Eric Weinstein Explains Octonion Numbers to Joe Rogan

the Joe Rogan experience and that we just we live our lives in the most ordinary mesoscale phenomena where you know we don't see we don't see the quantum because we're not you know playing with polarized lenses in ways that show us what light actually is you know we're not playing with superfluid helium we're not understanding just how bizarre olfaction is or you know whether there's some sort of quantum aspect of biology and what you see people doing is that they're they they start grasping for everything like I'm not saying that there's nothing to ancient aliens or UFOs or whatever but a lot of that is just people want something richer and more more amazing for their lives and I'm not going to pass too much judgement on that but I am going to say if we just restricted the the rest of our days to the provable stuff that we know is out there it could be amazing people need more meaning with all of the rationality with all the mystery we've taken out of the world it's time to put a ton of it back in when you say put a ton of it back in like I gonna put it back in well you know if I were to start talking about the octo nians an eight dimensional number system that no one understands I can do that totally rigorously I can show you all sorts of bizarre stuff involving the octo nians what is the octo no well that's my point you don't even know that there are four types of numbers whose dance called the real numbers that we know complex numbers that were tortured once with in high school maybe during some kind of a trip a friend of you mentioned the court mentioned the quaternions to you and then there's this one system of numbers which is like the crazy relative nobody discusses and that's called the octo nians and the octo nians are so weird that mathematicians don't even really understand why they're there that's an oxonium that thing well my guess is that that's probably back to the root lattice of e8 which we discussed last time which has this kind of Mandela pattern to it but I could show you their multiplication table I could describe their symmetries there's a symmetry group called g2 which involves these strange numbers but it's a mystery like if I got to I probably know more about the octo nians than most mathematicians if I got to the end of all of my knowledge of the Arcturians I still wouldn't know what to tell you about why they're there and what they mean nobody knows I promise you that that's a real mystery now we could talk about like you know my friend said that that event that happened in Siberia in the early you know 20th century was actually an alien visitation well maybe yes maybe no I don't know anything about it if I just focused us unlike what we know is out there that we don't grasp which is 100% rock-solid it provides so much mystery and meaning and invitation to adventure like if you if you're looking for a hero's journey I'll show you a ton of these things and it's empowering it's just incredibly it's incredibly empowering to know that you're a hair's breadth away from superpowers so I want to help people explore that well so what is that like when you're explaining this when you're saying this is bizarre series of numbers right what is it doing like what how do we interface with it well so for example let's let's take an easier system that we feel a little bit more confident with there's this thing called the quaternions which are based on the number one the complex number i if you remember that from some distant math class and then there's something called J and K so I times J equals K J times K equals I J times I is equal to the negative of I times J so negative K there's a multiplication table for these these objects and these objects help with computer vision you know computer simulation 3d projections they're used all the time you probably videogames they may come up in nature I mean we know that nature uses complex numbers and most people never found out why they were being told about complex numbers or imaginary numbers because they never got to the point where you're actually looking at wave functions that describe photons and electrons and all of all of that good stuff that you read about in physics so in essence the the octo nians are a system where ijk keeps going effectively through elemental PQR you know till you've got eight different objects and they're not even associative which is one of these rules that you learn about like you know multiplication is associative and you think well what is an associate right so if I you know if you if you talk about commutativity for example I can't tell whether you put on your shirt first or your shoes first because it's it's commutative as to which order you did it but if you put on your underwear in a different order then you put on your pants that'll become immediately obvious which order you did it in right okay well there's another thing called associativity and it's almost everything that we deal with in you know elementary mathematics is associative skews like why do I learn about associative never met anything that isn't associative what the octo nyan thing associate a number system that is responsible for most of the platypi of mathematics if you will things that just occur anomalously so that's an example of an invitation out of this planet you know if you start to think about the octo nians and care about them and say are they a message do they have meaning we can prove that they're there I can construct them for you but they generate so much bizarreness in some sort of abstract space how would they recognize like how how was it how did it come to be that this is a point of discussion well there's there's a process in fact they're two processes where you can build these number