Eric Weinstein's Theory of Everything Confirmed

What Sean said is, I, Sean Carroll, am not that interested in labeling things as pseudoscience. No, Sean. How dare you cast shade and aspersions of the kind that I wouldn't seek to cast on you, but I will now.

After the noise died down, I sat down with Eric for a conversation about all of this. His theory of geometric unity. What does it all mean? And why do so many people misunderstand or misrepresent what it's all about? How can we test it in the lab and in space? And will geometric unity kill off string theory once and for all? Eric Weinstein, welcome back to the into the Impossible podcast. Live and in person. Well, not live, but we're in person. Good to see you.

Oh, we're live.

We are alive.

There we go.

It's been about two years since you were in that very seat. Podcast seating has changed a little bit. Coming off a one hour plus seminar with you speaking about geometric unity to a wrapped audience of string theorists, cosmologists, particle physicists, and fresh men and women. What did you think of it?

Like ucsd. Excuse me, crowd.

When you heard about the DESI results, the cognizante called it desi. We never, we never read out the acronym. We always say the acronym as if it's.

Well, I have to be careful because I'm married to an Indian woman and the word for country in Hindi is desh. And so they refer to themselves as desi.

When you heard about this news, I mean, obviously this is not something you post, dicted, retrodicted and put in just before our talk. Right? So this must been something that.

From the 1980s, right?

So this must have been something that you've been thinking about for quite some time. So how, how did you react when you heard the news? Now, we should say in that seat last week was the spokesperson, former spokesperson, desi, still leader of the project, Kyle Hansen, the University of Utah, the running utes or the Uding ute. Something like that. Anyway, and he told me, well, look, this is a tantalizing hint, but so was dark energy when it was first kind of encountered. So we should not, you know, immediately jump to conclusions. A cosmological constant is dead and. And so forth. But what was your, as a human, as a man, Eric, what was your reaction?

Look, I don't think that it. The results could fall apart. You could have systemic error and I wouldn't change my tune. Einstein was already dissatisfied with the term that he introduced because it's preposterous, it's a ridiculous term and it sits There, because it's the only thing that we think can go in that slot without sort of entering a check kiting problem where you have to introduce new fields and then you create more debt that you have to pay off later. So if you don't want to get into that problem, you have to accept it's some constant that falls out of the heavens. Exaggeratedly tiny level multiplying the metric because the metric is itself annihilated by its own derivative operator. And so because of a product rule in calculus, it has to be lambda some constant times little g mu knew the metric. And that technically can sort of accommodate dark energy.

But it's preposterous. So assume that the experimental result fell apart. I'd be in the same place I was in the 80s. This is not going to hold. This is completely artificial. Einstein was correct. And if he'd had the courage of his convictions, I think what he would have done is to recognize that the entire Einstein field equations cannot live on in this fashion. Where you've got one term that's perfect and two terms that are ungainly to say the least and preposterous to say more.

You know, we were talking in particular about a piece of geometric unity that's supposed to cover the dark energy. And I think that with new tentative results from desi, people are more willing to listen to the idea that this is a pretty serious challenge to integrate experimental evidence potentially with geometric perfection of Einstein's setting for general relativity. And so if you think about the idea that the Einstein tensor, capital G mu nu sits in this equation with these two other terms, one of which is the dark energy term, which is the cosmological constant lambda times little g mu nu, the so called space time metric, and that being equal to some constant times the stress energy tensor. Only one of those three terms has this quality of seeming geometric perfection to it. So all of the attributes that are associated with that beautiful capital g mu nu term of Einstein's curvature have to in some sense be carried over to the other terms because they're set equal, right? So if you take the stress energy tensor to zero, you basically have to say that if the curvature term in general relativity has a property like being divergence free, that is being annihilated by some differential operator, then the dark energy term has to have the same property. And we just don't have essentially any choice in what that term can be, given Einstein's setting of working over the space of all potential space time metrics.

Now to the proverbial the implications of the dark energy changing is, are astonishing, if indeed it's true. There are many things that can happen. The cosmological constant can slowly change, sort of asymptotically changing to some value. It could get bigger, it could get smaller. Right. It changes.

It's not going to be a constant.

It won't be a constant. Right. So the dark energy term will evolve, can evolve. We parameterize it by these two terms, omega or w0wa. Those are both the equations of state which govern the existence and the, the net effect of the scale factor on distance, how the scale factor has evolved over distance, or redshift. It's proxy, we call it it's proxy. So one of the implications of a cosmological constant was potentially the heat death of the universe, when entropy would sort of evalu zero and more. And we would be in this cold, sterile, barren environment where perhaps only photons and black holes might persist and maybe not even them.

Now things are different. We could have a much more exciting future awaiting us. The Big Rip, the Big Crunch. These, these are now back in play, whereas before they weren't.

So, but just getting out of general relativity because it's enough already.

How do you mean?

Let me make an analogy that I made in the talk. Many people don't realize that there is no Leaning Tower of Pisa. They all lean.

There's more than one.

Yeah, well, the problem is, what do you make of the fact that when you, when you put towers in the soil of Pisa, that it's in this, I don't know, silty, silty, sedimentary, unstable, Arno river basin, whatever it is, they all leap. And in fact, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as we call it, isn't even the one that's leaning the most. What I believe is that once you understand that many towers in Pisa lean, you realize that it's nothing to do with the towers, it's about the soil. And the soil of general relativity is terrible. It's the space, infinite dimensional space of what we would call pseudo Riemannian metrics. And it has this very simple action on it that is a function that tells us how good or bad any of these things are, how advantaged, disadvantaged, desirable, undesirable, any particular choice of the world would be. And it generates this Einstein curvature tensor, which we love, and it struggles to generate anything to pair it with. So my claim is you're doing general relativity in the wrong place.

And you took a mathematician, Einstein, which he was regarded as a mathematician in his lifetime because he was very mathematical compared to physicists of his day. And you venerated him to the point that he no longer feels like a colleague. Right. It's like if one of your friends from high school became the Pope.

Right? Or the president.

Yeah, well, no, the President. You can think, all right, you could still be badly behaved. But, you know, if. If Freddy Fazfingers became the Pope, you wouldn't know how to hang out with him anymore.

Speaking of the Pope. Rest in peace, Francis. We have here a finger puppet of another prisoner, in fact, Galileo Galilei. If you're. If you're listening on the anti Impossible Outcast Network, I'm holding up my favorite finger puppet, my hero, Galileo Galilei. An Italian of some renown who also created our first forays into relativity and also had some of the first interactions, dangerous as they were with the Pope, that ended him up in a literal prison. Why is the gravitational potential. Well, of what you've called Einstein's prison?

Yeah.

Why is it so much more deep, robust in inescapable than. Than was good old gal?

I'm glad you asked that question, by the way. Einstein never made it into Bohemian Rhapsody, so you have to assume that maybe it was worth it. And you and I visited his prison. That's right. Where he was under house arrest in Florence. Thank you for taking me there. Of course. What I would say is the problem is the following.

Imagine you go to a seminar in theoretical physics. It might begin with the following words. I'd like to thank everybody for coming. Let us assume that x1, comma 3 is a space time manifold. As soon as you've said that, the game is already over. You can't do physics at the deepest level after you've said those words. In my opinion, the problem is Einstein baked in this assumption of a space time metric at such a fundamental level that we can't actually do anything about it after the fact.

Explain what a metric is.

For those that aren't sure, a metric. I want you to picture a 4x4 matrix of numbers. And if I flip about the diagonal that goes from the northwest to the southeast, I need that matrix of numbers to be the same. So in other words, I can choose the diagonal however I like, but then I'm only allowed to choose the upper triangle above it, and that will now determine the lower triangle below it.

But these are not real objects. These are mathematical matrices, but they're sort.

Of real objects in a way. The four down the middle, the four numbers down the middle of that 4x4 matrix, roughly speaking, correspond to four rulers three of those rulers are measuring in the X, Y, and Z direction. So that makes good sense to us. And you can calibrate them however you like. So if you want a larger number, in essence, you're making that ruler larger. The fourth number is, in some sense, a time ruler. And so that's, in a certain sense, calibrating a watch. And then if you think about the remaining elements of that four by four matrix, you're really dealing with six numbers that have to do with six protractors.

So that is protractor measuring the angle between X and Y, between X and Z, between Y and z. So those are three protractors that we probably feel more comfortable with. But then there are these weird three extra numbers which measure the angle between time in the X direction, time in the Y direction, and time in the Z direction. So that's four rulers down the diagonal of the matrix. Three of them are regular rulers. One of them is a time ruler or a watch that are being calibrated. And the remaining six numbers are three regular protractors measuring an angle of space with space. And then three bizarre protractors that measure the angle of time with X, time with Y, and time with z.

So those 10 numbers chosen at every point is a calibration of a set of instruments measuring length and angle in a generalized sense. And we choose them so that we can, at any point in space and time, make measurements. That is, the cardinal sin, in my opinion of general relativity, is that you cannot quantize in any meaningful sense the space time manifold the way people would have imagined it. Because so much depends on this structure. So it's a little bit like building the Empire State Building and then realizing that you forgot to drive piles or shore up the bedrock or do anything like that. It's a little bit late in the game. Once the skyscraper is built, to realize you probably should have laid the foundation. And I think that that's Einstein' great sin, if you will, is that he built this unbelievable building in the wrong place without doing the foundational work properly.

And now we're locked in.

So if you'll do me the indulgence of passing that white circle behind us is a fabric of space time that's a membrane which we will play out the little game of measurement that you just discussed. So if you'll hold that up or hold it horizontally around it.

Have no idea, Brian, what we're doing.

I don't have an idea. So I've got a mass, I've got a ruler. Here's a ruler. Okay, so this, if you're watching, if you're listening, you're missing. You really should be watching as well. So we've got this ball and when it dents and it indents the plane and we have a ruler, and we can have a watch too, that measures it. I thought that this was the paradigm that displays how we actually traveling through space time, re envisioning gravity not as a force but as a curvature on this higher dimensional manifold. You can put this back.

Thank you for the demonstration. I'm an experimental physicist, so you know, I love to do demonstrations. What is wrong with that? I mean, I thought that was the towering achievement. I mean, he was taught, as you pointed out in your talk times, man of the millennium, of the century, really. But the millennium, really?

I am the biggest Einstein fan. So this is not a knock against. I'm not trying to diminish the accomplishment. I'm trying to say that partially what just happened is that he built the most beautiful buildings in the wrong place. Now what do we do? So I would like to move them somewhere else.

Is part of the danger that it led to and gave us, you know, inextricably, things like string theory, which we've spoken about.

No, no, no, no.

What's the sin? What is the sin?

Space time is a corpse. It's not a dynamic thing. It's. You've frozen time, you've frozen space. You're saying this is what happened and in a certain sense it's not a dynamic and inviting playground for an indefinite future.

What are the broader societal implications though? I mean, is this just a squabble amongst, amongst academicians and.

Come on, Brian, no, of course not.

Explain it.

So even people who don't know any physics at all will say, well, you can't go faster than the speed of light. That sounds like faster than light travel.

It's the modern day equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It just immediately gets rejected from the patent office.

Well, and as a result, something that's four light years away, like Alpha Centauri is pretty uninviting as a destination. Given that it would take, I don't know, 100,000 years, going as fast as man has ever gone to go four light years. So you just think about, you know, recorded history for a few thousand years and try to imagine doing that on a ship. It means that we are completely stranded. As Agnew Bainson once said, one of the funders of the golden age of relativity. The stars are too high.

We've heard a lot of talk, more than ever about, you know, the, the benefits and the, and the desire to get to places in our solar system to inhabit Mars. Obviously, we've, we've heard about that nonstop, incessantly from Elon Musk, who I've talked to very briefly on this podcast last year, but not really engendering the kind of conversation on a technical level, because his mother was on the phone and she didn't want to have him answer too many difficult physics questions. But the obsession that we have with going to our. Near this nearest rock to us is that also, like Einstein type of prison, that it is too close to us than the star. The. The planets are too low.

It took me a while to understand why Elon Musk is not. He's got this thing about Ad Astra and he wants to go to the stars, and he wants to start by going to Mars. And there's no plausible way to level chemical rocketry up to becoming a path to the stars. And there's no allocation to physics. So with a very, very, very rich man at this impossible level, you can measure something about his belief structure and his desires that the allocation to physics proper appears to be close to, if not identically, zero. And I think what this is, in my opinion, involves the fact that he finds Mars to be energizing as an engineering project, and he finds the stars to be enervating as a science project.

Is it driven by some venal concerns? He happens to have a satellite launching company.

And, you know, people always say this about Elon, and I don't, no Elon, but that's not the vibe I get. You know, at some point, I remember somebody informed him, today, you became the world's richest man. And he said something like, huh, interesting. Okay, back to work. And my belief is, is that the opportunity cost for him of not doing something remarkable is so high that he just wants to do remarkable things. I just, I think I've gotten really bored of taking everyone and turning them into a money machine. Obviously, money matters to him because money is what gives him freedom to do things. But to constantly have to listen to somebody say, well, Trump is only doing this for money.

