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

''[https://youtu.be/Z7rd04KzLcg?t=2123 00:35:23]''<br>

'''Marcus du Sautoy:''' Well, welcome to this special Simonyi lecture, and my name is 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20160205051240/http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/aims/charles-simonyis-manifesto.html 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 labelled, 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.

''[https://youtu.be/Z7rd04KzLcg?t=2169 00:36:09]''<br>

I first met Eric Weinstein when we were both post-docs 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 he began to explain the mathematics he had been 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 its magic on me.

''[https://youtu.be/Z7rd04KzLcg?t=2209 00:36:49]''<br>

Over the last two years, I have had the privilege of being taken through the twists and turns of Eric's ideas. After our post-docs in Israel, when I went the academic route, getting my professorship here in Oxford, Eric went a more independent route, 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 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 a great pleasure to be here in Oxford. For those of you who are not aware, it is possible that no other university in the world has kept the faith for so long with Einstein's great vision of a final theory for physics as a theory of pure geometry, a sort of elegance and simplicity of the highest order. And the names that are associated with Oxford that weigh heavy on me are [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Atiyah [Michael] Atiyah], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose [Roger] Penrose], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Segal [Graeme] Segal], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Woodhouse [Nick] Woodhouse], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Hitchin [Nigel] Hitchin]—it's a very long list of people who, even when fashion did not hold those ideas in favor, 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, being tempted by the siren song of geometry, 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 there is no evidence to date, in my mind, that we are being called to quantize general relativity directly. In fact, there's been more effort spent on that quest, 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.

''[https://youtu.be/Z7rd04KzLcg?t=2387 00:39:47]''<br>

Marcus asked me to begin presenting these ideas here. And hopefully this is a first opportunity, but if the ideas are not good, then lighting on the aisles will lead you to safety, and your exits may be behind you. But, in the event of a good flight, hopefully this will begin a conversation rather than end one. I feel, in some sense, that I'm presenting the works of another man, a younger man, someone who came of age right in the middle of the great string theory boom 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 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.

''[https://youtu.be/Z7rd04KzLcg?t=2465 00:41:05]''<br>

So, with that as 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, right now we're going to break that contract. 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.