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

[02:13:25] So, thanks for watching that video. What I thought I would do since that was the first time I'd really presented the theory at all in public and I had gotten somewhat turned around on my trip to England and trying, probably stupidly, to do last-minute corrections got me a bit confused in a few places, and I wrote some things on the board I probably shouldn't have.

[02:13:48] I thought I would try a partial explainer for technically-oriented people so that they're not mystified by the video. And any errors here or my own and I'm known to make many. So, hopefully they won't be too serious, but we'll find out. So this is a supplementary explainer for the Geometric Unity talk at Oxford that you just saw.

[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.

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[02:14:36] 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 M.C. 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. 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.

[02:15:32] And I find that there really aren't any candidate Theories of Everything or Unified Field Theories that I can find that plausibly give us an idea of how a canvas would will an entire universe into being. And, so that really to me is the conceptual problem that I think bedevils this, and makes the step quite a bit more difficult than some of the previous technical steps.

 

[02:16:00] If you ask for antecedents, however, there is one that, at least within physics, is relatively famous, and that is by [[John Archibald Wheeler]]. And it is a picture, in some sense, of the universe contemplating itself. And so this idea that somehow the universe would contemplate itself into existence, maybe the letter U is in some sense analogous to the paper, and somehow the eye rather than the hand is drawn across to look at a different part of the of the U. And whether or not that has meaning is intrinsically always a question. People are animated by it, but I don't know that people have actually worked on it. The quote of Einstein's, I think that really speaks to me often the most and maybe even was my thesis problem was he asked whether the creator had any choice in how the universe was constructed.