15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself: Difference between revisions

In this episode Garrett and [[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] sit down to discuss the current status of Garrett's ideas for a final theory based on a mysterious object called [[Lie group E8|E8]], perhaps the oddest of mathematical symmetries to be found in the universe.  

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[[File:ThePortal-Ep15 GarrettLisi-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Garrett Lisi (left) on episode 15 of The Portal Podcast]]

00:  

I'm actually having a conversation with Garrett here he's updating me on where his thinking has gone with respect to unifying physics  

I hope you enjoyed 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 usually presented with I hope you like it, stay tuned

02:

L - yeah it's a very fair statement and the 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  

W - 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  

L - 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 in their description in fundamental physics it was something about it that really I didn't like it just didn't just didn't feel right to me and I got wrapped up in solving that, you know, 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 you you have to be somewhat of a lunatic to take that on it's like you know I trying to prove some theorem in mathematics it 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.  

L - I hope not

W - but no it's quite possible and 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 ideas suppression complex - and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and up end and disrupt previous structures. So for example I would claim that [[String Theory]] which has absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what 1984  

L - it was but it continued all the way through the 70s and and from that culture of, you know, community working together on information that's coming in a steady stream right, you got this culture of like "yeah no don't go do the other thing it's a waste of time" you really want to be working on what's hot, right? 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 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's very is much more  

W - do you mind if I set this up a little bit for our audience and you critique it if I do a poor job (L -sure) 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 theory (QFT) a complex or the Quantum complex around the ideas of Bohr - sort of fair enough? - and Planck and I don't mean to slight Dirac and others but just to keep it simple the children of Einstein and the children of Bohr  

L - so they're so they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire you know moving 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 there is more of an exploratory culture and that's the culture that turned into [[Loop Quantum Gravity]] so that  

W - so first of all I'm just gonna I'm gonna begin arguing with you there to me yeah the issue was is 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 less tied up 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 it was less for them to do and then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between theory and experiment  

L - and and but what happened was that when they 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 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|geometry]] and try to somehow get [[Quantum Mechanics|quantum mechanics]] to play nice with this essentially classical geometric theory and there were two very different approaches and two very different cultures  

so that in 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... 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  

L - 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 you know high dimensional manifold to attach to for our strings to vibrate in and will 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 wrapped up  

W - I think something's still different happened I think that [[Edward Witten|Ed Witten]] showed up and that there was one human being  

W - 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 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

W - 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 that even though that 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  

15:

L - yeah, and it's stunning just to what degree that failed.

L - well the the String Theory unification program -  the idea that this description of all fundamental particles and gravity - in our entire universe - would come from a model based on strings vibrating and 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 high hopes and promises  

W - 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 modelled 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  

L - it is for pretty subtle reasons specifically anomaly cancellation and also the ability to produce what appeared to be particle excitations within from the string model  

W - 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  - I don't know - fad what it was hard to  

L - like agiant rolling what kind of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy Katamari Damacy] where it's just collecting everything that it touches and making it part of itself  

W - 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  

W - so this was a bizarre you know there was 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 gonna 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 gonna wrap it all up (L -yeah) and in essence you know we have this concept in evolutionary theory called interference competition where one animal will attempt to out-compete the other by keeping it away from like a watering hole.

W - well I think almost everybody was in that position that that is really the founding crime for me in the string revolution. It was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us as an idiot  

W - 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 that humans are engaged with I think there are three components to it and just see whether whether it resonates with you  

2) the second thing is 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 the generated chemistry, (L - nuclear power), nuclear power, nuclear weapons, communications technology - electromagnetic, you know, Wi-Fi what have you. If you want, and invented - theoretical physics - more or less created molecular biology.

W - if you look at the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_Tie_Club RNA Tie Club], you know the people and it word [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller Teller] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman Feynman], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick 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 for 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  

L - so so biology I mean it's it's I I agree it's intricate and 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 it you know DNA a helix is gonna spiral to the left or the right and and and what its chemical components are precisely that might vary other planets you know other civilizations' biologies could be different  

W - (you can) make a decent argument that systems of selective pressures as described by Darwin and Wallace might be conserved even if you had didn't have carbon based life

L - there will be convergent evolution of course sure but 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 gonna be wildly different in different different places in the in the galaxy alright whereas whereas physics is the same everywhere okay it's it's independent of biology and it's independent of humanity and it's I think and then when you go to mathematics 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 it's a larger playing field than physics. So within that huge arena of possible mathematical structures okay we see appear to live in one mathematical structure, so I mean a physicist only has to focus on the the mathematics that we that describes reality

