Tits' Freudenthal Magic Square and Other Mathematical Theories (Eric Weinstein pt. 3)

I think we are over an hour in we're gonna keep going here I have not looked at these ones which I always all right is the sign of a good interview but I have to look at them because I want to talk some math stuff that's probably going to go over my head and some of these phrases oh hey are spring of tacular let's start with the e8 and tits Royden Thal magic square Wow I googled that okay tits Freud and ball very funny to me very strange yeah I was now a long time nobody ever made the obvious joke ever and it's all May all-male group I swear to God is that say about math people yeah and humor that we can be trusted apparently yeah um no all right so I want to knock out just a couple just interesting mathematical theories and and some other stuff and I have a few here let's start there because I want to impart some of this because as I said at the top this is not my department knowing about this kind of stuff so what God's name is the e8 and tits Freud and all magic square you're already looking around well on an example of something so you have these you have these uh origami very symmetrical origami shapes my grandma made them so this is living in three dimensions and we would call its symmetries a group and the problem is that there are very strange isolated sets of symmetries that don't act in three dimensions but act in very high dimensions so 5233 the largest of these strange objects is called ea8 and it acts in 248 dimensions so it's like the monolith in 2001 it shows up we have no knowledge of why it's there the average human being is never worried about it because they don't know it exists we have no idea what its symmetrize it only seems to symmetrize itself and the tits Freud and Thal Magic Square is this collection of symmetries that are generated by some procedure and it's almost as if it's a message from pure design from pure order and nobody knows what it means and so this is something that we should be worrying about this is like you know if I were running the NSF I would say why are we not putting money into these four very strange objects called f-4e 67 and e8 to try to figure out what they are telling us we know that they're at the center of mathematics and then at another level they're like the platypuses to mammals they're so different and so strange that we have effectively no understanding of them yeah this is going to maybe sound like a stupid question but so this is understood purely at a at a theoretical level or this is understood at a literal level like it this idea has been we can construct them we okay that's that's what I'm at mathematically but we can't fit that over here yeah so we can't build them I can't build you a model right and we don't know all all indications are that these should be absolutely central to mathematics and maybe even to physics you know a friend of ours also a rival who lives in Maui has built a theory of everything around this this object ehm we know that the symmetries of our universe seem to generate all four of the fundamental forces and so symmetries and physics are closely intertwined now the question is does this physics somehow come out from these very strange objects so do you start with the most complicated simple objects of a type and then try to recover our world or do you try instead to start with an extremely simple object and have the complexity of our world emerge and so these are you know that I've taken that route trying to think about physics but these are things that people should at least know exist and with your viewer base hopefully a couple of kids are going to google these things and say holy crap yeah and spend the rest of their life trying to bring it home for us or they're gonna go man Dave's looking at him like yet no frickin clue what do you think nobody does you're in the same boat as I I mean all I can picture as you're talking about this I can understand what you're saying in a in a certain sense but I am picturing the monolith from 2001 so it's the idea of something that is packed with itself or something I think I so that's the core everything strange and with Noah it doesn't come with an instruction manual right we just thought we can prove that it's there yeah yes so for example Plato had these 5 solids and platonic solids turns out that in dimension 4 all of them have an analog but there's a new one that had never been thought of and wasn't understood until the 1800s that it existed mathematically called the 24-cell so these are these puzzles where you know if you were a religious minded person you might think that these are messages from a creator that have not been decoded and if you're a different sort of person you think well these are undoubtedly structural elements that have not been tied together with the major themes of mathematics so probably they unlock something amazing and if you were Indiana Jones you would try to find them but you wouldn't necessarily beautify it but believe in them right but prior I think he kind of believed in a lot of stuff yeah and and so that's that's one of the things is that it takes a certain level of confidence to say I'm going to pursue this because there's no indication you know what are you gonna get from the monolith does that make better toast or you know right or do you become one with the universe or nobody understand glass see exactly you just end up in a bed as an old man and somewhere beyond desire the sirens of Titan yeah you mentioned the theory of everything which was a movie last year but also is beyond just the movie when the hell is the theory of everything um well it's the source code whatever we're you and I are talking in something that I referencing the matrix call the construct and the construct isn't some fake computer program is the geometric underpinnings of what we would call quantum field theory in the theory of gravity and these two theories are known to be flawed in some sense and so they're not complete and yet there's no way that we currently have of having a single graceful and elegant theory that particular eise's to both of these that is what obsesses me which is we are the artificial intelligence that lives inside of this differential geometric