Geometric Unity: 40 Years in the Making | Eric Weinstein

Why are you nervous? I... You're formidable. Sean Carroll doesn't make me as nervous as you do. And he's hostile and you're not. You've arrived. I'm nervous for the right reasons, because we're actually going to have a conversation... Aand I never have a conversation. What is a core idea of geometric unity that if people knew more about it, it would get them as excited about GU as you are? That despite the fact, I mean, it's a great question, first of all. I believe it is the only claim of a theory that starts from essentially as close

to nothing as you can in mathematics to try to derive everything we see. And because we see a world that is complex and baroque, like the standard model in general relativity, that process of development and unfolding has to be fairly lengthy, just the way human development from a single fertilized egg is. And I think that what gets lost, and I think what you did beautifully, is to show that just because something has a simple starting point doesn't mean that the theory Remains simple. This concept of writing something down on a napkin that represents the entire

world skips many steps of what you're really trying to do is to understand where you are, who you are. And I think the fact that it starts basically from four degrees of freedom and a tiny amount of sectoral information, like which spin structure is active and how many temporal dimensions do you want? That's it. That's really the only starting point for geometric unity. And the only comparable claims that I know of would be Garrett Lisi saying, let's start from the most complicated, simple Lie group possible. Peter Woit saying, let's start from SU4 and we'll quotient

out by SU(3) cross U(1) to get the electrostrong group, and then we'll try to figure out how to get an SU(2) from a Wick rotation inside of a projective space. Or Stephen Wolfram saying, maybe this all comes out of a very simple cellular rule. And I don't think that any of those have actually gotten to the point where they can make the claim that that's a logical train of development. So to me, that would be one way of answering the question. Another way of answering it is how much do you Care about the actual particles

of matter that make up everything? Like, do you care about the up quark, down quark, electron, tau particle? Do you care about the symmetries of nature? Where is this crazy SU(3) cross SU(2) cross U(1) coming from? Why are the three generations, why is this chiral and therefore asymmetric, left-handed, right-handed, or different? And I guess one of the things I'm astounded by is the way that those questions when I was 17 were on the lips of every theoretical physicist. And through whatever process we went through starting in 83, 84, those questions got relegated to not particularly

interesting or relevant questions, which I think if you told me that you could get physicists to stop worrying about three generations, the famous who ordered that problem in Isidore Rabi, I wouldn't have believed you. So two notes. Number one, you contacted me 48 hours ago and said you were coming to Toronto. I normally prepare for a podcast weeks in advance mentally, and then also just studying like psychologically and then studying. So this is a teaser podcast, which somewhat assumes people have watched some Of the geometric unity iceberg so that we can go into some depth.

As for greater depth, that will be in the non-teaser, which will be, I don't know how long from now, but it's upcoming. And I'll, I'll come back to Toronto for it because I'm, I can't tell you how much that has impacted me. Like for the first time, I'm having a real conversation about a real thing with another human being that I've spent my entire life talking about to myself. I'm in myself alone. The second note is that that first question about what is the greatest idea about geometric unity or some core idea that would be

impressive. I think it comes from Richard Behiel. If I'm pronouncing his last name correctly, he has a fantastic YouTube channel. I'll place it on screen. He's the one who did the Higgs particle video recently and did a spinor video recently. So plenty of this will be me also reiterating what you're saying so that I can ensure that I can ensure that I'm following along. And I'll try to make sure you get your act back like TCP, IP. Okay. Let's see. How would you summarize GU simply? Okay. Now let me, let me put a caveat to

that. Yeah. Again, on Screen, I'll put a link to this video where I talk about the perils of explain like I'm five else you don't understand it. I have a video where I say there are three factors here, much like there's cost, speed, and quality in the business world. Very often there's a, There's a trade off. Any, many things, whether it's human relations or pedagogy or business or whatever it's, here's three things that you feel are essential. Choose any two. Sure. Exactly. So I think for teaching, Yeah. It's succinctness, accuracy, and simplicity. So if you

want something that's simple and accurate, it's going to take quite some time. So that's say an algebraic geometry textbook. It's actually quite simple because it starts from something rudimentary, but it takes a semester to go through. Right. If you want something that's accurate, but succinct, you sacrifice simplicity and that's what, sorry. Yes. Accurate, but succinct. You sacrifice simplicity. Yes. So let's say, what is the standard models gauge group? So you can say it's SU three across blah, blah, blah. Then you can say it's modded out by Z six, super succinct. It's not quite simple. So

anyhow, I'm asking you to sacrifice some accuracy now. Okay. Oh really? Cause that would be great. To tell GU in a simple and succinct manner, a life begins as a four manifold, which begets, I've already failed. So someone said that in my explain, like I'm five videos for geometric unity. I use the word engendered and they're like, what five-year-old knows the word engendered? So let alone manifold. Now we're not aiming at the five-year-old. Okay. Here's the, here's the thing. Most people, why do they care about fundamental physics? Because it's existence. You're here in this miracle

place. You don't know what you are. You don't know where this is and you want to know like God's thoughts. And that's the thing where, when we talk about a crisis in physics or whatever, and people say, well, what about condensed matter? Well, that's not the part that scratches the philosophical itch of who am I? Where am I? What is this? I want to know before it's all over. Right? So the key thing is we are waves in a medium. The medium is called a bundle. It's a very strange thing that you are a wave

and nobody told you what the name of the Medium is. You'll have an entire, you're an entire conversation about the ether. And like the bundle is probably the right concept of the ether. You know, and instead for some reason, they stopped minting new words after ether. So we're still discussing the ether and we're not discussing bundles. So if you're a wave in a medium, the universe is a newspaper story. You want to know where and when, who and what, how and why, where is space? When is time put the two of them together? You have

space time. Then there's the who and what? Those are the bosons and fermions that make up the matter in the case of the fermions and the force and the other fields in the case of the bosons. So you have matter acting on force and force redirecting matter, whichever way they're interacting. And then how and why is what we would call the equations in the Lagrangian. And so that's a pretty good idea about how to remember how a physicist thinks about reality at the deepest level. Tell me where it's going on. Tell me what the equipment

and the players is, are, and tell me what the rules are and what the consequences are. So basically geometric unity Says that we have this wrong, not wildly wrong in the sense of I can't connect it. It's very connected to what I'm claiming and what Einstein was claiming or what the authors of the standard model are claiming, but the first thing is that the arena is not space time. It's a different kind of a gadget called a bundle. And one thing you can think about it is that there's sort of two spaces in a bundle,

not one space. And that gives you a little bit of an opportunity to say, maybe if you, if you're going to sacrifice accuracy, let's go for it. The quantum is happening on a 14 manifold and the classical is happening on a four manifold and they're not on the same space, they're not native to the same space. So a lot of the attempt to say that you have to quantize gravity or which slit, which slit does the photon or electron go through in the double slit experiment, all these things come from the fact that you're trying

to answer a non-space time question in a construct called space time that because Einstein sort of wrote down the rules around 1913 through 1917, sometimes with Grossman, sometimes in rivalry with Hilbert, that story has confused us, it's Like having a Mercator projection of the world on your, on your wall and starting to think, well, that is the world. No, it's a distortion. Einstein distorted the world for his time and geometric unity is ultimately, if you want to not look at the map and you want to look at the territory, you have to keep putting in

a new map until finally, in the end, reality is its own exegesis. There's no tool to look at it. So geometric unity says you're not living on one space. You're living on a relationship between two spaces. And in that relationship, you've put the quantum on one space, the classical on another, which decreases the amount of conflict between them. It also says, for example, that the classical world is by far the more important of the two worlds than the, than the quantum. How does it say that? So look, I want to riff with you differently than

I can riff with anyone else is I'm in the rare position where I'm talking to the only person who has actually talked about one of the great revolutions of our time that actually happened when you, when you did that show with Eva Miranda on geometric quantization, you took one of the three Great developments in physics after the standard model, and you made it publicly accessible with a professor Miranda. So what is the situation? Isn't it amazing? We had a revolution called geometric quantization and there's no trace of it. Yeah. In the pop, the public doesn't

know, but for your channel that it exists. And if you wanted to say it in a really funny way, it's that Hamiltonian dynamics, one way of their two ways of basically figuring out the consequence of a rule. If you use the Hamiltonian formalism itself quantizes, there's a thing called a symplectic form that generates how the world develops and what we didn't realize is it comes from something else. It's the curvature of the world. And what we didn't realize is it comes from something else. It's the curvature tensor of a connection on a bundle over something

called phase space. So we have this concept of phase space to figure out how classical physics develops. And classical phase space births and bootstraps its own medium for quantum waves. So once you, once you know that, and it's not perfect, but just we're sacrificing a Little bit of accuracy to say something like dramatic, meaningful, and punchy. If I tell you the classical theory, you have to figure out the consequences of it quantum mechanically, but the quantum fetish that you see is kind of weird and wild. Yes, there are systems that don't appear to be the

quantization of any classical structure, but the standard model is a classical theory that then gets quantized. And it, in some sense, it bootstraps its own quantization. Once you give, like you'll hear physicists say, once you've given the Lagrangian or the action, everything is in place. It's just a question of figuring out the consequences. Well, if that's true and the action is classical, then what do you mean that you're so focused on the quantum? So I guess, look, it's embarrassing, but I just think we have a quantum fetish. And we have a tiny number of people

who convinced everyone to repeat the same statements about, well, you know, the world is quantum mechanical. So if you say, I think the classical is more important, they don't hear that as an informed statement. They hear that as you didn't get the fact that The world is quantum. You still think that you live in a classical world. Or for example, the fact that why does the classical world dominate? Why are we confused about the quantum world? Why isn't it evident that everything is quantum? It's Feynman voting. Have I ever talked to you about Feynman voting?

No. Imagine that you have 10,000 people lost in a featureless landscape, and they're trying to figure out which way to go. And you've got one cult of like a thousand people, right? So a small group of people, and they all agree. And you say, we're going to take a poll, we're going to add up, we're going to point in different directions. And then whatever the sum of the direction we're going to average out by the number of people, and we'll go in that direction at that speed. Well, the key point is, is that everybody who's

not in the cult is pointing in some different direction, and that's randomly going to average out to going in no direction at all, except for the cult. And they're all going in the same direction. So in Feynman voting, the classical thing contributes a much more coherent picture of what should happen. And that's why The classical world dominates, even though it's a minority perspective. Okay. Why can't you say that the action itself is not classical? You have an action, and you can interpret it in two ways. One is a quantum way, then another is a classical

way. You can do that. That the action itself is not, or the Lagrangian itself is not classical. This is logomachy. We're arguing over words rather than substances. Okay. Let me be, let me, let me be semantically clear. Okay. You can get classical observables by taking the action, or you can get quantum observables by doing something else with the action. And the classical one just looks at a small part of the action and says, okay, this is where all everything is happening. And the quantum one actually looks at all of it. And so it has more

information, the quantum one, sorry, the quantum one interprets more of it. I'm a little bit confused because they're both local. The quantum picks up more information because you're looking at it at the wave function over the entire space. But what actually happens with the observable is, is that you have a function and you can either measure the function at the point And then multiply it by the quantum wave, or you can take that function, differentiate it to get a one form, stick it into a symplectic form to get a vector field, throw the vector field

to a connection and use that connection to take a directional derivative. So one of these ends up as the position operator. One of these sort of ends up as a momentum operator for the P's and Q's and the underlying coordinatization of phase space. But that process of promoting a classical observable, which is just like some number, I don't really think that that works exactly because the function is defined over the entire phase space. So in a certain sense, even if you're thinking classically, you're working over the entire space of possibilities in both cases. The only

thing that's different is the state of the system is seen as naturally looking at the entire space, whereas in this other case, you actually imagine a physical situation in which only one part of it is relevant at any time. So in the classical case, are you saying that because we use a variational principle that we're seeing all of the space? In a certain sense. Well, look, You're defining an action or a Lagrangian on the entire space, and then you're defining observables that you wish to measure. So you're thinking about for the space of all possible

initial conditions, if I then measured the system, you know, n units of time later, I believe I would be sampling this function at this point. And it's the point part of it that is that is narrowing things to a single point, whereas a state that is distributed, every wave is a wave in a medium that's distributed over an expanse. So what I meant was that if you do some variation principle, you say, okay, let's take the extreme of that. Yeah. Only that for the classical case contributes to an observable. Yes. Whereas in the quantum case,

it's, it doesn't have to just be that single part. Well, again, the variational sounds more Lagrangian than Hamiltonian. Hamiltonian sort of says, I don't need to know about all that. I'm just going to start from here and move. Where you can, the Legendre map, no? Certainly. Okay. So if you're lost, don't worry. This is just the beginning. I have some other questions. Two friends talking late on a, late on a Friday. In GU. Yeah. And again, I'm just going to assume that the iceberg is out and people have watched this, though you and I can

talk instead of having to cover GU. Put the link in the. Sure. There's a Frobenius inner product that's introduced. Yeah. Why the Frobenius inner product? Presumably there are other inner products that could, could have been used. Well, in fact, it's not the Frobenius inner product. It's the trace reversed Frobenius inner product. And that the only reason it's traced reversed is that we don't have a grand unified theory of the observed world that uses spin seven cross SU two, which would really be spin seven cross spin three. One of the problems is that the typical description

of the Pati-Salam theory that we've discussed is that that theory is usually presented as SU four cross SU two cross SU two. And it's not that the field doesn't know that that's equivalent to spin six cross spin four, but it is meaningfully different because it pushes you, how you call something determines how you think about it. This is a very human thing. And it really is spin six cross spin four because GU, and I don't know that you've, you and I have even had this discussion is a machine that could also accept a one 11

spacetime or a one 15, any multiple of four dimensions with one of them taken as time results in a GU. Why would a one 11 work? Sorry, did I say one 11? I meant. Seven 11. Seven 11. I meant one seven. No, no, I'm messing you up now. One 11. Yeah. No, why? Because it has to add up to. Well, 12 is a multiple of four. Uh-huh. Okay. No, I did it right. Did you? Yeah. Doesn't have to add up to 14. Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away. Don't be

like the economy. Instead, read the economist. I thought all the economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to date on world trends. And that's true, but that's not only true. What I found more than useful for myself personally is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets. For instance, the economist had an interview with some of the people behind Deep Seek the week Deep Seek was launched. No one else had that. Another example is the economist has this fantastic

