No, because we don't even know how long a piece of string is? But seriously, the two ideas that seem to be breaking ground are geometric unity and the understanding that there are additional factors or dimensions coupled with the realisation from the 'delayed erazor double slit experience' which shows that what is experienced is based on what wd expect to be. 'Allah gives you what you expect' , and 'prayer is the only thing that can change what is written for you'. Or as my enlightened daughter said, 'we don't know anything about reality'! My question is is it the expectation that changes the outcome of the experiment, or does it just mean we experience the outcome of the experiment differently due to what we expect? I'd say the later, but that's probably just because that's what I expect it to be...
Brian plzzz the sound in the background does not go well the voice and speech. You can have the audio but it has to be different. You can hire an audio engineer for cheap and they will pick out the type of music that does go well and mix it so it all sounds right. Please I love your work but this makes it unbearable to listen.
First of all, I absolutely love your interviews and your deep knowledge in so many areas. My only request is: please, please, please lose that random background music that shows up in the podcast lately. It makes the interviews unlistenable to me. Am I the only one? It wouldn’t be the first time I’m an army of one :)
Yeah, it's quite distracting and doesn't add anything useful. I'm also not sure the displaying of book covers on quantum gravity right when Smolin starts talking about it actually helps us to understand what he's saying. This was when the background music first dropped in though, so it might be that without the music i would have been less distracted by the book covers. The combination of the two sets up a mental expectation that you shouldn't actually be listening to the speaker anymore. Think of those sections in quick news videos when they're highlighting an idea by showing a clip of someone explaining the idea, then they fade the speaker's voice into the background as they bring on visual info to keep the explanation going but through a different medium. In those videos (of they're done well) the speaker's voice fades, and the music comes in overtop, to allow your brain to shift to taking in the info through the new medium. But with this video, that's not even the intention. So you prime the viewer into switching modes when you don't actually want that, and Smolin's explanation gets lost.
Brian, it's so fantastic how you keep expressing your deep personal admiration for your guests, even though they sometimes hold deeply contradictory views. That gratitude for people's work and commitment (also shared by Lee) is in my mind what a field needs in order to be as good as it can be - both in terms of technical results, but also in terms of value to humanity. And this is also one of the reasons why I (from my amateur's point of view) hold Lee as one of the most important people to his field.
@@DrBrianKeating Maybe I can clarify. The background music that appeared sporadically during conversation, was at times, extremely annoying. The volume seemed to vary quite a bit, and didn't match conversation. I am assuming this was an editing oversight with the other visuals that appeared (overlapping audio) but it was infrequent enough that I watched anyway, because as the previous poster noted, the topic material is extremely interesting.
Smolin is a total picnic to listen to. Keating doesn't bother but ask the highest pertinent questions. Great conversation between the two. Thanks for this !
Great fan of your but please lose this background music esp when someone like Lee Smolin is speaking. We want to concentrate on what the man is saying when is already very frail and faint of voice.
I really like Lee Smolin. I've read his books including, "The Trouble with Physics." He was objecting to String Theory long before others had joined the chorus. When I think about physics, I see an elephant in the room. And that elephant is quantum entanglement. How can it be that two particles can seemingly communicate faster than the speed of light? To me, this is the big clue that's winking at everyone in the physics community. It's telling us that Einstein's relativity is incomplete. Perhaps there is more to reality than our classical 4D spacetime? QE suggests a broader theory that includes higher dimensions and/or more exotic geometries that allows quantum entangled particles to communicate without violating special relativity - when viewed in this new framework. Of course, the broader theory will have to recover special and general relativity in our familiar 4D spacetime. QE is imploring us to find a better theory of spacetime. I also suspect that once this new theory is discovered that explains how QE actually works, then quantum gravity may likely fall out of the equations as well. I'm not a theoretical physicist, but I am a mathematician, and this is what I think.
