Eric Weinstein: Hello, you found the portal.
I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I think that today's must be the most unusual
episode yet of a podcast that has been marked by almost regular, unusual
episodes.
Now, this is the first podcast that I'm recording at home.
I don't really have a home recording studio, so we're really doing this from
chicken wire and masking tape, but I am sheltering in place because of the
worldwide COVID pandemic.
And what we've been asked by the state of California and by the federal government
is to shelter in place for an upcoming month because today is April 1st.
Now during a pandemic, I can assure you that no one is interested in April Fool's
jokes.
So the question is what to do with the April Fool's tradition in a situation in
which nobody wants a prank.
I thought that this was probably the best time to launch an idea that I've been
playing with for years.
And that idea is that it is dangerous to have a world in which we are afraid to
talk about what we think is true.
When I think about what happened during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I
find that we were in general intimidated from sharing our fears about the virus.
We were told that if we wore masks, that we were acting in a peculiar fashion.
If we refuse to shake hands, that we were behaving in a strange and unpleasant
social way.
We did not want to be alarmist.
We did not want to be seen as chicken little, and in fact, it was extremely
important that we not be seen as xenophobic, given that the outbreak was
originating in Wu Han, China.
In fact, perhaps the most dangerous idea was that this outbreak might've been
connected to some research being done in a lab, perhaps a bio weapons lab.
We really don't know where this epidemic began.
What is the etiology of something that is causing me entire world economy to
effectively shut down?
What I believe is that that silence has been deadly.
We have many people who have now lost their lives because we did not feel free
to exchange ideas to think and to talk.
And in fact, many of the people who warned us first were the freest members of
society having been previously canceled by standard mainstream institutions and their
associated media.
So what I thought would be important for an April Fool's Day that no one wants to
actually participate in was to deal with an idea that maybe one day a year we
should all be free to share crazy ideas that are going around between our ears and
in our head.
We're having conversations with ourselves wondering, is anyone else seeing the same
thing that I'm seeing?
But we are too afraid because the social stigma for actually believing in things.
That maybe things are possible or perhaps there's a conspiracy somewhere.
Perhaps we are ill prepared.
For example.
I believe that our current pandemic is exacerbated because our government and our
readiness czars, failed to stock adequate supplies and that these supplies were
called for in the academic literature for years, there was absolutely no excuse not
to have personal protective equipment stocked for doctors and nurses and
hospitals to say nothing of all of the people who are in the front lines of
treating patients sick with COVID.
Now, currently, I don't believe that you can trust the World Health Organization.
Absolutely not.
I don't think you can trust the Surgeon General of the United States, and I
absolutely don't think you can trust the CDC because they are all covering for our
inadequacy.
This was a problem that we always knew it was coming.
And we at one point had stocks which apparently were depleted under a previous
administration and not restocked under this administration.
In fact, our fear of dealing with a pervasive institutional incompetence has
blinded us to the degradation in our society across all major institutions.
As I've discussed before on the program, I believe that this has a singular etiology.
That is that because of Embedded Growth Obligations coming from the previous era
of unsustainable postwar growth from about 1945 to 1971/73 something like that, we
built in expectations to our system that cannot currently be met.
We will not have technology that follows the same breakneck pace of innovation.
As a result, we have a system whereby the heads of our organizations are forced to
cover for their inadequacies because growth is built into the system that
cannot be sustained.
Therefore, there is not the funding, the manpower.
There is not the wherewithal to continue many of our programs because we do not
actually have the ability to continue to simply grow our way out, at least so far.
So what's today's program about?
Well, I thought that what I would do is to let go of something that I've been keeping
pretty close for I think about 37 years.
When I was around, um, 19
I started.
It's hard to talk about it.
When I was around 18 or 19, I was at the University of Pennsylvania.
And I thought I saw a glimmer of hope.
I thought I saw that some new equations that were being played with might actually
provide a solution to some of the problems that had bedeviled Einstein and others for
years in the quest for a unified field theory.
Now, it's an embarrassing thing to say that one is a unified field theorist.
It is effectively equivalent to saying, I'm interested in perpetual motion
machines.
Uh, or that I have a private cure for cancer that I'm trying on rabbits in my
backyard.
However, I actually think that it's important to fess up because that's
exactly what this is.
Now in my situation.
Um, I have an extremely unusual history and I really don't want to get bogged down
in all of the things that happened while I was a student trying to develop this
theory because it is not a particularly happy story.
I believe that this theory is an incredibly joyous one.
Now,
in this situation, I want to talk about what it means to have a theory of
everything.
We've never seen one.
And in fact, not only have we never seen a theory of everything, we've never even
seen, I believe, a candidate for a theory of everything.
And because a theory of everything would have to have different characteristics
than I believe every theory that has gone before, we don't think enough about what
the difference is between what we would normally call in physics an effective
theory and a fundamental one.
Now, if you're familiar with the MC Escher drawing called Drawing Hands, it is a
lithograph of two hands apparently drawing each other into existence.
On some kind of a canvas or piece of paper.
That is sometimes referred to as a strange loop, but it in fact is an attempt to
answer the question, what is the fire that lights itself?
This is the problem that bedevils us when we search for a unified theory that
doesn't be devil us, in my opinion, in any previous effective theory.
Now, why is that?
Well, many people confuse a theory of everything as if they imagine that it's a
theory in which you can compute every eventuality.
And it is absolutely not that because the computational power is very different than
the question of whether or not the rules are effectively given.
I've analogized it to a game of chess.
And knowing all of the rules is equivalent to a theory of everything.
Knowing how to play chess well is an entirely different question.
But in the case of a theory of everything, or a unified field theory, if you will,
many people also take it to be an answer to the question, why is there something
rather than nothing?
And I don't think that this is in fact, what a theory of everything is meant to be
either.
Now, why is that?
Well, because I believe at some level it is impossible for most of us to imagine,
uh, a, an airtight argument mathematically speaking, which coaxes out of an absolute
void a something.
However, there's a different question which I think might actually animate us
and, um, which is the right question to ask of a potential candidate.
And that is, how does one get everything from almost nothing.
In the MC Escher drawing or lithograph Hands Drawing Hands or Drawing Hands what
we see is that the paper is presupposed.
That is, if you could imagine a theory of everything, it would be like saying, if I
posit the paper, can the paper will the ink into being such that the ink gives
rise to the pens and the pens draw the hands, which in fact manipulate the pens
to use the ink.
That kind of a problem is one which is of a very different character than everything
that has gone before.
It is also, in my opinion, an explanation of why the physics community has been
stalled for nearly 50 years since around 1973 when the standard model was
intellectually in place.
Now consider this.
We have never had, in modern times a drought where no person working in pure
fundamental theory has taken a trip to Stockholm just as a rough indicator, um,
for contributing to the standard model.
No one, in my opinion, since let's see, Frank Wilczek, who was born in 1951 no one
born after that time has in fact contributed to the standard model in a
clear and profound way.
That is not to say that no work has been done, but for the most part, the current
generation of physicists has for more than 40 years and almost 50 years, remained
stagnant within the standard paradigm of physics, which is positing theories that
are then verified by experiment.
Now, my belief, which is relatively radical, is that there is no way to get to
our final destination using the tools that have gotten us to where we are now.
In other words, uh, what got you here cannot get you there.
And in particular, one of the biggest problems we have is the political economy
of science.
We have effectively starved our scientific enterprise for resources creating a dire
and cutthroat competition, which has completely deranged the scientific
tradition.
And so one of the things that's going to happen in this lecture is that I'm simply
going to announce that I have broken and have broken for many years with just about
every expectation of standard science.
That is not to say that the equations or the style of presentation is going to be
foreign.
Quite the contrary.
Uh, I have every intention of writing up some results, um, in standard terminology,
wherever possible, using a popular mathematical type setting programs.
But it goes far deeper than that.
My belief is that what we've created is a career structure, a journal structure, and
employment structure and access structure that cannot possibly complete the job.
And why is that?
Well, what if in the last leg, in fact, we had a situation by which an attempt at the
fundamental theory would result almost certainly in career suicide.
Now, if you think of that as an explanation, you would realize that it has
the power to synchronize failure across many seemingly independent experiments.
And I believe that that's exactly what's been going on through the so-called string
theory revolutions one, two, and perhaps three.
Now, in that case, what happened was a theory became uh fixed in the minds of
really the Baby Boom generation of physicists because it allowed for infinite
elaboration within a mathematical or more particularly a geometric context.
And those supposedly physicists spent their time submitting papers to what's
called, um, the high energy section of the so-called preprint arXiv.
But in fact, most of these papers have nothing to do with high energy physics
whatsoever.
And if you're looking for the, the designation, it's hep-th high energy
physics dash theory.
Now, if you look through those papers, they don't seem to have much to do with
particles.
They don't seem to have to do with forces and space time.
They seem to have to do with very strange and obscure mathematical issues.
And in the years since the, uh, string theory program got particularly
reanimated, uh, I guess that would be around 1984 with the anomaly cancellation
of Green and Schwarz.
What you'll find is, is that physics became very active and simultaneously
ground to a halt.
It failed to remain a physical subject.
It became something like a medieval quest for the number of angels to dance on the
head of a pin.
Now, in this circumstance, I think it's very important to realize that this is not
a paper and we are not submitting to the arXiv.
In fact, the arXiv requires people who are not employed at universities uh, to get
permission from some member of the community, which is called an endorsement,
which I find absolutely insulting and I refuse to go along with.
Furthermore, we are expected to cite papers sometimes, which, uh, are behind
paywalls.
And I think that it's absolutely immoral to ask people to pay outside the system,
to read the papers, to cite other people's work.
I could go on about the number of things that are currently wrong with the system.
But instead, what I would like to do is to simply joyously reject it.
I have every intention of simply sharing this with you and jealously guarding my
right to shepherd this through.
Now, what does that mean?
In two previous episodes, we've had interactions with academicians, which I
think are interesting and bear scrutiny.
In the first case in a, in an interview with the economist, Tyler Cowen, I talked
to Tyler about the fact that the Boskin Commission was in fact committing economic
malpractice.
Now.
Why was that?
It was because they had decided that they needed to transfer a trillion dollars over
10 years, and that they had found a devious way of doing it, which is to
adjust the CPI by backing out the amount of adjustment needed to get a trillion
dollars.
They decided that a 1.1% overstatement in the CPI would cause a reduction in
entitlements.
That is Medicare and Medicaid payments together with social security.
As well as an increase in taxes, because tax brackets are also indexed.
Now, to my mind, it is absolutely unconscionable to say that you have a
right to transfer wealth cryptically by adjusting a fundamental, uh, barometer.
That would be like saying, in order to meet our global warming targets, we have
to recalibrate all the thermometers to show that in fact, things have cooled.
One simply can't do that in science.
But Tyler's response, I found it was very interesting.
His perspective was that this was in fact not a terrible thing because it was
"directionally correct".
And in general, he believed that because the CPI should be considered overstated,
that this was not the world's most terrible thing to do as an economist.
I respect Tyler a great deal and I enjoy his company, but I have to say that I am
absolutely of a different opinion.
My belief is, is that one has no rights and no ability as a scientist to fudge the
data to meet social goals in this fashion.
Another interesting interaction was the interaction with Professor Agnes Callard
of the University of Chicago.
Now, when she listened to episode 19 about Bret Weinstein, she found that it was a
very compelling episode, but strangely, even though the point of the episode was
to surface Bret's long forgotten theory.
Because Bret had not been acknowledged as having predicted that laboratory mice
would in particular have radically elongated telomeres where it was thought
that all mice had long, radically elongated telomeres, uh, which has
incredible, um, potential implications for drug testing and all of the work that is
done on laboratory, rodents as model organisms.
This is a, an episode you should definitely listen to if you haven't
already.
But Agnes's perspective was very different than mine.
Her feeling was that because we were in a situation in which the work actually
surfaced, that the system worked, even if it was the case that Bret's name was
erased from the history of the development.
And that his theory was, uh, put in a situation in which it was not able to
carry the day because in fact, there was no record of the fact that a prediction
had been made.
Now, I disagreed with Agnes on that program, uh, vociferously.
But what I found was, is that it was very telling in general, our academic
population has given up on the previous and quaint idea of decency, propriety,
truth, fairness, because there simply isn't the resource for everyone.
Now.
I believe that current science is not necessarily unsalvageable, but it will be
unsalvageable if we don't get the very people that I rail against far more money.
And I know that's very confusing, but my belief is, is that the inadequate
resources that we have put aside are very similar to the inadequate masks that we
have put aside for our doctors.
We have asked some of the world's most gifted and smartest people to devote their
lives to the study of science and technology.
And we've inadequately prepared them.
We've put their lives and their family's lives under incredible pressures.
And what I wished to do is to, in fact, point to the very people who I have been
most angry at for years and say that part of the problem is that we need to take a
hard look at how we've invested in science and technology and give the very people
that I'm most angry at more money.
