundary condition of this horizon. This horizon is such that if you enter it here, you'll

Starting point is 01:14:50 get out there but there's something very important in that change it's the position of this particle which turns into momentum of that particle there's a very strange kind of mix up between position and momentum but just in accordance with quantum mechanics

Starting point is 01:15:05 quantum mechanics says that's what you must have and then the sea works extremely well I believe but you do you should not you cannot even ask the question what happens when it goes through it no when you go through this horizon

Starting point is 01:15:19 in practice you will break it pieces and you come out, shed it all over this past horizon, you'll come out as another particle. So then there's no information paradox? There's no information paradox. Except perhaps the black hole is not exactly what you think it is. And that's usually the answer in physics,

Starting point is 01:15:41 in many branches of physics. You're only getting successful theory if you first declared something you thought to be accurate that actually wasn't very precisely at all. So what I'm saying here about the black holes is only an approximate description of black holes, but not infinitely precise when you go to very tiny ones.

Starting point is 01:16:00 Now, this doesn't completely eliminate singularities. You get conical singularities, no? Yes. So why is that an improvement? It isn't. At first side, it means that there's something very basically going wrong at this point.

Starting point is 01:16:20 Because when you fold, when you say this is a clone of that, a clone of that, then it means that you actually have to fall out a piece of paper double. And that folding, this. Can you lift up the paper? If you don't mind, just lift it up, just so that the audience can see it some more? More? Yeah, perfect. If you, yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:43 So now I again forgot what I wanted to say. Oh, no, that's fine. You were talking about the singularity. and you were talking about how you have to fold the paper. Yes. If fold the paper, you get like when you may have a bag of French fries, then at this point where they all collected, there's a singularity. It's a very mild singularity.

Starting point is 01:17:07 You can undo it by making space time a little more inaccurate here, and then the singularity disappears. But in the limit that you have the out of description now, this looks like a singularity. that's called the chronicle of singularity. That singularity, however, is a one that already occurs in ordinary string theory. String theories have all the singularities

Starting point is 01:17:27 as very mild singularities at such a point where two strings interact. And, yeah, or actually it's the string itself, the position of the string itself also is a singularity. But those are usually much milder because the string coupling constant is much smaller. So this is like a string, but there's a very strong string

Starting point is 01:17:48 coupling constant. Right, right. It's a Euclidean string, or is it... It's a Euclidean string, yeah. So it's quite the thing that String Theoretist talk about, but it's very similar to the thing string theorists talk about. Now, this factor of two, by the way, does that factor survive if the back reaction is non-perturbative?

Starting point is 01:18:09 Like fully non-perterbative? Or is it independent of that? It's independent of that. I think the description of, have here is very much like a zero's order description if you throw away the higher order correction terms. There will be correction terms, but very small. So they don't take away the basic properties of the theory. I see. Thank you so much, Professor. I know that you have to get going. Why don't we talk about what you're working on these days? What's new? What's going on in your life

Starting point is 01:18:39 where are you headed, research-wise? It is a black hole problem because The model I have right now is not accurate enough. It's accurate, I believe, but some of the details are not very well understood. In particular, this conical singularity at the origin, I want to understand it better, and I want to also to understand how to confront it with the particles of the standard model,

Starting point is 01:19:06 to see how they interact with the black hole. I want that to be very precisely described by some perturbative theory. But when you write down perturbation expansion, you have to say perturbation in what? What is a small parameter? And usually that is a small parameter is that the masses of the standard model particles are much much lighter than the masses

Starting point is 01:19:26 of the black holes that you're looking at. And that means that in all our situations you'll be very precise in saying that the first order calculation is probably far more dominant than any of the others. But I want to have this ready in the form of a textbook where I say this textbook has the same kind of introduction as any textbook in quantum field theory.

Starting point is 01:19:50 In the old days, quantum field theory is a very difficult subject. You need to be explained in detail how it works. This is also a difficult subject as we be explained in detail how it works, but there will be no doubt that the description is correct. You can always doubt whether the entire theory is correct, and that's allowed. You can always ask nasty questions, and they will be asked nasty questions. But in principle, I won't get it as clear.

