15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself

Garrett Lisi, the so called "Surf Bum with a Theory of Everything (or T.O.E.)", is a PhD theoretical physicist who has refused to be captured by the theoretical physics community. By making shrewd investments, he has avoided holding meaningful employment for his entire adult life. Instead, he lives in Maui and travels the world chasing the perfect wave.

My Arch-nemesis, Myself
Information
Guest	Garrett Lisi
Length	01:45:58
Release Date	6 December 2019
YouTube Date	3 February 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
Links
YouTube	Watch
Portal Blog	Read
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In this episode Garrett and Eric sit down to discuss the current status of Garrett's ideas for a final theory based on a mysterious object called E8, perhaps the oddest of mathematical symmetries to be found in the universe.

Garrett and Eric have held each other in mutual “contempt” for over a decade. By vacationing together and staying in each others' homes, they had hoped to hone and deepen their mutual disgust for each other's ideas. However, as the theoretical physics community moved away from actually trying to unify our incompatible models of the physical world, it became intellectually unmoored, and drifted toward a culture of performative Cargo Cult Physics. The antagonists were thus forced by necessity to develop a begrudging admiration for each other's iconoclasm and unwillingness to give up on the original dream of Einstein to unify and understand our world.

The discussion is rough but a fairly accurate depiction of scientific relationships belonging to a type that is generally not shown to the public. This may be uncomfortable for those who have been habituated to NOVA, The Elegant Universe, or other shows produced for mass consumption. We apologize in advance.

Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Garrett Lisi (left) on episode 15 of The Portal Podcast

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Relevant Tweets

• I fell into The Portal! Got harassed by Eric for two hours. Didn't particularly enjoy it, but others might.

References in the Episode

• YouTube: Sidney Coleman, Quantum Mechanics in Your Face (1994)

Transcript

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: Hello. You're cued up to enter the portal, but I thought I'd say a few words before this episode. In general, when we present science in front of the public, we do it in one of two ways. Either we talk in an incredibly hand-wavy way about very speculative ideas like string theory, or we have a sort of a corpse of previous scientific thought that has been specifically arranged for public viewing. It's not really science the way we do science. It's kind of a denatured version to make sure that we don't lose anybody, because the public is famously supposed to be squeamish about anything involving equations, abstractions, or jargon. In this episode, we try to, well, do something different. I'm actually having a conversation with Garrett here. He's updating me on where his thinking has gone with respect to unifying physics. Now, it's very unusual for anyone to try to unify physics, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for Garrett, even though I don't think his theories are going to work. I make no secret of this. I'm not saying anything behind his back. But he is, in some sense, Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena. He actually is trying to take on the general problem of the cosmos, and even though I don't think he's succeeding, he has my profound admiration for simply suiting up and trying. Most people, in fact, almost everyone I know, does not attempt to do what he is doing, and for that, he has my admiration and respect. Now, with that admiration and respect comes a desire not to be mean, but to actually push him on his theory, because I don't want to see him wasting his time, and I feel that when you're outside of the university system, there's almost no one who takes your research seriously. So while there's an aspect of tongue in cheek with respect to us being each other's arch nemeses, there's actually something quite serious about it. I don't necessarily like the path that he's going down, and I don't know that I really believe that he's going to get anywhere productive, but I do think that he's an inspiration to us all simply for trying in an era where everyone else seems to have given up. I hope you enjoy 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 you're usually presented with. I hope you like it. Stay tuned. [upbeat music] You found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm here today with my arch nemesis, physicist Garrett Lisi. Garrett, welcome to the portal.

00:02:27
Garrett Lisi: Thanks for having me on, Eric. You're a brave man.

00:02:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, as I would say, you're a brave man coming into the lion's den, so thank you for coming by. Uh, for those who don't know who you are or what this issue of, uh, being arch nemeses is about, what, uh, what could you do to inform our listeners and viewers, uh, about who you are and what our relationship might be?

00:02:51
Garrett Lisi: All right. Well, we have, uh, many disturbing similarities in that we, uh, did fairly well in school. We got our PhDs, but then we left academia and s- but maintained an interest in fundamental physics and, uh, kept pursuing this on our own. Um, however, uh, there are some distinctions in that you went into the finance world, and I went into being a surf bum.

00:03:17
Eric Weinstein: Yes. That's not that similar.

00:03:19
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. Yeah.

00:03:19
Eric Weinstein: Also, you are-- you have a PhD in physics proper-

00:03:23
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:03:23
Eric Weinstein: ... whereas I have one in mathematics. Um, so I would say a- advantage Lisi, but then I have one from a, uh, more typically powerhouse school. You have one from one that's a little bit off of that main corridor, uh, that maybe got up, caught up, uh, in string theory and the, the fads that propel, uh, the field. But I think what, what's been very interesting to me is that in all of theoretical physics, which everyone is quite interested in, you still find people publishing books on quantum theory and, uh, all of the spookiness, weirdness, and beauty that constitutes theoretical physics. Um, it feels to me that almost no one is pursuing actual theories of everything. We talk about theories of everything all the time, but that the courage to actually put forward anything that even remotely resembles a theory of everything, um, almost nobody's willing to do that. Would you say that that's a fair statement?

00:04:25
Garrett Lisi: 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, to tackle it or to think you have a chance of succeeding at it.

00:04:38
Eric Weinstein: 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?

00:04:53
Garrett Lisi: 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 and their description i- 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, I'm really gonna tackle this problem of coming up with a theory of everything," because you, you, you have to be somewhat of a lunatic to, to take that on. It's like, you know, like trying to prove some theorem in mathematics that has been stagnant for hundreds of years. It's just, you know, you're probably not gonna succeed, and you'd probably just be frustrated with the attempt. You have to have a huge ego to even think about it, right? And also, there's a lot of discouragement. Students are actively discouraged from tackling such problems because the professors who came before them and know a little bit more about the field know just how hard it is to make progress even on small problems, and that making progress on a huge one is just insurmountable. So they try to actively discourage their students from, from going into fundamental problems in physics because they, they, they haven't had success themselves. So they're, they're trying to be protective of their students that way.

00:06:12
Eric Weinstein: So maybe just to set this up, and I, I should say to regular listeners and viewers of The Portal this is intended to be something of a transitional episode. So the entire podcast is an experiment, and you know, other, other people have shows and there's a concept of professionalism. I don't think that's what we're striving for here at The Portal. This is really, um, un- untested. We're gonna experiment with our advertising models. Uh, we're gonna experiment with what the traffic will bear when it comes to in- uh, intellectual discussions, uh, without spoon-feeding everything to the audience, realizing that some people may get left behind. In fact, the host may get left behind. We don't know.

00:06:52
Garrett Lisi: I hope not.

00:06:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, it's quite possible. And um, what we've done is we've done a series of interviews to begin the podcast to just establish that we can have, uh, conversations that people wanna tune into and get great guests in that chair, uh, 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 at maybe an academic level outside of traditional channels. And it has to do in part with my belief that, um, we don't really understand how much, uh, 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 Idea Suppression Complex, and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and upend and disrupt previous structures. So for example, I would claim that string theory, which has absolutely dominated theoretical physics since, what, 1984?

00:08:01
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, since about then.

00:08:03
Eric Weinstein: So it's about 35 years. Um, it artificially consolidated the field around a complex of ideas that did not have a huge signal coming from experiment, uh, you know, to, to s- to try to steal home base.

00:08:20
Garrett Lisi: Well, I mean, to understand that, you have to understand the, uh, as I'm sure you do, the, the culture of particle physics at the time when string theory started to grow. Which is, you know, up until, uh, you know, up through the '70s, there had been steady experimental results coming in from particle accelerators where it was, like, a new particle every week that theorists were having to, to really, uh, cooperate on as a community to jump in on and try to figure it out and exchange ideas very rapidly.

00:08:50
Eric Weinstein: That was more the '50s and '60s.

00:08:51
Garrett Lisi: It was, but it continued all the way through the '70s. And, and from that culture of, you know, community working together on, on information that's coming in a steady stream, right? You got this culture of like, "Yeah, no, don't go do that other thing. It's a waste of time. You really wanna 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, i- is, is much more casual.

00:09:27
Eric Weinstein: Do you mind if I set this up a little bit for our audience-

00:09:30
Garrett Lisi: Sure

00:09:30
Eric Weinstein: ... and you can critique it if, if I do a poor job. In essence, the two great idea complexes in fundamental physics, not condensed matter physics or astrophysics, but, like, whatever ground reality physics is, um, is the general relativistic complex around the ideas of Einstein, and then there's the sort of quantum field theoretic 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.

00:10:04
Garrett Lisi: Right. And the, the, the boring people went into particle physics.

00:10:09
Eric Weinstein: The boring people?

00:10:10
Garrett Lisi: Well, you said they're the children of Bohr, so yeah.

00:10:12
Eric Weinstein: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay.

00:10:13
Garrett Lisi: So, 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 it is more of an exploratory culture, and that's the culture that turned into loop quantum gravity. So-

00:10:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So first of all, I'm just gonna s- ar- I'm gonna begin arguing with you there. To me-

00:10:38
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

00:10:39
Eric Weinstein: ... the issue was is that Einstein put much more of, uh, 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, um, 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 there was less for them to do.

00:11:08
Garrett Lisi: That's right.

00:11:09
Eric Weinstein: And then th- you had the quantum community s- start to attract the real brains, uh, because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between theory and experiment.

00:11:19
Garrett Lisi: That's right.

00:11:19
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:11:20
Garrett Lisi: And, and but what happened was that, uh, when the, when you think about it as a whole, that gravity has to be quantized. So there, there are two ways of getting there. You can either start from, uh, 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 and geometry and try to somehow get quantum mechanics to play nice with this essentially classical geometric theory. And they were two very different approaches and two very different cultures.

00:11:58
Eric Weinstein: I still have some disagreements, but I don't think I necessarily want to, uh, to derail us.

00:12:05
Garrett Lisi: All right.

00:12:05
Eric Weinstein: So-

00:12:05
Garrett Lisi: All right. So, so anyway, my, my... the, the point I started with was that the, the string theory came out of the particle physics community.

00:12:12
Eric Weinstein: Now, when we say string theory, we mean the cultural explosion that happened in 1984 rather than the original string revolution of, let's say, Veneziano, which was much earlier. Okay. So that in, in the mid-1980s, there was a discovery called the anomaly cancellation, where two very improbable things, uh, canceled each other, and the theory, uh, was suddenly... There was a theory that was given a green light that was highly restrictive as to what could f- what could go in that spot.

00:12:46
Garrett Lisi: Yep.

00:12:46
Eric Weinstein: And that result, the anomaly cancellation, gave birth to a cultural phenomena, which was the sort of takeover of theoretical physics by string theory.

00:12:58
Garrett Lisi: Right. It, I mean, it looked so promising at the time, in the '80s. I mean, they thought that, yes, it naturally encompasses gravity, and, uh, all we need to do is find the right, uh, you know, high dimensional manifold to attach to, uh, for our strings to vibrate in, and we'll 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, be wrapped up.

00:13:19
Eric Weinstein: I don't believe that story.

00:13:20
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. Well, they- it didn't happen. That was-

00:13:22
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

00:13:22
Garrett Lisi: ... that was what it sounded like

00:13:22
Eric Weinstein: ... but I don't think that's e- even what actually happened in... I, I r- I mean, I was in college in, at, during this period, and even though that's the story that I would agree is told inside of the community-

00:13:34
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

00:13:34
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm not sure that I fully believe it. If I go back to my own memories, something very different happened.

00:13:38
Garrett Lisi: Well, it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon.

