YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Woit

lines on the record: 138
first: 2021-12-03
most recent: 2021-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The mathematics just enjoy our life in general. Life is a perfectly pleasant life and enjoy it and often think, wow, things are, I'm really enjoying this. Things are going well.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not especially much. Certainly, I've been getting older. I'm now 64 years old. You start to realize, well, there's probably less ahead than there was behind. And so you start to, that starts to become, you know, what do I think about that? Maybe I should actually. Get serious about getting some things done, which I may not have, which I may otherwise not have time to do, which I didn't seem to be a problem when I was younger. But that's the main, I think the main way in which that thought occurs.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, but unfortunately people do have a somewhat correct perception that what these people are doing every day is pretty far removed from anything. Yeah, from what's kind of close to what I do every day and what my typical concerns are. So you may learn something very interesting by talking to mathematicians, but it's a... Probably not going to be, you're probably not going to get what you were hoping.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're also, to my mind, I think you're also making a bit of a mistake that you're looking to. I'm very, very aware that I've led a very pleasant and fairly privileged existence of a fairly without many challenges of different kinds and of a certain kind. And I'm really not in no way the kind of person that a lot of people who are looking for trying to understand in some the meaning of life in the sense of the challenges that they're facing in life, I can't really, I'm really the wrong person for you to be asking about this.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's funny. So Everybody just kind of assumes, okay, well, you people are studying about that, whatever you're doing, it's maybe very interesting, but it's clearly not going to tell me anything useful about the meaning of my life. And I'm afraid a lot of my point of view is that if people realized how little difference there was between what the mathematicians are doing and what a lot of these theoretical physicists are doing, they might understand that it's a bit misguided to look for deep insight into the meaning of life from many theoretical physicists. They're people and they may have interesting things to say about this. You're right. They know a lot about physical reality and about About, in some sense, about metaphysics, about what is real of this kind.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Yeah, I was thinking about this. So it did occur to me. One interesting. Thing about that question is that you don't, yes, I have Life in mathematics and this life in physics. And I see some of my physicist colleagues kind of Seem to be people are often asking them what's the meaning of life, and they're writing books about the meaning of life and teaching courses about the meaning of life. But I realized that no one ever asked my mathematician colleagues. Nobody ever asked mathematicians.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is that it's also a combination of humility to know when you're wrong and also you have to have a certain, very serious lack of humility to believe that you're going to make progress on some of these problems.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So how to kind of achieve that kind of diversity of thought and within kind of the sociology of how we organize scientific research is, I know this is one thing that I think it's very interesting that Sabina Hossenfelder has very interesting things to say about it. And I think also Lisa Mohan in his book, which is also about that, I'm very much in agreement with them that there's Anyway, there's a really kind of important. Questions about How research in this field is organized and how people, you know, what can you do to kind of get more diversity of thought and get more and get people thinking about a wider range of ideas?”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a specific population of people to make sure that, look, you know, people. It doesn't matter so much what the average person on the street thinks about string theory, but what the best students at Columbia or Harvard or Princeton or whatever who really want to change work in this field and want to work that way, what they know about it, what they think about it, and that they not be go into the field being misled and believing that a certain story, this is where this is all going, this is what I got to do, that's important to me.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in something. But I don't know. Anyway, it's hard to say because different, there's many, many people doing this kind of thing with different degrees of... Of success and whatever. I guess one thing. But I mean, what's kind of front and center for me is kind of a more parochial interest, is just kind of what. What damage do you do to the subject itself ignoring? Misrepresenting what a high school students think about string theory and not that doesn't matter much, but what the smartest Undergraduates or the smartest graduate students in the world think about it and what paths you're leading them down and what story you're telling them and what textbooks you're making them read and what they're hearing. And so a lot of what's motivated me is more to try to speak to”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's always a problem. But this particular field is kind of fun. It's always a strange one. I mean, I think it in the sense that There's a lot of public fascination with it that it seems to speak to kind of our deepest questions about what is this physical reality, where do we come from and these kind of deep issues. So there is this unusual fascination with it. Mathematics is versus very different. Nobody's that interested in mathematics. Nobody really kind of expects to learn really great deep things about the world from mathematics that much. They don't ask mathematicians that. So it's a very unusual. It draws this kind of unusual amount of attention. And it really is historically in a really unusual state. It's kind of gotten itself way kind of down a blind alley in a way which it's hard to find other historical parallels.