L - yeah yeah and we have to wonder if that's you know is that just our human take on it because our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world in the universe so, is it that I mean [[Douglas Adams]] described the [[Anthropic Principle|anthropic principle]] as a puddle of water right and thinking it's like wow this "this this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my shape alright 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 the hole 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 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"

L - I know I agree and that and right like I have to wonder about it I have to I mean I understand (W - we have to pay lip service) you know that'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 because I have to question everything all the time (W -sure) mostly cuz I don't talk to enough other people but but also it's because you know yeah 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  

W - 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  - with the closest thing we have to source code we don't we're not at the source code yet we're not quite at that layer  

W - I think it's almost provably close but but the 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 be we should clarify that when we see 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  

L - ...there's evidence I mean there in our in our understanding of physics as we've learned more particles yeah the fundamental particles we've learned about appear to be filling out a complete set. I mean we've, you know, when you when you predict that a Tau quark should exist all right know that a Tau Lepton should exist, yeah, or you figure out that you know it completes this set, there's this third generation - it's complete right so we seem to be completing our set a fundamental particles

W - SO we have three sets of Lego yeah 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 at different mass scales. So far that's what it looks like  

L - well it's not just so far it's like whether we have we have reasons to know that there aren't there aren't more from from how the Big Bang sent matter loose in the universe, we know that there aren't more than three generations up to a certain very high energy  

W - I don't dispute but I just  

31:

W - the thing that has affected both both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called [[Accelerators:Spinors|spinors]] at the core of our understanding of matter do you want to say a little bit about what that is Wyatt you think it's affected you and and and me as well and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional and intellectual impact on the community  

L - right I mean when you're... basically when physicists more or less completed that what's called the standard model of particle physics, right, you have you have the 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 the matter particles which are [[Electron|electrons]] and [[Quark|quarks]] and [[Neutrino|neutrinos]] and and other generations of these that form you know what are called the [[Fermions|fermions]] okay and these are called the matter particles and then they have mass because of the interaction with the [[Higgs Boson|Higgs boson]] right which is sort of...

W -  that's not going to make sense to people  

L - it's not alright but anyway the the force particles behave differently as elementary particles under rotations than the matter particles all right. so these matter particles, they 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 get back to where you started all right but spinors are different right and they they behave in a very specific way and there's a there's a very specific way of describing them mathematically but it's described in an unusual way. It's described as a as a column of [[Complex Numbers|complex numbers]] or a column matrix if you like that's acted on by a [[Rotation Matrix|rotation matrix]] that tells you specifically how these particles transform under rotation  

L -  well you can, can I hand it off to you in about 10 seconds?

L - 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 under rotations.That's not how you know why would the universe do that it's not elegant it's not it's not geometric all right it seems sort of arbitrary, why would the universe have spinors in it? well it turns out that because if you if you describe General relativity as curving four-dimensional space-time describe gravity and you just describe forces as gauge fields right with both of those they're very geometric descriptions they're very elegant mathematically when you describe, physically, the fermions as spinors, it looks like a kludge it just it doesn't fit with the other theories but that's why I left physics, to solve this problem I wanted to know "why spinors 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 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 are all our other forces described geometrically the universe is just one thing it's right there in the name I mean "uni" is one, "verse" is turning we have we have this "one-turning thing" we call the universe and it's just one mathematical object and if this if we have different particles they have to be aspects of this one mathematical object why would this mathematical object have spinors as an aspect of them it was a huge mystery to me I want to go solve it no one else even acknowledged it was a problem and you also tackled this this also bothered you  

W - well there was a so 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 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 Bottle|Klein bottles]] from Acme Klein Bottle and [[Cliff Stoll]] out of Oakland I guess these objects that I'm holding up or you can look up Klein bottles on the on the web have this very odd property that they are covered if you will by the surface of a doughnut if the surface of the doughnut 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 but that it's wrapped twice by some object which has different properties namely the surface of a doughnut called a torus, the rotations of our three-dimensional space, bizarrely have some object that covers them twice, just as a doughnut covers a Klein model 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, when 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|spin group]] and that spin group is the thing that has the property that it acts on these things called spinors 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 spinors even exist to play with  

L - right I mean it comes out of [[Representation Theory|representation theory]] but that once again that's a fairly high level of mathematics you have to get to to even see that these things exist  

W - Let me give an argument as to why this is a real really serious problem. If I take two kinds of thing that might 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 (electrons) and I've got light and it's 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 spinors.

W - and gravity so spinors are over on the quantum side of the equation all right the quanta in the children of Bohr it's really more their object than the children of Einsteins. 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 won yet if it turns out that they're we don't know how to measure length and angle between measurements because in quantum theory you get something very different when when things 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.

