Difference between revisions of "15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself"

Garrett Lisi, the so called "Surf Bum with a Theory of Everything (or T.O.E.)", is a PhD theoretical physicist who has refused to be captured by the theoretical physics community. By making shrewd investments, he has avoided holding meaningful employment for his entire adult life. Instead, he lives in Maui and travels the world chasing the perfect wave.

In this episode Garrett and Eric sit down to discuss the current status of Garrett's ideas for a final theory based on a mysterious object called E8, perhaps the oddest of mathematical symmetries to be found in the universe.  

Garrett and Eric have held each other in mutual “contempt” for over a decade. By vacationing together and staying in each others' homes, they had hoped to hone and deepen their mutual disgust for each other's ideas. However, as the theoretical physics community moved away from actually trying to unify our incompatible models of the physical world, it became intellectually unmoored, and drifted toward a culture of performative Cargo Cult Physics. The antagonists were thus forced by necessity to develop a begrudging admiration for each other's iconoclasm and unwillingness to give up on the original dream of Einstein to unify and understand our world.  

The discussion is rough but a fairly accurate depiction of scientific relationships belonging to a type that is generally not shown to the public. This may be uncomfortable for those who have been habituated to NOVA, The Elegant Universe, or other shows produced for mass consumption. We apologize in advance.

<span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/34b7e123-41aa-4bf3-8c35-2e34d2226cd2 Listen to Episode 15]</span>

[[All Episodes]]

* Skillshare: Get two months free when you sign up at http://Skillshare.com/PORTAL

* Wine Access: Get $100 off your first purchase of $250 or more at http://Wineaccess.com/PORTAL

* Chili: Save up to $300 on Chili sleep systems visit http://Chilitechnology.com/PORTAL

* Blinkist: Try it FREE for 7 days AND save 25% off your new subscription http://Blinkist.com/PORTAL

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_uiqjO1IEU

== Relevant Tweets ==

* [https://twitter.com/garrettlisi/status/1203461064932806657 I fell into The Portal! Got harassed by Eric for two hours. Didn't particularly enjoy it, but others might.]

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw YouTube: Sidney Coleman, Quantum Mechanics in Your Face (1994)]

== Transcript ==

About Garrett Lisi:

Papers: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=Garrett+lisi&searchtype=all&source=header

ERIC WEINSTEIN - Hello you're queued up to enter the portal but I thought I'd say a few words before this episode in general

When we present science in front of the public we do it in one of two ways. Either we talk in an incredibly hand-wavy way about very speculative ideas like string theory, or we have a sort of a corpse of previous scientific thought that has been specifically arranged for public viewing.

It's not really science the way we do science, it's kind of a denatured version to make sure that we don't lose anybody because the public is famously supposed to be squeamish about anything involving equations, abstractions or jargon. In this episode we try to well do something different.

I'm actually having a conversation with [[Garrett]] here he's updating me on where his thinking has gone with respect to unifying physics  

now it's very unusual for anyone to try to unify physics and I have a tremendous amount of respect for Garrett even though I don't think his theories are going to work I make no secret of this I'm not saying anything behind his back but he is in some sense Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena he actually is trying to take on the general problem of the cosmos and even though I don't think he's succeeding he has my profound admiration for simply suiting up and trying.

most people, in fact almost everyone I know, does not attempt to do what he is doing and for that he has my admiration and respect now with that admiration respect comes a desire not to be mean but to actually push him on his theory because I don't want to see him wasting his time and I feel that when you're outside of the university system there's almost no one who takes your research seriously. So while there is an aspect of tongue-in-cheek with respect to us being each other's arch-nemesis there's actually something quite serious about it  

I don't necessarily like the path that he's going down and I don't know that I really believe that he's going to get anywhere productive but I do think that he's an inspiration to us all simply for trying in an era where everyone else seems to have given up.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope that you understand that it is an experiment. I'm trusting you guys to listen in on something which is much closer to actual science than what usually presented with I hope you like it  

WEIN - you found the portal I'm your host Eric Weinstein and I'm here today with my arch-nemesis physicist Garrett Lisi  

Garrett, welcome to the portal

GARRETT LISI - thanks for having me on Eric you're a brave man

W - well I would say you're a brave man coming into the lion's den so thank you for coming by for those who don't know who you are or what this issue of being arch-nemesis is about what what could you do to inform our listeners and viewers about who you are and what our relationship might be  

LISI - all right well we have a many disturbing similarities in that we did fairly well in school we got our PhDs but then we left academia and but maintained an interest in fundamental physics and kept pursuing this on our own however there are some distinctions in that you went into the finance world and I went into being a surf bum  

W - yes that's not that similar also you are you have a PhD in physics proper whereas I have one in mathematics so I would say advantage Lisi but then I have one from a more typically powerhouse school you have one from one that's a little bit off of that main corridor that maybe got up caught up in string theory and the the fads that propel the field but I think what's been very interesting to me is that in all of theoretical physics which everyone is quite interested in - you still find people publishing books on quantum theory and all of the spookiness weirdness and beauty that constitutes theoretical physics  - it feels to me that almost no one is pursuing actual theories of everything. We talk about theories of everything all the time but that the courage to actually put forward anything that even remotely resembles the theory of everything, almost nobody is willing to do that would you say that that's a fair statement

L - yeah it's a very first team and the the main reason for that is because it's such a hard problem that you pretty much have to be a megalomaniac just to tackle it or to think you have a chance of succeeding at it  

