One way to look at the issues with string theory is, that it tries to describe some underlying structure(s) of the universe with the right kind of language, but what it's trying to describe, is not observable today etc. might never be. So, it's not really right to discredit too much the scientists, who are trying to figure out those hidden structures, but just where they themselves ridicule/disregard certain pretty obvious(imo) things like for example, that there are two fundamental parts to the universe, infinite empty space and matter. Both of them are not observable. Also, singularity in the beginning(...) of BB contains some absurd infinities, but are taken as given facts. One really needs to understand psychology & philosophy to understand reality! BB was an explosion, thus naturally had an inflationary phase of expansion like all the explosions. We have mystified(gaslighted) things to suit our psychological needs. PS, The second law is trivial, but confusing when forced to some arbitrary limitations(time&space). Force(law(s) of nature) creates symmetry & for ex. explosions entropy and with infinite time, we are observing kinda perfect balance in nature.
I've been following the not even wrong site for years , it's a withering critique of string theory and especially the hype surrounding it.He's not just a critic , but has his own ideas too - I hope Peter's new theory works out in the coming months
@@robinsonerhardt 🟥🌑🌑🌐🌑🌐🌑🌐🌑🌑🌑 The multiverse is more or less a given. There is more logical evidence for than against, but also empirically - with QM, Double Slit, Virtual Particles, Spontaneous Quark Doubling, etc etc. There are close to an infinite number of universes within this universe and holographic principles alone should be sufficient enough. But regardless - try to entertain this thought: Given an infinite amount of parallel and/or asymmetrical universes, there must be a universe where entropy is reversed. It is a 100% mirrored replica of our universe, but with “time” going backwards. The inhabitants of this universe perceive everything just like us - it is a total carbon copy of our universe. But observed from the outside, that entire universe would flow backwards. Who can say that WE don’t live in such a universe? The only way to even begin to understand that our own entropy is reversed, is to observe it from another universe. From the outside a flashlight would catch the light and the waterfall would flow upwards. How can such dimensionality be understood within the confines of our own entropy? 🌐🌑📀💿🌑🌐
@@robinsonerhardt 🌒🌐💿🟥📀🌐🌘There are no differences between the BH singularity and the BB singularity. Inside a BH singularity/Event Horizon, space/time goes negative from the outside vantage point. There is a common misconception that the singularity is non-dimensional, but that only holds true from the outside. Within the Schwarzschild radius we enter POSITIVE space. It is important to differentiate between the OUTSIDE & INSIDE of the Event Horizon. Space, matter, light and time is REVERSED traversing the boundary. Meaning that the dimensionality of a BH is flipped related to outside vantage point. The dimensionality within a BH is infinite, giving birth/access to a whole new universe. Within a BH, new spacetime is infinite, entering a fractally new universe that in turn gives birth to new matter, new spacetime and in turn new BHs that repeat this process forever. This also solves issues with the Information Paradox. The IP is only relevant from an outside vantage point. Within the negative singularity information is conserved and is holographically stored within the Photon Sphere, where it fundamentally can feed both the outside and inside of the Event Horizon, simultaneously applying Holographic Principles. Applying Möbian principles through *SR/GR/HH* we discover the intrinsic properties of HyperTensored Holigraphic Spacetime - *HtH* This equation proves the HyperTensorality in conjunction with SR/GR: v=d-(t³c³) The Universe ≡ Holoverse is fundamentally an *Endless Array of HyperTensored Holographic Projections* or the 💿 *EAHT/HP* 📀 - conjunction *Information* is fundamentally secure within systems. It cannot vanish and is stored within *SR/GR/QM/HH* 🌒🌑🌏🌐🌏🌑🌘 🌘🌐🌑🌏🌑🌐🌒 🌒🌑🌏🌐🌏🌑🌘
Hi Robinson - thanks for your thoughtful questions and respectful treatment of the subject. I’ve seen some interviews of Peter in the past and they almost always have an agenda one way or the other. However this was a very objective discussion and I quite enjoyed it. I don’t think I agreed with Woit’s characterization of Susskind, but otherwise I think he offered a fair assessment of many topics, while still not hiding from his opinions and positions. Keep up the good work.
@@DrDeuteronI hear you. BUT Occam’s razor!! (I’m a biologist not a physicist). It’s his argument too: IF his hypothesis is true, it’s the simplest answer. And he does have two chits down: left neutrino has to have a zero mass and the right has to be 5x10^8 mass of the proton.
@@thomaswarren7831 I have always wanted dark matter to be made from the right handed weak sector--but that was decades ago and idk where it stands now. More recently I kinda liked dark matter to be 5 standard model copies that are all mutually dark, and then we could have 6 "parallel" universes with planets and life..all in the same space. That would be so weird, but I think it's ruled out by observation 😞
Why not invite Ed Witten? He is the strongest proponent of string theory, and he could defend his approach best. I think he would agree that we need to develop better testing to verify some of the outcomes of string theory, but the mathematical framework seems to align with his expectations of a coherent hypothesis. Nonetheless, Peter Woit is absolutely correct in pointing out weaknesses in mathematical form, not just in argument.
My brother knew I was fascinated by physics and got me Dr Green's "The Elegant Universe" in the early 00's. What I learned about relativity and quantum mechanics completely blew my mind. Indeed, a bowling ball on a mattress is to gravity what a vinegar/bicarbonate volcano is to actual plate tectonics. I fundamentaly understand special and general relativity now in a way most humans that have ever been alive simply have no idea about, and this is without even mentioning quantum mechanics Planck, Schwarzchild and all the particles in the standard model. And for that I am thankful to Brian. But as elegant as it is, I just felt like the argument for string theory (which the books are actually about) got more convoluted, ad-hoc and patchy as it went on. To me string theory fell short and I almost felt embarrassed that I could see it while so many physicists, ostensibly much smarter and more learned than I were stuck beating a dead horse.
Re string theory: "I'm going to keep doing this because I don't know what else to do". Well, I have a suggestion. Base-12 mathematics. Dozenal geometry is on the horizon and will provide an interesting avenue for exploration that will provide fruitful results.
Yeah, but “wrongly spent money” is difficult in fundamental research. Nobody knows what research will turn out to be fruitful. You’re doing the research to find it out. First of all, the aim of fundamental research is not the practical application of it. Any application is purely accidental. The goal of the theory is the theory itself. Compare it with arts or sports. Nobody claims we “wasted money to make the wrong kind of art or play the wrong kind of sport”. In mathematics, that’s clear to everyone. You prove some cool theorem in knot theory, nice! Good for you! Perhaps some application comes at some point, perhaps not. It’s about the persuit of our own curiosity for its own sake. In physics, the goal is “to understand the universe”. That’s a big goal… So what if it fails. If you had pleasure while trying things out and found some cool ideas along the way, that’s enough! More money to those people who do that! You don’t go around blaming people they didn’t succeed, trying to find a theory no-one knows if it even exists. Like Witten said: it’s a long term speculative enterprise. At least the money wasn’t “wasted” on religion or philosophy ;). String theory was a bit unlucky that our universe doesn’t have SUSY particles in the energy range of the LHC. That was a bummer. But you cannot blame people for looking in the wrong place and telling others “I think there might be something interesting over here!”.
Very good interview. I share some values with Woit - looking at the established physics like QFT through the lens of pure mathematics seems to be a sensible occupation, and it has been fruitful many times. Quantum mechanics wouldn't be there if classical mechanics wasn't reformulated by mathematicians like Lagrange and Hamilton, and general relativity wouldn't be possible without Laplace rewriting Newton's theory of gravity in terms of potential. Quantum electrodynamics would be much harder without exploring Maxwell's equations and writing them concisely. There are also examples of alternative history of physics where some theories would emerge much earlier if people were better mathematicians - e.g. Woldemar Voigt found the Lorentz transformations before Lorentz by exploring the wave equation, and there are some modern derivations of general relativity based on formulating Newton’s theory more geometrically. Quantizing general relativity like loop quantum gravity seems to be the most conservative approach, and exploring it is in some sense the mathematics of established physics. String theorists convinced me that their study is worth exploring as a rewarding prototype of quantum gravity, but it's pathological that some of them still advertise it as a particle model that can revolutionize particle physics. Sometimes they do it unfairly, appealing to the success of mathematical research like AdS/CFT sharing the same name with their particle model. Luckily, the community may be becoming more moderate now, more defensive than offensive and there are ecumenical initiatives like ISQG - International Society of Quantum Gravity.
Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with Lagrange and Hamilton. Quantum mechanics is a partition of unity that is compatible with relativity. Most interesting and relevant quantum phenomena don't have a classical limit (Planck radiation, photoelectric effect, superconductivity, stability of matter, nuclear decay etc.). You can't get mathematically from classical physics to quantum mechanics. It's simply not in there. IN HINDSIGHT you can theoretically get to quantum mechanics from relativity with logical reasoning, but that is not how we got there in the first place. Not even close. We simply guessed it.
