Eric Weinstein: A Conversation (YouTube Content): Difference between revisions

'''Brian Keating:''' And certainly, I'll have on Michio Kaku next week on the Into the Impossible podcast, and I hope maybe we'll get a cameo from you. But in his book, he writes something very provocative. And he says at the end of his book, he quotes those lines from Stephen Hawking, which is kind of like this infinite regress, which kind of strains credulity, so to speak. But he says, at one point he says, "It's not fair to test String Theory, to ask to test String Theory experimentally, because we don't know its final principles." But the same, I claim, could have been said about quantum mechanics. Do we know the final principles of quantum mechanics? Does that immunize it from experimental test?

One of the reasons String Theory got such a boost is that the brilliance of the initial volunteers for the first string revolution around 1984 were so good that we were inclined to give them a huge pass, at least at first. And then, we have this differential application where the string theorists become paradoxically the most persnickety about what is a prediction, because they don't want to give up the fact that they aren't really making predictions. So if you, for example, predict internal quantum numbers of the next particles to be found, but you don't come up with an energy threshold, and you don't say what will invalidate your theory, they get angry. Because, in fact, what we've done is we've given them an asymmetric relationship with the scientific method through special pleading.  

So I think that you have a situation by which new ideas are always not properly instantiated, and the community that is constantly trying to make sure that... I think that the idea is that people are foolish enough to play this game with the most aggressive members of the community, because the implication is if you won't come up with a testable prediction that invalidates your theory, you're anti scientific and we have no time for this. And so people, well like, you know, with the \(\text{SU}(5)\) theory, they immediately said okay, well it predicts proton decay. Well, grand unification is a larger idea, and some versions and instantiations do predict proton decay, and some do not. So what are you going to say about that? I think that the problem is that we're not in an adult phase where we've faced up to the fact that we have almost 50 years of stagnation, and what you're seeing with this proliferation of new claimants to have fundamental theories is, in part, that String Theory has finally weakened itself, and the aging of the particular cohort—which is Baby Boomers, who are the String Theory proponents—they've gotten weak enough that effectively other people feel emboldened. And I think Stephen Wolfram said this recently, that in a previous era, he would have expected to have been attacked. But we've been waiting around for so long that perhaps the political economy of unification and wild ideas has changed somewhat.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is very unpleasant to have to say this, but I think that we are talking about a great era with heroes. The top hero among them is undoubtedly Ed Witten. But I do believe that Yang and Simons, I think Yang and Simon's discovery of Ehresmannian bundle theory, which has a precursor—and I'm blanking on the gentleman's name (Robert Hermann), all the self published books from from the '60s. It'll come to me, but there was a man in Boston who probably got there a little bit earlier. And then I would say that you have accidental physicists. Dan Quillen, for example, did a huge amount to talk about connections on determinant bundles and the like, which come out of various quantization procedures, particularly with Berezin integration of fermion sectors. So I think that a lot of things got done to shore up what we do to mature input into a quantum theory. It just, it wasn't physics, per se. It was sort of the mathematics of physics. And I think that that was very frustrating, which is, you know, it's sort of, to physicists it's yeoman's work. They wanted to go to Stockholm, and they ended up winning the first Fields Medal won by a physicist, and I think—it's weird. It's like, what is your time? Your time is whatever it is that can be done. And they thought their time was to quantize gravity. "Well guess again," nature said, "we have something incredibly important." So I feel like I'm trying to rescue their legacy. They want to go down as string theorists for the most part. And they want to say that String Theory was the most successful of any claimant, even though it wasn't very successful. And, my feeling is—

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, yes, I feel like we can say that it's not very successful, because they gave us the terms in which we should evaluate it. You know, I remember being told "Give us 10 years, we'll have the whole thing cleaned up. Don't worry your pretty little head, we'll be fine," or, "We have a finite number of theories to check." And then lo and behold, there's a continuum, or why is it called String Theory when there are branes involved? And it was because if you asked once upon a time, they'd say, "Well, it's not like mathematicians think about higher-dimensional objects beyond strings." There was an explanation for why there were no branes. And, you know, that—yes, String Theory has failed in its own terms. Now is it salvageable, are there pivots beyond? Yeah, sure. I'm not saying that they didn't stumble on a tremendous amount of structure, maybe that structure ultimately carries the day. But I do think that the idea that they're entitled to this many pivots without having to become self-reflective is preposterous. And I think many people feel that way, and they know that they might pay for such a statement with their career. And since I've prepaid, it falls to people like me and to you, perhaps, to say look, the string theorists weren't able to confront their failure.