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my, into your, intellectual growth. It's one that you won't regret. As a listener of this podcast, you'll get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less. Head over to their website, www.economist.com slash TOE, T-O-E, to get started. Thanks for tuning in, and now let's get back to the exploration of the mysteries of our universe. Again, that's economist.com slash TOE. Doesn't it have to add up to 14? That's in the total space. I'm saying the input is a one and a three. Uh-huh. And that begets

you the 14th. Okay. Now the next one up is. Okay, I see what you're saying. Is one and seven, and then it's one and 11, and then it's one and 15, et cetera, et cetera. In each one of those, there's a Pati-Salam analog. In each one of those, there's a standard model analog. And in each one of those, there's a spin 10 analog. And an SU-5 analog. And in all of those cases above one comma three, the Pati-Salam thing is a spin cross a spin. It's not an SU cross an SU. So it's meaningfully spin

six cross spin Four. I don't think I've ever had a chance to, you know, basically everything is always at this goddamn explain it like I'm five level. So we never actually get to anything interesting. That's a great question. That's what determines which Frobenius inner product. And, you know, you want to know something fun. If you watch the Oxford lecture, I screw it up. And I know that I'm screwing it up. And why is this? It's because like, look, I don't think people have a clue, Curt, as to what it is like to work completely on

your own. They just don't. They're trying to remind yourself. If you think about how much you've forgotten about GU, I bet it's huge. Right. And then you have to refresh it. Okay. I had forgotten all sorts of stuff I'd already done. One of the things I'd forgotten is that you end up with a three comma seven metric on the fiber, which can't work. And so while I'm giving the talk in Oxford, I'm thinking, I know this works, but I have to be honest that I'm coming up with three and seven and three. And right at

the end, I say, are there things left to do? Certainly there are. In fact, you have to get somehow. Sure. I'm trying to be honest, but I'd forgotten. Oh yes. It's the trace reversal of the Frobenius metric. Now, most people don't know that Frobenius metrics even exist because they've never, it is not typical in an entire career in mathematics that you had to induce a metric on the space of metrics. Well, the space of metrics isn't even talked about. Much. I mean, I think it is. It's not, it's not never discussed. It's just, I actually,

there's two different ways, right? There's a language problem. Do you mean the space of metric sections or do you mean the space of point wise metrics? So certainly the space of metric sections is, is very much discussed. Point wise metrics has never really been focused on. Now, if you say something like that, I guarantee you, somebody will pull out papers from 1957 and Bryce DeWitt looked at this and who knows what, I don't know. But most people never induce a Frobenius metric in their lives. And so it comes, and this is one of the taxes

that you see is that if you do something really different, even if it's not like developing a new, a new collection of mathematics, people have an idea of, I bet There's one or two or maybe three changes from what we usually do. And Geo's says. I accept the standard model. I accept general relativity, but everything we do is slightly wrong. We call, we call Pati-Salam by the wrong name. We have the wrong grand unified real forms of the group. SU five is really SU three comma, uh, SU three comma two. SO 10 is really spin

10 and spin 10 is really spin six comma four. Like the amount of wear and tear on the mind to hear somebody say, no, no, no. I accept all these things, but we've, we've minorly got everything shifted. I think there's a huge barrier to entry in Geo. But anyway, you asked me why the Frobenius metric? I don't think you, there are many different metrics. I think there are exactly four metrics. If you don't add a parameter to figure out how much trace to how much traceless you want, in other words, it's, it's only plus or

minus one. There are precisely four metrics you can define and only four metrics you can define. And two of them are consistent with experiment. And two of them are ruled out by experimental. And the two obvious ones are ruled out by experiment. The trace Reversed ones remain in the game. And I, you know, it is kind of fun because Einstein forgot to trace reverse the Ricci tensor. And, you know, it's like, if I could recapitulate anyone's mistake, that would be the one I'd recapitulate. So the observers, is it the same as the metric bundle or

is it the tangent space of the metric bundle, the tangent bundle to the metric bundle? Well, the observers is the package, you know, and here I was thinking actually a little bit about Grothendieck where Grothendieck replaced the concept of a variety with the concept of a scheme. I don't want to say that the total space is the observers, it is the bundles and the relationships and the pullbacks, like it is the package that is the observers. Okay. So think about if we can, I love the fact that you trust your audience. So let's trust your

audience. Take a, take a page from object oriented programming. In a class definition, you've got member variables and you've got bound methods. So that's like stuff and stuff you can do and method and it's, you've got nouns, you've got verbs, you've got stuff and you've got things you can do with the stuff. So that's what The observers is. It's two spaces with a fiber and sections connecting them, and then it's bundles on top of them. And if you wanted to talk about like the shift in perspective from Einstein, most of what we're going to do

in GU takes place, not on X4, but on Y14. Mostly we're not dealing with the tangent bundle on Y14, the way Einstein dealt mostly with the tangent bundle. You're dealing with the spinor bundle on Y14. Mostly you're not dealing with the Einstein Hilbert action. You're dealing with this new action that has homology to both the Einstein Hilbert action and the Chern-Simons action and additional components that you've noticed. Has homology to both or analogy to both? Sorry, you want to know if it's funny, the biologists use homology to mean similarity. Right. And so somehow I was

in the wrong part of my head. Yeah. It has similarity and analogy. I thought I missed something. No, but it's very, it's very interesting. I always tell people that if somebody has a meaning to the word ham, puts a meaning to the word Hamiltonian, you know, that they're in only one field because it means one thing in civics, One thing in physics, and one thing in biology. Cause Ham, Hamilton is a great name in the, in human history. So yes, I didn't mean homology in the sense of algebraic, but I did mean So yes, I

didn't mean homology in the sense of algebraic topology. Okay. Let me tell you some of my gripes when I was going through GU. Ah, I knew this was going to be a gotcha interview. And then I'll tell you some of what I, and then I'll, I'll ease the wound. You're negging me. Yes. Great. Great. In part, one of the reasons I made the iceberg was so that I can understand and also try to explain it to someone else who, if they have a differential geometric background, they could understand it. So mathematician or physicist. So when

I was going through the paper, there were some terms, this is why I think there's, this is one reason I think there's a communication gap. Please. Okay. So going through the paper, there were some terms introduced, which were not used again, like invasive fields versus native fields that were introduced on like page six, and then I did control F because I'm like, did I miss something? And this is like, in films called Chekhov's gun, When you're reading something, you want to, you want to know it's leading somewhere because it takes up working memory. Okay. So

there was that, there was something you just did right there with object oriented programming. You're like, okay, let me give you an analogy. And then you go into object oriented programming. So in the PDF, I believe you give an analogy. You're like, if you don't know what sections are, think of indifference curves in economics. And then I'm thinking most mathematicians and physicists don't know what indifference curves are for foliations. I think that's what it was. So then I'm like, you want to stay in someone's field. Like if you're explaining to them, not jump outside and

assume their competency there. So for instance, if I said a fiber bundle is like the entity class component in video game architecture, people are like, what the heck are you talking about? Yeah, but, but, but I, I don't know how to not do this. Okay. Well, anyhow, so I was, I'm sorry. Look, this is wonderful because I'm aware that I do this. I'm sorry that I do this. It's not like I say this as a friend. I'm not trying to, this is not a gotcha. I don't feel it's a gotcha. I think that to be

honest with you, if I can, if I can play with it, you and I are both facing the same problem, right? I watch you across different fields. You're not just the physics guy. You're also in the consciousness space. I think that you're pretty responsible about all sorts of things. I have no idea how it is that we bridge this. And partially what I love that you're doing is you just throw things out. You try your best to make them understandable. You try to say them clearly. But the person has access to ChatGPT and Grok and,

you know, Claude, all these things, these are great tools. Okay, so use them. And by the way, if you're convinced that you and I are bad explainers, you've picked the wrong time. Because you can sit there with one of these AIs and say, make this make sense to me. And the AI can't do it. Well, if people watch this video that I have on, I don't know what the title is currently because we keep changing the title. But at one point it was explain it like I'm five okie dokie. That was the original title. And

I think currently it's the, this is hurting popularizing of science, Something like that currently. It's this whole explain it like I'm five and give me the whole, give me the simplistic explanation. So if you watch, okay, so then someone may say, but Curt, what about these videos from Wired where a mathematician goes through something at five different levels? So then I give a specific example with Emily Riehl, a professor of category theory is known for being the top category theorist. She's been on the podcast before as well on infinity categories. So this was her explaining

infinity at five different levels. And actually, if you watch it, what she does is she explains something about infinity, like something that's unbounded to a nine-year-old, not a five-year-old. Okay. Then she explains Hilbert's hotel to someone else. Right. And then she explains cardinality and then she explains the axiom of choice and its equivalences. But the point is, but that by the end, when she's speaking to another professor, she's speaking about infinity categories. Yes. And also how you can construct proofs by looking at one space is some domain and the target space is a proof. And

that's what a mathematical theorem Is. And then, okay. So now if you look at it and you're like, okay, was that explained at five different levels? No, it was just tangentially concepts related to this that was explained to five different levels. Because the internet has its own weird intellectualism that is horrendous. I mean, let's just be honest. What do you mean? The internet wants to know all sorts of things and it believes certain things. Like one thing it believes is, is that you can watch a conflict between two people on a topic that you can't

possibly understand. And by looking at body language and who's sweating and all these things. Yeah. He, he curb stomped that guy. No, both of them were wrong. And one of them was more polished and, you know, if I put my shoulder back, I, I appear to be more confident in my position. So the internet is making us incredibly broad. It's informing us. It's making us stupid. It's making us smarter. It's distorting our relationships. You know, like I, I'm so glad we're doing this in person because I can't stand doing interviews over zoom. I didn't caught

a rise of the wound. So allow me to say something. Sure. What struck me about geometric unity at first, I thought it was extremely convoluted. Just that was just my impression. I hadn't gone through the material. And then as I started to go through it. So firstly, I encountered new terms being introduced, which that was something that I've, I tried to overcome in, in the iceberg to explain it in the way that I would explain it. Cause I wouldn't do your paper in the way that you did your paper. Maybe I screwed up. I'm open

to it. I tried to put some order to it because it was a collection of results, right? Like slime mold, but in a, in a positive manner, like many arms. So I tried to put some narrative to it. It's difficult to, but I tried to. What struck me was that it's remarkably simple. I remember I said that to you and I thought you'd be angry at me. The highest compliment you could possibly pay me because I know, I know how hard it is. Look, Curt, if I'm honest, I've failed every year for 40 years to

communicate this. And I want to say also that I make it my living to go through different people's theories of everything. And sure, there are shortcomings. There are shortcomings to every Theory of everything. There are shortcomings, a laundry list to string theory and string theory has been around for decades and takes tens, if not hundreds of minds to solve a particular problem. And it's not even clear if it's been open and shut. There's loop onto gravity and so on, blah, blah, blah, blah. I haven't seen such a, such novel ideas from a single theory from

a single person, sorry, ever. And I don't know if anyone else will tell you this, but what you've done is remarkable, man. I don't even know how to be with that, to be honest. Look, thank you. Right? Like one of the things that's just hard. Look, I'm not trying to compliment you for the sake of complimenting you. No, no, no. And I'm not saying this as an endorsement that this is the correct theory. I think this is, I'm saying this is fantastic. I really appreciate it. And I don't know who else will say that to

you. Well, look, you know, part of what, I wouldn't stay with anything for this long if I didn't believe in it. So I really believe in it. I believe it is the answer. And I don't know how to be with that. It's a very weird thing to say, You know, and to have to promote something. And I look at the distortions in myself, you know, very often when you meet somebody who's got a history of trauma, you can see that they're trying to stop the things that have gone wrong to begin with. There's this wonderful

interchange in Kung Fu Panda where Oogway says to Shifu, we often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it. I couldn't understand why does the world not see flakes of this? Right? One flake of GU made it into the world. And that's what's now known as Cyber Witten. Now, you have to be very careful. There's two separate things that make up the constellation that's called Cyber Witten. There's the Cyber Witten equations, which is what I'm talking about as a flake of GU. And there's Cyber Witten theory, which has nothing to do with

anything I know how to do. That's just some wonderful thing that Natty Cyberg and Ed Witten came up with. But the equations occurred around 1987 at Harvard as a flake of GU. And, and this is something that I don't know that I agree with in your treatment of GU, GU happens At two different layers. The first thing you do is you do the Einstein-Dirac portion of the theory. And once you have the Einstein-Dirac portion of the theory, there's a second Lagrangian in an action that gives you the Yang-Mills-Higgs in addition. And so that's something that

probably you and I could work through and I could, and maybe I've learned something from you. You know, one of the things I believe with you is you're not just curating, you're actually in there working on the theory. So what I would say is that when I flaked that off at Harvard, it was referred to as insufficiently nonlinear. And what's, what's worse is that my point about it was, this is an Einsteinian equation. It's not a Yang-Millsian equation, right? Because there is no derivative in front of the curvature tensor, it belongs to the Einstein sector.

Now, because all of Donaldson theory and self-duality and instantons was trumpeted as self-dual Yang-Mills theory, people didn't understand what part of speech it was. So I was having an argument with people like Roman Jackiw at MIT, and I would go around and talk to people and they would say, no, no, You don't understand these equations. I understand that they look physical to mathematicians, but they're really only instanton sector equations. So people couldn't hear that I was actually questioning that. Like, isn't this really an Einsteinian concept? And it sort of predates something that I'm hoping to

see a Curt Jaimungal treatment of, which is the double copy problem, which is the relationship that was discovered through amplitudes between Yang-Mills and general relativity. It was entirely unexpected. In a certain sense, Einstein is a square root of Yang-Mills, but it's not Einstein that's the square root. It's the thing that replaces Einstein is the square root of the thing that replaces Yang-Mills Higgs. And so when I flaked this off, there was no interest in it. And what's more, it just got me into trouble. So I was being punished for what I thought was great work.

After this was rediscovered by Natty Seiberg and Ed Witten around 1994, and I was in the lecture at MIT where Ed Witten puts this up and says that there is a replacement for Donaldson theory. He didn't say what it was. And I believe Alan Knudson, who, As I recall, was seated below me and to the right as I faced Ed Witten in the audience, said in the Q&A, do you want to tell us what these equations are? I think he's now a professor at Cornell. This is a detail lost to history. And he writes these

two equations. And I think if I recall correctly, he used phi rather than psi for the spinor field because, well, another thing I've been told was that I had violated spin statistics. And since I was talking about a classical theory, I had no idea why anybody was telling me I was violating spin statistics seven years earlier. Okay. Okay. There's an entire story that nobody knows about Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts, having a very dim view of Princeton, New Jersey. And the thought was we worked very hard at Harvard to get great results in Donaldson theory. And

then Princeton tells us after the fact, yeah, yeah, we know all this stuff from quantum field theory, but it's always like taking credit for work we've already done at Harvard. And a very dramatic thing happens. I don't think I want to tell this full story here right now, where when the lecture is finally given, it's on, the title of the lecture Is Witten's Magical Equation. I think there's no S on the end of it. Now there were two equations. So it was like weird. And Seiberg was nowhere in sight in the title. And the professor

at Harvard, you know, three weeks later, who was giving this lecture was the most dramatic lecture I've ever seen. It's like his entire life's work changed in an instant by equations that he had called insufficiently non-linear. And he said, if Ed Witten hadn't told us, I never would have believed it. And he looked directly at me afterwards, after saying that, because he had said, no, you don't get it. You think this is Einsteinian, this is Yang-Millsian, this is not enough non-linearity in the squaring of the spinor. You can't just replace SU(2) by U(1), blah, blah,

blah. So that was like really dramatic for me, which is that a flake of this theory could change the world and it was clear that it was a flake of the theory. And there was zero, you know, there was a conference afterwards at Princeton. Well, what is this new set of equations that then was called Seiberg-Witten after that lecture? And I asked to speak at it. It was ludicrous. Why should you speak? It's like, cause those are my equations. It's so hard to say it. People say, well, do you want credit for the equation? No.

