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15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself: Difference between revisions
15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself (edit)
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L - I hope not | L - I hope not | ||
W - but no it's quite possible and what we've done is we've done a series of interviews to begin the podcast to just establish that we can have conversations that people want to tune into and get great guests in that chair where people may not have even heard of the person before but hopefully walk away feeling enriched. However that's not really the point of the podcast. The point of the podcast is to explore new territory intellectually and it may be an academic level outside of traditional channels and it has to do in part with my belief that we don't really understand how much idea suppression has been going on for a very long period of time within the standard institutions. In fact I've I've created this thing I've called the DISC - the distributed ideas suppression complex - and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and up end and disrupt previous structures. So for example I would claim that [ | W - but no it's quite possible and what we've done is we've done a series of interviews to begin the podcast to just establish that we can have conversations that people want to tune into and get great guests in that chair where people may not have even heard of the person before but hopefully walk away feeling enriched. However that's not really the point of the podcast. The point of the podcast is to explore new territory intellectually and it may be an academic level outside of traditional channels and it has to do in part with my belief that we don't really understand how much idea suppression has been going on for a very long period of time within the standard institutions. In fact I've I've created this thing I've called the DISC - the distributed ideas suppression complex - and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and up end and disrupt previous structures. So for example I would claim that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory String Theory] which has absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what 1984 | ||
L - yeah since about then | L - yeah since about then | ||
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W - hahaha okay | W - hahaha okay | ||
L - so they're so they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire you know moving moving things along as part of a community whereas general relativity the people from the Einstein community were more exploring different possibilities at their own pace and there is more of an exploratory culture and that's the culture that turned into [ | L - so they're so they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire you know moving moving things along as part of a community whereas general relativity the people from the Einstein community were more exploring different possibilities at their own pace and there is more of an exploratory culture and that's the culture that turned into [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity Loop Quantum Gravity] so that | ||
W - so first of all I'm just gonna I'm gonna begin arguing with you there to me yeah the issue was is that Einstein put much more of the general relativistic picture in place, so there was less to do for the descendants of Einstein and because the quantum was considerably less tied up there was much more work and so through a system of selective pressures the more successful community in some sense left fewer descendants and they were less capable because it was less for them to do and then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between theory and experiment | W - so first of all I'm just gonna I'm gonna begin arguing with you there to me yeah the issue was is that Einstein put much more of the general relativistic picture in place, so there was less to do for the descendants of Einstein and because the quantum was considerably less tied up there was much more work and so through a system of selective pressures the more successful community in some sense left fewer descendants and they were less capable because it was less for them to do and then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between theory and experiment | ||
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W - okay | W - okay | ||
L - and and but what happened was that when they when you think about it as a whole - that gravity has to be quantized. So there are two ways of getting there - you can either start from Bohr's children and and quantum field theory and try to get from there to a quantum theory that encompasses gravity or you can start from the gravitational side in | L - and and but what happened was that when they when you think about it as a whole - that gravity has to be quantized. So there are two ways of getting there - you can either start from Bohr's children and and quantum field theory and try to get from there to a quantum theory that encompasses gravity or you can start from the gravitational side in geometry and try to somehow get [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics quantum mechanics] to play nice with this essentially classical geometric theory and there were two very different approaches and two very different cultures | ||
W - I still have some disagreements but I don't think I necessarily want to to derail us so all right so | W - I still have some disagreements but I don't think I necessarily want to to derail us so all right so | ||
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L - well it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon | L - well it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon | ||
W - I think something's still different happened I think that [ | W - I think something's still different happened I think that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten Ed Witten] showed up and that there was one human being | ||
L - Right, he's his own anomaly he wasn't | L - Right, he's his own anomaly he wasn't | ||
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W - and I by the way share your intuition then in a certain sense this is the best and most interesting place to play in part 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 (L - yeah) about what to care about within it's as if you let it loose in the mathematical jewelry store in it it selects only the finest pieces | W - and I by the way share your intuition then in a certain sense this is the best and most interesting place to play in part 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 (L - yeah) about what to care about within it's as if you let it loose in the mathematical jewelry store in it it selects only the finest pieces | ||
L - yeah yeah and we have to wonder if that's you know is that just our human take on it because our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world in the universe so, is it that I mean | L - yeah yeah and we have to wonder if that's you know is that just our human take on it because our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world in the universe so, is it that I mean Douglas Adams described the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle anthropic principle] as a puddle of water right and thinking it's like wow this "this this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my shape alright isn't it wonderful how it just fits me so perfectly and it's so comfortable here just like it was made for me". Well, it's like, no the puddle got there and filled the shape of the the hole I mean the water got there and filled that shape and as humans we ended up here and we filled this niche and our aesthetic taste was shaped by what's around us including the the mathematics that underlies the physics of this universe and so when we look at the universe you might say "oh no maybe it's just our tastes evolved within this universe, so this is why we find physics aesthetically pleasing" | ||
W - do you actually believe what you're saying right now | W - do you actually believe what you're saying right now | ||
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!!Spinors | !!Spinors | ||
W - the thing that has affected both both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called [ | W - the thing that has affected both both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor spinors] at the core of our understanding of matter do you want to say a little bit about what that is Wyatt you think it's affected you and and and me as well and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional and intellectual impact on the community | ||
L - right I mean when you're... basically when physicists more or less completed that what's called the standard model of particle physics, right, you have you have the the known forces in physics like the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the strong force as well as the force of gravity and then you have the the matter particles which are [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron electrons] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark quarks] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino neutrinos] and and other generations of these that form you know what are called the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion fermions] okay and these are called the matter particles and then they have mass because of the interaction with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson Higgs boson] right which is sort of... | L - right I mean when you're... basically when physicists more or less completed that what's called the standard model of particle physics, right, you have you have the the known forces in physics like the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the strong force as well as the force of gravity and then you have the the matter particles which are [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron electrons] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark quarks] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino neutrinos] and and other generations of these that form you know what are called the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion fermions] okay and these are called the matter particles and then they have mass because of the interaction with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson Higgs boson] right which is sort of... | ||