Elon is only doing this for money. All Peter Thiel cares about is money. Marc Andreessen is focused on money. Putin is about money. You know, Netanyahu, the Qatari connection to Hamas, it's all about money. Yeah, that's not true. That's not how the world works. That's how we console ourselves.

It's like a security blanket that you hold so that you have an explanation for everybody's actions.

And while you're not rich, you have a sour grapes.

No, I think that people, you know, general, it's better to have more money than less. The key question is if you've ever met somebody who's who can always make more money because they know how to make money. Sometimes they get trapped on this treadmill where they can't afford to get off because if they were to take a week off, they can calculate what the cost of it would be.

Now, you may not want to go here, but then we can always remove this segment. But our mutual friend or mutual guest at least Sam Harris on my podcast a year ago, his first and presumably last appearance and it was a three hour conversation. I think we got enough out of each other. But he essentially hinted that Trump is the only the second most dangerous person on earth and that actually Elon is more dangerous. And just last week he said similar thing on his own podcast, Waking up Making sense. I always forget two two different words. Jaron's both like Keating. He said something to the effect again that Elon is the most pathological, effectively called him a sociopath.

The most he called him the most dangerous person on earth with, you know, Trump being only the possible second exception. Something that effectively when you hear these things again, if you want to discuss it, if not, we don't have to why that level of appropriate from somebody.

Who is otherwise I don't want to get into. So I'm going to decline to get into the value judgment. But I will say if you wanted to turn it into a different style of question, I would be willing to play with it.

Yeah, please help yourself.

These are very capable people who've settled next to the levers of power and are interested in pulling them and trying to do things. So in terms of good or bad, I'm not very interested in having that conversation for reasons. It's not that I don't form private judgments, but I found that the online world is not where I choose to share my, my normative judgments as much. These are very dangerous people and they're very dangerous people because they can do a lot.

The people you're referring to are who exactly?

Trump, Trump and Musk, Elon RFK Jr. J. Bhattacharya these are people who are sitting right next to the lovers of power who I think are inclined to action. Now I will point out that you can do, you can be incredibly dangerous by sitting next to the levers of power and doing nothing. So where are we? I don't really know, but nobody does.

We can pivot to something that I found very fascinating, which is your talk at ark, which occurred a couple weeks ago. And I thought you went very deep into certain things, but I wish that you had gone deeper.

I'm willing to talk about that. But here's my frustration. What happens when you give a talk on theories of everything and people want to talk about, have you had any good sushi recently? It's implicitly a statement that the talk did not go well, and I don't think that's what's going on at all. I just gave a talk on dark energy.

I think it was one maybe your first in a long time in a university in the United States, at least.

Yeah, well, I gave one at the University of Chicago a while back. But yeah, it is. And I think the answer. And I'm just going to be horrible about this. This is a physics E podcast. You're a physicist. We're at a top university. I just gave a talk on dark energy.

Why do we want to talk about Sam Harris? I know Sam. He's a good friend. I think Elon does all sorts of amazing things, including rockets. Might go to Mars. He might terraform Mars. Trump is doing all sorts of things to reorder the world, but by asking these questions. And this happened at lunch, too. So you say, here's why there are three generations of matter.

There are really two responses to that if you're a physicist. One is, wait a minute, did you just say what I thought you just said? Or I don't believe it. You know, the chicken is really good. Today is not one of those. So every time that we get into these questions, I have this feeling of.

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The fact of the matter is, it's not all I talk about. You know as well as I do that I spoke to Douglas Murray this morning. He's not a physicist. We talked about culture. No, I know. With you, too. But you are a man of many opinions, and so I want to talk.

I will come back on the into the Impossible podcast.

If it's right now, yes.

No. But I'll come back next week. If you like to talk about other things, I'm happy to drive down. I just drove down from LA to talk about dark energy, and I want to talk about dark energy. I think I'm tired of doing physics this way. If I'm going to say something like, here is the formula for the dark energy, I don't think I want to talk about. Is Lenny Susskind losing his hair?

All right, well, in that case, we can have a short podcast or we can talk in detail.

We can have a long podcast about.

Dark energy, but it has to be at a. That the audiences. I can't let the audience be totally swept up in G4, you know, X, X to the fourth, and fiber bundles and pullbacks and double covers. And it's not.

We can talk.

I want to talk to. That's why I asked you, what are the implications for an ordinary person? What are we going to talk about?

I don't want to talk about the implications of the ordinary person. Somehow the ordinary person very often has bought the elegant universe. Do they know string theory? I don't think they do. I don't think they know what a Calabi Yau manifold is. I Don't think that they understand what is meant by tiny vibrating loops of string. I don't think they know what Schrodinger's cat is or what an eigenfunction or an eigenvalue is. I don't think they know what a Hilbert space is. But we've lured them out into pseudo physics space and they're completely conversant in entanglement.

Of all things. They know about the double slit experiment. Now do they really know about the double slit experiment? I don't think so.

If it has quantum healing properties, they might.

Okay, so my claim is we're on this weird agreement with our audience that we've given them a tiny number of ideas, we hit them over and over again and those people become pseudo conversant in quantum entanglement, quantum computing, quantum cryptography. They talk about quantum nonstop. They have no idea what the quantum is because we don't actually talk about the quantum. And as a result of this, when you try to say something else, people have a very strong sense of, well, we can't talk about that because people don't know what an elliptic operator is. Well, if we talked about the Atiya Singer index theorem as much as we talk about some guy named Schrodinger who had a cat, I don't ever want to hear about this cat again in my life. I don't want to hear about the double slit experiment ad nauseam. Barely aware of Aronof Bohm effect, I got to talk to Yakir Aronoff on a zoom call. A guy who figured out in 1959, Brian, now there's some prior art, but in 1959 he figured out together with David Ball that there was some sort of non local thing happening that was entirely classical, but could only be detected by a quantum mechanical interference pattern and that we didn't understand electromagnetism, that should be as or more famous than Schrodinger's cat.

Well, to get it to that level we have to explain what is a potential, what is a holonomy? What is. I mean, you're welcome to do it, I've heard you talk about it briefly. But my problem with the way that these things discussions come about, I think the original sin was Hawking's. Hawking sold the public that they could get a glimpse into reality which was providing nothing of the sort. And he sold them a real bill of goods, that string theory was the final theory of everything and that once we understood string theory, not physics, we would see, quote, the mind of God. That's the last three letter words of his book, to the extent that anyone's ever read it or understood it, he took for granted that things like inflation took place. We have no proof of that. He did a lot of things.

Tricks, he called them. Well, you just make time an imaginary number. It's just a trick, don't worry about it. And then the rest of the book is about the Hawking Hardle Theorem. Right. So which is complete mathematically on, you know, beautiful mathematics perhaps, but a completely physically untested, unfounded. So my, my problem is when you talk to a general person. I believe, by the way, and I've made this controversial statement before, that I believe scientists have a, a moral obligation to explain things to the public who pay our salaries.

And part of the reason, yes, I do want to talk to you about non physics things because we're living in an age in which the implications of not paying those dues to the public are coming back to bite us squarely in the ass. And some of those have to do.

I'm happy to talk about the funding situation for science. That's something that I care about.

What is on. Yes. Academia in general.

Here's my point and I'm going to be clear about it. I think I've done my last podcast where I say, yes, I have some ideas about why there are three generations of fermionic matter. I think I can say something about why the dark energy is not a cosmological constant. And when I say these things, it can't be. Yeah, that's very interesting. I noticed you're wearing a new jacket today. Is that Brooks Brothers like that thing basically is a dig. So if you want to talk about non physics things, I want to talk about non physics things with you.

But I do want to know why are we not. I gave a formula for dark energy.

You gave an interpretation of how dark energy can arise. As I read it, explain how you give a formula in the context of gr. In the context of the Friedman equations, as we teach our students, we have an equation, we have two equations. There's two Friedman equations. One is for the first derivative of the scale factor and one is for the second derivative. We cannot measure the scale factor, so we use proxies to detect, to determine what the.

Should we say what the Friedman equations are?

Please do. Actually, you should.

I don't know the best way of saying this to your audience because I don't think a lot of them will know this stuff, but if you have something like a herald's trumpet, so you have a Very long tube that flares progressively and then very violently at the end. Right. In a certain sense that's a two dimensional model, the surface of that of a four dimensional structure that would be analogous to this sort of standard, a cosmological model. That is the axis along the trumpet. So going from the mouthpiece to the flared bell at the end. Think of that as time like and think of the radius of the cross sectional circles as being the scale factor. So effectively the idea is I've got a round symmetry which is the various cross sections where the circumference or the radius changes as a function of how far I am towards the bell of the trumpet. That extra symmetrical assumption is what goes into these basic cosmological models.

And this is the weird origin of this. The universe is expanding. And then every smart person thinks into what? And the answer is it's not into what. What they really mean is that the circumference of the cross sections is getting bigger in the metric that is measuring the size of the cross sections. That is what's going on. It's not expanding. You've assumed that there's an axis that is akin to going the length of the trumpet. You assume that there's not a circle in the case of a trumpet, but an entire three dimensional sphere.

That is the two dimensional sphere that we have like the surface of a beach ball, but a one dimensional higher analog. And that thing greatly simplifies the Einstein field equations because the only parameter that matters is how big is the radius. Given that, I've determined that it has to have spherical symmetry. So you're using symmetry to get rid of a lot of the possibilities in Einstein's equation. You're saying the only thing that matters is the size of the cross section.

Okay, that is certainly not how we teach the Friedman equations. We teach it from an observable perspective. So I'll explain how an astronomer does it. So we used to take these plates. This is an actual 60 year old plate, so be careful with it. Taken by Margaret Burbage of renowned astronomy fame, who was her husband, used to occupy this very office that we're in now. And you would lay down slits on top of it and they would make diffraction not, not unlike the double slit experiment, but with photons. And they would demonstrate the red shift.

My apologies to cat lover.

Everything actually, according to our mutual friend Sean Carroll. Yeah, it doesn't say. He never said the cat was alive or dead, apparently.

Really?

Yeah, something about that. Anyway, so the observables that we see, we Again, we would love to be able to measure the scale factor. We cannot do that. We have proxies that measure the scale factor. Things like the luminosity of objects, the redshift that they appear at, and other things, the angular diameter that standard rulers and standard candles, etc. Will obtain. And, and there's new things as well. And interestingly enough, each one of those can sample the rate of change of the scale factor, the rate of change of the rate of change of the scale factor.

And just like we have velocity acceleration, you know what you call the, the third derivative of position? Do you know what that's.

Don't. Don't say it.

Say it.

Jerk.

Would you call me? I actually had my students doing that the other day. They called me a jerk and I let them get away with it. And so we have actually apparently we can measure cosmic jerk, which is not me according to most people. So we have these proxies that measure it and that tells us all the observations tell us with a handful of five exceptions, the universe appears as if all these galaxies, like this guy here. Yeah NGC 6437 are moving away from us via the Doppler shift, which is towards the red, not towards the blue. And the implication is that the universe is getting bigger. The coordinate distance, if you have a ruler that's expanding along with the universe that's not changing, that we call the CO moving distance and things like DESI or the eventual Simons Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, they sample the redshift distribution. Different redshifts.

The just the exciting discovery of the last few years is not the measurement of the Hubble constant, which proves there's no doubt the universe is expanding again, not into what it's between what. Right. It's a surface.

Can we just say it my way and then you tell me if you don't like it.

Okay.

That the successive cross sections, the three dimensional cross sections of pure space at different instance of time have metrics on them that indicate that the distances as measured in each cross section are getting larger as the time develops.

That's right. So that such that when we observe light from a galaxy or from a supernova or from a baryon acoustic oscillation, which is what does he's measuring. We are not seeing it as it is right now. We're seeing it as it was when that light was emitted, propagated along light cones as light does. And then we can actually translate that back to the physical separation at the time of the emission or the physical separation today. Which is called the proper distance. We have different proxies for those. Then we plug those into, again, the.

This redshift distance relationship. And the startling thing is not that the people seem to disagree that the universe is expanding. There are people that say that. But that the rate derived from different measurements is in violent disagreement at the greater than five sigma level, greater than the level that DESI currently excludes. Lambda being a cosmological dark energy being cosmological constant, which is only 4.2-sigma. So, and just as an aside, so a physicist, you know, there's a joke like, we invite you down.

By the way, I. I love hearing the sign.

Okay, so you wanted to go deep. Let's go. Okay, fine. So, thank you. That makes one person in the audience. But that's okay. We're not doing it for, for ratings and numbers. The.

The point is this measurement, it has to be, typically, we say one in five sigma is sort of a five sigma result is, you know, evidence almost, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because in a statistical normal distribution that only happens once in a million.

Assuming that there isn't either systematic errors or a systematic error or a bizarre.

Chance where, and I tell my students the actual hard part of being a scientist is not making the measurement. It's assessing how ignorant you are of what you measure.

Very nice.

So in the case of desi, they're able to exclude a region of the universe, parameter space, that describes the Freeman equations, which includes lambda cosmological term. They exclude that at 4.2- Sigma, which is more like 1 in 60,000 chance of happening by vice, random chance. If everything's Gaussian distributed, which, you know, they actually believe, it's quite close to that. Okay, so now we have these tensions, we have these anxieties, and I've said frequently that I want to hire a psychologist for the field to alleviate our anxieties and our frustrations. But there's the Hubble tension. We're.

