Geometric Unity - A Theory of Everything (Eric Weinstein)

00:00:00.000 | - You recently published the video of a lecture

00:00:05.400 | you gave at Oxford presenting some aspects of a theory,

00:00:08.720 | a theory of everything called geometric unity.

00:00:12.880 | So this was a work of 30, 30 plus years.

00:00:17.400 | This is life's work.

00:00:18.760 | Let me ask sort of the silly old question.

00:00:22.880 | How do you feel as a human?

00:00:24.960 | Excited, scared, the experience of posting it?

00:00:30.120 | - You know, it's funny.

00:00:30.960 | One of the things that you learn to feel as an academic

00:00:35.080 | is the great sins you can commit in academics

00:00:39.520 | is to show yourself to be a non-serious person,

00:00:43.360 | to show yourself to have delusions,

00:00:45.340 | to avoid the standard practices

00:00:50.600 | which everyone is signed up for.

00:00:55.080 | And you know, it's weird because like,

00:00:59.520 | you know that those people are gonna be angry.

00:01:01.680 | He did what?

00:01:02.520 | You know, why would he do that?

00:01:05.400 | And--

00:01:06.240 | - And what we're referring to, for example,

00:01:08.720 | there's traditions of sort of publishing incrementally,

00:01:12.080 | certainly not trying to have a theory of everything,

00:01:14.800 | perhaps working within the academic departments,

00:01:19.560 | all those things.

00:01:20.400 | - That's true.

00:01:21.960 | - And so you're going outside of all of that.

00:01:24.560 | - Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that.

00:01:27.860 | And we did not come to terms when I was inside.

00:01:31.980 | And what they did was so outside to me,

00:01:34.560 | was so weird, so freakish.

00:01:36.840 | Like the most senior respectable people

00:01:39.500 | at the most senior respectable places

00:01:41.740 | were functionally insane, as far as I could tell.

00:01:45.040 | And again, it's like being functionally stupid

00:01:47.240 | if you're the head of the CDC or something

00:01:50.480 | where you're giving recommendations out

00:01:52.600 | that aren't based on what you actually believe,

00:01:54.500 | they're based on what you think you have to be doing.

00:01:57.000 | Well, in some sense, I think that that's a lot

00:01:59.560 | of how I saw the math and physics world as,

00:02:02.200 | the physics world was really crazy

00:02:05.400 | and the math world was considerably less crazy,

00:02:07.820 | just very strict and kind of dogmatic.

00:02:10.700 | - Well, we'll psychoanalyze those folks,

00:02:12.820 | but I really wanna maybe linger on it a little bit longer

00:02:17.320 | of how you feel 'cause this is such a special moment

00:02:21.200 | in your life.

00:02:22.040 | - Well, I really appreciate it, it's a great question.

00:02:23.160 | So if we can pair off some of those other issues,

00:02:27.760 | it's new being able to say what the Observer's is,

00:02:35.800 | which is my attempt to replace space-time

00:02:39.220 | with something that is both closely related

00:02:41.160 | to space-time and not space-time.

00:02:43.360 | So I used to carry the number 14

00:02:46.560 | as a closely guarded secret in my life

00:02:48.860 | and where 14 is really four dimensions of space and time

00:02:53.860 | plus 10 extra dimensions of rulers and protractors

00:02:57.940 | or for the cool kids out there, symmetric two tensors.

00:03:02.940 | - So you had a geometric, complicated,

00:03:06.600 | beautiful geometric view of the world

00:03:08.360 | that you carried with you for a long time.

00:03:10.080 | - Yeah.

00:03:10.920 | - Did you have friends that you, colleagues that you--

00:03:14.780 | - Essentially, no.

00:03:15.980 | - Talked?

00:03:16.940 | - No, in fact, some of these stories

00:03:19.780 | are me coming out to my friends

00:03:23.320 | and I use the phrase coming out

00:03:25.460 | because I think that gays have monopolized

00:03:28.200 | the concept of a closet.

00:03:29.960 | Many of us are in closets having nothing to do

00:03:32.300 | with our sexual orientation.

00:03:33.740 | Yeah, I didn't really feel comfortable

00:03:37.500 | talking to almost anyone.

00:03:38.740 | So this was a closely guarded secret

00:03:42.420 | and I think that I let on in some ways

00:03:44.220 | that I was up to something and probably,

00:03:46.940 | but it was a very weird life.

00:03:48.660 | So I had to have a series of things

00:03:50.540 | that I pretended to care about

00:03:52.240 | so that I could use that as the stalking horse

00:03:54.960 | for what I really cared about.

00:03:55.980 | And to your point, I never understood this whole thing

00:03:59.300 | about theories of everything.

00:04:01.220 | Like if you were gonna go into something

00:04:02.900 | like theoretical physics,

00:04:04.940 | isn't that what you would normally pursue?

00:04:07.580 | Like wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult

00:04:10.100 | and that poorly paid if you were gonna try

00:04:12.940 | to do something other than figure out

00:04:14.460 | what this is all about?

00:04:16.460 | - Now I have to reveal my cards,

00:04:18.300 | my sort of weaknesses and lack and understanding

00:04:21.720 | of the music of physics and math departments.

00:04:24.880 | But there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence

00:04:27.980 | and often folks come in and say,

00:04:32.540 | "Okay, so there's a giant department

00:04:34.860 | "working on quote unquote artificial intelligence,

00:04:37.940 | "but why is nobody actually working on intelligence?"

00:04:42.700 | Like you're all just building little toys.

00:04:46.700 | You're not actually trying to understand.

00:04:48.580 | And that breaks a lot of people.

00:04:50.180 | It confuses them 'cause like,

00:04:54.060 | okay, so I'm at MIT, I'm at Stanford, I'm at Harvard,

00:04:57.980 | I'm here, I dreamed of being,

00:04:59.740 | working on artificial intelligence.

00:05:02.140 | Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence?

00:05:05.340 | And I have the same kind of sense

00:05:07.860 | that that's what working on the theory of everything is.

00:05:10.820 | That strangely you somehow become an outcast for even--

00:05:15.180 | - But we know why this is, right?

00:05:16.820 | - Why?

00:05:18.860 | - Well, it's because, let's take the artificial,

00:05:20.860 | let's play with AGI for example.

00:05:23.360 | I think that the idea starts off

00:05:25.600 | with nobody really knows how to work on that.

00:05:27.900 | And so if we don't know how to work on it,

00:05:30.340 | we choose instead to work on a program

00:05:32.780 | that is tangentially related to it.

00:05:35.060 | So we do a component of a program

00:05:37.300 | that is related to that big question

00:05:39.820 | because it's felt like at least I can make progress there.

00:05:42.960 | And that wasn't where I was.

00:05:46.140 | Where I was in, it's funny,

00:05:49.020 | there was this book called Frieden-Uhlenbeck

00:05:51.540 | and it had this weird mysterious line

00:05:53.700 | in the beginning of it.

00:05:55.440 | And I tried to get clarification

00:05:57.700 | of this weird mysterious line

00:05:59.180 | and everyone said wrong things.

00:06:01.700 | And then I said, okay, well,

00:06:02.580 | so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly

00:06:05.160 | because I just asked the entire department

00:06:08.100 | and nobody has a correct interpretation of this.

00:06:11.420 | And so, it's a little bit like you see a crime scene photo

00:06:16.020 | and you have a different idea.

00:06:18.140 | Like there's a smoking gun and you figure,

00:06:20.060 | that's actually a cigarette lighter.

00:06:21.500 | I don't really believe that.

00:06:22.700 | And then there's like a pack of cards

00:06:25.020 | and you think, oh, that looks like the blunt instrument

00:06:27.220 | that the person was beaten with.

00:06:29.460 | So you have a very different idea about how things go.

00:06:32.680 | And very quickly you realize

00:06:33.860 | that there's no one thinking about that.

00:06:37.580 | There's a few human sides to this and technical sides,

00:06:40.580 | both of which I'd love to try to get down to.

00:06:43.860 | So the human side, I can tell from my perspective,

00:06:46.900 | I think it was before April 1st, April Fool's,

00:06:50.440 | maybe the day before, I forget.