I will explain more about this later, but I do want to give you an introduction to
this episode.
What I will be doing is to screen a very unusual and somewhat awkward lecture at
the University of Oxford.
Now, why is it so awkward?
Well, first of all, I had left uh standard research, um, perhaps 20 years earlier,
almost.
Further, I'm not a physicist and I have only taken one or two courses, uh, in the
physics major sequence.
I think I've taken one semester of mechanics.
And perhaps I took an advanced general relativity course in college, but in
general, no one goes into a theoretical physics department and attempts to lecture
physics physicists on physics.
And why is that?
Well, because physics is incredibly demanding, and this is almost certainly
the world's most interesting and most accomplished intellectual community.
These are guys that don't miss a trick.
Uh, there are so many things to know and it is such a difficult field that it is
effectively almost impossible to contribute from outside.
Chemists don't do it.
And once in a blue moon, mathematicians will attempt to talk about actual real
physics.
So one thing that you're seeing is a very unusual circumstance where somebody is
trying to figure out how to give their first lecture in a physics department.
And it concerns the possibility of a theory which attempts to solve the problem
of how does a fire light itself.
Another thing that you'll see is, is that it's relatively difficult to read my
handwriting.
I'm not gonna make any bones about it.
I've been very vocal about having learning differences, dysgraphia, dyslexia, all
sorts of different issues.
Symbols come extremely difficult to me.
I don't want to spend this time making excuses.
What I do want to say is the following, I will be attempting to record a short um,
PowerPoint presentation for after the lecture to say at least some of what some
of the constructions are more clearly.
This is not meant to be the actual presentation of the theory.
What this is, is an introduction, a down payment, and above all a historical
account of what happened seven years ago at the University of Oxford when I tried
to present these ideas.
I've talked before about the twin nuclei problem and our need to get off of this
planet.
And if we have a hope of getting off of this planet, it really comes from
fundamental physics.
You see, a hundred years ago, or perhaps 105 when Albert Einstein gave us General
Relativity, he effectively consigned us for life to the solar system.
Why is that?
Well, his model, his geometric model of space and time effectively creates a speed
limit known as C or the speed of light.
Now there are three rocks that are at least interesting for habitation by
humans, although two of them are marginal, the moon and Mars, one of them, of course,
is unbelievable the Earth, but I doubt that we're going to be able to steward the
Earth through our new godlike powers, which I've called the twin nuclei problem
of cell and atom.
We've unlocked the power of both, and I don't think we have the wisdom to stay all
in one place.
So the question that I had was, if there is any ability to escape to the cosmos
that we can see in the night sky, where would it come from?
We are almost positive that Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity is in some
weird way incomplete.
The Schwarzschild singularities, which give us black holes, and the initial
singularities of the Robertson Walker Friedmann universe, which are associated
with the Big Bang, are some clue that there is some subtle flaw in Einstein's
theory.
So how to go beyond Einstein.
I mean, what Einstein did to Newton was to recover Newton as a special case of a more
general theory that is more flexible.
And in fact, this is the same problem that we have because Albert Einstein's theory
is so fundamental.
We effectively begin every theoretical physics seminar with a statement about
space time.
In other words, Albert Einstein is locked in at the ground floor.
So if we can't get below the ground floor to the foundations, it's very difficult to
make progress.
This is one of the things that is making it almost impossible for us to go beyond
the initial revolutions of the 20th century.
Do I know that this new theory, if it works, will allow us to escape?
I do not.
And there's no one who can uh can say that and I don't think I have the skills to
develop the physical consequences of the theory, even if the theory turns out to be
mostly right.
What I will say is that I think that the theory is the first of its kind that I've
seen.
I believe that in part, what you will see is that at a minimum it is like fool's
gold.
It appears to explain why we think we see three, three generations, but it also says
that perhaps they aren't really three generations of matter.
Perhaps there are only two.
Even though physicists tell us that there are at least three or perhaps more.
I believe that physics tells us that the universe is chiral that is left, right
asymmetric, but the theory is itself not chiral.
Instead, it chooses to present a different idea, which is that perhaps chirality is
emergent much the way our hands are individually left, right asymmetric as our
pinky is not a reflection of our thumb, but the thumb on each hand is a pairing to
the other one.
As is the pinky.
Now, what does that mean?
It means that if perhaps there is matter and there is force that is decoupled from
our ordinary world, that that matter might restore the parity or the chirality.
Um, rather it would break the chirality and restore parity between these two
halves the matter we see and the matter that is missing.
There are a good number of other things that happened in the theory.
It replaces space time with what I've termed an obsiverse.
Now an obsiverse is an unusual gadget in that it's thought of as two separate
places where physics takes place connected by a map.
That means effectively that we are in something like a stadium where there is,
there are stands and there is a pitch and the playing field that we think we see may
not in fact be where most of the action is taking place.
In fact, not all of the fields live on the same space.
So when we see waves and particles dancing around, they may have separate origins in
each of the two components of the obsiverse.
What I hope to do after this is to gracefully and gradually develop the
theory under my leadership.
Now, why do I say that?
There is a belief in physics and in most fields that the field should behave in a
communal fashion.
And that people should put forward their ideas and other people should joyously
build upon them and that the community should be allowed to name, uh, the
various, uh, accomplishments for whoever they say accomplish those things.
There's not a way, there's not a way in hell that I'm letting that happen.
My experience with this community is, is that it simply can't be trusted to behave
equitably given the fact that it is so resource starved and constrained.
People simply do not have the freedom to be generous, kind and accurate as to who
did what.
Furthermore, there is an incredible premium on cherry topping that is who
finished something off is considered bizarrely much more important than who
found something to begin with.
Imagine you located an Island.
And you named the island after the first person who could plant the flag on the top
of the highest peak.
This is patently offensive and ridiculous.
Uh, there's a story, uh, years ago about how Hilbert almost scooped Einstein by
giving the Hilbert action from which Einstein's equations could be recovered.
Really not a chance.
So if Hilbert came up with the Hilbert action and recovered Einstein's equation,
so what.
I mean, the real theory actually takes place in Einstein and Grossman before
Albert Einstein even works out a lot of the flaws in the original theory.
It's about the ideas.
It's not about the formulas and it's not about racing to the final form.
Now, I know that the community won't agree with that, but think about this.
What I'm doing is taking an incredible risk.
I'm addressing you here on April Fool's Day.
And I'm saying that if there is a fool, it is certainly me because I have sat on this
theory for almost 40 years.
Now, I've never known.
Is it true?
Is it false?
It's impossible to tell when you're only talking to yourself, but in this
situation, what I've done is I've taken a tremendous amount of risk and now I'm
trying to share it with you.
Hopefully I know that.
Well, Newton did his greatest work when he was sheltering, sheltering from a great
plague.
Uh, in England, and I would like to think that perhaps whether or not this is
correct, simply the act of somebody trying earnestly to share hope and some path
forward, uh, would be uplifting.
Now, under the worst circumstances, if this doesn't work, what do I think is the
question I'm asked frequently and there are two things that I'll say.
Many years ago, around 1987, uh, I put forward some equations that I thought
might become my thesis at the Harvard department of mathematics.
And they were disallowed for a variety of reasons.
Those equations were later discovered in, I believe 1994 and I sat in a lecture in
which I saw these equations go up on a board, the very end at MIT.
And I looked at those equations and I said, huh, those are the exact equations I
was told, could never work.
Why is the leading physicist in the world placing them on the board and saying that
these are the equations from which all of something called Donaldson theory can be
derived.
What I'm giving you, at least at a minimum, had the ability years earlier,
um, to provide those equations from a different source.
There's something called Seiberg–Witten theory, which I have no claim on it.
But the actual equations that are called Seiberg–Witten equations came originally
as an outgrowth from investigations of this theory.
So at a bare minimum, the Seiberg–Witten revolution should have happened at Harvard
rather than Princeton, and it should have been recognized that this theory was
capable of at least at a minimum, giving birth to that as a side project.
The other thing that I think is incredibly important is that we've never seen how a
universe.
That looks like ours could possibly emerge from almost no assumptions whatsoever.
And I believe that even if this theory were to turn out to be wrong, which I
don't think is likely, I believe that it would give us something to go on.
We would at least have a first candidate of how a hopeful theory of everything
would look and how it would go wrong.
So under any circumstance, I think that I'm going to be fine.
If the theory doesn't work out, I will have at least taken my shot on goal.
And I think that that's probably more than almost anyone can ask from a life to
attempt to make contact with the deepest question that we've ever had, which is
what is this place and what brought it into being.
Lastly, I want to just talk about a personal aspect of this, which is what
does it mean to come to an end?
Whether or not this theory, in fact, does what I claim it.
I think it does.
Uh.
I don't know, but I do know that sooner or later in the era of intercontinental land
exploration, someone found the last landmass, and that must've been a very
strange moment when there was nothing left to do.
I think whether or not this theory in fact accomplishes that is one question, but we
all have to plan for what it is that we think will happen when men at last learns
his own source code.
In fact, this was the last edge question that I answered for John Brockman, which
is does something unprecedented happened when man at last learns his own source
code.
I don't know the answer to this, but I want to return to the same spirit that I
started this when I was 18 or 19, which is that of joyous investigation of brave,
open-hearted, uh, undertakings.
And I also want to bring back a different style of scientific investigation.
There has been far too much communalism.
In fact, there is a belief that there are no lone researchers and that everything is
produced by a community.
And pardon my French, but this is absolute horseshit.
Um, I've been so long alone with these, uh, principles, equations, and ideas that
I don't even know what my adult life will look like once I disgorged them and I
began to talk about them with the community at large.
I've talked to many theoretical physicists who have taken some interest in them, but
I've never put out enough to absolutely ensure that people are seeing what it is
that I'm seeing.
So whether or not the April Fool's joke is on me, I cannot tell you.
But I can promise you that I'm not trying to play one on you.
What I hope to show you is a lecture that was the first of three versions of this
lecture that were delivered in Oxford, uh, over the course of a week.
And one of the things that has held me back is that I have a great number of
people who I have to thank for effectively being my underground railroad when my
career got into serious trouble, to make sure who made sure that I always had, um,
an opportunity to fight another day.
And some of the most important of those people, one of whom occurs on this video,
um, is Marcus du Sautoy.
And Marcus, I just wanted to say thank you for your bravery, your courage, your
friendship, and your encouragement.
I know I've been absolutely impossible to you.
I've made you wait for this and I just want to say how much I love you.
I also want to thank Isadore Singer for effectively saving me from not getting a
PhD, by I think putting pressure on the Harvard department and, um, for coming to
my assistance, making sure that I got a postdoc at MIT.
Uh, despite not having any publications at all, I'd like to think Raoul Bott, who's
no longer with us.
Who I should have invited to my wedding.
I was very angry at him, but I didn't realize that he was saving me in a very
difficult situation against the department that probably just wanted to see me gone.
I'd like to thank Peter Thiel.
Uh, one of my closest friends is like a brother to me for allowing me these seven
years since this lecture, to lick my wounds, to get strong, to have a 401k, to
buy a house.
And, uh, to begin coming back to regular society after a very difficult and
strained career.
I'd like to thank Adil Abdulali and Michael Grossberg.
Uh, the two greatest, best friends from college a guy could have.
I'd like to thank my grandfather, Harry Ruben, who believed in things that
couldn't possibly be true and made some of them happen.
I'd like to thank my parents, Karen and Les Weinstein for all the good things that
they did.
I'd like to thank my brother Bret Weinstein and his family, Heather and the
kids for sticking by me.
And I'd like to thank my inlaws in Bombay, India, and I hope you guys are well.
And lastly, I would very much like to thank my wife and my two kids for putting
up with a lot of lost weekends, a lot of lost vacations.
And believing that just maybe there was something to this and sticking by me all
of these years.
So I hope everybody really, uh, enjoys this.
It may not be comprehensible.
And after this video finishes, I'll do a short presentation of some of the
constructions that took place, not all of the equations and things, which I think
some of them were sort of botched on the board because they became disoriented the
night before, um, and rearranged things in a way that probably wasn't optimal.
But I, uh, I'll attempt to clarify these things going forward and to begin to
present the theory as I see whether or not I can bring myself to once again, work on
it somewhat close to full time as a 54 year old father of two.
So sit back, relax, and coming up.
Next is the first of my three lectures at Oxford University on Geometric Unity.
Be well.
Marcus du Sautoy: Well, welcome to this special Simonyi lecture and my name Marcus
du Sautoy.
I'm a professor of mathematics here and the Simonyi Professor for the Public
Understanding of Science.
And Charles Simonyi prepared a manifesto when he endowed this chair to guide the
holder of the professorship in their mission.
And I'd like to read one part of that manifesto to you.
It said scientific speculation when so labeled and when the concept of
speculation and its place in the scientific method has been made clear to
the audience can be very exciting.
It is a very effective communication tool and it is by no means discouraged.