'''Brian Keating:''' Every time you gotta pick up your dry cleaning—but when we lose sight of it, I find with my colleagues, and I'll speak, because I doubt many of them are listening. I really don't feel like they're that curious, intellectually. I think it is a job. I think their their job is the dry cleaning. And I can sort of prove that in some ways, because I often hear them say things like well, Eric is a showman, he's a podcaster. He's a host, and he's had training, and he's very smooth, and he can speak well. And I say "Well, do you think he do you think he emerged from the womb like that? And by the way, Mister or Missus Professor, Doctor Professor, you have got a lot of training in quantum field theory and String Theory yourself. That was presumably a challenge for you. You didn't emerge womb-like, you know, from the caverns of the womb, knowing quantum field theory, so you had to work at that." So it's all about prioritization. Why do you think physicists aren't more troubled by the lack of progress, that our mutual friend Sabine has pointed out, in the last 50 years, at least in fundamental physics? My colleagues will rightfully point out tremendous advances in cosmological theory, in condensed matter theory, etc. But why isn't that more troubling? I think the answer is we're not that curious. You have a vision of us that's maybe more more refined than I think we deserve, and that's because you're not a professional physicist.

'''Brian Keating:''' Yeah. I mean, you might also say oh, there's 26 dimensions in heterotic String Theory. That can't be right. No, it's only 10, or 11, or 5-brane, m-brane theory. I want to ask another question, which is frequently used in criticisms, both anonymous and nonymous, which is that this doesn't—

'''Brian Keating:''' I can do better as well. But I do want to say that this is maybe a general comment, not for pseudonymous and anonymous people, bananymous. But this is a general complaint that I've heard: it has to reproduce quantum theory. And I think, forget about that with regard to GU, it could be said about other theories, loop quantum gravity, etc. First of all, I think GU does produce what we would say is a relativistic quantum field theory in the Dirac equation, which is manifestly resplendent and produced and predicted. So I don't want to hear from you just yet, Eric, I do want to get your response. But this notion that a theory of everything has to subsume anything—I said this to our mutual friend, Stephon Alexander, professor at Brown University and esteemed cosmologist, and close friend to both Eric and myself, I said, "Look, I don't think it's valid to say that any theory of everything, String Theory or whatever, has to predict every manifestation of physics," and this is where I take issue, and I make truck with Professor Kaku, who says things like, "The one-inch-long God equation will predict everything." I don't think that's possible, (A) I don't think it's useful to think about the goal of physics is to predict every phenomenon in physics.

'''Brian Keating:''' Now, when I look at the corresponding, shall we say, implications against String Theory, I would say things like the swamp land, the multiverse problem, these may be issues that cause stillbirth in many people's minds. I've talked to you about Paul Steinhardt, the Einstein Professor of Natural Science at Princeton—he regards the String Theory as essentially bad for society, not just for physics, not just for science, but bad for society because of the extravagance in a truest sense of the word, in a bad sense of the word, of the multiverse and string landscape. Now I know you're shaking your head—go ahead.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No no no. Let me be very clear about it. We're wimping out from what needs to be said, and it's really important the community gets it right. I don't think String Theory is a problem. String Theory can't harm anyone, String Theory doesn't—it's the string theorists when they're in their triumphalist mode, that it's an insufferable state of being. But even then, you know, I'm sure Feynman was insufferable, and I think Murray Gell-Mann was insufferable, and Pauli was pretty insufferable. We've had insufferable members of our community for a very long time, and we should not be getting rid of insufferable people. The problem is, what happens when people become insufferable and they don't constantly check in with the unforgiving nature of the universe. I mean, Pauli predicted the neutrino in an insufferable fashion.

'''Brian Keating:''' And apologized. He apologized profusely, "I've done something which should never be done." Now, I asked you though, should String Theory—let's just be neutral to GU for a second. Should String Theory, from String Theory, emerge the Aharonov–Bohm effect? I mean, a true theory of everything, it would, right?

Look, I want to defend both the string theorists and String Theory. These are incredibly smart people who found some real structure, and who never knew when to quit when it came to trumpeting just how much better String Theory is than everything else. Even there, they had a point. They were smarter and deeper, in general, than everyone else. They just weren't as good as they claimed to be, and they weren't as successful as they claimed to be, and what they did succeed that they didn't want to take credit for, because it was really mathematics done in physics departments rather than physics.