00:13:40
Eric Weinstein: I think something still different happened. I think that Ed Witten showed up-

00:13:44
Garrett Lisi: Right, right

00:13:44
Eric Weinstein: ... and that there was one human being-

00:13:46
Garrett Lisi: He, he, he's his own anomaly

00:13:48
Eric Weinstein: ... he was an, he was absolutely an anomaly. He came to Penn in, I don't know whether it was '83 or '84. Uh, 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 hi- higher mathematics in ways that most of the community couldn't track. He was saying things like, "The reason we have three copies of, uh, the kind of matter that makes up our world comes from the, uh, c- 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 sh- uh, shoes as many people in the community. There was a voice that was clearly coming from another planet.

00:14:46
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:14:46
Eric Weinstein: Um, 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, uh, coercive and seductive so that even though the, 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.

00:15:14
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, and it's, it's, uh, it's stunning just to what degree that failed.

00:15:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so say more.

00:15:23
Garrett Lisi: Well, the, the string theory unification program, the idea that this description of all fundamental particles and gravity and, and our entire universe would come from a model based on strings vibrating in other higher dimensions, I mean, that, this unification program has failed. The, 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, the high, high hopes and promises.

00:15:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, a- and this has to do, uh, 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, uh, were kind of the naive model of particles. Then you had to smear them out, uh, and do waves on waves, uh, from that point particle concept-

00:16:15
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

00:16:15
Eric Weinstein: ... 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 modeled by something that was a- an as if string, obviously, and it wasn't string made out of atoms. It was-

00:16:31
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:16:32
Eric Weinstein: ... some sort of mathematical version of-

00:16:34
Garrett Lisi: Right. It's an abstract mathematical description of a, of a surface inside a, another surface, essentially.

00:16:40
Eric Weinstein: Right, and so th- this, this thing had a peculiar appeal to the children of Bohr that was not that appealing to the children of Einstein. Would that be a fair description of it, that it, it had-

00:16:51
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, it's b- for pretty subtle reasons, specifically anomaly cancellation, and also the ability to produce what appeared to be, uh, particle excitations within, from the string model.

00:17:02
Eric Weinstein: Right. Now, that thing, w- 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, uh, or supersymmetry, all of this seemed to get subsumed in this, um, I don't know, a fad? What, what it w- it's hard to... A cult?

00:17:26
Garrett Lisi: It's like a giant rolling, what, Katamari Damacy ball where it's just collecting everything that it touches and making it a part of itself as it rolls along.

00:17:33
Eric Weinstein: 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.

00:17:40
Garrett Lisi: That's right.

00:17:40
Eric Weinstein: So this was a bizarre, uh, you know, there wa- it was a sociological phenomena. It was a, um, we, we would say the political economy of science was involved, where w- if, 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, uh, pieces about the string theorists and how they were gonna wrap it all up.

00:18:06
Garrett Lisi: Yep.

00:18:07
Eric Weinstein: And in essence, um, 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.

00:18:20
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

00:18:21
Eric Weinstein: So nobody else could afford to get nourished because the string theorists were saying all the smart people are in string theory. It's the only game in town, was the famous phrase.

00:18:29
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. I, I certainly encountered a lack of nourishment when I graduated in the '90s, and I wasn't interested in strings, but I was interested in high energy physics.

00:18:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, and I think almost everybody was in that position. That, that is really the founding crime Uh, for me, in the string revolution, it was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us is an idiot.

00:18:49
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. Yeah. That's above and beyond normal physicist arrogance.

00:18:53
Eric Weinstein: Above and beyond normal physicist arrogance.

00:18:55
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

00:18:55
Eric Weinstein: And I wanna say also why I think I'm so focused on theoretical physics as the most important endeavor, uh, that humans are engaged with, and I think that there are three components to it, and just see whether, whether it resonates with you. One is that this is the closest we get responsibly to asking why are we here, what is it that we're made of? It, it, it is the thing that would best substitute for a religion if you were able to understand what it was. The second thing is, is that it appears to be, um, the secret powering our economy that very few people have really fully understood. It gave us the World Wide Web, the semiconductor, uh, the electron shells that generated chemistry-

00:19:43
Garrett Lisi: Nuclear power

00:19:44
Eric Weinstein: ... nuclear power, nuclear weapons, uh, communications technology, electromagnetic, you know, WiFi, what have you. Um, if you want it... And it invented the, theoretical physics more or less created molecular biology.

00:20:00
Garrett Lisi: That's probably a bit of a stretch, but the, the others certainly aren't, so yeah.

00:20:04
Eric Weinstein: If you look at the RNA tie club, you know, the people-

00:20:07
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

00:20:07
Eric Weinstein: ... in it were Teller, Feynman, Crick, people trained in physics. So in, in this telling of the tale, um, 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 from, you know, the Web, semiconductors, um, 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 this was the world's most impressive intellectual community ever.

00:20:48
Garrett Lisi: It certainly, it seems to attract some of the greatest minds.

00:20:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, I would say I would go even farther. I would say that because of the interplay between the most beautiful mathematics, even according to mathematical standards, and experimental discipline, so you have this, this thing that's forcing you to go back and forth between pu- the purest of pure theory and the, the dirt and intuition, uh, and messiness of experiment, I don't think anything else had that property, so that it wasn't necessarily even that it just attracted the best people, but it, it actually rewarded, um, human intellectual achievement at like no other subject ever.

00:21:26
Garrett Lisi: Right. It's also on touching on something, uh, that's a little bit different socially, which is the type of people who are attracted to, to really, you know, hard problems in, in fundamental physics and, and modeling and really trying to get, as you say, the source code of the universe, um, these often aren't very skilled people people. They're, they're not very socially oriented people for the most part.

00:21:52
Eric Weinstein: Some are, some aren't.

00:21:54
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, but for, for the real intellectual heavy hitters, you're, you're talking about people who sort of, I mean, walk among us as aliens. You're talking about, you know, that they're not extremely social. They're not very focused on, on issues with other human beings. And physics, this understanding of our universe through mathematics, is really a otherworldly pursuit, right? It's not like law where, where laws are made up by humans and discussed in front of humans and compared in front of humans. It's, it's... I mean, that has its own intricacies and difficulties and puzzles, but theoretical physics, you're getting, uh, you're working at something that's not related to humans directly. I mean, any intelligent beings in this universe that advance to a certain state are gonna be involved in studying physics, and it's gonna be the same physics, right? With some of the same mathematics and the same mathematical tools. It's, it's something that exists independent of humanity, so if you're, if you're not a huge fan of human beings and but you, you really like puzzles and you, you're good at math, physics is very attractive 'cause it's a, it's a, it's the greatest puzzle there is in our universe, and it exists completely independent of humanity, and yet humans have been able to work on it and make progress, which is freaking amazing. It's amazing the degree to which humans have, have understood our reality and, and I think we're getting close to having a com-

00:23:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:23:25
Garrett Lisi: ... what could be considered a complete picture of it

00:23:26
Eric Weinstein: ... I would say it's one of the three classes of greatest puzzles. I mean, if I, I could, I could tell a story w- that biology is the greatest puzzle because, uh-

00:23:36
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

00:23:36
Eric Weinstein: ... without, without something to care about the universe in which it lives-

00:23:41
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

00:23:41
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, this is all completely sterile to begin with. And I can also make a different case for mathematics, which is that physics is but one example of a universe. We don't know if there are other universes that can c- could be constructed.

00:23:53
Garrett Lisi: So, 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 a, a, you know, DNA 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, other civilizations, biology is gonna be different.

00:24:17
Eric Weinstein: You could make a decent argument that systems of selective pressures, as described by Darwin and Wallace-

00:24:22
Garrett Lisi: There, there will-

00:24:22
Eric Weinstein: ... might be conserved even-

00:24:24
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

00:24:24
Eric Weinstein: ... if you had, didn't have carbon-based life.

00:24:26
Garrett Lisi: There will be convergent evolution, of course.

00:24:28
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:24:28
Garrett Lisi: But, but the, the details will, will be slightly different, so if you're studying biology, by the time you get up to something like cells or, or, or animals, um, it's gonna be wildly different i- in different, different places in the, in the galaxy, right? Whereas, uh, whereas physics is the same everywhere. Okay, it's, it's independent of biology a- and it's independent of humanity and it's, uh, I, I think a- and then when you go to mathematics, um, 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 l- 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.

00:25:29
Eric Weinstein: Right. And I, by the way, I share your intuition that in a certain sense this is the best and most interesting place to play in part, um, because there's this very weird feature that we've seemingly unearthed about the physical universe, which is that it unexpectedly has this bizarrely good taste-

00:25:50
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. [laughs]

00:25:51
Eric Weinstein: ... about what to care about within... It's, it's as if you let it loose in the mathematical, um, j- jewelry store and it, it, it selects only the finest pieces.

00:26:02
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. Yeah. And we have to wonder if that's, you know, is that just our human take on it? 'Cause our, our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world and universe. So is it that, uh, I mean, Douglas Adams, uh, described the anthropic principle as a, as a puddle of water, right? Thinking it's like, "Wow, this, th- this, this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my shape," right? "Isn't it wonderful how it just fits me so perfectly and it, and it, and it, it's so comfortable here, uh, 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, the water got there and filled that shape. And as humans, we, we ended up here and we filled this niche, and our aesthetic taste was shaped by what surround 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, uh, maybe it's just our taste evolved within this universe, so this is why we find physics aesthetically pleasing."

00:27:00
Eric Weinstein: Do you actually believe what you're saying right now?

00:27:02
Garrett Lisi: No, I think it's wrong.

00:27:04
Eric Weinstein: I mean, uh-

00:27:06
Garrett Lisi: But I, I have, I have to think about it

00:27:06
Eric Weinstein: ... I think this is so cowardly.

00:27:08
Garrett Lisi: I know. I agree. And I, and I-

00:27:09
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, like-

00:27:10
Garrett Lisi: ... I have to wonder about it. I have to, I mean, I have to question everything.

00:27:12
Eric Weinstein: No, I understand but you have to pay lip service, you know?

00:27:14
Garrett Lisi: No, it'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? 'Cause I have to question everything all the time.

00:27:24
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:27:24
Garrett Lisi: Mostly 'cause I don't talk e- to enough other people. But, but also it's, it's because, you know, y- y- you have, when you're questioning things and you're delving with fundamental building blocks, y- you wanna make sure as you build things up that you have things right. And in looking at the fundamental phys- pieces of physics, you know, the fundamental mathematical physics, I, 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 that's been shaped by evolution that causes me to think that. I really think, uh, objectively these are very pretty mathematical objects be- underlying our physical reality.

00:28:01
Eric Weinstein: 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, um, w- with which to write what we, I mean, the closest thing we have to source code. Uh, we don't, we're not at the source code yet. We're not quite at that layer.

00:28:29
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:28:29
Eric Weinstein: But-

00:28:29
Garrett Lisi: But you smell it, can't you?

00:28:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, yes and no.

00:28:34
Garrett Lisi: It feels close.

00:28:36
Eric Weinstein: I think it's almost provably close, but-

00:28:39
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

00:28:40
Eric Weinstein: ... but th- there's a caveat to that, which is I think we're almost at the end of this chapter.

00:28:46
Garrett Lisi: Hmm.

00:28:47
Eric Weinstein: And it does feel like it could easily be the final chapter. Um, and by, by the way, we should be cl- we should clarify that when we s- 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.

00:29:04
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:29:04
Eric Weinstein: We mean-

00:29:04
Garrett Lisi: Love is still gonna be a mystery, of course.

00:29:06
Eric Weinstein: Oh, God. You really did that?

00:29:08
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] Of course I did. But yeah, no, but I mean-

00:29:11
Eric Weinstein: Ladies, file-

00:29:12
Garrett Lisi: But the [laughs]

00:29:13
Eric Weinstein: ... form a single file line.