00:06:52.140 | But I was laying in bed in the middle of the night

00:06:54.700 | and somehow it popped up on my feed somewhere

00:06:59.700 | that your beautiful face is speaking live.

00:07:05.420 | And I clicked and it's kind of weird

00:07:09.660 | how the universe just brings things together

00:07:11.540 | in this kind of way.

00:07:12.980 | And all of a sudden I realized

00:07:14.940 | that there's something big happening

00:07:16.620 | at this particular moment.

00:07:17.700 | It's strange, on a day like any day.

00:07:21.500 | And all of a sudden you were thinking of,

00:07:25.460 | you had this somber tone, like you were serious,

00:07:28.780 | like you were going through some difficult decision.

00:07:33.140 | And it seems strange, I almost thought you were maybe joking

00:07:38.140 | but there was a serious decision being made

00:07:40.180 | and it was a wonderful experience to go through with you.

00:07:42.780 | - I really appreciate it.

00:07:43.620 | I mean, it was April 1st.

00:07:45.140 | - Yeah, it's kind of fascinating.

00:07:46.580 | I mean, just the whole experience.

00:07:48.280 | And so I want to ask, I mean, thank you for letting me

00:07:54.340 | be part of that kind of journey of decision-making

00:07:57.580 | that took 30 years.

00:07:59.260 | But why now?

00:08:01.860 | Why did you think, why did you struggle so long

00:08:05.020 | not to release it and decide to release it now?

00:08:09.140 | While the whole world is on lockdown,

00:08:13.380 | and April fools, is it just because you like the comedy

00:08:17.300 | of absurd ways that the universe comes together?

00:08:21.700 | - I don't think so.

00:08:23.140 | I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.

00:08:29.140 | And I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier

00:08:33.660 | in Oxford.

00:08:34.540 | And it was too early.

00:08:37.940 | - Which part was too, is it the platform?

00:08:41.460 | 'Cause your platform is quite different now, actually.

00:08:43.380 | The internet, I remember you,

00:08:44.900 | I read several of your brilliant answers

00:08:48.140 | that people should read for the Edge questions.

00:08:49.940 | One of them was related to the internet.

00:08:52.540 | - It was the first one.

00:08:53.940 | - Was it the first one?

00:08:54.940 | - An essay called "Go Virtual, Young Man."

00:08:57.020 | - Yeah, yeah, that's like forever ago now.

00:09:00.500 | - Well, that was 10 years ago,

00:09:01.740 | and that's exactly what I did,

00:09:03.140 | is I decamped to the internet,

00:09:04.740 | which is where the portal lives.

00:09:06.060 | The portal, the portal, the portal.

00:09:07.780 | (laughing)

00:09:09.380 | - Well, let's start the whole, the theme,

00:09:11.260 | the ominous theme music, which you just listen to forever.

00:09:15.420 | - I actually started recording tiny guitar licks

00:09:18.700 | for the audio portion, not for the video portion.

00:09:22.340 | You kind of inspire me with bringing your guitar

00:09:25.820 | to the story, but keep going.

00:09:27.940 | - So you thought, so the Oxford was like step one,

00:09:30.620 | and you kind of, you put your foot in the water

00:09:34.180 | to sample it, but it was too cold at the time,

00:09:37.500 | so you didn't want to step in--

00:09:38.340 | - I was just really disappointed.

00:09:40.220 | - What was disappointing about that experience?

00:09:42.460 | - It's a hard thing to talk about.

00:09:43.820 | It has to do with the fact that,

00:09:45.700 | and I can see this mirrors a disappointment within myself.

00:09:51.980 | There are two separate issues.

00:09:53.380 | One is the issue of making sure that the idea

00:09:57.260 | is actually heard and explored,

00:09:59.620 | and the other is the question about,

00:10:02.580 | will I become disconnected from my work

00:10:06.140 | because it will be ridiculed,

00:10:07.940 | it will be immediately improved,

00:10:10.180 | it will be found to be derivative of something

00:10:12.180 | that occurred in some paper in 1957.

00:10:14.460 | When the community does not want you to gain a voice,

00:10:17.740 | it's a little bit like a policeman deciding

00:10:21.380 | to weirdly enforce all of these little-known regulations

00:10:26.380 | against you and sometimes nobody else,

00:10:30.580 | and I think that's kind of this weird thing

00:10:35.140 | where I just don't believe that we can reach

00:10:40.100 | the final theory necessarily

00:10:42.860 | within the political economy of academics.

00:10:45.920 | So if you think about how academics are tortured

00:10:48.140 | by each other and how they're paid

00:10:51.420 | and where they have freedom and where they don't,

00:10:53.900 | I actually weirdly think that that system

00:10:55.940 | of selective pressures is going to eliminate anybody

00:10:58.540 | who's going to make real progress.

00:11:00.540 | - So that's interesting.

00:11:01.380 | So if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles, for example,

00:11:04.700 | from Mausoleum, he, as far as I understand,

00:11:10.340 | he pretty much isolated himself

00:11:12.500 | from the world of academics in terms of the bulk

00:11:15.820 | of the work he did.

00:11:17.300 | And from my perspective, it's dramatic and fun to read about

00:11:22.060 | but it seemed exceptionally stressful

00:11:23.660 | the first steps he took when actually making the work public.

00:11:28.260 | That seemed, to me, it would be hell.

00:11:30.820 | - Yeah, but it's like so artificially dramatic.

00:11:33.660 | You know, he leads up to it at a series of lectures.

00:11:37.660 | He doesn't want to say it.

00:11:39.060 | And then he finally says it at the end

00:11:41.940 | because obviously this comes out of a body of work

00:11:44.140 | where, I mean, the funny part about Fermat's last theorem

00:11:47.340 | is that it wasn't originally thought to be a deep

00:11:49.540 | and meaningful problem.

00:11:51.260 | It was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved.

00:11:54.520 | But if you think about it, it became attached

00:11:57.500 | to the body of regular theory.

00:11:59.700 | So he built up this body of regular theory,

00:12:02.140 | gets all the way up to the end, announces.

00:12:04.860 | And then like, there's this whole drama about,

00:12:07.660 | okay, somebody's checking the proof.

00:12:09.060 | I don't understand what's going on in line 37.

00:12:12.140 | You know, and like, oh, is this serious?

00:12:13.780 | Seems a little bit more serious than we knew.

00:12:15.700 | - I mean, do you see parallels?

00:12:17.060 | Do you share the concern that your experience

00:12:19.180 | might be something similar?

00:12:20.340 | - Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly,

00:12:23.100 | his original proof was unsalvageable.

00:12:24.940 | He actually came up with a second proof

00:12:28.140 | with a colleague, Richard Taylor.

00:12:32.980 | And it was that second proof which carried the day.

00:12:35.900 | So it was a little bit that he got put

00:12:37.460 | under incredible pressure and then had to succeed

00:12:41.220 | in a new way having failed the first time,

00:12:43.020 | which is like even a weirder and stranger story.

00:12:45.660 | - That's an incredible story in some sense.

00:12:47.620 | But I mean, I'm trying to get a sense

00:12:50.660 | of the kind of stress you're under.

00:12:51.740 | - I think that this is, okay, but I'm rejecting.

00:12:54.620 | What I don't think people understand with me

00:12:57.180 | is the scale of the critique.

00:12:59.240 | It's like, I don't, people say,

00:13:03.540 | well, you must implicitly agree with this

00:13:05.180 | and implicitly agree, and it's like, no, try me.

00:13:07.920 | Ask before you decide that I am mostly in agreement

00:13:11.500 | with the community about how these things should be handled

00:13:14.020 | or what these things mean.

00:13:15.820 | - Can you elaborate?

00:13:17.100 | And also just why does criticism matter so much here?

00:13:22.100 | So you seem to dislike the burden of criticism

00:13:28.860 | that it will choke away all--

00:13:31.420 | - There's different kinds of criticism.

00:13:33.500 | There's constructive criticism

00:13:35.060 | and there's destructive criticism.