Look, sorry, we're looking to get anxious.

Right.

Because that's exciting.

Right.

All right.

As Leonard Cohen said, you know, the cracks are how the light gets in. There's a crack in everything. But when you hear these observables, do you think. I'm just curious. I've never really understood the mathematical approach that.

You sure.

What's your attitude towards these data when you look at it?

I don't know. And that's one of the reasons why I'm really keen to talk to you and your department. Look, the magic of physics, and I'm not trained As a physicist, I'm a mathematician, but the magic of physics is that it's the most beautiful and the cleanest theory you could possibly have mixed in with the most infection, dirt, grit, everything. Everything irregular about the universe. Yeah. So I have these two favorite waves on planet Earth, one of which I'm going to butcher. The name in Tahiti is Chopo, and it is glassy perfection. You just can't believe anything is this regular and powerful.

Yeah, it looks like some it was waiting for some Japanese woodcut artist to paint it or who knows, whatever. And the other wave that I love is the Shipstern's Bluff wave in Tasmania, which has an underground sea floor that creates waves within waves within waves, like ledges and things. It's like a skate park in the wave every time it goes. And they're the opposite ends of beauty. And so I think about physics as the marriage of Chopo and Chip Sterns. The most beautiful, pristine stuff and the most dirt you can possibly imagine. And what I see in this potential result is Einstein was divided. Einstein knew that his curvature tensor was perfect, and he knew that the cosmological constant was an embarrassment.

And he had no love for the stress energy tensor when he said that. My equation is like a mansion, one wing of which is made of fine marble, the other is made of cheap wood. So you've got fine marble, greatest blunder. Fine marble plus greatest blunder equals cheap wood. This is a call to rescue Einstein. Time to say, we've been afraid to question and sorry, but you locked in the problem. Was the house made of the wing made of fine marble because we couldn't move that we couldn't touch that we couldn't go underneath the foundations. Nobody wanted to crack it, nobody wants to destroy it.

Everybody loves it. They like testing it and say, oh, Einstein still tests beautifully. Okay, but it's preventing everything else from moving along with it. And I think that that's what's going on with the dark energy. So my claim is, assume that the deci result evaporates. I will not change my opinion that the cosmological constant has to go. Einstein, I think, knew that it had to go. But the problem is it's connected in a complex to these other two terms.

Is there the danger of, you know, what I call the Nancy Kerrigan problem? Which one out of a thousand Nancy.

Kerrigan, showing her age. I love it.

I know one of a thousand of our audience will understand. So she was abused by Tanya Harding. I think she was commissioned.

And conversely, yeah, I think Tonya Harding was The only woman to land a triple axel in competition. And because she wasn't as refined, there's a sense that. That in figure skating, we prioritize the princess rather than fully appreciate the athleticism. So I think that Tanya Harding was just like a dastardly, just a bad force in the world. And I think that that's real. But I also think that it came from somewhere super interesting.

I love the fact that when they made the movie about it called I, Tanya, they got a very horrendous, hideous, even hideous woman to play Tonya Harding. Do you know who that was? Margot Robbie. They got Margot Robbie to play Tanya. Is this.

This woman who's mid.

Mid, yes. According to some, she's mid.

The only thing I know about Margot Robbie is that there was a. There was a meme. Margot Robbie is mid.

Mid, Right. Yeah. On what planet? I don't know. She's second only to our wives in beauty, Right? But. But if you look, they did a survey once, and they said, you know, who's the most handsome man alive? And, you know, we weren't eligible at the time. So they took. They took Brad Pitt and he won Most handsome in Life. And then you do a funny thing.

You. You take an image of Brad Pitt and you split it down the middle and you reflect it across, you know, the left to the right. And he comes out grotesque, hideous, disgusting. And. And yeah, I was always told symmetry.

Super symmetry, fearful symmetry.

Fearful symmetry. The fear, you know, the tiger's eye. Isn't it true that. That it's where these things break down? Not the beauty, not the perfection, not the, you know, Nancy Kerrigan esque nature of things. But. But that's really what's interesting. In other words, it would be less interesting if the cosmological constant were constant than if it's finely tuned or rolling down to an eventual value which it will disappear. Right.

In other words, you're saying the cosmology. There's no doubt there's a. There's a dark energy component now. There's not a constant. Maybe it's a constant, maybe it's not. Do you doubt that the universe possesses currently a dark energy component? I mean, we have no 20 Sigma.

No, no, no, no. Look, I'm giving a formula for dark energy, right?

Okay.

So the question is, we.

Why now? Why here, like Nancy asked? I didn't ask the question that she asked. Why now? Why do we live in an era where the dark energy is a value that happens to be the exact amount to make the universe also spatially Flat. Those two things should be completely unrelated. And yet they are. Why?

I don't even understand the question. Let me tell you why.

Okay.

My claim is you have two separate problems. You have like a cosmological constant problem, and you have a flatness problem. Wouldn't it be better to have one problem rather than 2? I would vote for sure. Okay.

Yeah.

So now the idea is if you've got some sort of a field that has to equal another field, and the field, one of these two fields happens to be very close to zero, the flatness problem, the only thing that's available to counterbalance it is a field that should be allowed to move. So when you set two things equal and you say one of them is fixed, then you've got a real problem. Right. Because now the idea is that the universe is very, very close to being flat. Yes. Where we are. And you have this question of and if the cosmological constant is constant, then it has to be very, very small. And there's no reason to think that it should be.

And that's the worst prediction in all of physics, supposedly.

Right?

Okay, bullshit. That's not real. What it is is it's a field with what's called a vacuum expectation value. And you can lure it higher or lower, depending upon what the field on the other side, the curvature field, is. So imagine that two things are allowed to both move and they're set equal to each other. You depress one of these things, you'll end up depressing the other.

The flatness has always been traditionally linked to inflation, sort of establishing initial conditions in anthropics and. Okay, so let's go there. Actually, we both know very many people who traffic in what's called intelligent design have talked about fine tuning from an a designer perspective. We've talked about this in this very room. I don't want to talk about that again. But the fact is, in that chair a month ago sat Fred Adams, who's an eminent cosmologist, particle astrophysicist from Michigan. He was very adamant that there's actually not that much fine tuning. There's actually not that much anthropomorphous arguments that we could use.

Anthropic arguments. It's actually less than the tuning of a tuning fork, which to our ear sounds very precisely tuned. But actually it could be a percent 1% or tuning a radio. Remember radios, you know, nowadays tuning in, YouTube, we don't do that so much. But remember radios, you had to tune it. You got to get it within a couple of kilohertz of a megahertz baseband frequency. Right. They're talking parts in million.

Maybe something like that. But now the fine tuning that he claims necessary to explain things like the Cosmo. No, these are. These are very rough. They're 3%, 4% fine tuning. He doesn't consider it fine tuning at all. So does that have impact on the. The need or the statement that you repeated that the cosmological constant is the worst problem in all of physics?

That I repeated it because it's a trope.

No, I know, I know, I know. It's not.

A worse feeling about it is that in general, we repeat too much stuff that we've heard. We do it ad nauseam, and that. That we become large language models ourselves as scientists when we do it. And then you don't even realize that you may know what the real truth is, but your students don't. And two generations later, they can't even think. And that's a really serious problem. So in my opinion, people want to immediately take whatever our current model is and ask about themselves and their lives. And I think this is terrible.

I think this is incredibly narcissistic. First question about science should not be, what does it do for humanity? How does this make a difference to the man in the street? It's like, you know what? The man in the street lies in his bed thinking about his brief time on Earth and wondering if there's a purpose to it all just as much as everybody else. And the man in the street deserves to know. We're not here to solve your free will question. We're not here yet to tell you whether God exists or what quantum measurement means. We're at an earlier stage. We're finding some stuff out, and we've got preliminary results. And if you base your notion of free will or God's love or whatever on some sort of purpose or.

Or eigenvalue spectrum, that's a mistake. Stop making it about you. It's not about you. Ultimately, the things that I care about and I think about in this domain are not about life. Now, it may be that life can only contemplate them in certain regions. So that's a place where you're not being narcissistic. You're saying, look, maybe nobody lives in the middle of a black hole because it's too violent, and therefore there is no science being done there. That makes good sense.

I heard on Joe Rogan that actually the universe is inside of a black hole. Or he said recently, I didn't know.

That I Didn't catch that episode. You understand what I'm getting at is that we. We've. I'm tired of pandering to taxpayers.

I'm not, but we have different masters, shall we say?

Well, my feeling is, is that I'm not receiving money from taxpayers. Yeah, you are.

Yeah.

And I'm saying the taxpayers can. Can take a hike.

No, I know you've talked About Seal Team 6, and we need to. We need to give them the guns and butter and support and cocaine and lawyers.

But you said you, Warren Zon and Milton Friedman at the same time.

At the same time.

Lawyers, guns and butter.

Exactly. I made an amalgam. I made a. You mentioned something along the way just a minute ago, but you also mentioned at the end of your talk. Okay, you talked about LLM. You kind of gave the, you know, gave the Bill Gatesian or. Or, you know, kind of, I don't know, Andrew Yang or physicist days are numbered. Perhaps, but.

But I want to push back with my requisite love and respect.

No, no. I hate when you do that. I don't know if you have something to say. Don't hide behind being the devil's advocate.

I don't think LLMs are going to take your job that might Take my job. No, I don't think they're gonna take my job either. I think you're going to augment it. I think they're going to give me superhuman powers that I never had before. My students are going to have superhuman powers, to be exact. But I want to take it back to your friend and mine, Einstein. So here he is. You know what he said was his happiest thought? Right.

What titillated him more than any he said, titillated me that. That if this happened, it would experience no gravitational force. He said if in free fall, an observer, freely falling observer experiences no gravitational force.

I was convinced it was going to be about Hedy Lamar.

No, it wasn't about Hetty. It was about maybe his cousin, one of his other cousins. Okay, we'll keep it clean. How can an LLM have a happy thought? How can it visualize the visceral sensation that every one of us knows, as I just said that as you go over a roller coaster's crest or you jump over a speed bump going too fast, as I sometimes do, that visceral feeling in the pit of your stomach that you have no gravitational force field. How isn't. How is chat GPT 7.0 going to. In intuit what that feels like and then know that it titillates it. What are we going to do? Blow a capacitor and, and you know, feed it some extra tokens.

And by the way we train these language, I think we've imprisoned ourselves. Let me, let me take a step back. I had this conversation with Terry Sidnowski who was one of the partners with Hinton and Yann Lecun and many other people. I said there's a, there's a concept of lock in, you know about this, that, that there are certain things that are locked in because of technical choices. Technical debt is a relative concept. For instance, they say the altitude of the, the Hubble Space Telescope was only able to take the Hubble Deep Field because of the width of a horse's ass. Have you heard this before?

No.

Okay, so the height that a rocket gets to is proportional to the cross sectional error area of the booster rocket that launches it. The booster rockets for the spatial were made which launched the Hubble Space Telescope and its repair missions, which is why I mentioned the Hubble Deep Field. They were made in Morton Thiocol in Utah and they were launched from Cape Canaveral. You had to get those boosters from Utah to Cape Canaveral. There's no way that they couldn't fly them. You had to take them by rail. Now, rail, rail width of a standard gauge railroad track was set by roads which go back to the Roman Empire. The standard width of a, of a two chariot, a two horse drawn driven chariot.

And that width is the horse's ass times two. Okay, so the eventual altitude, the cross sectional area's dependence on that is based on the width that someone chose for the standard gauge theory. Gauge of a railroad 2,100 years ago.

Is this what you think about when I don't visit for two years?

This is what happens. This is why you got to come. We got to have more, more of those King's Gambit drinks like we had last night. So there's a lock in. I think we've been locked in by the marriage of chat GPT or the LLMs rather. And GPUs GPUs were started for, for fast, you know, for playing GTA 6 or you know, Minecraft or whatever. And LLMs were started to, you know, basically compete, you know, tokens, you know, given tokens. There's no physics in that.

They're, they're solving matrix equations and they're vectorizing problems in a large multi dimensional, almost infinite dimensional vector space. Right. That's how we're getting weight functions that then train neural networks. Networks and then we train them on human interest data. There's nowhere in that you're going to get physics out unless that physics of the theory of everything is lurking within there. So remember, my claim is that we're not going to get.

I don't. I'm trying to even understand this point.

Okay. This is. Might be too, too, too advanced. Okay. My claim is that physicists job security is maintained or at least LLMs aren't going to take it away. Some other type of. Of AI may take our job Doge.

May take your job way Doge.

I think I'm. I'm safe for now. I've got the Simons foundation as.

Okay, not your job, but somebody else's. Your competitors. Joe, you should be back. Doge. Everybody else is going to disappear. Keep going.

That's right. How do you think I got to where I am? The literal Doge. I mean Gala was with the literal doge 2,400 years ago. Anyway, my point is that we are locked in because of the success of Nvidia + chat GPT. There's almost no chance that some successor type of AI chip+ model, I don't know what, what it would be. Topological neural network, whatever it would be that that can supplant anything. Because if, if you stipulate that we're. It's so successful, it's a victim of its own success.