Do you want them to be called Seiberg-Witten? That's fine. But if somebody, if there was justice in the world, the thing I would love to be called, them to be called is the insufficiently non-linear equations, because that's what they were called for seven years. Anyway, look. That experience taught me that I can't interact with the system. You do great work. You hand the work to the system and the system thinks nothing of assigning the credit to somebody else. Um, and that matters because that credit was supposed to be health insurance, the ability to raise children,

to buy a home, maybe even a second home. And when credit is reassigned in academics, very interesting people have this whole act that they do, like, ah, who cares who, who gets the credit? The only thing that matters is the underlying subject matter. And then they fight tooth and nail to get credit after saying that, and they have names for this stuff. It's called the Matthew effect. If you go to Washington, DC, and you talk about the problem That older people are stealing credit from younger people or reassigning names and who knows what, they say,

oh, that's just the Matthew effect. It's like, that's just the casting couch in, uh, in Hollywood. You're like, you are talking about rape or some sort of very serious coercion. Yeah, it's just the casting couch. Well, in, in, in academics, it's called the Matthew and the Matilda effect. The Matilda effect is that we don't credit women, um, with results if they raise it, you know, colloquially known as he peeding. So what is the claim? I know you want to perhaps save it for another time. Is the claim that Witten or someone close to Witten took

those equations from you or independently came up with them? Absolutely not. Ed Witten is as brilliant as you could possibly be. Those equations probably came from Natty Seiberg. I, Natty and I have talked about this. Natty said, I never understood what the big deal at the equations was. To this day, he still doesn't understand or at the time? No, I think he doesn't understand. I think he's a physicist and Ed, you know, look, I will say some, some, some serious things, It's not really clear what Ed Witten is, and I think that's fine. I don't

need it to name it, but when you say Jackie Chan is an actor who does all his own stunts, you're totally missing it. Jackie Chan is a stunt man who does all of his own acting. So far as I know, Ed Witten is the world's greatest differential geometry, who does all of his own physics, right? The math is really the impressive stuff. The physics has never gotten to the same level. And because that's so counter-narrative, one of the things that's really important in academics is that there's a single official narrative, just the way there is

a single blockchain. There's consensus about what happened, who did it. We all know that it's sort of not right. But we have, we agree to officially talk about a story. The story is completely wrong. And that's one of the reasons why you can't really do this from podcast space. You can't contradict the official narrative in the journals. There's so much that's just wrong. And Ed Witten did not steal this, Natty Seiberg and I also resolved this. When Natty Seiberg got $3 million for the Breakthrough Prize, he and I encountered each Other at a San Francisco

fundraising event for the Institute. And this is a very dramatic story. I won't tell the whole part of it, but we hugged it out at the end and we accepted. And it's like, I don't have a beef with Natty Seiberg or Ed Witten on that front. The problem was, is that Harvard had a very clear perspective and that is we do incredible nonlinear analysis. That's why we get the results. It was a morality play because we do better nonlinear analysis than anyone else. We get better topological results than anyone else, including Donaldson. And the point

was, no, you guys landed in the new world and you built an entire city, the first site that you found and you built it in the swamp and that's why your lives are so difficult. Just go over there and you build your city and everything will be fine. And they didn't want to hear it. And then when they, when they realized how, how wrong they'd been for a decade, then it became like this rush to credit the great Witten, um, who is great. And by the way, Seiberg-Witten theory, which I have no claim on whatsoever.

I have the equations. Yes. The theory now, I don't know whether anyone Fully understands it to this day. I mean, it's an unbelievable achievement. I didn't have that. I really saw it as general relativity and part of the, one of the most uncomfortable things about geometric unity, partially why I've held things back and haven't handled things great in the end, it'll become very clear where the Seiberg-Witten equations came from. They came from Einstein, not Yang-Nels. About holding back with geometric unity. Have you thought about publishing it on the archive? Yeah. I tried to get access

to the archive at some point and I think, I can't remember. Publishing access, you mean? Because anyone can access it. Oh, yes. I write rather than read. Okay. Okay. I think at first you could, and then you needed to have a .edu and, you know, it's like, why should there be a .edu requirement? It's like, we don't serve Negroes here. Oh, really? I know that sounds fine to your ears, but it doesn't sound good to mine. As Muhammad Ali and Dick Gregory said, that's okay. I don't need them. And then I, I think I interacted

with Paul Ginsberg and he said, no, no, no. This doesn't apply to you. We'll get you a special exemption. And then I was like, why do I get a special exemption? And a friend of mine just got his paper that I read turned down by the archive. There are people, there's a string theorist on the archive committee who says, no, no, you can't post. So I think people have this idea. Why don't you just submit things? It's like. Maybe you don't understand the critique. You haven't, you haven't succeeded in over 50 years moving the Lagrangian

of fundamental physics. Do you understand that part of the critique is the way peer review works, the way credit is apportioned, the way disputes are adjudicated is the problem. Your culture is decaying. You were no longer the people who were able to do the standard model. You've accepted such a degraded state in your culture that your institutions are repugnant to me. I don't, I don't apply for your grants either. I'm trying to, I would love for GU to be evaluated with my H index as low as it could possibly be. If I could have an

H index of zero, if I could do this with no PhD, I'd love that. But everybody pays lip service to no, nobody cares where it comes from. Nobody cares about it, but everybody Does. Everybody's just, we're just, we're a deeply hypocritical culture, which we don't realize we've abandoned science. We've abandoned mathematics. We have where we used to have the scientific method. We have what might now be termed the academic method. What's what's the impact factor. What's your H index. Who cares? What's what's Gödels. So the answer is I'm not, I'm not against sharing it, but

I'll tell you what will not happen. Um, I have a joke that I tell what's the difference. People have to say, why do you say that's a work of entertainer or that you're an entertainer? I say, okay, what's the difference between a professor of physics and an entertainer? An entertainer has rights. I'm not against sharing it, but I'll tell you what will not happen. I reject wholeheartedly things that other people have never even heard of. There's a concept called restricted data that exists nowhere else in us law. Do you know about it? No, the 1946

and 1950, I'm going to say something that's going to sound totally crazy. And after I'm done saying the totally crazy thing, go ask ChatGPT, he's going to tell you something that's totally crazy. Go Ask Chet GPT, whether I was accurate, put in the portion of the transcript. Right. Cool. I like doing that. So it's a great new thing in 1946 and 1954, we passed the atomic energy acts. And if you couple that to something called the 1917 espionage act, there's a question that occurs, which sounds totally outlandish, can you put, be put to death for

doing theoretical physics? Well, you ever heard of the zone of death theory in Yellowstone national park? No, some legal scholar figured out that there's a sliver of Yellowstone that is not in Wyoming, but is in Idaho where no one lives. And if you committed a crime on federal land in Idaho, where there is no one where there is no one living, you would have to impanel a jury from people who lived there so you could actually commit murder if you could lure somebody into the Idaho portion of Yellowstone, like it's an unexploited vulnerability in our

legal. To this day? Yeah, I think so. I don't think anyone's done it, but I think it's actually been used in, as a trope in like movies or something like that. Okay. Here's a crazy one. Most physicists do not know that if you do any work on a napkin that could Possibly influence a nuclear weapon, it is automatically Q classified without anyone in the government choosing to Q classify your work. And this is technically known, you can look this up in a search engine as born secret. Okay. If you seek Q classified material without a

Q clearance, that can be viewed as treason and you can be put to death under. So if you combine 1946, 1954 atomic energy acts, which have a provision against free speech found nowhere else in the law. And I can't believe you're not warned about this when you start, when you sign up to do physics. ChatGPT told me, yes, it is technically possible to execute someone for doing theoretical physics correctly. If it creates any change in the theory around nuclear weaponry, because you're seeking a Q clearance document without Q clearance. So my claim is I don't

think the average physicist has a clue what physics is, where it's been, what the national security architecture is. I don't think they know that the department of energy is really the department of physics, right. Which was created out of the end of the seventies in the Carter administration, Because yeah, if physics is serious national security, and if you fail at it long enough, you just think it's an academic subject, but this is so dangerous, this is so powerful that we go to a movie called Oppenheimer and we see like, oh, there's Feynman, you know, there's

beta, there's Teller. Yeah. All those guys, you know, wiped out two Japanese cities. This is, this is no joke and we don't connect it to what we do because what we do doesn't work. This is what I call nerf physics. I don't know if we've ever discussed this. No, but I want to get back to, so you, you wanted access to the archive, right? To access, they said, you need an EDU email address. They then said, well, we'll make an exception for you. And then you didn't want that 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Why

didn't you want to publish on the archive? I did. Everybody wants to start, look, everybody starts by wanting to play the game, right? And then I did. Suddenly I'm missing my work. It's attributed to somebody else. I was just like, oh. Well, publication would, I triggered that system in the eighties. So my experience isn't the same as the Professor who says, oh, you know, you submit stuff, sometimes it gets rejected. You take it to another journal. Of course, there are times when you want to submit something to, let's say. HEP-PH, HEP-TH, and they tell you,

no, no, no, that's really HEP-PH. So the idea is it's kind of annoying, it's a little bit cumbersome, it's bothersome. Sometimes somebody gets more credit than you think they should deserve. That's not my experience. My experience is totally different. My experience was it's a secret world that has all sorts of ways that it works that aren't advertised. And if you talk about it, you're treated like a crazy person. But I can point, I'm like one of the world experts on what doesn't work in academics. And what I've seen is, oh, you know, a good friend

of mine in the last two weeks had a paper, PhD in physics, not accepted, no reasons given on the archive. It's like, what does it cost you to store this on the archive? Oh, no, no, didn't say it's bad, didn't say it's wrong. The system isn't what you think it is. It's never been what people think it is. There's some sort of an agreement not to talk about it. Like if I say peer review has not existed back to the beginning of the Royal Society. Outside review has, peer review hasn't. Peer review is mostly a

response in 1975 to something called man a course of study. It originally comes out of Utah and it has to do with the great society programs, which in the mid 60s are passed that makes the federal government the main payer for Medicare. And so what it really was was a defense by the physicians from having the government pry into their pricing because suddenly the government was paying for everything. It was the peer says you're not good enough to supervise what we do in medicine. Okay, let me just finish it up. Sure. If you have the

belief that the system works pretty well, then I understand you completely. You want to know why aren't you following the rules? Well, my point is it didn't work well when I tried interacting with it repeatedly over and over and over again. If you do something different enough, you get a very different experience. And that's sort of what I'm trying to say, which is like I tried, I believed, I got burned. Why is it that I have to go back to the same casting couch to the same director to be Put into a movie? No, I'll

start my own studio. I'm not going into that office. I'm not going to play that game. I'm just not going to do it. Now, if you told me, hey, we've heard you. You want to make sure that you understand that credit matters to you. If I'm the only person in physics, the credit matters to I'm happy to say that on camera. Everybody else credit matters to it's, it's the lifeblood. It depends whether, you know, can you afford to have another child? Can you afford to be in the same city as your spouse? How is it

that that doesn't matter? It's academics and physics is suffused with a totally insane level of duplicity. Of course credit matters and it's and it should. I'm not playing with people who are that disingenuous. They only, how often have you heard this? The only thing that really matters is the truth. Please don't bother me with, with sociology. Yeah, I had a terrible experience. The number of people who had terrible experiences is insanely large. We could do an entire channel that every week featured a different academic horror story. Yes, the people who remain in the system have

agreed to say, oh, It works pretty well. No, it doesn't. Clearly it doesn't. So I have the internet. I have a very large channel. I'm probably the most followed mathematician on planet earth. And I will forever pay a price by not wanting to play the game with people who stole something from me. By the way, I highly recommend looking at Alexander Grothendieck's rejection of the Crawford prize, where he says, I won't participate in a culture. I will not take money from a culture that now believes that it is that theft from young people is absolutely

acceptable to the profession. So I'm with him. So my understanding, he said that after the university started accepting military funding and he was extremely anti military. He was a guy with a certain kind of integrity who I think got driven mad by having that integrity. Like, look, let me just be honest and forthcoming about a very crazy sounding thing. Imagine GU is right. Let's, let's go on that branch of the decision tree. If it's right, this is the most crazy dramatic story anyone's ever heard. It's, it's, it's dramatic scientifically, it's dramatic personally. It's just, it's

a big deal. If it's Wrong, none of this is true. And I'm living in a Walter Mitty world. That's fine. But it's not like I'm not aware of that. My goal is not just to benefit from this, but I wish to help out science. I wish to help out many of the people whose names are not on their results, who are not employed currently after having done great work like Doug pressure and green fluorescent protein. Terrible story. My goal is to break peer review. My goal is to open the archive to anyone credential so that

there is no committee sitting over it. My goal is to get the national security apparatus to come out of the shadows and say, look, this is serious business. We need to classify this. We should have fights with them about what should be open, what should be classified. I wish to change science and get it much closer to what we think about with the scientific method, with norms of collegiality and decency to each other, where we are progressing in the science. We are not a medieval theological debating society about angels and heads of Calabi-Yau pins and

all that kind of nonsense. This is broken, and I refuse to be referenced to a system that can't buy a base hit in 51 years, 52 years. It doesn't work. Why do I care about my colleagues opinions? If they're not leading physicists, the leading physicists of today are not leading physicists. There's no proof that they're doing physics. Like Frank Wilczek. I recognize him. I talked to Frank. Right. In general, we're not really doing science anymore. And I don't want to, I don't want to spend our time on this. I want to talk to you about

three generations. I want to talk about SU(3) cross SU1. The problem is, is that somehow the only people who know what those things are, are the, are the survivors suffering from survivor bias in a system that doesn't work. So more or less, 100% of my seated colleagues are people who got through the system without raising much of a fuss about something that obviously is unethical, not civil, not collegial, and doesn't work. So yeah, I'm happy to be wrong, but the problem is, is that it sets me up in this absolutely monotonous pattern of opposition. Eric,

why are you so arrogant? Eric, why are you so forceful? Oh, only because I'm opposing 10,000 people who are all in lockstep who believe the same things and aren't Getting anywhere. Yeah. So I'm confused. So if you were willing to publish on the archive before, and you still had the trauma of having credit taken from you and so on, but you were willing to, and then there was this conversation that you don't have an EDU, but you could also get an EDU just by emailing Harvard. No, no, no. There's something called post.harvard.edu that they stopped

accepting because that meant that you were an alum, but you weren't active. Interesting. There's a game going back and forth. Okay. I think you should have Jacques Disler on your podcast and ask him these questions. Let's, I'd rather do science. And then you said that there's no proof that these people who are dealing in fundamental physics for the past 50 years have are doing anything related to physics. Then what if someone said, okay, but what's the proof GU has anything to do with fundamental physics? Well, this is the thing I was trying to talk about

when you deftly steered me away, if I may. There's something I call not even remotely physics. Now that acronym for that is NERF physics. So you can tell how many safeties are on the gun and how far you are away from doing Does your theory put dimension four in pride of place. If you're working in dimension three or dimension 10, if you're not highly focused on dimension four to begin with, that's a strike against you. Do you have one temporal dimension to begin with? If so, you're doing real physics. If you're in Euclidean signature, generally

speaking, you're not doing real physics. Do you have SU three somewhere in the structure group of your model? If you're only using SU two or you one, you're not wrestling with quantum chromodynamics. That's a strike against you. Do you have three generations of fermions, which is a feature of our world? That's an artificiality. No, no, no. I'm only worrying about one collection of fermions. Okay. If I look at the sheer number, Oh, does your Higgs field value itself in the adjoint representation of your structure group? That's not what the real Higgs field does. So I

could take a new metric and we could pass an AI over it and say, how many papers? Oh, one last one. I forgot. This is, is your work phrased in the language of geometry and bundle theory? If you just take those things where I would imagine The average paper would be a four dimensional manifold. One time dimension SU three would be included. There'd be three generations of matter and it would be phrased in bundles and connections in geometry. I believe essentially the number of people working in actual physics approaches zero and that that is a

decidable proposition as to whether I'm right or wrong. I believe essentially physics has stopped at its most fundamental level and we can just test it. So if you're out there, do me a favor, write a script that uses AI regular expressions and checks papers, ingests PDFs and checks how many of those safeties are on the gun. I don't want to work in 10 dimensions before I get to four. I don't want to work with no time dimensions. I don't want to work if SU three isn't in the picture. And I don't want to pretend that

you can do this without bundle theory. I believe that effectively no one is doing physics full stop. Okay. Now, what if someone said that this metric that you came up with, with six or so criteria that yours theory will fall through that sieve. So it stops other theories because they didn't satisfy it. Yours goes through. Okay. No, we're starting. You're starting from a wrong premise, the standard model in general relativity. We all accept. I think if you don't accept them as effective theories governing our world, you're really not part of the serious conversation. I think

