15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself. 01:47:29

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

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 and 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 nemeses, 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 enjoy 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 you're usually presented with. I hope you like it.

You found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm here today with my arch nemesis, physicist, Garrett Leacy. Garrett, welcome to the portal. Thanks for having me on, Eric. You're a brave man. 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, uh, what could you do to inform our listeners and viewers, uh, about who you are and what our relationship might be? All right. Well, we have a many disturbing similarities in that we, uh, did fairly well in school. We got our PhDs, but then we left academia and maintained an interest in fundamental physics and, uh, kept pursuing this on our own.

there are some distinctions in that you went into the finance world and I went into being a surf bomb. Yes. That's not that similar. Also you are, you have a PhD in physics proper, whereas I have one in mathematics and,

so I would say advantage Lisi. But then I have one from a more typically powerhouse school. You have one that's a little bit off of that main corridor that maybe caught up in string theory and 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 a theory of everything is

Almost nobody's willing to do that. Would you say that that's a fair statement? Yeah, it's a very fair statement. And 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.

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 and their description in fundamental physics. It was something about it that really I didn't like. It just didn't feel right to me. And I got wrapped up in solving that 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 have to be somewhat of a lunatic to take that on. It's like trying to prove some theorem in mathematics that 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 a 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 tried to actively discourage their students from, from going into fundamental problems in physics because they, they, they haven't had success themselves. So they're, they're trying to be protective of their students that way.

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 the entire podcast is an experiment. And 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 something.

We're going to experiment with our advertising models. Uh, we're going to experiment with what the traffic will bear when it comes to, uh, intellectual discussions, uh, 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, but it's quite possible. And, um,

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 idea suppression complex. And its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and upend and disrupt previous structures. So for example, I would claim that string theory, which is absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what, 1984? Yeah. Since about then. 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 try to steal home base. I mean, to understand that, you have to understand the, as I'm sure you do, 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 and try to figure it out and exchange ideas very rapidly. That was more the 50s and 60s. It was, but it continued all the way through the 70s.

And from that culture of community working together on information that's coming in a steady stream, you got this culture of like, "Yeah, no, don't go do that other thing. It's a waste of time. You really want to be working on what's hot." 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 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 is much more casual. Do you mind if I set this up a little bit for our audience and you critique if I do a poor job? 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 theoretic complex or the quantum complex around the ideas of Bohr. Sort of fair enough and Planck, I don't mean to slight Dirac and others, but just to keep it simple, the children of Einstein and the children of Bohr. Right. And the boring people went into particle physics.

- The boring people? - Well, you said they're the children of boars. - Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay. - So they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire, moving things along as part of a community, whereas general relativity, the people from the Einstein community, were more exploring different possibilities at their own pace, and it was more of an exploratory culture. And that's the culture that turned into loop quantum gravity.

So first of all, I'm just going to begin arguing with you there. To me, the issue was 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 smaller,

less tied up. Um, 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 there was less for them to do. And then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains, uh, because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between theory and experiment. That's right. Okay. And, and, but what happened was that, uh,

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 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.

I still have some disagreements, but I don't think I necessarily want to derail us. So anyway, the point I started with was that the string theory came out of the particle physics community. Now, when we say string theory, we mean the cultural explosion that happened in 1984 rather than the original string revolution of, let's say, Veneziano, which was much earlier. Okay.

So that 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 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. 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 high dimensional manifold to attach to for our strings to vibrate in. And we'll 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. We wrapped up.

I don't believe that story. Yeah. Well, it didn't happen. That was, I don't think that's even what actually happened in, I mean, 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 memories, something very different happened. Well, it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon. I think something's still different. I think that Ed Witten showed up and that there was one human being. He's his own anomaly. Yeah.

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 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. There was a voice that was clearly coming from another planet. Right. Um, 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 even though 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.

Well the the string theory unification program, the idea that this description of all fundamental particles and gravity and our entire universe would come from a model based on strings vibrating in 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 the high hopes and promises.

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 modeled 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 abstract mathematical description of a, of a surface inside another surface essentially. Right. And so that this, this thing had a peculiar appeal to the children of bore and

that was not that appealing to the children of Einstein. Would that be a fair description of it? Yeah, for pretty subtle reasons, specifically anomaly cancellation and also the ability to produce what appeared to be particle excitations from the string model. 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 era.

I don't know, a fad? It's hard to... It's like a giant rolling, what, Katamari Damacy ball, where it's just collecting everything that it touches and making it a part of itself. That's right. And in fact, the claim was, if we find something that isn't string theory, we'll just find some way of including it and call it string theory. So this was a bizarre... 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 going to 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 going to wrap it all up. And in essence,

You know, we have this concept in evolutionary theory called interference competition, where one animal will attempt to outcompete the other by keeping it away from like a watering hole.

So nobody else could afford to get nourished because the string theorists were saying all the smart people are in string theory. It's the only game in town was the famous phrase. 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. Well, I think almost everybody was in that position. That is really the founding crime.

uh, for me in the string revolution, it was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us is an idiot. Yeah. Yeah. That's above and beyond normal physicist arrogance. 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, uh, that humans are engaged with. And I think there are three components to it and just see whether, whether it resonates with you.

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. The second thing 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 that generated chemistry. Nuclear power. Nuclear power, nuclear weapons, communications technology, electromagnetic, you know, Wi-Fi, what have you. If you want it, and it invented theoretical physics, more or less created molecular biology. That's probably a bit of a stretch, but the others certainly aren't. So, yeah. If you look at the RNA Thai Club, you know, the people in it were Teller, Feynman, 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, 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

that this was the world's most impressive intellectual community ever. It certainly seems to attract some of the greatest minds. 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 thing that's forcing you to go back and forth between

between the purest of pure theory and 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 actually rewarded human intellectual achievement like no other subject ever. Right. It's also touching on something that's a little bit different socially, which is the type of people who are attracted to

to really hard problems in fundamental physics 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. Some are, some aren't. Yeah. But 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 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. It's not like law, where laws are made up by humans and discussed in front of humans and embedded in front of humans. I mean, that has its own intricacies and difficulties and puzzles, right?

But theoretical physics, you're working at something that's not related to humans directly. I mean, any intelligent beings in this universe that advance to a certain state are going to be involved in studying physics. And it's going to 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 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 been able to work on it and make progress, which is freaking 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. Three.

classes of greatest puzzles. I mean, if I could, I could tell a story that biology is the greatest puzzle because, uh, without, without something to care about the universe in which it lives, uh, 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,

of a universe. We don't know if there are other universes that could be constructed. - So biology, I mean, it's, I agree it's intricate 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 a DNA helix is gonna spiral to the left or the right and what its chemical components are precisely, that might vary. Other planets, other civilizations, biology's gonna be different.