It's true that exploring classical physics is not enough to reach quantum theory, but it's based on methods developed in classical mechanics like Lagrangian and Hamiltionian formalism.
@@michatarnowski580 That is complete bunk. Structurally quantum mechanics follows trivially from Kolmogorov's axioms (and that they are applicable in this case follows from relativity). Historically, however, von Neumann wrote his quantum mechanics textbook in 1932, whereas Kolmogorov published his axiomatization in 1933, i.e. the physicists were ahead of the mathematicians by at least half a dozen years and even then Kolmogorov did not see, at least to the best of my knowledge, that his axioms had a much broader range of solutions than probability theory. I have heard it said by mathematicians that von Neumann understood this generalization independently of physics very well, but I didn't check his mathematical work. Based on the contents of his physics book I would say that he was probably well aware that quantum mechanics and probability theory are merely two special cases of a broader range of mathematical structures. I can tell you from first hand experience with mathematicians who were working with probability theory that this insight is still not general knowledge within the math community.
@@michatarnowski580 As a corollary, it should be possible to derive the Hamiltonian structure of classical mechanics directly from relativity in a certain limit, but that's an arbitrary choice of limit. We can as well derive classical friction from first principles that way and then we DO NOT end up with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. We do not even end up with Newtonian physics.
Actually it all makes perfect sense if Ed Witten is an alien directed by a Trisolarian sophon to put a cap on human progress until the invading fleet arrives.
I can see why the real universe would need extra 6 dimensions. The idea that higher dimensions are compact or rolled up in a perspective of our lower 3 dimensions for me reinforces the idea of thr fractal nature of our universe.
This particular question is why Feynman said "the easiest person to fool is yourself", so if you know that is a fact, we should begin talking about Methodology for discovering an unfooling one's self in context of Actuality and what to look for. At the Centre of Logarithmic Time Duration Timing is Singularity-point nothing, positioning Absolute Zero-infinity reference-framing containment of i-reflection oscillation relative-timing Geometrical potential positioning possibilities in the No-thing=> potential nowhere-when Aether in/of e-Pi-i omnidirectional-dimensional logarithmic time-timing interference. (Add) Just for the beginning of the ending=> trancendental transverse 1-0-infinity instantaneous limit(s).., fun to imagine? Decades before, "the ghosts of departed particles" could easily fit this same categorization of holography-quantization wave-packaging formation of mass-energy-momentum continuous creation cause-effect connection, ie what exists in Eternity-now Actuality Interval, is another aspect-version of Singularity-point Lensing Partitioning shell-horizons in a String Theoretical=> 0-1-2-3ness 3D-T time-timing wave-packaging, potential displacement by Sublimation-Tunnelling, analysis of temporal thermodynamical real-time superposition. Should be a continuation of Feynman type guessing Diagrams, lectures on Perpetual Motion in abstract Absolute zero, thought experiment fitting Actuality.
What my friend Peter here needs is some...... public leverage. Which will come with some broader positive contributions. There is a reason why someone like SC reaches out exponentially more. His positive impact overrides his arguable omission of stagnation, and not taking any uncomfortable position etc. In Peters case it's the opposite. I can't assess the validity, but even presuming he's 100% correct, he will not reach out to a fraction, because all his positive contributions are far too niche (i.e a lay physics enthusiast isn't going to pick up his qft graduate textbook, nor are they going to pick up a "what's wrong with physics book"). He really needs to build some general rep. Edit: I'm saying this from a place of positivity, woit seems like a genuinely nice person on a personal level. But this level of hostility as a primary tactic is not quite helping his case or so I feel. Like, go give some public talks getting more people awed by and getting into physics, make a blog section introducing physics to new people, instead of getting people out of it with these RUclips interviews. 🤣
@1:10:00 yeah, but what the (4+1)-AdS stringy theorists ignore is that you can consider this a 3-space Conformal spacetime (Clifford) algebra. The conformal GA (Clifford geometric algebra) extends a euclidean GA with two basis vectors one of + signature and one −. So it is pretty similar to the AdS/CFT bulk spacetime, right? In projective and conformal geometric algebra the line and sphere "at infinity" become concrete, and this permits rotations, translations and dilatons to *_all_* be described by rotor sandwich products. This is much nicer because now you are not restricted to AdS, but can do all the analysis for not just de Sitter but also in messy old FRWL. Conformal GR is a proper theory, an extension of Einstein-Cartan gravity, and is even perhaps the superior GR, since with Weyl symmetry we can "explain" the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy, all without employing the (fictional) 'inflaton' by postulating CPT-Symmetry (q.v. Turok & Boyle). This conformal GA + wormhole topology is thus practically "QM=GR" or even "GR⇒QM" by any other koan. (The particle sector is isomorphic, or at least functorially related to the Hilbert space formalism, up to gauge redundancy of the latter.) Here though, you do not need the extra 5 Calabi-Yau, you do not need the superstrings. Non-locality can be handled by wormhole topology around the Planck scale (non-traversable except to qubits.) The particle phenomenology can also be handled by 4D topology. You do not need to promote fictional fibre bundles to concrete reality (though they are a useful math tools for some purposes.)
I would add that not only is String theory undergoing a model collapse, but also the Cartesian Bifurcation has dead ended: reductionism and mechanistic materialism is no longer viable.
A video section titled "Is String Theory the only game in 'time'." was a funny 'conceptual slip' by the summarizing AI (or was it manually labeled by you?)
Imagine there were some major discoveries in physics. Maybe a way to safely and easily harness immense energy from simple molecules, or maybe even some way to manipulate time in meaningful ways through physical processes that are relatively simple to perform even by laymen. What would the “powers that be” do in response? Wouldn’t it make sense to suppress that knowledge, perhaps using the knowledge they gained to come up with a dead-end, but safe theory like string theory to delay or even halt the eventual or imminent discovery of such things? A red herring to distract and pull away the brightest minds of generations from making such discoveries, and thus preventing them from becoming public knowledge. After all, what would be the result of such discoveries? Massive social upheaval, a total disruption of power at the highest levels in society, potential economic collapse-maybe even the complete destruction of mankind. Something to think about.
There are major discoveries in physics all the time, you are just not reading the literature. A scientific discovery does, by the way, not have to have important commercial applications. That's just in your imagination. ;-)
I have a slightly different perspective on the landscape issue. Yeah within the theory this landscape is based on the geometry of these manifolds, but the theory doesn't explain how those come about or why they are what they are in different universes, they are sort of brute fundamental facts within the theory. So there is no substructure to be found ln the theory in our bubble, that explains why its this way for us and another way for others its kind of just is random or just a selection from a set of possible configurations. So it end up having no predictive power for the variables that look different for different geometries so to speak, but what if you added that in? Then you would have some specific substructure that the geometry comes out of, maybe its like a phase of the vacuum in our bubble or whatever, but with the possibility of a theory that explains how it came to be like this here and like that somewhere else. But then ofc you are talking about an extended version of the theory which is a new theory really, and whether that should be done for these constructions in particular is a different matter, but in principle you could figure that out. Then the anthropic principle isn't some statement about selecting some geometry from a large set of possibilities at random or selecting based on properties we observe, but deriving what initial condition so to speak and dynamics belong to our bubble in this larger context, and that would not be so bad, i think something like that maybe with a more restricted landscape of phases of vacuum should turn up in our theories at some point, but only by considering that part of the dynamic as more of an emergent material rsther than some fundamental entity in a theory. A crude analogy but it would be more like finding out that we live in copper instead of nickel so to speak with respect to the top layer of vacuum structure and the emergent laws associated with it, than figuring out that the universe can be fundamentally nickel in one place and copper in another, not that i think metals are a veru good analogy, but i think you get the point, the difference is that the fundamental theory doesn't have a landscape, it has different environments with different effective laws, andnits basically the same unless there is some purchase on understanding the underlying dynamics of why its sometimes like cooper and sometimes like iron or nikel, but always a material of a certain kind so to speak, i think that as an analog to a more realistic version is a much more reasonable kind of landscape, ultimately it gies back tk some version of the principle of sufficient reason but i think it makes sense, i don't think there should be a fundamental theory with no reason that explains why it goes one way Tuesday and another way Wednesday, i thinknthat is a reasonable ask for a fundamental theory, as just a toy model I don't think the distinction matters, but i think the aspiration for a fundamental theory should include some version of satisfying a version of the principle of sufficient reason.
@1:55:00 that's a terrible false framing. There have been petabytes of new experimental results, and that's even ignoring everything not at the LHC. They showed no new particles other than the Higgs. But those are massive results. If you go hunting over millions of hectares and find no new beasts not even sandworms, that might tell you something about the desert you are hunting in. Makes you really go back to the drawing board. A la Turok & Boyle - who have used these huge null results to motivate a whole new breathe of life into the LR symmetric Standard Model.