00:29:15
Garrett Lisi: There, there's, there's evidence. I mean, there, in our, in our understanding of physics as we've learned more particles-

00:29:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:29:21
Garrett Lisi: ... 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, right? Or, or no, that, that a tau lepton should exist, y- or, you, you sh- you figure out that, you know, it completes the set. I guess that's third generation. It's complete, right? So we, we seem to be completing our set of, of fundamental particles.

00:29:48
Eric Weinstein: So we have three sets of Lego.

00:29:49
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

00:29:50
Eric Weinstein: Right? The first generation, second generation, and third generation of matter.

00:29:54
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

00:29:54
Eric Weinstein: And all the pieces in each generation are mirrored i- in the other two generations, just at different mass scales so far. That's what it looks like.

00:30:03
Garrett Lisi: Well, it's not just so far. It's like we, the, we have, we have reasons to know that there aren't, there aren't more. I mean, from, from how the Big Bang set matter loose in the universe, we know that there aren't more than three generations up to a certain, uh, very high energy.

00:30:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, we, we've known a lot of things, Garrett, that have turned out to be wrong.

00:30:23
Garrett Lisi: Uh, well, but this is really filling out a pretty complete pattern.

00:30:27
Eric Weinstein: I don't dispute, but I just, I-

00:30:29
Garrett Lisi: Exce- except for this minor point of dark matter still being completely unknown for the most part.

00:30:33
Eric Weinstein: W- y- yeah. I, I mean, I guess my discomfort with this comes from the fact that knowing the history, I know how we've been wrong, and I also know how we haven't had the courage of our convictions, and one of the things that really, you know- ... occupies my mind is why we're not more definite about things that I think we have very good, good reason to believe, and we're so definite about things that sort of scare me, where we say, "I know that it can't be other than this." Um, and yet it has- we've been, we've been shown up multiple times. The, the- we've got two different directives telling us to be both more confident and more humble.

00:31:15
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:31:16
Eric Weinstein: Um, the thing that has affected both, both you, uh, and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called spinors at the core of our understanding of matter. Do you wanna say a little bit about what that is, why you think it's affected you and, and, and me as well, and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional or intellectual, uh, impact on the community?

00:31:43
Garrett Lisi: Right. I mean, when you're... Basically, when physicists, uh, more or less completed the, 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 electrons and quarks and neutrinos and, and other generations of these that, that form, uh, you know, what, what are called the fermions, okay? And these are called the matter particles, and they, they have mass because of their interaction with the, the Higgs boson, right, which is sort of in between.

00:32:21
Eric Weinstein: That's not gonna make sense to people.

00:32:22
Garrett Lisi: It's not. All right. Um, but anyway, um, the, the force particles behave differently as elementary particles under rotations than the matter particles. All right? So these matter particles, uh, they... You have to basically s- rotate them 720 degrees to return them to their original state. All right? Whereas most objects, you rotate it and you rotate it 360 degrees and you 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 a, in an unusual way. It's described as a, as a column of complex numbers or, or a column matrix, if you like, that's acted on by a rotation matrix that tells you specifically how these particles transform under rotation.

00:33:17
Eric Weinstein: Honestly, that wouldn't make any sense to me, and I don't think I can help all of my audience to get it right.

00:33:21
Garrett Lisi: Well, this is the, this is the thing. So, so this is the way physicists are introduced to a description of electrons.

00:33:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, look, can, can I just try to-

00:33:29
Garrett Lisi: Okay, fine then

00:33:29
Eric Weinstein: ... to play with something while, while we're talking about this, it this way?

00:33:32
Garrett Lisi: Well, I, uh... You can. Let me... Can I hand it off to you in about 10 seconds?

00:33:35
Eric Weinstein: No, you, you t- finish it out.

00:33:37
Garrett Lisi: All right. 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, 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, right? It seems sort of arbitrary. Why would the universe have spinors in it? Well, it turns out that, uh, because if, if you, if you describe general relativity as curving four-dimensional spacetime, describe gravity, and you describe forces a- as, as gauge fields, right? With, both of those are very geometric descriptions. They're very elegant mathematically. And then you describe physic- the, the fermions as spinors, it looks like a kludge. It just, it doesn't fit with the other theories. But that's why I, uh, I left physics, to, 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, they transform this way, and, uh, and maybe it comes from strings," and that's all you get. And it's like, no, that's totally unsatisfying. If, if gravity is described geometrically and, and our, if all our other forces are 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 w- 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 wanted to go solve it. No one else even acknowledged it was a problem. And you, you also tackled this. This also bothered you.

00:35:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, y- there was a... So this is the very difficult part of what the portal is supposed to be, and I, I have the feeling that we've probably left a lot of our listeners behind, but I've, I've said that we're going to have to take some risks, and this is gonna be one of them. So the way I see it, um, some, some of our listeners are also viewers, right? And we have in studio, um, these beautiful Klein bottles from Acme Klein Bottle and Cliff Stoll out of, uh, Oakland, I guess. These objects that I'm holding up, um, 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 donut if the surface of the donut 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 donut called a torus. The rotations of our three-dimensional space bizarrely have some object that covers them twice just as a donut covers a Klein bottle 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 t- to understand where 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, and that spin group is the thing that has the property that it acts on these things called spinors.

00:37:05
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:37:05
Eric Weinstein: 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.

00:37:26
Garrett Lisi: Right. I, I mean, it comes out of representation theory, but it, that, once again, that's a fairly high level of mathematics you have to get to to even see that these things exist.

00:37:34
Eric Weinstein: And for all of the other basic kinds of symmetries, we don't have these hidden representations. We don't have these hidden spaces that have these bizarre properties. It's only for these things called orthogonal groups. So it's a very special property of real, um, Euclidian rigid space that spinors are there to be found, and not only does nature find them, she bases all of matter around the hidden object that can't easily be seen or deduced, which is a total mind job.

00:38:11
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:38:12
Eric Weinstein: And the math community has in fact sort of split between people who think, "Hey, we can describe these things mathematically, so our work is done," versus other people who believe there's something about spinors that just, it, it continues to surprise us. We don't understand where they came from. They're a hidden feature of the universe, and they keep giving in this very mysterious fashion.

00:38:37
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, and the, uh, most of the general relativists who came at this problem, um, just would not wanna touch it 'cause it's too foreign to them, and the people who came into it from the particle physics side thought it wasn't a problem. It's, th- they, they tran- it's this field transforms a certain way. Seems perfectly well described to me.

00:38:58
Eric Weinstein: See, well, Eve, that doesn't, this doesn't make sense to me at all, so let-

00:39:02
Garrett Lisi: It didn't make sense to me either, Eric. That's why-

00:39:03
Eric Weinstein: But, well, let me-

00:39:04
Garrett Lisi: ... I left it for you to play with [laughs]

00:39:04
Eric Weinstein: ... let me give you an argument as to why this is a real- really serious problem.

00:39:07
Garrett Lisi: All right.

00:39:09
Eric Weinstein: If I take two kinds of thing that might, one might hope to find in the universe, an electron and a photon, 'kay? So the idea is that I've got stuff that orbits around, uh, atomic nuclei, and I've got light and its relatives, uh, that carry, uh, 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.

00:39:49
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:39:49
Eric Weinstein: In other words, if there isn't a ruler and a protractor, which is effectively what Einstein used to define spacetime, I don't have an ability to talk about spinors, and that's a big problem because if you're going to-

00:40:03
Garrett Lisi: It's not just a problem. It's a huge clue. It says that-

00:40:05
Eric Weinstein: And a huge clue

00:40:05
Garrett Lisi: ... spinors have to be intimately related to gravity and general relativity.

00:40:09
Eric Weinstein: And gravity, so spinors are o- over on the quantum side of the equation. Or, uh, the quan- in, in the children of Bohr, it's really more their object than the children of Einstein. The children of Bohr claim we have to quantize gravity and make everything quantum, so it's sort of an imperial, um, belief that the people who study the standard model should extend their techniques to cover gravity so that all can be one. Yet, if it turns out that there, we don't know how to measure length and angle between measurements, because in quantum theory you get something very different when f- when things, when, 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.

00:40:58
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm.

00:40:58
Eric Weinstein: If you don't know where length and angle are while something is propagating, then you don't even know where w- where the electrons can be a disturbance... If, if electrons are waves, they have to be waves in some kind of a sea. You know with photons that you can't tell exactly where the wave is, but you know where the sea is. 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.

00:41:30
Garrett Lisi: That's right.

00:41:30
Eric Weinstein: And it's a very convoluted thing, but it's a big difference.

00:41:33
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, and it's, I mean, I can almost describe it, uh, in extremely simple terms, which is most people, most physicists who, who think about it think of gravitational charge as being mass, but gravitational charge is really spin.

00:41:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, y- y- we're getting pretty-

00:41:54
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

00:41:54
Eric Weinstein: We're, we're getting pretty far afield.

00:41:56
Garrett Lisi: All right.

00:41:57
Eric Weinstein: Um-

00:41:58
Garrett Lisi: So to speak.

00:41:59
Eric Weinstein: So to speak. Um, so let's imagine that maybe our listeners haven't understood exactly what we're saying, but that there is some special problem about spinors and how, how they're tied to the structure of spacetime that is different-

00:42:16
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:42:16
Eric Weinstein: ... where you can describe things like photons in some sense without knowing how length and angle are measured, whereas length and angle are essential if you're ever going to talk about spinors.

00:42:26
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:42:26
Eric Weinstein: Now, you and I have two very different points of view, and the reason that, that I consider you an arch nemesis is that I think your theory, um, based on E8, which is depicted in this crystal block for those who are viewing on YouTube-

00:42:40
Garrett Lisi: And thanks for bringing your kryptonite to the show.

00:42:42
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Um, your approach to this is to say, let's start out with some object that is mathematically distinguished and very peculiar-

00:42:55
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:42:55
Eric Weinstein: ... 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 is ex- maybe the most complicated naturally occurring object, um, arguably that you could pick, and let's find the richness of our natural world as distilled from this bizarre, um, freakish occurrence in the laws of mathematical necessity. Is that a fair telling?

00:43:26
Garrett Lisi: 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, to these, this class, this small class of objects.

00:43:47
Eric Weinstein: And when you say exceptional Lie groups, what you mean is-

00:43:50
Garrett Lisi: Flatified

00:43:50
Eric Weinstein: ... continuous symmetries that only occur once, that they don't fall into some regular pattern.

00:43:58
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:43:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:44:00
Garrett Lisi: And, uh, and spinors are naturally a part of their geometry. And they're, and they're, and they're, they're intricate, beautiful objects. They have spinors naturally as part of their geometry, and that if you dissect them, you can see all the other parts necessary to particle physics and gravity. And this was just stunning to me, and at this point I'm like, all right, I've, I've built up from the ground up, from, from particle physics and from gravity and from spinors, I've built this structure up and seeing how it's all interconnected, and I found that they're all part of this small class of mathematical objects that are, that are unique in their intricacy and beauty, um, for finite dimensional objects. And that's why now I appear to have adopted more of a top-down view, where it seems like, oh, I started with this pretty object, and I said, "Oh look, it explains everything," but it's, it's nowhere near like that how I actually got to there. Right? The, the truth is I'm building up, and the truth is the next object is gonna be higher dimensional objects that include, uh, E8, like this one, as a, as a subgroup.

00:45:06
Eric Weinstein: So the way I'm hearing you, Garrett, and again, you know, this is like one of the m- most obscure top-

00:45:11
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] This is gonna lose so many listeners, but I, I-

00:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's gonna l-

00:45:13
Garrett Lisi: ... I'm, I'm happy to talk about it

00:45:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I'm trying to, we're trying to describe this, I would like to describe this a little bit as, as if we were taking somebody to an opera in a foreign language, so that they can follow the plot even though they can't follow line by line.