Make a decent argument that systems of selective pressures, as described by Darwin and Wallace, might be conserved even if you didn't have carbon baseline. There will be convergent evolution, of course. Sure. 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 going to be wildly different in different places in the galaxy. Whereas physics is the same everywhere.

It's independent of biology and it's independent of humanity. And then when you go to 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 larger playing field than physics. So within that huge arena of possible mathematical structures, we appear to live in one mathematical structure.

So, I mean, a physicist only has to focus on the mathematics that we, that describes reality. And I, by the way, I share your intuition that 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 about what to care about within. It's as if you let it loose in the mathematical jewelry store and it selects only the finest pieces. Yeah. Yeah. And we have to wonder if that's, you know, is that just our human take on it? Cause our, our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world and universe. So is it that,

I mean, Douglas Adams described the anthropic principle as a puddle of water, right? Thinking it's like, wow, this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my shape, right? 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 hole, right?

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 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. Do you actually believe what you're saying right now? No, I think it's wrong. I mean...

I think this is so cowardly. I know, I agree. And I have to wonder about it. I have to, I mean, I understand. We have to pay lip service. It'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? Cause I have to question everything all the time. Sure. Mostly cause I don't talk to enough other people, but yeah.

But also it's because, you know, 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. 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, the closest thing we have to source code.

We're not at the source code yet. We're not quite at that layer. - But you can smell it, can't you? - Well, I mean, yes and no. - It feels close. - I think it's almost provably close, but 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 clarify that 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. Right. We mean, love is still going to be a mystery. Of course. Oh God, you really did that? Of course I did. But yeah, no, but I mean, form a single file line. There's evidence. I mean, in our, in our understanding of physics, as we've learned more particles, the fundamental particles we've learned about appear to be filling out a complete set.

I mean, when you predict that a tau quark should exist, or that a tau lepton should exist, you figure out that it completes this set. It's a third generation. It's complete. So we seem to be completing our set of fundamental particles. So we have three sets of Lego, 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 scale so far. That's what it looks like. Well, it's not just so far. It's like we have reasons to know that there aren't more. From how the Big Bang set matter loose in the universe, we know that there aren't more than three generations up to a certain very high energy. Well, we've known a lot of things, Garrett, that have turned out to be wrong.

Well, but this is really filling out a pretty complete pattern. I don't dispute, but I just... Except for this minor point of dark matter still being completely unknown for the most part. Yeah. I mean, I guess my discomfort with this comes from the fact that knowing the history, I know how we've been wrong. 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. We've got two different directives telling us to be both more confident and more humble. Right. The thing that

has affected both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called spinners at the core of our understanding of matter. Do you want to say a little bit about what that is, why you think it's affected you and me as well, and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional or intellectual impact on the community? Right. I mean, when you're basically, when physicists think

more or less completed what's called the standard model of particle physics. You have 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 matter particles, which are electrons and quarks and neutrinos and other generations of these that form what are called the fermions. And these are called the matter particles. And they have mass because of their interaction with the Higgs boson.

which is sort of in between. - It's not going to make sense to people. - It's not, all right. But anyway, the force particles behave differently as elementary particles under rotations than the matter particles. So these matter particles, 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 you get back to where you started. But spinners are different.

And they behave in a very specific way, and there's a very specific way of describing them mathematically.

But it's described in an unusual way. It's described 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. Honestly, that wouldn't make any sense to me. And I don't think I can help all of my audience to get it right. This is the thing. So this is the way physicists are introduced to a description of electrons.

Well, can I just try to play with something while we're talking about this in this way? Well, you can. Can I hand it off to you in about 10 seconds? No, you finish it out. 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 into rotations. That's not how, you know, why would the universe do that?

It's not elegant, it's not geometric. It seems sort of arbitrary. Why would the universe have spinners in it? Well, it turns out that because if you describe general relativity as curving four-dimensional space-time, describe gravity, and you describe forces as gauge fields, both of those are very geometric descriptions, they're very elegant mathematically. Then you describe the fermions as spinners, it looks like a kludge. It just doesn't fit with the other theories.

But that's why I left physics to solve this problem. I wanted to know why spinners 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 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 all our other forces are described geometrically, the universe is just one thing. It's right there in the name. I mean, Una is one. Verse is turning.

We have this one turning thing we call the universe, and it's just one mathematical object. And if we have different particles, they have to be aspects of this one mathematical object. Why would this mathematical object have spinners as an aspect of them? It was a huge mystery to me. I wanted to go solve it. No one else even acknowledged it was a problem. And you also tackled this. This also bothered you. Well, there was a...

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, 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 stole out of Oakland, I guess. And,

These objects that I'm holding up, or you can look up Klein bottles on the web, have this very odd property that they are covered, if you will, by the surface of a donut if the surface of the donut 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 is

but that it's wrapped twice by some object which has different properties, namely the surface of a donut called a torus. The rotations of our three-dimensional space bizarrely have some object that covers them twice just as a donut covers a Klein bottle 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 where 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 rotation.

And that spin group is the thing that has the property that it acts on these things called spinners. 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 spinners even exist to play with. Right.

I mean, it comes out of representation theory, but once again, that's a fairly high level of mathematics you have to get to to even see that these things exist. 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 symmetry.

Euclidean rigid space that spinners 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 spinners that just, it continues to surprise us. We don't understand where they came from. They're a hidden feature of the universe and they keep giving in this very mysterious fashion.

- Yeah, and most of the general relativists who came at this problem just would not want to touch it, because it's too foreign to them. And the people who 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 to me. - See, this doesn't make sense to me at all. - It didn't make sense to me either, Eric. That's why I left it for my own-- - Let me give you an argument as to why this is a really serious problem.

If I take two kinds of thing that 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 and I've got light and its 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 spinners. 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 spinners. And that's a big problem because if you're going to... It's not just a problem, it's a huge clue. It says that spinners have to be intimately related to gravity and general relativity. And gravity. So spinners are over on the quantum side of the equation. The children of Bohr, it's really more their object than the children of Einstein's.

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 one. Yet,

If it turns out that we don't know how to measure length and angle between measurements, because in quantum theory, you get something very different 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 metric is, you can't even say where the sea is that the electron would be a wave in. And it's a very convoluted thing, but it's a big difference. 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. Well, we're getting pretty, we're getting pretty far afield. All right. So to speak. 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 spinners 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 spinners. Now,

You and I have two very different points of view. And the reason 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. Thanks for bringing your kryptonite to the show. 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 is maybe 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? From a top-down perspective, it is.