LQG people have missed something big, because they've tried to quantize an already quantized theory[^]. Rovelli infected them all with unviable quantization. If they go back to the gauge picture, then formulate the GR sector in terms of geometric algebra (Lasenby & Doran's work) you get most of relativistic wave-mechanics for "free" (so to speak) with the rotors in the _real_ geometric (Clifford) algebra (David Hestenes work), then add non-trivial spacetime topology (wormholes --- Lenny Susskind & Maldacena's work) then use that to raise the _effective_ degrees of freedom so you get an "effective" extra pair of space dimensions (c.f. Dixon, Baylis and others), hence 6+1 d.o.f then with the geometric algebra you get octonions (Dixon, Baez) and the full standard model group with chirality (Cohl Furey's work). I cannot be certain but I also think you will not get superstring anomalies, and you do not need supersymmetry, since spacetime topology tames modes (and the graviton is not really a thing), you just have ordinary gravity waves and solitons, or wormhole vibrational modes. On the scale where wormholes persist (Planck scale) you'll get CTC"s and hence "time loops" which "explains" all the rest of quantum mechanics --- decoherence or "collapse" is a macro consequence of the fact big things cannot travel trough these CTC's, and so quantum effects must fade naturally the more fundamental topological geons have to coherently jump around the wormholes (whihc is what quantum foam is). I know this is a broad brush I'm painting with, by hey, it's only a youtube comment. Feel free to "steal" this patchwork quilt, but drop me a line if you do. I have more pressing humanitarian problems to solve, trying to get a job guarantee program into New Zealand law, switching career from physic to activist macroeconomics. [^] the "already quantized theory" is GR!!! (Mark Hadley's work) --- and Susskind & Maldacena have also cracked into this piece of the puzzle, the key to that bit is "ER=EPR," and more recently Susskind has even been writing about "QM=GR". The laboratory for studying QG will be on the desktop, the quantum computer (wormholes (GR) _are_ entanglement (EPR => quantum computing)). Susskind's missing all this because he is biased, he thinks GR emerges from entanglement, but it's the other way around! One can appreciate GR => QM when you listen to Feynman: all the weird shit like Pauli exclusion arises from spacetime symmetry and exchange (via what?... via wormholes, hello!!!) Sum over histories too and the "fractal" and acausal Feynman--Hibbs trajectories --- what's all that from?... from the non-time oriented statistics of topological geons jumping around through Lorentzian wormhole CTC's on the Planck scale or thereabouts (probably a quite broad scale of length and time, say sub-atomic, I don't know how extremal wormholes persist, not sure anyone does for sure, but the hint is at least as long as entanglement of one quibit persists). In a sort of very "macro" picture what's happening is gravity is what other forces "push off" --- topologically. The "EM-motor metaphor" is like gravity is the "stator" for the universe,and the gauge boson forces the "rotor" --- I got this off an engineer friend who's also an economist, Warren Mosler of MMT fame, of all people. It's only a metaphor but I kinda' like it.
Were just couple of nobodies in the UK,,but we allways feel privileged listening to the top minds in physics you have on your podcasts,,if the sounds a bit dodgy or we cant hear something clearly we go back a few minutes & listen again ..& again if need be,, we allways pause it & discuss certain issues,,then carry on. Your interviews are a big part of our lives right now. These older guys wont be around for ever,...😃
If Einstein was right with E=MC^2 then there is only one building block of the Universe, and that is Energy. The first question has to be what is the nature of the actual energy itself. Energy as we experience it is confined by a field, the Higgs Field. So that is a second building block which by Einstein’s theory must be energy in a different form to that of Matter Energy. Consider for a moment what properties Energy without a constraint field would have? It is logical that energy without constraint is infinite and therefore dimensionless for both space and time. Space and Time are emergent properties of spontaneous transition of infinite energy to energy with two properties which I suggest could be thought of as Dynamic Energy and Static Energy where Static Energy is the Higgs Field. Energy as we observe it is either moving (photons, electrons, quarks, neutrinos, gluons, etc) or static in the form of fields that mediate the nature of the dynamic energy passing through it. If you look at the universe from that perspective every thing we experience are emergent properties of the confinement of the dynamic form of energy which I perceive to be string like in nature and everything we know are clues as to how dynamic energy is contained within the field. So string theory is the only solution consistent with the fundamentals.