construct and our job is to figure out what is our own source code so we sort of did this at one level with let's let's say DNA or the theory of selection from Darwin so humans have been trying to figure out progressively okay what is this place where are we having this conversation with the Rubin report right right and the idea it's not just LA it might be deeper than that oh yeah it could fever yeah it could be Simi Valley you don't know but uh I think that what it is is it's the greatest puzzle ever this is this is the main story can we understand each level of our source code right down to the machine code do you think we can actually get there well that's an awkward question because I think that I'm I'm gambling that I've broken through something which could could put me pretty close so let's talk about that thing all right this was about three years ago three and a half well that's it about there yeah I know your mathematician has to be very precise so can you explain what you did about three years ago that clipped some of I'd Stein's stuff sure so when I was a a young guy I watched string theory start to bubble up in 1984 there was a discovery and there was a lot of desperation because for about ten years theoretical physics had been stalled and I looked at strength here and I said this is fascinating it's really interesting and it doesn't feel right and I bet the whole field is going to go down this path at least give me string theory 101 just for string theory 101 says the your concept of the world is not a theory of waves built on idealized little balls but instead you imagine some sort of rubberband like geometric structures and then you'd build waves in some sense on top of that rather than on on point particles and very quickly it starts to get greedy and it demands I want to live in 26 dimensions or I want to live in 10 dimensions maybe 11 I want to have this super symmetric aspects which has to do with a symmetry between force and matter and the problem is is that it feels intellectually like a check-kiting scheme where you're constantly repairing something but you're opening up a new can of worms and I don't think that solvent at the moment that nobody's figured out how to get this this game to close and to rejoin what we think of as experimentally verified physics so I think I was early saying this is madness and I went into mathematics in order to avoid what I saw is like the tulip bubble of string theory huh and so what I believed was that actually the hardest thing is to unthink Einstein because Einstein laid the groundwork when we talk about string theory we still think about space and time as space-time and there's something wrong at that level but there's nothing to correct it's it's so elementary that it's as if there's no room to fix it right you'd have to untie a gajillion other things or so it seems all right and so what I what I did was I tried to spot a couple of things that people had in my opinion miss thunk about the geometric underpinnings that were there were some discoveries in the mid-1970s by Jim Simons the world's most successful hedge fund manager and CN yang arguably the greatest living theoretical physicist where they figured out a dictionary between mathematics particularly geometry and theoretical physics which has spawned a revolution that is now 40 years old right and so some of the equations that came out of that I saw as capable of replacing Einstein's field equations which are very elegant and again have this this feature of locking out any attempt to play with them so if you think about the world that we see around us as currently understood by physics there are three main equations Einstein field equations there's the souped-up Maxwell's equations called yang-mills and then there's something called the Dirac equation for matter and those three equations are in some sense probably the simplest equations in their classes so we're a little bit stumped because it feels like okay there's nowhere to go we've searched the room for our keys we cannot find them and we can almost say that they can't be here but that's not quite true so the way I saw it is is that physics conceived of a battle between Einstein and Bohr relativity and quantum mechanics and in fact what we found was is that Einstein was derived from a kind of geometry called Romani in geometry and only recently in the 1970s did we find out that quantum mechanics seems to come from a different geometry from a guy named Arish mon-sol era shmaaya geometry and so what I did is I said I don't think it's a battle between Einstein and Bohr I think it's a battle between Riemann and Arish MA and the question is is there any geometry known that can incorporate the advantages of both of these two different kinds of geometries and in generically there isn't but in a very special case you can marry them and get something new and when I was in graduate school we thought there were only 16 particles and what we call a generation that mostly makes up this construct but it turned out that neutrinos had a little bit of mass and that meant that there was an extra possible particle from 15 to 16 particles so we thought 15 now 16 and if you have two to the two to the n particles so in this case two to the fourth there's a new kind of geometry that combines arish monte and geometry and romani and geometry that might govern our world and so what I believe is is that physicists have an economic incentive to study the generic cases because that's what you can build a career on but our world may be the most particular of cases and so it's a sort of a one-way suicide pact dieter it's going to work or it isn't right and so I went to non-economic route which was sort of self-destructive but that I lined up Eric I am NOT going to pretend that I fully understood all of them but I got some of it okay how about that that's a start right you gotta start somewhere it's not I'm doing like Einstein thing you got to start somewhere exactly we'll go from there you know all right so I got one more for you sure the edge question we toss a question that goes out to about it was about 200 tuna public intellectuals per years public intellectuals fair to say it's always kind posers acres and blowhard by - look yeah yeah this question Jon Brockman