hello you're queued up to enter the portal but I thought I'd say a few words before

this episode in general when we present science in front of the public we do it in

one of two ways either we talk in an incredibly hand-wavy way about very
speculative ideas like string theory or we have a sort of a corpse of previous
scientific thought that has been specifically arranged for public viewing it's not
really science the way we do science it's kind of a denatured version to make sure
that we don't lose anybody because the public is famously supposed to be squeamish
about anything involving equations abstractions or jargon in this episode we try to
well do something different I'm actually having a conversation with Garrett here
he's updating me on where his thinking has gone with respect to unifying physics
now it's very unusual for anyone to try to unify physics and I have a tremendous
amount of respect for Garrett even though I don't think his theories are going to
work I make no secret of this I'm not saying anything behind his back but he is in
some sense Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena he actually is trying to take on
the general problem of the cosmos and even though I don't think he's succeeding he
has my profound admiration for simply suiting up and trying most people in fact
almost everyone I know does not attempt to do what he is doing and for that he has
my admiration and respect now with that admiration respect comes a desire not to be
mean but to actually push him on his theory because I don't want to see him wasting
his time and I feel that when you're outside of the university system there's
almost no one who takes your research seriously so while there is an aspect of
tongue-in-cheek with respect to us being each other's arch-nemesis there's actually
something quite serious about it I don't necessarily like the path that he's going
down and I don't know that I really believe that he's going to get anywhere
productive but I do think that he's an inspiration to us all simply for trying in
an era where everyone else seems to have given up I hope you enjoyed this episode
and I hope that you understand that it is an experiment I'm trusting you guys to
listen in on something which is much closer to actual science than what usually
presented with I hope you like it you found the portal I'm your host Eric Weinstein
and I'm here today with my arch-nemesis physicist Garrett Lisi Garrett welcome to
the portal thanks for having me on Eric you're a brave man well I would say you're
a brave man coming into the lion's den so thank you for coming by for those who
don't know who you are or what this issue of being arch-nemesis is about what what
could you do to inform our listeners and viewers about who you are and what our
relationship might be all right well we have a many disturbing similarities in that
we did fairly well in school we got our PhDs but then we left academia and but
maintained an interest in fundamental physics and kept pursuing this on our own
however there are some distinctions and that you went into the finance world and I
went into being a surf bum yes that's not that similar also you are you have a PhD
in physics proper whereas I have one in mathematics so I would say advantage Lisi
but then I have one from a more typically powerhouse school you have one from one
that's a little bit off of that main corridor that maybe got up caught up in string
theory and the the fads that propel the field but I think what's been very
interesting to me is that in all of theoretical physics which everyone is quite
interested in you still find people publishing books on quantum theory and all of
the spookiness weirdness and beauty that constitutes theoretical physics it feels
to me that almost no one is pursuing actual theories of everything when we talk
about theories of everything all the time but that the courage to actually put
forward anything that even remotely resembles the theory of everything almost
nobody is willing to do that would you say that that's a fair statement yeah it's a
very first team and the the main reason for that is because it's such a hard
problem that you pretty much have to be a megalomaniac just to tackle it or to
think you have a chance of succeeding at it well I think that's a weird statement
like if you're doing if you're going to throw away your life on issues of
theoretical physics what is it that you would imagine people would think that they
were doing like if you're not going for the brass ring why into that field well I
think that a lot of people in physics are doing the usual thing where they
encounter a problem and try to solve it and try to proceed incrementally and that's
how actually I got wrapped up in this is I identified a problem with electrons in
their description in fundamental physics it was something about it that really I
didn't like it just didn't just didn't feel right to me and I got wrapped up in
solving that you know one aspect of this big picture I didn't go off trying to sync
oh I'm really going to tackle this problem of coming up with a theory of everything
because you you you have to be somewhat of a lunatic to take that on it's like you
know I trying to prove some theorem in mathematics it has been stagnant for
hundreds of years it's just you know you're probably not going to succeed and you'd
probably just be frustrated with the attempt you have to have huge ego to even
think about it right and also there's a lot of discouragement there students are
actively discouraged from tackling such problems because the professors who came
before them and know a little bit more about the field know just how hard it is to
make progress even on small problems and that making progress on a huge one is just
insurmountable so they try to actively discourage their students from from going
into fundamental problems in physics because they they haven't had success
themselves so they're they're trying to be protective of their students that way so
maybe just to set this up and I should say to regular listeners and viewers of the
portal this is intended to be something of a transitional episode so that the
entire podcast is an experiment and you know other other people have shows and
there's a concept of professionalism I don't think that's what we're striving for
here at the portal this is really untested we're going to experiment with our
advertising models we're going to experiment with what the traffic will bear when
it comes to intellectual discussions without spoon-feeding everything to the
audience realizing that some people may get left behind in fact the host may get
left behind we don't know I don't know but no it's quite possible and what we've
done is we've done a series of interviews to begin the podcast to just establish
that we can have conversations that people want to tune into and get great guests
in that chair where people may not have even heard of the person before but
hopefully walk away feeling enriched however that's not really the point of the
podcast the point of the podcast is to explore new territory intellectually and it
may be an academic level outside of traditional channels and it has to do in part
with my belief that we don't really understand how much idea suppression has been
going on for a very long period of time within the standard institutions in fact
I've I've created this thing I've called the disc the distributed ideas suppression
complex and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and
up end and disrupt previous structures so for example I would claim that string
theory which is absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what 1984 yeah since
about then it's about 35 years it artificially consolidated the field around a
complex of ideas that did not have a huge signal coming from experiment you know to
just to try to steal home base I mean to understand that you have to understand the
as I'm sure you do the the culture of particle physics at the time when string
theory started to grow which is you know up until you know up through the 70s there
had been steady experimental results coming in from particle accelerators where it
was like a new particle every week that theorists rafting to really cooperate on as
a community to jump in on try to figure it out and exchange ideas very it was more
than 50s and 6th it was but it continued all the way through the seven and and from
that culture of you know community working together on information that's coming in
a steady stream right you got this culture of like yeah no don't go do the other
thing it's a waste of time you really want to be working on what's hot right
because there's new information coming in all the time and this is where the
culture of string theory started I was also more involved in the in the culture of
John relativity and gravity okay which is a very different culture it's much more
slow-paced you don't have new results coming in all the time everything's very is
much more do I set this up a little bit for our audience and you charity if I do a
poor job in essence the - great idea complexes in fundamental physics not condensed
matter physics or astrophysics but like whatever ground reality physics is is the
general relativistic complex around the ideas of Einstein and then there's the sort
of quantum field theory a complex or the quantum complex around the ideas of Bohr
sort of fair enough and plunk ona I don't mean to slight Dirac and others but just
to keep it simple the children of Einstein and the children of Bohr right and the
the the boring people went into particle physics the boring people well you said
they're the children of Bohr's hahaha okay so so they're so they're in this culture
that's a very rapid fire you know moving moving things along as part of a community
whereas genre relativity the people from the Einstein community
were more exploring different possibilities at their own pace and there is more of
an exploratory culture and that's the culture that turned into loop quantum gravity
so that so first of all I'm just gonna I'm gonna begin arguing with you there to me
yeah the issue was is that Einstein put much more of the general relativistic
picture in place so there was less to do for the descendants of Einstein and
because the quantum was considerably less tied up there was much more work and so
through a system of selective pressures the more successful community in some sense
left fewer descendants and they were less capable because it was less for them to
do and then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains
because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between
theory and experiment that's right okay and and but what happened was that when
they when you think about it as a whole that gravity has to be quantized so there
are two ways of getting there you can either start from Bohr's children and and
quantum field theory and try to get from there to a quantum theory that encompasses
gravity or you can start from the gravitational side in geometry and try to somehow
get quantum mechanics to play nice with this essentially classical geometric theory
and there were two very different approaches and two very different cultures I
still have some disagreements but I don't think I necessarily want to to derail us
so all right so so anyway my the the point I started with was that the the string
theory came out of the particle physics community and when we say string theory we
mean the cultural explosion that happened in 1984 rather than the original string
revolution of let's say vinet Siana which was much earlier okay so that in in the
mid-1980s there was a discovery called the anomaly cancellation where two very
improbable things canceled each other and the theory was suddenly there was a
theory that was given a green light that was highly restrictive as to what could