But the way I got there is by describing spinners and seeing that spinners is part of this one beautiful mathematical object naturally. And it's unique to the exceptional Lie groups, to this small class of objects. And when you say exceptional Lie groups, what you mean is... Platypi. Continuous symmetries that only occur once, that they don't fall into some regular pattern. Right. Okay. Okay.

And spinners are naturally a part of their geometry. And they're intricate, beautiful objects. They have spinners 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, all right, I've built up from the ground up, from particle physics and from gravity and from spinners. I've built this structure up and seeing how it's all interconnected. And I found that they're all part of

of this small class of mathematical objects 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 and I said, oh, look, it explains everything. But it's nowhere near like that, how I actually got to there. 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.

So the way I'm hearing you, Garrett, and again, you know, this is like one of the most obscure. This is going to lose some of your listeners, but I'm happy to talk about it. Well, but 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. The way I see what you're saying is, is that there is a usual kind of symmetry between

which we would associate with bosons, that is the force particles of the universe. And what makes these very strange objects that you've referred to in referring to exceptional Lie groups is that you appear to take something from the fermionic universe, that is the spinorial universe, where the spinners come from, and you adjoin it in some sense to the bosonic to get more symmetries.

Yes. Yeah, that's very clear. Okay. There's a huge problem with the strategy. Well, wait, but this, but you're forgetting the part where this structure exists as part of these exceptional objects. Well, no, no, 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 take some of these spinners that are related to that symmetry and

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. Right. One of them goes into the name of bosonic quantization. And the other sort of goes under the name sometimes of, of,

you know, bear is in theory. Right. And anti-commuting numbers, numbers were a times B equals negative parallel, totally different treatment. And the way you've done it, you've really taken the fermions. That is the matter part, the spinners 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 spinners in a, uh,

manner befitting fermionic quantization. Yeah, no, it's very straightforward though. The fermions just end up being along directions orthogonal to space-time. 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 I give you your credit, that E8, the largest of these objects, a 248-dimensional behemoth, carried some numerology surrounding three copies of the spinners that are present, which looked, in some sense, could be confused for, may be related to, three copies of matter. It was about that hand-wavy, yeah. Okay. So...

All the honor to you. That's not an obvious feature. Most people who barely know what the exceptional league groups are, most of them don't know that it has to do with this property called triality. Okay. That was, that was true, but there really wasn't, in my opinion, enough room for,

to pack the particles that we currently see into this group structure with three generations. That was one issue. Second of all, because 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 going to 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, um,

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 these.

Any object that you derive from E8 is going to 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 were going to have to pay back if you were going to connect this to the world that we see. And my irritation with you was that I brought this up with you in 2000, you remind me 2008, not 2009, when we met at the Perimeter Institute.

And I tried to warn you about these things. I felt like you never took me seriously. No, I did take you seriously. I've taken all of these problems seriously and, uh, they're discussed in subsequent work. And, uh, 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, right?

And E8 is 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. Well, I always thought 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 as being its problem. But that's not good enough.

Say more? Because just when you talk about waves on a geometric object, those act as different representations mathematically, because of the Peter Weill theorem. But when you do that, that's not enough to give you all the structure you need for quantum field theory. 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 fermions should, like matter particles should. And it's also large enough to give you the sort of dynamics you need for quantum field theory.

So that's why I've intervened 10 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 solve these problems. And that's why I've been working. You really believe that you've solved these problems? I think I have a really good description that goes a long way. Here's the thing. If I just think about where we are with the standard model, you've got

four dimensions of space and time, right? Then you've got an extra eight dimensions coming from something called SU3, three dimensions from something called SU2, and one extra dimension coming from something called U1. That's the basic data that occurs. - And gravity. - You could put in six dimensions for something called spin three one, okay?

But the point is I can add those all up and I'm going to get some number probably, you know, in 20s of dimension, 20 some odd dimensions, whatever. That finite thing generates the infinite dimensional world of quantum field theory. Wait a minute. But quantum field theory, we have a way of mapping between those, the base geometry and then going to quantum field theory. Right. Then you have Fox space. Right. And you have occupation numbers for all the different possible states. You're right.

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 telling you that you're dead on arrival just because certain problems can be seen. That would be unfair. And 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 that wants to play in is, 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, uh,

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 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 it doesn't contain as i said i'm now working on its generalizations to infinite dimensions

but there's an issue of intellectual 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." But there is a question of, well, now that you've recognized-- Am I right? Am I right? No, you're absolutely right. Am I right that the issues that I raised with you initially turned out to be really serious problems? Of course. I mean, and-- But you didn't know that back then. Yeah, I did. They were in the paper.

They're in the original paper saying that the description of three generations was very hand-wavy and unsatisfactory. That's in the original paper. Okay. My recollection was that when I tried to explain to you why...

people were going to have the objection about the two different quantization schemes that that was not handled correctly. Right. Well, I handled that in a paper in 2010 or so. Okay. So that was cosmology. All right. That was one of the issues. Then there's going to be an issue that you weren't able to bring the left, right asymmetry out of the initial data. There wasn't enough. And that was a fair description. Absolutely. Okay. And then you're saying that the, um,

I ceded to you that you were making a connection between the mysterious appearance of three copies of matter and something called triality, which was not manifest obviously inside of E8, but to the few people who actually care about this structure, it definitely is there in a very profound way. It relates to rotations in eight-dimensional spaces. Yes. But you also haven't taken an interest in what is E8 if not

the wellspring for the source code of the universe. Like, if it isn't the universe-- I think it's a piece of it. But I'm not religious, Eric. I mean, I'm gonna explore whatever seems most promising to explore. Okay. Well, have you changed your sense of the status of E8 as a candidate for the unified theory in the fashion that you were originally seeing? Absolutely. -You have changed your view? -Yes. -Can you talk about that? -Right.