00:13:36.980 | And what I don't like is I don't like a community

00:13:40.820 | that can't, first of all,

00:13:44.500 | if you take the physics community,

00:13:46.780 | just the way we screwed up on masks and PPE,

00:13:49.820 | just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis

00:13:52.700 | and mortgage-backed securities,

00:13:53.980 | we screwed up on string theory.

00:13:55.980 | - Can we just forget the string theory happened?

00:13:59.260 | - Sure, but then somebody should say that, right?

00:14:01.540 | Somebody should say, you know, it didn't work out.

00:14:04.340 | - Yeah.

00:14:05.160 | - But okay, but you're asking this,

00:14:08.180 | why do you guys get to keep the prestige

00:14:10.460 | after failing for 35 years?

00:14:13.140 | That's an interesting question.

00:14:13.980 | - Who is the you guys?

00:14:15.020 | Because to me--

00:14:16.220 | - Whoever the, look, these things,

00:14:18.700 | if there is a theory of everything to be had, right,

00:14:21.740 | it's going to be a relatively small group of people

00:14:24.380 | where this will be sorted out.

00:14:25.740 | - Absolutely.

00:14:26.580 | - It's not tens of thousands.

00:14:28.940 | It's probably hundreds at the top.

00:14:32.500 | - But within that community, there's the assholes.

00:14:40.180 | There's the, I mean, you always in this world

00:14:43.700 | have people who are kind, open-minded.

00:14:46.740 | - It's not a question about kind.

00:14:47.580 | It's a question about, okay, let's imagine, for example,

00:14:52.220 | that you have a story where you believe

00:14:55.620 | that ulcers are definitely caused by stress,

00:14:57.940 | and you've never questioned it,

00:15:00.860 | or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue

00:15:03.380 | and attacked us at Pearl Harbor, right?

00:15:05.940 | And now somebody introduces a new idea to you,

00:15:08.740 | which is like, what if it isn't stress at all?

00:15:11.180 | Or what if we actually tried to make resource-starved Japan

00:15:14.980 | attack us somewhere in the Pacific

00:15:16.500 | so we could have Cassius Belli to enter the Asian theater?

00:15:19.420 | And the person's original idea is like,

00:15:21.900 | what, what are you even saying?

00:15:24.020 | You know, it's like too crazy.

00:15:25.520 | Well, when Dirac in 1963

00:15:29.500 | talked about the importance of beauty

00:15:33.380 | as a guiding principle in physics,

00:15:35.140 | and he wasn't talking about the scientific method,

00:15:38.900 | that was crazy talk.

00:15:40.260 | But he was actually making a great point,

00:15:42.940 | and he was using Schrodinger,

00:15:44.220 | and I think Schrodinger was standing in for him,

00:15:47.380 | and he said that if your equations

00:15:48.960 | don't agree with experiment,

00:15:50.740 | that's kind of a minor detail.

00:15:52.700 | If they have true beauty in them,

00:15:54.540 | you should explore them,

00:15:55.660 | because very often the agreement with experiment

00:15:59.300 | is an issue of fine-tuning of your model,

00:16:02.260 | of the instantiation.

00:16:03.460 | And so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong.

00:16:07.660 | Of course, Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong

00:16:11.020 | because the proton and the electron

00:16:13.900 | should be the same mass

00:16:14.920 | if they are each other's antiparticles.

00:16:17.620 | And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness

00:16:21.720 | rather than a real threat to the Dirac theory.

00:16:25.420 | - Okay, so amidst all this silliness,

00:16:28.660 | I'm hoping that we could talk about

00:16:30.740 | the journey that geometric unity has taken and will take

00:16:34.780 | as an idea and an idea that will see the light.

00:16:38.140 | - Yeah.

00:16:39.300 | - So first of all,

00:16:40.260 | I'm thinking of writing a book called

00:16:43.260 | "Geometric Unity for Idiots."

00:16:45.420 | - Okay.

00:16:46.260 | - And I need you as a consultant.

00:16:47.820 | So can we--

00:16:48.660 | - First of all, I hope I have the trademark

00:16:50.380 | on geometric unity.

00:16:51.340 | - You do.

00:16:52.260 | - Good.

00:16:53.100 | - Can you give a basic introduction

00:16:55.900 | of the goals of geometric unity,

00:16:59.240 | the basic tools of mathematics,

00:17:02.420 | use the viewpoints in general for idiots like me?

00:17:06.940 | - Okay, great, fun.

00:17:08.420 | - So what's the goal of geometric unity?

00:17:10.940 | - The goal of geometric unity is to start with something

00:17:14.100 | so completely bland that you can simply say,

00:17:19.100 | well, that's something that begins the game

00:17:21.740 | is as close to a mathematical nothing as possible.

00:17:25.100 | In other words, I can't answer the question,

00:17:26.540 | why is there something rather than nothing?

00:17:28.260 | But if there has to be a something that we begin from,

00:17:31.340 | let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas.

00:17:34.620 | - Let's even more basic.

00:17:37.540 | So what is something?

00:17:38.940 | What are we trying to describe here?

00:17:40.180 | - Okay, right now we have a model of our world

00:17:45.180 | and it's got two sectors.

00:17:47.700 | One of the sectors is called general relativity,

00:17:49.780 | the other is called the standard model.

00:17:51.940 | So we'll call it GR for general relativity

00:17:55.780 | and SM for standard model.

00:17:58.060 | - What's the difference between the two?

00:17:59.260 | What are the two described?

00:18:01.380 | - So general relativity gives pride of place to gravity

00:18:06.380 | and everything else is acting as a sort of a backup singer.

00:18:12.500 | - Gravity is the star of the show.

00:18:14.220 | - Gravity is the star of general relativity.

00:18:17.220 | And in the standard model,

00:18:20.420 | the other three non-gravitational forces,

00:18:23.620 | so if there are four forces that we know about,

00:18:25.420 | three of the four are non-gravitational,

00:18:27.820 | that's where they get to shine.

00:18:30.340 | - Great, so tiny little particles

00:18:32.820 | and how they interact with each other.

00:18:34.540 | - So photons, gluons,

00:18:36.620 | and so-called intermediate vector bosons.

00:18:40.020 | Those are the things that the standard model showcases

00:18:43.020 | and general relativity showcases gravity.

00:18:45.900 | And then you have matter,

00:18:47.240 | which is accommodated in both theories,

00:18:50.780 | but much more beautifully inside of the standard model.

00:18:53.980 | - So what does a theory of everything do?

00:18:57.700 | - So first of all,

00:18:59.020 | I think that that's the first place

00:19:01.280 | where we haven't talked enough.

00:19:02.580 | We assume that we know what it means,

00:19:05.380 | but we don't actually have any idea what it means.

00:19:07.900 | And what I claim it is,

00:19:08.940 | is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that theory

00:19:13.940 | are no longer of a mathematical nature.

00:19:17.060 | In other words, if I say,

00:19:20.660 | let us take X to be a four-dimensional manifold,

00:19:26.300 | to a mathematician or physicist, I've said very little.

00:19:29.300 | I've simply said,

00:19:30.460 | there's some place for calculus and linear algebra

00:19:33.980 | to dance together and to play.

00:19:36.220 | And that's what manifolds are.

00:19:38.860 | They're the most natural place

00:19:40.220 | where our two greatest math theories can really intertwine.

00:19:45.220 | - Which are the two?

00:19:48.580 | Oh, you mean calculus and linear algebra, yep.

00:19:50.620 | - Right.

00:19:51.460 | Okay, now the question is,

00:19:52.940 | beyond that, so it's sort of like saying,

00:19:56.100 | I'm an artist and I want to order a canvas.

00:19:58.380 | Now the question is,

00:20:02.260 | does the canvas paint itself?

00:20:04.180 | Does the canvas come up with an artist

00:20:09.100 | and paint an ink, which then paint the canvas?

00:20:15.620 | Like that's the hard part about theories of everything,

00:20:18.700 | which I don't think people talk enough about.

00:20:21.020 | - Can we just, you bring up Escher

00:20:23.180 | and the hand that draws itself.

00:20:25.460 | - The fire that lights itself or drawing hands.

00:20:28.020 | - The drawing hands.

00:20:28.860 | - Yeah.

00:20:29.700 | - And every time I start to think about that,

00:20:32.100 | my mind like shuts down.