Sean Carroll is exactly right about that. He said it on your show. He said, you have a theory. That's great. Well, I have a theory. My theory is called the standard model. I heard those words from him. Why is the standard model history? That's just how he said it. He didn't mean that he developed it, but he did sound a little bit like Colonel Jessup saying the blanket of freedom I provide is something you Lieutenant Caffey should be grateful for. Okay. Is the standard model after the Wu Yang dictionary in bundles? Yes. Is it on

a four manifold? Yes. Is it one comma three? Yes. Does it have three generations? Yes. Does it have SU three? In other words, the theory that we all agree goes through that sieve. We all agree on the standard model. It goes through the sieve. I'm not coming up with something that selects my theory. I'm saying that any theory that is trying to go beyond the standard model in general relativity Will have these characteristics. Okay. And by the way, if I'm wrong, let me just look, right. If I'm wrong, write the script. I'm happy to come

back on the show and say I was wrong. Where I was going is that there are other people who have their own checklists and it tends to be a checklist that their theory passes. So for instance, Wolfram may say something like, we have to explain why these laws, not any other law, and we have to explain observers and his theory purports to solve both of those. So he says, those are the most important. So I find that when I'm dealing with people in the space of theories of everything, I am engaging in special pleading. I

took the assignment to be going beyond the standard model means going beyond the standard model. And I took going beyond general relativity to mean going beyond general relativity. And I took the idea that it should be on a napkin to mean it should develop from very few assumptions. These are the things everyone repeats and no one follows. We all talk about this, you know, what the scientific method is. We don't follow it. We talk about what attribution should be. We don't follow it. We pass laws. We don't know that they exist. We're living in like

loony land. And so what I'm doing is I'm saying, I see your collective fictions. I have collective fictions of my own. It's not like I don't understand what a collective fiction is, but I'm not going to get any science done if I live in your collected fictions. So my claim is I took those, that's a core set of assumptions. If you have additional assumptions, I understand that, but I'm claiming that nothing passes even those. Like for example, GU is not phrased as a quantum theory. So what do you imagine the quantization procedure to be for

GU ultimately? It's a little confusing. It's not so confusing. If you think about it downstairs on the base space, the big problem is, is that it's not one. The difference between zero temporal dimensions, one temporal dimension and multiple temporal dimensions is enormous. With zero temporal dimensions, you're an elliptic theory and you have access to a TS Singer and all the great stuff that comes from that. If you have one dimension, we know a lot about Hamiltonian dynamics and development and initial Conditions. Problem is if you have two or more temporal dimensions, you're in something called

ultra hyperbolic equations. And very few people can think in two or more temporal dimensions. GU has several things. This is something that like, it's a great pleasure to be able to talk about what am I critical about GU? You know, like that's not a question that I get much. I didn't ask that, but I'm curious to know. I'm glad you asked that of yourself. So for example, I don't know how to deal with ultra hyperbolic equations. So if I think upstairs on the 14 manifold, I'm not, there are no initial conditions because that's a co-dimension

one concept, really what you have is boundary conditions and now good luck. I don't, I think I had to be told that the Cauchy problem was well posed in ultra hyperbolic equations. That's something I, yeah, but this is not stuff I know. So it's a good example. If I'm not, if I, you know, the entire concept of physics is that I have an initial state. Wouldn't that mean there's no Cauchy horizon? I don't, I believe that they are well posed, but I don't know, I don't know how to push Hamiltonian dynamics In multiple temporal dimensions.

Is the bundle trivial? Which bundle? The metric bundle. Uh, depends on the topology. Well, the reason I say that is cause in GU, there's a global section. So you can't take a global section unless the bundle's trivial. There isn't a global section. You're talking about the metric section? No, no, no. That, that was a thing that you actually cut. This is fun. Cause like I now get to actually have a meaningful argument. Um, didn't we agree that there are patches on which there's only a connection defined on the tangent bundle and then where you're doing

observations is where you have the metric defined. And that's one of the ways in which we get around some of the quantum gravity problems. Okay. So let's, let's, let's go, man. Because just like you have forgotten much of GU or you have to reintroduce it to yourself, same with myself. By the way, thank you for saying that. Because when, when I, when, when I say things like I forgot aspects of this, this is like a city where you don't remember what your work is from 17 years ago, and it's stored in some piece of paper.

You can't find all that kind Of stuff. Yeah. My recollection is the PDF has IOTA, which is a local section. And then it has GIML, which is a global section. But I'm saying that the existence of the GIML implies that the bundles trivial. This is interesting. This is a problem I never had before because occasionally I would have to do a refactor of the theory because I realized that the, the notation was cumbersome or it conflicted with some, you know, there are only so many letters, all that kind of stuff. Uh, So then this was

my other critique, Hebrew. So there are other letters that are used not much by mathematicians, other than in cardinality, Hebrew letters that were used in GU, so, and then there were some that I chose to keep in. And if I was to introduce this to a friend afresh, I wouldn't use the variation pie, which was funny because I called it variational pie, which in math, there's something called taking the variation. Right. And I didn't mean that. I know. But see, so you made an error. And the, and the thing is, is that the error is

now immortalized in the video. But the point I put in a pause to emphasize that. And also the point that I left in the different notation, Because it's my understanding that you implemented that notation to honor certain people. I don't have that same relationship to those people. So I don't honor them. Even though you're honoring trammels, your explanations, it's that communication gap I mentioned. Pi is my wife. Zeta is my son. Nu is my daughter and I'm Epsilon. And so I wanted us to be together. It's also, that's a humble view of yourself to give

yourself Epsilon. Look, I'm the roadie for a group of superstars. Epsilon is usually diminutive. So that was the joke. Yeah. Let's let's I'm uncomfortable being here. Look, I'm sharing that with you, but like, it's very important to me that some jerk doesn't come in and say, we're going to change all the notation. It's like, no, these people suffered for this theory. And I'm going to make sure that we're going to write their name. We're going to burn their names into the theory. And by the way, the Hebrew letters, it matters to me too. You know,

I come from a tiny, tiny community that is always in danger of being wiped out for reasons that we can go into, but it's a scary thing. Yeah. I can make it worse. I can call, um, the base Space Haaretz for the land and the total space Hashem. No, I'm saying you asked me a question. I'm answering it because I'm proud of my people. And to be honest with you, the Tau homomorphism, which is not just the gauge group being included simply trivially into the first factor, the Tau comes from the Hindi concept of being

Tara or slanted, right? So I didn't say that, but at some point I had a Devanagari character and then I found that people just really didn't like it. And so I said, that's too bad because I run out of letters regularly. And I'm very proud of our family's Indian heritage. And so I wanted to honor India as well as I wanted to honor, uh, Jews in Israel. So yeah, that's a personal choice and I get to make it and I'm pretty unapologetic about it. So I'm sorry if you have to learn Gimel and you'll have

to learn Aleph. It's pretty painless and it's over quickly. What else have you not said about GU? So great. Um, one of my beliefs about GU is that GU gets a lot of its power. From the fact that it's willing to consider, uh, killing forms that are not positive definite. Yeah. How do you deal with unbounded spectra? Well, I don't know What my claim is, is that we don't know how nature deals with it because we're shielded because of maximal compact subgroups. In other words, what is picking out spin six cross spin four as the

Pati-Salam model is maximal compact inside of a different real form of spin 10 than the S O 10 theory. So in the S O 10 theory, if you ask, well, what's the maximal compact, that's just the whole group. But how you're getting somehow from the D D five Dynkin diagram down to spin six comma spin four is that nature is saying somehow I'm going to handle this indefinite killing form, but I'm not going to show you yet because you haven't gotten that. So I'm just going to show you the compact subgroup to which it is

broken. Okay. That's totally different intellectually, completely from saying, no, nature can't do that because, uh, this will lead to problems and cause out. No, nature's not listening to what you can do today and what you can't do today. You also have a, well, how do you do a Feynman integral? Nobody knows, right? Unless it's, unless it's very restricted. Okay. But you're using it. You're using a bunch of analogies. Who said I can't go into technical debt And say, I don't know how she's going to quantize this theory. The reason I have it as a classical

theory, it's not that I don't understand anything about quantum theory. It's that almost certainly the physics community is mostly confused. Of course you can have an indefinite group. We have, we have spin one comma three that we're forced to deal with. And if everybody understands the rest of the theory, I hope that one of the biggest, uh, one of the most important agendas becomes, okay, we've got to learn to deal with an indefinite killing form. Let's, let's get our best people on it. Right now. We write an occasional paper like Whitten's written on this. Um,

so that's an early super gravity theories. So you have gauge though that were non-compact. They did some call set though, but it was still non-compact. Yeah. There's that on the multiple time. You know, like I think Steven Weinstein, a philosopher does physics at perimeter institutes, ultra hyperbolic. There's it's like bars, two time physics. So if GU is right, what it should do is to say, look, Eric took on technical debt in order to do this thing. Let's pay it back. And that's by the way, That's normal science. What does pay back? Do you mean solve

it? Do you know what technical debt is in computing? That's again, one of my, yeah, please explain. So sometimes you do something that is kind of not right while you're coding and you say, okay, well, I'm taking on technical debt. I have to fix this somehow, but right now I'm just going to do this now. And then being expedient sort of, yeah, it's, it's like a stop gap measure that you has to go back and fix. Okay. Yeah. So my claim is, is that one of the ways that things have gone horribly wrong with critique,

I think most of the critiques in physics are not critiques. And what you see is there's a huge difference between saying, let me understand you first, let me steel man you second, and let me give criticism that is constructive third. That is normal to me. And by the way, I actually weirdly modeled this with Terrence Howard. Let me see if I understand you in your own terms first. Let me put your best, best foot forward relative to my community, the math community second, and let me give you criticism only after I've done those two steps.

Yeah. I don't think your real genius is GU. I think it was making sense of Terrence Howard in real time. You know, Terrence is a perfect example of, we tell everybody, everybody can be a scientist. You can learn this on your own. We don't care about credentials. And if you ever try that, we're just going to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. And I think it's terrible. And I, I'm still friends with Terrence and I will tell anybody Neil deGrasse Tyson totally missed the fact that Terrence took a regular tetrahedron and spanned the affine

group, which is a six dimensional group with six almost regular Pentagons arbitraging the difference between a 108 degree internal angle and a 109.47 and change. Uh, angle inside the vertices from the center of a tetrahedron genius move, lots of stuff, I think is garbage. Terrence laughs and laughs and laughs at me saying that I, he's like, you talked about the baby in the bathwater. You know what? We're colleagues, we're friends. I don't think he's a mathematician. I don't think he's a physicist. I think he's got some great ideas. I think he's got some good ideas.