So it was in tackling quantum field theory and how to describe it geometrically, which as far as I know, nobody has done. I mean, whenever you start with, as you say, U1, SU2, SU3, and you go through this quantization procedure for its fields, you get a quantum field theory. Or if you're dealing with strings, right? You have this model of vibrating strings in higher dimensions. Then you go through this quantization procedure to get a quantum theory of strings. Okay. Right? Physicists have this...

toolkit for quantizing things but that's utterly the wrong way to look at reality if if the universe is just one thing which it is then it's one mathematical object i mean you're making a point that is very well understood i believe in the standard theoretical physics community which is that if the world starts off as quantum right you should talk about classicalizing pieces of it rather than quantitizing the classical pieces that appear to exist yeah that's exactly right

So what's a quantum geometric object look like? It's, you know, with all these infinite dimensional Fox space and the creation and annihilation of elementary particles. People at home won't know what a Fox space is. A Fox space is effectively where the states of the system can live when you have multiple particles in a situation and you can change the number of particles and

that you have just the way a photon can break into an electron and a positron pair, that would be possible in a Fox space, not possible in a simpler quantum system. That's right. So effectively, a Fox space is just a large place to play where the number of particles in the system can change. Up to infinity. Keep going. So in order to describe this as one geometric object, you're stuck with a generalized Lie group, infinite dimensional generalized Lie group.

Yes. And in order to describe spinners, it's going to be an exceptional generalized lead group. Garrett, I don't think you're adding anything. I think that the problem here is that E8 is an exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally interesting object. It did have the properties that you were talking about, and it unifies spinners.

standard symmetries with these spinners to form new symmetries. That's right. But it does. What? It's not only inadequate. It would push them into a universe of pure force rather than a universe divided between force and matter. You're actually, the problem is, is the kind of unification it would create would be completely force unification with, with an absence of matters. You'd be dragging, uh,

if you will, spinners. You're focusing on a problem that was, you know, that was solved in a paper in 2010. But it's very simply that fermions are orthogonal to spacetime, whereas, you know, the force fields, the boson fields, are along spacetime.

But the same way, the same way if you have two force fields that are long space time, but in different directions, they would anti-commute, right? So what you're doing is you're using space time, if you will, which is again, kind of a classical Einsteinian concept to break apart a unified system, which was the intention in unification to begin with. And then you're going to try to treat these two things naturally and

According to two totally different prescriptions. You're violating, I mean, in some sense, any kind of naturality that you just picked up in the unification to begin with. In a sense, yeah. But the symmetry has to break somehow. Does it do it in a natural? I mean, this doesn't feel, this feels like a pudge. Probably not. It allows it. It doesn't seem completely natural, but it does allow it.

Well, but the whole point of the thing I thought was to take the naturality and what we had understood about the nature of these exceptional objects and to say, Hey, these things actually unified beautifully inside of these very unusual, elegant mathematical structures. They do, but it was, it was too small. As you said, it was too small because it didn't correctly contain three generations of matter and because it can't correctly portray quantum field theory.

But once you go to the larger generalized lead groups, it can't. Well, you know, if this was a startup, what you're saying is that the business is going great, but it's just run out of money and I need a fresh infusion of cash. No, I'm not kidding. This is sounding like an intellectual check hiding. No, no, it's round B funding. Series B. I see. Is it cash flow positive? Not yet. I haven't even put the paper out yet. Okay. Okay.

So there's I mean, I look, it's not a question that I need to see the paper or that you're not allowed to take out more loans. But are you getting more? I mean, I know you to be like, I hate to say this, but I have defended you to the regular community with some frequency because I have viewed you as an honest broker for your own stuff everywhere.

I don't think you're trying to get away with something. I think what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, I need to take some advances, which I think, and I hope I can pay back, which I think is an admirable and honorable way to do physics. Are you worried about your own theory? Are you worried that you're going to infinite dimensions in the way that you've been forced to modify on several previous occasions? And then in fact, this is not going to close forever.

I am unusually confident that I'm on the right track with this one. Really? Yeah. There are too many things matching up in the right way. This doesn't sound good, Garrett. I got to be honest with you. But you see, I will put a paper out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, people may not find it interesting or they might find it really interesting. Well...

I wish you the best of luck, but I have to tell you that I do think that the problems in this program, I mean, again, I should just be honest about it. I thought that the choice of E8 was so natural that they're really one of two choices that I can see as being the way to go if you're going to avoid the usual problems.

paths in research into fundamental physics. One is that you start with the most beautiful, intricate object you can find, and then you find the intricacies of the natural world somehow living inside of the intricacies which occurred naturally. That would be the top-down view, and it's quite nice to look at it that way. The bottom-up view is that somehow you start with something that's practically lifeless, which I've analogized to a fertilized egg,

And somehow it bootstraps itself into this weird, intricate and Baroque world that we find ourselves in. And it sort of auto, the universe auto catalyzes from almost nothing. And these are the two basic approaches that I can imagine that would,

not strain the concept of a theory of everything. Right. Well then we both engage in both of these, but once you've used this bottom up approach, right? Starting with your fertilized egg and getting up into more and more complexity, then you start to see a complete object after you've expanded it out. Sorry, you view yourself as exploring the concept of going from the bottom up. What is it that you've done that that has that character?

starting from gravity and particle physics and how they can be matched up together in a, in a, in a way that brings spinners about natural. Okay. That's, that's not very simple at all. Well, I know gravity, gravity is already, you know, you're talking about curvature of a space time manifold. Oh, it's beautiful stuff though. I love it. No, it's absolutely gorgeous. I don't think we're, we're divided by that, but when it comes to, um,

you know, breaking up this object called the curvature tensor into three different pieces, throwing one of the, one of them away called the vial curvature, and then fine tuning the other two to be equal to the matter and energy in the universe. There's a lot of stuff that's going into that story that isn't, that's an intricate story. And then the other story is even worse and weirder. So it's,

you know, you're, you're smuggling in a ton of complexity. When I say fertilized egg, I'm thinking at the level of cytology, but you know, at the level of the actual DNA, that's incredibly rich. So when I, you know, maybe it's a bad analogy because it's not bootstrapping itself out of nothing, right? You're smuggling in a ton of intricacy, but you have to look in both directions. You have to look from the bottom up. And then once you can see the larger picture,

then you have to look again from the top down. And if going that way from the top down doesn't match up very well with what you did to get there, then you have to go further and see if you can get a different, bigger picture. It's the only way forward. Garrett, but I'm going to be honest. I feel like, you know, this is, something has run into a wall and there's the sense that, like, how could this beautiful structure not be

Not be right. It doesn't feel to me like. It's insufficient. Yeah. Yeah. But there are larger structures that are not finite dimensional, but there are still Lie groups and exceptional Lie groups. They're just generalized infinite dimensional Lie groups that contain E8 as a substructure. And they're beautiful. They're just as beautiful, if not more so. I really don't. I think that the problem is, is that, you know, we have this mutual friend, Sabine Hassenfelder.