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a success is ideas which really completely failed. And so I've kind of a very, very specific. If you have people, I won't name any names. For instance, coming on certain podcasts like yours telling the world this is a huge success and this is really wonderful. And it's just not true. And this is really problematic. And it carries a serious danger of, you know, once. When people realize that this is what's going on, the loss of credibility of science is a real, real problem for our society. And you don't want people to have an all-too-good reason to think that what they're being... What they're being told by kind of some of the best institutions or a country or authority is not true. It's a problem.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, the problem, I think physics, is it in a, I think it's actually hard for people even to believe or really understand that this particular kind of physics has gotten I spent half my life among mathematicians and half among physicists. And, you know, mathematics is kind of doing fine. People are making progress. And it has all the usual problems, but also so you could have a, but I just, I don't know, I've never seen anything at all happening in mathematics like what's happened in the specific area in physics. It's just the kind of sociology of this, the way this field works banging up against this harder problem without anything from experiment to help it. It's really, it's led to some really kind of problematic things. And those, so it's one thing to kind of oversimplify or to slightly misrepresent to try to explain things in a way that's not quite right. But it's another thing to start promoting to people.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wait a minute, if you're getting people excited about ideas that are wrong, you're really kind of actually kind of discrediting the whole scientific enterprise in a not really good way. So there's problems. My general feeling about expository stuff is, yeah, to the extent you can do it kind of honestly and well, that's great. There are a lot of people doing that now to the extent that you're... Just trying to get people. Excited and enthusiastic by kind of telling them stuff which isn't really true. You really shouldn't be doing that.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That kind of what happened during this 20th century in physics and up to the time of the standard model in 1973, it's called the Second Creation by Bob Creese and Mann. That's one of the best ones. I know that's, but the one thing that I can say is that, so that book, I think, forget when it was late 80s, 90s. The problem is that there just hasn't been much that's actually worked out since then. So most of the books that are kind of trying to tell you about all the glorious things that have happened since 1973 are they're mostly telling you about how glorious things are, which actually don't really work. It's really, the argument people sometimes make in favor of these books is, well, oh, you know, they're really great because you want to do something that will get kids excited. And then, you know, so they're getting excited about doing something that's not really quite working. It doesn't really matter. The main thing is get them excited. The other argument is.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, go back books. And yeah, so and then that's one thing I'd recommend is the books about from the original people, especially Heisenberg about how that happened. And there's also very, very good kind of history of...”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often the combination of the right ideas are in place and the right experimental data is in place to point in the right direction. And it's just waiting for somebody's going to find it. Maybe to go back to your aliens, I guess the one thing I often wonder about aliens is would they have the same fundamental physics ideas as we have in mathematics? How much is this really intrinsic to our minds if you start out with a different kind of mind when you end up with a different ideas of what fundamental physics is or what the structure mathematics is?”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even for Einstein, from the point which he had kind of a general idea of what he was trying to do to the point where he actually had a well-defined theory that you could actually compare to the real world, that was, you know, I don't forget the numbers of the order of magnitude. 10 years of very serious work. And if he hadn't been around to do that, it would have taken a while before anyone else got around to it. On the other hand, there are things like with quantum mechanics, you have Heisenberg and Schr ⁇ dinger came up with two Which ultimately equivalent but two different approaches to it within months of each other? And so if Heisenberg had been there, you already would have had Schroeder or whatever. And if neither of them had been there, it would have been somebody else a few months later. So there are times when the...”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting case to case. I mean, I mean, special relativity, I think we would have had, I mean, there are other people. You could even argue that it was already there in some form in some of these. But I think special relativity would have had without Einstein fairly quickly. General relativity, that was much, much harder thing to do. Required much more effort, much more sophisticated. I think he would have had sooner or later, but it would have taken quite a bit longer.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the human story. But yeah, just also how there are these very, very weird ideas that didn't seem to make sense, how they were struggling with them and how they actually, anyway, I think the period of physics kind of beginning in 1905 with Planck and Einstein and ending up with the war when these things get used to make massively destructive weapons. It's just that truly amazing.