I think he's got some lousy ideas. We don't do that. And I think it's really Important to talk about this, but I do want to get back to the science, what we do is we pretend we, we, the community of academicians, if you come into my office and you say, Hey, I've got a really crazy theory and I want you to listen to it, take it seriously and give me feedback. We're sort of, we know we're obligated to do some of that. We first, we find out we're incredibly busy. So the person who's incredibly busy

is then playing ping pong in the lounge and doing all sorts of other things. The next thing we do is we try to find the critique, which causes us not to have to listen ever again. If I can just find one flaw, we can dismiss your theory. This is not how science works at all. And there's a question about, did you ever steelman the theory to begin with? I think the first, I think the GU went 41 years without ever being steelman. Like that's impossible. I can steelman Garrett Lisi, Peter Woit, string theory, loop quantum

gravity, all of them. In general, it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get the gist of an idea in this world. And it takes much more, as you know, to fill it in, but I take as almost proof the GU is really interesting and different In that there are no steelmans of it. It's just a portrayal of a crazy person talking garbage on the internet, which is not, can I say it's not true? It's false. There's so much there and simple stuff. I was just meeting with Lee Smolin at his home in Toronto

today. I said, you know, Lee, one generation of standard model fermions is just the pullback of a violinist's theory. One generation of standard model fermions is just the pullback of a Weyl spinor properly understood from the space of pointwise Lawrence metrics to the four dimensional manifold. And then he started talking about something else. I said, did you hear what I said? I want to talk about GU. Yeah, let's do that. Something I endeavored to do with this channel is to understand the theory of to the point where recapitulating it back to them is met with

agreement. And only then do I think I've apprehended it. And so when you're saying that that should be the first step, I wholeheartedly agree. I hope you felt like I didn't misrepresent GU. I hope you felt that I didn't misrepresent GU because, you know, to be honest, keeping something alive while wanting to be open to the serious Critique, wanting to make sure credit isn't taken away at the same time as not wanting to interfere with the scientific, it's impossible. There's no way of solving this, this puzzle. Currently, what's interesting is, is that we're talking about

a group of people who've appointed themselves the border colleagues of academia. And anytime somebody starts to stray and say, I want to self publish, I don't really think that, um, this is the correct story, whatever they slam that person and that person is pushed back into, well, clearly you're a self promoter. It's like, really? Have you looked at what your university has put out in terms of PR releases with the lousy research, with the huge claims, et cetera, et cetera. Have you once talked about the problem of the leading people in the field, totally misrepresenting

thing? There are certain tells that they're not even aware of that show you that they're not interested in the underlying subject matter, what they're very interested in is we've got to make sure nobody arbitrages the flaws in the system. And I'm here to arbitrage the flaws in the system because they are flaws in that system. Now, when It comes to steel manning, that's a really special moment because you get a chance to see. Whether the person has not only understood something, but added some, and that's one of the things that I got out of your

treatment of GEO. I think that there are places where you say wrong things, but then you know what? There are places where I say wrong things. And what isn't true is that when you say something wrong, the theory collapses, or if there's a flaw that you weren't aware of, or there is a flaw that you were aware of that the theory collapses. This is part of this different academic method, which says the outside world can't tell the difference between a colleague trying to be a colleague and assassin trying to destroy something or steal it. There's

a horrible phrase that I learned in graduate school called gripe and swipe, where the idea is you complain about something and say it's incomplete, it's flawed, it can't work. And the idea is that now, you know, as much about the theory, and if you can fix the flaws, then it belongs to you. It's one of the reasons I'm an entertainer. I'm not an academic because there's no such thing as gripe And swipe. If I, if I release a con a version of a song and it could be improved, it doesn't become that person's song without

dealing with the issue of copyright. I don't know if copyright will protect you. I don't mean copyright. I don't mean copyright really legally. It's an unexplored area of the law. Oh no, no, no. I mean, in the math sense, if you publishing something related to math, claiming it as an entertainer, I don't believe copyright covers that. Well, you know, there was a point where Jon Stewart reported the news by saying he was reporting the fake news and he would say, and now the fake news. And then he would say real things that weren't sayable on

CNN or NPR. I'm an entertainer. Let's leave it at that. Let's get back to GU. Okay. So I want to know what is GU? Now I know that's an odd question to ask someone after I've investigated it as long as I have. But the reason I say that is that I've heard you say more than once. Can't recall where. So. I can't place the citation on screen, but it was something akin to, look, Dirac should have had the convictions, courage of his convictions when it came to predicting an Antiparticle to the electron. Okay. And the

reason was something like he proposed a theory. Actually, he proposed a specific instantiation of a theory. So you take something here. That's a theory, a theory, the theory. Cloud reify it. And then this gets disproved. And then you say, well, the theory itself has not been disproved. So then that can sound like from the outside as hedging, like I'm going to put forward whatever GU is. Someone could find critiques. Then I can retreat up here and say, but what GU is has not been disproved. You've disproved my explication of GU. So what is G like,

what is it that you see is up here? Sure. What makes GU GU such that if you were to see it in the wild, someone would say a wild GU appears. This is such a great question, Curt. I really appreciate this. Um, you ever, you ever seen the Zen of Python? No, there's this thing called the Zen of Python, which tries to reduce the Python programming aesthetic to, you know, uh, to a list of 24 Zen, uh, koans and, or 26 or whatever it is. Um, you know, you're in GU where you, when you replace

the inhomogeneous Lorentz group with the inhomogeneous gauge group, You know, you're in GU where you spend most of your time on a 14 manifold rather than on a four manifold where the 14 manifold is constructed from the format of, you know, you're in GU when there are no internal symmetry groups, you know, you're in GU when the Higgs field comes out of an ad valued one for, you know, you're in GU when you begin with a four manifold, use it to construct a 14 manifold that behaves like a three manifold, you know, you're in GU.

Just a moment. So you're referring to Chern-Simons theory? And yeah, there are two beautiful Lagrangians that are incredibly different that both result in Euler-Lagrange equations where there's a curvature tensor, and then you called me out on this very well, I really appreciate it, I often say that something is a projection operator and you point out that it's a contraction operator, which is quite, you were correct. I'm wrong. Cool. Yeah. Um, my belief is that Einstein was the first person to really relate a curvature two form to an implied gauge potential by taking his contraction operator

to get the Einstein tensor capital G mu nu from the Riemann tensor. That thing, There's two branches, right? There's a branch that uses the star operator to do this little trick, which is called the Chern-Simons branch. And then there's the Einstein contraction. And both of those results in Euler-Lagrange equations with the curvature tensor with a contraction, um, that gets you from two forms to one forms. That's how, you know, you're in GU because you're using the equivariance that's provided in having the gauge group. Like why, why are we failing to quantize gravity from, I claim

that there are answers to this, there are people that I didn't know about until I started talking about GU called McDowell and Mansouri who tried to get, uh, gravity to come out of a gauge theory on potentials. Now their thing, I think doesn't work because you don't use the space A of gauge potentials. You work on a group, by the way, there's another one, you know, you're in GU when you take Einstein's unified field concept much more seriously than the need to quantize gravity, right? In GU unified field means something. It's algebraically unified. And the

idea is you start with the inhomogeneous gauge group, And then you effectively supersymmetrize it. And that is the gauge content. So you're doing, I love this aspect. You're doing field content that is an algebraic gadget. Um. Boy, there's so many questions. Okay. May I linger? Yeah. By the way, we can also do a multi-part series at some point later, but this is the teaser effectively supersymmetrized. Yeah. So that was something that confused me before. So my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm incorrect, is that in the seventies there was supersymmetry. Yes. So I

forget who invented it in 1971. In 1973, there was a Wess and Zumino as far as I recall. Right. In 1974, there was Strathdee and Salam who created some wizardry or machinery called the Strathdee-Salam construction. Could be. Took in spacetime and outputted a superfield or took in fields and outputted a superfield or the Poincaré group. I would say it took in an affine space and gave you a super, an automatically supersymmetric field theory. So the idea is you didn't have to ad hoc construct an action and then check laboriously that this crazy term cancellation happens

up to a surface term. So when you say supersymmetry is In your theory, I'm thinking, I was thinking spacetime supersymmetry because that's the only supersymmetry that exists in the literature. Totally reject spacetime supersymmetry. Okay. And by the way, what a key point, and it fits exactly what you're trying to ask earlier. Should you call something that isn't spacetime supersymmetry, supersymmetry? Like I've never liked the word supersymmetry. I can't stand it. My take would be no. Okay. Now you have a different take. I want to hear it. All right. Well, one, I don't want to slight

anybody who's like, you know. McDowell and Mansouri doesn't work and I don't want somebody telling me, oh, you're just doing a modified McDowell Mansouri. That's like dismissive. No, they tried something. It was really good. Had a lot of good ideas. It failed. Okay. I also don't want to take credit for all of supersymmetry just because space-time supersymmetry doesn't work. Right. So I claim that you will never see super partners of the type that we hypothesize would spill out of the LHC. It's not going to happen. The concept is broadly, do you want to adjoin to

the Lie algebra fractional spin fields, Which have an algebraic pairing that land you in the Lie algebra of the honest group and I do, but the input is not Minkowski space, Minkowski space doesn't exist, it's a Fugazi. Right. It's a, it's an approximation. The space of connections is a legitimate affine space. It is an affine space. It's not, okay, well we won't ding it and put curvature into it. It just, it's, it's a flat space that was always meant to be what the Salam Strathdee machine did. Now, I believe that there are supersymmetric theories that

don't come from a Salam Strathdee thing. But the cool thing about Salam Strathdee, by the way, if we're mangling this name, I apologize to the Strathdee family. The cool thing about the machine is, is that it guarantees you that your output will have good characteristics. And so what I'm claiming is what fixes the number of generations at an effective level at three is the extension of the inhomogeneous gauge group to include supercharges. Now you call them supercharges because? They're fractional spin fields that should have commuting rather than anti-commuting products that land you in the space.

Look, if you want, you know, The informal claim that supersymmetry, you're taking the square root of the momentum. GU says, no, no, no, that idea should be, you're taking the square root of connections. You're taking the square root of the gauge potentials. That's a powerful idea because the gauge potentials are typically associated with first order differential operators. So you're taking a square root, not like of the Laplacian, the way Dirac did, but you're taking a square root of a first order operator. The thing is, is that I don't want to get, the reason I say

supersymmetry like things is that I notice we have an epidemic of spell checkers and if you spell like something wrong, they pretend that they can't read it and that it's garbage and that there's nothing. I don't quite know what they're going to object to. There are dimensions to it. I don't know what they're going to object to, but I don't know what they're going to object to. No, there are dimensional limits on space-time supersymmetry. And then there's infinite dimensional concepts of supersymmetry. And so I don't know, if I use the Phrase supersymmetry, there's this, you

break it, you, are you saying it's a supersymmetric theory? Do you have an actual, I don't want to get into that because that's not what we need to do to do GU. But it's the, it's the same basic format. And I want, I'm trying to, I think what I'm really trying to say is I want to honor the concept of supersymmetry, which I think is a brilliant idea, which was terribly instantiated. And if it turns out that this thing works, I want to say that this is, it's spiritual, I want to actually not take credit

for this. I think you're going to find out. Okay. So are you doing the opposite of what was being done earlier with the cloud being instantiated where it's, you're looking at the instantiation of space time, supersymmetry and saying, supersymmetry exists here as such. And I come from here, not down here. But I'm trying to, I'm trying to not obliterate. Yang-Mills theory is really non-Abelian Maxwell theory. Okay. We didn't do that to Dirac or Maxwell's Abelian Yang-Mills. Well, what I'm trying to say is I don't understand, I don't have a clue how Churn-Simons became Churn-Simons-Whitten Without

becoming Churn-Simons-Schwartz. Right? Like Schwartz, this guy was there in the seventies. I mean, it was one of the great intellectual feats of all time. So my claim is I, I think what Yang-Mills did was great by adding that AYJ. However, isn't it funny that we don't have a concept like Dirac and Maxwell occurred at the same time in quantum electrodynamics that we have a non-Abelian version of that Dirac equation. We have a non-Abelian version of Maxwell's equations. We call the non-Abelian version of Maxwell's equations, Yang-Mills theory. We call the other thing Dirac theory is if

nothing happened or changed. So this is just like, we're wildly inconsistent about who we bury. This is a really interesting point. We have this idea that Einstein was in a race with Hilbert to get to the answer. This is total nonsense. The person who really should get the credit along with Einstein is not Einstein's wife and it's not Hilbert, it's Grossman, Marcel Grossman was there in 1913 and the basic idea of GR of general relativity occurs in that paper. Grossman absolutely got shafted by history. And we have particular people over And over again, who gets

shafted, like Stuckelberg gets shafted. Right. Just along with the Matthew and the Matilda effects for, to him who has much, much as will be given so that we have attribution magnet. There's also something I've been trying to name for years called the Sudarshan effect. George Sudarshan was one of the absolute giants of physics and we don't honor him. I was visiting with Kathy Fries at a university of Texas at Austin. She's in his office. I was just like, oh my God, I'm in Sudarshan's office. Well, how many people? Recognize how much Sudarshan did because he

never gets the credit and never gets a Nobel prize for all of his great work. So I have no idea why it is that Robert Herman wasn't credited with figuring out Yang-Mills theory was bundle theory. We have this weird thing where we just don't honor things. Right. So I'm trying as best I can to be very, very careful about the spiritual nature of the work. The idea to take, once you have the idea that you're taking an analogy with the Poincaré group, that Lorentz becomes the gauge and the momentum becomes the gauge potentials, do you

really want to claim, Hey, I had this brilliant idea. I'm going to see whether it can be extended to spinors. That's not, anybody would try that. And so the thing is, is that I want to call it supersymmetry. Like, because if it turns out to be right, I want to honor all the people who worked on supersymmetry in the wrong instantiation. And by the way, I also just think everyone should read that 1963 Dirac article in scientific American, because he makes the point that this idea of saying, we will force you to pin yourself to

one instantiation and that is your theory. That's like terrible science. I'm starting to clear up some of the confusions I have by understanding you more psychologically. Oh, no, but you see, I haven't, I haven't had this conversation in my life. I see that honoring is extremely important to you. Extremely. And spirit is also important to you, but I'll also define spirit in a different manner. So spirit can be spiritual, but spirit in the way that I'm going to speak about it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to that. So you would say it's, it's a

battle between Grossman and Erisman, the battle for fundamental physics, something like that. No, I would, sorry, Riemann and Erisman. Are you sure? Well, there's Grossman versus Hilbert as the people who might've been given credit for general relativity. That's one thing. So you see it as Grossmanian geometry versus Erismanian geometry or Riemann versus Erisman? It's Riemann versus Erismanian. So why not Riemann versus Whitney or versus Steenrod? Tell me about that. Well, if both of those were there in the early days of differential geometry, why is Erisman getting credit when Whitney introduced the concept of a fiber

bundle before Erisman added G-actions on it? So I think of these, well, I think of these, yeah, so Steenrod, Cartan, these are important names. And I'm not fetishistically saying we can do a perfect job with attribution. Whatever we do, if I was given all the time and information in the world, there's no way of naming things that's going to work exactly. So I'm not claiming we should, we should go for perfection, but these gross injustices are offensive to me. So I'm, I'm really, I'm trying to say, I'd like to do as little violence as is

practical and humanly possible. I can't stand George Zweig Not being given credit for substructure of the nucleons. If I start giving a talk and I say, all right, we have three valence aces inside every proton and neutron. Everyone will say, you mean quarks. And then they will say, oh, I remember that he called them aces and that there was a conflict, right? So for example, another one of these, I could give a talk about QCD and the theta angle, and I could say, all right, we've never actually seen Higlitz in the wild, but the search

for Higlitz should actually be very important. Everyone would say Higlitz. Don't you mean axion? Then they'd realize, oh yeah, yeah. There was a conflict between Weinberg and Wilczek. I believe that Weinberg, who has many things credited to him, graciously agreed to use Frank's terminology. Because we will always remember the names of Wilczek and Weinberg. I'm less worried about that. I'm much more worried about George Zweig, who's one contribution to physics that's lasting, ended up with Murray Gell-Mann's name. Murray Gell-Mann was a great attribution magnet. Like some of his work really was done by Sudarshan and

some by Stuckelberg and some By Zweig as well. And so there's a question about conflict. But it's very important to me for personal reasons that the Zweigs of the world are retained and remembered, even if we don't use their language and the Sudarshan's and the tiny, you know, like we have a problem that there have been very few high level females in math and physics in the tiny number of instances where we, we can prove that we've done injustice to them. And I think Madam Wu and Emmy Noether are the two great injustices of 20th

century physics. Um, it's very important to me that we honor those people. And so, yeah, I have a personal code, a personal notion of justice. And I, in particular, just despise the debunking community. There's just this background chatter of laughing at people. And I saw that done to Terrence Howard and I saw some of the laughter being open and some of the laughter being, you know, I think there was a movie or something called the game where you brought the biggest idiot to a dinner party and then everybody sort of laughed at the guffaws and

