"the following is a conversation with peter white a theoretical physicist at columbia outspoken critical string theory and the author of the popular physics and mathematics blog called not even wrong t..."

"conversation with peter white you're both a physicist and a mathematician so let me ask what is the difference between physics and mathematics well there's kind of a conventional understanding of the ..."

"you you kind of see this this uh really really everywhere at this point which particular overlap are you looking at group theory yeah so the um at least what the way it seems to me that if you look at..."

"thing is if you look at the kind of grand unified theory of mathematics he's talking about and you look at the physicists kind of ideas about unification it's more or less the same mathematical object..."

"they're really quite different and i can say some of my initial fascination with this when i was young and starting to learn about it was actually exactly this um this kind of arcane nature of these t..."

"has been a really um has been kind of a mistake that physicists have made and for decades and decades to try to to try to go to higher dimensions to try to formulate a theory in higher dimensions and ..."

"uh like if you look at from o's last theorem it's much easier to prove that there's no solution for n equals three than it is for the general case and and so i guess that's the nice benefit of being a..."

"intuition or do you go to einstein route and just imagine like everything inside your mind and sort of build like thought experiments and then work purely on paper and pen well the problem with this k..."

"speaking of a limited amount of time we only have a few hours maybe a few days together here on this podcast let me ask you the question of um amongst many of the ideas that you work on in mathematics..."

"and just recently in the last few months there's been um there's kind of a really major paper that uh appeared by uh peter schultz and laurel farg where they you know made you know some serious advanc..."

"yeah well i mean i i think that unfortunately it's not just you as i think even most mathematicians have no really don't actually understand this about them in the the group of people who really under..."

"kinds of relations you can multiply them and add them and do stuff but it's it's completely abstract and there's nothing geometric about it but the um the kind of really fundamental idea is that unifi..."

"powerful idea and so much of mathematics emerges from this kind of simple relation so uh you're talking about mapping from one discrete space to another to another so um for a second i thought perhaps..."

"completely different looking areas of mathematics together do you have uh particular examples where it allowed to prove some difficult things by jumping from one to the other is that something that's ..."

"what are the implications of this idea what non-trivial things does it tell you versus you know how how how how simply can you can you express the idea and so so level of compression yeah uh what is i..."

"do you have a good explanation why that is is it just because humans want it to be that way are we just like ultra biased then we we we just kind of convinced ourselves that simple is better because w..."

"actually fairly strongly disagree with her about sometimes sometimes the way she'll refer to math and so the problem is you know physicists and people in general just refer to as math and and they're ..."

"they have and then they they weave narratives around that idea or they present in such a way that uh emphasizes uh the simplicity and the beauty yeah that's part of it but i mean the thing about physi..."

"part of her argument i think i was we're on the same page about uh what's what is consistency in inconsistencies what what exactly um do you have examples in mind well it can be just simple inconsiste..."

"actually you know i've over the years certainly spent a lot of time learning about gravity and about attempts to quantize it but it it hasn't been that much in the past the focus of what i've been thi..."

"you end up um the danger is that you end up with that that everybody could be successful everybody everybody's program for how to find a theory of kind of gravity you know ends up with something that ..."

"well it makes sense and hopefully i mean we'll sneak up onto this question a bunch of times because you kind of said uh a few slightly contradictory things which is like it's nice to have a theory tha..."

"people felt that they had found a unified theory of our so-called standard model of of all the standard well-known kind of particle interactions and gravity and it all fit together in a quantum theory..."

"back in 84 85 was the hope that you could just take this some 10 dimensional string theory and find one of a limited number of possible ways of of getting rid of six dimensions by making them small an..."

"and yes the the book title is not even wrong your blog your excellent blog title is not even wrong okay but there is nevertheless been a lot of excitement about string theory through the decades as yo..."

"so there's a lot of beautiful mathematics came out of it i think one of the most spectacular is what the physicists call two-dimensional conformal field theory and so these are basically [Music] quant..."

"that's very structured and has to work in a certain way for it to make sense and um but but then you ended up you ended up in ten space time dimensions and so to get back to physics you had to get rid..."

"that by itself just just doesn't doesn't give you any hint as to what to do about the six dimensions so actual perturbed string theory by itself really only works in 10 dimensions so you have to start..."

"you have 10 dimensions the kind of things that happen say that's actually the way that's actually the fabric of our realities 10 dimensions there's a limited set of behaviors of objects i don't even k..."

"but the bottom line is where you're trying to go with this whole theory you're creating is to just make all of its effects essentially unobservable so it's a it's not a really it it's an inherently ki..."

"say ah but it it's if it's just it's just much much smaller you can say that which by the way makes ligo and the detection of gravitational waves quite an incredible project ed whitten is often brough..."

"but if you look post 1973 pretty much it it's a little bit more there's some edge cases if you like but the if you look post 1973 at what people have done to try to do better than the standard model a..."

"that's what we should look for but to stick on string theory a little bit longer could you play devil's advocate and try to argue for string theory why it is something that deserved the effort that it..."

"problem with this is that having as your as your initial name and what what everything points back to something which um which really didn't work out it kind of makes everybody makes everything you've..."

"telling you something something true about it i mean you know either either telling you that if you do some experiment and go out and do it you'll get some unexpected result and that's the kind of gol..."