I like Lee, he seems very down to earth, and realistic about not only science but the humility that is really necessary to not waste time and get on with the next frontier...
To everyone complaining about the background music, I think that was on Dr. Smolin's end. Because it seems to only play while he is speaking. He may have had his rebellious teenage grandson's garage band practicing downstairs 😂😂
I only have two years of college calculus.... and I never believed in string theory for a second....If a know nothing like me can see that, imagine how many well informed scientists had to hold their noses for years.
As a published PhD Mathematician, physicists (both theoretical AND the experimentalist ones who criticize theorists) annoy me. We mathematicians have no problem amongst ourselves. Conflicts between different subsets of physicists do not concern us mathematicians. We are quite a happy open-minded bunch.
Thank you Brian and thank you Lee. Listening to this RU-vid channel has had the most profound effect on how I view life, myself, my work and everything else. Keep the wisdom coming, it’s great.
If you’re to interview serious thinkers, you should focus on the content and drop the random shiny clips and poor design choices… Its just not your strength.
I appreciate that there are some graphics vaguely related to what's discussed. But I wish they were less flashy and more closely related to what's discussed. For example, when Lee is talking about the quantum loop paradigm, you show some really pretty stock videos that arguably have nothing to do QLG. Instead, I wish you showed static images that are less pretty but are more related to the subject.
Could you please provide a vid with the same content, but without background music, please? Your background music is too loud, it distracts, it makes it very very difficult to understand Lee Smolin's words. Thank you.
Thanks Brian for including helpful graphics. I’m finding myself increasingly wanting to learn the guts of the physics discussed; the math and terms that go beyond pop literature. I think we’ve underestimated the broad appeal of science AND the competency and capacity to learn by the average person sufficiently committed. I’m certainly surprising myself the deeper I go. So, many thanks !
Hi SE. yes you noticed. This is a new format for my channel. Glad you like it. I’m going to keep doing it. Please share with folks so i can help get new members on this journey!
Time is a result of spin which creates a forward, backward and a center. This creates time whereas the flow of strings or waves doesn't have direction or a present, future and past. The future and past equally can inform our present though and can't be defined unless you consider a larger system in motion.
Superstrings actually do exist. But they're not particles or fields. Superstrings are actually thoughts. They're thoughtforms. Any particular thought, besides being made of neurochemicals, it's also made of a wavefunction shape that is equivalent to the V(x,y,z,t) term of the Schrodinger equation that is equivalent to the chemicals that would take the shape of the wave function that would be the solution to the Schrodinger equation with that particular V(x,y,z,t). In other words, superstrings do exist. But they're not for particles. Superstrings are the thoughtforms, the things that a psychic would be able to pick up on or a mind reader. Can you imagine the utter shock that the physics community would have if their prized theory, superstring theory, was a better description of thoughtforms, the things that brains emit (and receive). Can you imagine how horrified and embarrased materialist physicists would be if they knew that superstrings (the most complicated, least woo things that could possiblity exist, could be a particle that makes woo woo woo wooo woooo psychics and mind readers possible?
Superstrings are not other universes and they're not particles. Superstrings are thought forms, psychic-ions, psychic particles. Superstrings have sufficient complexity that they can describe any configuration, 10^500 +, any thought form that the brain can think or experience. The superstrings project a potential energy V(x,y,z,t) that can create a wave function that includes all of the molecules necessary to sustain a thought. There is no evidence that superstrings are particles. No evidence that superstrings are other universes. But there is evidence that thoughts and feelings exist. There is also a theory (string theory) looking for a phenomena to describe. Why not make,... superstrings = thoughts and feelings.
Prof. Smolin is adorable. I turn on cc so as not to miss anything. He's a classic thinker (INTP). I like what you and he say about character. Many people today can't talk about it.
