How are recent DESI experimental results challenging the traditional view of dark energy as a fixed cosmological constant? Are foundational assumptions in Einstein’s general relativity limiting progress in theoretical physics? And how do tensions in cosmological measurements, like the Hubble constant discrepancy, reflect deeper issues in physics?
In this episode, we’ll explore these fundamental questions with none other than Eric Weinstein! Eric is one of the most revered thinkers of our generation. Though not an academic physicist, he proposed a unified theory of physics in 2013, which is supposed to have the potential to explain phenomena that string theory cannot. In a lecture held live at UCSD in April 2025 at the prestigious Astrophysics and Cosmology Seminar, Eric presented an update to his groundbreaking theory. Today, we discuss his fascinating theory, the future of physics and academia, and much more.
Eric is an investor, financial executive, and host of The Portal. He coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits. Eric is a vocal critic of modern academic hierarchies and advocates for advances in scientific theory over an emphasis on experimental results. He proposed a new unified theory of physics in 2013 and has been an active member of the physics community since then.
Outline
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:29 DESI results and the cosmological constant
00:08:33 Why general relativity is fundamentally limited
00:16:11 Elon Musk’s obsession with Mars
00:26:01 Sharing ideas with broader audiences
00:30:56 Dark energy’s evolving nature
00:34:16 Discrepancies in cosmological measurements
00:43:02 Freeing dark energy from constancy
00:50:16 Einstein’s happiest thought, LLMs and physics
00:59:09 Eric’s thoughts on Lenny Susskind, Joe Rogan, and Terrence Howard
01:04:44 Pseudoscience and the debunking community
01:23:55 The future of academia and academic freedom
01:48:45 Political polarization in the United States
01:56:43 October 7th
02:00:50 Remembering Jim Simons and Chern-Simons theory
02:21:10 Outro
Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: What Sean said is, “I, Sean Carroll, am not that interested in labeling things as pseudoscience.” No, Sean, how dare you cast shade and aspersions of the kind that I wouldn’t seek to cast on you, but I will now.
00:00:12
Brian Keating: After the noise died down, I sat down with Eric for a conversation about all of this, his theory of geometric unity. What does it all mean, and why do so many people misunderstand or misrepresent what it’s all about? How can we test it in the lab and in space? And will geometric unity kill off string theory once and for all? Eric Weinstein, welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast, live and in person. Well, not live, but we’re in person. Good to see you.
00:00:36
Eric Weinstein: Oh, we’re live.
00:00:36
Brian Keating: [laughs] We are live.
00:00:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, we are.
00:00:39
Brian Keating: It’s been about two years since you were in that very seat. Podcast seating has changed a little bit, but-
00:00:44
Eric Weinstein: A little bit
00:00:44
Brian Keating: … coming off a, uh, one-hour-plus seminar with you speaking about geometric unity to a rapt audience of string theorists, cosmologists, particle physicists, and fresh men and women. What did you think of it?
00:00:58
Eric Weinstein: I like UCSD, excuse me-
00:01:00
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:01:01
Eric Weinstein: … um, crowd.
00:01:02
Brian Keating: When you heard about the DESI results, um, um, the Cognizant, they call it DESI. We never br- we never read out the acronym. We always say the acronym as if it’s a-
00:01:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I have to be careful-
00:01:10
Brian Keating: … a beautiful DESI
00:01:10
Eric Weinstein: … because I’m married to an Indian woman, uh-
00:01:13
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:01:13
Eric Weinstein: … and the word for country in Hindi is desh.
00:01:16
Brian Keating: Ah.
00:01:16
Eric Weinstein: And so, uh, they refer to themselves as-
00:01:19
Brian Keating: Bharat
00:01:20
Eric Weinstein: … DESI.
00:01:20
Brian Keating: When you heard about this news, I mean, obviously this is not something you postdicted, retrodicted, and put in just before our talk, right? So this is, must have been something that-
00:01:29
Eric Weinstein: It’s from the 1980s.
00:01:30
Brian Keating: Right. So this must have been something that you’ve been thinking about for quite some time.
00:01:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:01:33
Brian Keating: So how, how did you react when you heard the news? Now, we should say in that seat last week was the spokesperson, former spokesperson of DESI, still leader of the project, uh, Kyle Hanson of University of Utah, the Running Utes or the Uting Utes, something like that. Anyway, and he told me, “Well, look, this is a tantalizing hint, but so was dark energy when it was first kind of encountered, so we should not, you know, immediately jump to conclusions. The cosmological constant is dead,” and, and so forth. But where, what was your n- as a human, as a man, Eric, what was your reaction?
00:02:02
Eric Weinstein: Look, I don’t think that it, the results could fall apart. You could have systemic error, and I wouldn’t change my tune. Einstein was already dissatisfied with the term that he introduced because it’s preposterous. It’s a ridiculous term. And it sits there because it’s the only thing that we think can go in that slot without sort of entering a check kiting problem where you have to introduce new fields, uh, and then you create more debt that you have to pay off later. So if you don’t wanna get into that problem, you have to accept it’s some constant that falls out of the heavens, exaggeratedly tiny level, multiplying the metric, because the metric is itself, um, annihilated by its own, its own derivative operator. And so th- because of a product rule in calculus, it has to be lambda some constant times little g mu nu, the metric. And that technically can sort of accommodate dark energy, but it’s preposterous. So assume that the experimental result fell apart. I’d be in the same place I was in the ’80s. This is not going to hold. This is completely artificial. Einstein was correct, and if he’d had the courage of his convictions, I think what he would have done is to recognize that the entire Einstein field equations cannot live on in this fashion, where you’ve got one term that’s perfect and two terms that are ungainly, to say the least, and preposterous to say more. You know, we were talking in particular about a piece of geometric unity that’s supposed to cover the dark energy, and I think that with new tentative results from DESI, people are more willing to listen to the idea that this is a pretty serious challenge to integrate experimental evidence potentially with geometric perfection of Einstein’s setting for general relativity. And so if you think about the idea that the Einstein tensor, capital G mu nu, sits in this equation with these two other terms, one of which is the dark energy term, which is the cosmological constant lambda times little g mu nu, the, the so-called spacetime metric, and that being equal to some constant times the stress-energy tensor. Only one of those three terms has this quality of seeming geometric perfection to it. So all of the attributes that are associated with that g- beautiful capital G mu nu term of Einstein’s curvature have to, in some sense, be carried over to the other terms because they’re set equal.
00:04:56
Brian Keating: Hmm.
00:04:57
Eric Weinstein: Right? So if you, if you take the stress-energy tensor to zero, you basically have to say that if the curvature term in general relativity has a property like di- being divergence free, that is being annihilated by some differential operator, then the dark energy term has to have the same property. And we just don’t have essentially any choice in what that term can be given Einstein’s setting of working over the space of all potential spacetime metrics.
00:05:25
Brian Keating: Now to the, uh, proverbial, uh, the implications of the dark energy changing is, are astonishing if indeed it’s true.
00:05:34
Eric Weinstein: It’s more-
00:05:34
Brian Keating: There are many things that can happen. [laughs] The cosmological constant can slowly change, sort of asymptotically changing to some value. It could get bigger, it could get smaller, right? It changes.
00:05:43
Eric Weinstein: But it’s not gonna be a constant.
00:05:45
Brian Keating: It won’t be a constant, right. So the dark energy term will, will evolve, can evolve. Uh, we parameterize it by these two terms, omega, or W0, WA. Those are both the equations of state which govern the existence and the, the net effect of the scale factor on distance, how the scale factor has evolved over distance, and re- or redshift, its proxy. We call it its proxy, right?
00:06:04
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:06:06
Brian Keating: So one of the implications of a cosmological constant was potentially the heat death of the universe, when entropy would sort of evaluate-
00:06:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:06:13
Brian Keating: … to zero, and, um, or, and we would be in this cold, sterile, barren environment where perhaps only photons and black holes might persist, and maybe not even them. Now things are different. We could have a much more exciting future, uh, awaiting us, the Big Rip, uh, the Big Crunch. Uh, these, these are now back in play, whereas before they weren’t. So-
00:06:32
Eric Weinstein: How about just getting out of general relativity, ’cause it’s enough already?
00:06:35
Brian Keating: How do, how do you mean?
00:06:36
Eric Weinstein: Let me make an analogy that I made in the talk. Many people don’t realize that there is no Leaning Tower of Pisa. They all lean.
00:06:46
Brian Keating: [laughs] There’s more than one.
00:06:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, the pr- the problem is, what do you make of the fact that when you, when you put towers in the s- soil of Pisa, that it’s in this, uh, I don’t know-
00:06:57
Brian Keating: Silty
00:06:58
Eric Weinstein: … silty, sedimentary-
00:07:00
Brian Keating: Unstable
00:07:01
Eric Weinstein: … Ar- Arno River Basin, whatever it is, they all lean. And in fact, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as we call it, isn’t even the one that’s leaning the most.
00:07:09
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:07:10
Eric Weinstein: What I believe is that, um, once you understand that many towers in Pisa lean, you realize that it’s nothing to do with the towers. It’s about the soil. And the soil of general relativity is terrible. It’s the space, infinite dimensional space of what we would call pseudo-Riemannian metrics, and it has this very simple action on it, that is, a, a function that tells us how good or bad any of these things are, how advantaged or disadvantaged, desirable, undesirable, uh, any particular choice of the world would be, and it generates this Einstein curvature tensor, which we love, and it struggles to generate anything to pair it with. So my claim is you’re doing general relativity in the wrong place, and you took a mathematician, Einstein, which he was regarded as a mathematician in his lifetime-
00:08:06
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:08:06
Eric Weinstein: … uh, because he was very mathematical compared to physicists of his day, and you venerated him to the point that he no longer feels like a colleague, right? It’s like w- if one of your friends from high school became the Pope.
00:08:19
Brian Keating: Right, or the president.
00:08:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, no, the president you can think, all right.
00:08:23
Brian Keating: [laughs] Maybe.
00:08:24
Eric Weinstein: That’s still, you could still be badly behaved. But-
00:08:26
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:08:26
Eric Weinstein: … you know, if, uh, if Freddy Fast Fingers became the Pope-
00:08:30
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:08:31
Eric Weinstein: … you wouldn’t know how to hang out with him anymore.
00:08:33
Brian Keating: Speaking of the Pope, rest in peace, Francis, um, we have here a finger puppet of another prisoner. In fact, Galileo Galilei, if you’re, if you’re listening on the NTIA Possible Odd Cast network, um, I’m holding up my favorite finger puppet of my hero, Galileo Galilei, an Italian of some renown, who also created our first forays into relativity and also had some of the first interactions, dangerous as they were, with the Pope, that ended him up in a literal prison. Why is the gravitational potential well of what you’ve called Einstein’s prison-
00:09:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:09:06
Brian Keating: … why is it so much more deep, robust, in, in- inescapable than, than was good old Galilei?
00:09:12
Eric Weinstein: I’m glad you asked that question.
00:09:13
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:09:14
Eric Weinstein: By the way, Einstein never made it into Bohemian Rhapsody, so you have to assume-
00:09:18
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:09:18
Eric Weinstein: … that maybe it was worth it. And you and I visited his prison-
00:09:21
Brian Keating: That’s right
00:09:22
Eric Weinstein: … uh, uh, where he was under house arrest-
00:09:24
Brian Keating: In our chattery
00:09:24
Eric Weinstein: … in Florence. Thank you for taking me there.
00:09:25
Brian Keating: Of course.
00:09:25
Eric Weinstein: Um, what I would say is the problem is the following. Imagine you go to a seminar in theoretical physics. It might begin with the following wor- words. “I’d like to thank everybody for coming. Let us assume, uh, that X one comma three is a space-time manifold.” As soon as you’ve said that, the game is already over. You can’t do physics at the deepest level after you’ve said those words, in my opinion. The problem is Einstein baked in this assumption of a space-time metric at such a fundamental level that we can’t actually do anything about it after the fact.
00:10:07
Brian Keating: Explain what a metric is for those that aren’t-
00:10:08
Eric Weinstein: Sure. A metric, I want you to picture a four-by-four matrix of numbers, and if I flip about the diagonal that goes from the northwest to the southeast, I need that matrix of numbers to be the same. So in other words, I can choose the diagonal however I like, but then I’m only allowed to choose the upper triangle above it, and that will now determine the, the lower triangle below it.
00:10:39
Brian Keating: But these are not real objects. These are mathematical matrices-
00:10:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, but they’re sort of real objects in a way. The four down the middle, the four numbers down the middle of that four-by-four matrix, roughly speaking, correspond to four rulers. Three of those rulers are measuring in the X, Y, and Z direction, so that makes good sense to us.
00:11:00
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:11:01
Eric Weinstein: And you can calibrate them however you like. Uh, so if you want a larger number, in essence, uh, you’re making that ruler larger. The, the fourth number is, in some sense, a time ruler, and so that’s, in a certain sense, calibrating a watch. And then if you think about the remaining elements of that four-by-four matrix, you’re really dealing with six numbers that have to do with six protractors. So that is protractor measuring the angle between X and Y, between X and Z, between Y and Z. So those are three protractors that we probably feel more comfortable with. But then there are these weird three extra numbers which measure the angle between time and the X direction, time and the Y direction, and time and the Z direction. So that’s four rulers down the diagonal of the matrix. Three of them are regular rulers. One of them is a time ruler or a watch that are being calibrated. And the remaining six numbers are three regular protractors measuring an angle of space with space, and then three bizarre protractors that measure the angle of time with X, time with Y, and time with Z. So those 10 numbers chosen at every point is a calibration of a set of instruments measuring length and angle in a generalized sense, and we choose them so that we can at any point in space and time make measurements. That is the cardinal sin, in my opinion, of general relativity, is is that you cannot quantize in any s- meaningful sense the spacetime manifold the way people would’ve imagined it because so much depends on the structure. So it’s a little bit like building the Empire State Building and then realizing that you forgot to drive piles or shore up the bedrock or do anything like that. It’s a little bit late in the game-
00:13:06
Brian Keating: Mm
00:13:06
Eric Weinstein: … once the skyscraper is built to realize you probably should’ve laid the foundation.
00:13:10
Brian Keating: Had to lay it down.
00:13:11
Eric Weinstein: And I think that that’s Einstein’s great sin, if you will-
00:13:15
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:13:15
Eric Weinstein: … is that he built this unbelievable building in the wrong place without doing the foundational work properly, and now we’re locked in.
00:13:25
Brian Keating: So if you’ll do me the indulgence of passing that white circle behind us is a fabric of spacetime. It’s a membrane which we will play out the little game of measurement that you just discussed. So if you’ll hold that, uh, up or hold it horizontally rather.
00:13:41
Eric Weinstein: I have no idea, Brian, what we’re doing.
00:13:42
Brian Keating: I don’t have an idea either. So I’ve got a mass and I’ve got a ruler. Here’s a ruler.
00:13:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:13:47
Brian Keating: So this, if you’re watching, if you’re listening, you’re missing w- you really should be watching as well. So we’ve got this ball, and when it dents and it indents the plane, and we have a ruler and we can have a watch too that measures it. I thought that this was the paradigm that displays how we actually traveling through spacetime, re-envisioning gravity not as a force but as a curvature on this higher dimensional manifold. You can put this back. Thank you for the demonstration.
00:14:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, thank you.
00:14:11
Brian Keating: I’m an experimental physicist, so you know I love to do demonstrations. What, what is wrong with that? I mean, I thought that was the towering achievement. I mean, he was ti- as you pointed out in your talk, Times Man of the Millennium, of the century really, but the millennium really.
00:14:23
Eric Weinstein: I’m-
00:14:23
Brian Keating: How do you swear that?
00:14:24
Eric Weinstein: I am the biggest Einstein fan, so this is not a knock against… I’m not trying to diminish the accomplishment. I’m trying to say that partially what just happened is that he built the most beautiful buildings in the wrong place. Now what do we do?
00:14:41
Brian Keating: Hmm.
00:14:41
Eric Weinstein: So I would like to move them somewhere else.
00:14:45
Brian Keating: Is part of the danger that it led to and gave us, uh, you know, inextricably things like string theory, which we’ve spoken about?
00:14:52
Eric Weinstein: No. No, no, no, no. It’s a corpse.
00:14:52
Brian Keating: What, what’s the sin? What is the, what is the sin then?
00:14:55
Eric Weinstein: Spacetime is a corpse. It’s not a dynamic thing. It’s you- you’ve frozen time, you’ve frozen space. You- you’re saying, “This is what happened,” and i- in a certain sense it’s not a dynamic and inviting playground for an indefinite future.
00:15:14
Brian Keating: What are the broader societal implications though? I mean-
00:15:17
Eric Weinstein: What?
00:15:17
Brian Keating: … is this just a squabble amongst, amongst academicians and-
00:15:21
Eric Weinstein: Come on, Brian. No. Of course not.
00:15:23
Brian Keating: Well, explain it some.
00:15:24
Eric Weinstein: Even people who don’t know any physics at all will say, “Well, you can’t go faster than the speed of light.” That sounds like faster than light travel.
00:15:32
Brian Keating: It’s the modern-day equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, which is immediately gets rejected from the patent office.
00:15:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, and as a result, uh, something that’s four light-years away, uh, like Alpha Centauri, is pretty uninviting as a destination given that it would take, I don’t know, 100,000 years going as fast as man has ever gone to go four light-years. So y- y- you just think about, you know, recorded history for a few thousand years and try to imagine doing that on a ship. It means that we are completely stranded. Uh, as Agneb Bainsen once said, uh, one of the funders of the golden age of relativity, “The stars are too high.”
00:16:12
Brian Keating: We’ve heard a lot of talk more than ever about, you know, the, the benefits and the, and the desire to get to places in our solar system, to inhabit Mars obviously. We’ve, we’ve heard about that nonstop, incessantly from Elon Musk, who I’ve talked to very briefly on this podcast last year. Uh, but not really in, engendering the kind of conversation on a technical level because his mother was on the phone and she didn’t wanna a- have him answer too many difficult physics questions. But the obsession that we have with going to our near, this nearest rock to us, is that also, like Einstein, type of prison, that it is too close to us than the star? The, the the planets are, are too low.
00:16:49
Eric Weinstein: It took me a while to understand why Elon is not… He’s got this thing about Ad Astra, and he wants to go to the stars, and he wants to start by going to Mars, and there’s no plausible way to level chemical rocketry up to becoming a path to the stars, and there’s no allocation to physics. So you, with a very, very, very rich man at this impossible level, you can measure something about his belief structure and his desires that the allocation to physics proper appears to be as close to if not identically zero. And I think what this is, in my opinion, um, involves the fact that he finds Mars to be energizing as an engineering project, and he finds the stars to be enervating as a science project.
00:17:42
Brian Keating: Is it driven by some venal concerns that he happens to have a satellite launching company and, uh-
00:17:48
Eric Weinstein: You know, people always say this about Elon, and I don’t know Elon, but that’s not the vibe I get. You know, at some point I remember somebody informed him, “Today you became the world’s richest man,” and he said something like, “Huh, interesting. Okay, back to work.” And my belief is, is that the opportunity cost for him of not doing something remarkable is so high that he just wants to do remarkable things. I just, I think I’ve gotten really bored of taking everyone and turning them into a money machine.
00:18:31
Brian Keating: Mm.
00:18:31
Eric Weinstein: Uh, obviously money matters to him because money is what gives him freedom to do things. But to constantly have to listen to somebody say, “Well, Trump is only doing this for money. Elon is only doing this for money. All Peter Thiel cares about is money. Marc Andreessen is focused on money. Putin is about money. You know, Netanyahu, the Qatari, uh, connection to Hamas, it’s all about money.” Yeah, that’s not true. That’s not how the world works. That’s how we console our… So it’s like a security blanket that you hold so that you have an explanation for everybody’s actions.
00:19:05
Brian Keating: And why you’re not rich, you have a, a sour grapes, uh, instance.
