General Relativity
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Me: Grampa, do you realize you're older than General Relativity? GF: Oh, please! I knew him when he was a Lieutenant.
H.Rubin (1913-2008)
2010
That Quantum Field Theory is now far more geometric than General Relativity ever was, seems a needlessly well kept secret from the layman.
2011
Calling General Relativity a brand/meme/mashup/remix communicates a deep confusion about the relationship of tech's tail to nature's dog.
2018
1/ "Theories of Everything": A Taxonomy.
It is often said that "Theories-of-Everything are a dime a dozen" or that "All theoretical physicists worth their salt have several in a drawer." So far as I can tell, this is simply untrue. We've barely ever, if at all, seen candidates.
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2/ The Escher Lithograph used in the first tweet points to the core of why TOEs are rare. A candidate TOE has to have some quality of "a fire that lights itself", which is difficult to think about beyond the equations that would instantiate it. Hence very few such theories exist.
3/ I'm going to lean on the following dictionary of analogies:
Physical Paper = Void Pictured Canvas = Manifold and/or Einsteinian Spacetime Ink=Matter & non-gravitational force fields Pencils = Pre-Conscious Lego (e.g. amino acids) Hands = Consciousness Paradox = Self-awareness
4/ In my taxonomy, Type I TOEs are our least ambitious but they best match our state of the world. They are distinguished by two *separate* sources of origin: one for the Canvas (General Relativity or Witten's point i) ) & one for the Ink (Standard Model or Witten's point ii) ).
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5 Type II TOE's are more ambitious & seek to derive the Ink from the choice of a mathematically distinguished Canvas that is anything but blank. My arch-nemesis @garrettlisi's theory is Type II. E8 is his 248 dimensional canvas. The intricacy is there, but doesn't quite match up.
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6/ In Type III TOEs the ink is to be derived from canvas, but the canvas is essentially blank; it simply permits mathematics to happen (e.g. calculus and linear algebra). In such theories the ink has to be bootstrapped into existence. My lectures on Geometric Unity were Type III.
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7/ Type IV TOE's try to change the question from Einstein's "Unified Field Theory." In String Thy, "Quantizing Gravity" became substituted for "Unified Field." For this crowd, many are now betting that the canvas & ink are both *emergent* from some deeper fundamental quantum thy.
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8/ Type V TOEs are of a type I've never been able to fully contemplate; they are without boundaries or origins. There is no "Why is there something rather than nothing" within them. That which is not forbidden is compelled into existence. Void creates canvas & canvas begets void.
9/ Type VI TOEs begin with the hands. Religions are of this type. I pass over this in silence as they aren't scientific.
I will leave open higher types, but I've really only seen attempts at I-IV & I wouldn't call String-Thy/M-Thy a full TOE try since events of the last 15 yrs.
10/ I believe fundamental physics is stalled out because we are finally at the doorstep of a TOE and we haven't really bothered to think about what that would actually mean because we've never been here before. A final step need not look like any previous one. In fact, it cannot.
END/ My bet is on Type III for a reason:
Type I is not unified.
Type II is possible, but appears to be unworkable in details.
Type IV appears to lack sufficient guidance from Quantum theory to actually 'ship' despite consuming resources for yrs.
Types V & VI lack any progress.
1/ APRIL FOOLS' SCIENCE: Theory into Practice.
I was challenged by someone as to why I wasn't taking my own medicine referenced in the sub-tweet below this April 1st. Ok. Here goes.
What I believe about the universe that is quite different and why I don't talk about it much...
1/ APRIL FOOL'S SCIENCE: A proposal.
Already bored of the coming "April Fools' Day!" pranks? Same here. And it's still March!
Consider how we might re-purpose this resource for science. What if 1 day a year, we explored big ideas that'd normally result in professional shunning?
2/ When I was around 16-17, I learned of a story that fascinated me much more than it seemed to captivate any other mathematician or physicist. It was the story of the discovery of the "Wu-Yang" dictionary around 1975-6, involving 3 super-minds: Jim Simons, CN Yang & Is Singer.
3/ What was learned was that the Quantum of Planck, Bohr & Dirac was built on an internal Geometry, just as surely as General Relativity was built on an external geometry of space-time. Only the two geometries weren't the same! One was due to B Riemann; the other to C Ehresmann.