what could go in that spot and that result the anomaly cancellation gave birth to a
cultural phenomenon which was the sort of takeover of theoretical physics by string
theory right I mean it looks so promising at the time in the 80s I mean they
thought that yes it naturally encompasses gravity and all we need to do is find the
right you know high dimensional manifold to attach to for our strings to vibrate in
and will immediately recover all the properties of the particles of the standard
model we just have to find the right one we'll probably get this done by lunchtime
wrapped up I don't believe that story well they didn't happen that was known I
think that's a even what actually happened in IRAs in college in it during this
period and even though that's the story that I would agree is told inside of the
community yeah I'm not sure that I fully believe it if I go back to my own memory
is something very different happened well it took a while to get everybody on the
bandwagon I think something's still different happened I think that Ed Witten
showed up and that there was one human being he's his own anomaly he wasn't he was
absolutely an anomaly he came to Penn in I don't know whether it was 83 or 84 I
left in 85 and he started talking about what the world was in a way that none of
the physicists could actually follow because he was using ideas from from
differential geometry and from higher mathematics in ways that most of the
community couldn't track he was saying things like the reason we have three copies
of the kind of matter that makes up our world comes from the characteristic numbers
of a six dimensional complex manifold found at every point in space and time and
these things were so mind-blowing I mean if the if our listeners can't exactly
follow it they were in the same shoes as many people in the community there was a
voice that was clearly coming from another planet all right undoubtedly the most
brilliant person I've ever met in my life the one person who continues to make me
tremble when I hear his name or his voice and this person signed on big-time to
string theory in a way that was very coercive and seductive so they even though
that the community understood why he was signing on it was in part Witten's
endorsement that really started to move the needle in my opinion returning sponsor
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Theory unification program the idea that this description of all fundamental
particles and gravity and in our entire universe would come from a model based on
strings vibrating and other higher dimensions I mean that this unification program
has failed the vast majority of the high-energy physics community has been working
on it for over 30 years and they've uh turley failed to deliver on that promise
despite the high hopes and promises well and this has to do and again we can sort
of do a small synopsis of the field the idea was the original hopes had been built
around an idealized point particle concept where hard little balls were kind of the
naive model of particles then you had to smear them out and do waves on waves from
that point particle concept called second quantization or quantum field theory and
string theory said no the fundamental unit should never have been a hard little
ball to begin with it should have been modelled by something that was and as if
string obviously and it wasn't string made out of atoms it was some sort of
mathematical version of right it's an abstract mathematical description of a
surface inside another surface essentially right and so that this this thing had a
peculiar appeal to the children of Bohr that was not that appealing to the children
of Einstein would that be a fair description of it that it is for pretty subtle
reasons specifically anomaly cancellation and also the ability to produce what
appeared to be particle excitations within from the string model right now that
thing that sudden shift in the community from regular quantum field theory from a
plurality of different approaches whether some of them had names like Technicolor
or grand unification or supersymmetry all of this seemed to get subsumed in this I
don't know if add what it was hard to click it giant rolling what kind of married
to Marcy baller it's just collecting everything that it touches and making it part
of itself that's right and in fact the claim was if we find something that isn't
strain theory we'll just find some way of including it and call it string theory
right so this was a bizarre you know there was it was a sociological phenomena it
was a we would say the political economy of science was involved where who could
get a job for their students whether or not the newspapers were gonna challenge
this or go along with it so you had reporters who had no idea what was going on
publishing these glowing pieces about the string theorists and how they were gonna
wrap it all up yeah and in essence you know we have this concept in evolutionary
theory called interference competition where one animal will attempt to out-compete
the other by keeping it away from like a watering hole so that nobody else could
afford to get nourished because the string theorists we're saying all the smart
people are in string theory it's the only game in town was the famous phrase I
certainly encountered a lack of nourishment when I graduated in the 90s and
I wasn't interested in strings but I was interested in high energy physics well I
think almost everybody was in that position that that is really the Founding crime
for me in the string revolution it was the desire to say that everyone who is not
part of us as an idiot yeah yeah that's above and beyond normal physicist arrogance
above and beyond normal physicist arrogance and I want to say also why I think I'm
so focused on theoretical physics as the most important endeavor that humans are
engaged with I think there are three components to it and just see whether whether
it resonates with you one is that this is the closest we get responsibly to asking
why are we here what is it that we're made of it is the thing that would best
substitute for a religion if you were able to understand what it was the second
thing is is that it appears to be the secret powering our economy that very few
people have really fully understood it gave us the World Wide Web the semiconductor
the electron shells the generated chemistry nuclear power nuclear power nuclear
weapons communications technology electromagnetic you know Wi-Fi what have you if
you want it invented the theoretical physics more or less created molecular biology
that's probably a bit of a stretch but the other certainly aren't so yeah if you
look at the RNA tie club you know the people and it word teller Fineman crick
people trained in physics so in this telling of the tale its second major feature
of importance is that it sort of created our modern economy and I don't think
people have understood the extent to which all of these things for you know the
Webb semiconductors and even molecular biology really came out of theoretical
physics because of the third issue which is I think even though I'm a mathematician
or trained in mathematics I could make a pretty decent argument that this was the
world's most impressive intellectual community ever it certainly it seems to
attract some of the greatest minds well I would say I would go even farther I would
say that because of the interplay between the most beautiful mathematics even
according to mathematical standards and experimental discipline so you have this
this thing that's forcing you to go back and forth between the purest of pure
theory and the the dirt and intuition and messiness of experiment I don't think
anything else had that property so that it wasn't necessarily even that it just
attracted the best people but it it actually rewarded human intellectual
achievement at like no other subject ever all right it's also on touching on
something that's a little bit different socially which is the type of people who
are attracted to really you know hard problems in fundamental physics and and
modeling and really trying to get as you say the source code of the universe these
often aren't very skilled people people they're not very socially oriented people
for the most part some are some aren't yeah but for for the real intellectual
heavy-hitters you're talking about people who sort of I mean walk among us as
aliens you're talking about think that they're not extremely social they're not
very focused on issues with other human beings and physics this understanding of
our universe through mathematics is really otherworldly pursuit right it's not like
law where laws are made up by humans and discussed in front of humans compat in
front of humans it's I mean that has its own intricacies and difficulties and
puzzles but theoretical physics you're getting you're working at something that's
not related to humans directly I mean any intelligent beings in this universe that
advanced to a certain state are gonna be involved in studying physics and it's
gonna be the same physics right with some of the same mathematics and the same
mathematical tools it's it's something that exists independent of humanity so if
you're if you're not a huge fan of human beings and but you you really like puzzles
and you're good at math physics is very attractive because it's a it's a it's the
greatest puzzle there is in our universe and it exists completely independent of
humanity and yet humans would be able to work on it and make progress which is
frickin amazing it's amazing the degree to which humans have understood our reality
and and I think we're getting close to having a complete three classes of greatest
puzzles I mean if I could I could tell a story that biology is the greatest puzzle
because now it without something to care about the universe in which it lives this
is all completely sterile to begin with and I can also make a different case for
mathematics which is that physics is but one example of a universe we don't know if
there are other universes that can could be concerned so so biology I mean it's
it's I I agree it's intricate and and it can be a pure pursuit but it's not pure in
the sense that so much of the foundations of biology are somewhat arbitrary like
whether it you know DNA helixes gonna spiral to the left or the right and and and
what its chemical components are precisely that might vary other planets you know
other civilizations by oh geez give me different our next sponsor is wine access
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that with skill shape make a decent argument that systems of selective pressures as
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have carbon baseline there will be convergent evolution of course sure but but the
details will be slightly different so if you're studying biology by the time you
get up to something like cells or animals it's gonna be wildly different in
different different places in the in the galaxy alright whereas whereas physics is
the same everywhere okay it's it's independent of biology and it's independent of
humanity and it's III think and then when you go to mathematics mathematics the
pursuit of mathematics like how things get proved and how structures get built up
through axioms that are then proved it's a it's a larger playing field than physics
so within that huge arena of possible mathematical structures okay we see appear to
live in one mathematical structure so I mean a physicist only has to focus on the
the mathematics that we that is reality and I by the way sure your intuition then
in a certain sense this is the best and most interesting place to play in part
because there's this very weird feature that we've seemingly unearthed about the
physical universe which is that it unexpectedly has this bizarrely good taste yeah
about what to care about within it's as if you let it loose in the mathematical