does a beautiful job of assembling some of the more interesting minds and I somehow snuck in and I've remained in every year but one for the last seven or so years so every year at the end of the year he sends out this question to all of these people and he asked them to respond and then they post all their answers publicly you were one of the 200 or so people I want to get the question absolutely right the edge question of the year of 2016 was what scientific term or concept should be more widely known right what was your answer to that so I deliberated it's very similar to the question he asked in 2011 what would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit and I said professional wrestling and kayfabe because my wife told me as well take the risk yeah but so this year you would have to write about the professional wrestling's actly as you explained it with Trump so there you go in 2017 I chose Russell conjugation and Russell conjugation was so we were talking privately before about the need to push out new language to understand our world okay I'm glad you're ending with this I was going to do a bonus thing so we'll do it we'll do it right now okay so the the thing that I I was searching for was what word should I use that sounds like synonym where two words are content synonyms but maybe emotionally antonyms so a good one is fink and whistle-blower mm-hmm right and so I asked this question on Quora and people said oh it's you know it's loaded speech no no that's too general finally somebody I think in Florida wrote in and said you're looking for a motive conjugation or Russell conjugation turns out Bertrand Russell had been here earlier and in 1948 he was on the BBC and he said let's look at the construction I am firm you are obstinate he she or it is a pigheaded fool and that that was just a moment where I said oh my gosh I don't realize that I have been given no extra information about the three conjugations that he's gone through and yet I feel differently I like the fact that somebody is firm in steadfast and I dislike the fact that somebody is pigheaded and then I realized that this could actually be weaponized and as part of an arms race that maybe the newspapers were in fact conjugating president strongman dictator mm-hmm and so I remembered this very strange phrase from years past Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and I thought who would come up with a construction that awkward and always invariant and then everyone read and everyone uses it exactly hawkish he's hawkish right or controversial businessman was was applied to a friend of mine declan Ganley who had fought the Lisbon Treaty in the EU and at some point they removed controversial businessman so he just became businessman declan galley and so what I what I came to understand is is that the big boys don't play around with faking the facts what they realized is that we have multiple opinions on everything but our emotional state selects which opinion and the person who figured this out it is Frank Luntz and Franklin's is a Republican pollster there's video of him where he asks people you know what do you think about undocumented workers oh you know they're doing a great job and we have to recognize the contribution well do you support illegal aliens no no they should be deported yeah and in an instant and then you see that the mind doesn't see itself it's having two reactions to death tax in a state it's the same object and so we are both for and against everything and so while we're watching information they're not looking at information they're looking at the emotional shading because our emotions pick out which of our multiple opinions we're actually going to act and so what I'm pointing to here is that this is the language that you need to get underneath the constructed world that you're presented with and what I hope is that this essay is going to show people that you can code up a computer program to crawl text with against the table of Russell conjugates to figure out what the exact bias is of any news source I don't need to know about Breitbart is conservative let me crawl it let's just look at the buzzword let's look at the Python program use regular expressions grab the text match it against the table and I'll tell you exactly what you're being told to feel irrespective you can be trusted with the knowledge what you can't be trusted with is your feelings because the feelings determine the opinion and so this is the great binary weapon the information superhighway had very little effect relative to what we were expecting because it needs the second emotional component there's no emotional superhighway to go next to it this is so fascinating because it's so everything that's happening right now and it actually does maybe this is the unifying principle of our entire conversation because it fits within the fake news thing it fits within the algorithm thing it fits within trying to talk about talk about honestly talk honestly difficult issues I mean it's all it's all right there well you think about it like this if if you're going to trust somebody like a physician to put you under and operate on you you want to have a lot of previous discussions so that you feel that person is aligned with you what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get the power tools into the hands of the people who've not been trusted with them and to say hey I want to upgrade my relationship I don't really want to kill the New York Times I want the New York Times to learn how to respect people who are as smart or smarter than the editors who drive the narratives then the reporters will go out and report and I want them to come to see themselves as part of the problem and part of the story which is please stop with the editorial headline everything's editorialize now right and stop with the narratives and you're going to have to be in partnership because you don't have the gatekeeping ability anymore and previously we democratized information but we kept turning the New York Times please tell me how to feel those aren't revolutions in Tahrir Square those are demonstrations right and so I was the one who was off of social media I was saying I'm watching a revolution but in New York when I went to a party