For someone who liked physics but didn’t go past undergrad, Not Even Wrong was a great review of the standard model and the odd hold string theory has had on the funding of new ideas. It is great that he was able to share this story.
I appreciate the content. It's too rare to hear from this minority who point out the disjoint between theory and reality. I hope that the very reasonable non-physicality points Woit and others make are eventaully given the respect they deserve. On the negative side, I think that Woit spent about 20% of the interview putting one or two feet on a tangent topic, only to back away after too much verbal temporizing. I suppose that's the way extemporaneous converssation goes - but some gentle editing would be helpful.
I always disliked the extra dimension stuff like described in string theory. In math it is useful to use more dimensions, but in reality I did not find it that it would make sense.
"The light has been stretched out and diffused by the expansion of the universe," is said as a mater of fact. How do we know that the photon of light are are not giving up their energy to expand the universe? Which is the cause and which is the effect? Is this the elusive "Dark Energy" that is expanding the universe? If this is “true” then we would expect that the greatest rate of expansion would be around the brightest objects, the galactic bulges. There is no reason to hypothesize “Dark Matter” to explain the unexpected galactic motion when ordinary matter displaced by local expansion of space will explain the galactic motion that we observe. Einstein defined the relationship between space-time and gravity and between energy and mass. Mass has the quality of gravity. Mass becomes more massive as its speed increases and slows the progression of time. What is missing is how and why light gives up its energy to expand space. His missing, constant or variable, term.
"Light giving up its energy" does happen - it's called redshift. And that's exactly what the Cosmic Microwave Backround is - the faint glow of the earliest photons being redshifted to the extreme. But photos do not expand the universe - it simply doesn't work that way, and if it did we would have discovered it long ago. So no, photons are not dark energy. Missing gravity is actually not even the strongest evidence for dark matter. There are like 3 or 4 "unrelated" theoretical gaps which dark matter answers, and whenever you have multiple "reasons" for a mechanism to exist, you have a very strong foundation to believe it is there even if you can't detect it. Einstein thought black holes were nonsense, and said people who believed in them were simply taking the math too literally, as an example historically of how to think about strong theoretical ideas that we cannot yet detect. Your last paragraph again assumes light has anything to do with the universe expanding. It doesn't. The universe began to expand before photons were even able to fly freely. The first ~200,000 years of the universe, there were no photons. The universe was opaque, because it was so hot and dense that all matter was in a plasma (quark-gluon "soup"). Once it had cooled and expanded enough, photons could finally fly out in all directions. Those first photons are what today comprise the cosmic microwave background which is visible in every single direction we look out into space, and is extremely uniform (same temperature).
THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST CONFUSED ABOUT MATHEMATICS AND ITS FOUNDATIONS ARE THE MATHEMATICIANS THEMSELVES. They are the ones who suffered at the hands of undefined infinity, discovered mathematical logic and Godel helped them suffer even more, through undecidables, unprovable etc.
Robinson, the audio on your podcasts only (not yt) have become unlistenable. The audio ads are SO much louder than the pod audio content and is extremely jarring of trying to listen when falling asleep as I and many others do. Can you mix more evenly, matching the pod and ad audio so users can adjust device volume accordingly?
I love the concept of being in the same room for an interview podcast. But my initial feeling is. You're sitting too close. I couldn't think of anything else so I have to mention it and will absolutely get over myself. 13 seconds in.
You saided space_time is right handed chiral systematic the universe is left handed chiral systematic does that mean relatively is theory of another universe space_time mirror universe mirror parallel universe or something like antidesitter model i just want to know what did mean space_time is right handed chiral and our universe is left handed chiral i mean peter woit .
Why do you have the guests so uncomfortably close. This is the third ep I've seen so far, and I feel some sorta secondhand anxiety so hard for them, being as close as my doctor so casually for like 2hrs+. Enjoyed this interview otherwise. Been following Peter's work for awhile
I just dislike how you set him up multiple times with why he wrote his book or does what he does, he had to be on the defensive the whole time, he likes it leave it at that and let him talk about what he loves. I don’t like this interview but I like the guy being interviewed.
Having known the world of publish or perish, I really appreciate that Dr. Peter Woit has had the courage, for decades, to logically question string theory. As a non-physicist, but a scientist, I was gravitating toward it by 1994-95 but slowly became disenchanted because of its lack of any meaningful predictions in the real universe and fantastical claims. I wish these brilliant people would admit the failure of this model and move on to something meaningful. Sad.
What "fantastical claims" did string theory make, exactly? The problem is that it didn't make any claims that are testable. That's not fantastical but rather merely disappointing. Also not surprising. If gravity had low energy effects other than the known mean field theory (Newtonian gravity/GR), then we would have seen them long ago in observations.
I get it! .......Who, sane , would say there's nothing there and I was wrong for 40 years if it means I get more no more grant money! Physics community needs to have a serious meeting and change the whole structure of who gets money, why, and show me constant proofs of what real results have been achieved! Money seems to be the root of all evil,........how's that for a theory (can I now apply for a grant?)
Why does string theory coincide with neoliberal economic theory, and what do they have in common? 40 years od failure? Convoluted mathematics that predict things we don't see? An academic fan club that are rewarded with career advancement for following these theories? I would love to see a physicist or math professor do an analysis on chicago school economics and its offshoots.
People are acting like "fans" of different ideas. It's hilarious. You'll never convince someone to stop studying the ideas that they are interested in. You can complain but it's not going to change anything. String theory might be perfectly correct, it might be wrong, nobody knows. I don't see the point in a bunch of "science fans" complaining about it. Get your degree and study whatever you want. Then, you can just change your mind and study something else! Tadaa! Or keep complaining. For no reason whatsoever.
Neil Turok completely changed his mind and rebelled against string theory. He even rebelled against his own Ekpyrotic universe theory. I guess you might have a point that it was not someone else who convinced him, it came from within his mind.
You are halfway there with that, but the failure doesn't lie with theoretical physics. It lies with experimental physics. What the theorists are talking about today is experimentally simply not accessible. Does that invalidate how we do theory? No. It does remove it from the realm of the testable, though. So instead of calling this theoretical physics, maybe one should call it mathematical physics. As such it is perfectly fine.
Woit sometimes makes it sound like progress could have been made if the academic establishment wasn’t so corrupt, but then he’ll also say the problem is just so difficult that progress might be an unrealistic expectation within our lifetime - ie, we just don’t have the technology to do the necessary experiments. If the latter is true, then has string theory really done that much harm? Any theoretical approach likely would have had the same result.
@@davidmoulton1991 The people who are calling "the academic establishment corrupt" are usually those who weren't successful in becoming academic establishment. That's an empty accusation with zero actual evidence. I did work with "the academic establishment". I went to lunch with these people. I didn't sense any "corruption". Nothing they said or did met any standard of moral failure in my eyes. Like you said... some problems are just hard and they can't be solved right now. The century between the discovery of spectral lines and the development of quantum mechanics was such a period. Today I can explain the physics behind atomic spectra to a smart high school student but back then not even the smartest people in the world could solve it. Your last remark is also correct. Loop quantum gravity is just as unverifiable as string theory. It is a tautology that ANY possible theory of quantum gravity would be unverifiable right now because quantum gravity simply doesn't leave any experimentally accessible signatures for the time being. This may change sooner or later because there are some mighty skilled experimentalists who are working on those experiments right as we speak.
I have a question unrelated to this particular podcast. Mr. Erhardt, your physics related podcasts for example are brilliant and I love them as my background is physics and math. My non-physics related question is why you only interview academics that have an unmitigated irrational anti-Israel bias? Norman Finkelstein is the worst. He sounds like a spokesperson from Hamas. Another academic, who I actually like and respect and agree with mostly on other matters, is Prof Jeffrey Sachs. He makes the most horrendous accusations against Israel. Why not also have luminaries such as Prof Alan Dershowitz who is positive about Israel? In debate, as you know, there is the other side as well. Thanks!
Dershowitz! 🤣 He defended Jeffery Epstein and is implicated in his sorted affairs. He drove his wife to suicide. No serious, knowledge person takes him seriously on anything, let alone on Israel. Norman Finkelstein exposed him as a plagiarist and a fraud on the issue years ago. The last two guests who talked about Israel/Palestine were European Jews whose families were in part or in whole exterminated in the halocaust, so no antisemitism here. Finkelstein is the foremost authority on the facts of the matter of the occupation. This cannot be denied. Cry more, I love it!
It's indeed a Kabbalist thing. God made the earth by speaking words, and for this matter he had to have vocal cords. The strings in string theory are supposed to describe these vocal cords -- the mystical entities that brought The World into being. It is a nice fantasy , but most certainly has nothing to do with reality.
It's the same it was twenty years ago. Still not even wrong. That doesn't mean it may not have application, it just means that we haven't found them, yet.
@@lepidoptera9337 american physics and european physics is different , americans can get too theoretical,, but europeans historically tested things in experiment..