jewelry store in it it selects only the finest pieces yeah yeah and we have to
wonder if that's you know is that just our human take on it because our human
aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world in the universe so is it that I
mean Douglas Adams described the anthropic principle as a puddle of water right and
thinking it's like wow this this this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my
shape alright isn't it wonderful how it just fits me so perfectly and it's so
comfortable here just like it was made for me well it's like no the puddle got
there and filled the shape of the the hole I mean the water got there and filled
that shape and as humans we ended up here and we filled this niche and our
aesthetic taste was shaped by what's around us including the the mathematics that
underlies the physics of this universe and so when we look at the universe you
might say oh no maybe it's just our tastes evolved within this universe so this is
why we find physics aesthetically pleasing do you actually believe what you're
saying right now no I think it's wrong I mean I think this is so powered Lee I
know I agree and that and right like I have to wonder about it I have to I mean I
understand every lip service you know that's not just lip service I think about
this I mean I think I mean is it really my proclivities have been shaped by my
environment in order to think this because I have to question everything all the
time sure mostly cuz I don't talk to enough other people but but also it's because
you know yeah when you're questioning things and you're delving with fundamental
building blocks you want to make sure as you build things up that you have things
right and in looking at the fundamental Pittock pieces of physics you know the
fundamental mathematical physics I really think that the mathematical pieces as you
say are the ones that are extraordinarily beautiful and it's not just my aesthetic
taste has been shaped by evolution that causes me to think that I really think
objectively these are very pretty mathematical objects being underlying our
physical reality yeah I think we just lack the courage to say what this appears to
be which is there is something that we do not understand about the universe in
which it is selected for the most mysterious most beautiful stuff with which to
write what we I mean with the closest thing we have to source code we don't we're
not at the source code yet we're not quite at that layer right maybe I smell it
can't you well I mean yes and no feels close I think it's almost provably close but
but the there's a caveat to that which is I think we're almost at the end of this
chapter and it does feel like it could easily be the final chapter and by the way
we should be we should clarify that when we see when we talk about a theory of
everything we don't mean a theory that once understood could explain everything you
see in your daily universe right we may be still gonna be a mystery of course oh
god you really did that of course I did but yeah nobody's well form a single-file
line there's evidence I mean there in our in our understanding of physics as we've
learned more particles yeah the fundamental particles we've learned about appear to
be filling out a complete set I mean we've you know when you when you predict that
a towel quark should exist all right know that a lepton should exist yeah or you
figure out that you know it completes this that there's this third generation it's
complete right so we seem to be completing our set a fundamental part of three sets
of Lego yeah right the first generation second generation a third generation of
matter and all the pieces in each generation are mirrored in the other two
generations just a different mass scales so far that's what it looks like well it's
not just so far it's like whether we have we have reasons to know that there aren't
there aren't more from from how the Big Bang sent matter loose in the universe we
know that there aren't more than three generations up there certain very high
energy well we've known a lot of things Garrett that have turned out to be wrong
well but this is really filling out a pretty complete pattern I don't dispute but I
just accept except for this minor point of dark matter still being completely
unknown for the most part yeah I mean I guess my discomfort with this comes from
the fact that knowing the history I know how we've been wronged and I also know how
we haven't had the courage of our convictions and one of the things that really you
know occupies my mind is why we're not more definite about things that I think we
have very good good reason to believe and we're so definite about things that sort
of scare me where we say I know that it can't be other than this and yet it has
we've been we've been shown up multiple times that we've got two different
directives telling us to be both more confident and more humble right the thing
that has affected both both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of
something called spinners at the core of our understanding of matter do you want to
say a little bit about what that is Wyatt you think it's affected you and and and
me as well and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional and intellectual impact
on the community right I mean when you're basically when physicists more or less
completed that what's called the standard model of particle physics right you have
you have the the known forces in physics like the electromagnetic force the weak
force and the strong force as well as the force of gravity and then you have the
the matter particles which are electrons and quarks and neutrinos and and other
generations of these that form you know what are called the fermions okay and these
are called the matter particles and then they have mass because of the interaction
with the Higgs boson right which is sort of himbut what's not going to make sense
to people it's not alright but anyway the the force particles behave differently as
elementary particles under rotations than the matter particles all right so these
matter particles they you have to basically rotate them 720 degrees to return them
to their original state all right where's most objects you rotate it and you rotate
it 360 degrees and get back to where you started all right but spinners are
different right and they they behave in a very specific way and there's a there's a
very specific way of describing them mathematically but it's described in an
unusual way it's described as a as a column of complex numbers or a column matrix
if you like that's acted on by a rotation matrix that tells you specifically how
these particles transform under rotation honestly that wouldn't make any sense to
me and I don't think I can help all of my audience together this is the thing so so
this is the way physicists are introduced to a description of electrons well look I
just try to play with something well we're talking about this is this way why you
can't can I hand it off to you in about 10 seconds no you finish it out all right
so I found this description to be incredibly unsatisfying all right because the
rest of physics is not described this way right you don't introduce a fundamental
field that transforms a certain way under rotations that's not how you know why
would the universe do that it's not elegant it's not it's not geometric all right
it seems sort of arbitrary why would the universe have spinners in it well it turns
out that because if you if you describe Kjell relativity as curving four-
dimensional space-time describe gravity and you just tribe forces as gauge fields
right with both of those they're very geometric descriptions they're very elegant
mathematically when you scribe physically the fermions as spinners it looks like a
kludge it just it doesn't fit with the other theories but that's why I love physics
to solve this problem I wanted to know why spinners geometrically and no one else
was interested in the problem no one else thought it was a problem they're like
yeah they transform this way and and maybe it comes from strings and that's all you
get and it's like no that's totally unsatisfying if gravity is described
geometrically and are all our other forces described geometrically the universe is
just one thing it's right there in the name I mean yoona is one verse is turning we
have we have this one turning thing we call the universe and it's just one
mathematical object and if this if we have different particles they have to be
aspects of this one mathematical object why would this mathematical object have
spinners as an aspect of them it was a huge mystery to me I want to go solve it no
one else even acknowledged it was a problem and you also tackled this this also
bothered you well there was a so this is the very difficult part of what the portal
is supposed to be and I have the feeling that we've probably left a lot of our
listeners behind but I've I've said that we're going to have to take some risks and
this is going to be one of them so the way I see it some some of our listeners are
also viewers right and we have in studio these beautiful Klein bottles from Acme
Klein bottle and cliff Stoll out of Oakland I guess these objects that I'm holding
up or you can look up Klein bottles on the on the web have this very odd property
that they are covered if you will by the surface of a doughnut if the surface of
the doughnut wraps around this object twice and we call this a double cover now the
idea that you have some very strange object with no inside and outside called a
Klein bottle but that it's wrapped twice by some object which has different
properties namely the surface of a doughnut called a torus the rotations of our
three-dimensional space bizarrely have some object that covers them twice just as a
doughnut covers a Klein model twice so when we talk this crazy language about you
have to rotate an object more than 360 degrees for it to come back to itself this
is somewhat of garbage language that we've taught people to understand we're we're
not really showing them what's behind the curtain we're not showing them that there
are the rotations of a rigid three-dimensional space and then there's this thing
that covers those rotations twice called the spin group and that spin group is the
thing that has the property that it acts on these things called spinners so this is
a hidden level of structure that you would not know was there just from three-
dimensional space there's some secret trapped in three-dimensional space that is
very well hidden and if we weren't at a very high level of mathematics or physics
you would never know that spinners even exist to play with right I mean it comes
out of representation theory but that once again that's a fairly high level of
mathematics you have to get to to even see that these things exist and for all of
the other basic kinds of symmetries we don't have these
hidden representations we don't have these hidden spaces that have these bizarre
properties it's only for these things called orthogonal groups so it's a very
special property of real Euclidean rigid space that spinners are there to be found
and not only does nature find them she bases all of matter around the hidden object
that can't easily be seen or deduced which is a total mind job right and the math
community has in fact sort of split between people who think hey we can describe
these things mathematically so our work is done versus other people who believe
there's something about spinners that just it continues to surprise us we don't
understand where they came from there a hidden feature of the universe and they
keep giving in this very mysterious fashion yeah and the most of the general
relativists who came at this problem um just would not want to touch it because
it's too far into them and the people came into it from the particle physics side