people would say what are you talking about the demonstration yeah right and so these conjugates then they realize that after Mubarak went down that it was no no this is the amazing part about it it's only when you actually hear the authoritative source that you've empowered right to switch the language that you actually feel safe because what happens is if you just take what you see and then you go into your social group you will find that you will be instantly ostracized and so what we've been we've been depending on the New York Times not for information we've been depending upon it for to tell us what's safe to feel with whom should I empathize who should I consider a pariah who should I hug to my bosom and this is the thing that we're now going to break through so 2016 was the year when that started to crumble yeah so let's just go through a couple words that wave that we've discussed and that you've been part of so first off the word bigoted ear I had Tim Ferriss on and I think he came up with the phrase when you were on his pod yes and basically it was this idea of what the social justice warriors are doing is not good they are finding bigotry everywhere and they are cheering bigotry because that is the ultimate virtue signaling goodness what's a hunting license for people that you disagree with right you can anybody I can label a bigot I'm allowed to hunt yeah so I love the fact that I've been pushing it out a little bit now and I see it starting to gain a little traction so that's one and then one that you actually came up with on your Sam Harris's podcast was steel Manning which I thought was not mine oh that's not you don't know oh I've given I'm giving you who know no that comes from sort of the rationality community that I run with I'm a huge on attribution I think it's important oh absolutely I they taught into me to tribute all right so dude you know who actually came up with it I think I first heard it from the first person I heard use it powerfully was Yan Tollan who is a brilliant Estonian who coded up Skype uh-huh and just an all-around very deep thinker well now I know you're very honest because I was I was attributing it to you much as I wish I could claim credit yeah I know I think that you know for example one thing I've been focused on is long short positions so the idea that your long support for Muslims and your short support for Islamists where those things sound very similar to most people right right but the idea of pulling apart something that's good from something that sounds similar to it but is in fact very dangerous is something that we are going to be doing and that's I think one of the things that we're going to give is our gift to the dialog how do you hold these nuanced positions that we've talked before but there seem to be about 20-25 people who can try to do this in public without falling off the a frame roof where they're dancing on rationality and if you follow this direction you end up as a troglodyte and if you end up this direction you end up with political correctness right so almost no one can managed to do this because the forces are making it impossible so I think that long short thinking which is taking the marketplace of ideas and treating it as we treat market the marketplace of investment of anything else right yeah all right I love that I'm going to start using that let's just backtrack voters to steel Manning real quick even though you didn't show up with it but I but I think it's such an important piece of what's going on here because we know that in the public space there are so many people who do the reverse of that they strawman this is and steel Manning is basically laying out your opposition's ideas in the clearest most concise way so that you can attack them properly right I mean that's the idea you are still Manning their position so that you can then disassemble it fairly and honestly as opposed to what we see so many people doing these days which is making up a person's position and then attacking the non position right so that I talk about liberal clairvoyance where a lot of the left believes that if you state even a little bit of your position oh I know why you hold that position because you secretly just like this and you're for that terrible thing that's so in this idiom one of the things is is that I look at very smart people I think Glenn Greenwald is a very smart guy like a lot of stuff he's done I think Reza aslam could be very impressive and what happens with these folks is is that they strong in repeatedly and they try to find the most powerful argument for their for their readership and you look at Sam and Sam whatever you think his faults may be is frequently trying to steal man somebody who is strong Manning his position and that is the cinah qua non of that's the ante to get into the the higher-level conversations and I know I'm going to take a tremendous amount of guff on Twitter for that but that's what I'm signed up for because I believe that fundamentally it's not just about attacking your opponent's position sometimes I'll steal me on somebody's positional say you know what I don't think they had the best version of that but now that I see what they may be saying maybe I'm even moved and I think that it's really important to sort of extend that as a courtesy as a grace what do you do though when that courtesy is not extended back to you repeatedly so without getting into Glenn and Reza who I think most of my audience knows they're they're bad intentions I mean I could even think of other examples where just in the last couple days you know I saw Judd Apatow and Sarah Silverman both of them I really like Judds from the same town as me when same high school I like both of their work I saw them tweeting about how Simon & Schuster should get rid of Milo's book now that would these are people who were comedians that are supposed to be getting to the edge and crossing it and write edgy and all of this stuff and I say I tweeted at them and I said you know I love I've Milo coming on a couple weeks I'd love to have you guys sit down a conversation I didn't mean it as a debate I'm not attacking I like Milo I like Judd I like Sarah although not they didn't respond to me and I suspect that they won't respond to me but that does