mistakes that the person made at the table. You know, it's this issue about when you see someone drink Their finger bowl, because they don't know what they're supposed to do. Yeah. And that, I probably don't have a rational reaction. I probably have a hatred of people who do that because whenever I see somebody mispronounce a word, I think, wow, you learned that from reading and self-study. Right. Let me tie in a Weinberg story with another woman in physics, Quinn. Helen Quinn. Because this goes into your specification versus the spirit. And the spirit versus the text

is also there biblically. You're not supposed to disregard the spirit in favor of the text. You know, we have a division in Judaism between the oral Torah and the written Torah, and there's a word that isn't used often enough in this way. I think pettifogging can be used as the intention of arbitraging the letter of the law against its spirit. There used to be something called the court of chancery that wasn't just about law in the sense that we mean it now. But was that fair? Was that just, did the law anticipate how it would

be wielded? And in part, it's very important to me that we destroy the debunking community as it exists today, because I think it's having terrible, terrible effects. I think we should care much less about peer reviewed research because peer review is actually peer injunction. Peer review is what happens when people start talking about your ideas. And I think that quite honestly, there are so many unsung heroes that weren't strong enough to defend themselves early in their career. But I hope that the AI will read a bunch of theses and realize, oh my God, here's the

injustice that we did at a scale we didn't even know was going on to people who are trying to contribute to a field and were so vulnerable that they could be killed off at the beginning of their careers. Please. I'm going to read this, but while we're on peer review, so what people think is the injustice of peer review is that you minimize type one errors, false positives at the expense of type two errors. That's what peer review does, and that's what most people think is the injustice. You have a different view, but forget about

that different view as you've already talked about it. What would replace peer review then to push back on your anti-peer review rants? I like the old system. Ask yourself the following question. If you go into Google Ngrams, You'll find that peer review does not exist as a phrase before 1965. It just doesn't. People don't know that. I show academicians, they're absolutely shocked. They're convinced that this goes back to the 1700s. What was the old system? I'm the only person bearing this torch. It was powerful editors making decisions for which they were accountable. The double helix

was never peer reviewed because it could not be peer reviewed. That was one of the statements that nature made. They said, in order to give this out to anyone outside, which is external review, which was what was present in 1953 when peer review didn't exist, we would, once you see the structure of the double helix, you can't unsee it, particularly because it gives an instantiation geometrically of the source of Chargaff's rules of equimolar relations between the nucleotides. That thing had to go into press without an outside review. We need powerful editors who do not all

agree. And particularly, we can't have the only game in town. If you want to hear me get completely crazy and rant, the only game in town was a concept that occurred in the quantum gravity community That said quantum gravity, there is no quest, but quantum gravity and string theory M theory is the only game in town to make it sound like the creed of Islam, right? Anyone found trying to say that only string theory M theory can and should be researched at the most fundamental level. And the quantum gravity is the holy grail when there's

no trace of this phrase before 1973, 72 is committing a grave ethical sin at a professional level. Now, something I never talked about before to the best of my ability to remember is something that I only heard from Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman somewhere says, I want to talk to you about ethics, but only professional ethics. I don't care what you do in your personal life, but this whole thing that we have collapses. If you're not following certain rules and I see a world in which I see Sodom and Gomorrah, that's what I see. Now in

Sodom and Gomorrah, I'm not capable of being the person that I wanted to be. I'm far too forceful. I'm far too pumped up on my own ego. People always say to me, Eric, why are you egotistical? Why are you loud? Why are you this? Why do you cut people off? You try Dealing with Ed Witten and everybody who came along with him. You're talking about the single most arrogant, insufferable, unethical approach to fundamental physics. A group of people who would murder you in your crib if you so much as suggested that quantum gravity was not

the quest and that string theory M theory was not the path. And my claim is you failed for 40 years and you've only succeeded at what the evolutionary theorists have a name for called interference competition, which is something I learned from my brother, where you make sure that your competitors can't get access to the salt licks or the fresh water in the lake so that they all starve to death. And my claim is, is that that particular thing is a, it is a personal quest of mine to destroy the theory that came in with the

idea that there is only string theory and everything else is just words in the words of Ed Witten. That is professionally unethical behavior. Full stop. I'll read a quote, please. This is from a lecture of hers. I don't recall what the lecture was on, but I wrote this quote down. This is Helen Quinn. Yeah. Helen wrote a queen was saying she was thinking about a Students, a student of June genius fingers. It was working on something called source field theory, which was Julian's way of reformulating phantom electoral dynamics. Steve, referring to Steve Weinberg, Steve didn't

like the source theory as the student began to speak. And this was the student's PhD defense. Steve began asking him questions about why source theory was valid. And Julian, the founder of source theory was right there. Naturally Julian jumped in to defend his students. This is something Quinn witnessed. So she was just relaying this at a lecture. She said this meant that the student didn't have to explain the theory he was working on, but could focus on explaining his own work. It turned into an argument between Steve and Julian about what constitutes a good theory.

I wish I had a tape recorder because having two Nobel Prize level physicists discussing the merits of different types of theories was extraordinary. Julian was arguing that the best theory is one that can absorb all new information. He was talking about a type of theory, a class of theories. Meanwhile, Steve was saying that you need to Have an explicit realization so that you can test it and rule it out. Those are two points of views, and I think they're both correct. I think we need to be seen in the context of what we mean when

we say a theory. Do we mean a theory or do we mean a type of theory? That is a sophisticated scientist. It is absolutely important that we have the scientific method to get rid of wrong instantiations. And it is absolutely imperative that we have the Dirac method to keep good ideas where an instantiation has been invalidated. And my private language for this, which is not as exalted as the great Helen Quinn is right freeway, wrong exit. The two great ideas of the 1970s were supersymmetry and grand unified theory, and both of them were correct. Right

freeway, we took the wrong exit on both. We drove the wrong conclusion because of the simplistic relationship. And, you know, look, there's entirely different ethics of science that involves who's allowed to take on how much technical debt. And I'll say somebody I don't really get along with very much with is Sean Carroll. And Sean Carroll said something brilliant on your podcast. He said, I don't really like the demarcation problem to call people pseudoscientists, which is basically to impugn their character on their mind and their sophistication. He says, I just like to say that things are

not good science. And this is great. And then again, on your, I mean, I don't think you really realize how much is happening that is happening nowhere else on your podcast, because then Leonard Susskind talking to you about Peter Woit, when you said, well, if you don't know these theories that you're claiming don't exist, I would be happy to explain them to you, which has never happened. I've never seen that interaction. So what's amazing then is, is that you have Susskind on camera saying that Peter Woit's physics and math is just bad. Now I really

appreciate that statement because it is so laughably stupid and obviously wrong. Peter Woit's mathematics, that book he wrote on group representations in quantum theory, Leonard Susskind wishes on his best day that he could write a book like that. Leonard Susskind has written some great books and he's got, he's had some great ideas, but he's not what he thinks he is. And to him, the only, this is Another thing people don't know about me. I tend to be very polite to people up until there's like one of these transgressions where they're just mean or wrong, or

they do something. I would never have said what I said about Ed Witten if Ed Witten hadn't misbehaved. If Leonard Susskind hadn't misbehaved by saying that Peter Woit's mathematics is bad, I wouldn't say Leonard Susskind is not the mathematician that Peter Woit is. And he's never written a book as good as Peter Woit's book on group symmetry and quantum theory. You mean rigorously? It's also just poetry, the pedagogy, and the fact that he standardized all of these different concepts. You know, it's like Jared Diamond writing guns, germs, and steel. You know, there are books, people

always ask me like, what's your favorite, what are your favorite books? And they want to hear Moby Dick or, you know, Tale of Two Cities. And it's like, oh, there's White's book on group theory and quantum theory. There's Woodhouse's Geometric Quantization. There's Bess's Einstein Manifold. Like these are great books. Spin Geometry by Lawson and Michelson. I want the movie rights. These are some of the greatest books Of all time. Peter Woit, no, who knew that Peter Woit was one of the great physics expositors of our time? I didn't. I know Peter pretty well. Yeah. I

would love to debate Leonard Susskind on that. And by the way, then you asked like about Eric Weinstein said, I have no idea who that is. It's so funny. I'm sitting next to Leonard after talking to him at Stanford at a Natty Seiberg lecture. These guys pretend that like, you don't talk to them. I have no idea what this is. It's like a, it's a theater troupe. I want to know what you think of this classification. Please. There's pop academics, which are those who give, who give lectures to the public and engage in popular science,

Sean Carroll's of the sort. Sean Carroll in some of his instantiation is in that world, but there's also Sean Carroll who came up with a version of Chern-Simons theory where you violate Lorentz invariance and you have a vector field that's non-vanishing on four space to try to move three-dimensional to four-dimensional techniques. Michio Kaku is a pop guy, but he wrote this book on string theory. And also helped invent string field theory. I know. So string theory Has a problem with not being non-perturbative and string field theory is non-perturbative. So there's a serious Michio Kaku who

we haven't seen for years. So like one of the, one of the memes is Michio Kaku is out of control. Get Michio Kaku in here with me. Like that's like a meme in this little physics space. Yeah. Michio Kaku is a serious person and a non-serious person. Sean Carroll is a serious person and a popularizer. Okay. So I'm saying there's a pop academic. Yeah. And then there's also the gym rat academic. What I mean is the person who's just, I don't want to speak to the public. There's no sense. Why am I going to engage

in a podcast? I'm just here to do my work. Neema or Connie Hamed is of that sort. Like, why do I have to engage? He will engage, but he's thinking I'm just going to do research. Although within academics, to an audience of academics, he's the great showman of our time. Keep going. What has the reception of GU been like? That's different between the pop academics versus the gym rat or closed door academics. GU, well, there's two things. There's GU and there's me. Some doors Are closed to me because people know that I worked for Peter

Teal. I'm just gonna be honest about it. Their idea is you've worked for the devil. Nevermind that I don't see Peter as the devil. Their point is you work for pure evil. Therefore you are a far right. Uh, you're, you're practically a KKK member. Good day. That's one of the reactions to me and to GU. Um, there isn't, if you look at what, let's say Stefan Alexander or Edward Frenkel or Marcus DeSoto or, um, Brian Keating or my hosts at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. If I showed you on my phone, me with all sorts

of top tier academics, you'd say, wow, you're clearly having all these conversations with top people. And it's true. Nobody gives it the time it takes. Like, I assume that you found that even though it's weirdly a simple idea, it takes forever to get some of this stuff across. Yeah. So the typical thing is if I'm invited into an academic department, um, they want a portion enough time. They won't say, why don't you give a series of four lectures? So everything's always an hour. Then you're trying to figure out how to sort of do all of

the Universe in an hour, which is impossible. At least I don't know how to do it. I would say that there are tons of top academics who are interested and who will talk. Nobody has digested enough of it. It requires at some point, some top person who in good standing with the community will say, I think there's way more here and that will change everything. I think what you said is key, some top person, because it doesn't matter if it's a person, there's a hierarchy. So one of the reasons Peter Woit is not looked favorably

upon in the string circles, generally speaking, is not because his critiques are invalid, but because they think, who are you to be saying that? It's very interesting because first of all, whether you know it or not, would you, let me ask you, would you agree that Peter Woit's blog is the most read blog in all of physics? I'd say he's top two. Okay. What's the other one? Sabine. Okay. So both of these people are known to know physics. Now I agree and disagree with both of them as humans do, but lots of people read Peter

Woit's blog for the physics, not for the critique of string theory. Note, there's also Scott Aaronson's blog, Though it's not exactly a physics blog, it's more about quantum computing. I spoke to Peter Woit, Sabine and Scott on this podcast several times, and the links are in the description. And they won't admit that they take Peter Woit very seriously. So we have this very weird thing about people sneaking off to go read, not even wrong, and then say, well, of course I, I frown on the, uh, the negative view of physics or this low level of

understanding, obviously Peter Woit is a very serious mind and he's a PhD. Who's, who the hell is trying to get away with saying this guy's an idiot? I don't, I just, it's weird. I'm sorry. I get emotional because it's like, you're benefiting from the blog and you're lying about your colleague. Um, Sabine, everybody knows what her, before you get to what she, what she says should or shouldn't happen, she's talking about the crisis in physics that Sean Carroll denies is happening. Wouldn't it be logical? Like when have we ever seen the top people as thought

about from inside the field, interacting with the top critics? Effectively almost never happens. And every time something Like that happens, I was on a panel, I was put on a panel with Brian Green. I told the organizers, Brian Green will drop off of this panel. And immediately Brian Green drops off of the panel. And then I said, okay, I've come all the way from England, all the way to England so that Brian can phone in from his office. And then I say, you know, are we going to set an empty chair? Are we going to,

should we talk about the fact that Brian Green is going to vanish from this? I think the tastemakers occur for a reason that we don't like to talk about. In our time, there arose one tastemaker. And I can tell you this because when I went and talked about GU, and this is probably no longer true, but GU has been around since like 84, 85. It wasn't as complete, but the core ideas were, were, were forming then. Whenever I tried to talk about it, people would say, what does Ed say? Have you talked to Ed? What's

Ed's thought? I said, well, what do you say? Ed was so dominant at that point that no one wanted to venture an opinion, lest they find themselves on the wrong side of the world's greatest intellect. So you weren't Getting a hundred different opinions. You were getting a hundred different people trying to guess which way Ed would go. And that's unhelpful. Like I'd rather say what I thought and find out, yeah, Ed's right again. I'm wrong. But that's not what happened. What happened was, is we created a world that was afraid to disagree with the top

person. And, you know, Nima has been incredibly kind to me. He invited my son and I into the Institute of Advanced Study to meet with him. And he just couldn't have been more constructive and a better advocate for physics. He's our top, in many ways, Nima is our top guy. Um, he stayed true to actual physics. I think all of his theories have ended up sort of wrong. I could be wrong about that, but he's honest and he's genuine and he's trying. And he's a great showman. He's a great advocate. Brilliant as the day is

long, Toronto product. Oh, right, right. Yeah. He was in U of T with my brother. Yeah. He said, he said this thing to me. He said, um, it doesn't really matter where you go. It just matters that you solve lots of problems, solve as many problems as you can and enjoy life doing it. By the way, Nima is also perfectly happy to be heretical. Like Nima will talk about negative energy and Casimir states and negative mass and you know, the Casimir effect, all of these wonderful things. And that's not at all, you know, there's a

very small number of people who achieve top status outside of string theory, M theory, and, you know, Lisa Randall might be one, Nima would be another. So this thing was absolutely brutal. It was V Burn actually. And the double copy stuff, even if it came from string theory, somebody who needs to be promoted, um, yeah. When you ask like, what's the reception? It's not, it's not what I would expect. I just gave a talk at Hebrew university. And I, the first thing I say is here's the formula for the dark energy. Like I've worked in

a formula and I say, you know, from this new DESI experiment that if it continues, there isn't a cosmological constant, it's variable and it's already a problem that the cosmological constant would be so many more orders of magnitude lower than it should be. Right. So what if it, what if there's a term that can respond, imagine that you set team unit stress energy tensor equal To zero, if there is a capital G mu nu curvature tensor Einstein curvature, then you need the dark energy term to go up and down with it. Right. You need it

to be able to achieve a VEV if you will. The reason that we're stuck with the cosmological constant is that there's an automatic identity inside of the Einstein curvature, which is that the full Riemann curvature has a Bianchi identity, the contracted version, the Einstein tensor is what has the divergence free due to the Bianchi identity, therefore set team unit equal to zero, throw the dark energy term to the other side, it better have an automatic differential equation because it's equal to something that has one. Okay. So now the only equation, there are only three real

tensors again, say something slightly inaccurate. There are only three real tensors in Riemannian geometry. There's the metric tensor, there's the torsion tensor, and there's the curvature tensor. Sure. Curvature tensor is used by Einstein to do gravity. The torsion tensor is the weak sister that never makes it to the big dance. So all you've got is G mu nu, and it's got one equation, which is that it's annihilated by Its own Levi-Civita connection. Therefore, all you can do is put a Lambda in front of that so that the divergence has a product rule, the derivative of

Lambda with G mu nu left alone, plus Lambda times the derivative of G mu nu, that the derivative of G mu nu dies, that means that the only thing that you can count on is, is that the derivative of Lambda has to die. That is what doomed Einstein to having to include this goddamn term in his equation, which he never liked because it was just, there were three terms. There was the beautiful term, there was the greatest blunder term, and then there was the cheap wood relative to the pure marble, which was what the stress-energy

tensor was, as he described it. And torsion. Well, the torsion isn't in the Einstein field equations because of the Palatini, the fact that if you open yourself up to torsion, then the only Lagrange doesn't select for it. So the reason was that, so one of the contentions, you know, you're in GU when instead of using the torsion, you think about contortion, and then instead of using contortion, contortion is not called contortion to me, What is it called? What do I call it? What do you call it? I don't know, because you're using a different term.