00:45:27
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:45:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay. The way I see what you're saying is, is that there is a usual kind of symmetry which we would associate with 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, in referring to exceptional Lie groups, is that you appear to take something from the fermionic universe, that is the s- spinorial universe, where the spinors come from, and you adjoin it in some sense to the bosonic to get more symmetries.

00:46:05
Garrett Lisi: Yes. Yeah, that's very clear.

00:46:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay. There's a huge problem with this strategy.

00:46:11
Garrett Lisi: Well, well wait, but this, but, but you're forgetting the part where this structure exists as part of these e- exceptional objects.

00:46:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, no, I'm not, y- you've correctly described how these objects occur in nature-

00:46:22
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:46:22
Eric Weinstein: ... that there is some regular kind of typical symmetry, a bosonic symmetry. Then you, you take some of these spinors that are r- related to that symmetry, and you fuse them together to get an even more s- beautiful, weird, symmetric object. But the problem with that strategy-

00:46:46
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

00:46:46
Eric Weinstein: ... is, is that we know that nature has these two very different recipes for how she wants to treat these things quantum mechanically.

00:46:55
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:46:56
Eric Weinstein: One of them goes under the name of bosonic quant- uh, quantization, and the other sort of goes under the name sometimes of, of, you know, Berezin theory, where-

00:47:07
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:47:08
Eric Weinstein: ... and-

00:47:08
Garrett Lisi: Anticommuting numbers. Num- numbers where A times B equals negative B times A

00:47:13
Eric Weinstein: Completely 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-

00:47:23
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

00:47:24
Eric Weinstein: ... you've lumped them together with the bosons, and now they're fused in a way that it's gonna be almost impossible to treat the spinors in a f- manner befitting fermionic quantization.

00:47:39
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's very straightforward though. The, the fermions just end up being along directions orthogonal to spacetime.

00:47:48
Eric Weinstein: I, I don't see that that actually works. I mean, th- this is-

00:47:52
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:47:52
Eric Weinstein: ... this is my great, my, my criticisms of your theory, which we've known each other now for 11 years, and this is the basis of our antagonism, is that on the one hand, um, you ingeniously saw, and I give you your credit, that E8, the largest of these objects, a 248 dimensional behemoth, carried some numerology surrounding three copies of the spinors that are present, which looked in some sense, could be confused for, may be related to three copies of matter.

00:48:26
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] It was about that hand-wavy, yeah.

00:48:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So all the honor to you, that's not an obvious feature. Most people who barely know what the exceptional Lie groups are, most of them don't know that it has to do with this property called triality. Okay? That was, that was true. But there really wasn't, in my opinion, enough room to pack the particles that we currently see into this group structure-

00:48:54
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

00:48:54
Eric Weinstein: ... um, with three generations. That was one issue. Second of all, because the, of the u- of the particular way in which bosons and fermions, matter and force, were fused together, it really pushed everything towards The bosonic side, that is the force side of the equation. So you're gonna now have to be in some kind of technical debt where you would have to figure out how to get the fermions back into a matter framework because you would actually push them too far through unification into a, a union with force. That was another basic concern.

00:49:30
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm.

00:49:31
Eric Weinstein: And, um, my last concern was that because of the properties of this object, you didn't have any room for what we call chirality, in which the universe, um, 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 these, um, the... 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 are going to have to pay back-

00:50:08
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:50:08
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, if you were going to connect this to, to the world that we see. And I-

00:50:12
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. And already-

00:50:13
Eric Weinstein: My irritation with you was is that I-

00:50:14
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

00:50:14
Eric Weinstein: ... brought this up with you in 2000 and... You remind me, 2008, not 2009-

00:50:19
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:50:19
Eric Weinstein: ... when we met at the Perimeter Institute.

00:50:22
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

00:50:22
Eric Weinstein: And I tried to warn you about these things. I felt like you never took me seriously.

00:50:25
Garrett Lisi: No, I did take you seriously, and I've taken all of these problems seriously. And, uh, they're discussed in subsequent work, and, uh, the way I've been resolving them is by tackling a, a larger unspoken problem, which is how to have a quantum description of this sort of geometry, right? 'Cause our universe is a, a quantum universe, and E8 is a finite dimensional object, and you have to have multiple states, multiple numbers of particles be able to occupy every state. So if you have a, a, a full quantum description of a theory, you need an infinite dimensional geometry to do it.

00:51:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I always thought your, your goal was to take a finite object and then take waves on that finite object to create something that was going to be infinite dimensional. I didn't see that-

00:51:13
Garrett Lisi: Right. That's-

00:51:13
Eric Weinstein: ... as being its problem.

00:51:14
Garrett Lisi: But, but that's not good enough.

00:51:16
Eric Weinstein: Say more.

00:51:17
Garrett Lisi: 'Cause just, just, just when you talk about waves on a geometric object, those act as different representations mathematically 'cause of the Peter-Weyl theorem. But when you, uh, when you do that, that's not enough to give you all the structure you need for quantum field theory. You really need an, a fundamentally infinite dimensional geometric object to describe quantum field theory. And, and this-- And, 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, you, you have-- you can have more space to handle the three generations of particles. You can have, uh, the, uh, anti-commuting fermions in them so that, that they behave like fermions 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, I've in the intervening 10 years since we've had a deep discussion about this, I've now started looking at generalized infinite dimensional geometries, which are, are gener- infinite dimensional generalizations of Lie groups, which, uh, which solve these problems. And that's, that's why I've been working-

00:52:31
Eric Weinstein: You really believe that you've solved these problems?

00:52:33
Garrett Lisi: I think I have a really good description that goes a long way towards easing.

00:52:37
Eric Weinstein: Garrett, here's the thing. If I just think about where we are with the standard model-

00:52:41
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:52:42
Eric Weinstein: ... you've got four dimensions of space and time, right? Then you've got an extra eight dimensions, uh, coming from something called SU3, three dimensions from something called SU2, and one extra dimension coming from something called U1.

00:52:58
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm.

00:52:58
Eric Weinstein: That's the basic data-

00:53:00
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:53:01
Eric Weinstein: ... um, that occurs-

00:53:03
Garrett Lisi: And, and, and gravity. People leave out gravity.

00:53:05
Eric Weinstein: You, you could put in six dimensions for something called Spin31.

00:53:09
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

00:53:09
Eric Weinstein: Okay? But the point is I can add those all up and I'm gonna get s- some number probably, you know, in 20s of dimension- 20 some odd dimensions, whatever. That finite thing-

00:53:21
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

00:53:21
Eric Weinstein: ... generates the infinite dimensional world of quantum field theory.

00:53:25
Garrett Lisi: Well, wait a minute, but quantum field theory, there we have a way of mapping between those ba- the base geometry and then going to quantum field theory, right? But then you have Fock space, right? And you have occupation numbers for all the different possible states.

00:53:40
Eric Weinstein: Garrett, my point is you're working on a problem that has certain foreseeable problems as part of the challenge. And unlike your detractors from the more standard community, um, I'm not loo-- I'm not telling you that you're dead on arrival just because certain problems can be seen. That would be unfair.

00:54:03
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:54:04
Eric Weinstein: And then by the way, that's what... You know, there are lots of problems that can be seen from the string theory community where, let's say, you know, the, the number of dimensions it wants to play in is doesn't seem to be the right number or th- they thought there were only a finite number of theories, and it turns out that there's a continuum of theories, et cetera.

00:54:20
Garrett Lisi: Or the, or the vast majority come out with the kind of statements-

00:54:21
Eric Weinstein: Right. And, and I get very irritated that somehow the string theory community, uh, is entitled to make all these mistakes, and anybody outside, if they say one wrong thing or one seemingly wrong thing, they're excommunicated. It's a ridiculous standard. Okay. That's not what I'm trying to do to you. I'm trying to say something very different, which is you're going to be up against the fact that if your initial data comes from this most beautiful and most bizarre of all objects, E8-

00:54:49
Garrett Lisi: Right. And as I-

00:54:50
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't contain-

00:54:51
Garrett Lisi: As I said, I'm now working on its generalizations to infinite dimensions.

00:54:56
Eric Weinstein: But there's an i- issue of intellectual check kiting. Like, I don't mind the idea that you recognize the debts that you're in.

00:55:03
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm.

00:55:03
Eric Weinstein: And then you say, "I think I have a way of getting this thing to close off."

00:55:06
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:55:07
Eric Weinstein: But there is a question of, well, now that you've recognized... Am I right? I mean, am I right that the-

00:55:11
Garrett Lisi: No, you're absolutely right. I-

00:55:12
Eric Weinstein: Am I right that the issues that I raised with you initially- Turned out to be really serious problem.

00:55:19
Garrett Lisi: Of course. I mean, and most of those-

00:55:21
Eric Weinstein: But you didn't know that back then.

00:55:22
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, I did. They were, they were in the paper. They were in the original paper saying that the, the description of three generations was very hand-wavy and unsatisfactory. That's in the original paper.

00:55:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay. My recollection was that when I tried to explain to you why people were going to have the objection about the two different quantization schemes, that that was not handled correctly.

00:55:45
Garrett Lisi: Right. Well, I handled that in a paper in 2010 or so.

00:55:47
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So that was-

00:55:48
Garrett Lisi: Lie group cosmology.

00:55:49
Eric Weinstein: All right. That was one of the, the issues.

00:55:51
Garrett Lisi: Yep.

00:55:51
Eric Weinstein: Then there was gonna be an issue that you weren't able to bring the left right asymmetry out of the initial data. There wasn't enough.

00:55:57
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:55:58
Eric Weinstein: And that was a fair description?

00:55:59
Garrett Lisi: Absolutely.

00:56:00
Eric Weinstein: Okay. And then you're saying that the, um, I ceded to you that you were making a connection between the mysterious appearance of three copies of matter, uh, uh, and something called triality-

00:56:13
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:56:13
Eric Weinstein: ... which was not manifest obviously inside of E8, but to the few people who actually care about this structure, it, it definitely is there in a very profound way.

00:56:23
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. It, it, it relates to rotations in eight-dimensional spaces.

00:56:27
Eric Weinstein: Yes. But you also haven't taken an interest in what is E8, if not the, uh, the wellspring for the source code of the universe. Like, if it isn't the universe-

00:56:42
Garrett Lisi: I think it's a piece of it, but I, I'm not religious, Eric. I mean, I'm, I'm gonna explore whatever seems most promising to explore.

00:56:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:56:50
Garrett Lisi: And-

00:56:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you, have you changed your, your sense of the status of E8 as a candidate for the unified theory in the fashion that you were originally seeing?

00:56:59
Garrett Lisi: Absolutely.

00:57:00
Eric Weinstein: You have changed your, your-

00:57:01
Garrett Lisi: Yes.

00:57:02
Eric Weinstein: Can you talk about that?

00:57:03
Garrett Lisi: Right. Um, so it was in tackling quantum field theory and how to describe it geometrically, which as far as I know, nobody has done. I mean, whenever, whenever you have... You, you start with, as you say, U1, SU2, SU3, and, and you go through this quantization procedure for its field.

00:57:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:57:20
Garrett Lisi: So you got a quantum field theory. Or if you're dealing with strings, right?

00:57:23
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:57:23
Garrett Lisi: You have this model of, of vibrating strings in higher dimensions, then you go through this quantization procedure to get a quantum, quantum theory of strings.

00:57:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:57:32
Garrett Lisi: Right? We ha- we physicists have this toolkit for quantizing things, but that's utterly the wrong way to look at reality. If, if the universe is just one thing, which it is, then it's one mathematical object.