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complicated issue. I think I certainly go back and go back to what inspired me and maybe to connect it a little bit to this question about books. I mean, certainly the books that some books that I remember reading when I was a kid were about the early history of quantum mechanics, like Heisenberg's books that he wrote about kind of looking back at telling the history of what happened when he developed quantity. It's just kind of a totally fascinating romantic great story. And those were very inspirational to me. And I would think maybe other people might also find them.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I must say, I mean, unfortunately, yeah, you can go to my website and you can click on book reviews and you can see I've written a lot of, a lot of, I mean, as you can tell from my views about string theory, I'm not a fan of a lot of the kind of popular books about how isn't string theory great and about, yeah, so I'm not a fan of a lot of things of that kind.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I originally got interested in physics. I actually started out as a kid interested in astronomy exactly that and a telescope and whatever that and certainly read a lot of. Science fiction Thought about that. I find over the years I find myself kind of less. Anyway, less and less interested in that just because I don't really know what to do with. Also, kind of at some point kind of stopped reading science fiction that much kind of filling out that there's just that the actual science I was kind of learning about was. Perfectly kind of weird and fascinating and unusual enough, but better than any of the stuff that in Isaac Asimov. So why should I? Yeah.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no idea, but I've certainly, as far as I know, unless the government's covering it up or something we haven't heard from, we don't have any evidence for such things yet, but there's no... No particular obstruction why there shouldn't be”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it just, I mean, the kinds of it mean I'm willing to agree that you can get into interesting kinds of questions going down that road, but they're just so different from anything from what I found interesting. Life is too short. And I'm very glad other people are thinking about this, but I just don't see anything I can do with it.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, anyway, I agree these are kind of fascinating questions and they may be very, very relevant to our future as a species. But yeah, they're just very far from anything.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem there is that that's promising more for this. For Phil Anderson's problem that if you want to, there's lots and lots of you take. Start putting together lots and lots of things, and we think we know they're by pair interactions, but what this thing is going to do, we don't have any good calculational techniques. Quantum computers may very well give you those. And so they may, what we think of as kind of strong coupling behavior. We have no good way to calculate Even though we can write down the theory, we don't know how to calculate anything with any accuracy in it. The quantum computers may solve that problem. But the problem is that I don't think that they're going to solve the problem, that they help you with the problem of not having what the right underlying theory is.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I mean, I think that field, my understanding is they're starting to make a great use of those techniques, but it seems to look like it will help them solve certain technical problems and be able to do things somewhat better, but not completely change the way they're looking at things.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's become so difficult to do experiments at higher energy that we've really lost this ability to kind of get unexpected input from experiment. And you can, you know, while it's maybe hard to figure out what people's thinking is going to be 20 years from now, looking at energy particle energy colliders and their technology, it's actually pretty easy to make a pretty accurate guess what you're going to be doing 20 years from now. I think actually I would actually claim that it's pretty clear where you're going to be 20 years from now and what it's going to be is you're going to have the Going to have the LHC, you're going to have a lot more data and order of magnitude or more data from the LHC, but at the same energy, you're not going to see a higher energy accelerator operating successfully in the next 20 years.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you're not. And even, I actually suspect if you ask string theorists that question these days, you're going to get few of them saying, I mean, if you'd ask them that question 20 years ago, again, when Kaku was making this bed or whatever, I think some of them would have taken you up on it. And certainly back in 1984, a bunch of them would have said, oh, sure, yeah. But now I get the impression that even they realize that things are not looking good for that particular idea. Again, it depends what you mean by string theory. Whether maybe the term will evolve to mean something else, which will work out. But I don't think that's not going to likely work out whether something else, I mean, I still think it's relatively unlikely that you'll have any. Really successful theory. And the main problem is just, um,”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is not at all what I originally had expected. And so that's the new thing that I've where I think gives you something is to do this move, which people often think of as just kind of a... Of a mathematical trick that you're doing to make some formulas work out nicely. But to take that mathematical trick as really fundamental and turns out in Twister theory allows you to simultaneously talk about your usual time and the time times the square root of minus one. They both fit very nicely into Twister theory. And you end up with some structures which look a lot like the standard model.