thought it wasn't a problem it's they Trent it's this field transforms a certain
way it seems perfectly well described that doesn't this doesn't make sense to me at
all so it didn't make sense to me either argument as to why this is a real really
serious problem if I take two kinds of thing that might one might hope to find in
the universe an electron and a photon okay so the idea is that I've got stuff that
orbits around atomic nuclei and I've got light and it's relatives that carry the
electromagnetic force in the photon if I don't know how to measure length and angle
I can still talk about the objects that are photons we call them spin one particles
but if I don't have length and angle I don't have any way of talking about spinners
in other words if there isn't a ruler and a protractor which is effectively what
Einstein used to define space-time I don't have an ability to talk about spinners
and that's a big problem because if you're a problem it's a huge clue it says the
antennas have to be intimately related to gravity and general relativity and
gravity so spinners are over on the quantum side of the equation all right the
quanta in the children of Bohr it's really more their object than the children of
Einsteins the children of Bohr claim we have to quantize gravity and make
everything quantum so it's sort of an imperial belief that the people who study the
standard model should extend their techniques to cover gravity so that all can be
won yet if it turns out that they're we don't know how to measure length and angle
between measurements because in quantum theory you get something very different
when when things wouldn't when a field is propagating versus when it's measured all
of the probabilistic stuff we talk about is happening when there's a quantum
measurement if you don't know where length and angle are while something is
propagating then you don't even know where where the electrons can be a disturbance
if electrons are waves they have to be waves in some kind of a sea you know with
photons that you can't tell exactly where the wave is but you know where the sea is
in the case of electrons if you don't know where the the metric is you can't even
say where the sea is that the electron would be a wave in that's a very convoluted
thing but it's a big difference yeah and it's I mean I can almost describe it in
extremely simple terms which is most people most physicists who think about it
think of gravitational charge as being mass but gravitational charge is really spin
well you we're getting pretty we're getting pretty far afield all right so to speak
so to speak so let's imagine that maybe our listeners haven't understood exactly
what we're saying but that there is some special problem about spinners and have
how they're tied to the structure of space-time that is different where you can
describe things like photons in some sense without knowing how length and angle are
measured whereas length and angle are essential if you're ever going to talk about
spinners now you and I have two very different points of view and the reason that
that I consider you an arch-nemesis is that I think your theory based on e85 tune I
to the shift your approach to this is to say let's start out with some object that
is mathematically distinguished and very peculiar effectively like a platypus of
the mathematical world and let's try to distill from this thing that has to exist
for reasons of logical necessity and as it may be the most complicated naturally
occurring object arguably that you could pick and let's find the richness of our
natural world as distilled from this bizarre freakish occurrence in the laws of
mathematical necessity is that a fair telling um from a top-down perspective it is
but the way I got there is by describing spinners and seeing that spinners is part
of this one beautiful mathematical object naturally and it's it's unique to the
exceptional League groups to to these this class the small class of objects when
you say exceptionally groups what you mean is out of high continuous symmetries
that only occur once that they don't fall into some regular pattern right okay and
and spinners are naturally a part of their geometry and there and there and there
their intricate beautiful objects they have spinners naturally as part of their
geometry and that if you dissect them you can see all the other parts necessary to
particle physics and gravity and this was just stunning to me and at this point I'm
like alright I've built up from the ground up from from particle physics and from
gravity and from spinners I've built the structure up in seeing how it's all
interconnected and I found that they're all part of this small class of
mathematical objects that are that are unique in their intricacy and beauty for
finite dimensional objects and that's why now I appear to have adopted more of a
top-down view where it seems like oh I started with this pretty object I said oh
look it explains everything but it's it's nowhere near like that how I actually got
to there all right the truth is I'm building up and the truth is the next object is
going to be higher dimensional objects that include EI Tyco this one as a subgroup
so the way I'm hearing you Garrett and again you know this is like one of the most
obscure I was gonna be happy to talk about well but I'm trying to we're trying to
describe this I would like to describe this a little bit as as if we were taking
somebody to an opera in a foreign language so that they can follow the plot even
though they can't follow line by line okay the way I see what you're saying is is
that there is a usual kind of symmetry which we would associate with bosons that is
the force particles of the universe and what makes these very strange objects that
you've you've referred to as in referring to exceptional ly groups is that you
appear to take something from the fermionic universe that is this spin oriole
universe where the spinners come from and you adjoin it in some sense to the
bosonic to get more symmetries yes yeah that's very clear okay there's a huge
problem with the strategy we'll wait but this but you're forgetting the part where
this structure exists as part of these exceptional object or I'm not you've
correctly described how these objects occur in nature that there is some regular
kind of typical symmetry Abo's onyx Emma tree then you you take some of these
spinners that are related to that symmetry and you fuse them together to get an
even more beautiful weird symmetric object but the problem with that strategy is is
that we know that nature has these two very different recipes for how she wants to
treat these things quantum mechanically right one of them goes into the name of
bosanna Kuan quantization and the other sort of goes under the name sometimes of
you know berezin theory right and anti commuting numbers number members were a
times B times a parallel totally different treatment and the way you've done it
you've really taken the fermions that is the matter part the the spinners that
we've been discussing you've lumped them together with the bosons and now they're
fused in a way that it's going to be almost impossible to treat these spinners in a
manner befitting fermionic quantization ya know it's it's it's very straightforward
though the the fermions just end up being along directions orthogonal to space-time
I don't see that that actually works I mean this is this is my great about my
criticisms of your theory which we've known each other now for 11 years and this is
the basis of our antagonism is that on the one hand you ingeniously saw and give
you your credit that he ate the largest of these objects at 248 dimension behemoths
carried some numerology surrounding three copies of The Spinners that are present
which looked in some sense could be confused for maybe related to three copies of
men is about that hand-wavy yeah okay so all the honor to you that's not an obvious
feature most people who barely know what the exceptionally groups are and most of
them don't know that it has to do with this property called tri ality okay that was
that was true but there really wasn't in my opinion enough room to pack the
particles that we currently see into this group structure with three generations
that was one issue second of all because of the unit of the particular way in which
bosons and fermions matter enforce were fused together it really pushed everything
towards the bosonic side that is the force side of the equation so you're gonna now
have to be in some kind of technical debt where you would have to figure out how to
get the fermions back into a matter framework because you would actually push them
too far through unification into a union with force that was another basic concern
and my last concern was that because of the properties of this object you didn't
have any room for what we call chirality in which
the universe that we've seen so far appears to have a left-right asymmetry to it
it's as if it has a beauty mark and these the any object that you derive from a 8
is gonna be very hard to get it to have a beauty mark because II 8 doesn't have a
beauty mark itself so these were three things that you're going to have to pay back
right if you were going to connect this to the world that we see and I that might
yeah irritation with you was is that I brought this up with you in 2000 and you
remind me 2008 not 2009 when we met at the Perimeter Institute and I tried to warn
you about these things I felt like you never took me serious no I did take you
seriously I've taken all these problems seriously and they're discussed in
subsequent work and the way I've been resolving them is by tackling a larger
unspoken problem which is how to have a quantum description of this sort of
geometry all right because our universe is a quantum universe and EA tis a finite
dimensional object and you have to have multiple states multiple numbers of
particles be able to occupy every state so if you have a full quantum description
of a theory you need an infinite dimensional geometry to do it well I always
thought your your goal was to take a finite object and then take waves on that
finite object to create something that was going to be infinite dimensional I
didn't see that it's a problem but that's not good enough say more because just-
just-just when you talk about waves on geometric object those act as different
representations mathematically this is a Peter Wilde theorem but when you when you
do that that's not enough to give you all the structure you need for quantum field
theory you really need a fundamentally infinite dimensional geometric object to
describe quantum field theory and and this and and by looking at what sort of
objects you need that include exceptional lis groups but are infinite dimensional
geometries that can correspond to quantum field theory that's how you tackle the
three problems you discussed you you yet you have you can have more space to handle
the three generations of particles you can have the anti commuting fermions in them
so that they behave like from yan should like matter particles should and it's also
you know large enough to give you the sort of dynamics you need for quantum field
theory so that's why I've I've in the intervening ten years since we've had a deep
discussion about this I've now started looking at generalized infinite dimensional
geometries which are general infinite dimensional generalizations of Li grips which
at which solve these problems and that's that's why I've been really believe that
you've solved these problems I think I have a really good description that goes a
long way here's the thing if I just think about where we are with the standard
model right you've got four dimensions of space and time right then you've got an
extra eight dimensions coming from something called su-33 dimensions from something