00:19:09
Eric Weinstein: No, I think that people, you know, in general it’s better to have more money than less. The key question is if you’ve ever met somebody who’s, who can always make more money because they know how to make money, sometimes they get trapped on this treadmill where they can’t afford to get off because if they were to take a week off, they can calculate what the cost of it would be.
00:19:28
Brian Keating: Now you may not want to go here, but then we can always remove this segment, but our, uh, mutual friend or mutual guest at least, uh, Sam Harris on my podcast a year ago, his first and presumably last appearance, uh, and it was a three-hour conversation, I think we got enough out of each other. But he essentially hinted that, uh, Trump is the se- only the second most dangerous person on Earth and that actually Elon is, is more dangerous. And just last week he said similar thing on his own, uh, podcast, um, Waking Up, uh, Making Sense, I always forget, two, two different words, gerunds both, like heating. He said something to the effect again that Elon is the most pathological… Effectively called him a sociopath. The most da- he called him the most dangerous person on Earth with, you know, Trump being only the possible second exception, something to that effect. When you hear these things, again if you want to discuss it, if not we don’t have to, why that level of appropriate from somebody who is otherwise rational?
00:20:21
Eric Weinstein: I don’t want to get into… So, I, I’m gonna decline to get into the value judgment.
00:20:26
Brian Keating: Okay. Let, but-
00:20:27
Eric Weinstein: But I will say if you wanted to turn it into a different style of question, I would be willing to play with you.
00:20:32
Brian Keating: Yeah, please help yourself.
00:20:34
Eric Weinstein: These are very capable people who’ve settled next to the levers of power and are interested in pulling them and trying to do things. So in terms of good or bad, I’m not very interested in having that conversation for reasons-
00:20:48
Brian Keating: Sure
00:20:48
Eric Weinstein: … it’s not that I don’t form private judgments, but I, I found that the online world is not where I choose to share my, my normative judgments as much. The- these are very dangerous people, and they’re very dangerous people because they can do a lot.
00:21:06
Brian Keating: And the people you’re referring to are who exactly? Which-
00:21:09
Eric Weinstein: Trump
00:21:09
Brian Keating: … Trump and Musk.
00:21:10
Eric Weinstein: Elon, RFK Jr, Jay Bhattacharya. These are people who are sitting right next to the levers of power who I think are inclined to action. Now I will point out that you can do, you can be incredibly dangerous by sitting next to the levers of power and doing nothing. So where are we? I don’t really know.
00:21:37
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:21:37
Eric Weinstein: But nobody does.
00:21:38
Brian Keating: We can pivot to something that I found very fascinating which is your talk at Arc which occurred a couple of weeks ago, and I thought you went very deep into certain things but-
00:21:46
Eric Weinstein: I-
00:21:46
Brian Keating: … I would wish that you had gone deeper into-
00:21:47
Eric Weinstein: I’m willing to talk about that but here’s, here’s my frustration. What happens when you give a talk on theories of everything and people want to talk about have you had any good sushi recently? It’s implicitly a statement that the talk did not go well, and I don’t think that’s what’s going on at all. I just gave a talk on dark energy.
00:22:12
Brian Keating: I think it was one of maybe your first in a long time in a, the university in the United States at least.
00:22:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well I, I gave one at the University of Chicago a while back. Um, but yeah, it is. And I think the answer, a- and I’m just gonna be horrible about this. This is a physics-y podcast. You’re a physicist. We’re at a top university. I just gave a talk on dark energy. Why do we want to talk about Sam Harris? I, I, I know Sam, he’s a good friend.
00:22:43
Brian Keating: Oh, of course.
00:22:43
Eric Weinstein: I think Elon does all sorts of amazing things including rockets that might go to Mars, might, he might terraform Mars. Trump is doing all sorts of things to re- reorder the world. But by asking these questions, and this happened at lunch too, so you know, you say, “Here’s why there are three generations of matter.” There are really two responses to that if you’re a physicist. One is, “Wait a minute, did, did you just say what I thought you just said?” Or, “I don’t believe it.” You know, the, the chicken is really good today is not one of those. So every time that we get into these questions I have this feeling of, yeah.
00:23:28
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00:25:11
Eric Weinstein: No, no
00:25:11
Brian Keating: … talked about culture.
00:25:12
Eric Weinstein: With me
00:25:12
Brian Keating: We talked about– No, I know with you, too, but you are a man of many opinions, and-
00:25:17
Eric Weinstein: So I, I wanna talk– I, I will come back on the Into the Impossible podcast-
00:25:23
Brian Keating: If it’s two years from now
00:25:24
Eric Weinstein: … to talk about-
00:25:24
Brian Keating: Yes
00:25:25
Eric Weinstein: … to– No, but-
00:25:26
Brian Keating: Hopefully
00:25:26
Eric Weinstein: … I’ll, I’ll come back next week if you like, to talk about other things.
00:25:29
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:25:29
Eric Weinstein: I’m happy to drive down. I just drove down from LA to talk about dark energy, and I wanna talk about dark energy. I think I’m tired of doing physics this way. If I’m gonna say something like, “Here is the formula for the dark energy,” I don’t think I wanna talk about is Lenny Susskind losing his hair.
00:25:54
Brian Keating: All right. Well, in that case, we can have a short podcast, or we can talk in-
00:25:58
Eric Weinstein: No, no
00:25:58
Brian Keating: … detail person.
00:25:59
Eric Weinstein: We can have a, we can have a long podcast about dark energy.
00:26:01
Brian Keating: But it has to be at a level that the audience is– I can’t let the audience be totally swept up in, uh, G4, you know, X, X to the fourth, and fiber bundles, and pullbacks, and, and double covers, and th- that’s not-
00:26:14
Eric Weinstein: We can talk
00:26:14
Brian Keating: … it’s not gonna serve them
00:26:15
Eric Weinstein: We can talk-
00:26:15
Brian Keating: I wanna talk to– That’s why I asked you. What are the implications for an ordinary person? What, what, what are we gonna talk about next?
00:26:19
Eric Weinstein: I don’t wanna talk about the implication for the ordinary person. Somehow, the ordinary person very often has bought The Elegant Universe.
00:26:29
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:26:29
Eric Weinstein: Do they know string theory? I don’t think they do.
00:26:31
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:26:31
Eric Weinstein: I don’t think they know what a Calabi-Yau manifold is. I don’t think that they understand what, what is meant by l- you know, tiny vibrating loops of string. I don’t think they know what Schrödinger’s cat is or what an eigenfunction or an eigenvalue is. I don’t think they know what a Hilbert space is. But we’ve, we’ve l- lured them out into pseudo-physics space, and they’re completely conversant in entanglement of all things. They know about the double-slit experiment. Now, do they really know about the double-slit experiment? I don’t think so.
00:27:05
Brian Keating: No. If it has quantum healing properties, they might.
00:27:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So my, my, my claim is we’re on this weird agreement with our audience that we’ve given them a tiny number of ideas. We hit them over and over again, and those people become pseudo-conversant in quantum entanglement, quantum computing, quantum cryptography. They talk about quantum nonstop. They have no idea what the quantum is because we don’t actually talk about the quantum. And as a result of this, when you try to say something else, people have a, a very strong sense of, “Well, we can’t talk about that,” because people don’t know, uh, what an elliptic operator is. Well, if we talked about the Atiyah-Singer index theorem as much as we talk about some guy named Schrödinger who had a cat, I, I don’t ever wanna hear about this cat again in my life. I don’t wanna hear about the double-slit experiment ad nauseam. We’re barely aware of Aharonov-Bohm effect. I got to talk to Yakir Aharonov on a Zoom call-
00:28:20
Brian Keating: Hmm
00:28:20
Eric Weinstein: … a guy who figured out in 1959, Brian, now there’s some prior art, but in 1959 he figured out together with David Bohm that there was some sort of non-local thing happening that was entirely classical but could only be detected by a quantum mechanical interference pattern, and that we didn’t understand electromagnetism. That should be as or more famous than Schrödinger’s cat.
00:28:48
Brian Keating: Well, to get it to that level, we have to explain what is a potential, what is a, you know, holonomy, what is– I mean, you’re welcome to do it. I’ve heard you talk about it briefly. But my problem with the way that these things, discussions come about, I think the original sin was Hawking’s. Hawking sold the public that they could get a glimpse into reality, uh, which was providing nothing of the sort, and he sold them a real bill of goods, that string theory was the final theory of everything, and that once we understood string theory, not physics, we would see, quote, “the mind of God.” That’s the last three letter, words of his book. To the extent that anyone’s ever read it or understood it, he took for granted that things like inflation took place. We have no proof of that. He did a lot of things, tricks, he called them. Uh, “Well, you just make time an imaginary number. It’s just a trick. Don’t worry about it.” And then the rest of the book is about the Hawking-Hartle theorem, right? So, uh, which is complete mathematically un- you know, beautiful mathematics, perhaps, but completely physically untested, unfounded. So my, my problem is when you talk to a general person, I believe, by the way, and I’ve made this controversial statement before, that I believe scientists have a, a, a moral obligation to explain things to the public who pay our salaries. And part of the reason that, yes, I do wanna talk to you about non-physics things, because we’re living in an age in which the implications of not paying those dues to the public are coming back to bite us squarely on the ass, and some of those have to do with politics.
00:30:03
Eric Weinstein: I’m happy to talk about the funding situation for science.
00:30:05
Brian Keating: Right.
00:30:05
Eric Weinstein: That’s something that I care about.
00:30:06
Brian Keating: That’s what is on my-
00:30:07
Eric Weinstein: But-
00:30:07
Brian Keating: Yes. Academia in general.
00:30:09
Eric Weinstein: But my, my-
00:30:09
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:30:10
Eric Weinstein: … here’s my point, and I’m gonna be clear about it.
00:30:13
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:30:13
Eric Weinstein: I think I’ve done my last podcast where I say, yes, I have some ideas about why there are three generations of fermionic matter. I think I can say something about why, uh, the dark energy is not a cosmological constant. And when I say these things It can’t be, “Yeah, that’s very interesting. I noticed you’re wearing a new jacket today. Is that Brooks Brothers?” Like, that thing basically is a dig. So if you wanna talk about non-physics things, I wanna talk about non-physics things with you, but I do wanna know why are we not… I, I gave a formula for dark energy
00:30:56
Brian Keating: You gave an interpretation on how dark energy can arise, as I read it.
00:31:01
Eric Weinstein: I gave a-
00:31:01
Brian Keating: Explain how you gave a formula in the context of GR and the context of the Friedmann equations-
00:31:05
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:31:05
Brian Keating: … as we teach our students. We have an equation, we have two equations, and what, there’s two Friedmann equations. One is for the first derivative of the scale factor, and one is for the second derivative. We cannot measure the scale factor, so we use proxies to detect, to determine what the scale factor is.
00:31:17
Eric Weinstein: Should we say what the Friedmann e- equations are?
00:31:19
Brian Keating: Sure, yeah. Please do.
00:31:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:31:20
Brian Keating: Actually, you should.
00:31:21
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know the best way of saying this to your audience because I don’t think a lot of them will know this stuff, but if you have something like a Herald’s trumpet, so you have a very long tube that flares progressively and then very violently at the end, right? In a certain sense, that’s a two-dimensional model, the surface of that, of a four-dimensional structure that would be analogous to this sort of standard, uh, cosmological model. That is, the axis along the trumpet, so going from the mouthpiece to the f- flared bell at the end, think of that as time-like, and think of the radius of the cross-sectional circles as being the scale factor. So effectively, the idea is that I’ve got a round symmetry, which is the various cross-sections, where the circumference or the radius changes as a function of how far I am towards the bell of the trumpet. That extra symmetrical assumption is what goes into these basic cosmological models, and this is th- the weird origin of this, the universe is expanding, and then every smart person thinks, into what? And the answer is, it’s not into what. What they really mean is that the circumference of the cross-sections is getting bigger in the metric that is measuring the size of the cross-sections. That is what’s going on. It’s not get- it’s not expanding. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve assumed that there’s an axis that is akin to going the length of the trumpet. You assume that there’s a n- not a circle in the case of a trumpet, but an entire three-dimensional sphere, th- th- that is the two-dimensional sphere that we have, like the surface of a beach ball, but a one-dimensional higher analog, and that thing greatly simplifies the Einstein field equations because the only parameter that matters is how big is the radius given that I’ve determined that it has to have spherical symmetry. So you’re using symmetry to get rid of a lot of the possibilities in Einstein’s equation. You’re saying the only thing that matters is the size of the cross-section.
00:33:43
Brian Keating: Okay. That is certainly not how we teach [laughs] the Friedmann equations. We teach it from an observable per- perspective, so I’ll explain how an astronomer does it. So we used to take these plates, this is an actual 60-year-old plate, so be careful with it, taken by Margaret Burbidge of renowned astronomy, uh, fame, who was, uh, her husband used to occupy this very office that we’re in now. And you would lay down slits on top of it, and they would make diffraction, not, not unlike the, uh, t- double-slit experiment, but with photons, and they would, uh, demonstrate the red shifting-
00:34:13
Eric Weinstein: My apologies to cat lovers everywhere.
00:34:15
Brian Keating: [laughs] Actually, according to our f- mutual friend, Sean Carroll-
00:34:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:34:19
Brian Keating: … it doesn’t say, he never said the cat was alive or dead, apparently.
00:34:23
Eric Weinstein: Really?
00:34:23
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:34:23
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t know that.
00:34:24
Brian Keating: Something about that. Anyway.
00:34:25
Eric Weinstein: Anyway.
00:34:25
Brian Keating: So the observables that we see, we’d, again, we, we would love to be able to measure the scale factor. We cannot do that. We s- have proxies that measure the scale factor, uh, things like the luminosity of objects, the red shift, uh, that they appear at, and other things, uh, their angular diameter, that standard rulers and standard candles, et cetera, will obtain, and there’s new things as well. And interestingly enough, each one of those can sample the rate of change of the scale factor, the rate of change of the rate of change of the scale factor, and just like we have velocity, acceleration, you know, what you call the, the third derivative of position. Do you know what that’s called?
00:35:03
Eric Weinstein: Don’t, don’t say it.
00:35:04
Brian Keating: Say it.
00:35:05
Eric Weinstein: Jerk?
00:35:05
Brian Keating: What’d you call me?
00:35:06
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:35:06
Brian Keating: I actually had my students doing that the other day. They called me a jerk, and they, I let them get away with it. And so we have, uh, actually, apparently, we can measure cosmic jerk [laughs] which is not me, according to m- uh, most people. Um, so we have these proxies that measure it, and that tells us, all the observations tell us with a handful of five exceptions, the universe s- appears as if all these galaxies, like this guy here-
00:35:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:35:27
Brian Keating: … NGC 6437, are moving away from us via the Doppler shift, which is towards the red, not towards the blue. Uh, and the implication is that the universe is getting bigger. The coordinate distance, if you have a ruler that’s expanding along with the universe, that’s not changing. That we call the co-moving distance. And things like DESI or the eventual Simons Observatory and, and the Hubble Space Telescope, they sample the red shift distribution at different red shifts. The dis- the exciting discovery of the last few years is not the measurement of the Hubble constant, which proves there’s no doubt the universe is expanding. Again, not into what, it’s between what, right? It’s a surface of-
00:36:04
Eric Weinstein: Can, can we just say it my way, and then you tell me if you don’t like it?
00:36:06
Brian Keating: Sure. Okay
00:36:07
Eric Weinstein: … that the successive cross-sections, the three-dimensional cross-sections of pure space at different instants of time have metrics on them that indicate that the Distances, uh, as measured in each cross-section are getting lo- larger as the time, uh, develops.
00:36:30
Brian Keating: That’s right. So that, such that when we observe light from a galaxy or from a supernova or from a baryon acoustic oscillation, which is what DESI’s measuring, we are not seeing it as it is right now. We’re seeing it as it was when that light was emitted, propagated along light cones as light does, and then, uh, we can actually translate that back to the physical separation at the time of emission or the physical separation today, which is called the proper distance. We have different proxies for those, then we plug those into, again, the, uh, this, this redshift-distance relationship. And the startling thing is not that the people seem to disagree that the universe is expanding.
00:37:04
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:37:04
Brian Keating: There are people that say that. But that the rate derived from different measurements is in violent disagreement at the greater than five sigma level, greater than the level that DESI currently excludes lambda being a cosmological con- dark energy being a cosmological constant, which is only 4.2 sigma. So, and just as an aside, so a physicist, you know, there’s a joke, like we invite you down-
00:37:23
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I, I love hearing this side of you.
00:37:25
Brian Keating: Okay, so you wanted to go deep.
00:37:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.
00:37:26
Brian Keating: Let’s go deep. Okay, fine. So, um, thank you. Um, that makes one person, uh, [laughs] in the audience. Uh, but that’s okay. We’re not doing it for, for ratings and numbers. Uh, the, the point is this measurement-
00:37:38
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:37:38
Brian Keating: … um, it has to be, typically we say one in five sigma is, is sort- a five sigma result is, you know, evidence almost, you know, beyond a s- reasonable doubt because in a statistical normal distribution, that only happens once in a million.
00:37:51
Eric Weinstein: Assuming that there isn’t either-
00:37:53
Brian Keating: Systematic errors or, correct
00:37:54
Eric Weinstein: … a systematic error or a bizarre chance where-
00:37:57
Brian Keating: Yeah. And I tell my students, the actual hard part of being a scientist is not making the measurement, it’s assessing how ignorant you are of what you’ve measured.
00:38:04
Eric Weinstein: Very nice.
00:38:05
Brian Keating: So in the case of, of DESI, they’re able to exclude a region of the universe, parameter space that describes the Friedman equations, which inc- includes lambda cosmological term. They exclude that at 4.2 sigma, which is more like 1 in 60,000 chance of happening by, by some ra- uh, random chance if everything’s Gaussian distributed, which, you know, they actually believe it’s quite close to that.
00:38:26
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:38:27
Brian Keating: So now we have these tensions, we have these anxieties, and I’ve said frequently that I want to hire a psychologist for the field to alleviate our anxieties and our frustrations, but there’s the Hubble tension.
00:38:37
Eric Weinstein: We’re look- Well, sorry.
00:38:37
Brian Keating: Yeah, go on.
00:38:38
Eric Weinstein: We’re looking to get anxious-
00:38:39
Brian Keating: Right
00:38:40
Eric Weinstein: … because that’s exciting.
00:38:41
Brian Keating: Right.
00:38:42
Eric Weinstein: All right.
00:38:42
Brian Keating: As, as Leonard Cohen said, you know, the cracks are how the light gets in. There’s a crack in everything. But when you hear these observables, do you think, uh, I’m just curious ’cause I’ve never really understood the mathematical approach that you-
00:38:54
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:38:55
Brian Keating: … What’s your attitude towards these data, like when you look at them?
00:38:58
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know, a- and that’s one of the reasons why I’m, I’m really keen to talk to you and your department. Look, the magic of physics, and I’m not trained as a physicist, I’m a mathematician, but the magic of physics is that it’s the most beautiful and the cleanest theory you could possibly have mixed in with the most infection, dirt, grit, everything, [laughs] everything irregular about the universe.
00:39:27
Brian Keating: I believe it, yes.
00:39:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So I have, like, these two favorite waves on planet Earth, one of which, I’m gonna butcher the name, in Tahiti is Teahupoho.
00:39:34
Brian Keating: Okay.
00:39:36
Eric Weinstein: And it is glassy perfection. You just can’t believe anything is this regular and powerful and-
00:39:44
Brian Keating: Tubular. [laughs]
00:39:44
Eric Weinstein: It, yeah, it looks like, uh, some- it was waiting for some Japanese woodcut artist to paint it, or who knows, whatever.