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your standard theory, if you do that to those, I mean, those formulas have some very strange behavior and they're kind of singular. If you ask even some simple questions, you have to very take very delicate singular limits in order to get the correct answer. And you have to take them from the right direction. Otherwise, it doesn't work. Whereas if you just take time and if you just put a factor of square root of minus one wherever you see the time coordinate, you end up with a much simpler formulas which are much better behaved mathematically. 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 quantum theories, but it has some very different flavor and very different aspects that I hadn't really appreciated. And in particular, the way symmetry is acted on.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it certainly does have such a hope because what I've found, I think the thing which I've done, which I don't think, as far as I can tell, no one had really looked at from this point of view before is To do with it, this question of how do you treat time in your quantum theory? And so there's another long story about how we do quantum theories and about how we treat time and quantum theories, which is a long story. But the short version of it is that what people have found when you try and write down a quantum theory, that it's often a good idea to take your time coordinate, whatever you're using your time coordinate, and then multiply it by the square root of minus one and to make it purely imaginary. And so all these formulas which you have”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the intuition becomes very difficult. But if you don't, not using Twister theory, you have to kind of go through a certain fairly complicated rigamole to even describe spinners, to describe electrons. Whereas using twister theory, it's just completely tautological. They're just what you want to describe the electron is fundamentally the way you're describing the point in spacetime already. It's just there.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then, to me the mind blowing thing about this is this then kind of tautologically answers the question is what is a spinner? Well, A spinner is a point. I mean, the space of spinners at a point is the point in Twister theory. The points are the complex two planes. And you want me to, and you're asking what a spinner is. Well, a spinner, the space of spinners is that two plane. So it's just your whole definition of what a pointed spacetime was just told you what a spinner was. It's the same thing.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard to visualize. But to get back to what I think is mind-blowing about twisters is that another way of saying this idea about talking about spheres, another way of saying the fundamental idea of twister theory is in some sense the fundamental idea of twister theory is that a point is a two complex dimensional space so that every and that it lives inside the space that it lies inside this twister space. So in the simplest case twister space is four-dimensional and a point in spacetime is a too complex dimensional subspace of all the four complex dimensions. And as you move around in space time you're just move at your planes are just moving around.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, what really captures it? The problem is that it's really The simplest way to describe it is in terms of two complex numbers. And your problem with two complex numbers is that's four real numbers. So your spinner kind of lies in a four-dimensional space. That makes it hard to visualize. And it's crucial that it's not just any four dimensions. It's just actually complex numbers. You're really going to use the fact that these are complex numbers.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things that they do, for instance, if you rotate a spinner around 360 degrees, it doesn't come back where it becomes minus what it was. Anyway, so the way rotations work, there's a kind of a funny sign you have to keep track of in some sense. So there are kind of two valued in a weird way. But the fundamental problem is that it's just not, if you're used to visualizing vectors, there's nothing you can do visualize in terms of vectors that will ever give you a spinner. It just is not going to ever work.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of more fundamental piece of geometry spinners and what we were actually seeing if you look at an electron are one and the same so it's a I think it's kind of a kind of a mind blowing thing but it's very unintuitive”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of spinners in some sense as 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 If you only have vectors, you can't get spinners. So they're in some sense, there's some kind of level of lower level of geometry beyond what we thought it was, which was kind of spinner geometry. And this is something which even to this day, when we teach graduate courses in geometry, we mostly don't talk about this because it's a bit hard to do correctly. If you start with your whole setup in terms of vectors, describing things in terms of spinners is a whole different ballgame. But anyway, it was just this amazing fact that this.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About vectors and things you build out of vectors. So you express everything about geometry in terms of vectors or how they're changing or how you put two of them together and get planes and whatever. But what I'd been realized on is that if you ask very, very generally what are the, if you that you can kind of consistently think about rotating. And so you ask a technical question, what are the representations of the rotation group? Well, you find that one answer is therectors and everything you build out of vectors. But then people found, well, wait a minute, there's also these other things, which you can't build out of vectors, but which you can consistently rotate. And they're described by pairs of complex numbers, by two complex numbers. And they're the spinners also. And to make, and you can...”