And Sabine has this very strange feature of her personality that she needs to tell the truth at scale. Oh, well, Sabina is a scientist and a scientist, you know, engage in the truth at all costs. Yes. But sort of our modus operandi. Well, I find it very interesting that almost no one has followed Sabine's lead. I think it's Sabina. Sabina. Yeah. Okay. From her perspective,

beauty has led theoretical physics astray. Right now I've, I've tangled with her. My claim is, is that the, the string theory community, which has generally hoovered up the most brilliant minds, but turn them into kind of almost cult like members, which are exploring some structure, but I just don't, it's, it's similar to E8 in the sense that I'm not positive that it's the structure of our world. It has some beauty and some consistency, but,

But I'm not positive that that's its reason for being. And because that argument has been so abusive and it's just been abused against other people that our work is beautiful and then when those outsiders look at it, it doesn't look like what you're doing is that beautiful at all. She's gone against beauty as a means of trying to figure out what's true and what isn't. I'm concerned that you're falling prey to the siren of beauty now

where you're not coupling, you're not, things that are beautiful that, there are many things that are beautiful that don't exist to do what you think they're there to do. - Right, well that's definitely true. I'm definitely inspired by beautiful mathematical objects. When I start exploring an area of mathematics and I start to see its intricacies and its connection to fundamental physics,

I am led to think that there might be something there based on aesthetics. And I've also discussed this with Sabina, who I think is great, and her points are wonderful. But I would be lost if I didn't have this aesthetic sense as a guide. Well, let's take an example like the hydrogen atom.

So you've got one proton at the center of a hydrogen atom and you have all of the electron shells in quantum theory that are generated by the Coulomb potential that comes off of that nucleus, right? Okay. That story of chemistry is just being these perfectly spherical electron shells works pretty well.

Well, you've got the other orbitals, you know, P orbitals, S orbitals, D orbitals, all these things, yeah. Yeah, in terms of the representation theory of something we'd call spin three that gives the symmetries of the system. That story is not... It is absolutely gorgeous. It's beautiful, and it works pretty darn well. But it starts to fall apart the larger the atoms are and the more neutrons and protons are stuck together in the nucleus. It gets much more subtle, yeah. Well...

It's a perfectly beautiful story that isn't the right story. It's not the true story. It's very close to a true story. It's suggestive. It's indicative. But it isn't actually the true story itself. So you have to be very careful in my mind that you don't fall into the trap of thinking that the hydrogen atom sort of generalizes its perfection is simply the story of chemistry. Right. Of course, they're much more complex stories.

elements and then grouped into molecules. And there's all sorts of things that go into, into that sort of chemistry. Well, but you don't, you have the same situation in theoretical physics where you have certain kinds of beauty that are incredibly pure, that actually kind of fall apart under scrutiny. And you have other kinds of, uh, beauty that seem to fall apart, but actually go the distance. I'm thinking about Dirac's, um,

discovery of antimatter as the corresponding solutions to the matter solution. And didn't you usually think that was that the anti electrons were, that were actually protons because they only knew of those two particles. And then Heisenberg, uh, tried to pop his bubble and said, um, you know, you actually have a new particle here. Well, no, he said that the proton was way too heavy to be the, uh, anti-particle mirror of the electron. And I think direct sort of recanted, uh,

But Dirac should have had the courage of his convictions and said, I predict that there will be two new particles, an anti-proton and an anti-electron, which was called the positron. And both of those things turned out to be true. Yeah. And that's considered a victory for the aesthetic of beauty in mathematical physics.

Yes, but there was an intermediate situation in which the beauty led Dirac astray because he wanted to shoehorn his theory into the pre-existing world that was understood. That's right. So it's important to be cautious and careful, but not too cautious. So if the mathematics is actually telling you something, you want to listen to it. What's the mathematics telling you? It's telling me that I think I've got the first...

on a geometric description of quantum field theory. I say this out of love, and I hope not envy. I'm super concerned that you can see the problems from here, and that rather than just going to infinite dimensions and saying that quantum field theory requires a jump from finite to infinite dimensions, you can say, look, I am fighting the fact that the beautiful unification that I saw

found actually is going to be challenged at the quantum level where that beauty becomes my enemy. I've never put it that way. 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, which aren't the exceptional league 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 six, which by an exceptional isomorphism is equivalent to some other object, surprisingly called SU four. And you can take the spinners of spin six and find out that they are just the four dimensional object from SU four and smush them together. And you get an analog of E eight.

It is 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. Right, but there are a vast world of mathematical possibilities out here, and I think we need more people exploring all of them. I totally agree with you that we need more people fanning out and trying things that look like they won't work. So we need a more exploratory culture. We need a more exploratory culture, and we need to be forgiving. What we don't need to do

is to fool ourselves when we start getting the sense that maybe this stuff doesn't actually work. I mean, it just, it feels to me like I can sort of see what the next set of problems are going to be. And it would be, I would be remiss if I didn't say them at the beginning. Sure. But you know, you can't really dig into this stuff until you see the mathematical details of it. And this gets back to an issue of, um,

The question of how science should be organized. So we've talked about how difficult it is to do science inside of the institutions because there is such a pressure economically to do whatever is fashionable, to get lots of results, to publish continuously. Can we talk a little bit about what happens when.

We try to do science outside of the institutions. Both of us have, and I think people will be very surprised to hear it, been rather critical of how hard it is to do science when you're not part of the standard community. Right. I mean, I think in some sense it is essential to stay connected with the scientific community, even when you're exploring out almost entirely on your own.

One thing that has to happen is you have to have an extreme set of internal checks on your own progress. And because science is extremely frustrating to work on, most of the pathways you follow end up being dead ends. And it can be really frustrating. So in doing that, if you're going to work outside academia, you also need an extremely strong support system and a healthy life independent of the science you're working on.

So you need to have good support from friends and family, good relationships. You need to have confidence in your ability to support yourself. And that frees up your time if you're really going to work on stuff outside of academia on your own. I've been fortunate enough to build and to have those things. I feel really lucky to be able to do that. And I think I've had a really good life that way.

And, uh, but if you're going to do that, you need to be really careful about it because if you, if you, if you just abandon everything else, cause you have this idea in science that you want to pursue and you abandon everything else, you're, you'll, you'll be totally out of balance in your life. And if you hit some frustrating item and what you're researching, it'll be crushing because the main thing you're working on and focused on stopped working.

When really what you want to be able to do is like, Oh, I've got other stuff going on that's keeping me happy. This thing didn't work out. I just have to wipe the board clean and start fresh. And that's not devastating to do because the rest of your life is good. You have to do that. Otherwise you just won't be healthy as a human being. Okay. And you have created something that you think might be an intermediate between being in total isolation and being hooked up to the community and

that lives within the standard institutional structures. That's right. I mean, I came to this idea when I was wandering from friend's house to friend's house. After getting my PhD, I would basically go hang out with a friend I hadn't seen in a while. And if they had extra space, I'd spend time in their house while I worked on theoretical physics and enjoyed the local environment.