And it is in the spirit of this part of my mission as the Simonyi professor that I
would like to introduce today's Simonyi Special Lecture.
I first met Eric Weinstein when we were both postdocs at the Hebrew University
just over 20 years ago, and I had the feeling then that he was working on
something big, but it wasn't until two years ago that Eric met me at a bar in New
York.
And we began, he began to explain the mathematics teaching working on in private
for the last 20 years.
As he took me through the equations he had been formulating, I began to see emerging
before my eyes potential answers to many of the major problems in physics.
It was an extremely exciting, daring proposal, and also mathematically so
natural that it started to work it's magic on me.
Over the last two years, I have had the privilege of being taken through the
twists and turns of Eric's ideas., After our postdocs in Israel when I went the
academic route getting my professorship here in Oxford, Eric went a more
independent roots working in economics, government, and finance.
So he comes here today as something of an insider and an outsider, a difficult place
from which to propose bold ideas.
But having spent time seeing how powerful these ideas appear to be, I felt it that
it was time that Eric shared his ideas more widely as I believe his perspective
could give the scientific community a new story to explain to some of the big
questions on the scientific books.
I'm therefore very happy to provide a platform here in Oxford for Eric to share
his ideas on a new theory he calls Geometric Unity.
The lecture will be approximately 70 minutes after which we will have a period
to ask questions.
Eric.
Eric Weinstein: So it's, well, uh, it's a great pleasure to be here in Oxford, uh,
for those of you who are not aware.
Mmm.
It is possible that no other university in the world has kept so tightly.
Uh, and kept the faith for so long with, uh, Einstein's great vision of a final
theory for physics as a theory of pure geometry, sort of elegance and simplicity
of the highest order.
And the names that are associated with Oxford that, uh, weigh heavy on me are
Atiyah, Penrose, Segal, Woodhouse, Hitchin.
It's a very long list of people who.
Uh, even when fashion, uh, did not hold those ideas in favor, uh, always kept the
faith that there was much to be learned from the geometric perspective on physics.
Of course, unified field theory in some sense, acquired a stigma with Einstein's
failure to find it in the sense that even someone like Einstein, uh, being tempted
by the siren song of geometry, uh, might lose their footing and go astray.
And in the years since we've had a replacement theory, which is that what is
really calling our generations is the quest to quantize general relativity and
gravity.
And I'd like to go back to the sort of earlier perspective that, um, there is no
evidence to date in my mind that we are being called to quantize general
relativity directly.
Uh, in fact, there's been more effort spent on that quest, uh, without very
tangible results than Einstein spent as one man searching for years for unified
field theory.
So we have to, in some sense, begin to undo some of what we think we know in
order to truly reconsider and allow me to put some of these ideas before you today.
Marcus asked me to begin presenting.
Uh, these ideas here, and hopefully this is the first opportunity, but if the ideas
are not good, um, then, uh, lighting on the aisles will lead you to safety and
your exits may be behind you.
But, uh, in the event of a good flight, uh, hopefully this will begin a
conversation rather than then one.
I feel in some sense that I'm presenting the works of another man, a younger man.
Uh, someone who came of age right in the middle of the great string theory boom.
Uh, with the anomaly cancellation in 1984.
And I look at this work and I see a young person struggling with the idea, why can't
I see that string theory is going to answer all of these questions over the
next 10 years as we were told at the time and making a very dangerous decision,
which was, I think I'm not going to follow that particular path and I'm going to
follow another.
And it's not clear where this path is going to lead us, but we're going to
explore it today and see, um, as best we can.
So in some sense, I've been able to polish some of that young man's work, but I'm
also struggling to reconstruct it because as someone spending full time on that
theory, he knew a lot of things that I no longer know.
So with that, uh, is a beginning, I'm just going to say one disclaimer, which is that
this is not a usual talk.
And whatever contract a speaker usually has with the audience.
Uh, right now we're going to break that contract.
This is a.
This is a talk about ideas, and some of these ideas are bold.
Some of them may offend some people because there's a sense that you don't
have a right to be considering those ideas.
But I go back to the admonition of Jim Watson that said, if you're going to try
to make progress, big progress, you are by definition unqualified to be doing
whatever it is that you're doing.
So in that spirit, let us begin.
What is physics to physicists today?
How do they see it different from the way in which we might imagine the lay person
sees physics?
Ed Witten was asked this question in a talk he gave on physics and geometry many
years ago, and he pointed us to three fundamental insights, which were his big
three insights in physics.
And they correspond to the three great equations.
So the first one is, is that somehow physics takes place in an arena and that
arena is a manifold X together with some kind of semi-Riemannian metric structure,
something that allows us to take length and angle.
So that we can perform measurements at every point in this space time or higher
dimensional structure, leaving us a little bit of head room.
The equation most associated with this is the Einstein field equation.
And of course I'm running into the margin.
Okay.
So it says
that a piece of the Riemann curvature tensor or the Ricci tensor minus an even
smaller piece, the scalar curvature multiplied by the metric is equal plus the
cosmological constant is equal to some amount of matter and energy, the stress
energy tensor.
So it's intrinsically a curvature equation.
The second fundamental insight,
I'm going to begin to start drawing pictures here as well.
So if this is the space time manifold, the arena,
the second one concerns symmetry groups.
Which cannot necessarily be deduced from any structure inside of the arena.
They are additional data that come to us out of the blue without explanation
and these symmetries for a non-Abelian group, which is currently SU-3
color cross weak eyes suspend cross you one week hyper charge, which breaks down
to SU, three cross you one where the broken you one is the electromagnetic
cemetery.
This equation is also a curvature equation, the corresponding equation, and
it says.
But this time, the curvature of an auxiliary structure known as a gauge
potential
when differentiated in a particular way is equal.
Again,
to the amount of stuff in the system that is not directly involved in the left hand
side of the equation.
So it has many similarities to the above equation.
Both involve curvature.
One involves a projection or a series of projections.
The other involves a differential operator.
The third point
surrounds the matter in the system.
And here
we have a equation.
Again, coupled to a connection.
One of the great insights is, is that the reason for the lightness of matter in the
natural mass scale of physics has to do with the fact.
That this sigh really should have two components and the differential operators
should map to one component on the other side of the equation, but the mass
operators should map to another.
And so if one of the components is missing, if the equation is intrinsically
lopsided, chiral asymmetric, then the mass term and the differential term have
difficulty interacting, which is sort of overcompensating.
For the mass scale, the university, you get to a point where you actually have to
define a massless equation, but then just like overshooting a putt, it's easier to
knock it back by putting in a Higgs field in order to generate an as if fundamental
mass through the Aqaba couplings.
Let me for consistency
so matter is asymmetric, okay.
And therefore light.
And then interestingly, he went on to say one more thing.
He said, of course, these three central observations must be supplemented with the
idea that this all takes place,
treated in quantum mechanical fashion or quantum field theoretic.
So it's a bit of a, an aftermarket modification rather than in his opinion at
the time.
One of the.
Uh, core insights.
I actually think that that's in some sense about right.
No.
One of my differences with the community in some sense is that I questioned whether
the quantum isn't in good enough shape that we don't know whether we have a
serious quantum mechanical problem or not.
We know that we have a quantum mechanical problem, a quantum field theoretic problem
relative to the current formulations of these theories.
But we know that in some other cases, the quantum becomes incredibly natural,
sometimes sort of almost magically a natural, and we don't know whether the
truth theory is that we will need to be generalizing, in some sense, have
beautiful quantum mechanical treatments.
Whereas the effective theories that we're dealing with now may not survive the
quantization.
So what I want to do
is I want to met, imagine a different sort of incompatibilities.
So let's take our great three theories and just visually treat them as the vertices
of a triangle.
So I'm going to put general relativity and Einstein's formulation.
And I'm going to put the probably won't write this again.
Yang mills, Maxwell Anderson, Higgs theory, uh, over here, and I'm going to
write the derog theory.
What I want to explore is the incompatibilities, not at the quantum
level.
But the geometric input, all three of these are geometric theories.
And the question is, what are the compatibilities or incompatibilities at
the level of geometry before the theory is treated quantum mechanically?
Well, in the case of Einstein's general relativity, we can rewrite the Einstein
theory by saying that there's a projection map due to Einstein.
Of a curvature tensor where I'm going to write that curvature tensor as I would in
the yang mills theory.
Sure.
That should be an LLC for levy Chivita.
So the Einstein projection of the curvature, tensor of the levy Chivita
connection of the metric on this side, and on this side, I'm going to write down this
differential operator, the ad joint of the exterior derivative coupled to a
connection.
And you begin to see that we're missing an opportunity, potentially.
What if the FAS were the same in both contexts?
Then you're applying two separate operators, one zero with order and
destructive in the sense that it doesn't see the entire curvature tensor, the other
inclusive, but a first order.
And so the question is, is there any opportunity to do anything that combines
these two?
But the problem is, is that the hallmark of the yang mills theory is the freedom to
choose the data, the internal quantum numbers that give all the particles, their
personalities beyond the mass, and the spin.
In addition to all of that freedom is some means of taking away some of the
redundancy that comes with that freedom, which is the action of the gage group.
Now we can allow the gage group of symmetries to act on both sides of the
equation, but the key problem
is that.
Okay.
If I act on connections on the right
and then take the Einstein projection, this is not equal
to first taking the projection.
And then conjugating with the gauge action.
So the problem is, is that the projection is based on the fact that you have a
relationship between the intrinsic geometry.
If this is an add value to form the to form portion of this, and the add joint
portion of this are both associated to the structure group of the tangent button.
But the gauge rotation is only acting on one of the two factors.
Yet the projection is making use of both of them.
So there is a fundamental in compatibility in the claim that Einstein's theory is a
gauge theory relies more on analogy than an exact mapping between the two theories.
What about the incompatibilities between the Einstein theory of general relativity
and the theory of matter?
I was very struck that if we're going to try to quantize gravity and we associate
gravity with the spin to field GMU new,
we actually have a pretty serious problem, which is, if you think about spinners,
electrons core as being waves in a medium.
And you think about photons as being waves in a different medium.
Photons medium does not depend on the existence of a metric.
One forms are defined whether or not a metric is present, it's spinners or not.
So if we're going to take the spin to GMU Newfield to be quantum mechanical, if it
blinks out and does whatever the quantum does between observations.
In the case of the photon, it's saying that the waves may blink out, but the
ocean need not blink out.
In the case of the derog theory, it is the ocean, the medium in which the waves live.
That becomes uncertain itself.
So even if you're comfortable with the quantum, to me, this becomes a bridge too
far.
So the question is how do we liberate the definition.
How do we get the metric out from its responsibilities?
It's been assigned far too many responsibilities.
It's responsible for a volume form for differential operators.
It's responsible for measurement.
It's responsible for being a dynamical field, part of the field content of the.
Lastly, we have the compatibilities and incapacity between yang mills and in the
derog theory, these may be the most mild of the various incompatibilities, but it
is an compatibility of naturality where the direct field, Einstein's field, and
the connection fields are all geometrically well motivated, push a lot
of the artificiality that we do not understand into the potential for the
scalar field that gives everything it's mad.
Yes.
So we tend to treat it as something of a mysterious fudge factor.
So the question is, if we have a Higgs field,
why is it here and why is it geometric?
It has long been the most artificial sector of our models.
The proposal that I want to put to you today.
Is that one of the reasons that we may be having trouble with unification this is
that the duty, our duty may be to generalize all three vertices before we
can make progress.
That's daunting because in each case, it would appear that we can make an argument.
That this, that and the other Vertex are the simplest possible theories that could
live at that verdict.
We know, for example, yeah, the Duroc operator is the most fundamental of all
the elliptic operators and Euclidean signature generating all of the Tia singer
theory.
We know that Einstein's theory is, in some sense, a unique spin to massless field
capable of communicating gravity, which can be arrived at from field theoretic
rather than geometric consideration.
In the yang mills case, it can be argued that the yang mills theory is the simplest
theory that can possibly result where we're taking the simplest LaGrand gene.
In the Einstein case, looking only at the scalar curvature.
In the yang mills case, we have no substructure, and so we're doing the most
simple minded thing we can do by taking the norm square of the curvature and
saying whatever the field strength is, let's measure that size.
So if each one of these is simplest possible, it doesn't outcomes raise there.
Tell us that if we wish to remain in geometric field theory, that we've already
reached bottom and that what we're being asked to do is to abandon this as merely
an effective theory that's possible.
And I would say that that in some sense represents a lot of conventional wisdom,
but there are other possibilities.
There are other possibilities that while each of these may be simplest in its
category.
They are not simplest in their interaction.
For example, we know that Dirac famously took the square root of the client Gordon
equation to achieve the direct equation.
You actually took two square roots, one of the differential operator and another of
the algebra, uh, on which it acts.
But could not, could we not do the same thing by re-interpreting what we saw in
Donaldson theory and churn Simon's theory and finding that there are first order
equations that imply second order equations that are nonlinear and in the
curvature.