@@cosmic_sky_mountain Oh, Dude, you have never been to Fermilab, have you? Or Brookhaven or Argonne or Stanford or Berkeley or a dozen other places like that. Just because you don't know where the leading high energy physics experiments in the world are doesn't mean they don't exist. All it means is that you are clueless. :-)
@@lepidoptera9337 yes, i know these are amazing places and have great successess, actually i probably know more about physics than you do , what gives you the ego to rubbish my knowledge, why dont you study the philosophy of physics to get to the real core of what is happening in physics today and its historical roots... sounds like you are the one who is clueless if you have to throw that term about to make yourself feel better..
@@cosmic_sky_mountain You know more about physics than I do? So you are also a physics PhD who has worked at CERN and some of the mentioned labs? Cool... then explain to me why you are talking so much bullshit. It doesn't add up. ;-) There is no philosophy in physics, kid. Physics is hard core experiments and their theoretical description. So, nah, you don't now crap about hard science. You are just a lonely kid on the internet who wants my attention. ;-)
Nassim Haramein has a theory that appears to solve so many misconceptions of the Universe, all assumptions of science are solved to a high mathematical degree, but it differs from string theory that has so far, solved nothing. Yet it is rejected! Why?
I think it's helpful to view the controversies in theoretical physics that Woit touches on here in terms of intellectual dynasties. Historically, we have the reign of Newton extending into the early 1900's, superceded by Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics emerged in its immediate wake, consolidated under Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation. Einstein then challenged Bohr with his EPR Paradox, a controversy which was resolved in Bohr's favor along with experimental confirmation of the Standard Model. However, this left General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory in a state of mutual contradiction. String Theory then arose to fill that gap with a quantum theory of gravity, consolidated by Witten into his proposed M-Theory. At that point, we reached an impasse, as Supersymmetry has not been experimentally confirmed, and Witten has yet to formulate M-Theory as a complete Theory of Everything. The point of this historical perspective is to highlight the influence these intellectual titans have had over the development of theoretical physics. The theories of Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and Witten are each founded on theoretical postulates which by definition lie outside of scientific experiment. The near-universal acceptance of Bohr's postulates of quantum mechanics has made it very difficult for competing theories and intepretations to gain traction in professional scientific establishments. Likewise, the intellectual dominance of Witten's conceptualization of Superstring Theory has left few opportunities for competing theories to thrive. While Woit's 2006 Not Even Wrong manifesto sparked widespread scientific skepticism of String Theory's presumed validity, Witten's unwavering support has sidelined any prospective alternative.
i wish folk wouldn't claim a 'historical perspective' when they choose to dramatize the past. it's a cute and tidy narrative, and not completely inaccurate, but to claim it 'historical' is excessive.
@@myca9322 It's historical within the context of theoretical physics, which has been dominated by the works of intellectual titans. It has often been the case that their influence began to wane only after their retirement or death.
@@myca9322 I take it you've not yet heard of the Collapse of the Wave Function, nor of the Measurement Problem, both postulated by the Copenhagen Interpretation.
I mean with all the intricacies and all of the complexity of it all to think that this was all just an accident and not done by intelligent design has to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard
Not agreeing or disagreeing, but complexity isnt necessarily proof of anything and has been shown to rise from extremely simple rule sets. If we're looking for a scientific basis for belief in a higher consciousness, then understanding what consciousness is and how it manifests through supposedly unconscious matter/energy is the only path. Donald Hoffman is on the frontier of that research, but we still have so far to go
It's fine if you want to flatly assert that Podcat was the initial cause and set everything off just so. But what does it add to any explanation? And where did Podcat come from?
Where are the holes dug out by the pyramid diggers? Just take the Graviton paradox, and someone please tell me why noone is talking about this: the particle theory of gravity is mutually exclusive to black hole theory. Gravitons cannot travel faster than light - so they cannot escape the interior of the black hole (!!!) Noone thought of this.
@@MrPageyjim The nature of forces, as you learn in college, is particle exchange. Each of the four fundamental forces: gravity, electro-magnetic force, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear, all have force carrying particles that are the cause of the force. So, one cannot have a field theory - as your stating - and a particle theory of black holes that overlap in any way.
@@Rawdiswar Standard model were not able to predict anything. It claim to describe all forces, but come to properties of atoms - zero predictive power. For me, contemporary physic try to explain how car work by smashing cars with higher and higher speed and study what flying. There is a philosophical limit on science, when it go too far away from practice. Eventually, science try to explain what it observe using it own theories to define what it observe. It manifest itself eventually with exponential grow of possible models. If you notice, every time some observation made which possible contradict existing theories, there are literally hundreds possible explanations pop up.
It is mathematical, it is like me saying 4+4=8. It is true but without saying what I mean (potatoes, atoms etc) it has zero truth about the real world. I would not say 4+4=8 is a scam.
Not a scam. Self delusion driven by other people's money. Same for epidemiology, climate science, psychology. Survival of the fittest false memes. Ref: religion.
@@sego001 math is the language of the niche substrates of science. It fundamentally best describes our observer condition. Unlike esotericism where dark matter isn’t part of the conjecture.
@Iahtheneniatsistwatherientere Look at the people that he is speaking against and he isn't even a professor. Maybe it you sound it out and repeat it a few more times.
![Lil Uzi Vert - Chill Bae [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/D7F42F_JM3U/mqdefault.jpg)
Great conversation, and I appreciate the high production value - great video and audio.
Thank you so much! I'm working hard to make this better!
One way to look at the issues with string theory is, that it tries to describe some underlying structure(s) of the universe with the right kind of language, but what it's trying to describe, is not observable today etc. might never be.
So, it's not really right to discredit too much the scientists, who are trying to figure out those hidden structures, but just where they themselves ridicule/disregard certain pretty obvious(imo) things like for example, that there are two fundamental parts to the universe, infinite empty space and matter. Both of them are not observable.
Also, singularity in the beginning(...) of BB contains some absurd infinities, but are taken as given facts. One really needs to understand psychology & philosophy to understand reality!
BB was an explosion, thus naturally had an inflationary phase of expansion like all the explosions. We have mystified(gaslighted) things to suit our psychological needs.
PS, The second law is trivial, but confusing when forced to some arbitrary limitations(time&space). Force(law(s) of nature) creates symmetry & for ex. explosions entropy and with infinite time, we are observing kinda perfect balance in nature.
I've been following the not even wrong site for years , it's a withering critique of string theory and especially the hype surrounding it.He's not just a critic , but has his own ideas too - I hope Peter's new theory works out in the coming months
I admire Peter's dedication and love of the subject!
Thanks, Dr. Peter Woit!
Agreed.
Thanks, Robinson! So kind of you to keep helping Podcat put out another wonderful interview!
Thanks. She's a demanding boss but I am honored to toil before her greatness.
@@robinsonerhardt
🟥🌑🌑🌐🌑🌐🌑🌐🌑🌑🌑
The multiverse is more or less a given. There is more logical evidence for than against, but also empirically - with QM, Double Slit, Virtual Particles, Spontaneous Quark Doubling, etc etc.
There are close to an infinite number of universes within this universe and holographic principles alone should be sufficient enough.
But regardless - try to entertain this thought: Given an infinite amount of parallel and/or asymmetrical universes, there must be a universe where entropy is reversed. It is a 100% mirrored replica of our universe, but with “time” going backwards. The inhabitants of this universe perceive everything just like us - it is a total carbon copy of our universe. But observed from the outside, that entire universe would flow backwards.
Who can say that WE don’t live in such a universe? The only way to even begin to understand that our own entropy is reversed, is to observe it from another universe.
From the outside a flashlight would catch the light and the waterfall would flow upwards. How can such dimensionality be understood within the confines of our own entropy?
🌐🌑📀💿🌑🌐
@@robinsonerhardt
🌒🌐💿🟥📀🌐🌘There are no differences between the BH singularity and the BB singularity. Inside a BH singularity/Event Horizon, space/time goes negative from the outside vantage point. There is a common misconception that the singularity is non-dimensional, but that only holds true from the outside. Within the Schwarzschild radius we enter POSITIVE space. It is important to differentiate between the OUTSIDE & INSIDE of the Event Horizon. Space, matter, light and time is REVERSED traversing the boundary. Meaning that the dimensionality of a BH is flipped related to outside vantage point. The dimensionality within a BH is infinite, giving birth/access to a whole new universe. Within a BH, new spacetime is infinite, entering a fractally new universe that in turn gives birth to new matter, new spacetime and in turn new BHs that repeat this process forever. This also solves issues with the Information Paradox. The IP is only relevant from an outside vantage point. Within the negative singularity information is conserved and is holographically stored within the Photon Sphere, where it fundamentally can feed both the outside and inside of the Event Horizon, simultaneously applying Holographic Principles. Applying Möbian principles through *SR/GR/HH* we discover the intrinsic properties of HyperTensored Holigraphic Spacetime - *HtH*
This equation proves the HyperTensorality in conjunction with SR/GR:
v=d-(t³c³)
The Universe ≡ Holoverse is fundamentally an
*Endless Array of HyperTensored Holographic Projections*
or the
💿 *EAHT/HP* 📀 - conjunction
*Information* is fundamentally secure within systems. It cannot vanish and is stored within *SR/GR/QM/HH*
🌒🌑🌏🌐🌏🌑🌘
🌘🌐🌑🌏🌑🌐🌒
🌒🌑🌏🌐🌏🌑🌘
Hi Robinson - thanks for your thoughtful questions and respectful treatment of the subject. I’ve seen some interviews of Peter in the past and they almost always have an agenda one way or the other. However this was a very objective discussion and I quite enjoyed it. I don’t think I agreed with Woit’s characterization of Susskind, but otherwise I think he offered a fair assessment of many topics, while still not hiding from his opinions and positions. Keep up the good work.