And I thought it was great to be able to do this because you're not worried about having a roof over your head. You have company to interact with and you have a good environment to play in. And I wanted to have a network of such places, but I had a hard time getting friends to give me their houses to use for this. So I ended up getting the resources together to buy a house in Maui and to start bringing friends and visiting scientists in. And I've called this the Pacific Science Institute.

And currently it's basically my house with delusions of grandeur because what I also have is a, is a beautiful piece of property. That's a 15 acres that I bought 10 years ago. Cause I like doing things slowly. So I've been growing the community of the Pacific science Institute by, by having friends come in and stay at my house, including you.

and my arch nemesis. I had a great time despite the obvious antagonism. And for you specifically, I tried to kill you in several different ways. Is that with the millipedes instead of bees? Yeah and shark infested water. Oh sure. It was great. Rough corals. But yeah, basically I have scientists visit and take people out to have fun around the island and really enjoy a good environment where they're free to explore

ideas that might be a little bit on the dangerous side to work on while they're in the confines of academia and among their normal colleagues. It's a place where you can explore a little bit wilder ideas. And I'm really excited to grow this community by starting to design things to build on the 15 acres I've got. That's really a nice location. So I've been growing things slowly up here and I'm really looking forward to some more progress with it and growing this community. And it's also been

a nice balance against working on physics directly because it's, it's guaranteed success. I mean, when you, when you have a place in Maui for, for scientists to come hang out and have a good time, that's, that's going to happen. And also it keeps me entertained to have good people coming through. That's fantastic. So it works out for yourself. Can you, um, just, I'm curious from your perspective, how do you see, uh, the two of us as being divided in our approaches to,

to the community. I would definitely say that I seem to be more connected to the sensibilities of the elite science community. I know that I can get their noses out of joint, but I track them very carefully. Yeah, you had a lot of fights with those guys. Okay. Yeah, whereas I didn't. So our academic lineages are quite different. I mean, I went to a smaller school. I went to UC San Diego and didn't go to Harvard.

But, you know, my advisor there in particle physics was Roger Dashen, but he passed away while I was a graduate student. And I finished up my dissertation under Henry Barbenow, who also had a background in particle physics, but it changed in nonlinear dynamics. But in some sense, you were a self-advised PhD. Yeah. So I was very much self-directed. Henry gave me the freedom to go explore whatever the heck I wanted. I had an extraordinary amount of freedom as a graduate student.

And I hit this problem with spinners and that's what I wanted to tackle. I want to figure out what they were geometrically and no one else was interested in that problem. But through academia, I was a straight A student. You know, I did really well. I never had any big conflicts. Was it easy for you? Yeah. It was. I spent a lot of time surfing. I was living on the beach in La Jolla. It was beautiful. It was the greatest time of my life. Okay. You know, people talk about, you know,

Being a big fish in a small pond and going to a bigger pond, you feel humbled. I never really had that experience. I was pretty close to the top of my class and really happy about it, how everything was going. Everything was great. I got my PhD. But there was no way I was going to get a job trying to understand the geometry of spinners when everybody else was doing string theory.

So you had already accepted that you were unemployable. Yeah, I was totally unemployable, but I invested in Apple stock in the nineties. So I had a few money. So I said, see you guys, I'm going to go surf in Maui and work on this stuff on my own. Whereas you had a very different experience. So you were, you were, you were in Harvard in the math department, studying mathematical physics. And as far as I know, you were making some really unusual breakthroughs that were very ahead of their time, but you weren't welcomed by the,

the head of the people, the head people there. And so you say you had a conflict from the get go. Well, I had a very, I had a very serious dispute about something in mathematics, which were called the self dual equations, self dual Yang Mills equations, which were related to the regular Yang Mills equations, which are the equations of force in the standard model. But the self dual Yang Mills equations were sort of a square root of those equations. And the,

they were very difficult to work with and to solve. And I was very confused as to why people were investing in this particular form of these equations when it felt to me that we hadn't asked what constellation of equations these new equations belong to. And I proposed, again, spinners as a means of

changing the equations and was told that if, I mean, the exact quote was something like if spinners had anything to do with the story, Nigel, who was Nigel Hitchens would have told us like it was just completely, it was bananas. And then I got into this issue that, well, you know, spinners have to be quantized as fermions. That is, they have to be treated as if they were matter inside of quantum field theory. But this was not,

Like we weren't doing quantum field theory. We were just doing classical geometry of a kind. And so none of the arguments, I put forward the set of equations, which later got recognized and completely changed the field, which came through Ed Witten and this guy called Natty Seiberg, both of them now professors at the Institute. And there was just no room to question why everybody was struggling with these almost unimaginable,

intractable equations and just, you know, getting great results, but with so much effort and work. So that was like a very weird story whereby, you know, I think that by 1994, the Harvard department had woken up to the fact that it was not using the right equations. And I'd been actually proposing several sets of different equations. But that, you know, when this all, you know, came about late, late 80s, early 90s,

Uh, there was just no way to, to have a productive conversation about it. Right. So you found yourself at odds with the people you were talking with and you decided to go into finance instead or how'd that happen? No, I mean, I, I wanted, I was trying to get back to physics and you know, I was proposing, I had proposed three sets of equations. Um,

One of which it turned out to have been done by somebody else in some place that I didn't know anything about. One of which later gets done by Cyberg and Witten. And then another set of equations that I wanted to connect to the actual standard model. And the department was just very concerned about.

that this didn't really have anything to do with actual physics. It was sort of a coincidence in their mind that something that was vaguely physics-y was having great topological results. And so there was this, you know, this fear. And I was sent to a guy named Sidney Coleman, who was a great quantum theorist. And he was much more encouraging than the Harvard math department. Yeah, Sidney Coleman was a great guy. I mean, an unbelievable human being. I had two memories of him, one of which was that

He had all the time in the world for people who had no idea what they were doing. And the other was that he didn't suffer fools gladly. And then I realized that those are two contradictory images. I unearthed old footage of him. He gave this brilliant lecture called Quantum Mechanics in Your Face to try to make the quantum. Have you ever seen this thing? I have not. Oh, it's a work of art. You'd love it. And it turns out both of these things were really true about him, that he

If you were full of yourself and you were wrong, he would just cut you up into little pieces. But if you said, I don't quite understand this, he had all the time in the world to be the greatest of teachers. No, I mean, one of the marks of a good scientist is humility. No. No. One of the marks of a good scientist is a dialectic between arrogance and humility.

