Editing A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look

Now, why is that? Well, many people confuse a theory of everything, as if they imagine that it's a theory in which you can compute every eventuality, and it is absolutely not that, because the computational power is very different than the question of whether or not the rules are effectively given. I've analogized it to a game of chess, and knowing all of the rules is equivalent to a theory of everything. Knowing how to play chess well is an entirely different question. But in the case of a theory of everything, or a unified field theory if you will, many people also take it to be an answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" And I don't think that this is, in fact, what a theory of everything is meant to be either. Now, why is that? Well, because I believe at some level it is impossible for most of us to imagine an airtight argument, mathematically speaking, which coaxes out of an absolute void a something. However, there's a different question which I think might actually animate us, and which is the right question to ask of a potential candidate. And that is, "How does one get everything from almost nothing?" In the M.C. Escher drawing or lithograph, ''Hands Drawing Hands'', or ''Drawing Hands'', what we see is that the paper is presupposed. That is, if you could imagine a theory of everything, it would be like saying, "If I posit the paper, can the paper will the ink into being, such that the ink gives rise to the pens, and the pens draw the hands, which in fact manipulate the pens to use the ink?" That kind of a problem is one which is of a very different character than everything that has gone before. It is also, in my opinion, an explanation of why the physics community has been stalled for nearly 50 years since around 1973, when the Standard Model was intellectually in place.

Now, consider this: we have never had, in modern times, a drought where no person working in pure fundamental theory has taken a trip to Stockholm—just as a rough indicator—for contributing to the Standard Model. No one, in my opinion, since let's see, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wilczek Frank Wilczek], who was born in 1951—no one born after that time has in fact contributed to the Standard Model in a clear and profound way. That is not to say that no work has been done, but for the most part, the current generation of physicists has, for more than 40 years and almost 50 years, remained stagnant within the standard paradigm of physics, which is positing theories that are then verified by experiment. Now my belief, which is relatively radical, is that there is no way to get to our final destination using the tools that have gotten us to where we are now. In other words, what got you here cannot get you there.

There are other possibilities that while each of these may be simplest in its category, they are not simplest in their interaction. For example, we know that Dirac famously took the square root of the Klein-Gordon equation to achieve the Dirac equation—he actually took two square roots, one of the differential operator, and another of the algebra on which it acts. But could we not do the same thing by re-interpreting what we saw in Donaldson theory and Chern-Simons theory, and finding that there are first-order equations that imply second-order equations that are nonlinear and in the curvature? So let's imagine the following: we replace the Standard Model with a true second-order theory. We imagine that general relativity is replaced by a true first-order theory. And then we find that the true second-order theory admits of a square root and can be linked with the true first-order theory. This would be a program for some kind of unification of Dirac's type, but in the force sector. The question is, "Does this really make any sense? Are there any possibilities to do any such thing?"

Well, let me just sum this up by saying: between fundamental and emergent, Standard Model and GR... Let's do GR. Fundamental is the metric, emergent is the connection. Here in GU, it is the connection that's fundamental and the metric that's emergent.