W - well I think that's a weird statement. Like if you're doing if you're going to throw away your life on issues of theoretical physics what is it that you would imagine people would think that they were doing like if you're not going for the brass ring why enter that field well  

I think that a lot of people in physics are doing the usual thing where they encounter a problem and try to solve it and try to proceed incrementally and that's how actually I got wrapped up in this is I identified a problem with electrons in their description in fundamental physics it was something about it that really I didn't like it just didn't just didn't feel right to me and I got wrapped up in solving that, you know, one aspect of this big picture I didn't go off trying to think "oh I'm really going to tackle this problem of coming up with a theory of everything" because you you you have to be somewhat of a lunatic to take that on it's like you know I trying to prove some theorem in mathematics it has been stagnant for hundreds of years it's just you know you're probably not going to succeed and you'd probably just be frustrated with the attempt.  

You have to have huge ego to even think about it, right, and also there's a lot of discouragement. Students are actively discouraged from tackling such problems because the professors who came before them and know a little bit more about the field know just how hard it is to make progress even on small problems and that making progress on a huge one is just insurmountable, so they try to actively discourage their students from from going into fundamental problems in Physics because they they haven't had success themselves so they're they're trying to be protective of their students that way.

W - so maybe just to set this up and I should say to regular listeners and viewers of the portal this is intended to be something of a transitional episode. So that the entire podcast is an experiment and you know other other people have shows and there's a concept of professionalism. I don't think that's what we're striving for here at the portal, this is really untested. We're going to experiment with our advertising models. We're going to experiment with what the traffic will bear when it comes to intellectual discussions without spoon-feeding everything to the audience, realizing that some people may get left behind. In fact the host may get left behind, we don't know.

W - but no it's quite possible and what we've done is we've done a series of interviews to begin the podcast to just establish that we can have conversations that people want to tune into and get great guests in that chair where people may not have even heard of the person before but hopefully walk away feeling enriched. However that's not really the point of the podcast. The point of the podcast is to explore new territory intellectually and it may be an academic level outside of traditional channels and it has to do in part with my belief that we don't really understand how much idea suppression has been going on for a very long period of time within the standard institutions. In fact I've I've created this thing I've called the DISC - the distributed ideas suppression complex - and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and up end and disrupt previous structures. So for example I would claim that [[String Theory]] which is absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what 1984  

L - yeah since about then  

W - so, it's about 35 years. It artificially consolidated the field around a complex of ideas that did not have a huge signal coming from experiment you know to just to try to steal home base

L - I mean to understand that you have to understand the (as I'm sure you do) the the culture of particle physics at the time when string theory started to grow which is you know up until you know up through the 70s there had been steady experimental results coming in from particle accelerators where it was like, a new particle every week that theorists were having to really cooperate on as a community to jump in on try to figure it out and exchange ideas very  

W - it was more than 50s and 60s  

L - it was but it continued all the way through the 70s and and from that culture of, you know, community working together on information that's coming in a steady stream right, you got this culture of like "yeah no don't go do the other thing it's a waste of time" you really want to be working on what's hot, right? because there's new information coming in all the time and this is where the culture of string theory started I was also more involved in the in the culture of [[General Relativity]] and [[Gravity]], okay, which is a very different culture. It's much more slow-paced, you don't have new results coming in all the time everything's very is much more  

W - do you mind if I set this up a little bit for our audience and you critique it if I do a poor job (L -sure) in essence the two great idea complexes in fundamental physics  - not condensed matter physics or astrophysics - but like whatever ground reality physics *is*, is the General Relativistic complex around the ideas of [[Einstein]] and then there's the sort of quantum field theory ([[QFT]]) a complex or the Quantum complex around the ideas of [[Bohr]] - sort of fair enough? - and [[planck]] ona I don't mean to slight [[Dirac]] and others but just to keep it simple the children of Einstein and the children of Bohr  

L - right and the the the boring people went into particle physics  

L - well you said they're the children of Bohr's  

W - hahaha okay

L - so they're so they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire you know moving moving things along as part of a community whereas genre relativity the people from the Einstein community were more exploring different possibilities at their own pace and there is more of an exploratory culture and that's the culture that turned into [[Loop Quantum Gravity]] so that

W - so first of all I'm just gonna I'm gonna begin arguing with you there to me yeah the issue was is that Einstein put much more of the general relativistic picture in place,  so there was less to do for the descendants of Einstein and because the quantum was considerably less tied up there was much more work and so through a system of selective pressures the more successful community in some sense left fewer descendants and they were less capable because it was less for them to do and then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between [[theory]] and [[experiment]]  

L - that's right  

W - okay

L - and and but what happened was that when they when you think about it as a whole  - that gravity has to be quantized. So there are two ways of getting there  - you can either start from Bohr's children and and quantum field theory and try to get from there to a quantum theory that encompasses gravity or you can start from the gravitational side in [[Geometry]] and try to somehow get [[quantum mechanics]] to play nice with this essentially [[classical geometric theory]] and there were two very different approaches and two very different cultures  

W - I still have some disagreements but I don't think I necessarily want to to derail us so all right so  

L - so anyway my the the point I started with was that the the string theory came out of the particle physics community  

W - and when we say string theory,  we mean the cultural explosion that happened in 1984 rather than the original string revolution of let's say [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_Veneziano Veneziano] which was much earlier okay

so that in in the mid-1980s there was a discovery called the [[anomaly cancellation]] where two very improbable things canceled each other and the theory was suddenly there was a theory that was given a green light that was highly restrictive as to what could... what could go in that spot and that result the anomaly cancellation gave birth to a cultural phenomenon which was the sort of takeover of theoretical physics by string theory  