00:39:50
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:39:50
Eric Weinstein: And the other wave that I love is the Shipsterns Bluff wave in Tasmania, which has an, an underground sea floor that creates waves within waves within waves, like ledges and things. It’s like a skate park in the wave every time it goes. And they, they’re the opposite ends of beauty. And so I think about physics as the marriage of Teahupoho and Shipsterns, the most beautiful and pristine stuff, and the most dirt you can possibly imagine. And what I see in this potential result is Einstein was divided. Einstein knew that his curvature tensor was perfect, and he knew that the cosmological constant was an embarrassment. And he had no love for the stress-energy tensor when he said that, “My equation is like a mansion, one wing of which is made of fine marble, the other is w- made of cheap wood.” So you’ve got fine marble, greatest blunder. Fine marble plus greatest blun- blunder equals cheap wood. This is a call to rescue Einstein, to say we’ve been afraid to, to question. And sorry, but you locked it… The, the problem was the house made of, the wing made of fine marble, because we couldn’t move that. We couldn’t touch that. We couldn’t go underneath the foundations. Nobody wanted to crack it. Nobody wants to destroy it. Everybody loves it. They like testing it and say, “Oh, Einstein still tests beautifully.” Okay, but it’s preventing everything else from moving along with it, and I think that that’s what’s going on with the dark energy. So my claim is, assume that, that the DESI result evaporates. I will not change my opinion that the cosmological constant has to go. Einstein, I think, knew that it had to go. But the problem is it’s connected in a complex to these other two terms.
00:41:54
Brian Keating: Is there the danger of, you know, what I call the Nancy Kerrigan problem, which, you know, one out of 1,000-
00:41:59
Eric Weinstein: The Nancy Kerrigan problem.
00:42:01
Brian Keating: One out of-
00:42:01
Eric Weinstein: Showing our age. I love it.
00:42:02
Brian Keating: [laughs] I know. One out of 1,000 of our audience will understand. So she was abused by, uh, Tonya Harding. I think she was, uh, a, a commission-
00:42:09
Eric Weinstein: And conversely.
00:42:10
Brian Keating: Yeah? I didn’t know that.
00:42:11
Eric Weinstein: I think Tonya Harding was the only woman to land a triple axel-
00:42:14
Brian Keating: Yeah
00:42:14
Eric Weinstein: … in competition.
00:42:15
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:42:16
Eric Weinstein: And because she wasn’t as refined-
00:42:18
Brian Keating: Nice
00:42:18
Eric Weinstein: … s- there’s a sense that, uh, in figure skating, we prioritize the princess rather than fully appreciate the athleticism. So I think that Tonya Harding was just, like, a dastardly, just a bad force in the world.
00:42:32
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:42:32
Eric Weinstein: And I think that that’s real. But I also think- That it came from somewhere super interesting
00:42:37
Brian Keating: I, I love the fact that when they made the movie, uh, about it called I, Tonya, they got a very horrendous, hideous, even hideous woman to play Tonya Harding. Do you know who that was?
00:42:47
Eric Weinstein: No, I don’t.
00:42:47
Brian Keating: Margot Robbie. They got Margot Robbie to play Tonya Harding.
00:42:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, is this this woman who’s mid?
00:42:52
Brian Keating: [laughs] Mid, yes. According to some, she’s mid.
00:42:55
Eric Weinstein: I, I-
00:42:55
Brian Keating: I think-
00:42:55
Eric Weinstein: The only thing I know about Margot Robbie-
00:42:57
Brian Keating: I don’t have eyes. Right
00:42:57
Eric Weinstein: … is, is that there was a, there was a, a me-
00:42:59
Brian Keating: A meme
00:43:00
Eric Weinstein: … a meme. Margot Robbie is mid.
00:43:01
Brian Keating: Mid, right. Yeah.
00:43:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:43:02
Brian Keating: On what planet? I don’t know. She’s n- second only to our wives in beauty, right? But, but if you look, they did a survey once and they said, you know, “Who’s the most handsome man alive?” And, you know, we weren’t eligible at the time. Uh, so they took, they took Brad Pitt and, you know, he won most handsome man alive. And then if you do a funny thing, you, you take an image of Brad Pitt and you split it down the middle, and you reflect it across, you know, the left to the right, and he comes out grotesque, hideous, disgusting. And, and yet I was always told symmetry, super symmetry even.
00:43:29
Eric Weinstein: Fear- fearful symmetry.
00:43:31
Brian Keating: Fearful symmetry. The fear- you know, the tiger’s eye. Isn’t it true that, that it’s where these things break down, not the beauty, not the perfection, not the, you know, uh, Nancy Kerrigan-esque nature of things. But that’s really what’s interesting. In other words, it would be less interesting if the cosmological constant were constant than if it’s finely tuned or rolling down to an eventual value which will disappear, right? In other words, you’re saying the cosmolo- there’s no doubt there’s a, there’s a dark energy component now.
00:43:59
Eric Weinstein: Yes.
00:43:59
Brian Keating: There’s not a constant. Maybe it’s a constant, maybe it’s not. Do you doubt that the universe possesses currently a dark energy component? I mean, we have-
00:44:06
Eric Weinstein: No
00:44:07
Brian Keating: … 20 sigma compos- uh, uh, evidence for it
00:44:08
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. I- look, I’m giving a formula for dark energy.
00:44:11
Brian Keating: Right. Okay. So-
00:44:12
Eric Weinstein: So the question is we, what-
00:44:13
Brian Keating: Why now? Why here? Why, like Nancy asked, I didn’t ask the question that she asked. Why now? Why do we live in an era where the dark energy is a value that is- happens to be the exact amount to make the universe also spatially flat? Those two things should be completely unrelated, and yet they are. Why?
00:44:28
Eric Weinstein: I don’t even understand the question. Let me tell you why.
00:44:30
Brian Keating: Okay.
00:44:31
Eric Weinstein: My claim is you have two separate problems. You have like a cosmological constant problem and you have a flatness problem. Wouldn’t it be better to have one problem rather than two? I would vote sure.
00:44:41
Brian Keating: Sure.
00:44:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:44:42
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:44:43
Eric Weinstein: So now the idea is if you’ve got some sort of a field that has to equal another field, and the field hap- one of these two fields happens to be very close to zero, the flatness problem, the only thing that’s available to counterbalance it is a field that should be allowed to move. So when you set two things equal and you say one of them is fixed, then you’ve got a real problem, right? Because now the idea-
00:45:07
Brian Keating: Right
00:45:07
Eric Weinstein: … is that the universe is very, very close to being flat, yes?
00:45:10
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:45:10
Eric Weinstein: Where we are.
00:45:11
Brian Keating: Yep.
00:45:11
Eric Weinstein: And you have this question of and if the cosmological constant is constant, then it has to be very, very small, and there’s no reason to think that it should be, and that’s the worst prediction in all of physics supposedly.
00:45:25
Brian Keating: Right, right.
00:45:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Bullshit. That’s not real. What it is is it’s a field with what’s called a vacuum expectation value, and you can lure it higher or lower depending upon what the field on the other side, the curvature field is. So imagine that two things are allowed to both move, and they’re set equal to each other. You depress one of these things, you’ll end up depressing the other.
00:45:52
Brian Keating: The flatness has always been traditionally linked to inflation as sort of establishing initial conditions-
00:45:58
Eric Weinstein: And anthropics
00:45:59
Brian Keating: And anthro- okay, so let’s go there. Actually, we, we both know very many people who traffic in what’s called intelligent design, have talked about fine-tuning from an a designer perspective. We’ve talked about this in this very room. I don’t want to talk about that again. But the fact is, in that chair a month ago sat Fred Adams, who’s an eminent cosmologist, particle astrophysicist from Michigan. He was very adamant that there’s actually not that much fine-tuning. There’s actually not that much anthropomorphis- uh, uh, arguments that we could use, anthropic arguments. Uh, it’s actually less than the tuning of a, of a tuning fork, which, uh, to our ear sounds very precisely tuned, but actually could be a percent, 1%, or tuning a radio. Remember radios? You know, nowadays tuning in YouTube, we don’t do that so much. But remember radios, you had to tune it. You had to get it within a couple of kilohertz of a megahertz baseband frequency, right? They’re talking parts in a million maybe, something like that. Um, but now the fine-tuning that he claims necessary to explain things like the cosmo- no, these are s- these are very rough. They’re 3%, 4% fine-tuning. He doesn’t consider it fine-tuning at all. So does that have imp- impact on the, the, the need or the statement that you repeated, that the cosmological constant is the worst problem in all of physics, the worst-
00:47:10
Eric Weinstein: Oh, but I repeated it-
00:47:11
Brian Keating: Pre-
00:47:11
Eric Weinstein: … because it’s a trope.
00:47:12
Brian Keating: No, I know. I know. I know. It’s not your original theory
00:47:14
Eric Weinstein: But my feeling about it is that in general, we repeat too much stuff that we’ve heard and we do it ad nauseam, and that, that we become large language models ourselves as scientists when we do it, and then you don’t even realize it. You may know what the real truth is, but your students don’t, and two generations later they can’t even think, and that’s a really serious problem. So in my opinion, um, people want to immediately take whatever our current model is and ask about themselves and their lives, and I think this is terrible. I think this is incredibly narcissistic. First question about science should not be what does it do for humanity? How does this make a difference to the man in the street? It’s like, you know what? The man in the street lies in his bed thinking about his brief time on earth and wondering if there’s a purpose to it all, just as much as everybody else, and the man in the street deserves to know we’re not here to solve your free will question. We’re not here yet to tell you whether God exists or what quantum, uh, measurement means. We’re at an earlier stage. We’re finding some stuff out, and we’ve got preliminary results, and if you base your notion of free will or God’s love or whatever on some sort of-
00:48:35
Brian Keating: Purpose, teleology
00:48:35
Eric Weinstein: … or, or eigenvalue spectrum, th- that’s a mistake. Stop making it about you. It’s not about you Ultimately, the things that I care about and I think about in this domain are not about life. Now, it may be that life can only contemplate them in certain regions, so that- that’s a place where you’re not being narcissistic. You’re saying, “Look, but maybe nobody lives in the middle of a black hole because it’s too violent, and therefore there is no science being done there.”
00:49:07
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:49:07
Eric Weinstein: That makes good sense to me.
00:49:08
Brian Keating: And I heard on Joe Rogan that actually the universe is inside of a black hole recently. I didn’t know that.
00:49:13
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t catch that episode.
00:49:14
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:49:15
Eric Weinstein: You understand what I’m getting at?
00:49:16
Brian Keating: I am.
00:49:16
Eric Weinstein: Is that we- we- we’ve… I- I’m tired of pandering to taxpayers.
00:49:22
Brian Keating: I’m not, but we have different m- masters, shall we say.
00:49:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, my feeling is, is that I’m not receiving money from taxpayers.
00:49:29
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:49:29
Eric Weinstein: You are.
00:49:30
Brian Keating: Yeah.
00:49:31
Eric Weinstein: And I’m saying the taxpayers can- can take a hike.
00:49:35
Brian Keating: No, I know. You’ve talked about SEAL Team Six, and we need the, we need to give them the guns and butter and support and cocaine and lawyers. Um, but you said s-
00:49:42
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Wait, you… Did you do-
00:49:43
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:49:43
Eric Weinstein: … Warren Zevon-
00:49:44
Brian Keating: Yes
00:49:44
Eric Weinstein: … and Milton Friedman at the same time?
00:49:46
Brian Keating: At the same time.
00:49:46
Eric Weinstein: Said lo- lawyers, guns, and butter.
00:49:48
Brian Keating: Guns, butter. [laughs] Exactly. I made an amalgam. I made a…
00:49:51
Eric Weinstein: Yes.
00:49:51
Brian Keating: You mentioned something along the way just a minute ago, but you also mentioned it at the end of your talk.
00:49:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:49:56
Brian Keating: You talked about an LLM. You kind of gave the, you know, gave the Bill Gatesian or, or, you know, kind of, um, uh, I don’t know, Andrew Yang, or… Physicists’ days are numbered perhaps, but, but I wanna push back with my requisite love and respect.
00:50:10
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.
00:50:11
Brian Keating: I actually-
00:50:11
Eric Weinstein: I hate when you do that. Don’t do that
00:50:12
Brian Keating: … I don’t believe… I don’t-
00:50:13
Eric Weinstein: No, no, if you have something to say-
00:50:14
Brian Keating: Okay, fine. I have something to say
00:50:14
Eric Weinstein: … don’t hide behind being the devil’s advocate.
00:50:16
Brian Keating: I don’t think LLMs are gonna take your job. They might take my job. No, I don’t think they’re gonna take my job either. I think they’re gonna augment it. I think they’re gonna give me superhuman powers that I never had before. My students are gonna have superhuman powers, to be exact. But I wanna take it back to your friend and mine, Einstein, so here he is. You know what he said was his happiest thought, right?
00:50:33
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:50:33
Brian Keating: What titillated him more than any… He said, “Titillated me,” that if this happened, it would experience no gravitational force. He said if r- in free fall, an observer, freely falling observer experiences no gravitational force.
00:50:45
Eric Weinstein: I was convinced it was gonna be about Hedy Lamarr.
00:50:47
Brian Keating: No, it wasn’t about Hedy. It was about, uh, maybe his cousin, one of his other cousins.
00:50:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:50:52
Brian Keating: [laughs] We’ll keep it clean. How can an LLM have a happy thought? How can it visualize the visceral sensation that every one of us knows as I just said that, as you go over a rollercoaster’s crest or you, uh, jump over a speed bump going too fast, as I sometimes do, that visceral feeling in the pit of your stomach that you have no gravitational force field. How is an, how is ChatGPT 7.0 going to in- intuit what that feels like and then know that it titillates it? What, what are we gonna do? Blow a capacitor and, and, and, you know, feed it some extra tokens? A- and, and by the way, we train these language mo- I think we’ve imprisoned ourselves. Let me, let me take a step back. I had this conversation with, um, Terry Sejnowski, who’s one of the partners with Hinton and, and, and Yann LeCun and many other people. I said there’s a c- there’s a concept of lock-in. You know about this? That, that there are certain things that are locked in because of technical choices. Technical debt is r- a relative concept. Uh, for ex- instance, they say the altitude the, of the… The Hubble Space Telescope was only able to take the Hubble Deep Field because of the width of a horse’s ass. Have you heard this before?
00:51:57
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:51:57
Brian Keating: Okay. So the height that a rocket gets to is proportional to the cross-sectional error, uh, uh, area of the booster rocket that launches it. The booster rockets for the Space Shuttle were made, which launched the Hubble Space Telescope, and its repair missions, which is why I mentioned the Hubble Deep Field, they were made in Morton-Thiokol in Utah, and they were launched from Cape, uh, Canaveral. You had to get those boosters from Utah to Cape Canaveral. There’s no way that they couldn’t fly them. You had to take them by rail. Now, rail, car- rail, width of a standard gauge railroad track was set by roads which go back to the Roman Empire, the standard width of a, of a, of a two-chariot, a two-horse drawn, driven chariot, and that width is the horse’s ass times two, okay? So the eventual altitude, the cross-sectional area’s dependence on that is based on the width that someone chose for the standard gauge theory, gauge of a railroad 2,100 years ago.
00:52:52
Eric Weinstein: Is this what you think about when I don’t visit for two years? [laughs]
00:52:55
Brian Keating: [laughs] This is what happens. This is why you gotta come more often.
00:52:57
Eric Weinstein: All right. Good.
00:52:58
Brian Keating: We gotta have more, uh, more of those, uh, King’s Gambit-
00:53:00
Eric Weinstein: Go on
00:53:01
Brian Keating: … uh, uh, drinks like we had last night. So there’s a lock-in. I think we’ve been locked in by the marriage of ChatGPT, or the LLMs rather, and GPUs. GPUs were started for, for fast, you know, for playing GTA VI or, you know, Minecraft or whatever-
00:53:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:53:16
Brian Keating: … and LLMs were started to, you know, basically compete, uh, you know, uh, tokens, you know, given tokens. There’s no physics in that. They’re ma- they’re solving matrix equations, and they’re vectorizing problems in a large, multi-dimensional, almost infinite dimensional vector space, right? That’s how we’re getting, uh, s- uh, weight functions that then train neural networks, and then we train them on human interest data. There’s nowhere in that you’re gonna get physics out unless that physics of the theory of everything is lurking within there. So remember, my claim is that we’re not gonna get-
00:53:46
Eric Weinstein: Wait, what? I don’t… I’m trying to even understand this point.
00:53:48
Brian Keating: Okay, this is might be too, too-
00:53:49
Eric Weinstein: I like it
00:53:49
Brian Keating: … too advanced. Okay. [laughs] My claim is that physicists’ job security is maintained, or at least LLMs aren’t gonna take it away. Some other type of, of AI may take our jobs.
00:54:01
Eric Weinstein: Doge may take your job away.
00:54:02
Brian Keating: Doge? Mm, no, I think I’m, I’m safe for now. I’ve, I’ve got the Simons Foundation as, as an-
00:54:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but-
00:54:08
Brian Keating: … as a keeper
00:54:08
Eric Weinstein: … it’s not your job-
00:54:08
Brian Keating: [laughs]
00:54:09
Eric Weinstein: … it’s somebody else’s.
00:54:10
Brian Keating: That’s my, my-
00:54:10
Eric Weinstein: Your competitor’s job
00:54:10
Brian Keating: … my grandson’s.
00:54:11
Eric Weinstein: You, you should be backing Doge-
00:54:12
Brian Keating: My grandson’s
00:54:12
Eric Weinstein: … then everybody else is gonna disappear. Keep going.
00:54:14
Brian Keating: That’s right. Now, how do you think I got to where I am? The literal Doge. I mean, Galileo was with the literal Doge 2,000, uh, 400 years ago. Anyway, my point is that we are locked in because of the success of NVIDIA plus ChatGPT.
00:54:26
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
00:54:26
Brian Keating: There’s almost no chance that some successor type of AI chip plus model, I don’t know what, what it would be, topological m- neural network, whatever it would be, that that can supplant anything because If, if you stipulate that we’re- it’s so successful, it’s a victim of its own success. Nvidia’s the biggest, one of the biggest companies on Earth. ChatGPT is running away with, with, uh, 97, 93% of all LLM and, and, um, and GPT type of requests. Where is the physics type of AI, a physics-based AI-
00:54:59
Eric Weinstein: Physics-based AI
00:54:59
Brian Keating: … that’s gonna create new physics of the kind that Einstein did when he visualized the gedanken experiment of free fall?
00:55:05
Eric Weinstein: I am so confused by this question, so maybe we’ll just start playing-
00:55:08
Brian Keating: Maybe I can, maybe, maybe I should do it again. Yeah.
00:55:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:55:10
Brian Keating: Okay.
00:55:10
Eric Weinstein: So here’s what I’m trying to understand.
00:55:12
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:55:13
Eric Weinstein: Are you saying somehow that you don’t think LLMs are gonna be able to push the physics frontier?
00:55:17
Brian Keating: I don’t think that they’re gonna surpass… Yes, I, I would say that-
00:55:21
Eric Weinstein: I disagree.
00:55:22
Brian Keating: Okay. What evidence do you have that they would be able to do that? They haven’t solved any, uh, initio new problems. They’ve actually been able to be quite good at visualizing smoke and, and turbulence and things like that.
00:55:33
Eric Weinstein: I think that if people have left really good ideas in the literature or somewhere that can be in- ingested into the corpus that, that’s used to train these things, you could find out that the people who are being ignored by the physics profession are understood by the LLMs.
00:56:01
Brian Keating: Right.
00:56:01
Eric Weinstein: And so if you think about-
00:56:02
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:56:02
Eric Weinstein: … what, what Jared Diamond did in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he weirdly didn’t seem to do any original research, and it was entirely original. He took things that weren’t known to all fit together, and he came up with an entire line of attack that I don’t think was really heard of before. If an LLM has never read Shakespeare, and you say, uh, “I realize it’s my wife’s birthday in two days. Could you write me a poem comparing her to a summer’s day?” The LLM will take a stab at it.