In the case of electrons if you don't know where the the metric is, you can't even say where the sea is that the electron would be a wave in (L - that's right) and it's a very convoluted thing but it's a big difference  

L - 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

Which is depicted in this crystal block for those who are viewing on YouTube (NOTE: Probably looks something like [https://bathsheba.com/crystal/e8/ this])

W - 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 may be 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?

L - um from a top-down perspective it is but the way I got there is by describing spinors and seeing that spinors is part of this one beautiful mathematical object naturally and it's it's unique to the exceptional Lie groups to to these this class the small class of objects  

The way I see what you're saying is is that there is a usual kind of symmetry which we would associate with [[Bosons|bosons]] that is the force particles of the universe and what makes these very strange objects that you've you've referred to as in referring to exceptional lie groups is that you appear to take something from the fermionic universe that is this spinorial universe where the spinors come from and you adjoin it in some sense to the bosonic to get more symmetries  

W - 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 you take some of these spinors that are related to that symmetry 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  

W - one of them goes into the name of [[Bosonic Quantization|bosonic quantization]] and the other sort of goes under the name sometimes of you know [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berezin_integral Berezin]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Berezin Felix Berezin]) theory right and  

W - a parallel totally different treatment and the way you've done it you've really taken the fermions that is the matter part the the spinors 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 spinors in a manner befitting [[Fermionic Quantization|fermionic quantization]]

L - yeah no, it's very straightforward though the the fermions just end up being along directions orthogonal to space-time

W - okay so, all the honor to you. That's not an obvious feature. Most people who barely know what the exceptional lie groups are and most of them don't know that it has to do with this property called [[Triality|triality]]

3) my last concern was that because of the properties of this object you didn't have any room for what we call [[Chirality|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 any object that you derive from E8 is gonna 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're going to have to pay back (L - right) if you were going to connect this to the world that we see and that might - my irritation with you was  that I brought this up with you in 200? remind me? 2008, not 2009, when we met at the [https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca Perimeter Institute] and I tried to warn you about these things I felt like you never took me seriously.

L - because when you talk about waves on geometric object those act as different representations mathematically, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter–Weyl_theorem Peter-Weyl Theorem], but when you when you do that that's not enough to give you all the structure you need for quantum field theory (QFT) 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 from yan should like matter particles should and it's also you know large enough to give you the sort of dynamics you need for quantum field theory. So that's why I've I've in the intervening ten 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 at which solve these problems and that's that's why I've been...

W - Garrett, here's the thing: if I just think about where we are with the standard model right you've got four dimensions of space and time, right, then you've got an extra eight dimensions coming from something called su(3), three dimensions from something called su(2) and one extra dimension coming from something called u(1). That's the basic data (L - right) that occurs.

W - you can put in six dimensions for something called spin(3 1) okay but the point is I can add those all up and I'm gonna get some number probably, you know, in 20 some odd dimensions whatever that finite thing generates the infinite dimensional world of quantum field theory  

L - but wait a minute. Quantum Field Theory - there we have a way of mapping between those the base geometry and then going to quantum field theory right then you have [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fock_space Fock Space] right and you have [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/occupation_number occupation numbers] for all the different possible States  

L - as I said I'm now work it's generalizations to infinite dimensions but there's an issue of intellectual [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting 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 (L -right) but there is a question of well now that you've recognized am i right I mean am i right yeah yeah right i right that the issues that I raised with you initially turned out to be really serious problem  

  W - no it's absolutely gorgeous I don't think we're divided by that but when it comes to you know breaking up this object called the curvature tensor into three different pieces throwing one of the one of them away called the Weyl 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 and that's an intricate story and then the other story is even worse and (L - right) here der yeah so you know 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 you when I you know maybe it's a bad analogy because it's not bootstrapping itself out of nothing (L - right) you're smuggling in a ton of intricacy  

  W - I really don't I think that the problem is is that you know we have this mutual friend [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder Sabine Hossenfelder] when Sabine has this very strange feature of her personality that she needs to tell the truth at scale  

  W - 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|exceptional isomorphisms]] which aren't the [[Exceptional Lie Groups|exceptional lie 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(6) which by an exceptional isomorphism is equivalent to some other object, surprisingly, called su(4) and you can take the spinors of spin six and find out that they are just the four dimensional object from su(4) right and smush them together and you get an analogue of E8 (L - yeah) there's 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  