Thank you!!
Thanks!
T! You do not cease to amaze me. Thank you so much!!
Awesome interview! Thank you Robinson!
Try doing it with Roger Penrose and Gerard t'Hooft. It would be amazing 😍
Keep going Robinson! At some point, this podcast is going to blow up to a level you deserve.
Please interview Neil Turok. He has an interesting idea about cosmology.
Absolutely on my list!
Neil is a brilliant mind and im glad his ideas are starting to get more attention. I think hes on the right track
Turok is fantastic, but his theory is mid. But I thought the Higgs was BS when I first heard about it, so what do I know?
@@DrDeuteronI hear you. BUT Occam’s razor!! (I’m a biologist not a physicist). It’s his argument too: IF his hypothesis is true, it’s the simplest answer. And he does have two chits down: left neutrino has to have a zero mass and the right has to be 5x10^8 mass of the proton.
@@thomaswarren7831 I have always wanted dark matter to be made from the right handed weak sector--but that was decades ago and idk where it stands now.
More recently I kinda liked dark matter to be 5 standard model copies that are all mutually dark, and then we could have 6 "parallel" universes with planets and life..all in the same space. That would be so weird, but I think it's ruled out by observation 😞
Why not invite Ed Witten? He is the strongest proponent of string theory, and he could defend his approach best. I think he would agree that we need to develop better testing to verify some of the outcomes of string theory, but the mathematical framework seems to align with his expectations of a coherent hypothesis. Nonetheless, Peter Woit is absolutely correct in pointing out weaknesses in mathematical form, not just in argument.
I love this channel
Thank you so much!
The criticism of string theory I've been waiting for!
Woit brings it
¡Excelente invitado!! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼🇲🇽
Thank you!
Muchas gracias por entrevistar a Peter Woit, saludos desde Argentina.
Saludos!
My brother knew I was fascinated by physics and got me Dr Green's "The Elegant Universe" in the early 00's. What I learned about relativity and quantum mechanics completely blew my mind. Indeed, a bowling ball on a mattress is to gravity what a vinegar/bicarbonate volcano is to actual plate tectonics.
I fundamentaly understand special and general relativity now in a way most humans that have ever been alive simply have no idea about, and this is without even mentioning quantum mechanics Planck, Schwarzchild and all the particles in the standard model. And for that I am thankful to Brian.
But as elegant as it is, I just felt like the argument for string theory (which the books are actually about) got more convoluted, ad-hoc and patchy as it went on. To me string theory fell short and I almost felt embarrassed that I could see it while so many physicists, ostensibly much smarter and more learned than I were stuck beating a dead horse.
Why are you begging me for attention, though? Is your imaginary brother not talking enough to you? :-)
absolutely excellent.
Thanks to Peter!
That little tree on the whiteboard adds a pleasant vibe to this nice convo.
7\
It’s a mushroom cloud.
Simple wow I didn't know such a people still exist huge thanks
Re string theory: "I'm going to keep doing this because I don't know what else to do". Well, I have a suggestion. Base-12 mathematics. Dozenal geometry is on the horizon and will provide an interesting avenue for exploration that will provide fruitful results.
It's all about the allocation of resources, intellectual, as well as monetary.
Yeah, but “wrongly spent money” is difficult in fundamental research. Nobody knows what research will turn out to be fruitful. You’re doing the research to find it out.
First of all, the aim of fundamental research is not the practical application of it. Any application is purely accidental. The goal of the theory is the theory itself.
Compare it with arts or sports. Nobody claims we “wasted money to make the wrong kind of art or play the wrong kind of sport”.
In mathematics, that’s clear to everyone. You prove some cool theorem in knot theory, nice! Good for you! Perhaps some application comes at some point, perhaps not. It’s about the persuit of our own curiosity for its own sake.
In physics, the goal is “to understand the universe”. That’s a big goal… So what if it fails. If you had pleasure while trying things out and found some cool ideas along the way, that’s enough! More money to those people who do that!
You don’t go around blaming people they didn’t succeed, trying to find a theory no-one knows if it even exists.
Like Witten said: it’s a long term speculative enterprise.
At least the money wasn’t “wasted” on religion or philosophy ;).
String theory was a bit unlucky that our universe doesn’t have SUSY particles in the energy range of the LHC. That was a bummer.
But you cannot blame people for looking in the wrong place and telling others “I think there might be something interesting over here!”.
Very good interview. I share some values with Woit - looking at the established physics like QFT through the lens of pure mathematics seems to be a sensible occupation, and it has been fruitful many times. Quantum mechanics wouldn't be there if classical mechanics wasn't reformulated by mathematicians like Lagrange and Hamilton, and general relativity wouldn't be possible without Laplace rewriting Newton's theory of gravity in terms of potential. Quantum electrodynamics would be much harder without exploring Maxwell's equations and writing them concisely. There are also examples of alternative history of physics where some theories would emerge much earlier if people were better mathematicians - e.g. Woldemar Voigt found the Lorentz transformations before Lorentz by exploring the wave equation, and there are some modern derivations of general relativity based on formulating Newton’s theory more geometrically.
Quantizing general relativity like loop quantum gravity seems to be the most conservative approach, and exploring it is in some sense the mathematics of established physics. String theorists convinced me that their study is worth exploring as a rewarding prototype of quantum gravity, but it's pathological that some of them still advertise it as a particle model that can revolutionize particle physics. Sometimes they do it unfairly, appealing to the success of mathematical research like AdS/CFT sharing the same name with their particle model. Luckily, the community may be becoming more moderate now, more defensive than offensive and there are ecumenical initiatives like ISQG - International Society of Quantum Gravity.
Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with Lagrange and Hamilton. Quantum mechanics is a partition of unity that is compatible with relativity. Most interesting and relevant quantum phenomena don't have a classical limit (Planck radiation, photoelectric effect, superconductivity, stability of matter, nuclear decay etc.). You can't get mathematically from classical physics to quantum mechanics. It's simply not in there. IN HINDSIGHT you can theoretically get to quantum mechanics from relativity with logical reasoning, but that is not how we got there in the first place. Not even close. We simply guessed it.
It's true that exploring classical physics is not enough to reach quantum theory, but it's based on methods developed in classical mechanics like Lagrangian and Hamiltionian formalism.
@@michatarnowski580 That is complete bunk. Structurally quantum mechanics follows trivially from Kolmogorov's axioms (and that they are applicable in this case follows from relativity). Historically, however, von Neumann wrote his quantum mechanics textbook in 1932, whereas Kolmogorov published his axiomatization in 1933, i.e. the physicists were ahead of the mathematicians by at least half a dozen years and even then Kolmogorov did not see, at least to the best of my knowledge, that his axioms had a much broader range of solutions than probability theory. I have heard it said by mathematicians that von Neumann understood this generalization independently of physics very well, but I didn't check his mathematical work. Based on the contents of his physics book I would say that he was probably well aware that quantum mechanics and probability theory are merely two special cases of a broader range of mathematical structures. I can tell you from first hand experience with mathematicians who were working with probability theory that this insight is still not general knowledge within the math community.
@@michatarnowski580 As a corollary, it should be possible to derive the Hamiltonian structure of classical mechanics directly from relativity in a certain limit, but that's an arbitrary choice of limit. We can as well derive classical friction from first principles that way and then we DO NOT end up with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. We do not even end up with Newtonian physics.
have you reached out to witten?
Great vid tx.
Actually it all makes perfect sense if Ed Witten is an alien directed by a Trisolarian sophon to put a cap on human progress until the invading fleet arrives.
Beautiful!
I can see why the real universe would need extra 6 dimensions. The idea that higher dimensions are compact or rolled up in a perspective of our lower 3 dimensions for me reinforces the idea of thr fractal nature of our universe.
A fractal universe would require irrational dimensionality. You can't even get the difference between integers and irrational numbers right. ;-)
Whatever happened to Peter's blog? Link is broken.
This particular question is why Feynman said "the easiest person to fool is yourself", so if you know that is a fact, we should begin talking about Methodology for discovering an unfooling one's self in context of Actuality and what to look for.