So let's imagine the following.
We replaced the standard model
with a true second order theory.
We imagine the general relativity is replaced by a true first order theory.
And then we find that the true second orders theory admits of a square root and
can be linked with the true first order theory.
This would be a program for some kind of unification of type, but in the forest
sector,
the question is, does this really make any sense?
Are there any possibilities to do any such thing?
So what I'd like to do is I'd like to talk a little bit about what the geometric
unity proposal is.
So we have a division to intrinsic theories and auxiliary theory.
Between physics
and mathematics.
More specifically, geometry and intrinsic physical theory would be general
relativity
and auxiliary physical theory would be the yang mills theory with the freedom to
choose internal quantum numbers.
The mathematical level and intrinsic theory would be,
let's be a little fastidious.
Okay.
The older semi Ramani in geometry study of manifolds with length and angle, but
auxiliary geometry is really what's taken off.
Of late since the revolution partially begun at Oxford when his singer brought
insights from Stony Brook to the U K and so we're going to call this fiber bundle
theory
or modern gauge theory.
Geometric unity is the search for some way to break down the walls between these four
boxes.
What's natural to one theory is unnatural to another.
Semi Romani and geometry is dominated by these projection operators as well as the
ability, uh, to use the levy Chivita connection.
Now, some aspects of this are less explored.
Torsion tensors are definable in semi Romani in geometry, but they are not used
to the extent that you might imagine in the case of fiber bundle theory, the
discovery of physicists that the gage group was fantastically important.
Um.
Came as something of a shock to the mathematicians who had missed that
structure, uh, and have since exploited it to great effect.
So what we'd like to do is we'd like to come up with some theory that is
intrinsic, but allows us to play some of the games that exist in other boxes.
How can we fit?
How can we try to have our cake eat it, uh, and use all the full suite of
techniques that are available to us.
So our perspective is, is that it is the quantum that may be the comparatively easy
part, and that the unification of the geometry, which is not occurred, may be
what we're being asked to do.
So let's try to figure out what would a final theory even look like
when I was a bit younger, I remember reading this question of Einstein, which
he said, I'm not really interested in . Some of the details of physics.
What really concerns me is whether the creator had any choice in how the world
was constructed.
And some people may have read that as a philosophical statement, but I took that
as an actual call for a research program.
So I'd like to describe that research program and try to unpack what I think he
was saying.
We talked a lot about unification, but we hardly ever actually imagine if we had a
unified theory, what would it look like?
Let us imagine that.
We cannot figure out the puzzle of why is there something rather than nothing.
But if we do have a something that that's something has his little structure as
possible, but it still invites us to work mathematically.
So to me, the two great theories that we have mathematically and in physics are
calculus and linear algebra.
If we have calculus and linear algebra, I mean, imagine that we have some manifold,
at least one of dimension four, but it's not a space time.
It doesn't have a metric.
It's not broken down into two different kinds of coordinates, which then have some
bleed into each other, but still maintains a distinction.
It's just some sort of flabby prodo space time, and in the end it's got to fill up
with stuff.
And give us some kind of an equation.
So let me write an equation.
So I haven't mind differential operators parameterized by some fields, Omega, which
when composed or not of second order, if these are first order operators, but as
zero with order in some sort of further differential operator
saying that whatever those two operators are in composition is in some sense
harmonic.
It's such a program even possible.
So if the universe is in fact capable of being the fire that lights itself, is it
capable of managing its own flame as well?
And closing up, what I'd like to do is to set ourselves an almost impossible task,
which is to begin with this little data in a sandbox to use the computer science
concept.
So if here this physical reality
standard physics,
it's over here.
We're going to start with the sandbox
and all we're going to put in it is X four.
And we're going to set ourselves a straight jacket and task of seeing how
close we can come to dragging out a model that looks like the natural world that
follows this trajector.
While it may appear that that is not a particularly smart thing to do, I would
like to think that we could agree that it is quite possible.
That if that were to be the case, we might say that this is what Einstein meant by a
creator, which was his anthropomorphic concept.
necessity and elegance and design having no choice in the making of the world.
So with that, let us begin
to think about what we mean today by geometric.
Yeah.
G U comes in four flavors, but I'm only getting one shot to do this, so I'm going
to do the most exciting of them.
To me,
there's a completely exotic genus flavor.
What I'm gonna do is I'm going to take the concept of observation and I'm going to
break the world into two pieces.
A place where we do our observation in a place where most of the activity takes
place.
And I'm going to try and do this without loss of generality.
So in this case, we have and it can map into some other space, and we are going to
call this an observers.
Yeah.
Idea of an opposite versus a bit like a stadium.
You have a playing field and you have stands.
They aren't distinct entities.
They're coupled.
And so fundamentally we're going to replace one space with two exciting.
This model simply means that you is unrestricted, although larger than X four
so any manifold of four dimension higher that is capable of admitting as an
immersion.
The next model we have is the bundle theoretic, in which case you sits over X.
Is a fiber bundle.
The most exciting, which is the one we'll deal with today, is the endogenous model
where X four actually grows
the space you where the activity takes place.
So we talked about extra dimensions, but these are in some sense, not extra
dimensions.
They're implicit dimensions within X.
And last to proceed without loss of generality.
We have the tautological model.
In that case, equals you.
And the immersion is the identity.
And without loss of generality, we simply play our games on one space.
Okay?
Now we need rules.
The rules are, sorry.
Okay.
Feedback.
Um.
No choice of fundamental metric.
So we imagined that Einstein was presented with a fork in the road, and it's always
disturbing not to follow Einstein's path,
but we're in fact going to turn Einstein's game on its head and see if we can get
anywhere with that.
Right.
It's also a possibility that because Einstein's theory is so perfect that if
there's anything wrong with it, it's very hard to unthink it because everything is
built on top.
So let's make no choice of fundamental metric.
And in fact, let's go more ambitious.
And let's say we're going to reverse the logic of Einstein.
Einstein.
The metric is fundamental, but the levy Chivita connection from which we deduced
the curvature is emergent, right?
So the fundamental theorem of Ramani and geometry is, is that every connection, uh,
causes every metric causes a connection to emerge.
And then the curvature is built on the connection.
We turn this around, we imagine we're looking for a connection.
And we wish it to build a metric because connections are amenable to quantization
in a way that metrics are not.
The next point is that we always want to have a plan to return to finite dimensions
without losing sight of the quantum.
And lastly, we want to liberate matter from its dependence on the metric for its
very existence.
So we now need to build onto our four dimensional manifold in some way without
ever choosing a metric, if we're even going to have any hope of playing a game
involving matter, starting from this perspective of no information other than
the most bare information.
Let's get started.
We take X for, we need metrics.
We have none.
We're not allowed to choose one.
So we do standard trick is we choose them all.
So we allow you 14 to equal the space of metrics on X four point wise.
Therefore, if we propagate on top of this, let me call this the projection operator.
If we propagate on you 14 we are in some sense following a fireman, like idea of
propagating over the space of all metrics, but not at a field level.
At a point wise 10
Is there a metric on you 14 well, we both want one and don't want one.
If we had a metric from the space of all metrics, we could define Fermi ons, but we
would also lock out any ability to do dynamics.
We want some choice over what this metric is, but we don't want full choice because
we want enough to be able to define the matter fields to begin with.
It turns out.
That if this is X four
and this is this particular indogenous choice of you 14
we have a 10 dimensional metric along the fibers.
So we have a G 10 mew new further for every point in the fibers, we get a metric
downstairs on the base.
So if we pull back the cotangent bundle,
we get a metric G4 mew new on PI star of the cotangent bundle of X.
We now define the Comeric bundle, right?
And the Comeric bundle.
Is this direct, some of the vertical tangent bundle along the fibers with the
pullback, which we're going to call the horizontal bundle from the base space.
So the Comeric bundle
is going to be the vertical tangent space of 10 dimensions to you direct sum, the
four dimensional cotangent space.
Which we're going to call horizontal to you.
And the great thing about the Comeric bundle is, is that it has an a priori
metric.
It's got a metrics on four metric on the 10 and we can always decide that the two
of them are naturally perpendicular to each other.
Furthermore, it is almost canonically isomorphic to the tangent bundle or the
cotangent bundle, because we either have four out of 14 or 10 out of 14 dimensions
on the nose.
So the question is, what are we missing.
And the answer is that we're missing exactly the data of a connection.
So this bundle, S Comeric C we have C is equal to the tangent bundle of you up to a
choice of a connection feta.
And this is exactly what we wanted.
We have a situation where we have some field on the manifold.
In the form of a connection which is amenable, more friendly to quantization,
which is now determining a metric turning around the levy trivia game.
And the only problem is, is that we've had to buy ourselves into a different space
than the one we thought we wanted to work on.
But now as theta changes, the Fermi ons are defined on the Comeric bundle, and
it's the isomorphism from the Comeric bundle to the tangent bundle.
Of the space you, which is very, which means that the Fermi no longer depend on
the metric.
They no longer depend on the theta connection.
They are there.
If things go quantum mechanical, and we've achieved our objective of putting the
matter fields and the spin one fields on something of the same footing.
But I want to emphasize this.
One thing, most of us, we think a lot about final theories and and about
unification, but until you actually start daring to try to do it, you don't realize
what the process of it feels like.
And I try to imagine conducting your life where you have no children, let's say, and
no philanthropic urges.
And what you want to do is you want to use all of your money for yourself.
And died penniless, right?
Like a perfect finish.
Assuming that that's what you wanted to do, it would be pretty nerve wracking at
the end, right?
How many days left do I have?
How many dollars left I have?
This is the process of unification.
In physics, you start giving away all of your most valuable possessions, and you
don't know whether you've given them away too early, whether you've husband them too
long.
And so in this process, what we've just done is we've started to paint ourselves
into a corner.
And we got something we wanted, but we've given away freedom.
We're now dealing with a 14 dimensional world.
Well, let me just sum this up by saying
between fundamental and emergent.
Standard model and gr.
Let's do gr.
fundamental is the metric.
Yeah.
Merging is the connection.
Okay.
Here.
G.
U, it is the connection that's fundamental and the metric that's emerged.
And the next unit of G U.
So this is sort of the first unit of G U there are any quick questions having to do
with confusion or may I proceed to the next unit.
Okay.
The next unit of geo is the unified field content.
What does it mean for our fields to become unified?
There are, in fact,
only at this moment.
Two fields, but know about X
painter, which is the connection that we've just talked about.
An a section Sigma that takes us back
so that we can communicate back and forth between you and X.
We now need.
Field content that only knows about you, which now has a metric depending on theta.
a particular member of the audience is a hedge fund manager who taught me that
there is something of a universal trade and a universal trade has four components.
You have to have a view, you have to have a trade expression.
You have to be able to calculate your cost of carry and you need a catalyst.
Our view is going to be that somebody doesn't understand what trade is possible
and we're going to make a trade that looks like one of the worst trades of all time,
and hopefully if we, if we have enough conviction, we're going to have a catalyst
to show that we actually got the better part of the deal.
What is that trade?
What is it that we think has been blocking progress.
In gr and remind me in geometry, as we've said, we have the projection operators and
we also have the levy Chivita connection.
In the auxiliary theory,
we have freedom to choose our field content.
And we have the ability to get rid of much excess through the symmetries of the gage
group.
We're going to take particle theory, we're going to make a bad trade, or what appears
to be a bad trade, which is that we are going to give away the freedom to choose
our field content, which is already extremely, as I think I said in the
abstract Baroque with all of the different particle properties.
And we're going to lose the ability to use the gage group because we're going to
trade it all.
You have the family cow
and you have some magic beans.
So it's now time to trade the family cow for the magic beans and bring them home
and see whether or not we got the better of the deal.
Okay.
What is it that we get for the Livy Chivita connection?
Well, not much.
One thing we get is that normally the space of connections is an AF fine space.
Not a vector space, but an fin space, almost a vector space, a vector space up
to a choice of origin, but with the levy Chivita connection, rather than having an
infinite plane with an ability to take differences, but no real ability to have a
group structure.
You pick out one point, which then becomes the origin.
That means that any connection a
has the torsion tensor a which is equal to the connection minus the levy Shavita
connection.
Okay, so we get a tensor that we don't usually have.
Gauge potentials are not usually well-defined.
They're only defined up to a choice of gauge.
So that's one of the things we get for our levy Chivita connection, but because the
gage group is going to go missing, this has terrible properties from with respect
to the gage group, it almost looks like a representation, but in fact, if we let the
gage group act, there's going to be an fine shift.
Furthermore, as we've said before.
The ability to use projection operators together with the gage group is frustrated
by virtue of the fact that these two things do not commute with each other.
So now the question is, how are we going to prove that we're actually making a good
Okay.
First thing we need to do is a, we still have the right to choose intrinsic field
con.
Have an intrinsic field theory.
So if you consider the structure bundle of the spinners, right, we built the Homeric
bundle, so we can define derog spinners on the Comeric Bible if we're in Euclidean
signature.