Nvidia is the biggest, one of the biggest companies on earth. Chat GPT is running away with, with the 97, 93 of all LLM and, and, and GPT type request. Where is the A physics type of AI? A physics based AI Physics based that's going to create new physics of the kind that Einstein did when he visualized the Gedankin experiment of free fall.

I'm so confused by this question. So maybe we'll.

Maybe I should do it again. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

So here's what I'm trying to understand. Are you saying somehow that you don't think LLMs are going to be able to push the physics frontier?

I don't think that they're going to surpass. Yes, I would say that I disagree. Okay, what evidence do you have that they would be able to do that? They haven't solved any initio new problems. They've actually been able to be quite good at visualizing smoke and turbulence and things like that.

I think that if people have left really good ideas in the literature or somewhere that can be in ingested into the corpus that's used to train these things, you could find out that the people who are being ignored by the physics profession are understood by the LLMs. And so if you think about what Jared diamond did in Guns, Germs and Steel, he weirdly didn't seem to do any original research. And it was entirely original. He took things that weren't known to all fit together and he came up with an entire line of attack that I don't think was really heard of before. If an LLM has never read Shakespeare and you say, I realize it's my wife's birthday in two days, could you write me a poem comparing her to a summer's day? The LLM will take a stab at, at it.

Sure, it's good.

And we'll think, okay, what has anybody ever said about comparing a beloved woman to a summer's day? I think that you will find that in part because this era has been so unethical in physics that the LLMs stand to do much better than they would in an ethical era.

I'm shocked to hear you say that, Eric.

Say more.

I'm shocked to hear you say, that said, first of all, there's some sort of landscape in which these things evolve. These, these LLMs will crawl. They will crawl. Right, you're absolutely right. They will crawl and they will dwell in certain, shall we say, potential valley minima.

Right, right.

Where, where will those be? They will be where the orthodox scientific output is, where the published, peer reviewed scientific literature takes them. They will not go to. I get an email a week from somebody, so much so that I've now established an office hours type thing where I am Brian Keating. Professor Keating. I've obtained a new cosmological theory, a theory of entropy, a theory of everything. A theory, whatever it is. And I get so many of those. And by the way, I don't want to waste your time first because they're very solicitous and wonderful people, but I.

So I don't want to waste your time. I checked it. Okay. Well, luckily I haven't had that encounter yet. Okay, I'm sorry to hear that.

Well, people, some people are very, very. They're very, very friendly. You, you have, you're the only one who will understand my theory. And then it becomes, wow, if I can't even trust you, I've lost faith in humanity. Or you're only doing this to steal my work.

So to preempt that, I often get the following, which I am appreciative. I've run this through chat. GPT. I've run this through deep research on Manus. I've Run this through Gemini 2.5 experimental with deep research, whatever. And it can find no flaws in this logic. I related the one of the, you know, very brilliant gentleman, he actually came here and visited me and to talk for a little bit. And I said, I don't have time to evaluate your theories and unless you.

I'm an experimental physicist, by the way. I do observation. So unless you can make a prediction of the CMB's power spectrum or you can make a prediction about, you know, some cosmological observable degrees of freedom that I have access to with my telescope, I'm useless to you. And they might not want to hear that, but I will tell them that. So, first of all, this is done to indicate two things. It's either going to gravitate to the high quality or the high quantity. These crawlers, these, these net crawlers or whatever you want to call them that are going to crawl the scientific literature looking for the unsung Einstein.

Okay, they're going to ingest everything.

How will they weight it? They have to wait it. There's no F but a metric on it, as you would say, right. How do they weight you versus Lenny Suskin versus the guy that sends me the theory?

You're putting too much structure. They simply ingest things that are out here. If you start asking a question like, let me give an example. In general, we are very careful about saying that a set of symmetries should be what we would say of a definite killing form. It should have a definite killing form.

Now, since you mentioned the violent people, can you explain what killing means in this context?

Killing was Wilhelm killing, I believe.

Irish physicist or something, right? German.

Okay. I think if it has an indefinite killing form, you're in some trouble. But it's not like the literature doesn't consider indefinite killing forms. So if somebody, for example, says, I'm interested in. In removing the restriction to definite killing forms and exploring the following ideas. Even if the weight of the evidence is that we should only be looking at symmetries with definite killing forms, you can change the weights in your prompt so that the LLM will disregard the usual caution about taking on things that might challenge unitarity, which is, you know, the loss of probability, the probability should remain one in total, or that things should be causal and shouldn't.

Null energy condition.

Exactly. So you have all of these things that can go wrong. And in a minority of the literature, people consider indefinite symmetries. You can change the weights by asking a prompt, saying, I'm not interested in taking on the usual will, for the moment, suspend those sets of assumptions. I want to explore the consequences. The LLMs will help. So I think that you're wrong. I think that the fact is that the LLMs won't be able to do that much if the field is actually digesting what people say.

But I heard Lenny Susskind do this thing, which is that he said, peter White's Mathematics are Bad, and it hurt my soul. Peter White has written one of the best books on the mathematics of quantum theory. Nobody knew he had this book in him. Nobody knew he could do this. At least I didn't. And I've been friends with him for years. And to hear Lenny Susskind, who is not as good of a mathematician as Peter White, slight Peter White. And then when I started to say something about got Lenny Susskind, you in fact say, well, Eric is causing these problems with Lenny Susskind.

Well, I said, this is what Lenny's done, okay? He's not a physicist.

But my point that I'm going to make is I don't hear almost any of you guys taking Lenny Susskind to task. He's a very outspoken, negative force in our field.

I thought you didn't want to go here, but I'm happy that you're.

Well, no, but I'm trying to say that the LLMs are going to allow you to get. Get around Lenny Susskind.

They're not going to enhance it. Based on his six books, his Feshbach professor, his National Academy stature, his many, many acolyte students that cite his papers and so forth, that published literature versus you, who have an H index much lower. I think zero.

I'm trying for. No, I'm trying for zero. I want to have an H index of zero. Fine.

You already have an H of. No, it's impossible to have an H index of zero.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah. It's the number of papers that have at least H citations. So that you've cited yourself gives you at least one citation. So your H index is at least one.

Well, I don't. I've tried not to publish anything. No, I'm not kidding.

I know.

Eric, I can't stand the way the way your field operates. Your field is operating in a circular fashion. What I would say about Lenny is those three books, the theoretical minimum, maybe. Is it three? Is it four? Pretty good. Pretty terrific, don't you think? Yeah, I love him. Do I think Lenny's done interesting things, saying things about quart confinement? I do. Do I think that Lenny Susskind has interesting things to say about black holes. Sure.

What I am trying to say is Lenny Susskind says a lot of negative things about his colleagues. And if you turn that lens on Lenny Susskind, that ant will fry under that magnifying.

How does that advance physics, though?

I mean, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, you've got malign influences at the top of the field who throw fear, uncertainty, and doubt at everybody who is not toeing the line. That's ridiculous. To be 40 years in, 41 years into the string revolutions and to be going on with the only game in town. It was very funny to watch Lenny Susskind say this thing, which is, we have got to go back to the origins to the fundamental assumptions of string theory. I'm like, you've got to be kidding.

Real string theory has never been tried.

Real string theory has never been tried. This is. The LLMs are going to allow people to go around this chorus of people who say the same things in lockstep.

But, okay, I want to move on. But I do want to say I'm not as confident as you, which is surprising because I think I. I am more representative of the orthodox of physics. You will often say, I'm not a physicist of yourself, and I will say, I am not a theorist. And you will. You will say, you physicists, don't take him to task. It's a very different thing to take him to task. You podcaster.

You, Brian the podcast. You, Brian the experimental cop, Eric the.

Entertainer, is going to do the work that theorists are supposed to be doing. In other words, I didn't have any problem with Lenny & Co. Promoting their work. You start coming after other people, having other ideas with this only game in town nonsense, and that breaks the contract. You're failing. You are failing with more resources, more time, more encouragement, more puff pieces than anybody else. And you look at the online debunking community, bunch of pussies. All the redditors are basically trying to figure out how to come down with Ed and Lenny and Andy and Qumran, and you're just thinking like, look, this is not science.

Science is about failure when things fail. It's information. The fact that we didn't find super partners when we turned on the lhc and there was all of these claims that now you're going to see gluey nose and squarks and all this great piece of information that tells you that those people who are so confident are wrong. And then you want to find out, well, what did they learn. Gordon Cain is a perfect example of this. Very, very strident about what's true and what's going to happen. And then when it doesn't happen, there isn't enough of. Boy, was I wrong.

And one of the things that I loved about Lenny on Kurt's program was Lenny admitting that he was talking about things he didn't know anything about. And part of that is alternatives.

What do you say to people? Say, well, Eric, you just are hurt that he, when asked about you, had no idea who you were.

Even though he knows who I am.

We both know who you are. Both. We know that Lenny knows who you are.

If I were to look on my phone and I were to say.

I remember coordinating a meeting with you, you and your son and Lenny from a few years back.

Yeah.

You were interested in. In having conversations with him, and I think maybe you did, or it was Covid or whatever. So it's not a personal vendetta, as you say. You're. You're upset on Peter White's behalf.

No, I'm saying something else. Lenny is a cantankerous, fun raconteur. Graffiti, gruff, ethnic, everything. I'm down for that. You go after Peter White, you go after Garrett Lecy, you go after me, you go after everybody else. And then you say you only want. We have to go back to the beginning of our assumptions. And you're like, yes, yes.

Forty years in the making. Go ahead and say it. Of string theory. And I'm thinking, no, no, you don't get to do that. You ruin too many lives. You ruin too many careers. These things have consequences. Who gets health care? Who has a pension? Who has security to be able to say who gets to train more students? No, you failed.

You lost. It's over. You're in your mid-80s. Ed Witten is going to turn 74 this year. Retired forcibly from the IAS, which has a retirement age. You don't get to say, I have no idea who that is. About Eric Weinstein. When I can tell you the exact date, when I last talked to any.

This is preposterous. And I think that partially what I'm trying to say is we can't allow physics to venture 100% into pretend land where unicorns and fairies and, you know, Kris Kringle at the North Pole making up.

Can we entertain people like you did and spent so much of your time with Terence Howard, for example?

What about him?

Well, when you are in interacting with people that are not in the mainstream to denigrate what they do is seen as gatekeeping.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. What are we talking about here?

There's two. There's two ends to the electromagnetic spectrum of collegiality, as I see what we're talking about in this.

What did I do with Terrence?

No, no. You engaged with Terrence.

Joe Rogan, a friend of mine, asked me, will you sit with Terrence? Now, he misportrayed that, saying, you wanted to come on with Terrence. Which it wasn't true, but he wanted me to come on because he. He had started this.

Why did he do that, by the way, it's curious to me. Why did Joe misrepresent the ask that he made? I mean, he doesn't have trouble getting guests, right?

Look, I don't think it was sinister. I think what he wanted is he wanted a debate. I didn't want to have a debate. He wanted a peer review. I didn't want to do a peer review. He wanted a collaboration. I didn't want to do a collaboration. I didn't need to come on and do a Terrence Howard episode.

In fact, I wasn't going to do a Terrence Howard episode unless I could find something that was really worthwhile in what Terrence was doing. And the two people who convinced me more than Joe were Rick Rubin, the music producer, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. So Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave a perfect, perfect back of the hand to Terrence Howard, where he just sat there, you know, in his, you know, Terrence, I'm just giving you a peer review. And the two things that, you know, became clear to me is, first of all, Neil does not understand a lot about platonic solids because he didn't know where all of these objects were coming from. And, you know, these are important, important concepts, including convex polytopes in Dimension 4, which we need to talk more about because there are six solids rather than just five. There's a new one called the 24 cell that's super interesting. And then Rick Rubin said this line. I wake up, he's like, why can't you explain physics like Terrence Howard? And that blew my mind.

Because whatever Terrence is doing, he's not getting the proper respect for good things that he's doing from the Neil DeGrasse Tysons. And he's getting this credulous buy in from the Rick Rubens. And Terrence and I, by the way, are fine. I mean, we're in discussion about things and we disagree. And I tell him, I don't think there's a lot in your claims of Physics or math. And he's fine with that. It he's.

He has thick enough skin in some.

Ways, all right, some days yes, some days no. But Terence and I, so far we've dealt okay with it. What I would say is I was the one who said 108, which is the angle in. In of an interior angle to a regular Pentagon is not 109.47, if I recall correctly, which is the angle between two vertices inside of a tetrahedron as seen from the center of mass. Terence cleverly and you know, you're a flight guy, you have pitch, yaw and roll, which is effectively a spanning of the SO3LI algebra. But then you have an affine shift, which is X, Y and Z, your center of mass. So he took the six edges of a regular tetrahedron, found a very close match.108 versus 109.47, stuck in pentagonal fans as propellers and spanned the affine lie algebra of the affine group on three dimensional space with a regular structure within engineering tolerances that can form dodecahedral structures in midair. Now, my claim is I'm not out to get Terence and I'm not out to celebrate Terrence.

I'm out out to evaluate Terence and give him his best hearing. Why can't Lenny do that for Peter?