At the Centre of Logarithmic Time Duration Timing is Singularity-point nothing, positioning Absolute Zero-infinity reference-framing containment of i-reflection oscillation relative-timing Geometrical potential positioning possibilities in the No-thing=> potential nowhere-when Aether in/of e-Pi-i omnidirectional-dimensional logarithmic time-timing interference. (Add) Just for the beginning of the ending=> trancendental transverse 1-0-infinity instantaneous limit(s).., fun to imagine?
Decades before, "the ghosts of departed particles" could easily fit this same categorization of holography-quantization wave-packaging formation of mass-energy-momentum continuous creation cause-effect connection, ie what exists in Eternity-now Actuality Interval, is another aspect-version of Singularity-point Lensing Partitioning shell-horizons in a String Theoretical=> 0-1-2-3ness 3D-T time-timing wave-packaging, potential displacement by Sublimation-Tunnelling, analysis of temporal thermodynamical real-time superposition.
Should be a continuation of Feynman type guessing Diagrams, lectures on Perpetual Motion in abstract Absolute zero, thought experiment fitting Actuality.
Excellent 👌
What my friend Peter here needs is some...... public leverage. Which will come with some broader positive contributions.
There is a reason why someone like SC reaches out exponentially more. His positive impact overrides his arguable omission of stagnation, and not taking any uncomfortable position etc.
In Peters case it's the opposite. I can't assess the validity, but even presuming he's 100% correct, he will not reach out to a fraction, because all his positive contributions are far too niche (i.e a lay physics enthusiast isn't going to pick up his qft graduate textbook, nor are they going to pick up a "what's wrong with physics book"). He really needs to build some general rep.
Edit: I'm saying this from a place of positivity, woit seems like a genuinely nice person on a personal level. But this level of hostility as a primary tactic is not quite helping his case or so I feel. Like, go give some public talks getting more people awed by and getting into physics, make a blog section introducing physics to new people, instead of getting people out of it with these RUclips interviews. 🤣
@1:10:00 yeah, but what the (4+1)-AdS stringy theorists ignore is that you can consider this a 3-space Conformal spacetime (Clifford) algebra. The conformal GA (Clifford geometric algebra) extends a euclidean GA with two basis vectors one of + signature and one −. So it is pretty similar to the AdS/CFT bulk spacetime, right? In projective and conformal geometric algebra the line and sphere "at infinity" become concrete, and this permits rotations, translations and dilatons to *_all_* be described by rotor sandwich products. This is much nicer because now you are not restricted to AdS, but can do all the analysis for not just de Sitter but also in messy old FRWL. Conformal GR is a proper theory, an extension of Einstein-Cartan gravity, and is even perhaps the superior GR, since with Weyl symmetry we can "explain" the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy, all without employing the (fictional) 'inflaton' by postulating CPT-Symmetry (q.v. Turok & Boyle).
This conformal GA + wormhole topology is thus practically "QM=GR" or even "GR⇒QM" by any other koan. (The particle sector is isomorphic, or at least functorially related to the Hilbert space formalism, up to gauge redundancy of the latter.) Here though, you do not need the extra 5 Calabi-Yau, you do not need the superstrings. Non-locality can be handled by wormhole topology around the Planck scale (non-traversable except to qubits.) The particle phenomenology can also be handled by 4D topology. You do not need to promote fictional fibre bundles to concrete reality (though they are a useful math tools for some purposes.)
Thankyou
I would add that not only is String theory undergoing a model collapse, but also the Cartesian Bifurcation has dead ended: reductionism and mechanistic materialism is no longer viable.
Physics wasn't materialist since the 1920s. That you don't know this proves that you weren't paying any attention to science in high school. ;-)
A video section titled "Is String Theory the only game in 'time'." was a funny 'conceptual slip' by the summarizing AI (or was it manually labeled by you?)
Imagine there were some major discoveries in physics. Maybe a way to safely and easily harness immense energy from simple molecules, or maybe even some way to manipulate time in meaningful ways through physical processes that are relatively simple to perform even by laymen. What would the “powers that be” do in response? Wouldn’t it make sense to suppress that knowledge, perhaps using the knowledge they gained to come up with a dead-end, but safe theory like string theory to delay or even halt the eventual or imminent discovery of such things? A red herring to distract and pull away the brightest minds of generations from making such discoveries, and thus preventing them from becoming public knowledge. After all, what would be the result of such discoveries? Massive social upheaval, a total disruption of power at the highest levels in society, potential economic collapse-maybe even the complete destruction of mankind. Something to think about.
There are major discoveries in physics all the time, you are just not reading the literature. A scientific discovery does, by the way, not have to have important commercial applications. That's just in your imagination. ;-)
I have a slightly different perspective on the landscape issue. Yeah within the theory this landscape is based on the geometry of these manifolds, but the theory doesn't explain how those come about or why they are what they are in different universes, they are sort of brute fundamental facts within the theory. So there is no substructure to be found ln the theory in our bubble, that explains why its this way for us and another way for others its kind of just is random or just a selection from a set of possible configurations. So it end up having no predictive power for the variables that look different for different geometries so to speak, but what if you added that in?
Then you would have some specific substructure that the geometry comes out of, maybe its like a phase of the vacuum in our bubble or whatever, but with the possibility of a theory that explains how it came to be like this here and like that somewhere else. But then ofc you are talking about an extended version of the theory which is a new theory really, and whether that should be done for these constructions in particular is a different matter, but in principle you could figure that out. Then the anthropic principle isn't some statement about selecting some geometry from a large set of possibilities at random or selecting based on properties we observe, but deriving what initial condition so to speak and dynamics belong to our bubble in this larger context, and that would not be so bad, i think something like that maybe with a more restricted landscape of phases of vacuum should turn up in our theories at some point, but only by considering that part of the dynamic as more of an emergent material rsther than some fundamental entity in a theory. A crude analogy but it would be more like finding out that we live in copper instead of nickel so to speak with respect to the top layer of vacuum structure and the emergent laws associated with it, than figuring out that the universe can be fundamentally nickel in one place and copper in another, not that i think metals are a veru good analogy, but i think you get the point, the difference is that the fundamental theory doesn't have a landscape, it has different environments with different effective laws, andnits basically the same unless there is some purchase on understanding the underlying dynamics of why its sometimes like cooper and sometimes like iron or nikel, but always a material of a certain kind so to speak, i think that as an analog to a more realistic version is a much more reasonable kind of landscape, ultimately it gies back tk some version of the principle of sufficient reason but i think it makes sense, i don't think there should be a fundamental theory with no reason that explains why it goes one way Tuesday and another way Wednesday, i thinknthat is a reasonable ask for a fundamental theory, as just a toy model I don't think the distinction matters, but i think the aspiration for a fundamental theory should include some version of satisfying a version of the principle of sufficient reason.
@1:55:00 that's a terrible false framing. There have been petabytes of new experimental results, and that's even ignoring everything not at the LHC. They showed no new particles other than the Higgs. But those are massive results. If you go hunting over millions of hectares and find no new beasts not even sandworms, that might tell you something about the desert you are hunting in. Makes you really go back to the drawing board. A la Turok & Boyle - who have used these huge null results to motivate a whole new breathe of life into the LR symmetric Standard Model.
For someone who liked physics but didn’t go past undergrad, Not Even Wrong was a great review of the standard model and the odd hold string theory has had on the funding of new ideas. It is great that he was able to share this story.
I appreciate the content. It's too rare to hear from this minority who point out the disjoint between theory and reality. I hope that the very reasonable non-physicality points Woit and others make are eventaully given the respect they deserve. On the negative side, I think that Woit spent about 20% of the interview putting one or two feet on a tangent topic, only to back away after too much verbal temporizing. I suppose that's the way extemporaneous converssation goes - but some gentle editing would be helpful.
Thank you! And I hear what you're saying!
@@robinsonerhardt Rare? They are all over the net.
@@robinsonerhardt You think it is rare to hear this point of view?
How can that be? Hearing among!
Spinners and entropy? Expansion of our universe? Laymen visual artists here. Any thoughts?
Me thinks that you know as much about physics as I know about oil painting. ;-)
His intros always feel as long as the interview 😂
How many angels can dance on a head of a pin?
The question no longer seems so ridiculous.
Out of curiosity Robinson, how much math training do you have? Not that it matters im just curious.
he is a mathematical logician - so presumably quite a lot, but not necessarily in the most physics-adjacent areas
@@jmarvins ah didnt know that. Yes I imagine he has a great technical toolkit then!
I'll listen for a while but I realize that this podcast is not meant for layman
I really identify with Woit because my forehead is also SO(2) invariant.
Students will say, shared Feet what is nothing in front of HIM?
I always disliked the extra dimension stuff like described in string theory. In math it is useful to use more dimensions, but in reality I did not find it that it would make sense.
It’s a „matter” of „time”.