A 14 dimensional manifold has Dirac spinners of dimension two to the dimension
of the space divided by two.
Right?
So two to the 14 over two two to the seventh is 128 so we have a map into a
structured group of you, 128
at least in Euclidean signature.
We can get to mixed signatures later.
From that, we can form the associated bundle.
And sections of this bundle
are either, depending upon how you want to think about it, the gage group age
work, see a space of Sigma field.
Nonlinear.
There's no reason that we can't choose this as field content.
Again, we're being led by the nose like a bowl.
If we want to make use of the symmetries of the theory, we have to promote some
symmetry to being part of the theory, and we have to let it be subjected to
dynamical laws.
We're going to lose control over it.
But we're not dead yet, right?
We're fighting for our life to make sure that this trade has some hope.
So potentially by including symmetries as field content, we will have some
opportunity to make use of the projections.
So for those of you who,
so when I was thinking about this.
I used to be amazed by ships in bottles.
I must confess that I never figured out what the trick was for ships in bottles,
but once I saw it, I remembered thinking, that's really clever.
So if you've never seen it, you have a ship, which is like a curvature tensor.
And imagine that the mass does is the Ricci curvature.
If you just try to shove it into the bottle, you're undoubtedly going to snap
the mass.
So you imagine that you've transformed your gauge fields, you've kept track of
where the re Ricci curvature was.
You try to push it from one space, like add value two forms into another space,
like add valued one forms where connections live.
That's not a good idea.
Instead, what we do is the following.
Imagine that you're carrying around group theoretic information and what you do is
you do a transformation based on the group theory.
So you lower the mast.
You push it through the neck, having some string attached to the mast and then you
under the transformation on the other side.
This is exactly what we're going to hope is going to save us in this bad trade that
we've made because we're going to add fields, content that has the ability to
lower the mass and bring the mass back up.
We're going to hope to have a theory which is going to create a communitive
situation.
But then once we've had this idea, we start to get a little bolder.
Let's take about unified content.
We know that we want a space of connections, a for our field theory, but
we know because we have a levy Chivita connection, that this is going to be equal
on the nose to add value one forms as a vectors.
Face.
The gage group represents on add valued one forms.
So if we also have the gage group, what we think of that instead as a space of Sigma
fields.
What if we take the semi direct product and a group theoretic level between the
two and call this our group of interests.
Well by analogy, we've always had a problem with the pong Caray group being
too intrinsically tied to rigid Flatman Kowski space.
What if we wanted to do quantum field theory in some situation, which was more
amenable to a curved space situation?
It's possible that we should be basing it around something more akin to the gage
group, and in this case, we're mimicking the construction work.
See here would be analogous to the Lorenzo.
Fixing a point in Mankowski space and add valued one forms would be analogous to the
four momentums.
We take in the semi direct product to create the inhomogeneous Lorens group,
otherwise known as the pawn Caray group, or rather, it's a double cover to allow
spin.
So we're going to call this the inhomogeneous gage group
or ag.
And this is going to be a really interesting space because it has a couple
of properties.
One is it has a very interesting subgroup.
Now, of course, H includes into G by just including onto the first factor, but in
fact, there's a more interesting home momorphism
brought to you by the levy Chivita connection.
So this magic being trade is going to start to enter more and more into our
consciousness.
If I take an element H and I map that in the obvious way into the first factor, but
I map it
onto the moral cartoon for, I think that's what I, I wish I remembered more of this
stuff.
Into the second factor.
It turns out that this is actually a group home momorphism
and so we have a nontrivial embedding, which is in some sense diagonal between
the two factors.
That subgroup we are going to refer to as the tilted gauge group, and now our field
content, at least in the Bose Onyx sector, it's going to be a group manifold, is an
infinite dimensional function space league.
Group, but a group nonetheless.
And we can now look at G mod, the Tilton engage group,
and it, if we have any interesting representation of age, we can form
homogeneous vector bundles and work with induced representations.
And that's what the Fermi ions are going to be.
So the Fermi ons and our theories are going to be H module.
So, and the idea is that we're going to work with vector bundles, curly II of the
form
inhomogeneous gage group
product over the tilted gauge group.
Okay.
Now, just as in the finite dimensional case, we have a linear and a nonlinear
component, right?
Because at the top logical level, this is just a cartoon, a Cartesian product.
So if we wished to take products affirming.
Of spinner oil fields.
We have a place to accept that.
We can't figure out necessarily how to map them into the nonlinear sector, but we
don't want to.
So just the way, when we look at supersymmetry, we can take products, the
spin one half fields and map them into the linear sector.
We can do the same thing here.
So what we're talking about is something like a supersymmetric extension of the
inhomogeneous gage group and now elegance to supersymmetric extension.
Of the double cover of the inhomogeneous Lorenz or pong Craiger
further, because this construction is at the level of groups, we've left a slot on
the left hand side on which to act.
So for example, if we want to take regular representations on the , we can act by the
group G on the left hand side, because we're allowing the tilt engage group to
act on the right hand right.
So it's perfectly built for representation theory.
And if you think back to Victor's, uh, classification and the concept that a
particle should correspond to an irreducible representation of the
inhomogeneous gage group, uh, in homogeneous Lorens group, we may be able
to play the same games here up to the issue of infinite dimentionality.
So right now, our field content is looking pretty good.
It's looking unified in the sense.
That it has an algebraic structure that is not usually enjoyed by field content and
the field content from different sectors can interact and know about each other.
Mmm.
Provided we can drag something of this out of this with meaning.
Now, what would it mean to be able to use a gauge group in an intrinsic theory like
this?
We would be talking.
About something like an action, let's say a first order action and it would take the
group G no, let's say to the real numbers
in variant,
not under the full group, but under the tilted gauge subgroup.
And now the question is, do we have any such actions that are particularly nice.
And could we recognize them the way Einstein did by trying to write down, not
the action and Hilbert was the first one to write that down.
But I, you know, I always feel defensive, uh, because I think Einstein and Grossman
did so much more to begin the theory in that the Lagrangian that got written down
was really just an inevitability.
So just humor me for this talk, and let me call it the Einstein Grossman.
Lagrangian.
Uh.
Hubbard's certainly done fantastic things and has a lot of credit elsewhere.
and he did do it first, but here what we had was that Einstein thought in terms of
the differential of the action, not the action itself.
So what we're looking for is equations of motion
or some field alpha where alpha belongs to the one forms on the group.
Now in this section of G U
unified field content is only one part of it, but what we really want,
it's unified field content plus a toolkit.
So we've, we've restricted ourselves to one gauge group, this big unitary group on
the spinners using whatever sort of inner product naturally exists on the spinners
and not spinners value in an auxiliary structure, but intrinsic spinners.
The toolkit that we have is that the ad joint bundle.
It looks like the Clifford algebra.
Okay.
At the level of vector space,
which is just looking like the exterior algebra on the Comeric one,
that means that it's graded by degrees.
Comeric bundle has dimension 14 so there's a zero part, a one part, a two part, all
the way up to 14 plus.
We have forms in the manifold, and so the question is, if I want to look at Omega I
okay valued in the adjunct bundle.
There's going to be some element fi.
Which is pure trace.
Okay.
Right.
Because it's the same representations appearing where in the usually auxiliary
directions as well as the geometric directions.
So we get an entire suite.
Of invariance together with trivially, uh, associated variants that come from using
the Hodge star operator on the forums.
I'm just going to call them for completeness.
I'm not going to deal with them.
Now, this is a tremendous amount of freedom that we've just gained.
Normally we keep losing freedom, but this is the first time we actually begin to see
that we have a lot of freedom and we're going to actually retain some of this
freedom through the to the end of the talk.
But the idea being that I can now start to define operators which correspond to the
ship in the bottle problem.
I can take field content.
Epsilon and PI, where Epsilon,
where these are elements of the inhomogeneous gage group.
In other words, Epsilon is a gauge transformation and PI is an, is a gauge
potential
and I can start to define operators.
I'm used.
So in this case,
if I have a fi, which is one of these invariants in the form piece, I can either
take a contraction or I can take a wedge product.
In the Lee algebra piece, I can either take a lead product.
Or because I'm looking at, um, the unitary group, there's a second possibility, which
is I can multiply everything by eye and go from SCU her mission to here mission and
take a Jordan product using anti commutators rather than Cami data.
So I actually have a fair amount of freedom and I'm going to use a magic
bracket notation, which in whatever situation I'm looking for, knows what it
wants to be is does it want to do contraction?
Does wanting to wedge product lead product Jordan product.
But the point is, I now have a suite of ways of moving forms around.
So for example, I can define a Shia of operator.
Okay.
That takes, I forms valued in the ads, right bundle.
To much higher degree forms valued in the ad joint bundle.
So for this, in this case, for example, it would take a two form two a D minus three
plus two or a D minus one form.
So curvature is an add value to form.
And if I had such a she app operator,
it would take add value to form.
To add value.
D minus one forms, which is exactly the right space to be an alpha coming from the
derivative of an action.
This is exactly what Einstein was doing.
He took the curvature, which was large, and he bent it back and he sheared off the
vial curvature and they took that part and he pushed it back along the space of
metrics to give us something, which we nowadays call Ricci.
Flow and ability for the curvature to direct us to the next structure.
Well, we're doing the same thing here.
We're taking the curvature and we can now push it back onto the space of
connections.
Okay.
Can you just clarify what the index of the is?
So you take all your forms to D minus three plus I,
right?
So in this case, the idea is, is that we've actually got something for our
magic.
We have an ability now to get equations of motion, which go along the group.
In some sense, it's as if it was a great vector field, except we're using forms
rather than vectors.
But now what are the transformation properties?
Well, because the curvature.
So you have Schab
because the curvature of a connection hit by engage transformation is equal on the
nose.
the joint action on the lead algebra of the curvature.
We know that if we have two possible actions of conjugation under a bracket and
the bracket, Mmm respects the action of the gage group, we know that this is going
to be well preserved.
In other words, we're going to get a form that is gauged in variant relative to the
tilted gauge group.
And so as a result, we now have the possibility for equations of motion, which
are well-defined.
Uh, even though they involve projection operators, because we've built the
symmetries into the theory and we're working on a group manifold to begin with.
What about the torsion?
Can we rescue the torsion here again, we have good news.
The torsion is problematic, but if I look at a different field, which I'm going to
call the augmented tourism, and I define it to be the regular torsion, which would
be PI.
Minus
this expression.
Okay?
This turns out to be beautifully invariant again.
So neither this term nor this term is in Varian, but they're, they fail to engage
in Varian in exactly the same way.
So an important principle of life, which I took too long to realize, is that if you
have one disease, you're in real time.
But if you have two diseases, you always have the possibility of having one disease
kill the other disease.
This is true in renormalization theory.
It's true in black Shoals theory.
It's true all over the place.
So what we have here is we've gotten more diseases into the theory, but an even
number of diseases allow us to have no disease at all.
So now we have two great tensors.
We've got one tensor coming from the curvature and the operator.
We have another tensor coming from the torsion and it's augmentation.
We're doing okay.
Okay.
We're not doing physics yet.
We're just building tools.
We've built ourselves a little bit of freedom.
We have some reprieves.
We've still got some very big debts to pay back for this magic beans trade.
We're in the wrong dimension.
We don't have good field content.
We're stuck on this one spinner.
We've built ourselves in projection operators.
We've picked up some symmetric, nonlinear Sigma field.
What can we write down in terms of equations of ? Let's start with Einstein's
concept.
Okay.
If we do, she add the curvature tensor, but the gauge potential hit with an
operator.
Okay.
Defined by the Epsilon Sigma field plus
the star operator.
Acting on the augmented torsion of the pair.
This contains all of the information when PI is zero in Einstein's tensor.
In other words, there is a analog of the vile curvature, a spinoff Oriel analog of
the Traceless Ricci curvature, and it's analog of the scalar curvature.
This operator should shear off the analog of the vile curvature.
Just the way Einstein's projection shears off the vial curvature, when you're
looking at the tangent bundle, and this term, which is now gaging variant, may be
considered
as containing a piece that looks like Lambda times G, mu, Nu, or a cosmological
constant.
And this piece here.
Can be made to contain a piece that looks like Einstein's tensor.
And so this looks very much like the vacuum field equations.
Okay, well we have to add in something else.
It'd be a little bit vague cause I'm still giving myself some freedom as we write
this up.
But we're going to define whatever tense or we need for this term, these terms
here.
This is gauging variant.
This is gauging variant, and this is gauge variant with respect to the tilted gage
group.
These two tensors together should be exact, and this tense or on its own should
be exact.
We're going to call the exact tensor, the swervature.
So the particular CI of operator, we call the swerve.
So that's swerve curvature, plus the adjustment needed for exactness
and another gauge and variant term, which is not usually gauge invariant.
So that's pretty cool.