Okay. So if you take the displacement tensor, displacement torsion tensor, we haven't gotten to distortion yet. Torsion is something involving some commutation of X and Y vector fields, as you've seen in Riemannian geometry, then there's an equivalent, but that's the thing I'm introducing, we haven't gotten there yet. Contortion isn't something I've introduced. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Great. My understanding, again, I've been out of academics for a long time, so maybe I'm screwing it up. If I have a bundle and I have a Levi-Civita connection, I can ask for what's the difference between any connection and

the Levi-Civita connection. That has to be an ad valued one form. That is called the contortion and you can get the regular torsion from the contortion or the contortion from the regular, in other words, they have equivalent, I didn't know that had a name. Yeah. I believe that, and this is stuff that nobody knows, so I'm going to be a little bit careful, I believe that the torsion and contortion have three separate representational Theoretic components. So the ad in the ad valued one form is Lambda two, and the one form valued in the two forms

breaks into a sum of three irreducible representations under a Lorentz group, that thing, if you think about it, if you think about Lorentz group, that thing, if you take different proportions of them, one proportion combination is the torsion, one proportional combination is the contortion, they're equivalent, neither one of those works. And so the whole one, you know, you know, you're in geometric unity when you use the gauge rotated Levi-Civita connection in what would be the contortion instead of the torsion tensor. Because that thing has incredible, uh, invariance properties and equivariance properties under the gauge group

acting on the inhomogeneous gauge group. Do I know that as the tilted gauge group? The tilted gauge group, this is, I love this, the tilted gauge group, the terra for our Hindi speaking friends, uh, gauge group is mapped in by this, what I now call tau sub plus, and you can multiply on the right or you can multiply on the left by the inverse so that you get a right action on both sides. You can take The double coset construction, the double coset of the inhomogeneous gauge group by the proper. Tau tilted homomorphisms acting on

both sides results in something equivalent to A mod G, which is what the McDowell-Mansouri people didn't understand. They started with the wrong space. Again, I want to honor them. Look, I found this without knowing about them, but they had a piece of the puzzle, you know, and so this thing has a beautiful differential equation that allows it to be the analog of divergence free. Let me see if I understand this. Sure. So the inhomogeneous gauge group, double coseted by the tau subscript plus, which I forgot what I called it, doesn't matter. The tilted homomorphism. Is

isomorphic to A mod G. Yeah. Think about it as this. Is isomorphic to A mod G or there's some extra structure. If you want to get technical, there's two different, because there are multiple homomorphisms, but think about this. An inhomogeneous, sorry, a semi-direct product topologically is a Cartesian product. It's just the algebra that's the semi-direct. Okay. So what if you had G cross G. Now you're speaking of a group G. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for keeping me honest. So you have a gauge group, Cartesian product with the space of ad valued one forms up

to an origin, ad valued one forms is the same as the space of connections. So first start with the inhomogeneous gauge group, realize that that's equivalent to gauge group, Cartesian product, gauge potentials, realize that the gauge potentials are equivalent to the space of connections. So therefore that's the whole inhomogeneous gauge group is equal to gauge group, Cartesian product connections. Now mod out by G, just try to cancel the G. So G mod G goes away. Now you're left with an A. Now you're mod out by another G and you get a mod G. You know,

you're, you know, you're in GU when a mod G is replaced by the double coset of the inhomogeneous gauge group by its own tilted. Subgroup. And, you know, you're in GU when the, um, dark energy term, which is the cosmological constant times, the metric is replaced by var pi, an ad valued one form minus the Epsilon gauge transformation inverted counter-rotating the exterior derivative coupled to the olive connection applied to the Epsilon Gauge transformation, the sort of the more cartan form. That thing is what solves the cosmological constant problem in GU. Now it's just a VEV.

Now your only question is why is it so flat where I live? Because you have this different term that doesn't have to be constant. Look, Eric, I have this geometric unity iceberg. I can see the reaction from the comments and people who email me. It comprises professors, lay people, researchers, graduate students in string theory, by the way, and in not string theory. So it's not as if string theorists don't like you or you don't like string theory. As a whole, but I don't know what the reaction to GU or the iceberg, but GU itself is

in the academic world. I know what the reaction is like from the pop academics that we talked about earlier. And most people see pop academics just by definition because they're popular. They're the people who put themselves out in the public, but that's a biased set. So one can't generalize and say academics think X about GU because pop academics think X about GU. And that's even provided that pop academics think X about GU. So what is it like behind closed Doors? I would say that for the most part, uh, I take a tremendous number of high

level academic meetings with people at the very top of the field. Um, so I frequently go to seminars at Caltech at UCLA. I meet with people afterwards. I could name names. I'd choose not to at the moment, but names everybody would know. The, the dominant reaction to GU, by the way, is silence. People don't know what to make of something this crazy, this bold, and it draws on a skillset. The number of people who both know the standard model cold still, and still thinking like bundle geometric terms is about zero. You can, uh, here's an

exercise for your listeners put in the term vector bundle, you'll get hundreds of thousands of hits on Google, put in the term CKM matrix, which is a reference to the standard model, and then require both of them with a plus sign before the quotation marks. And it drops to three digits. In other words, the number of people who are in contention to be working on the standard model is now vanishingly small. That is in part, the problem is that nobody who's thinking in vector bundle terms in physics is Really focused on the standard model. They're

mostly in string theory, or maybe some very high end GR stuff. Most of the people thinking about the CKM matrix have no idea really what vector bundles are other than something they saw when they were a graduate student. So in general, the major note is silence. The only group that is really vocal is the negative pop side people, the negative pop academic people. Some of them aren't even in math or physics. And their thought is, well, this is obviously garbage because it has the following characteristics. You've got somebody who's. Um, you know, close to 60

years old is not in an academic seat, making crazy claims, very large. And this is a classic failure mode of something going wrong psychologically. So yeah, that's what their point is. Well, if you're avoiding the, uh, the archive, you're avoiding submitting to journals, the only reason for that is you're hungry for clicks and trying to make a fortune bamboozling the public. So I'm just, I want to say that so that they hear, do you imagine I can't see you on the internet? Okay. How many of you understand what the standard model gauge Group is and,

uh, understand vector bundles and have looked at the various theories so that you have an idea of what Peter Woit and string theory and loop quantum, right? Like this is a group that doesn't exist. So more or less, what you're seeing is you're seeing people trying to make a heuristic distinction about, well, it violates these heuristics. So if you're not going to play by the rules, we're going to treat you like a crank. And I would say that there's some reflection of that in math and physics departments, but there's also, if you listen to the

way I speak when I'm talking mathematically, which is rarely, people don't usually see me in this. Well, fine. If you, if you don't like what I'm saying, I would imagine you'd take issue with it on a blackboard. Why is the third generation, the imposter generation? Because when you do the decomposition, it looks like the first generation's the one that's different than the latter two. Well, it depends what you call first, second, and third. So the claim is that you're looking at zero forms, tensor spinors, direct sum, one forms, tensor spinors. Yeah. So I call zero

forms, Tensor spinors, the first generation. Now it could turn out to be not right, but I believe that's the way it'll go. The second generation would be what you get by taking a direct contraction, which you call the trace. Gamma trace, gamma traceless. I don't know if that's the right language. Is it? No, I don't know. I don't know either. It was my understanding. I know, I know. But that's why you were saying to me before that, Eric, you misportray a contraction as a projection. And I'm saying, yeah, this is what happens. We're fumbling. I

see. So you say that in analogy, the gamma trace part, where you take a one form tensor spinor and you contract the one form against it using Clifford multiplication is that I would call that the second generation. You've called it the gamma trace. I see. And then you started with the gamma trace lists as the second generation, which I didn't think I said. So it's a little bit of a discrepancy between you and me, which is great. Cause this is like, this is, this is because it's real. Like we're trying to develop something and you're

making a point where there's confusion of language. And I want to show That this is a process as opposed to I, I hand you the perfect finished thing. It is flawless. Yeah, sure. Sure. So the claim is first generation is spinor, spinors, tensor, zero forms. Second is one forms, tensor spinors contracted across the tensor product. Just a moment. Would you say that it's zero forms valued in spinors? It's just spinor fields, but in order to make it consistent, I see, like I would never have introduced zero form valued spinors, except I know that one form

valued spinors are in the mix. So then I have to point out that it is true that ordinary spinor fields can be technically and pedantically called zero forms valued in the spinors. Yeah. So you have zero form valued spinors. That's the first generation. Then I claim the second generation is what you get when you take one form valued spinors and you Clifford multiply across the tensor product, right. And it's all of those things that, um, I guess it would be the inverse image. You Clifford multiply what though? The spinor with the one form. Okay. Yeah.

Cause you have a metric. That, that piece, which is equivalent to the spinors. So, so you're looking for the, Um, you got it, Eric. Oh, I'm going to screw up the kernel, co-kernel, all this kind of stuff. The easy thing to say is the third generation piece, which is the kernel of that map, right? And then the issue is what is the compliment to the kernel? That would be the second generation. That's what you're calling the trace, the trace and the traceless. Yeah. Gamma trace. So these all look different. So why are you saying that

two of these are equivalent in some way? Because at the, at the representation theoretic level, two of them are equivalent and the third is not an equivalent representation, but you can have two groups, sorry, you can have two group representations at the level of a subgroup that are isomorphic, which at the level of where they came from in the total group are not isomorphic. And I think sometimes this may be called somebody should check me Lepton universality, uh, where you believe that you, you have to be technically, this isn't much discussed, but we don't know

whether these three generations that we have will continue to be identical up to mass as the energy scale increases. So I'm claiming two of them. Well, one of them will not. That's like a prediction, you know, you're in GU when you actually have predictions about what the remaining matter is to be found and how it would behave if you went to higher and higher groups rather than just broken subgroups. Okay. Let's speak about predictions. Yeah. Suppose someone wanted to know something concrete, like tell me what happens when two electrons scatter. Well, first of all, I'm

not the best person to answer that question. Sabina made an excellent point. She said, look, there are only three places to find new physics. Again, if Sabina, if I don't get this exactly right, forgive me. One place. Is you can have things that are incredibly massive and require energies that we've never gotten to. So we wouldn't see them because we haven't gotten to enough energy equivalents to the mass that we actually see the objects in the phenomenon. Another thing that can happen is, is that things can be so weakly coupled that we can barely detect

them. Neutrinos are all but dark matter. They're very weakly coupled. They're not, the ones we see aren't massive, but so both of those are things. Then the third one is the most interesting one, Which is effects that you only get to see in special configurations. So that would be like Eddington waiting for the moon to pass in front of the sun and getting in the right place to see the effect of bending, uh, the light of distant stars or the Bohm-Aronoff effect, which showed how did we get so far into the story of electromagnetism? And

we didn't even know that we had it wrong. So it's accessible at low energies. It just requires some novel constructions. Yeah. And that one's also funny because it's really a classical effect, but it's quantum detected. Right. So one thing I didn't know because I'm not a physicist, um, is that there's this thing called a phenomenologist. I didn't know what a phenomenologist was. I just thought they were people who were closer to the standard model. I think what a phenomenologist is, is a bridge object between the pure theory community and the experiment community where the pure

theorists are not really good at saying you should build a calorimeter that does this, you know, um, and so the phenomenologists have the trickiest jobs, don't they? And I think they're kind of, you have to speak both languages. They Have to speak both languages and they, they, they're not highly visible. Like Brian Keating makes an excellent point that almost everyone you hear of from, from in the popular version of physics is a theorist. And he said, what about the experimentalists? I'm a, I, Brian, I'm an experimentalist. Well, the theorists are broken into two categories and

we never really hear from the phenomenologists. So I, I agree. And I didn't understand this, like things I got wrong in life. I didn't understand. I'm not supposed to be asking questions. Um, but I can tell you effects that I think you should look for. I don't think the world is chiral. You know, you're in GU when your theory is not chiral. Like one of the critiques of my theory is, is that I have a chiral anomaly, which I find funny because it is not chiral. Um, but nobody notices it by the way. Now you

can still have an intermediate chiral structure though. Sure. You have an effect, you have an effective theory, right? So the idea is that or an anomalous triangle diagram or an inconsistent regularization procedure. So GU is not chiral, but it has to produce a chiral world Because effective at an effective level, nature is chiral. So what you have is you have a field, a VEV in a Dirac like operator. Again, this Dirac-Rurita-Schwinger thing that comes up to meet the scalar curvature a scalar curvature in the Einstein equation analog of GU. So GU has a, what it

claims is an improved Einstein equation. Therefore there is like Riemannian curvature in it. It coaxes this thing out of the vacuum that then plays the role of a fundamental mass scale. So what happens when things flatten out, the scalar curvature drops and the masses drop. If the mass drops sufficiently, then a Dirac type operator decouples into vial type operators. So the claim is, is that what we have is we have a non-chiral world where there were two chiral halves that were coupled because of a VEV. And then when gravity gets low enough, what I believe