00:57:46
Eric Weinstein: I mean, you're making a point that is very well understood, I believe-

00:57:50
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:57:50
Eric Weinstein: ... in the standard theoretical physics community-

00:57:52
Garrett Lisi: So-

00:57:52
Eric Weinstein: ... which is that if the world starts off as quantum-

00:57:55
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:57:55
Eric Weinstein: ... you should talk about classicalizing pieces of it rather than-

00:57:58
Garrett Lisi: That's exactly right

00:57:59
Eric Weinstein: ... quantizing the classical pieces that appear to exist.

00:58:02
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, that's exactly right. So, so what's a quantum geometric object look like? It's an, you know, with, with all these infinite dimensional Fock space and the creation annihilation of, of elementary particles possible.

00:58:17
Eric Weinstein: People, people at home won't know what a Fock space is.

00:58:19
Garrett Lisi: Right.

00:58:19
Eric Weinstein: A Fock space is effectively where the states of the system can live when you have multiple particles i- uh, in a situation, and you can change the number of particles that you have, just the way a photon can break into an electron and a, a positron pair. Um, that would be possible in a Fock space, not possible in a simpler quantum system.

00:58:43
Garrett Lisi: That's right.

00:58:44
Eric Weinstein: So effectively, a Fock space is just a large place to play where the number of particles in the system can change.

00:58:50
Garrett Lisi: Up to infinity.

00:58:53
Eric Weinstein: Keep going.

00:58:54
Garrett Lisi: So in order to describe this as one geometric object, you're stuck with a generalized Lie group, infinite dimensional generalized Lie group.

00:59:04
Eric Weinstein: Y- yes. But this is-

00:59:05
Garrett Lisi: And in order to describe spinors, it's gonna be an exceptional generalized Lie group.

00:59:13
Eric Weinstein: Garrett, I don't think, I don't think you're adding anything. I think that the problem here is, is that E8, um, is an exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally interesting object. It did have the properties that you were talking about in that it unifies, um, standard symmetries with these spinors-

00:59:34
Garrett Lisi: Right

00:59:34
Eric Weinstein: ... to form new symmetries.

00:59:35
Garrett Lisi: That's right. But it's inadequate.

00:59:36
Eric Weinstein: But it does... What?

00:59:37
Garrett Lisi: It's inadequate.

00:59:37
Eric Weinstein: It's not only inadequate, it, it would push them into a universe of pure force rather than a universe divided between force and matter. You're actually, the problem is, is the kind of unification it would create would be completely force unification with, with an absence of matter. You'd be dragging matter, if you will, spinors-

00:59:58
Garrett Lisi: No, you're, you're, you're focusing on a problem that, that, that was, uh, you know, that was solved in a paper in 2010. But it, it, it's very simply that fermions are orthogonal to spacetime, whereas, uh, you know, the force fields, the boson fields are along spacetime. But the same way the, the same way if you have two force fields that are along spacetime but in different directions, they would anti-commute, right?

01:00:21
Eric Weinstein: So what you're doing is you're using spacetime, if you will, which is a- again, kind of a classical Einsteinian concept-

01:00:28
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:00:29
Eric Weinstein: ... to break apart a unified system, which was the intention in unification to begin with.

01:00:36
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:00:36
Eric Weinstein: And then you're going to try to treat these two things naturally, uh, according to two totally different prescriptions. That's-

01:00:43
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:00:44
Eric Weinstein: ... you're violating, I mean, in some sense, any kind of naturality that you just picked up in the unification to begin with.

01:00:51
Garrett Lisi: Um, in a sense, yeah, but the symmetry has to break somehow.

01:00:55
Eric Weinstein: Does it do it in a natural... I mean, this doesn't feel, this feels like a fudge.

01:00:59
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, probably not. It, it allows it. It doesn't seem completely natural, but it, it does allow it.

01:01:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, but the whole point of the thing, I thought, was to take the naturality and what we had understood about the nature of these exceptional objects-

01:01:15
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

01:01:15
Eric Weinstein: ... and to say, "Hey, these things actually unify beautifully inside-" Of these very unusual, elegant mathematical structures

01:01:24
Garrett Lisi: They do, but it was, it was too small. As you said, it was too small because it didn't correctly contain three generations of, of matter, and because it can't correctly portray quantum field theory. But once you go to the, to larger generalized Lie groups, it can.

01:01:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, i- if this was a startup, what you're saying is is that the business is going great, but it's just run out of money, and I need a fresh infusion of cash.

01:01:50
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:01:51
Eric Weinstein: No, I'm not kidding.

01:01:52
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:01:52
Eric Weinstein: This is, this is sounding like an intellectual check, Garrett.

01:01:55
Garrett Lisi: No, no. It's, it's, it's round B funding. [laughs] Series B. [laughs]

01:02:01
Eric Weinstein: I see.

01:02:03
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:02:03
Eric Weinstein: Um, are, is it cashflow positive?

01:02:07
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] Not yet. I haven't even put the paper out yet.

01:02:09
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So the, there's... I mean, I, look, it's not a question that I, I need to see the paper or that you're not allowed to take out more loans, but are you getting w- I mean, I know you to be... Look, I've, uh, I hate to say this, but I have defended you to the regular community, uh, with some frequency because I have viewed you as an honest broker for your own stuff. I don't think you're trying to get away with something. I think-

01:02:34
Garrett Lisi: Thank you

01:02:34
Eric Weinstein: ... what you're try- what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, "I need to take some advances, which I think and I hope I can pay back," which I think is an admirable and honorable way to do physics.

01:02:44
Garrett Lisi: Mm.

01:02:46
Eric Weinstein: Are you worried about your own theory? Are you worried that you're going to infinite dimensions in the way that you've been forced to modify on several previous occasions, and that, in fact, this is not going to close?

01:03:01
Garrett Lisi: I am unusually confident that I'm on the right track with this one.

01:03:05
Eric Weinstein: Really?

01:03:06
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:03:08
Eric Weinstein: Oy.

01:03:09
Garrett Lisi: There, there are too many things matching up in the right way.

01:03:12
Eric Weinstein: This doesn't sound good, Garrett.

01:03:13
Garrett Lisi: No.

01:03:13
Eric Weinstein: I gotta be honest with you.

01:03:15
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:03:15
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:03:16
Garrett Lisi: But, see, I, I, I will put a paper out.

01:03:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:03:19
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:03:19
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:03:20
Garrett Lisi: And, uh, you know, people may not find it interesting, or they might find it really interesting.

01:03:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, I wish you the best of luck-

01:03:29
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:03:29
Eric Weinstein: ... but I, I have to tell you that I do think that the problems in this program, I mean, again, I, I, I should just be honest about it. I thought that the choice of E8 was so natural, that they're really one of two choices that I can see as being the way to go if you're going to avoid the, the usual, um, paths in, in research into, into fundamental physics. One is that you f- start with the most beautiful, intricate object you can find, and then you find the intricacies of the natural world somehow living, uh, inside of the intricacies which occurred naturally.

01:04:06
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:04:06
Eric Weinstein: That would be the E8-

01:04:07
Garrett Lisi: That's the, that's the top-down view-

01:04:08
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:04:08
Garrett Lisi: ... and it's, and it's quite nice to look at it that way.

01:04:10
Eric Weinstein: The bottom-up view is that somehow you start with something that's practically lifeless, which I've analogized to a fertilized egg, and somehow it bootstraps itself into this weird, intricate, um, and baroque world that we find ourselves in, and it sort of autocat- the universe autocatalyzes from almost nothing. And these are the two basic approaches that I can imagine that would not strain the concept of a theory of everything.

01:04:41
Garrett Lisi: Right. Well, then we, we both engage in both of these. But once you've used this bottom-up approach-

01:04:47
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:04:47
Garrett Lisi: ... starting with your fertilized egg and, and getting up into more and more complexity, then you start to see a complete object after you've expanded it out.

01:04:59
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, you view yourself as exploring the concept of-

01:05:02
Garrett Lisi: Going from the bottom up

01:05:03
Eric Weinstein: ... what is it that you've done that, that has that character?

01:05:07
Garrett Lisi: Um, starting from gravity and particle physics and how they can be matched up together in a, in a, in a way that brings-

01:05:16
Eric Weinstein: Neither of those-

01:05:16
Garrett Lisi: ... spinners out naturally

01:05:17
Eric Weinstein: ... okay. That's, that's not very simple at all.

01:05:23
Garrett Lisi: Well, I know, but-

01:05:23
Eric Weinstein: Gravity, gravity is already, you know, you're, you're talking about the curvature of a space time manifold.

01:05:29
Garrett Lisi: Oh, it's beautiful stuff, though. I love it.

01:05:30
Eric Weinstein: No, it's absolutely gorgeous. I don't think we're, we're divided by that. But when it comes to, um, 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, uh, and energy in the universe, there's a lot of stuff that's going into that story that isn't-- I mean, that's an intricate story. And then the other story-

01:06:03
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:06:03
Eric Weinstein: ... is even worse-

01:06:04
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:06:04
Eric Weinstein: ... and weirder.

01:06:05
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:06:05
Eric Weinstein: So y- you know, you're, you're smuggling in a ton of complexity. When I say fertilized egg, um, I'm thinking at the level of cytology, but, you know, at, at the level of the actual DNA that's incredibly rich. So y- when, when I-- you know, maybe it's a bad analogy because it's not bootstrapping itself out of nothing.

01:06:25
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:06:26
Eric Weinstein: You're smuggling in a ton of intricacy.

01:06:28
Garrett Lisi: But you have to look in both directions. You have to look from the bottom up, and then once you can see the larger picture, then you have to look again from the top down. And if going that way from the top down doesn't match up very well with, with what you did to get there, then you have to go further and see if you can get a different, bigger picture. It's the only way forward.

01:06:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but, I mean, to be honest, I, I feel like, you know, this is-- something has run into a wall, and there's the sense that, like how could this beautiful structure not be, not be right? It doesn't feel to me like-

01:07:11
Garrett Lisi: It's insufficient.

01:07:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:07:13
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. And there, but there, there's, there are larger structures that are not finite dimensional, but they're still Lie groups and exceptional Lie groups. They're just generalized infinite dimensional Lie groups that contain- E8 is a substructure, and they're beautiful. They're just as beautiful, if not more so.

01:07:32
Eric Weinstein: I really don't... I think that the, the problem is, is that, you know, we have this mutual friend, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Sabine has this very strange, um, feature of her personality that she needs to tell the truth at scale.

01:07:49
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] Oh, well, Sabine is a scientist, and, uh, scientists, you know, engage in the truth at all costs.

01:07:58
Eric Weinstein: Yes, but-

01:07:58
Garrett Lisi: That's sort of our, our modus operandi.

01:08:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, I find it very interesting that almost no one has followed Sabine's lead.

01:08:05
Garrett Lisi: I think it's Sabine.

01:08:06
Eric Weinstein: Sabine?

01:08:06
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:08:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Um, from her perspective, um, beauty has led theoretical physics astray.

01:08:17
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:08:17
Eric Weinstein: Now, I've, I've tangled with her. My claim is, is that the, the string theory community, which has generally hoovered up the most brilliant minds, but turned them into kind of almost cult-like members, which are exploring some structure, but I just don't... It's, it's similar to E8 in the sense that I'm not positive that it's the structure of our world. It has some beauty and some consistency, but I'm not positive that that's its reason for being. And because that argument has been so abusive and it, it's, it's just been, it's been abused against other people that our work is beautiful, and then when those outsiders look at it, it doesn't look like what you're doing is that beautiful at all, um, she's gone against beauty as a means of trying to figure out what's true and what, what isn't. Um, I'm concerned that you're falling prey to the siren of beauty, where you're not coupling... You're not... Things that are beautiful that... There are many things that are beautiful that don't exist to do what you think they're there to do.

01:09:22
Garrett Lisi: Right. Well, that's definitely true. I'm definitely inspired by beautiful mathematical objects. When I start exploring an area of mathematics and I, I start to see its intricacies and its connection to fundamental physics, I am led to, to think that there might be something there based on aesthetics.