First. Friedman equation should be performed not on a perfect fluid (since space is no such thing) but on a variable viscosity fluid which appears to be infinitely compressible. This gives low density regions higher viscosity which has many characteristics of mass/inertia. This would also make denser regions like galaxies less viscous which would encourage turbulence and micro turbulence which would absorb the smooth large scale rotational energy solving galactic disk problem. Second. The quantum unit of gravity (which itself is continuous and fluid as energy does impart curve) is the neutralized charge pair which is in both proton and neutron but not in any other particles. P=+2/3+2/3-1/3=1 but the neutralized +1/3-1/3 is not gone. It is spinning at c . m = E/c^2. These charges, chasing each other at c induce inertia through centripetal force of c^2. This is the quantum of mass and why only P N have.
30:33 Really interesting ideas on time. Past: Determined. I was what it was. Present: It is what we experience and the result of the past. It is what it is. Future: Indefinite realm. It is what you make it, within the bounds of physical reality, but your starting point was pre-determined.
Wow the last 5 minutes of this literally brought tears sir, Truly beautiful and inspiring conversation . I always find out so many of my favourite people are also musicians . Thank you Brian truly thank you
Human ignorance often inhabits those aspects of the world that we refuse to include in our considerations. These are usually aspects that we find repugnant due to cultural and traditional pressures. As it turns out, the other situation in which the macro universe meets the quantum universe is in you. It is in your position of view (POV). It is in ones' individuality. The fact that you perhaps find this idea repugnant should be taken as the clue that individuality may indeed be the missing link. The well-considered 'LINE' (Life Instantiated by Natural Entanglement) hypothesis outlines this idea captivatingly.
Smolin's Cosmological Natural Selection idea is lent a little credence by James Gate's discovery that error correcting codes can be found in the supersymmetric equations associated with string theory (how ironic). Error correcting 'codes' are found in DNA to prevent too much mutation from happening. Maybe error correcting codes are part of the fabric of the universe to control the mutations during reproduction of universes. You would not need error correcting codes if mutations were not happening at all. Error correcting codes control the rate and manner of mutations - too much and too little mutation is not good. Error correcting codes in DNA are also subject to evolution, meaning that the proper amount of error correction is selected for.
I agree that the laws could be changeable across space and time. I find it oddly comforting that listening to great physicists, as they have grappled with physics their wholes lives, they feel no certainty, perhaps less certainty about what we know. The trick is to learn how to live without certainty. Live in awe and gratitude at the power and wonder of the Universe.
I wish I understood what these people were talking about. These discussions do not discuss any experimental detail from which one can determine how they make their hypotheses. It is a common flaw. I explain my theory directly from timing and pulse-heiights of clicks in detectors. Does a magnetic field from a superconductor really get strung together in lines? How do they know that? I do not buy it. Etcetera.
That mass particles/units are quantum makes the magnetic field act quantized. It does not show that the fields themselves are quantized. How do you have energy densities but no gravity? Gravity is measure of energy density in local vacuum.
The advertisements break up the flow of the conversation. It turns into cheesy commercial. Trust your audience and stop trying to re-direct their attention. Your material is interesting so you don't need the theatrics. Thanks.
Thanks. I don’t control the commercial. RU-vid has an algorithm that determines it for each user. Personally I pay for YT premium and avoid all ads. It’s a game changer. But that’s just me
I wish the physics community would figure out the mechanisms that make physics work, so that we can build a warp drive. If you need ideas, I have ideas.
String theory went too deep in describing the vibrational nature of matter and although I think it's correct it is also irrelevant at the levels they describe. The dimensions of string theory I believe relate to scales of energy but to understand that we need to understand consciousness, entanglement and the influence of magnetism/electricity which arises from dark energy/inflation.