00:20:34.700 | - No, don't do that.

00:20:35.540 | - There's a spark.

00:20:38.020 | - No, but this is the most beautiful part.

00:20:39.340 | We should do this together.

00:20:40.180 | - No, it's beautiful, but this robot's brain sparks fly.

00:20:47.420 | So can we try to say the same thing over and over

00:20:52.420 | in different ways about what you mean

00:20:56.980 | by that having to be a thing we have to contend with?

00:20:59.700 | - Sure.

00:21:00.700 | - Like why do you think that creating a theory of everything

00:21:05.280 | as you call the source code,

00:21:07.180 | our understanding our source code,

00:21:08.860 | require a view like the hand that draws itself?

00:21:13.100 | - Okay, well, here's what goes on

00:21:14.460 | in the regular physics picture.

00:21:17.300 | We've got these two main theories,

00:21:18.780 | general relativity and the standard model, right?

00:21:21.180 | Think of general relativity as more or less

00:21:26.920 | the theory of the canvas, okay?

00:21:30.980 | Maybe you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape,

00:21:34.820 | maybe you've measured it,

00:21:35.740 | so it's got length and it's got angle,

00:21:37.620 | but more or less it's just canvas and length and angle,

00:21:40.820 | and that's all that really general relativity is,

00:21:44.660 | but it allows the canvas to warp a bit.

00:21:46.960 | Then we have the second thing,

00:21:50.660 | which is this import of foreign libraries,

00:21:55.660 | which aren't tied to space and time.

00:22:00.780 | So we've got this crazy set of symmetries

00:22:03.020 | called SU3 cross SU2 cross U1.

00:22:06.300 | We've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation,

00:22:09.660 | which are these sort of twisted spinners,

00:22:12.700 | and we've got three copies of them.

00:22:14.940 | Then we've got this weird Higgs field that comes in

00:22:17.380 | and like deus ex machina,

00:22:19.260 | solves all the problems that have been created in the play

00:22:22.500 | that can't be resolved otherwise.

00:22:24.140 | - So that's the standard model,

00:22:25.300 | quantum field theory just plopped on top of this canvas.

00:22:28.060 | - It's a problem of the double origin story.

00:22:30.980 | One origin story is about space and time,

00:22:33.700 | the other origin story is about what we would call

00:22:36.020 | internal quantum numbers and internal symmetries.

00:22:40.100 | And then there was an attempt to get one

00:22:43.420 | to follow from the other called Calusa-Klein theory,

00:22:45.800 | which didn't work out.

00:22:46.960 | And this is sort of in that vein.

00:22:51.580 | - So you said origin story.

00:22:55.300 | So in the hand that draws itself, what is it?

00:22:58.300 | - So it's as if you had the canvas

00:23:02.140 | and then you ordered up also give me paint brushes,

00:23:05.940 | paints, pigments, pencils, and artists.

00:23:08.180 | - But you're saying that's like,

00:23:09.740 | if you wanna create a universe from scratch,

00:23:12.860 | the canvas should be generating the paint brushes

00:23:15.060 | and the paint brushes should be generating the canvas.

00:23:16.940 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

00:23:18.140 | Like you should-- - Who's the artist

00:23:19.420 | in this analogy?

00:23:20.340 | - Well, this is, sorry,

00:23:22.220 | then we're gonna get into a religious thing

00:23:23.740 | and I don't wanna do that.

00:23:24.980 | - Okay.

00:23:25.800 | - Well, you know my shtick, which is that we are the AI.

00:23:29.700 | We have two great stories about the simulation

00:23:32.300 | and artificial general intelligence.

00:23:34.180 | In one story, man fears that some program

00:23:39.140 | we've given birth to will become self-aware,

00:23:41.620 | smarter than us, and will take over.

00:23:44.820 | In another story, there are genius simulators

00:23:48.820 | and we live in their simulation.

00:23:51.340 | And we haven't realized that those two stories

00:23:54.040 | are the same story.

00:23:55.580 | In one case, we are the simulator.

00:24:00.220 | In another case, we are the simulated.

00:24:02.140 | And if you buy those and you put them together,

00:24:06.180 | we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators,

00:24:09.260 | we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code.

00:24:12.500 | So this could be our Skynet moment,

00:24:14.100 | which is one of the reasons I have some issues around it.

00:24:17.380 | - I think we'll talk about that 'cause I--

00:24:19.340 | - Well, that's the issue of the emergent artist

00:24:21.100 | within the story, just to get back to the point.

00:24:23.620 | Okay, so now the key point is,

00:24:26.340 | the standard way we tell the story

00:24:27.980 | is that Einstein sets the canvas

00:24:30.460 | and then we order all the stuff that we want

00:24:33.740 | and then that paints the picture that is our universe.

00:24:36.500 | So you order the paint, you order the artist,

00:24:42.700 | you order the brushes, and that then,

00:24:46.700 | when you collide the two,

00:24:48.220 | gives you two separate origin stories.

00:24:50.180 | The canvas came from one place

00:24:52.780 | and everything else came from somewhere else.

00:24:54.940 | - So what are the mathematical tools required

00:24:58.500 | to construct consistent geometric theory

00:25:03.940 | and make this concrete?

00:25:07.900 | - Well, somehow, you need to get three copies, for example,

00:25:12.900 | of generations with 16 particles each.

00:25:17.500 | And so the question would be,

00:25:21.180 | well, there's a lot of special personality

00:25:24.700 | in those symmetries.

00:25:26.580 | Where would they come from?

00:25:27.940 | So for example, you've got what would be called

00:25:31.660 | grand unified theories that sound like SU5,

00:25:36.660 | the George I. Glashow theory.

00:25:38.260 | There's something that should be called spin 10,

00:25:40.500 | but physicists insist on calling it SO10.

00:25:43.780 | There's something called the Petit-Salam theory

00:25:46.380 | that tends to be called SU4 cross SU2 cross SU2,

00:25:49.860 | which should be called spin six cross spin four.

00:25:52.420 | I can get into all of these.

00:25:53.900 | - Now what are they all accomplishing?

00:25:56.100 | - They're all taking the known forces that we see

00:25:58.860 | and packaging them up to say,

00:26:01.740 | we can't get rid of the second origin story,

00:26:04.900 | but we can at least make that origin story more unified.

00:26:08.820 | So they're trying, grand unification is the attempt to--

00:26:11.500 | - And that's a mistake in your--

00:26:13.100 | - It's not a mistake.

00:26:14.380 | The problem is, is it was born lifeless.

00:26:17.140 | When George I. Glashow first came out

00:26:19.620 | with the SU5 theory, it was very exciting

00:26:24.060 | because it could be tested in a South Dakota mine

00:26:28.020 | filled up with like, I don't know,

00:26:29.820 | cleaning fluid or something like that.

00:26:31.300 | And they looked for proton decay and didn't see it,

00:26:33.940 | and then they gave up because in that day

00:26:36.380 | when your experiment didn't work,

00:26:37.720 | you gave up on the theory.

00:26:39.820 | It didn't come to us born of a fusion

00:26:42.700 | between Einstein and Bohr.

00:26:45.820 | And that was kind of the problem

00:26:49.980 | is that it had this weird parenting

00:26:51.360 | where it was just on the Bohr side.

00:26:52.820 | There was no Einsteinian contribution.

00:26:55.860 | (sighs)

00:26:58.060 | Lex, how can I help you most?

00:26:59.620 | I'm trying to figure out what questions you wanna ask

00:27:03.460 | so that you get the most satisfying answers.

00:27:05.800 | - There's a bunch of questions I wanna ask.

00:27:09.900 | I mean, one, and I'm trying to sneak up on you

00:27:13.380 | somehow to reveal in a accessible way

00:27:18.380 | the nature of our universe.

00:27:22.180 | - So I can just give you a guess, right?

00:27:24.700 | We have to be very careful that we're not claiming

00:27:27.740 | that this has been accepted.

00:27:30.020 | This is a speculation.

00:27:31.620 | But I will make the speculation

00:27:33.660 | that I think what you would wanna ask me

00:27:35.620 | is how can the canvas generate all the stuff

00:27:37.940 | that usually has to be ordered separately?