00:56:40
Brian Keating: Sure. It’s good for-
00:56:41
Eric Weinstein: And it will think, okay, what has anybody ever said about comparing a, a beloved woman to a summer’s day?
00:56:46
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:56:49
Eric Weinstein: I think that you will find that in part because this era has been so unethical in physics, that the LLMs stand to do much better than they would in an ethical era.
00:57:03
Brian Keating: I’m shocked to hear you say that, Eric.
00:57:04
Eric Weinstein: Say more.
00:57:05
Brian Keating: I’m shocked to hear you say that. First of all, there’s some sort of landscape in which these things evolve. These, these LLMs will crawl. They will crawl.
00:57:12
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:57:12
Brian Keating: You’re absolutely right. They will crawl, and they will dwell in certain s- shall we say, potential valley minimum.
00:57:19
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:57:19
Brian Keating: Right? Where will, where will those be? They will be where the orthodox scientific output is, where the published peer-reviewed scientific literature takes them.
00:57:28
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no.
00:57:29
Brian Keating: They will not go to… I get an email a week from somebody, so much so that I’ve now established an office hours type thing where I, Brian Keating, I, uh, Professor Keating, I’ve obtained a new cosmological theory, a, a theory-
00:57:40
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:57:40
Brian Keating: … of entropy, a theory of everything, a theory, whatever it is, and I get so many of those. And by the way, I don’t want to waste your time, professor, because they’re very solicitous and, and wonderful people. But I, so I don’t want to waste your time. I checked it-
00:57:51
Eric Weinstein: Some of them are violent.
00:57:52
Brian Keating: I checked it with [laughs] okay. Well, luckily I haven’t had that encounter yet.
00:57:55
Eric Weinstein: I have.
00:57:55
Brian Keating: Um, okay. I’m sorry to hear that.
00:57:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, people, some people are very, very, they’re very, very friendly. You, you have, you’re the only one who will understand my theory-
00:58:04
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
00:58:04
Eric Weinstein: … and then it becomes, wow, if I can’t even trust you, I’ve lost faith in humanity, or-
00:58:10
Brian Keating: Right
00:58:10
Eric Weinstein: … you’re only doing this to steal my work.
00:58:12
Brian Keating: So to preempt that, I often get the following, which I am appreciative. I’ve run this through ChatGPT. I’ve run this through, uh, deep research on Manus. I’ve run this through Gemini 2.5 experimental with deep research, whatever, and it can find no flaws in this logic. I related the, one of the, the, um, you know, very brilliant gentleman, he actually came here and visited me, and we talked for a little bit, and I said, “I don’t have time to evaluate your theories, and, and unless you… I’m an experimental physicist, by the way. I, I do observations. So unless you can make a prediction of the CMB’s power spectrum-
00:58:42
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:58:42
Brian Keating: … or you can make a prediction about, you know, some cosmological observable degrees of freedom that I have access to with my telescope, I’m useless to you.” And they might not want to hear that, but I will tell them that. Um, so first of all, this is, uh, done to indicate two things. It’s either gonna gravitate to the high quality or the high quantity, these crawlers, these, these net crawlers or whatever you want to call them, that are gonna crawl the scientific literature looking for the unsung Einsteins that weren’t recognized for their genius.
00:59:05
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, that’s not what they’re gonna do, Brian.
00:59:06
Brian Keating: Okay.
00:59:07
Eric Weinstein: They’re, they’re gonna ingest everything.
00:59:09
Brian Keating: How will they weight it? They have to weight it. There’s no, they have to put a metric on it, as you would say, right? How do they weight you versus Lenny Susskind versus the guy that sends me the theory?
00:59:18
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, Brian, you’re, you’re putting too much structure on it.
00:59:20
Brian Keating: Okay.
00:59:21
Eric Weinstein: They simply ingest things that are out here. If you start asking a question, like, well, let me give an example. In general, we are very careful about saying that a symmetry, a set of symmetries, um, should be what we would say of a definite killing form. It should have a definite killing form.
00:59:47
Brian Keating: Now, since you mentioned the violent people, can you explain vi- what killing means in this context?
00:59:51
Eric Weinstein: Killing was Wilhelm Killing, I believe.
00:59:53
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
00:59:54
Eric Weinstein: Um-
00:59:54
Brian Keating: It’s the name of an Irish physicist or something, right?
00:59:56
Eric Weinstein: Was he German?
00:59:57
Brian Keating: Or no, it was German? Okay. Yeah.
00:59:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, Wilhelm. I, I think if it has an indefinite killing form, you’re in some trouble, but it’s not like the literature doesn’t consider indefinite killing forms. So if somebody, for example, says, “I’m interested in removing the restriction to definite killing forms and exploring the following ideas,” even if the weight of the evidence is that we should only be looking at symmetries with definite killing forms, you can change the weights in your prompt so that the LLM will disregard the usual caution about taking on things that might challenge unitarity, which is, you know, the loss of probability. The probability should remain con- One in total or that things should be causal and shouldn’t back, back-
01:00:50
Brian Keating: Null energy condition.
01:00:52
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.
01:00:52
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:00:52
Eric Weinstein: So you have all of these things that can go wrong and in a minority of the literature, people consider indefinite symmetries. You can change the weights by asking a prompt saying, “I’m not interested in taking on the usual. For the moment, suspend those sets of assumptions. I want to explore the consequences.” The LLMs will help. So I, I think that you’re wrong. I think that the fact is that the LLMs won’t be able to do that much if the field is actually digesting what people say. But I heard Lenny Susskind do this thing, which is that he said Peter Woit’s mathematics are bad.
01:01:36
Brian Keating: Hmm.
01:01:36
Eric Weinstein: And it hurt my soul. Peter Woit has written one of the best books on the [laughs] mathematics of quantum theory. Nobody knew he had this book in him. Nobody knew he could do this, at least I didn’t, and I’ve been friends with him for years. And to hear Lenny Susskind, who is not as good of a mathematician as Peter Woit, slight Peter Woit, and then when I started to say something about Lenny Susskind, you in fact said, “Well, Eric is causing these problems with Lenny Susskind.” Well, here’s my-
01:02:06
Brian Keating: That’s not exactly what I said
01:02:06
Eric Weinstein: … here’s my, here’s my-
01:02:07
Brian Keating: I, I said, “This is what Lenny’s done. He’s-
01:02:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay
01:02:09
Brian Keating: … he’s not a physicist of known repute.” Yeah
01:02:10
Eric Weinstein: … but, but my point that I’m going to make is I don’t hear almost any of you guys taking Lenny Susskind to task. He’s a very outspoken negative force in our field.
01:02:23
Brian Keating: I thought you didn’t wanna go here, but I’m happy that you’re, [laughs] that you were-
01:02:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, no
01:02:26
Brian Keating: … willing to bring it up
01:02:26
Eric Weinstein: … but I’m going to say that the LLMs are going to allow you to get around Lenny Susskind. Lenny Suss-
01:02:32
Brian Keating: They’re not gonna enhance it, but based on his six books, his pr- uh, Feshbach professor, his National Academy, his stature, his, uh, many, many acolyte students that cite his papers and so forth, that publish literature, versus you, who have an H index much lower, I think with-
01:02:47
Eric Weinstein: Zero. I’m trying for z-
01:02:49
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:02:49
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m trying for zero.
01:02:50
Brian Keating: You’re [laughs]
01:02:51
Eric Weinstein: I wanna have an H index of zero, Brian.
01:02:54
Brian Keating: You can’t. You already have an H index of one.
01:02:55
Eric Weinstein: No.
01:02:55
Brian Keating: It’s impossible to have an H index of zero.
01:02:57
Eric Weinstein: Oh, is that right?
01:02:57
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:02:58
Eric Weinstein: Oh.
01:02:58
Brian Keating: It’s the number of papers that have at least, uh, H citations, so that you’ve cited yourself, uh, gives you at least one citation, so your H index is at least one.
01:03:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don’t, I’ve tried not to publish anything.
01:03:08
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:03:08
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m not kidding, Brian.
01:03:09
Brian Keating: I know, Eric. I know.
01:03:09
Eric Weinstein: I can’t stand-
01:03:10
Brian Keating: I’ve just, I’m, it’s-
01:03:11
Eric Weinstein: … the way, the way your field operates. Your field is operating in a circular fashion. What I would say about Lenny is those three books, the, the theoretical minimum, maybe is it three, is it four, pretty good. Pretty terrific, don’t you think?
01:03:26
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: I love him. Do I think Lenny’s done interesting things saying things about quark confinement? I do. Do I think that Lenny Susskind, uh, has interesting things to say about black holes? Sure. What I am trying to say is Lenny Susskind says a lot of negative things about his colleagues, and if you turn that lens on Lenny Susskind, that ant will fry under that magnifying glass.
01:03:50
Brian Keating: How does that advance physics, though? I mean, h-
01:03:52
Eric Weinstein: No, but I’m telling you-
01:03:53
Brian Keating: Do we-
01:03:53
Eric Weinstein: I’m telling you.
01:03:53
Brian Keating: Okay.
01:03:53
Eric Weinstein: You’ve got malign influences at the top of the field who throw fear, uncertainty, and d- and doubt at everybody who is not toeing the line. That’s ridiculous. To, to be 40 years in, 41 years into [laughs] the string revolutions and to be going on with the only game in town, it was very funny to watch Lenny Susskind say this thing, which is, “We have got to go back to the origins, to the f- fundamental assumptions of string theory.” I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
01:04:27
Brian Keating: But real string theory has never been tried.
01:04:29
Eric Weinstein: Real string theory has never been tried.
01:04:31
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:04:32
Eric Weinstein: This is, the LLMs are going to allow people to go around this chorus of people who say the same things in lockstep.
01:04:44
Brian Keating: But okay, I wanna move on, but I do wanna say I’m not as confident as you, which is surprising because I think I, I am more representative of the orthodox of physics. You will often say, “I’m not a physicist,” of yourself, and I will say, “I am not a theorist,” and you will, you will say, “You physicists don’t take him to task.” It’s a very different thing to take him to ta- you podcaster, you Brian the podcaster, you Brian the experimental cosmologist-
01:05:08
Eric Weinstein: Eric the entertainer-
01:05:09
Brian Keating: Right
01:05:09
Eric Weinstein: … is going to do the work that theorists are supposed to be doing. In other words, I didn’t have any problem with Lenny and company promoting their work. You start coming after other people having other ideas with this only game in town nonsense, and that breaks the contract. You’re failing. You are failing with more resources, more time, more encouragement, more puff pieces than anybody else, and you look at, like, the online debunking community. Bunch of pussies. All the Redditors, you know, are basically trying to figure out how to come down with, uh, Ed and Lenny and Andy and Kumrun, and y- you’re just thinking like, look, y- this is not science. Science is about failure. When things fail, it’s information.
01:05:58
Brian Keating: It’s good to admit.
01:05:58
Eric Weinstein: The fact that we didn’t find superpartners when we turned on the LHC and there was all of these claims that now you’re gonna see glueinos and squarks and all this stuff, great piece of information. That tells you that those people who are so confident are wrong, and then you wanna find out, well, d- what did they learn? Gordon Kane is a perfect example of this, very, very strident about what’s true and what’s gonna happen, and then when it doesn’t happen, there isn’t enough of, “Boy, was I wrong.” And one of the things that I loved about Lenny on Curt’s program was Lenny admitting that he was talking about things he didn’t know anything about, and part of that is alternatives.
01:06:39
Brian Keating: What do you say to people who say, “Well, Eric, you just are hurt that he, when asked about you, had no idea who you were, even though-
01:06:47
Eric Weinstein: He knows who I am
01:06:47
Brian Keating: … we both know who you are. Both, we know that Lenny knows who you are.”
01:06:52
Eric Weinstein: If I were to Look on my phone-
01:06:55
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:06:56
Eric Weinstein: … and I were to say, um-
01:06:59
Brian Keating: I, I remember coordinating a meeting with you or, uh, you and your son and Lenny from a few years back.
01:07:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:07:06
Brian Keating: You know, uh, you were interested in, in having conversations with him, and I think maybe you did, or it was COVID or whatever. So it’s not a personal vendetta. As you say, you’re, you’re, you’re upset on Peter Woit’s behalf.
01:07:17
Eric Weinstein: No-
01:07:17
Brian Keating: Um-
01:07:17
Eric Weinstein: … I’m saying something else. Lenny is a cantankerous, fun raconteur-
01:07:23
Brian Keating: Gruff
01:07:24
Eric Weinstein: … gruff-
01:07:25
Brian Keating: Old school-
01:07:25
Eric Weinstein: … ethnic
01:07:25
Brian Keating: … New York
01:07:26
Eric Weinstein: Everything. I’m down for that.
01:07:29
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:07:30
Eric Weinstein: You go after Peter Woit, you go after Garrett Lisi, you go after me, you go after everybody else, and then you say you only w- we have to go back to the beginning of our assumptions and you’re like, “Yes, yes, 40 years in the making, go ahead and say it, of string theory.” And I’m thinking, no, no, you don’t get to do that. You ruined too many lives. You ruined too many careers. You d- th- these things have consequences. Who gets healthcare? Who has a pension? Who has security to be able to say s- who gets to train more students? No, you failed. You lost. It’s over. You’re in your mid-80s. Ed Witten is going to turn 74 this year, retired forcibly from the IAS, which has a retirement age. You don’t get to say, “I have no idea who that is” about Eric Weinstein when I can tell you the exact date when I last talked to Lenny. Th- this is preposterous, and I think that partially what I’m trying to say is we can’t allow physics to venture 100% into pretend land, where unicorns and fairies and, you know, Kris Kringle at the North Pole making up strings-
01:08:37
Brian Keating: But can we entertain people like you did and spend so much of your time with Terrence Howard, for example?
01:08:43
Eric Weinstein: What about him?
01:08:44
Brian Keating: Well, when you are in- interacting with people that are not in the mainstream, to denigrate what they do, uh, is seen as gatekeeping. I’ve heard that-
01:08:52
Eric Weinstein: I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. What are we talking about here?
01:08:55
Brian Keating: Uh, there’s two s- there’s two ends to the s- electromagnetic spectrum of collegiality, as I see what we’re talking about in this little segment.
01:09:01
Eric Weinstein: What did I do with Terrence?
01:09:02
Brian Keating: No, no, you engaged with Terrence, and-
01:09:04
Eric Weinstein: Joe Rogan-
01:09:05
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:09:05
Eric Weinstein: … a friend of mine-
01:09:07
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:09:07
Eric Weinstein: … asked me, “Will you sit with Terrence?” Now, he misportrayed that, saying you wanted to come on with Terrence, which it wasn’t true, but he wanted me to come on because he had started this thing-
01:09:18
Brian Keating: Why did he do that? I, I- it’s curious to me.
01:09:20
Eric Weinstein: W-
01:09:20
Brian Keating: Why did Joe misrepresent the ask that he made? I mean, he doesn’t have trouble getting guests, right?
01:09:25
Eric Weinstein: Look, I don’t think it was sinister. I think what he wanted is he wanted a debate. I didn’t wanna have a debate.
01:09:30
Brian Keating: Right.
01:09:30
Eric Weinstein: He wanted a peer review. I didn’t wanna do a peer review.
01:09:33
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:09:33
Eric Weinstein: He wanted a collaboration. I didn’t wanna do a collaboration. I didn’t need to come on and do a Terrence Howard episode.
01:09:39
Brian Keating: Right.
01:09:39
Eric Weinstein: In fact, I wasn’t going to do a Terrence Howard episode unless I could find something that was really worthwhile in what Terrence was doing. And the two people who convinced me, more than Joe, were R- Rick Rubin, the music producer, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. So Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a perfect, perfect back of the hand to Terrence Howard, where he just sat there, you know, in his, uh, “You know, Terrence, I’m just giving you a peer review.” And the two things that, you know, became clear to me is, first of all, Neil does not understand a lot about platonic solids because he didn’t know where all of these objects were coming from, and th- you know, these are important, important, uh, concepts, including convex polytopes in dimension four, which we need to talk more about ’cause there are six solids rather than just five. There’s a new one called the 24 cell that’s-
01:10:31
Brian Keating: There we go
01:10:31
Eric Weinstein: … super interesting.
01:10:32
Brian Keating: There we go.
01:10:33
Eric Weinstein: And then Rick Rubin said, you know, this, this line, I, I wake up, he’s like, “Why can’t you explain physics like Terrence Howard?” And I just, uh, that blew my mind because whatever Terrence is doing, he’s not getting the proper respect for good things that he’s doing from n- the Neil deGrasse Tysons, and he’s getting this credulous buy-in from the Rick Rubins. And Terrence and I, by the way, are fine. I mean, we’re, we’re, we’re in discussion about things, and we disagree, and I tell him, “I don’t think there’s a lot in your claims of physics or math,” and he, you know, he’s fine with it. He’s-
01:11:04
Brian Keating: He has thick enough skin in some ways, right?
01:11:06
Eric Weinstein: S- some days yes, some days no-
01:11:07
Brian Keating: [laughs] Right
01:11:07
Eric Weinstein: … but Terrence and I, so far, we’ve dealt okay with it. What I would say is I was the one who said 108, which is the angle in, in, of an interior angle to a regular, uh, pentagon, is not 109.47, if I recall correctly, which is the angle between two vertices inside of a tetrahedron as seen from the center of mass. Terrence cleverly, uh, and you know, you’re a flight guy. Um, you have pitch, yaw, and roll, which is effectively a spanning of the SO (3) Lie algebra. But then you have an affine shift, which is X, Y, and Z, your center of mass. So he took the six edges of a regular tetrahedron, found a very close match, 108 versus 109.47, stuck in pentagonal fans as propellers, and spanned the affine Lie algebra of the affine group in three-dimensional space with a regular structure within engineering tolerances that can form dodecahedral structures in midair. Now, my claim is I’m not out to get Terrence, and I’m not out to celebrate Terrence. I’m out to evaluate Terrence and give him his best hearing. Why can’t Lenny do that for Peter Woit?
01:12:29
Brian Keating: That’s exactly what I was gonna say. So I think, not to answer, but I would say the same reason that you don’t answer every email that you get. There is a finite amount of time. I don’t think my job is to evaluate others. I was asked by Patrick Beck David to come-
01:12:46
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
01:12:46
Brian Keating: … on his show multiple times, including to give, uh, and ironically, I couldn’t make it the first time because he, uh, I was being interviewed by Neil deGrasse Tyson [laughs] in which c- uh, in, in his office in New York City. So I couldn’t do it, and then by the time I said, “Look, get someone who’s knowledgeable,” I didn’t mention, I mentioned that- You obviously con- converse with, with, with Joe and Terrence, and, you know, Ter- Terrence has my email and my phone number-
01:13:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:13:09
Brian Keating: … thanks to you. Uh, so why didn’t he call me up and ask me if I wanted to do it? I felt like it might be a setup, maybe Patrick’s trying to get this, which was confirmed like-
01:13:16
Eric Weinstein: Patrick is causing trouble for reasons that-
01:13:18
Brian Keating: I don’t know
01:13:19
Eric Weinstein: … I don’t understand
01:13:19
Brian Keating: He wants to be like Joe. He wants to have a, an influence like Joe Rogan. He even has a Jamie-like character.
01:13:25
Eric Weinstein: No, but what I’m trying to say about Patrick-
01:13:26
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:13:26
Eric Weinstein: … I, I don’t know Patrick.
01:13:27
Brian Keating: I don’t know him either.
01:13:28
Eric Weinstein: His team has been very polite to me. They tried to get me out-
01:13:31
Brian Keating: Me too
01:13:31
Eric Weinstein: … uh, multiple times. I don’t have a negative view on that.
01:13:34
Brian Keating: Right.
01:13:34
Eric Weinstein: But he’s looking to say something like, “Wow, this smells of gatekeeping.”