4/ Further the 2 geometries had different advantages. Riemann's geometry allowed you to compress the curvature & measure the 'torsion' while Ehresmann's encouraged "Gauge Rotation"... as long as you didn't do either of those two things. So I asked could the geometries be unified?
5/ This would be a change in physics' main question. Instead of asking if Einstein's gravity could fit within Bohr's quantum, we could ask "Could Einstein's structures peculiar to Riemann's geometry be unified & rotated within Ehresmann's?" The answer was almost a 'No!'
Almost.
6/ While physicists said the Universe was known to be chiral, I came to believe it was fundamentally symmetric. While we seemed to observe there being 3 or more generations of matter, I came to believe that there were but 2 true generations, plus an improbable "imposter." etc...
7/ In short a great many things had to be slightly off in our picture of the world in the 1980s to get the two geometric theories into a "Geometric Unity." Then in 1998, it was found that neutrinos weren't massless! This started to tip the scales towards the alterations I needed.
8/ In short the April 1st "trick" that is being played on me is that I see a *natural* theory where chirality would be emergent (not fundamental), the number of true generations would be 2 not 3, there would be 2^4 and not 15 Fermions in a generation, and the geometries unify.
9/ I spoke on this nearly 5 years ago; I have been slow to get back to it as I found the physics response bewildering. I have now decided to return to this work & to disposition it. So over the coming year, I'll begin pushing out "Geometric Unity" (as a non-physicist) to experts.
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END/ I am sorry that this was a bit technical for lay folks and not technical enough for experts, but it's twitter. I may begin to say more in the weeks and months ahead that may be clarifying.
If you are interested, do stay tuned. Until then, I thank you for your time.
2021
The way we speak now may ensure nothing transcendent can ever happen again:
âBruh, Leonardo was da GOAT among cross platform creators. If heâd crowdfunded or pivoted to a freemium model coupled to a revenue share, meme distribution could have scaled his content. lol! Self-own.â
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War and Peace? âTL;DRâ
General Relativity? âThatâs cool Albert, but like, Thatâs just your opinion and my friend Sarah is like wicked smart on spiral dynamics and has been waiting patiently while you mansplained her.â
Shackleton? âTotal Narcissist. Didnât do his shadow work.â
Also: Get off my lawn. Apparently.
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Notice this style of article. It confuses the *instantiation* of an idea which experiment *can* probe w/ the idea *itself* which experiment *cannot* probe. This is one of the most basic errors in science, philosophy of science & science reporting.
Iâm sorry but whatâs being addressed is closer to Naive Mildly Broken Spacetime SuperSymmetry models based on SUSY extensions of the symmetries of flat spacetime. Which many, if not most, sane theorists didnât believe. But that seems to be a mouthful to say. Hence this silliness.
The bottomline is that the scientific method doesnât work on ideas. It only works on instantiations of ideas & executions of experiments. That is why I call the Scientific Method the âRadio Edit of Great Scienceâ. Itâs scienceâs Golden Calf. It isnât how top science works at all.
So why do we keep making this error. Because the real issue is keeping out bad ideas and keeping order. The Scientific Method can be invoked selectively against loons and heretics and suspended selectively for those we believe in. Read Dirac on Schrodinger. Or Einstein&Grossman.
You will see that General Relativity actually has Grossman as a coauthor at the level of ideas. The main mind blowing insight is in a co-authored 1913 paper seldom discussed. All that changes after that is the instantiation. Science fetishizes instance over insight. So bizarre...
Letâs be clear about this weird sounding issue.
@elonmusk is one of the only minds properly focused in public on the issue of the current danger to human consciousness from having all known intelligent life in the universe on a single terrestrial surface. His top idea: rockets.
I think thatâs great. Where we differ is that I donât think Earth, our Moon & Mars plus space stations connected by rockets give us much real diversity. Itâs barely doable. But assume you could make it work. I would want to run 1000s of uncorrelated experiments as most will fail.
And if we are stuck in this solar system with the physics we know there is only one good surface and two marginal ones.
Faster than light spacetime travel is bullshit. But going beyond Einstein is not.
Itâs unbelievably hard, but everything Elon does is hard. Like hope.
But yes, he believes. In fun. In hope. In ending the epidemic of learned helplessness that has infected everyone else. So Iâm a pretty die hard Elon supporter. Not because I agree w/ everything. But he gets **the** big issue right. We need to end the single correlated experiment.