Love Lee, love how you are giving a voice to anti establishment physics. This stagnation in physics I whole heartedly believe is due to the stubbornness of academia. Is gravity simply emergent? Is dark energy simply a second inflation event? Can a "slow bang" explain it away? Are we too focused on making "right now" applicable to the past and the future? Are fundamental physics evolving over time? Are we simply living on a temporal island of stability? I ask myself things like this every day. We need more out of the box thinking, because strumming the theory of strings is getting us nowhere.
And even black holes perhaps don't exist because after all, from our point of view as distant observers, black holes never come into existence because we never see matter falling into a black hole. If this is the case GR doesn't need to be quantized and information paradox simply does not exist at all
Michio Kaku is a sideshow barker but where in this video did Lee Smolin weigh in on String Theory? All I heard him address is Kaku's claim that Loop Quantum Gravity fails to account for fermions, which Smolin readily debunked.
What I like about Lee is that he seems to prick the bubble of theoretical physics in a nice way. Too many believe the map is the territory. If I understand him correctly I think he is astutely aware that the map (i.e. quantum physics) is not the territory.
I read Lee’s latest book on QM. I thought he left out some very credible interpretations (not of the Bohm or Bell type) of QM that resolve the paradoxes and address Einstein’s primary concern: nonlocality. To be fair, Rovelli’s interpretation also does not really address nonlocality either.
The closing words are quite inspiring and poetic! I'm going to quote them in my little notebook in which I collect all aphorisms that are meaningful to me.
Please, PLEASE lose the constant, changing pictures when Lee is speaking. And the music. It's intolerable. Unbearable. Insufferable. I want to see and hear Lee. Concentrate on Lee. Not see what you feel I should concentrate on: covers of books, pictures of galaxies, tables of particle types. Some time ago I had to (reluctantly) abandon your podcast because aspects of your style were unfortunately unbearable for me. After months and months, simply because I saw Lee was a guest, I am trying you again. Because I want to hear Lee, I am going to force myself to listen but it has not enticed me back to your podcast. ps. You seem like an *amazingly nice* person so I don't say any of that with ill intent towards you. I just am frustrated you seem to think bells and whistles and certain other things are what we want. No. I at least am just here for THE GUEST. To hear you posing *short*, interesting questions and then letting the guest speak at length, without interruption, in order to express his ideas.
This was an amazing interview. Thank you, Brian! As much as I love the live interviews, this edit really improved the production quality and my overall enjoyment of the video with all of the visuals and edits.
Contra what I so far (admittedly math free) understand Einsteinian space-time to be: When someone speeds away and his processes slow down relative to his twin's, unless there are gaps in the traveler's existence there is one-to-one co-existence between them at any moment (you can pause, presumably, at any moment and find them both in the midst of some activity). What this implies, I think, is that time and the rate of change must be different things. Speed stretches moments, otherwise there would be those existential gaps. And if speed stretches moments, then some third thing (absolute time) is required to explain what the differing length moments share as a common denominator. This is just the temporal corollary of an argument against Einstein's, Leibniz's, other's view of space... that postulating reality as space free until objects appear makes no sense because the relevant objects supposed to bring space into being are inherently spatial themselves and so presuppose the reality of space prior to even the possibility of their existence. Also, the thought experiment against absolute space I have heard seems to me to fail: the argument is, if space had independent existence from objects you could move all of it 10 meters in some direction and you'd have a change without a difference. But space is infinite in all directions from any given point if space is absolute, and so there is nowhere for space to move (as proposed), so the thought of it moving is incoherent. Anyway... that's where I'm stuck trying to make sense of these basic ideas.
Ztrings occur in living structures. That is one reason to unify forces for free will possibilities in physics to control all the 4 forces from another point. These are complex fractal string dimensions in number theory which underlies our brain physics of numbers. 🥸 /string dimensions being 1nerves and2 blood vessels centering in the heart and brain to coordinate all living events such as rhythms, and 3neurofibers inside nerves.