L - right I mean it looks so promising at the time in the 80s I mean they thought that "yes it naturally encompasses gravity" and all we need to do is find the right you know [[high dimensional manifold]] to attach to for our strings to vibrate in and will immediately recover all the properties of the particles of the standard model we just have to find the right one we'll probably get this done by lunchtime wrapped up  

W - I don't believe that story  

L - well it didn't happen

W - I don't think that's a even what actually happened. I was in college during this period and even though that's the story that I would agree is told inside of the community. yeah I'm not sure that I fully believe it if I go back to my own memory is something very different happened

L - well it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon

W - I think something's still different happened I think that [[Ed Witten]] showed up and that there was one human being  

L - Right, he's his own anomaly he wasn't  

W - he was absolutely an anomaly he came to Penn in I don't know whether it was 83 or 84. I left in 85 and he started talking about what the world was in a way that none of the physicists could actually follow, because he was using ideas from from differential geometry and from higher mathematics in ways that most of the community couldn't track. He was saying things like the reason we have three copies of the kind of matter that makes up our world comes from the characteristic numbers of a six dimensional [[complex manifold]] found at every point in space and time and these things were so mind-blowing. I mean if the if our listeners can't exactly follow it they were in the same shoes as many people in the community. Tthere was a voice that was clearly coming from another planet

W - undoubtedly the most brilliant person I've ever met in my life - the one person who continues to make me tremble when I hear his name or his voice and this person signed on big-time to [[string theory]] in a way that was very coercive and seductive so that even though that the community understood why he was signing on, it was in part Witten's endorsement that really started to move the needle in my opinion  

returning sponsor chili technology is the maker of what is probably my favorite product of 2019 they make a hydronic pad that fits over your mattress but under your sheets so that the third of your life that you spend asleep will be at the perfect temperature to keep you and any partner sleeping deeply and without waking up sweaty or taking the covers constantly on and off your body all night so meet deep sleep delivered chilly sleep systems manage your body sleep temperature using hydro powered technology if you go to chilly technology calm slash portal you can save up to $300 in chilly sleep systems with 25% off the chilly pad using code portal chilly that's pee ort alch ili or 15% off the euler system using code portal euler that's p Orta l oo l ER so visit chile technology comm slash portal increase your metabolism boost melatonin production naturally and activate muscle recovery with deep sleep stop fighting with your sleep partner of her bed temperature you get to keep your mattress but upgrade your mattress pad with chilly temperature controlled sleep systems chilly technology calm / portal I say come on now brother no don't be a fool you gotta let chilly you keep you whoo that's chilly pad and Lou - if you're like me you're still reading books but you're also recognizing that in the modern era your attention as being micro checked therefore you have to figure out how do I invest my book reading time wisely so that it repays the investment enter bling cos they have their teams of readers digest the books that you're considering and give you a 15 minute executive summary either in written form or in audio form so that you can figure out whether to go deep or to move on to the next title which might be a better investment for you that means that when I was looking at Edward Snowden's permanent record I was able to quickly digest whether the book was likely to be written for me and what the major points were as a result I felt much more comfortable with my decision with blankets you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed non-fiction books all the books you want and all for one low price so right now for a limited time Linkous has a special offer just for our audience go to blink is calm slash portal and try it free for seven days saving 25% off your news subscription that's blink is spell bli and kay ist blink is calm / portal to start your free seven-day trial you'll also save 25% off but only when you sign up at blink is calm / portal

well the the String Theory unification program -  the idea that this description of all [[fundamental particles]] and gravity - in our entire universe - would come from a model based on strings vibrating and other higher dimensions. I mean that this unification program has failed. The vast majority of the high-energy physics community has been working on it for over 30 years and they've utterly failed to deliver on that promise despite the high hopes and promises  

W - well, and this has to do -  and again we can sort of do a small synopsis of the field  - the idea was the original hopes had been built around an idealized [[point particle]] concept where hard little balls were kind of the naive model of particles then you had to smear them out and do waves on waves from that point particle concept called [[second quantization]] or [[quantum field theory]] and string theory said no the fundamental unit should never have been a hard little ball to begin with it should have been modelled by something that was an "as if string" obviously and it wasn't string made out of atoms it was some sort of mathematical version of  

L - right it's an abstract mathematical description of a surface inside another surface essentially

W - right and so that this this thing had a peculiar appeal to the children of Bohr that was not that appealing to the children of Einstein would that be a fair description of it that

L - it is for pretty subtle reasons specifically anomaly cancellation and also the ability to produce what appeared to be [[particle excitations]] within from the string model  

W - right now that thing - that sudden shift in the community from regular quantum field theory, from a plurality of different approaches; whether some of them had names like [[Technicolor]] or [[grand unification]] or [[supersymmetry]] all of this seemed to get subsumed in this  - I don't know - fad what it was hard to  

L - like agiant rolling what kind of [[Katamari Damacy|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy]] where it's just collecting everything that it touches and making it part of itself  

W - that's right and in fact the claim was if we find something that isn't strain theory we'll just find some way of including it and call it string theory  

W - so this was a bizarre you know there was it was a sociological phenomena it was a we would say the political economy of science was involved where who could get a job for their students, whether or not the newspapers were gonna challenge this or go along with it. So you had reporters who had no idea what was going on publishing these glowing pieces about the string theorists and how they were gonna wrap it all up (L -yeah) and in essence you know we have this concept in evolutionary theory called [[interference competition]] where one animal will attempt to out-compete the other by keeping it away from like a watering hole.