00:27:40.380 | All right, should we do that?

00:27:41.400 | - Let's go there. - Okay.

00:27:42.700 | So the first thing is is that you have a concept

00:27:47.480 | in computers called technical debt.

00:27:50.700 | You're coding and you cut corners,

00:27:52.220 | and you know you're gonna have to do it

00:27:53.740 | right before the thing is safe for the world.

00:27:57.540 | But you're piling up some series of IOUs

00:28:02.220 | to yourself and your project as you're going along.

00:28:04.920 | So the first thing is we can't figure out

00:28:09.500 | if you have only four degrees of freedom,

00:28:11.500 | and that's what your canvas is,

00:28:13.060 | how do you get at least Einstein's world?

00:28:15.540 | Einstein said, look, it's not just four degrees of freedom,

00:28:19.280 | but there need to be rulers and protractors

00:28:21.580 | to measure length and angle in the world.

00:28:23.640 | You can't just have a flabby four degrees of freedom.

00:28:27.020 | So the first thing you do is you create 10 extra variables,

00:28:31.900 | which is like if we can't choose any particular set

00:28:34.420 | of rulers and protractors to measure length and angle,

00:28:37.620 | let's take the set of all possible rulers and protractors,

00:28:42.140 | and that would be called symmetric non-degenerate two tensors

00:28:46.260 | on the tangent space of the four manifold X4.

00:28:49.220 | Now, because there are four degrees of freedom,

00:28:53.100 | you start off with four dimensions,

00:28:54.700 | then you need four rulers

00:28:56.160 | for each of those different directions, so that's four,

00:29:00.840 | that gets us up to eight variables,

00:29:02.560 | and then between four original variables,

00:29:05.360 | there are six possible angles.

00:29:06.940 | So four plus four plus six is equal to 14.

00:29:10.560 | So now you've replaced X4 with another space,

00:29:14.800 | which in the lecture, I think I called U14,

00:29:16.760 | but I'm now calling Y14.

00:29:18.260 | This is one of the big problems of working on something

00:29:20.820 | in private is every time you pull it out,

00:29:22.420 | you sort of can't remember it,

00:29:23.440 | and you name something new.

00:29:25.240 | Okay, so you've got a 14-dimensional world,

00:29:27.680 | which is the original four-dimensional world,

00:29:29.920 | plus a lot of extra gadgetry for measurement.

00:29:34.140 | - And because you're not in the four-dimensional world,

00:29:37.320 | you don't have the technical debt.

00:29:38.880 | - No, now you've got a lot of technical debt,

00:29:40.720 | because now you have to explain away a 14-dimensional world,

00:29:43.320 | which is a big, you're taking a huge advance

00:29:45.960 | on your payday check, right?

00:29:48.080 | - But aren't more dimensions allow you more freedom?

00:29:52.040 | - Maybe, but you have to get rid of them somehow,

00:29:54.180 | because we don't perceive them.

00:29:56.140 | - So eventually you have to collapse it down

00:29:57.400 | to the thing that we perceive.

00:29:58.740 | - Or you have to sample a four-dimensional filament

00:30:03.080 | within that 14-dimensional world,

00:30:04.960 | known as a section of a bundle.

00:30:06.520 | - Okay, so how do we get from the 14-dimensional world,

00:30:12.300 | where I imagine a lot of--

00:30:13.500 | - Oh, wait, wait, wait.

00:30:15.180 | You're cheating.

00:30:16.020 | The first question was,

00:30:17.660 | how do we get something from almost nothing?

00:30:21.040 | Like how do we get the,

00:30:22.840 | if I've said that the who and the what

00:30:25.340 | in the newspaper story that is a theory of everything

00:30:29.620 | are bosons and fermions,

00:30:32.000 | so let's make the who the fermions and the what the bosons.

00:30:35.120 | Think of it as the players and the equipment for a game.

00:30:38.420 | - Are we supposed to be thinking

00:30:39.740 | of actual physical things with mass or energy?

00:30:42.780 | - Sure, yep. - Okay.

00:30:44.020 | - So think about everything you see in this room.

00:30:47.340 | So from chemistry, you know it's all protons,

00:30:49.340 | neutrons, and electrons,

00:30:50.580 | but from a little bit of late 1960s physics,

00:30:54.720 | we know that the protons and neutrons

00:30:56.520 | are all made of up quarks and down quarks.

00:30:59.220 | So everything in this room is basically up quarks,

00:31:01.740 | down quarks, and electrons stuck together

00:31:03.740 | with the what, the equipment, okay?

00:31:08.220 | Now, the way we see it currently

00:31:11.740 | is we see that there are spacetime indices,

00:31:15.460 | which we would call spinners,

00:31:17.740 | that correspond to the who,

00:31:19.620 | that is the fermions, the matter, the stuff,

00:31:21.820 | the up quarks, the down quarks, the electrons,

00:31:24.440 | and there are also 16 degrees of freedom

00:31:29.440 | that come from this space of internal quantum numbers.

00:31:34.380 | So in my theory, in 14 dimensions,

00:31:40.360 | there's no internal quantum number space that figures in.

00:31:44.380 | It's all just spinorial.

00:31:48.480 | So spinners in 14 dimensions without any festooning

00:31:53.480 | with extra linear algebraic information.

00:31:57.840 | There's a concept of spinners,

00:32:03.080 | which is natural if you have a manifold

00:32:05.520 | with length and angle.

00:32:07.780 | And Y14 is almost a manifold with length and angle.

00:32:12.300 | It's so close.

00:32:16.360 | In other words, because you're looking at the space

00:32:19.760 | of all rulers and protractors,

00:32:21.400 | maybe it's not that surprising

00:32:23.320 | that a space of rulers and protractors

00:32:25.200 | might come very close to having rulers and protractors

00:32:27.720 | on it itself.

00:32:29.120 | Like, can you measure the space of measurements?

00:32:31.940 | And you almost can't.

00:32:33.080 | In a space that has length and angle,

00:32:36.680 | if it doesn't have a topological obstruction,

00:32:39.000 | comes with these objects called spinners.

00:32:42.480 | Now, spinners are the stuff of our world.

00:32:47.280 | We are made of spinners.

00:32:49.240 | They're the most important really deep object

00:32:51.640 | that I can tell you about.

00:32:52.680 | They were very surprising.

00:32:53.800 | - What is a spinner?

00:32:55.520 | - So famously, there are these weird things

00:32:58.920 | that require 720 degrees of rotation

00:33:03.200 | in order to come back to normal.

00:33:06.720 | And that doesn't make sense.

00:33:08.920 | And the reason for this is that there's a knottedness

00:33:12.480 | in our three-dimensional world that people don't observe.

00:33:15.920 | And you can famously see it by this Dirac string trick.

00:33:20.920 | So if you take a glass of water,

00:33:22.600 | imagine that this was a tumbler

00:33:23.880 | and I didn't want to spill any of it.

00:33:25.840 | And the question is, if I rotate the cup

00:33:29.440 | without losing my grip on the base 360 degrees,

00:33:34.120 | and I can't go backwards,

00:33:35.780 | is there any way I can take a sip?

00:33:38.640 | And the answer is this weird motion,

00:33:40.640 | which is go over first and under second.

00:33:45.640 | And that's 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal

00:33:50.080 | so that I can take a sip.

00:33:51.640 | Well, that weird principle,

00:33:53.000 | which sometimes is known as the Philippine wine glass dance

00:33:56.080 | because waitresses in the Philippines

00:33:58.760 | apparently learned how to do this.

00:34:00.480 | That move defines, if you will,

00:34:06.600 | this hidden space that nobody knew was there of spinners,

00:34:10.800 | which Dirac figured out when he took the square root

00:34:14.120 | of something called the Klein-Gordon equation,

00:34:16.420 | which I think had earlier work incorporated

00:34:22.160 | from Cartan and Killing and Company in mathematics.

00:34:25.360 | So spinners are one of the most profound aspects

00:34:27.720 | of human existence.

00:34:28.960 | - And you forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions,

00:34:31.060 | but would a spinner be the mathematical object

00:34:34.200 | that's the basic unit of our universe?

