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

“People should be concentrating on when they're trying to develop better theories on morons on self-consistency, not so much on beauty, but is this idea beautiful? But is there something about the theory which is not quite consistent and use that as a guide that there's something wrong there which needs fixing? And so I think that part of her argument, I think we're on the same page 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
“Yeah, that's part of it. But the thing about physics that you have is that you, you know, what really can tell, if you can do an experiment and check and see if nature is really doing what your idea expects, then you do in principle have a way of testing it. And it's certainly true that if you thought you had a simple idea and that doesn't work and you go out and do an experiment and what actually does work is somewhere, maybe some more complicated version of it that can certainly happen and that can be true. I think her emphasis is more that I don't really disagree with is 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
“Very easy to fool yourself, and it's very easy to decide to fall in love with an idea. You have an idea. You think, oh, this is great and you fall in love with it. And like any kind of love affair, it's very easy to believe that the object of your affections is much more beautiful than others might think and that they really are. And that's very, very easy to do. So if you say, I'm just going to pursue ideas about beauty and this and mathematics and this, it's extremely easy to just fool yourself, I think. And I think that's a lot of what the story she was thinking of about where people have gone astray that I think it's, I would argue that as more people, it's not that there was some simple, powerful, wonderful idea which they'd found and it turned out not to be useful, but it was more that they kind of fooled themselves that this was actually a better.”
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 guess I do disagree with her on that so much. I don't think, and especially, and I actually fairly strongly disagree with her about sometimes the way she'll refer to math. And so the problem is, you know, physicists and people in general just refer to it as math and they're often... They're often meaning not what I would call math, which is the interesting ideas of math, but just. Some complicated calculation. And so I guess my feeling about it is more that it's very, the problem with talking about simplicity and using simplicity as a guide is that it's 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
“I thought it was really fascinating reading your book. And anyway, I was finding disagreeing with a lot. But then at the end, when she says, yes, when we find. When we actually figure this out, it will be simple. We agree in the end.”
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
“Own belief is that there is something about a universe that is simple, and as I was trying to say that there is some kind of fundamental thing about math, physics, and physics and all this picture, which Which is in some sense simple. It's true that it's of course true that our minds are very limited and can certainly do certain things and not others. It's in principle possible that there's some great insight in, there are a lot of insights into the way the world works, which just aren't accessible to us because that's not the way our minds work. And that what we're seeing, this kind of simplicity is just because All we ever have any hope of seeing.”
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 think all of our evidence. What we see in the history of the subject is the simpler one, though often it's simpler in a surprising way, but yeah, that we just don't The kind of best theories we've been coming up with are ultimately when properly understood, relatively simple and much, much simpler than they would have expected them 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
“That's one aspect of it. And so you can start to tell that an idea is becoming uglier and uglier as you start kind of having to, you know, it doesn't quite do what you want. So you throw in something else to the idea and you keep doing that until you get what you want. But that's how you know you're doing something uglier and uglier when you have to kind of keep adding in. More into what was originally a fairly simple idea and making it more and more complicated to get what 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
“Well, and I think there are many different things you can find beautiful for different reasons. I mean, I think in this context, The notion of beauty, I think, really is just kind of an idea is beautiful. If it packages a huge amount of power and information into something very simple. So in some sense, I mean, you can almost kind of try and measure it in the sense of what are the implications of this idea? non-trivial things does it tell you versus how simply can you express the idea and so”
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, so this is kind of all the time. Much of modern number theory is kind of based on this idea. And when you start doing this, you start to realize that you need simple things on one side in the algebras start to require you to think about the other side, about geometry in a new way. You have to kind of get a more sophisticated idea about geometry. Or if you start thinking about the functions out of space, you may need a more sophisticated kind of algebra. But in some sense, I mean, much or most of modern number theory is based upon this move to geometry. And there's also a lot of geometry and topology is also based upon If you want to understand the topology of something, you look at the functions, you do duram co-mology, and you get the topology. Anyway.”