An experiment that is called a Photon Wormhole or an Artificial Worm Hole is an idea that is worth explaining. Imagine if you had access to a wormhole. You can think of the wormhole in the movie Stargate if you like. What would happen if you took a laser and shined it directly into the wormhole? The photons would travel along the wormhole to the other side. But you have to remember that the wormhole is gravitationally either uphill or downhill. So in that sense, we are talking about a real physics phenomena called Gravitational Redshift. Gravitational redshift is normally talked about when photons are emitted from the event horizon of a black hole and have to climb out of the energy well. when they do climb, the photons redshift. If you were to shine a laser into a black hole, the photons would blueshift until they reach the event horizon. Likewise, a wormhole has two ends, and one end has a higher gravitational potential than the other, so that whatever falls into the wormhole can fall in the right direction. But photons will travel in both directions, both uphill and downhill. We don't have a wormhole like the one on Stargate. But we can simulate a wormhole by attaching an optical fiber along the radius of a spinning disk of radius r = 2 meters, that is spinning at 5000 RPMs. Depending on which way the photons enter, will determine if the photons are going uphill or downhill. The best quality Artificial Worm Hole would be able to continually allow the photons to climb or fall along the path of the optical fiber, by having a optical fiber path that brings the photons back to the start point to climb or fall again. This is a prerequisite to warp drives.
Not a big fan of background music, and the way the overlays are done so that the participants faces are missing for large quantities of time. The point of a discussion is to see a discussion.
I really, really wanted to watch this but the random back ground music while I'm trying to listen to both people talk is super frustrating. Is there any way for this to be uploaded without it?
We all must addapt to the circumstances! Smolin was probably online from an laptop, and those have very very cheap and poor microphones. We can't blame either of them for the weak audio quality, but we can be gratefull that Dr. Brian make this conversation possible. (And shhh🤫 but mr.Smolin is senior citizen, so we must have understanding for his talking)
Michio Kaku's argument is just a deflection, If String Theory can't make predictions it can't make predictions, saying "what about Loop Quantum..." is just fallacy. Both could be wrong. and they have to stand on their own merits.
All quantum mechanical models of gravity suffer from the same problem. The reason for that is simple: nobody has observed quantum mechanical gravity effects, yet. The criteria for valid physical theories is not that they predict the unobserved. It is that they predict the observed correctly.
I would love to have heard Smolin - (obviously brilliant) but the audio is a bit noisy - and not helped by the "background" music. Others seem to have managed Ok ....
Please next time don't underlay background music to talks. For pauses and slides fine but the music is highly confusing the sublet/soft spoken voice. Thanks.
"No one's right if everyone is wrong". Real-time physical manifestation projection-drawing of stringed nodal-vibrational sequences is subject to the same perceptions of Uncertainty Principle in e-Pi-i sync-duration connectivity function that Forms the Holographic Principle Imagery state-ments of Singularity-point positioning.
Thanks again for the interview! Now when it comes to Octonions, John Baez is the grand master. His insights into mathematical and fundamental physics are brilliant as well. One of my heroes to be honest. Also, any plans on inviting Chiara Marletto to talk about Constructor Theory? Her interesting book just came out earlier this month, The Science of Can and Can't. By the way, sorry that I throw some names every now and then here. It's just that you have a great way of picking people's brains and make them reveal their cool ideas :)
Brian, Just a suggestion, but it may be worth having debates again, not over the “TOE” but more mundane topics, such as the existence of black holes and the foundation of the physics underpinning them. Quite a few credible alternative models out there for gravitational collapse that don’t admit BH solutions (horizons, singularities). The science is not settled, despite Nobel awards that suggest the contrary. Confirmation bias has no place in scientific method!
Nitpick: This Clark quotation: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... does anyone ever ask, what does 'sufficient' mean here? I'm guessing it means, sufficient to amaze us. And when you ask what the criterion for 'amazement' is, you're going to get something explicitly circular... like 'well, the way magic amazes us'.
5:25 This is whataboutery at its worst, forget about whether LQG has fermions or not, why should I believe your theory when you don't even stand a chance in hell of computing g-2 from first principles?