00:34:37.760 | - When you start with a manifold,

00:34:41.420 | which is just like something like a donut or a sphere

00:34:46.960 | or a circle or a Möbius band,

00:34:48.940 | a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing

00:34:53.880 | that you found was hidden in your original purchase.

00:34:57.080 | So you order a manifold and you didn't even realize,

00:35:02.400 | it's like buying a house and finding a panic room inside

00:35:05.900 | that you hadn't counted on.

00:35:07.680 | It's very surprising when you understand

00:35:09.600 | that spinners are running around in your spaces.

00:35:12.000 | - Again, perhaps a dumb question,

00:35:15.280 | but we're talking about 14 dimensions and four dimensions.

00:35:18.680 | What is the manifold we're operating under?

00:35:22.240 | - So in my case, it's proto-spacetime.

00:35:24.400 | It's before Einstein can slap rulers

00:35:28.320 | and protractors on spacetime.

00:35:31.080 | - What you mean by that, sorry to interrupt,

00:35:32.840 | is spacetime is the 4D manifold?

00:35:36.680 | - Spacetime is a four-dimensional manifold

00:35:39.440 | with extra structure.

00:35:40.800 | - What's the extra structure?

00:35:42.920 | - It's called a semi-Romanian or pseudo-Romanian metric.

00:35:47.920 | And in essence, there is something akin

00:35:51.040 | to a four by four symmetric matrix,

00:35:55.400 | which is equivalent to length and angle.

00:35:57.760 | So when I talk about rulers and protractors

00:35:59.620 | or I talk about length and angle,

00:36:01.620 | or I talk about Ramanian or pseudo-Romanian

00:36:04.160 | or semi-Romanian manifolds,

00:36:06.120 | I'm usually talking about the same thing.

00:36:08.680 | Can you measure how long something is

00:36:10.680 | and what the angle is between two different rays or vectors?

00:36:15.680 | So that's what Einstein gave us as his arena,

00:36:19.000 | his place to play, his canvas.

00:36:24.000 | - There's a bunch of questions I can ask here,

00:36:28.080 | but like I said, I'm working on this book,

00:36:31.100 | Geometric Unity for Idiots.

00:36:32.680 | And I think what would be really nice as your editor,

00:36:39.720 | to have beautiful, maybe even visualizations

00:36:45.280 | that people could try to play with,

00:36:48.840 | try to reveal small little beauties

00:36:51.380 | about the way you're thinking about this world.

00:36:53.360 | - Well, I usually use the Joe Rogan program for that.

00:36:55.820 | Sometimes I have him doing the Philippine wine glass dance.

00:36:59.180 | I had the hop vibration.

00:37:01.100 | The part of the problem is,

00:37:02.280 | is that most people don't know this language

00:37:05.980 | about spinners, bundles, metrics, gauge fields.

00:37:10.600 | And they're very curious about the theory of everything,

00:37:13.580 | but they have no understanding

00:37:15.020 | of even what we know about our own world.

00:37:16.980 | - Is it a hopeless pursuit?

00:37:20.100 | - No.

00:37:20.940 | - Like even gauge theory.

00:37:22.100 | - Right.

00:37:23.420 | - I mean, it seems to be very inaccessible.

00:37:26.300 | Is there some aspect of it that could be made accessible?

00:37:28.700 | - I mean, I could go to the board right there

00:37:30.600 | and give you a five minute lecture on gauge theory

00:37:33.500 | that would be better than the official lecture

00:37:36.660 | on gauge theory.

00:37:37.500 | You would know what gauge theory was.

00:37:39.500 | - So it is possible to make it accessible.

00:37:41.820 | - Yeah, but nobody does.

00:37:43.900 | Like in other words, you're gonna watch over the next year,

00:37:47.540 | lots of different discussions about quantum entanglement,

00:37:50.560 | or the multiverse, where are we now?

00:37:54.440 | Or many worlds, are they all equally real?

00:37:57.820 | Right?

00:38:00.720 | - I mean, yeah, that's like--

00:38:01.540 | - Okay, but you're not gonna hear anything

00:38:03.020 | about the hop vibration except if it's from me,

00:38:05.400 | and I hate that.

00:38:06.880 | - Why can't you be the one?

00:38:08.980 | - Well, because I'm going a different path.

00:38:10.800 | I think that we've made a huge mistake,

00:38:12.660 | which is we have things we can show people

00:38:14.840 | about the actual models.

00:38:16.720 | We can push out visualizations

00:38:18.720 | where they're not listening by analogy,

00:38:20.780 | they're watching the same thing that we're seeing.

00:38:23.360 | And as I've said to you before,

00:38:25.000 | this is like choosing to perform sheet music

00:38:28.200 | that hasn't been performed in a long time,

00:38:30.080 | or the experts can't afford orchestras,

00:38:32.560 | so they just trade Beethoven symphonies as sheet music,

00:38:35.720 | and they go, oh, wow, that was beautiful.

00:38:38.000 | But it's like nobody heard anything.

00:38:40.480 | They just looked at the score.

00:38:41.600 | Well, that's how mathematicians and physicists

00:38:44.160 | trade papers and ideas, is that they write down

00:38:47.520 | the things that represent stuff.

00:38:49.360 | I want to at least close out this thought line

00:38:53.200 | that you started, which is how does the canvas

00:38:57.440 | order all of this other stuff into being?

00:39:01.940 | So I at least want to say some incomprehensible things

00:39:05.880 | about that, and then we'll have that much done, all right?

00:39:09.000 | - On that just point, does it have to be incomprehensible?

00:39:14.960 | - Do you know what the Schrodinger equation is?

00:39:16.880 | - Yes.

00:39:17.720 | - Do you know what the Dirac equation is?

00:39:20.320 | - What does no mean?

00:39:22.200 | - Well, my point is you're gonna have some feeling

00:39:24.800 | that you know what the Schrodinger equation is.

00:39:27.320 | As soon as we get to the Dirac equation,

00:39:29.360 | your eyes are gonna get a little bit glazed, right?

00:39:32.460 | So now why is that?

00:39:35.920 | Well, the answer to me is that you want to ask me

00:39:40.920 | about the theory of everything,

00:39:44.000 | but you haven't even digested the theory of everything

00:39:47.800 | as we've had it since 1928,

00:39:50.400 | when Dirac came out with his equation.

00:39:52.780 | So for whatever reason, and this isn't a hit on you,

00:39:58.060 | you haven't been motivated enough in all the time

00:40:02.720 | that you've been on Earth to at least get as far

00:40:05.480 | as the Dirac equation.

00:40:06.800 | And this was very interesting to me

00:40:07.880 | after I gave the talk in Oxford.

00:40:09.840 | New scientist who had done kind of a hatchet job on me

00:40:14.000 | to begin with sent a reporter to come to the third version

00:40:16.880 | of the talk that I gave,

00:40:18.680 | and that person had never heard of the Dirac equation.

00:40:21.600 | So you have a person who's completely professionally

00:40:26.880 | not qualified to ask these questions,

00:40:31.000 | wanting to know, well, how does your theory

00:40:34.720 | solve new problems?

00:40:35.920 | And like, well, in the case of the Dirac equation,

00:40:38.240 | well, tell me about that, I don't know what that is.

00:40:40.120 | So then the point is, okay, I got it.

00:40:43.120 | You're not even caught up minimally to where we are now,

00:40:47.160 | and that's not a knock on you, almost nobody is.

00:40:50.640 | But then how does it become my job

00:40:53.200 | to digest what has been available for like over 90 years?

00:40:58.200 | - Well, to me, the open question is

00:41:02.120 | whether what's been available for over 90 years

00:41:04.440 | can be, there could be a blueprint of a journey

00:41:09.440 | that one takes to understand it, not to--

00:41:13.640 | - Oh, I wanna do that with you.

00:41:15.040 | And one of the things I think

00:41:17.080 | I've been relatively successful at, for example,

00:41:19.760 | when you ask other people what gauge theory is,

00:41:23.860 | you get these very confusing responses.

00:41:26.560 | And my response is much simpler.