"The light has been stretched out and diffused by the expansion of the universe," is said as a mater of fact. How do we know that the photon of light are are not giving up their energy to expand the universe? Which is the cause and which is the effect? Is this the elusive "Dark Energy" that is expanding the universe?
If this is “true” then we would expect that the greatest rate of expansion would be around the brightest objects, the galactic bulges. There is no reason to hypothesize “Dark Matter” to explain the unexpected galactic motion when ordinary matter displaced by local expansion of space will explain the galactic motion that we observe.
Einstein defined the relationship between space-time and gravity and between energy and mass. Mass has the quality of gravity. Mass becomes more massive as its speed increases and slows the progression of time. What is missing is how and why light gives up its energy to expand space. His missing, constant or variable, term.
"Light giving up its energy" does happen - it's called redshift. And that's exactly what the Cosmic Microwave Backround is - the faint glow of the earliest photons being redshifted to the extreme. But photos do not expand the universe - it simply doesn't work that way, and if it did we would have discovered it long ago.
So no, photons are not dark energy.
Missing gravity is actually not even the strongest evidence for dark matter. There are like 3 or 4 "unrelated" theoretical gaps which dark matter answers, and whenever you have multiple "reasons" for a mechanism to exist, you have a very strong foundation to believe it is there even if you can't detect it.
Einstein thought black holes were nonsense, and said people who believed in them were simply taking the math too literally, as an example historically of how to think about strong theoretical ideas that we cannot yet detect.
Your last paragraph again assumes light has anything to do with the universe expanding. It doesn't.
The universe began to expand before photons were even able to fly freely. The first ~200,000 years of the universe, there were no photons. The universe was opaque, because it was so hot and dense that all matter was in a plasma (quark-gluon "soup"). Once it had cooled and expanded enough, photons could finally fly out in all directions. Those first photons are what today comprise the cosmic microwave background which is visible in every single direction we look out into space, and is extremely uniform (same temperature).
It’s the human condition to measure time in the visible spectrum. Which why measuring time outside the photon makes a philosophical conjecture.
THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST CONFUSED ABOUT MATHEMATICS AND ITS FOUNDATIONS ARE THE MATHEMATICIANS THEMSELVES. They are the ones who suffered at the hands of undefined infinity, discovered mathematical logic and Godel helped them suffer even more, through undecidables, unprovable etc.
Robinson, the audio on your podcasts only (not yt) have become unlistenable. The audio ads are SO much louder than the pod audio content and is extremely jarring of trying to listen when falling asleep as I and many others do. Can you mix more evenly, matching the pod and ad audio so users can adjust device volume accordingly?
Hi Zrstopa. I'm really sorry to hear this. I'm working on a fix, but it might be a couple of weeks. Thanks for listening, and I hope to fix this soon.
@@robinsonerhardt Thank you very much!!! Hope to hear Tim again soon :)
Students shared "i" AM will say, given something to talked about! From nothing!
I love the concept of being in the same room for an interview podcast. But my initial feeling is. You're sitting too close. I couldn't think of anything else so I have to mention it and will absolutely get over myself.
13 seconds in.
lol
I disagree- sit closer !!!!!
Here we go again,
The fact that it is intestable doesn't mean that it is not true.
No, but it means that it is useless. Utility is a key criterion in science.
Reinvigorate experimental physics. Generate new puzzles. Then theoretical physicists will have something real to chew on.
Dead Rising vs. Doom remake
I'm not sure what this means but it's funny.
You saided space_time is right handed chiral systematic the universe is left handed chiral systematic does that mean relatively is theory of another universe space_time mirror universe mirror parallel universe or something like antidesitter model i just want to know what did mean space_time is right handed chiral and our universe is left handed chiral i mean peter woit .
King has no clothes on,string theory.
Release the information buried under that tree. ❤
No one wants to consider it but the issue begins with Einstein and his bogus theories.
Talk is cheap. Especially on RUclips.
Why do you have the guests so uncomfortably close. This is the third ep I've seen so far, and I feel some sorta secondhand anxiety so hard for them, being as close as my doctor so casually for like 2hrs+. Enjoyed this interview otherwise. Been following Peter's work for awhile
String theory is a track from the band helloween its called A tale that wasn't right!😅😅😢😅😢
I just dislike how you set him up multiple times with why he wrote his book or does what he does, he had to be on the defensive the whole time, he likes it leave it at that and let him talk about what he loves. I don’t like this interview but I like the guy being interviewed.
Having known the world of publish or perish, I really appreciate that Dr. Peter Woit has had the courage, for decades, to logically question string theory. As a non-physicist, but a scientist, I was gravitating toward it by 1994-95 but slowly became disenchanted because of its lack of any meaningful predictions in the real universe and fantastical claims. I wish these brilliant people would admit the failure of this model and move on to something meaningful. Sad.
What "fantastical claims" did string theory make, exactly? The problem is that it didn't make any claims that are testable. That's not fantastical but rather merely disappointing. Also not surprising. If gravity had low energy effects other than the known mean field theory (Newtonian gravity/GR), then we would have seen them long ago in observations.
47:00 ed witten an alien..
I get it! .......Who, sane , would say there's nothing there and I was wrong for 40 years if it means I get more no more grant money! Physics community needs to have a serious meeting and change the whole structure of who gets money, why, and show me constant proofs of what real results have been achieved! Money seems to be the root of all evil,........how's that for a theory (can I now apply for a grant?)
You were probably wrong since you were born and let out your first cry. So what? So nothing. ;-)
Why does string theory coincide with neoliberal economic theory, and what do they have in common?
40 years od failure?
Convoluted mathematics that predict things we don't see?
An academic fan club that are rewarded with career advancement for following these theories?
I would love to see a physicist or math professor do an analysis on chicago school economics and its offshoots.
With your thinking we would be 300+ years behind where we are now. I bet your ancestors rejected fire and the wheel.
People are acting like "fans" of different ideas.
It's hilarious.
You'll never convince someone to stop studying the ideas that they are interested in.
You can complain but it's not going to change anything.
String theory might be perfectly correct, it might be wrong, nobody knows.
I don't see the point in a bunch of "science fans" complaining about it.
Get your degree and study whatever you want. Then, you can just change your mind and study something else!
Tadaa!
Or keep complaining. For no reason whatsoever.
Neil Turok completely changed his mind and rebelled against string theory. He even rebelled against his own Ekpyrotic universe theory. I guess you might have a point that it was not someone else who convinced him, it came from within his mind.
Giving criticism is part of science
Because you can influence where others’ invest their time and money? Obviously.
Am i the only one here who thinks peter looks a little like Graham Hancock?
Its just me huh?
I like Woit but feel like the part he leaves out is the equal failure of all other attempts to advance theoretical physics over the same period.
You are halfway there with that, but the failure doesn't lie with theoretical physics. It lies with experimental physics. What the theorists are talking about today is experimentally simply not accessible. Does that invalidate how we do theory? No. It does remove it from the realm of the testable, though. So instead of calling this theoretical physics, maybe one should call it mathematical physics. As such it is perfectly fine.
Woit sometimes makes it sound like progress could have been made if the academic establishment wasn’t so corrupt, but then he’ll also say the problem is just so difficult that progress might be an unrealistic expectation within our lifetime - ie, we just don’t have the technology to do the necessary experiments. If the latter is true, then has string theory really done that much harm? Any theoretical approach likely would have had the same result.
@@davidmoulton1991 The people who are calling "the academic establishment corrupt" are usually those who weren't successful in becoming academic establishment. That's an empty accusation with zero actual evidence. I did work with "the academic establishment". I went to lunch with these people. I didn't sense any "corruption". Nothing they said or did met any standard of moral failure in my eyes. Like you said... some problems are just hard and they can't be solved right now. The century between the discovery of spectral lines and the development of quantum mechanics was such a period. Today I can explain the physics behind atomic spectra to a smart high school student but back then not even the smartest people in the world could solve it.
Your last remark is also correct. Loop quantum gravity is just as unverifiable as string theory. It is a tautology that ANY possible theory of quantum gravity would be unverifiable right now because quantum gravity simply doesn't leave any experimentally accessible signatures for the time being. This may change sooner or later because there are some mighty skilled experimentalists who are working on those experiments right as we speak.
The gyroscope theory💀
Cierra Pines
followup with suskind?
Maybe!
He had Susskind on about a month ago. Do you really think Susskind is going to appear again just to refute Woit?
I have a question unrelated to this particular podcast. Mr. Erhardt, your physics related podcasts for example are brilliant and I love them as my background is physics and math. My non-physics related question is why you only interview academics that have an unmitigated irrational anti-Israel bias? Norman Finkelstein is the worst. He sounds like a spokesperson from Hamas. Another academic, who I actually like and respect and agree with mostly on other matters, is Prof Jeffrey Sachs. He makes the most horrendous accusations against Israel. Why not also have luminaries such as Prof Alan Dershowitz who is positive about Israel? In debate, as you know, there is the other side as well. Thanks!