So nobody else could afford to get nourished because the string theorists we're saying all the smart people are in string theory, "it's the only game" in town was the famous phrase

L - I certainly encountered a lack of nourishment when I graduated in the 90s and I wasn't interested in strings but I was interested in high energy physics  

W - well I think almost everybody was in that position that that is really the Founding crime for me in the string revolution. It was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us as an idiot  

L - yeah yeah. That's above and beyond normal physicist arrogance

W - above and beyond normal physicist arrogance and I want to say also why I think I'm so focused on [[theoretical physics]] as the most important endeavor that humans are engaged with I think there are three components to it and just see whether whether it resonates with you  

1) one is that this is the closest we get, responsibly, to asking why are we here what is it that we're made of. It is the thing that would best substitute for a religion if you were able to understand what it was.

2) the second thing is is that it appears to be the secret powering our economy that very few people have really fully understood. It gave us the [[World Wide Web]] the [[semiconductor]] the [[electron shells]] the generated [[chemistry]], (L - [[nuclear power]]), nuclear power, [[nuclear weapons]], communications technology - electromagnetic, you know, [[Wi-Fi]] what have you. If you want it invented - theoretical physics - more or less created [[molecular biology]].

L - that's probably a bit of a stretch but the other certainly aren't so yeah

W - if you look at the [[RNA tie club|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_Tie_Club]], you know the people and it word [[Teller|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller]] [[Feynman|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman]], [[Crick|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick]], people trained in physics, so in this telling of the tale its second major feature of importance is that it sort of created our modern economy and I don't think people have understood the extent to which all of these things for you know - the web, semiconductors and even molecular biology - really came out of theoretical physics because of the third issue which is I think, even though I'm a mathematician or trained in mathematics, I could make a pretty decent argument that

3) this was the world's most impressive intellectual community ever  

L - it certainly it seems to attract some of the greatest minds  

W - well I would say I would go even farther I would say that because of the interplay between the most beautiful mathematics even according to mathematical standards and experimental discipline. So you have this this thing that's forcing you to go back and forth between the purest of pure theory and the the dirt and intuition and messiness of experiment I don't think anything else had that property so that it wasn't necessarily even that it just attracted the best people, but it it actually rewarded human intellectual achievement like no other subject ever.

L - all right it's also on touching on something that's a little bit different socially which is the type of people who are attracted to really, you know, hard problems in fundamental physics and and modeling and really trying to get as you say the source code of the universe. These often aren't very skilled "people people", they're not very socially oriented people for the most part

W - some are some aren't yeah

L - but for for the real intellectual heavy-hitters you're talking about people who sort of I mean walk among us as aliens you're talking about think that they're not extremely social they're not very focused on issues with other human beings and physics - this understanding of our universe through mathematics is really otherworldly pursuit, right? it's not like law where laws are made up by humans and discussed in front of humans compat in front of humans it's I mean that has its own intricacies and difficulties and puzzles but theoretical physics you're getting you're working at something that's not related to humans directly.

I mean any intelligent beings in this universe that advanced to a certain state are gonna be involved in studying physics and it's gonna be the same physics, right? with some of the same mathematics and the same mathematical tools. It's something that exists independent of humanity so if you're if you're not a huge fan of human beings and but you you really like puzzles and you're good at math, physics is very attractive because it's a it's a it's the greatest puzzle there is in our universe and it exists completely independent of humanity and yet humans have be able to work on it and make progress which is frickin amazing.

It's amazing the degree to which humans have understood our reality and and I think we're getting close to having a complete picture of it

W - yeah, I would say that's one of the three classes of greatest puzzles. I mean if I could I could tell a story that biology is the greatest puzzle because without something to care about the universe in which it lives this is all completely sterile to begin with  

and I can also make a different case for mathematics which is that physics is but one example of a universe we don't know if there are other universes that can could be (conceived)

L - so so biology I mean it's it's I I agree it's intricate and and it can be a pure pursuit but it's not pure in the sense that so much of the foundations of biology are somewhat arbitrary like whether it you know DNA helixes gonna spiral to the left or the right and and and what its chemical components are precisely that might vary other planets you know other civilizations by oh geez give me different  

our next sponsor is wine access calm they're going to replace your local wine store by sending their team of geeks all over the planet to find you top quality product at a fraction of the price that you would pay for a famous bottle of wine but unfortunately even though they send you information about the wine talking about wine is a little like dancing about architecture so what we thought we'd do instead is work our way perhaps halfway through a bottle of late bottle of vintage report from 2014 that they sent us it was delicious and give you your new favorite drinking song from 1609 this one from Thomas Ravenscroft see if you can hear a famous Van Morrison song hidden within it we bees soldiers three named Wu's army the Lowcountry any of [Music] [Music]  