you have is you have a decoupling into matter sectors. And we, what we call luminous will be connected to matter that is currently dark when gravity becomes strong enough. By the way, this is like a mathematician trying to sound cool, but like, that's what I Think the equation said. Dirac-Rurita-Schwinger. Yeah. There's a complex and there's an operator. Let's take a Diram complex where d squared equals zero on a manifold. And let's put a bundle on top of that manifold with a connection. Let's imagine the connection is flat. So we've tensored this bundle, this vector bundle,

with the Diram complex with a flat connection. d squared will continue to be zero. Now let's say, okay, let's relax the flatness condition. d squared is no longer equal to zero. d squared actually becomes definitionally the curvature. Okay. Right. Because you need, like, you need to go from I-forms to I plus two forms. And instead of it being a second order differential operator, it's a zeroth order differential operator equivalent to a degree two form valued in the adjoint bundle, which is the form valued in the adjoint bundle, which is the curvature. Okay. Yeah. So sometimes

in such situations, you're like, oh no, that ruined my complex. The curvature, which I love, ruined the complex structure of the tensored Diram complex. So what do you do? You say, okay, I'm going to roll it up into an operator. Instead Of having a multi-step complex, I'm just going to say, let's say even forms on one side, odd forms on the other, and I'll map the even forms up via d, and I'll map them down via d star, both coupled to a connection. So now you get a one-step operator rather than a multi-step operator. It's

not a complex, but that thing would be the Diram complex, the best you can do with a Diram complex with a vector bundle tensored with it, where the connection was not trivial, which was, did not have trivial curvature, rather. So this is a rolled-up complex that normally one would find on a 3-manifold. Remember I said that your NGU, when a 4-manifold births a 14-manifold, which behaves like a 3-manifold? There are two ways that that happens. You pointed to one of them, which is, oh, you mean churn silence. That was part of the truth. But then

there's a second part of the truth. Only on a 3-manifold do I get a cheap version of a complex that has 0-forms to 1-forms, 1-forms to 2-forms, 2-forms to 3-forms. Right, so there are three non-trivial steps in that complex. This one goes 0-forms to 1-forms, 1-forms to 2-forms, but the 2-forms then get contracted To d-1-forms, and then the d-1-forms get taken to d-forms. So if you put those together, it looks like a 3-complex, because you cut out almost all of the middle of the DRAM sequence. Right? Now, that gadget gets rolled up, and that's what

this Dirac-Farida-Schwinger operator is all about. That's what the fermion sector looks like. And by the way, the idea that, I haven't heard any commentary on this idea at all. It's just weird. It's like, here is a bold, clear idea. Take the 14-manifold, and that 14-manifold has a chimeric bundle, which is equivalent to the tangent and the cotangent bundles. In fact, it's semi-canonically equivalent, and is endowed with natural metric information. So you can build spinors without ever making a metric choice. Okay? That guy, because you can build spinors, you can think of that as a bundle

with a U64,64 structure group, and what we're going to do is we're going to take the DRAM complex on that thing, which would normally have degree 0, degree 1, degree 2, 3, 4, all the way up to 14 before it died. So it'd have 15 different terms, 14 different operators. You're going to cut out almost all of them in the middle. So you're going to go 0 to 1 to 13 to 14 and then die. And so how did you get from 2 to 13? Oh, well, you took two. You did a contraction that got

you back to one. Yeah. And then you did a star. And so that thing, when rolled up, has that zero in the Southeast corner of a two-by-two matrix of operators, which is what I think will be found to be a seesaw mechanism. So there's an entire, there's a wonderful book by Michael Atiyah called The Physics and Geometry of Knots. And you see this complex in that book. So the reason that the 14 manifold behaves like a three manifold, three is magical, just a magical dimension. There's the bosonic magic, which is Chern-Simons-like theories. And there's the

fermionic magic, which is that you roll up this very simple thing. And that's what leads to three generations. Do you still have the D-squared property in this complex that's only three to four long? This is something I've never said anywhere. There is a new D-squared, I think it's acyclic, crazy, beautiful complex that if you have two connections, I created and Have never released to anyone. I haven't even mentioned it because it's going to engender more confusion. But suffice it to say, suffice it to say, there's something that looks like, oh God, what is it? D-A,

F-sub-B for the second connection, identity D-B. I think that's the four entries. Oh, sorry. There are two negative signs in the second column. So there is a new D-squared, which is unbelievable. And one of the coolest things about this is that on shell, where the equations get satisfied, a complex is birthed. So if you think about it, and this is, you know, this is like, this is more with my old math buddies. My interpretation is that the Einstein condition is a cohomological condition. Because what it says is the curvature has some special property, but if

the curvature is the obstruction to D-squared equaling zero, then maybe on shell, what that's telling you is that a new cohomology theory is born on shell. So you're going to get a modulized space of connections. And then you can look at the kernel and co-kernel of a cohomology theory on that space. And you get this gorgeous structure. But the thing is, is that, look, I went into math to avoid string theory. And, you know, there's just this very weird story, which I couldn't sort out in my mind, where I, I was a 17 year old

kid at the university of Pennsylvania who went to a lecture of Ed Witten on string theory in 1980, seemingly three, but Ed Witten doesn't give a lecture on string theory until 1984 after the green Schwartz anomaly cancellation. And in this story where I'm clearly lying, I switched my major from physics to math because I can see the effect that he's just had on a room full of physicists where suddenly everyone has given up like instant learned helplessness. And I never told that story because it's clearly time inconsistent. Like he, I'm in my sophomore year, I

I'm in college only for three years. I'm in my sophomore year when the green Schwartz anomaly cancellation happens, but I've already changed my major. I'm reading Peter Woit's book about this period of time. And he says, wouldn't doesn't begin to get interested in this until the green Schwartz anomaly cancellation, but he actually gives his first lecture on string theory in 1983 at a conference on Grand unification. I read this. I just think you're kidding me. Tell me where this conference was. This conference was held at the university of Pennsylvania. I am the only 17 year

old in that room. I'm the youngest person to see the beginning. I'm almost 60 right now, as we speak 59. I am the youngest person on earth to see the birth of the Whitten era of strength. I'm the only person who can report accurately of what it's like to be an undergraduate and watch as the theoretical physicists in this room lose their minds. Because God is in the room saying things that are so incredible claims that are so strong from a position of so much understanding and wisdom that nobody wants to oppose it. And I

just looked at this and I said, I cannot go into this field. This is going to take over everything. Gosh, man, there's many questions that I have pages and pages of questions from before. I'll come for several days. We'll do whatever you want to do. But may I say something? I think we're making history right now. Tell me more. So all these questions, what was it like to be in the room when nobody had heard these stories, Like there's so much of my life that lives only in my head because everyone's still trapped about like,

so wait a minute, you think the world is 14 dimensional? Why do we only see four? That's sort of the level of my life. I never get to the real part of my life. My whole life has been lived alone. This is really creepy in a weird way. Having a discussion about something real. This doesn't happen. Let's go. Earlier, when you said that we have the three generations, the two of them have the same representation, but one doesn't see physicists tend to mix up the word representation with representation space. Mathematicians tend to be more careful

about that. The representation is the map that goes from the group to GLV. Yeah. Or the handles if you're on the algebra. Great, great is. But representation space is the V. So we have a triple. We have a group. We have a space and we have a map from the group into the automorphisms of the space. So let's call that a representation. Very good. So when you said that they have different representations, do you mean the representation spaces are the same for two of them, but not The third or, or what? You're asking the right

question. So let's back all the way up. If we're going to do it from a math perspective. A breaking of a representation is a group, a subgroup, an initial representation of the ambient group into the automorphisms of a, some space, usually a vector space. When you break from an irreducible representation or easily presented tensor product of representations of representations to a subgroup, very often something that was irreducible breaks into smaller irreducible subcomponents. Yes. Of the smaller subgroup. The claim that I am making is. The spinors that we see, the 16 dimensional complex. Internal quantum numbers

tensored with the two complex dimensional Weyl spinor. As we go to the higher and higher groups in GU. What you're going to see is those dimensions of the spaces won't change. You will see something that looks like. Dark matter coming out of its non-luminous phase and being connected and coupled to the luminous matter at higher gravity regimes. That's my interpretation. Higher gravity regime just means higher curvature. High curvature. Yeah. Really, really what I'm thinking Of is high curvature, but I'm trying to sound like. Okay. Okay. But the thing is that the, there are two. Even

without high curvature, there are two spaces of fermions that we haven't seen in GU. There's spin three halves fermions that are really weird because, so they'll appear to be spin three halves on the four manifold we know and love. Tensored with a 16 complex dimensional space that'll look like the standard model fermions. Except it will be conjugated. So that is in our, that's a prediction. You know, you're in GU and GU makes the prediction that there will be spin three halves matter coupled to a 16 dimensional vector space that looks awfully familiar, but that the

parody is sort of reversed and flipped. And then you're going to have an additional collection of spin one half fermions. That are coupled to, I forget it's 144 complex dimensional vector space that nobody's ever seen. And the third generation of fermions that we see that's also spin halves, spin one half. We'll combine with that when the group rises from this broken SU(3) cross SU(2) cross SU1. So there will be a grand unification at a Pati-Salam level. That's where the observed Leptons, the electron and the electron neutrino become the fourth color of the quarks for the

SU4 that contains the SU(3), which is really spin six, but never mind. And then you're going to see all these other particles you've never seen before. And so the physicist trying to dismiss the theory says, great, you're making a prediction, tell me something. Why haven't we seen these particles? You have a mass, right? I don't really know, but we didn't see the third generation of particles for a while. Robbie was the one who said, why is there a second generation of particles? I assume that there's a mass prohibition because a lot of these things are

electrically charged. So yeah, there is a, there's a hidden, I think it's 144 dimensional complex representation that'll be tensored with spin one half Weyl spinor. And it will combine with a third generation. Eric, it's a pleasure, man. I could keep talking to you for another couple hours. Well, probably a week. Yeah. I think we'll have at least another podcast on GU that will be more in depth as mentioned. And also it wasn't fair to you. So maybe you're going to want to do it More structured. Well, that's fine. I mean, that's like five hours of

no-brainers. Well, that's fine. I mean, that's like five hours of notice. I haven't had time to prepare for this, but take care, man. Hey, really, really great to be here. And by the way, thanks for really taking an interest in this. I learned a great deal from watching your video. Okay. Enlighten me. What did your observation math tell you? I can tell you what I learned. I think I'm less interested in giving you like A minus B plus all that kind of stuff. I had no idea that this was so difficult because I just remember

all of the little problems along the way that I was trying to tackle. So whether this is right or wrong, whether it's delusional, we'll find out, but it has a kind of coherence to it. But it has a kind of coherence. And at least to me, to my mind, it's like, yeah, obviously, you know, because GU begins with an assumption of four degrees of freedom only together with a tiny bit of extra information, almost nothing. I always think of it as really simple. And I think that I just didn't have an appreciation for how overwhelming

this is. I get No point. Did I feel like I was doing anything particularly unusual or clever? It's just a series of beliefs and intuitions that I followed and followed and followed. And I've always had this question about like, well, I don't understand where is everybody. And I think in some sense, watching you struggle with how to present it, I think I've become kinder to myself. I think I realized why I've taken on all these personality distortions and affectations of trying to have the same car. Try to imagine having this conversation for 40 years. Eric,

I've got 40 minutes, explain GU to me. And then like, I'll be three minutes in the person will say, okay, let's design the experiment that will prove or disprove your theory. Like what? Or is there a double cover of GLV? Yeah. I think Edward Frenkel and I recently spent an hour and a half on whether there's a double cover of GLV. There's a metal linear group. It has an end lab entry. I didn't know that. I didn't know the name of it. I just worked out that it had to have non-trivial GLV had to have

non-trivial PI one. And then I think I remember once running into a reference in Lawson and Michelson that says that there is such a group, but it's not important because there are no finite dimensional representations of it, which reduced to the spin representation. It's like, that's the entire acquaintance I have with this, with this object. So I had no idea until theories of everything that I'd actually, like, you say this thing at the end, I'll tell you something else. I didn't, I didn't know the word unexampled. I was like, should I correct Curt? Cause he's

not using the English language properly. And I realized, no, I just didn't know the word you're using it beautifully. At no point did it occur to me that this is an unexampled phenomenon, that what you're actually asking is for people to use a heuristic. Look, I'm not going to read all that. Just tell me whether it's right or wrong, whether he's, you know, full of it or whether there's anything to it. And by the way, here's a story that I don't think I've told much. There's a guy named Eugenio Bianchi, who's I think still running

around in physics. I went to a conference with him and he said, I went to a conference right after the Oxford talk in 2013. And he said, you know, we've been at this conference for three days. This is our last day, the fourth. And everybody in the world, because like Lamont had written about this was a big, you know, the guardian had written about it. And he said, everybody wants to know, is there anything to this or is there nothing to this? So let's go and we'll ditch the conference. So we ditched the conference. We

sit down. I started explaining it to him. I don't know where he went. And he finally, he just said, stop right there. We're like 20 minutes in. And I should have listened to this. It was just like, I didn't have the confidence to hear what he had to say. He said, forgive me, Eugenio, if you're out there. He said, the only thing that's occurring to people is that there are either zero new ideas or one new idea. And nobody imagines that there are two or more. And the most likely number is zero. And then he

pointed at the displaced torsion of the augmented torsion tensor. And he said, just take that. He said, that's an entire field. He said, that one idea is worthy of a field. I didn't know how to process that. And He said, the problem is, there's new idea after new idea, after new idea. And nobody, no one has budgeted that this is a possibility. It was like, remember when you said something nice and I said, thank you. And I said, it's a struggle to figure out what to say. I don't know how to receive the idea. Like

it's a weird thing that you work on the theory of everything and you think it's right. You take those two statements. That shouldn't be a weird thing for anyone with a PhD and a technical subject. It's like, of course, that's what you're working on. If I was in biology, I'd be trying to cure cancer. You know, if I owned a rocket company, I'd be trying to go to Mars. And to me, it's like, we're in theoretical physics to solve physics. Like, you know, I know Jim Watson as a person. That guy's name will be around

for 10,000 years if humans still exist. It's very weird to have like hung out with Archimedes for four days. Raoul Bott, I swam naked with Raoul Bott off Martha's Vineyard. He was a sun worshiper. Raoul Bott will be remembered forever. What we do is normal in a region which almost, things almost never work, but if they work, The prize isn't riches. You can look at Einstein's house on Zillow and it's like, I don't know, a million, 2 million ducks. It's not much. If it works, you get to have your name perpetuated. And that's a weird

thing to think about. We don't think about glory. We don't think about lasting contributions. We can talk about them for other people, can't talk about them for ourselves. And what he was telling me was there's too much here. And, you know, just visiting with Lee Smolin, he once said this thing to me, which forever will, you know, it just disturbed me, no end. He said, Eric, you're too present. I still don't know what he meant. I think every time somebody had something to say, I was like, yeah, let's go, let's pounce. Let's, what can we

do? Ultimately, the hope of GU is that we get our own source code and we figure out whether we have to die on this planet from the fruits of previous generations of physicists. There's much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on Theories of Everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, Hey Curt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy, and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in

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