01:13:38
Brian Keating: Right.
01:13:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, gatekeeping is the wrong concept.
01:13:41
Brian Keating: He exactly said that. He said, “This reminds me of what they did to RFK during COVID, that they won’t talk to Terrence.” I said, “Look, something doesn’t become true…” Once Eric debunked s- whatever, I don’t wanna say debunked, but let’s say once Eric gave an expert review on Joe Rogan-
01:13:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:13:55
Brian Keating: … um, of Terrence, those aspects were now no longer, um, grist for the mill of discussion. Now, Terrence kn- knows that. He’s intelligent. So he will say, “Well, now I’ve got this new proof of-
01:14:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:14:08
Brian Keating: … the three-body problem,” right? So now he’s got a new reason to insight, you know, an interest in his work and get you an invite. So then, but Pa- Patrick’s like, well, he wants to have a live debate with you in front of a live audi- That’s not what science is. I’m sorry. Science is not about, you know, who has the more eloquent… I’m sure he’s more eloquent than me, and he can talk more.
01:14:25
Eric Weinstein: So this is this problem that we don’t know how to do demarcation theory. And you know who’s actually been-
01:14:33
Brian Keating: So what is demarcation theory?
01:14:34
Eric Weinstein: What is science? What is not science?
01:14:35
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:14:35
Eric Weinstein: And you know, one of the people who’s actually said the most thoughtful things on this is, is Sean Carroll of all people. And what Sean said is, “I’m, I, Sean Carroll, am not that interested in labeling things as pseudoscience,” because I think we have to talk about this so-called debunking community. The debunking community is this bizarre mixture of keeping the world safe from total horseshit and keeping the world safe from legitimate heterodoxy at the same time.
01:15:07
Brian Keating: Right, the Nick West, the, uh, the, whoever his, uh, counterpart or analog would be, right?
01:15:13
Eric Weinstein: Doesn’t matter. Sometimes you see it online as debunking-
01:15:16
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:15:16
Eric Weinstein: … uh, because there’s this weird energy of like, “I review so and so, and I call out all his BS.”
01:15:22
Brian Keating: “I owned him,” right?
01:15:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:15:23
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:15:24
Eric Weinstein: Owned him, pawning and all this kind of thing.
01:15:25
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:15:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay. What Sean Carroll said is, “I’m, I, Sean, am not interested in the science versus pseudoscience. I’d rather call it science and say that’s bad science.” So I thought that was interesting-
01:15:36
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:15:37
Eric Weinstein: … is, is that it gets rid of the psychologicalization of why is this person behaving the way they are. You know, if somebody believes that they have a m- a means of turning lead into gold, that person may be an absolute lunatic. But if they did have such a process, I don’t understand why they would wanna protect it.
01:15:54
Brian Keating: Sure. But when you have people that sa- say that they have proof that the moon landings didn’t happen, the Earth is flat.
01:15:59
Eric Weinstein: So this is this issue about, I try to say to people, the odds that JFK was assassinated by something other than a lone gunman, namely Harvey Oswald, are in a different category than the idea that we didn’t go to the moon, and there shouldn’t be a category called conspiracy theory.
01:16:19
Brian Keating: Right, like COVID lab leak. Right.
01:16:21
Eric Weinstein: Right?
01:16:21
Brian Keating: No doubt.
01:16:21
Eric Weinstein: Because these things are at all different levels, and, you know, including things in previous times like plate tectonics. And so in a certain weird sense, the problem is words like gatekeeping.
01:16:32
Brian Keating: Right.
01:16:32
Eric Weinstein: Like, sorry, is gatekeeping bad? There are lots of things that I really appreciate-
01:16:36
Brian Keating: Terrence, Terrence accused me of that
01:16:36
Eric Weinstein: … there’s a gate around them, and the gatekeeping is done really well.
01:16:39
Brian Keating: Right.
01:16:39
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, in part, it’s the internet, the tyranny of the internet, uh, has infected our speech. So in the case of all of these things, yes, we are all besieged with requests and demands. Please look at my thing. My claim is, in part, we’re lying. Because if we administered a rudimentary test, I don’t mean, like, giving really hard, detailed problems at the Math Olympiad or Physics Olympiad level.
01:17:08
Brian Keating: Right.
01:17:08
Eric Weinstein: I mean, like, name s- [laughs] name some leptons. You know? Most people would fall apart.
01:17:14
Brian Keating: What’s the Fokker-Planck equation?
01:17:15
Eric Weinstein: Right. And what I’m claiming is that we don’t listen to our colleagues who know a lot of the basics.
01:17:23
Brian Keating: Can, can I summarize? Like, I think I, I wanna move on, but I, I do now see something I didn’t see before.
01:17:28
Eric Weinstein: Please.
01:17:28
Brian Keating: There’s, there’s a difference between me saying, me saying, “Look, I don’t, I’m an experimental physicist, Terrence. I’m not gonna criticize that, except when you have on this complete pseudoscience expert, uh, Dr. Wei-Ping Yu, who Patrick chose to… ‘Cause he wouldn’t wait a week or two. Maybe I could have done it, maybe I couldn’t. He had to do-
01:17:45
Eric Weinstein: Oh, this person who’s supposedly, he knows me.
01:17:48
Brian Keating: Wei-Ping, yeah, he’s talked to you, actually. He’s visited you and talked to you in California. He comes-
01:17:52
Eric Weinstein: Where?
01:17:52
Brian Keating: Does, uh, uh, see the interview. He’ll talk about it. He’ll say that he-
01:17:56
Eric Weinstein: I know, but-
01:17:56
Brian Keating: He not only did that, but he found flaws in GU. Anyway, I don’t wanna talk about that.
01:17:59
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, I’m just, uh, what I’m trying to say is how interesting that I have no knowledge of this person.
01:18:06
Brian Keating: [laughs] No data. No, I agree. But I wanna say this. There’s a difference between me ig- a, there’s many possibilities, ignoring Terrence or ignoring Wei-Ping-
01:18:14
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:18:14
Brian Keating: … uh, Yu. There are ways to do it, and I’m s- and what I’m hearing and what I now finally understand is that Lenny Susskind took the latter approach. He could have said nothing. He could have been charitable. “I don’t have time to evaluate geometric,” or Peter Woit or GU. I, I-
01:18:27
Eric Weinstein: He talks to me about geometric unity when I’m, when I meet him.
01:18:31
Brian Keating: Yeah, but he chose instead to say something negative, to say, “I don’t know,” or maybe prevaricate or perseverate. He, he so chose-
01:18:38
Eric Weinstein: Curt Jaimungal is providing a service that has never existed, and I think it’s very important, uh, ’cause I, I’ll be honest, I did not have an easy time with Curt when I met him.
01:18:48
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:18:48
Eric Weinstein: And I didn’t understand who he was. This is a very strange phenomenon, and I, and I just, just to, let me spend a minute on it.
01:18:56
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:18:56
Eric Weinstein: In general, there are two kinds of interviewers in physics. There are Ostensibly disinterested interviewers who don’t know enough physics who have to basically go along with the party line because they just don’t have the basis to challenge. Then there are interested physics people who don’t challenge their colleagues because that leads to loss of funds, loss of reputation, bad things. So what happened with Kurt is is that he was assumed to be of the former category because he’s not a PhD, he’s not a researcher, and people, he would accept- people would accept interviews with him, and then he’d say things like, uh, “Do you favor this approach?” Somebody’d say, “Well, yes.” And he, then he’d say, “Well, what do you think of the other approaches?” And the person would sort of do the usual and say, “Well, I don’t, I don’t really think there are any other approaches.”
01:19:50
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:19:51
Eric Weinstein: And, a- and so then Kurt would say, “Well, I, I could list five of them for you.” And, “Well, I, I don’t know anything about…” “Well, actually, I, I know about them. I- i- if you don’t mind, I, I, I could d- describe what the assumptions-“
01:20:02
Brian Keating: We don’t have time for that, right? [laughs]
01:20:03
Eric Weinstein: And suddenly, in 40 years, Kurt managed to get through something no one else has gotten through, and I’ll, I’ll say what it is.
01:20:11
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:20:12
Eric Weinstein: How can you have a community that is absolutely convinced that they are doing the only thing possible, that it is the only game in town, and they know nothing about what’s going on outside of their community? There’s… That, that is… If you think about it, it’s just, for 40 years, that question has never been asked by anyone.
01:20:33
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:20:33
Eric Weinstein: And Kurt was the first person to get through this by saying, “You know, I’m not a physicist and I’m not a mathematician, but I can tell you that you’re distorted completely in claiming that you’re doing the only possible thing. You’re just wrong. Do, do you care to answer?” And that’s when Lenny had to back up and say, “You know what? I have no idea what I’m talking about.” And by the way, praise to Lenny Susskind-
01:20:58
Brian Keating: Yeah, for-
01:20:59
Eric Weinstein: … for having the presence of mind to do that.
01:21:00
Brian Keating: Intellectual honesty.
01:21:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.
01:21:02
Brian Keating: So right, even the, even, uh, the, the he can be, uh, distempered, uh, as-
01:21:06
Eric Weinstein: But, by the way
01:21:07
Brian Keating: … sometimes. Mm-hmm
01:21:07
Eric Weinstein: I, I just wanna also point out that when you and I are talking about Sean Carroll or Lenny Susskind or Neil deGrasse Tyson or any of these people-
01:21:14
Brian Keating: I’m not denigrating them or…
01:21:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, no. Sometimes, you know-
01:21:17
Brian Keating: No, I, I, I-
01:21:17
Eric Weinstein: I, I, I can’t stand-
01:21:18
Brian Keating: Ad hominem
01:21:18
Eric Weinstein: … I can’t stand Neil’s condescension.
01:21:20
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:21:20
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, I don’t know of a person who does as well explaining so many things brilliantly.
01:21:26
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:21:27
Eric Weinstein: The guy’s got a tremendous amount of knowledge and an incredible gift for exposition.
01:21:31
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:21:32
Eric Weinstein: It… What’s weird is-
01:21:33
Brian Keating: And, and, uh, he- don’t say gift. He played, he literally, when I claimed that he had a gift for explanation, he play- said, uh, it was, uh, uh, implied it was racism and, and said-
01:21:42
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no
01:21:42
Brian Keating: … “I’m going to play the race card.”
01:21:44
Eric Weinstein: You stepped into the well-spoken trap.
01:21:45
Brian Keating: No, I said, uh, “How do you react to people that will, that, you know, don’t have these gifts?”
01:21:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:21:50
Brian Keating: And he said, “Wait a second. I’m comfortable.”
01:21:51
Eric Weinstein: “Well, I worked very hard.”
01:21:53
Brian Keating: Yeah. You assume you see a white person doing that, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, you’re just gifted at, at, at elocution and, and explication and, and the way that you’ve communicated,” but you don’t realize how much work I do. When I go on Stephen Colbert, I spend three weeks, um, investigating what past-
01:22:06
Eric Weinstein: Sorry
01:22:07
Brian Keating: … jokes he’s told and how I can relate them to my science, and then how long does he pause-
01:22:11
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
01:22:11
Brian Keating: … between asking a question and letting me answer it, and I do study. I work hard at it.
01:22:15
Eric Weinstein: I think he works-
01:22:15
Brian Keating: And you assume it’s a gift ’cause I’m a Black.
01:22:16
Eric Weinstein: I think he works his ass off.
01:22:17
Brian Keating: I do, I do too. And I knew that.
01:22:19
Eric Weinstein: And on top of that-
01:22:20
Brian Keating: Yes. I think he is
01:22:20
Eric Weinstein: … the man has a gift.
01:22:21
Brian Keating: Right. I, I said you’re six foot two, you wrestled and, and got into college in part because you’re a wrestler. That wasn’t like you didn’t work for that. You were born, you know-
01:22:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah
01:22:29
Brian Keating: … you won this lucky sperm club.
01:22:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.
01:22:30
Brian Keating: And there’s nothing to be, you know, the, the c- confluence of greatness occurs when there is a confluence of-
01:22:35
Eric Weinstein: I, I could work-
01:22:36
Brian Keating: … preparation
01:22:36
Eric Weinstein: … that hard at exposition and I couldn’t do what he does.
01:22:38
Brian Keating: Right, exactly. And he works hard, right, exactly.
01:22:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:22:41
Brian Keating: Um, but let, let’s move on to one last thing.
01:22:43
Eric Weinstein: No, but I just wanted-
01:22:43
Brian Keating: Okay, okay
01:22:43
Eric Weinstein: … to sum that one thing up.
01:22:44
Brian Keating: Okay, go ahead.
01:22:45
Eric Weinstein: That riff is-
01:22:45
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:22:46
Eric Weinstein: … isn’t it interesting, I don’t sense with either you or, or myself any desire to just negate people. If somebody is just determined to be horrible-
01:23:00
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:23:00
Eric Weinstein: … I don’t mind commenting. That person seems to want to be horrible. Dave Farina, perfect example. But if he did, if he did something genius or something really brilliant, I would like to think that we would say, you know, “Hey, this is kind of uncomfortable, but this person actually really did something impressive.”
01:23:17
Brian Keating: Right. Yeah.
01:23:18
Eric Weinstein: My claim is, is that one of the, the hallmarks that there’s something going wrong in the science system is these absolute ad hominem attacks that attempt to get rid of humans. Not say, you know, “That person’s a little high on his own supply. That person is overplaying a weaker result,” or blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:23:36
Brian Keating: Right. It’s he’s insane. He’s unhinged.
01:23:38
Eric Weinstein: It’s just-
01:23:38
Brian Keating: Right.
01:23:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And, and I think that that is, that is what really offended me in part about, like, the slight against Peter Woit. When Peter Woit… Everybody, uh, highly recommend go buy his book on symmetry and the quantum theory. If you know anything, you will not be disappointed.
01:23:56
Brian Keating: When you were here two years ago? [laughs] Uh, in person we did an interview, uh, sorry, we did a podcast with Dan Green about the progress in physics. I thought that was very, uh, positive. But then we did a solo episode or, you know, two-part episode conversation.
01:24:09
Eric Weinstein: Dan Green was terrific.
01:24:10
Brian Keating: Yeah, Dan Green’s wonderful. No, I’m saying then we did another episode where it was you and I in conversation. That was our last in-person interview.
01:24:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:24:16
Brian Keating: Uh, although we’ve met many times since then-
01:24:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:24:18
Brian Keating: … in LA and Florence and other places. You said two things that I wanna double-click on, as they say. Uh, one was about the war in Ukraine, and it was, just had s- was entering its first year of, uh, ending its first year rather.
01:24:30
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
01:24:31
Brian Keating: And it was six months, seven months before October 7th, and I, we haven’t talked about this in the conversation yet, or in conversation on, at least on the podcast. You know, as a friend, I know this is not the primary motivation, nor was it my invitation to you to come down here to talk politics and stuff, but I, I, I do wanna talk about that, and I wanna talk about academia and the future of academia in light of especially the October 7th events because on this campus, and you know, and you’ve been a big supporter of it.
01:24:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:24:56
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:24:56
Eric Weinstein: So here’s the thing. I’m happy to talk about October 7, and I’m also happy to talk about the threat to science and the context of science in the current-
01:25:04
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:25:05
Eric Weinstein: … situation. I think both of those things are huge issues and, and, and even Ukraine, although I’m, I’m less clear where I stand. The thing that I don’t wanna do is what I said before.
01:25:15
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:25:16
Eric Weinstein: If I’m gonna come down and talk on dark energy, I really want us to focus on I’m saying a thing, I’d prefer to adjudicate it and figure out where it stands than that we just sort of treat it as like, “Oh, you gave a talk on dark energy.”
01:25:29
Brian Keating: Yeah. All right. And, and again, we have the talk, which we’ll put on the-
01:25:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:25:32
Brian Keating: … channel, put a link to that. But what I wanna say is how does this pertain to the, to the practice of science? The destruction of the superstructures that support science. We’re told recently that your alma mater, Harvard, is the lone defender, you know, of, of the integrity of the university where we’re sitting. We’re sitting in a top university. I felt like this quote from, I think it was… I, I forget the name of it, but you know, “First they came for the socialists, but I wasn’t a socialist.” You know this famous quote, right? Um, for, “Then they came for the gays, but I wasn’t gay, so I didn’t stand up for them. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t, I wasn’t Jewish, so I didn’t stand up to them. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” I feel like in academia, we scientists who get money from the federal government in many cases or even from private institutions like myself, we get institutional money from s- foundations, we still pay overhead. That overhead goes to the university that is used to support activities that have nothing to do with science whatsoever. What I wanna ask you is do we need a new paradigm for the university where we have even beyond MIT, where you, uh, you know, are familiar with, where we cleave off the science, the engineering, the technology, the math, we cleave it off forever, and we have a separate university structure, and we go it alone? Or is, uh, or am I missing the point of the liberal education-
01:26:49
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no
01:26:49
Brian Keating: … which I don’t think is actually occurring anywhere on [crosstalk].
01:26:52
Eric Weinstein: Oh, boy, is this a tough one.
01:26:53
Brian Keating: Okay, so this is what I wanna talk about.
01:26:55
Eric Weinstein: You got any-
01:26:55
Brian Keating: It’s that important to me.
01:26:56
Eric Weinstein: You got any alcohol?
01:26:57
Brian Keating: [laughs] Yes, I do.
01:26:58
Eric Weinstein: Let’s have a drink.
01:27:00
Brian Keating: L’chaim to life, Jim Simons, wherever you may be. We’re drinking to your memory, to your generosity, to your mentorship. You were like a, a godfather to me, and I miss you every day, and we’re trying to make you proud with the Simons Observatory. And the only thing I said when I gave him one of these himself, this is an engraved bottle, you can see how beautiful that is.
01:27:16
Eric Weinstein: I love it.
01:27:17
Brian Keating: He said, “I wish it was gin.”
01:27:19
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?
01:27:20
Brian Keating: L’chaim.
01:27:20
Eric Weinstein: L’chaim.
01:27:21
Brian Keating: Tell me, sir, academia, should we cleave it off? Is it time for the bliss?
01:27:26
Eric Weinstein: We have a problem, and the problem, as I see it, is very clear. This was a system that was architected by a bunch of people who are now dead and much, much smarter than almost any of us.
01:27:38
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:27:38
Eric Weinstein: This was a very cleverly worked out cryptic system that did all sorts of things that people have no idea how it worked.
01:27:44
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:27:44
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m not kidding.
01:27:45
Brian Keating: I’m laughing.
01:27:46
Eric Weinstein: Overhead-
01:27:47
Brian Keating: Fringe
01:27:47
Eric Weinstein: … do you have any idea what overhead really is? Overhead is a system to avoid third-tier universities putting political pressure on the government to f- fund them at the expense of our top-tier institutions. It’s a-
01:28:02
Brian Keating: AKA a cartel. The first tier colluded, exercised cartel behavior-
01:28:06
Eric Weinstein: No
01:28:06
Brian Keating: … to exclude the nuke, uh, portenders from the front.
01:28:09
Eric Weinstein: I don’t agree with this.
01:28:10
Brian Keating: Okay. So explain.
01:28:10
Eric Weinstein: Basically, Vannevar Bush-
01:28:12
Brian Keating: Bush, the endless frontier
01:28:13
Eric Weinstein: … the endless frontier.
01:28:15
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:28:15
Eric Weinstein: A small number of people realized they had a problem post-World War II, which was we figured out, oh my God, science is so much more valuable than we even knew. We have radar. We have nuclear weapons. We are doing things-
01:28:28
Brian Keating: We have ecology
01:28:28
Eric Weinstein: … never thought possible.
01:28:30
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:28:30
Eric Weinstein: We’re spoofing, you know, all of the stuff that you’ve talked about. Thank you for bringing up, was it Alvarez?
01:28:36
Brian Keating: Luis Alvarez.
01:28:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, very nice.
