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

“It's only in the last couple years I really, really kind of come to really, I think, to appreciate it and to see how to really, what I believe, to see how to really do something with it. And I've gotten very excited about that the last year or two. I mean, one way of saying one idea of twister theory is that it's a different way of thinking about what space and time are and about what points in space and time are, which is very interesting that it only really works in four dimensions. So four dimensions behaves very, very specially unlike other dimensions. And in four dimensions, there is a way of thinking about space and time geometry where as well as just thinking about points in space and time, you can also think about different objects, these so-called twisters. And then when you do that, you end up with kind of a really interesting insight that 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
“And at some point, you just realize, wait a minute, for me to really, really understand exactly what's going on here would just Take time, I just don't 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
“I mean, the same thing in pretty much every day in my email, there's somebody's gun. Theory of everything about why all of what physicists are doing. Perhaps the most disturbing thing I should say about being a critic of string theory is that when you realize who your fans are, that every day I hear from somebody who says, oh, well, since you don't like string theory, you must, of course, agree with me that this is the right way to think about everything. Oh, no, oh no. And most of these are, you quickly can see this is person doesn't know very much and doesn't know what they're doing, you know, but there's a whole continuum to people who are quite serious physicists and mathematicians who are making a fairly serious attempt to try to do something. And Like Garrett and Eric. And then your problem is try to spend more time looking at it and trying to figure out what they're really doing.”
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. It depends. I have to confess, I haven't looked that closely at Eric's. I mean, he explained to this to me personally a few times, and I've looked a bit at his paper, but it's, again, we're back to the problem of a limited amount of time in life.”
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
“And I think the kind of thing that Eric and all of a sudden Garrett and lots of people try to do, they all kind of founder in that same way that they don't have a good answer to 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
“Have to explain well, yeah, and I forget in his case, but it's not just four dimensions, it's also these, um, Structures you see in the standard model, there's certain very small dimensional groups of symmetry, so called U1, SU2, and SU3. The problem with, and this has been the problem since the beginning, almost immediately after 1973, about a year later, two years later, people started talking about grand unified theories. So you take the U1, the SU-2, and the SU-3, and you put them together into this bigger structure called the SU-5 or SO-10. But then you're stuck with this problem that wait a minute. Why does the world not look, why do I not see... These SU5 symmetries of world, I only SU these.”
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 I just anyway, it's the same, and there's another interesting example of a similar kind of thing is Garrett Lezy's theory of everything. Again, there it's a little bit more specific than Eric's. He's working with this E8. But again, I think all these things founder at the same point that You create this unity, but then you have no Don't actually have a good idea how you're going to get back to the actual. To the objects we're seeing, how are you going to create these big symmetries? How are you going to break them? Because we don't see those symmetries in the real world.”
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 think that he fundamentally has, I think, the same problems that everybody has had trying to do this. And there are really versions of the same problem that you try to... Tried to get unity by putting everything into some bigger structure. So he has some other ones that are not so conventional that he's trying to work with. He has the same problem that even if he can. If you can get a lot farther in terms of having a really well defined, well understood, clear picture of these things he's working with, they're really kind of large geometrical structures of many dimensions, many kinds. And I just don't see any way he's going to have the same problem in the string theores have. How do you get back down to... Structures of the standard model, and how do you?”
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 agree. I think that is a truly great problem. And depending where it goes, it may be... It may start to develop some kind of connections to the things that I've kind of found more fruitful. Hard to know. I think a lot of that area I kind of strongly feel best not say too much about it because I don't know too much about it. Again, we're back to this original problem that, you know, your time in life is limited. You have to figure out what you're going to spend your time thinking about. And that's something I just never seen enough to convince me to spend more time thinking about.”