01:09:41
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:09:41
Garrett Lisi: And I, and I, I've also discussed this with S- Sabine, who I think i- is great, and her, her points are wonderful, but I would be lost if I didn't have this aesthetic sense as a guide.

01:09:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let's, let's take an example like the hydrogen atom. So you've got one proton at the center of a, a hydrogen atom, and you have all of the electron shells in quantum theory that are generated by the Coulomb potential that comes off of that nucleus, right?

01:10:11
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:10:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. That story of chemistry as just being these perfectly spherical electron shells, um, works pretty well.

01:10:27
Garrett Lisi: Well, you've got the other orbitals, you know, P orbitals, S orbital, D orbital, all these things, yeah.

01:10:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, in terms of the representation theory of something we'd call spin three that gives the symmetries of, of the system. That story is not... It, it, it is absolutely bea- gorgeous. It's beautiful, and it works pretty darn well.

01:10:46
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm.

01:10:46
Eric Weinstein: But it starts to fall apart the larger the atoms are and the more neutrons and protons are stuck together in the, in the nucleus.

01:10:55
Garrett Lisi: It gets much more subtle, yeah.

01:10:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's, it's a perfectly beautiful story that isn't the right story. It's not the true story. It's very close to a true story. It's suggestive, it's indicative-

01:11:08
Garrett Lisi: Mm

01:11:08
Eric Weinstein: ... but it isn't actually the true story itself. So you have to be very careful, in my mind, that you d- you, you don't fall into the trap of thinking that the hydrogen atom sort of generalizes its perfection is simply the story of chemistry.

01:11:25
Garrett Lisi: Right, of course. There, there are much more complex elements, and then grouped into molecules, and there's all sorts of things that go into, into that sort of chemistry.

01:11:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, but don't you have the same situation in theoretical physics, where you have certain kinds of beauty that are incredibly pure that actually kind of fall apart under scrutiny, and you have other kinds of, uh, beauty that seem to fall apart but actually go the distance? I'm thinking about Dirac's, um, discovery of antimatter as the corresponding solutions to the matter solutions.

01:12:02
Garrett Lisi: Right. And didn't he originally think that was, that the anti-electrons were, th- were actually protons and it was really just neutral?

01:12:07
Eric Weinstein: Because he only knew of those two particles-

01:12:08
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:12:08
Eric Weinstein: ... and then Heisenberg, uh, tried to pop his bub- bubble and said, um, you know-

01:12:15
Garrett Lisi: You actually have a new particle here.

01:12:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, he said that the proton was way too heavy to be the, uh, antiparticle mirror of the electron, and I think Dirac sort of recanted, but Dirac should have had the courage of his convictions and said, "I predict that there will be two new particles, an antiproton and an anti-electron," which was called the positron, and both of those things turned out to be true.

01:12:39
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, and that's considered a victory for es- the aesthetic of beauty in mathematical physics.

01:12:44
Eric Weinstein: Y- yes, but there was an intermediate-

01:12:46
Garrett Lisi: There was

01:12:46
Eric Weinstein: ... situation in which-

01:12:48
Garrett Lisi: There was

01:12:48
Eric Weinstein: ... the beauty led Dirac astray because he wanted to f- to shoehorn his theory into the preexisting world that was understood.

01:12:58
Garrett Lisi: That's right. So it, it's important to be cautious, but... And careful-

01:13:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:13:02
Garrett Lisi: ... but not too cautious. So if you're, if the mathematics is actually telling you something, you wanna listen to it.

01:13:07
Eric Weinstein: What's the mathematics telling you?

01:13:09
Garrett Lisi: It's telling me that I think I've got the first handle on a geometric description of quantum field theory.

01:13:18
Eric Weinstein: Garrett, I, I say this-

01:13:19
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:13:19
Eric Weinstein: I say this out of love, and I hope not envy.

01:13:23
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:13:23
Eric Weinstein: I'm super concerned that you can see the problems from here, and that- Rather than just going to infinite dimensions and saying that quantum field theory requires, um, a jump from finite to infinite dimensions-

01:13:37
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:13:37
Eric Weinstein: ... you can say, "Look, I, I am fighting the fact that the, the beautiful unification that I found-

01:13:46
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

01:13:46
Eric Weinstein: ... actually is going to be challenged at the quantum level where that beauty becomes my enemy."

01:13:54
Garrett Lisi: I would never put it that way.

01:13:56
Eric Weinstein: I know, because y- what you did is you, you took a theor- I mean, to be honest, there's a different set of objects called the, uh, exceptional isomorphisms, which aren't the 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, uh, spin six, uh, which by an exceptional isomorphism is equivalent to some other object, surprisingly called SU4-

01:14:26
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:14:26
Eric Weinstein: ... and you can take the spinners of spin six and find out that they are just the four-dimensional object from SU4-

01:14:33
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:14:33
Eric Weinstein: ... and smoosh them together, and you get an analog of E8.

01:14:38
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. There, there's-

01:14:39
Eric Weinstein: That is also probably not used by the physical universe in any way that we think of as being important. I d- I don't think that that feature is what you think it is.

01:14:47
Garrett Lisi: Right. But there are a vast world of mathematical possibilities out here, and I think we need more people exploring all of them.

01:14:52
Eric Weinstein: I totally agree with you that we need-

01:14:54
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:14:54
Eric Weinstein: ... more people fanning out and trying things that look like they won't work.

01:14:59
Garrett Lisi: So we need a more exploratory culture.

01:15:00
Eric Weinstein: We need a more exploratory culture.

01:15:02
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:15:02
Eric Weinstein: And we need to be forgiving. What we don't need to do is to fool ourselves when we start getting the sense that maybe this stuff doesn't actually work. I mean, I, it just-

01:15:14
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:15:14
Eric Weinstein: ... it f- it feels to me like I can sort of see what the next set of problems are gonna be, and it would be, I would be remiss if I didn't say them at the beginning.

01:15:23
Garrett Lisi: Sure. But, you know, y- you can't really dig into this stuff until you see the mathematical details of it.

01:15:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, and, and this gets back to an issue of, um, the question of how science should be organized. So we've talked about how difficult it is to do science inside of the institutions because, um, there is such a pressure economically to do whatever's fashionable, to get lots of results, to publish continuously. Um, can we talk a little bit about what happens when, uh, we try to do science outside of the institutions? Both of us have, um, and I think people will be very surprised to hear it, been rather critical of, um, how hard it is to do science when you're not part of the standard community.

01:16:16
Garrett Lisi: Right. I mean, I think in some sense it is essential to say, to stay connected with the scientific community, even when you're exploring out almost entirely on your own. Um, you- one thing that has to happen is you have to have an extreme set of internal checks on your own progress and because it, it, science is extremely frustrating to work on, most of the pathways you follow are end up being dead ends, and it can be really frustrating. So in doing that, um, if you're gonna work outside academia, you also need a extremely strong, uh, support system and a healthy life independent of the science you're working on. So you need to have good support from friends and family, uh, good relationships. Um, y- you need to have confidence in your, uh, ability to support yourself and, and that frees up your time if you're really gonna work on stuff outside of academia on your own. Um, I've been fortunate enough to, to, to build and to, and to have those things. I feel really lucky to be able to do that, and I, I think I've had a, a really good life that way, and, uh, but if, if you're gonna do that, you need to be really careful about it. Because if you, if you, if you just abandon everything else 'cause you have this idea in science that you wanna pursue, and you abandon everything else, you're, you'll, you'll be totally out of balance in your life. And if you hit some frustrating item in, in, in what you're researching, it'll be crushing because the main thing you're working on and focused on stopped working, when really what you wanna be able to do is like, "Oh, I've got other stuff going on th- that's keeping me happy. This thing didn't work out. I just have to wipe the board clean and start fresh." And that's not devastating to do 'cause the rest of your life is good. You have to do that, otherwise you'll, y- you just won't be healthy as a human being.

01:18:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay. And you have created something that you think might be an intermediate between being in total isolation and being hooked up to the community, uh, that lives within its, it, the standard institutional structures.

01:18:24
Garrett Lisi: That's right. That's right. I mean, I've, I came to this idea when I was wandering from friend's house to friend's house. After getting my PhD, I would basically, uh, go hang out with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, and if they had extra space, I, I, I'd spend time in their house while I worked on theoretical physics and enjoyed the local environment. And I thought it was great to be able to do this 'cause you're, you're not worried about, you know, having a roof over your head. Um, you have company to interact with, and you have a good environment to play in. And, uh, I wanted to have a network of such places, but I, I had a hard time getting friends to give me their houses to use for this. So I, I ended up getting the resources together to, to buy a house in Maui and, uh, and to start bringing friends and visiting scientists in, and I've, uh, called this the Pacific Science Institute. And currently, it's basically my house with delusions of grandeur because what I also have is a, is a beautiful piece of property that's, uh, 15 acres that I bought 10 years ago 'cause I like doing things slowly.

01:19:22
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:19:22
Garrett Lisi: So I've been growing the community of the Pacific Science Institute by, by having friends come in and, and stay at my house, including you. And my arch nemesis

01:19:31
Eric Weinstein: I had a, I had a great time-

01:19:32
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:19:32
Eric Weinstein: ... despite the obvious antagonism.

01:19:34
Garrett Lisi: Um, and, and, uh, for you specifically, I tried to kill you in several different ways through [laughs]

01:19:39
Eric Weinstein: Was that what, is that with the millipedes and centipedes-

01:19:41
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:19:41
Eric Weinstein: ... were-

01:19:42
Garrett Lisi: And shark-infested water, yeah

01:19:43
Eric Weinstein: Oh, sure

01:19:43
Garrett Lisi: It was, it was great.

01:19:44
Eric Weinstein: Rough corals.

01:19:45
Garrett Lisi: Um, but, uh, but yeah, basically I have scientists visit, uh, and, uh, take people out to have fun around the island and really enjoy a good environment where, uh, they're free to explore, uh, ideas that might be a little bit on the, the dangerous side to, to work on while they're in the confines of academia and among their normal colleagues. It's a, it's a place where you can explore a little bit wilder ideas. Um, and I'm really excited to grow this community by, uh, by s- by starting to design things to build on the 15 acres I've got that's really in a nice location. So I, I'm, I've been growing things slowly up here, and I'm really looking forward to some more progress with it and, uh, and growing this community. It's, and it's, it's also been a, a nice balance against working on physics directly because it's, it's guaranteed success. I mean, when you, when you have a place in Maui for, for scientists to come hang out and have a good time, that's, that's gonna happen, and also keeps me entertained to have good people coming through.

01:20:41
Eric Weinstein: No, that's fantastic.

01:20:42
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. [laughs]

01:20:43
Eric Weinstein: So it works out for you selfishly. Can you, um, just, I'm curious from your perspective, how do you see, uh, the two of us as being divided in our approaches to the community? I mean, I would definitely say that I, I seem to be more connected to the sensibilities of the elite science community. I know that I can get their noses out of joint, but I'm v- I c- I track them very carefully.

01:21:12
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, you had a lot of fights with those guys.

01:21:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:21:16
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. Whereas I, I didn't. So my, our academic, uh, 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. Um, but, uh, you know, my advisor there in particle physics was Roger Dashon, but he, he passed away while I was a graduate student, and I, I finished up my, my dissertation under, under Henry Barbinal, who also had a background in particle physics, but had changed to nonlinear dynamics. But-

01:21:43
Eric Weinstein: But in some sense, you were a self-advised PhD.

01:21:46
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. So I was very much self-directed. Um, Henry gave me the freedom to go explore whatever the heck I wanted. I, I had an extraordinary, extraordinary amount of freedom as a graduate student, um, and I hit this problem with spinors, and that's what I wanted to tackle. I wanted to figure out what they were geometrically, and no one else was interested in that problem.