called su 2 and one extra dimension coming from something called u1 that's the
basic data right that occurs and gravity people leave out you used to put in six
dimensions for something called spin three one okay but the point is I can add
those all up and I'm gonna get some number probably you know in 20 s of dimension
20 some odd dimensions whatever that finite thing generates the infinite
dimensional world of quantum field theory but quantum field theory there we have a
way of mapping between those the base geometry and then going to quantum field
theory right then you have Fox Base right and you have occupation numbers for all
the different possible States do it my point is you're working on a problem that
has certain foreseeable problems as part of the challenge and unlike your
detractors from the more standard community I'm not I'm not telling you that you're
dead on arrival just because certain problems can be seen that would be unfair and
then by the way that's what you know there's lots of problems that can be seen from
the string theory community where let's say you know the the number of dimensions
it wants to play and it doesn't seem to be the right number or that they thought
there were only a finite number of theories it turns out that there's a continuum
of theories or the vast majority come out with right and I get very irritated that
somehow the string theory community is entitled to make all these mistakes and
anybody outside if they say one wrong thing or one seemingly wrong thing they're
excommunicated it's a ridiculous standard okay that's not what I'm trying to do to
you I'm trying to say something very different which is you're going to be up
against the fact that if your initial data comes from this most beautiful and most
bizarre of all objects he ate and that doesn't contain as I said I'm now work it's
generalizations to infinite dimensions but there's an issue of intellectual check-
kiting like I don't mind the idea that you recognize the debts that you're in and
then you say I think I have a way of getting this thing to close off right but
there is a question of well now that you've recognized am i right I mean am i right
yeah yeah right i right that the issues that I raised with you initially turned out
to be really serious problem of course I mean and you did that was that back then
yeah that I did they were there in the paper there in the original paper saying
that the the description of three generations was very hand wavy and unsatisfactory
that's in the original paper okay my recollection was that when I tried to explain
to you why people were going to have the objection about the two different
quantization schemes that that was not handled correctly right I handled that in a
paper in 2010 or so okay so that cosmology all right that was one of the the issue
yeah then there's gonna be an issue that you weren't able to bring the left-right
asymmetry out of the initial data there wasn't enough and that was a fair
description absolutely okay and then you're saying that the I ceded to you that you
were making a connection between the mysterious appearance of three copies of
matter and something called try ality which was not manifest obviously inside of eh
but to the few people who actually care about this structure it it definitely is
there in a very profound way it relates to rotations in hate dimensional spaces yes
but you also haven't taken an interest in what is eight if not the the wellspring
for the source code of the universe like if it isn't the unit I think it's a piece
of it but I'm not religious Eric I mean I'm I'm gonna explore whatever seems most
promising to explore okay and well have you changed your your sense of the status
of EI tis a candidate for the unified theory in the fashion that you were
originally seeing absolutely you have changed your yes can you talk about that
right so it was in tackling quantum field theory and how to describe it
geometrically which as far as I know nobody has done I mean whenever whenever you
start with as you say you want an su 2 su 3 and you go through this quantization
procedure for its field so you don't filter or if you're dealing with strings right
you have this model of vibrating strings and higher dimensions then you go through
this quantization procedure to get a quantum quantum theory of strings okay right
we have we physicists have this toolkit for quantizing things but that's utterly
the wrong way to look at reality if if the universe is just one thing which it is
then it's one mathematical object I mean you're making a point that is very well
understood I believe in the right standard theoretical physics community which is
that if the world starts off as quantum right you should talk about classical izing
pieces of it rather than quantizing the classical pieces that appear to exist yeah
that's exactly right so so what's a quantum geometric object look like it's in you
know with with all these infinite dimensional Fox space and the creation and
annihilation of elementary particles people possible people at home won't know what
a fox bases box space is effectively where the states of the system can live when
you have multiple particles in a situation and you can change the number of
particles that you have just the way a photon can break into an electron and a
positron pair that would be possible in a fox based not possible in a simpler
quantum so that's right so effectively a fox base is just a large place to play
where the number of particles in the system can change up to infinity keep going so
in order to describe this as one geometric object you're stuck with a generalized
Li group infinite dimensional generalize Li group yes and in order to describe
spinners it's going to be an exceptional generalize Li group yeah I don't think I
don't think you're adding anything I think that the problem here is is that ei t'
is an exceptionally beautiful exceptionally interesting object it did have the
properties that you were talking about and then it unifies standard symmetries with
these spinners to form new symmetries that's right what it's not only inadequate it
would push them into a universe of pure force rather than a universe divided
between force and matter you're actually the problem is is the kind of unification
it would create would be completely force unification with an absence of metod
you'd be dragging matter if you will spinner you're focusing on a problem that that
that was you know they're solved in a paper in 2010 but it's very simply that
fermions are orthogonal to space-time whereas you know the force fields of boson
fields are a long space-time in the same way the the same way if you have to force
fields that are along space-time but in different directions they would anti
commute right so you're doing is you're using space-time if you will which is again
kind of a classical
einsteinium concept to break apart a unified system which was the intention in
unification to begin with and then you're going to try to treat these two things
naturally according to two totally different prescriptions that's like you're
violating I mean in some sense any kind of naturality that you just picked up in
the unification to begin with um in a sense yeah but the symmetry has to break
somehow does it do it and in natural I mean this doesn't feel this feels we know it
allows it it doesn't seem completely natural but it does allow it well but the
whole point of the thing I thought was to take the naturality and what we had
understood about the nature of these exceptional objects and to say hey these
things actually unify beautifully inside of these very unusual elegant mathematical
structures they do but it was it was too small as you said it was too small because
it didn't correctly contain three generations of matter and because it can't
correctly portray quantum field theory but once you go to the larger general Eisley
groups it can well you know if this was a start-up what you're saying is that the
business is going great but it's just run out of money and I needed a fresh
intellectual check its round be funding Series B I see R is a cash flow pause not
yet I mean put the paper out yeah okay so the there's I mean I look it's not a
question that I I need to see the paper or that you're not allowed to take out more
loans but are you getting more I mean I know you to be look I've I hate to say this
but I have defended you to the regular community with some frequency because I have
viewed you as an honest broker for your own stuff I don't think you're trying to
get away with something I think thank you what you try it what you're trying to do
is you're trying to say I need to take some advances which I think and I hope I can
pay back which i think is an admirable and honorable way to do physics are you
worried about your own theory are you worried that you're going to infinite
dimensions in the way that you've been forced to modify on several previous
occasions and that in fact this is not going to close I am unusually confident that
I'm on the right track with this one really yeah only there are too many things
matching up in the right way this doesn't sound good Garrett I gotta be honest with
you but it's see I will put a paper out yeah yeah okay and you know people may not
find it interesting or they might find it really interesting well I wish you the
best of luck but I have to tell you that I do think that the problems in this
program I mean again I should just be honest about it I thought that the choice of
e8 was so natural that there really one of two choices that I can see is being the
way to go if you're going to avoid the the usual paths in in research into into
fundamental physics one is that you start with the most beautiful intricate object
you can find and then you find the intricacies of the natural world somehow living
inside of the intricacies which occurred naturally that would be that's a top-down
view and it's quite nice to look at that the bottom-up view is that somehow you
start with something that's practically lifeless which I've analogize to a
fertilized egg and somehow it bootstraps itself into this weird intricate and
baroque world that we find ourselves in and it sort of AutoCAD the universe Auto
catalyzes from almost nothing and these are the two basic approaches that I can
imagine that would not strain the concept of a theory of everything right well then
we both engage in both of these but once you've used this bottom-up approach right
starting with your fertilized egg and getting up into more and more complexity then
you start to see a complete object after you've expanded it out sorry you view
yourself as exploring the concept of going from the bottom up what is it that
you've done that that has that character starting from gravity and particle physics
and how they can be matched up together and in a in a way that brings about natural
okay that's that's not very simple at all well I know rabbity gravity is already
you know you're talking about the curvature of a space-time manifold that's
beautiful stuff that I love it no it's absolutely gorgeous I don't think we're
divided by that but when it comes to you know breaking up this object called the
curvature tensor into three different pieces throwing one of the one of them away
called the viol curvature and then fine-tuning the other two to be equal to the
matter and energy in the universe there's a lot of stuff that's going into that
story that isn't and that's an intricate story and then the other story is even
worse and right here der yeah so you know you're smuggling in a ton of complexity
when I say fertilized egg I'm thinking at the level of cytology but you know at the
level of the actual DNA that's incredibly rich so you when I you know maybe it's a
bad analogy because it's not bootstrapping itself out of nothing right you're