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 if you're an algebraist and you've got these abstract algebraic gadgets that you're multiplying and adding, say, wait a minute, are those gadgets, can I think of them in some way as a function on a space? What would that space be and what kind of functions would they be? And that going back and forth really brings these two completely different looking areas of mathematics together.”
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, you can take if somebody gives you a space, you can ask, you can say, well, let's, and this is part of the same idea. The part of the same idea is that if you try and do geometry and somebody tells you here's a space, that what you should do is you should say, wait, wait a minute, maybe I should be trying to solve this using algebra. And so if I do that, the way to start is you give me the space, I start to think about the functions in the space. So to each point in the space, I associate a number. I can take different kinds of functions and different kinds of values, but basically functions on a space. What this insight is telling you is that if you're a geometer, often the way to work is to change your problem into algebra by changing your stop thinking about your space and the points in it and think about the functions on 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
“And so this is really kind of a truly fundamental idea. It's at the basis of what's called algebraic geometry, and it just links these two parts of mathematics that look completely different. And it's just incredibly powerful idea and so much of mathematics emerges from this kind of simple relation.”
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 algebra, but it seems to have nothing to do with geometry. But what you can, it turns out, but if you ask yourself this question and ask, you know, are integers, can you think if somebody gives you an integer, can you think of it as a function on some space, on some geometry? And it turns out that yes, you can, and the space is the space of prime numbers. And so what you do is you just, if somebody gives you an integer, you can make a function on the prime numbers by just at each prime number taking that integer modula, that prime. So if you say, I don't know, if you're given 10 and you ask what is its value at 2, well, it's 5 times 2, so mod 2, it's zero. So it has 0 at 1. What is this value at 3? Well, it's 9 plus 1, so it's 1 mod 3. So it's zero at 2, it's 1 at 3, and you can kind of keep going.”
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 call an algebra some abstract thing of things that you can multiply and add that you should ask yourself, is that algebra the space of functions on some geometry? So one of the most surprising examples of this, for instance, is a standard kind of thing that seems to have nothing to do with geometry is the integer. So you can multiply them and add 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
“There's this idea that I kind of went and got a physics PhD and spent a lot of time learning about mathematics. And I guess it was embarrassing that I hadn't really actually understood this very simple idea and kind of learned it when I actually started teaching math classes, which is that. Maybe that there maybe there's a simple way to explain kind of the fundamental way in which algebra and geometry are connected. So you normally think of geometry as about these spaces and these points. And you think of algebra as this very abstract thing about with these abstract objects that satisfy certain kinds of relations. You can multiply them and add them and do stuff, but it's completely abstract. It has nothing geometric about it. The kind of really fundamental idea is that unifies algebra and geometry is to think whenever anybody gives 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
“Well, I mean, I think unfortunately it's not just you. I think even most mathematicians have no really don't actually understand what this is about. I mean, the group of people who really understand all these ideas. And so, for instance, this paper of Schultz and Farg that I was talking about, the number of people who really actually understand how that works is, anyway, I'm on very, very small. And so I think even you find if you talk to mathematicians and physicists, even they will often feel that there's this really interesting sounding stuff going on. Which I should be able to understand. It's kind of in my own field. I have a PhD in, but it still seems pretty clearly far beyond me right now”
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 local problem of what happens in number theory near a certain prime number. And they turn this into a problem of exactly the kind the geometric language people had been doing, these kind of pure geometry problem. And they found by generalizing the mathematics, they could actually reformulate it in that way, and it worked perfectly 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
“A way that was also close to some ideas about geometry. And then more later on in the 80s, 90s, there was something called geometric Langlands that people realized that you could take what people had been doing in number theory in Langlands and just forget about the number theory and ask, what is this telling you about geometry? And you get a whole, some new insights into certain kinds of geometry that way. So anyway, that's kind of the name for this area is Langlands and Geometric Langlands. And just recently in the last few months, there's been a really major paper that appeared by Peter Schulze and Laurent Farg where they made a serious advance in trying to understand a very much”
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, one name for this that this has acquired in mathematics is the so-called Langlands program. And so this started out in mathematics. It's that, you know, Robert Langlands kind of realized that a lot of what people were doing in... Was starting to be really successful in number theory in the 60s. And so that this actually Anyway, that this could be thought of in terms of these ideas about symmetry in groups and representations.”