27:00 - Eric Playing "We Soldiers Three"

you got $100 off and support the show by going to wine access comm slash portal you'll be glad you did with wine access that conversation poodle you're gonna get yourself one hell of a bottle with wine access concise portal so why not order them bottles tonight loyal sponsor skill shares perhaps one of the best fits for the portals audience of self teachers I'm not exactly sure why I had never heard of Skillshare before during the podcast because if I'm honest with myself I'm very envious when I see somebody who's become proficient at a task that I would love to master but where I usually can't figure out how they even got started learning it if that's you and you know the predicament with skill shooters universe of master teachers and instructional videos I can learn without embarrassment at my own pace and in my own style and usually in any area from interior designs is a programming languages or photography if I can search it I can almost always find it on Skillshare and with Skillshare my hit rate on Graydon star ders is much higher than on YouTube where the quality is not as closely curated further much of this content is exclusive to skill shares universe of subscribers so join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare and get two months free when you sign up at skill share calm slash portal that's two full months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free get started today by heading to skill share calm slash portal to sign up that skill share calm slash portal I think you'll be glad you did I can do that with skill shape

(you can) make a decent argument that systems of selective pressures as described by Darwin and Wallace there might be conserved even if you had didn't have carbon baseline

L - there will be convergent evolution of course sure but but the details will be slightly different so if you're studying biology by the time you get up to something like cells or animals it's gonna be wildly different in different different places in the in the galaxy alright whereas whereas physics is the same everywhere okay it's it's independent of biology and it's independent of humanity and it's III think and then when you go to mathematics mathematics the pursuit of mathematics like how things get proved and how structures get built up through axioms that are then proved it's a it's a larger playing field than physics. So within that huge arena of possible mathematical structures okay we see appear to live in one mathematical structure, so I mean a physicist only has to focus on the the mathematics that we that describes reality

W - and I by the way sure your intuition then in a certain sense this is the best and most interesting place to play in part because there's this very weird feature that we've seemingly unearthed about the physical universe which is that it unexpectedly has this bizarrely good taste (L - yeah) about what to care about within it's as if you let it loose in the mathematical jewelry store in it it selects only the finest pieces  

L - yeah yeah and we have to wonder if that's you know is that just our human take on it because our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world in the universe so, is it that I mean [[Douglas Adams]] described the [[anthropic principle]] as a puddle of water right and thinking it's like wow this "this this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my shape alright isn't it wonderful how it just fits me so perfectly and it's so comfortable here just like it was made for me". Well, it's like, no the puddle got there and filled the shape of the the hole I mean the water got there and filled that shape and as humans we ended up here and we filled this niche and our aesthetic taste was shaped by what's around us including the the mathematics that underlies the physics of this universe and so when we look at the universe you might say "oh no maybe it's just our tastes evolved within this universe, so this is why we find physics aesthetically pleasing"

W -  do you actually believe what you're saying right now  

W - I mean I think this is so cowardly

L - I know I agree and that and right like I have to wonder about it I have to I mean I understand every lip service you know that's not just lip service I think about this I mean I think I mean is it really my proclivities have been shaped by my environment in order to think this because I have to question everything all the time (W -sure) mostly cuz I don't talk to enough other people but but also it's because you know yeah when you're questioning things and you're delving with fundamental building blocks you want to make sure as you build things up that you have things right and in looking at the fundamental pieces of physics you know the fundamental mathematical physics I really think that the mathematical pieces as you say are the ones that are extraordinarily beautiful and it's not just my aesthetic taste has been shaped by evolution that causes me to think that I really think objectively these are very pretty mathematical objects underlying our physical reality

W - yeah I think we just lack the courage to say what this appears to be which is there is something that we do not understand about the universe in which it is selected for the most mysterious, most beautiful stuff with which to write what we  - I mean - with the closest thing we have to [[source code]] we don't we're not at the source code yet we're not quite at that layer

L - but you can smell it can't you  

W - well I mean yes and no  

W - I think it's almost provably close but but the there's a caveat to that which is I think we're almost at the end of this chapter and it does feel like it could easily be the final chapter and by the way we should be we should clarify that when we see when we talk about a [[theory of everything]] we don't mean a theory that once understood could explain everything you see in your daily universe  

L - right I mean love is still gonna be a mystery of course  

W - oh god you really did that

L - of course I did but yeah nobody's...

W - Ladies form a single-file line  

L - ...there's evidence I mean there in our in our understanding of physics as we've learned more particles yeah the fundamental particles we've learned about appear to be filling out a complete set. I mean we've, you know, when you when you predict that a [[Tau quark]] should exist all right know that a [[Tau Lapton] should exist, yeah, or you figure out that you know it completes this that there's this third generation - it's complete right so we seem to be completing our set a fundamental particles

W - SO we have three sets of Lego yeah right the first generation, second generation and third generation of matter and all the pieces in each generation are mirrored in the other two generations just a different mass scales. So far that's what it looks like  

L - well it's not just so far it's like whether we have we have reasons to know that there aren't there aren't more from from how the [[Big Bang]] sent matter loose in the universe, we know that there aren't more than three generations up there certain very high energy  

W - well we've known a lot of things Garrett that have turned out to be wrong  

L - well but this is really filling out a pretty complete pattern

W - I don't dispute but I just accept

L - except for this minor point of dark matter still being completely unknown for the most part

W - yeah I mean I guess my discomfort with this comes from the fact that knowing the history, I know how we've been wronged and I also know how we haven't had the courage of our convictions and one of the things that really you know occupies my mind is why we're not more definite about things that I think we have very good good reason to believe and we're so definite about things that sort of scare me where we say I know that it can't be other than this and yet it has we've been we've been shown up multiple times that we've got two different directives telling us to be both more confident and more humble  

W - the thing that has affected both both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called [[spinors]] at the core of our understanding of matter do you want to say a little bit about what that is Wyatt you think it's affected you and and and me as well and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional and intellectual impact on the community  

L - right I mean when you're... basically when physicists more or less completed that what's called the [[standard model of particle physics]], right, you have you have the the known forces in physics like the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the strong force as well as the force of gravity and then you have the the matter particles which are [[electrons]] and [[quarks]] and [[neutrinos]] and and other generations of these that form you know what are called the [[fermions]] okay and these are called the [[matter particles]] and then they have mass because of the interaction with the [[Higgs boson]] right which is sort of...

