Difference between revisions of "A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look"

<p>[00:37:51] <span style="color:#de2898;">'''Eric Weinstein: '''</span>[00:37:51] 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.

<p>[00:38:16] 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.

<p>[00:38:38] 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.

<p>[00:39:06] 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.

<p>[00:39:33] 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.

<p>[00:39:47] 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.

<p>[00:40:10] 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.

<p>[00:40:45] 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.

<p>[00:41:05] 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.

<p>[00:41:25] 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.