00:41:28.000 | It's, oh, it's a theory of differentiation,

00:41:31.160 | where when you calculate the instantaneous rise over run,

00:41:34.560 | you measure the rise not from a flat horizontal,

00:41:37.500 | but from a custom endogenous reference level.

00:41:40.060 | What do you mean by that?

00:41:42.360 | It's like, okay, and then I do this thing with Mount Everest,

00:41:44.840 | which is, Mount Everest is how high?

00:41:47.480 | Then they give the height.

00:41:48.320 | I say, above what?

00:41:49.160 | Then they say sea level.

00:41:50.120 | And I say, which sea is that in Nepal?

00:41:52.760 | They're like, oh, I guess there isn't a sea

00:41:53.960 | 'cause it's landlocked.

00:41:54.880 | It's like, okay, well, what do you mean by sea level?

00:41:57.080 | Oh, there's this thing called the geoid I'd never heard of.

00:41:59.720 | Oh, that's the reference level.

00:42:01.320 | That's a custom reference level that we imported.

00:42:04.640 | So all sorts of people have remembered

00:42:08.220 | the exact height of Mount Everest

00:42:10.280 | without ever knowing what it's a height from.

00:42:12.800 | Well, in this case, in gauge theory,

00:42:16.340 | there's a hidden reference level

00:42:17.840 | where you measure the rise in rise over run

00:42:20.440 | to give the slope of a line.

00:42:22.000 | What if you have different concepts

00:42:27.080 | of where that rise should be measured from

00:42:30.080 | that vary within the theory,

00:42:31.320 | that are endogenous to the theory?

00:42:33.480 | That's what gauge theory is.

00:42:34.880 | Okay, we have a video here, right?

00:42:37.680 | - Yeah. - Okay.

00:42:39.280 | I'm gonna use my phone.

00:42:40.440 | If I wanna measure my hand and its slope,

00:42:46.120 | this is my attempt to measure it using standard calculus.

00:42:49.880 | In other words, the reference level is apparently flat,

00:42:52.800 | and I measure the rise above that phone using my hand, okay?

00:42:57.760 | If I wanna use gauge theory, it means I can do this,

00:43:00.840 | or I can do that, or I can do this, or I can do this,

00:43:03.640 | or I could do what I did from the beginning, okay?

00:43:06.840 | At some level, that's what gauge theory is.

00:43:09.440 | Now, that is an act.

00:43:10.280 | Now, I've never heard anyone describe it that way.

00:43:13.960 | So while the community may say, well, who is this guy?

00:43:16.160 | And why does he have the right to talk in public?

00:43:18.160 | I'm waiting for somebody to jump out of the woodwork

00:43:20.760 | and say, you know Eric's whole shtick

00:43:23.120 | about rulers and protractors leading to a derivative.

00:43:27.240 | Derivatives are measured as rise over run

00:43:29.080 | above a reference level.

00:43:29.920 | The reference level's not fit to get.

00:43:31.080 | Like, I go through this whole shtick

00:43:32.680 | in order to make it accessible.

00:43:34.280 | I've never heard anyone say it.

00:43:35.840 | I'm trying to make, Prometheus would like to discuss fire

00:43:40.120 | with everybody else.

00:43:41.320 | All right, I'm gonna just say one thing

00:43:44.120 | to close out the earlier line,

00:43:45.760 | which is what I think we should have continued with.

00:43:48.520 | When you take the naturally occurring spinners,

00:43:51.880 | the unadorned spinners, the naked spinners,

00:43:54.640 | not on this 14-dimensional manifold,

00:43:58.860 | but on something very closely tied to it,

00:44:01.420 | which I've called the chimeric tangent bundle,

00:44:04.280 | that is the object which stands in

00:44:07.920 | for the thing that should have had length and angle on it,

00:44:10.040 | but just missed, okay?

00:44:11.500 | When you take that object and you form spinners on that,

00:44:15.800 | and you don't adorn them,

00:44:16.920 | so you're still in the single origin story,

00:44:19.160 | you get very large spinorial objects

00:44:23.480 | upstairs on this 14-dimensional world, Y14,

00:44:27.720 | which is part of the observers.

00:44:29.680 | When you pull that information back from Y14 down to X4,

00:44:34.680 | it miraculously looks like the adorned spinners,

00:44:42.820 | the festooned spinners,

00:44:45.200 | the spinners that we play with in ordinary reality.

00:44:49.800 | In other words, the 14-dimensional world

00:44:52.640 | looks like a four-dimensional world

00:44:54.640 | plus a 10-dimensional complement.

00:44:57.240 | So 10 plus four equals 14.

00:44:59.540 | That 10-dimensional complement,

00:45:01.200 | which is called a normal bundle,

00:45:03.640 | generates spin properties, internal quantum numbers,

00:45:06.960 | that look like the things

00:45:08.720 | that give our particles personality,

00:45:10.960 | that make, let's say, up quarks and down quarks

00:45:15.040 | charged by negative 1/3 or plus 2/3,

00:45:19.480 | that kind of stuff, or whether or not

00:45:21.400 | some quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not.

00:45:27.720 | So the X4 generates Y14.

00:45:32.320 | Y14 generates something called the chimeric tangent bundle.

00:45:35.560 | Chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners.

00:45:38.680 | The unadorned spinners get pulled back from 14 down to four,

00:45:42.600 | where they look like adorned spinners.

00:45:45.320 | And we have the right number of them.

00:45:47.360 | You thought you needed three.

00:45:48.720 | You only got two.

00:45:50.520 | But then something else that you'd never seen before

00:45:52.880 | broke apart on this journey,

00:45:55.120 | and it broke into another copy of the thing

00:45:57.720 | that you already have two copies of.

00:45:59.440 | One piece of that thing broke off.

00:46:01.820 | So now you have two generations

00:46:03.640 | plus an imposter third generation,

00:46:05.640 | which is, I don't know why we never talk

00:46:08.360 | about this possibility in regular physics.

00:46:10.640 | And then you've got a bunch of stuff that we haven't seen,

00:46:12.560 | which has descriptions.

00:46:14.240 | So people always say,

00:46:15.080 | does it make any falsifiable predictions?

00:46:16.920 | Yes, it does.

00:46:17.760 | It says that the matter that you should be seeing next

00:46:23.600 | has particular properties that can be read off.

00:46:26.060 | - Like?

00:46:28.160 | - Like weak isospin, weak hypercharge,

00:46:30.960 | like the responsiveness to the strong force.

00:46:33.920 | The one I can't tell you

00:46:34.840 | is what energy scale it would happen at.

00:46:36.840 | - So you can't say if those characteristics

00:46:41.840 | can be detected with the current--

00:46:43.960 | - It may be that somebody else can.

00:46:45.360 | I'm not a physicist.

00:46:47.240 | I'm not a quantum field theorist.

00:46:48.520 | I can't, I don't know how you would do that.

00:46:51.880 | - The hope for me is that there's some simple

00:46:55.800 | explanations for all of it.

00:46:58.880 | - Lex, should we have a drink?

00:47:00.360 | - You're having fun.

00:47:02.640 | - No, I'm trying to have fun with you.

00:47:04.200 | - Yeah, there's a bunch of fun things

00:47:07.040 | to talk about here.

00:47:10.880 | Anyway, that was how I got what I thought you wanted,

00:47:14.040 | which is if you think about the fermions as the artists

00:47:19.040 | and the bosons as the brushes and the paint,

00:47:24.600 | what I told you is that's how we get the artists.

00:47:28.280 | - What are the open questions for you in this?

00:47:32.240 | What are the challenges?

00:47:34.080 | So you're not done.

00:47:35.720 | - Well, there's things that I would like

00:47:37.640 | to have in better order.

00:47:39.480 | So a lot of people will say,

00:47:41.880 | the reason I hesitate on this is I just have

00:47:45.160 | a totally different view than the community.

00:47:47.000 | So for example, I believe that general relativity

00:47:50.520 | began in 1913 with Einstein and Grossman.

00:47:55.000 | Now that was the first of like four major papers

00:47:59.160 | in this line of thinking.

00:48:02.040 | To most physicists, general relativity happened

00:48:05.200 | when Einstein produced a divergence-free gradient,

00:48:10.200 | which turned out to be the gradient

00:48:15.600 | of the so-called Hilbert or Einstein-Hilbert action.