Exactly what I was going to say. So I think not to answer. But I would say the same reason that you don't answer every email that you get. There is a finite amount of time. I don't think my job is to evaluate others. I was asked by Patrick McDavid to come on his show multiple times, including to give. And ironically I couldn't make it the first time because he. I was being interviewed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson in which in his office in New York City.

So I couldn't do it. And then by the time I said, look, get someone who's knowledgeable. I didn't mention, I mentioned that you obviously converse with, with, with Joe and Terence. And you know, Terence has my email and my phone number, thanks to you. So why didn't he call me up and ask me if I wanted to do it? I felt like it might be a setup. Maybe Patrick's trying to get this which was confirmed.

Patrick is causing trouble for reasons I don't know, I don't understand.

He wants to be like Joe. He wants to have an influence like Joe Rogan. He even has a Jamie like character.

No, but what I'm trying to say about Patrick, I don't know Patrick.

I Don't know him either.

His team has been very polite to me. They tried to get me out multiple times. I don't have a negative view on that. But he's looking to say something like, wow, this smells of gatekeeping. Well, gatekeeping is the wrong concept.

He exactly said that. He said, this reminds me of what they did to RFK during COVID that they won't talk to Terence. I said, look, something doesn't become true once Eric debunked. Whatever. I don't want to say debunked, but let's say once Eric gave an expert review on Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Of Terence. Those aspects were now no longer grist for the mill of discussion. Now Terence knows that he's intelligent, so he will say, well, now I've got this new proof of the three body problem. Right. So now he's got a new reason to incite, you know, an interest in his work and get you and invite. So then. But Patrick's like, well, he wants to have a live debate with you in front of a live audience. That's not what science is.

I'm sorry, Science is not about, you know, who has the more eloquent. I'm sure he's more eloquent than me and he can talk more.

So this is this problem that we don't know how to do. Demarcation theory. And you know, who's actually demarcation. What is science? What is not science? And you know, one of the people who's actually said the most thoughtful things on this is. Is Sean Carroll people. And what Sean said is, I'm. I, Sean Carroll, am not that interested in labeling things as pseudoscience because I think we have to talk about this so called debunking community. The debunking community is this bizarre mixture of keeping the world safe from total horseshit and keeping the world safe from legitimate heterodoxy at the same time.

Time, Right. The Mick west, the whoever his counterpart or analog would be. Right.

Doesn't matter. Sometimes you see it online as debunking because there's this weird energy of like, I review so and so and I call out all his bs.

I owned him, right?

Yeah, I owned him pawning and all this. Okay. What Sean Carroll said is, I, Sean, am not interested in the science versus pseudoscience. I'd rather call it science than say, that's bad science. Science. So I thought that was interesting, is that it gets rid of the psychologicalization of why is this person behaving the way they are? You know, if Somebody believes that they have a means of turning lead into gold. That person may be an absolute lunatic, but if they did have such a process, I would understand why they would want to protect it.

Sure. But when you have people that say that they have proof that the moon landings didn't happen.

So this is this issue about. I try to say to people, the odds that JFK was assassinated by something other than a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald are in a different category than the idea that we didn't go to the moon. And there shouldn't be a category called conspiracy theory.

Covid lab leak.

Right, right. Because these things are at all different levels. And, you know, including things in previous times like plate tech, toxic. And so in a certain weird sense, the problem is words like gatekeeping. Sorry, is gatekeeping bad? There are lots of things that I really appreciate. There's a gate around them, and the gatekeeping is done really well. So in part, it's the Internet. The tyranny of the Internet has infected our speech.

So in the case of all of these things, yes, we are all besieged with requests and demands. Please, look at my family thing. My claim is, in part, we're lying. Because if we administered a rudimentary test, I don't mean, like giving really hard, detailed problems at the Math Olympiad or Physics Olympiad level. I mean, like, names. Name some leptons, you know, most people would fall apart.

What's the Fokker Planck equation? Right.

And what I'm claiming is that we don't. Don't listen to our colleagues who know a lot of the basics.

Can I summarize? I think I want to move on, but I. I do now see something I didn't see before.

Please.

There's a difference between me saying. Me saying. Look, I don't. I'm an experimental physicist, Terence. I'm not going to criticize that. Except when you have on this complete pseudoscience expert, Dr. Weiping Yu, who Patrick chose because he wouldn't wait a week or two. Maybe I could have done it, maybe I couldn't.

He had this person, supposedly, he. He knows me way Pen.

He's talked to you. Actually, he's visited you and talked to you in California. Where, See the interview? He'll talk about it. He'll say that I know about. He not only did that, but he found flaws in Gu. Anyway, I don't talk about that.

No, no, I'm just. What I'm trying to say is how interesting that I have no knowledge of this person.

No, I agree, but I want to Say this. There's a difference between me a. There's many possibilities. Ignoring Terence or ignoring Weiping you. There are ways to do it. And what I'm hearing, and what I now finally understand is that Lenny Susskind took the latter approach. He could have said nothing. He could have been charitable.

I don't have time to evaluate geometric. Peter White or Gu.

He talks to me about geometric unity when I'm. When I meet him.

Yeah. But he chose instead to say something negative, to say, I don't know, or maybe prevaricate or perseverate.

He Mongol is providing a service that has never existed. I think it's very important because I'll be honest, I did not have an easy time with Kurt when I met him, and I didn't understand who he was. This is a very strange phenomenon, and I just. Just let me spend a minute on it. In general, there are two kinds of interviewers in physics. There are ostensibly disinterested interviewers who don't know enough physics, who have to basically go along with the party line because they just don't have the basis to challenge. Then there are interested physics people who don't challenge their colleagues because that leads to loss of funds, loss of reputation, bad things. So what happened with Kurt is that he was assumed to be of the former category because he's not a PhD, he's not a researcher, and people.

He. People would accept interviews with him, and then he'd say things like, do you favor this approach? Somebody would say, oh, yes. And then he'd say, well, what do you think of the other approaches? And the person would sort of do the usual and say, well, I don't really think there are any other approaches. And so then Kurt would say, well, I could list five of them for you. Well, I don't know anything about. Well, actually, I know about them, if you don't mind. I could describe.

We don't have time for that. Right.

And suddenly, in 40 years, Kurt managed to get through something no one else has gotten through. And I'll say what it is. How can you have a community that is absolutely convinced that they are doing the only thing possible, that it is the only game in town, and they know nothing about what's going on outside of their community. That is, if you think about it, it's just. For 40 years, that question has never been asked by anyone. And Kurt was the first person to get through this by saying, you know, I'm not a physicist and I'm not a mathematician, but I can tell you that you're distorted completely in claiming that you're doing the only possible thing. You're just wrong. Do you care to answer? And that's when Lenny had to back up and say, you know what?

What?

I have no idea what I'm talking about. And by the way, praise to Lenny Suskin.

Yeah.

For having the presence of mind, intellectual honesty.

Yeah. So right. Even, even he can be distemperate.

But by the way, I just want to also point out that when you and I are talking about Sean Carroll or Lenny Suskin or Neil Degrasse Tyson or any of these people, I'm not denigrating them. Well, no. Sometimes, you know, I can't stand, can't stand Neil's condescension. On the other hand, I don't know of a person who does as well explaining so many things brilliantly. Guys had a tremendous amount of knowledge and an incredible gift for exposition. What's weird is.

Don't say gift. He played, he literally, when I claimed that he had a gift for explanation, he said it was implied it was racism and said I'm going to play.

The race card, the well spoken trap.

No, I said, how do you react to people that will. That, you know, don't have these gifts? And he said, wait, I worked very hard. Yeah. You assume you see a white person doing that. You wouldn't say, oh, you're just gifted at elocution and, and explication and, and the way that you've communicated. But you don't realize how much work I do when I go on Stephen Colbert. I spend three weeks investigating what past jokes he's told and how I can relate them to my science. And then how long does he pause between asking a question and letting me answer it? And I do study.

I work hard at it.

I usually work because I'm a black his ass off.

I do. I do too.

On top of that.

Yes.

I think a man has a gift.

Right. I said, you're six foot two, you wrestled and got into college in part because you're a wrestler. That wasn't like you didn't work for that. You were born, you won this lucky sperm club and there's nothing to be, you know, the, the confluence of greatness occurs when there is a confluence of.

I could work that hard at exposition and I couldn't do it.

Exactly. And he works hard. Right, Exactly. But let's move on to one last.

But I just wanted to sum that one thing up. That riff is, is, isn't it interesting? I don't sense with either you or myself. Any desire to just negate people. If somebody is just determined to be horrible. Yeah, I don't mind commenting. That person seems to want to be horrible. Dave Farina, perfect example. But if he did, if he did something genius or something really brilliant, I would like to think, think that we would say, you know, hey, this is kind of uncomfortable, but this person actually really did something impressive.

My claim is, is that one of the, the hallmarks that there's something going wrong in the science system is these absolute ad hominem attacks that attempt to get rid of humans, not say, you know, that person's a little high on his own supply, that person is overplaying a weaker result, blah, blah, blah, blah.

He's insane. He's unhinged.

Right? Yeah. And, and I think that that is, that is what really offended me in part about like the slight against Peter White when Peter White, everybody highly recommend go buy his book on symmetry and the quantum theory. If you know anything. You will not be disappointed.

When you were here two years ago in person, we did an interview. Sorry, we did a podcast with Dan Green about the progress in physics. I thought that was very positive. But we did a solo episode or two part episode con.

Dan Green was terrific.

Yeah, Dan Green's wonderful. No, I'm saying. Then we did another episode where you and I in conversation. That was our last in person interview, although we've met many times since then in LA and Florence and otherwise. You said two things that I want to double click on, as they say. One was about the war in Ukraine and it was just had. Was entering its first year of ending its first year. Rather.

Sure.

And it was six months, seven months before October 7th. And I. We haven't talked about this in the conversation yet or in conversation on at least on the podcast. You know, as a friend, I know this is not the primary motivation, nor was it my invitation to you to come down here, talk politics and stuff. But I do want to talk about that and I want to talk about academia and the future of academia in light of especially the October 7th events. Because on this campus and you know, and you've been a big supporter.

Okay, so here's the thing. I'm happy to talk about October 7th and I'm also happy to talk about the threat to science and the context of science and the current different situation. I think both of those things are huge issues and even Ukraine, although I'm less clear where I stand. The thing that I don't want to do is what I said before. If I'm going to come down and talk on dark energy. I really want us to focus on. I'm saying a thing. I'd prefer to adjudicate it and figure out where it stands than that we just sort of treat it like, oh, you gave a talk on dark energy.

And again, we have the talk, which we'll put on the channel, put a link to that. But what I want to say is, how does this pertain to the. To the practice of science, the destruction of the superstructures that support science? We're told recently that your alma mater, Harvard, is the lone defender, you know, of. Of the integrity of the university where we're sitting. We're sitting in a top university. I felt like this quote from. I think it was. I forget the name of it, but, you know, first they came for the socialist, but I wasn't a socialist.

You know, this famous quote, right? Then they came for the gays, but I wasn't gay, so I didn't. I didn't stand up for them. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't. I wasn't Jewish, so I didn't stand up to them. And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me. I feel like in academia, we scientists who get money from the federal government, in many cases, or even from private institutions like myself, we get institutional money from foundations. We still pay overhead. That overhead goes to the university that is used to support activities that have nothing to do with science whatsoever.

What I want to ask you is, do we need a new paradigm for the university where we have even beyond mit, where you, you know, are familiar with where we cleave off the science, the engineering, the technology, the math, we cleave it off forever, and we have a separate university structure and we go it alone. Or is am I missing the point of the liberal education I don't think is actually occurring anywhere?

Oh, boy, is this a topic.

Okay, so this is why I want to talk about. About. You got any important.

You got any alcohol?

Yes, I do.

Right. Let's have a drink.

L. To life, Jim Simons, wherever you may be. We're drinking to your memory, to your generosity, to your mentorship. You were like a. A godfather to me. And I miss you every day. And we're trying to make you proud with the Simons Observatory. And the only thing I said when I gave him one of these himself, this is an engraved bottle.

You see how beautiful that is?

I love it.

He said, I wish it was gin.

Is that right?

Time Tell me, sir. Academia should we cleave it off. Is it time for the bliss?

We have a problem. And the problem, as I see it, is very clear. This was a system that was architected by a bunch of people who are now dead and much, much smarter than almost any of us. This was a very cleverly worked out, cryptic system that did all sorts of things that people have no idea how it worked. No, I'm not kidding. Overhead. Do you have any idea what overhead really is? Overhead is a system to avoid third tier universities putting political pressure on the government to fund them at the expense of our top tier institutions.

A cartel. The first tier colluded. Exercise cartel behavior. No, to exclude the new portenders.

I don't agree with this. Basically, Vannevar Bush Frontier. The endless frontier. A small number of people realized they had a problem post World War II, which was we figured out, oh my God, science is so much more valuable than we even knew. We have radar, we have nuclear weapons. We are doing things never thought possible. We're spoofing, you know, all of the stuff that you've talked about. Thank you for bringing up Alvarez.