make our job as people willing to extend the the fig leaf a little more the fig leaf the fig leaf yeah I was they all branch with the olive branch the fig leaf that sang us but I was I was going to the big leaf for some reason but for those of us that are willing to extend that willing to have those conversations willing to to do the intellectual work to make the world better if it's not handed back to you and I'm not I'm giving a bit of a stretch with sure position on the two of them maybe they've responded to me while we're talking right now but it does make our work a little bit harder right well let's try to steal man their position which is a sign of good faith I think that in part we haven't pushed out the language we haven't pushed out the toolkit and as a result everybody is fumbling around with language that was barely adequate in the 1980s it totally doesn't make sense now and I'm not positive that all of these people will stay where they are I think that it's quite possible that when we stop focusing just on the intellectual and of course I'm guilty of intellectualizing everything but we start to come more into contact with our own humanity and pushing out some of the empathy and emotion when I was on Sam's podcast for example he started talking about the beauty of the poetry of Rumi and the the call to prayer as being one of the most beautiful songs you know the one hears all the time in the Middle East which is you know central to Islam yeah and so horrible I think I've been called a prayer yeah it's probably I'm extremely moved but yeah I heard you say that I thought pretty obnoxious in the middle of day four times and all it's just no we had have a different reaction I lived in Jerusalem for a couple of years but what I what I find is is that when we show that we are empathic that we understand you know Reza's in a tough spot and that's hard for me to say because I really don't like the way he savages but he's in a tough spot and you know Glenn Greenwald probably thinks at some level that he's doing the right thing and I'm pretty unhappy with the biasness of some of those arguments but I find that when I extend a certain amount of just I muster any grace I can to listen and to not react once people feel a level of security in the conversation they say you know I can climb down from these battle positions I thought you were saying this and so I had to make this move I don't think you're going to get everybody that way but I think what part of what the problem is is that we have to be more willing to be emotionally vulnerable it's not the easiest thing for a middle-aged hard-charging you know male but I'm trying and I'm trying to do it on Twitter and I'm finding that I'm able to say things they're quite difficult with so far a minimal amount of blowback in part by just being slower on the draw not thinking about these as enemies thinking that we are in some confused state and that it's the language and the impoverished nature of the language that's keeping us trapped here so I'm up for a good fight if I'm really looking at the enemy but some of these people like you were saying about Sarah Silverman right she's making some bad calls in my opinion and I just think the world of some of some of the comedy and the insight and and the decency and the bravery so something has gone wrong and I think it's up to us in part not to fight it out but to try to figure out well what went wrong logically yeah well I mean that's exactly why I even phrased the tweet in a specific way where I didn't say debate I said conversation because I wouldn't make it a debate I think at the end of the day Milo and Judd and and Sarah could all sit down and actually be okay I really do even if they don't agree on every political this or that well this is one of the reasons that I was so excited to come here because I forget what the original title of Casablanca was but like everybody comes to Rick's or something like that and I feel like strangely this particular home studio is the crossroads of this new emerging sensibility which is that you have a lot of people on some of whom should be you know allied some of whom should be antagonistic and what you're doing is you're providing a substrate where it is safe to hash some of these things out now people are going to interpret what's going on here very different oh my god yeah Milo and siRNA which you know he's gone completely crazy all right right wing yeah but I don't think that's what's happening I think that what's happening is is that the world is going to wake up to the fact that we're having an inauthentic conversation and this is the germ of a new way of being which dovetails with older ways of being that have been lost you might say that this very room is the tits prudent all of the thing you might say that I can't get away with it I might say X I know what the hell I'm talking about there you go well it's been a pleasure to talk to you of course and I got a whole bunch more here but we'll do this again how about that love - all right thanks for having us on that note you can check out more of Eric's work well you know we'll do we'll put his answer to the edge question we're going to link to it right down below and can I pick out your website you said it was a throwback so yeah about some I think I think well maybe my Twitter feed or he's on the Twitter it's just at Eric Weinstein right at Eric our Weinstein at Eric our Weinstein and thanks for watching we'll do it again next week you [Music]

Channel: The Rubin Report

Views: 150,411

Rating: 4.9201574 out of 5

Keywords: math, mathematics, methematical theories, geometry, science, mathemetician, smart, nerd, mathematical thought, smart interview, interview, string theory, string theory 2016, string theory debate, math debate, mathematical debate, string theory for dummies

Id: Q0QtZmLC14U

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/wazzup987]

Russel Conjagates

Also

Steel Manning

[u/TokenRhino]

I'd be really interested to run my own writing through his 'Russel Conjagation program' to see what kind of bias it comes out with.

[u/Lifeisallthatmatters]

Words that work - frank luntz

Author is mentioned by interviewee, great book - though be vigilant, right/conservative biases are veiled herein.