W -  what's not going to make sense to people  

L - it's not alright but anyway the the force particles behave differently as elementary particles under rotations than the matter particles all right. so these matter particles, they you have to basically rotate them 720 degrees to return them to their original state. Whereas most objects you rotate it and you rotate it 360 degrees and get back to where you started all right but spinors are different right and they they behave in a very specific way and there's a there's a very specific way of describing them mathematically but it's described in an unusual way. It's described as a as a column of [[complex numbers]] or a [[column matrix]] if you like that's acted on by a [[rotation matrix]] that tells you specifically how these particles transform under rotation

W - honestly that wouldn't make any sense to me and I don't think I can help all of my audience together  

L - this is the thing so so this is the way physicists are introduced to a description of electrons  

W - well look I just try to play with something well we're talking about this is this way..

L -  why you can't can I hand it off to you in about 10 seconds  

L - all right so I found this description to be incredibly unsatisfying all right because the rest of physics is not described this way right you don't introduce a fundamental field that transforms a certain way under rotations.That's not how you know why would the universe do that it's not elegant it's not it's not geometric all right it seems sort of arbitrary, why would the universe have spinors in it? well it turns out that because if you if you describe General relativity as curving [[four-dimensional space-time]] describe gravity and you just describe forces as [[gauge fields]] right with both of those they're very geometric descriptions they're very elegant mathematically when you describe, physically, the fermions as spinors, it looks like a [[kludge]] it just it doesn't fit with the other theories but that's why I left physics, to solve this problem I wanted to know "why spinors geometrically?" and no one else was interested in the problem no one else thought it was a problem they're like yeah they transform this way and and maybe it comes from strings and that's all you get and it's like no that's totally unsatisfying.  

If gravity is described geometrically and are all our other forces described geometrically the [[universe]] is just one thing it's right there in the name I mean "uni" is one, "verse" is turning we have we have this "one-turning thing" we call the universe and it's just one mathematical object and if this if we have different particles they have to be aspects of this one mathematical object why would this mathematical object have spinors as an aspect of them it was a huge mystery to me I want to go solve it no one else even acknowledged it was a problem and you also tackled this this also bothered you  

W - well there was a so this is the very difficult part of what the portal is supposed to be and I have the feeling that we've probably left a lot of our listeners behind but I've said that we're going to have to take some risks and this is going to be one of them, so the way I see it some some of our listeners are also viewers right and we have in studio these beautiful [[Klein Bottles]] from [[Acme Klein bottle]] and [[cliff Stoll]] out of Oakland I guess these objects that I'm holding up or you can look up Klein bottles on the on the web have this very odd property that they are covered if you will by the surface of a doughnut if the surface of the doughnut wraps around this object twice and we call this a [[double cover]]. Now the idea that you have some very strange object with no inside and outside called a Klein bottle but that it's wrapped twice by some object which has different properties namely the surface of a doughnut called a [[torus]], the rotations of our [[three-dimensional space]], bizarrely have some object that covers them twice, just as a doughnut covers a Klein model twice so when we talk this crazy language about you have to rotate an object more than 360 degrees for it to come back to itself, this is somewhat of garbage language that we've taught people to understand, when we're not really showing them what's behind the curtain.  

We're not showing them that there are the rotations of a rigid three-dimensional space and then there's this thing that covers those rotations twice called the [[spin group]] and that spin group is the thing that has the property that it acts on these things called spinors so this is a hidden level of structure that you would not know was there just from three-dimensional space there's some secret trapped in three-dimensional space that is very well hidden, and if we weren't at a very high level of mathematics or physics you would never know that spinors even exist to play with  

L - right I mean it comes out of [[representation theory]] but that once again that's a fairly high level of mathematics you have to get to to even see that these things exist  

W - and for all of the other basic kinds of symmetries we don't have these hidden representations we don't have these hidden spaces that have these bizarre properties it's only for these things called [[orthogonal groups]] so it's a very special property of real [[Euclidean rigid space]] that spin0rs are there to be found and not only does nature find them, she bases all of matter around the hidden object that can't easily be seen or deduced which is a total mind job right? and the math community has in fact sort of split between people who think hey we can describe these things mathematically so our work is done versus other people who believe there's something about spinors that just it continues to surprise us we don't understand where they came from there a hidden feature of the universe and they keep giving in this very mysterious fashion

L - yeah and the most of the general relativists who came at this problem um just would not want to touch it because it's too far into them and the people came into it from the particle physics side thought it wasn't a problem -  it's this field transforms a certain way it seems perfectly well described  

W - that doesn't this doesn't make sense to me at all

L - so it didn't make sense to me either, Eric...

W - Let me give an argument as to why this is a real really serious problem. If I take two kinds of thing that might one might hope to find in the Universe an [[electron and a [[photon]] okay? so the idea is that I've got stuff that orbits around [[atomic nuclei]] (electrons) and I've got light and it's relatives that carry the [[electromagnetic force]] in the photon. If I don't know how to measure [[length]] and [[angle]] I can still talk about the objects that are photons,  we call them [[spin one particles]], but if I don't have length and angle I don't have any way of talking about spinors.