Starting point is 01:20:13 as I can get the whole theory. Did you have a talk in Marseilles about asymptotic freedom? Yes, that's an interesting thing that happened, that we were in Marseille, and I already knew Professor Kurt Simonsic, a very nice person, a very good thinker. He was doing very smart mathematics, which was very difficult for people to understand but

Starting point is 01:20:45 he went to that he happened to meet each other at that conference was a few years after here I learned lots of things from him at his cargesse school but I was again in Marseille and there he was and

Starting point is 01:21:02 when we came out of the plane we realized he had both been using the same airplane at the airport of Marseille and there he we asked each other what we were doing and he said I'm working on

Starting point is 01:21:16 theories that have the wrong sign of the coupling constant and naturally my question was why do you choose the wrong sign? He said well then they have an important property that we call asymptotic freedom or something like I don't think he called it that but there was an important property which nowadays would be

Starting point is 01:21:34 called asymptotic freedom right said do you know that you can use the gauge theories you get the same effect and you don't have to choose the wrong side of the couplings. He just choose the couplings as they really are thought to be. But this theory has this property already. And he said, no, I didn't know that. How do you know? I said, well, I computed it. He said, well, if that's true, which is what you say, you should publish it very quickly, because if you don't, someone else

Starting point is 01:22:02 will make that discovery. And this is important. It will explain strong interactions. And although I agreed with him, I have so many other things to do that I postpone. writing down because I'd use different ways than any people who do these calculations. So I would have to explain everything before I could give the answer. What I should have done, I learned, I should have written just a physics letter paper, a very short paper saying, this is my result, and this property is called asymptotic freedom. But now what's happened was I waited much too long, and that came across Wilczek and Politzer, who independently had arrived at this same result.

Starting point is 01:22:41 that these theories are asymptotically free. So, well, then semantic was the first to say, yes, but if you announced something in a conference, that counts as far as priority goes. But, well, I hadn't written down properly, and he thought he should talk about it, because maybe I probably made a sign error somewhere. So I couldn't believe that gauge theories

Starting point is 01:23:07 are so much different from scalar theories that you could change the sign of the beta function, which is the essential thing that happened to you. Now, before you go, Professor, you have a program on how to become a good theoretical physicist. I'll place that URL on screen,

Starting point is 01:23:25 a link to that website as well. Can you please talk about it? For those who are listening, who want to become researchers in physics, new students, maybe some existing researchers who want to improve their skills, follow the advice of a Nobel laureate. Yes.

Starting point is 01:23:39 well indeed I thought that I can many letters by people who who have a view of nature that isn't quite real that doesn't agree with many of the things you know very well in science so I thought let me try to give an answer to all of them or all of the more serious researchers that they have what they have to know about physics and of course all the standard things in physics which you shouldn't skip you shouldn't skip the understanding of neutrons laws or why planets move in elliptical orbits you shouldn't skip

Starting point is 01:24:13 the relationship with the electric magnetic fields by max or all those topics you have to learn first. You have to learn what the thermodynamics is. And I mentioned a sort of a dozen one of the topics in theoretical physics that you really have to understand.

Starting point is 01:24:30 When you understand all these theories and you understand also what the limits are like quantum mechanics it's not believed to be exactly true but true enough for practical purposes and you have to understand that then you can try to see if you see any gap here that you can fill in with a personal calculation that should improve what we know now and that's difficult difficult part of this you shouldn't just uh well this discard the old theories

Starting point is 01:25:05 without first having an idea about what to replace it with and what would be better than the replace series. And now I get letters, of course, where people discard the old theory and replace it for something they think is better. But I mean to see yes, but those aren't any equations you can use.

Starting point is 01:25:23 You can't use that to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron. Or you can't use that to calculate the thermal properties of particles near the black hole. and all these kind of questions which you now do know how to calculate. So you first have to know

Starting point is 01:25:37 the existing and verified part of physics, which is an enormous amount of work. More than 100, maybe 200 years of science now fits in one big textbook. But to read it all, it takes lots or lots of time, and effort you have to calculate, not just read it,

Starting point is 01:25:57 but also do the calculations to see that it works. So it can't just be that one's new theory has to recapitulate all of the 200 years of science, of physics in particular, because even you're a champion of cellular automaton, someone could say, well, where is the magnetic moment of the electron, to even five decimal places, you would say, well, that's not what this theory is about. I haven't gotten to that level. So it has to be more than just reproduced 200 years. Yes, it is, of course, a reason why I didn't have so many papers on cellular automata, because there are so many things. things I don't know. But where I disagree with Steve Wolfram, who wrote a very thick book

Starting point is 01:26:38 about cellular automata, but the book contains no information, not much information that I can use. I want the rule. If you have a cellular automaton of this and that sort, now find which elementary particles will occur in nature because of the cellular automaton behavior. And I think that is possible in principle. And those particles might look like standard model particles, but But what the exact rules are, how to do this calculation, is still way beyond me, because it's very, very difficult to see how these things hang together. But eventually, people also said a hundred years ago about relativity theory and quantum mechanics and particles. They also thought it was infinitely complicated.

Starting point is 01:27:19 But now we have found the answers. So one day the answers will be found. And when the answers are found, it will be in large part thanks to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye, bye. Hi there. Kurt here. If you'd like more content from theories of everything

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Nobel Laureate Who (Also) Says Quantum Theory Is "Totally Wrong"

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