Einsteins Prison

I've been, to some extent, very much focused on physics recently, talking to colleagues and going to meetings and things. What I'm most alarmed by is that we get in touch with the desperation of the current moment with Putin in Ukraine, recognize that we're no longer kidding around, and that it's not safe to continue in this idiom, even if we probably survive this particular misadventure. It's really important that we drive more people towards science and make sure that when they get there, they've got great lives ahead of them, as opposed to this madness of having them eke out a living and constantly apologizing for everything interesting so that they can stay in the good graces. I would look at the 2014 article that I wrote called M-Theory or String Theory Is The Only Game in Town to the question of what scientific idea is ready for retirement. And there's also an article about Einstein's revenge, which had to do with the idea that people who wanted to quantize gravity ended up instead geometrizing the quantum. And after listening to what is now currently considered cutting edge physics theory, I want to just point out that a lot of people are leaving for quantum computation, trying to do quantum computers, trying to do machine learning, we've got to keep the excitement going. A generation or two has failed at theoretical physics. And it's time for voices that we haven't heard and new people entering the field to be given free rein, and particularly not constantly dogged by the quantum field theory crowd. I've come to the conclusion that quantum field theory is our maybe our most powerful theory, but we don't understand it well enough to allow it to select for good new ideas. And I think what we have to do is we have to recognize that we are in a desperate search for new ideas beyond Einstein, they will ultimately have to conform to experiment and make sense of quantum field theory, which works very well, but we're going to have to look to make physics in particular exciting, and we can't back off it. Not everything is equally exciting. Fundamental physics is the only thing that I know of that has a reasonable hope of getting us out of the problem that fundamental physics originally got us into. So I think that this alien stuff is really important, even if I think it's relatively unlikely that it's going to do what I hope it could do for us, we're going to have to find every possible way of breaking out of Einstein's Prison. So organizing an Einsteinian Prison Break, I think should be all of our top priorities at the moment, because we're in pretty dire straits. But we're definitely a group worth saving. So that's where I am. That's where I'm at.

- Eric Weinstein on June 17, 2022 on Into The Impossible 234