If that works, we've now taken the Einstein equation and we've put it not on
the space of metrics, but we've put a generalization and an analog on the space
of gage potentials, much more amenable to quantization with much more algebraic
structure and symmetry in the form of the inhomogeneous gage group and its
homogeneous vector bundle, some of which may be super symmetric.
Now the question is, we've w w we've integrated so tight.
With the matter field, we have to ask ourselves the question, can we see
unification here?
Let's define matter content in the form of Omega zero 10 cert in the spinners, which
is a fancy way of saying spinners together.
Okay.
With a copy of the one forms tendered in the spinners,
and let me come up with two other copies of the same data.
So I'll make Omega D minus one just by duality.
So imagine that there's a HUD star opera.
And
, whereas a little kid, I had the Soma cube.
I don't know if you've ever played with one of these things.
They're fantastic.
And, uh, I later found out that this guy who invented the Soma cube, which you had
to put together as pieces, there was one piece that looked like this, this object.
And he was like this amazing guy in the resistance during world war II.
So I would like to name this, the sematic . Flex, uh, after, I guess his name is I
think so this, this complex, I'm going to choose to start filling in some operators,
the exterior derivative coupled to a connection, but on the case of spinners,
we're going to put a slash through it.
Let's make this the identity.
We'd now like to come up with a second operator here.
Here in this second operator here should have the property that the complex should
be exact and the obstruction to it being a true complex to know potency should be
exactly the generalization of the Einstein equations.
Thus unifying the spin Noriel matter with the intrinsic replacement for the
curvature equations.
Well, we know that da composed with itself is going to be the curvature, and we know
that we want that to be hit by a Schab operator.
And if she had is a derivation, you can start to see that that's going to be
curvature.
So you want something like FAA followed by Xi YAB over here to cancel.
Then you think, okay, well how am I going to get at getting this augmented torsion?
And then you realize that the information in the inhomogeneous gage group, you
actually have information, not for one connection, but for two connections.
So in one case
I can do
plus star T to pick up the a sub PI.
But I'm also going to have a derivative operator if I just do a star operation.
So I need another derivative operator to kill it off here.
So I'm going to take minus the derivative with respect to the connection, H inverse,
da not H, which defines a connection one form as well as having the same.
Derivative cup, uh, coming from the levy Chivita connection on you.
So in other words, I have two derivative operators here.
I have to add valued one forms.
The difference between them has been to be a zero with order, and it's going to be
precisely the augmented torsion.
And that's the same game I'm going to repeat here.
So I'm going to do the same thing here.
I'm going to define a bunch of terms
where in the numerator, I'm going to pick up the pie as well as the derivative in
the denominator, because I have no derivative here.
I'm going to pick up
this H inverse da, not H.
I'm going to do that again.
On the other side,
there are going to be plus and minus signs, but it's a magic brag that knows
whether or not should be a plus sign or a minus sign, and I apologize for that, but
I'm not able to keep that straight.
Okay.
And then there's going to be one extra term.
Where all these teas have the Epsilon and pies.
Okay.
So some crazy series of differential operators on the Northern route.
So if you take the high road or you take the low road, when you take the
composition of the two, the differential operators fall out and you're left with an
obstruction term that looks like the Einstein Heald equation.
Well, that's pretty good.
If true,
can you go farther?
Well, look it up.
Close to this field.
Content is to the picture from defamation theory that we learned about in low
dimensions.
The low dimensional world works.
By saying that symmetries map to field content
map two equations usually in the curvature.
And when you linearize that if you're in low enough dimensions, you have Omega zero
Omega one.
Sometimes I make a zero again and then something that comes from Omega two and if
you can get that sequence to terminate by looking at something like a half signature
theorem or a bent back.
Durham complex.
In the case of dimension three, you have N a T, a singer theory, and remember, we
need some way to get out of infinite dimensional trouble, right?
You have to have someone to call when things go wrong overseas and you have to
be able to get your way home.
And in some sense, we call on a T and singer and say, we're in some infinite
dimensional space.
Can't you cut out some finite dimensional problem that we can solve even though we
start getting ourselves into serious trouble?
And so we're going to do the same thing down here.
We're going to have a mega zero ad
Omega one ad direct, some Omega zero ad
Omega D minus one add, and it's almost the same operator.
And this is now not just a great guess, it's actually the information for the
defamation theory of the linearized replacement of the Einstein field
equations.
So this is computing the dirt Zirinsky tangent space.
Just as if you were doing self duel theory or churn.
Simon's theory, you've got two sematic complexes, right?
One of them is Bose.
One of them is firming.
The obstruction to both of them is a common generalization of the Einstein
field equations.
What's more is if you, if you start to think about this,
this is some version of Hodge theory with funky operators, so you can ask yourself,
well, what are the harmonic forms in a fractional spin context?
Well, there are different, depending upon whether you take the degree zero piece
together with the degree to piece, or you take the degree one piece, let's just take
the degree one piece.
You get some kind of equation.
So I'm going to decide that I have a Zeta field, which is an Omega one tensor
spinners and a field new.
Should we strikes me as a Yiddish field.
New is a mega zero tensor ass.
Okay.
What equation would they solve if we were doing Hodge theory relative to this
complex,
the equation would look something like this.
There'd be one equation that was very simple, and then there'd be one equation
that would be like really hard to guess.
Gotcha.
Screwing this up, but, um.
Yeah, look all these boards and I still feel like I'm managing to run out of room.
Now, if you have something like that, that would be a hell of a direct equation.
Alright, you've got differential operators over here.
you've got differential operators.
Um,
I guess I didn't write them in.
But you would have two differential operators over here, and you'd have this
differential operator coming from this more cartoon form.
So I apologize, I'm being a little loose here, but the idea is you have to have
these terms are zero with order.
Three of these terms would be first order, and on this side, one term would be first
order.
Um,
and that's not there.
That's fine.
That was a mistake.
Oh, no, sorry.
That was a mistake.
Calling it a mistake.
These are two separate equations, right?
So you have two separate fields, new in Zeta, and you have a couple set of
differential equations that are playing the role of the direct theory.
Coming from the Hodge theory of a complex who's obstruction to being calm, ology
theory would be the replacement to the Einstein field equations, which would be
rendered.
Gauge it variant on a group relative to a tilted subgroup.
Okay.
What would, so now we've dealt with two of the three sectors.
Is there any generalization of the yang mills equation?
Well, if we were to take the Einstein field equation generalization and take the
norm square of it, Oh, there's some point I should make here.
Just one second.
Yeah.
I've been treating this as if everything is first order, but what really happens
here
is that you've got symmetries.
You've got symmetric field content,
you've got ordinary connections.
And we're neglecting to draw the fact that there have to be equations here too.
These equations are first order.
So why do we get to call this a first order theory?
If there are equations here, which are of second order,
well, it's not a pure first order theory, but when I say a first order theory in
this context, what I really mean.
I mean is that the second order equations are completely redundant on the first
order equations.
By virtue of the symmetry principle, that is any solution of the first order
equation should automatically apply, imply his solution of the second order equation.
So from that perspective, I can pretend that this isn't here because it is
sufficient to solve the first order equations.
So I can now look.
Let's call that entire replacement,
which we previously called alpha.
I mean that alpha equal to Upsilon because I've actually been using Upsilon.
The portion of that is just the first order equations and take the norm square
of that.
That gives me a new LaGrand gene, and if I solve that new LaGrand Jian, it leads to
equations of motion.
That looked like exactly what we said before.
And it ends up defining an operator that looks something like this, da star.
The advent of the operator.
So in other words, this piece gives you some portion that looks like right from
the S the swervature 10 so there's going to be some component that's playing the
role of Einstein's field equations directly and the Ricci tensor, but
generalized.
And then you're going to have some differential operator here so that the
replacement for the yang mills term instead of da star of FAA, you've got
these two she have an at.
She had been an ad joint.
She had together in the center, generalizing the yang mills theory.
You say, well, how come we don't just see the Ang mills theory?
Why don't we see general relativity as well?
But in the full expansion there's also a turn the zero with order that's
effectively acting like the identity.
Which hits this as well.
So you have one piece that looks like the yang mills theory, and in these second
order equations, you also have a piece that looks like the Einstein theory.
And this is in the vacuum equations.
So then the question is how do you see the derog theory coming out of this?
And so what we're just trying to put together now before we come out with the
manuscript for this is.
Putting these two elliptic complexes together, the Dereck terms go between the
two complexes, right?
So the idea is that the stress energy tends, there should be the up and back
term and the equations should come out of the term that goes up and over versus the
term that goes over and up, and you need some cancellations to make sure that
everything is of zero with order properly and very, it's a.
And that's taking a little time because frankly, I'm not good at keeping track of
indices minus signs left, right?
That it's a learning disabled nightmare.
So
we've got one more unit to go.
I mean, there's a fifth unit that has to do with mathematical applications, but
this is sort of a physics talk for today.
Is there any questions before we go into the last unit and then really handle
questions for real?
All right, let me show you the next little bit.
We've got problems.
We're not in four dimensions.
We're in 14 we don't have great field content cause we've just got these
unadorned spinners and we're doing gauge transformations effectively on the
intrinsic geometric quantities, not on some safe auxiliary.
data.
That's tensor product did with with what?
Our, our, uh, our spinners are.
How is it that we're going to find anything realistic?
And then we have to remember everything we've been doing recently has been done on
you.
We've forgotten about X.
Okay.
How does all of this look to X.
So is sitting down here and all the action is happening up here on you 14 there's a
projection operator.
I've used pie twice.
It's not here.
The field contents, just projection.
And I've got a Sigma, which is a section.
What does Zeta.
Okay.
Pulled back
or new
pulled back look like on X four.
All right.
Okay.
Let's try to think about how we would come up with this field content starting from
first principles.
Let's imagine that there's nothing to begin with.
Then you have one copy of matter, whatever it is that we see in our world, the first
generation.
In order for that to become interesting,
it has to have an equation, so it has to get mapped somewhere.
Then we've seen the mew on and all the rest of the matter that comes with it.
We have a second generation.
Then in the mid 1970s.
Paul finds the towel particle and we start to get panicked that we don't understand
what's going on.
One thing we can do is we could move these equations around a little bit and move the
equation for the first generation back, and then we can start adding particles.
Let's imagine that we could guess what particles we'd add.
We'd had a pseudo generation of 16 particles.
Spin three halves, never before seen.
Not necessarily super partners, but Rita swinger matter with familiar internal
quantum numbers, but potentially so that they're flipped.
So that matter looks like anti-matter to this generation.
Then we add just for the heck of it, 144 spin, one half Permian's, which contain a
bunch of particles with familiar quantum numbers, but also some very exotic looking
particles that nobody's ever seen.
Now we start doing something different.
We make an accusation.
One of our generations isn't a regular generation.
It's an impostor at low energy in a cooled state.
Potentially.
It looks just the same as these other generations, but where are we somehow able
to turn up the energy?
Imagine that it would unify differently with this new matter that
We've posited rather than simply unifying onto itself.
So two of the generations would unify unto themselves, but this third generation
would fuse with the new particles that we've already added.
We consolidate geometrically.
We can add some zero with order terms, and we imagine that there is an elliptic
complex that would govern the state of affairs.
We then choose to add some stuff that we can't see at all that's dark
and this matter would be governed by forces that were dark too.
There might be dark electromagnetism and dark, strong, and dark week.
It might be that things break in that sector completely differently and it
doesn't break down and do an ESU three cross SU to cross you one because these
are different and you ones, and it may be that there would be like a high energy SU.
You know, or some a putty Salaam model.
Imagine then that was not fundamental, but it was emergent that you had some complex
and as long as they were cross terms, these two halves would talk to each other.
But if they cross terms went away, the two terms would become decoupled.
And just the way we have a left hand and we have a right hand, and you asked me,
right?
Imagine you have a neurological condition and in an all of her sex sort of . Idiom.
If somebody is only aware of one side of their body and they say, Oh my God, I'm
deformed, I'm asymmetric, right?
But we actually have a symmetry between the two things that can't see each other,
then we would still have a Cairo world, but the wouldn't be fundamental.
There'd be something else keeping the Fermi ons light, and that would be the
absence of the cross term.
Now, if you look at what happens in our replacement for the Einstein field
equation.
The term that would counterbalance the scalar curvature.
If you put these equations on a sphere, they wouldn't be satisfied if the teacher
term had a zero expectation value because there would be non-trivial scalar
curvature in the current and the swervature terms, but there'd be nothing
to counterbalance it.
So it's fundamentally the scalar curvature that would coax the valve on the augmented
torsion out of the vacuum.
Yeah.
To have a non zero level.
And if you pumped up that sphere and it's smeared out, the curvature, which you
can't get rid of because of topological considerations, let's say from churn Bay
theory, you would have a very diffuse, very small term.
And that term would be the term that was playing the role of the cosmological
constant.
So when a large universe, you'd have a curvature that was spread out.
And things would be very light and things would get very dark due to the absence of
curvature linking the sectors.