systems up from each other so you build the complex from the real you build the quaternions from the complex you build the octo nians from the quaternions and then you can't build anything beyond that because each time you're giving up a magical power to get to the next stage and by the time you get to the octo nians you're exhausted this is giving them a magical power well like for example it's very hard to think about the square root of negative one so like what does it mean for something squared to be negative all right so that's like the complex numbers gave up that kind of sensibility and then the complex numbers are at least commutative a times B equals B times a but the quaternions don't have that property so then you have a further property called associativity so you're sort of to eat to build the next system you're giving up properties that sort of make sense to us and by the time you've got into the act onions you've given everything away there's no way you're gonna build the next system okay but yet it's real yes yet it's real you know in us in in a very real mathematical sense so does it just highlight our lack of understanding yeah and it is a call to adventure it's like a message from something that isn't human I'm not gonna say that it's God I'm not gonna say that it's logic or design but it's a more complex it's some victim of the universe that's right and you have to uncover that these things are there or for example you know C elegans I don't know if you've like played with do you know about C elegans no all right CLA you C elegans C letter uh-huh elegans and L again elegans I think it's okay so it's this worm that was chosen by this guy Sydney Brenner who just died and it's a shame because he would have been a great podcast guest just like one of the most brilliant biologists that we didn't focus on and he said you know what we're missing a species that we can completely describe soup-to-nuts here's the one that's about the simplest thing with a brain it's only got a thousand cells and 300 of those cells make up a very primitive neural system and we're gonna track where every goddamn cell like bring up Jamie if if I could ask you something to bring up the cell lineage diagram for C elegans so this would be the first of two images well that is a complete map of how one fertilized egg becomes a tiny microscopic worm for every possible division what right now [ __ ] I looked in there I love when you say that that is so wild yeah right now here's the thing everyone in biology knows how cool this thing is and very few people not enough people outside of biology know that we have completely mapped how one cell like if you're thirty trillion cells around it's too big to write a diagram it's only possible because they're only a thousand cells and this thing has local motion it has sexual reproduction you know it eats so you're looking at the architectural plans for an actual organism and Jamie when we're done with that if I could trouble you for the for the folks that are just fallen upon street for a moment for the folks that are following at home listening just listening not watching what we're looking at Jamie explained how someone could see this image if they want to give themselves the letter see it's not not see like the ocean C elegans and then that cell lineage it looks like a really long basketball bracket yeah that's pushed out forever that's a good way to describe it yeah so it's [ __ ] wild yeah talk about March Madness it just doesn't stop if we could bring up the wiring diagram or adjacency matrix yeah let's see elegans wired boring - all right yeah perfect that is a complete math of the 300 neurons in the C elegans worm how they are wired to each other like that is a map of the mind of the worm Wow okay so that's the portal that's another portal here's an organism which is completely mapped and has complex behaviors it has I think about half the number of adult cell types that you and I have so maybe we have like 250 like only 250 different kinds of adult cells more or less I don't want to get too precise about that and yet we are like 10 trillion or 30 trillion copies of those tiny number of different types of cells well I think the C elegans has about a hundred and twenty-five or something like that different cell types and it only has a thousand cells and it's able to do most of what we're able to do we move around we eat we have sex I mean pretty simple life do you think it's ever possible well I'm sure it's probably possible but do you think in our lifetime we'll ever see a map like that of a human organism I don't think so but the cool thing is we have this map and we still don't understand it like we've got this thing dead to rights mmm we've got it boxed in it can't we know every single cell what it does we have all the wirings between the neurons we still don't get it right right so like imagine that you're eight years well what did you what a genius this guy Sydney Brenner was for choosing this organism mm-hmm right because this organism is the simplest place to look at complex life mmm this image of the reconstructed biological neural networks [Music] like you're looking okay now we could have a discussion about some weird Peruvian structure and whether we've been visited mmm and I'm be up for that look I'm not gonna pretend that I'm too good for it but I know that this is real right I don't have any doubt I'm not gonna sit around asking well do you believe that you know aliens talk to this federal government in the 40s right that might as well be an alien yeah and it's an invitation to adventure [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 373,785

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: a6ruHbUGImQ

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 04 2019