If you don't have, that's a more subtle and accurate way of putting it. Yeah. Well, no, I just, I, I, I worry about us extolling the virtues of the humble, the meat, the self effacing. And it's just like, that's not where the magic happens. You have to have had the arrogance to tackle hard problems and made some progress, but then been kicked back by something that didn't work right. And after enough of that, you develop some humility, but you still have to maintain the arrogance to get anywhere. So how do you feel currently about, about the communities?

Like the professional community, you have to know that they regard you with very, I mean. Well, I know what's going on. I mean, I got a lot of contempt from string theorists for getting attention, for putting forward a mathematical model of reality that wasn't strings. And it wasn't complete. It was a model that was proposed that had problems with it.

And I was forthcoming with the problems in it, but I was still saying, yeah, this is, this seems like it's making progress towards the description of reality and has nothing to do with strings. And that set alarm bells off all over the place. It set off alarm bells for either it's a threat or this guy's a complete crackpot, which is more likely. And I got criticisms from both for both. I don't think if I were to steal me in their perspective. And again, you know that I don't share it and I'm willing to fight them. And I, as I did when I,

you first encountered what I called their immune system in a gentleman known as Jacques Dissler, right? I'm willing to stand up for what it is you're trying to do, but I do think that we have to give them their due before we say what's wrong with their perspective. Their perspective is there are lots of constraints that one learns are very difficult to evade when you immerse yourself in standard quantum field theory. Like they know everything.

what it is that is demotivating them. It's all the no-go theorems and the intricacies. And the reason they got crazy about string theory, first of all, I'm convinced that it was a way of evading the real problems in physics. It gave them something to do. It's like war games for general for the period of peace. It's an amazing toolkit. Well, it gives you something to do to keep your chops up that is different from the thing you're supposed to be doing.

And what they were objecting to is to say, this guy doesn't understand all the things that have to go right in order to have an improvement on the theory. From our perspective, how dare he blithely saunter forth if we ignored all the constraints on us, we could have fun proposing all sorts of things that also won't work. That was really the responsible version of their critique.

Now the irresponsible version of their critique is, Hey, we have something that isn't working very well. How dare he take something that isn't working very well and get attention. Right. And maybe funding or maybe destroy the sense that there's only one game in town. Right. And you know, I was separately lobbying you and them for different things. I wanted you to just say the words like, I understand these are the constraints that will have to be satisfied and I'll

I don't have answers and I don't know how difficult they'll be to find, but I don't want to be demotivated from the get go. So please don't immediately tell me all the no go theorems because any successful theory will probably have to have a period where it's flying in the face of no go theorem. So that's what I wanted to hear from you. Right. I believe I said those things scattered over several interviews at the time. Somewhat. But I think that, I think that what they don't intuit is that you understand how, how significant the,

negative results are the no-go theorems as they're called are pretty profound. Right. I mean, there's a theorem called the Coleman-Mandulo theorem that prohibits the unification of gravity with the other forces. And I just blew right through that because it didn't seem to apply in what I was doing. Well, I mean, really it prohibits naive unification of matter and force. And there's a way of evading it using this thing called supersymmetry. Right.

And supersymmetry is this very weird thing that doesn't have that much mathematical beauty behind it. So the mathematicians know about it. They studied a little bit, but they're not bananas over it. Yeah, I'm not either.

The natural world doesn't seem to use it in the expected way, but it does so much for theoretical physics that despite the fact that math is just kind of ho-hum on it and that the natural world doesn't seem to be using it, it doesn't stop the theoretical physics community from embracing that because it evades this dreaded no-go theory. It stopped me from embracing it.

I never embraced supersymmetry. I never liked it. But you didn't evade the problem with it either. No, I got around it. You think you really got around it? The Coleman-Mandoula theorem, yeah. It requires as one of its axioms that you have to have, you know, it talks about properties of the scattering of particles. And you have to have a spacetime in which the scattering occurs. And the theory I put forward, the spacetime comes out after the symmetry breaking between gravity and forces. Right.

So it's only after the symmetry breaking happens when the unification is no longer there. Yeah. I'm sure that you have a space time. I don't. Then in that context, the theorem applies. My guess is, and I could be wrong about this because I haven't studied exactly what you're talking about, that what's going to happen is,

that even with how you claim this arises in your theory, they're going to say in whatever approximation is going to be applied to relatively flat space times close to Minkowski space, that if you've really evaded it in some super meaningful way, you should be able to tell us some theorem about good old quantum field theory in relatively flat space time. Right. Well, I mean, it evades it by not satisfying the axioms of the theorem.

Do you know what I'm trying to get at? It's not evading it in some fantastic way. You should be able to tell us something really new if your underlying theory truly unifies force and matter. Right. It would be the case that the approximation of it that is found in ordinary regions that look close to flat, right, where the usual rules of quantum field theory apply...

It should be telling us something wildly new about that. Can you tell us a new theorem about how it would appear to unify force and matter, a region that looks close to classical quantum field theory, to standard quantum field theory? Well, I mean, once the theory is advanced to the stage where it can get to that description, then that would happen. But in the initial stages, all you can see for certain is that it's not violating the theorem.

I don't know enough about how we can talk about it after this. Okay. Sure.

But anyway, I had a number of these things. So those were my, I had these wishes for you, and then I had the wishes for the community, which is that they would stop being pricks about the whole thing and that they would say, look, we can't keep telling everybody who's not a string theorist that their theory is dead on arrival and keep saying, well, we know that our theory doesn't appear to be living truth

in four dimensions and appears to have a bunch of stuff that we don't want and not necessarily all the stuff that we do want. And maybe there's a huge landscape of different theories that would. Yeah. At this point, I don't think string theory is living at all. I think it's an X theory. I think it's pining for the fjords. I've seen nothing but decline since I left this train wreck. Well, this is the thing is it refuses to take stock of itself and it took a lot more minds than one. I think that's happening. Yeah. Certainly the graduate students who are coming up,

are seeing what's going on with string theory and they're taking stock of the field and they're going in other directions. So where, where do we go next? Like, well, is there any way, I mean, I actually view it as highly demotivating that in essence, every new theory is dead on arrival because of the number of things. I mean, can we agree that physics has gotten incredibly difficult? It has, we have, it's, it's difficult by virtue of being so successful that

I mean, you can smell that we're almost at the end of this chapter and we've exhausted everything that we know that has worked previously, which is like to vary the assumptions a little bit on every. And that's been spectacularly successful. And now it doesn't work anymore and it hasn't worked for almost 50 years. Right. It's incredibly frustrating. I think that's why most people are wise to stay the hell away from it.