In other words, if there isn't a ruler and a protractor, which is effectively what Einstein used to define space-time I don't have an ability to talk about spinors and that's a big problem because if you're...

L - It's not just a problem, it's a huge clue it says the spinors have to be intimately related to gravity and general relativity

W - and gravity so spinors are over on the quantum side of the equation all right the quanta in the children of Bohr it's really more their object than the children of Einsteins. The children of Bohr claim "we have to quantize gravity and make everything quantum" so it's sort of an imperial belief that the people who study the [[standard model]] should extend their techniques to cover gravity so that all can be won yet if it turns out that they're we don't know how to measure length and angle between measurements because in quantum theory you get something very different when when things when a field is propagating versus when it's measured - all of the probabilistic stuff we talk about is happening when there's a quantum measurement. If you don't know where length and angle are while something is propagating then you don't even know where where the electrons can be a disturbance if electrons are waves they have to be waves in some kind of a sea.

You know with photons that you can't tell exactly where the wave is but you know where the sea is

In the case of electrons if you don't know where the the [[metric]] is, you can't even say where the sea is that the electron would be a wave in (L - that's right) and it's a very convoluted thing but it's a big difference  

L - yeah and it's I mean I can almost describe it in extremely simple terms which is, most people most physicists who think about it, think of [[gravitational charge]] as being [[mass]] but gravitational charge is really [[spin]]

W - well you we're getting pretty we're getting pretty far afield

L - all right so to speak :)

W - so to speak so let's imagine that maybe our listeners haven't understood exactly what we're saying but that there is some special problem about spinors and how they're tied to the structure of space-time that is different where you can describe things like photons in some sense without knowing how length and angle are measured, whereas length and angle are essential if you're ever going to talk about spinors.  

Now you and I have two very different points of view and the reason that that I consider you an arch-nemesis is that I think your theory based on e8

Which is depicted in this crystal block for those who are viewing on YouTube (NOTE: Probably looks something like [[this|https://bathsheba.com/crystal/e8/]])

L - Thanks for bringing your Kryptonite to the show

W - your approach to this is to say let's start out with some object that is mathematically distinguished and very peculiar effectively like a [[platypus]] of the mathematical world and let's try to distill from this thing that has to exist for reasons of logical necessity and may be the most complicated naturally occurring object, arguably, that you could pick and let's find the richness of our natural world as distilled from this bizarre, freakish occurrence in the laws of mathematical necessity is that a fair telling?

L - um from a top-down perspective it is but the way I got there is by describing spinors and seeing that spinors is part of this one beautiful mathematical object naturally and it's it's unique to the [[exceptional Lie groups]] to to these this class the small class of objects  

W - when you say exceptionally groups what you mean is (L - platypi) continuous symmetries that only occur once that they don't fall into some regular pattern

L -  and spinors are naturally a part of their geometry and there and there and there their intricate beautiful objects they have spinors naturally as part of their geometry and that if you dissect them you can see all the other parts necessary to particle physics and gravity and this was just stunning to me and at this point I'm like alright I've built up from the ground up from from particle physics and from gravity and from spinors. I've built the structure up in seeing how it's all interconnected and I found that they're all part of this small class of mathematical objects that are that are unique in their intricacy and beauty for finite dimensional objects and that's why now I appear to have adopted more of a top-down view where it seems like oh I started with this pretty object I said oh look it explains everything but it's it's nowhere near like that how I actually got to there all right.

The truth is I'm building up and the truth is the next object is going to be higher dimensional objects that include E8 like this one as a subgroup  

W - so the way I'm hearing you Garrett and, again, you know this is like one of the most obscure  

L - this is going to lose so many of your listeners, but I'm happy to talk I  

W - Well, I'm trying to, we're trying to describe this. I would like to describe this a little bit as as if we were taking somebody to an opera in a foreign language so that they can follow the plot even though they can't follow line by line, OK?  

The way I see what you're saying is is that there is a usual kind of symmetry which we would associate with [[bosons]] that is the force particles of the universe and what makes these very strange objects that you've you've referred to as in referring to [[exceptional lie groups]] is that you appear to take something from the fermionic universe that is this [[spinorial universe]] where the spinors come from and you adjoin it in some sense to the [[bosonic]] to get more symmetries  

L - yes yeah that's very clear  

W - okay there's a huge problem with the strategy

L - we'll wait but this but you're forgetting the part where this structure exists as part of these exceptional objects  

W - I'm not. You've correctly described how these objects occur in nature that there is some regular kind of typical symmetry, a [[bosonic symmetry]] then you you take some of these spinors that are related to that symmetry and you fuse them together to get an even more beautiful, weird, symmetric object but the problem with that strategy is is that we know that nature has these two very different recipes for how she wants to treat these things quantum mechanically

W - one of them goes into the name of [[bosonic quantization]] and the other sort of goes under the name sometimes of you know [[Berezin|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berezin_integral]]([[Felix Berezin|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Berezin]] theory right and

L - anti commuting numbers.  number were A times B times equals negative B times A

W - a parallel totally different treatment and the way you've done it you've really taken the [[fermions]] that is the matter part the the spinors that we've been discussing you've lumped them together with the [[bosons]] and now they're fused in a way that it's going to be almost impossible to treat the spinors in a manner befitting [[fermionic quantization]]

L - yeah no, it's very straightforward though the the fermions just end up being along directions [[orthogonal]] to [[space-time]]  

W - I don't see that that actually works. I mean this is my great... my criticisms of your theory which - we've known each other now for 11 years and this is the basis of our antagonism - is that on the one hand you ingeniously saw, and give you your credit, that he E8 the largest of these objects, a 248 dimensional behemoth, carried some numerology surrounding three copies of The spinors that are present, which looked like, in some sense could be confused for, maybe related, to three copies of matter.