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Described by pairs of complex numbers, just weird. But if you go, and then you can ask, you know, well, what happens if you take an electron and rotate it? So how do things move in this pair of complex numbers? Well, now if you go back to mathematics, what had been understood in mathematics some years earlier, not that many years earlier, was that if you ask very, very generally think about geometry of three dimensions and ask, and if you think about things that are happening in three dimensions in the standard way, everything, the standard way of doing geometry, everything is about vectors, if you take it in a mathematics classes, you probably see vectors at some point, they're just triplets of numbers tell you what a direction is or how far you're going in three-dimensional space. And most of everything we teach in most standard courses in mathematics is a”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particles was in terms of wave functions, and these wave functions were complex values. Well, if we actually look at particles, that's not right. They're pairs of complex numbers. There's pairs of complex numbers. So one of the kind of fundamental from the physics point of view, the fundamental question is, why are all our kind of fundamental particles”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There seems to be some kind of doubling of the degrees of freedom going on. If you counted what was there in some sense in the way you would expect it, and when you started doing quantum mechanics and started looking at elementary particles, there seemed to be two degrees of freedom there, not one. And one way of seeing it was that if you put your electron in a strong magnetic field and ask what was the energy of it, instead of it having one energy, it would have two energies. There'd be two energy levels. And as you increase magnetic field, the splitting would increase. So physicists kind of realized that, wait a minute. So we thought when we were doing, first started doing quantum mechanics that the way to describe”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing you say about Penrose, I mean, Penrose is actually a very good writer and also a very good draftsman. He saw drafts to the extent this is visualizable. He actually has done some very nice drawing. So, I mean, almost anything kind of expository thing you can find him writing is a very good place to start. He's a remarkable person. But spinners are something that independently came out of mathematics and out of physics. And to say where they came out of physics, I mean, what people realized when they started looking at elementary particles like electrons or whatever, that there seemed to be”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uses a kind of mathematics that's relative what was kind of goes back to the 19th century among mathematicians. Anyway, it's a bit of a long story, but one problem is that you have to start, it's crucial that you think in terms of complex numbers and not just real numbers. And this for most people, that makes it harder to, for mathematicians, that's fine. We love doing that. But for most people, that makes it harder to think about. But I think perhaps the way that there is something you can say very specifically about it in terms of spinners, which I don't know if you want to, I think at some point you wanted to talk.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit like string theory that by using these ideas about twisters, they could develop them in different directions and find all sorts of other interesting things, but they weren't finding any way of doing that that brought them back to kind of new insights into physics. And my own, I mean, what's kind of gotten me excited really is what I think I have an idea about that I think does actually work that goes more in that direction. I can go on about that endlessly or talk a little bit about it, but that's the... I think that's the one kind of easy to explain insight about Twister theory. There are some more technical ones. I think it's also very convincing what it tells you about spinners, for instance, but that's a more technical.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way of thinking about About physics. And he and others working with him developed A beautiful mathematical mathematical formulism and a way to go back and forth between some aspects of our standard way we write these things down and work in the so-called twister space. And certain things worked out very well, but they ended up, I think, kind of stuck by the 80s or 90s that they weren't.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is quite amazing. If you ask yourself, you know, what do we know about the world? We have this idea that the world out there, all these different points and these points, well, that's kind of a derived quantity. What we really know about the world is we open our eyes, what do you see? You see a sphere. And that what you're looking at is you're looking at a sphere is worth a light rays coming into your eyes. And what Penrose says is that, well, what a point in space time is is that sphere, that sphere of all the light rays coming in. And he says, and you should formulate your, instead of thinking about points, you should think about the space of those spheres, if you like, and formulate the degrees of freedom as physics as living on those fears, living on, so you're kind of living on your degrees of freedom are living on light rays, not on points. And it's a very different...”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you can formulate a theory and you can formulate a very, take a standard theory that we formulate in terms of points of space and time. And you can reformulate in this twister language and in this twister language the fundamental objects actually are more kind of the Are actually spheres in some sense kind of the light cone. So maybe one way to say it, which actually I think is really.”
2021-12-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #246 – Peter Woit: Theories of Everything and Why String Theory is Not Even Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source