And that turns out to be exactly our complex.
So in other words, just to recap, starting with nothing other than a four manifold,
we built a bundle.
You.
The bundle.
You had no metric, but it almost had a metric and had a metric up to a
connection.
There was another bundle on top of that bundle called the Comeric bundle.
The Comeric bundle had an intrinsic metric.
We built our spinners on that.
We restricted ourselves to those spinners.
We moved most of our attention to the emergent metric on you 14 which game?
Yes.
A map between the Comeric bundle and the tangent bundle of UWF.
14 we built a tool kit allowing us to choose symmetric field content to define
equations of motion on the cotangent space of that field.
10 to form a homogeneous vector bundle with the Fermi ions to come up with
unifications of the Einstein field equations, yang mills, equations, and
directors.
Equations.
We then broke those things apart under decomposition, pulling things back from
you 14 and we found a three generation model where nothing has been put in by
hand and we have a 10 dimensional normal component,
which looks like the spin 10 theory.
I can tell you where there are problems in this.
I can tell you that when we moved from Euclidean metric to Minkovski metric, we
seem to be off by a sign somewhere.
Or I could be mistaken.
I could tell you that the propagation in 14 dimensions has to be worked out so that
we would be fooled into thinking we were on a four dimensional world.
There are lots of things to ask about this theory, but I find it remarkable that
tying our hands, we find ourselves with new equations unifications and
three-generation.
In a way that seems surprisingly rich, certainly unexpected.
Um,
and I think I'll stop there.
Thank you very much for your time.
so thanks for watching that video.
What I thought I would do since, uh, that was the first time I'd really presented
the theory at all.
Blick and had gotten somewhat turned around on my trip to England and trying,
uh, probably stupidly to do last minute corrections.
Got me a bit confused in a few places, and I wrote some things on the board I
probably shouldn't have.
I thought I would try a partial explainer for technically oriented people so that
they're not mystified by the . Yeah.
Um, and any errors here or my own, uh, I'm known to make many.
So, uh, hopefully they won't be too serious, but we'll find out.
So this is a supplementary explainer for the geometric unity talk at Oxford that
you just saw.
First of all, I think the most important thing to begin with is to ask what new
hard problems arise when you're trying to think about a fundamental theory that.
Weren't found in any earlier theory.
Now every time you have an effective theory, which is a partial theory, there
is always the idea that you can have recourse to a lower level strata.
So you don't have to explain, in some sense, everything coming from very little
or nothing.
I think that the really difficult issue that people don't talk enough about.
Is the problem of the fire that lights itself.
And I think this was beautifully demonstrated by MC Escher in his famous
lithograph, drawing hands where he takes the idea of the canvas or the paper as a
given, but somehow he imagined that the canvas could will into existence.
The ink needed to draw the hands that move the pen, the draw the hands.
Um.
That concept is actually the super tricky part, in my opinion, about going from
effective theories to any attempt at a fundamental theory.
So with that said, what I want to think about is what antecedents does this
concept have in physics.
And I find that there really aren't any candidate, um, theories of everything are
unified field theories that I can find that plausibly give us an idea of.
Of how a canvas would will an entire universe into being.
And so that really to me is the conceptual problem that I think devils this and
makes, uh, the step quite a bit more difficult than some of the previous
technical steps.
If you ask for antecedents, however, there is one that, at least within physics, is
relatively famous, and that is by John Archibald Wheeler.
And it is a picture in some sense of the universe contemplating itself.
And so this idea that somehow the universe would contemplate itself into existence,
um, maybe the letterU is in some sense analogous to the paper and somehow the
eye, uh, rather than the hands.
And, uh, is drawn across to look at a different part of the, of the UW.
And whether or not that has meaning is intrinsically always a question.
People are intimated by it, but I don't know that people have actually worked on
it.
The quote of Einstein's, I think that really speaks to me often the most, and
maybe even was my thesis problem, was a, he.
Just whether the creator had any choice in how the universe was constructed.
And so I think if you believe that the canvas is itself, um, the,
that which generates, um, all of the content and all of the action, you're,
you're left with a puzzle as to how would you move forward from this?
It might be easier in a mathematical sense, uh, to temporarily.
put the U on its back, to put it more in line with a standard picture that many
mathematicians and physicists will be familiar with
in sector.
One of the geometric, uh, unity theory space time is replaced and recovered by
the OBS averse contemplating itself.
And so there are several sectors of G you and I wanted to go through a, at least
four.
In Einstein space time.
We have not only four degrees of freedom, but also a space time metric representing
rulers and protractors.
If we're going to replace that.
It's very tricky because it's almost impossible to think about what would be
underneath Einstein theory.
Now, there's a huge problem in the sector, which I don't.
And why more people don't worry about which is that spinners aren't defined for
representations of the double cover of GL four are the general linear.
A effective spin analog.
And as such, if we imagine that we will one day quantize gravity, we will lose our
definition, not of the electrons, but let's say of the medium in which the
electrons operate.
That is, there will be no spinoff IAL bundle until we have an observation of a
metric.
So one thing we can do.
Is to take a manifold XD as the starting point and see if we can create an entire
universe from no other data and not even with the metric.
So since we don't choose a metric, what we instead do is to work over the space of
all possible point-wise metrics.
So not quite in the Fineman sense, but in the sense that, um, we will work over a
bundle that is of.
A quite larger, quite a bit larger dimension.
So for example, if X, uh, was a four dimensional, therefore D equals four, then
Y in this case would be D squared, which would be 16 plus three D, which would be
12 making 28 divided by two, which would be 14.
So in other words, a four dimensional universe, or sorry, a four dimensional
prodo space time, not a space-time, but a produce based on, with no metric would
give rise to a 14 dimensional.
Um, obser verse portion called Y.
Now, I believe that in the lecture in, um, Oxford, I called that you, so I'm sorry
for the confusion, but of course, this shifts around every time I take it out of
the garage.
And that's one of the problems with working on a theory in solitude for many
. So we have two separate spaces and we have fields on the two spaces.
Now what I'm going to do as I'm going to refer to fields on the XD space by Hebrew
letters.
So instead of GMU, new for a metric, I just wrote a gimbal, mem.
And the idea being that I want to separate Latin and Greek fields on the Y space from
the, uh, rather rarer field that actually lived directly on X.
So this is a little bit confusing.
One way of thinking about it is to think of the obser verse as the stands plus the
pitch in a state.
I think I may have said that in the, in the lecture, but this is what replaces the
questions of where and when.
In the newspapers story.
That is a fundamental theory where and when correspond to space and time.
Who and what correspond to Bose ions and Fermi ions and how and why correspond to.
Um, equations and the LaGrand G in the generates them.
So if you think about those six quantities, you'll realize that that's
really what the content of a fundamental theory is, assuming that it can be
quantized properly, most fields.
Uh, and in this case, we're going to call the collection of two tuples.
Omega.
So the inside of Omega that will be in the first Tupelo will have Epsilon and PI
written sort of an nontraditional variation of how we write this symbol for
PI.
In the second Tupelo, we'll have the letters, uh, new and Zaida.
And I would like them not to move because they honor particular people who are
important.
So most fields, in this case, Omega, um, are dancing on . Y, which was called you
in the lecture, unfortunately, but they are observed via pullback as if they lived
on X.
In other words, if you're sitting in the stands, you might feel that you're
actually literally on the pitch, even though that's not true.
So what we've done is we've taken the you of Wheeler, we've put it on its back and
created a WC.
Sure, and the w structure is meant to say that there's a bundle on top of a bundle.
Again, geometric unity is more flexible than this, but I wanted to make the most
concrete approach to this possible for at least this introduction in sometimes.
Yeah.
We don't need to state that.
Why would in fact be a bundle?
A, you could be an immersion of X into any old manifold.
But I, I'd like to go with the most ambitious version of G U first.
So the two projection maps are PI two and PI one.
And what we're going to say up top is that we're going to have a, uh, a symbol.
And an action of a group RO a on Z, standing in for any bundle associated to
the principle bundle, which is generated as the unitary bundle of the spin of the
spinners on the Chi Merrick tangent bundle to Y.
It's a bit of a mouthful, but the key issue was that on the manifold Y, there
happens to be a bundle, which is isomorphic non-canonical.
to the tangent bundle of why, which, uh, has a definite, um, and canonical metric.
And in fact, there that carries the spinners.
So this is the way in which we get spinners without ever having to choose a
metric.
But we pick up some technical debt to use the computer science concept by actually
having to now work on two different spaces, X and Y.
And we're not merely working on exiting.
This leads to the Mark of Zorro.
That is, we know that whenever we have a metric by the fundamental theorem of
Ramani and geometry, we always get a connection.
It happens, however, that what is missing to turn the canonical.
Comeric bundle on Y into the tangent bundle of wa is in fact a connection on
the space X.
So there is one way in which we've reversed the fundamental theorem of Ramani
in geometry where a connection on X leads to a metric on Y.
So if we do the full transmission mechanism out, a Gimmel on X leads to
alpha sub Gimmel for the levy Chivita connection on X.
Alpha sub Gimmel live leads to a G sub alpha, which is, or sorry, the G sub Alef.
Um, I'm not used to using Hebrew, uh, in, in math.
Um, so G sub Alef, uh, then is a metric on Y and that creates a levy Chivita
connection of the metric on the space Y as well, which then B induces one on the
. Symbols in sector to the in gauge group on why replaces the punker rig.
Group and the internal symmetries that are found on X.
And in fact, you use a Fermi ionic extension of the inhomogeneous gage group
to replace the supersymmetric pong Caray group, and that would be with the field
content, zero forms, tensors and spinner, tenured with spinners, a direct, some one
forms tensor to spinners all up on Y as the Fermi ionic field of.
10 so that gets rid of the biggest problem because the internal symmetry group is
what causes the failure, I think, of supersymmetric particles to be seen in
nature, which is we have to have two different origin stories, which is a
little bit like Lilith and, uh, and Genesis.
Um.
We can't easily say we have a unified theory.
If space time and the SU three cross as you two cross you one group that lives on
space-time have different origins and cannot be related.
In this situation, we tie our hands and we have no choice over the, the uh, group
country.
So just to fix bundle notation, we let H, um, be the structure group of a bundle
piece of H over a base base B.
We use PI, um, for the projection map.
We've reserved the variation in the pie.
Um, orthography.
For the field content and we try to use right principal actions.
I'm terrible with left and right, but we do our best.
Uh, we use H here, not G because we want to reserve G for the inhomogeneous
extension of H once we moved to function spaces.
So with function spaces, we can, um, take the bundle of groups.
Using the action of H a on itself and form the associated bundle, and then move to C
infinity sections to get the so-called gauge group of auto morphism.
We have a space of connections, typically denoted by a, and we're going to promote a
Omega one, a tensor in the add joint bundle to a notation of.
Script N a as the fin group, which acts directly on the, um, space of connections.
Uh, okay.
Now the inhomogeneous gage group is formed as the semi direct product of the gage
group of auto morphism together with the fin group of translations of the space of
connections.
And.
And you can see here is a version of an explicit group multiplication rule.
I hope I got that one right.
And then we have an action of G that is the inhomogeneous gage group on the space
of connections, because we have two different ways to act on connections.
We can either act by gauge trans transformations, or we can act by fin
translations.
So putting them together gives us something for the inhomogeneous gauge
group.
Do we then get a buy connection?
In other words, because we have two different ways of pushing a connection
around.
If we have a choice of a base connection, we can push the base connection around in
two different ways according to the portion of it that is, uh, coming from the
gage transformations, uh, curly H or the fin translations coming from curly.
Yeah.
We can call this map the by connection, which gives us two separate connections
for any point in the, uh, in homogeneous gage group.
And we can notice that it can be viewed, um, as a, uh, a section of a bundle over
the base space to come.
. We find an interesting embedding of the gage group that is not the standard one in
the inhomogeneous gauge group.
So our summary diagram looks something like this.
Uh, take a look at the Taos of a knot.
We will find a home amorphism of the gage group into its inhomogeneous extension
that isn't simply inclusion under the first factor.
We, um, and I'm realizing that I have the wrong pie production.
Just be as simple.
Hi, projecting down, we have a map from the gay inhomogeneous gage group, uh, via
the, by connection to a cross, a connections cross connections, and that
that behaves well according to the difference operator Delta that takes the
difference of two connections and gives an honest add value.
Okay.
The infinitesimal action of the gauge transformation of a engaged
transformation, or at least an infinite testable one on a point inside of the
group is given by a somewhat, almost familiar expression, which should remind
us of how the first term in the gauge defamation complex, um, for self dual yang
mills actually gets started.
And so by acting via this, um, interest.
, uh, embedding of the inhomogeneous gage group on, sorry, the embedding of the gage
group inside it's inhomogeneous extension, but the non-trivial one, we get something
very close to the original first step of the two step defamation complex.
Now in sector.
there are payoffs to the magic beans trade.