L - it was about that hand-wavy yeah

W - okay so, all the honor to you. That's not an obvious feature. Most people who barely know what the exceptional lie groups are and most of them don't know that it has to do with this property called [[triality]]

!!Eric's Objections to Garrett's Theory

1) okay that was... that was true but there really wasn't, in my opinion, enough room to pack the particles that we currently see into this group structure with three generations. That was one issue  

2) Second of all because of the unit of the particular way in which bosons and fermions, matter and force, were fused together it really pushed everything towards the bosonic side; that is the force side of the equation, so you're gonna now have to be in some kind of technical debt where you would have to figure out how to get the fermions back into a matter framework because you would actually push them too far, through unification, into a union with force. That was another basic concern and..  

3) my last concern was that because of the properties of this object you didn't have any room for what we call [[chirality]] in which the universe that we've seen so far appears to have a left-right asymmetry to it -  it's as if it has a beauty mark - and any object that you derive from E8 is gonna be very hard to get it to have a beauty mark because E8 doesn't have a beauty mark itself, so these were three things that you're going to have to pay back (L - right) if you were going to connect this to the world that we see and that might - my irritation with you was that I brought this up with you in 200? remind me? 2008, not 2009, when we met at the [[Perimeter Institute|https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca]] and I tried to warn you about these things I felt like you never took me seriously.

L - No, I did take you seriously. I've taken all these problems seriously and they're discussed in subsequent work and the way I've been resolving them is by tackling a larger, unspoken problem which is how to have a quantum description of this sort of geometry,  right?  

Because our universe is a quantum universe and E8 tis a finite dimensional object and you have to have multiple states, multiple numbers of particles be able to occupy every state so if you have a full quantum description of a theory you need an infinite dimensional geometry to do it.

W - well I always thought your your goal was to take a finite object and then take waves on that finite object to create something that was going to be infinite dimensional I didn't see that it's a problem  

L - but that's not good enough  

W - say more  

L - because when you talk about waves on geometric object those act as different representations mathematically, the [[Peter-Weyl Theorem|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter–Weyl_theorem]], but when you when you do that that's not enough to give you all the structure you need for quantum field theory ([[QFT]]) you really need a fundamentally [[infinite dimensional geometric object]] to describe quantum field theory and by looking at what sort of objects you need, that include exceptional lie groups, but are infinite dimensional geometries that can correspond to quantum field theory - that's how you tackle the three problems you discussed...

You can have more space to handle the three generations of particles, you can have the [[anti-commuting]] fermions in them so that they behave like from yan should like matter particles should and it's also you know large enough to give you the sort of dynamics you need for quantum field theory. So that's why I've I've in the intervening ten years since we've had a deep discussion about this, I've now started looking at generalized infinite dimensional geometries which are infinite dimensional generalizations of Lie groups which at which solve these problems and that's that's why I've been...

W - You really believe that you've solved these problems?

L - I think I have a really good description that goes a long way

W - Garrett, here's the thing: if I just think about where we are with the standard model right you've got four dimensions of space and time, right, then you've got an extra eight dimensions coming from something called [[su(3)]], three dimensions from something called [[su(2)]] and one extra dimension coming from something called [[u(1)]]. That's the basic data (L - right) that occurs.

L - and gravity, people leave out gravity

W - you can put in six dimensions for something called [[spin(3 1)]] okay but the point is I can add those all up and I'm gonna get some number probably, you know, in 20 some odd dimensions whatever that finite thing generates the infinite dimensional world of quantum field theory  

L - but wait a minute. Quantum Field Theory - there we have a way of mapping between those the base geometry and then going to quantum field theory right then you have [[Fock Space|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fock_space]] right and you have [[occupation numbers|https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/occupation_number]] for all the different possible States

W - do it my point is you're working on a problem that has certain foreseeable problems as part of the challenge and unlike your detractors from the more standard community I'm not I'm not telling you that you're dead on arrival just because certain problems can be seen. That would be unfair and then by the way that's what you know there's lots of problems that can be seen from the string theory community where let's say

# you know the the number of dimensions it wants to play and it doesn't seem to be the right number or  

# that they thought there were only a finite number of theories it turns out that there's a continuum of theories or  

# the vast majority come out with right and I get very irritated that somehow the string theory community is entitled to make all these mistakes and anybody outside if they say one wrong thing or one seemingly wrong thing they're excommunicated it's a ridiculous standard okay that's not what I'm trying to do to you I'm trying to say something very different which is you're going to be up against the fact that if your initial data comes from this most beautiful and most bizarre of all objects E8 and that doesn't contain

L - as I said I'm now work it's generalizations to infinite dimensions but there's an issue of intellectual [[check-kiting|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting]] like I don't mind the idea that you recognize the debts that you're in and then you say I think I have a way of getting this thing to close off (L -right) but there is a question of well now that you've recognized am i right I mean am i right yeah yeah right i right that the issues that I raised with you initially turned out to be really serious problem  

L - of course I mean and you  

W - but you didn't know that then