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 think from the point of view of certain mathematical point of view, quantum mechanics is already mathematically as simple as it gets. It really is. Story about really the fundamental objects that you work with when you write down a quantum theory are in some fun point of view precisely the fundamental objects At the deepest levels of mathematics that you're working with, they're exactly the same. And cellular automata are something completely different which don't fit into these structures. I just don't see why. Anyway, I don't see it as a promising. Promising thing to do, and then just looking at it and saying, Does this go anywhere? Does this solve any problem that I've ever solved any problem of any kind? I just don't see 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
“Yeah, I have to say, unfortunately, I've kind of pretty much zero sympathy for that. I mean, I don't, I spend a little time looking at it, and I just don't see, it doesn't seem to me to get anywhere. And it really is just really, really doesn't agree at all with what I'm seeing, the kind of unification of math and physics that I'm kind of talking about around certain kinds of very deep ideas about geometry and stuff. You want to believe that things are really coming out of cellular automata at the most fundamental level, you have to believe that everything that I've seen my whole career and as beautiful, powerful ideas, that that's all just kind of a mirage, which just kind of randomly is emerging from these more basic, very, very simple-minded things. And you have to give me some serious evidence for that, and I'm seeing nothing.”
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
“This various emergent behavior, and as you go to different levels of explanation, you're going to need to develop different completely different ideas, completely different ways of thinking. And I guess there's the famous kind of Phil Anderson's slogan is that more is different. Even once you understand how what a couple of things, if you have a collection of stuff and you understand perfectly well how each thing is interacting with it. With the others, what the whole thing is going to do is just a completely different problem. It's just not, and you need completely different ways of thinking about 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
“Oh, yeah, yeah, no. No, anyway, yeah, I agree completely. I mean, there is something kind of completely wrong with this terminology or theory of everything that's really in some sense a very bad and bad terminology because this is explaining. This is a purely kind of reductionist point of view that you're trying to understand a certain very specific kind of things, which in principle, other things emerge from. Actually, understand how anything emerges from this, it can't be understood in terms of. This underlying fund wealth area is going to be hopeless in terms of telling you 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
“All the correct objects you need to describe what's happening in the world and describes how they're interacting with each other at a most fundamental level, how you get from that theory to describing some macroscopic, incredibly complicated thing is there that becomes, again, more of an engineering problem and you may need machine learning or you may need a lot of very different things to do 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
“I mean, this is very much a kind of reductionist point of view in the sense that so it's not a theory. This is not going to explain to you anything. This kind of theory of everything we're talking about doesn't say anything interesting, particularly about macroscopic objects, about what the weather is going to be tomorrow or things that happening at this scale. But just what we've discovered is that as you look at Universe that kind of you know if you You can start breaking it apart into, and you end up with some fairly simple pieces, quanta, if you like, and which are interacting in some fairly simple way. And so what we mean by the theory of everything is... A theory that describes”
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, your theory should, I mean, if your theory is going to include gravity, our current understanding of gravity is that you should have. Should be black hole states in it. You should be able to describe black holes in this theory. And just one aspect that people have concentrated a lot on is just this kind of questions about if your theory includes black holes like it's supposed to and it includes quantum mechanics, then there's certain kind of paradoxes which come up. And so that's been a huge focus of quantum quantum gravity work has been just those paradoxes.”
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
“My guess is it's a combination of a physics and a math problem that you really need. It's not really engineering. It's not like there's some kind of well-defined thing you can write down, and we just don't have enough computer power to do the calculation. That's not the kind of problem it is at all. But the question is, what mathematical tools you need to properly formulate the problem? Is unclear. So, one reasonable conjecture is the way the reason that we haven't had any success yet is just that we're missing, either we're missing certain physical ideas or we're missing certain mathematical tools, which are some combination of them, which we need to kind of properly formulate the problem and see that it has a solution that looks like the real world”
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, I mean, ultimately, to be really convinced. That new idea about unification really works, you need some kind of real world and see that this is telling you something. Something true about it. I mean, either Telling you that if you do some experiment and go out and do it, you'll get some unexpected result. And that's the kind of gold standard, or it may be just that like all those numbers that are, we don't know how to explain, it will show you how to calculate them. I mean, it can be various kinds of experimental validation, but that's certainly ideally what you're looking for.”