The big issue here is, is that we've forgone the privilege of being able to
choose and dial in our own field content, and we've decided to remain restricted to
anything we can generate only from XD, in this case X . So we generated Y 14 from X.
And then we generated Comeric tangent bundles.
Uh, on top of that, we built spinners off of the Comeric tangent bundle, and we have
not made any other choices.
So we're dealing with, I think it's you 128, um, w you, you two to the seventh.
That is our, uh, structure group and we, it's fixed by the choice of X for not
anything.
So what do we get?
Well, as promised, there is a tilted home momorphism um, which, uh, takes the gage
group into its inhomogeneous extension.
It acts as inclusion on the first factor, but it uses the levy Chivita connection to
create a second sort of more cartoon form.
I hope I remember the terminology right.
It's been a long time.
Um.
The map is injective because it's injective under the first factor, but it
actually gives us a nontrivial embedding of the, uh, gage group in its, in
homogeneous extension, which makes the whole theory work.
We then get to Xi, I have operators now, a she of operator, um, is a map from the
group crossed the add value.
Arms.
Uh, in this case, the particular Shabbat operators were interested in is mapping.
iForm is two D minus three, plus I forms.
So, for example, uh, you would map a to form to a D minus three plus ay.
So if D, for example, were, um, 14, then, uh.
Um, and, and I were equal to two.
Then 14 minus three is equal to 11.
Uh, plus two is equal to 13.
So that would be, uh, an add valued, uh, 14 minus one form, which is exactly the
right place for something to form a current.
That is the differential of a LaGrand Jian on the space.
Now the augmented torsion, the torsion is a very strange object.
It's introduced sort of right at the beginning of learning a differential
geometry, but it really doesn't get used very much.
One of the reasons it doesn't get used, engaged theory is that it's not gauge
invariant.
It has a gauge and variant piece to it, but then a piece that spoils the gauge
invariant.
But we, because we have two connections, one of the ideas was to introduce two
diseases and then to take a difference, and as long as the disease is the same.
Both, um, the difference will not have the disease because both diseases are
included, but with a minus sign between them.
So the augmented torsion is relatively well behaved relative to this particular,
uh, slanted or tilted embedding of the gage group in its inhomogeneous success.
Which this is very nice because now we actually have a use for the torsion.
We have an understanding of why it may never have figured, particularly into
geometry, is that you need to have two connections rather than one to see the
advantages of torsion at all.
So here's an example of one ship in a bottle operator.
I think this would be sort of analogous, if I'm not mistaken, to trying to take the
Ricci curvature from the . Are a reman curvature, but if you think about what
Einstein did, Einstein had to go further and reduce the Ricci curvature to the
scalar curve.
Sure.
And then, uh, sort of dial the components of the Traceless Ricci and the scalar
curvature to get the right proportions.
So, um, there are many, she have operators and you have to be very careful about
which one you want.
And once you know exactly what it is you're trying to hit, you can choose the
she of operator to be bespoke, um, and get the contraction that you need.
Now I've, I've made you guys sit through a lot.
So I wanted to give you a sort of humorously, a, uh, a feeling, um, of
positivity for the exhaustion.
So the years of anxious searching in the dark, but they're intense longing.
They're intense alternation of confidence and exhaustion in the final emergence into
the light.
Only those who have experienced it can understand it.
I've just always thought this was like the most sensitive and beautiful quote, and I
wish it were one of his better known quotes, but I think it's so singular that
it's hard to, it's hard to feel what it was that he was talking about because in
fact, he sort of explains this in the last line.
So, given that you've been on a long journey, here is something of what a
geometric unity equations might look like.
So in the first place you have the swerved curvature, the Xi AB applied to the
curvature tensor.
That in general, does not work out to be exact, so you can't have it as the
differential of a LaGrand Jian.
And in fact that we talked about swirls, swerves twirls eddies.
Um, there has to be a quadratic Eddy 10.
That, uh, I occasionally forget when I pull this thing out of mothballs and the
two of those together make up what I call the total swervature.
And on the other side of that equation, you have the displaced torsion, which I've
called the dysplasia Asian.
Um, and to get rid of the pesky sort of minus sign and Hodge star operator.
Um, this would be the replacement for the Einstein equation, not on X where we would
perceive it, but on Y before being pulled back onto the manifold X.
So a condensation of that would be very simple.
In simplest terms, we would be saying that the swervature is equal to the Z to the
dysplasia, and at least in this sector of the four main equations.
Of theoretical physics.
This would be the replacement for the Einstein equations, again, on why before
being pulled back to X.
Next is the sketch of the from Yanik field content.
I'm not sure whether that should have been sector four, sector three, but it's going
to be very brief.
Uh, I showed some pictures during the lecture and I'm not going to go back
through them, but I wanted to just give you an idea of where this mysterious third
generation I think comes.
So if we review the three identities here, we see that if we have a space V thought
of like as a tangent bundle, and then you have spinners built on the tangent bundle
when you product tensor product.
The tangent bundle with its own spinners, it breaks up into two pieces.
One piece is the so called product, which is sort of the, some of the highest
weights and the other is a second copy of the spinners gotten through the Clifford
contraction.
So that's well known, but now what I think fewer people know, many people know that
the spinners have a sort of an exponential property that is the spinners of a direct
sum or the tensor pro.
Addict of the spinners of the two some ends of the direct sun.
So that's a very nice sort of version of an exponential and exponential would take
a sum and turn it into a product.
Um, what happens when you're trying to think about a tangent space in Y is being
broken up into a tangent space along an immersed.
Together with its normal bundle.
So imagine that X and Y are the tangent space to exit and a normal bundle.
So the retouch swinger piece that is the spin three halves piece has a funny kind
of an, almost a exponential property that is the Rita swinger, uh, content of a
direct sum of vector spaces is equal to the radish winger of the.
First, a tensor product did with the ordinary spinners in the second direct.
Some with the ordinary spinners in the first tensor product had with the Ricci,
with the, sorry, the Rita swinger content of the second some man, but then there's
this extra interesting term, which is the spinners on the first summoned tensor
product did with the spinners on the second Samantha.
Now recalling that.
Um, when I started my career, we did not know that neutrinos were massive.
And I figured that they probably had to be massive because I desperately wanted a 16
dimensional space of internal quantum numbers, not 15, because my, my ideas only
work if the space of internal quantum numbers as a dimension to, to the end.
And, uh, one of my favorite equations at the time was 15 equals two to the four.
Uh, not literally true, but almost true.
And thankfully in the late 1990s, uh, the case for, uh, 16 particles in a generation
was strengthened when neutrinos were found to have mass.
But that remaining term in the South East corner, the, uh, spinners on X tensor
spinners on Y looks like the term above it in line 2.1.
Five and that in fact is the third generation of matter, in my opinion.
That is, it is not a true generation.
It is broken off and would unify very differently if we were able to heat the
universe to the proper temperature.
So starting to sum up, this is not the full theory.
I'm just presenting this in part to dip my toe back into the water.
It's a daunting task to try.
Address, uh, people about something you've been thinking about for a long time and
have no idea whether it's even remotely correct.
This is the Einsteinian replacement and it must be pulled back to X.
That's the first thing.
The young mills, Maxwell piece comes from a direct square of the Einstein
replacement.
That is, I don't believe that we're really looking for a unifying equation.
I think we're looking for a unifying direct square.
Direct famously took the square root of the client Gordon equation, and he gave.
Um, the Dereck equation.
And in fact, I believe that the Dirac equation and the Einstein equation are to
be augmented and fit into the square root part of a direct square.
And I believe that the yang mills content and Higgs version of the Kline Gordon
equation would go in the square part of the direct square.
So two of these equations unified differently than to others.
And the.
Two pairs are unified in the content of a direct square.
Um, the direct piece will be done separately elsewhere.
When you get around to it, um, and contains the radish winger field content,
which is fundamental and new.
There are only two generations in this model.
I think people have, um, accepted that there are three, but I don't believe that
there are three.
I think that there are two and that the third unifies with other matter at higher
energies.
The cortic P Higgs piece comes from the direct squaring of a quadratic.
Remember, there's a, an Eddy tensor, which is quadratic in the augmented tour.
The metric does multiple duties.
Uh, here is, it's the main field in this version of GPU with the sort of strongest
assumptions as field content on that is originally on X, um, where as most of the
rest of the field content is on Y.
But it also acts as the observer pulling back the full content of Y, uh, onto X to
be interpreted as if it came from X all along, generating the . Colonel, the, the
sort of illusion of internal quantum numbers.
And I should say that the putty Salaam theory, which is usually advertised as I
think as euphoric cross as you two across is really much more naturally spin six
cross spin for, uh, when the trace portion of the space of metrics is put in with the
proper sign.
If you're trying to generate the second.
that begins as X one comma, three.
Remember X, D, whereX , where D equals four a is the generic situation.
But you have all these different sectors.
I believe that these sectors probably exist if this model's correct, but we are
trapped in the one, three sectors.
So you have to figure out what the implications are for pushing that, uh,
indefinite signature up into an indefinite signature on the Y manifold.
And.
And, uh, there are signatures that make it look like the putty Salaam rather than
the, uh, directly in the spin 10, as you, five line of thinking.
So we will attempt to present the full theory.
Early and shortly.
Keep in mind, this took seven years to just bring me to want to come back to
this, but it must be reassembled from decades of notes, and that's part of the
problem when you're working alone and you're not really expecting to talk to
anybody.
So I want to thank you for your patience and your time.
Time, and I just want to read a bunch of names that people who mattered to me, and
if I've done anything wrong, uh, this is not no reflection on them.
Marcus does.
So toy Peter teal is the door singer bot Michael Grossberg, idle Abdul Ali, Harry
and Sophie Rubin, Bret Weinstein and family.
Heather highing and Zach and Toby.
Peter fried Scott axle rod Nima are Connie ed Louise, other as Gumay.
Edward.
Uncle drawer, barn Aton Shlomo Sternberg David caused on Daniel bar K Karen and Les
Weinstein, Hanes Miller, Ralph Ghamari, John Tate, Sidney Coleman, Graham seagull,
Robert Herman, and here in Esther Malani, uh, errors and omissions because I've too
many people to thank our, um, our all my own is, as for the claims that should
reflect badly on no one else other than myself.
In most, especially, I just want to say that I've asked a tremendous amount from
my family to stick with me on this quixotic quest.
Um, and I want to thank Pam Alani, NILAH Weinstein, and Zev Weinstein.
I love you all very much, and thank you for making this possible.
Uh, I do want to leave you with one thought.
I really think that we've gotten completely bent out of shape about trying
to force a formalize and routinize science.
And it.
Work.
You cannot mandate sciences, social engineering.
You can't decide that science is always in the zeitgeists and done by committee.
In fact, it is essential to understand that science will not conform to what you
want.
One of the things that I, I'm very proud of, I think is quite true.
Um, is the saying that great science.
Um, has the scientific method as its radio edit.
I don't think that great science is actually done the way we say it's done.
And I think that directs 1963 scientific American article should be read by
absolute absolutely everyone.
Every time major theories have come out, they've almost always been wrong, but
they're not wrong in an important.
Way and I think that we have to fix the political economy of people racing to
correct theories or point out that there is no agreement with the experiment.
We are killing many of our best ideas by creating a terrible and combative
environment, which already attempts to apportion credit for work.
And more importantly, risk, uh, undertaken by industry.
Jewels.
And I just think that, I want people to understand that.
I've always wanted to share this, but I, I, I detest the culture that I saw that
cropped up around what is now become known as the cyber Whitten equations when they
were put forward.
There was a period of time where I watched people, uh, as if it a feeding trough, uh,
trying to stay up around the clock to use a new machine tool that had been given to
them to claim.
Credit and it profoundly pushed me away from the community.
We have to become more ethical and we have to honor the people who are trying to
speak and act imaginatively.
Now, if this doesn't work, if it's silly, uh, I'll have egg on my face and I'll go
on, I'll be fine.
But I'm very worried that maybe some of the best ideas are between the ears of
people without the confidence in the chutzpah and just the.
Sort of almost psychotic drive to push things across the finishing line.
We've got to be kinder and nicer and more decent and stop stealing people's lives,
their credit, their future, uh, and their ability to have families and make a
living.
And that's absolutely essential.
Well to me, and I look forward to finding out whether this theory has merit to it or
is without merit, but I guarantee that if I'm going to go down with the ship, I'm
also not going to be knocked off the ship as I was many years ago.
Completely unfairly, and I won't dwell on it.
But the amount of power you professors have is absolutely, um, almost without
parallel because nobody really understands enough to adjudicate disputes that happen
in academics.
I'm going to insert.
Just that we fund you better and that you are nicer to the people who depend upon
you in this beautiful chain that we call a science, scientific method.
And most particularly a American science, which I think is still the envy of the
world.
So you've been through the portal.
I know it was a long slog.
I hope you found it interesting and enjoyable and we'll see you again soon.
Be well, everybody stay safe.