smuggling in a ton of intricacy but you have to look in both directions you have to
look from the bottom up and then once you can see the larger picture then you have
to look again from the top down and if going that way from the top down doesn't
match up very well with with what you did to get there then you have to go further
and so you can get a different bigger picture it's the only way forward Garrett but
I'm gonna be honest I feel like you know this is something is run into a wall and
there's the sense that like how could this beautiful structure not be not be right
it doesn't feel to me like it's insufficient yeah yeah and there but there there's
there larger structures that are not finite dimensional but there's still Lee
groups and exceptional Lee groups they're just generalized infinite dimensional Lee
groups that contain EI tis a substructure and they're beautiful they're just as
beautiful if not more so I really don't I think that the problem is is that you
know we have this mutual friend Sabine Hassan Felder when Sabine has this very
strange feature of her personality that she needs to tell the truth its scale well
sabina is a scientist and scientists you know engage in the truth at all costs yes
but serve our modus operandi well I find it very interesting that almost no one has
followed Sabine's lead I think it's a bina Sabina yeah okay from her perspective
Beauty has led theoretical physics astray right now I've I've tangled with her my
claim is is that the the string theory community which has generally hoovered up
the most brilliant minds but turned them into kind of almost cult-like members
which are exploring some structure but I just don't it's it's similar to e8 in the
sense that I'm not positive that it's the structure of our world it has some beauty
and some consistency but I'm not positive that that's its reason for being and
because that argument has been so abusive and it's it's just been it's been abused
against other people that our work is beautiful then when those Outsiders look at
it doesn't look like what you're doing is that beautiful at all she's gone against
beauty as a means of trying to figure out what's true and what what isn't I'm
concerned that you're falling prey to the siren of beauty where you're not coupling
you're not things that are beautiful that there are many things that are beautiful
that don't exist to do what you think they're there to do right well that's
definitely true I'm definitely inspired by beautiful mathematical objects when I
start exploring an area of mathematics and I start to see its intricacies and it's
connection to fundamental physics I am led to think that there might be something
there based on aesthetics well and I and I've also discussed this with sabina who i
think is great in her points are wonderful but i would be lost if I didn't have
this aesthetic sense as a guide well let's take an example like the hydrogen atom
so you've got one proton at the center of a hydrogen atom and you have all of the
electron shells in quantum theory that are generated by the Coulomb potential that
comes off of that nucleus right okay that story of chemistry is just being these
perfectly spherical electron shells works pretty well well you've got the other
orbitals young people's s orbiting over all these things yeah yeah in terms of the
representation theory of something we'd call spin 3 that gives the symmetries of
the system that story is not it is absolutely beautiful and it works pretty darn
well but it starts to fall apart the larger the atoms are and the more neutrons and
protons are stuck together in the in the nucleus it gets much more subtle yeah well
it's it's a perfectly beautiful story that isn't the right story it's not the true
story it's very close to a true story it's suggestive it's indicative but it isn't
actually the true story itself so you have to be very careful in my mind that you
you don't fall into the trap of thinking that the hydrogen atom sort of generalizes
it's perfection is simply the story of chemistry right of course they're much more
complex elements and then grouped into molecules and there's all sorts of things
that go into that sort of chemistry well but you don't you have the same situation
in theoretical physics where you have certain kinds of beauty that are incredibly
pure that actually kind of fall apart under scrutiny and you have other kinds of
beauty that seemed to fall apart but actually go the distance I'm thinking about de
rocks discovery of antimatter is the corresponding solutions to the matter solution
and then he originally think that was that the anti electrons were that were
actually protons because they only knew of those two particles and then Heisenberg
tried to pop his bubble and said you know you actually have a new particle here
well no he said that the proton was way too heavy to
be the anti particle mirror of the electron and I think direct sort of recanted
but Dirac should have had the courage of his convictions and said I predict that
there will be two new particles an antiproton and an anti Terron which was called
the positron and both of those things turned out to be true yeah and that's
considered a victory for the aesthetic of beauty in mathematical physics yes but
there was an intermediate there what situation in which the beauty led Dirac astray
because he wanted to shoehorn his theory into the pre-existing world that was
understood that's right so it's important to be cautious but and careful yeah but
not too cautious so if you're if the mathematics is actually telling you something
you want to listen to it what's the mathematics telling you it's telling me that I
think I've got the first handle on a geometric description of quantum field theory
you're out of love and I hope not Envy I'm super concerned that you can see the
problems from here and that rather than just going to infinite dimensions and
saying that quantum field theory requires a jump from finite to infinite dimensions
you can say look I I am fighting the fact that the the beautiful unification that I
found actually is going to be challenged at the quantum level where that beauty
becomes my enemy I would never put it that way I know because what you did is you
took a theory I mean to be honest there's a different set of objects called the
exceptional isomorphisms which aren't the exceptional lis groups that have the
exact same property that you found where you take something from the force universe
let's say there's some object called spin six which by an exceptional isomorphism
is equivalent to some other object surprisingly called su 4 and you can take the
spinners of spin six and find out that they are just the four dimensional object
from su four right and smush them together and you get an analogue of eight yeah
there's also probably not used by the physical universe in any way that we think of
as being important I don't think that that feature is what you think it is right
but there world of mathematical possibilities out here and I think we need more
people what's wrong with you that we need more people fanning out and trying things
that look like they won't work so we need a more exploratory cut we need a more
exploratory culture and we need to be forgiving what we don't need to do is to fool
ourselves when we start getting the sense that maybe this stuff doesn't actually
work I mean I it just like it feels to me like I can sort of see what the next set
of problems are gonna be and it would be I would be remiss if I didn't say them at
the beginning sure but you know you can't really dig into this stuff until you see
the mathematical details of it and this gets back to an issue of the question of
how science should be organized so we've talked about how difficult it is to do
science inside of the institutions because there is such a pressure economically to
do whatever's fashionable to get lots of results to publish continuously can we
talk a little bit about what happens when we try to do science outside of the
institutions both of us have and I think people will be very surprised to hear it
been rather critical of how hard it is to do science when you're not part of the
standard community right I mean I think in some sense it is essential to say to
stay connected with the scientific community even when you're exploring out almost
entirely on your own you one thing that has to happen is you have to have an
extreme set of internal checks on your own progress and because it science is
extremely frustrating to work on most of the pathways you follow our or end up
being dead ends and it can be really frustrating so in doing that if you're gonna
work outside academia you also need a extremely strong support system and a healthy
life independent of the science you're working on so you need to have good support
from friends and family good relationships you need to have confidence and your
ability to support yourself and and that frees up your time if you're really gonna
work on stuff outside of academia on your own I've been fortunate enough to build
into and to have those things I feel really lucky to be able to do that and I think
I've had a really good life that way and but if you can do that you need to be
really careful about it because if you if you if you just abandon everything else
because you have this idea in science that you want to pursue and you abandon
everything else you'll be totally out of balance in your life and if you hit some
frustrating item and what you're researching it'll be crushing because the main
thing you're working on focused on stop working when really what you wanna be able
to do is like oh I've got other stuff going on that's keeping me happy this thing
didn't work out I just have to wipe the board clean and start fresh and that's not
devastating to do because the rest of your life is good you have to do that
otherwise you just won't be healthy as a human being okay and you have created
something that you think might be an intermediate between being in total isolation
and being hooked up to the community that lives within it's it the standard
institutional stress right that's right I mean I have I came to this idea when I
was wandering from friend's house to friend's house after getting my PhD I would
basically go hang out with a friend I haven't seen in a while and if it had extra
space I'd spend time in their house while I worked on theoretical physics and
enjoyed the local environment and I thought was great to be able to do this cuz
you're not worried about you know having a roof over your head you have company to
interact with and you have a good environment to play in and I wanted to have a
network of such places but I had a hard time getting friends to give me other
houses to use for this so I ended up getting the resources together to buy a house
in Maui and and to start bringing friends and visiting scientists in and I've
called this the Pacific Science Institute and currently it's basically my house
with delusions of grandeur because what I also have is is a beautiful piece of
property that's 15 acres that I bought 10 years ago because I like doing things
slowly mm-hmm so I've been growing the community of the Pacific Science Institute
by having friends come in and and stay at my house including you and my arch night
assist I had a great time despite the obvious antagonism and and for you
specifically I tried to kill you in several different ways and shark-infested water
yeah sure it's great rough world but but yeah basically I've scientists visit and
take people out to have fun around the island and really enjoy a good environment
where they're free to explore ideas that might be a little bit on the dangerous
side to work on while they're in the confines of academia and among their normal
colleagues it's a it's a place where you can explore a little bit wild or ideas and