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 it's a failure mode of kind of that this idea ended up being essentially empty, that it just ends up not telling you anything because it's consistent with just about anything. And so, I mean, there's a complex, if you try and talk with string theories about this now. I mean, there's an argument, there's a long argument over this about whether, you know, no, no, no, maybe there still are constraints coming out of this idea or not, or maybe we live in a multiverse and everything is true anyway. So there are various ways you can kind of, that string theories have kind of react to this kind of argument that I'm making. I try to hold on to 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
“The initial idea was, as I tried to explain it, it was quite seductive in that you could see why Witten and others got excited by it. At the time it looked like there were only a few of these possible clabbyows that would work. And it looked like, okay, we just have to understand this very specific model and these very specific six-dimensional spaces. And we're going to get everything. And so it was very subjective idea. But it just, you know, as people... Worked more and more about it. It just didn't, they just kind of realized that there are just more and more things you can do with these six dimensions and you can't, and this is just not going to 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
“Home where the whole tribe starts and everything comes from. And so the problem with this is that having as your initial name and what everything points back to, something which really didn't work out, it kind of makes everybody makes everything, you've created this potentially very, very interesting field with interesting things happening. But people in graduate school take courses on string theory and everything kind of, and this is what you tell the public in which you continually pointing back. So you're continually pointing back to this idea, which never worked out as you're guiding inspiration. And it really kind of deforms the whole way of your hopes of making progress. And that's, to me, I think the kind of worst thing that's happened in this field.”
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 right, it is kind of a common problem that what you call some field changes and evolves in interesting ways as the field changes. I guess what I would argue is the initial understanding of string theory that was quite specific. We're talking about a specific idea, 10-dimensional super strings compactified as six dimensions. To my mind, the really bad thing has happened to the subject is that it's hard to get people to admit, at least publicly, that that was a failure, that this really didn't work. And so de facto, what people do is people stop doing that and they start doing more interesting things, but they keep talking to the public about About string theory and referring back to that idea and using that as kind of the starting point and as kind of Place”
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
“Started out. Or were trained by the people who worked on that have now become this string theorist, but it's become almost more kind of a tribal denominator than a... So it's very hard to know what you're arguing about when you're arguing about string theory these days.”
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 prominent now really is that you really don't know what it is now. You've never, nobody has ever kind of come up with this non-perturbative theory. So it's become more and more frustrating and an odd activity to try to argue with a string theorists about string theory because it's become less and less well-defined what it is. And it's become actually more and more kind of a whether you have this weird phenomenon of people calling themselves string theorists when they've never actually worked on any theory where there are any strings anywhere. So what has actually happened kind of sociologically is that you started out with this fairly well-defined proposal. And then I would argue because that didn't work, people then branched out in all sorts of directions doing all sorts of things that became farther and farther removed from that. And for sociological reasons, the ones who kind 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
“Well, I think the most positive argument for it is all the all sorts of new ideas about mathematics and about parts of physics really emerge from it. So it was very fruitful source of ideas. And I think this is actually one argument you'll definitely, which I kind of agree with you'll hear from Witten and from other string theorists, that this is just such a fruitful and inspiring idea and it's led to so many other different things coming out of it that, you know, there must be something right about this. Anyway, I think that's probably the strongest thing that they've got.”
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
“Of things are and what's going to happen. So you've gone from a very tightly constrained thing with a couple parameters to a This thing, which the minute you put it in, you had to add all this extra parameters to make things work. And so that It may be one argument as well, that's just the way the world is, and the fact that you don't find that aesthetically pleasing is just your problem. Maybe we live in a multiverse and those numbers are just different in every universe. But another reasonable conjecture is just that, well, this is just telling us that there's something we don't understand about what's going on in a deeper way, which would explain those numbers. And there's some kind of deeper idea about where the Higgs field comes from and what's going on. which we haven't figured out yet and that that's That's what we should look for.”
