Eric Weinstein and Geometric Unity | Stephen Wolfram and Lex Fridman

what are your uh i mean you've talked with him but just as a matter of personalities because it's a beautiful story what are your thoughts about eric weinstein's work you know i i think his his um i mean he did a phd thesis in mathematical physics mathematical physics and and you know it's it it seems like it's kind of you know it's it's in that framework and it's kind of like i'm not sure how much further it's got than his phd thesis which was 20 years ago or something and i think that you know the the you know it's a fairly specific piece of mathematical physics that's quite nice and um what trajectory do you hope it takes i mean well i think in his particular case i mean from what i understand which is not everything at all but you know i think i know the rough tradition at least is operating in is sort of theory of gauge theories gauge theories local gauge invariants and so on okay we are very close to understanding how local gauge and variance works in our models and it's very beautiful and it's very um and you know does some of the mathematical structure that he's enthusiastic about fit quite possibly yes so there might be a possibility of trying to understand how those things fit how gauge theory fits very well i mean the question is you know so there are a couple of things one might try to get in the world so for example it's like can we get three dimensions of space we haven't managed to get that yet gage theory the standard model of particle physics says that it's su 3 cross su 2 cross u1 those are the designations of these um lee groups um it doesn't but but anyway so those are those are sort of representations of symmetries of the theory and um so you know it is conceivable that it is generically true okay so all those are subgroups of a group called e8 which is a weird exceptional lead group okay it is conceivable i don't know whether it's the case that that will be generic in these models that it will be generic that the gauge and variance of the model has this property just as things like general relativity which corresponds to thing called general covariance which is another gauge-like invariance it could conceivably be the case that the kind of local gauge and variance that we see in particle physics is somehow generic and and that would be a you know the thing that's that's really cool i think you know sociologically although this hasn't really hit yet is that all of these different things all these different things people have been working on in these in some cases quite abstruse areas of mathematical physics an awful lot of them seem to tie into what we're doing and you know it might not be that way yeah absolutely that's a beautiful thing i think i mean but the reason i so the reason eric weinstein is important is to the point that you mentioned before which is it's strange that the theory of everything is not at the core of uh the passion the dream the focus the funding of the physics community it's too hard it's too hard and people gave up i mean basically what happened is ancient greece people thought we're nearly there you know the world is made of platonic solids it's you know water is a tetrahedron or something we're almost there okay long period of time where people were like no we don't know how it works you know time of newton uh you know we're almost there everything is gravitation you know time of faraday and maxwell we're almost there everything is fields everything is the ether you know then the whole time we're making big progress though oh yes absolutely but the fundamental theory of physics is almost a footnote because it's like it's the machine code it's like we're operating in the high-level languages yeah um you know that's what we really care about that's what's relevant for our everyday physics we've talked about different centuries in the 21st century will be uh everything is computation yes if that takes us all the way we don't know but it might take us pretty far yes right that's right and but i think the point is that it's like you know if you're doing biology you might say how can you not be really interested in the origin of life and the definition of life well it's irrelevant you know you're studying the properties of some virus it doesn't matter you know where you know you're operating at some much higher level and it's the same what's happening with physics is i was sort of surprised actually i was sort of mapping out this history of of people's efforts to understand the fundamental theory of physics and it's remarkable how little has been done on this question and it's you know because you know there have been times when there's been bursts of enthusiasm oh we're almost there and and then it decays and and people just say oh it's too hard but it's not relevant anyway and i think that the um the thing that um you know so so the question of of you know one question is why does anybody why should anybody care right why should anybody care what the fundamental theory of physics is i think it's intellectually interesting but what will be the sort of what will be the impact of this you

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Length: 5min 32sec (332 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020