Yeah, very nice. And then suddenly all of these people said, okay, we're done with the government. We're not doing that military. That was just to defeat Hitler. The defense industry and the intelligence services and the covert groups said, wait a minute, don't you love us? And a lot of left leaning socialist idealists who were the ones calculating, you know, chain reactions, exactly, suddenly said, I don't want anything further to do with you. So there had to be a system that was worked out in which we kept our scientists happy, well fed, able to be free, and we could call on them in times of national emergency or national interest. And we decided that we were going to get into the business of funding elite, private, nominally private institutions. So Harvard and Princeton and MIT and Stanford were going to get money from the federal government to keep America wealthy and powerful.

Safe and powerful and safe. Yeah. And then weird stuff started to happen because this was a quiet structure. So I want to talk about the difference between esoteric and exoteric behavior. The exoteric reason for overhead, indirect costs, is that it costs some money to administer a grant. That is not what overhead is. It's not what it's supposed to be. It was supposed to be a cryptic payment to a university based on the merit of who it hired.

So we'd have a merit based system. And based on merit, your university would get richer or poorer depending upon whether you hired great researchers. Then we lost all of this information we lost the idea that universities, as distinct from colleges, are about research and mentorship, not about teaching. Most universities have a college, but there's a distinction in software between ISA and Hazza. So the university, let's say, of Pennsylvania, has a college, but it isn't a college, it's a university. Swarthmore College is a college, but it has no university, but it's not a university. We have two basic systems, one of which was called the aau, probably still is association of American Universities. The other one changed its name, used to be like naslug, national association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.

And that was sort of the Public Ivies, or whatever you want to call them. And what we tried to do was we tried to hide the system from the American taxpayer and allow the taxpayer to benefit. A tiny amount of money in certain terms would go into this weird endeavor, and then we would be powerful and rich. So the American taxpayer had this incredible deal that the American taxpayer was not consulted about. This was an elite idea coming out of the mind of Vannevar Bush.

Enough tragedy of the commons was sure to follow.

And so this issue about esoteric and exoteric has become a lightning rod. You can't expect that your doctor or your financial advisor or whoever is going to give you all information about everything that's going on, on. And you can't expect that people are going to be represented by a fiduciary that doesn't take on fiduciary duties either. So what we've had is we've had a very badly behaved group of people who have abused public trust and a populist revolt against them, saying, trash the system, pull the plug, cut the funding, stop the bleed, and that's where we find ourselves. Ourselves. And this is the thing that I really do want to talk about, but it's just I don't think I've done this in public yet. So let's give it a shot. This physics department, like every other top physics department, is engaged in bullshit.

And the most demanding possible stuff you could do that is honest, brilliant and pure. And it's happening simultaneously in the same department. Department. We tolerate certain kinds of misrepresentation to the public, which we call exoteric speech to let the public know everything is going great. There's never been a better time. You should continue to fund us.

The future will be better than tomorrow.

The future, blah, blah, blah.

Yep.

And we also accepted a terrible deal for us where we basically don't have intellectual property. Right. People wonder, well, Eric, why do you say you're an entertainer. And I always say, here's a joke. What's the difference between a physicist and an entertainer? An entertainer has rights. You know, you complain about physics and you say, well, somebody was attributed my work, suck it up. You know, that has a name, the Johnson effect, or you know, you have something called the Matthew effect to him as much more will be given. And the Matilda effect, which is that women can't be heard.

Then you have the Sudarshan effect, which is that brown people tend not to be credited with their discoveries as much as white people. And you know what? There's real truth in this. You don't have to be woke. You can be anti woke and still see that there's truth in this. What happened is that we let the ethics slide. And in particular we started this with the Mansfield Amendment. The Mansfield Amendment was the withdrawal in the late 60s, early 70s of military support for our science departments to do blue sky research. The military was the best friend of pure research, often by people who didn't like the military at all.

And so we pulled the plug on that. Mike Mansfield was, I think, a senator from Montana, had this amendment that said you couldn't fund university professors to do research unless there was an express military purpose like it was directed. And then we followed on with all of these bad laws. The eilberg amendment in 1976, the Bayh Dole amendment in 1980. We started this labor shortage scare which Vivek Ramaswamy is still on about in the mid-80s, which became the Immigration act of 1990, or IMAC 90. We've been making all sorts of terrible rules which has been making science more and more particular precarious. So the average scientist is too focused on what do I need to do to keep my health care going. And it's offensive.

This is, you know, I'm, I'm not. I'm an entertainer. I'm not a scientist, says the man with the Ph.D. in mathematics. This is offensive that you have a tiny group of people who are secure producing insecurity in everyone else, and it's affecting the science. This is how Anthony Fauci got away with claiming that it was racism to ask the question about whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology might have something to do with the bat coronavirus.

Far less racist to ask to say that they prefer to eat pangolins and bats than to say that it escaped.

From the hey, man, I had Hong Kong flu in like 1968. You know, am I a racist?

Actually, you're right. Yeah, that was one of the deadliest flu went around during the Woodstock.

It's ridiculous, right? And so more or less everybody, Fauci and Covid caused a, I don't know, an aneurysm in the tech elite. I don't, I still don't understand this exactly. But all sorts of people who are now called the tech right woke up some point during COVID and said, you know what? We were all pro science. Screw these guys. These are liars. They won't stand up. They're cowards words. Universities are over.

Science is done. And I thought, wait, what, what meeting did I just miss? Like Fauci and public health have nothing to do in my mind with science.

Science.

Yeah, right. Somehow the quote tech, right?

Like David Sachs.

And I didn't say anybody, okay. I felt that way about the tech Right. Whatever they are, have developed a brain illness. Science is over. Universities are over. Everything is unreformable. I go to seminar after seminar at UCLA and Caltech and I never see any of them. They have no idea what's going on, of course.

Okay, well that's what's going on.

Demonize that with you.

That's what's going on at Mar a Lago. As long as you don't invite actual PhD researchers, you'll have no idea that actual PhD level research church acts as.

The advisor on AI and the czar of science and technology to the present. I find that scary because he even on his own podcast he's an entertainer as well as a craft ventures, you know, founder, etc and friend of Elon and so forth. But he will say on the previous podcast he would. It was a running gig that when Friedberg, who's a bit on the podcast, David Friedberg would start talking about something interesting in science. David's actually a very curious and imaginative person person and very knowledgeable about science, especially bioscience and, and, and Sachs would say, I'm checking out. I'll talk to me in 10 minutes when you're done. When he's done yapping his mouth. I mean, he's explicitly.

I don't know anything about this.

This is on the all David.

David's been nothing but nice to me. So I just don't have.

I don't know.

I don't have any knowledge.

I'm just saying from his public statements, he's claimed that, you know, he's demonstrated his lack of curiosity at least about. Okay, that's all I'll say. But let me get back to the original question, which is what the hell do we do we have a literature department. We have a general study department. We have a. They're all supported in some way by fringe benefits that I get charge of my. My grant. So how do I.

What do I do as a science. I mean, there's a lot of science professors listening to this podcast. 21 Nobel Prize winners. Okay, what do we do? What would you have us do? Einstein University. What would it look like?

We have an elite product. We should own what we're doing. Badly.

Stem.

To be honest, it's not just stem. I mean, let me say more.

Is it? Yeah.

If you look at a music department department. Good luck trying to do voice leading. First day, you know, of class, if you don't know any theory. Well, you've got different. You've got a chord progression. You've got different lines that might be sung or played as chords, and you're trying to figure out how to keep the voices in a melodic pattern with following a harmonic progression.

Hardly play Spotify.

So.

Okay, I'll take it your word for it.

Yeah. My claim is linguistics has lots of aspects of this. Ancient languages, you know, people who know, you know, ancient Sumerian. Those are highly technical people.

But the Anthropology department, in which they're hired.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. They're having a different version of our problem, which is much more severe. So my claim is, is that the English department and the Physics Department look somewhat the same. Same. The nonsense about the only game in town, which is, pardon me, string identitarianism. Okay. No, it's. It's basically.

It's like an intersectional Olympics. The people who can't do physics have to be the best. Whatever. And by the way, I'm just going to be merciless about this because those boys have caused so much trouble and so much pain to so many people. If there's ever a group of people, the only game in town, cowboys deserve everything coming their way. Way. In an English department that looks like intersectional studies. Now, is there somebody who's also doing Chaucer's Middle English? Yes, there is.

So you have a portion of the English department that is actually engaged with English literature scholarship. Everything that you want is still happening, but it's much more infected and it's much more political. So my claim is, one, let's not pretend that STEM has escaped this, and two, let's not pretend that our friends in the humanities now do nothing other than write about transgenderism, transgender dog parks, or whatever it is that they. That they do.

I tell you what happened.

Wait, I don't want to go ahead. So your question is, well, what should we do? I think that the key point to say is we have some problems in stem. They're far less than our problems in the humanities. And what's worth salvaging is everything is worth salvaging. But if we have to go it alone, I am prepared to cut the most ideological, political and anti scholarly departments loose, particularly starting with activist studies.

I don't think I ever told you this, but the day after the 2016 election, I was having lunch with one of my colleagues who's a literature professor. We actually co taught a class class on poetry for physicists, you'll be pleased to know, because typically the trope is you got to teach physics for poets. But I said, no, actually the physicists need the poetry sometimes. Right? So we taught it, co taught a class, it was a wonderful class. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

Ray Arab Dyke, do a beautiful Neutrinos.

Yes, neutrinos, they are very small. They have no mass at all. But he's wrong.

I know.

If only he had been talking about dark energy Eric, he could have had a career. So we had lunch and it was the day after the election. She, she was depressed as I've ever seen her and she was moping around and I said, you know, Ray, I'm so, you know, I could tell that you're not as enthusiastic as, you know, as many of our, you know, colleagues on the right may be wherever they are on the campus. But you know, you seem really far gone. You know what's about. She goes, I understood that there would be people that would vote not the way I like in other departments say vote for Trump at this time, it's Trump for Hillary. But I didn't, I didn't, I could not believe the people in my own department, department that, that turned on us. I was like, is she saying what I think she's saying? She's saying that there were literature professors that voted for Trump.

And I said, ray, you gotta tell me, what do you mean? And she did they, did any of her colleagues vote for Trump? Oh God, no. He's horrendous. They voted for Bernie. They threw their vote away as if Hillary would have won if it wasn't for these write in votes for Bernie. So ideologically, you know, uniform were they that to defect to Bernie was considered a treasonous act from which there was no recovery in the social circles among them. But last thing I, I, we, we have to, we have to get to, unless, unless there's some other things I do, I do want to mention this Chern Simons thing I, I started to mention to you. Okay, go ahead.

Look, the big problem is a lot of other stuff is happening that shouldn't be happening in the universities. And I'm just going to be very clear to you. Harvard is right to try to resist what the Trumpies are doing and it's trying to do it from a position that is untenable. You cannot fight from where they are. So in other words, if they had a commitment to scholarship as opposed to commitment to supplication of the government, when the government asks for some sort of cryptic program to be undertaken through Harvard, then Harvard would be in a position of saying we have always jealously defended our independence and our integrity, our use to the countries because of our unwillingness to bend to the temporary needs of politics.

33 cancer patents last year. Right.

No, I'm saying things like what they did with the CPI where they tried to raise taxes and slash the benefits by artificially cutting CPI by 1 point, 1 percentage point because they backed out, that that would be a 10 year savings of a trillion dollars. And so my claim is that if you play that game and you bury real scholarships and then you attempt to play the next card, which is Harvard is committed to the truth. It's on our motto in Latin and don't you ever tell us what we can and cannot do. Sir. Good day. My point is, who are you fooling? Exactly. I would much rather that come from the University of Chicago, which has also done the business of the United States government, particularly through its Economics department far too often. But if I had to pick a school, the school would not be Harvard.

Harvard plays with the federal government far too much. And what they're really saying is you, sir, with the orange hair are beneath us. Good day.

Contemptible.

Yeah. And my feeling is that that's not going to work. So what do I think we should do? Honestly, I think we should say. You know what? You're mildly right. You got a few points. We have departments that are completely riddled with ideological cancer and we don't know what to do about them. We've let in too many people who are here for protest and we've taken too much money from abroad. Absolutely.

There's a bunch of things that we've done that are wrong. And having said that, you now want to tell us that you want out of the compound fact. Oh boy, you're initiating divorce proceedings with the thing that kept America strong, rich and safe. Think twice. Think three times. Is this really important to you in these terms. And then if you want to sit down, remember something. A university goes home at night.

All that you have left at the end of the day is the facilities, the brains leave. And by the way, any country at the moment that wants to absolutely leapfrog. All it needs to do is start offering freedom and an upper middle class existence to professors at the top of their game in science.

They wouldn't do it for the other. There's no critical studies in the University of Lagos.

I have no idea what we're talking about. Talking about.

I'm just saying. And we're restricted to science.

It's.

There's not. It's not true. That's all that.

No, no, no. It could be Milton Babbitt in the music department at Princeton. I don't know what you're saying.

We talked about. Okay, fine, Eric. Is it mostly science? Are they studying critical theory at the University of Lagos? Or are they studying, you know, physics, science, technology?

Just blow the whole thing up. I have no. What are we even talking about?

