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

|guest=[[Garrett Lisi]]

[[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.

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 [[Electron|electrons]] and [[Quark|quarks]] and [[Neutrino|neutrinos]] and and other generations of these that form you know what are called the [[Fermions|fermions]] okay and these are called the matter particles and then they have mass because of the interaction with the [[Higgs Boson|Higgs boson]] right which is sort of...

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|complex numbers]] or a column matrix if you like that's acted on by a [[Rotation Matrix|rotation matrix]] that tells you specifically how these particles transform under rotation  

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 Bottle|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|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|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|orthogonal groups]] so it's a very special property of real Euclidean rigid space that spinors 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  

The way I see what you're saying is is that there is a usual kind of symmetry which we would associate with [[Bosons|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  

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

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|fermionic quantization]]

3) my last concern was that because of the properties of this object you didn't have any room for what we call [[Chirality|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 [https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca Perimeter Institute] and I tried to warn you about these things I felt like you never took me seriously.

  W - I know because what you did is you took a theory I mean, to be honest, there's a different set of objects called the [[Exceptional Isomorphisms|exceptional isomorphisms]] which aren't the [[Exceptional Lie Groups|exceptional lie groups]] that have the exact same property that you found where you take something from the force universe let's say there's some object called spin(6) which by an exceptional isomorphism is equivalent to some other object, surprisingly, called su(4) and you can take the spinors of spin six and find out that they are just the four dimensional object from su(4) right and smush them together and you get an analogue of E8 (L - yeah) there's also probably not used by the physical universe in any way that we think of as being important I don't think that that feature is what you think it is  

L - yeah you had a lot fights with those guys (W - okay) yeah whereas I I didn't so my our academic lineages are quite different I mean I went I went to a smaller school I went to UC San Diego I didn't go to [[Harvard University|Harvard]] but my advisor they're in particle physics was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Dashen Roger Dashen] but he he passed away well as a graduate student and I finished up my my dissertation under under [https://www-physics.ucsd.edu/Directory/Person/1 Henry Abarbanel] who also had a background in particle physics but it changed into non-linear dynamics.