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
“Let's just say that they're not beautiful. To make the thing work, you have to throw in lots and lots of extra parameters at various points. And a lot of this has to do with the so-called Higgs mechanism in the Higgs field, that if you look at the theory, everything is, if you forget about the Higgs field and what it needs to do, the rest of the theory is very, very constrained and has very, very few free parameters, really a very small number. There's a very small number of parameters and a few integers which tell you what the theory is. To make this work as a theory of the real world, you need a Higgs field and you need to, it needs to do something. And once you introduce that Higgs field, all sorts of parameters make an appearance. So now we've got 20 or 30 or whatever parameters that are going to tell you what all the mass 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
“The thing that gets most attention is gravity, that we have trouble. So you want to in some sense integrate. Integrate what we know about the gravitational force with it and have a unified quantum field theory that has gravitational interactions also. So that's the big problem everybody talks about. But it's also true that if you look at the standard model, it has these very, very deep, beautiful ideas, but there's certain aspects of it that are very...”
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
“Specific problem of trying to do better than the standard model is just this insanely successful thing. And it kind of came together in 1973 pretty much. And all of the people who kind of were involved in that coming together, many of them ended up with Nobel Prizes for that. But if you look... Post 1973 pretty much it's a little bit more there's some edge cases if you like but if you look post 1973 at what people have done to try to do better than the standard model and to get a better unified theory it really hasn't it's been too hard a problem it hasn't worked the theory's too good and so it's not that other people went out there and did and did it and not him and that they got Nobel Prizes for doing it is that no one really the kind of thing he's been trying to do with string theory is not no one has been able to do since 1973.”
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
“His greatest work is stuff that doesn't have little or nothing to do with string theory. I mean, for instance, so he was actually one of fields. The very strange thing about him in some sense is that he doesn't have a Nobel Prize. So there's a very large number of people who are nowhere near as smart as he is and don't work anywhere near as hard, who have Nobel Prizes. I think he just had the misfortune of coming into the field at a time when things had gotten much, much, much tougher and nobody really had, no matter how smart you were, it would have been very hard to come up with a new idea that was going to work physically and get you a Nobel Prize. But he got a fields medal for certain work he did in mathematics. And that's just completely unheard of for mathematicians to give a field of medal to someone outside their field. And physics is really, you wouldn't have before.”
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 think here's a truly remarkable figure. Had the pleasure of meeting him first when he was a postdoc. And I mean, he's just completely amazing. And physicist, and A bit smarter than just about any of the rest of us and also more hardworking. It's a kind of frightening combination to see how much he's been able to do. But I would actually argue that his greatest work, the things that he's done that have been of just this mind-blowing significance of giving us, I mean, he's completely revolutionized some areas of mathematics. He's totally revolutionized the way we understand the relations between mathematics and physics. And most of those”
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
“Yes, I mean, you can certainly assume that we've got models with more dimensions and ask what would be the observable effects? How would we? Know this, and you go out and do experiments. So, for instance, you have a like gravitationally, you have inverse square law of forces. If you had more dimensions, that inverse square law would change something else. So you can go and start measuring the inverse square law and say, okay, an inverse square law is working, but maybe if I get, it turns out to be actually kind of very, very hard to measure gravitational effects at even kind of somewhat macroscopic distances because they're so small. So you can start looking at the inverse square law and say start trying to measure it at shorter and shorter distances and see if there were extra dimensions at those distance scales. You would start to see the inner square law fail. And so people look for that. Again, you don't see it. But you can, I mean, there's all sorts of experiments of this kind you can imagine which test for effects of extra dimensions at 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
“Some sense, I mean, just the basic fact is you need to get rid of them. We don't see them. So you need to somehow explain them. The main thing you're trying to do is to explain why we're not seeing them. And so you have to come up with some theory of these extra dimensions and how they're going to behave. String theory gives you some ideas about how to do that, but The bottom line is where you're trying to go with this whole theory you're creating is to just make all of its effects essentially unobservable. So it's not a really It's an inherently kind of dubious and worrisome thing that you're trying to do there. Why are you just adding in all this stuff and then trying to explain why we don't see it? I mean, it just.”
