A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look: Difference between revisions

<p>[02:14:15] First of all, I think the most important thing to begin with is to ask what new hard problems arise when you're trying to think about a fundamental theory that aren't found in any earlier theory. Now every time you have an effective theory, which is a partial theory, there is always the idea that you can have recourse to a lower level strata.

  So you don't have to explain, in some sense, everything coming from very little or nothing. I think that the really difficult issue that people don't talk enough about. Is the problem of the fire that lights itself. And I think this was beautifully demonstrated by MC Escher in his famous lithograph, Drawing Hands where he takes the idea of the canvas or the paper as a given, but somehow he imagined that the canvas could will into existence the ink needed to draw the hands that move the pen that draw the hands. Um. That concept is actually the super tricky part, in my opinion, about going from effective theories to any attempt at a fundamental theory. So with that said, what I want to think about is what antecedents does this concept have in physics.