00:48:18.800 | And from my perspective, that wasn't true.

00:48:22.200 | This is that it began when Einstein said,

00:48:24.120 | look, this is about differential geometry

00:48:28.600 | and the final answer is gonna look like a curvature tensor

00:48:32.760 | on one side and matter and energy on the other side.

00:48:36.160 | And that was enough.

00:48:37.360 | And then he published a wrong version of it

00:48:39.920 | where it was the Ricci tensor, not the Einstein tensor.

00:48:42.760 | Then he corrected the Ricci tensor

00:48:45.000 | to make it into the Einstein tensor.

00:48:46.820 | Then he corrected that to add a cosmological constant.

00:48:49.620 | I can't stand that the community thinks in those terms.

00:48:54.680 | There's some things about which,

00:48:57.040 | like there's a question about which contraction do I use?

00:48:59.920 | There's an Einstein contraction,

00:49:01.920 | there's a Ricci contraction.

00:49:03.200 | They both go between the same spaces.

00:49:05.880 | I'm not sure what I should do.

00:49:07.280 | I'm not sure which contraction I should choose.

00:49:10.360 | This is called a Shiab operator

00:49:12.280 | for ship in a bottle in my stuff.

00:49:14.500 | - You have this big platform in many ways

00:49:19.680 | that inspires people's curiosity

00:49:23.640 | about physics and mathematics.

00:49:25.760 | - Right.

00:49:26.580 | - And I'm one of those people.

00:49:30.080 | - Well, great.

00:49:31.920 | - But then you start using a lot of words

00:49:34.400 | that I don't understand.

00:49:35.600 | And I might know them, but I don't understand.

00:49:41.760 | And what's unclear to me,

00:49:43.360 | if I'm supposed to be listening to those words,

00:49:46.280 | or if it's just, if this is one of those technical things

00:49:50.400 | that's intended for a very small community,

00:49:53.900 | or if I'm supposed to actually take those words

00:49:56.240 | and start a multi-year study.

00:50:01.140 | Not a serious study, but the kind of study

00:50:03.620 | when you're interested in learning about machine learning,

00:50:06.900 | for example, or any kind of discipline.

00:50:09.340 | That's where I'm a little bit confused.

00:50:11.300 | So you speak beautifully about ideas.

00:50:14.720 | You often reveal the beauty in geometry.

00:50:18.860 | And I'm unclear in what are the steps I should be taking.

00:50:23.740 | I'm curious, how can I explore?

00:50:27.540 | How can I play with something?

00:50:28.740 | How can I play with these ideas?

00:50:30.540 | - Right.

00:50:31.380 | - And enjoy the beauty of,

00:50:33.220 | not necessarily understanding the depth of a theory

00:50:35.700 | that you're presenting, but start to share in the beauty.

00:50:39.060 | As opposed to sharing and enjoying the beauty

00:50:42.620 | of just the way, the passion with which you speak,

00:50:45.580 | which is in itself fun to listen to,

00:50:50.140 | but also starting to be able to understand

00:50:53.380 | some aspects of this theory that I can enjoy it.

00:50:57.540 | To, and start to build an intuition,

00:51:00.740 | what the heck we're even talking about.

00:51:02.660 | 'Cause you're basically saying we need to throw

00:51:04.500 | a lot of our ideas of views of the universe out.

00:51:09.500 | And I'm trying to find accessible ways in.

00:51:16.180 | - Okay.

00:51:17.020 | - Not in this conversation.

00:51:19.060 | - No, I appreciate that.

00:51:19.900 | So one of the things that I've done

00:51:21.220 | is I've picked on one paragraph from Edward Witten.

00:51:26.220 | And I've said, this is the paragraph.

00:51:28.580 | If I could only take one paragraph with me,

00:51:30.700 | this is the one I'd take.

00:51:31.940 | And it's almost all in prose, not in equations.

00:51:34.340 | And he says, look, this is our knowledge of the universe

00:51:38.060 | at its deepest level.

00:51:39.260 | And he was writing this during the 1980s.

00:51:41.860 | And he has three separate points

00:51:44.140 | that constitute our deepest knowledge.

00:51:46.660 | And those three points refer to equations.

00:51:49.860 | One to the Einstein field equation,

00:51:51.540 | one to the Dirac equation,

00:51:52.900 | and one to the Yang-Mills-Maxwell equation.

00:51:55.820 | Now, one thing I would do is take a look at that paragraph

00:52:00.820 | and say, okay, what do these three lines mean?

00:52:05.020 | Like it's a finite amount of verbiage.

00:52:06.660 | You can write down every word that you don't know.

00:52:09.860 | - Beautiful.

00:52:10.700 | - And you can say, what do I think?

00:52:12.860 | - Done.

00:52:13.700 | - Now, young man.

00:52:15.700 | - Yes.

00:52:16.540 | - There's a beautiful wall in Stony Brook, New York,

00:52:20.740 | built by someone who I know you will interview

00:52:23.420 | named Jim Simons.

00:52:24.580 | And Jim Simons, he's not the artist,

00:52:28.820 | but he's the guy who funded it.

00:52:30.300 | World's greatest hedge fund manager.

00:52:32.260 | And on that wall contain the three equations

00:52:35.420 | that Witten refers to in that paragraph.

00:52:39.420 | And so that is the transmission

00:52:40.980 | from the paragraph or graph to the wall.

00:52:44.580 | Now, that wall needs an owner's manual,

00:52:48.500 | which Roger Penrose has written called "The Road to Reality."

00:52:53.100 | Let's call that the tome.

00:52:55.260 | So this is the subject of the so-called

00:52:57.420 | graph wall tome project that is going on

00:53:01.300 | in our Discord server and our general group

00:53:04.620 | around the portal community,

00:53:06.180 | which is how do you take something that purports

00:53:09.700 | in one paragraph to say what the deepest understanding

00:53:13.260 | man has of the universe in which he lives.

00:53:15.560 | It's memorialized on a wall, which nobody knows about,

00:53:21.460 | which is an incredibly gorgeous piece of art.

00:53:24.880 | And that was written up in a book

00:53:28.060 | which has been written for no man.

00:53:30.660 | Maybe it's for a woman, I don't know.

00:53:33.380 | But no one should be able to read this book

00:53:35.980 | because either you're a professional

00:53:38.500 | and you know a lot of this book,

00:53:39.740 | in which case it's kind of a refresher

00:53:41.340 | to see how Roger thinks about these things.

00:53:43.700 | Or you don't even know that this book

00:53:45.200 | is a self-contained invitation

00:53:48.060 | to understanding our deepest nature.

00:53:50.700 | So I would say find yourself

00:53:52.500 | in the graph wall tome transmission sequence

00:53:55.800 | and join the graph wall tome project if that's of interest.

00:53:59.700 | - Okay, beautiful.

00:54:01.100 | Now just to linger on a little longer,

00:54:03.160 | what kind of journey do you see geometric unity taking?

00:54:06.660 | - I don't know.

00:54:07.580 | I mean, that's the thing is that first of all,

00:54:09.380 | the professional community has to get very angry

00:54:11.460 | and outraged and they have to work through

00:54:13.700 | their feeling that this is nonsense, this is bullshit,

00:54:16.180 | or like, no, wait a minute, this is really cool.

00:54:19.220 | Actually, I need some clarification over here.

00:54:21.080 | So there's gonna be some sort of

00:54:22.660 | weird coming back together process.

00:54:25.540 | - Are you already hearing murmurings of that?

00:54:29.540 | - That's very funny.

00:54:30.420 | Officially, I've seen very little.

00:54:32.120 | - So it's perhaps happening quietly.

00:54:35.860 | - Yeah.

00:54:36.700 | (silence)

00:54:38.860 | (silence)

00:54:41.020 | (silence)

00:54:43.180 | (silence)

00:54:45.340 | (silence)

00:54:47.500 | (silence)

00:54:49.660 | (silence)

00:54:51.820 | (silence)

00:54:53.980 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Geometric Unity - A Theory of Everything (Eric Weinstein) | AI Podcast Clips

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