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 the problem is that what you learn if you start doing mathematics and looking at geometry and topology and more and more dimensions is that, I mean, Asking the question, what are all possible six dimensional spaces? It's kind of an unanswerable question. It's just, I mean, it's even kind of technically undecidable in some way. They're just too many things you can do with all these, if you start trying to make one-dimensional spaces, it's like, well, you've got a line, you can make a circle, you can make graphs, you can kind of see what you can do. But as you go to higher and higher dimensions, there's just so many ways you can put things together and get something of that dimensionality. So unless you have some very, very strong principle, which is going to pick out some very specific ones of these six-dimensional spaces, and they're just too many of them, and you can get anything you want.”
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
“Basically, I mean, you have to get rid of the sixth dimension. So there's kind of two ways of doing it. One is what we call compactification. You say that there really are ten dimensions, but for whatever reason, six of them are so, so small, we can't see them. So you basically start out with ten dimensions and what we call, you know, make six of them not go out to infinity, but just kind of a finite extent. So small, it's unobservable”
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 by itself just doesn't give you any hint as to what to do about the six dimensions. So actual perturbed with string theory by itself really only works in ten dimensions. So you have to start making some kinds of assumptions about how I'm going to go beyond. This formulation that we really understand of string theory and get rid of these six dimensions. So kind of the simplest one was the Clabiau postulate. But when that didn't really work out, people have tried more and more different things. And the hope has always been that Solution to this problem would be that you would find a deeper and better understanding of what string theory is that would actually go beyond this perturbative expansion and which would generalize and that once you had that, Would solve this problem of it, it would pick out what to do with the sixth dimension.”
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's kind of no particularly nice way of doing this. There's an infinite number of ways of doing it, and you can get whatever you want depending on how you do it. So you end up, the whole program of starting at 10 dimensions and getting to four just kind of collapses out of a lack of any way to kind of get to where you want because you can get anything. The hope around that problem has always been that The standard formulation that we have of a string theory You can go by the name perturbative, but it's kind of A standard way we know of given a classical theory of constructing a quantum theory and working with it, which is. The so-called perturbation theory that we know how to do.”
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 to begin with, I think that the simplest thing to say is. The initial idea really was that, okay, we have this, instead of what's great is we have this thing that only works, it's very structured and has to work in a certain way for it to make sense. But then you ended up in 10 space-time dimensions. And so to get back to physics, you had to get rid of five of the dimensions. And the bottom line, I would say, in some sense is very simple, that what people just discovered is just...”
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
“Quantum field theories, and kind of think of it as one space and one time dimension, which have just this huge amount of symmetry and a huge amount of structure, which is some totally fantastic mathematics behind it. And again, and some of that mathematics is exactly also what appears in the Langlands program. So, a lot of the First interaction between math and physics around the Langlos program has been around these two dimensional conformal field theories.”