Dershowitz! 🤣 He defended Jeffery Epstein and is implicated in his sorted affairs. He drove his wife to suicide. No serious, knowledge person takes him seriously on anything, let alone on Israel. Norman Finkelstein exposed him as a plagiarist and a fraud on the issue years ago. The last two guests who talked about Israel/Palestine were European Jews whose families were in part or in whole exterminated in the halocaust, so no antisemitism here. Finkelstein is the foremost authority on the facts of the matter of the occupation. This cannot be denied. Cry more, I love it!
Are you serious what exactly is spinning what is symmetrical you're just making stuff up
Physics theology. How many strings on the head of a pin.
It's indeed a Kabbalist thing. God made the earth by speaking words, and for this matter he had to have vocal cords. The strings in string theory are supposed to describe these vocal cords -- the mystical entities that brought The World into being.
It is a nice fantasy , but most certainly has nothing to do with reality.
String theory seems to have unravelled
It's the same it was twenty years ago. Still not even wrong. That doesn't mean it may not have application, it just means that we haven't found them, yet.
@@lepidoptera9337 american physics and european physics is different , americans can get too theoretical,, but europeans historically tested things in experiment..
@@cosmic_sky_mountain Oh, Dude, you have never been to Fermilab, have you? Or Brookhaven or Argonne or Stanford or Berkeley or a dozen other places like that. Just because you don't know where the leading high energy physics experiments in the world are doesn't mean they don't exist. All it means is that you are clueless. :-)
@@lepidoptera9337 yes, i know these are amazing places and have great successess, actually i probably know more about physics than you do , what gives you the ego to rubbish my knowledge, why dont you study the philosophy of physics to get to the real core of what is happening in physics today and its historical roots... sounds like you are the one who is clueless if you have to throw that term about to make yourself feel better..
@@cosmic_sky_mountain You know more about physics than I do? So you are also a physics PhD who has worked at CERN and some of the mentioned labs? Cool... then explain to me why you are talking so much bullshit. It doesn't add up. ;-)
There is no philosophy in physics, kid. Physics is hard core experiments and their theoretical description. So, nah, you don't now crap about hard science. You are just a lonely kid on the internet who wants my attention. ;-)
WTF Weinstein?!
Careful about jiggling your knee. Otherwise, rivetting - thanks.
It's literally a too big to fail scam
Nassim Haramein has a theory that appears to solve so many misconceptions of the Universe, all assumptions of science are solved to a high mathematical degree, but it differs from string theory that has so far, solved nothing. Yet it is rejected! Why?
No, he doesn't. Total crank.
@@bryandraughn9830 Tell me why he is a crank, please.
21:21 Cheap shot and complete nonsense.
String “theory” isn’t the end of physics. It was never physics to begin with.
Strings are just numerology.
Not the end of physics; hopefully just the end of finding bad physics “frameworks” aka Sillystring Theory
I think it's helpful to view the controversies in theoretical physics that Woit touches on here in terms of intellectual dynasties. Historically, we have the reign of Newton extending into the early 1900's, superceded by Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics emerged in its immediate wake, consolidated under Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation. Einstein then challenged Bohr with his EPR Paradox, a controversy which was resolved in Bohr's favor along with experimental confirmation of the Standard Model. However, this left General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory in a state of mutual contradiction. String Theory then arose to fill that gap with a quantum theory of gravity, consolidated by Witten into his proposed M-Theory. At that point, we reached an impasse, as Supersymmetry has not been experimentally confirmed, and Witten has yet to formulate M-Theory as a complete Theory of Everything.
The point of this historical perspective is to highlight the influence these intellectual titans have had over the development of theoretical physics. The theories of Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and Witten are each founded on theoretical postulates which by definition lie outside of scientific experiment. The near-universal acceptance of Bohr's postulates of quantum mechanics has made it very difficult for competing theories and intepretations to gain traction in professional scientific establishments. Likewise, the intellectual dominance of Witten's conceptualization of Superstring Theory has left few opportunities for competing theories to thrive. While Woit's 2006 Not Even Wrong manifesto sparked widespread scientific skepticism of String Theory's presumed validity, Witten's unwavering support has sidelined any prospective alternative.
Thanks for these comments! And thanks for listening!
i wish folk wouldn't claim a 'historical perspective' when they choose to dramatize the past. it's a cute and tidy narrative, and not completely inaccurate, but to claim it 'historical' is excessive.
@@myca9322 It's historical within the context of theoretical physics, which has been dominated by the works of intellectual titans. It has often been the case that their influence began to wane only after their retirement or death.
@@QuicksilverSG no. among other things, neither "Bohr's postulates" nor "Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation" exist.
@@myca9322 I take it you've not yet heard of the Collapse of the Wave Function, nor of the Measurement Problem, both postulated by the Copenhagen Interpretation.
More nonsense.
String theory is Sudoko for the mathematically gifted.
It's utterly worthless, except as a hobby.
Then you are a really, really lousy Sudoku player. ;-)
I mean with all the intricacies and all of the complexity of it all to think that this was all just an accident and not done by intelligent design has to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard
So you would conclude that things being unintellibly complex is a hallmark of intelligence
Not agreeing or disagreeing, but complexity isnt necessarily proof of anything and has been shown to rise from extremely simple rule sets. If we're looking for a scientific basis for belief in a higher consciousness, then understanding what consciousness is and how it manifests through supposedly unconscious matter/energy is the only path. Donald Hoffman is on the frontier of that research, but we still have so far to go
It's fine if you want to flatly assert that Podcat was the initial cause and set everything off just so. But what does it add to any explanation? And where did Podcat come from?
Where are the holes dug out by the pyramid diggers? Just take the Graviton paradox, and someone please tell me why noone is talking about this: the particle theory of gravity is mutually exclusive to black hole theory. Gravitons cannot travel faster than light - so they cannot escape the interior of the black hole (!!!)
Noone thought of this.
They don't have to escape the black hole. A black hole has mass so it has a gravitational field around it.
@@MrPageyjim The nature of forces, as you learn in college, is particle exchange. Each of the four fundamental forces: gravity, electro-magnetic force, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear, all have force carrying particles that are the cause of the force.
So, one cannot have a field theory - as your stating - and a particle theory of black holes that overlap in any way.
@@ryanchicago6028 A particle is a quantum axcitation of a field.
@@ryanchicago6028 A particle is a quantum excitation of a field.
@@ryanchicago6028 A particle is nothing but the excitation of a field.
"Noone thought of this" LOL
Standard model is useless. Calculate half life of tritium, a simplest atom - 1% precision. Absolutely useless.
Can you expand on that please?
@@Rawdiswar Standard model were not able to predict anything. It claim to describe all forces, but come to properties of atoms - zero predictive power.
For me, contemporary physic try to explain how car work by smashing cars with higher and higher speed and study what flying.
There is a philosophical limit on science, when it go too far away from practice. Eventually, science try to explain what it observe using it own theories to define what it observe. It manifest itself eventually with exponential grow of possible models. If you notice, every time some observation made which possible contradict existing theories, there are literally hundreds possible explanations pop up.
@@Mutineer9 The standard model predicts parti le decay all the time. Carbon 14 dating used a lot.
@@oliviamaynard9372 Sorry, that was measurement, Carbon 14, not prediction. Existing well before standard model.
@@Mutineer9 Measurements don't make predictions
Scam. String Theory is a scam.
It is mathematical, it is like me saying 4+4=8. It is true but without saying what I mean (potatoes, atoms etc) it has zero truth about the real world. I would not say 4+4=8 is a scam.
Not a scam. Self delusion driven by other people's money. Same for epidemiology, climate science, psychology. Survival of the fittest false memes. Ref: religion.
It’s a link between physics and philosophy. Hence it remains a debated conjecture.
String theory probably doesn’t describe the universe but it became part of the mathematics such as group theory or any other mathematical concept.
@@sego001 math is the language of the niche substrates of science. It fundamentally best describes our observer condition. Unlike esotericism where dark matter isn’t part of the conjecture.
Long discourse to tell us that string theory is garbage? Yeah, I got that memo 20 years ago.
String theory is what happens when you worship Math.
Is String Theory the end of physics?
Well, if it isn't, it will be.
Nonsense.
How about the failure of LQG that he at least used to push? Still pushing a book that is almost 20 years old? He is a nobody in the field.
I have to stop watching I made it up to minute 17 are you people buying this what exactly is rotating
I've never heard a more nonsense explanation of gauge symmetry are you kidding me you believe in nonsense fairy tales
He isn't even a professor.
Maybe I’m out of the loop on the joke, but he is a senior lecturer at Columbia
@@orthostice That is the equivalent to an associate professor.
@Iahtheneniatsistwatherientere Look at the people that he is speaking against and he isn't even a professor. Maybe it you sound it out and repeat it a few more times.
@@MrPageyjim what a shallow and empty hill to die on… Maybe you can think of something more substantive to criticize?
@Iahtheneniatsistwatherientere LOL