And I think a lot of the smarter minds are going into machine learning or even biophysics or just into other fields or even condensed matter. How do you feel about that? I feel like I'm out in an island in the middle of the Pacific watching it from unfold from afar. Well, I work on the puzzle myself, my own different way. You're having fun. Yeah. That's, that's my prime directive is have fun. Is to have fun. Yeah. And do you think that,

inducing other people to do this as kind of like maybe the big programs fall apart and we start just becoming individuals trying crazy strategies that probably won't work. Yeah. I mean, there are, there are undergraduate textbooks and undergraduate courses on string theory. Yeah. Okay. And people from undergraduates there and, and there's this culture of arrogance saying is string theory is the pinnacle of

of physics. Right. And people are coming up to that and they're becoming, and if you're really working on fundamental physics and the, the whole area of strength theory has gotten so large in the amount of research done. Sure. That it just takes an enormous amount of intellectual effort to consume it and to get it up to speed to what the current status is of the field. And by the time you're there, you're so invested that,

Then of course, what you want to do is go and continue a postdoc in string theory when you graduate. And there, there are hundreds of students who are coming up this way. And when they get there, they go to HEP like I did this morning. They look at the job, the high energy physics theory section where of, of this thing called the archive where all the new papers are found every day. Yeah. And, and, and the, this high energy physics archive also has a postdoc and job posting board.

And just, just for giggles, I went and say, okay, well, how many opportunities does a rising strength theorist have now? And I went and looked and there are all these subfields of physics. The condensed matter is a big party because it's so incredibly vibrant and productive right now. And you go into high energy theory and okay, there are 30 positions open in North America. Okay. All right. And some of them are open to strength theorists, but out of those 30 positions, you go, how many of them actually actively want a strength theorist and are looking for a strength theorist? There's one.

One Eric. So you have these hundreds of people groomed up saying, strength theory is the pinnacle of what you can be studying and there's nowhere for them to go. Well, but this was a field is dying. Well, because it was a baby boomer phenomenon. We treated it as if it was an intellectual phenomenon, but it was actually this weird generational phenomenon that this took hold. Um, you know, there's this very weird feature of 1951 where Frank Wilczek and Ed Witten, two great physicists born in the same year, um,

Wilczek is effectively like the last guy to make the train for real physics. He is an amazing guy. Yeah. And then Witten, born later that year, probably more powerful than anyone else alive in terms of his mental abilities, hasn't had a trip to Stockholm because he hasn't been able to make contact with the physical world. And almost certainly in any era that wasn't this one, this guy would have been to Stockholm once or more.

Yeah. And it's, in my mind, it's a cultural problem. We're stuck in this culture of particle physics where you have everybody in the same community studying the same popular direction in full force as if there was lots of data coming in supporting that and there's not. So what it is, is they're going full bore, full self-supporting force, a long direction that in my mind just doesn't describe our universe. And what we need is an exploratory phase

With graduate students coming up and picking up stuff that they think is interesting and following that direction on their own, branching away from the main herd. And by having more explorers going different directions, you're more likely to find something good. And I guess my hope is that some graduate student will have listened through this incredibly long and detailed podcast and go look at stuff and say, well, that's kind of interesting. Maybe I want to learn more about that.

Do you have any ideas or the Pacific Science Institute? Is there any way that our listeners can support it?

Are you a nonprofit? I'm a 501c3 nonprofit. I'd be very happy to take donations and put those donations to use, supporting scientists. To diversify. And it's not just supporting physicists. The idea is that, as you said, science has supported our economy to an incredible degree. And I don't think scientists have been sufficiently personally rewarded for that.

So basically what I want to do is, you know, give them a nice place to hang out in Maui, enjoy the environment and work and think on whatever they want undirected while they do it. So it's a place to fight groupthink effectively within the field. While still having community support.

Well, solving community support. The problem is I have very limited resources right now. I'm basically running this out of my house. Right. I have a big piece of land. I have dreams for what I want to build on. And I've been there and it's, it's incredibly generous that people can hang out and just actually fulfill the promise of dreaming about our world and trying things that they wouldn't feel comfortable trying, uh, under the watchful eyes of a departmental chairman who's telling them what they need to do to get chair tenure or to win grants.

Uh, do you have any sense of what we should be directing people to do if they're in a position to change the culture of the field? I always want to think like we still have a few old great people that everybody looks up to and they refuse to say something really provocative. Like here's the thing that I dream about.

We get all of the negative results. They're incredibly demotivating. Allow your young people to violate several of them without being string theorists, and then insist that they try to pay that back once they've been exploring a theory that in a previous era would have been dead on arrival. Because somewhere we have to go backwards to go forwards. We have to question something.

that is rock solid in all of our minds, but isn't actually right. Don't, I mean, yeah, this is totally right. And this sort of cultural inertia that's holding things back is it's in biology, it's in computer science, it's in, it's in all fields of science. So I would say just,

I mean, it's almost the best thing to do just to find people who are really fricking smart and want to work on stuff on their own and give them money and support and let them do it. Well, this is, I'm on record as saying that we have too much oversight, too much transparency and too much accountability. It's strangling us. Yeah, it's absolutely true.

It's absolutely true. Well, Garrett, I really appreciate you sitting down. It's a hell of an experiment to just even try to have conversations about, you know, what might be the path towards final theories of everything. And I'm actually really worried that we hurt most of your listeners. Well, but if we use this at all, I'll try to say something at the beginning of the program.

to try to say what it is that people are listening to. So they'll have an idea. They're not just going to stumble in on a podcast and hear people talking about bosons, fermions, E8 quantization, and have no idea what's going on. The fact is very few people are invested in this like this, but this is the fabric of reality ultimately in a question, but how we go about trying to probe whatever's next. Yeah. I think it's amazing. I think it's the most

and intricate and difficult puzzle there is right now for anybody to tackle and to immerse themselves in. And I also think it's potentially incredibly rewarding, but it's also one of the hardest things you can do. It's probably the hardest thing and it's never been harder. Yeah. That's almost as hard as learning to surf. Yeah.

Okay. Well, you've been through the portal with Garrett Lisi here from the island of Maui, my arch nemesis. You're welcome to come back anytime. And if you're interested in the Pacific Science Institute, it's Garrett's attempt to try to figure out how to move science outside of direct institutional control. You can find him on Instagram, I think, as Garrett.Lisi. And on Twitter as? Garrett Lisi. Garrett Lisi. Not hard to find. All right. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Eric.