01:28:38
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:28:38
Eric Weinstein: And then suddenly, all of these people said, “Okay, we’re done with the government. We’re not doing that military. That was just to defeat Hitler.” The defense industry and the intelligence services and the covert groups said, “Well, w- wait a minute, don’t you love us?” And a lot of left-leaning socialist idealists who were the ones calculating, uh, you know, chain reactions-
01:29:02
Brian Keating: Trajectories
01:29:02
Eric Weinstein: … exactly-
01:29:03
Brian Keating: Yeah. Mm-hmm
01:29:04
Eric Weinstein: … uh, suddenly said, “I don’t want anything further to do with you.” So there, there had to be a system that was worked out in which we kept our scientists happy, well-fed, able to be free, and we could call on them in times of national emergency or national interest. And we decided that we were going to get into the business of funding elite private, nominally private institutions. So Harvard and Princeton and MIT and Stanford were gonna get money from the federal government to keep America wealthy and powerful.
01:29:46
Brian Keating: Safe and powerful.
01:29:46
Eric Weinstein: And safe, yeah.
01:29:47
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:29:48
Eric Weinstein: And then weird stuff started to happen because this was a quiet structure. So I wanna talk about the difference between esoteric and exoteric behavior. The exoteric reason for overhead, indirect costs, is that it costs some money to administer a grant. That is not what overhead [laughs] is. It’s not what it’s supposed to be.
01:30:14
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:30:14
Eric Weinstein: It was supposed to be a cryptic payment to a university based on the merit of who it hired. So we’d have a merit-based system, and based on merit, your university would get richer or poorer depending upon whether you hired great researchers.
01:30:29
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:30:29
Eric Weinstein: Then we lost all of this information. We lost the idea that universities, as, uh, distinct from colleges, are about research and mentorship, not about teaching. Most universities have a college, but there’s a distinction in software between is a and has a. So the University, let’s say, um, of Pennsylvania has a college, but it isn’t a college. It’s a university. Uh, Swarthmore College is a college-
01:30:59
Brian Keating: But it’s not a university
01:31:01
Eric Weinstein: … but it’s not a university. We have two basic systems, one of which was called the AAU, probably still is-
01:31:08
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:31:08
Eric Weinstein: … the Association of American Universities. The other one changed its name, used to be like NASUG, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and that was sort of the public- IVs or whatever you wanna call them. And what we tried to do was we tried to hide the system from the American taxpayer and allow the taxpayer to benefit. A tiny amount of money in certain terms would go into this weird endeavor, and then we would be powerful and rich. So the American taxpayer had this incredible deal that the American taxpayer was not consulted about. This was an elite idea coming out of the mind of Vannevar Bush and others.
01:31:57
Brian Keating: Tragedy of the commons was sure to follow.
01:31:59
Eric Weinstein: And so this i- this issue about esoteric and exoteric has become a lightning rod. You can’t expect that your doctor or your financial advisor or whoever is going to give you all information about everything that’s going on. And you can’t expect that people are going to be represented by a fiduciary that doesn’t take on fiduciary duties either. So what we’ve had is we’ve had a very badly behaved group of people who have abused public trust, and a populist revolt against them saying, “Trash the system, pull the plug, cut the funding, stop the bleed.” And that’s where we find ourselves. And, and this is the thing that I, I, I really do wanna talk about, but it’s this-
01:32:47
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:32:47
Eric Weinstein: I don’t think I’ve done this in public yet, so let’s give it a shot.
01:32:50
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:32:50
Eric Weinstein: This physics department, like every other top physics department, is engaged in bullshit and the most demanding possible stuff you could do that is honest, brilliant, and pure, and it’s happening simultaneously in the same department. We tolerate certain kinds of misrepresentation to the public, which we call exoteric speech, to let the public know everything is going great, there’s never been a better time, you should continue to fund us.
01:33:22
Brian Keating: The future will be better than tomorrow, than today.
01:33:24
Eric Weinstein: The future blah, blah, blah.
01:33:25
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:33:26
Eric Weinstein: And we also accepted a terrible deal for us where we basically don’t have intellectual property rights. People wonder, “Well, Eric, why do you say you’re an entertainmer, an entertainer?” And I always say, “Here’s a joke. What’s the difference between a physicist and an entertainer? An entertainer has rights.”
01:33:45
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:33:45
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, you complain about physics and you say, “Well, somebody was attributed my work.”
01:33:51
Brian Keating: Right, stole my citation.
01:33:51
Eric Weinstein: It’s like, suck it up. You know, that, that has a name. It’s the Johnson Effect or-
01:33:55
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:33:55
Eric Weinstein: … you know, um, you, you have something called a, the Matthew effect, to whom has much, mu- more will be given.
01:34:02
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:34:02
Eric Weinstein: And the, the Matilda effect, which is that women can’t be heard. Then you have the Sudarshan effect, which is that, uh, Brown people tend not to be credited with their, uh-
01:34:12
Brian Keating: Discoveries
01:34:12
Eric Weinstein: … discoveries as much as white people. A- and you know what? There’s real truth in this. You don’t have to be woke. You can be anti-woke and still see that there’s truth in this.
01:34:18
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:34:19
Eric Weinstein: What happened is, is that we let the ethics slide, and in particular we started this with the Mansfield Amendment. The Mansfield Amendment was the withdrawal in the late ’60s, early ’70s, of military support for our science departments to do blue sky research. The military was the best friend of pure research, often by people who didn’t like the military at all. And so we pulled the plug on that. The, Mike Mansfield was a, I think a senator from Montana, uh, had this amendment that said you couldn’t fund university professors to do research unless there was an express military purpose, like it was directed. And then we followed on with all of these bad laws, the Eylberg Amendment in 1976, the Bayh–Dole Amendment in 1980. We started this, uh, labor shortage scare, which Vivek Ra- Ramaswamy is still on about in the mid, uh, ’80s, which became the Immigration Act of 1990 or IMMACT 90. We’ve been making all sorts of terrible rules which has been making science more and more precarious. So the average scientist is too focused on what do I need to do to keep my healthcare going? And it’s offensive. This is, you know-
01:35:31
Brian Keating: Right
01:35:31
Eric Weinstein: … I’m, I’m not, I’m an entertainer, I’m not a scientist, says the man with a PhD in mathematics. This is offensive that you have a tiny group of people who are secure producing insecurity in everyone else, and it’s affecting the science. This is how Anthony Fauci got away with claiming that it was r- racism to ask the question about whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology might have something to do with, uh, ba- coronavirus.
01:35:59
Brian Keating: Yeah, it’s far less racist to ask the qu- or to say that they prefer to eat pangolins and bats than to say that it escaped from the Wu- Wuhan institute.
01:36:06
Eric Weinstein: Hey, man, I had Hong Kong flu in like 1968.
01:36:10
Brian Keating: I know. My, yeah.
01:36:10
Eric Weinstein: You know, am I a racist?
01:36:11
Brian Keating: That was actually… You’re right, yeah. That was one of the deadliest flu. That was a, went around during Woodstock, right?
01:36:15
Eric Weinstein: It, it’s ridiculous.
01:36:16
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:36:16
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so more or less everybody, Fauci and COVID caused a, I don’t know, an aneurysm in the tech elite. I don’t, I still don’t understand this exactly, but all sorts of people who are now called the tech right-
01:36:32
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:36:33
Eric Weinstein: … woke up some point during COVID and said, “You know what? We were all pro-science. Screw these guys.”
01:36:40
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:36:40
Eric Weinstein: “These are liars. They won’t stand up. They’re cowards. Universities are over. Science is done.” And I thought, “W- wait, what? What, what meeting did I just miss?”
01:36:52
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:36:52
Eric Weinstein: Like Fauci and public s- health have nothing to do in my mind with science.
01:36:56
Brian Keating: With science, yeah.
01:36:57
Eric Weinstein: Right? Somehow the, quote, tech right-
01:37:01
Brian Keating: These are like David Saxe and-
01:37:02
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t say anybody.
01:37:03
Brian Keating: Okay.
01:37:03
Eric Weinstein: The tech right.
01:37:04
Brian Keating: I, I felt that way about David.
01:37:05
Eric Weinstein: The tech right-
01:37:06
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:37:06
Eric Weinstein: … whatever they are, have developed a, a brain illness. Science is over. Universities are over. Everything is unreformable. I go to seminar after seminar at UCLA and Caltech, and I never see any of them. They have no idea what’s going on.
01:37:23
Brian Keating: No, of course.
01:37:24
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, that’s what’s going on at Mar-
01:37:25
Brian Keating: You can more demonize that, which you fail to see
01:37:26
Eric Weinstein: … but that’s what’s going on at Mar-a-Lago.
01:37:28
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:37:28
Eric Weinstein: If, as long as you don’t invite actual PhD researchers, you’ll have no idea that actual-
01:37:35
Brian Keating: Right. Again
01:37:35
Eric Weinstein: … PhD level research is taking place
01:37:37
Brian Keating: … David Sacks is the advisor on AI and the czar of science and technology to the president. I find that scary, ’cause he, even on his own podcast, he’s an entertainer as well as a craft ventures, you know, founder, et cetera, and friend of, of Elon and so forth. But he will say on the previous podcast, he would, it, it was a running g- gig that when Friedberg, who’s been on the podcast, David Friedberg, would start talking about something interesting in science, David’s actually a very, uh, curious and, and imaginative person, and very knowledgeable about science, especially bioscience. And, and, and Sacks would say, “I’m checking out. I’ll s- talk to me in 10 minutes when you’re done, when he’s done yapping his mouth.” [laughs] I mean, he’s explicit this exact thing.
01:38:11
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know anything about this.
01:38:12
Brian Keating: This is on the All-In podcast.
01:38:13
Eric Weinstein: Da- David’s-
01:38:14
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:38:14
Eric Weinstein: … David’s been nothing but nice to me, so I just don’t have any know-
01:38:16
Brian Keating: I don’t know him at all
01:38:17
Eric Weinstein: … I don’t have any knowledge of it.
01:38:17
Brian Keating: I’m just saying from his public statements, he’s claimed that, you know, he’s demonstrated his lack of curiosity, at least about science.
01:38:24
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:38:24
Brian Keating: That’s all I’ll say.
01:38:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, well-
01:38:25
Brian Keating: But let me get back to the original question, which is, what the hell do we do? We have a literature department, we have a gender studies department-
01:38:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, so-
01:38:30
Brian Keating: … we have a… They’re all supported in some way-
01:38:32
Eric Weinstein: So-
01:38:32
Brian Keating: … by fringe benefits-
01:38:33
Eric Weinstein: So-
01:38:33
Brian Keating: … that I get charged on my grant. So how do I… What do I do as a sci- I mean, there’s a lot of science professors listening to this podcast. 21 Nobel Prize winners have been on.
01:38:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:38:40
Brian Keating: What do we do? What would you have us do?
01:38:42
Eric Weinstein: All right. So be elitist.
01:38:42
Brian Keating: In Einstein University, what would it look like?
01:38:45
Eric Weinstein: We have an elite product. We should own what we’re doing badly.
01:38:50
Brian Keating: STEM.
01:38:52
Eric Weinstein: Um, to be honest, it’s not just STEM.
01:38:55
Brian Keating: Or, I mean-
01:38:56
Eric Weinstein: L- let me say more.
01:38:57
Brian Keating: Is it… Yeah. Okay.
01:38:59
Eric Weinstein: If you look at a music department, good luck trying to do voice leading first day, uh, you know, of class if you don’t know any theory.
01:39:07
Brian Keating: What’s voice leading? Singing? Or-
01:39:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, you, you’ve got different, you’ve got a chord progression, you’ve got different lines that might be sung or played as chords, and you’re trying to figure out how to keep the voices in a melodic pattern with following a harmonic prog- progression.
01:39:22
Brian Keating: I can hardly play Spotify, so-
01:39:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay
01:39:23
Brian Keating: … I’ll take your word for it, yeah.
01:39:25
Eric Weinstein: My claim is linguistics has lots of aspects of this, and ancient languages.
01:39:31
Brian Keating: Sure.
01:39:32
Eric Weinstein: You know, people who know, you know, ancient Sumerian, those are highly technical people. So-
01:39:38
Brian Keating: But the anthropology department in which they’re housed-
01:39:40
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They’re having a different version of our problem, which is much more severe. So my claim is, is that the English department and the physics department look somewhat the same. The nonsense about the only game in town, which is, pardon me, string identitarianism. Okay?
01:40:03
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:40:04
Eric Weinstein: No, it’s, it’s basically ele- it’s like a intersectional Olympics.
01:40:07
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:40:07
Eric Weinstein: The people who can’t do physics have to be the best.
01:40:10
Brian Keating: Right.
01:40:10
Eric Weinstein: Whatever. Um, and, and by the way, I’m just gonna be merciless about this because those boys have caused so much trouble and so much pain to so many people. If there’s ever a group of people, the only gra- game in town cowboys deserve everything coming their way. In an English department, that looks like intersectional studies. Now-
01:40:29
Brian Keating: Critical
01:40:29
Eric Weinstein: … is there somebody who’s also doing Chaucer’s Middle English? Yes, there is. So you have a portion of the English department that is actually engaged with English literature, scholarship. Everything that you want is still happening, but it’s much more infected and it’s much more political.
01:40:51
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:40:51
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is, one, let’s not pretend that STEM has escaped this, and two, let’s not pretend that our friends in the humanities now do nothing other than write about, uh-
01:41:05
Brian Keating: Oh, God, transgenderism
01:41:07
Eric Weinstein: … transgender dog parks-
01:41:08
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:41:08
Eric Weinstein: … or whatever it is that they, that they do. Right?
01:41:10
Brian Keating: Now, did I tell you what happened, uh-
01:41:11
Eric Weinstein: Wait, I don’t wanna get into it.
01:41:12
Brian Keating: Okay. Go ahead. Go finish.
01:41:13
Eric Weinstein: So your question is, well, what should we do? I think that the key point to say is we have some problems in STEM. They’re far less than our problems in the humanities.
01:41:21
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:41:22
Eric Weinstein: And-
01:41:22
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm. And what’s worth salvaging is, is self-evident.
01:41:25
Eric Weinstein: Everything is worth salvaging, but if we have to go it alone, I am prepared to cut the most ideological, political, and anti-scholarly departments loose, particularly starting with activist studies.
01:41:40
Brian Keating: I don’t think I ever told you this, but the day after the 2016 election, I was having, uh, lunch with one of my colleagues who’s a literature professor. We actually co-taught a class on poetry for physicists, you’ll be pleased to know. ‘Cause typically the trope is you gotta teach, uh, physics for poets, but I said, “No, actually the physicists need the poetry sometimes,” right? Um, so we taught a, co-taught a class. It was a wonderful class. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Rae Armantrout.
01:42:02
Eric Weinstein: Did you not like do a beautiful neutrinos-
01:42:04
Brian Keating: Yes. Neutrinos, they are very small. They have no mass at all. But he’s wrong.
01:42:07
Eric Weinstein: I know.
01:42:08
Brian Keating: So, you know. If only he had been talking about dark energy, Eric. He coulda had a career. Um, so we had lunch, and it was the day after the election. She was depressed as I’ve ever seen her. And, um, she was moping around and, and I said, um, you know, “Rae, I’m s- you know, I can tell that you’re not as enthusiastic as, you know, as, as many of our, you know, colleagues on the right may be, wherever they are on the campus, but, you know, you seem really far gone. You know, I, what, what’s bothering you?” She goes, “I understood that there would be people that would vote, not the way I like, in other departments, say, vote for Trump at this time.” This is Trump versus Hillary. “But I didn’t, I didn’t, I could not believe the people in my own department that, that turned on us.” I, I was like, “Is she saying what I think she’s saying? She’s saying that there were literature professors that voted for Trump?” And I said, uh, “Rae, you gotta tell me. What do you mean?” And she, uh, “Did they f- did any of our colleagues vote for Trump?” “Oh, God, no. He’s horrendous.” They voted for Bernie. [laughs] They threw their vote away, as if Hillary would’ve won if it wasn’t for these write-in votes for Bernie. Uh, so ideologically, you know, uniform were they that to defect to Bernie-
01:43:14
Eric Weinstein: Sure
01:43:14
Brian Keating: … was considered an treasonous act from which there was no recovery in the social circles among them. But last thing I, I, uh, we, we have to, we have to get to, unless, unless there’s some other things. I do, I do wanna mention this Churnsimons thing. I, I started to mention it to you-
01:43:26
Eric Weinstein: Ooh, so it’s, uh, I think we’re gonna-
01:43:28
Brian Keating: We gotta, we gotta rush, rush
01:43:28
Eric Weinstein: … finish on that.
01:43:29
Brian Keating: Okay. Go ahead.
01:43:30
Eric Weinstein: Look, the big problem is a lot of other stuff is happening that shouldn’t be happening in the universities, and I’m just gonna be very clear to you. Harvard is right To try to resist what the Trumpies are doing and it’s trying to do it from a position that is untenable. You cannot fight from where they are. So in other words, if they had a commitment to scholarship as opposed to commitment to, uh, supplication of the government when the government asks for some sort of cryptic program to be undertaken through Harvard, then Harvard would be in a position of saying, “We have always jealously defended our independence and our integrity. Our use to the country is because of our unwillingness to bend to the temporary needs of politicians.”
01:44:16
Brian Keating: 33 cancer patents last year alone.
01:44:18
Eric Weinstein: Bl-
01:44:18
Brian Keating: Right.
01:44:19
Eric Weinstein: No.
01:44:20
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:44:20
Eric Weinstein: I’m saying things like what they did with the CPI where they tried to raise taxes and slash the benefits by artificially cutting the CPI by 1.1 percentage point because they backed out that that would be a 10-year savings-
01:44:33
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:44:33
Eric Weinstein: … uh, of a trillion dollars.
01:44:35
Brian Keating: Right.
01:44:35
Eric Weinstein: And so my claim is, is that if you play that game and you bury real scholarships and then you attempt to play the next card, which is Harvard is committed to the truth, it’s on our motto in Latin-
01:44:46
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:44:46
Eric Weinstein: … and, um, don’t you ever tell us what we can and cannot do, sir. Good day.
01:44:52
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:44:53
Eric Weinstein: My point is, who are you fooling exactly?
01:44:56
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:44:56
Eric Weinstein: I would much rather that come from the University of Chicago, which has also done the business of the United States government-
01:45:04
Brian Keating: Mm
01:45:04
Eric Weinstein: … particularly through its economics department far too often. But if I had to pick a school-
01:45:09
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:45:10
Eric Weinstein: … the school would not be Harvard. Harvard plays with the federal government far too much, and what they’re really saying is, “You, sir, with the orange hair, are beneath us.”
01:45:19
Brian Keating: [laughs]
01:45:19
Eric Weinstein: “Good day.”
01:45:19
Brian Keating: Contemptible.
01:45:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And my feeling is that that’s not going to work.
01:45:23
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:45:23
Eric Weinstein: So what do I think we should do? Honestly, I think we should say, “You know what? You’re mildly right. You got a few points. We have departments that are completely riddled with, with, uh, ideological cancer, and we have… We don’t know what to do about them. We’ve let in too many people who are here for protesting. We’ve taken too much money from abroad. Absolutely, there’s a bunch of things that we’ve done that are wrong.” And having said that, you now wanna tell us that you want out of the compact? Oh, boy. You’re, you’re initiating divorce proceedings with the thing that kept America strong, rich, and safe. Think twice. Think three times. Is it… Is this really important to you in these terms? And then if you wanna sit down, remember something, a university goes home at night. All that you have left at the end of the day is the facilities. The brains leave. And by the way, any country at the moment that wants to absolutely leapfrog-
01:46:26
Brian Keating: Yeah. China.
01:46:28
Eric Weinstein: All it needs to do is start offering freedom and an upper middle class existence to professors at the top of their game.
01:46:37
Brian Keating: In science. They wouldn’t do it for the other… There’s no critical studies in the University of Lagos.