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 we've kind of gone over that. I think that the key idea is what we were talking about earlier that. Just kind of a claim that if you look and see what have been successful ideas in unification, 50 years or so. And what's been happening in mathematics and the kind of thing that Frankl's book is about, that these are very much the same kind of mathematics. And so it's kind of an argument that there really is, you shouldn't be looking to unify just math or just fundamental physics, but taking inspiration for looking for new ideas in fundamental physics that they are going to be in the same direction of getting deeper into mathematics and looking for more inspiration and mathematics from these successful ideas about fundamental physics.”
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, let me just tell you something which I'm tempted to kind of start trying to explain what I think is the most powerful idea that brings together math and physics, ideas about groups and representations and how it fits quantum mechanics. But in some sense, I wrote a whole textbook about that. And I don't think we really have time to get very far into 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
“Is kind of sad how difficult this is. I mean, I would put it a different way that most questions that people have about this kind of thing, you can give them a really a true answer and really understand it. But the problem is one more of time. It's like, yes, I could explain to you how this works, but you'd have to be willing to sit down with me and work at this repeatedly for hours and days and weeks. It's just going to take that long for your mind to really wrap itself around what's going on. So that does make things inaccessible, which is sad. But it's just kind of part of life that we all have a limited amount of time and we have to decide what we're going to spend our time 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
“Yeah, or but to capture what you're trying to understand about them, you have to go to four more dimensions. So it starts to get to be hard to, I mean, you can train yourself to try it as much as to kind of think about things in your mind. And I often use pad and paper and often if my office often use the Blackboard and you are kind of drawing things, but they're really kind of more abstract representations of how things are supposed to fit together. They're not really unfortunately not just kind of really living in three dimensions where 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
“Well, the problem with this kind of stuff I'm interested in is you rarely can kind of, it's really something that is really kind of, or even the simplest example, you can kind of see what's going on by looking at something happening in three dimensions. There's generally the structures involved are... Either they're more abstract, or if you try to kind of embed them in some kind of space where you could manipulate them in some kind of geometrical way, it's going to be a much higher dimensional space.”
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, exactly. That's often a really fruitful way to, if you've got some idea just to kind of try to boil it down to what's the simplest. Situation in which this kind of thing is going to happen and then try to really understand that and understand that. And that is almost always a really good way to get insight into 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, physicists are very interested in. Saying something about specific examples. And I find that interesting. When I'm trying to do things in mathematics and I'm trying even teaching courses to mathematics students, I find that I'm teaching them in a different way than most mathematicians because I'm very often very focused on examples, on what's What's kind of the crucial example that shows how this powerful new mathematical technique, how it works, and why you would want to do it, and I'm less interested in kind of proving a precise theorem about exactly when it's going to work and when it's 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
“Typically, this attempt kind of founders because you just don't know, you end up not being able to explain why we only see four.”
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, certainly. And from a mathematician's point of view, I mean, the kinds of mathematicians also are very different than physicists and that we like to develop very general theories. If we have an idea, we want to see what's the greatest generality in which you can talk about it. So from the point of view of most of the ways geometry is formulated by mathematicians, it really doesn't matter. It works in any dimension. We can do one, two, three, four, any number. There's no particular For most of geometry there's no particular special thing but four. Anyway, but what physicists have been trying to do over the years is try to understand these fundamental theories in a geometrical way. And it's very tempting to kind of just start bringing in. Extra dimensions and using them to explain the structure, but it, 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
“My point of view, which goes against a lot of these ideas about unification, is that no, this is really everything we know about really is about four dimensions. And that you can actually understand a lot of the structures that we've been seeing in fundamental physics and in number theory, just in terms of four dimensions, that it's kind of, it's in some sense I would claim has been a really mistake that physicists have made for decades and decades to try to go to higher dimensions, to try to formulate a theory in higher dimensions. And then you're stuck with the problem of how do you get rid of all these extra dimensions that you've created because we only ever see anything in four dimensions.”