So on the main issue we agree. The second issue is where we differ. A multi multi billionaire (12 digits!) as smart as Elon w a physics background could diversify & place a small 2nd bet on rendering General Relativity a mere effective theory by single handedly fixing physics.
Now he may have a reason. But I have never heard him address this so it just makes no sense to me. No one is taking the need to go beyond Einstein seriously so we are pretty much trapped here in this solar system with the physics we know. That means three terrestrial surfaces.
But because Elon is so smart, I donât discount the idea that he isnât interested in finding out if post-Einsteinian physics for some reason. I just doesnât add up to me, but maybe he knows something I donât. But north of $100B w/ his knowledge of physics, he could change it all.
I just want to know why no one asks this question. Lex could do it. Joe could do it. But he doesnât seem to address it so I have no idea what is going on. Itâs not some special insight of mine. Our best hope for his stated dream is new physics. And making physics rich is cheap.
Imagine you wanted to pay 2m salary to all the top 50 theorists in the world for 10 years to get them all to move to a couple of centers to free them from careerist temptations so they could at last swing for the fences. The salaries would be about 0.005 of current net worth.
Now that doesnât strike me as a small ask. Itâs a big bill. But it is also our best hope. Imagine COVID was radioactive fallout from a serious nuclear exchange and compute half lives. Or imagine a climate disaster.
Elon shouldnât have to do this. But government canât anymore.
And the two multi billionaires I believe have the best technical chops to do this are Jim Simons and Elon Musk. But no one wants to build institutions that can do this because our institutions havenât worked well enough since the Apollo program. So, Iâm hopeful he gets asked.
Either way I want to encourage him. But I want to know why rockets over physics. Why not both? Why is a physics guy w a HUGE risk appetite not trying to do for Einstein & his speed limit what Einstein did for Newtonâs Gravity? If you know the answer, Iâd love to know it as well.
There isnât much left that works in this area. Iâm still betting on Elon making sense. Itâs one of our last really good hopes. And returning fun and mischief to public spirited scientific attempts to âpreserve the light of human consciousnessâ is something Iâm 100% behind.
#OccupyMars is good, but #FreeThePhysicists isnât even as popular as #FreeTheNipple or #FreeBeer
Take a look around you. Much as I love it, this place is likely going to blow.
Elon is right: time to diversify. And we need to have fun if we are going to be saving ourselves. đ
@finaltoe Physics is subject to survivor bias in a system of perverse incentives. We induce physicists to work within failed paradigms if they want to eat or house their families. Itâs an insane thing to do. We shoot ourselves in the foot when we take away their independence.
@jetpen No one sane wants to have to lean on time dilation for the reason you state.
But I *formally* agree.
2022
2023
2024
2025
Letâs try a science post to show you the problem with the hijacking of science:
CLAIM: Quantum Gravity has been a 41 year disaster for physics. EVERYONE knows the String Theory leadership told us exactly what they were about to do, and then FAILED physics.
A mitigated disaster:
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Everyone who has followed fundamental physics closely since â84 knows this is true.
If science were healthy we would discuss that. But we canât, because we have unwanted leaders. Those leaders are refereeing their OWN games. And, they win all games that they both play & referee.
So has physics failed you? No! Fundamental Physics is fine. But it got hijacked by a crew. That crew created a cult called âThe Only Game In Townâ or TOGIT. Literally. That is what they called it. Pure hubris and murder.
TOGIT failed you. And TOGIT hijacked fundamental physics for 41 years. But science didnât.
Fundamental physics is sitting right where it was overpowered, mugged, robbed, and tied up by String Theory and Quantum Gravity and left for dead in 1984.
Itâs fine. The Standard Model is amazing. As is general relativity. In fact: itâs totally spectacular. We could get back to work tomorrow if we could get out from under the cult and get our own resources back.
But we canât yet run De-Stringification schools, undo Quantum Gravity Indoctrination and get back to actual science. We are still run by zombie ideologies refereeing fundamental physics. Or what is left of it. And that is why I post like this. Itâs a fight to get you to grasp what happened.
Similarly for COVID Zoonotic origin theory. Or Economic Theory and Neo-Classical theory. Or Neo-Darwinism. Etc. Etc. You got hijacked. We all did.
One and all. And I am suggesting we take OUR cockpits back.