I'm really excited to grow this community by by starting to design things to build
on the 15 acres I've got that's really in a nice location so I've been growing
things slowly up here and I'm really looking forward to some more progress with it
and and growing this community it's in its it's also been a nice balance against
working on physics directly because it's it's guaranteed success I mean when you
when you have a place in Maui for scientists to come hang out and have a good time
that's that's going to happen and also keeps me entertained to have good people
coming through that's fantastic so yeah can you just I'm curious from your
perspective how do you see the two of us as being divided in our approaches to the
community I would definitely say that I I seem to be more connected to the
sensibilities of the elite science community I know that I can get their noses out
of joint but I'm attracted them very carefully yeah you had a lot fights with those
guys okay yeah whereas I I didn't so my our academic lineages are quite different I
mean I went I went to a smaller school I went to UC San Diego I didn't go to
Harvard but my advisor they're in particle physics was Roger dashing but he he
passed away well as a graduate student and I finished up my my dissertation under
under Henry Bartman who also had a background in particle physics but it changed
non-land dynamics but in some sense you were a self advised PhD yeah so I was very
much self-directed Henry gave me the freedom to go explore whatever the heck I
wanted I had an extraordinary extraordinary amount of freedom as a graduate student
and I hit this problem with spinners and that's what I wanted to tackle I want
figure out what they were geometrically and no one else was interested in that
problem but through academia I was a straight-a student you know I did really well
I never had any big conflicts was it easy rebound yeah it was I spent a lot of the
time surfing I was living on the beach in La Jolla is beautiful is the greatest
time in my life okay you know people talk about you know a small you know being in
a small pot big fish in a small pond and going to a bigger pond you feel humbled I
never really had that experience that was it I was pretty pretty close to the top
of my class and really happy about it how everything was going everything was great
I got my PhD but there was no way I was going to get a job trying to understand the
geometry of spinors when everybody else was doing string theory so you had already
accepted that you were an employer yeah that's totally unemployable but I invested
in Apple stock in the 90s so I had a few money so I said see you guys let me go
surf in Maui and work on the stuff on my own whereas you had a very different
experience so you were in Harvard in the math department but studying mathematical
physics
and as far as I know you were making some really unusual breakthroughs that were
very ahead of their time but you weren't welcomed by the the head of the PETA they
had people there and so you say you had a conflict from the get-go well I had a
very had a very serious dispute about something in mathematics which were called
the self-dual equations self-dual yang-mills equations which were related to the
regular yang-mills equations which are the equations of force in the standard model
but the self-dual yang-mills equations were sort of a square root of those
equations and they were very difficult to work with and to solve and I was very
fused as to why people were investing in this particular form of these equations
when it felt to me that we hadn't asked what constellation of equations these new
equations belong to and I'd proposed again spinors as a means of changing the
equations and was told that if I mean the exact quote was something like if
spinners had anything to do with the story Nigel who was Nigel Hitchin would have
told us like it was just completely yeah it was bananas and then I got into this
issue that well you know spinners have to be quantized as fermions that is they
have to be treated as if they were matter inside of quantum field theory but this
was not like we weren't doing quantum field theory we were just doing classical
geometry of a kind and so none of the arguments I put forward the set of equations
which later got recognized and completely changed the field which came through ed
Witten and this guy called natty Tsai burg both of them now professors at the
Institute and there was just no room to question why everybody was struggling with
these almost intractable equations and just you know getting great results but with
so much effort and work so that was like a very weird story whereby you know I
think that by 1994 the Harvard Department had woken up to the fact that it was not
using the right equations and I'd been actually proposing several sets of different
equations but that you know what when this all you know came about late late 80s
early 90s there was just no way to to have a productive conversation about it right
so you found yourself at odds with the the people you were talking with and you
decide to go into finance instead or how'd that happen no I mean I I wanted I was
trying to get back to physics and the I was proposing I'd propose three sets of
equations one of which had turned out to have been done by somebody else in some
place that I didn't know anything about one of which later gets done by cybergun
Witten and then another set of equations that I wanted to connect to the actual
standard model and the department was just very concerned that this didn't really
have anything to do with actual physics it was sort of a coincidence in their mind
that something that was vaguely physics II was having great topological results and
so there was this you know this fear and I was sent to a guy named Sidney Coleman
it was a great quantum theorists and he was much more encouraging than the Harvard
math departments any comments a great guy I mean an unbelievable human being I had
two memories of him one of which was that he had all the time in the world for
people who had no idea what they were doing and the other was that he didn't suffer
fools gladly and then I realized that those are two contradictory images unearths
old footage of him he gave this brilliant lecture called quantum mechanics in your
face to try to make the quantum have you ever seen this thing I've know it's a work
of art you'd love it and it turns out both of these things were really true about
him that he he had if you were full of yourself and you were wrong he would just
cut you up into little pieces but if you said I don't quite understand this he had
all the time in the world to be the greatest of teachers no I mean one of the marks
of a good scientist is humility you know know one of the marks of a good scientist
is a dialectic between arrogance and humility if you don't have that's a more
subtle and accurate way of putting it yeah well no I just I worry about us
extolling the virtues of the humble the mean right the self-effacing and it's just
like that's not where the magic happens yeah yeah but you have to have had the
arrogance to tackle hard problems right and made some progress but then been kicked
back by something didn't work right I mean after enough of that you develop some
humility but stuff to maintain the arrogance to get anywhere so how do you feel
currently about about the community like the professional community you have to
know that they regard you with very I mean well I know what's going on I mean
there's I got a lot of contempt from strength theorists forgetting forgetting
attention for putting forward a mathematical model of reality that wasn't strings
and it wasn't complete it was it had is a model that was proposed that had problems
with it and I was forthcoming with the problems in it but I was still saying yeah
this is this seems like it's making progress towards the description of reality and
has nothing to do with strings and that said alarm bells off all over the place it
set off alarm bells for either it's a threat or this guy's a complete crackpot
which is more likely and and I got criticisms from but for both don't think if I
were to steal me in their perspective and again you know that I don't share it and
I'm willing to fight them and I as I did when you first encountered when I called
their immune system in a gentleman known as Jacque dis lair night I'm willing to
stand up for what it is you're trying to do but I do think that we have to give
them their due before we say what's wrong with their perspective their perspective
is there are lots of constraints that one learns are very difficult to evade when
you immerse yourself in standard quantum field theory like they know what it is
that is demotivating them it's all the no-go theorems and the the intricacies and
the reason they got crazy about string theory first of all I'm convinced that it
was a way of evading the real problems in physics that gave them something to do
it's like like wargames it's an amazing creative piece well yeah it gives you
something to do to keep your chops up that is different from the thing you're
supposed to be doing and what they were object ding to is to say this guy doesn't
understand all the things that have to go right in order to do anime have an
improvement on the theory from our perspective how dare he blithely saunter forth
if we ignored all the constraints on us we could have fun proposing all sorts of
things that also won't work that was really the responsible version of their
critique now the irresponsible version of their critique is hey we have something
that isn't working very well how dare he takes something that isn't working very
well and get attention all right and maybe funding or maybe destroy the sense that
there's only one game in town right and you know I was separately lobbying you and
them for different things I wanted you to just say the words like I understand
these are the constraints that will have to be satisfied and I don't have answers
and I don't know how difficult they'll be to find but I don't want to be
demotivated from the get-go so please don't immediately tell me all the no-go
theorems because if any successful theory we'll probably have to have a period
where it's flying in the face of no gothe you know so that's what I wanted to hear
from you right I believe I said those things scattered over several interviews at
the time somewhat but I think that I I think that what they don't Intuit is that
you understand how how significant the negative results are the no-go theorems as
they're called are pretty profound right I mean there's a theorem called the
Coleman mandala theorem that prohibits the unification of gravity with the other
forces I just blew right through that because it didn't seem to apply in what I was
doing well I mean really it prohibits naive unification of matter and force and
there's a way of evading it using this thing called supersymmetry and supersymmetry
is this very weird thing that doesn't have that much mathematical beauty behind it
so the mathematicians know about it they study it a little bit but they're not
bananas over yeah I'm not either the natural world doesn't seem to use it in the
affected way but it does so much for theoretical physics that despite the fact that
math is just kind of ho-hum on it and that the natural world doesn't seem to be
using it it doesn't stop the theoretical physics community from embracing that
because it evades this dreaded no go it's not me from from embracing it I never
embraced supersymmetry I never I never liked it but you didn't evade the problem
with it either I mean it got around it you think you really got around it the
common men dual thing yeah it requires as one of its axioms that you have to have
you know certain it talks about properties of the scattering of particles and you