01:46:43
Eric Weinstein: I have no idea what we’re talking about.
01:46:45
Brian Keating: I’m just saying in- we’re restricted to science. It’s… There’s not… It’s not true that all the talent walked out.
01:46:49
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. It, it could be Milton Babbitt i- in the music department at Princeton. I don’t know what you’re saying.
01:46:55
Brian Keating: The, uh-
01:46:55
Eric Weinstein: It’s not all science
01:46:56
Brian Keating: … so we, we talked about… Okay, fine. Eric, is it mostly science? Are they studying critical, uh, theory at the University of Lagos, or are they studying, you know, physics, science, technology, engineering, math, music?
01:47:05
Eric Weinstein: Critical theorists blow the whole thing up. I have no… W- s- uh, what are we even talking about?
01:47:09
Brian Keating: Say something is truly legitimate as an academic discipline suitable for an intellectual, it should be something universal. It should be something that is done in Nigeria. They’re no less intellectually capable as we are. That’s why they do the same calculus and, and group theory they teach at the university there as well as we do here at UCSD. But they don’t have things that we do have here. As I said, cr- any critical… anything with critical in it, any studies department, we don’t have-
01:47:32
Eric Weinstein: Can, can we do me a favor?
01:47:33
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:47:33
Eric Weinstein: I’m tired of focusing on the people with blue hair.
01:47:35
Brian Keating: [laughs] Fine. Okay.
01:47:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay?
01:47:36
Brian Keating: I’m happy to move on.
01:47:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So there’s all of this shit that shouldn’t be happening.
01:47:39
Brian Keating: Yeah, that’s all I have. That’s all I-
01:47:40
Eric Weinstein: But you know what? No string theorist that I know-
01:47:42
Brian Keating: Yeah
01:47:42
Eric Weinstein: … has blue hair, and they are absolutely the blue hair problem of physics.
01:47:47
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:47:47
Eric Weinstein: And it’s not string theory. It’s the only game in town add on. In other words-
01:47:52
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
01:47:52
Eric Weinstein: … you could do string action, string phenomenology. You could do all sorts of stringy physics. You’ll never hear anything from me.
01:48:01
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:48:01
Eric Weinstein: You touch this thing where you say, “And my colleagues are pseudo scientists because if they don’t actually toe the line, then that’s not physics.”
01:48:09
Brian Keating: Right.
01:48:09
Eric Weinstein: My feeling is, oh boy, did you pick the wrong fight.
01:48:12
Brian Keating: You’re not, you’re not entitled to the game.
01:48:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, my claim is, is that any country that wants to clean up on academics and take the part that makes the US wealthy, safe, and powerful can do it. All you need to do is to start offering people half a million dollars a year, second homes, travel budgets. The world is your oyster.
01:48:35
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:48:35
Eric Weinstein: I can’t believe we are this dumb.
01:48:38
Brian Keating: Sacrificing, right. Surely the baby is being ditched. Sometimes the baby, you know, is the bathwater.
01:48:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay, let’s talk about Ukraine and October 7th.
01:48:47
Brian Keating: Yeah. So last time you were here, we were concerned about the precipice that we seem to be facing, uh, with a president who had a 1 in 20 or, or higher percent chance of dying in any given year. It was Joe Biden at the time. And then his surrogate, you know, should that heartbeat be skipped, was none other than, uh, Kamala Harris. Now that that’s no longer the case-
01:49:08
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. First of all, we don’t know who the surrogate was-
01:49:11
Brian Keating: Oh
01:49:11
Eric Weinstein: … in case the call came in the night and Joe Biden was not up for making a decision.
01:49:16
Brian Keating: He was rested and ready. What are you talking about? He was, he was sharp as a tack, I heard, from outside.
01:49:20
Eric Weinstein: I don’t wanna make a joke about this. We had a brain dead president, uh, for part sh- part of that presidency.
01:49:26
Brian Keating: Who was pulling the strings?
01:49:27
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know, but I was told. I was given names. I was said… I was told, “Don’t worry about this. Stop talking about it publicly.”
01:49:34
Brian Keating: Hmm.
01:49:35
Eric Weinstein: And my feeling about this is, you know, this is like the Democratic Party has to own the fact that they covered- For a Parkinson’s patient that could be diagnosed from his gait, from his speech, from his memory. Like th- this was completely known symptoms.
01:49:51
Brian Keating: Does that give you hope in some sense that actually the president isn’t that important?
01:49:55
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know why you do these moves.
01:49:57
Brian Keating: I’m just-
01:49:58
Eric Weinstein: No, I said this thing, what happens when the missiles come? The missiles didn’t come. M- m- maybe I can clarify something. The Cold War is forever, and I’m a child of the Cold War. When I hear about people who are post-Cold War, they don’t care about the apocalypse much. They’re vaguely apocalyptic. But part of the problem is, is that I- look, this physics thing, the reason that we are important in the minds of the public in part is that we are the ones who brought the end of the world. We brought the, the final sword of Damocles. You can add to the sword, but it’s been over the head of humanity, and I don’t love making light of it.
01:50:39
Brian Keating: I think the people that are guilty of making light, and, and I think that’s an important distinction, are the people who deliberately misled the public, that he was, and, and that you still consider yourself a Democrat is of curiosity to me.
01:50:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah? Tell me.
01:50:56
Brian Keating: I mean, a lot of the positions you hold, I mean, the ones that we’ve just discussed in, in particular, are not that dissimilar from, except for the possible denigration of technological engineering and military prowess in the United [laughs] States, which I agree is a paramount importance-
01:51:11
Eric Weinstein: No, Democrats were, were destroying that left, right, and center.
01:51:14
Brian Keating: Right. What tenets of the Democratic Party do resonate with you, besides the fact that, yes, that was a tradition of most Jews when they were born in the era-
01:51:23
Eric Weinstein: No, no
01:51:23
Brian Keating: … that you were born in-
01:51:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:51:24
Brian Keating: … had Democrat on their, on their birth certificate?
01:51:26
Eric Weinstein: No, no, that’s not what it is. What it is, is-
01:51:29
Brian Keating: Or what would it take to have you say, “I am not a member of the Democratic Party, even if I’m not a Republican”?
01:51:34
Eric Weinstein: I think people just don’t grasp what this is. If you were in France as a French person and it became Vichy France, would you stop being French? Do you think Marlene Dietrich stopped being German because of Adolf Hitler? You know, this is the thing. Oh, this, I’m no longer an American. I leave the country. I-
01:51:54
Brian Keating: Well, Einstein did.
01:51:55
Eric Weinstein: What?
01:51:56
Brian Keating: Einstein was no longer a German.
01:51:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, well, he was a, he, he, that’s a path that he chose where he was actually stateless.
01:52:01
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:52:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay. He never stopped being German. Read what he writes. [laughs]
01:52:08
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:52:08
Eric Weinstein: He’s German.
01:52:09
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:52:09
Eric Weinstein: Um, my claim is we have forgotten ourselves. I don’t think I’ve seen a world I recognize since the ’80s. I just see madness. I just, the, all I see since Dick Morris is madness.
01:52:24
Brian Keating: But okay, so you didn’t like what I said. Uh, does not make you more hopeful, but isn’t there a resilience in America? There’s something resilient about us.
01:52:31
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, you, you were on a different point. You were on a point about why do you consider yourself a Democrat.
01:52:35
Brian Keating: Okay, I made a tangent.
01:52:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:52:36
Brian Keating: That’s what I want. It’s my prerogative-
01:52:37
Eric Weinstein: That’s all right
01:52:38
Brian Keating: … as a podcast host.
01:52:39
Eric Weinstein: It’s your, it’s your whiskey.
01:52:39
Brian Keating: Okay. [laughs]
01:52:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:52:40
Brian Keating: Okay, so why are you… Yes, go back. Let’s go back to that.
01:52:42
Eric Weinstein: So my, my claim is, is that the stated aims of the Democratic Party, as they once were, are to make the world a bit better for working families and to be, to take the position of the little guy against the overdog, okay? Of the two parties, that is closer to my orientation. Now, to be honest, JD Vance led a pro working class movement before he was ever considered for vice president. It just came out of him. I was on board. I would help the Trumpies. I would, I would help Kamala Harris. I would help anybody who wants to make the country better. Right now, we’re caught in this loyalty thing-
01:53:24
Brian Keating: Mm
01:53:24
Eric Weinstein: … and it’s tearing people apart for g- very good reason. Do you really want to say, “I support X,” and then have to sign on to all the stuff that X is doing? Like this tariff stuff, this is, this is re– I don’t know what the plan is. Nobody’s clued me in as to how this is just great. I didn’t want to be associated with Kamala Harris.
01:53:47
Brian Keating: Yeah.
01:53:47
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t want to be associated with Donald Trump. I didn’t, nobody called me up and said, “Here’s the plan. Are you with us?” I have no idea what the plan is. I just l- I, I tune in and, you know, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris would announce things, and now Donald Trump and Elon Musk announce things, and I just clutch my head. So am I, am I strongly attached to either party as it currently stands? No.
01:54:11
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:54:12
Eric Weinstein: But, I, what I’ve said is I’m a nail house Democrat. Somebody has to be left behind to remind the party, “You’re just going mad.” This is what I say about theoretical physics or science.
01:54:26
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:54:26
Eric Weinstein: It’s like-
01:54:26
Brian Keating: There’s a theme, yeah.
01:54:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, yeah, the theme is you’ve forgotten yourself. Somebody will intone quantum gravity is the Holy Grail of theoretical physics, and I will put up a slide that shows nobody even mentioned the words quantum gravity before 1972. You know, at some level, we’re caught in a mass delusion, so that’s where my life is living out, is that I’ve got two political parties, have no clue as to what the planet is, how everything worked. We had a bunch of technocrats. They built a system that was too complicated. It was way too exoteric esoteric, so it kept certain things in secret, shared certain things in the public. That’s this, that system spun out of control, and right now we’re sitting on a planet where we’re at risk of nuclear proliferation because, quite honestly, the Trumpies are all about, uh, revitalizing, and as they revitalize and they pull in America’s commitments from overseas, it’s like pulling the control rods out of a reactor. You c- you’ll see what happens next. Two beautiful oceans will keep us safe because no- nothing knows how to cross, and Lord knows there are no submarines that patrol our coasts. I have no idea what’s-
01:55:31
Brian Keating: The Chinese balloons that fly about.
01:55:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is ridiculous, and we’re playing with the planet in this completely cavalier way where… A- a- and I’ll just be honest about something that really offends me. There’s this meme in my very smart friends, which is, “Don’t worry, Trump and Elon have this,” and my claim is- Do you have any idea how many nonlinear interacting things they just threw up in the air? So imagine that you threw up a spinning chainsaw, uh, bungee cords, uh, a plasma TV, uh, glitter. I don’t know. You just start electrical stuff with water, blah, blah, blah.
01:56:11
Brian Keating: That’s called bedtime at the Keating house. [laughs]
01:56:14
Eric Weinstein: The, um… Oh, yeah, don’t worry. They’ve got this. Well, no one on planet Earth can control-
01:56:19
Brian Keating: 4D chess, right
01:56:20
Eric Weinstein: … Yes. It’s, uh, like you’re, you’re playing four- 40,000 dimensional quantum chess. You’re just making things crazy, and the only thing that I can see about this is is that at least when things are crazy, Donald Trump at least knows what he’s gonna do next, which nobody else can say.
01:56:36
Brian Keating: Mm.
01:56:36
Eric Weinstein: So in some sense, he’s got a permanent one-move advantage by throwing the world into chaos.
01:56:42
Brian Keating: Yeah. The instability has a tactical advantage, if not a strategic one. Okay, last topic before we break bread. Kind of highlight this from a perspective of you recently having been both to this art conference where you spoke about this, this, you know, clandestine war, so to speak, or, or the secret war that people don’t realize that they’re in.
01:57:02
Eric Weinstein: Hybrid war.
01:57:02
Brian Keating: Hybrid war, and also your recent trip to Israel.
01:57:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:57:06
Brian Keating: So what are these two trips? What… Is there some core that resonates between the two of them? Is there some s- the post-October 7th world, is it, is it can we go back to the time before, or are we permanently in a new era, um, not unlike the Cold War or something like that?
01:57:21
Eric Weinstein: We, we don’t want to go back. October 6th was a really dangerous and stupid time in Israeli history.
01:57:29
Brian Keating: Protest. Yeah.
01:57:30
Eric Weinstein: Is- Israel was focused on internal issues, thinking that it was as stable as Spain or France.
01:57:37
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
01:57:38
Eric Weinstein: And it isn’t, and Israel’s been in a terrible bind that no one will let it out of. As long as the US harbors a fantasy about a two-state solution involving people who cannot live under a two-state solution, you will consign people to bury their children, and I think this is a problem with 20th century idealism. It’s just not real enough. So yes, there are people who can live in harmony in the Middle East e- e- even if it’s cold and bitter as a peace, and there are people who cannot. And my feeling is that both the Jews and the Arabs who cannot live in peace need to be relocated, and then whoever is left needs to get on with it, the business of living.
01:58:29
Brian Keating: And where do they go is the obvious question. Those things-
01:58:32
Eric Weinstein: That has always been a question of absorption. And to be entirely honest, part of the problem lies at the foot of the Arab League. The issue is that we keep doing weird Western style idealism in a region in which the participants are much smarter than the tourists, and for the most part, I’m a tourist. The people who cannot live in peace need to leave on both sides. You know, you can’t have, uh, Israeli settlers, uh, taking their frustration out by humiliating their Arab neighbors, and you cannot have a bunch of psychopaths on paragliders attacking music festivals. And whatever… You know, you can’t have Baruch Goldstein gunning down people in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. They’re just people who can’t be placated. I will point out Israel has repatriated people in Yamit in, in Sinai o- once upon a time.
01:59:37
Brian Keating: In, uh, mm-hmm.
01:59:38
Eric Weinstein: And it’s moved people, uh, out of Gaza. There were Israelis who were living in Gaza. It’s like your time is up. We-
01:59:44
Brian Keating: Forced, yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:59:45
Eric Weinstein: In- including graveyards and digging up remains. Now, my claim is we’ve got to recognize that under extreme circumstances that haven’t been visited much since World War II, when we had the Potsdam agreement where we repatriated the Sudeten Germans to German soil, we have to reexamine are we really being idealistic? Are we really doing something good and positive by telling people who cannot get along, “You will remain married forever”?
02:00:17
Brian Keating: The only thing that defines a human being, I mean, existence, charity-
02:00:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, y- you look at Black September, r- you know. When, when Jordan had a state within a state, they didn’t sit around saying, “Oh, we cannot expel these people,” because that would be ethnic cleansing, and that would-
02:00:30
Brian Keating: Mm
02:00:30
Eric Weinstein: … y- you know.
02:00:31
Brian Keating: Or Kuwait, right
02:00:32
Eric Weinstein: … They, they went to, um, they went to Lebanon, and then Lebanon says, “We can’t deal with these people,” and they send them to Tunisia.
02:00:39
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:00:39
Eric Weinstein: You know? Ultimately, you need to live someplace where you can live hating another person every moment and not kill anybody.
02:00:48
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:00:49
Eric Weinstein: So let’s find that place.
02:00:50
Brian Keating: I’ve been talking, thinking a lot about my late great friend and mentor, Jim Simons, who was a fan, and actually the one, one of my regrets is that we never got to take him up on his offer to, to, to repatriate you to the, uh, to the East Coast for at least some sabbatical time. Maybe we still will. Maybe we still will.
02:01:07
Eric Weinstein: You should tell that story ’cause that-
02:01:09
Brian Keating: Yeah
02:01:09
Eric Weinstein: … that’s something you did.
02:01:10
Brian Keating: Yeah. Well, my-
02:01:11
Eric Weinstein: You called me.
02:01:12
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:01:12
Eric Weinstein: And you said, “Eric, how quickly can you get to Santa Barbara?”
02:01:15
Brian Keating: [laughs]
02:01:16
Eric Weinstein: Now, I knew Jim from before.
02:01:18
Brian Keating: Yeah.
02:01:19
Eric Weinstein: But I knew him in a professional context. I never I never was wildly friendly with him, and you invited me to a family event
02:01:25
Brian Keating: Yeah, it was my mother’s, uh, s- 80th birthday party four years ago, and, uh, and we, uh, my brother, who was living in Santa Barbara at the time, had, uh, you know, was, um, hosting a big party. He threw this wonderful party for her
02:01:39
Eric Weinstein: Right
02:01:39
Brian Keating: And my only contribution was I invited Jim and Marilyn Simons to, uh, come to the birthday party of my mom, and I kept that a secret from her, which, so it was a great surprise
02:01:47
Eric Weinstein: Very nice
02:01:47
Brian Keating: And so they came out and, uh, spent a couple days in Santa Barbara, and then we had this party, and then after the main festivities were over, uh, Jim, as is want, wanted to sit by the fireplace and recount stories, both of-
02:01:59
Eric Weinstein: Smoke a cigarette with no socks
02:02:01
Brian Keating: … smoke cigarettes, uh, no socks and no filter on the cigarette-
02:02:03
Eric Weinstein: No fi-
02:02:03
Brian Keating: … or on the conversation
02:02:04
Eric Weinstein: Exactly
02:02:05
Brian Keating: Um, and we had my, uh, my nephews who had never really met him, um, and, uh, my, my, some of my children were there at the time, and, uh, we had a great time, and talked late into the night
02:02:15
Eric Weinstein: We had a crazy time
02:02:17
Brian Keating: Yeah, it was quite good. You played the hand pan drum of my brother at one point, and, uh, and we stayed up till wee hours of the morning talking physics. And by the end of the evening, um, we, uh, you exchanged information, or I exchanged your information with Jim
02:02:32
Eric Weinstein: No, something more important happened before that
02:02:34
Brian Keating: Oh, say, okay, so tell, say your recollection. That’s too-
02:02:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, this, this is important because these are historical figures, and nobody’s gonna have a further conversation-
02:02:42
Brian Keating: Right
02:02:42
Eric Weinstein: … with Jim Simons, so I wanna make sure that we talk about what actually happened. So Jim, in my estimation, was very aware of the string theoretic and related interest in the Chern-Simons theory. And at least officially, he professed that he didn’t quite understand what the big deal was. Now, I bring this up because there’s an interview that Jim did with his arguably main collaborator. He had two great Chinese collaborators, one in differential geometry, one in physics, and C.N. Yang was his great collaborator at Stony Brook. And C.N. Yang realized what they had done together, and I have been keeping this Wu-Yang dictionary, which in my opinion is actually the Simons-Yang dictionary, which is the Rosetta Stone between bundle theoretic differential geometry and particle theory. One of the most important things that happened that has almost no discussion of whatsoever in the literature, uh, that anybody could read outside of the field, is the discovery that all of particle theory was geometry, except for the Higgs sector. And Jim was very reticent to make a big deal of this. You can see it on camera when C.N. Yang was like, “This is incredible. It’s amazing.” And Jim’s like, “I, I never really understand fully,” but in part that was just him. So what I said to Jim is, “You do realize that the Chern-Simons functional is the only other real action or Lagrangian, the magic thing that determines all physics, that produces Euler-Lagrange equations with no differential operator in front of the curvature other than the Einstein field equations from the Hilbert Lagrangian.” He thought about that, and he said something like, “Do you think that’s important?” And I said, “Without wanting to give you false hope, it is my belief that the final theory of gravity will be as much Chern-Simons as it is Einstein-Hilbert.” And so he said, “Well, how do you figure that?” So I started explaining why I believe the marriage of these ideas with extra stuff that isn’t yet in the story is going to be what fixes gravity, and it will fix what I believe is the cosmological constant problem. Then there was this bizarre interaction, which I, I still to this day can’t understand, and Jim says, “That’s remarkable.” And he asked me if I knew anything about the Simons Center. I said, “Yes, I’ve visited. You have an incredible leader in Louise Alvarez-Gaume at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics.” And he says, “Why don’t you come for a year and develop the theory at Stony Brook?” And I said, “That is a remarkable and generous offer. I just need some help because I have a son who’s finishing high school, and I have to relocate and move a family for a year. So if, if there’s the ability to help with the, with the heavy lift, I would be very interested.” And Jim said, and I’ll never forget this, “Do you have any idea where you’d get the money?” And I could not figure out what was happening. I was trying to tell him that I believe that Chern-Simons is going to be as important as Einstein-Hilbert in the final theory of gravity. He saw it, he was very interested, and then it got hung up on this completely bizarre issue of a guy who was made of money himself, and I, I just don’t understand it
02:06:35
Brian Keating: Yeah, I mean, I can’t offer too much insight into it other than, [clears throat] um, he was, um, blessed in some ways by having an infinite amount of people that he was curious about their work and wanted to support. And I’ll never forget, he had a charity that was a subsidiary of the Simons Foundation called Math for America-
02:06:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
02:06:57
Brian Keating: … was to do what Teach for America did, but specifically for math. So we had a chapter here of all places at UC San Diego, and I was one of the members of the board of advisors at the time, and we had an event at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on the beach here in San Diego. There’s a beautiful, uh, facility, and we had a fundraiser, which we invited wealthy people. Let’s be honest, who’s gonna give money, you know? The students, no.