01:22:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:22:02
Garrett Lisi: But through academia, I was a straight-A student. You know, I did really well. I never had any big conflicts with anybody else around.

01:22:07
Eric Weinstein: Was it easy for you?

01:22:08
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:22:09
Eric Weinstein: It was?

01:22:09
Garrett Lisi: I spent a lot of time surfing. I was living on the beach in La Jolla. It was beautiful. It was the greatest time of my life.

01:22:14
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:22:14
Garrett Lisi: You know, people talk about, you know, uh, small f- you know, being in a small po- big fish in a small pond and going to a bigger pond, you feel humbled. I never really had that experience. I was a, I, I, I was pretty, pretty close to the top of my class and really happy about it, how everything was going. Everything was great. I got my PhD, but there was no way I was gonna get a job trying to understand the geometry of spinors when everybody else was doing string theory.

01:22:41
Eric Weinstein: So you'd already accepted that you were unemployable?

01:22:43
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, I was totally unemployable. But I invested in Apple stock in the '90s, so I had a few money. So I said, "See you guys. I'm gonna go surf in Maui and work on this stuff on my own." Whereas you had a very different experience. So you were, you were, you were in Harvard in the math department studying mathematical physics, and y- and as far as I know, you were making some really unusual breakthroughs that were very ahead of their time. But you, you weren't welcomed by the, the head of the pe- the head people there. And so you, so you had, you had a, a, a conflict from the get-go.

01:23:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, I had a very, I 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, uh, 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, um, changing the equations and was told that if ... I mean, the exact quote was something like, "If spinors had anything to do with this story, Nigel," who was Nigel Hitchin, "would have told us."

01:24:16
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:24:16
Eric Weinstein: Like, it was just completely-

01:24:18
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:24:19
Eric Weinstein: ... 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, uh, i- 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, um, which later got recognized and completely changed the field, which came through Ed Witten and this guy called Natty Seiberg, uh, both of them now professors at the institute. Um, 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, um, 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. Um, but that, th- you know, wh- when this all, you know, came about, uh, um, late, late '80s, early '90s, uh, there was just no way to, to have a productive conversation about it.

01:25:40
Garrett Lisi: Right, so you found yourself at odds with the, the people you were talking with and, and you decided to go into finance instead? Or how, how'd that happen?

01:25:47
Eric Weinstein: No. I mean, I, I wanted... I was trying to get back to physics, and the... Uh, you know, I was proposing... I had proposed three sets of equations, um, one of which it turned out to have been done by somebody else in some place that I didn't know anything about, one of which later, um, gets done by, uh, Seiberg and Witten, and then another set of equations that, um, I wanted to connect to the actual standard model. And the c- the department was just very concerned that th- 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 Sidney Coleman, who was a great quantum theorist, and he was much more encouraging-

01:26:46
Garrett Lisi: Mm

01:26:46
Eric Weinstein: ... than the Harvard math department.

01:26:47
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, Sidney Coleman's a, was a great guy.

01:26:49
Eric Weinstein: I mean, an unbelievable human being. I had two memories of him, one of which was that, uh, 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.

01:27:03
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:27:04
Eric Weinstein: And I, I, I unearthed old footage of him. He, he gave this brilliant lecture called Quantum Mechanics In Your Face to try to make the quantum... Have you ever seen this thing?

01:27:13
Garrett Lisi: I've n-

01:27:13
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's a work of art. You'd love it. Um, and it turns out both of these things were really true about him, that he, he had... If, 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.

01:27:32
Garrett Lisi: No, I mean, one of the marks of a, of a good scientist is humility.

01:27:38
Eric Weinstein: Ye- no.

01:27:40
Garrett Lisi: No.

01:27:40
Eric Weinstein: One of the marks of a good scientist-

01:27:42
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:27:42
Eric Weinstein: ... is a, is a dialectic between arrogance and humility.

01:27:45
Garrett Lisi: All right.

01:27:45
Eric Weinstein: If you don't have-

01:27:46
Garrett Lisi: But that's a more subtle and accurate way of putting it, yeah.

01:27:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, I just... I, I, I, I worry about us extolling the virtues of the humble, the meek-

01:27:53
Garrett Lisi: Right

01:27:53
Eric Weinstein: ... the self-effacing, and it's just like, that's not where the magic happens.

01:27:57
Garrett Lisi: But you have to-

01:27:57
Eric Weinstein: The magic happens in the tension

01:27:57
Garrett Lisi: ... you have to have had the arrogance to tackle hard problems-

01:28:00
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:28:01
Garrett Lisi: ... and made some progress, but then been kicked back by something-

01:28:05
Eric Weinstein: Sure

01:28:05
Garrett Lisi: ... that didn't work right.

01:28:06
Eric Weinstein: And I agree.

01:28:06
Garrett Lisi: And after enough of that, you develop some humility, but you still have to maintain the arrogance to get anywhere.

01:28:11
Eric Weinstein: So how do you feel currently about, about the community? Like, the professional community, you have to know that they regard you-

01:28:21
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:28:22
Eric Weinstein: ... w- with very, I, I mean-

01:28:25
Garrett Lisi: Well, I, I know what's going on. I mean, they're, the, I, I got a lot of contempt from string theorists-

01:28:30
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:28:30
Garrett Lisi: ... for getting, for getting attention, for putting forward a mathematical model of reality that wasn't strings. And it, and it wasn't complete. It wa- it, it had... It was a model that was proposed that had problems with it, and I was forthcoming with the problems in it, but, uh, I was still saying, "Yeah, this is, this seems like it's making progress towards a description of reality, and it has nothing to do with strings." And that set alarm bells off all over the place. It set off alarm bells for either it's a threat or this guy's a complete crackpot, which is more likely. And, and I got criticisms from bo- for both.

01:29:04
Eric Weinstein: I don't think... If I were to steel man their perspective, and again, uh, y- you know that I don't share it, and I'm willing to fight them, and I, as, as I did when, um, you first encountered, uh, w- what I called their immune system in a, in a gentleman known as Jacques Distler.

01:29:22
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:29:24
Eric Weinstein: Right? 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 quantum field theory.

01:29:44
Garrett Lisi: Mm.

01:29:44
Eric Weinstein: 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, I'm convinced that it was a way of evading the real problems in physics. It gave them something to do. It's like, like war games for general-

01:30:08
Garrett Lisi: It's a, it's an amazing toolkit

01:30:09
Eric Weinstein: ... for the period of peace. Well-

01:30:10
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:30:11
Eric Weinstein: ... it gives you something to do to keep your chops up that is different from the thing you're supposed to be doing.

01:30:16
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:30:17
Eric Weinstein: And what they were objecting to is to say, "This guy doesn't understand all the things that have to g- go right in order to do an impr- may have an improvement on the theory."

01:30:30
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm.

01:30:30
Eric Weinstein: "From our perspective, how dare he, um, blithely saunter forth? If we ignored all the constraints on us, uh, we could have fun proposing all sorts of things that also won't work." That was really the responsible version of their critique. Now, the irresponsible version of their critique is, "Hey, we have something that isn't working very well. How dare he take something that isn't working very well and get attention-"

01:30:57
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] Right

01:30:58
Eric Weinstein: "... b- a- a- and maybe funding or maybe destroy the sense that there's only one game in town?"

01:31:03
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:31:04
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, w- 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 wanna be demotivated from the get-go."

01:31:22
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:31:22
Eric Weinstein: "So please don't immediately tell me all the 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."

01:31:31
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:31:31
Eric Weinstein: So that's what I wanted to hear from you.

01:31:33
Garrett Lisi: Right. I believe I said those things scattered over several interviews at the time.

01:31:37
Eric Weinstein: Somewhat, but I think that, uh, I, I think that what they don't intuit is that you understand w- how, how significant the negative results are The no-go theorems, as they're called, are pretty profound.

01:31:52
Garrett Lisi: Right. They, I mean, they, there's a theorem called the Coleman-Mandula theorem that prohibits the unification of gravity with the other forces, and I just blew right through that because it didn't seem to apply in, in what I was doing.

01:32:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, it, I mean, really, it, it, it prohibits naive unification of matter and force, and there's a way of evading it using this thing called supersymmetry.

01:32:15
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:32:16
Eric Weinstein: And supersymmetry is this very weird thing that doesn't have that much mathematical beauty behind it, so the mathematicians know about it and they study it a little bit, but they're not bananas over it.

01:32:29
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. I'm not either. [laughs]

01:32:31
Eric Weinstein: The, the natural world doesn't seem to use it in the expected way-

01:32:35
Garrett Lisi: No

01:32:35
Eric Weinstein: ... but it does so much for theoretical physics that despite the fact that math is just kind of ho-hum on it and that the natural world doesn't seem to be using it, it doesn't stop the theoretical, uh, physics community from embracing that because it evades this dreaded no-go theorem.

01:32:54
Garrett Lisi: Right. It stopped me from em- uh, from embracing it. I never embraced supersymmetry. I never, I never liked it.

01:33:00
Eric Weinstein: But you didn't evade the problem with it either. I mean, in other words-

01:33:04
Garrett Lisi: No, I, I-

01:33:04
Eric Weinstein: You, the, the pro-

01:33:04
Garrett Lisi: ... I got around it

01:33:06
Eric Weinstein: ... you think you really got around it?

01:33:07
Garrett Lisi: The Coleman-Mandula theorem, yeah. It, it requires as one of its axioms that you have to have, you know, cer- y- it talks about properties of the scattering of, of particles, and you have to have a spacetime over which the scattering occurs. In, in the theory I put forward, the spacetime comes out after the symmetry breaking between gravity and, and forces. So it's only after the symmetry breaking happens when the unification is no longer there-

01:33:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I'm sure you have-

01:33:29
Garrett Lisi: ... that you have spacetime-

01:33:30
Eric Weinstein: I don't-

01:33:30
Garrett Lisi: ... and then in that context, the theorem applies

01:33:33
Eric Weinstein: ... my, my guess-

01:33:33
Garrett Lisi: But before that breaking, it doesn't apply

01:33:34
Eric Weinstein: ... well, but my guess is, and, and I could be wrong about this 'cause I haven't studied exactly what you're talking about, that what's gonna happen is that e- even with how you, you claim this arises in your theory, they're gonna say in whatever approximation is going to be applied to relatively flat spacetimes close to Minkowski space-

01:33:52
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:33:52
Eric Weinstein: ... that y- if you've really evaded it in some super meaningful way, you should be able to tell us some theorem about s- good old, uh, quantum field theory and relatively flat spacetime.

01:34:06
Garrett Lisi: Right. Well, I mean, it, it evades it by not satisfying the axioms of the theorem.

01:34:12
Eric Weinstein: You, do you know what I'm trying to get at?

01:34:15
Garrett Lisi: Um, it's not evading it in some-

01:34:18
Eric Weinstein: You should be able to tell us-

01:34:19
Garrett Lisi: ... fantastic way

01:34:20
Eric Weinstein: ... something really new if you've in, y- if your underlying theory-

01:34:26
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

01:34:27
Eric Weinstein: ... truly unifies force and matter.

01:34:29
Garrett Lisi: Right.

01:34:31
Eric Weinstein: It would be the case that the approximation of it that is found in ordinary regions that look close to flat, right, where quantum-

01:34:42
Garrett Lisi: Mm-hmm

01:34:42
Eric Weinstein: ... the usual rules of quantum field theory apply. It, it, it should be telling us something wildly new about that. Can you tell us a new theorem about how it would appear to unify force and matter in a region that looks close to classical quantum field theory? To, to, to standard quantum field theory?

01:35:02
Garrett Lisi: Well, I mean, once the theory's advanced to the stage where it can get to that description-

01:35:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:35:06
Garrett Lisi: ... then that would happen. But in the initial stages, all you can see for certain is that it's not violating the theorem.

