Physics Dollars

You should not have a gun put to your head in order to extract yourself money to pay for things like basic research. That's a very understandable perspective. On the other hand, I view it differently, which is, I'm not allowed as a mathematician or as a physicist to lay claim to the fruits of my labors under the intellectual property system. And so I'm in a bad spot. And I think that those aren't your taxpayer dollars, they're my Physics Dollars, right? Because my Physics Dollars bought the development of the semiconductor, they won World War Two at the end, they created the World Wide Web out of CERN. And so all I want is a little bit of a licensing fee, so I can extract money out of all of you for coming for using all the great things that we developed. So when you say well, why should my tax dollars be used to pay for your physics habit? My point is, Are you kidding? Why should my Physics Dollars be supporting your lavish lifestyles, when I'm not able to charge—you got the best deal in history for extracting a rent from me because I'm unfairly disadvantaged. So there's all sorts of ways of turning this around. You can look at public goods, you can look at any place where price and value gap in a market. And the problem of course, if we're all getting, let's fast forward, because the easy stuff is an interesting, the question is the problems of fixing it using a tool, whether it's blunt, or even surgical and incisive, versus the problems of leaving it alone. And it's in some sense, it's type one versus type two error, there are two different ways to go wrong. And in general, the reason that objectivism is so powerful, is that it gives a permanent thesis or antithesis in the dialectic, so that everybody who wants to use the tools has to confront the people who don't want the tools used. And the question here is, would we be better off in a universe in which something like objectivism prevailed generally, or is the use of objectivism is its highest and best use as part of a dialectic to constantly bring us to a more meaningful synthesis between two different systems with two different sets of problems? And I would also say that in terms of like the non-initiation of force, it's always strange to meet Israelis who, you know, believe the non-initiation of force because of the 67 War. I mean, there's, there's situations in which you can pretty much see what's coming, and you got to do what you got to do, because surviving a calamity is much better than a self-extinguishing strategy.

So I think that all of these things require refinement, they require a location within dialectics. And these tensions are fascinating. What's going on with Google, I think, is that we're slowly waking up to the idea that free speech, free markets are not sufficient paradigms. In the case that we built these machines, where these are now merely heuristics, we can't figure out what is the best way forward to capture the essence, the intent, of free speech and free markets, because—and what we are agreed on on this panel, I think, is that ultimately any system that doesn't value the Radical Individual with a better idea than the rest of society and shackles that individual to collectivism, right, is not optimal. We need some situation in which the Radical Individual can say "No" to tens of thousands or millions of people and produce something of great value and great beauty and grace for all of us, or for themselves, and any system that doesn't have that aspect to it is not a system that I want to be part of.

The key question is, what should the substrate be below that? And objectivism has never been tried at a national scale, so far as I know, but the question is, what is its role at the dinner party of interesting ideas? Should it take over the dinner party? Should it be invited? Is it so dangerous that it needs to be kicked into the shadows? And that's what I think we're here to explore.

But what unifies us I think, in part is the, you know, and I said this in a tweet before I came—I felt very strange being invited to an Ayn Rand Institute event, because my two critiques are that, one, she was not sufficiently aware of the problems of multi-level selection—sometimes we act at individual level, but we can also do family level, group level, national level, memetic levels—but the other thing is that I found her insufficiently radical in defensive of individualism. Right? Her heroes are sort of sympathetic. They're people who want to do brilliant, beautiful things. And if you read an article that I wrote, called the War on Excellence, I am against excellence—many of you are for it. I believe that excellence crowds out genius, and a lot of the geniuses that we that we deal with, let's say the transistor, on which everything rides now, you know, is largely a development of Bill Shockley, the famous eugenicist. Our three-dimensional structure of DNA was adjusted by Jim Watson. I just spent a week with him not too long ago. Let me tell you, that guy has points of view that you cannot take anywhere. We have to celebrate these people. And you know, we were just talking in the green room about my time at Hebrew University. It was very interesting to me that we talked about the Bieber Bach Conjecture, we talked about the Stern Gerlach Experiment and Pascal Jordan's Jordan Algebra. All these people are Nazis, right?

We celebrate Nazis in Israel with the names on their achievements. It's an absolutely radical idea that we don't—sometimes we say, may his name be cursed, but we still use the name. We don't sanitize it. You know, when I visited Rome recently, I went to the Arch of Titus, and I held up my middle finger because it celebrated the destruction and looting of Jerusalem. But I don't want to burn it down, right. So the idea that we should burn, you know, The Merchant of Venice because it's against my people, all of these collectivist impulses have to be silenced. We have to figure out how to fight them and make better cases and make these voices go quiet, not through force, but through humiliation. Right? Because these are terribly destructive ideas. The world has birthed all sorts of fantastic things. Many of these things were created by people whose hands were not clean. And if we keep trying to sanitize everything that human beings have done, and make it all brilliantly heroic, we're doomed. So we need a more radical defense of individualism than I think Ayn Rand could afford.

- Eric Weinstein on Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets (YouTube Content)

On X

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

1/ Sabine Hossenfelder has done an impressive job collecting and rebutting the arguments for building a new particle accelerator. I find them partially convincing. Let me give the big reasons that no one ever mentions as they are not in her list.

1:13 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Sabine Hossenfelder

@skdh

Nonsense arguments for building a bigger particle collider that I am tired of hearing (The Ultimate Collection)

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html

5:32 PM · Mar 27, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

2/

I) The physics community gave us both the hydrogen bomb and the Einsteinian speed limit. Humans who acquire the Bomb never lose the ability to make them and they only get cheaper with technology. Further, the speed limit of 'c' traps us on three rocks: Earth, Moon and Mars.

1:13 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

3/

The combination of these twin gifts likely doom humanity over the long run unless we can, somehow, get around the speed of light 'c'. For that we will need to make physics a *top* priority unless we want to pretend we are going to become wise, colonize Titan, etc..etc..

1:13 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

4/

II) Theoretical physics practically created the modern economy:

Chemistry
Semiconductors/Transistors
World Wide Web
Electrification
Wireless
Nuclear Power/Weapons
Molecular Biology

These are not simply taxpayer dollars. They began as Physics Dollars. We are being absurd.

1:13 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

End/

III) We are at the end of this thread...but also at the end of what may be the last chapter of physics. The three main equations (Dirac, Einstein, Yang Mills) are provably, in some sense, the best possible. No one would walk out just before learning the end of our story.

1:13 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Calcifer

@StefanTarr

I) "We gotta get FTL"
II) "Might be unexpected bonuses"
III) *appeals to emotion*

1:26 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I) Not exactly FTL...but that is fair from what I wrote. I was using shorthand. Guilty.

II) No. We have obligations to this community. We don't allow them to fully participate so they have economic rights that we are abusing. This is a foreign idea to most.

III) No: Meaning.

1:26 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Fourliquin

@Fourliquin

Curious... I just reviewed the 'Dirac Sea' issue last night.

@EricRWeinstein , could you 'lightly' outline the 'provably the best possible' claim? w/o definitions for dark matter/ energy/ fluid, etc. how can we be near the end of the 'story'? thx

1:41 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Briefly: A) Dirac operator actually generates K-theory.

B) Einstein theory from Hilbert Lagrangian is simplest possible Lagrangian in pseudo-riemannian geometry (just scalar curvature).

C) YangMills Lagrangian simplest in Ehresmannian geometry (just norm square of curvature).

1:48 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Wyvern

@David2APatriot

Lord Kelvin called from the past.

1:20 AM · Mar 28, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

You should answer his call because he clearly doesn’t have my number. He’s a few digits off.

1:50 AM · Mar 28, 2019

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