L - right that's right I mean I have 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 haven't seen in a while and if it had extra space I'd spend time in their house while I worked on theoretical physics and enjoyed the local environment and I thought was great to be able to do this cuz you're not worried about you know having a roof over your head, you have company to interact with and you have a good environment to play in. I wanted to have a network of such places but I had a hard time getting friends to give me other houses to use for this so I ended up getting the resources together to buy a house in Maui and 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 is a beautiful piece of property that's 15 acres that I bought 10 years ago because I like doing things slowly mm-hmm so I've been growing the community of the Pacific Science Institute by having friends come in and and stay at my house including you, my arch-nemesis

L - yeah you had a lot fights with those guys (W - okay) yeah whereas I I didn't so my our academic lineages are quite different I mean I went I went to a smaller school I went to UC San Diego I didn't go to [[Harvard University|Harvard]] but my advisor they're in particle physics was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Dashen Roger Dashen] but he he passed away well as a graduate student and I finished up my my dissertation under under [https://www-physics.ucsd.edu/Directory/Person/1 Henry Abarbanel] who also had a background in particle physics but it changed into non-linear dynamics.

W - well I had a very 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 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'd proposed again spinors as a means of changing the equations and was told that if I mean the exact quote was something like "if spinors had anything to do with the story Nigel who was (Nigel Hitchin) would have told us" like it was just completely (L - yeah) it was bananas and then I got into this issue that well you know spinors 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Seiberg Nati Seiberg] both of them now professors at 'the Institute' ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study The Institute for Advanced Study]) and there was just no room to question why everybody was struggling with these almost 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 what when this all you know came about late late 80s early 90s there was just no way to to have a productive conversation about it  

3) another set of equations that I wanted to connect to the actual standard model and the department was just very concerned 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Coleman Sidney Coleman] it was a great quantum theorists and he was much more encouraging than the Harvard math departments any  

W - 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw quantum mechanics in your face] ([https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/for-the-weekend-quantum-mechanics-in-your-face.html#comment-6a00e551f08003883401b8d2944173970c Transcript]) to try to make the quantum have you ever seen this thing I've know 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 he had 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  

W - I don't think if I were to steel-man 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 you first encountered when I called their immune system in a gentleman known as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Distler Jacques Distler]. 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 QFT like they know what it is that is demotivating them it's all the no-go theorems and the 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 that gave them something to do. It's like like wargames  

W - 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 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-go_theorem no-go theorems] because any successful theory will probably have to have a period where it's flying in the face of no-go theorems" you know so that's what I wanted to hear from you right  

  L - right I mean there's a theorem called the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman–Mandula_theorem Coleman-Mandula] theorem that prohibits the unification of gravity with the other forces I just blew right through that because it didn't seem to apply in what I was doing  

  W - well I mean really it prohibits naive unification of matter and force and there's a way of evading it using this thing called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry supersymmetry] and supersymmetry is this very weird thing that doesn't have that much mathematical beauty behind it, so the mathematicians know about it they study it a little bit but they're not bananas over  

  L - yeah at this point I don't think string theories living at all, I think it's an ex-Theory. I think it's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnciwwsvNcc pining for the fjords]. I've seen nothing but decline since I left this train wreck in progress.

  L - 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  

L - yeah I mean there there are undergraduate textbooks and undergraduate courses on string theory (L - yeah) okay and people from undergraduates there's and and there's this culture of arrogance saying string theory is the pinnacle of physics (W - right ) and people are coming up to that and they're becoming and if you're really working on fundamental physics and and the the whole area of string theory has gotten so large in the amount of research done (W - sure) that it just takes an enormous amount of intellectual effort to consume it and to get up to speed to what the current status is of the field and by the time you're there you're so invested then of course what you want to do is go and continue a postdoc in string theory when you graduate. And they're there hundreds of students who are coming up this way and when they get there they go to [https://arxiv.org/archive/hep-th HEP-Th] (of [https://arxiv.org arxiv]) like I did this morning you look at...  

W - HEP-TH being the high-energy physics theory section where of this thing called the 'archive' (NOTE: which is written [https://arxiv.org arxiv])where all the new papers are found every day  

W - well because it was a baby boomer phenomenon we treated it as if it was an intellectual phenomena but it was actually this weird generational phenomena that this took hold. You know this is a very weird feature of 1951 where [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wilczek Frank Wilczek] and Ed Witten -  two great physicists, born in the same year - Wilczek is effectively like the last guy to make the train for real physics  

W - 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 -  its Garrett's attempt to try to figure out how to move science outside of the direct institutional control - you can find him on [https://www.instagram.com/garrett.lisi/?hl=en Instagram I think is Garrett Lisi] and on [https://twitter.com/garrettlisi?lang=en Twitter as Garrett Lisi].