"see that it it has a solution that looks like the real world but those you need uh i guess you don't but there's a sense that uh you need both gravity like all the laws of physics to be operating on t..."

"quantum gravity work work has been just those paradoxes so stepping outside of string theory uh can you just say first at a high level what is the theory of everything what does the theory of everythi..."

"think it's uh just engineering it's also science it one thing that i find um kind of interesting talking to physicists is is a little bit there's a a little bit of hubris so some of the most brilliant..."

"on top of that is things like in the computing space artificial intelligence systems like that feels like it is a theory of everything and it's almost like once we solve once we come up with the theor..."

"terminology because it's not um this is explaining this is a purely kind of reductionist point of view that you're trying to understand certain a certain very specific kind of things which you know in..."

"thinking about it what do you think about this i got to ask you at a few different attempts at the theory of everything especially recently uh so i've been for many years a big fan of cellular automat..."

"things and i you have to give me some serious evidence for that and i'm saying nothing so mirage you don't think there could be a consistency where things like quantum mechanics could emerge from much..."

"behavior of complex systems yeah and that to me is both exciting and paralyzing like we're at very early days of understanding you know how complicated and fascinating things emerge from simple rules ..."

"spend more time thinking about it well also timing it's not just that our time is limited but the timing of the kind of things you think about there there's some aspect to cellular autonomy these kind..."

"are there lessons ideas to be learned from theories like that from gary leases from eric's um i don't know it depends i have to confess i haven't looked that closely at a at uh at eric's i mean he exp..."

"i'm because i'm dismissing them because they're outside of the sort of the usual process of academic research yeah well i mean the same thing and pretty much every day in my email there's a somebody's..."

"and engineer a system like naturally leads to engineering with physics here if you have a perfect theory that explains everything that still doesn't obviously lead one to um to scientific experiments ..."

"behaves very very specially unlike other dimensions and in four dimensions there's certain there is a way of thinking about space and time geometry where you know as well as just thinking about points..."

"living on so you're kind of you're kind of living on your degrees of freedom are living on light rays not on points and it's a very different way of thinking about um about about physics and you know ..."

"to explain insight about twister theory there are some more technical ones i should mean i think it's also very convincing what it tells you about spinners for instance but that's more technical well ..."

"more fundamental than vectors because you can build vectors out of spinners you can take two spinners and make a vector but you can't you can't if you only have vectors you can't get spinners so there..."

"there's a kind of a funny sign you have to keep track of in some sense um so they're kind of too valued in a way another weird way but there's but but the fundamental problem is that it's just not if ..."

"get back to what i think is mind-blowing about twisters is that the another way of saying this this idea about talking about spheres another way of saying the fundamental idea of twister theory is in ..."

"do you have a hope you mentioned that you've been uh you found it appealing recently is it just because of certain aspects of its mathematical beauty or do you actually have a hope that this might lea..."

"and what i what i hadn't really appreciated until fairly recently is also how dramatically that changes the whole structure of the theory you end up with a consistent way of talking about these quantu..."

"something directly connected to a first broadly theory of everything and second of course one of the possibilities one of them string theory um strength definitely not that uh things have gone yeah so..."

"underlying physics you think i don't think so i mean i think that that that feel that my understanding is that they they're starting to make a great use of those techniques but but it seems to look li..."

"with it what about space itself so i have to ask you about aliens again something uh since you emphasize evidence do you think there is how many do you think there are and how many intelligent alien c..."

"are you a fan okay can you explore the pros and cons of forget string theory sort of science communication sort of cosmo style communication of concepts to people that are outside of physics outside o..."

"truly amazing so many so many new ideas let me on another tangent on top of a change on top of a tangent ask if we didn't have einstein so how does science progress is it the long geniuses or is it uh..."

"got around to it on the other hand there are things like with quant mechanics you have um you know heisenberg and um schrodinger came up with two which ultimately equivalent but two different approach..."

"synthesis the full range and like sort of uh like darwin kind of mark okay it took them uh what is it several hundred million years to come up with uh calculus i would just like keep noting how long i..."

"state which is not really i mean i spent half my life among mathematicians and athletic physicists and you know mathematics is kind of doing fine people are making progress and it has all the usual pr..."

"it's not true it's a problem that's it's obviously a characteristic of not just physics it's uh it's sociology yeah and it's uh i mean obviously in the space of politics it's the the history of politi..."

"interest in interesting ways and they're able to communicate their thinking interesting ways and so in some sense they have a responsibility not just to do science but to inspire and not responsibilit..."

"yeah yeah and sometimes but um i know anyway it's hard to say because because different um there's many many people doing this kind of thing with different degrees of of success and whatever i i guess..."

"what they're hearing and um and so a lot of what's motivated me is more to try to speak to as kind of a specific population of people to make sure that look you know people it doesn't matter so much w..."

"so there you always should question sort of the uh the ways of the past yeah yeah so so how to kind of achieve that kind of diversity of thought and uh within kind of the sociology of how we organize ..."

"humility to believe that you're going to make progress on some of these problems i think you have to have like both modes and switch between them when needed let me ask you a question you're probably ..."

"bit of a mistake that you're you're looking to uh i mean i'm very very aware that you know i've led a very pleasant and fairly privileged existence of a fairly without many challenges of different kin..."