have to have a spacetime of which the scattering occurs and in the theory I put
forward the space-time comes out after the symmetry breaking between gravity and
forces so it's only after the symmetry breaking happens when the unification is no
longer there yeah I'm sure the web space-time I don't then in that context that
theorem applies my guess making it doesn't but my guess is that could be wrong
about this because I haven't studied exactly what you're talking about that what's
gonna happen is that even with how you claim this arises in your theory they're
gonna say in whatever approximation is going to be applied to relatively flat space
times close to Minkowski space yeah that if you've really evaded it in some super
meaningful way you should be able to tell us some theorems about good old quantum
field theory
and relatively flat space-time right well I mean it evades it by not satisfying
the axioms of the theorem you do you know what I'm trying to get it it's not
evading it in some you should be able to tell us something really new if you've if
your underlying theory mmm truly unifies force and matter right it would be the
case that the approximation of it that is found in ordinary regions that look close
to flat right where quantity usual rules of quantum field theory apply it should be
telling us something wildly new about that can you tell us a new theorem about how
it would appeared to unify force and matter in a region that looks close to
classical quantum field theory to the standard quarter well I mean once the
theories advanced to the stage where you can get that description yeah then now it
happened but in the initial stages all you can see for certain is that it's not
violating the theorem I don't know enough about all right how we can talk about it
after this ok lecture but so so those were my I had these wishes for you and then I
had a the wishes for the community which is that they would stop being pricks about
the whole thing and that they would say look we can't keep telling everybody who's
not a string theory string theorists that their theory is dead on arrival and keep
saying well we know that our theory doesn't appear to be living in four dimensions
and appears to have a bunch of stuff that we don't want and not necessary all the
stuff that we do want and maybe there's a huge landscape of different theories that
would yeah at this point I don't think string theories living at all I think it's
an X Theory I think it's pining for the fjords it's it's it's I've seen nothing but
decline since I left this train wreck well this is prodding is it refuses to take
stock of itself and it took a lot more Minds than one I think that's happening yeah
it's certainly the graduate students who are coming up are seeing what's going on
with string theory and they're taking stock of the field and they're going another
dress so where where do we go next like well is there any way I mean I actually
view it as highly demotivating then in essence every new theory is dead on arrival
because of the number of things I mean can we agree that physics has gotten
incredibly difficult it has we have it's it's difficult by virtue of being so
successful I mean that this that you can smell that we're almost at the end of the
rest of this chapter we've exhausted everything that we know that has worked
previously which is like two very the assumptions a little bit on everything and
that's been spectacularly successful and now it doesn't work anymore and it hasn't
worked for almost 50 years it's it's incredibly frustrating I think that's why most
people are wise to stay the hell away from it and I think a lot of the smarter
Minds are going into machine learning or even biophysics or just into other field
or even condensed matter how do you feel about that um I feel like I'm out in an
island in the middle of the Pacific watching it from unfold from afar well I work
on the puzzle myself my own different way you're having fun yeah that's that's my
prime directive is have fun is to have fun and do you think that inducing other
people to do this is kind of like maybe the big programs fall apart and we start
just becoming individuals trying crazy strategies that probably won't work yeah I
mean there there are undergraduate textbooks and undergraduate courses on string
theory yeah okay and people from undergraduates there's and and there's this
culture of arrogance saying it's string theory is the pinnacle of physics right and
people are coming up to that and they're becoming and if you're really working on
fundamental physics and and the the whole area of string theory has gotten so large
in the amount of research done sure that it just takes an enormous amount of
intellectual effort to consume it and to get up to speed on to what the current
status is of the field and by the time you're there you're so invested then of
course what you want to do is go and continue a postdoc in string theory when you
graduate and they're there hundreds of students who are coming up this way and when
they get there they go to help like I did this morning you look at a John the high-
energy physics theory section where of this thing called the archive where all the
new papers are found every day yeah and and and the this high-energy physics
archive also has a postdoc and job posting board and just just for giggles I
wouldn't say okay how many opportunities does the rising string theorist have now
and I went and looked and there are all these subfields of physics the condensed
matter is a big party because it's so incredibly vibrant and right and productive
right now and you go into high-energy theory and okay there are 30 positions open
in North America okay all right and some of them are Oh - string theorists but out
of those 30 positions you go how many of them actually actively want a string
theorist and are looking for a strength there's there's one one Eric so you're
these hundreds of people groomed up saying drink there is the pinnacle of what you
can be studying and there's nowhere for them to go well but the field is dying well
because it was a baby boomer phenomenon we treated it as if it was an intellectual
phenomena but it was actually this weird generational phenomena that this took hold
you know this is a very weird feature of 1951 where Frank will check and Ed Witten
two great physicists born in the same year we'll check is effectively like the last
guy to make the train for real physics he's an amazing guy yeah and then Witten
born later that year probably more powerful than anyone else alive in terms of his
mental abilities hasn't had a trip to Stockholm because he hasn't been able to make
contact with the physical world and almost certainly in any era that wasn't this
one this guy would have been to Stockholm once or more yeah and it's in my mind
it's a cultural problem we're stuck in this culture of particle physics where we
have everybody in the same community studying the same popular direction in full
force as if there was lots of data coming in supporting that and there's not so
what it is is they're going full-bore full self-supporting force a long direction
that in my mind just doesn't describe our universe and what we need is an
exploratory phase with physicist students coming up and picking up stuff that they
think is interesting and following that direction on their own branching away from
the main herd and by having more explorers going different directions you're more
likely to find something good and I guess my hope is that you know some graduate
student will listen through this incredibly long and detailed podcast and go look
at stuff and say well that's kind of interesting maybe I want to learn more about
that do you have any ideas or the Pacific Science Institute is is there any way
that our listeners can support it yeah are you are you a non-profit 501c3 nonprofit
I'd be very happy to take donations and put those donations to use supporting
scientists to diverse size okay and these aren't just it's not just supporting
physicists the idea is that as you said science has supported our economy to
incredible degree and I don't think scientists have been sufficiently personally
rewarded for that so basically what I want to do is you know give them a nice place
to hang out and Maui enjoy the environment and work and think on whatever they want
undirected while they do it it was a place to fight groupthink effectively with the
field while still having community support well solving community support the
problem is I've very limited resource right now I'm basically running this out of
my house right I have a big piece of land I have dreams for what I want build on
you and I've been there and it's it's incredibly generous that people can hang out
and just actually fulfill the promise of dreaming about our world and trying things
that they wouldn't feel comfortable trying under the watchful eyes of a
departmental chairman is telling them what they need it's ready to get chair tenure
or to win grants do you have any sense of what we should be directing people to do
if they're in a position to change the culture of the field I always want to think
like we still have a few old great people that everybody looks up to and they
refuse to say something really provocative like here's the thing that I dream about
we get all of the negative results they're incredibly demotivating allow your young
people to violate several of them without being string theorists and then insist
that they try to pay that back once they've been exploring a theory that in a
previous era would have been dead on arrival because somewhere we have to go
backwards to go forwards we have to question something that is rock-solid in all of
our minds but isn't actually right don't I mean yeah this is totally right and this
sort of cultural inertia that's holding things back is it's in biology it's in
computer science it's in it's in all fields of science so I would say just I mean
it's almost the best thing to do just to find people who are really freaking smart
and want to work on stuff on their own give them money and support and limb to it
unless well this is the and I I'm on record as saying that we have too much
oversight too much transparency and too much accountability it's strangling us yeah
it's absolutely true that's absolute you well Garrett I really appreciate you
sitting down it's a hell of an experiment to just even try to have conversations
about you know what might be the path towards final theories of everything and I'm
actually really worried that we hurt most of your listeners well but I do that if
we use this at all I'll try to say something at the beginning
of the program to try to say what it is that people are listening to so they'll
have an idea they're not just gonna stumble in on a podcast and hear people talking
about bosons fermions ei quantization and have no idea what's going on the fact is
very few people are invested in this like this but this is the fabric of reality
ultimately in a question but how we go about trying to probe whatever's next yeah I
think it's amazing I think it's the most significant and intricate and difficult
puzzle there is right now for anybody to tackle and to immerse themselves in and I
also think it's potentially incredibly rewarding but it's also where the hardest
things you can is it yeah probably the hardest thing has never been harder yeah
that's almost as far as learning to surf okay well through the portal with Garrett
Lisi here from the island of Maui my arch-nemesis you're welcome to come back
anytime and if you're interested in the Pacific Science Institute its Garrett's
attempt to try to figure out how to move science outside of the direct
institutional control you can find him on Instagram I think is Garrett Lisi and on
Twitter as Garrett Lisi Garrett least not hard to find all right thanks for joining
us thank you Eric [Music] [Music]