Something is truly legitimate as an academic discipline suitable for an intellectual. It should be something universal. It should be something that is done in Nigeria. They're no less intellectually capable as we are. That's why they do the same calculus and group theory. They teach at the university there as well as we do here at ucsd. But they don't have things that we do have here. As I said, any critical.

Anything with critical in it. Any studies department we don't have.

Can we do me a favor?

Yeah.

I'm tired of focusing on the people with blue hair.

Okay. I'm happy to move on.

Okay, so there's all of this that shouldn't be happening. But you know what? No string theorist that I know has blue hair. And they are absolutely the blue hair problem of physics. And it's not string theory. It's the only game in town. Add on. In other words, you could do string action, string phenomenology. You could do all sorts of stringy physics.

You'll never hear anything from me. You touch this thing where you say and my colleagues are pseudoscientists because if they don't actually toe the line, then that's not physics. My feeling is, oh boy, did you pick the wrong fight.

You're not entitled.

Well, my claim is, is that any country that wants to clean up on academics and take the part that makes the US wealthy, safe and powerful can do it. All you need to do is to start offering people half a million dollars a year Second homes, travel budgets. The world is your oyster. I can't believe we are this dumb.

Sacrificing, right? Surely the baby is being ditched. Sometimes the baby is the baby.

Okay, let's talk about Ukraine in October 7th.

So last time you were here, we were concerned about the precipice that we seem to be facing with a president who had a 1 in 20 or higher percent chance of dying in any given year. As Joe Biden at the time. And then his surrogate, you know, should that heartbeat be skipped, was none other than Kamala Harris. Now that that's no longer the case.

First of all, we don't know who the surrogate was in case the call came in the night and Joe Biden was not up for making a decision.

He was rested and ready. What are you talking about? He was, he was sharp as attack. I heard from.

I don't want to make a joke about this. We had a brain dead president for partial part of that presidency.

Who was pulling the strings?

I don't know, but I was told, I was given names, I was set, I was told to don't worry about this, stop talking about it publicly. And my feeling about this is, you know, this is like the Democratic Party has to own the fact that they covered for a Parkinson's patient that could be diagnosed from his gait, from his speech, from his memory. Like this was completely known symptoms.

Does that give you hope in some sense that actually the president isn't that important?

I don't know why you do these moves.

I'm just.

No, I said this thing. What happens when the missiles come? The missiles didn't come. Maybe I can clarify something. The Cold War is forever. And I'm a child of the Cold War. When I hear about people who are post Cold War, they don't care about the apocalypse much. They're vaguely apocalyptic. But part of the problem is that, look, this physics thing, the reason that we are important in the minds of the public in part is that we are the ones who brought the end of the world.

We brought the final sword of Damocles. You can add to the sword, but it's been over the head of humanity and I don't love making light of it.

I think the people that are guilty of making light, and I think that's an important distinction, are the people who deliberately misled the public. That he was. And that you still, still consider yourself a Democrat is of curiosity to me.

Yeah, tell me.

I mean a lot of the positions you hold, I mean the ones that we've Just discussed in particular, are not that dissimilar from. Except for the possible denigration of technological engineering and military prowess in the United States, which I agree is a paramount.

Democrats were destroying that. Left, right and center, right.

What tenants of the Democratic Party party do resonate with you? Besides the fact that, yes, that was a tradition of most Jews when they were born in the era that you were born in. A Democrat on their. On their birth certificate.

No, no, that's not what it is. What it is, is what would it.

Take to have you say, I am not a member of the Democratic Party, even if I'm not a Republican?

I think people just don't grasp what this is. If you were in France as a French person and it became Vichy France, would you stop being French? Do you think Marlene Dietrich stopped being German because of Adolf Hitler? You know, this is this thing. Oh, this. I'm no longer an American. I leave the country. I. Einstein did what?

Einstein was no longer a German.

Yeah, well, he was a. That's a path that he chose where he was actually stateless. Okay. He never stopped being German. Read what he writes. He's German. German. My claim is we have forgotten ourselves.

I don't think I've seen a world I recognize since the 80s. I just see madness. I just. All I see since Dick Morris is madness. But.

Okay, so you didn't like what I said. Doesn't that make you more hopeful? But isn't there a resilience in America? There's something resilient.

Sorry, you were on a different point. You were on a point about why do you. You consider yourself a Democrat?

Okay, I'm in a tangent.

Okay.

I won't. It's my prerogative.

That's all right. It's your whiskey.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay. So why are you. Yes, go back. Let's go back to that.

So my claim is, is that the stated aims of the Democratic Party, as they once were, are to make the world a bit better for working families and to be. To take the position of the little guy against the overdog. Okay. Of the two parties. That is closer to my orientation now, to be honest. J.D. vance led a pro working class movement before he was ever considered for vice president. It just came out of him.

I was on board. I would help the Trumpies. I would help Kamala Harris. I would help anybody who wants to make the country better. Right now we're caught in this loyalty thing and it's tearing people apart for very, very good reason. Do you really want to say I support X And then have to sign on to all the stuff that X is doing, like this tariff stuff. This is. This is re.

I don't know what the plan is. Nobody's clued me in as to how this is just great. I didn't want to be associated with Kamala Harris. I didn't want to be associated with Donald Trump. I didn't. Nobody called me up and said, here's the plan. Are you with us? I have no idea what the plan is. I just.

I tune in and, you know, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris would announce things, and now Donald Trump and Elon Musk announced things, and I just clutch my head. So am I. Am I strongly attached to either party as it currently stands? No, but what I've said is I'm a nail House Democrat. Somebody has to. To be left behind to remind the party. You're just going mad. This is what I say about theoretical physics or science. It's like, well, yeah, the theme is, you've forgotten yourself.

Somebody will intone, quantum gravity is the holy grail of theoretical physics. And I will put up a slide that shows nobody even mentioned the words quantum gravity before 1972. You know, at some level, we're caught in a mass delusion. So that's where my life is living out, is that I've got two political parties, have no clue as to what the planet is, how everything worked. We had a bunch of technocrats. They built a system that was too complicated. It was way too exoteric, esoteric. So it kept certain things in secret, shared certain things in the public.

That system spun out of control. And right now we're sitting on a planet where we're at risk of nuclear proliferation. Because quite honestly, the Trumpies are all about out revitalizing. And as they revitalize and they pull in America's commitments from overseas, it's like pulling the control rods out of a reactor. You'll see what happens next. Two beautiful oceans will keep us safe because nothing knows how to cross. And Lord knows, there are no submarines that patrol our coasts. I have no idea.

Chinese balloons that fly above.

Well, this is ridiculous. And we're playing with the planet in this completely cavalier way where. And I'll just be honest about something that really offends me. There's this meme in my very smart friends, which is, don't worry, Trump and Elon have this. And my claim is, do you have any idea how many nonlinear interacting things they just threw up in the air? So imagine that you threw up a spinning chainsaw, bungee Cords, a plasma tv, glitter, I don't know, you just start electrical stuff with water, blah, blah, blah.

That's called bedtime at the Keating House.

The. Oh yeah, don't worry, they've got this. Well, no one on planet Earth can control. Yeah, you're playing 40,000 dimensional quantum chess. You're just making things crazy. And the only thing that I can see about this is that at least when things are crazy, Donald Trump at least knows what he's going to do next, which nobody else can say. So in some sense he's got a permanent one move advantage by throwing the world into chaos.

Yeah, the instability has a tactical advantage, if not a strategic one. Okay, last topic before we break bread. Kind of highlight this from a perspective of you recently having been both to this ARC conference where you spoke about this. This clandestine war, so to speak, or the secret war that people don't realize that they're in.

Hybrid.

Hybrid war. And also your recent trip to Israel.

Yeah.

So one of these two trips, what, is there some core that resonates between the two of them? Is there some. The post October 7th world. Is it? Is it? Can we go back to the time before or are we permanently in a new era, not unlike the Cold War or something like that?

We don't want to go back. October 6th was a really dangerous and stupid time in Israeli history. Israel was focused on internal issues, thinking that it was as stable as Spain or France. And it isn't. And Israel's been in a terrible bind that no one will let it out of as long as the US harbors a fantasy about a two state solution involving people who cannot live under a two state solution, you will consign people to bury their children. And I think this is a problem with 20th century idealism. It's just not real enough. So yes, there are people who can live in harmony in the Middle east, even if it's cold and bitter as a peace.

And there are people who cannot. And my feeling is that both the Jews and the Arabs who cannot live in peace need to be relocated. And then whoever is left needs to get on with it. The business of living.

Where do they go is the obvious.

Question that has always been a question of absorption. And to be entirely honest, part of the problem lies at the foot of the Arab League. The issue is that we keep doing weird Western style idealism in a region in which the participants are much smarter than the tourists. And for the most part, I'm a tourist. The people who cannot live in peace need to leave on both sides you know, you can't have Israeli settlers taking their frustration out by humiliating their Arab neighbors. And you cannot have a bunch of psychopaths on paragliders attacking music festivals and whatever. You know, you can't have Baruch Goldstein gunning down people in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. They're just people who can't be placated.

I will point out Israel has repatriated people in Yamit, in Sinai once upon a time, and it's moved people out of Gaza. There were Israelis who were living in Gaza. It's like your time is up. Including graveyards and digging up remains. Now, my claim is we've got to recognize that under extreme circumstances that haven't been visited much since World War II when we had the Potsdam Agreement where we repatriated the Sudeten Germany Germans to German soil, we have to re examine. Are we really being idealistic? Are we really doing something good and positive by telling people who cannot get along, you will remain married forever?

And the only thing that defines a.

Human being, I mean, well, you look at Black September, you know, when. When Jordan had a state within a state, they didn't sit around saying, oh, we cannot expel these people because that would be ethnic cleansing. And that would be, you know, or Kuwait. They went to. They went to Lebanon. And then Lebanon says, we can't deal with these people. They sent them to Tunisia. You know, ultimately, you need to live someplace where you can live hating another person every moment and not kill anybody.

So let's find that place.

I've been talking, thinking a lot about my late, great friend and mentor, Jim Simons, who is a fan. And actually, the one. One of my regrets is that we never got to take him up on his offer to repatriate you to the east coast for at least some sabbatical time. Maybe we still will. Maybe we still will.

You should tell that story because it's something you did. Yeah, well, you called me and you said, eric, how quickly can you get to Santa Barbara? Now, I knew Jim from before, but I knew him in a professional context. I never was wildly friendly with him. And you invited me to a family event.

Yeah, it was my mother's 80th birthday party four years ago. And. And we. My brother, who's living in Santa Barbara at the time, had, you know, was hosting a big party. He threw this wonderful party for her.

Right.

And my only contribution was I invited Jim and Marilyn Simons to come to the birthday party of my mom. And I kept that a secret from her, which. So it was a great surprise.

Very nice.

And so they came out and spent a couple days in Santa Barbara. And then we had some this party. And then after the main festivities were over, Jim, as his want, wanted to sit by the fireplace and recount stories.

Both smoke cigarette with no socks.

Cigarettes, no socks and no filter on the cigarette or on the conversation.

Exactly.

And we had my. My nephews who had never really met him and my, my. Some of my children were there at the time and we had a great time and talked late into the night.

We had a crazy time.

Yeah, it was quite good. You played the hand pan drama of my brother at one point.

Point.

And. And we stayed up till we. Hours of the morning talking physics, talking. Talking Churn Simons, talking about Stony Brook, talking about my father, talking about Renaissance.

Technologies, technologies, the medallion fund.

And by the end of the evening we. You exchanged information or I exchanged your information with Jim.

No, something more important happened before saying.

Okay, so don't say this recollection that's.

Well, this is important because these are historical figures and nobody's going to have a further conversation with Jim Simon. So I want to make sure that we talk about what actually happened. So Jim, in my estimation, was very aware of the string theoretic and related interest in the Chern Simons theory. And at least officially, he professed that he didn't quite understand what the big deal was. Now, I bring this up because there's an interview that Jim did with his arguably main collaborator. He had two great Chinese collaborators, one in differential geometry, one in physics. And C.N. yang was his great collaborator at Stony Brook.

And C.N. yang realized what they had done together. And I have been keeping this Wu Yang dictionary, which in my opinion is actually the Simons Yang dictionary, which is the Rosetta stone between bundle theoretic differential geometry and particle theory. One of the most important things that happened that has almost no discussion of whatsoever in the literature that anybody could read outside of the field is the discovery that all of particle theory was geometry except for the Higgs sector. And Jim was very reticent to make a big deal of this. You can see it on camera when CN Yang is like, this is incredible. It's amazing. Just like I never really understand fully, but in part that was just him.

So what I said to Jim is, you do realize that the Chern Simons functional is the only other real action or Lagrangian, the magic thing that determines all physics, that produces Euler Lagrange equations with no differential operator in front of the curvature other than the Einstein Field equations from the Hilbert Lagrange. He thought about that. He said something like, do you think that's important? And I said, without wanting to give you false hope, it is my belief that the final theory of gravity will be as much Chern Simons as it is Einstein Hilbert. And so he said, well, how do you figure that? So I started explaining why I believe the marriage of these ideas with extra stuff that isn't yet in the story is going to be what fixes gravity. And it will fix what I believe is the cosmological constant problem. Then there was this bizarre interaction which I still to this day can't understand. And Jim says, that's remarkable. And he asked me if I knew anything about the Simon Center.

