Einsteins Prison
Eric Weinstein coined the term "Einstein's Prison" to describe the constraints imposed by Einsteinian physicsâspecifically the speed of light as a fundamental limit that makes interstellar travel incredibly difficult. He argues that our current understanding of physics, based on Einsteinâs theories, creates a kind of barrier preventing significant breakthroughs in space travel and fundamental physics.
In contrast, the idea of an "Einsteinian Prison Break" is about finding a way beyond these constraints. Weinstein suggests that just as Einstein revolutionized Newtonian physics, we may need a new paradigm shift in physicsâone that renders Einstein's theories as approximations rather than the most fundamental laws. He implies that such a breakthrough could allow for previously impossible ideas, like faster-than-light travel, to become feasible.
Quotes[edit]
Einstein's Prison is the distance to the nearest habitable world. So that if we imagine that we're going to somehow travel just below the speed of light in an Einsteinian way, full benefits of time dilation, you found the closest habitable planet, you stayed there for an hour, and you came back, how much older is everyone here on Earth? Even if you were able to make the trip lickety-split, it would be it. It's a depressingly large distance to the outside world. So that moat, effectively, if there is an Einsteinian speed limit, we have to recognize that it belongs to the map, which is known as space-time, which is not the territory which is wherever we actually live, where we do not live in space-time. But that is our best map that we have. So that's what I mean by Einstein's Prison.
- Eric Weinstein, March 5, 2025 on Cracking Einstein UFOs Lead the Way | Eric Weinstein and Avi Loeb
Then you start thinking about, okay, well, what about the Moon and Mars? Yeah, the moon you can get to, Mars you can get to, but it's pretty tough to think about, and then you have to think about terraforming. It sounds like science fiction. Bezos weirdly, maybe a little bit betterâhe's talking about orbital space station's, but if you ask me, you know, you have some super fragile, brittle spinning Ziqi Hills wheel to give you centrifugal centripetal gravity or something like that. That's not gonna work. The real diversity comes from getting beyond Einstein. We don't know whether it's possible, it's possible that the ultimate theory beyond Einstein doesn't allow you to leave either. So right now we're in Einstein's Prison. And what we need is an Einsteinian Prison Break. And the way to do that is to ask, can we do to Einstein what Einstein did Newton, which is that you render Einstein an approximate rather than a fundamental theory? At the moment, it's the most fundamental theory we have, along with what's called the Standard Model of Quantum Field Theory. My goal is to say, is the theory that does to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton, does that have a new feature, which is that what previously seemed like faster than light travel becomes possible? And so that should be the question obsessing everyone. But Bezos doesn't seem interested. Biden doesn't seem interested. Musk doesn't seem interested. The Silicon Valley people don't seemâeverybody wants to go on an Ayahuasca retreat or build DeFi. And I just look at them. And I just think, you have no effing idea where you are.
- Eric Weinstein, February 23, 2022 on What Bitcoin Did
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, June 17, 2022 on Into The Impossible 234