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
“These ideas that we were looking at naturally fit into a context where your theory is kind of four dimensional. So geometry is a big part of this. And we know a lot and feel a lot about two, one, two, three-dimensional geometry.”
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 kind of arcane nature of these things. It was a little bit like being told, well, there are these kind of semi-mystical experiences that you can acquire by a long study and whatever, that it was actually true. I mean, there's actually evidence that this actually works. I'm a little bit wary of trying to give people that kind of thing because I think it's mostly misleading. But one thing to say is that geometry is a large part of it. Maybe one interesting thing to say that's about more recent some of the most recent ideas is that when we think about the geometry of our space and time, it's kind of three-spatial and one time dimension. Physics is in some sense about something that's kind of four dimensional in a way and a really interesting thing about some of the recent developments in number theory have been to realize 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
“I mean, what I find kind of remarkable about this is the way in which these, we've discovered these ideas, but they're actually quite alien to our everyday understanding. We grow up in this three spatial dimensional world and we have intimate understanding of certain kinds of geometry and certain kinds of things. But these things that we've discovered in both math and physics are that they're not at all closely have any obvious connection to kind of human everyday experience. They're really quite different. And I can say some of my initial fascination with this when I was young and starting to learn about it was actually exactly this.”
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 a problem with any of these things to kind of really say what's going on and make accessible is very hard. In this book and elsewhere, I think takes the attitude that kinds of mathematics he's interested in and he's talking about provide kind of a grand unified theory of mathematics. They bring together geometry and number theory and representation theory, a lot of different ideas in a really unexpected way. But I think to me the most fascinating thing is if you look at the kind of grand unified theory of mathematics he's talking about and you look at the physicist kind of ideas about unification, it's more or less the same mathematical objects are appearing in both. So it's this I think there's a really we're seeing a really strong indication that the deepest ideas that we're discovering about physics and some of the deepest ideas that mathematicians are learning about are really intimately connected”
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 at least the way it seems to me, that if you look at physics and look at our most successful laws of fundamental physics, they have a certain kind of mathematical structure. It's based upon certain kind of mathematical objects and geometry connections and curvature, the spinners, the Dirac equation. And this very deep mathematics provides kind of a unifying set of ways of thinking that allow you to make a unified theory of physics. But the interesting thing is that if you go to mathematics and look at what's been going on in mathematics the last 500 years, and even especially recently, there's similarly some kind of unifying ideas which bring together different areas of mathematics, which have been especially powerful in number theory recently. And there's a book, for instance, by Edward Frank. About love and math.”
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 it's actually become very, very complicated. I think it's really interesting to see a lot of what my colleagues in math department are doing. Most of what they're doing, they're doing all sorts of different things, but most of them have some kind of overlap with physics or other. So, I mean, I'm personally interested in one particular aspect of this overlap, which I think has a lot to do with the most fundamental ideas about physics and about mathematics. You kind of see this really, really everywhere at this point.”
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 interesting. But anyway, there was kind of no such distinction then that's more of a modern thing. But anyway, I think these days there's a very interesting space in between the two.”
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 a conventional understanding of the subject that there are two quite different things so that mathematics is about making rigorous statements about these abstract Abstract things, things of mathematics, and proving them rigorously. And physics is about doing experiments and testing various models and that. But I think the more interesting thing is that there's a There's a wide variety of what people do as Much very interesting area. And if you go back kind of far enough in history and look at figures like Newton or something, at that point, you can't really tell, was Newton a physicist or a mathematician. Mathematicians will tell you he's a mathematician, the physicist will tell you who's a physicist.”
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