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, yeah, I mean, the problem in talking about the whole subject, and partly one reason I wrote the book, is that it gets very, very complicated. I mean, there's a huge amount. A lot of people got very interested in this. A lot of people worked on it. And in some sense, I think what happened is exactly because the idea didn't really work that this caused people to, you know, instead of focusing on this one idea and digging in and working on that, they just kind of kept trying new things. And so people, I think, ended up wandering around in a very, very rich space of ideas about mathematics and physics and discovering all sorts of really interesting things. It's just the problem is there tended to be an inverse relationship between how interesting and beautiful and fruitful this new idea that they were trying to pursue was and how much it looked like the real world. So there's a lot of beautiful mathematics came out of it, I think one of the most spectacular is what the physicists call two-dimensional conformal field theory. And so these are basically”
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 ended up being just too many ways of doing this, and you didn't know how to do this consistently. There was kind of not even wrong in the sense that you couldn't even, you never could pin it down well enough to actually get a real falsifiable prediction out of it that would tell you it was wrong, but it was kind of in the realm of ideas which initially looked good, but the more you look at them, they don't work out the way you want and they don't actually end up carrying the power or the that you originally had this vision 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
“You could just take this 10 dimensional string theory and find one of a limited number of possible ways of getting rid of six dimensions by making them small. And then you would end up with an effective four-dimensional theory, which looked like the real world. This was the hope. So then there's a very long story about what happened to that hope over the years. I mean, I would argue, and part of the point of the book and its title was that... This ultimately was a failure that you ended up, that this idea just didn'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
“And so then you had this problem again, the problem I referred to at the beginning of okay, now once you make that move, you've got to get rid of six dimensions. And so the hope was that you could get rid of the six dimensions by making them very small and that consistency of the theory would require that these six dimensions satisfy a very specific condition called being a clabiau manifold, and that we knew very, very few examples of this. So what got a lot of people very excited back in 8485 was the hope 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
“Having a quantum theory of particles moving around in spacetime, think about quantum theory of kind of one-dimensional loops moving around in spacetime, so-called strings. And so instead of one degree of freedom, these have an infinite number of degrees of freedom. It's a much more complicated theory. But you can imagine... We're going to quantize this theory of loops moving around in spacetime. And what they found is that you could do this and you could fairly relatively straightforwardly make sense of Of such a quantum theory, but only if space and time together were 10-dimensional.”
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 interesting thing about the current state of string theory is that I think I'd argue it's actually very, very difficult to at this point to say what string theory means. If people say they're a string theorist, what they mean and what they're doing is kind of hard to pin down the meaning of the term. But the initial meaning, I think, goes back to Was kind of a series of developments starting in 1984 in which people felt that they had found a unified theory of Our so-called standard model of all the standard well-known kind of particle interactions and gravity and it all fit together in a quantum theory and that you could do this in a very specific way by instead of thinking about”
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
“More about beauty and how can you integrate and unify these issues about gravity with other things we know about physics? And can you find a theory where these fit together in a way that makes sense and hopefully predict something that's much more promising?”
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 danger is that you end up with that everybody could be successful, everybody's program for how to find a theory of quantum gravity ends up with something that is consistent. And so in some sense, you could argue this is what happened to the string there is. They solved their problem of finding a consistent theory of quantum gravity and they found 10 of the 500 solutions. If you believe that everything that they would like to be true is true, well, okay, you've got a theory, but it ends up being kind of useless because it's just one of an infinite, essentially infinite number of things which you have no way to experimentally distinguish. And so this is just a depressing situation. But I do think that there is a, so again, I think pursuing ideas about what”
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
“We have the best route to finding a consistent theory of quantum gravity. And string theorists will tell you this. Other people will tell you it's kind of what people argue about. But the problem with all of that is that you end up.”
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've actually, you know, over the years certainly spent a lot of time learning about gravity and about attempts to quantize it, but it hasn't been that much in the past the focus of what I've been thinking about. My feeling was always as I think Spino would agree that one way you can pursue this if you can't do experiments is just kind of search for consistency. It can be remarkably hard to come up with a completely consistent model of this in a way that brings together quantum mechanics and generativity. And that's, I think, kind of been. Traditional way that people who have pursued quantum gravity have often pursued.”
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, it can be just simple inconsistency between theory and experiment that if you, so we have this great fundamental theory, but there are some things we see out there which don't seem to fit in it like dark energy and dark matter, for instance. But if there's something which you can't test experimentally, I think she would argue, and I would agree that, for instance, if you're trying to think about gravity and how are you going to have a quantum theory of gravity, you should kind of Test any of your ideas with kind of a thought experiment. Does this actually give a consistent picture of what's going to happen, of what happens in this particular situation or not?”
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