I said, yes, I visited. You have an incredible leader in Luis Alvarez Galme at the Simon center for Geometry and Physics. And he says, why don't you come for a year and develop the theory at Stony Brook? And I said, that is a remarkable and generous offer. I just need some help because I have a son who's finishing high school and I have to relocate and move a family for a year. So if. If there's the ability to help with the. With the heavy lift, I would be very interested. And Jim said, and I'll never forget this.

Do you have any idea where you get the money? And I could not figure out what was happening. I was trying to tell him that I believe that Chern Simons is going to be as important as Einstein Hilbert in the final theory of gravity. He saw it. He was very interested. And then it got hung up on this completely bizarre issue of a guy who was made of money himself. And I. I just don't understand it.

Yeah, I mean, I can't offer too much insight into it other than he was blessed in some ways by having an infinite amount of people that he was curious about their work and wanted to support. I'll never forget he had a charity that was a subsidiary of the Simons foundation called Math for America.

Yeah.

Was to do what Teach for America did, but specifically for math. So we had a chapter here, of all places, at UC San Diego. And I was one of the members of the board of advisors at the time. And we had an event at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on the beach here in San Diego. There's a beautiful facility. And we had a fundraiser, which we invited wealthy people. Let's be honest. He was going to give money, you know, the students now.

So we had a big, you know, fundraise cost a lot of money to raise. And we brought in, in congresswoman, our local congresswoman. We brought in dignitaries, visionaries, you know, other rich people, potential donors. I eventually ended up setting him up with Irwin Jacobs and, and that was a nice coup for me to get some support from Irwin to support Jim's support is two billionaires, you know, arguing about, you know, who could give each other, you know, the 50k check. And then Craig Ventner was there and Craig's been on the show.

Marvelous.

And we're talking and I didn't know Craig at the time, but I saw them scrolling off and I'm like, what's he doing? And then Jim came back and said, oh yeah, he wants me to give him money. He says I'm a genius. And I, and I said, well, and he's supposedly pretty smart guy. I mean he sequenced the human genome, you know, before Francis Collins, by the way. And, and Jim said, yeah, but you know something, Brian? If I gave a dollar to everyone who told me I was a genius, even I would be broke. Now obviously he's tongue in cheek, but I think, yes, I think if we had to follow, because he did follow up, to be honest with, I mean, to give him, you know, I don't want to say, say anything negative obviously about him, but he did after the fact he did go to. I got emails from him coordinating a possible invitation from Luis to you. And so I mean, I have that he mentioned it and then I think maybe, well, we'll just talk off camera about my supposition what happened next.

But, but, but yes, I don't know why that happened, Eric, but, but the.

Point, I don't want to dwell on that aspect. It was just mysterious. The thing that I wanted to get to though is what is the Churn Simons functional? Because I don't think people really know about it.

No.

And I don't think they know how important it is. So the Churn Simons functional is an object that eats two of a thing called a connection and spits out a three dimensional object that can only be integrated in dimension three. So we don't live in dimension three, even though it feels like we do at any instant of time, because you have a bunch of time incidents. So you have this fourth dimension. But imagine that we lived in two spatial dimensions like we were in Flatland. And that was perfect. Progressing in time. Jim and SS Chern figured out that if you hand their object two different connections, it can in some sense take a difference between them, technically called a transgression.

And that object can be integrated. And that integration gives you information about a physical system which was sort of rediscovered by Ed Whitman, originally due to a guy named Albert Schwartz from the Soviet Union who settled at UC Davis. And he did the Abelian theory. And I really wish we called Chern Simons theory after Albert Schwartz as well as Ed Witten as well as Chern and Simons. The key thing is that it's mispresented almost always. It's presented as a thing that eats one object called a connection A. And you're hiding the fact that there's a trivial second object so that you suppress it and you don't see it in the actual equation. But if you do it properly, as a mathematician would.

It eats two connections and spits out a thing that can be integrated to give a number. And this thing is so beautiful and so remarkable because. Because it is the rival to general relativity. And that is not really appreciated. I think enough.

Worse than that. I mean, as we were talking last night. Say less. As we were talking last night, I think to a good approximation, thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of people know about. Know about Calabio manifold. I've heard about them, don't know them, but let's just say they know about them. Heard about them rather. And zero people.

People know about turn Simons. I mean, basically zero people. I think even in this department, this astronomy building, now we're on enemy territory. But zero people in this building know about what Chern Simons is. But a few of them would know about that. Which I think is a. Is much a marketing branding failure of Jim Simons.

Also part of the story, to be entirely honest, because I think it was in 1986, there was a centenary conference at Duke University for Herman Vile. And I was an activist at the time and I lobbied the Harvard math department for funds so that all of the graduate students could go to this historic conference. And to Barry Mazur's credit, he just said yes and he gave us all money. So we traveled and I saw one of the most remarkable lectures ever where Sir Michael Attia stood up, up in front of this incredibly prestigious conference and all of these great luminaries and said, you know, there have been these discoveries recently, I think, of invariants of the. The Jones polynomial and the Cassin invariant. And they should have a description in quantum field theory. If only somebody could find the quantum field theory to give us this topology. And Whitten was there.

And it is a testament to the fact that nobody knew enough about the Chern Simons function that they searched, I think, for three or four years before rediscovering what Albert Schwartz had done in the commutative case. And Ed Witten did it in the non commutative case. And that's what Ed Witten won the Fields Medal for. He won it for Chern. So in other words, it was the fact that nobody was conscious enough of it that meant that it had to be this mystery theory that no one could find, when they actually found was very deeply embedded in real science. Now here's a completely crazy story that shouldn't necessarily be linked to this, but I throw it out. There is a guy named Bob Lazarus.

Yes.

Who may be a crazy person. I have no idea whether anything he says is true. But in 1989 he gave a crazy interview. And in the interview he says, you know, gravity comes in two flavors, gravity wave A and gravity wave B. Now as a physics person, have you ever heard anyone talk like this? No, no, exactly, exactly. And he says one of these things is the weak form of gravity that you already know. But if there is an alien engineering project, it uses the other gravity wave, which you most likely know is associated with the strong force. And I thought, what is this guy talking about? Okay, well, the strong force comes from a theory called qcd.

QCD actually has two subsects vectors, one of which is called the Yang Mills theory, which involves F wedge star F. But the other sector is called the theta angle or the theta sector. And that's F wedge F. And that is the first Pontriagon class, which when transgressed, never mind what that means exactly, means question of how does it change? You're trying to figure out how it changes. Changes with response to perturbation that transgresses to the Chern Simons function. And that Chern Simons function mirrors gravity because it results in a curvature tensor with no differential operator in front of it. Whereas the other term results in a curvature tensor with a differential operator in front of it. In other words, Maxwell's theory is da star of fa, where FA is the curvature.

So it's differential of curvature equals stuff. Whereas Einstein's theory is contraction of curvature with no differentiation. You just do some linear algebra equals stuff. So these two theories that are sort of incompatible, gravity and Yang Mills theory, in fact are very closely related. And the crazy thing that Bob Lazar says about out gravity wave B, which you most likely know as this as involved in qcd, actually has a high level interpretation. Although I have no idea whether Bob Lazar has any clue what he's even talking about. So what I'm claiming.

Didn't expect that on my bingo card for the podcast.

Well, but this is the thing.

Raid an alien or something. He flew like a bomber over an alien base for or something like that, or.

I don't care. No, no, look, assume that. Assume that. A lot of what he's saying is, you know, he's like a convicted criminal. He's a. We keep laughing about everything. Right. Okay.

You can take the following to the bank. There's something called the theta sector in qcd. It's associated with the strong force, and the transgression of it leads to the Chern Simon Simons action. And the Chern Simons action, when differentiated in Dimension 3 to give the Euler Lagrange equations, is eerily similar to the Einstein Hilbert equations, which give you general relativity. You don't. You can take Bob Lazar the hell out of that story and I'll stand by everything I just said. And I've never heard anyone mention this. So my claim is Jim stands to win at an enormous level.

Level. If what I believe is true is true. And it's not Chern Simon's theory and it's not Einstein, Hilbert. It's more than both of them. But, boy, is Chern Simon's theory going to be important to gravity. And the reason that, by the way, it doesn't have credence in a place like an astronomy or physics department is it's locked in Dimension 3. What I said today in our talk is that Einstein is the first person, in a certain sense, to show that through his contraction operator, you can make Dimension 4 look a great deal like Dimension 3. If you augment something called the Lorentz group to the Poincare group, the de Sitter group, or the anti de Sitter group.

And in all of those cases, you can relate something called a curvature tensor or a field strength to a gauge potential or a connection one form. And in that, that relationship where you take something of degree two and turn it into something of degree one, in Chern Simons theory, you do it through a Hodge star operator. And in Einsteinian gravity, you do it through a contraction through a tensor product. So this story is far from played out. Absolutely. Jim Simons has a horse in this race. And Jim was very briefly active in mathematics before he became this mysterious hedge fund figure. And what I would say is the little bit that he did do in math before he jumped ship is absolutely first rate, astonishing mathematics.

Amen. There was one thing that he wanted. He. He had a Gulf Stream he had a mega yacht. I even got him an asteroid which you can read about here. Asteroid 6618 Jim Simons discovered by Clyde Tombaugh. Do you know Clyde Tombaugh was what his famous. Discovered Pluto, which was killed by past guest Michael Brown, who was here a couple weeks ago sitting in that very.

But how did he discover it?

How did he discover. How did. How did Clyde Tombaugh discover Pluto?

Wasn't it the visible world's failure to close is how you discover an invisible object?

That was Le Verrier. That was Discovery. Neptune.

Oh, okay. So close.

One planet off. But actually it's a planet Pluto's not. Anyway, got him the planet. I got him the minor planet, which call it considered a minor planet. And he said, Brian, you know, grizzled voiced merit cigarettes for 60 years. He said, Brian, it's wonderful. Answer one question, do I have mining rights? That was Jim Simons.

So funny. By the way, you. Can I just tell my tiny Math for America story?

Yeah, yeah.

Ahead. Go.

Go for it.

I wouldn't have told this, I think, while he was alive, but years ago I met with him in New York before I knew you. And I spent three hours talking to him. And I knew he'd made all this money in the markets. And I said, look, you're a geometer, I'm a geometer. You're married to an economist, as am I. I know what you're up to. And I said, the markets are actually differential, geometric, and in fact, they're gauge theory theoretic. You've figured out that the markets are gauge theoretic, and that's what you're doing to make money.

And I went through three hours explaining it, and he looked up at me and he said, eric, if you only knew how we actually made money, you'd be so disappointed. I said, what are you talking about? He says, you know, look, I found all sorts of. He said, I didn't know any of this stuff. Thank you for telling me. Me? He said, it's astounding, but I'm caught on much simpler problems. I said, what do you mean? He said, you know, I was determined to solve the problem of math education in America. He said, after studying it and being willing to give away a very large amount of money, he said, I had to settle for making terrible teachers, slightly less terrible. And that was so uninspiring that I didn't feel energized by it.

And I felt so sad that such a. A brilliant and amazing human being when tackling a real World problem. It just enervated him no end.

No, I mean he was. He was one of the most amazing, amazing people. But he said to me, well, I have to tell you one quick vignette about him before we close. He was being awarded a prize by, you know, for being such a great supporter of the American Lung Association. And they came to his office to present him not only with a prize, but it was on his birthday eight years ago. Hold on, that gets better. And he invited them to his office because he had only a few minutes to meet. And they kept, he kept, they said, they kept droning on and on about it.

And he was, you know, understandably, he was a little bit, you know, getting nervous. He had to use the bathroom, but he would smoke. He had the only office in Manhattan. You were allowed to smoke inside because he owned the whole building. Building. And then he got so was insufferable. He didn't have an ashtray. And so in the middle of this meeting with the American Lung association they had the birthday cake for him and he ashed a cigarette in the birthday cake, the American Lung association logo.

But Eric, I want to conclude with one thing. The one thing that he always wanted. He had the mega yacht, the mega jet, the asteroid, the. The accolades galore. He wanted one of these. He really did. And you know, with God's help, perhaps will not only tell his story, but maybe, just maybe someone, someone not saying me, I've lost my affinity as you know, spoiler alert. But I think he should be recognized.

I think turn two. Obviously I mean this law, but posthumous Nobel. Tell me where in the laws of physics you can't give away a proper eyes posthumously. It's actually been done. But Eric. Anyway, we gotta go. We gotta go have dinner, we gotta leave, get you back to home. And I just want to thank you.

Let's not make it two years next time. Let's make it at least 18 months or sooner. And I did a fan favorite and I enjoyed your talk very much and, and seeing you in your element. That's the lion amongst his. Amongst his fellow. His fellow beast of the field in the best possible way of the mind was quite inspiring and fun. Fun. And I always learn tremendous amount from you and benefit from your company, your collegiality, your friendship and your conscience as a voice of reason of the field.

So thank you very much, really appreciate.

That Brian, thank you.