02:07:19
Eric Weinstein: Right
02:07:19
Brian Keating: So we had a big sh- you know, fundraiser, cost a lot of money to raise, and we brought in, um, congresswoman, our local congresswoman. We brought in, uh, dignitaries, visionaries, um, you know, other rich people [chuckles] potential donors.
02:07:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
02:07:32
Brian Keating: I eventually e- ended up setting him up with Irwin Jacobs, and, and that was a, a nice coup for me to get, uh, some support from Irwin to support Jim’s support. You know, just two billionaires, you know, arguing about, uh, you know, who could give each other, you know, the 50K check. And then Craig Venter was there, and Craig’s been on the show
02:07:48
Eric Weinstein: Marvelous
02:07:50
Brian Keating: We’re talking, and I didn’t know Craig at the time, but I saw them scrolling off, and I’m like, “What’s he doing?” And then Jim came back and said, “Oh yeah, he w- he wants me to give him money. He says I’m a genius.” And I, and I, and I said, “Well, then he’s supposedly a pretty smart guy. I mean, he sequenced the human genome.” Um, uh, you know, before Francis Collins, by the way. And, uh, and Jim said, “Yeah, but you know something, Brian? If I gave a dollar to everyone who told me-
02:08:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
02:08:13
Brian Keating: … I was a genius, even I would be broke.” Now, obviously he’s tongue in cheek, but I think, yes, uh-
02:08:19
Eric Weinstein: But-
02:08:19
Brian Keating: I think if we had fol- ’cause he did follow up, to be honest with… I mean, to give him, you know, I don’t want to say, say anything negative, obviously, about him, but he did, after the fact, he did go to, uh, I got emails from him coordinating a possible invitation from Luis to you. And so, I mean, I have that. He mentioned it, and then I think maybe, well, we’ll just talk off camera about my supposition what happened next. But, but yes, I, I don’t know why that happened-
02:08:42
Eric Weinstein: But-
02:08:42
Brian Keating: … Eric, but, but the, the point-
02:08:43
Eric Weinstein: I don’t want to dwell on that aspect. It was just-
02:08:45
Brian Keating: Yeah
02:08:45
Eric Weinstein: … mysterious. The thing that I wanted to get to, though-
02:08:48
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
02:08:48
Eric Weinstein: … is what is the Chern-Simons functional?
02:08:53
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:08:53
Eric Weinstein: Because I don’t think people really know about it.
02:08:55
Brian Keating: No.
02:08:56
Eric Weinstein: And I don’t think they know how important it is. So the Chern-Simons functional is a, an object that eats two of a thing called a connection, and spits out a three-dimensional object that can only be integrated in dimension three. So we don’t live in dimension three, even though it feels like we do at any instant in time, because you have a bunch of time incidents-
02:09:24
Brian Keating: Correct
02:09:24
Eric Weinstein: … so you have this fourth dimension.
02:09:26
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:09:26
Eric Weinstein: But imagine that we lived in two spatial dimensions, like we were in flatland, and that was progressing in time. Jim and S.S. Chern figured out that if you hand their object two different connections, it can, in some sense, take a difference between them, technically called a transgression, and that object can be integrated, and that integration gives you information about a physical system, which was sort of rediscovered by Ed Witten, originally due to a guy named Albert Schwarz from the Soviet Union, who settled at UC Davis.
02:10:05
Brian Keating: Davis.
02:10:05
Eric Weinstein: And he did the abelian theory, and I really wish we called, uh, Chern-Simons theory after, uh, Albert Schwarz as well as Ed Witten, as well as Chern and Simons. The key thing is that it’s mispresented almost always.
02:10:21
Brian Keating: Hmm.
02:10:21
Eric Weinstein: It’s presented as a thing that eats one object called a connection A, and you’re hiding the fact that there’s a trivial second object, so that you, you suppress it and you don’t see it in the actual equation. But if you do it properly, as a mathematician would, it eats two connections and spits out a thing that can be integrated to give a number. And this thing is so beautiful and so remarkable because it is the rival to general relativity-
02:10:53
Brian Keating: Yeah
02:10:53
Eric Weinstein: … and that is not really appreciated, I think, enough.
02:10:57
Brian Keating: Worse than that, I mean, as we were talking last night-
02:11:00
Eric Weinstein: Say more.
02:11:00
Brian Keating: Say less. Uh [laughs] as we were talking last night, I think, to a good approximation, thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of people know about, um, know about Calabi-Yau manif- or have heard about them. Don’t know them-
02:11:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
02:11:14
Brian Keating: … but let’s just say they know about them, heard about them r- rather, and ze- zero people know about Chern-Simons. I mean, basically zero people. I think even in this depart- well, this is an astronomy building. Now, uh, we’re on enemy territory, but zero people in this building know about what Chern-Simons is, but a few of them would know about, uh, that, which I think is a, is much a marketing, branding failure of Jim Simons.
02:11:36
Eric Weinstein: And it’s also part of the story, to be entirely honest.
02:11:38
Brian Keating: How so?
02:11:38
Eric Weinstein: Because I think it was in 1986, there was a centenary conference at Duke University-
02:11:44
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm
02:11:45
Eric Weinstein: … for Hermann Weyl.
02:11:47
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:11:48
Eric Weinstein: And I, I, I was an activist at the time, and I lobbied the Harvard math department for funds so that all of the graduate students could go to this historic conference. And-
02:11:59
Brian Keating: [laughs]
02:11:59
Eric Weinstein: … to Barry Mazur’s credit, he just said yes, and he gave us all money, and so we-
02:12:03
Brian Keating: Wow
02:12:03
Eric Weinstein: … traveled, and I saw one of the most remarkable lectures ever, where m- Sir Michael Atiyah stood up in front of this incredibly prestigious, uh, conference and all of these great luminaries and said, “You know, there have been these discoveries recently, I think of, uh, invariance of the, the, the Jones polynomial and the Casson invariant, and they should have a description in quantum field theory if only somebody could find the quantum field theory to give us this topology.” And Witten was there.
02:12:38
Brian Keating: Hmm.
02:12:41
Eric Weinstein: And it is a testament to the fact that nobody knew enough about the Chern-Simons function that they searched, I think, for three or four years before rediscovering what Albert Schwarz had done in the commutative case, and Ed Witten did it in the noncommutative case, and that’s what Ed Witten won the Fields Medal for. He won it for Chern-Simons.
02:13:02
Brian Keating: Hmm.
02:13:03
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, it was the fact that nobody was conscious enough of it that meant that it had to be this mystery theory that no one could find.
02:13:11
Brian Keating: Hmm.
02:13:12
Eric Weinstein: And when they actually found it, it was very deeply embedded in real s- science. Now, here’s a completely crazy story that shouldn’t necessarily be linked to this, but I throw it out.
02:13:24
Brian Keating: All right.
02:13:24
Eric Weinstein: There is a guy named Bob Lazar-
02:13:28
Brian Keating: [laughs] Yes. I know
02:13:30
Eric Weinstein: … who may be a crazy person.
02:13:32
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:13:34
Eric Weinstein: I have no idea whether anything he says is true. But in 1989, he gave a crazy interview, and in the interview he says, “You know, gravity comes in two flavors, gravity wave A and gravity wave B.” Now, a- as a physics person, have you ever heard anyone talk like this?
02:13:52
Brian Keating: No.
02:13:53
Eric Weinstein: No, exactly. And he says, “One of these things is the weak form of gravity that you already know- But if there is an alien engineering project, it uses the other gravity wave which you most likely know is associated with the strong force. And I thought, “What is this guy talking about?”
02:14:12
Brian Keating: Yeah.
02:14:12
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, the strong force comes from a theory called QCD.
02:14:18
Brian Keating: Yeah.
02:14:19
Eric Weinstein: QCD actually has two sub-sectors, one of which is called the Yang-Mills theory which involves F wedge star F. But the other sector is called the theta angle or the theta sector, and that’s F wedge F, and that is the first Pontryagin class which when transgressed, nevermind what that means exactly, it means a question of how does it change. You’re, you’re trying to figure out how it changes with response to perturbation. That transgresses to the Chern-Simons function, and that Chern-Simons function mirrors gravity because it, it results in a curvature tensor with no differential operator in front of it, whereas the other term results in a curvature tensor with a differential operator in front of it. In other words, Maxwell’s theory-
02:15:15
Brian Keating: Yeah
02:15:15
Eric Weinstein: … is DA star of FA where FA is the curvature, so it’s a differential of curvature equals stuff, whereas Einstein’s theory is contraction of curvature with no differentiation. You just do some linear algebra equals stuff. So these two theories that are sort of incompatible-
02:15:31
Brian Keating: Mm
02:15:31
Eric Weinstein: … gravity and Yang-Mills theory, in fact are very closely related.
02:15:36
Brian Keating: Right.
02:15:37
Eric Weinstein: And the crazy thing that Bob Lazar says about gravity wave B which you most likely know as the s- as involved in QCD-
02:15:47
Brian Keating: [laughs]
02:15:47
Eric Weinstein: … actually has a high-level interpretation, although I have no idea whether Bob Lazar has any clue what he’s even talking about.
02:15:55
Brian Keating: That’s, uh-
02:15:55
Eric Weinstein: So what I’m claiming is-
02:15:57
Brian Keating: Didn’t expect that on my bingo card for the podcast.
02:15:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but this is the thing. If you, if you-
02:16:01
Brian Keating: Didn’t he also raid an alien or something?
02:16:02
Eric Weinstein: What?
02:16:03
Brian Keating: He, he flew like a, a bomber over an alien base or something like that or…?
02:16:08
Eric Weinstein: I don’t care.
02:16:09
Brian Keating: [laughs]
02:16:09
Eric Weinstein: No, no, look, as- assume that, assume that a lot of what he’s saying is, you know, he’s like a, a, a convicted criminal.
02:16:15
Brian Keating: But-
02:16:15
Eric Weinstein: He’s a…
02:16:16
Brian Keating: [laughs]
02:16:17
Eric Weinstein: I, I… We keep laughing about everything.
02:16:20
Brian Keating: Right.
02:16:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay. He, you can take the following to the bank. There’s something called the theta sector in QCD.
02:16:27
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:16:27
Eric Weinstein: It’s associated with the strong force.
02:16:28
Brian Keating: For sure, yeah, yeah.
02:16:29
Eric Weinstein: And the transgression of it leads to the Chern-Simons action, and the Chern-Simons action, when differentiated in dimension three to give the Euler-Lagrange equations, is eerily similar to the Einstein-Hilbert equations which give you general relativity. You don’t, you can take Do- Bob Lazar the hell out of that story and I’ll stand by everything I just said.
02:16:48
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:16:48
Eric Weinstein: And I’ve never heard anyone mention this.
02:16:50
Brian Keating: Right.
02:16:50
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is Jim stands to win at an enormous level if what I believe is true is true. And it’s, it’s not Chern-Simons theory, and it’s not Einstein-Hilbert.
02:17:07
Brian Keating: Mm.
02:17:07
Eric Weinstein: It’s, it’s more than both of them.
02:17:09
Brian Keating: Mm.
02:17:09
Eric Weinstein: But boy, is Chern-Simons theory going to be important-
02:17:12
Brian Keating: Yes
02:17:13
Eric Weinstein: … to gravity. And the reason that, by the way, it doesn’t have credence in a place like an astronomy or a physics department is it, it’s locked in dimension three. And what I said today in our talk is that Einstein is the first person in a certain sense to show that through his contraction operator you can make dimension four look a great deal like dimension three if you augment something called the Lorentz group to the Poincaré group, the de Sitter group, or the anti-de Sitter group. And in all of those cases, you can relate something called a curvature tensor or a field strength to a gauge potential or a connection one form, and in that th- that relationship where you take something of degree two and turn it into something of degree one, in Chern-Simons theory you do it through a Hodge star operator, and in Einsteinian gravity you do it through a contraction through a tensor product. So this story is far from played out.
02:18:15
Brian Keating: Mm.
02:18:15
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely Jim Simons has a horse in this race, and Jim was very briefly active in mathematics before he became this mysterious hedge fund figure. And what I would say is the little bit that he did do in math before he jumped ship is absolutely first rate, astonishing mathematics.
02:18:35
Brian Keating: Amen. There was one thing that he wanted. He, he had a Gulf Stream. He had a mega yacht. I even got him an asteroid which you can read about here, asteroid 6618 Jimsimons, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh. Do you know who Clyde Tombaugh was, what his fame-
02:18:51
Eric Weinstein: Sure
02:18:51
Brian Keating: … claim to fame is? Discovered Pluto, which was killed by past guest Michael Brown who was here a couple weeks ago sitting in that very chair.
02:18:58
Eric Weinstein: But how did he discover it?
02:18:59
Brian Keating: How did he discover, how did, how did Clyde Tombaugh discover Pluto?
02:19:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, wasn’t it the-
02:19:04
Brian Keating: Tell me
02:19:04
Eric Weinstein: … visible world’s failure to close is how you discover an invisible object?
02:19:08
Brian Keating: That was Le Verrier. That was the discovery of Neptune.
02:19:11
Eric Weinstein: Oh, okay.
02:19:11
Brian Keating: Yeah, sorry.
02:19:11
Eric Weinstein: So close, so close.
02:19:12
Brian Keating: One planet off, but actually it’s a planet and, uh, Pluto’s not. Anyway, got him the planet. I got him the minor planet, which ca- considered a minor planet, and he said, “Brian,” you know, grizzled voice, Merit cigarettes for 60 years, he said, “Brian, it’s wonderful. Answer one question. Do I have mining rights on it?”
02:19:30
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
02:19:30
Brian Keating: [laughs] That was Jim Simons.
02:19:32
Eric Weinstein: He’s so, so funny.
02:19:34
Brian Keating: But I said, “No, Jim.” Um-
02:19:34
Eric Weinstein: By the way, you, can I just tell my-
02:19:36
Brian Keating: Yeah
02:19:36
Eric Weinstein: … Tiny Math for America story?
02:19:37
Brian Keating: Yeah, yeah, go for it.
02:19:38
Eric Weinstein: I wouldn’t have told this, I think, uh, while he was alive.
02:19:41
Brian Keating: Yeah.
02:19:41
Eric Weinstein: But years ago I met with him in New York before I knew you.
02:19:46
Brian Keating: Mm-hmm.
02:19:46
Eric Weinstein: And I spent three hours talking to him, and I knew he’d made all this money in the markets, and I said, “Look, you’re a geometer, I’m a geometer. You’re married to an economist, as am I. I know what you’re up to.” And I said, uh, “The markets are actually differential geometric And in fact, they’re gauge-theoretic. You’ve figured out that the markets are gauge-theoretic, and that’s what you’re doing to make money. And I get… I went through three hours explaining it. And he looked up at me and he said, “Eric, if you only knew how we actually made money, you’d be so disappointed.”
02:20:23
Brian Keating: [laughs]
02:20:24
Eric Weinstein: I said, “What are you talking about?” He says, “You know, look, I found all sorts of…” He said, “I, I didn’t know any of this stuff. Thank you for telling me.” He said, “It’s astounding, but I’m caught on much simpler problems.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You know, I was determined to solve the problem of math education in America.” He said, “And after studying it and being willing to give away a very large amount of money,” he said, “I had to settle for making terrible teachers slightly less terrible, and that was so uninspiring that I didn’t feel, uh, energized by it.” And I felt so sad-
02:21:01
Brian Keating: Mm
02:21:02
Eric Weinstein: … that such a, a, a brilliant and amazing human being, when tackling a real world problem, it just enervated him no end.
02:21:10
Brian Keating: I know. I mean, he was, uh, he was one of the most amazing people-
02:21:13
Eric Weinstein: Amazing human being
02:21:13
Brian Keating: … I ever got to know. But he said to me, um… Well, I have to tell you one quick vignette about him before we close. Um, he was, um, being awarded a prize, uh, by, you know, for being such a great supporter of the American Lung Association, and they came to his office to present him-
02:21:30
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
02:21:30
Brian Keating: … not only with a prize, but it was on his birthday-
02:21:32
Eric Weinstein: Oh, dude. The American Lung
02:21:33
Brian Keating: … eight years ago. Hold on, it gets better.
02:21:35
Eric Weinstein: Oh.
02:21:35
Brian Keating: And he invited them to his office, ’cause he had only a few minutes to meet, and they kept, he kept, they said they kept droning on and on about it, and he was, you know, understandably, he was a little bit, you know, getting nervous. He had to use the bathroom. But he would smoke. He had the only office in Manhattan you were allowed to smoke inside of ’cause he owned the whole building. Um, and then he got so, uh-
02:21:53
Eric Weinstein: He was insufferable
02:21:54
Brian Keating: … he didn’t have an ashtray, and so in the middle of this meeting with the American Lung Association, they had the birthday cake for him, and he ashed a cigarette in the birthday cake-
02:22:04
Eric Weinstein: Oh
02:22:05
Brian Keating: … with the American Lung Association logo. But Eric, I wanna conclude with one thing. The one thing that he always wanted, he had the mega yacht, the mega jet-
02:22:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
02:22:12
Brian Keating: … the asteroid, the, the accolades galore. Um, he wanted one of these. He really did. And, you know, with God’s help perhaps will not only tell his story, but, uh, but maybe, just maybe someone, someone, not saying me, I’ve lost my affinity as you know, uh, spoiler alert. Um, but I think he should be recognized. And I think Cherng, too, obviously. I mean, this law, the posthumous Nobel Pri- Tell me where in the laws of physics you can’t give away a prize posthumously. Uh, it’s actually been done. But Eric, anyway, we gotta go. We gotta go have dinner. We gotta leave, get you back to home. And I just wanna thank you. Let’s not make it two years next time. Let’s make it at least, uh, 18 months or, or sooner. And, uh, you’re a fan favorite, and I enjoyed your talk very much. And, and seeing you in your element, the t- the lion amongst his, amongst his, uh, fellow, his fellow beast of the field in the best possible way of the mind, was quite inspiring and fun, and I always learn tremendous amount from you and benefit from your company, your collegiality, your friendship, and your conscience as a, as a voice of reason of the field. So thank you very much.
02:23:20
Eric Weinstein: Really appreciate that, Brian. Thank you.
02:23:22
Brian Keating: Okay.
02:23:23
Brian Keating: If you can’t get enough of Eric, make sure you check out his lecture given at UCSD the day that this conversation was recorded. Click here for that. And if you wanna hear a deep dive of Eric debating a fellow theoretical physicist, my colleague, Professor Dan Green, click here. You don’t wanna miss that conversation either.