01:35:13
Eric Weinstein: I don't know enough about-

01:35:14
Garrett Lisi: All right

01:35:15
Eric Weinstein: ... how, how it goes.

01:35:15
Garrett Lisi: We, we, we can talk about it after this-

01:35:17
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:35:17
Garrett Lisi: ... if you like.

01:35:17
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

01:35:18
Garrett Lisi: But, uh, but anyway-

01:35:20
Eric Weinstein: But yeah, so-

01:35:20
Garrett Lisi: ... I hit a number of these things

01:35:21
Eric Weinstein: ... so, so those were my, I had these wishes for you, and then I had a, the wishes for th- the community, which is that they would stop being pricks about the whole thing and that they would say, "Look, we can't keep telling everybody who's not a string theory th- string theorist that their theory is dead on arrival," and keep saying, "While we know that our theory, uh, doesn't appear to be living in four dimensions and appears to have a bunch of stuff that we don't want and not necessarily all the stuff that we do want, and maybe there's a huge landscape of different theories that would-

01:35:54
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. At, at this point, I don't think string theory is living at all. I think it's an ex-theory. I think it's pining for the fjords. I think it's, [laughs] it's, it's, I've seen nothing but decline since I left this train wreck of a discipline.

01:36:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing, is it refuses to take stock of itself, and it took a lot more minds than one-

01:36:10
Garrett Lisi: I, I think that's happening.

01:36:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:36:12
Garrett Lisi: Uh, certainly the graduate students who are, who are coming up are, are seeing what's going on with string theory and, and they're taking stock of the field, and they're going another direction.

01:36:20
Eric Weinstein: So where, w- where do we go next? Like-

01:36:23
Garrett Lisi: Well-

01:36:24
Eric Weinstein: Is there any way... I mean, I actually view it as highly demotivating that a, in essence, every new theory is dead on arrival because of the am- number of things. I mean, th- can we agree that physics has gotten incredibly difficult?

01:36:37
Garrett Lisi: It has. We have, it's, it's difficult by virtue of being so successful. I mean, th- there's, the-

01:36:44
Eric Weinstein: But you can smell that we're almost at the end-

01:36:46
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:36:46
Eric Weinstein: ... at least of this chapter, and we've exhausted everything that we know that has worked previously, which is like-

01:36:53
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:36:53
Eric Weinstein: ... to vary the assumptions a little bit on, on every... And, and that's been spectacularly successful, and now it doesn't work anymore, and it hasn't worked for almost 50 years.

01:37:02
Garrett Lisi: Right. It's, it's incredibly frustrating, and 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, are going into machine learning or even biophysics or, or just into other fields-

01:37:15
Eric Weinstein: And you're okay with this?

01:37:15
Garrett Lisi: ... or, or even condensed matter.

01:37:17
Eric Weinstein: How do you feel about that?

01:37:19
Garrett Lisi: Um, I feel like I'm out on an island in the middle of the Pacific watching it from a, unfold from afar while I work on the puzzle myself in my own different way.

01:37:28
Eric Weinstein: You're having fun?

01:37:29
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:37:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:37:29
Garrett Lisi: Fun, that's, that's my prime directive is have fun.

01:37:32
Eric Weinstein: Is to have fun.

01:37:32
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:37:33
Eric Weinstein: And do you think that inducing other people to do this is kind of, like maybe the big programs fall apart and we start just becoming individuals trying crazy strategies that probably won't work?

01:37:44
Garrett Lisi: Yeah, I mean, there are, there are undergraduate textbooks and undergraduate courses on string theory.

01:37:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:37:49
Garrett Lisi: Okay? And people from undergraduates, there, and, and, and there's this culture of arrogance saying this, string theory is the pinnacle- Of physics.

01:37:58
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:37:59
Garrett Lisi: And, and people are coming up to that, and they're becoming... And if, 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-

01:38:10
Eric Weinstein: Sure

01:38:11
Garrett Lisi: ... that it just takes an enormous amount of in- intellectual effort to consume it and to get up to speed on to what the current status is of the field. And by the time you're there, you're so invested that of course what you wanna do is go and continue a postdoc in string theory when you graduate. And there, there are hundreds of students who are coming up this way, and when they get there, they go to hep like I did this morning, and they look at the job-

01:38:36
Eric Weinstein: Hep being the high energy-

01:38:38
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:38:38
Eric Weinstein: ... physics theory section where, of, of this thing called the archive, where all the new papers are, are found every day.

01:38:45
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. And, and, and the, this high energy physics archive also has a, a postdoc and job posting board. And just, just for giggles, I went and say, "Okay, well, how many opportunities does a rising string theorist have now?" And I went and looked and, and there are all these subfields of physics. The condensed matter is a big party 'cause it's so incredibly vibrant and-

01:39:06
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:39:06
Garrett Lisi: ... and productive right now. And you go into high energy theory and okay, there are 30 positions open in North America. Okay. All right. And some of them are open to string theorists, but out of those 30 positions, you go, how many of them actually actively want a string theorist and are looking for a string theorist? There's one. One, Eric. So you have these hundreds of people groomed up saying string theory is the pinnacle of what you can be studying, and there's nowhere for them to go.

01:39:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, but this was a-

01:39:32
Garrett Lisi: Because the field is dying.

01:39:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, because it was a baby boomer phenomenon. We, we treated it as if it was an intellectual phenomenon, but it was actually this weird generational phenomenon that this took hold, um, you know, there's this very weird feature of 1951 where 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.

01:39:57
Garrett Lisi: He is an amazing guy though. He's... Yeah.

01:40:00
Eric Weinstein: And then Witten, born later that year, probably more powerful than anyone else alive in terms of his mental abilities, hasn't had a trip to Stockholm because he hasn't been able to make contact with the physical world.

01:40:13
Garrett Lisi: Yeah.

01:40:13
Eric Weinstein: And almost certainly in any era that wasn't this one, this guy would've been to Stockholm once or more.

01:40:21
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. And it, it, it's a, in my mind, it's a cultural problem. We're stuck in this culture of particle physics, where you have everybody in the same community studying the same popular direction in full force as if there was lots of data coming in supporting that, and there's not. So what it is is they're going full bore, full self-supporting force along direction that in my mind just doesn't describe our universe. And what we need is an exploratory phase with physicist, with graduate students coming up and picking up stuff that they think is interesting and following that direction on their own, branching away from the main herd. And by having more explorers going different directions, you're, you're more likely to find something good. And I guess my hope is that, you know, some graduate student will have listened through this incredibly long and detailed podcast and go look at stuff and say, "Well, that's kind of interesting. Maybe I wanna learn more about that."

01:41:09
Eric Weinstein: Do you have any ideas, so the Pacific Science Institute, is, is there any way that our, our listeners can support it?

01:41:15
Garrett Lisi: Um, yeah.

01:41:16
Eric Weinstein: Are you a, are you a nonprofit or?

01:41:18
Garrett Lisi: I'm a 501 [c] [3] nonprofit. I'd be very happy to take donations and put those donations to use supporting scientists-

01:41:24
Eric Weinstein: To diversify-

01:41:26
Garrett Lisi: ... of all stripes.

01:41:26
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:41:27
Garrett Lisi: And, and these aren't just phys- it's not just supporting physicists. Um, the idea is that, as you said, science has supported our economy, uh, to incredible degree, and I don't think scientists have been sufficiently personally rewarded for that. So basically what I wanna do is, you know, give them a nice place to hang out in Maui, e- enjoy the environment, and work and think on whatever they want undirected while they do it. I, I-

01:41:48
Eric Weinstein: So it's a place to fight groupthink effectively-

01:41:50
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:41:50
Eric Weinstein: ... within the field.

01:41:51
Garrett Lisi: While still having community support.

01:41:53
Eric Weinstein: While still having c- community support.

01:41:55
Garrett Lisi: The, the problem is I have very limited resources right now. I'm basically running this out of my house.

01:41:58
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:41:59
Garrett Lisi: I have a big piece of land. I have dreams for what I want to build on it.

01:42:01
Eric Weinstein: No, you, and, and-

01:42:01
Garrett Lisi: But I don't have the money to do it

01:42:02
Eric Weinstein: ... I've been there and it's, it's incredibly generous that people can hang out and just actually fulfill the promise of dreaming about our world and trying things that they wouldn't feel comfortable trying, uh, under the watchful eyes of a departmental chairman who's telling them what they need-

01:42:16
Garrett Lisi: That's right

01:42:16
Eric Weinstein: ... to do to get chair, t- tenure or, or to win grants. Uh, do you have any sense of what we should be directing people to do if they're in a position to change the culture of the field? I always want to think like we still have a few old great people that everybody looks up to, and they refuse to say something really provocative. Like, here's the thing that I dream about. We get all of the negative results. They're incredibly demotivating. Allow your young people to violate several of them without being string theorists, and then insist that they try to pay that back once they've been exploring a theory that in a previous era would've been dead on arrival. Because somewhere we have to go backwards to go forwards. We have to question something-

01:43:08
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:43:08
Eric Weinstein: ... that is rock solid in all of our minds, but isn't actually right. Don't, I mean-

01:43:13
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. This is totally right. And, and this sort of cultural inertia that's holding things back is, it, it's in biology, it's in computer science, it's in, it's in all fields of science. So I, I would say just, I mean, it's almost the best thing to do just to find people who are really fricking smart and wanna work on stuff on their own, give them money and support, and let them do it.

01:43:29
Eric Weinstein: Unless... Well, this is the-

01:43:31
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:43:31
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I'm on record as saying that we have too much oversight, too much transparency, and too much accountability. It's strangling us.

01:43:39
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. It's absolutely true. It's absolutely true.

01:43:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, Garrett, I really appreciate you sitting down. It's a hell of an experiment to just even try to have conversations about, you know, what might be, uh, the path towards final theories of everything.

01:43:53
Garrett Lisi: And, and I'm actually really worried that we hurt most of your listeners.

01:43:55
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:43:56
Garrett Lisi: [laughs] But I'll, I'll-

01:43:56
Eric Weinstein: ... do that

01:43:57
Garrett Lisi: ... if we use this at all, I'll try to say something at the beginning of the program to try to say what it is that people are listening to, so they'll have an idea. They're not just gonna stumble in on a podcast and hear people talking about bosons, fermions, E8 quantization, and have no idea what's going on. The fact is, very few people are invested in this like this, but this is the fabric of reality ultimately and a, a question about how we go about, uh, trying to probe whatever's next.

01:44:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:44:26
Garrett Lisi: I think it's amazing. I think it's the most significant and intricate and difficult puzzle there is right now for anybody to tackle and to immerse themself in, and I also think it's potentially incredibly rewarding, but it's also one of the hardest things you can do.

01:44:41
Eric Weinstein: It's a-

01:44:42
Garrett Lisi: Yeah

01:44:42
Eric Weinstein: ... probably the hardest thing, and it's never been harder.

01:44:44
Garrett Lisi: Yeah. It's almost as hard as learning to surf.

01:44:46
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Okay. Well-

01:44:49
Garrett Lisi: [laughs]

01:44:49
Eric Weinstein: ... 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, uh, if you're interested in the Pacific Science Institute, it's Garrett's attempt to try to figure out how to move science outside of the direct institutional control. Uh, you can find him on Instagram, I think is garrett.lisi, and on Twitter as-

01:45:11
Garrett Lisi: Garrett Lisi

01:45:11
Eric Weinstein: ... Garrett Lisi.

01:45:12
Garrett Lisi: Not, not hard to find.

01:45:13
Eric Weinstein: All right. Thanks for joining us.

01:45:15
Garrett Lisi: Thank you, Eric.

01:45:16
Eric Weinstein: All right. Be well. [outro music]